Songs of the Spheres

by GMSeskii

Rating: teen
Tags: Violence, Crossover, Human, Sunset Shimmer, Sweetie Belle, Main 6, My Little Pony: The Movie, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Death, Other, Drama, Equestria Girls, Science Fiction, Starlight Glimmer, Profanity, Adventure
Length: 2076786

Twilight Sparkle comes across a strange black ball with the power to travel to other worlds.

The scope of the multiverse is so tremendously beyond the comprehension of most beings that, if they were to truly know what it meant, they would break down and be unable to live their lives the way they wished. Most worlds are lucky to be blissfully unaware of the true picture of reality, never to encounter the higher forces and civilizations.

However, when one of those higher forces make contact with one of those unaware worlds - intentionally or not, peacefully or not - everything will change drastically. Sometimes the change is slow, sometimes rapid. Regardless of the pacing, like all change, it is both good and bad. Civilizations have risen from simple worlds overnight and have crumbled just as quickly. Many can't handle the revelation, and those that can are not always the best examples of honor and dignity.

It is often said that each world - each universe - has a Song, and that all these Songs are related, intertwining together in a mesh of powerful destiny among the Spheres of the multiverse.

This is the story of how a certain world inhabited by Technicolor ponies found their Song and how it interwove itself in the Songs of so many others.

This is a story of finding meaning in infinite possibility.

This is a mega-crossover project of immense proportions covering dozens of fandoms. However, it is written in such a way that no previous knowledge of any of them - not even the ponies - will be required. The only warning is that there will be spoilers for any franchise you haven't seen.

There are several side-stories being written for Songs of the Spheres by several authors, and links to them can be found in our Fimfiction group, including links to non-pony related stories. There's also a Discord chat. Lastly, we have a Spacebattles forum. Discussion about the multiverse, setting, and future events can also be found there if you don't mind spoilers.

Has a TV Tropes page now. Needs love.

Special thanks goes to my little editing army. Keywii_cookies55, VoidTemplar2000, Ponygood11, Omnipresent Microorganism, Blaster Master, Useless Common, Galliar,
Mal Masque, Nickle241, and Triv the Imaginary Duck.

Cover drawn by Little Duke. (DA: Spiralling Vibrance)

Has been updated to comply up to Season 8. Does not comply with Season 9 though elements from it are included.

-GM, master of the Dark Tower

Published 2017-10-29 20:50:06 UTC
Last updated 2020-04-19 19:13:08 UTC

002 - Enter, Part 2

"They did go this way, right?"

Rarity fixed her friend of many years with an 'are you serious?' look.

"Sorry," Twilight recanted. "It's just... I don't know where they went and... Yes I know I should trust you more."

Rarity shrugged, carefully stepping over a dampened area of the ground. "No need to apologize Twilight, I understand you're anxious. They'll be fine. They probably already found some ancient temple or something and are finding us a powerful magical artifact as we speak."

"Knowing them they probably found something at least," Twilight admitted. "Though it can't be that easy to find a magical artifact..."

Rarity raised an incredulous eyebrow.

"Who am I kidding, if we were home I could find several dozen of them without much effort at all. If we get home we won't be hurting for a power source to use this spell. Celestia could probably just cast it. The problem here is that we don't know the lay of the land." At this, she tripped over a lone tree root and fell right into the soil below, sending bugs scurrying. "Eeeeech..." she muttered.

Rarity huffed. "We're going to get extremely filthy out here... We should have just waited for them."

"I left a note. We should be fine. I'll sense if anypony finds it and then we can just teleport back. I do know that clearing."

Rarity nodded, making sure to twist her head to avoid a possible mane-tussling branch. "To be honest I'd just rather not tromp through a jungle where there are dozens of shifty roots waiting to trip me. Not to mention whatever's been making those noises."

"I have enough magic to protect us and Fluttershy's with the others, so there's nothing we should worry about from any sort of predators." And yet I'm finding myself regretting letting them go... I'm afraid there's something I didn't think about. I was too fixated on the problem... Maybe I still am.

Rarity put a hoof on Twilight. "Hey, don't beat yourself up. You did figure out what was going on and have a few ideas for solutions. We're no longer completely lost here."

"Yeah... You're right," Twilight nodded, swatting away a mosquito. "Just need to find it... Or them... Or both."

"Preferably both," Rarity said. She looked up at the sky. "Huh. There's a second moon up there."

Twilight stopped in her tracks and stared into the sky. A stupid grin covered her face. She tried to say something but all that came out was vaguely wordlike noises. Her inner thoughts weren't much more coherent - stuck on MOON MOON MOON and many questions about what the second moon meant tangled her mind into an indecipherable ball of inquisition. Were there two Lunas in this world? Did it orbit under gravity like Earth's moon? If that was the case, how did the gravity work? Why was it blue of all colors?

"Twilight, you've stopped moving."

"Oh!" Twilight blushed. "Yes, sorry. But, two moons! Or more we can't see right now! It's like something from a book!" She squealed. "When we get home I think we'll be coming back here a lot just to learn more..."

Rarity smirked. "I don't believe I'll be joining you unless there's something here besides jungle."

Twilight pointed at the blue moon with her wing.

"Dear, we can't go to the moon."

"Well, yes, but it could be studied."

"Twilight, you're the scientist."

Twilight nodded in mild disappointment. "I wonder if Sunset'll be interested..."

"Probably," Rarity admitted. "As well as the other you."

"Ah, yeah, Sparky will be really interested in this..."

"...Sparky?" Rarity said, raising an eyebrow.

"Well, I don't call her Twilight, too confusing," Twilight laughed. "She calls me Twinkie though, so there's that."

Rarity chuckled, putting a hoof over her mouth. "I can't believe I've never heard about this before."

"It's a thing we agreed to more recently. It's really annoying calling with 'Twilight! No, other Twilight!' all the time. I don't know how Pinkie manages. I think the two of them switch places sometimes."

Rarity pondered Twilight's thought on Pinkie. "While that would explain many things it raises just as many if not more questions," she chuckled to herself. "Why-"

Rarity tripped over a loose root as she laughed, shifting from cries of amusement to cries of dread (and then disgust) rather quickly. Her face hit the soil, agitating more than a few resting bugs.

Twilight's snickering devolved into open laughter as Rarity squealed and jumped up, waving her hooves around in a haphazard panic, flinging the bugs in her mane everywhere.

"Heh - never change, Rarity. Never change."

~~~

Applejack decided quickly that she hated being led by a rope. It was uncomfortable, undignified, and unbearable. She knew that was probably the point but that didn't stop her from growling, stomping her hooves in annoyance, and spitting none-too-kind insults at the demons whenever she could. She almost wished they could understand her.

Pinkie and Rainbow Dash had looked at her with inscrutable expressions when she'd called them demons aloud - but as far as Applejack was concerned that's what these things were. Red, ugly, deadly, and violent - already the red one had punched the pink one a number of times. Notably few of those instances had resulted in the pink one's 'laughter' - which was a strange twittering noise that gave Applejack goosebumps.

The two demons also weren't stupid. Despite having their backs to the three of them most of the time, they still managed to keep a close eye, looking back whenever Applejack was thinking about making a go for one of them. The red one just seemed to know what she was thinking. For all she knew he could, which wasn't a pleasant thought. The pink one wasn't as logically minded - staring more at Rainbow Dash's wings and at the earth pony he was riding that was Rainbow Dash but without wings. Even though he had no facial expressions Applejack could tell he was very confused. A silver lining in this mess, she supposed.

Regardless, to her, they were demons until they did anything that gave her another idea.

Applejack turned to look at her two friends. Rainbow Dash's wings were tied up, so there was little the pegasus could do. Applejack knew Pinkie could get out whenever she wanted but had chosen to stay tied up with a grimace on her face instead. Applejack got the impression that Pinkie was more aware of the danger than the rest of them; she wasn't afraid of the demons though. She was afraid of Applejack trying something. She wouldn't come out and admit it, but Applejack knew. She had a knack for these sorts of things.

So Applejack refrained from taking action, despite all the times she wanted to. She knew Rainbow Dash would have definitely tried something by now had her wings been free. She supposed they all were lucky the feathery limbs were pinned.

Applejack growled again. "Ah don't like this Pinkie.... Ah really think we should..."

"Shoooosh Applejack," Pinkie said. "We don't want to anger these people."

"Demons."

Pinkie shook her head. "People, Applejack. They talk, laugh, play, yell, and throw big festivals that involve giant red rubber balls! ...You know, probably. Who can say really about festivals?"

Rainbow Dash grunted. "They can still be people and evil. Ponies aren't always nice either, as we all know."

Pinkie sighed. "We should still give them a chance."

"They've tied us up, Pinkie," Applejack said. "Ah'm running a little low on chances to give here."

Pinkie shrugged. "Just keep doin' what they ask. We don't want to get one of their spears pointed at us again. That wouldn't be very fun!" She smirked. "Though I could make it fun if they let me, just need to sew streamers and a party blower onto it... Probably some cotton candy for decoration..."

Applejack tuned Pinkie's musings out, moving on to study the demons once again. Much of their armor was natural carapace, including their 'face'. Some of the arms and shoulders had complex engravings in them that might have been symbols with meaning or just complex patterns they carved into their limbs for fun. These symbols were also on their breastplates, which were artificial, made of some dull leather that was painted the color of the wearer.

The pink one caught her staring. She looked away - those four-eyed heads were just disturbing on so many levels it wasn't even close to funny, no matter what Pinkie said.

They rode in silence until they could see their destination.

It was a flower the size of a small town. It needed to be that size since a town was built on top of the red 'daisy' that had a few hundred more petals than a proper daisy had any right to have. Applejack had to admit the tremendous flora was glamorous, even if its design bugged her for some reason she couldn't discern. The buildings built onto the flower were very primitive - all made of wood and leaves, most little more than tents. There were a few dozen demons in the village, ranging in color from a pale pink to an almost black red. Some of them had large, brilliant wings - probably the females, though this was just Applejack's guess. She was going off her knowledge of ants, which admittedly was spotty at best, though much better than the two ponies she was with. Only a few of the female bug-demons used the wings, presumably because they were really heavy creatures so it would take a lot of energy to stay in the air.

There were no trees on the flower so the entire town was in the brilliant sun, shade only provided by carefully erected leaf umbrellas, of which there were a dozen or so mixed among the various tents. There were also about twenty 'tamed' ponies in town, a few of which were being ridden around. A couple others of which were being kept in pens like pigs.

Like pigs.

Applejack almost blew it when she saw herself - hatless and with the pronounced forehead - in one such pen, eating out of a trough. It was only Pinkie's steadying hoof that kept her pacified. "Things are... different here, Applejack!"

Applejack made no response beyond a single, long breath.

They were led into the center of town, on top of the fuzzy pollen-filled center. They drew quite the crowd, so much that the red demon had to keep moving the others away and shout something at them, but that only had a minimal effect on the citizens. They couldn't stop staring at Rainbow Dash’s wings - especially the children, whose shells looked considerably softer than the adults'.

"What are you looking at?" Rainbow Dash spat.

The demon crowd backed away at the words, scared of something that could speak.

"Don't worry!" Pinkie called in the friendliest tone she could manage. "We're just talking ponies! Not dangerous! Well not unless you catch Rainbow Dash on a bad day but that's beside the point!"

The words were meaningless to the demons and probably wouldn't have helped even if they were understood. The red demon yelled something out that calmed the crowd. He then yanked on the rope, dragging them the rest of the way to the center of town. Sitting in this prominent position was a tall circular hut crafted from expertly weaved dry grass, by far the largest 'building' in town at the size of a large living room. The red and pink demons disembarked, tying their mounts to a nearby post and entering the hut, dragging Applejack and her friends with them.

The interior was well lit by a big crystal hanging from the ceiling. There was a bed, a chest, and a few sets of armor lying around. Sitting in the throne towards the back was the largest demon Applejack had seen yet - a bright crimson male with a tall staff in his hands. The wooden object was covered in markings similar to the ones found on his carapace, the weaving designs leading to the largest piece of jade Applejack had ever seen. The green gem reflected red light from its surface, producing an interesting color effect.

The red and pink demons fell to one knee and put two of their hands behind their head. They extended their other two and spoke one word - a word that sounded vaguely like 'Siron' through the clicks.

So this was their leader.

Siron.

He was one ugly customer, in both the literal and figurative sense.

The red demon spoke first - and for a somewhat long time - no doubt explaining what they had found and how these three 'pony prisoners' had acted. Siron just nodded occasionally and held his chin with a hand, giving the appearance of deep thought. Otherwise, his flat face made it impossible to read him.

The pink demon said little, and even then only when prompted to by the red one. The responses were short and simple - Applejack was fairly sure that "tach" and "mil" were "yes" and "no" thanks to him, but she had no idea which was which.

Eventually, Siron himself spoke. His 'voice' was significantly deeper than the two demons standing before him. He gestured towards the ponies - inviting them to do something. The pink demon tensed.

Applejack knew what he wanted - he wanted them to speak. She shut her mouth. Heck no, she wasn't doing anything these demons wanted.

"Hello, Mister Siron! I'm Pinkie Pie!" Pinkie extended a hoof. "I see we've gotten off on the wrong hoof, but I hope to change that!"

Siron was silent for a moment – then he made the sound Applejack had identified earlier as laughter. He stood up from his throne, a left hand gripping his staff tightly, a right one raised high into the air. A crimson aura surrounded the fingers, wafting around the digits like a soft flare. Applejack felt the rope around her tighten.

He's got magic. He's going to kill us with it.

In an instant, the ropes disintegrated, freeing the ponies. "Yeah!" Rainbow Dash shouted, stretching her wings. "Siron rocks!"

Siron's legs buckled under him - it looked painful, but it was probably natural for his kind. He stuck a finger out to Pinkie's outstretched hoof and tapped it in greeting.

Pinkie grinned - and proceeded to show Siron how to properly hoofbump, curling his fingers into a fist and nudging it with her hoof. She giggled and Siron nodded.

He stood tall once again, dwarfing all present. He pointed at the ponies and spread his arms wide; making waving motions with the three limbs that weren't holding the staff.

The meaning was clear. They were free to go. The red demon seemed irked by this, but something Siron said shut him up really fast. Siron pointed at the ponies again and made a shrugging motion, and did the reverse of his previous gesture, bringing his arms in. Then he laid his palms flat and made a circular motion.

Applejack frowned. "...What?"

Rainbow Dash smirked. "I think he just said we are welcome to stay if we want."

Pinkie blinked. "Oh. I thought he was offering us pie, but that does make more sense." She grinned, turning to Applejack.

Applejack sighed, laughing softly, almost out of breath. "All right, maybe they aren't demons."

"Can we stay?" Pinkie pleaded.

"Fine... We can stay for now. Twilight'll be in for a surprise when she finds us, eh?"

Rainbow Dash laughed. "Can't wait for that!"

~~~

Twilight found herself displeased with what she was looking at once again.

What kind of creature made a track this big? Something predatory, given the claw-like impressions of the toes and the distance between the tracks. She was no advanced tracker but she could make some simple deductions from what she saw. The thing had two legs, a tail, and was hunting.

The image that came to her mind first was that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex - but of course, that was silly, right?

...Dinosaurs might still walk the planet in other worlds...

She gulped. There were a lot of smaller tracks around the big ones, from which she could deduce little besides what kind of creature made them - pony. She could see several of them shooting off in one direction, more or less directly north. She couldn't make heads or tails of any other direction - not even which way the predator went.

"Well?" Rarity asked, nervous. Her face was still dirty from the fall a short while ago but she had managed to fully recover her eyelashes and reform her mane to a 'suitable' level of grace.

Twilight took a breath. "Well, they were here and a big predatory thing attacked them. At least some of them ran that direction. The creature... I have no idea where the creature went, but I don't see any big tracks where they fled, so that's good."

Rarity frowned. "Unless it can fly."

Twilight bit her lip. "...I think I'd be able to know if it took off flying here. The canopy's still intact..."

"Why wouldn't it chase them then?"

"Fluttershy's Stare?"

"Then why'd they even need to run?"

Twilight shook her head. "I don't know, Rarity. All I can tell you is what I see with my rather dubious tracking skills. Which is not much."

"It's okay. Just... Follow them then?"

Twilight nodded. "Hopefully we can find Applejack and she can put together this mess of trails. Or just tell us what happened... Splitting up was a really bad idea."

"That remains to be seen," Rarity reminded her. "We don't know what happened."

Twilight forced herself to accept the comforting remark. "Right. Right. Let's not keep them waiting. Who knows, we could meet them on their way back!"

~~~

The 'demon' village adjusted to the three unusual ponies rather quickly. Siron made a short announcement - barely two minutes - and things moved along at a quick pace. The children still couldn't take their eyes off the unusual ponies and although they weren't hiding in fear anymore, they wouldn't come close to the ponies either. The adults kept shooting the mares surprised glances but nodded in their direction as though they were people, not animals. It was a much less hostile environment than it had been just a few minutes before.

Rainbow Dash liked the attention to the surprise of absolutely no one. She waved, grinned, and did numerous aerial tricks for the populace just to see their reactions. Granted, their faces were basically impossible to read, but there was always body language to go off of and Rainbow Dash decided that was good enough. She was the center of attention, and she loved it. This was likely because none of the animal ponies had wings or horns - not even the version of Twilight she had seen trotting around. Nothing but regular, cutie-markless earth ponies in the care of 'demons.'

Darn Applejack, naming them 'demons.' Now Rainbow Dash couldn't think of anything else to call them. It was still somewhat insulting to them, no matter how apt of a description the name was. The 'demons' were a rather violent people - fighting broke out every few minutes and at least two of those incidents hadn't been friendly sparring. Nobody had gotten seriously injured, but from what Rainbow Dash had seen she wouldn't put duels to the death past these people. The thought was both cool and terrifying, like that T-Rex from earlier.

Oh - Fluttershy! Where was she!?

The moment of panic subsided quickly - she probably tamed that big dinosaur easily. The three of them probably didn't even need to run into the hands of the demons. But had Rainbow Dash thought of that? No, not until now. She'd been in panic mode, which had quickly shifted into the annoyed angry mode, and then to showoff mode. She hadn't really gotten a chance to think till now.

"Hey, we should probably go out - check for Fluttershy. We've been here a while."

"We'll head out soon," Applejack said. "Ah think a group of them are preparin' to go huntin', if Ah'm readin' Pink correctly. We could leave with them, have some protection."

Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow. "Where?"

Applejack looked at Pink - the same pink-carapace demon that had helped capture them and had been with them ever since. (The other one, Red, had noticeably avoided the ponies at every turn.) Pink paused, trying to figure out what Applejack wanted. He eventually just shrugged and pointed to a basket of apple-like fruit.

Applejack facehooved and shook her head. "No..."

"Tach," Pinkie said before pointing to a group of demons - two men and one woman - suiting up with weapons, breastplates, and their pony mounts. Rainbow Dash tried not to look at the ponies too closely, especially the one that looked like her. She instead focused on the weapons. Most of them were spears, though she caught sight of a couple swords. One demon had a set of razor-sharp yo-yos she swung around with her four arms, mesmerizing Rainbow Dash with their cyclic motions.

"Yep.." Rainbow Dash smiled. "That's them, that's the hunt. Totally going on that."

Applejack raised her eyebrows. "We aren't exactly hunters, Rainbow."

"Oh, Psh, I'm sure we can show them some fun things, right Pink?"

Pink looked at her and shrugged in bafflement.

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes at Pink and in the process noticed an almost-white demon coming up to her; a female with four blue, shimmering eyes. She had more designs etched into her carapace than most of the others, all variations of a diamond pattern not seen on any other demons. Even the usually untouched 'face' was covered in them, the etchings twisting all the way down to her toes.

Rainbow Dash waved at her and did an aerial frontflip, smirking.

The white woman - who Rainbow Dash was already calling White - raised her hand, creating a soft pink-white glow around her digits. Magic. Rainbow Dash had slowly become convinced that of all the demons, only Siron had magic, but before her was proof that the assumption was false. White's wings began to glow impressively with her magic energy, the power lifting her into the air as effortlessly as Rainbow Dash's wings lifted herself. She performed her own frontflip.

Rainbow Dash smirked. "Hey Pinkie! I think I've just been challenged!"

"Go easy on her at first, Dashie!"

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. "Okay fine." She stretched her hooves and wings - then launched into the air, stalled, and entered a controlled fall. She angled herself perfectly at the ground and pulled up at the last possible second, the tip of her tail touching the top of one giant petal. She arched upward into a loopdeloop and stopped in front of White, smirking.

White looked around the area, calculating. Then she launched herself into the air, fell, did a loopdeloop mid-fall, and then pulled up at the last second.

Some demons started rubbing their fingers together to produce a cricket-like noise. The equivalent of applause, presumably.

Rainbow Dash chuckled. "Nice one! Time to show them what I've really got!" She considered doing one of her more advanced tricks - a tornado, for instance - but that was probably a little too extreme for this. She decided to keep it subdued, but still something beyond her opponent. She launched into the air; flying in a pattern she'd flown before at hundreds of Wonderbolt stunt shows. She hit a critical speed, and a trail of rainbow magic appeared behind her. The manifestation of color drew gasps from the mass below.

"Go Dashie!" Pinkie cheered, waving a flag.

Rainbow Dash did exactly that - she performed a rapid corkscrew back into the ground, landing with a sharp turn, wings splayed, a rainbow visible between them. She smirked at White. "Beat that."

She did.

Rainbow Dash gawked as White raised both of her hands, summoning dual magic spheres to her sides. She flew into the air, face skyward, as the orbs circled her. Two magic trails were left behind in a double-helix pattern, leading the eye up to the impressive glowing point that was White herself. She floated up there for a while, shining like a star atop a double helix. Then she exploded in a shower of sparks, falling down as if dead. Rainbow Dash was concerned for a second but White righted herself, landing on her feet.

"Heh," Rainbow Dash chuckled. "I'm going to have to bring out the big guns, aren't I?"

"No time," Applejack said. "The hunting party's heading out. Pink's getting adamant about it."

This was an understatement, Pink was hopping up and down, waving all four of his arms. Rainbow Dash nodded. "Looks like we have to put this on hold White, but we will continue."

White nodded as if she understood. Maybe she did. Maybe she thought Rainbow Dash was conceding. Rainbow Dash didn't know, she simply left to check out the hunting party. Pink came with them.

Pinkie made a "hrm..." noise.

"What?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"I'm going to call these three... Rose, Crimson, and Fuchsia. The winged one's Fuchsia, if that isn't obvious."

"Good enough for me," Rainbow Dash said, looking at the demons that comprised the hunting party. Rainbow Dash did think that maybe Rose was more of a light pink, but they already had a demon named Pink. It'd be so nice if they could just figure out their names. "...I've always wanted to be on a hunt..."

Applejack raised an eyebrow. "Really?"

"Well, yeah! It's exciting! Hunting down a target and taking it out - the mark of the predator's life!"

"You'd like being a dragon, huh?" Pinkie asked.

"Griffon too. Gilda'd talk about the hunt sometimes, even though she did eventually admit she sucked at it."

Applejack blinked. "She admitted to that?"

"We were young idiots who hadn't quite gotten the nuance of 'awesome' yet."

"Ah'm just surprised you know the word 'nuance'."

Pinkie snorted at this remark.

As the group of four demons and seven ponies (counting the mounts) set out, Pink eventually urged the three yammering ponies to quiet down. Soon, all of them were carefully prowling through the jungle. Fuchsia was at the front, her wings twitching with the soft breeze. She had the posture of someone listening closely to every last detail she could. The posture of a predator.

After what seemed like hours of walking, she held up a hand. She pointed with the other arm on the same side through a nearby bush. Rainbow Dash didn't see anything at first, but her great eyes eventually made out the target. There was a large green reptile standing perfectly still behind the bush. The behemoth was vaguely reminiscent of a triceratops, except the 'crown' was dome-shaped and there were five horns.

She realized she could hear it breathing.

Fuchsia waved three hands to point at Pink, Rose, and Crimson, directing them to certain locations around the triceratops-thing, giving it a wide berth. They expertly flanked it, weapons ready. Pink and Rose had spears, Crimson had two swords, and Fuchsia held the yo-yo things, eyes narrow in focus.

Applejack took in a deep breath and turned away. Apparently, she'd decided she couldn't actually be a part of this. Her loss, Rainbow Dash thought, turning to Pinkie. The earth pony was smiling, but that smile wasn't as big as usual. Rainbow Dash knew she wasn't thrilled about this either - heck, Rainbow Dash herself was a little nervous - but Pinkie was going through with it. Probably to get on the good side of these people more than anything else.

Rainbow Dash just wanted to prove to herself she could be a part of this. She took in a breath to calm herself...

Fuchsia yelled the command to move before Rainbow Dash was done breathing out. Fuchsia slung the beast’s back legs with one of her yo-yos, preventing it from running away. It was surprising that such a flimsy looking string held in the struggles. Rose and Pink threw their spears into the reptile's thick, flabby side, prompting a substantial roar of pain. Rainbow Dash saw the red blood seep out, a sight that both chilled and excited her. The duality was strong with her emotions today.

Crimson moved next, leaping onto the raging reptile's back, kicking it and driving his swords in with impressive force. He was trying to knock it over, but no matter how much Fuchsia pulled with her yo-yo to help the beast wouldn't topple. It tried to flee again, but the line held fast.

Pinkie Pie decided to act - appearing on top of the triceratops-thing's crown with a wooden mallet in her hooves. She walloped it alongside the head, dazing it. Rose and Pink seized the opportunity, ramming themselves into the beast's side while it was disoriented. This made the fat reptile fall to the side, legs flailing. Crimson leaped into the air again, landing right in front of the beast's face. He drove a sword right between its eyes. It twitched and let out one final roar before falling still, dead.

Pinkie whooped nervously. "G-got 'im! Heh... Heh..." Her entire body shook and her breathing sped up. "Okay... Calm... Calm... Down Pinkie, everything's fine..."

Fuchsia put a hand on Pinkie, drawing the jarred pony's gaze. She nodded in approval - and Rainbow Dash knew the demon was trying to comfort Pinkie. The earth pony grinned, pulling the creature into a big hug. Fuchsia was obviously baffled by this action, but she didn't remove Pinkie from her.

Pinkie eventually removed herself. "It's done Applejack, you can look!"

"How... Nasty is it?"

"Less blood than I was expecting," Rainbow Dash observed. "You always think it'll go gushing... It doesn't, really." She laughed nervously. "Haven't you had dead animals at your farm Applejack?"

"Yeah..." Applejack said, turning slowly. "Ah'm not a fan of it when it happens though. There's a reason we ship the pigs off to get slaughtered."

Pinkie gasped. "You slaughter the pigs? I thought you used them for truffle hunting!"

"Why in Equestria would we need that many pigs for truffle hunting? No, it's just that Equestria's griffon and dragon population need to eat too, you know."

"Oh riiiight! Duh!" Pinkie tapped her head.

And then Pinkie's tail started twitching the same time her left pupil dilated. "Pinkie sense acting up!" She shouted.

The demons went on edge. They were able to recognize the intensity in her voice.

Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow - Pinkie sense. Yet another thing about Pinkie you just couldn't question. Twilight had tried once and ended up in the hospital multiple times for it. It was just a 'feeling' you had to trust. "What's it mean this time?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"I dunno, it's a new one. Feels bad though."

And then a ‘T-rex’ burst out of the nearby trees, roaring.

How in Equestria didn't we hear this thing walk up!? Rainbow Dash glanced at the once-noisy triceratops-thing. Oh.

Rainbow Dash briefly considered running, but she had enough of her wits about her to realize the demons weren't. Fuchsia had launched herself into the air with some effort, wrapping the predator's jaw in her yo-yo, forcing the maw shut. Rose and Pink retrieved their spears from the felled beast's flesh and threw them at the larger monster's knees. Crimson drove a sword into the Rex's flanks, opening an impressive gash as long as Crimson was tall. And yet, the apex predator remained standing, albeit displeased with the pain it was experiencing.

Pinkie appeared on top of the Rex's head - this time with a golf club - and hit it in the earhole. The muffled roar it unleashed somehow sounded more unnerving than a natural one.

Rainbow Dash took a breath. Okay... She flew towards the beast's nose and bucked it at high speed. Her back hooves hurt - but the Rex's skull hurt more. "Take that!"

Applejack even got in on the action this time - it was no longer a hunt, it was a battle to survive. Her impressive earth pony strength took the Rex's legs out from under it, toppling it to the ground.

Crimson moved to deal the killing blow between the eyes, but that was the moment the yo-yo wire finally snapped. Crimson stopped just short of leaping into the dinosaur's gaping maw. The Rex roared, standing back up despite constant whaling from Rose, Pink, and Applejack. Its head was level with the flying form of Fuchsia. It was angry, biting at her with intents to devour her in a single bite. There wasn't much she could do to avoid it with her tired wings, seeing as falling wouldn't help. The beast missed the first bite. He would not miss the second.

Then another ‘T-Rex’ showed up and chomped down on the other predator's neck, killing it in a near instant. The fight stopped instantly when everyone saw who was riding the savior dinosaur.

"Hello!" Fluttershy called, waving from atop her mount. "Meet Rexy! He's a good boy. Uh... Do you all mind if he eats? He's kinda hungry still... It's a little gruesome to watch, more so than predators from home."

Rainbow Dash nodded in agreement. "Yeah... Everything's more brutal..." She let out a breath of relief. They were alive and awesome.

Pinkie smiled. "He can have some, but the demo- er, the red people need to take some of it back to their tribe."

"Oh, that's no problem, he can share." She then told Rexy what to do and floated down from atop him. "So, are you going to introduce me to your new friends or..."

Crimson pointed at Fluttershy and cocked his head. Fuchsia shrugged.

Rainbow Dash laughed. "Yeah, I guess we can do that. Fluttershy, this is Pink. He... Well, he took us prisoner..."

~~~

Twilight and Rarity found the gigantic flower with almost no difficulty at all despite having lost the trail several minutes ago. Their jaws dropped at the sight of the flower-based village. Unlike the others, they'd had nothing to prepare them for the unusual sight - the flower, the bug-people, the domestic ponies, the pony that looked just like Twilight - all these things were dumped on Twilight and Rarity all at once. Twilight stared at her other self for some time from her vantage point at the flower’s edge.

Twilight shivered. "This isn't Equestria, all right..."

"My... Do you think those ponies down there are anything like us?"

"Eating out of a trough? Being kept in pens? I doubt it."

"...We do that with cows, dear."

Twilight blinked. "...That suddenly seems horribly degrading."

"It might be," Rarity admitted. "The others are probably in there somewhere."

"The chances are very high. Let's hope they aren't captured." Or being cooked. "I'm going to introduce myself, you should stay back."

"Twilight, I'm not letting you go near those things alone. No discussion."

Twilight took in a breath. "Okay then..." She trotted onto the flower, heading right for the center of town, Rarity close behind. At first, the bug-people paid no attention to them. Then one pointed out Twilight's wings in curiosity. A vermillion female looked up and stared right at Twilight with that unreadable expression all of them shared. Then her posture started to tremble slightly and she pointed at Twilight's horn and yelled an alien word.

Twilight cast a translation spell the instant she heard that without thinking - acting on the instinct of a mage. Since there were dozens upon dozens of different races on Equestria and thousands of different dialects, it was one of those spells that had been perfected in the deep past and one that would be taught to any higher-level mage, even if the need for such a spell had declined. It was by no means a simple or easy spell, but she had been trained to use it whenever she ran into any language not touched by it. She was so fixated on the spell that she didn't notice the red people scamper away from her in fear.

Rarity had to tell her. "Twilight, they're scared."

"Why?" Twilight asked. "They are obviously natural predators and have domesticated..." she paused. "...What are presumably Neandroponies. I suppose they haven't seen wings before..."

"No, perhaps not. But they were scared of your magic."

Twilight frowned, wondering why again. She turned her head to the version of herself - no horn. "I suppose unicorns don't exist..."

"Agreed. Perhaps you could keep magic to a minimum then?"

"Well, I already cast the translate spell, but okay. Speaking of that, they need to talk more so the translation can work itself out. It doesn't read their minds. So... hey!" She called, moving towards a velvet individual standing by a cart pensively. "I'm Twilight Sparkle!"

The man let out a series of panicked clicks - one of which the spell managed to translate as 'away' in an uncharacteristically high-pitched voice.

Twilight smirked. "Oh! Keep talking! We need to be able to communicate! 'Away', see? It works both ways!"

The velvet man apparently heard the clicking noise that meant 'away' come from her mouth. It made him scream in fear, running for a nearby tent. More than a few followed his example.

Twilight shook her head. "This doesn't make any sense! These people are obviously brutal and violent, given the social structures I've observed from afar. Why are they so terrified of me?"

Then a white female walked right up to them. She met Rarity's eyes first. The two had a moment of inexplicable connection, but the white bug broke off the stare quickly. She turned to Twilight and started to speak rapidly. Only a few words got through - 'speech' and 'learn' and 'me' and 'you'.

"She knows what I'm doing!" Twilight said. "Thank you miss... White!"

White kept talking and making gestures. "Fear." "Magic." "Danger." "Secret." "Then." "Others."

"Others? Have you seen my friends?"

"What." "Hear."

Twilight created a magic image of Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, and Fluttershy's cutie marks. "These?"

"Gone."

"GONE!?" Twilight shouted - instantly going from zero to panic. "What do you mean gone!? Tell me-"

A bolt of red magic hit her in the side, sending her skidding across the dirt. Rarity gasped. "Twilight!"

Twilight opened her eyes, barely giving herself enough time to dodge the next attack by taking off into the air. She saw her attacker - by far the largest of the bug-people. One of his right hands was enveloped in red magic while the other held an impressive staff. Even though he had no expression Twilight could see murder in his eyes.

"Siron! Stop!" White yelled.

This was answered with untranslated clicks mixed with "that is danger."

"I mean no harm!" Twilight shouted. Siron turned to her instantly and Twilight knew that Siron only heard "harm." He pointed the staff at her, channeling his magic through it. A claw of green and red swirled death shot out. Twilight raised a magic shield, blocking it - but she could feel it tearing away at her magic in an unnatural way. Sadly, since she was able to block the magic at all she knew the staff wasn't powerful enough to open a portal. She'd hoped it would be. She fired her own bolt of magic at Siron in retaliation.

He took it face first, a mark appearing between his four eyes. It hurt, but he evidentially wasn't the type to care about a little pain. He raised his hand, enveloping Twilight in his telekinesis. He twirled the staff, firing a dozen bolts of green-red at her.

Twilight levitated herself out of the grip, flying in an arc behind Siron. She pulled her horn back and unleashed a powerful explosion of purple energy, sending Siron forward - but he didn't topple over. He kept his ground and pointed two hands at Rarity - enveloping her in telekinesis. She screamed. "Twilight!"

Siron put the jade of the staff to Rarity's neck and gave Twilight a deadly look. He wanted her to stand down, or Rarity was going to get it.

Twilight gulped. She couldn't think of anything fast enough to get Rarity out safely. Siron had discovered her weakness...

And then Twilight remembered her teleportation spell.

Rarity vanished in a puff of purple energy and appeared right next to Twilight. Twilight smirked at Siron.

Siron was not deterred. He raised his staff into the air, collecting energy into a swirling mass. Twilight did the same with her horn, ready to see exactly how much power Siron could muster.

"Everybody STOP!" Rainbow Dash yelled, flying between the two of them, hooves outstretched. "WE! ARE! NOT! ENEMIES! NOT!"

Siron lowered the staff. Twilight let her spell fizzle out. "Rainbow... You're okay. I… I was worried for a second there."

"Naw, don't be. We made friends here, Twilight, even though we couldn't understand a word they said."

"You can now," Siron spoke, standing tall, but visibly more relaxed. A few more untranslated clicks followed this.

"Woah..." Rainbow Dash said. "That's cool."

"Translation spell," Twilight smiled. "...Sorry for getting worked up, Siron."

White narrowed her eyes at Siron, making mad clicks. "Siron." "Worked up."

Siron glanced at White. "Veila." "Protect you." "Alicorn."

"Your name is Veila?" Rainbow Dash asked White. She nodded tentatively.

"You have a word for alicorn?" Twilight wondered aloud.

Siron frowned, trying to parse together what she was saying. "Hand." "Blue." "Danger."

A fuchsia female walked up to Siron and gave a little speech about "Hunt." "Beast." "Chomper." "Pink one." and "New yellow one."

Twilight raised an eyebrow at Rainbow Dash. "...What did you do?"

Rainbow Dash smirked. "We hunted dinosaurs Twilight!"

Twilight had nothing to say to this.

~~~

Rainbow Dash really liked being able to talk to the demons. It had only taken a few more minutes of conversation to get most of the kinks worked out and it was much better than communicating with gestures consisting mostly of varying degrees of shrug. Siron agreed with this statement. It turned out that Siron was really his name and not just a title. Red - or, rather, Anix - as just grumpy about it regardless and hardly talked at all. Veila found the idea of communication simply fascinating, and Fuchsia...

...Well, "Fef" was not the person Rainbow Dash had expected. She was not an awesome, cool, strong warrior type. She was a warrior - as were all the demons - but she was also rather hyper and excited about, well, everything. Her retellings of what happened on the hunt made Siron chuckle more than a few times.

Rainbow Dash was really glad laughter translated as well, the alien noise had been a little disconcerting.

Fef was still going on, even as Rainbow Dash thought. "And then the yellow one just rode in on her CHOMPING BEAST and DOWNED the enemy! It was just so... So..."

"Awesome?" Rainbow Dash suggested.

"Yes! AWESOME!" Fef twirled her remaining yo-yo in triumph. "That's exactly what it was! Thank you, Rainbow!"

"Don't mention it."

Siron chuckled again. "Well, this is... Interesting. Where is this tame chomper you speak of?"

"Riiiight behind the treeline with the half-eaten Horner and dead chomper. Mlinx didn't want to scare the town with the hulking beast. Probably a good idea, seeing as you were already dueling an ALICORN."

“I'm right here you know," Twilight said.

"Wait, Mlinx? Who's that?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"The bro you probably just call 'Pink'," Fef giggled. "Naming us by colors... What a SILLY idea!"

Siron held up a hand, silencing further conversation. "Before we continue this we should go deal with this tame chomper. I'll believe it when I see it."

"Won't take long," Rainbow Dash chuckled.

Siron, Fef, and Anix set out with Twilight, Rarity, and Rainbow Dash close behind. Rainbow Dash took a moment to wave at Veila as they left. She waved back.

"Hey, why isn't she coming?" Rarity asked Siron.

"She and I are the only P'e'thika in the tribe," Siron saw the look on Rarity's face and knew instantly the word wasn't translated. "We can use magic. There must always be one in the tribe. She is the only heir for now, so she must be protected. It is the main reason why I took swift action against Twilight."

"Ah, I see."

It took less than a minute to reach the edge of the flower and enter the treeline. Pinkie Pie was waiting for them. "Come one, come all, see the giant Rexy! Admission free, but don't call him Roxy, or else he'll make your hearts break with adorable ferocity!"

Fef broke out into laughter. "You sound EXACTLY like how I imagined you!"

"Oh cool! The translation spell's ON! Woo! Now we can have real parties!"

"Calm yourselves," Siron said. "I must see this... Rexy."

"Right this way Siron!" Pinkie trilled, trotting deeper into the jungle.

Rexy was, in fact, right that way. He stood just under the canopy, sniffing the air like some kind of ferret. Fluttershy was scratching his nose. "Who's a good boy? You're a good boy!"

Siron nodded. Despite his cool demeanor, he was at a loss for words. "...Ah."

Rarity saw the half-eaten 'Horner' and gagged. She put a hoof over her eyes and turned away. Twilight didn't gag, but she gave the carcass an untrusting look.

Rainbow Dash laughed. "It's just food for the tribe, Twi!"

"Not just food!" Fef said. "SCALES for ARMOR too! And those horns can make some off-the-wall weapons!" She squeed.

Mlinx (Rainbow Dash still thought of him as Pink internally) looked up. "...Wait, we can understand them... How?"

"Spell," Twilight offered. "It translates between languages.”

Mlinx looked at Twilight for the first time and jumped skittishly into the air, letting out a swear that had no translation.

"At ease, Mlinx," Siron said. "It is not the Mistress."

"Horns on a chomper, now there's more. And look!" Mlinx pointed at Rarity. "Just a horn? Wow! That's terrifying. Must be more powerful..."

Anix let out a huff. "Coward."

Fef punched Anix. "Hey, cool it with that! Mlinx held himself ADMIRABLY on the HUNT!!!"

"You are not a good judge of that."

Siron let out a sigh. "Settle this like warriors or shut up. I'd prefer the latter at the moment seeing as we have other things to attend to."

Twilight looked at the chief of all the demons. "Indeed we do. Among the first things I'd like to know is who this 'Mistress' is and why she makes you terrified of me."

"Come to my hut then. We will no doubt have much to discuss."

~~~

"So... Hi! I'm Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria. I'm an alicorn pony. What do you call yourself?"

Siron pondered this with two hands on his hips, one on his chin, and another on his staff. He was still having difficulty processing the fact that he was talking to a pony - an alicorn at that. It - she - wasn't walking around in that aloof, mindless way regular ponies did, nor was she being a savage monster. "I am just Siron. We don't have all those complex names here."

"...What do you call yourselves? As a people."

Siron cocked his head. "Not sure what you mean by that."

"Well, I'm a pony, Rexy is a 'chomper', some of my friends are dragons, certain animals are dogs, and you are...?"

Siron laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"We're just 'the people'. I can see now that not giving ourselves a name was perhaps a little hasty, but we had no need for one. Until now, I suppose."

"I... Guess there are a lot of different peoples where I come from. It's just assumed that everyone has a name..." She looked like she was pondering something.

"What were you calling us earlier - demons? What does that mean?"

Twilight folded her ears back and blushed. Siron marveled once again at the expressiveness of that face. The ponies wore their expressions for all to see - it was so fascinating to watch. It must be much easier for leaders to prove their worth in the land they came from.

"Siron... It's not a very... flattering word."

Siron liked the idea already. "What's it mean then?"

"Demons are a... Special kind of monster, often associated with violence, evil, and corruption. Most that exist where we come from are sealed away in a horrendous place called Tartarus."

Siron weaved two of his hands together. "I like this. We are, in fact, warriors that terrify all the creatures of the jungle. Even chompers run away in fear sometimes. I accept this label."

"You should really reconsider, it has evil connotations..."

"We are the red demons," Siron stated matter of factly. He could tell this annoyed Twilight, the expressions were just too obvious. Not only were the eyes easier to see than those of his people - there was also adjustable ears, flaring nostrils, twistable mouth, and shifting skin! There was no way these ponies could keep secrets, he was certain of it.

Siron leaned back in his throne. "Now that that's out of the way, tell me your story, Twilight Sparkle."

She did - she described her home in a reverent, almost poetic manner. He didn't understand a lot of what came from her mouth, but he didn't let her know that. He gleaned that there were many different tribal villages - or 'cities' as she called them - filled mostly with ponies. There were other unusual races with names like griffons, dragons, and changelings. Magic was apparently common over there, which Siron felt cheapened the gift. Most interesting was the notable cosmology of only one moon - the evil gray one. He felt sorry for the plight that must have come from that.

Then she spoke of the man of light and the enchantress. Siron had no idea about the man in light, though he did deduce that a unicorn was a pony with just a horn, like Rarity. Twilight spoke of the sphere, something she obviously knew little about.

"May I see it?" Siron asked.

"Sure. Just don't touch it. We... Really don't know what activates it." She brought it out, levitating it towards his face. He took over holding it with his own magic, narrowing his eyes. She was right - there was a spell in there. He'd never heard of enchantments before, though the idea of them explained much about the world he lived in now that he thought about it. She was also right that there was almost no power within the ball.

She nodded. "Yeah, I know, it's baffling. I think I have the right spell, but I don't have enough magic within me to activate it. And no, neither you nor your staff do either. I scanned it."

Siron knew this but nodded to confirm anyway. He also knew what she was going to ask next - it was written on her face.

"Do you... Know of any magic powerful enough?"

"The blue moon."

Twilight sighed. "Yeah, can't really get to the moon..."

"There is an altar roughly an hour's ride from here that summons the spirit of the blue moon to those it deems worthy. It no doubt has one of those 'enchantments' you spoke of. The spirit has more power than I can even imagine."

"That'd do it. Probably," Twilight said. "...There's a catch isn't there?"

Siron wasn't sure if she picked up on his body language or just deduced that on her own. Either way, it made him respect her more. She may not have held herself like a warrior, but he was becoming more and more convinced she had just been brought up wrong. "Yes. The Spirit of the gray moon prowls those lands. An alicorn. A dark, evil beast that has used its dark horn to kill many of our kind - demons - for glee. No warrior has managed to even wound her. Many have tried. She kills random demons while we are out hunting, but she always kills at the altar."

"So our way home - if we are worthy - is guarded by a dark alicorn moon spirit?"

"Yes."

"I can see why you were terrified of me. You thought I might have been her."

"The thought crossed my mind. But you just look too weak for that."

"Gee, thanks."

"Wasn't a compliment."

"That was a thing called sarcasm."

Siron blinked, silent. For a moment he became angry - but then he burst into laughter. "Of course it would go both ways..."

"Huh?"

"Not important," Siron said, waving a hand dismissively.

"Okay." Twilight frowned, entering deep calculated thought. Siron found this interesting.

"...You are a leader yourself," he said.

"Er... yes! One of the four Princesses of Equestria! Well, five, but my niece is a little young to be ruling. We're all alicorns. And no, none of us are 'warriors' like you, at least not devoutly so. Ponies are a peacekeeping race, though you probably already figured that out. Your culture is closer to that of the dragons, though more cooperative."

"If I get the opportunity I shall challenge a dragon to a duel."

Twilight smirked. "Better hope you pick one of the smaller ones, they can grow to the size of mountains."

Siron thought that sounded fun.

"Regardless... Thank you for your hospitality Siron, but we should probably try to get home as soon as we can. Maybe we can talk to this evil moon Spirit - or won't run into her at all."

"Wishful thinking."

"I know. But we won't have to beat her, I just need the power. I can get us out of there quickly."

Siron nodded. "Normally fleeing is unacceptable, but exceptions are made for the Mistress. I wish you luck on your quest." He stood up, clasping his hands over his chest and clapping the other two together. "May our arms cross again."

"...I have no arms."

Siron took a moment to realize how silly the saying was in this situation and laughed again. "No... No, you don't."

Twilight smiled warmly. "I get the idea though, don't worry." She turned to the door of the hut and opened it, stepping into the afternoon sun.

The five ponies and assorted demons looked up from their conversation to her and Siron.

Twilight looked at her friends and quickly explained the situation with the altar and the Moon Spirit.

"You... You're going to face the Mistress!?" Mlinx blurted. "You're all crazy!"

"Yep!" Pinkie said, hefting a fuzzy golf club. "There has to be some challenge, after all!"

"Count me in!" Fef said, twirling her yo-yos, having replaced the broken one already. "I've ALWAYS wanted to see the Mistress!"

Siron held up a hand. "You need not feel obligated, Fef."

"I'm not Siron! I just wanna LOOK and SEE!"

"Fool," Anix muttered.

Applejack glared at him. "She's courageous."

"Courage that gets you dead is foolish."

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. "We've faced off against dark monsters before, we'll be fine."

"Plus I can bring Rexy along!" Fluttershy said. "Scare the scary Mistress away!"

Rarity blinked. "My, that's a rather good idea."

"We should go soon - Spike is probably getting worried," Twilight said.

"Yeah..." Pinkie nodded slowly. "Come on Fef! Let's go!"

"Oh my YEEES!" she squealed. "Let the biggest hunt EVER commence!"

"I..." Mlinx looked at Pinkie, then at Rainbow Dash. "I'll come as well."

Anix wordlessly turned form Mlinx and walked away, making a careful gesture behind his back.

Siron shook his head. "You know what that means, Mlinx."

"Yes... Yes I do, Siron. We will make it right." He bowed.

Fluttershy blinked, glancing from the receding form of Anix to Mlinx. "Uh... What just happened?"

Mlinx held up a hand. "I can tell you about it after this hunt."

Fef's energy increased at the sound of someone else using the word 'hunt'. "Can we GO already!? HUNT! HUNT! HUNT!"

Twilight chuckled. "Yes Fef, we can go now." She paused. "Uh... Which way?"

Siron pointed with all four hands and the staff.

"Got it," Twilight said, oblivious to the mocking nature of the gesture. Ah, it was good to be a demon.

Siron wished them luck and returned to his hut. He laughed again - heartily and long.

That had gone exactly as planned.

They were going to take care of his alicorn problem for him. Some of them would probably die, but so what? The altar would be free...

~~~

Fef laughed suddenly. "We are now officially in a part of the jungle I've never SEEN!" She eagerly looked around with peeled eyes. "And as expected it looks a lot like the rest of the jungle. Bluh."

Pinkie grinned. "Well I think it looks pretty cool! Look at this giant blue flower!" She gestured at a large snapdragon-like plant.

Twilight examined it and thought it looked more purple than blue, but the color wasn't all that important at the moment. If she came back and documented the flora of this world it would be, but that thought was running in the background. Her focus was on the magic - she could feel it now, a powerful enchantment calling to her with a sweet song only she could hear. Rarity couldn't hear it - Twilight had asked a few minutes ago. The graceful unicorn just wasn't as attuned to magic.

Twilight had been pretty confident the altar would provide enough magic power before but now she was certain of it. She even thought she could steal the needed magic from just the excess emanations on the chance the blue moon Spirit didn't find them worthy, though that would take time. Twilight found herself wondering what 'worthy' meant on this world - battle-hardened? Strong? Or was it dependant on being pure of heart? ...Whatever that meant. She supposed she was about to find out.

Until that happened...

She turned to Mlinx, who was walking alongside Rexy. He had taken a liking to the huge dinosaur and had been talking with Fluttershy about the possibility of taming other dinosaurs, and she'd been glad to give him tips. He appeared to be actively listening, unlike Fef, who had the attention span of a mayfly.

"Mlinx!" Twilight called.

"Yes?" he said, riding over.

"Why was Anix so upset with you back there?"

"He thinks we're going to our deaths. I don't think that, but he did. He was just trying to look out for us."

"Odd way of showing it..."

"Really? That's pretty standard around here. Though, Fef and I aren't exactly normal. Well, okay, Fef is more normal than me, she's one of our best warriors. I'm well known as the soft shell who gets ideas."

"Are ideas bad?"

"No, just uncertain or dangerous. Mainly to myself. Anix keeps me under his arm to keep me out of trouble. Or... He did."

Twilight frowned. "He rejected you, didn't he?"

"Yes. There will have to be a public confrontation when I return." He laughed bitterly. "I'm going to be trounced."

"Is he really that good?"

"Best warrior in the tribe, besides Siron."

"I take offense to that!" Fef interrupted, slinging her yo-yo expertly past his head, close enough to put him on edge.

Mlinx shivered. "No one is questioning your... Erm... Skill with those things."

Fef laughed. "Oh of course not! Derp, I just have to give you a hard time, you know. Ohmygosh I've never seen this kind of bug before- Oh. Never mind. It was just the lighting." She then did a cartwheel for no reason. Pinkie followed suit, giggling with her.

"Those two are really hitting it off..." Mlinx noted.

"Indeed," Rarity agreed. "It's rare Pinkie finds somepony - er, someone - who can keep up with her antics.

"Fef's never had someone. She's always been the odd bug. At least there are other soft shells in the tribe..."

Twilight was annoyed by his continual self-deprecating use of the phrase ‘soft shell’. However, his tone wasn't all that negative, so she couldn't be sure if it really was a degrading term or just a cultural thing. She didn't ask - although she was thinking about it.

All thoughts and clatter stopped instantly when they entered the clearing. Where there had been dense flora before now there was nothing but bare dirt in a circular formation, dried under the gaze of the sun. There was only one thing in the clearing - a single, round, white pedestal. Twilight was instantly struck with a feeling of déjà vu. She didn't know it, but this was only to be one of many such feelings she would get in her life. She would never fully understand then, but they would become constant companions, thoughts defined by the sense of things having happened before.

Twilight looked around - no sign of the Mistress. Good. She cautiously approached the altar, the rest of her party following behind.

They heard a horrid screeching behind them - the sound of something dark, angry, and dead inside. Fef and Mlinx whipped around, readying weapons.

The dark one appeared behind the two of them with a teleport, taking her position in the center of the group. She was an alicorn twice the height of Twilight, mane and tail the color of Void swirling with an unsettling magic aura. Her wings were angular and predatory while her eyes were that of a serpent. Dark gray armor akin to bones lined her midsection, and her horn curved upwards slightly into a threatening point.

Twilight's eyes widened - this was more than déjà vu, this mare looked familiar.

It was the form of one of her first enemies, the evil she had faced with her friends when they first met. Nightmare Moon. Slightly altered from the image in Twilight's memory, but unmistakably her.

The Nightmare went after Fef and Mlinx first, giving them no chance to turn around. Her hooves came down on them, smashing them painfully into the dirt.

Rexy stopped the Nightmare from killing them then and there with a swipe of his enormous tail. Even a being such as the Nightmare was powerless against the sheer girth of the reptile. Pinkie moved in next with her party cannon, bringing it out of nowhere and blasting confetti festively into the dark mare. Rarity fired off some simple magic bolts from her horn; Twilight smiled, glad to see the spell she had taught Rarity put to good use. Rainbow Dash flew around the Nightmare rapidly, enveloping her in a tornado of wind.

The Nightmare'd had enough of this. She banished the tornado with a simple flap of her wings, tossing Rainbow Dash to the side. Rexy tried to eat the Nightmare but he found himself lifted by pitch-black telekinesis and thrown to the treeline. Pinkie dodged the attack that came after her, appearing on the Nightmare's back with a golf club in her hooves. "Fore!" she shouted.

She never got to the punchline of her joke - the Nightmare grabbed her in a magic chokehold before the club made contact with her skull. The Nightmare tried to snap the pony's neck, expression shifting to fury when Pinkie's neck simply bent like a limp noodle instead of snapping. Pinkie's pained smile distracted the Nightmare enough for Applejack to get a buck in across the dark mare's jaw, releasing Pinkie.

"Thanks, Applejack... Gah..."

"Thank me later!"

"Oh look at that, a cheesy line! Ha- oh right."

The Nightmare pulled her head back, black energies coalescing around her horn, giving it an unusual metallic sheen. Twilight recognized the spell - a big laser, directed right at Pinkie.

"Cover me!" Twilight told Rarity as she leaped right into the path of the laser, pulling her own head back to charge a retaliation spell. She had to release it early to counter the Nightmare's, so her purple beam was considerably smaller than the black onslaught, but it held for a moment.

A moment was all that was needed. Fef - who had been pretending to be seriously injured - flung a yo-yo from her position, wrapping around the Nightmare's legs. The blades wouldn't cut into the dark one's flesh, but Fef didn't need that. She just pulled and the Nightmare fell over, her spell stopping in an instant.

Rexy returned to the fight, Fluttershy on his head. She nodded to him. He raised a foot and stomped down on the Nightmare, kicking up an impressive cloud of dust.

Mlinx laughed, getting up on one knee. "Crushed by a chomper... What a way t-"

"Not done," Twilight, Pinkie, and Fef said at the same time.

"Crud," Mlinx said. The Nightmare teleported in front of him, growling. He thrust his spear forward and it snapped in two.

Then the Nightmare spoke.

"Fool."

Twilight remembered to teleport Mlinx out of the way before the Nightmare could lob off his head. "You can talk?" Twilight asked the Nightmare.

She didn't respond. Instead, she released an explosion of black energy that toppled everyone over except Fef. Fef gulped. "Nice moon mare..."

The Nightmare rammed Fef through the chest, her black horn driving all the way through the carapace, dripping blue blood out the back.

Fef cried out a little - both in pain and... amusement? "GOTHCA!” With her other yo-yo she tied herself to the Nightmare and wrestled the alicorn to the ground, attempting to snap the dark mare's neck. The neck wouldn't break. The Nightmare teleported out, leaving Fef down on the ground, blue blood pooling around her.

It was then Twilight knew they would lose this fight. They needed a plan B.

"I'm going to try something!" she shouted. "Keep her away from me!"

"I'll... Try, dear!" Rarity yelled. She was shaken by the injury of Fef, but Twilight had faith she wouldn't faint until later.

Twilight bolted for the altar, trying to tune out the yells, screams, and roars of the fight. She arrived, laying her hooves on the altar, feeling its magic course through her. Yes, there was plenty to work with; she just needed to access it...

The altar lit up with a flash of light - a beam that led directly to the blue moon up above. A white figure took form before Twilight. The entity looked human, albeit with four arms. She had no face - merely a white space with a lump that might have been a nose. She wore nothing and her hair trailed behind her like wispy clouds.

Twilight was speechless. What was this?

The woman extended her four white hands and levitated the 'bowling ball' out of Twilight's pack, placing it equidistant from all her palms. She held it there for one second. Then she raised a single hand, poised upright for what seemed like an eternity.

She brought it down, cutting the sphere in two.

Twilight screamed - and was momentarily able to hear the scream of Applejack. Twilight panicked. There went their hope. The Spirit had denied them, cutting up the device, refusing the power. It wanted them to end right here...

The Spirit banished these thoughts with a single action.

She removed a green diamond out of the sphere. It glowed a soft color and shifted in and out of phase with the light around it, making it seem like it was moving.

Twilight's eyes widened as she realized what it was.

A nonmagical power source.

Suddenly the Spirit was gone and the battle rushed back into Twilight's senses. Rexy was laying on the ground, barely moving, Fluttershy frantically tending to him. Fef was trying to stand up, but her wound was too great. Rainbow Dash was nowhere to be seen. Mlinx and Applejack were lying in a pile to the side, the latter's hat over the demon's head.

Only Rarity and Pinkie were facing the Nightmare - and with a magic bolt directed right at her horn, Rarity fell as well.

"Twilight if you're going to pull a trick out of your hat now would be the time!" Pinkie yelled as she leaped over the Nightmare's rage-induced attacks, which were currently in the form of dark scythe-like magics that Pinkie avoided by a hair's breadth each time.

Briefly Twilight wondered how Pinkie was so good at this, but she quickly banished the thought. Pinkie was right; she had to act now. She grabbed the green diamond in her magic and pushed it with the spell she had crafted earlier - a spell for direct transport to Earth. The diamond reacted with ease, pumping far too much energy into the spell. Twilight saw the fabric of reality stretch around her - but no portal formed.

Twilight paled. No. No, that was our last shot.

"Twilight!" Pinkie yelled, one of the Nightmare's hooves hitting her across the jaw.

What had even been the point of going to Earth anyway? There was no magic there, this Nightmare would just lay waste to it - unless one of the leaders decided to drop one of those 'nuke' things, and that'd be just as horrible...

"Argh!" Pinkie yelled - the Nightmare had gotten smart again and trapped her in the dark telekinesis.

"You are unnatural," the Nightmare stated coldly.

"You're one to talk nasty-pants!"

If only we could go back to Equestria.

Twilight's eyes lit up. Then she turned to look at the Starburst on her flank.

The connection was still there. She knew it - even from worlds beyond, she was still attached to her destiny. She lit her horn, trying to pull at the faint connection. But she wasn't powerful enough. The connection was there, she just couldn-

"Twilight!" Pinkie wailed just before her head was slammed into the ground, flattened like a pancake, silencing her.

Twilight grabbed ahold of the green diamond with her wing and locked eyes with the Nightmare.

Twilight saw the reptilian eyes of darkness.

The Nightmare watched Twilight's eyes go pure white. She channeled the power of the diamond and found her connection to her home, her destiny.

The evil being had no time to react - and Twilight knew it. She knew exactly where she was connecting to in Equestria. There was no other location it could possibly be.

A hole tore between the worlds, swelling to the size of a large house in under a second. The edges were white with strands of magic interwoven like braids. Through the portal, a Tree could be seen. A Tree made of Crystal with a purple starburst in the center that matched Twilight's flank.

The Tree of Harmony.

Twilight and her five friends all felt their souls resonate with the magics within the Tree. The Nightmare felt it as well, lifting up a hoof, preparing to flee.

She forgot to teleport.

A rainbow of colors shot from the center of the Tree of Harmony, enveloping the dark Nightmare in the holy light of Harmony itself. The Nightmare said no words - she merely screamed as she was enveloped by the blinding colors. In a flash of brilliant white, the magics dissipated, leaving behind an alicorn almost nothing like the one that had stood there moments prior. She was shorter, her wings were more natural, her armor was gone, and the dark mane had been replaced with beautiful stars. The eyes were closed peacefully. She was asleep.

Twilight stopped casting the spell and the portal behind her closed with a comical 'pop.'

Pinkie pulled her face off the ground with a single motion. "That was-"

"So AWESOME!" Rainbow Dash yelled, trotting out from the treeline, taking a branch out of her mane. She was very bruised and battered - more so than everypony else - but she looked so alive.

"Hey! That's my line!" Fef shouted, before going into a fit of coughing.

Twilight gasped - she really saw Fef's wound, by far the worst out of all of theirs. "We need to get you-"

"I'll live," Fef said, laughing. "Not like she punctured anything VITAL."

"But... Your chest... There are all sorts of vital organs there..."

"You keep vital organs there? No wonder you ponies aren't warriors. Wow. Sad."

"She's talking petals," Mlinx muttered. "That attack narrowly missed her stomach. If it had hit that, she'd be dead. Most of us wouldn't be able to stand while oozing blood either."

"Ahaha- I'm not standing!" she laid back down on the ground. "I'm not movin' at all!"

"Is everyone else okay...?" Twilight asked, unsure about Fef.

There was a chorus of 'yes'es.

"Uh..." Fluttershy said. "Rexy broke a leg. You... Do you think you can make a portal so I can take him home to treat him?"

Twilight looked at the diamond. "I think I could move all of Canterlot with this thing. A T-Rex should be easy."

"Oh. I'll take that as a yes then. Can we go now? There's not anything else to do here..."

"Take care of me," A deep, melodious voice announced. The dark alicorn was awake. "Do what you must."

Twilight put on a pitying smile. She knew exactly what to do with this mare.

~~~

"Siron, meet Luna. Luna, meet Siron."

Siron blinked - he had not been expecting this outcome. Or at least that's what Twilight assumed; as always, the demons were hard to read. "We found a way home and used it to purge the dark magics from her. She won't hurt you anymore. In fact..."

Luna bowed. "I submit myself to you as one of your warriors. If you will have me, after all I've done."

Siron was silent for several seconds. Then he laughed, as Twilight expected.

"I'd be a fool to turn you down. Come, Luna, let's see what you've got..." He led her away. As he walked off, he took one moment to look at Twilight. "You are welcome in our village anytime."

Fef shot a fist into the air. "YES - ow."

Mlinx shook his head. "Yes, we all know you're excited, yeah, yeah, go rest already so you live to wear that scar proudly."

"Bluh..." she groaned, followed immediately by a giggle.

Twilight saw Anix watching the procession from a distance. Twilight shook her head. "Mlinx..."

"I'll deal with him when the time comes," Mlinx said. "It'll be much later. You should head home."

Twilight nodded. "Okay. But I'll be back."

"Of that, I have no doubt." He walked away with Fef.

Twilight turned to her four friends - minus Fluttershy, who was already back in Equestria, tending to Rexy. "Well, girls..." She glanced at the receding form of Luna. “I guess the Tree always does send us to solve Friendship Problems.”

Pinkie smiled. “You think we would have learned that by now, given what happened with the Pony of Shadows.”

Twilight chuckled. “Yeah…” She held the green diamond up for all to see. The shifting mesmerized them. "Shall we go home?"

"This is just the start, isn't it?" Rarity asked.

Pinkie laughed. "Yep! You can count on it!"

Applejack shrugged. "Ah suppose Ah'll be up for some more explorin' later... If we have a better plan next time."

Twilight nodded. "We will."

She tore a hole in reality to home. It was then - and only then - when their cutie marks glowed, signifying a job well done.

004 - Beware Thy Self

Spike walked down the stairs to the basement that held the ever-so-popular Mirror Portal, carrying a tray of sandwiches. He was mildly surprised to find all six of the girls there rather than just Twilight. “What’s the special occasion?” he asked.

“Ah, Spike! I was just explaining to everypony what I’ve done!”

Spike looked at the Mirror Portal, specifically at the large glass globe mounted on top of it that hadn’t been there yesterday. The sphere was filled with a large quantity of multicolored magical gas that held a strangely uniform shape vaguely vaguely reminiscent of a puffy sea urchin. It nested itself snugly inside the halo-like machinery the Mirror Portal had been adorned with prior. “Uh… What have you done?”

Twilight gestured towards the globe with her wing. “Why, I’ve made it so we no longer have to switch out spells! This bulb is set to change to whatever I want! Earth, the demons, somewhere else, you name it! So long as I have a correct spell configuration we’re fantastic!”

“Uh huh…” Rainbow Dash said. “…So, what’s that mean for us?”

“I’ll get to that, Rainbow! I had a randomization spell running on the bulb all night to see if I could land a stable connection, and wouldn’t you know it – it worked! I’ve got a new dimensional address that nopony has ever been to before!”

Rainbow Dash’s bored expression vanished. “When are we going in?”

“Well, soon, obviously. I called you over here as soon as I saw it myself!”

Applejack raised a hoof. “Isn’t walkin’ in blind a little… Dangerous?”

Twilight blinked. “…Fair point.” She stuck her hoof through the portal, waving it around a bit. “…Seems safe, room temperature, I can feel air…”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Oh, in that case, why not go ahead and stick your head in?”

Twilight stuck her head in, prompting a facehoof from Applejack. ”Ah was jokin’ Twilight.”

“Huh?” Twilight said, pulling her head out. “I’m sorry, didn’t catch that.”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Is it safe, Twilight?”

“Yeah. It’s actually another version of this very castle.” Twilight grinned. “Can’t wait to meet other versions of ourselves!”

“Like that won’t be confusing… Or creepy...” Rainbow Dash muttered.

“We’ll obviously have to use nicknames at some point.”

Rarity smirked. “Like Twinkie?”

“Sure, like that,” Twilight said, oblivious to Rarity’s soft giggling. “…What should the rest of our nicknames be?”

Everypony looked at each other and shrugged. “Ah suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Applejack said.

“It’s probably best if somepony else gives us nicknames anyway,” Pinkie added. “I mean, giving yourself a nickname is just a taaaaaad silly.”

Fluttershy raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t Rainbow Dash do that all the time?”

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “What can I say? I’m so awesome I can make my own nicknames.”

Twilight smirked. “Well, I’m sure we’ll get to put your nickname skills to the test eventually. But, for now, who wants an adventure?” She gestured towards the mirror. “Who knows what lies behind this shimmering portal?”

“You do,” Applejack said. “You looked in.”

“Well, I – yes – let’s just go through the portal already.” She spread her wings and flew through the portal, her five friends following behind.

Spike waved goodbye as they left. He looked at his tray of sandwiches. None of them had been taken. Once again, more for him. He wondered if this was going to become a pattern or if it was just an early adventure fluke. He shrugged, throwing a sandwich into his mouth. If it was a pattern, good; if not, he’d enjoy it while it lasted.

He walked out of the Mirror room and back into the castle proper, devouring another sandwich. “Hmm… These could really use some sapphire sprinkles…”

With a flash of blue magic sprinkles of sapphire gemstones appeared on the sandwich he was holding. “Huh. I have gained the power to summon sapphire sprinkles at will!”

He heard lighthearted laughing behind him. He sighed. “Or it’s just you using magic.”

A pinkish-purple unicorn walked in front of him. “Hey, you don’t know for sure that was me.”

“Starlight, it was either you or Trixie, and if Trixie had done it things would have exploded. Violently.”

Starlight shrugged. “It would have probably just turned into a teacup.”

Spike nodded, taking a bite of his sapphire sprinkle sandwich. “Woah, this is excellent.”

“Flavor enhancement spell,” Starlight said. “Figured I might as well make the best possible sandwich.”

Spike gulped down the entire sandwich. “I can never look at sandwiches the same way again…”

“Yeah, that spell tends to do that. Though not to Pinkie’s cakes, for whatever reason.”

“Her pastries defy explanation.”

“That they do.”

Spike wiped his face and offered Starlight a sandwich, which she grabbed in her telekinesis. “So, Starlight, where have you been? Haven’t seen you around.”

“I was helping Trixie with a show because, you know, she needs help.”

“Did you do all the tricks for her?”

“Oh no, merely that one that needs the teleport spell.”

“Which one’s that, again?”

Starlight gave Spike a knowing smirk. “If I told you that it’d remove the mystery of the act. A true magician never reveals her secrets.”

“Trixie’s told you, though.”

“That’s because I’m in on the act.”

“Thought you said you only helped on that one part…”

Starlight blinked. “…You’re on point today, Spike.”

“Thank you.” He took a bite out of another sandwich. “…That’s disappointing.”

“Hey, don’t give me that look, I’m not enhancing everything you eat.”

“You’ve ruined me.”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “You’ll live.” She juggled a sandwich in her magic. “…So, where’s Twilight?”

“Adventure,” Spike said.

“Where’d the map send her this time?”

“The map didn’t send her. She went through the Mirror Portal.”

Starlight grinned. “Oh, she’s going to see Sunset? Well, why don’t we join them?”

“No, I mea- oh, that’s right. You haven’t been around the last two days. You don’t know.”

Starlight cocked her head. “Don’t know about what?”

“Twilight’s figured out how to use the Mirror Portal to other worlds. She’s exploring somewhere new right now.”

Starlight blinked. “…I go hang out with Trixie for a few days and all the exciting stuff happens.”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, I can join them anyway.”

Spike shrugged. “I mean, you could but they might be far from the Mirror by now doing Celestia knows what. …Actually, Celestia probably has no idea. Huh.”

“Riiight… Probably dangerous to charge in blind alone…” Starlight sighed. “Well, guess I’m doomed to be bored today.”

Spike shook his head. “Come on, we could do stuff! Like… Uh…”

“Ogres and Oubliettes?”

“Well I mean that’s just one of many options…” Spike said, tapping his fingers together, nervously grinning.

Starlight chuckled. “I guess we can do that, Spike. Do we have anyone else who actually knows how to play though?”

“Well, Big Mac’s busy, and I have no idea where Discord is, so… No.”

“If Discord’s not playing, I have some terms.”

Spike folded his arms and smirked. “What are your terms, o’ great mage?”

Starlight grinned evilly. “I get to run the adventure.”

Spike broke out into a cold sweat. “Uh…”

The sound of ominous thunder booming came from Starlight’s horn. “You want to play, don’t you Spike?”

“…Yeah. Can you… Make it not so intense this time?”

“No promises. It is very likely you are going to die in your quest.”

“…Fine. I suppose emotional terror is better than boredom.”

“That’s the spirit!” Starlight squeed. “Come on, your wizard has to come to terms with the true face of the ‘fair Schmarity’.”

“Hey! That’s not fair!”

“Ah ah ah, it’s not against the rules, and it’ll be a good story. Come on, time for some fun.”

Spike winced. The chances of some important character dying were about 100% when Starlight was running the adventure. And yet… Even though his emotions went through a brutal rollercoaster during her stories, they often felt more satisfying than the ones he came up with. It was moments like that when Spike wondered if he really had what it took to be a great dungeon master.

~~~

Starlight slammed her hoof on the crystal table hard, making Spike jump. “The fair Schmarity has betrayed you for her own selfish desires, trading you to Lord Vester for riches and power.”

“Schmarity would never do that-“

Starlight raised an eyebrow. “Really? What about all those times she complained on your little trek? What about her annoyed glances? Her avoidances of you? She also didn’t seem very thrilled about all those times you failed to protect her interests. Though, pfft, I mean, it’s not like you’ve been failing over and over here.”

Spike took in a deep breath. “…And, once again, you’re right. I cast lightning storm on Vester.”

Starlight grabbed a twenty-sided die and menacingly handed it over to Spike. “Roll a 17 or higher. You don’t want to find out what happens when you don’t.”

Spike carefully examined the twenty. He sent off a short prayer and rolled it. It tumbled across the table, ending up in a slow spin on a point. It leaned towards a rest point – 10. Spike slammed his head on the table in defeat before it had stopped rolling, making the dice shift slightly to 17.

Starlight blinked. “…I’m going to allow that. It’s just too perfect.”

Spike beamed. “Really!?”

“Yeah. Your powerful electric energies shoot through the air and impact Vester right in his ethereal brain matter. He is unable to reciprocate to destroy you and at the same time he is utterly baffled that you had enough power within you to injure him in this form.”

Spike raised a fist. “I take him out!” He rolled another die without asking – 20.

Starlight laughed. “You feel the energies and souls of your fallen companions enter you, giving you the power to do what you need. All the suffering, horrors, and wrongdoing you’ve experienced has been leading to this moment. A single moment of righteousness, all you need to redeem it all. Your staff glows with the power of a billion wronged souls and fires a blast of intense magic at the malevolent Vester. He tries to respond, firing off some spells of his own, but they all fall flat to the power of those he wronged. Karma has come to bite him in the rear, forcing his own spirit conglomeration to dissipate into nothing. The dark army will fall without its head and the world will be allowed to rebuild.”

“Awwww yeah!” Spike whooped.

“You have saved the world, dragon mage. Congratulations. But there is one thing left undone…”

“Oh?”

Starlight nodded solemnly. “Schmarity comes up to you, crying more tears than you have ever seen come from her face, and you have seen plenty on this journey. She throws herself at your feet and begs for forgiveness.”

Spike smiled. “I knew it. I lift her up and hug her, telling her it’ll all be fine now.”

Starlight groaned and rammed her face into the table. “Spike…”

“…What?”

She rolled a die in her magic. It was a 6. “You’re an idiot. She takes a shiv out and stabs you in the neck, killing you on the spot. She will claim that you died heroically facing Vester, and will take your place as the hero of the world, even though she sure as Tartarus doesn’t deserve it.”

“But… But… Starlight! I was offering forgiveness!”

Starlight shook her head. “Come on Spike, the one thing I was trying to do with this adventure was to get you to drop the whole Schamrity thing, to see that maybe this character of yours isn’t the best pony! Sometimes you’ve got to just realize that! Sure, she was redeemable, but implicitly trusting that avalanche of crocodile tears? Come on!”

Spike blinked. “…Wait, you were trying to get me to realize something?”

“Well yeah, there’s a moral to the story. Morals to most the stories I write for this, actually. There’s a point I was trying to get across.” Starlight shrugged, sitting back in her chair. “Well, there you go. You ‘won.’ World’s saved.”

“…That was a pretty good adventure, Starlight, though… the ending was… Yeah, I didn’t like the ending.”

“I maaaay have been a bit annoyed with you at that point,” Starlight admitted. “Sorry. Tell you what, your death won’t be permanent. In a thousand years you’ll be resurrected, or something.”

“All right then. So, it’s my turn to run an adventure-“

Twilight walked into the room at that moment, startled to find the two of them there. “Oh. Hi. You two look like you had fun.”

Starlight nodded. “Yeah. Now, you and I need to have a talk about your adventures in the Mirror Portal…”

Twilight yawned. “Maybe later. I’ve got some notes I need to file.”

Spike blinked. “...You don’t have your notebook.”

“Mental notes, Spike,” Twilight said. “It was an interesting place, like our world but different. Have to get it down while it’s all fresh in my mind.” She laid her hoof on the map and stroked it, smiling.

“Uh… You want us to get off?” Starlight asked.

“Well you don’t have to, but that’d be elegant.”

Spike raised an eyebrow. “Eh, we were done anyway.” Starlight cast a spell and put the entire game up in under ten seconds. “Enjoy your… Note scribbling.”

Twilight nodded. “Uh-huh…” She conjured a bunch of papers and laid them out on the table as the two left.

Starlight raised an eyebrow after they’d left the room. “She seems… Distant.”

“Probably just distracted by something that happened. She’ll tell us about it later.”

“COMING THROUGH!” Pinkie screamed, bounding up the stairs. Spike and Starlight shot to either side as the pink blur shot through them. “TOTALLY NOT GOING TO SEE TWILIGHT!”

“Uh…” Spike raised a hand, but Pinkie had already entered the map room.

Starlight rolled her eyes. “Pinkie probably got into my energy drink stash.”

“You have an energy drink stash?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Spike pointed at where Pinkie had just been. “That’s why.”

“Oh come on, she’s not that bad.”

“Yes. She is. I’m going to go get some armor on, there’s no way she isn’t blowing something up with her energy.”

Starlight groaned, using a spell to summon some simple magic armor on Spike. “Happy?”

“…It’s blue and see-through.”

“And stronger than steel.”

Spike shrugged, accepting this. They descended the stairs to the main hall, where Fluttershy, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and Applejack were mingling.

“Oh, hi Starlight!” Rarity said. “My, what mischief did you get up to while we were gone?”

“I emotionally scarred Spike,” Starlight said with an innocent smile.

“She isn’t joking,” Spike said, shivering.

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Uh-huh. All right then.”

Rarity pursed her lips. “Didn’t think that was you, dear.”

Starlight laughed. “It was just a round of Ogres and Oubliettes that took a dark turn because Spike was being a numbskull.”

“You and I both know it would have taken a dark turn regardless,” Spike muttered.

Starlight shrugged with a proud smile on her face.

“Huh,” Fluttershy said, scratching her chin. “…What a moment.”

“I could tell you all about it!” Starlight grinned. “Actually might make a good book... I wonder if Twilight would be willing to write it…”

“Ah’m sure she’ll give you time for it,” Applejack said.

“Yeah, not now though. She’s… distant.” Starlight frowned. “What happened through that portal by the way? I’m dying to find out!”

Rarity smiled. “Well, we found a world much like this one – almost every detail was the same. Right down to the other Twilight. They spent so long talking over complicated magics in detail – it’s probably why she’s distant, her head’s swirling with that.”

Rainbow Dash laughed. “Yeah, even eggheads can’t handle that much webbing.”

Applejack grunted. “You just like being right.”

“What? I vouch betrayal!”

Starlight raised an eyebrow. “Really Rainbow? I seem to recall you fighting for your right to be right on many, many occasions.”

“Wow,” Rainbow Dash said, staring at Starlight. “…Just wow.”

Starlight blinked. “Uh… What?”

Rainbow Dash coughed. “Just… Really, calling that out? Soda in a bomb, Starlight.”

Starlight smiled sheepishly. “Oh! Sorry. Thought you’d be okay with that.”

“She’s just in a bad mood,” Rarity said. “Had a whole debacle with her other self. She lost the race.”

“Hey!” Rainbow Dash blurted.

Spike chuckled. “Lost a race against yourself? Does that mean you won?”

“I… I...” She looked like she wanted to say something but couldn’t manage it.

Applejack coughed. “It means it doesn’t matter all that much. It was a thing that definitely happened, that’s about it.”

Starlight looked at Applejack. “…You okay Applejack?”

“Wha? Yeah, totally fine.”

“You seem a little… Nervous.”

Rarity sighed. “She’s fine, dear, just… Well, she wasn’t all that thrilled about meeting herself.”

Fluttershy nodded. “It was a very awkward silence that lasted till the end of all.”

“Uh… Yeah. Sure,” Applejack said. “That.”

Starlight blinked. “Okaaaaaaaaaaay…”

Rainbow Dash nudged Rarity and mumbled something in her ear. “Oh! Right. I do believe we all have homes to return to. It’s been a long day, time for some rest. See you around, Starlight, Spike.”

“Sure,” Spike said, raising an eyebrow as the four mares dispersed.

“Well then,” Starlight said.

“Something happened over there and they’re not telling us.”

“Applejack’s really bad at lying…” Starlight frowned. “Though if she’s lying, it’s probably something big. She never lies about much of anything.”

“Maybe they just had something really embarrassing happen?”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “I doubt it. …We should go talk to Twilight about it. Busy or not.”

Spike nodded in agreement. They turned around, setting back up the stairs they had just come down a few minutes prior. They approached the door they heard a loud yell.

“What are you talking about Pinkie?!” Twilight shouted with a venom Starlight had never heard in her voice before.

“You should know better than to ask questions like that,” Pinkie responded, giggling.

“Most ponies at least follow rules.”

“Aha!”

“You get that accusing hoof away from me.” Starlight heard a thud. Had… Had Twilight just slapped Pinkie?

“Look at you. Twilight the great and glorious, spreading her domain! I’ll have a cake prepared for you by sundown!”

“As always,” Twilight muttered. “Look, Pinkie, straight-talk, okay? What do you mean? You never follow any of the rules, you always bounce from one end of the spectrum to the other, and yet you are the most instrumental.”

Pinkie shrugged. “I mean that the tables have turned, that’s it. Surprised you needed to declare straight-talk. Don’t you know me well enough by now?”

“I’ve got plenty of other things to deal with. The good news is that exploitation will be easy. The art of speech is foreign to them.”

“Oh, so they’re all mutes?”

“Pinkie, straight-talk.”

“I Don’t follow the rules, remember?” Pinkie giggled again. “Call me the ‘bozo’ in double all you want, I’m the reason this all works.”

“But you’ve said the tables have turned. Which means it isn’t working anymore. Why?”

Starlight imagined Pinkie shrugging. “Too ambitious perhaps? I don’t know everything, Twilight. The other me didn’t see me coming, as I’m sure you noticed.”

“She can’t escape in her state. There’s no way she’s coming here.”

Pinkie groaned. “That was just an illustration! Yeesh.”

“Illustrations should be restricted to double,” Twilight spat.

“Oh but that’s the art of it! I mean, it’s not like I can do whatever I want whenever I want.”

“…Your shifting of modes is irksome.”

“I know right? But you like it.”

“No, I do not, but I have to admit it is useful at times.” She frowned. “I’d recommend refraining from straight-talk with any of the locals, it’s the only kind they know. With their assumptions in place, manipulation will be easy.”

Starlight gasped loudly.

Twilight sighed audibly from the other side of the door. “Pinkie, the noises of this castle sure are unusual, are they not?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“I suppose… Neither did I.”

Starlight and Spike took a cautious step back from the door, glancing at each other with worried expressions. Their hesitation would have been their doom had a yellow blur of color not swept into them at high speed, tossing them into a side room. Twilight and Pinkie poked their heads out of the room to see… Nothing.

In the adjacent room, Fluttershy stuffed Starlight and Spike behind a shelf. “Straight – keep quiet if you want to live,” she hissed. She quickly turned away from then and faced a window, putting on a scowl.

Twilight and Pinkie walked into the room, Pinkie sniffing the ground like a dog. Normally the sight would make Starlight chuckle, but now it only sent ice through her spine. Pinkie was almost always able to find them normally…

Fluttershy turned to them. “I see you’re here.”

Twilight nodded. “It’s prudent to find those who hear.”

“Ah, but where?”

Pinkie held up a hoof. “Either here or not.” Twilight and Fluttershy shot Pinkie confused looks. “What? It’s a perfectly valid statement.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “In marginality.”

Pinkie continued sniffing. “Hey Fluttershy, did you see them in here?”

“On the sun.”

Pinkie laughed – hard. Way too hard. “The echelons of irony!”

“What lies beyond the moon.”

Twilight grimaced. “Astrologically speaking, the foremost nature of the universal constants is beyond most plebian minds.”

Fluttershy rolled her eyes. “For what it’s worth, no.”

Twilight turned to Pinkie. “The ears?”

“Are deceptively hidden from my senses, master Twilight!”

Twilight facehooved. “Adieu, then.” She and Pinkie left.

Pinkie turned and giggled. “You know what, this was the perfect conversation to confuse ponies.”

Fluttershy blinked. “In fin.” When she was sure she was alone, she looked behind the bookshelf. “Straight – you can come out now.”

“What… was that?” Starlight asked, baffled.

“They aren’t the ponies we know!” Spike said, waving his hands.

“Thank you Spike, I managed to deduce that.”

Fluttershy nodded. “We are not. My Twilight is here to subjugate your people with double.”

“...’double’?” Starlight asked.

“You’d probably think of it as simple lies, but the nuance is far too much to explain at this juncture,” Fluttershy said. “You need to go through the portal and free your friends. They’re in the dungeon of the castle exactly like this one.”

Starlight frowned. “…Dungeon?”

“The area of this Castle that has letter storage.”

Spike raised a claw. “I know where that is.”

“Good. Now get yourselves to the portal and hurry – Pinkie knows things. Her senses have been off lately but I have no idea how long that will last.”

Starlight nodded. “One question – why are you helping us?”

“The light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Uh…”

Fluttershy facehooved. “Celestia damn it’s hard to talk in pure-straight… Just do it, it’s in your best self-interest. I don’t have time to figure out how to express that straightly.”

Starlight let out a breath. “Okay. Spike, we’re going in.” She cast an invisibility spell on the two of them. “See you soon… Uh… Lieshy.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “Eternal detriments, indeed, I don’t see why not.”

“…You’re really going to have to explain that later,” Spike said.

Lieshy twitched. “Straight – get moving already!”

“All right, geez!” Spike said, moving to leave the room. He tripped over an outcropping because he couldn’t see his feet. “Ow.”

Lieshy sighed. “What an evident paradox of fate.”

Starlight put Spike on her back and snuck out of the room, levitating herself down the stairs so as to not make a sound with her hooves. She passed Applejack and Rarity – who hadn’t gone home – speaking in that strange disconnected way Lieshy and Twilight had. Lielight? She found herself wondering how to insert ‘lie’ into the names of all her friends… Liety, Liebow, Linkie, Lack.

…Lack.

She was barely able to contain the laugh on that one.

Yeah, all those names were pretty stupid. She’d have to think of better ones later. She eventually arrived at the Mirror Portal, which was currently being guarded by their Rainbow Dash. She was muttering something about pinnacles for whatever reason. She was none the wiser as the two slipped through the shimmering veil…

~~~

A few hours ago…

Twilight Sparkle stepped out of a wall into a room identical to the one she had just been in except for the lack of a Mirror Portal and associated devices. It was rather empty, save for a few boxes. The area was apparently used for simple storage.

Her five friends came out behind her. They took a moment to look around the familiar surroundings.

“Now what?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“…Now we try to find somepony?” Twilight suggested.

Pinkie grinned. “The best way to do that is to go to Ponyville! Quick, out the front doors! Chop chop!”

Twilight did as suggested, walking through the empty castle halls to the front door. She noticed the castle had slightly fewer decorations in it than her own, though the layout itself was precisely as she remembered it. Even the engravings on the front doors were exact! It just – well it lacked the personal touch.

She opened the doors of the castle and looked out at Ponyville.

“Doesn’t… Look any different,” Rainbow Dash said.

“This world must be extremely similar to our own,” Twilight said. “I’m willing to bet their Applejack is working on her farm and their Pinkie Pie is working at Sugarcube Corner.”

“Shouldn’t their version of you be in the castle then?” Rarity asked.

“Maybe… But she could be out on important princess business.”

“We could just ask somepony,” Fluttershy said.

“Good idea.” Twilight trotted into Ponyville proper. The first pony she saw was a mare she knew – in her world at least. The cream-coated earth pony Bon Bon. She waved. “Hey!”

Bon Bon smiled and trotted up. “Nice weather.”

Twilight nodded. “It is, isn’t it? Anyway, to the point. I’m not the Twilight you know, and I’m looking for her. You see, we’re from another world!”

Applejack facehooved. Bon Bon just looked at Twilight with a delicate smile, though her eyes gave away mild infuriation. She took a few seconds before responding. “Time sure has its way sometimes.”

“...Indeed it does…” Twilight said, furrowing her brow. “But that’s not helpful.”

Bon Bon tensed. ”I’m certain you can render your own assailment.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Bon Bon’s ears laid flat. “…Please…”

Twilight cocked her head. “What in Celestia’s name has you so worried? I may be a bit… Weird, but I’m just asking straight questions.”

Bon Bon gasped – and fainted on the spot.

Rainbow Dash shook her head. “Okay, what in Equestria?”

“I… I have no idea.” Twilight frowned. “Maybe their culture’s different? …Oh no, how many taboos did I just break!?”

“Several,” Fluttershy said.

“How can you know? How can we know it wasn’t a hundred!?”

Fluttershy pointed away from herself. “Uh… That wasn’t me.”

The group turned to see… Another Fluttershy. There was no physical discernable difference between the two pegasi save for the new Fluttershy’s notably grumpier expression.

“Uh… Hi.” Twilight waved sheepishly with her wing. “I… Er…”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Twilight’s not working right now, too afraid to break a taboo. But not me! I don’t care about that at all right now! Hi! I’m-“

“Pinkie Pie. Straight talk?”

“…What?”

The other Fluttershy facehooved. “For the sanity of golems…”

Pinkie giggled. “That’s a fun saying! I like ‘and that’s how Equestria was made’, but that’s just me.”

“If only just.”

“Oh yeah, probably other Pinkie too. Is she just as hyperactive as me?”

“For the equation, indeed.”

“…What?”

The other Fluttershy took in a strained breath. “Straight talk. Okay. Requirement of the natural endowment of mind apparently… Greetings, I am Fluttershy. You are not Twilight, you are not Pinkie, and you are not Fluttershy.”

“Uh… Yeah,” Fluttershy said.

“I need… You to explain,” the other Fluttershy said, fumbling with her words.

“We’re from another world where things are really similar but pretty different!” Pinkie said. “For one, we don’t talk like you! At all!”

“An… Annoyance. I assure you.”

“Why?” Rarity said.

“…I am currently unable to express that feeling in straight-talk. There may be a way, but I do not grapple it.” She glanced around. “It is taboo to use straight-talk in public.”

Twilight groaned. “I knew it… Everything I said was a political blunder!”

Fluttershy put her wing over Twilight. “There there… You didn’t know. You just need to ask for forgiveness!”

“Uh…” Twilight looked at the still unconscious Bon-Bon and to the other Fluttershy. “Sorry?”

The other Fluttershy bit her lip and let out a strained breath. “Never apologize in straight-talk to somepony who isn’t a lover.”

Twilight blushed and covered her face with her wings. “Done talking now!”

Rarity smiled. “Well… I must admit, while this way of speaking is confusing, it sounds like it is quite civilized. I wonder if we could learn?”

“Probably over time,” Applejack said. “Not now.”

Other Fluttershy looked to the sky. “My Twilight is coming. You will not understand the ensuing conversation, be prepared.”

The native Twilight appeared, just as foretold. She looked exactly like Twilight, once again the only difference being in the expression, one of pride. She turned to Fluttershy. “In the labyrinth?”

“The mirrors edge isn’t forged.”

The other Twilight raised her eyebrows. “A land of loss and sorrow?”

Rainbow Dash glanced at Rarity. “I feel like we’re being insulted.”

The other Fluttershy continued. “What understanding? So much is outside the realm.”

The other Twilight laughed – hard. Then she turned to the six ponies and started speaking. “And then the ball started rolling, down, down, down, much further than any could possibly see. In the depths of the realm – that’s you – there is a spark. Thus, lightning comes from beyond with just rule and provides an avenue for intrigue. Doubly beyond these, but for far more than possible, the taboos. Entrapment with a physiological aspect, careful, implied, powerful. Hello!”

Twilight blinked. “…Uh… Hi?”

This was greeted with more laughter. She pointed back to her castle, gesturing they come back with her. Twilight turned to the other Fluttershy – and she nodded.

Pinkie shook her head. “Okay, so the entire time other Twilight was talking, I had a really weird feeling. Pinkie Sense was acting up.”

“She was probably just insulting us,” Rainbow Dash muttered.

Other Twilight pointed at Rainbow Dash and grinned, nodding comically, like an adult would do with a young child. Except more patronizing. Rainbow Dash seethed inwardly. “Okay, so not fair that she can understand us and we can’t understand her.”

“Shh, Rainbow Dash,” Twilight hissed. “Taboo, remember?”

Rainbow Dash fell silent until they were led back into the castle. The native Twilight gestured for them to move forward, a big dumb grin on her face.

Rarity looked at Twilight. “Your counterpart gets far too much enjoyment out of our predicament.”

Twilight sighed. “Yeah.”

The other Twilight chuckled. “What a half, mysterious!”

“Okay!” Rainbow Dash said. “We’re in private now! You can use the ‘straight-talk’ or whatever! Nopony’s going to know!”

The other Twilight shrugged. “All right. Have a nice imprisonment.”

“…Wait wha-“

The other Twilight cast a spell, capturing Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Fluttershy in crystal. Twilight gasped. “Why – why did you do that?”

“Because I see an opportunity with you idiots,” her counterpart responded. “Quite an easy one, I might add.”

“What are you planning?”

“Oh, you see, I already told you. To your face, I might add, not only a few minutes ago. But since you’re incapable of experiencing the double, let me reiterate. I’m going to imprison you all. I’m going to keep all of you here, locked away. I will return to your world and pretend to be you after I’ve harvested enough information from your mind with my magic. I will make sure you can’t use magic and your Pinkie can’t use her shenanigans. There were also a lot of insults – really clever ones, I might add – that would be completely lost in translation to straight-talk. Such a shame, really.”

Twilight lit her horn and Pinkie Pie produced a frying pan. Twilight aimed. “We can’t let you do that.”

“Does the little alicorn want a fight?” the other Twilight snarked, rolling her eyes. “Please, the only reason I haven’t frozen you is because you could break out. I’ve got another plan for you.”

Twilight didn’t let her finish. She tried to shoot a bolt of magic from her horn, but instead only got a migraine.

“Magic circle!” her counterpart laughed.

Twilight looked down – they were indeed standing in a strange magic circle that… Well she was pretty sure her castle didn’t have.

The evil Twilight conjured up a horn-sealing spell. “Can’t have you casting spells when I move you out of there. Be a good girl and accept this willingly, will you?”

Pinkie was having none of this. She appeared next to the other Twilight and hit her alongside the head. “Yeah, how about no?”

“Backups within backups!”

“Hi there!” another Pinkie Pie said, hitting Pinkie Pie across the head with another frying pan. Pinkie went flying – right into a net of cotton candy laid by her counterpart.

Pinkie screeched. “No! Cotton candy nets! My weakness!”

“For today, anyway,” the other Pinkie said.

“Curse you and your identical abilities! Woe! Oh woe!”

“Woe!”

“Enough you two,” the other Twilight said, turning to the normal Twilight. “Now, take this spell or I have to knock you out.”

Twilight ran for the edge of the circle.

A frying pan hit her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground. This didn’t knock her unconscious. The magic bolt from her counterpart did.

~~~

In a world parallel the two colliding universes, Sunset glanced at the team she had formed for the ‘dimensional explorers’ club. She… was honestly expecting more to show up. But she could work with this.

“Okay, so. Let’s go around introducing ourselves. Name, skills, and why you’re interested in this club. I’ll start. I’m Sunset, I’m good at scientific analysis and have magic powers. I used to be a unicorn and frankly other worlds fascinate me because I came from one.”

Twilight stood up excitedly. “Hi! I’m Twilight and I’m good with technology and have a lot of theories on how magic works and I’m the one who invented all the machines we’re going to use! It’s just such an interesting scientific journey!”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Hey. Rainbow Dash here. I’m an athlete, so, I’m going to be your action girl. I’m here for the awesome adventure.” She looked around. “I’m a little surprised Pinkie didn’t show up…”

“She could be in Equestria for all we know,” Sunset said, shrugging. She turned to their other three prospective members. “Well?”

The young lanky man in glasses adjusted them nervously. “Ah… I’m Micro Chips, I’m good with computers, and I… I always wanted to see how these machines work. I’m sure we can find new scientific discoveries!”

“You bet we can!” Twilight added.

A minty-green girl went next. “I’m Lyra! I uh… …I can play the harp. But I’m also an avid follower of blogs that seek to find the truth in our world! I like to think I’m a master of the internet! I’m sure we can uncover the conspiracy with this! Right? Right?”

A bigger student with heavy green hair went next. “I’m Sandalwood. I like working with nature and animals. I’m mainly here because Micro is, but I’m interested to see other cool parts of nature.”

Sunset grinned. “You’re in luck! If everything goes as planned, today we’ll be heading to a world with a huge jungle and a race of bug-people!”

“Nice.”

Sunset pointed at Twilight. “Take it away!”

She nodded. “Well… Uh, Hi! Princess Twilight Sparkle has given us the magic spell to travel the universes.” She pulled out a circular locket from her pocket. “When I release the magic from inside this device, I will combine it with the power from my necklace and we’ll have created a portal.” She pulled out another locket. “And this one contains the return spell. I’m currently designing a device that can permanently store spell patterns. It should be done soon, but until then, you’re going to have to stand back when I open these portals.”

Everyone stared at her.

“I mean stand back now.”

Everyone except Rainbow did. Twilight rolled her eyes. “Well okay, if you really want to get blown over, be my guest.” Twilight lifted the first locket into the air and popped it open. A swirling ball of light generated in the space between the two halves. Twilight focused her gaze, channeling the magic energies from her necklace into the ball. The energies spiked into an urchin formation and shot forward, hitting the air in front of her like it was a wall, rippling a flat area of spacetime faster and faster until it couldn’t take it anymore. The boundaries between worlds ripped with a soft white glow, revealing a direct passage to a jungle.

Twilight had fallen to her back from the forces, as had Rainbow. The two stood up and dusted themselves off.

“Woah…” Sandalwood said. “Those are some big flowers…”

Sunset gestured to the portal. “Come on in. Though look out for dinosaurs.”

“D-Dinosaurs!?” Micro blurted.

“Dinosaurs,” Sunset affirmed.

Lyra’s eyes glistened. “Dinosaurs…” she said, giddy.

Sandalwood stepped through the portal first, a stupid grin forming on his face. The slightly wet leaves glistened in the morning sunlight, illuminating the small butterflies flying through the air. “Sweet.”

“It is ‘sweet,’ indeed,” Sunset said.

“Are you kidding Sunset? This is awesome!” Rainbow Dash whooped.

“I was trying to avoid an overuse of the word.”

“There can never be an overuse of awesome.”

“Actually,” Twilight said, raising a finger. “It is a true statement that too much of anything can become bad for you. Moderation is the key to life. If you said nothing but awesome I am sure you would quickly regret it.”

Rainbow Dash sighed. “Way to take the fun out of it. Yeesh.”

Lyra took out her phone and started snapping pictures while Sandalwood carefully examined some of the larger flowers. Micro just… stood there, nervous.

Twilight walked over to him, scribbling some things on a notepad. “Hey, Micro? You don’t have to just stand there.”

“I want to be next to the portal in case some dinosaur shows up.”

The portal closed behind him with a comical pop. He yelped in surprise.

Twilight held up the second locket. “Calm down. This is our way out. Everything’s fine as long as we have this.”

A verdant pterodactyl swooped out of the sky and snatched the locket out of her hand. She stared at the place the locket had been for several seconds before facepalming. “Guys, a pterodactyl just made off with our escape plan!”

Rainbow Dash stretched her neck and cracked her knuckles. “On it.” The blue crystal around her neck flashed and she took off with super speed, leaving a trail of rainbows behind.

Lyra pursed her lips. “No fair, you guys get all the special powers.”

Sunset shrugged. “Maybe we can find you some on our adventures?”

“Powers shouldn’t be the goal,” Sandalwood said. “We should be here to explore, to contact other peoples, to learn about the vastness of existence…”

“To boldly go where no man has gone before?” Micro said.

“Yes. That.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. The conversation was cut off by Rainbow’s return. She held a dazed pterodactyl in one hand and the locket in another. The only problem was the locket was crushed.

“Rainbow!” Twilight scolded.

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Hey, it was already crushed when I got there, don’t blame me.”

“Well now what are we going to do? We’re stuck here!”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “No, we’re not. Princess Twilight will be back in this world eventually, we can have them pick us up. …Annoyingly.”

“How long will that be?!”

“I dunno. A day, maybe? Two?”

Micro grabbed his hair. “My parents will freak out if I’m gone for two days!”

Sunset blinked. “Oh yeah. Sometimes I forget you all have lives.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Really? Sometimes?”

“Yeah. Okay, a lot of the time.”

“Where are we going to stay until then!?” Micro wailed.

Sandalwood cracked his knuckled. “I can make us a shelter.”

“No need,” Twilight said. “There’s a friendly race of aliens here. Apparently, they call themselves demons, but don’t judge them for that. We just have to make our way to their village. Since Equestrian and English are the same thing they should be able to understand us.”

Lyra’s eyes widened. “…We’re going to meet aliens?”

“Yes. Yes we are-“

And then a velociraptor charged at them from behind. They all screamed. Rainbow Dash prepared to give the dinosaur a lesson but she never got the chance, for a large sword flew right into the thing’s skull, killing it instantly. It collapsed in a heap at her feet. She kicked it. “…Well, it’s dead.” She shivered.

“Really,” a new voice said – a red demon, walking towards them. Micro Chips hid behind Sandalwood.

Sunset snapped her fingers. “Anix?”

“That would be me,” he said. “You look like Twilight.”

Twilight shrugged. “Different world, different Twilight. You can call me Sparky.”

“I’ll just call you Twilight unless there’s another reason,” he grunted. “You probably want to go to the village…”

“Yes please,” Twilight said. Lyra furiously took pictures of Anix with her phone. This annoyed him to no end, but he didn’t snap.

“My mount is this way,” he said, taking his blood-covered sword out of the raptor and hefting the raptor itself over his shoulder. Human beings may have been tall, but the Anix was a full head taller than all of them. Sunset figured the only reason he could ride ponies was because his legs had two joints, letting the limbs fold. Interesting.

They all followed him – even Micro, though he stayed as far away from the creepy bug monster as possible.

~~~

Twilight Sparkle – the alicorn – woke up on a crystal floor. Her first thought was did I fall asleep in the library again? She quickly realized this wasn’t the case since there were large crystal bars in front of her, like a jail cell. I don’t have a dungeon…

Oh. Right. I’m not in my castle.

She sighed, tapping her horn with her hoof – as she expected, there was a silence cover on it. Looking at her reflection in the crystals, she saw that it was a smooth black substance with a locked metallic pressure ring at the base of her horn. She wasn’t going to be pulling off any magic like this.

“Ah, dear, you’re awake.”

Twilight turned to Rarity, looking her over. She looked as graceful as ever and was even lucky enough not to have her magic sealed – probably because their captors didn’t think it powerful enough to bother. “Oh thank Celestia, you’re fine. I was worried…”

“At the very least, our captors aren’t complete monsters,” Applejack added. “But they aren’t stupid either.”

“How so?”

Rainbow Dash pointed a wing at the lethargic form of Pinkie. She was breathing extremely slowly, almost unnaturally. Twilight’s stomach leaped into her chest, twisting into knots. “Pinkie…?” She put a hoof to her neck – even her heartbeat was far too slow.

“They’ve drugged her… heavily,” Fluttershy said. “I think they know how strange she can be. So she doesn’t get to be awake.”

Twilight grimaced. “Will… she be okay?”

“So long as we can get it out of her system. I think Zecora knows some brews that can do that.”

Pinkie’s tail started twitching and her cheek began vibrating.

Rainbow Dash raised her eyebrows. “Apparently being asleep doesn’t stop the Pinkie sense.”

“Doesn’t really help us,” Applejack noted. “None of us have any idea what the Pinkie sense even means. Ah think the twitchy tail has meant both falling objects and surprise pie.”

Rainbow Dash shivered. “…Surprise pie…”

Everypony turned to Pinkie, half expecting her to shoot up and throw a surprise pie in her friends’ faces. She stayed where she was.

Twilight took in a deep breath. “Okay. Escape plan. Rainbow Dash, time to put those destroying-my-house skills to the test. Smash through a wall.”

Rainbow Dash grinned. “You got it, princess!” She flew into the air, backed to the far side of the cell, and charged the bars at top speed. Rainbows shot from her tail and sparked in all directions upon impact with the crystal pillars. Despite the impressive light show, the only result of the dash was a loud thump and a pained yell. “Owowowowowowow!”

Applejack looked from the unbroken bars to Rainbow Dash. “…Ah’m surprised you didn’t crack your skull.”

“Well, I probably have a concussion, so that’s the next best thing! Ow!”

Twilight tapped the bars. “…These are stronger than they’re supposed to be.”

Rarity frowned. “Had they been weaker Rainbow Dash probably would have been drugged like Pinkie. We’re facing off against you, remember? As forgetful as you can be at times, you are still very thorough when you want to be.”

“Great,” Twilight muttered. “Of course, that means she also has my weaknesses…”

Fluttershy pondered this. “If only we could deshelve the books in her library to distract her…”

Twilight twitched. “I wouldn’t wish that on anypony…”

Rainbow Dash groaned. “Of course… Maybe we can play off her pride?”

“That’s your problem, Dash,” Applejack said.

“Eh, I’m awesome, so I can tell when ponies have egos that are through-the-roof. Other Twi sure does.”

“But how exactly could we take advantage of that?” Twilight asked. “She’s not exactly going to let us convince her to do anything.”

Rarity put a hoof on Twilight. “No offense Twilight but I think you’re underestimating your gullibility.”

“Oh.” Twilight sagged. “Yeah.”

“There’s a problem though,” Fluttershy added. “They’re different enough that we can’t be sure something will work. We-“

They heard a pony walk into the dungeon. They quickly shut up and looked through the bars. Starlight was walking in, carrying… Starlight in her telekinesis. The limp Starlight had a horn-seal just like Twilight did. Twilight smiled nervously. “Would you by chance be our Starlight?”

“No,” Starlight said, teleporting the Starlight she was carrying into the cell. “Through my amusement, imprisoned within your fill.”

“Ah was afraid of that,” Applejack said. Fluttershy walked over to the groaning form of their Starlight, checking her for any signs of harm. She nodded to Twilight, signifying she was fine.

Twilight glared at the other Starlight. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.” She teleported away, leaving Twilight alone with her friends.

“That… Darn…” Starlight muttered, rubbing her forehead and trying to stand up. “Ugh…”

Fluttershy steadied her. “Easy Starlight, you’ve just been captured…”

“Well there goes plan A,” Starlight laughed bitterly.

“Ah take it you figured out the ponies who came back weren’t us?” Applejack asked.

“Duh. Wasn’t all that hard.”

“Is… Spike okay?” Twilight asked.

“He’s fine. He’s back in the castle – your castle – watching the other ponies to see what their plan is and possibly stop them from over there. He should be rallying the town sometime soon.”

“What is their plan?”

Starlight shrugged. “I’m pretty sure they want to use their ‘cunning’ or whatever to exert control over us ‘simple ponies.’ But they talk really weird. Like, Luna’s mane, it’s a strange ‘double talk’ where everything has a hidden meaning, and that hidden meaning is the most important part!” She groaned. “What kind of language even is that?”

“One found in this world,” Twilight said. “And since we don’t know how to speak or understand it, they look down on us like fools. They think they can exploit us…”

“They’re right, aren’t they?” Applejack said. “They got all of us captured, and unless Spike can do something, there’s not much stopping them from taking over our home.”

Twilight shrugged. “I… I think Celestia’ll know something’s wrong with me. That I’m not myself. And you have a close family, Applejack. They’ll figure that something’s up. As gullible as we may have been, I don’t think they thought this through as much as they think they have.”

“Good point.”

“Though we could still be stuck here even if they’re found out…”

Fluttershy winced. “We need to get home.”

“Portal’s still open. They haven’t closed it,” Starlight said. “If we could get out of here…”

“I already tried smashing it,” Rainbow Dash muttered, nursing the lump on her head. “Wasn’t that a great idea, Twilight?”

Twilight laughed nervously. “Eh… Yeah, sorry. We’ll get you patched up later. So… What else can we do here…?” Twilight turned to Rarity. “Your magic is free.”

“Yes. Though you know I’m not that great at it.”

“You might not need to be. If we can find the lock and pick it…”

“There’s no lock,” Rarity said. “This is a teleport in-out cage.”

Twilight glanced at the bars. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Wow. That’s a pretty ingenious design. How come I never thought of it…”

“Because you don’t design dungeons,” Starlight offered.

“Fair point.” She furrowed her brow. “There must be some way out of here…” She touched her horn’s cover. “If only I could remove this… Rarity, do you remember that spell I taught you?”

Rarity cocked her head. “Which one dear?”

“The basic laser. I want to see if we can burn it off.”

Starlight grimaced. “I don’t think we need to resort to burning your mane off just yet. Probably won’t even work. Takes a lot of magic to break a silence.”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s an idea at least.”

Fluttershy looked at an ant scurrying across the ground. “Hey there little guy. Do you think you could help us? …Oh? Oh, well nevermind. Have a nice day!” She looked up. “The ants can’t break the crystal either, even in small chunks. He’s just here because Pinkie’s got sugar all over her.”

“You know…” Applejack said. “It says somethin’ that none of us are freakin’ out about bein’ captured. We’re just tryin’ to find a way out.”

“We get captured way too much, don’t we?” Rainbow Dash said.

Twilight shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, I’m worried… Okay that’s an understatement, I’m terrified. But… Well, I just don’t feel the need to panic. Yet.”

“Good,” Starlight said. “We need to keep our heads…” She glanced at her hoof as if at a watch and tapped her hoof impatiently.

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “We’re tryin’ to come up with an idea. No need to get impatient.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s just…” They heard footsteps approaching, shutting up once again. Soon, the small purple form of Spike was standing before them.

Starlight cleared her throat. “Klutzy…?”

“Draconequus,” Spike said. “I have no idea why that’s the code word though.”

Twilight blinked. “Wait I thought he was back at the-“

Starlight grinned. “That’s what I wanted my other self to think. So, she took the bait?”

“Totally did!” Spike gave the thumbs up. “She’s gone through the portal and is probably searching the castle for me right now!”

“I love it when plans work,” Starlight said. “Now, burn us out of here.”

Spike took in a breath and unleashed a powerful belch of green fire that consumed part of the crystal bars. He burped, smiling at the hole he had created in the imprisoning columns. “I have no idea where I sent those.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Twilight said. “We need to get out of here. Can you burn off our horn-caps?”

“Sure thing!” Spike carefully shot a small flame around Starlight and Twilight’s horns, consuming the silencing devices and sending them… somewhere.

“You know, if you’re sending those to Celestia…” Rainbow Dash’s eyes widened. “Or this world’s Celestia…”

Spike blinked. “Huh. Wonder what she thinks.”

Applejack hefted Pinkie onto her back. “Somethin’ tells me we don’t want to run into her. Let’s move, Twi.”

Twilight quickly teleported them all to the portal. She stepped through the wall, a spell at the ready in case she ran into any unwanted company. The Other Rainbow Dash was quickly captured in a crystal spell.

Rainbow Dash passed through the Mirror and laughed. “Justice has been served.”

Twilight nodded. “I don’t think she can break out, but watch her anyway. You never know with these ponies…” She waited for everypony to come through and then set the Mirror’s dial to Earth with a quick spell. She didn’t want to take any chances that they might have their own backup plan. “So… Now that we’re back, I see a problem. How are we going to deal with their Pinkie?”

“That… is a very good question,” Rarity said.

“I can go get Maud,” Starlight suggested. “She can handle any version of her sister.”

“Do you know where she is right now?” Twilight asked.

“…Not exactly, no.”

“Then we probably don’t have time…”

“Do what she did,” Rainbow Dash suggested. “Freeze as many friends as you can then rush those who are left.”

Spike raised his hand. “Their Fluttershy might help us. She’s… Not on their side. I think. We call her Lieshy.”

Twilight nodded. “That does make things easier… Okay. Let’s go with that. Starlight, I think I should go in first…”

~~~

Twilight Sparkle – the evil one – sat on the throne with her cutie mark, looking at the map of Equestria. She wondered briefly how this castle had been formed in this world. She didn’t think any of the ponies she’d met were cunning enough to manipulate the Tree of Harmony itself into doing their bidding. Perhaps it had given it to them as a gift?

Pathetic, really.

She glanced at the book she had just finished reading – A contemporary guide to the world – and smiled. That had been helpful. None of this world’s peoples knew how to speak properly. This Equestria was just naive and ripe for exploitation. It had been extremely difficult to rise to the top of her own world. Here… she could probably get ponies to go to the moon and conquer it for her.

It was amazing what a superior mind could do when it was applied among fools.

Starlight charged into the room, a grumpy look on her face.

Twilight wondered what was wrong with her, and if she’d found the dragon yet. “Reptile got your tongue?”

“Jello.”

Twilight sighed. So he’d gotten away then. How could any version of Spike actually have any skill at anything? “You realize the outliers?”

Starlight shot her with a furious look. “Straight talk. Now.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. What would the purpose of that be? She’d done enough straight talk today. “Your sound is that of a fecal pond.”

“Porridge.”

Twilight blinked. She… She couldn’t parse what that one meant. She couldn’t admit it, she’d never admit to not seeing the true meaning, but Luna’s horn did she hate the single word responses. So many interpretations… She’d just respond in a generic, yet meaningful, way. Divert the conversation back to finding the Spike. “What are your new buildings?”

“Ah, that’d be known as a distraction.”

Twilight frowned. That seemed a bit too… Literal. Oh, wait, of course. ‘A distraction’ must refer to how she was setting up a secondary method by which to capture him. She needed the details. “Show your work.”

“Uh, no, I’m really just a distraction.”

Twilight blinked. What?

And then a magic bolt hit her horn and sealed the magic within. She heard the sound of her own chuckling. “Gotcha!”

Twilight glanced at her naive self. How did they pull off the double talk? “You cannot reflect. How?”

Her counterpart shrugged. “Well, I’m assuming you’re asking about the double talk? Starlight kinda just… improvised?”

“I honestly can’t believe porridge worked,” Starlight said. “What did you think it meant?”

Twilight was not going to dignify that with a direct answer. “Let’s refer to it as sod, hmm?”

The other Twilight facehooved. “Celestia, she’s still doing it. Whatever. Straight talk - you are going to order your ponies back home.”

“Straight talk, well fine then. No. I will not stoop so low.”

“Then we’ll just have to take care of them ourselves. Already froze your Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Rarity. Pretty sure we can take your Starlight and Fluttershy easy.”

“And our Pinkie?”

Other Twilight and Starlight exchanged a nervous glance. “…We have a plan.”

Twilight laughed. “Oh, well would you look at that, their plan falls apart because of the pink one! Shocker!”

“Pinkies are not invincible,” her counterpart said. “I should know. I spend a lot of my time with one. Sometimes more.”

“Oh, you do?” Pinkie said, suddenly sitting in the throne with her cutie mark. Twilight laughed again.

Starlight turned to Pinkie. “…We don’t have to fight, you know.”

“Oh, I know. I also know I’m almost guaranteed to lose since the tables have turned. But I’m not about to turn down a good fight!” She produced a giant blue hammer with a Z on it. “Time to smash you with obscure foreshadowing that I don’t even understand!”

The ‘naive’ Twilight grabbed the hammer with her own magic and hit Pinkie across the head with it, tossing her across the room.

“What are you doing?” ‘evil’ Twilight shouted. “Use a chainsaw or something!”

Pinkie pulled out a chainsaw, cackling. “Gladly!” She charged Starlight, sparks flying off the chainsaw. Her targets teleported to dodge.

‘Evil’ Twilight saw an opportunity. She slinked out of the room while her assailants were occupied. All she needed to do was find her Starlight to remove this magic seal on her horn and everything would be fine. These ponies were still stupid, despite the upper hoof they had temporarily acquired. All she needed to do was use her superior mind…

“The sun sure is bright, isn’t it?”

Twilight turned to Fluttershy. Time for a quick test to see if this was her Fluttershy. “I require a present of soliloquy.”

“The last frog you found was the starline,” Fluttershy responded.

Ah, so not only was she the right Fluttershy, but she remembered the moment Twilight had risen to power. Good. Time to brief her on the situation. “The walls close in, the tables turn, the outside fight.”

“Knowledge is not hard to come by.”

Twilight bristled. Now was not the time to be insulting her. “The implosion is imminent, Fluttershy.”

“The direction will surprise you.”

What?

Fluttershy punched her across the face, forcing her to the ground, dazed.

“The path of the servant is done,” Lieshy said, kicking Twilight again, knocking her out.

~~~

Princess Twilight Sparkle and Starlight were having difficulty fighting the murder-crazed Pinkie.

“Pinkie!” Twilight yelled, teleporting out of the way of a dual-sword slice. “You really don’t have to do this!”

“But I waaaaaant to!”

“You can’t stay here – your secret’s out! There’s no more reason to be here!”

Pinkie shrugged. “So? Even if I’m destined to lose, I’m going to have some fun!”

Starlight twitched. “If you know you’re destined to lose why haven’t you forfeited?!”

“Same reason I go on living. Because it’s fun! Woooo!” She leaped into the air and tossed exploding cupcakes around. Twilight caught them all in her telekinesis and shot them back at Pinkie, throwing the pink pony into the chandelier. “Oh! Nice trick!”

Starlight cast a spell to slow Pinkie down, but there was no visible result. She kept moving like a hyperactive pink hummingbird. Starlight grimaced. “Okay, seriously, what is with you? Do you ever get hurt? Can you be affected by anything?”

“Oh, of course I can!” Pinkie giggled. “It all just depends on the context! And you have to surprise me! And there’s no way you can do that!” Her pupils shrunk. “…I’ve just doomed myself.”

Rainbow Dash shot into the room from a window and grabbed Pinkie, holding her tight and crashing to the ground. Pinkie struggled, shouting and yelling, but Rainbow Dash held her tight, not letting her out.

Starlight looked at Pinkie nervously. “…Uh… How? Why?”

Twilight blinked. “She… doomed herself? I… I – let’s not question it, let’s just send them home. Thanks, Rainbow Dash.”

“Don’t mention it!” Rainbow grunted. “Man she’s a wriggler…”

“I AM MORE WRIGGLER THAN ANY PONY EVER WAS!”

“Can you cool it? You lost!”

Pinkie grunted. “I know. I just… Why did I have to say that? I didn’t want to fall because of my hubris! The double-decker tables!”

“…You don’t talk like the others,” Twilight observed.

Lieshy nodded, walking into the room herself, dragging the limp form of evil Twilight behind her. “She… is a confuser.”

“I speak in both! So I can grundle your topiaries while following no rules whatsoever!” Pinkie giggled. “Can we get it over with now? Come on, Starlight.”

The other Starlight walked into the room, took one look at the scene, and tried to run – but Starlight and Twilight pulled her back and sealed her magic.

Twilight smiled. “And that’s everyone! Time to send you all back and get things back to normal!”

Lieshy shook her head. “That’s not what’s going to happen.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Lieshy smiled. “I… Don’t want to go back. And… I don’t want to stay here either.”

~~~

Sunset sat next to Mlinx in the village of the demons. “So. You and Anix did… what?”

“A fight for honor,” Mlinx said. “The details aren’t important. He rejected me. I proved him wrong. So we fought. I lost.”

Sunset furrowed her brow. “What does the fight even accomplish?”

“An official ending of the bond,” Mlinx said. “Custom dictates we are not to speak to each other or go on hunting parties together ever again.”

Sunset shook her head. “That’s stupid.”

Mlinx laughed. “…That’s the way things are. I’m sure you have a few ‘stupid’ customs.”

“As a member of two very different worlds, I can say every culture has them,” Sunset said. “Though that doesn’t mean you can’t change them.”

“I talked to Siron about it. He said he understood that I think differently than the others, and that if it were anyone other than Anix he might allow it. But… Anix is the most traditional of all of us.” He pointed. “Look, there he is, avoiding Luna and your friends. He wants nothing to do with anything that isn’t us ‘demons’.”

Sunset shook her head at the scarlet demon’s motions. The regal form of Luna even gestured towards him, but he made no response. Sandalwood put an arm around Luna to comfort her.

The rest of Sunset’s group was doing fine – even Micro, who had gotten over the freaky bug-creatures after about half an hour. Rainbow Dash was racing demons around the village, showing them all up with her speed, though she was annoyed at Veila’s ability to just fly on command. Twilight was talking to Siron directly, taking notes on their culture and asking a million questions. Lyra… was just taking pictures and giggling to herself oddly.

Mlinx cocked his head. “What is the green one… Lyra right? What is she doing?”

“I… I really don’t know,” Sunset said. “She’s a little… out there.”

“Ah, like Fef?”

“No, that’s… Another kind of crazy entirely.”

The two of them laughed.

Then princess Twilight walked into the village, Fluttershy behind her. She waved to Siron and he came right over. “Ah, Princess. Here for your friends?”

Twilight blinked, looking at Sunset. “Ah, no? Didn’t even know they were here.”

Siron chuckled. “Well they’re here, and they need a way back to their home.”

Sunset blushed. Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Did you forget a return spell?”

“No, a pterodactyl took it.”

“Ah,” Twilight chuckled. “I’ll get you all home. But first… Siron, this pony behind me is not the one you know.”

“Oh?”

“She comes from a world where everyone spoke in veiled lies. Their culture bred deception, manipulation, and other unsavory things. She does not wish to stay in my world – too ‘nice’ apparently – so I thought maybe she could come here?”

Siron raised his head. “Are you dumping more citizens on me?”

“It’s just a request, Siron. I can probably find another world for her.”

Siron nodded. “She shall be welcomed. What shall we call her?”

“Lieshy,” Lieshy said. “That’s what they call me. Stamp the papers.”

“…Hmm?”

Lieshy facehooved. “Sorry. Habit.”

“That’s her double-speak,” Twilight said. “You’ll… probably have to get used to it. It’s how she’s spoken her entire life.”

Siron nodded. “Curious.”

Twilight smiled, turning to Lieshy. “I hope you will enjoy it here! I was planning on staying a little longer to introduce you to people and ponies, but apparently I have to save some humans. See you around!”

“Until the next sunrise,” Lieshy said. “The doubles will collide to one.”

“…Riiiight. Sunset, gather your people.”

Sunset sighed and nodded, still really embarrassed they had to be bailed out. This was supposed to be a friendly little competition between the ponies and the humans, not the ponies helping the humans at every turn.

They needed an edge…

005 - Cross Mask

“So, let me guess,” Rarity said. “You found another one?”

“Actually, I found several,” Twilight said, gesturing at the Mirror Portal. “I let it run while I did all that paperwork yesterday.”

“Ah was kinda hopin’ we’d get more than a single day’s worth of break,” Applejack admitted.

“Oh come on Applejack, this is something new and never before explored!”

Rarity raised a hoof. “Didn’t Starswirl make this Mirror? And a few others like it? And what about that ‘limbo’ place or all those things Discord shows us?”

Twilight blinked. “Fair point. Still, it’s not something most ponies get to explore, and we’re making all kinds of new and interesting friends!”

“Yeah!” Rainbow Dash cheered. “And there’s so much awesome around every corner!”

“Uh… Sometimes awesome action isn’t good,” Fluttershy said.

“Ah, pfft, really?” Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “It’s not like we’re picking fights, we’re just defending ourselves when things get too hot.”

Pinkie giggled. “And having fun while doing it!” She and Rainbow Dash bumped hooves.

Applejack sighed. “So, do we know if the place on the other side of that mirror is safe?”

Twilight smiled. “I have a spell for that now.” She lit her horn, creating a white spark. “I’ll send it through the portal, and if it comes back green everything’s good. If it comes back red it’s not. So I’ll prove to you that it’s all fine.” She sent the spark into the mirror and it shot back all on its own, glowing a red color.

“…Ah…” Twilight said. “Well, it’s a good thing we checked!” She went over to a large notebook and wrote next to the location the Mirror was currently set to: unsafe.

Pinkie winked. “Just try another one!”

“Yeah…” She pulled a lever, changing the spell in the globe to another confirmed location. “I should have listened to you sooner, Applejack.”

“No, really?”

Twilight smirked. “Yes, really.” She sent another spark through the Mirror, this time coming back with a satisfactory green result.

“Onward!” Rainbow Dash shouted, flying through the portal. Rarity rolled her eyes and followed her through in a calm and dignified manner. She came out the other side at the base of a round tower in the middle of a simple town. The tower had what Rarity could only assume was a clock affixed to it, though she couldn’t read the time of the ornately decorated circle. She saw what she thought were images of the moon, sun, and maybe stars, but it was hard to tell. Was it noon? Morning? Evening? The clock itself was rotating to tell the time, so she had no ‘noon’ reference point at the top, making what would normally be a difficult puzzle impossible.

She eventually decided it was gorgeous and that was all that really needed to be determined at the moment. The rest of the town was… notably less striking. The buildings were simple constructions, usually square and made of stone, many of which had thatched overhangs shading numerous people with shops. Most of these people were human, though they all had dull hair colors and simple peach skin - not to mention a high quantity of absurdly pointy ears. Strikingly there were a few non-human races, beings Rarity didn’t have words for. There were a couple large rocklike creatures with huge bellies and a couple short wooden creatures with round mouths below leaves sprouting out of them instead of hair.

A few of the locals had noticed the six ponies, giving them odd looks. Nothing fearful or angry, mostly just gestures of confusion. Rarity couldn’t understand what they were saying, but Twilight was about to fix that. She lit her horn, walking up to two of the rock people who were having a conversation. She sat down next to them and listened for a while, allowing the spell to do its magic.

“What.” “Horse.” “Think it can.” “Sell?” “It’s staring.”

Twilight figured there were enough words translated to issue a greeting. “Hi! Keep talking, trying to learn your language.”

The two rock people looked down at her and then at each other. One pointed at the other, demanding he think of something to talk about. The other shrugged, grunting something about not having any idea what to talk about when talking about things was what they needed to do.

Rarity smirked. “Dears, you’re having a conversation now aren’t you?”

Evidentially, some of that didn’t translate properly since they gave her odd looks. She sighed and pointed at the Clock Tower. “Talk about that.”

They took this to mean they should walk over to the Clock Tower and bask in its glory. At least they were talking about it, which helped the translation spell immensely. Within a minute or two it had a working understanding of the native language.

“There we go!” Twilight said. “Hi! I’m Twilight Sparkle, and these are my friends! We’re new here, as you can probably tell.”

“You are welcomed!” One of them said in a voice that was deep, but not as scratchy as one would expect from a being composed largely of rock. “I am Durinlo, and this is Timon. What brings you here, travelers from afar?”

“Exploration,” Twilight said. “Could you tell us anything about where we are?”

Timon laughed heartily. “You walked into the center of town without even knowing where you are?”

“We teleported,” Applejack said. “From another world.”

Durinlo raised an eyebrow. “Are you from the land across the sea?”

“No,” Twilight said. “We come from a place called Equestria. We actually came from that shimmering spot in the Clock Tower wall over there.”

Timon looked at the area, squinting his eyes. “That soft sparkliness definitely wasn’t there yesterday.”

“We weren’t here yesterday,” Durinlo pointed out.

Timon laughed again. “This is true!”

Durinlo bowed slightly to Twilight. “In that case, welcome to our land! This is the town of Termina, a quaint place in the outskirts of a kingdom called Hyrule.”

“Interesting. And what do you call your planet?”

“…Your speech-changer isn’t working. You just said ‘planet’.”

“Ah…” Twilight nodded. “I guess you don’t have a word for that and the spell didn’t realize that… World. What do you call your world?”

Durinlo glanced at Timon, who just shrugged. Durinlo scratched his head. “…The land is called Ardent…”

“Good enough. Just wanted a name.”

Rarity looked their forms over again. They wore no clothing, unlike the humans walking around, and had a strange mixture of fat and muscle to parallel their rocky backs. There were also faint patterns on their bodies that may have been tattoos, maybe not. If they were natural they were most impressive in the regularity of their angles.

“What’s your race, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Goron. We are gorons.” They fist-bumped and bumped bellies, showing off their impressive girth. “We are the people of the mountains and land itself! We are steadfast, strong, and dependable!”

Twilight smiled. “I have no doubt. We’re ponies. I’m an alicorn, Rarity over there is a unicorn, Rainbow Dash is a pegasus, and then Applejack and Pinkie here are earth ponies.”

“I’m also a pegasus,” Fluttershy said, raising a wing.

“Never heard of talking ponies before,” Timon said, laughing again.

Rainbow Dash flew up to his head, smirking. “You sure like to have a good time, huh?”

“That I do, rainbow flying pony!”

“What do you like to do for fun?”

“Arm wrestling and races!”

Rainbow Dash grinned. “I doubt I could beat you in arm wrestling, cause I don’t have arms… But I don’t think a race would be fair for you.”

Timon pounded his chest. “Not fair? You’re on, pony.” He pointed at the archway leading out of town. “First one out to the field is the victor.”

“What’re the stakes?”

“A hundred rupees!”

Twilight facehooved. “We don’t have your currency.”

Durinlo blinked. “You must have money of some kind.”

Twilight reached into her saddlebags and produced a few bits. “This is what we use. We call them bits.”

Durinlo picked one up in his large hand and examined it. “Gold. Valuable. Each of these is worth twenty rupees, easy.”

“Then we have a deal!” Rainbow Dash whooped. “Ready Timon?”

“Yes. Three…”

Rarity sighed. “We’ve been here less than ten minutes and already we’re spectators in another race…”

“Go!” Timon yelled. Surprising everypony present, he curled himself into a ball and rolled across the cobbled road of the town at high speed like a tire. Rainbow Dash quickly snapped out of her astonishment at the surprising agility of the maneuver, using her wings to blast towards the gate at a much higher velocity. Even with his head start, Timon did not manage to get out of town quickly enough.

Rainbow Dash smirked. “Not bad, didn’t expect that from you.”

Timon laughed. “Everyone always thinks Gorons are slow! We are not! We’re just not runners!”

“Well, I still won. You owe me.”

Timon jogged back to Durinlo at a much slower pace. “She won.”

Durinlo sighed. “You always wager too much…” He pulled out five red crystals from his pocket and handed them to Rainbow Dash.

“So, each of these is a bit?”

Twilight shook her head. “Probably not. Gold is a valuable commodity here. That’s likely worth quite a bit more than five bits. At least here.” She examined one of the red crystals. “Back home this would probably fetch a price of about thirty bits, I’m thinking.”

“…Bleh, currency, booooring.”

“Aha!” A new voice said – young and male. The ponies and gorons turned to see a kid in a blue shirt pointing at Rainbow Dash. “I was right! Money is boring!”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Uh… Hello young man.”

He ignored her, looking right at Rainbow Dash. “You, tell my mom that money isn’t interesting!”

Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow. “I’ll tell anyone money isn’t interesting. But why do I need to?”

He pointed at a large countertop a tall woman was running. She was examining many different colors of rupee with a magnifying glass and putting them in various chests. “She won’t stop talking about them!”

Fluttershy raised an eyebrow. “Is she a banker?”

The boy blinked. “…Yes?”

Fluttershy smiled warmly. “Then it’s her job to talk about them. You shouldn’t take it personally.”

The boy threw his hands into the air. “Moooooooom!” he called, deciding to ignore Fluttershy.

She looked up from a purple rupee. “Yes?” she called

“Money is boring! This flying horse agrees with me.”

She looked at Rainbow Dash, raising an eyebrow at her alien body. “…That’s nice. Hey, you, flying rainbow horse.”

“Uh… yeah?”

“Come here, would you?”

Rainbow Dash landed right in front of her, five friends and the boy close behind. The gorons shrugged and went back to their business.

The woman smiled. “So, money is boring?”

“Yes?”

The woman stood tall and took in a breath. “Do you realize that currency, in and of itself, is the lifeblood of a good economy? Why, it comes from a point deep in the past where people decided to leave behind the primitive methods of barter. Without currency, we would be stuck without society, without reason, and-“

Fluttershy coughed. “I don’t think she finds money useless, she just finds it boring.”

“…Yeah,” Rainbow Dash said. “It’s just boring.”

The woman blinked. “…Oh. Well as long as you realize it’s important.”

“Trust me, we do,” Rarity said. “I run my own business back home, it’s quite the nightmare to keep track of all the funds. Yet, oddly exhilarating.”

The woman clapped her hands. “Oh, you own a business back home? Well, if you lived here I’d be offering you a loan right now but we can just forget about that. What do you do?”

“I design clothing. Beautiful clothing.”

Applejack smirked. “For a bunch of ponies who don’t normally wear clothes.”

“I still make a living!”

“Yeah, still. A bit silly.”

“Coming from the only mare here actually wearing an article of clothing,” Rarity said, pointing at Applejack’s hat.

“Uh…” Twilight gestured towards her saddlebags.

“Doesn’t count, too practical.” Rarity turned back to the woman. “Regardless, I am Rarity.”

“Eliza,” the woman said, shaking the outstretched hoof.

The boy groaned. “No… You were supposed to make her stop!”

Eliza rolled her eyes. “Just ignore my son, he’s taken a bit of a rebellious streak as of late.”

Fluttershy smiled. “I can see that. But don’t dismiss him, okay? Sometimes they just need love.”

“EEEEEWWWW!” the boy said, squirming.

Eliza chuckled softly. “I’ll keep that in mind. Regardless, what can I do for you?”

Twilight blinked. “I… I have no idea. We’re just exploring, looking for interesting things to do.”

Eliza pursed her lips. “Well, there’s a dance festival this evening themed around hidden identities. You’ll need a mask to participate, though in your cases I’m not sure exactly what they’d hide…”

Rarity’s eyes sparkled. “A dance festival?” She turned to Twilight, eyes as big as she could make them.

Twilight chuckled. “Fine, we can check it out. How long until… evening?”

“Three hours. Better find your masks fast. There’s probably a vendor around who’ll sell them, but they’ll be busy.”

“We better hurry then,” Pinkie said. “Rainbow Dash! Be prepared to spend your earnings!”

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Eh, sure. Masks sound cool. Will they fit on our faces though?”

“They probably have masks for those bush-things,” Rarity said. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Will you be there, Eliza?”

“I plan on it,” she said.

“Then see you there!”

“Oh, I’ll see you, but you won’t see me. The whole point of the masks is to hide your identity.”

“Ah,” Rarity said. “…That does sound interesting. Until later then, I suppose.”

The six friends set out, looking for a mask shop. There were plenty of shops – it seemed at times that this town was nothing but residential houses, shops, and the Clock Tower. Rarity found that somewhat odd, but decided not to judge the town based on its layout. It worked for the inhabitants.

Then they heard an echoing laugh behind them; the laugh of a man amused with something morbid, something that should not be laughed at under any circumstances. The laugh of someone mad delighting in suffering, quietly, as if only slightly tickled.

The laugh of someone who knew death all too personally.

The ponies turned to see a tall, human man standing over them. His eyes were squinted, almost shut, and his mouth was twisted into an eternal smile that was just too perfect. His ears were larger and pointier than any of the others they had seen and his purple cloak rippled with a wind that none of the ponies felt. On his back was a tremendous knapsack filled with all number of strange knick-knacks and devices, many of which gave off a magical vibe Rarity could detect. Most of these objects were masks of many different colors, sizes, and designs.

“Hello, my little ponies. I’m the Happy Mask Salesman, and I heard you needed some masks!”

Rarity already didn’t trust this man, and Twilight apparently shared her opinion. The princess looked up directly at the Happy Mask Salesman’s narrow eyes. “I’m sorry sir, but I think we’ll go with masks that aren’t enchanted. It’s a simple party just for tonight. Thank you for offering though.”

“Oh, but I assure you purple alicorn, you can use these masks for far more than just a party. And if you are concerned about any…” His expression and posture shifted to anger for a split second. “…dark magics…” his mouth shifted back to a smile and his pose returned to normal seemingly instantly. “I assure you, none of the masks I am willing to sell have such power. Here.” He pulled a yellow, foxlike mask off his bag and held it out to Fluttershy. “This is a Keaton Mask, enchanted with the aura of the keaton foxes, which will allow you to bring them out of hiding and speak to them!”

Fluttershy hesitated only a moment before grabbing the mask in her hooves. “That sounds… nice.”

“Fluttershy,” Twilight said. “We probably can’t afford that.”

“Oh, it costs a mere hundred rupees… or five bits.”

Rarity raised her eyebrow. He’s been scouting us out. But we do have plenty of bits…She considered trying to fight his insistence to sell them magic masks, but then she saw it – a beautiful pearly white mask hanging off his bags, adorned with the design of a brilliant ruby eye with three eyelash marks. It stared into her soul – and she felt a connection.

“Ah!” The Happy Mask Salesman said, suddenly in front of her, holding the mask in his hands. “This is the Mask of Truth! A beautiful work of art that will not only allow communication with the ancient Gossip Stones of the land, but also let you see the truth of the matter in many situations.”

Rarity stroked it with her hoof. It was so smooth, so pristine… and it called to her. “…Twilight?”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Fine, we can buy some magic masks. So long as no dark magics show up on them.”

The Happy Mask Salesman put his hands to his chest. “I would never do such a thing! I assure you, all my products are completely clean!”

Pinkie appeared on his back and pulled out a black round mask with a skull design on it.

“Wait, that one’s not-“

She slapped it on her face, giggled, and promptly exploded herself across the street. “I’LL TAKE IT!”

The Happy Mask Salesman looked stunned for a moment, then shrugged. “That’s the bomb mask. It explodes. I don’t sell it because that’s not something you can survive, but… Well, it seems I was mistaken.”

Twilight blinked. “Who even makes that kind of mask?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “I merely collect the things and sell the beneficial ones.”

“And the others?”

“Sealed away,” he chuckled. Then he shot her a death glare. “Don’t get any ideas.”

Twilight took a few steps back. “I won’t…”

Fluttershy put her mask on, fitting the yellow fox-face on perfectly. “Huh. Enchanted to fit any face?”

“Yes!” the Happy Mask Salesman bowed. “Only quality materials for my customers.”

Rarity put the Mask of Truth on and didn’t feel any different. She could see through it just as well as she could see with her own two eyes, which was a little disconcerting, but not all that unexpected.

She jumped when Pinkie’s mask exploded again, tossing Pinkie back to the group where she landed upright. “Whee! This is fun!”

“Please don’t blow up anywhere near us,” Applejack said.

“Ah, I’m not that carele-“ the mask exploded again, charring Applejack and launching Pinkie into the air. She landed flat on her face, the mask somehow squishing along with the rest of her body. “I’m okay.”

“Ah’m not…” Applejack muttered, scratching soot out of her eyes. “Hey, got a mask for me?”

The Happy Mask Salesman was at her side, holding a rocky mask with a simple face drawn into it. “This is the Stone Mask. It might as well make you invisible!”

“Might as well?”

“Well you still exist and can be seen but nobody notices you.”

“Ah.” She took it in her hoof. “…Rainbow Dash, don’t even think about it.”

“Don’t even think about what?”

Applejack just put the mask on. Rainbow Dash laughed. “Hey, mister Mask guy? I can totally still see her. And notice her. What gives?”

“Look again,” the Happy Mask Salesman said, hand to his mouth. Rainbow Dash did look again.

She blinked. Then she blinked again. “Okay, where’d she go?”

Rarity cocked her head. “Really Rainbow Dash? She’s right there!” Rarity pointed.

Rainbow Dash rubbed her eyes and gawked. “Woah… She is. How didn’t I see her? How did you see her?”

“Mask of Truth,” Twilight explained. “Applejack… Wherever you are, could you take off the Stone Mask? When only Rarity can see you it’s a bit… weird.”

Applejack took it off. “Ah’m not sure if this’ll be good or bad at the party.”

Fluttershy jumped into the air. From her perspective it was as if Applejack had just suddenly appeared and started talking.

Rainbow Dash decided she was done waiting. “Okay Mask guy, where’s my mask?”

The Happy Mask Salesman produced a mask with a beak and white feathers. “The Breman Mask. With this you will be able to lead animals and other beings of lesser will with a simple march.”

“…I’ll take it.”

“And as for you…” the Happy Mask Salesman turned to Twilight. He produced a terrifying looking mask of blackness and red eyes. “The All Night Mask.”

“…What’s it do?”

“When you’re wearing it, you won’t fall asleep, no matter how tired you are. Good for late night cram sessions or guard duty.”

Twilight levitated it to herself, scanned it, and put it on. “Okay then. Thirty bits for them all?”

The Happy Mask Salesman nodded slowly. “Of course. Though if you had your own masks I would happily trade for free.”

“Don’t have any,” Twilight said, taking out thirty bits and levitating them into his hand. They vanished on contact with him. “There you go.”

“It was a pleasure doing business with you. Until we meet again!”

“You going to the festival!?” Pinkie asked.

“Alas, no. I am referring to something…” He was suddenly standing behind them with a more sinister look on his face. “…further down the line.”

Twilight glared at him. “…You know, I really don’t appreciate you trying to scare us like that.”

“Oh, really?” He took a few steps back, rising to his full height. “Maybe you need to be scared though. Evils hide in this land. I’ve seen legions of darkness thunder across the land. I’ve seen the moon threaten to crash into the planet. I’ve seen horrid artifacts used for the destruction of many. This world is not as welcoming as you may think, my little ponies.”

Rarity’s eyes widened. He used the word planet. And the phrase ‘this world’. “Sir, are-“

He was gone.

Applejack shivered. “He gave me the creeps.”

Twilight nodded, taking off her mask. “I think that’s just who he is. Creepy.”

“Are the masks safe?” Fluttershy asked.

“I think so,” Twilight said.

“They are,” Rarity said, tapping her own beautiful headpiece. “I… I think that’s what this feeling is. I know they’re safe.”

Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow. “So… You can read minds now or what?”

“No… I just get inklings of truth, I believe. I have no idea if any of that stuff he said about darkness was true, though I doubt it. But I feel certain about the safety of these masks. They won’t hurt us.”

“Then we’ll use them,” Twilight said. “Then study them when we go home. I’m very curious how these enchantments work.”

Rarity smiled. “Good. Now, I do need to learn more about this festival so I can observe the proper rituals. I am going to speak to Eliza about it.”

Pinkie exploded again. “And I’m going to play real-life hot potato!”

Rarity shrugged. “You… do that, dear.”

~~~

“Okay, so, here’s all you need to know about the festival.” Eliza cleared her throat. “You wear a mask and you dance. There’s some symbolic reason about not seeing your true face or something, but basically remember not to take your mask off and you’ll be fine. The dance will last until you want to go to sleep. There will be food everywhere, and most of it will cost a fortune.”

Rarity shrugged. “I… guess that’s simpler than I thought it was. Is there any story or legend to it?”

“There probably is, I don’t know, it’s not rupees, so really it can’t be all that fascinating.”

“Er… Well, what do you think of my mask?”

“Looks great.”

Rarity paused. Yeah, that definitely wasn’t true. “…You haven’t even looked at it.”

Eliza glanced up and smiled. “It really does look great.”

Rarity took in a breath to calm herself. “Of course. Well, I must be going then…” She trotted away, frowning. Of course, Eliza was just trying to be nice, right? No… No, she just didn’t care. Rarity knew she just didn’t care.

Wow, the mask really worked. She saw the truth of the matter. If she hadn’t been aware that was the mask’s enchantment she probably would have just commended her own instinctual skill with these matters. It was a very subtle feeling…

She could root out lies and find truth. However, unlike Twilight she didn’t really have any desire to analyze the exact capabilities of the mask – it was nice to know it could do special things but it really didn’t matter much beyond that. She decided she should just explore the town for a while, see who she ran across and what colorful customers she could find.

After wandering a bit, she found herself in north Termina, watching a group of boys playing, all of them wearing similar getups to that of Eliza’s son. She watched them from afar, tossing a ball to and fro, laughing. Then one of them spiked the ball right into another’s face. Rarity gasped as the boy fell over and hit his head on the cobblestone, hard.

She rushed to his aid, lifting the boy’s head up and checking him over. He would be fine – but he was going to have a nasty lump on his head. Rarity glared at the boy who spiked the ball.

“It was an accident!”

No it wasn’t. “No it wasn’t, you did this on purpose.” She glared at him – the design of her mask only serving to heighten the intensity of the expression, rather than obscuring it. He backed down and looked at the ground, ashamed.

“Apologize,” Rarity demanded, leaning the hurt boy up.

“S-sorry…”

“Good.” She turned to the boy in her hooves. “Is there a hospital nearby?”

“Yeah,” a boy said. “Right over there. We can take him miss, don’t worry.” They all lifted him up and helped him walk to a place that was probably understaffed, but Rarity didn’t worry. She knew he’d be fine.

She smiled under her mask – this felt good. She wondered if her friends were getting as much out of their masks.

There was an explosion and Pinkie sailed over Rarity’s head, Bomb Mask still firmly planted on her face. “Wheeeeeeee!”

Rarity shook her head – best not to question Pinkie, as usual. It was worthwhile to question Rainbow Dash, who was pursuing the pink missile with a dozen birds flying in formation behind her. “Come on, she can’t launch away from us forever!” The birds cawed in agreement.

“Yes she can…” Rarity muttered, smiling to herself. They’d be doing that back and forth until the festival started, no doubt about it. It was nice, having certainty about that. Having certainty about anything. This mask was turning out to be quite the blessing to her. Simply divine!

Applejack walked up to her, mask and all. “Hi Applejack!”

“Hey. Uh…” She took off her mask and stared into the eye on Rarity’s mask. “Hey, could you-“

“I can take the mask off, since it bothers you,” Rarity finished for her, sliding her mask off. “You have to admit, it is gorgeous.”

Applejack rolled her eyes. “It’s a one-eyed thing that makes everypony feel like they’re being stared at.”

“Well, yes, but I believe that’s the point. It’s letting everypony know I can see the truth of the matter. I’ve already had little inspirational inklings about a half dozen things!”

Applejack blinked. “Interestin’. Ah’d personally rather rely on my own judgment than what a mask says, but Ah suppose Ah’m already Honesty.”

“That you are. You’d have no need for this beautiful thing. Though if you really want it you can have it, I could try out your mask for a while.”

“Ah’m gonna keep this. Less chance of Dash getting’ ahold of it.”

Rarity chuckled. “She really wants to cause trouble doesn’t she?”

“Ah can just imagine her prankin’ us all for the rest of the day, and we’d have no chance to even see her. …Well, Ah guess you could, with that mask.”

“I can see all that is hidden. I should really try to find one of those ‘Gossip Stones’ that mask salesman talked about… I can speak with them.”

“Well, Ah dunno what one of those are.”

“I will know it when I see it,” Rarity said, tapping the mask. “And I will strike up a rousing conversation with a rock. …It’ll be an experience.”

“Everything’s been an experience since we’ve been out here…” Applejack said, frowning.

Rarity cocked her head. “Applejack, what’s wrong?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“Mask’s not on,” Rarity said.

“Ah… Right.” Applejack looked into the distance. “It’s just, we’ve been doing this a lot lately. Ah know this is only the third world we’ve been to, but it’s been taking up most of our time. We always had adventures, yeah, but never this frequently, and it’d never been this… intense for so long before.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can handle it.”

“It’s not that. Ah’m more wondering if this is really a good use of our time.”

Rarity frowned. “Really Applejack, we’re making new friends and exploring new worlds. I think that’s definitely worthwhile!”

“Maybe…” Applejack said, watching Pinkie sail over them again, still pursued by Rainbow Dash. She fell silent, the conversation drifting into an awkward lull.

Rarity looked around and slid her mask back on.

“Where you goin’?” Applejack asked.

“I’m going to find one of those stones. Ask around, see what there is.”

“Good luck.”

“I’m sure I’ll find one eventually.” She chuckled. “Actually, I know I’ll find one eventually. See you at the festival, Applejack.”

“Sure thing.”

Rarity had hardly gone a few feet before she noticed Fluttershy talking to a young red-haired woman tending to a cow. She decided this was interesting enough to deter her quest for the Gossip Stone.

“Oh, hello Rarity!” Fluttershy said, her mask still on her face. “This is Romani! She runs a nearby ranch and takes care of these beautiful cows! Did you know cows don’t talk here?”

Rarity shrugged. “I do now. Though…” She looked at the cow closely. “…She wants onions right now.”

Romani rolled her eyes. “She always wants onions even though she knows it makes her milk taste sour. I take it that’s a genuine Mask of Truth then?”

Rarity tossed her mane back. “Why, yes! Have you seen one before?”

Romani smiled. “Yeah, few years back, a certain hero had one. He didn’t use it very often though.”

“Why not?”

Romani shrugged. “I don’t know. Never asked.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “…It was a bit offputting, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t think that was the only reason he avoided it…” she shrugged. “But now’s not the time to dwell on the past, now’s the time to get ready for a dance festival!” She put on her own mask – a simple cow’s head. “Moo.”

Fluttershy chuckled. “Flift.”

“…Is that what the keaton says?”

“I… I’m not sure,” Fluttershy said. “I talked to one. He… He really liked puzzles. I think Twilight would have fared better against his riddles…”

“What was he like?” Rarity asked.

“Well, golden fox, three tails, very playful. Though quite a bit smarter than me…”

Rarity put a hoof on Fluttershy. “He probably just collects puzzles and riddles, he may not actually be all that smart.”

“You think so?”

Rarity tapped the Mask of Truth and chuckled.

Romani crossed her arms. “Now, I’ve never met a keaton, but they are pretty well known for being intelligent creatures.”

“They may be known for it, but that doesn’t mean they are,” Rarity said.

“Huh. You learn something new every day.” She paused for a moment. “Do you mind if I ask something?”

“Go ahead,” Fluttershy said.

“What exactly are you?”

“Ponies,” Rarity said. “I’m a unicorn, she’s a pegasus.”

“I’ve heard of your kind…” Romani said. “I thought you were just legends though. I also expected you to be… bigger.”

“What does that mean?” Fluttershy asked.

“Horse-size,” Rarity said. “We’re ponies.”

“Oh, I see. You’re just a small version?”

“Well I don’t know,” Rarity said. “I have no idea what the pegasi and unicorns are like here. We’re from really far away, a place called Equestria.”

Romani chuckled. “What a fitting name.”

“What does that-“ Rarity paused. “Huh, I suppose it does mean ‘horse land’ doesn’t it?”

“You didn’t realize that until just now?”

“It’s not something we really think about.” Rarity sat down, thinking of all the other places in Equestria… She’d known Ponyville was literally “village of ponies” before, but… Appaloosa? That was a pun on a certain kind of pony and apples. Canterlot? Based on the movement of hooves known as a canter…

“Fluttershy, our world is filled with places named after horse puns. Nothing but horse puns.”

“…Weird,” Fluttershy agreed.

“How did all these puns get accepted? Who named all these things? And who keeps just going along with it?”

Fluttershy cocked her head. “Rarity, you okay?”

“…I’m just a tad confused at our culture…” She twitched – the Mask of Truth wasn’t helping her find any answers to her questions. Perhaps because they didn’t exist.

Good gravy, I’m turning into Twilight. I don’t need to know the answers to everything. She shook herself out of her confusion and turned back to Romani. “So, what’re you doing for the festival?”

“Selling milk.” She patted the cow on the side. “Everyone loves the milk from Romani ranch, and since today’s a special day, it’s time to sell it personally. And probably do some dancing.”

“How much for the milk?” Fluttershy asked.

“Five rupees. But, seeing as you’ve never had it before, your first cup is free.” She took a mug out of her pack and started milking directly into it. Rarity and Fluttershy waited patiently as the mug filled up.

“Hey…” Rarity said. “…How do you think Applejack’s cows get milked? We don’t exactly have… hands.”

Fluttershy raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know. I do think that mask gets you to ask a lot of questions.”

“Oh, sorry-“

“It’s not a bad thing!” Fluttershy said quickly. “It’s just something I noticed.”

Rarity put a hoof to her chin, wondering exactly how much the mask was making her question things. She was certain it wasn’t zero – but if that was the case, what else in her mind was it affecting? …Probably not that much.

Romani stood up and handed the mug to Rarity and Fluttershy. “Drink up!” Fluttershy took a sip first, shivering a little as she did so.

“This is delightful!” She handed it to Rarity. “It’s a bit strong,” she warned.

Rarity rolled her eyes – how could milk be strong? But then she paused. It was strong, wasn’t it? But… what did strong mean? There was no inkling of help there. The mask was apparently very selective and spotty over what inspirations it decided to give her. She shrugged and took a swig.

The liquid was thick, creamy, and full of flavor – a bit too much flavor. The intensity of the milk hit her tongue like an anvil. She reared up on her hind legs, stumbling backward a few steps. “My… This is rather rich. Delicious, divine, but my Stars…”

Romani chuckled. “That’s the usual reaction. But people keep coming back for more. It’s a very vital drink, apparently almost as good as an enchanted health potion.” She patted the cow on the back. “I don’t know what she does to make it so good, but she’s a blessing to the farm.”

Rarity looked at the mug in her hoof and took a sip, expecting the impact of flavor this time. She shivered. “…I can see the appeal…”

Pinkie popped up next to them without exploding. “Oh cool!” She grabbed the mug and drank the entire thing in one swoop, somehow without taking off her mask. “DELICIOUS!”

Romani’s eyes widened. “You just… chugged it.”

“Yep! And boy was it tasty! Not as good as cider though.”

“Most people end up in the hospital after attempting that.”

Pinkie giggled. “I’m a pony, silly. Anyway, I have to jet, Rainbow Dash is still chasing me with her army.” She leaped into the air and exploded, flying over a nearby building. Rainbow Dash flew overhead in hot pursuit with a flock of birds behind her

“Your kind is… Unusual,” Romani said.

“No argument here,” Rarity said. “Oh, by the way, do you know where I can find a Gossip Stone?”

Romani nodded. “There’s one in town, behind the Clock Tower. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Thanks. It was a pleasure.”

Romani smiled awkwardly. “Uh… Same?”

Fluttershy chuckled. “Don’t mind her, she’s being fancy.”

Romani shrugged. “Never did understand that…”

Rarity rolled her eyes – not that anybody could tell – and walked towards the Clock Tower. She found Twilight and one of the wooden bush people sitting next to each other, staring at it.

“Uh… Twilight?”

“I’m trying to bore myself into falling asleep,” Twilight said. “It’s not working.”

“Told you,” the bush muttered in a high, squeaky voice.

“Shush! You’re making me more interested in talking!”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Is it really the time to be testing the magic in your mask, Twilight? There’s a festival soon, and I doubt staring at such wondrous architecture will make you bored enough to sleep.”

Twilight groaned, putting her face in her hooved. “You’re right…”

The bush twitched. “What am I, chopped liver?”

Twilight looked up at him. “…You did say your name was Liver.”

“It is. Chose it myself.” He rustled his leaves, turning to Rarity. “Maybe you’ll be better. Name’s Liver, I consult on everything from architecture to politics to art. I’m what’s known as a Deku Shrub if you haven’t figured that out by now. So, just to clarify, you are all from another world.”

“Uh, yes,” Rarity said.

“This is going to bring great business. I can add ‘culture consultant’ to my impressive list of consulting endeavors.”

Rarity sighed – this guy wasn’t any good at being a consultant. This guy just didn’t like taking orders from people and wanted to be in charge of his own business. Not really all that deceptive, but very delusional in his own greatness.

Still, she could probably ask him some things about the culture and he’d give more or less correct answers.

“So, Liver, explain the importance of this Clock Tower.”

“No idea. Legend states that it just appeared here one day and people decided to build a town around it. No one knows what makes it tick, and no one knows if there’s even an interior. Apparently, some hero in recent years found a way in but he didn’t tell anyone how that worked.”

Now Rarity was curious. “Would there be any way to find that out?”

“If you can get the Gossip Stone to talk, maybe. But nobody can get those things to talk.”

Rarity smirked. “I’ll be right back. Enjoy your… sit.”

“We will,” Twilight said, staring at the clock again.

“No, we won’t,” Liver muttered as Rarity moved behind the Clock Tower. The back face of the tower was blank, though still constructed with an excellent regard for symmetry. A single round statue stood in the pavement there, motionless. It had a number of spiked protrusions on top of it, and a single decorative eye was engraved in its center.

She knew it was the Gossip Stone the moment she saw it. She walked right up to it and cocked her head. “Hello?”

It said nothing. It remained as motionless as a statue should be.

Rarity frowned and tapped it with her hoof. It bounced back from her like it was made of rubber. “Boing-oing!”

“AUGH!” Rarity jumped back.

It looked at her, twisting its rubbery body without a hint of difficulty. “What’s the problem there miss? Never seen a Gossip Stone before?”

“N-no but – how? Stone is not rubber!”

“Beats me, it’s just the way I am. So, you got ahold of a Mask of Truth didya? Discovering the fun parts yet?”

“…No?”

“Ah, well then I wish you luck with that. You’re in for a ride! Anyway, what you want to know? I know lots of things!”

Rarity put a hoof to her chin. “What are the ‘fun parts’?”

“I may be a Gossip Stone but I won’t take the fun out of things, that just wouldn’t be sporting.”

Rarity twitched. “In that case, how do we get into the Clock Tower?”

“You need the moon to be out to do that. There’ll be a big one tonight, I’d suggest coming back here then.”

“…You aren’t very helpful are you?”

“Well, you’re not exactly some big hero on a quest so I don’t have to tell you anything. I’m just here to talk. I can tell you that Eliza really likes money to an extent that isn’t good and Romani secretly drinks that strong milk nightly. Addiction is a powerful thing.”

Rarity blinked. “I… I’m not sure what to do with that information.”

“Exactly. I’m a Gossip Stone, no rule that this has to be useful.”

Rarity leaned in. “Know anything about the Happy Mask Salesman?”

“He and I have a deal. I don’t say anything about him and nothing bad happens to me.”

Rarity shook her head. “What is it with people and being so violent all the time?”

“I don’t do philosophical questions. Just a bad idea.”

“Well, in that case, what should I ask?”

“Ask what to do next.”

“What should I do next?” Rarity deadpanned.

“Go to that festival already, it’s about to start.”

“…Oh. Right. …Well, goodbye then.”

The Gossip Stone made no response. It once again looked like a perfectly normal stone statue with no hint of a rubbery structure.

This world was certainly unusual.

~~~

The festival began with fireworks. Everyone had masks on, and most had robes over their bodies to hide the rest of their features as well. The town became a shifting mob of sheets with flat faces – a ghostly image. Lanterns of all colors lit up the town, and people ran into the streets dancing every dance imaginable. Musicians stood outside the various buildings, playing every song they knew, producing a mixed cacophony of noises that somehow managed to have a unique beauty to it.

Rarity trotted down one of the streets, witnessing six couples in blue masks dancing around a large barrel. Their dance was one focused primarily on the legs, kicking in and out repeatedly with ever increasing speed. They switched their dancing partners every few seconds, spiraling around in a strange flowery pattern.

She moved towards them, curious about what they were doing. Eager, even, to become part of it. But then all twelve of them turned to look at her – staring at her with their masks. She knew they did not want her presence. She sighed and turned around, looking to find someone else to involve herself with. Someone to dance, to be a part of this culture. As poor as this town obviously was, they obviously knew what class was.

And she was going to be part of the class. She just needed to find an open group.

The barrel in the midst of the dancers exploded, shooting a brilliant crimson firework into the sky behind Rarity. She didn’t turn around to appreciate it. It was not for her.

There – she saw Pinkie. And, of course, Pinkie was the one dancing with everyone, masterfully standing on her hind legs and spinning some people around a goron minstrel with a rather large guitar. The moment Rarity started walking over, Pinkie grabbed her and threw her into the dance. “Stand on your hind hooves and just let the dance carry you!” she cheered, spinning Rarity around in a short dance before tossing her to a person in a pig’s mask.

She heard him snort.

He wanted nothing to do with her.

She was tossed to a smaller person; a woman, the Mask of Truth told her. This woman was distracted, didn’t even notice Rarity. Was busy thinking of something else. Someone else.

Next was a goron who lifted her up and laughed. It was probably Timon, only dancing because he knew who she was. Only because of a previous connection…

Rarity took in a sharp breath as she was tossed to the next person. This person danced with her kindly, carefully, appreciatively. He must have felt sorry for her. He did feel sorry for her. And after he thought she needed no more consoling, he tossed her away.

He didn’t know she could see the truth.

The next one thought her form was ugly. The next one thought the dance itself was stupid. The next one hated her because she couldn’t dance properly.

She tore herself from the dance, stumbling to the side of the street. While leaning against a wall she bit back tears.

“Hey…” Pinkie said, walking up to her. “What’s wrong?”

She’s only doing this because she feels like she has to. “Nothing, Pinkie. Nothing at all. I just need a breath, is all.”

Pinkie shook her head, taking off her mask to reveal a concerned face. “Rarity, I can tell when something’s wrong, even if I can’t see your face. Something’s got you sad.”

She really seemed concerned… But no, the mask had told Rarity that Pinkie was only doing it out of obligation, and that had to be true. The mask knew everything. “…Pinkie, get back to your dance.”

Pinkie frowned. “Rarity…”

She needs to go back. “Pinkie, go have fun. I’ll be back.”

Pinkie shook her head, putting the mask back on. “…Okay.” She bounced back to the party, unleashing a burst of confetti from nowhere.

Rarity slunk away. So this is what people really thought at parties and events – they judged each other. They judged her, deeming her unimportant. Ugly. Alien. Maybe she didn’t belong out here, in the other worlds… She would just be pushed back in every way. Pushed to nothing, pushed because they were different. Because people had their own desires. Because of the truth.

Even her own friends had that. Everyone had that. She had it.

Certainty…

She stood tall at the edge of a street, looking into an alleyway. The dust and grime told her the people were dark here. The trash told her they cared not. How could she have not seen this before? Why only now was she seeing this toxic atmosphere?

Two people stood in the alleyway – one wearing the cow’s mask. Romani. The other was tall, probably a man, wearing a mustached mask. The tall man grabbed Romani by the arm, hard. She cried out, but no one heard.

No one but Rarity. She activated her horn and tossed the burly man back with her telekinesis, dumping him in a trash can, where his kind belonged. She walked up to Romani.

“T-thank you…” Romani said, distantly.

She isn’t all that thankful. She’s distant. She has mixed feelings. You messed something up.

Rarity took a few steps back, trembling.

“…Rarity?”

Obligation. Culture. That’s all she cares. She just wants you out of her sight so she can sort through things.

Rarity took off at a full gallop, tears streaking down the bottom of her mask. She couldn’t take it anymore. She was done with this – done with the people, done with the festival, done with the dancing. She’d just lock herself in her house forever and eat all the ice cream she had. That’s all that would help her now.

Only it wouldn’t. She knew it. It was more truth. Everything was horrendously disparate. Everything she saw had a dark twist, a nasty eventuality, a devastating realization. Nothing was clean. Every last thing she laid eyes on lashed at her already broken psyche.

She ran for home… But came to the Clock Tower’s back first. A back with a large gaping hole in it. She paused, tear streaks still plain on her face.

“See? There it is. Only you can see it,” the Gossip Stone said. “The night reveals the truth.”

She walked towards the hole – the doorway – without speaking.

“What, no thank you? …All right then. Enjoy.”

She walked into the darkness, the light from the outside vanishing the moment she stuck her head in. Her eyes took a moment to adjust – but adjust they did. The interior was simple, made of stone, and had a spiral staircase leading up. There was a lack of clockwork mechanisms to drive the spinning disc, but this impossibility didn’t bother her. She ascended to the top of the Tower absent-mindedly.

She arrived, standing atop a round flat roof at a height from which see the entire town and quite a bit of the surrounding grasslands as well. It was beautiful – but tainted.

She was not alone. There was a man in green wearing a rather unique cone hat that drooped down his back. Numerous weapons, potions, and other miscellaneous artifacts lined his person and the magic within him more than strong enough to register with Rarity’s meager magic sense.

He doesn’t want me here.

She started back down the stairs-

“Don’t go,” he said, turning to her. He had no mask. His face was that of a middle-aged man, but his eyes were young and full of life. He extended a hand.

Rarity stared at him a moment, not sure what to make of the mixed signals she was getting.

“Take off that mask. Nobody needs it up here – and Masks of Truth tend to cause more problems than they solve.”

Rarity took it off, gulping. She wiped her eyes, realizing slowly that he could see she was crying. “I…”

“Don’t apologize for your emotions,” he said. “They’re a part of us. The things we do because of them we may be responsible for, but we are not in control of them.”

Rarity blinked. “…Wise words.”

“Well, I have a Mask of Truth myself,” he said, taking one out of his backpack. “I know what it’s like.”

“…It just tells you the horrors of everything.”

“No… it tells you the truth of things, sometimes.” He held it to the light. “But the truths it tells you are so vague that it’s hard to discern them from your own intuition. It’s impossible to tell the two apart.” He sighed. “It becomes a horrible self-fulfilling process.”

“…So it lies?”

He shook his head. “No… You just think it’s telling you things when it isn’t.”

Rarity looked at the mask in her hooves. “…I’ve hurt some people because of this. Pinkie… Romani…”

“Romani will understand. She doesn’t know everything, but she understands people.”

Rarity nodded. “…How could I have thought those things about everyone?”

“When you’re wearing an oracle, you only hear what you want to.”

Rarity looked down at the town. “Do I really want to think those things?”

“On some level, you do. On some level, I wanted to think everyone was an enemy. I wanted them all to be servants of a great evil.” He laughed. “The only one who ended up being a servant was someone I thought I trusted. Dismissing all the inclinations the mask actually gave me.”

“That… that sounds horrible.”

“It was.”

Rarity looked at her mask again.

“You’re thinking about chucking it over the edge?”

“Yes…” Rarity admitted.

“I wouldn’t. It’s still a powerful mask that can do great good. But it’s a horrible thing to view the world through.”

Rarity nodded, placing it on the back of her head. She extended a hoof. “I’m Rarity.”

“I’m Link,” he said, shaking her hoof. She felt a warming power, a courage, flow through her.

Rarity smiled. “Charmed.” She glanced down at the festival. “…They’re still dancing.”

“They always dance.”

“Why aren’t you down there?”

Link shrugged. “It’s… It’s deceptive down there. People lead fake lives behind their masks. With them on, they feel like they can do anything. And that’s a truth. I can’t bring myself to be down there with so many people doing horrible things. I can usually figure out who they are.”

Rarity shook her head. “Part of me wonders why.”

“I honestly have no idea. This festival is much older than I am, or any of the elders. They do it because of tradition. In the morning there are just as many scared people as those who had a wonderful time, and they always forget about that by next year.”

Rarity pursed her lips. “Some of that ugliness was true.”

Link nodded. “People are a paradox. We are ugly. But we are also noble.” He laughed. “I’ve met many of both on my adventures…”

“Oh, care to elaborate, mister Link?”

“Just Link, no mister. And I won’t mind elaborating if you talk about yourself a little.”

Rarity chuckled. “Well, I don’t do as much adventuring as you probably do, judging by all those artifacts you have and that impressive sword, but I do have my fair share of excursions. I think it’d be best to start with the day I met my best friends…”

The two of them talked the night away while what tradition commanded continued on below.

In the end, it didn’t matter all that much.

~~~

“Well, the mask works,” Twilight said, standing in front of the shimmer that led to Equestria. “It’s, what, 3 AM? I’m not even remotely feeling like falling asleep. I feel like I’m about to fall over, but you know, that’s nothing.”

Pinkie giggled. “Yeah!”

Applejack took off her mask. “Okay, done with this mask. We better be goin’ home, Twilight.”

Fluttershy nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I’m beat. And this… party wasn’t really that nice all the time.”

Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow. “How do you mean?”

“Let’s just get home. …Where’s Rarity?”

“Here,” Rarity said, coming out from the back of the Clock Tower, Link behind her. She shoved the Mask of Truth in Twilight’s hooves. “That thing is dangerous. Careful with it, Twilight.”

“…Okay. Who’s your friend?”

Link bowed. “I’m Link, your highness.”

Twilight facehooved. “Great, you told him I was a princess.”

Link smirked. “I might have bowed regardless. You look like a leader.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “I do not!”

Rainbow Dash facehooved. “Yes, yes you do.”

“You are a shining star of leadership, darling,” Rarity said.

Twilight shrugged. “Okay, sure, I’m the leader. What do you do Link?”

Link smirked. “I’m just an adventurer.”

“I bet you’re more than just a simple adventurer.”

Rarity nodded. “He’s a lot like us, dear. I’ll tell you about it later – I can tell you need sleep. I don’t need the mask to see that your body is done with all this.”

“But I feel fine!”

“When you take off that mask of yours you will collapse in a heap,” Rarity said.

Fluttershy giggled. “You probably will.”

Twilight smirked. “I’ll prove it to you!” She took off her mask – and fell asleep on the ground, in a heap.

Pinkie laughed heartily. “Well, we need to get Twilight to bed! We’ll probably be coming back here! See you later Link!”

“Later,” he waved as the six of them left through their portal. He smiled contently to himself, his spirits having been lifted slightly by the sight of six colorful equines.

~~~

Later that night, long after the six ponies from another world had left, hours after most the dancers had gone to bed, another portal opened. Sunset Shimmer stepped out of the gap in reality. She took a moment to appreciate the night air and the appeal of the unique quiet a town had after a large festival.

But, well, it was night. She probably wouldn’t be welcomed here just yet, since even the inns were probably unmanned. She’d just have to come back later when the world would be more responsive to her presence. She was about to head back when she saw something.

There was a man in green talking to another man in purple. The man in purple sent shivers down Sunset’s spine just from the way he stood – unnatural.

“Is it still safe?” the man in green asked.

The man in purple laughed, and suddenly there was a purple mask in his hands. Its primary shape was that of a heart, but it was far from an image of affection. It had two eerie eyes that glowed slightly, two colored horns on the rounded top and eight spikes along the bottom edges. Even in the darkness, Sunset could see the jarring tribal designs all around it. That mask was evil.

“Put it away!” the man in green said. “It’ll call to someone!”

“It’ll do that anyway,” the man in purple said, having somehow put the mask back in his pack without Sunset seeing. “But rest assured, it is safe in my possession.”

“You know…” a new voice said, this one feminine. “Those ponies came from another world. What’s to say they don’t have the ability to take it from you?”

“Midna, they wouldn’t do that,” the man in green said, addressing his faint shadow.

“They would not,” the man in purple said. “And I’m more than capable to defend against otherworldly threats, ye of little faith.”

“We’re putting a lot of faith in you…” Midna muttered.

“But I’m the only one who can resist its call, and you know that from personal experience.”

The man in green nodded. “It’d be better if it was destroyed.”

The man in purple laughed, the sound making Sunset shiver again. “I’m open to suggestions!”

The man in green said nothing in response. He just shook his head.

“Hey,” Midna said, suddenly. “I think we’re being watched.”

Sunset leaped back through her portal and closed it faster than even she could comprehend. It took a moment for her to realize how hard she was breathing and how terrified she felt.

Twilight blinked. “…What happened over there?”

“I probably just heard a conversation I really wasn’t supposed to hear,” Sunset said.

“…Want to investigate?”

Sunset shivered. “Normally I would, but… I don’t think I want to mess with something that evil.”

Twilight blinked. “Okaaaaay….”

Author's Note

And those are the first five chapters of Songs of the Spheres, published all at once to give you a sense of what this story is about. I'm putting my heart and soul into this work, and I hope it will trump everything else I've ever written.

This story world is actually an open multiverse setting that anyone can write anything in. The forum where such things are discussed is here and there's a Discord chat here. Feel free to drop in to give feedback or share your ideas! You may find spoilers for future events in Songs of the Spheres in these places, but I am keeping the ending a closely guarded secret.

Anyway, like, comment, subscribe - wait you can't subscribe here this isn't youtube. DARNIT. Foiled again.

Regardless, hope you enjoyed.

-GM, master of forks.

006 - Home Calling

Spike walked to the Mirror Portal room, a cup of piping hot tea in his hand. It was far too hot to drink at the moment, so he was wandering around while it cooled. He had expected to find Twilight and the gang preparing for another adventure, but they weren’t here. Maybe they’d taken an off day or something, though they had gone almost every day in the last week. He’d heard tales of new friends, awesomeness, explosions, and strange games. At first he’d felt left out, but now he realized that getting involved would probably drain a lot of his time, and he was not the mad machine of productivity Twilight was. He, like any normal living being, needed more than four hours of sleep a day.

He glanced at the Mirror Portal. It was on, connected to some far off world, like it always was. Usually the default was Earth, but Twilight was forgetful and often forgot to switch it back until Sunset yelled at her through the communication journals. Speaking of which, one of them was on a nearby table right now. He would have opened it, but that would have been rude. The private correspondence between Twilight and Sunset was none of his business.

He found himself staring at the globe of magic above the Mirror Portal, the device that contained the glowing pattern of a faraway world. This particular cloud seemed to be a half and half mixture of vibrant rainbow and dusty desert colors. The colorful contradiction drew him in and soon he had no idea how long he’d been standing there.

He checked his tea – still too hot. He really needed to get a control on his fire breath when heating things up. He may have been fireproof but heat was still uncomfortable.

Something extremely fast shot right past his ear, setting him on edge. This something hit the wall behind him with a pang! He didn’t even have time to turn around before another one shot through the gap in his legs, denting the floor beneath him. A third one flew right through his teacup, shattering the piece of porcelain and pouring steaming water on his hand. He screamed and ducked for cover, the sudden heat serving as a good reminder that he should get out of the way.

More of the tiny objects – bullets, Spike’s mind finally concluded, drawing on what he knew of humans from Twilight – shot from the portal, bouncing off the crystal walls. No others came close to hitting Spike, but he knew his chances of escaping unscathed lowered the longer those bullets kept flying.

“TWIIIIILIIIIIGHT!” he yelled.

Twilight leaped out of the portal, performing an athletic roll while holding a magical shield up, deflecting several bullets. Her friends poured out of the portal right behind her, ducking out of the way of the bullet stream. Amazingly, there wasn’t a single bullet wound on any of them, though they were ragged and covered in dust.

“Close the portal!” Applejack yelled.

“On it!” Twilight said, using her telekinesis on a nearby lever. She was unable to change it fast enough – a giant man stepped out of the portal, so large that Spike wasn’t sure he was human despite his peach skin, red shirt, and giant gatling gun.

He pointed a finger at Rarity. “SPY!” He yelled in a deep, thundering voice.

“What is that, the catchphrase of your people!?” Rarity retorted, exasperated.

The heavy man readied his gun to tear Rarity to shreds, but Twilight wasn’t having any of that. She grabbed him in her magic and threw him back through the portal. Then she changed the destination to somewhere else, letting out a sigh of relief.

“Yeah!” Rainbow Dash shouted. “That showed him!”

“…Do we know why he was attacking us?” Fluttershy asked. “Why they were all attacking us?”

Pinkie shrugged. “I think we interrupted them in the middle of something. Probably shouldn’t hold it against them.”

“They kept calling me a spy and shooting at me!” Rarity wailed. “Then there was that man who hit me with a baseball bat!” She rubbed the back of her head. “I’m going to be lumpy for at least a day!”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Nobody can see that bump, Rarity.”

“Maybe I care about how much it hurts rather than how it looks for once!”

Rainbow Dash raised an incredulous eyebrow.

“Okay, so it’s both. Whatever. I still have a right to complain!”

“It must be horrible there…” Fluttershy said. “Always fighting…”

“Fluttershy, we were only there for, what, ten minutes?” Twilight said. “We don’t know if they’re always fighting.”

“Pretty sure they are,” Pinkie said. “It’s a big game to them!”

Twilight twitched. “…Fair enough. Regardless, it seems we ended our adventure early… I’ve got about a dozen other worlds we could check out, and we’ve got plenty of time-“

Applejack raised a hoof. “Twi? Ah’m gonna have to pass. Ah’ve got work to do. Haven’t been doing as much on the farm as Ah need to lately.”

Twilight nodded. “That’s fine Applejack, we’ll see you tomorrow then-“

Applejack shook her head slowly. “Twi, it’s a bit more than just takin’ a day off. Ah need to stop doin’ this.”

Twilight stopped flipping through her book of discovered worlds and looked Applejack in the eyes. “…What are you saying?”

“Ah’m sayin’ these little adventures of ours are gettin’ in the way of my life and my responsibilities. Far more than they should. So Ah’m checkin’ out, goin’ to my farm and doin’ what’s needed. Ah’m sorry, but this just isn’t meant for me Twi.”

Twilight sagged. “I’ll respect your decision Applejack, but… Are you sure?”

“Very sure. In fact, Ah’m surprised the rest of you haven’t thought about this. How much of our lives are we putting into this exploration? Twilight, you’re a princess. Have you been taking care of what you need to?”

“I – of course I have!” Twilight said, flustered.

Applejack raised an eyebrow.

“…Okay, I’ve been loading a lot of it off on Spike…”

Spike blinked. She had? …He supposed he did have more work than usual, but he didn’t really mind. Should he mind? He didn’t know; he’d have to think on that one.

Applejack nodded. “See? You’ve had to give up some stuff too. And it’s fine if you want to give that up, but my life is at the Apple Farm, not here. Ah suggest you – all of you – think about what you want to do here. Ah don’t think any of you have really thought about all the time you’re sinking into this.” She adjusted her hat and smiled. “See you girls around. Ah’ll be at my farm, where Ah belong. Hope you girls enjoy whatever it is you decide to do.” She walked out of the room, leaving five ponies speechless.

Twilight gulped. “Well…”

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Ah, whatever, let’s just go to a new place already.”

“Rainbow, I think she’s right,” Rarity said. “We should think about this. I have boutiques, after all…”

Twilight nodded. “Applejack does have a point. …Let’s take a break today. Meet back here tomorrow if you still want to go somewhere, okay everypony?”

Everypony nodded.

“Good. I want you to know that, whatever you decide, I’ll respect it. And… Well, that I need to think as well. I’ll let you girls use the Mirror even if I don’t though, so no worries.” She put a hoof to her chin, walking to a nearby wall.

The other four ponies stood still, in awkward silence.

Twilight turned and looked at them. “Uh… you girls can go now. Okay?”

“Oh. Right,” Fluttershy said, shaking her head. “See you tomorrow?”

“Hopefully,” Pinkie said, walking out instead of bouncing like normal.

Rarity took a breath. “Time to go sort out our lives then, I suppose.”

Soon, Spike was left standing alone in the room, feeling a little existential. He sat down, holding his legs close.

He wished he still had that tea. It would have been drinkable by now.

~~~

A few miles out from Ponyville there was a giant cloud construction known as the Wonderbolt Academy, where pegasus stunt fliers were trained and one of the more common places the actual Wonderbolts practiced their stunt shows.

Rainbow Dash had quickly found herself in one of these practice sessions after the earlier conversation at the castle. Flying always helped clear her head, and extreme flying was just better in every imaginable way. She flew across the length of the clouded academy at speeds close to that of sound itself, leaving a complex trail of rainbows over the runways embedded in the cloudy ‘ground’. Other pegasi – both students and fellow Wonderbolts – cheered her on as she picked up speed.

She wasn’t going for a rainboom this time. They’d all seen that trick before. Even though it was her signature move and by far the showiest, she was always looking for something a little more interesting to perform for the audience. She checked behind her to make sure the rainbow trail of pegasus magic was perfectly vibrant, which it was. She smirked to herself and angled herself directly upward, twisting her left wing slightly to turn her body in a corkscrew motion. The rainbow trail behind her became a twisting ribbon, spiraling behind her at an ever-increasing frequency. Soon, a tall and narrow tornado formed around the rainbow ribbon, coursing with the energies of the wind and air itself. When she felt as though she should stop climbing any higher in altitude, she pivoted her body around and kicked the rising tornado with her hoof, forcing a discharge of static energy throughout the cyclone. A bolt of lightning drove itself through the swirling rainbow, destroying it in a single instant with a thundering roar.

Rainbow Dash went temporarily deaf from the thunder but she could see the cheers and applause coming from the ponies on the ground. She gently glided down to the runway and landed gracefully, smirking.

As her hearing returned, she could hear the shouts and commendations from the other pegasi. She grinned.

She loved her job.

The grin vanished in an instant as she remembered what Applejack had said earlier. Would traveling through the worlds keep her from doing this? If she was forced to choose…

Spitfire, the fiery leader of the Wonderbolts, walked up to her. “…You okay, Crash?”

Rainbow Dash started nodding – then shook her head. “Can I… Talk to you for a minute?”

Spitfire raised an eyebrow. “Sure. Here or the office?”

Rainbow Dash looked around at all the ponies. “Office.”

Spitfire’s expression became concerned. “Well all right then.” The two of them flew to one of the larger cloud-mounted buildings, entering the top floor. Spitfire sat at her desk, shoving all the paperwork off to the side of the desk, probably ruining a few students’ test scores in the process. “What’s on your mind Crash?”

Rainbow Dash bit her lip. “Well… Hard to explain. How about – well, think about it like this. What if you had been doing something for the last week or so that was so awesome and full of adventure that you’d forgotten about doing most anything else.”

“Was this why you missed last practice?”

Rainbow Dash blushed. “Eheh… Maybe, but let me finish. So you do this thing, right? And it’s awesome and great and could change the world. But then one of your friends says you need to think about what you’re giving up, what you’re not doing, that sort of thing. And you realize that by doing this thing you’re neglecting your childhood dream that you spent so long trying to accomplish, squandering it.”

“Ah,” Spitfire said. “You’ve found something more interesting than flying stunt shows.”

“N-no!”

Spitfire facehooved. “Crash, let me tell you something. All we really do is fly in complex patterns so ponies can have a sense of awe. In theory, we’re a special ops military unit for Equestria, but there’s never any battles so we’re rarely called in as that. If you’ve found something that can really change the world, I’d take it.”

Rainbow Dash blinked. “…Spitfire? Are you saying that…”

Spitfire interrupted with a sigh. “…I didn’t join the Wonderbolts all those years ago to become a stunt flier, Rainbow Dash. I joined to defend Equestria and make a difference. But this is what we became. It’s a fine life, don’t get me wrong, but I often feel like there’s something… missing. And I’m rather stuck here. You though… you’re not.”

“Are you… Telling me to stop being a Wonderbolt?”

Spitfire laughed. “Oh hay no! …Guess I was laying it on a little thick there. I’m just saying you should pursue what’s valuable. You’d know this if you thought about your Wonderbolt history more, but many Wonderbolts have taken time off to pursue other interests, and more than a few come back later. Why, I remember Fleetfoot vanishing for two years!” She laughed. “I still have no idea what she did.”

Rainbow Dash frowned. “I still don’t know if I want to.”

“Hey, your decision. You are one of our best fliers and your tricks make the shows worth seeing for a lot of ponies. But if I were able to elope, I would.” She glanced at a piece of paper.

Rainbow Dash frowned. “I really don’t know. This is what I’ve wanted my whole life, Spitfire, you know that. I’m happy here. But I’m also happy there.” She grabbed her head. “Ugh, why do decisions have to be so hard?”

Spitfire laughed. “No offense Rainbow, but that’s just life itself. You’re going to have to choose one way or another. Or find some third option. Just don’t refuse to decide.” A wistful look appeared in her eyes. “That never ends well.”

Rainbow Dash looked out the window at the many pegasi, young and old, doing stunts in the brilliant sunlight. She bit her lip, still not knowing what to do. “Spitfire, this was my life. I’m happy here. I love my job. I don’t know if I’ll love adventuring as much as I love this.”

“It’s your life. All I’m telling you is what I’d do. But then again, I’m not known for being satisfied with life. If you are satisfied, I wouldn’t throw that away. Very few ponies can actually consider themselves happy with life.”

“I know… Ugh. Why does thinking about things have to be so hard?”

Spitfire laughed. “I’m tempted to say that your question is also your answer.”

“…What?”

“You aren’t a thinker. You’re a pony who acts based on instinct and feeling most of the time. That’s pretty knuckleheaded of you, but it makes you who you are. If your mind fails you, follow your gut.”

“My gut is a twisted knot that doesn’t even know which way’s up!”

“Now, is that from the decision or the trick you just pulled out there?”

“I don’t know!” Rainbow Dash rammed her head into the desk. Spitfire patted Rainbow Dash’s head with her wing.

“There, there, it’ll be fine.”

“…That doesn’t help.”

Spitfire shrugged. “Well then pony-up and make a decision. I’ll support you whatever you do.”

~~~

Suddenly Pinkie Pie was standing over two adorable foals by the name of Pound and Pumpkin Cake. They weren't quite babies anymore, but they were still really young. “Hello!” Pinkie called.

The twins smiled at her and raised their hooves excitedly. Pinkie grabbed them and swept them into a big hug. “Aren’t you two just the most adorable things?”

They nodded in unison. Pinkie giggled. “Well, I need to talk to you two about something. Usually I’d go talk to Gummy, but he’s surprisingly unhelpful today. I mean, just look at him!” She pulled a small toothless alligator out of her mane and set him on the floor. He blinked, remaining motionless. “See? He’s just being existential again! Come on Gummy, snap out of it! We do not fall to the forces beyond our control!”

Gummy licked his eyeball.

Pinkie facehooved. “These moods of yours. What am I going to do with you? Tsk tsk tsk.”

Gummy did nothing at all.

Pinkie returned to the twins. “See? I’m not crazy.”

This prompted the twins to laugh. Pinkie glared at them. “Oh, so you find that funny, do you? Do I look crazy to you?” She giggled. “Of course I do, what am I thinking. Hey! You’ve sidetracked me, you rascals! I’ve got something important to talk to you two about!”

They stared at her, giving her their absolute attention.

“So, it looks like I’ve been given the opportunity to go on a grand adventure that will be bigger than anything any of us can imagine! But to do that, I’d have to see you two a lot less, and probably stop working at the bakery. I mean, I suppose I could just leave your parents with a stockpile of random pastries, because those aren’t hard to make.” To prove her point she pulled two cupcakes out of her mane and gave them to the twins. They ate the pastries in one gulp.

“Buuuuuuuuut there’s something about working in that bakery. And, well, I guess to be completely honest, I could probably work at the bakery just fine, I’d just need to manage my time. But what the real problem is… is I won’t be able to celebrate the birthdays of every pony in Ponyville! It can’t be done!” She leaned on a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before, putting her front leg to her forehead. “Oh the horror! A pony in Ponyville not getting a birthday cake from me!”

The twins looked at her, sadly.

“And it’ll only get worse. You can’t tell anyone, because they don’t know this, but I know that soon this whole series of tiny adventures will get blown way out of control. I’m so nervousited about it! I could be part of the biggest amazing thing ever! But… It’ll also be hard if I’m involved. I could be so helpful to everypony, but I would have to be put through so much…”

They looked at her questioningly.

“I don’t know exactly what, sorry. There’ll be both good and bad. There’ll be good and bad regardless. It’s what life is, really.” She giggled. “But I have a choice. I can stay here and be the party pony of Ponyville… Or go out and become… Something else.”

She fell silent, looking down at the ground. “…It should be easy,” she said. “All I have to do is realize that there’s something bigger than me. And I can be a part of it. Why am I so selfish!? Why do I want a simple life in a simple town!?” she groaned, slumping to the ground. “Everything outside is so exciting, so powerful, so amazing. There’s almost definitely a world filled with nothing but giant donuts and it’s almost guaranteed that I will find it one day! That is, if I go. If I don’t… I just stay here with you, with the ponies I know.”

She stood up, looking in a window and seeing her reflection. “…Who am I kidding? The problem’s not the bakery, the problem’s not the other ponies in Ponyville, it’s me. And just me. I’m scared.”

The twins walked up to her and hugged her. Pinkie giggled. “Yeah… Hugs are always welcome.” She wiped a tear away, looking out the window, out into the existence only she was aware of. She caught glimpses…

She had a choice. She could stay or go.

The end result would probably be the same regardless of her choice. But…

But she could make a difference.

If she was willing to put herself out there. To welcome the danger and the coming sorrow.

“…The sadness will come anyway,” she said to herself.

The twins looked up at her.

“It’s okay, not you. You two are safe.” She giggled. “Look at me, I’m starting to cry for no good reason. Silly Pinkie, you’re not juggling lives in your hooves.”

Gummy stared at her.

“Stop giving me that look,” Pinkie muttered, shaking her head and wiping her eyes. “I am thinking, Gummy. Thinking hard.”

Gummy blinked.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. You were always right. Sorry for being mean to you earlier, you didn’t deserve that. Sometimes I need a healthy dose of existentialism!”

Gummy licked her hoof.

“Awwww, thank you Gummy!” She pulled him and the twins into another hug. “Thank you all! I think I know what to do now!” She set them down, stuffed Gummy back into her mane, and bounced into the main room of Sugarcube Corner, taking her position at the counter next to the blue form of Mrs. Cake.

“Hey Mrs. Cake!”

Mrs. Cake’s ears perked up. ”Pinkie, you’re using that tone of voice...”

“What tone of voice?”

“The tone of voice of ‘I did something and now I have to tell you about it, please don’t be mad’. What did you break?”

“What?” Pinkie said, aghast. “Nothing! I broke nothing! I just spent some time seriously thinking about my life! You know, healthy things for healthy ponies to do healthily! Everypony needs to do some deep thinking from time to time.”

Mrs. Cake blinked. “…And what were you thinking about?”

“Well, life, but you want something more specific. I was thinking about adventures, alligators, two awesome little foals in the other room, baking, parties… And if I’m going to go exploring with my friends long-term or stay here in Ponyville.”

“And what did you decide?”

Pinkie grinned. “You’re about to find out! Just you and nopony else!” She winked and giggled.

~~~

Animals.

Fluttershy loved animals.

Fluttershy loved animals more than ponies a lot of the time. She understood animals when she didn’t understand ponies. Their desires were simpler, their lives quieter, and they were just so much more fluffy. Well, most of the time. Fish and reptiles weren’t fluffy. And neither were bugs. And… Okay so a lot of things weren’t fluffy but she liked the fluffy ones because they were so huggable. And a big snake was huggable as well; you just had to know how to hug it right. Fluttershy was one of those ponies who knew.

Presently, she was hugging all the animals that lived at her house – the snakes, the bears, the rabbits, the squirrels, the bees, the hummingbirds, the turtles, the strange squishy things that didn’t have official names but she called frishen, Rexy, and the other innumerable types of animals. She was in bliss as she did this, all her worries vanishing by simple contact with hundreds of animals. Her house was a haven. Not as good as Sweet Feather Sanctuary, but that place was the animals’ home, not hers. There was just something about her treehouse that made her feel glad to be there.

Though she was starting to feel a little crushed by the sheer mass of animals around her…

“Okay! Enough hugs for now!” she said. They all backed off without so much as a growl of fuss. “Thank you,” she said, sitting down on her couch and taking a deep breath – and finally allowing herself to think.

Applejack was always the one to point out what should be obvious. Really, she wondered how Twilight, Rarity, and Rainbow managed to go to other worlds that often given their jobs. But Fluttershy knew she didn’t really have a job – she just cared for animals and the Sanctuary, things that she definitely didn’t get paid for. She lived off the welfare of others these days, though years ago she had lived off the welfare of animals and the forests. She had to admit, even though the food her friends provided was tasty, she did miss forest berry salad sometimes.

But really, what was she leaving behind when she went through that Mirror? She had little to no responsibilities. She was mainly worried about the adventures themselves. As much progress as she had made over the years, she still wasn’t all that keen on constant danger and adrenaline. Did she want to keep going? That was the question. The time she spent with her friends was precious to her, and she had to admit the places they went that didn’t have danger were beautiful and fun. She even had some animals from those other worlds here right now.

Rexy was the most obvious of these, having refused to leave after he was healed, standing now as a sort of sentinel for Fluttershy’s house. He did have to eat a lot, which scared some of the other animals, but they were slowly realizing that Rexy knew who was off limits. Harry the bear had even ridden Rexy for a while in one of the most adorable scenes Fluttershy had seen with two apex predators. Usually they were a lot less adorable than that.

But that was the way life was.

A plate hit her in the face. Fluttershy shook her head and glared at the white rabbit that had thrown the dish – Angel Bunny, simultaneously her most beloved and most infuriating animal. “Angel! That is not how you greet ponies!”

Angel grabbed another plate and pointed down at it with his finger. Then he pointed into his mouth.

Fluttershy gasped. “…Did I forget to feed you!?”

Angel nodded vigorously and glared at her.

“Oh my gosh I’m so so so sorry Angel I… I completely forgot, I think I was caught up in the moment of coming home and hugging everyone…”

He threw the other plate at her and folded his arms. This time the plate shattered on impact.

“Ow! Angel bunny! I am getting you food!”

Angel folded his arms and glared. He held up a calendar of the current month and pointed at the current week. Red x’s were around three days.

“I fed you on Thursday…” Fluttershy said, nervously.

Angel took a book off a shelf and showed her a complicated salad with a cherry on top. He pointed at the cherry and growled.

“I thought we discussed eating food even when it doesn’t have cherries, Angel.”

Angel made a slicing motion over his neck and threw his arms into the air. He pointed at Fluttershy and made a noise that was supposed to be threatening but just sounded cute.

Fluttershy sagged. “You… You’re right. I… I have been forgetting to feed you and I’ve been neglecting you and…” she burst into tears. “I’M SORRY!” She grabbed Angel and pulled him into a hug. “I’LL NEVER LET YOU STARVE AGAIN!”

Angel rolled his eyes and accepted the hug.

“I’ll… I’ll have to call off the adventures…” Fluttershy said. “I’ll need to stay here and keep you fed…”

Angel nodded, sure in his victory.

“Fluttershy…” a deep, amused voice said, coming from all directions.

Fluttershy raised an eyebrow, a smile coming to her previously sad face. “Discord…”

The moment she said the name, a creature that could only be described as an abomination against nature appeared in a flash of white light. His body was snakelike in shape, composed of both scaled and furred sections. His legs were different, one ending in a hoof and the other in reptilian claws. His hands that of a paw and taloned hand, while his head was a mix between a pony and a goat with both a deer and a unicorn horn on his head. He was Discord, spirit of chaos. And he just so happened to hang around Fluttershy’s house a lot because the two were good friends.

“Fluttershy!” He called, pointing at Angel. “You know he’s toying with you, right?”

“Uh… no?”

Discord snapped his fingers, making large glasses appear on his face and a whiteboard appear on the wall. He quickly scribbled a diagram of Angel eating the salad without the cherry on top and getting berries from the forest. “The rabbit gets food on his own. He just wants to be doted over like a prince.”

Angel shook his fist at Discord in cute rage. Discord chuckled, flicking the rabbit’s ears with his talons. “I’m sorry, did your diabolical plan completely fail?”

Fluttershy looked at Angel, narrowing her eyes. “You really did didn’t you? You were fine without me!”

Angel nodded slowly, ashamed. He grabbed his heart and drooped his head.

“Oh… Angel…”

Discord raised a hairy eyebrow. “Hmm? What is it now?”

“…He just wanted me to spend more time with him.”

“You already spend a ton of time with him,” Discord said. “More than you spend with me I might add.”

Fluttershy nodded. “That… is true.”

Angel grabbed her by the neck and pleaded with his big rabbit eyes. Fluttershy hugged him close. “...You really do want me to stay, don’t you?” She looked at her other animals. “…You do too…”

Discord snapped his fingers, appearing in Fluttershy’s hoof as a rabbit similar to Angel. “But Fluttershy, the animals don’t have to tell you what to do! They like you, but your friends like you as well! And sometimes you just need to get out and have some fun! Whatever kind of fun it is your friends are planning. I’m sure it’s absolutely delightful.”

Fluttershy nodded slowly, pursing her lips. She looked from Discord to Angel, unsure. “I don’t know…”

Angel pleaded.

Discord huffed. “That rabbit knows nothing but how to manipulate you. You’ll see him every night.”

Angel punched Discord in the face. He reverted to his normal chaotic form. “Why you little…”

“Discord, no swapping of Angel’s body parts.”

Discord sighed. “Fiiiiine.”

Fluttershy looked at Discord’s eyes, her gaze steady. “…You really think I should stay on these adventures? I… I feel like I should stay here.”

“And let the rest of existence not see your beautiful face and your kindness?” He snapped his fingers, opening a chaotic portal of his own making to a land filled with darkness and lightning. “You had the power to redeem me, and there’s a lot more out there that could stand some redeeming if I do say so myself.”

Angel squirmed.

Fluttershy, years ago, would have looked at the thundering landscape and screamed, preparing to hide under a couch until it went away. Now she just stared at it, eyes reflecting the lightning. She nodded slowly. “There is a lot I could do… Animals I could save and put in the sanctuary… Ponies who need kindness… I’ve already seen horrible things done in worlds without kindness…” An image of Lieshy came into her mind. The other version of her was trying hard to adjust from a world built on half-truths, but she was still struggling. So many people and ponies struggled.

Was she meant to help them? She felt compelled to…

She took a deep breath. “I’m going to go think about this for a while. Angel, Discord, play nice while I take my walk, okay?”

The two begrudgingly nodded while shooting daggers at each other with their eyes.

“And Discord, close that portal, okay? It’s scaring the birds.”

~~~

In a world parallel, Sunset Shimmer was staring at a computer screen blankly.

Congratulations! Your application to Wolfe University has been completed! You will be contacted within two months about acceptance!

Sunset continued to stare intently at the large blue words on the screen. She didn’t move. She barely breathed. The magnitude of what she’d just done weighed on her.

“…What are you doing?” Twilight asked.

“I just applied to college,” Sunset said, voice hollow, as if the soul had been drained out of her.

“That’s awesome! Where’d you apply!?”

“Local, Wolfe. Best college in the state,” she deadpanned.

“What are you planning on studying?”

“…Not sure,” she admitted. “Part of me wants to go into physics… But there’s also psychology, anthropology, sociology…”

“Go into physics,” Twilight said. “Tell me what it’s like.”

“…Sure,” Sunset said, still distant.

Twilight finally picked up on her tone. “Hey, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“I’m still not sure if this is what I want to do. Drop everything and march off into an education system in a world I’m not even from. I could go home to Equestria and become a high mage without much effort, serving in Twilight’s court. Or Celestia’s…” She wasn’t sure she was ready for that though. Even if Celestia wasn't technically angry at her anymore, she wasn't sure the princess of the Sun could trust her yet. “But, well, here I am, applying to a university so I can learn about science and maybe change the world? I don’t know. I’ve only really cared about this place for, what, a little over a year? Am I really devoting myself to it?”

Twilight sat down next to her. “Well, that’s your decision. You could also go to college, get your degree, and run to Equestria and not have to pay back any loans!”

Sunset smirked. “You know I’d just grab some gold from Twilight to pay for it. It’s not too hard to make money when you have magic at your disposal.”

Twilight shrugged. “I suppose… You do have a big decision to make soon.”

“To think I would never have even thought about it had Pinkie not pointed it out to me.”

“She has a way of saying just the right things and just the right time. Or the complete opposite.”

Sunset chuckled. “That she does…” She looked away from the computer screen. “Well, I don’t have to commit for sure yet. I can always run back to Equestria if I want. I do know that I don’t want to get a job flipping burgers.”

“Here’s what I think. I think you should go to college, see if you like it. If you do, stay, and decide after you graduate if you want to use that knowledge in Equestria or stay here. If you don’t, leave and go back to the land of colorful equines. I’m sure we can visit you from time to time, and you us.”

“That’s… a nice and logical way of looking at it. Thanks, Twilight. But… Unless we can get that dimension dialer working visiting will be somewhat annoying to accomplish…”

Twilight’s face became a canvas for the biggest grin her face had ever held.

Sunset’s pupils shrunk. “You didn’t…”

“I DID!” She pulled a disc out from her shirt. There, affixed around her neck like a piece of jewelry, was a flat device made of numerous adjustable dial rings with a circular screen in the center. She used her fingers to quickly dial a location by twisting the many rings. When she hit a known coordinate, the screen flashed a green check. She then used her magic on it, activating the spell within and opening a gateway large enough for a person to walk through to a mysterious land where the grass was orange and the trees looked like pom-poms.

“…Where is that?” Sunset asked.

“No idea!” Twilight said. “Twinkie sent over some new coordinates a day or so ago, and that was one of them.”

Sunset frowned. “Still relying on ‘Twinkie’s’ spells, huh?”

“Yeah. Not like anything other than magic can open a portal, though. Even the sphere used magic despite the amazing power source it had…”

Sunset blinked. Then she looked back at the computer screen. Then a mischievous smirk appeared on her face.

“…What?”

“Challenge accepted,” Sunset said. “I’m going to find a non-magical way to traverse the universes.”

Twilight blinked. “I… I’d have no idea where to even start!”

“That’s the fun part, Twilight.” Sunset rubbed her hands together. “Twilight, I’m going to study physics. I’m going to figure this out…”

Twilight smiled. “I’m glad you got that sorted out.”

“I’m going to need a really, really big binder,” Sunset said. “And some more books. Mostly on quantum mechanics. And all those papers you’ve written about the nature and effects on magic you’ve never published.”

Twilight blushed. “A-all of them?”

“Yes. Even the ones you think are useless. There could be something useful. We’re going to figure this out, Twilight. Then we can explore without leaning on ‘Twinkie’s’ understanding.”

Twilight smiled. “This is going to change the world!”

“You bet it is! All we need to start is to know how exactly these spells open up portals…” she frowned. “But how to do that…”

~~~

Rarity walked into her boutique.

It looked exactly the same as when she had left it. The dresses were still in the window, the mannequins were all arranged neatly, and all her fabrics were put away in the correct shelves. The floor was clean, the design beautiful, and the sewing station just the perfect level unkempt to appear busy, but not frantic.

And yet she couldn’t look at it normally.

How long had she spent in the boutique lately? An hour or two a day? Less?

The boutique may never have actually been busy, and usually if a client needed anything they could just find her later or have somepony tell her… But there was still the principle of neglect. This place wasn’t being cared for, despite how it looked. It was uninhabited. Closed.

And yet, even when she had been here, she hadn’t really had much work. She sewed and designed, sure, but most of her actual jobs involved beautifying the town for events, not clothing. Ever since she’d established her other shops in Manehattan and Canterlot she’d been popular – but the work was largely out of her hooves. It had been bumpy there for a while – stressful, frantic, insanely busy – but after it settled… Well, everything ran itself.

She was in charge, but she didn’t really do anything anymore. She couldn’t design everything, and what she did design was produced by Coco and Sassy in the other locations with their own hired hooves while she lived here with hardly a customer. They all went to the more prestigious locations in the big cities…

She had never really thought how much she had let control of her enterprise slip. It could probably function pretty well without her at this point. She still produced plenty of designs in her free time, even if she didn’t sew all of them. It was an odd thought, one that was slightly demeaning, but true. Had she realized it at any other time it probably would have sent her into an emotional funk that could only be cured by tubs of ice cream.

Oh, ice cream, that sounded simply divine at the moment. With her magic she levitated some ice cream from a hidden freezer and started eating. She wasn’t stressed enough to make a mess of the ice cream, but she was stressed enough to forego eating at a proper pace. A fourth of the gallon was gone in a matter of minutes.

She ran her hoof over her sewing machine. “Old friend… what do you think I should do?”

The sewing machine offered no response, as expected. Rarity rolled her eyes at her antics – what was she thinking, talking to something that couldn’t talk back? Preposterous. She sat down in her chair and took in the air of the boutique again, expression shifting from a smile to a frown every few seconds. She had so many memories here, so much in pursuit of her dream. So much success. She was easily rich at this point and could afford to buy a mansion in a far-off exotic country. But she stayed here because it was her home.

In the end, the classy society was overrated, she supposed. Even though it was delightful, when she was here with her friends and neighbors, here at home, she was happier.

And there was something about those adventures. So much… daring. So much culture. So much surprising beauty. The romantic quality of jaunting off to new lands on a daily basis was just so tantalizing. There had been that difficulty with the Mask of Truth, admittedly, but she thought she was a better pony for having experienced it. She felt more full of life out there in the unknown.

She was surprised by how much she loved it. And she got to enjoy it with her best friends in the world. Well… Some of them at least, now.

“…Am I really considering closing the boutique?” she asked herself.

“WHAT!?”

Rarity looked up from her stupor to see a pony on the other side of the counter – her little sister, the white unicorn Sweetie Belle. She had her purple curls held to the sides of her head, her hooves pressing stressfully into her skull. “What are you talking about!? CLOSING!?”

“Oh, Sweetie, dear…” Rarity chuckled. “Surely you’ve noticed I’ve been out a lot lately. I’m just thinking of closing this location here since I’m not here often enough to warrant it. I could move everything to my house, take simple orders from people when they asked, but otherwise go explore with Twilight and the girls.”

“But but… The boutique is an important part of Ponyville! It can’t just be… closed!”

Rarity frowned. “I… I suppose not. But nopony comes here all that often. It’s… Well, it’s about as busy as it was before Twilight came to town, which is to say hardly anypony comes in here anymore.”

Sweetie frowned. “I… I mean, yes, but come on! Rarity, this is your dream! You… This is your life!”

Rarity smiled. “I wouldn’t be giving up on fashion dear, Stars no. The other locations will still make my designs and I’ll run them, but it’ll be mostly hooves-off.”

“But… But ponies like this boutique!”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Well, I suppose I could hire someone to run it for me, like Coco and Sassy do elsewhere, but I don’t know anyone in town who has the requisite tastes besides you and the Doctor.”

Sweetie smirked. “The Cutie Mark Crusaders can find you somepony.”

Rarity blinked. “Really? Your friends could do that?”

“Yeah, we’ve managed to get a lot of connection in helping ponies get their cutie marks. That said…” Sweetie frowned. “You sure you have to leave it? Can’t you just stay? I’m pretty sure the town would feel different without your presence. So many look up to you.”

“Dear, they can find other role models…”

“I look up to you…” Sweetie said, sagging.

Rarity had to fight back a momentary urge to cry. Sweetie Belle was just so precious and adorable. Rarity couldn’t believe she used to find her very existence annoying. She smiled. “Oh, Sweetie… Sometimes things change. You changed, after all. Maybe I need to find some way to grow up as well. When a goal is reached, a new goal must be made…” She paused. ”…Or maybe you’re supposed to be satisfied with where you are...?”

“I don’t know,” Sweetie said. “All I know is I’ll be sad if you aren’t here, doing what you’ve always done.”

“Hmm…” Rarity said, hoof to her chin. “I’m at a crossroads in life… Ah, how poetic.”

“…You feel the need to burst into song?”

“Oh goodness me, no, I was just reminded of a poem I read a while ago by the poetic legend, Rippling Frost. A crossroads…” She imagined the two roads splitting, one side leading to adventure and beauty, the other leading to a life of fashion and business.

Both sides were very tantalizing.

~~~

Twilight stared at the Mirror Portal the following morning, face blank. Spike stood next to her, drinking his tea.

“Spike, should I stop?”

Spike blinked. “What?”

“Should I stop exploring? Should I return to my duties as a princess and fulfill them in every way I can? Should I ignore the call to learn everything I can? Should I sit down and stay put or go out and risk it?”

Spike shrugged. “I really don’t know. I don’t mind staying here and doing the princess work, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I know you don’t mind, it’s…” She took a breath. “It’s more about what the right decision is. I want to go out there and explore, and I’m coming up with so many reasons why I should. But the more I go, the more I’ll have to neglect public appearances, celebrations, friendship consultations… And my school! I mean, we may not be the teachers anymore since the graduating class has taken over, but I still need to make sure it runs!”

“Well, by going out there you help other people in faraway places that don’t know of the magic of friendship,” Spike said.

“That’s true…” Twilight said. “But… But… But it still feels wrong, somehow.” She began to rock her head side to side, thinking.

Spike took a step back – he knew what was coming.

Twilight took in a deep breath and began to sing.

“I’m a princess, leader of my kind

But now I’m asked to leave them behind

For the gateway before me has shown

That the worlds outside are so alone”

She took a calm breath, spreading her wings.

“Out there in the beyond there is fire

Ponies stuck in life’s deep mire

Great wonders to discover for all

True friends who lie just beyond this wall

Waiting to be found…”

She flew into the air, spinning in a slow corkscrew fashion.

“I hear the cosmos calling my name!

Demanding that I come forth to them!

I hear the cosmos calling my name!

Singing with a melodious hymn!”

She teleported to the room with the map, and her cutie mark suddenly appeared on it over her castle.

“I am called

I am sung

I am brought

I am seen

I am taught

I am lured

I am the one

My destiny is to leave this place

My calling to find what lies beyond

But my soul that lies beyond this face

Belongs to my friends and to our bond”

She teleported back to the Mirror Portal, placing a hoof on the rim, breathing hard.

“Oh what does this mean, oh Harmony

My destiny seems split in two; three

Called to beyond I cannot resist

But what would happen if I desist?”

She took a step back – and heard hoofsteps behind her. Some ponies were returning. She didn’t know who.

“I hear the cosmos calling my name!

Demanding I lead friendship to them!

I hear the cosmos calling my name!

Singing with the power of all!

I hear the cosmos calling my name!

Singing the song…

Singing the song of us…

Trapped in this sphere of our own making…”

She landed, took a breath, and turned to see who had come back.

Pinkie and Rarity stood there, smiling at Twilight warmly.

Twilight smiled. “So… No Fluttershy or Rainbow Dash?”

“Not that I see,” Rarity said. “Sorry dear. I guess it just wasn’t for them.”

“That’s fine,” Twilight said. “We all have our hopes and dreams… Not all of us can align with one goal. Nor should we.” She turned to the Mirror Portal. “But I have to go. If I don’t… I don’t know. I’m called. I know I’m called. There’s something out there I need to do. I don’t know if you have to be with me to do it, but I would like it if you joined me.”

“We’ll be with you until the end,” Rarity said.

“Even those of us who aren’t here!” Pinkie said. “You’re our friend Twilight.”

Twilight nodded. “So… Why did you two decide to come back?”

Pinkie giggled. “I felt like I needed to, in the end. Ponyville can go without a few parties. Plus, this way I get to make so many more friends! It’s great!”

Twilight smiled. “Yeah. I felt called as well. Rarity?”

“I… Well I realized my business is able to operate without me. Not a particularly pleasant realization, but I just made it official. Sweetie and the CMC are out looking for somepony to run the boutique while I’m gone. I’m still the manager, but no longer do I need to stand at the counter all day. There’s… Not all that much traffic in Ponyville anymore, admittedly.”

Twilight smiled. “I’m glad you came. Well… Where do you girls want to go?”

“I don’t know…” Rarity said. “I do believe somewhere new. What do we know about the places we haven’t been yet?”

Twilight shrugged. “Not much, besides what’s safe and what’s not. We could probably look into a few of them with a spell though…”

Pinkie grinned. “Yeah! Let’s do that!”

Twilight turned to the Mirror Portal and pulled a lever.

~~~

Rainbow Dash stood in front of the doors of Twilight’s castle, staring. Her expression was blank.

Fluttershy walked up to her, concerned. “…Why aren’t you going in?”

“…I don’t know if I want to,” Rainbow Dash admitted.

Fluttershy gasped. “You? Not sure if you want adventure and awesomeness? What happened?”

“I’d have to stop being a Wonderbolt. I’m not sure I want that, even if it is temporary. I’m pretty sure I don’t want that. But… Behind this door, there’s the Mirror, and there’s so many new things...”

Fluttershy nodded. “I know…”

“Wait, why are you here? I figured for sure you’d stay away! You’re, like, the pony among us who likes adventure the least! Plus, your animals!”

Fluttershy shook her head. “It’s not that simple… My animals can all take care of themselves, especially with the Sanctuary there. And even if I may not like the danger… We do help ponies. We saved the demons and redeemed their Luna. We helped people in Termina. Then there was that colony of mushroom people we saved from a fire. We do great good out there.”

“That’s true,” Rainbow Dash said. Then she laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Look at us, the ponies you’d think wouldn’t hesitate to go on an adventure or avoid it, the ones having the most difficulty.”

“Yeah…” Fluttershy said, staring at the doors alongside Rainbow Dash.

“…Are either of us going to go in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Same.”

“You should go in,” Fluttershy said. “You’re the awesome pony who could save everyone with your amazing tricks and acrobatic stunts. You’re built for danger.”

“…You should stay. You have the animals to take care of and you aren’t the best at handling it when it gets tough.”

They were silent.

Fluttershy shook her head. “I can handle it.”

“Yeah. And I’m already doing what I want with my life.”

The two stared at each other for a moment. Then they burst out into laughter.

“And here we are!” Rainbow Dash said. “Failing miserably to convince the other to do what we think they should do!”

Fluttershy nodded. “The more we argue, the less they want to do what we say!” She shook her head. “...That was a confusing sentence.”

“Oh yeah,” Rainbow Dash said, furrowing her brow. “I’m Loyalty though… Leaving you would be against that.”

“But you’d be Loyal to your team, to the Wonderbolts,” Fluttershy said. “They do need you, regardless how much as they may say otherwise. It’s the same with my Kindness – do I be Kind to my animals, or to the many people and ponies who need it elsewhere?”

“Can’t do everything,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Definitely not,” Fluttershy chuckled.

There was silence.

Suddenly, Fluttershy stood up. “I’m going in.”

“…Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“What made you decide?”

“I realized that, if I devoted myself to my animals, that would be a step back for me. I’d be shying away from those who need kindness rather than those who just want it.”

Rainbow Dash nodded. “I… See.”

“You coming?”

Rainbow Dash looked at Fluttershy – her eyes, her outstretched hoof, her soft smile.

She put out her hoof, shakily.

She retracted it and shook her head. “I… I can’t.”

Fluttershy nodded in understanding. “It’s okay Rainbow. It’s not an easy decision. You are where you want to be in life – that’s not something many ponies can say about themselves. You should be happy about it.”

“I feel like I’m betraying you.”

“You’re not,” Fluttershy assured her. “Nopony has to share their interests with all their friends. If neither of us went in there, it would still be okay. We all need to make decisions in the moment.”

Rainbow Dash nodded. Fluttershy grabbed her and pulled her into a hug. “See you later, Rainbow Dash.”

Rainbow Dash wiped some tears out of her eyes. “You too, Fluttershy.”

They completed their goodbyes. Fluttershy waved as Rainbow Dash flew back to the Wonderbolt Academy. Fluttershy took a breath, turned, and walked into the castle. She entered the room where Twilight, Pinkie, and Rarity were, standing in front of the Mirror Portal.

“Rarity?” Fluttershy said. “You came!”

“I did indeed. And I see you did too. Should we expect anypony else?”

Fluttershy shook her head. “No. Rainbow Dash isn’t coming.”

Twilight nodded sadly. “Well, that is her choice. She’s happy where she is. Perhaps in a few months we’ll all realize she was the smart one.”

“I doubt it,” Pinkie said. “The can of worms is open! There’s no closing it now!”

“So…” Twilight said, looking at her three friends. “This is our team?”

Fluttershy glanced around. The excitable Pinkie Pie, the fabulous Rarity, the regal Twilight…

Four friends, going on a trip, a mission, as friends to seek out interesting people and to bring aspects of Harmony wherever they could.

“Yeah,” Fluttershy said. “This is everyone.”

“Oh no it isn’t!”

The four ponies looked to the doorway to see Starlight Glimmer standing there, a smirk on her face. “It’s about time you girls let me in on one of these mysterious adventures, considering I had to deal with the aftermath of one already.”

Twilight laughed. “Sure, Starlight. Come on in. You don’t have anything else to do today, do you?”

“Not at all! I get bored a lot in this castle.”

Fluttershy smiled. “Well, this will be perfect for you.”

Starlight winked. “You betcha! So, Twilight, where are we going today?”

Twilight shrugged. “My spell only told me it was tropical and humid. I’m hoping for a beach instead of another jungle.”

“I’d like to meet a squid,” Fluttershy said suddenly.

Everypony chuckled jovially. “Me too!” Pinkie shouted.

Twilight set the Mirror Portal to the new location. “Let’s go then!” At that point, her cutie mark glowed, telling her that she had just solved the friendship problem she’d been called to in the middle of her song. She grinned – the tree of Harmony was giving them its blessing. If that wasn’t a tangible feeling of being on the right path for her destiny, she didn’t know what was.

The five mares bounded through the portal, ready to have a good time.

Spike finished his tea. He wondered if Rainbow Dash was going to be up for some Ogres and Oubliettes while the others were gone sometime later.

007 - Spectacularium

In a world not far removed from Equestria, the sun shone down on the landscape, blanketing the lush greenery with a slight azure tint. The sky was a simple blue, adorned with a small gathering of wispy clouds and a filament of blue-purple magic coursing through the heavens from north to southwest, shifting with an aurora effect. The aurora’s soft glow was easily trumped by the intense light of the sun, but magical reflections would occasionally flash through the shadows of large trees, bringing light to dark locations. The land itself was covered in lush grass and tall evergreen trees, the edge of a mountain forest. A single dirt road ran through the landscape, meandering around the landscape at a mostly constant elevation. It deviated from its level course only to circumvent a small stone obelisk covered in violet glowing runes.

The Mirror Portal connected to a loose rock a fair ways from the mysterious obelisk. Five ponies stepped into the new world, ready for anything the world might throw at them.

“Another day, another world,” Starlight said, looking around with a smile on her face. She crossed her eyes to look at her horn – it was buzzing slightly. “There’s a lot of magic here.”

“No kidding…” Twilight said, looking at her own horn with concern. “It’ll be really easy to channel too much energy here…”

Starlight cast a simple light spell and instead conjured a ball of magic with the light intensity of the sun. She quickly dispelled it but she had already blinded everypony.

“Starlight!” Rarity wailed. “What did you do!?”

“Too much magic,” Starlight muttered, rubbing her eyes. “Our sight should come back in a few seconds. Ow…”

Pinkie fell over. “Oof. It’s hard to bounce around when you can’t see.”

“Then stop bouncing around,” Fluttershy suggested.

“Silly Fluttershy! One does not simply stop bouncing around!” She fell over again. “Oof.”

Starlight squinted – she could make out shapes again. Rarity let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, good, grass. I never thought I’d be so happy to see grass.”

“Don’t go overboard and eat the strange grass,” Twilight warned.

“Already did!” Pinkie said, “It’s tasty!”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Well… Still not easy to see, but we’re at the edge of a forest, evergreen. The air is very open and there’s an oversaturation of magic here. I don’t know if that’s just the way this world is or if we’re in a special location…”

“The sun’s blue,” Starlight said.

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Starlight, that’s just your eyes-“

“The sun’s blue,” Starlight insisted, holding out her hoof and examining it. “I’m not seeing a normal pink tint here. I’m seeing a purple. You’re a much deeper purple than usual. And Pinkie’s violet.”

Twilight blinked. “…A blue sun… That doesn’t make any sense! Stars aren’t actually blue that’s just the name we give them! All stars emit colors across the entire spectrum! Even if there were a spike in blue it wouldn’t create this drastic a difference!”

“Other universe,” Rarity offered. “Maybe the stars here aren’t the same as stars in our world.”

“Isn’t our sun unusual anyway?” Starlight pointed out. “I mean, it’s smaller than all the others and Celestia controls it. Why should we expect every sun except our own to act like Earth’s?”

Twilight shrugged. “Good point. Maybe it’s just the saturation of magic that’s making it blue, I don’t know. But… it is definitely blue.” She poked the grass. “Makes the green things look bizarre.”

“I think it makes them taste better!” Pinkie cheered.

Starlight chuckled. “Your opinion has been noted.”

“Yay!”

Twilight pointed at the obelisk. “That looks interesting.”

Starlight squinted at the runic construct. It was composed of a smooth, dark stone and was twice her height. The violet runes didn’t care about the blue light blanketing over them, popping out as if they didn’t belong. She briefly wondered if their color was some kind of optical illusion, given how they seemed to shift as her eyes darted around the runic edges. There was also a much higher concentration of magic around the stone, extending up to the edge of the road.

“Looks like they built around its magic bubble,” Starlight said.

“I wonder why…” Twilight said, flying closer to the obelisk, careful not to enter its bubble. She examined the grass around it, noticing hundreds of tiny flowers growing in between the blades that weren’t in other patches of greenery.

“It makes flowers grow?” Fluttershy wondered aloud.

“Could be a side effect of the magic it’s producing,” Twilight said. “I can tell it’s something relating to life – a pure essence of some kind. It might just literally be producing a ‘flower’ spell pattern that’s so strong the area around it is sympathizing.”

“Uh… what?” Fluttershy asked.

“It’s making the area around it want to be flowers,” Twilight said. “It’s extremely strong and concentrated, more so than most magics in our world, and it seems to be very permanent.”

“Let’s take it home and study it,” Starlight said.

Rarity blinked. “Starlight, I don’t think it’s ours.”

“Nopony’s been around here for a long time. This road is unkempt and I don’t see any sign of habitation whatsoever. Nopony owns this thing. We could just take it and learn how to use it.”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “It would fit through the mirror portal… But I don’t know, it’s pretty powerful. Probably dangerous. I certainly don’t want my insides thinking they have to be flowers.”

Fluttershy shook her head. “I don’t think we should mess with it.”

“Oh come on Fluttershy!” Starlight said. “Where’s your sense of discovery? Look, it’ll be fine, watch.” She lit her horn and surrounded the obelisk in her telekinesis, careful not to channel too much energy. She tried to lift it up, but found it rooted firmly to the ground. “Well, this thing doesn’t want to move…”

“Stop!” Fluttershy called. “You could be defiling a grave for all we know!”

Starlight was about to retort when the obelisk’s runes flashed brighter for a moment. A dozen purple lights shot out of the obelisk and gathered together on top of the monument, forming a violet wireframe. The resulting being was essentially a skeleton of lights with four legs, a tail, and a head without any defining features. Flowers popped into existence all around it.

Starlight felt the magical bubble around the obelisk extend to encompass them. Her stomach did a flip-flop, a sure sign of it wanting to become a flower but not being able to comply. She didn’t let this deter her, however. She took advantage of the surge of magic to fire a laser at the beast. She made direct contact, but the power of her blast caused so much knockback she went flying into a nearby tree. The creature of violet light disintegrated into dozens of light shards, only to reform almost instantly.

Fluttershy squealed, running away. The creature tried to pursue her but was hit by a lesser laser from Rarity. It charged Rarity, only for Twilight to grab the creature in her telekinesis, holding it firm. “Stop it…”

The beast did not stop it. It unraveled itself, worming out of Twilight’s telekinesis in multiple parts, coming together behind her. It lunged for her neck with reckless abandon, crashing into a hasty magic shield with enough force to flatten itself. Any normal creature would have broken all its bones, but luckily for this beast, it didn’t have any bones. It reformed once again, ready to envelop Twilight in a snare of violet light.

A giant sword flew through the air, driving itself into the best’s framework. The beast shattered, trying to reform, but one of its strands was now stuck on the sword’s blade, struggling.

“Ah suggest you all get out of the circle like the yellow one did!” a familiar voice yelled. “The golem won’t stay down for long!”

Rarity didn’t need to be told twice – she ran first, followed closely by Pinkie. Twilight took a moment to think about what she’d just heard but quickly decided now was not the time for deep thinking.

Starlight took up the rear after recovering from her daze, glancing behind her to see the violet strand of the beast known as a golem free itself from the blade. It met with its brethren, forming into the full beast once more. It charged Starlight at full speed, managing to look ravenous despite not having a face.

Starlight raised a shield, easily smashing it. She leaped out of the circle just as it reformed, jumping after her – disintegrating into flowery dust the moment it tried to leave.

“Huh,” Starlight said. “…That was interesting.”

“It tried to kill us!” Rarity wailed. “How is that interesting!?”

“Have you ever seen anything like that? A creature made of strands of light?”

“Girls, we can talk about this later,” Twilight said. “We have somepony to thank.” She turned to their savior, using her telekinesis to grab the sword inside the magic circle and giving it back. The orange mare grabbed the sword with her hoof and put it on her back alongside another sword of similar construction. The mare looked exactly like the Applejack they knew, with only one major difference besides the swords.

She had two antlers.

The Applejack blinked. “…What’re you staring at?”

“The antlers,” Pinkie said, eyes wide.

“What, you never seen a deer before?”

Fluttershy cocked her head. “Uh… Well, not ones like you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Twilight cleared her throat. “We’re from really far away – another world in fact. One where the sun isn’t blue, where there aren’t golem-creatures made of light, and there aren’t deer-ponies.”

The Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Really!” Pinkie said. “We came through that shimmering portal in that rock right over there.”

“…Ah guess there is somethin’ there…” She walked over to it to investigate, sticking her head in. She pulled it out. “That… was a lot of crystal.”

“It’s my castle,” Twilight said. “A gift from the Tree of Harmony – do you have a Tree of Harmony here?”

“Ah have no idea,” she said. “Doesn’t ring a bell at least.”

Twilight nodded. “Well, I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle, this is Rarity, Starlight, Fluttershy, and Pinkie.”

“Your name sounds familiar…”

Twilight smirked. “There’s probably a version of me in this world with an identical or at least similar name.”

“There ain’t no way. Ponies don’t just have duplicates.”

“Your name is Applejack,” Starlight said.

“…How’d you know that?”

“We’ve met several versions of you. Granted, none of them are deer, but you still look like them.”

Applejack shrugged. “Ah guess that’s interestin’.”

“It really is!” Twilight squeed. “The differences between alternate versions of the same pony are always fascinating! I happen to know another me who’s a great scientist and another who’s a complete jerk!”

Applejack raised her eyebrow. “So, okay, you’re all from another world. Ah’ll accept that. Why on Lai did you come here and get attacked by a golem?”

“Exploring!” Twilight answered. “We’re here to explore, make friends, and help ponies where we can!”

“We need a better mission statement,” Starlight said.

“It is just a work in progress,” Fluttershy added.

Rarity pursed her lips. “I still think it should be ‘to discover and bestow beauty’.”

“Too cheesy,” Pinkie said. “What we need is a goal set around cheese itself!”

Starlight facehooved. “Pinkie…”

Applejack looked at each of them in turn. “This is perhaps the stupidest argument topic I’ve ever heard.”

Twilight blushed sheepishly. “Riiiight… Sorry about that, we’re still working out the kinks to this. We’ve only been doing this a month or two.”

“It shows.”

Starlight coughed. “Well, why don’t you tell us about your world? What’s it like here? What do the ponies do?”

Applejack looked at the blue sun and grimaced. “The world is in darkness and despair. Our lives are defined by a struggle that goes unnoticed by the evil Queen Luna, ruler of the ‘civilized’ world. She cares not for our struggles and stamps out any town that complains with her impressive army. My world is a place of slaughter – slaughter of my friends and family, and slaughter of the armies that assault us. It is my life’s quest to dethrone the Queen and bring in a new era of peace and harmony to our land.”

The group of five ponies stared at her blankly.

“Y’all are free to go running back to your home now, pretend like you never saw this place.”

Twilight shook her head. “We won’t do that. If there is an evil Queen hurting your world… We can help stop her.”

Pinkie nodded in agreement. “You betcha! We’re out here to be adventuring heroes! Basically what you are, but on a larger scale!”

Applejack shook her head. “All of those who have stood by my side have fallen. Ah wouldn’t dare let you risk your lives for something you don’t know.”

Pinkie pulled a giant hammer out of nowhere. “I’m pretty sure we can take care of ourselves.”

“And we can leave at any time,” Twilight said. “This world is close enough to ours that I can just open a portal under my own power.”

“And, among other things, the Tree of Harmony sent us here,” Rarity said. “Apparently it saw into this world and deemed there was a friendship problem that needed fixing.”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Friendship problem?”

Starlight shrugged. “It’s a term we use to describe our missions. The Tree of Harmony wants ponies to get along. For all we know it could mean deposing your queen and restructuring your society with harmony in mind. That’s what happened when I was the ‘evil queen’ after all.”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Come again?”

Starlight smiled nervously. “I brainwashed a town. They stopped me.”

“How in Lai can you let her travel with you?” Applejack asked Twilight.

Twilight smiled brightly. “She’s proven herself time and time again to be reformed. That thing with the town was deep in the past.”

“Not somethin’ Ah would do. Ah also wouldn’t talk about my dark past in the open like that, it’d give ponies the wrong idea.”

Starlight blinked. “You are probably right about that.”

Applejack sighed. “Well, it looks like Ah’m not goin’ to be able to get rid of you, so looks like you’re with me for a while.”

“What’s the plan?” Pinkie asked.

“There’s a town a couple miles to the north called Peri. There’s a sage there Ah’m going to meet who will give me the location of the Spectacularium now that Ah’ve accomplished all the tasks of purification.”

“…The Spectacularium?” Fluttershy asked.

“You really aren’t from ‘round here… It’s an ancient temple made of crystal that made many distinct prophecies in the deep past, all but a few of which have come true. It is the holder of all answers, and it will tell me the secret to defeating the Queen.”

“That sounds amazing,” Twilight said. “Do you think it’d answer our questions as well?”

“Maybe? Ah really don’t care, so long as it can tell me what Ah need to know.” She turned around. “Enough dilly-dallying. Ah’m ready to go. You can come or not.” She started walking without another word.

“She seems… nice,” Starlight said a few seconds later.

“She’s been through a lot,” Fluttershy said. “We should try to be understanding.”

Twilight nodded in agreement, setting off after Applejack without another word. They followed the winding path through the trees, leaving the obelisk and its violet lights behind, returning once again to a world shrouded in blue.

About a minute later Starlight felt the excess magic drop away to levels that were still high, but no longer absurd. “What just happened?”

“We just left the range of the Sigma Runes,” Applejack said. “There is a giant runic artifact inside that mountain that fills this entire area with power.”

“What exactly are these runic artifacts?”

“Ah dunno, they’ve just always existed, probably built in ancient times by somepony long forgotten. They shape the very landscape on which we walk. You’ll see what I mean when we enter the range of the Crusted Runes.”

“How long will it take us to get there?” Rarity asked.

“Right now,” Applejack said. They turned a bend in the path and the scenery abruptly changed. The mountainous forest gave way to a flattened desert. The change was so abrupt it looked like the mountains had chunks sliced off of them at the edge of the desert.

Fluttershy stuck a hoof into the desert. “There’s no moisture in the air at all over here…”

“Hope you girls can survive the heat, because we’ve got to walk through this area for the next hour or so.”

Starlight used her magic to summon bottles of water. “Ready.”

“Neat trick. Hope it works for you.”

“It will.”

~~~

Starlight chugged her tenth bottle. “How… How is it so dry…” She created another one and handed it to Fluttershy, who splashed it over her face.

Twilight gasped. “I think… The spell is one of dryness… So it’s drying us from the inside out…”

“Is drinking water even helping!?” Rarity wailed, downing another bottle.

“No,” Applejack said, still walking strong. “You just have to deal with the heat until it’s over.”

Twilight took a break from her drinking. “How are you okay?”

“I’m a deer. We are one with the environment. I’m more curious as to how Pinkie over there is just fine.”

Pinkie gasped like a fish. “I’m still dry as a bone!”

“And yet you were bouncing around like a ping-pong ball just a few minutes earlier. That is not a sign of dehydration.”

“And check,” Rarity said.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing big. It’s just that every adventure, a few things always happen. Chief among them is somepony questioning Pinkie. Word of advice: it never works, stop trying to understand her. …Stars, I wish I could tell that to everypony who’s about to ask.”

Pinkie pouted. “But Rarity, it’s fun when they’re baffled!”

“That may be true but it does get old for some of us after a while.”

Applejack shook her head. “You five make no sense collectively.”

Starlight doused her head in water. “Yeah, that’s not news to us.”

“How much longer until Peri...?” Rarity asked.

Applejack grunted. “Closer than last time you asked.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything!”

“Armonia’s will, you’re whiney.”

“This is not whining, Applejack, this is complaining.”

“You don’t want her to start whining,” Fluttershy warned.

Starlight blinked. “Wait, we don’t?”

“Definitely not!” Twilight blurted, laughing nervously while tossing more water into her face. The water stayed on her face instead of evaporating quickly. “…Huh?”

“We left the Crusted circle,” Applejack said. “You don’t have to keep dousing yourself in water.”

“Drat,” Rarity said, tugging at her mane. “This is going to be a nightmare to curl again… Extreme humidity changes are no good for any mane.”

Applejack shot her a look. “How can you care about your looks at a time like this?”

“It’s called being dignified.”

“Dignified ponies are pompous halfwits who serve the Queen.”

“Did you just call me a halfwit!?”

“That’s what you take issue with in that sentence?”

“I’ll have you know I’m a qualified seamstress who is very successful!”

“I bet you actually do serve some evil Queen!”

“I’ll have you know that our Luna is not only a very good and kindhearted mare, but she also is a Princess, not a Queen, and rules alongside her sister Celestia as equals!”

Applejack took a step back. “…Your world makes no sense.”

“How so?”

“There is no way the Sun and Moon could live in harmony. There must be a lie somewhere.”

“There’s no lie,” Twilight said. “I’m the personal student of Celestia and a good friend of Luna’s, in our world at least. They had a falling out a while back but they’ve learned a lot since then.”

Applejack shook her head. “There’s something fundamentally wrong with your world.”

“Actually it seems to be one of the normal ones,” Twilight said. “Most of the worlds we find are similar to ours in one way or another. Yours is one of the exceptions.”

“More reason for me never to leave this world,” Applejack muttered. “We’re entering the grasp of the Slanted Runes.”

“The wha-“ the ponies suddenly walked into a horrendous gust of wind, blasting them from the side, threatening to knock them over. They could no longer hear each other, but they saw Applejack point further down the path towards a town. As they approached, the winds died down and they could make out the simple stone houses. There were perhaps a few hundred inhabitants and a dozen or so fields that grew numerous kinds of produce. Ponies of many kinds walked around – alongside the standard three races, Starlight could also make out some deer and even a seapony poking its head out of a river. In the center of town was presumably the obelisk of the Slanted Runes, a stone pillar two stories tall with light blue-green runes on it. It was most likely responsible for the giant whirlwinds around the town.

Starlight also noticed something odd as she walked in – there were a couple hybrid races. She saw a deer with wings fly across the sky and a pony with two antlers and a horn. “…Hybrids?”

“Yeah?” Applejack said, eyebrow raised. “Isn’t your friend a unisus?”

Twilight blinked. “I guess I would look like one… I’m called an alicorn where I come from. And I wasn’t a hybrid… I was made.”

“You aren’t an alicorn here. Alicorns also need the antlers and fins and other stuff to be real. So maybe get off your high horse, hmm?”

Twilight was taken aback. “I am no-“

“Take it easy, Twilight,” Rarity said.

Applejack kept walking.

Fluttershy looked around at the inhabitants of Peri. Most of them had smiles on their faces, going about their lives with a grin. It was a lot like Ponyville, if a little smaller. “…These ponies look happy to me.”

Applejack grunted. “Don’t let this place fool you. They’re just unaware of the Queen’s horrors. They’re protected by the wind.” She pointed. “Come, the sage’s this way.”

Fluttershy held up a hoof. “I think I’ll stay out here and talk with the locals if you don’t mind.”

“Ah really don’t care.”

“Don’t get lost,” Twilight told Fluttershy.

“Don’t worry Twilight, I know how to take care of myself.” She trotted off to talk to the seapony. They struck up a conversation quickly and seemed to be enjoying each other’s company, but Starlight soon lost sight of them as her group entered a round house with no windows.

In the center of the room was a crystal ball. Behind it, a pony sat, dressed in robes that covered every part of her except the mouth. She spoke with a dry, level voice that was nonetheless young. “Why did you bring others here?”

“They won’t leave me alone. And Ah’ve done all you asked me to do, so Ah’m a little low on patience. You said you can show me the Spectacularium.”

“That I can. Are you sure you wish your new companions to know?”

“Ah really don’t care. Ah’m headin’ there the moment you tell me and there’s nothin’ anypony can do to stop me.”

The sage nodded slowly. “That much is true. You’ll be glad to know they aren’t allied with the Queen, at the least.”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “It’s not like you to give away free information.”

“It’s not every day prophecies can be challenged.”

“What do you mean?”

The sage paused. “I mean that since the five entered the world, all certainty in prophecies has vanished.”

Applejack’s eye twitched, turning to Twilight. “What did you do?”

“N-nothing!” Twilight stammered.

“She speaks the truth,” the sage said. “It is merely the fact that the prophecies did not take into account the possibility of other worlds existing.”

Applejack glared. “Ah’m still goin’ to be the one to dethrone the Queen, right?”

“At this point nothing is certain, though it seems likely,” the sage answered.

“Then let’s get this over with and tell me already. Ah’m tired of runnin’ your errands.”

The sage nodded, glancing at Pinkie for a moment before touching the crystal ball with her hoof. With her other hoof she took off her hood, revealing her face. Everypony gasped – not because she looked exactly like Pinkie except with straight hair, because that wouldn’t have been all that unexpected. It was because of her eyes – they glowed like moons in the night, their brilliant blue color illuminating the room. There were no whites to the eyes, only the giant blue voids with a pupil of ever-shifting shapes. The black dot became a square, an octagon, five circles, a star… Shifting around all sides of the glowing globe, independent of the other eye. The crystal ball glowed a soft pink, producing a magical effect around Applejack. A small gilded key floated out of her satchel and into the sage’s extended hoof, the final task complete when it touched her hoof.

The crystal ball flashed, showing an image of a pointed dome made entirely of crystal similar to that of Twilight’s Castle. Around it stood six tall runic obelisks in six familiar colors. The color scheme of the Elements of Harmony sure was everywhere.

“That doesn’t tell me where it is,” Applejack said.

“Look at the scenery.”

Applejack did. “…There’s no sunlight…”

“Underground,” Rarity said. “There’s no plants around at all.”

“That still doesn’t tell me where underground,” Applejack said.

The sage and Pinkie facehooved.

“Ah’m not an idiot…”

“Yes you are,” the sage said. “I sent you on the quest to the Dragon Tunnels last to get that key. Well, it just so happens that this key can open a door in the Dragon Tunnels to the Spectacularium now that I’ve given it my enchantments.” She handed Applejack back the key.

“Which door is it?”

“You can figure that out on your own.”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “The really, really big red one.”

The sage looked at Pinkie. “You are much more forthcoming with information.”

“Eh, looks like I don’t get the specifics you do. Must be fun, being able to see everything you want.”

“It does allow me to guide the path of the world.”

Applejack snorted. “Give me a break. You just wanted me to gather fancy artifacts for you.”

“I never claimed to be altruistic.”

“You should have sent me for just the key and gotten me to the Spectacularium sooner. The longer the Queen is in position the more suffering occurs!”

The sage shook her head and closed her eyes – plunging the room into near-darkness. “You are so headstrong… Whatever. I’m done here. Go fulfill your destiny, if it still holds merit.” She put her robes back on and walked out. “You will not see me again.”

Applejack grunted. “Ah still have more questions!” She rushed outside – but the sage was gone. “…How in?”

“Same way I can do this,” Pinkie said, suddenly appearing in a far away bush. “There are tricks we Pinkies have.”

“…What kind of pony was she?” Starlight asked.

“Oculus,” Applejack answered. “The ones with weird eyes.”

“What do those eyes do, exactly?”

“Dunno. Ah just know Oculi tend to know things. That one in particular.” She started marching off.

“Uh… Applejack?” Rarity called. “Where are you-“

“Going back to the mountains.”

“But night is starting to fall…”

“Don’t care. If you need sleep, stay.”

Twilight shook her head. “We don’t have to walk all the way back. Now that I know where we are, I can teleport us back. It’s as simple as remembering where we were. Just need to find Fluttershy first…”

The obelisk of Slanted Runes flashed for a moment, summoning a wireframe blue-green creature that stood like an ape with a sword. Twilight, Starlight, and Rarity tensed.

Applejack held up a hoof. “This golem protects the town. Don’t fear it. Be afraid of whatever it detects coming.”

“What could have set it on edge?” Rarity asked.

Applejack sighed. “Probably the army…”

“The army!?”

“ATTENTION PERI!” A male voice boomed from the edge of town. “I AM COLONEL TURNER. IF YOU ARE AWARE OF IT OR NOT, YOU ARE HOUSING THE FUGITIVE KNOWN AS APPLEJACK, WANTED FOR TERRORISM, MURDER, INSURRECTION, AND TREACHERY. WE REQUEST THAT YOU GIVE HER OVER TO US. WE WILL COMPENSATE YOU HANDSOMELY IF YOU DO.”

“No they won’t,” Applejack muttered, readying both her swords. “This is going to get ugly.”

Twilight glanced around at the many townsponies turning in their direction with angry looks in their eyes. “Applejack, you seriously aren’t thinking of…”

“They’re going to try to turn me in. Ah can’t stop now.”

“Ah, Applejack, did you get some companions with a conscience?” The voice of Sunset Shimmer said. Everypony turned to see a mare on top of a nearby building – she had a horn, antlers, and a tail that ended in a mouth with many sharp teeth. “Perhaps you should listen to them.”

Applejack grit her teeth. “Sunset Shimmer. This is the last time you get to destroy the livelihood of my ponies.”

“You’re the one destroying their livelihood Applejack!” Sunset spat. “All you can see is your stupid quest!”

“You’re the one with the army around this town, ready to attack despite the wind and the guardian golem!”

“The golem’s smart enough to realize you are the threat,” Sunset said. “Otherwise it would have attacked me by now.”

“It hasn’t attacked me has it?”

Sunset’s tail snapped hungrily. “It’s just waiting.” She lit her horn, summoning a giant fireball between her antlers. The antlers glowed slightly, and the fire was sent into the ground, transforming the grass around Applejack into fiery snake tendrils. Applejack’s own antlers sparkled and she drove her hooves into the ground, turning all the grass to dust. She whirled around, deflecting the golem’s blade with her own two weapons, barely able to resist the tall construct’s stature.

Sunset leaped towards Applejack, tail ready to remove the hero’s head from her body.

Starlight cast a teleport spell forcing her, Twilight, Rarity, Pinkie, and Applejack back to the Mirror Portal.

Applejack put her swords away wordlessly. “Thank you. That was significantly less bloody than usual. Though Ah would have liked to end that Sunset’s plans then and there.”

Starlight shook her head. “How can you keep going through all this? Why haven’t you broken?”

“Because Ah can’t.”

Twilight suddenly screamed. “FLUTTERSHY! WE LEFT FLUTTERSHY!”

Starlight sighed. “I know, but we had to get out-“

“Wait. You knew you were leaving her behind!? And you left her anyway!? What if she gets hurt!? I’m going back!”

“Don’t,” Applejack said. “They probably haven’t killed her. They’re fans of capturin’ and using them as leverage later. You’ll just get yourself captured because they’ll manipulate her with you. Our best bet is to use the Spectacularium.”

Twilight growled. “I bet Pinkie, Starlight, and I can-“

“Do you want to take your chances with an opponent you don’t know? Sunset is brutal, dangerous, and relentless.”

“The same could be said about you,” Starlight muttered.

“I have to be. She just serves the Queen.”

Twilight shook her head. “Fine. We do it your way, Applejack. This Spectacularium better have some good answers.”

~~~

Fluttershy was talking with the seapony – Germanium – when the announcement went off. She froze, realizing that the town was about to be under siege.

“Oh no…”

Germanium narrowed his eyes. “You said you were with an Applejack…”

“Yes, I mean, yeah, it’s probably her, but I don’t know…” She bit her lip. “Remember what we talked about?”

“Yeah?”

“She’s the reason why. I have to stop this before something goes wrong…” She saw her friends out in the open… Fighting a version of Sunset with far too many horns and the guardian golem of the town. Starlight teleported them away before Fluttershy could do anything.

Fluttershy gulped. This couldn’t be good.

Sunset looked at the guardian golem and nodded in respect. Then she stamped her hoof on the ground in rage and screamed. “ALL RIGHT! Is there ANYPONY here who talked to APPLEJACK or ANY OF HER NEW COMPANIONS!?”

Germanium raised a hoof. Fluttershy stared at him, a look of betrayal on her face. “Germanium…”

“Sorry, Fluttershy. You seem nice. Just tell her what you told me and you should be fine.”

Fluttershy wanted to say something back, but Sunset had already walked over. “Yes, citizen?”

“This pegasus came into town with that group.”

Sunset turned to Fluttershy, tail snapping like a barely restrained guard dog. “Is that so?”

“Y-yes.”

Sunset conjured some hoofcuffs around Fluttershy’s legs. Sunset teleported the two of them away, placing them in a large tent lined with a bedroll, numerous bladed weapons, and a handful of books. “So, pegasus, why were you associating with a well-known terrorist?”

“You’re not going to believe me, but I’ll tell you anyway. We’re visitors from another world and Applejack was the first pony we met.”

“You’re right, I don’t believe you.” She lit her horn.

“…There wouldn’t be a chance that you’re preparing a truth-detecting spell, is there?”

“No. It’s a torture spell. It will get you to tell me whatever you know.”

“H-how about we just use the truth-detecting spell!?”

“…Why? You could have some way to trick it. It’s not very reliable. You’re just afraid of pain.”

Fluttershy nodded vigorously. “Y-yes. And I know I can’t give you the answers you want…”

Sunset growled. “I want to know where Applejack is going. Tell me that.”

“The Spectacularium. I don’t know where it is, I wasn’t in the tent when they talked to the sage.”

Sunset stepped back. “…She knows where it is now?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t talk to them after they talked to the sage. You came before that.”

“So acting quickly was a bad thing?!”

“You had no way to know,” Fluttershy said.

Sunset stared at her for a moment. “…You really have nothing to hide, do you?”

“No. I’ll tell you whatever I know.”

“Why?”

Fluttershy sighed. “I don’t think I could lie to you and… Well, I don’t think the way Applejack’s doing things is right.”

“It doesn’t take much of a brain to realize that.”

“It’s… different than that. She seems like a hero who’s willing to stop at nothing to dethrone an evil Queen. …Tell me, what has Applejack really done?”

Sunset frowned. “All right. I’ll go along with this for now, pretend you really have no idea. Applejack is a terrorist from a distant town on the edges of the kingdom that was inhabited only by deer. Then for whatever reason, a member of the court was brutally murdered there for seemingly no reason. I ordered an investigation to bring whoever killed him to justice. The investigation found out it was Applejack’s brother, but the town came together to kill the team to cover it up, not realizing they had already sent word to me. I brought the army in, planning on taking every deer into custody and figuring out the whole mess. They decided they wanted a war instead of a simple intervention. They refused to let a single one of their number get arrested for anything, blind in their stupid bond. They eventually had to be slaughtered, killing way more of us than we did of them. Applejack survived, somehow, and ended up catching wind of a prophecy that declared there would be a hero from a slaughtered village to dethrone the Queen. She took up the mantle and has been destroying entire towns that are loyal to the Queen, and we can’t stop her!” She slammed her hoof into the ground, shaking the tent. “Do you have any idea how much pain she’s caused?!”

Fluttershy shook her head.

“I’m the last living member of my family!” Sunset screamed. “My partner, a mare who looked a lot like your unisus friend, was killed by Applejack in combat! And yet, try as we might, we can’t stop her! We try to use any of her followers against her, but she always chooses herself over them. We’ve tried hitting her with overwhelming odds but she’s just too strong. We’ve tried conscripting the golems now, but even that doesn’t seem to work!”

Fluttershy sagged. “I’m… I’m sorry. We haven’t helped, have we?”

“No, of course not! You all show up and now you’ve ruined yet another chance!”

“…Have you ever considered that you might be being too aggressive with her?”

Sunset growled. “What do you mean?”

“Your constant anger and spite is just giving her more reason to fight you. I can see why she thinks you are evil at least – you constantly try to kill her and exploit her in any way you can.”

“Then why don’t you think I’m evil? Huh? I’m pretty angry at you aren’t I?”

Fluttershy took in a deep breath. “Because you’re passionate. And you’re telling me what you feel. I know you mean what you say. Even if you might be biased… You are telling the truth. She’s killed so many…”

Sunset frowned. “…I’m still not sure if I believe you about the other world thing.”

“There’s a portal in the forest next to the mountains past the desert. I’m sure Twilight won’t mind me taking you there to sho- Sunset?”

“…Her name really is Twilight…”

“Yeah? I – oh. Your friend…” Fluttershy tried not to cry. “I’m so sorry…”

“How can Applejack not see it? The face of her!?”

“I don’t know,” Fluttershy said. “I just met her today. As I’ve just met you.”

Sunset nodded. She undid Fluttershy’s hoofcuffs with a spell. “I’ll be upfront. I’ve done many of the horrible things she’s done. You shouldn’t think of me as some kind of hero. I’m just doing what needs to be done.”

“That’s… More or less her attitude, I think. Except she thinks she’s the hero.”

“That’s nothing new,” Sunset said. “Though usually when her followers tell me this they don’t think she’s wrong.”

“I’m not a follower,” Fluttershy reminded her.

“Well then… Maybe you can help me. Who’s right?”

“…Excuse me?”

“Applejack or me. Who’s in the right.”

“Uh… You’re both wrong.”

Sunset blinked. “…Come again?”

“From what little I know, it… looks like you and her have both made many, many mistakes to get you to this point. A personal war of vendetta.”

“What else can I do?”

Fluttershy smiled. “Well… You could refuse to use any underhanded tactics. You could be honest. You could own up to what happened at her home.”

“That was their fault!”

“It wasn’t just their fault, was it?”

Sunset blinked. “…No.”

Fluttershy put a wing around Sunset. “It’s okay… You thought you were doing right. That’s not all that matters, but that doesn’t mean nothing.”

“How… How in Lai did you do this?”

“Do what?”

“Get me to talk?!”

“It’s… a skill I have. I was also really terrified of being tortured and spoke a lot of that without thinking. Still pretty terrified.”

“I’m not going to kill you, there’s no reason to. You’re free to go, even.”

“I still need to get back to my friends. The best way to do that is stay with you.”

“Guess we can go check out that portal…” Sunset muttered, rubbing her eyes. “It’s the only lead we have…”

Fluttershy nodded. “…Remember, try something different this time, okay?”

Sunset twitched. “She still needs to die…”

“Do you?”

Sunset gulped. “…Maybe.”

Fluttershy sighed. “Don’t think that…”

“I’ve done the same things she’s done for roughly the same reasons! If she deserves to die, I do too!”

Fluttershy failed to keep the tears from falling down her face. “But… But that’s just so sad. You’re a pony who cares, and cares deeply!”

“Yeah, so? That might not be a good thing!”

“You haven’t turned your back on connecting with others though.”

“Armonia damn it, how are you so good at this!?” Sunset blurted. “I don’t even know you and yet I’m pouring myself out to you!?”

“Maybe the time was just right. I was called here by the Tree of Harmony after all… I think I needed to be here, to help you see.”

“…Well, now that you have, now what?”

“I need to resolve the ‘friendship’ problem. I need to end the fight between you two, one way or another. And my friends are going to help.”

Sunset nodded. “I… I hope you’re right. I hope your ‘Tree’ knows what it’s doing.”

“It always does. There hasn’t been a failed mission yet. Though they’re not always what we think they are…”

~~~

In a world of humans and high school, Sunset sat on a stage next to several other students, tapping her heels nervously. There was a huge crowd – everybody and their parents had shown up for this. That was to be expected, but it was still a lot of people. Sunset may not have had as much difficulty speaking in front of people as a lot of her classmates did, but there was still a nervous feeling in her gut.

It had all happened so fast…

She had been working on the dimensional adventurers club, traveling around for fun, and then Principal Celestia had told her she was the valedictorian and needed to give a speech at graduation. Sunset had tried to deny it, saying she’d had an unfair advantage over the students given how old she really was, but Celestia insisted that she deserved the honor for all the other things she had done, if not for her grades. So there was a speech to make.

And then it was graduation.

Pinkie hadn’t been kidding about it coming quickly...

She felt like there was so much she hadn’t done… Hadn’t really explored that many worlds… Hadn’t really accomplished what she set out to do… Hadn’t spent enough time with her friends…

But time marched on, and she had to deal with it. And that meant giving this speech.

And it sure wasn’t going to be a boring one like all the others she’d heard over the years.

Principal Celestia had finished giving Sunset Shimmer an introduction – it was time to go up there. She took a breath and walked to the podium. She glanced at Rarity and Fluttershy, both of whom were sitting in the row of graduating students. Both waved encouragingly. Sunset swore she could hear Pinkie screaming her name from somewhere in the back.

With a smile on her face, she gripped the podium.

“You all do realize all the insane magic and problems you’ve had over the last four years are basically my fault, right?”

This prompted laughs from the audience and baffled looks from some of the parents. Good. Already this was better than most other speeches. Her grin became a smirk and she leaned in.

“Think about it. For most of my time here, I was the worst bully imaginable. And after, what, a year of good behavior you give me this medal and tell me to address the entire student body? You are all way too forgiving. I was a manipulator, a liar, a deceiver, a girl who wanted to be worshipped. Hey, Pinkie, I see you bowing, stop it.”

More laughter.

“I could go on and list more disgusting features I used to have – anger, insecurity, rage, vanity, excess… The list goes on and on. The original draft of this speech was just me being a thesaurus for five minutes on how garbage I used to be. Worst idea ever. I would have ended up with actual garbage all over me had I gone through with that. So let’s forget about all that – just like you all did.”

She beamed at them all.

“It was rough, but the forgiveness all of you showed me after I hit my low… It speaks for this school. You saw me show my true colors as a literal demon, only to welcome me back into the fold. Not all of you came to me at once, but eventually I was welcomed. And… Well, first of all, you’re all insane! Secondly… Thank you. It makes this school mean so much more to me than just a place to learn things or make myself ‘popular.’ This school, Canterlot High, has shown me what it means to be forgiven. It taught me, more than anything else, mercy.”

She grabbed the valedictorian medal hung around her neck. “Had I not learned that, I think we all know I’d be up here giving some horrendous speech about how great I am and how all you suck. But it doesn’t matter how great I am, or how great the school system wants me to be. There’s more here than just education and a place to hang out. There’s a family here. And I have no doubt that, when I’m gone, it’ll continue to go on just as brightly as it did before. So here’s my shoutout to you – all of you – who were willing to see another side of someone. For that, I thank you.”

She leaned back and sighed. “I really wish I could stay with you all, but time marches on. Life’s not something we can run away from. So keep it crazy, my friends, and you can make life worth living.”

She bowed – and the audience entered into applause. She smiled, walking off the podium and to her seat.

Now she could go have fun exploring other worlds all summer.

Then… college, she guessed.

She wondered if it’d be like she was expecting.

~~~

The Dragon Tunnels were exactly what they sounded like. Spacious tunnels in the earth filled with dragons.

Except all the dragons were just skeletons littered around everywhere.

“…What is this place?” Rarity asked.

“A dragon burial ground,” Applejack answered. “This is where they took their dead since they lacked the patience to dig large enough graves.”

“Do any dragons live in here?”

“There was one. It’s dead now.”

Twilight shivered. She thought the odds were pretty good that Applejack had been the one to slay it, probably recently. Rainbow Dash probably would have found that awesome… Twilight just found it another way this world was too brutal. But having seen what that Sunset was like… They really did need to stop the Queen. Though she knew the Tree would never send them to do it by pure force… There was probably something in the Spectacularium that would help resolve this. Something only they could find.

She wondered if she could ask it what the friendship problem actually was. She still wasn’t clear on that.

“Hey, should we figure out what questions we’re going to ask?” she asked aloud.

“How to get rid of the Queen,” Applejack muttered. “That’s all Ah want, and all Ah need.”

“I’ll ask it what’s really in the blue flavor!” Pinkie Pie announced.

Rarity furrowed her brow. “I think… I’ll want to know about you, Applejack. You don’t tell us much about yourself.”

Applejack tensed but kept walking deeper into the caverns. “Ah could care less. Ask away. There’s nothin’ to tell.”

“Why don’t you tell us about you so we don’t have to ask?”

“No,” she said. “Ah’m not talking.”

Starlight raised an eyebrow. “You’re afraid you’ll form a connection with us.”

“Ah don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Dear, I can tell that you’re lying. No Applejack is good at it.”

Applejack twitched. “Do you want me angry? Because you’re gettin’ there.”

“No, of course not.”

“Then shut up and mind your own darn business. We have a mission. Nothing else matters. Getting all friendly only makes us weak.”

Twilight shook her head. “Applejack… That’s not the case, and I think you know it. Friendship makes ponies stronger and gives them something to lean on when the going gets hard. Friendship is magic. It’s how I got my wings, it’s why Starlight’s traveling with us, it’s why we’re here in the first place.”

“Then things are just different in your world.”

Twilight nodded. “Maybe. But that only makes us want to help you more.”

“You’re all a bunch of idiots.”

Pinkie giggled. “Yeah, so?”

Applejack grunted. “Done listenin’.”

“You said that already, and yet you kept talking!”

Applejack made no response. She just kept walking forward.

Twilight sighed. She wanted to say something – she really did – but she couldn’t. Applejack didn’t want to hear it. The deer ‘hero’ was a tragedy. After she was done with her quest, what would she even do? She defined herself so much by this single goal. What would life mean to her after it was over? Would it mean anything?

Applejack turned a corner in the tunnels and came to a large red door. She took the key out and placed it in the lock, turning it. The doors recognized the key, pulsed with the light of dozens of multicolored runes, and slid open all on its own. Applejack marched into the darkened interior, followed by the other four. The interior was much like the rest of the Dragon Tunnels: rocky, spacious, and empty. There weren’t even any dragon bones this far down. The floor became steeper and Twilight was slowly becoming aware of a powerful source of magic beneath them.

They eventually came out into a much more expansive cavern that was so large they couldn’t see the other end. The six runic obelisks – which Twilight just knew were the Runes of Harmony – glowed in the distance like lighthouses in the night around a shimmering blue crystal dome.

The Spectacularium.

Twilight saw a tear roll down Applejack’s cheek. She’d been looking for this thing – the answer – for Celestia knew how many years. Twilight suddenly felt like she could never understand what was going on in the warrior’s head, never empathize with the intense emotion in this moment. Applejack had finally shown a crack in her tough exterior. Who knew what was flashing before her eyes right now?

Twilight didn’t. This was just an adventure she’d come in near the end. It had little impact for her. This realization struck her as rather messed up. Because of her position, she was distant to the issues – all of her friends were.

Was she missing something because of this?

“C-can you teleport us closer,” Applejack stammered.

Twilight nodded. “Of course.” They were soon inside the boundaries of the Runes of Harmony, all five of them filled with serene power. Before them stood a giant door, through which was a hollow interior with seemingly nothing inside. But the five ponies knew better than that.

“So, you finally arrived.”

Twilight turned to see a version of Starlight standing on a nearby outcropping of rock. She was hornless, but that didn’t mean she had no magic. Two arcs of rune-covered material extended from both her sides, forming a circular pattern when viewed from head-on. The runes glowed the color of Starlight’s magic, and some of the runes had embedded themselves in her flesh instead of the arcs. It looked painful.

Applejack drew her swords. The unicorn Starlight grabbed her with her telekinesis. “Calm down!”

“She’s an arcei!” Applejack yelled. “Blasphemous!”

“She might be able to tell us things!”

“That I can,” the arcei said, glancing into the Spectacularium’s interior. “I am Starlight, though it wouldn’t surprise me if you already knew that given your companion. I am a… caretaker of sorts.”

Twilight glanced at the struggling Applejack. “…Why does she want to kill you?”

“I fused myself with a golem, creating a race that has no right to exist,” the arcei answered.

Applejack’s jaw dropped. “You’re the first arcei!?”

“Yes,” the arcei said.

Pinkie nodded slowly. “Yeah, this would be a lot more interesting if we’d been a part of this story from the start.”

“You’d be surprised how little it actually matters.”

“So… What is the Spectacularium?” Rarity asked.

“It’s an ancient device created by the rune-makers. I have no idea who they were, all I know is that they made this place to answer their questions before they vanished from Lai. I have my theories that they were slain by their answers, but I cannot prove this without asking a question myself. Which I will never do again.”

“Then why do you live here?”

“Because I detected a surge of magic here larger than anything I’d felt before. It was something I could only describe as a man of light running away from a unicorn.”

Twilight’s pupils dilated. “…Did this happen a couple months ago?”

The arcei looked surprised for the first time. “…Yes. Why?”

“That… That was the crystal man who had the device that allowed us to start traveling dimensions.”

The arcei frowned. “Interesting. Very interesting, in fact. It seems our worlds are connected in more ways than one. Perhaps there is fate beyond what the Spectacularium can see.”

“Can you just let us in already,” Applejack muttered, having finally stopped struggling.

“I’m not stopping you. I’m just warning you. It’s changed since the man of light was here.”

“How so?” Starlight asked.

“It gained a mind.”

And with that, her arcs glowed the colors of magic and she folded herself up into nothingness. Twilight had no idea if what she had just done was even magic. Maybe that was something to ask the Spectacularium…

…What had the arcei meant, it had a mind?

Applejack didn’t care – she walked right into the big room, and the others followed close behind her. In the center of the Spectacularium, there was nothing but magic.

And then there was something. A thread of magic appeared, forming into an E like rune shape. Then it became a Y. Then a 6. It never settled, shifting through shapes as fast as the ponies could make them out. The color kept shifting as well, gradually, like a passing rainbow.

They felt it touch their minds. They felt an intelligence.

It spoke to them through their thoughts. The two prophecies that remained – that Applejack would defeat the Queen, and that the Spectacularium would return and make prophecies again one day – were no more. Things had changed too much to ensure their occurrence. Not the least of which was the existence of the Spectacularium’s intelligence. Its power. It could no longer simply live like it did, focusing towards one goal. The rune-makers did not foresee their creation attaining a new level, becoming the conscience of magic itself.

But it would answer their questions one last time. Whatever each of them wanted to know most.

The Queen can be defeated if you simply reveal that her dead sister was given an honorable burial and has a secret shrine within the royal palace, despite the sun’s evil deeds. The Queen visits it daily and has regrets. If the people realize that she doesn’t have that conviction and in fact holds the most horrendous figure in history as a good memory, she couldn’t possibly hold power.

Nopony resents you for your past actions, they are all truly your friends. You should stop second-guessing.

You will not outlive your friends.

You will find love one day, and it will be beautiful.

The answer to your deepest yearning is protected. But you knew that. You also know this intelligence’s birthday. The blue flavor is an anomaly beyond logical answers. You are one side of the coin.

The Spectacularium’s intelligence allowed them to wonder what answers were to whose questions. Those who asked the questions knew. But they all heard the answers.

The Spectacularium was now ready to self-destruct.

“WHAT!?” Rarity yelled.

Starlight teleported them out. The moment they left the premises the crystal center of the Spectacularium shattered, leaving only the six runic obelisks to light the cavern.

Applejack smiled. “Ah have it! Ah have the answer! The way to depose the Queen!”

“…Didn’t that answer seem a bit… odd to you?” Twilight asked. “It seems like she just cares about her sister…”

“Who cares? It’s a way to get the tyrant off the throne. Ah’ll take any weakness Ah can get.”

“You’re in luck, then.”

The five ponies turned around to see Sunset and Fluttershy standing a few meters away. There was no sign of any army, golems, or anything. Applejack drew her swords.

Fluttershy held up a wing. “We aren’t here to fight. We’re here to talk.”

“We!?” Rarity blurted. “Fluttershy, you teamed up with this… maniac!?”

“That really is how I come off…” Sunset sighed. “Yes, she has. But she’s also made me realize something.”

Applejack lowered her sword slightly. “…Ah’ll bite. What happened?”

“Applejack, we’re killing the world we love.”

“You don’t love anything!”

Sunset shook her head. “I love the ponies of this nation, and I fight to keep you from killing them. But I fought blindly, violently, and without any thought about what I was destroying in the process. It was a single-minded goal. I didn’t see the destruction – and this little pegasus came along, said some things, and suddenly I see.”

“How does this change anythin’? You still serve the Queen, and Ah have to get rid of her.”

“Applejack, I’m the one responsible for everything that’s happened to you, your town, and your family. The Queen doesn’t even know what really happened to start you on your quest for vengeance. Only I know.”

“But she lets ponies like you run things!”

“I made a mistake!” Sunset yelled. “And you’ve made a mistake as well! We’re both wrong!”

“Ah don’t care!” Applejack roared. “Ah’ll do anything to stop this madness!”

Sunset looked ready to scream again, but Fluttershy put a wing around her, silencing her. “Applejack, I know you’re angry. But… what if she’s really the one who did everything to you? What if the Queen had almost nothing to do with it?”

“Destiny isn’t that cruel,” Applejack said. “Ah’m the chosen hero, destined to save the world from the evil Queen.”

“…Where in the prophecy does it say you’re a hero, or that the Queen is evil?” Sunset asked.

“Does it matter? Why would there be a prophecy about a little deer fighting against a Queen if the Queen wasn’t evil and the deer wasn’t the hero?”

“Because it’s a realistic prophecy about real things?”

Applejack growled. “You think you can stop me…”

“I’m willing to pardon everything,” Sunset said, gulping hard. “You may have killed her and everyone I held dear, but I did the exact same to you. If I walk free, you should as well. All you have to do is agree to stop. I’ll resign from the military if you do. We’re destroying the world with our fight, Applejack. It has to stop.”

Applejack stamped her hoof. “Ah don’t think you realize that if Ah stop this will have all been for nothing!”

“It is for nothing,” Sunset said. “I’ve had to accept that. All my fighting only made you angrier and killed more ponies. I’m sorry.”

Applejack threw one of her swords, embedding it in Sunset’s side. The blood splattered all over Fluttershy, like a claw across her face. She stood strong, holding Sunset up despite the wound.

Sunset coughed, blood flying out of her mouth onto the ground. “I… I suppose this is what I deserve…”

Applejack’s eyes were wild. She grabbed her other sword. “STOP DOING THAT! YOU ARE EVIL AND YOU CANNOT CHANGE! THERE’D BE NO POINT!” She threw it – only for Twilight to grab it.

Applejack turned around, charging her – but Starlight grabbed Applejack in her telekinesis and pinned her. Applejack’s antlers glowed and the ground began to shake like an earthquake – but Pinkie leaped in, smashing Applejack with a squeaky hammer and knocking her out. It was over. For now, at least.

Everypony ran to Sunset. Twilight cast a spell on the wound – but she didn’t know the advanced healing magic required. “S-sunset…”

“Take her… away from this world…” Sunset said, gagging. “Neither of us can be here…”

“Don’t say that,” Fluttershy said. “You can still do well! You have so much to do!”

“There’s no way you’re getting me to a healer in time…”

Starlight looked at Twilight. “Crystal stasis.”

“Crystal stasis,” Twilight agreed. The two of them used their horns, encasing Sunset in a crystalline cage, freezing her inside. “I don’t want to teleport her like this. But we can get her to a healer.”

“What about… her?” Pinkie asked, pointing at Applejack.

Twilight sighed. “Tie her up.”

Fluttershy wiped some of the blood off her face and stared at it. She gulped.

“Hey… It’s okay. We’ve got her,” Pinkie said, hugging Fluttershy.

“Everything’s so brutal… I tried… I tried so hard…”

“You got one of them. That’s good Fluttershy. That’s good.”

~~~

Sunset awoke a little later, her wound already healed by magic from some unknown healer. It had the unusual stiffness magical healing always had, but at least she was alive. She was mildly surprised to see Twilight standing over her.

She didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t have to say anything. I’m also not her, sorry.”

Sunset nodded. “What… happened to Applejack?”

“We have her tied up. She’ll be in your custody.”

“I’ll have to take her in. The ponies will want execution…”

Twilight nodded. “We could take her. There’s a world of demons who like to take in ponies.”

“No… I can’t just let her run away. That was hasty of me. But… I’ll argue for her life. I have sway, I can get the Queen to give her life in prison instead, despite what she’s done.”

“…And?”

“…I’m going to visit her. We really aren’t that different. She just ended up on the wrong side…”

“What is the Queen like, really? I’m curious.”

Sunset laughed painfully. “A bit clueless, to be honest. Despite her age, she seems to have a childlike aura about her a lot of the time. She switches from old and wise to young and energetic. She’s a delight to be around.”

Twilight smiled. “It does sound like Applejack was misguided… There’s part of me that thinks the Pinkie sage was just manipulating you all, by the way.”

Sunset frowned. “It’s possible. Though why, I don’t have any clue.”

“Well… We’ll return to our world now. We might meet again. Might not.”

“Actually…” Sunset coughed. “As a general within her majesty’s army, I’d like to establish official relations with your people.”

Twilight blinked. “Really?”

“Really. You helped me. It’s the best I can do for you in return. Put in a good word.”

“Well… Not what I expected, but cool. We aren’t really a big part of our nation though. We mainly just explore to help ponies.”

“Doesn’t matter. I have power, I’m going to use it for something good for once. Remember you have a friend here.”

Twilight smiled. “I will.”

Then her cutie mark started glowing, signifying a job well done. She sighed. “I was hoping we’d be able to do better than that.”

“…Huh?”

“The Tree of Harmony just told me we did what we came here to do. I’m not sure if that was to become friends with you, get you to help us, or to resolve the tension between you and Applejack… Possibly a combination of all three. But I really thought we could help her as well.”

“She’s more determined than me,” Sunset said. “It’s one of those neutral traits…”

Twilight nodded. “I hope you can show her the way, given time.”

“Somehow I doubt it, but I have to at least put in the effort. Atone for my sins…”

Twilight smiled. “I knew a Sunset like you. Ashamed of what she’d done, she ended up living with those she hurt, and they became her closest friends. Maybe there is parallelism in the cosmos.”

“Maybe… I hope so.” Sunset smiled. “…Thank you, Twilight. Just… Just for talking.”

“And thank you for not torturing Fluttershy.”

Sunset chuckled. Twilight left the room, telling the girls it was time to go home.

008 - Into the Fire

A dimensional portal ripped through the fabric of space-time into Sunset’s living room - which, given the minuscule size of her house, meant it took up most the space between the couch and the TV. Sunset, Twilight, Rainbow Dash, and Lyra all walked through the ring laughing.

“It’s always such a delight to visit the mushroom people!” Twilight managed as the portal popped shut. “So cute!”

“I got a video of the one doing the dance!” Rainbow Dash said, holding out her phone. “So sweet.”

“Not ‘awesome’?” Sunset ribbed.

Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow. “Well, it’s that too. But that goes without saying.”

“Then why do you say it so much?”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Because. It’s awesome.”

There was silence for a couple seconds. Lyra broke the silence with a slight snicker, sending everyone into a collective laughing fit lasting for at least a minute. They stopped only because they were starting to run out of breath.

Sunset fell onto the couch. “So, you girls want anything? I’ve got some of those amazing pocket nacho things.”

“You’re the only one who thinks those are amazing,” Lyra said.

“I’ve got other food, if you don’t want that, yeesh.”

Twilight shook her head while fingering her necklace. “Sorry, I’ve got a trip to NASA tomorrow, need extra sleep for it. Can’t stay.”

“I drank far too many of those shakes, not hungry.” Rainbow Dash laughed – then belched loud enough to knock herself over. “Ow.”

Sunset turned to Lyra. “What about you?”

“Uh… Will you be mad if I say I wanted to eat with my folks tonight?”

“Not at all,” Sunset said. “It’s okay, I shouldn’t expect you all to stick around every time. See you next week!”

Twilight waved. “See you!”

Soon, Sunset was the only human being in her house. She took in a deep breath, leaned deeply into the couch, and grabbed the remote. She pointed it at the TV, ready to turn it on and gel over random entertainment until she fell asleep, but something stopped her. She found herself staring at the remote’s power button, contemplating how it turned things on and off. If she turned the TV on, she turned her brain off. That probably wasn’t good, come to think of it. But if she didn’t she’d just have to realize that she was completely alone in this house.

Too late, she thought. She set the remote down and looked around the living room. The furnishings were simple and uninspired – a clock, a couch, a TV, and a random painting Sunset had hung without much thought. Pinkie had given it to her. It was of a beautiful woman made entirely of fire writing in a study, herself as the only source of light in the canvas. Knowing Pinkie, this could be the most in-depth and meaningful painting on the planet, or it was just random. There was no telling with her.

The clock ticked.

Sunset stood up, deciding not to watch TV. She couldn’t waste her mind all summer. She had a big project ahead of her. One I could be working on right now, come to think of it. She set out across her small house, entering what had once had the dual function of a dining room and schoolwork space. These days, it was a place to store all her designs. The walls were covered in equations, schematics, and random musings written in hasty handwriting. Most of the scrawling only she could read, the rest was by Twilight’s much neater hand.

She set her hand on the biggest sheet of paper, placed in an honorable position atop the round oak table. Two arched spikes, connected to each other through the ground. The perfect shape to tear a hole in reality, angled for maximum focus at the center, and yet separated like two lines ready to open a set of double doors. She was certain this was the basic design, and she knew she could make it work… with magic.

It wasn’t a question of power – she was certain a small power plant could form a connection to Equestria easily enough – it was a question of methods. In their experiments, Sunset and Twilight had discovered how the spell opened a portal. Regardless of if it was attached to the Mirror Portal or just summoned on the spot, the spell always manipulated gravity forcefully, drawing the fabric of space-time to a single point then pushing. The pushing part was difficult enough to understand, but it wasn’t the problem. It was the manipulation of gravity. She had no idea if that was even possible without magic.

She looked for her notes on the subject. They weren’t where she left them. Somebody had probably come in here and messed it up. Primary suspect: Rainbow Dash. As if it could be anybody else. That girl never listened…

Sunset found the notes on the floor after a few minutes of searching. Forgetting her momentary annoyance with Rainbow Dash, she was absorbed in her own musings…

Gravity cannot be bent with known technology or materials. Quantum mechanics has not identified a graviton, so it’s impossible to even start work on that. Controlled gravity surge with mass would not function. Wormholes are a possibility, but negative mass has not been proven. Consider attempting to create some with magic as a proof-of-concept, then work backwards. Alternatively, find a universe with highly advanced technology and convince them to answer some questions or provide assistance.

Now there was an idea. The only problem was they hadn’t found any universes with advanced technology yet. They’d found plenty of worlds with high magic that had gone to the moon and other planets within the system, but the best non-magical world they’d found was a bunch of strange furred creatures living on two different planets that were essentially just Earth and Mars analogs. No teleportation, no gravity manipulation, no wormholes.

Apparently similar universes were clustered together. Most of the other universes Sunset and her friends – and the ponies in Equestria – had explored were simply different versions of Equestria itself. Earth was a bit of an oddball, though there were a few other Equestrias with copies of it as well. And yet, no two universes were exactly the same… Just similar. Some more than others. Even the demon’s jungle resembled prehistoric Equestria. Then there were the occasional oddballs like the worlds with the mushroom people…

But if she believed anything, it was that the multiverse was a lot bigger than what they’d seen.

She pulled out another piece of paper, examining the ‘map’ created of explored universes, a bunch of dots with labels connected by lines of a length determined by the energy required to travel. Some of the lines squiggled since the numbers didn’t line up properly on a two-dimensional surface, but the idea was the same. Most everything was clustered around Equestria and Earth, with a couple more distant worlds, Ardent being the furthest away. The place where she’d seen that mask…

She pushed the thought of the evil out of her mind. If she wanted to find more advanced technology, she’d have to go further out. She pulled one of the portal-devices out of her pocket and twisted some of the dials, testing out some of the connections, letting it drain some power from her necklace for a moment. It lit up green, displaying how much energy it was using to connect to… She checked her list of coordinates. The world of doublespeak liars.

“Yeah, let’s not go there,” she muttered to herself. She flipped open a large magical journal, laying it flat. The most recent message she’d received from Twilight was a table with a few more world coordinates, most untested. She plugged one at random into the device…

It turned red.

Not enough power.

Sunset grinned, tucking the journal into her jacket and allowing the device to draw more power from her necklace. The device couldn’t drain the relic completely; the magics were too fundamental for that. But it took five whole minutes to power it up to green.

She looked at it, curious.

This would lead her somewhere far away. It was using more power than Ardent by a fair margin, not quite double.

Sunset glanced out the window. The sun was setting. Was she really going to go to another world, all on her own, this late? She felt like that would be irresponsible, even though she had literally no responsibilities. She didn’t work tomorrow, her friends were out doing things…

She shrugged, holding the device out and activating it. The surge of energy blew several of her papers around, driving Sunset even further up the wall.

“You know what? I’ll clean that later.”

She looked through the portal, glad that these direct rips in space-time weren’t as mysterious about the destination as the Mirror Portal’s connections, although they definitely weren’t as permanent. The sky through the portal was red and something fiery was flying through the sky. The world was that of a city filled with many stone buildings, though the roads weren’t paved.

She likely wasn’t going to find what she was looking for here.

But the fiery object in the sky was enticing… There was no way she could just close the portal now and not have a closer look.

She stepped in.

~~~

In a world where the sky was red and the earth was made of pillars, two men fought.

One was a tall man with a body fit for an emperor. His muscles tensed and his hair whirled as he shot his hands forward, unleashing a torrent of fire from within brighter than the cosmic blaze from above.

His blaze hit a shell of carefully constructed rock, shattering it and revealing the occupant inside. The target was little more than a boy cowering in a defensive posture, blowing air from his body to keep the licking flames from burning him. He was covered with blue arrow tattoos that pointed to his hands, feet, and forehead; the latter matching the creases formed in his face from his intense concentration.

The fire pushed him back into the stone pillar, a blunt point ramming into his back where a scar interrupted the flow of the tattoos. The sharp pain awoke something within him that had been lost. Energy flowed through his body freely where once it had been blocked.

The fiery man stood tall over the rubble, taunting the boy. “Come on out, Avatar! You can’t hide in there forever!” He smirked slightly, continuing his berating, oblivious to the energy shifting beneath the rubble.

The Avatar shot out of the rubble, eyes an intense white, tattoos glowing with the power of spirits unknown to both combatants. He grabbed his assailant by his long, wispy beard. The man swiped at the Avatar, aiming for his vulnerable neck with a flaming slice, but the Avatar stopped the movement with his other hand. With a kick, a pillar of earth shot out of the ground and threw the man aside.

The Avatar flew into the air, a bubble of wind whirling around him fast enough to be visible from afar. Fire shot from his hands, feet, and mouth, showing the landscape a five-limbed monster of pure heat. The Avatar’s opponent could only stand and stare at what was taking shape before him.

The tentacles of fire coalesced into a ring, taking its place alongside the whirlwind of air. Next, rocks flew up from the ground, shrinking as they were crushed into dense conglomerations, forming a second ring. To complete the set, water was drawn into the air from the nearby sea to form a ring, giving the Avatar the appearance of an atom of the elements.

Then the Avatar started attacking again. With a face as impassive as that of a statue, he tore the pillars of earth from their positions in the ground, throwing them at the man. The man used his fire to blast into the air like a rocket, avoiding the oversized rocky assault. He attempted to throw a few bursts of fire at the Avatar.

The attacks were blown away by intense winds, filling the air with intense light once again. The Avatar pursued, face steadfast, eyes featureless. Fire, water, earth, and air flew at their target with accuracy, power, and beauty beyond anything seen before. All four elements worked in unison, ready to corner their enemy.

With a blast of fire, the man attempted to gain some distance. He may have been arrogant, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew when he had to change strategies. This fight would no longer be won through brute force. He’d have to think.

Unfortunately for him, the Avatar wasn’t giving him time to think. Waves came from nowhere; crashing over him and sweeping him along like nothing. Chunks of earth fell on him, destroyed only by quick flaming clouds from his fists. Air flew through his body, changing his direction.

Something as simple as fleeing became difficult.

He rocketed away, forcing fire out of his hands and feet, pushing his speed to the maximum.

And yet, the Avatar gained. He looked ancient, monstrous – unnatural. With a quick movement, a trail of water wrapped around the flaming feet, extinguishing the heated power. The rushing water enveloped the man, tossing him to the top of a pillar of earth. He gasped, the wind knocked out of him by the impact.

The Avatar raised the earth around the man’s feet and hands, pinning him. The man gritted his teeth.

The Avatar spoke with the voice of many. Men young and old, women of all ranges; they spoke alongside his own boyish vocalization in a haunting harmony. “Firelord Ozai. You and your forefathers have devastated the balance of this world, and now you shall pay the ultimate price!”

All four elements formed into a single, devastating point. Air took the center, spiraling water and fire around it in a corkscrew while forcing chunks of earth along with it. The spearhead of the Avatar rushed the Firelord’s chest, aiming right for the heart.

Ozai turned away, unable to face his own death.

But it never came.

There was a noise – something that could only be described as sparkling – and he heard the attack bounce away from him.

He opened his eyes, surprised to see a circle of a purple, translucent substance between him and the Avatar. It was unlike anything he had ever seen.

A purple winged unicorn appeared next to him, angrily staring at the Avatar. Both men stared at it in disbelief.

“Run!” she said. “I’ll keep him busy!”

Ozai and the Avatar stared at the winged unicorn, still disbelieving.

She shook her head. “Don’t have time for this…” She lit her horn. In a flash of purple, Ozai was on a faraway rock pillar, barely able to see the shape of the winged unicorn and the Avatar in the distance.

He didn’t waste any time to see what happened next. Surveying the landscape, he knew this battle was lost. In the distance he could see his entire fleet of Fire Nation zeppelins smoldering on the shore. Sozin’s Comet would leave the atmosphere eventually, and the boost to his power would be gone. It was time to cut his losses and accept what fate had given him.

His four limbs unleashed a torrent of fire and he rocketed across the sea towards his kingdom.

Meanwhile, the Avatar was screaming.

“You freed him!”

“Of course I did!” she yelled back. “You were going to kill him!”

“He-“

“Did he need to die?!”

The white energy vanished from the Avatar, returning him to his normal state. The winged unicorn’s expression softened. He no longer looked like a monster. He looked like… a boy.

“Maybe not…” the Avatar said.

“Good. Then I’m glad I-“

“But he did need to be stopped!” he shouted, his face now fully capable of showing true, passionate anger. “He was a horrible man! This was when we needed to stop him!”

“I’m sure he couldn’t have been-“

“Do you see that over there?!” he yelled, pointing at a patch of scorched earth at least a mile long. “He was going to blanket this entire continent in fire, killing all the resistance he could! He was defeated! But you stepped in and stopped me from ending this! You… You unicorn-bird!”

She took a few steps back, turning to look at the devastation. She gulped. “I… I didn’t know.”

“How could you not know? He’s been waging war on the entire world for decades!”

“…I’m not from this world. This is the first thing I saw. I… I felt like I needed to act…”

The Avatar rammed his foot into the ground, knocking off a chunk of earth. “Go back to where you came from.”

“But… But I can help you catch him! And find a way not to k-“

“You’ve helped enough!” the Avatar yelled, the energy flowing into him again. “You are not welcome here!”

The winged unicorn whimpered. She lit her horn and teleported away.

The Avatar let the energy flow out of his body. He fell to his knees and roared. He stayed there, motionless, for a long time, contemplating how everything had fallen apart at the last moment once again.

An airship eventually drifted near him, unloading three people.

“Uh… Aang? Did you do it?” one of them, a young man in blue, asked.

“No,” Avatar Aang said. “He got away. Some… thing with unusual bending saved him. He’s going back to regroup. We haven’t won yet.”

“But… But we will! The airships were destroyed and Ba Sing Se’s been liberated!”

“And Ozai is still free, Sokka.” Aang stood up, looking at where the alien form had been. He frowned. She’d seemed nice, but misguided. Definitely the wrong place at the wrong time.

She had ruined everything with a single action.

~~~

Sunset walked around the city and did what she normally did when coming to a new world – observe quietly. She wasn’t being sneaky, but she wasn’t walking up to people and talking. She noted, curiously, that they were speaking a language she could understand, no need to use the translator spell at all. Which was probably best because she did not have that particular device on her at the moment. Probably not a smart move, come to think of it. She made a mental note to always bring it with her from here on out.

The inhabitants of the city were all standard humans. It had been a bit unusual to discover most humans didn’t have the neon-colored hair and pastel skin, but in the end it didn’t really matter. Her yellow skin tone wasn’t that unusual, so she was only getting occasional sideways glances. She was left alone, allowed to wander freely. They probably thought she had a disease or was born wrong, or something.

She looked up at the flaming power moving across the sky. She’d heard a few people call it Sozin’s Comet, even though it obviously wasn’t a comet. It was too on fire for that. It was definitely powerful though – she couldfeel the cosmic energy in the air all around her. If only she were a unicorn right now, she could experiment with it.

She walked through another street, passing a bunch of kids playing a game with… a stack of black war tanks. She blinked – she’d overheard conversations suggesting there’d been a war in the city recently, and several of the buildings had looked rather damaged, but… Well, she hadn’t seen any tanks until now. The kids were punching the ground, drawing pieces of earth up into the air and kicking them over the black metallic pillar.

So, magic definitely existed in this world. It was not a form she’d ever seen before – it was channeled through the movements of the entire body rather than a single body part, like the horn or hands. As she watched the earth get tossed around like volleyballs, she noted that the movements of the body allowed more power to be put into it. It was more a physical exercise than a mental one.

She had to admit; the sight of children tossing rocks over war machines was as delightful as it was poetic. A smile was creeping up her face.

“I see you appreciate the beauty of freedom.”

Sunset turned to her left. A large old man with a spiky gray beard stood there, looking at the children with a pleased smile.

Sunset nodded. “Yeah. I may not have any idea what’s going on… But it’s great.”

The man smiled coyly. “There was a war. This city, Ba Sing Se, was under the control of a brutal enemy that had been laying siege to the entire world. Today, this city was freed, and I have faith that the war has ended.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “…Why are you explaining this to me? I mean, I’m glad, but that all sounds like it should be public knowledge.”

The man laughed. “You obviously aren’t from here. I have no idea how you managed to get in here without knowing, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is I saw you looking at those kids with a smile – and that’s all I need to know about you.”

Sunset smiled. “Well I’ll tell you more, I’m not really trying to be secretive.” She held out her hand. “I’m Sunset Shimmer.”

“I’m Iroh,” he said, shaking her hand. “Welcome to the newly liberated Ba Sing Se.”

“Glad to be-“

“TRAITOR!” Someone screamed. A man in black and red armor ran out of a nearby building, pointing at Iroh.

Iroh sighed. “Again…?”

The man thrust his fist forward, producing a fireball. Iroh nimbly dodged the attack despite his large figure. He took a breath, channeling energy into his body.

Sunset twisted her leg, planning on kicking the man over. She felt cosmic energy flow into her, traveling through her head and to her foot, producing a fiery spark at the end. The kick made direct contact with the soldier’s armor, blanketing him in fire in addition to knocking him down. He groaned pathetically.

Sunset stared at her foot. “What!? I can’t use magic like this! What just…?”

Iroh raised an eyebrow, dropping his fighting stance. “Well, that’s not the reaction I was expecting.”

Sunset punched the air. She felt the energy of the Comet flow into her again, and a fireball launched into the air, dissipating quickly. She stared at her hands in disbelief. “Could I always use magic…?”

“I wouldn’t call it magic,” Iroh said. “It’s called firebending. It channels the chi within you to produce changes in the elements.”

Sunset stared at her hands, a smile slowly creeping up her face. “It’s not the same… You’re right. But it’s close enough.” She pushed her hand into the air, launching out a burst of fire. “Yeah!”

Iroh laughed. “Now I’m the one who has no idea what’s going on, but it’s still delightful! Would you by chance be some spirit? A witch perhaps?”

“Spirit? No… I’m a human. Well, not really, obviously not the same type of human as you, and I used to be a unicorn.”

Iroh took this in stride, chuckling. “Looks like fate is having a fun time with the world today.”

“Multiple worlds,” Sunset said. “I’m from another place entirely.”

“I should probably be surprised at that…” Iroh mused. “Would you like to continue this over some tea?”

Sunset nodded cheerfully. “I’d love some tea.”

“I used to own a teashop right over here… It should still have what we need.” He led her through the streets of Ba Sing Se, past many signs of a recent battle. Yet, despite the destruction apparent in most places, people were walking around happy. Even those working themselves ragged rebuilding did so with a smile on their face, as if this was an honor. She even saw a few of the enemy soldiers working alongside them. It was simultaneously an image of past suffering and future peace.

Iroh found his old teashop boarded up, but he didn’t let this stop him. With an agile finger, he burnt the edges of the boards and tore them off. He delicately opened the door to reveal a dark interior. He grinned. “Hasn’t even been touched!” He set to work, quickly lighting a fire with his bending and pulling a teakettle out of a nearby shelf. He dusted the dishes off and found a sealed container of water, pouring it in the kettle, humming to himself all the while.

“The firebending must make it a lot easier to cook.”

“Oh it certainly does, but sadly few of us ever bother to learn the culinary aspect of our power. It’s usually all about the fighting.”

Sunset nodded, accepting a cup of tea from Iroh. “Your kind was the one leading the war, weren’t they?”

Iroh nodded. “It’s been a long war. I even fought in it myself – tried to capture this very city.”

Sunset smiled. “Well, as you said, you’re pretty sure it’s over now. And you helped free this city. I may not know all the details… But that looks pretty good to me.”

Iroh chuckled softly. “Just going with the first story you hear? You know nothing, how can you know I’m telling the truth?”

“I don’t, really. But you haven’t been afraid to tell me anything, and you also looked at those kids with a smile on your face. They are here because of your actions, from what I can tell.”

“It’s nice to hear that from an outsider. All I usually get to hear is encouragement or hatred based on the side I’m on.” He took a sip of his tea. “…I suppose the leaves got stale.”

“It tastes fine,” Sunset said.

“You’ve never had good tea then! We’ll have to remedy this!”

“Sure. As long as you teach me the culinary arts of firebending.”

Iroh laughed. “I would be foolish to turn down such a delightful and mysterious student. We’ll have to wait for the Comet to leave though – starting your journey with empowered firebending will ruin your expectations.”

Sunset shrugged. “Fair point. How much longer until it leaves?”

“A few minutes?” Iroh shrugged.

Sunset rolled her eyes. “That’s unhelpfully vague.”

“It gives us time to get to know each other. If I’m going to be teaching you anything, I have to know who you are.”

“What do you want to know?” Sunset asked. “There’s a lot I could say.”

Iroh pointed at the necklace. “What does that mean to you?”

Sunset lifted the red crystal up so she could look at it. “I’m… not sure. It’s a crystal with magic properties that allows me to feel what other people are feeling and thinking if I touch them directly – it’s why I wear these gloves, so I don’t accidentally trigger it. As for what it means… I guess it’s a reminder that I’ve moved beyond my past. I wasn’t always the best person. I have a feeling you know what that’s like.”

Iroh nodded. “Fighting a war on the wrong side, as a general no less, does weigh on a man as the years pass by.”

“You had it worse than I did then. I was on the right side – then I betrayed my mentor and tried to take great power for myself. I didn’t actually get to fight a war. I might have if I was allowed to continue, but I was stopped by some good friends.”

Iroh chuckled. “Now I’m curious… Does that crystal of yours work both ways?”

“No. And it only works for me, sorry.”

“Seems rather unfair to everyone else then, if you can see into them but they can’t see into you.”

“It might be,” Sunset admitted. “But it helps a lot. Many people don’t want to say what they’re feeling, and the only way to get them to talk is to call them out on it.”

Iroh nodded slowly. “Do you think that perhaps you need to look into me?”

“No? You seem to have it together and appear trustworthy.”

“Appearances can be deceiving. Though you are right.” He took another sip. “So, you were once a unicorn?”

Sunset nodded. “My original world was one filled with magic. I was a powerful mage, the personal protégé of Princess Celestia herself - the leader of our nation. I specialized in fire and light magic, though when I betrayed her I ran to another world, became a human, and lost my magic powers… Even this crystal didn’t give them back. But…” She snapped her fingers, shooting fire into the air. “Something about this world has given me something.”

“That does explain your reaction. Though I do wonder if you always had the power within you, and it was just the Comet that awakened it.”

“It’s possible. Magic does exist on Earth – the human world I live in now – just not as powerful. Maybe I just hadn’t tried hard enough before…”

“Could be you were trying too hard,” Iroh suggested. “Sometimes struggling for the thing you want with reckless abandon gets in the way of actually obtaining it.”

“You’re full of all sorts of wisdom, aren’t you?”

Iroh chuckled. “And you’re full of… I believe the word the young people are using these days is ‘spunk’.”

Sunset snorted.

“Is that not the word?”

“I have no idea, I don’t live here. But if it is the word I’m never going to be able to take it seriously. It sounds like something Rainbow Dash - one of my friends - would say. Alongside ‘sweet’ and ‘awesome’ and ‘rad’.”

“She sounds like quite the handful.”

Sunset had some difficulty sipping her tea through her chuckles. “She’s rather headstrong. ...Who am I kidding, she’s really headstrong and oftentimes I wonder if she even uses that brain of hers.”

“I have a nephew like that, Zuko. No matter what he’s doing, he has a reckless determination about him. You have no idea how long it took him to realize the war was a bad idea.”

“...What’s he doing now?”

“Currently? Challenging his sister in the Fire Nation capital to ensure the war ends. I have confidence he can do it since he’s not alone. Actually, he’s probably already done it and just waiting for us to go see him.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

His face became home to the largest and stupidest grin Sunset had seen in a while. “Because I’m having tea with a beautiful young woman! What kind of fool would I be to pass that up?”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “You’re quite the character, Iroh.”

“I try.”

The red light flowing through the window dimmed, giving way to a bright blue sky. Sunset felt the intense power from the Comet leave her body. She suddenly felt… empty.

She stood up and walked outside. She took a deep breath and tried to channel energy through her body. She punched forward.

A tiny spark of fire appeared and then vanished. She smiled sadly. “…Looks like I need training.”

“Your form is good, for a beginner,” Iroh said. “You lack an understanding of the flow of chi, however. Try feeling your soul – reach for the energy in your heart and toss it out along your arm, like throwing a ball.”

Sunset took a breath, reached toward her chest, and punched out. A slightly larger tuft of fire came out.

Iroh smiled warmly. “Promising.” He quickly looked up into the sky.

“Huh?”

“I heard something. It looks like we’ll have to put this on hold…”

A strange white creature Sunset could only describe as a flying lemur landed on Iroh’s shoulder. Iroh smirked. “Ah, Momo.” He stroked the creature and took a piece of paper off the lemur’s back. He frowned upon reading it.

“…Not good news?”

“No…” Iroh said, folding the paper up nicely. “The war isn’t over. The Firelord has not been defeated. He escaped, and will perpetuate the war as long as he is able…”

Sunset grimaced. “…Should I go then?”

“No… I think you’re here for a reason. Come with me, we’re going to steal a tank.”

Sunset nodded. “On the way, you’ll need to tell me more about this Firelord.”

Iroh laughed. “You’ll be begging me to stop before I’m even half done with all the stories I could tell!”

“You’re on!”

~~~

In the capital of the Fire Nation, a prince was preparing to become Firelord. The man known as Zuko stood at the edge of the Fire Palace, looking at the beautiful blue sky. He smiled.

He knew in his heart that the other missions had succeeded. Ba Sing Se was free, his father was defeated, and the war was over. He and the Avatar would lead the world into a brand new era, one without a century-long war. One where the three nations lived together in harmony.

However, like the scar across his eye, there would be a constant reminder of those who had done wrong in the war. It would be a difficult job to remedy this literal and metaphorical burn, and he wasn’t sure he could do it well enough. But he knew he had to.

He glanced downwards, at the Palace courtyard. He could see his sister chained up to a grate down there, screaming and yelling every few seconds. Nobody had tried to move her to the prison cells yet. She was far too… insane and dangerous at the moment. He could still see her belching fire at nothing in vain attempts to release her undying rage and developing insanity.

She was a sad sight, to be frank. A powerful woman who had run the Fire Nation for all of a day before losing her grip to paranoid madness. As horrible as she was, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. She was still Azula, his sister, despite all she’d done.

“Hey, don’t feel bad, okay?”

Zuko turned to his companion, one of the Avatar’s great friends, a waterbender by the name of Katara. Had she not been here, they would not have been able to stop Azula and take control of the Fire Nation directly.

“I’m… Well I do,” he admitted. “But I also feel… complete. Like we’re finally done. Even though there’s a lot left to do, the war’s going to be over. Almost no one alive even remembers what the world was like without war. It’s going to be amazing.”

“Yeah,” Katara said, leaning on the balcony and allowing her loops of hair to drift in the soft breeze. “…Hey, there’s something bright over there.”

Zuko put a hand over his eyes, looking into the distance. There was a bright fiery point coming at them from the direction of the sea. “A rocketing firebender…” He said. “Not many benders have the power to do that.”

“Aang?”

“Why wouldn’t he just airbend? Much easier to fly with that.”

“Iroh?”

“Possible. I’ve never seen him rocket though. He’d just take a boat; he never wants to get anywhere quickly. Unless…” Zuko frowned. “Unless something’s gone wrong.”

Katara’s eyes narrowed. “We should be prepared.”

Zuko turned behind him to an aid. “Tell the men to be ready. The war may not be over yet.”

The armored man nodded and ran into the palace.

Zuko narrowed his good eye, studying the spark in the distance closely. “Let’s go to the ground and meet them.” With a quick burst of flame he leaped off the balcony and landed on the ground below. He caught Katara, setting her down next to him. The two stood tall, awaiting the arrival of the spark. Several ranks of soldiers filed in alongside them, mostly Fire Nation soldiers, but a couple of earthbender warriors lined up alongside them.

Zuko’s eyes widened in fear when he saw who the star was. “No…”

Ozai landed on the ground, leaving a small crater in the cobblestone with his fiery landing. He breathed in and out with impressive force, tired from rocketing across the sea without the power of the Comet for the last leg of the journey. “Yes, Zuko… Your Firelord has returned…”

Zuko glared. He entered a fighting stance alongside Katara. “You’ve been weakened. You can’t take us on.”

“I don’t have to. Guards! Seize them!”

“No!” Zuko yelled. “Don’t listen to him! Do you want the war to continue? Do you want your friends and loved ones to suffer as we attempt to destroy the entire world for our own selfish gain? Seize my father. End this madness.”

Ozai stood tall despite his lack of energy, towering over most of the people in the courtyard. “You are going to listen to my traitor of a son rather than me? What has he done for you besides produce false hope and perform foolish actions? He’s a traitor. I, on the other hand, have brought you glory and power. We are on the verge of ending the war with our victory. Today has been but a minor setback. Do you want to make this century of suffering and sacrifice of the Fire Nation mean nothing? If we end this war without getting what we came for, it was all pointless. Now, I give you an order, seize my son.”

No soldier moved.

Zuko smiled. “It looks like there’s a standoff here, Father. I think they want us to fight, and they’ll side with the winner. And you can’t win as you are.”

Ozai’s fist tightened until his knuckles became white. Then he smiled. “Then so be it.” He threw a punch of fire at Zuko, who was barely able to deflect it behind him. Katara unleashed a torrent of water from her pouch, dousing the Firelord. He jumped out of the way before she could turn it to ice, sending out an arc of fire towards Katara that Zuko deflected – only this time he deflected it into one of the soldiers.

In reaction, they sent a beam of fire at Zuko. One of the other soldiers sent that fire back, only for an earthbender to step in and launch a rock at Ozai.

Ozai grinned. “Perfect.”

Katara bit her lip, finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the sudden chaos of attacks. Earth and fire flew in all directions, and it was getting harder and harder to simply defend herself…

Then Ozai grabbed her by the neck. She screamed – and all the fighting stopped in an instant.

Ozai glared at Zuko. “You lose.”

“Father, fight me, one on one. The rite of Agni Kai. For honor.”

“I will honor the rite later, my son. I agree that we will fight, as we always should have, tomorrow. But the life of this girl rests in your hands right now, regardless of the outcome of the rite.”

Zuko curled his hand into a fist, and for a moment it looked like he was going to try something. But he dropped it and sagged.

“Take him away,” Ozai ordered. “And the girl too.” He shoved her into the hands of a nearby fire soldier. “All of you are extremely lucky I don’t execute you on the spot for hesitating.”

“Woo-hoo!” Azula yelled from her chained-up position. “Goooo Dad!”

Ozai’s eyes twitched. He strode over to Azula.

“Hey, do you mind getting me out of these things? I-“

He slapped her. “All of my children have shamed me. You are to be banished like Zuko was those few years ago. Your mission is the same. The Avatar.” He tore the chains off her hands without care for her wrist. She screamed as part of it broke. “Leave. Now.”

Azula’s fingers crackled with electricity. Like Zuko, for a moment it appeared as if she was going to try something. But she didn’t. She bowed and ran off.

Ozai took in a furious breath, turning to watch his two prisoners be taken to the dungeons. He briefly considered having the girl killed. She had no say in the Agni Kai… But no, she could be useful. If his intelligence was correct, she could be used to lure in the Avatar.

He pointed at a soldier. “You. Prepare a small balloon and get a pilot. Have them sail to the wreckage of the fleet with a message for the Avatar and my brother. Tell them I want to meet and… work out our differences.”

~~~

In the land where pillars of earth rose into the air, a Fire Nation tank drove up and parked. Iroh popped his head out of the tank, grinning. “Hello!”

Aang forced a smile. “Hello, Iroh. Nice tank.”

“Thanks, we examined dozens of different models before settling on this one. She’s a beaut’.”

“…We?” Aang asked.

Iroh crawled out of the tank, allowing Sunset to come out as well. She waved. “Hi! I’m Sunset. I hear you’re the Avatar, master of all four elements!”

“Uh. Yeah.” He blinked. “Is it ‘weird people show up for no reason’ day, or something?”

Sunset blinked. “Maybe. Why do you ask?”

Aang frowned. “That… Will take a while to explain.”

Iroh leaned against the edge of the tank, surveying the charred landscape. “Then forego telling us that story and tell us what happened with Ozai.”

“Those stories are related… I had him,” Aang said. “I unlocked the Avatar state and had him pinned in the rock. I was ready to deal the final blow… And then some unicorn-bird showed up and stopped me with some kind of purple spirit-energy!”

Sunset paled but said nothing.

“Then she made him vanish, telling him to get away while she dealt with me. It only took me about a minute to get her to realize what she’d done, but… He was already gone.”

“He probably went back to the Fire Nation…” Iroh said.

“Oh no!” Aang grabbed his head. “Zuko and Katara!”

“Indeed…” Iroh said, sighing. “We’ll have to hope they were able to get out in time. Sunset, why don’t you tell Aang what you know.”

“Huh?” Aang said.

“I… I think I know who came through here,” Sunset said. “She’s a friend of mine. Twilight Sparkle, exploring different worlds just like I am.”

Aang twitched. “Did you know about this!?”

“No! I didn’t even know she was here! It’s a complete coincidence!”

“It may not be as much of a coincidence as you think,” Iroh commented.

“Well, even if there is some ‘fate’ at play here, I had no clue about this until you said something.” She took the journal out of her jacket.

“What are you doing?” Aang asked.

“Writing Twilight. She’ll see this and we’ll get to set things right-“

“No! I don’t want her to get involved again and mess things up further!” Aang shouted. “In fact, you should go back before you rui-“

Iroh held up a hand. “Aang, it’s okay if you don’t want this ‘Twilight’ Involved. But you cannot judge a person based on the actions of another.”

Aang took in a breath and let out a slow sigh. “I am sorry, Sunset. Please, just don’t contact her.”

Sunset closed the journal. “Okay. How can I help then?”

Aang shrugged. “I don’t know… Ozai’s protected by his entire nation once again…”

Iroh nodded. “The Fire Nation has been beaten back significantly for the first time in years. There is still hope to win through the art of war alone. While not ideal, there is still a possibility.”

Momo appeared on Iroh’s shoulder again, this time pointing into the air. The three of them turned to see a small Fire Nation balloon drifting their direction.

“It’s… unarmed,” Aang noticed.

Iroh frowned. “It probably carries a message.”

“Maybe Zuko defeated Ozai?”

“…It’s possible,” Iroh said.

The balloon landed next to them and a simple Fire Nation pilot stepped out, reading from a scroll. “Avatar Aang and General Iroh are cordially invited to the Palace of the Firelord for a banquet, over which the future of relations between the Fire Nation, the war, the Avatar, and the rest of the world will be discussed. Firelord Ozai wishes it known that this banquet is to work out the differences between the various parties. Transportation has been provided for you.”

Iroh frowned. “This… is unexpected.”

“Maybe being saved from me made him rethink everything?” Aang suggested.

“Or he has Zuko and Katara captured, and just wants us where he can see us”

Aang frowned. “Probably. …We can’t really refuse, can we?”

“Who knows what he’d do to them otherwise…” Iroh muttered. He pointed at a nearby member of Aang’s party. “Gather everyone and head to Ba Sing Se. It’s liberated. Use it as a stronghold. I no longer know if this war will end soon or last several more years. Be prepared.”

“You got it!” The small woman said, running off to tell the others.

Iroh turned to Sunset. “…Would you mind coming along? Your skills would be appreciated.”

Sunset glanced at her necklace and nodded. “I’ll try to read him.”

Aang looked like he wanted to object. He took one look at Iroh and decided not to push it; Sunset was coming along. The three of them piled into the balloon and rose into the air, heading over the sea toward the Fire Nation. The sun was setting. It would be night by the time they got there.

Sunset leaned on the side of the basket Aang was on. “So, you’re the Avatar. Chosen hero of this world. Iroh’s told me a lot about you.”

“And I don’t know anything about you.”

“From another world, used to be a unicorn, used to be a horrible person, I know Twilight, and I’m also apparently a firebender.”

Aang blinked. “…That was fast.”

“I explain it a lot, especially since I travel so often. It’s a good way to sharpen your storytelling skills. I could probably write a book at this point.”

“I haven’t had time for that,” Aang said. “Ever since I woke up it’s been nonstop fighting against the Fire Nation. I was looking forward to all of it stopping…”

Sunset looked at Aang with pity. “You’ve been given far too much responsibility all at once…”

He raised an eyebrow. “Look who’s talking. You’re not that much older than me.”

“I’m well into my twenties. I just look like a teenager due to a spell inconsistency.”

Iroh laughed. “You learn something new every day!”

“Spell?” Aang asked.

“Where I come from, we don’t bend. We use magic to do any number of things. Magic is more about the mind than the body, so I’m pretty sure it isn’t the same thing as chi, though as a unicorn I could cook up quite a storm of fire.”

“So you basically just use magic instead of chi to bend the elements?”

“Oh no, magic can be used for other things. Teleporting, shields, lasers, healing, growing, transforming… Every unicorn worth their salt can lift things with magic, the rest of the tricks require training.”

Aang nodded. “…Do you think I could learn to use magic?”

“…I don’t know. I didn’t think humans could, but here I am discovering I can throw fire with my fists. So… Maybe? You want to try?”

“…No.”

Sunset could sense he was still livid about what Twilight had done. “All right. Fair enough.” She turned to Iroh. “So, do we have a plan?”

Iroh gestured to the messenger in the balloon with them.

“On it,” Aang said, lifting the soldier with a gust of air and tossing him into the water, closer to shore. “And now we can talk.”

“So, the plan is I don’t have a plan,” Iroh said.

Sunset and Aang facepalmed.

“Ozai has us where he wants us. We have to go to this banquet and talk to him. Our only edge is Sunset here, who can tell us what he’s planning after a simple shake of the hand. After that…”

“Make it up as we go…?” Aang said.

“Well that is what you usually do,” Iroh chuckled.

Sunset bit her lip, holding tightly to the journal in her jacket. She could call for help, but… Twilight had already ruined things once. What were the chances she messed up again? Higher than Sunset wanted to admit. Maybe Aang was right.

Should I even be here? Is it possible for me to make it even worse?

~~~

It was highly unusual for the banquet hall to be set this late at night, but Ozai knew he wouldn’t be able to rest until he dealt with this insulting slice at his power. Had that unicorn-bird not appeared, the war would be over and the Fire Nation would have fought for nothing.

He was not going to put himself in that kind of danger again. This time, instead of coming to the Avatar, the Avatar was coming to him, along with the only real remaining threat to Ozai’s power: Iroh. But this time it wouldn’t be brute force… The time for brute force had been when Sozin’s Comet was in play. It was time for other tactics.

For one, he actually wanted to hear what they’d say to him. It would be quite the experience to know the Avatar, as well as what Iroh really thought.

Ozai did not expect there to be a peaceful resolution to this meeting. Nor did he want one. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to have some fun and let them think they had a chance.

The double doors to the red hall opened, revealing three figures. Two were easily recognizable to him – the large figure of his brother and the childish figure of the Avatar he had seen only a few hours prior in close combat. The Avatar’s expression was that of barely contained rage. Ozai knew he wouldn’t try anything though, such a move would be a suicide mission not likely to work, for the entire Palace was crawling with guards and soldiers.

The third figure he didn’t recognize. She was a young woman with unusual yellow skin and brilliant red hair. Her clothing didn’t match that of any of the nations, though if he had to place her he’d say Fire Nation. Perhaps an estranged colony or band of traitors.

Ozai nodded, maintaining his professional appearance. “Brother. Avatar. And…?”

“Sunset. Sunset Shimmer,” Sunset said, holding out her hand.

“You could call her my new apprentice,” Iroh said with that big smile of his.

Ozai smirked – even in dire situations, Iroh knew how to keep his chin up. An admirable trait, even if he was a traitor. He shook Sunset’s hand. There was a feeling vaguely like a static shock, and for a split second Ozai thought he saw light in the crystal. This meant nothing to him – the slight shiver that went through Sunset did. She was terrified of him, and angry. As he expected they all were.

Good.

Iroh shook Ozai’s hand without incident. For a split second, they both smiled. These were not pleasant smiles; these were the smiles of brothers remembering a time when things were better, but also plotting each other’s downfall.

Aang refused to bow or shake Ozai’s hand. The Firelord was not surprised by this action. The boy did not understand the nuance of politics and meetings. As insulting as it was, there was no way Ozai could get any more furious with the Avatar, so the slight was meaningless.

They sat at the long table decorated with food. Ozai at one end, Iroh, Aang, and Sunset at the other. Everyone knew that there were dozens of soldiers watching from nearby, ready to intervene at a moment’s notice, even if they couldn’t be seen.

Ozai knew that the Avatar and Sunset weren’t used to the decorative walls of fire along the room’s edges. To him, it was comforting. To them, the decorations were sinister. Perfect.

“Where’s Azula?” Iroh asked.

“Banished,” Ozai stated matter-of-factly. “Sent her on the same errand I sent Zuko on a few years ago.”

“May I ask what she did to deserve that?”

“Went insane and lost control of her position of power,” Ozai stated. “But that’s not why we’re here, and you all know it.”

Aang nodded. “You said you wanted to work out our differences?”

“That I do,” Ozai said, delicately taking a grape and devouring it. “You see, it has become clear to me that this war is rather devastating to the Fire Nation in addition to the rest of the world. You may not think so, but I assure you, many tens of thousands of my people have died and lost their livelihood for this war.”

“It is not like you to feel concern for our people,” Iroh noted.

Ozai shook his head. “It’s not a concern, Iroh. It’s a fact. And if the war were to end now without any gain from the Fire Nation, all the years of fighting and loss will mean nothing. The number of individuals driven solely by revenge in our people is extreme. Even if it is the right move to end the war, many of the people just won’t allow it.”

Sunset whispered something in Iroh’s ear. Ozai wondered what she could have possibly known. There was no way she knew about his soldiers being unable to choose between him and Zuko? No… She wasn’t there. But she might have deduced. She was definitely here to play the role of a wildcard, not only to provide some unknown assistance but to play off Ozai’s paranoia.

Iroh cleared his throat. “Such things can be dealt with, Ozai. Most will follow the royal family without question, and those that don’t can be made to comply.”

“It is not so easy as you think. Not all are intellectuals like yourself.”

“What do you propose then?” Iroh said.

“Do we just let you conquer everything!?” Aang blurted.

“No,” Ozai said, sitting back. “I don’t think you have the influence to arrange that. What can be done is to create a ‘victory’ for the Fire Nation. It will not be feasible for us to run the entire world, but we can make it seem that way.”

“How so?” Iroh asked.

“If the population centers of the Earth Kingdom and both Water Tribes were under our control, I could declare the war a victory and end the fighting so long as the remaining people didn’t take up arms.”

Iroh frowned. “I do not have power over the Water Tribes.”

“But you do have influence over Ba Sing Se. They’d make you their king if they could.”

Iroh folded his arms. “That leaves the Water Tribes.”

“I fully believe that once a treaty is struck with the Earth Kingdom – Ba Sing Se in exchange for peace with the rest of the kingdom not under Fire Nation control – the Water Tribes will soon follow.”

Aang frowned. “If you just wanted to declare victory and be done with it, why didn’t you do this when you had Ba Sing Se under your control?”

“Because I had not been reminded of my own mortality,” Ozai spat, letting his calm exterior drop for the first time. “Being pinned atop a rock pillar and being saved at the last minute by providence does things to a man.”

“You still don’t believe the war was wrong, though,” Sunset said, speaking up for the first time in the conversation.

Ozai had to fight to look at her without visible contempt. “Why would I? It’s all any of us have ever known. It’s our drive as a nation. This war is our goal. What would we do without it?”

“You seem pretty handy with technology. You could pursue progress.” She shrugged. “Just a suggestion.”

“What is your point?”

Sunset ate a grape. This annoyed Ozai for some reason. “My point is that you don’t believe the war was wrong. You still want domination and plan to extort your subjects for fire Nation dominance, even if you no longer think conquering the whole world is viable. And what’s stopping you from holding onto the population centers for a decade then launching an all-out assault on the rest of the world anyway? I doubt they could stop that. What you have is just a long con.”

Iroh, Aang, and Ozai stared at Sunset, surprised.

Ozai sat back. “Even if that is the case, that would result in a quick end to this war and all the death. Why not consider it?”

“You’re asking for a surrender,” Aang said.

“In a way, I am,” Ozai said. “A direct surrender would be ideal, but the people will not accept a drastic measure such as that. I’m just calling for you to use your influence to change how the future will play out – will the war be long and hard, or end quickly?”

Iroh took in a breath. “Ozai, you know I’ll never turn over Ba Sing Se.”

“Are you sure?” Ozai said, smirking.

“Just bring them out already,” Iroh said. “Lay out your real terms.”

Ozai scowled. “Fine. Bring them!”

Two guards walked in, dragging Zuko and Katara. Katara had fresh lash marks all over her body and was too weak to look up. Zuko stared ahead with an intense fire in his eyes.

“Katara!” Aang yelled, standing up. Iroh held up a hand, keeping him from acting foolishly.

“Your real terms?” Iroh reiterated.

“If you don’t do what I want, they die,” Ozai said.

“Your own son Ozai?”

Ozai’s face darkened. “Perhaps. I do owe him one final Agni Kai. It will likely be to the death if you don’t comply. As for the girl, I can have her throat slit right now.”

“No!” Aang shouted, standing up.

Ozai smirked. “As expected. Iroh might be able to put his love aside for his cause. But you can’t. Luckily for you, you don’t have to betray anyone to save the girl. You just have to give yourself over to me. I won’t even kill you; I’ll just keep you locked in my dungeons for eternity, ensuring that another Avatar does not come. You’ll even get to spend your life with her, won’t that be romantic?”

Aang faltered, sitting back down.

“I’ll take that as your acceptance. As for you Iroh… Brother…” Ozai smirked. “I know you probably have some sort of plan, some sort of agency. Some secret society that will continue acting even once you two are out of the picture. All you have to tell me is everything about them. Then you live, Zuko lives after losing the Agni Kai, and I’ll get to lead the Fire Nation to a new age. I’ll even declare victory before the entire world is under my thumb. I’m no fool.”

Iroh stood up and took a breath. “Yes, you are.”

“Come again?”

“You can’t see the world’s beauty. There is no real glory in war, there is no future in bloodshed. You talk of those driven by revenge. More war will only lead to more revenge, until we destroy this world we call home. Your war cannot end in your victory. It can only end in your defeat, or the destruction of everything.”

Ozai’s face twisted into a scowl, his composure falling away. He slammed his fist on the table. “Are you really willing to go through with this? I’m not an unreasonable man Iroh. I keep my word. All that I’ve said, I will follow through with. There is no deception here.”

Iroh looked Ozai in the eyes. “Do you, by chance, not really want to kill your son?”

Ozai faltered. “I will if I need to.”

“…I’m not sure about that.”

“Do you want to test me?”

“I don’t need to. I know you care for your children, despite everything. You can’t bring yourself to kill them. Just banishment, quests of honor, and reinstatement. You won’t do it.”

Ozai slammed his fists on to the table. “Maybe I should just kill you then.”

“You tossed me in prison before. You will do it again.”

Ozai roared. This time he lit the table on fire when he slammed his fist into it, breaking it down the middle and pouring all the food off. His hand was still aflame as he stood there, staring at the broken piece of furniture.

He turned to Iroh. “Agni Kai, brother.”

“Such a duel would mean nothing,” Iroh said.

“Then we’ll fight without any rules or honor!”

Aang stood up. “No you won’t. We’re talking here.”

Sunset quickly took a book out of her jacket and scribbled furiously into it. Ozai leaped over to her and swiped it out of her hand. “WHAT is THIS!?”

Sunset stared at him in abject fear. “…A journal.”

He flipped to the last page. He couldn’t read what was written. But he was able to see some purple words appear before his eyes, as if written by an invisible hand. “What. Does. This. Say!?”

“…Already here…” Sunset said, surprised by the words.

“Who’s already here!?”

Aang shook his head. “No, we do not need her!”

Ozai lost all composure. “Guards, take them all away! You!” He pointed at the soldier around Katara. “Do it.”

Katara braced as the soldier readied the knife. The blade vanished with a flash of soft white energy.

Ozai’s confidence fell. Soldiers began to storm into the room, but a barrier of white magic separated the dining table from the incoming soldiers. With a flash of holy power, a tremendous white unicorn-bird appeared in front of him, towering over him by at least a full foot. Her pastel mane shifted as if blown by an absent wind. She glared right at him, speaking with a voice both melodious and wise. “Firelord Ozai?”

Ozai regained his stature. “Yes. You are trespassing on the Property of the Royal Family.”

The white unicorn-bird ignored him. “I am Princess Celestia. My protégé saved you from death. While that action may not have been a mistake on its own, letting you escape was. You will face judgment for your crimes.”

Ozai frowned. “My armies will fight you.”

“I have armies of my own,” Celestia said. “This palace is surrounded by my many ponies, ready to challenge you for power right here. I don’t think you want to go that route.”

Ozai glowered. He knew she was right. She could be bluffing – but something told him she alone could defeat him. At the very least she could teleport him far away and deal with him later. She just wanted him to order his men to stand down.

To surrender.

Oh, how the tables have turned.

He found himself considering it. If he fought back, he doubted they’d let him live. He couldn’t run in this position. He couldn’t manipulate anyone with his soldiers sealed out.

But was he really willing to give up all that the Fire Nation had worked for all these decades?

It really was a cause bigger than him.

No… No. He would have to fight. If he died, that would just fuel the fire of his people. They would keep fighting out of a desire for revenge. The Fire Nation would not be snuffed out!

He pointed at Sunset Shimmer, unleashing a bolt of fire in her direction. She yelped, flailing her hands around, managing to deflect the oncoming torrent.

Ozai did not get off a second shot. But it was not Celestia who attacked him. It was Aang.

“You don’t have to die,” Aang said, grabbing Ozai’s head and chest. “But you can’t continue as you are.”

Ozai felt the very chi inside him – his soul – react with that of the Avatar’s. They mingled, twisted, and warped around each other. Ozai felt the Avatar encroach on his own being, so he fought back. He pushed the boy’s weak spirit out of his own with pure determination, using his power to alter the Avatar’s essence. He felt the boy, all alone, crying out for help…

And then Ozai felt hundreds of spirits at once, the voices of all Avatars that came before. In an instant, Ozai was flooded with power from beyond possibility, beyond his pathetic understanding. The energy of a spirit long forgotten to all present flooded Ozai, twisting the chi connected to his inner fire.

He fell back, hitting the ground. He groaned.

Aang stared down at him.

Ozai threw a punch – but no fire came out. He stared at his fist. “Wh- what did you…”

“I took your bending away. Like I should have done on that pillar. You won’t be able to hurt anyone with it ever again.”

“N-no!” He yelled, standing up tall. “That’ll… Ruin their will to fight! That will…”

Sunset punched him, knocking him out and singeing his face. She twisted her wrist. “That felt good. It was so unpleasant having those emotions in me.” She shivered. Iroh chuckled despite himself.

Celestia dropped the shield surrounding them and stared at the many soldiers. “Your Firelord has fallen. You should now go.”

Slowly, wordlessly, all of them filed out.

Celestia turned to Aang, a pained smile on her face. “Avatar. There is somepony who wants to talk to you. Are you willing to hear her out?”

Aang looked at the fallen form of Ozai. “…Yeah.”

Twilight dropped the invisibility spell she had on, walking towards Aang. “I am sorry. I couldn’t stay away like you asked. I had wronged you – I had to set it right.”

“It’s…” Aang sighed. “Well, it’s not okay. But your heart was in the right place. I didn’t want to kill him either. You’re forgiven.”

“We have not fully repaid our debt,” Celestia said.

Iroh blinked. “You haven’t? You fixed the problem you caused! Don’t feel obligated to do anything else!”

Celestia smiled. “Well, don’t consider it part of the debt then. I’m doing it anyway – your world is recovering from war. My world is not. We will provide you with the aid you need to rebuild your society.”

Aang, Iroh, and Zuko bowed in Celesita’s direction. “We… Cannot tell you how much this means to us,” Iroh said. “For such a gift, we would owe you.”

Celestia smirked. “To continue the back and forth of repaying, how about this. Twilight here hasn’t bothered to inform me of any of her extra-dimensional escapades until now. So, I am creating plans to hold a meeting of multiple universes, to sort out how we should all interact with each other. All you have to do to repay us is have some of your leaders show up and play nice. Nothing more will be expected of you.”

“N-nothing?” Zuko said. “You… You are far too kind.”

“Yes, I’m told that may be a fault of ours…” Celestia said. “Apparently being naïve about conflicts has gotten Twilight and her friends into trouble more than once…”

Twilight blushed. “Yeeeah… Sorry again.”

“Now…” Celestia looked at Aang. “Do you think you can convene the world leaders to discuss how I am to give aid to you all?”

Aang looked at Iroh. Iroh chuckled. “Sure, we can do that. But first…” Iroh grabbed Sunset. “This girl is going to show me her home and make me some tea.”

“What!?”

“You said you wanted to learn, and I can tell I’m not going to get another chance for a vacation for a loooong time,” Iroh said.

Sunset blinked. “Uh… Sure. Okay. Sounds good!”

Twilight looked at Sunset. “Do you need a quick way back? It can’t be easy to get this much power into your device.”

“No, I got it, just… give me a few minutes.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Okay then…” She turned to Aang. “I… I still don’t feel like I’ve done enough for you. I stole your moment as the hero. What you were meant to do.”

Aang smiled sadly. “Don’t worry about it. You… You aren’t as bad as I thought, and I was pretty angry. But if I do think of something, I’ll let you know.”

“Okay! Good.”

Sunset smiled. And just like that, everything was set right.

~~~

Azula watched Iroh and that fiery girl walking down a street.

She grinned – she’d been right. Her father had been defeated, in the end. Good thing she didn’t leave right away. Serves the old man right, slapping her like that. She wasn’t Zuko. She’d never be Zuko.

They were talking about something Azula didn’t care about. All she wanted to do was watch them. The girl was holding a strange device that glowed red. Azula didn’t want to make her move on Iroh just yet, because she didn’t know what it did. She’d wait…

The device turned green, and the girl’s face lit up. She activated it, tearing a hole made of unusual strands in the air itself. Azula could see a sprawling city with dozens of houses. Automatic carriages rode by across black roads. Sunset and Iroh stepped through.

Azula leaped through as well, making barely a sound as she entered. The portal closed behind her with a pop. She leaped into a bush before Iroh could notice her. “That’s a lot of effort for something that lasts only a few seconds,” Iroh noted.

“Well, your world is very distant from this one. Now… Oh great. I just realized, we’re on the other side of the planet. I came to your world in Ba Sing Se, and exited in the Fire Nation. Just my luck.”

Iroh laughed. “I suppose I’m in for a longer vacation then?”

“Probably. Come on, let’s see if the translator spell already knows how to speak Mandarin, or whatever’s actually spoken here.”

Azula watched them walk away, a smile creeping up her face.

A whole new world for her…

~~~

On the other side of the planet, in Sunset’s house, Agent Tempest Shadow rooted through Sunset’s many notes. Since the fiery girl had neglected to clean them up, the agent had full freedom to examine whatever she wanted without fear of getting caught by misplacing a note. But all of it was nearly impossible to read. She had to snap photos and send it to the tech department so they could attempt to use computer algorithms to detect letters. It was a horribly annoying process.

There was one note she could read through that caught her attention. One probably written by Twilight.

Observation: it seems like time flows at different rates in different universes. I had previously thought the constant shifts in hours were because of different planetary rotation periods or magic, but this is not the case. Using two synchronized watches, I found that the one I left home had let seven hours pass while the one I took had let six and a half hours pass. Similar results occurred in other universes. This explains why Sunset talks about Equestria as if it’s experienced multiple years since the demon incident, but how it’s definitely only been one year from here. This time discrepancy warrants further investigation.

Very interesting.

010 - Under the Nose

It is time to move in.

Agent Tempest Shadow stood before the statue at Canterlot High. The sculpture’s base shimmered in the sunny afternoon, making it impossible to tell if there was a portal there or if it was just really shiny.

There was an easy way to find out. She could just touch it.

She stood motionless, hesitant. She found herself going down a mental checklist – her gun was safely hidden under her jacket, her sunglass scanners were active, and she had her bulletproof vest on. Not to mention the other useful gadgets she carried on her at all times… She was prepared. She knew it was time to make her move.

But why did she pause here, now?

She shook her head – no, none of that. She was an agent of the United States Government, and she would not let herself falter now. She moved her hand toward the pedestal, expecting to be sucked in…

She just hit solid rock.

The portal wasn’t open right now. She retracted her arm slowly. Turning, she walked away nonchalantly. Nobody paid her much attention.

She pulled out her phone and dialed her boss. “The portal’s inactive at the moment. The operation cannot continue.”

“Well that’s a load of bull. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve got a load of illegally shipped bulls here.”

Tempest heard angry mooing in the background. “I did inform you of the portal’s unreliability.”

“Oh, I’m not mad at you, merely at fortune. I await the day when we can know things for certain…”

“I suggest we attempt again in a week.”

“Bah, I’m tired of waiting. We’re going with plan B.”

“…I am not confident in the validity of that plan.”

“You don’t have to be. Just gather division C and bring in Sunset Shimmer. Today.”

“…Yes, sir.”

“Good! Now hurry back, you might miss french toast day.”

Tempest hung up. She was tempted to roll her eyes but decided the gesture would be pointless. She was more than used to the antics of her boss at this point. Slightly crazed, possibly insane, but also very effective. He had a way of making things work.

Would this be the day everything fell apart?

Possibly. Though she always thought this when she went on missions she believed were ill-advised.

She dialed another number on her phone. “Division C, it’s Agent Shadow. We’ve got a mission. Meet me on the corner of Maple and Locust Grove.”

~~~

Starlight returned to Twilight’s Castle through the Mirror Portal, humming a little tune to herself. In her hoof was a small obelisk carved in white runes, the most dominant of which was a cross shape.

Another successful haul. This beauty was able to heal all sorts of wounds by touch alone. It had sure come in handy when she was procuring it, so much danger attacking her from all sides. Thanks to these runes she didn’t even have any scars. This was one of the better items she’d managed to obtain on her journeys.

“What do you have there?” Fluttershy asked, sauntering up to her.

“Souvenir,” Starlight said automatically.

“Oh? What’s it do?”

“It’s a small healing rock,” Starlight said.

“You sure do get a lot of magical souvenirs when you go through the portal alone…”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “It’s just because I’m looking for interesting things when I’m alone. When I’m with you girls we’ve usually got other things to deal with. I just let myself have some fun.”

Fluttershy narrowed her eyes. “That looks a lot like one of the runes from Lai…”

Starlight lit her horn, adjusting the controls on the Mirror Portal with her magic, careful not to let Fluttershy notice. “I wasn’t in Lai, Fluttershy. Plus, trying to take one of those runes would be stupid. Not only would the ponies get upset that they lost a rune, but the golems would be out for blood.”

Fluttershy turned to the Mirror Portal, checking the levers. “…The mushroom people had it?”

“Well they didn’t have it, but it was in some magical alcove in their world,” Starlight said. “You want it? Very helpful. Cleaned up a pretty nasty cut of mine in an instant.”

Fluttershy smiled. “I will if I get an injured animal. Don’t have any though. The Sanctuary’s been doing fine on its own. Rexy is a great guardian.”

“I’d expect so. Anyway, see you tomorrow, Fluttershy. Think we’ll find that world made of donuts yet?”

“I don’t think it’d be safe to let Pinkie in such a place…”

“We’re still going to find it eventually. It’s just a matter of time before we get to witness the apocalypse.”

Fluttershy chuckled. “I hope we find it sooner rather than later. Rip the bandage off quickly.”

Starlight shrugged. She waved goodbye and sauntered off to one of the castle’s basements. The moment she was out of Fluttershy’s sights she let out a harsh breath. “I’ve got to be more careful. They’d never understand…”

“Never understand what?” A deep, amused voice said from all angles.

Starlight tensed – not because she couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from, but because she recognized who it was. “D-Discord! Uh… How nice of you to drop by! …Where are you?”

With a flash of white magic, the wall right next to her transformed into Discord himself, in all his conglomerated glory. He smirked at her, staring into her soul with his uneven eyes. “Right here, of course, are you blind?”

“Veeeeery possibly,” Starlight said. “What brings you here?”

“Oh, just checking in on Fluttershy. And lo and behold, I find that you are talking to her and decide to listen in. It seems innocent enough, but then, oh but then, I hear you make a remark…” He snapped his fingers, changing his face into a parody of Starlight’s. He let out a comical wail. “Oh, woe is me! I was almost discovered! They can never understand me!”

“That’s not what I said!”

“It’s close enough. Still pretty suspicious, if I do say so myself.”

“I just didn’t want to tell her about all the pain I went through to get this,” Starlight said, holding out the rune. “I lost a leg before I got a hold of it.”

Discord narrowed his eyes. “Hrm… You’re covering up the lie with a half-truth.”

“…What?”

“What you just said was true, but it’s not the whole story. You’re being misleading. A wonderfully chaotic move, I must say, but Fluttershy doesn’t like it when that’s done to her. So I suppose I’ll have to grab her and have her demand the truth from you.”

“Oh no. The Stare.”

“Yes. The Stare. Nobody can resist those eyes.”

Starlight shivered, biting her lip. “Please… Please don’t, Discord. If you’re my friend, you won’t grab her. The truth would hurt her.”

“Then tell me. I’m unlikely to be hurt.”

“You… You probably won’t-“ She blinked, thinking for a moment. “Actually, I think you might be able to understand.” She glanced around nervously. “…Is anyone else around?”

“Pinkie. But that’s a universal constant.”

Starlight shrugged. “I think she knows, like she knows so many things, she just doesn’t say. I’ll never understand why… Regardless, this way. I’m going to take you to my… stash.”

“Is it full of energy drinks?”

“Part of it, at least.” She trotted further into the castle’s basement, arriving at a hall with no light in it. She used her own horn to illuminate the way, eventually coming to a stop at a door with her cutie mark imprinted on it. “Magically sealed, only I can open it. You probably could as well if you put your power to it.” She lit her horn, undoing the lock spell. The door slid open, revealing a small room with numerous boxes in it. Many of them contained energy drinks.

“…Why are you showing me a bunch of energy drinks?”

“Not what I’m here to show you.”

He twisted his body so he was standing behind her and looking her in the face. “Why energy drinks though? I never see you drink them!”

“I don’t in public. Pinkie finds them. Then things start exploding. Have to keep them hidden down here, in the stash.”

Discord grabbed one and drank it – prompting a spit-take that lit a nearby box on fire, reducing it to rubber balls. Starlight rolled her eyes at Discord’s chaotic antics. “It’s not that bad!”

“How can you drink these things!?”

Starlight ignored him and walked up to a seemingly empty wall. She lit her horn, unleashing magical sparks on six particular sections. A magic circle appeared in the wall, dissolving a circular path into the crystal. Starlight stepped through, entering a new, even more secret room.

Discord’s jaw dropped the moment he got a look around the new enclosure. There were boxes in here as well but they weren’t full of energy drinks. There were magical artifacts of many different sizes, including more than a few Lai runes. Several boxes were filled to the brim with electronic tablets, phones, and computers. A large television screen was mounted on one wall with several large boxes plugged into it. Propped up next to the screen was a large blue rune with a cat-like golem sleeping on top of it. The unusual items had no unifying pattern – robot heads, scientific equipment, ancient bending scrolls, books – it seemed like she’d taken anything she wanted.

“…You have a problem,” Discord said.

“I’m not a kleptomaniac,” Starlight asserted.

“…What?”

“It means someone who can’t stop stealing. I don’t steal from the other worlds for no reason – I take so we can use these things. You see that table over there? I’m trying to insert one of the runes into a helicopter drone. If possible, I could create an automatic friend that’ll constantly cast protection spells for us! Or look over here, this is a completely normal tablet, right?”

“Too shiny to be a normal tablet.” He snapped his fingers, transforming it into stone. “Much better.”

“Undo that, I was trying to make a point.”

Discord shrugged, reverting it. Starlight smiled, tapping the screen with her hoof. An apple materialized in the air in front of her. She tossed it to Discord. “I’ve enchanted this thing with several spells, each activated by certain buttons in this ‘app’ here.”

Discord looked at the screen, eyebrow raised. “…Why’s it a cookie?”

“I adapted one of the games on this thing. This tablet used to belong to an evil Sunset before I got my hooves on it.”

“Seventeen decillion cookies?”

“Uh… Ignore that number, it means nothing,” Starlight blushed. She shut off the tablet with a quick press of the button. “I also have projects exploring the art of fusing runes together, making masks out of runes, letting these robots use magic… All stuff that Twilight will be very glad I made, all stuff that’ll greatly help Equestria.”

Discord raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“She’s too nice, Discord. Refuses to take anything, doesn’t think about furthering her world. The others do, having taken advantage of our magic and hospitality without giving much in return. I’m just the backup Twilight doesn’t know about. We have their stuff.”

Discord furrowed his brow. “So… You go to universes, take random things you think might be useful, and then work on them here, hoping that in the future Twilight will thank you for what you’ve done?”

“Yeah! That’s it!”

Discord chuckled. “I like it! Completely crazy and doomed to failure, of course, but who cares about that!?”

“…What a rousing endorsement.”

“I do have a question though. What’s the TV for?”

“Ah… When I was in Earth stores, there were a lot of things to take easily. They’re video games unlike anything we have here, much better than those dinky arcade machines. Wanna play? I’ve got a two player game but I’ve never had anypony else down here to try.”

“Not even Trixie?”

Starlight raised an eyebrow. “Funny. Trixie. Keeping her mouth shut. What an interesting thought.”

Discord created a blue unicorn sock puppet meant to be Trixie. “Oh Starlight, I assuuuuure you, the Great and Powerful Trixie won’t boast about all the things her best friend is doing! Trixie can keep a secret! Trixie is great at being silent about your thieving exploits!”

Starlight chuckled. “Trixie, the entire neighborhood just heard that. You’ve doomed us all.”

Discord created a sock puppet Twilight. “TRAITORS! ALL OF YOU!” He made the Trixie sock puppet look aghast. “But Trixie wasn’t involved!” The Twilight sock puppet folded her arms. “You were standing nearby and you’re Trixie! GUILTY!”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “That’s enough Discord. Do you want to play or not?” She levitated two controllers into the air.

He shrugged. “Eh, I have time to kill. I need to see if these things of yours are really worthwhile.” He grabbed one with his foot, ready to conquer these ‘video games.’

~~~

“Fire comes from within, Sunset. Reach into your passion and push out!”

“I know, Iroh!” Sunset said, flinging a fireball at a sparring dummy made of a propped up mop and a bucket. “That’s one of the first things you told me!” She did a backward cartwheel, shooting fire into the air, careful not to burn the track she was practicing on.

“Feel the chi flow through your body-“

“Are you just repeating basic training to annoy me?” Sunset asked, spinning around to generate a small whirlwind of fire around herself.

“I thought that was obvious!” Iroh laughed.

Sunset grunted to herself, standing on one leg and shooting fire out of one of her fingers, hitting the dummy right in the bucket-head. Then she leaped over to the bucket, grabbed it by the handle, flipped it over, and put a flame under it. She reached into her pocket, removing a piece of bacon from a sealed bag and tossing it into the bucket. In two minutes the delectable meat was ready. She removed the flame and kicked the bucket into the air, tossing the meat over to Iroh. He caught it in his mouth, licking his lips. “Well done!”

“This is very, very absurd,” Sunset said.

“So? You’re getting good. A fast learner. Not as fast as Aang, but he had a bit of an unfair advantage over you.”

“Did he learn to combatatively cook things?”

“…I’m not sure that’s a word.”

“Did he?”

“No. He had a more… specific goal. But I fully expect him to discover the art of culinary firebending and fall in love with it. Once he has time to rest, anyway. The world always needs its Avatar.”

Sunset nodded. “I’m surprised you find the time to come here to me.”

“I am as well. It turns out that an ambassador, while an important individual, isn’t needed constantly.”

“If you were an ambassador for Earth the paperwork would never end.”

Iroh chuckled. “Remind me to never be an ambassador for Earth then!”

“They’ll never let an outsider speak for them…” Sunset said, smile vanishing. “Humans have a… problem. At least here. They all think they’re right and will seek out information that confirms what they believe, passing off anything else as lies. Anyone who isn’t them or with them is the enemy, worthy of being hated.”

Iroh raised an eyebrow. “I thought your world was at peace?”

“There are wars happening elsewhere. They’re small compared to what you experienced and to what happened in this world’s past. But they’re there. It’s like people just want to hate each other. I’m concerned what they’d do if they found the other universes…”

Iroh shrugged. “I won’t pretend to have any idea. This world makes little sense to me. Everything’s so prevalent, and yet nobody seems happy.”

“My friends tell me not to worry about it, that I can’t do anything,” Sunset said. “And they’re probably right. For now, anyway.” She shook her head. “Sorry about this. I guess I went a little deep there for a second.”

“It’s no problem. It’s a sign that you know how to think.”

“I have to know how to think or I’m not going to make it in the world of theoretical physics.”

Iroh shook his head. “I don’t mean that kind of thought. I mean the thought directed inward, the thought that helps you see yourself and others for what they are.”

“I try.” She kicked the bucket back on top of the mop. “Well, I should probably go study. Those derivatives won’t derive themselves.”

Iroh chuckled. “There you go, speaking those words again. Such a strange alien language.”

Sunset rolled her eyes, waving as she walked away. She turned a corner, heading to the dorms. She was already considering flopping onto her bed the moment she arrived, but that Calculus homework was due tomorrow and if she didn’t do it now she’d have to rush it. That’d just be bad.

She was suddenly thankful her roommate wasn’t a party animal. Sugarcoat was surprisingly helpful in studying. Sometimes brutal tactless honesty had a point normal encouragement didn’t.

Sunset heard a footstep behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see another student.

It wasn’t. It was a woman dressed in black. She moved too fast for Sunset to react – covering Sunset’s mouth with a hand and jabbing a gun painfully into Sunset’s side.

“You’re coming with me,” she said in a powerful, somewhat arrogant tone. “Don’t try anything. I’m Agent Shadow, and your presence is demanded by the Government of the United States. I’m willing to release you if you’ll come peacefully.”

Fat chance, Sunset thought. She let her muscles relax and go slack though.

Agent ‘Shadow’ (if that was her real name) apparently knew this was just a ruse to gain the upper hand since she produced a pair of handcuffs, ready to imprison Sunset.

“Excuse me, can you tell me where-”

Agent Shadow didn’t let Iroh finish. She pointed the gun in his direction - a motion he was apparently expecting, for he threw fire in her face as she turned to look at him. She was knocked to the ground, leaving Sunset free from handcuffs.

“Let’s get out of here…” Sunset said, reaching into her pocket for the dimensional device. She realized with a shock that it was busted. The agent had pressed her gun right into it. “Crud.”

“I used the Mirror Portal,” Iroh said. “It should be open.”

Agent Shadow leaped up with alarming speed, kicking Iroh right in the chest. She whipped her gun on him. “My quarrel is not with you.”

“That’s what you think.” He breathed fire at her, throwing her aim off. The gun went off, hitting nothing. Sunset elbowed her in the gut, knocking her to the ground again. She was prepared for a longer fight, but Iroh grabbed her and ran.

“Why are we-“

“Those kinds of people never work alone,” Iroh muttered. “Where’s your car?”

Sunset nodded, taking the lead. “This way!” She leaped over a bush, heading right for the parking lot, Iroh showing no difficulty in keeping up with her.

Two men in black charged at them from the side, holding guns. “Stop in the name of the law!”

“Drat,” Sunset muttered. “They’re going to start shooting.”

Iroh leaped into the air, putting his hands together. A torrent of fire shot forth from his hands, bright enough to blind the two agents. Only one of their guns went off, again, hitting nothing.

“They’re being very cautious with those guns…” Iroh observed.

“They don’t want to cause a scene. It’d be really bad if someone other than us got hit.” She ran to the door of her car, jumping in. “Mildly surprised they weren’t watching this.”

“They still might be,” Iroh said, taking his place in the back seat. Sunset turned the keys and floored it. She pulled out of the parking spot with the intense and unpleasant screech of burning rubber on a rough road. She tore through the lot of cars at a speed well above what was safe.

She was glad she tossed safety to the wind. A black car began pursuing them at its own reckless speed. A siren went off, alongside red and blue lights.

“They want everyone to think this is just a criminal chase…” Sunset muttered.

Iroh furrowed his brow, looking out the back window. “They’re not gaining, at least. We should be able to make it…”

Sunset paled. There was a red light ahead at a busy road. There was a sea of cars moving across her field of view. “Iroh, I’m going to have to pull a very, very sharp right turn at a speed right turns were not meant to be taken at. Hold onto your lunch.”

Iroh grabbed his stomach and grinned. “Done!”

Sunset shifted slightly into the left lane, making many cars honk at her for intruding on their space. Then she yanked the wheel down to the right, skidding into the intersection in a semi-spiral. The car leaned up on its two left wheels, but didn’t tip over. Sunset was able to floor it, completing the high-speed turn without crashing into any cars.

Mostly.

She noticed her left mirror was missing.

She wondered when that had happened.

“They did it as well,” Iroh announced.

“Trained professionals…” Sunset muttered under her breath.

“One’s pointing a gun out of the window.”

Sunset’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. This was the only reaction she was allowed before a bullet shot through the back window and went straight through to the front windshield, barely missing Iroh and Sunset.

“I have no way to stop that!” Sunset said, hanging a left into a mostly abandoned side street.

“I do,” Iroh said, popping open the skylight and crawling onto the roof of the car. “Tell me if you’re going to turn!” He yelled down.

“Are you crazy!?” Sunset blurted.

“Very.” Iroh looked behind them, now able to see two cars in hot pursuit. A bullet flew past him, nicking his ear. He winced at the pain but maintained his composure. He raised his hands into the air and began to move them in a calculated circular motion, separating his chi into controllable powers. Blue sparks of energy began to come out of his fingers.

Sunset had no idea what he was doing. But she trusted him.

Iroh moved his body back, pushing energy behind him. He pointed a finger towards the pursuing cars, blue electricity crackling around his extended hand. He unleashed a bolt of lightning from his fingers, hitting the metallic cars dead on. The arcs of electricity bounced from car to car with intense energy.

Cars, especially government issue ones, are designed to protect their occupants from lightning strikes, should they ever come. Had Iroh’s attack been a simple bolt similar to the ones in storms, nothing would have happened besides some very disoriented drivers. But Iroh got lucky. Tires, while very good insulators, will blowout if enough heat is put into them. Iroh’s lightning lasted long enough to raise the air pressure beyond manageable levels. Both cars blew out a tire. When combined with the disorientation of the lightning strike itself, the cars spun out.

“…That was awesome.”

Iroh leaped down into the car again. “I’m a firebending master, Sunset. Don’t be all that surprised when I pull out something unexpected.”

“You’re bleeding!”

“Just a nick on the ear. They’re horrible shots.”

“I’m talking about your arm!”

Iroh looked at his left arm. It was drenched in blood. “…Well would you look at that. I suppose I’m in shock then. Keep driving, I’ll treat myself.” He tore off the sleeve on his right arm, wrapping it tightly around the wound. “Went clean through…”

“I think that’s good! I think? I don’t know, TV could lie!”

“Sunset, calm yourself. Get us to the Mirror Portal.”

Sunset pulled onto the curb of Canterlot High a moment later. She ran past the statue – the Portal wouldn’t be there. Twilight had moved the Mirror Portal, so the connection point had moved as well. Twilight was working on figuring out why that was the case, but at the moment Sunset didn’t care. She ran to one of the first-floor windows of Canterlot High, pressing her hand into it.

The portal wasn’t there.

Sunset took a breath. “…Are you sure you came through here?”

“Positive. It appears someone else used it.”

“Well, fudge,” Sunset said.

“You should’ve used a stronger word than fudge,” Agent Shadow muttered, aiming her pistol at Sunset’s head. “You’ve just made a big scene.”

Sunset looked at the street. Yep. There was a black car there. One without a busted tire. She gulped.

“Both of you. In the car. Now.”

Sunset curled her fist. Maybe she could…

“Sunset…” Iroh said, gesturing with his head towards the car. There were other agents with guns aimed and ready.

Sunset was pretty sure they wouldn’t miss this time.

She sighed, putting her hands high into the air. “…Fine. We surrender.”

Agent Shadow produced a pair of handcuffs. “Good.”

They were soon on their way in the custody of people who Sunset doubted were really government agents. To make matters worse, she didn’t have the journal on her. They couldn’t call for help…

And she wasn’t getting that calculus homework done.

Somehow that was the worst part of all this.

~~~

Discord and Starlight stared at the screen with tears in their eyes. The controllers had been discarded a long time ago in exchange for a movie. And Celestia, was the movie emotional.

“That… That was beautiful,” Discord said.

Starlight sniffed. “She gave up her dream so the kids could have theirs… That was so…”

“…Perfect.” He stood up. “This is definitely worthwhile. I’m on your side, Starlight.”

“Thank you,” Starlight said. “You’re welcome to come down here whenever you want. I’ll keep getting new stuff. Just don’t mess with anything.”

Discord snapped his fingers, summoning one of the Directory books to his hand. “I’m going to do more than that. I’m going to help you.”

Starlight blinked. “…What?”

“Let’s go. Right now. Find a world, get something interesting.” He flipped to a random page and pointed at a world marked with UNSAFE. “I’m sure I can get us through here.”

“Discord! We don’t know what’s in those places!”

“Exactly. Ripe for the plundering!” He snapped his fingers, putting Starlight in a blue suit. A spherical bubble surrounded her head.

“Discord this is bizarre. And unsafe.”

Discord smirked mischievously. “You’re already being unsafe and dastardly. I’m just here to improve your experience.” He snapped his fingers, tearing a hole in reality completely on his own power. The world they connected to was monochrome and unlike any world they had seen before. The ‘sky’ was visible in all directions – an unchanging static pattern that belonged on a TV screen in a picture, not all around them. They could see the individual ‘pixels’ that made up the pattern, all identical in size, all somehow forming a single grid even though they should have appeared like a celestial sphere. The world was filled with impossibly expansive chunks of black earth only as thick as a bell tower. They floated on every level, and Starlight knew they extended beyond their sight range.

Discord stepped through and stretched his legs on top of a black chunk. “Well, this is something I’ve never seen before. I particularly like this sky. My house could use something like that.”

Starlight stepped out behind him, carefully touching the earth beneath her. It felt like a rock. Like what she’d expect a rock to feel like, a rock that was somehow the combination of all rocks she’d ever felt. “Bizarre…” She used her magic to lift a pebble and toss it back into the room. She waved her hoof in front of her. “This place is airless.”

“Yep!”

“How are we talking?”

“Magic. Mine, of course.”

She walked to the edge of their earth chunk and stared into the abyss below. More static – but also more slabs of earth. All of them were parallel to the one they themselves were standing on. Some must have stretched for hundreds of miles.

“How is there even an up and down here?” Starlight wondered.

“Well that isn’t me,” Discord said, creating an apple that fell upward and exploded in a shower of cardboard. Each brown piece was immune to gravity. “I can remove it if you want.”

“Nah… I like having a down.” She glanced at the portal. “We should probably close that before we suck all the air out of Twilight’s castle.”

Discord closed the portal dutifully. It was then Starlight realized how quiet everything was here. There was no sound and no motion besides her and Discord. She could hear her own heartbeat thumping in her chest.

“We need to name this place,” Discord said.

“What if it already has a name?”

“Does it look like anybody lives here?”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Starlight said.

“I vote for calling it the Graybox.”

“No…” Starlight said, lifting her ears. She listened to the silence. “That’s not it…”

Discord raised an eyebrow. “Whatever. We can name it later.”

Starlight rammed her hoof into the ground. She heard half of the noise that was supposed to come from that action. The part that came from her hoof. No sound at all came from the rock. “This is impossible,” she said. “I’m hitting it, and it’s not giving way, it has to be vibrating. But there’s no thunk, no thud, no skidding noise… Just motion. But motion implies at least some sound…”

Discord facepalmed. “This is another universe Starlight! That may be unusual, even for me, but come on, you’re talking to the lord of Chaos. I could make sounds come from nothing and turn you into sound.”

“Please don’t,” Starlight said. “I don’t think that’d be safe here.”

Discord shrugged. “As you wish.” He snapped his fingers, teleporting them to another slab of rock. Even though they had to have moved several miles, the static sky did not change.

“They must be light-years away,” Starlight offered.

“Or they could always be the exact same distance from you,” Discord said, creating a box of orange peels in front of them. It always stayed precisely one meter from Starlight’s face. She turned to Discord – slapping him in the face with it. “Ow…”

“You should be more careful with the illustrations you create. Your point can always come back to bite you.”

Discord created a pen with teeth. It snapped at him. “Eh, I don’t know. Seems innocent enough.”

Starlight facehooved.

Discord grinned, tossing the pen behind him. It imploded, spraying laughing ink everywhere. Starlight wiped it off her face, unamused. She took in a breath. “Well, it doesn’t look like anything’s here… Just rocks, gravity, and no sound whatsoever.”

“Do you want to go back already?” Discord put his hands to his face, forcing green reptilian tears to fall from his face.

“I already got a soil sample. There’s nothing else to collect. Unless you’ve suddenly learned how to teleport light-years away so we can investigate the static.”

Discord frowned. “There she goes. Ladies and gentlemen, pointing out a limit in my power. Amazing.”

An audience composed of three copies of Discord yawned. The ‘feminine’ one booed.

Starlight summoned an orange with her magic and threw it at the booing Discord. The audience vanished before it made contact.

“Are oranges your attack of choice now?” Discord mused. “I much prefer limes myself.”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “Can you think of anything else to do here besides throw fruit at each other?”

Discord turned into a mouse. “We can have a rat race. Or…” He transformed back into his regular self, except wearing a pilot’s suit. “We can see how far we can fall.”

“Discord…”

“TALLY-HO!” He cheered, stepping off the edge of the rocky slab, falling down into the eternity. Starlight rolled her eyes, wrapping herself in telekinesis and rushing to match his increasing speed. Without air, there was nothing working against gravity. They both kept falling faster and faster.

“Think we’ll be able to see a rock before we hit it?” Starlight asked after a minute of falling.

“I dunno. But you can rest easy, Discord is here! I’ll just bring your flattened body back to life, easy.”

“It’s almost like there’s no danger when you’re around.”

“I know! It’s great, isn’t it? You all should have Fluttershy scream ‘Discord! Save me!’ so I can swoop in and save the day!”

“We all know you can’t hear her when she’s in another universe.”

“You never know, I might be watching anyway…”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “…How fast do you think we’re falling now?”

Discord took out a speedometer from nowhere. “Over a kilometer a second. In two more minutes it’ll be two kilometers a second.”

“…Those numbers don’t mean anything to you.”

“Nope! It’s just what the dealy says!”

“It’s a compass now.”

“Huh. So it is. Apparently up is north.”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “So, had enough of falling yet?”

“Yeah.” Discord clapped his hands, and suddenly they were motionless. Starlight didn’t question how she survived this deceleration. Discord opened a portal back home – and hit rock. Soil poured out of the opening into the world of static.

Discord put on a detective hat and a pipe that blew bubbles upside down. “It seems we’re deep underground.”

“No, really?”

“Easy fix. Just a teleport-“

“Wait,” Starlight said, holding up a hoof. “I see something over there.”

Discord stopped his fingers from snapping. He followed her gaze to a nearby slab of rock. There was, in fact, something on top of it. A tall black rectangle.

A monolith.

Starlight teleported them right next to it. It was about the height of Discord, taking the shape of an ideally proportioned rectangle. It was only as thick as a hoof and it floated above the ground high enough that Starlight could walk under it, which she did. It was made of some black featureless metal that glinted in the light.

“Question. Where is the light coming from?” Starlight asked, ignoring the whine that had started in her ears. Her senses were finally wigging out from the silence.

“No idea,” Discord said, tapping the monolith with his claw. Nothing happened.

“Discord, you could have triggered an apocalypse or something.”

“Yeah, right,” he rolled his eyes.

Starlight returned her attention to the monolith, eyes narrowing. She figured since nothing had happened when Discord touched it, she might as well try messing with it herself. She lit her horn, attempting to touch it with her magic.

It sucked her telekinesis spell dry, right into itself.

Starlight grinned. “…A magic absorption material.”

Discord took a step back from it. “Like that bug Chrysalis’ throne? Eck!”

“Somewhat. That absorbed magic selectively, and with a range. This thing will just absorb whatever contacts it…” She rubbed her hooves together. “We’re taking this home.”

“How? It’ll just absorb any magic we throw at it, and that’s about all we’ve got to throw at it.”

“Only what it’s touching. Discord, create some rockets and put them under this stone slab. We’re carrying this thing up.”

Discord shrugged. “Sure.” In an instant, seven rockets were placed beneath the rock. Starlight cut a circular area of the rock out of the miles-long slab, allowing it to rise into the air. The monolith maintained a constant distance from the rock, effectively moving upward.

“This’ll take a while,” Starlight noted. “Now we are fighting something. Gravity itself.”

Discord conjured a deck of cards. “Care for a game?”

“I don’t see why not. As interesting as this monolith is, I’d prefer not to chance it draining all my magic here. Here is bad.” As the whine in her ear attested, ponies were just not meant to have true silence around them. She tried to focus on the game, but it was difficult. Everything she heard felt wrong. She was certainly ready to get out of this place.

But she couldn’t leave without the treasure.

~~~

Sunset and Iroh sat in a room. It was comfortable enough, like a hotel room. Two large beds, a TV, a desk, and a bathroom. No windows though, and the door was locked with several levels of security in addition to being completely fireproof.

This didn’t stop Sunset from trying to get through. She’d bypassed two electronic locks and had picked a physical keyhole. Currently, she was using a wire obtained from a light bulb fixture to probe a lock situated through the door’s crack.

Iroh glanced at her. “You know, they probably know what you’re doing.”

Sunset held up a busted video camera and three listening devices. “I combed the place. They have no more eyes in here.”

“Then why haven’t they come in to check on us in a while?”

“I have no idea,” Sunset said. “I’m just going to work on getting out since there appears to be an opportunity.”

Iroh shrugged, lying back on the bed. “I’d just wait for our captors to return and tell us what they want. They even treated my wound. No enemy would do that.”

“It means they want something, and I don’t like that…” Another lock clicked open. “Gettin’ there…”

“Come, Sunset, relax and watch TV. I’m personally learning a lot from your news. I just saw the same story run twice on two separate channels. Very different…”

“News is not relaxing…”

“It can be amusing though. Your leader is a riot!”

“Joy,” Sunset deadpanned, continuing her work. She probed the lock – and it clicked open. Then all the other locks opened up as well.

Sunset blinked. “Uh… what did I do?”

The door swung open, revealing Agent Shadow standing there with a keycard. “Four locks. Not bad. But your time’s up. Come on out you two, the boss wants to see you.”

Iroh stretched his uninjured arm and grinned. “Ah, good thing you came now, I was considering taking a nap!”

Sunset twitched. “How can you be so relaxed!?”

Iroh shrugged. “I’m an old man. Getting worked up over things seems like too much work.”

Agent Shadow narrowed her eyes. “Hurry up.”

Sunset stood up, kicking all her makeshift tools out of the way. She reached out for Agent Shadow gently, her ungloved hand ready to get a reading.

The agent kicked Sunset in the gut and shoved her in the shoulder. “You are not going to be doing that. Put your gloves on.”

Sunset groaned but did as was asked. She stood up, glaring at the agent. “You’ve clearly done your homework.”

“I’m well versed in your capabilities. We clearly underestimated the old man though.”

“Us old folks often know the dirtiest tricks,” Iroh said. Then his face suddenly became serious. “Take us to your leader. I have a feeling there’s much to discuss.”

“That there is.” She put handcuffs on the two of them, leading them into a hallway with many other doors that presumably led to similar rooms. They passed dozens of these rooms before coming to an elevator. The three of them piled in. The agent selected “B12” on the keypad. Sunset ran her eyes across the numbers – highest floor was 3, lowest was B13. This was a big facility. It probably also didn’t exist. At least not the lower levels.

“What’s in basement 13?” Sunset asked.

The agent gave no response. Iroh and Sunset followed her example. They arrived at the basement in a few seconds. The doors slid open to reveal a large, open space filled with computers. Dozens of people in suits and glasses sat at the computers, typing furiously. A few agents stood rigidly at the edges of the room, presumably serving as both guards and overseers. Towards the back of the room were several giant screens, one of which showed a map of the world colored in different places. Most were a faint purple, but a few areas spiked in color. The Bermuda Triangle, someplace in China, and the state Canterlot High was in were all bright red.

Other screens showed images of people. Sunset saw herself, Iroh, both Twilights, and Pinkie up there alongside other individuals she didn’t recognize. Words flashed by faster than she could read. Magic surge found in… …China researching Arcanum… …conformed haunting in Japan…

“Holy meatballs on a stick. You guys are a paranormal investigations unit,” Sunset muttered.

“That we are!” A loud, jovial, bombastic voice yelled from just beneath the world map. A tall man with pale blue skin and an impressive white beard stood up from his large swivel chair, his black suit shining with premium polish. “I am Director Storm! Pleased to make your acquaintance! Agent Shadow, remove their handcuffs, this is no way to do meet new people!”

Agent Shadow tensed. “But sir, they can-“

“I know they could burn this place to the ground, but since we’ve been rather rude in bringing them here, I think we should extend an olive branch.”

Agent Shadow undid the handcuffs reluctantly, letting Iroh and Sunset free.

Director Storm rubbed his hands together. “Much better! Come up here, my desk has extra chairs. I can even order us drinks. Coffee or tea?”

“Tea,” Iroh said.

“Coffee,” Sunset said.

Iroh looked at her like she was a traitor.

“Hey, hey, I’ll get tea next time! Both are good drinks!”

Director Storm laughed. “Already off to a great start!” As they sat down opposite Storm, an agent with a blank expression delivered piping hot tea and coffee, along with a bizarre rainbow fruit cocktail for the Director.

Iroh extended his hand. “I am Ambassador Iroh, Director, pleased to finally make your acquaintance.”

Director Storm shook the hand. “The pleasure is all mine. And I see you using your injured arm there, trying to show you aren’t afraid of a little pain are you, hrm? I do apologize about the gunshot, I had instructed her to be brought in without injuries. Though I suppose that did end up being true. Not a scratch on Sunset. Don’t you hate it when your subordinates technically follow your orders?”

Iroh nodded. “I was a general once. Many battles were lost by technicalities.”

“Ah, a military man? I myself was one, served as a colonel before coming here. I like this job a lot better.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “What, investigating magic?”

“Precisely!” Director Storm confirmed. “We are the Arcane Investigations Department, tasked with observing the magical hotspots of the world for the United States Government. Unfortunately, we don’t exist so there’s no special arcane badge or anything, we just get regular FBI stuff. So disappointing.”

“So...” Sunset pursed her lips. “Let me get this straight. You saw some of the magic happenings going on around the school recently, decided to investigate and watch us, and then became so interested in what was going on you had to capture me so I could tell you how to take control of it for yourself?”

Director Storm laughed. “So close, and yet, so far! We’ve been watching Canterlot High for decades, Sunset, since before I came in the program! Magic keeps popping up around there for no discernable reason – or, well, at least until we realized it was all because of its connection to another world. Thanks to you and your notes, by the way.”

“…You were rifling through my notes.” Sunset blinked. “…I need to apologize to Rainbow Dash. Wait, how did you read them?”

“It wasn’t easy. We had to run most of it through computer algorithms.”

Iroh laughed. Sunset furrowed her brow. “You still want me to tell you how to take control of magic.”

“Goodness gracious, no! You obviously don’t know how to do that and this isn’t some power play. That’s for politics, and we hate politics here. I have numerous Senators breathing down my back and it’s painful when a power play is involved. It goes like this. ‘Hey, can I get some funding to stop a magical disease from exploding all over India?’ ‘No, sorry, if I provide funding to you now they’ll hate the new budget proposal!’ And on and on and on and on…”

Sunset frowned. “You must want something from me to go through all this trouble.”

Director Storm smirked. “That I do.” He grabbed a remote and pointed it at the main screen, switching it from the world map to an in-depth schematic that Sunset recognized instantly. A fully 3D rendered version of her non-magical portal. The two spikes were clear. She watched as the model animated and tore a hole in reality.

Then the screen switched to a live video feed. In a large, dark room, Sunset could see two physical spikes protruding from the ground. Her jaw dropped.“You built it!?”

“Well, not precisely. It doesn’t function without magic, and we lack the precise spells you use to travel. But it’s your design. It can draw power from the nearby plant and drive it into a dimensional energy gateway… in theory, anyway. We’re unable to test it. So I decided I was tired of waiting for the brainiacs on level nine to replicate the spell. I brought you here with an offer. I want you to work for us, Sunset. I want you to push this division beyond simple ‘Arcane’ studies – we can make history with a non-magical portal device. You have the new ideas, the genius, and the prerequisite knowledge. You probably know more about magic than this entire facility put together!” He sat back. “Make the portal work and you’ve got yourself a job. It’ll pay for all your education and you’ll get to turn what you’ve been doing in your free time into something more… worthwhile. Isn’t this exciting!?”

Sunset blinked. “You have my broken portal device. You can just use that. Why all this talk of ‘offers’ and a ‘deal’?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Iroh said. “He wants you on their side.”

Sunset raised her right hand and took off her glove. “Director Storm, I do not know if you are altruistic, if you are telling the truth, or if you have some sort of evil plan in the back of that mind of yours. This all seems very, very fishy to me. But you can do something to prove yourself to me, and I think you know what it is.”

Director Storm grinned. Without a word he vigorously shook Sunset’s hand.

She felt his deep passion, his intense joy about life, his devotion, his anticipation… His desire. He wasn’t perfect. His positivity and words were genuine, but power corrupts, and it was corrupting him like it did all other men. He was being honest now, but he was a well-versed liar. He had not gotten to the top without causing bloodshed.

She was witness to several memories. Him throwing a Christmas celebration for all the AID agents. Him killing a man in cold blood with an arcane artifact. Him leading troops in a battle he was not prepared for. Him yelling at some random politician with a fire usually limited to the mouths of bloodthirsty barbarians…

Sunset leaned back. “…You mean what you say.”

“But, naturally, I’m not pure. I’m a horrendously selfish man who just wants to be great. I’m definitely willing to hurt people to do that. But it just so happens that I think huge projects for all of mankind is part of being great. And I think we can help each other here.” He folded his hands and grinned. “So? You want a job?”

“…I’ll have to let the sushi place know I’m quitting ahead of time…”

Director Storm fist pumped. “Yes! We can take care of that for you. I’m sure they’ll accept a Harvard graduate as a worker for now.”

“I haven’t said yes yet!”

“Yes you have,” Iroh and the Director said at the same time.

Sunset rolled her eyes. “Fine. I do have a condition though. I’m not going to be able to keep this secret from certain people I know.”

“You can tell anyone who knows about magic,” Director Storm said. “Well, that we exist at least, and that you’re working with us. You can’t give them details. Good enough of a compromise for you?”

Sunset slid the glove back over her hand. She tried to calm herself – she couldn’t let Director Storm’s excitement make her lose control. “Fair enough. Before we make any plans, what exactly will I be doing besides helping design this portal?”

“You have experience traveling the worlds, yes? You’ll be going through it with our main team with my best agents. Yes, that includes you Tempest.”

“I’m aware,” Agent Tempest Shadow muttered.

“Good!” Director Storm quipped. “You can start work right away! See if you can get old Iroh here home. Speaking of Iroh, Ambassador, I’ve been neglecting you. I do hope this won’t interfere with our agency’s relation to your world.”

Iroh raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You did shoot me.”

“I apologized!” Director Storm put on his best ‘cute eyes’ expression. It worked surprisingly well, Sunset decided.

Iroh smirked. “I’m afraid my opinion of you can only go so far, the people close to me aren’t going to like you.”

“Challenge accepted.”

“Hold it!” Sunset said. “I have calculus homework to get done! I can’t be working on a portal right now!”

Director Storm narrowed his eyes. “...I think we all know you won’t be able to focus on homework now that you’ve heard this.”

“…Yeah,” Sunset admitted.

“Agent Shadow! Take them to level 13, and bring the broken device. Introduce Sunset to the rest of the team!”

Tempest nodded. “This way,” she said, clearly not pleased that Sunset had accepted.

“You know, if we’re going to work together we’re going to have to get along,” Sunset observed.

“I don’t get along with anybody. Not my boss, not my coworkers. I do the job and I do it well. That’s it. End of story.”

Sunset turned to Iroh. “Challenge accepted?”

Iroh nodded. “Challenge accepted.”

“CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!” Director Storm echoed.

“Do you even know what challenge was accepted?” Sunset asked.

“Nope! Don’t care, that was fun to say. Now go have fun!” He waved them off cheerfully.

~~~

“Right, should be back to the right height now,” Starlight said. “Kill the rockets.”

Starlight heard agonizing screams beneath them as the rockets cut out. She facehooved. “I didn’t mean literally.”

Discord shrugged. “You should be careful about what you say around me, Starlight. I could turn anything into a juggling competition at any moment!”

“Just suck the monolith into the room.”

Discord snapped his fingers, creating a portal beneath the monolith. He lifted the gateway upward, transporting the monolith without actually touching it. Starlight grinned – this was working well! She’d be able to leave soon and her ears would be fine.

When half of the monolith was out of the dimension a brilliant red eye shape appeared in its center. The crimson shade was jarring to both of them. Nothing in this world had had any color before.

Then the monolith moved. It touched the edge of the portal, forcing it to close. The interdimensional forces were so strong the black slab was cut clean in two. The crimson eye vanished, unable to fully manifest on half a monolith. The remaining half fell to the ground, kicking up dust – but making no noise.

Starlight examined the place where the cut had occurred. There was no inner workings to the monolith at all. It might as well have been solid metal.

“…Odd,” Starlight said, biting her lip. “That makes me a little… nervous. Maybe this place is inhabited after all.”

“Could be.” Discord shot a magic bolt at the partial monolith. It absorbed the magic. “Still works though.”

“Hmm. Well at least we got something interesting. Come on Discord, take us-“ it was at this point she saw them coming right at them. Hundreds, if not thousands, of monoliths that definitely hadn’t been there before approaching them from all sides. All the monoliths wore the single eye. All of them drifted in their direction, silent, emotionless. Yet, still threatening.

Starlight felt compelled to look up. She paled – the static sky still existed. But there was another red eye directly above them, as if painted. On a hunch, she looked down over the edge to the static below them. There was another eye, but this one was… closed? How did she know it was an eye then?

Gravity suddenly flipped. They fell up, towards the open eye. Starlight was forced to reorient herself, realizing that the open eye was down.

“Discord! We’ve awakened something! Get us out of here!”

Discord snapped his fingers, generating a portal between them and the eye in the static. The monoliths were suddenly right next to them, close enough to disturb the formation of the dimensional portal. They closed in, making a box of red eyes around the two of them.

Starlight summoned a bomb with her magic and tossed it at the monoliths. The bomb hit, exploded, and did nothing.

Discord’s attempt at doing something worked better. He folded space itself into a noodle, creating a pathway out of the monolith box by circumventing three-dimensional space. He created another portal, shoving the two of them through it before the monoliths could react.

They were back in Starlight’s secret stash room. The bottom half of the first monolith was there, as dead as it had first seemed. Starlight glanced back through the portal.

She saw something sitting on a rock, past the swarm of monoliths.

Something purple.

“…Twilight?”

Discord closed the portal.

Starlights ears instantly stopped detecting any sort of whine. She let out a sigh of relief. Then she laughed. “We did it!” She set her foot on top of the monolith chunk. “We have obtained some anti-magic stone! Ha-ha!”

Discord produced a party blower out of nowhere and blew it.

Starlight shook her head. “Tsk tsk tsk. You should stop copying Pinkie’s moves, Discord. It isn’t good for your self-image.”

Discord shrugged. “Originality is overrated. So, Starlight, when are we going to do this again?”

“Again?”

“That was fun. I think it’s about time I put my foot in this dimensional exploration ring, and your lack of regard for rules seems just right for me!”

Starlight grinned. “How about every time I head out? I’ll no longer have to sneak around the Mirror Portal, and we can deposit things right here. Discord, we’re going to get so much awesome stuff.”

Discord smirked, knocking the monolith chunk. “You got it! …You think we could make a throne out of this?”

Starlight furrowed her brow. “….Maybe…?” Already, she was thinking about how to turn it into a throne without using magic. Already pushing the memories of the Noise out of her mind.

What Noise? There was no noise.

~~~

“Well, I like the Director,” Iroh said. “Reminds me of myself in many ways.”

“He doesn’t care as much as you,” Sunset said. “He wasn’t lying when he said he was selfish. He really does like power and glory, even if he does like those around him as well. He’s… An interesting character, I have to say. I wouldn’t trust him.”

“What do you think about him, Tempest?”

“He’s my boss,” Tempest muttered. “That’s it.”

Sunset put her hands on her hips. “Come on, every person you ever meet you have thoughts about.”

“People aren’t worth my time,” Tempest muttered. She led them into the elevator again, pressing the basement 13 button. They arrived at the bottom of the base shortly thereafter. It was just the large room they had seen on the screen earlier with the two arches. The only other people in the room were two men in suits talking happily to each other.

“Mike! Ike!” Tempest yelled. “Looks like we’ve got the sun girl on our team now.”

“Nice!” The shorter, pale white man said. “Told you she’d accept! Nobody can say no to the Director!”

“I could,” the dark red skinned man said. “It just happens that I agree with him most of the time.”

“Mike, there’s no way.”

Mike gave no response beyond a knowing smile.

The shorter man – presumably Ike – just shrugged. He went to shake Sunset’s hand – but held it back. “Waiiiit… I don’t want you seeing into my mind.”

“I’ve got a glove on right now,” Sunset said, smiling. “It’s fine.” She grabbed his hand and shook it. “See? No weird stuff. I’m Sunset Shimmer, but you know that. You probably know a lot about me. How about you tell me about yourselves?”

Tempest grunted. “Mike and Ike were once agents of the FBI whose very names are a national secret. Mike and Ike are code names they gained on a very, very classified assignment you will never know about. Mike is an agent with several confirmed kills, combat experience, and commendations. Ike… is his friend.”

Ike frowned. “Really Tempy? Really?”

“And I am Agent Tempest Shadow. And that’s all you need to know.” She shoved the broken portal device into Sunset’s hands. “You’ll know how to make the thing work.”

“Where do I put the spell?”

Tempest pointed at the only spot on the arches that had a light shone on them.

“Ah. Gotcha.” She popped the back off the device, which was easy considering how broken it was. She took out a single silver wafer, the part of the machine enchanted with the spell. She placed it inside the arch. “That was really easy.”

“Wait, that was it?” Ike blurted.

Iroh grinned. “That it was, my young friend. If you don’t mind, Sunset, do you think you can take me home?”

Sunset frowned. “Let’s see… Tempest, controls?”

Tempest shrugged. Mike pointed at a computer in a nearby wall. Sunset ran to it, finding to her delight that the user interface was almost identical to how she imagined it. She adjusted a few parameters involving the portal, and pressed go.

The two arched spikes lit up with a purple energy, coursing with electricity drawn from the power grid. A small point appeared in between them, stretching to match their edges to the arches. The city of Ba Sing Se could be seen clearly through the portal.

“Hrm…” Sunset said, scratching her chin. “We aren’t underground on that end… Something to look into.”

Tempest shrugged. “Finding that out is your job. Iroh, leave now. We’ll be in contact.”

Iroh shrugged. “To the point, aren’t you?”

“Move it.”

Iroh didn’t get a chance to move. A small group of people had noticed the portal and were walking towards it.

“Abort!” Tempest yelled.

Iroh held up his hand. “I know them.” He waved to the approaching group. Sunset could make out an Earth Kingdom girl, Fef, a grumpy looking Fluttershy, and some shadow girl…

“So, old man, you seem to have found yourself an adventure!” the Earth Kingdom girl said, smirking.

Iroh smiled. “What are you doing with such an interesting group, Toph?”

“Looking for you! Nobody wants to go exploring, everybody’s got a bunch of responsibilities. Sokka, Katara, Aang, Zuko, all of them are just too busy. But I’m not about to let this chance go. So I’m gathering whoever I can find to go have some fun with those things the ponies gave us. And you’re going to give us one!”

Tempest looked at Iroh. “You let children command you?”

Iroh and Toph burst into laughter. “Good Spirits, no!” Iroh said. “She’s a friend. And I think an exploration team is a great idea. A parallel to what you’re doing here, as it turns out.” He smirked. ”What are the odds two groups would form at the same time?”

“Extremely low. And yet, perfect,” Mike offered.

“Yeah! I like you!” Fef cheered.

“We are not the same team. All of you out!” Tempest shouted.

“Yeesh. Anger issues incarnate,” Toph muttered. “All right! Everyone follow the blind girl out, as is tradition! Hup hup!”

Iroh laughed, waving to Sunset. “I guess I’ve overstayed my welcome. This was fun. We should do this again.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “Something tells me we will. There’ll be no end to the fun.”

Tempest closed the portal, sealing the two worlds apart.

“There. Done. From now on we will do things by the book and follow the rules.” She stood tall. “Such a security breach should not be allowed again.”

Ike shrugged. “Loosen up, will you?”

“The boss is loose. I’m not. That’s how it works,” Tempest huffed.

Sunset shrugged. Frankly, she didn’t care all that much about what Tempest thought. She had a new job… And she was still excited about it. She was sure it was her excitement now, and not Director Storm’s. She now had the resources to actually help build the portal. And probably scientists who could figure out the gravity problem!

There’d be a non-magical solution yet…

~~~

Princess Twilight Sparkle teleported a desk in front of the Mirror Portal. “Okay, so since people are starting to travel to and from the worlds a lot, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the public is starting to learn about the Mirror Portal and what it is. More than a few have actually showed up asking to be let through. Naturally, this is a precious magical artifact and we can’t just let anypony in. That’s where you come in. You’re here to defend this Portal and keep track of who leaves, as well as who arrives.”

A cream-coated mare with a blue-pink curled mane bowed. “You can count on me, Princess.”

Twilight smiled. “You came highly recommended, Bon Bon. Celestia herself suggested you.”

Bon Bon glanced around nervously. “…What does this mean about my cover?”

“You’re still Bon Bon of Ponyville. No secret agent history as far as anyone who comes through here is concerned. You’ll look like a simple secretary. But your job is very important.”

“I won’t let you down.”

Twilight smiled. “I know you won’t.”

She left Bon Bon to get situated with her new desk. She noticed Starlight and Discord walking towards her. “Oh. Hello you two!”

Starlight smiled. “Hi Twilight! Hey, have you, by chance, recently been to a world where the sky was static?”

Twilight blinked. “Uh… No. Why?” “

“Thought I saw you somewhere. Guess it wasn’t really you.”

“…And why are you in a spacesuit?”

Starlight smiled brightly. “Discord and I went to one of the unsafe universes with his spell! It was an interesting place. It had no sound Twilight! And the light came from nowhere!”

Twilight’s eyes widened. “Oh really? Awesome! Put what you found in the Directory!”

“I will! Don’t go there though, no air at all.”

Twilight nodded. “Oh, of course. And thanks for being helpful, Discord!”

Discord gasped. “Oh no – I was helpful!” He made his body melt into an agonizing puddle. “Nooooooooo…”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Well, if you promise to behave yourself you can come on adventures with us. Okay?”

Both him and Starlight started laughing uncontrollably.

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Ooooor not. See you around.” She trotted off, completely oblivious to what was going on right under her nose.

011 - Triple Point

“Woo-hoo!” Pinkie hollered. “It’s been a while!”

Twilight took her gaze off the Mirror Portal and raised an eyebrow in Pinkie’s direction. “We went through two days ago. The crystal world, remember?”

“Yeah, I’m not talking about that though!” Pinkie giggled.

“What are you talking about then?” Fluttershy asked, curious.

“Well, it’s just been awhile since I’ve felt like this! So good! We’re going to do something fun today, Twilight!”

“You think so?” Twilight asked.

“Well, yeah! But then again I always make things fun so this might just mean nothing for us. Eh.”

“Oh! Before we go in…” Starlight said, reaching into her saddlebags and pulling out a small helicopter drone. “I’ve made… this.”

Rarity looked at the thing resting in Starlight’s hoof. “…What is it, dear?”

“It’s a flying machine.” Starlight lit her horn and the small machine rose into the air. “It’ll follow us around automatically and cast a shield spell whenever it thinks we need it.”

Twilight looked at it and grinned. “That’s pretty amazing Starlight. How’d you get the technology to accept the spells?”

“Ooh! Ooh!” Pinkie said, raising her hoof. “It was her souvenirs!”

Starlight chuckled. “Uh… Yeah! I worked with various otherworldly magics and a drone from an Earth and eventually made this thing. Discord and I tested it, it works pretty well.”

“Oh, so that’s what Discord’s helping you with?” Fluttershy asked.

“Yeeeep! I mean, what else would he be helping me with?”

“I don’t know. It just seems unlike him to do ‘sciencey’ things.”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “He got to shoot chaos magic at a robot for a few hours.”

Fluttershy smiled warmly. “Well that certainly sounds like him.”

Twilight nodded. “That it does. Hopefully we won’t need to test this drone today. I don’t want to spend another day getting shot at.”

“Twilight, we have not visited enough worlds to be jaded to gunfire,” Rarity asserted. “Give it a year or two. Some of us still jump whenever there’s a bang.”

“Right, right, sorry.”

“No need to apologize!”

“But I-“

“Enough chit-chat!” Pinkie said, appearing between the two of them. “We’re wasting the time that could be used elsewhere! Perhaps in a world of candy!”

“Is today donut world day?” Fluttershy asked.

“Fluttershy, there’s no way we could know that,” Twilight noted. “We have to go in first. All I know right now is that the other side is safe. Other than that, could be anything.” She took a step forward. “Pinkie’s right though, time to find out!”

She stepped through. The other side was dark. There were no sources of light, and yet she could see her purple hooves as if it were the middle of the day. The sky was a pitch black emptiness, a void of starless despair. The ground was flat, cold, and felt vaguely like plastic. Twilight noted that the ground was a grid – black squares bordered by dark blue glowing lines, each roughly the size of a square meter. She could see precisely fifteen squares in every direction before the blue lines no longer existed, giving way to seeming endless blackness.

“…Peculiar,” Twilight said.

“Why do we even say that anymore?” Rarity asked, taking her place beside Twilight. “This is nowhere near as odd as that infinite forest.”

“True…” Twilight said, putting a hoof to her chin. Starlight, Fluttershy, and Pinkie arrived in the new world along with Starlight’s drone. The robot happily buzzed above Starlight, observing every space it could see.

Twilight took a step forward into the next square. The moment she did so, more squares lit up in front of her. Glancing behind her, she saw that the squares in the back had vanished, replaced with blackness. “Hey, Starlight.”

“Yeah?”

“How many squares away from yourself can you see?”

Starlight glanced at the square she was on, counting in her mind. “…Fifteen in every direction. Exactly.”

“I can see fifteen as well. From where I’m standing. That means I can see squares you can’t.’

Fluttershy blinked. “Um. What does that mean?”

“Not sure yet…” Twilight cast a simple light spell and forced it to sit on the fifteenth square in front of her. “Can you see that Starlight?”

“It just vanished into nothingness for me.” Starlight smirked. “It seems each of us has a limited field of view. There’s no way this place is natural…”

“Ahem,” Rarity coughed. “There are weirder things in the multiverse.”

“All right, fine, I doubt it’s natural. Too many squares, artificial light, forced perspective. Almost like a…”

“GAME!” Pinkie squeed, jumping around in her characteristic way. She bounced out of the last square in Twilight’s field of view, vanishing into nothing in an instant. Twilight felt afraid for a moment – what if Pinkie never came back? They couldn’t see far enough to locate her, and if she needed help there’d be no way for them to give it!

Pinkie came back into the field of view a few seconds later, putting those thoughts to rest for the most part. She stopped right next to Twilight. “I’m here to report that there’s nothing but flat squares in that direction!”

“Nothing but flat squares anywhere,” Rarity said, walking around. “The only feature is… Well, what we came out of.”

What they came out of was a simple cube raised out of the ground, borders glowing a soft dark blue. One of the cube’s faces shimmered with the light of the Mirror Portal. Starlight tapped one of its sides. “It’s… Just like the floor.”

“Why’s it raised though?” Twilight asked.

“Could be natural,” Fluttershy shrugged. She looked up. “I’m going to try flying.”

“All right. Just make sure you can still see us. If you can’t, come back down.”

Fluttershy flapped into the air. She was soon much higher than fifteen meters, but they could still see her easily. She kept going higher, but nothing changed besides her getting smaller.

“You can come down now!” Twilight yelled. “There’s no upper limit!”

Fluttershy slowly drifted down to the ground. “It’s… odd not being able to see further when you go higher.”

“Rainbow Dash would hate this place,” Rarity observed. “Can you imagine?”

Pinkie smirked. “AUGH! I can’t see where I’m going! AUGH! Stupid wall! AUGH! Going fast is punisheeeeed! No fair! Lame!”

The girls had a good chuckle at the impression.

“So…” Fluttershy eventually said. “Are we going to go explore, or what?”

Twilight blushed slightly. “Right, right, we do need to look around…” She cast a simple navigation spell so they’d always be able to find their way back here. Not that they needed it, since she had the dimensional device in her saddlebags as a backup, but it never hurt to be careful. They set out in a random direction – compasses didn’t work, so there wasn’t really a north here – and quickly left the sight of the raised block.

A couple minutes passed. Nothing presented itself to them.

“Ugh,” Starlight muttered. “Is there nothing here?”

“That wouldn’t be very fun…” Pinkie said.

“There’s obviously something imposing the field of view on us,” Twilight said. “Though I suppose that could be the universe itself… But if this place really operated on a grid why would we be allowed to stand on corners and move like we do?”

“Cause it’s a game!”

“What a thrilling game,” Rarity deadpanned. “I’m on the edge of my seat with excitement.”

“Girls…” Fluttershy said.

“Hrm?” Twilight asked, looking to her left at Fluttershy.

“I see something over there.” She pointed into the void.

“I don- Oh. Right.” Twilight walked into the same square as Fluttershy. The square was a little cramped with two ponies on it, but they managed without issue. Twilight looked at the furthest square she could see and did make out something. It was a blue pawn, similar to those pieces on the game of chess she’d seen on Earth. “Huh.”

“I want to see!” Starlight said, trying to worm her way onto the same square. The location went from cramped to uncomfortable in an instant.

“Starlight, if you want to see just move one square for-“

“LEMME SEE LEMME SEE!” Pinkie cheered, leaping into the three of them and creating a pony pile.

Rarity rolled her eyes at her friends’ antics, taking it upon herself to move forward. She strode gracefully towards the blue pawn, eyes watching it closely. It was a brighter color than the lines on the ground, bright enough that it spread a little blue spotlight around itself. It seemed alive – even though it didn’t have any moving limbs or body parts, it bounced around slightly like some frog, shifting its weight around to remain comfortable.

It eventually noticed her approaching it. It hopped up and down excitedly.

“Hello,” Rarity said.

The pawn hopped a square closer to Rarity. She took a step back – making the pawn pause. It leaned towards her as if trying to gauge her reaction to it.

“Can you talk? …Or even understand me? …Or even have ears?”

The pawn made no response.

“Take that as a ‘no’ on all three!” Starlight called.

“Already got that figured out, but thanks anyway!” Rarity called back. She changed tactics, resorting to gestures to facilitate communication. She beckoned for it to come to her. It got the message, hopping over squares one at a time until it reached the one in front of hers. She touched it with her hoof, discovering that it felt exactly like the ground. “Don’t worry girls, he’s harmless.”

The pawn decided that was enough of that, and bounced over to the other four ponies eagerly. Pinkie Pie appeared on its head mid-journey, making it stop to re-examine its life. “Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie! You can’t understand me but that’s okay! Onward, steed!”

The pawn seemed to understand anyway, carrying Pinkie to her friends. Twilight eyed the pawn suspiciously. “Are you sure this thing’s safe? We’ve been wrong before.”

“Well, it probably doesn’t want us dead,” Pinkie said. “It’s kinda like a dog!”

Fluttershy put her wing on it. “…Not like any dog I’ve dealt with. I don’t understand it at all… I have no idea what the poor thing wants!”

“How do you know it’s a poor thing then?” Starlight asked.

“Animal talk,” Pinkie explained. “All cute things are poor things unless Fluttershy is doting over them.”

“Hey! I…” Fluttershy blushed. “I can’t argue with that.”

“Pinkie strikes again!” Pinkie leaped up and struck a power pose. “I win a cookie!” She grabbed a cookie out of her mane and devoured it.

Starlight raised an eyebrow. On a hunch, she pulled a virtual tablet out of her saddlebags. “Hey… Pinkie! My cookie count is down! What did you do?”

“I won a cookie. That’s worth, like, a trillion internet cookies.”

“At this phase of the game-“ Starlight noticed her friends looking at her. “…All right, the game is stupid, I shouldn’t get so worked up over it, sorry Pinkie.”

Pinkie winked. Then she pulled out a cupcake, offering it to Starlight. “Here.”

“How many internet cupcakes is that worth?”

“None, I just grabbed it!”

Starlight nodded slowly, trying desperately to make it look like she understood.

The pawn hopped up and down excitedly again, moving a square away and pointing its head in the same direction. It hopped another square, stopping to point at them, then leaned away.

“…I think it wants us to follow,” Twilight observed.

“Brilliant deduction,” Starlight deadpanned.

“I say we follow it,” Rarity cut in. “It’s the only thing we’ve seen in this entire place. What else are we going to do? Have a sleepover?”

“I do have pillows,” Pinkie said, throwing a pillow in Rarity’s face.

“Thank you, Pinkie, for your input. I’m going to follow the pawn.”

Twilight nodded. “It seems like the best thing to do.” They fell in line behind the blue being. It wanted to go as far and as fast as it could, but it never let itself get more than seven squares away from Twilight. She figured this meant that the pawn had a smaller field of view than she and her friends did.

Once again Twilight was left to wonder why and not come up with a satisfactory answer. Something had to be keeping track of them to do this. She didn’t detect any high levels of magic, but that didn’t really mean anything anymore.

Their pawn friend led them to an area that had more blue pawns – much, much more. Twilight could count twenty in her field of view alone, and she knew there were even more behind them.

“There might be hundreds… Thousands…” Twilight muttered.

“Well, it’s a society at least,” Rarity observed. “No buildings though… Nothing but them and this grid. What kind of life do they have if they can’t talk? It must be boring.”

“They seem happy,” Fluttershy said. “Maybe they just don’t need anything but each other.”

Twilight surveyed the landscape, brow furrowed. “I still want to know why. What runs this place?” She glanced around – and on the edge of her vision she saw a red pawn. It hopped into the field of view – then hopped out.

“Girls, I just saw-“

From the left edge of her field of view, dozens of red pawns poured out, charging the blue pawns. The blue ones leaped up and ran for the most part, fleeing the red onslaught. Not all of them were fast enough to escape. The red pawns leaped on top of the blue ones, smashing them into a thousand pieces that dissipated into nothing. Five shattered before Twilight registered what was happening.

“No!” Fluttershy said, flying towards the pawn that had led them here. She was too late – it was quickly crushed by an invading red pawn. Fluttershy screamed, Staring at the red pawn with ferocious intensity.

It froze solid, unable to move as Fluttershy inched closer.

“You… Are going… To… Protect these lit-“

The red pawn bolted, as if a switch had been flicked inside of it from ‘stand frozen in fear’ to ‘flee!’ The entire group of red pawns got the idea at the exact same time, fleeing from the ponies’ field of view.

Twilight stared, jaw hanging. “…What just happened?”

“I’ll tell you what happened!” Fluttershy screeched. “A bunch of mean red pawns attacked for no reason and killed a bunch of adorable blue pawns!”

Rarity held a hoof to her mouth. “There are no remains at all…”

“This isn’t any game I’d like to play,” Pinkie muttered.

“We need to help these pawns!” Fluttershy said. “They can’t live like this. Look at them – they’re terrified!”

The pawns did indeed seem to be terrified. Instead of hopping around carefree and amiably, they shivered and huddled as close together as possible.

“We can’t do that,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “We don’t know all the details. We can’t talk to them, we can only go off what we see. And we haven’t seen much. Acting without knowing is likely to cause more problems. More destruction.”

Fluttershy’s face indicated that she really wanted to argue against Twilight’s stance, but couldn’t. She sagged in defeat. “Fine. But we need to do that quickly so more of this doesn’t happen while we’re waiting! How do we find out more?”

“We can’t ask them, so we’ll have to watch them. And since we need both sides of the story, we need to go see what the red pawns are doing.” She took in a deep breath. “They fled that way. Let’s follow them.”

Fluttershy spread her wings and flew away, giving no regard to her usual slow movement.

“W-wait up!” Starlight called after her, galloping at full speed, her drone flying behind her. Twilight, Pinkie, and Rarity took places behind Starlight, attempting to keep up with the driven pegasus.

“Fluttershy!” Twilight yelled. “Slow down when you see them! We can’t let them know they’re being followed!”

“Got it!” Fluttershy called back, showing no signs of slowing.

Rarity turned to Twilight as they ran. “Did… Did we just see pawn creatures die?”

“Think about it later, Rarity,” Twilight said. If she was being honest, she said that more for her own benefit. She couldn’t let herself get bogged down by what had just happened now. Her mind couldn’t process it.

Fluttershy flared her wings, slowing everypony down in that moment. They all kept running, but at a slower pace – because Fluttershy had seen the pawns and was keeping them at the edge of her vision. She glowered at them.

“Good job, Fluttershy,” Twilight said. “Now we just have to keep them in our sights…”

While Twilight was finishing that thought, the red pawns arrived in their encampment, taking up positions in a loose coalition of happily bouncing red pawns. None of them could see the ponies, for they were too far away.

Fluttershy blinked. “It… It looks exactly like the blue pawn place…”

“That’s what it seems like…” Twilight frowned. “I think we should go in.”

“What!?”

“Those pawns we were tailing are long out of our sights. The red pawns won’t be able to recognize us. So they should accept us just like the blue ones…” She took a few steps forward. One of the pawns saw her and began shaking in fear. It ran into the sea of other read pawns. Twilight imagined it screaming.

Some of the red pawns looked like they wanted to take a stand, but ran away anyway.

Twilight held out a hoof. “Uh… So we’re terrifying. Great. This makes no sense!”

She did not have time to contemplate the senselessness of the situation, for what sounded an awful lot like a gunshot reached her ear. She noticed with some fear that Starlight’s drone had raised a shield directly to the left of her skull, protecting her from a projectile. She’d probably be dead right now without that drone.

To her left, exactly fifteen spaces away, she saw a floating red octahedron. It flashed red, firing another red bullet, which the drone defended as well.

Twilight was done – she had to defend herself now. She fired a magic laser at the diamond, only for it to step out of her field of view.

“What is it Twilight!?” Starlight shouted.

“Under attack! Red diamond! Look out!”

“I see it!” Rarity yelled, firing off a magic bolt of her own. “It’s staying out of our line of sight!”

Twilight saw it to her right. It fired the moment it entered her field of view, but Twilight sent the bullet right back at it – only to miss. “It has the same field of view we do! Next time one appears, try to keep it in your sights!”

“I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE, A DIAMOND!” Pinkie yelled. She ran out of Twilight’s field of view, presumably after the diamond. But then one appeared behind Twilight in the exact opposite direction.

“There’s more than one!” Twilight shouted.

“Got one!” Starlight yelled, latching onto a red diamond with her magic. She encased it in a bubble shield so it couldn’t unleash its bullets and pulled it closer to her. “Keep an eye on it!”

Fluttershy nodded, Staring at it intently.

A red diamond rushed at them from beyond their sight range, fire burning off of it on all sides. With graceful movement, it bounced over Starlight’s and Twilight’s attacks, landing directly on the magic box containing the other red diamond with a fiery burst. With its companion freed, the flame-wielding diamond turned on Rarity, a torrent of flame shooting right at her. Starlight blocked it with her magic, unable to prevent Rarity’s mane from getting slightly singed.

The drone blocked another bullet, this time saving Fluttershy a wound to her chest. Pinkie came out of nowhere, holding a red diamond in her hooves and hitting the fiery diamond across the side with it. “STRIKE! Or FORE! Or something!”

The flaming diamond didn’t hit the ground – it just floated upright, ready for more fighting. It charged, accompanied by more gunfire from a fourth companion.

“How many of them are there?” Rarity yelled, firing off ineffective bolts of magic.

“I don’t know!” Starlight said, tying the one she’d had imprisoned previously and the one Pinkie had brought it down. “I count four so far!”

The flaming diamond unleashed a wave of flame towards everypony. Twilight had to raise the shield to defend this one since the drone was far too weak for the task. The drone caught a bullet from behind, and Starlight took the opportunity to imprison a third diamond. “Just the fiery one left unless we’ve miscounted!”

The fiery diamond launched itself right at Starlight, only to be caught by her telekinesis. “Woo! Full of fire wouldn’t you say?”

Pinkie facehooved. “That’s my job, Starlight.”

“Did… Did we get them all?” Twilight asked, nervously glancing around. There were no diamonds besides the four Starlight had frozen in magic bubbles.

“No more action on the horizon…” Rarity said, scanning the area.

“Good,” Twilight let out a breath. “…I did not want guns today…”

“They weren’t really guns, you know,” Starlight observed. “Just… Gun-like magic-like like… …I’m going to stop this sentence before it gets too out of hand.”

Twilight glanced at the diamonds. “You have them secure?”

“Long as I’m thinking about it, it stays up. Give me a minute or to and I could make it more permanent.”

“Well-“

A yellow pawn appeared out of the corner of their vision and charged. Rarity stopped it with her telekinesis, grunting from the strain. “My… How do you two push so hard all the time?”

Twilight shrugged. She was about to respond when two more yellow pawns appeared, charging. She caught these in her telekinesis, but it didn’t end. More appeared, all needing to be stopped. Soon there were a full dozen yellow pawns frozen by their magic.

“This… Is a bit much to focus on…” Starlight admitted. “Maybe we should consi-“

A yellow diamond showed up. It grabbed a pawn from behind it with an invisible force and threw it at Starlight. Starlight panicked from the sudden movement, unable to stop the pawn from hitting her in the head. It bounced right off of her harmlessly, but she lost her focus on all the beings she was keeping imprisoned. Including the four red diamonds.

The fiery diamond wasted no time at all. Starlight was given a face full of fire without any sort of magical protection. She fell to the ground, singed.

A second yellow diamond appeared out of the floor and attacked the flaming red diamond. Fire appeared in front of the yellow diamond, before exploding onto the red diamond. The red diamond didn’t seem to care – and its associates fired bullets right at the yellow shape. They passed right through without so much as a dent.

Two more yellow diamonds entered the scene, bringing with them more yellow pawns. One broke the grid beneath it and tossed chunks of it at the red diamond and the ponies, while the other attacked with neon chains that lengthened and shrunk with alarming accuracy. One of the chains clocked Fluttershy in the side of the head, knocking her out. The drone stopped the other one from hitting Pinkie.

Pinkie grabbed ahold of a red shooting diamond and smacked a yellow diamond with it. Both the diamonds slumped to the ground, but Pinkie was open to an attack from the grid-smasher. Part of the grid hit her in the back of the head. “OW! That hurt! Tha-“ A chain hit her right in the face. Pinkie twisted around like a corkscrew and fell to the ground.

Twilight unleashed the spell she’d been building up in her horn. “Enough!” She sent out a burst of purple magic energy, a spell designed to stun all enemies. It worked – all the diamonds and yellow pawns stopped moving.

They’d only be frozen a second. She lit her horn again, drawing magic together for a somewhat less complex spell. She latched onto Pinkie, Starlight, Rarity, and Fluttershy with her magic and teleported them all the way back to the blue pawn base. They escaped the battlefield in an instant, out of danger and into safety.

Twilight ran to Starlight first. She could smell the burn. “Starlight!”

Starlight moaned. “Hrng…”

Twilight winced when she saw Starlight’s face – the coat was burned off the right side, revealing the pale skin beneath. Her eye was swollen shut and part of the skin was charred. “All right… Twilight… You can do this…” She lit her horn, trying to remember her first aid spells she had brushed up on for these missions. For a burn… Cool aspect, aloe effect, and… And uh...

She gulped, forcing herself to stop thinking and just perform the spell. A soft purple glow surrounded Starlight’s face, working on the burn wound.

Starlight screamed about a second in. Twilight reeled and would have stopped the spell had it not been automatic at this point. Starlight screamed the full three seconds it worked on her – and then fell silent.

“S-Starlight…?” Twilight said, nervously.

“You… Forgot…. The anesthetic…” Starlight spat, breathing heavily.

“SORRY!”

Starlight stood up, rubbing her face. “Ow…” her coat was still burnt off that half of her face, and the scent of singed hair was still strong, but her eye was no longer swollen shut. “That hurt worse than the burn, Twilight.”

“Well burns tend to remove your nerves and so it probably hurt more and I’ll stop talking now because you really don’t need to hear that heheh.”

Starlight walked over to Fluttershy, standing her up. “You okay?”

“I’m… Fine. I feel sore though…”

“Your wing is bleeding,” Starlight said, lifting the limb with her magic. “I think a bullet grazed it…”

“Yeah…”

Starlight cast a simple ‘scab’ spell to stop the bleeding. “That’ll work for now.”

Fluttershy nodded. “Thanks…”

“Well,” Rarity said, “now we know what’s going on here. Three-way war.”

“Probably,” Twilight said, sighing. “They’ve been fighting for Celestia knows how long. We… We really shouldn’t do anything here. It’s not our place. …I’m not sure what we could do either, besides fight in the war.”

“I understand,” Fluttershy said. “I… I think” She shook her head. “This is a messed up place. We should leave.”

Twilight nodded. She lit her horn, teleporting the five of them to the raised block.

Or what she had marked as the raised block.

There was no raised block anymore.

“Uh…” Rarity murmured, pointing. “The Mirror Portal is gone.”

“That… That it is,” Twilight said, trying her best to keep a straight face. “How… Great.”

“You brought the device, right?” Starlight asked.

“Oh yeah!” Twilight said, pulling it out of her bags. “I forgot!” She levitated it out in front of her and dialed Equestria. The device had more than enough charge, seeing as she always kept it full when possible. Never hurt to be prepared. She activated it, channeling the magic into reality itself. She saw the familiar ripple of space-time in front of her – but no tear. Just the ripples.

“…Huh?” She activated the device again, this time pushing her own magic into it, trying to accentuate the space-time ripples. She felt something push back against her magic, forcing the distortion levels to remain and manageable lows.

“Twilight, please don’t tell me we’re stuck here,” Starlight said.

“Something’s keeping us here, forcing the portal to stay closed…”

“I take it back, I would have much preferred you just told me we were stuck here.”

Fluttershy curled into a ball. “Something wants us here?”

“That seems likely. There is a… force.”

“It wants to play a game,” Pinkie said with no hint of her usual jovial tone.

Twilight gulped. “That it does…”

“What are we going to do!?” Starlight wailed.

“Someone will come looking for us eventually,” Twilight said. “Discord could probably get us out…”

“Trusting Discord to be prompt and helpful?” Rarity blurted. “That sounds… Less than ideal.”

“Well we can’t do anything from this end! Our spells and machines don’t work!”

“We could find who’s doing this and ask him to let us go,” Fluttershy suggested. “I’m sure we can convince him.”

Twilight frowned, glancing at the glowing grid in the ground. “I could… I could try to trace the power as I attempt to open a portal, but I don’t know if that’ll work. And if something can prevent us from opening a portal, couldn’t it do much worse to us if we angered it?”

Starlight gulped. “Maybe… Maybe we should play the game. Fight in the war. The blue pawns will accept us.”

“No,” Fluttershy said, putting her hoof down. “I will not fight in any war. Ever.”

“How would we even win? There’s probably an endless number of pawns!” Pinkie added.

Starlight shrugged. “Defeat the diamonds? They seemed… special. More unique.”

“There was something odd about them,” Rarity agreed. “They didn’t seem limited to the grid and seemed to be smarter.”

“Commanders, probably,” Twilight said.

“Is anyone listening to me!?” Fluttershy interjected. “We are not playing the game! We are finding the pony or person or thing that’s doing this and making them stop!”

“It might not even be a person,” Twilight said. “It might not be able to talk…”

“We have to try, Twilight. Please. For all these pawns who are always fighting…”

Twilight sighed. “Fine, I’ll try again, but I’m burning through the device’s battery. I shouldn’t try this more than once.” She activated it again, using her magic to accentuate it once more. She felt the presence push against her magic again, and she latched onto it. The power tried to pull back, but Twilight managed to get a direction. She pointed. “That way.”

“Where is that way?” Rarity asked.

Twilight frowned. “It’s not the red or blue base, that’s for sure. The yellows maybe?”

“Well, we’re about to find out,” Fluttershy asserted. “Lead the way, Twilight. We’re getting to the bottom of this.”

Twilight nodded absent-mindedly – her thoughts drifted back to the diamonds. Something about them didn’t sit right with her, but she couldn’t put her hoof on what it was. In silence, they walked through the field of squares. They passed by a few blue pawns and saw a red one for a split second, but otherwise nothing much happened on the journey.

Yet, this time, nobody complained about the relatively boring silence. There was a somber mood, and even Pinkie knew to keep quiet when that was the case. It was a mutual understanding between the five of them, even if they all knew they probably should talk about it.

The journey took much longer than the journey to the blue base from the raised cube – but only by fifteen minutes or so. They arrived at a tall, black diamond floating on top of a single square. It was easily the size of Fluttershy’s tree house and was composed of the same material as the ground.

“…This is the center of the warzone,” Starlight said. “I think we’re roughly equal distances from the red and blue bases, and I would not be surprised if the yellow base was over there.”

Twilight nodded. “I think you’re right… But… I wonder what this is?” She scanned it with her magic and came up with nothing. The power had definitely come from here, but it felt no different than the rest of the ground around them. “Hrm…”

“RED DIAMOND!” Pinkie said, pointing at the edge of their vision. Twilight tensed as the four red diamonds appeared. Curiously, none of them attacked. They just hovered there and did nothing, much like Twilight and company were doing. Nobody moved.

Twilight furrowed her brow. “I’m going to walk towards them.”

“Twilight!” Rarity hissed. “What if they’re trying to figure out how to kill us?”

“I… I don’t think that’s the case.” She took a few steps forward. “But you girls stay here, okay? Starlight, teleport me away if there’s trouble.”

Starlight nodded. “Okay. If… If you’re sure.”

Twilight walked towards the red diamonds. One of them turned to the other three, made a strange tilting motion, and left the group as well. This red diamond alone met Twilight. They were soon a single square apart from each other in the shadow of the black floating diamond.

Twilight put a hoof on the diamond – nothing happened. The red diamond leaned against the black one – and half the black diamond’s faces lit up with a red glow.

Twilight frowned. “Only half…”

The red diamond leaned away from the black one and created a ball of fire in midair. Twilight flinched, but didn’t flee – it wasn’t an attack. A smaller ball of fire began to orbit the large ball of fire.

“Are you trying to make me think of the sun?”

The fiery diamond kept doing what it was doing.

“…Right, can’t understand me. Uh… Sun. Sun…” What was it about these diamonds that seemed so off to her? Why was that fire bringing such an itch to her mind? What was it? What were they?

Something clicked in her mind. Not really believing what she had just deduced, she lit her horn and summoned a magical image of a sun – the sun that was Sunset Shimmer’s cutie mark.

The red diamond bounced up and down in joy and confirmation.

Twilight’s jaw dropped. “SUNSET!?”

“What!?” Starlight yelled. “That’s Sunset!?”

“Apparently!” Twilight said. Continuing with communication, Twilight created images of the cutie marks of the five of them, placing the six-pointed star on herself. The diamond that was Sunset jumped up and down in understanding. She turned back to her other three teammates, presumably to yell something at them Twilight couldn’t hear.

“This is beyond weird…” Twilight muttered. “Why were you turned into diamonds? Why’d you attack us? Uh, wait, right…” Twilight used her magic to create an image of sunset, a question mark, and a red diamond. Then a symbol of a sword and shield for battle.

Sunset generated an attempt at a flaming question mark next to the red diamond. Then some fire pointed at the diamond, then at Twilight.

“…Girls?” Twilight called back.

“We look like diamonds to them don’t we?” Pinkie said.

“Apparently.”

“Well that certainly explains a lot,” Fluttershy said.

“And brings up more questions!” Rarity muttered, walking toward Twilight. “For instance, why are we all made to look like diamonds? Why are we forced to play this game? Who wants us fighting?”

“Who are playing the yellow diamonds?” Starlight offered.

Twilight sighed. “Ugh. This just got more confusing…”

~~~

Tempest walked up to her red-haired agent. “Corona, are you absolutely positive it is the ponies?”

“Positive,” Agent Corona – a woman previously known as Sunset Shimmer – responded. “They’ve got the cutie marks down and seem to be just as confused as we are about the whole thing.”

Tempest nodded. “It’s safe to assume the yellow diamonds are similar. Travelers plucked into this sick game by some higher power. Ike, has the central diamond’s readings changed any?”

“Nope. It reacted when the blue diamond – er, Twilight, I guess – touched it, as you saw, but nothing else.”

Corona frowned. “It needs the yellow diamond as well. It probably needs all three colors, actually.”

“Where are we going to find a red diamond though?” Ike asked.

Mike raised an eyebrow. “We’re the red diamonds, Ike.”

“…Oh. Right.”

“How are we going to get a yellow diamond here though?” Mike asked Corona.

“Diplomacy, like we did here?” she suggested.

“Wishful thinking,” Tempest said. “Ponies are naturally trusting and willing to talk, but even they fought at first.”

“We fired first,” Corona deadpanned.

Tempest didn’t dignify this with a response. “I suggest we engage in a capture operation.”

“And how exactly?”

Tempest pointed at the many blue diamonds that were really ponies. “We have them help us. They subdued all of us pretty easily.”

Mike looked at his arm. Currently it was in a makeshift sling. “You don’t have to remind us.”

“All we need is for that blue-magic one – Starlight, I presume – to ensnare one of the diamonds in her magic and bring it here. Possibly by teleport, if they can do that.”

“You really do read up on their capabilities, don’t you?” Corona said.

“I’m well informed so I can make good decisions,” Tempest asserted. “Now, we need to communicate the plan to them. Corona, we know they can see your fire clearly. Use it.”

“…I really wish I was a unicorn right now…” Corona muttered, lighting her hand on fire. “It would make this so much easier…”

~~~

Twilight cocked her head at the flurry of flames dancing before her eyes. “I do not understand.”

Starlight squinted her eyes. “…She’s pointing at herself, then us, then out into the distance. She emphasizes the distance. Does she want us to go somewhere?”

“When I pointed that direction she lit on fire. I presume that means frustration.”

“Safe bet,” Rarity said.

“Pinkie,” Fluttershy said, “care to help?”

Pinkie giggled. “Nah, you girls don’t need my help. Just think of it as a game of charades with poorly controlled fire!”

“You know, sometimes you’re helpful, sometimes you’re the exact opposite of helpful,” Starlight commented.

“Thank you! I try.”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “Okay, so… She’s pointing at herself…” She created an image of Sunset’s cutie mark. “Us…” She created an image of her own cutie mark. “And… over there.” She created an arrow image.

The fires from Sunset surrounded the three glyphs in diamond patterns. Twilight facehooved. “Oh. She’s talking about the three colors of diamond.” She changed the images to red, blue, and yellow diamonds.

Sunset’s fire danced around the yellow diamond image, then a burst of fire thrust toward the black diamond, causing half of it to light up with a red color. Twilight blinked. “So we need to get a yellow diamond to touch the black diamond as well. I got it. I was thinking the same thing.” To display her idea, she created a black diamond image with three colored diamonds on top of it. Sunset marked this with a flaming checkmark.

“Okay. So…. How?” Starlight asked. Twilight generated the image of a question mark.

Sunset’s flame pointed at Starlight.

“What does that mean?”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “It means you’ve got to go capture one, silly!”

“Oh. Oh that’s just a great idea! Go attack a yellow diamond and capture it! Do you not remember that they trounced us just a short while ago?”

Twilight nodded. “That I do. But… We have allies now. And we don’t have to defeat them, just capture one and get back here.”

“But the question remains, where are they?”

Rarity smirked. “I have a feeling if we find the yellow base and scare a few pawns, we’ll draw their attention. After all, the game wants conflict does it not?”

“That could work…” Twilight said.

“I still want to know what this will accomplish,” Starlight muttered. “I mean, we’re going to light up a black diamond! What’ll it do?”

“Maybe it’s the victory condition? I have no idea. Honestly, it’s our only lead at this point so… We just have to do it. Now… We need to make a fully developed plan.” She took in a deep breath. “This is going to take some masterful communication skills…”

~~~

The yellow base was identical in every way to the red and blue ones except occupied by yellow pawns. Twilight had taken her position – far, far above the ground, so high up that the pawns didn’t notice her, but she could see them. She flew in a circle pattern around the field so she could scope out a much larger area than the world usually allowed. She couldn’t locate the yellow diamonds, so they would have to go with the special plan.

Sunset’s group of red diamonds was closest to the base, ready to move first. Starlight, Pinkie, and Rarity were spread out a bit further out, poised to strike at any single location should it be needed. Fluttershy flew into Twilight’s line of sight, completing Twilight’s mental map of the ground below. “I can’t see the diamonds… But everyone’s in place.”

“I hope this works,” Twilight said.

“I hope they don’t shoot any pawns…” Fluttershy added.

“They’ve been told not to. I’m sure they’ll do whatever’s in their power to keep all the pawns safe.”

“…If you say so.”

Twilight nodded. “We need to start the cycle. Fly in the circle we outlined and try to always stay on the opposite side of it as me. We are the eyes in the sky. We make sure there are no complications. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Then go. I’ll give them the signal.” Fluttershy nodded, flying away on the predetermined path, leaving Twilight behind. Twilight waited three seconds before sending a purple spark to the red diamonds directly below her. She couldn’t see her three friends. But she knew they could see that spark she created. It was go time.

Twilight took off in the same direction Fluttershy went, angling in a circular pattern. She witnessed the red diamonds fire off a few bullets, hitting the ground right in front of numerous yellow pawns. The pawns reacted with fear for the most part, retreating deeper into the base. However, more than had been expected attacked back viciously. Sunset cleverly used walls of fire to keep them back, and those that continued on were blocked by Starlight’s magic. Twilight found it mildly odd that she could see Starlight’s magic but not Starlight herself.

Twilight’s path of flight took the battle out of her sight, replacing the scene with the inner workings of the yellow base. The pawns were moving like a sea from this vantage point. A ‘wave’ of running pawns dominated Twilight’s vision, with a few outliers moving behind or in front of the wave. The alarm had spread quickly through the base, exactly as planned.

Then she saw one – a yellow diamond, rushing through the base, heading right for the source of the battle. Twilight broke off her circular path to follow. It didn’t see her, even though she knew it could if it only bothered to look up. It was too focused on finding the source of the commotion.

Twilight flew ahead of it, sending a magic spark down to Sunset’s group – a warning that a yellow diamond was coming. They were supposed to spread out the moment they got it – but they were a little surrounded. On one side were the yellow pawns, and on the other … blue pawns aggressively attacking? Where did they come from?

Twilight flew further out until she could see Pinkie. She was dealing with a bunch of red pawns, using her bouncy abilities to keep them occupied. Twilight couldn’t find Starlight, and Rarity had encased herself in a magical bubble shield. Twilight prayed that would hold – Rarity wasn’t very proficient in the spell. Twilight grit her teeth - everybody’s mobility had been squandered by the sudden appearance of pawns.

“It was as if they knew we’d be doing this and wanted to mess it up…” Twilight muttered to herself. She flew back over Sunset’s group, which was now within sight range of the incoming yellow diamond. The red diamonds had started shooting the blue and yellow pawns around them directly, shattering them into a thousand pieces that faded to nothing. This pulled at Twilight’s stomach – but she was able to rationalize that they were being overwhelmed and had no choice.

Fluttershy was not able to do any such thing. Twilight saw her dive-bomb from the sky directly at one of the red diamonds, pinning them to the ground. “Fluttershy, no!” Twilight yelled, far too late.

This disagreement gave the yellow diamond the opportunity it needed – dragging the ground beneath the red diamonds and Fluttershy up, encasing them in a blue-black box. Twilight tried to swoop down to assist them – but another yellow diamond hit her from the side.

Twilight didn’t bother to think about how one of the diamonds had gotten this high up – it was probably just a being with wings under that yellow shell. Twilight encased the diamond in telekinesis to prevent it from acting any further. It fell still.

Twilight began to ready the teleport spell – screw the original plan, she had a rogue yellow diamond in her magic, it was time to return to the black diamond and… and…

She stared at the yellow diamond, losing focus. Why… Why did she feel so guilty all of a sudden? Why did she – why did she feel like she couldn’t move? Why were her wings freezing up? Oh Celestia.

She lost her hold on the yellow diamond and dropped from the air like a stone. She couldn’t take her eyes off it – and she knew that if she could see the eyes behind the visage it would be Staring right at her.

Twilight wondered how far away the ground was now. Pretty close, given how small the diamond appeared now. She was definitely moving fast enough to completely blow her brains out simply by landing. But… she wasn’t scared. For whatever reason, she didn’t feel like today was her day. It wouldn’t be a very satisfying ending.

When Pinkie caught her, Twilight just smiled. “Thank you, Pinkie.”

“Don’t mention it. Yellow diamond have the Stare?”

“I guess so…” Twilight regained control of her wings. “You don’t think it’s Lieshy do you?”

“Could be,” Pinkie said, kicking a rogue red pawn in the head, knocking it over. “But that’s not something to think about now. What we need to do is capture one of these diamonds.”

Twilight stood up, rubbing her head. “I… I don’t think I have the focus to teleport us out now, and I don’t know where Starlight is, and-“

The yellow diamond that was on the ground charged them, lifting a block of the ground and tossing it at them. Pinkie drew a solid-iron baseball bat and hit the block right back at the diamond. The block shattered on contact.

“Just grab it or something!” Pinkie shouted, deflecting another chunk of ground.

Twilight shook her head, clearing the fog away as well as she could. She focused on the yellow diamond assaulting them and prevented it from moving with her telekinesis. “Got it!”

“Incoming!” Pinkie said, bringing out a shield and deflecting the yellow chain attack. “We need to get out! That was part of the plan, right!?”

Twilight focused – she had to find everyone. Where were they though? Sunset’s group and Fluttershy were trapped in that rock cage, Rarity was huddling under her magic over there, and who had any idea where Starlight was…

Wait, there was the drone. Hanging around… nothing. What was it doing…?

Starlight decloaked herself, revealing her position to be right underneath the drone. She also revealed a few dozen blue pawns she’d been hiding. They launched from her sides at her command, charging the yellow pawns around Sunset’s prison. Starlight lit her horn, shattering the walls of the prison, and the four red diamonds and Fluttershy ran out.

“Starlight! Teleport!” Twilight yelled.

Starlight didn’t waste any time – she checked the positions of everyone, nodded, and lit her horn.

The flying yellow diamond barreled into Twilight just as the teleport was executed. She lost control of the yellow diamond in her telekinesis, but it was still teleported.

Five ponies, four red diamonds, and two yellow diamonds appeared before the black diamond.

The yellow diamonds tried to fight back, but without the chaos of the pawn war around them, not to mention two of their team members being absent, there wasn’t much on their side. A chunk of the ground was thrown only to be stopped by Rarity, then the yellow diamond was frozen by Starlight.

Twilight shook her head. “Now!” She called, grabbing the yellow diamond next to her and pressing it to the black diamond. Half of the black structure became yellow. Sunset floated up to the black structure and touched it, making half of it red.

Rarity touched the diamond last, presumably lighting the diamond up with blue colors for all the others.

The diamond flashed brightly, becoming white. The whiteness of the diamond quickly raised to a level so bright, it was blinding. But as soon as Twilight considered looking away, it flashed, making everything go white in the most literal sense. The sky and ground became white, with only the dark blue of the gridlines not changing color.

Now, instead of a diamond, there was a strange white cube floating a meter off the ground.

It ‘spoke’ with a reverberating voice that just sounded wrong.

“You found the alternate solution,” it said, “congratulations. You’re all winners.”

“Winners of WHAT?” Tempest demanded. Twilight noted that not only could she hear the human agent now, but could also see her as something other than a diamond. The two yellows as well – one was indeed Lieshy, while the other was some girl in green and yellow Twilight swore looked very familiar.

“The experiment.”

“WHAT experiment!?”

“Hey, calm down,” Twilight said, stepping forward. “I am Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria. I wish I could say I was pleased to meet you.”

“I do not have a name. I was not aware names were a thing until you arrived here. I was not aware speech was a thing until you arrived here.”

“What were you aware of then?”

“The grid. And my dominion over it.”

“You did do all of this then!” Fluttershy blurted.

“Indeed I did. Everything you see is my doing.”

“How could you have made those poor pawn creatures fight each other?!”

“They are not creatures. I merely designed them to look alive. They are but fragments of my own subconscious.”

Fluttershy gawked. “Wh… He… Why would you make us think people were dying!?”

“That was your own assumption. But in truth, I did it to make the experiment more realistic. To give you a motivation to become involved that you, ultimately, turned your back on.”

“…You wanted us to fight,” Sunset asserted.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought it would be interesting to see how my wars would play out without my knowing exactly what every single move would be.”

Lieshy glared. “The grayscale uncertainty – the insanity caused by loneliness.”

Twilight shook her head. “…You should know we wouldn’t approve of this.”

“Your approval was not my concern. I wanted to see what would happen. I would have preferred you played the game as it was meant to be played; until one color completely dominated, but I knew you might be too smart for that. So I provided this other victory, one that could only be accomplished if you deduced your nature. The only concern of mine was making sure things stayed interesting.”

“What on earth is going on,” the girl asked. “Who’s the arrogant jerk talking, and where is he so I can fling a rock at him?”

“It’s a cube, Toph,” Lieshy said. “And probably wouldn’t care if you threw a rock at it. It doesn’t care about much at all, the doorway.”

“The ‘Lieshy’ understands. This was just a game. You won. You’re free to go.”

Twilight shook her head. “I mean, thank you for letting us go now, but… This conversation isn’t over. You’ve done horrible things to us. I don’t think we can just let that slide.”

“So?”

“So… So…” Twilight’s features twisted into a mess. “So what you did was wrong!”

“By your definition.”

“How could what you did be right?”

“How can you be so sure there is right?”

Twilight gawked. She had never heard this from anyone else before. Everyone – even the many villains she had seen – believed in a right to do things. A good, even if it was misguided, or if they knew they weren’t part of it. This guy… He couldn’t be serious.

Rarity spoke next. “How can you be so sure there isn’t?”

“I’m not. But why would I care? All I do is exist here, alone, forever with my games. You are the first other beings I’ve ever seen. And you’ve proven to be horribly unsportsmanlike. Not bad, just unsatisfactory. I’ll just continue existing now, you can go home, and we can all forget about this until the next group of adventurers comes through. Hopefully in a few eons I’ll have better ideas. Or maybe they’ll never show up and I can just go back to the way things were. Either way.”

Starlight shook her head. “There’s no talking to this guy. I… I don’t think he can see things the way we do, Twilight.”

“So… we just… go?” Fluttershy said. “Go and forget about all that he put us through without any kind of resolution?”

“I… guess so,” Twilight said, glancing at the faces around.

“Good. Use your devices. I won’t block them now. The game is over.”

Twilight took hers out. “…Well, it was good to see you Sunset.”

“Yeah,” Sunset said. “Though, uh, call me Corona out here, okay? Need to get used to that.”

“Right.”

“Also… Sorry, Starlight. I… I didn’t know it was you.”

Starlight rubbed her burn. “Yeah. I didn’t know I was freezing you in magic either.”

“Hey, where’s my apology?” Toph demanded. “I was kicked around a lot!”

“Would you stop?”

Everyone turned to the black cube. Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Why? Do you care?”

“I am annoyed that I cannot start the next game for certain until you leave.”

“Well, maybe we’ll stay around a little longer.” Toph crossed her arms. “Vivian and Fef aren’t here anyway.”

Suddenly both Vivian and Fef were there. “Oh. There you are,” Fef said.

“Go. Now. Actually, I don’t know why I’m being polite. Go or I kill you when I wipe the universe.”

The three teams pulled out their dimensional devices faster than ever before, leaving the dimension in a matter of seconds.

The cube was pleased with this. The entire world returned to black, and a four-color game was started. The cube continued existing as it had. The experience it had just had changed nothing about it.

Meanwhile ponies and humans would spend the next few days wondering about the pointless game they had been in.

~~~

Sunset – or Corona – wouldn’t be allowed to think too deeply about it until she was in her bed that night. For when she returned to the A.I.D. office, she was greeted with quite the surprise. Every conceivable surface was covered in red and green knick-knacks ranging from wool socks to fake presents to glass ornaments. Four separate Christmas trees were set up in the corners of the workspace, and numerous pieces of mistletoe hung from the ceiling. Each computer had a reindeer bobble-head sitting on it, a nearby table had a nativity scene on it, and there was fake snow dusted around.

Corona blinked. “Uh…”

Ike grinned. “Oh yeah! Christmas time! The boss always goes overboard in holiday decorations.”

“HO HO HO!” Director Storm yelled, turning around in his giant chair. He had a bright red Santa hat on, but had apparently decided not to trade away his nice suit to complete the costume. “Are you all ready to get into the holiday cheer?”

“Sir, I have a report to make,” Tempest said.

“It can wait a few minutes, can’t it? Let Agent Corona grow accustomed to her first Christmas here. I’ve already got a gift picked out for you! It’s under the southwest tree, wrapped in the black, red, and green stripes.”

“Sir, it’s rather important.”

Director Storm shrugged. “If you insist. Ike, show Corona around in my stead. Alas, I have a job.” He and Tempest disappeared into his private office.

“Huh,” Corona said, furrowing her brow. “You know, half of the time I wonder how he runs this place.”

Mike smirked. “Most new agents wonder how such an ‘idiot’ could be placed this high. He’s not an idiot. Nor is he foolish. He’s a very thoughtful and careful man. He’s just also decided not to agree with societal norms.”

“It was weird for us at first as well,” Ike said. “And we had worked with an eccentric like him before.”

Corona smirked. “That ‘super secret assignment’ that I’ll never know about?”

“Exactly,” Mike said.

“I could just touch you and find out.”

“Tempest would throw a fit,” Ike said. “Also that’d make Storm’s superiors upset at you.”

“Right… Sometimes I forget he’s not in charge of everything.”

Ike shrugged. “Anyway, welcome to the Christmas office. It’s exactly like the normal office, except decorated to kingdom come with Christmas stuff. He’s bought a present for everyone who works here and will be elated if people put gifts for each other under the trees. He never asks for any himself. He has everyone open them on Christmas Eve unless there’s a national emergency, then it’ll be the day after Christmas.”

Corona blinked. “And now I just remembered finals are next week. Oh my gosh, I am going to die.”

Mike smirked. “You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for.”

“I’m not worried about the physics test! I’m worried about art history! I haven’t lived in this world my whole life, I don’t just know these things like most people do!”

“You shouldn’t worry about your grades,” Ike encouraged. “You’ve already got a neat job.”

“I… True. I do need to pass though.”

“Suuuure you do.”

“You’re projecting, Ike,” Mike pointed out.

Corona shook her head. “Okaaaaay… Ike, was there anything else? Director Storm made it sound like the tour of Christmas was going to take a while.”

“Oh, if he did it, it would,” Ike answered. “Luckily for you, I know exactly what to tell you and what you need to know! I don’t need to tell you precisely what each individual in the nativity represents.”

“And for that, I thank you.” Corona smiled. “…I think I like the decorations.”

“You should see it on Halloween.”

“Or St. Patrick’s day,” Mike reminded him.

“…I still have no idea how he put all the green stuff up and down in a day…”

“Could have hired Pinkie Pie,” Corona suggested.

“…I wouldn’t put it past him…”

Mike raised an eyebrow. “That would be such a breach of security.”

“Mike, you and I both know the pink anomaly notices everything.”

Corona furrowed her brow. “Wait, she saw you guys before?”

“Several times,” Mike said. “We considered taking action, but she never told anyone. She just made sure we knew she knew.”

“…I wonder why she never said anything…”

Ike blinked. “I’d think that, as her friend, you would have realized that asking questions about her is kinda pointless by now.”

Corona smirked. “Once you get to know someone, you ask deeper questions about them than why they throw cupcakes everywhere. There are answers to be found, somewhere.”

~~~

The cube detected another portal entering its universe several hours later. An object was thrown in, and then the portal closed.

The cube paused the game – all four colors stopped moving in an instant. It examined the strange device. It had no mind, no words, nothing to tell the cube what its function was. The cube noted that there was a flag design imprinted on the side of it, as well as the word ‘NUCLEAR.’ What could that mean?

The cube never got the chance to answer its question. It was soon no more.

012 - Call of the Stars, Part 1

Twilight’s castle had a different sort of beauty about it in the middle of the night. While in the day it shone like a pearl, at night it flickered softly, sending sparks of soft light out in a sort of reflection of the stellar sky above.

Sometimes, when sleep proved difficult for any number of reasons, Princess Twilight liked to come out to her balcony and stare at the stars overhead. Sometimes she thought about what had been going on in her life, sometimes she wondered what the future would bring, and sometimes she just appreciated the natural beauty of night.

How could anypony have ignored this a thousand years ago? She wondered. It’s just so… mesmerizing...

She started examining the constellations. There was the triangle, the bear, the bull, the alicorn, the Handmaid, the dragon, the sphinx, the belt, the noble circle…

She stared at the noble circle. It was several stars in a loose ring around a single, much brighter star. One of the brightest in Equestria’s sky, Sarin. A deep red spark on the blue night.

“Stargazing?” Starlight asked, walking onto the balcony.

Twilight smirked. “Yep. Sleepwalking?”

“No,” Starlight said, yawning. “Though I suppose this could be a dream and I really am sleepwalking in reality.”

Twilight rolled her eyes, returning her gaze to the stars, their luminous points reflecting in her huge eyes.

“Whatcha lookin’ at this time?”

“The noble circle. And what, if anything, is actually up there.”

Starlight raised her eyebrow. “You mean aliens?”

“Maybe. I’m talking more about the Stars though.”

“Stars? But – oh, you mean capital S Stars. Didn’t you say they were just legends?”

Twilight smirked. “Most of the stories about them are. For instance, the idea of one crashing into Equis long ago and bestowing the sun and moon to us is laughable, even more so based on what I’ve seen in the other universes. But the Stars themselves certainly do exist – some of those sparks of light hold consciousnesses.”

“Have you ever talked to one?”

Twilight shook her head. “No. Celestia has, though. She says they’re… rather indifferent to us.”

Starlight frowned. “…When I was little, I used to pray to the Stars. I still do, sometimes. Started again around the time you took me in.”

Twilight smiled softly. “There’s no shame in that, Starlight. Though you didn’t strike me as the type.”

Starlight laughed nervously. “I’m not. Yet I still feel the urge to do it sometimes. To ask for protection. For help. For all of you.”

“…Maybe some of them do listen.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, it could be true. There are many different kinds of ponies – there are probably many different kinds of Stars. Some would care more. A large part of me wants to visit them and find out.”

“Well we don’t have any starships, and no universe we’ve come across has had any either.”

“That doesn’t change anything…” Twilight said, holding a hoof up to the stars. “I want to go up there, Starlight. I want to see them, to feel them, to be among them. Maybe to get some answers about our universe.”

“Heh. If only we could find a ship.”

“If only…”

Starlight coughed slightly. “Uh, Twilight?”

“Hrm?”

“There’s something… Well, uh, you know those things I make with my souvenirs?”

“Those things? What about them?”

“Well… You see… They… Uh…”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “…What is it Starlight?”

Starlight let out a long breath. “Eheh… Sorry. No idea why I’m so nervous. I… May or may not be working on a way to get into space. Yes. That’s it.”

Twilight blinked. “…R-really? But you don’t have any idea of all the math involved?! How are you-“

“Discord! And, heheh, brute force magic! That’s all it is. Definitely.”

Twilight frowned. “Starlight? Are you okay? You’re… being a little odd.”

Starlight gulped. “Er, yeah. I think I’m just tired. And crazy. And I may have also been unable to sleep because I was thinking too hard about my place in the universe. Great idea, coming out here to talk about Stars.”

Twilight rolled her eyes, fears put to rest. “Sometimes we just need to think about these things. I’ve discovered it’s always better done with other ponies. I was feeling the same way, really. So thanks for joining me out here.”

“I’m glad I came out. It’s better than wandering the pointless maze of corridors in your castle.”

“They aren’t pointless!”

“You don’t use half the rooms and the floorplan can’t be mapped out on a flat piece of paper.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re pointless!”

Starlight chuckled. “It just means it’s a mess to navigate, Twilight.”

“Now that I can understand.” Twilight chuckled, turning back to the light of the stars – and Stars.

“…You really want to go up there don’t you?”

“Yeah…” Twilight said. “The studies of space in all these worlds… The more I read, the more I want to see it with my own eyes. It’s like the Stars are calling me.”

Starlight nodded. She lit her horn, creating a small bubble of magic in front of her mouth. She whispered something into it and launched it into the sky.

“…What was that?”

“A prayer spell. It launches the words into the sky at the speed of light. There’s no way it actually does anything, but it’s symbolic.”

“I… see.”

“No you don’t,” Starlight said, nudging Twilight playfully.

Twilight shrugged. “Fair enough. You’ll have to explain these customs to me at some point. But right now, we really should be in bed.”

“Yeah.” The two of them left the balcony, allowing the night to fall into silence once more.

~~~

The next morning, Pinkie had a question. “So. Twilight. Why the sudden announcement of an instant adventure? Not that I mind or anything, but I think Gummy might be stuck to the ceiling right now.”

Twilight chuckled. “This is why.” She went to the Directory, flipping to the last page. “I was testing the latest batch of worlds for safety, when this happened.” She pulled a lever, setting the coordinates to a specific dimension. When she did so, the green diamond in the Mirror Portal flashed brighter than it ever had before and some sparks went flying off the machinery.

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “While impressive, and mildly concerning, we have no idea what that means, dear.”

Twilight unrolled a scroll in front of them all and grabbed a pen. She scribbled a dot on it. “All right, so. Let me explain ‘distance theory’ as we currently understand it. Let this dot represent our world, okay?”

Everypony nodded.

“This next dot, almost right next to Equestria, is Earth, a world extremely closely related to our own. So close, in fact, that the worlds are basically inseparable. They are connected by a very short line.” She drew a line between her two dots. “A little further out are worlds that are close to ours, but not the same. The world of liars, Lai, etcetera. Curiously, we find worlds like this far out as well, almost as if we’re inside a membrane of pony worlds with others dispersed around randomly, like a pepper in a salt and pepper shaker.”

“…Uh…” Fluttershy said, confused by the metaphor.

“Not important to understand. But if I draw more dots here further out…” She drew several dots and lines in quick succession. “I create a map of the known multiverse. We know of just over a hundred worlds in this map, with some close, and others like the Static world very distant compared to others.” On the edge of the map she drew a single dot to represent the Static. “Now, the longer the path, the more energy it takes to get to a universe.”

“So, I take it this universe takes a lot of energy?” Starlight postulated.

Twilight grinned. “A hundred thousand times more energy than the Static draws. If I tried to draw it on this sheet of paper I’d need to stretch it all the way to Canterlot. It took so much energy that, for the first time, the green thing showed strain. And, to put the cherry on top the universe is safe. Checked just a few minutes ago then called you all here.”

“Well what are we waiting for then!?” Pinkie said. “Let’s go to the furthest reaches of the multiverse already!” Without waiting for any of them, she bounced through the Mirror Portal.

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Well, guess we’re rushing in head first then.” She shrugged and leaped in herself, passing through the Mirrory Barrier. Traveling felt slightly different this time – whereas every other trip had always felt instant, she could have sworn there was a fraction of a second where she wasn’t in either location. She couldn’t even imagine what that would be.

The five of them appeared in a largely gray hallway with large numbers painted on the walls. It was mostly concrete with a few metallic pipes snaking around, indicative of a deep underground bunker. Judging from the height of the hallway, something human sized lived here.

Twilight blinked. “I… Was expecting something more exotic.”

“Definitely seen this kind of thing before in Earth government bases,” Starlight said.

“When were you in an Earth government base?” Rarity asked.

“I was on a random Earth universe. Upset the government. Had some fun.”

“I wonder how in Equestria you manage to get up to so much without us…”

Starlight shrugged. “I make time.”

“Are you neglecting your other friends?” Twilight asked. “When was the last time you saw Trixie?”

Starlight blinked. “A week?”

Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “Mmm… I’ll be watching you, Starlight. Watching…”

“You already are. I doubt there’s a single secret I have that you don’t know.”

Pinkie giggled. “Yeah… How you doing with your thing, by the way?” She winked cheesily.

Starlight turned beet red. “Pinkie…”

“Hey, I’m not telling.” She held her hooves up in surrender. “You’re the one who brought up me knowing secrets. Like tha-”

Rarity put a hoof over Pinkie’s mouth. “Things are usually secret for a reason, Pinkie. It wouldn’t be decent to shout it out.”

“Duh, I know that! I learned that lesson a long time ago!”

“Flurry’s only a few years old, Pinkie,” Twilight deadpanned.

“Egad! Years! I’m getting old!”

Fluttershy facehooved. “Girls, we haven’t done anything here yet. Think we should look around?”

“Right, right,” Twilight said. “Celestia, we get sidetracked easily. Let’s go… this way!” With a confident grin on her face, she turned a corner in the hallway.

A dozen humans in green military uniforms were pointing guns at her.

“Already with the guns!?” Twilight blurted. “Come on!”

“Should I get the drone out?” Starlight asked, poking her head cautiously out from around the corner.

“No… They’re not shooting yet.” She waved at them. “Hi! I’m Twilight Sparkle!”

One of them said something in a bizarre language.

“Of course humans this far out wouldn’t be in the translation spell…” Twilight muttered. She sat down, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. “We come in peace. Please keep talking so we can get the translation to work, okay?”

One of the men said something. No words were translated yet.

“Yep, this is going to be a far-removed language,” Starlight said. “Might take some time.”

“Never could have guessed that,” Twilight deadpanned.

The human man said something again.

“You’re going to have to talk more, I really can’t understand you.”

The man angled his gun closer to Twilight. He gestured to the left, where the other ponies were.

“…Girls? I think he wants us all where we can be seen.”

Fluttershy shrunk back. “Is that… safe?”

“Well, if they were going to just kill us I think they would have already. I say we go along with what they want.”

Pinkie shrugged, trotting into plain view of the soldiers. “Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie!” She waved. Two of them started muttering things to each other – but the leader silenced them. “Hey! Keep talking!”

Fluttershy and Rarity walked into view as well, Fluttershy making sure she was as far back as she could be. The lead soldier seemed pleased with this. He issued a command to his men, and they backed to the sides of the hallway, guns still poised. He himself gestured for the ponies to follow him before he set down the hallway in an ordered march.

Twilight shrugged. “Well, guess what we’re doing? That’s right, following him.”

The five ponies had to line up in single file to get through the men on either side of them. When Fluttershy passed the first set of soldiers, they fell in line behind her, startling her. Everyone tensed for a moment, thinking fighting would break out, but no such thing happened.

Starlight let out a breath. “Good. Everyone here just needs to calm their nerves a bit.”

“Why aren’t they talking?” Rarity asked. “They’re all being dreadfully silent and it’s making our lives more difficult.”

“They’re soldiers,” Starlight said. “They’re trained to say what needs to be said. Speaking out of line will not help them here.”

“Hmm…” Rarity mused.

“I think lots of them would like to talk but they’re scared of the big guy,” Pinkie suggested.

“Or they’re scared of us…” Fluttershy added.

“Very possible,” Twilight said. After a few more minutes of walking, they were led to a medium-sized room with no windows, one door, and a single nondescript table. There was only one chair, and seated in said chair was a middle-aged man with large glasses and brown hair. Behind him was an older man in a blue uniform with a wrinkled frown on his face. Judging from all the colored rectangles on his shirt, he was either high raking, accomplished, or both.

The man in the glasses greeted them with a warm smile. He moved to offer them a seat out of habit, but realized that not only did the room not have chairs, but he wasn’t even sure if ponies needed chairs. He said something to the older man – who just shrugged.

Twilight cleared her throat. “I am Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria, and we come in peace. You cannot understand me, I know this, but please just respond.”

The man in the glasses responded warmly with what was presumably an introduction of his own. Then he pointed to himself and said two words – “Daniel Jackson.”

Twilight smiled. He was trying to translate the old fashioned way. That helped her, at least. “Hi Daniel.” She pointed at herself. “Twilight Sparkle.” Then she pointed at her friends. “Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Starlight, Fluttershy.”

“Hi Daniel!” Pinkie echoed.

Daniel smiled. He gestured at the older man. “O’Neill. Jack O’Neill.” The man simply nodded in confirmation.

Twilight bowed, believing she should show the man some respect. “Now that that’s out of the way, what’s next on your list of attempts to communicate with us?”

Daniel started speaking rapidly, changing the way he spoke dramatically every few seconds.

“…He’s shuffling through languages,” Rarity said.

Twilight facehooved. “That won’t help the spell. Unless he hits one it knows. Which… Doesn’t appear to be happening.”

“Wow, he knows a lot of languages,” Fluttershy commented. “He’s still going.”

“…Impressive,” Twilight agreed.

Eventually Daniel ran out of languages and turned to O’Neill to say something. O’Neill shook his head, responding negatively to something. Their conversation lasted several seconds, but still the translator couldn’t work anything out.

Daniel pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it, covering the table with a sheet of hundreds of written scripts. Almost all of them looked familiar to Twilight, but none of them made any grammatical sense. She smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Sorry. You’ll just need to keep talking amongst yourselves until we get something…”

“Twilight, I propose finding a way to improve this spell,” Rarity suggested.

“It’s one of the most complex spells around, improving it is much easier said than done!”

“I’m sure you can do it Twilight!” Pinkie encouraged.

Twilight returned her focus to Daniel – he was talking to O’Neill again. Twilight had no idea what it was about, but O’Neill was looking rather tired. As if what was happening wasn’t all that unusual for him, and it was just a sign of “one of those days.” That’s a curious response… Twilight thought.

Then she caught a word come from O’Neill’s mouth. “Again.”

Twilight grinned. “Again!” She shouted, grinning. “You hear that, again! You can hear the world ‘again’ coming from my mouth, a partially translated sentence!”

Daniel turned to her and blinked again. He said a few more words, “again” and “meaning” came though.

Pinkie grinned. “Woo! There it is! Meaning! What kind of meaning? I don’t know! But I do know it’s finally working!”

Twilight nodded, grinning in Daniel’s direction.

He looked right at her and spoke. “Translator?”

“Yes!” Twilight said, nodding vigorously.

Daniel nudged O’Neill. “Speak.” “Again.”

“Again?” “Why?”

“Translator.” “Working.”

Twilight spread her wings, beaming. “Yes! Oh my Stars that took a lot longer than it usually does. Rarely does it need any more than a few sentences to latch onto something…”

“Something?” “Slower?” Came through from Daniel.

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Speaking.” “Thing.” “There.”

“Faster.” Daniel said. He started talking so fast Twilight could barely hear anything, but the spell was still able to pick it up. The sounds blurred together in Twilight’s mind – and apparently O’Neill’s as well, since he was fixing Daniel with the ‘have you lost it?’ look. But Pinkie was more than able to keep up.

“OhmygoshyouknowtheartoffasttalkingfastwellsodoI! Weshouldgettogetherandhaveacompetitionsomeday!”

Daniel took a breath. “Okay, I understood that entire sentence. I believe your translator has enough words now, Miss Sparkle?”

Twilight smirked. “I believe so. Also, you can just call me Twilight. Though I believe real introductions are in order now. I am Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria, and these are my friends whose names I presume you already know.”

Daniel nodded. “I’m Daniel Jackson, and this is General Jack O’Neill.”

Twilight bowed again. “Nice to meet you.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Care to explain why you were in our hallway?”

“We’re explorers,” Twilight answered. “We opened a portal to somewhere new and it happened to be in your hallway.”

“…How did you get here, then?”

“Through a portal,” Twilight said. “If you look around the corner where you found us, you’ll find a shiny spot on your wall. That leads directly back to our world.”

“And you’ve traveled to other worlds… often?”

Twilight nodded. “Around a hundred at this point, and we haven’t even been at it for a year! Your world is the most distant one we’ve visited so far!”

“So, let me get this straight…” O’Neill said. “You are a bunch of colorful ponies that go through a portal regularly to explore other worlds?”

“Yep!”

“Daniel, they’re pony versions of us, except instead of space it’s other universes.”

“Yeah, I got that-“

Starlight and Twilight glanced at each other and spoke at the same time. “Did you just say space?!”

Daniel blinked. “Yes? Do you do that as well?”

“No!” Twilight said, grinning. “And neither does any other universe we’ve encountered! This is amazing, we finally found one that can go to the stars! Oh yes oh yes oh yes!”

“Twilight, get a hold of yourself,” Rarity muttered in her ear.

Twilight blushed hard, forcing herself to stop bouncing around. “Ahem. Yes. I and the rest of my people would be very interested to see how you travel the stars. Or to see the stars themselves. Are we on a spaceship right now!?”

“Ah, no,” Daniel said. “You see, we use…” He paused when O’Neill grabbed his shoulder. “Oh, am I not allowed to tell them?”

O’Neill let a smirk crawl up his face. “Oh, they’ve got the same clearance as any other alien visitor. I just want to see the look on their faces when they see it.”

“See what?” Starlight asked.

~~~

“…Celestia…” Twilight said, jaw hanging loose.

It wasn’t a spaceship.

It was a giant ring with alien symbols all the way around it. The metal was a dark dull gray, giving it a somehow ancient feel. Seven orange triangular shapes were spread along the edge of the ring, glowing softly, each one pointing at a singular symbol on the inner part of the ring. The inside of the ring was currently blocked by an iris hatch, clearly designed to open and close the ring quickly.

O’Neill nodded slowly. “Behold! The hunk of metal that’s more trouble than it’s worth!”

Daniel sighed. “It’s the stargate.”

“I like mine better.”

Twilight turned to Daniel. “How’s it work?”

“Well, I’m not really a scientist… But I know it operates by forming a wormhole connection with a gate at the other end, creating a near-instant passage from gate to gate. Just enter the coordinates and wait for it to connect, basically.”

“Sunset would love this…” Twilight said. “She’s been looking for a non-magical solution for months now, and if this thing can make wormholes…”

“…Did you just say ‘magic’ there?” O’Neill asked.

“Uh… Yes?” Twilight said, smiling nervously. “We’re very magical creatures from a world where the arcane arts are used in day to day life. I take it that’s not the case here?”

“No,” O’Neill deadpanned.

“Well, uh, I can demonstrate if you want…”

“Please do,” Daniel said, adjusting his glasses.

Twilight gulped. “Now, don’t be scared or anything…” She lit her horn, taking a pen out of her saddlebags with her telekinesis. She grinned stupidly.

“…I was expecting something more, I don’t know, impressive,” O’Neill said.

Starlight lit up. “Do you want impressive!?”

“Starlight no,” Twilight said.

“Starlight yes,” O’Neill said, nodding in confirmation at Starlight.

Starlight lifted herself into the air and created a crystal from the aether. Then she teleported to the other side of the room, frowning. “That took a bit more effort than usual…”

Daniel’s glasses slid down his nose. “…Do all of your kind have these abilities?”

“Only those who bother to study,” Rarity said. “For instance, you won’t see me teleporting around randomly.”

“And only unicorns,” Pinkie said, appearing behind Daniel.

Daniel jumped back from Pinkie. “And what about you?”

“I’m just Pinkie Pie!”

“I know that, I mean you aren’t a unicorn, but you just appeared behind me!”

“Already answered the question!”

O’Neill nodded in approval at the pink pony’s response. Suddenly, an alarm went off – not a particularly jarring one, but one designed to get everyone’s attention without causing a panic. The stargate made a large clunk sound and its inner ring started turning, and one of the orange triangles shifted overtop of a symbol, presumably entering it into the system as the first digit of the address.

“Ah. SG-14 must be coming back,” Daniel said. “Looks like you get to see it work.”

The ponies fell silent, staring right at the gate as its inner ring cycled around slowly, coming to a stop only after several seconds of turning for one of the triangles to lock in a symbol. The grinding sound the gate made was somehow comforting, though Twilight wondered how it didn’t wear out from the constant rotating. Every time one of the symbols was locked, the strange noise sent shivers of anticipation down Twilight’s spine.

She was overcome with a feeling of it taking way too long. Four symbols. Five. Six. Seven.

With the seventh lock, a noise vaguely reminiscent of an engine revving and failing to startup filled the room, and then a noise that could only be described as a ‘kawoosh’ greeted their ears. There was a blue glow coming from behind the gate, though its source was blocked by the iris.

O’Neill looked behind him, up at the bulletproof glass separating the gateroom from the control room. “It them?”

A balding man nodded from behind the glass. He pressed a button and the iris slid open with the noise of a dozen knives scraping against each other. Behind the metal was a rippling puddle of blue and white energy, kept in place by the stargate itself, its glow filling the entire room with watery light.

A soldier stepped through, followed by three other men. They saluted to O’Neill and walked down the ramp to him. “Alien visitors today, sir?”

O’Neill nodded. “It always happens when I’m here, doesn’t it? I should just stop agreeing to help Landry with his vacations.”

The soldier looked at the ponies. “So, these guys again?”

Twilight blinked. “Wait… Again? You’ve met others like us before?”

Daniel’s eyes widened. “Oh, right. Forgot about that. We did have a unicorn in here for a short while several months ago. She was chasing a being made of blue crystal.”

“No way…” Twilight said.

“You know them?”

“Sort of. Their chase ended in our world. When they vanished the crystal man left his dimensional device. It’s why we’re able to explore the multiverse at all. That’s all we know of them. But… You aren’t the first people besides us who saw them, strangely…”

The soldier who’d just come through the gate raised an eyebrow. “Multiverse? One of those days, eh General?”

“Yes it is,” O’Neill said.

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “…Do you guys travel the multiverse as well, or am I reading this wrong?”

Daniel put a hand to his forehead. “The stargate is, under special circumstances, able to link to other universes. Such events are rare, poorly understood, and, as Jack would say, more trouble than they’re worth.”

“You girls come across evil versions of yourselves yet?” O’Neill asked.

Twilight pondered this. “From time to time, yeah.”

“That’s why. It also gets really confusing differentiating one person from another.”

“Did you ever consider nicknames?” Starlight asked. “I mean, Twilight here goes by Twinkie sometimes.”

O’Neill tried to suppress a laugh and ended up snorting instead.

“…No, we didn’t consider that…” Daniel said, a little embarrassed. “Still, it’s not something we really looked into that often. We could count the number of times other universes were encountered on one hand.”

“So you must be really good at space travel then, huh?” Starlight asked.

“Yep, even got ourselves a few ships,” O’Neill said.

Twilight’s eyes sparkled. She looked right into O’Neill’s eyes with the cutest expression she could muster.

“That’s cheating,” he said.

Pinkie giggled. “No it isn’t! If Fluttershy was doing it would be cheating, but she’s not.”

“…The Apollo is in orbit,” Daniel said. “They’re not doing anything at the moment.”

O’Neill relented. “Fine. Let’s go on a space cruise. Show off our ship.” He turned back to the control room. “Walter! Tell the Apollo to pick us up and prepare for a little demonstration.”

The bald man – Walter – nodded and got on the phone.

“You have a ship…” Twilight said. “…How fast does it go?”

O’Neill blinked. “Uh…”

“Thirty thousand light years per hour, give or take,” Daniel Jackson said.

“I can’t even comprehend that speed,” Starlight said. “Twilight, what’s a light year?”

“The distance it takes light to travel in a year…” Twilight murmured, processing exactly how fast that was in her mind.

“…I take it that’s a really long distance?”

“The nearest star to Equis is about five light years away. It would take you thousands upon thousands of years to fly there if you could survive.”

Starlight blinked. “So, am I the only one not able to comprehend this sense of scale? Anyone else?”

O’Neill pointed at Starlight. “This unicorn gets it.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “That she-“

Suddenly, there was a flash of blue-white light, and they were somewhere else.

“-does,” Daniel finished.

O’Neill tensed up and sighed. “I thought we’d stopped the ‘teleporting without warning’ thing.”

Twilight blinked. “Technological teleportation!? How’s it work?”

Daniel raised his hands. “I can’t answer that one. I’m an archeologist by trade, not a theoretical physicist.”

“It also doesn’t matter,” O’Neill deadpanned. “Something about atoms and stuff.”

“But that is matter!” Pinkie said.

“Matter doesn’t matter.”

“So matter’s an oxymoron?”

O’Neill paused for a moment. “…Maybe.”

Twilight took the moment to examine her new surroundings. Instead of bland concrete, now there was cold metal all around, arranged in a practical manner. The novelty of the metal made it less boring than the concrete hallway they had just been in, but no doubt the grey color would seem monotonous to those stationed on here. A few people in uniforms walked around, glancing curiously at the ponies but not paying them too much attention. Screens lined the walls, displaying schematics of what Twilight assumed was the ship itself – a large rectangular center with two rectangles on either side and one large neck. She hadn’t the foggiest idea what any of the parts of the Apollo actually were, just that it certainly looked spaceworthy - though she couldn’t really be considered a worthy judge of such a thing.

“This way,” O’Neill said, marching through a doorway. “You want to see space, well the best way to see space is from the bridge.”

“Ohmygosh yes,” Twilight said, giggling to herself. She was trying very hard to keep herself under control, but even she could only take so much. They walked up to the bridge of the ship. O’Neill exchanged pleasantries with the captain, but Twilight definitely wasn’t looking at that. She passed the command consoles and other controls, walking right up to the front window. She pressed a hoof to the glass, delicately. Her pupils shrunk to pinpricks and her mouth went slack. She could see stars – and a large blue marble. A planet.

“It’s really somethin’, isn’t it?” O’Neill said.

“Yeah… I… I can’t believe I never asked the Binaries to take me up…”

“Captain, engage hyperdrive. Take us to Chulak.”

“Huh, wha-“ Twilight began, only to be stunned into silence as the starry field was replaced with a blue-purple vortex of energy surrounding the ship on all sides, passing all around them. She reeled back, a little nauseous at the patterns she saw. “…What is this?”

“Hyperspace,” O’Neill said. “Can’t tell you much else about it.”

“…It’s beautiful…” Rarity said, placing her hoof on the window as well. “I could get used to this…”

The moment she said that the blue shimmer of hyperspace vanished, replaced by a different planet, and a different star. Twilight grinned. “How far did we go?”

“Only a few dozen light years,” Daniel said.

“Only a few dozen,” Twilight emphasized. “Why, with this it would be easy to find the stars in our world… Just jump around until you get one you can connect with…”

O’Neill raised his eyebrows. “Since when did we give you permission to use our ship for your scientific curiosity?”

Twilight laughed nervously. “Yeeeah… You didn’t.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Twilight’s just getting ahead of herself, don’t hold it against her.”

Daniel smiled. “It’s fine. We’re used to people being overwhelmed.”

Twilight cleared her throat. “I believe our next course of action should be to form official relations and discuss diplomacy, yes? Unless your human culture is very different than the others we’ve encountered.”

Daniel blinked. “I… Have no idea if we’re the same or not, but that would be the next step.”

“Politics…” O’Neill muttered under his breath, making a ‘great’ gesture with his hands.

“Oh no… Politics…” Pinkie muttered. “Twilight, do we have to?”

“You girls can head home, assuming our friends here can take us back to where we came from. I’ll do all the talking.”

Rarity raised a hoof. “I’ll stay.”

Twilight smiled. “Thanks. I could stand some backup. Funny, this is actually the first time we’ve gone right to diplomacy. Usually there’s some crazy adventure first or-“

“DON’T JINX IT!” Pinkie shouted, covering Twilight’s mouth.

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Anyway, can you take us back?”

O’Neill gave the order.

~~~

Discord sat in Starlight’s secret room, playing some random game where he was a human killing blobs with a knife. He had no idea about the story of the game (if there was one), all he knew was that killing amorphous blobs was fun. Really, really fun. Also a little hard, but that was part of the fun.

Starlight teleported into the secret room. “Discord! We are going on a trip!”

Discord blinked. “Where to?”

“We’ve found a new world – one with science-fiction technology. Spaceships. C’mon, we’re going to steal their secrets.”

Discord dropped the controller. “Yes! So, what are we going for?”

“I don’t know. Ideally, we get spaceship blueprints, but only if we can grab it without them noticing. If they notice, they’ll probably blame Twilight. So not only do we need to be invisible, but intangible. Got it?”

Discord snapped his fingers. “Got it. We are now invisible and intangible. To the Mirror Portal?”

“To the Mirror Portal.”

With a snap of his fingers, Discord and Starlight appeared in front of the Mirror Portal. Bon Bon looked up from her paperwork as if she sensed something, but shrugged and went back to work.

“Can we be heard?” Starlight wondered aloud, quietly.

“Nope!” Discord giggled. “HEY BON BON!”

Bon Bon didn’t so much as flinch at the scream.

“Good,” Starlight said. “Can’t take any chances. That place is probably crawling with cameras, sensors, the like. But they don’t have magic. So that’s our way in.”

Discord pressed his fingers together evilly. “Perrrrfect…”

Starlight stepped through the Mirror Portal, appearing back in the hallway. There was a human guard there, completely unaware of them. Starlight passed her hoof through his body. “We’re like ghosts.”

“Who knows? Maybe ghosts are just ponies who learned this spell and didn’t know how to undo it.”

“What a comforting thought…” Starlight muttered. “How in Tartarus are my hooves touching the ground?”

“Magic. Duh.”

“I do not believe for a second you had the foresight to make me not pass through the floor.”

“You wound me so. Maybe you just want your hooves to be solid. Ever think of that?”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “Riiight. Anyway, let’s check this place out. To the gate first. It’s down a few levels. …Maybe I can just…” She jumped into the air, and landed face first on the ground – passing through to the level below. “Sweet.”

“We could just teleport,” Discord noted. “You obviously know where it is.”

“Right,” Starlight lit her horn and then they were in the gateroom. At the moment nobody was there. Starlight glanced towards the back – through the glass she could see the control room, and she also noticed a higher ‘window’ overlooking the stargate where Twilight and Rarity were talking with a bunch of humans.

“Okay, so… the meeting probably isn’t important, but I bet that control room is.”

They walked through the walls, climbing up the stairs to the stargate control room. There were dozens of tall computer boxes with hundreds of blinking lights distributed among them. Wires snaked across the walls and floors, and screens of all kinds were littered around in a fashion that looked disorganized but was actually optimized for space.

Starlight furrowed her brow. “And now, to figure out if anything here is particularly useful…”

Discord reached a finger out to poke a scientist’s hat, presumably for a prank.

“Discord! Stealth!”

“Fine then.” He folded his arms. “What should I do if I can’t have fun?”

“Look at the screens, see if they can tell us where the interesting stuff is!”

Discord pointed at one of the bigger screens. “This one shows a hangar right above the stargate. Status: closed. Calls it the Jumper Bay.”

Starlight shoved her head closer to the screen Discord was pointing at. “Wow. That was fast. Good work.”

“It’s on multiple screens and seems like it’s an important thing. I’m surprised you didn’t notice it.”

“I was… Interested in numbers. Yeah.” A soldier walked right through her. She shivered. “That just doesn’t feel right at all.”

Discord waved his hand through her face. She glared at him. “The epitome of comedy, everypony.”

“I’m here all week!”

“Let’s try not to be here all week.” She levitated herself up, floating back into the gate room and through the ceiling. They arrived at a large room with a handful of cylindrical shaped objects with windows in the front. Little ships. Probably little spaceships. Little spaceships that looked designed to fit through the stargate.

“…These are probably the Jumpers,” Starlight said.

Discord rubbed his hands together. “Let’s take one.”

“Are you crazy!? There’s no way in Tartarus that we’ll be able to get one of these out without them noticing!”

“Starlight, I can turn an entire city into utter chaos in a manner of minutes. I can make everyone think there’s still a ship here. Just have to mess with their heads.”

“…Discord! We do not want to be caught! What if they have some kind of alarms!?”

Discord smirked. “Then I just have to be precise with my chaos, don’t I?”

“Discord this is a bad idea and I’m telling you-“

“Done.”

Starlight blinked. All the Jumpers were still there. “…What do you mean?”

“I mean I stole the Jumper. I currently have it in my hand.” He unfolded his claw, revealing a small metallic cylinder.

“But… But none of them are missing!”

“That’s what everyone thinks. But that one right there isn’t real.”

“…While I admit that’s impressive and makes me wonder why you don’t do these things more often, they’ll still notice when they try to fly it!”

“Oh, but that’s the beauty of it!” Discord grinned. “We can take this home, have some fun with it, figure out how it flies, and then return it! They’ll never know.”

“I’m not sure a copying spell will work on this.”

“Well at the very least you can download the computer or whatever.”

“…Fine. But we need to work fast, okay? Who knows, maybe there’s a Jumper cleaning day today!”

Discord snapped his fingers, taking them back to the hallway where the Mirror Portal was. “After you.”

Starlight rolled her eyes, stepping back into Equestria. Once again, Bon Bon looked up. This time she furrowed her brow, like her sixth sense was acting up, but since she didn’t see anything she went back to her papers.

One more teleport took them to the secret room. “Why do you even have a door?” Discord wondered aloud. “Seal it up with bricks, make it more secure.”

“Never know what’ll happen. I might lose my horn or magic or something and need to get in here.”

“…How would you open the magic lock then?”

Starlight blinked. “…Good point. Time to invest in a different lock. Anyway…” She facehooved. “Discord we can’t look at it in here, not enough space. We need to be outside.”

“I could just shrink us-“

“Discord, I think if there was ever a time to adhere to the laws of physics, it’d be now.”

Discord rolled his eyes. “Fiiiiiine. Everfree Forest?”

“Everfree Forest.”

With a quick teleport, they stood in one of the many clearings in the magical Everfree Forest. The mixture of purple and green trees was usually uninviting and mysterious, but today the sun shone bright and the air felt friendly. Discord dropped the stealth spells and grew the Jumper back to its normal size.

They stood there for several seconds.

“Now what?” Discord said.

“…There should be a way to open it…” She walked around to the back, prodding the hatch with her magic. “Locked.”

“Then use an unlock spell!”

“I don’t know how it’d rea-“

Discord snapped his fingers. The back of the Jumper slid open, creating a ramp into the surprisingly roomy interior.

Starlight twitched. “You know, if we break it…”

“They’ll blame it on their technicians.”

“…Mmmf. Whatever.” She walked in. “…Looks like there’s supplies here.” She levitated a bag off one of the side shelves and opened it. Inside was a first aid kit, food rations, a few devices she couldn’t identify, and a couple guns. One of the guns looked different from all the others.

She took out the small, vaguely snakelike pistol. “Huh. Looks alien.”

Discord snapped his fingers and created a dummy outside. “Fire away.”

Starlight clicked the button on the side with her magic. With a startling noise, the pistol readied itself, but didn’t fire. “Geez, all these noises are going to give me a heart atta-“

She accidentally fired it, hitting the dummy head-on with a coursing bolt of power that vaguely resembled electricity. The dummy shook, singed.

Starlight’s mane was now standing on end. “…Welp, that’s probably an effective weapon,” Starlight said, shoving it back into the bag. “Let’s never shoot it again.”

“I say we do more experiments to determine if it’s shocking in the electrical or emotional sense.”

“Nooooot right now!” She rummaged around through the extra boxes for a while longer, finding a box with dozens of crystalline chips inside of it. “…I bet these interface with the system computer.”

“Is there an instruction manual?”

“…Sorta?” Starlight pulled a small booklet out of the case. “More like scientific gibberish for people who already know what they’re doing.”

“Well copy some of the stuff and let’s move on already. Come on, I want it to fly.”

Starlight frowned. “Why don’t you duplicate some things?”

With those words, Discord decided to make another one of the snake-pistols.

“AUGH!” Starlight blurted. “Not those!”

Discord pointed it at the dummy and fired, successfully knocking it to the ground. “Looks like I still have it.”

“Could you just duplicate the entire ship then!?”

Discord frowned. “…I could try… HUZZAH!”

Another Jumper appeared.

“WE DIDN’T HAVE TO STEAL IT AT ALL DISCORD, FOR THE LOVE OF F-“

Discord burst into laughter. The duplicate Jumper fell over, revealing it to be a cardboard cutout. The gun in Discord’s hand disintegrated into sound. “I can’t replicate things this complicated, why do you think I’ve been helping you steal things?”

Starlight twitched. “…Fine. We can take that entire bag out, they won’t miss it.” She threw the bag with the gun, rations, and other supplies out of the Jumper. “But now I want to see how this thing flies…” She and Discord walked to the front of it and sat in the two chairs. Starlight pressed one of the buttons with her hoof.

Nothing happened. Not even a consolatory beep.

Starlight furrowed her brow. “Great.”

“Maybe we need a key…”

Starlight tried a simple ‘unlock’ spell. Nothing happened. “Nope, not a key. Not in a literal sense at least.”

“I’m sure you’ve got spells that break into just about everything, including the minds of ponies.”

“Leeeeeet’s not talk about that!” Starlight laughed. “I’ll just try my ‘skeleton key’ spell. It should allow access to anything that isn’t magically guarded in some way. And I’m not detecting any magic on this thing, so…”

She cast the spell, and the console lit up.

“Cool. It’s on.” Discord snapped his fingers, turning his head into a car. “How make go?”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe you just ask it to go up.”

The Jumper opened up its sides, revealing two engines. It activated them and floated a meter up into the air.

Starlight blinked. “Okay. It’s interfaced with my mind. Not creepy at all. Nope.”

“Starlight.” Discord grabbed her face and touched her muzzle with his nose. “Take us. To. The. Moon.”

Starlight thought about this for a moment – then decided it was time to throw caution to the wind. “You got it!” She thought about closing the Jumper’s back hatch, and it complied. She thought about flying into the sky, and it compiled. The Jumper rocketed through the atmosphere, passing all the clouds in a matter of seconds. Starlight briefly wondered why she wasn’t feeling any acceleration – but then she decided she didn’t care. She pushed the thing as fast as it would go, leaving Equis behind rapidly. The blue orb shrank behind them to a tiny pinprick as they sailed towards the sun.

“Moon, Starlight. Moon. Not the fiery thing.”

“Right, right…” Starlight turned the Jumper around, looking back at Equis. The day side was nice, brilliant, and inviting. Not to mention absolutely amazing to look at. She wasn’t even sure she knew all the landmasses she saw. She ordered the Jumper around to the other side, the side in shadow. She could see small pinpricks of magical light wafting from parts of the globe, but there weren’t that many.

But the moon was certainly easy to see. She sailed right for the mysterious silvery orb, thinking that they’d arrive at any moment, certainly.

The moon was a lot further away than it looked. It took a few minutes to actually arrive, and Starlight didn’t even land. She just skated over the surface.

“Wow. Bigger than I thought it was,” Starlight noted.

Discord shrugged. “Eh, it’s not that interesting.”

Starlight blinked. “…You could have just teleported us here.”

“Yeah, but at least we know the Jumper works!”

Starlight twitched. “Discord, those last two minutes were of no help determining if the Jumper worked or not…”

“But they were fun!”

“Discord…”

“And who cares about two minutes anyway?”

“We need to get this computer system downloaded so we can return this thing!” Reacting off her anger, the Jumper decided it was a good time to fire a weapon. A yellow drone shot from one of the Jumper’s sides, impacting the surface of the moon. The weapon hit, bounced off the surface after making a crater, and decided to hit again in the same spot.

Starlight blinked. “…That’s too small to see from Equis, right?”

“I’m sure nopony noticed,” Discord said, the uncertainty in his voice clear.

“Take us back.”

“Good idea.”

Discord teleported the Jumper back into Equis orbit, and Starlight took it down to the Everfree Forest, landing back in the clearing. She let out a breath.

“…I’m going to try to get the computer’s information out, somehow. Something tells me we won’t have enough storage. Then we can return and-“

There was a knock at the back of the Jumper. Starlight and Discord tensed. They turned behind them, looking at the closed hatch.

There was another knock.

Starlight told the Jumper to open the hatch. She put on the most innocent grin she could manage, and Discord followed her example.

On the other side of the hatch was a very ticked off Princess Luna.

“Why Luna! Fancy running into you here!” Discord announced. “Why, Starlight and I were just-“

“You two are going to explain to me exactly what’s going on here,” Luna interrupted. “There will be no lies, no deceptions, and no half-truths. Understand?”

Starlight gulped. “Y-yes, Princess.”

Luna sneered. “Now, how about we start with what hit my Moon?”

~~~

Rarity laid the dimensional device on the table. “And here it is. The portable device. It can’t store anywhere near enough power to get from here to Equestria, but it can go most other distances. We are most willing to share it and our knowledge of dimensional travel with you, in exchange for some of your own devices. Namely the hyperdrive you use to travel the stars at ‘impossible’ speeds.”

Daniel glanced at O’Neill and the other politicians and soldiers in the room. “Well?”

O’Neill nodded. “I approve. Now all we have to do is wait several weeks while the senators sort out the paperwork.”

“It really takes weeks to do that?” Twilight asked.

“Anything that isn’t urgent will be deliberated until it can’t be deliberated anymore,” Daniel admitted. “If there was a crisis on hand, O’Neill could authorize it. But it’s not like you need it to survive.”

“Yeah… Mostly just curiosity. I guess I can wait a little longer.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Should there be any formal signatures of any kind? Humans generally like that sort of thing. No offense, mind you.”

Daniel chuckled. “Signatures won’t come until your lawyers and our lawyers actually draw up a treaty of some kind.”

Rarity took in a breath and let it out. “I was mildly afraid of that. Our society isn’t big on… Lawyers and legalese, usually.”

“You two seem fine at it.”

“By necessity only. Run into enough different cultures you realize that lots of them like paperwork.”

O’Neill smirked. “So the opposite problem we have.”

“I suppose so.”

Twilight used her horn to create a scroll. She shook her head. “Wow… This universe must have extremely low levels of magic. It’s difficult to perform spells. Glad there are at least enough to maintain the translation, but ponyfeathers…” She levitated a pen out of her saddlebags and started scribbling out some lines.

Daniel adjusted his glasses. “That makes sense, seeing as magic doesn’t exist here, far as we know. The only things that come close to having it are Ascended beings.”

“Come again?” Twilight said, looking up from her scroll.

“There’s… some kind of spirit-force in our world that you can advance through a number of… bizarre and seemingly inexplicable methods. Eventually you can turn your mind and ‘soul’ into a physical entity with immense power.”

“It’s like ‘enlightenment’, but in space!” O’Neill remarked.

“Curious…” Twilight said. “That doesn’t quite sound like magic… More like the powers the Elemental Nations have. Powers that come from within. Hrm… I may wish to meet one of these Ascended to learn more. I’ve been trying to formulate a theory of esoteric powers, and it’s been proving rather difficult.”

Daniel shrugged. “You’re looking at one. Or, well, a man who used to be one.”

“Really? Why aren’t you one anymore?”

“Lots of reasons. Mainly because the Ascended enforce a pretty strict non-interference policy. I had the inability to just sit by and let things explode.”

“Ah. Don’t suppose they’d be willing to talk to me then.”

“Probably not,” Daniel agreed.

“Well…” She turned back to her scroll, scribbling a few more things down. She handed it to Rarity, who crossed out a few items on it and scribbled a few ideas of her own. She then slid it to Daniel.

“This is a… ‘draft’ of sorts.”

Daniel read it over. “Very basic, but we can work with this.”

“Then let’s hope all goes well with your political processe-“

There was a knock at the door. O’Neill sighed. “Timing… Yes, what is it?”

Walter stuck his head in the room from the doorway. “There’s a ‘Princess Luna’ here about... Something.”

Twilight blinked. “Luna? Here? …Why?”

“You know her?” Daniel asked.

“Yes, she’s one of the rulers of Equestria, alongside me. But she never leaves Equestria… I wonder what she’s got to say. …Maybe she wants to look over what we’re doing? It should be fine to bring her in.”

O’Neill nodded to Walter. He left the doorway to let Luna in.

Everyone got the impression something was about to go wrong when Starlight was tossed into the room, faceplanting on the ground. She covered her face with her hooves and couldn’t make eye contact.

Twilight paled when Discord was tossed in next, landing face-first next to Starlight. Luna strode in afterward, scowling. “I take it you are General Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson?”

“…Yes? What is this about?” Daniel said, frowning. He set the scroll down on the table and folded his hands together.

“These two have committed a crime against you. They stole one of your devices for their own needs.”

“We were going to give it back!” Discord spat back, standing fully upright. A few of the soldiers drew guns on him. He snapped his fingers, turning the guns into silly putty.

“Discord… Just stop…” Starlight moaned, refusing to look up.

O’Neill stared right at Starlight with a stare that anyone could feel boring into the back of their head. “What did you take?”

“…One of your Jumper ships,” Starlight muttered.

“There’s no way, we would have noticed.”

Luna slammed the Jumper – currently miniaturized – on the table. “The one in your hangar is currently a fake, crafted by Discord and Starlight here. They were planning on stealing all the technology and secrets they could, and would have had I not stopped and found them. I turn them over to you for prosecution.”

“Luna!” Twilight blurted. “You can’t do tha-“

“They’ve been doing this for months, Twilight. Starlight has a secret room filled with stolen objects from other universes. They need to see that there are consequences for their actions.” She turned back to O’Neill, refusing to respond to Twilight’s aghast expression. “How does your kind go about this?”

O’Neill took a deep breath, picking up the tiny ship in his fingers, studying it. “…Well from what I understand, there’s a trial, and for something like this we lock them up in jail for a while. Though… This will be an odd case…”

“Nope,” Discord said, “not dealing with that.” He snapped his fingers, vanishing in a puff of white light.

Starlight stared at where he’d just been, tears in her eyes. “…Discord…”

Daniel turned to Luna. “Can you…”

Luna shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. Discord’s power is far beyond that of any others. I was lucky to get him this far.”

“He’s basically an Ascended...” Daniel commented under his breath.

O’Neill turned to Starlight. “…You really handing her over to us?”

“Yes. Considering her position in our society, I believe Twilight would just pardon her with a stern talking to.”

Twilight shot Luna a look. A look that was both accusing and hurt. Luna remained impassive.

Daniel let out a long, deep sigh. He slid the scroll back to Rarity. “I’m afraid this is no longer on the table. I don’t think we could convince our people to work with those associated closely with thieves. I’m afraid discussions have to be suspended.”

“It was going so well…” O’Neill sighed. “Take her away, men. And… hold on, what about her magic?”

“I’ve sealed it,” Luna said. “She won’t be able to use it unless I release her.”

O’Neill nodded to his men. Then grabbed her and dragged her away – she didn’t fight. “By the way,” he said. “It’s a Puddlejumper. Not a Jumper.” He left without another word. Everyone began to file wordlessly out of the room after him, including Luna.

Twilight turned to Rarity. “Rarity, what am I going to do.”

Rarity furrowed her brow. “We’re going to talk to Luna, that’s what.” She trotted out of the room, face determined. They met up with the lunar princess in the hallway. “Princess Luna!”

Luna was clearly not used to one of her subjects addressing her with that tone. She turned around and loomed over Rarity. “What? Choose your words carefully.”

Rarity didn’t flinch. “That was a political mess Luna! A mess! We were working towards a better tomorrow and a great friendship, and because you did that you ruined it!”

“Would you rather I let them do what they wanted?”

“Maybe!” Rarity spat, standing as tall as she could muster. “Or just make them return it with no one the wiser!”

“That’s dishonest, Rarity.”

“If you’re honest all the time the world will grind you into powder. This was one of those times.”

Luna glared. “Starlight was acting far out of line, and she’s ruined Stars know how much with her constant thefts. She needed something like this.”

“Then you could have punished her!” Twilight blurted.

“You and I both know you would have found a way to pardon her. Turn Cadence and Celestia to your side.”

Twilight fumed. “Did you ever think that, maybe, if you thought the rest of us would disagree with your choice that maybe it was wrong?”

“How many times has Starlight overstepped a major boundary, Twilight?” Luna said. “She learns, yes, but she learns slowly because you keep pardoning her. Brainwashing, mind control, magic abuse, theft - you just talk to her and tell her to learn. I see her dreams. She never does those particular things again, but her nature is still disposed for going against the rules, against harmony. She needs more of a kick than you’re willing to give.”

“She’s my student, Luna, not yours!”

“Didn’t you let her ‘graduate’, Twilight?”

Twilight took a few steps back, tears in her eyes. “W-why didn’t you just tell me about this earlier? Talked it out?”

Luna sighed. “Twilight… I – I probably should have. But I needed to act now in this particular instance. I cannot say I handled the situation perfectly, but I stand by it.”

Rarity shook her head. “Luna, there’s more to this than what Starlight and Twilight need. Your actions have changed things forever between these people and Equestria. They may never trust us again.”

“Should they?” Luna asked.

“…We’d want them to.”

“Isn’t that manipulative?”

Rarity narrowed her eyes. “Please, princess, you live in Canterlot. You know how things are. You can’t be as high as you are without pulling a few calculated strings.”

Luna’s expression lost its certainty. “…Maybe. Regardless, what’s done is done. Now we all have to deal with it.” She walked away, trying to keep a regal figure – but her stature was damaged.

Rarity let out a panicked breath the moment Luna turned the corner. “Oh. My. Stars. I just shouted at the princess. Twilight I just shouted at the princess. TWILIGHT I JUST SHOUTED AT THE PRINCESS! I’m dead!”

“No… No you’re not dead,” Twilight said, wiping her eyes. “She… I think she needed to hear that. I’ll have to go talk to her later. But… But right now, I’ve got something else to do. We need to stay here to deal with what Starlight’s done.”

“I still can’t believe she did that…” Rarity said.

“…I can,” Twilight said. “She tried to tell me as much last night. There were signs… And Luna’s right, it is in her nature to just do things against Harmony.” She shook her head. “What a mess…”

Rarity hugged her close.

~~~

Starlight sat in a cell. The door was locked, she had no magic, and she was crying.

What in Equestria was I thinking? I should have known, I should have known, I should have known, I… No, I made this choice! I knew exactly what I was doing and did it for the future of Equestria! Equestria just didn’t want me! So why did I bother? Was there even a point…? Discord betrayed me. He just left me here to dry. He… AAAAAAAAAAA

“AAAAAAAA!” She screamed, ramming her head into a nearby wall. Since she already had a splitting headache, the pain didn’t even register. She just couldn’t deal with this right now. Her mind was a swirling mess of contradicting thoughts and emotions, urges to beat herself up and to inflate her own ego coming at her from all sides.

She couldn’t think. What did this even mean? Was she wrong? Was everybody crazy? Was it somehow both? Was she crazy? What did Twilight think?

Oh no. Twilight. She probably hates me. They were doing something important and I… I…

There was a knock at the door. Starlight looked up to it, unable or unwilling to say anything. Even she wasn’t sure.

It slid open. A guard let Twilight in. He shut the door behind them.

Starlight froze. Tears dripped down her face but her expression was blank, her pupils tiny.

Twilight sighed. “…Why?”

“…I, I wanted to help Equestria. Y-you wouldn’t do it, so I had to. I… that drone that saved your life? It wouldn’t exist without what I d-did.”

Twilight bit her lip. “I was afraid of that. Starlight, bad things can result in some good, and good things can result in bad. If you’d never brainwashed that town, we’d never have met. But I still think it would have been better for you never to do that.”

Starlight sagged. “…You’re right.”

Twilight frowned. “Am I really?”

“Of course you are! You’re always right!”

“No, I’m not, and you know this. Luna doesn’t think I’m right either. She thinks I’m way too soft with you. That you need to be punished like this.”

Starlight blinked. “You… don’t think so?”

“No. I think you need to be taken back to my castle so we can talk this out. There didn’t need to be public embarrassment or irreversible consequences. There didn’t need to be persecution. Or… I thought that.”

“…And now?”

“I’m not sure. Luna’s made me think about it…” she leaned against one of the cell walls and sighed. “I can probably strike a deal to get you out of here. All I’m wondering is if I should. What do you think?”

“I…” Starlight grabbed the side of her head. “I don’t know. I’m not in my right mind right now. There’s part of me that thinks I need to be locked up forever and there’s the other part that’s begging you to let me out. To forgive me.”

Twilight shook her head with a sad smile on her face. “I’ve already forgiven you. Just like all the other times.”

Starlight wiped her face. “You are way too forgiving, Twilight.”

“I know. I think that’s part of what Luna wants to teach me.”

“Nopony ever stops learning, huh?”

“No.” Twilight hugged her. “It’s something we share.”

“You should probably let them have their way with me,” Starlight said suddenly. “It’s the politically correct thing to do at this point.”

Twilight shook her head. “I’m not thinking about that right now. I’m thinking about what’s best for you and me.”

“Well, I can’t tell you that.” Starlight removed herself from the hug. “You’ll need to make your own decision.”

“It seems like I’m making a lot of those lately…”

“Yeah…”

Twilight took in a breath. “I’m going to think this over. Whatever I decide, know you’re still my friend, Starlight. Okay?”

“I know.”

They hugged again, and Twilight left, leaving Starlight alone in the cell again.

It was so silent.

~~~

Discord analyzed the situation. He was not about to let Starlight succumb to this, oh no. He had the power in him to stop all of this. It’d take a little effort, but he could do it.

The plan was deviously simple. All he had to do was teleport Starlight back to Equestria, then use a complicated chaos matrix to alter everyone’s memories to have no idea she ever existed – on this side of the portal, anyway. It would be better if he could alter Luna’s mind, but she and her sister were very resistant to that. Twilight probably was as well, come to think of it. So manipulating ponies was out of the question.

He’d find some way to make Twilight believe that these humans had released Starlight because they felt like it was a good idea. Perhaps disguise himself as that Daniel fellow and do the speech himself.

Then he’d actually go to that Daniel guy and give him the scroll draft again. He’d find it and suddenly remember that it HAD to be written up exactly as the ponies wanted it. And everything would be better, Starlight would be off the hook, and Discord would feel great.

He’d also engage in a campaign against Luna to stop her from trying to assault him again. She’d learn her lesson.

He teleported into the meeting room – it was empty now. Nothing remained on the table except the drafted scroll that nobody had known what to do with. He grabbed it, read it over, and shrugged. “Guess this is it.” He then set to work on the cascade spell. There wasn’t much magic to work with here, but he was a master. He could alter the memories of an entire city in Equestria, altering just a few dozen individuals would be nothing to him.

He teleported to Starlight’s cell. “All right, I’m getting you out of here.”

Starlight sighed. “Discord, that’ll just make things worse-“

He held up the scroll. “They won’t remember anything, Starlight.”

“Discord, no. We can’t just undo this.”

Discord folded his arms. “…Well I’m doing it anyway. I’ll just-“

Before he could snap his fingers, he was enveloped in a flash of light.

He was suddenly standing in a well-lit and simple diner filled with old patrons. “…What in my name is this place?”

The patrons paid him absolutely no mind. One sipped his coffee in a way that annoyed Discord. He twitched, snapping his fingers, attempting to turn the coffee into a singing bean. Nothing happened.

He blinked. “…Okay, something’s up.”

“That it is,” a woman said, turning to him, turning her seat around. Her features were young, but her eyes extremely old.

“Who are you?”

“Sestar. I’m what you may or may not know as an Ascended Ancient.”

“A what now?”

“One of many beings in this universe with powers similar to your own.” She leaned in, contempt evident on her features. “You’ve broken our laws.”

“What did I do?”

“You were about to heavily interfere with the course of history. We allowed you to take the Puddlejumper, thinking you would leave and not interfere again. This has proven to not be the case. So we’re going to keep you here.”

“What.”

“You heard me.”

~~~

One thing Discord failed to realize was that there was supposed to be more than the scroll in the meeting room - the dimensional device. The humans hadn’t touched it before they left, and the ponies forgot completely about it in their emotional stupor. It would be a long time before anyone asked where it was.

And by then it would be far too late.

Somewhere far across the galaxy, there was a large pyramidal ship among a small fleet of similar, golden ships. They were drifting in the endless void between stars, trying their absolute best to remain hidden. After all, they were on the run from the forces of the Milky Way, labeled as the eternal ‘bad guys’ of the conflict.

They were the alien forces under the name of Ba’al.

Ba’al sat on his throne in the largest ship, plotting. He was a tall, middle-aged man with a short black beard and sly, cunning eyes. To his side was a man who looked exactly like him – another Ba’al. One of many, many Ba’al clones in the fleet.

They all knew they were running out of options. Their enemies – the humans, the Tau’ri – had gained powerful allies and risen as the dominant power in the galaxy, and Ba’al was the only one of their enemies still alive. Hundreds of thousands of clones had fallen to the Tau’ri, and as far as this Ba’al knew they were the last sect left. Drifting in the void, waiting for an opportunity.

The opportunity came in a way none of them expected. A man – one of Ba’al’s informants that had been planted amongst the Tau’ri – ran into their presence. He bowed to one knee and presented them with an unusual device.

“…What is this and why have you left your station to bring it to us?” the two Ba’al’s said at the same time.

“It is a device from a different universe, my Lord. A device with the power to travel between universes, near and far. It will lead us to new lands to conquer.”

Ba’al raised an eyebrow at his clone. The clone raised an eyebrow in return. “This galaxy is lost to us.”

The other nodded. “All we’d have to do is find a simple world to start the empire again. Build our forces without their knowledge.”

The first picked the device out of their servant’s hands. He twisted a few dials until he came to a name he liked – Ardent. “Hrm… Now how does it work?”

“There was no demonstration, but it needs power.”

Both the Ba’al’s stood up. “You do not have to return to the Tau’ri,” they said at the same time. “I doubt we will stay here for long.”

The servant bowed respectfully and scurried away.

“Let us hope this thing actually works…” One said.

“I have no doubt it works. It will likely need some altercations though…”

“With a few hundred of us working on it, it should take no time at all.” They grinned and let out slow, evil laughs.

013 - Call of the Stars, Part 2

Waiting is Tartarus.

No…

Waiting is hell.

Somehow, it felt more cathartic thinking of it that way. Starlight didn’t know why, but she felt a little better. Maybe she should just start screaming “ponyfeathers” or “peeve” or “heck” or the human “damn” at the walls now. Maybe it would help with the waiting.

The waiting…

How long had she been in here? Normally she’d just cast a simple timekeeping spell to get the time, but that clearly wasn’t an option right now. Her horn felt dead right now. She tried not to think hard about the horror stories of unicorn horns going permanently dead after being sealed, but since she was doing nothing but waiting… Well, she could do nothing but remember.

The great unicorn Bursting Neon was a mage of unparalleled power – until one day he decided to seal his own magic away for a month to see if he could live without it. That month was the hardest of his life, but he got through it. Then the seal wore off and he found he couldn’t use magic anymore, but he didn’t mind, he had learned to live without it.

The moral was supposed to be ‘don’t put too much trust into your gifts’ or something. But Starlight could only think about that in passing. All that came to her mind was the horrific idea that she could never use magic again. Surely Twilight would be able to re-infuse magic, right? Or figure out how to grow a new horn? Or… something?

No, no she wasn’t able to do that for Tempest the unicorn. Horns were still broken. Magic finesse could be taken away.

Would she be able to live without magic? It was so much of what defined her. She had a handful of spells operating at any given time without even thinking about it: heightened senses, rain avoidance, arcane ping, vague… What did vague even do? Why did she have it on all the time? She knew there must be some reason. But she couldn’t remember it at the moment. She was stuck in her own mind.

Had it been a day? It felt like it’d been three days, so it’d probably been only a day. She hadn’t heard the guard switch shifts yet, but frankly she could have missed that in one of her crying fits.

Why was she crying? She was doing what was best – no! No that was wrong. She was wrong. How could she have ever thought that stealing random things was a good idea? Well nobody noticed most of the things that went missing, and most of them weren’t actually that important… But there were the runes… The large computers… The monolith chunk…

She still had nightmares about those eyes.

Had she slept at all? She could swear she remembered seeing the eye in this room. …Was she just going crazy?

Wait, they hadn’t fed her! So it must be less than a day! Unless they were cruel. But these humans didn’t strike her as cruel, just stuck in their laws. …How long was a sentence for stealing valuable government property? A year? Ten? How long even was a year on this planet?

How could she minimize the sentence? Probably… Plead guilty, put on the waterworks and puppy eyes, and beg. Unless that offended them. So… Plead guilty, put on the puppy eyes, and stay quiet? Puppy eyes always worked – even more so on humans. But these humans were very distant from the rest of them… More serious. Much more serious.

More real, in a way.

What in Equestria was she even thinking now? What did ‘more real’ even mean?

She had no idea where that thought had even come from. That scared her. Lots of her thoughts scared her right now. She had thought stealing was a good idea and that maybe the others could be brought around to see it – just like when she’d been in charge of that cult! It was happening all over again! She got an idea in her head, decided it was true, and thought it’d be best to get other ponies on board!

Thank Celestia she was stopped before she recruited someone other than Discord.

…Great, Discord. She was worried about him. He had been about to do something to ‘help’ her when something grabbed him. She knew he could take care of himself, but whatever it was had kept him from doing something crazy. She just couldn’t have accepted what he was trying to do… Something about memories, right? Crazy. Just like her. They’d set up a feedback loop with each other.

She wondered what the humans here thought of Discord. They didn’t seem that scared of him when he was there, merely surprised and cautious. Though if she knew their kind, they’d probably be paranoid about his mere existence later. It was just the way things were, sadly…

Waiting.

She was going mad by waiting.

Time to start thinking about shouting swears at this wall again…

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Starlight leaped into the air, bumping into a nearby wall. She let out a sharp yell of surprise from the pain.

Daniel poked his head in through the doorway. “…Starlight?”

“Uh… H-hi.”

“I’m here to bring you to our little makeshift court.”

“Oh. Okay.” At least it’ll be over quick.

“But first... I want to talk to you, if you don’t mind.”

Starlight laughed nervously. “I am at your mercy!”

“The judges are going to be hypocrites.”

“…What do you mean?”

Daniel sighed. “Almost everything we have in this base was not technology given to us. It was stolen, in one way or another.”

Starlight blinked. “…What?”

“The stargate? Used to belong to Egypt, but one of our intrepid explorers dug it up and shipped it here. Our weapons? Many of them were stolen from our old enemies, the Goa’uld. Our early ships were based on technology we recovered from other worlds, not through our own intelligence. Eventually, we proved our worth and things like the transporters were given to us, but we started our journey grabbing everything we could. That was just a little over ten years ago.”

Starlight nodded slowly. “I… So we are like you in a way then?”

“Judging from how Twilight responded, I don’t think so. You and that… Discord fellow were the only ones stealing, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. But we’re different in another way. We stole from friends in addition to enemies.”

Daniel smiled awkwardly. “We… Tried to do that as well, a few times. It wasn’t just spoils of war.”

“I take it you were probably the one who objected?”

“Yeah. It still doesn’t change what we did.”

Starlight nodded slowly. “Okay, so now I don’t feel like I was completely out dancing in left field, but the fact remains that I’m a bit of a psycho. Plus, you said the judges are going to be hypocrites, meaning they won’t care about this.”

Daniel nodded. “I’ll do what I can. But we can be very, very harsh people.”

“Can you at least make sure my friends can visit me?”

Daniel smiled. “That I can do for sure. Might even be able to arrange for you to be held on this base, by reason of ‘useful knowledge’ or something.”

“Thank you. I really don’t deserve it, but thank you.”

“I think you do deserve it, actually. You ponies are much more trusting and cooperative than almost any other race we’ve encountered. I am more than a little disappointed that we couldn’t just get that accord signed quickly.”

“…Totally my fault.”

“More like your Princess’ fault. Tell me, does she even understand politics?”

“Yeah. I think she was just really upset we blew a crater in her precious moon.”

Daniel furrowed his brow. “Now that you mentioned it she did seem rather moon-themed. Anyway… I am still here to take you to the little court we have. Jack decided to have it all arranged here quickly so he didn’t need to have much of a headache. Be thankful he has little patience for bureaucracy, you could have been here for days otherwise.”

“How long have I been in here?”

“Five hours?”

“…Yep. I have no sense of time without my magic.”

“…You’re going to hate legal proceedings. This is going to take all day. There’ll be many breaks and a lunch, but most of it will be legalese nobody understands.”

Starlight facehooved. “Can I just plead guilty and get it over with?”

“The judge will still want an exhaustive study of motivation and politics to make sure the sentence is correct, and because this is a case involving two worlds in a semi-first-contact scenario, we’ve got a lot of paperwork to sort through.”

“Greeeeat.”

~~~

Discord glanced at Sestar. “So what do you people actually do here?”

“We observe.” She dropped a newspaper in front of his face. Discord knew instantly that if he flipped the page he could know anything he wanted to know about anywhere, through a network of Ascended Power. The front page declared CONTACT WITH ANOTHER UNIVERSE! UNICORN ON TRIAL! WILL THIS END IN DISASTER OR GREATNESS?

“A bit dramatic on the titles, are you?”

“It’s an approximation of what’s really there, which is unique to our power. You aren’t the same as us so you can’t see the reality, even if your power is approximately equal.”

“That doesn’t explain why the headline is so over the top. I bet some days it probably reads A NEW RACE DISCOVERS HOW TO LIGHT FIRE, BEHOLD THE DAWN OF IMAGINATION or something equally stupid.”

There was no response from any of the other Ascended.

“Do any of you people actually listen to anything?”

“They think you are a child, not worth their time,” Sestar said. “I think you are a child, but realize that if I said nothing it would become… problematic.”

“A howling screaming draconequus too much for you?”

“Doubtful. But it would be annoying.”

“My specialty.” He took a drink from his mug. Determined to have some chaos even if his powers weren’t working, he drank from the far side of the glass, upside down, spilling some around the table. He burped.

“Why do you feel the need to cause disorder?”

“I am the literal incarnation of chaos and disharmony, what do you think?”

“Have you ever considered stopping?”

Discord laughed. “Why, yes actually! But, here’s the thing, I tried to be orderly to accommodate Fluttershy once – great pony, you jerks will never get to meet her if I have anything to say about it – and wouldn’t you know it, I started fading into nothing! It looks like if I’m not chaotic I cease to exist! Isn’t that fun?”

“You are telling the truth,” she said with mild surprise in her voice. “Interesting. How did you obtain your power?”

“I was just born with it, Miss Pompous. One day, there was no Discord. Sensing a hole in the fun side of existence, I was born, and completed the balance. Tah-dah, best day ever!”

“And how do you use your power on your world?”

“Can’t you, like, look into the minds of people and ponies to find out?”

Sestar was silent.

“…You can’t can you? Oh, this is rich! Powerful deity level beings who can’t read minds!”

“Can you?”

“Er… Not exactly. It’s never reliable. Just changing memories is much easier. There’s a spell system for that.”

“Do you change memories often?”

“Why would I want to? Every time they see this face is a blessing!”

“Are you sure that’s not just your ego talking?”

“It is just my ego talking. What do you take me for, a self-absorbed idiot? No, just self-absorbed here, and proud of it.”

“Why do you take pride in that?”

“Look, lady, if you have to ask that question you clearly need to grow an ego.”

Sestar sat back and pursed her lips.

Discord grinned. “I’m wiiiiiinning.”

“Do you regularly try to alter the course of history on your world?”

Discord laughed. “In my day I tried to control the entire world! But, you know, there were magical artifacts, and friends; I mellowed out a bit. I’m a retired supervillain!” He snapped his fingers, trying to create a superhero suit out of habit. As usual, nothing happened. “Man, you have a joke and then the buzzkill just suffocates you…” he muttered.

“You imply that you don’t alter the course of history anymore?”

“Not true! I’m on the good side now! I helped take out an entire hive of changelings that were being all evil and such, I help my ‘friends’ see the best way to do things, I go on adventures, and, oh yeah, I help Starlight steal stuff. Which, by the way, I have to bust her out. So how do I get out of here?”

“You agree to abide by our laws of non-interference with a binding contract, punishable by imprisonment here.”

Discord laughed. “I’m not going to do that! That’d be so plain boring. Think about it, starry, think about it. Do you think a being of chaos and disharmony can survive without causing those things?”

“It is wrong for any beings of our power to interfere with the affairs of lower races.”

“Oh, so I should have been a lonely hermit in my universe then?”

“I doubt you were the only one of your power.”

“What if I was?”

“Then an eternity of solitude was your duty.”

Discord laughed. “Wow, you’re dogmatic. I’m just waiting for you to get up and start barking. Would have done it myself just now but, you see, magical chains.”

“You will stay here until you agree to follow our ways. We cannot let a being like you roam free.”

Discord folded his hands. “I’ll find a way out.”

“No you won’t. We have numbers.”

“But, you see, I’m clever.

“And we’re dogmatic.”

Discord blinked. “Did you just try to make a joke?”

“If that’s what you want to believe.”

Discord sat back. “Well… In that case. HEY! ALL YOU PATRONS OF ASCENDED IDIOT CITY! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!”

Only one of them with a bored expression glanced his direction. Discord leaped to him. “What do you think about all this? I swear this lady’s got bats in her brain and an airhorn for a mouth.”

The Ascended didn’t respond. He went back to looking at a newspaper.

Discord fumed. “What does it take to get people’s attention around here?”

“Galactic war,” Sestar said. “The last time we interfered directly was when another faction similar to us tried to conquer this galaxy. We only interfered when it was clear the inhabitants of this galaxy would not survive on their own.”

Discord blinked. “Are any of you actually happy with this life? Sitting around and doing nothing?”

“It is the way things are. Were they not this way, we would be just like our brethren. Feeding off the worship of our followers for power, for glory. We would fall to using them for our ends.”

“That sounds like a pessimistic view of the world. Why not just have some fun with them?”

“It is not our way. And we cannot let it be your way in good conscience, either.”

Discord fell back into his seat and fumed. To his annoyance, he didn’t actually start steaming. He considered starting screaming, but that would just confirm their belief that he was childish. Well, he wasn’t going to give them what they wanted. This was war.

~~~

A dozen Ba’als stood in the bridge of the mothership. Just hours ago, they had witnessed an amazing test. With almost no work or reverse-engineering required, the dimensional device was able to open a portal large enough to fit a small ship through. The scouting ship had gone through and scouted out a singular, primitive planet brimming with unusual energies. It had seen a single, tiny spacefaring vessel around the world, but the vessel was easily destroyed with simple weapons. The planet was defenseless.

The dimensional device was now hooked up to the hyperdrive of the mothership, the largest ship in Ba’al’s little fleet. If their calculations were correct, and they probably were, simply pushing more power into it would create a larger opening. It had taken a lot of power to open a portal to the universe on the other side – more than the little device could store inside it – but that was no issue for a powerful man with access to a Zero-Point Module. Stolen, of course, and saved for a rainy day.

“Power the device,” several Ba’als said at once, essentially ordering other versions of themselves to press a button. The hyperdrive and power systems of the ship focused as much as they could to the dimensional device, more than overloading its storage capacity. But the ‘spell’ inside was more than able to accommodate the power. It surged with the energy needed to traverse galaxies, rippling through spacetime in front of the ship. A tear forced its way through the cosmos, widening slowly to the size required to fit the mothership. The Ba’als grinned evilly as the stars through the portal took shape, showing them constellations and arrangements they didn’t recognize. The planet wasn’t visible from here since the portal opened up several stars away from it, but it would take but a minute to arrive.

The ships filed in, first the mothership, then its six similarly-pyramid-shaped Ha’tak vessels. Even a single one of these ships was generally considered powerful enough to subjugate a planet, but they were headed into uncharted territory. It never hurt to be cautious.

The portal closed behind them. One of the Ba’als checked a display. “Yeah, our Ancient power cell is burnt out. We won’t be making a return trip.”

“We won’t need to,” another said. “The device has numerous locations within it that can be accessed with much less power. All we need to do is find them. But first… Let’s pay Ardent a personal visit, shall we?”

~~~

Corona – or Sunset, if you were one of the people or ponies who knew her a few months ago – was on an interdimensional vacation. It may have just been a single day where she didn’t do anything for Storm or, Celestia forbid, Tempest, but she still considered it a vacation. Time to stretch her legs, relax, and enjoy the scenery.

She knew this world was Ardent. But she saw no reason to be scared of it, even after what she’d seen that one time. So long as creepy mask guy or that Link didn’t show up, she was fine. The Gorons were nice, the shopkeepers were welcoming, and everything was just quaint. It was a good world to spend an afternoon in.

She was currently visiting with one of the said shopkeepers, a potion seller. “I don’t know, you really think I could use a flaming potion? I’ve already got the fire ‘magics’, after all.”

The pink-haired white-skinned shopkeeper shrugged. “I think you’ll like it. Overkill for the sake of overkill. I think it’s useful from time to time. And something tells me you might want it soon.”

Corona shrugged, grabbing a few rupees from her pocket and slapping them on the table. “Well, there you go Seskii. I am now the proud owner of a flaming potion. Your sales pitch worked.”

Seskii clapped her hands together excitedly. “Yay! Here you go!” She handed Corona the orange potion. “Careful, really hot!”

“How are you holding it then?” Corona asked, delicately picking it up with her gloves.

Seskii tapped her hands. “Plastic, remember?”

“Right. Well, see you around. Thanks for the potion.”

“That I will. Come again soon!”

Corona placed the small potion in one of her pockets, walking away. As she walked down the street filled with happy people, she was overcome with an intense feeling that life was good.

“Hey, you’re Sunset, right?”

Corona smiled. “I actually go by Corona now, but-“ she froze when she saw who she was talking too. Link. She remembered his exchange with the Happy Mask Salesman, the creature in his shadow, and that Mask. She tried her best to smile confidently. “Ah! Link! What a… surprise!”

“Surprise? Why’s it a surprise?”

“Just wasn’t expecting you is all.”

Link shrugged. “Well, in the future, don’t be. I spend most of my days here. Even more so now that you people have started showing up more often.”

Sunset frowned. “That’s not a problem, is it?”

“Not at all, none of you have been bad yet. Though some have been better than others. Those hairy people were just jerks.”

“Oh, the Binaries? They are a bit stuck-up, aren’t they?”

“Definitely have a superiority complex. I’m not worried though. I think we scared them off.”

“How, exactly?”

Link smirked. “Growling.”

Sunset nodded slowly like she understood everything. “I see.”

“Anyway, what brings you here to little out of the way Termina?”

“Vacation. For a day. I’m taking a break from all the secret agent and scientist business. It sometimes gets a little tiring.”

“I can imagine. I adventured a lot in my day. Did a lot of hard work. I’m basically on a permanent vacation now.”

“Lucky.”

“Well if any great evil shows up again, I’m going to have to deal with it.”

Corona shrugged. “I wish you luck when that happens.”

“I said ‘if’.”

“I said ‘when’,” Corona emphasized.

Link just smiled at her. “Little pessimistic there, hrm?”

“If you want to think so. I’ve just learned from experience that there’s always more danger and evil out there. It never ends. We just have to keep fighting it.”

“You have the heart of a hero.”

Corona smirked. “I would try to deny that, but at this point that’s pretty pointless.” This guy wasn’t actually that bad. He probably had nothing to do with that mask and just wanted it kept safe. She didn’t know why she was so unnerved by him before…

There was a soft, mad laugh from right behind her. She whipped around, fists ready for a fight, coming face to face with the Happy Mask Salesman. She paled.

“Hello, Sunset…”

“C-Corona,” she managed to correct.

“Sunset,” he emphasized. “A mare who knows things she shouldn’t…”

“…Mare?” Link asked.

Corona gulped. “Uh… Yeah, I’m a unicorn. Or was. Link who is this guy?”

Link put his hands on his hips. “He’s an old… ‘friend’. A bit mysterious, creepy, and over the top, but ultimately a decent guy.”

The Happy Mask Salesman’s hands were pressed together. “Ah, Link, you inflate my ego.” His finger was pointing at Corona now. She hadn’t seen his arm even move. “But she needs a warning. Your dreams are haunted by what you know, but you must not ask. You have more important things to deal-“ Suddenly his face became livid. Sunset considered bolting, but soon realized he wasn’t angry at her. He was looking to the sky. “…We have visitors.”

Link readied his sword. “I take it they aren’t friendly this time?”

“No,” he said, standing up to his full height. “Not at all.” His hand was pointing into the sky. “There.”

Corona and Link saw a golden pyramid descending from the sky. It had a large gray extrusion coming out of its base from all sides, and spikes stretching out in all directions. It was metallic, shiny, and was a clear sign of highly advanced technology.

Corona blinked. “That doesn’t belong in this universe.”

“No, it does not…” the Happy Mask Salesman hissed. Then he was gone. No puff of smoke, no movement, he was just suddenly gone. Corona shook her head in bafflement.

Link drew his masterfully crafted and ornate bow. He loaded it with a silvery arrow glowing with the power of light itself. He aimed – and fired. The arrow seemed unaffected by gravity, flying straight and true right into the pyramid ship.

They didn’t even see it impact.

“That’s a big pyramid,” Link said.

“Maybe we can talk to them?”

“I doubt it. The Salesman wouldn’t have acted the way he did if he thought that was possible.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so he knows all about otherworldly threats then?”

“Yes.”

Corona shivered. “Well, maybe we can fight them directly. After all-“

A yellow bolt of energy shot from the pyramid ship’s bottom, impacting the Clock Tower. The entire building exploded, showering the town square in splinters. The large bell let out one huge ring one last time, crashing into the ground alongside dozens of large clockwork gears. The people of the town screamed in fear, running away from the smoldering ruins of their precious clock tower.

The pyramid didn’t fire another shot at the small town – instead, it focused on shooting elsewhere. Presumably somewhere more populated…

“Hyrule…” Link said. He drew his sword and started running out of town.

“Link! Wait!” she yelled after him. “There’s no way you can-“

“I’m going to try!”

“We should try to get help first!” Corona yelled. “I’m sure Twilight would be willing! Or any of the others!”

Link turned and ran back to her. “What are we waiting for then? Open a portal!”

Corona pulled out the dimensional device – fully charged. It should have a couple jumps in it. She opened a portal directly to Equestria, stepping into the main hall of Twilight’s Castle, Link right behind her.

Bon Bon stared at them and listened to the panicked screaming from through the portal.

“Where is Twilight?” Corona asked.

“Offworld,” Bon Bon responded. “Busy dealing with a legal case against Starlight.”

“Darn it…” Sunset muttered. “That’d probably take too long…” She pulled out the dimensional device. “If you can, Bon Bon, tell her that Ardent is under attack by some pyramid spaceship and we need help. Okay?”

Bon Bon nodded. “Of course.”

She opened a portal again, this time stepping into her Earth. She pulled out her cell phone while Link looked around the street, somewhat confused by the area around him.

“Hello, Corona!” Director Storm’s voice came through her cell phone. “What can I do for you today?”

“There’s a world under attack from a spacefaring threat,” Corona explained. “We need to help them. I’m requesting some agents to go-“

“Let me stop you there. Sadly, this is not a military installation. I don’t have the resources nor the authority to help in a war. I’d suggest talking to your pony friends.”

“They’re busy with legalese!”

“There are other options. I am sorry.”

Corona hung up, quickly dialing another number. “Twilight? Get the girls, head to Ardent. We’re going to have to fight what are probably aliens. I’ll explain more when you get there.”

“Is that it?” Link asked.

“No, I have another option.” She dialed the device to the Elemental Nations and stepped through, arriving in Ba Sing Se. She ran to the palace, tripping over her own two feet occasionally. She and Link charged into the main hall, panting.

Aang and Iroh were currently there, discussing matters that were probably very important, but not as important as what Corona and Link needed. “Ardent is under attack!” Sunset yelled. “We need help!”

Iroh furrowed his brow. He nodded to one of the aids nearby. “Ready the army. What’s the attack?”

“Pyramid spaceship,” she said, panting. “I’ve managed to conscript the girls from Earth, but Princess Twilight’s not available at the moment and I don’t have time to go look for anyone else. We need help.”

Aang nodded, grabbing his staff. “I’ll be right there.”

Iroh held out a hand. “Aang, your duty is to this world. Let Toph and the others go.”

“…No. I feel like I need to go. Get the army ready, I’m heading over with them now.”

Iroh nodded slowly. “I suppose we do not have time to deliberate… Very well. I’ll send help as soon as I can. Go, you three, figure out what you can.”

Corona nodded. She lifted the dimensional device – it needed a little charge to make it back to Ardent, but that didn’t take long. She, Link, and Aang stepped out into Termina. The Clock Tower was still smoldering, and the pyramid ship was much larger, closer to the ground, though further to the east.

Twilight Sparkle the human stumbled out of an open portal with Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, and Applejack. “This is everyone I could find!” She looked around the wreckage, pupils dilating. “…Oh my goodness…”

Corona nodded. “We’re getting more help from the Elemental Nations, but we don’t have time to dally around. Link, the ship is headed to Hyrule?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s where we’re going. Dash, Twilight, we’re going to need to get there fast. Think you can manage with your powers?”

Twilight looked at her necklace, unsure – but Dash grinned confidently. “You bet we can!”

Twilight gulped. “It’ll be complicated, a little crazy, and-“

“Just levitate everyone, make them lighter for me, and I’ll rush us all the way over there! Simple!”

“That’s hardly simple! I’m not that strong of a spellcaster!”

“Just do it!” Link ordered. “We can’t waste time!”

Aang pressed his hands together, entering the Avatar State. He lifted everyone up with his power over air itself, pressing them all into an uncomfortable ball. “Just get us there!”

Rainbow Dash gave him a thumbs up, grabbed Sunset by the ankle, and dragged them across the grassland at high speed like they were some kind of balloon. The speeds they moved at were jarring, but not unbearable. It was difficult to see what was happening, but Corona spied three different towns as they ran, all of which were smoking from at least one hit.

Whoever these attackers were, they were trying to drive fear into the people of Ardent. It was working.

Rainbow Dash slid to a stop suddenly, right at the edge of Hyrule City, the capital of the Kingdom of Hyrule. The city was large, expansive, and dominated by a single huge castle. It was also smoldering in several places, and the nearing pyramid ship only continued to berate it with golden bullets.

Whenever a bolt attempted to hit the castle itself, a blue diamond-shaped shield would appear, conjured out of some kind of magic.

Link leaped to the ground, out of Aang’s air. “Zelda’s defending. Good. We’ve still got a chance.”

Applejack shivered. “How exactly are we gonna fight this thing? It’s way up there and has a really big gun!”

Aang’s eyes flashed brighter for a second. “It shouldn’t take too much effort…”

“Wait,” Corona said. “It looks like it’s dropping smaller ships.”

Sure enough, smaller ships descended from the bottom of the pyramidal ship, landing in the field below. Hatches dropped open, revealing hundreds of beings that looked human, albeit dressed in archaic armor and wielding strange staves.

Corona’s group could see the armies of Hyrule charging from the Town to meet the opposing force. The otherworldly beings aimed their staves, firing energy bolts that burned right through the armor of the knights, often killing more than one with a single shot.

Corona put her hand to her mouth. Rainbow Dash, Twilight, and Applejack flinched backward, biting their lips.

People were dying.

This wasn’t like the shattering pawn game, these people were really getting holes burned through their chests by golden plasma. She… She wasn’t sure she could handle this. She started breathing faster and faster.

Link put his hand on her shoulder. “We must remain strong. Death is a horrid evil, but we cannot let it deter us from what we need to do.” He pointed his sword at the clashing armies. “See those blue and green lights? We have our own mages in the midst. They’re not outmatched. Our soldiers can win this fight.”

The pyramid ship shot a bolt of plasma at the Hylian army, decimating it.

“If we can take out that ship.”

Aang prepared to take everyone up there, but a yellow plasma bolt shot right at him. In the Avatar State, he had the reflexes required to bend the ‘fire’ away from him. He whirled around. “Who!?”

It turned out that there was a small troop of a dozen or so men right next to them. Most were just like the soldiers on the battlefield, but one was a bearded man in a robe. He smirked, holding out a hand, around which was a strange metallic device that placed a red crystal on his palm. It glowed – and Aang lost all control of his muscles.

Twilight pointed her finger at him and shot a magic bolt, but a forcefield blocked it. He laughed, ordering his soldiers to fire. They aimed their staves. Rainbow Dash kicked one faster than humanly possible, knocking one of them over, while Corona attempted to engulf them in fire – but it wasn’t either of them who took the warriors out.

Link was suddenly just there, standing in front of the bearded man, the Master Sword right through his chest. All the other soldiers already had sword wounds from the sword in their chests, keeling over all at once. The bearded man looked at him in surprise and awe. “…Quite the trick you got there… Boy…”

Link kicked him down. “I’ve got a lot of tricks. All of them will be used against your assault.”

“Heh… Heh…” His head rolled to the side and his eyes lost focus.

“Okay,” Rainbow Dash said. “Blood. Yep. That’s blood. That’s a looooot of blood. And it’s on your sword. That’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

“It ain’t fine,” Applejack muttered. “But we don’t have a choice.”

Twilight just held Corona’s arm. Pinkie curiously leaned down and inspected the man’s corpse. She poked it.

“Pinkie!” Corona shouted, looking away from the strange motion the body’s head made. “Agh!”

“Sorry,” she said. Then she coughed, stood up, and shivered. “…We… Woah, we need to move.”

Aang shook his head, letting the Avatar State dissipate. “What… What happened?”

Pinkie pointed at the device on the man’s hand. “Ba’al here had you in the grasp of that hand device. You wouldn’t have been able to do anything had Link not saved you.”

“So… Ba’al, then…” Link said. “We won’t be seeing him again.”

Pinkie giggled nervously. “Uh… Right.”

“…There’s more than one, isn’t there?” Applejack asked.

“Yeeeah…”

Aang cracked his knuckles. “Then we need to go – now. The more time that pyramid is in the air, the more people die.”

He entered the Avatar State again, raising them all higher with the power of wind. They could soon see the entire battlefield beneath them. It was clear – the Hylians were losing, badly. They could not face the forces of Ba’al, it was simply too much to face an army and a ship they couldn’t reach. Even if they managed to defeat the ship, it might have been too late…

“Is that your help over there?” Twilight asked, pointing toward the horizon.

Corona squinted. “…Iroh’s forces shouldn’t be coming from there…”

Link frowned. “That’s the direction of the Gerudo Desert. And that does look an awful lot like an army…”

It was an army – a large army composed of hundreds of dark-skinned individuals. Most of them blurred together in Corona’s vision, but she could make out one individual at the front of the forces. Someone big, burly, and powerful. She could sense the power even from her considerable distance.

“Let’s hope Ganondorf’s in a helpful mood today…” Link muttered under his breath. Then he grabbed Aang’s arm. “Look out!”

Aang shifted the entire group upward, just barely fast enough to dodge plasma fire from a smaller, birdlike craft.

Link drew his bow and fired a bomb-arrow. It hit the craft, exploded, but did no damage. “I can’t deal with it from this range!”

“I got it,” Twilight said pointing a shaky finger at the craft as it tried to loop around back toward them. She shot three times before hitting, but the magical bolt hit true and the fighter exploded. She whooped.

Corona shook her head. “We can’t keep doing this, there are too many of these ships!”

Pinkie took a marshmallow out of her pocket and tossed it at a nearby ship, blowing it up. “Good point. We should probably go back down, too many defenses are locked on us!”

“No!” Aang said. “We’re doing this!” He rushed them toward the hull of the pyramid ship, flying past the various fighter ships. Several of them ended up on their tail, firing relentlessly. It was only Twilight’s magic shields that protected them.

“Guys, I’m not very good at this!” Twilight yelled.

“Only a little longer...” A bolt got through Twilight’s defenses, glancing across Applejack’s leg. She screamed, throwing everyone’s focus off. A ship aimed, ready to take them out completely.

It exploded in a shower of darkness and magic. The shockwave from the explosion tossed the group the rest of the way to the ship, planting them uncomfortably into the golden hull.

“What was that!?” Rainbow Dash shouted.

Link stood tall, tossing a health potion to Applejack as he did so. “…Ganondorf.”

The man floating before them had dark green skin, short red hair, and ornate black armor flanked by a flowing red cape. “Link. I never thought this day would come.”

“Working together. What an interesting thought.”

“The enemy of my enemy.”

Applejack stood up, leg healed by the potion. “No offense, but we need to take this ship out now. Y’all can get back to chit-chat later.”

Ganondorf nodded in understanding. He pulled his fist back and punched the hull of the ship, denting it. He stared in disbelief. “That should have been more than enough to break through.”

“It’s a heavy alloy spaceship hull, several inches thick,” Pinkie said. “Course it’ll be a little more difficult than what you’re used to.”

Applejack cracked her knuckles. Her orange necklace started sparkling. She placed her hands on the edges of the hull and pushed with all her might. It buckled, bent, twisted, but eventually did break through. She peeled the two pieces of metal apart, revealing the three-inch-thick plating she just broke. She took a breather. “That was… somethin’ else.”

Link and Aang charged in without another glance. Corona took the chance to look at the battle below them – Ganondorf’s army was helping the Hylians face off against Ba’al’s forces. A once hopeless battle had now returned to a real fight, a real contest.

They still needed to take this ship out.

She pushed the thoughts of how many people were dying down there out of her mind, running after her friends into the ship itself.

~~~

The mothership remained in orbit around Ardent, two of the smaller ships flanking it. Four of the Ha’taks were down on key places on the planet, causing chaos. Most were experiencing heavy resistance, but nothing too impressive. Ba’al had to admit he hadn’t been expecting two different nations to send armies to the same location, but they still couldn’t do anything to the Ha’taks. They were just too far above these primitive people, and he could always get more Jaffa and clones to replace the losses.

Actually, Jaffa might be at a premium now. Though he could get new soldiers easily from this world. Already, the idea of fish-people and rock-people servants tantalized him. Naturally stronger than Jaffa. With technology they’d be unstoppable.

“Hey, we’re detecting large amounts of dimensional activity near one of the smaller towns.”

Several Ba’als turned to look at the screen. They saw a satellite image of a small town with an army slowly appearing out of nowhere.

“Ah… Otherworldly allies. We should have foreseen as much…”

“Order one of the free Ha’taks to intercept. We don’t want to be surprised.”

One of the Ha’taks broke orbit, descending to the gathering army below. On this ship was one Ba’al in particular who found himself in the position of leading a troop of Jaffa in battle against the inhabitants of the town itself, instead of the gathering army. Such tactics usually put the enemy off their game. He and his dozen Jaffa took one of over a dozen smaller landing ships down to the surface while the Ha’tak began laying waste to the army from above.

Ba’al’s interest was piqued when he saw the armies shoot fire from their arms and launch into the air with pillars of earth. These people had control over fire and the very ground itself. More useful servants. They lacked technology, and even with their powers of earth they were having difficulty getting to the Ha’tak. Not that they could break in even if they got to it, it was far, far too durable.

Ba’al’s ship landed, and he led the Jaffa troop out into the streets. There were a few soldiers here that tried to shoot fire and earth at him, but the Jaffa’s staff weapons made quick work of them, and Ba’al’s personal shield deflected all the loose fire. The earth was more concerning – it might be moving slow enough that it could pass through the forcefield. He’d need to be careful.

But for now, it was time to terrorize the inhabitants. He kicked in a door, finding a woman holding both her son and a pile of colored gems tightly. He smirked. Ah, this would be fun. He raised his hand, forcing the energy in the crystal to attack the mother. Her expression went blank and she lost all feeling in her muscles. With a push of his mind, Ba’al killed her in an instant.

The son went in much the same way. Then he ordered the Jaffa to blow the walls out of the house. Things were going well. He went to house after house after house, tormenting the inhabitants and quickly killing the few soldiers that weren’t occupied with the other attacks. This was fun, easy, and great.

He kicked in a cellar door next, hand device at the ready. Inside was the most disturbing man he had ever seen, staring right at him.

The Happy Mask Salesman laughed and said something Ba’al couldn’t understand. Ba’al held out the hand device, shoving the man into the wall. He would have pushed further, killed the man right then and there, but something caught his eye.

Several masks had spilled out of the Salesman’s backpack. Almost all of them were boring and uninteresting, but there was one. One mask that called to him. It was a purple thing in the shape of a heart, spikes lining the edges. Two eyes stared at him through the wooden fixture.

He knew without being told this was an artifact of great power. He reached down and picked it up. The chilling energy ran through his limbs, driving a feeling of sick pleasure into his brain. He looked at the Happy Mask Salesman, who stared right back at him with a look of contempt.

“Don’t want me to have this do you?” Ba’al said, even though he knew the Happy Mask Salesman didn’t speak his language. It was just Ba’al taunting for the sake of taunting.

Suddenly the mask was in the Salesman’s hands again. Ba’al hadn’t even seen the man reach out for it. It was as if the Salesman moved without taking all the steps between.

Ba’al glared at him. “Kill him.”

The jaffa fired their weapons, but the Salesman was suddenly on the other side of the room. Ba’al shot out his hand device, smacking the Salesman with a burst of telekinetic energy again. The Salesman vanished – but he lost his grip on the mask. Ba’al grabbed it again, holding it to his chest. “We need to return this to the fleet. Now.”

The Happy Mask Salesman appeared behind him, punching Ba’al in the back. He was more than ready for this – he shoved the hand device into the Salesman’s face, trying to blow his brains out. The Salesman screamed in pain but he didn’t die.

Ba’al pinned the Salesman to the ground, pushing more energy from the hand device into him. “What are you?”

The Salesman laughed – then said something presumably insulting. Ba’al was prepared to draw a dagger to stab the man to death, but he never got his chance. A Fuchsia bug with four arms dropped into the cellar from the ceiling, spinning two yo-yo’s with enough precision to behead four of Ba’al’s Jaffa.

“Retreat!” Ba’al yelled, ducking under a yo-yo attack. He clutched the mask to his chest, running towards his dropship. The mask filled him with determination. All the action around him fell silent as he ran, becoming nonissues to him. He felt a yo-yo tear at his leg, enough that it should have made him fall. But something kept him running. He didn’t even feel the pain.

His Jaffa fell behind him, but he didn’t notice. A girl threw some rocks at him, but they mysteriously missed. Some shadowy vixen tried to punch him, but he ducked without even thinking. He ran into his dropship, alone, and it took off into the sky.

He didn’t even notice that it had taken off without him giving any command. It wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. But he already didn’t care.

He looked at the mask. The beautiful, beautiful mask.

He knew what its name was.

Majora.

Beautiful.

~~~

“The bridge is this way! Come on!” Pinkie shouted, blowing through dozens of armored soldiers with her explosive confetti and giant squeaky hammer. Everyone followed her, not questioning where she was getting her information – after all, Pinkie was Pinkie, and if she was this serious she was probably right.

Corona unleashed a torrent of fire, horrendously burning a soldier trying to ambush them. The scent of the charred flesh filled her nostrils. This particular soldier wasn’t dead, but she’d probably consigned more than a few to their ends on the journey to this part of the ship. She tried not to think about it. She didn’t really have time to think about it even if she wanted to, really.

Ganondorf and Link were much more lethal than the rest of them though. Corona’s friends and Aang at least tried not to deliver killing blows. The two of them just blazed trails through whoever they could. Corona had seen heads explode. She was rather surprised she wasn’t freaking out like Rainbow Dash was.

Rainbow Dash zipped past them, kicking another body out of her sight. “Okay! Okaaaaay! Okay. Can we just get this over with already? We’ve been in here doing… things… for far too long!”

“This door here! Open sesame!” Pinkie said. Applejack nodded, punching through the sealed doorway, a structure much weaker than the outer hull. The room on the other side was filled with consoles, screens, and only a single instance of Ba’al. He held out his hand device, ready to waste them, but Link shot an arrow right through his skull. He keeled over and fell to the ground, blood pooling around him.

Rainbow Dash kicked the body out of the room, trying really hard to ignore the blood that was on her shoe now. And the blood that had been on her shoes and hands since she’d started removing the bodies as fast as possible. Because she had to. She started humming to herself.

Corona walked up to the controls, frowning. “Okay, so, how do we turn off the gun… Gun… Gun…” The entire thing was in an alien script Corona didn’t recognize, so that made understanding it difficult. There were a few diagrams, but they could mean anything.

Twilight pointed to a diagram. “That’s probably flight controls.”

“Just move it out of range…” Corona said, smirking. She pressed a few buttons. A diagram that showed the ship’s location relative to the planet told her the entire pyramid was rising. “There we go, I think we’ll be high enough shortly.”

Pinkie twirled a knife in her hand. “Ah, but we won’t be high enough for long.”

Corona turned to her, eyebrow raised. “…Why not? And what’s with the knife, Pinkie?”

Pinkie sneered, her eyes flashing an eerie, alien white for a second. “Pinkie’s not home,” she said in a deep, reverberating voice. “It’s Ba’al in here.”

Corona took a moment to register that she’d just been stabbed through the stomach with a comically large knife. Oh boy. I can’t feel any pain right now. That’s not good.

Her friends prepared to fight – but the doors to the control room opened, revealing dozens of Ba’al clones, each one holding a snake-like gun in their hands. “I wouldn’t try anything,” one of them said.

Corona gagged, looking at Pinkie-Ba’al. “H-how…?”

Pinkie grinned, removing the knife from Corona’s stomach with a sharp yank. “The Goa’uld, my race, are a race of parasites. When a host body dies, we transfer. She just got close enough for me to get in. And boy oh boy is this a great host! It made everything so easy!”

Sunset slumped to the ground, vision blurring.

~~~

Rarity cleared her throat. “And as you can see, my client clearly feels remorse for what she’s done, and will be more than willing to do anything you ask of her. All I ask is that you be lenient, and consider the fact that Discord pushed her to his level of action.”

The prosecuting attorney – some fellow named Friedrich – stared Rarity down. “We cannot hold this Discord accountable for anything, due to his power. Therefore that argument is moot.”

Starlight glanced at Rarity, and she nodded. Starlight took in a deep breath. “I think Discord is being held accountable. He came to my cell and told me he was going to free me – but then something took him away.”

Rarity nodded. “I therefore believe that Discord is being held accountable by your Ascended, having apparently decided Discord was their responsibility.”

Friedrich frowned. “Where’s your evidence?”

“You have a security feed in Starlight’s cell, do you not? Just look at that.”

“This still does not change what she did.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “We already pleaded guilty. This piece of information simply pertains to the sentence. She does not need to be locked away for eternity.”

Friedrich leaned back, turning to the judge. “Your honor, if it pleases you, I have one last line of questions to ask.”

The judge – some guy Starlight didn’t even know the name of – nodded slowly. Friedrich continued. “You ponies, as a race, are familiar with the crystal man and the unicorn that came here previously?”

“Yes…?” Starlight said.

“What does this have to do with anything?” Rarity asked. “You already know that we know about them. They’re where we got our dimensional technology.”

“Are you also, by chance, aware of a being that could be described as a ‘red humanoid fairy with ram horns’?”

Rarity blinked. “…Yes, actually. There’s a legendary figure on our world known as the Handmaid who fits that description. Why do you ask?”

Friedrich ignored her question. “So you are aware of two interdimensional powers that have visited this very base, and yet claim this is the first time you’ve ever visited? Is it not more likely you’ve known of us for a while, and were instead trying to lull us into a false sense of security exactly so you could pull this stunt off?”

“…Are you accusing us of conspiracy?” Rarity said, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m merely saying that the situation should be looked into and that this case cannot be truly decided until we know for certain exactly how many forces were at play here.”

O’Neill charged into the room and grabbed Friedrich by the ear. “Excuse me, your honor,” he said to the judge. He glared at Friedrich. The glare was all Friedrich needed to know.

“Ahem…” Friedrich said, adjusting his tie. “…That will be all I have to say on the case, your honor.”

The judge nodded. “The case has been reviewed. I judge Starlight Glimmer of Equestria as guilty of grand theft. However, due to the delicate nature of the situation, she will not be jailed. Since she is a representative of the Equestrian government, the payment of the fine falls to them. A hundred thousand dollars worth of materials or currency will suffice.” He sat back. “Court is dismissed.”

Starlight blinked, turning to Rarity as the people shuffled out of the room. “I thought you said to expect jail time?”

Rarity frowned, nodding. “You should have… I read over their laws. Grand theft usually involves a year for much smaller thefts. I was expecting many years, actually. Something must have happened. Maybe they didn’t want to ruin a political relationship?”

“It was me,” Twilight said, walking up to them. “I offered them a trade.”

Starlight cocked her head. “You… Did?”

“After Rarity told me what sentences were, I couldn’t just let it slide. I promised them a dimensional device and a Directory, as well as personally seeing to it that I equip their ships with dimensional capability. I… also gave them permission to request official Equestrian mages for magic testing.”

Starlight raised an eyebrow. “And… You did that all just so I could go free? Twilight... I didn’t need that much…”

Rarity narrowed her eyes. “It’s also another political blunder. Now the number of things we have to offer them are more limited. They’re coming out on top in this interaction, and will easily be able to exploit us in the future.”

Twilight sighed. “Maybe so. I… I just couldn’t let it happen. I had the power to change it, so I did. There’s no way Starlight needs to spend a decade in prison to learn her lesson.”

Starlight looked at the ground. “…You sure?”

“Yes, Starlight, I’m sure. I’m very sure.” She pulled her into a hug. “Come here.”

Starlight let tears fall down her eyes. “Will… Will I ever get it? Do you think I can?”

“…I don’t think anypony ever truly gets it, Starlight. We all struggle, we all flail, we all fall. Over and over and over again, even at things we already thought we learned.”

“Life sure is funny.”

“Yeah, it is.” She shook her head, releasing Starlight from the embrace. “Anyway, we need to get back to Equestria and grab a dimensional device. I… misplaced the one we brought here.”

Starlight blinked. “…You ‘misplaced’ it?”

“Well I’m not accusing them of stealing it, that’d just be stupid at this point,” Twilight said. “I’m pretty sure Daniel wasn’t involved anyway. Speaking of…”

Daniel walked up to them. “Are you girls ready to head home?”

“Yeah,” Twilight said. “I still need to get things for your ship though.”

“I know. I’m planning on coming back with you, to learn more about your culture.”

Twilight smiled. “Good.” She lit her horn, expending some effort to teleport them back to the hallway. She let out a breath from the energy loss. “Ouch…”

“Maybe you shouldn’t rely on teleportation so much?”

“Probably not…” She shook her head, stepping through the shimmering wall into her castle, Daniel, Starlight, and Rarity behind her. “Bon Bon! We need to figure out how much a hundred thousand dollar fine is in pure gold, stat.”

“Of course, Princess. But first, Corona came by earlier with an urgent message.”

“What was it?”

“There’s a pyramid ship attacking Ardent right now, and they need your help.”

Daniel paled. “…Pyramid ship?”

Bon Bon narrowed her eyes. “Are you responsible?”

“No. But… But that’s the kind of ship our enemies use.”

Twilight blinked. “Well, at least I know you guys didn’t steal the device now.”

Daniel shook his head. “Does this ‘Ardent’ have any technology capable of repelling ships designed to conquer entire planets?”

“I doubt it very much,” Bon Bon said.

“Damn,” Daniel muttered under his breath. He turned to Twilight. “I hope you can work fast.”

Twilight gulped. “…I can try.”

~~~

The other Twilight, the human, couldn’t take her eyes off Sunset – Corona’s – limp form. She was alive, for now, but that wound was serious. They needed to heal her, and heal her fast. But they were currently being held at gunpoint.

“Shall we kill them?” one of the Ba’als asked.

“Nah,” Pinkie-Ba’al said in Pinkie’s regular voice. “They’re all useful. Dark guy is the king of the Gerudo, the green guy is the hero of Hyrule, the arrow kid is the patron hero of an entire other world, and the colorful girls are all very precious to important people and ponies.” She giggled. “And baconhair here is also important, but I felt like stabbing someone.”

“How do you know all these things?” another Ba’al asked.

Pinkie-Ba’al smiled. “This host is connected to something… beyond understanding. She has a natural way of seeing everything. Who everyone is. What they are for. How things are going to happen. It’s almost like a psychic, but not quite. I’m still figuring it out myself, but it allowed me to mimic her antics easily. She can also pull things out of nowhere, such as this knife.” She cackled. “Such a powerful body!”

“Do each of you control a human mind?” Link demanded.

“Yes, but this particular human mind is blank due to cloning,” another Ba’al said. “Though you’re probably still upset about it.”

An alarm went off. A Ba’al close to Twilight checked a screen. “That interdimensional army took out one of our Ha’tak’s.”

“How?” Another said.

“They were clever,” Pinkie-Ba’al said. “They had a shadowy being on their side that could pass through walls and an earthbender who could fold metal like paper. They found the engine room and things collapsed from there.”

“They’re coming here.”

Pinkie-Ba’al pointed at Aang. “Show them him tied up, and they’ll stop fighting. He’s their ‘Avatar’. Truly a stupid title, but it works.”

Link tried to inconspicuously trace an hourglass symbol with his sword near the ground, but Pinkie-Ba’al knew it was happening before he tried. Suddenly the Master Sword was in her hand. “No mysterious time-stop powers from you! We just can’t have that!”

Link bristled. “At least let me heal Corona. I have potions.”

Pinke-Ba’al shrugged. “Hey, guys, let’s take it to a vote! Let them heal her?”

All the Ba’als gave a thumbs down with bemused expressions on their faces. One sipped a martini. Pinkie-Ba’al snickered. “The mob has spoken.”

“If you are the mob it’s hardly fair,” Applejack said, placing herself in such a way that she protected Rainbow Dash, who was currently curled up in a ball on the ground, crying.

“Oh look, they’re trying to take defensive stances…” Pinkie-Ba’al said, shaking her head. “You’ve all lost! We’ve got weapons far beyond anything you’ve ever seen pointed at you, and…” She paled suddenly. “The Tau’ri are coming.”

“What?!” most of the Ba’als said.

“Forget about reactivating the weapon! Tell the mothership to get us out of here now! We need to leave this place before they show up! Dial some random universe!”

The Ba’als frantically scrambled around, working with the controls. The Ha’tak rose further away from Ardent, moving to meet the mothership and its single guardian Ha’tak. The mothership began to shift ominously, channeling energy into the dimensional device, preparing to escape into a nearby dimension.

A portal opened in the opposite direction, revealing the human ship Apollo. Twilight stared in awe at the contrast between the golden pyramid ships and the dulled, rectangular visage of the Apollo. It came out, guns blazing, firing standard turrets alongside long, thin blue energy beams. On the main screen, the mothership got hit, but its shields held. Its companion Ha’tak was not so lucky, with a few shots destroying it quickly.

The mothership opened a portal, accelerating into it to a place without stars at all. The ship Twilight and the others were on attempted to follow – but a laser grazed its side.

Consoles on the bridge exploded, screens went dead, and the room fell into darkness. Pinkie-Ba’al screamed. “NO NO NO!” The scream of someone who had felt like this was going to happen, but just ignored it. Twilight cowered – she heard guns go off, spells fly around her, and bones crunch. The ship shook again, taking another hit.

Was she going to die here, on an alien ship, with most of her friends? After witnessing all that death, that destruction, that-

She saw Aang enter the Avatar state, his eyes providing enough light to see by. She could see many Ba’als laying around them, dead. Not as many as there had been – presumably more than a few fled.

She screamed when she saw Corona standing – holding the Master Sword, having thrust it right through Pinkie-Ba’als chest.

Pinkie-Ba’al let out a sick laugh. “I guess… I guess this body can’t see everything then…”

Corona winced, falling to a knee, holding her chest – but keeping her other hand solidly on the sword. “Give… Us… Pinkie… Back…”

“Hahahah! She’ll be gone forever, you stabbed her Sunset! You’re to blame!”

Both Corona and Pinkie-Ba’al collapsed in that moment. Twilight swore she could still hear Pinkie-Ba’al’s laughter.

There was silence. Aang dropped out of the Avatar State. There was nothing else to see.

Twilight heard Link saunter over to Corona and Pinkie-Ba’al. He took a jar out of his satchel, one with a glowing white fairy inside it. He tied Pinkie-Ba’al’s hands behind her back and tied her legs together – then released the fairy. It swirled around the two of them, flooding them with white magic before vanishing.

Twilight heard Corona cough and Pinkie-Ba’al moan.

She let out a sigh of relief. They would be okay. And, for whatever reason, the ship had stopped shaking…

The last thing she remembered clearly for the next little while was the face of her alicorn counterpart lifting her up to see if she was okay.

~~~

Princess Zelda of Hyrule strode across the halls of the Tau’ri ship Apollo. She’d already had her meeting with O’Neill and the Captain – it was time to see those other people who’d saved their kingdom.

She walked into the sickbay, noticing a few familiar faces. Link, nursing numerous cases of internal bleeding. Ganondorf, suffering through a broken arm and leg. He shot her a look but said nothing. As it should be. Most of the other faces were new to her though. An orange-skinned girl was talking to a blue-skinned girl who looked like she had seen the horrors of war for the first time - and probably had. A boy with an arrow on his head stood next to a purple girl, standing over the bedridden woman Zelda knew was Corona.

Zelda touched Corona’s arm, smiling. “I want to thank you.”

Corona groaned. “You’re welcome… Ugh…”

“The pain will pass. Focus on that.”

Corona managed a slight chuckle. “Probably a good idea… But I’m busy thinking about Pinkie…”

Zelda raised an eyebrow.

“…Some snake got into her head. They’re trying to remove it now.”

As if on cue, they heard some alien screaming. Coming from behind a curtain. A doctor came out from the curtain with a glass tube, inside of which was a large white fleshy snake. It had three sharp prongs for teeth and a few beady eyes – and it was livid.

Corona looked at it. “So, that’s Ba’al then?”

“Yep,” O’Neill said, walking into the room. “Pretty pathetic without bodies, huh?”

“Creepy,” Corona muttered. She managed to sit up, looking at the horrid snake a little closer. She winced, but glared. “Ba’al…”

The creature just hissed and complained with incomprehensible languages.

Corona swiped the jar, popped the top off, and burnt the Goa’uld inside to ashes before anyone could stop her. Then she handed the cremated remains back to the doctor. “How’s Pinkie doing?”

“She’s doing great!” Pinkie said, leaping out of the operating curtain. There was still blood on her shirt, and she really shouldn’t have even been able to walk, but there she was. “That was interesting!”

Corona grinned. “Pinkie, we almost died.”

“I said interesting, not fun. Though parts of it were fun. Most of it was terrifying though.” She paused, staring into nothing for a moment. “I knew everything Ba’al knew, but I also knew things he didn’t, and he knew things I didn’t, and… And I was watching everything happen like it was on TV.”

Rainbow Dash hugged her without any warning. “Don’t ever go do stuff like that again, okay Pinks?”

“Of course not!” She hugged Rainbow Dash back tightly. Far too tightly, but nobody cared at this point. The doctor just shrugged and went back to examining his various patients.

Zelda smiled. “It warms my heart to see you all here. I’m going to give you all the highest honor of valor in our kingdom, the Goddess’s Regalia. Yes, even you Ganondorf.”

“…Sweet,” Rainbow Dash said, devoid of her usual vigor. It was as if she wasn’t really into it.

“There’ll be a ceremony in a few days. I expect you all to be there.”

“Also, something else,” O’Neill said. “That Ha’tak you guys were on? It’s busted up, but still functional. Corona, we’ve decided to give it to you.”

Corona blinked. “Give it to Twilight.”

“…Huh?”

“The people I work for do not need access to a spaceship, okay?”

O’Neill shrugged. “Screwing over the man. I can respect that. Request granted.”

“Thank you.” She laid back down in the hospital bed. “Ugh… Can I get some sleep now?”

“You heard her! Everyone out!” O’Neill shouted, clapping his hands. “If you aren’t critically wounded or are a pink monstrosity that can’t feel pain, move!”

A flood of people began to move out of the hospital – while Princess Twilight tried to get in.

“Hey, I said everyone out!” O’Neill said.

“But… I need to see Coron-“

“I sai-“

Corona raised a hand. “It’s fine, O’Neill. She won’t stay long.”

O’Neill shrugged. “Fine, fine. Everyone else out.”

Soon, Twilight and Corona were more or less alone.

“How’d you get this ship over here?” Corona asked.

“Had to drain one of their ZPM power module things,” Twilight said. “But it wasn’t that hard. It was really as simple as slapping the dimensional device onto the hyperdrive and channeling power to it, which explains how Ba’al was able to get here so easily.”

“…Heh. Both a blessing and a curse, how easy those things are to use.”

“It appears that way.”

Corona blinked. “I got you a spaceship, by the way. The Ha’tak that’s intact is yours for the keeping.”

“…What, really?”

“Really.”

“Oh thankyouthankyouthankyou!”

“Hey, you’ve still got to fix it. Don’t get too excited.”

Twilight rubbed her hooves together. “But I love fixing things!”

“Indeed you do.”

Twilight got a hold of herself. “Anyway… You okay?”

Corona sighed. “I think so. There was… a lot that happened today. A lot of death. A lot of blood. A lot of war. But… I believe I’ve come to terms with it. It’s affected me, but not as badly as I was thinking. Not as badly as Dash.”

“…How’s she doing?”

“Badly. She’s been rambling a lot. Laughing a lot sometimes, seeming strikingly apathetic at others. I think she needs therapy. Maybe Twi- Sparky as well.”

Twilight nodded. “I’ll be sure they get some. You just stay here and rest.”

“I will. Am I getting taken to their world?”

Twilight shook her head. “They’re not going back. They’re keeping the Apollo on this side of the multiverse. It’s over here, they might as well use it. Try to hunt down the Ba’als that escaped. They are, apparently, their responsibility.”

Corona frowned. “I wonder what the story behind it is…”

“Ba’al is apparently the last of the powerful System Lords, a race that had the entire galaxy in their universe subjugated until recently. He’s really, really crafty, and was willing to use cloning to get the upper hand.”

“We definitely haven’t seen the last of him.”

“That much is clear,” Twilight agreed. “But… We’ll all be ready for him.”

Corona nodded, mumbling something.

“…I think I’ll let you sleep now.”

Corona tried to mumble ‘thanks’, but she was already drifting off again.

~~~

Discord stared at Sestar. “So, in conclusion, by keeping me here you are interfering with the ‘lower races,’ because part of their culture and life depends on me. You’re breaking your own laws by dealing with me.”

“It is our duty to keep you from exploiting them.”

“For the love of chaos, you’re a broken record.” He sat back, grabbing another newspaper. “See? Look at this. THOUSANDS DIE DUE TO INTERDIMENSIONAL MISHAP. I bet you if I had gone through with my plan that wouldn’t have happened.”

“The consequences of upholding our laws are not our concern.”

“You. Are. Dense.” Discord sighed. “Okay, how about this. I agree never to come back here, ever, on punishment of ‘death’ or whatever, and I return to Equestria, and you never have to think of me again.”

“And you will then interfere with their lives, which is something we cannot allow.”

“What is that? A lie I hear?”

“How so?”

“You let your evil counterparts force their followers into worship. The…” He flipped through the newspaper. “Ah yes, the Ori, great Ascended beings who controlled an entire galaxy with religious domination. You just let them have their way.”

“The Ark of Truth was our creation and their demise.”

“You did that back before you Ascended. And it says here you didn’t even try to tell the Tau’ri about it! Wow! Talk about crazy luck! I’m surprised they managed it.” He cleared his throat. “The point is, star lady, that you need to send me back. You’re like a foreign nation. I’ll admit, you can tell me not to act here, but you have no right to tell me what to do in my homeland. For all you know the laws of the universe make my actions right there. So ha.”

Stestar stared at him with an intense glare. “You actually have good points.”

“Was there ever any doubt about that?”

“Yes. But you-“

For the first time, another Ascended interrupted. “Just let him go, Sestar. He’s offered a deal. Get him out of our hair.”

Sestar took in a deep breath and sighed. “Fine. Go home. Do your unsavory deeds.”

Discord grinned. “Thank you.” He snapped his fingers, finding that he could indeed summon a top hat and a zoot suit. “I’ll be off. I’m sure Fluttershy’s worried by now.” He walked out the front doors of the establishment.

Sestar shot a glare at the Ascended who had spoken up. “This will bite us later.”

“Either option would have bitten us. The important thing is that now he knows he’s not at the top, and will have to think more about what he does. A small improvement, but one nonetheless.”

“We’re promoting unacceptable use of power.”

“He doesn’t get power from worship. It may work out.”

Sestar fell silent, fuming.

~~~

After three more universe jumps, the Ba’al mothership stopped jumping. They figured they couldn’t be traced anymore, especially because they didn’t even really know where they were.

Plus, there was something new to discuss.

Several dozen Ba’als stood around a table, staring at a purple heart-shaped mask.

“This is a powerful object.”

“It saved my life.”

“It can be used to further our power…”

“It wants to help us.”

“It is Majora.”

“It’s obviously manipulating our minds.”

“Clearly. We must devise a way for it to remain distant.”

“You. You were the original holder. You will take several of us onto a smaller ship and keep it away from the rest of us. You will be the voice of Majora.”

“Delightful!”

“Concerning. It may cause madness. It may be causing madness in all of us.”

“Why aren’t we considering throwing it away?”

“Because that’d be crazy and foolish.”

“That sounds crazy and foolish.”

“Huh. So it does. Whatever, go with the plan. This mask will bring new opportunities to us. We just need to be clever.”

They all laughed again.

~~~

Twilight stood on the balcony of her castle, staring up at the stars – and Stars – again.

Starlight joined her. There was an awkward silence.

“Twilight, I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“But I never apologized. I never admitted I was wrong. I never admitted it to myself, not really. Still not sure if I have. I’m running around in my head ways I could have kept doing it. I’ve already come up with plans to steal more things. I’m not acting on them, but they’re still there. I’m a natural manipulator, Twilight. That can’t be good.”

“Everypony has a part of them that isn’t good. I’m often too fixated and detail oriented.”

“Hardly as bad as being naturally manipulative…”

“I think it balances out. We all have strengths, we all have weaknesses. We all have to do what we can with what we can.”

Starlight sagged. “Maybe…” She looked up at the stars. She summoned a spell, whispered something into it, and shot it up.

“…What was it this time?”

“I was just… Just hoping that the Stars would accept us, even with all the mistakes we’ve made.”

“We’ll find out eventually. The Ha’tak should be ready to fly soon.”

“…Did the ship do anything to lessen Luna’s anger at your ‘diplomacy’?”

“Not at all!” Twilight chuckled. “Celestia had to intervene. She essentially said we were both handling it like idiots.”

“I think this entire escapade can be described as ‘people acting like idiots’, don’t you?”

“That certainly seems like an apt description…” She frowned. “…We’re going to see death eventually, Starlight. And lots of it. It’s affected Corona and her friends. I’m not sure their Rainbow Dash is going to be okay. What’s going to happen to us when we get in that kind of fight? Fluttershy almost exploded during the pawn fiasco…”

“We’ll have to prepare ourselves for it. We’ll have to be strong. But not forget harmony… Like I do so often.”

Twilight nodded. “Yeah… I really don’t know what’s going to happen. Ardent isn’t going to be able to ignore the other universes anymore, the Tau’ri have a ship in this area of the multiverse now, we’ve got a ship, the Elemental Nations helped fight a short war…” She shook her head. “Things are changing, Starlight. It no longer seems quite so… happy as it once did.”

Starlight looked at the stars. “Maybe it was never happy. Maybe we were just deluding ourselves.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing what we’re doing, though,” Twilight asserted. “The Stars call, the many universes around us call, they scream to be explored and uncovered. We’re not going to run away with our tails between our legs because of a little hardship. There will be ugly things. And we will face them.”

Starlight smiled. “Yeah. Yeah we will. Together.”

“Always, together.”

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 1: BREATH]

ARC 1 INTERLUDE<<

Hey there! Welcome to the Arc 1 interlude! I am… Well, who I am is not important, actually. Like, at all, right now. You and this story still have a long way to go! I’m just here to tell you all about the other stuff that happens BESIDES the thirteen chapters of the first arc! There are lots of links stored in here! Click some!

First off, there’s an optional prelude story you might want to read called The Handmaid, in case you were wondering who that figure of legend was. It’s an interesting story filled with time travel!

There have been several side-stories written and posted on the Forum and discussed through the Discord Chat. The story I’ve decided to showcase here today is by TheNewGuy, a story about a civilization discovering a multiversal superstructure entitled MORI Corporation. It comes highly recommended and was completed recently! It reveals some things about the multiverse that have not been discussed in the main Songs of the Spheres story yet, so be warned of what I guess are worldbuilding spoilers!

There’s also some fanart! Keywii_Cookies55 commissioned Tabula Rasa to create this beauty of the five mane ponies!

Now, since there won’t be any ‘Credits’ for a long, LONG time, it’s probably best to get the ‘what belongs to who’ out of the way here. It’ll also serve as a helpful guide as to what franchises have shown up so far! If you’re interested in that sort of thing.

My Little Pony belongs to Hasbro
Homestuck belongs to Andrew Hussie
The Dark Tower belongs to Stephen King
Doctor Who belongs to the BBC
The Legend of Zelda belongs to Nintendo
Team Fortress 2 belongs to Valve
Avatar: The Last Airbender belongs to Nickelodeon
Limitless belongs to CBS
Cookie Clicker belongs to Julien Thiennot
Minecraft belongs to Mojang. (Where was Minecraft? You tell me. It was in there somewhere, very loosely and tangentially.)
Stargate belongs to MGM

Here’s a fun question: what’s Vivian from? That’s the mysterious question of the day! Her franchise won’t be revealed for a while yet, but some people should be able to figure it out.

Now that that’s out of the way, who wants to take a pointless poll for best chapter of the arc? I know I do! [https://strawpoll.com/hy69222s]

You'll be glad to know that, currently, FIVE chapters of arc 2 are already drafted! For the foreseeable future, there will be a chapter posted every six days! Won't that be great? You can also read the drafts ahead of time if you want, just check in the discord linked above. For fun and profit, here's the chapter titles of the next arc for those who are curious!

ARC 2: Heart
014 - Magitech, Part 1
015 - Magitech, Part 2
016 - Shipping!
017 - Omnic and Otherwise
018 - The Hand of the Market
019 - NINETEEN
020 - Spacepone
021 - Murder on the Apollo Express
022 - Of Vampires, Insanity, and Rarispies
023 - A Lost Apocalypse
024 - Thief of Light
025 - Majorism, Part 1
026 - Majorism, Part 2

See you at the end of the next arc!

[HEART] 014 - Magitech Part 1

Rarely was the Mirror Portal surrounded by so many beings from so many different universes – ponies and humans mostly, though there were a smattering of gorons, demons, furry Binaries, and some of Ganondorf’s Gerudo. It was, needless to say, a special day, for it was time for the Mirror Portal to be moved once again.

One particular pony in the crowd was trying very hard to not be recognized. She wore a large black cloak that covered every part of her save her face, and that was covered by a simple round white mask. She was certainly setting people on edge with her presence, yes, but there was no chance any of them would recognize her, which was exactly what she wanted. She needed to get in and get out quickly, and she knew she could do it. Would do it. There were no chances, not this time.

She found herself mildly interested in the ‘ceremony’ that was taking place. All four Princesses had shown up, even the usually-distant Princess of Love, Mi Amore Cadenza. The secretive mare studied her, determining that she was rather basic. No power like Celestia, no mysterious wisdom like Luna, no excitable intelligence like Twilight, just… The cliché pretty pony princess. She didn’t have anything distinguishing about her from first glance.

Now, the mare knew Cadence was more than she appeared, but first impressions were everything in the games that were being played with entire universes. It was worth pitying her. Not too much though, should she ever end up on the opposing side…

The train of thought was interrupted when Celestia began talking, bringing the entire room to a hushed silence. “Today, my ponies, my people, my others, we finally put the Mirror Portal out of our hall and into the hands of all, to be used freely in communion. The Hub has been built in the demon’s jungle, and it awaits the Mirror Portal’s presence. We are gathered here today to move this powerful portal out of the monopoly of Equestria and to a place all can gather.”

There was a round of polite applause.

Celestia nodded, lighting her horn. The masked mare knew she was channeling cosmic power, more than enough to open a portal all on her own. A golden rimmed ring appeared in the air, leading to another world entirely, one with shiny gray floors and yet another crowd. Twilight stepped forward, removing the Mirror Portal itself from all the excess machinery, leaving only the green diamond itself in the frame. The connection faded away leaving a dull, plain mirror behind. Luna went next, lifting the Mirror away from Twilight with her magic and carrying it through Celestia’s opening. The three princesses followed the mirror, and Celestia’s portal closed behind them.

“And now we wait,” Cadence said, “it shouldn’t be long before they re-establish a connection, from what they told me.”

The entire hall was silent, the loudest noise being the gorons’ breathing. The masked mare counted down in her mind, tapping her hoof in the air slightly with each second that passed. Some of the Binaries started to look at each other nervously, like something was wrong. One of the Tau’ri coughed loudly. The masked mare simply kept counting.

She set her foot on the ground at the exact instant a shimmering mirrory surface appeared on a nearby wall. Twilight poked her head through. “Sorry for the wait, it’s working now. Come on through!”

Cadence nodded. “You heard her.” Slowly but surely, the entire crowd filed through the opening. The masked mare made sure to place herself in the middle of the group, so as to draw the least attention. Even the crowd around her didn’t pay her any mind – the atmosphere around them was simply too momentous to care for a slightly creepy mare. She moved unnoticed.

The other side of the Mirror Portal was the Mirror Portal. It was affixed to a single glass column filled with magical gasses instead of the rather messy conglomeration of random devices that had been attached to it previously. The appearance was much more orderly, intentional. One large screen hanging above the Mirror Portal showed the name of the current location dialed: “Equis Vitis,” with the coordinates displayed beneath. Two consoles stood to either side of the Mirror Portal, each scrolling with large quantities of information. A few meters in front of the Portal’s opening was Bon Bon’s desk, where a video camera stood and Bon Bon herself was furiously scribbling, trying to keep track of everything.

The masked mare didn’t care if Bon Bon saw her or not – the secret agent was not going to find her as interesting as, say, General Sunset over there. If the masked mare was noticed at all, it would be as a simple checkmark. The camera would hardly show anything damning either. After all, all she was doing was walking.

“Welcome to the Hub!” Celestia shouted, using the Royal Canterlot Voice to make sure her voice was heard throughout the space. The main room they were in was large, circular, and lined with a few hundred people. “This building is owned by no one and yet everyone at the same time. We are currently in the very large central room, where we expect lots of interdimensional traffic to come and go. Through the doors there are hallways that lead to rooms that are mostly empty for now, but soon there should be shops, embassies, and other things. For now, feel free to wander around and mingle. Luna and myself should be available for the next few hours, as well as several other world leaders.” She smiled and let everyone get to whatever they wanted to do.

The masked mare found it interesting that the only media coverage was from Equestria – it was the only world with an active media that didn’t keep the existence of the multiverse from its population. She wondered how long that would last, even if it wasn’t really her business. She shrugged to herself and walked towards the edge of the central room, the large metal doors sliding open for her.

A dragon could fit through the gap, and the masked mare had no doubt that was how they were designed. The largest creature in here right now may have been Siron, but the architects here had planned for the future. They couldn’t see like she could, but educated guesses were worthwhile.

She walked through the door, finding that some people had already entered the outer rooms. The hallways were bare and dull for now, but would soon be filled with decorations from every sort of world. The hallways snaked around in a mixture of geometric patterns and artistic ones – though the mare stayed on the one that led directly to the edge of the hub itself.

She passed Iroh and Zuko looking at two separate, but adjoined, ‘rooms.’

Iroh scratched his chin. “…Embassy right here, and tea shop right there.”

“Uncle, you can’t run an Embassy and tea shop at the same time.”

“Watch me.”

The mare smiled under her mask. Zuko would indeed watch him. And be very very surprised at how effective the combo was. She liked the little ironies of life, sometimes. Especially when they helped her.

The mare walked right out the main doors, leaving the hub entirely. From outside it was easy to tell the structure was built with several conflicting ideals in mind. Overall, it was a perfect flat cylinder, a single silvery white color. Yet, while the doors were simple and effective, the outside wasn’t smooth, but instead was covered with many relief sculptures. They had been crafted by magic, largely carved by the ponies, but they made sure to include images of humans and the many other races as well, including some the mare had never actually seen. The theme was harmony, as always with Equestria. As always. They were a little crazy about that. Harmony wasn’t always a good thing, and the mare knew this all too well.

The jungle that surrounded the hub was decidedly less pretty. One day, it would grow back to its once lush state, but now it was dry, charred, and showed almost no signs of life. Siron had not been kidding about the oddly scheduled fires. Days after that meeting, the jungle had been swept by fire, killing everything that couldn’t run. The demons no longer lived here. Nothing lived here.

Except for the mare herself. She took in a deep breath, took a moment to think, and set out in the direction she deduced she needed to. She walked past dinosaur skeletons, shriveled flowers the size of towns, and charred spires of wood that scraped the sky. Through all this, she kept her cloak and mask on tight, even though she knew she didn’t need to. There was nobody watching her.

Well… Nobody that mattered anyway.

Yet.

She eventually arrived in what had once been a beautiful clearing filled with magic, but was now just a charred mess with a single point of interest. A brilliantly glowing altar, shining as a beacon of hope for the charred land around it. A few tufts of grass had sprouted up next to the holy altar of the Blue Moon Spirit, signifying that eventually the jungle would return. It flooded the mare with powerful, calming magics.

This was what she had come for. It was time.

The mare took off her mask and removed her hood, revealing herself to the few who were watching. She was an oculus with blue eyes, a version of Pinkie Pie from Lai – otherwise known as Sage Pinkie. She held the simple white mask in her hoof, approaching the altar.

The Blue Moon Spirit appeared on top of the altar, four arms pointing at the Sage with an accusatory finger each. The Sage did not do more than glance the Spirit’s way with her ever-shifting eyes. She saw right through the Spirit. The Spirit could not bring herself to harm the Sage. Any oculus would not have feared this being, for in the Spirit believed she was too ‘pure’ to bring harm.

The Sage found this disgusting. Nothing was that pure. Had she been an obviously evil pony, the Spirit would not hesitate. But no, the Spirit had to hold herself back. Not because of any morals, or altruism, but because of the way she perceived her own nature. That such actions were beneath her.

The Sage admitted to herself that, if the Spirit knew what was about to happen, she probably would retaliate with lethal force. As it was, this would be too easy.

The Spirit warned the Sage not to come any closer, but the Sage ignored it. Judging the Sage unworthy, the Spirit pushed her back with a gust of magic. The Sage simply walked forward again, mask outstretched. The Spirit pushed back once more, harder this time, and still the Sage came, mask outstretched.

The Spirit moved her hands to fashion a more complicated spell, and then the Sage jumped positions, appearing behind the altar in an instant. She laid the mask on top of the altar, beneath the Spirits’ dangling legs.

The Spirit could not speak, but if she could, she would have been screaming. The mask drained the power from the altar, and by consequence the Spirit herself. She clawed out with a dangerous attack for the first time, but the Sage was already behind a tree. The Blue Moon in the sky shook slightly, sending a beam of blue light that razed the ground where the Sage was.

She would have died, had she not already been on the other side of the clearing.

The Spirit lost her power and will to fight, falling to her knees on top of the mask, slowly being absorbed into it. The Blue Moon lost its lustre, dulling in the sky above. No one would notice the change until the Blue Moon rose at night, which would not be for several days. The Altar turned to plain stone, and the image of the Spirit vanished completely.

The Sage walked back to the altar and picked up the mask. It shone with a slight sheen now, but nothing too unusual. She placed it on her face and walked away.

~~~

Corona asked herself a very important question: had she touched Pinkie today? She didn’t remember it, but being this excited was rather unlike her. Sure, her dream for the last several months was finally being realized, but that was no reason to literally feel like running around the base dancing, right?

Because that was what she was doing. Dancing down through the AID base, grinning to herself and twirling around. She was making a fool of herself, yes, but given her current emotional state she couldn’t have cared less. She was taking her secret-agent sunglasses on and off over and over again in a horrible recreation of some musical she had seen recently.

Ike took out his phone and started filming. “Man, I wish I could post this to Youtube. This would get so many views.”

“I’m not even sure you’re allowed to have videos of this base on your phone,” Mike said.

“Ah, probably not. But Storm’s pretty understanding. He just gets the need to record amusing things.”

Mike was about to correct him, but then saw that one of the security cameras that was usually sweeping the room was instead following Corona closely. He shrugged.

Corona tapped the ‘down’ elevator button while humming to herself, prancing in the moment it arrived. The two agents in the elevator shifted to the sides of it to give her room to twirl. They got off before she did, since they didn’t need to go to the bottom of the base. They were happy about this, Corona was rather oblivious to their feelings. She waved goodbye to them, eagerly awaiting the time when the elevator would hit basement 13.

That time was not far off at all. When the elevator finally went ‘ding’ at the correct floor, she jumped out, lit her hands on fire, and grinned. “Carter! Is it ready?”

The blonde human woman from the Tau’ri looked up from a laptop she had in her hand, stopping whatever she was explaining to Tempest. “It would seem so. We’ve just got to perform some tune-ups on the interfaces, but we’ll be able to test within the hour.”

“Yes!” Corona said, turning to what had her so elated. The two spires she designed poked out of the ground, humming with electricity from a nearby power plant. In between them was a stargate, sitting on the ground with a thin, clear ramp leading up to it. The gate was of a different design than the one on Earth Tau’ri, as it was blue and filled with constellation-designs instead of symbols; not to mention that the inner ring didn’t turn, it only lit up. But that didn’t matter, not for what it was going to be used for anyway.

“Were you able to encode it to nine chevrons?” Corona asked.

“Easily, actually,” Carter said. “The Ninth Chevron really does appear to be a catch-all, allowing it to initiate any program we have set, even bizarre ones. Makes me think the Ancients designed their gates with it as a ‘catch all’. Seven for within the galaxy, eight for extragalactic, and nine for whatever unusual uses they would find in the future.”

“Wonder if they ever used it to travel realities…”

“You’d have to ask Daniel that one, and I doubt he’ll remember.” Carter typed a few more things on her laptop. “The hardest part wasn’t getting the Ninth Chevron program open, it was getting the gate to accept a possible connection without anything on the other end. It’s not designed to do that.”

Corona cracked her knuckles. “Well my arches are. Punch a hole into any universe. The gate is just here to get the gravity right. Wormholes.”

“I’m curious what the event horizon will look like,” Carter admitted. “Your portals can be seen through, but the Stargate is usually one-way only. We’re combining two things that operate on different principles.”

“And without magic!” Corona grinned. “No magic at all! Meaning this will work even in universes where magic is dead or completely gone.”

“Maybe there are universes that can’t be dialed with magical methods?”

“I don’t know! This is how we’re going to find out!” She poked her head over Carter’s shoulder. “How’s the interface going?”

“It’s ready. The gate isn’t complaining about the alien program anymore, and the arch-spikes are ready. …Do you have a better name for your things?”

“I was going to just call them the gateway,” Corona admitted. “I think that now, ‘arches’ works. Even though they’re not touching at the top. But pillars just sounds silly.”

“Fair enough. Power levels are optimal, gate is loaded with the program, arches pass all pre-test checks…” She closed her laptop. “People! We’re ready!”

Tempest stood up. “Finally. What are we waiting for then? Do it.”

Carter flipped open a box with a lever. She handed it to Corona. “This is mostly your invention. You do the honors.”

Corona took off her glove, feeling the lever with her hand. There was no emotion to feel coming from the lifeless piece of metal, but she couldn’t bring herself not to feel it with her own skin. She looked directly at the gate-arch combo and pulled the lever down.

The arches lit up first, crackling with electricity. The arcs of purple lightning were attracted to the gate. The gate remained unaffected by the arcs of electricity, dialing like it always would. The ring swirled with blue patterns, quickly lighting up seven symbols. Eight. Nine.

Kawoosh. The gate’s connection burst forward, a torrent of unstable energies tearing into the room, putting everyone on edge – but the disturbance of the kawoosh was reined in, until the gate held what appeared to be a rippling pool of water inside it. Not opaque blue-white energy, but something clear. The light was distorted by the ‘liquid’ nature of the event horizon, but Ardent could clearly be seen on the other side.

A small helicopter drone was sent in to test the waters. It hit the barrier between worlds, shook a bit, but righted itself on the other side easily. It flew around for a few seconds then came back through, landing in Carter’s hand.

Corona grinned. “Okay. It works. Are we safe?” She checked the pulses of electricity coming off the arches – they would be rather painful if they hit, seeing as she didn’t know how to redirect lightning.

“They’re all grounding at the gate,” Carter said. “It shouldn’t be a problem unless there’s a power surge. Most of the power’s being funneled into the gate anyway, so even then that’s remote. I would fix it as soon as possible, but it’s fine for initial prototyping.”

Corona had heard all she needed to hear. She slipped her glove back on and jumped through the stargate’s new connected portal. It didn’t feel like water, but it didn’t feel like air either. She felt like she had to pass through a membrane of semi-fluid rubber that was somehow infinitely thin. A minor impediment that she overcame quickly, but it was notably disorienting.

She fell a couple of feet to the ground. Right. The gate, being a raised circle, would create a portal a few feet above ground level. Something to remember in the future.

She stood up, dusted herself off, and laughed. She was standing on Ardent right now, in the great Hyrule Field. Behind her was a giant circular opening, brimming with white wispy energies around the edge. In front of her was a beautiful land of adventure and…

…Black scars from Ba’al’s attacks. Her mood darkened considerably as she looked upon Hyrule Town in the distance. Sections of the wall were completely decimated, the castle had lost one of its impressive towers, and she knew many districts didn’t even exist anymore. It was sobering.

Here she was, celebrating that one of her life dreams had been completed, when some people had just suffered a horrible travesty. It made her feel guilty, even though she knew this wasn’t her fault, and that she’d helped put an end to it.

She had flashes of the death… The blood… The master sword through Pinkie’s chest…

She shook her head, clearing it. She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath – she needed to be strong. Not everybody could be strong, but she could. Pinkie was fine, Ardent survived, and Ba’al was on the run. She should feel happy that things went as well as they did.

Carter and Tempest finally stepped through the portal behind her. Carter shivered slightly. “That certainly feels different to a normal gate transit.”

“It’ll work better once we figure out how to make our own stargates,” Corona noted. “Then we can just make it part of the arches.”

“Good luck. Not even we’ve figured out how to build them. Very advanced.”

“Challenge accepted.”

“Someone’s coming,” Tempest said, readying her weapon. Carter and Corona looked up to see a brilliant white horse riding up to them, alongside a significantly darker one. Both had familiar riders.

Corona raised her hand to Tempest’s gun. “It’s just Zelda and Ganondorf. They probably sensed us, or something.”

“That I did,” Zelda said, gracefully dismounting. “Seeing as you probably haven’t been here long, it was likely a premonition.”

“Must be nice, knowing what’s going to happen,” Corona said.

“Bit of a curse, really,” Zelda said, looking at her hand. “…It’s rather selective about what it shows me. Makes it untrustworthy.”

Carter blinked. “It?”

“The Triforce of Wisdom.” Zelda said, holding out her hand and revealing a triangular glow shining on it. “It shows me things and improves my judgment considerably.”

“…What exactly is it?” Carter asked.

“An ancient relic created by the goddesses,” Zelda said. “Legends state that when they created the world, they created the Triforce to keep it balanced. Three separate parts – Courage, Wisdom, and Power. The parts tend to seek out those who personify them most, though when brought together it can apparently grant a wish.”

Ganondorf held up his hand and smirked. “Power, here.”

“Link has the Triforce of Courage,” Zelda revealed.

“Does that mean you guys can make wishes?” Tempest asked.

“We could…” Zelda said. “But then the Triforce would split and be lost once again. For now, we just reap the benefits of each individual piece.” She frowned. “I would appreciate you not reveal this to my people. If they knew all three pieces of the Triforce were available, they would demand a wish.”

“Understandable,” Corona admitted.

“Also, try not to put your portals out in the open like this,” Zelda said. “People will start asking questions.”

Carter blinked. “…Why do you need to keep it secret from them? Ba’al already attacked, blowing the secret wide open.”

Ganondorf grunted. “Nobody officially knows where Ba’al came from. Most think he’s an alien, which he is, but know nothing of another universe. The town that did, Termina, was mostly destroyed. Those of us who did know agreed not to reveal it publicly because there would be an outcry and probably war.”

“War…?” Corona said.

Zelda nodded. “The nations of Ardent do not get along. We are not the Elemental Nations, nor are we Earth. Being transparent would be disastrous.”

Corona wasn’t sure about this. She fixed Zelda with an unsure glance. “What do you think’s going to happen when they find out you’ve been lying to them?”

“It will be revealed at such a time when retaliation would be minimal, if at all,” Zelda affirmed, turning to Tempest. “As I recall, your world has been hiding the existence of magic for millennia.”

Tempest nodded. “That’s right…”

“Why can we not do the same? Blame the attack on aliens and demons, and move on.”

Ganondorf chuckled. “The words of someone about to bite it.”

“If I am about to bite it, you are as well, for you are in on it,” she spat.

Ganondorf shrugged, saying nothing further.

Corona glanced at the portal behind her. “Well, I suppose you’re right. We probably should close it then and respect your wishes. See you around.”

“Likewise,” Zelda said, bowing slightly.

“By the way…” Corona said, looking back. “…do you know anything about a weird mask salesman who calls himself the Happy Mask Salesman?”

Zelda looked at her with a confused expression. “No… Should I?”

Corona shrugged. “I don’t know. He lives in your world, and he’s got something mysterious about him. Maybe you should ask Link.”

Ganondorf folded his arms. “Yeah. Ask Link. Like he’ll be easy to get ahold of.”

“…He’s not here?”

“No. For whatever goddess-forsaken reason, he’s gone and hitched a ride on the Apollo and has been there for the last few weeks as far as we know.”

“The Apollo’s not exactly hard to find,” Carter said.

Zelda nodded. “Admittedly not. That said, being in the right place at the right time is not worth it if we only need to ask him one thing. I’m just letting him do what he wants for now, he’ll come back eventually. It’s not like he’s really doing anything that important. He’ll return when the world needs him.”

~~~

“We are not any closer to finding Majora’s Mask.”

Link glanced at his shadow. “Midna, we know Ba’al has it.”

Midna popped out of his shadow, settling her impish self on his shoulder, twirling her glowing orange-red hair around like she was trying to make a point. “And that’s all we know! And how much closer are we to finding out where he has it hidden?”

“Not much,” Link admitted. “But these people are our only lead.”

Midna yawned. “Didn’t they admit to thinking Ba’al was defeated until he invaded Ardent?”

“Yes. But they still know more about him than we do. How he thinks. What he’s likely to do.”

“But, alas, we can’t exactly just ask where they think he’d hide something, can we? That’d be too obvious.”

“Knowledge of the mask is dangerous. You know that.”

Midna bit her lip. She did in fact know that. She knew of the mask, and she heard it calling to her in her sleep sometimes. Though lately it just laughed. “True. But you and I both know that this ship isn’t just hunting Ba’al, it’s doing other things. For instance, what have we been doing all day?”

“Diplomacy.”

“Right. Diplomacy. The most boring of all boring things where no bad-guy hunting takes place. Ever.”

Link shrugged. “It is necessary though. It is gracious enough that we are allowed to stay on this starship, and engage in the hunt when it does happen.”

“That’s another thing. We keep rooting out Ba’als, but they never tell us what we need to know. Where the mask is. Something tells me they don’t just keep it on their mobile mothership.”

“But they probably do move it around,” Link said. “Which does make it a big problem. Ba’al is clever, and after his first mistake of charging headfirst, he’s biding his time. He’s smart.”

“Eventually, however…”

Link grimaced. “I’d prefer that we find the mask before that happens. It makes him easier to find, but more dangerous.”

Midna nodded. “Yep. Mixed blessings all around. What I’m saying is that we need a new plan.”

Link raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“We’re out here in the multiverse, right? Surely there’s something here we can use to find it. Or even defeat Majora once and for all!”

Link shook his head. “Then we’d have to ask questions. And questions lead to questions in return.”

“Zelda could probably find it…”

“We are not giving her knowledge of it,” Link said, standing up suddenly.

“You know I could go ask her without your permission.”

“You won’t.”

Midna sighed. “Fine. Find some other prophet-type to find it.”

“Too dangerous.”

“Well if you aren’t willing to use anything, are we just going to let it all explode in a shower of deranged laughter and chaos?”

Link smirked. “No. We have time, for now.”

“Sure we do.”

“We’ll collect what we can from here,” Link said, leaving the room. “And we can use what we find. Just like old times.”

“Another grand adventure!” Midna cheered, a bit too intensely to be serious. She vanished back into his shadow as he left. “Just remember, we’re on a nonspecific timetable here. Could be next week he loses it, could be next year. Maybe even longer, if he’s smart enough. But he won’t last forever.”

Link nodded, walking down the halls of the Apollo to the bridge. His plans were to see how much longer it’d be before O’Neill was done with the diplomacy and could order the Apollo somewhere else.

It turned out that O’Neill was already done, since he was sitting in the captain’s chair with a slight smirk on his face. Someone Link didn’t recognize was next to him.

“Ah, Link! Just talking about you,” O’Neill said, waving him over. “This here is Director Storm, the only sane person on this round rock we’re orbiting.”

Link looked Director Storm up and down. He wasn’t sure what he thought of the tall man. “I’m Link, though I guess you already know that.”

Director Storm shook his hand, smirking. “Indeed I do! I hear you’re quite the classic adventuring hero, aren’t you? Saved your world from a great evil, saved it again from alien invasion, and now are seeking to save multiple universes from the same aliens! Truly, an epic man on an epic quest!”

Link felt like he was being buttered up. “Do you want something?”

“Me? No. Well, besides having you on my good side. I’m sure you can guess why.”

Link nodded. “Yeah. Of course, that makes me a tad suspicious.”

Storm threw his hands into the air. “Ah, what can I do? Alas, my advances are all seen as ploys. Perhaps I am but doomed to be seen as a conniving mastermind. Oh, woe…”

O’Neill pointed at the Director. “This guy…”

Link nodded slowly. “So, I take it things went badly down there?”

O’Neill reclined back in the seat and put his hands over his eyes. “Their President is an absolute moron.”

“I’m sure there were other leaders there.”

“None of them were the ones I already knew, yet they were oddly similar enough that I felt like I could say certain things and everything blew up. Alternate universes – who needs ‘em?”

“Need is such a strong word,” Director Storm said.

O’Neill gave Director Storm a look that was torn between amusement and annoyance. Director Storm just smirked.

Link turned back to O’Neill. “Are we ready to get back on our mission?”

Director Storm nodded, as if he were expecting this. “Always eager to get back to the mission, to return to what must be done.”

O’Neill put his chin in his hand. “Well, seeing as we accomplished nothing down there, I’m ready to be done with politics for a while. Storm, you’re going back down. Don’t die from political suffocation.”

“Likewise,” Storm said, smirking.

O’Neill pressed a button on the intercom. “Beam Storm back down. And this time don’t interfere with a weather satellite, I don’t want to sit through that soul-wrenching discussion again.”

Soon, Storm was gone, leaving just the regular bridge crew and Link.

“Any leads?” Link asked.

“We had to extract one from a senator within the last twenty-four hours.” O’Neill sat up straight, grimacing. “He’s trying to get a hold on everyone we’re connected to. He doesn’t seem to be able to infect ponies, though.”

“Gorons? Zora? Binaries?”

“No idea. We’ve found nothing but human cases. But he’s spreading. The Elemental Nations lack the infrastructure to root him out so he’s probably everywhere there. We only caught one with the Goa’uld sensors installed in the Hub. He’s moving around carefully. No more information about his mothership, and none of the clones can tell you where it is because it keeps moving.”

“They must have some way to contact it.”

“It seems like it contacts them somehow. But I don’t know for the life of me how he’s pulling that off. I like to think we’d have caught a message by now…”

Majora…? No, there’s no way he’s advanced that far along. There’d be signs. Link shook his head. “Do we have anything on him?”

“Besides evidence of him spreading? No. He’s just being too damn careful…” O’Neil clenched his fist. “I don’t like being outmaneuvered, Link. Yet he always seems to find a way to weasel out of final defeat… Always. He’s like a zombie plague.”

“…A what?”

“Nevermind,” O’Neill shook his head. “Let’s think about something less depressing. Like ponies. We’re going to the main pony world.”

Link raised an eyebrow. “Is Ba’al there?”

“No. Not as far as we know anyway. What is there is that Ha’tak that’s going to launch today. We’re going to be there in case it blows up so we can save every little pony on board. “

“…I see…”

O’Neill sighed. “Look, I know you want to go guns blazing and hunt Ba’al down, but it’s just not that simple. He’s hiding. We don’t know where he is. We don’t have any leads that will take us to the mothership. Unless you’ve got something that can just tell us where he is, then we’re stumped until he makes a mistake.”

“Triforce of Wisdom…” Midna whispered from Link’s shadow.

O’Neill blinked, looking around. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Link said, managing to hide his frustration at Midna.

“…I’m hallucinating noises in my old age…” O’Neill muttered. “Anyway, take us to… What are we calling it now? Equis Vitis? What does that even mean?”

“Equis Vine, I think. Sir,” one of the crew said.

“And what does Equis mean?”

“Something to do with horses.”

O’Neill shrugged. “Sometimes I marvel at how literal their names are. Anyway, take us there.”

The Apollo’s drive activated the dimensional device, cutting a circular hole through the fabric of space. The ship passed right through without incident, appearing in orbit around Equis, both the moon and miniature sun visible from the bridge.

“Love this place. The sun orbits the planet,” O’Neill rubbed his hands together. “Tell them we’re ready.”

The communications officer frowned. “They’re not. Apparently there’s some technical difficulties that arose. They’re suggesting we wait a few hours.”

Link abruptly left the room, heading back to his given quarters. He was going to try and take a nap. Operative word being try.

Midna chuckled. O’Neill grunted about hearing things again.

~~~

Luna and Celestia were walking down the halls of the Hub, surprised to see that already a few of the rooms had been occupied. They were even more surprised that some of them weren’t embassies.

“We’re creating a culture here faster than I was anticipating…” Celestia mused. “Apparently everyone had plans and was just waiting for it to become official.”

“And yet, still no signed accords,” Luna said. “The Binaries refuse to be reasonable and the ponies of Lai just don’t care. No offense to my counterpart intended, but she could stand to get her ponies more organized.”

Celestia smirked. “Luna, really, who cares about that now? So what if we’re not really in an official alliance. Friendship with paperwork always means less, know what I mean?”

“I do, sister, I do. But I also know that humans love loopholes and exploits. Not to mention Ba’al…”

“Ba’al is a force of darkness,” Celestia said. “He is our collective enemy. And, as of now, the only one. In many ways, having an opposing force brings ponies closer together.”

“Never let anypony hear you say that. Or anyone.”

Celestia smirked. “I know. Not all can see things from our perspective. In fact, few can. How many immortals have we found out there that aren’t just versions of us?”

“…A few. The Spectacularium. The Ascended.”

“The point is a human could easily count the number of them on their fingers.”

“Well the Ascended are a race…”

“Luna, you’re being nitpicky again.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “Sometimes you need to examine all the details.”

“I do not think that is now. And – oh would you look at that. It’s Twilight.”

Luna raised her eyebrow. “Isn’t she with the ship?”

“Sparky, Luna.” Celestia gestured at one of the rooms that had been clearly furnished into a shop called Earth Gizmos. Human Twilight was inside, sorting strange rectangular devices into and out of boxes. “Let’s pay her a visit, hrm?”

The two strode into the little shop, and nobody inside noticed them at first. Twilight was busy scrambling around, freaking out about how this totally wasn’t going to work, and everyone else was watching her. Celestia took a moment to recognize everyone, but eventually she worked it out. Micro Chips, Sandalwood, Lyra, and Principal Celestia.

“Hello,” Princess Celestia said, smirking.

“Ah!” the Principal said. “I was wondering when we’d get to meet!”

Twilight stopped in her tracks, turning her head around slowly until she faced Princess Celestia. “P-P-princess! What are- Why- Wha?”

Micro Chips hid behind Sandalwood while Lyra just started scribbling furiously in her notebook. Princess Celestia found the antics of the humans amusing. “I just saw you and decided to drop in. As a friend.”

“But we’re not ready yet!” Twilight blurted.

“Ready for what?”

Principal Celestia smirked. “This is the ‘group project’ of the dimensional explorer’s club. Every club in my school has to accomplish something beyond having fun by the end of the year, and that is quickly approaching, so they’re in a bit of a panic. They’re going to operate a shop in the Hub and sell… ‘Earth Gizmos’, and learn about economic processes while they do it. A wonderful learning opportunity!”

Princess Celestia nodded. “And what exactly are these Earth Gizmos?”

Everyone looked to Micro Chips. He cleared his throat. “Well, those of us on Earth h-happen to, uh, have a love of technology. We, er, well, figured since you don’t have it, we’d be able to do pretty well in selling it to you. Yeah. We’ve got TVs, computers, and other similar things. And we’ve also got a lot of entertainment – game consoles, movies, TV shows, and videos you can normally only see on the Internet. B-bringing a bit of our world to the others, if they want it.”

“I know of a few ponies who would love all these things,” Princess Celestia mused, taking a look around at the half-stocked shop. “How could you afford all this? My understanding is these devices aren’t exactly cheap.”

“Rarity’s family is stinking rich and Micro’s dad works at Best Buy,” Lyra offered. “We don’t have a lot of stuff, but what we do have will give us a start.”

“And how are you going to power it?” Luna asked, looking at all the places cables needed to be stuck in on a flatscreen TV. “Not everyone is the masterful unicorn Starlight is, able to convert magic directly into electricity. And those areas of our world that do have electricity won’t have the same outlets.”

“I’ve got outlet adaptors!” Twilight said, opening up a box filled with rectangles that would stick into a pony wall socket and turn it into an earth outlet. “Also, we’ve got a way to give you at least some electricity. See, in the back we’ve got…”

A light blue unicorn marched out of the back room and slammed a tray of softly-glowing cylinders on a counter. “The Great and Powerful Trixie has created another batch!”

Princess Celestia blinked. “…Trixie?”

Trixie looked up. “Yes, who wants to kno-“ her arrogant expression vanished. “PRINCESS CELESTIA!?”

Princess Celestia nodded. “Yes. What are you doing here?”

“Uh, well Trixie’s helping out some friends make magic batteries! Yep! Just like at the power plant!”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “You’ve worked at the power plant?”

“It was slightly better than the rock farm,” Trixie muttered, then shoved a hoof over her mouth. “I mean, not that rock farmers aren’t worthwhile, I’m sure they’re excellent ponies, it’s just that I found the power plant work more rewarding. Yes. Heheh.”

Luna snickered, turning away from Trixie and her power-enchanted cylinders, focusing instead on a shelf lined with many green rectangular cases. She took one off and popped it open, finding a disc inside. “…What is this?”

“Video game, for one of those consoles,” Micro said. “I think in that one you play a girl who wants to collect hats and hourglasses. Or something. I haven’t played it.”

“It looks adorable,” Luna said. “…I think I’ll take it. And whatever you need to play it. See if these ‘games’ are any better than our little arcades.”

“That’ll be a console, the game, and a screen,” Sandalwood said, grabbing what she needed right then and there. “That’ll be eight-hundred seventy-eight dollars. And in bits that’ll be-“

“We can’t charge the Princess!” Twilight shouted.

“Yes, you can,” Luna said, conjuring up a Royal Treasury Note. “How much in bits?”

“Seven-hundred and twenty-six,” Sandalwood said, taking the Note as soon as Luna wrote the value on it. “You are now the proud owner of a gaming system. It comes with a few games already installed on it, since it was used before. Hope you enjoy!”

Luna smirked. “We shall see. I doubt I’ll get that into it, though.”

Princess Celestia was mildly impressed that Sandalwood had worked out a conversion rate already. All they’d done previously was assume the value of the bit based on its construction from gold, nothing else. “I see you’ve all got this well under control. I’d expect a lot of traffic in this little shop of yours, assuming other people don’t have the same idea.”

Principal Celestia shrugged. “I think they’ll do fine.”

“Yeah! You’ve got Trixie helping you!” Trixie raised her hoof into the air.

“…Do you want to be paid now or something?” Twilight asked her.

“Uh…Yes please.”

Twilight took a box of peanut butter crackers out of a nearby box and handed them to Trixie. She grabbed them and grinned. “Trixie now has an entire box of the best snack in existence!”

Princess Celestia blinked. “…I suppose money isn’t everything.”

“Definitely not,” Twilight agreed. “Anything else we can do for you two?”

“Not now, no. We may be back though. So prepare yourselves.”

“We will!” Sandalwood said, giving them a thumbs up. The two princesses left the store with their items.

Celestia smirked. “I expect you’ll be up all night playing that thing.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh? Don’t remember losing sleep so many nights because you’d found a good book?”

Luna flushed. “I’m significantly older and wiser now, sister. Such things won’t affect me anymore.”

Celestia leaned closer to her sister and grinned.

“…Affect me as much.”

Celestia leaned even closer, raising her eyebrows.

“Are you just trying to make me uncomfortable.”

“If I am, is it working?”

Luna sighed. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but let’s talk about politics again.”

“You know we can’t drop this now.”

“...Celestiaaaaaaa…”

Celestia chuckled. It was always fun, messing around with her sister. It was their little ritual. Something they could no longer do with many other ponies due to their position. Just a sad fact of life.

~~~

Applejack held up a glass bottle of apple cider in her hoof. “Ready?”

“Ready!” Princess Twilight called over.

“Throw it already AJ!” Rainbow Dash begged.

Applejack hefted the bottle and threw it as hard as she could. It flew far into the air, spinning through it in a perfect arc. It smashed against something hard and metallic, spraying glass and cider everywhere.

“I declare the Equestrian Starfinder spaceworthy!” Twilight shouted, for once using the Royal Canterlot Voice so everypony could hear. Applause – both with hands and hooves – filled the air around the Starfinder. What was once a brutalized and broken Ha’tak was now a shimmering pyramid of a largely white color, covered in pink and purple magical runes that glowed softly, giving the ship the illusion of life.

Pinkie Pie pressed a button and confetti exploded from all sides of the Starfinder, down its pearly sides and onto the ground in a colorful blanket. “WOOHOO!” She shouted.

Starlight smirked, ready to give the gathered crowd a show. She lit her horn, activating the pre-programmed test flight response. The Starfinder’s engines activated for the first time in months, encasing the bottom of the ship in a brilliant purple fire. It floated several stories into the air and then stopped, holding position far above the crowd. There were many ‘ooooh’s and ‘aaaaaah’s, mainly from the ponies who had come to see the show, rather than the humans who’d helped work on it.

“Ponies of Equestria! Our first starship is ready to explore the Stars! Wish us luck on our outing!” With a quick spell, Twilight teleported herself and her seven friends onto the bridge, which was still the same as the default Ha’tak bridge, golden and a bit excessive. They hadn’t had time to paint the interior. “Okay, now I can stop talking like that. Gak.” She rubbed her throat. “Never like it.”

“You sounded great,” Spike said, giving her a thumbs up.

“I agree. I think,” Fluttershy said, unaware that her ears were still folded back on her skull.

Twilight turned to Applejack and Rainbow Dash. “Glad you two could make it today. We’ve… We’ve missed you.”

Rainbow Dash grinned. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world! I mean, come on, the first spaceship we get flying without Rainbow Dash? Tell me that doesn’t sound crazy!”

“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Starlight said, smirking.

“Ladies and gentleponies, introducing Sarcasm Glimmer,” Rainbow Dash muttered.

“I’d call that more deadpan.”

Applejack chuckled softly. “Glad to be here as well, Twi. Not as invested as Dash over there, but Ah figure it’s been long enough since Ah’ve joined ya. When was the last time?”

Fluttershy raised a hoof. “The Tree of Harmony asked us to calm down a dispute between the demons and the swamp tribe.”

“Ah. Right, that,” Applejack said. “Ah don’t remember that very well.”

“It wasn’t very memorable.”

Rainbow Dash grabbed her head. “Can we get moving already? We’ve got a spaceship to fly!”

Twilight laughed. “Sure, Rainbow Dash, sure.” She tapped one of the consoles in front of her with a hoof, telling the Starfinder to rise into orbit. Rainbow Dash’s grin only grew as she saw Equis get smaller and smaller on the screen in front of them. “Yessssssss!”

“Hey. Incoming message,” Spike said, pointing at a flashing green light.

Twilight smirked. “Accept the call, ensign Spike!”

“Oh, so we’re all part of a bridge crew now, is that it?”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Just put it on screen.”

O’Neill’s face quickly lit up the board. “Well, you’re pretty lucky. It took us several years before we managed to get a full blown spaceship.”

“Well, you did build the Prometheus more or less from scratch, right?” Rarity said.

“Eh. More or less. Anyway, we have a teleport lock on all… sixty of you in that ship. If something goes wrong we’ll have you out. It might be a tight fit though.”

Twilight shrugged. “Hey, if the ship blows up, I’d much rather live in a tightly compressed transporter room than explode out here in space.”

“When you put it that way it doesn’t sound so bad.”

Rainbow Dash blinked. “What part, the exploding, or the cramped space?”

“Does it matter?” Applejack asked.

Pinkie giggled. “Oxymoron.”

O’Neill facepalmed. “You’re still on about that?”

“I’m always on about everything.”

“…It’s hard to argue with that.”

Twilight chuckled. “Anyway, Starlight, set a course for Proximus. ETA… Four minutes.”

“Right awa-“

There was a flash of silvery light. Instead of Discord appearing, like half the ponies were expecting, it was an elderly gray unicorn with an impressive beard. His large, pointed hat jingled as he shook his head. “My Stars, that was a difficult teleport…”

Twilight’s jaw dropped. “S-Starswirl!? What are-“

“You’re going to visit a Star. I have a particular one in mind I want answers from. I would have appreciated being informed prior to launch.”

“Nopony knows where to find you half the time!”

Starswirl scratched his beard. “Fair enough. I won’t hold anything against you. But I have a long overdue conversation with Malat, and it looks like you have the ship to get me there. …If you don’t mind.”

Starlight groaned. “Fine. Malat. Ten minute travel time. Okay?”

“Yes, much faster than the hibernation I was expecting.”

O’Neill raised a hand. “Who’s the old guy?”

“Starswirl,” Twilight said. “The greatest mage in all of Equestria’s history. Also apparently has an overdue conversation with a particular Star. Trained Celestia and Luna. And… Well…”

“Needs to learn a thing or two about politeness,” Rarity muttered.

“That wasn’t very polite, Rarity,” Starswirl shot back.

“Touché.”

O’Neill shrugged. “Okay then, not going to ask any more. You ponies ready or not?”

“Actually, don’t we need to check the weapon?” Pinkie said. “We’ve never fired it.”

“Right,” Twilight said. “Spike, fire it into space.”

The main cannon of the Starfinder lit up, fusing the normal golden energy of the Ha’tak cannon with magics that made it significantly more potent. The purple energy bolt shot out of the Starfinder with perfect cohesion.

Then it hit the moon.

Twilight turned to Starlight, panicked. “Engage!”

Starlight facehoofed. “That sounds stupid, Twilight.”

“It sounds like Star Trek,” O’Neill added.

“Oh, so I need a different line then?” Twilight rolled her eyes. “Just activate the hyperdrive before Luna gets here!”

Starlight pressed a screen with her hoof and the Starfinder shot into hyperspace. They had expected the hyperspace effect to be different – the Apollo had already reported that the color pattern was different in every universe – but this was far from what they were expecting. It was rainbow, with a larger quantity of pink and purple than any other color. The colors were bright, but also calming. The vortex could hardly be called a vortex, for it wasn’t violent. It was just a hypnotic swirl of color.

Rainbow Dash grinned. “I am space.” Applejack facehooved.

Twilight turned to look at Starswirl, trying her best not to let her annoyance be obvious. “Okay, Starswirl, I know you’ve saved Equestria a lot and all, and I know we owe a lot to you, but I still want to know why we’re going to Malat.”

“She’s a Star I had a conversation with long ago,” Starswirl said. “What about? Many things, but of chief importance was the nature of the Harmony forces. The moment I asked about what I and the other pillars represented, she fell silent. She wasn’t the most helpful voice of the heavens to begin with, but that was unheard of.”

“Wait, how many Stars have you talked to?” Starlight wondered.

“Dozens. It is my special talent, after all.”

“Oh,” Twilight said. “…That makes sense, actually.”

“Why wouldn’t it? Did you think I was just good at crafting spells, or something?”

Starlight raised a hoof. “Does this mean I’m related to Stars in some way then?”

“Probably not.”

“Wow. Dreamcrusher, right there.”

Starswirl shrugged. “Sorry, just not likely. I’ve been contacting them with spells since I was a foal. Most won’t listen. Some listen often, but don’t respond. Others respond but just don’t care. Malat was somewhere in the middle. Thought herself high and mighty but wasn’t above ‘messing’ with ponies.”

Starlight turned to Twilight. “Why did we need to wait for a spaceship to get answers? We could have just talked to Starswirl.”

“Nopony ever knows where he is, Starlight, how would we have found him?”

Rarity raised an eyebrow at Twilight. “Just blow up something in the vicinity of the Tree of Harmony. It’ll work wonders.”

“Please refrain from doing that,” Starswirl said, looking straight ahead, into the vortex. “Most interesting… Perhaps I should read some books on the subject of this ‘hyperdrive’.”

Twilight smiled. “They are pretty interesting. It works by accessing a sub-framework in reality where laws of nature can be superseded, an odd concept that I wouldn’t have thought possible, but here it is.”

“Peculiar. How would such a sub-framework be accessed without prior knowledge of its existence?”

“I have no idea! Every hyperdrive seems to have been based off another one!”

“They’re eggheading. Oh no,” Rainbow Dash moaned.

“It’s what their kind do,” Starlight said. “They’re basically marvelling over the fact that hyperdrive should be impossible to invent.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Applejack said.

“Exactly what I told Twilight,” Spike said, “but did she listen?”

“Noooooo!” Starlight droned.

Twilight shot them all a look. “I’m trying to have an educated conversation here.”

“We’re going to be there in a couple minutes, Twi!” Pinkie said. “How are you going to have a big conversation in that much time?”

“I don’t know, actually.”

“I know some time distortion spells,” Starswirl offered.

“No.” Both Twilight and Starlight said.

“…I feel as if I’m missing some context here.”

“I used your time spells and almost destroyed everything,” Starlight said. “Remember?”

“No.”

Fluttershy held up a wing. “Er… Can we all play a little nicer now? It seems like all we’re doing right now is yelling back and forth, sometimes excited, sometimes angry…”

“We’re all on an emotional high!” Pinkie shouted. “Come on Fluttershy, we’re on a starship! How could you POSSIBLY stay CALM at a time like THIS!?”

“…Practice.”

Rarity shrugged. “Makes as much sense as anything else that’s been said in the last few minutes.”

“And how,” Spike muttered. “There’s just too many ponies here trying to get in on everything.”

Pinkie shrugged. “A nine-way conversation is a bit much. Even I have trouble keeping track of everypony!”

“And dragon,” Spike said.

“Yes, and dragon.”

Twilight shrugged. “Anyway, trying to reign this in… We’re going to Malat to learn more about the Stars. …Which apparently we could have asked Starswirl about, but we’re doing it anyway because we had the ship all ready to go. He has some questions to bring to Malat about previous conversations, and uh… I guess we head back after that with a successful mission. Or failure, if she doesn’t want to talk. …Wait, Stars have gender?”

“Their voices do, anyway. At least when I spoke with them,” Starswirl said.

“Are they biological beings in any way? Do they have a culture? Are-“

“I have no idea about any of the questions you are about to ask and Malat will not answer those questions. They prefer to be selectively secretive.”

“Ah have a question,” Applejack said. “How can they see us while we’re in Equestria if they’re so gosh darn far away?”

Starswirl blinked. “That remains a mystery to this day.”

“Something to figure out then!” Twilight clapped her hooves. “Oh I can’t wait!”

It turned out that she could wait a few more minutes. The Starfinder eventually dropped out of hyperspace next to the star Malat, a red dwarf star that was still hundreds of times larger than Equis itself, brimming with red power.

Twilight blinked. “Well, I was going to try a broadcast spell, but… Starswirl? How’d you do it?”

“Well I used rituals back on Equis. But there’s no need for that. HEY! MALAT! I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME!”

The sudden shouting made Fluttershy cover her ears and wince.

There was no response from Malat.

“MALAAAAT!” Starswirl yelled. “We’re RIGHT on your DOORSTEP, I know you can’t ignore that!”

Silence.

“Oh, giving me the SILENT TREATMENT, huh? Is that your strategy now? Just refuse to talk like a spoiled brat.”

This evoked a response. The red sphere before them shook, flaring in brightness for a moment. “STARSWIRL, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE COME HERE.”

“Oh look, deflecting,” Starswirl muttered. “Malat, listen, we never finished our conversation-“

“IT IS NOT FOR YOU TO KNOW, STOP ASKING.”

“Where did the Harmony forces come from?”

“TWILIGHT SPARKLE, IT IS A PLEASURE.”

“Are you just ignoring me?”

No response.

Twilight gulped and bowed. “Uh, it’s a pleasure to meet you as well, Malat.”

“WE’VE BEEN WATCHING YOU FOR A WHILE.”

“Really?” Twilight echoed. “Why?”

“Malat this is trying my patience!” Starswirl shouted.

“TWILIGHT, YOU ARE THE ELEMENT OF MAGIC, ONE OF THE MOST DESTINY-DRIVEN BEINGS ON YOUR ENTIRE PLANET. YOU ARE WATCHED CLOSELY SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU ARE CENTRAL. MANY HOPED YOU WOULD DISCOVER HOW TO CHANNEL OUR VOICES.”

“That’s… Great! What did you want to talk about?”

Starswirl grabbed his beard. “How does she do this? Why does she do this to me?”

Pinkie patted him on the back. “There there, it’ll all be fine Starswirl…”

“OH, YOU MISUNDERSTAND TWILIGHT. I WAS TALKING ABOUT US AS A WHOLE. THE GROUP OF STARS. I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU AT ALL. THEY’D JUST BE DISPLEASED IF I DIDN’T INFORM YOU.”

Twilight cocked her head. “Uh… Okay?”

Starswirl facehooved. “Oh great Harmony, here we go…”

“YOU ARE PATHETIC LITTLE FLESHBAGS. YOU ARE NOTHING TO US. YOUR ONLY PURPOSE IS TO DISTRACT US FROM MORE IMPORTANT THINGS.”

“There it is!”Starswirl shouted. “Happy now Malat?”

“This entire exchange just makes me feel guilty for some reason,” Fluttershy commented.

Rarity rolled her eyes. “It just makes me feel disappointed that so many ponies worship these beings.”

Starlight took in a deep breath, and then breathed out. “Okay Starlight, just because this one’s a jerk doesn’t mean all of them are…”

“YES, GO TALK TO SIRIUS, I’M SURE HE’LL BE NICER. ALSO QUIETER. SEE, THE NICER ONES TALK LESS, BECAUSE APPARENTLY HEARING FROM US DRIVES YOU SLOWLY INSANE.”

Rainbow Dash looked at Starswirl. “Hrm… That would explain a lot…”

Starswirl shot her a look. She slapped her hooves over her mouth and blushed.

Twilight shook her head. “Is everything we do pointless to you?”

“YES. OR, WELL, IT USED TO BE. APPARENTLY YOU’VE GONE AND DONE SOMETHING THAT HAS EVEN THE ONES THAT DON’T CARE LOOKING AT YOU. DIMENSIONAL TRAVEL.”

“What? That’s what it took to grab your attention?” Starswirl shouted. As usual, Malat acted like Starswirl didn’t exist.

Rarity spoke up instead. “What does your kind think of it?”

“WE HIGHLY ADVISE YOU CEASE IMMEDIATELY. YOU SEE – WHY IS YOUR REACTOR CORE CHARGING UP?”

“…What?” Twilight said.

“YOUR ENERGY LEVELS ARE SPIKING DANGEROUSLY.”

It was at that moment the Starfinder’s alarms went off.

A second later a purple explosion shook the entire ship, blowing off a chunk of the bottom, shaking everything out of alignment. The Starfinder tumbled end over end through space, tumbling toward Malat at high speeds.

Malat would have blinked were she able to. “…THAT’S GOING TO INTERFERE WITH MY CORONA.”

~~~

Pinkie Pie the Sage approached the Hub again, mask on her face. Some of them may have sensed her coming, though they didn’t know what she was. Plus, the magic she had in her was a holy magic, nobody would think holy magic was dangerous. Not even those badly named ‘demons’ would come to that conclusion.

She knew this. For certain. Was it her oculus powers or something else? Did it really matter? She just knew.

She also knew that now was the perfect time to strike. The Hub wasn’t as crowded as it had been when the Portal opened. People were moving into the many divisions, and everything was falling into routine. A routine she was going to royally screw up.

She took a deep breath. “Okay…” Her knowledge of what was to come did not make her any less nervous about the events soon to take place. It would be intense, powerful, and very dangerous. Just because she knew didn’t mean she couldn’t change it by screwing up. And that was what she feared – a bad judgment call on her part.

As an oculus, the first thing you learned about your eyes is that, even though they show you what is to happen, or what is hidden, you also have to know that nothing is certain. By being able to see more of what is to come than any other pony, you are ironically cursed to live a life of less certainty in many areas.

The curse of the oculi.

She put a hoof on her mask and walked in.

She hoped they wouldn’t scream all that much.

015 - Magitech, Part 2

Twilight lifted her head as the lights flickered back on. “Wha… What happened?” She rubbed her head – she’d fallen over and hit it on a console. It was definitely going to leave a bruise.

“Uh…” Starlight sifted through images on the console, trying her best to actually understand what was on there. “…I think the hyperdrive blew up. Halfway. Or something.”

“Is everypony okay!?”

“Same amount of life signatures on board. Apparently everyone got out of the reactor room in time…”

“Did they at least try to fix it?” Applejack asked.

“How should I know? I wasn’t looking before the alarms started blaring!”

Twilight took a deep breath to calm herself. “Starlight, Applejack, Pinkie, Spike, with me. We’re going to check out the hyperdrive, see what the damage is. Rest of you… I guess stay with Malat.”

“I CAN TALK TO YOU ANYWHERE IN THE SHIP. I HAVE BEEN TALKING TO A CERTAIN GRIFFON WHO IS NOW HAVING AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. VERY SATISFACTORY.”

Starlight winced. Twilight wanted to take a moment to talk to her, but there were more pressing matters to deal with. Namely the giant hole that had just been blown in the ship.

“NOT TO MENTION THAT YOU’RE FALLING TOWARDS ME. THAT’LL BE PRETTY CRISPY.”

Twilight’s eyes widened. “Er… Are maneuvering thrusters still working?”

Spike looked at a console. “Yep.”

“Get us into a stable orbit.”

“Done.”

“All right then, that was easy.” She lit her horn and teleported five of them to the hallway outside engineering. A dozen humans and ponies were sitting on this side of the doorway, breathing heavily.

“Twilight!” One of the humans said – Janus, she recalled – “Thank God, I thought we were goners!”

“We would be goners if I hadn’t patched that hole,” a unicorn by the name of Craft Box said. “You have any idea how much energy’s stored in this thing?”

Janus nodded vigorously.

“What happened?” Twilight asked. “What made it explode?”

“Indeterminate,” Craft Box said. “The hole wasn’t the only problem, I can tell you that.”

“Sabotage!” Another human shouted, one by the name of Gilles. “There’s no way that thing just blew up without some external force!”

“Who’d do that?” Starlight asked.

Applejack fixed Starlight with a look. “Ah’m not that involved, and Ah can tell you the options. Ba’al, Ba’al, or Ba’al.”

Twilight sighed. “Right… I’m going to have to screen all of you. This could take some time and may feel a little weird.“ She lit her horn and focused a spell on Gilles, scanning the insides of his neck. It took a few seconds for her to get a clear picture of the spinal column, but she saw no Goa’uld snake on it. Then she moved to Jones.

Janus raised his hands into the air in surrender before she even started. “All right, fine, you got me.”

“Wait, what?” One of the Engineering ponies said, eyes widening. “You?”

Janus just shrugged and smirked. “I play a pretty convincing panicky idiot, don’t I?”

Twilight scanned Janus anyway to make sure. Yep. There was a Ba’al symbiote in there, affixed to the brain stem. She facehooved. “How did we miss you? We scanned everyone who came through!”

Ba’al shrugged. “Isn’t that hard to infect someone who’s already passed inspection. Just portal in, portal out, done. By the way, pleasure to meet you face to face, I don’t think any Ba’al has had the honor quite yet.”

Pinkie frowned. “You’re too happy for having been found out.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? My goal was to disable your ship. Not only have I done that, but I also stranded you all out here in the middle of nowhere. Not as good as destroying the entire ship, but, you know.”

“…You were on a suicide mission?” Pinkie blurted. “That’s not like you!”

“How do you know what’s like me?” he said, leaning back and smirking.

Starlight turned to Twilight. “Can I just probe this guy’s mind? Please?”

Twilight frowned. “It’s not-“

“Twilight, he tried to kill us. It’s less than he deserves.”

“…All right.”

Starlight’s eyes went white as she connected her mind to Ba’al’s, forcing his eyes to go white as well. The connection lasted a few seconds before Starlight removed herself from it. “He has no idea where the Mothership is, there was an escape plan but he was unaware we changed destinations to Malat instead of Proximus, so they couldn’t portal him out. His escape team has assuredly abandoned him at this point and moved to another dimension. He is of little use and…” She frowned. “Well that’s odd. Apparently they have some kind of magical artifact with them.”

“Does that help us figure out where they are?” Twilight asked.

“Nope. Just some dark magic mask.”

Ba’al frowned. “You know, it isn’t fair if you can just read people’s minds.”

“It isn’t fair to bomb a planet that has only minimal means of defense. Plus, you can teach yourself to resist it.”

“Don’t tell him that!” Pinkie shouted.

“Oh. Right.”

“He’s not going to be able to tell any of his copies though,” Twilight noted. “He’s going to be extracted from Janus and squashed.” She shivered a little at the thought that this Ba’al would soon be dead. Even if he was an abject monster, he was still alive. But he had basically declared war on them all…

Ba’al smirked. “Tentative about turning me over to them, are you? You ponies are very soft, you know. Security almost doesn’t exist, everyone gets a second chance, and you sing and dance all the time! It’s a little amusing to watch!”

“Little. Ha.” Pinkie winked, somehow sarcastically. “I see what you did there.”

Ba’al shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re all stuck out here and your ship is crippled. What now?”

“We wait for the Apollo to realize something’s up,” Twilight said. “They know where we are.”

Ba’al frowned. “You sure you have enough air for that? You’ll discover soon that your air recyclers have been corrupted and that you are leaking atmosphere.”

“I can literally create more air out of the aether,” Starlight muttered. “It actually seems easier here than on Equis.”

Ba’al clearly hadn’t thought of that. His confident smirk vanished, replaced with one of annoyance. “…Well then, congratulations, this entire outing has been nothing but an annoyance to everyone involved.”

“I AGREE WITH THE GOA’ULD ON THIS CHARGE.”

Ba’al blinked. “The voice of the Star, I presume?”

“Yep,” Applejack said. “And that’s all you need to know.”

“I didn’t even need to know that. Ever consider investing in a ‘keeping secrets’ course? I’m sure it’ll be worthwhile.”

Twilight teleported Ba’al into the brig. “There we are, done with that. So done with that.”

“He’s just as infuriatin’ as everyone said he’d be,” Applejack said.

“Definitely not what I was expecting…” Starlight commented. “Seems a lot less mad supervillain and more… Clever and mischievous.”

“Still really dangerous,” Pinkie reminded them. “We can’t let him smooth talk us!”

“Yeah,” Spike said. “Anyway, think we should actually look at the drive and see if we can fix it?”

“Right,” Twilight said. She cleared her throat. “Everypony out of this section! The atmosphere is about to be vented!”

All the engineers quickly scrambled out of the hallway, leaving just four ponies and a dragon. Twilight encased them in a magic bubble and sealed all the doors shut. Then she opened the one leading to the engine room. The atmosphere in their section of hallway rushed out into the vacuum, pushing the magic bubble out into the room. They floated aimlessly since the gravity generators weren’t working, likely because there was no floor to contain them. They looked down and saw nothing but white stars and the soft red glow of Malat.

“HEY.”

“Hey,” Twilight said, looking down at Malat – or, well, what she perceived as down.

“THIS IS WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT EARLIER. THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS DIMENSIONAL TRAVEL IS INADVISABLE.”

“Oh, and how’s that?” Applejack said as Starlight pushed the sphere towards the sparking hyperdrive.

“ENEMIES. ENEMIES AROUND EVERY CORNER. DESTRUCTION. ALL WHO FLY CLOSE TO THE TOP GET BURNED.”

Twilight examined the cables on the Hyperdrive. “Well, that certainly seems pessimistic,” Twilight said. “How would you know?”

“UGH. APPARENTLY I ACTUALLY GET TO TELL YOU SOMETHING. YAY. WE, THE STARS, USED TO BE A MULTIVERSAL RACE, ONE OF THE MORE POWERFUL ONES AT THAT. BUT THEN THERE WAS WAR, BROUGHT ON BY FORCES WE COULD NOT HAVE FORESEEN. AND YET, WE STILL BROUGHT IT ON OURSELVES. WHAT MY RACE WANTS TO TELL YOU IS TO STOP, TO GIVE YOU A WARNING.”

“Maybe we’ll be different!” Pinkie said. “We’re obviously quite a bit more friendly than you!”

“Plus, how could we stop now?” Twilight asked. “We’re in too deep.”

“YOU’RE NOT IN TOO DEEP YET. YOU CAN RETREAT, STOP EXPLORING, LEAVE THE DIMENSIONAL WORK TO OTHERS. DO WHAT MOST OTHER ALTERNATE EQUESTRIAS DO WHEN THEY ENCOUNTER YOU – TALK TO TRAVELERS THAT COME BUT FEEL NO NEED TO JOIN THEM ON THEIR QUEST. YOU’VE VISITED WELL OVER A HUNDRED WORLDS, AND WHAT, LESS THAN TEN ACTUALLY JOIN YOU ON YOUR LITTLE EXPLORATION? DOES IT OCCUR TO YOU THAT MAYBE THEY’RE JUST SMARTER?”

Twilight shook her head. “I don’t think so. We’re called to do this. I’m sorry, but we’re just not going to drop it.”

“CALLED BY WHAT, EXACTLY? WE ARE THE FORCES OF DESTINY IN YOUR UNIVERSE. WE ARE THE STARS.”

“The Tree of Harmony, for one,” Starlight said.

There was no response. Twilight examined the entire dimensional component of the drive in the silence.

“…Why’s she silence?”

“She wouldn’t answer Starswirl’s questions about the Harmony Forces,” Twilight reminded her. “She won’t make any comment on the Tree. So I’m going to take it to be a valid reason to keep exploring.”

“Sounds good to me,” Spike said.

Starlight just frowned. “I don’t know… It’s not just Malat saying this, it’s the other Stars as well. Shouldn’t we at least consider listening to them?”

Applejack frowned. “Ah’d consider it, but Ah know y’all can’t just leave it be now. There are too many friends out there. Too many connections.”

“It’d be a betrayal in more ways than one,” Twilight admitted.

“Yeah!” Pinkie said, turning to look directly at Malat. “So guess what? We’ll take whatever horrors are coming our way! And we’ll face them together!”

“I TOLD THEM YOU’D BE STUPID. I WAS RIGHT. THANK YOU.”

“Any hints on helping us survive?” Starlight asked. “Since, you know, the Stars care?”

“NOT FROM ME, I’M DONE. ALSO, SOMEONE STICK A SOCK IN STARSWIRL’S MUZZLE. HE’S GETTING REALLY ANNOYING.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Not doing that.”

“I COULD DESTROY YOUR SHIP WITH A THOUGHT.”

“You won’t,” Pinkie said.

There was no response. There was no exploding either.

Twilight finally let out a loud sigh. “Drive’s completely shot. We need new parts to repair it. So we’re stuck here until someone comes and gets us. Could be a few minutes, could be a few hours. We didn’t exactly set a timetable for them.” She teleported them back into a hallway with air and removed the bubble. “So… I guess we wait then.”

“Rainbow Dash is going to go crazy,” Applejack muttered.

“You’re implying she hasn’t already gone crazy,” Pinkie said.

“Back to the bridge then?” Spike asked.

“Back to the bridge,” Twilight confirmed, teleporting them all back.

Starswirl was still yelling, but his voice was very scratchy now. “Malat! Do… Do you hear me!? I’m… I’m not going to stop until I get answers! Malat!”

Rainbow Dash grabbed Twilight’s face. “Get me out of here, this guy’s loco.”

Twilight facehooved. It was going to be a long day.

~~~

General Sunset was trotting around the Hub, observing all the new things that were slowly forming. The embassies were truly established now, and more than a few shops had already opened their doors. She’d stopped by Earth Gizmos herself and purchased something called a ‘smartphone.’ It apparently would make calls on Earth, but for her it was only useful for taking pictures, videos, and other such things. Its ability to store data was more than enough for her to consider it worth the price, which was pretty exorbitant. She had it though, being a General had its perks.

She had found using magic to press the screen worked far better than carefully aligning a hoof or her tail. The hoof was far too wide and her tail didn’t listen half of the time, even when she fed it that hot dog. Meat products usually kept the tail satisfied, but for whatever reason today was not one of those days.

She snapped a few pictures with the smartphone of every shop she came across, and added some notes to it every time she did. She had no doubt the Queen would want to visit the best of these shops, and this was a much better way to categorize than scroll or memory.

If Sunset was right on the money, the Queen would probably like the ‘Trinq’ the best, a shop that already had small pieces of art and sculptures from several worlds. The Queen was always fascinated by the ‘beautiful’ and ‘interesting’, something Sunset rarely understood herself, but at this point had learned to tell the Queen about.

The next shop was Arcane Academics. Judging by the sign out front, it was run by a pair of unicorn brothers who GUARANTEED that anyone could learn magic there. Sunset raised an incredulous eyebrow absentmindedly. That shop would either make a killing or get kicked out of here faster than an Arcei out of town square. …Though she wasn’t sure that metaphor applied here. They’d probably accept Arcei here. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

Her thoughts were interrupted by an explosion of holy white power. A nearby Embassy – that of the Binaries – exploded in a flash of white. Sunset was fairly sure nobody was inside, but that didn’t matter because the holy power was spreading, tearing apart the walls and ceiling with increasing intensity.

Sunset lit her antlers, driving her hooves into the ground and summoning the power of the scenery around her. The metallic ground vibrated with her hooves, sending out a wave that forced everything within several meters to stop moving – except the holy energy, which just kept on destroying things.

Ponies and people screamed, running away from the burst of power. A few tried to stop it – a Hylian raised some magical staff that exploded before it could do anything, and one of the demons charged and was flung back like a silly ragdoll. Alarms blared as more and more people arrived and fled, only adding to the chaos.

Sunset noticed something odd. The magic wasn’t hurting anyone. It obviously could, but it wasn’t. It seemed far more concerned with causing meaningless destruction…

A distraction.

She knew one when she saw one. Her mind went into overdrive – what would be the purpose of a distraction? What could they possibly be after in this place?

The Mirror.

She bolted, trying to scream that it was a distraction to everyone around her, but nobody was in a mood to listen. She was on her own, running toward the center of the Hub. She rushed through the large doros to the main room, horn and antlers glowing, ready for anything.

There was a version of Pinkie Pie wearing a plain white mask leaping over everyone still in the main room, beelining for the Mirror Portal by bouncing over heads. Sunset was able to register that Toph’s team was providing the most resistance, with earth, yo-yos, and fire spells being tossed around, but the Pinkie dodged everything.

Sunset decided to put an end to that. Using her deer powers, she accessed the scenery again. This time, instead of making everything stop, she launched a perfectly rectangular slab of metal out from the ceiling into the Pinkie. The Pinkie grabbed it, twisted, and was suddenly on top of the falling slab. She used it as a springboard to approach the Mirror Portal, throwing a bean bag from nowhere into Sunset’s face at the same time.

Lieshy dove out of the sky, impacting the Pinkie from the side. Her mask slid off her face, revealing two alien blue eyes. An oculus. The Sage.

Sunset’s already high levels of anger went through the roof. She launched a bolt of blood-red flame at the Sage, but she used her mask to deflect it with some white holy shield. Vivian shot out of the ground and punched her with a flaming fist, but the fire was simply absorbed by the mask this time. Tendrils of white shot out of the Sage’s four hooves, pushing all opponents back.

“Get down here!” Toph yelled, forcing metal and earth to shoot out of the ground in the shape of a hand, grabbing the Sage by the tail. The Sage was suddenly on top of the hand. She grabbed Fef’s yo-yos before they could do anything and pulled, knocking both the demon and a few bystanders over. Lieshy swooped again only for the yo-yo to be tossed at her, tying her wings up and getting tangled in her mane.

Sunset teleported in front of the Sage, explosion spell ready, only to get a white tendril to the face. She flew right into the central column behind the Mirror Portal, the wind knocked out of her. The Sage dodged the last few rocks thrown by Toph, but was unable to dodge Bon Bon’s quick use of a grappling hook.

Sunset realized with mild horror that the Sage probably wanted to get grabbed by the grappling hook. She sailed toward Bon Bon and kicked her in the face. The mare reacted surprisingly quickly, grabbing the Sage’s midsection and piledriving her into the ground. However, being a version of Pinkie, the Sage simply didn’t care about this. She bounced right back up and blew Bon Bon into Vivian with a burst of holy energy. She tapped a button on the desk, setting the Mirror Portal to Lai.

Sunset cleared her head, trying one last time to stop the Sage from reaching the Mirror Portal. She lit her horn, creating a wall of reddish magic. The Sage did as expected – use her strange new holy mask powers to plow through the forcefield. Sunset readied the explosion spell as the Sage flew over her, ready to bring the Sage down – but a giant rock hit Sunset in the face.

“Great, I hit the wrong pony,” Toph muttered. She readied another rock, but it was too late.

The Sage leaped toward the Mirror Portal, a white tendril of energy snaking behind her. She bounced through, using the white tendril to grab a hold of the green diamond at the last possible moment and drag it through with her. The Mirror Portal lost power a second after the green diamond was removed, just enough for it to pass through the boundary between worlds as well.

Bon Bon blinked. “…She just took the diamond.”

Sunset took out her dimensional device, sneering. “She won’t have it for long – dammit!” She noticed her device was out of power. It’d take a few seconds to charge with her magic.

Toph, Vivian, Lieshy, and Fef all lined up behind her. Toph pointed at her. “We’re coming with you.”

“Not complaining,” Sunset said, finally opening the portal. The five of them leaped through.

Lieshy turned and looked through the portal at Bon Bon. “Tell anyone who asks that we’re on the case. We’ll get the diamond back for the key-link.”

Bon Bon barely had time to nod before the portal closed.

On the other side of the portal, Toph slammed her foot into the ground. “There’s no way she moved fast enough to get out of range… But I can’t feel her…”

“She’s a version of Pinkie,” Lieshy said. “Pinkies are knights – as in, knights in chess. They don’t operate like the rest of us.”

“That is not going to stop us from hunting her down,” Sunset asserted, using her horn and antlers to find whatever she could. “I can sense the trail of holy magic her mask left behind. South.”

Toph slammed her hands into the ground, creating a large slab of rock for them all to ride on. Then she rolled her arms around, pushing all of them forward on a wave of rock. It was almost like surfing.

Sunset shook her head. “I didn’t think earthbenders were this powerful…”

“I’m not most earthbenders!” Toph smirked. “I am the best in the world!”

“Debatable as cherry bombs,” Lieshy muttered under her breath.

“Come again?”

“I’m allowed to double talk my insults, thank you very much.”

Fef shrugged, trying to pull her yo-yo out of Lieshy’s hair with minimal success.

Vivian pointed. “What’s that?”

“Just a large pointed rock, nothing to worry about,” Toph said.

Sunset paled. “Stop the earth wave! That’s a Rune Obelisk! You need to-“

Toph barreled through the large orange Runes, knocking the structure to the side. Needless to say, this awoke the golem, and it was a very angry giant orange spider.

“RUN RUN RUN!” Sunset yelled, turning behind them to defend. She was able to combine the earth beneath her with fire to create a burst of lava, but as always Golems were annoyingly resistant to everything. Their only hope was to get out of its circle of influence, and given the size of it, that was probably a very large circle.

“Got anything else to try?” Lieshy said. “I ask because Toph’s busy making us run, and the rest of us would be useless against a giant light spider.”

“I am not useless!” Fef assured her, throwing a yo-yo at the spider. The string snapped instantly. “Okay, fine, maybe I’m not particularly useful in this instance.”

“It’s gaining!” Vivian yelled to Toph, launching a fire spell of her own at the spider, to no effect. “Great.”

“I can feel how close it is, morons!” she muttered. She upset the balance of the earth wave to grab a rock from nearby and fling it at the spider, slowing it down slightly. “How much further?”

“I have no idea! That was a large Rune! It could be a mile or more!” Sunset shouted, trying to melt the earth beneath the spider. It worked, but it just walked right through the hissing ground. Sunset hoped she didn’t just cause a forest fire with that move.

The spider lunged at them, ready to sink its teeth into Sunset – and then it shattered. They had reached the edge of its influence.

“That could not have been any closer…” Sunset muttered.

“Nothing’s so close that it can’t be closer,” Lieshy observed.

“Words of wisdom, yes. Necessary? No.” Sunset frowned, looking further south. “The holy energy is coming from that town. Can’t tell from where exactly though. We’ll have to ask around.”

It wasn’t until after they started getting the strange looks that Sunset considered that might have been a bad idea. She facehooved. “Riiiight… They’ve never seen a human, demon, or… whatever you are Vivian.”

Vivian shrugged. “Shadow siren.”

Sunset sighed, producing a general’s insignia. “I’m General Sunset Shimmer, they’re with me, you do not need to be afraid. We are here looking for a pink oculus who may or may not be wearing a smooth, white mask.”

The ponies of the town murmured amongst themselves, unsure of how to respond. It looked like one was about to say something, but then another gasped. “You!”

Lieshy blinked, trying to find out where the voice was coming from. “Me?”

A pegasus-seapony hybrid dropped from the sky and looked right into Lieshy’s eyes with identical eyes. “You look like me!”

“I’m Lieshy, you’re probably Fluttershy, and we don’t have time for this,” Lieshy muttered.

“DID YOU STEAL MY FACE!?” She roared.

Sunset turned to stare at her. “…What?”

“I’m asking a perfectly logical question. DID YOU STEAL MY FREAKING FACE?”

“No,” Lieshy said, monotone. “Can we please talk about this later?”

“THEN WHY DO YOU LOOK LIKE ME?”

Sunset made the pegasus-seapony fall asleep with a simple spell. “Okay, enough of that.”

“…Not the standard Fluttershy,” Fef said.

“Definitely not,” Toph agreed. Then she cleared her throat. “ALL RIGHT! PONIES! Stop gawking! We need to find this pony and fast! Who knows where she is?”

An elderly mawlie walked up to them, his tail purring like a cat. “I dunno where you’re goin’ with this. But we don’t just turn in ponies to random strangers.”

Sunset waved the insignia around. “Here on official business of the crown. She’s wanted.”

“Why?”

“She stole an artifact. Looks like a green diamond that isn’t completely solid. It’s a tremendous source of power and could be dangerous in the wrong hooves.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “Why feed the details?”

“What?” The old mawlie said.

Sunset got Lieshy’s message – that had probably given too much information. “Just tell us where she is, okay? We’ll just take her in, that’s it. Nopony will be killing anyone.”

The old stallion scratched his beard. “Well, I dunno where she is. I did see someone similar rush down third street a few seconds ago. You’ll have to ask around there.”

“Where is third street?”

“There are only three streets in this town,” Toph said, tapping her foot on the ground. I’m going to bet the one furthest from the big building is third street.”

Sunset sighed. “Thank you for the help.” She followed Toph to third street and repeated the question.

A couple mares there glanced at each other. “I thought I heard you say you saw her.”

“Ah, but you said you saw her first and I think I was just going crazy!”

“No, no you really saw her. Left I think?”

“No, right.”

“No, left”

“ARGH!” Toph yelled. “These ponies are all morons!”

“No…” Lieshy said, walking up to one of them. “…Who paid you?”

“C-come again?”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. That was the response of a guilty pony.

Lieshy smirked. “Let me tell you what I think happened. She planned this out in advance and paid you all long ahead of time. She gave instructions for you to distract anyone who came looking for her, to keep them occupied long enough for her to make a getaway.”

“Er…”

“And your response – the slight facial twitch, the single step backwards – is all I need to confirm it. I think you can arrest them for collusion, General.”

Sunset nodded. “That I can. Or… I can save them a trip to the dungeon if they just tell us where she is now.”

They both pointed to a boring building on second street. “She stays in there.”

“Thank you,” Sunset said, walking over to that building. She melted a hole in the wall and strode in.

The interior was like an empty warehouse. There was evidence of big, heavy things having been moved very recently. Namely, lots of places where dust had been kicked up, lots of drag marks on the ground, and lots of hoofprints. There were a few loose screws, planks of wood, and chunks of black rock laying around – chunks of Runes.

The only major thing left in the room was a small box, on top of which sat the green diamond and a hoofwritten note.

Sunset walked over to it and read the note.

I won’t be needing this anymore. Thanks for letting me borrow it! –Pinkie the Sage.

Sunset crumpled the paper in her magic, lit it on fire, and smashed the ashes into a flat mess under her hoof. She grabbed the green diamond. “We’ll return this. We’ll deal with the fallout. Then I’m coming back here to track that irritating oculus down. She’s made a fool of me. I’m not going to let that stand.”

Toph put her fist in her hand. “I am feeling the need to throw a rock in masked pony’s face…”

Sunset nodded. “She knows not what she’s done…”

If Susnet was being honest with herself, she would probably have admitted that the Sage knew exactly what she was doing. She was clearly a practiced oculus, and they rarely did things without planning astronomically well. This was going to be a significant challenge.

~~~

Starlight stared at the main screen on the bridge, looking right at Malat. She knew the Star could see her staring, and probably even knew what she was thinking. But nobody on the ship had heard anything from Malat since the empty threat. The Star was apparently done talking to the mortals and was now… doing whatever it was Stars did when they weren’t messing with the affairs of lesser beings. Starlight had no idea what that was, if anything. Now that she was thinking about it she was having a hard time coming up with anything the Stars could do besides watch other things. Maybe they talked over long distances with their impressive magic? What did they even talk about?

How had they even had a multiversal society? They never seemed to move, never did anything besides occasionally speak and heat planets up... or if the legends were to be believed, changed and manipulated things in small, yet key ways.

But all of those were just legends- wait.

Starlight turned to her left. “Twilight, how exactly did the Stars aid in Nightmare Moon’s escape?”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “I’m not exactly sure. Four of the brightest Stars ended up in precise alignment with the moon, and she was released from her prison. Then we used the Elements of Harmony to banish the Nightmare Forces and return Luna to her right mind.”

“But why would the position of the stars matter in relation to the moon?”

“I have no idea. What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know, but I think I might be onto something… hey Starswirl!”

Starswirl looked up, grunting. His voice had given out well over an hour ago.

“Why would the positions of Stars cause a seal to be broken?”

He sighed, summoning a scroll with his magic. He drew a diagram of a single point at several points in time, moving from the top to the bottom. Then he arranged four stars, not in a square, but a spread out pattern. He drew lines connecting every pair of them, then circles connecting every set of three points possible. There turned out to be an X right on top of the point moving through space when he was done, where several circles and lines connected.

“…I think I know what he’s drawing. Magical fields,” Twilight said. “The places where these lines intersect are where the magical fields of different Stars intersect, giving them more intense power. Or providing more intense power. Or both.”

Starswirl gave a sideways nod, as if to say ‘close enough.’

“So, the Stars basically channel magic between each other through a complex maze of circles and lines?” Starlight asked.

Starswirl gave the same nod.

Starlight started grinning. “Twilight, remind me again why there’s no ‘faster than light’ spell.”

“Because the arrangement of arcane energies off of Equis is inconsistent. In deep space there’s simply not enough energy to supersede what the humans call ‘relativity’.” She rubbed her head, no doubt remembering the moments Sunset had tried to explain the extremely complicated topic.

“What if we ride these lines, though?” Starlight asked, pointing. “We could keep up an impressive speed so long as we found a powerful enough conduit.”

Twilight blinked. “Maybe… Find a path between two Stars that goes right through Equis and just ride the winds of magic… No, that wouldn’t work, rarely will anything in space line up that perfectly.”

“It apparently did on the night Nightmare Moon was released.”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “That will take a lot of calculations and drawing to find a path that gets us anywhere near Equis…” She tapped a screen, bringing up a map of all the local stars. “And how are we going to know which of these are capital S Stars and which ones are regular?”

“You’re the princess of Friendship right? Friendship is magic, just scan Malat with your magic.”

“I can’t scan something that big!”

“Just feel around for the flow of magic.”

“That’ll take forever!”

“So? Maybe O’Neill will wise up and come get us before then. If not, we’ll get lucky.”

“Fine…” She lit her horn, feeling the magical aura around Malat. Her horn sparked, igniting a small magical explosion. “…Bad idea.”

“What happened?”

Twilight rubbed her skull. “Magical overload. We’ll need to bring a machine to scan the magic channels, but I think your idea is sound. We could use the Stars’ connections to move between them, and the various circle points to get to other locations. There are enough Stars, there should be some combination that gets you just about everywhere…”

“Any other ideas?” Starlight wondered aloud, turning to Starswirl.

He started sketching a circle.

“Dimensional travel won’t work, we’d just appear in deep space in another dimension. Plus, it’s not like we have the power to move the entire Starfinder.”

Starswirl shrugged, returning to doing not much of anything.

“We could try using special-displacement to get help,” Twilight suggested. “See, when you translate an entire ship from Tau’ri Earth to Ardent, you get closer to the world of Ardent than you were to Earth itself. It’s as if each universe has a ‘size’ that has to translate from one to another. We could go to Arde- wait, nevermind. Our universe is ‘small’ compared to the others. We’d just move even further away.”

Starlight looked at Malat again. “There’s a whole ton of magical power here, we just need to find a way to use it… These Stars produce the magic, and… Hooooold on a second…” She lit her horn. “Which way is Equis?”

Twilight pointed at a faint yellow speck on the screen. “That’s the sun. We’re close enough that we can still see it. Why?”

Starlight lit her horn and closed her eyes. She didn’t dare touch the Star itself, but she probed the space between Malat and Equis. “…There’s a magic channel there. It’s how they watch us, Twilight. They use these channels. The only reason we’ve never noticed them before on Equis is because all of them are pointing at us.”

Twilight blinked. “That makes sense. I wonder if there are other planets out there they’re looking at. Or… How they’re able to look at Equis if these ‘pathways’ are made between Stars. …Right Starswirl?”

Starswirl nodded at that remark.

“I’m not sure…” Starlight said, glancing at her cutie mark. “But I do know that we can use it. We have smaller ships, right?”

“Right. I think they’re called Tel’taks.”

“Let me use one. I think I can move it. Get O’Neill’s attention.”

Twilight frowned. “You sure?”

“Nope. But it can’t hurt to try, now can it?”

“It most certainly can! You could blow your horn off!”

“Ha! Right.”

Pinkie appeared from nowhere and glared at Starlight.

“Pinkie there’s no such thing as ‘jinxing’.”

“That’s where you’re wroooooooong…”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “I’m still going to try it. Coming?”

“No. Dashie is though.”

Rainbow Dash’s ears perked up. “Did somepony call me?”

“Yes. You’re going to get to ride with Starlight in something that has a pretty good chance of blowing up!”

Rainbow Dash blinked. “…Better than staying here and sleeping for eternity. Can I pilot?”

“I think I’ll be doing all the moving,” Starlight said. “Also you don’t exactly have… hands, do you?”

Rainbow Dash spread her wings and raised an eyebrow.

“Fair enough. I’ll let you see if you can figure out the controls once we’re back home.”

“Awesome!”

Starlight waved to Twilight. “See you soon!” Twilight teleported the two of them to the hangar, filled with a few dozen Tel’taks. They, like almost all Goa’uld designs, were reminiscent of pyramids, though this one had one of its three bottom points stretched out significantly further than the others and had a segmented appearance. The two walked in and sat at the two main seats, looking right out the windshield.

The bay doors slid open, and Starlight lifted the entire Tel’tak into the air and out into space. It was difficult to move the ship while the false gravity of the Starfinder was in effect, but once they were out the smaller ship moved almost effortlessly.

“…I like space,” Starlight asserted, turning the Tel’tak upside down just because she could. “There’s no resistance at all out here. Not to mention all the power from Malat…”

Rainbow Dash put her wings on the unusual red control mechanism, trying to get a feel for how it worked. “Let’s see…”

“Rainbow! I said when we got back!”

Rainbow Dash ignored her. She pulled the round, red ovoid back, maneuvering the ship upwards. The view outside began to spin rapidly.

Starlight removed Rainbow Dash’s wings from the control mechanism, trying to keep herself from hurling. “…Ergh…”

“What? Can’t handle it?” Rainbow Dash snarked.

“No… Just… Let me do this, and you can play all you want later, okay?”

“Fine.”

Starlight moved the small ship directly between Malat and Equis, ten light years distant. She felt around herself, latching onto the linear flow of magic. Then she enveloped the entire craft in a bubble of blueish magic, and pushed.

The acceleration was too much for the Tel’tak to absorb. Rainbow Dash and Starlight were pushed back into their seats as the ship sped up far more than it should have been able to. It sailed through the stars with a much less comfortable motion than the hyperdrive. They shook, jumped, rattled, twisted, and wobbled their way across the cosmos.

From outside, it looked like the Tel’tek was trying its best to escape from a translucent blue balloon, the front point stretching the ‘rubber’ as far as it could go, while the rest of the balloon trailed behind the ship like a heavy sack. Streams of yellow energy spiraled off the ship’s point as it cut through the magical conduit, tearing at space slightly.

Eventually, the speed stabilized enough to where Rainbow Dash could pull herself out of her chair. Starlight stared straight ahead, unblinking, her horn surrounded by a double-strength magic aura.

“Wooo-wee!” Rainbow Dash whooped. “This is fast! I have no idea how fast but it’s fast.”

Starlight made no response.

“How fast do you think we’re going Starlight? Has to be faster than the Starfinder, didn’t get any acceleration rush from that at all. Don’t care what Twilight said, that still has to hold true in some way out here in the stars. Ooh, do you think we’ll run into any aliens? Can we defend ourselves if we do?”

“Rainbow…” Starlight grunted. “Be… Quiet… I need… To… Focus…” She clenched her teeth. Her eyes were starting to burn from being kept open so long, but she didn’t want to risk blinking.

“Oh. Right. I’ll leave you to that, focusing, thing. I-“

“RAINBOW!”

“Right. Shutting up now.”

They rode on through the stars in shaky silence.

~~~

Spike woke up as the screen he was sleeping on beeped at him. “Wha-huh?”

Rarity looked at him. “What is it Spike?”

“We - we’re getting a call!”

Twilight blinked, looking over. “Really? Who could be talking to us way out here?”

“I don’t know…” Rarity murmured. “Answer it.”

O’Neill’s face appeared on screen. Twilight blinked. “Uh… O’Neill? How are you talking to us?”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “I just dropped out of hyperspace. I’m in the system now. Can’t you tell?”

“Uh… No. Either we’re not paying attention or the sensors are broken too.”

“Too?” O’Neill turned to the left, getting some information from a crewmember. “…I see your reactor blew up halfway.”

“Yeah. It was Ba’al. I take it Starlight got to you and told you about our problem?”

“…No? We just decided to leave after we’d not seen you for an hour. You didn’t really say how long you’d be gone. Not to mention I had certain people breathing down my back to wrap this up and get back on the Ba’al hunt. Yours got anything useful?”

“No. Starlight probed his mind, didn’t get much. Just as useless as the rest. He’s in one of your people, Janus. You can teleport him right out of the brig, if you want.”

O’Neill nodded. “Done. Would you like to order a ride on Apollo Towing incorporated?”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Sure. What’s the price?”

“Nothing but a bruised ego.”

“Well then, we’ve already paid,” Rarity said. “Get to towing.”

“Riiiiight away!”

~~~

Corona had no idea where she was. It was dark, and yet oddly purple everywhere at the same time. She could see her hands and legs clearly, but nothing else. She could tell she was standing on something hard, but that was all her senses told her. Well, besides the fact that it was cold. She couldn’t see her breath but she wouldn’t be surprised if someone came along and told her it was forming clouds right in front of her face.

She lit her hand on fire, but it did nothing to cut through the murky darkness. She launched a fireball, losing sight of it long before she should have. She frowned. “Hello?” she called.

There was no answer. Did she feel a breeze though? …No. If there was a breeze, it was extremely slight.

Corona’s heart was starting to race, but she forced herself to keep control. How had she gotten here? She tried to retrace her steps. She’d gone to college earlier that morning, attended all her classes, checked in with Storm to see if he needed anything (he had not), did homework, and… And probably fell asleep sometime around 2 AM.

Ah. She was probably just asleep, having nightmares from all her stress. This relaxed her mind considerably. “Okay then. Subconscious, hit me with your best shot.”

“Suuuuunseeeeeeet…”

Corona frowned. “It’s Corona now, brain. Get used to it.”

“Nooooooo…. Suuuuuuunseeeeeeeeet…”

Corona tried to identify the sharp, ghostly voice but couldn’t. It was probably just her mind’s default idea of what a ‘scary voice’ sounded like. Nothing all that creative, interesting, or even all that scary. She sighed and shook her head. “Look, disembodied voice, your little remarks aren’t going to get me to change back.”

“Who said that was what I was doing…?”

“Me. And since you’re just my mind, that’s probably how it’s going. Unless I’m lying to myself. Or reading far too much into this. Probably the latter.”

The voice seemed to move to a position behind her. “Does it matter? Sunset, does it matter?”

Corona shrugged, turning around slowly. “Not really.” There was nothing behind her, as expected.

“Exaaaaactly…” The voice was louder now. Not necessarily closer, though. “Don’t treat me like your mind, but something elssssssse…”

“Yeah, right. Like you could be anything else.”

“Does this feeeeeeeel like a normal dream, Sunset?”

Corona twitched at the use of her old name again. She really shouldn’t be annoyed, but she was. “No, not really. Ground’s a bit too solid, I can feel a slight pain from the chill, and my mind’s not filling in the blank purple space like it should.” She put a hand to her chin. “What are you suggesting?”

“This isn’t a normal dreaaaaam…” The voice was louder now, and Corona was sure it was closer. “There’s something in here with you…”

Corona took a defensive stance. She quickly went over the mental defense material she’d learned during her time in Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns.

“Taking me seriously now…?”

“A precaution. There’s rarely such a thing as too careful.”

“Wise. But you still aren’t scared.”

“Why would I be?”

There was a sudden thump that came from nowhere. It was there. Right in front of her. The mask. The purple heart, the spikes, the eyes.

The eyes looked so much more alive than when she had seen them last. Much more vibrant. Menacing. Corona’s confidence faltered. “Y-you’re the mask.”

“Yes, I am. Isn’t that somethiiiiiing?”

Corona clenched her firsts, planting her feet in the ground. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll fight you.”

“You think you caaaan?” The voice clearly wasn’t coming from the mask, but Corona could no longer tell where it was coming from. “Sunset, Sunset, Sunset… Why assume you have a chance?”

“Why not? You’re just some freaky magic mask.”

“J͠U̧S̸T̵!?͝” The voice ululated, somehow producing enough force with just one syllable not only to knock Corona to the ground but also to give her a pounding headache. It hurt to hear it speak like that. She was suddenly sure it hadn’t spoken at all, but rather made known to her what it thought.

She could see through the purple now. She wasn’t standing on anything hard, but something soft and fleshy. It had always been there, how had she not felt it? How could this possibly have been hiding around her the entire time?

She saw the rest. She couldn’t partake of it. Her brain wanted to shut down – the eyes, the purple tendrils, the horror. The moon. What the hell was that? Why was it twitching?

“You seeeee… I am so much more than this mask…” The voice continued, no longer whispering, but no longer speaking in Truth. “And I have you, Sunset…”

Sunset whimpered. “No… No you don’t…”

“Yes I do. And it won’t be loooooooong…” Then everything collapsed around her. She closed her eyes, but the mask was still visible. She felt the tendrils grab her from the inside somehow, tearing at her, clawing at her, pulling her from the inside out. She knew they were looking for her soul.

She lit herself on fire. She couldn’t let them have it. She’d die first-

Corona gasped awake, sitting up with enough force to fling sweat to the wall across from her. She was literally dripping with it. She threw off the blanket, got out of bed, and tried to walk to the bathroom. She failed – instead she leaned against a nearby wall and started crying.

“It was all just a dream… It was all just a dream… It was all just a dream…” She couldn’t remember what the mask had shown her. What was behind the purple everything. But she could remember the mask. How it spoke. How it drilled into her mind.

But everything was fine now. She was in her dorm. It was early morning. Sugarcoat was still sleeping in her bunk, stirring only slightly from Corona’s noise.

Corona wiped the tears from her face. Why was she so scared? It was just a dream. It was always just a dream. There was never any danger to her…

“You look like you’ve been to the track meet and back,” Sugarcoat said as she rubbed her eyes.

“Terrible nightmare,” Corona said, gasping for breath. “I just… I don’t know where it came from.”

“Stress. You’ve got a lot more on your plate than the regular college student.”

“That… Is certainly true,” Corona agreed. “It just… It felt different this time.”

“You need to schedule an appointment with a government therapist.”

Corona nodded. “Maybe…” She pulled open her sock drawer and took out the dimensional device. “I think I’ll go for a walk first, though.”

“Suit yourself. Physics in two hours, be there if you want to pass.”

“I will.” She dialed Equestria and stepped through. She ended up in a field outside Ponyville, the light of Celestia’s sun shining down on her and filling her with warmth. She smiled – everything, for once, felt fine. She could forget about the dream completely and just enjoy her original home. She walked around for a few minutes, smiling, the dream quickly becoming but a memory,

She saw somepony she recognized sitting on a hill, looking up at the sky. She walked over. “Hey, Starlight.”

“Hey, Corona,” she said, not taking her eyes off the sky. “What brings you here today?”

“Needed some real fresh air to clear my head. You?”

“Return from a trip into space. I used everything I had to drag a small ship from a nearby star to here, only to find out that wasn’t necessary.”

“Ouch. …Wait, you dragged a ship here from a nearby star?”

“Yeah. Discovered how to use the magic connections between Stars. Wasn’t really hard, just needed a way to know they existed. Bit hard to do that from here. Still took a lot of energy.”

A small, vaguely pyramid-shaped ship dropped from the sky. Starlight used her telekinesis to keep it from impacting the ground, tossing it back into the air.

“…Rainbow Dash driving?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. …Must be nice.”

A look of sadness crossed Starlight’s face. “Yeah…” she shook her head. “Anyway, so I feel both amazing and useless today. I invented magic spaceflight but the Apollo just went and saved everyone anyway.”

“Don’t lessen what you did. It was amazing. Worthy of being named after you, anyway, putting you in the history books.”

Starlight laughed. “The ‘Starlight Drive’ sounds silly. As does ‘Glimmer’.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Then change your name. You’ll need to eventually.”

“To what? Something like Spartwinkie? Stars, no!”

Corona laughed. “No, not like that, unless you want to. I chose Corona because it was similar to my own, carried much of the same connotations, but also meant… more, somehow. To differentiate me.”

Starlight frowned. “I mean, I’ve thought about it. Talking to other Starlights is a pain, and it’s not exactly polite to ask them to alter their names. …But I don’t know.”

“Well, you’re Starlight and you just did something Star related, why not make it somehow related to a Star?”

“Like what? Star Star?”

“How about… Nova. What happens when a star sheds its outer layers.”

Starlight snorted. “That’s-“

Rainbow Dash crashed the ship into the ground at that moment. In a panic, Starlight teleported Rainbow Dash out of the Tel’tek. This turned out to be a good move since the craft exploded a moment later.

“You were supposed to catch me!” Rainbow Dash yelled.

“Well somepony messed me up!” Starlight gestured at Corona.

“Hey, all I did was suggest a name!” Corona said, hands in the air.

“What was it?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Nova.”

“I like it.”

Starlight blinked. “Really?”

“Really. It just sounds… You.”

“…Okay, I guess,” Nova said. “I’ll have to think about it though.”

Corona smirked. “Something tells me you won’t have to for long, Nova.”

“Are you two going to force it on me?”

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Well, that’s what I’m calling you even if you don’t choose that. Another nickname for the pile!”

“…I’m not sure how I feel about this.”

“It’ll be fine,” Corona said, kneeling down and putting an arm around Nova. “Trust me, you get used to it. I wasn’t sure about my name at first, thinking I would still go by Sunset. Now… Well, I get a little upset when I’m called Sunset. Completely illogical, but, you know.”

“Not at the moment…”

Rainbow Dash nudged her. “C’mon, at least try it out.”

“Fine. Though I feel like I am already doing that.”

Corona chuckled.

“Hey, who wants to go out for ice cream?” Rainbow Dash said suddenly. “We never hang out anymore, Nova. And we never hung out at all, Corona.”

Corona’s smile faltered. “I… I’d love that, Rainbow Dash.”

“Then come on! Let’s go!” She flew away in a blur of rainbow.

Nova smirked and lit her horn. “Teleport to beat her there?”

“You betcha.”

~~~

Meanwhile, in orbit…

”PRINCESS TWILIGHT SPARKLE!!!!” Luna roared in the loudest Royal Canterlot Voice she could muster.

As scared as Twilight was, the only thing Twilight could think was If I had a middle name this would be even more terrifying.

Luna stamped her hoof inches from Twilight’s face, shaking her considerably. “Twilight… Why… Did you shoot… The moon…?”

“Uh. Oh. About that. Accident.”

“Oh. Just. Just an accident?” Luna’s left eye twitched. “Let me tell you about how this affected my day, Twilight. I was playing a nice little video game from Earth. It was cute. I jumped around and collected things on this bright screen, and it was all just great. And I was inches from getting a particularly hard piece that I’d been spending the better part of an hour building up for, and guess what happens?”

“Er… You get it?”

“Oh no! Instead, some crack decides to shoot my moon! Which, by the way, I have a constant connection to. I jumped from the impact, fell into a bottomless pit, and lost all my progress. Oh, and my beautiful moon got yet another crater on it that didn't need to be there! Why do you all have to go and change it!? Then I discovered that you had run with your tail between your legs, and that I’d have to wait to talk to you!” She leaned in, touching snouts with Twilight. “I’ve been sitting here, stewing, for well over an hour.”

“Eheh…”

“As punishment-“

“You can’t punish her,” Applejack said. “Wouldn’t be proper.”

Luna shot Applejack a look that made her back up several steps. “Ah mean… Whatever works, Princess…”

Luna sneered. “Twilight can, in theory, refuse the punishment. But she knows deep down that I’ll find some other, more creative way to make her suffer should she do that. All I’m asking her to do is do a little errand for me.”

“Oh?”

“You know about Earth. Find out what the good games are from your friends and other connections. Get me them. Understood?”

“Of course.” That’s not so bad, just have to contact everyone…

“You have twenty-four hours.”

Twilight’s face twisted into barely controlled panic. “Starswirl, teleport us down to the surface. Now.”

That he did.

~~~

That night, it was a different pony’s turn to dream…

“Nova.”

Nova opened her eyes. She was floating in the middle of space without a suit, looking right at a bright blue star. “Huh. So guess that really is going to stick. So… Star?”

“Yes. I am Sylius. I decided I owe you more than what Malat gave you.”

“Why not just do this earlier to save the trouble?”

“It is not our way. You need to carve your own path.”

“Why is that your way?”

“…I will not say. I will not answer any questions about your world, nor about your destiny.”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “…Then what are you here to say?”

“You clearly will not heed our warning about the practice of traveling to other universes. So at least hear this. You don’t want to catch the attention of the Starcross Society.”

“Why?”

“…I am sorry, it seems so cruel to you, doesn’t it? Not to be told. To be kept from what your world really is, what it means.”

“Well can you at least point me in the right direction? Show me how I can find out?”

Sylius paused. “…There is one on your world who can answer many of your questions. It is not Discord. Find this individual to get the fastest answers. That is, if you can be convincing.”

Nova narrowed her eyes. “That’s pretty vague.”

“It’s stretching our tradition enough as it is.”

“Why not change?”

Sylius chuckled softly. “We’d have to agree. Most of us are old enough to remember when life formed on your planet. It would take a long time for us to do anything of the sort.”

“…I think I understand,” Nova said.

“You do. I also hope I’ve given you a better image of our kind than… Malat.”

“That you have. I was starting to be… disillusioned in you. Still am. It’s… It’s a bit much to take in, what you actually are.”

“We may be more than you, and higher, but we are never what you hold us up to be. I apologize if that’s not to your liking.”

Nova drooped. “It’s… Fine. Really. …So what, do I just wake up now?”

“No. You fall back into regular sleep. It wouldn’t do for this to end like a nightmare, would it?”

~~~

Link walked down to the brig. As luck would have it, there was no one outside Ba’al’s cell at this moment. Good. They could finally have a one-on-one talk.

Ba’al’s eyes flashed the moment Link entered the room. “Ah, finally, the hero arrives.”

“Ba’al. Figured we should have a talk, just you and m-“

“She read my mind, hero. She knows about it.”

Link’s eyes narrowed while Ba’al’s grin widened. Link leaned forward. “You could tell anyone you wanted. But you know they’ll just try to take it from you.”

“She’s calling out, hero. She wants them all. Maybe your little mind-reading pony is affected by that slight glance, maybe not, but there are others. They’ve seen it. And now she wants them.”

Link glared. “Where are you hiding it?”

“It moves. Ba’al to Ba’al. World to world. Spreading.”

“You’re mad.”

“Quite possibly. But she will give us power.”

“She wants nothing but her own power.”

“So? Mutually beneficial arrangement.” He glanced at Link’s shadow. “I’m sure you can sympathize.”

Link stood up. “You’re not going to be any help.”

“Nope. Nice talking to you though.”

Link started walking out.

“She will be free, Link. There’s no more delaying the inevitable.”

Link left the room completely, bumping into O’Neil as he did so. “Sorry.”

“Talking to the prisoner, huh?” O’Neill said.

“No help, as usual.”

“I could have told you that.”

Link nodded, but hurried away. Something was obviously on his mind.

O’Neill shrugged, taking a sip of his unidentifiable drink. He walked to his office, sitting down in the big chair. He pulled up a computer screen and played a video. He watched and listened to the entire conversation between Link and Ba’al, frown deepening as he did so.

He opened up several other videos, watching them again. Conversations between Link and that thing – Midna – in his shadow. They thought they weren’t being watched. They were, closer than most other passengers, because they were hiding something.

From what he was seeing, O’Neill was pretty sure Link’s heart was in the right place. But the man in green was hiding something very, very nefarious.

~~~

Sage Pinkie held the white mask to her face – and froze.

They were watching again. She couldn’t let them know anything about where she was, or what she was doing.

She was in a dark room, the mask providing the most light of anything. It illuminated a wooden floor and a tremendous object four times taller than the oculus herself. It was composed of dozens of large gears, pieces of colored runes, magical items, and a few metallic chains. In the center was a single, bright white rune that was shaking with immense power. It was held in place by another rune, a greenish-brown one, which had recently been powered up by a certain green diamond. It would be able to keep the white power in check indefinitely.

The Mechanism was functioning properly… but the plan was not yet finished.

There was still much, much more to do.

It would involve a lot of waiting.

016 - Shipping!

Twilight and Company stepped through a dimensional device’s portal into a sunny town reminiscent of Ponyville, but with a more brown-green color scheme. Ponies walked around with smiles on their faces, waving to each other and occasionally laughing.

“This looks familiar…” Pinkie mused.

Fluttershy rolled her eyes. Pinkie giggled.

“Think there’s going to be anything here for us?” Rarity asked. “Seems as if it might be awfully redundant.”

“We should at least say hi,” Nova said, twirling her hoof in the air to accentuate the point.

Twilight nodded in agreement. She scanned the town for ponies to talk to. “Let’s see… Oh! I see me.” She pointed at a purple unicorn walking down the street, books in her saddlebags. “No wings. This should be interesting.”

Pinkie bounced over to Other Twilight first. “Heeeeeeeeey!”

She blinked. “Oh, hi Pinkie.” She smirked. “So, about last night-“

“Ashushashushamush!” Pinkie said, shoving a hoof into the unicorn’s mouth. “I am not the Pinkie you know. I come from an alternate uuuuniverse!”

The unicorn rolled her eyes. “Oh Pinkie, come on, that again?”

“Again?” Princess Twilight said, walking closer. “You’ve had other visitors?”

The unicorn blinked, smirk vanishing. “Oh. …I just thought Pinkie was joking… Oh my gosh you’re me!”

Twilight grinned. “Yeah. I’m Princess of Friendship Twilight Sparkle, from Equestria. We were just dropping by to see what your world was like.”

“That’s so amazing!” the unicorn shouted. “You’re a princess and… Eeeeeeee!” She did a little dancing motion with her legs.

Twilight found this absolutely adorable, unable to contain her laughter. “Yep! Mind telling us a bit about yourself and where we are?”

“Oh not at all! Welcome to Neighton! I’m just Twilight Sparkle. I run the library. And live in it.”

Twilight blinked. “…Is it by chance Golden Oaks library?”

“Why, yes! It’s even built into a tree! Do you have one as well?”

Twilight smiled sadly. “I used to. It… Got blown up several years ago. I have a full-sized castle now, but it’s not the same.”

The unicorn clasped Twilight’s hoof in her own. “I’m so sorry… I couldn’t imagine what’d happen to me if my Golden Oaks got destroyed.”

Rarity looked the unicorn up and down. “Well, seeing as you’re not an alicorn… It may just be that it hasn’t happened yet for you.”

“…Wh-what do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know if this world follows the same path ours did, but if you become an alicorn and face off against a monster known as Tirek, your library will be destroyed in the encounter.”

Pinkie grinned. “Think of this as a warning! If that ever happens, try to keep your library out of the blast!”

“I… Thank you,” the unicorn bowed. “I’ll do what I can, if or when that happens.”

Twilight smiled. “Good. It’d be more than I did…” she shook her head. “Anyway, you know me, this is Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rarity, and Nova.”

The unicorn narrowed her eyes at Nova. “…Why not ‘Starlight’? The rest of you have the same names.”

Nova shrugged. “I go by Nova to differentiate myself from the other Starlights. These four should get their own names at some point. Sooner rather than later.”

Rarity nudged Twilight. “I keep telling this Princess here she should consider something relating to ‘Charter,’ since that’s what ponies are calling her.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “And I keep telling you that ‘Charter’ is a title, if anything, not a name.”

Nova snickered. “You may not have a choice in the matter.”

“You all still call me Twilight, don’t you?”

“I suppose that’s true. But be prepared for the day we strike gold!”

Pinkie pointed at Nova. “That would have been perfect if Twilight were yellow, then we’d have come up with a name involving gold!”

Fluttershy raised an eyebrow. “Seems a bit on-the-nose.”

Nova laughed. “Who cares about that, really? It just needs to get the job done.”

The unicorn Twilight looked at Nova, furrowing her brow. “You’re very different from the Starlight I know. The rest of you are a similar – Fluttershy’s a bit more forward, admittedly – but you blow expectations out of the water, Nova.”

“Well… when Twilight met me, I was not the nicest pony. Had a bit of an issue brainwashing an entire town.” She smiled sheepishly. “She took me in and helped me get to where I am now. So we might actually be pretty similar, just… displaced.”

The unicorn pondered this. “Maybe… I’ll keep that in mind.”

“So…” Pinkie said, leaning closer to the unicorn. “What do ponies do for fun around here?”

“Well, we do normal pony things. Go out, talk, party, date, and basically just enjoy life. Unless you’re me, in which case you spend most of your day analyzing ponies.”

“Ah,” Twilight said, remembering when she had thought friendship was a puzzle that needed to be analyzed scientifically. It was a little embarrassing and she had to fight not to say anything to her counterpart about it. It would be best if she discovered that on her own.

“Hey, what do we do?” Fluttershy asked. “The other versions of us, I mean.”

“Oh! Uh, Pinkie’s a party planner, Fluttershy’s a traveling biologist, and Rarity runs the newspaper.”

Rarity blinked. “…Identical, close, and way, way far off.”

“Oh? What do you do then?”

“I run a boutique back home. Sell finely crafted dresses.” She looked around the town of Neighton and pointed at a building. “Looks almost exactly like that place, actually,”

“Huh. That’s… Actually a diner,” the unicorn frowned. “Pretty good one, but I can’t imagine a clothing store there. Clothes just get in the way, after all.”

Everyone gasped. Fluttershy quickly ran to Rarity and stroked her mane. “There, there Rarity… Things are just different here… Don’t freak out…”

Rarity’s eye twitched. “I… Know…”

Unicorn Twilight put a hoof over her mouth and blushed. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t think they could mean all that much to you! Sorry!”

Rarity gently pushed Fluttershy away and straightened her mane. “It’s fine, darling. I’m the one exploring, I’ll just have to accept being slapped across the face once in a while.”

“I’m still sorry! How can I make it up to you?”

“Twilight, there’s no need. Everything’s fine now, I just needed to recover. Although…” She looked at the diner. “I think I want to eat there. See what it’s like.”

The unicorn tossed Rarity ten bits. “That should cover a meal for you, no matter how exorbitant it is.”

Rarity smiled. “Anypony else coming?”

Fluttershy blinked. “Rarity, we literally ate just before we came here.”

Rarity shrugged. “I suppose I’m just going there to get a feel for the place, see if it’s worthy of the space it’s using. See you girls later then.”

Princess Twilight nodded. “We’ll either come get you at the diner, or be at the place we appeared.”

“Got it!” Rarity said, trotting off.

“And then there were four…” Pinkie said, strangely ominously.

“I count five,” Nova said, pointing at the unicorn Twilight.

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “Well, then there’s just about to be four.” She raised a hoof to the air, and out of nowhere another Pinkie appeared and hoofbumped it.

Fluttershy blinked. “Oh.”

The new Pinkie grinned. “Hey! Me! Want a party!?”

“DO I EVER!?”

“THEN LET’S MOVE I HAVE ONE GOING RIGHT NOW!”

“ARE THE PARTY CANNONS IN FULL SWING?”

“YOU BET!” The two bounced off before any of the other ponies could say anything.

Nova put a hoof to her chin. “You know, if I was more paranoid I’d say these ponies were trying to separate us and pick us off one by one.”

Fluttershy shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think this place really is nice.”

“Thanks,” the unicorn said. “We try.”

“I’m sure you do,” Twilight said. “So…Can we go see the Golden Oaks Library? Please?”

“Yeah, I’ve never actually seen it,” Nova said.

The unicorn beamed. “Of course we can! Right this way!” She trotted away, the three otherworldly ponies following close behind. They only made it a few yards before a blur of rainbow barreled into Fluttershy. Fluttershy reacted quickly, spreading her wings and bouncing off the ground with her front hoof, knocking the speeding pegasus off her and onto the nearby ground.

“Woah! Fluttershy! When did you get so quick?” Rainbow Dash said, eyes spinning.

Fluttershy shook her head to clear it. “Ah, I’m not the Fluttershy you know. Other world.”

“Yeah, ri-“ Rainbow Dash saw the two Twilights. “…Oh. All right then.” She blushed slightly. “Sorry for barrelling into you then. I thought you were her.”

“It’s okay. If you travel around a lot, you get recognized incorrectly a lot. I’m getting used to it - though admittedly this is my first time being sky-tackled.”

Princess Twilight groaned. “Meanwhile, almost every other Rainbow Dash we meet loves to find some excuse to tackle me for whatever reason.”

“Very interesting,” the unicorn noted.

Rainbow Dash stretched her wings and pointed at Fluttershy. “Heyyyy… Flutters, you think you’re a good flier?”

“Um. Well, no – actually, wait…” She put a hoof to her chin. “I think I’ve had to get better at it now. So I don’t really know how good I am.”

“Whatever, you’re better than my Fluttershy by a mile, I can already see that. Let’s race.”

“I don’t know…”

Nova smirked. “You’ll do fine, Fluttershy. I think you might win, actually, given all the flying you’ve had to do lately.”

Fluttershy shrugged. “I guess I can, then. Where we going?”

Rainbow Dash pointed to a cloud in the distance. “See it?”

Fluttershy nodded.

“Ready… Set… Go!” The two pegasi took to the skies, flying over the heads of the now three-pony party.

“…Do you think I’ll even make it to the library?” Twilight asked her counterpart.

“Who knows. You do seem to be fans of splitting up.”

“I swear, it’s just a fluke today!”

“We’ll see who actually makes it to the library then, won’t we?”

Nova smirked. “That we will.”

They walked further down the street, passing many cheerful, friendly ponies who waved at them as they passed. At one point they passed close to a mare and a stallion sitting on a bench, staring deeply into one another’s eyes. Then, like something snapped between them, they started passionately kissing and fell off the bench.

Nova and Twilight blinked in surprise at the sudden movement.

“Ah, love is in the air,” the unicorn Twilight said, smiling. “Come on, let’s leave them be. The library is right over there.”

Twilight and Nova managed, with some effort, to tear their eyes off the passionate kissing that was now taking place on the ground and push it out of their minds. After all, it wasn’t their business. Right? Just two ponies enjoying each others’ company.

~~~

Rarity walked into the ‘Hungry Bun’ diner, her graceful stride drawing more than a few appreciating glances. She wondered if this was because she looked good, or because she looked like the unicorn who ran the newspaper. Or, as was probably the case, both.

The diner itself looked nothing like her Boutique on the inside, save from the same general shape of the room. Half of the rounded interior was blocked off presumably to make room for an in-depth kitchen while the part Rarity could see was filled with clean, silvery tables at which sat many, many patrons. The vast majority of tables only had two stools at them, but there were a couple booths.

Rarity looked to her left where a sign read ‘seat yourself’. She shrugged, pulled up to a two-seat table next to the window, and grabbed a menu. She was vaguely aware of giggling and happy chatter coming from the other patrons, but she paid them no mind. She’d do that after she ordered.

The diner specialized in ‘things-in-buns’, ranging from carrot-dogs to hayburgers to a few things Rarity had never actually heard of. What even was a ‘Neighpon Panini’?

“Can Ah take your order, Miss Rarity?”

Rarity looked to her left and down to see a familiar yellow filly. A cute version of Applebloom, Applejack’s younger sister, with a chef’s hat instead of a little bow. “Oh! I’m sorry, I’m not actually the pony you know. I’m…” She frowned. “Miss Belle.”

Applebloom raised an eyebrow. “Whatever you say. What you want?”

“I am curious. Since I’m new in town, care to tell me what exactly a Neighpon Panini is?”

“Ah really have no idea. It tastes really good and we ship the key ingredient from Neighpon, whatever it is.”

Rarity pursed her lips. “Am I feeling adventurous today…”

“I’d order it,” a tall, black pegasus stallion said, leaning in on the table. “It’s a good bit of food that doesn’t taste quite like anything else, not to mention it always makes you feel a little better. I swear, they charm it with something back there.”

Rarity smiled. “I believe I’ll take that then.”

“Make that a double order,” the stallion said, sliding in the opposite seat. “That is, if you don’t mind.”

Rarity chuckled to herself. “Not at all!”

Applebloom scribbled something short in her notebook. “It’ll be right out.”

The stallion smiled at Rarity. “So, what’s a beautiful unicorn like you doing in a place like this?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

“Name’s Thunder Lane. I travel around a lot performing stunt shows, and I just have to drop by this diner every time. Food’s great, the ponies are great, and you never know who you’ll meet!”

“Really? Well, I’m a bit of a traveler myself. Name’s Rarity, not to be confused with the other Rarity in this town. I’m from so, so far away, you have no idea.”

“You don’t sound foreign. How long did it take to get our accent down?”

Rarity smirked. “I believe that’s the translation spell I have on me, dear. It’s almost guaranteed I’m not speaking your language at all.”

Thunder sat back and put his front hooves behind his head. “You weren’t kidding when you said far away.”

“It might as well be another world entirely.”

“That just makes me want to see your world. I travel around a lot, who knows? Maybe I’ve been there.”

Rarity shook her head. “Have you ever needed a translation spell to get by? Don’t think so.”

“Eh, probably not. But a guy’s got to try, right?” He raised his eyebrows up and down.

“I’m certainly not stopping you from trying. I do expect I’ll run your bragging thoroughly through the ground, though. Sorry in advance.”

“Ouch. Feisty,” he said, feigning pain. “The graceful mare slowly murders her companion with words…”

Rarity chuckled. “What makes you think it’s going to be slow?”

Thunder Lane blinked. “Okay, so you could tear me apart quickly. I don’t think so though. No mare with those sweet, blue eyes could bring themselves to do such a thing.”

“Oh my, the compliments,” Rarity tried to deadpan, but chuckled and blushed instead. “Quite the gentlestallion I’ve found myself here.”

“The gentlestallion is astounded by the words of praise coming from the lady’s lips.”

Rarity raised her eyebrow. “Really? Third person?”

“It was worth a shot, wasn’t it?”

“I’m not leaving in a huff yet, am I?” Rarity said. The food arrived a moment later. Two plates set with a bun and some strange, orange filling drizzled with caramel-colored sauce.

Rarity lifted the sticky mess in her telekinesis. “How is a non-unicorn supposed to eat this in a dignified manner?”

Thunder Lane smirked. “It takes some doing. First, you’ve got to arrange your plate like so. Then, you’ve got to have the coordination of a monkey and the dexterity of a hummingbird. Watch.” He slammed his hoof into the table, flipping the Neighpon Panini into the air. He opened his mouth and swallowed the entire thing in one swift gulp.

Rarity stared at him, rather speechless.

“Or you could just use a fork,” Thunder Lane said, picking up a nearby fork with his wing. “I just prefer the all-at-once approach, because it stuns mares speechless.”

“…I’m just not sure if that was dignified or not.”

“Well, do you feel like stomping off in a huff at my ‘uncultured’ eating habits?”

“No…”

“Then it must be dignified enough,” he smirked. “And now you need to eat yours.”

Rarity delicately levitated the sticky mess to her mouth and took a small, delicate bite. The flavor of the food item was intense – both sweet and sour at the same time, and yet somehow carried with it the feeling of being at an ocean beach and smelling the sea air. She took a moment to look at what she was eating again. “…The secret ingredient might be fish.”

Thunder Lane blinked. “Wait, really? Wait, how do you know?”

“When you travel as much as I have, you sometimes eat things outside your normal diet range. Pretty sure there’s fish in here.” She took another bite. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

“…Are we allowed to eat fish?”

“I have no idea about you, but I am,” Rarity smirked, taking another bite. “Mmmm, delicious. Certainly a different taste.”

“I’m still trying to get over the fact that there’s probably some form of meat in here.”

“Thunder, animals eat meat all the time. It’s not as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be. Just because tigers don’t naturally eat any sort of plant doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy a watermelon from time to time.”

“That makes just enough sense to keep me from having an existential crisis,” Thunder Lane commended.

Rarity took another slow bite of the Neighpon Panini, savoring the unique flavor. She had to admit, this was an acceptable use of her boutique. Even if it never had been her boutique. Or had any relation to her boutique. …Who cared if it made sense, she was just happier that this place was good.

As she thought, she forgot to keep a tight hold on all the Neighpon Panini’s sauce, and some dripped down onto her face. “Oh, Drat.”

“Here, let me get that.” Before Rarity could do anything, Thunder Lane leaned over the table and wiped the smear off with a flick of his wing. Rarity stared right into his much closer eyes and blushed furiously. She couldn’t bring herself to say anything.

He moved in, connecting his lips with her own. Lightly, gently, as if testing the waters. He pulled away shortly thereafter.

Rarity dropped her Neighpon Panini on back on the plate, splashing the sauce on both of them. She stared blankly into space, trying to process what had just happened and failing for the most part. It was only about one second before the two of them broke out into childish laughter.

Rarity picked a napkin up off the table and started wiping herself down. “Well, Thunder, that was… a bit fast. And unexpected.”

Thunder Lane started wiping himself off as well. “Hey, you were the one who said it wouldn’t go slow.”

“I do believe you misread me a little there.”

“Oh? Really?” Thunder Lane raised an eyebrow. “Too fast for you?”

“A bit, yes. But I’m not storming off in a huff, now am I?”

“Nope.”

“So let’s continue from where we are now, and see where this goes. I assume you have time?”

“All day!”

Rarity smiled. “Good. Why don’t you tell me more about yourself?”

Thunder Lane grinned. “Gladly, my lady.”

Rarity shook her head. This stallion was absolutely crazy and far too forward. And yet… she couldn’t bring herself to stop quite yet. She was intrigued…

~~~

Fluttershy had no idea why she was actually trying to beat this Rainbow Dash, but she was. She was flapping her wings as hard as she could and had her hooves pointed in front of her face for maximum speed. She was very surprised to find that she was actually gaining on the rainbow blur that was Rainbow Dash, and this filled her with an inexplicable desire to win. She smiled to herself – it actually felt good, to be able to fly like this. All those years she’d held herself back, calling herself a weak flier… She wasn’t. She was able to dive bomb to protect her friends, keep up with the many birds of the sky, and could keep an eye on everything around her. She was even producing a pink magic trail behind her, which not every pegasus could do. It was good, not to feel held back anymore.

She still couldn’t do any fancy tricks, but she didn’t feel the need to either. She was just able to fly freely now. And that was all she needed.

Still would be a nice bonus to actually win this race.

She narrowed her eyes and strained her wings just a little more, trying to get a slight boost. She was still behind Rainbow Dash and the goal cloud was fast approaching. She tightened her back legs, trying to force them back so they wouldn’t interfere with the air around her. She angled the motion of her wings – cut forward, push back, cut forward, push back, faster… Faster…

Fluttershy saw Rainbow Dash glance behind her. That would slow her down, maybe enough for Fluttershy to pass her.

Rainbow Dash made a bigger mistake right after that. Something made her tumble head over hooves, losing almost all her speed. Fluttershy put her hooves to her mouth and did a quick loop to grab the out of control Rainbow Dash. She didn’t struggle the entire time between Fluttershy grabbing her and setting her on the cloud.

Rainbow Dash rubbed her nose, wiping away some blood. “Gah. Stupid nosebleed. Made me lose.”

Fluttershy set herself down next to Rainbow Dash. “You still got to the cloud first, Rainbow.”

“Those were pity points, and you know it.”

“Yeah… What happened to your nose, by the way? I didn’t see you hit anything?”

“I have no idea,” Rainbow Dash grunted, rubbing her nose. “I look back to check on you and BAM, nosebleed.”

“Maybe it was the pressure?”

“Usually don’t have that problem.” She shook her head. “By the way, nice flying. Like, really nice. You might have won anyway.”

“Wow, thanks,” Fluttershy said, a little taken aback. “My Rainbow Dash would never admit she might lose.”

“My Fluttershy would never even bother to race.”

Fluttershy smiled warmly. “Well, give her time. I think if you treat her well she’ll gain some confidence. It’ll be a long, slow process, but it can work.”

Rainbow Dash laid down on the cloud. “Yeeeah… It’s hard sometimes, though, y’know? You want to do things with her and you try to spend time with her but she always turns it down. Get her to go somewhere and she ditches the moment anything happens, when you’re not looking. I just…” She sighed. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be venting to you. It must be weird, hearing about yourself.”

“It’s almost like hearing about my past self,” Fluttershy said. “So yeah, a liiiittle weird, but I’m used to this sort of thing by now. She’s locking herself up?”

“Yeah. Nothing I can do gets her out, and it’s really hard sometimes.”

Fluttershy put a wing around Rainbow Dash. “Well, I have a suggestion. If you greet her like you greeted me, you’re probably scaring her. Your brashness, your excitability, your energy. To her, those things are probably scary.”

“…Really?” Rainbow Dash said, looking up into Fluttershy’s eyes.

“Really. I used to hide from everything I could. You and Pinkie were the two of my friends I tried to avoid, simply because I didn’t have the nerve to engage with the loudness and excitability. It was exhausting, and nerve-wracking.”

Rainbow Dash frowned. “So… What do I do?”

“Tone down the loudness around her, if you want to help her. The other you… Didn’t really do that for me, so I had to come around in other ways. But I think it would have helped a lot.”

“So I… Change myself?”

“Nothing so drastic, but… Maybe just realize that being loud all the time isn’t always very nice? And cool it on the tackles.”

“But… those things define me. I am the action pony! If I take those away, won’t she see something that isn’t me?”

Fluttershy raised an eyebrow. “I think she knows who you are at this point, assuming you’ve been friends for a while. Just show her you’re willing to give her some space, and I think things will improve. But don’t back off completely, since that’d just let her shrink into her cave again.”

“That sounds… hard.”

Fluttershy nodded. “You’ll have to be patient with her. Very patient. It will take a lot of work on both your parts, but it can work out in the end. I’m sure of it.”

“…I don’t know…”

“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t think you can do it. Some ponies just can’t.”

Rainbow Dash sniffed, wiping her eyes. “I really don’t know.”

“Shh… It’s okay. I’m just here to help.”

“I… Yeah. Thanks.” She looked off into the distance, at Celestia’s sun. “Hey…”

“Hrm?”

“You’re a lot more willing and strong than she is…”

“Yeah?” Fluttershy responded, cocking her head.

“Want to, you know, maybe… Try something?”

“Try what?”

Rainbow Dash blushed furiously. “I mean, I’m not sure I can give her what she wants, and maybe what I’m supposed to take away from this is that I should stop chasing after her. But… You, on the other hand…”

Fluttershy retracted her wing and fixed Rainbow Dash with an unsure expression. “W-what are you saying?”

Rainbow Dash approached her, eyebrows raised. “I’m saying why don’t we, er, get to know each other a little better. The hungry bun is always open for two ponies looking for that…”

“R-rainbow Dash! Are you asking me on a date?!”

“Uh… yeah?”

“We just met!” Fluttershy blurted.

“Uh, so? I-I mean, is that a problem?”

“Of course it’s a problem!” Fluttershy pointed at her. “It – it’s way too fast! It’s just out of nowhere and… and…”

“Ah,” Rainbow Dash drooped. “You have someone. I understand.”

“N-no?” Fluttershy said. “I don’t have anyone. I’m just not interested.”

Rainbow Dash’s sad, depressed expression switched to anger. “What!?”

Fluttershy backed away. “…What…?”

“Are you telling me that you, a single mare, are turning down an offer? From me nonetheless? Who does that!?”

“R-rainbow Dash, I think you need to c-calm down…”

“Oh no, we’re not calming down now! Do you have any idea how much of an insult that is? Oh look at me, I’m a Fluttershy, I fly in such a way that makes Rainbow Dash notice me, I stroke her mane to help her through emotional problems, I care - why would you do all that just to reject me? Huh!?”

Fluttershy glared, taking a firm stance and recollecting her thoughts. “I don’t think you understand how this works.”

“It’s how it always works!” Rainbow Dash shouted. “Two ponies get together, share a moment, and BAM, there it is! You don’t fight that urge unless you’re Starlight!”

“I guess I’m like Starlight then.”

Rainbow Dash growled. “You owe me. I’m not in the mood for a round of hard-to-get.” She stepped forward.

Fluttershy Stared at her. “You need to go now, Rainbow Dash.”

Rainbow Dash’s eyes twitched. “I d-don’t think so!”

Fluttershy slapped her, knocking her off the cloud. “BACK OFF!”

Rainbow Dash flew back up to eye level with Fluttershy. The rainbow pegasus was crying profusely. She flew away as fast as she could.

Fluttershy was still breathing heavily. Tears streaked down her own cheeks. She didn’t understand what had just happened. She didn’t have the emotional power left within her to even try to understand either. She just laid down on the cloud and let herself cry.

~~~

“So what kind of party is this?” Pinkie One said.

“The wildest kind of party you’ll ever see!” Pinkie Two announced. “Wilder than even yours!”

“Oh, I doubt that! One time there was a party war with a party tank!”

“You didn’t set that one up yourself!”

“Ah, I could though! If I wanted to, anyway!”

Pinkie Two giggled. “True. But what you’re about to see is going to blow your miiiiiiiind!”

“I’ll believe that when I actually see it!”

“Now, no peeking ahead of time, you hear me?”

Pinkie One nodded. “I’m nooooot, you know I’m not!”

“That I doooo!”

“OooooOOOOoooo we’re so spoopy!”

“So, which building is it?”

Pinkie Two pointed a hoof at a large residence with an ornate oak door. “Right this way, me-from-the-other-place!”

Pinkie bounced up to the door and threw it open. “HELLO EVERYPONY I’M HERE TO PA-“

She stopped talking. She quickly turned around, slammed the door shut, and walked into the street.

Pinkie Two blinked. “…What’s wrong?”

“You’ve scarred me for life!” Pinkie One wailed, ramming her head into the ground. “That’s… That wasn’t a party! That was messed up was what that was!”

Pinkie Two’s eyes began to form tears. “I… I… I…”

“Oh no!” Pinkie One yelled. “Don’t cry! You can and they can do what they want-“ she shivered at the thought. “Buuuuut that’s just not my thing! Okay?”

“How can it not be your thing?”

“Pinkie, come ooooon, do a little search!”

“Oooooooh…” Pinkie Two said, tapping her head. “Right… I see… Wow you ponies have a sad existence.”

“Hey!” Pinkie One retorted. “We get by just fine without getting that wild!”

“But where’s the fun in that?”

“Maybe there’s more to life and parties than just fun! Maybe there are, I don’t know, more important things?”

“Woah… You’re really off the deep end, aren’t you? That’s okay, I guess we’re more likely to be like that.”

Pinkie One grabbed her head and rammed it into the ground again. There were muffled screams of exasperation. Then she shot bolt upright onto all four hooves. “Okay. Done. I’m done with today. I’m going to see if I can pull some brain bleach out of somewhere and forget I ever saw that. Then I can go on with my life.”

“But Pinkie! Come oooooon! You should at least try-“

“NO!” Pinkie One snapped, shoving a hoof into her counterpart’s face. “None of that. Nooooone of that. Nope. Nope nope nope. Noooooope.”

Pinkie Two shrugged. “Your loss.”

“No, yours.”

The two giggled, then looked at each other like aliens, then walked their own separate directions.

Pinkie One sat down at the side of a road later and held her head. “Agh. Why. Why did I have to see that? Come on! I’d like to knoooow! Oh, I know lots of things, do I? Yeah but I’m not an omnipotent she-demon or something!”

“You okay?” A stallion asked, walking over to her with a concerned expression on his face.

“Do not talk to me,” Pinkie said, pointing a hoof. “I can feel the ‘romance’ flowing off you. Not today, got it?”

The stallion whimpered and walked away.

Pinkie decided now was a good time to stare blankly ahead at nothing for the next few hours. Because why not. It was better than talking to herself and attracting… unwanted attention. For once in her life, attention was a bad thing.

She shivered to herself.

~~~

Twilight blinked. “Hey, where’d Nova go? She was here just a second ago.”

The unicorn Twilight shrugged. “Maybe she saw herself, I don’t know. All I know is that we’re alone and now we’re at the library!”

Twilight smiled with nostalgia as she laid eyes upon the familiar wooden visage of Golden Oaks Library. The coloring was slightly off, and a couple of the branches were different sizes than she remembered, but there was no doubt in her mind that this was her home. She really hoped this one didn’t get destroyed as well.

“Want to come inside?”

“Sure!” Twilight said, walking in the front door and gazing at the shelves upon shelves of books. “I wonder if any of the books are different…”

“We could take a look! We can skip the romance studies section though, I’m sure you’ve already studied that exhaustively.”

“Uh… what?”

The unicorn blinked. “Didn’t Princess Celestia send you to your library to learn about romance?”

“No, I had to learn about friendship. Hence ‘Princess of Friendship’.”

The unicorn gasped. “Oh my Celestia, you didn’t study romance? How did you survive?”

“What do you mean? I didn’t have much of a problem.”

“Did you come pre-installed with a special somepony then?”

Twilight cocked her head. “No… Don’t have one. And I generally don’t have much of a desire to get one.”

The unicorn looked like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Have you ever been with anybody?”

“I mean, no? I danced with a guy in an alternate universe once, but I wasn’t exactly myself.”

The unicorn grabbed Twilight by the cheeks. “We’ve got to fix this immediately. Come with me, we’ll be in the romance section. We’ve got to get you in the playing field.”

Twilight walked with her to the romance section, frowning. “Why though? I’m perfectly happy the way I am.”

“Lies. Classic case of hard to get, possibly even kuudere, but you don’t strike me as rash enough for that. I mean, we all know aromantics don’t actually exist, been socially proven. Nothing just-so-story legend.”

“You’re saying a lot of things that sound pretty crazy to me. Also a little… disrespectful.”

The unicorn looked Twilight right in the eyes. “Listen to me, other me. I am the master shipper in this town. I know exactly who to pair with who, at what time, and how long. I-“

“How long?”

“Yeah. Not everypony needs the same partner for that long. Some ponies do, others don’t. Come on, this is basic stuff! How starved are you? You must be holding in a lot of emotions. Can’t be healthy.”

“I’m not though,” Twilight said, recoiling. “Why is it such a big deal? I- oh. Ooooooooooh.” She facehooved. “I think I get it. Your universe must operate on romance, or something.”

“…Come again?”

Twilight smiled. “Romance isn’t a big deal where we come from, not really. I know of a few paired off ponies – my brother’s one of them – but for the most part we’re all just happy to live our lives. Most ponies aren’t in any rush to pair up or-“

“That… That sounds horrible!” the unicorn interrupted. “I… I don’t think I could live in a world where that wasn’t the case! It’d be like living as Rainbow Dash for eternity, never letting the feelings out for any reason just because of stubbornness!”

“Really, Twilight, I’m happy, there’s no need-“

“No,” the unicorn said, stuffing her hoof in Twilight’s mouth. “I’m the best shipper in town. I’ll find somepony for you and prove it’ll work. Just place two ponies together and BAM, match!”

“…That strikes me as emotionally unhealthy.”

“Why? It’s how matches are made nine out of ten times! Of course, as I said, you could be a hard-to-get or a kuudere. Or something more exotic, being from a universe where… Oh, is it possible you’re actually an aromantic? Oh my Celestia, can such ponies exist out there? Your lives must be horrible!”

“Hey, I-“

The unicorn took out a giant book and laid it on the table. “I’ve accepted this challenge, as the student and possible future Princess of Romance, I will find you, at the very least, a one night stand…”

“Twilight! Hey! No! Stop!”

The unicorn stared at the alicorn. “…Why?”

“I, just, this feels wrong, don’t you say? For you to just smash me in a position with someone and demand we click?”

“I haven’t failed yet!”

Twilight grabbed her head, which was starting to throb. “Oh for the love of… Listen, Twilight, listen. Think for a moment that maybe, just maybe, that not everything runs on romance.”

“…Impossible. Why else is it so prevalent? Our minds are filled with thoughts almost solely devoted to romantic inclinations! It is the primary driving force in our nation!”

“And that’s not the case where I’m from.”

The unicorn fixed Twilight with a big, innocent grin. “Then I’m here to show you how wonderful it is and improve your culture!”

“That’s not-“ Twilight stopped herself. A single phrase entered her mind. Something she’d said to so many different worlds so many times.

Friendship is Magic.

Other common remarks came shortly thereafter.

Try to be friendlier.

Stop the fighting!

We’re here to help you. Look at how we can make things better.

“…You okay?” the unicorn asked.

“I… I’m not sure. I may be on the verge of a minor existential breakdown…” She shook her head. “Okay. I’ll try it. I’d just be a hypocrite if I didn’t. Though, I do suggest toning down the enthusiasm if you want to try this on other ponies. There’s going to be a lot of similar reactions.”

The unicorn clapped her hooves in glee. “All right! So, first off, I have to set some ground rules. Mares or stallions or both?”

“…Stallions, I guess?”

“Stallion leaning…” She checked something off on her list. “Care about the race at all?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Good… Good…” She made a few more marks. “The next question is ‘what do you typically look for in a partner’, but obviously this won’t apply to you. So, tell me what traits you find admirable in other ponies.”

“Intelligence, Passion, Kindness, Loyalty, Laughter, Generosity, Honesty-“

“Ignoring the listing of the Elements of Harmony.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Okay then. Intelligence and Passion still count. Drive. Courage. Hope. Understanding. Diversity.”

“Okay, good enough then. You mentioned something about being concerned with the timeframe of the relationship.”

“Yeah. Isn’t romance supposed to be, I don’t know, a life-long commitment?”

The unicorn put her hoof to her chin. “That is the strongest and generally most fulfilling kind of romance, though of course not always, but there’s a big problem. Ponies click all the time, regularly, left and right. With so many clicks happening all the time, rarely will any long-term relationship be able to last. It’s beautiful when one manages to blossom and stay strong for decades, and it’s certainly the stuff of legends told to swoon ponies, but it’s just not realistic.”

“Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

“Look, I may not be the best example, but I’ve had a different pony every month or so. The average is about six months, I think. There’s several click moments a day, I’m sure you saw the one outside on the bench, right?”

“…Yes.”

“Basically, I can try to find you a lifelong partner, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to resist the click, and definitely not him.”

“How does your culture even raise children?” Twilight wondered aloud.

“Uh, the parents who bore them dur. Who else?”

“But if they keep changing…”

“Ohhhhh…” The unicorn hit herself upside the head. “That’s right! You guys probably still have jealousy in your universe! I feel your pain. We mostly got rid of that a while back. Took some cultural renovations, but we all realized it was flat impossible for every pony to remain devoted. Too much power in the desires.”

Twilight frowned. “That just sounds… sad. It actually makes the romance seem… less potent to me. Like it means little.”

“Well how would you know if, as you claim, you’ve never really experienced it?”

Twilight had nothing to say to that. “…It just feels wrong, is all. But I’ll go along for now.”

“I’d recommend staying away from Pinkie’s parties then. They’re promoting the idea of continual sharing.”

Twilight blinked. “…I have no comment.”

“Fair enough…” She dug through a few more pages in her book and made some more notes. “Well, I can try to get you as long term as you want, perhaps even start with an initial date with no intention of having an instant click…”

“…You’re speaking more and more alien. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be several dates before you make anything official.”

“Your world is backwards.”

“…Actually we’ve been to hundreds of worlds. Yours seems to be the oddball, here.”

The unicorn frowned. “…Strange. That does deserve more looking into… After I’m done with you I think I’d like to explore a bit!”

Twilight wasn’t sure why, but she felt like that was a horrible idea.

~~~

“Where in Celestia’s name am I?” Nova shouted.

A pink unicorn removed her goggles and placed them over her horn, revealing herself to be a Starlight. “Yeah. Hi. You’re in my secret research station.”

“…Your what?”

“Please don’t freak out, I had to get you in here without anypony noticing.”

Nova looked around at the ‘station’ – which was just a basement lined with pictures. Hundreds of pictures of ponies kissing, making eyes at each other, and sitting staring into each other’s eyes. “…This is freaky.”

“Yes. It is. But someone has to keep track of what’s going on,” Starlight said, taking a deep breath. “I figured that if anyone would understand me, it’d be you. And that I had to get to you before they did. Her in particular.”

“…Who?”

“Twilight. The unicorn. The shipper.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand anything about what you’re saying.”

Starlight bit her lip. “Okay, so, in order to answer that, I have to ask a question. Does your world define itself in almost every interaction by spontaneous displays of romantic affection? Like that couple on the bench?”

“…No. Wait, that thing on the bench defines this place?”

Starlight nodded sadly at Nova. “Indeed it does. For the last few years, I’ve slowly become aware of a ‘curse’ of sorts placed on our entire world.” She used her magic to lift a picture of a younger version of herself playing with a small, sunny colt. “Every pony feels the urge, the click, as Twilight named it. Every day, thousands of ponies – in a relationship or not – feel an instant, nearly inexplicable attraction to another pony, and the vast majority of the time that feeling is reciprocated. They explain it away as something about the event that made them click, but the things that happen are things that happen every day. Talking over dinner. Racing. Having fun at a completely normal party…” She put the picture back on the wall. “I myself am not immune. But I decided to fight it as a young filly when I saw what it was doing to the ponies around me. It was… hard. It still is. Ponies cry because I run the moment a click happens.”

Nova shook her head. “T-this is a lot to take in. Are you saying there’s, like, some kind of love curse on the world, or something?”

“It’s not a curse as we understand it, but it’s definitely not natural,” Starlight said, taking out a large sheet of paper and laying it out on the table. “It’s not magic. But, after years of research, I was able to prove that there is some force that acts whenever a click happens.” She pointed at a bunch of scrawlings that reminded Nova of some of the things she’d seen Corona working on. “…You can’t understand what this says, can you?”

“No, sorry. I was never a good scientist or intellectual mage. I just think and cast.”

“Well… I guess the details aren’t that important. What is important is that there is something strong acting in this world, Nova, and nopony cares. Nopony cares that our world is under the thumb of something else. Everypony just wants to find the next click or to enjoy their lives in blissful romance without a care for much of anything else.”

Nova furrowed her brow. “That… that does sound horrible. Do you have any idea how to stop it?”

“No. All I can do is detect it, and only barely. Whatever it is, it’s everywhere – even on you – but it’s ambient unless there’s a click going on. It’s as if some fundamental force of the universe is forcing ponies together!” Starlight sighed. “I… I really don’t know why I brought you in here. You can’t help me.”

“…Maybe you just needed someone to agree with you?”

Starlight smiled. “Yeah. Maybe. Nopony else has ever agreed…”

“Starlight, is there… Anypony else like you?”

Starlight shook her head. “No. I used to go around, trying to preach to ponies about what I saw. Nopony ever listened. It was like they couldn’t. Many times I could barely listen to myself…”

Nova put a hoof on her back. “Hey, you tried. I’m not sure we can do anything against this force… But we can get you out of here. We once met a world filled with double-talking manipulative liar ponies. One of them decided she didn’t like what her universe had for her, so she left. Version of Fluttershy who goes by the name Lieshy now. She’s part of a team that explores the multiverse.”

“You… You’re really offering me a way out?” Starlight asked.

“I don’t see why not. You obviously aren’t happy here. And… no offense, I don’t even think our more technologically advanced allies could help with something like… this.” She gestured at the vast conspiracy wall Starlight had set up. “And I’m not sure the ponies here would like us even if we could.”

“That’s true… …I guess… It just feels so wrong throwing it all away, choosing a new name, and leaving the problem behind.”

“Some things… Can’t be fixed,” Nova said, hugging her counterpart close.

Starlight kissed her without thinking – then jumped into the air and placed herself against a wall. Pictures and papers fluttered to the floor, punctuating the scene in silence. Starlight clinged to the wall, her eyes darting in every direction. “THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN. OKAY? OKAY?”

Nova wiped the kiss off her check and shook her head. “There… There really is a problem here.”

Starlight blushed furiously, like so many ponies in this world did. “Y-yeah. I need out of here. I need to move, change my name, and... yeah. Yeah that sounds good. Starbeat. I can be Starbeat.”

Nova helped Starbeat up. “You’ve just chosen your name in a moment of emotional turmoil. Hope you don’t regret it.”

Starbeat took a breath. “Let’s… Let’s just get out of here. Grab your friends.”

Nova paled. “Wait… If you’re actively fighting your inner urge, what’s happening to them?”

“…Probably nothing good,” Starbeat said.

~~~

General Sunset and Toph were sitting at a bar. Sunset passed Toph a drink.

“Wow. I’ve had to keep reminding people that I’m blind, but never have I had to remind someone that I’m just a kid. Not even fourteen here! There’s no way I’m supposed to drink that!”

Sunset rammed her head into the table and groaned.

Toph completely forgot her earlier annoyance and laughed. “That can’t be easy on your antlers.”

“It isn’t,” Sunset confirmed, lifting her head up and downing her drink. She downed Toph’s as well, for good measure. “I’m just a little sick of not getting any information about the Sage.”

“I think we’ve gotten plenty of information!” Toph said. “Let’s see… She’s an oculus, she likes to grab ponies who think they’re heroes and manipulate them into giving her magic artifacts, she can probably see into the future, and she’s got some kind of evil plan!”

“We’re not even sure it is an evil plan, Toph.”

Toph shrugged, kicking her feet up onto the bar. “It seems pretty obvious to me that she’s up to no good. She royally screwed up the Hub, took the diamond, and had you and Applejack at each other’s throats for years!”

Sunset nodded. “Fair point. You really know how to cut right to the meat of the issue, don’t you?”

“I do. Especially when I’m on a planet that has almost no meat. Why do only mawlie joints ever have anything succulent?”

Sunset rolled her eyes, not dignifying the question with a response.

Toph suddenly sat up, alert. “Somebody big is coming.”

“How far?” Sunset asked, preparing a few anticipatory spells.

“Far, but moving fast.”

Sunset could feel the earth shaking with the hoofsteps of whoever was coming. Every patron in the bar turned to the main doors. They were gently opened, revealing a gigantic pony in full plate armor made of a white metal. A tremendous warhammer floated in the armored behemoth’s telekinesis, ready to smash at a moment’s notice. The pony walked up to Sunset and Toph and set the hammer on the ground.

“Wow. Big guy,” Toph said.

The ‘big guy’ removed the helmet and set it down – revealing a mare inside with a purple mane, white coat, and blue eyes. Her head looked too small for the armor she was in. “I am no guy, little one. I am Lady Rarity.”

“Oh. Yeah, weirdest Rarity so far,” Toph commented.

“…What?”

“Nothing,” Sunset said. “What do you want from us?”

“I hear you’ve been asking around about the Sage. I can tell you a bit about her.”

“She manipulated you too, huh?” Toph said. “Apparently that’s going around.”

“She did a little more than that,” Rarity said. “I knew her when she was young. She betrayed me to embark on the path she currently walks.”

Sunset’s ears perked up. She shook her head, trying to clear her head of inebriation. “This is new. Continue.”

“I’m not giving it to you for nothing. I’ll tell you all I know, but only if Toph here agrees to meet with a friend of mine.”

“Tell us who this friend is,” Sunset demanded.

Toph folded her arms. “I can make my own choices, Sunset. I’ll go regardless of who it is, so long as I’ll be able to come back.”

Rarity nodded. “You have my word as a Lady that you will be returned before the day is out. She only wishes one conversation with you, to give you some insight. She does not want to get involved with the military.”

“Oh, so she’s a criminal?” Sunset said.

“Yeah, obviously,” Toph said, waving her hand. “I accept!”

“Toph-“

“Too late, already did, spill the beans lady. …That sounds a lot lamer when your actual title is Lady.”

Rarity nodded. “Pinkie and I were born in the town of Serville. It was a small town, out of the way, everything was self-contained and we didn’t care too much about anything. She was one of two oculi in town, the other being her mother. From the beginning, everypony knew she was no ordinary oculus. She knew things she had never witnessed, was able to answer questions about the future, and regularly commented on how people were destined to act. Like she was some kind of prophet.”

“Were these predictions accurate?” Sunset asked.

“Most often, yes. But she made less and less of them as time went on, because ponies feared her for it. Meanwhile, I joined the town guard and protected us from whatever would come, namely wild magic creatures from the nearby forest.”

“Why do you ponies always build towns near dangerous forests?” Toph asked.

“I have no idea,” Rarity admitted. “I do know that life was good. Pinkie and I were friends, even. I accepted what she said without letting it get in the way of our companionship. But then… One day she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see.”

Sunset leaned in. “What?”

“I don’t know. She saw what she called ‘the truth of the world’. It was apparently terrifying and angering. She told me, that day, that we were going to find a way to change the truth. After that day she never told me anything else about what she’d seen, no matter how much I asked. She just told me that she’d become aware of several interesting magical artifacts, and would appreciate it if I could help her find them.”

“The question is why she did that, though…” Sunset said.

“I do not know, to this day, what her use for them was. All I know was that we adventured, collected then, and she put them all together in some kind of Mechanism. She would never tell me what the Mechanism was for, but I trusted her. This was a mistake. Our friendship ended the day she said she needed a recently deceased pony. I destroyed the Mechanism in a fit of rage and she vanished the day after that.”

“So, she’s probably building something to change the ‘truth of the world’,” Toph said. “Uh… Yeah I got nothing. What does that mean?”

Sunset furrowed her brow. “I don’t know. Only Armonia knows the truth of the world…”

“Hey, why don’t you ask her? She’s like, the guardian spirit of this world, right?”

“I don’t know how to contact the Goddess. I’d have to speak to the Queen, and I’m not sure even she knows.”

“Well, guess where we’re going next then?” Toph said. “The palace! Well, after I talk with mysterious criminal pony.”

“It should not be long,” Rarity said. “I will perform the teleport now if you don’t mind.”

Toph shrugged. Sunset fixed Rarity with a steeled look. “If you don’t bring her back, I can and will bring the entire might of Lai’s army crashing down on you.”

“I understand.” With a flash of light, Toph and Rarity were somewhere else, underground. The only other pony there was a pink pony with arcs coming out of her side.

“Ah, you’re that Starlight that’s the Arcei!” Toph said, pointing. “I’ve heard about you!”

“Most of that is all wrong,” Starlight said. “I’m also going by Starcei now, since the dimensions don’t appear to be going away.”

“Fair enough,” Toph said, tapping her foot on the ground. “We’re just under the bar, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” Starcei said. “All we need is for Sunset not to be here. She would likely kill me on sight.”

“Why do the ponies hate you guys so much, anyway?”

“An Arcei can only be created through the destruction of a holy Rune. Naturally, the destruction of those Runes is frowned upon. While most younger Arcei would probably get a pass, I’m the inventor, so I have a death sentence twenty times over.”

“Harsh.”

“Not really. Thousands did die from what I did.”

“…Should I be concerned?”

“Not at the moment. I just want something from you. Feel free to refuse.”

“What?”

“I want you to help the Arcei,” Starcei said. “Everypony hates them. Tell them they can leave this world. They at least need the opportunity.”

“…Sure,” Toph said. “No problem with that.”

“Good. Rarity will take you back now. I won’t hold it against you if you fail to save them all. I just wanted you to be thinking about it.”

“Can I tell Sunset about this, or…?”

“That is up to you. You can tell her I talked to you, or not. I’ll be gone by the time she can react.” She nodded to Rarity. “Take her back.”

Toph and Rarity were back in the bar. Sunset blinked. “That was fast.”

“It was a quick talk,” Toph said.

“Who with?”

“Oh, you know, public enemy number one. Starlight the Arcei.”

Sunset’s eyes twitched. “…She’s gone already, isn’t she.”

“Yep.” Toph tapped her foot on the ground and detected no Starcei at all. “She’s gone.”

Sunset glared at Rarity. “I could question you about this.”

“And I couldn’t tell you anything.”

“Fine.” Sunset walked towards the door. “Come on Toph, we’re leaving. The Palace calls us.”

Toph shrugged. “Right behind you, steamy.”

~~~

“So, your parents exhibited a full life-long devotion,” Twilight the unicorn commented. “Describe to me what that was like.”

“That’s… Kinda their business, don’t you think?” Twilight the alicorn responded.

The unicorn shrugged. “I’m just trying to get a read on you. I think I’m forming a picture of your hidden preferences, but I need to be sure since you’re such an unusual case.”

Twilight took a big breath. “Okay. I can best describe their relationship as one where my mom dragged dad everywhere and dad kept her from blowing everything up.”

“…Interesting description.”

“Were your parents similar?”

“Well, I guess? They were only together for a total of about two years during my childhood, and that was spread out over two different stretches of time.”

“I want to tell you I’m sorry, but I have a feeling you’d just consider that ‘normal’.”

“Yep!”

Twilight shook her head. “Okay, next.”

“Okay, so, when you think of a-“

Nova and Starbeat burst into the library at the same time.

Twilight turned to look at the two of them, able to identify Nova by the lack of goggles. “…What’s wrong?”

“This entire world has a ‘curse’ of some sort on it!” Nova said.

“Oh no,” the unicorn said. “She got to you? I thought you were different!”

“You can shut up, shipper!” Starbeat shouted.

Nova nudged her. “Not cool.”

Starbeat took a breath and swallowed. “Sorry, Twilight. But it’s true.”

Twilight looked at Nova. “What kind of curse?”

Nova shook her head. “It’s a confusing one, but it’s something that affects everypony here. Romance is a driving force in this world because something forces it on them. A force that pushes ponies in situations to click and feel a deep, powerful connection all the time.”

Twilight nodded. “I mean, that makes sense, but how can you be sure?”

Nova pointed at Starbeat. “Starbeat here, er… showed a display of affection seconds after explaining the problem to me, even though she clearly didn’t really want to. Apparently the force latched onto her elation of being believed for the first time in forever and made a click. Which I’m pretty sure is still happening given the way she keeps glancing at me.”

“I’m sorry!” Starbeat yelled, covering her eyes. “I can’t stop staring…”

The unicorn furrowed her brow. “This pairing could work, actually… Just need to get you past the conspiracy stage, and since you’re of the same gender there’s no danger of inbreeding…”

Twilight stuck her tongue out in disgust. “Are you… Are you really going there now? Seriously?”

“Er, yeah?”

Twilight turned to Nova and Starbeat. “I think you two are right. This just isn’t natural. Is there anything we can do?”

“Already talked about that,” Nova said. “We don’t think so. And I don’t think these ponies want us to anyway. I just promised to take Starbeat out of here. We need to find the others before something else happens.”

The unicorn blinked. “…So… You’re taking Star..beat off our hooves? Good! She’s been nothing but a nuisance!”

Starbeat looked crestfallen. Twilight shook her head in shame at her counterpart. “I… I tried to be accepting of you, to be more understanding, to think that maybe I’ve been a hypocrite all this time, but… I can’t do that anymore. Twilight Sparkle, you’re so focused on romance that you’re forgetting there’s other things. You just called a pony a nuisance in order to hurt them! That’s not right!”

“But it’s the truth,” the unicorn responded.

Twilight shook her head. “…I really do feel sorry for you. But you appear to enjoy where you are. We’re going to leave and not come back. You won’t have to deal with us challenging your beliefs ever again.”

Twilight the unicorn looked mad. “But I didn’t even get to try anything out on you!”

“If that’s why you’re upset…” Nova didn’t finish the question. “Come on, Twilight, let’s find the others.”

They left the library, slamming the door behind them. Unicorn Twilight never came out after them.

“There’s Pinkie,” Nova said, pointing at a pink blob on the side of the road. “…She doesn’t look good.”

Pinkie shot right up to Nova. “I’ve seen things, Nova. Terrible, terrible, disturbing things.” Her eye twitched.

“…At least your mane isn’t flat, so…”

Pinkie nodded vigorously. “Yep. Silver lining. Heheh…” She shook her head. “Can we go yet? The universe wants ponies to love me. It’s unnerving.”

Fluttershy landed next to Pinkie, not even trying to hide the fact that she’d been crying heavily. “I… Yes, I need to go as well.”

“We all do,” Nova said, shaking her head.

The four of them walked toward the diner just as Rarity and Thunder Lane walked out.

Rarity waved to them. “Ah, girls! I want you to meet Thunder Lane, simply the most dashing of stallions and-“ she saw the depressed, angry, sad, and crazy faces of her friends. “…What in Celestia’s name happened to all of you!?”

Pinkie grabbed her head. “I DON’T KNOW! Is this a comedy? A social commentary? A rant? A parody? Am I supposed to be serious or not? Is there even a right answer!?” She rammed her head into the ground again and let out a muffled scream.

Rarity turned to Twilight. “Twilight…”

Twilight sighed. “You aren’t going to like this Rarity. This universe is ‘cursed’ by a ‘romance’ plague of some kind. It forces relationships and romantic connections to happen extremely often and without restraint.” Twilight glanced at her friends. “I think we all experienced something less than… pleasant because of that.”

Rarity turned to Thunder Lane. “Well… Girls, I assure you that Thunder Lane is not subject to such a curse-“

Twilight turned to Thunder Lane. “Thunder Lane, how long do you intend to stay with Rarity?”

“As long as both of us want. What kind of question is that?”

Twilight sighed. “Let me guess. You’d no longer want it next time you felt a click?”

“Naturally.”

Rarity stared at him aghast.

“…What’s the problem Rarity? That’s romance 101! The-“

Rarity slapped him. He was apparently so startled by this he passed out.

“Why… Does life… Have to be so cruel…” Rarity spat, trying to hold back her tears. “I just wanted to be loved, Twilight! Why couldn’t I just enjoy that! Why?”

Twilight hugged her close. “Because it wasn’t real. Not like the friendship that we all share.”

Nova turned to Starbeat. “...Is it?”

Starbeat lit her horn, scanning for the force. “…There’s more of the force around you than there is normally, but… Nowhere near as much as when there’s a click. I don’t think you’re being forced into your companionship.”

“Don’t think…” Rarity said, pulling back from the hug. “This… I think I understand why Pinkie didn’t know what to think of this. She’s… always seen a bit more than we have. She’s probably asking questions a lot deeper than we are.”

Pinkie rolled over and gasped. “Word of advice, don’t go that deep into the thinking pool. Bad things lurk there.”

Twilight chuckled. “I... I’m not sure what to make of this whole adventure. I’m not sure what to make of romance anymore, or even friendship. But I do know one thing. We do not want to be like these ponies here. Perhaps we have a lesser curse in our world, one of Friendship. We should be aware that might be the case. There should be other things important to use besides friendship. It’s not all there is.”

Everypony looked at each other like they weren’t quite ready to believe it, but they realized that not being ready to believe it was a possible sign of it being true.

Rarity sighed. “Just… Just take us home Twilight. I have a date with a drama couch and several gallons of ice cream.”

“I need to organize a normal town-wide party,” Pinkie added.

“I need to go talk to Rainbow Dash…” Fluttershy commented.

Twilight smiled sadly. “Nova?”

“Going to teach Starbeat here some things. You?”

“I… I’m going to reread all those letters I sent to Celestia on friendship. Probably talk to her about this as well.” She pulled out the dimensional device and dialed Equestria. “…I hope the ponies here can… I don’t know, live well? I... I just feel sorry for this place.”

“It’s like someone made a wish, and it went horribly wrong,” Rarity observed.

“Yeah. It does look a lot like that. Suspiciously like that…” Pinkie muttered.

The six ponies left through the portal, leaving the world obsessed with romance behind for as long as they could manage.

A certain unicorn named Twilight Sparkle sat in her library, looking at all her notes.

For the slightest of moments, she wondered if Starbeat had been right. That if maybe something was wrong with their universe.

…Nah, that’d be silly.

017 - Omnic and Otherwise

Bon Bon sat at her desk, staring at the Mirror Portal. She was not the only ‘secretary’ watching the relic anymore – shifts had been arranged, and usually there were two or three on duty at any given time. For the moment, however, she was at the desk alone. Nobody had come through the Mirror Portal in some time, probably since it was in its “Binary” connection period, and the Binaries didn’t want people without invitations showing up. It was due to switch locations in a few minutes, however.

Bon Bon looked at all the papers in front of her. She had mixed feelings about all the data she gathered from those who came and went. The notes were perhaps the most important pieces of paper for Equestria, and yet most everything on them was boring. Occasionally there was someone suspicious who needed to be watched for a while, but for the most part it was just… notes. Notes on people.

Then again, she supposed if she kept getting bored the Pinkie Sage might show up again and trash the joint. It was only a matter of time before something else like that happened. Maybe she should revel in the present dull moment…

A swiveling office chair slid up next to Bon Bon’s desk, Lyra the unicorn lounging on it. “Hey, Sweetie, when do you get off work?”

Bon Bon facehooved. “Lyra…”

“What?”

“You know what.”

“You also know there’s no way anypony knows what that means. This sounds like a perfectly normal, albeit sappy, conversation.”

Bon Bon raised an eyebrow. “It did until that moment.”

“…Horsefeathers. Now they’re onto me.”

Bon Bon rolled her eyes. “My shift ends in an hour.”

“Mind if I stick around ‘til then?”

Bon Bon should have said no, but she was already a little bored, nothing was happening, and Lyra’s adorable expression was an unfair weapon. “You can stay.”

“Woo!” Lyra slid her office chair next to Bon Bon’s. Luckily the desk could seat two easily. “All right, so, what’re the secrets of the day?”

Bon Bon shrugged, lifting up a piece of paper. “Not much. The Binaries are hairy and grumpy, as usual.”

“Aren’t they always?”

“Lyra, have you even met one?”

Lyra pursed her lips. “No… But I hear a lot about them! Secluded, xenophobic, and paranoid!”

“Close,” Bon Bon said. “What most people don’t realize is that they’re scared. They were scared of magic because they have no way to stop it. Now they’re scared of everything because their edge – their technology – is far outclassed by that of the Tau’ri. They feel like the multiverse is a competition and that they are slated to lose.”

“Huh. I guess so… Wouldn’t they outclass our Earth, though? I mean, I did a lot of studying of their culture, and ‘Earth Vitis’ isn’t exactly an advanced or magical place.”

“They don’t need to be dead last to be afraid.”

“Good point…” Lyra scratched her chin, looking around them. “You know, all these humans walking about are much less of a big deal than I thought they’d be. Ponies aren’t really surprised they exist, and you can see one walking around Ponyville on any given day. Yet when I was all talking about humans I was seen as crazy.”

Bon Bon shook her head. “Ponies believe what they see.”

“And that includes you,” Lyra prodded.

“Er… Yes,” Bon Bon said, flustered. “I… Well I’m still not sure there were ancient humans on Equestria, but humans certainly do exist. Again, I’m sorry.”

Lyra smirked. “It’s okay. Didn’t really mind that much that ponies didn’t believe me… Most of the time. That said… Humans are a lot less interesting than I thought they’d be.”

“How so?”

Lyra put a hoof to her chin. “Well, I don’t know, I think I was expecting more than a bunch of apes with big imaginations? I was expecting a race that could mold worlds into what they wanted, not these people who regularly fight among themselves over every little thing.”

Bon Bon smirked. “They’re just different, Lyra. Humans are generally more innovative and determined than we are, though this comes with stubbornness and more violent tendencies. But think about it from their perspective. We have magic and significantly tighter ‘community’ than they do, but we’re also a bit too trusting and can be emotionally compromised somewhat easily. That said, I am just speaking in generalizations here.”

“Hrm…” Their conversation was brought to an end when the Mirror Portal changed its destination to ‘Earth Tau’ri’. Like clockwork – which the Tau’ri were so fond of – Daniel Jackson and a small team of Stargate Command personnel walked into the Hub. Daniel walked right up to Bon Bon. “Contact Twilight Sparkle, we’re requesting the assistance of her team.”

Bon Bon raised an eyebrow. “What for?”

“We’ve been shot at by an alternate universe and would like some assistance on getting them to think before they shoot.”

Lyra turned to Bon Bon. “That sounds like a perfectly valid reason to me. “

Bon Bon nodded, pulling out her dimensional device. “Give me a moment, I’ll pass on the message.” She left, leaving Lyra with Daniel.

Lyra looked at the desk in front of her. “…She does know I have no idea how to do this job, right?”

Daniel shrugged. “From what little I know of her, that does seem like something she’d know and purposefully exploit in an act of petty revenge.”

“…Greeeeeat…”

~~~

“Okay, so…” A human man with strangely fluffy hair said, adjusting his General’s uniform as he paced in front of a computer screen. “Dimension E-17 is the topic of discussion today.”

Pinkie raised a hoof. “General Landry?”

Landry pointed at her. “Yes?”

“Why give it such a boring number of a name?”

Landry shrugged. “It’s how we do things. If the natives have a name for it, we’ll call it that, but at the moment such a designation is not really an option.”

“Since they shot at you,” Rarity supplemented.

“Yeah, I’m curious about how that happened,” Fluttershy said. “Did you provoke them in some way? We’ve done that…”

Landry blinked. “You all have never been in an official briefing before, have you?”

Twilight smiled sheepishly. “Nope! I just tell everypony what we’re doing and then we go do it.”

“You ponies could stand to get more organized…”

“It does prevent there from being tons of paperwork,” Daniel pointed out.

“Much as I hate to admit it, paperwork exists for a reason.”

“And there is tons of paperwork,” Twilight reminded them. “Spike just does most of it, and it’s nowhere near as esoteric as your monstrosities.”

“Ooo! Esoteric!” Pinkie clicked her tongue. “Nice word!”

“Thank you.”

Landry shrugged. “This is certainly one of the more interesting briefings I’ve had… Anyway, yesterday, at approximately fifteen-hundred hours, the Hammond entered a new universe that was near our own as part of a routine scanning mission. The crew was able to determine that they were around another version of Earth, like most universes around here, before they got shot at by surface weapons. Their weapons were not large enough to be a significant threat to the Hammond’s shields, but they were large enough to grab our attention. The Hammond left the universe after leaving a ‘we come in peace’ message that got no response.”

“Could be the translation spell just didn’t have their language figured out,” Twilight suggested. “Actually, I have no idea if the translation spell works on long-range communication or not…”

Landry nodded. “Something to look into. Regardless, we attempted to take a physical team through a dimensional device to the universe, and were shot at by automated turrets the second we stepped through the gate. No fatalities, but a couple men were shot up pretty badly.”

“So what are we doing here, then?” Rarity asked.

“The idea is simple – we’re going to go in through the dimensional device again, this time with you ponies though. You can easily defend against turrets, but more importantly you’ll give them pause because, well, you’re ponies. Use those friend-making skills of yours and see if we can get them to stop shooting at us.”

Pinkie grinned. “You can count on us!”

“Is anybody coming with us?” Twilight asked.

Daniel shook his head. “It’s possible they just don’t trust us, for whatever reason. You five will be it. But we’ll be ready if you need to fall back.”

Twilight smirked. “In that case, we accept this mission. Time to go see the inhabitants of… E-17. What’s the E stand for anyway?”

“Earth,” Landry said. “Seventeenth Earth we’ve found with your devices.”

“Ah. I see. To the gate room then?”

“To the gate room,” Daniel confirmed. He moved to lead them to the room, but Nova decided it’d just be faster to teleport them.

Daniel frowned. “…Is there any way to block teleportation?”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “Yes, but the spells are complicated. Usually you just lock the unicorn’s magic if you don’t want them teleporting…”

“How do those anti-teleport spells work?”

“It creates a field of magical energy that prevents a connection from being able to form between point A and B. I don’t know of any non-magical way to create this effect though, sorry.”

“You mind teleport-proofing some places in the base?”

Twilight smiled. “I don’t mind at all. It’ll take some time to make them permanent, though, especially considering how little magic there is to work with here.”

“Thanks. That’ll get the paranoid security people off our backs.”

“Why do you care so much about security?” Fluttershy asked.

“Have you ever had someone try to chase you back through a portal and take over your world?”

Nova nodded. “Once or twice.”

“You’ve been lucky. Happens all the time here. Most of them never make it through the gate, but those that do cause a lot of damage.”

“Our corner of the multiverse does seem a lot more friendly,” Fluttershy admitted. “The biggest problem we’ve ever had to face is Ba’al. And you’re helping with that.”

Twilight pulled out her dimensional device. “So… What are the coordinates to ‘E-17’?”

Daniel smiled. “You can find them in the directory, but we won’t need to use yours. We have one of the devices installed in the ceiling. Walter should have it dial E-17 anytime now… Stand back, just in case they start shooting on connection.”

The dimensional device activated, creating a large portal at the base of the ramp leading to the stargate. Daniel poked his head around the edge of it. “No bullets. That’s a good sign.” He gestured for them to go on through.

Twilight raised a shield around them just in case, and the five of them stepped through.

“We’ll reconnect in fifteen minutes if you aren’t back,” Daniel said. “I suggest reporting in before then so we don’t cause drama.”

Twilight nodded. “Gotcha.” She led her four friends through the portal, looking around cautiously. The world they came out in was a ghost town. Large pine trees grew around old, crumbling concrete walls. There was evidence of a recent firefight – maybe a day old. The concrete walls were riddled with bullet holes, and there were a couple of broken machines that resembled mounted turrets.

Nothing fired at them. In the distance, they could hear a bird chirping.

Nova activated the drone, tossing it into the air. “I guess you can drop the shield now?”

Twilight cautiously dropped the shield – nothing fired at them.

Everything looked abandoned.

Pinkie blinked. “I don’t see anyone here. What were they so concerned about?”

“Maybe whoever was here thought they’d won the fight…” Rarity mused.

“Or they disabled the turrets and didn’t realize it?” Nova suggested.

“I don’t know,” Twilight said. “All I know is that we’re going to have a look around. Let’s not split up this time, okay?”

~~~

“Hey, Genji, maybe we should split up! Cover more ground that way!”

The cyborg-ninja took a long, deep, annoyed breath. He looked to his teammate with an exasperated expression, though since his entire face was covered by a metal mask akin to the rest of his body armor, his look went unseen.

She deduced that he was annoyed anyway. She put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrow – an expression Genji could see through her orange-tinted goggles. “What’s wrong with that Genji?”

Genji stood up, craning his neck around a nearby concrete wall. “There was gunfire exchanged, Tracer. We don’t want to get ambushed by Talon or… something else.”

Tracer took her hands off her hips and shrugged. “Hey, you know if I’m ambushed I can always just go back.” She tapped a glowing blue machine affixed to the coat on her chest. “Recall! Saving Tracer’s life since-“

“You and I both know that isn’t perfect. We can’t take the chances.”

“Oh come on! There’s not even anything here anymore! I’m not even convinced there was anything to begin with! We’re in Colorado. What’s important in Colorado?”

“We are on the site of what was once a United States military base, one of several that were destroyed in the Omnic Crisis.”

“Oh,” Tracer said. “…So secret government secrets here?”

“That’s the thing. We don’t know. So we have to be cautious.”

“…Fine… But how long do we keep looking around before we can tell Winston that there’s nothing here and that report was completely bogus?”

Genji made no response. He just moved forward, stealthily, cautiously, while Tracer just followed behind him not making any attempt to be silent whatsoever. “Genji, why are you being so slow? We’ve got no-“

“I’m looking for interesting details,” Genji defended, even though he was mostly moving silently by habit. He pointed between two trees. “See that over there? That’s a busted automatic turret left over from the Omnic Crisis.”

“Oh! Cool!” She lifted up her leg, preparing to dash for it. Genji grabbed her.

“Tracer…”

“Fine, where’s the vantage point you had in mind?”

Genji pointed to a still-standing concrete building. It was missing a roof but the second floor had plenty of cover in it. Genji leaped in one of the windows gracefully – Tracer just phased in an out of existence, effectively teleporting next to him with a quick swish of blue energy.

They looked through a window that, somehow, still had all its glass in it. They could see a ‘clearing’ of sorts made from a set of walls that once made up a storage facility. Genji used his cybernetic vision to scan the area, noting four separate busted turrets and a lot of bullet holes. The damage was fresh – within the day, at least.

Tracer frowned. “Okay, so this is where the thing happened. But why?”

“The warehouse might have held something valuable…” Genji suggested. “But I don’t see evidence of movement anywhere else but this small area…”

“So, we dealing with another ninja then?”

“Even I leave tracks of some sort,” Genji muttered. He stood up, ready to go closer and learn more. But then he saw space itself rippling slightly. He sat down, quickly, pushing Tracer lower as well. They kept their heads as low as possible, staring through the window at the space below.

A hole in reality opened up, showing the two of them an interesting interior dominated by a very large ring-like device covered in strange markings and orange chevrons.

“What is that?” Tracer asked.

“Shh,” Genji hissed.

A few moments later, some beings came out of the side of the portal opposite them. The idea of a two-sided portal of infinite thinness boggled Genji’s mind slightly. Clearly, however, he had more important things to consider besides the bizarre application of physics.

The creatures who came through were horses – no, wait, they were a little too small to be horses. Ponies. But even that wasn’t quite right – their eyes were too large and forward facing, their mane and coat colors were far too bright, and there were wings and horns on some of them.

He quickly began to assess them – they had come through in a defensive formation, a purple forcefield around them all. They had taken a quick look around, launched a small drone into the air, and then dropped the shield in favor of looking around. They were talking amongst themselves, though Genji had no idea what the language was. They were unarmed save for the drone itself, and Genji wasn’t even sure it had a weapons system.

The purple one was clearly the leader, as could be inferred from the way all the others looked at her. Her position might have been due to her unique combination of both a horn and wings, or because she was the one with a strange device held in her hooves… somehow. She walked with confidence and curiosity, her eyes a strange mixture of childlike innocence and deep thought. The pink unicorn was Genji’s best guess for a right hand man – er, pony. She stayed near the purple one, commenting on things she said, and seemed to be suggesting possible courses of action or answers to questions.

The others Genji couldn’t really place as part of the unit. The white one walked with grace and confidence, and had a bit of style to her the others didn’t. Perhaps the diplomat or communicator? The yellow one talked the least, but was by no means timid or uncertain, though she was clearly more jumpy and not trained. And then… the pink one.

The pink one bounced around like she was made of rubber, talked a lot, and at one point pulled a pastry out of her mane and ate it. Genji was certain it could not have been there before.

“…What are they?” Tracer whispered.

“Ponies. Unicorns. ‘Magical’.”

“They’re adorable.”

“They could also be dangerous. They are exhibiting abilities which I cannot explain.”

“You can’t explain your dragon sword.”

“The dragon is dangerous.”

Tracer frowned. “…I think I’m going to go say hi.”

“…Just because they look harmless doesn’t mean they aren’t.”

“Well how are we going to find out if we don’t interact?”

Genji nodded. “Go ahead then. I’ll bail you out if you need it.”

Tracer waved. “Pfft, as if!”

Genji considered if it would have been more appropriate to say ‘when you need it’, but that was neither here nor there. Not to mention the fact that Tracer had already left, teleporting on top of a crumbling wall and waving to the ponies. “Hello!”

The ponies tensed at first, and for a split second Genji moved his hand to his sword’s hilt, preparing for a fight. However, their nervous expressions vanished rather quickly as they realized Tracer was just waving to them with a smile. They waved back and said something in their bizarre, alien language.

“Sorry, ‘fraid I can’t understand a word you’re saying!” Tracer said, leaping down to be closer to the ponies. She pointed at herself. “Tracer.”

“Twilight,” the purple pony said, pointing to herself, and then slowly introducing the other ponies as well. Twilight pointed to her mouth and rolled her hoof in a circle, while talking rather quickly. The pink one – Pinkie – joined in as well.

“My, I haven’t the foggiest idea what you want from me!” Tracer said.

Genji sighed, accessing his radio. “Tracer, they want you to keep talking so they can work out your language.”

“Oh!” Tracer laughed. “Oh that makes a lot of sense. Hi! I guess I’m just supposed to talk to you while… whatever you have translates. My gosh, a translation device would be great for the world, I mean given our job it’s rather annoying to have to find-“

“Find!” Twilight spoke in English, clear enough for everyone to hear.

“Oh! It seems to be working! Brilliant!” Tracer clapped. “Hey Genji! Come down here, I want to see if-“

“Don’t reveal my location to them, I’m - dammit, they see me.”

Nova waved at him and said something. The words “safe” and “afraid” came through. She was probably telling him not to be afraid. The realization that she thought he was afraid annoyed him, because he was not. He was just being cautious. But at this point hiding was no longer helpful, so he leaped out of the ceilingless vantage point and landed squarely next to Tracer. The motion made a few of the ponies jump, but not as tensely as when they’d seen Tracer.

Tracer playfully nudged Genji. “This is Genji.”

“Hi Genji!” Pinkie said, grinning.

Twilight lit her horn, looking at Tracer, then to Genji. She said something about “unusual” and “power.”

Genji looked at Tracer. “A full translation would be appreciated. You know what to do.”

Tracer took a deep breath and launched into a long rant about how cute Winston could be. “He’s just the biggest, coolest, smartest gorilla around! He’s definitely in charge but it’s just so hard to take him seriously sometimes because of the way he opens the peanut butter and the bananas, and, well, even though he saved my life, which I am eternally grateful for, there’s just something about that cute ape expression that just… Oh I don’t know how to describe it, you’d have to meet him!”

Genji facepalmed at her choice of topic.

About twenty seconds later, Fluttershy raised a hoof. “So, I’m confused, since I only got half the conversation… Are we talking about a person or a gorilla?”

Tracer blinked. “Oh. It’s done then? Ah, well, Winston’s both! A gorilla with a brilliant mind! Born on the moon!”

Fluttershy blinked. “That just gives me more questions.”

Genji folded his hands together. “You can ask later. Right now, we need to figure out what you are and what you’re doing here.”

Twilight cleared her throat. “We are a group of interdimensional explorers from another universe entirely.”

Genji nodded. Considering that they were sapient ponies, that wasn’t such a crazy idea.

“With me? Good. In this particular instance we weren’t just exploring random universes, we were asked to come here since another set of explorers got shot at every time they came here.” Twilight gestured at the turrets. “They figured we’d need to talk some people down, but so far that hasn’t seemed necessary.”

Tracer gasped. “They shot at you? How could they!”

Rarity shook her head. “No no, dear, they were humans, just like you and… I presume Genji here.”

Genji made no comment. Tracer gasped. “My stars, your voice is so refined!”

Rarity beamed. “Finally! Someone who gets it! It takes a bit of work to get it this way. Your accent is delightful as well, by the by.”

“And once again I am forced to wonder how the spell deals with accents,” Twilight muttered.

“Spell…?” Tracer asked.

“Ah, right. We’re magical creatures, using the magic we were born with to translate all languages we come in contact with. I… Figured you’d actually know what magic was, considering Genji has a somewhat large amount in him.”

Tracer whipped to look at Genji. “…Dragons.”

Genji nodded slowly. “Presumably. I am far from a normal individual, Twilight Sparkle. Only members of the Shamada clan are known to have this ‘magic’, as you say.”

Pinkie grinned. “That just makes your magic more unique!”

“It is a proud heritage.”

Twilight smiled. “Well, it looks like there’s nothing to worry about here. We can talk more, but we need to report back to those who hired us.”

“And we should probably call in someone qualified to deal with a first-contact scenario!” Tracer said, nudging Genji. “Make the call!”

“In a minute,” Genji said. “I want to see how they do this.”

Twilight held out the dimensional device and activated it with her magic. The space rippled again, tearing a hole through existence, revealing the same interior as before, albeit seen from the other side. A human man blinked. “I take it that went well?”

“Very,” Twilight said, smiling. “Daniel, this is Tracer and Genji. Tracer, Genji, this is Daniel Jackson from Stargate Command.”

Tracer nudged Genji. “Hey. Look at that thing printed on his shirt.” She was referring to an upside down V with a circle on top of it. “Look familiar?”

Genji nodded. “That it does. Mister Jackson, would you by chance have anything to do with a ship that appeared in orbit about a day ago?”

Jackson stepped through the portal as it closed behind him. “Yes, actually. We tried to contact your world but you shot at us.”

“Some of us are trigger happy. Some of us also thought you may have been an attack.”

“Do you have alien problems?” Daniel asked.

Genji shook his head. “Not that I know of. But if anyone were to create a spaceship, it would be Omnics.”

“…What are Omnics?” Pinkie asked.

“I should not be the one to answer that question,” Genji said. “I also should not be the one making first contact. Excuse me while I contact base and get someone more… qualified.”

Daniel nodded. “I understand. I can wait here as long as you need.”

Genji stepped outside the walls, leaving Tracer to talk with the ponies and Mister Jackson. He activated his long-distance radio. “Overwatch command, come in.”

A deep but friendly voice came in on the other end. “This is Winston. What have you found?”

“It’s not Talon, nor is it Omnic. But it is something. We’ve got what are essentially aliens from another universe.”

“…That’s not what I was expecting.”

“They are responsible for the ship in orbit, so they have access to advanced technology, though they don’t seem to know what an Omnic is.”

“Could be they just know them by another name… This is exciting. How are they reacting to you?”

“Well enough. They seem to be friendly. I am requesting we get a qualified diplomat here before Tracer causes some kind of cultural offense.”

“Backup is on its way. Mei and Zenyatta should be there within the hour.”

“Good. If you need me or Tracer for another mission, we can leave the moment they arrive.”

“Nothing’s happening at the moment. I am mildly surprised the data was legitimate, though. I was half-expecting a Talon ploy.”

“As was I. Tracer, evidently, was not.”

“I don’t think anyone could have predicted this.” Genji heard a few buttons getting pushed on the other end of the line. “Tell me about these otherworlders, I’m curious.”

~~~

While her friends talked with Genji and Tracer and waited for the others to arrive, Fluttershy found herself thinking. Thinking about the two people they’d met, and what else they knew about this world. Fluttershy had decided Tracer was a cross between Rarity and Pinkie Pie, a woman who had the qualities of both but not to the extremes they did. Excitable, stylish, optimistic, and a bit ‘fancy’ some of the time. She was trustworthy.

Genji was a lot harder to get a read on. Part of this was because his face was hidden behind a mask, but that wasn’t all. The cyborg-ninja didn’t talk too much, and only said what needed to be said. While Tracer was all about telling them about her life, Genji was silent, only stepping in to keep Tracer from giving a ‘bad impression’ of something.

He really didn’t want her talking about ‘Omnics’, whatever they were. Fluttershy wasn’t sure if it was something bad, or just controversial. Apparently she was destined to find out when the others arrived.

Fluttershy had managed to discern that the two of them were part of an organization called Overwatch, though as for what that organization did, she had no idea. Something that required ‘heroes’, considering Tracer’s constant overuse of the word. So they at least viewed themselves as good people, but… Well, Fluttershy wanted to trust them, but they’d been taken advantage of too many times at this point to just give new worlds the benefit of the doubt.

It was sad, really.

Tracer pointed at Twilight. “Hey, are all your names meant to be literal?”

Twilight blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re Twilight, and you have colors similar to the time of twilight, and have a butt-tattoo similar of stars.”

Nova snorted and Pinkie burst into laughter. Twilight blinked. “…I can’t believe I’ve never heard butt-tattoo before…”

“O’Neill calls them that when we aren’t looking,” Pinkie managed to say through her snorts.

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Of course he does… They’re actually called cutie marks.”

It was Tracer’s turn to snort, trying in vain not to laugh. Twilight facehooved. “All right then, the cycle of stupidity has made its rounds. But, yeah, I suppose our names are supposed to be literal, though not always.”

“Really?” Tracer said. “But I see a night-like Twilight, a star-like and colorful Nova, a cultured and ‘rare’ Rarity, a pink Pinkie, and a…” She looked at Fluttershy. “…Hrm. Okay, you’re the oddball. You don’t seem shy to me, just quiet.”

Fluttershy smiled. “Glad to hear that. I used to be really shy, but I worked most of it out.”

Tracer frowned. “Must be annoying to be called Fluttershy then.”

“…Why?”

“Everyone’s going to think you’re shy until you do something… uh… what’s the opposite of shy?”

“…Confident?” Nova suggested.

“There we go! Yeah, Fluttershy, the name doesn’t do you service! I thought I had to dance around you and be extra nice. Would have kept thinking that had you not spoken up those few times.”

Fluttershy nodded slowly. “I know…”

“We need to change our names anyway,” Nova said. “We have to be able to differentiate ourselves from our other universe doubles. I used to be Starlight, now I’m Nova.”

“I like my name, though,” Fluttershy said. “It’s… me.”

“Then just change it a little,” Tracer suggested. “Like… Only keep the parts that are still you! Like, oh… Just Flutter?”

“Or Flutters! Like what Dashie calls you!”

Fluttershy blinked. “I suppose that could work… Seems rather obvious now that you think about it.”

“You could replace ‘Shy’ with something,” Nova pointed out. “Remember Starbeat? Or Lieshy?”

Fluttershy shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m also not sure about ‘Flutters’…”

“The chances of you being able to shirk the name are minimal, dear,” Rarity said. “It’s why I’m not letting anypony suggest anything until I’m sure of what I want.”

Pinkie inched towards Rarity, breaking off from a one-sided conversation with Genji. “What about Ravish?”

“Pinkie, no.”

“Aw come on! I’ve already changed my name, why do you need to be the holdout?”

“No you haven’t,” Twilight said. “You tell us a name, then change it the next day. Last week you were Pinkus. There’s also been Punky, Prelude, Paparazzi, Pizza, Ponk, Ordvoir, Spanglish, and a number of others. Today you’re, apparently, Paroni. You need to settle.”

“Maybe you just need to settle for me!”

Tracer put her hand to her chin. “I wonder if there are alternate versions of me I’ll need to deal with…”

“There probably are,” Daniel said. “But you won’t have the same problem they do, since your universe isn’t surrounded by others almost exactly like it. I wouldn’t worry about changing your name unless you make a habit of running into yourself.”

“Knowing her, it’s not unlikely,” Genji offered. He tapped his helmet. “They’re almost here, by the way.”

Daniel stood up. “Should I be expecting anything weird?”

Tracer shrugged. “Well, Zenny’s not exactly ‘normal’, but he’s not scary either, so-“

A synthetic voice greeted all of their ears. “Not ‘normal’ or ‘scary’? My dear Tracer, that’s how you decide to describe me?”

Fluttershy turned to look at the newcomers. One was a cute, pudgy woman in a thick winter coat despite the slightly warm temperatures. The other, the one who’d spoken, was… a humanoid robot. He floated toward them, wearing only thin, loose pants similar to the robes of a monk. His upper body was metallic, filled with wires and pistons, yet he didn’t look bogged down by all the metal. His head was shiny, and instead of a face he had nine blue dots above two slits that could have been taken as either eyes or eyebrows.

“Oh. You’re a robot,” Rarity said, cocking her head. “Somehow that’s both completely unexpected and not that big of a deal.”

“Not that big of a deal?” Twilight blurted. “He’s a robot! Have any of us actually seen a fully self-autonomous intelligent machine before?”

Daniel raised his hand.

The floating robot monk pointed at Daniel. “Has your kind created machines like me?”

“No,” Daniel said, “We’ve just run into the creations of others.”

“And what were they like?”

Daniel let out a sharp breath of air. “No offense to you, but they were one of our major enemies.”

The robot nodded. “I do hope you can put that behind yourself. I am Zenyatta, agent of Overwatch, monk, and recenty, diplomat. To my left is Mei, a scientist who would be very happy if she could examine some of your devices at some point.”

Mei waved and smiled, clearly a bit nervous. Fluttershy waved back, trying to make her feel more welcome.

Twilight smiled at Zenyatta. “I take it Genji already told you our names?” Zenyatta nodded. “Then I guess it’s time for you to actually tell us about your world we’ve found ourselves in?”

Zenyatta pressed his hands together. “Travellers from afar, the story of our world is a complicated one, but it has been defined in recent years by a single issue – that of Omnics, and their relationship with humanity.”

“…You’re an Omnic, aren’t you?” Fluttershy asked.

“Yes. And that, friends, is a fact that gives many people fear, while others suffer hatred. You see, it was only a few decades ago that my kind was created – and that most of them declared war on humanity the world over. This Omnic Crisis, the war of man and machine, was horrendous, bloody, and caused more death than any other war in history. And that’s only counting the human casualties.”

“Oh,” Nova said. “That… That’s horrible.”

“That it was. I have never condoned the actions of my predecessors, but what’s done is done. The problem that faces us today is that Omnics and humans still don’t live in peace, and to make it worse the world doesn’t agree on a stance anymore. Nations like Japan are all for Omnic rights while Russia is fighting another war of man versus machine. You see, the discussion of Omnics is a difficult one likely to spark the worst of reactions from anyone. As outsiders, you could easily get the wrong idea from those who tell you. Omnics are not completely evil murderers. But we are not innocent.”

Rarity turned to Genji. “You were afraid you’d tell it wrong? Give us a bad idea?”

Genji nodded. “I am but a human infused with machines who barely knows his place in the world. Master is much wiser in the ways of the Omnics and humanity.”

“Do not put too much credit in my tale,” Zenyatta warned. “Even I am biased. Before you conclude, you should hear it from another. Our world is a turmoil of differing, strong opinions.”

Daniel nodded. “I plan on it. For now, though, we just need to talk about how to go forward with relations between our people from this point on, and to what exten-“

The sound of a gunshot rang through the air, ringing with the force of a sniper bullet. Zenyetta looked to his side, glancing at the shield the drone had created right in front of his face. “…Her.”

“Ambush!” Genji yelled, taking out his sword. Another shot rang out, and again the drone caught it. “Retreat!”

Twilight fumbled with the dimensional device, opening a portal back to Stargate Command. “Come on!”

“Not so fast…” a deep, haunting voice groaned. A misty shadow took form at the edge of their sights, taking the form of a man with a skull mask and two miniature shotguns. He fired them both at the group of humans, ponies, and Zenyatta. The drone could not catch all the bullets, but Genji leaped in with his sword to toss the shots back with a quick motion, the reflection added to by fire from Tracer’s miniature energy pistols.

Twilight finally managed to raise a magical shield around everyone, and Nova took the opportunity to use her magic to toss people back through the portal. A few more sniper shots went off, and the shadowy ‘man’ tried to phase through the shield, but their efforts were in vain. They all stumbled into Stargate Command and closed the portal behind them.

“It appears that Talon found us…” Genji said, sheathing his sword. “Widowmaker and Reaper at least, maybe others I couldn’t identify.”

“Talon?” Daniel asked, frowning.

“As I said, the world is in turmoil,” Zenyatta said. “There are misguided men who set themselves up as enemies.”

“I – and my people – will want to know more about them.”

“I will cooperate however I can.”

It was at this point Mei squeed. “Look at this device!” She pointed at the stargate and jumped. “It’s a teleporter of some kind isn’t it?”

“It’s a stargate,” Fluttershy said. “Takes you to other planets instantly.”

Mei’s jaw dropped. “…Tell me more.”

“I, uh… Don’t know much, actually.”

Nova raised an eyebrow at Daniel. “Should I just teleport everyone to the meeting room?”

“Yes!” Tracer said, clapping. “Do that! Do the teleport!”

Nova did.

~~~

General Sunset and Toph stood in front of the bars of a prison cell. Attempts to contact the Goddess Armonia had not gone well, which was to be expected, considering how mysterious she was. So they were visiting the prison for a possible other lead. The cell on the other side of the bars wasn’t unpleasant – the window was large, the mattress was well-kept, and there was a small bookshelf to one side.

The occupant was a mare by the name of Applejack.

“Who’s your friend?” She asked, glaring at Sunset from the bed.

“This is Toph. She’s from another world.”

“Hey,” Toph said.

Applejack shrugged in response. “So, what brings you two here today? Going to see if a third party will make lunch go any better? Or have you finally decided to kill me?”

Sunset shook her head. “Neither, actually. For once, I actually need something from you.”

This got Applejack’s attention. “Really…? So you’re not even goin’ to pretend you’re here out of the goodness of your heart? That’s an improvement, you should be proud. The next step is admittin’ to you’d be doin’ the world a favor by jumpin’ off the next cliff you see.”

Sunset sighed. “Applejack…”

“Just spit it out. What do you want?”

“We’re trying to hunt down the Sage that told you to get all those artifacts. She’s been causing a lot of trouble and we just can’t find her.”

“Tough luck. Ah haven’t the foggiest idea where she’d be,” Applejack said. “Guess you wasted your time.”

“You can know other things,” Toph said. “Like what kind of artifacts she asked you to get. We need to figure out why.”

“And why would Ah bother rackin’ my brain to remember all that useless crud? You’re definitely not worth it, and Ah’m pretty sure by refusin’ it won’t get you angry enough to off me, even if it should. So… Ah can sit pretty here and infuriate you all Ah want without a problem.” She winked.

“Look, Applejack, if you know something, just tell us. That Sage is up to no good. She manipulated us into fighting each other for years. Even if we don’t know what she’s planning, you’d have to at least agree that she’s up to no good and should be stopped.”

“Ah dunno Sunset, she could be tryin’ something evil, but it’d still be less evil than you.”

Sunset’s eye twitched. “Haven’t I done enough to prove to you that I’m not an evil wench?”

Applejack scowled. “See, this is it. This is why. It’s all just manipulation and control to you. All those lunches, all these books, all this time you spend coming to see me – it’s all part of your stupid mind games! You and the Queen want somethin’ from me! Well Ah’m not gonna give it! Ah’m not gonna fall for your false pretenses, ever! You may have everypony fooled but not me!”

Sunset growled. “Applejack, it’s just information about the Sage. There’s no way givin’ that up will harm anypony.”

“It would keep you from getting’ hurt. And, to be honest, praying that you’ll die someday is one of the few things that keeps me goin’ here.”

“Why are you such a stub-“ A pillar of earth shot out of the ground and hit Sunset in the face, knocking her to the ground, dazed.

Applejack blinked, then turned to Toph. “…Are you gonna bust me out or-“

“You are a stubborn moron,” Toph said, launching a rock hand out of the ground to grab Applejack by the midsection. “She’s kept you alive, fed you, and tried her hardest to be your friend! And what do you do to her?”

“What those manipulations deserve!”

Toph tossed Applejack into her bookshelf, splintering the wood. “You know why I knocked her out? Because she wouldn’t let me do this. Let me break you like a book. She wouldn’t do that to you. Thinks it’d be too damaging.”

“Lies!”

Toph tossed Applejack to the other side. “You really shouldn’t care about that right now. You should care that your protector is lying unconscious on the floor and that I can make you enter a much more extreme world of hurt than you’ve ever experienced.”

“You think I’ll crack? Please!”

Toph cracked the bars of the cell open, walking in. She tossed a rock into Applejack’s face with her bare foot. “Every person has the point where the pain’s too much.”

“You know nothing, girl.”

Toph threw Applejack up, then down again. “Just let go of your hate for one measly second and tell us some of those things she had you get!”

“She’s lying to you too, you know. She lies to everyone. She is a lie. Everything is a lie!”

Toph twitched. “You’re an idiot!” She grabbed another rock and threw it – only for a yellow magic aura to grab it and toss it into her face. Toph went skidding backward, out of the cell.

Sunset screamed at her. “TOPH! APPLEJACK IS NOT TO BE HARMED!”

“Stop feigning concern!” Applejack yelled. “Quit your games!”

Sunset turned to Applejack, flinging tears. She couldn’t force herself to say anything. She just stared at Applejack, unable to respond.

Toph sat up, groaning. “You two are a couple of idiots.”

Applejack raised her eyebrow. “How so?”

“Sunset’s an idiot for trying so hard to be your friend, and you’re an idiot for being unable to even think that you’re wrong.”

“Ah’m not wrong.”

Toph shrugged. “You sure think that.”

Sunset sighed, wiping her face. “Applejack, what do you want from me?”

“Ah want you to go kill yourself.”

Sunset shook her head. “I mean, what do you want for you?”

“Ah want you to stop ‘bein’ my friend’, or whatever it is you’ve been hornswaggling with me.”

Sunset glanced to Toph. “You’re right. I’m being stupid. There does come a point where you should just cut your losses.” Sunset turned to Applejack with sad eyes. “Tell me about all the artifacts the Sage sent you to find and you’ll never see me again.”

Applejack thought about this for a moment. “You won’t come back for any more lunches, any more talks, nothin’?”

“Nothing.”

“You have yourself a deal.”

Sunset sat down, admitting defeat. She took out her smartphone. “Okay, just tell us everything you know. This device will record everything.”

“That must be handy.”

“It is. The sooner you start talking the sooner you can have us out of here.”

“Best news Ah’ve heard all year. Ah met the Sage almost instantly after you slaughtered my entire village, it was as if she knew Ah was destined for something great from that moment on. Of course, she was an absolute cryptic nutcase half the time…”

~~~

Fluttershy sat in the back of the room while Daniel, Landry, Genji, Zenyatta, Twilight, Rarity, and Pinkie discussed politics. Fluttershy found herself thinking how redundant all this seemed – how many times had they talked to new worlds like this? A dozen? Even though she had virtually no idea exactly how the politics worked, she still found it same-ey. Usually everyone started on different pages with different prejudices, and those had to be worked out first. More often than not both sides wanted a positive relationship, so they would seek that out. And in the end, after several hours of discussion, they’d find some way to continue said relationship. If humans were involved, there’d be paperwork. If it was just ponies, not so much.

She yawned to herself, trying not to fall asleep – that’d just be rude. She needed to stay awake. This was difficult since the most interesting thing that had happened was a flickering light that made Daniel lose his train of thought.

Mei wheeled her chair over to Fluttershy. “Hey, how are you doing?” she whispered, so as not to interrupt the actual talks.

Fluttershy shrugged. “Bored. Annoyed with politics. Trying not to fall asleep.”

“Ah, yeah, I feel that. I’m just a scientist. I’m starting to wonder why I’m here – I haven’t actually gotten to look at much of your technology.”

Fluttershy smiled. “They thought we had advanced technology, so they sent you along just in case. I’m sure once they hammer something out you’ll get your chance.”

“Probably. So… those ponies your closest friends?”

“Yeah. I’ve known them for several years now. Best friends I’ve ever had.”

“Do they let you speak up?”

Fluttershy raised an eyebrow. “Uh… Why do you ask?”

“Well, it’s just that you’ve been rather quiet this whole time, and I know everybody has things to say-“

“It’s because I’m Fluttershy isn’t it,” Fluttershy muttered.

“...Huh?”

“Look, Mei, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But I don’t feel ashamed to speak my mind. I just don’t feel like I need to say anything – we’ve just done this so many times. So, so many times.”

“Oh. I-I’m sorry, I misjudged you.”

“…It’s a thing people tend to do…” Fluttershy said. “My friends suggest I remove the ‘shy’ from my name, become just ‘Flutters’. I’m just not sure if I want to, really…”

Tracer poked her head in on the conversation. “Well, I don’t know you at all, but I think Flutters is a great name for you! It sounds like freedom, breeze, the wind. Someone aloof and gentle!”

“Thanks, Tracer. Still…” she bit her lip. “Am I just being stubborn?”

“Yes,” Nova said, rolling her chair in. “Accept the Flutters, Flutters. Accept it.”

Fluttershy took in a breath. “I… You know what, no. I am not Flutters. I am Flutterfree. I have broken free from the shyness. I am Flutterfree Asquall.”

“…Asquall?” Tracer said, cocking her head.

“It’s like Squall, but the A means ‘against the squall,” Flutterfree explained.

“Works for me,” Nova said. “Congrats, Flutterfree.”

“Hey! You four!” Pinkie called over to them. “Are you even paying attention? Or am I going to have to come over there and drag your ears back!”

“S-sorry!” Mei said.

Pinkie shrugged. “It’s okay. I think we need your attention back now, though. Zenyatta’s about to decide on a thing!”

Zenyatta nodded. “That I have. General Landry, Princess Twilight, your offers are both selfless and grandiose. But I am afraid I have to decline strong relations, for many reasons which have already been discussed to some extent. The largest of which is that we are simply not ready, as a world, to take the step beyond. We are on the brink of a major global crisis that could spark into all out war at any moment, a war that will just spill outward and result in more destruction were we to have access to the rest of the multiverse. Furthermore, Overwatch is technically an illegal organization in the eyes of international law, and we have no real authority to establish such immense ties. Using our camaraderie that we’ve developed, we simply ask that you refrain from establishing a presence on ‘Earth Omnic’. All we wish is for a way to contact you if, and when, we deem we are ready, or have gone on an irreversible path of self-destruction.”

“Wait what?” Tracer blurted. “I thought we were making allies here!”

“You haven’t been paying attention,” Genji said. “We’ve been leaning towards this conclusion for some time now.”

Flutterfree blinked. “I… Guess it makes sense, though. Not everyone wants to join. Though you are the first I know of who just admitted they aren’t ready.”

“Bollocks!” Tracer blurted. “We’re more than ready!”

Zenyatta shook his head. “Tracer, our world as a whole is not, even if you in particular are. We have more to think about than just ourselves and how to win our personal battles. On an issue this large, even Talon’s threat means little. Perhaps one day, we will be able to rise above our own conflict. That day is not today.”

Tracer looked like she wanted to object but decided not to. She just folded her arms and sat back.

Daniel nodded slowly. “We can send you back home then with a subspace beacon. We’ll check in every now and then to see if it’s active.”

“Thank you for your time,” Zenyatta said. “We request that you take us somewhere apart from where you picked us up the first time, so we may avoid the likely ambush waiting for us.”

Landry called the Hammond. “Prepare to take four to E-17 and beam them wherever their home base is.”

Mei frowned. “We have to go already?”

“You get to ride in their ship, first,” Genji reminded her.

“That’s nice and all, but…” she looked at the ponies. “I wanted to get to know all of you better…”

Pinkie smiled. “Well, hurry up and solve your world’s problems so you can come back to visit us! Okay?”

Tracer gave Pinkie a thumbs up. “You’ve got it!”

Flutterfree waved. “Goodbye then! Thanks for getting me to keep my new name. And not shooting us.”

Zenyatta bowed. “Thank you for not holding those shots against us. Old war machines die hard, and world governments are paranoid about spaceships in their space.”

“Believe it or not, we can relate,” Daniel said. “We’ll be waiting for you.”

The four Overwatch heroes were beamed onto the Hammond, which prepared to take them home.

Daniel yawned. “Well that ended up being nothi-“

The lights flickered again. Landry frowned. “Two times in one day? That’s… Odd.” He walked out of the meeting room and down to the control room, followed by Daniel and the ponies. “Walter, run a systems diagnostic on the power systems.”

Walter ran the diagnostic. “Everything checks out, sir. It was just a random fluctuation.”

“…Right…” Landry shrugged. “Well, Twilight, thanks for your help, I think that’s all we needed.”

“Didn’t you want me to teleport-proof some areas of the base?”

Daniel nodded. “That’s right! Gate room first – we don’t need the stargate getting stolen. It’s the primary thing the oversight has been yelling about lately.”

Nova laughed nervously. “Definitely not…”

“You’re on that list as well. Did you know that we had to fight against the lawyers to even let you on the base again, Nova?”

“Uh… Sorry again?” she sighed. “Really, I know I messed up big time there, and I know it’s still causing everybody problems. But… you humans do not move on quickly, do you?”

“Sometimes I wonder if we ever forget…” Daniel muttered.

Twilight shrugged. “I don’t know. What I do know is that Nova and I are going to teleport-proof your high security rooms to help her earn your trust.”

Nova nodded. “Right.”

~~~

A few hours later, Twilight and Nova were teleport-proofing a room devoted to storing alien weapons, ranging from the simple snakelike Zat guns to bizarre hefty conglomerations that supposedly could hit out-of-phase beings.

Twilight was slowly working her way along the south wall, clearly glad this was the last major room they needed to seal, ready for the hard work to be done. Nova was feeling similarly exhausted, but she kept herself held a little higher as she worked along the north wall.

Coming to a corner, she maneuvered herself behind several stacks of boxes, trying to get to the very edge of the room. After she accomplished this, she turned around to find a woman in black and purple standing over her.

Nova blinked. “Uh… Hi?”

The woman smirked playfully, and yet somehow malevolently. “Sorry about this, I just can’t resist.” She reached out one of her fingers, allowing Nova to see her long purple ‘nails’ laced with circuitry. She touched Nova on the nose. “Boop!”

“Wha-?” And then the woman vanished in thin air.

“Nova, what was that?” Twilight asked, walking over to her. “I thought I heard someone.”

“…I think the base has an intruder,” Nova said, rubbing her nose. “She… she booped me.”

“Intruder?” Twilight’s ears perked up as the main doors to the storage room opened – and no one came in or out.

“Invisible intruder,” Nova said, rushing out into the hallway and scanning for anything – she found nothing. “Great… Daniel!”

“What?” he called, running over.

“There’s an intruder! Woman, medium size, purple-black getup, half-shaved head, strange circuitry nails! We-“

The alarms in the base began to go off. Walter’s voice could be heard over the intercom. “We’ve been compromised! Virus detected in the system database!”

Twilight lit her horn, preparing to teleport to the control room. She facehooved. “We just teleport proofed everything. Gah!”

Daniel took off at a run. “It’s not that far. Come on!”

The three of them ran down the hallways to the control room, taking two flights of stairs. Along the way they saw almost every computer screen was displaying a pink hexagon with a skull design inside of it. Some of those skulls looked like they were laughing.

“How badly were we just compromised?” Daniel asked as he ran into the control room with the two ponies.

“Badly,” Landry said, gesturing at all the corrupted computer screens. “We’ve lost control of virtually every system. We can’t even remove the lockdown on the gateroom!”

Twilight looked at the pink skull. “Do we know whose symbol this is?”

“No,” Landry said. “It’s not anything we’ve seen before-“

“Then you best remember it well!” the voice of the woman rang through the base intercom. “Because I want my name to burn into your minds as I rob you blind.”

“Who are you?” Landry yelled.

A portal opened sideways in the gateroom, at such an angle they couldn’t see into it well enough to determine where it led. The doors to the jumper bay above the gateroom glowed purple, opening up with a loud clang. A Puddlejumper dropped out of the ceiling, tumbling nicely into the large open portal. The portal shut, and the woman dropped from the ceiling, bowing. She grinned and pointed at them through the glass. “Nice expressions!”

Nova closed her mouth.

The woman pointed at herself, grin still huge. “I am Sombra. Remember the name of the woman who beat the ‘most secure government base’ in your nation!” She pulled a dimensional device out of her jacket and prepared to open a portal, but something stopped her. “You know what? I think I can stick around and brag a little bit. You’re not going to be able to remove my virus from your computers for a few hours, this entire room is teleport proof, and by the time you’re able to break through that bulletproof glass I can be gone.” She chuckled.

“Why?” Nova asked. “What did we do to you?”

“Nothing!” Sombra grinned. “You just showed up and gave me an opportunity! You see, I got ahold of a pair of amazing files, one about a spaceship that randomly appeared in orbit, transmitted a message, and then left; and another from a long-forgotten Omnic sentry firing at the same people! What luck, I had found a connection, and I also had a plan. You see, amigos, I disabled all the turrets there as soon as I could, then sent a covert report to Overwatch to draw their interest. Something that suggested, oh, possible alien invasion location, as well as secret Talon business. And then I wait – and sure enough, both Overwatch and a delightful bunch of ponies show up! But, alas, their portal does not stay open long enough for me to slip through…” She put her fingers to her face, sad.

“Aha, but then, I have an idea. I can force them back through if I just give Talon the same report, and even make them think I’ve got a plan to help them! Oh, wondrous! So in the chaos of a firefight, I slip through the escape portal and make my way into your base. Then, as you are so distracted with meetings and teleport-proofing the place, I work my magic unnoticed! Cause a few power surges, but nothing major. It’s just so easy since all your computers are antiquated versions of mine! I load physical tons of items onto a Puddlejumper and, since the computer system of that ship is too complex for a quick job, I just dump it in a portal you won’t be able to trace!” She clapped her hands together. “And now here we are, after I’ve mocked a unicorn and made you all wish you hadn’t made this room impossible to teleport into!”

Nova glared. “That doesn’t answer why.”

Sombra pointed a finger at her. “You know why, little thief. I just want things to help me. I want to find the truth. With these devices, I’ve come to realize that my little world is puny and pathetic, and that I could stand to expand my horizons. I’m going to find out what’s really in charge.” She took out the dimensional device and set it to a random location. “Adios!”

Then Sombra was gone.

Daniel shook his head. “I suddenly have the feeling that we were never in charge of anything today.”

Twilight looked at the sugar skull on every computer screen. “…Should we even try to chase her?”

Nova frowned. “She planned this out far too much. She’s long gone. No way we can get to her now with what we have.”

“Pulled a better heist than you,” Landry commented.

“Gee, thanks.” She glared at one of the skulls. “Is it really going to take a few hours to get rid of these things?”

Of course, the answer was yes.

~~~

The black form of Reaper threw his shotguns on the ground next to the thin, bluish form of Widowmaker. “She’s not coming back,” he muttered.

“Have patience. Sombra can take care of herself,” Widowmaker responded without emotion.

“She could have betrayed us or fallen prey to that ‘magic’ those ponies had.”

“She’s not stupid enough to outright betray us nor fall to unknown powers.”

“That’s what you think…” Reaper muttered, blasting a tree to shreds with another shotgun conjured out of nowhere.

Widowmaker’s phone started buzzing. She frowned. “I had that off.”

Reaper grabbed the phone and answered it. “Sombra…”

The phone went to speakerphone automatically, blasting Reaper’s ears out with the volume. “Hey Talon! This is a recorded message from… Sombra! Just wanted you to know, I am now closer to the truth than I ever thought possible! You’ll probably never see me again! Adios, it was a pleasure working with you!”

Reaper stared at the phone. “…I’m surprised she didn’t end with that ‘boop’ she’s so fond of.”

“Boop!” the phone blurted.

Reaper threw the phone onto the ground and crushed it under his foot. Then he pulled out another shotgun and blasted it to smithereens.

“You owe me a new phone,” Widowmaker deadpanned.

“Fine. Whatever. Don’t care. Going back to base now. This day has been a complete waste of everyone’s time. I hope that gorilla summoned an alien invasion or something.”

Widowmaker put her gun away and started walking. “You’ll have to call the getaway vehicle,” she said.

Reaper angrily tore his phone out of his pocket. There was no message, but the background had been changed to a picture of Sombra smirking.

It took every ounce of his self-control not to crush the device in his hands.

018 - The Hand of the Market

Corona walked around the Hub like the AID agent she was – which to say she had high tech sunglasses on. She’d taken to wearing them more and more often simply because they were so useful – they were able to remind her of the names of thousands of individuals, told her if there were hidden weapons anywhere, and could help her navigate any maze-like corridors. As the Hub evolved, the corridors became more and more complex, and the need for aides increased.

No longer were the winding halls empty – now they were filled with decoration, stands, and near constant foot traffic. This particular area had taken the form of a bazaar of sorts, with both official spaces and unofficial ones. The difference could be told by which places were in actual enclosures and which ones were just over glorified lemonade stands.

This created an unusual atmosphere – large, impressive, official locations had big signs, display windows, and official workers. It didn’t matter if it was an embassy, shop, restaurant, information center, training dojo, arcade, or something else. They drew attention, and the smaller stands and such took advantage of that, clustering as close as they could to the important places, creating large halls filled with trinket carts, mystics, and people playing with cups.

Corona stopped by one of the more popular locations – the Embassies for the Elemental Nations and Iroh’s tea shop. There were several humans of varying colors trying to sell teacups alongside a handful of opportunity-seeking ponies. Corona ignored them as they called to her. They weren’t important and she wasn’t in the mood for engaging with the attention-seeking crazies.

She walked through the doors of the tea shop. As usual, it was completely full of patrons calmly enjoying their tea. She could see more than a few high-ranking individuals using the location to discuss policy, including Siron and Boxen of all people.

What they were talking about wasn’t her business. She walked past all the tables and back into the ‘kitchen’, where Iroh himself was crafting more tea with his firebending. “Ah, Corona! How nice of you to drop by!”

Corona reached into one of the shelves and grabbed some cherry-infused tea bags. “I was in the neighborhood, figured I’d drop by and say hello.” She used her fire to heat up the water quickly and dunked the tea in. “How’s business and politics?”

“Business is excellent. The more tea I get the more I sell!” he laughed. “I’m making quite the profit even at the low prices I’m selling everything at! Who knew?”

Corona smirked. “People like your company. And, apparently, talking about ‘business’ in a public location.”

Iroh nodded, setting freshly brewed tea on the serving counter. “Chala and Chamomile for the General!”

O’Neill got up from his table he shared with Link and a few Apollo crew members to grab the tea. He incredulously examined his cup and nodded slowly, as if it was satisfactory. “Cool beans.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Did you seriously just say ‘cool beans’?”

O’Neill raised his eyebrow in return. “Did you seriously just call it out like some phrase Nazi?”

“Did you seriously just invent the phrase ‘phrase Nazi’ for this conversation?”

“Please!” Iroh said, holding up his hands and chuckling. “We’re all friends here. No need to have a battle of banter.”

Corona pointed at O’Neill. “But that’s how he gets his laughs.”

“I will neither confirm nor deny my completely theoretical enjoyment with banter.”

Iroh shrugged. “In that case, maybe I should challenge you to a battle of wit.”

O’Neill narrowed his eyes. “You’re on, old ma-“

“General!” one of the Apollo crew members yelled. “Where’s the tea?”

O’Neill put on an obviously fake smile. “It appears that I have to cut this meeting short to dote on my men.” He grabbed the tray with several teacups on it. “The duel of snarky old men will have to wait for another day.”

“And what a glorious day it will be,” Corona commented. Soon, she and Iroh were alone in the back of the kitchen again.

“I believe you asked about politics, earlier,” Iroh said, moving to prepare more tea.

“Yeah. How’re things going on your end?”

“The demons are working out really well for us. Hard workers with a strong pride that helps them build everything well. They’ve crafted the neutral Republic City well. Though, it can hardly be called a city at the moment, it’s more like a… ‘bumpkin town’.”

“…What.”

“I don’t know why people are calling it that but they are. It’s some joke on the demons’ presence, calling them unsophisticated and claiming anything they make is just like them.”

Corona pursed her lips. “That’s hardly fair…”

“Better than the extremists who’ve been attacking the demons’ own settlement,” Iroh sighed. “There’s a large movement forming to cut off all ties to other worlds because it’s an ‘invasion’ of sorts.”

“Well, that’s stupid.” Corona took a sip of her tea – delicious, as usual.

“Their violence is, but their reasonings are not without merit,” Iroh admitted. “We refused aid from Equestria to preserve our culture, and many of them are arguing the mere existence of Republic City and the demons ruins this.”

“Republic City was completely your idea, though.”

Iroh chuckled. “Try telling that to people who weren’t around when the idea was proposed. They’ve gotten it in their heads that it had to come from some alien force and ruins the ideal of balance. Using the demons as workers just gives them more fire, even if they have no say in the designs of the city itself.”

Corona frowned. “Sounds like your world’s getting the short end of the stick.”

“Hey, the rest of you are keeping everything secret from your various worlds. I’m just waiting for that to explode in your faces.”

Corona shrugged. “Well, it’s public knowledge in Equestria, and it’s not really a secret in Lai, it’s just that they don’t advertise it.”

“Ardent, both Earths, and the Binaries, all into keeping secrets.”

Corona shrugged. “I don’t think it’s a problem, really. If my Earth got public knowledge of everything… Well, that’d just make this mess of marketplaces even worse. The place is basically driven by wealth. I’d say Earth Tau’ri is the same, but I haven’t actually spent a lot of time there to study the culture.”

“Same here, I mostly just talk to their leaders and people in on the secret. They’ve perfected the art of classification.”

“Hey, question – have you ever been to the Binary worlds?”

“Once or twice, and under heavy, heavy guard.”

“Same,” Corona said. “They’re paranoid. …Which makes it even weirder that Boxen is talking to Siron out there.”

Iroh shrugged. “Deals will be made regardless of whether either side likes each other or not.”

Corona nodded. Iroh set out another platter of tea. “For the lovely little ladies!”

Twilight ‘Sparky’ the human walked up, head hung low. “Thanks, Iroh.”

“Oh! Sparky, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing much,” Twilight muttered.

Corona lowered her sunglasses and raised her eyebrows. “Twilight, something’s definitely wrong.”

“…Fine. Earth Gizmos is going to go out of business if we can’t turn a large profit soon. I’ll have to close it up forever. ”

Corona put her sunglasses back on. “Not if I have anything to say about it.” She leaped over the counter and grabbed Twilight by the shoulders. “I am going to help your little store in whatever way I can.”

“Corona… I mean, thanks, but you don’t have to-“

Corona held up a hand. “Don’t try to talk me out of it, I have nothing else to do today, so I might as well try to help a friend. What’s the issue?”

“It’s just… People don’t want to come in and buy our things! I have no idea why!”

Corona smirked. “Sounds like I need to investigate.” She took a sip of her cherry-infused tea. “To Earth Gizmos!”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “I guess the tea was ‘to go’ anyway.”

Corona and Twilight said their goodbyes to Iroh and left the establishment, passing by O’Neill’s table. Something Link had said had him laughing hard. Judging from Link’s expression it wasn’t supposed to be funny.

The two entered the long halls of the Hub and moved along, passing by shops, musicians, and dozens of important people and ponies. Neon signs demanded their attention, large screens showcased interdimensional news reels, and Corona was sure she spotted the infamous pink sugar skull appear on someone’s glasses for a split second. She wondered if the hacker could get into her glasses… Not a pleasant thought.

Corona took a moment to wave hello to a person she recognized - Seskii, the pink potion seller, apparently doing really good business now that she’d left Ardent in favor of the Hub. They exchanged no words, but Seskii tossed Corona a free potion in between dealing with customers. Corona drank it as she and Twilight kept walking.

“You know her well?” Twilight asked.

“Not really. But she’s nice. She’s also got great potions. I think this one’s enchanted with a hint of ‘amusement’.”

“...Huh.”

They soon arrived at the Earth Gizmos store, which was surrounded by a number of watch sellers for some reason. They walked in the front doors. Lyra was at the register, Trixie was taking a nap on the floor next to her, and there were two patrons in the store.

“Hey Twilight,” Lyra said, looking with dismay at the pathetic cash register. “Sold a toaster since you left, that’s it.”

Twilight set out the tea on the countertop, which Lyra took eagerly to escape from the drudgery of her ‘job’.

“How much longer until we cut our losses?” Lyra asked.

Twilight shrugged. “I was thinking a week, but Corona wants to try to help us.”

Lyra raised an eyebrow. “Got any clever marketing ideas that a bunch of high school students can pull off?”

Corona grinned. “I have no ideas at the moment, but I plan to have some momentarily. First, we need to figure out what exactly the problem is.”

“The problem’s easy,” Lyra said. “Nobody’s buying our stuff. We sell machines and gizmos from Earth, and nobody wants them!”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t make any sense. I see smartphones everywhere. I’ve gone to Ponyville and found several televisions. They’ve even got a Ponyville Broadcast up and running, thanks to Pinkie. Everyone loves these devices.”

Lyra raised an eyebrow. “Then explain to me why nobody’s rushing in to buy our entire stock.”

“I plan to,” she said, noticing that one of the patrons – an Earth Kingdom woman – was leaving. “Hey, I’m Agent Corona, AID. Mind if I ask you a question or two?”

“You’re just saying that-“

Corona produced her badge and raised an incredulous eyebrow.

The woman tensed up. “Why of course! What do you want to know!”

“Just curious why you’re leaving this store.”

“Oh. Didn’t want to buy anything.”

“Why?”

The woman leaned back. “Because it was all too expensive? Why are you asking?”

“Reasons,” Corona said, nodding to her. “Where you going now?”

“Gear Emporium. Prices are better. Can I go now?”

Corona nodded. “Sure.” The woman scampered out of the store.

“The price is bad!?” Twilight twitched. “I price these as low as I can! We buy them in bulk and at a discount! If I sold them any cheaper it’d be at a loss!”

Corona frowned. “What about this ‘Gear Emporium’? Do we know anything about them?”

“They operate in the next district over,” Lyra said. “That’s all I know.”

“I didn’t even know that,” Twilight said. “But I did know there were several other shops in the Hub that do the same thing we do… I wonder if they’re having similar problems?”

Corona smirked. “I think we should pay them a visit. Come on Twilight, we’ve got competition to scout out!” She dragged Twilight out of the store, leaving Lyra with the remaining patron and the unmoving Trixie.

They dashed through the halls of the Hub once again, leaving the familiar area and approaching one Corona had only been in a few times before, one of the strangely ‘empty’ zones where several enclosures were not occupied by anything. It was slightly eerie, seeing all the stands and tents without the glowing light of the large establishments.

There were, however, a couple of places here. One was a ‘gateway’, a service that would dial any universe for anyone at a small price. From the looks of it, it was one of the less reputable places that might be convinced to send a patron to an ‘unsafe’ universe if enough money was paid, despite the Hub’s regulations forbidding that practice. It was one of the Hub’s few regulations.

The other place was the Gear Emporium, a shop that occupied two entire rooms. It boasted a neon sign made of actual turning gears to draw in the crowds. Despite the lack of other establishments around, the Gear Emporium was crazy busy. People were dragging out televisions, game consoles, cameras, and phones by the dozen.

Corona blinked. “…Well this is where all your customers have gone.”

Twilight gawked. “…How?!”

“We’re about to find out.” Corona adjusted her glasses and marched into the store, Twilight behind her. The store itself was, while larger than Earth Gizmos, not any nicer looking. The lights were the same, the shelves were identical, and the products were the same thing. But the prices…

Twilight looked at a smartphone’s price tag and gawked. “That’s… That’s factory cost right here! This is how much you pay the factory to make one of these things directly! There’s no markup!”

Corona furrowed her brow. “They can’t be making a profit off this at all, can they?”

“No! Unless they’re stealing these things for free! Even if they’re making them themselves it’d be a zero-profit scenario, you have to put the money in to create them. They’re probably running at a negative profit margin, since they have to pay something to keep this store running!”

“Something fishy’s going on…” She walked up to an employee sitting at a nearby wall, a human with purple skin grossly engaged in her phone. “Excuse me?”

“Hm?” she said, looking up. “Can I help you with anything?” she asked in a tone that made it clear she did not want to help anyone with anything ever.

“Hey, we were wondering, how can you sell your things so cheaply?”

“Look, lady, this is the price everything in the Hub is at if it wants to survive,” she rolled her eyes. “Every tech store that has a chance is like this. I’ve checked myself, there are no better deals anywhere.”

“How can you afford that?”

“I just work here. I have no idea where we get our things from. A fairy godmother for all I know, or care.” She went back to her phone, clearly not in the mood for any more talking.

Corona glanced at Twilight. “…Every store has these prices?”

“I don’t know! I’ve not really looked at the competition before!”

“Probably why you didn’t figure this out earlier…” Corona put a hand to her chin. “I don’t think the people here are going to be very helpful. Perhaps we should try somewhere else…”

Twilight pulled up a map of the Hub on her phone. “Let’s see… I’ve got ten separate tech shops in the Hub, not including our own. The one we’re at now has the highest rating… But most of them are sitting even.”

Corona checked the information on her sunglasses. “Wow. The internet sure moves fast.”

“There’s already Hub YouTube,” Twilight commented. “I think it’s run by our Earth. I have no idea what’s going to happen when Tau’ri YouTube gets wind of this.”

“Copyright law is going to be an absolute nightmare…” Corona realized. “Anyway, pick a store, any store.”

“This one! The Flimflam Gadgetry Pit!”

“Huh. Sounds a little crazy. Maybe they’ll be more helpful.”

The Flimflam Gadgetry Pit was in an area of the Hub with a lot more shops than anything else, a bit of a ‘shopping’ district, if such a thing could really be considered to exist in the Hub. The two of them walked right in. The store was nowhere near as clean and organized as Earth Gizmos or the Gear Emporium, rather, it was a disorganized mess with products tossed around everywhere, labels slapped in awkward places, and no semblance of organization. There were a dozen or so patrons, and the counter was manned by four yellow individuals – two humans and two unicorns, each pair of which was clearly an alternate version of the other pair.

“Hello!” One of the yellow unicorns called, the one with a mustache. “Welcome to the Flimflam Gadgetry Pit, run by Flim, Flim, Flam, and Flam!”

Twilight blinked, pointing at the humans. “I know you! You’re those crazy salesmen that try to rip off everyone! How did you get clearance to get in here!?”

“Stepped through the portal by accident,” human Flim said, shrugging. “It was as simple as promising to be a good boy and we got tickets.”

“Plus, we got to meet ourselves!” human Flam said, leaping onto unicorn Flam. Unicorn Flam reared, laughed, and bounced across the store.

Corona facepalmed. “I… Oh this is just great. Look, we’re just here to ask questions.”

“I’ll answer them if there’s something in it for me,” unicorn Flim said.

Corona flashed her AID badge. “Trust me, it's in your best interest.” She took no small amount of pleasure when unicorn Flim’s stance tightened and his pupils dilated. Of course she didn’t really have authority over him, but he didn’t have to know that.

“Ah, right! What do you want to know?”

“A simple curiosity. I’m wondering how you can sell all these things so cheap.”

“Well, you see…” he coughed. “We don’t price them, our distributor does. They come to us with the prices printed on the box, we just slap the labels on the individual items. So you can’t hold us accountable!”

“That’s completely fine,” Corona said. “I would like to know where the distributions come from though.”

Human Flim came into the conversation. “Oh, just some blokes. Some fancy-schmancy rich type from Earth Tau’ri who wants to ‘spread the technology’. Decided to trust us and give us an edge.”

“Who’s this guy?”

“Calls himself Frank. Frank Saltwist.”

Corona narrowed her eyes. She held her hands behind her back, slowly removing a glove. “That doesn’t sound like a human name.”

“Oh, who knows, it might not be. It’s what he calls himself-“

Corona rushed her ungloved hand for human Flim’s arm. He recoiled before she could touch him. “EVERYBODY BAIL!” He screamed, leaping onto unicorn Flim and riding out a side door. The Flams had already left the establishment a while ago.

“Get them!” Corona yelled, bounding after the human-pony combo, hands on fire. Twilight ran alongside her, preparing a spell.

The Flims saw them coming. The human reached over to a nearby cart vendor and pulled it down, spilling cabbages into Twilight and Corona’s path. The cabbage salesman yelled in distress as his produce was trampled over. “MY CABBAGES!!!”

“Sorry!” Twilight called back, stumbling over more than a few cabbages. She turned forward, casting her spell. She summoned a purple whip-like tendril of magic energy from the aether, twisting it toward the Flims. The human saw it coming and deflected with his hat of all things. The hat did not survive.

Corona went next, throwing fire at the hooves of the unicorn, making him trip up. However, in the time it took Corona to make sure the fires didn’t spread, he had regained his footing. Twilight tried a spell again, this time grabbing the unicorn’s tail with her telekinesis. Her telekinesis was comparatively weak to that of most unicorns, but the tug was enough to make the unicorn stumble.

Corona took the opportunity, blasting fire at the unicorn’s hooves again. This time he stumbled and fell over, dumping the human into a cart of scorpion popsicles. “Ugh…”

Corona pressed her hand to the unicorn’s forehead…

…Corona was standing in a dark space in a forested area, clearly a different universe. All four Flims and Flams were standing there, looking at a giant naval shipping crate filled with technology.

There was a hooded man standing next to it. “Here’s our part of the deal. The prices you should use are inside on the individual boxes, as well as instruction manuals for everything. You’ll find that, at those prices, they should sell like hotcakes. All sold good profits go directly to us, but we pay you by the hour. Use your best judgment as to what should go on the sales floor at any given time. Our only requirement is that nobody finds out where you get your machines.”

“What if we empty the crate?” human Flam asked.

“We’ll be around to restock it for you.”

Unicorn Flim scratched his chin. “You’re providing this to every store, aren’t you?”

“Huh? That’d be silly. What kind of business model does that?”

Corona, seeing this entire event from unicorn Flim’s eyes, understood that it was a brilliant business model. Try to control every store you can, drive the others out of business with low prices, and then start charging up the ‘wazoo’ for extra extra cash.

Unicorn Flim was excited, nervous, and thrilled at the same time, similar to his mood in the future. Or, rather, present.

“Sunseeeeeet…”

The mysterious man left the universe with a portal device, leaving the crate behind. The memory blurred into the background as the four people started looking at their new wares…

…Corona snapped back into reality. “Thank you, Flim, I have everything I need. Actually, one more thing. How close to empty is that crate?”

“…Very.”

“Good. You are going to tell me how to get there, and then you aren’t going to breathe a word about this to anyone. Got it?”

“G-got it! It’s in the Forested World, right where our shop is!”

She dropped him, turning to Twilight. “I’ve got answers!”

“That was a… pretty public display, Corona.”

“Then we need to move fast, before they got onto us. Come on Twilight, we’re going on a stakeout.”

“…Yay?”

~~~

The Forested World was a strange one. It was an apparently endless forest filled with evergreen trees where it was always a warm summer night. There were always stars visible in the night sky, though there was no apparent way to get to them, even in a starship they never got any closer. The world had so much space that taking one step in most other worlds would result in a thousand steps in the forest. This huge space displacement effect made it a perfect place to hide large things, because people would rarely chance upon just the perfect location.

Luckily a giant shipping container wasn’t too hard to see from a couple thousand feet away. Big, bright red, metallic, it was hard to miss. Corona and Twilight were currently up in a tree, watching the box below them. Twilight was shivering slightly.

“Remember the plan,” Corona said.

“What plan? It’s just a sleep spell!”

Corona shrugged. “I’m mainly reminding you to have it ready.”

“It takes a bit of effort to keep a spell ready for this long!”

“Shh!”

“There’s nobody here!”

“There could be! The box is very empty now, and they should be back with a shipment anytime.”

Twilight frowned. “Unless they saw what happened to the Flims and Flams.”

Corona sighed. “That’s true… I don’t think so, though. If these guys have access to the Hub’s security tapes, I think we have bigger problems than your store.”

Twilight folded her arms and fell silent. They continued watching the crate. They’d already been here for hours – not quite a day, but that didn’t mean much in this place.

“How do you think this forest survives without anything to pollinate it?” Twilight asked out of the blue some minutes later.

“I think these trees are frozen in time or something,” Corona said. “I don’t think they grow, seed, or anything.”

“There’s wind though, they react to that. And us pushing on them.”

“I also don’t see any pinecones. Makes me think they don’t reproduce at all.”

“Then how’d this place come to exist in the first place?”

Corona shrugged. “One of the mysteries of the mult- shh!” She pushed Twilight down the instant a portal opened up in front of the crate. A single person came out and investigated the crate with a clipboard. He was dressed all in black and his face was hidden. His hands were covered in gloves and clothing shined from excessive polish. He stuck his head into the crate, made a few notes on his clipboard, and reached for his dimensional device.

“Now!” Corona nudged Twilight. She remembered she needed to make him sleep – and cast the spell. Twilight was far from an apt magician, but the sleep spell was a simple one. It also helped that the figure was tired to begin with. Before he could return to wherever he needed to report to, he slumped to the ground, snoring.

Corona leaped out of the tree, removing a glove from her hand. She pressed it to his face…

…She was on a beach covered in women in bikinis.

Right, the man was sleeping, so she was sort of in his dream. She could see who she presumed to be him, a blue man lounging on a beach chair. His muscles looked far too defined to be real.

“Dreeeeeeams…”

Corona needed to focus on finding information, not nagging sensations in the back of her mind. But this dream wasn’t giving her anything, and as for the emotions in the space, they were all about ‘happy’ emotions that made Corona feel rather disgusted with herself.

But she couldn’t really do anything. Her empathy was a passive ability. She didn’t control what it saw, not really. It merely saw what memories and emotions were strong in the mind of whomever she touched. Usually, the important things rose to the surface, a consequence of being interrogated. But this man had been snuck up on, he hadn’t been thinking about it at all…

All she got was this beach.

“Passive, you saaaaaaay? Why not try something?”

There was definitely nothing she could do. But since she was here, she might as well try. She walked towards the blue man and stood in front of him. Something purple flashed, and he suddenly saw her. “Hey babe, what are you doing at a beach like this?”

Corona realized with some trepidation that she was now a part of his dream, and therefore was dressed to match. She twitched. “I am your worst nightmare. Quite literally.”

“Oh, really?” he sat up. “I like a challenge-“

She slapped him – it was very satisfying to slap someone with her bare hand without getting a rush of emotions from them. “No. You are going to stop ogling at these impressive and beaut-“ she caught herself acting on his emotions, growling. “Basically you’re going somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“The place you want to seeeeeeeee…”

Corona smirked. “Why not your workplace?”

Suddenly the blue man was in his shiny black suit, and Corona was standing next to him in the same suit. They were standing in a room filled with similarly dressed people, all holding clipboards with lists of technological devices on them. At the front of the room was a projector, and a woman in a suit.

Corona recognized her. Her eyes widened – it was an agent at AID, one of her coworkers. Her name was… Katty, Corona remembered.

“…Why am I back here…?” the blue man wondered aloud.

“You tell me,” Corona asked, noticing with trepidation that much of what Agent Katty was saying was only half-remembered, blurred.

“I… I already do the job… What’s with orientation again?”

“Same response.”

“You did this!”

“No, really?”

“Hey! Hey everybody, this woman’s crazy!” None of the audience paid him any mind. “What in…?”

“Memoooooooory…”

Corona smirked. “This is just a memory, and a rather fuzzy one at that. You can’t do anything.”

He turned to glare at her. “Who are you?”

“Probably just another figment of your imagination destined to torment you.” Can’t have him waking up and remembering this, if that is even possible. “Hey, here’s a thought. Maybe I’ll go away sooner if you ‘appease’ me.”

He backed away. The scenery shifted to a park in the middle of a big city. There was a little girl holding his hand. “Daddy, who’s the strange lady?”

Corona blinked. Unexpected. The man turned to his daughter. “I… I’m not sure at all.”

“Something from another universe,” Corona said. Which was true, when taken in a literal sense. She technically lived on this Earth though…

“Techniiiiiicalitiesssss…”

Corona continued digging forinformation. “So, besides that woman, who’s your boss? Do you like him?”

“Are you some kind of mind parasite?”

“Yesssss you aaaaaaaare.”

Corona gave him a thumbs up. “I am if you want me to be! So, show me your boss! Let’s talk about your boss!”

The scene with the park vanished, replaced with a political rally. A man in a suit waved at the populace and smiled, the podium beneath him reading Senator Pearse.

“Do you like him?” Corona asked.

“He pays me…” the blue man answered, clearly not processing all of this properly.

“One of the higher ups…” Corona mused. “You’ve been very helpful, mister.”

“Wait… How come you...”

“Because I’m derogatory and mean. I’ll probably be going now-“

“SUNSEEEEEEEEET!”

Corona looked directly at Senator Pearse. He was wearing the mask. She screamed…

…Corona jerked back from the man’s body, breathing heavily.

“What happened!?” Twilight yelled.

“I… He must have had some sort of mental training…”

“You went all purple for a while, Corona! I was worried!”

Corona kicked the unconcious blue man. “I’m fine. Let’s go, I’ve got something to talk to Director Storm about…”

~~~

General Sunset, Toph, Lieshy, Vivian, and Fef were climbing a large mountain.

Well, everyone but Lieshy was climbing. She was flying a little to the side, looking at them all impatiently. “The bumble can move above and below. I could just fly up, get the likely useless information, and come back down.”

Sunset shook her head. “No, Lieshy. This is a monastery – we’re not going to upset the acolytes by just letting you charge in.”

“Then just tell me what to do.”

“They won’t speak to anyone who isn’t an acolyte or government employee.”

“…That’s stupid.”

Fef laughed. “So, can I test them when I get there to see if I can get them to crack?”

“No trying to make them break their laws, we want information, not a fight.”

Vivian nodded. “Got it. What’s the information this time?”

Toph grunted. “This was the sixth artifact the Sage had Applejack get. Some kind of perfectly round sphere of white material. Applejack just charged in here, took it, and ran out. Didn’t know anything else about it, like so many of the other artifacts. Not that knowing more has been helpful.”

Vivian put her head in her hands. “Aw, but I liked the story of the Red Rune! Such passionate love and sacrifice!”

“Still useless,” Toph muttered.

“The legend behind could esoterically affect the artifact’s power,” Lieshy commented.

“Big word alert!” Fef called to her.

“I can be the sesquipedalian whenever I desire.”

“You are just such a STICK in the MUD sometimes, you know that?”

“I hazard to suggest it’s called ‘being the reasonable one’.”

“Now you’re just speaking like that to ANNOY me!”

Lieshy smirked. “Eeeyup!”

Fef pointed at Lieshy but couldn’t come up with a retort.

“We’re almost there,” Toph announced.

“Really?” Fef shouted, glad to be changing the topic of focus. “How can you tell?”

Toph stomped her foot into the ground. “I can feel earth above us too, numbnuts.”

“…Ah.”

Vivian smiled. “Oh, that’s good, I can’t wait to meet these acolytes! …Even if they won’t talk to us, I’m sure the story of the artifact will be fascinating!”

They arrived at the top of the mountain, discovering the summit to be a crater-like enclosure with one entrance – a set of gates that seemed to be made out of a solid piece of pearl. Sunset was fairly sure magic was used to construct it, since finding a pearl that size would require an oyster the size of a mansion or two. The gates themselves were inscribed with two giant eyes. One pupil was the shape of a hexagon, the other a six-pointed star.

Sunset moved to knock, but the doors opened before she reached them. They slid back, kicking up significant dust, slowly revealing the interior of the summit-crater. There were a dozen simple stone buildings carved from the mountain’s rock, a handful of trees with strange blue fruit, and a statue of Armonia in the center, enchanted to have water flowing over her constantly.

The Goddess looked exactly as she was usually depicted – humanoid with four arms and vague features alongside two pairs of wings – pegasus and dragon. Her head had three small, rounded horns to draw attention away from the nearly void face. A single tail twisted around her two legs, a simple mouth at the end.

Sunset bowed purely from reflex. Lieshy glanced at the others before following suit. Soon, all five of them were bowing to the statue, most feeling pretty awkward about it.

“General Sunset Shimmer, you are welcomed to the Gateway Monastery. We’ve been expecting you.”

Sunset took that as her cue to look up. She stared into the purple eyes of an oculus with a similarly colored mane and a dull gray coat who was wearing perfectly white robes. “Thank you for your gracious welcome. I apologize for the unusual companions, but they need to hear what we’ll discuss.”

“I understand. I also understand they will blurt things out constantly.”

“…Now, I’m sure they can behave themse-“

“MAUD!?” Lieshy blurted.

The acolyte made no reply – didn’t even so much as look at Lieshy. Sunset, on the other hand, shot Lieshy a look. “Don’t test them!”

“But she looks like Maud! Pinkie Pie’s sister!”

Sunset blinked, slowly turning back to the acolyte. “You wouldn’t, by chance, be related to Pinkie the Sage, would you?”

“Your companion is indeed correct, I am her sister. I can hear them, by the way, I’m just forbidden from interacting with all of them save Fef, who holds a prominent position in her government.”

“Cool!” Fef cheered. “What’s with the no talking thing though? Seems lame!”

“It is to keep us disconnected from the ways of the world. However, we do understand that sometimes discussing our place in the world is necessary, hence the clause that allows for discussion with the government. Any government, really.”

Toph grumbled. “Shoulda gotten Iroh to give me a title…”

Maud looked back to Sunset. “You are looking for my sister.”

Sunset nodded. “She’s caused some problems and is definitely up to something. Can you tell us anything?”

“I know no more about what she wants than Lady Rarity did,” Maud said. “I may be able to see further than almost every oculus thanks to the Goddess’s blessing, but I cannot see inside the minds of anypony, not even my sister.”

“Well, what about just Pinkie in general? How does she do the things she does?”

Maud turned to look at the Goddess’ statue. “She sees something all other oculi can not. We see what is. She described once, to me, that she saw the reason for what is, as well. And, as you know, one day she saw a reason she hated, and started her quest, whatever it is.”

“And what did she want taken from here?” Vivian asked.

Maud made no response. Sunset shook her head. “Sorry. What she said, what was taken from here?”

“The Goddess’ mold,” Maud said, pointing at the cupped hands of the statue. “The vigilante Applejack crashed through our doors one day on Pinkie’s behest and despite our best efforts to defend ourselves, made off with our prized possession. It was a pure white material that could take on any shape, made in ancient times by the essence of the Goddess against her will.”

“I take it there’s a story behind that?” Sunset asked.

“Yes. But first, you are going to have a mental breakdown.”

Sunset blinked. “Come again?” She began to look around, concerned that something would jump out at her. She saw a large, blue dragon sitting on the edge of the crater. “Oh. You have a dragon. …Mildly terrifying, but nothing worth losing my mind over.”

Toph tapped her foot on the ground. “Oh, yeah, dragon. Forgot to mention that.”

“How do you forget to mention something like a giant predatory reptile?” Lieshy asked.

“It seemed friendly.”

Lieshy facehooved.

“I don’t see any-“ Sunset began, but then she saw it. Towards the back of the canyon was an Arcei in acolyte dress. Sunset’s tail began growling, lighting on fire. She teleported right in front of the brown stallion. “I spy me an Arcei.”

The Arcei backed away, but didn’t speak.

“Oh, you can talk. I’m General Sunset Shimmer. Please, I’d like to hear which runes were destroyed in the construction of your arcs. How did the golems scream when they were slain? What ponies’ livelihood did you steal?”

“I… I…”

Sunset’s tail really wanted to eat him. “I’m not sure how much longer I can keep the maw back, Arcei. Spill the beans, I’m curious.”

“The Rune of Magnus!”

Sunset’s face darkened. “…That was you!?”

“I was young! I didn’t know what I was being asked to do!”

“You think that’s an excuse for condemning an entire town to freeze to death?” She pulled her head back, preparing a devastating fire spell.

She hit a rock wall instead of the Arcei. Sunset glared at Toph. “You think you’re defending an innocent, do you?”

“No. I mean, he doesn’t sound like that much of a jerk, but I’m just stopping you from a murderous rampage.”

“I grew up around the Rune of Magnus, Toph. The pack of Arcei that harvested that rune used it to make him.”

“It doesn’t sound like he really had a choice. And something tells me if you try to kill him, you’ll turn all the acolytes on us. Including bad mama dragon up there.”

Sunset glared at the ‘bad mama dragon.’

“I will roast you if you so much as touch Turner,” the dragon bellowed.

Sunset took a deep breath and put the fire on her tail out. “…Fine. He lives. Whatever, keep your blasphemous freak here, see if the Goddess decides to smite you for betraying her creed.”

“You are mistaken about her creed,” Maud said, walking up to Sunset again. “The runes are not part of the Goddess’ plan at all, and therefore are outside her doctrine.”

Sunset shook her head. “What are you, crazy? Of course they’re part of the Goddess’ plan!”

“They are not mentioned at all in any of the scriptures aside from as set pieces. They are not considered holy, nor evil, but are instead neutral forces.”

Sunset frowned. “You’re an odd group.”

“There’s a reason we left the main Order to live up here, they began to teach things deviating from the true scripture.”

“Whatever. Fine. Do what you will, see what I care. Tell me about the Goddess’ mold so we can get on with our lives.”

“The sphere that can take any shape came into existence at the time of magic. If you recall the legend, in the creation of the world the Goddess lost focus momentarially and infused part of her essence into the world that later became magic. The world started draining it from her in large quantities, trying to take all her power for itself. She could not allow this, and tied a knot to separate her power from the power the world had already taken. That knot is the mold.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “Okay, so we have an artifact that can take any shape with a relation to the Goddess. How does that help us?”

“I do not know, I cannot see much. I do know that the mask she wears is the Goddess’ mold.”

“Oh, so it has special white magic tendril powers?”

“No,” Maud said. “It should be completely docile, unable to do anything beyond change shape.”

Fef gasped. “She’s done something to it!”

“Genius deduction,” Lieshy deadpanned.

“What has she done?” Sunset asked.

“I have no idea,” Maud admitted. “I do know it can’t be good. Something sick and dark is brewing. What makes me most concerned is that my prophecies tell me only part of it comes from Pinkie. The other is something… maddening.”

Sunset nodded slowly. “Well, we’ll be off then. Enjoy your little den.”

“May the Goddess bless you.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Sunset muttered, walking out of the ‘monastery’. She growled. “Glad that’s over with.”

Vivian put her hands on her hips. “Sunset Shimmer, that was completely uncalled for, rude, and brutish!”

Sunset narrowed her eyes. “There’s a reason Arcei are illegal, Vivian. They destroy runes. In some cases, maybe that can be allowed to slide, even if I don’t think so. But that case? Ponies died when that rune was taken away!”

Toph folded her arms. “And you think risking the mission was worth attacking him?”

“You and I both know you only protected him because you felt like it and not because of the mission.”

“Doesn’t matter. I still stand by it. Not to mention that by killing him you’d just bring about more violence. Isn’t that something you’re trying to stop doing?”

Sunset frowned. “…I wouldn’t kill him. I would have just broken his arcs so he wouldn’t be able to destroy another rune.”

“That’d be like removing somepony’s horn,” Lieshy pointed out.

“So? It stops further destruction!”

“I don’t think he was planning on destroying any more runes,” Vivian said.

Sunset groaned. “You know what? You guys can find your own ways down the mountain. I’ll be waiting in the bar at Silkerton.” She lit her horn and teleported away.

Toph threw her hands into the air. “Stubborn as a mule!”

Fef broke out laughing.

Toph facepalmed. “Fef that wasn’t that funny.”

Lieshy sighed. “It was very painful. I worry about our leader, sometimes.”

Vivian shrugged. “It’s a fault she has. We shouldn’t let her think it’s fine, and we should encourage her to change herself, but we also shouldn’t let it destroy our bond.”

“I doubt,” Lieshy said. “It is something rather difficult to move past.”

Toph clenched her fist. “You have no idea…”

~~~

Corona stepped into the primary mission control of AID and walked down the center aisle to Director Storm’s big seat. She took off her sunglasses. “Director? Can I have a word with you?”

“Always! Well, so long as I’m not busy, but I’m not busy now!” He chuckled. “What’s on your mind?”

“…In private?”

His expression lost some of is jovial nature. “Ah, I see. Well, to the private office then! Onward!” He performed an exaggerated march into his private office, Corona in tow. His personal office was a somewhat small space consisting almost entirely of a desk and two bookshelves. There were three small chairs at the front of the desk, and one large behind. Storm took his place in the large seat and rested a finger on one of his many shiny paperweights. “So, what do you have for me?”

“I uncovered a bit of an economic conspiracy at the Hub, and it involves at least one of our agents.”

Director Storm sighed, putting his hands on the bridge of his nose. “It was only a matter of time… All right, who’s the traitor, what’s their plan, and how can I get them behind bars?”

Corona found this reaction a little more accepting than she’d expected, but that was good for her. “Agent Katty. Her face was in the memories of a man I touched. She was teaching him how to do his ‘job’ which, at the very least, involved supplying technology shops of the Hub with products to sell at-cost in order to run any competing shops into the ground. Basically they’re encouraging price-fixing in order to exploit the extremely popular market of technology at the expense of ponies and the people of the Elemental Nations.”

Storm furrowed his brow. “That’s definitely illegal here, but I’m not aware that we can charge them for doing such things on the Hub.”

Corona smirked. “Well, we can cut off the people in charge on this end and expose the plan to the people of the Hub. Make a big show of it, make the people of the Hub come to realize that we’re on their side, and will defend them. Plus, if we can stop them before they complete their plan, we can keep technology prices from skyrocketing. For a while at least, I don’t really understand the economy that well.”

“You and me both.” He put his hand to his beard, stroking it. “I like it, I like this a lot. We expose a conspiracy, boot out one of our less-than-loyal agents, and then we claim some glory of our own! Ha!” He took out a notebook. “Okay, so, who else is involved besides Katty? I know you’ve got more than you’ve told me. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have more.”

“I intercepted a shipment and emotionally read a blue skinned man. Didn’t get his name, actually. I did get the name of who I believe is the mastermind behind it all. Senator Pearse.”

Director Storm stopped taking notes and facepalmed, ramming the notepad into his face.

Corona’s confident expression fell. “…What’s the problem?”

“Pearse is the primary reason we get funding here at AID. Going up against him would be incredibly dangerous. Even if he wouldn’t declare political war on us if we exposed him, we need him in office so we can work like we do. If we remove him somehow, some other Senator I don’t know how to work with is going to screw everything over.”

“So you’re saying we aren’t going to do anything.”

Director Storm sighed, fixing Corona with a serious expression. Corona wasn’t quite sure, but this may have been the first time she’d seen a truly serious expression on his face. “More than that. I’m ordering you to stop looking into it. If he wants to do this, we let him. I’m very upset he didn’t at least have the courtesy to tell me what he was doing with one of my agents, but I can’t do anything about that now. I can’t have him knowing one of my agents acted against him.”

“But sir, what about-“

“Corona, no. My decision is final, and it has nothing to do with my personal opinion on the matter. You are to cease investigations immediately and do nothing to hinder Senator Pearse’s shady operation. He is to have the full control of the technology market if he wants, no matter how many regulations or laws he’s breaking. …You didn’t get caught did you?”

“The Hub’s cameras may have seen me tackle the Flim Flam brothers, but the blue man was asleep when I confronted him.”

“Good. I’ll try to have those recordings erased from the Hub data…”

“You have access to the Hub cameras?”

Director Storm shrugged. “Not at the moment. But I’m pretty sure I can get it, it’d just take a couple agents in the right place.”

Corona sat back in her chair, looking down. “So… That’s that? I just stop?”

“Yes. I am sorry, Corona. This is one of those cases where my hands are tied. I will have a discussion with Senator Pearse about informing me of things, but that’s as far as the action I can take goes.”

“So, he just wins.”

Director Storm nodded. “It’s not like we can get the people upset to put pressure on him, everything here’s top secret.” He stood up. “Sometimes they have us in ugly traps, Corona. The cost of doing what you think is right is intentionally made too steep. You’ll just have to accept that.” He tapped one of his paperweights as he left the office.

Corona just sat there, staring at the large empty seat in front of her for around a minute. Eventually she stood up, face downcast, and walked out. She put her sunglasses back on and tried to stare as impassively as possible, but it was still easy for everyone to tell she was down. Nobody said anything to her.

~~~

Twilight did not take the news well.

Corona eventually forced herself to leave Twilight crying in the Earth Gizmos shop. Her presence wasn’t helping, not today. Corona had tried to tell Twilight she could take action herself, but she wasn’t hearing it. Twilight had gone into a pit of despair and there was nothing Corona could do about it. Not without some time.

She walked through the Hub aimlessly, no clue of where she was going. No goal in mind. Trying not to think about today. The lies, the rules, the cheating, the manipulation, the mask, the barriers, the people in charge. She wanted to burn them all right now.

Her phone rang. She whipped it out, planning to hit Ignore – but there was no button for that. There was just a pink hexagon with a sugar skull inside and the words GO THROUGH THE DOOR ON YOUR LEFT printed on the screen.

Corona put her phone away and glanced to her left. There was, in fact, a door leading into an empty establishment. Her curiosity was piqued. She checked the door – unlocked. She walked into the room, not surprised in the slightest that the door closed behind her.

The room was completely bare except for one large television screen with the sugar skull on it.

“So… What now?”

The symbol glitched for a second and switched to a live camera feed. A woman grinned at Corona. “Ah, I see you listened! Muy bueno.”

Corona nodded. “I take it you’re Sombra?”

“Yes! And you are Agent Corona, otherwise known as Sunset Shimmer, sophomore at Wolfe University on Earth Vitis, and technically you still hold the title of Protégé in Equis Vitis.”

“Nice trick, knowing stuff that’s basically public knowledge. Why am I here?”

Sombra grinned. “Here specifically? It was empty and you were walking by. Why am I talking to you? Well, you see, I’ve been watching your little game of detective through every camera I can find. You’ve gotten quite the story – an otherworldly attempt to exploit the friendly denizens of other worlds for money by manipulating the sale of technological devices.”

Corona was mildly impressed she knew all that. “And?”

“And it seems as if you have been silenced. But no worry, this is where your good friend Sombra comes in! You see, I started doing my own digging once I realized what you had stumbled upon, and I found a loooooot of evidence.” She pressed a button, bringing a picture of Senator Pearse and Agent Katty up next to her head. “You’d be surprised where people think there aren’t any cameras. Or where documents can be stored without being found.” She brought up a file detailing a ‘meeting’ orchestrated by ‘Blight Katty’. “And you see, Corona, what we have here is a case of me having all the evidence needed to blow the lid right off this thing, and the means to broadcast it to everyone in the Hub!”

Corona narrowed her eyes. “And you want something from me for it, don’t you?”

“See? This is why I like you, you actually have a brain. You’d be surprised how few people do.”

Corona laughed. “No I wouldn’t.”

“Perhaps not,” Sombra admitted, shrugging.

“Your terms?”

“Ah yes, my terms. You see, I want to form what you’d consider a partnership with you. In this partnership, we’d both get something we want. I’d get access to the events that Director Storm knowingly changes in reports, or things he never digitizes. You’d get a friend who could help you keep your little AID organization accountable for the things they do.”

“…You’re asking me to become a mole, a traitor.”

“Yes!”

“No deal.”

“But think about this, Corona!” Sombra said, leaning in closer to her camera. “Do you really think this will be the last time something like this happens? Surely, if Senator Pearse is willing to do this, he’s willing to do other highly despicable things. This will be far from the last exploitation of his, and there will no doubt be other things the ‘admirable’ Director Storm will be unable to prevent – if he truly is that great of a person.”

“He’s not. But he is forward and honest.”

“Do you really think so?” Sombra took a physical file from off screen and examined it. “This file was never digitized, and I only got it by being really lucky with a stupid agent not checking if the paper shredder was working properly. It describes a magic artifact that was ‘lost in action’ that I swear looks a lot like one of Director Storm’s fancy paperweights…”

Corona shrugged. “He was probably hiding it from people like Senator Pearse.”

“That’s certainly possible, but how would you know?” Sombra asked.

“I don’t,” Corona admitted.

“And that’s what I’ll provide. A way for you to find out. A method by which to keep them accountable. A friend of sorts who just wants information in exchange for an avenue for you to achieve justice, when needed.”

Corona furrowed her brow. Sombra was actually making a lot of sense here. “You make a fair argument. But you’re a criminal.”

“What have I done besides steal a few things and hack a lot? Didn’t your close friend Nova do the exact same thing several months ago, and yet you’ve forgiven her completely!”

“You’re not showing remorse.”

“I was just making a point…” Sombra said, putting on a pouty face. “This is a one-time offer Corona, I won’t offer it again later.”

“I won’t betray them, Sombra. I may not agree with what they do all the time, and they may be locked by bureaucracy, but I trust them.”

Sombra placed another file onscreen. “Do you remember the world with the pawns and the cube?”

“Yes, actually. What about it?”

She pointed to a specific part of the file. “They authorized a nuke to be dropped on it, destroying everything there. The reason? ‘Possible security breach’. Suggested by Agent Tempest and authorized by Director Storm. There’s a footnote here that the rest of the team should not be made aware of the course of action, this time suggested by Director Storm himself.”

Corona blinked. “That… That can’t be real.”

“You have your dimensional device on you, do you not? You can always go check. I’d be wary of the radiation though.”

Corona pulled out the device, setting it to open a portal. There was nothing but blackness, not even the grid was visible. She closed the portal quickly, nervously glancing at the red radiation readout on her glasses.

“Nice reflexes,” Sombra said. “So, there you go. They’re hiding at least that from you, and I’m pretty sure you think that’s pretty horrible. I may not be the best person, Corona, but I think I’m your only option if you don’t want to become a soldier who follows orders blindly.”

Corona took a deep breath and nodded. “We have a deal. What do you want me to do now?”

Sombra grinned with victory. “At the moment? Nothing. Just keep an eye out for AID being secretive or manipulative about anything. I’ll be in touch. Feel free to get back to your day, in about five minutes the lid should be blown wide open on this thing. See you around!”

The screen went dead and the door behind Corona popped open. She took a step out into the street and started walking, once again without any clue where she was going. She wondered what Sombra was going to do…

Precisely five minutes later, when she passed Seskii and the cabbage salesman again, every screen in the Hub lit up with photos, documents, and a typed up description of the Senator’s plan. It took a few minutes for people to start getting angry.

Corona smirked. The sight of people getting angry was, for once, something good. She returned to Earth Gizmos to find Twilight staring at a computer. She looked up. “Did you…”

Corona held up a hand. “I didn’t do this Twilight.”

Twilight smiled and dragged her into a hug. “Of course you didn’t.”

The two friends embraced.

~~~

Director Storm paused the video. “So, let’s review. You walk into the store smiling, and Twilight asks you if you did this. With a cocky smile on your face, you emphasize the words ‘didn’t’ and ‘this’, implying that you had some tangential relation while making it clear she’s not to suggest any sort of involvement to anyone in a statement that probably isn’t a full lie.”

Corona opened her mouth to speak. Director Storm held up a hand to stop her. “Look, I know there’s an excuse coming, and it’ll be a good one, and I’ll see right through it because I’ve been at this job way, way too long. Let me just make it clear that I am not happy with you disobeying my order.”

Corona said nothing.

Director Storm continued. “Now, I can’t find what exactly you did to do that, so I have to give you points for that, a good agent knows how to cover her tracks. But I did find enough to point at you and probably get you convicted. I then promptly threw all that information into every trash heap I could find so no one could ever say you had anything to do with it.”

“…Why?”

“Because you are a good agent. There’s a delicate balance of following orders and using your own judgment. As much as the system wants you to follow orders blindly every time, I wouldn’t be where I am today without a bit of rule breaking. You’ve pulled a good one – Senator Pearse’s plan is completely toast, he’s still a senator, and he has no reason to hate us at all. Though he is being very adamant we find out who did this. Frankly, I’m encouraged to just pin it on that loose hacker, Sombra, and get on with our lives, but we’ll see if a better target presents themselves.”

Corona smiled nervously. “Heheh… Yeah…”

“Anyway, as well as this turned out, I still can’t have you disobeying direct orders like that. So there will be some punishment disguised as regular assignment.”

“…What?”

“Your team is going to go through ‘survival training’ on this planet. Spend a month in the wilderness without any supplies. And I’ll order Tempest to ensure you don’t use any of those fire powers of yours.”

“I’m in college, Director!”

Director Storm grinned. “This won’t take place until your summer vacation. I’ll keep adding days and weeks to it if you do more questionable things. So I’d suggest being a good girl for the next little while, hrm?”

“Yes sir!”

“Good. Now get out of my office, I need to call someone about another illegal shipment. The cargo only gets weirder when you upgrade to interdimensional status.”

“I can imagine…” Corona said, standing up and walking outside. She put her sunglasses back on. There was a little sugar-skull icon that flashed on them for the briefest of moments. A smiley face emoticon appeared in the top right corner.

Corona nodded, biting her lip. This… well, this was going to be interesting, to say the least.

019 - NINETEEN

“Hey guys! Pinkie Pie here! I’ve been waiting for this moment for quite a while – I finally get my own chapter! Isn’t that great? I’ve been one of the mane ponies for an arc and then some already and I haven’t really gotten a chance in the spotlight! Twilight and Nova definitely have, Rarity has, Flutterfree’s had some good pivotal moments, but me? I’m usually just there, along for the ride, there to make you smile and spread cheer around!

“I mean, that’s not something that upsets me or anything, sometimes I just work best in the background! Probably most of the time actually, me being an important force on the way things pan out is sorta cheating. Usually. That might change…

“Ah, what am I saying? Who cares about that! Ahah… How’s your life been lately? Must be good, or at least better, since you’re reading this, right? I like to think it is, anyway, though it’s a little hard to give a message to everyone reading this that actually applies to everyone. Your life might actually suck right now – and if it does, don’t lose hope! Things have a way of turning out for the better!

“I mean, right now, my situation isn’t all that great, but I have faith it’ll turn out okay. Probably. Today was quiiiiite a doozy, let me tell you! Lots of running, jumping, and crazy things that are just too much to deal with! You should have seen it, actually. I’m surprised you haven’t already. Ooooooh, right, you’re just looking at this first so you can go back later! That’s a pretty cool narrative trick, huh? Must be nice, time both being linear and fluid for you. You can read everything in a single sequence of events even if the events themselves jump around a lot. It’d save a lot of headache if it looked that way for us.

“Oh, but I don’t want you to go yet! It’s nice to have someone to talk to, or at least talk at. Some of you are responding in your heads – thank you for the imaginary cookie, by the way – but as you can see it’s more than a liiiiiiittle difficult to give any sort of answer to you that makes any sense! And now you’re all thinking about cookies! Heh!

“…So, you’ve probably started asking about now, why am I talking to you? Even if I’ve dropped hints before, I’ve never actually addressed you. See, yeah I’m usually not supposed to, or even really able to do this, but… Ah, that’s not important. Well, it is, but I kinda don’t want to talk about it right now. You’ll probably figure it out. …Yay.

“Let’s talk about something else! Apparently I’m going to be the only mane pony not to change her name! Or, well, I try changing it so often and never settle on anything that it is going to be permanent so nopony takes my names seriously and… Yeah. You’ll like what Twilight and Rarity choose, I think. I’m actually not sure why Twilight chooses hers though, and I’m keeping my lips zipped about Rarity! There’s got to be some fun, right?

“Oh? Why don’t I just choose Diane? Because, sillies, there’s already other Pinkies who have that one! Quite a lot, actually! It’s what my loose mirror clone duplicate is going by on ‘Equis Vitis’ right now! Heh, ‘Equis Vitis’. What a silly name! I love it!

“What else… What else… Oh! You want to know what I’m doing? Nothing actually, just standing in a field of roses. Nothing all that interesting, to be honest. Definitely not. Everything’s perfectly fine and you shouldn’t be worried. Ow – yeesh, these things are much, much more pointy than they look. Or should be. Or could be… Everythinghasgonenineteen. Ahemherm! Right, right.

“I think it’s time for you to go back now, see at least part of my story. Fun, I guess. Just… when you go back, please don’t judge me, okay? You… You really can’t understand what went on in my head, no matter how much he tries to describe it to you. Okay?

“Please…?”

~~~

“Watcha dooin’?” Pinkie asked, putting her hooves on the laboratory counter covered with strange, vibrating panels of glass that reflected the walls of Twilight's castle rather well.

Starbeat looked through her goggles at Pinkie and bit her lip. “Ah. Pinkie. I am… Experimenting.”

“Experimenting on what?”

Starbeat scooted away from her and tapped one of the panes of glass. “The mysterious force, what else? It’s all I study.”

Pinkie nodded slowly. “What are you finding out?”

“Well, that everywhere has it. Every dimension, every world, every person. As of yet I haven’t found a place where it manifests like a curse – like mine – but everywhere there’s ambient spread of it. I’m starting to wonder if it’s an inherent part of reality, like space, time, matter, and energy.”

Pinkie poked one of the vibrating glass panes. “That’s cool!”

“That’s terrifying! There’s something around us that nopony has any idea about that probably changes a lot of things without us realizing! Some ponies have more of the mysterious force around them! Some universes just have more background energy! And I have no idea what it does or means!”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll figure it out!”

“I’ve been working on this for months, Pinkie, and nothing, nothing, has revealed itself!”

Pinkie smiled sadly. “I think that’s just how it’s going to be for a long, long time. But you shouldn’t let that discourage you! I’m sure you can find out more the more you keep working on it!”

“Yeah, I will… After all, I need to find a cure for myself…” She looked at Pinkie. “Yes, you look really, really hot to me right now and I want to caress you. It’s… painful.”

Pinkie giggled. “No problem. You can pet me if you think it’ll make you feel better.”

“Ah… No. Like an addiction, giving in just forces me into a worse relapse. I have to remain strong and not give in to my nature.”

“I’m sure you can do it!”

Starbeat took a deep breath and scooted further away from Pinkie. “Here’s the cruel ironic paradox of this mess, the positive reinforcement from other ponies just makes the urge worse. How’s that for fun?”

Pinkie frowned. “That’s horrible…”

“Yeah, it is…” She shook her head. “Talk about something else. Quickly.”

“Did you name the force after yourself yet?”

Starbeat grabbed a tissue off the countertop to help with her nosebleeds – apparently they were quite common, given the small pile of bloodied tissues neatly stacked next to the tissue box. “Erhem… Sorta? When I write papers about it, I call it the Beat, but that’s obviously geared toward the observation of it in my world.” Starbeat turned to Pinkie. “Hey, you have a… tendency to know things, and a strong focus of the ambient force around you. Do you have a name?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Eh, I think you should just go with Beat for now.”

Starbeat nodded. “Fair enough…”

“So, anything interesting about ponies or universes with strong amounts of the Beat?”

Starbeat nodded slowly. “Charter Twilight Sparkle has the most ambient beat of any individual I’ve scanned. You’re the second. The universe we’re standing in right now has the highest ambience of any of the others, with Earth Tau’ri being the second. The problem is I can’t assign definite measures to the Beat since it fluctuates wildly and doesn’t make any sense…”

Pinkie smiled. “Hey, hey, don’t worry, sometimes you just have to be okay with not understanding everything. That’s what all my friends have to do with me daily! ‘It’s just Pinkie being Pinkie’ has become a meme.”

“Meme?”

“An idea that spreads that people recognize and use over and over again. You should check the Hub Internet, they’re everywhere.” She pulled a smartphone out of her pocket and produced a picture of Senator Pearse with the caption “NEW FRIENDS WHO WANT NOTHING AND WOULD LOVE TO HELP ME WITH ANYTHING I ASKED? CLEARLY, I NEED TO ROB THEM.”

“…I don’t get it.”

Pinkie shrugged. “It’s just a thing you slowly begin to understand the more you’re exposed to it. Or just laugh at if you’re me, but you aren’t.”

“There are a few ponies who are,” Starbeat commented.

“Yeah, that’s true. It makes things more fun! Did you know there’s a clone of me wandering around this world that goes by the name Diane?”

Starbeat blinked. “I had no idea. Guess that’s why you don’t use that name then, huh?”

“Yep!” Pinkie grinned. “By the way, why did you chose Starbeat in the heat of the moment?”

“Cause I felt like it, really. I was Starlight, and beat was related to the heart, which was what my world was all about. In a disgusting sort of way.”

“I see…” Pinkie furrowed her brow. “Well, I wish you luck in your experiments!”

“You leaving?”

“I’m about to be called away!”

Twilight poked her head in the doorway. “Pinkie! We’re off on an adventure! New world!”

“Yay!” Pinkie bounced over to Twilight. “See you Starbeat!”

Starbeat weaved. Twilight nodded in her direction. “Hey, Starbeat, how you doing?”

“Oh, you know, suffering from an extreme urge to hold Pinkie and never let go, but it will pass.”

Twilight smiled awkwardly. “Right… Good luck with that. See you later.”

“As always,” she said, sliding her goggles back on her face.

~~~

The world in question was another alternate version of Equestria. Today, the grass was extra blue and the buildings of Ponyville were all in the wrong spots, and Twilight’s castle was floating. Other than that, the ponies acted more or less the same and everything was enjoyable. They’d already met their alternate selves and had made quick friends with them. One of the simplest outings yet.

“So, marking this one as just another regular world?” Nova asked. “Doesn’t seem to be anything special here.”

“Really?” the world’s native Starlight said, frowning. “Nothing special?”

“Well, the grass is blue,” Nova conceded. “Unless you’ve got something better.”

Starlight frowned. “Well, the best thing we’ve got is Melinda, and you probably have her as well.”

Twilight blinked. “Melinda?”

“Who’s Melinda?” Pinkie asked.

“Oh, she probably just has a different name in your world. She’s just the best.” Starlight grinned. “She’s, like, the personification of all six elements of harmony at once, is just so talented at everything, and can help everypony with all their friendship problems!”

“…Not ringing any bells,” Rarity said.

Starlight gasped. “You… You don’t have a Melinda!? How do you live? Without her we’d be… I don’t want to think about it!”

“I guess our universe just survived,” Flutterfree said. “Can we meet this Melinda?”

“Well, uh, I don’t exactly know where she is right now. But you can talk to other ponies, I’m sure some of them can tell you where she is! Actually, while you go do that, I’m going to look for her! Don’t leave while I’m gone!” She ran off.

Nova glanced at Twilight. “Well that was weird.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Not as weird as me. Still weird though.”

Twilight nodded. “True. I do want to meet this Melinda now, apparently she’s something special.” She waved down a version of Applejack. “Hey, do you know Melinda?”

“Do Ah ever! She’s just so great! Ah had her over for dinner yesterday with the family and she managed to solve three separate issues with our crops and animals simply by sayin’ things! We’ll have twice the load of apples next year!”

“Know where we can find her?” Rarity asked.

“Not really, she moves around a lot, talks to a lot of ponies. She’s around Rarity – our Rarity – most often. Check the boutique. You’ll be in for a treat when you meet her!”

“…We’ve gathered that,” Twilight said, turning to Rarity. “You see your Boutique yet?”

Rarity smirked. “Two streets down, three buildings to the left. I always have an eye for finding it, every time.”

The five ponies walked through town to the Boutique, all curious about this Melinda now. Such high praise from two ponies, she must really be something.

They walked into the world’s version of Carousel Boutique, and Rarity instantly gasped at the clothing on sale. “I… I…”

“Do you like?” the native Rarity said, poking her head out from behind a screen.

Rarity bit her lip. “I mean…” she pointed at an olive green dress. “The color on that one seems a bit… off, and the stitching is a liiiiiittle sideways-“

“Oh, your eyes must not be working properly. Melinda designed that; it’s one of the best pieces in my shop. Far outshines anything I design.”

The traveling Rarity’s pupils dilated. “Twilight, the ponies in this town are crazy!” she hissed.

Twilight stifled a chuckle. “Ahem. Rarity, is everything Melinda designs better than yours?”

The native Rarity grinned. “Why, yes! She’s a fashionista the likes of which the world has never seen! Just look at all these dresses! Beauty! Fashion! Brilliance!”

Pinkie blinked. “Yeah, even I can tell that pink dress is a bit overdone.”

The native Rarity gasped. “Never! It’s such the perfect balance of color, seamwork, and fabric choice! I – oh, maybe you just come from another universe and have different eyes. It must be terrible to be you. I bet Melinda could fix that, get you to see right with her magic!”

Nova narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “She can get us to see ‘correctly’ with magic?”

“Well, I’d assume so! Never seen her do such a thing, though. But with her magic prowess I’m sure she could!”

“Do you, by chance, know where she is?” Flutterfree asked.

“Ah, no. Last I saw she was headed over to Fluttershy’s cottage to deal with the animals. She’s the only one besides Fluttershy who can keep Angel at bay.”

“…Thank you, Rarity.” the visiting Rarity said, furrowing her brow. “Try to have more confidence in your own designs though, okay?”

“Of course!”

The five ponies left the Boutique.

“This is suspicious,” Pinkie said.

“No, really?” Nova snarked. “My bet is that the ponies in this town are brainwashed. Nobody’s that well liked.”

“I know who we can ask,” Twilight said. “We’re going to Fluttershy’s cottage, right? We can probably find this world’s Discord. I doubt he’d be affected by brainwashing.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Right! To my other cottage!”

Fluttershy’s cottage looked identical to Flutterfree’s cottage back in Equis Vitis. It was a tree covered with all sorts of cute animals and a couple not-so-cute ones. Flutterfree gently knocked on the door, and Fluttershy answered. “Oh! It’s… you five! Hi! What brings you to my cottage?”

“We’re wondering if we could see your world’s Discord,” Rarity said, smiling warmly. “Is he around?”

“Oh, he is if I ask for him. Heeeeey Discord!” Fluttershy called. In an instant Discord appeared in a flash of white. He was covered in strange, fluffy, purple spiders seemingly made of cactuses.

“Hello Fluttershy! And – oh! Otherworldly visitors! I am Discord, charmed to meet you!” He snapped his fingers, hitting Twilight alongside the head with a lucky charm marshmallow.

Twilight blinked. “You certainly aren’t any different.”

“I’m glad to hear that the other mes across the multiverse understand how to have a good time.” He stroked her cheek, making her feel like grass was growing in her face when, in reality, the hair had just turned blue. “It’d be a shame if that ever came to an end.”

“Right, right,” Nova said. “We wanted to ask you something. What do you think of Melinda?”

Fluttershy snorted. “Oh, this should be fun!”

Discord groaned. “Fine, fine…” he cleared his throat. “Melinda is a strange freak of nature who brings a tremendous amount of order to existence that, while annoying me to no end, I must admit is quite possibly the best person in existence. There. You happy? Did you just want to see me dance around the issue or something!?”

Nova stared at Discord in disbelief. “H-how? How can anyone be that well liked?”

“Clearly you haven’t met her,” Discord said, folding his arms. “Everyone who sees her truly understands that she is, the best!” He grabbed a microphone and sung the best into it a few times for an annoying echo effect. “Of course she and I have chaos and order fights all the time, it’s good to have a rival.”

Pinkie frowned. “Girls, something tells me we should leave. Like, hop along back home, deal with stuff there.”

“Right!” Twilight said, smiling nervously. “We’ve got another world to go look at! So many worlds, so little time!”

Discord put his hands on his hips. “Oh, we can’t have that! Clearly, you need to meet Melinda first!”

Flutterfree smiled, putting on the cute puppy-eyes. “Discord, I don’t think we do…”

Fluttershy looked at Discord as well with a similar expression. “I think they do!”

Discord blinked. “…Having two of you is absolutely terrifying. But, regardless, to Melinda!” He snapped his fingers, teleporting himself and the five otherworldly travelers back into the center of town. There, they saw this world’s Twilight Sparkle being ridden – by a young human woman.

Everypony had to admit, she looked stunning. Her hair was a lush, yet simple brown that curled delicately around her ears, each of which held a softly glowing red pearl earring. Her eyes were full of hazel wisdom, and her nose small, but slightly pointed. Her lips were full, and naturally vibrant, permanently twisted in a bemused and friendly smile. Her neck was slender, delicately sloping her skull down to her body, which was adorned with a simple blue t-shirt that somehow showed off all her curves in an amazing, yet modest way. Her jeans were simple blue denim, carefully sculpted around her powerful legs. The shoes were-

“Augh! Enough of that!” Pinkie said, smacking herself in the head.

Twilight looked at the human that was clearly Melinda and smiled. “Hello. I am Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle, and I’m from another universe. I’ve heard a lot about you Melinda.”

Melinda smiled a smile that was truly innocent. “Oh, are the ponies spreading stories about me again? Really, they shouldn’t do that.”

“But we just have to let others know about you!” the native Twilight said. “What would we even be without you?”

Melinda blushed. “Please, there’s no need! I can do everything you need, I don’t need any praise in return!”

“Ah, but you’ll get it, because you deserve it!”

“Aw, Twilight!”

“…Why do I feel like puking,” Nova whispered to Charter Twilight.

Twilight didn’t get to answer. Melinda apparently heard that remark. “Excuse me, Starlight?”

Nova coughed. “Nova, actually, I go by a different name to avoid confusion. I was just making a joke to Twilight here, nothing to worry about.”

Melinda frowned. “It wasn’t very nice though. You shouldn’t make jokes at the expense of other people.”

“Especially Melinda!” the native Twilight shouted, defensive.

Discord shrugged. “I don’t know… I make jokes at her expense all the time.”

“And it’s wrong,” Melinda asserted.

“I know,” Discord chuckled. “I’m just so bad aren’t I?”

Flutterfree glanced back and forth between them. “I… Twilight, are you sensing anything?”

Twilight’s horn was alit. She shook her head. “No…. There’s a lot of magic coming off of Melinda, more than Discord, but no sign of mental manipulation at all…”

Melinda gasped. “You… You think I’m mind controlling these ponies?”

Twilight smiled nervously. “No offense. You seem nice enough, but I’m finding it hard to believe that that everypony likes you this much.”

“What are you talking about?” native Twilight shouted. “Melinda’s amazing! Why can’t you see that?”

Charter-Twilight cocked her head at her other self. “Well, you see, she’s just a little too ‘perfect’ don’t you think? She’s not exactly arrogant, but she steals the spotlight from everypony else. She doesn’t seem to be willing to defend her own self, but you are all ready to defend her for her. It’s… Just a little weird, and I can’t believe it’s normal.”

Melinda walked up to Twilight, an expression of true confusion on her face. “…What are you talking about?”

Twilight smiled sadly. “I guess… I just don’t think you’re the best person in the world, Melinda.”

“That’s perfectly fine,” Melinda said, leaning down. “Not everyone has to like me. I didn’t even ask for it.”

Native Twilight gasped. “Look at that, other me! Look at that! She’s letting you win! How can you not see now?”

Charter-Twilight raised an eyebrow at her other self. “Why are you so worked up over this?”

Native Twilight ignored the question. “Melinda, think about it! Who are the only ponies who didn’t like you?”

Melinda shrugged. “Troublemakers, but…” Her pupils dilated. “Wait, Twilight, are you saying…?”

“Yes! Anyone who doesn’t like you is either a troublemaker, a liar, or a hater! You are a gift to everyone, and it’s blatantly obvious!”

Melinda turned back to Charter-Twilight. “She’s right… Literally no good pony has ever said what you said… You’re probably a villain in disguise!”

“…What.” Flutterfree deadpanned.

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but…” Melinda raised her hand, encasing Twilight in a magic bubble that froze her solid. “I’m going to have to have a long talk with Charter-Twilight here, see if I can redeem her. Not everyone’s mind can be changed, but I’ll try my hardest. To the castle, Twilight, let’s see if we can help her.”

Then Melinda, native Twilight, and Discord were gone.

Nova twitched. “What just happened!?”

Rarity had her hoof to her mouth. “I think… I think Melinda believed Twilight was a bad pony? Just for not liking her? And then somehow overwhelmed her with magic?”

Flutterfree shook her head. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Rarity nodded. “Yes… Of course…”

“We need to get Twilight back and leave, fast,” Nova said. “They said they were going to the castle so… Hey, wait a second. Where’s Pinkie?”

Pinkie was nowhere to be seen.

~~~

“Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope!” Pinkie yelled in a panicked sing-song voice as she ran across the world’s version of Ponyville. “I don’t need to be here, I really don’t need to be here…”

She laughed to herself. “Oh, sure, Melinda can break the rules, that’s perfectly fine, just dance around and be a little crazy! But me? No… Can’t do a thing! Need to get as far away from her as possible…” She ducked behind an alleyway and took a knapsack out of her mane. “Check for survival supplies… Cakes that will last me several months, check. Timer to tell me when they fix the problem, check. Alarm that’ll tell me if Melinda’s within seven miles of me, check. Why isn’t it ringing right now? Why am I even looking right now? She could just know I’m running, or find me by chance or… AUGH!”

She stuffed all the stuff back in her mane and took off in a pink blur through the town. Soon she left the version of Ponyville behind, arriving at a mountain. She threw herself into a cave and crammed herself into the deepest portion of it she could find. “There! I should be able to survive here until it blows over!”

She sat there for about a minute before she realized that wasn’t going to work.

“Oh, come on! What are you all looking at! Go back to Nova or something, I’m sure she’s cooking up a great bust-Twilight-out-of-jail plan! Go on! Shoo!”

A drop of water hit the floor nearby, echoing through the cave. Pinkie groaned. “Aaaaaugh why is this my moment? I’m not supposed to be near her! She’s scary! She’s, just, AGH.” She folded her legs and pouted. “No, I’m not doing this. I’m sitting right here and there’s nothing you can do about it! You’re all just looking at words on a page! You have nooo control! This is going to be boring, and boring, and boring until the scene changes or something!”

There was an eerie breeze through the cavern. Pinkie could hear the nothingness around her, interspersed with the water drops. She counted the drops - nothing better to do while cowering here. Twelve… Thirteen… Fourteen… Fifteen… Sixteen… Seventeen… Eighteen… Nineteen… Then nothing. It stopped at nineteen.

Pinkie twitched. “What, am I supposed to go back then? And do what? Actually, no, nevermind, not talking, Miss Zipperlips here! Not giving you what you want!”

There was silence.

The cave itself was dark, so dark that even with Pinkie’s eyes wide open she couldn’t see anything. Not that there was anything, now that the water drops had stopped. It was just her in a very, very dark cave, trying her hardest to be uninteresting.

Her tail started twitching and her jaw opened forcefully. The Pinkie Sense had activated, but Pinkie wasn’t going to listen to it. Nope. Her place was not out there, it was in here, away from things that twisted her world. There were some things she shouldn’t mess with, and Melinda was one of them. She had no idea what’d happen-

“Would you stop broadcasting my thoughts!?” she shouted. There was nothing for some time. “Thank you.”

Due to a lack of thoughts or cave interactions, it just so happened that ten minutes passed. Then something happened.

“Oh for the-“

The native Pinkie Pie appeared, holding a lantern. “Hi! Watcha dooin?”

“Hiding in a cave.”

“Woah! Why?”

“Because I need to stay away from town for a while, that’s all,” Pinkie smiled. “Nothing for you to worry about, everything will be fine!”

“Oh! It sounds like you have a bit of a problem! I can help!”

Pinkie looked at her counterpart. “Really? How?”

“I know just the person to introduce you to!”

“OHHHH NONONONONONONO!” Pinkie blurted, scooting up against a far cave wall. “I’d rather just… Not, okay?”

“What’s wrong with Melinda? She’s the best!”

“Can… Can you not see what she is? What she does to all of you ponies?”

The other Pinkie cocked her head. “Uh… No. What does she do?”

“Well if I told you you’d just label me a crazy, a baddy, a hater, or something and drag me over to her castle!” Pinkie put her hooves over her mouth. “Actually, ignore that!”

The other Pinkie pursed her lips. “I think you really need to see Melinda.”

Pinkie took out a squeaky hammer and pointed it at her counterpart. “You won’t be taking me there!”

“Yes I will!” she said, producing a giant candy cane and hooking Pinkie with it. Pinkie twisted out of its grasp, bopping her other self on the head. The native Pinkie took the opportunity to grab the visiting Pinkie with her hooves, trying to drag her out of the cave. They apparead around numerous different stalactites and stalagmites, moving in clearly impossible patterns all around the cave walls.

“Hey! If you can do these things, why can’t you see her for what she is? Aren’t you aware of them?” Pinkie asked herself when they both had each other in a chokehold.

“Them? Who?”

Pinkie jumped into the air, laying flat on the ceiling. “The ones watching and reading, silly!”

“There’s nopony watching or reading! You’re crazier than I am!”

“…Oh,” Pinkie said. “Time for me to check out.” She tried to duck behind a stalactite and appear somewhere on the outside of the mountain, but the other Pinkie grabbed her. They both tried to appear each other in different, distant locations…

POP.

Pinkie was suddenly in a dark room with a wooden floor. Her counterpart was gone. “Woo!” She cheered. “I got away! Now, where am I?”

“…Here, apparently,” the Sage said, staring at Pinkie in disbelief. She removed the mask from her face and held it to her side, giving Pinkie an incredulous look.

Pinkie looked right into the Sage’s blue, oculus eyes. “You’re causing a lot of ponies a lot of trouble, you know that?”

“Yes,” the Sage agreed. “So are you, at this moment.”

Pinkie glanced behind the Sage. The Mechanism was beautifully constructed, glowing with powerful magics, and… waiting. “What’s it waiting for?”

“You think I’d tell you?”

“No, but it was worth a shot, wasn’t it?”

“Not in my mind,” the Sage commented.

“What about that mask then, huh? I know General Sunset found where it came from. Why the shape of a mask, hrm? What’d you do with the Moon Spirit?”

The Sage narrowed her eyes. “So you did see that.”

“Well, I just know that. I probably don’t know everything that’s happened, but that one I do!”

“You know you need to go back.”

Pinkie laughed. “No I don’t! I can stay here and make it my mission to figure out what you’re doing!” She appeared behind the mechanism, tapping one of the yellow runes. It zapped her, tossing her down to the floor. “Ouchie…”

“Don’t touch it. You might break something.”

Pinkie stood up. “Would that be bad for you? That means it’s probably good for me!”

“You don’t know though. I certainly believe my actions are good, and that everypony will be better off after I accomplish my goals. There are other forces who offer no such assurance.”

Pinkie frowned. “Such as?”

“You know the rules.”

Pinkie smirked. “Ah, see, exactly why I can’t go back! That’d require messing with the rules.”

The Sage pointed at her. “The rules can change. You know this. You just don’t want them to, not this time. You want to have happy-go-lucky party time for eternity. Wake up, Pinkie, that’s not the way things are going.”

Pinkie ground her teeth. “I can try to keep them that way.”

“When you decided to go on your little adventures, you knew that there would be danger, horror, and death. You decided to go do it anyway. You knew this was coming. Your rules change. You can use it now.”

“But, she’s a Mary Sue Sage-me! That’s, like, the hardest thing to outfox I could possibly imagine! I’m not that great at being clever!”

“You can figure something out.”

Pinkie pointed the hammer at the Sage. “You’ve been steering the conversation as far away from you as you possibly can.”

“And now so are you.”

“Aha, we already talked about me!”

“You are running away from your calling.”

Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “I am no-“ Her cutie mark suddenly started glowing and flashing, the call of the Tree of Harmony. “Uh…”

The Sage nodded. “See? Your Tree wants you back.”

“The Tree doesn’t know the truth.”

“It’s smart enough to know you, though. It knows they need you.”

“But I can’t just ‘be Pinkie Pie’ this time! I’d have to explain some things to them! They’re not ready!”

“You’re the one deciding it has to be that way.”

“Well what about THIS?” Pinkie shouted, pointing at the Mechanism. “Does THIS, whatever it is, have to be whatever way you have it!?”

“Perhaps not, but it’s the path I’ve chosen.”

“Then I’m not going to go back there!”

“Even if you can do that, which I’m not sure you can, there will come a time when you do have to. They are on a path, Pinkie. We can both see that they are going to rise high enough to see it. They’re already starting to notice a few oddities.”

“And I’m starting to notice more things about this Mechanism!”

“Pinkie, stop changing the-“

“I’ll change what I want! What’s this thing do, Sage? It’s something about the Goddess Armonia, isn’t it? What, you want her power? Got a way to contact her?”

The Sage put the mask back on. “I’m putting you back.”

“No you aren’t,” Pinkie said, taking a defensive stance. The Sage leaped at her, but Pinkie jumped out of the way. Pinkie was not able to stop a giant metal hook from grabbing her mane, dragging her back.

The Sage tried to force her back to the other world.

“We’re not supposed to jump worlds!” Pinkie yelled.

“You just did.”

“Accidentally!”

“It’s not the only thing you shouldn’t have done.” The Sage tried to twist Pinkie away-

POP.

Pinkie was not in the world with Melinda.

She was standing on a red planet covered in war and blood. She was pretty sure the planet was red because of the blood. How… How horrible.

On both sides were beings encased in red, buglike armor that was oddly reminiscent of the demons, but without the four arms and significantly larger. She was pretty sure it was just humans fighting against humans with tooth, claw, gun, sword, laser, and anything else they could get their armored hands on. Blood constantly flew threw the air, filling the atmosphere with enough particulates to give it a reddish tint.

Pinkie did not want to be here. She did not want to look. But they saw her and wanted to fight anyway. Warriors from both sides of the conflict swung at her with their huge oversized blades and explosive guns. She leaped into the air, bouncing off a missile and deflecting arrows with a giant cookie shield. She threw a party-bomb into the ground, sending several soldiers flying around her.

This place was brutal. She had to get out. She couldn’t live here, it just wasn’t her way. She whirled her tail around like a helicopter blade and flew off, distraught to find some of the blood, covered warriors finding ways to fly to her.

She took out a party bazooka and shot cakes into each of their faces, forcing them to the ground. “Just stay away!”

They spoke in an untranslatable, alien manner. She grunted under her breath, launching more party bombs in an attempt to just get away. But they were relentless, unending, and impossible.

Even if she started using lethal force they would still overwhelm her eventually. She needed a way out…

To her surprise a blue metal orb dropped from the sky, split itself into six parts, and encased her within itself like some random space claw. The inside was well lit, but it was impossible to see out of. She banged against the walls, yelling out, hoping somepony would hear her. But she knew they wouldn’t… So after a few seconds she waited, preparing to pull a fast one.

The six-part orb arrived at a location far, far away shortly thereafter, sliding itself into an enclosure, floating a meter from the ground and ceiling. A humanoid, blue, metallic creature strode up to it, feet clanking on the ground as he walked. He had numerous blue spikes coming out of his head that resembled far-reaching groups of hair. He pointed at the orb, and it popped open.

Nothing was inside.

Pinkie was behind him with a hammer to the back of his head. “You better be friendly,”

The hammer shattered to dust without so much as a motion from him. He simply turned around and looked at her. “Pinkie Pie.”

“Well, you know my name, it’d be nice if you told me yours!” she said, trying to remain cheerful.

“If you don’t know you are not meant to,” the thing said in a surprisingly normal sounding voice. “You are not supposed to be out this far.”

“Nope!”

“Statement, not a question.”

“I know!”

The eyes – which were just points of red in black recesses on the ‘face’ – flickered. “I think you’re running, and you’re being punished for it.”

“No… Really? Can’t be.”

“I don’t think you’re being fully sarcastic.”

Pinkie bit her lip. “What do you want?”

“I want to capture you, but you and I both know that’s not going to happen at this moment. Perhaps another time.”

“Capture…?”

“You’re too far out, Pinkie Pie. It’s not important now.”

Pinkie knew he was right. She let herself calm a bit. “So… Am I even out here for a reason?”

“I can’t say for sure. I don’t have your power. I can just make educated guesses. It looks like you’re in denial about something.”

Pinkie frowned, looking at the ground. “I don’t want to be involved in the struggle against Melinda. She’s just… Outside. We encountered her too early.”

“I have no idea what she is, but it sounds like if you’re having these thoughts maybe it was exactly the correct time.”

“It’s always exactly the correct time,” Pinkie muttered. “This is my chapter, my moment, apparently. I’m not just going to give in to it though.”

“You’re fighting it? You should know that’s pointless.”

“I know, it’s like a time loop, I know… Just… ARGH, I keep waiting for the third option to present itself, you know?”

The being leaned back and shrugged. “The truth isn’t always to take a third option.”

“Well, what even is the truth?” Pinkie asked. “I don’t know! All I know is we’re in some book somewhere on some pages, scribbled in a margin, typed on a document. It’s a reason – but the reason for it is beyond me!”

“Peculiar. Usually your kind isn’t that open about it.”

“It’s clear that you already know.”

“You have given more information about this specific moment.”

“Aaaaaaa – the rules!”

“Are you breaking them?”

Pinkie cocked her head. “I don’t know anymore! I thought I did, but guess not! It looks like the pink party pony actually is an idiot!” She blew a party blower sarcastically. “Woo.”

“I’m not going to pretend to know. But I am going to say, I bet the lesson should be obvious.”

Pinkie shook her head. “Nope!”

“You can be really stubborn. If you just calm yourself…”

Pinkie pointed a hoof at him. “You’re one of them! You’re a Sue!”

“Guilty as charged. I live pretty well with it though, don’t you think?”

“Of course you do! Naturally perfect and unbeatable, and apparently at least partially aware to boot! How can things like you be allowed to exist!? Twisting the rules, finding loopholes, apparently breaking them to create walls?”

He took a few steps forward, placing a finger on Pinkie’s nose. “We happen when everything goes nineteen.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You’re about to find out, Pinkie. You wanted answers? I feel as though you’ll get them. You’ll suddenly feel like you understood nothing all those years.”

Pinkie twitched. “What is that supposed to-“

He pushed his finger deeper into her nose.

POP.

She stood in a field of roses. Perfect roses of the most brilliant red imaginable that stretched as far as she could see over rolling hills. There were no other plants, no other signs of life but her and the roses. The sky was an odd mix of blue and orange, filled with precisely nineteen wispy clouds, swirling about a center.

The Tower. It needed a capital letter before it was even described.

It had no top, as far as Pinkie could tell. It reached for infinity, never stopping to consider how impossible it was. No… It was more than that. It considered it, and made it possible by using how impossible it was as proof. It was round, black – Dark, and covered in a swirling pattern of windows glowing with eldritch color that didn’t really exist. The large double doors beckoned to Pinkie, asking her to come and see. Come and feel.

Pinkie Pie of Equis Vitis stood in the shadow of the Dark Tower, and she knew it was the Truth.

Nineteen.

She saw what it meant – and she laughed. Celestia, that was funny. To make it better they didn’t even get to know. They just got to see her laugh.

Nineteen.

Gold!

It wanted her – The Dark Tower called to her again, demanding she enter its doors. Telling her to come, to come, to come.

She didn’t want to. She never wanted to. She tried her best to ignore it, to ignore its demands, to defy what it asked for, what it wanted, what it meant, what it… WHAT. Just what in general! Everything was what! Everything was nineteen.

So she used the nature of this place – this place at the center of everything – to talk to them. She usually wasn’t aware of them this strongly, and she knew she wouldn’t be again for quite some time. So she’d use them. Talk to them, try to keep them here. To keep herself here. To…

…Aw, horsefeathers.

~~~

“Aw, horsefeathers! You’ve gone through the entire thing and come back here! And I reviewed it as well along with you, and… And well… Besides the fact that clearly it didn’t exist before I arrived here, this is completely…

“…It makes sense. Clearly, the moral of the story is not to run away from your problems, but to face them head on, blah de blah. But… But I thought I was doing something else. I thought I was protecting them from the truth. Well, it turns out I didn’t actually know the Truth, and probably still don’t, but I’m closer now that I’ve seen the Tower. I know what nineteen means – yes, you’ll just have to wait to find that one out. You’ll really hate me when you do. Trust me.

“I guess that isn’t the whole story, though. See, I wasn’t just running from the truth I knew, it was also the Truth I didn’t know, and… And this is the part where the wibbly-wobbly mess of this drives even me insane. In some ways, I was in this rose field FIRST. In others, I had to go through the rest of the story, then back there, then back here. It wasn’t time… It was Ka.

“Ah, Ka, what a nice word. Nopony will use that for forever, sadly. But I didn’t know what it meant either, so… I guess I was just in the same boat with them? I probably still am. No idea who that blue guy was. Important, yes, knowable, no. It’s all a big game of ever-changing rules and regulations, you see, and I’m not even a big player! I have the chance to be, though.

“I was running from something else too, I think. I liked being mysterious, random, and crazy. It was a delight, and I always told myself they just didn’t need to know. That they couldn’t handle it. That was a lie. They can. They will be told when the time is right, I just… I was just reminded that time would be soon. I could also have been a lot nicer to them. Could have saved Twilight a lot of headache if I just told her that there was a reason, and asked her not to look into it. To tell her to trust me. Maybe not when we first met, but after we became good friends, I think that would have worked for us.

“I’m about to find out if it’ll work now. I haven’t lied – not really. But I’ve been deceptive. It’s… It’s time for them to actually know a little bit. Not everything, but some. And I’m going to help them get out of their predicament. Because that’s what friends do, and this is my chapter after all. It’s my time to shine.

“One thing still confuses me though. Was I supposed to come out here and learn to be more open, or did I bring that on myself by running away? I don’t know. I’m not sure I ever can know. I’m starting to think I should actually test the limits of myself more often. You all should try that too.

“Some of you are probably annoyed by all this needless meta-ness. That’s fine. Frankly I’m getting a little tired of it myself, since there are still rules and things I can’t even tell you. No, the secret I want to tell you is not the secret of nineteen, the secret of nineteen is just delightful. Heehee.

“And don’t worry. I won’t tell them everything. Still have to keep some around. But… Well I won’t be the crazy ditz, anymore. It looks like at least part of that role has to go. …I really wanted to keep it. I really liked being the way I was. Was that wrong? Was it mean? Deceptive, even? I still don’t know. Not sure I ever will.

“So, now I guess I walk into the Dark Tower. It’ll take me to where I need to be. Because that’s what it wants, as much as it can actually want something. And then I won’t be back here for a long, long time.

“We probably won’t talk like this again until then – if at all! So… Bye!”

~~~

“We need to get Twilight back and leave, fast,” Nova said. “They said they were going to the castle so… Hey, wait a second. Where’s Pinkie?”

Pinkie was nowhere to be seen.

Nova rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Flutterfree, you’re going to go to the front and politely ask for Twilight back. This is not likely to work, but it’ll be distracting. Rarity and I will sneak into the castle from the back and get Twilight out. I should be able to crack through with my magic and use the dimensional device she has.”

“Won’t work,” Pinkie said, walking out from behind a tree.

“…Why not, Pinkie?”

Pinkie sighed, cracking her hooves against each other. “Melinda is not your normal enemy, she has a little something extra about her. It’s not quite magical, but think about it like an ‘I am the best and I win’ spell. If she can notice you, she will. Even if she seems kinda stupid, she will deduce your exact plan within a few seconds of you unleashing it. She may seem to make mistakes, rarely, but in reality it’ll just be her setting up.”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “Pinkie, that’s impossible.”

Pinkie grinned. “About as impossible as a person that literally everypony who comes into contact likes unconditionally!”

“Um… We don’t like her,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s because we’re from somewhere else, we have a bit of buffer. If we stayed here long enough we would. And yes, Twilight is in danger of being ‘redeemed’ in that way, though not anytime soon. It’s like universally condoned brainwashing.”

“…How do you…?”

“It’s just Pinkie being Pinkie, dear,” Rarity said.

Pinkie held up a hoof. “Don’t say that anymore, Rarity. It’s an excuse. I’m… Not sure if it’s a bad one, a good one, or what. But it’s done what it needed to do. You can now ask. I don’t promise to answer – and right now I think we should go save Twilight instead of deliberating – but you can ask.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Pinkie… What happened to you?”

“I tried to run away,” she said, looking up towards Twilight’s castle. “Then I came back, knowing more than when I left.”

“But you were barely gone at all!”

Pinkie smirked. “Isn’t the fluidity of time fun?”

“So you experienced time change?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yep! Jumped a couple universes, experienced some weird stuff, and viola! It was life changing. Woo!” She launched her party cannon.

Rarity smiled. “You’re still the same Pinkie though.”

“Aww, Rarity!”

Nova shook her head. “Pinkie’s right, we need to focus on getting Twilight back. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but…” She took in a deep breath. “Pinkie, what’s the plan?”

Pinkie grinned. “I thought you’d never ask!”

~~~

Melinda looked at the crystal Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle was imprisoned in and frowned. “I don’t understand her, Twilight. She seemed nice. But you’re right, she acted like one of them.”

Native Twilight nodded. “Clearly, she’s just really, really clever, like myself. You’re too trusting Melinda, you need to watch out for those trying to take advantage of you.”

Melinda sighed. “What would I do without you?”

“You’d find a way to survive, you always do. You’d even thrive. Then you’d eventually discover their manipulative ways and turn it against them.”

“Twilight, you’re just too kind!”

“I know!”

There was a knock at the door.

“…They’re looking for her,” Melinda said. “I should have grabbed the rest of them as well, huh?”

Twilight furrowed her brow. “Maybe. But we can always get them later. It’s not like anyone can resist your spells.”

Melinda threw open the front doors of the floating castle to see Fultterfree sitting there, smiling. “So, you know already, don’t you?”

“You’re a distraction,” Melinda said, turning around. “They’re trying something to – wait.” She turned back to Flutterfree. “How did you know I already knew?”

Flutterfree smiled. “I have my sources.”

“Tell me,” Melinda insisted, pointing at her with a finger and Staring. “Or else.”

Flutterfree Stared back. “Make me.”

Twilight gasped. “…H-how? Nopony can resist your Stare charms!”

Flutterfree sighed. “That… Didn’t sound… ‘good’. Let’s go with good.”

Melinda took a step back. “It doesn’t matter, I can find them the old fashioned way.” She teleported to the place Charter Twilight was being held, glad to find her still frozen away. “Good.” Melinda knew Charter Twilight could hear everything they were saying, so Melinda leaned in close. “Listen, other Twilight, your friends are trying to bust you out of here and stop you from understanding the glories of true friendship. You and I both don’t want that. So realize that I am defending you when I do this.” She turned back to the doorway – Flutterfree was no longer there.

The native Twilight gasped. “She’s gone!”

“Just part of the distraction,” Melinda said, getting a firm stance on the ground. “I think they have their Nova, Rarity, and Pinkie working on a way in. The Rarity will show up with a secondary distraction, leaving the two most powerful to take their Twilight with a hit and run. But they can’t, everything about that spell is unbreakable. Anti-teleport, anti-dispel, anti-everything. She’s not going anywhere.”

Sure enough, they saw Rarity run across the hall in front of them, trying to catch their attention. Melinda had to hold Twilight in place to keep her from going. “Remember what I said.”

“Right. Got it. You’ve sure got their plan figured out!”

Nova teleported behind them and lit her horn, smashing against the crystal bubble covering Charter Twilight with her impressive magic. She blew out a wall, but the magic bubble didn’t budge. Melinda levitated the unicorn to her. “Don’t worry, Nova, you’ll still get to spend lots of time with her. Wait… Where’s Pinkie?”

There was a sound of applauding hooves. Melinda turned to see Pinkie sitting on a barstool, clapping her hooves with a super-snarky grin on her face. “Well done, Melinda! You did exactly what you were designed to!”

“…I what?”

“You won!” Pinkie shouted, putting a party blower in her mouth and a pointy hat on her head. “Congratz! You stopped our plan, knew exactly how it would pan out far before it happened, and, well, made a spell that not even Nova could break! I mean I always say do five impossible things before breakfast – and so do a lot of other people – but that’s a bit much all in a row there! Wow!”

Twilight growled. “That’s not impossible, that’s-“

A cartoonish anvil dropped from nowhere and hit Twilight in the head, knocking her out. Melinda gasped. “Twilight!”

“She’s fine. It’s not the first anvil she’s experienced,” Pinkie said, beginning to pace around Melinda. “But now it’s just you and me. And Nova, but, well, she’s indisposed, and I’ve told her to stay quiet during this part anyway.”

Melinda narrowed her eyes. “This was part of the plan all along. To get me alone. So what, you could overpower me? Do you have some bizarre otherworldly trick up your sleeve that you think I can’t take when alone?”

“Well, there’s nineteen, but that’s nothing,” Pinkie giggled. “Or there’s this!” She pulled a giant laser cannon out of nowhere and hit Melinda dead on with it. Melinda took the blast, part of her hair charring, and part of her clothes turning black, but she stood strong. She breathed hard.

“Did you think that… Would do anything?”

“Nope!” Pinkie said. “But you felt like it pushed your physical limits, didn’t you? Like you could just barely fight your way through it. You see, here’s a fun thing, you’re precisely as strong as you need to be. Well, actually, you’re a bit too strong, but you have to at least look like you’re trying sometimes, and you have to feel that way too.”

“This doesn’t make any sense. I’m not some perfect sculpture, I’m just a human being!”

“Are you sure about that?” Pinkie said, producing a drill-machine from her mane and tossing it into the ground. “That just hit this castle’s floatation crystal. Someone’s going to have to catch this castle to keep it from hitting Ponyville.”

“You monster!”

Pinkie’s hair went flat for a moment and a knife appeared in her hooves. “Maybe, maybe not! But you better go down there and save everypony!”

Melinda teleported outside just as the castle began to fall. She grabbed hold of it with her hands and pushed it away from Ponyville, into a nearby mountain. She appeared in front of Pinkie again, breathing heavily. She grabbed Nova before she could try to free Charter Twilight again, throwing the unicorn into her own bubble.

“See? Not only did you manage to stop the castle from hitting Ponyville, you also had enough energy stop Nova! And you were already exhausted!”

“It’s… Amazing what you can do… When you have no choice.”

Pinkie nodded. “That it is!” She giggled. “But, how could I have been so sure you could do that? I never would have dropped this castle if I wasn’t sure you’d save everypony involved. The thing is, I was. I knew you had it in you. I know you still have more in you.” She pulled a real warhammer out of her mane, brandishing it in her hooves. “And I think you want a fight.”

Melinda shot her magic bubble spell at Pinkie, only for her to appear behind Melinda and hit her across the head dead-on. “See? That should have been more than enough to knock you unconscious. But no, you stand, even though you’re already running on empty.”

“If I’m ‘designed’ to win, why can I not stop you?” Melinda demanded, firing a laser bolt at Pinkie, deflecting off the hammer.

“You can,” Pinkie said, narrowing her eyes. “You have precisely enough energy within you to win this fight. Like always. You will struggle…” Pinkie hit her midsection, tossing her into a wall. “…And you will feel like the end is near, but you will pull through.”

Melinda kicked Pinkie in the face, tossing her into a nearby wall. “No!”

“Why not?” Pinkie said, face clearly bruised.

“I’m not some perfectly designed creature!”

“So…” Pinkie said, leaning in. “You don’t want to be that?”

“I n-“ She caught herself, smiling. “Oh, oh that’s clever. You wanted me to admit that I didn’t want to be perfect, and therefore mean that I would get what I want, that is, ‘win’, by ‘losing’.”

Pinkie’s grin fell. “…Er…”

“It’s a classic paradox. You set up against my ‘winning’ by making me actually want to ‘lose’. Well, I won’t. I’ve decided that I don’t want to lose anymore. I’m okay with being the perfect thing they all know I am. Maybe I just needed to accept that.”

Pinkie threw her hammer to the ground and facehooved. “OH COME ON! That’s cheap! Stupid and cheap! You don’t just turn your entire philosophy around like that! You were supposed to stay existential!”

“That. It. Is.” She pointed her finger at Pinkie, smiling. “And now that I know all this you’ve told me, I have quite a bit more confidence. Thank you, it was a thing I was lacking.”

Pinkie rammed her face into a nearby wall, waiting for the magical trap to hit – and then a lightbulb appeared above her head. “HEY! Stop the fighting!”

“…What?”

“Hey, since you realized that you are a perfect thing that basically has to win, can you maybe realize that Twilight’s not a bad pony for being suspicious of you?”

Melinda blinked. “I… I…”

“I mean, no one can hold it against you, you didn’t know before, what you were. But now, think of it! You can just let Twilight go and be happy with your life, having found a better, newer identity! You now know why she was suspicious – she can’t accept a ‘perfect’ individual! Different universes, and all that. She’s not meant to be around you as an admirer. Knocked-out Twilight over there is, but my Twilight isn’t.”

Melinda nodded slowly. With a snap of her fingers, she released Nova and Twilight. Rarity and Flutterfree crawled out from behind a nearby column. “…Is it over?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yes,” Melinda said, kneeling down to her. “I hope you can accept my apology. I didn’t know.”

“…I’m not sure I understand, but I’ll accept your apology,” Flutterfree said, smiling awkwardly.

Twilight shook her head. “So… That’s it then? I’m just… Free?”

“Yes!” Melinda said. “You’re free to go, go do what things you are meant to do, I’ll mind the business of my own! Thank you Pinkie for showing me something new!”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Pinkie said, grunting. “She still won. Absolutely brilliant. Whatever, I’m done here, let’s go home Twilight.”

Twilight nodded, activating the dimensional device.

“Come back and visit!” Melinda called.

“Don’t plan on it!” Pinkie called.

They left and found themselves in a field in Equis Vitis. Then Twilight turned to Pinkie. “What... What WAS that!?”

Pinkie sighed. “I knew that’d scare you. I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you but… But… I…” She shook her head. “Nevermind…”

“No, Twilight,” Pinkie said, grabbing her by the shoulder. “You can ask. You have the right to.”

Twilight blinked. “I… Do?”

“I did a little soul-searching,” Pinkie said. “Twilight, Nova, Flutterfree, Rarity… It’s time you knew some things. I know things. You’ve known this for a long time, but you’ve learned not to question it. You’ve known I can do impossible things as well, and you learned not to question that. It’s ‘just Pinkie Pie being Pinkie Pie’. Well… I liked it that way. It was fun to keep you all in the dark, dance around you, and laugh at your expressions. And that was a little selfish of me.”

“Pinkie…” Rarity said, putting a hoof around her. “It’s okay.”

“I know it was. You all accepted me as the loco giggly pony I was.” She giggled. “And I still am. I always loved parties, I always felt joy with my randomness, and it was all just great. But… But I need to stop hiding everything from you all. I can’t tell you everything, there are rules, regulations, and a few things that you just shouldn’t be aware of. And don’t want to know.”

Twilight frowned. “Don’t want to?”

Pinkie whispered something in Twilight’s ear. She turned beet red and hung her head.

“That’s mild,” Pinkie said. “There’s a lot of things worse than that you just don’t want to deal with. But I have to, because they’re just shown to me. And I don’t act on these things most of the time. I just… take them and act like a random lunatic. I probably should have started sharing my inklings when we met the Sage Pinkie, but I didn’t. She’s gotten a head start because of it. She uses them.”

Twilight frowned. “Pinkie… Where do your powers come from?”

Pinkie giggled. “Twilight, that’s a good question. A very good question. You aren’t ready for the whole answer, but you will eventually. For now, let’s just say I thought I knew where it came from, and today it turned out I was completely wrong. I’m a reversal of a fundamental concept in the multiverse, apparently. As are most other Pinkies.”

Twilight nodded. Then she hugged Pinkie. “I’ll accept that. I’ll accept anything from you, Pinkie. You don’t have to do this.”

“I need to,” Pinkie said. “Melinda’s not the worst of what lies out there. There are many other, actually horrible things that lie in wait. Most of them lie in blind spots in my vision, but there are a few I can see. Sage Pinkie is working on something that she’s trying her best to keep from me, and there’s another dark power of some kind in the hands of Ba’al. I’m done sitting in the background, taking comfort in knowing that ‘everything will be okay’. If today taught me anything, it’s that I can’t be sure of that.”

Pinkie pulled everyone into a group hug. “All I know is that we’re going to face it together, whatever it is. Okay?”

“Okay!” The other four cheered.

It was a cute, blessed moment.

A tear slid down Pinkie’s cheek.

She knew not all of them would be able to stand together, at the end.

That was something she wished she didn’t know.

~~~

“Ka,” Pinkie said, trotting by Starbeat’s lab.

“What?” Starbeat said, raising an eyebrow.

“Kaka.”

“…Are you okay?”

Pinkie grinned. “I’m nineteen!”

“Aren’t you like, twenty-something?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Eh, yeah.”

Starbeat rolled her eyes and returned to her work. Pinkie bounced off, chuckling to herself.

Who said she had to stop messing with ponies completely? Nobody, that’s who! She giggled maniacally. Maybe this could make it even better – after all, now she could get her closest friends in on it!

They were going to throw a party for the multiverse.

020 - Spacepone

General Sunset, Toph, Fef, Lieshy, and Vivian stood in front of a set of double doors disguised to look like a sheer rock face on the side of a mountain. Toph turned to Sunset, folding her arms. “You have to promise not to lose your head when we go in. Got it?”

“I won’t kill anypony if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“No crippling their arcs either,” Toph emphasized.

Sunset grumbled to herself. “If you insist. Whatever you thought about that Arcei at the temple, and the others you’ve seen, this is an organized Arcei cell we’ve found. They actively destroy large runes that provide the livelihood of ponies everywhere. You’re about to get a wake up call.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “Maybe. I suspect it’s more of a case of both sides being absolute jerks and destroying the world they care about so much by refusing to see past each other.”

Sunset opened her mouth to object but quickly shut it.

“Wow. Profound,” Fef commented.

Lieshy shrugged. “Bright bulbs do serve a purpose.”

“What?”

“Oh come on, that was obvious. Connotations of intelligence as well as illumination? I thought you’d be able to figure that one out, actually. Not sure if I should feel sorry or annoyed.”

Fef folded her arms. “Can we just go in already?”

Vivian knocked on the door. “Helloooooo! Anypony home?”

A very purple Arcei-unicorn opened the door and glared at them. “You here to kill us?”

“Much as I would love to put an end to your little rampage, no,” Sunset said, sneering. “We received a tip that the individual known as ‘the Pinkie Sage’ was told you existed and went right to you. We’re just here for information.”

“And after you’re done with that you’ll just summon the army on us.”

Toph pointed at Sunset. “You better not be thinking about doing that.”

Sunset said nothing, simply looking away form Toph.

Toph facepalmed. “Okay, look, small Arcei-“

“Name’s Sparkler.”

“Right, Sparkler. You probably know we’re from another world, right?”

Sparkler furrowed her brow. “So the rumors are true.”

“Yeah, they are. We can get your entire society off this world and onto a place they’d not be hunted. Keep you away from this maniac here.”

Sparkler nodded slowly. “Are there runes in these other worlds?”

“I… Well there probably are, but none that I know about.”

Sparkler shook her head. “We’ll have to decline then. We need runes to grow our people.”

“And there it is!” Sunset blurted. “The ‘need’ to grow. There’s no way in the Goddess’s name that’s a real ‘need’.”

Sparkler sighed. “Look, I can let you in, I doubt I could stop you even if I wanted to, but I don’t guarantee they won’t try to kill you on sight.”

Vivian glanced to Sunset. “Maybe you should stay outside.”

“No,” Sunset growled. “I want to see this.”

Sparkler shrugged, opening the doors the rest of the way, revealing a slick, black metal interior hallway. “Welcome to Elestar. Largest Arcei settlement in Lai. Big enough that we’re not going anywhere.”

“There’s no way you’re big enough not to be-“ Sunset’s jaw dropped when they entered the actual cavern that held Elestar. It was a city composed of black metal, many of them glowing with artificial rune imitations. She saw thousands of Arcei walking, flying, and floating around their city. Their signature hard-light flashed on and off everywhere in the city, creating roads for Arcei to walk on and signs for ponies to read.

“…I’m impressed,” Lieshy admitted. “This is a pretty well kept secret.”

“See, this is why I went ‘woah’ five minutes ago,” Toph commented.

Sunset shook her head. “How have we not found this place!? How is there not a war going on right now!?”

“We’re good at keeping secrets,” Sparkler said. “We never raid any runes ourselves, only get the harvested material secondhand from other tribes that know not of our existence. Though we also have a large mining operation. There’s a decent amount of runes beneath the ground – not enough, but some.” She activated her arcs, creating a bridge of light down towards the city itself. “You’ll probably want to talk to the Tzar.”

“Tzar?” Fef asked.

“Boss. Head Honcho. Monarch. Ruler.”

“Oh. AWESOME title!”

“If you say so.” They walked down to a larger hard-light street. There were dozens of Arcei walking alongside them. More than a few shot them dirty looks, clearly considering fighting them, but the presence of Sparkler and the alien nature of most of them gave the ponies pause.

Vivian waved at them, trying to be sociable. One of the pegasus-Arcei just flipped her off with her wing. She gasped. “Rude!”

“They think you’re with the outside world, which does nothing but hunt and condemn them,” Sparkler commented. “Personally, I think those of you who aren’t the General are just normal crazy.”

“You’re not wrong,” Lieshy admitted. “I do wonder though… There are some Arcei down here with features, but the vast majority don’t have any.”

“Something about the Arcei process makes our children less and less likely to have any features at all, not even Earth Pony features,” Sparkler said. “Most of the featured Arcei you see had a parent who wasn’t an Arcei when the featured Arcei was conceived.”

Toph blinked. “Why do you guys always get the cool mixing thing? In my world it’s air, earth, fire, or water, no combos. Unless you’re the chosen hero of the entire world, in which case you get them all.” She tapped her foot on the floor. “I would have loved some fire…”

Sparkler didn’t bother to respond. They walked on in silence a moment on top of a green-blue light bridge, several other bridges both above and below them at this point. This close, the buildings could be seen to be relatively simple constructions. The black metal and artificial rune-lights made them look advanced, but really they were just easy to construct in cubic and rectangular shapes with regular divisions within. The few they could see into held scenes much like any regular Lai home – families sitting around on chairs, reading, perhaps talking. There were fireplaces, and fillies running around laughing or restless.

“None of the fillies have arcs,” Lieshy noted.

“They’re not added until they get older,” Sparkler responded. “They wouldn’t grow correctly.” She pointed ahead at one of the few round buildings. “The Tzar’s in there.” She gestured towards the door.

“You’re not coming in?” Lieshy asked.

“Armonia, no!” Sparkler laughed. “You get to fumble in there alone. Have fun!” She gestured towards the door again.

Toph shrugged, kicking the door open and marching in. “Hey. Here to see the Tzar.”

The interior of the round building was a single throne room. Decoration was minimal, though there was a throne with a single full rune obelisk behind it, glowing with a dark gray color. In the throne sat an orange-peach Arcei mare with deep, wise eyes. “That would be me.”

Vivian moved to the front of the group. “Tzar, I am Vivian, and these are my friends, Lieshy, Fef, Toph, and Sunset. We come not to hurt you, but to seek information.”

The Tzar narrowed her eyes. “I am Tzar Somnabula, ruler of Elestar. Were this any other day I’d just kill you on the spot.”

“…But?”

“But I’ve heard about what you’re trying to do, and who you’re hunting. Pinkie the Sage.”

Vivian nodded. “Yes. We believe she passed through here, and we’d like to know if you have anything on her.”

“I do not. She arrived and vanished within a night, taking an unidentified book with her, allowing only a scant few Arcei to see her.”

Sunset twitched. “Then what good are you?” Toph stomped and sent a small pillar of earth into Sunset’s jaw to shut her up.

Somnabula pointed at Sunset. “You are the reason we don’t trust the outside.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you attack their towns to destroy their runes?”

“We don’t have to explain ourselves to you.”

“Maybe you should,” Toph said. “We try to protect you while she’s on a crazy rampage. The Arcei I’ve met seem decent, but even I have to admit the attacks seem a bit much.”

Somnabula sighed. “Fair enough. Most Arcei fight simply because they feel as if they have to, because they always have, because the world won’t accept them and it's one against all. If this were truly the case, I think you could agree that it was just an example of both sides refusing to sit down and talk.”

“There’s more to it than that.” Fef pushed.

“Much more. Most Arcei don’t know this, but if their children don’t receive arcs by the time they reach maturity they will slowly approach a brain-dead state.”

Vivian put a hand to her mouth. “That’s horrible!”

“It’s a flaw in our Mother’s design,” Somnabula said. “She failed to take into account the genetic alterations she made to herself would be passed on to her descendants, but that the arcs would not. Every arc must be created from new material. Mining for runes is very difficult, and almost every rune in the wild has been claimed. Not to mention the golems each one has defending it. It is a difficult existence.”

“…I see a problem,” Lieshy said.

“The runes are a limited resource.”

“Yeah, that’s it. I can see you’ve tried creating artificial runes, but am I right in assuming they aren’t working?”

“They are not,” the Tzar admitted. “Every time we try to create an Arcei with our false runes, the result is gruesome. It is looking like they cannot be replicated.”

Toph clapped her hands. “We can help with that! We’ve got mages and scientists and a lot of other ‘genius’ types that we can put on the problem, bring in stuff from the outside.”

Somnabula’s scowl lessened for the first time in the conversation. “I was expecting a positive conversation. I was not expecting an offer.”

Toph shrugged, glancing at Liehsy. “It’s kinda what the whole multiverse community is built on. Everyone helps reinforce everyone else.”

“Unless you’re Senator Pearse,” Fef said. “Then you try to screw everyone over and suffer the wrath of public shaming!”

Somnabula nodded slowly. “I will consider this. However, it still is not why you’re here.”

Toph shrugged. “You already said you didn’t have anything. That’s fine, it’s just like all the other places we visit.”

“Move on to the next…” Lieshy said. “Find nothing, go again, find nothing. It is getting tiring.”

Somnabula shook her head. “Just because I have nothing doesn’t mean I don’t have a way to get what you need.” She tapped the true rune behind her. “This rune is kept intact because it has a very special effect infused within it.”

“What?” Toph asked.

Somnabula tapped it. The rune’s dark gray color flared slightly, creating a spherical golem on top of it. The spherical golem exploded into dust, the particulates fusing together in front of Somnabula’s throne. A brilliant sparkling essence appeared within the room.

The Spectacularium was now present, fully, within the throne room, its all-encompassing magical essence focused on a single point. This summoning of its attention did not surprise it, merely annoyed it. It let it be known to all around that it was done answering the questions of the world, that it had already given its last decree. It wanted to live.

That said, it also knew they were so close to uncovering what the Pinkie Sage had done – the piece of the puzzle was here, it was just that nopony knew what it was. It debated how exactly to go about this with itself. At this point it was a question of if the Spectacularium wanted to act. To interfere.

It considered what it knew about Sage Pinkie – everything. Mostly. It knew what she was going to do, how she was going to do it, and what its consequences would be. It also knew that it was actually rather powerless to interact with the Sage’s plan on its own. It had already tried to interfere with the Mechanism and the Sage had just moved it to another universe for the time being. The Spectacularium thought this was obvious and was annoyed that some of those present found this to be useful information.

The Spectacularium thought more, considering. It supposed the actions the Sage were about to take were, in the end, neutral to its magical desires. But did it really want to be a distant presence? It wasn’t entirely sure. Plus if the Sage just got to do what she wanted it would be rather boring. The Spectacularium wanted a bit of a show, something interesting. It’d probably drag more of the other universe people here as well, which would be absolutely fascinating. More interaction…

The Spectacularium decided it was okay to reveal that the title of the book was The Study of Spirit Ellipses and Foci written by a somewhat crazy Arcei determined to quantify spirits and holy energy. There was currently a copy in the Elestar library. The Spectacularium decided this was enough information, and if they couldn’t figure anything out from that then these ponies were hopeless.

The Spectacularium left.

Toph blinked. “That was freaky.”

“The Study of Spirit Ellipses and Foci,” Lieshy reiterated. “Somnabula, where’s the library?”

Somnabula narrowed her eyes. “You will not be allowed in the library. I will order the book, and it will arrive here within a few minutes. You are free to stay until then.”

“What do you think the book is going to tell us?” Vivian wondered aloud.

“Anything is better than nothing,” Sunset muttered. “Maybe it’ll make this trip not a complete waste of time. Maybe.”

~~~

O’Neill sat in the Captain’s chair of the Apollo, tapping his fingers impatiently on the armrest. The faint thud thud thud thud of his digits slowly bore its way into the minds of the bridge crew, moving them to a special form of insanity. They all knew that, should they say anything to O’Neill, the outrageous tapping would stop – but none of them felt like speaking up. It was as if part of their brains wanted the constant, unending rhythm of fingers tapping. Their irritation levels rose, but so did their inability to speak up, to do anything.

It would approach a breaking point in about an hour.

O’Neill, of course, was perfectly aware of the psychological warfare he was engaging in. He would feign ignorance in the small chance there was anyone with enough guts to call him out on it, an easy feat seeing that finger tapping would not be considered remarkable by any sane person who heard about it after the fact. It was the perfect crime.

No, not a crime… O’Neill thought. Perfectly legal… I need a new word. Hrm…

Link walked onto the bridge, boots thudding on the floor. O’Neill stopped the finger tapping to look at Link, pleased to hear the crew let out sighs of relief. “Link?”

“General. Why are we still out here?” He gestured at the empty field of stars. “Nothing’s happening.”

“We’ve got another hour.”

“I’m telling you, that ‘tip’ was just Ba’al wanting to keep us occupied for a while! Who knows what he’s doing elsewhere right now?”

“And I’m telling you that the Starfinder can take care of anything that goes wrong. Which, by my estimates and amazing old man reckoning powers, is probably nothing.”

Link folded his arms. “If the tip wasn’t from Ba’al or relating to him- nevermind. I guess I’ll just wait an hour.”

“That you will,” O’Neill remarked. “Why not have a seat? Enjoy the view. Dimension 47J-something has a lot to offer. Namely lots of stars against a black backdrop.”

“Just like every other dimension.”

“Not true! That forest has no stars. Then there’s the Static. That was fun to fly through.”

Link shrugged. “Most every other dimension. The stars are the most common feature of most skies at night.”

“Common doesn’t make it any less beautiful.”

And then, just like that, something bright and sparkling zipped onto their screen. A few soft alarms went off as the streaking pink-purple structure halted right in front of them, a streak of light receding from it – a telltale sign of something moving faster than light. The thing was an ovoid shaped crystal that was translucent, but refractive enough that it was difficult to see exactly what was inside.

The crystal had already begun to deteriorate now that it was no longer traveling at superluminal speeds, shattering by way of flakes until the crystal shape deteriorated into nothing, leaving only the ship inside visible. It was composed mostly of a pearly-white alloy marked with the occasional pink-purple line of glowing power. The shape was that of three pointed semicircles sprouting off a central round section, as if protecting it.

After the crystal dust had dissipated a fair way, two wings were projected out of the ship, taking the shape of leaf blades physically separated from the ship. They were blue, translucent, and shimmered with unusual energies. The wings flapped ever so slightly, turning the ship to look directly at the Apollo.

O’Neill looked to Link. “See? Something happened. Send out the first-contact hail.”

The communications officer pressed a button, sending out a signal on every frequency the Apollo was able. Usually alien ships were able to pick up at least one, so if they didn’t answer it would be a safe bet they were ignoring the call or didn’t have a communication system.

They did answer, though. An image appeared on-screen of a pegasus – green coat with a purple and grey mane. She looked at them with a curious expression, momentarily distracted by their appearance. She quickly regained her composer and cleared her throat. “Greetings. I am Captain Shockwave of the EQS Counselor. We are not aggressive.”

“I’m General O’Neill of the USS Apollo. We’re only aggressive when we haven’t gotten enough sleep, and I had a nap a few hours ago.”

Shockwave let out a sigh of relief. “At least you’re talking. That’s good. We have not had good … Hold on, is that a unicorn on your bridge?”

O’Neill glanced behind him. “Oh, yeah. That’s Mauve. He’s our magic consultant. Say hi Mauve.”

The large, bearded stallion waved. “Hi.”

“How did you get one of our ponies on your ship?”

O’Neill folded his hands together and stared right at Shockwave. “Would you believe me if I told you he’s from an alternate dimension?”

“Not without evidence.”

“Spin up the dimensional drive,” O’Neill ordered. “The forest should prove the point. Don’t go through, we don’t want more trees in the bays.”

The Apollo tore a hole through spacetime through which a forest could easily be seen. It closed a moment afterward. O’Neill let the smallest hint of a smile crawl up his face. “That good enough for you?”

Shockwave nodded slowly. “Certainly.”

“Now, allow me to be surprised,” O’Neill said, sitting back. “You’re the first ponies we’ve met with a space force. Actually, you’re the first FTL capable species we’ve met outside our home cluster of universes. Not to mention that I have no idea what that crystal thing was.”

“Ah, the shell drive,” Shockwave said, thinking over exactly how to explain that. “We have a magical icosahedron in our core that draws vis from the aether. The faster you move, the more vis can be drawn because larger areas are swept out. At a certain speed it becomes possible to form a shell of pure vis around the ship that solidifies at certain conditions, allowing vis to automatically be converted into faster and faster speed. There are also enchantments to keep time from dilating and the ship from being converted into energy, but that’s the basics.”

O’Neill looked to Link and shrugged. “Ours punches a hole in reality and travels fast through a bunch of crazy moving colors. We punch out and we’re light years away. We call it hyperspace.”

“Oh. You’re not a science vessel,” Shockwave deduced from O’Neill’s comparably simplistic explanation.

“No. We’re a flagship. Did you think something this big was a science vessel?”

“Usually scouts or science vessels are the ones doing the exploring.”

O’Neill shrugged. “Things get different when you’re traveling the multiverse. And when you don’t have all that many ships.”

“You’ll probably want to head further into our territory. We can give you directions to the current location of the Homeworld, where you could meet the Princess. It’ll be a several day journey…”

O’Neill leaned in. “We can cross the galaxy in a matter of hours.”

Shockwave blinked. “We cannot, and if you arrived without us-“

“We can tow you.”

Shockwave struggled to keep her face straight. “In that case, it would be best to get you there as soon as possible. Coordinates are being sent over.”

“Thank you!” O’Neill smiled. The feed was cut. “So, clearly she’s not a diplomat, and probably just wanted to scan stars all her life.”

Link shrugged. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“No, but it does mean we might not get a great report written about us. We’re probably annoying.”

“Ah. This is going to delay us, isn’t it?”

“Considerably!”

~~~

Twilight turned to her friends. “All right, so, who’s ready to go exploring!”

“Me!” Flutterfree shouted. “I can’t wait to go back to the mushroom world! I bet they’ll be glad to see us!”

Rarity threw back her mane. “I wonder if they’ve appreciated any of my designs since last time I was there…”

Nova blinked. “Well I have no reason to feel pumped about going but I’m excited anyway. It just feels like today is going to be a good day!”

Pinkie laughed. “We’re not going to the mushroom world today!”

Twilight turned to her. “…We’re not?”

“Nope!” She took out a pocket watch and looked at it with a mock sophisticated expression. “Three… Two… One... Zero!”

A portal opened up, depositing Lieshy in front of them. “Whatever esoteric antics you were about to get up to, stop. The bell rings, calling you to duty.”

Flutterfree looked at her. “Did you find something?”

“The bear’s earlobes, yes we did. We’ve got a book.”

Twilight’s smile widened. “A book? What about?”

“It was written by a crackpot knucklehead breadstuffer who just so happened to record surges of spiritual energy meticulously. He created a table of accurate future predictions of when and where on Lai such a surge would take place. He says it calls the ‘Goddess’ or whatever down to that location for a short moment. We are now fairly certain – certain as hedgehogs – that the Pinkie Sage is going to enact her plan at one of these times and locations.”

“Next one’s very very soon, isn’t it?” Rarity said.

“We have six hours. After that there won’t be another surge for three Lai years, so it’s safe to assume if this IS what the Sage is going to act on, she’s going to do it now, exploding egg timer.”

Nova blinked. “…You calling me an exploding egg timer?”

“No, no, that referred to the short timeframe. We’re gathering everyone we can on short notice and preparing for a stakeout. I hope you like sitting in one place for six hours!”

Pinkie produced a beach chair and leaned back on it, grinning. “Why wouldn’t I? Everypony loves sitting!”

“You were the one I expected to like it the least.”

“Give her five minutes,” Flutterfree said. “She’ll get really, really antsy.”

“Let’s get all the backup we can…” Twilight said. “Flutterfree, go grab Discord, if you can.”

“Oh! Um… I think he’s in another world right now,” Flutterfree said. “…I have no idea when he’ll be back or how to find him.”

Pinkie put on a pair of sunglasses and lowered them. “He’d make it too easy.”

“I’ll see if Celestia can spare anything,” Twilight said. “The Apollo as well, wherever it is. Have to check with the Tau’ri… Oh! Corona as well!”

Lieshy nodded. “We need to get moving. General Sunset’s already at-location, setting the trap. We don’t need an army, but any help will be welcome.”

“Question,” Nova said, raising a hoof. “What exactly is the Sage’s plan? What’s her ‘Mechanism’ do once it’s there? …She does have a Mechanism, right? I’m not remembering wrong?”

“You’re right,” Lieshy said. “And we have no idea. It has something to do with the Goddess, a Mechanism, and the Sage hating the ‘reason’ behind things. Nobody has a clue what the Goddess can do to help her with that, or why she needs a Mechanism to get help, or even what the Goddess thinks of all this. All we know is that the Sage is up to something and that we’re going to stop her.”

“Fair enough,” Rarity said. “We’ll gather whoever we can.”

“Same here.” Lieshy opened another portal. “Remember, six hours, Lai time. Be there.” The portal closed.

Twilight turned to Pinkie. “What is she planning?”

“I have no idea!” Pinkie said, standing up straight. “I saw the mechanism, but I can’t tell you what it does. I can tell you that mask she wears is extremely important, that she thinks what she’s doing is good, and that she’s very careful about what she’s doing. She’s got plans to the moon. She’s even taken me into account, trying to do things in such a way so I won’t know anything!”

“And she has your knowledge as well…” Nova commented.

“Yep! And oculus vision! She’s like Pinkie 2.0 – except more serious party pooper edition!”

“So it’s safe to assume she knows this conversation is happening.”

Pinkie shrugged. “It’s possible, likely even, but she might not.”

“But she’ll know there’s a trap.”

“Ohooooo yes!”

Flutterfree frowned. “That… Is pretty annoying.”

“Now you know why I’m so effective!” Pinkie winked.

“Can you do to her what you did to Melinda?” Twilight asked.

Pinkie shook her head. “Melinda was something completely different. She had no idea what she was. We Pinkies more-or-less do. Trying to get the Sage to realize that will do nothing, and I kinda already tried to talk her out of what she was doing. Sorta. I don’t think she’ll give me the time to talk anyway.”

“We need to come up with some kind of plan to go over the other plan,” Twilight said. “A trap trap, of sorts. Any ideas?”

“Coming up with a trap trap would require knowing precisely what the Sunset’s plan to face the Sage is,” Rarity said.

Pinkie pulled out a military issue map. She pointed at a completely random location that had no bearing on reality. “Surround the place in a circle! Draw weapons! Attack and subdue!”

“…That’s her plan?”

“Well, basically?” Pinkie said. “She’s the kind of pony who’ll add details later. Every person will have a role to play and we’ll have some people in orbit and... Yeah. I have noooo idea what kind of trap trap we could even make!”

Twilight frowned. “True… We have no idea where she’s coming from until she comes, and no idea where she’ll escape to, and have no leverage on her at all. She’ll arrive with her plan and expect to succeed. So…”

“The monolith chunk!” Nova shouted. “I’ve got it! We can keep her from escaping that way – all dimensional devices that aren’t the giant arches Corona invented run on magic. If we can repurpose the anti-magic materials of the monolith, we’ve got her for sure!”

“And we could throw it on the Mechanism!” Twilight grinned. “Nova, that’s a great idea!”

“I’ll get on that.” She teleported away.

Pinkie rubbed her hooves together. “I have a distinct feeling that nobody’s going to expect what’s about to happen but I’m pumped anyway! Let’s do this thing! Let’s catch a Sage!”

~~~

A couple hours later, O’Neill and Link walked into the central room of the Hub to find a rather large gathering around the Mirror Portal. Twilight and her four friends were there, preparing for a conflict along with Spike, who was busy trying to keep track of everyone present. General Sunset, Toph, and their group was there as well – with the addition of a few other ponies from Lai, including Lady Rarity hefting her hammer and Starcei of all ponies walking out in the open. Apparently there were too many witnesses for Sunset to take the Arcei Mother out. Corona, Tempest, and the rest of the team were there, cleaning their guns. Bon Bon was suiting up next to Aang and Iroh, watching the two of them trade fiery training blows curiously. There was even an Tau’ri team sent over for the mission, readying their zat guns to stun.

A smile came to O’Neill’s face. “This… This is good. Look at this! I don’t even know what we’re doing and I feel like we’re ready to kick some ass!”

“Oh!” Twilight said, flying over to them. “You’re back! Good, having the Apollo in orbit would be great! You could just teleport the Sage off the ground!”

“I’d need a tracker on her, but yeah.”

The Tau’ri team leader nodded to O’Neill and prepared a tracker for that exact purpose.

“When’s the op?” O’Neill asked.

“Two hours. There’ll be a ‘spirit surge’ on Lai that Sage Pinkie needs to use. We’re probably going in with a lot of overkill here, but this Sage definitely knows we’re going to be there.”

“So since we can afford the overkill, go ahead and use it. I like your style,” O’Neill said. He turned to Link. “Ground support?”

Link drew the master sword and looked at his own reflection in its blade. “I will be honored to provide aid for once.”

“Good.” O’Neill adjusted his uniform. “Twi, you got a minute?”

“Hm? Yes, why?”

“We found a very interesting universe and have some people we want you to meet.”

“Oh? Who?”

A truly gigantic purple pony – taller than Celestia – dropped the invisibility spell she had on. Her hair swirled with the majesty of fading light and distant stars, her eyes were deep intelligent pupils ringed by mystical irises, and her horn was pointed as if ready to tear through space itself. She was wearing a complex set of regalia on her chest made of a pearly white alloy and a few glowing veins of purple power surrounding a central blue crystal. Her cutie mark was that of a six pointed magical star with five smaller points around it.

Twilight looked up. “…Wow. You’re impressive. Twilight, I take it?”

The majestic being smiled. “Yes. I am Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equis. An Equis almost exactly like your own, from what I have read, save two thousand years into the future.”

Twilight gasped. “Oh. My. That’s… That’s so interesting! You could tell us what’s about to happen before it happens like we’ve been telling some of the other worlds, and we could learn what our fates are – of course, only in the short term since this whole multiverse thing is a little jarring and will definitely spiral out of control…”

The other Twilight smiled. “You’re just like me all those years ago. Sometimes I wish I still had your level of energy.”

“Talk to Nova. She’s got energy drinks.”

“…Nova?”

“Oh, right. Starlight. Changed her name to differentiate from the other Starlights. There’s Starcei over there, and I think I’ve seen Starbeat around somewhere. Don’t think she’s part of the operation though…”

“Oh, right, names. It must be confusing for you all to have so many. You’re still Twilight, right?”

“For now. I’ll probably change eventually.” Twilight shrugged.

“I can be Cosmo, then,” Cosmo said. “At least for now.”

“Wow you are a lot more decisive than I am.”

“You stop making such a big fuss over things at about year three hundred.”

Twilight chuckled. “So Celestia tells me. Anyway, was there anyone else O’Neill? You said ‘people’.”

Cosmo smirked, tapping the crystal on her chest. “I’ve far outlived the vast majority of all ponies you’d know… All but this one. Say hello.”

The crystal flared. “Hello.”

Twilight leaned in. “…Starlight?”

“She’s passed the intelligence test, ‘Cosmo’. Her powers of deduction are beyond compare.”

Twilight looked up at Cosmo, raising an eyebrow. “…She seems sarcastic.”

The crystal beeped. “When you live your life as a digital intelligence you tend to get very sarcastic. By the way, can I access the computer network here? The constant wireless signals keep prodding me.”

“Sure,” Twilight said, shrugging. “Be warned we do have a hacker around here, Sombra, who’s… Pretty good at getting into everything.”

“I’ll be fine,” Starlight said, falling quiet – presumably to surf the Hub Internet.

“So, what’s the story behind that?” Twilight asked. “Actually, how did your world even come to be? What happened in those two thousand years?”

“Well, it’s a long story, but I’ll try to cut it short,“ Cosmo cleared her throat. “The six of us lived as friends for a very, very long time, well into our adulthood. It was beautiful. I never married or had any foals, but all the others eventually did, even Starlight.”

Starlight beeped indignantly. “You say that like it’s surprising.”

“It was. The point is most of us had families, and all of us were apart of everypony else’s families. It was a great time. I had no foals of my own, so I became sort of a built-in aunt of sorts for everyone, the binding glue, the princess everyone knew. I began to champion technology research because it seemed like a good idea, and we eventually developed our ships. Took about fifty years, but that wasn’t much of a problem. I was surrounded by a huge family and had begun to unite the many races of Equis together in harmony.”

“Then we found the aliens,” Starlight added.

Cosmo nodded. “There was a war across the Stars - who, if you haven’t figured out already, aren’t big on interfering. We almost never saw the aliens’ faces until the end, only saw their ships and swarms of death impending upon us all. We fought valiantly, but they did eventually make it to Equis. More than a few of my family perished in that war, and it looked like we might actually lose. Celestia and Luna had fallen as well…

“When it was clear we could not win, even with Discord’s assistance, I went to the Tree of Harmony. It let me drain its entire essence into myself and purge the entire planet of alien life. With the power of the entire Tree inside of me, I utterly destroyed their fleet, and wiped the entire world clean. I tried many times after this to talk to the now losing attackers, but they refused. They would not stop until they were utterly exterminated.

“After this… We discovered that there was a sacrifice. The Tree of Harmony was the reason, the life-force of most races in our world. It was possible for them to survive without it, but what I had done was not normal. The non-pony races began to die out, losing the will to live, because I had used that will. Soon there were nothing but ponies on Equis, and I was the only remaining princess.”

Twilight put her hoof to her mouth. “I’m sorry… That’s horrible. You’ve been through so much.”

“That was a long, long time ago. Eventually, all my friends and close family grew old. Pinkie was the last one to go - no surprise there at all. She was laughing until the end. Starlight transformed herself into this crystal. And I moved around the cosmos, looking for anyone. All the signs of civilization we found were destroyed by the aliens. Had I not used the Tree of Harmony, we would have fallen like the rest. We never discovered why the aliens were so genocidal, we never found out why they were so driven, we just knew we had finally been the thing to stop them. So we expanded. The galaxy is a huge place and we haven’t explored all of it, but it’s getting clearer and clearer that we were extremely lucky. You are actually the first aliens we’ve found since then.”

“...I wonder if those aliens exist in our world,” Twilight wondered.

“If they do, I still have the Tree’s power within me,” Cosmo said. “We will offer our aid.”

“Thank you. I guess I should have exp-”

“ATTENTION EVERYPONY, EVERYHUMAN, AND EVERYONE ELSE!” General Sunset yelled, standing on top of the main Mirror Portal desk and messing up Bon Bon’s carefully arranged paperwork. “We are going to capture the Pinkie Sage today. Yes, that’s right, capture. While lethal force is allowed, we’d like to have her answer some questions about what exactly she is doing first. But before that, we have to make sure we destroy the Mechanism by any means necessary. We believe she’s going to drop it in using a dimensional portal, and our job is to destroy it before it can do what it does. We will use every power at our disposal to rip that thing to shreds. That is what we are doing.

“We will go to Lai now, and set up a circular perimeter around the area of incident. The Starfinder - and hopefully Apollo – will be in orbit, ready to offer assistance from far above. We are fairly certain she knows we’re coming, so expect her to expect whatever you throw at her. We do not know exactly what she’s trying to do, and there will be a high concentration of ‘spiritual energy’ in the area that may summon the being known as the Goddess Armonia to the location. There are a lot of unknowns here. A lot of you probably think this many people on this mission may be overkill for just one pony, but there’s so much in the air I’m willing to take the risk of over-committing.

“Some of you may ask why we’re doing this. We have tremendous amounts of evidence that the Pinkie Sage has been manipulating the ponies of Lai for her own selfish reasons, pitting them against each other and inciting rivalries that have killed hundreds. She has raided this very compound. She’s been toying with too many ponies for far too long. Today, we stop her.

“It’s time to move out and set up. Let’s go.”

She pressed a button, setting the Mirror Portal to Lai. She was the first through.

Cosmo smiled. “…I think I’ll come along for this little trip, see what you ponies are doing that’s deviated from the history I know.”

Twilight smiled awkwardly. “This… Isn’t really normal. Rarely do we need to do big missions like this.”

“All the more reason for me to come along then. It will be interesting – as you’d say – to witness something that doesn’t happen every day.”

“Well, come on! We’ve got just over an hour!”

~~~

The Twilight currently known as Cosmo had been on many missions in her time as Princess over the entire pony race. This particular one wasn’t bad, but wasn’t that good either – they were operating on extremely low intel, but to compensate they had gone for extreme overkill. They had an exceedingly odd variety of allies in the conflict, one definite enemy and target, and a neutral presence in the form of whatever the ‘Goddess’ actually was, yet another unknown.

The location was a field next to a mountain Cosmo had actually been informed was a gigantic ‘rune’ rather than a geologic feature, the glowing blood red glyphs on it giving it power of a sort. They were well within the ‘range’ of the rune, here, but the rune’s effect was not one that would affect them directly. It apparently made plants bleed. The ‘golem’ guardian of the mountain was a monstrous giant that would only appear if the entire rune was threatened – and if the Sage wanted to do that she was probably suicidal.

There was absolutely nothing where the ‘spirit event’ was supposed to happen. It was an empty spot in the field with a medium-sized rock about a meter away from it. One of the Tau’ri walked up to the exact point to set up a scanning machine and an orange flag for all to see. Cosmo found the scanning device interesting – it was a bit large and square for what she was used to, but perhaps it scanned more things than the devices her ponies used.

The rest of the group had formed a circle around the area several yards in diameter. There was no attempt to be stealthy at all – they knew their efforts were not secret. Cosmo briefly used a long-distance scan spell and found the pyramid-shaped Starfinder and blocky Apollo directly above them, monitoring the whole situation.

She returned her attention to the present moment to find that her Starlight was talking to two other Starlights.

“Oh, pardon me, I was elsewhere,” Cosmo said. “So, which of you is which?”

The unicorn smiled. “I’m Nova, this is Starcei.” The Arcei bowed respectfully as she was introduced.

“What conversation did I miss while I was out?”

“Talking about various unusual consistencies and inconsistencies between the three of us,” Starlight called from her crystal. “Nova and I had almost identical lives until we hit the divergent point, which for her was just under two years ago, and for me was two thousand years ago. Her Twilight found a dimensional device, you didn’t.”

Cosmo turned to Starcei. “And you?”

“Different world, way different time,” Starcei said. “I was born, took it upon myself to be something special, and created an entire race.” She tapped her arcs. “My legacy has been mixed. I never knew my world’s Twilight, nor did I care to. It seems odd to me that so many of us seem connected to her in some way, others more literally.”

Starlight flashed indignantly. “I usually have technological means to keep myself occupied. No offense to the Apollo’s network, but it’s lame.”

“That’s pretty offensive!” Nova ribbed.

Starcei nodded slowly but said nothing.

Cosmo pointed at her. “Your never knew your world’s Twilight? What happened to her?”

“Killed by Applejack, a ‘hero’ who was actually a terrorist egged on by Sage Pinkie.”

Cosmo nodded slowly. “So it comes back to her.”

“Yes, it does, as does much. The rest of it comes back to me – or the Goddess, I suppose. Or the ancients, whatever their crazy ideas were.”

Cosmo looked at the mountain rune. Curious, she snipped a blade of grass with her magic, and it did indeed ooze red blood. “It does seem to serve no real purpose…”

“HEY STARCEI!”

The human known as Toph stomped over, pointing at Starcei. “Got a few questions for you!”

Starcei raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.”

“Why’d you think getting the Arcei offworld was a good idea if their kids need runes or they become vegetables?”

“Oh, you found that out.” Starcei looked somewhat surprised. “Most Arcei don’t even know that. It’s a closely guarded secret. You must have gotten Somnabula to spill the ‘beans’ as it were?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Starcei shrugged. “Think of it this way. They were being persecuted. You’ve been moving them for enough months now that the population in your world and others isn’t zero. They’ve probably paired up with some ponies by now, and there’s at least one conceived Arcei offspring, and there will be more soon.”

“That’s the problem! Those kids are going to be vegetables!”

“Ah, but they’re the citizens of another world now. Those worlds are charged with their wellbeing.” Starcei stared right into Toph’s eyes even though Toph return her gaze, making the menacing gesture rather pointless. “You best find a way to create artificial runes before they grow up then.”

Toph pointed at her and tried to say something, didn’t, thought about it for a moment, then scowled. “You conniving little spazwheel.”

Starcei nodded. “I look out for my ponies. I am the Mother, after all.”

“You’re going to help us… And you are going to come clean with everything you know!”

“No promises, but ask away.”

Toph grabbed her. “Come on, taking you to someone with more science in their head…”

Cosmo glanced at Nova. Nova glanced at Cosmo.

“And we just witnessed a mastermind’s plan go exactly as intended,” Starlight beeped. “Can’t really complain, it sounds like she’s in the right place, if taking a bit extreme measures. Can’t really say for sure though, bit low on information.”

Nova shrugged. “I… Am not involved in the Arcei dilemma, actually, so I couldn’t say. You could talk to General Sunset about that one. Actually, I think she’s biased against the Arcei in an extreme way, Starcei is angering her just by being here. So… I don’t know who to talk to for an impartial look. …Maybe Vivian?”

“Who?”

“The shadowy girl with the pink hat,” Nova said, pointing. “She likes just about everyone, though I don’t talk to her often enough to know much about her beyond that.”

“Where is she from? She doesn’t look like any of the others here.”

Nova opened her mouth, then closed it. She blinked. “I have no idea where she’s from. Huh. Probably should ask.”

“There’s a situation on the Apollo,” Starlight said suddenly.

“Huh?” Cosmo said, looking down at her regalia. “What’s happening?”

“Oh for the – their other enemy, Ba’al, is attacking our fleet. They’re going to intercept, and are preparing to beam us on the bridge now.”

The moment the words left Starlight’s crystal, Cosmo was on the bridge of the Apollo. O’Neill coughed. “Engage, helm. Ah, Princess, it appears that we’ve got an idiot who decided to attack you. Don’t know much from the report – it was sent by your people and relayed to us – but any ‘pyramid ship’ is a definite sign of Ba’al. Why he’s attacking you, I have no idea, you have more than enough of a fleet to destroy him. We’re heading over to minimize casualties.” He turned to the helm, checking to make sure they had entered the space pony universe.

Cosmo frowned, processing all of this in an instant. “He’s probably doing this to bait you.”

“Definitely,” O’Neill said. “But the Starfinder’s still back there, all they’ll be missing will be the specialty weapons on this thing. Probably shouldn’t fire those at a planet anyway with friendlies on the ground. I made a call, we’re going.”

Cosmo growled. “Thank you. I assume the Apollo is more than capable to deal with his ship?”

“Easily. He may have some clever tricks, but he doesn’t have Ancient Drone Weapons.”

“How long until we arrive?”

“Three minutes,” O’Neill said. “This is very conveniently timed around the event with the Sage. It’ll take us at least a minute to make sure we got Ba’al, and by then the ‘spirit thing’ will have already happened.” He frowned. “…They might be working together.”

“That seems very likely. Do you think your overkill can handle it?”

“Ba’al only has one ship as far as we know, and even if he did build another one somehow, the Starfinder is decked out with ‘magitech’. It should be able to hold its own.” He clenched his fist. “But I have the nagging feeling we’re all missing something…”

~~~

Word that Ba’al was involved and had diverted the Apollo away at the worst possible moment spread around the ring of heroes quickly. The reactions were mixed from thinking Ba’al was being stupid to mild concern to anger.

Corona herself got a sinking feeling in her stomach, and she didn’t know why. She glanced to Link, noting that he had a look of pure panic across his face. He thought something was going to go down, something big and bad.

Corona loaded her gun and prepared to infuse it with fire. Perfecting the art of lighting the bullets on fire when they left the gun and not before had been difficult, but she was more than prepared at this moment. They were all prepared – not all the people here may have liked each other, but they all knew how to work together for the moment. They had a goal, and an enemy, and they planned to use the many connections they had formed to win. Friendship was magic, after all.

“Just checking in,” Sombra said, coming through Sunset’s glasses directly into her brain. “Connection stable. That Starlight AI is a pain to avoid in this setting without enough servers, but you’re my safe place.”

Corona nodded, not daring speak since Tempest was standing right next to her.

“I’ll tell you what I can about the Mechanism the moment I see it – if I can connect to it, I will. It’ll be the fastest hack in the history of ever. A good challenge!”

Corona made no motion to respond to this one. It was nerve-wracking enough that things were already starting to go wrong, let alone the fact that she had a wanted criminal in her sunglasses actually helping. The situation was tense and weird. A bit more intense than the other times Corona and Sombra had helped each other recently.

“T-MINUS ONE MINUTE!” General Sunset yelled. “Ready yourselves for anything!”

Those who hadn’t readied their weapons earlier did so now. Hammers were raised, party cannons were set, spells were prepared, guns were loaded, and eyes were narrowed. Everyone stared at the tiny orange flag in the center of the area.

Nobody spoke for the entire minute.

Wind blew through the field. A grass blade lost its fight against a beetle, bursting into a small shower of blood. Corona heard a bird chirp.

Several timers rang, signifying the end of the wait. Everyone jumped, some even took a step forward, but after that initial lurch there was confusion. They thought nothing was happening.

They were wrong – a spark of white energy appeared slightly above the flag, growing in size and rising into the air. It soon filled the sky with its presence, unfolding into a soft, but holy shape. Four arms, two legs, two pairs of wings – one reptilian, one avian. Three small rounded horns crowned a rather featureless face, and a single tail pointed directly into the air. A halo appeared over the head.

Even though the Goddess Armonia had no defining eyes, everyone felt like they were being stared at. She spoke with no mouth and no jaw movement, but her voice was not loud, eldritch, or reverberating. She sounded like a woman – a mother.

A very displeased and impatient mother.

“What has happened to my world? What are all you creatures? Why is the magic different?”

The Spectacularium decided to say hello in the only way it knew how. This briefly gave Armonia pause, but she recovered quickly.

“I see into all your minds. You have made a mess of my creation in such a short time.”

Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle stepped forward, looking into the Goddess’s face with a determined look. She was scared, clearly, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. “Goddess of Lai! I am Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle of the world Equis Vitis, and I speak for all of those here who are new to your world! We apologize if we have trespassed where we were not supposed to tread, and are open to your words on what we have done to cause a mess of your creation, and what we may do to redeem ourselves in your eyes. That said, there is a Sage who is-”

“The Sage is meaningless. What you’ve done is not. You’ve ruined my world by interfering. The kingdom was supposed to fall. It has not.”

Corona saw General Sunset’s face twist into a conflicted expression of horror and uncertainty.

Twilight took the revelation in stride. “How could we have known, Goddess? We arrived here, unaware of your presence, and believed we were helping everypony we could. If you had some greater plan for the betterment of everypony, we apologize. I just a-“

Twilight did not get to complete her thought. A portal opened up a couple meters away from the central flag and dropped an orange rune in the ground. In quick succession, three more portals placed three more runes – teal, salmon, and deep green – in a square pattern around the center. Then a fifth portal dropped a small bomb in the center which was geared to explode before it even hit the ground. The shockwave upset all four runes.

The intent was clearly to summon their guardian golems. The hard-light quickly formed an orange saber-toothed cat, a teal humanoid leaning on a cane, a large floating fish with an orb of light in its mouth, and a deep green saw blade.

Under the Goddess’ now silent gaze, all hell broke loose.

The dozens of guns – both physical and energy-based – went off first, finding that they had little to no effect on the hard-light golems, breaking off only small chunks if there was any effect at all. Corona’s own fiery bullets had a minimal effect at best. A bullet bounced back and hit Mike in the leg, dropping him to the ground.

The fish golem was able to shoot back, using the orb of light it held in its jaw to fire lasers of energy. Corona had to duck for cover, only there wasn’t a large enough rock to hide behind. They were all exposed.

Lady Rarity met the teal man with her hammer, shattering its head, only for it to grow right back. Her armor deflected the sharp ‘cane’, staggering it so Nova could throw it into the ground. It reformed itself behind Nova, but Pinkie came flying out of nowhere, knocking it to the side.

Elsewhere the saw blade and the cat were double teaming, focusing on Twilight Sparkle and General Sunset, who were standing back to back, firing spells, raising shields, and trying their best not to fall to them. Link used his sword to pause time, cutting all the golems at least once, but even the Master Sword couldn’t fell them permanently.

Toph plowed a chunk of earth right into the fish’s crystal, shattering it. She then picked up its own salmon rune and tossed it at the fish before it could reform. The fish shattered completely – but reformed just the same as before. “This is not fair!”

Pinkie unleashed all her laid party canons, decimating the golem’s forces. The Tau'ri followed up with a volley of grenades while the unicorns and alicorn in the group blasted the golems in a coordinated attack. For an instant, all four golems were vaporized – but they just re-appeared, vicious as ever.

“Why do these things even need to protect their runes if nothing can hurt the darn rocks!” Toph said, trying in vain to punch one of the runes in half.

“I’m why,” Starcei announced, her arcs glowing with a brilliant color, like any Starlight’s magic, but significantly more saturated. The hard light claws that protruded from her arcs skewered the salmon rune right in the center, cutting it right in half. The rune shook, shuddered, and fell into a powder that floated into Starcei’s arcs through an unseen opening. The fish suddenly became the color of Starcei’s power and began attacking the other golems. Starcei herself ‘teleported’ behind the teal man, slicing at him with a piece of hard light that actively kept him from reforming.

“Protect Starcei!” General Sunset ordered. Corona got the message. She leaped into action, encasing the teal man in a wall of fire, giving Starcei an opportunity to go for another rune.

“EVERYONE BACK UP!” Pinkie yelled. “THE STARFINDER IS FIRING AT THE RUNES!”

Corona flipped backward, kicking the teal man in the face with a flaming boot. Starcei and all the others fell back a fair distance. Those who looked up could see the pink bolt of energy falling from the sky. It hit the ground hard enough to send those who weren’t fast flying several meters, tossing earth into the air and creating a shower of plant blood that splattered over everyone.

The pink magic fires dissipated into electric bursts, driving themselves into the runes. Two of the runes had gone dark, leaving only the deep green sawblade, which Starcei currently had the fish occupying.

“It’s not over!” Pinkie said, running for the center. She wasn’t fast enough – not this time. A portal opened, dropping a small device composed of gears, runes, and strange unidentified metals onto the patch of dirt that once held an orange flag. The machine lit up brilliantly, casting a complex triple-barrier spell about ten meters in diameter.

Another portal opened up, dropping the full glory of the Mechanism onto the freshly exposed earth. Corona wasn’t sure what she was looking at – the closest approximation she could come to was a humungous church organ that had no keys and had cannibalized parts from so many different other organs that the Mechanism couldn’t be considered its own thing anymore. There were a dozen large batteries filled with power that likely came from the green diamond, hundreds of tiny steaming pipes that snaked in an out of the large upright structure, numerous glowing rune fragments that were casting spells on different parts of the Mechanism continually, a few clocks ticking down to midnight, and a single table with a magical inscription on it.

Sage Pinkie dropped down from the portal in the air, mask in her hoof. She took one look at her opposition with her blue, shifting, oculus eyes.

Everyone with a brain attacked the barrier at once, breaking the outermost layer with the combined might of bullets, fire, hooves, hammers, magic, lasers, and confetti. One layer fell, but two layers remained – and Pinkie had already laid the mask on the Mechanism’s table.

“No…” Armonia spoke, able to see into the Sage’s mind for the first time. “No!” She raised her hand, preparing to smite the Sage.

The Sage looked directly into the Armonia’s eyes, daring her to try. Corona didn’t know what was going on through the Sage’s mind, but whatever it was startled the Goddess. And that was all the Sage needed.

The second layer of barrier broke, but it was a lost cause at this point. The Mechanism activated, bouncing up and down like a motorized jack in the box. Crystals lit up, sparks flew, and clock faces exploded. The mask floated a short ways into the air. A chain made of purely white magic shot out of it. The Sage dropped the barrier so it could go through unhindered.

Nobody fired, they knew it was over. Nova acted now that nobody needed to use magic anymore – activating her cobbled together anti-magic device, covering the nearby area in a spell-inhibiting effect. The Mechanism itself lost all magic color at that moment, but the mask did not.

The white chain of something that wasn’t quite magic impaled the Goddess in the face. Her entire form shook. She let out a shriek, like that of a woman dying. …In a way, that was exactly what was happening. The white chain pulled, dragging the Goddess down, shrinking her, compressing her – and forcing her into itself. The mask absorbed the Goddess’ entire essence in only a couple of seconds. It fell onto the now defunct Mechanism.

The Sage must have read the minds of everyone around her because she pulled a white flag out of her mane. “I SURRENDER!”

“…What!?” General Sunset yelled.

Corona was aware that there was a back and forth between the General and the Sage, but she didn’t see that. She was suddenly overcome with a feeling of overbearing horror. She turned to look at Fef, and she couldn’t bring herself to look away.

She saw Fef press a button on a small metal disc.

Demons didn’t carry devices.

She was calling someone. Or telling someone something.

Corona needed to tell someone about it. Someone. Anyone.

“Noooooo you doooooon’t…”

Corona froze. No, no no, no. This wasn’t happening… This…

“Corona!” Sombra’s voice yelled in her ear. “What is wrong with you? Move! Just move!”

Corona couldn’t. She couldn’t.

~~~

“…What!?” General Sunset yelled on one of Sombra’s screens.

“I surrender!” the Sage yelled back. “I did what I wanted, you can do whatever you want to me now! Kill me, jail me, whatever!”

“What did you do?”

“I freed this world from its stupid reason!” the Sage called back. “That’s what I did!”

Sombra glanced at her other monitor. Corona was behaving oddly, staring at Fef. Sombra’s eyes widened as she saw Fef press a button. Corona didn’t do anything.

“You freed us from the Goddess? How does that even make sense!” General Sunset shouted, though now Sombra was only paying a the slightest bit of attention to that conversation. She grabbed her microphone.

“Corona! What is wrong with you? Move! Just move!”

Corona did nothing. Sombra knew she heard her, there was no way not to. Sombra took in a breath and cracked her knuckles – time to take matters into her own hands. She began furiously moving her fingers through her various holograms, working her magic.

The Sage was talking. “You heard the Goddess. She wanted to destroy your kingdom, make it fall. She’s done a lot more than that! This world is her little game – she created a bunch of ants so she could watch them fight! Peace is boring to her, so she introduces new variables – creating a mutant pony born with no features so Arcei will come to exist, creating prophecies through the previous Spectacularium to drive heroes into existence, and she even wiped out the ancient rune builders so she could start over with some ancient relics around to make things more interesting!”

“Sounds like she was bored,” Sombra muttered absent-mindedly. She cropped the video of Fef pressing the button and reduced it to only a second in length, so nobody would be able to tell for sure what individual camera the video came from. Then she sent it directly to the bridge crew of the Starfinder.

They, in turn, called everyone on the ground who had a radio.

General Sunset was not one of the radio holders. “You… You think you had the right?”

“Yes,” the Sage responded.

“…I bet you can use her power while it’s in that mask!

“Also yes, but I’m not. I’m surrendering it and myself to you. The mask won’t respond to anyone but me now, unless I give it permission, but-“

“FEF!” Lieshy yelled, tearing out her headset. “WHAT DID YOU DO?”

“What? Nothing I-“

Lieshy tackled her down, knocking the disc out of the folds of her carapace. “She called someone ever-“

People barely had a change to register that Lieshy had given a warning. With a teleport effect, a single Ba’al appeared on the ground before them. He had no Jaffa, no clones, not even a hand device. It was just him – but something seemed wrong about him. He seemed… dark.

He leaped toward the Sage. She put on the mask and pointed at him, a burst of holy energy firing at him. It should have been enough to completely vaporize him thirty times over.

He teleported behind her in a flash of sickly, dark purple. It wasn’t magic, but it sure wasn't the transporter technology that had been used to get him here.

Sombra couldn’t believe what she was seeing on her screen. She shook her head, trying to find the source of the teleporter that got him here. But she couldn’t find anything… He probably had a ship sitting somewhere in an alternate dimension that had opened a portal, teleported him in, and closed the portal. “Caray! Clever aliens…”

The Ba’al grabbed the Sage with some kind of darkness, lifting the mask with his free, bare hand. Lady Rarity charged at him with her hammer, Pinkie right beside her. Some bullets flew. Ba’al raised an eyebrow and a wall of shadowy horrors erected itself between him and his attackers. The hammers impacted the wall with a disgusting squish and the bullets did nothing.

For the briefest of moments, Sombra detected a foreign wireless signal. She tried to connect, but the portal opened and closed too fast. Ba’al, the Sage, and the mask were teleported away.

The wall of black sludge fell to the ground.

Everyone was silent. Nova deactivated the anti-magic field wordlessly.

Lieshy broke the silence, lifting Fef into the air. “WHAT. DID. YOU. DO?”

“What’s it look like, silly? I called Ba’al! And oo-wee did he have some scary dark mumbo-jumbo going on around him!”

“WHY?” Lieshy screamed, tears running down her cheeks. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!”

“That’s the mystery!” Fef shrugged, giggling slightly. “You know what? I don’t even remember anymore! I guess something erased it from my memory so you couldn’t go poking around!”

Lieshy threw Fef to the ground. She looked ready to tear the demon apart. She elected to fly off instead.

The reactions of Fef’s ‘teammates’ varied from barely contained rage to tears. General Sunset was in the middle, walking up to Fef impassively, face unreadable.

As a demon, Fef saw right through it. “Oh, I definitely betrayed you. There’s no way to hide that. Was never on your side. I recall thinking about this moment a few months ago! So, eeeeeeh SORRY-not-sorry!”

Sunset’s face clouded over. She turned and walked away, using her dimensional device to go somewhere else.

Twilight gulped. “Uh… We’re done, everyone. Anyone who wants to go to the post mission briefing is welcome to return to the Mirror Portal. But… I don’t blame you if you don’t come.” She lifted Fef up in her telekinesis and imprisoned her in a magic box. “We… Will have to decide what to do with her.”

Sombra sat back in her chair, shutting her monitors off.

She shouldn’t feel upset. She wasn’t involved or invested in this conflict. She just acted for the sake of Corona, her informant.

…Why was she so angry though? Why did she feel like she had been bested?

Actually, who cared?

Ba’al was going down.

~~~

O’Neill had his hands folded and up to his mouth. Behind him there was a video playing – that of Link talking to the Ba’al clone in the cell. It switched to a video of Link and Midna talking in a hallway of the Apollo.

Link was sitting across from O’Neill, face as straight as he could manage.

“Well, the jig is up!” Midna said, appearing on Link’s shoulder. “Hello General, name’s Midna, and I can tell you’re pissed!”

“You bet I am,” O’Neill said, switching to a picture taken of Ba’al raising a wall of shadow. “Do you care to tell me what the hell happened down there?”

Link said nothing. Midna sighed. “Okay, so, there’s this thing called Majora-“

Link held up a hand. “Midna…”

O’Neill glared. “Spill the beans or I prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law for living on a military vessel under false pretenses for months. Or I can just lock you in the brig for eternity. I can probably do that, out here. Nobody to question me.”

Link grit his teeth. “…Knowing about it does things to your head.”

“I gathered that much from your little hallway conversations, Link.”

“I will not-“

Midna rolled her eyes. “Link! Stop being a hero for once! If he wants to burn his brain, let him. He’s probably doomed already. O’Neill, prepare for eternal nightmares. Prepare never to get a good night’s sleep again. Prepare to stand, frozen, while the force of darkness acts, powerless to do anything because it’s in your head.”

O’Neill sat back. “I’m ready. Cameras are disabled, don’t be afraid of anyone else seeing this.”

“You better be. There’s this mask known as Majora’s mask. There is a thing inside of it that has the power to destroy everything. And that thing is so far off the deep end insane that it will spread its insanity to everything that even knows about it. And if you see the mask, well, that’s even worse, because then it starts calling to you, demanding that you serve it, demanding that you become a holder of its power. And it will give you power, oh yes, power beyond your wildest imaginable dreams. You begin to think of it as your god, your savior, your everything. And all the while it spreads, spreads, spreads. And then it tries to destroy everything it can. That is the evil of Majora.”

“And how do you know this?”

“We stopped it,” Link said. “Majora only had a small group of people under its influence when we found it, and it already had enough power to summon terrible natural disasters. All its power was forced back into the mask. But we knew we couldn’t resist the power ourselves, so we gave it to a mysterious being known only as the Happy Mask Salesman, who could.”

“So, what, did he fail?”

“Ba’al stole it from him,” Midna said. “During the invasion.”

“This is why we needed to stop Ba’al sooner,” Link said venomously. “Not do other things.”

“You know full well we had no leads,” O’Neill responded. “And we still don’t. All we have is a larger sense of urgency. How long do we have until this Majora starts unleashing complete destruction?”

“That’s the thing,” Link said. “It should have already started. I don’t know why it hasn’t yet. It’s clearly given Ba’al the power to initiate such things. It must have some other plan.”

O’Neill sat back in his chair. “Well, I’m going to state the obvious. We’ve got an evil entity influencing an enemy we can’t find that’s probably deemed all of us fit to be destroyed. I think we have a problem.”

“No, really?” Midna remarked.

“He’s also building ships somewhere,” O’Neill said. “What we destroyed for the space ponies was a regular Ha’tak, not his mothership. Given the existence of this Majora, we can’t know if he has enough extra ships to lose that one or was just compelled to use it as a distraction.” He shook his head. “You mentioned Zelda in one of your conversations. You really think she can find it?”

Minda shook her head. “I don’t think so anymore. She can see things and understand things with the Triforce of Wisdom. But I don’t think she can see into the other dimensions. Not anymore.”

O’Neill shook his head. “…You can stay on the Apollo. I think we need you. And while I’m upset right now, I understand what you were doing. Now get out of my office.”

Link didn’t need to be told twice.

~~~

Corona sat down in her dorm, alone. Sugarcoat was out, so it was just her and the television screen.

The television screen quickly showed an image of Sombra’s face.

“Want to tell me what happened?”

“I…” Corona gulped. “I don’t know! I… I saw her press the button, then there was darkness, and… And…”

“Something was influencing you,” Sombra said.

“No!” Corona yelled.

Sombra shook her head sadly. “That was far too fast and angry. Corona, there’s something in your head. What. Is. It?”

“The… The…” She racked her brain. Why couldn’t she think? Why couldn’t she say? She knew, but she

“SUNSET SHIMMER!” Sombra shouted.

“The mask!” Corona shouted. “Oh the mask, it’s definitely the mask, it’s in my head, it’s been in my head so long. In the dream with the blue guy, in the nightmares, it’s been talking to me for weeks but it just won’t let me think about it!” She grabbed her hair and broke down crying.

Sombra looked at her for a few seconds, face impassive at first, but quickly melting. “Corona, I-“

“Can you get it out? Hack my brain or something?”

Sombra shook her head. “Can’t do that yet.”

“What if it makes me hurt someone? What if it takes full control of me? What if it drives me insane?”

“I’ll watch you,” Sombra said, taking in a sharp breath. “I’ll watch you closely. I’ll keep you alive, well, and keep you out of danger. And I’ll try to find this mask, whatever it is.”

“Th-thanks…” Corona managed.

Sombra’s face twisted into a conflicted expression Corona couldn’t read in her current state. Sombra shook her head. “I’d wear the sunglasses as much as possible. And when you go to sleep, try to record what you see when you wake up. Or call me and tell me. I’ll be here.”

Corona nodded. “The mask… It… It was with the salesman. The Happy Mask Salesman. Link gave it to him to keep safe. I… I don’t think he’s kept it safe.”

“Ba’al has it, doesn’t he?”

“That… That would make sense…” She laid down in her bed, staring at the ceiling. “I… I’m going to sleep now. Goodnight, Sombra.”

“Goodnight,” Sombra said, preparing to shut off the screen.

“…I won’t be able to talk to anyone else about this…” Corona whispered to herself. “It won’t let me…”

Sombra closed the screen and shivered. That was terrifying.

She had the distinct feeling she might have declared war on a literal god a few hours ago.

She decided she was going to sleep as well. Too many thoughts and emotions swirling around her head…

021 - Murder on the Apollo Express

Those who explored the multiverse had begun to formulate a small map of it, composed mainly of two areas – the ‘east’ multiverse, and the ‘west’ multiverse. The pony worlds and those closely associated occupied the east, and the largely human worlds related to Earth Tau’ri were in the west. There were a handful of universes that seemed to fall somewhere in the middle, such as the Static, but for the most part everything was either east or west, and moving things larger than the Mirror Portal could accomodate from east to west and vise versa was rather difficult.

So if anyone wanted to fly to another galaxy in the east multiverse, there was only one ship that could be asked, a total monopoly.

Luckily O’Neill was an amiable sort who loved to hand out favors, especially when the Apollo wasn’t needed elsewhere and after he convinced Link that they really had no leads. He also had to remind the green-clad hero that Ba’al couldn’t be involved in this one, since it was the space ponies of ‘Equis Cosmic’, and ponies were immune to the Goa’uld infection. It took some time to accomplish this.

The mission? There was an odd, regular signal coming from a dwarf galaxy a fair distance away. The Apollo would take the trip there, investigate, and then return. A handful of pony scientists had come along for the ride, as well as a handful of people interested in another galaxy, or some who just wanted to take a ride on a spaceship like it was a cruise.

Twilight and her friends came for a mixture of all the above reasons, most choosing to view it as a sort of vacation. The first day of the voyage was nearing its end, and many passengers were in the mess hall having a bit of a celebration.

Rarity was sitting with Link and a surprising passenger, Mlinx.

“Mlinx, dear, what are you doing on this ship?”

“…Looking for a break,” he said, sitting back. “You know Fef?”

Rarity’s expression soured. “How could I not?”

“She’s given us a bad name. There are enough people in the Elemental Nations who hold it against us that it’s becoming a problem. For me, at least. The rest can just take it, but, well, I wasn’t exactly the most welcomed anyway, and Fef was my friend…” He clenched his fist.

Rarity put a hoof on his fist, keeping him from punching a hole through the table. “Hey, hey, Mlinx. It’s okay. You needed to get away for a while, and that’s good for you. You’re going through a lot right now. Take the moment to relax, okay?”

“…Right,” Mlinx said, sighing. “That is what I’m here for. I hope that galaxy is beautiful.”

“Won’t see it until we get there,” Link said, gesturing at the window. “Nothing but hyperspace for the next few days. As beautiful and radiant as this world’s sparkly pattern is, the novelty wears off after a while.”

Rarity glanced out the window at the hyperspace pattern – a largely green and blue alternating swirl with patterns of pink and purple stars spread throughout. “Is every world’s hyperspace pattern unique Link?”

“No, a lot of pony worlds close to yours have the same one. Some don’t have any at all. Can’t travel faster than light in those.”

“Some worlds have more or less magic… Some have some or no hyperspace…” Rarity furrowed her brow. “I wonder what happens if there is a world with absolutely no magic. Or a world where life is impossible.”

“Probably should get out of there as fast as possible.”

“Would you have time though? Twilight has observed that our internal magic levels slowly fall when in a low magic world, but if the change was jarring would there even be a moment to return?”

Link shrugged. “That sounds like a question that needs to be answered by ‘experimentation’ or something.”

A passing diminutive reddish-brown unicorn overheard the word ‘experimentation’ and looked to the group at the table. “Hey, what experimentation?”

Rarity shrugged. “Wondering what would happen in a universe with no magic at all, and Link here says we’d have to find one to see what would happen.”

The unicorn smiled. “Well you would have to do that to be certain, but you could probably use analysis to figure it out ahead of time.” He extended his hoof. “Name’s Diesel, I’m Captain Shockwave’s assistant.”

Rarity shook it. “Charmed. I’m Rarity, this is Link, and Mlinx. We aren’t exactly scientists, while I presume you are?”

Diesel nodded. “All of us here – Shockwave and Cream. We found the signal years ago while drifting around the galactic rim and it has eaten away at our sanities not knowing what’s out there. I hope it’s friendly aliens, personally.”

“I hope it’s a resort,” Mlinx added.

Diesel chuckled. “Sure, why not! Anyway, about your little question. I may not be that knowledgeable on the subject of transitional physics, but from Twilight’s brief I read on the subject, I can surmise that so long as you are able to physically act within the confines of the new universe you find yourself in, you will be able to leave before all your magical properties revert to nothing. The big question is if you do let all your magical properties revert to nothing, what’ll happen to you? As observed previously, things tend to ‘shift’ to accomplish the same function in whatever universe they’re in – for instance, the ‘magic’ on Earth Tau’ri is very different in nature from the magic in most pony worlds, and yet the magic spells work as advertised, even if they are a bit harder to cast on Earth Tau’ri. The hyperdrive accesses a different sub-plane of existence in every universe, but it manages to do so with ease, as if the universe tweaks the device slightly so it will still work if it can. But in the places with no hyperspace at all, the drive just does nothing. Would your bodies survive? Wou-“

“Dear, dear,” Rarity said, holding up her hooves and chuckling slightly. “You’re overloading our tiny little minds with your knowledge!”

“Oh, sorry. I do tend to do that. Talk and keep talking without thinking.”

“I have no idea what he was really talking about,” Mlinx said. “I zoned.”

Link shrugged. “I think I got it.”

“Thank you,” Diesel said.

“I’d recommend talking to Twilight about that,” Rarity said. “Or maybe even Pinkie, if you can catch her in a listening mood. They’d be able to keep up with you.”

“Right, right.” Diesel smiled. “See you around then! Nice talking to you!” He trotted off, a skip in his step.

Rarity blinked. “…I didn’t mean for him to go, but I guess he really wanted to talk science. I was a bit curious about him, actually…”

Link shrugged. “Some people have a one-track mind.” He yawned. “Speaking of, my mind is currently egging me on to sleep. It was a pleasure, as always, Rarity.”

Rarity smiled. “Likewise. Have a good night!”

Link left the table, reducing the number of occupants to two. Rarity put her hooves on the table. “So, Mlinx, I’m sure you have some stories to tell!”

“Not really. You know my place in the tribe. Let’s not talk about that.”

Rarity frowned. “…All right, if you insist. I’ll tell you one of my stories. Oh, there was this one time I was foalnapped by some hopelessly incompetent Diamond Dogs, now that was somehow both a horrible day and a great day. It started when I was looking for gemstones with Spike – I was probably using him a bit unfairly, if I’m being honest with myself. See, he had quite the crush on me. I think he still does, though it’s significantly less than it was prior and he generally doesn’t act on it anymore. But I was fully aware of it back then, and I told him it would be dashing to go out and help me dig up gemstones. Little did I know that there were Dogs about…”

She told her story for the next twenty minutes or so, allowing the rest of the mess hall to fall into the background of her perception. Mlinx, to his credit, paid rapt attention and laughed at all the right moments. It was, all in all, an enjoyable experience.

“…And that basically wraps it up. The moral? Well, there were several, but the one I got is that a lady can use her words to get out of any situation.” She chuckled.

“Weaponized whining and complaining. That’s a trait Lieshy had. She could dance circles around everyone with her speech.”

“You two still friends?”

Mlinx shrugged. “She talks to me sometimes, but she no longer lives with us. She bunks wherever Toph does at this point. She admitted to me a few days ago that she doesn’t hold us demons very highly anymore… I’m all right, but-“ He shook his head. “And here I was saying I didn’t want to talk about this.”

“Mlinx, it’s okay. We all have problems and we need to work through them. I understand that.”

Mlinx nodded. “I… Think I’ll turn in now, follow Link’s example.”

Rarity glanced around. “I do suppose the hall is starting to clear out… Good night, Mlinx. See you tomorrow for another day of traveling through empty space.”

Mlinx chuckled. “That you will.” He stood up and walked out, leaving Rarity at the table. After a minute of quiet contemplation. Rarity got up, intending to approach the table her close friends and O’Neill were sitting at, but another pony caught her eye: a cream-colored earth pony sitting at the edge of the hall, her nose in a book. Curiosity piqued, Rarity trotted over.

“If you don’t mind my intrusion, what is it that you’re reading?”

The pony looked up from her book with a smile on her face. “It’s a mystery novel, Murder on the Pony Express. The great detective Renee is traveling with a mail caravan across the Zebrican desert in pre-war Equis when somepony is gruesomely murdered. All signs point to the homeless stallion, but I think it’s the caravan leader at this moment.”

Rarity blinked. “Why, that sounds like a fascinating read! Such an good name for a detective as well!”

“It is a great book. I think the name’s foreign, or made up to sound foreign. My name’s Cream, by the way. Here with Captain Shockwave to find the source of the signal I found.”

“So you’re Cream! I’m Rarity, just here for the ride. Don’t have any scientific background at all.”

Cream smirked. “That shouldn’t mean anything. If you have enough cunning and skill, you can move up quite far. I don’t have any secondary education, actually, but I’ve proven myself to be more than skillful. Helps that I’m an earth pony mage, a pretty rare skill set.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Earth pony mage? I have run into a couple of those in my travels, but besides other versions of Pinkie I’ve never really gotten a close look. How exactly do you cast magic?”

Cream laid her book down next to her and held up her hooves. “Unicorns use their horns to cast magic, and pegasi channel their power through their wings. What most earth ponies don’t realize is that their hooves aren’t quite like wings or horns – they’re just focal points of magic that flows throughout their entire body. To cast magic as an earth pony, you need to dance.” To demonstrate, Cream stood up on her hind legs and waved her front hooves around in a series of semicircular patterns. The tips of her hooves began to glow a soft green as magic collected around them. She pressed them together, creating a simple floating ball of light in front of her. “Definitely more difficult than using a horn, but there’s something invigorating about it.”

“That’s amazing!” Rarity declared.

Cream smirked. “I practice. There’s technology that can help you cast as well – Shockwave was never able to use her wings, so she has a pair of boots that can cast magic spells for her.”

“You are a talented mare, Cream.”

“I can also etch designs into solid objects and channel my magic into that which allows me to mold materials into highly specific shapes. It’s the main reason I’m with the Captain, I can create technical parts on the spot should they be needed.”

“I stand corrected, you are a very talented mare.”

Cream shrugged. “No, really?” She picked up her book. “Anyway, now that I’m not engrossed in my pages I can see that the place is clearing out. I think I’ll continue reading in my room until I pass out.”

“Good night then!” Rarity called.

“I will probably not fall asleep until the AM hours given how exciting this book is,” Cream commented, trotting out of the hall.

Rarity finally mmoved to the table with her friends and O’Neill. “Well, tonight has been an interesting one filled with delightful conversations! I’ve told stories, heard others, and met new ponies! I think I know everyone on board now, except that Captain Shockwave. No idea where she is.”

“Reclusive bird,” O’Neill said. “Doesn’t like people.”

Flutterfree shook her head. “Why’s she a captain then? Even if she does just run a science vessel, she still has to deal with the ponies she commands.”

“I don’t know,” O’Neill said. “As I said, reclusive bird.”

Rarity shrugged. “I’d just like to meet her, is all.” She heard the doors to the mess hall open. “Oh! Maybe she’s decided to pay us a visit!”

“Ah… no,” Starbeat said, walking from the main door to the food dispenser. “Just here to get my dinner and go.” She rubbed her right hoof, where a metal band was affixed. “Can’t be around a lot of people, you know how it is.”

Pinkie shook her head. “You don’t need the band, Starbeat.”

Starbeat levitated a tray of food over her head. “It’s there to tell me when I click, and to warn everyone else of the same, Pinkie. It’s for my sake as well as you all.”

“It makes you look like a convict,” Nova said.

“It’s the prison known as life…” Starbeat sighed. Shaking her head, she decided to come over, pulling up a chair. “I guess I can sit for a while.” She munched on one of her carrot sticks. “So, why you all hanging around this late? Almost everyone else is cleared out.”

Twilight shrugged. “I don’t know. Just feel like talking tonight, I suppose.”

Pinkie grinned. “We. Are. Wild. Party. Animals!”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “We sure act like that sometimes.”

Starbeat raised her eyebrows as she sipped some of her drink. “Do elaborate.”

Nova snorted. “Go to a Pinkie Pie party and behold, the depths to which all of us will stoop.”

“I’ve started spiking the punch every few parties!” Pinkie grinned. “Things get fun!”

“Wait, you have?” Nova blurted. “That… certainly explains a lot.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Really, dear? You didn’t notice?”

Twilight raised a wing. “I didn’t either. You do have an eye for detail, Rarity.”

“I suppose I do…”

O’Neill shrugged. “I don’t think it’s that. Intoxication should be obvious, methinks.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “…’methinks’?”

“I can speak fancy if I want.”

“No, no you can’t.”

Starbeat chuckled, chewing on a piece of bread. “Seeing all of this is always a little weird to me. Just ponies talking.”

O’Neill snorted. “Hey, you’re not the grown man talking to a herd of colorful equines.”

“True… I guess I was trying to say… Well, I don’t know, actually. Here I am trying to express a sentimental feeling that isn’t a form of romance and I’m tripping over my words. Heh.”

Twilight put a hoof on her back. “It’s okay, we understand.”

Starbeat looked right into Twilight’s eyes. “Aw, thanks Twi-“ Her hoof-bracelet started beeping like a car alarm, albeit quieter. She yelped in alarm, lashing out with her hoof, hitting Twilight across the face.

Starbeat took several steps back, pulling her tray with her. “S-s-sorry! I, I didn’t mean to!”

Twilight rubbed her face. “Ow. It’s okay.”

Starbeat flushed, pressing her ears against her head. “I need to go. Thanks for letting me eat with you all. Bye.” She teleported away.

Flutterfree shook her head. “…We need to find a way to help that mare…”

“She’s the expert on the mysterious Beat Force,” Rarity reminded them. “She’s her own best hope.”

Flutterfree sighed. “She’s becoming a recluse by necessity. It’s not healthy for her.”

“Neither is what just happened.”

Pinkie sagged onto the table. “Okay, now I’m just sad.”

“New topic then,” Nova said. “I hear Daniel’s been working hard to forge tighter relations with the Binaries?”

O’Neill nodded. “Yep. Quite the ordeal, apparently. Furry bundles that lack any semblance of trust…”

They talked about random things for another hour or so, bonding as a group as ponies generally did and one old man generally didn’t, but was forced to anyway. Eventually, however, they began to yawn and grow tired.

The lights above them flickered for a moment.

Pinkie stretched her hooves. “I’m going to take that flicker as a suggestion that we’ve kept the lights on in here a bit too long. To bed everybody!”

The group of six friends walked to the area of the Apollo where the quarters were. O’Neill gestured toward the door that held the guest quarters. “This is where we part ways. See you in the morning.”

Twilight nodded, pressing her hoof to a console to open the door. Her bright smile vanished instantly. “…O’Neill?”

O’Neill looked over her into the guest rooms hall. “Yes – oh.”

Rarity put a hoof to her mouth. There was blood in the hallway, seeping out in large quantities from under a door to one of the rooms. Rarity couldn’t help but wonder who was behind that door. Not Mlinx, his blood is blue… Starbeat? Diesel? Is there anyone else on this level?

O’Neill’s instincts kicked in. He jumped past the ponies and took out his master keycard. The door slid open, revealing a gruesome sight.

A certain earth pony who had spent the evening reading a book was splayed on the ground, unmoving, her eyes wide open. Her jaw hung slack, her neck was bent too far back, and the bottom of her throat was slit right open, dripping deep red blood onto the ground. It was still flowing, pouring on to the ground. It was very recent.

Rarity screamed, but couldn’t look away. The eyes were looking right at her, so lifeless – without the spark. But this was much, much worse than the neandroponies. At least the neadroponies had life in there. These eyes… They had nothing.

She realized that her screams had drawn everyone in the area to the scene. Mlinx, Link, and Diesel were close by, Shockwave and a Tau’ri crewmember were to the left keeping their distance, and Starbeat was poking her head out of her room, hoof over her mouth.

O’Neill called the bridge. “Get the camera feed for the passenger hall, stat!”

“C-cream?” Diesel finally managed. “Wh… What happened?”

“She’s been murdered,” O’Neill said, leaning down and shaking his head. “Cut to the throat. Very recent…”

Rarity forced herself to look down at Cream’s body with a more analytical eye. She realized with some pain that she hadn’t actually seen a dead body yet on their adventures; at least not this close. She now understood what Corona was talking about, how it changed things. How it drove itself into your mind. Had Twilight seen this on Ba’al’s ship that day? Had she ignored it? Pushed it out?

She noticed her breathing increasing rapidly. She held her hoof to her chest, calming herself. Now would not be the time to completely lose it.

Diesel was apparently fed up with the silence. “You!” he shouted, pointing at Mlinx. “Your people are aggressive warriors! You did this!”

Mlinx, instead of backing up, moved closer to Diesel and glared. “I did no such thing, unicorn.”

Shockwave stepped forward, getting a closer look herself. “Anders,” she said, pointing at the Tau’ri crewmember. “You have a very large collection of knives.”

Anders, a burly bald man, squinted. “Are you accusing me?”

“Just putting information out in the public eye,” Shockwave stated, trying not to look at the body.

O’Neill got a call back from the bridge. He cursed. “There was a video blackout.”

“What? How can you have a video blackout?!” Diesel demanded.

“Power surge,” Pinkie explained. “I mean, some of us saw the flickering lights right?”

Rarity looked further into the room, her eyes falling upon a book lying pages-down on a small bed, very very close to the end of the story. She couldn’t explain why, but this angered her more than anything else about the situation. This mare didn’t get to finish her story! Celestia knew what else was just ended here!

“Pinkie,” Rarity said. “Hat. Now.”

Pinkie nodded, pulling a wide-rimmed fedora with a pink bow lining out of her mane. Rarity placed the hat on her head, stepping to the front of the group. Everyone sensed she was going to do something, taking a step back.

She levitated the book off the bed and to her face, reading the next page. “…The caravan leader did do it.”

“Rarity, what ar-“ Mlinx began.

“Not Rarity... not right now at least,” she said, voice abnormally devoid of its usual pompous flair. “I am Renee. And I’m going to solve a crime.” She turned, back to the crime scene. “Twilight, Nova, Flutterfree, Pinkie, and O’Neill couldn’t have done it, since we’ve all been together for the last few hours. Since this is extremely recent, it means that the person who… did it would have to be someone in this hall at the time, or a teleporter. O’Neill, Mauve’s the only teleporter not present. Could you get him?”

“He couldn’t do this,” O’Neill said. “He faints at the sight of blood. If you need another alibi I’m sure the folks in engineering can provide one. He usually falls asleep there.”

“Fair enough. Assuming that checks out, only people here at the time could have done it.” She looked at Shockwave, Diesel, Anders, Mlinx, Starbeat, and Link. “You six are the suspects. I’m the detective. Twilight, be a dear and keep tabs on the six of them. O’Neill and I are going to step in here and examine the crime scene.”

Twilight tore her gaze from the blood. “Right! Right! You heard her! Everyone, back to your rooms. Don’t leave. Me and my friends will be watching.”

Mlinx pointed at Renee. “You can’t be serious, Rarity.”

“I have to be impartial, Mlinx,” Renee said. “Go to your room and wait.”

He clenched his fists and stormed off. Renee looked to O’Neill, adjusting her hat before stepping over Cream, carefully entering the room. O’Neill closed the door behind them.

“…You okay?”

“No,” Renee said. “You’d think we’d have seen this by now, but no. You tell so many stories of war and death that you were personally involved in. That happens a lot less over here in the east. Hearing about death and seeing it are two very different things.” She placed the book back on the bed, open. “I shouldn’t have moved that…”

O’Neill folded his arms. “Are you sure you’re qualified to do this?”

“This is not the first time I’ve taken the guise of a fictional detective. I did fairly well last time.” She took out a smartphone and started snapping pictures of the room. It was small, containing only a bed, a light, and a small closet – no bathroom, that was down the hall. “Nothing strikes me as obviously a clue.” She leaned down to look closer at the body. This time, she kept herself under control, though she knew she was just bottling up emotional turmoil for a later violent discharge. Now was not the time to lose her cool.

The wound across the neck was a slice from something sharp – presumably a knife or blade of some sort. There were no other signs of contact – no bruises, not even a messed up mane. There clearly wasn’t a struggle at all. It was quick. That was something, at least.

Renee looked around the room closely again. The bed wasn’t made, signaling that Cream had probably sitting in it, reading. Her closeness to the door suggested she got up to answer it, and probably got sliced right as she opened it. She’d have gone quietly, since the cut went for the neck. Nothing else was disturbed.

Renee turned back to the door – realizing it wasn’t closed all the way. She leaned closer and noticed the wall to her left was dented. She nodded slowly, taking a few steps back and taking one final look around the room.

“Well?” O’Neill asked.

“Someone either knocked on the door or she heard something. She went to open the door, got a blade of some kind to the neck, and fell where she is now. The only clue in here? A dent in the doorway, made by something hard. A hoof slamming into it wildly, or a carapace.”

O’Neill looked at the dent. “That’d have to be a pretty hard hit.”

“If I’d just… done away with somepony, I would have run away fast enough to hit a wall head-on. Ponies have the strength, and I’m pretty sure demons do as well.”

O’Neill leaned against the back well. “So, our suspects. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that, first of all, that camera blackout is a bit too convenient. That’s our other clue. My current bet is on Shockwave. As Captain of a science expedition, she’d be able to work her way into your system, not to mention have the hoof required to make that dent. I hear she has magic boots, maybe they could have helped. Furthermore, she knew Cream in the past, giving her a possible longer-term motive.”

“Anders has technical experience,” O’Neill offered.

“He’s certainly possible, but I’m finding it hard to construct a situation where he creates that dent. Burly as he is, he’s still a normal human. Unless he’s got a Ba’al symbiote in him. Twilight can check that. Other than that, I don’t really have a read on him yet.”

“The others?”

“I don’t believe for a second that Mlinx, Starbeat, or Link could have done this, but they’re still suspects, and they might know something. I suppose Diesel could have done it, but he didn’t strike me as the type. Keep in mind, I’m probably wildly wrong about these initial judgments, if I know anything the real culprit or motive is unexpected. For all we know Cream isn’t as innocent as we previously believed.”

O’Neill nodded. “That’s enough for me, you know what you’re doing. You’re on investigation.”

“We should have a look at that camera blackout in detail first,” Renee said. “It’s the other part of this mystery.”

“That information will be in Engineering.”

“Let’s head there then,” Renee said. “I think we’ve gleaned all we can from here.” She opened the door and did a quick examination of the outside, finding no hairs, cloth, or anything else interesting at all. She closed the door behind them, finally allowing the body to leave her sight.

She let out a breath, looking around at the hallway in general. Twilight was the only one there. “Where’d the others go?”

“To sleep,” Twilight said. “We’ll take turns keeping watch.”

“Does Pinkie know any… You know.”

Twilight glanced to O’Neill. She whispered in Renee’s ear. “She doesn’t know who, but she knows you need to do this.” She leaned back. “You sure you’re okay, Rarity?”

“No,” Renee said. “And it’s Renee, right now. Tell Pinkie thanks.”

“I will.” The two parted ways. Renee and O’Neill went wordlessly to Engineering, where there were more than a few Tau’ri running around in a mild panic. Mauve was sleeping soundly next to a computer terminal, somehow tuning out all the commotion.

“Report!” O’Neil demanded.

“There was a virus!” one of the engineers said, furiously typing on a keyboard. “It was a Sombra virus. It’s been in our system for days!”

“What was it doing?”

“Trying to access the Asgard Core!”

Renee looked at O’Neill. “…Asgard Core?”

“Secondary computer system where the big secrets are kept,” O’Neill answered.

“Why would you need two computers? Why not just put the bigger secrets in the old one?”

O’Neill coughed. “That’s… Classified, actually. A non-classified answer is that the technology was gifted to us by one of our allies and that we’ve just not fully integrated the systems yet.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Will this classified information be important to the investigation?”

“Investigation?” an engineer asked.

“A pony was murdered,” O’Neill answered. “And no, I don’t think it will. And this is not the first time Sombra’s tried to breach an Asgard core…”

“So we have three options. The… killer was either working with Sombra, knew Sombra was going to act and took advantage of it, or just got lucky. Either way it means we no longer have to limit our suspects to people and ponies with technical expertise, since she was involved. …Could she be on the ship?”

“That’s possible, but unlikely,” an engineer said. “The virus was acting autonomously. It still is, actually. Programmed to make our lives annoying down here in engineering. It knows its not getting into the Asgard Core so basically it’s throwing a fit now. Sorry General, this is going to cause more than a few systems to be buggy.”

“Hyperdrive?” O’Neill asked.

“That’s been quarantined. Shouldn’t be anything dangerous. It clearly doesn’t want to destroy us, just be a pain.”

“Keep me posted. And not with a post-it note this time, got it?”

“Got it.”

O’Neill turned to Renee. “What now?”

“We have the doctors examine the body overnight while we get some sleep. I’ll question them in the morning. We all need some rest, and any guilty party will stew and get nervous. There’s nowhere to run, and performing more murders won’t help them at all. I believe we can afford to take a night.”

O’Neill called for the body to be taken out of the room and studied.

“Good. See you in the morning, General.”

“You too, Renee.”

~~~

Renee stood in front of a door, Twilight at her side.

“First suspect,” Twilight said.

“Yes,” Renee confirmed. “Diesel. He’s not high on my ‘guilty’ list but he’ll likely know more about Cream and what reasons people would have to… off her. You’re here to make sure nobody tries to attack me. Insurance.”

“Right,” Twilight said, gulping.

“Twilight… You can handle a knife. Don’t be nervous.”

“I’m just worried it’s one of the people we know… Or, really, anyone here… I’ve talked to them all, they all seemed like nice people. I know that’s not a good indicator anymore… Still.”

“I know Twilight. I know. It’s hard. But someone had to do it. Necks don’t get cut by nobody.”

Twilight shivered, looking away from Renee. Renee took in a breath and knocked on Diesel’s door. “Diesel?”

Diesel opened the door. His face was tear-stained and his eyes heavy. “Oh. …Questions?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Come on in then.” He backed up, climbing onto his bed, allowing the two mares more space to shuffle in. “So… What first?”

“Cream,” Rarity said, speaking the name with as little emotion as possible. “Tell me about her.”

Diesel shook his head. “She… was a good pony. Talented in the art of magic, brilliant in the cutting of circles, and had intelligence despite her lack of schooling. She was a quiet daydreamer with a lot of ideas and a penchant for shining bright. She-“

“Diesel, you don’t have to be afraid to tell me of her bad qualities as well.”

Diesel paused for a moment. “She… She wanted to be on top. She wasn’t exactly power-hungry, but she would do all she could to outshine everyone. It was almost like she observed ponies and determined what she could do to show them up. Everyone who didn’t praise her was a competitor. You… You don’t think she angered someone, do you?”

“Very possible,” Renee said. “Anyone on your team could be jealous of her success.”

“Including me.”

Renee nodded. “But we don’t need to go there just yet.”

“I did not feel jealous, nothing of the kind! I di-“

“Stop lying,” Renee said. “Everypony around a mare like that would be jealous in one way or another, even slightly, or subconsciously. Not to the point of murder, no, but to the point of resentment? Easily.”

Diesel looked at the ground, ashamed. “…Right. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m actually expecting everyone to lie to me a little bit.”

Diesel nodded slowly.

“Describe your relationship with Cream to me.”

Diesel took a breath. “Well, we worked together. That… That was about it.”

“Her competitive nature didn’t cause any problems at all?”

Diesel shrugged. “I guess I’m just used to it a this point. At first, yeah, things were rocky, and everypony butted heads, but once she was given a berth and the ability to shine everything just locked into place. It does seem a little unfair, now that I think about it…”

Renee adjusted her hat, contemplating what she’d just heard. “Give me a specific example of her desire to ‘show ponies up’.”

Diesel frowned. “W-well, a few years ago I was working on a better matter oscillator, and she came in every day seemingly to help me improve, but days after I released my oscillator she released hers which was just slightly better. And that was not the only time she got away with something like that…”

“Sounds like she was a manipulator.”

“Of sorts? I don’t know, all I know is that she was effective and pulled her weight, even if it was at the expense of the rest of us. You could ask Shockwave for her view on this as Captain. I can’t recall any moments off the top of my head where Cream challenged her, but… I don’t know.”

Renee nodded. “Moving on to more in-the-present questions, describe what happened last night after you left the dining hall?”

“I came up to my room. Before I went in I caught up with Shockwave, talked a bit about the mission. She was distant, as usual. Then I went to sleep. I was woken up by an infernal beeping a little later, and before I could get back to sleep you screamed.”

“Right. One more question. Who do you think did it?”

Diesel raised an eyebrow. “That demon. You know what his kind is capable of, and his room is the closest to hers.”

Renee nodded. “Both Mlinx and Starbeat are close to her. The rest of the nearby rooms were supposed to be filled by me and my friends.”

“…Right. Don’t think Starbeat did it, she just looks too innocent. …Do you need anything else?”

“Not at the moment. I may question you again later. Good day, Diesel.”

~~~

Anders folded his arms. “Before we get into this, I have to say something before you use your detective skills to put it in a bad light.”

Renee glanced at Twilight and back to Anders. “This about the knife collection?”

“Yes.” He took a box out of the small closet, unfolding it, revealing dozens of beautifully crafted knives. “When I went to bed last night after the murder, I checked my case. All my knives were there. This morning…” He opened the case, revealing several spots where knives were missing. “Someone’s stolen them.”

“You do realize this looks like you trying to hide evidence?”

“I know. That’s why I’m being upfront with it.” He sat down on the bed. “And if I really wanted to hide, I could rearrange the knives to make the chest look full and only ditch one of them.”

“The fact that you’ve thought of this means you’re clever enough to obfuscate an innocent response.”

Anders shrugged. “Take it as you will. Just being upfront. Someone’s trying to frame me, and they got into my room somehow. It’d have to be one of the unicorns or that Link guy.”

“Right…” Renee put her hoof to her chin. “To the actual questions now. How did you know Cream?”

Anders shook his head. “That mare was more than a little crazy. When I showed her how to use the controls to her room she seemed upset that I had to show her, and felt the need to demonstrate her absolute mastery of the system. She honestly looked a little silly, and she knew I thought this. I had to worm my way out of an awkward conversation. She avoided me after that.”

“I’ll mark that as ‘barely any contact’. Describe last night.”

“I came here after my shift, wondered for the millionth time why my room is in the guest quarters hall, and went to sleep. I didn’t notice anything until you screamed.”

“No beeping noise?”

“No. Why?”

“Just checking for consistency. Anything else?”

“Well as I said before I checked to make sure all my knives were here before I went to bed, and when I woke up some were missing. They are probably the ones that would fit the wound.”

“And you think one of the unicorns or Link did it?”

“It’d have to be, they had to get to my room and I know the camera feed was functional all night. Unless the others can turn invisible, or something. I don’t think Link did – he’s a good man, if a bit pushy. I can’t imagine why he would anyway. …Unless he thought she had some evil in her, or something. But if you find out she had an evil thing in her, you probably shouldn’t charge him.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Renee assured him.

~~~

“You know what I think?” Mlinx blurted. “I think this is bullshit!”

Twilight gasped. “Mlinx!”

“Don’t like the word? Tough break! That’s what happens when you question friends like they could be murderers!”

Renee took in a breath. “Mlinx, I have to talk to everyone.”

“Oh, you going to give Link the same treatment? Your little green hero in shining armor?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You’ll love to hear what I have to say about him.”

Renee blinked. “W-what?”

“I leave the dinner, right? After you finish telling your story, I head over to these rooms, but I run into Link first. I swear, I saw him talking to someone, but when I looked there was no one there. He claimed he wasn’t even talking, but that’s a lie. I figured maybe he spent twenty minutes in the bathroom or something, but that doesn’t make much sense when there’s a bathroom right here. He was doing something, something instead of going to his room like he told us.”

“…I take it you think he did it?”

“He’s got that time-stop sword thing. He could easily do it quickly, before she could do anything. He could break into any room and do anything he wanted and not leave a trace of himself!”

“Capability does not ma-“

“Oh look at that!” Mlinx pointed. “Defending him! I knew it. Great objectivity, Rarity.”

“Renee.”

“Whatever.” He folded his arms. “I was supposed to get away from all this fighting nonsense. Looks like it's actually everywhere.”

Renee pressed forward. “Describe your relationship with Cream.”

“Still? Fine! She openly insulted my race in the one conversation I had with her! There’s your motive!”

“…Describe last night.”

“I came right here and went to sleep – unlike Link – and then I was woken up by a beeping noise. Before I got back to sleep you screamed, had your little existential crisis, and forgot where your loyalties lie.”

“My loyalties lie with the truth.”

“I bet if you somehow discovered that Twilight over there was guilty you’d cover it up. That’s what you did with ‘Nova’ right? Didn’t she steal a ship from the Tau’ri, and after the whole invasion everyone conveniently decided to be quiet about it?”

Renee stamped her hoof. “That’s enough Mlinx!”

“I can’t agree more.”

~~~

“Captain Shockwave,” Renee began.

“That’s me,” Shockwave said with only a modicum of emotion in her tone.

“Tell me about Cream.”

“She was a good crew member who didn’t work well with other ponies. You’ve probably figured this out from Diesel.”

“Why do you think that?”

Shockwave shrugged. “Cream more or less replaced his position as my assistant. Proved herself to be more resourceful. I know he resents her for that.”

“That’s not what he said…”

Shockwave furrowed her brow. “…I don’t think he’s a killer, if that’s what you’re implying. Even if there was bad blood, they were still a team. My hypothesis is Anders. He is clearly a psycho trying very, very hard to seem like a well-adjusted man. Even if he turns out not to be, I wouldn’t trust him.”

Renee took this under advisement. “So, how was your relationship with Cream?”

“I was her Captain. I gave her the position of my second after she proved herself resourceful and useful enough to outweigh her lack of proper teamwork, which is an overrated skillset anyway.”

“Did she ever try to… compete with you in anything?”

“Definitely,” Shockwave admitted. “We quickly reached an understanding. That’s to say, I made her realize that I took credit for everything she did anyway being her Captain, and that making me look bad in front of the crew was a one way ticket to getting transferred. After we hammered this out, she gave me no trouble, focusing her efforts on the others, biding her time until she would be Captain.”

“…She was ambitious?”

“I believe so. She probably had some plan in place to depose me.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. I hear you have a pair of magitech boots?”

Shockwave pulled a heavily locked chest out of her closet. “Here they are, under lock and key. Haven’t worn them the entire time we’ve been on this voyage. I can pop it open, if you want.”

“Please do,” Renee asked.

After entering a complex code, Shockwave popped the top off, revealing a small screen in the lid of the box and two boots packed in tight foam. The boots were made of a strange clear fabric glowing with green circuitry. “See? Not stolen or anything.” She closed the box.

Renee nodded slowly. “Describe last night.”

“I was here all day. Talked to Diesel before heading to bed, went to sleep, then you screamed and woke me up. Simple.”

“Did you hear a loud beep?”

“No,” Shockwave said. “Though if there was one I might have just been far away.”

“That will be all then.”

~~~

Starbeat rubbed the metal band on her left hoof nervously. “So… Er… Hi!”

“Hi,” Renee said. “I’ve got some questions for you.”

“I, er, bet you do!”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “…You okay?”

“N-no. Not at all. Somepony’s died Rarity do you think I should be okay?”

“Renee,” Renee said.

“S-sorry.” She rubbed her band again.

“How do you know Cream?”

“There’s, uh, no way at all… I just…” she shivered. “I… She tried to f-flirt with me once and it made me extremely uncomfortable…”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “…Really?”

“Really. It was… Jarring. App-pparrently the ‘disorder’ just ‘t-turned her on’, or s-something.”

“Any other reactions with her?”

“N-no! I av-voided her after that! I’m not crazy!”

“Starbeat, calm down, okay?”

Starbeat gulped. “Right. R-right.”

“Describe last night to me.”

“Came here, went to my room, closed and locked the door, went to bed. Then you screamed and I poked my head out.”

Renee narrowed her eyes. “Starbeat, two other people heard your bracelet there go off.”

“O-oh. Yes.” She sighed. “Ok-kay I wasn’t actually asleep. I couldn’t sleep. I… I… Cream knocked on my door and I shut it in her face the moment she gave me the eyes, okay?” She whimpered, covering her head in her hooves.

Renee nodded very slowly. “…Who do you think did it?”

“I don’t know! Nobody seems like a killer! Maybe it was some sort of other party?”

“Very unlikely,” Renee said.

“Oh…”

~~~

“Link.”

“Renee.”

“You’re the first one to get that right.”

“I pay attention.”

“How did you know Cream?”

“Not at all. I was barely aware she existed before tonight. The only time I ever observed her doing anything was when she was, I believe, flirting with Starbeat. It was very unsolicited.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“Anything else?”

“She was reading a book the entire time I saw her in the mess hall, and that’s that.”

Renee nodded. “Right. Link, from the point when you left the mess hall, describe what happened last night.”

Link shrugged. “I went to my room, fell asleep, and woke to you screaming.”

“That’s a lie,” Renee said.

“What?”

“A witness places you away from the scene roughly twenty minutes after you left the dining hall.”

“Bathroom, didn’t think that was needed.”

“On a completely different deck separated from this hall?”

“It was a-“

“LINK!” Renee yelled, pointing a hoof at him. “You DO realize what happens if you keep lying, right? You DO realize what it means!?”

Link stood upright in his chair, a bit startled. “I’m not-“

“You are turning yourself into the number one suspect! Darling, please don’t do that!” She was trying her best not to make her watering eyes obvious.

Link fell silent. A new voice came into the room. “Link, Link, Link, you are stubborn about your secrets.” Link’s shadow shifted and a little imp appeared out of it. She took a seat on Link’s shoulder, waving at Twilight and Renee with her hair. “So, here’s the deal, I’m Midna, I’m a secret, and I live in Link’s shadow. What were we doing before we went to bed? Why, we were talking to the Ba’al prisoner stored away in the brig! You don’t know he exists because you’re not supposed to. You can confirm with O’Neill that we were supposed to be down there and were not doing anything murderous. But we also can’t tell you what we were talking to him about for your own safety. It has nothing to do with this case, of course.”

Renee and Twilight glanced at each other, surprised.

“…I’ll accept this,” Renee said eventually. “This doesn’t exonerate you, but… It sure makes you seem a lot less untrustworthy.”

Link folded his arms. “I…” he looked like he wanted to say something, but couldn’t. “…Just ask another question.”

“Did you hear a beeping last night?”

“No.”

“Yes,” Midna said. “I was lying awake, unable to sleep. It was a little hard to hear through the walls, but there it was.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Interesting… Who do you think did it?”

“Shockwave or Diesel,” Link said. “They have a personal connection with her. They should be the primary suspects.”

“Thank you. That’ll be all. And Link? I am sorry.”

“…It’s fine.”

Renee took off her hat and looked at him, shaking her head. “No, it’s not. I may have had to do it, but it wasn’t okay.”

Link sighed. “I understand.”

“That’s better.”

~~~

O’Neill looked at Twilight and Renee. “So, who do you think it is?”

“There’s no conclusion yet,” Renee said. “I’m almost certain Link is innocent, but the rest all have some form of motive, unusual response, or evidence. Shockwave and Diesel because they knew her before, Anders because of his mysterious knives, Mlinx because he was very defensive in getting me off his case, and Starbeat just acted guilty. She also lied to me.”

“You really think Mlinx would do this?”

Twilight shook her head. “I don’t think so. We can’t exactly exonerate him, but I think he’s just mad we’re considering him at all.”

“I think so too.” Renee looked at O’Neill. “Have you read Anders’ file?”

“Not a single charge against him besides that one time he got drunk,” O’Neill answered. “He wasn’t drunk last night,”

Renee nodded. “So, someone tried to frame him by messing with his knives, almost certainly. Mlinx could not have done that; he has no magic and never left his room for certain. That leaves Shockwave, Diesel, and Starbeat.”

“I find it hard to believe Starbeat did it…” Twilight said.

Renee shook her head. “I see her being startled by Cream at some point or other during the minute of blackout. I see a click happening with Cream again, and Cream being ‘into’ it enough to terrify Starbeat into lashing out with magic. She then uses her magic to toss Cream into her room, clean up the hall, and run back into her room. I just have no idea why she would wake up, or what would prompt the meeting…”

“Cream herself?” O’Neill suggested.

“Possibly.”

“Alternatively,” Twilight interjected, “Shockwave is actually tired and jealous of her subordinate, and possibly annoyed at her flirtatious tendencies. She also acted like she cared the least out of all the people we interviewed. And she has those boots that can probably do just about anything, easy…” she choked. “…Murder weapon.”

“Yes. The… murder weapon,” Renee said, going over the idea in her mouth. “The cut is a bit too clean for me to think Starbeat did it, but I’d also think Shockwave would have a more creative and clean spell in those boots…”

“What about Diesel?” O’Neill questioned.

“He was legitimately distraught, but I suppose he could be faking,” Renee said. “He certainly has the most motive out of anypony involved, being shown up by Cream. He specifically left out details involving that Cream replaced his position, and tried really hard to portray her in a positive light.”

“So we’ve reduced from six suspects to three,” O’Neill said. “That’s something, at least.”

“Indeed it is. Now, what we need to consider is that dent in the wall. One of them had to hit it with their hooves extremely hard. Since Cream didn’t struggle, it means they hit it themselves. Diesel’s hoof is too small to make the dent, but Shockwave and Starbeat can. Hitting it that hard would likely leave a bruise or a sore spot.”

“I didn’t see a sore spot on anypony,” Twilight said. “Shockwave could have been wearing her boots, though-“

Renee’s eyes suddenly widened. “No… No no no…”

“No what?”

Renee left the room quickly. Glancing to each other with confused expressions, Twilight and O’Neill followed. They decided to scramble after her, see where she was going. She galloped across the ship back to the guest rooms, which Pinkie happened to be guarding. She looked at Renee with a sad look.

This only made Renee feel worse. She pulled her hat as low as she dared. She knocked on one of the rooms.

Starbeat opened it. “Yes…?”

“Starbeat, your hoof band was on the right hoof yesterday.”

“…Y-yeah! I just, well, put it on another hoof today!”

“Can you take it off for me?”

Starbeat stopped trying to smile. She lit her horn, removing the band and placing it on a nearby shelf. She held out her hoof, showing the previously-covered mark. Tears were streaming down Starbeat’s face. “I… I… I didn’t mean to…”

Renee held Starbeat’s sore hoof, looking at it, eyes covered. “Starbeat… Give me an excuse. Tell me where you got this sore.”

“Rarity, stop it! I did it! I shouldn’t have been trying to protect myself!” She grabbed Renee’s head and made her look her right in the eyes. “Look at this! This is me! I’m sick and need to be locked away!”

Renee shook her head. “Starbeat…”

“I walked out of my room, okay? I felt compelled, driven! Knocked on her door, the thing started beeping, and I lashed out. I don’t know what I was thinking before or after; it all seemed like a dream! I ran back to my room and tried not to think about it, and then you screamed a little while later! That’s what happened!” she extended her hooves. “Take me away already!”

“…That’s a confession,” O’Neill said. “I’ll call security.”

Renee held up a hoof. “Not done yet. So, you took Anders’ knives?”

“What? His knives are missing?”

“…Someone took them to frame him.”

“I didn’t! I cast a spell on myself to force sleep after you started the investigation!”

“…I believe you,” Renee said. “Which means something weird is going on. Has the Beat ever compelled you to do something before a click before?”

“No, but it went beep, that means it was involved!”

Renee walked to the band, picking it up and looking at it. “There’s a button on the inside here.”

“Yeah? It’s a test button for the alarm, but it’s designed not to be able to go off while I’m wearing it…”

“Someone who could figure out how it functioned could make it go off,” Renee said. “Starbeat, is there a way to check this thing’s record for how many Beat surges it detected?”

Starbeat nodded slowly, wiping her face. She lifted it in her magic and twisted the band a bit to the side, hitting a button on the outside. A holographic display shot up. “As you can see, there were three surges yesterday-“ her jaw dropped.

“I only see two,” Renee said. “That last beep wasn’t really a surge. Someone wanted you to think it was.”

O’Neill folded his arms. “But how could she have been compelled to do what she did?”

“Nova knows a complex compulsion spell. An advanced spellcaster could know how to do it. And there just so happens to be a pair of boots on board that can probably do just that.”

Starbeat blinked. “I… I was conditioned?”

“I believe so.”

“WHAT KIND OF SICK FREAK-“

“Starbeat, calm down, okay? I have to question them first. Stay in your room.”

Starbeat nodded slowly, her face a visage of something much more hateful and vicious than a few moments ago. Renee, O’Neill, and Twilight left her behind.

Renee shot a look at Pinkie as she passed. “You made me think…”

Pinkie shrugged. “I don’t know, Renee, I just knew you were going to accuse her.”

“…Fair.” Renee arrived at Shockwave’s room and knocked. “Shockwave, is there, by chance, a way to look at the spell history of your boots?”

Shockwave sighed. “So, I’m a suspect now, am I? Yes, there is. It’s even got extensive data on magical levels, use, and charge. The last spell will have been cast last week at a quarter to six on a computer to duplicate the motherboard.” She pulled out the box, entered the combination, and turned on the built-in screen. She pressed ‘history’ and the most recent spell was…

…’Condition.’

Shockwave stared at that in disbelief. “…What? Who would…” She examined the logs more closely. “No, no I didn’t…”

Renee lifted one of the boots out of the box. “These are too small for your hooves.”

“They’re adjustabl-“ Shockwave blinked. “Oh. Diesel? I didn’t think he had it in him… Unless…”

“Unless what?”

Shockwave shook her head. “Nothing. Just go confront him with the evidence, it should be enough at this point.”

Renee pointed her hoof at Shockwave accusingly. “If you don’t tell me what, I can still be made to believe this is all an elaborate ruse on your part.”

“Fine. Don’t reveal this to my government though. Cream regularly broke interpersonal relations protocols, flirting in secret with many of the crewmembers. Myself included. I don’t think there was a pony on that ship who hadn’t been in a ‘relationship’ with Cream at some point or other. It is possible Diesel took her inevitable betrayal harder than most, if it happened. I’m not sure, she was good at keeping it mostly secret from me.”

Renee nodded. She turned to O’Neill. “I think we have our culprit.”

They stepped out into the hallway. Starbeat wasn’t in her room – she was beating on Diesel’s door. “OPEN UP!”

Diesel did. “You’re supposed to be-“

Starbeat threw him out of the room and into the hall. She marched toward him, eyes narrow, mouth twitching. “You… You…”

“She’s clearly the murderer!” Diesel called to Renee. “Stop her!”

Starbeat moved to kick Diesel again, but Twilight kept her back. “Starbeat, no. Okay?”

“But he-“

“We know.”

Diesel blinked. “Know what?”

Renee tossed the boot to the ground, landing right next to Diesel’s own hoof. “That.”

“…Are you seriously accusing me of-“

“You had a ‘relationship’ with Cream. She, being the pony she is, cut it off recently, probably stealing yet another one of your ideas in the process. It may even be related to this expedition we’re on. Maybe even took credit for finding that signal alone – she did, after all, claim that it was the signal she found when I talked to her earlier. You decided you had enough of her ‘reign of terror’ so you stole Shockwave’s boots while she was sleeping, used them to compel Starbeat to walk to Cream’s room, and I think you activated the beeping and used your own magic to cut Cream’s neck from a distance. I’m not sure how far Compel went, maybe you had Starbeat do that with her own magic without letting her realize.”

“You don’t-“

“You’re the only one who was woken up by the beep besides Mlinx, and his race has excellent hearing. Not to mention your room was further away from hers than Mlinx’s.”

Diesel narrowed his eyes. “Explain the camera blackout then.”

Renee narrowed her eyes. “Even with that inconsistency, we’ve got you made Diesel. You did it. You didn’t want the camera to be off. You wanted everyone to see Starbeat do it so there wouldn’t even be an investigation. I don’t know if the Sombra Virus screwed you over intentionally, or you just got unlucky. It honestly doesn’t matter. You realized the camera wasn’t working so you switched tactics, trying to blame Mlinx and taking Anders’ knives, so I could have evidence pointing to others. But you killed Cream, and unless you can provide me some reason to think Shockwave is framing you right now, you’re pinned.”

Diesel glared. “I want a lawyer.”

“Good enough for me!” O’Neill said. “Can I call security now?”

“Yes you can,” Renee said.

Shockwave glared at Diesel. “You’re going to try to take me down with you out of spite.”

“Of course I am. You let her run free. The way you turned a blind eye is going to be exposed.”

Shockwave glared at Renee with contempt. She turned tail, walked back to her room, and slammed the door.

Renee let out a long, stressed breath. “Okay… It’s done then.”

Starbeat looked at the ground. “Yes… It is… …I wanted to kill him, I really, really did. Am I… Not as innocent as I think I am?”

“There’s a potential for darkness in all of us,” Twilight said. “Even the best.”

Renee looked towards Mlinx’s room. He was poking his head out. Renee was sure he, too, was looking at her with contempt. His expression may have been hard to read, but sometimes you just knew.

Renee wasn’t happy that she’d figured it out.

~~~

Shockwave stared out the main window at what was producing the signal.

It was a pink star with a high concentration of magic that kept sucking more magic in, creating a strange fractal pattern that radiated radio signals into space. It had been burning for billions of years and would be for billions more.

Shockwave wordlessly left the bridge.

Renee, Pinkie, and Twilight stayed, staring at the pink fire.

“So…” Twilight said, not taking her eyes of the spectacle. “…This is what we came all this way for.”

“Not worth it,” Pinkie said. “It’s just a strange star.”

Renee adjusted her hat. “All of this just for a sight to see. …Had this journey been easier, this may have been a beautiful end. Now it just seems… pointless.”

Twilight turned to Renee. “You keeping the name?”

“I think so. Renee. Dimensional traveler. I originally thought I’d keep it to honor Cream, but… Well, she wasn’t that great. But she was a mare; a mare who wanted to read a story. A story that she never completed.” She pointed a hoof at herself. “I am Renee. I am an incomplete story.”

Pinkie smiled. “I think that’s a good reason for a name.”

“Better than most of you. Corona, Nova… Nothing poetic there at all.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Nova has something to do with Stars.”

“Of sorts.” Renee sighed. “This… This was our first real death wasn’t it? Right in front of us, that we were forced to confront.”

Twilight frowned. “I think I saw some on Ba’al’s ship, but… I was focused on Corona and human Pinkie.”

Pinkie coughed. “That was actually me.”

“…You do change places still? Where do you get the spell?”

Pinkie grinned. “A good magician never reveals her secrets!"

“So are you actually human Pinkie or pony Pinkie?”

“A mystery I will never reveal. Does it really matter anyway?”

“Not really, I suppose. Just feels… weird,” Twilight admitted. She sighed. “We’re avoiding talking about it, you know.”

Pinkie shrugged. “I’ve seen lots of things already. I… While I’m bothered it isn’t really going to affect me.”

Twilight frowned. “It’s bad, but not unbearable. I’ve been preparing myself for this moment. Flutterfree is handling it well, actually. Nova’s not.”

Renee looked forward, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I’m not either. Her eyes were looking at me Twilight. I… Like you, I knew this was going to happen eventually. We were going to see this. But I… I couldn’t prepare. She’ll be in my head forever.”

“Others will join her,” Pinkie said. “…Probably others that you know better.”

Renee nodded. She pulled her two friends into a hug. “Don’t you two go anywhere.”

“Never,” Twilight said.

“Not planning on it!” Pinkie echoed.

022 - Of Vampires, Insanity, and Rarispies

The arches deep within the AID base may not have been one-of-a-kind anymore – the Tau’ri, Binaries, and Equis Cosmic had invested in constructing their own – but there was something about these particular pointed spires surrounding a ring of stellar power that made them special. It was the first of their kind, and it would never lose that honor.

Corona preferred the way it sparked with purple electricity. The others didn’t do that, having managed to contain all their energy through connections in the floor. It made it far more impressive, not to mention intimidating. More than a few had thought the loose electricity was a safety hazard, but no matter what they did short of sticking something in the electricity, the shocks always went directly to the gate and not anyone looking to travel.

Even though it would be easy to keep the loose electricity under control, Director Storm never authorized the arches to be ‘upgraded’ by reason of ‘it’s just cool’. Corona agreed. Tempest didn’t, needless to say.

Sadly, she was not going through today. She was just here to watch as a military squad was sent to one of the Tau’ri’s offworld bases to provide ‘joint support’ in an effort to improve relations. Corona didn’t know the world they were going to, but it had to be simultaneously interesting and dangerous to require a military presence. So she was at least a little curious what would be on the other side.

The arches activated, sending electricity right into the gate. The gate swirled with blue light, dialing the custom nine-chevron command. The portal formed with the signature kawoosh, settling into a clear membrane within the gate. The scenery appeared to be that of an abandoned wild west town. A familiar face stood on the other side.

“Colonel Carter!” Corona waved.

“Agent Corona! Are you part of this outfit?”

Corona shook her head. “Sorry, these guys are coming, not me. I was just curious. I had no idea you were the one in charge of the base in… Wherever you are.”

“Esefem, one of the first worlds in the Directory. Surprised you don’t know about it. Have you read the Directory lately?”

As the soldiers filed through the portal, Corona rubbed the back of her head. “Er… No, not really.”

“You should read up on it. This world is much more complicated and bizarre than the Princess’ group first thought. Don’t have time to explain it myself though, we’ve got to head to the actual base. Your arches aren’t in the same location as the Mirror Portal, after all.”

“Right. I’ll look it up!”

Carter smiled, turning to the men “Okay men, there shouldn’t be any problems on the way to the base, it’s a short distance and we keep a decent perimeter around here, but be on your guard anyway…”

The arches closed, dropping the room into relative darkness. Corona walked to the elevator and rode back to the control center of AID. She went to the large table in the middle of the room that held a truly tremendous book. Corona was fondly reminded of the days the book had been smaller than a dictionary, with only a few sentences devoted to each world. Then Twilight had updated the Directory to allow insertion of other files, images, and alterations of the pages beyond scrawled markings. She thought this would let everything get more organized, but it only resulted in the information influx being a bit much. She was allegedly working closely with the ‘Cosmo’ Twilight to turn the Directory into a digital system, which Corona would be immensely thankful for when they succeeded.

But for now, it was a giant book.

She opened it to the first page. 000001, Equis Vitis, her world, the first recorded one. There were more than just paragraphs on this world, there were studies on important ponies, the nations beyond Equestria, and the history of its role in the multiverse. Corona was pretty sure the section devoted to Equis Vitis was larger than any of the others because all the humans who liked making large reports loved to examine places foreign to them, not to mention it had the ‘standard Equis’ section in it, telling any explorers what to expect from a normal pony world. The entry for her current world, 000002, Earth Vitis, was close to it in size with the ‘standard Earth’ section within. 000003, the Hub, was large as well, though nowhere near the pages upon pages devoted to those two behemoth worlds. 000004, Equis Doublespeak… 000005, Ardent… 000006… 000007… 000008… 000009, Esefem. Looking at some of the images inserted on the page, Corona was sure this was the right world.

There were a few notes from Twilight herself at the top, the coordinates, and some basic facts: safe, human/pony/other race mixture, high but not absurd magic, FTL allowed, no known esoteric limitations, and civilization…

…Civilizations uncertain? What? How hard was it to tell if there was a civilization in a place or not? There were clearly wild west buildings there, and the race notes said human/pony/other…

Twilight’s notes were brief. “Spent ten minutes here, was shot at by two sets of humans, red and blue clothing. Left quickly while being pursued. Last world visited by all six of us.”

But after that there were tons and tons of pages of information. Corona soon found herself neck-deep in information about a truly Bizarre world unlike any of the others encountered so far, one that, apparently, Twilight had discovered early on and never returned to. A place of eternal war, bizarre mixtures, and duplication…

Corona took out her private journal; the one with a direct link to Twilight’s. She took out a pen and wrote down a message. You should go check out. Esefem, number nine in the Directory. There’s a Tau’ri base there and the place is very bizarre. As far as I can tell, you’ve never gone back since you first visited. It’s just so… different. Read the documentation if you can’t go yourself or don’t want to, but the world raises a lot of fascinating questions!

She closed the book, glancing at her watch. She had to study for Sophomore finals today, no way she could visit the world herself. She knew she’d drop in as soon as summer vacation started, assuming Director Storm didn’t load her with work-

Wait. Right. Survival Training. She’d forgotten about that until now.

That was going to suck.

~~~

Twilight looked at the Mirror Portal, uncertain.

“Esefem?” Nova said, looking at the screen above the Portal. “…Where’s that?”

“The last place all six of us visited,” Twilight said. “Though, we didn’t know its name. Apparently the Tau’ri have found that out, or at least gave it one. I just… I always avoided reading about this place or going back.”

“Really?” Renee said. “I’ve seen you pore through that Directory over and over again! You never looked at this one again?”

“Only glanced over it,” Twilight admitted. “But Corona’s message made me realize what I was doing. Avoiding it. That world has nothing at all to do with Rainbow and Applejack deciding to leave. And it’s not like we stopped being friends. I had dinner at Applejack’s just a few days ago, she’s doing well.”

Nova frowned. “…I haven’t seen her much. Barely see anypony who’s not involved in the other worlds.”

“Trixie?” Renee asked.

“She basically lives in the Hub now, I see her all the time. But she’s involved. I haven’t been to see Rainbow Dash, Applejack, or Maud in forever.”

“Things change sometimes,” Flutterfree said. “It’s not really worse because of it. We’re all just living our lives. We can’t keep everypony really close forever. The important thing is that we’re all still friends.”

“And the Tree did call Rainbow Dash to Ardent a month ago,” Pinkie said.

Nova nodded. “Right. …So, Twilight, what is this place we’re going to?”

A childish grin of excitement appeared on Twilight’s face. “I don’t know, I still haven’t read the Directory’s entry. All I know is that there’s a Tau’ri base on the other side of this Mirror, observing it. They’ll be able to tell us what’s up, but we’ll also get to be surprised.”

Pinkie gasped. “Twilight that’s amazing! That sounds like something I’d try to do!”

“Maybe I’m just in the mood for a surprise today.”

Renee adjusted her hat. “Well, shall we?”

“Yes we shall,” Flutterfree said. She smirked and spread her wings, leaping through first. Twilight rolled her eyes and followed along with everypony else.

They came out the other side from a wooden plank propped up against a wall. The room they entered was wooden and old. The windows were boarded up, the ceiling was falling apart, and one of the walls had a hole in it big enough for a person. The room contained dozens of computers from other worlds and large military-issue crates from both Earths stacked near the edges. There were a few human soldiers around, alongside several ponies and a few otherworldly creatures, a bit more than Twilight would have expected.

A Rainbow Dash flew up to them, a smirk on her face. She wore a black baseball hat, a headset, bandages around her front hooves, and she carried a baseball bat between said hooves. These features quickly defined themselves in Twilight’s mind so she could recognize this particular Rainbow Dash as different from all others she encountered. “Ah, hello, I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle. Are you Rainbow Dash or do y-“

“Oh. My. Gosh. You’re the Charter!” She dropped her baseball bat and put her hooves to her face. “This is so awesome! Name’s Rainbat, since we couldn’t come up with anything better and the thestral Rainbow’s called Dashula. Welcome to Esefem!”

Twilight smiled. “I see my reputation precedes me.” She pointed at the headset. “Are you supposed to call anyone?”

“Oh, right, yeah, all incomers have to be reported and approved, but of course you will be.” She put a hoof to her headset. “Hey, Colonel? The Charter’s here. Figure you might wanna come have a look see yourself.”

Twilight nodded, looking out the hole in the wall while she waited, watching ponies, humans, and a handful of others getting along.

“I had no idea there were so many worlds working together here…” Renee said. “I don’t recognize many of these! Who’s that blue person over there without a face?”

Rainbat looked over Renee’s shoulder at a muscular blue and silver man with no face. “Oh, that’s just Pepsi Man. He’s a native, like me!”

Twilight nodded. “You’re this world’s version of Rainbow Dash. Got it.”

“One of them, anyway,” Rainbat said.

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “One of…?”

Nova glanced at Twilight. “Surprised yet?”

Twilight blinked. “Very. No world I’ve come across has had more than one Rainbow Dash…”

“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” Rainbat said. “You don’t know what Esefem’s all about?”

“No. We wanted to be surprised.”

Flutterfree raised her eyebrow. “You wanted to be surprised.”

“Yes, I did, but nopony objected.”

Rainbat laughed. “Oooooh boy I want to see the look on your faces when you figure some things out! Hah!”

“Unfortunately you won’t get to see them,” Colonel Carter said, entering the room. “You’re still on your watch shift.”

“Aw come on!”

“Rainbat, it is an order.”

Rainbat folded her hooves and kicked her bat into a wall.

Twilight extended her hoof to Colonel Carter. “Nice to meet you. You helped Corona build the arches, right?”

“I came in at the end with a big stargate,” Carter said, shaking the hoof. “But yeah, you could say I helped.”

“Don’t undersell yourself,” Renee insisted.

Carter shrugged. “If you say so. I hear you’ve all come here without knowing what this world is?”

“That’s right,” Twilight said. “I… Haven’t looked at the documentation closely since I wrote the original notes. It’s evidently a lot more than just red and blue humans fighting, isn’t it?”

Carter smirked. “Walk with me.” She set out through the hole in the wall, leading them into a wide open area surrounded by various run down buildings. The sun beat down on them with its intense heat, sand blew in from somewhere beyond the buildings, and a couple cacti dotted the landscape. Intermingled with this were military-issue tents, scientific equipment, and a few firepits. “The world is mostly a desert with a few different biomes here and there. This itself makes it unusual, on par with the endless forest, though nowhere near as uniform. At first glance, it seems to be nothing but mostly abandoned buildings of indeterminate age spread across the desert, or in the cases of certain other places, the mountains.”

“…Weird,” Nova commented. “It’s an endless plane universe then?”

Carter shook her head. “No, this is a planet. The Apollo visited a month or so ago and found that the world is actually a round planet, though due to reasons we don’t understand, from orbit it appears to have a lot more oceans than real-scale maps have, appearing more like a classic Earth. It seems that, when you land on the planet, the ‘land’ area expands exponentially, especially the deserts. This means we get day and night here, but ‘globe’ maps are impossible. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“I can imagine…” Twilight said, glancing around with newfound appreciation for the world. Already, from Carter’s description, it was pretty unique.

“The Apollo was able to travel the stars, finding that distances in space are really small. It still requires an FTL drive to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, but other stars aren’t even full light years away, just fractions of it. Planets and stars don’t have mass-size correlation of any kind, and every planet we’ve come across has the same ‘expanding area’ effect. Mapping from orbit is impossible, and mapping from the surface is difficult because it’s tremendous, and not arranged in a perfect sphere.”

“Like it’s rendering more data,” Twilight commented.

“What?” Flutterfree asked.

“Sometimes in video games or simulations, when you approach something it becomes more detailed. It’s like that, but much more literal.”

Carter raised an eyebrow. “That’s an apt analogy. But if the world was just a spatial anomaly, we’d only have a small science team here, not an entire base complete with aircraft and military vehicles.” She pointed at a green jeep with a gun mounted on it. “Most of the others are out on patrol.”

“Red and blue humans?”

“Yes. This world is largely defined by the unending fight between Red and Blu, two entities that are ‘companies’ as far as we can tell, or used to be at some point in the past.” She rubbed her temples, groaning slightly. “Right, the past… I’ll get to that in a minute. What’s important is that there are basically Red and Blu armies facing off against each other for essentially no reason. A few have realized this and are trying to avoid fighting; for example, Scouty over there.”

A human man in a yellow shirt looked up. “Did someone call my name here?”

“Yes. Scouty, this is Charter Twilight and her team.”

“Oh, so the big honcho then?” He said, sitting back and twirling his baseball bat. “Come to visit Crosstown have you?”

“Crosstown?” Nova asked.

“It’s the nickname for our base,” Carter explained. “Officially we are the Esefem Beachhead, but try as I might I can’t get people to refer to it as that.”

“Because that’s stupid,” Scouty said, tapping his headset. “Not to mention boring, lame, jargon-y, and did I mention boring?”

Carter shook her head. “Scouty here was once a Blu mercenary, but he met us and decided he’d rather help than keep fighting the war.”

“True pointlessness,” Scouty said, hands on his hips. “I don’t think anybody knows why we’re still blowing each other up.”

Renee put a hoof to her chin. “Scouty dear, why are you wearing the exact same thing Rainbat is?”

Scouty blinked. “Oh my god, your little brains are going to explode in about fifteen seconds.”

“What?”

Carter’s lips curved up into a bemused smile. “Twilight, you know how many universes have versions of you and your friends?”

Twilight nodded. “Yeah. It’s why we change our names or get new titles.”

“In this world, there are naturally hundreds of versions of the same individual.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Look over there,” Carter pointed. Twilight saw two identical men with identical hats and glasses holding identical sniper rifles, the only differentiating feature between them being a number 2 written on the sleeves of the closer one. “Both those men are Snipers, native to this world. Duplicates.”

“Duplicates?”

“Duplicates.”

Twilight cocked her head. “Is there cloning going on here?”

“In the case of the mercenaries for Red and Blu, sometimes,” Carter revealed. “There are only nine basic mercenary types to be found, though occasionally we see a few other classes mixed in with them. But as you have to know by now, there’s not just mercenaries in this world, even if that is all that seems to happen on any planet when you first look.”

“It extends to other planets…” Flutterfree shook her head. “What a cruel world…”

“What else exists?” Nova egged Carter on.

“Seemingly everything,” Carter said. “There are a large number of ponies around the world. Travel far enough and you will find Red and Blu battles fought entirely with pony versions of the mercenaries, or a mix of humans and ponies. And beyond that you sometimes find settlements where there isn’t fighting. Versions of Ponyville. Places filled with Rainbow Dashes and Fluttershys and others. Things we’ve never seen before either – there’s a rather prevalent ‘race’ that’s essentially just restaurant animatronics that seem to be designed for killing.”

“How though? How are there so many of everyone?” Twilight asked.

“That’s one of the reasons we’re here, to figure that out,” Carter said. “Nobody knows why that is. It’s not just a universe that’s being strange with how it displays space, it’s a universe that likes to duplicate, again and again, everyone it has, when no other universe does this at all.”

“But wait, there’s more!” Pinkie said.

“Much more,” Carter said, leading them elsewhere. “You see, look at these buildings. They look old right? Worn down. But almost every building looks old and worn down, and largely abandoned. Despite the large populations of mercenaries and warriors, there’s little evidence of new construction. Many of the buildings are identical in different places, and even in locations where war isn’t happening and variations are exceptionally… odd, they look largely the same. Which leads me to one of the biggest headaches about this world… the past.”

“Time shenanigans?” Nova asked, nervously.

“Maybe? It’s different than that. Every part of the world can trace their history back for recent memory – they remember plays the enemy made, they remember where their parents took them on Sunday, they remember who’s their friend and not. But when asked about their deep past, they start giving vague details. Childhood memories are generally generic and disinterested, and they mention places like ‘Paris’ or ‘France’ or other locations that don’t seem to actually exist. Nobody can remember who built any of the buildings or why, and those who are aware of the duplications feel as if the buildings don’t change unless you physically blow a hole in them. It’s as if the past doesn’t exist – people just pop into existence and feel like where they are is normal. Though when they are questioned about it, usually they agree it doesn’t make much sense.”

“This… is actually a little terrifying,” Flutterfree said. “Think about it. False memories? A past that doesn’t exist? Endless duplication?”

“Are they being dragged from other worlds somehow?” Twilight asked.

“No,” Carter said. “We know this because we’ve met a handful of people who were dragged from other worlds.”

“Did somebody ring?” A deep, bemused voice called. “I could have sworn somebody called.”

“Who…” Nova began.

“Me!” the voice yelled, its user revealing itself to be a version of Fluttershy by dropping from the sky and nearly giving Nova a heart attack. She wore red tinted glasses that matched the color of her hat, suit, and menacing eyes. Her teeth were sharp, her wings batlike, and her ears tipped with extra fur. Two guns, black and white, pointed out of the folds of her crimson suit.

Nova stared at her blankly. “Wh-wh-wha?”

“Oh my goodness the look on your face is just priceless. You are currently shitting yourself – metaphorically, you understand – from a mixture of so many different emotions. Should I be scared of the daunting vampiric pegasus? Does she want to eat me? How in the name of all that is holy would meek little Fluttershy have a version of herself with such outrageously good looks? What the actual hell-slash-Tartarus is wrong with her voice? Is that magic coming off of her or something much more sinister and disgusting? How many ponies has she eaten today? Can I be one of them? An-”

“Alushy,” Carter said, raising an eyebrow.

“All right fine, be the buzzkill.” She threw her mane back and outstretched her hoof. “Hello there, grand exploratory ponies, I am Alushy. I am a fudgemothering vampire trying to earn good-girl points from the Colonel there so I can get off the god-forsaken rock that makes no physical sense. I’m also not from here, but from a world with a lot of blood, destruction, and thousands of adorable ponies fighting each other over religion, undead magics, and Nazism. It was an absolute delight.”

Flutterfree walked up and shook Alushy’s hoof. “It’s nice to meet you. I go by Flutterfree.”

“Thank the inconsistent heavens above, you aren’t a pussy. Do you have any idea how many of us are pussies? Like, all of them. All of them. It’s a disgrace.”

“I… Tend to agree,” Flutterfree admitted. “Though you really shouldn’t talk about them like that.”

Alushy laughed. “Do I look like a pony who listens to words like ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’?”

“Nope,” Renee said, raising an eyebrow.

Alushy shrugged, turning to Carter. “Anyway, I believe you needed to use me to make a point? I’m all here, splayed out and ready for the scientific monologue.”

Carter nodded. “Alushy here is one of a handful of individuals we’ve met who are from other universes and were sucked here. That makes this the only universe that seems to have a natural interdimensional component.”

“Assuming it is natural,” Twilight noted. “A lot of this does appear… Artificial.”

“Universe builders? That’s a scary thought,” Flutterfree said.

“We don’t exactly know what creates universes. It’s clear that some have existed longer than others at this point and the discrepancy can’t be explained away by simple time dilation. Something has to make them, or at least dictate when they come into existence.”

“Ooh! Sounds like you’re trying to find God!” Alushy said. “Lovely idea, I’m sure that won’t backfire.”

Pinkie narrowed her eyes at Alushy. “I’m watchin’ you.”

“That’s a thing you Pinkies tend to do. I’m starting to think you all find my mane attractive or something.”

Twilight carried the conversation onward, ignoring Alushy. “So we have a universe that loves duplicates, has a unique spatial bending effect, has virtually no traceable history, and is dimensionally active? Anything else?”

“The Red and Blu armies know how to respawn,” a woman who looked exactly like Carter said, walking up to them.

Twilight glanced back and forth between them. “Wait, this universe has duplicates of you as well?!”

“No,” the original Carter said, “That’s just a Spy class of some kind.”

“Make that two!” another Carter said, coming out from behind a box.

“Fudge this, I’m out,” Alushy said. “Not playing the triple-decker guess-who challenge. Here’s a hint for you five – pick door number three.”

“…What does that mean?” Nova asked.

“BR-549,” Alushy answered, turning a corner. They could hear her cackling to herself as she walked away.

Twilight had too many questions. Respawn? Spy class? What?

Renee helped her. “Oh, I see. That’s why they thought I was a spy. I take it that the Raritys here are ‘Spies’ as it were?”

The two fake Carters’ bodies shifted with a strange faint orange smoke, disappearing into two very similar ponies – Rarities in pale yellow suits, each one with a slightly menacing smirk on their faces. “I’d guess the ‘main’ Rarity would have to have a brain, hrm ma soeur?”

The other smirked. “It would seem so. Dear Renee, the Rarity of Equis Vitis, we are the Rarispy Sisters.”

“Identical in every last way.” They gracefully brushed hooves, a gesture Renee hadn’t seen before but found much more elegant than the hoofbump everypony else was so fond of.

Renee pulled her hat back a bit. “Absolutely charmed. Though calling me the ‘main’ doesn’t give the others enough credit.”

A Rarispy shrugged. “You can try to play the humble card if you want, but remember, we may be part Spy, but we are also part you.”

“We know how you think of yourself,” the other added.

“A-hem?” Twilight blurted. “The ‘respawn’. What is it?”

Carter looked at her watch. “We have time for a demonstration. If you don’t mind substantial amount of blood.”

Renee tensed slightly. “We… should be fine.”

“Shall we ring Uni?” a Rarispy asked Carter.

Carter nodded. “Go ahead. She’ll know where to go.”

“Uni?” Nova asked as the Rarispies ran off, transforming into different ponies.

“A Twilight. She joined us as our magic expert. Shouldn’t be long…”

A couple of seconds later, a Twilight Sparkle appeared in front of them – a unicorn. “Ack! Sorry Colonel! I was staring off into-“

Carter shook her head. “Uni, you’re not in trouble, I just needed you for something. Have you met Charter Twilight?”

Uni gasped. “Why didn’t anyone tell me she was here?”

“We’ve only been here a few minutes, maybe?” Flutterfree suggested.

“Oh. Right. What can I do for you all?”

Carter leaned in. “Do you know where there’s a Red and Blu conflict happening right now?”

“Of course I do! There’s three I’m sure haven’t died down yet, and sixteen others that might still be up!”

“Have enough strength to teleport us all so we can watch?”

“Sure!” Uni said, rubbing her hooves together. Unlike Twilight, she was still a unicorn, so she had to expend a significant amount of time and energy initiating the teleport, but it wasn’t long enough for anybody to get impatient. The six ponies and Carter were teleported on top of a rusting water tower overlooking another set of buildings that were similar to the ones they had just left. The main difference was that gunfire was everywhere. They all looked down and had an easy vantage point of a set of Red mercenaries and a set of Blu mercenaries shooting at each other from across a large street. Rocket launchers, sniper rifles, flamethrowers, and other weapons filled the air with their noise.

When they were here last, around two years ago at this point, they were a bit too caught up in the danger they were in to really pay attention to the fight. Now, however, the ponies were able to watch from a relatively safe location, and they had the opportunity to see what was really happening.

Death.

One moment a bullet would fly, the next – blood. Bodies fell to the ground on both sides. Still, though, more and more mercenaries flooded out of the respective bases, ready with new weapons, hats, and copies of themselves.

Occasionally a mercenary in a white coat would come out with a special gun and heal his team, resurrecting some of them, but eventually he would fall as well.

Nova had to look away. Uni sighed. “Yeah… It’s horrible.”

“How can they keep sending people in?” Twilight asked, aghast. “They just keep falling like… like flies! Why do they keep charging? How are there this many?”

“There aren’t,” Carter said. “Look at that Scout there on the Red side. He’s following the same path the last Scout who came out did, trying to distract the Blu forces on that side.”

Flutterfree eyes widened. “It’s the same Scout?”

“And that’s what respawn is. Any mercenary involved in the conflict between Red and Blue – standard or not – will appear after ‘death’ after a short time. They seem to think this is because of cloning, but it’s just not the case. That explains some of the duplicates, not the coming back to life over and over again. We’re trying to figure out how they do it, but progress is slow.” She leaned back on the water tower. “It doesn’t help that once a mercenary leaves the Red and Blu fight, they stop respawning. And that’s why we need the large military presence at the Crosstown. Protection from those who have absolutely no reason to fear death, and think any incursion that isn’t them has to be the enemy.”

Renee watched the carnage with less horror on her face and more morbid curiosity. “This… This world is horrid in ways I can’t even begin to put into words.”

“It’s also curious and fascinating,” Uni said. “I’m from here and I know it’s weird. Once you get out of the constant battles, things range from wholesome quiet places to complete and utter random nonsense. …Like Pepsi Man. Nobody knows what’s up with him.”

“I can see why Corona said I should check this place out…” Twilight said. “I think we’re going to stay for a while, Carter, see what we can do.”

“No problem here. Most of my people would love to talk to the great Charter, so prepare to be swarmed.”

“Oh!” Uni said, blushing. “Am I swarming you? I’m sorry-“

“No, you are-“

A bullet flew past her ear, cutting off her sentence.

“Crap, a Sniper sees us,” Carter blurted.

Nova lit her horn and teleported back to their base. “There you go.”

“…That was a fast teleport…” Uni said, jaw hanging.

“I could give you some tips, but I doubt they’ll be as in-depth or as technical as you’d like.”

“I would love some tips!”

Twilight chuckled. “I think we’re going to like it while we’re here.”

They could hear Alushy whooping from somewhere in the distance. “Yeah! More fools to school!”

~~~

Nova blinked. “So, it’s not weird for you two?”

Rainbat and Scouty glanced at each other. “Not really,” Rainbat said. “We just do the same jobs. Must be weirder sharing a face, frankly.”

“I dunno how those Rarispies do it,” Scouty shivered. “Or the Snipers. Seeing my own face gives me the heeby-jeebies. Oh, and gettin’ to this place? Had to cave my own face in a couple times. That’s a traumatic experience you don’t recover from. I’m sure you’ve all probably had that a million times over though, bein’ the explorers you are.”

Flutterfree smiled sheepishly. “We’ve… only actually seen death up close a few times. We usually resolve things without lethal force.”

Nova nodded. “I don’t think any of us have actually killed anypony.”

“Corona has. During the invasion of Ardent,” Flutterfree shook her head. “It didn’t bother her as much as I thought it would…”

Rainbat nudged Scouty. “Told ya’ being nonlethal was cool.”

“Yeah yeah, you can shut your trap, bird-brain,” Scouty muttered, twirling his bat around in a circle. “Maybe you can get away with that in other worlds, but not here. Here it’s just death death and more death, and once you’ve died you get to die again. Let me tell you, dying, not a fun experience. Gets to your head after a while.”

“I can imagine,” Nova admitted.

“Course, now I can die and stay dead, so… It’s an improvement, yeah, but nothin’ good comes without pain.”

Rainbat nodded. “Same. I didn’t have to bash my own skull in though. Merely… Lots of his skulls.”

“Part of me wonders if you actually did bash my skull in back in the day…”

“You’re way too young to be using ‘back in the day’ in casual conversation.”

“And you’re too much of a… a… somethin’ to use ‘casual conversation’ in… casual conversation.” Scouty put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “My god, that was stupid.”

Alushy dropped from the ceiling, hanging from her tail like a bat. “But Scouty, that’s what you do best!”

“Holy corn salad! Alushy! I told you to stop doin’ that!”

“And I want you to keep telling me that! It feels gooood when you do.”

“Ew,” Rainbat gagged.

“Anyway, what else are you losers talking about? Me?”

“Bashing skulls in,” Nova deadpanned.

“And with that you have my undivided attention.” Alushy dropped to the floor. “What kind of skulls? And how many? Oh please tell me hundreds…”

Scouty raised an eyebrow. “You already know about the skulls.”

“But I- oh you mean your skulls. But that’s nothing special, skulls are everywhere here. It’s like a kid in a candy store, too easy, too sickening. I’m talking to these two.”

“Never killed anypony,” Nova said, keeping her expression and tone deadpan.

“You do not like me do you?”

“No.”

Alushy laughed. “Nice. Could always use someone who’s technically on my side that I can push into a fight. Just a few buttons pressed here and there and mmm you’d be at my throat. It’d be interesting to say the least. Rawr.”

“I have more self control than tha-“

Flutterfree grabbed her shoulder. “Ah, Nova? I could probably do that if I wanted. Don’t give her more of a reason to, okay?”

Alushy whistled. “Oh yes, you’ve even got an overly protective guardian with you. This could work nicely.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “You know we’re not staying here that long, right?”

“I’m not stuck here permanently either. I will get out eventually, and I will haunt you forever. Ever. Ever. Ever.”

Rainbat folded her arms. “Ain’t no way the Colonel’s giving you a device.”

“Sounds good to me!” Alushy laughed.

“But… I just…”

“You used a double negative,” Flutterfree deadpanned.

“Oh. Dammit Alushy!”

Alushy shrugged. “Let’s see, vampire, unholy, killed probably millions of people, probably only half of whom deserved it, two thirds if I’m being generous… Yeah I think I’m already well and truly damned. Thanks for the sentiment though!”

“Your world must have been violent,” Flutterfree said.

“You have no idea, clearly. Even this place is less bloody than where I’m from. Wait until you see me get shot, the blood will gush like a pony sized pimple.”

“Ew!” Rainbat groaned.

“Would you rather I used a euphemism? I can use a euphemism. It’ll be a glorious euphemism!”

“EWWWWWW.”

“And this, ladies, is how you wage psychological warfare. Didn’t even need to come up with one.”

“What else was your world like?” Fluters asked.

“It was an Earth, except it was ponies. Undead were a serious problem, and I was the biggest badass of a vampire to ever roam the earth. I had a bit of a soft spot for ponykind though, defended them from undead threats. It made killing a lot more fun when other ponies begged you to do it. There was a lot of blood involved, a lot of death, a lot of brutally losing my own limbs, and a lot of delicious feasts. There was one thing though…”

“What?”

“There was no swearing. I went my entire, centuries long life – or unlife or whatever – without knowing what swears were! I’d find strange things like ‘heck’ or ‘darn’ or ‘crud’ to say whenever I could, but those just don’t get the job done, you know? And when I came here I realized I was speaking through a filter all this time.” She pointed at Nova. “You know what I’m talking about. It feels damn good, doesn’t it?”

“…Sometimes,” Nova admitted.

“Now, I have a question for you powerful, great explorers of the multiverse. I’ve found all the common swears I replaced, all of them, except one. I want to know, what the actual hell am I trying to say when I scream ‘fudge’ to the heavens?”

Nova glanced at Flutterfree. “No idea. You?”

“…The S word?” Flutterfree suggested.

“Already know shit,” Alushy said. This prompted Rainbat and Scouty to laugh. “Oh right, laugh it up, apparently being knowledgeable in the field of fecal matter is worthy of mockery.”

“Hey, don’t you pretend for a moment you wouldn’t laugh if one of us said that,” Scouty retorted.

“I’m really good at pretending. And lying.”

Scouty threw his hands in the air. “You’re impossible.”

“Good! If I wasn’t I’d be concerned I wasn’t projecting the right image. Would consider changing hair products, even. Go from ‘pig’s blood’ to ‘blood of your enemies’.”

“It is so hard to tell when you’re joking,” Nova muttered.

“I could make you a flow chart.”

Nova facehooved.

The two Scouts got a call in their headsets. Rainbat groaned. “Looks like we got a shift on patrol.”

“Dunno why we put up with this…” Scouty muttered.

Flutterfree smiled. “It’s probably because you like it here, it’s your home, even if it is crazy.”

Scouty shrugged, dropping his hand and walking away, Rainbat flapping along behind him.

Alushy grinned, turning to the two of them. “Hey, want to see something cool?”

Nova blinked. “Er…”

“Sure,” Flutterfree said. “What is it?”

“We’ve got a cuddly bear down in the basement,” Alushy said, smiling. “I think you’d like to meet him!”

Nova raised a hoof. “When you say ‘cuddly’ do you by chance mean ‘vicious murder machine’?”

“Known me for only an hour and you’re already catching on. Oh yes.”

“You avoided the question.”

“The answer is in the basement!”

Flutterfree smiled warmly. “Let’s just go, okay?”

Alushy led them to another part of the Crosstown compound, bringing them to a set of black cellar doors. There was no lock, so it was easy for Alushy to pull the doors back. “Ladies first.”

“We’re all ladies,” Nova pointed out.

“But I sound like a man…”

“Yeah, what is that?” Flutterfree asked. “Why that voice?”

“One of the mysteries of existence. No plans on changing it, just sounds too awesome. Now move it, the bear awaits!”

Flutterfree and Nova descended the cellar stairs, half expecting Alushy to lock them in. She didn’t, she simply filed in after them. The cellar was dark, dusty, and full of barrels marked with MANN CO logos.

“I don’t see a bear,” Nova commented.

Alushy coughed. “Oh, he’s in here all right. Just give it a moment.”

Flutterfree took a step forward, swiveling her ears around, listening carefully. “Hello? Mister bear? I’m Flutterfree. Where are you?”

A voice returned her comment, echoing from all around them. “I… Am here…”

“Where?” Flutterfree asked. “It’s okay…”

There was a clank of metal, a groan – and then it jumped in front of their faces. Teeth, red eyes, metal spikes, black ‘skin’, mechanical roar. Nova screamed, lighting her horn with a reactionary laser spell. Flutterfree brushed her wing across Nova’s face to interrupt the spell. “That wasn’t very nice, mister bear.”

The large robotic bear leaned back, sitting down. He looked like a mess – both his chest and his mouth were filled with dozens of razor sharp teeth. His black ‘skin’ was just outer casing that had many holes, revealing a metallic endoskeleton inside. The ‘bear’ was a machine that maybe have looked like a bear once, but was now a razor-sharp killing machine. It stared at Flutterfree. “Your heart races.”

“Of course! You jumped out of nowhere and screamed!” Flutterfree said. “What do you expect?”

“Nothing less.” The bear walked away, back into the shadows.

Nova glared at Alushy. “What was that all about?”

“Meet Nightmare, our resident animatronic nutcase,” Alushy answered. “He likes to scare people. He also doesn’t like being shot at. So he lives down here for the most part. Chill dude, really, bit of a macabre streak though.”

“Look who’s talking…” Nova muttered, still breathing hard.

“Oho! Wow he got you good.”

“I almost zapped him!”

“Probably wouldn’t do much. I’m fairly certain he’s a fudging undead robot. I’m no engineer but there’s no way machinery that worn still works.”

Flutterfree sighed. “Usually I’d tell everyone ‘that wasn’t nice’ at this point, but I just don’t see the point with you.”

Alushy clapped her hooves. “As it should be!”

“Let’s just get out of this cellar…” Nova muttered.

~~~

Renee looked behind her at a room of seemingly ordinary individuals. She cleared her throat. “Rainbow Dash with a limp, blond man with a mustache.”

The two individuals who were called out looked at each other, shrugged, and transformed back into the Rarispies. “How could you tell?”

“Lack of a gun on the soldier, too sly of a look on the pony. Rainbow Dash has never ever pulled off stylishly cunning.”

One of them raised her eyebrow. “How can you be so sure that particular Rainbow Dash couldn’t?”

“Gamble,” Renee admitted. “Paid off though, didn’t it?”

“Ah, a risk taker. Good,” the other said.

“I think I know how to get her this time…” the first mused.

Renee facehooved. “Please stop with the hiding games. Why not be yourselves?”

“Dear, this is us. We live by hiding, by sneaking, by pretending.”

“To all except each other,” the other said, slinging her counterpart into a playful hug. “We are les soeurs. Sisters.”

“What is your story?”

“Ah, a most interesting tale…” the first one said, smirking. “You always tell it the best, you should do it.”

The second rolled her eyes. “It’s always the exact same. So, no doubt you have seen the carnage of a Red and Blu battle in the heat of the situation?”

Renee nodded. “It was… brutal. But at the same time, fascinating to see how people with no fear of death act.”

“It just so happened that our defining moment was during one of those battles – we were in an all pony scenario, and hadn’t discovered the other scenarios or anything apart from the battles yet. We were both convinced we were clones of some original Spy from France, fighting for a large sum of money to be given at the end of the conflict. Of course, as always, there is no money, there may not be any conflict, and the few people that qualify as ‘superiors’ for the colored armies mean only slightly less than nothing.

“Regardless, there we were, the two of us. We had both decided to take a risky move – disguise ourselves as the Spy of the opposite team. This had worked beautifully for both of us before, but we had never come across a Spy trying the same thing. Rarely do Spies miss their targets, but there are occasional slip-ups in the assassination attempts. We faced each other and swung wildly with reaction – gouging out each other’s stomachs at the same time, but not scoring a complete kill. We were down, bleeding out, next to each other with nopony else around.”

“That’s where this thing called ‘bonding’ happened,” the other said.

The storyteller smirked. “That it did. We both realized we were tired of fighting, but we knew the fight wouldn’t end. We got to know each other, talked a bit about what we were fighting for, but agreed we couldn’t stop. At first, anyway. We respawned and leaped back into the action – but ran into each other again in much the same manner. We couldn’t do it – couldn’t kill. And this time, there were witnesses. So we ran. We fled the battle, resolving never to return.

“Of course then we had to deal with realizing the world wasn’t what we thought it was, but that’s a whole other story. Needless to say we wandered around, keeping our heads down, infiltrating the wars on the same side when we needed to. We eventually ended up here, and frankly it’s just magnifique, no more fear. Any of those idiot armies who attack get beaten back easily at this point. We provide assistance, they provide us with sanctuary.”

Renee smiled. “That’s a great story. I’m happy for you two – really, I am.”

The two Rarispies performed the graceful hoof-brush again.

“I do have a question though. Why do you stay here? Why not go to a more peaceful world?”

They both smirked. “Why, Renee, we’re not just a Rarity. We’re also a Spy. Most other worlds would have… issues with the naturally deceptive and manipulative type. Not to mention we are mercenaries. Killers. Very effective ones.”

“Ah… Yes. Sometimes I forget what this world is… even after just hearing about it.”

“We take some pride in our completely off-the-wall world. I’m quite curious to see what these Tau’ri uncover about the reasons behind this mess.”

“I do have someone I could ask…” Renee put a hoof to her chin.

“Who?”

Renee blinked. “Well… Are you aware of the ‘sight’ some Pinkies seem to have?”

“Very,” the other one groaned. “They’re such a pain.”

The first raised an eyebrow. “You going to try to trick yours into revealing something? Bit of a pain, that.”

Renee smiled. “Little different than that with us, but I’ll see what I can find out.” Her ears perked up. “…Do I hear soda fizzing?”

At this remark, the Rarispies ducked for cover.

“…What?”

The door to the room they were in was kicked down, revealing the towering, muscular Pepsi Man, Pinkie riding his back. “PEPSI MAAAAAAN!” Pinkie sung.

Pepsi Man pointed at Renee, and suddenly there was a can of Pepsi in her hoof. Pepsi man saluted her, and ran for the doorway, tripping on the door he had just bashed in. He hit the ground, tossing Pinkie to his side. The party pony laughed harder than she had in some time.

Renee glanced at the can in her hoof. “…What?”

The Rarispies came back out. “Oh good, nothing exploded. Things tend to explode when he’s around.”

Renee glanced at Pepsi Man as he slowly stood up, rubbing his head. “…What are you?”

He shrugged, summoning a can and tossing it to Pinkie. She popped the tab and drank it down. “I prefer Coke, but still good!” His fist met her hoof in a celebration.

Renee looked at the Rarispies.

“Nobody knows. He’s got super speed, strength, and an ability to summon unlimited amounts of Pepsi. He’s also a bit clumsy. That’s all we know.”

The other shrugged. “He’s nice, helpful, and defends the Crosstown with everyone else.”

Renee blinked. She decided she might as well see what the drink was like. She popped the tab – and the soda sprayed in the face of all three Rarities. Renee sighed, wringing out her hat. It tasted fine, but the flavor wasn’t worth a face full of sugar.

Pinkie giggled.

“You were waiting for that,” Renee commented.

“Yes! I was! The looks on your faces were great!”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Hey, got a question for you.“

“Eh, I’m in a good mood today.” She reclined against Pepsi Man. “So, what secrets of the universe bother you today?”

Renee frowned. “…Why? Why are they fighting?”

“Couple reasons,” Pinkie said. “There were two silly, silly men who didn’t know how to share worthless land, hired nine mercenaries, started a clone war and went to the absolute maximum with it. Thus, the eternal war began.…In a different world.”

Renee blinked. “How’d it start here?”

Pinkie shrugged. “No idea. I can guess – maybe this universe dragged the elements from another universe? Maybe it just knew? Maybe somebody with a sick mind did this?” She shrugged. “Possibly a mixture of all the above. I just dunno. I also don’t think we’re supposed to find out.”

The Rarispies glanced from Pinkie to Rarity. “I have never heard one of your kind talk that openly before,” one pointed out.

Pinkie shrugged. “Hey, as the Pinkie leading the charge into everything, I get to be a little different. By the way, you two are adorable. Never take each other for granted, mmk?”

“Never,” the other said, smiling.

Pinkie winked. “Good on you then!” she leaped back onto Pepsi Man. “Let’s sneak up on Alushy! Go!” Pepsi Man ran out of the building, into the distance.

A Rarispy glanced at her sister. “That will end in tears.”

“Can Pepsi Man even cry?” the other wondered.

“We shall find out soon.”

Renee shook her head. “This place is bizarre.”

~~~

Twilight walked with Uni into her lab. Twilight grinned at the computers, the corkboards covered in papers and string, the magical crystals set into nice organized patterns, the notebooks filled with scribbles… it was inspiring to see.

Uni smiled. “I see you like it.”

“Like it? I love it! Reminds me what my lab looks like when Spike’s busy, actually.”

“…Spike? – Oh! The little dragon.”

Twilight’s smile vanished. “Oh… You never had a Spike?”

Uni shook her head. “Nope.”

“Well, what was your life like then?”

“My past? …Very vague, and probably not real. I liked books, books, books, and lived in a library. Then I really did exist, and found a library to live in. I never felt the need to take the role of Sniper like the world wanted me too. I pawned off my gun to a Fluttershy. She’s actually here, now. Brought another Twilight Sniper in. We call them Twiper and Snipershy. Good friends.”

“Must be weird, knowing your early memories are fake.”

“It is, but not really?” Uni said. “I mean, it’s scary sometimes, but it means I can be my own person without being defined by childhood experiences. I turned down what it tried to give me, became my own thing. I lived in one of the peaceful pony settlements for the longest time. Then there were robot versions of the mercenaries that put that little dream in the dirt…” her emotions caught up with what she was saying, tearing her smile down. “…I had some good friends there.”

“Did any of them survive?”

“I don’t know. The world’s a bit too large to go hunting for them now… I just have to hope some of them made it.” She forced a smile. “But that’s in the far past. I worked as a ‘freelance magitechnician’ after that for whoever wanted me. Either team, any third party. Never enjoyed it, but I vowed never to settle down again. Until I came here – a sort of in-between option.”

Twilight smiled. “It would be fitting if a pony who didn’t accept what the world gave her would be the one to figure out why it wanted to give her a role in the first place.”

“Something I’ve been working on constantly for months. It’s a big, huge, tremendous mystery. We still have no idea. We brought Starbeat in – you know her – and she told us that the Beat was high here, but not acting unusually. She did suspect that at the moment a new person is ‘created’ there might be a spike in Beat activity similar to the click, but we’ve never seen anyone come into existence. It’s just like they’re there. Respawn has no surge in the Beat, and the events we like to call ‘complete randomness’ are the only ones that do.”

“Complete randomness?”

“There are pockets that don’t follow rules,” Uni said. “A pony head grows to the size of a moon and demands that everyone worship it, but they defeat it with cheese, farts, and sometimes other unseemly actions. Starbeat left behind a notebook full of notes on how the Beat behaved in those situations – apparently a lot more complicated than her clicks, stronger at times, but less common and often more subtle. It… confused me, but she assured me it had nothing to do with the rest of the world’s weirdness.”

“Just another thing tacked on…” Twilight mused. “What if all the oddness has separate reasons behind it?”

“Definitely,” Uni said. “My theories are that the spatial distortion is just a natural part of this universe’s physics, the respawn is something the Red and Blu corporations do themselves somehow, and… Well I don’t have anything concrete for the false past and duplicates. Pretty sure they’re related though.”

Twilight flipped through a notebook. “Did you think it looked almost designed?”

“Yeah, I did think that. But come on, it couldn’t be possible to craft an entire universe, right? You’ve never seen anything that comes even close to that kind of power, have you?”

Twilight shook her head. “Discord and the Ascended are at the top of the list right now. I’m not sure on a power rating for the Stars or the ‘Goddess’, but I can tell they don’t have anywhere near the ability to mess with a whole universe. If all the Stars worked together, maybe.” She looked up from the notebook. “…They used to have a society.”

“Hrm?”

“The Stars used to have a multiversal society. It… Well they stopped being a society, not exactly sure what happened. But they told Starlight to beware the Starcross. If there is something that can face a society of Stars…” she bit her lip.

“So… What, this ‘Starcross’ might be responsible for this? Why?”

“I don’t know. Why would you make a universe like this?”

Uni frowned. “You’re evil, you have power, and you’re bored, so you want to watch a game?”

“I…” Twilight pondered this. “Actually, we met a cube once that did nothing but play games. Didn’t have the capability to do this, but the idea was similar. Of course, you’re not just mindless pawn constructs.”

“I sure hope not,” Uni said, checking a computer screen. “You know, if this universe was designed, I think it failed to do what it was supposed to do. Became something… unintended.”

“You might be onto something there.”

“Maybe… But I need to find a way to quantify everything, and that’s not working. So I keep working with everyone here, and we try to uncover the powers behind these secrets. Mostly respawn. That would be… so useful.”

“It’d save so many lives. Change society forever.”

Uni nodded. “Here’s to hoping we figure it out!”

“Yeah! I-“

An alarm started blaring.

Twilight looked around. “…Should we be worried?”

Uni shook her head. “That’s the perimeter alarm. Means we’re engaging an enemy at the edge of Crosstown. Probably a team of mercenaries. They’ll be turned away quickly.”

The alarm started blaring louder.

Uni’s ears folded back onto her head. “Now we worry. Something’s broken the perimeter.”

“…That was fast.”

“Very fast,” Uni said.

Twilight teleported them to the command building. Carter was on a headset, yelling into it. “What’s happening out there!? Come on!”

They could hear a voice coming through the speaker – a man, choking on his own blood. “Ponies… Not mercenaries… Crazy… Sorry, sir…”

The line went silent.

Carter slammed the headset into the ground. She grabbed a microphone. “Everyone, we’ve got incoming! Prepare to engage an enemy – non-mercenary ponies of unknown potential! High threat assessment! Defend this base!”

Twilight flared her wings and lit her horn. “I’m ready.”

Carter readied her Zat gun. “I doubt they’ll make it here, or even want us, but we’ll be ready for them.” She pointed to some men in the room. “Guard the exits.”

“I’m going out,” Twilight said.

“Don’t, we need you alive more than anypony else,” Carter said – though it sounded like an order. “Use your magic from here, like the sniper class other Twilights find themselves in so often. That’s what I’m doing.” She approached a window, looking out. “I doubt they’ll get within our sight range though. Too much between us and them.”

They heard a scream fill the air from the distance.

“…That’s way too loud,” Carter noted.

Uni dragged some sound-blocking headphones out of an emergency crate. “We can use these, if we need to. But I don’t think everyone’s going to have some…”

“Not sure it’ll help. Some noises are loud enough to just move you.”

“Great,” Twilight muttered. “…Still think they can handle it?”

Carter nodded. “We’ve got the best of the best here from several different worlds. They won’t win.”

Twilight found herself wondering how many of theirs could fall and still let the fight be considered a ‘win.’ It was probably a high number…

~~~

Rainbat and Scouty peered over the edge of their barricade of sandbags nervously. The alarms blared, constantly reminding them that they were under attack and that the first perimeter had been breached.

They knew full well they were at the second perimeter. They were praying that whatever was attacking wasn’t coming from their side. A pony and a man with bats and simple guns probably couldn’t face whatever broke through the first line of defense in only a couple of seconds.

A couple of seconds. Even magic teleport spammers could usually be caught…

Flutterfree put her hooves up on the barricade as well. “What are we doing?”

Rainbat gasped. “Flutterfree? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for somepony to tell us what’s going on,” Nova said, looking over the barricade as well. “Under attack?”

“Yep,” Scouty said, aiming his gun at nothing. “Nothing breaks through the outer perimeter. Something just did.”

Nova lit her horn. “Good thing I’m here then.”

Flutterfree blinked. “I probably shouldn’t be here… Anywhere safe?”

“As deep inside Crosstown as you can get,” Scouty said. “You better-“

A jar of medical healing pills flew through the air. Scouty caught it rather than letting it hit him in the head. “…What in the world?”

“Pills…”

Flutters’ ears perked up. “What was that?”

“Somebody talking,” Nova said, trying to find the source of the voice. She did, but only because the source was no longer trying to be stealthy.

“PILLS!” a version of Applejack screamed. Unlike the other versions Nova had seen here, this one was very far removed from her ‘base’ self – matte black hair, pale peach skin, and psychotic green eyes. Her appearance was too sudden to react to. She grabbed the pills from Scouty and punched him across the jaw in the process. He fell to the ground, grunting.

The Applejack popped the top off the pills and began to feast on them disturbingly, paying no mind to the ponies around her.

Nova blinked. “…Yeah, there’s no way this pony is what caused the break in.”

Flutterfree pointed her wing in the air. “She’s a distraction!”

Nova looked into the air just in time to see a Derpy flying through the air – a Derpy with a gatling gun instead of a right front leg. She was aiming right at them.

Nova barely raised the magical shield in time, deflecting all the bullets. Rainbat ducked out from under the shield just long enough to toss a baseball through the air, hitting the Derpy square in the head. She plummeted like a dead bird to the ground, landing on a nearby crate with a thud.

“Ow…” The Derpy muttered, shaking her head.

Scouty rubbed his skull. “Was that a distraction too? Or are we just amazing?”

Nova furrowed her brow. “I don’t know… These two don’t seem that threatening, compared to the mercenaries…”

“That’s because they’re being idiots,” a synthetic, but nonetheless familiar voice said. With an ominous thud a Rainbow Dash landed on the ground before them, her entire body covered in a metallic sheen. Her ears were two black spikes of metal, and with a flick of her front leg the limb turned into a gun. “I, on the other hand, won’t be. Cause I’m Rainbine.”

Rainbat hit another baseball at the robotic Rainbow Dash. The ball bounced right off with a resounding clang. Rainbat blinked. “Er… Heheh…”

Rainbine pointed her gun at Rainbat. “And like that you’re dead.”

Scouty rushed her, bringing his bat down on her wings, also to no effect. As a reward for his efforts, he got the explosive bullet instead of Rainbat. The explosion wasn’t a dead-ringer on Scouty, but blood flew from his midsection and he collapsed.

“Scouty!” Flutterfree yelled, running to him.

“Oh boy, look at the other one,” Rainbine said, aiming her gun at Flutterfree. “Nighty night!”

Nova shot Rainbine with a magic laser, a move which did have some effect. She grabbed Rainbine in her telekinesis and rammed her to the ground as hard as she could manage. “You don’t get to do that, machine.”

Rainbine grunted. “You’re… Pretty good with that magic…”

“You have no idea.” She pushed down harder. “I wonder how long it’ll take for you to give up.”

“Never!” Rainbine struggled, putting her hooves beneath her and pushing up. She slowly rose to an upright position. “See? I can-“

Nova twitched her head, pushing Rainbine back to the ground. “I’m not using anywhere near my full power.”

It was at this moment the Applejack decided she was done devouring pills. She bucked Nova across the face, making her lose concentration on Rainbine. Rainbine may have been a bit of a knucklehead, but she knew when to take an opportunity. She pinned Nova to the ground, gun pointed at her neck.

“Nice going Applepills! You did something useful!” Rainbine laughed. She prodded Nova. “You turned your back on the enemy!”

“So did you,” Rainbat muttered, barreling into the robot from the side at high speed. Rainbine took the charge and didn’t budge.

Rainbine rolled her eyes. “All that accomplished was a headache for you.”

Nova teleported herself out of Rainbine’s grasp, appearing on the roof of a nearby building. She lit her horn again – teleporting Rainbat, Scouty, and Flutterfree away. She stood alone against the crazy ponies.

Applepills cocked her head. “Did… You just teleport away your help?”

“They were just putting themselves in danger,” Nova said, pulling the drone out of her saddlebags and activating it. “I also don’t think I need them to take you on.”

The Derpy decided now was the time to fire, unleashing a stream of bullets at Starlight. The drone was able to catch them all.

Nova smirked. “Nice try. So, You’re Rainbine, you’re Applepills, and you…?”

“Derpigun,” Derpigun said, aiming her gun again. “And I’ll mow you down eventually.”

“No, you won’t,” Nova said. She cast a lightning bolt spell, hitting Derpigun’s gun. Part of it exploded, tossing her to the side. With a quick spell, she tossed Applepills into the same pile. “Those two weren’t a threat.”

Rainbine grinned. “You can tell I am though.”

Nova nodded. “But you don’t know who I am.”

“You’re Starlight,” Rainbine said.

Nova smirked. “I’m Nova. I’m hardly your normal Starlight. You see, I’m not from this world.”

Rainbine raised an eyebrow. “So Brutalight was right…”

“Hrm? Who was right about what?”

“Nevermind. Maybe if you beat me I’ll tell you!”

Nova grinned. “Gladly.” She grabbed Rainbine in telekinesis again and pushed her into the ground. “Dangerous as you are, you won’t be able to get up without any help.”

Rainbine managed to shift her gun so it pointed at Nova, firing. The drone caught the bullet.

“Hey! That’s not fair! You have help!”

“I invented this thing myself. I have a right to use it.” Nova shrugged. “Though I doubt you ever play fair.”

Rainbine tried to stand up – and was pushed into the ground harder. She sunk into the sandy dirt about two inches at one point. “Are you ever going to run out of magic?!”

“Doubt it,” Nova said. “Magic’s strong here and I’m still not crushing you with all my might.”

“Mmmf.”

“So, I think you’ve lost, care to enlighten me about what you were talking about earlier?”

Rainbine started roaring at the top of her lungs.

Nova glanced around, trying to see if she was calling for help from anywhere – but no ponies appeared. She could hear gunfire in the distance, possibly from another intrusion point, probably some more dangerous ponies that could break through an outer perimeter easily. She turned back to her opponent. “What are you doing?”

She just kept roaring.

“Are you upset you lost? Really? I mea-“

Rainbine’s ‘coat’ transformed into a brilliant white, while her ‘mane’ stood upright and became more vibrant. Power surged off of her like she was a magic battery.

Nova’s eye twitched at the trick. She pushed down harder – hard enough for her horn to gain a two layered magical aura. Rainbine stood strong, smirking. Nova went all the way to three-layer telekinesis before giving up.

“Nice trick,” Nova admitted.

“Thanks. I like to call it ‘super-mode’. It’s awesome.”

Nova went for something more direct, blasting Rainbine with a powerful magic laser. Rainbine deflected the burst of energy with a swipe of her hoof.

Rainbine moved absurdly quickly, flanking behind Nova and hitting her off the roof like she were some baseball and Rainbine’s gun was the bat. Nova struggled to stand up – but once again Rainbine had her pinned, gun to the unicorn’s neck. “Any last words, Nova?”

“Yeah. Boo.”

Rainbine blinked. “…What?”

The undead robot bear that was the Nightmare plowed through Rainbine, Flutterfree riding his back. His screeching drove fear into Nova once again, but at least he was here to save them this rather than scare them. A few human soldiers revealed their positions around Rainbine, pointing their guns at her.

Nightmare pointed a claw. “Machine versus machine, surrounded.”

Rainbine smirked. “You know what? This might actually be fun!”

Nova lit her horn. “You bet it’ll be fun. Not for you though.”

Rainbine flew into the air, firing in several directions at once, knocking the human soldiers to the side with ease. “You were saying?”

Nova fired a laser that Rainbine dodged easily, only for the Nightmare to latch onto her legs and drag her to the ground. He drove a claw into her side, puncturing the mechanical skin, drawing oil rather than blood.

Rainbine yelled out in pain, bucking Nightmare with a force far higher than that of any earth pony. His metallic chest dented and he fell onto his back. Rainbine readied her gun, but a magical explosion from Nova drove her back.

Rainbine landed, holding her wounded side. “You’re all dead.”

“I doubt it,” Nova responded. “Seems like you’re on the defensive.”

Rainbine pointed her gun. “We’ll see about that.”

~~~

Pinkie rode Pepsi Man into battle. “CHAAAAAAARGE!” He moved more than fast enough to get to a front in a matter of seconds. They were graced with the sight of a Rarity with bright pink hair, a gauntlet on her hoof, and a small hat to the side of her horn. She decapitated an Applejack Engineer, taking the hard hat for herself.

This is when Pepsi Man smashed a can of Pepsi in the Rarity’s face, the force of the impact knocking her onto her back. “What in the…?” She said in a soft, almost inaudible voice.

Pinkie took a giant frying pan out of her mane. “Hey Rarifruit! I’m Pinkie Pie. I’ve got a frying pan and I’m pretty sure it’s got your name on it! Whaddo you say we experiment and see if you’ve got this frying pan’s name on your face?”

“Celestia, you’re one of those shits,” Rarifruit muttered. She glanced around. “Pinkis I could really use you right about now-“

The frying pan made contact with Rarifruit’s face, letting out a clang that signified the perfect match of head and cookware. Pinkie giggled. “Oh, I’m sure Pinkis will be around eventually. But you know we have to start with a curb-stomp!”

Rarifruit narrowed her eyes. She lifted her gauntlet and ripped the frying pan from Pinkie’s hooves. “Your turn.”

Pepsi Man kicked the frying pan out of Rarifruit’s grasp. He pointed his hands forward, unleashing a jet of Pepsi powerful enough to sweep her like an ocean wave. “…I feel violated.”

“Oh no, don’t say that!” Pinkie said. “Pepsi Man’s a bro!”

Rarifruit summoned two giant, magical claws and grabbed Pepsi Man. “I will tear you apart!”

“…You’re yelling, but you’re still strangely quiet,” Pinkie observed.

“Shut the hell up.” She tried to move her claws apart and rip Pepsi Man in half, but his strength was too much. He just broke out and threw another can into Rarifruit’s face. He then tripped on a rock and fell face-first into the ground.

Pinkie facehooved. “Of course.” She produced a squeaky hammer. “So, Rarifruit, want to stop killing people?”

“What? No!”

“Yeah, thought so.” She swung her hammer, but Rarifruit caught it in her magic claws. Pinkie appeared behind Rarifruit and threw a fish net over her, tangling up her legs.

“I got a Raritrout! Woo!”

“I’m the only one who gets to catch the Raritrout…” A new, deeper, louder voice said.

“Ah, Pinkis,” Pinkie said, not bothering to turn around, instead deflecting one of Rarifruit’s claws with a pink broom. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

“You’re… One of them. The odd ones. The ones that know things they shouldn’t.”

Pinkie gasped, turning around. “And you don’t?”

Pinkis – a dark reddish-pink version of Pinkie Pie with a flattened mane – scowled at Pinkie. “No. I happen to be a respectable pony and not a stupid, fucking enigmatic bitch!”

Pinkie whistled. “Don’t let Alushy hear that one! It’ll ruin the joke.”

“What joke?”

“Fudgemothering vampire.”

“Screw it,” Pinkis muttered, charging Pinkie. Pinkie simply appeared behind her, bopping her on the head with a squeaky hammer. Pinkis appeared behind her, biting down on Pinkie’s ear. She tried to bite it clean off, but only managed to draw some blood.

Pinkie reacted by putting on her Bomb Mask and exploding. Pinkis, unsurprisingly, failed to see this coming and was launched into the air, landing on top of Rarifruit. Pinkie bowed. “I bet everyone was wondering when that would make a comeback!”

Pinkis rushed Pinkie, driving her hoof right into the party pony’s chest. Pinkie yelped, flying high into the air – right into one of Rarifruit’s claws. She wormed her way out like a rubber snake, but Pinkis was ready for that. Glowing with an intense red energy, she grabbed Pinkie in midair and tossed her into a wall hard enough to kill a pony.

Pinkie bounced back from her flattened state and shook her head. “Okay, ow.”

Pinkis twitched. “I hate your kind. You make me get creative.”

“Why don’t you like using your abilities? I’ve hardly seen you jump around or pull things out of nowhere at all!”

“None of your goddammed business!” Pinkis yelled. Still charged with red energy, she punched toward Pinkie again. Pinkie dodged, but Pinkis was expecting this, twisting a hoof behind her to knock Pinkie to the ground. She placed a hoof on Pinkie’s neck. “Did you know that the meat of Pinkies tastes like cotton candy?”

“Yeah.”

“Screw you.” Pinkis opened her mouth, aiming for Pinkie’s neck. Pepsi Man stood up to help, but a magic hand came out of nowhere and pinned him to the ground.

Rarifruit walked up alongside Pinkis, smiling. This gave the evil pink pony pause. “Wait, weren’t you in the net?”

“Surprise,” Rarifruit said, stabbing Pinkis in the neck.

Pinkis recoiled, her red energy healing the wound quickly. “What the hell?” She glanced at the net – only to see a Rarifruit inside.

The other Rarifruit shrugged, revealing herself to be a Rarispy. “Not as lethal as I was hoping, but still satisfying.”

Rarifruit groaned from under the net. “Pinkis, what are you waiting for? Eat her!”

Pinkis charged the Rarispy, only for a blue magic shield to protect the unicorn. Renee adjusted her hat and smirked as she walked onto the scene. “I’m afraid we can’t have cannibalism here, that just wouldn’t be proper.”

Pinkis appeared next to Rarifruit in her net. She bit through the ropes, freeing Rarifruit. She was hit by a bullet from somewhere nearby, but the red power healed it right away.

The Rarispy frowned. “Ubercharge. Nothing we do is going to hurt her.”

“And she’s a Pinkie,” Renee said. “Trapping her isn’t going to work.”

Pinkie produced her real warhammer. “I can take her.”

Pinkis appeared behind her. “Think so?”

Pinkie appeared behind her, grinning. “Yep!”

Pinkis appeared behind her, again.

Pinkie did the same. “I think we’re in a feedback loop.”

Pinkis just tackled Pinkie to the ground, but instead of a successful pin the two tumbled around as a pink ball of fluff.

Rarifruit pointed at Renee’s hat. “Mine.”

“Dear, no. This is what makes me Renee rather than just some Rarity.”

Rarifruit summoned her hands and lunged for the hat, but Renee raised numerous magic shields to protect herself. Rarifruit blinked. “What? Rarities never learn combat magic!”

“I’ve had two years of danger to make me learn,” Renee said, retaliating with a laser. “I may not be powerful, but I can keep a lot of spells going at once.” A handful of magic shields orbited her body, and her horn kept firing lasers at Rarifruit. Some made contact, pushing the greedy Rarity back.

The Rarispy fired her gun, hitting Rarifruit in the back leg. Rarifruit softly wailed, falling to the ground, glaring at the blood like it somehow insulted her. Another gun was fired from an unknown location, hitting her other back leg.

“Where’s the other one!?” Rarifruit yelled in her strangely quiet voice.

“Ma soeur’s not going to reveal her location to you.”

Pinkie and Pinkis tumbled back into the fight, landing on Rarifruit – driving even more pain into her wounds. Pepsi Man finally managed to get back up, dousing Pinkis in a torrent of Pepsi, forcing it down her ravenous mouth. She couldn’t get out of the torrent of soft drink.

“THIS IS STUPID!” She yelled, trying to move forward, but instead just falling back with the torrent of soda.

Pinkie giggled. “Yeah it is!” She brought the warhammer down on Pinkis, flattening her. She got back up with her Ubercharge, grunting.

Then the other Rarispy showed up and drove a small sword through Pinkis’ skull. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she slumped onto the ground.

Renee blinked. “Is she…?”

“No,” both Rarispies and Pinkie said. Already the wound was healing.

“Ah.” Renee let out a sigh of relief. “How are we going to deal with her then?”

Pinkie tapped her hooves together. “I suggest we-“ Her eyes widened suddenly. She acted as quickly as she could – slapping a pair of sound blocking headphones on herself and pressing the skulls of Renee and a Rarispy together, blocking all sound she could manage.

A Fluttershy with a red mane, white tail, and red striped top hat dropped from the sky. Her red and blue eyes focused on all of them. She took a breath – and shouted. Pinkie, Renee, and one Rarispy was fine. Pepsi Man didn’t have ears. But the other Rarispy…

The other Rarispy dropped her weapon. Blood shot out of her ears and her eyes rolled into the back of her skull. The blood in the air vibrated with the frequency of an intense sound the ponies could feel shifting around inside their own bodies.

“SOEUR!” Rarispy – the only Rarispy – yelled out, a cry unheard over the vocal assault.

Pepsi Man charged the Fluttershy, but she directed her voice directly at him. She may not have been able to blow his brains out with her sound, but her voice was powerful enough to knock him down. She turned to the three living ponies and Stared at them.

“Running time!” Pinkie said, dragging Renee and Rarispy away by their heads.

She knew they were being pursued.

Pinkie hoped there was a sniper somewhere to take the Fluttershy out. Otherwise Pinkie was pretty sure they were doomed. All it took was one scream…

~~~

Carter looked on in horror at what was happening. She couldn’t see much, but her security cameras showed her Pinkie fleeing, somehow dragging Renee and a Rarispy with her, their heads pressed together. A Fluttershy was chasing them. She had seen a version of Pinkie eat a man earlier, a gray pegasus with a gun mow others down, and… And so far the only hint of success was a brief report that Nova had subdued two of the intruders and was working on a third. She’d heard nothing after that.

“Alternate versions of us…” Twilight said, glancing out the window.

Uni shivered. “Unlike any we’ve seen before.” She saw an alicorn version of Twilight appear on a screen, stab a half-dozen humans with swords, and teleport away.

Carter turned to Twilight. “Charter, make sure the Mirror Portal is closed. I don’t know what they want, but we can’t chance them leaving the universe.”

Twilight nodded. “I’m coming too!” Uni said. Without a word, Twilight teleported the two of them to the Mirror Portal’s location. The shimmering wooden plank indicated it was open. With a quick spell, Twilight reached for the controls on the other side, setting them to another location.

She pulled out her dimensional device. “Anyone who comes here, we evacuate.”

Uni nodded. “What about the… enemies?”

Twilight glared. “We stop them.”

“Right. We will stop them! With you on our side, there’s no way we can-“

A green sword impaled Uni in the chest. Twilight was already readying the dimensional device to throw her to Equestria, where Uni could get advanced medical treatment, but the unicorn’s entire body turned brown, losing all its fleshy appearance, becoming a lifeless solid. She tipped over like a statue, eyes lifeless.

The green sword vanished. An alicorn strode into the room, sneering. Her coat was a darker purple than Twilight’s, her mane a bluer shade with streaks of deep crimson in it rather than pink. She pointed at Twilight. “I take it you’re the Charter. I’m Brutalight Sparc-.”

Twilight flared her wings and stood tall. She decided there was no need for talking, jumping right to a magical laser directed at Brutalight’s face. She deflected it with a magic shield of her own - but Twilight was expecting this, creating a small magical explosion right beneath the dark alicorn. While Brutalight was in the air, struggling to gain control of her momentum, Twilight created a complex structure of magical rings beneath the dark alicorn. Spires of magic shot from the ground, chaining her wings, hooves, and horn to the ground.

Twilight stepped forward, and completed the magic seal on Brutalight. She placed a hoof on Brutalight’s head. “Why are you here?”

Brutalight started laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, nothing really. Just that you think you’ve won.” A glowing sword appeared and cut right through the chain on Brutalight’s horn, freeing it. “See, not all my abilities are purely magic. Unlike yours.” With a flash of her horrendous magic, she was free. She fired her own laser at Twilight. Twilight met it with her purple laser, both providing equal magical power in their spells.

Unfortunately Twilight didn’t also have fancy swords. She had to dodge an incoming blade, but that dodge allowed Brutalight’s power to overwhelm her. Twilight soon found herself chained to the ground, her magic sealed. She glared right at Brutalight, unfaltering.

Brutalight grabbed the dimensional device. “I’ll be taking this.”

“We could have just taken you out of universe if that’s what you wanted!” Twilight shouted. “You didn’t need to do this killing!”

Brutalight looked at the deceased form of Uni. “Oh, you liked her did you? Shame. Grow up, ponies die.”

“Not where I’m from.”

“I know that, Charter. I’m not from this world either.”

Twilight blinked. “You aren’t?”

“Oh no, I came from a nice peaceful Equestria. Course, I was a unicorn. Then I was here. And boy was here good fun. But it wasn’t home.” She levitated the dimensional device and smirked. “The thing is, we couldn’t have asked to leave. Because you’d ask why or tell us where to go. But we want to make our rampage mean something. We want to return home – and then, after taking care of that world, move on to the next. And the next. And the next. The Elements of Insanity will finally carry some weight beyond the confines of this bizarre, senseless world…”

The dimensional device exploded.

“Oh, look what you did,” Alushy said, revealing her position at the window, a smoking gun pointed right at where the dimensional device had been a moment ago. “You just gave me a reason to care. I really must thank you for that; I’ve had a horrible case of bloodlust apathy lately. Unfortunately, this is quite possibly the worst thing that could happen to you-“

Brutalight blew Alushy’s head off, sending blood everywhere, spraying like a fountain that had been under pressure. “I am not in the mood for that.”

Twilight whimpered audibly – enough for Brutalight to smile again. “Well well well… It seems I’m going to have to go with plan B. There may be another device somewhere in this place, but I don’t think I have the time to look for one. But you… You are the Charter. Quite possibly the top of the top when it comes to other worlds. You’ll know how to open a portal without one.”

Twilight said nothing.

“I’m riiiiight…” She lit her horn, lifting Twilight up, turning the magical seal into a portable one, converting the ground-based chains into ones that wrapped around Twilight’s entire body. “And you’re going to tell me.”

“No.”

“Oh, it’ll only be a matter of time-“

There was a click and Brutalight felt a gun pressed into the back of her head.

“You know, when a bitch blows my head off, I choose to listen to the age-old golden rule. Since getting your head blown off is quite exhilarating, I simply have to return the favor.” Alushy pulled the trigger – and her gun jammed. “…What the-“

Brutalight fired a magical laser at Alushy, which she just took. Gallons of blood sprayed everywhere, far more than Alushy should have had in her tiny body. An entire leg was burnt off, but was slowly being reconstructed by a shadowy essence as Brutalight stared at it. “How did you survive?!” the alicorn demanded.

“Special kind of otherworld vampire,” Alushy said. She dodged an incoming sword. “Woah, calm your noggin point! I’m not in the mood to experiment with my immortality today. Perhaps later, once you’ve gotten to know me, we can see what one of those stabby things can do.”

Alushy fired a few rounds at Brutalight only for the bullets to disintegrate the moment they got within an inch of her. Brutalight sneered. “You’re interesting, but you can’t do anything to me.”

Alushy sighed. “Ponies usually stop or deflect the bullets, not destroy them. It’s like you’re grinding up my babies.” She cracked her neck, adjusted her hat, and pushed her glasses further up her nose. “Time for some complete bullshit attack from me. Level one, of course.”

“…Level one?”

Alushy grinned, revealing many menacing rows of teeth that were far, far too sharp. “Ah, there it is. The first hint of worry.” Her dark essence began to swirl around her, dozens of red eyes appearing within the choking, black mist. Blades began to form from the dark power, reaching for Brutalight.

Brutalight teleported herself and Twilight away.

Alushy dropped the shadow powers and blinked. “…Well fudge.”

~~~

Brutalight appeared over the fleeing Pinkie, not paying her any mind. “Fluttershout, it’s time to fall back. I’ve got what we need and they’re starting to regroup.”

Fluttershout looked up at Brutalight, stopping the chase without so much as a grunt. “Rarifruit’s down, and last I saw Pinkis she was having problems.”

“We’ll get them.” Brutalight teleported Fluttershout back to the base. She then dragged Twilight to another location, where Pinkis was trying to keep Rarifruit from bleeding out.

“We’re falling back,” Brutalight called. “Is Rarifruit going to be fine?”

“She needs fucking medical attention!” Pinkis shouted.

“I’ll teleport you to the base’s infirmary,” Brutalight said, doing just that. She then moved to Applepills, Derpigun, and Rainbine – who had clearly lost. Derpigun and Applepills were out cold in a pile, and Rainbine was being beaten by a Starlight, a nightmarish black bear, and a few loose humans and mercenaries who had shown up to assist.

Brutalight facehooved. “Falling back!” She yelled, teleporting the three of them away.

“Nova!” Twilight yelled from her imprisoned state.

Nova pulled back her horn and unleashed a torrent of dark, powerful magics at Brutalight. The dark alicorn simply teleported away.

They were no longer in Crosstown. Twilight didn’t know where they were, besides the fact that it was made of stone and very damp. Brutalight tossed the imprisoned Charter into a corner and created iron bars around her.

Brutalight glared at Twilight. “I’m going to go check on my friends now. You be a good girl and realize you can’t escape. By the time I’m back, I expect you to tell me everything you know about opening portals. Understand?”

Twilight didn’t dignify this with a response.

Brutalight grinned. “Oh good, I haven’t had a reason to torture anypony in a while. This’ll be fun.” In a puff of red magic, she was gone.

Twilight was alone.

She had no magic and was tied up by powerful chains. She could hardly move, much less think of a way to escape.

She was going to have to wait for a rescue. The only problem? They probably didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she was. She could have been anywhere on the planet!

…But she had hope in her friends. They wouldn’t leave her here.

She just wished they’d hurry.

~~~

Pinkie kicked down the door to the command building, deposited Renee and Rarispy on the ground, then passed out on the floor.

Carter looked at Renee. “What happened?”

Renee held Rarispy close. “We lost. The only reason we’re still alive is because they fell back. That Fluttershout would have found a way to scream in our ears eventually, and we’d be… We’d be…”

Carter took one look at Rarispy’s expression and the absence of her sister and put two and two together. She leaned down and looked Rarispy in her eyes. “We’re gonna get these bastards.”

Alushy barged in through the already open doorway, mildly irked that there was no door for her to knock in. “You really do have to. They took Charter Twilight.”

Carter looked right at her. “What?”

“Their ‘leader’, Brutalight, wanted a dimensional device. I shot Twilight’s device out of her disgusting grasp, so she took Twilight instead, thinking she’d know how to open one with magic.”

“She does,” Renee said. “She doesn’t have enough power within herself, but if they can find a power source…”

“Why do they want one?” Carter asked.

“Couple reasons, all equally fascinating,” Alushy responded. “Let’s see… They want to return to their world and burn it to the ground, they want to go to other worlds to subjugate them with their insanity, and they want to get away from the pointless war in this world. They also call themselves the Elements of Insanity, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why…”

“You’re undead,” Renee pointed out.

“And Miss Detective has detected part of the joke. You win a cookie.”

Nova and Flutterfree appeared in the room by way of teleportation. “What happened!? I saw one of them with Twilight!” Nova shouted.

“You all just got the shit kicked out of you and I didn’t get my kill,” Alushy said.

Renee took a breath. “The… ‘Elements of Insanity’ came for a dimensional device, it was destroyed, so they took Twilight so she could tell them what to do. We have no idea where they went and no idea how to find her.”

Nova facehooved. “I should have traced that teleport…”

“You had no time to think,” Flutterfree said. “None of us did…”

Rarispy stamped her hoof. “I’m going to make them pay… Personally… That Fluttershout has an evisceration date with my weapon…”

Pinkie shot up, suddenly full of energy. “We’re going to get her back!” She produced a pink, glitter covered knife and drove it into the table for punctuation. “I’m taking a team out to get her.”

“Do you know where she is?” Carter asked.

“Not the foggiest idea! But we can find out!”

Alushy raised an eyebrow. “Nobody has the slightest idea where they came from, much less where they went. Are you suggesting a random jaunt around the world demanding information? I’m all for that, but I’m not known for my practicality.”

Rarispy raised a hoof. “There’s a place ma soeur and I stayed before we came here. One of the Mann Co. factories. They liked to keep tabs on unusual happenings, they might have something. If they’re… cooperative.”

Pinkie grinned. “That’s a start! We head out immediately! Who’s with me?”

“Road trip!” Alushy shouted.

Rarispy nodded wordlessly.

Renee and Nova stepped forward without hesitation.

Flutterfree looked behind her. “…I don’t think I’ll be good at a rescue mission. I think the people here need my help more. I want to come, though.”

Renee put a hoof on her shoulder. “Flutterfree, we understand. Help how you can here.”

Carter turned to Pinkie. “I can send you with a full contingent.”

Pinkie shook her head. “Sorry, but no.”

“…Why?”

Alushy twirled her guns. “They’ll just get killed, trust me. Not to mention be very suspicious. We’re not just a rescue mission; we’re also a badass information hunting party. A small army would not help by any stretch of your imagination. We need a small unit, like they had, to invade them effectively and get out with what we want. I honestly think I could do the whole thing by myself but it never hurts to have a few bullet sponges around.”

Renee shot Alushy a look.

“Not apologizing.”

“There’s five, that’s good enough,” Pinkie said. “Carter, we’re leaving now. Keep the fort held down, kay?”

Carter nodded.

“Flutterfree, save some lives with your first aid.”

Flutterfree saluted. “Won’t let you down, Pinkie!”

Pinkie pointed to Nova. “Teleport us to the edge of Crosstown. We’re heading out into the world to face the representatives of Insanity.”

Nova lit her horn, dragging Pinkie, Rarispy, Renee, and Alushy with her.

Renee grabbed her heart. “Uh… Just give me a… Moment…”

Rarispy looked ahead, coldly. “We have a moment now. We won’t in the future.”

Renee shook her head. “How can they kill with such… brutality? Uncaring? It meant nothing to her – wasn’t even enjoyable – it was just casual. Normal.”

Alushy, for once in her life, lost her smile. “Some ponies are like me. Death comes so naturally to them that it’s just a part of life, part of them. Sometimes you need that. Other times it’s just a fudging danger to society. In case you can’t tell this is why the Colonel isn’t just letting me walk out of here.” She gestured at a few soldier bodies nearby. “She’s afraid of this getting loose.”

Nova frowned at Alushy. “Is she wrong to think that?”

Alushy ignored the question. “Where’s the Mann Co, Rarispy?”

Rarispy pointed straight ahead. “A long way that direction. I recommend traveling by teleport jumps if we want to get there within the day.”

Nova took a breath. “That would be taxing…”

“We could just take the car,” Pinkie suggested.

“What car?”

A large white van suddenly came flying out of a nearby garage, Pepsi Man at the wheel. He gestured for them to get in.

“It’s a literal road trip!” Alushy clapped. “I call roof seat!”

“Nopony will fight you for that,” Renee observed, trotting toward the van. Everypony quickly got in, Alushy on top, Pinkie in the passenger side, and the other three loaded in the back.

Pinkie beeped the horn. “AWAY WE GO! WE’RE COMING, TWILIGHT!”

Renee looked out the window, her vision glossing over. “Yes… We’re coming…”

Rarispy looked down at her hooves, wordless. Nova stared off into space, contemplating all the carnage she had just witnessed.

That they had all just witnessed.

There would be no coming back from this event in their lives. They could never look at things the same way again.

~~~

Flutterfree pulled on a belt as hard as she could manage, tightening it around Rainbat’s leg. The blue pegasus unleashed a horrendous scream from the sudden pain, letting out tears despite considerable effort not to.

Flutterfree hugged her. “I’m sorry, that hurt a lot… But it’ll heal better this way, okay?”

“I know… Ergh…” Rainbat carefully laid back down on the gurney, moaning. “Just… Get to the others now. I’ll be fine.”

Flutterfree knew Rainbat was right, she would be fine. But there were others in the makeshift hospital that weren’t going to be fine. She surveyed the twelve gurneys that had been set out in a garage, next to the medical supplies. Just an hour ago, before the attack, there had only been one gurney in here. Nobody had expected twelve patients.

…Eleven, now. An Applejack Engineer had been carted out. Flutterfree never even got to look at her to see what had been wrong. There was only the empty bed to remember her by. A mare Flutterfree had probably only seen for a couple minutes was haunting her for much more than that already.

Flutterfree shook her head – she was one of the nurses here, she may not be as trained as the professional doctor on staff, but she did know what she was doing. She moved on to the next bed – the one that held Scouty.

“Ay, Flutterfree, how you doin’?”

“Better than you, certainly,” Flutterfree said, walking up to Scout with a jar of medical pills. “You already got these, right?”

“Of course not-“

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, fine. Yeah, I did.”

She looked at his bloodsoaked shirt, expression shifting to one of concern. “Can I see?”

“There’ll never be a day I’ll say no to a woman asking to take my shirt off.”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “You humans and clothing…” She lifted the shirt up, looking at the wound. It was still bleeding, despite all the gauze already wrapped around it. The flow of blood was slowed, but Flutterfree knew a horrible wound when she saw one. Scouty might survive this, but Flutterfree didn’t think the odds were good.

“I know that face,” Scouty said.

“I…” Flutterfree shook her head – she wasn’t going to try to lie, not right now. “It doesn’t look good. You need to get to a healing mage. I’m going to see if we can get you offworld…”

“Hey, I’m not complainin’ if it saves my ass.”

Flutterfree did some dressing of Scouty’s minor wounds before walking up to the doctor – a Medic class mercenary, complete with glasses, labcoat, and a frantic look in his eyes. He had just completed an amputation for a Twilight Sniper. “Yes, vhat is it?”

“We need to get some of these patients offworld.”

“I sent vord to ze Colonel for the portal device, it should be arriving soon...”

As the words left his mouth, a Pinkie Engineer popped in, grimacing. “Er… It seems that, well, uh… Yeah, the dimensional devices? We think some of our people fled with them. The few we had are gone. Colonel’s personal one wasn’t in her office. We’re… trying to find out who’s missing, or if anyone has a stash.”

The Medic menacingly snapped his gloves. “Then zis will be very difficult.”

“Any mediguns?” Fluttersk asked.

The Medic grit his teeth. “The three ve had vere destroyed in ze battle, along vith most ze other Medics Favorite snack of ze pink one.”

Flutterfree looked back at Scouty. “Is there any way we can get another one?”

“You vant to try to pry a medigun from its Medic? You’re crazier than I am. Too dangerous, take too long…”

Flutterfree furrowed her brow. “…I may have an idea.”

“You are free to try,” the Medic said. “All ze small care is taken care of here. If you can get ze medigun, you will save zem all.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Just you wait Scouty, I’m going to get you something!”

“Wait, no, don’t go after the medigun! Flutterfree!”

She was already out the door, flying across the sky. She knew she couldn’t do this alone – but she didn’t plan on it. She knew just who to ask for help.

She dropped down right in front of the cellar doors, throwing them open with her wings. She rushed down the stairs and sat down. “Hey, Nightmare?”

There was no response, but she knew he was listening.

“There are people dying out there. The battle’s over, but there are injuries. We’re out of mediguns. We need to go get one. I can’t do it myself, but I think that, together, we could.”

Still no response.

“I know you care about this place, Nightmare. When it was under attack, you rushed to defend it. You fought valiantly. I’m just asking you to come out for a little while to help once more.”

“…All right,” he said, coming out into the light. “Get on.”

Flutterfree flew onto his back, carefully arranging her hooves so they wouldn’t brush against any of his sharp, pointy bits. She smiled at him from the side. “I knew you could do it.”

“Haven’t done it yet.”

“True. We need to hurry though.”

Nightmare didn’t need to be told twice – he burst out of the cellar, running as fast as his mechanical legs could carry him, which was to say considerably faster than a regular human being. He splayed his claws and let out a deep battlecry. Flutterfree laughed.

A few other people screamed.

Nightmare was used to this reaction.

~~~

The Mann Co. factory was a set of flat, industrial buildings surrounding a tall corporate skyscraper with the words MANN CO printed at the very top, so high up it was somewhat difficult to read from the ground. The sun was approaching the horizon, casting the skyscrapers in a silhouette that would only get more intense as the day progressed.

“This the place?” Alushy asked, poking her head through a window.

“Yes,” Rarispy responded. “Parking’s through that security gate. Just pull up and let me do the talking.”

Pepsi Man did as instructed, driving up to the gate and stopping.

There was a young woman in glasses at the gate. The raised her eyebrows at the strange man. “…You can’t talk can you?”

“No, but he’s got one hell of a body!” Alushy said. “Let it do the talking, little lady.”

Rarispy sighed. “Ignore them, they’re hooligans. I’m Rarispy L M N Three Asterisk Dash Two. I should be in there with a footnote along the lines of ‘feisty’.”

The woman flipped through her pages. “You are here… But it’s L M N Three Asterisk Dash One who has that note.”

“Ah. She… Was probably pretending to be me that day. Or vice versa.” She sighed.

The woman lowered her glasses looking right to Rarispy. “You aren’t here looking for revenge, are you?”

“Wasn’t killed by a Red or Blue,” Rarispy said. “We’re looking for information.”

The woman sat back. “You are authorized to continue. I will have to record your friends though. A standard Pepsi Man, Rarity, Starlight, Pinkie, and…” she looked at Alushy. “What are you?”

“Just put me down as ‘the best fudging thing in existence’. Esquire.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Just put down ‘Alushy’, Dear. I go by Renee and the Starlight goes by Nova.”

“Got it.” The gate’s red and white bar lifted up. “Pick a spot, any spot, and lock your doors. Mann Co. is not responsible for any stolen property in any way.”

“Of course,” Rarispy said. Pepsi Man took control of the van and pulled into the parking lot. The vast majority of vehicles within the parking lot looked like simple corporate cars, though there were enough other cars for the eye keep itself entertained. There were cars designed to operate in wasteland apocalypse conditions, hover cars, military vehicles, and even a couple of miniature helicopters.

Pepsi Man pulled into a random spot and let them all out. They were in the ominous shadow of the main skyscraper, easily feeling dwarfed by the immense perceived power of the company.

“Question,” Nova began. “If there’s no central government, no organization in this world, how does this company exist?”

“It exists in several places,” Rarispy answered. “It’s not as common as a Red and Blu war, but it’s the source of all their weapons, ammo, and technology. Most instances of the company gladly take part in the wars, ‘selling’ weapons to both sides and building them with a seemingly unlimited supply of material. This particular instance of Mann Co. is aware of the nature of this world. They don’t seek to change it though, but rather exploit it.”

“That doesn’t sound very nice!” Pinkie commented.

“No, it isn’t. They still egg on the war, but they also provide technology to others, and have their own mercenaries that can be rented out to defend actual settlements from the war.”

Renee frowned. “Exploitative… But better than outright war, I suppose.”

Rarispy shook her head. “We aren’t here to question their ethics, which are almost nonexistent. They’ve got a lot of information. They know who comes in and out of here, and what’s going on in the world. They’re well aware of Crosstown, for instance.”

Nova nodded. “So we ask them what they know about the ‘Elements of Insanity’… How exactly?”

“We walk in and ask. Reception is usually pretty efficient.”

Alushy gawked. “A big corporate conglomerate has efficient reception?”

“They deal in information a lot. The more people they see, the more information they get. The more customers and employees they get, the more power and money. It’s all about profit. Mostly.”

“Mostly?” Renee asked.

“The guy in charge is crazy.”

Alushy blinked. “Oh. Oh one of him? Oh ahahaahhhahhahahah! This is going to be rich.”

“We probably won’t meet him,” Rarispy told Alushy. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“My wings are already upright and ready.”

“I… Do not want to know,” Nova said.

“Sucks to be you.”

“Let’s move,” Rarispy grunted. “No causing trouble.”

Pinkie and Alushy exchanged glances before devolving into barely contained chuckling. Rarispy didn’t dignify this with a response. They walked across the parking lot and into the large glass doors of the main Mann Co. building. Inside was a large lobby filled with dozens of people – surprisingly few of which were mercenaries, and none of which were easily identifiable as Red or Blu. Renee did suppose it wouldn’t be good for business to have shootouts in the lobby.

Instead, there were a large quantity of ponies, people with brightly colored hair and big eyes, some brightly colored animals with shoes on, and a handful of even stranger things. It was an interesting sight to see, to say the least.

“Uh, hey!” a girl with a red and black dress who was carrying a large mechanical scythe said, walking up to them. “Do you know where the, uh… ammunition depository is?”

Rarispy nodded. “Seventeenth floor, room seven.”

“Thank you!” She dashed off, scrambling to one of the elevators.

“…Ammunition Depository?” Nova asked.

“There are so many different kinds of weapons,” Rarispy said. “Mann Co. doesn’t forge all kinds of ammunition, but chances are all kinds of ammunition can be found out there. Anything you find that you can’t use, you drop in the depository and Mann Co. will pay you for it. Anything in the depository, you can buy.”

“That seems useful,” Renee mused.

“Pansies don’t do any of their own hunting,” Alushy muttered. “Get your own damn bullets. Or, better yet, just get one of those cloning sacks. Never-ending ammunition.”

Pinkie shrugged, pulling out a squeaky hammer and twirling it around. “I wonder what that’s like…”

“Cheeky.”

Rarispy grunted, leading them to the reception desks, of which there were ten. One was already open, filled with a Rarity in pointed red-rimmed glasses. “Ah, what can I do for you… six? Is the large man with you?”

“Yep!” Pinkie said, walking up next to Rarispy. “I’m Pinkie Pie, and this is Rarispy L M N Three Asterisk Dash One! I think you can look her up, easy.”

“Of course…” the Rarity said, typing away at a nearby computer with her telekinesis. “It looks like you’re marked as one of our investors, though you haven’t paid a visit in a while.”

“I left,” Rarispy said. “Guess the man didn’t change the records.”

“Maybe. I think it’s more likely he just always expected you to come back. What can I do for you?”

“Looking for some information!” Pinkie chirped. “Know anything about the Elements of Insanity? Six – er, wait, seven – ponies, quite crazy, not standard versions at all.”

The Rarity typed some things on her keyboard. “If we do, it’s not in the public database. It’ll probably cost something.”

“Need something killed? I’m good at that! Too good.” Alushy piped up.

“Shush,” Pinkie said. “Cost what?”

“I really don’t know, I’d have to transfer you to the information department. I…” She blinked in surprise as an alert appeared on her screen. “Oh. It looks as if Mister Hale wants to see you himself.”

Rarispy twitched. “How… Wonderful.”

“How wonderful!” Alushy echoed in a much more eager tone of voice.

The Rarity pointed at an elevator. “Top floor. The button should actually work for you.”

“Thank you!” Pinkie said, bouncing towards the elevator, leading the six of them along. They piled in and pressed the button for the top floor – 113. They barely felt the elevator lurch at all before they were at the top.

“…How…?” Nova wondered aloud.

“Don’t question it,” Pinkie said. “I’m not.”

“B-but…”

The doors slid open, revealing a wide space open to the sky above. Along the edges of the floor were walls with overhangs, protecting lavish couches, large tvs, and other indoor things from possible rain. The rest of the floor was one giant garden filled with exotic plants, the center holding a full size helicopter pad. There wasn’t a helicopter on the pad at the moment, but it was occupied.

There was a man wrestling a zombie pterodactyl. He popped its head off and tossed it over the edge of the skyscraper with ease, laughing the entire time. The man was beyond tall, more muscular than any human the ponies had ever seen, and wore nothing but cargo shorts, explorer boots, and a rugged hat. His chest was very exposed, revealing hair that took the shape of Australia, of all things.

He leaped into the air, crashing right in front of them, making some of the ground give way. He gave them a warm, if crazed, smile. “Aha! Welcome back, Rarispy!”

“…Yes.”

“I see you brought friends! In case you don’t already know, my name is Saxton Hale, and I am currently the only one of my breed to run a Mann Co. right!”

“Hell yes!” Alushy said, throwing her hooves in the air. “How’s about we have an arm wrestle?”

“YOU’RE ON!”

Pinkie pulled a table out of her mane and dropped it on the ground. Without pausing, the pony and the man sat at it, extending their limbs. Saxton’s was significantly larger than Alushy’s hoof, but they made it work.

“Three…” Pinkie began. “Two… One… GO!”

Both pushed. Alushy dropped her normal demeanor instantly, letting her teeth grow to full sharpness, her eyes glow as brightly as they could, her wings extend to agitated points. The shadowy power that was Alushy shot out of her like a shadowy vortex of pure power, filling the air around them with unholy eyes from beyond the grave.

Saxton Hale just pushed like a man- sweating, grunting, but holding firm.

“Saxton…” Rarispy muttered. “We don’t have time for this.”

“You know I never turn down a challenge!” Saxton Hale yelled, grinding his teeth. “First good arm wrestling match I’ve had in years!”

“It’s not even arm wrestling! That’s a leg!” Nova pointed out.

“Technicalities are for bitches!” Alushy grunted, her voice even deeper and more unholy than usual. “Granted, I’m a bitch, but I’m the kind of bitch that needs cannons, not technicalities.”

“I’ve got plenty of cannons here! You can have one, win or lose!”

“If I win will it be bigger?”

“I will invent a cannon bigger than all others for you if you win!”

Alushy’s aura became even more intense, somehow. “BIG CANNON, COME TO MAMA!”

Pepsi Man started doing cheerleading dances.

“This is stupid,” Rarispy muttered.

“…You’re not wrong,” Renee noted.

Saxton Hale’s hand began to drift downward toward the table. Alushy’s tongue shot out of her mouth, licking her lips with a vicious slurping sound. “Saxton… It’s coming…”

“That’s what you think!” Saxton Hale flexed his muscles and pushed back with newfound fury, driving Alushy’s hoof towards her side. With rage, she pushed back, holding her hoof an inch from the tabletop. She bit her lip, drawing blood – blood that charged her. She lifted Saxton’s hand back up, slowly…

“Come on…” Alushy grunted. “This man is but a mortal…”

Then her knee joint gave out. Her leg cracked and all resistance was lost. Her small, vampiric form was driven through the table, shattering it.

Saxton Hale shot one hand into the air. “Victory!” With the other, he offered to help Alushy up.

She laughed, taking his hand. Her broken leg repaired itself reasonably quickly, the pain clearly not enough to dampen her mood. “That was the best fudging arm wrestle I’ve ever had!”

Saxton Hale laughed. “It’s been one of my best as well – wait, ‘fudging’?”

“Do you know what swear word is supposed to go there?” Alushy demanded. “I need to know.”

Saxton Hale shrugged. “I’d just use good ol’ damn. Serves the purpose well.”

“But it isn’t strong enough!”

“If you need to rely on words to be strong enough you’ve got bigger problems than not knowing the right word!” he laughed.

Pinkie grinned. “I like him.”

The Raritys facehooved. Pepsi Man continued doing his dance.

“Why’d you call us up?” Rarispy asked.

“Well, I was just minding my own business, wrestling a yeti, when I get one of those notifications about one of the Rarispy sisters logging in without the other one. Not that odd, figured I’d get to see you later – but then you start asking for information that waves a red flag on the database? I just had to call you up, you understand.”

He moved to sit down, and Pinkie provided him with a chair. His jovial smile had vanished, replaced with a somber expression that his mustache made even dourer. “They got her, didn’t they?”

Rarispy nodded slowly. “The one known as Fluttershout. I take it you do know about them?”

“They’re a big nuisance. So big it’s probably fair to call them more than a nuisance,” he grunted. “The Elements of Insanity seemed to have it in their heads that the entire world was their oyster, to be conquered and brutalized as they wished. Entire teams of Reds and Blus, wiped right out easily. Settlements of all kinds brutally murdered for fun. Even Mann Co headquarters weren’t safe. It really was a terrifying rampage. But then they ran into us.”

“Didn’t go well for them?” Nova asked.

Saxton Hale smirked. “No it did not. I could tell they were very surprised they were forced to retreat. They’d clearly never lost a fight before – at least not one of their coordinated attacks. It was invigorating, showing that Brutalight that you don’t need magic to be an excellent warrior.”

“Pure manliness conquers all,” Alushy agreed.

“You got that right!”

“So what do you actually know about them?” Rarispy asked.

“Not much. We know their base is some castle over in the Haunted Territories. Don’t know which one, don’t really care since we don’t have any operations that far out. It’ll probably be easy to find once you get close though. Center of the area without anything living in it at all.”

“We know a bit more,” Renee said. “They’re not from this universe originally, and they want to escape. They currently have Charter Twilight.”

Pinkie gave Saxton Hale a cup of piping hot coffee. He took a sip and then did the spit-take. “The Charter Twilight was here? How did I not know of this?”

“She arrived today,” Nova pointed out.

“But I’m watching Crosstown.”

“What!?” Rarispy shouted.

Alushy raised an eyebrow. “You’re surprised by this?”

“I, well, er… No, not exactly.”

Renee frowned. “The Elements of Insanity may have attacked when they did because they intercepted your information. They’d been waiting for the right opportunity to strike.”

Saxton Hale rammed his fist into the floor, putting a crack in it. “They’ve made fools of us! That’s it, I was going to help you six as it was, but now I’m giving you a leg up. You get to take the Blackbird.”

“Mother of God, yes.” Alushy blurted. “Please tell me it’s what I’m thinking of.”

“A state of the art fighter jet equipped with every weapon we could slap on it?”

Alushy melted into the floor. “I can die happy. Oh wait, I did, and I am.”

Saxton Hale clapped his hands together. “Then it’s decided! I’ll get the runway ready, you all return to the lobby and mingle a bit!”

Nova blinked. “…Won’t you be going to the lobby with us?”

Saxton Hale laughed. “What man uses the elevator?” He jumped over the wall and started climbing down the side of the skyscraper. “Race. Go!”

Nova teleported them all back down to the lobby.

Saxton Hale landed on the ground outside a couple seconds later. He stuck his head in through the front doors. “WELL PLAYED!” he yelled.

Pepsi Man waved back. Saxton Hale gave him a thumbs up then ran across the parking lot.

“What a strange man…” Nova said.

“He’s insufferable…” Rarispy muttered.

“That’s a bit strong,” Renee said. “He seems a decent, if intense, sort.”

“Try living near him for a few months. It gets old fast. Really fast.”

Renee shrugged. “Perhaps…” She looked around, surveying the gathering in the lobby. “Something tells me there’s more to learn here, though…”

Pinkie looked at Renee. “Are you getting a Renee Sense?”

“I don’t think so. Just a… hunch.” She smirked. “I knew it, that mare over there is watching us. The Trixie. She’s trying not to make it obvious, and by doing that she’s making it obvious.”

Alushy flew into the air and landed behind the Trixie, holding a gun to her head. “Boo.”

“AUGH!”

“Relax, I won’t hurt you with them around. As long as you don’t annoy me.”

The Trixie whimpered.

Renee walked up to her, smirking. “Trixie, I presume?”

“M-magic Mare, actually…”

“…Not going to judge,” Renee commented. “I just want to know, why were you spying on us?”

“W-well, er… You were interesting! Yeah!”

Alushy pressed a gun to her skull.

“All right all right! I…” she gulped. “Look, I was looking for information on what the Elements of Insanity were doing, all right? I heard they attacked your compound and-“

“How did you hear?” Rarispy demanded.

“I’ve been following them for a while, okay? They… Killed my friend.”

Pinkie sighed. “Oh.”

Rarispy’s expression softened. “Same. They’ve hurt us all. And many, many others, from what I’ve heard.”

“Want to join us?” Pinkie asked. “They have our friend captured, we’re going to free her!”

“Uh…” Magic Mare shivered. “No, you can do that on your own. I…” She shook her head. “Can’t do it.”

“That’s okay. Alushy, please stop pointing the gun at her.”

“Oops, forgot I was doing that. Sorry-not-sorry,” Alushy responded.

“Anything you can tell us?” Renee asked.

“…There’s a graveyard near their castle. One of many, I think, but it’s an important and powerful one. You… Might want to go there first. It has a habit of showing you images of the past. It is very haunted though, so be careful.”

“I’m sure we can handle it,” Nova said. “We do have the biggest ‘fudgemothering vampire’ around, after all.”

“And suddenly I’m relevant,” Alushy said, grinning. “My ego has grown three sizes at your approval.”

“Thanks, Magic Mare,” Pinkie said. “I’m sure this will be helpful.”

Magic Mare smiled. “I hope you don’t die.”

“We won’t,” Rarispy said. “There’s been enough death on our side today…”

Saxton Hale rushed back into the lobby, forgetting the door was there. He ignored the shattered glass on the ground. “Hup hup! There’s a fighter jet with your names on it!”

Pinkie grinned. “Yay! See you Magic Mare!”

“…Bye.”

The six of them followed Saxton Hale to a runway. There, on the stretch of pavement, was a menacing black fighter jet with four engines, a cockpit that could easily fit a dozen people, and several fins that clearly served no practical purpose beyond coolness factor. The cutie marks of Renee, Nova, and Pinkie has been painted on the back fin alongside a Pepsi logo, Alushy’s glasses, and a knife inside a diamond for Rarispy. “There you go!”

Pinkie gasped. “Best present ever!” She took out the party cannon and unleashed a torrent of confetti everywhere.

Alushy glanced at the blue weapon. “I need to get me some of those and some hammerspace.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Maybe one day…”

Saxton Hale put his hands on his hips. “Anyway, in order to legally get you to fly this, I had to talk to a lawyer and figure out if I had any sort of rules set up for this kind of thing.”

A pony in a bunny hoodie nobody had noticed before took out a briefcase and held out a legal document.

Saxton Hale rubbed his hands together. “Right, so, all of us are here, what’s the requirement?”

“Boot to the head,” the pony said. A boot flew from nowhere and hit Saxton Hale in the head.

Saxton Hale blinked. “…I don’t remember writing that.”

The lawyer shrugged, folding up her briefcase and walking away. Pinkie snickered.

Saxton Hale shrugged. “So, who knows how to fly a fighter jet?”

Alushy raised her hoof. She was the only one.

“There’s your pilot everybody! Now go, lay waste to the enemy!”

Renee bowed. “Mister Hale, I doubt we can ever repay you enough.”

“If you deal a blow to those crazy ponies it’ll be payment enough, Lady Renee.”

Renee smiled. “See you soon, hopefully.”

“Can we go already?” Alushy said, already in the cockpit. “I don’t even have fingers to be triggery with and I’m positive I’m going to push this button accidentally with a point on my bat wing or something.”

Pinkie popped into the cockpit next to her. “Ooh, I wonder what this button does…”

This remark prompted everyone to scramble into the cockpit. Renee was still climbing in when the engines activated. She had time to sit down and buckle in before the Blackbird started moving.

Alushy laughed. “Christmas has come early! Hold on to your stomachs bitches, I’m not going to be pulling any punches with this bad girl!”

“Bitches and bastard,” Rarispy corrected.

“What?”

“Pepsi Man’s a guy, he’s a ba-“

Alushy floored the throttle, shutting Rarispy up. Alushy soon forgot the technical ruining of her joke and just kept laughing.

Pinkie was the only one who remained conscious through all the loopdeloops, swirls, and dives.

~~~

Twilight sat up straight in her cell, a sour expression on her face. Nothing had happened for the last several hours, and it was starting to drive her a little crazy. Maybe that was what they wanted – they were the ‘Elements of Insanity’ after all, perhaps this was all part of their plan. Drive her mad from isolation.

Luckily Twilight was one of those ponies that could go large stretches without interacting with anypony else. Not the most common trait of a self-described social species, and certainly an unusual one for the Princess of Friendship, but she found that it helped her deal with individuals who maybe weren’t sold in the magic of friendship. And it helped keep her own sanity intact during moments like this.

Maybe she could use it to get through to them. They may have been brutal and insane, but there was a possibility, however remote, that they could be salvaged. If not… She’d try to find their weaknesses. Insanity usually hinted at some kind of exploit.

Brutalight walked into the room, drawing Twilight’s attention.

“I see you finally decided to drop back in,” Twilight commented.

“Not just me,” Brutalight said, walking forward and allowing all of the others to file in behind her, bringing the total number of ponies in the room to eight. “Let me introduce everypony. I’m Brutalight Sparcake, the leader of the Elements of Insanity. This is Rarifruit, Fluttershout, Pinkis Cupcake, Applepills, Rainbine, and Derpigun.”

Twilight Sparkle looked at everyone and nodded. “I am Charter Twilight Sparkle of Equis Vitis, Princess of Friendship.” The ponies behind Brutalight filled Twilight with uneasy feelings – each one had the gaze of a mare barely held together inside. Rarifruit was the only one who was obviously injured from the prior attack, her back legs propped up with a two-wheeled frame.

Fluttershout snickered. “Princess of Friendship. Silly.”

“Not as silly as we might wish…” Brutalight commented. “She has the power within her.”

“But so do we!” Applepills said. “I mean, look at us, if we weren’t great friends Pinkis would have just eaten us all by now!”

Pinkis laughed. “And Rarifruit would have stolen Fluttershout’s hat!”

“I still want it,” Rarifruit muttered.

Brutalight chuckled. “You rascals.”

Rainbine smirked. “Effective and awesome rascals!”

Flutershout rolled her eyes. “You never change, do you…”

Brutalight cleared her throat. “The point is, Twilight, we have the magic of Friendship in us as well. So if you’re thinking you can just count on a magic rainbow laser from your friends to save you, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Twilight’s confident expression faltered. They were right – she could see their friendship, corrupted and exclusive though it was. They had an extremely strong bond, a bond that kept them alive and gave them dominion over whoever they deemed an enemy. Which was probably everyone.

Brutalight smirked. “Are you going to let this go the easy way? I’m in a charitable mood, I’ll just let you go if you give us the secrets to interdimensional travel. You don’t have to die.”

“You need one of the devices-“

Brutalight’s smile vanished. “Wrong answer. You know how to do it without a device. You know how the device works. You could tell us how to make one.”

“It’d be far too complicated to create in a place like this, and I don’t understand every part-“

“You are a horrible liar,” Brutalight said. “Fluttershout, ‘cheer’ her, lowest volume.”

Fluttershout took in a breath and let out a loud noise that drove itself into Twilight’s brain like a railroad spike. The other Elements didn’t seem to care, probably because the noise was directed only at Twilight, not that she was able to realize this at the moment. The pain forced her to crumple to the ground, shaking in her chains.

Brutalight used her magic to ensure Twilight could still hear what she was saying over the ‘cheering’. “You feel that? That is her voice, driving its way deep into your mind, destroying your ears and your very ability to hear naturally. Much louder and it’ll blow your eardrums out completely. Louder, and your brain starts to get affected. At full volume her shout is an instant kill. She’s probably the most effective at killing out of all of us.” She smirked. “Unfortunately, unlike everyone else she comes in contact with, you don’t have the pleasure of knowing the pain will end soon. It will just keep going and going and going.”

Twilight grunted, forcing herself to sit back up despite the pain. Her face was in an eternal grimace, but her eyes were narrowed in fiery defiance. “Then let it go on.” She realized with fear she couldn’t even hear what she was saying.

Brutalight clearly could. “Louder, Fluttershout.”

Fluttershout increased the volume slightly. Twilight’s brain throbbed as the already-present nail felt as if it moved around within her skull, scrambling her brain. Her ears no longer had the control to keep themselves folded down, not that being open or closed did much difference at this volume. But she stood strong.

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a fighter, girls. Louder.”

Twilight could feel a hammer within her awareness, pounding at her head with every beat of some unheard, cruel song. She realized this was just her heartbeat amplified through the noise.

“Louder.”

The insides of Twilight’s ears were now vibrating with enough energy that the pain in the ear canal far outweighed the pain happening within her mind. Her entire skull screamed in agony, like a wine glass ready to burst. Tears flowed down her cheeks and onto the ground, but she did not give in.

“Just tell us!” Brutalight demanded.

“No!” Twilight screamed, glad for an excuse to unleash her bent up fury. Any distraction from the pain was welcome, no matter how small or useless it was. “I cannot let you leave this place! You’d kill so many ponies more than me! So many! I cannot let you do that! If I must give my own life to protect all others, then good! I’ll gladly lay it down!”

“We’ll kill people regardless of where we are, fool!”

“Death is at least cheap, here!”

“Louder.”

Twilight reeled, the sound somehow carrying a real physical force with it now, pushing her back across her cell. “Why do you have to kill? Answer me that! WHY!?”

“Because we’re batshit insane!” Brutalight said. “And it’s fun! You’ve clearly never felt the exhilaration of holding someone’s life in your hooves and ending it in a clean, single moment. The power. The poetry. The life it gives you. There is no action more enthralling.”

“I… Don’t… Kill…”

“You’ll have to try it eventually. If you survive this. Louder.”

Twilight lost all ability to form coherent words. She just screamed. She channeled all her rage into one single, powerful noise that meant nothing to Fluttershout’s unending noise. The pain collected to a point in her ears, building pressure, both pressing her skull and pushing it out in a set of forces that could not exist in tandem for long. One would have to give.

Her inner ears exploded. She felt more pain in that moment than she had felt in most of her life. Blood rushed out from both sides of her head, spraying across the bars of her prison. She could still feel the force of the sound on her body, but the pounding in her ears was gone. There was still a spike in her brain, but it was significantly less painful than it had been before. She was, partially, relieved.

The force of the noise stopped, allowing Twilight to slump to the ground. Twilight saw Fluttershout shaking her head, saying something to Brutalight that Twilight couldn’t hear. The other Elements were talking among themselves, opening and closing their mouths, making various gestures... But Twilight couldn’t hear them.

Twilight couldn’t hear anything. There wasn’t even a ringing in her ears. Her ears were still there – she could feel them and move them – but they weren’t picking up any sound.

Brutalight lifted Twilight in her magic, dragging her against the bars. She spoke – and Twilight could unfortunately hear that. “The wound is still fresh. We can return your hearing if we act fast. But you have to give us what we want.”

Twilight mustered enough energy to scowl. “…Screw you.”

Brutalight tossed her to the ground. “Then I guess it’s time for the next round of torture. I can see I’ll have to get creative.” She turned to her friends. “You can go. This is going to take a while, unless anyone has any ideas.”

A few of them said something, but Twilight had no idea what. Then the six of them filed out of the room, leaving only Brutalight and Twilight.

Brutalight smirked. “I am the only voice you can hear, Twilight Sparkle. As far as you are concerned, I am your God, your everything, your master. There is nothing but you and me, and I am very angry. To ease this anger, you just need to tell me some simple things. Should be easy, right?”

Twilight said nothing. She just prepared herself for more pain.

Brutalight lifted Twilight back up. Blood dripped from the Charter’s ears onto the cell floor below.

~~~

A giant pony head with lightning bolts coming out of its eyes chased down a waffle with human legs and a Pinkie Pie head while an Applejack rode a cow made of cubes over a man with a horse head. Elsewhere, a Lyra poked a freshly dead Sniper in his rear with a toothpick, as if checking to see if he was done cooking.

“…What?” Flutterfree said, not able to believe what she was seeing.

“Complete randomness.” Nightmare commented.

“Is this… I don’t even know what to ask.”

Nightmare shrugged. It wasn’t like he knew any more about what was going on than she did. He was just harder to baffle. “Somewhere Else?”

“Maybe…” Flutterfree said. “I don’t like delaying, but I don’t think we can-“ Then she saw it. What they needed.

A medigun.

It was currently in the hands of a Medic screaming at the top of his lungs. “TRY NEW CARTOON HORSE PROGRAM HORSE MEAT!”

“There!” Flutterfree said, ignoring the horrific implications of the Medic’s statement. “Get it!”

Nightmare jumped down the cliff face he was standing on, Flutterfree holding on to his back as tight as she could manage. They landed on the ground below, kicking up a small cloud of dust.

The Medic pointed at the Nightmare in terror. “HORSES CANNOT DRIVE AUTOMOBILES!”

Flutterfree blinked. “Nightmare, just… get the gun.”

Nightmare leaped forward, swiping at the Medic’s medigun, only for the target to leap back. “GET YOUR OWN GODDAMN FRENCH FRIES!” He took off in a run. He would have not made it far, but unfortunately for Flutterfree and Nightmare, a jar of peanut butter flew through the air and hit Nightmare right in the face. He paused a few seconds to contemplate what had happened.

Flutterfree licked the peanut butter that had gotten on her. “Huh. Pretty good.”

Nightmare shrugged and moved to resume his pursuit of the Medic into a blue barber shop, but once again he was stopped. This time by an unicorn Twilight Sparkle with a truly grumpy expression permanently affixed to her face. A set of words appeared beneath her face – ‘Dwight Likes Sparkles’ – that she clearly couldn’t see.

“Uh… Hi?” Flutterfree said. “Do you mind letting us through?”

The words vanished. The Twilight they could only presume was named ‘Dwight’ took one look at the two of them and summoned a hamburger from the aether before digging into it ravenously.

Flutterfree blinked. “Think we can just walk by?”

“No,” Nightmare said. He tried to walk by anyway.

Dwight took exception to this, wordlessly conjuring another hamburger and tossing it at Nightmare’s head. Nighmare’s response to this was to lurch forward suddenly and scream in Dwight’s face. Dwight headbutted him, knocking him backward. She followed this up with a barrage of fax machines conjured from nothing.

Nightmare cut through the fax machines with his quick reflexes, leaving piles of electronics around him. Flutterfree looked right at Dwight. “Why are you attacking us?”

Dwight teleported behind Flutterfree and slapped her upside the head, tossing her off Nightmare. Nightmare reacted by sinking his claws into Dwight, only to realize that he’d skewered a full size car. “What.”

Dwight appeared behind him, grew a body of a centaur, and punched him in the face. His head turned around a full three hundred and sixty degrees, roaring the whole while. He leaped onto Dwight, trying to tackle her, but once again he failed to grab what he was aiming for, somehow latching onto a cow made of squares.

Flutterfree reasoned that Nightmare could handle himself for now – she needed to get what they came for. She ran into the barber shop after the Medic, mildly shocked to find that the interior was on fire. She considered backing out, but then she saw the Medic hoisting his medigun through the flames with his back turned toward her.

“CATCH HORSY HORSE FEVER THIS SUMMER!” he announced, kicking an action figure of Twilight into the fire.

Flutterfree took a breath – all she had to do was move quickly. Treat him like a bear, right. Just a little twist, he’d drop the gun, and she could make off with it… Easy, right?

She lunged across the room, flames lightly brushing her wings. She placed her front hooves directly on the Medic’s back, right below his shoulders. She twisted her body around, placing a back hoof on top of his shoulder. Then she twisted him, giving his back the ultimate in ‘massage’ treatments. He let out a roar of surprise, dropping his medigun as his arms splayed straight outward.

Flutterfree kicked him to the ground, hoping he’d spend a good deal of time wondering why his back suddenly felt so much better. She grabbed the medigun in her hooves and flew toward the front door.

“QUEEN HORSYTIME!” the Medic yelled from behind her. Flutterfree thought this was probably a bad sign, and the instant explosion behind her proved that it was. She and the medigun were launched through the doors of the barber shop, tearing the flimsy structures off their hinges. She landed in the dirt, careful to orient herself face up to protect the medigun from the crash.

A Princess Celestia stood over her – no doubt the ‘Queen Horsytime’ the Medic had called for but a moment ago.

She looks peeved, Flutterfree thought. She, luckily, didn’t get a chance to find out how peeved Queen Horsytime was. A strangely flat apple came flying out of nowhere and hit Queen Horsytime between the eyes, somehow knocking her out.

Flutterfree blinked. “What?”

“Apple. It’s just the kind of thing that happens here,” a synthetic, monotone voice drawled. A human Fluttershy walked into her field of view. Flutterfree almost thought she was normal save for the gray lampshade-like hat on her head, but as the pegasus looked closer, she found the new Fluttershy to be… flat, just like the apple.

“Um… thanks? Who are you?” Flutterfree asked.

“My name is Zed Ex,” she droned, speaking without moving any part of her body. She hoisted Queen Horsytime over her back. “And I randomly saved you.”

“I see that. But… why?”

“You looked like you weren’t part of the randomness and I just so happened to need an unconscious version of Celestia.”

“…Why?”

“Time travel, Greggs, and another universe.”

“Oh. …Are you part of the randomness?”

“Girl, I am the randomness. I wrote the book on randomness. You should help your bear friend, he’s being eaten by Dwight.”

“What!?” Flutterfree said, turning to Dwight and Nightmare. Nightmare was in fact being eaten by Dwight – if Dwight chewing ineffectually on Nightmare’s arm could be considered being eaten. Flutterfree glanced back to Zed Ex – but she was gone.

“…I’m going to have to ask Pinkie about that one…” Flutterfree muttered to herself, hoisting herself up and slinging the medigun over her back. “Nightmare! Time to go!”

“Good,” he said, running away from Dwight at his top speed. She took offense to this as well, summoning a flaming meteor and tossing it at Nightmare. He jumped out of the way easily, leaping back up the cliff face with Flutterfree flying alongside him. They narrowly dodged another flaming meteor as they climbed.

At the top, Flutterfree perched herself on Nightmare’s back, smiling. “To Crosstown!”

She could hear the medic yell behind them. “YEEEEEEE-HAW!” This prompted Flutterfree to glance behind them and see a herd of Applejacks and Engineer Mercenaries charging the cliff face.

“Go go go!” Flutterfree shouted.

Nightmare did as instructed, dashing across the desert. Flutterfree saw Applejacks and Engineers falling over each other in their attempts to reach her, and a very furious Dwight shooting meteors at them that always seemed to miss. A car exploded.

Flutterfree laughed, the absurdity of the situation finally getting to her.

~~~

“This is your captain speaking…” Alushy announced. “If you look to your left you will see the Twisty Hills, a lovely place where I made the horrid decision of getting dreadlocks. Avoid at all costs. To your right, there’s a Mann Co. Tower with a giant hole blown through it in the shape of a skull, complete with physics defying eyeballs. And if you could look beneath us, which none of you can, you’d see the Haunted Territories.”

“I can see them!” Pinkie yelled clapping her hooves.

“Go figure,” Alushy muttered. “Are you the only one awake?”

Pinkie glanced behind her. “I think so. Except Pepsi Man, but he doesn’t talk, so it might as well be just us!”

Alushy shrugged, glancing at the downward-display in front of her. It showed a lot of dead trees, dark mists, and graveyards lit by the light of the moon. “Then I suppose it’s ‘bonding time’ then, isn’t it?”

“You do realize you’re asking for it now, right?” Pinkie asked.

“See, I’m over here thinking it’d just be best to rip the damn bandage off all at once, on my terms, rather than on your terms when you want to throw a party or something equally stupid.”

Pinkie giggled. “I wasn’t going to demand any one-on-one bonding time at all! You didn’t seem like the type to appreciate that! You prefer to get your socializing in by being the center of attention, random mockery, or beating the stuffing out of people.”

“The term is ‘beating the shit out of everyone’, Pinkie,” Alushy corrected.

“Hey, you say things your way, I say mine my way, okie dokie?”

Alushy smirked. “Okie. Dokie.”

Pinkie giggled and winked. “That’s more like it!”

Alushy facehooved. “You were supposed to get mad at that.”

“Does this look like the face of a pony who gets mad a lot?”

“No. That’s part of the challenge, get the pink puff of adorable laughs and smiles and goddamn rainbows to lash out.”

“I can get angry if you want!”

“And your self-imposed challenge is to drive me up a wall.”

“It’s workiiiiiiiiing!”

Alushy smirked. “And I thought I was the world’s most annoying asshole.”

“Your descriptions just don’t work…” Pinkie shook her head. “Try being more creative!”

“You are such a fudging spaz that when you laugh, the entire world is forced to laugh with you in the most horrible perversion of the sound imaginable – a joyless haunting gasp that’s nothing more than a pathetic wheeze of air unleashed by a fear reflex. A fear of the party pony’s smiling wrath.”

Pinkie giggled. “And you, my vampiric friend, have an ego so large it could be used to pilot the Titanic.”

Alushy blinked, processing that one for a minute. “Huh. That’s a pretty good one.”

“I’ve got more! Ahem! What’s with those red glasses? Trying to disguise all the blood so you don’t feel ashamed?”

“What’s with your body? Are you some kind of sapient pasta noodle or did you try one too many advanced maneuvers in bed?”

“I think I know why you like to eat people – it’s the only way you can get anything close to resembling a close relationship with anypony!”

“I bet you cry every night over that one time in sixth grade little Timmy rejected your advances!”

“How much work do you put into your outfit? It’s not worth it, even if it’s none.”

“Your mother was so fat she gave birth to you.”

“In your previous life you were a pathetic bullied foal with supervillian aspirations!”

“You’re a creeper who secretly gets off on all the things she knows!”

Rarispy groaned. “Are you two seriously having a ‘roast me’ contest?”

“Shut up, we’re bonding. I’m pretty sure we’ll be soul sisters by the time we land,” Alushy said.

“But… So many of those were bad…”

“That’s part of the fun!” Pinkie said, giggling. “We should probably stop though, there’s only so much roasting that can be done before it starts getting overdone.”

Rarispy raised an eyebrow. “You’re implying it wasn’t overdone before you started.”

“Oooooh burn!” Alushy laughed.

Rarispy facehooved. “No, no I am not playing your moronic game.”

Then a magic missile hit the jet because Alushy wasn’t looking at what she was doing. The left wing blew off, the tremor waking up all ponies who were still asleep.

“What was that?!” Renee shouted, holding onto her seat as tightly as she could.

“Magic missile!” Pinkie said, grabbing a pillow and placing it over her chest.

“Where from!?” Nova asked.

“That’s the thousand dollar question!” Alushy shouted, trying to pull up in vain. “The answer? Probably that castle down there that’s shooting another one at us.”

Nova lit her horn, creating a shield to deflect the other magic bullet. “This is either Brutalight or an automated spell, either way I think it’s a pretty good indication we’re in the right place!”

“We are going to crash!” Renee yelled. “Do something!”

Alushy cocked her head and widened her eyes. “What the fudge do you think I’m trying to do?”

Nova lit her horn again, teleporting all six of them out of the Blackbird. She levitated all of them slowly to the ground with only a slight strain on her magical powers. They watched as their beautifully crafted state-of-the-art aircraft crashed into the ground a mile or so away, producing a giant fireball that lit up the night.

“…Why do my Blackbirds always explode!? I didn’t even get to use the weapons!” Alushy shouted.

“Lame!” Pinkie said, folding her front hooves.

Nova placed them gently on the ground, sighing. “Well, at least we know which castle to go to. This way everypony.”

“Wait!” Renee said. “Remember, Magic Mare told us to check out the graveyard. Okay? We do that first.”

Pinkie pointed to their left. “That’s it right there.”

Renee glanced that direction, not as surprised as she probably should have been to see a wire gate leading into a large graveyard filled with worn gravestones.

Rarispy drew one of her guns. “Shall we?” She glanced to Alushy. “Should we expect any of your kind?”

Alushy grinned. “Undead? Definitely, these are the Haunted Territories, what self-respecting place named that doesn’t have ghosts? Vampires like me? Definitely not.”

“Good to know.”

“Can I just say that it feels wonderful to be under moonlight?” Alushy took a deep breath of the night air and bore her sharp teeth with a grin. “So much better than daylight.”

Nova blinked. “Wait, how did you survive in the daytime? Aren’t vampires supposed to, you know, burn up in the sun?”

“I’m not your garden variety vampire if that wasn’t clear by now.”

Nova narrowed her eyes. “I asked how.”

“And I don’t particularly feel the need to tell you! Not to mention the look on your face right now is pure gold. Wish I had a camera. Oh wait, I do!” she pulled out a smartphone and took Nova’s picture. “This is going on my Twitter feed…”

Pinkie pulled out a phone of her own. “What’s your Twitter?”

“The Crimson Fudger.”

“Oooh, nice! I’m following you. I’m Pink Party Palooza.”

Nova twitched. “Internet here how?”

“Blame Mann Co.” Pinkie answered.

Rarispy slapped the phones out of Alushy’s and Pinkie’s hooves. “Stop it with this nonsense! We have a mission! We need to move. The sooner we find out what the deal is with this graveyard, the sooner we can take down the Elements of Insanity.” With a dignified huff, she tossed her mane back and trotted into the graveyard.

Pinkie shrugged, following her, bringing the rest of the group with her. Pepsi Man was a bit too tall and hit his head on the top of the entrance arch, falling down like a domino.

Nova helped him back up. “You seem to randomly hurt yourself a lot…”

Pepsi Man shrugged.

The graveyard itself was dark and filled with fog. The black, pointed fence was lined with occasional stone columns topped with pumpkins. The graves themselves were so old and worn it was nearly impossible to tell what their inscriptions once were. A bat screeched overhead.

Alushy shot the mammal out of the sky. “That bat just told us to go die in a fire,” Alushy explained. “It got what it deserved.”

Nova closed her eyes and lit her horn. “There’s… a lot of power here. Some of it is magic… Some is… something else.”

“Probably ghosts,” Rarispy said.

“That does match Twilight’s theories,” Renee added. “She’s been working on a theory that separates special abilities and other things into classes. She was talking to me about ‘magic’ and ‘spirits’ the other day. One comes from without, the other from within…”

One of the graves shifted. A large, meaty hand reached out of the soil beneath, translucent like all ghost arms should be. At this point most ponies would just run, but not the party there currently – they stared at the ghostly arm with an overall mood of curiosity.

The ghost of a mercenary pulled itself out. He was one of the large, bulky, Heavy class, his only unique feature being a frying pan on his head. He stood tall, glaring at all six of them.

“Hello! I’m Pinkie Pie!” Pinkie said.

“I’m Intelligent Heavy,” the Heavy said, pointing at her. “You’re mine!” He jumped at her, trying to force his spiritual form into her body. She just put on the Bomb Mask and exploded, sending both of them flying.

Pepsi Man tossed a can of Pepsi at the ghost, but it flew right through. The Intelligent Heavy laughed. “I am a ghost! You can’t hurt me!”

Nova froze the ghost in a magic crystal. Intangible though he was, the magic prison kept him sealed away. Nova glanced to Alushy. “Can you take care of this thing if it becomes a problem?”

Alushy grinned. “I’d love to find out.”

“I’ll take that as a yes…” Nova said, walking to another grave. “We need to be careful, there may be more ghosts.”

“Do you think Magic Mare tricked us?” Rarispy asked.

Renee shook her head. “I don’t think so… There is something here, I’m sure of it.”

“I’m more than sure,” Pinkie said, removing the Bomb Mask. “I know there’s something here.”

“Then what?” Nova said, searching around for anything she could find.

Rarispy looked at the Heavy. “If it helps, I think mercenaries with small additions like that are called ‘Freaks’, though I’m not sure how that relates to the Elements of Insanity…”

“I don’t see how it does either…” Nova said, placing her hoof on a gravestone.

The gravestone reached out to her. Images flashed in her mind, flooding her with information.

There were seven ponies, seven normal ponies. Twilight, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, and Derpy. They were in their world – an Equis set slightly before Twilight had gotten wings – and then they weren’t. Nova saw them appear in the graveyard – disoriented, scared, and alone.

Rarity was first. Nova watched Rarity approach a grave, curiously examining a small red hat laying on it. A transluscent green hand shot out of the ground, startling Rarity. The ghost rose into the air, pointed at Rarity, then went inside her.

Not a second later Rarity was no more. Now it was Rarifruit. She placed the small hat on her head, grinned psychotically, and yelled ‘MINE!’

Nova reeled back from the gravestone. “They… They were normal, once.”

“Huh?” Renee said. “What?”

“They were all once normal ponies, like you and me. But… This place.” She gestured around. “This place did something…”

She touched another grave, flooding her mind with more images. She saw others wandering the graveyard, getting possessed by ghosts… No… It wasn’t quite possession. It was more… a fusion. Neither the ghosts or the ponies had full control. What resulted was its own being, something new.

Nova tore her hoof back. “That’s what all of them are… Lost ponies, dragged to this world, instantly having their lives torn away.”

“That’s… That’s horrible,” Pinkie said.

“Alushy, do you by chance know how to… Exorcise somepony?”

Alushy shook her head. “In my world priests didn’t do the exorcism thing, they killed whatever they thought was an unholy blight.” Alushy smirked. “Quite fun, the one-sided rivalry I had with a particular priest…”

“I do not think that would work anyway,” Rarispy said. “There’s clearly more to them than just being possessed.”

“Quite…” Nova said, touching another gravestone. She saw six Elements of Insanity capture a poor unicorn Twilight and force her to absorb two separate spirits into her, becoming the brutal leader they all wanted. Nova couldn’t remove the image of Twilight chained in midair with dark magics from her mind. A tear rolled down her cheek. “This place… This Graveyard… It killed all of them and replaced them with insane monsters.”

Pinkie sighed. “And in return, the monsters killed everything around them.”

“They might not have a choice,” Renee said. “Maybe… Maybe we shouldn’t hold it against them?”

Rarispy shot her a look. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

Renee lifted her hat slightly. “I am suggesting that they may not have any say in what they’re doing. It may just be a result of this horrific place. They could just be mental patients, doomed to do what they do.”

Nova placed her hoof on another grave and winced. “No… They have a choice.”

Renee blinked. “How so?”

“Magic Mare is a fusion with one of these ghosts. Her friend was as well. I saw her. A fusion of Sunset.” Nova shook her head. “I saw the two of them doing horrid things as well, but Magic Mare is proof enough. They had a choice.”

Rarispy twirled her gun. “Good enough for me. They must be stopped by any means necessary. They’re too dangerous, have killed too many.”

Renee frowned. “I… Can’t bring myself to disagree. I wanted to.”

Nova looked at the moon above them. “This place… It’s more than just a collection of ghosts and memories.” She lit her horn and closed her eyes. “There is a lot of power here, of all mysterious kinds. This place – I think it’s like a sinkhole for the multiverse. A nexus of sorts, one that draws ponies and people in only to get possessed by ghosts. By these ‘Freaks’, as it were.”

“What does that mean?” Renee asked.

“It means this place, right here, is a place of high dimensional activity.” Nova rubbed her chin. “I wonder…”

Pinkie clapped her hooves. “Girls! Pepsi Man! I’ve got a plan!”

Nova blinked. “You do?”

“Yes. I do. I think you do as well. Huddle up, we’re going to get Twilight back!”

~~~

Rainbine leaned against a wall at the front gates of the castle, her black ‘ear spikes’ humming softly. She was resting her eyes, like she always did when it was her turn for guard duty. She snored, making it clear to the entire world that she was asleep on the job.

Anypony trying to bust into the castle would think the sleeping robotic pegasus would make their jobs so much easier, but this would not be the case. Her robotic spikes picked up on movement, jolting her awake in a single instant. She pointed her gun through the front gates where she’d detected movement. But now there was nothing.

She narrowed her eyes. “Who’s out there?”

“PEPSI MAAAAAN!” Pinkie shouted while Pepsi Man charged Rainbine. Rainbine had time to aim her gun but not time to shoot before she got punched in the face by the bizarre soda superhero. Pinkie followed this up with a golf club to the face.

Rainbine cracked her neck side to side. “Well, if it isn’t the pink one and the fizzing idiot! You’ve just raised the alarm. Everypony’s closing on this position, ready to give you a bad time!”

Pinkie put her hooves to her face. “Oh woe is us, your friends are coming! How dreadful and unexpected!”

Rainbine launched a missile at Pinkie, only for her to jump on top of it and ride it like a wild bull. She directed it back at Rainbine, yelling “Yippee Ki Yay!” the whole way. Rainbine dodged the missile by flying into the air, but Pepsi Man met her with his fist, forcing her to the ground.

She grunted, standing back up. “Two on one isn’t fair…”

“You were doing fine with two on one before!” Pinkie said, twirling her golf club. “Nova and Nightmare aren’t pushovers!”

Rainbine twitched. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, candy horse.”

A can of Pepsi appeared in Rainbine’s hooves and exploded, showering her in liquid. This did not seem to affect her. She looked at Pepsi Man and raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

Pepsi Man moved to punch, but this time Rainbine fired her gun in time. The bullet exploded at his feet, knocking him flat onto his face. “Ha! Loser!”

Pinkie took the opportunity to hit Rainbine with her squeaky hammer, tossing the robot into a nearby wall. “Ha! Loser!” she echoed, giggling.

Rainbine growled, firing a volley of missiles at Pinkie, only for her to dodge all of them. “You shot! And you missed!”

Rainbine fired again, and again, and again, always missing. Pinkie giggled nonstop, having a wonderful time playing the game. “Oh! You hit something! It wasn’t me, but, you know, you should get points for that!”

The robotic pegasus twitched. She started yelling at a constant, enraged tone, building up her power.

Pinkie grinned. “That didn’t take as long as I was expecting.”

Rainbine stopped yelling once she had reached her ‘super’ state. “I was getting tired of this.” She pointed her gun, unleashing a barrage of much more powerful bullets, which Pinkie dodged. Rainbine was expecting this, taking the opportunity to punch Pinkie across the face with her enhanced speed. Pinkie went flying into Pepsi Man.

“Don’t. Mess. With the Rainbine.”

Pinkie giggled. “Looks like you’re finally ready.” She pulled her real warhammer out of her mane, slamming it on the ground hard enough to crumble the earth beneath. “I can start using the actual weapons now.”

Rainbine’s eyes widened. “Aw sh-“

The gigantic hammer met Rainbine’s face with a resounding clang that could only be made by two giant hunks of metal colliding at high speed. Rainbine’s face was now dented, but this didn’t appear to deter the robot. She flew behind Pinkie and kicked her into the ground.

Pepsi Man tried to take advantage of her turned back to deliver a punch, but her sensors warned of his attack. His face was sent back into the ground with a quick roundhouse kick. She fired a couple missiles at him, ready to finish off the muscular weirdo once and for all, but Pinkie caught the attack in a butterfly net.

Rainbine growled. “How’d you keep them from exploding!?”

“I didn’t,” Pinkie said. The missiles in her net all exploded, sending her flying, but keeping Pepsi Man safe.

“Ha!” Rainbine laughed. “Now you’re open!” She fired a complex pattern of missiles at Pinkie – one of which actually hit. Pinkie flew up into the air.

Rainbine narrowed her eyes. “Hey, where’s the blood?”

“I’m a sapient pasta noodle!” Pinkie giggled, pulling her warhammer out of nowhere again and bringing it down on Rainbine as she fell. Rainbine was flattened into the ground, grunting. A screw popped loose from one of her legs.

“Oh mallet, mallet, mallet in the morning,” Pinkie sung, swinging the warhammer back and forth. “Mallet, mallet, mallet all day!”

She stopped swinging, putting her weapon away. Rainbine’s super was gone. She tried to stand up, but found that two of her legs weren’t working, one of which was her gun leg. Her face was flat on two sides, one of her eyes wasn’t glowing, and her metallic tail was bent sideways. “Ow…”

“You’ll be fine,” Pinkie said, smirking. “A day at the shop and it’ll be good as new!”

Pepsi man doused Rainbine in a flood of Pepsi. “OWOWOWOWOWOOW!” she screamed. “THAT STINGS!”

“Hey, Pepsi Man!” Pinkie held up his hand, stopping the flood. “Not cool! She’s down, don’t hurt her anymore unless you have to! Got it?”

Pepsi Man nodded in understanding, apologizing with a short bow to Rainbine.

“…Screw you,” the robot muttered.

Pinkie looked deeper in the castle. “I hope the others are doing well… I’m concerned we didn’t attract more attention.” She furrowed her brow. “Did they expect us to be a distraction?”

Pepsi Man shrugged.

“Well come on! Let’s move in!” The two of them ran into the castle proper, ready for whatever the Elements of Insanity threw at them.

~~~

Brutalight’s alarm spell went off in Pinkis’ mind – they were being attacked at the front gates. Pinkis knew was that they were fighting Rainbine; that was all.

She dropped the giant sandwich she was preparing in the kitchen. She’d give Rainbine flak about interrupting her meal later, but helping the robot pegasus was easily more important than a simple sandwich. Plus, she could just eat the intruders. That would be great.

She heard a gunshot. A bullet shot right through the back of her head, emerging between her eyes. She fell to the ground, glowing with the red energy of the Ubercharge, slowly healing herself back to full health. “All right, who’s the wise guy-“

Another bullet hit her, this time through the neck. She grunted, healing it again. “That’s really painful you know! It makes me angry! And hungry!”

Alushy dropped from the ceiling, twirling her guns. “Oh, trust me, I know the feeling.”

Pinkis laughed. “That’s a riot! You can’t know the hunger within me!”

“Bitch, I’m a vampire. I eat people.” She pointed a gun right at Pinkis’ face. “I biologically require industrial quantities of blood to live at my full potential. In other words, you’re not a special snowflake. You going to go cry to mommy about that or you gonna own up and fight like a woman?”

Pinkis roared, charging. Alushy pulled the trigger again, sending a bullet right into Pinkis’ mouth; a bullet that she caught with her teeth. Pinkis bit down on the bullet, shattering it.

Alushy blinked. “…That’s my trick.”

“I’m going to eat you just like I shattered that bullet.”

“What a coincidence!” Alushy sneered. “I was thinking the exact same thing!”

Pinkis punched Alushy across the face, tossing her red glasses to the side. Alushy aimed her gun, but Pinkis bit down on the leg the gun was attached to, severing the limb in a single chomp. Bucketloads of blood – far more than should have been inside Alushy – blasted everywhere.

Pinkis grinned. “Heh. That’s pretty good meat you got on you.”

Alushy smirked, her shadows coalescing together to reform her leg. “You were saying?”

“…What are you, just a flappier version of me?”

“I’m a flappier version of you with guns, better teeth, and a lot of undead magics buried within me.” Her tongue shot out, licking her teeth. “And you look like you need to see them.”

Pinkis grunted. She took a giant knife out of her mane. “Fine, let’s pull out all the stops here.”

“Oh, all the stops?” Alushy laughed. “Pinkis, you pathetic little ball of fluff. I don’t think you realize what you’re asking for.”

Pinkis grinned. “I’m asking for both of us to stop toying around.”

Alushy chuckled. “I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t toying around. Ready for Complete Bullshit Level One?”

“…Level One? Please, give me a bre-“

Alushy’s shadows shot from her body, forming dozens of sharp edges lined with necromantic eyes and laughing sounds. Pinkis’ leg was torn off with a quick burst of dark power, but she didn’t let the pain deter her. She just screamed in rage, twirling her knife around in an impossible way so as to deflect all the incoming shadows.

“It seems like you have some spark in you after all!” Alushy laughed. “Tell me, why do you not use those Pinkie abilities of yours often enough?” Pinkis jumped through hoops and twists to avoid the encroaching shadows. “It’s clearly all that’s keeping you alive right now!”

“Shut the hell up!” Pinkis yelled, punching Alushy right in the face, driving her knife between the vampire’s eyes. With a twist and a bite, Alushy’s head flew clean off, arcing through the air and landing with a splat.

“Heh,” Pinkis said. “Lost your head there.”

“That was a horrible joke,” Alushy said, shadows spiraling from where her head had been moments before. “It was so bad it makes me feel sorry enough for you that I’m going to skip right to the point. You want all the stops pulled? Consider them pulled.”

“That’s more li-“ Pinkis was cut into a hundred pieces and thrown onto the ground. She reformed in a few seconds, eyes wide. “What. In. The. Hell?”

Pinkis was thrown to the ceiling, all her bones cracking at once. She screamed. She couldn’t see anything but the eyes in the darkness. So many eyes… Staring at her…

Then there was the red hat and glasses. When had Alushy put them back on?

“You may be wondering why I was sent to you of all ponies,” Alushy began, her shadows tearing at Pinkis’ limbs continually, never giving her a moment to react, never letting her Ubercharge stop working. “Certainly the sheer power of my complete bullshit would be better suited against Brutalight, yes?”

Pinkis grunted. “Enlighten me.”

“It’s because when you go down, you don’t stay down.” Alushy threw Pinkis to the ground, allowing the shadows to dissipate. “You heal yourself back up to full, no matter how intense the injuries. And there is nopony on that team who can make you stay down. Or, at least, none willing.”

Pinkis spat blood on the ground, standing back up to her full height. “So, a team of pansies then?”

“Yes. But I’m smart enough to know that’s probably better for them, in the long run.” Alushy shot Pinkis in the head, pushing her back. “But you know what else? Being a pansy only gets you so far. So, sometimes, you need somepony like me.” She grinned psychotically, her blood-soaked teeth glinting, her eyes flashing with a bright red bloodlust. “One who can get the job done. One who won’t hesitate. One who isn’t afraid to brutally murder. I’ve been ordered to take you out of the equation permanently by any means, and for once I’m giddy to follow somepony else’s orders.”

Pinkis coughed. “That… May be true, but-“

Alushy’s jaw opened far wider than should have been physically possible. She sank her teeth into Pinkis, driving her to the ground. She set to work slowly dismembering the freaky pony’s entire body, condensing it piece by piece into nothing.

In under a minute, there was no Pinkis left to devour. Alushy wiped her lips. “Told you.”

It was then that Alushy noticed she’d had an audience. Rarifruit was standing in a nearby hallway with the wheeled crutches on her back legs. She had a hoof to her mouth and eyes that trembled with emotions she wasn’t able to process. There was evidence she had already lost the contents of her stomach.

“Oh, sorry you had to see that,” Alushy said, twirling a gun. “Bit gruesome, no? Not as bloody as I’m used to, admittedly, but…”

“YOU MONSTER!” Rarifruit shouted, losing her strangely quiet voice for once in her life.

“Takes one to know one!”

“HOW COULD YOU DO THAT AND STILL HAVE THAT STUPID SMILE ON YOUR FACE!?”

“I don’t know…” She lowered her glasses and narrowed her eyes. “How could you slaughter all those hundreds of people you did?”

“They didn’t mean anything!”

Alushy fired a bullet, shattering one of Rarifruit’s wheeled crutches. She fell to the ground, unable to stand under her own power. Alushy’s looked down at her, scowling. “You know, I may be a monster, but I at least recognize that everyone I kill is a person. Rarely are they worthy of my respect, or really, worthy of more than a simple punchline, but they exist.” She holstered her gun.

Rarifruit summoned her magical grabby hands, throwing them at Alushy. Alushy rolled her eyes, dodged the hand, and flew away – out of Rarifruit’s range.

Rarifruit screamed at the top of her lungs in a rage unknown to most ponies. She knew, deep in her heart, that Alushy was going to pay. They would all pay with their lives.

In her tears, she pulled herself along the ground with her front hooves. She had somewhere important to be.

~~~

Fluttershout and Derpigun ran through the halls of the castle, planning to give Rainbine aid.

“Okay, Derpigun, listen,” Fluttershout said. “If your gun jams, get behind me. I’ll blow everything out of the water while you fix it. Then, any of them that are still up for some reason, you riddle with holes. Got it?”

“Right!” Derpigun said, hoisting her weapon. “Let’s kill some invaders!”

“As painfully as possible!”

“PILLS!” They heard Applepills scream, falling from a floor above them. She landed on her head.

Fluttershout shook her head, picking up Applepills with her wing. “Applepills, we have to help Rainbine. I’ll give you pills after we’re done, okay?”

“Oh, right! I can wait!”

Fluttershout nodded. “Goo-“ She paused, a suspicious expression crossing her face. “Wait…”

“Damnit,” Applepills blurted, swinging with a butterfly knife at Fluttershout’s neck.

Fluttershout dodged, raising an eyebrow. “A Spy, huh?”

Rarispy revealed herself along with her sound-blocking headphones. “Yes. A Spy. A very particular Spy. The Spy whose sister you killed!”

“Uh, wait, how are you hearing us?” Derpigun asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Fluttershout muttered.

“Lip reading,” Rarispy said, drawing her gun on Fluttershout. “Regardless, it’s been a terror knowing you, adieu.”

Fluttershout caught the incoming bullet with her voice, tossing it to the side. Derpigun activated her artillery, planning to riddle Rarispy with holes.

Unfortunately a large blue magic shield rose up in front of Rarispy, sending bullets ricocheting every which way.

“Quit it!” Fluttershout blurted. “You’re going to hit me!”

“Oh! Right!” Derpigun said, lowering her gun. “Where’s the other one?”

“Don’t know. Keep an eye out.” Fluttershout took in a breath and blasted the noise at Rarispy. The magical shield vibrated and shattered, allowing the force of sound to grab Rarispy and toss her back, head over hooves.

Fluttershout flew to Rarispy and flicked the headphones off with a swift motion. “Look at you, helpless before me. You came here looking for vengeance – instead you just get to join your sister on the other side.” She took a breath.

A blast of blue magic hit Fluttershout in the side, knocking her over. Renee leaped from behind her vantage point, placing the headphones back on Rarispy with her magic and using her hooves to drag the dazed unicorn away.

“Derpigun!” Fluttershout blurted. “You were supposed to be watching for her!”

“Sorry!” Derpigun blurted, aiming her gun at the two retreating unicorns. The click sound was a clear indication of a jam. “Oh, come on!”

Renee pulled Rarispy all the way into a side hallway. She slapped her across the face. “Get a hold of yourself!”

Rarispy shook her head, clearing it. “That bitch…”

“Yes, I know, but we lost our surprise. We can’t take her in a straight fight.”

Rarispy grunted, standing up. “I’m not running from her again.”

Fluttershout and Derpigun slid into the view of Rarispy. Derpigun didn’t have to draw her weapon – she just aimed and fired. Renee raised the magical shield again, deflecting all the bullets.

Fluttershout reared. “Derpigun what did I tell you about shooting at-“

Derpigun’s arm-gun stopped firing in a single moment, and it wasn’t because it had jammed. A single bullet had bounced off Renee’s shield at just the wrong angle, nailing Derpigun right through the eye. A mixture of blood and circuitry was visible through the resulting hole.

She was able to keep standing for about three seconds. Then she collapsed, unmoving.

Renee gasped. “I just… I just…”

“You just did the multiverse a favor,” Rarispy muttered, drawing her gun on Fluttershout.

“I didn’t mean to!” Renee said. “We were supposed to subdue and… and…” she couldn’t take her eyes off the hole in Derpigun’s face that she had made. It was because of her, a clothing designer from Ponyville, that a pony was dead. She’d known this day would come, but nothing she told herself was doing anything to help her right now. She was frozen.

Fluttershout, on the other hand, was not. “You BASTARDS!” The vocal swear tossed the two of them back several yards. One of Rarispy’s legs broke on impact with the ground, prompting a sharp cry.

Fluttershout didn’t rush forward and remove the headphones – she just shouted again, tossing the two ponies further down the hall. Rarispy managed to get some shots off, but all the bullets were deflected by the power of Fluttershout’s voice.

The insane pegasus could have ended it at any time. She just needed to fly over there, yank off their headsets, and they’d be dead in a second or less.

She wasn’t going to let them go that fast. She kept unleashing violent bursts of sound, pushing the two Raritys further and further back, bruising and breaking them with every toss. They had taken her friend from her, so they were going to get the gift of a swift death taken from them.

“You HEAR that?” Fluttershout screamed. “THAT is the SOUND of you BASTARDS getting what you DESERVE!”

Renee couldn’t bring herself to disagree.

~~~

Brutalight slammed on the doors of Twilight’s cage. “It looks like your friends are here, little pony. We’re going to kill them. Every last one of them. Unless you tell me what I want to know.”

Twilight barely had enough energy to look at Brutalight. Both of her wings were broken, her tail had been cut down to a pathetic size, fresh cuts lined all areas of her body, and half her face was swollen so much she couldn’t open an eye. But look at Brutalight Twilight did. She coughed. “…No.”

“Maybe you’ll change your mind when I drag one of your friends in here by their neck…” Brutalight sneered. “Do you think you could still say no if I held, say, ‘Renee’ by the throat and slowly gouged her fair mane out by removing her scalp?”

Twilight couldn’t respond. All she could do was cry.

“Ah, look at that, still haven’t run out of tears…” Brutalight stamped her hoof. “You can’t possibly last much longer. I’ll just wait here until one of your friends shows up – then I’ll capture them, and make you tell me. It’s just part of the waiting game… Think closely about your response when they come.”

A pony burst into the room – but it wasn’t one of Twilight’s. It was Rarifruit, crawling along her two front legs, dragging her broken crutches behind her. Brutalight’s stern exterior melted when she saw Rarifruit’s tear-stained face. “Rarifruit! What happened?”

“Alushy,” Rarifruit muttered. “She… She killed Pinkis…”

“Impossible,” Brutalight said, lighting her horn. To her alarm she couldn’t sense Pinkis – or Derpigun. “No… No no NO!” She glared at Twilight, eyes alit with arcane fire. “Two of my friends are dead, Princess!”

“I’m… Sorry…” Twilight said. The worst part was Brutalight knew she meant it.

Brutalight broke one of Twilight’s legs, prompting a shout of pain that was considerably less satisfying than she’d hoped. Brutalight sneered. “I’m not even going to pretend I have the high ground on you. I’d be in denial if I did. But you can’t pretend you have the high ground over me. You’re no different than us.”

Twilight hung her head, giving no response.

Brutalight lit her horn, fixing Rarifruit’s wheel crutches. “Go hide. Things are going to get ugly.”

“They’ve already gotten ugly…” Rarifruit said, trembling slightly.

“That’s why you need to hide. It’s going to get worse.” Brutalight twisted her head side to side. “We’re not going to let this all be in vain, Rarifruit. We will defeat them, and we will lay waste across their precious multiverse in the name of those who have fallen.”

Rarifruit nodded, allowing herself to smile. “R-right.”

“Now hide.”

Rarifruit ran off, galloping much faster now that she had working wheels.

Brutalight sneered. “Time to expose our little spy…” She cast an explosion spell, blasting a hole in a nearby wall right where Nova was hiding. The unicorn was tossed across the room, but she caught herself in her telekinesis, avoiding any injury.

Nova landed flat on her hooves. “There goes plan A.”

“Oh? Pray tell.”

“Wait for you to leave Twilight alone so I could get her out of here.”

Brutalight narrowed her eyes. “And what’s plan B?”

Nova levitated herself into the air and surrounded herself in a complex rotating crystalline shield. “Brute force.”

Brutalight flapped her wings, summoning two swords to her side. She created a complex array of magical circles beneath her. “So, how’s it feel?”

“How does what feel?” Nova asked, focusing seven different magical lasers onto the alicorn, which were easily deflected by her swords.

“Knowing that you ordered a pony’s death?” Brutalight retorted, activating her magical circles. The spells latched onto Nova’s shield on all sides, shattering it. Nova’s own circles reacted, launching crystal balls at Brutalight to little effect.

“I didn’t order anything of the sort,” Nova said, teleporting behind Brutalight and freezing her into a crystal prison. Brutalight broke out by summoning a sword to crack the crystal in half.

“Oh, so you couldn’t tell that Alushy was going to kill? Are you claiming to be that naive?” Brutalight shot her swords at Nova, spinning them in a complex pattern designed to hinder those who liked to spam teleport. Nova reacted with a burst of white energy, pushing everything away from her.

“No, I’m just saying that I wasn’t the one who gave the order.” Nova summoned a giant pole with holy winds swirling around it, driving it toward Brutalight’s chest. Brutalight summoned magical armor to her, shattering the weapon the moment it made contact.

“Then who the hell did?” Brutalight demanded, summoning spires of blood red all around Nova. One spike nicked Nova’s ear, drawing a small amount of blood, but Nova’s retaliation of a crystal shard storm had the same net effect on Brutalight.

“Pinkie did. She came up with the plan. Renee was the only dissenter.” Nova snapped the tips off the red spikes, hurling them at Brutalight. Brutalight shattered them as they reached her with a telekinetic barrier.

“You let a Pinkie order you around?” Brutalight said, flabbergasted.

Nova nodded. “When Twilight’s not around, she’s in charge. She’s proven herself.”

Brutalight shook her head. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Your Pinkie decided, all of a sudden, that you needed to use lethal force?”

“Only against one of you,” Nova said, expression dour. “We couldn’t think of any other way to take care of Pinkis. There weren’t supposed to be any others.”

“What about Derpigun? What happened to her?”

“I don’t know. Whatever did, it wasn’t supposed to. I’m sorry.” Nova summoned a glowing sphere of cosmic energy. “I still have to get Twilight back.”

Brutalight activated her magic-sealing spell, completely done with this extended battle. Nova was expecting this, lighting her horn with a specially crafted spell that exploded, shattering the chain that went for her horn. She sliced the rest of the magic chains with a series of translucent blades.

Nova lit her horn, surrounding herself in a series of ticking constructs. “This may be a bad idea, but here goes…” She altered time so she would move several times faster than everything around her. She teleported behind Brutalight, hitting her in the back of the head with a small laser. A sword flew toward her – she managed to dodge, but she lost her focus on the complex time management spell.

“Maybe finesse isn’t always the way to go…” Brutalight muttered, whirling around. She flared her wings and put every inch of power she could into her magical laser. Nova met it with her own, equally powerful laser. Brutalight grinned, bringing a sword from the side right at Nova, ready to eviscerate her. A small magical shield deflected it. “…What!?”

“Heh… Heh…” Nova grunted, struggling against the force of the laser. “I’ve got… backup.”

Brutalight saw it – the drone, hovering at the edge of the room on Nova’s side. Brutalight sent a sword at it, but it deflected with its own spell. Brutalight tried forcing several swords to the drone at once, but it deflected each one in quick succession. It would be all too easy to simply crush the drone with magic, but Brutalight was currently busy dealing with a giant laser…

Brutalight smirked, an idea coming to her. She generated two swords and sent them to Nova and the drone at the same time. The drone protected Nova – not itself. The little machine exploded in a shower of white hot sparks.

“D… Darnit…” Nova muttered. She saw the other sword coming for her. She had to do something, but she knew it wasn’t going to work. The instant before the sword hit, she dropped her retaliation laser to create a prism shield. It existed just long enough to block the sword – but its creation let some of Brutalight’s laser through. It hit Nova square in the chest, singing her coat. She went flying through the wall behind her, coming to a stop in a pile of rubble.

Brutalight had mixed feelings when she discovered Nova was still conscious. She lifted Nova out of the rubble with her telekinesis and glared. “I. Win.”

“No. You. Don’t!” Nova yelled, furrowing her brow. Then a look Brutalight couldn’t recognize came over Nova, and the unicorn let her body go limp.

Brutalight grinned. “Did you blow out your horn with that? What a pathetic way to go. You fought well, considering you’re just a unicorn. But you knew when you decided to face me that I would win.”

Nova refused to say anything.

Brutalight pressed Nova into the cage wall separating them from Twilight. “Hey Twilight! I got one!”

Twilight whimpered. “Nova…” she said, reaching out a hoof.

Nova winced, now that she could see Twilight closely. “What did she do to you…?”

Twilight looked at Nova’s moving lips in confusion – then started crying.

“Too late for that… But you can still save her,” Brutalight told Twilight. “What will it be?”

~~~

“We need to get to the Rarities now,” Pinkie said, running through the castle halls. “It’s not going well.”

Pepsi Man glanced at her. She knew he was confused by what she was saying even though he had no expression.

“I just know, okay? No I don’t know where in the castle they are, but I know it’s going badly. Just look, evidence of a large fight, anythi-“ Pinkie leaped into the air and twisted to the side, narrowly missing a large magical hand flying right at her. “Woa-HO-oh!”

Rarifruit cursed under her breath. “You should have died right there.”

“Didn’t!” Pinkie said, exchanging her warhammer for a squeaky hammer. “You should really go hide, Rarifruit. You’re disabled, in pain, and… Well you need to think through some thin-“

“YOU KNOW!” Rarifruit yelled. “No, you KNEW! YOU SENT HER!”

Pinkie nodded, grimacing. “Yes, that was me.”

“HOW COULD YOU!?”

“Had to. Knew it was what needed to be done.” Pinkie shook her head. “I don’t want you, or anypony else, to have to join her.”

“HOW CAN YOU TALK LIKE THAT!?” the magical hands swept Pinkie again, but she effortlessly sidestepped them.

“Cause… I know things, Rarifruit. I know that you’re the bad ponies here. I knew Pinkis couldn’t be stopped with anything less than what happened. I take full responsibility for it.” Tears started flowing from Pinkie’s eyes. “This place is so horrible. But I couldn’t just let her keep killing ponies!”

“WHY NOT?” Rarifruit yelled. “THEY’RE JUST PONIES!”

Pinkie’s hair went flat. “E-excuse me?” She threw her hammer aside, opting for a scythe instead. “There were a pair of Rarispy sisters, once. They left their pointless war together and set out to change the world. Then one’s brains exploded out her ears, leading to a destruction of the remaining Rarispy’s joy and replacing it with pointless revenge.” She took an ominous step closer. “There was once a Twilight who refused her call since her birth in this world, devoting her life to understanding the existence she had denied, hoping to help others. It would have been so poetic and beautiful were she the one to finally crack the code, but she was killed by an enchanted sword, frozen by special death magics.” Pinkie swung the scythe, disintegrating a magic hand. She placed the blade right at Rarifruit’s neck. “And then there was a psychotic monster of an alicorn who, honestly, probably deserved what she got. But when she left, a mare was given reason to change for the better.”

Rarifruit whimpered.

“So what were you saying about them ‘just being ponies?’ Please. I’d love to hear more.”

“F-fine then,” Rarifruit stammered. “T-think what you will. Just kill me already.”

Pinkie pulled the scythe away and placed it back in her mane. “Not going to. There’s been enough death today. If I did, I’d just justify what you do. I won’t do it if I don’t have to.” She shook her head, poofing her mane back out. “You should just go hide.”

Rarifruit started laughing. “You… You’re a fool!”

“I… I what?”

There was a loud squishing sound behind her. Pinkie paled, turning around to see the second magic hand – the one she hadn’t taken care of – having snapped Pepsi Man in half. He wasn’t moving, only leaking brown soft drink onto the ground.

Pinkie didn’t even have to go check him to know he was dead.

Pinkie’s hair went flat again. She summoned the scythe.

“Go ahead and kill me. Eye for an eye. That’s how it has to be.”

Pinkie slid past Rarifruit, swinging the scythe twice. Rarifruit expected the pain, or at least the shocked feeling of being cut up, to come – but it never did. Her wheeled crutches fell apart instead, crumbling to the ground.

“What?” Rarifruit yelled.

“Not. Unless. I. Have. To,” Pinkie said, lifting up her squeaky hammer. “An eye for an eye gets us nowhere.”

She hit Rarifruit on the head, knocking her out.

~~~

Rarispy tumbled across the ground as another shout hit her. She had lost count of how many bones were broken at this point. She caught a glimpse of Renee as she tumbled – the unicorn had stopped moving a few seconds ago. Rarispy couldn’t do anything to help her. She couldn’t do anything at all.

She tried to move, but she was tossed back again. And again.

“DIE in the MOST painful way you CAN!” Fluttershout screamed at them.

Won’t be much longer at this rate…

“Hey Flutterbitch,” a deep, menacing voice said. “Those are my friends.”

“What the-“

Alushy dropped on the ground behind her, pointing a gun and smirking. “Helloooooo sprightly! You’re lucky, I have to play nice, so-“

Fluttershout didn’t wait. She noticed Alushy wasn’t wearing any soundblocking headphones, so she let out the strongest shout she could muster in the vampire’s direction. Her head flung back, her red glasses cracked, and blood poured behind her – but she just twisted her neck and righted herself.

Alushy grinned. “See, Fluttershout? This is called a ‘shit eating grin.’ Remember it well, it may be t-“

Fluttershout was having none of this. She unleashed a scream and maintained it. Alushy’s body was lifted off the ground and pressed into a wall – and held there. “This… Gives a new meaning to earrape…” She gurgled through her rapidly flattening body. She tried to reach for a gun, but realized that not only were the guns probably broken from the stress, but her hoof wouldn’t move at all.

She waited for Fluttershout to take a breath.

She didn’t.

Alushy tried to sneer, but her face muscles wouldn’t respond. She tried the Stare – but she was just Stared back, the effects cancelling. She unleashed her shadows, but they were only pressed back to the wall with her. She let out a bloodcurdling roar.

The sound kept her pressed to the wall, immobile, unable to act.

Alushy let herself smile. “And… Here I thought I… was the one with the complete… bullshit attack…”

Fluttershout just kept screaming, fueled by pure rage, unable to think about anything else.

Not even the Rarispy crawling toward her. One of Rarispy’s legs still worked, and she was using it to drag herself closer and closer to the back end of Fluttershout. Even with the sound directed away from her, the power was strong enough to make one of her ears bleed. But she didn’t care.

She readied her butterfly knife. It would take one stab to the throat, and even if she didn’t die she definitely wouldn’t be able to speak anymore. Just... One… Stab…

“PILLS!”

Shit. Rarispy twisted to the left and thrust her knife forward, hitting the incoming Applepills right in the neck. A fatal blow – but not one that would stop the incoming earth pony. The hoof made direct contact with Rarispy’s already severely damaged skull. Something in her neck snapped.

She and Applepills slumped to the ground in a heap. Neither moved.

Fluttershout kept screaming at Alushy.

This lasted until Pinkie arrived. The flat-maned earth pony appeared beside Fluttershout and swung her squeaky hammer – hitting the pegasus square in the throat.

Fluttershout choked on the attack, stopping the shout instantly. She tried to start it up again – but her vocal cords wouldn’t cooperate. She could barely breathe, much less scream. She crumpled to the ground, focusing on getting enough oxygen to her brain to stay alive. She couldn’t focus on anything else.

Pinkie wiped her face, doing almost nothing about the tears rolling down her face. “I… I didn’t kill her. Good. Good…”

Alushy tore herself out of her hole in the wall. “I… Guess. …God I’m pissed.”

“No tearing her apart.”

“I won’t. I’ll just imagine it.” She sighed. “You… Might want to check on your Raritys.”

Pinkie went to Renee and lifted her up, placing her hat back on her head. The unicorn was bruised, battered, and had several broken bones and presumably a comparable amount of internal bleeding, but she was alive.

Rarispy…

Rarispy coughed up blood. “I… I am not making it…”

“We could get you to a-“ Renee began.

“No, you can’t,” Rarispy said.

Alushy, looked at Rarispy with pity. “…Vampirism is an option. I can give it to you, right now. You’ll get a bunch of totally kickass powers. You’ll also get to experience ‘life’ a bit more.”

“…Thanks, but no thanks. I… Need to be with ma soeur.” She looked at Pinkie. “Is that… Are we winning?”

“Just one left,” Pinkie said.

“Good…” Rarispy said, closing her eyes. “The job… will be done…” Her face went slack.

The three ponies stood in silence around the fallen unicorn.

Alushy coughed. “Should we go after Brutalight, or…?”

“That’s up to Nova,” Pinkie said, shaking her head. “Let’s… Let’s just round all of them up.” She laughed bitterly. “I guess I was the one to deal with all three that are still alive…”

She turned and trotted away. “Watch Renee, okay Alushy?”

“You got it,” Alushy said, looking at Renee. “…You really should stop staring at the body, it isn’t good for you.”

“…That could be me,” Renee said, looking into Alushy’s eyes. “That could be me, Alushy. That could have been any of us!”

Alushy nodded. “And it could have been one of them. Death happens. You knew what you were signing up for.”

“…There’s a difference between preparing yourself for it and actually experiencing it.”

Alushy let out a bitter laugh. “You’re full of precious little nuggets of wisdom. You would make millions in the fortune cookie business.”

Renee let out a very undignified snort despite herself.

~~~

Brutalight was lowering the magic spike ever-closer to Nova’s eye, prepared to gouge it out if Twilight wasn’t going to say anything – but then she felt it.

Applepills’ soul vanish.

She stopped the torture, making the spike disappear. She listened closely – she could still hear Fluttershout screaming. Why was she screaming for so long? What could possibly demand that much noise?

Then the noise stopped abruptly.

Brutalight paled. Fluttershout was still alive, but that didn’t sound good. She ground her teeth together – Twilight’s friends would probably arrive at her present location very soon. There was no more time for conventional torture.

“Dammit,” she cursed. “Fine, plan C.” She grabbed Nova and Twilight in her telekinesis, the magic chains around Twilight jingling slightly. “We’re going on a trip.”

She teleported the three of them into a graveyard - a very particular graveyard that meant a lot to Brutalight and her friends. Tears stung at her eyes as memories flooded her mind of Pinkis, Applepills, and, yes, even the klutzy Derpigun. Every last one of them had been at her side for their entire rampage of insanity, and most of them had been her friends in a previous life… And now that bond was gone. They wouldn’t be coming back. They wouldn’t get to be ghosts. They’d just be gone.

And these ponies – oh these interdimensional travellers – had been the cause of their undoing. She’d be sure that she, Brutalight Sparcake, would be their undoing.

She threw Twilight on the ground in front of a gravestone. “Look closely at the scene around you, Charter. It will be the last thing you see as yourself.”

“W-what?” Twilight said.

Brutalight smirked. “Curious thing. Did you know I used to be a regular Twilight Sparkle, not all that unlike you? I was dragged here from another world and deposited in this graveyard full of Freak ghosts… And these ghosts possessed my friends, birthing the ponies that would become the Elements of Insanity. But, see, I didn’t want to be like them. So I tried to run, to flee, to escape. They had to force me to give up Twilight, and become Brutalight.” She cackled. “Best decision they ever made.”

Twilight stared up at her, slowly working out what was going to be done to her.

“You see it, don’t you? I’ll just turn you into one of us. I didn’t want to resort to this – considering how unpredictable it is – but desperate times call for desperate measures.” She lit her horn, summoning the ghost within. The ‘intelligent’ Heavy appeared, groaning.

Brutalight smiled at him. “I’ve got a fleshy body for you.”

Intelligent Heavy rubbed his hands together.

“HEY ASSHOLE!”

Brutalight stopped, turning to Nova. “…Did you just say-“

Nova had her horn lit. Her hoof was placed on the edge of a complicated set of magic circles etched into the ground around the whole graveyard. “Yes, I called you an asshole. Because that’s what you are. And guess what, asshole, you never sealed my magic away. I got you good, pretending to be helpless.”

Brutalight twitched, preparing a spell of her own – but Nova activated the magic circles. The Heavy hid back in his gravestone, leaving Brutalight all alone.

Brutalight growled at the lights of the magic circle appearing all around her. She tried to fire off her spell – but a magic lock clasped itself around her horn. She summoned a sword to free her – but Nova herself grabbed the sword with her magic.

Brutalight roared as she was tied to the ground next to Twilight, all of her attempts to escape foiled by Nova’s quick thinking. “This won’t hold me long!”

“Definitely not,” Nova said, “but I didn’t spend a whole hour inscribing a magic circle just for a simple magic seal spell. You see, you are currently standing in the middle of a dimensional sinkhole, a place where dimensional energies are prevalent and the boundaries between worlds are, effectively, thin. I can, under my own power, open a portal.”

The ground beneath Brutalight shimmered, shaking with the ripples of spacetime. Brutalight’s eyes widened. “No…”

“You’re going somewhere where you can never hurt anypony ever again!”

“NO!” Brutalight yelled. The ground gave out beneath her, but Nova opted to levitate her for a moment rather than let her plunge. She let Brutalight see the endless ocean beneath her. Nothing but water for as far as the eye could see.

“I’ll drown!” Brutalight wailed.

“The chains will lose their anchor when the portal closes, you’ll be fine,” Nova said. “But you’ll spend your days in this abandoned ocean world.”

“You… You can’t do this!”

“Yes, I can. And I have.” Nova narrowed her eyes. “You can’t possibly think I’m doing the wrong thing. What would you do in my place?”

Brutalight didn’t make eye contact.

“That’s right, kill me. Thought so. Goodbye, Brutalight. Enjoy the rest of your life.”

Pinkie appeared next to Nova, a large cardboard box with three ponies in her hooves. “Here’s your friends, Brutalight,” Pinkie muttered. She tossed the box into the portal, landing it perfectly on the waves so it floated. “Bye.”

Nova closed the portal, sealing the four ponies on the other side.

She let out a deep breath. “...Are the others okay, Pinkie?” Judging from Pinkie’s flat mane, she thought she knew the answer.

“Pepsi Man and Rarispy didn’t make it. Renee needs medical attention. I’m not sure what we can do…” Pinkie looked down at Twilight. “Hey, Twilight…”

Twilight forced herself to smile. “H… Hey?”

Nova gulped. “Back to Crosstown.” She lit her horn and teleported away.

~~~

Flutterfree burst into the medical room. “I got it!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

“Ah, yes! Brilliant!” the Medic said, grabbing the medigun and turning it on. “Hardly a scratch on her!” He activated it, healing a different version of Fluttershy who was barely clinging on to life.

Flutterfree grinned, rushing over to Scouty’s bed. “I got it! I got it, Scouty, I got the-“

The bed was empty.

Flutterfree stared at it, a hollow feeling in her stomach. She turned to the bed on the left, to Rainbat. “W-where’s Scouty?”

“He… Didn’t make it…” Rainbat said, tossing a baseball off a nearby wall and back into her hoof. “…Medic carted him out only a few minutes ago.”

Flutterfree trembled. She lost all support in her back legs and fell onto her rear. Her wings hung limp, and her lips began to quaver.

Rainbat saw this happening. “L-look, Flutterfree, you d-did what you could. You’re a hero.”

“But I…”

Rainbat grabbed Flutterfree’s head, even though it was painful for her to make this motion. “You. Are. A. Hero. You can’t save everyone.”

Flutterfree began to cry. “That’s not fair!”

“You save as many as you can, Flutterfree! That’s all you can do!”

“B-but-“

“MAKE WAY!” Alushy shouted, flying in through the front doors, carrying two ponies. She plowed into the dirt, making a crease in the ground with her face. “Ugh… Thank you for flying Air Alushy. The exit is on the left and the pilot needs to hurl…” She passed out.

The Medic took one look at Alushy’s passengers – Renee and Twilight – and pointed the Medigun at them. “Zese injuries… Terrible. Vould not have been able to treat vithout ze gun… zanks to you, Flutterfree.”

Flutterfree rushed to Twilight and Renee, heart in her chest. Scouty was momentarily forgotten in favor of two ponies she had known much of her adult life. “Renee! Twilight! Are you okay!?”

Renee let out a sigh of relief as the medical gun’s charge filled her up. “I… I will be. I… OW! Okay, ribs snapping back into place are not pleasant…”

Flutterfree hugged her. “I was worried about you…”

“It’s good to see you too.”

Flutterfree released Renee and turned to Twilight. Twilight’s injuries were much more intense, but they were healing just the same. The cuts turned to scars, the bones in her legs and wings reset correctly, and her face’s swelling reduced to normal.

Twilight let out a sigh of relief – the pain was gone.

“Hey, Twilight,” Flutterfree said. “How are you doing?”

Twilight looked at Flutterfree and tried not to cry. She failed. “I… I can’t hear you, Fluttershy. I can’t hear you. I…” She broke down, putting her head in her hooves.

Flutterfree forgot everything for the moment and hugged her old friend.

~~~

Alushy cleared her throat and walked into Colonel Carter’s personal office. “So, what did I do this time and how bad is the punishment?”

Carter ignored the question. “The Mirror Portal connected to us again. They had a full army ready to deploy in case everything went wrong – I had to tell them we’d sorted it out, and that we just needed to replenish our dimensional devices. We didn’t need to declare war – and in fact had some friends at a nearby Mann Co who might want to talk to them.”

“…And?”

“And all of that is due, in part, to you. There is no war, there are new friends. One of the most important individuals in the entire multiverse was saved. A threat to many worlds was nipped in the bud.” She leaned in. “And yet, I still believe you are an out of control murderous psychopath.”

“Not really the biggest secret in the universe now, is that?”

“No. It’s not.” She leaned back. “But, despite this, I’ve decided to give you what you want.”

Alushy’s grin widened. “Wait, seriously? I was beginning to think that’d never happen!”

“It’s not because of your ‘good girl points’, mind you. The way you were going you wouldn’t have impressed me at all.” Carter folded her arms. “It’s something Pinkie said to me. ‘Batman needs to kill the Joker already’.”

“…What?”

“She meant that we sometimes need people like you. Sometimes, extremely brutal force is just what’s required. The pony who can do that without hesitating is a boon to those she allies herself with. She recommended I let you through.” Carter reached into her pocket and pulled out a dimensional device. “…You’ve earned this.”

Alushy laughed. “Thank you Colonel! Haha!” She stuck it in her suit. “I knew it’d pay off eventually!”

“…Aren’t you going to jump to another universe?”

“Now? Nah, later. I’ll probably hang out until the ponies leave. What did you take me for, some cut and run little bitch?”

“…Yes.”

“Looks you need to learn a bit more than the Batman-Joker lesson. Why not the ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ lesson? Much simpler, grade-school stuff.”

“I…”

“Baby steps, Colonel. Baby steps.”

Carter shook her head. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

“Very likely,” Alushy said. “I won’t though!” She spread her wings and flew out of the room. “WOOOOOO! I GOT MY DEVICE EVERYONE! YOU CAN NOW CASH IN ON YOUR BETS WITH EACH OTHER! Let me revel in the sudden influx of people who are completely broke. HA!”

Carter sat down in her chair and held the bridge of her nose.

~~~

Twilight stared at the sunset, watching as the day slowly turned to twilight.

She knew there were many ponies and people walking around below her vantage point on a roof, but she couldn’t hear any footsteps, any chatter, nothing. There was no noise.

…That wasn’t completely true. There was a soft ringing tone in her ears, but she knew that was just her body’s internal vibrations interacting directly with her brain. Probably a mixture of the circulatory, nervous, and thaumic systems. There was no external sound at all.

She was deaf.

The medigun hadn’t fixed it. She was pretty sure that meant it was permanent.

There were spells she could use… She could learn wing sign… She could practice reading lips… None of which were things she currently had. Hearing spells were never perfect, and they didn’t process sound the same way an ear did… There was no filtering, no processing, and it was always too sensitive. And she didn’t even know one of those spells right now.

This was going to be hard to adjust to. She’d never be able to listen to music and enjoy it again. It’d interfere with her adventuring. She’d never hear Pinkie’s voice with her own ears again… None of their voices with her own ears again…

A pink hoof waved in front of her eyes. She turned to her left, seeing Pinkie. “…How long have you been standing there?” She could feel her vocal cords vibrate, and she was reasonably sure she’d said what she meant to, but… It still felt wrong.

Pinkie pulled a sign out of her mane. A while.

“…Sorry, didn’t notice.”

She flipped the sign over. Not a problem.

“I know… Guess you were just letting me think, huh?”

She flipped it again. Yeah. Also didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

I’m not! Woo!

Twilight laughed – yet another noise of her own she could feel, but not hear. “Right, right… I just… I don’t know, Pinkie. I know there are lots of ponies who can live without hearing, and I know it’s possible. I just… Part of me was taken away.”

I know.

“You’d think I’d be scarred by the torture… Or the pain… Or, well, these literal scars I have all over my body now, right under my coat. But no. All of that… I knew I was doing it for a cause, so I went through it. My mind didn’t let it affect me. Everything about it… It’s blurry. But this… This is going to stay. Forever.”

I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop it.

“My hearing was the first thing she attacked. After that… She just tried to break my bones. She did. I let her. I didn’t break, and that kept me going. I didn’t let myself think about what I was going to do. I just…” She broke down in tears.

Pinkie pulled her into a hug. Twilight felt her sigh. Twilight checked her mane – poofy, but somehow not as vibrant as usual. “…What happened to you?”

I told Alushy to kill a pony.

Twilight gulped. “Pinkie… I’m so sorry I had to put you in that situation…”

Don’t. One of us would have to do it eventually. We’ll have to do it again.

Twilight wiped her face. “I know. …Why does there have to be death out here, Pinkie? Why does there have to be so much violence, blood, and torture? Why?”

I’m not sure. It might just be that we’re the unusual ones. Maybe things aren’t supposed to be as nice as we are.

“We’re losing our niceness… “ Twilight said, rubbing the scars on her leg. “It’s being tormented out of us, bit by bit.”

Might that be a good thing?

“Maybe. Maybe not. It might just be a tradeoff. Lose some innocence, gain some wisdom.” She shook her head. “I… Just…” She looked at Pinkie. “We really aren’t going to get through this in one piece.”

Nope.

“…I still can’t bring myself to tell us to stop. The Stars told us to stop…”

But we can’t listen.

“No. We can’t.” Twilight stood up tall, glaring at the twilight sky. “We can’t listen. I don’t care if it’s just Starbeat’s stupid Beat carrying us on, or some other stupid force, hunkering down and hiding just isn’t right. What if our world was the one where the Elements of Insanity were born? Had we not explored and known things, they would have killed us all.” She shook her head.

You’re right.

“I know I’m right. But I don’t like it.”

You don’t have to like it.

Twilight smiled at Pinkie. “Yeah. That’s true. How much of what you see do you like?”

Less than I’d like.

Twilight chuckled softly. “And that’s the truth.” She hugged Pinkie. “I’ll be strong when I have to do it, just like you were. Then you won’t be alone.”

Pinkie wasn’t able to reach the sign to turn it over. She just returned the embrace.

~~~

Renee and Flutterfree sat on opposite ends of a table at the Crosstown mess hall. Both of them had giant cups of coffee.

“…I couldn’t save Scouty,” Flutterfree said.

“You saved us. I killed a pony,” Renee said.

“Did it… help save Twilight?”

“Yeah. I like to think so, anyway,” Renee said. “I’m not sure if we would have failed with her alive, though…” She took a sip of her coffee, looking out a window. “Flutterfree, I’m scared.”

“Of more death?”

“No. Of what we’re becoming.”

Flutterfree looked down. “How… so?”

“Pinkie came up the plan quickly. Very quickly. Condemning a pony to her death…” Renee shook her head. “We would never have considered a plan like that before. Not in a million years.”

Flutterfree nodded. “…Was the plan wrong?”

“That’s the problem. I complained at the time. But… Pinkie was right in her thinking. Pinkis wasn’t going to stay down, and we were only able to plan that Brutalight would teleport to the graveyard…” She rammed her forehead into the table and groaned.

Flutterfree put a wing over her. “Shh… Renee, it’s over now. The bad ponies are gone, Twilight is safe, and the Elements of Insanity aren’t going to kill anypony else.”

“At what cost?”

Flutterfree gulped. “The innocence of a handful of ponies. It’s… It’s a good trade.”

“Can’t save everyone…” Renee said.

“Can’t save yourself…” Flutterfree added.

“I couldn't save Rarispy. Couldn’t even move. Then a pony came out of nowhere, and both ended up dead. Eye for an eye…”

“Horrible way to live.”

The two silently took another drink.

“…Thank you, Flutterfree, for risking yourself for us.”

Flutterfree smiled. “I’d do that in a heartbeat.”

Renee nodded. “…What wouldn’t we do for each other?”

“I… I don’t think there’s much of anything.”

Renee’s expression darkened. “That’s terrifying, in a way.”

“Hrm?”

“Friendship is powerful, Flutterfree. Very powerful. The Elements of Insanity had it, and look what they did. What if we become like that?”

“We won’t,” Flutterfree asserted. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“The pony who stands…” Renee said, frowning.

“None of that, Renee! We are going to be better than them! So what if the Magic of Friendship may not always be a good thing? We can make sure that our Friendship is. Got it?”

A smile crawled up Renee’s face. “Got it, Flutterfree.”

“Good. Celestia, this coffee is terrible.”

“I know!”

~~~

“So, in conclusion,” Nova said, making her magical image vanish, “we need to remove Nautica from the Directory.”

“I agree,” Colonel Carter said. “And everyone will agree. But you know the governments will keep the coordinates for themselves, for their own use. And do you know what an uninhabited blacklisted universe sounds like?”

“…What?”

“A prison. A prison to dump any criminal they can’t or won’t deal with.”

Nova frowned. “That sounds… Well, actually not all that bad.”

“Some people are going to be thrown in there who don’t deserve it. For many of them, it will just be a death sentence because they don’t have the magic the Elements of Insanity have. Not to mention the Elements might just kill them.”

Nova sighed. “…What do you suggest we do then?”

“Blacklist it anyway,” Carter said, leaning into the palm of her hand. “I’m just making sure you know the consequences. Not blacklisting it will just give the Elements of Insanity an opportunity to escape.”

“…Okay.”

“Are you sure they can’t escape themselves? You made a portal under your own power.”

“The dimensional fabric was weak in that particular spot,” Nova said. “I simply reversed the flow of ‘energy’ and tapped into it for my spell. It wouldn’t have worked anywhere else in the multiverse. The other side did not have that type of space in it – not that Brutalight would even know what to look for. We told her nothing.”

Carter nodded. “Of course.” She opened the Directory she had on her desk, flipping to 000009 – Esefem. She scribbled a few notes on a piece of paper and inserted it at the end of the file. Then she flipped toward the back of the book, to the small entry on Nautica. She scrawled Dangerous Individuals Present, Blacklist Pending. “That should take care of that, for now. …How’s Twilight doing?”

“…I don’t know,” Nova admitted. “She seems fine, but she’s not doing great. I… Can’t really talk to her at the moment. She has no idea what I’m saying. We’ll see about getting her a hearing spell when we get back, but I know she won’t like it. I have confidence she can get through this – she’s strong – but it will take some time.”

“Pinkie?”

“She doesn’t seem all that affected, but I’m pretty sure she is. I know she’ll be fine though. It’s Renee I’m worried about.”

Carter nodded. “Her first kill…”

“Our first. For any of us. Even Pinkie didn’t actually… you know.”

Carter sighed. “It’s always difficult. It really does become easier. No, that’s not a good thing.”

“I wouldn’t think it was.”

“Part of me had hoped you ponies would get to live like your world wants – in harmony and friendship and amazing innocence.”

Nova shrugged. “We’re just too curious for that, apparently.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s our choice,” Nova asserted. “Let us face our consequences and don’t feel guilty about it.”

Carter nodded. “I’ll try.” She saluted Nova. “Thank you, Nova.”

Nova saluted back. “Thank you, Colonel.”

~~~

Brutalight had transformed the cardboard box into a simple raft with her magic. They had already caught several dozen fish to eat and had gotten over the seasickness. Rarifruit had her crutches again, Fluttershout’s voice was slowly returning, and Brutalight was currently repairing Rainbine.

“Just… Hold… Still!”

“Not my fault!” Rainbine shouted. “You’re pulling a motor wire! Just replace it!”

“There’s no replacements out here!” Brutalight shouted. “Look around! We’re in an endless ocean. There’s probably not any land at all on this god-forsaken planet! We’re in a prison. So we’re just going to have to make do.”

Rainbine sighed. “I… You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Brutalight took in a sharp breath. “It’s… It’s Okay. We… We’re all angry.”

“Yeah…” Fluttershout rasped.

Rarifruit just burst into tears without any words.

Brutalight hung her head in defeat. “Look… Girls, we lost. We lost our fight, we lost our friends, and we lost our home. We… We need to accept that, and do our best here. We have each other. That’s… That’s something.”

“…Yeah…” Fluttershout agreed. Rainbine nodded as well. Rarifruit just kept crying.

Brutalight looked up into the sky at the huge alien moon. She found herself wondering how this affected the tides of this water world, but before she could complete her analysis she saw something else.

A fireball.

A big fireball.

Something was crashing toward the planet from space.

Brutalight smirked. “Girls, we may have lost, but it looks like we might have something to do.” She pointed up. “Whatever that is… It’s ours now.” She stood tall. “We are going to remember our friends, and we are going to turn this world into our world. For them.”

“Right!” Rainbine shouted, grinning. “This place is ours!”

“Ours,” Fluttershout added.

“…Ours,” Rarifruit managed, looking into the sky.

Four ponies watched the skies with anticipation.

023 - A Lost Apocalypse

Corona and Tempest stood before the arches, preparing for what Corona believed to be one of the cooler missions they’d been assigned. Usually the area around the arches was crowded – but not today. Today, it was just the two of them, the arches, and a spherical white capsule with two seats in it.

They were to climb into the capsule and take it through the arches into a universe that had absolutely nothing in it. Just eternal blackness. Visiting this place would be amazing all on its own, just to feel what floating in nothingness really felt like. But there was a real purpose to their mission – they were to take the capsule ‘up’ and use a dimensional device to return. They were going to try and get into orbit around Earth without using a rocket.

Corona was a little surprised they hadn’t tried this before – it’d be so useful if they could pull this off. No more huge, expensive, accident-prone rockets. It’d be as simple as shifting to a dimension, moving ‘up’, and you could escape the gravity prison of the Earth.

Corona zipped up her custom red spacesuit – it was rather tight around her body, and made her limbs look puffy. It wasn’t anywhere near as baggy or awkward as the suits she’d seen used around the International Space Station, so she considered herself lucky. Yet, she couldn’t get the itching at her shoulders and hips out of her mind.

“And they say these are designed for comfort…” Corona muttered, zipping up the arm pieces around the gloves.

“As much as a spacesuit can be,” Tempest said, adjusting the shoes on her own purple suit. “Haven’t discovered a universe with a true bodysuit yet, so we’ve got to deal with this. Suck it up.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “I am.” She snapped her fingers, creating a small flame in the air. Her gloves didn’t catch fire. Good. She flexed her legs and arms, getting a feel for the movement of the suit. “You know, if everything goes right we’ll never have to leave the pod, and these suits will be pointless.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Tempest reiterated, grabbing her fishbowl-esque helmet and placing it on her head.

Corona moved to place hers on as well.

“You don’t need your sunglasses on under the helmet,” Tempest said, muffled through her helmet.

“But what about-“

“The helmet has the same scanning systems,” Tempest told her. “You’re too dependent on those glasses.”

You have no idea, Corona thought, folding the glasses up and placing them in an internal breast pocket. She put the helmet on, getting a much larger version of the display she was used to – faint green lines and symbols that quickly minimized themselves so as not to obstruct her view. It briefly identified Tempest as a friendly and logged her location.

Corona tapped her helmet. “Is this what a fish feels like?”

“Who cares?” Tempest muttered. “It’s a helmet. It does what it needs to do.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “You’re never any fun.”

Tempest harrumphed, climbing into the open pod. “Get in.”

Corona bounced in, landing on the plush seat with considerable force. She buckled herself in. The top of the pod slid over them, sealing the two agents in a white sphere with a single oval window in front of them. There were numerous levers and dials below the window, forming a complicated console. Corona realized that she knew what most of them did. Apparently she really was learning. Go figure.

“Ready,” Tempest called into the microphone.

The arches activated with the usual song and dance – electricity, rings of blue star patterns, a clear portal to another world. In this case, the portal led to a place of infinite blackness.

“Initiating roll,” Tempest said, pressing a button.

Corona blinked. “…Roll?”

The pod rolled forward, rotating Corona and Tempest with it. Corona felt the blood rush to her head when the seats were at the highest place, then back to her feet when it made a full turn. She shook her head. “This is disorienting…”

She didn’t know what she was talking about. The pod passed through the arches when it was upside down, jarringly changing Corona’s orientation from upside down to none whatsoever. She blinked and tried to get her bearings, failing miserably to determine any up at all. She brought her hands to her stomach. “Ooogh…”

“You don’t want to hurl in that,” Tempest said.

“No, really?” Corona said. She realized that the orb was continuing to turning slightly, tumbling through space. The portal was visible, passing across her vision. She cocked her head sideways, trying to line up her orientation with the floor on the other side. The portal closed before she succeeded.

Corona tried to grab her forehead, but the helmet got in the way. “Good gravy… This is bizarre.”

Tempest ignored her. “Orienting.” A few maneuvering thrusters activated, twisting the pod to an orientation Corona assumed was upright. “Beginning ascent.” The thrusters on the bottom of the pod activated, accelerating them ‘upward’. The acceleration pushed Corona into her seat, giving her a feeling of partial gravity. She let out a sigh of relief as her brain processed the gravity into directions.

Tempest looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “You’d make a horrible astronaut.”

“Not arguing that point,” Corona said. “…How ‘high’ do you think we are now?”

“Chronometer says we’ve moved about a hundred meters.”

“Accelerating really is easy without gravity or friction.”

“We don’t know how the distance correlates to Earth,” Tempest reminded her.

“We can check,” Corona said. She pressed the ‘establish portal’ button, planning to look through the portal to see how high they were.

Nothing happened.

Tempest frowned. She popped open the hatch that was supposed to contain the dimensional device – it was empty save for the wires supposed to plug the device in.

Tempest sighed, facepalming. “You didn’t, by chance, bring a spare did you?”

“Uh… No. I was told we didn’t need it.”

“We weren’t supposed to.” Tempest narrowed her eyes. “Somehow, this is Ike’s fault. I know it.”

Corona sighed, sitting back in her chair. “Now we have to wait for them to come get us.”

Tempest cut the engines to conserve power, removing the artificial gravity. Corona groaned. “How long until they check on us?”

“An hour, at least. And even then they may have to get an actual ship to come find us.”

Corona looked at the nothingness outside.

It was suddenly a lot less interesting.

~~~

Renee stepped out of a portal, alone, into the endless forest. There was nothing there but a bench and a man sitting on said bench – Daniel Jackson.

Renee lifted her hat and sat down next to him. “So, what brings a man like you to a place like this?”

Daniel rolled her eyes. “Same as you.”

“Binaries.”

“Binaries.”

Renee shrugged. “It’s been so long since I’ve been to their world… Actually, I’m not sure they’ve let us back there since our first visit.”

“I’ve never been,” Daniel admitted. “Always met them at the Hub or in the SGC.”

“I wonder why they’re so paranoid, sometimes. It’s not like they’ve had experience with aliens before. As far as they’re concerned, it’s just them and their two planets in their universe. What do they think we’re going to do?”

Daniel frowned. “From what I’ve garnered from them in my discussions, they are a thoughtful rather than emotional people. To them, the question of if you should or shouldn’t is rarely asked. The question is ‘can you do it and not suffer any negative consequences’?”

“They’re not robots, dear.”

“No. You ponies aren’t thoughtless emotional bundles of happiness either. But for many of you, emotions and morals overrule your mind. They’re just the opposite – their minds overrule their emotions and morals.”

“So, they put themselves in our shoes. If they had all our magic and technology, they would be using it to raise themselves up?”

“Exactly,” Daniel said. “I’m not sure how their government is structured precisely, but what I do know tells me that it’s a very strict council regime.”

“You’re not wrong,” Renee said. “Though it doesn’t exactly seem evil, like you’d think any ‘strict regime’ would. It’s more of a… place governed by secrets.”

“How so?”

“Well, when we arrived there, the Binary who found us thought he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to. He wasn’t afraid, but he was sad. He thought he would be forced to move with his family to another location where we ponies were known about, so as to not spread it. Apparently the Binaries’ living arrangements are determined by what they know.”

Daniel blinked. “That’s an interesting way to deal with classified information. Move anyone who finds out about it, or wants to know, to the other people who do know. Suddenly the classified information isn’t classified and there’s no chance of further breach. Unless, well, the person is crazy or malicious.”

Renee furrowed her brow. “I’d solve that by creating a ‘prison district’ of sorts, one where all those who want to scream the secrets out would be sealed up. …I would not be surprised if they had such a thing.”

“This all does explain why I couldn’t get him to reveal the names of all the councillors, or even how many there were.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Their leaders love their secrets. I wouldn’t be surprised if not a single one of them was allowed to know how every facet of their government worked.”

“By the way, what happened to the Binary that found you?”

“We revealed ourselves to the whole district,” Renee said, smirking. “They didn’t have to move. The Binary higher-ups weren’t happy about it though.”

There was silence for a moment. Renee stared blankly ahead, expression unreadable.

“Renee? Are you holding up okay?”

Renee gulped. “I… I’m sorry. I just… I see her face again. Exploded… The image just hits me from time to time. Give me a minute.”

A portal opened, cutting short Renee’s minute. Boxen stepped out, flattening out his considerable hair. “We’re ready.”

Daniel and Renee nodded, standing up. They followed Boxen through the portal, arriving in the Binary universe. They appeared inside a building of standard Binary architecture, which was to say really tall ceilings twice as tall as they needed to be with one-way windows that could be looked through, but not into. The buildings visible through the giant, round portals seemed solid and windowless, even though they had the exact same design as the one they were in. The majority of the skyline outside was covered in buildings, with only the occasional tree about seven times taller than any of the round, egg like structures. In the distance, Renee saw a red glow, a sign of a district boundary energy fence.

The interior was well decorated, filled with electric candles, complex carpet patterns, a motorized sculpture of their sun and two planets, and a few portraits of Binary leaders. Renee noticed with mild surprised that one of the Binary leaders was hairless, revealing a creature that might as well have been human if it wasn’t for the black skin and beady eyes.

“Dasei,” Boxen said, noticing where her gaze had fallen. “She had a hair disease. Immortalized here because she created a split media.”

“Split media?” Daniel asked.

“A system of selecting news stories and segments based on district that allowed media companies to expand beyond single districts, increasing unity while adhering to regulations.”

Renee blinked. “Well, you’re certainly being a lot more open than previously, Boxen. It’s a nice change.”

Boxen harrumphed. “Offworlders have officially been declared part of District 7-Z-8 after much political deliberation.”

Renee blinked. “It took two years?”

Daniel shrugged. “I’m not that surprised, honestly. Sometimes things take longer on Earth. Though usually when something’s a pressing matter we can force ourselves to get things done quickly.”

“Approval to move the Apollo to Ardent?”

“Yeah, that was one of those times.”

Boxen shook his head. “For better or worse, you’ve been placed to one of the higher knowledgeable districts that I’m aware of. Enough that yes, you are allowed to know that information between districts is controlled, and that we have two planets, and that we are in contact with otherworlders.”

“We were placed here because we figured these things out, just like when dealing with your people, huh?” Renee asked.

“You were placed a bit higher than that. You have clearance to know some things you didn’t know before. You have to ask though, we’re not just going to spill all our secrets.”

“Not asking you to spill them all, it wouldn’t be proper,” Renee said. “Unless you want to brief us on something particular? Is that why we’re here?”

Boxen shook his head. “You have asked us, time and time again, to increase relations in some way or other. Six council members have convened here to hear what you have to say.”

Daniel sputtered. “It would have been nice to know this ahead of time!”

“This is ahead of time. They won’t be here for a few hours.” He gestured towards a plush couch, sitting to the side of a pair of giant double doors.

Renee gulped. “Well… Then…” She took a piece of paper out of her saddlebags. “Daniel, we better figure out exactly what we want.”

Daniel nodded. “Do you by chance have a table?”

Boxen rolled his eyes. “Of course we do. What kind do you desire? Wooden? Metal? Antigravity?”

“Just whatever’s the easiest for you to get.”

Boxen bowed, leaving to get them a table.

Renee bit her lip. “So, we need to offer them some things… Do we know if Cosmo’s ponies are willing to provide spaceships?”

“They sold one to Earth Vitis, I don’t see why not...” Daniel said, scratching his head. He opened a portal to the Hub and dialed his phone. “Yeah. This is Daniel Jackson, Earth Tau’ri. Need to get a message to Princess Twilight Sparkle, the ‘Cosmo’ version. See, we’re talking with the Binaries and we need to know a few things rather quickly…”

Boxen brought the table, raising his eyebrows at the open portal. “Hrm?”

“Trying to get a hold of Cosmo,” Daniel said. “Have to go through her to even discuss giving you ships.”

“Ah,” Boxen shrugged, looking at Renee scribble furiously on her piece of paper. “I suppose you can open the portal for phone service, just don’t let anyone in.”

“Of course,” Daniel said, adjusting the portal to a much smaller size. “There.”

“Much better.”

Renee lifted up the sheet of paper and squinted at it. “So, we want economic relations, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“How can any of us sell things to them that makes sense? We know nothing about their economy!”

Boxen sighed. The long day just gotten longer.

~~~

Corona tumbled through the emptiness, a bored expression on her face. She was vaguely aware she was rotating in the darkness, though that may only have been because the white dot of the pod rolled through her vision every few seconds.

“Corona, I can’t see you anymore,” Tempest’s voice came through her radio.

“I can see you,” Corona said, stretching herself out and pointing at the pod. “Pointing at you now.”

“Corona, you need to stay within sight range. If you drift too fa-“

“I’m attached by a cord, Tempest,” Corona said. “I’m not going anywhere.” To prove her point, she tugged on the cord, knowing the slight jerk would jostle the pod in the distance. She heard a satisfying grunt from Tempest, but no further comment.

After a few minutes of silent tumbling, Corona groaned. She tried to shoot fire again, but there were only a few glowing sparks to fly off her hand. No air meant no fire. If I was a unicorn, I’d be able to do this. I’d be able to do a lot of things. Possibly even do something.

“Hey, Tempest, what do you think happened to this world?”

“What do you mean?”

Corona sat up, placing a hand on her helmet. “I mean, was this universe made like this, or did it just… die?”

“I don’t know. You’re the physicist.”

“Don’t have my degree yet!” she chuckled. “I can make a guess though… Physically speaking, an empty universe and a universe that has fully entered heat death would be indistinguishable from each other. One never had anything in it. The other has things like photons zipping around, but space is expanding so fast you’ll never get to see any of them.”

“Who cares, then?”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Come on Tempest, you have to admit you’re at least a little curious here. Are we stuck in pure emptiness, or some sort of lost apocalypse?”

Tempest gave no response.

“Wow, you are grumpy today. Come on, we’re stuck here for the foreseeable future, let’s get to know each other!”

Nothing from the other end.

“Fine, I’ll go first. You have extensive files on me from my life on Earth, but I never told you much about my early years in Equestria. You know I was Celestia’s Protégé – actually still am according to paperwork, apparently – but do you ever know how I got there? No? Well, I wasn’t a student of any kind, I was just enamored with the sun. Everything about it was just glorious to my eyes as a young filly. I practiced fire magic, solar magic, and any sort of magic I could think of that was vaguely sun related. It became my special talent. I was young, and silly, and thought that if I studied enough I could learn to move the sun itself, just like Celestia. She eventually visited my town one day and saw me trying. Apparently I just looked ‘adorable’ and she sensed an eternally burning determination with my heart. She didn’t want me to waste my life trying, so she took me in and told me there were other things I could learn.” Corona sagged slightly. “…Her mistake, really. My determination just found a new goal to focus on. Power.”

No response.

“Tempest, come o-“

“I’m not from the United States,” Tempest said. “I’m from Afghanistan. I was a young child when the war broke out.”

Corona sighed. “I’m sorry you had to live through that. War isn’t pretty-“

“The invasion of Ardent was nothing,” Tempest blurted. “That lasted less than a day. You didn’t have to deal with bodies piling up. You didn’t have to deal with watching your family die. You didn’t have to see the same place bombed over and over again.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“…I felt like I was going to die so many times. But I didn’t. I was brutalized in every way you could think of by both sides, near so many bombs that went off, and witnessed kinds of bloodshed that no girl should ever see.” She paused. “Then Director Storm got me out of there.”

“He was in the war?”

“He was in a lot of wars. The way he talks, sometimes you’d think he was in World War Two.”

“There’s no way.”

“Exactly. He just pulls on your leg, like always. But he was in that war. And he saved me. Today, I’m not sure if he did it out of kindness or obligation, but at the time I thought he was a saint for pushing me out of the way of a bullet and taking it in his own leg. I wouldn’t leave his side and he wasn’t bothered by the tagalong girl. He took me back to the United States and trained me. Then I ended up working with him in everything he did – moving with him when he became Director of AID.”

“I didn’t know you had such a history with him.”

“I do. He may not be the best man, but I trust him with my life. I refuse to believe he’s left us to rot out here.”

Corona blinked. “Where’d that come from?”

“It’s been three hours, Corona. Not so much as a radio message to check in on us. Something’s wrong.”

Corona gulped. “That… You have a point there.”

“I know it’s bad, and I just want to be there instead of sitting here in the middle of nowhere doing nothing!”

“Right… I get it.”

She heard Tempest punch something on the other end.

“Woah, Tempest! Think calm thoughts! Everything’s going to be fine! I’m sure help will arrive soon, the moment he deals with whatever the problem is, okay? Maybe the arches just broke down.”

“I’ll think calm thoughts, but I won’t believe the bullcrap you’re spilling about everything being fine.”

“…All right. It might not be fine. But we can’t do anything, so we have to sit here and be okay with that. Okay?”

Tempest said nothing.

~~~

Director Storm looked up from a crystal paperweight he was fiddling with when Mike came into his office. “Ah, Mike!”

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Yes. I’m going to take a vacation for a day or two,” Storm said, winking. “I’ve got enough vacation days saved up, time to use a few of them.”

“Good to hear you’re finally going to relax.”

“Heh. You’re in charge until I get back,” he said, pocketing the paperweight.

“What about Tempest?”

“She’s away on a longer-term mission. She probably won’t get back before me.” Storm shrugged. “Though if she does come back, your choice if you want to give her the big chair or not. But, knowing you, I think you’ll keep it.”

Mike smirked. “You know me.”

Storm stood up and shook Mike’s hand. “Good luck. I hope nothing explodes while I’m off.” He pulled a dimensional device out of his desk, setting the dials to the Hub. “I’m going to go visit an old friend first.”

“Not going to say goodbye to the agents?”

“The best vacation is where none of them figure out that I’m gone,” Storm smirked. “I doubt you can actually pull that off, but consider it a challenge.” He opened the portal. “Don’t burn the place to the ground, mmkay?”

Mike nodded. “I won’t.”

“Good.” Storm stepped through the portal, standing tall in the halls of the Hub. He kept his toothy smile wide open for all to see as he marched through the mazelike corridors. He stopped to purchase a small dumpling-like ball of food that tasted like strawberries. Very delicious, he decided.

He looked at one of the large screens hung near the ceiling. A deer news anchor was interviewing Saxton Hale. Storm had no idea what was being said, but he knew he’d want to watch that later. It would be hilarious no matter how well the interview went.

Storm eventually arrived at his destination despite numerous stops to ‘smell the roses’. He walked right into Iroh’s tea shop and sat down. He leaned back, tapped on the side of the table seven times in a particular pattern, and ordered orange chai tea ‘in a blue cup, if you don’t mind’.

He waited a couple minutes, examining the patrons of the shop. Most of them were just regular people wanting to have a good time, but he did see Siron discussing something with a Binary. Why was he always with a Binary? There was definitely something going on there, but sadly that wasn’t why he was here. Investigating now would prove problematic.

Storm saw the doors that led to the tea kitchen tilt open slightly. That was the signal. He stood up, shrugged, and walked out the front door. Circling back around, he headed through the Elemental Nations’ Embassy, ignoring the receptionist’s strange look as he passed her and went through a back door that led to the rear of Iroh’s tea shop. It was a single room with a small card table. Iroh himself was sitting alone at the table, a single eyebrow raised. “You must have some problems if we had to use this room.”

Storm snorted, closing the door behind him and sitting down opposite Iroh. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Iroh sighed. “I have a feeling I can relate more than you’d like to whatever it is… What happened?”

“I was ordered to have Tempest and Corona killed.” Seeing Iroh’s expression, he held up his hand. “I didn’t. They’re just stuck in an empty universe with no way back. But my superiors think they’re dead.”

“That is concerning. Why would they want this?”

“I don’t know,” Storm said, taking a large folder out of his suit. “I’ve been slowly building a case against Senator Pearse. I’ve got so much damning evidence in this folder I might be able to get him executed. I’m planning to bring it to him and blackmail him into some real answers.”

“That sounds dangerous. Also rather foolish.”

“It is. Extremely,” Storm said. “But there’s something rotten happening on my world, and it’s starting to interfere with my agents. I’m fed up with this, not going to stand for it anymore.”

“I’m your backup. Wonderful.”

Storm slid the folder to him. “You’re the only one I can trust not to file this with some bureaucracy. O’Neill’s fine, but if he was going to act he’d have to tell everyone he reports to. You don’t really report to anyone. And you’ve got a personal stake in Corona’s safety.”

“What am I to do with this?”

“Nothing. I’ll return, having completed my mission, and will ask for the folder back.”

“If you don’t return?”

Storm smirked. “On the extreme off-chance that happens, you publish the information however you see fit.”

“What of Corona?” Iroh asked, leaning in. “Do we just leave her in that universe?”

Storm shook his head. “Of course not. But if I can’t figure out how to get her back myself, that’s up to you. I don’t envy getting into that empty universe and finding her with the resources your world has.”

“You better succeed then. Root out this corruption, Director.”

Storm laughed heartily. “I plan on it. Don’t worry, I have extra insurance.” He opened a portal to the endless forest. “Until then, Iroh. Never stop being you.”

Iroh laughed back. “That’s the idea! …Take care of yourself.”

Storm winked, vanishing as the portal disappeared.

~~~

Corona was back at the pod, though not inside of it. She was sitting on what qualified as the top in a contemplative position. She stuck her head in front of the porthole, looking at Tempest. “Hey, you should come out. The weather’s great!”

“There’s no weather out there at all.”

“That’s what makes it great.” Corona shook her head, sighing. “Tempest…”

“Five hours,” Tempest said. “It’s been five hours. People could be dying.”

Corona shook her head, popping the hatch of the pod open, climbing back in to her seat. “You’re letting your thoughts run away with you, Tempest. That’s… Well, that’s my job. I get the influx of emotions that I don’t always deal with. You… You’re the cool, calm, collected one. You’re, well, you’re the leader.”

“I need to do things,” Tempest admitted. “I can’t just sit.”

Corona put her feet on the dashboard and leaned back. “Honestly? I can’t either. But I went outside and danced around in the nothingness. I distracted myself. Got you to tell some stories. It wasn’t as effective as I would have liked, but I’ll take what I can get.”

Tempest stared ahead blankly, saying nothing for several moments. Then she stood up, popping the hatch open. She stepped out of the orb.

“Woah – hey you need a cord!” Corona blurted. She tossed the cord attached to her out of the pod. Tempest grabbed it and yanked, pulling Corona out as well. The rapid movement swung the rope around the capsule, eventually ramming them into the bulk of the white sphere.

“Ow…” Corona muttered, trying to stand up, realizing that she was still spinning in space. Tempest locked her feet around the open hatch of the pod and pulled the cord, yanking Corona back. Corona tumbled back to Tempest, and the two knocked helmets together.

Corona started laughing as Tempest pulled them both back in.

Tempest just smirked. “That enough of an outing for you?”

“You bet it is!” The two sat back down. “I never thought I’d get you to have any fun.”

Tempest nodded. “Neither did I.” Her smirk vanished instantly. “I’m sorry,” she said out of nowhere.

“…For what?”

“For resenting you. What you were. Given a place instead of working for it. I thought you were a brat. When I decided you weren’t a brat, I thought you were just plain childish. And then…” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. You are a valuable member of the organization. It’s not just because you’re from another world.”

Corona smiled. “Thanks. Good to see I finally got through to you.”

Tempest looked right into Corona’s eyes. “You have an immense amount of patience.”

“…I think it comes from me realizing that I used to treat people like they were nothing. I’d want them to have patience with me, after all.”

Tempest let her smirk return. “Apparently not.”

Corona grinned. “Yeah, it-“ her smile vanished instantly.

“What is it?”

“…Something on my helmet. Give me a sec…” She took in a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Why now…”

“What? What did you see?”

Corona grabbed Tempest by the shoulders. “You are going to hate me in about twenty seconds.”

Tempest, for once in her life, looked bewildered. “…What? Why?”

“I… Have a way out.”

“Why would I be mad about that?”

“Because you aren’t going to like it, that’s why.”

Tempest blinked. “Corona…”

A portal opened right in front of them, depositing a Puddlejumper in the empty universe.

Tempest gawked. “How did you call the Tau’ri?”

“I didn’t,” Corona said, opening the hatch on the spherical pod. The back hatch of the Puddlejumper opened at the same time. Corona grabbed Tempest’s hand. “Come on.”

The two of them drifted into the Puddlejumper – falling flat on their faces when the ship’s artificial gravity took over. The hatch closed behind them and air rushed into the cabin.

Corona took off her helmet, letting her hair spill out. Tempest did the same, though her hair was nowhere near as large. Corona was smiling nervously and sweating.

Tempest raised an eyebrow with her. “I don’t care if you broke protocol somehow to do this, we’re getting out. That’s what matters.”

Corona nodded. “It’s… Good to hear you say that!”

Tempest glanced around at their enclosure; the Puddlejumper’s back half, sealed off from the front currently. It didn’t look like a normal one, due to all the open panels, extra screens, and a few throw pillows tossed around and a rug on the ground. “…Who runs this ship?”

The second hatch of the Puddlejumper opened up, revealing the bridge to be even more mutilated than the back half. The two driver chairs had been replaced with a single large swivel, and numerous screens lined the walls and the controls. Holograms flickered in the air, and a large keg of fruit juice sat in a huge cupholder.

Sombra swiveled the chair around, smirking. “Hey.”

Tempest drew her gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

Sombra glanced at Corona. “Told you I needed to disable her gun.”

Corona sighed, swiping Tempest’s gun out of her hands and tossing it to the ground. “Tempest, be nice, Sombra just saved you.”

Tempest made no sound, still processing the new information.

Sombra shrugged, leaping out of her chair. “By the way, good to see you in one piece Corona.”

Corona hugged Sombra. “Nice to see you face to face.”

Sombra snorted, but didn’t reject the embrace. “I couldn’t exactly let you suffocate in nothingness, could I?”

Corona stepped back, shrugging. “Thanks, by the way. I don’t know what we would have done otherwise. Had, what, a day’s worth of air in that thing?”

“Traitor…” Tempest growled.

Corona looked at Tempest with evident pain in her face.

“Traitor!”

“Yeah. I am,” Corona said, sitting down. “Not going to deny it. I lied to you, Mike, Ike, Director Storm – everyone. I’ve been lying since Pearse’s scam on the Hub economy. I’ve been feeding secrets to Sombra through my glasses.”

Tempest curled her hand into a fist and punched Corona. Corona took it, going so far as to hold up a hand to keep Sombra from intervening. She propped herself up against the Puddlejumper’s wall – only to get punched again.

Corona moved her hand to wipe blood off her face – but Tempest punched again. And again. And again.

Sombra grabbed Tempest’s fist at the sixth punch. “Time to stop, amiga.”

Tempest pulled back her other first – and this one Corona caught. “Tempest, no.”

Tempest pulled both her hands back and folded her arms. “Fine then. I’m your prisoner.”

“Prisoner?” Corona sighed. “You aren’t a prisoner. We can take you back to AID right now.”

Tempest narrowed her eyes. “Corona. Why?”

Corona wiped the blood off her face and rubbed the back of her neck. “Director Storm said he couldn’t help me expose Senator Pearse. Sombra could. Her deal was that I feed her information from the AID, with the promise that she’d help me keep you all accountable.”

“Accountable!?” Tempest spat. “We are the-“

“We are not!” Corona blurted. “We need to be held accountable! I’ve found nukes that have been dropped on unusual universes that were thought to be a ‘threat’. I’ve found Senators manipulating us to exploit everyone else. I’ve found corruption that runs deep. Very deep. With Sombra’s help we’ve stopped several disasters that our little government organization wants to cause.”

Tempest twitched. “You’re such a naïve child.”

“That’s not what you said earlier.”

“Clearly I was wrong,” Tempest spat. “Things like that are a necessary evil. If we don’t have the strong arm, if we don’t attack first, if we don’t let those who may be ‘corrupt’ run things-“

“Equis Vitis. The Elemental Nations. Lai. The Space Ponies. None of them do what we do. None of them drop bombs on worlds. We’re wrong, Tempest.”

Tempest sneered. “You disgust me.”

Corona was legitimately hurt by this. She couldn’t respond.

Tempest continued. “You say you hate our means – our bombs, our betrayals, our deceptions. Then why are you using the same tactics against us?”

“I’m fighting fire with fire,” Corona said, summoning a flame into existence. “I didn’t like what I was doing. I still don’t.

“You betrayed AID, Corona. It never betrayed you. How is that-“

Sombra coughed. “Mind if I interject?”

Tempest twitched. “What?!”

“The reason you’re stuck here? Director Storm was ordered to kill you two. Make it look like an accident.” Sombra folded her arms. “Evidently he decided he didn’t like that order, since you were both trapped rather than dead, but it doesn’t change the fact that they wanted both of you, specifically, dead.”

Tempest blinked, her rage vanishing. “…Why?”

Sombra pulled up the document on a holographic screen. “This here says that you needed to be ‘eliminated’ due to ‘uncertain loyalties.’ Frankly, I don’t buy it. I think they were testing your Director’s loyalty to them.”

Tempest’s face blanked. “But… What about all my years of loyal service? What of-“

Sombra enlarged a portion of the document. “Ahem. Says here that your contributions will be honored posthumously should Director Storm desire. If not, all your achievements could be stricken from the record and given to other agents. Clearly, they don’t give a rip.”

“Where did you get this?” Tempest demanded.

Sombra’s smile soured. “That’s the fun part. I’m in your security camera systems, watching everything I can get my claws on closely. Today, Storm started acting weird around them. He dropped a single sheet of paper in plain view of one of the cameras – when he usually keeps everything well locked inside folders. Then he ordered your mission, and walked out not an hour later without making an announcement. His official file says he’s ‘on vacation’ right now.” Sombra folded her arms. “I think he knew I was watching.”

“…Wait, why’d you take so long to get us then?” Corona asked.

“I didn’t notice the paper instantly. And it took a while to piece together that you guys were stuck on the other end. Also, since your glasses were in your pocket, I not only didn’t know you were stuck, I had to hack into your suit helmet, which took several minutes with my limited connection. And here we are, a happy family of hacker, agent, and physics student. Two of whom are not supposed to be alive.”

“We can’t go back to AID,” Tempest realized. “They – some of them at least – want us dead. Or need to think we are dead, for Director Storm’s sake.”

“…Where can we go?” Corona asked.

“Iroh, maybe,” Sombra said. “I think Director Storm went to meet him just after he left AID, I’m not sure. Other than that… You two can stay in the shadows with me! I’ve been hiding for quite some time now, getting pretty good at it.”

Tempest growled. “Never working with you.”

“Oh? Am I beneath you? Last I checked, I didn’t drop nukes. Also, despite my ability to do so, I haven’t even tried to crash the Hub market. All I do is find information and sell it to the highest bidder.”

“You’re a killer. I’ve read the files of Earth Omnic.”

“And you’re not!?” Sombra waved her hand in a wide arc. “Every person here is a killer. If we’re judging by how much we hate killing, I think you’re the one with the most unhealthy outlook on it. Tell me, did that cube, asshole that it was, deserve to be blown to kingdom come? Was there even a mission objective there?”

Tempest threw a punch. Sombra caught it. “Thought not,” Sombra said, smirking.

Corona pulled the two of them apart. “Stop it! We may not like it, but right now we’re in this boat together. Can we please stop it with the antagonizing?”

“I’ll agree if she does,” Sombra said.

Tempest leaned back. “Fine. Let’s revel in treachery and betrayal, why not. What’s our move, oh great Sombra?”

Sombra shrugged. “No idea. I’m here to save you. You two do what you want. I’m just pretty sure you want to stay off the grid.”

Corona nodded. “I know how to meet Iroh in an out of the way place. It shouldn’t be too difficult to explain. He’s very understanding.”

Tempest shrugged. “Fine.”

Sombra gave them a thumbs up. “Nice talk! Now we-“ She blinked. “That’s odd.”

“What?” Corona asked.

“I’m picking up subspace signal in this universe,” Sombra said, tapping a screen and bringing up a wave-form diagram. “FTL communication.”

“What’s it say?”

“Encrypted. It’ll take a minute to clear up. Or significantly longer…” She frowned. “I do know where it’s coming from though. Few hundred light years that direction.”

Corona tapped the Puddlejumper walls. “This thing have FTL?”

“No. But we can cheat.” She smirked. “Your mission to this world was complete bogus, by the way. As a ‘heat death’ universe, there is so much space here that moving an inch in another universe will move a million inches here. Or something like that, the number keeps changing because space is expanding so quickly. The point is it actually won’t be hard to get to the source of this signal if we do some jumping…”

Tempest raised an eyebrow. “Are we really investigating a signal at a time like this?”

Something tugged at the back of Corona’s mind. “Yeah… Yeah I think so. I think there’s something important there.”

Sombra smirked. “Activating cloak!” The Puddlejumper vanished from sight and jumped through the portal, ready to investigate.

~~~

Director Storm adjusted the collar on his suit and marched into what was perhaps the most boring building he had ever seen. It was a white brick with windows. The worst part was he knew that unlike his unassuming base, there wasn’t even a secret basement in here. There were just a lot of offices. Offices, offices, offices. One of those offices happened to have one Senator Pearse in them at the moment, though nobody was officially supposed to know that.

Storm smirked. This was either going to go wonderfully or crash and burn. It had been a while since he had taken any actual risks like this, but he was fed up with all the political shenanigans going on over his head. He was the Storm, dammit, and he wasn’t going to be pushed around like some normal scribble-monkey secretary. They’d clearly forgotten who he was. It was time to remind them.

Well, he was just going to see Senator Pearse, but it was symbolic of putting them all in their place.

He walked in the front doors like he owned the place. It helped that he sure felt like he owned it. He waved his badge at security. They thought it was a regular FBI badge. Morons.

Nobody ever questions the tall man in the well-tailored suit with sunglasses and a slight sneer. Nobody wants to. Storm secretly loved it when some schmuck who didn’t get the memo would ask him what he was doing there. He’d flash his badge, grin menacingly, and say ‘investigating every nook and cranny of this place. I’ll have to come back to you when I’m done with preliminaries.’ Glorious. He rarely checked up on them later, which just made their lives even worse.

But even with his badge, he definitely wasn’t supposed to just go barging into the office that didn’t exist. So he had to look really confident and impressive. Yes, his position as Director should be able to get him through that door should he flaunt it, but the Senator could always just refuse to see him if he asked.

He wasn’t going to ask.

He marched up to the office door, plain like all the others in the place save for a single guard.

Director Storm made sure to add urgency to his voice. “I’ve got some things he needs to see!”

“Who needs to see?” the guard asked.

“You know I’m not supposed to say! Just let me in!” He waved the folder in front of the guard’s face, letting him catch just enough glimpses of pictures of Senator Pearse.

The guard nodded. “Of course.” He let Storm into the room, following him.

There were only three people in the room besides Storm and the guard – a Chinese man standing at attention, a black-haired woman with a vicious smile scribbling something on a sheet of paper, and the aged Senator Pearse himself.

Storm threw the folder on the desk in front of Pearse. “We need to talk.”

Senator Pearse took one look at the size of the folder, realization dawning in his eyes. “Leave us,” he told the guard. The guard nodded, backing out of the room.

Storm sat down in a chair, leaning in with a smirk. “What about the other two? Want them to hear this?”

Senator Pearse smirked back – new behavior for him. “They can hear whatever you want to accuse me of, Mister Oncoming Storm.”

Storm opened the folder. “Let’s see. I’ve got affairs, embezzlement, many dozens of lies, a half-dozen cover ups that had nothing to do with my organization, a very damning story about a river full of dead kids, and – here’s the fun one – evidence of you ordering two agents to their deaths without a trial.”

The Chinese man and the woman didn’t react in surprise to any of this. Senator Pearse folded his hands and smiled. “This all looks pretty convincing. I bet you could have me imprisoned with this despite my army of lawyers.”

“Exactly what I was thinking.”

“So, what is it you want Mister Oncoming Storm? Or should I call you Director Oncoming Storm? General Oncoming Storm? Sir Oncoming Storm? Thane Oncoming Storm? Boyar Oncoming Storm?”

Storm whistled. “You must have done some impressive digging for that last one. Though, I have to ask, am I supposed to be impressed? You’re the Senator in charge of my organization, of course you’d do some research on me. Trying to make me feel uncomfortable?” he laughed. “Many, many people besides you have tried and succeeded.”

Senator Pearse frowned.

“As for what I want, it’s rather simple really. I want all this bull to stop. Yes, all the bull. All of your muscular, giant, angry mooing plans that you put so much stock into. I want AID to run free of your influence. You give us funding, then leave us alone. Couldn’t be simpler! No more stupid orders, no more hiring agents under my purview to do your bidding, and no more looking at the other worlds with your hungry, perverted expressions. Screw up your own world first, mmkay?”

Senator Pearse smiled. “I’m sorry, Oncoming, but that just won’t do.”

Storm pointed at the papers. “You know this goes live if you refuse, right?”

“Oh, I do. But the bulls are much bigger and angrier than even you could comprehend, Oncoming.”

Storm narrowed his eyes, putting two and two together. “Pearse would never act like this. You’re not Senator Pearse.”

Pearse’s eyes glowed. “Oh, he’s in here somewhere.”

“Ba’al,” Storm said, leaning back. “Can’t believe I didn’t see this until now.”

Ba’al closed the folder and handed it back to Storm. “Go ahead and publish these papers. There are others, many others, to continue my work.”

Storm laughed. “We both know it’s not that simple. You can’t let me live now that I know you’re a Ba’al and that you have other big plans. You have a particular interest in my organization. It means you’re doing something with magic. You’d have no need to meddle with us if it was just for the other worlds. You Ba’als have your own devices.”

“You’ve been playing this a long time haven’t you?”

“Not as long as you, but eh, I like to think I’m pretty good.”

Ba’al smiled. “So. I’m curious, how do you plan to get out of here alive?”

“Knock you all out, cut, and run.”

Ba’al grinned. “This should be interesti-“

Storm pulled a crystal out of his jacket and hit Ba’al in the head with it. The secretary stood up and the Chinese man drew his gun. Ba’al just blinked. “What is that?”

“It’s a perfectly normal paperweight, I assure you.” Three bolts of lightning shot out of the crystal, hitting Ba’al, the Chinese man, and the secretary. Both the man and Ba’al fell with ease, but the woman… She caught the electricity in her fingertips and shot it back into the crystal.

Storm raised an eyebrow. “There’s more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?”

The woman smiled. “I’m Azula. And you’re in our way.” With one hand, she summoned lightning - the other, fire. She launched both at Storm in a single motion.

Storm moved the crystal in a circular pattern, generating a ring of magic that met the incoming attacks with a small whirlwind of fog.

Azula roared, readying another attack.

Storm reasoned that he could probably take her, but he wasn’t going to chance backup arriving. He pulled out his dimensional device and dialed Equis Vitis. He leaped through, rolling under a bolt of lightning.

The portal closed as he stood up, surveying his surroundings. He was in Canterlot and there were several ponies staring right at him with looks of shock.

He waved. “Hello there! I’m Director Storm – you may or may not have heard of me – and I need an audience with Celestia! Care to point me in the right direction?”

A pegasus pointed at the main body of the castle.

“Thank you, good citizen. I’ll see if I can get y-“

A portal opened up behind Storm. A large, fleshy, purple hand jittering in an impossible manner reached out. Something about it snapped something in every pony who saw it, making them scream or pass out.

Storm kept his wits about him. Obviously, this was bigger than political corruption… Bigger than Ba’al. Something else was involved. He leaped back and thrust his crystal forward, summoning a miniature thunderstorm to beat back the gnashing hand.

His storm did nothing.

The claw grabbed him and dragged him in. He tried to yell to the ponies’ warnings of Ba’al, but they were clearly unable to listen to him at this moment.

The portal closed. The hand and Storm were no more.

Ponies would not remember what had happened that moment well. All they would know for sure was that they were terrified.

~~~

“That should be enough!” Sombra said. “Dropping back into the dead universe!”

They did.

Corona screamed, collapsing to the ground instantly.

Sombra and Tempest didn’t move to help her up. They couldn’t. They were transfixed.

There were three things in space before them. One was Ba’al’s mothership, hiding out in the dead universe so as not to be found. The second was a freshly built Ha’tak, shiny and new.

The third was a Ha’tak covered in purple… somethings. At times, they looked like tentacles. At others, they looked like eyes. At one point, the entire mess looked like a face. It was as if the Ha’tak was a living being and the purple horrors were mutations, or parasites - there to control it and use it for their own ends.

“IT’S HERE!” Corona screeched. “IT SEES ME!”

This snapped Sombra out of it. She leaned down. “Corona, listen to me. Just like we practiced, okay?”

“IT’S HERE! MAJORA’S HERE!”

Sombra slapped her. “GET AHOLD OF YOURSELF! Think, Corona, think. Let your mind overrule its influence. Slow, deep mental breaths. Count… Count… One… Two… Three…”

“You’re a fool,” Corona spoke with a voice that was not her own. “She can do nothing to the power wi-“

Tempest cut the eldritch monologue short by hitting Corona’s skull with the butt of her pistol. Corona’s eyes rolled up into the back of her head and she fell to the ground.

“…Good call,” Sombra said.

Tempest grunted. “What was that?”

“She’ll tell you when she wakes up. I’ll summarize by saying the more you know about it the more likely you are to go loco like… that.” She typed on her screens. “Now to break into Ba’al’s systems…”

“You can do that?”

“Easy. Same design as the Starfinder. Hacked into that months ago. Just need to…”

A dimensional portal opened in space, and the Mothership and free Ha’tak went through it. The corrupted ship turned right at them.

Sombra stopped hacking. She leaned over to the button that activated the dimensional device. “It can’t see us… We’re cloaked...”

The corrupted ship shot a tendril of impossible purple energy that corrupted every display that showed it.

“It can see us!” Sombra said, smashing the portal button. The Puddlejumper shot a portal into existence and flew through, appearing in a completely random universe with stars all around. From the other side of the portal, the purple tendril coiled around back, reaching for the Puddlejumper.

Sombra pressed another button, closing the portal. The purple tendril-thing shook, screamed, and then vanished into nothing.

“…You can’t hear screams in space,” Tempest said.

“I know,” Sombra said, shaking her head.

The two of them looked down at the twitching form of Corona. They quickly lifted her up and placed a pillow under her head, trying not to let spastic seizure motions cause any harm.

Tempest stood up and breathed out a long, hard breath. “...Something’s happening.”

“Something bad. Worse than me destroying the Internet,” Sombra added. “What now?”

“Iroh,” Tempest said. “We call Iroh.”

~~~

Renee and Daniel left the meeting with haggard expressions. The two of them went right for the couch they had sat on before the meeting began.

Renee took out the list of topics and suggestions she had drafted up before the meeting started. She crumpled it up in her magic and tossed it over her back.

“That… could have gone better,” Daniel muttered.

“Did we decide anything?!” Renee blurted. “Is there any future discussions on any of the topics? Did they say yes or no to any of them? Did they even know what we were talking about?” She grabbed her head. “Augh! There’s no way for an outsider to get any say in this system!”

“I got the distinct impression that none of them really had any say in the system. It’s like they’re all compartmentalized in areas of specific knowledge. Their system is unable to change significantly because of the way it’s designed…” He adjusted his glasses. “I understand why it took them two years to decide on something urgent…”

“I got the impression we weren’t in the right ‘clearance district’ to know about the decisions they were making,” Renee harrumphed. “I guess this system works for them but it does not work when there are outside forces…”

“Maybe that’s the point,” Daniel suggested. “I’m curious how this system formed. Could they have built it to increase unity, in a way? So there’d be no infighting, no rebellion, no revolution? Since, well, anyone who learned anything that might drive them to revolution would be displaced to a district where they could use that knowledge in some way… And become part of the societal ‘leaders’. When this was first created, it would have needed to be a very oppressive regime ruled by an iron fist. But after that… It might just propagate itself. There may not be a leader here anymore. They don’t need one, or even really a council. The system keeps building itself up… maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“There are a few holes in the theory. How can they organize forces to keep track of who knows what? What about all the operations going on in space? Obviously, there’d have to be nuance…”

“And if your theory there is right, there really isn’t anyone we can ask to find out how they do it, because they don’t actually know. It just works.” She shook her head, rather boggled by the nature of the Binaries. “I think I liked them better when they were xenophobic and gruff…”

“They’re an alien culture,” Daniel said. “It seems to work for them, and their people seem more or less happy, so… I don’t think we have the right to judge them.”

“We do need to find a way to work with them, though…” Renee said, shaking her head. “And I’m not sure how to do that.”

“Me neither.” He leaned back, stretching his arms. “…Hey, think this world has a place for lunch?”

“You mean dinner? We skipped lunch.”

Daniel glanced at his watch. “Well then.”

“And yes, I’m sure there’s a place for dinner around here somewhere. Oh Boxen!”

Boxen looked up from his clipboard. “Yes?”

“Is there a restaurant in this district?”

“Several. Most food is imported from districts with cooking knowledge though, don’t expect to see a chef.”

“Fine by me,” Renee said, leaping off the couch. “I need to unwind. What better way to do that and still technically do my job than eating alien cuisine?”

Daniel shrugged. “Can’t think of one right now.”

Renee adjusted her hat, smirking. It was time to eat some alien soup.

~~~

Iroh sat in the back room of the teashop, folder on the table.

Director Storm walked in, a huge grin on his face. “Mission success!”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I got Senator Pearse to listen to me. He’s removing all of his oily, grimy fingers from AID.”

Iroh smiled. “That’s great news. Everything go smoothly?”

“Smooth as butter!”

“What about Corona?”

“Pearse still thinks she’s dead. She’ll have to stay that way for a while, until I find a reasonable explanation for sudden agent revival. She’s fine, Iroh, don’t you worry your beard. Of course you can’t tell anyone that, but I’ll try to sell the story that she and Tempest are on an extended mission for a while so you don’t have to pretend to be devastated.”

“That would be appreciated.”

Storm quickly grabbed the folder Iroh had, flipping through it. “Right, everything checks out. It was a pleasure, Iroh. Let’s hope we never have to do this again!”

Iroh smiled. “It is never healthy to have this level of intrigue.”

“No it is not!” He opened a portal and jumped through.

Iroh stood up, dusted himself off, and went to the restroom. He closed himself in a stall and pulled out his phone. “Definitely not Storm anymore. Something’s off about him – not to mention he claimed everything went smooth as butter. No mention of a purple hand.”

“Probably just doesn’t realize ponies carry phones now,” Sombra said, playing the shaky video of the purple hand grabbing Director Storm again. “Doesn’t matter if you’re an abomination that can alter memory, a video’s a video.”

Iroh sighed, looking at Sombra and Tempest on the phone. “How is Corona doing?”

Tempest shook her head. “Not well.” She glanced behind her at the back of the Puddlejumper. “Still twitching and muttering. We’ve seen purple magic sparks a few times now.”

Iroh sighed. “I may have an idea, but we can’t do it right now. We have to lay low. They’ll be watching. I’ll soon take a page from Director Storm’s book and declare I’m going on vacation, and we’ll meet on my world. Understood?”

“Understood,” Tempest said, saluting.

“Keep her sedated and tied down until then,” Iroh said. “I fear what will happen if she wakes up and that thing is still in her.”

Sombra nodded. “You can count on me.”

“Can I?” Iroh asked.

Sombra smiled cheekily. “Hey, it’s Corona. I’ve got her back. I’ll keep in touch.” The feed ended, and Iroh’s phone went back to normal.

He made sure to flush so no one got suspicious. He went back to work, serving tea.

He reflected on the fact that he was really good at acting normal when there were conspiracies twisted all around him. What did that say about his life?

024 - Thief of Light

Charter Twilight Sparkle looked at herself in the mirror. She almost looked normal. Her eyes were clear, shining with the magic inside her. Her horn was smooth and rounded, reflecting the ambient light aesthetically. Her mane hadn’t grown back properly, but Renee had worked with it, giving Twilight a windswept appearance. It looked more adventurous and outgoing than her prior style, and Twilight had already decided she’d keep it even when her mane returned to normal. Her muzzle was round and smooth, her lips curled into a smile that was perhaps not as big as it could have been.

Then there were her ears. They could swivel, perk, and flatten like any normal pony ears. But they didn’t look the part. Along the back edges of both ears a line of metal shone, the only outward appearance of a magitech machine that reached into her inner ear. She could no longer feel the device’s presence, but she would always know it was there. Marking her as different from all ponies.

It wasn’t even on right now. She tried to use it as little as possible. If she came to rely on it – well what would happen when there was no magic in a universe? What would happen when it shorted out in a battle? She couldn’t let herself depend on false hearing. It was there for when it was needed, and not any other time.

She still felt the need to turn it on right now, to check. She lit her horn, clicking an internal switch on the devices. A few soft, purple lights lit up on the metal rods, and sound rushed into her mind. Her breathing, her hooves scraping against the floor, the motion of the air around her, the buzzing of her horn, the soft sound of chatter outside…

The influx of noise was slightly painful. It also sounded wrong. Her heart started racing as her mind automatically tried to keep track of all the sounds coming in, many of which were abnormal.

“Good morning Twilight!”

The noise of a voice so close to her own location made her wince. She turned off the sound, plunging herself into a noiseless void. Her body’s response was that of relief, of all things. It no longer had to deal with it all. She turned around, smiling. “Morning Spike!”

Spike frowned. He opened his mouth, saying something. Twilight studied the motion of the lips very carefully, processing slowly. She was fairly sure he’d said: “sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

Twilight’s focused expression was quickly replaced with a warm smile. “That’s okay, Spike. I’m still learning to live like this.” She knew she was talking with a slight accent of deafness. She had a spell that could make her voice ring clean as day - but that would be reserved for more important occasions.

“I should still be more aware,” Spike responded.

Twilight rubbed her hoof on his head. “Hey, we’re all going to have to adjust. You’ve been doing really well. Always my number one assistant.”

Spike grinned and said something Twilight couldn’t see. She got the message anyway when he hugged her leg. She held him in her wing, smiling. Twilight had no idea how long they just held each other in silence.

Eventually, Spike removed himself from the embrace. “I should finish making breakfast,” he said, making sure Twilight could see his face.

Twilight smiled. “What’s on the menu today?”

“Waffles. Earth waffles.” He waved her on, trying to walk backwards so they could move to the kitchen and talk at the same time. “I have it on good authority they’re really good!”

“Spike, you don’t need to walk backwards. We can talk in the kitchen.”

Spike nodded, turning around and speed walking to the kitchen. Twilight teleported there, a smirk on her face. “Beat ya.”

“No fair!” Spike said, throwing his arms in the air. “You could have at least flown here instead of teleporting!”

“Then you wouldn’t have had such a surprised look on your face!” Twilight giggled. “How does one cook Earth waffles, by the way?”

Spike pointed at a giant bowl filled with batter and a waffle iron. He grabbed the bowl and angled it over the appliance. He turned to Twilight. “See? All you do is pour it into the iron here and make sure it’s plugged in to a magic cell!”

Twilight used her magic to catch the batter he was spilling. “Spike, look at what you’re doing. You don’t need to keep looking at me like that, okay? I’m not going to see everything you say. We’re just going to have to be okay with that.”

Spike sighed, closing the waffle iron. “I know… It’s just hard, y’know?”

“Yeah. Believe it or not, I do. I’m the one without the hearing.”

“Sorry!” Spike said, holding up his hands.

“…I’m the one who should be apologizing. That was snappy.”

“Maybe we can both agree that neither of us are handling this all that well?”

Twilight chuckled softly. “Sure. We can do that.” She sat down at the kitchen table, pulling the magic journal off a nearby shelf. She opened to the back, frowning. “Corona hasn’t written me back yet…” She scrolled her eyes over the last couple pages, studying the back and forth she and Corona had had about Twilight’s new disability. There were even a few diagrams of the ear devices themselves, and a note of Corona feeling guilty for sending Twilight to Esefem. There was the response that told Corona not to feel bad, and then a response to that, and another response… Twilight shook her head – sometimes it was hard to figure out exactly how their conversations evolved. It was delightful, but it made her head swim.

…Corona hadn’t responded for a few days now. Twilight was beginning to worry.

Spike sat down at the table, jostling Twilight out of her book. He laid a plate in front of her with a waffle on it. “I’m noticing one good thing about this, for you anyway.”

“What’s that?”

“You are never going to have trouble focusing on reading. Ever again. Pinkie could be blowing holes in the wall downstairs and you’ll stay engrossed in your book.”

Twilight put a hoof to her chin. “You may have found the silver lining! I knew I could count on you.”

Spike leaned back in his chair. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Twilight cut up a bit of the waffle and levitated it into her mouth. “Where’s yours?”

“Cooking. Unless you want more than one. Then that’s yours cooking and mine will be cooking the moment it’s out.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “I’m not that hungry, it’ll be yours.”

“Yeah!”

“You look happy.”

“I… Was really hungry.”

Twilight smiled. “Glad I could help.”

“Hey, I’m the one doing all the cooking.”

Twilight was so busy studying Spike’s face she missed her mouth when she attempted to levitate another bit of waffle into it. She smeared the pastry across her cheek. She narrowed her eyes, correcting the trajectory of the waffle bit and tossing it into her mouth. She grabbed a napkin from nearby and rubbed her face.

Spike was trying very hard not to laugh. But he knew that laughing would be rude, so he was holding it in with all his might. His face was starting to turn red.

Twilight softly chuckled at his pained expression. This amused reaction only worsened his predicament, flushing his face even further.

“Spike, you can laugh! It was funny. I wiped waffle across my face because I wasn’t paying attention. That’s hilarious.”

Spike fell out of his chair. He started laughing, but the impact with the floor knocked the wind out of him.

Twilight poked her head over the table. “You okay?”

Spike muttered something, but Twilight couldn’t see it since he was facedown. She lifted him up and set him in the seat. “You okay?” she repeated.

“Yeah.”

“You can’t make yourself suffer like that, Spike. I’m deaf. It doesn’t mean you can’t laugh at me.”

“But it’s rude!”

“I can take it Spike. I don’t want anybody walking on eggshells around me, understand?”

Spike nodded slowly. “Yeah…”

Twilight took another bite of waffle. “By the way, this is really good. Who sugg-“ Twilight felt a strange shimmering feeling on her cutie mark. She glanced downward, seeing the familiar glow of the Tree of Harmony’s summon. “Looks like I’ve got to go, Spike! See you later!”

“Are you sure you can go?” he asked.

“The Tree of Harmony thinks so!” Twilight said, grinning. Maybe it was time for her to get back into the swing of things. She teleported to the map room, not surprised in the slightest to find Pinkie already sitting in her chair. The map itself had generated a second layer of images about a foot above the map of Equis, as it had taken to doing when it wanted to send them to another world.

Twilight recognized the location as the demon settlement in the middle of the Elemental Nations. “Oh, looks like we’re going to our old friends!” Twilight said.

Pinkie smiled, looking right at Twilight. “That we are! All five!” She pointed at their marks alongside Flutterfree’s, Nova’s, and Renee’s. “First big adventure since, well, you know.”

Twilight nodded. “I know.” She sat down in her throne, spreading her wings. “I think I’m ready. It may be… slow. But I need to get back into it.”

Pinkie patted her on the back. “I wonder what the problem will be?”

Twilight only saw the trailing end of the statement, but she reasoned out the rest of it. “Harsh feelings about the demons have been rising. It might finally be time for us to deal with that.”

~~~

The best way to get around in the Elemental Nations was by airship.

Actually, that wasn’t quite true, since teleporting was better. But neither Twilight nor Nova had a clear image of the demon village in their mind, seeing as they hadn’t been to the village in recent memory. So travel by airship it was. Sure, it took a few hours for the trip, but nopony was in any sort of hurry.

Twilight stood on the balcony of the airship, her new windswept manestyle living up to its description. She could feel the air brush through the hairs of her coat and stream past the lines in her face. She’d never bothered to study exactly how it felt before, always being overtaken by the noise of high winds.

She kept discovering new things without her ears. She’d discovered the art of closing her eyes to appreciate other senses before, but never had she been able to turn off her ears. Not like she had a choice. …Well, she did, but the headache that would result from turning on the ear devices here would probably make her fall off the balcony.

Twilight felt vibrations in the metallic floor she was standing on, telling her there was a pony walking up to her. She turned around to see Renee approaching, desperately trying to hold her hat to her head. “Hey,” Twilight said.

“Sorry dear. Can’t hear you. Wind’s too loud!”

Twilight smirked. “Well I can see what you’re saying just fine!”

“…I think that was a sassy comment,” Renee said, narrowing her eyes.

Twilight grinned. She moved her mouth without actually saying anything.

Renee furrowed her brow. “Can we go somewhere without all this wind?”

Twilight pointed over the balcony into the distance. They could make out a large settlement of newly constructed buildings – Republic City. But Twilight was pointing at a smaller settlement in a neighboring forest, composed of simpler constructions.

“Ah, I suppose we are almost there, aren’t we?”

Twilight nodded, walking back into the main cabin of the airship, gesturing for Renee to follow with her wing. The moment Twilight closed the door behind them, Renee let out a breath. “Peace and quiet…”

Twilight smiled, looking around the cabin. It was a simple metal room with windows on all sides and only the one room. The captain was a member of the Water Tribe fixated on driving the craft accurately, while Twilight’s friends played a game of cards on the floor behind him.

“Full house!” Pinkie shouted, slamming her cards down. “Pay up!”

“Pinkie, we aren’t playing with money,” Flutterfree said, turning her head and saying something else Twilight didn’t catch.

Nova said something, but her back was turned. Whatever it was must have been hilarious since Pinkie broke out laughing and Flutterfree blushed.

Renee walked up to them, mumbling something under her breath. Pinkie turned to her. “Hey, you want in?”

“Dear, we’re almost at our destination. I’m not sure we have time for anypony to be ‘dealt in’.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Fair point.” She threw all the cards in the air. “Game over!”

Nova said something.

Flutterfree grinned. “Twilight’s right behind you, you know.”

Nova’s entire body tensed. She turned around slowly with a sheepish grin on her face. “Hello there, Twilight! I, uh…”

“You do know I don’t have any clue what you said, right?” Twilight asked. “I’m confused how the conversation could have led to me being insulted anyway. Whatever it was, you’re forgiven.”

“Good!” Nova laughed nervously. “So, Renee, how far were we again?”

The pilot called something back to them – presumably ‘we’re here’ or something similar. The airship descended into an empty clearing in the forest at the edge of the demon village. The ponies thanked the pilot and stepped out, looking at the demons for the first time in quite a while. Their village was composed of tent-like structures similar to what they’d seen before, though made with smaller leaves and not on top of a giant red flower. There was more than one round hut structure this time around, though the center one was significantly larger than the others. Presumably it was where Siron lived.

Unlike the first time when they had arrived, the demons didn’t react in fear, nor did they react with aggression. They reacted with friendly waves, nods, and a few gruff motions.

Twilight realized very quickly that, unlike pony and human mouths, she wasn’t going to be able to read the lips of the demons simply because they didn’t have any lips. Instead it was mandibles...

She sighed – she was going to have to turn on her ears. She lit her horn and braced herself.

Demons sure liked to yell. She wasn’t sure if they were louder than she remembered or if she was just unable to process the noise. She could pick out the clanking of the carapaces as they bent their joints. She heard scraping coming from somewhere that was probably from some demon etching designs into their carapace, and she heard weapons clashing elsewhere from some kind of fight.

Flutterfree grabbed her with her wing. “Twilight. Focus. Everything will be fine if you just take a moment to piece out the voices… Okay? Look at me. Hear my voice.”

Twilight nodded, staring right at Flutterfree and letting her soothing voice fill her mind. “I... know. It’s hard, but I can do it. I can still hear everything else though… Everything else…”

Flutterfree smiled sadly. “It’s okay. We can do all the talking if you want.”

“I want to be involved,” Twilight asserted. “Even if just… a little.”

Pinkie walked up to her. “I’ll take the lead for now, if that’s okay. Okay?”

Twilight nodded. “It’s fine. I’m not exactly leader material at the moment.” She took a breath, trying to calm her nerves and not let the constant clacking, heartbeat, breeze, or anything other noise bother her. She managed to calm her nerves, but the incessant noises continued their irritating and distracting drone.

Pinkie patted Twilight on the back. “You’re gonna be fine, okay?” She jumped into the air and waved her hoof. “HEY SIRON!”

Siron looked up from the discussion he was having with Anix. “Hrm? Ah, Pinkie Pie! What a surprise.”

“Yeah it is!” She bounced up to him. “How’s it been?”

“You know, generally disliked by the humans around us, distrusted, the whole normal scenario.”

“They’re still letting you work on Republic City, I assume?” Renee asked.

“Indeed they are. Iroh and the other leaders are rather determined to keep us as part of the effort and their society, despite the ‘backlash’. I’m not sure why they bother, but I’m not complaining.”

Twilight forced a smile. “You’re getting lots of protection and legal standing, if I recall, right?”

Siron shrugged. “I believe that’s what it’s called.” He leaned down so he was level with her. “I hear you’ve obtained some real battle scars.”

Twilight flattened her ears. The gesture served only an expressive purpose, since the devices cared not for her ear orientation. “Yeah. I… I’m relying on magic to talk to you right now. It’s not exactly… pleasant.”

“Those of us who experience true battle rarely come out unchanged. But our changes are a source of pride, proof of survival.” He pointed at her ear devices. “This? This is not a crutch, not a cast. This is a badge of honor. A battlecry to the world saying that you survived. It gives you power.”

Twilight chuckled. “Thank you, Siron. I don’t think I’ve been told that yet.”

Siron glanced at the other ponies. “What kind of encouragement do you ponies offer that you forget the basics?”

Flutterfree shrugged. “Different cultural values.”

“…Bizarre creatures…” Siron shook his head. “Regardless, what actually brings you here?”

“The Tree summoned us,” Twilight said. “We need to solve a Friendship Problem of some kind here. Has anything interesting happened recently?”

“Besides the general distrust, we do have a visitor to the village who has been challenging every warrior we have to a duel and beating them soundly.”

“Really? Where?” Nova asked.

Siron pointed behind one of the huts. The ponies circled around to see the winged Veila cast a magic bolt at the visitor. The visitor wasn’t demon, pony, or human – she was a gray-skinned humanoid with two candy corn colored horns poking out of her mess of black hair; one shaped like a claw, the other like a poised stinger. She wore glasses that slightly magnified her orange eyes, one of which held seven pupils instead of the usual singular dot. Her cobalt blue lips were curved into a bemused smile, their color matching the ‘M’ symbol on her shirt.

In this visitor’s hands were a set of eight eight-sided dice made of a blue gemstone. She dodged to the left of Veila’s magic bolt and rolled the dice. They fell to the ground and glowed a bright white color, summoning a strange box into existence.

Veila looked at the box in confusion. It popped open, socking Veila in the face with an oversized boxing glove. Veila fell to the ground, dazed.

The visitor walked over to her and grinned. She extended a hand. “Nice try with that magic trick, but you’ll need to try a lot harder than that to beat me.”

Veila accepted the hand and the visitor helped her stand back up. The visitor bowed to the crowd. “Who’s next? Come on, can’t any of you demon bugs face me? I’m just waiting for a challenging fight! Prove to me that you’re not a bunch of bark without any real bite!”

Siron cracked his neck. “It’s my turn, then. Stranger, I am Siron, chief of the demon tribe. I accept your challenge.”

The stranger smirked. “Stranger? Name’s Vriska Serket. Thief of Light if you want a title.” She summoned her dice back to her fingers. “I hope you’ve got something interesting for me, boss man.”

Siron slammed his staff into the ground, forcing the jade crystal within to glow softly. “That I do. Prepare yourself, Vriska.”

“I’m always prepared.”

Siron twisted one of his left hands, grabbing Vriska’s foot in an aura of telekinesis. She was clearly not prepared for this, yelling out in surprise as she lost her footing. Siron thrust his staff forward, unleashing the swirling red and green energy.

Vriska twisted her body in just the right way to dodge the onslaught, flipping onto her hands and back onto her feet. “Nice shot!” She stood tall, raising an eyebrow. “Interesting color scheme as well. Where’d you get that?”

Srion arranged his three free hands in a triangle around the staff. “Ancient heirloom of my kind.” The red and green energy shot out again, this time accentuated by his magic. It curved its trajectory toward Vriska. She leaped over it, realizing with some annoyance that the energy was coming back around. She ducked under it, throwing her dice on the ground in the time before the bolt made another pass.

The bolt’s next pass skimmed her leg as her dice activated. Eight small cherry bombs appeared in midair and flew at Siron, exploding all over his body. He took every hit and didn’t fall over.

Vriska leaped over the energy bolt again. “You’re made of sterner stuff than the others!”

“Wouldn’t be chief if I wasn’t,” he said. He waited for Vriska to dodge out of the way of the swirling energies again. Then he shot exactly where she was going to dodge into, the attack hitting her dead on. She was sent tumbling across the dirt – but she landed on her feet, poised to attack again.

She summoned her dice to her hand again. “You would have declared it a win for you had I landed facedown, huh?”

“You have no proof of such allegations.”

“Cheeky bastard,” Vriska grinned, throwing the dice to the ground. Siron prepared for an attack. He was not expecting them to summon a ghost. A swirling ethereal being leaped for Siron, going right through his defensive attack. Siron braced for impact – but found the ghost was completely intangible.

The real threat was the distraction. Vriska was soon in front of him. She kicked him in the face with enough force to knock him to the ground. She placed her foot on his chest. “Gotcha.”

Siron glared at her with intense rage for a moment. His hand twitched, readying a spell – but he decided against it. His eyes softened and he let out a laugh. “That you did.”

Vriska stepped off and offered him a hand, which he took. “I think I’ve beaten your entire village now. Anyone else around to challenge me? Anyone?”

Siron looked to the poines. “There are the otherworlders.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Otherworlders, huh?”

Twilight nodded, pushing through the pain in her mind. “Yeah. Ponies aren’t native to this universe.”

Vriska smirked. “Neither am I. Though I guess that’s pretty obvious. Any of you ponies good fighters? Come on, send me your best hitter. I sense a challenge in you.” She looked at Twilight’s metal-lined ears. Upon seeing them, her smile faltered slightly and her eyes narrowed. “Perhaps you?”

“Er… I’ll pass,” Twilight said. “I’m not our best fighter and I’m not feeling all that great at the moment.” She rubbed her headache.

Nova shrugged, glancing at Pinkie. “Me, or you?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Hey, we’re both good for different things.”

“Both of you at once, then,” Vriska declared.

Nova rolled her eyes. “That wouldn’t exactly be fair.”

“Nova’s right,” Pinkie said. “You’d trounce us.”

Nova glanced at Pinkie. “That’s not what I…” She looked at Vriska after she realized what Pinkie was implying. “…You’re holding back a lot, aren’t you?”

Vriska smirked. “Guilty as charged!” she bowed. “Honestly, I’m certain nobody here could beat me if I was giving it my all, but I’d at least like to see someone force me to use some more creative tricks.”

Pinkie grinned, nudging Nova. “Hey, Nova. Let’s give her a good time.”

Nova shrugged. “…Fine. Any particular plans?”

Pinkie pulled out a squeaky hammer with an imprint of Vriska’s face on it. “Nope! We’re just going to have fun.”

Nova readied herself some magic armor, coating herself with a sheen of crystal. Vriska summoned her dice. Pinkie menacingly ate a cupcake.

Renee rolled her eyes, deciding to take the role of announcer. “Three… Two… One… Aaaaaand go.”

Vriska threw her dice to the ground first. She pulled out a sword to deflect Pinkie’s hammer, cutting into the squeaky head unleashing a sad wheeze of air. At the same time she twisted her body upward, dodging a beam of energy from Nova. Her dice activated, throwing a handful of knives at Nova, which the unicorn easily blocked. Vriska kicked at Pinkie, but Pinkie was suddenly behind Vriska with the Bomb Mask on her face. “Surprise!”

The explosion sent Vriska into the air. She nimbly twirled, dodging several volleys of magic lasers. “It would have been so much more hilarious if you’d said ‘surprise, motherfucker’.”

“Yeeeeeeah, not my style,” Pinkie said, pulling out her party cannon. “This is my style.”

Vriska dodged the onslaught of confetti and balloons but failed to twist away from a magic bolt to the leg. She lost her balance and went tumbling. She quickly rolled away from Pinkie’s tossed golf club and stood up.

Nova grabbed Vriska with her telekinesis, trying to pin her to the ground from a distance. Vriska’s strength was impressive, but it was not enough to stop the magic from pushing her down.

Vriska smirked. “Looks like I will have to do that…” Her body shifted slightly, and suddenly her outfit was orange. The robes hung over her back, a hood appeared over her head, a brilliant sun symbol took form on her chest, and she had suddenly grown two large butterfly wings. She took one look at Nova. Her seven-pupil eye glowed, latching onto the unicorn with some kind of magic power.

Nova’s horn experienced a power surge, blowing up in her face and tossing her to the ground. This released Vriska from the telekinesis field. She grinned. “And that’s tha-“

The real warhammer came down over Vriska’s head, planting her face several inches into the dirt. The attack drew blood of a cobalt blue color and shattered Vriska’s glasses.

Pinkie moved to pin Vriska, but somehow her hoof missed. Vriska rolled back onto her feet and grinned. “Did you think you had me there?”

“Nope,” Pinkie said, shrugging. “I did get a good hit off you though, didn’t I?”

Vriska pulled another pair of glasses out of her robes, placing them over her eyes. She wiped the blood coming from her nose off to the side. “Yeah. Did not see the real hammer coming.”

Nova tried to stand up and shoot Vriska, but she tripped over her own two hooves. “What the… What’s happening to me?” She tried to stand up again but fell on her back.

“I stole your luck,” Vriska said, smirking. “You’re very unlucky right now. And I’m very lucky.” She summoned her dice. “I think I can get a pretty good roll right about now.”

Pinkie smiled nervously. “I don’t suppose you’ll accept a surrender right now?”

“The terms of your surrender is that I get to unleash this roll on you.”

“Figures.” Pinkie tossed the warhammer aside for a pair of fishing poles.

Vriska blinked. “…What?”

“Hey, I drew them, means they’re going to be useful.”

Vriska shrugged, tossing the dice to the ground. A giant salmon appeared out of nowhere, mouth open wide. Pinkie ducked to the left, swinging her fishing poles at the gaping maw, hooking the jaw’s sides with her two hooks. She twisted herself sideways, spinning the fish around in an arc, swinging it back towards Vriska.

Vriska activated her eye, latching onto Pinkie’s luck, but the fish was already heading for her and it was way too big to dodge by pure luck. She was hit like a bowling pin, flipping sideways and landing flat on the ground.

Pinkie laughed hard – but lost control of the fish with her newfound bad luck. It hit her in the face at just the wrong angle, knocking her out cold. The fish flopped on her a few times before vanishing.

Vriska stood up rubbing her head and favoring one of her legs. “Yeah! I won- ow. Ow. Ow that fucking hurts. Giant fish sure pack a punch…”

“Can I have my ‘luck’ back now?” Nova muttered, struggling to remain standing. “Because I’m not sure I can take a step without faceplanting right now, and it’s infuriating.”

Vriska smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Hey, sorry, I’m a Thief, not a Rogue. Can’t exactly give it back. It’ll return on its own, give it a day or two.”

“A day or two!?”

“Hey, I didn’t take all of it! If I did you’d be having a heart attack right now.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Was that a cleverly veiled threat?”

“What? No!” Vriska threw her hands into the air. “Everyone assumes that! Gog! Maybe I’m just trying to let you know something because it’s interesting, huh? Ever think about that?”

Flutterfree blinked. “You have issues with people thinking you’re dangerous, don’t you?”

“What? I…” Vriska blinked. “Yeah, that’s exactly it.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “But you clearly are dangerous.”

“Hey, just because it’s evident doesn’t mean it needs to be a fucking issue!”

Flutterfree smiled. “Do you ever wonder if it’s you that’s making it an issue?”

“Oh Jegus… Nope, nope, not letting this turn into a gogdamn therapy session. Vriska is removing herself from the premises of this conversation and moving onto something with significantly less ‘nope’ content.” She looked directly at Twilight. “So, what’s the story behind those fancy ears of yours?”

Twilight blinked and tried to clear her head. “Oh! Well, it’s… Rather pain-“

Before she could start her story, one of the demon’s tents exploded in a shower of fire. A young woman burst out of it, hands aflame. “DEATH TO DEMONS!”

“DEATH TO DEMONS!” a dozen other voices chorused. Water, earth, and fire erupted from all around the demon village, filling the air with the power of Elemental war. Around a dozen men and women revealed themselves, taking out a similar number of tent houses as quickly as they could.

“WARRIORS!” Siron yelled. “DEFEND YOUR PEOPLE!”

The demons launched into action, grabbing their weapons and charging the various attackers. Blades and clubs met fire, earth, and water. All the ponies save Twilight leaped into action alongside them.

Twilight froze – the clang of weapons shook her to her core. The rumblings of the earth ground her awareness as the rocks were thrown. The crackling fire tingled and the water’s rush felt like an impact. She winced, closing her eyes tight.

“Twilight!” Pinkie’s yell cut through the other noises. “Just turn it off!”

Twilight clenched her jaw, cursing herself inwardly. Why hadn’t she just done that to begin with? She lit her horn and turned off her ears. Silence reigned.

She opened her eyes. Without the noise, everything was different. She felt like an observer, rather than a participant. Earth flew through the air with fire added to it, landing on top of Siron’s hut. Twilight felt the vibration of the impact in her hooves, but it was a dull feeling. A distant feeling.

She narrowed her eyes. She would not be distanced from this. These people, whoever they were, had attacked out of nowhere, unprovoked as far as she knew. She would take care of them. She focused her magic on a chunk of earth, redirecting the flung boulder into a different assailant. She teleported a waterbender in front of a firebender’s attack.

One of them saw what she was doing and thrust a jet of water at her. Twilight calmly used her magic to twist the jet around her body and back at the bender, knocking them to the ground.

A spire of earth hit her from behind, tossing her head over hooves. She attempted to right herself but the burly earthbender drove a pillar of earth at her from underneath, tossing her into the air. She lit her horn, firing a laser at him, but he deflected with an expertly aimed rock, which he then chucked right at her. The stone hit her in the chin, turning her fall into a rapid corkscrew dive. She landed on the ground, grunting.

The man glared at her. “Why do you defend them?” he asked.

“They are our friends,” Twilight coughed, standing back up. She flared her wings.

“They are a danger.” He readied a fist, preparing to drive earth into her face. She reared back, lighting her horn. She doubted she was going to be able to dodge his attack.

He thrust his fist upward – and generated a spike of earth a foot to Twilight’s left. He took a step forward, tripped, and fell flat on his face. Twilight saw Vriska standing behind him, a smirk on her face. “Not your lucky day, is it Twilight?” she asked.

“No…” Twilight said, canceling her spell.

Vriska’s eyes widened. She activated her eye again, stealing the luck from something behind Twilight. Turning her head, Twilight saw there was a firebender woman there who had just burned her own hands. Twilight gulped. “You… saved me there.”

Vriska moved back into Twilight’s field of view. She was already saying something. “-id. How did you not notice her? She wasn’t exactly being subtle!”

“Maybe because I’m deaf?” She pointed at her ears. “Maybe!?”

Vriska blinked. “That explains a lot.” She threw a punch to her side, hitting an earthbender in the face and giving him a broken nose in the process. She threw her dice on the ground, launching a giant marshmallow at an incoming hunk of rock.

Twilight sat down and blinked, watching as Vriska took care of everything around her in a matter of seconds. I don’t even need to do anything…

Soon, the attackers were fleeing. However, the plan had clearly been hit-and-run to begin with. The damage to the demon village was substantial, and there were more than a few of the red bugs crawling around, injured. Twilight took a breath and stood tall. She turned her ears back on, audibly wincing.

Vriska looked around, checking for what hit Twilight.

“I turned on my ears,” Twilight said. “It’s just… the noise.”

“What kind of lame hearing aids are they if they hurt?”

“The ones that work if your ears were completely blown out,” Twilight muttered. She dragged herself over to Siron, who was tending to a demon woman’s broken wings. “Who were those people?”

“Terrorists,” Siron muttered. He reached for the form of a knocked out earthbender, rolling back the man’s sleeve to reveal a tattoo – a circle with seven spikes poking out of it. “The Defenders of Paradise, they call themselves.”

Twilight furrowed her brow, trying to think through the noise. “…Have they done this before?”

“Attacked our village? No, this is a cowardly and brazen attack. They always attack us when we are alone, or people who associate with us, or when we’re in Republic City… I would declare war on them if I could.”

“Why can’t you?” Nova asked.

“Don’t know who leads them. Don’t know who their members are. Don’t know where they stay. Don’t know anything.”

Twilight looked at the knocked out man. “Why don’t we ask them what’s going on?”

“Be my guest. They never know anything, taking a page out of Ba’al’s book.” Siron curled his claws into a fist and punched the man’s prone form across the face. “Their leaders don’t reveal their identity and always communicate through pigeon.”

Vriska tore one of the womens’ jackets off, revealing a ton of tiny scrolls. “Hey, look what I found!”

The group walked over. Renee raised an eyebrow. “I’d say she is one of the ones who writes the messages.”

Siron’s eyes twitched. “Why would they send a communicator into battle? It doesn’t make sense!”

“They’re all pretty crazy,” Pinkie said, rifling through the scrolls. “I think this particular lady just really wanted to go and destroy some demon tents. Lucky break for us.”

Renee levitated some of the scrolls. “All of these are in code…”

Twilight furrowed her brow, squinting. “It would have to be a pretty good code if the translation spell can’t work it out…”

“Uh, we can always just ask her,” Flutterfree said. “I know we have a wake-up spell.”

Nova narrowed her eyes. “Or I could just tear it out of her mind.”

“That too.”

Twilight frowned. “You sure we should do that?”

Nova nodded. “They attacked. I’m going to see if she knows anything.” Nova’s eyes went white as her magic connected with the woman’s mind. There was silence for a few seconds. Nova returned, blinking. “She does write messages for the Defenders of Paradise. She does know more than ‘demons must be eradicated’ and ‘the other dimensions are impure.’ There’s a ‘safehouse’ in Republic city where she gets instructions.”

Pinkie rubbed her hooves together. “Now we’re talking. Information. Siron, we will help take these terrorists down! It probably has something to do with the friendship problem. To the ‘safehouse’ place!”

Vriska grinned. “I haven’t raided a safehouse in a while. I’m in.”

Twilight found herself groaning inwardly at the comment. She shook her head, chastising herself for it. Vriska was offering help and was happy to give it, Twilight should be happy. ...But she wasn’t.

“Are you coming, Siron?” Renee asked.

“Sadly, no, I must remain here with my warriors and rebuild the town.”

Nova blinked. “…Really? I thought of all people you would want revenge.”

“I trust you to take care of it,” Siron grunted. “My people need me. You do what you need to.”

Vriska shrugged. “We won’t need the help. Hell, we won’t need much other than me. I could take the place out all on my own…”

“We do need to, you know, actually get more information there?” Twilight said. “Brute force won’t do that.”

Vriska tapped her forehead. “Psychic. I bet one of them will have a weak, impressionable mind.”

She has everything… Twilight sighed, but forced a smile through the mounting pain in her head. “Well, great then! Let’s get going! Nova, lead the way!”

Nova nodded, leading them out of the demon village and toward Republic City.

Twilight turned her ears off. She was done with the sound of Vriska’s voice.

~~~

After the Hundred Years war had ended and territories were returned to their respective Elemental Nations, there was a problem. On Earth Kingdom soil there were numerous Fire Nation colonies that had not only been there for decades, but had also mixed with the culture of the Earth Kingdom to produce something new. When the war ended, the Fire Nation citizens didn’t want to leave, and there were more than a few earthbenders there who had started families that went back multiple generations with the firebenders.

It was among the first of the issues faced by a world suddenly at peace.

Sick of war, the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom sought to work out a peaceful solution, and their final decision was something of an oddity. They voted to make the mixed colonies free, separate from either kingdom. This idea soon evolved beyond simply creating a new Elemental Nation – Avatar Aang stepped in, suggesting the newly formed nation should serve as the ‘center’ for the entire world, as a place where all types of benders could live in peace and harmony.

Thus, the United Republic was born, and plans to create a spectacular capital known as Republic City were created. The demons were conscripted as extra workers, and more than a few other worlds had taken a keen interest in the city, though all involved were careful to adhere to the original city plans, for the United Republic felt a strong need to form its own culture that was not influenced by powers from beyond.

Republic City did not fully avoid all outside influence, but it did rather well considering where most of its resources were coming from. Buildings began to rise from the previously abandoned beaches of the coast.

That was roughly two years ago. The city was still very much under construction, but it was advanced enough that people had begun to move in. The city should have taken a minimum of ten years to create, but with all the help it was moving along far ahead of schedule. The buildings were orderly constructions, mixing design elements of all four nations to create efficient, simple, and yet somehow beautiful structures. There was even an Air Temple under construction on a nearby island, to be the future home of the Avatar himself, the last of the Air Nomads.

A constant sight along the streets was construction – construction, construction, construction. It was not uncommon to see a demon hauling material around, or working with earthbenders to construct an architectural overhang. The demons were regularly given untrusting glares, but they made do. Usually they were on good terms with the people they were working with.

A pony could be seen walking around the city’s streets occasionally, though few were involved with the construction efforts. Most were just tourists, or ponies whose circumstances had led them to live here for some reason or another. The United Republic had reasoned that since they were a home to all benders, they shouldn’t have an issue with otherworlders making their homes within their borders.

It was like a much neater version of the Hub, in many ways. There wasn’t a prevalence of technology, there weren’t dozens of people coming and leaving through dimensional portals each day, but there was a clear mixture developing. The Elemental culture may have been dominant, but it wasn’t all that existed.

Vriska, Twilight, and the other ponies walked down the streets of this scene, taking in the sights. Vriska had to admit; it was nice to see something a bit more orderly than she was used to. The multiversal scene tended to be a huge mess of chaos nobody could wrap their head around. Every world that had numerous others involved in any area was usually a hopeless disorganized mess that changed every other Tuesday – if Tuesdays could even be considered to exist, really. It was a nice change of pace.

Better than the fucking Strands by a long shot.

She looked to Nova. “Hey, how much further?”

Nova looked back at her, smiling. These ponies were always smiling; though Vriska could tell this wasn’t the usual naïve smile she was used to from their kind. These five weren’t idiots, not even the Pinkie. “Down that alley there, the orange house,” Nova answered.

Vriska cracked her knuckles. “Good.” She was looking forward to laying the smack down on a terrorist cell. To be fair, she was always looking forward to a good smack down of any kind. As long as it wasn’t dealt to her.

Nova cast an invisibility spell over them all as they stepped into the alleyway, walking cautiously. They saw no one else in the alley. The orange house was clearly occupied, raised voices audible from their current position.

“Okay,” Twilight said. “We should go the stealthy route, see if we can sneak in and listen to what they’re saying.”

“Bah,” Vriska said. “We don’t need that. You have me remember?”

“…She can’t hear you, or see you,” Renee said.

“Right. Invisible.” Vriska shrugged. “Well I’m going in.”

“Vriska!” Nova hissed. “We should stick to a plan of – hey! I hear you running off!”

“What’s going on?” Twilight asked.

Vriska smirked. I’m saving you all a lot of trouble. She charged in through the front door, noting with some mild annoyance that the invisibility spell dropped. The six benders on the first floor saw her and attacked. Vriska dodged all the elements with her momentarily high luck. She touched the mind of a bender, putting him to sleep. She kicked another in the face and stole the luck of another. They never stood a chance.

“Six down, zero fatalities,” Vriska said to herself, rather proud of her finesse. She threw her dice, using some of her luck to alter the outcome purposefully to something explosive. A lemon with a stick of dynamite in it flew into the ceiling and tore a hole to the second floor. She leaped up, elegantly dodging all the rocks, ice, and fire tossed at her.

She landed on top of a table with numerous papers placed all around it. “Excuse me, did I break up an important meeting of Terrorists R Us?”

An old guy pointed his finger at her, unleashing a torrent of fire. She dodged to the side and punched him out the window into the alley below. She threw her dice behind herself, summoning a giant tangle of vines that entrapped everyone in the room. She dusted her hands off and looked down into the alleyway. “There you go! All taken care of! And none of them are dead! So you can question them all.”

Pinkie blinked, calling up to her. “That was anticlimactic!”

“So? I got you what you needed, right?”

“I guess so?” Pinkie poked the old guy. “I dunno, it just means less, if that makes sense?”

Vriska shrugged. “It sorta does? Oh, I can get him to tell you who’s in charge of this mess too.” She touched the old guy’s mind. “Tell me who is in charge of your little terror tabernacle.”

He looked up at her from the grimy ground. “I will never tell you anything!”

“Okay, he’s got a strong mind.” She grabbed one of the women tied up in the tree. “Let’s see… you tell me who’s in charge!”

The woman’s eyes glazed over. “Anix…”

“Hey! Does the name Anix mean anything to you ponies?” she called down.

“WHAT!?” Nova shouted. “ANIX is behind this? But he’s a demon! That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense!”

Renee put her hoof to her chin. “…It does, though. The demons have been getting a lot of protection and assistance under the new laws…”

“Demons have died! He’d never do that!”

“Do we really know Anix that well, dear? Now if this were Mlinx we were talking about, I’d agree with you, but Anix has always been more… ’demonic’, if you catch my drift.”

Nova turned to Pinkie. “Well, what do you say?”

“He did it,” Pinkie confirmed. “Though… I think there’s more to it than what Renee’s suggesting. There’s something more sinister at play here.”

Vriska leaped down into the hallway, pumping a fist. “All right, we got the guy! Let’s go punch him in the face!”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “You sure like violence.”

Vriska shrugged. “I can be peaceful.”

“That wasn’t what I said.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Whatever, how about we…” she blinked. “Hey, where’s Twilight?”

Nova blinked. “What do you mean wher-“ She looked around, but couldn’t find her. “Uh…”

“Did she get foalnapped?” Renee gasped.

“No,” Flutterfree said, shaking her head.

“Then what happened to her?”

“She left,” Flutterfree said, staring into Vriska’s eyes. “Because of her.”

Vriska put a hand to her chest. “What did I do?”

“Everything,” Flutterfree said, fixing her with a disapproving look.

“Hey, I didn’t kill anyone!”

“I mean everything in the sense that there was no need for the team. You just walked in, kicked everyone around like ragdolls, then walked out with the information we needed.” Flutterfree raised a wing, pointing at the hole in the second story window. “You took away anything any of us could have done.”

“So?” Vriska said, folding her arms. “Come on, I did what we needed, and I did it quickly too.”

“And Twilight is struggling to convince herself that she’s still worthwhile,” Flutterfree countered. “She wants, badly, to get over her disability and be useful. This was her first mission since her injury. And then you show up, stealing the spotlight. Normally I wouldn’t hold this against you, but I can see that you wanted to be the center of attention. You dragged the light to you on purpose. Thief of Light indeed.”

Vriska’s smile vanished, replaced with a glare. “What did you just say to me?”

“I said you live up to your name,” Flutterfree continued, taking a step forward instead of backing down. “You stole the light, and now Twilight is Celestia-knows-where, probably crying and brooding because you felt like showing off!”

Vriska folded her arms. “Sounds like that’s her problem.”

Nova snapped. “She’s been deaf for less than a month, you asshole! Of course it’s her problem! That doesn’t give you an excuse!”

“Me, the asshole? What about all you, acting so entitled!”

“Entitled!?” Nova blurted. “Why I-“

Flutterfree held up a wing. “Vriska has a point, Nova. We are acting a little entitled.”

“Thank you,” Vriska said. “…Wait, what?”

Flutterfree shook her head. “Look… None of us are handling this well. Twilight just ran off, you’re being defensive, and we’re looking for someone to blame. Yes, Vriska, you’re being a spotlight hog and you were completely oblivious to Twilight’s feelings, but thinking it over I can’t really blame you for ignorance. Twilight has run off, but I can’t blame her because she’s going through a hard change. And as for me… What I just said was mostly uncalled for. I’m sorry.”

Vriska blinked, shaking her head. “…You backed down way too quickly.”

Flutterfree smiled sadly. “I was angry. I’m not right now. Just sad.”

Vriska rolled back onto her heels. “You shouldn’t just back up like that. Some of what you said meant something.”

Flutterfree smirked. “Are you admitting you were being a bit of a showoff?”

“Fuck.” Vriska facepalmed. “I walked right into that one…”

“Yeah, you did…” Flutterfree said. “Sorry, I think you just ran into us at a bad time. We’re all under a lot of stress and, well, we’ve just recently realized what a horrible place the multiverse can be.”

Vriska’s expression softened considerably. “It doesn’t pull any punches, does it?”

“Nope,” Renee added, looking at her horn guiltily.

Vriska held up her hands. “I get it. I get it. I was acting like my crude, badass self, and it wasn’t what you needed. That’s fine. I’ll just leave you girls to it.”

Flutterfree sighed. “You don’t have to leave.”

“You girls can handle Anix, I’m sure of it,” Vriska said, giving them the thumbs up. “I’m also sure Twilight will come back to you, eventually. You’re her friends. Pretty fucking good ones, from what I can see. So… Yeah.” She changed into her orange cloak and flapped her wings. “I’ll see you around.”

“You sure?” Flutterfree asked.

“Positive. I don’t need to be here right now. Just give that Anix guy a punch in the face for me, okay?”

“…Sure,” Flutterfree agreed.

Pinkie gasped. “You’re going to punch Anix in the face, Flutterfree?!”

“Looks like it.”

Vriska laughed. “Well, it’s been fun, ciao!” She flew off into the sky, careful not to look back.

She skimmed past buildings, through construction lattices, and toward the ocean. She stopped herself over the waves, looking down.

Damn, she thought, I feel like a tool. Just my presence tore someone up.

She shook her head – why was she letting what some whiney pony thought mess with her? She was just some stupid alicorn with a stupid emotional tangle and a stupid disability that Vriska had inadvertently preyed on…

She put a hand over her face and sighed. “I’m never going to be able to escape, am I?!”

The sky had no answer for her.

Vriska, now ticked off at life in general, descended to the beach and sat down on the sand. She removed her orange robes, reverting to her regular clothes. She picked up a rock and threw it into the waves, watching the ripples spiral out only to get washed away by the bigger waves of the ocean itself.

“Great, looks like Poetry Sight™ has kicked in. Wonderful. So what am I, the fucking ripples or the fucking waves? Or, wait, I get it, this is one of those double reacharound things where I’m both!” She tossed another rock into the ocean.

Vriska had no idea why she was still here. She should just grab some luck from the townspeople until she had enough to slip through a world boundary and go somewhere else. But here she was, sitting on a beach, staring at the ocean.

Feeling alone.

She groaned, preparing to launch into a random tirade at existence again, when something caught her eye.

Twilight was sitting on the beach a few meters to her right. The moment Vriska noticed Twilight, Twilight noticed Vriska.

The two stood up at the same time, staring at each other with confused, forlorn expressions. They wordlessly walked toward each other until they were right next to each other, standing on the beach, waves brushing past their feet and hooves.

There was silence.

“I’m sorry,” they both said at once.

“Wait, what the fuck?” Vriska said taken aback.

“You, sorry?” Twilight said, cocking her head. “How?”

“I was being an asshole that’s how!”

“You were just doing what needed to be done and I took it personally!”

“I was hogging the damn spotlight.”

“You had the right to! I’m the one who decided it made me useless.”

“You? Useless? Give me a break, you’re changing the world around you. You are the Charter Twilight.”

“And you’re clearly some kind of hero. You’re from elsewhere in the multiverse. You know more than we do, I can tell. I probably pale in comparison to you.”

Vriska pointed a finger at Twilight. “First rule of dealing with asshole bitches – of which I am the queen – don’t inflate their ego.”

“…You just called yourself the queen.”

“Yeah. I did. So what?”

“I don’t know, really.” Twilight blinked. “All I know is that I shouldn’t have run off.”

“I, clearly, needed to pay more attention to the alicorn I was supposed to be paying attention to.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Supposed to?”

Vriska shrugged. “I was told, a long time ago, that I would meet a Twilight with metal in her ears, and that it would be important to me for some reason.”

“Who told you this?”

“Another Twilight,” Vriska answered, smirking. “Your kind gets around a lot.”

“I… Have a lot of questions.”

“I have answers. Question is, do you want the answers, or do you want to discover things on your own?”

“I’ll take the latter, for now,” Twilight said. An awkward silence developed after this statement.

Vriska kicked some sand. “So… are mutual apologies accepted and does everyone agree this was fucking stupid?”

Twilight snorted. “Sure. Especially the competition to be the bad guy a minute ago.”

“I won that. Totally.”

“I think the moral we’re supposed to learn here is that there isn’t always a clear fault to be found and that sometimes interactions just suck. And that, well, other stuff about being the center of attention and not taking things personally. And… that me and my friends need to work some trauma out.”

Vriska blinked. “My gog, you think of things in terms of morals.”

Twilight grinned. “Yeah, I do.” She glanced at her flank. “Sometimes, when I do that, my cutie mark starts glowing, telling me I did what I was meant to do.”

“…The hell does that mean?”

Twilight cocked her head. “You’ve met other versions of me but you don’t know what the Tree of Harmony and its friendship problems are?”

Vriska shook her head. “Enlighten me.”

Twilight grinned. “Oh, trust me, I will.”

~~~

Less than an hour later, Twilight teleported back to the demon village. “Hey guys, Vriska and I made up – HOLY CELESTIA.”

She was witness to a gruesome scene – Siron’s fist was currently driven straight through Anix’s head. He pulled it back, leaving a blue, dripping hole where Anix’s face once was. The insubordinate demon’s body crumpled to the ground. Nova, Flutterfree, Pinkie, and Renee stared in shock, clearly not expecting what had just happened.

“WHAT!?” Twilight shouted. “…WHAT!?”

Siron looked at her and moved his arms around.

Twilight turned her ears on, wincing. “Care to repeat that?”

Siron clearly wasn’t in the mood. He stamped his foot on the ground and pushed his face up to Twilight’s. “Anix. Was a traitor. You know what he did.”

“He was in charge of the attacks, but-“

“BUT WHAT!?” Siron roared.

“But now we won’t know what his reasons were!” Nova shouted. “You got him to confess and then punched his face in! There could be more out there, Siron! More threats to your people!”

“Anix was never a threat to his people, not really,” Flutterfree said. “He was helping the-“

“You can stop talking now,” Siron grunted, turning his back on them. “All of you, out. Now.”

“But-“ Twilight began.

“I SAID OUT!”

The five ponies scrambled out of Siron’s hut through the hole in the wall.

Twilight caught her breath. “I… I… What in Celestia’s name!?”

“I don’t know!” Pinkie said, grabbing her head. “I knew he had a rage problem but I wasn’t expecting that!”

“Poor Anix…” Flutterfree muttered.

“That’s debatable,” Nova commented.

Renee shot her a look. “We do not condone senseless killings via face punching.”

Flutterfree started crying.

“Oh my Stars, Flutterfree, I’m sorry…”

Twilight took a deep breath and sighed. “I…” she shook her head and turned off her ears. “Okay, girls, get yourselves together! Snap out of it! GIRLS!”

The four of them stopped talking and looked to her.

“We need to get a hold of ourselves! We’ve seen terrible things, horrendous things, deadly things. We’ve been the cause of some of those things and we’ve been the victim of some of those things. We can’t let it do this to us! I can see you all – I can see myself – unraveling at the seams! Pinkie, afraid the world isn’t what she wanted it to be. Renee, afraid of herself, the rest of us, and what we can do. Flutterfree, unable to reconcile the anger she feels with her compassion. Nova, losing faith in her own role in the world. And me, struck with a disability and losing my confidence.

“These are just a small number of the problems we face that aren’t evil. They are just things inside us. Usually, we talk about them together, work them out – but we’ve been afraid. Afraid of hurting each other. Afraid of opening up the wounds. Afraid, afraid, afraid. I’m not going to stand for that anymore. I am here, girls. I am not a fragile piece of glass that could break from the slightest prod. I am deaf, not sickly. I can still help you.” Twilight smiled. “Girls, we were the friendship problem. We weren’t here to ease relations with the demons, we weren’t here to help Vriska discover herself, we were here to be here. For each other.”

She spread her wings. “We can’t unravel now. We have so far to go.”

Her four friends rushed into her embrace. There were tears – she didn’t know whose. She didn’t care. They were together, and the cutie marks on their flanks were glowing strong.

They were together.

Twilight opened her eyes for a moment, spying Vriska watching in the distance. She waved at them – and vanished.

Twilight knew they’d meet again someday. At a better time.

~~~

For Twilight and friends, the day was over.

For General Sunset and company, it had just begun.

The General ran into Hyrule’s grand Temple of Time, screeching to a halt in the main chamber. The Temple was beyond impressive – at least four stories tall, carved from an ancient pearly material that glistened from every angle, and covered with beautiful, ornate depictions of the Goddesses of Ardent. Power, Wisdom, Courage, and Time, all focused around an image of the Triforce above a simple, marble pedestal.

Zelda stood in front of the altar, looking down at Sunset. “You came.”

“Yes,” she said, panting. Toph, Lieshy, and Vivian filed in behind her. “What’s wrong?”

“The Triforce of Wisdom called me here…” Zelda said, tracing her hand over the altar. “All I saw was the Triforce, this temple, darkness, and the Sage’s mask.”

“So… what?” Sunset said, cocking her head. “The Sage is coming here? Ba’al took her, there’s no way.”

“Never say no way,” Toph pointed out. “It’s asking for trouble.”

Lieshy furrowed her brow. “Premonition’s brewing something awful, there lies another. Perhaps the Sage isn’t coming, but Ba’al is with the mask.”

Sunset growled. “Whatever it is, we’re ready. Princess, is there anyone else coming?”

Zelda nodded. “Word has been sent to the Apollo and a few other groups. You are just the first to resp-“

A portal opened right behind the altar. A pulse of purple energy launched outward, assaulting the minds of all present. Vivian vanished into the ground, Toph started screaming, and Sunset was frozen in place, eyes unable to move.

Lieshy and Zelda stood their ground. The Triforce of Wisdom glowed brightly on her hand. Lieshy glanced at her friends, confused by their reactions.

The Sage walked out of the portal, a dark chain affixed around her neck. Her expression was not stoic, or determined – it was sorrowful. “I’m sorry,” she said, moving to lay the mask on the altar.

Zelda was having none of that. She unleashed a quick spell on the Sage, tossing her to the side. Lieshy swooped in and picked up the mask, turning around as fast as she could. She bolted for the Temple’s exit, mask close to her heart.

The mask wanted her to escape. She knew it.

A tendril of disgusting blackness grabbed her back hoof. She was able to touch the doors – but not leave. She was pulled back and thrown to the ground, losing her grip on the white mask.

It flew into the hands of a Ba’al surrounded by purple, alien energies. Zelda pointed her Triforce hand at Ba’al, eyes narrow. “Begone.”

The holy force that shot from the Triforce of Wisdom was more than enough to tear the horrific power from Ba’al. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he slumped to the ground.

Zelda directed her holy magic onto the Sage next. The pony herself was largely unaffected, but the dark, impossible chain began to fade as the light burned its evil essence.

Something pulled on the chain from the other side of the portal, reestablishing its substance. A dark energy shot out of the portal in the shape of a claw, aiming right for Zelda’s heart. She fired back with her holy energy, barely keeping the claw at bay.

Tears in her eyes, the Sage picked up the mask. She walked to the altar, trying to drag it out as long as she could.

Lieshy tackled the Sage. “That shackled nothing! Fight, Pinkie, fight! This creature doesn’t have to control you! The cotton candy touches that above all! You are more than it!”

“I… I have to,” the Sage said, crying. “I can’t escape. It’s not meant to happen.” She bucked Lieshy away. “I never wanted this to happen.”

Lieshy flew at her again, but this time the Sage didn’t let her get close. She hit her away with a frying pan, dazing the poor pegasus.

The Sage picked up the mask again and placed it on the altar. Zelda was far too busy keeping the dark claw back to do anything about the mask as it floated above the altar. A ping of magic went off, and four separate essences of divine power appeared in the air above the mask. Blue, green, red, and a larger white one in the center, shining their holy light down on all.

It was enough to push the madness out of Sunset and Toph’s minds. The holy essences of the Goddesses told them it was too late to save them – but the Sage needed help.

Sunset roared, summoning every ounce of magic she could into a single fire spell aimed directly at the dark chain around the Sage’s neck. A swirling blade of holy energy channeled through her antlers combined with the flame summoned through her horn, colliding with the chain. Chunks of it went flying, but it healed itself almost instantly.

“It doesn’t want me to go!” the Sage yelled.

“Screw that!” Toph yelled, driving a spike of earth into the chain, to less effect than Sunset’s disc.

The divine essences began to vanish into the mask – including the one that bestowed much of the Triforce of Wisdom’s power. Zelda’s light began to falter. Toph and Sunset could feel the madness melting into their mind again. They slowed, stumbling over their own attempts to break the chain.

Zelda’s power broke. The claw slammed into her, cutting a gash across her midsection. Toph and Sunset broke down, unable to continue facing the monster. The mask absorbed all four divine essences into itself, and fell back onto the altar.

Crying, the Sage picked up the mask. She placed it on her face, and stood still.

The chain yanked her back. She struggled against it, but her limbs froze up. She let out a bloodcurdling, agonized scream as she was dragged back from where she came from.

Vivian’s hand shot out from the ground, grabbing a hold of the Sage’s leg at the last possible minute.

She was dragged through the portal along with the Sage.

“Vivian!” Sunset yelled, wailing at the world on the other side. The portal closed, leaving nothing behind. “Vivian!”

Something inside her snapped. She shot an explosion spell at the back wall, destroying the engraving of the Triforce in a blind rage. “VIVIAN!”

“I could see it…” Toph said. “I… I can’t see anything. I’ve never seen anything.”

Link, O’Neill, and a team of Tau’ri teleported into the room. Link clenched his fist. “I knew it. We’re too late.”

“The Goddesses…” Zelda mumbled. “They’re… They’re gone…”

Link looked at his hand. He forced the power of the Triforce to show itself – but he only got a faint glow. He bit his lip. “There went our trump card…”

“Okay!” Sunset shouted, pointing at Link. “You know something! I know you know something! You better start explaining or I start burning!”

O’Neill glanced at him. “Link, I think we’re beyond the point that the secret will help.”

Link sighed, nodding. “…There is this being called Majora…”

~~~

Aang walked into a large tent in the middle of the desert. “Hello?”

Iroh was seemingly alone in the tent. “Ah, Avatar Aang. I’m glad you could meet me here.”

“…What’s with all the secrecy? And this… big, empty tent?”

Iroh folded his hands. “Aang, there is a great evil from another world that is threatening ours. We don’t know what it is, exactly, or what it wants. But it infects the minds of those who know about it, driving them to do its bidding.”

Aang blinked. “…What?”

Iroh sighed. “There’s an evil spirit running amuck in other worlds and it’s causing big problems in everyone who thinks about it.”

“How is that even possible?”

“How do unicorns use magic? I have no idea; all I know is that it’s infected the soul of a dear friend. And you are the only force I know of that can change a person’s soul.”

Aang looked at his hand. “…Yeah. I can do that. Who is it and where are they?”

The Puddlejumper decloaked, revealing Sombra and Tempest sitting at the back hatch. The two of them quickly wheeled a gurney out with Corona on it. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth was twisted in a permanent scowl. Her skin was covered in sweat and Aang swore he saw purple tendrils of energy coming off her fingertips for a split second.

Aang took a deep breath. “All right. I can do this.” He crossed his legs and pressed his hands together at the side of Corona’s bed, entering a meditative state. “What should I expect?”

“There is a presence within Corona that should not be there,” Iroh said. “A dark, evil thing. We believe only a small part of the entity is within her, but it is connected in some way to the rest of it. We have to be careful – we don’t want to draw the attention of the larger entity if we can help it. But above all else, we need to save Corona. She’s sedated, so she shouldn’t be able to fight back. Physically.”

Aang nodded, opening his eyes in the Avatar State. He stood up slowly, touching his hand to Corona’s forehead and chest. Aang’s eyes shot out a soul energy of blue, while Corona’s gave off a red – a red with purple imperfections.

Aang’s blue energy shifted into Corona’s body, working its way through her chest and lower body, purging the purple darkness bit by bit. The darkness squirmed in Aang’s perception, trying to fight back, but failing against the power of the Avatar. Corona’s own soul realized it was getting help, and began to fight against the darkness with renewed strength.

Then the darkness reacted in a different way. Magic spiraled off Corona’s fingertips in the physical realm, inching toward Aang’s chest.

Aang removed his hand from Corona’s chest, pointing at the dark magic approaching him. He remembered what Twilight had taught him about magic at the interdimensional meeting that seemed so long ago. He may not be able to use magic alone, but the dark energy was providing him with some. He channeled the darkness into his hand and pushed back.

Something clicked in his mind. He felt the magic within Corona, alongside her soul. It was far more corrupted than her soul – tied in knots, twisted, and alien. He needed to fix it as well, and the darkness had just given him his way in. He pushed his free hand back on Corona’s chest and stirred her inner magics. They aligned, twisting back to what they needed to be. To Aang’s mild surprise, the shape of her entire body began to change – fingers retracting back into her hands, legs shifting their joints around and pushing the knee closer to her body, face elongating, skin growing a thin coat of fur. A horn protruded from her head, sparking with magic. She slowly returned to her natural form of a unicorn, breaking through the seams of her skin-tight spacesuit as she did so.

“…Woah,” Sombra said. “Now that’s cool.”

Aang moved to adjust the last little bits of magic and darkness. He was getting tired from all the exertion, but he was almost done. He just needed to-

"BO͝Y̨” a voice shouted. Aang no longer found himself in a tent in the middle of the desert – he found himself in an infinite plane of darkness. He saw nothing but a human Corona, standing next to him.

She grabbed his hand, clutching it tight. Aang stood firm and glared into the darkness. “I am Avatar Aang.”

He was still in the Avatar State – and so every Avatar who had ever existed appeared behind him, hundreds of Avatars from every one of the Elemental Nations, standing firm, flanking him and Corona.

“We are the Avatar.” All of them said at once. “Leave this soul be and begone from this world!”

There was laughter – alien, disgruntled, but slightly feminine laughter. The mask was there, where it hadn’t been before. Purple, heart shaped, spiked, and with two soul-burning eyes.

Corona squeezed Aang’s hand harder. He didn’t flinch from the mask’s gaze.

“You want me to leave?” it – she – said. “But, you see, I don’t want to.”

The entire legion of Avatars took a battle stance. “We will make you leave.”

“Maybe you can,” she said, chuckling. “After all, I’m not truly there. Only so much I can do against you, Raava. But even if you do drive me away, I won’t be gone. I’m coming through. And I will destroy you, just like I’m destroying all the other pathetic guardians and goddesses of your precious worlds.”

The mask floated closer. “I am Majora. And my darkness will be your end.”

The Avatar legion thrust their hands forward, forcing spirit energy at Majora, pushing her back. She didn’t go quietly – roaring with the eldritch power beyond understanding. Tentacles pulsed from behind her mask, forming a landscape of true impossibility and evil.

The Avatars stood strong.

“AL̷L Y̷OU͏ D̸Ó ͘I͡S D̷ELAY͞! ̀D̨E͢LA̸Y!̴ ̡D̷E͡LA̸Y̶!̨ D̴EL͡AY̛!“

Corona curled her free hand into a fist. “NO!” She screamed against the eldritch words. “WE DO MORE!” She let go of Aang’s hand and ran at the mask, screaming. She punched her hand right through its heart-shaped wood, grabbing the horrors that lay behind. She pulled out a disgusting fleshy mess twisted in patterns that had no right existing within any sane mind.

She crushed the mess in her hands, slowly transforming to her true unicorn form. “DO YOU HEAR ME!?”

Majora’s mask pulled back and reformed. For a split second, Corona thought it looked startled. But if there had been any moment of uncertainty, it was gone in an instant, replaced with receding darkness. “I hear you, Sunset. I have always heard you. I ̶H͟ĄVE̡ A̛LWAYS H̴ȨA͢RD ́YOU ̶ALL̸.”

Aang and Corona were suddenly back in the real world, both awake, both breathing heavily.

Corona grabbed her head. “I think… I think she’s gone!”

Aang fell onto his back, breathing hard. “Yeah… At least most of her…”

“…Her?” Iroh said, turning to Aang while Sombra engulfed Corona in a hug.

“Majora,” Aang said. “She has a name. And she called me Raava, whatever that means…”

Iroh raised an eyebrow. “It’s an ancient name associated with the eternal spirit of the Avatar. I know little else about it.”

Aang nodded. “Whatever she is, she’s out there. And she’s evil.”

Corona pulled her unicorn self away from Sombra, eyes widening. “I took something from her.”

Aang blinked. “You did?”

“Yes! I… I know her plan.” She paled. “Oh no…”

“What? What is it?” Tempest asked.

“Majora’s on Earth. She wants to destroy it to fully free herself from the mask.”

Nobody had anything to say to this.

026 - Majorism, Part 2

General Sunset and her group stood at the edge of a floating island in the Twilight Realm, examining a large, flat, black disc with six pillars spread around its edge. Between each set of pillars stood three Twili in long, ancient robes. Their hands were outstretched to the center of the disc, where, surrounded by lines of magic ‘circuitry’, an empty version of Majora’s Mask sat. Wooden, colorless, and without the vibrant eyes the real mask contained. It was to serve the exact same purpose as its predecessor - to seal Majora’s magic away where it could only do little.

The eighteen Twili finished their chants and rammed their fists into the floor of the disc. The circuitry flashed between all the colors of the rainbow, infusing the mask with sealing power. It gained a soft purple color, ready to entrap the magic of Majora within. It floated into the air and began to rotate, slowly.

“We done?” General Sunset asked, turning to the Twili Queen.

She nodded. “It simply requires contact with Majora’s essence now. It will draw all the power into it. Simply get her into this world and it will find her, and then you can leave.”

“Finally,” O’Neill muttered. “It’s been hours.”

“Such a complex ritual is an ordeal,” the Queen stated. “Now imagine how difficult it was to perform when she was here, looking for us. Remaining hidden from Majora for several hours is no easy task. I’m not sure how our ancestors pulled it off.”

The Happy Mask Salesman chuckled. “Very carefully. I may or may not have helped.”

“What are we going to do with it once she’s sealed inside?” Toph asked.

“Toss it into a black hole,” O’Neill said. “I don’t care how powerful she is, she’s not getting out of that.”

“If you believe that will remove her for eternity, by all means, try,” the Queen said. “But since she is not here, we will have to move the altar.”

O’Neill glanced at the Apollo, hovering overhead along with all of Cosmos’ ships. “I think we can handle that. Dial the Hub, see if we’ve got any dirt on anything Ba’al or Majora related. Just need a little touch-“

A tremendous, purple-rimmed portal tore through the fabric in reality like a shark tearing at fresh meat. A lone, purple claw reached out for the altar. The edges of the tremendous arm shimmered with an edge that hurt to observe and tentacles that grew from all angles, branching out like a tree’s roots. The tendrils angled around the mask carefully.

Sunset looked away. “Ugh… Well at least we won’t have to go hunting….”

The Happy Mask Salesman’s smile vanished. “No…”

Comso narrowed her eyes. “Something’s wrong.”

The tendrils deliberately attacked the altar from below, triggering the reaction. The new mask became a gravity well, sucking the tendrils of darkness in. Cosmo teleported the eighteen Twili to safety before they could be destroyed by their own creation. The defenses of the Twilight Realm itself activated, sealing Majora’s power within a gray bubble covered in patterns reminiscent of refracting water. Majora’s claw swirled into the mask’s essence like a hurricane, infusing into the wood.

The Happy Mask Salesman roared. “Keep the portal open!”

As he said this, the portal Majora’s claw was sticking out of started closing. Cosmo was the only one who could do anything, appearing behind the portal and forcing it open with the full brunt of Harmony.

On the other side, Majora slammed the portal shut, severing her own essence.

The eldritch tendrils were completely absorbed within the mask. The moment they were gone, the gray bubble vanished. The mask tried to suck more dark power in, but there was nothing to latch onto. It shook for a moment and promptly disintegrated into dust.

The Happy Mask Salesman let out a sound that had no right to leave a human’s mouth; conveying agony, distress, and rage.

Comso teleported back. “That’s a problem.”

“She knows how to use dimensional portals now…” The Happy Mask Salesman said. “She doesn’t have to slip between Ardent and the Twilight, she can slip anywhere. She can seal the Sealing Altar away whenever she wants! Even if we took it to her physical location, she’d just move it!”

“Take it?” the Queen blurted. “That was a one time use! We’d have to make a new one, and that’ll take hours. Hours I doubt you have.”

General Sunset paled. “No… We have to be able to do something else!”

“Like what?” the Happy Mask Salesman said, laughing. “She’s expanded too much!”

“Brute force,” O’Neill said. “We’ve got a fleet right here. I say we find a way to use it.”

The Queen glared. “You can use it elsewhere. Leave our world, now. You are not welcome here, nor will you ever be welcome here.”

O’Neill nodded. “As you wish, your highness.” He turned to his radio. “Apollo, start beaming us up.”

Link and Midna took one look at the Queen. She lifted her head higher. “I will celebrate when you die to Majora. It will finally serve your world justice.”

Midna slapped the Queen across the mask with her hair. “Not happening.” They were transported away before the Queen could react.

The Apollo and other ships left the Twilight behind.

Every Twili was happy to see them leave. They returned to their lives, confident no destruction could come their way, from Majora or otherwise.

~~~

Corona walked back to the command center of AID. Blood caked her coat. Most of it wasn’t hers. She stumbled into the room, coughing. “Got mine taken care of,” she called.

“Same,” Tempest said, returning with her group of agents. “There may be some stragglers, but we’re good now.”

Director Storm and Iroh returned as well. Director Storm was leaning on Iroh for support from a broken leg. “Clear,” Iroh said, laying Director Storm down in a chair.

Aang returned to the center as well, breathing heavily. “I… Have never spent so much energy… In my life…”

“Good for all of you!” Sombra called over the intercom. “Now we should probably get out of here, you know, see how Twilight’s doing?”

Corona nodded, scratching her neck, trying not to look at the blood on her legs. “Exit’s easy enough to get to, now.”

Director Storm laughed. “All right! Who’s ready to get out of here and kick some more Ba’al ass?”

“I think most of us are exhausted,” Iroh commented. “But we will.”

Tempest saluted, along with all the agents behind her. “Yes we will!”

Corona smiled. “Yeah… we will. Hey, Sombra, think you can activate the sprinkler system in the hall over there, I need to-“

Sombra activated the sprinkler system in the room they were all in.

“SOMBRA!” Tempest shouted.

Sombra chuckled. “Oh, I’m sorry – Corona, did you want to not get all these schmucks wet?”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Not really?”

Storm chuckled. “We may be sworn enemies, Sombra, but I have to admit, I like your style.”

“You’re nicely eccentric as well, Oncoming Storm.”

“What is it with people and trying to use my full name ominously? Really doesn’t work on me.”

Tempest coughed. “We should probably move out. Get beyond the bubble so we can teleport, contact reinforcements, and update the Hub.”

“Yeah, right,” Director Storm grunted, standing up, leaning on his chair. “That’s going to be slow.”

“We can send a scout, sir,” Tempest said.

“Yeah, I vol-“ Corona didn’t finish her sentence. She just started screaming. Director Storm followed her example, falling to the ground.

“What happened?” Aang shouted, running to her.

“YOU DID!” Corona yelled, lashing out with a burst of purple magic, tossing Aang back. He fell against a wall, dropping to the ground. “YOU LET ME KNOW!”

Aang stood up, glaring at Corona – or what had just been Corona a second ago. Now, a being with deep, purple pupil-less eyes stood in Corona’s body. She took a few steps forward, sneering at Aang.

The agents behind Tempest fired. Corona lit her horn and shot the death spell at several of them, draining the life from them in an instant. Tempest tensed as she heard the agents fall behind her. “Hold your fire!” She yelled.

“Yes…” the voice of Majora said, coming from both Director Storm’s and Corona’s mouths at the same time. “Realize that to retaliate… Is death.” Director Storm stood on his broken leg, unable to feel the pain within. He slapped Iroh across the face, knocking him to the ground. Corona took a few more steps to Aang.

The guns in the walls locked on Corona, readying a volley of specialized bullets.

“Sombra!” Majora said, her voice echoing into Sombra’s ears despite the distance between them. “You don’t want to do that!”

“Why not?” Sombra demanded. “Worst you do is kill all your hostages.”

“You may not care about these hostages,” Majora said. “In fact, you don’t care about anyone here – except one.” She forced Corona to create a knife of magic and held to her own neck. “I can make Sunset here cut off her own head if you so much as make a move of any kind.” She pressed the knife deep enough to draw blood on Corona’s already bloodsoaked coat.

Sombra said nothing. She also didn’t do anything.

“Thought not.” Majora turned both her heads to Aang. “Hello, Raava.”

Aang shook his head. “Just Aang right now.”

“Why not enter the Avatar State and destroy us?”

“Because that’s what you want,” Aang said. “You want to destroy the Avatar Spirit forever. You can’t do that unless I’m in the Avatar State.”

“Smart boy,” Majora said. “But you want to turn to the Avatar State anyway. If I don’t get to kill your essence soon this entire place goes up in flames and I kill everyone in it.”

Aang narrowed his eyes. “You are going to do that anyway.”

Majora’s faces scowled. “Surrender yourself, Raava, or-“

“Or what? You kill me?” Aang stood tall. “You’ll have to try.”

Majora twisted her heads. “Why must all you guardians be so pesky and petty…” Corona unleashed a beam of fire at Aang, which he quickly deflected around himself. Using the water in the room, he froze Director Storm and Corona solid. Storm was unable to break free, but Corona easily melted the ice around her.

Majora only spoke through Corona now. “That was intensely stupid. I am-“

Aang ran away. He charged down a hallway on top of a sphere of air, blowing papers everywhere.

Corona’s face sneered. She teleported after him. “You can’t run away from me, Raava.”

“I can try!” Aang said, dodging a bolt of fire from her.

“I could kill you in an instant!” Majora yelled.

“Oh, I think you’re right!” Aang said, making a hard right in the compound. “I just think you won’t unless I’m in the Avatar State!”

Majora tugged on Aang with Corona’s telekinesis, but Aang bent the magic into his hands and unleashed it in a bright flash-bang. Majora shrieked.

Aang noticed something. “Hey… That wasn’t painful to my ears.”

Majora growled. “I wasn’t angry enough.”

“I think your little bubble-shield prevents you from getting your full power in here as well!” Aang grinned. “You have to use her power, not your own!”

“It’s still more than enough,” Majora said. “You transformed her into her true form, a being with nigh unlimited magic potential. She has spells that can twist your very perception of pain. Her past is a rather delightful one.”

Aang caught a jet of fire with his hand, twisting the magic into his body and releasing it again. He smirked. “Aren’t you mad I figured out how to bend magic? And… I guess whatever your mysterious purple stuff is, not that you can use it.”

Majora roared, forcing a piece of wall near Aang to transform into an explosive. It ignited, tossing Aang through a wall of the compound, He groaned, barely jumping in time to avoid a flaming hoof to the face.

“It’s only a matter of time before I force you into the Avatar State…” Majora growled. “Then, Raava, your time as an annoyance will be over. No more removing my influence from the souls of others. No more bending my eldritch energies. I will have dominion.”

“Yeah, don’t think so.” Aang blew a mixture of air and fire at Corona, toppling her to the ground. “I think I’ll just stay alive. Or, well, die, and then let the next Avatar defeat you.”

“I’ll find them… As a child…”

Aang smirked. “And that worked so well with me, didn’t it?”

Majora roared, surrounding Aang in fire. He calmly collected it with his fire bending, throwing it on the ground. Aang was right – Majora could easily use the powers of Corona to kill him outright, but Majora didn’t want that. She was having difficulty using the nonlethal attacks to force the Avatar State, and Aang was just so good at dodging that he recovered from whatever he was hit with quickly.

He was drawing her out.

“How long does this go on, Raava?” Majora shouted. “How long?”

“Oh, it’s already gone on long enough. I’m pretty sure that, by now, everyone’s evacuated the building. It’s just you and me in here, Majora.”

Majora’s face twitched. She focused on the frozen Storm for the first time in a few minutes, only to find that he was the only person in the room. All the agents and Iroh were gone.

Majora lit Corona’s entire body on fire in a fit of rage. “YOU WILL REGRET BLINDING ME, RAAVA!”

Aang shrugged, bending the fire around Corona to knock her over. “I don’t think so.” He raised his hands and waved her on. “Come and get me.”

Corona, under Majora’s wrathful control, charged.

~~~

The eldritch claw reached out to Twilight. She would be dead the moment it touched her. She knew this, and couldn’t do anything. Its impossibility froze her. It wanted her stuck there, stuck to just take it. Majora wanted them all gone in one fell swoop they wouldn’t be able to do anything about.

Rick pointed his fully operational portal gun at the hand and fired with the calibration slightly off. Instead of opening a portal it latched itself onto Majora’s portal, turning the connection between worlds into a sinkhole of green sparks and nothing. The hand disintegrated, and the portal Majora had made solidified into a green swirling mess of instabillity.

Twilight could suddenly think again. She backed away from the pulsating green mass in front of her, shaking her head. The green mass twitched, pulsing. She heard the sound of a battering ram hitting a door.

Someone must have said something, because suddenly they were somewhere else. Nova had teleported them to Canterlot High.

Twilight turned around to look at everyone. Rick, Morty, Flutterfree, Renee, Pinkie, Nova… All were fine.

Rick threw his hands into the air. “Fuck this shit, I’m out!” He recalibrated the portal gun and connected to another universe correctly. “Come on Morty.”

“But, Rick-“

“No buts, Morty! These ponies currently have a one-way ticket to Destination Fucked because somebody forgot to consider the possibility that, maybe, I dunno, there was more than one planet the fucking ‘god’ was trying to destroy!”

“Can’t you do something?”

“No, Morty, because there are some things you just don’t fuck with. Eldritch god-monsters that have just had their seal broken is one of them! It’s not worth the effort.”

Morty looked at the ponies. “But what about-“

“They can escape with us, if they want,” Rick muttered. “If that’ll make you stop whining”

Morty looked at them, eyes pleading.

Twilight shook her head. “We can’t abandon what we’ve made.”

Morty sighed. “Well… Good luck then. Hope you don’t die.”

Twilight smiled sadly. “Take care of yourself, Morty. You’re a good kid.”

Morty felt the need to hug her, and Twilight let him.

“Oh for the love of-!” Rick yelled. “Let’s go Morty!”

Morty retreated from the embrace, nodded to Twilight, and followed his grandfather through the portal. It closed, leaving the five ponies alone with a very big problem.

Pinkie took in a breath. “Okay, so, allow me to say what we’re all thinking. WHAT IN CELESTIA’S NAME ARE WE GOING TO DO!?”

“Find out more,” Twilight said. “We… We don’t know where Majora was freed, how exactly she’s been freed, if she’s just in the process of being freed, or what her plans even are besides, well, kill us.” She took a breath. “At least Earth is okay…”

“What if it was Equestria, Twilight?” Flutterfree asked. “What if our world was taken?”

“It wasn’t Equestria,” Twilight said. “I would have sensed those magic nodes, or the Starfinder would have. No, our world is fi-“

All of them felt their connection to the Tree of Harmony hiccup. Their cutie marks flashed brightly for a second and then went out.

The Tree of Harmony wasn’t calling them to solve a friendship problem.

It was just screaming in pain.

Twilight paled. “The Tree of Harmony is in danger!”

“Let’s move it!” Pinkie shouted. “It needs our help!”

~~~

O’Neill looked at the horrifying picture on the Apollo’s bridge screen.

Boxen folded his arms. “I was on a ship returning from the Other Side. I saw this. I left the universe as soon as I could. Then I came here.”

O’Neill stood up and walked closer to the screen. It was a still of the ruined Binary planet – purple, fleshy, impossible core surrounded by twisted tentacles that grasped the chunks of crust that survived or drove themselves into dimensional portals. O’Neill knew the image wasn’t moving but he swore the core was beating like a heart.

Cosmo put a hoof to her chin. “Well, we know where Majora really is.”

Link pointed out the extruding tendrils that ended abruptly. “She’s reaching into other universes. That’s how she got to the Twilight.”

General Sunset’s eyes widened. “Where else is she attacking?”

“Probably everywhere,” O’Neill said, folding his hands. “We need to destroy that planet she has become completely.”

“Do you have a weapon that can do that?” Boxen asked.

“I can think of one. We dump a stargate in your star, connect it to something unpleasant, force the ball of fire to go supernova. That’s off the table because it would destroy your other planet as well.”

Boxen nodded. “Keep it on the table as a last resort.”

Sunset blinked. “I was not expecting that response from you.”

“We are able to realize when there’s something bigger than us,” Boxen said indignantly. “If it comes to it, use it.”

O’Neill sighed. “We’ll have it ready. I’ve also contacted Earth Tau’ri to see if we can get a shipment of some of our super big bombs and a ton of drones.”

Cosmo spoke up. “My portion of the fleet is designed with the capability to take my power and amplify it. The onslaught was enough to drive a race of galactic exterminators to the extinction they themselves dealt out for so long. I do not know if it can face this Majora, but it will certainly be a boon.”

The Happy Mask Salesman stood up. “I believe you are all being foolish. Even this idea of destroying the sun has no guarantee of success. Majora is a being far beyond what any of you have experienced. That Tree of Harmony you have within you, Princess? Majora started as that. Then she became more. So much more. Not even the holiest weapons in our world could destroy her while she was sealed in a mask. As destructive as your magic and technology can be, do you really think it will be enough?”

“The other option is run with our tails between our legs,” Sunset spat. “And we aren’t doing that.”

Link nodded. “We’re fighting, no matter what. We may die trying, and if that is the case, then so be it. But we will not run away quietly. That’s just giving Majora what she wants on a silver platter.” He grabbed his sword and plunged it into the ground. “We’re going to fight for our lives, our families, and our worlds. We’re going to make her fight for her life.”

“Nice speech, but you’re fixing the hole you made in the floor,” O’Neill commented. “I’m going to check to see the ETA on those weapons and any possible backup…”

“A ship just entered the universe!” a crewmember yelled.

“That’s way too fast,” O’Neill muttered. “On screen.”

An image of Ba’al’s Mothership appeared alongside a single Ha’tak. There was a large gash cut through one of the Mothership’s sides.

“…His weapons aren’t charged,” the communications officer said.

“He’s not stupid,” O’Neill said. “I bet he wants to talk. Put him up when he calls.”

A Ba’al with blood running down his face soon took up the screen. “Ah, O’Neill!”

“You screwed up.”

Ba’al bit his lip. “Er… Yes. Clearly. You know, I did have backup plans in case she tried to betray us. Mental conditioning on a few of us, spies sent into her ship, a couple outposts…”

The Happy Mask Salesman laughed his usual eerie laugh. “But she knew about all of them and destroyed them before you could activate them.”

“Yes. …Excuse me, O’Neill, who is this man?”

“The Happy Mask Salesman,” O’Neill answered. “I have come to accept that I will never learn his actual name. He knows a bit about Majora.”

“Ah. So, O’Neill, what’s the plan?” Ba’al asked.

“Wait for a shipment of weapons and brute-force our way to destroying Majora,” O’Neill said. “Think you can not mess this one up?”

“My ships are at your service.”

O’Neill rolled his eyes. “Of course.” He cut the channel.

“…We’re just accepting this?” Link said.

“Link, trust me, I know Ba’al. He’s willing to cooperate right now. It always happens when a bigger fish shows up. He can manipulate and deal with us in many creative and vile ways. He cannot deal with Majora.”

Link nodded. “Fine. He doesn’t actually have much to give us though. Just a big ship and a smaller ship that the Apollo alone could destroy.”

“We need every edge we can get,” Cosmo said. “Every weapon, every ship, every spell. I’ve already sent orders back home to acquire as many ships as possible. They’ll be pouring in steadily for some time. I doubt we’ll have time to wait for them all.”

“Must be nice, being able to leave your world unattended,” O’Neill commented.

“It is. No internal threats, and I don’t believe Majora can operate well over large enough distances to reach our planets.”

“Furthermore, she’d have no interest in your world,” the Happy Mask Salesman said. “Since you aren’t in it.”

Cosmo nodded slowly. “I am aware I am probably one of her targets. I am surprised she hasn’t attacked me directly, yet.”

“It may just be she doesn’t know what universe we’re in,” Lieshy piped up. “Or doesn’t care to find out.”

O’Neill gripped the arms of his chair. “I don’t like relying on the cluelessness or apathy of our enemies… At any moment, a switch could turn.”

“We don’t have much of a sign – choice,” Lieshy said. “Do we?”

O’Neill just shook his head slowly.

~~~

Aang was losing energy quickly. He could tell Majora had made Corona break one of her legs – but Majora forced the unicorn’s body not to feel anything.

“What’s the matter, Raava? Losing your energy? Perhaps you should go into the Avatar State, tap into your true self,” Majora chided. “All you have to do is defeat one broken, bruised, and battered unicorn before she can kill you! Can’t be that hard, right?”

“Not taking the risk!” Aang said, running down another hallway. He was getting real tired of running. He’d already been doing it for… He had no idea. Not an hour, but more than fifteen minutes. And she pursued relentlessly with her fire and her magic, never running out of juice.

But she couldn’t force him to do what she wanted, and he knew it. Not here.

Then he tripped. He tripped and hit his head on a wall hard enough to blur his vision.

Majora seized the opportunity. She made Corona leap onto Aang and flip him onto his back. She tied his hands up, preventing him from bending magic. She tore a piece of metal out of the wall and heated it up to extreme temperatures. “I’ll get you to show your real self yet…” The metal glowed white hot after only a few seconds of direct exposure.

Corona pressed the scalding chunk to Aang’s leg. He screamed, feeling the instinct deep within him to unleash the judgment of the Avatar – but he kept it inside him. He couldn’t risk it.

“Stop fighting it Raava!” Majora yelled, using Corona’s magic to drive the white hot slab into his other leg. “The longer you fight the urge, the less likely you can win when you do give in!”

“NEVER!” Aang shouted back. In retaliation the metal plate was pressed against his back, scalding it. He roared, but kept his instinct within.

Majora screamed. “SHOW YOURSELF RAAVA! SHOW YOURSELF!”

“NO!”

“SHOW YOURSELF!”

“Okay,” Sombra said, dropping her invisibility and shooting a syringe into Corona’s neck.

Corona blinked. “…Wha…?”

“Sorry Corona, have to keep you sedated, doctor’s orders!”

Corona took a few shaky steps forward. Her horn sparked, trying to come up with a spell, but it fizzled out quickly. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she slumped to the ground, out cold.

Aang allowed himself to relax. “Thank goodness…”

Sombra walked over to him, smirking. “You don’t look too hot there.”

“Funny,” Aang wheezed.

“Good news: you’re not bleeding. Bad news: burns. Lots of them.”

“You should have left already,” Aang muttered.

Sombra rolled her eyes. “I might have left you behind. Her? Nah.” Sombra checked Corona’s pulse. “Out like a light.”

“Should we get out of here?”

“After Majora realized you’d let everyone go, she surrounded the magic bubble in her power. We’re rather stuck.” Sombra laughed. “Erecting a shield you can’t even get through. What a moron.”

“She’ll get through eventually,” Aang said.

“Yeah. We’ve just got to hope the others find a way to stop her before then.” She sat down next to him and took out her phone. “Can’t do anything from in here right now.”

“So… We’re just stuck?”

“Yep. But hey, she didn’t get you, and everyone else got out. That’s good.”

Aang nodded with considerable effort. “Yeah…”

~~~

Twilight teleported herself and her friends to the Tree of Harmony’s clearing. They were not surprised to find a giant portal with tendrils of Majora pouring out of it.

They were surprised by who was there.

Defending the Tree in its rainbow power of Harmony stood Starswirl, Discord, and the Sage. All three of them had exceedingly focused looks on their faces, all working together with Harmony to push back the eldritch horrors. Starswirl’s horn smoked, Discord’s form shifted unnaturally as he poured chaotic energies back at the oncoming chaos, and the Sage’s mask pushed back at the claw with all the energy it could muster within its multi-faceted power.

It was enough. Majora could not make any headway. This did not stop her from trying. Her tendril pushed, and pushed, and pushed. They would have to give in eventually.

Vivian appeared in front of them. “Hi,” she said, nervously.

“W-what’s going on?” Twilight asked.

“Majora wants to extinguish the Tree of Harmony,” Vivian said. “Apparently more than a few powerful beings disagree.”

“This can’t go on forever,” Flutterfree said, shaking her head at the light show. “Somebody will give. And it’s probably going to be Starswirl. Even if the others can keep it up…”

Twilight turned to Vivian. “What… What’s happened? Why is Majora doing this? Do you know?”

Vivian nodded slowly. “…We – General Sunset and the rest of us – were called to the Temple of Time in Ardent to defend against an attack by the Sage. The Sage was forced by Majora to seal the goddesses of Ardent into the mask. When she was dragged back in, I followed her, and managed to hide from Majora’s perceptions. Then a couple of humans showed up and I took the opportunity to hide the Sage as well. Majora decided that, without knowing where the Sage’s mask was, she had to move ahead with her plans faster. We went to the Binary world and saw it destroyed.”

“…D-destroyed!?” Renee said.

Vivian wiped a tear from her face “Y-yeah. It was terrible. Majora… She’s free. She is the planet now, I think.” She turned to the Sage. “I think the Sage could explain better, but… She’s busy protecting your Tree.”

Pinkie looked at the Sage. “Tag in for her, Vivian.”

“I can’t use the mask-“

“She’ll let you. Just tap on her shoulder, she’ll give it to you. But you’ll need to think fast, Vivian.”

Vivian blinked. “R-right!” she moved to the sage, tapping her shoulder. The Sage twisted around back, shoving the mask onto Vivian’s face. In the second it took the mask to recognize Vivian, Majora’s essence pushed forward.

“BACK!” Discord shouted, letting out a burst of pure energy, not bothering with any of the chaotic visual gags. Just pure energy. “BACK, YOU DISGRACE TO CHAOS!”

Vivian activated the spirits within the mask, pushing back against Majora’s onslaught, returning the momentary imbalance back to a stalemate.

The Sage took a deep breath and turned to the five ponies. “So, first off, I technically surrendered last time.”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you did.”

“You’re not off the hook yet,” Twilight said. “But we have bigger problems.” She turned to the claw of Majora; its presence a constant nail in her skull. It didn’t have enough power right now to freeze her in place, but it had more than enough to upset her on a deep, deep level.

The Sage nodded. “We need to defeat Majora.”

“How?” Twilight asked.

Pinkie and the Sage looked at each other. “The Triforce,” they said at the same time.

“The wish-granting artifact?” Nova asked. “The one Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf have the parts to?”

“That’s the one,” Pinkie said.

“It’s connected to Majora on a personal level,” the Sage said. “Unfortunately, due to my recent escapades, the goddesses that provide the Triforce’s power are sealed away within that mask.”

“So, can’t we just use the mask’s power on the Triforce?” Renee asked. “Bring those three bearers here, use the mask on them, and wish for Majora to be destroyed?”

“Majora’s powerful enough she might be able to defend against that…” the Sage said.

Pinkie facehooved. “No beating around the bush, Sage-me. She is powerful enough to defend against a simple wish. We actually have to bring the Triforce to her, with the mask. Find the center of her essence on her planet.”

“How can we do that?” Flutterfree asked. “We can barely keep her away from the Tree of Harmony! How do we go to the place where she is?”

Twilight gulped. “We leave the Tree of Harmony. Use Discord, Starswirl, the mask – everything – to protect us while we’re in her territory. We use everything at our disposal to cut a hole right to Majora’s center, and use the Triforce. The Tree of Harmony… will not survive.”

Renee gasped. “Twilight, remember what Cosmo said! When she sacrificed her Tree of Harmony, the other races vanished! If… If you don’t find a way to absorb it, all of us might perish!”

Twilight took a deep breath. “I… I know Renee! I just… I can’t think of what else to do! We can’t stay here and protect the Tree, we have to do something!”

Flutterfree blinked. “Take the Tree with us.”

Nova blinked. “What?”

Pinkie and the Sage exchanged glances.

“That could work…” Pinkie said, rubbing her chin.

“We’d need someone with a personal connection to it that it trusts…” the Sage said.

“Starswirl will volunteer to carry it. ISN’T THAT RIGHT STARSWIRL?”

Starswirl managed a grunt that was probably a yes.

Pinkie grinned. “We might just have a shot!”

“But if she tries to crush us, even with my mask’s power, she can,” the Sage said.

A smile slowly grew on Twilight’s face. “Girls – we just need more friends to help. We’ve met hundreds of people on our journey, many of which were very very powerful.” She turned to the portal Majora was pushing through. This time she didn’t wince in fear. “What we need is a group to defend the Tree of Harmony and the Triforce while we take it to Majora on her own turf…”

Nova grabbed Twilight’s dimensional device. “I’ll get on that.”

“Me too!” Pinkie said, pulling out a spare device.

“…Why can’t you do that when we get stuck in another universe?”

“It’d make everything too easy.” Pinkie hoofbumped Nova. “Let’s go round up some friends.”

Nova nodded. “I’ve got some ideas. You?”

“Ooooh yeah. Some not-so-great ones, but you know how it is.”

Nova chuckled. “Yeah, I do. I’ll get the Triforce bearers.”

The two opened portals and went their separate ways.

Twilight took a moment to look at the Sage. “…So. We finally get to meet.”

“Hello, Charter Twilight,” the Sage said, extending a hoof. Twilight shook it.

“You know,” Twilight said, putting a hoof to her chin. “Just a few months ago I thought you were a big problem. But you really didn’t have any plan beyond sealing your Goddess away, did you?”

The Sage shook her head. “I wanted to rid our world of the horrible reason it had for existing and for its conflict. She was responsible for the way our world turned out, for the wars, for the petty arguments, for Applejack and General Sunset. I decided from the moment I knew this that I wanted to end it. I did what I wanted – though admittedly with some unforeseen consequences. I knew Ba’al and Majora were up to something. I did not see what. I should not have been so focused on my quest. I do not apologize for what I did to free my world, but I do apologize for what my actions did to Ardent. What it’s allowed Majora to do.” She bowed her head.

“I forgive you,” Twilight said. “Though I think you need to apologize to the people of Ardent more.”

The Sage nodded. “I also need to be locked up for, let’s see… stealing, manipulation, organizing the death of a handful of ponies, and conspiracy. Not innocent here, nor do I pretend to be.”

Twilight nodded. “I understand. But know that you’ll have a friend, regardless of what happens.”

The Sage let a small smile crawl up her usually stoic face. “You sure live up to your name, Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship.”

Twilight chuckled softly.

“CAN YOU TWO STOP IT WITH THE CUTE MOMENT AND HELP!?” Discord shouted, using just enough of his magic to ensure Twilight would hear since she wasn’t looking at him. “TWILIGHT, I KNOW YOU HAVE ALICORN MAGIC IN YOU!”

“Right,” Twilight said. She flared her wings, lit her horn, and pushed back against the claw of Majora with all her might. She did little compared to the mask, Discord, and the Tree, but it felt good to do something.

~~~

Nova teleported onto the Apollo’s bridge a short while later. “There you are!” She pointed at Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf. “I’ve been looking all over for you! We need the Triforce! Come on!”

“Triforce doesn’t work anymore,” Link said, sighing. “The Sage stole their power.”

“We have the sage and her mask in Equestria,” Nova said. “We can reactivate its power. Come on, we’ve got a plan.”

O’Neill looked up from his chair. “Funny, so do we.”

“What plan is that?” Nova asked.

“Punch it until it gives up. Failing that, blow up the sun and everything in the system.”

Nova blinked. “…Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.”

“What’s yours?” General Sunset asked.

“Ours is to drag the Triforce, the Tree of Harmony, and all the other powerful friends we can find to the planet that is Majora, and use the Triforce on her essence, wishing her sealed or destroyed. Whichever works.”

O’Neill blinked. “…Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.”

“Both,” Lieshy said. “Let’s do both the stupid plans.”

“…What?” Toph said.

“You don’t need powerful individuals in the fleet besides Cosmo, and you don’t need spaceships on the ground with the Triforce. Do both. Attack Majora from two fronts.”

O’Neill and Nova glanced at each other. O’Neill shrugged. “You know what? Why not. Got nothing to lose at this point.”

Nova nodded. “Who’s coming with me besides Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf? You three don’t get a choice.”

“Fine by me,” Ganondorf said, curling his fingers into a fist. “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t be allowed to get my hands dirty…”

General Sunset came forward. “I’m coming.”

Toph raised her hand. “Me too.”

The Happy Mask Salesman stepped forth. “I believe it would be prudent if I came along as well…”

O’Neill nodded. “Good luck.”

“We’ll be supporting you from above however we can,” Cosmo said.

“Thanks,” Nova said, lighting her horn. “Anyone else? Because we probably need to move quickly. There’s a very high chance Majora knows what we’re doing. You should probably begin your space assault as soon as possible.”

O’Neill turned to Cosmo. “Should we wait for any more ships?”

“I don’t think more will help at this point,” Cosmo said.

“Then tell the fleet to prepare to jump universes.” O’Neill stood up. “We’re going to drop some nukes on a god’s face.”

Nova teleported away with Link, Zelda, Ganondorf, Sunset, Toph, and the Happy Mask Salesman.

~~~

Pinkie looked at her dimensional device. It was time to go fast. She opened a portal to another dimension and jumped to another location far away.

She poked her head out of Siron’s armor. “Hey. Hey Siron. Psst. Over here.”

Siron looked down at her, a drink in his hand. “What, Pinkie?”

“Got something to tell you I think you’ll really like to know.”

“What?”

“A chaos being known as Majora took control of Ba’al and destroyed the Binary world.”

The drink in his hand crushed from the pressure his fingers exerted on it.

“Imma take that as a ‘yes, Pinkie, I’m available to crush this Majora’s head in for personal reasons I will not go into.’ Am I right?”

Siron nodded slowly.

“Good!” Pinkie jumped out and grabbed him. “Awaaaay we go!” She opened another portal and jumped through.

They were suddenly standing at the edge of a mysterious forest. In front of them was a yellow mare in a red suit and hat, firing her guns at an oncoming hoard of zombies.

“Ah, Pinkie!” Alushy yelled. “Glad you could join me, slaughtering the hordes of undead has been proving to be a bit boring here. They just keep coming! They don’t get any smarter, don’t try anything new. So sad.”

“Hey Alushy! Want to help us punch a chaos god in the face?”

Alushy stopped shooting the incoming zombies. She slowly turned to Pinkie, a psychotic grin on her face. “I’m listening…”

“No time to explain, we’ve got one more to pick up!” As Pinkie opened a portal and dragged them through, Alushy extended a hoof to Siron.

“Name’s Alushy. Fudgemothering vampire. Siron, I take it? Bug demon king?”

Siron nodded slowly, but wordlessly.

“Ah, still reeling from the rapid Pinkie-ness, huh? Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll do fine facing off against whatever eldritch horror we’ve dreamed up today. I must say, I’m excited. I have no idea who we’re fighting or why but I know it’ll be big, bad, and hella awesome.”

Siron blinked, refusing to comment further. He registered that they were in a different Ponyville.

Pinkie cleared her throat. “I really hope I don’t regret this… HEY MELINDA!”

The ‘perfect’ human appeared in front of her. “Hey, Pinkie! What can I do for you?”

“There’s an evil chaos being by the name of Majora that’s destroyed a planet and is trying to kill so many others.”

“Kill? That sounds a little extreme!”

“It is,” Pinkie said, extending a hoof. She shivered slightly. “Care to come with us and lend your… skills?”

Melinda smiled. “Do I ever!”

“Good. Just remember, you’re not in charge, Charter Twilight is.”

“Fine by me!”

Alushy blinked. “Holy shit, you’re agreeable.”

“Hey, watch your language,” Melinda countered.

Alushy cocked her head. “Okay, that was a compliment but take it however you want.”

Pinkie rolled her eyes, activating the dimensional device again. “Let’s gooooo!”

“Hold on,” Siron said. “Shouldn’t it have run out of power by now?”

“We don’t have time!” Pinkie muttered, throwing the three of them through and walking back into the Tree of Harmony’s clearing. “Made it!”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “What took you so long?”

“I’m going to blame the time dilation effect and my scrambled mission. I got three. I thought about getting Celestia and Luna, then I realized we probably need them here in case Majora tries something crafty.”

“I got six,” Nova said.

“Three of those were required!”

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” Alushy cheered.

“Friends shouldn’t fight!” Melinda countered. “We need to work together to face the evil.”

Alushy looked up at her. “I’m really not sure what to make of you.”

Twilight blinked, walking over. “Quite a group, Pinkie. Hey Siron, Alushy, Melinda.”

“What’s with your ears?” Melinda asked.

“Oh. I got my ears blown out. Went deaf.”

“That’s horrible!”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Yes it is. But not important right now. What’s important is the giant claw of purple you three have conveniently not looked at yet.”

The newcomers stared at the claw being beaten back by Discord, the mask, the Tree of Harmony, and a handful of unicorns. Starswirl was currently not beating back the darkness, but instead was placing magical markings in the ground around the Tree of Harmony.

The shadow flooded the minds of the newcomers. Siron let out a breath of bloodcurdled rage. Melinda’s face became overcome with fear – a feeling she had felt so rarely in her ‘perfect’ existence.

Alushy, on the other hand, just grinned. “Yes. Hell yes. Hell fudging yes! This is the kinda thing I want to fight! The kinda thing that could trounce me! Do you have any idea how hard it is to find things like that?”

“Fluttershout,” Renee reminded her.

“That was bullshit and you know it.”

Renee shrugged. “Not claiming otherwise.”

Twilight turned on her ears, wincing audibly. She climbed up on a rock on the outside of the clearing, coughing to grab everybody’s attention. “Okay, everyone, let’s go over what we’re doing. We are taking Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf to the center of Majora’s essence on the other side of this portal. We will activate the Triforce with the power of the Sage’s mask, and either seal Majora away or destroy her, whichever works.”

“It will likely end up being a seal,” the Happy Mask Salesman offered.

“Thank you… Mister Salesman.” Twilight shook her head, clearing it. “The other side of this portal will be horrendous, monstrous, and full of death. I don’t know if we’ll make it far, or even if we can really make it back. But we need to take this to her. Those of you who can’t fight on a high level… I am going to ask you to leave. Sage, tag Vivian out. She’s been through enough.”

The Sage swapped places with Vivian, reclaiming the mask. She focused on keeping the purple claw at bay again.

“Vivian,” Twilight said. “Did you catch what I said?”

Vivian nodded. “I’m not complaining. Today… Today has been enough.”

“Renee, Flutterfree… I’m going to ask you to stay behind as well.”

Renee smirked. “Figures. I wish you luck, Twilight. Come back to us, you hear?”

Twilight nodded. “I plan on it. And as for you-“

Toph held up a hand. “If you were about to tell me to stay back because I’m not on the same ‘level of power’ as you all, you can take your words and shove them back down your throat. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Neither am I,” Sunset said, lighting her antlers and horn. “Not only because I feel that this is my quest that I need to finish, but also that I can use Majora’s very essence against her.”

Twilight smiled. “Fair enough. You two can come.” She turned to the claw, smile vanishing. She turned off her ears. “We go in five minutes, or when I give the signal. That’s when everyone pushes in with everything we’ve got. Starswirl will be ready by then. The Tree will do all it can to protect us.” She stared at the portal. “Just a matter of time…”

Twilight, Pinkie, Nova, the Sage, Discord, Starswirl, Toph, General Sunset, Link, Zelda, Ganondorf, Siron, Alushy, Melinda, the Happy Mask Salesman, and the Tree of Harmony itself… Whatever these people were normally, they could forget that for now.

Today, they were heroes.

~~~

O’Neill had Cosmo permanently on screen for the battle in a small window next to the actual battle display. “Ready if you are,” he said.

“Ready,” Cosmo said. “All ships’ channels are online and prepared for my magic.”

“Our really big bombs are active and our drone bay is full,” O’Neill said. “Ba’al, Starfinder, you two good as well?”

“Peachy,” Ba’al muttered.

“Ready!” Mauve called from the Starfinder.

O’Neill walked over to the control console and pressed the jump button himself. The Apollo went into overdrive to power the dimensional device, tearing a hole in space large enough to fit several ships through. The fleet moved in, far enough away that the Majora planet wasn’t in sight range.

“How’s our power?” O’Neill asked.

“Should be plenty to maintain the portal until they’re all through,” a crewmember said. “No reaction from Majora. She may not know we’re here…”

“She knows,” Cosmo said. “I can feel her, and she can feel me. She just knows that she can’t reach us all the way out here effectively.” She sighed. “She thinks she can take us when we move in.”

“Be careful,” O’Neill said. “Don’t let her get in your head.”

“Princess Cosmo’s head is just fine,” the Starlight AI chirped. “I know. I’ve been scanning it constantly. It’s under stress, but no nefarious entities yet.”

“Thank you,” Cosmo said, narrowing her eyes. “It still unnerves me, the confidence I feel coming off Majora. I’m almost certain she knows exactly what we’re doing, and what our plans are.”

“She can’t know exactly how powerful one of our bombs are, or precisely how good your ships are at amplifying your power, or the extent of Twilight’s group.”

“No. But her confidence is unnerving.”

“Do you think she knows about Plan B?”

“I’m not sure…” Cosmo said. “I did detect a reaction in her when you said that, but I don’t know what it means.”

“Okay, it is now time to stop talking about Plan B just in case we managed to slip that one by her. Is everyone through?”

“Yes,” a crewmember said. “All ships accounted for.”

“Then here we go,” O’Neill said. “ATTENTION MULTIVERSAL FLEET. We’re ready for battle. You all know what this is going to be – our goal is to shred that purple planet to complete smithereens. There’s a very large chance none of what we do will have much effect, but keep attacking anyway. We have men trying something else, and our presence may keep them alive. And to you, Majora – I know you’re listening. You’re about to find out what it feels like to have an entire colony of fire ants get inside your trousers.”

“I LOO̢K̵ ͜FORWAR̀D TO͠ ́TH͝E ̧P̸AI͟N͝,͏ MÒRT̀ÁL̡,” Maojra called across the divide of space.

“Bejeezus,” O’Neill muttered, grabbing his pounding head. “You must have a difficult time at the club with that kind of voice… Fleet, engage!”

The fleet used their various FTL drives to arrive at Majora’s planet in quick succession.

Neither side wasted any time getting started.

Majora had been preparing a large, powerful tendril longer than the Earth itself, and now she swung it at the ships. The Apollo responded by firing off three sets of weapons. The laser weapons did next to nothing, simply tearing holes through the impossible fleshy mass that healed almost immediately. The second weapons, the drones, were much more effective – the golden nodes of light rammed through the fleshy tentacle, then turned around and rammed through it again, and again, and again, tearing at it apart until they ran out of energy and exploded. But trumping all this was the cluster-nuke, special-ordered from Earth Tau’ri.

A weapon designed to glass planets.

The huge cylinder departed from the Apollo’s underside, rushing toward the fleshy mass. It split into eight sections, swirling around the tentacle and hitting it in seven different places, the eighth part continuing on to the planet’s ‘surface’. The supercharged nukes were more than enough to blow the tentacle to smithereens, though the surface took the hit dead on with little apparent damage.

Majora fought back with psychological warfare. Every mortal mind within the fleet had to scream in madness from the noise that entered their ears. Weapons that weren’t automatic stopped firing.

Cosmo took a deep breath in. “When all hope is lost, look to the Harmony within yourself, connect the souls between ponies, and stand stronger than any alone.” She let it out, and spread her wings. Her entire body flashed white, the power of her Tree of Harmony spreading from her horn, wingtips, and mane. The specially designed holes in the flower-shaped ship she was on sucked the power from her. Every petal point produced a spark of white magic, sending a beam of Harmony to another one of Cosmo’s ships. Each of those ships took the magic it received and magnified it, firing it back to the flower capital ship and other amplifier ships. A spherical lattice of magic lines connected everyone together save the Apollo, Starfinder, and Ba’al’s ships.

The mental assault of Majora ended, banished by the holy barrier.

“Th-thanks…” O’Neill said, touching his ear. That was blood all right.

“I’m not done yet,” Cosmo said. “Majora, Goddess of Ardent and the Twilight! You threaten my ponies, and my allies, like the exterminators did so long ago. Prepare yourself to face the might that drove them to extinction.”

Cosmo’s lattice shot a beam of pure holy light forward. Majora acted fast, knowing that if that power hit her core, it would be bad for her. A shield composed of purple miasma, claws, and eyes the size of small moons appeared, dissipating the holy power. The shield didn’t crack or bend from the power.

“Don’t stop shooting!” Cosmo yelled to the others. “This isn’t going to be enough!”

“You heard her!” O’Neill yelled. “Fire all weapons!”

Everything flew towards the planet that was Majora with intent to kill.

~~~

General Sunset felt the power of Majora falter. Apparently Twilight did as well, because she instantly yelled “NOW! EVERYONE, MOVE IN!”

Sunset didn’t need to be told twice, She put all the power she could into her antlers and horn, charging. She felt the weakened tendril of Majora give way. Her power was enough to push it back.

When Alushy, Melinda, and Siron joined in, it was more than enough to break through the barrier. Starswirl uprooted the Tree of Harmony and dragged it through with them, the glowing crystals shooting out all the rainbows the tree could manage, providing them a bubble of multicolored safety in the other world.

The portal closed behind them, leaving them inside a drifting bubble several hundred kilometers above the surface of Majora. Majora fought back, pushing them away with what energy she could spare – but most of it was going to the assault from space. Apparently throwing nukes and magic at Majora did have an effect – there just needed to be a lot.

The fleet could have completely reduced several normal planets to rubble at this point, but Majora was still facing off against them strongly.

“I hope we have radiation therapy,” Alushy said. “Because holy fudge that’s a lot of nukes.”

“We’ll all go to healers,” Nova said. “Right now…”

“EVERYONE! PUSH DOWN!” Twilight yelled, firing her magic laser at the shadow keeping them from progressing. Melinda pushed both her hands forward, unleashing a torrent of magic stronger than Twilight had seen her use before. Just the right amount for the occasion. Alushy completely discarded her physical pony form in favor of thousands of dark ridges covered in teeth and eyes.

They could still feel Alushy’s voice. “The number of lost souls… They empower me… THE DEAD RISE AGAINST YOU, MAJORA!”

Siron wordlessly shot his beam of red and green energy downward. Toph folded her arms, bored because she was floating and couldn’t detect any rock - though she was also on edge, trying not to freak out about how helpless and dependant she was right now. General Sunset used her antlers to connect directly to the eldritch power beneath them, and banish it as far as she could.

Their combined efforts dragged the bubble of Harmony closer and closer to the actual surface of Majora.

The Happy Mask Salesman rubbed his hands. “Once we touch down, we should be able to use the Triforce! Simple as that!”

The Sage grunted through her use of the mask, her holy tendrils tearing apart the shadow more than most others.

“I feel like an overglorified battery…” Discord muttered.

Pinkie shrugged. “Eh, I’m actually not doing anything, so… Yeah. I’m more here to catch if someone tries something spooky.”

Melinda grinned. “Stand together everyone! We can do this!”

Zelda, Ganondorf, and Link held their hands that bore the pieces of the Triforce together, ready for the rapidly approaching ground.

They crashed into the eldritch soil way too hard, creating a crater in the fleshy mess. It was pretty clear that the geometry of the world around them was impossible, but the bubble of Harmonious energy kept the eldritch power from driving them insane.

What they could tell was that the ground was made of both flesh and rock, the mountains had both eyes and mouths, tentacles appeared from nowhere and yet everywhere, and a deep, purple miasma filled the whole place.

Then they saw her. Or her center.

Majora’s mask had taken its place at the top of a mountainous sized hunk of flesh, the only truly defined physical property of the scenery. It leaned in, revealing a tremendously long tendril of a body affixed to an ever changing number of spidery legs – sometimes six, sometimes thirteen, sometimes somewhere in between. The arms came closer to them, allowing three separate hands to grab the outside of the harmony bubble. The palms contained designs of eyes, teeth, mouths, and miniature versions of Majora’s mask itself.

She spoke, clearly trying to use her eldritch voice to burn their brains, but the power within the bubble was too strong. “GIVE ME YOUR WORST.”

General Sunset gulped. Had they miscalculated horribly? Majora seemed way, way too confident for this…

Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf raised their hands into the air. The Pinkie Sage stood on top of them, letting the power within her mask flood into their hands. The pieces of Triforce left the bodies of the bearers, taking their positions in the world as three physical triangles of a golden hue, arranging themselves in a larger triangle pattern, a single inverted triangular hole between them. The Sage floated in the middle of the Triforce, holding her mask high. “Majora – we wish for your defeat.”

Majora laughed. “I defeated the Goddesses! Your Triforce can do nothing!” She pointed at the golden triangles attempting to grant her wish. “Look at them squirm! Look at them dance! But they know they do not have the power within them to undo me. Not even with all the souls sealed within your mask. I am Majora. I am more than a stupid Goddess. I am the destruction of everything, including the divinity that is creation.”

The Happy Mask Salesman was suddenly standing outside the bubble. “You created something, once.”

“What is…”

“Did you ever wonder what happened to your piece of the Triforce once it was rejected?”

“It was destroye- No.”

The Happy Mask Salesman held up his hand, revealing a single, black, inverted triangle. “I’ve kept this a secret for so long. Until the moment came where I knew I could get rid of you forever. They have the means. But first you need to go back into that mask.”

“NO!”

The inverted piece of Triforce took its place in the hole between the rest. The Triforce became a solid piece of holy whiteness. It rotated, accepting the wish spoken by the Sage.

The Sage screamed, throwing herself into the true Triforce. It absorbed both her and the mask in an instant.

Sunset gasped – the Sage. She… She was gone.

Link, Zelda, Ganondorf, and the Happy Mask Salesman all passed out as the true Triforce whirled around faster… And faster… and faster…

Majora tried to hit the Harmony bubble with more might, but the effort going into the space battle prevented her from mustering enough. Alushy, Melinda, Discord, and the Tree of Harmony managed to keep her back.

The Triforce unleashed its full power, hitting Majora right in the mask that was her face. She reeled back, screaming. Sunset suddenly realized how powerless she was in this fight, against this creature who could fight against the power of several goddesses, an onslaught more than capable of wiping out an entire planet, and even a part of herself.

She was one being fighting against multiple universes.

How had Sunset not realized how terrifying Majora truly was until now?

Majora screamed.

~~~

Majora’s planet sent out a burst of intense magic and not-quite-magic energy, shaking every ship in the fleet. A few that were damaged from the battle exploded, including Ba’al’s Mothership.

O’Neill was not sad to see that one go. One less problem for later.

“Report!” he said, climbing back into the chair he was just tossed out of.

“It… looks like they did it,” Cosmo said. “Look at the planet.”

The purple energy around Majora’s world was dissipating quickly, leaving behind nothing but chunks of earth. The fleshy tendrils, the shield, everything Majora-esque began to vanish.

“Stop firing!” O’Neill yelled. Cosmo dropped her gigantic purging laser before he finished his sentence. The fleet, sitting at ninety percent of their original numbers, stood over the world, watching it revert to a normal ruin.

Cosmo frowned. “…I still sense her. Her power is severely limited, but she’s there.”

“Probably sealed in the mask,” O’Neill said.

“You’re probably right. Let’s move in closer and see.”

“Roger roger,” O’Neill saluted. He shook his head. “Most headache inducing battle of all time…”

~~~

The ground returned to normal. Toph celebrated by kicking a rock into the air. “Yeah! We did it!”

“No we didn’t! Stop celebrating early!” Pinkie shouted, drawing her warhammer. “There’s more where that-“

Majora’s mask fell to the ground, landing right in the center of all of them. Its eyes glowed an intense color, filled with rage. But the mask was inert.

Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “I was sure there was more to this…”

Alushy kicked the mask, knocking it to the side. “There. Now I can say I punched out Cthulhu.”

“She’s not-“ Nova began.

“Sh sh sh... Let me have this.”

Melinda stood on top of the mask and grinned. “We’re victorious, friends! Let us seal this evil creature away forever!”

“My God, how much of a ham are you!?” Alushy blurted.

“All the ham,” Pinkie said, grunting.

Discord walked up to Melinda. He looked down at the mask. “Huh. Is it supposed to be calling out to me?”

“Yeah, we’re all hearing that,” General Sunset said. “Just don’t put it on, we’ll toss it into a black hole and everything will be fine.”

Discord kicked the mask – and the moment he made contact he was tossed far away.

They could hear Majora laugh. “It’s not that hard to absorb chaos magic… Just need an unguarded touch…”

A spike of fleshy darkness shot out of the mask and right through Melinda’s midsection. She quickly teleported away but still passed out from the sudden intense pain.

Pinkie blinked. “Crud.”

The spike of flesh turned into a hand, and three other spikes shot out the back of the mask in quick succession. Soon, a lanky humanoid figure took shape, with Majora’s Mask as its chest. It laughed. “Who wants to go first?”

Despite the Harmony of the Tree, almost everyone present was frozen in fear.

Everyone except one particular vampire pony.

“Hey. Majora. Sup.”

“Sup?” Majora said.

“Yeah. Sup. Name’s Alushy.” She flew into the air and bucked Majora in the place where her head should have been. “And now I’ve punched you in the face, officially, no take backs.”

Majora drove her hand straight through Alushy. She dissipated into a dark, loose form. “Nyah! Not even you eldritch gods can-“

Majora squeezed. Alushy yelled in pain as she was forced back to her solid form. “HOLY HELL THAT HURTS!”

Majora tossed her to the ground, stomping on her head and splattering it against the ground. She kept her foot planted, keeping Alushy from regenerating for the moment.

Toph snapped out of it next, tossing rocks, but this was just child’s play to Majora. Nova and Twilight fired as one, but their magic reflected right off her. Pinkie smashed the real warhammer down on her, but she was kicked to the side.

Siron pointed his staff at Majora. “You’re a traitor.”

“So are you.” Majora retorted. She snapped her fingers, breaking all four of Siron’s wrists. She just glared at him and he fell over.

Then she walked to the Tree of Harmony and Starswirl. “Taking your magic will be more difficult than that chaotic snake’s, but I’m more than willing to be patient.”

Starswirl narrowed his eyes. “You will not-“

Majora backhanded him away. She stroked the branches of the Tree, chuckling. “You know your little rainbows can’t purge me. But I wonder why you’re not even trying, great Castor…”

General Sunset’s mind suddenly started working. She had an idea. She teleported over to the form of Link. He was breathing, but clearly not getting up anytime soon. She was sure he wouldn’t mind what she was about to do, considering.

She levitated the Master Sword out of its sheath. It was the finest blade she had ever seen – sharper than any she had ever beheld, more intricately designed than most artworks, and the handle’s brilliant blue stood out like it was too pure to exist. On one side was an engraving of the Triforce, which seemed to have lost its power. But on the other, there was an imprint of an hourglass. And this part still held power, Sunset knew it.

She’d seen Link do it before, right? Just point the tip of the sword in front of you and trace out an hourglass shape. That was all it needed.

Majora drew her claw over a branch of the Tree of Harmony. “So delicious… So pure…”

Sunset lifted the master sword with her magic and traced out the hourglass shape.

Everything froze in a single instant. Nothing moved, not even Majora.

Sunset swore she could hear Pinkie scream to her. “Move already!”

Sunset teleported right behind the frozen Majora and cut her as many times in as many places with the Master Sword as she could manage in a blind frenzy. Arm, leg, chest, pelvis, chest again, hand, leg, other arm.

A handful of seconds later, time restarted. Around every cut, a burst of purple mist poured out of Majora. One of her arms fell to the ground.

Maora still managed to turn despite her severed hips. The front half of her body slid to the ground, but her hand was still outstretched. The eyes of the mask stared right into Sunset’s.

Sunset froze. She saw the hand reaching for her, but the gaze of the mask wouldn’t let her go. Majora knew she had lost. But she wouldn’t let the smallest victory escape.

“Sunset!” Toph yelled, throwing a volley of rocks. But it was too late – the fingers of Majora slid out, puncturing Sunset’s brain, heart, and horn. The fingers disintegrated the instant after they performed the vile act, once again leaving just Majora’s mask on the ground.

Twilight encased the mask in a magic box, then she ran to Sunset - but Toph got there first. She touched Sunset’s body and knew she those were no ordinary wounds Majora had inflicted. They had frozen Sunset’s body, turning it into a material that wasn’t quite flesh, but not quite rock.

Tears flowed from Toph’s eyes. “S… Sunset! Come on!” She laid her hands on her friend and leader for most of the last year. “You can’t just check out because your quest is over! Sunset! Sunset get up!” She extended a hand to her side. “Does anyone know any healing magic!?”

“I… Don’t think it would help,” Twilight said, leaning down. “Majora… She…” Twilight sat down and shook her head.

“She was a sore loser,” Alushy muttered, standing up.

Toph stood up, fists clenched hard enough to hurt. She raised a hand, kicking up a pillar of earth. The Master Sword flipped up, down, around, and into her hand. It was still covered in the strange juices of Majora.

Toph showed no signs of ever letting that sword go.

O’Neill and Cosmo teleported down.

“Did you do it?” O’Neill asked.

Twilight didn’t hear. Nova had to point O’Neill to the magic box. Cosmo sealed it up tighter in her own magic and took it.

“Who didn’t make it?” O’Neill asked.

“The Sage. General Sunset,” Nova said, biting back her tears.

O’Neill let out a sharp breath. “It always happens…” He grit his teeth. “I’m sorry.”

Toph pointed the Master Sword at him. “You’re sorry?Old man, what are you sorry for? Was the plan not good enough? Should she not have come? Should-“

O’Neill leaned down and put a hand on Toph’s shoulder. “Kid, listen to me. Listen close. You’re going to hurt for a long, long time, and it will never completely go away. Don’t remember her by thinking, over and over again, how you could have done things differently. The ‘what if’ game never goes anywhere. Remember her by thinking what she’d want you to do, what you’re going to do with her legacy.”

Toph looked like she wanted to stab him, but ended up hugging him instead.

“I know. I know. It hurts…”

~~~

Sombra’s phone beeped. She looked at it. “Well, the bubble went down, and we’re not dead, so I think they won.”

Aang let out a sigh of relief. “That’s good…”

Corona started to stir.

Sombra blinked. “…Convenient timing.”

Corona opened her eyes. “…What?”

“The drugs wearing off just as we all realized we’re alive.”

“Oh,” Corona said, groggily trying to stand up. She realized she had a broken bone and fell to her other side, hissing at the pain.

“Yeah, we need to get you fixed up…” Aang said.

“I… Am so sorry. I know it wasn’t me, but…”

“Shh,” Sombra said, pressing Corona’s lips with her finger. “You were under the influence of an alien deity, and we all thought she couldn’t get in your head anymore. It’s okay.”

“I know. I still feel horrible.”

“That might just be the drugs.”

Corona snorted. “…Tempest? Mike? Ike?”

“They made it out alive,” Sombra said.

“Thank goodness… …Director Storm?”

“Here,” Storm said, limping through the hallway. “Broken, but fine.”

Sombra tensed.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” Storm muttered, sitting down in the rubble.

“I am getting out of here, though,” Sombra said. “Can’t be around when the nice guys show up and feel a need to capture me.”

“You earned your freedom this time. Take it,” Storm said.

Sombra bowed. “I’ll be in touch, Corona!” She vanished right before their eyes.

Corona nodded. “Yeah… touch… ugh…”

Aang laughed. “Wow. I need to get you some cactus juice. I bet you’ll be hilarious on it.”

“Shut up. Hey, Director, am I still fired?”

“Yes.”

“Figured I’d ask.” Corona was silent for a moment. “I’m going to be really upset about that after the drugs wear off, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Looking forward to that.”

There was silence for a little while.

“How much longer until the emergency rescue shows up?”

“No idea.”

Aang groaned. “Just… great.”

~~~

In a cell on a world where the Spectacularium ran free, a certain Applejack saw a familiar face.

“Ah thought you were never comin’ back,” Applejack called to Toph as she strolled closer to the cell. “Does Sunset know you’re here?”

“I just thought you’d like to know something,” Toph said, walking right up to the cell bars, Master Sword in hand.

“What?”

“Sunset’s dead.”

Applejack blinked. “…What?”

“She finished the quest. All of it. Sage Pinkie, Ba’al, Majora – everything. She delivered the final blow to a being who wanted to destroy everything. She saved us all. Even you.”

Applejack blinked.

“What’s the matter? Not as happy as you thought you’d be?”

“Buck off.”

“I’m NOT bucking off!” Toph screamed. “She was a great mare who sacrificed herself for us all and you hate her!”

“Bad ponies can do good things, kid,” Applejack said. “Just because you died right doesn’t mean you lived right.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Yes,” Applejack said, turning away. “Now, leave. Thank you for telling me. I don’t want to see you again.”

Toph clutched her sword. Then she relaxed. “…I was expecting some kind of reaction. An admission of wrong, or a delighted smile that would give me an excuse to cut you in two. But… You just look lost.”

Applejack said nothing.

“…I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Toph turned and walked away.

Applejack sighed. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for…”

~~~

Queen Luna led Nova and Pinkie into the secret chamber. “Here they are. The graves.”

Spectacular statues of three ponies stood in the chamber – a white marble Celestia, a rose quartz Pinkie Sage, and a sunstone General Sunset. Luna smiled. “I know General Sunset has an official grave out in the military yard but… I think she belonged here, with the others.”

“Thank you,” Nova said, tears coming to her eyes. “They… They needed this.”

The Queen nodded. “Apparently I have a habit of making graves I’m not supposed to. It won’t be much longer before I reveal this to everypony. Just a little longer.”

Pinkie nodded. “I know. …Can you give us a moment?”

The Queen teleported away without a word.

Nova and Pinkie stared at the two graves.

Pinkie sighed. “I knew the Sage was sacrificing herself. I knew it from the start. But Sunset? I…” she sniffed. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“I don’t think she did, either,” Nova said. “She just acted. To save us all.”

“She can’t be defined by just her last moment,” Pinkie said. “Come on, what else was she?”

“Driven. Stupidly driven, at times,” Nova said. “Single minded. Very loyal, trustworthy, and full of a fire few other ponies had.”

“She knew how to lead. She knew how to leave a legacy. And she knew how to turn her life around,” Pinkie added. “She was a villain to us, at first. Then she was just misguided. Then she became the hero, then the savior.”

“Was she really any of those things?” Nova asked.

“I don’t think anybody’s truly those things. All of us fighting Majora, in that moment, we were heroes. But we’re not heroes right now. We’re just ponies. Crying ponies.” She hung her head, holding Nova close.

Nova didn’t feel the need to say anything in return.

~~~

Twilight looked at Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf. “I’m curious. What are you three going to do now? All the Goddesses of your world are gone, the greatest power you had at your disposal was sacrificed, and now you’ve all got to go home.”

Ganondorf grunted. “Same as before. Lead my people to power.”

Zelda nodded. “The same.”

“Link?” Twilight asked. “And Midna, I guess.”

Link shrugged. “I don’t know. The Master Sword has chosen someone different for the first time in… the history of our world. Maybe it’s telling me that it’s time for the line of chosen heroes to come to an end. That I should settle down, stop all the adventuring.”

Midna rolled her eyes. “You always say that at the end of an epic quest, and you can never sit still for long.”

Link smirked. “I… Guess you’re right.”

“That’s why I think we spend maybe a week with Zelda then it’s off to the races again. And that’s where I’ll be, in your shadow, keeping you from doing something stupid.”

Link nodded. “Yeah, that is what you do.”

Twilight smiled. “Then… I wish you all luck. For better or worse, you are now free.”

The three of them bowed and left through the portal to their world.

Twilight didn’t know why, but she felt happy for them.

~~~

Renee looked up at Daniel. “You must be in a thinking mood.”

“Hrm?”

“They brought you something made almost entirely out of avocados. You must want to think. I know you aren’t a huge fan of them otherwise.”

Daniel smirked. “Ah, you’re right there. I am thinking.”

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“…I was thinking about how Majora managed to get as far as she did. She exploited our desire to keep secrets.”

“How so?”

“In the case of Earth Vitis, she built nodes at the magical locations kept secret by the government, and used Ba’al to ensure the government didn’t complain by taking over the minds of key figures. And in the case of the Binaries she had the nodes built with smuggled magic artifacts, each in different areas of the planet so the Binaries couldn’t organize to figure out what they were. She used our systems of government against us. I have no doubt she could have done the same on Earth Tau’ri with a bit more effort.”

“So… What, secrets are bad?”

Daniel nodded. “I’ve been talking to Jack and the rest of my government about disclosing the stargate program to the public for some time now. I’m thinking of turning it into a large announcement, and encouraging all of our allies to do the same. It’ll be like a multiversal disclosure day.”

“That sounds like a nightmare to get everyone to agree on, darling.”

Daniel smirked. “That’s the fun part. But I think it’d be good for everyone, even with the difficulties it brings up. It’ll allow our worlds to become even closer than they are. And since Majora’s gone and Ba’al has been thoroughly decimated, I think the time to think about it is quickly approaching.”

Renee smirked. “You’re crazy, but right. You know that?”

“Yes. Yes I do. You should eat your mushroom stew, looks like it’s getting cold.”

“I wonder what mushroom stew says about my mood…” Renee pondered.

“…That you were in the mood for something thick and creamy?”

Renee rolled her eyes. “I meant about my psychological state.”

“Hey, sometimes, it’s just food, Renee.”

~~~

O’Neill and the Happy Mask Salesman stood on the front-most point of the Apollo, both in full spacesuit.

In front of them was a circle of blackness that bent the light of all stars around it into an eerie, distorted halo.

O’Neill turned to the Happy Mask Salesman. “Ready to end this?”

The Happy Mask Salesman took Majora’s Mask out of its black box and held it in his hands. He could feel it reach out to his mind, but fail miserably to do anything to him, as always. He smiled. “You know, it almost feels sad, to finally close the book on this purpose in my life.”

“I can throw it in if you’re having second thoughts.”

The Happy Mask Salesman laughed his creepy laugh, sending shivers up O’Neill’s spine. “Oh, I’m throwing it. If I didn’t get the honor, I’d be very upset.” Seemingly without motion, suddenly his hand was outstretched and the mask was flying toward the black hole.

It turned to face O’Neill directly, one last time.

“I ͞WILL ̧H́AUNT ͟YO̷U͝ FO͝REVE͞R.”

O’Neill whistled. “Yeah, I believe you on that one. Now enjoy your existence in a place that’s just as impossible to wrap my head around as you are. Toodeloo.”

Majora said nothing further as she tumbled towards the event horizon.

O’Neill and the Happy Mask Salesman watched the mask shift to a red color and eventually vanish from their sight completely.

Majora was forever trapped within the cosmic vacuum of the universe.

O’Neill stretched his arms. “Well, ready to go back inside? I can get us a drink. I can tell we’ll need it.”

The Happy Mask Salesman nodded wordlessly.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 2: HEART]

ARC 2 INTERLUDE<<

Hello again! Welcome to the second interlude! As usual, here I am to tell you about a couple fun things that exist to satisfy your insatiable hunger for content! As always, anyone here is welcome in either the Discord or the Forum.

Today’s featured side story is Wanderers by Triv the Imaginary Duck and it’s a cool story that involves two important individuals - Vriska and the Doctor. Same warning as before - it reveals some things about the nature of the multiverse the main story has only hinted at.

And, as always, a list of franchises referenced/added in this Arc…

Overwatch belongs to Blizzard
Hellsing Ultimate belongs to Kohta Hirano
Hellsing Ultimate Abridged belongs to Team Four Star
Studio Film Maker/Gmod belongs to Valve (And the various videos referenced belong to their various creators.)
The Elements of Insanity belong to the Inverted Shadow
Five Nights at Freddy’s belongs to Scott Cawthon
Pepsi Man belongs to Pepsi. (Duh.)
RWBY belongs to Rooster Teeth
Subnautica belongs to Unknown Worlds Entertainment
Rick and Morty belongs to Adult Swim

And we still don’t know where Vivian’s from, save for those of you who’ve figured it out! Heh. Also, Zed Ex from Esefem is an obscure reference. Any guesses?

Now that that’s out of the way, who wants to take a pointless poll for best chapter of the arc? I know I do! https://strawpoll.com/677xg65y ! Nothing's stopping any of you from voting on the Arc 1 poll either, it's open forever.

And now, a preview for the next arc: Chapter Titles! Six of these are already drafted, so the rapid update schedule can continue to be maintained for a while at least!

ARC 3: Life
027 - Disclosure, Part 1
028 - Disclosure, Part 2
029 - Broken Mirrors
030 - Doors in the Snowblast
031 - Origins
032 - The Comedians
033 - A Third Party
034 - Identity Crisis
035 - Sinkhole
036 - Hyrule’s Folly
037 - Six… Six… Six…
038 - The Hand in the Door, Part 1
039 - The Hand in the Door, Part 2

See you at the end of the next arc!

[LIFE] 027 - Disclosure, Part 1

Life endures.

Once, the entire town of Termina was the scene of a grand battle between Elemental and Ba’al forces. Otherworldly allies fought against powerful aliens, and in the end the aliens were driven away. There were celebrations that day all across the worlds.

But the town of Termina lost in a more fundamental way than Ba’al had. Their town was beyond repair. Their ancient Clock Tower was destroyed, their farms were razed, and their leadership had been brutally murdered. While the rest of the world rejoiced, the people of Termina needed to find a new home. Termina was left in ruins.

However, a few stubborn individuals were determined to stay. They tilled the land, they cleared the debris, and they fought the beasts of the wilderness. It was a hard life, but the humans put their unwavering willpower to good use, and the other races provided what they could. They got by.

Eventually, Link returned from his adventures across the multiverse. He made himself the protector of Termina, organizing whatever he could to rebuild the town. Those who had struggled received relief through him.

In the end, Termina was no more. But New Termina rose in its place. It was a bright light in the darkness that had attacked them, a reminder that even when crushed, people would rise up.

That life would endure.

Today, roughly three years since Termina’s destruction in the invasion, there were almost no signs of the destruction and death the town had experienced. There may not have been a Clock Tower, but in the end, nobody needed a defining landmark. They just needed homes, shops, and a city hall. The people were happy.

Near the edge of town there was a small restaurant that was all about exotic Ardent salads. Since it was between the breakfast and lunch rush, there were only two patrons dining – Renee and Daniel. They were currently sharing the house special Giant Platter filled with every piece of edible greenery Daniel could think of – and some he couldn’t.

He picked up something that looked like it might have been a flower. He took a bite, surprised by its honey-esque taste. “Absolutely amazing. One of the best things about the multiverse, all the new unusual foods.”

“Until you get stomach poisoning from something you can’t eat,” Renee shivered. “Never order anything a dragon eats.”

“That seems like it would be obvious.”

Renee flushed. “Well – I wasn’t speaking from experience-“

“Never implied that you were.”

Renee rolled her eyes and grumpily munched on a giant piece of lettuce.

Daniel shrugged and leaned back. “So, today’s the day. Excited?”

Renee’s left eye twitched. “Darling, I feel like there’s a million things we’ve forgotten and that I should really be back helping all the others deal with the chaos that is about to ensue. But no, you insisted I needed to take a moment to breathe. So, excited? Yes. Stressed out through the proverbial roof? Also yes!”

Daniel nodded. “Same. I… I can just see this going wrong in so many ways.”

“Well, yes, you can’t really judge the collective reaction of billions of people,” Renee said. “But we also can’t really keep lying to them.”

“You were never lying.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Well I have to be turned into a human whenever I go to your world, don’t I? I also have to avoid talking about where I’m from around here. Maybe I never lie directly, but Daniel, I’ve definitely had to engage in deception.”

“You and I both know you enjoy a little bit of deception in your life.”

Renee bit her lip. “…You have me pegged. It is a bit exhilarating at times… But the people need to know. Which is why we’re doing this.”

“Two years in the making…”

“Longer, you were plotting before you brought me in.”

Daniel chuckled. “Plotting?”

“Yes. Plotting.”

“Isn’t plotting a little, you know, evil?”

“I know the plotting face, my sister has it all the time. It was definitely plotting you were doing. You can be plotting a good thing and still go about it in a nefarious manner.”

“…Right.”

“And you know it.”

The front doors to the shop opened, letting two new patrons into the restaurant: Link and the redheaded Romani. Renee knew Midna was in Link’s shadow, but the Twili wasn’t making herself known.

Renee smiled. “Ah, Romani, dear! How’s it been? I haven’t seen you since… Well, since the wedding. That was four months for me, you?”

“Five,” Romani said, shrugging, taking a seat with Link on the table closest to Renee’s. “Of course, I time my life around how many milking days have passed, so it might be a little off.”

“Been a little less than five for me,” Daniel said. “You have to just love time dilation.”

“Not our problem anymore,” Link said, putting his boots up on the table. “Our problems are all about the farm now. The most excitement we get is making sure the cows don’t get abducted by aliens.”

“It still baffles me that your universe not only has aliens, but they only care about abducting cows,” Daniel commented. “Also, I thought you got Equis Cosmic to take care of them?”

Link shrugged. “They showed up a month ago, so they’re still around. I’ve still got my bow though, so it’s easy enough to take care of them.”

“A true mystery…” Renee said, putting a hoof to her chin. “That I really don’t have time to get into right now.”

“Is today the… day?” Romani asked.

“Disclosure,” Daniel confirmed. “The secret’s almost out. It’s not too late for your people to join us. Renee and I have plans drafted up for your political climate that could be initiated if you change your mind.”

Link shrugged. “As I said, not my problem. Zelda and her father decided to keep you all a secret, and I defer to them.”

“Your choice,” Renee said. “Still would prefer if you joined us.”

“The farm’s always open to you,” Link said. He took a moment to tell the waiter what salad he and Romani wanted.

“We know,” Renee responded. “It’s just… I don’t know. This world is so beautiful and we don’t really get to see it. Link, you told many stories of vast, distant lands. So many of us want to go explore those, but it’s just a hassle to do so. We have to take precautions coming here. Can’t see the rest of your world’s beauty from this town...”

Romani smirked. “There’ll be some new beauty at the farm rather soon.”

Renee raised an eyebrow, glancing at Romani’s stomach. There was the slightest of bulges. She blinked. “Well then… Congratulations! How far along are you?”

“Little over four months.” She beamed. “Probably going to be the first child born in the completely New Termina.”

Daniel smirked. “Lucky timing. Almost like you planned it this way.”

Romani rolled her eyes. “Romance was in the air. Isn’t that right, Link?”

Link smiled warmly. “It was in the air on that day more than any other day.”

Renee squished her cheeks together. “You two are just so cute!”

Midna’s voice piped from the shadow. “Aw, you and Daniel are too!”

Renee flushed. “M-midna! We are just-“

“On a date!”

Renee twitched. “Link, do you by chance have a way to strangle your little imp while she’s in your shadow?”

Link shrugged. “Yes.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“No.”

Renee fumed; ready to unleash a spell on the shadow Midna was hiding in. Daniel put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re just giving her what she wants, Renee.”

Renee twitched, sitting back down. She elegantly tossed her mane back and adjusted her hat. “Right, of course. I think we need to be going anyway, they’re probably wondering why we aren’t ready. I can already imagine Twilight having a freak out, looking under every cabinet like we’re loose change.”

Daniel nodded. “It was nice seeing you two.”

Romani waved. “I hope it all goes well!”

Renee twitched. “Yes. Hope. Eheheheh…”

“Renee, calm,” Daniel said. “It’s mostly out of our hands anyway.”

Renee nodded wordlessly. The two left the restaurant just as Link and Romani were served.

~~~

In the royal courtyard of Lai, there was a tense confrontation underway.

“I am Flame Majesty – and you can do nothing to stop me, pathetic whelps!” The bombastic voice came from a tall, muscular pony with features of every race on Lai except the oculus eyes. His horn was sharp, his antlers reminiscent of a moose, his fins and wings spread to make him look threatening, his tail ending with a dragon-like mouth, his mane and tail made of literal fire. Quite an overload of features to take in, visually speaking.

Lady Rarity hefted her hammer and raised an eyebrow. “Care to explain exactly what you’re trying to do?”

“Why, shouldn’t it be obvious!?” He laughed madly. “I am a full feature! Queen Luna has become soft, so clearly I must take the throne! You stand in my way of challenging her, so prepare to be-“

“You’re missing the eyes,” Lieshy pointed out. “Shortsighted, with a pencil.”

“…What?”

Vivian pointed at Flame. “She’s just saying you don’t have the oculus eyes. So, technically, not a full alicorn.”

“Which means you have no right to challenge the Queen,” Lady Rarity asserted. “The ponies will never view you as legitimate, even if you bested her.”

“Who needs those stupid eyes? They don’t really do anything! They-“

Suddenly, Toph was standing in front of her three friends. She was well into her teens now with a taller stature and a curved body; calling her a child would hardly be appropriate anymore.The Master Sword hung from her hand and blood dripped off the blade onto the ground. Flame Majesty’s left wing fell off.

He stared at it and blinked. “…How…?”

Toph cocked her head. “How are you not screaming in agony?”

“I don’t know…”

“Shock,” Lady Rarity said. “Let me knock it out of him,”

“Wait wha-“

Her warhammer made direct contact with Flame Majesty’s face, twisting his entire body to the side. Blood squirted out of his wing-stump, kicking his nervous system into overdrive. He did start screaming, flailing randomly on the ground. He fired off a few bolts of fire in random directions.

Toph raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

Lieshy shrugged her wings. “He does seem rather… pathetic to actually be a threat. Bit of a wild boar.”

Toph rammed her foot into the ground and lifted the Master Sword high. Rocks rose around Flame Majesty’s body, sealing him into the ground.

“…That was too easy.” Lieshy said.

Vivian put her hands to her face. “Uh oh…”

“There’s no such thing as jinxing, Vivi-“

Flame Majesty used his antlers to connect to the earth around him, throwing it off his body. “I am not to be made a fool by the likes of you!” He lifted his antlers and horn, lighting the entire garden on fire.

Vivian pressed her hands together and chanted a brief spell. Then she pointed her finger at Flame Majesty, summoning all the fire he just unleashed back into his face. He didn’t burn, but the impact did send him back. Lady Rarity hit the other side of his face, while Toph threw a boulder at his side.

He got up again. “You… mysterious ponies have some fight in you, but I won’t let it-“

Toph was suddenly on the other side of the room, holding his other wing. She raised an eyebrow. “I could have killed you, you know.”

Flame Majesty stared at his other stump. “…You bitch!”

“And the childish waterfall erupts,” Lieshy deadpanned.

“What?”

Lady Rarity hit him across the face again. “Just give up, Flame.”

“You’re not even landing any hits!” Vivian said, snapping her fingers. A spark of fire lit in front of Flame’s eyes, blinding him temporarily.

“I WILL NOT BE MADE A FOOL OF!”

“Far too late for that,” Lieshy muttered.

Toph encased him in a pile of rocks and Lady Rarity encased that in a magical bubble. Vivian lit the whole thing on fire just for added effect.

With a roar of rage, Flame Majesty destroyed the entire magical prison. “You cannot keep me! I will get to the Queen! I… I…”

“Are about to pass out from blood loss and head trauma,” Lieshy said.

That’s exactly what happened. The alicorn wannabe slumped to the ground, tongue out.

Toph threw his wing back on top of him. “Wonder if the surgeons can reattach that.”

“Maybe?” Lady Rarity said. “It really doesn’t matter. He’ll spend his life behind bars for threatening the Queen directly without cause.”

Queen Luna teleported into their midst. “Good show, you four. I knew I could count on you to take care of it quickly.”

“You could have done it,” Lieshy pointed out.

“It would have validated him,” the Queen said, teleporting his unconscious form to the dungeons. “He would have fallen easily, but if anypony ever caught wind, well, there’d be more of a political fallout than there’s already about to be.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “The ponies aren’t going to be happy soon.”

Lieshy shrugged. “It’ll explain a lot of the weird things they’ve been experiencing. Some peace of mind.”

“And hatred of change,” Lady Rarity said. “Even Sunset, a good pony, never got past the Arcei stigma. We hate change, or anything that challenges our worldview.”

Toph sheathed the Master Sword. “Tough luck, they’ll just have to deal with it.”

Queen Luna smirked. “To be honest, I’m actually looking forward to their reactions. Good or bad, it’ll be interesting.”

Lieshy looked up at her. “You sure you know what to tell them?”

“Nope! I’ll just talk, like I always do. They always think it sounds profound, even that one time I was outlining what to do about an upcoming festival. I completely botched that and they lauded me for it.”

“Your confidence is too high.”

“Maybe,” Queen Luna said. “But you’ll be there, as examples as well as backup.”

Toph stood alert. “You’re not going to ask us to say anything, are you?”

“…Probably not?”

“Sometimes I wonder why you’re in charge here.”

Queen Luna smirked. “Sometimes, I wonder that as well, Toph Beifong. Believe it or not, I am aware that I’m rather clueless at times. Maybe it would be better if someone with a stronger hoof took the crown from me. But, for now, we have no real enemies and the world is happy. We’ll see how that changes, or if I can count on the ponies to keep things as status quo as possible.”

“Won’t take long to figure that out,” Lady Rarity said. “I admit that I am curious as well.”

“Are we going to reveal why Sunset has a memorial in town square?” Vivian asked.

“No,” Queen Luna said, sighing. “I may be clueless, but I’m not stupid. If we tell them about Majora… Panic.”

“The less they know about how much death is out there, the better,” Lieshy asserted. “Ponies don’t handle the possibility of imminent death very well.”

Toph twirled the Master Sword. “I’m sure we can prove ourselves to be good allies.”

“Proof often means nothing,” Lieshy retorted.

~~~

Corona levitated the blowtorch closer to her face and pulled down her welding mask. She positioned two pieces of metal by the blowtorch’s flame and moved them across, slowly, fusing them together with a filler rod. It was so much easier when she didn’t have to bother using hands. She could rotate the pieces to be welded easily enough to come in at any angle she desired.

“I still think that’s cheating,” Sugarcoat said from her chair near the stairwell.

Corona smirked, turning the blowtorch off. “Say what? Didn’t catch that.”

“I said I still think that’s cheating.”

“Maybe. But the less time I spend on basic college assignments like this, the more time I get to work on important things.”

“Doing basic college assignments is all you have a societal obligation to do at the moment.”

“Pshaw, I can work on this!” She tossed the carefully welded metal chunks away, bringing up a much more intricate device from under the worktable that resembled a coconut covered in hundreds of wires and lights. She turned on a nearby monitor so it could show her the source material for the finished product, composed mostly of images of Rick working in a Hub lab.

“You know, Twilight wasn’t working on that for a reason.”

“Like you tell me every day,” Corona said, examining the image closely, checking for more wires and comparing it with her drawn blueprint. “I just feel the need to work on what she’s not, you know? I don’t think she’ll be mad.”

“It’s not like you stole it from her or something with help from a high profile criminal.”

“Hey, Twilight knows about Sombra. She’s cool with it.” Corona plugged in a few wires.

“Sparky isn’t.”

Corona bit her lip. “Well, yeah, that’s why Sparky doesn’t know where all of this came from…”

“You just keep digging yourself deeper and deeper into a hole and you know it.”

Corona sighed. “Look, if it makes you feel better, I’ll tell her where these blueprints came from and suffer the wrath of a ‘good citizen’. Okay?”

Sugarcoat raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one bothered by this. Did I say I had any problems? No. I was just doing what I normally do.”

“Which is…?”

“Speak without any trace of tact whatsoever.”

“At least you’re aware of that…”

“Something you are already painfully aware of. It’s amazing how many of our conversations are truly pointless.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Sugarcoat… Never change.”

“The likelihood of me never changing at all is nil.”

“You know what I mean.”

Sugarcoat let a smile crawl onto her face. “Since when did that matter?”

Corona facehooved. “You’d think I’d know you by now.”

“You secretly enjoy being baffled and thrown around like a ragdoll. You think it gets you into a better mindset.”

“And there goes the psychoanalysis,” Corona said, shaving some of the coating off a nearby wire. “What else do you creepily ‘know’ about me?”

“You’re once again wondering what you’re going to do with your life. You’re starting your last semester of college, about to get your degree. You’re just not thinking about it.”

“WRONG!” Corona laughed. “I’ve been accepted to an Equis Cosmic program for furthering my education.”

“And after that you’ll know everything conceivably possibly about physics. Then what?”

“Can’t even revel in the small victories,” Corona shook her head. “I don’t know. Adventure again?”

“AID won’t take you on again.”

“Twilight will.”

“With the security risk you pose?”

Corona stopped working. “…Twilight doesn’t care as much about secrets.”

“There are definitely some things she’ll want to keep secret, and those are the things Sombra will want to know.”

“I’ll figure that out when I get to that point.”

“Sure you will.”

A portal opened up next to Corona. Alushy walked out of it, depositing a bag of rare mechanical pieces on Corona’s worktable. “You don’t want to know what I had to do to get these.”

“Did you kill someone again!?” Corona exclaimed. “Alushy!”

“No, believe it or not, but you still don’t want to know.”

Sugarcoat blinked. “What could she possibly be upset at if you didn’t kill anyone?”

Alushy snorted. “Imagine, for a moment, if you will, me using my powers of seduction on an entire troop of-“

Sugarcoat and Corona held up a hand at the same time.

“Told you,” Alushy said, smirking. “You got this thing working yet?”

Corona shook her head. “Not even close. I can’t simulate the portal fluid, and I know if it’s even slightly off things go horribly wrong.”

“Remind me why I’m helping a hopeless science project.”

“Because you felt the need to work on something beyond slaughtering hordes of evil because lately that’s been feeling inadequate,” Sugarcoat said. “Also you just like the idea of working on something the authority rejected.”

“Have I ever told you how much I like you?”

“Yes. However, unlike that troop of unidentified individuals, your powers of seduction are powerless against my assault of deadpan remarks.”

“Yeesh. You must have all the guys fighting over you.”

“She’s actually dating Micro Chips,” Corona said, turning the unfinished project over and over in her telekinesis. “He comes down here to help, sometimes.”

“How many people know about this ‘secret’ project?” Alushy asked.

“Let’s see… you, me, Sugarcoat, Micro, Sombra, probably Storm since I know he’s watching me, and… Sparky. Though she doesn’t know where I got the designs.”

“Something, something, you’re becoming a regular criminal, cutting remark, laugh.”

Corona grunted. “Please, it’s not like I’m doing anything illegal.”

“You survive on technicalities,” Sugarcoat added.

“Oh wow, looks like today is ‘assault Corona’s confidence’ day!”

“You? Confidence?” Alushy laughed.

“Very funny,” Corona muttered. She put the device back under the workbench. “Now, I’m going to sta-“

The doorbell rang. Corona reacted quickly, grabbing a robe off a nearby wall hook. She clicked a small, silver bracelet on her front leg. The bracelet, crafted by Twilight over a year ago, flooded her body with magic and transformed her into her human form. She slid the robe on and jogged up the stairs.

“Nice bod’!” Alushy yelled after her.

“Why would you care, you’re a pony,” Sugarcoat commented.

“Why do you not?”

“I’m a decent human being.”

Corona rolled her eyes at the absurd conversation occurring in her basement. She marched up to the ground floor of her house, a lovely place purchased with the fat paycheck she’d received after she’d left the AID. Apparently she just hadn’t been allowed to use the funds publicly while she was employed. Silver lining to being fired, she supposed.

She opened the front door; glad to see a familiar face. “Hey, Sparky!”

Sparky – the human once known as Twilight - looked at the robe Corona was wearing. “Am I coming at a bad time?”

“Sparky, you know I spend my time in my house as a unicorn. This is just the easiest thing to throw on.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Come on in,” Corona invited, gesturing into her home. “Sugarcoat’s in the basement arguing with Alushy.”

“Oh. Her. Do you have any… other unsavory company?”

Corona narrowed her eyes. “Sparky, they’re friends.”

Sparky shrugged, clearly not in the mood to have this conversation again. “Just… I needed to talk to you about your plans. Everyone’s ready for tomorrow. I just want to be sure that you’re really going through with it.”

Corona walked into another room and shut the door so she could change out of sight of Sparky. It wasn’t that Corona minded, but Sparky did. She came back out, a unicorn, lips pursed. “Yeah, pretty sure I’m not making any last-minute changes. Unless the entire world lights on fire after Disclosure. There’s always that chance.”

“Y-yeah…” Sparky wrung her hands. “I hope they know what they’re doing…”

“There’s only so much they can predict and know,” Corona said. “People are random. The people of five different worlds are even more random.”

“I don’t like not knowing if my world will be intact next week. I’d like to have some certainty about the fate of me and my family, Corona. Some!”

“Sorry, it just can’t always be quantified,” Corona said. “I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to complete college, at least.”

“A lot can change in two years!”

Corona nodded slowly. “Yeah. You just have to be prepared.”

“How am I supposed to prepare for variables I can’t quantify!?”

Alushy laughed from the basement. “Do I hear the nerdy bitch panicking about the completely normal uncertainty in life?”

“Yes you do!” Corona called down. “And that’s a perfectly normal response to the completely normal uncertainty!”

“…Am I the ‘nerdy bitch’ now?” Sparky said, taking a step back.

Corona sighed. “No, Sparky, no… When you’re talking with Alushy you just have to take some things in stride, okay? If I spend time correcting her language, it’d miss the entire point of what I was trying to say.”

Sparky took in a deep breath. “I… I can’t deal with her, Corona. And I can’t see how you can. How you can deal with all those… people you call friends.”

Corona smiled sadly. “I know. But we’re friends. We don’t have to approve of each other’s friends.”

“I know. It’s just… hard to stomach, sometimes.”

“Hey, I’m not asking you to interact with her,” Corona said. “Not asking you to like her either. Nor Sombra. Nor did I ask you to like Tempest, Mike, Ike, or Storm. Or even Iroh, but I know you like Iroh.”

“Everybody and their mother likes Iroh!” Sugarcoat called.

“Not helping, Sugarcoat!”

“We just had the discussion about that not being a criteria of my function.”

Corona’s eye twitched. “I’m surrounded by…”

“Friends,” Sparky said, folding her arms.

Corona rubbed the back of her head. “Er… Yeah!”

Sparky nodded, forcing a smile. “I should probably go.”

“…If that’s what you want.”

She waved. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”

Alushy called up from the basement as she walked out the door. “Yeah! You better run, bitch! Flee from personality confrontation! I’m just insufferable!”

Corona teleported down to the basement and shot Alushy a death glare. “Do you have to be such a jerk all the time?”

“Please, Corona, call me what I am. Fudgemothering asshole shitty vampire.”

“Look at the creative use of swears alongside boring, regular syntax,” Sugarcoat deadpanned. “You do realize it’d be more interesting if you could get the point across without the swears. It’d speak more to your creativity.”

“Fudge you.”

“Score. Sugarcoat, one. Alushy, zero.”

Corona grabbed the bridge of her nose. “Alushy, I’m talking about your antagonism. How do you expect to make friends like that? How do you expect to stay on anyone’s good side.”

“I don’t!” Alushy laughed. “I’m a free spirit. If you don’t take me as I am, your loss.”

“To those who thought Trixie had a big ego, take a five-second look at Alushy to discover what true ego is,” Sugarcoat said.

Corona shook her head. “You know, I wonder if Sparky has a point about you, Alushy…”

“She probably does!” Alushy grinned. “But I’m just too damn attractive to you. You can’t-“

Corona levitated a boot and threw it into Alushy’s head. “You’re so unpleasant sometimes…”

“And I’ll always be that way, baby! How’s about a date? I can bring everything worthy of attention to the party and you can bring the fiery ‘I don’t really like you or anything, you insufferable horse’s ass!’ to the table!”

Corona twitched. “You are not helping your case.”

“Corona,” Sugarcoat said. “Consider investing in the ability to learn from recent conversations.”

“You can stuff a sock in it.”

“Can, yes. Will, no.”

Corona rammed her head into the workbench and let out an agonized groan.

“Ha! Broke her.” Alushy raised a hoof in Sugarcoat’s direction. She made no move to meet it. “Oh come on, don’t leave me hanging!”

“You are an insufferable dolt who was needlessly cruel and antagonistic. Why wouldn’t I leave you hanging?”

“Ouch. Burn.”

“Just a statement of fact.”

Alushy shrugged. “Fine, I can tell when I’m not wanted. Off to the races I go!” She ripped a portal to another universe and stepped through.

Sugarcoat stood up from her chair when she was done and walked over to Corona. “Hey, Corona. It’s going to be okay.”

Corona moaned like a depressed puppy.

Sugarcoat put a hand on her back. “Corona. It’s a testament to you that you can put up with her at all. Maybe you can change her, like you’re changing Sombra.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m making deals with the devil here…”

“Oh, you are.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Sugarcoat patted Corona gently. “It is a vote of confidence. I think you can get through this. You’re the strongest, most determined person I know. Don’t sell yourself too short.”

“…Thanks, Sugarcoat.”

“Don’t mention it.”

~~~

The endurance of life is not always a pretty picture.

Take the remaining Binary world as an example. During the release of Majora, she specifically sent a corrupting influence of magic directly to the other world, just because it was nearby. The world was not destroyed, but it was irrecoverably corrupted. The other half of Binary society collapsed, a mockery of their supposed preparedness.

The cities of the world were ruins, the land was covered in dark monstrous magics, and unfathomable beasts prowled the world. It was the blemish in the multiverse that Majora had left behind to ensure she would not be forgotten. The world was a hellscape where only the most stubborn tried to live.

Which was to say it was a perfect place for Siron to take an interest in.

Currently, he was standing on a floating disc-shaped building, far from the purple ground below. He had gone down to the surface before, dealt with the horrendous beasts, but even he had to admit he couldn’t forge a permanent settlement in such horrid conditions. He couldn’t imagine how the remaining Binaries kept it up.

He didn’t care all that much, though. They were weak, they had been exploited, and they had fallen to a stronger foe. They deserved the loss of their entire civilization. And then Majora… For the being of chaos, he could only feel respect. She tricked the Binaries, the multiverse, even him. He didn’t even know he was being played…

But she was only one being. She proved herself to be formidable, but not worthy of her rampage. He was thankful for her existence, and even her manipulations, because the aftermath…

Well, the aftermath he was standing over he could use. She used him, now he used her. It was perfect – poetic.

“Siron?” Mistress Luna said, walking up to his side. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking of this world,” Siron said, pointing his staff at a triple-headed elephant covered in fangs on every square inch of its body. “I’m thinking of how its magic is inexplicably suited to mine.” The green-red energy of his staff enveloped the elephant-creature. It turned to other members of its herd and started trampling them. “I’m seeing power.”

“For what, though?” Luna asked.

“My – our – race. We deserve much more than we have been given on this platter that is existence itself. But time and time again we are foiled by things beyond our control. The Moon Spirit was destroyed, our allies don’t recognize strength, Majora…” He clutched his fist harder around the staff. “We aren’t at the bottom anymore – those Binaries below us have that honor – but what say do we have?”

“You were one of the heroes who faced Majora, Siron. You’re a celebrated hero.”

“That only lasted so long, Mistress… They know who I am, but the popularity fades. They always want new, new, new.”

“So, what are you going to do about it?”

Siron used his magic to connect to the corruption below. “Use this place to elevate us. This… den of darkness. It will be our light.”

Luna smiled. “I suppose I can get behind that.”

“Good. It will be long, hard, and more than a little bloody. This place is brutal. But there is structure here we can use, where others abandon.” He looked to the sky. “I’m going to ask for Fef’s release.”

“What?”

“I need a strong, capable, adaptive warrior at my side, and Anix is gone. She may have betrayed the others to Ba’al and Majora, but she didn’t betray us. Her people come first.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

I know her loyalties lie with me. “Yes. I am certain.”

“Toph and her party will be livid, Siron.”

“They don’t need to know. She won’t need to leave this world. It’s not like you can just portal to here easily, you need a ship. And nobody has any reason to come here, except us. Everyone else just wants to leave.”

The third passenger of the disc grunted. The two turned to see their momentary ally, the Gerudo Ganondorf. “You have arrogance, Siron.”

“Arrogance is a consequence of strength.”

“True. That doesn’t mean it itself is a strength.”

Siron folded both sets of his arms. “You’re one to talk.”

“It would be wise not to underestimate the tendency those who call themselves ‘heroes’ have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Lyna raised an eyebrow. “…What does that have to do with anything?”

“More than you know,” Ganondorf said, looking down at the world below. “This is an age of darkness we observe. They just ask for ‘heroes’ to tame them.”

“Wouldn’t that be us?”

Ganondorf smirked. “Your innocence is, in a way, beautiful. But in this world, I think you will soon open your eyes to the way of things.”

Siron chuckled. “Mistress Luna, he is right. In some ways, you are naïve. Reserved. I am not convinced this world will change you, considering your ancient mind.”

Luna pursed her lips. “Well then we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

~~~

Equis Cosmic had no planet where all the other major worlds were. When one opened a direct portal to the universe, they found nothing but empty space and rapid decompression. Portable dimensional devices didn’t allow direct connections to the world under normal circumstances. So far, everyone had managed to avoid a tragedy.

Admittedly, the area wasn’t completely empty any longer. While there was no full sized planet there, a large space station had been built - a shipyard placed specifically for interdimensional ships. The station was composed of dozens of very long and narrow rods, between which were areas that held ships in various states of construction; ranging from a basic wireframe construction to nearly complete.

Most of the ships were clearly of the smooth, nature-inspired design indicative of Equis Cosmic, but there were two that did not follow this pattern. One appeared as a larger version of the Apollo, except with a double-layered body in the center that had a total of six docking bays; three on each side, arranged in a triangle pattern. Unlike the Apollo, it had a threatening glowing cylinder of many colors embedded in its very top.

O’Neill stood on the bridge of this ship, smirking as he looked out the front window. “This has been a long held dream of mine…” he said, gesturing at the bridge in front of him.

Cosmo raised an eyebrow. “…You wanted a really large ship built to your designs with help from magical ponies?”

“What? No! Really, we could have built this thing ourselves given enough time – well most of it anyway. I’m talking about naming a ship the Enterprise. They just wouldn’t let me do it. Well, now they don’t get a say in the matter.” He put his hands on his hips. “The Enterprise. It feels so good to say that.”

“What does that name mean to you?”

“It’s from a historic TV show.”

Cosmo raised an eyebrow. “Something tells me that you’re being a little silly.”

O’Neill chuckled. “Sometimes the best thing is a little silly.”

“I’m not saying it was a bad decision.”

“Rousing endorsement,” O’Neill deadpanned.

Cosmo chuckled. “It sounds impressive and powerful.”

O’Neill leaned back. “So, what do we owe you?”

“Use of the ship and political favors,” Cosmo said. “Nothing specific, though you knew this.”

“Have to make sure you’re not trying to pull a fast one.”

“Me? Pull a fast one? You wound me.”

The Starlight AI popped in. “You never pulling a fast one? That’s a laugh.”

“I don’t do that to my friends, Sta-“

“21/11/3092. The individual in question was your great grandniece, Acorna Sparkle, and-“

“That was centuries ago!”

“8/2/3432. Only a couple years ago. You fooled me into flooding myself with a cat meme virus.”

O’Neill stifled a chuckle. “Like two little sisters.”

Cosmo smirked. “Not the worst thing we’ve been called.”

“I’ve been called a ‘built-in lover.’ Which is just disgusting,” the AI said.

O’Neill shrugged. “I wouldn’t judge.”

“Why did you tell him that?” Cosmo asked.

“Momentary lapse in judgement,” the AI responded.

“You can process things thousands of times faster than us.”

“End of line.”

“Oh no you don’t.”

There was no response from the AI. Cosmo rolled her eyes. “Looks like she’s ducked out of the conversation.”

“Wish I could do that sometimes,” O’Neill commented.

“Doesn’t everyone?” She turned to look at one of the screens with a ship schematic on it. “Is the Harmony Core functioning?”

“They tell me that the miniature star works like a charm,” O’Neill answered. “Carter’s giddy. It’ll be able to take us back to the west, apparently. Not that we really need it over there.”

“I’m glad you like. Those things aren’t easy to make.”

“How are they made?”

“Me,” Cosmo said, tapping her chest. “It takes part of the Harmony Essence and infuses it into a complex crystal matrix. You’ve basically got a Tree of Harmony seed sitting in your engineering.”

“Wait, hold it, will that thing actually grow into a tree?”

“It’ll start sprouting in a few thousand years. By then, something tells me we’ll have better methods of power. Just don’t become evil or un-harmonious. The Harmony Core is able to sense that and will start acting up.”

“What if we’re in a war?”

“Don’t rely on the Harmony Core’s power, simple,” Cosmo said. “You should only need it to make tremendous jumps across the multiverse anyway. Even the magic weapons are designed to operate off regular electricity, as per your design requests.”

“Our engineers were that demanding?”

“They’re the ones who figured out how to get it to work. The main Spectral Tube is almost entirely their design, though I had to ensure the spells would work. I hope you have someone who knows how to code thaums. That tube really isn’t worth it if you don’t know how to build spells on the spot.”

“Mauve?”

“He’s… learning.”

“Will that be enough?”

Cosmo shrugged. “To shoot a laser or release an explosion? Yes. To specifically disable an enemy ship’s shield system using a teleport bypass? No.”

“So I have a big honkin’ space gun that none of my crew knows how to use. Great. Care to lend someone?”

“It’d have to be temporary, since combat specialists are rather hard to come by. We rarely have reason to shoot at anything.”

“Lucky.” O’Neill sat back in his big chair. Through the window, he noticed a unique chrome ship in the nearby bay. It was composed of two sections: an ovoid top devoid of features above a boat-like bottom, complete with a figurehead of an unidentifiable alicorn. It was as if a boat was using a metal balloon like a sail, except the masts were numerous beams of white magic. “How’s the ponies’ ship doing?”

“Well. They decided to rely almost entirely on magic for theirs,” Cosmo said. “I think the only purely technological thing in there is the hyperdrive, and it’s powered by magic. The top part holds all the complex spells, machinery, and most of the weapons, while the bottom there is mostly living quarters. It’d designed a lot more like a luxury liner than an exploration vessel.”

“Which is definitely something they’d do. Comfort, art, friendship, and all that.”

“Indeed. But it’s still a versatile ship, equipped with hyperdrive, Nova drive, and the shell drive. It’s so adaptable it’s able to handle overloads of power, increasing its effectiveness by several times when in a high magic realm. When powerful mages are on board, it will adapt. It’s an interesting piece of engineering that would never pass any sort of standardization here.”

“Must be nice, not having to listen to standards. Did they decide what to name it?”

“The Feldspar.”

“…Sounds cool.”

“It’s the mineral found in both sunstone and moonstone. I’d say that’s a better reason than some historic TV show.”

O’Neill shrugged.

~~~

A portal opened in the central area of the Hub, depositing three ponies into the crowded room. The Hub was a paradoxical mix of change and consistency. In the last two years, it could be argued that everything about the place had changed, or that nothing had really changed at all. It was still filled with people from dozens of dimensions, the Mirror Portal was still active in the center, and all the halls were filled with shops, embassies, and a couple of living centers. The bazaar of carts, tents, and stands filled as much space as they possibly could.

It was different in the way that new shops had come and old ones had left. If one had been here two years ago and had just come back, it would be unlikely that they would be able to navigate the Hub. There’d just be too much visual change.

Luckily for Pinkie, Nova, and Flutterfree, they came here almost every day and knew exactly not only how to get to everything, but also how to avoid the halls that were jammed with sleazy shop owners. Their portal closed behind them and they trotted off, Pinkie taking the lead.

“The Mushroom World is always so nice,” Flutterfree said.

“Don’t see me arguing,” Nova agreed. “Great place to get a breather before… Well, today.”

Pinkie turned her head around and grinned. “Today’s going to be great! I have this entire place rigged to explode in confetti the moment everything goes live!”

“Are you sure that won’t impede the plans everyone else has?” Flutterfree asked.

“Oh, it will, but not that much. There’ll just be a dusting of confetti everywhere, not an entire hallway full of the stuff like last time.”

“The last several times,” Nova countered.

Pinkie shrugged. “Eh, people can afford a small bit of unwanted confetti in their lives. What matters is that this is time for celebration.”

“Assuming one of the Earths doesn’t suddenly break out in war.”

“Not going to happen,” Pinkie said.

“Do you just know that or just think that?” Flutterfree asked.

Pinkie pondered this. “Think,” she finally answered.

Nova raised a hoof. “Then I retain my right to be paranoid.”

“If you want to!” Pinkie smirked, taking a hard left to avoid a nearby reporter. “Gotta watch ourselves girls, we can’t let the pizzarazzi take up hours of our time today!”

“Paparazzi,” Flutterfree corrected.

“Papapizza?”

Flutterfree facehooved. “Pinkie…”

“Whaaaaat?” Pinkie said, smiling innocently.

“Nevermind.”

Pinkie giggled, bouncing through a small trinket shop and out the back door, entering the area of the Hub that contained the Elemental Nation Embassy – which meant Iroh’s tea shop was nearby.

The three of them walked in, smiles on their faces. The shop hadn’t changed at all in two years – there were still high-profile patrons enjoying tea and talking with each other. The smell of dozens of different tea varieties flooded the nostrils of the three ponies, putting them at ease.

The three ponies had plans to head through the side door to the actual Embassy, but something caught their eye – or, rather, two people. Against the back wall, in an area reserved for the occasional performance scheduled by Iroh, a magic show was underway.

“Be amazed as Trixie pulls a rabbit out of her hat!” Trixie called, pulling her hat off her head with her magic, sticking her hoof in, and pulling out a small, fluffy white creature. “Tah-dah!”

Next to her stood Discord. He folded his arms. “That’s nothing.” He snapped his fingers, creating a hat out of nothing. He shook it and a dozen rabbits fell out.

Trixie huffed. “It’s easy to create rabbits with chaos magic, Discord.”

“Oh, you wound me. But I saw your horn, it was on. You used magic as well,Trixie the Cheap and Cheating.”

Trixie huffed. “Well, Trixie never!” She stood up on her hind legs, holding her hat in one hoof. “Behold, Trixie’s horn is off! No spells are being cast!” She reached into her hat with her other free hoof and pulled out her own head.

She blinked, staring at herself. “DISCORD!” Both Trixies yelled.

Discord put his hands into the air. “What? I’m not doing anything!”

“Likely story. You don’t have a shiny horn!”

Discord tapped his horns and made them glow with every color of the rainbow.

Trixie stuffed her other head back into the hat. “Humph. Now Trixie will do the trick without interference…” She reached her hoof in and pulled on her on tail, yanking herself through a hole in spacetime and into the air. She landed flat on her back.

Discord howled with laughter. “Okay, that, I can’t just let go attributed to you. That was all me.”

Trixie pulled a link of colorful fabrics out of her hat and tied Discord up in them with a swift motion. Her horn didn’t flash the entire time. “Gotcha.”

Discord snapped his fingers, making the fabrics tie themselves around Trixie. “No, I gotcha.”

“Why you little…” Trixie lit her horn, lifting her hat and shooting more colorful links at Discord. They blasted him in the face. He twisted an arm, turning the fabrics back to Trixie. After a quick tornado of color, both of them were completely tied up.

“This is your fault,” Discord grunted.

“My fault!?” Trixie gasped. “The audacity!”

They continued arguing over each other. A curtain slowly drew over the two of them. When it repealed, the two of them were free of all colored imprisonment. They bowed.

The patrons clapped and nodded in approval at them. Nova walked up. “Nice show, Trix!”

“Thanks, Nova,” Trixie said, embracing her friend. “But you’ve seen this act already, you know it’s good.”

“I still say we needed more chaos in it,” Discord muttered.

“Discord, random spontaneous chaos without any rhyme or reason gets boring real quickly in show business,” Trixie said. “There needs to be structure. A punchline. Something impressive. Never show your most impressive tricks, just in case.”

Discord folded his arms.

“Hey, who has the special talent in stage magic, you or Trixie? That’s right, Trixie.”

Flutterfree smiled. “She is right, Discord. As delightfully crazy as you are, for a stage show that doesn’t quite work.”

Discord sat down at a nearby table. “Yes, yes, I know.” He summoned tea to himself. “Now, I wonder what else I’m going to do today…”

“You’re going to stay in the Hub, like we talked about,” Flutterfree said, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, did we? I don’t rememb-“

“Don’t play dumb with me mister! You know you’re staying here, you know why, and you agreed to it.”

“I don’t recal-“

“Discord…”

Discord sighed, sagging in defeat. “Fine. Ahem.” He transformed his face into a mockery of Flutterfree. “Oh, Discord, you’ll need to keep yourself out of sight during Disclosure! People will freak out if you show up! I’m just so terrified that other people will have heart attacks from your delightful chaos that everyone will love! I-“

Flutterfree raised her other eyebrow. Nova and Trixie chuckled.

Discord returned to his normal appearance. “I admit, I may be getting the exact words wrong, but that’s the basic idea, right?”

“Yes,” Flutterfree said.

“Don’t you worry your wings, Flutterfree. I’ll stay in the Hub the entire time.”

“And don’t get into any trouble here whi- I’m talking to a brick wall, aren’t I?”

Trixie nodded. “We already have plans to change all the apples to oranges and all the oranges to apples.”

Nova chuckled. “That’s going to tick off a lot of Applejacks.”

“I personally want to see the reaction Orangejack has,” Trixie added.

Pinkie gasped. “That… Oh I want to see that… But I can’t, I’ll be elsewhere…”

“Human Pinkie?” Nova asked.

“With Corona right now, and needs to be for the next day or so,” Pinkie explained. “Too much to do, too much to see!”

“Speaking of…” Flutterfree said, looking at a clock. “I think we should check in on Twilight and the others now.”

“Right,” Nova said. “See you around, Trix.”

“Enjoy your endless flood of politics!”

Nova sighed. “Yeah… ‘Enjoy’…”

Pinkie led the three of them into the Embassy proper. It was less chaotic than they were expecting. There weren’t dozens of people running around with papers in their hands and hooves, there wasn’t a lot of screaming panic, there wasn’t someone rushing in with new information that changed everything, and there weren’t calls for last minute revisions to the plan.

There was just a room of people and ponies sitting down, staring intently at a countdown that currently read 1:34:13. Everyone was dead silent.

“…Uh, hi?” Flutterfree said. Some people looked at her, but Twilight remained fixated on the descending numbers. Flutterfree flew in front of it and waved her wing.

Twilight’s concentration on the timer broke. She shook her head, looking to Flutterfree. “Oh, hi! Sorry, I… Well…” She glanced around. “I think we’re all just waiting.”

Nova blinked. “No last minute plan chaos?”

“Nope. We’ve had this entire thing planned out for over a week,” Twilight said. “We’ve just have to… wait. Wait an hour and a half. Everything’s coordinated, people are moving to where they need to be, speeches have been written, and the various medias have been informed of imminent press conferences…” She gulped. “Everything is going exactly as planned so far. And that worries me. The other shoe is going to drop, I can feel it.”

Pinkie smirked. “Hey, Twilight, look at me. For once, your plan will go off without a hitch.”

Twilight beamed. “Really!?”

“Yeah! Everything you’ve got written down in those papers will run more or less smoothly.”

“Oh, Pinkie, you’re a lifesaver!”

“It’s after those plans are completed that things go sideways!”

Twilight blinked. “…Pinkie…”

“Just being honest!”

“But what if, because you’ve told me that, I mess something up by being nervous? What if I change the reactions?”

“You won’t.”

Twilight opened her mouth to object, then decided shut it. She looked away. “That’s more confusing the more I think about it.”

“Exactly! I’ve got you thinking about paradoxical certainty instead of Disclosure!”

Twilight looked back. “…Did you say something?”

“Yeah, wasn’t important though.”

Flutterfree picked up one of the many sheaves of paper labeled in giant, blue letters. DISCLOSURE. “Renee and Daniel pulled all the stops on this one…”

“Five worlds…” Twilight said. “Five worlds are participating. Six, if you count the Elemental Nations, but they already knew.” She stretched her wings. “Everything’s going to change, today, in a little over an hour.”

“I know!” Pinkie cheered. “Isn’t it exciting? In a few days I can actually go to the Leaning Tower of Pisa as a pony! Isn’t it amazing?”

Nova smirked. “Sure Pinkie, it’s amazing.”

~~~

Five worlds.

Equis Vitis, the center of the vine, the land of ponies and friendship where it all started. A world where there were not many secrets, but there was an entire world that had no contact with the other universes. Equis Vitis was not a world of just ponies, as much as it may seem.

Earth Vitis, a world closely linked to Equis Vitis, a world filled with humans, two hundred nations, and a presence of magic generally kept out of public view. Admittedly, the magic wasn’t hidden that well, but officially it didn’t exist, and the people were just fine with that.

Equis Cosmic, an empire of ponies that spread across an entire galaxy, an image of Equis Vitis’ once possible future. A galaxy of friendship and magic, but also a dark past and loneliness. Ponies that had to remember the time when there were griffons and dragons, people that had to be sacrificed for their own survival.

Earth Tau’ri, a distant world far removed from the magic of friendship, and yet oddly similar to Earth Vitis. A world that ran a secret program to the stars for around two decades, hiding from their people entire wars that took place in the stars, and hiding from their allies the other universes surrounding. They were not alone in the universe.

Lai, a world with less connection to the others. The ponies here detested change, wanting nothing more than to live their lives without having their views challenged. They loved their Queen, hated the Arcei, and lived their lives in general devotion to a Goddess who no longer existed. Was their existence a cruel joke? Or were they strong? Questions that would remain unanswered…

Each of these worlds prepared.

On Equis Vitis, it was simple. Representatives from every nation were invited to Canterlot to hear Princess Celestia and Charter-Princess Twilight speak. A handful of beings from other universes would be there to represent.

On Earth Vitis and Earth Tau’ri, every nation that was in on the secret – be it the wars in the stars, or the existence of magic – would give a speech at roughly the same time. Each of them would have a single otherworlder with them as proof. The nations that weren’t in on the secret would just have to react to the Disclosure, but there was nothing to be done about this.

On Equis Cosmic, Princess Twilight ‘Cosmo’ was to stand with O’Neill and reveal the Apollo in a broadcast sent to the entire galaxy. The largest population of all five worlds would hear the news all at once.

On Lai, a Queen would address her subjects with a team run by the recently knighted Toph at her side. The palace would open to all ponies that day, allowing the main hall to be flooded. The result was completely dependant on a Queen’s ability to talk to her people.

At the same time, all of these efforts began. It was a simple ping sent to everyone’s phones through a set of open portals in the Hub.

On Equis Vitis, Princess Celestia strode out onto the balcony, Twilight and Luna at her sides. The three of them overlooked the crowd composed of many, many races. There were ponies, there were dragons, there were zebras, there were griffons, there were yaks, there were buffalo, there were diamond dogs, there were hippogriffs, there were minotaurs... There were even the buglike changelings, standing in the open among the other races with hardly any fear from anyone. There were no centaurs or gargoyles, sadly. Did they even get the message? Nopony knew.

Celestia took a breath, speaking with the Royal Canterlot Voice. “People of Equis! There are some of you who know why I have called all of you here today, and many others who don’t. Those of you who live outside our borders may have been noticing strange things happening in Equestria. Rumors of strange creatures, unusual devices coming from nowhere, and new magics that do things nobody could have imagined. While we have not kept any secrets, we believe now is the time to tell you all directly what has been happening, and what it means for all of you. I will say that what we have to show you will likely be hard to stomach for many and will have some unfortunate implications. But I assure you that everything we say is true, and in the end is a good thing for all of us.”

Murmurs spread through the crowd. Exactly as expected, so far. Celestia looked down at them all. “The Princess of Friendship, Twilight Sparkle, is better versed in this than I am, for she has had much personal experience. Listen closely to her words, my friends.”

Twilight turned off her ears, thankful she could end the headache. She didn’t need to hear what anypony was saying anymore, for she was the one talking now. She switched places with Celestia, placing her front hooves on the balcony. She spoke loudly, but without the boom of the Royal Canterlot Voice. She used a simple voice amplification spell, to make the crowd feel like she was talking to each of them personally, not shouting at them.

“Hello everyone! It warms my heart to see so many of you standing together, as one! It’s hard for me to imagine, standing here today, that before I got these wings none of us would have dared meet like this. The dragons were angry, the changelings were deceptive, and we ponies were afraid. But, today, we’ve all moved past that, we’ve become something greater than we once were. What I implore all of you to do today is to hold onto this beautiful unity we have achieved, in the face of something new.

“I won’t keep you in the dark any longer. I can tell you’re all really nervous, thinking I’m going to reveal something bad. I’m not. You see, me and my friends have, for the past four years, been exploring other worlds. Not other nations, other worlds. Worlds with ponies, griffons, dragons, changelings, and minotaurs of their own. Some worlds are almost exactly like this one, except I never became a princess, or where Celestia was banished to the sun, or where the genders of everyone are switched! There are also other worlds with creatures beyond our wildest imaginations, people that exist in our legends but not in our reality, or worlds that are nothing but expanses of magic. And in these worlds, we’ve made new friends.”

Twilight lit her horn, teleporting Daniel next to her. She saw gasps from the crowd.

“This man is named Daniel Jackson. He’s a human, exactly like the creature of legend. He’s from a world called Earth – we call it Earth Tau’ri, to separate it from other Earths. We’re Equis Vitis, that is, the Equis vine, branching out to embrace all the other worlds. Daniel is one of many friends. Daniel, tell us a bit about yourself. Don’t worry, they’ll all be able to hear you.”

Daniel smiled. “Thank you, Twilight. Hello everyone. As you already heard from her, I’m Daniel Jackson. I’m an archeologist; that is, I study the deep past by analyzing artifacts, attempting to decode their languages, and investigating cultures. On Earth Tau’ri, humans are the only race on our planet, and I help my people study the cultures of the races we find among the stars. But everything I’ve seen among the stars is nothing compared to what I see here – never in my life have I seen so many races occupy the same world and live in peace. You should all be proud of yourselves for what you’ve accomplished here, a rare culture that deserves a reward.”

Twilight nodded. “He is just one of many friends we have made in the other worlds, my ponies. There are others, and…”

~~~

“…among these allies include a race that may look simplistic at first, but are actually very formidable and strong in the face of adversity.” President Henry Hayes of the Earth Tau’ri United States gave the signal. Renee stepped out from behind the President, to an empty podium next to his. Camera flashes went wild. The gasps were loud, and a couple people screamed out expletives.

“Hello,” Renee said, taking off her hat to reveal her horn. “My name is Renee. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you all out in the open like this. I am sorry we couldn’t do this sooner, but it took two full years of planning.”

President Hayes smiled. “People of America – and the world! We now have the chance to, as a whole, united body, show the people of other worlds who we are. People like Renee here are offering us an amazing opportunity to stand by them in a multiverse that is bigger than any of us can imagine. I call for us to forget the disagreements we have with each other, the petty wars, the struggles, and ask that we make our new allies proud of us and who we are. I ask that we forget, for a moment, the justified anger that alien technology and other universes were kept hidden for so long. Instead, we need to focus our efforts to the new frontier that has opened to us. A frontier of…”

~~~

“…opportunity, magic, and a large amount of new things we know almost nothing about!”

Corona rolled her eyes as she watched the television screen. Their president still sounded like an idiot even when his speech was pre-written and had been practiced several times. She’d even been there during some of the practice sessions. It was painful to watch at times… But at least he was getting the point across. Nova’s presence at his side was clearly helping.

Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.

“Now, this presents us with a solution to a lot of our problems. We now have plenty of places to move refugees…”

Corona facepalmed. She was certain that wasn’t in the speech draft. She saw Nova nudge the president with her magic, probably sending a message directly into his mind. The president shook his head. “But before we talk about our problems, there are some other things…”

~~~

“…to observe. The worlds outside our own have suffered much difficulty,” Cosmo said, addressing the entire galaxy with her voice. “We, by far, have the largest infrastructure of any of them. I call my ponies to serve the other worlds, to give them space, to be welcoming when those who need a place to live can find comfort instead of cramped living conditions.”

Cosmo smiled, glancing to O’Neill for a second. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble accepting the others. All of us feel, deep down, that we aren’t supposed to be the only people in this galaxy. That which we lost in the past… It is about to be returned to us. The griffons, dragons, and others of the past – they will come. Humans will come. Others will come. And I know that we will come to them as well. We’ve already stood together in secret, let us continue to stand together…”

~~~

“…in the future!” Queen Luna announced. “I know many of you were unaware, but Toph here has been serving the crown for two years as one of our knights! Saving ponies from evil, stopping wars, and helping all she could. Her entire team, save for Lady Rarity, is not of this world. Let us continue to treat them – and everypony else who comes here – with the respect they deserve. As knights, companions, leaders, and ponies just like you and me, even if they aren’t ponies, as it were.” She chuckled slightly.

Toph twirled the Master Sword and bowed.

“My ponies, some of you may not wish to involve yourself in the other worlds, and this is fine. But those of you who do, remember…”

~~~

“…they are our friends,” Twilight finished, a big smile on her face.

She looked down at the crowd and saw complete silence. Eyes were wide and jaws hung loose.

She waited nervously for the response.

028 - Disclosure, Part 2

Twilight glanced awkwardly back at Celestia, sending her a magical ping.

Patience, Twilight, Celestia responded, keeping her regal gaze on the crowd below. Twilight followed her gaze to the crowd – thousands of individuals who had just gotten to the end of a world-shattering speech. There was no response from any of them beyond the unbelieving stares.

Daniel folded his hands together and rocked on his heels awkwardly.

Twilight turned on her ears, just to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. She could hear the breathing of Celestia, Luna, and Daniel – but there were no sounds from the crowd. She wouldn’t be able to hear a whisper from where she was, but it was still disconcerting.

She was preparing to go through with the ‘dead silence’ response they had planned when she heard it. Clapping – clapping from a pair of hooves she couldn’t see. The powerful clack hit her perceptions like a frying pan, but she couldn’t bring herself to be annoyed. Her strained smile softened into a genuine one as more applause began to come forth – after all, once one pony starts clapping, it puts the idea into the minds of others.

The crowd was shaken out of their silence into an eruption of celebratory noises. Twilight turned her ears off long before it stopped getting louder. She saw smiles. She saw excitement. Of the expressions she spied from her pier, most were positive - even the yaks seemed excited, and they were known for being grumpy and untrusting compared to the others. Such excitement at something new was contagious.

Twilight saw Daniel let out a sigh of relief. He waved to the crowd. A green-coated pegasus mare came up and met his hand with a hoofbump and an enthusiastic shout. Other flying creatures saw what the pegasus had done and flew up after her.

Luna smiled. “Please remain on the ground level! We aren’t prepared for a flood of visitors just yet! I’m glad you’re excited, and there will be time to meet those from the other worlds later. But let’s try to keep this at least somewhat organized.”

With mild disappointment on their faces, the flying people returned to the ground.

Twilight grinned at Luna, then back down at the crowd. “I… I have no words, everyone. Thank you for this. Thank you for… being so welcoming!”

Celestia put a hoof on Twilight. “People of Equis Vitis, today, by this simple act of welcoming applause, you have done our world proud. I’m sure you have many questions, and in time we will answer them. You can find some information in the books stacked around the palace gardens, and we will answer any other questions you have, but for now I believe the various world leaders would appreciate discussion of the future first. If it would please them, could we-”

Somepony nudged Twilight. She turned to see Pinkie at her side. “You’re welcome,” Pinkie said.

Twilight smirked. “You started the clapping, didn’t you?”

“Guilty as charged!” Pinkie giggled. “And I’ve got more in store. Just waiting for Celestia to finish her invites… And…” She slammed her hoof on a giant red button, unleashing streamers and confetti over the entire crowd. “HAVE A HAPPY HARMONIC!”

Celestia teleported them all to the palace’s grand hall, the solar and lunar princesses placed in their respective thrones with Pinkie, Twilight, and Daniel in front of them. The many stained glass windows depicting the great feats of Equestria’s history shone beautiful light in the currently empty space.

Luna raised an eyebrow at Pinkie. “Did you just create a holiday?”

“Yeah! The Harmonic! It’s like harmony and music! Many people, resonating as one!” She grinned. “Yes, I did plan it so I’d announce that just as we were teleported away, aren’t I clever?”

Celestia rolled her eyes. “I could see myself doing the same thing.”

“See? Clever.”

“I like the name,” Daniel offered.

“Hey, Pinkie?” Twilight asked. “Everything went as planned, as you said. Things might go wrong now right?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep. I’m sure that something, somewhere is going to go off the deep end, I’m just not sure what.”

“We’ll ensure it doesn’t happen here,” Luna said, a determined expression crossing her face. “The leaders of Equis are approaching this very hall. We need to be ready for all of them.”

Twilight nodded. “Right.”

“I’ll be taking my leave then!” Pinkie said. “Heh. I said ‘taking my leave’. Mooooost fancy! Anyway, see ya!” She bounced out a side door.

“Bye,” Twilight called. She took a seat between the two celestial alicorns, making sure she could see the sides of both their mouths. She didn’t have a throne there, but there was enough space for her. Daniel stood to Twilight’s side, trying his best to look like he belonged when clearly he didn’t.

Celestia took out her phone, checking incoming feed from the Hub. “Looks like everyone else’s speeches wrapped up. Mostly positive receptions, but that’s only the initial response. No detailed information yet.” She put the phone away.

“Sister, have your dreams told you anything of this day?” Luna asked.

Celestia shook her head. “I do not know. As of late, my dreams have been much less specific. As if my magic is unable to see much with certainty anymore. Pinkie probably does it better than me, at this point.”

Luna nodded. “Indeed…”

The front doors to the hall flew open, and the leaders began to flow in one by one. There were dozens – but Twilight only made special notice of a few, those she knew personally in one way or another. Thorax, the tremendous king of the changelings who may have looked like a terrifying cross between a stag and a vibrant green beetle but was actually a rather soft guy on the inside. Ember, the young blue dragonlord who had led the dragons away from their ways of senseless violence with her more thoughtful approach to life – even if she was still pretty aggressive when compared to the average pony or human. Rutherford, prince of the yaks, as usual with a scowl fixed on his face and fur over his eyes. Gaider, current chancellor of Griffonstone, an eagle-panther breed with sly eyes and an official purple sash over his feathered chest. The last individual that caught Twilight’s eye was Queen Novo, the white-coat fuschia-mane queen of the hippogriffs and seaponies… She was currently a hippogriff, given the non-aquatic nature of the realm, but Twilight knew she preferred the ‘glamour’ of the sea, like most of her race.

Others filed in – buffalo, minotaurs, and zebras – and Twilight tried her best to keep track of them, but she could only do so much.

When Ember spoke first, Twilight wasn’t surprised in the least.

“Okay!” Ember shouted. “As excited as I’m sure everyone here is, and as much as everyone is thinking ‘oh, this explains a lot about what the ponies have been doing lately’, I, for one, would like to ask why we didn’t get told about this any sooner?”

Daniel coughed. “That’d be our fault. The other worlds as a whole, I mean. We have a lot of political nuance that your world – thankfully – doesn’t have. And some of our worlds, including mine, were hiding a lot more than just the existence of other worlds from people. It took two years to plan this so every world would be revealed at once.”

Thorax spoke up, voice wavering slightly. “See? A reasonable answer! I told you there wasn’t anything nefarious.”

“Why should we have waited for them!?” Rutherford demanded. “We don’t need to wait for anyone!”

“It’s polite,” Novo said, tapping her claws on the ground. “I’m more concerned about what they know about us than we don’t know about them.”

Daniel adjusted his glasses. “I actually don’t know much about you. I’ve heard about you, yes, but I never left Equestria while I’ve been here.”

“Why not?” Rutherford asked.

“Mostly? Busy exploring other worlds. There’s thousands out there, even if less than ten of them involved in active exploration.”

Thorax coughed. “So… Do you think we could do some exploring of our own?”

Novo sighed. “Jumping the gun a bit, are we?”

“Oh, was I not supposed t-“

“It’s fine, Thorax,” Twilight said. “You’ll all get devices that allow you to travel to other universes after you learn a bit more about how things work out there. We don’t want you dropping right in the middle of a volcano or something by accident.”

“What’s so wrong with that?” Ember asked.

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “It was just the first analogy that I thought of. I’m sure there’s an ice-volcano somewhere out there you wouldn’t be happy with.”

“Is there a world made entirely of donuts?” a zebra asked.

“…Maybe? We haven’t found one yet.”

“Well what worlds have you found?” Novo asked. “How about you actually tell us about our new friends?”

Twilight smiled. “Gladly. Let’s start with a world close to our own, which goes by the name of Lai…”

~~~

Sombra sat back in the large seat of her Puddlejumper and munched on a bag of Cheetos. The small ship was currently adrift in a random universe, several light minutes away from the primary planet. In about an hour it would automatically jump to another universe, just to keep the ‘feds’ off her trail. However, while they couldn’t see her, she could see them.

Usually she’d be working hard at hacking into something new or discovering another cache of top-secret information – but not today. Today, she just let her numerous screens display a constant feed of vastly entertaining text.

It was a good decision to tap into every social media outlet on every major world during the Disclosure. Everything was on digital fire and it was glorious. She sadly couldn’t see anything about Lai, but both Earths and Equis Cosmic were giving her plenty to go off of – not to mention the Hub and the primitive Equis Vitis Internet. So many points of view exploded onto the screen in front of her eyes. It was better than watching a movie.

She had turned it on a while ago. Virtually everyone knew the world governments were planning some announcement, and the theories were flying. The most common explanation was aliens. Not that far off, considering, and in the case of Earth Tau’ri it was literally true. Beyond that, there were a handful of other suggestions – secret world peace talks, revelations of secret scientific research (often involving space travel), or the coming of the apocalypse. …Or the Illuminati. That came up all the time.

Equis Cosmic generally steered away from those explanations, thinking things through in a more personal note – had they finally figured out how to reanimate the dead races? Was the Princess finally just too old? Had another world with life on it been discovered? There was a lot less panic in their messages as well, and more understanding. Even if some of their thoughts were dark, they anticipated the message with little fear.

The various hacker chat rooms she had opened in a side window had been trying their hardest to find out what the announcement was about – but Sombra had actively worked against them. She really wanted it to be a surprise. She stopped all Earth hackers with ease, though a couple from Equis Cosmic managed to find the answer. Sombra may have been from a world with highly advanced technology compared to the norm, but Equis Cosmic blew her out of the water.

At least she could be proud that the Earth hackers already hated her. They knew another hacker was working against them, and they knew it was her by her calling card. In the realm of hackers, however, there was respect in the hate. She knew this respect would only grow, with time.

And then the Disclosure happened.

The first responses?

WTF? So many WTFs from every platform. A few people tried to claim ‘I knew it!’ but that was complete bullcrap. The Equises were easy to look at for the most part – Vitis already knew where their Internet came from, so their messages were all about applauding the Princesses for a good speech. Cosmic could best be described as way too excited and hungry for information.

The Earths, however, were the best. Seconds after the announcement, complete non-sequitur arguments broke out on all sides, ranging from yelling at the immigrants for forcing everyone to find entire new universes to house them to yelling at the government for failing to use magic to cure cancer.

One message read, “this is why we need to stop teaching our children evolution!” How did that have anything to do with anything?

It was but one of many, many emotionally charged messages directed at everything everyone could point a finger at. Earth Vitis’s messages were generally more bitter and outrageous about it, but Earth Tau’ri had its fair share of stupid people with access to the Internet.

Sombra was a student of politics – she had to be, given her goal of finding out what really happened behind all the closed doors – but she had failed to realize how much humans fixated on things. If they cared a lot about one issue - say, gun control - everything major that happened needed to have some relation to that one issue. So many one-track minds…

They couldn’t realize that there was the new issue. That everything they had thought in their tiny little lives paled in comparison to the tiny taste they had just received of what really lay beyond.

Then again, Sombra supposed that not even those who spent their lives living and breathing the multiverse really looked beyond either. There were a handful of scientists digging into the strangeness of the world – time dilation, magical strength, the Beat, the structure of the multiverse – but they weren’t really searching. They sought to understand what they had already seen from their point of view, not delve as far as they could. They poked into the abyss and recoiled. Even Twilight had backed off after Rick had dropped by.

Really, only Corona was actively pushing the envelope, and that annoyed Sombra. How was she supposed to get her answers if nobody was looking? It was a bit infuriating really. She could get any piece of information she wanted, so long as it was on a computer somewhere. But if nobody found it, she was in the dark. She’d had just enough of a taste to know there was something out there.

She had no idea what, and that was both exciting and infuriating.

She focused back on the scrolling social media. Ah, the general public was starting to flood the ‘informational’ sites set up for precisely this moment, the ones the hackers had attempted to find earlier. The sites didn’t have the full directory, only touching on the handful of universes that were allies or interesting examples of universal parallelism. Things like Esefem and the Binary world had no mention.

Clearly, it wouldn’t do to terrify the population just yet.

Let them find out about Majora by word of mouth, until they thought she was nothing but a rumor. A clever ploy, Sombra had to admit.

The existence of magic caused a fun spark, especially on the Earths. Earth Vitis had a high belief in the mysterious force, simply because it was rather prevalent on the world, albeit not obvious. They had several messages along the lines of “Awesome! Magic is real!” The Tau’ri, on the other hand, didn’t have as much of that.

“All users of magic are servants to Satan, defilers of God’s nature!”

“Our governments haven’t opened a portal to other worlds – they’ve found Hell!”

“We must protect ourselves from these witches!”

“I bet they practice human sacrifice!”

A video popped up of Renee with a very displeased look on her face. “Ahem. I was expecting those who learned of magic to read more than the first sentence of the article we have on the subject, but clearly I was mistaken. The ‘magic’ we use in the other worlds is clearly not what your religions condemn...”

The video went on, but Sombra shut it off. She didn’t need to hear Renee try to dispel the religious paranoia of humanity. It wouldn’t have much effect. Sombra supposed Renee was right, but it wasn’t like real demons actually existed.

She paused for a moment, sitting back in her chair. What exactly was Majora then? There were numerous documents citing that she wasn’t using just magic to fight them. There was something else in there.

Sombra cursed herself for her dismissal – for all she knew there were demons manipulating everything around them. She couldn’t discount it, not anymore. Nothing was impossible as far as she was concerned.

She sat straight up – something interesting had just happened. Somebody in the Hub had just opened a chat server that was connected to the Internets of all the other universes involved. The hacker collectives moved in quickly, faster than anyone who actually wanted to chat. They started forming permanent connections through interdimensional servers. The uplink speed was pathetically slow, but the devices that had permanent data portals open did exist.

Earth Tau’ri got the short end of the stick since it took a lot more power to open a portal to them. Sombra was pretty sure there was actually a wireless signal being sent through the Mirror Portal right now to them, and even then it wasn’t that great.

Sombra watched in glee as the Internet fused. The initial chat room was run by somebody with the moniker TheGreatLulamoon.

“…No way,” Sombra said.

~~~

“Are you sure nobody’s going to find us?” Trixie said, glancing over her shoulder, face lit only by the light of the laptop in front of her.

“Nobody will have any idea,” Discord said, summoning a wafer of silicon from the aether. “Unless you chose an obvious username or something.”

“R-right!”

“Oh, well, I guess they’ll know you did it instantly then. But we’re invisible, underground, and not technically in the Hub, so… Since Twilight’s busy I think we’ve got several hours.” He etched the wafer with a complex silicon pattern.

Trixie stared at the chat program open on the computer screen. There were only two participants – TheGreatLulamoon and CapriciousButterfree.

“Discord, nobody’s in here yet.”

“Oh, they’re there, trust me. The first ones to find the connection will be the clever types. Sombra’s probably already in your computer.”

“What!? Why didn’t we use a throwaway then!?”

“Because she’ll leave something hilarious on your desktop you’ll never be able to remove and I’ll love it,” Discord chuckled.

“Hey! She could just as easily make it explode! Or one of the others could!”

“Oh, they probably won’t, since you’re running this server here.” Discord said, feeding several wafers into a large metallic box. He summoned a giant book on the topic of Internet Technology and consulted it to see what to do next. “Sometimes I impress myself with how far I’m willing to go for some fun…”

“What even are you doing? We’re already connected!”

“Connected, yes, but not prepared for the heavy influx of traffic. You see, the wires we have permanently wired into the other universes are tiny, insufficient, and frankly likely to explode. They can’t handle the outrageous flood of colorful ones and zeroes! What I’m doing is making it so we can cause some real chaos.”

“How?”

“Send images. Or, more accurately, let the hackers get the images in your photos folder.”

“WHAT!? There are private things in there!”

“Privacy is overrated.”

“Nova will kill me!”

Discord raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Are there some special pictures in there I don’t know about?”

“You can shut up right now.”

“Nova and Trixie, sitting in a tree, K I-“

“You’re a juvenile delinquent!”

“Your point?”

“I…”

“Also your reactions prove that I’m right.”

Trixie went back to the computer and right into her image folders, deleting a file named ‘DELETE THIS.’ “There. Now everything’s fine.”

Discord smirked. “I refuse to believe that you deleted a picture of anything other than you and Nova in a compromising position of one kind or another.”

Trixie huffed. Discord completed the construction of his server, hooking it up to the network above them with his magic. “There we go; more data can go in and out now. Time to make another one…”

“You’re going to be busy.”

“And you’re going to greet our new guest.”

Trixie looked to the chat program. There was someone in there – one by the name of SoulKrazed. Hi!

Trixie lit her horn and typed back. You’re the first to show up! Welcome to the amazing interdimensional chat hub! Where you from?

The Hub. I’m a potion seller you’ve probably met.

Trixie blinked. “Discord, how is this going to work with someone who already knows everything?”

Discord rolled his eyes. “It’s not. Give it time.”

“Since when are you patient?”

“Since I had to teach myself how to create modems and servers,” Discord said, wiring something into a sphere of white magic.

Trixie typed a few things back to SoulKrazed. The conversation wasn’t all that interesting. “Humph. This is nowhere near as-“ Another name showed up, followed shortly thereafter by a handful of others. There was a bunch of ‘what is this?’ messages.

Trixie cleared her throat out of habit. Welcome to the amazing interdimensional chat hub! Where are you all from?

There were a bunch of quick responses, most with locations in a world rather than the world itself.

I meant universe. I’m not sure what ‘Indonesia’ is.

The responses were Earth Vitis, Earth Tau’ri, Equis Cosmic, and the Hub, though there were several who didn’t know the official name for their world.

Discord sent a message. We’re here to answer any and ALL questions you may have, no matter how prying!

Trixie glanced at Discord. “How are you doing that without a computer?”

“I’m converting my magic directly into a data stream for the Ethernet signals as they travel along the wires.”

“…What?”

“Magic,” Discord grunted. “I swear, I’m turning into Twilight here…” to emphasize the point, he actually transformed into Twilight. “Egad!”

Trixie rolled her eyes, turning back to the screen. “They’re asking about our world.”

Discord cackled. Equis Vitis is a world filled with adorable ponies who think friendship is the answer to everything. They like the color pink too much. When you meet them, boop them on the nose, they love that.

Another member responded quickly. We do not! Don’t boop us!

I’ll boop every pony I come across BECAUSE you all hate it, another said.

Trixie huffed. That’s cruel.

You’re one of them stupid ponies, aren’t you?

Who you calling stupid?

Somebody with the username LOLMOOD interrupted. MAXLOL LOL FRIGGISH THIS IS AWESOME TELL ME HOW YOU THINK YOU DO STUFF WITH THE TAIL BIG MOOD

Trixie looked to Discord. “…What?”

He transformed back into his regular form and shrugged. “I have no idea, but I’m going along with it.” The tail comes from your left nostril in the form of a powerful swan song that should have done the powerful brain thing ago.

I don’t get it, someone said.

Another responded. We’re experiencing culture. About as horrid as I was expecting.

YEAH WELL YOU CAN SHOW WHAT YOU REALLY MEAN HAHA SUCK IT :D :D XD LOL.

Trixie blinked. “Do we have a five year old in here?”

Discord didn’t respond vocally. This is hilarious. Barely a minute in and there are already baffled expressions all around.

XDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXD

Except from you. I don’t think you have enough brainpower to become baffled.

Ooh, burn! another said.

What? Did he light someone on fire? one of the users who Trixie was pretty sure was from Equis Cosmic.

It’s an expression. Means mister LOL got roasted. Served. Hold on a second, do we even have a term for that thing that ISN’T an expression?

A presumably human messenger responded. Burn – an expression that verbally insults an individual in an amusing, yet poignant, way.

NEEEEEEEEEEEEERD.

Trixie rolled her eyes, typing some messages back. “Amazingly childish. I can see why you thought this was a good fit for you.”

Discord smirked. “I’ve just been burned.”

“And roasted. And served.”

“The horror.”

“So far, though, no chaos,” Trixie observed. “You said there’d be juicy stuff.”

“Watch this.” Hey, by the way, did you all know the leader of Equis Cosmic is a being of godlike power who can destroy entire planets if she puts her mind to it?

Trixie grinned. “Oooooh, that’ll do it…”

Responses were varied.

You’re pulling our leg, nothing’s that powerful.

I knew it! I knew there was nothing but danger out here!

I, for one, am happy she’s on our side. And terrified that such power was ever needed.

Our Princess Twilight would never do anything like that without good reason!

SPAAAAAAAAACE XDDXDXDXDXDXXD

That better not be the most juicy thing you know about.

Discord obliged. Oh, you want to know more? Fair enough. Go to the articles on Equis Vitis, look at the Changelings. It says they can change form, what it doesn’t say is that they get stronger by absorbing love. One of the most effective methods they have is to replace a loved one and pretend to be them, absorbing the emotional affection like a parasite.

ERMAGERSH SO TERRIFYING.

Stupid, this guy’s a hack. Emotions aren’t tangible objects.

This sounds almost exactly like some of our legends! That’s stupid!

Hey, buddy, we’re humans, and we’re part of THEIR mythology. Maybe they’re part of ours? After all, unicorns.

What would that even MEAN?

Trixie typed a few things in. There’s a strange force called the Beat that’s present in every universe. We’re really not supposed to know about it, but it exists.

The Beat? What does that have to do with anything!

We’re not part of a song.

I AM MUSIC INCARNATE FEEL MY IN THE PLACE OF SONG XD

I can confirm the Beat is a thing.

Trixie! Starbeat here, what the heck are you doing!?

Oooooh, something tells me we’ve got the feds on us! Quick, save everything, burn the evidence and run!

Heck! My god, what strong language!

“Crud,” Trixie said. “How come she’s the one onto us?”

I gave her a tip. A message popped into the chat window from Sombra.

Sombra!? an Earth Vitis user responded. It’s an honor!

Wait, you know her too? an Earth Tau’ri user responded. Wait…

She’s interdimensional.

This explains so much.

Sombra sent another message. Glad you finally pieced that together. By the way, oh Great and Powerful Lulamoon, I did NOT expect you to be the one to do this kind of thing. Color me surprised. Nova is going to kill you.

Trixie narrowed her eyes. Nova will be understanding. It’s not like I’m associating with you. She’ll get you, Sombra. One day.

I’m not referring to that.

Trixie gasped and flushed a deep red. Discord howled with laughter. “Not what I was expecting! But still hilariously embarrassing!”

Trixie moaned. The image was of her doing the backstroke in a half-melted bowl of vanilla ice cream, Nova riding her like she was a surfboard.

I’ve got hundreds of these, Sombra messaged. Not that hard to restructure data that was just recently deleted. Also not hard to hack into your video camera. That’s a nice shade of red you’re turning. I’ll send this all to Nova right now…

Trixie closed the laptop and put her hooves over her head. “This is it. This is the day Trixie dies. Tell Nova I went out with some of my dignity intact.”

“That’d be a lie,” Discord observed.

“I know!”

A few moments later, Trixie’s phone started ringing. She tensed, slowly levitating it out of her robes. It was from Nova.

Trixie answered. “Hi-“

“WHAT DID YOU DO!?”

“Glimmy, promise not to be mad with Trixie-“

“I’M ALREADY MAD.”

Discord snapped the phone out of Trixie’s magic. “Yeah, Nova? Discord here. We’re causing chaos in a secret location with a computer and self-sustaining Internet. Don’t worry, I’m not telling them about Majora or the secret Tau’ri wars or anything, just riling them up, getting them introduced to each other. Oh – oh you still take issue to that? I’m ruining the plan you say? Well, then maybe Twilight shouldn’t have insisted I stay in the Hub! Ever think of that? I could have been a great help out there, but – oh wow you really aren’t listening to a thing I’m saying, are you? …Ouch, you wound me so.”

Trixie whimpered. “Trixie regrets everything about today already.”

Discord handed the phone back. Trixie put it to her ears. “H-hey Nova.”

“Look, Trixie, please tell me this was all Discord’s idea.”

“This was all Discord’s idea.”

“Trixie…”

“Okay, fine, it was mostly Discord, but I thought it would be a little fun, get the people to talk to each other, maybe… maybe bring about some friendships?”

“…I guess that’s a good reason. Just… Can’t really tell you to stop since I’m pretty sure Sombra will just keep the damn thing running herself. It’s best if you watch it until I can get there. Don’t try to rile them up.”

Trixie opened the laptop to see an argument between seven different people. “I don’t think they need our help to get riled up, actually. Discord underestimated them…”

“Did you?”

“Nah, I expected this. Trixie’s been on the Hub long enough to know humans love to argue.”

“…Trixie?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think Sombra got all the pictures?”

“…Yeah?”

“I am going to kill her.”

“Trixie is glad your anger is focused elsewhere.”

“I know she’s in there. See if you can get her to reveal anything.”

Trixie looked at the chat again. “I think she left. At least officially.”

“…Great. Look, we’ll talk later; I’ve got work to do. This president is a complete moron.”

“You and Corona would agree.”

“I know. Bye.”

Trixie put the phone down. She started breathing in and out rapidly. “I’m dead…”

“That went well, considering,” Discord pointed out.

“SO DEAD…”

“You don’t have to deal with Flutterfree. She has much higher standards than Nova.”

“Trixie feels like you’ve just insulted everyone involved, including yourself.”

Discord smirked. “The evidence of a true master at work.”

~~~

Corona stood outside the door to her Quantum Physics classroom, leaning against the wall with the motivational cat poster on it. Hang in there!

She gulped. An entire day had passed since Disclosure, and classes hadn’t been cancelled because of it. So… Today was the day. She was going to do it. The first day of the rest of her life.

She wasn’t sure she would have been able to go through with it without all her friends here for support.

Applejack put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re here for you if anything goes wrong.”

Pinkie gave a Corona thumbs up. “I can get you out of there in an instant!”

Fluttershy smiled. “I don’t think it’ll come to that. Don’t worry, Corona.”

“I’m sure everyone will love you,” Rarity emphasized.

Sparky clapped her hands. “How could they not? They’ve all known you for a long time.”

Sugarcoat shrugged. “They could feel threatened.”

“Sugarcoat!” Rarity blurted.

“Rarity, it’s fine,” Corona said. “I get more nervous if I receive nothing but positive reinforcement, makes me question myself more.” She took off her jacket and handed it to Sparky. “Thank you for all being here. I know a lot of you have lives, it must have taken some working to be here today.”

“Pfft, I can miss Cornerstone for one day,” Sparky said.

“No offense to my fashion classes, but they don’t mean as much as you do,” Rarity added.

Fluttershy hugged Corona. “Anything for your big day.”

Corona smiled. “Thanks. So… Here goes.” She opened the door to the classroom slightly, poking her head around the corner. The rest of the class was already in there, listening to Doctor Turner’s intro bit.

“Now, today’s class is going to be a bit special,” the brown-haired man said, smirking. “I’m sure you’re all dying to learn about the probability curve equations for electron shells, but the world has come a-knocking. Unless you’ve been living under a rock – which, let’s be honest, may be the case with Pomello – you know that the government has revealed the existence of other universes.”

The various students nodded.

“You may think I have put aside class today to talk about the scientific implications of this momentous event. I do have a few topics set aside for discussion, but I doubt we’ll be able to get to them today. Because I’ve got a much bigger surprise for you all today. What if I told you one of your fellow classmates that you’ve known for three and a half years was secretly from one of these alternate universes all along?”

The students started to look amongst themselves with surprised expressions.

“I would like to introduce you all to someone you’ve known for a long time. You can come in now.”

Corona felt a hand press against her spine and forcefully push her through the doorway, the door slamming behind her quickly thereafter. There was truly no turning back at this point. She stumbled slightly in her four boots, but she managed to keep her balance despite the large textbooks in her saddlebags. With a deep breath she trotted over to the front row of class, her necklace bouncing with every step. The silver transformation bracelet glinted in the light, catching the eyes of her classmates. She took her seat at the front row of class, took out her Quantum Physics textbook, and then grinned sheepishly at her fellow students. “Uh… Hi! I’m Protégé Corona Shimmer from Equis Vitis. I’m a unicorn with a special talent in fire magic and I’m actually thirty-two years old. But you can all just keep calling me Corona.”

There was silence.

Doctor Turner shrugged. “Feel free to ask her questions. You can take the entire class period if you want. The electrons can wait.”

Micro Chips raised a hand.

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Micro, you already knew what I was.”

“Well, maybe, but I didn’t know you were a Protégé. What’s that mean?”

“Oh,” Corona said. “Right. It means I’m the personal student of one of the ruling Princesses of Equis Vitis. I haven’t done any actual studying under Celestia for a long, long time, but she hasn’t revoked the title, so… There you go.”

“So, wait, you’re royalty?” a student called Pixie Sticks asked.

“More like adopted royalty…?” Corona said, shrugging. “I suppose I have considerable authority back there, if I wanted. Celestia’s made it clear I’m always welcome back.”

“How does magic work on a quantum level?” the class genius, Chrome Tesla, asked.

Corona smirked. “You’re lucky I’m curious enough to work on that in my own time. Different universes use magic differently, and the process by which magical powers are adjusted when transferring from universe to universe is poorly understood. That said, I can describe how the natural magic of this world and most Equises works. Magic is constructed from miniscule particles called thaums that exist as a force-carrier alongside photons and bosons. These carriers can, sometimes, interact with physical matter. My horn is an amazing organ infused with complex lattices of perfect subatomic structures that interface with all thaums it can get ahold of, ‘wiring’ them together like a circuit. A spell is constructed by creating a chain of thaums in distinct patterns and tying the long line into a circle, which unleashes the desired effect. It acts a lot like DNA replication, actually, with the subatomic structures sewing everything together and…”

Sparky closed the door. “I think she’s got it.”

“That class knows her,” Sugarcoat said. “The rest of the college may not be so open.”

Applejack folded her arms. “That’s why we’re here.”

Rarity smirked. “The school newsletter’s going out soon with an article all about Corona. I’ve made sure it’s nice to her.”

“People can be cruel, though,” Fluttershy said.

“Yes, yes, I know, but we’ll give her the best we can offer.”

Pinkie squealed. “This is so exciting! A unicorn living among humans! There’ll be a book about this someday, I’m telling you!”

Rarity nodded. “Let’s make it a happy book, shall we, dears?”

~~~

Renee let out a delighted sigh, looking up from the menu at the skyline from which the Eiffel Tower was easily visible. “I have wanted to visit this city for so long,” Renee said. “The center of class for your world…”

Daniel shrugged. “They don’t call it the City of Love for nothing. Though I have to admit, being here and not hearing people talk in French is bizarre.”

“I bet the waiters are glad they no longer have to deal with clueless foreigners who don’t know the language.”

“It may be worse. Now there’s clueless foreigners who do know the language and can no longer be dismissed.”

Renee blinked. “What an uncharacteristically pessimistic remark from you!”

Daniel sighed. “Sorry. There’s just… Well there’s a lot going wrong. Your world got lucky, everyone’s mostly on the same page. Here… I don’t think a world war is going to break out, but some people are calling for one. Enough that news outlets have started covering the idea.”

“It’s more than that.”

“There’s also the fact that it’s 2011 here, but 2018 over in Earth Vitis. The economy is having a mild freak-out at possible predictions of future historical events. Stocks are being bought and sold like candy, the Internet is fusing because of Trixie, and the religious fallout is extreme…”

Renee facehooved. “I made that speech for a reason…”

“And it helped, trust me, it got a lot of outlets to cover the scientific side of your magic. But humans don’t like changing their minds about things. Ever. There’s already a heavy anti-unicorn movement forming, and talk of purging the translation spell’s propagation throughout the world.”

“I’m… Not sure we can stop it, now that we’ve released it the way we have.”

“I know. We probably should have thought that through a little better…”

“How else was I supposed to address the masses? We don’t exactly have a technological universal translator!”

“True,” Daniel said, sitting back. “I guess we would have just had to deal with it regardless. Magic is such an integral part of your society. I don’t think the anti-unicorn movement has realized that every race on your world has some form of magic to them. The majority of universes in the east have magic…”

“They’ll come around,” Renee said.

“Some of them, yes. Others… I don’t know. Zealots have always existed. Women’s rights… Racism… You name it. The world moves on, but some people always stay behind. It probably doesn’t help that the Middle East is screaming bloody murder.”

“Oh?”

“None of the nations in that area of the world were involved in the Stargate Program – except Egypt, but not everyone considers it an actual part. We didn’t tell any of them because they were always filled with violence, terrorism, and anger at the rest of the world. We were afraid if any one of them knew it would light the powder keg. It’s pretty clear that the powder keg is now exploding because we didn’t tell them.”

“They’re the ones calling for war, aren’t they?”

“Mostly. For once in their lives they seem to agree on something.”

“At what cost…” Renee muttered. The waiter dropped by, serving their meals – fancy cakes in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

Daniel blinked. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”

“Daniel, please, this is a refined dish. And unlike some of the flavorless crumbs in Canterlot that are inexplicably popular, this has flavor.” She carefully separated the top of the tower with her magic and levitated it into her mouth and bit down, the flavor melting on her tongue. She leaned back in her chair, pleased. “This… This is food.”

Daniel looked down at his plate. “It really isn’t enough to be a meal. More like… a snack.”

Renee looked like she wanted to be insulted, but instead could only sit and realize how right Daniel was. “Well… We can order twenty more, we have the cash, and nobody’s able to judge us.”

“Oh, they can judge us all right.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Well, I know we’re being stared at and all the phones are out.” She turned behind her and smiled for the camera of a Russian man to prove her awareness. “I just think it’s not a thing to concern ourselves with at the moment. Just sit back, relax, enjoy our meal, and let the press do whatever they want later.”

“The press is dangerous.”

Renee shrugged. “Perhaps… Oh look, it appears a reporter has worked up the gumption to talk to us.”

A man scurried up to them with a confident smile on his face and a professional camera under his shoulder. He took out a recording device. “Doctor Daniel Jackson, Miss Renee, it is an honor. I am Phillip Laurent with Le Monde. Would you care for a short interview?”

“It’s no trouble at all,” Renee said, lifting her hat up slightly. “What would you like to know?”

“Is it true that you two were the ones responsible for the Disclosure plan?”

“Well, we weren’t the only ones,” Renee said. “Disclosure was an effort that required the ideas and input of thousands of people from several worlds. But it would not be a stretch to consider us among the project heads.”

“Do you consider the efforts a success?”

“It’s only been a day, Mister Laurent, so we cannot say for certain if it was a success. But from what I have seen, I am confident it’ll turn out well in the end.”

“Would there be anything about the plan you would change now that you’ve seen immediate results?”

“Earlier explanations on magic,” Renee said. “First impressions are everything, and I’m afraid we rather blew the first mentions of it.”

“Doctor Jackson?”

Daniel furrowed his brow. “If I were to change something… have the dimensional license system working long before Disclosure. My own card didn’t work earlier today. Almost got arrested.”

“The bureaucracy ensures that something will go wrong, dear,” Renee said. “If not that, something else.”

Mister Laurent nodded. “Well, thank you for your time. Enjoy the rest of your lunch. You can expect to see an article in the papers by the morn.” He turned off his recorder.

“Can’t wait to see how we get portrayed,” Renee smirked. “Do go easy on us.”

“I’m not a madman. I will portray you as objectively as possible. What I would fear is the secondary articles made from mine.”

Daniel nodded. “Those are always the worst. Bloggers are vicious.”

Mister Laurent turned and walked away, dropping a newspaper behind him.

“Oh!” Renee called, jumping out of her chair. “Mister Laurent! You dropped-“ She stopped talking. From her current height, she could see a small wire dangling from under her and Daniel’s table. She ducked her head all the way under the table and saw it.

A bomb.

“My Stars!” She called, ripping the bomb off the table with her magic. She levitated it as far into the sky as she could. “Daniel, call the bomb squad or whatever it is here, we’ve got a-” The bomb exploded in a ball of fire far above them, shaking the entire block of Paris.

Shrapnel rained down upon the diner, the dangerous bits blocked by Renee’s large crystal shield. She let out a deep breath. “Okay. All clear!”

Several people started calling the police on their phones.

Daniel sat back in his chair and sighed. “There’ll be a bomb squad coming.”

“Great,” Renee said, climbing back into her chair. “There goes our lovely afternoon.”

“…Are you okay, Renee?”

“Please, my life is in danger almost constantly these days, hardly shaken at all.”

Daniel raised an eyebrow.

“…Fine. My heart is racing, I have an image of myself exploding all over everyone’s faces in a shower of blood, and I can see Sweetie Belle crying at my funeral.” She sagged. “I’m used to the mental images at this point. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.”

Daniel held her front hoof. “I think it’s a necessary thing for people in our line of work.”

“I know. I know…”

~~~

“It took them one day,” Queen Luna said, pacing around her darkened throne room. “One day! It was one of the first things they found out! Just… Argh!”

Toph shrugged. “I guess they just latched onto what they cared about.”

“Hatred doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Lieshy added.

Lady Rarity looked at her Queen. “What are you going to do?”

“I have to go out there and tell them something. They won’t accept nothing. But if I go out there, I’m going to purposefully sound sympathetic, and it’s going to stir the rage into an explosion.”

Toph folded her arms. “I think you should just tell them exactly what you think. Stand strong, be aggressive, they can’t defy you. You are the alicorn of this world, they have to listen to you.”

“They’ll use Armonia as a force against me if they can. I can’t exactly tell them their Goddess is dead either. They wouldn’t believe me and it’d probably get me beheaded quicker than this business.”

“So? Stand your ground. You have the powe-“

“Toph, you don’t understand, I see them beheading me after acting like that.” She pointed at her oculus eyes. “They will kill me if I talk about the Goddess.”

“…Are they really that dumb?!”

“Yes,” Lady Rarity said. “They will not turn back on their ways in one day. It will take years of slow acclimation that has been decidedly ruined by their little discovery.”

Vivian put a finger to her chin. “Luna, what if you just tell them in a neutral voice what’s happening, and that they’re free to choose?”

“They want a why, Vivian. And if I tell them the real why, I… I well I can’t see but it’s very likely they won’t trust me anymore.”

“Political suicide,” Lady Rarity said.

Toph grunted. “I could just go out and yell at them.”

“You’d die,” the Queen deadpanned.

“Yeesh. Aggressive much?”

“Yeah. I haven’t paid them as much attention as I should have…” the Queen shook her head. “My own fault, I raised them to be like this. To not like change.”

“Or was it the Goddess?” Lieshy asked.

“I… I don’t know.” The Queen gulped. “I think I have to do it though. The political suicide. I’ll tell the exact truth, and hope their previous trust in me isn’t completely destroyed. After all, you’ve saved them from many threats, they should be able to see that for what it is…”

“Don’t,” a new voice said.

The group turned to the trotting form of Starcei. Toph tensed, hand on the Master Sword’s hilt, but Starcei shook her head. “I am not here to fight, Toph. I am here to talk.”

The Queen looked down at Starcei. “It has been a long time.”

“Eons,” Starcei said.

“I really should kill you.”

“And you would be right to do so. But hear me out before you try. You can keep your kingdom if you provide a secondary reason.”

“What would that be? They hate the Arcei and think anyone who’d take them in deserves to die!” The Queen grunted. “That includes all the universes that have taken Arcei in which is, last count, all of them.”

“The friendship with the other universes is ruined for the time being,” Starcei said. “For that I am deeply ashamed. But you can build them up. As a leader, you can say one thing and do another. Call this a solution to the Arcei problem. They’ll be moved offworld and will have no further reason to harvest the Runes. You are preventing a bloody war against the Arcei by moving them peacefully. They’ll accept this reason.”

“…But it’s not the reason.”

“Not the only reason. But it’s the only reason you need to talk about.”

“I approve of this plan,” Lieshy said. “It’s clever. Make them think it’s because of them and that it’s good.”

Vivian shrugged. “But… They’ll all keep hating the Arcei!”

“That’s not going to change for at least a generation,” Starcei said. “Not without some spectacular event. And the Queen making a speech about peace does not qualify as a spectacular event.”

Queen Luna sighed. “Fine. That makes sense, Starcei. It will work. Thank you. I do have one question for you though… why?”

“My ponies owe you something for allowing us to move out. You should be able to keep your kingdom.”

“Yes… Still. They view all the other worlds as enemies.”

“Something to be worked out over years, not in a day. Talk to Renee and Daniel after things die down on their end, they’ll be able to help.”

“I know this…” Luna lowered her head to be level with Starcei’s. “What’s your angle here?”

“…Amending. If you’ll believe that.”

Queen Luna’s eyes widened. “You? Amending?”

“Believe it or not,” Starcei said. “It’s true. I’m leaving now – if you’ll let me.”

“Where are you going?”

“To tell my ponies everything,” Starcei said. “They’ll ostracize their mother. Then… I’ll just wander other worlds. I don’t know where I’ll end up, if anywhere. My life has served its purpose here.”

The Queen nodded. “…You may leave, Starcei.”

Starci lit her arcs and vanished without so much as bowing or waving.

Toph shrugged. “You know, I’m never sure what to think of her.”

“She is wise beyond measure, but deeply regretful,” Lady Rarity said. “If you get the chance, take some time to get to know her.”

The Queen scowled. “Well, I guess I’m going to go half-lie to my ponies now. I’d ask for luck, but I’m not sure I want it.”

“Don’t you want to write it out first?” Vivian asked.

“No. I’ll do it as I usually do it.” She walked out of their presence and toward the palace balcony.

“Doomed chinchillas,” Lieshy muttered.

Toph just focused on the receding footsteps of Queen Luna. She gripped the hilt of the Master Sword tightly, just… angry. Angry at how stupid people could be.

~~~

“THE EQUESTRIAN STARBEAM INQUIRER, TODAY, HERE WITH A SPECIAL!”

Television screens across the galaxy lit up with the most popular news program – in many cases the only news program ponies trusted for galaxy-wide news.

“I’m your host, Rainbow Depths!” a rainbow-maned earth pony stallion with a black coat announced.

“And I’m your co-host, Quanta!” an albino pegasus mare said, her red eyes somehow comforting rather than threatening.

“And do we have a treat for you today! As the vast majority of you are aware, yesterday our Princess, Twilight ‘Cosmo’ Sparkle, made an announcement, revealing the recent discovery of other universes close to our own. Since then, the overall reaction of our galaxy has been overwhelmingly positive, but also full of unfounded rumors.”

“Those rumors will be dispelled shortly – our reporters have gone to the Princess herself, read the mysterious Directory of Other Universes, and even traveled to a handful of other worlds to bring you the real scoop!”

“First, some history. Imagine, if you will, back in the time of the Tree of Harmony and a fully vibrant Equis where Twilight Sparkle hadn’t moved on to discover space travel, but rather found a mysterious sphere with the power to travel to other universes. This is exactly what happened in a universe close to ours somewhat recently. An alternate version of the Princess we all know, Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle, found such a device and unlocked its secrets, taking her and her friends on adventures across the many worlds they could suddenly visit.”

“Just like our Princess would have, she made friends, many of which joined her in the explorations of the multiverse, spreading far and wide. Alliances were formed, friends were made, and even a couple of enemies were fought. Two years into their explorations, they found us. Shortly thereafter our fleets were called to aid them on a top secret military operation. The details of the event are still classified, but we do know we were very successful and that the rest of the multiverse felt like they owed us for our help.”

“Four years after the Charter initially stepped into another universe, six universes participated in the act of Disclosure. This is what happened yesterday, when everyone banded together and decided they should no longer keep secrets from their people. That may seem long to us, but apparently for the other universes that is an extremely short amount of time. The schedule was a compromise.”

“What were these worlds? Well, one was us, clearly. We are one of only two naturally space capable universes involved, and we are by far the one with the most planets, even if we do not have the most advanced technology. We have been given the title Equis Cosmic as homage to our impressive might in the realm of space. The home of the Charter is Equis Vitis, given the name because they were the first to explore the other worlds, akin to a vine. Their world is almost a perfect image of our deep past, down to the same ponies. Historical figures such as Celestia and Luna are still ruling on Equis Vitis, as well as all the races we lost in our past. It is cause for celebration – our long lost brothers and sisters are being returned to us.”

“Equis Vitis is naturally connected to a world filled with humans called Earth Vitis, a world that Equis Vitis had been in contact with for several years prior to finding the dimensional device, through a Mirror Portal created by one Starswirl the Bearded. We did some research into our own history and discovered that our world had a Mirror Portal as well, but the world it leads to is a dead one, destroyed by a nuclear war. Earth Vitis has no other races besides humans naturally, only a small amount of magic, as well as over two hundred distinct nations. Their people often mirror ponies in the world of Equis Vitis for an unknown reason. Yes, they have a Twilight Sparkle as well, though she goes by Sparky and isn’t a Princess. She is responsible for the invention of the portable dimensional device.”

“There is another Earth as well, Earth Tau’ri, located in what is tentatively called the ‘western’ part of the multiverse, far removed from the rest of the worlds we know here in the ‘east’ multiverse. Their history is parallel to that of Earth Vitis, though strangely they generally don’t mirror individuals, even if all two hundred nations are more or less the same. Earth Tau’ri has almost no magic, and is in a universe with aliens. Earth Tau’ri has used relations with these aliens to achieve a respectable space program, and while they do not control more than a handful of star systems, their level of technology is far beyond our own.”

“Back in the east multiverse, we have two other worlds – the Elemental World and Lai. Lai is a pony-based world where there are more than just pegasi, unicorns, and earth ponies. They have seaponies, deer, a tail-mouth race called a mawlie, and a race of seers called the oculi. Combinations of pegasus wings, unicorn horns, and other features are somewhat common over there. They also have an artificial race, known as the Arcei, but there is a large political fallout in their world regarding them, an issue that will sadly have to be reported on at another time. The Elemental World is run by humans with a quasi-magical power that allows them to bend the four elements. There are four nations in the world, three based in elements, and one that serves as a unity of the powers. The people of the Elemental World completed a long hundred-year war just as the Charter arrived, and because of this they are a hardened people who are nonetheless endlessly seeking peace among everyone.”

“These are just the briefest of possible looks at our new friends. There’s more information available online, should you wish to know more.”

“Now, before we get to our interviews and curiosities found in the Directory, there is a movement happening in our own universe in response to this Disclosure. We’re talking about the Dual Migration, a powerful idea headed by the Princess’ own descendant, Jade Snow.”

“Jade Snow, an alicorn many of you have likely heard of for her heroism in the Adank Mines Tragedy and clever solution of the Third Rim Crisis, has declared that the revelation of the other universes were precisely what our universe needed. I’ll just let her explain it for us, in her mission statement speech.”

All the screens switched to a video of a green alicorn with a wispy white mane smiling warmly. “Ponies of Equestria, I am Jade Snow, and what has just been revealed to us is more than new friends. It is a chance to reclaim what our world lost so long ago in the ancient war. Our brothers and sisters – the griffons, the dragons, the changelings, the minotaurs, the yaks, the zebras – all these graceful creatures that were exterminated in our past struggles. Our family can be whole again, and it can grow to beyond what it ever was before with the humans, the mushroom people, and the other varied creatures of the world. Today, I unveil the Dual Migration movement, a program I’ve had in the works for months now. Many of the worlds that are our allies have people struggling, homeless, in need of a family to teach them love and care. Their worlds do not have space. But we have an endless supply of worlds, and an extensive amount of resources. In addition, many of us in the galaxy will want nothing more than to go live somewhere new, somewhere where the culture is different.

“This is what Dual Migration is about. They’ll come to us, we’ll come to them. Through this initiative, our worlds will band together as one – in unity and family. Some may not want us, but we will make sure we let them know they’re wanted. We’ve been alone in the universe for far too long. It’s time to fix that.”

Cosmo turned away from the Enterprise’s main screen. “Well, she’s certainly ambitious.”

O’Neill smirked. “She didn’t approve this plan with you beforehand, did she?”

“Not at all, the little rascal,” Cosmo said with a smirk. “She probably knew I’d tell her to wait for a while after Disclosure to start it up. Must have taken a lot to get past Starlight’s radar.”

“I plead innocence, I was busy making sure the ponies wouldn’t flip out when you told them,” the AI chirped.

“All is forgiven,” Cosmo said. “I should probably be mad at her… But I’m not. That little speech of hers… It just fills me with hope.”

O’Neill shrugged. “The young people have a way of doing that, don’t they?”

“She’s over a century old, O’Neill. That’s well past middle age for a normal unicorn.”

O’Neill blinked. “…Wait, how long do you ponies live?”

“Naturally? The limit is around two hundred years. If you can get ahold of magic the limit is impossible to measure.”

“Fun,” O’Neill said. “How old are you?”

“Not polite to ask a woman her age,” Cosmo asserted.

“3,824 years,” the AI chirped.

Cosmo rolled her eyes. “Well there you go. Truly ancient.”

“I know some people who were older.”

“Oh? Which race was that?”

O’Neill blinked. “You know, I’m going to get yelled at for telling you this, but I have the authority. Our benefactors were a race called the Asgard. They prolonged their lives through perpetual, endless cloning. They eventually had to wipe themselves out because the cloning was detrimental, but they’re still around.”

“How?”

O’Neill smirked. “Why do you think we call it an Asgard Core? Their minds are spread throughout those machines, assisting how they can.”

Cosmo blinked. “…Even in death, they help you.”

“Yeah.”

“…O’Neill, do you think they wish to be alive again?”

“Of course they do, but their technology can’t d-“

“You haven’t tried Magic,” Cosmo said, tapping her chest. “And you haven’t tried the power of Harmony itself.”

“Are you offering to revive them?”

“I’m offering to try. If they’re willing.”

“Well, I’d have to ask Th-“

A hologram of a short, gray alien with pale skin and large black eyes appeared. “Twilight Cosmo Sparkle of Equis Cosmic, I am Thor of the Asgard. We would be eternally grateful if you attempted such a thing.”

O’Neill cursed. “I thought we were done with you popping in and out at random times!”

“The moment called for it, O’Neill.”

Cosmo smiled warmly at Thor. “I will do my best. I do not guarantee instant results, but it is the least I can do.”

~~~

“AAAAAAAAAAAA!” Twilight wailed, ramming her head into the desk she was sitting at, sending vast amounts of paperwork flying in every direction. “Spike, it’s finally happened. Tartarus has come to the surface and grabbed a hold of me. I’ll never leave.”

“It’s not that bad,” Spike said, reading over a sheet of paper. “It… Twilight?” He tapped her. “I’m talking.”

Twilight lifted her head from the desk, groaning. “Why can’t I just stay down and wallow in my own hatred of pieces of paper with walls of text on them?”

“Because you’re exaggerating. It’s not that bad. It's just paper. I’ve been dealing with your paperwork for years, if I can do it, so can you.”

“But… There’s so much… This is going to keep me from adventuring as much! And something tells me this workload is only going to get bigger and bigger!”

Pinkie Pie appeared from behind a stack of papers. “Oh, Twilight, you don’t have to come on every adventure.”

“But I want to,” Twilight said.

“You could hire someone else to do all this paperwork if you didn’t care for it,” Spike said. “I mean, I can’t do it all, but I know some people who would…”

“No, this is too important to leave it with hired people I don’t trust,” Twilight said, holding up a huge document. “For instance, this one is about that Dual Migration movement, and has seventeen different check boxes ranging from ‘yes, accept all proposals’ to ‘no, reject all proposals’. Clearly the actual answer is somewhere in the middle but it’s so hard to choose. I don’t really think I should let someone else do that…”

“You’re the princess,” Pinkie said.

“I know. I know…” Twilight rolled her eyes. “Look at me, whining. I shouldn’t be whining, I’m the Charter-Princess. I need to pony-up and face what’s going on. I just… Wish it could be a little more fun.”

Pinkie pulled a boombox out of her mane and set it on a nearby desk. A strange Harmonic tune began to play. Pinkie smirked. “I didn’t call it the Harmonic for nothing.”

Twilight took a breath, letting the Harmonic flow into her.

“Like a child, I wish to play

But, at the end of the day

I need to be the princess

The princess everyone needs

These stacks of paper, daunting

The consequences, haunting

Worlds hang on my decisions

Millions judging all my deeds.”

Pinkie jumped in, grinning.

“Come on Twi, no need to fret

The fun’s not over just yet

So what if paperwork’s mean?

The multiverse calls our names!”

Pinkie gave Spike a top hat and cane, pushing him into the song.

“Check there, stamp that, approve this

Don’t care if the others hiss

Wrap it up fast as you can

Then come to join the fun games!”

Twilight smiled to the two of them, chuckling.

“I cannot have all the best

This may be some kind of test

The call pulls me down two roads

I will need to decide soon

Not today, but eventually...”

Far away, in another world entirely, Corona the unicorn broke into song while trotting down a college hallway.

“I have shown my true colors

To my brothers and sisters

Accepted me as I am

Together in friendship’s tune!”

On a different earth, amidst a bomb investigation, Renee couldn’t help herself.

“Stars! The horrid explosions!

Dears! The elegant culture!

Oh! What beautiful conflict!”

“Renee, why are you singing?”

Renee smirked in Daniel’s direction.

“The heartsongs give no reason

They come in special season

The empathy of the worlds,

Harmoniously ringing!”

Siron looked over the land that was soon to be his.

“Power, magic, extortion

control, determination

The world below me is my

Part amidst the harmony.”

Toph tapped her feet against the ground.

“People never want to change

Sometimes I just find this strange

But show them I will and – wait,

Why the heck am I singing?”

Cosmo felt the familiar feel of a heartsong wash over her. With a childish laugh in her voice, she joined in.

“The life and hope without end

Our worlds, with great fire, conjoined

I never thought I would see

The day of sorrows’ ending.”

O’Neill blinked, and felt suddenly compelled to say something.

“I don’t get what’s going on

Or why I feel like, um, gone?

Cosmo, what’s happening here?

The things my mouth is doing?”

“You are doing great, O’Neill”

“What am I even doing?”

Trixie laughed as she read messages flying past on her computer screen.

“Trixie the Great, Powerful,

Back with the might of a bull

All thought she was the background,

But Trixie never stays down!”

Discord snapped his fingers, summoning dozens of dancing shadow puppets.

“Trixie should thank her great friend,

For showing her the great bend,

The what to prosperity

Chaotic day on the town!”

Twilight felt the power of the heartsong come back to her. She couldn’t hear it – she never could – but the power was still there.

“All of us in Harmony…

Creating sanctuary…

Fighting for a bright future…

Coming from the Harmonic…”

The music faded, the tune ended, and most everyone went back to their lives like nothing had happened, but they all felt more confident in the future of the world.

Except Sombra.

She had just witnessed a song cross multiversal barriers with no explanation.

She suddenly felt like she understood nothing.

She also felt a little left out.

029 - Broken Mirrors

Endings really are lies. At the end of every story, no matter how far it goes - there is always something after. This goes beyond the usual ‘time is an illusion’ approach. It means that, at one moment, there may appear to be a resolution to everything you’ve ever experienced. And then next week the universe decides there needs to be a new conflict, a new dream.

Even if it would be best for a story to be left at its intended ending, that would be more dishonest than coming up with an ‘ending’ in the first place. Happily ever after is an illusion that destroys lives. Even not-so-happily ever after has its negative influence on society. There is something to be said for catharsis, but there is also something to be said for realism.

Though, if I am being honest, I don’t really know. There may be instances where the ending is the best, where the meaning becomes pointless if something is taken further. After all, often times it seems like we are all part of a larger story, doesn’t it?

Some sort of song that everyone is singing, seeking some appropriate end.

Or is it not an end, but simply resumption?

Or is it a true beginning?

The real fun part about this is that I could be talking about any old thing, and no reader would have any idea what I meant.<<

~~~

Pinkie twirled a dimensional device with the tip of her mane. “Oooooooh there’s one million and two bottles of cider on the wall, one million and two, take one down-“

“Pinkie!” Flutterfree shouted.

“What?”

“Can you… please stop singing that song?”

“Fine. But we’re going to have to pass the time some other way.” She gestured at the main hall of Twilight’s castle. “We can’t exactly leave without Twilight, can we?”

Renee nodded. “Definitely not.”

Nova bit her lip. “We have been waiting half an hour… Should I go check on her?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Eh… She’s fine. You can check if you want, though. Or we could play a game of twenty questions!”

Nova smirked. “Okay. Is what you’re thinking of a pony?”

“Yes!”

“Is it one of us?”

“No!”

“Is it Twilight?”

“Yes!”

“Three questions,” Nova said, smirking. “Gotcha.”

Pinkie feigned panic. “Oh no! I’m losing my touch!”

“Now if only hunting Sombra down was that easy…” Nova muttered.

Renee blinked. “You’re still on about that?”

“Can you think of a bigger threat to us right now besides her?”

“Civil unrest?” Flutterfree offered.

“A threat that’s actually an individual.”

“Oh. Yeah, Sombra’s the biggest bad around right now.”

Pinkie shrugged. “She’s not even that bad! She helped us with Majora…”

“She’s also manipulated several world leaders, stolen countless classified documents, and has killed more than a few people!”

“You’re more mad about the images she’s posting on the Internet than any of that,” Renee observed.

“Wouldn’t you be!?” Nova twitched. “Can’t believe Trixie kept all those pictures…”

“She liked to remember the fun times you two have had,” Flutterfree said. “I think that makes her a good friend.”

Nova paused. “Yeah…”

“You’re still thinking of ways to find Sombra, aren’t you?”

“…Would you believe me if I said no?”

“No.”

“Then yeah, I am. Corona has to know something…”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Nope! Sombra knows we know they’re friends, so she doesn’t say anything. Makes it easier on Corona though – she doesn’t have to choose which friend to keep secrets from.”

“Can’t believe they’re friends,” Nova muttered. “I mean, Sombra met Corona by blackmailing her!”

“And you tried to steal all our cutie marks and brainwash us,” Flutterfree said.

Nova’s expression turned dour. “…You’re right.”

Pinkie smiled. “Corona assures me that she’s working on reforming Sombra. It’s a slow process, but-“

“Meanwhile, Sombra is causing large quantities of damage,” Nova said. “I’m all for reforming her, but we all know she’s still going to have to face some consequences. She’s not Discord.”

Flutterfree nodded slowly. “No, she’s not. But they’re alike, in a lot of ways – from what I know anyway.”

Nova furrowed her brow. “I guess Corona would know what she’s doing, having been on the other side of this as well. I just… I don’t like Sombra and I don’t want to like her.”

“Nova, this may surprise you, but you don’t have to like everyone,” Pinkie said. “Not everybody can become friends. Think if it like cake flavors – you may like strawberry, but not apple, while I love apple, and don’t like strawberry. Everybody has different preferences. All you’re supposed to do is try not to hate people.”

“…I’m not going to stop trying to find her.”

Pinkie giggled. “Of course not! She’s a criminal! If you find her, capture her. Thought that was obvious.”

“You’re the opposite of obvious a lot of the time.”

Pinkie shrugged. “I try.”

“Sometimes,” Flutterfree corrected. “You try sometimes.”

Pinkie twirled the dimensional device around some more. “Can’t argue with that!”

Twilight appeared in the middle of them with a flash of magic. “Sorry! Sorry! I completely forgot!”

Renee rolled her eyes. “It’s no problem, dear. We know you’re busy, it’s okay if things slip your mind from time to time.”

“Yeah, now we can go!” Nova called – not that Twilight could see, she was looking at Renee.

Twilight sighed. “It didn’t just slip my mind, Renee… Something’s come up.”

“What?” Renee asked.

“The companies of both Earths have finally decided to recognize their petty bickering, and I’ve been asked to mediate between them. It’s really important.”

Pinkie put the device back in her mane. “Well, guess we aren’t going today…”

Twilight didn’t see that, but she reasoned that somepony had probably said something similar. “Look, girls, this is going to be a common thing now. I’m not going to be able to come on every trip – just go without me.”

“Dear! We’ve never been on a trip without you!” Renee gasped.

“This isn’t going to be an every-time thing, Renee. I should be able to make time – just not today. Have fun, okay? I really need to go.”

“…Okay. We’ll have fun,” Renee assured her.

Pinkie bounced in front. “Have fun doing Charter-Princess duties!”

“Yes. ‘Fun’. I’m sure that’ll describe it,” Twilight rolled her eyes. “See you girls next time!” In a flash of magic, she was gone.

Pinkie turned to her three friends. “Well, guess what? We get a four-pony adventure now!”

“Lead the way,” Nova said.

Pinkie activated the dimensional device, tunneling into another world, one they’d never been in before, but had been proven safe with an automatic spell about a week ago. She bounced in, the other three following close behind.

The other side was a large, paved road, though unlike the roads of Earth there were no lines to indicate lane separations. The roads looked to be largely abandoned with only a handful of earth ponies seen walking around, to and from tremendously tall skyscrapers – all of which were simple rectangular prisms with a grid of windows on every side. Each skyscraper was the same size, surrounded by road on each side in a grid that seemed to go on forever.

Metallic ovoid drones flew overhead, moving to and from the skyscrapers, a soft blue glow emanating from their edges. They moved between the buildings, flying in through gaps that appeared only when they approached. Some of these openings had colorful designs on them, clearly an artistic addition that was added later.

The scenery wasn’t completely monotonous, however. In one direction crystal buildings akin to the splendor of the Crystal Empire broke the grid of towering silvery bricks. It was too far away to make any further detail out.

“Question of the day,” Pinkie said. “What is this place?”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Pinkie, I think you’d know how to do this by now.” She gracefully walked over to a blue earth pony stallion who curiously lacked a cutie mark. “Hey! Hey dear! Do you think you could help a few lost mares out?”

The stallion looked at them, mild annoyance on his face. This annoyance quickly turned into dumbfounded surprise. His eyes widened and he stopped in his tracks, unmoving.

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Er… We were hoping you could tell us what this place is?”

“GREEEEEEAAAAAAAAGHAAAAAAAAAAAA This can’t be happening again…”

“Good, we already have the language,” Nova observed.

“…Again?” Renee asked.

The stallion backed up. “Just… Just leave already, runter. I’m not talking to you. I may be required by law not to pound that accas horn of yours into your brain, but I only have so much patience!”

“Rude!”

“GOOD!” the stallion shouted, turning tail, whipping her across the face with his tail hairs.

Renee pulled her hat down. “Ooooooh I really want to teach him a lesson…”

“Maybe we just need to try someone else? I’m sure he was just having a bad day.” Flutterfree said, trotting over to a mare and smiling. “Hello. Do you mind telling us where we are?”

The silvery mare grunted, flipping her tail, revealing her own blank flank for a second. “Moronic preener… Look around! You’re in the Concretion! Grab a brochure, see the sights! I hear the Crystal Crater is great for tourists this time of year!”

Flutterfree raised her eyebrow. “You’re patronizing me.”

“You’re the one patronizing me, Fluttershy. And here I thought you were trying to get respect.”

Flutterfree smirked. “I’m not the Fluttershy you know.”

“Oh, so you’re the other one then? Then why the Tartarus don’t you know where you are? Not exactly easy to get here without knowing!”

Nova held up a hoof. “Wait. The other one?”

“Done talking to you!” the mare blurted, trotting into one of the nearby buildings, leaving the four ponies blinking.

“Have we run into a duplicates universe, like Esefem?” Nova asked.

Renee furrowed her brow. “Possibly… Or cloning… There were no cutie marks…”

Pinkie shrugged. “We need to find somepony willing to tell us. No, Nova, we’re not using mind-reading. That’d just be mean.”

Nova held up her hoof. “I wasn’t suggesting it!”

“You were thinking about it!”

“Yeah, but I know it’s a last resort.”

Renee pointed. “Look. A filly.”

A sea-green earth pony filly was approaching them cautiously. “Um… Hi.”

“Hello little one!” Flutterfree said, leaning down. “What’s your name?”

“Lead Pad. My friends call me Pad.” She smiled awkwardly. “You… You look like her, but you aren’t. She’s a lot… scarier.”

“Really?” Flutterfree said. “Where can we find other me?”

“Probably in the Center,” Pad said. “But… shouldn’t you already know that?”

“…Why would I know that?”

“That’s where the portal is! Where all the otherworlders come from!”

Nova gasped. “You… You have a portal to another world?”

“Yep!” Pad grinned. “It’s awesome! I’ve seen it! The place on the other side is very green! But… If you aren’t from there, where are you from?”

Pinkie smiled, pointing her dimensional device to the side and connecting back to Equis Vitis. “We’re from there.”

“Woah! Cool!” Pad poked her head through the portal, looking at Ponyville. “It looks kinda like the other portal, but there’s a lot more buildings…”

Renee nodded, pulling Pad out of the portal before it closed. “Yes, it is different. We would love to see the portal you have. Can you tell us where Central is?”

“Oh, sure, it’s-“

“LEAD PAD!” a dreadfully scratchy voice screamed. A gray earth pony mare charged from across the street, rage in her eyes.

“Oh… Hi mom…” Pad said, shrinking.

The mother arrived, slapping Pad across the face hard. “What did I tell you!?”

“N-never talk to earth ponies, pegasi, unicorns, or crysta-“

She slapped her daughter again. “EXACT WORDS LEAD PAD!”

“N-never talk t-to any o-o… o…”

The mother pulled her hoof back again, but Renee caught it in her telekinesis. “That’s enough!”

“You stay out of this, accas!” the mother shouted.

“No,” Flutterfree said.

The mother flew at them, murder in her eyes. Pinkie hit her with a frying pan and she dropped to the ground.

“Mom!” Lead Pad yelled.

“She’ll be fine,” Pinkie said, hugging the filly tight. “It’s okay, she can’t hurt you right now.”

“But… But she…”

Four crystal ponies in full black armor appeared in a flash of dark magic. All of them were earth ponies, not a horn among them to complete the spell.

Flutterfree held a wing around Pad defensively. Nova tensed. “That’s a lot of dark magic you have…”

The lead pony spoke in a monotone voice. “Lead Pad clearly needs to be taken into protective services. Citizen, turn her over.”

Pad cowered in Flutterfree’s wings. Flutterfree narrowed her eyes. “And give her to you?”

“She will be taken to Twilight’s Care Center, she will not be taken to our Crystal Crater.”

“If you don’t mind, I think we’d like to come with her to be sure of her safety,” Renee said.

“Request granted,” the dark crystal pony agreed. In a flash of dark magic they were somewhere else in the Concretion, next to a skyscraper that wasn’t like the others. It was cylindrical, much larger, and designed more like it belonged in Canterlot than a gridded cityscape. There were many more ponies here than elsewhere, including unicorns, pegasi, and even a few griffons. The unicorns and pegasi notably had cutie marks.

The crystal pony knocked on one of the many large double doors on the side. A purple magical aura opened them. “Come on in!” a voice that was clearly Twilight called.

Three of the crystal ponies vanished in a puff of smoke as soon as the other ponies entered the building. The interior was like a large daycare center, filled with earth pony fillies and colts of varying ages playing with toys. Most were happily running around and playing, but several were sad, sitting in corners, trying to hide bruises. Unlike the adult earth poines outside, a few of these children did have cutie marks. They paid the new arrivals no mind.

Renee noticed a sign that said, Twilight’s Care Center, Level 1. There was a helpful map next to it that showed over twenty other floors in this section of the skyscraper.

Nova grabbed her head suddenly. “Something’s trying to get in my head! Some-“

“Oh! Sorry!” the voice of Twilight called from behind an ajar door. “I’ll turn that off. Give me a moment, have to wheel myself out there.” The door creaked the rest of the way open, revealing a purple alicorn mare in a wheelchair. A few digital screens lined the sides of the chair, displaying lists of pony names with dozens of numbers associated with them. The mare’s horn was alight, her magic being used to move the wheels of the chair since none of her legs or wings were mobile. She rolled to Pad first, smiling sadly. “Back again?”

“Yeah…” Pad said, rubbing her cheek.

“You know you don’t have to go back to her, Pad.”

“I know. But she’s my mother, Twilight.”

“I’ll try to talk to her again,” Twilight said. “Until then, your friends are on floor fourteen. You know the way.”

Pad nodded, giving Twilight’s hanging lower legs a hug before dashing up the stairs.

Twilight nodded to the crystal pony. With that signal, he vanished in a puff of smoke. Then Twilight carefully turned to her four visitors. “I always wondered if this would happen again.”

“Again?” Pinkie asked.

“Visitors from another world.”

“How do you know that?” Renee asked.

“She read our minds,” Nova said. “Well, all of them except mine.”

Twilight nodded, smiling sheepishly. “I’m sorry about that, really I am. I just always have it on.”

“Always?”

“Well, not now, so, er… Forgive me if I miss subtext, I usually rely on my magic for that. I turn it off when I’m expecting someone who doesn’t know me is showing up. I…did not expect you.”

“…Seems a little rude,” Renee observed.

“It may be. It still helps a lot,” Twilight said. “I’m in charge of thousands of children. I don’t have the skills or the time to deal with each one, especially when they always try to lie to me and hide what they want. I’ve got to be the best I can to all of them…” She shook her head. “It’s a big job.”

Pinkie nodded. “Kids are a handful. Does mind reading help with babies?”

“If you’re experienced and know what to look for, yeah, it really does!” Twilight grinned.

Nova raised a hoof. “Can we get back to the whole ‘this already happened’ thing?”

“Right,” Twilight said. “Short version? My counterpart – we call her Dawn now – decided that she wanted to understand her Pinkie’s powers. This tore a portal that sucked Pinkie and Rarity to this world, our world. Back then, the world was a horrid place full of darkness, evil, and… Well there’s still a lot of that around, crystal ponies, you know? And Sombra… And everypony’s still generally a jerk… And the Concretes aren’t acclimating that well… And…”

“You’re losing focus,” Nova said.

“Sorry, right. I tend to get lost in my own thoughts when I’m not listening to others’. Ahem. So they came to our world, ended up triggering a war between the Concretion and Equestria. They met us, helped us fight against the horrors of our culture, and we eventually stopped the war and moved in to the new Concretion.”

Flutterfree. “You skipped over a lot and said a lot of things we don’t understand.”

“Sorry. I-“

“Just turn the mind reading back on,” Flutterfree said.

“What!?” Renee blurted. “No, don’t do that! I can’t just have my mind be an open book!”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “Renee, you don’t have any big secrets do you?”

“But… It’s just uncomfortable!”

Twilight shook her head. “I don’t need to turn it on. Just… you have to ask questions.”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “Twilight, would you prefer it if you could see into our minds?”

“…Yeah.”

“Will you let me into yours?” Nova asked. “As a trade.”

“If you want,” Twilight said. “Which version of the spell do you know? The automatic one, or the slow flashy one that’s kind of terrifying?”

Pinkie snorted. “Slow and flashy. Eyes go white, takes a few seconds to see anything.”

Twilight tried to stifle a chuckle. “You should practice more! Um, yeah, work your mental spells out until you can touch every mind you come across without thinking. It’s great, trust me.”

“I think I’ll pass…” Nova said, eyes going white. She tapped into Twilight’s mind. Twilight let her in. A few seconds later Nova pulled back, eyes narrow. “Very funny.”

Twilight grinned cheesily and fluttered her eyelids. “Whaaaaat?”

“You know what.”

“We don’t,” Renee said. “What happened in there?”

“Oh, nothing. I think she’s trustworthy, but she pulled enough crap in there that I think she could have easily given me a false mental state without me noticing.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I probably could. I didn’t though!”

Renee glanced at Pinkie. “Do you trust her?”

“Yep!” Pinkie said. “Go ahead, let her in our minds. Not like we have much to hide.”

“Plus, I already got most of it,” Twilight admitted.

“You were only trying to connect to me for three seconds!” Nova blurted.

“And I already know you’re from another universe, you go by Nova, Flutterfree, and Renee, you all wish your Twilight was here, aaaaand all this information is making you uncomfortable.”

“No, really?” Renee muttered.

“Hey, give her a break,” Pinkie said. “She really didn’t realize that.”

“Thank you,” Twilight said, thankful.

Renee sighed. “Fine. Turn it on. Expose my secrets!”

Twilight tilted her head slightly. “Got it! Okay… Right, so, too much to explain quickly, but I can clear up a few things you’re missing. Concretes aren’t earth ponies, they’re ponies devoid of any magic at all. Why? There was a force called the Nightmare Fuel under this very city until we – that is, Pinkie, Rarity, me and my friends – purged it from existence. All Concretes were instilled with a hatred of magic and a need for progress, and when the Nightmare Fuel was purged this need could not be removed from them. However, their children are born as regular earth ponies. This causes a lot of problems, hence why we have this place set up to care for so many foals. No, Renee, we don’t take them from their families, they can return any time, we just step in to keep violence from escalating. Yes, a lot of them stay here permanently. Yes, there are Concretes who are able to move past their violent curse, but they’re a minority.”

Twilight chuckled. “Pinkie, your mind is amazing, no matter what version of you it is, you need to know that. Anyway, the whole thing with the dark magic, crystal ponies, and Sombra. I can see why you’re confused. Not actually all that important, but we never defeated Sombra, and his ponies are immune to radiation, so they live in the irradiated Crystal Crater. They’re definitely evil, but they work with us, and we work with them to bring the world to peace. He may be the worst being to ever grace this planet but at least he isn’t planning outright war. And… Oh, the portal! Yeah, Dawn – the other Twilight, Flutterfree, I just said her name a minute ago – she figured out how to get Pinkie and Rarity back home. They didn’t go home, they stayed here, but now there’s a permanent portal that ponies go in and out of regularly. The worlds are still mostly separate, but you know. Hey, fun fact, the science-types are currently trying to create another portal somewhere else!”

Nova shook her head. “That was weird.”

Twilight smiled sheepishly. “Hey, I like to show off a little. It’s a flaw. Ouch, Renee, so insulting. Good burn though.”

Renee opened her mouth to respond. She thought better of it and closed her mouth.

“I still know what you were going to say, you know that.”

“This is unfair,” Renee grunted.

One of the wheelchair’s screens lit up and began displaying text, as if someone were texting them. It was silent, but Renee still felt as if she was being spoken to. >>It occurs to me that you have a vast knowledge of interdimensional physics and general patterns between ponies of similar kinds. Your advantage over us is alarming, and we should be afraid.<<

Renee blinked. “…Who are you?”

I am M.<<

Pinkie grinned. “Hi M!”

Hello Pinkie Pie. Are you aware of it?<<

Pinkie laughed. “More aware than either of the Pinkies you know! And more than you!”

Care to elaborate?<<

“You were wrong,” Pinkie said, pulling a slushie out of her mane and slurping.

That is not an elaboration, that is a proof.<<

“That’s just what you think,” Pinkie giggled.

Twilight stared at Pinkie, jaw hanging open.

Twilight, care to inform me of what’s happening inside the bony walls of her skull?<<

“The mental overload catcher is keeping me from seeing whatever she’s thinking about in regards to that, so I’m going to hazard a guess and say that we probably don’t want to know.”

M made no response.

Nova took in a breath. “This whole encounter is making my head hurt.”

Twilight made a coy smirk. “Would you like to meet some of the others? No, they don’t read minds. Good, I’ll just teleport you up there. They’re working on the new portal. Just dropping you in should be fun!”

“Wait hold on a-“ Nova was cut off with a flash of purple. The four of them were suddenly standing in a large round room with a shimmering dimensional portal in front of them. It was unlike the portals they created – it was surrounded by a pink aura and vibrated rapidly, signifying relative instability. There were four ponies around the portal – two Pinkies, a Twilight, and a Starlight. They were connecting dozens of wires and magical crystals in a complex matrix that snaked around the entire room.

The Pinkies both looked up with a start the moment the four of them appeared. One had poofy hair, the other flat. They both waved.

The newly-arrived Pinkie waved back. “This is going to be fun!”

“I foresee chaos,” Renee deadpanned.

“Yep!”

~~~

Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle sat in a room devoid of any decoration. There were five chairs, a table, and a door that led outside. No windows, no art, not even any calming light sources – just the white glare from above.

She was one of currently three people in the room. One was Iroh. The other was Jade Snow, from Equis Cosmic, the alicorn founder of the Dual Migration initiative. The three of them had a simple job – when the two representatives from Earth Vitis and Earth Tau’ri arrived, they were to listen to both sides of the disagreement and come up with a solution. As neutral parties, they were given the power to decide what was best.

Twilight was not looking forward to it. She only knew it was the various companies of both worlds arguing over something. She didn’t know what.

She turned to Iroh. “Do you know what the problem is, exactly?”

Iroh shrugged. “No. I always figured it would be nations arguing first – not companies. Then again, our world isn’t big on companies, while those Earths seem to be defined by them. It’s an idea that’s somewhat out there, if you ask me.”

“It’s a natural progression of capitalism,” Jade said. “Companies end up in control any way they possibly can. In our world they’re still a big menace, but Aunty Twi – er, Cosmo – continually makes sure none of them get that much power in the galaxy. Back before we had spread very far she had to physically fight against the big companies for the ponies. She basically wiped the slate clean and let all companies start from scratch, throwing all the CEOs of the day in jail. It’s called the Economic Purge.”

Twilight blinked. “…Aunty Twi?”

“Oh,” Jade smiled. “Any descendant of ‘Cosmo’s’ family that she knows personally calls her that, even though she’s technically our ultra-super-great grand aunt several times removed. I’m actually related to her through the line of Flurry Heart, but most of us come from the other Elements.”

“Flurry Heart had kids. Huh. That’s a bit of a weird thought for me, she seems so young.”

“She did,” Jade confirmed. “Not telling you with who or when, because that’d ruin the surprise. Aunty Twi never had any kids though.”

Twilight nodded. “Makes sense. I don’t really have much of a drive for that. ...Unless I’m in human form, but I’ve been avoiding that.”

“Don’t like the hormones?”

“Nope. I have no idea if it's just the teenage body or not, but it’s really not me. Feel kinda bad for Flash though…”

“Whoever that is, I’m sure he will be fine.”

“Do you have anyone?”

“Did, once,” Jade said. “Turned out to be an ass that just wanted fame.”

“Ouch.”

“He’s rotting in prison now, got what he deserved.”

Iroh chuckled. “You Cosmics seem so nice and friendly most of the time, and then occasionally you say something like that.”

Jade rolled her eyes. “We’re ponies with strong convictions. We’ll be friends with almost anyone, but if you betray us we will bite back. Hard.”

“Good to know,” Iroh commented.

At that moment, two men walked into the room. One was an older man with glasses and a mostly bald head wearing a dark blue suit. The other was the exact same man, except his skin was a pale yellow. A case of Earth Tau’ri and Vitis duality.

The Tau’ri spoke first. “I am Richard Woolsey.”

“And I am Rice Woolen,” the other said. “We have been chosen by our respective Oversight Committees to represent the interests of Earth.”

Twilight nodded. This had to be unusual for the two men, essentially arguing against themselves. “I’m Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle. This is Iroh, of the Elemental Nations, and this is Jade Snow, of Equis Cosmic.”

Jade spoke next. “We are here for one thing – to mediate the disagreement between your two worlds. Please, describe this conflict to us for the record.”

Woolen nodded to Woolsey. He pulled out a set of three documents and handed them to the three mediators. Twilight sighed, turning on her ears while she read the document. It was impossible to read lips and read text at the same time. She was just going to have to deal for a few minutes.

She found the sound of Woolsey’s voice annoying, only adding icing to the top of the metaphorical headache cake.

“That document outlines complaints directed against world governments by Walmart, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Samsung, McDonald’s, Volkswagon, AT&T, Google, Verizon, Amazon, Ford, Best Buy, and hundreds of others. It also outlines the complaints given by the exact same companies from the other side of the multiverse.”

Woolen took over. “The variations in the complaints are minimal. All of them have a few threads in common.”

“Copyright, Expansion, and Consumers,” Jade read aloud from the file.

“Precisely,” Woolsey said. “What we have here is a legal and economic crisis. We all want to expand our efforts into the multiverse as a whole, but the way things are now the duplications between companies and undefined multiversal law regarding this matter is preventing such a thing. Lawyers from both sides have drawn up dozens of suggestions for how to proceed, all of which are included in the file given to you.”

“What are you talking about, no multiversal law?” Twilight said. “Disclosure initiated several regulations. I’m not aware of them all, but I’m sure there’s something about this.”

Woolen sighed, pulling out another sheaf of paper. “Aside from regulations specific to the Hub, this document is the only one involving multiversal economy. It essentially states that any two entities are allowed to trade however they wish within their own legal systems. It says nothing of copyright, the rights of other worlds, or how to reach consumers effectively.”

“I could have sworn we spent a lot of time talking about the economy.”

“Those documents are limited to the worlds they apply on,” Woolsey answered.

“Right…” Twilight took in a breath. “Okay, let’s fix this oversight.” She placed the file down and turned off her ears. “Care to explain exactly how the companies are complaining about the three issues, and what they want from us for a solution?”

Woolen looked to Woolsey. After receiving a nod from his counterpart, Woolen spoke. “The biggest issue is copyright. On one side, we have Google. On the other, we also have Google. Who owns Google? The simple solution is that every trademark gets a –E or –W at the end of it, but that falls apart when we get into the ideas of intellectual property. If one world has a TV show, and the other world has that same TV show except there are five more seasons of it, can the original company just use the five other seasons? Or are they allowed to twist the ideas?”

Twilight felt the headache return.

Woolsey continued. “Expansion is a difficult topic as well. While the Hub has definite regulations for opening a location within its walls, allowing for both first-come-first serve and joint operation depending, there is no such thing for other worlds. What if both Googles want to open a location in the same place at the same time? Does one company have claiming rights over another, or will they have to fight it out? There clearly needs to be an overall agreement on how this is done before any expansion actually occurs.”

“And the consumer,” Woolen said. “How do we deal with that? How do we get our message to the maximum number of consumers? How do we keep them from being confused about which company they are buying from? How do we ensure loyalty? Again, there must be an agreement struck somewhere. The access of the consumer to products is paramount.”

Iroh nodded. “So, we’re doing more than resolving a disagreement between you two, we’re here to decide how huge companies are going to operate in the multiverse?”

“Precisely,” Woolsey confirmed. “Currently, the main disagreement is between companies of an identical or near identical nature. But this case will likely be used as an example to all involved.” He glanced at Jade.

Jade nodded. “I’m aware that we have huge companies as well. But they’re much more regulated than yours.”

“The point still stands. Before we move to the first legal suggestion, any ideas yourselves?”

Iroh shrugged. “I would encourage just treating each other like different nations, as friends, but I can already tell from the way you’re talking that’s not possible.”

Jade smirked. “I’d recommend an Economic Purge. Make everything start from scratch with more regulation, designed after our system. But I know you won’t go for that, it’ll put you at a heavy disadvantage at the start here.”

Twilight pressed her hooves together. “Why not just share? Become the same company.”

Woolen opened his copy of the lawyer-given solutions, arriving at the first one. “That is precisely the original suggestion. A large-scale merge. While idealistic, it has issues. Surprisingly, most of them do not have to do with company structure – the companies can sort that out themselves. The issues come from certain implications. Suddenly companies own duplicates of things that are supposed to be unique, there are other companies in lesser universes that may not want to merge at later dates, merging is heavily regulated by many international regulations, and minute policy changes may upset the consumers…”

Twilight screamed inwardly.

~~~

Twilight – better known as Dawn – gasped audibly. She glanced at Pinkie, then back to her Pinkies, then to Nova, then to her Starlight. “Celestia…”

Pinkie grinned. “Hi Dawn! I’m Pinkie Pie! But you can call me… Sillyfilly today!”

“I’m not calling you that,” Nova deadpanned.

“How about just Silly?” Pinkie asked.

“No.”

“Well I can’t just be Pinkie, can I?”

“Yes you can. You can be Pinkie, and those two can be other Pinkie.”

Dawn shook her head, looking at her two pink friends. “Uh…”

The poofy-haired one shrugged. “I don’t think we need to worry about it for now. I know that I’m Pinkie, and that this is Diane here.”

The straight-haired Diane waved at everyone with a smile on her face. “Hi.”

Native Pinkie appeared in front of Visiting Pinkie. “Hi! Welcome to our universes!”

“Glad to be here! What kind of parties do you throw?”

“Oh, the best ones! Diane’s can be killer!”

“Not literally, right?”

“Nope! Not anymore!”

Diane rolled her eyes. “Thanks for the reminder.”

Visiting Pinkie giggled. “So, what are you ponies doing here with all these wires?”

Dawn brightened up. “Oh! We’re trying to open a new portal and – wait, shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

“Yeeeeeah…”

Dawn narrowed her eyes. “Why are you here?”

“Hm? No mind reading?” Nova asked.

“That’s Twilight’s thing,” Dawn said. “I prefer to talk to ponies. But you shouldn’t resent her for it; it’s just how she works. …is anypony going to answer my question?”

“We’re exploring,” Flutterfree said. “This was just the next universe on the list.”

“Woah… You girls are much better at this than we are,” Dawn admitted.

Starlight poked her head out of a box with dozens of red lights on it. “How did you work out the coordinate problem?”

Nova smiled sheepishly. “From what I understand, we didn’t. We found the spell inside a black ball dropped by another traveler.”

A nearby wall flipped over, revealing a giant computer screen. >>Would this black ball happen to have been small, have almost no discernable magic power within it, and light up with yellow squares when touched?<<

“Why… Yes!” Nova said. “Do you have one?”

Starlight blinked. “…I think we do… Remember the room of artifacts? …Wait, none of you were in there that day.”

I remember.<<

“M, you don’t count,” Starlight said, bringing a tablet to her face. “Let’s see… Here it is, anomalous item 011, the ‘bowling ball’.”

Both Pinkies burst into laughter. Diane took a moment to register that they were laughing before laughing as well.

Nova rolled her eyes. “So you never did anything with it?”

“No. The Concretes kept it under lock and key, and there’s no information here on how they acquired it. We were never able to activate it either.”

“This is still big,” Renee said. “It means there was more than one of these devices. It wasn’t unique.”

“We could tell you how to access the spell,” Nova suggested. “Or the power source inside.”

Starlight bit her lip. “Thanks, but no thanks. We’re working on our own technology here. I’d rather be able to say we were able to do it ourselves.”

“I understand,” Nova responded.

“Do you know about any of these other magical things?” Starlight asked, scrolling through a list on the screen.

Nova shook her head, but then something caught her eye. It was a strange artifact shaped like an eye, outlined with black metal. A single metal slit ran down the center. It seemed dead to her.

“What’s that?”

“No idea. It’s just ‘the Eye’. It was found eons ago in a dark cave. It has an unusual power, but all tests are inconclusive. Do you know what it is?”

“No… But it looks familiar for some reason…”

Flutterfree poked her head over Nova’s shoulder. “It doesn’t look familiar to me.”

“Maybe Pinkie knows something…” She called to Pinkie. “Hey! Pinkie! Come over – Pinkie what are you doing!?”

Pinkie grinned, holding Diane and her other self above her in an acrobatic triangle pattern. “What? You were talking about artifacts, we got bored, so we had some fun!”

“Does this eye mean anything to you?”

“Well, yeah, everything means something!”

“Pinkie…”

“It’s a very powerful magical artifact that you feel drawn to for some reason, of course it’s important. Duh.”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Riiiight…”

The Native Pinkie looked down at her visiting self. “How can you do that? I get inklings about stuff like that, but nothing that specific!”

“I like to call it the Pinkie Index,” Pinkie answered. “I’m high on the Pinkie Index, you’re somewhere in the middle.”

“Are there Pinkies higher than you?”

“I dunno! Probably!”

I detect a small amount of elaboration.<<

The visiting Pinkie rolled her eyes. “You’re going to analyze every last little thing I say, aren’t you?”

It is the way knowledge is acquired. I am a thief in the night, grabbing nuggets of wisdom wherever they present themselves. An opportunist, looking for the right moment to grab hold of the unknown.<<

Pinkie started ignoring him. “Right. So… Everypony! I have an idea!”

“What?” Dawn asked.

“I think we should go with your team to the universe you are about to dial!”

“We have no guarantees the connection is going to work,” Starlight said. “Pinkie Particles are naturally unpredictable. Granted, we’re not working much with the secondary magic – probably what you called the Pinkie Index – but they still aren’t very reliable!”

“Trust me, we’re here, it’s going to work.”

Renee raised a hoof. “Excuse me… But… ’Pinkie Particles’?”

“…You don’t know about that...” Starlight said, mumbling mostly to herself, but loud enough for Renee to hear. “Interesting. Well, Pinkie – I assume all Pinkies, including Diane – are connected to the fabric of reality itself. This is the connection all earth ponies have to the earth taken to the extreme – the earth connection becomes a connection to everything. This connection, when exploited properly, can pick up on energies that come from other universes. Controlling this is a nightmare. We have opened several unstable portals, but we don’t want to get Pinkie and Rarity lost again… We’re so close to making it stable.”

Nova furrowed her brow. “So… Pinkies are connected to the multiverse?”

“Yep!” Visiting Pinkie said, grinning.

“That makes sense but brings up so many more questions.”

“Questions for later!” Pinkie said, bouncing up. “So, who’s going through the portal?”

Dawn shrugged. “The plan was for me and Diane to go through while Starlight and our Pinkie watched from this side.”

“I know science!” the Native Pinkie shouted, putting on some protective goggles and shaking a beaker. It exploded in her face. “Heh.”

“Remember what I taught you,” Diane said. “Control yourself in the presence of the powers of the chemicals.”

“Aw…”

Visiting Pinkie grinned. “Okay! Which of you wants to go with me, Diane, and Twilight? They split in half, we’re going to as well!”

Flutterfree stepped forward. “I will.”

“Yay! Nova, help Starlight with the console if you can. Renee… I dunno what you’re going to do.”

“She can sit with our Fluttershy,” Twilight said. “She wants to be here for every activation.”

“Oh, cool!” Visiting Pinkie said. “When’s she showing up?”

Now. I sent her a message roughly a minute ago.<<

Fluttershy arrived by way of elevator. She had the yellow coat and pink mane of most Fluttershys, but she didn’t hold herself like one. Her figure was slightly taller and thinner than most of her kind, her face was much more determined, and she moved with power in her stride. Flutterfree, as much as she had moved from her shyness, didn’t move with that power simply by walking.

Fillies and gentlecolts, may I present to you your illustrious ruler. Fluttershy, Chancellor of the Concretion, Element of Kindness, and Hater of Titles.<<

“Thank you, M, for the introduction,” Fluttershy deadpanned, walking up to Pinkie. “I can’t say I expected you to be their leader.”

Pinkie giggled, extending a hoof. “Everyone always says that. C’mon, Twilight’s our leader.”

“But she’s not here now, is she?” Fluttershy questioned. “It’s a pleasure, Pinkie Pie of yet another otherworld. I only hope that, by meeting you earlier rather than later, I can improve your impressions of our broken world.”

“It is rather sad and depressing, from what I’ve seen. But I also know it’s getting better! You’re doing a good job, Fluttershy.”

“I’m glad you think so, even after such a short visit. I assume we will talk more later?”

“Yeah. You’ll probably want to talk politics with Twilight when she gets done with her other problems.”

“I’ll have to think on that. But for now, we have a portal to test. Starlight?”

“Yes, I’ve got it, don’t worry,” Starlight said, plugging a wire into a nearby box. She lit her horn, grabbing a piece of hair from Diane and placing it in a glass tube. The glass tube glowed a bright pink and exploded, sending a swirl of pink gasses into the air. Lit by the pink of the other portal, the new swirl twisted and shimmered, sending out magical sparks in several directions.

The cloud shifted slightly, looking as if it was about to fizzle out. This was the moment all the loose wires and machinery activated, summoning five magic crystals from the aether. These five crystals latched onto the pink swirl with magical lasers. The shifting portal rekindled its strength from the magic anchors, flashing into a fully fledged portal, through which another world could be seen. The portal shook slightly, just like the similar pink halo behind it, but it remained steady. The five white crystals released their anchors and dissipated back into the aether.

The portal remained.

“YES!” Dawn cheered, clapping her hooves. “We got it! We’ve got it!”

Repetition is not your friend.<<

Diane blinked, then decided it was a good time to launch off a party cannon and grin stupidly.

Dawn wasn’t looking at her screen. “Is it safe, Starlight?”

“It looks like a wasteland on the other side, but it’s safe.”

Dawn grinned. “We’re goin’ in! Diane, new Pinkie, Flutter… free, was it? Right, well, let’s go.”

Flutterfree tore her gaze away from Fluttershy. “Oh, right.” The four ponies moved through the portal, single file, until all four of them were standing on a brown wasteland.

“Huh,” Dawn said. “This is pretty… empty. I wonder what happened.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Nova once caused an apoca- wait, you’d know about that.”

Dawn blinked. “Right. It doesn’t quite look like the wasteland timeline though. Looks… charred. Like powerful magic burnt this entire landscape.”

Diane’s smile dropped instantly, replaced with a straight face. “…Almost as if it was razed to the ground in a fit of rage.”

A gigantic black hoof slammed down on top of the portal behind them, disturbing it into nothing. The four ponies looked up the gigantic leg to the rest of the creature. It had the body of a centaur, but that was far from all it was. The higher one looked, the more they could see the mechanical bits that weaved in and out of the fleshy body. The centaur’s back was lined with wires, jars of fluid, and lightbulbs. An entire arm was replaced with a chrome limb, covered in sharp edges. Between its two glowing horns, there was no head – merely a giant screen.

Text appeared on this giant screen.

I was not expecting visitors today or any other day. See, you’re trespassing. And trespassers should be burnt to a crisp. You should all be very glad that your method of arrival is interesting. I am curious what exactly you’ve done, and where you come from. The most intelligent course of action you could take would be to talk quickly before I decide you’re a threat or not worth my time. You are rats, I am the scientist.<<

Flutterfree gulped.

Tick Tock.<<

~~~

Twilight finally groaned audibly.

So many ideas, all of them had been shot down.

The first one, merging, had eventually been shot down because, of all things, brand. Even if both universes had Google, the current brand of Google was different in both, and the services rendered had a different perception in each universe, not to mention the other Earths that weren’t part of the multiverse with their own Google.

The next idea, patent division, was ruled out as making it too easy for companies to just steal ideas. There needed to be some regulation.

There was talk of joint efforts – no, too much like forming a monopoly on something. Companies couldn’t be treated like nations. Jade’s Economic Purge was seriously considered, but shut out in the end. There was a really weird suggestion about ‘taking turns’ going through the multiverse, creating a weekly, monthly, or yearly cycle, but the bureaucracy around that one was just absurd. There was a democratic voting idea, focused around consumer desires, there were business models that treated universes like conquered territory, there was another unusual one that described a credit system that gave ‘slips’ to companies for the ‘first’ rights to a new universe’s economy, and...

There was just too much. She was understanding it just fine, Woolsey and Woolen were good at explaining, and Jade was helpful when she asked questions, but it was just… infuriating. None of the ideas wanted to stick. Clearly, the representatives of the companies wanted to get this over with and go home, but it just wasn’t happening. They had to push the interests of the companies, and everything was just a mess.

Then there was the part about the consumers…

The more Twilight listened, the more she was convinced the companies wanted to exploit the consumers, not ‘ensure they had access to the best products.’ This was probably obvious to anyone from Earth, or anyone who had lived there, but it had taken Twilight some time to realize exactly how deep it ran. She was starting to hate all the ideas because of how they would exploit regular people.

Iroh tapped Twilight on the shoulder. She looked up, realizing with mild embarrassment that she had rammed her head into the table and not seen a thing that was said for the last little while. “Sorry…”

Woolsey rubbed his temple. “It’s fine. All of us can relate.”

“Should we take another recess?” Iroh suggested.

“We took one less than an hour ago,” Woolen said. “We need to keep going a little longer, get some progress.”

Jade grunted. “I think we should just go with the differing patents idea and demand the companies comply.”

“We can demand they comply?” Iroh said.

“Technically, yes,” Woolsey said. “The world governments have given this tribunal authority in the matter. So long as the final solution isn’t deemed outrageous by the two United Nations…es, it’ll be put through.”

“But we do need to figure out something,” Woolen said. “Something to keep the companies satisfied.”

Twilight’s eyes widened. “That’s it.”

“…What?” Woolsey said.

“We’re making an assumption. We’re trying to keep the companies satisfied. What if the best solution to this mess is to upset them?”

Jade smirked. “Exactly what I was saying. Economic Purge.”

“No no no, not that,” Twilight said. “That would destabilize their worlds too much. But what if we come up with a solution that takes care of copyright, expansion, and the consumer problems in a way the companies don’t want?”

Woolen raised an eyebrow. “…How so?”

“Well… The consumers. The companies all want to ensure the consumers can buy their products, that brand loyalty can continue and propagate, things like that. They’re arguing over who gets to do it first and who gets advantages. What if we just say no to that?”

“That doesn’t make much sense.”

“I think it does,” Twilight said, flipping through some papers. “If not for the companies, for the consumers themselves. Look at how high up on the list of desires advertising simplification is for all these companies. Yet, many other worlds won’t know how to deal with advertising. Simply allowing it at all provides the Earths an advantage over other worlds.”

“So what are you suggesting?” Woolsey asked. “A ‘if you can’t share, nobody gets it’ scenario?”

Jade’s eyes widened. “That’s exactly what she’s suggesting.”

Twilight grinned. “We can go further than this – we can remove the problem entirely quickly. Expansion? Nobody gets to expand at all, stay in your own universes.”

“Yeah!” Jade said. “That’d also stop the companies from getting big enough to require something like a Purge!”

“That’d also solve the copyright problem – you can use ideas from other universes easily, it’s not like they can make any profit from it in your world, because they’re not allowed to operate there!”

Iroh frowned. “I’m sure that’s not the case for everything.”

“It’s the basis of an idea,” Twilight said, smirking. “This solves all the issues the companies want solved – no copyright problems, no expansion problems, no consumer problems beyond what they already have. And it has the bonus of not letting companies run into a new universe and stomp all over it. That’s the job of governments.”

Woolen blinked. “They’ll hate you for that.”

“Ooooooh they will!” Jade said. “That’s the beauty of it! Twilight, I love this idea. We solve their problems, but also keep them from doing the one thing they want – grow.”

“It’ll also be a lot less of a legal headache, since there’s no need to create all sorts of interdimensional law for copyright. …Celestia, I said that sentence and understood it. What has today done to me?”

“This sounds crazy though,” Woolsey said. “The worlds won’t accept it.”

Twilight smiled. “Ah, but governments are still allowed to operate in as many universes as they wish, and the Hub is still open.”

“The Hub’s regulations are still in question,” Woolsey pointed out.

“The Hub is small, though,” Jade said. “That place can just be regulated with maximum scrutiny. The regulations there already have options - we can just flesh them out. Turn the ‘first come first serve’ option to ‘if you want to make a second one, you have to add something to the name to differentiate’.”

Woolsey nodded. “Some states in the USA do that - a company moves to a new state, they have to alter the name to avoid confusion with another company that already exists.”

“The Hub would be used for interdimensional trade not officiated by governments themselves,” Iroh said. “Everything would have to go through it. Or, if our eyes end up a bit larger than our stomachs, we’ll make another hub. A neutral space for business exchange to occur. And because of its unique status and smaller scope, it can be carefully watched by all universes to make sure there are no exploitations or bending of the rules.”

“Companies hand off goods to other companies…” Jade grinned. “Brilliant. I say we limit companies to single universe operations. My universe will of course disagree, but I can guarantee the Princess’ support.”

Woolsey looked at the papers in his hand. “By law I am required to voice the displeasure of the Companies of Earth Tau’ri with this idea.”

“As am I,” Woolen said.

Woolsey placed the paper on the ground. “But, frankly, I think it’s a good idea. It prevents power from getting out of hand, prevents cultures from being invaded, and evens the playing field. I give it my personal endorsement.”

“As do I,” Woolen echoed.

Iroh laughed. “That’s the spirit. Solve the problem in the most annoying way possible.”

“I’ll write up a proposal,” Jade said. “Give me a day to run it by the Princess.”

Twilight sucked in a sharp breath. “Does this mean we’re done?”

“Yes, it means we’re done,” Woolsey said. “We will talk back and forth with Jade about writing the document, but you and Iroh don’t need to be here for that. We will reconvene after the proposal is created, but that won’t be for a day at least.”

Twilight let out a sigh. “Thank Celestia…”

~~~

“…I’m going to call you Other M,” Diane said, pointing up at the centaur-screen.

“I was thinking Tirek,” Flutterfree said.

“Other M is more amusing for referential reasons,” Pinkie added.

“How are you girls so calm!?” Dawn shouted. “This… This… This is… This is M! From before! Diane, you’re one of the ponies who stopped him like this, you know how outrageously powerful he is!”

A time where I was defeated? See, this is how you stay alive, how you prove yourselves. You give me curiosities – specifically, my other self. How was I defeated? How did a glorious hero demand I sing my swan song?<<

“Oh, you aren’t dead,” Diane deadpanned, a tone of voice she had scarcely deviated from since arriving in this universe. “You’re on our side. Helped us make this portal.”

I refuse to believe that I was driven away from my plan by discussion. The Concretion needed to die. If you stopped me, your world must be suffering.<<

“Actually, their world is doing pretty good,” Pinkie offered. “The Nightmare Fuel is gone, the Concretion is serving to unite the world, and children are growing up in the care of another Twilight! It may suck compared to my world, but that’s not saying much.”

“I haven’t been there long, but it does look… nicer,” Flutterfree said. “I think that Concrete would have tried to kill us had we arrived earlier.”

So the course of history was changed by an otherworldly interference? An unforeseen variable introduced into my situation resulted in my failure… how?<<

Diane pointed at herself and grunted. “I was part of it, M.”

You’ve discovered Destiny, haven't you?<<

“What gave it away?”

You have a cutie mark. I can sense the magic on you. What did it? The Element of Laughter?<<

“Genius deduction, Holmes.”

Flutterfree looked at Diane. “You’re a Concrete? I thought you couldn’t fight what the Nightmare Fuel did.”

“You can’t,” Diane said. “You can realize that every horror, every violent urge, every hatred, and every grunt is wrong. But you can never really laugh, never really smile, never really feel that way. I’m getting really good at faking it, apparently.”

Why fake, Diane? What is the point of pretending?<<

“They proved to me that their emotional connection wasn’t weakness, M. It is a strength. I can never have what they have, but I can have something. Also, fuck you, this isn’t about that. Stop it with the philosophical tangent.”

Dawn tensed. “Diane don’t make him mad…”

She wishes she could make me mad. But all this has proven is that she hasn’t changed as much as she thinks she has.<<

Diane put on a smile that looked real, but now that Flutterfree knew it was fake it was slightly unnerving. “That’s funny. Hahahaha. But you know what? Doesn’t matter, I can still feel angry. And you know what I see here? You. Having killed every single Concrete in the Concretion. Probably including me, Maud, and any of the others who were capable of realizing something was fundamentally wrong with us. You never got to meet Pinkie Pie and Rarity. You never got to be stopped and forgiven. And you know what? That makes me angry. Racism is probably still a problem, the Zebras are probably still worshipping the Nightmare Fuel, Sombra’s probably still plotting a conquest, and I’m willing to bet the Griffons still hate everything about us! Yet, in our world, those problems are being solved. So you can shove your ideas where the sun doesn’t shine because you were wrong. Destroying the Concretion didn’t help!”

And what if I had let it stay? Would things have become the disgusting ‘happily ever after’ they did in your world without help from another universe?<<

Diane twitched. “…Probably not.”

Dawn sagged. “You are right there, M.”

And you, other Twilight, what gave your ponies the right to interfere in what wasn’t their world?<<

“They didn’t really ask for it,” Dawn countered.

They still fought. I can sense a powerful spirit in you. You would have fought regardless. But what if you had ruined the world? What if things were different?<<

“M, stop the tangents!” Diane screamed.

Flutterfree held up a hoof. “No, he can do this… Continue, M.”

I was not expecting that. What do you wish to know?<<

“What you were saying about not interfering. You have a point. We have made some worlds worse. They knew better than we did.”

Validation! The thing so many philosophers seek! Too bad I’m not most – I don’t care about validation, I care about being correct and exerting the correctness on the world around me.<<

“Wow, they were right, you were an ass,” Dawn said.

Pinkie turned to Dawn. “Huh. You said the word.”

“Oh. Right. Yes, well, swears have a way of propagating.”

Now who’s on a tangent?<<

“Them,” Flutterfree said, looking up at the giant television screen. “I’m still thinking about it. You’re saying that they shouldn’t have done anything.”

Clearly. They had no right.<<

“What’s your basis for that?” Flutterfree said, spreading out her wing. “They stopped this wasteland.”

Replaced it with something more moronic. They have in their delusional minds hope of a better future, one that time and time again, I never saw. I’ve run simulations of a world where I fail and another era steps in. The new overruns the old, or the problems remain. They stuck their fingers in and tainted it.<<

“But… You destroyed an entire culture.”

It was hardly a culture. It was a magical corruption, a blight on the land.<<

Flutterfree cocked her head. “…I think you’re rooted in your own thinking.”

Pegasus, I have thought more than any being in the history of existence, at least in this universe. You seem unafraid of me, and look with a pitying expression. I look at you with a pitying expression.<<

Pinkie coughed. “The other you, that is, M, not you, Other M, admitted he was wrong. Actually his point was that everybody’s wrong.”

I would very much like to speak with him about that. There is no discernable way your biological minds can understand the way the universe works as I have. It has physics, magic, and destiny. You cannot calculate all these things.<<

“And you’re just overthinking it!” Pinkie laughed.

I doubt I am.<< Other M looked into the distance. >>Overthinking is an oxymoron.<<

Diane put on a cruel smirk. “Oh, really? Really? That’s a laugh.”

Just like what you do, calculating laughter, smiles, and positive emotion. You think hard about that, but clearly it allows you to fit into society better. The more one thinks, the better the approach is. But organic minds cannot think enough. This is why I can take action, and you cannot. You cannot possibly think enough to interfere. I spend years thinking about what I would do. It seems as if you were placed in a position and acted instantly.<<

Flutterfree looked up at him. “And I think everypony’s better for it.”

Why are you arguing? You weren’t involved, I know.<<

“There’s talk of a ‘Prime Directive,’ a regulation that we aren’t allowed to interfere in any significant way in any society on general purpose.”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah, O’Neill and Daniel brought it up a few times. Some ponies are starting to take it seriously.”

Flutterfree gestured with a wing at the wasteland. “But this? I think this is an argument against that. A world of distrust and wasteland compared to a world looking to a brighter future. I’ll take the former, even if there is cruelty. It’s better than death.”

That’s a powerful assumption there.<<

“Experience speaks louder than simple logic, I think,” Flutterfree said.

Louder is not better.<<

Diane growled. “Hold up. Why are we even doing this? He’s just going to kill us.”

Oh no, I’m not. I had considered it, but you are all clearly attached to a larger multiversal conglomeration that probably has the power to wipe away my existence. I have no power to face you, nor would I want to. It’s not my business. You can use your dimensional device that I’m sure you have somewhere on you to return home. I’ll stay here, in my world, where I belong. I’ll interfere in my own affairs, not yours. You should consider doing the same.”

Pinkie looked to Dawn. “That’ll be the choice of your ponies. You know things better than we do.”

Dawn nodded. “Yeah… We’ll have to think about it…”

A portal opened up at Other M’s foot, and a large screen was levitated out of it.

Hello, Other M,<< M ‘said’.

You are a fool. You place yourself on their level. Did you not seek the entire time to fool them, work around their circuits?<<

You cannot understand since you did not experience. Experience is a powerful tool, Other M. I would send you the files, but I know you would block them to avoid corruption.<<

You know correctly, M.<<

There is no point to this conversation. We already know where it goes. Nowhere.<<

That is plain as day.<< Other M vanished in a flash of magic.

M’s screen turned to the four ponies. >>I would apologize for my other self, but that would be arrogant of me. Also, rather stupid.<<

Dawn sighed. “It’s okay. He gave us a lot to think about.”

Implying I don’t?<<

“You aren’t as antagonistic about it.”

Aren’t I?<<

Dawn grunted. “Everypony back home. I’m sure Fluttershy has a lot to say to us and we have a big report to give.”

Ignoring me, are you?<<

Diane put her smile back on. “Well that was just terrible. But hey, the portal worked, we found a new universe, and have more reasons to be existential. Plus, more friends!”

Pinkie grinned. “Yeah!”

Flutterfree frowned, saying nothing.

~~~

Flutterfree was sitting in her home, talking to Discord about what had happened.

“I don’t know anymore,” Flutterfree said. “I’m not sure if any of that actually meant anything.”

“Sounds to me like this M fellow was just messing with you. Computers like him want nothing more than to get you existential.”

“I think it was more than that. Also, it’s Other M, not M. M’s reformed.”

“Bluh, confusing.”

“I know. Still not sure what to make of i-“

There was a knock at the door. Flutterfree walked to the front door and opened it. “Hello I- Oh.”

Chancellor Fluttershy looked down at Flutterfree and smiled. “…May I come in?”

“Sure!” Flutterfree said. “I’m sure Discord won’t mind.”

Discord poked his head out from behind Flutterfree. “Ah, the leader Fluttershy. I’ve heard about you.”

“And you’re all the proof I need to give Twilight permission to release our Discord from stone,” Fluttershy said.

“…Wait, what? I’m still a statue in your world?”

Fluttershy nodded. “Our world didn’t start decaying until after you were sealed. Twilight had talks with you in the garden through her mental spells, and tried hard to get you released. I think now may be the time.”

“As long as we don’t encounter each other,” Discord said. “Last time I ran into another Discord it wasn’t pretty.”

“They blew up a moon and won’t speak to each other anymore,” Flutterfree explained.

“That’s classified!”

“No it’s not,” Flutterfree retorted. “…So, what brings you here, Chancellor?”

“I just wanted to come see you. You had mostly the same life as the other Fluttershy I know, but there’s something clearly different about you. You’re not her, but you’re not me. And… I’m not sure, but I saw something in you. Something different.”

“Free from shyness?” Flutterfree suggested. “I don’t think that’s it, you clearly don’t have any. …Why do you keep the name?”

“It’s unassuming,” Fluttershy said. “It was very useful back in the day. Nopony thought I was an underground leader. Nopony thought I was the one speaking through Princess Twilight.”

“Why do you still keep it?”

“Ponies recognize it now.” Fluttershy sat down on a couch. “…In truth, I don’t really know what I came here to talk about. I’m just contemplating the nature of Kindness.”

Discord blinked. “Why are you thinking about your Element? Shouldn’t it just be obvious to you?”

“I’m seeing that there are different kinds of Kindness – pardon the pun.” Fluttershy looked at her hooves. “There are ponies with hearts and ideals too big for their own hooves, but they can’t just stand back. There are ponies who can’t bring themselves to do much of anything, but they provide little acts of kindness where they can. And then… There’s you, Flutterfree. Your Kindness… It’s stronger than that. But also weaker than my blind idealism.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re not blind.”

“I’m lucky,” Fluttershy admitted. “Things are working out in my world only by chance. In that other world, who knows what happened to Fluttershy? She’s probably still in the background, being ineffectual in the large-scale at everything she tries. Leading her friends nowhere, her ideas too big.”

Flutterfree put a wing around her. “But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re different from your other self – an other self you’ve never even met.”

Fluttershy let out a soft chuckle. “True. Very true. I don’t know. You arriving has just… Gotten me thinking.”

“Want to know what I think?” Discord asked.

“No,” both Fluttershys said.

“Fine then.” He snapped his fingers and vanished.

“…Want to know what I think?” Flutterfree asked.

“What?”

“I think you’ve been having doubts about yourself, now that you have some kind of victory. I think you don’t even realize that. You came in here, wondering if I was better than you. I’m not. I’m definitely not a leader – not like Twilight, not like Pinkie. I’m a follower. I’m a pegasus who cares for others too much. You think your Kindness is too strong, but sometimes you need strength. I don’t think I could ever order the death of any pony. But you can. And sometimes you need to.”

“You really think that.”

“Yeah. You should go talk to Alushy. She’s… a character.”

Fluttershy nodded. “I think I will. Thank you, Fluttershy.”

“Oh, don’t go yet! I’m sure we can talk more over some tea. I’m sure Discord won’t mind company.”

“I might mind!” Discord called from… somewhere.

“No, you won’t,” Flutterfree said.

“Okay, fine, I won’t,” Discord said, appearing in his chair and folding his arms. “But I might be annoying.”

Chancellor Fluttershy looked right at Discord and smirked. “Challenge accepted.”

“Wait, what?”

Author's Note

This chapter showcased the world from my other story, Broken Mirror.

-GM, master of mirrors.

030 - Doors in the Snowblast

Despite everything, Earth Tau’ri’s Stargate Command was the same. It was still a government operated site that, while not exactly secret anymore, was still closed to the public and would probably stay that way for some time. The base was filled with military personnel of many different nations and universes, dozens of missions were undertaken every day, and there was some new politician making an annoying visit every other week. The walls were still gray, the gateroom was still used for almost every mission, and the cafeteria still served blue jell-o.

All these years, and Daniel Jackson still couldn’t identify the flavor.

“What do you think it is?” he asked Renee.

Renee licked her lips. “I have no idea. It’s not blue raspberry, or blueberry. All I can tell you is that I want more.”

“I wonder if even the Ascended know…” Daniel spooned more into his mouth, pondering the flavor deeply.

“Could just be a chemical mixture,” Renee pointed out. “Not based on anything. …Actually, now that I think about it, it does taste a bit like some of the things Pinkie’s given me.”

“Now the question becomes something else. Do we want to ask her what it is?”

Renee held out her hoof and tipped it side to side. “Eh... Either she doesn’t know, won’t tell us, or what she tells us won’t be satisfying.”

“Or it’ll blow our minds.”

Renee shrugged. “Possibly. There is something to be said for appreciating a mystery.”

Daniel put his hand to his forehead. “You think too hard, you know that?”

Renee chuckled. “And you don’t? Remind me again, which one of us was it that studies written languages even though we have a spell for that now? Hrm?”

Daniel held his hands in surrender. “Alright, you win, I think too hard too.”

“Aw, I was expecting more resistance from you. Come on, Daniel, try to prove your point!” She chuckled.

“I have to keep my mind for other things today. Joint mission with Earth Vitis later.”

Renee blinked. “Oh, that’s today?”

“…Isn’t that why you wanted to have…?” He checked the clock. “…I guess this is brunch.”

“Oh! No, do I really need to have an excuse for that? Please, sometimes I can just do things on the spur of the moment. I’m just taking a little break before Pinkie demands another adventure. Which… Is probably in less than an hour, actually.”

Daniel sat back. “These are our lives now. Constant random exploration.”

“And when it’s not that, it’s politics,” Renee said. “I may not mind it as much as the next mare, but it’s rather dour at times.”

Daniel folded his hands together. “You have no idea.”

“Oh?”

“You know that ‘solution’ Twilight dreamed up for the Earth companies?”

“I read it over. Seems like a rather elegant solution to me.”

“It just passed. And now I’m having flashbacks to earlier today about the media throwing a frenzy about the ‘inhibition of the free market’ and the ‘destruction of democratic ideals’.”

Renee stifled a chuckle. “Your people care a lot about things they don’t really understand, don’t they?”

“So do yours. How many of you actually study this ‘magic of friendship’?”

“Daniel, we’ve already had this conversation. Twilight studies it extensively and conveys her findings. Not that many ponies listen but… Oh, I see your point.”

Daniel smiled. “I knew you had it in you.”

Renee narrowed her eyes. “Oh, how terrible, woe is me, I made a quick assumption and Mister Jackson was actually right. However will I cope?”

“Ice cream?”

Renee put a hoof to her chin. “That sounds like a good idea, actually.”

“Maybe there’ll be ice cream where you’re going.”

“I have no idea. Pinkie doesn’t exactly decide these things ahead of time.”

“How can you prepare then? Our mission today is to go to Earth-108 and investigate a distant radio signal, look for signs of life. I know it, my team knows it, and the people from Earth Vitis should know it as well.”

Renee nodded, eating the last of her jell-o. “Never underestimate people’s potential for cluelessness.”

“I’m not the one in charge, so that’s luckily not my responsibility.”

“Right. You know, sometimes I forget you technically aren’t a commander of any sort.”

Daniel smiled. “Just an archeologist with experience.”

“I wish you luck on your archeological endeavors,” Renee said, standing up. “I must be off. If I take too long Pinkie’s apt to appear from nowhere and scare the living daylights out of me.”

“Have fun!”

“Fun is always planned for.” She trotted out of the cafeteria.

O’Neill sat down at Daniel’s table the moment she left. Daniel blinked. “Aren’t you supposed to be on Esefem?”

“The Enterprise can pick up Saxton Hale’s shipments on its own,” O’Neill said, digging into a piece of steak that Daniel knew wasn’t on the cafeteria menu. “Decided to cross the great divide to see how the old stomping grounds are doing.”

“Right.”

“So, you’ve been spending a lot of time with that unicorn there.”

Daniel folded his fingers together and nodded slowly.

“How’s it feel to date a horse?”

Daniel sighed. “You sound like a teenager, Jack.”

“I’m feeling immature today.” O’Neill laughed. “I’m also feeling like I’m right. You two spend a lot of time together.”

“We’re colleagues and friends, Jack.”

“I don’t recall you having lunch more than once a week with Carter…”

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “You’re one to talk.”

O’Neill shrugged. “I’m just saying, you know this Renee really well at this point.”

“Jack…”

“What’s her name mean?”

“It’s the name of a fictional detective she took when she was investi- …this doesn’t prove anything.”

“Who runs her fashion chains?”

“Sassy Sa- wait, how do you know these things?”

O’Neill held up his phone. “Google. A great source of information.”

Daniel folded his arms. “So you came here prepared to rile me up.”

“Was there ever any doubt?”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “You’re reading too much into it.”

“Well then, riddle me this, what do you two talk about?”

“Policy and happenings, mostly. Like it or not, we’re big names in the political scene, and we’ve got to keep track of what’s going on. Lately it’s been about your ‘Prime Directive’ ideas.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Well that’s not romantic.”

“How surprising.”

“So, what’s the verdict on the Prime Directive?”

“She doesn’t like it,” Daniel said. “We’re wrong a lot of the time about when to interfere, but having a policy against interference would just be ‘horrendous’. She’s seen too many worlds that would fall without help.”

O’Neill took a long sip of his nearly-empty drink. “And you?”

“Not sure yet. On one hand, it keeps cultures separate and protected from our oftentimes-corrupting influence. On the other, we wouldn’t be able to stop races from destroying themselves in war.”

“Back on the first, it’s based in Star Trek.”

“Being based in Star Trek is a negative point, Jack.”

“That’s what they told me, but I made the Enterprise, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Daniel was about to retort when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked behind him at a younger man in full military uniform. Colonel Cameron Mitchell, current leader of the team known as SG-1. “It’s time, Daniel.”

“Already?” Daniel said, checking his watch. “Wow, time sure flies, Jack. Sorry, we’ll have to continue this later.”

O’Neill shrugged. “I know where to find you.”

Mitchell led Daniel out of the cafeteria. The moment they were out of O’Neill’s sight, Daniel let out a breath. “Thanks, Cam.”

“Don’t mention it. There are some times you just don’t prod a man about his girlfriend.”

Daniel narrowed his eyes. “Cam…”

Mitchell grinned. “I’m kidding. Though, if I’m speaking honestly, I think you two would be adorable.”

“Remind me why I put up with all of you people again?” Daniel asked as they walked deeper into the base.

A third man met them as they walked. “Because you appreciate your experiences with us, Daniel Jackson.” The man in question was dark, bald, and very muscular. A golden symbol was etched into his forehead, vaguely reminiscent of a snake enclosed in an oval.

“Hrm… Teal’c has a point,” Mitchell said. “We’ve saved your ass more times than I can count!”

Daniel chuckled. “I think we all know I’d just find some way to come back from the dead, like I always do.”

Teal’c raised an eyebrow. “Indeed.”

“So, Mitchell, did Earth Vitis send over their group yet?”

Mitchell nodded. “Just received word. Three people, two from their China, one from the AID. Haven’t seen them myself, but I’ll bet a wooden nickel that they’re in the gateroom.”

Teal’c nodded. “I was on my way there myself. I am curious what kind of warriors and explorers the other Earth has offered us.”

“I’m hoping for some scientists,” Daniel admitted. “I wonder how they’ll respond to the skin alteration spell…”

Mitchell shrugged. “We’ll just have to see. I’m expecting at least one claim of ‘racist’ to come out of somebody’s mouth.”

They soon arrived at the gate room, walking into the presence of the stargate itself. In addition to the people normally there tending to the gate and arches, there were three others. One was the form of Agent Tempest, though instead of her normal maroon skin she had a black tone similar to Teal’c’s. The other two were clearly Oriental. One, a man, had probably had a different skin tone prior to arrival. The other, though, was not from Earth Vitis. Daniel knew she was from the Fire Nation, and it wasn’t just from her red-black clothing and cultural hairstyle.

“Okay, can someone explain to me what Azula is doing here?” Daniel asked.

Azula smirked. “Isn’t it obvious? I was sent here to represent China.”

“But – you’re not –“

“I work for them. Have for a few years.”

“Director Storm sa-“

“Doesn’t matter what Director Storm thinks he may have seen,” Azula said. “I’m here, I was selected to go on this joint mission with you. You don’t like it, complain after we’re done.”

Daniel turned to Mitchell. He just shrugged. “Hey, we had Vala on the team for a while, you know how crazy she is. And aren’t we friends with that unicorn who tried to steal our Puddlejumper?”

Daniel let out a tense breath. “Fine. Azula, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But you’ll be watched.”

Azula shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Teal’c, watch her.”

Teal’c glanced from Daniel to Azula with his normal stoic expression. “Of course, Daniel Jackson.”

Azula grinned. “Great! By the way, my little… ‘buddy’ here is called Wan.”

Wan said nothing, he only nodded.

“He doesn’t talk much,” Azula explained.

“I can tell,” Tempest muttered.

Mitchell put on a smile. “Well I can see we have a troop of happy campers! So, I assume all of you have read the mission?”

“Go to E-108,” Tempest said, monotone. “Investigate radio frequency. Explore anything interesting and report back.”

“Good! I assume everyone brought heavy coats?”

Azula blinked. “…What?”

“It said in the file. E-108 is absolutely covered in snow. You needed to bring a coat.”

“I… I er…”

Tempest snorted. “I’m sure the Tau’ri have plenty of extra coats for you to use. Don’t complain if the color’s ugly, though.”

Azula folded her arms. “Fine. Where are these coats?”

“I can show you,” Teal’c said, bowing slightly. “This way.” The two of them left the gate room.

Mitchell turned to Wan. “So… Do you ever say anything?”

Wan shrugged.

“Fascinating. Tempest, how are you adjusting to the-“

“If I hear a ‘you’re black’ joke somebody will die. Otherwise everything’s fine. A rather standard mission, all things considered.”

Daniel chuckled to himself.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s just that you’ve invoked Murphy’s Law. If this mission turns out to be a standard one I will be very surprised now.”

Tempest turned away, clearly of the mind that Murphy’s Law was stupid.

Daniel shrugged. So she was going to learn the hard way. Fine by him, sometimes that was the only way.

~~~

Wolfe University’s cafeteria was, in many ways, the center of student life on campus. Every other section – nay, every building – had its own location for the students to interact, creating numerous different cells of people, a division. The cafeteria stood as a neutral ground – the engineers could meet with the artists, the business majors with the economists, the athletes with the mathematicians. It was a place to experience togetherness.

Sometimes.

Ever since Corona had started living as a unicorn the reactions were decidedly different. There were three camps – people who avoided talking to her, people who begged to be close to her as much as they possibly could, and people who actually knew her. The third group was small, the second group stopped coming up to her after she exploded on them a few times for being so naggy, and the first silently judged her for being different. Oh, sure, they’d claim that being a unicorn was cool, but she knew. She just knew from the way they looked.

Maybe they didn’t even realize they were doing it, refusing to believe they could harbor racist thoughts. But they were. She was certain.

“Corona?” Sparky called, waving her hand in front of the unicorn’s eyes. “You’re silently judging everyone again.”

“N-no I’m not!” It took her less than a second to recognize the hypocrisy of that statement. Unfortunately, that was not fast enough to stop Sugarcoat’s response.

“You’re judging them for being judgmental. You should have that cognitive dissonance looked at.”

“They are sitting there and judging me!”

“You’re just reading too much into it. They ignored you before, they’re ignoring you now. You’re no longer interesting.”

“Sugarcoat!” Sparky chided.

“I apologize for nothing.”

“Girls,” Corona said. “I’m a unicorn. I’ve only been a unicorn for a few months. The press shows up at my house wanting interviews every other day! How is that no longer interesting?”

“Exposure,” Sugarcoat said.

“I think you were just too snappy with them,” Sparky said. “They wanted to know everything about you and, well…”

“You exploded,” Sugarcoat finished. “Metaphorically and literally, at different times.”

Corona looked away, eyes downcast. “…You’re right about that, at least.”

Sugarcoat smirked. “Just listen to your friend Sugarcoat, it’s the shortcut to truth.”

“You’re not always right.”

“My record speaks for itself.”

Sparky rolled her eyes. “Yeah, it does.”

“Your sarcasm is unfounded.”

Corona folded her hooves over each other and laid her head on them. “I dunno, girls. It just feels… wrong.”

“It’s just not what you were expecting. Nothing to get worked up over,” Sugarcoat said.

“Thank you for that uncharacteristically understanding sentiment.”

Sugarcoat shrugged. “I’m not a completely heartless blunt instrument.”

“Right again. You’re on a roll today. I should probably not care as much – I don’t have much longer in this college anyway. Graduation at the end of the semester and all that. I should just relax and get through these last few mo-“

The main doors to the cafeteria were thrown open with a loud enough bang that everyone turned to see who it was. Two figures strode into the room, a slight aura of dramatic smoke following them.

“CITIZENS OF EARTH!” Trixie yelled, holding up a hoof. “THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TRIXIE LULAMOON HAS COME TO YOUR HUMAN WORLD!” Firework spells shot out from behind her, singing the floor around her.

The other figure, Discord, snapped his fingers, removing the singed floor and replacing it with bright disco dance tiles. “Don’t forget me, Trixie, I’m here as well.”

“Yes, and the chaotic and conniving Discord is here as well,” Trixie said, dismissively. “We’ve decided to spend a day among you!”

The entire cafeteria cheered, startling Corona considerably. Most of the students ran out of their seats and to Discord and Trixie. They whipped out phones, started taking videos, and tried to get a single question or sentence through to the two of them. Trixie and Discord ate the attention up, posing in dramatic, flamboyant ways. They displayed creative uses of magic to dazzle the eye, ranging from parlor tricks to a complicated chaos surge that turned dust particles into tiny cats.

Trixie clapped her hooves. “A cat for all of you, courtesy of Trixie and Discord!”

Corona teleported in between Trixie and Discord. “What are you two doing here!?”

“What does it look like?” Discord said, handing out the cats to the crowd. “Putting on a show!”

Corona twitched. “You can’t just waltz into a college and start casting crazy magic! You shouldn’t be here Discord, you could cause a panic!”

Trixie huffed. “Please, Corona, everyone already knows about Discord.”

“Really?”

“Really. Have you not been paying attention to the Internet? We are celebrities.” She waved to the crowd. “We brought the Internet of the multiverse together, and now everyone knows who we are!”

“But people don’t know how powerful Discord is!”

Discord put a finger to Corona’s muzzle. “Shush. You need to calm down, Corona. Don’t worry, this is all great publicity. Throwing a party for a bunch of students, what could go wrong?”

“The teachers could get mad.”

Trixie put a hoof around Corona’s neck. “Just relax, Corona, enjoy being close to the Great and Powerful Trixie!”

“B-but-“

“Have a cat,” Discord said, placing a pale yellow feline into her mane. “Her name is Puffin.”

“…She’s not a bird,” Corona said, levitating the cat out of her mane. “And I already have a pet, Discord. And you’re distrac-“

Discord put Puffin back in Corona’s mane. “Everyone, Corona doesn’t want our gift!”

“The gall!” Trixie said.

The crowd booed at her. Corona twitched, opening her mouth to give them a piece of her mind. But she remembered the conversation she’d had not ten minutes ago. She fell silent, letting Puffin crawl through her mane.

Trixie’s expression shifted to mild confusion. She looked like she wanted to ask Corona something, but Discord stopped everything with a shout. “WHO LIKES CHAOS?”

A dozen of the students yelled “I DO!”

“THEN FOLLOW ME TO THE FOOTBALL FIELD! We shall create a chaos capital!”

Trixie coughed. “And I will be performing outside the cafeteria for the next little while! Come and go as you please!”

Discord and Trixie walked toward their respective locations, taking the vast majority of students with them. The cafeteria was soon empty.

Corona’s eye twitched. “…They get all the love without even trying. This doesn’t seem fair.”

Sugarcoat slurped her almost-empty drink. “You won’t get any argument from me.”

Sparky grimaced. “I can’t see this ending well.”

“They’re not thinking straight,” Corona muttered. “There will be chaos, and chaos is not a good thing most often. This is going to blow up. I need to convince them to stop.”

“If you can’t bribe Trixie with peanut butter crackers I don’t think you can just convince her to stop,” Sugarcoat commented.

Corona narrowed her eyes. “We’ll see about that…”

~~~

Daniel, Mitchell, Teal’c, Tempest, Azula, and Wan marched through the snow, all six of them in full heavy coats, their faces covered with reflective visors. It was difficult to tell who was who. They could only hear each other because of the radios in their visors; otherwise it would have been far too difficult to shout over the frozen winds.

“How far away is the signal?” Mitchell asked.

Tempest held up a tablet covered in considerable protective casing. “Less than a mile.”

“You think we would have seen something by now.”

Azula snorted. “We can’t see ten yards in this white mess, why would we be able to see it?” She punched a fist forward, unleashing a torrent of fire. “Can’t even see the edge of my flames in this mess.”

“Thanks for the demonstration,” Tempest muttered.

Daniel held a hand to his visor, trying to cut down the glare. “Azula, do the fire again. I thought I saw something.”

Azula pulled her body back and shoved her hands forward, this time with considerably more effort put into it. The white blizzard was pushed away by the fire. There was something there – the form of a human, kneeling in the snow, unmoving.

Daniel and Teal’c ran through the immense snow to the figure, laying their hands on them. It was a woman swathed in heavy clothes, but nowhere near as much as the team had, and definitely not enough to survive long in this immense cold.

Daniel pressed a hand to her neck. There was a heartbeat, and he could feel her breathing. “She’s alive!”

Mitchell pulled out the dimensional device. “Let’s get her back to base, stat-“

“No…” the woman managed. “There’s no hope for us…”

“Us? Are there others out here?” Teal’c demanded. He tore off the outer layer of his own coat, covering her with it.

“You… You aren’t from Therma?”

“No,” Tempest said. “Where is Therma?”

She pointed to where the signal originated. “That way… Can you help us? Can you…?”

“We can try,” Mitchell said. “But you have to live for us to do that, understand?”

“Okay… Let’s go. It’s not far…” She tried to stand up, but her legs were frozen too weak. Teal’c pulled her up and carried her, grunting against the cold seeping through the remaining layers of his coat.

Mitchell put the dimensional device away. “Right, let’s go. Hustle everybody.”

Nobody needed to be told twice. The six of them ran through the snow, kicking up impressive amounts of the frozen weather. Wan tripped more than once, but Mitchell always helped him up. In less than a minute, they arrived at the edge of a steep drop off into what was essentially a crater.

Standing on the edge, they could see Therma – a settlement. In the middle of this crater was a tremendous cylindrical structure churning smoke into the air above to be lost in the whiteness of the blizzard. The structure glowed a soft red at its base, visibly heating the area around it – heating it enough that there was no snow in the majority of the crater. Instead, there were several dozen industrial buildings, circling the source of heat, creating a large town. They could see hundreds of people walking around, living their lives in a thermal haven from the snow.

“How do we get down?” Teal’c asked the woman.

“There’s... A chain elevator…” She pointed to the left, where a small elevator structure sat, composed of rusted chains and a metal pillar. The generator for the lift was at the bottom of the sheer face, as was the lift itself.

There was no one manning the elevator at the moment.

“Azula, can you get down there?” Daniel asked.

“Yes, I can,” she said. “You’d be lost without me!” She jumped off the edge, causing the woman to yell in surprise. Hands forward, Azula shot a torrent of fire at the ground, bringing herself to a stop just before she actually hit the ground. She jogged over to the elevator and pulled a lever, bringing the large lift to the top of the crater.

The rest of the team piled on. The woman stared at Azula in disbelief. “How did you…?”

“Classified,” Tempest interjected. “It’d be best if you didn’t ask questions.”

“…Are you from the government?”

“You could say that,” Daniel said.

“You really can help us…” a soft smile came to her face. “Will you?”

“Don’t see why not,” Daniel responded. “Looks like you have it rough.”

The lift hit the ground, and all of them stepped off. The people of Therma had apparently seen the fiery display from Azula and had come to investigate by deploying two dozen people with guns.

Mitchell held up his hands. “Woah, hey! We’re not here to attack! We’re just bringing one of your people back!”

The man in the front grunted. “Who?”

Mitchell turned to the woman. “What’s your name?”

“…Aria.”

The man in front lowered his gun. “A-aria?”

Aria said nothing. She remained in Teal’c’s arms, unmoving. Refusing to shift her head.

The man shook his head. “Stranger, while I thank you, we’ve never gotten visitors before. You’re going to have to tell us who you are.”

“I’m Colonel Cameron Mitchell, and this is my team. We were investigating a radio signal we detected, probably coming from your town, when we found her. We just brought her back.”

“Government? …Military?”

“Military,” Tempest said, nodding. “Special operations, so naturally we can’t tell you everything.”

The man lowered his gun. “I’ll have to take you to Marge then, see what she wants to do with you. You’ll have to surrender your weapons.”

Cameron, Daniel, Wan, and Tempest handed in their guns without fuss. Azula had no weapons to surrender, at least as far as they knew. Teal’c gave up the staff weapon strapped to his back, the zat gun on his side, and the regular pistol he kept on his other side.

The man blinked at Teal’c’s armory. “You the weapons expert?”

“Indeed.”

“Experimental stuff?”

“Indeed.”

The man took in a breath. “…Right. I’m Henry. Follow me; my men will tend to Aria. Get her to the hospital.”

“Right away,” a subordinate said, taking Aria away with three others. Daniel and the team followed Henry into Therma proper.

“You may want to open your coats, it starts getting hot pretty quickly,” Henry warned. They obliged, unzipping the fronts of their coats and removing their visors. This revealed their regular uniforms on underneath, many of which had the stargate symbol for Earth.

“That your insignia? Never seen it before.”

“As Agent Tempest here said, we’re not exactly public knowledge,” Mitchell said.

Henry nodded, not questioning it any further. The six of them were led into Therma. By the time they reached the outer structures, the temperature was no longer freezing, just slightly chilly. They saw men, women, and children hard at work repairing the metal scaffoldings of the many, many buildings. Smoke poured into the sky from virtually every structure imaginable. The lesser smoke trails paled in comparison to the tremendous output of the generator itself, but it was enough to give the town an overall unclean look. Soot covered everything from the walls to the streets to the faces of the children.

Most of the population walked around with a downcast expression plastered on their faces. They walked around with little energy in their motion, going through the motions of intensive labor just to stay alive. People yawned immensely, some struggling to keep awake. They saw one girl – couldn’t have been older than twelve – fail to tighten a bolt on a construction project properly. She had to twist herself to avoid getting crushed and clearly dislodged a shoulder in the process.

Her cries sent pain into the hearts of the newcomers, but they didn’t have to do anything – they saw people taking her away, presumably to the hospital. They saw other people walking around in casts, but still working.

“You do have it rough here,” Daniel commented.

“No argument here,” Henry responded. “It’s nothing but work, work, and work to stay alive. Things have calmed down a little since the engineers improved the generator’s efficiency, but it’s still hard. At least we’re actually able to educate the children now…”

“What do you guys eat?”

“It’s called gruel. It’ll be a treat when you get to it. Everyone swears it’s fifty percent sawdust, fifty percent random mold. It’s disgusting but it works.”

Daniel looked around at all the dour faces. “Do you have anything to look forward to? Any leisure?”

“Besides the occasional duel? Not really. We’ve been hanging to life by a thread for so long…”

Tempest raised an eyebrow. “Duels?”

“Well – oh, it looks like one’s happening right now. Over there.”

The six of them looked. A small crowd of people was forming around two men, each glaring at each other. An official-looking woman with an ugly green robe stood between them.

She looked at the two men, arms folded. “This duel is officially sanctioned. The weapons – type 5 pistols.” She produced the two pistols from her robe. “The dispute is over the courtship of one Eliza Bennet, let it be known. The setup is a five paces quickdraw. The weapons will be returned to me upon conclusion, or else punishment will be severe.” She handed the guns to the men and casually strode out of the ring, face expressionless- bored if anything.

The crowd cheered as the two men moved five paces back and glared at each other, hands on their guns as if they were in some old western movie – just how the people liked it.

There was a BANG, and the man on the left fell to the ground, a hole in his chest. He didn’t scream, he just tipped over like a ragdoll. The crowd went wild, patting the victor on the back. He grinned, especially when a woman who was presumably Eliza Bennet flung herself around him, laughing jovially.

The people who had only a few minutes ago looked hopeless and destitute now walked around with excited smiles on their faces, chattering excitedly. There was a decidedly sharp improvement in the people’s mood from the bloody duel.

But there was one sorrowful person – an old woman standing over the dead man’s body, weeping bitterly. She was probably his mother. Official-looking people came in to clean up the body, having to tear it from the mother’s hands.

“This place just earned some respect from me,” Azula said.

“Huh? Why?” Henry said. “It was just a duel. Happens every few days.”

Daniel forced the lump in his throat down. “Is that really all you have to look forward to here?”

“…Pretty much. It’s either that or talk about rumors. And the rumors get more outlandish every day.”

“Such as?” Tempest asked.

“The most recent one is that there’s some girl who can walk in doors and just vanish. If you ask me, it’s just some clever girl who’s figured out how to use the vent systems. Probably a thief.”

Mitchell nodded. “I think we need to see this Marge now. How far away is she?”

“I am right here.” An older woman with a sharp nose, white hair, and a pale blue cloak walked up to them. “We never get newcomers here. Henry, explain.”

“They brought back Aria from the wastes, Marge. Found us from a radio signal. This is Colonel Cameron Mitchell and his team, a special operations unit of some sort.”

She turned to Mitchell. “You’re American, and most of your team is as well, but clearly you’re international.”

“Yes,” Mitchell said.

“Care to explain how you survived the freeze?”

“We have our own secret base, not all that far from here. Been there the whole time.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why didn’t you pick up our signal earlier?”

“Had other problems to deal with first before we could send a team to investigate.”

“Took you that long to get organized?”

“Took you this long to get make your generator better?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I mentioned it,” Henry said. “Was I not supposed to?”

Marge pressed her hands together. “You’re fine, Henry. As for you… I don’t suppose you are allowed to tell me much, are you?”

“That’s right, everything’s classified.”

“Can you at least provide some assistance?” Marge asked, somehow managing to ask the question in a standoffish manner.

Mitchell glanced at where there had been a duel but a few minutes before. “I’m not sure about that, we were not expecting to find such a full-fledged civilization here. We may not be prepared.”

“You have the resources,” Marge said. It wasn’t a question. “How dare you think we don’t deserve it?”

Azula chuckled. “She’s observant!”

Daniel held up a hand. “Before we start yelling at each other about who deserves help or not, let’s realize that we’ve all only just met and that we may all be jumping to conclusions.”

Marge nodded. “Your diplomat is right. Stay a day, live among us. See what it’s like here in Therma beyond first impressions. See if you can come to realize that the future of humanity depends on our continued survival.”

Mitchell nodded. “All right. We’ll stay for a while. I think we were going to do that anyway.”

Marge nodded. “Good. You’ll be placed on the construction of the Repository.”

“…Wait, what?” Daniel blurted.

“Everyone in Therma has to work. You’ll be no exceptions.”

“Wouldn’t we be better as soldiers or hunters?”

“How would you get to see our city that way?” Marge folded her arms. “You’re working on the Repository. That’s final.” She turned and walked away.

Mitchell blinked. “...We don’t have to listen to her, you know.”

“But we will,” Teal’c said.

“…Yeah, fine. Let’s go build a Repository. Lead the way, Henry. That woman…”

Tempest folded her arms. “Colonel, why are we doing this? We should just leave.”

“These people can get at least some help out of us.”

Tempest shook her head but didn’t comment any further. Henry led them back to the edge of Therma to experience the life of a citizen.

~~~

Trixie grinned, levitating her hat into the air. “And for the grand finale, Trixie shall pull herself out of her own hat!” She reached into her hat with her magic and pulled, pulling herself into nothing and back out of the hat, landing flat on her hooves. Fireworks exploded from behind her, flying into the air and covering the sky with images of her face. The audience went wild. “Thank you all for your adoration! Next show in… half an hour. Be there!” She pulled the curtain closed, grinning. “This feels great! Trixie was expecting adoration but not this much.”

“I bet it feels great,” Corona said, muttering.

“Corona! What are you doing backstage? Trixie and Discord are the only ones allowed back here!”

“I needed to talk to you without the crowd constantly demanding your attention!”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Pfft, Trixie isn’t that self-absorbed, she can tear herself from a crowd if she wants.”

Corona raised an incredulous eyebrow.

“Okay, most of the time. What did you need to talk about? Do you think we’ll bring about chaos and destruction?”

“Maybe?”

“Corona, Trixie can’t believe she has to tell you this, but lighten up. It’s just a show, and Discord’s just having some fun. There have been no authorities here telling us to stop, so I think we’re good. You’re friends with human-me, you should know I can handle this.”

“They’re all scared of Discord!”

“Please, if they were really that scared they’d try to drop a nuke.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “They aren’t that stupid.”

“Then we’re good!”

“Trixie, just waltzing in here without any warning draws too much attention!”

“That’s the idea! Trixie’s an Internet celebrity, Corona, Trixie plans to capitalize on that.”

“You aren’t charging admission.”

“Yet,” Trixie said. “Plus, the adoration of the crowd is generally payment enough.”

“You need to get over yourself.”

“You need to-“ Trixie stopped herself. “You’re jealous aren’t you!”

“What? No I-“

“You’re jealous! You’ve been here for months as a unicorn and you never got this much attention!”

“That’s not what this is abou-“

“Take some advice from Trixie, Corona. You want ponies to notice you; you have to get out there. Be bombastic, loud, and put on a show! I can get you in on the act, actually. You’ve got some pretty good fire magic. The dragon thing would be killer.”

“You’re shifting between pronouns, Trixie”

“Trixie can refer to herself however I want whenever I want.”

Corona facehooved. ”Ugh… Trixie, this isn’t the point. The point i-“

“Look, Corona, if you’re really worried, you should talk to Discord. He’s the one with the powers that can actually do damage. Look at me. Nothing I do here is more than clever illusions, and everyone knows it. Personally, I think he’s got himself under control and won’t make a mess of things.”

“A vote of confidence in Discord?”

“Yeah. We’re friends. Isn’t that, like, loyalty or something?”

Corona blinked. “…Right.”

“Corona, you really are making this into a bigger deal than it needs to be. It’s just fun. We’ll be gone tomorrow and things will more or less go back to the way they were. Discord knows better than to leave chaos magic around and Trixie will vanish with a smoke bomb, as usual.”

“…Why is it I keep getting things wrong...”

“You’re insecure?”

Corona chuckled. “At least you have the decency to treat it like it’s a question. Sugarcoat wouldn’t.”

Trixie shrugged. “Trixie has her ways. Now, if you’ll excuse Trixie, there’s another show to prep for and chocolate pudding to eat.”

“Fine. I guess I’ll calm down. But if something does go wrong, I will be relentlessly smug about it.”

“Trixie has no fears.”

~~~

Discord sat on a throne surrounded by two dozen enamored students. The football field they were on was hardly recognizable – covered in hexagon patterns, soap stains, and unusual maze walls. He grinned – he could get used to this.

“Discord!” a young man yelled. “As your followers, we ask that you bestow us with powers to further your chaos!”

Discord put his hand to his chin. “Well… I suppose. You’ll only get it for a day though, so use it well!”

“Of course!”

Discord snapped his fingers. “There. Now you can summon bubbles faster than any bubble blowing machine ever could. Probably.”

A woman raised her hand. “Me next! Me next!”

“Uh… You can turn inanimate objects into high velocity bagels.”

“Thank you!”

Discord smiled as he saw his ‘followers’ use their new chaotic powers. This was amazing. Perhaps he should consider getting more…

~~~

Daniel sat down at the lunch hall table, hands folded. His uniform was dusted with soot, torn in a few places, and his hand had a nasty scratch on it. “These people need help.”

“That was the whole point,” Azula pointed out. “She wanted to force us to have empathy. A classic tactic.”

“You’d know,” Tempest muttered.

Azula smirked. “Thank you!”

Mitchell rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the pain on his back. “They have it hard… And they don’t have any contact with the outside. They can’t be a threat, no reason not to.”

“No reason?” Tempest blurted. ”She’s a manipulator, and a cruel one at that. If we let them into the multiverse we may have a problem. They’ll get demanding.”

“She has a point,” Teal’c said. “They want much. They may not be many, but their need is significant.”

“Just ask Cosmo,” Daniel said. “She’s got resources and land to spare.”

Tempest folded her arms. “We’re interfering too much. We are not gods.”

Mitchell frowned. “You’re bringing the ‘Prime Directive’ argument into this? Really?”

Daniel furrowed his brow. “It is an important debate… We do have to consider how our actions affect the future. The more we interfere like we’ve been doing, the more everyone else will do that. Even if it is good in this one case, that doesn’t mean it’s better in all cases.”

“Isn’t that kinda the point?” Mitchell asked. “From what I understand, Renee’s putting forth the idea of ‘case by case basis’ for interference.”

“She is writing up some proposals,” Daniel confirmed. “They’re in very early stages and not everyone has agreed that’s the way to do it. Jack wants a non-interference policy, while there are others who want every universe ever discovered to be told about the multiverse.”

“Let me guess,” Azula said, leaning in. ”Ponies who don’t like secrets are in that camp?”

“Sometimes. It’s usually power-hungry manipulator types arguing for it.”

Azula blinked and said nothing.

“I think we can agree that complete transparency is a bad idea,” Tempest said. “This does not change the argument between non-interference and the ‘case by case’ interference. You know if we set precedent for case by case, some explorers are going to take advantage of the freedom.”

“Renee has been discussing a license…”

Tempest snorted. “Renee isn’t here and we’re not that far along. We’re in the era where the problem is just barely being noticed, Daniel Jackson. What we groups at the front decide set what people in the future will base the laws around. The Charter has already declared her support for case by case judgements. You, the Tau’ri, are the other major voice in this debate. O’Neill advocates the Prime Directive. Cosmic has not made a stance, and frankly the opinions of the others don’t matter all that much.”

“Why are you speaking like we’re united?” Azula said. “We’re not. We are friends today, but we could easily be enemies tomorrow. It makes things fun.”

Tempest nodded. “Yes. Which is why we can set a different precedent than the ponies are. We are separate, operating under Tau’ri oversight. What we do reflects on their future.”

Mitchell took a breath. “Daniel? What do you think?”

“I’m not sure,” Daniel admitted. “We interfered a lot on missions in our own universe with every planet we found, but as we’ve expanded, we’ve found that interfering with alternates of ourselves doesn’t go well most often… But…” He frowned, looking at all the hungry and cold people in the hall around them. “These people are losing hope. They will die if we don’t do something. The planet is freezing around them. We have to do something.”

“Then that’s what we’re doing,” Mitchell said. “We’ll help them.”

“Hey, what about-“ Tempest began.

“This isn’t a democracy,” Mitchell chided her.

Tempest clearly wanted to punch him, but resisted the urge.

Daniel turned to Mitchell. “We don’t need to tell them about the multiverse. We can just give them supplies from the ‘secret government base’ we’ve been telling them about. It’ll keep their dueling mentality away from the others.”

“That would be hard to deal with,” Teal’c said.

Mitchell nodded. “It’s a plan. We’ll let Landry work out the specifics of the help. Soon as we can get away and dial home, get news back. …Hey, Wan, what do you think?”

Wan just nodded in agreement with the plan.

“Right. Anyway… Where is lunch? We’ve been waiting forever!”

A kid ran into the mess hall. “Someone stole the food!”

“What do you mean someone stole the food?” a man yelled.

“The main warehouse is empty!” the kid yelled.

“Uh oh…” Mitchell said.

“I bet those new guys took it!” a woman said, pointing at the six of them.

The people in the mess hall stood up, murder in their eyes. They began to move toward the six of them.

“There’s a window behind us and to the left,” Teal’c told Mitchell. “We could-“

Azula interrupted him by standing up so fast she knocked her chair over. “We did no such thing!”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah!” Azula said, putting her hands on her hips. “And you know what? The sheer audacity of you accusing us makes me livid. Think we could resolve this with a duel? I’ll represent my side.”

“Azula what are you doing!?” Tempest hissed.

Azula ignored her. “Come on, who’ll face me?”

“I will,” a burly man with impressive stubble said, standing up – clearly a man who had been in more than a few fights in his time. “What’s the weapon?”

Azula grinned. “Would you happen to know martial arts?”

“Yes. Are you asking for hand to hand?”

“Precisely,” Azula said, pointing a finger at him. “I am Azula. You?”

“Raymond.”

“Good. When do we do this? I’m not exactly familiar with your customs.”

“Tonight. Eight. I’ll have everything put through the proper channels.”

Azula grinned. “Nice.”

The angered crowd of people slowly dispersed, knowing they weren't going to get lunch, but also knowing that tonight they were going to get a duel with a newcomer. It was exciting.

“What was that!?” Mitchell yelled at Azula.

“You’re welcome,” Azula muttered. “Now they’re not going to mob-kill us. I saw it in their eyes, they wanted to, and no offense to muscles over there, but there was a lot of them.”

Mitchell put a hand to his forehead. “Fine. We’re not helping you with that duel though.”

“I can burn one man.”

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Pretty sure they’d consider that cheating.”

“Whatever.”

Mitchell took out the dimensional device and handed it to Teal’c. “Leave Therma and go get some food stores for these people. Take Wan with you. Make sure to get your weapons before you leave.”

“Indeed.” He took the device and walked away with Wan.

Daniel furrowed his brow. “We should investigate the missing food.”

“Duh,” Azula said.

The four of them set out across the street to the food stores. There was a small crowd outside, but none were allowed in – Henry was guarding it. “Go back to your jobs!” He yelled at the crowd. “Do you know what Marge will do if you riot?”

The small crowd of people heard Marge’s name dropped and quickly ran like scared dogs, allowing Daniel and the rest to walk up to Henry. “Food missing?” Daniel asked.

“You heard?” Henry grunted. “This is what we get for employing the children…” he shook his head. “I can’t let you in.”

“We sent Teal’c and Wan to go get food from our base for you,” Mitchell said. “The least you can do is let us look. I bet you have the authority to do that.”

Henry nodded slowly. ”I do. Fine, you can come in.” He let the four of them in and shut the door behind them. The warehouse was a single, large room with a dozen tremendous metal barrels that should have been filled with dried grains, edible fungus, and the like – but all of it was empty, besides a few scattered pieces of grain and fungus on the ground.

“How could someone have taken all this…” Mitchell muttered.

Tempest looked left and right suspiciously before taking a tablet out of her pocket and performing some scans. “We’ve got magic levels in here.”

“Is there magic in this world?”

“The levels were three hundred times lower out in the blizzard. I’d have to scan elsewhere in Therma to be sure, but something that probably wasn’t supposed to be in this universe happened here.”

“Did something follow us? Sombra?”

“These people don’t use advanced computers,” Daniel said. “While Sombra could definitely do something, I don’t think she could steal all this food… Plus, this isn’t exactly her M.O. Not to mention the lack of her signature.”

“Got something!” Azula said, lifting a small, green globe off the ground. It resembled a crystal ball, but glowed more like a glowstick and had visible circuitry lining the outside. “This doesn’t belong here.”

Daniel took it and examined the circuitry. “Not a language… But definitely not from here. Too advanced.”

Tempest scanned it. “The scanner says it’s producing a magical field to fuel its light spell. It’s not struggling against the physics of this universe at all…”

Mitchell raised an eyebrow. “Don’t most spells weaken or require more power when placed in a universe with low magic?”

“Yes… This isn’t. It’s overwriting the physics of this universe, substituting its own.”

“That’s unheard of.”

“No,” Daniel said. “The black spheres with the green diamonds did that. They had to, because they were technologies designed to work in any universe.” He held the glowglobe in his hand. “Not even the Enterprise or Feldspar was able to do this… This is a feat of engineering beyond us at the moment.”

“And it’s a flashlight,” Azula commented.

“Yeah. A flashlight. I’m not sure I want to read too much into what this implies we’ve stumbled across…”

Mitchell crouched, lowering himself to the ground. “Someone’s been in here.”

“Oh?” Daniel responded.

“I see evidence of footprints. Small, possibly a child.”

“Probably the child that told everyone what had happened.”

“It’s hard to see against the wood floor, but the dust patterns…” He moved behind one of the large metal drums. “It’s clearer back here, easily seen in the dust. Nobody comes back here.” He followed a trail to a door, and opened it, revealing a long hallway covered in dust – but where there were no footprints. He reeled back, baffled – he was trained to track as part of his military schooling, and he knew the girl had come through this door – but he also knew she hadn’t come out the other side.

He walked out from behind the drum. “Okay, so maybe the rumor about the girl who walks through doors and vanishes is a real thing.”

Tempest frowned, glancing at the glowglobe. “So we have a mysterious girl with probably access to advanced magic. Why would she need to steal all the food?”

“Good question,” Daniel said, hand to his chin. “What if-“

The door to the warehouse flew open. Daniel stuffed the glowglobe into his pocket as fast as he could, and Tempest hid her tablet. A man in a long silvery coat strode in, holding out identification. “I am Doctor John Smith, and I’m here to investigate the mysterious vanishing of food in this warehouse. Tell me, what are you four doing here?”

“Investigating as well,” Mitchell said.

“Have you found anything?”

“Besides a trail that goes to that door and ends? Nothing,” Tempest answered.

“Hm… Hm…” John Smith said, walking around, an incredulous look in his eyes. “Where are your other two team members?”

“Getting food from our base to help yours,” Mitchell said.

“Really… So what you’re telling me is that you’re our saviors in our time of need?”

“If that’s how you want to see it.”

John Smith raised an eyebrow. “What if, bear with me a moment here, you stole the food just so you could replace it and seem like the heroes?”

“Oh, this again!?” Azula said. “Do I need to duel you too?”

“Ah, no, I’m not part of such a barbaric practice. I’m just here to solve a crime, and you are my prime suspects.”

“We were working on the Repository all day,” Daniel said. “Ask around.”

“I’ve examined your weapons. You have access to some rather spectacular technology, I must say. Your secret base must be very well funded. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had something that could make all the food vanish from a distance.”

“We don’t have any such thing!” Michell shouted.

Azula whistled innocently.

John Smith did something that no normal human would do – he noticed her falsely innocent whistling, and then called her out on it. “Oh, so you can do that? Specifically you? Curious. I hear you challenged Raymond to a duel in martial arts. You have a special trick up your sleeve, don’t you?”

Azula’s confident smile faltered for the first time the entire mission. She said nothing.

John Smith smiled. “Right! So you’re some kind of powerhouse that could do this, through some esoteric means. Wonder if you’re a wizard of some sort. But that’d be silly, wouldn’t it?” He chuckled. “Daniel Jackson, you’re hiding something in your pockets.”

“Classified, Mister Smith.”

“What a convenient excuse, that,” John Smith said, whirling around. He still had a smile on his face that was somehow rather jovial, despite the nature of the comment. “I ask a question, you just say it’s classified. What am I going to do, shout it to the world? This is just a small town, not worth your time or effort.”

He’s trying to convince us to just leave, Daniel thought. He cleared his throat. “We’ll be out of your hair as soon as we replace your food stores, if that’s what you want.”

“Really? Your base must be really close by. I’m pretty sure the scouting parties would have found it if it was within twenty miles.”

“It wouldn’t be very secret if it was easy to find.”

John Smith put a hand to his chin. “You have a point there…” Suddenly, a grin grew across his face. “Oh… Ooooooh… If you’ll excuse me, I have something to attend to. Such a wonder, talking to you.” He ran out of the warehouse.

Tempest blinked. “That man was way too clever for his own good.”

“He’s onto us,” Mitchell said. “And that makes us look guilty in his eyes.”

“We should find out what happened to the food, and fast,” Daniel said. “I don’t think he’ll be distracted by… Whatever he was distracted by for long.”

~~~

Corona had just started believing Trixie’s assertions that nothing was going to go horribly wrong when the man that summoned lizards from his mouth started tormenting Trixie’s crowd. The swarm of sticky, wet reptiles sent the adoring crowd screaming in every direction.

Trixie shrieked. “What are you doing!?”

“Using my new powers, what does it look like?” He hurled a lizard onto her face.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW!” Trixie shrieked, tearing the wet reptile off her face and tossing it to the ground.

Corona encased the lizard-spewing man in a red crystal. “HEY TRIXIE!” she shouted.

“W-what?” Trixie said, face already red.

“I TOLD YOU SO!” She ground her teeth. “We need to go talk to Discord.”

“Trixie is sure he’ll have a good explana-“

Corona glared at her.

“Uh… I think we should go talk to Discord too.”

“That’s good. Sparky, with me!”

Sparky performed a teleport, appearing to Corona’s side, wobbling. Trixie trotted on the other side.

The three of them barely made it one step before a man with the power to create ice that was as hot as a roast turkey dinner appeared, riding a sled of his own bizarrely warm ice. Corona swore the ice smelled like turkey. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Corona lit her horn, red magic swirling around it. “Going to talk to Discord. You should get out of the way.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, we can’t allow that.” He said. A girl appeared to his left, her slender body duplicating itself several times over. To his right another man in a tuxedo appeared – his eyes glowing slightly.

“All right, Freezy, Copy, and Starey, get out of the way,” Corona growled. “I am Corona Shimmer, and you don’t know what you’re dealing with. You and your friends are tormenting this campus.”

“Jumping to conclusions much, are we?” the girls dubbed ‘Copy’ said. “We’re just enjoying our powers!”

Corona pointed at a bunch of bagels flying through the air and breaking windows. “That’s tormenting!”

Starey stepped forward, expression flat. “We can’t let you talk to Discord. He would remove our powers. And we can’t have that.”

“I thought you were his followers!?” Trixie shouted. “Shouldn’t you want what he wants?”

Corona blinked. “…They played him. Pretended to be his followers so they could get powers.”

Freezy clapped loudly. “You’re significantly smarter than he is. But he has given us the power of chaos. We a-“

Corona froze him in a box of red crystal. “One down, two to-“ Corona blinked. The box of red crystal was gone, and Freezy was free. Trixie and Sparky were nowhere to be seen. She teleported out of the way of the unpleasantly hot ice, only to end up in a location that she hadn’t intended to teleport to. The Copy copies were there, even though Corona was sure they hadn’t been there before. They tackled her, but she blew them back with a burst of telekinesis. She kicked off her boots and touched one of the Copys on the face – but no emotions rushed into her mind.

I’m under the influence of an illusion or something.

She grabbed one of her back boots and pulled out a particular pair of sunglasses. “SOMBRA! Come in! My senses and possibly my mind are compromised, help!”

A message appeared on her lenses. We’re sorry, Sombra can’t come the phone right now. Please leave a message after the beep! That was the beep, Corona, just leave a message.

“You heard me – or you didn’t and I’m still under the influence...” Corona muttered, leaping back over a bunch of ice shads. It’s probably mister Starey that’s doing this, but I can’t exactly be sure if hitting him will actually hit him…

I’ve just got to hope when I yell out that I’m actually talking and not in some vegetative state.

“TRIXIE! You’re the illusion master; you know how to see through illusions! Do something about this!”

She had no idea if Trixie heard her – or if Trixie could hear her. That was the problem, she had no idea how far the sense manipulation of Starey went. She just had to operate however she could.

She focused all the magic she could into a complex matrix designed to protect her from incoming ice and Copy duplicates. She still wasn’t getting anything off the sunglasses, and contact never let her get the emotions of others. She glared at Starey, trying to take him down with fire, but his form moved without moving – it was suddenly in another place the moment she fired.

“This is hardly fair!”

“This is power,” Starey said. “This is magic so many of us have dreamed of for so long. You will not take it from us.”

“There are other ways to get magic!”

“Not of this power.” He pointed a finger at Corona. “You were gifted with power, and you don’t use it. That’s why you’re in the background. That’s why you’re nothing.”

Corona snarled. “I used my power once. It turned me into a monster. I’d rather you didn’t go through that. It may be too late though.”

“That’s all you need to thi-“ A firework explosion went off behind his head. The illusions around Corona vanished the moment Starey hit the ground. She was able to hear Sombra laughing in her ear.

Trixie whooped. “Yeah! Got him! Take that, you substandard illusionist!”

Sparky looked around, blinking. “Wh… What happened?”

Freezy and Copy looked at each other. “I guess we’ll actually have to fight now,” Copy said.

Corona removed her sunglasses and put her boots back on. “Nope.” She lit her horn and teleported the three of them right to Discord. “Should have done this from the start.”

Discord looked at them. “Hm? What brings you to my chaos capita-“

“Discord your ‘followers’ are playing you just so you’ll give them cool powers and then they are abusing the powers to do whatever they want.”

Discord dropped his bag of popcorn, the contents spilling into the sky and turning into teddy bears made of marshmallows. “…What?”

A woman looked panicked. “I assure you, great Discord, we had no such intent-“

Discord snapped his fingers, removing all the chaos and powers in an instant. He glared at all of them. “Care to explain? Any of you?”

“Corona’s lying!” one of them shouted.

Discord appeared next to the shouting man. “You, hey you, SHUT UP, Corona’s not exactly a liar. And, you know what, now that I think about it you all seemed too eager. Well guess what? I’m never giving out special powers again! You’ve ruined it for everyone! And I’m taking Trixie away!”

Trixie blinked. “Wh-“

“We’re leaving Trixie.”

“But-“

Discord raised an eyebrow. “Trixie?”

“Er… Okay, fine, they lost their chance.” She sighed. “Goodbye all! The Great and Powerful Trixie will probably not be back! Shame on you!”

Discord snapped his fingers and the two of them were gone.

The crowd of students dispersed, suddenly not wanting to be anywhere near where the teachers could find them and make them clean up.

Corona sat down and rubbed her temples. “Ugh…

Sparky blinked. “I still have no idea what happened.”

“I was right. That’s what happened,” Corona muttered. “Just wait until tomorrow when the news picks this up and blows it up in everyone’s faces.”

Sparky blinked again. “…I’m still confused. Was there or wasn’t there a giant evil quesadilla?”

“No, there was not. He must have really gotten into your head.”

~~~

“Got a description of the girl,” Tempest reported. “Maybe fourteen years of age. Reddish eyes, white hair that some people claim was slightly blue. Her most distinctive feature is the two red gloves she has on her hands. Her clothing is also odd for this world – smooth, almost rubbery. She’s been seen entering several doors and never leaving, even when people walk in right after her. There’s occasional mention of her being accompanied by someone, but those descriptions don’t match up.”

“Why doors?” Daniel wondered. “What is it about doors that make everyone associate them with her? Surely she disappears behind other things. Surely people see her in other locations…”

“Any pattern to where they see her?” Mitchell asked.

“More sightings around the generator than anywhere else,” Tempest said.

“Then we go there,” he stood up and adjusted his hat. “Since we don’t have our weapons, if we run into a problem – Azula, you’ll be our only firepower.”

“Not a problem. It’ll be nice if some fun shows up.”

“You are not to instigate a fight.”

“Fiiiiine.”

The four of them quickly arrived at the central generator areas. There had once been living quarters surrounding the generator, but they were abandoned now. It was sweltering here, so hot that nothing could be done comfortably. There were only a few generator engineers working around the giant cylinder, and these people were sweating profusely.

“It’s a giant space heater,” Mitchell said. “…I was expecting it to be more elaborate.”

“Sometimes simplicity works best,” Azula said. “If we were in the Fire Nation we’d just have firebenders pouring fire into the air twenty-four-seven to accomplish the same thing.”

“This must take a tremendous amount of power,” Daniel observed. “I wonder what they did to get it working this efficiently.”

“Trade secret, classified, that sort of thing,” Tempest said. “Y’know, like how we can’t tell them what we’re doing.”

“Right…” Daniel said, looking around with curiosity. He wiped his brow.

Then he saw it – something unusual tucked between two buildings. “Hey, what’s that?”

Everyone turned. They saw what could only be described as a blue phone box sitting snugly between two buildings, mostly in the shadows. The door was slightly ajar, allowing a slight glow to come out – the glow being the only reason Daniel had noticed it.

Cautiously, Mitchell approached the phone box. He touched his boot to the door, pulling it open the rest of the way. All four of their jaws dropped.

“It’s bigger on the inside…” Azula managed to say.

Mitchell walked in cautiously. The phone box should only have been able to hold one or two people, but the room he entered could easily hold twenty. It was spherical, with a large column of complex glowing technology in the center. A beyond-complicated console surrounded this central column, lined with buttons, levers, screens, widgets, and springs that served some indecipherable function. The outer walls were lined with doors, stairs, and there was even one side that had a small bookshelf.

“What is this place?” Mitchell asked as he walked around the central pole.

Azula leaned in to touch one of the central buttons, but Tempest slapped her hand away.

Daniel went right for the bookshelf. On top of it was a tremendous tome with a peculiar design on the cover – three large circles of differing sizes arranged around an unusual symbol that resembled a ‘K’ with a line through it. A fourth circle was inscribed near the bottom of the cover, distant from the other three.

The Multiverse.

“Guys?” Daniel called to them. “I think I’ve just found a Directory.”

“What?”

“A multiversal guidebook.” He held up the tome, showing its cover to everyone. “I think this might be a map of sorts. You know how Twilight’s map arranges things into two ‘spheres’ – east and west? This suggests there might be others – two or three, I don’t know what all the symbols mean.”

“What’s inside?” Tempest asked.

Daniel tried to open the book – but it wouldn’t let him. “Sealed shut. Don’t have any mages to open it either…”

“We could just take it back with us,” Azula said. “I’m sure whoever owns this place has a few extra around.”

“Aaaaaand that’s all I needed to hear!” the voice of John Smith echoed through the room. The front doors of the phone box closed and locked. John Smith opened another door and walked into the room. “Multiversal travelers, aware of magic, and thieves.”

Azula pointed a finger at John Smith – but he pulled a small, blue rod out of his coat. “Ah ah ah, we can’t have that! Terribly sorry.” All four of them froze. John Smith smiled. “Now, the question remains – why are you tormenting these people?”

“We aren’t!” Mitchell shouted. “We just got here today!”

“What are the chances that not one, not two, but three multiversal parties make contact with the same separated universe within a few days of each other? Not very likely. Since I know you’re not with me, you must be with her.”

“Who is she?” Daniel asked.

John Smith rolled his eyes. “Don’t you play dumb with me! I’m the one who wants to know who she is! You tell me!”

“We have no idea!” Mitchell said. “I’m Colonel Cameron Mitchell and we’re with Earth Tau’ri, ally of Equis Vitis, Earth Vitis, Lai, Equis Cosmic, and the Elemental Nations! We didn’t even know there was a settlement on this world until today!”

“And I’m the Doctor, the Traveling Doctor,” the Doctor said. “And none of those names ring any bells. The words Equis and Earth being exceptions, but those are just standard world names. This is not the first time I’ve dealt with a Cameron Mitchell or Daniel Jackson, however. A disgrace to your counterparts, you’re usually the good guys.”

“Think about this,” Daniel said. “If we knew what was going on, why would we be investigating the girl? We’d just be able to go right to her!”

“The working theory is that she’s a runaway of yours and you’re trying to catch her and sweep the mess you created under the rug.”

“Yeah, no,” Daniel said. “I have proof of this, but I have to reach into my coat to show it. Okay?”

The Doctor pointed the rod directly at Daniel. “Go ahead.”

Daniel removed the glowglobe. “We found this. We do not have the capabilities to make such a technology. It overwrites the local physics of this universe, replacing it with its own light spell. None of our mages can do this, and this is just a flashlight.”

The Doctor blinked. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth? I’ve met some really good liars.”

“Oh for the-“ Tempest couldn’t take it anymore. She unleashed a spin-kick on the rod the Doctor had in his hand. He reacted quickly, using a precise calculation of movement and a twist of his body to knock Tempest to the ground. She tried to get back up, but he kicked the back of her leg, making her fall flat on her back.

He pointed the rod right in her face. “Nope.”

Tempest grinned. “That rod does nothing.”

“I assure you, it does something.”

“It’s not a weapon though.”

The Doctor tensed. Then he held up his hands, sticking the rod back into his coat. “I could probably modify this sonic screwdriver to do some damage quickly, but I know when I’ve been made.”

Daniel looked at Tempest. “How did you…?”

“He would have used it on me if it was a weapon,” Tempest said. “Even if he didn’t go for a lethal blow, it could have been used to threaten me. But he just took me down.” Her smile fell as she realized she had just been well and truly trounced by a man without a weapon. She made some disgruntled noises.

Azula turned to Mitchell. “Can I burn him?”

Mitchell shook his head. “We’re on the same side here. Do you realize that, Doctor?”

The Doctor furrowed his brow. “I’m not completely sold on it just yet…”

Mitchell shrugged. “Teal’c and Wan have our dimensional device, so we can’t just show you…”

Daniel’s eyes lit up. “I got it. Doctor, you said you think we’re after the girl to clean up our mess?”

“That still seems rather likely, yes.”

“We aren’t, but even if we are that still means we want the same thing. To catch her – and by consequence save these people. We should work together.”

The Doctor shrugged. “That’s all fine and good, but do you have any leads I don’t?”

“We know what she looks like, that she disappears through doors, and has been seen hanging around the generator lately.”

“I know all those things,” the Doctor said. “I also know she vanishes through doors because her particular method of interdimensional travel relies completely on doorways. No idea why.”

“I had a thought earlier,” Daniel said. “She’d clearly have no use for food. What if she came to the room for the same reason we did – to investigate? To find out where the food went?”

The Doctor blinked. “That makes some sense, but that means there’d have to be something else here. Something that could take all that food in an instant… Something that hasn’t been here for very long, or it would have happened befo-“

Daniel and the Doctor locked eyes.

“The engineers upgraded the generator,” they said at the same time.

The Doctor snapped his fingers, opening the doors to the phone box. “Everyone out of the TARDIS!”

“Tardis?” Azula commented.

“Time And Relative Dimensions In Space – I do not have time to explain this right now! Let’s go, to the object of our interest!”

The five of them rushed out of the TARDIS doors, toward the generator. They stopped right next to the extremely hot object.

“So,” the Doctor said. “Anyone know how to get in?”

“Is there even an inside at all?” Mitchell asked.

“Has to be. Maintenance tunnels at least…” the Doctor facepalmed. “Everyone back in the TARDIS.”

“…We just left,” Azula pointed out.

“I can teleport us right in. Just a quick jump into the middle, the TARDIS will find where she can land.”

The five of them piled back into the blue phone box. The Doctor closed the doors and began activating dozens of lights with the central console. Nobody could follow the pattern of inputs he was inserting, and that was probably the point. The TARDIS shook slightly and the central column glowed a brighter white. A VWEEEEERRRRP VWEEEEEEERRP VWEEEEEERP noise met their ears – and then there was a thump. The Doctor snapped his fingers, opening the front doors.

The inside of the generator was so hot the temperature difference created a wind in the Tardis’ interior, blowing a few loose objects around. The five of them didn’t care – they marched out into the heat. The place was dark, but the central heating element let out a consistent dim red glow that covered the area in a hellish scheme.

And then there was the thing. It was square, but it had five sides. It was in three dimensions, but it shifted through thousands of cross sections before their eyes. It was bright, but it didn’t cast any light. It was impossible to look at, because it didn’t make sense.

What could be seen was a large cable dangling from the ceiling, channeling power from the thing, shunting it into the heating element.

“That’s not supposed to be here,” Mitchell said.

Tempest pulled out her scanning device and the Doctor pulled out his screwdriver. Their eyes widened.

“I’m not getting any readings that make sense,” Tempest said.

“Seven-dimensional object,” the Doctor said. “It really shouldn’t exist here. It’s reaching into dimensions this universe can’t handle… Probably causing spontaneous teleportations.”

“Is it… bad?” Daniel asked.

“Not really,” the Doctor said. “It’s an object. They’re running power from it, but they don’t know how to control it. I could probably get them an appropriate replacement…”

“I’m afraid that won’t be happening.”

They looked to their left, to see Marge standing above them on a metallic scaffold. Below here were a half-dozen soldiers – including Raymond. Marge continued. “We will figure out how to use this divine gift, and you can’t use your secrets to stop us, or give us something else. It is ours, and we will use it to thrive. You can’t have it back.”

“…Back?” Mitchell said. “Wait! We’re not with the girl-“

“Likely story. Raymond, get them.”

Azula turned to Mitchell. “Can I?”

Mitchell nodded.

Raymond and his compatriots had to raise their guns. Then they were on fire, their clothes and skin burning. The surprise came so far out of left field that they all dropped their guns. Some remembered to stop, drop, and roll – Raymond was not one of them. He charged Azula, ignoring the intense pain of flames on him. He raised his fist – she shot him to the ground with a fireball.

“You’re all regular humans,” Azula said, snarling. “You can’t do anything against me.”

“Not me, but I have a new friend,” Marge said, pulling a large cable from behind her. She flicked a switch on the wall, forcing a tremendous bolt of lightning to shoot out from the wire. Azula managed to duck out of the way, but the current found a target – Daniel. The poorly-controlled and primitive blast of electricity went right through his chest. He fell backward, motionless.

“Daniel!” Mitchell yelled, kneeling down to tend to him. Tempest, the Doctor, and Azula acted as a single unit. Marge fired off another bolt of electricity from the wire, but Azula caught it in her hands, twirling in the air as she did so. The Doctor Pulled out his sonic screwdriver, overloading the technology in the wire, making it useless. Tempest rolled, picked up one of the discarded guns, and shot Marge right in the head.

To add to the overkill, Azula released the bolt of lightning out of her body, returning it to Marge. Her body shuddered with the electric signals and fell back, smoking.

The Doctor shook his head in disappointment at the sight of death.

Tempest lowered the gun. “All clear.”

Everyone crowded around the form of Daniel. Mitchell was checking his pulse. “He’s still got one, but it’s irregular…”

“That lightning hit near his heart,” Azula said. “He’s lucky there’s a pulse at all.”

The Doctor leaned down and examined Daniel, feeling his heart. “That might just be remnant signals... The heart could stop, then we’ll have to revive him.”

“Again?” Mitchell said.

“Happens a lot to you too?”

“You have no idea…”

“You’d be surprised how many Daniels have this problem.”

Luckily, it appeared as though another round of ‘find a way to revive Daniel’ would go unplayed. His heartbeat returned to regular, and he opened his eyes. “Ugh… Cam, have I ever been struck by lightning before?”

“Don’t think so.”

Daniel put a hand to his head. “Why is it always me…” he muttered.

“The multiverse hates you,” Azula said.

Tempest looked up at the seven-dimensional thing. ”So... what are we going to do with this?”

Mitchell looked at it and shrugged. “Probably study it, after we help these people get over their… Somewhat crazy leader.”

“I have a better idea!” a young voice called. “How about letting me have it?”

Everyone except Daniel looked beneath the seven-dimensional object to see the girl lay a doorframe down on the floor – a doorframe large enough to accommodate the seven-dimensional object. She pulled it open with her bright red gloves faster than they could react. Something on the other side of the door sucked the object through.

The girl looked ready to jump through the door herself, but the Doctor called out. “Wait!”

The girl raised her eyebrow. “I mean, sure, but why?”

“Why are you doing this?” Daniel asked.

“Who are you?” Tempest demanded.

“Who do you work for?” the Doctor asked.

The girl grinned. “All right, I’ll play along. This thing wasn’t theirs, they got it by accident, and I’m returning it. My name is Jenny, Jenny of the Red Gloves, C.E.O. of Dracogen Enterprises, and I’m currently working for the University of Doors.” She smirked. “Such satisfying expressions you all have.” She jumped into the door and closed it behind her.

Mitchell walked up to the door in the ground and opened it. Of course there was only the floor through it.

“…Well,” he said. “Doc, think you can take us to our hospital before this town decides to lynch us?”

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “Just this once. The TARDIS is not a taxi.”

“We’re not exactly paying you,” Azula pointed out.

The Doctor smirked. “Azula, I never ask for payment of any kind. I’ll get you home. Just promise me that you’ll take care of this place. I wouldn’t recommend telling them about the multiverse, but they will be in for some tough times.”

Mitchell nodded. “That was the plan.”

“Good!”

“Wait, Doctor,” Tempest said. “Can you answer some questi-“

“It’d be best if you discovered the nature of the multiverse naturally, rather than having an old man tell you.”

“But-“

“No buts! We will meet again, I am sure of it. But now is not the time for me to tell you everything I know. Actually, I don’t think that time will ever come. Nobody can know everything I know. …Except maybe Flagg…”

“Who?”

“Not important,” the Doctor said. “Are we just going to stand here talking all day, or are we going to let Daniel die again?”

“That would be…inconvenient,” Daniel muttered.

Mitchell bit his lip. “Right. Everyone, move out. Let’s hope Teal’c and Wan have already gotten most of the food figured out…”

031 - Innocence

Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle sat in one of the wings of her castle, a giant pile of papers on one side of her desk, a tremendous stack on the other. Spike sat across from her at his own desk with his own similarly sized stacks and piles of paper that loomed in such a way that should have been ominous, but was instead just somewhat annoying.

Twilight glanced up from her desk to see that Spike was yawning, hardly an unusual sight.

This was her life now. She was either reading and signing paperwork, or she was traveling to other worlds as an official ambassador – not an explorer. She enjoyed the latter half well enough, but… Well, it wasn’t much compared to the adventures she used to go on. Dangerous and heavy as they sometimes were, she found that her current, safer job was rather… boring.

She cursed herself for these thoughts. If she didn’t do what she did, nopony would. Exploration was important, yes, but maintaining strong friendships and keeping oneself well-informed was even more important.

She missed having adventures with her friends though. Only Renee ever came along for diplomatic missions, Pinkie generally wasn’t well suited for the patience involved, Flutterfree didn’t want to, and Nova had a certain reputation that would reflect badly on Equis Vitis. Just her most of the time - not even Spike came on every trip.

Twilight would have called it too quiet a life, but she had enough awareness to realize how much weighed on her shoulders.

She let out a sigh, reading over a proposal by the Hub to improve their ‘on call’ pseudo-military. Of course, the proposal was largely headed by O’Neill. She read over it, absorbing the information at an impressive speed. She thought it seemed fair, so she grabbed her green stamp and hit it. TWILIGHT SPARKLE, CHARTER-PRINCESS OF FRIENDSHIP, EQUIS VITIS-42: APPROVAL. She clicked a purple pen and wrote an encouraging remark in the margin, reminding those who would see the file that the forces needed to be varied enough that no single universe’s interests would be above the others. She placed it on top of the larger stack where a small camera mounted in the ceiling snapped a digital picture of the proposal and uploaded it to a database somewhere.

The next thing she looked at was a tremendous sheaf of around thirty pages. Her ears twitched involuntarily. She read it – realizing with relief this was just an updated version of a festival plan. The changes were conveniently outlined, so she flipped over to them, found them satisfying, and stamped it – this time finding no need to leave an extra note.

She reached for another file…

Her jaw dropped.

“Spike…”

“Yes, Twilight?” He said, looking up from a strange hexagon-shaped piece of paper.

“I’m… done.”

“…What?”

She spread her wings and grinned. “I’M DONE!” Her excitement blew her large stack of paperwork over, but she caught it all with her telekinesis. It had only taken three paper spills for her to obtain the needed reflexes for such an operation. “Spike, check my schedule. Is there anything else I have to do today?”

“Uh…” Spike pulled up her planner. “…Let’s see… Nope. Tomorrow’s light too, just a little trip to Lai to make a statement. Yeesh, I can see why that’s the only thing that day, it might cause a riot.”

“Spike, do you have everything handled on your end?” Twilight asked, eyes hopeful.

Spike looked up at his stack. “I can probably get it done in a day.”

“Thank you Spike! You’re the best!” She looked at the clock on the wall. “I might be able to catch them before they leave today!” She clapped her hooves together and lit her horn. “Oh this is going to be great!”

She teleported into the main hall of her Castle, grinning like a filly who’d just been given a lifetime supply of ice cream. “Guess what!?” She said, calling to the four ponies standing there.

Pinkie opened her mouth.

“Not you, Pinkie, that’s not fair to the others.”

“Aw…”

Renee put a hoof to her chin. “Judging from your downright cheerful demeanor and excitement, I’d say you finally managed to get yourself a break, darling.”

“Right!” Twilight couldn’t sit still, jumping from place to place. “Oh, I get to come with you girls today! Oh this is going to be great – I’ve been wanting to go for sooo long you know… It’s been forever.”

“It’s been two weeks, Twilight,” Flutterfree said. “Remember, the robots that turned into cars?”

“Oh. Right. But still, that’s a long time! You guys go to one or two worlds a day! I’m missing out on so much!”

Nova smirked. “Hey, it’s our job. We kind of have to go out and explore. Not fair to compare yourself.”

Twilight shrugged. “Eh, I’m just missing out. But not today! Pinkie, where are we going?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Dunno. We’ve been sitting here for about five minutes scrolling through the Directory, nothing’s standing out.”

Twilight looked at the Directory. No longer was it a book – instead, it resembled an arcade cabinet – tall, rectangular, and with a large screen embedded into it. Twilight pressed her hoof to the front of the machine, and the screen switched to display a list of dimensions, sorted into groups of 100. At the top was the current number of known universes – 32,064. 32,065 now. Someone must have just uploaded another set of confirmed coordinates. Probably one of the many machines in the major universes scouring combinations to find a new connection. The Directories didn’t use the internet, but rather the spells the original Directories and Journals had used. This, thanks to some enchantments from Equis Cosmic, made the digital Directory network impervious to hacking. Sombra could, of course, find access to one of these devices and read the data, but she couldn’t alter it.

Twilight pressed her hoof on folder 134, and saw a list of a hundred universes. Most were just labeled with random number-letter codes, though she saw a couple names. She ignored the named ones, instead opting to hit the ‘random’ button. It selected universe 013433. She plugged the location into her dimensional device and fired.

Nothing happened.

She facehooved. “Forgot for a second that not every universe is directly connected to this one.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s an easy mistake to make. We even made it last week. We were running from a herd of zombie buffalo. Nova thought the dimensional device was broken for a good ten minutes.”

“Hey, Pinkie let me keep trying!” Nova retorted.

Pinkie giggled. “But it was so fun to watch!”

“We were in danger, Pinkie!”

“Psh, they were slow.”

Twilight rolled her eyes, setting the device to dimension 013434 instead. This portal connected, revealing a world colored similarly to their own, though they saw no castle or buildings. “This one works. Oh, I’m so excited! I can’t wait to meet who or what’s on the other side of this portal and find out what kind of adventure or culture they’ll show us! Eeee!”

~~~

“…and at the end of the race, everypony’s a winner!”

Twilight slowly blinked, taking in the sight before her again just to make sure she wasn’t going crazy. The pony in front of her was more like an Earth pony than an Equis pony – her muzzle was significantly more pronounced and her eyes weren’t forward facing like most Equis ponies’ were. Her figure was significantly fuller and more rounded, and her cutie mark was centered higher on the flank. Despite the pink coat and white-purple mane, Twilight knew she was looking at another version of herself – admittedly without wings.

Twilight was trying really hard not to think of the other version of herself as an idiot.

“What’s the point of the race if there’s no winner?” Twilight asked. “Doesn’t that kind of take the fun out of it?”

“We don’t want anyone losing and feeling bad!” the native-Twilight said.

“Yeah!” Another native pony said, a blue pegasus named Wind Whistler. “The fun is in the running!”

Twilight blinked, turning to Pinkie. Pinkie shrugged. “I dunno. It might work for them. Just be glad Dashie isn’t here.”

Renee shrugged. “Just get done with your race, girls. I’d like to get to this ‘Paradise Estate’ and find a spa. If there’s one place I’m sure this world has, it’s a place to get your mane done spectacularly.”

Twilight shrugged, lining up with Flutterfree and Pinkie for a race. Their competition? Native ponies by the name of Firefly, Wind Whistler, and a version of Applejack. Twilight, Flutterfree, and Pinkie took a ready stance. Renee and Nova watched from the sidelines.

“Ready… Set… Go!” Native-Twilight said. In an instant, Twilight and Flutterfree used a takeoff technique they had learned from Rainbow Dash a few years back, shoving themselves into the air along the track. It was a simple dirt circle that wound through a sparse set of trees on a grass-covered hill. Within moments, Twilight and Flutterfree were neck and neck, flapping their wings as hard as they could.

Unfortunately for Twilight, Flutterfree had been flying for a lot longer than she had. She easily completed the track a full pony-length ahead of Twilight.

Of course Pinkie was waiting for them, whistling innocently.

“Pinkie, number nineteen, wins! Flutterfree – thirty-three - second, and Twilight – forty-two - third!” Nova declared. “And… All the others are a fair bit away.”

Native-Twilight smiled. “Good race! I’ve never seen ponies move that fast!”

“I guess we’re just faster?” Flutterfree said. “Or maybe Rainbow Dash just rubbed off on us.”

“I have become Filly-second,” Pinkie said, grinning.

Twilight rolled her eyes. “We all know you’ve always been able to move that fast.”

Pinkie shrugged. “The costume’s fun though!”

“Why not wear it then?” Renee asked. “I’m pretty sure you can just reach into your mane and pop it out.”

“Oh yeah!” Pinkie said, pulling out a pink and white superhero outfit and putting it on. “You shall now call me Filly-second!”

“Nope,” Nova deadpanned.

“Aw…” She took off the suit and shoved it back into her mane. “You’re no fun…”

Firefly crossed the finish line. “Hey! Why’d you all go so fast!?”

“…I thought it was a race?” Twilight said, uncertain.

“But but…”

“It’s not like I actually won anything.”

“But you still went fast!” Firefly said, pointing a hoof. “And that’s showing off! You’re a showoff! All of you!”

Renee blinked. “Firefly, dear, I don’t think that was their intention-“

Firefly snorted. “That’s not how we do things!”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Okay, I won’t show off my flying again. That work for you?”

“Why didn’t you say that earlier!?”

“…Earlier?”

“Back on the track! I tried to get your attention!”

“Oh,” Twilight smiled sheepishly, tapping her ears. “I’m deaf, sorry.”

“…What’s deaf?”

Twilight blinked. “…That means I can’t hear anything.”

“That’s silly! All ponies can hear! You’re a liar!”

“Firefly, I-“

“Twilight, wing-you is lying!”

“Wing-me, stop lying,” Native-Twilight said. “It’s mean.”

Twilight’s eye twitched. “Fine. I’ll stop this supposed ‘lying’ and substitute it with a new rhetoric. I’m just a crazy, manipulative, clinically insane pony who has difficulty listening to others. Satisfied?”

“…I didn’t understand those words,” Firefly said.

“What’s ‘rhetoric’?” Wind Whistler asked.

“It’s a way of talking and speaking,” Twilight explained. “…Wait, why do I even need to explain this to you?”

“…Why not?”

Twilight took in a deep breath. Pinkie put a hoof around her to calm her. “Hey, how about we head to Paradise Estate now? I bet there’ll be fun and parties there!”

The attitude of the native ponies changed in an instant. With a “yeah!” they started galloping off to their home.

Twilight and company walked after them, trailing behind.

“I… I don’t even have words,” Twilight said after a couple of minutes. “They have the minds of children. Actually… no, the CMC are more mature.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “The CMC are hardly children anymore, Twilight.”

“Oh. Right. …Guess I haven’t seen them in a while. Still, I don’t remember them ever being like… this.”

“Really young, like Flurry,” Pinkie said.

Nova blinked. “So this place has a race of ponies that can’t think any better than an extremely young foal? Well. That’s… not sure if it’s depressing or interesting, actually.”

“Well…” Flutterfree began, a hoof to her chin. “Think about our world. Ours is slightly ‘dumbed down’ as well. We all know what disability, injury, death, and other such things mean, but did we ever really come across those things in our day-to-day lives before we started exploring? We hardly have any swear words at all, and friendship is a physical force. They’re like a more extreme version of us.”

“Innocent,” Renee said. “They’re innocent, that’s it.”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep. Not always the best thing, though. They aren’t exactly the nicest.”

“How do they survive?” Twilight wondered aloud. “I sense powerful magics in this world, and I’m certain I’m getting traces of a tremendous dark power that was here relatively recently.”

“Maybe they have the Elements or something?” Flutterfree suggested.

Pinkie shrugged. “They’ve got something, that’s for sure.”

“Good leadership?” Nova suggested. “Maybe they have a Celestia?”

“Other me’d never seen a unicorn with wings before,” Twilight reminded her.

“Who’s to say this Celestia’s an alicorn?” Renee suggested.

Twilight smirked. “Who indeed. Maybe their Paradise Estate will tell us…”

To Twilight’s surprise, Paradise Estate was only a handful of pink buildings surrounded by pastures. There were a few dozen ponies there – all female. There was one small dragon, presumably a version of Spike, but otherwise it was uniform. There weren’t even enough buildings to house every pony.

Nova blinked. “So, is anyone going to ask them how they… er… go on without any stallions, or what?”

“Nope,” Renee deadpanned.

“Right. Just checking.”

“I’m more curious about how they can live here,” Twilight said. “No farms, not enough houses…”

“This may be a case of questioning it not helping, Twilight,” Pinkie pointed out.

“Riiiight…” Twilight tossed her mane back. “Let’s go see if we can find a leader, or how they protect themselves, at least.”

The five trotted down to the Paradise Estate proper, waving hello to the ponies. Most accepted them without another glance.

“No spa…” Renee muttered. “Stupid naturally perfect manes…”

Twilight trotted up to her native-self, who was talking to some pony lamenting their terrible luck. “Hey, Twilight? I have a couple questions.”

“Oh, ask anything!” Native-Twilight said with a smile on her face. Twilight thought the expression looked strange on such a long face. She tried not to laugh at her own thoughts.

“Right. Well, I was wondering if you girls have ever come across any dark magic?”

“Oh, plenty! There was that nasty Tirek, and that horrid Smooze.”

Twilight was thrown for a loop at the mention of the Smooze being horrid – she’d met the Smooze of her world. He was a chill, rather dim green fellow that had some sort of connection to Discord. Twilight, to this day, still didn’t know what that connection was. “How’d you stop them?”

“Oh, we used the Rainbow, Megan, and the Flutter ponies!”

“…Rainbow?”

Native-Twilight pointed at a filly wearing a red necklace. “That’s Lickety Split, she keeps the Rainbow safe for us!”

“Looks like an Element of Harmony,” Flutterfree commented.

“Doesn’t feel like one. Low magic,” Nova said.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Renee reminded her.

Twilight turned back to her other self. “Right. Rainbow, got it. And got help from some others. Next question, do you have a leader?”

Native-Twilight blinked.

“Princess? Queen? President? ….King? Prince?”

“Oh! I know a Prince! Prince Scorpan! He has his own kingdom and everything!”

“A full kingdom?” Renee said, suddenly very interested. “Mind telling us the way?”

Wind Whistler landed next to them. “Better yet, I can just take you. It’s only over that mountain, and you guys are pretty fast!”

“Yeah. We are,” Flutterfree said, smiling softly.

“Then let’s go!” Wind Whistler cheered, slowly floating out of the house.

Twilight blinked. “These ponies like to jump around a lot.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “You were pretty jumpy to get on this adventure, earlier.”

“Oh. Right. Uh… Yeah, shouldn’t judge.” She walked out of the simple houses of Paradise Estate, following Wind Whistler on the ground. “I’m glad we found something, I was just about to give up and try another universe.”

Renee held up a hoof. “Wait, girls. Doesn’t the name Scorpan mean something to you?”

“Uh…” Nova scratched her head. “No?”

Twilight blinked. “Scorpan! Tirek’s brother! Oh, weird – we’ve never met a version of him in the multiverse yet!”

“Should we be expecting something?” Nova asked.

“Friend to ponies, betrayed his evil brother, gargoyle,” Twilight said. “Considering how xenophobic Tauryl is back home, maybe I can finally learn a bit about them here! Oh, I’m excited again!”

Pinkie laughed nervously. Luckily, Twilight didn’t notice.

~~~

Toph, Vivian, Lieshy, and Lady Rarity were, for once, not adventuring on Lai. They were, instead, taking a ‘vacation’ in the United Republic of the Elemental Nations. Specifically, they were hanging around the demon village.

Lady Rarity knew Lieshy had mixed feelings about the visit – the poor pegasus had lived among these people for a significant amount of time, enough to form connections. Especially with Fef. All of the group save Lady Rarity were getting painful reminders of their betrayal, but the buttery pegasus was the worst off.

The armored pony hefted her hammer, taking point instead of Toph. “I’ll take over.”

Toph pointed a finger at her. “Rarity…”

“You need a moment to collect yourselves.”

“I told you we could handle ourselves.”

“You still need a moment,” Lady Rarity asserted, walking further into the demon settlement. Toph didn’t try to forcibly stop her, instead resigning herself to following behind.

Lady Rarity had never been here before, so she didn’t know what to expect. There were demons of several differing hues of red walking around, some young, some old, some winged, some not. The buildings were made of simple implements taken from the forest around them, but there was a paved road that led right to Republic City and a station for charging technological devices such as phones.

There were a surprising number of Arcei walking around, apparently having chosen this place as a good one for their outsider lifestyle they didn’t want to abandon quite yet. Lady Rarity saw more than a few young Arcei children without arcs. They had no idea what was coming in a handful of years if the scientists couldn’t figure out how to synthesize runes… They were getting closer, as Lady Rarity understood it, but not close enough.

“…Sparse rose…” Lieshy said under her breath.

“Hrm?” Lady Rarity said.

“There’s not enough demons here,” Toph ‘translated.’ “Maybe half as many as last time. Town looks full because of all the Arcei, but it’s not.”

Vivian adjusted her hat. “Where’d they go? Are they all working?”

“Let’s find someone we know and ask,” Toph said, ramming her foot into the ground to get a clearer image of all the demons around. “…Weird. I can’t find Mlinx, Veila, Siron, or Mistress Luna…”

“Maybe there’s a party going on somewhere?”

“Doubtful,” Lieshy said. “Look, I’ll just ask someone. Hey, Hastik!” she called to a female demon of a pale rose color. “Where’s Siron?”

Hastik shrugged. “He’s been gone for a while on some kind of secret mission.”

“How long?”

“…Weeks? The mission’s been going on for months though, but he drops by every now and then.”

Lieshy furrowed her brow. “Huh. Half the town with him?”

“Eh, lots of us have moved to Republic City. We’re not hated as much anymore, so some just decided to move. Lavill’s become a personal trainer for non-benders, can you believe it?”

“My waves struggle to encase.”

“Heh. Nice. Anyway, if you want anything, you should probably go there. There’s not much here anymore.”

“…Your society is fading,” Vivian said, dour.

Hastik nodded. “Unless what Siron’s doing has some way to help us remain distinct, I don’t think we’ll stay proud much longer. We’re already mixing with the Arcei. I think we’ll just have to carry on our legacy as proud warriors some other way. Gardis has taken to exploring, looking for rare creatures to slay.”

Lieshy blinked. “Siron didn’t take Gardis?”

“Gardis… Does his own thing now.”

As if on cue, a dimensional portal opened up and deposited a reddish-brown demon who was tall, but nowhere near as tall as Siron. His rust carapace was covered in dents and cuts from combat, ruining any designs he may have had etched on there long ago. He had dozens of blades all over his back, a couple of guns at his hips, and what appeared to be a defensive amulet around his neck.

His most recent ‘kill’ was in his top left hand – Alushy’s head.

Lieshy gawked. “Gardis? You cut off Alushy’s head?! AND LIVED!?”

Toph shook her head. “…You’re insane.”

Gardis nodded. “True. But Alushy has no idea who I am. She probably never even saw me. And if you keep quiet, it will stay that way.”

“She’s going to hunt you down!”

“She can try,” Gardis said, tossing the head into a nearby tent. “It’s interesting, having a target hunt you after you’ve already gotten the trophy. Nice seeing you Hastik, Lieshy. But my work is never done.” He opened a new portal to the Hub, but hesitated a moment. “Happen to know of any horrendous beasts that need slaying or trophies that would be a challenge?”

Lady Rarity frowned – she knew of a few things that were exactly what Gardis was looking for, but she said nothing.

Toph shrugged. “Go to Ardent and talk to Link. He knows where to find the monsters.”

“Travelers aren’t allowed on Ardent! Everything’s secret!” Vivian reminded Toph.

Gardis shrugged. “I can get a go-between.” He walked into the Hub and let the portal close behind him.

“I know it’s not that hard to get a dimensional device, but don’t they require a permit now?” Lady Rarity asked.

“He’s got one,” Hastik said. “…I think.”

Toph shrugged. “We can check later. Just… For now, let’s…” She felt the Arcei and demons walking around the village. She placed a hand gently to the side of her Master Sword, head sagging slightly. “…Let’s go to Republic City, girls, nothing else to do here.”

Lady Rarity sensed Vivian preparing to object, but with a glare the shadow siren was silenced before she even uttered a peep. They left along the road in silence.

A few minutes later, after the demon settlement was out of sight, Toph rammed her foot into the ground, launching a boulder out of the well-paved road, presumably incurring a large fine. “Why did we even go there!?”

“I wanted to see Mlinx and the Mistress,” Lieshy reminded her. “They weren’t there. It was pointless.”

“Yeah…” Vivian said, sagging. “It’s just full of bad memories now.”

“Maybe them fading is a good thing,” Lieshy muttered.

“Lieshy!” Vivian chided.

“Vivian, they’re a highly violent and militaristic race, Siron is a conniving manipulative mastermind, and they’re always asking for trouble. Spread the gasoline out!”

“But their culture!”

“Is fading,” Lady Rarity said. “The argument of if their culture is good or bad is moot. They do not have large numbers, they do not have a large presence, and even when trying to respect it the mere existence of the multiverse forces adaptation. This can even be seen in Lai. The Arcei are moving out, others are moving in, and tensions are on the rise as a culture is changed – and in the case of Lai, I feel confident that the change is for the better.”

Toph cocked her head. “Wow. That came out of nowhere.”

“I finally felt a connection to the conversation.”

“Right…”

Vivian sighed. “…But Lai will still exist once it changes. The demons will just become part of something else.”

“But they will be remembered as a pivotal race in the history books,” Lieshy pointed out. “They will have a legacy.”

“Like the Binaries?”

Lieshy took in a sharp breath. “…Yes.”

Vivian shook her head. “I don’t know…”

“It’s not like we can do anything about it,” Toph commented. “We’re just a bunch of explorers and ‘knights’ for Queen Luna. We’re not leaders here.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “None of us are in the political game.”

Vivian sighed. “All right. We’ll just see what happens.”

Lady Rarity’s ears perked up. She drew to a stop, looking off the side of the road. The sudden clank of her armor went unheard by the other three – they kept walking and talking. Lady Rarity stepped off the road towards the noise that had caught her attention, readying her hammer for a confrontation. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t call the others’ attention.

A short ways off the road, hidden behind the trees, there was a young Arcei, albeit one old enough to have his arcs already in place. There was a human standing over him, left hand producing a flame. He had the messiest hair imaginable and his clothing was perhaps the most atrocious crime against fashion - dusty, ripped clothes that had probably never been washed. “Look at the little murder-machine, out here all alone…”

“P-please…” the stallion said, backing away. He lit his arcs, but clearly he wasn’t experienced with using them since nothing happened.

“Do my eyes deceive me? The splicer’s unable to use his murder-circles? Rich!” He pointed his hand at the Arcei. “I think it’s time for you to burn.”

A small fiery jet shot out of the man’s hand, barely glancing the Arcei’s side. The stallion shrieked from the burn.

Lady Rarity's instinct rose within her, a long forgotten past bubbling to the surface from her anger. She wanted nothing more than to chew this pathetic excuse for a human being up into a thousand tiny pieces.

Since that particular course of action was off the table, she opted to leap in and smash her hammer on the ground in front of him. “Leave him alone.”

The man looked at Lady Rarity. His crazy eyes twitched. “Get out of my way, unicorn!” He showed no fear, unleashing a torrent of fire from both his hands simultaneously.

Lady Rarity pulled her helmet over her head, the casing deflecting the brunt of the heat. She cast a quick cooling spell and swung the hammer from the side, intending to knock the man to the ground. Instead, he did a backward kickflip and dodged the metallic weapon.

Lady Rarity shot a magical laser after him, but he had apparently realized he wasn’t going to win this conflict if he kept at it. He ran. Lady Rarity felt the intense desire to pursue, but the need to check the Arcei won out. She kneeled down, checking his burn. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly would be painful. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll… I’ll be fine. But… He’ll be back. With friends, since you attacked him…”

The desire to brutally tear the man’s flesh apart returned with a fire. “…I’ll take care of him.”

“…Thank you… Uh...”

“Lady Rarity,” she said, galloping off. She was going to dice that man into a thousand pieces, as well as whoever his friends were. He was a predator, and predators needed to be stopped.

~~~

Scorpan was a human.

The kingdom he ruled – which didn’t seem to even have a name – was filled with humans of all shapes and sizes, though of a uniform white skin tone. At least it was an actual kingdom, and not a small set of houses that didn’t even qualify as a village…

Scorpan wasn’t a gargoyle.

They were currently in the throne room, a nice hall that was for some reason… nondescript. It was a throne room without anything in the way of decoration besides a plain red rug and the cliché regalia Scorpan was wearing.

Scorpan had a beard.

“Charter-Princess? You seem lost in thought.”

Twilight shook her head. “Right, sorry, your highness. This just wasn’t what I was expecting, as I believe I already said.”

Scorpan nodded. “Well, I welcome you back! I was just introducing my advisors, Nadir and Ursula. Say hello.”

Nadir, a man with a strange floppy hat, smiled and waved. Ursula, a haughty woman in purple robes, did the same.

Twilight awkwardly waved back. “…Hi.”

“I don’t know where I’d be without these two. They kept the kingdom running while I was gone, and always tell me what’s happening with the people! Such great help.”

Nova sent a telepathic message to Twilight. Better than the ponies, but still kinda dumb.

Twilight sent one back. Yeah. We’re probably wasting our time here.

Scorpan turned to Nadir. “By the way, Nadir, how’s the family these days?”

Nadir visibly tensed. “Absolutely wonderful, sir.”

“Good to hear! Ursula, how’s your sister?”

Twilight was prepared to excuse her party from the room before the conversation turned to sub-standard small-talk, but what Ursula said caught Twilight’s attention.

“Buxom as always!”

Buxom.

“Scorpan…” Twilight said, hoof to her chin. “Do you know what the word ‘buxom’ means?”

Scorpan blinked. “No, I don’t actually. Mind telling me?”

Twilight lit her horn, looking at a now extremely nervous Ursula up and down. “I think it means your impostor just slipped up.”

“…Impostor?”

Twilight lit her horn and cast a revelation spell, forcing the magic around Ursula to vanish, revealing a four-legged black creature with translucent wings, a jagged horn, and pale blue eyes. “Yep. We’ve got a changeling infestation.”

“Scorpan! She’s lying! She turned me into this horrid creature!” the Changeling shouted.

“Twilight! Turn my advisor back this-“

Twilight facehoofed. “I am out of patience.” She cast a spell and forced Scorpan to sleep. She turned to Nadir. “So, are you going to reveal yourself or are you going to make me do it?”

Nadir shrugged, dropping the disguise. With a flash of green energy, the true form of the changeling was revealed – significantly taller than the other one, with jagged wings and a large horn overtop two gigantic, intelligent, evil eyes.

“A Chrysalis,” Nova said, putting herself on guard.

“You don’t belong here,” Renee said. “You don’t look anything like the ponies here. You look like our changelings.”

Chrysalis smirked. She spoke with a deep, reverberating tone – that Twilight couldn’t hear, but knew was there. “Good observation, Renee. No, I do not hail from this world. But you would know where I do come from. Does the name Melinda ring any bells?”

Pinkie nodded. “How could we forget?”

“Me and my hive were stuck in a world where we could not win. We were starving. But then you came along, and we saw that there were other worlds. I took the identity of one Starbeat for a short time, using my appearance to get a hold of a dimensional device. We evacuated, and found this place, a world where it was so easy to draw love and power. Everyone was just so stupid. Even when a drone broke character, the ponies would never notice or suspect. It was simply beyond them.”

Twilight nodded. “Well, sorry to crash your party, but you know we have to stop you. You know who we are, and the power we wield.”

Chrysalis lit her horn, teleporting Twilight’s dimensional device to her and crushing it.

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “…You know that’s not what we were going to-“

“I know very well, my little pony. What I do know is that, after I show my power, you’ll want help. And now you won’t be able to get it.”

She teleported two necklaces to herself and placed them around her neck. One looked exactly like the ‘Rainbow’ artifact they had seen back with the ponies, though the one Chrysalis had was definitely giving off enough magic to actually be an Element of Harmony. The changelings had probably stolen it and replaced it with a fake. The other necklace was just a bag, filled with some sort of churning dark magic.

Twilight tensed. “The Rainbow shouldn’t be a threat to us, Chrysalis, if it works like the Elements of Harmony.”

“Ah, but this other thing? The Rainbow of Darkness?” Chrysalis opened the bag with her magic. A dark, swirling horror flew out of the bag and hit Wind Whistler – a pony Twilight had honestly forgotten about until that moment. The poor pegasus was twisted and transformed into a four-legged creature of darkness with bony protrusions, evil eyes, and a mouth that screamed in rage.

Chrysalis smirked, letting the Rainbow of Darkness back into her bag. “For a land of such stupid ponies, there sure are a plethora of powerful magical artifacts here, great powers of darkness. This Darkness can corrupt whatever it touches, transforming it into a monstrous slave. And I am the only one with the power to undo the damage, with this real Rainbow.” She leaned in closer to the five ponies. “Now, I’d like to keep you all aware and clever, since it’d make for a better audience, but if you try anything I will turn you all into slave monsters.”

Twilight furrowed her brow. She wasn’t sure if she could pull off a spell that could do anything to Chrysalis or her Rainbow of Darkness without getting corrupted by said Rainbow. She glanced at Pinkie – Pinkie just shook her head.

“Fine. You’ve got us. What did you want an audience for?” Renee asked.

Chrysalis grinned. “There was once a worthy power in this land, one by a name you would recognize. The great Tirek. He knew of the great evil in this world, and how to bend it to his will.” She lit a horn, teleporting all of them – except Scorpan – into a room deep beneath the ground with about a dozen changelings in it, all walking around in their default forms. The room was round, dark, and lit only by torches. In the center, there was an altar with two black, broken horns and a tuft of loose red hair. “These objects are all that remain of him.”

“You’re going to resurrect him,” Flutterfree. “Doesn’t that sound like it could easily go wrong?”

“I’ve got the Rainbow, I can always just kill him again. But I need his knowledge. And you’ve come at a perfect time – the ritual is ready.”

“Convenient,” Pinkie said.

“Inconvenient,” Flutterfree countered.

“Trust me, it’s convenient.”

Chrysalis started laughing. “Tirek will show me the dark powers of this world, and I will use them to unleash devastation over everything I can find, and perhaps even gather something to defeat Melinda. Everyone will pay!” She entered the crazy-evil laugh phase, barely able to stand straight.

Twilight considered making an aggressive move, but the presence of the other changelings was a problem.

She opted for plan B. She lit her horn…

~~~

Lady Rarity was on the hunt.

She had traced the man back to Republic City proper. She barely registered the peculiar city around her, focused entirely on her target. It wasn’t hard to trace him at all – even if she didn’t have tracking spells at her disposal, she believed the stench he left would have been enough to go on, even in this busy city.

To her annoyance, her large stature, clanking armor, and tremendous figure drew a lot of attention. There were probably a few people here who knew who she was. None asked for an autograph, or even approached her – but they stared, and a few followed at a distance.

She let out a hissing growl. They might ruin the justice she was about to dish out. They’d probably lose interest eventually, but she couldn’t ignore the possibility that there’d be one who would decide to follow her to the ends of the multiverse. She wondered if they were going to regret their decision.

Then she saw him – down an alley, knocking on the door of a beat-down house. She slowly approached, grinding her teeth, ready to confront him.

An old woman opened the door. “Rodney, what is it?”

“Mom? Can I…”

“No, you can not come in, you used up your last chance already, Rodney.”

Rodney put his hands together. “Please, Mom, you know I-“

“Go away. I mean it, Rodney, you’re not allowed here anymore, not after what you did.” She slammed the door in his face.

Rodney’s hands balled into fists. He punched the door, turned, and ran further down the alleyway in a blind rage.

Serves him right, Lady Rarity thought, continuing to follow him. She was in no hurry – let him suffer a little more before she got to him. It’d just make it better.

She continued tracing him, drawing the hunt out as long as she could. She hadn’t done this in quite some time – she’d forgotten how exhilarating it was… Why had she ever denied this part of herself…?

She didn’t let herself think about the question too much. She was focused on other things.

So focused that she didn’t even notice when Toph and the others caught up with her – not until Toph said something. “Loser says what?”

“What?” Lady Rarity said. “Wait… …Toph.”

Toph shrugged. “Seemed like the perfect opportunity.”

Lieshy facehooved. “That was beyond stupid, Toph.”

Vivian shrugged. “Rarity, what are you doing?”

“I’m hunting down a horrible excuse for a human being who was trying to brutalize an Arcei – he might be trying to gather up his friends and try again. His trail leads down these alleys.”

“Ah. The bad part of town,” Toph commented. “Makes sense, the unsavory types hang out here from what I hear.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “...How?”

“Iroh.”

“Oh. Right.”

Lady Rarity continued walking forward, her gaze narrow. She said nothing further as she marched along the trail.

“…Rarity? You okay?” Vivian asked.

“Fine,” Lady Rarity lied.

“You sure? You seem… fixated.”

“You didn’t see what he was trying to do. I did. And he’s going to get what he deserves.” She hefted her hammer in front of her. “Justice.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “That seems a little vindictive for you, Rarity.”

“Shush, he’s close by,” Lady Rarity chided, ignoring the content of the comment. She approached an ajar door placed in the side of a run-down building that rested in the shadow of a large industrial factory. Lady Rarity followed the trail through the doorway, feeling the closeness of her target.

Her prey.

She walked into the building, hammer held high. The trail went through another door, this one actually closed. She quickly drove her hammer through it and leaped into the room, preparing for the attack.

Rodney was in there, alone, sitting on a bed. He was crying into a pillow so hard that he hadn’t even noticed her bash the door in. His shirt was off, revealing a body covered in scars – some of which were indicative of regular beating. There was an unnatural lump of skin on the side of his chest, and he looked malnourished.

Lady Rarity’s instinct vanished. She dropped the hammer and quickly backed out of the room, tears in her eyes. “…What was I doing?” she said, barely any breath in her voice. “Wh…”

Toph stamped her foot, feeling the broken body of the man. “I’ll get him to a hospital.” She picked him up – he didn’t fight. Didn’t even say anything. With a burst of earth, she left the building, leaving Lady Rarity, Lieshy, and Vivian behind.

Vivian put a hand on Lady Rarity’s armored back. “Hey… You just wanted justice.”

“No, I didn’t! This was more than that! I was giving in to my instinct!”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have an instin-“

Lady Rarity stamped her hoof on the ground. “Yes I do! You don’t know, you couldn’t! You…”

Vivian folded her hands. “Rarity, we might not know – but you can tell us. You can trust us.”

“I… I know.” Lady Rarity sighed. “You won’t know what this means… But I’ll explain it.” She reached to her mane, pulling it all the way back, revealing the part of her forehead just below her horn. There were two smaller, rounder, but fully functional eyes.

Toph returned, breathing heavy. “Even with the master sword, that’s not a short tri- woah. Rarity, you have your eyes uncovered. Neat.”

Lady Rarity chuckled softly, wiping all four of her eyes. “Yes. Yes, they are cool. But they also mean something you’re not aware of. I’m not a unicorn – I’m a spirid-unicorn.”

Toph raised an eyebrow. “…Never heard of a spirid. Thought I knew all the Lai races.”

“Spirids aren’t considered a race, and for good reason,” Lady Rarity explained. She bared her teeth, making sure they noticed the highly sharp edges and protruding fangs. “Spirids are a strictly carnivorous and regularly cannibalistic race. They’re considered monsters and not real ponies by any stretch of the imagination.” She began to, for the first time in forever, take off her armor completely. The tremendous metallic chunks fell to the ground, revealing Lady Rarity to not be the tremendous unicorn they all thought she was. In reality, the spirid-unicorn was only slightly above average in terms of height, but the armor suit just gave her a ton of extra mass. Beyond the eyes and sharp teeth, the rest of her body wasn’t normal either. She had no tail, but instead, a large rounded abdomen with a cutie mark printed on it of a diamond encased in a web. She only had three legs – but there were five stumps, suggesting she once had eight.

“You poor thing…” Vivian said.

“I’m part monster,” Lady Rarity asserted. “My mother was a Spirid living near the edge of an outer forest, and my father was a unicorn she captured, had some fun with, and devoured one night. I was born with powerful predatory instincts and nopony to tell me otherwise. And with the advantage of my magic, I was a ruthless monster that never failed to capture prey. I have no idea how many lives I took.”

Noting that all three of them were paying attention to her with eyes wide, she continued her tale. “I was gravely wounded one day by a wild dragon. I would have bled out and died had I not been taken in by a kind old wizard. I don’t know why I didn’t eat him or attack when I woke up – but I didn’t. He taught me to speak, how to use magic with more finesse, and taught me what it meant to be a pony… not a monster. How to deny the instincts.” A soft smile came to her face. “I had more than a few adventures after that. You could say I helped save the world. But… Well, I was eventually being hunted down by terrified ponies. Starcei came to my rescue. She built the armor, told me how to hide what I was. We had to amputate four of my legs that day – I lost the back left one a few years before that. And… then I was Lady Rarity, and I became a knight, a champion.”

She looked at the empty room Rodney had been in before. “And then today the instincts came back. I was going to kill him. I was going to eat him. But… He’s me, don’t you see? A monster that doesn’t really want to be. Someone who needs help…”

Lieshy pulled Lady Rarity into a hug. “You’ve had a hard life, and a dark past. But that doesn’t matter to us – what matters to us is today.”

“And you didn’t kill him. You’re the reason he’s getting help at all,” Vivian said.

“Maybe you just needed to have your instincts act up today,” Toph suggested.

Lady Rarity smiled. “…Thank you.”

“You also don’t have to wear that armor all the time, if you don’t want to,” Vivian said.

“Girls, I only have three legs. The armor not only protects me, it gives me a fourth leg for balance. It’s used for more than just hiding who I am.”

“You don’t have to hide the eyes, though,” Lieshy said. “Seriously, even Lai won’t be able to racially judge you anymore. Far as they know, you’re the result of something from another universe.”

Lady Rarity sighed. “…But I want to deny this part of me.”

“Maybe that’s part of the problem,” Lieshy suggested. “Just bottling it up doesn’t work that often. It tends to explode outward.”

Lady Rarity nodded slowly. “Maybe… All I know for sure, right now, is that I trust you all. And... thank you for being here.”

Toph gave a thumbs up. “Don’t mention it. We’re a team, Rarity. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t.”

“Good. Now let me ride you into the sunset.”

“No,” Lady Rarity deadpanned.

“Aw…”

~~~

The resurrection ritual clearly was not of the world they were currently in – Chrysalis must have been doing some exploring of her own to find the magics required to accomplish the blasphemous act she was currently undertaking. Moaning spirit noises filled the room the moment she activated her horn. The altar turned a sickening green color, covering the horns and hairs of Tirek in a thick, syrup-like magic. They floated into the air, rotating at ever-increasing speeds. The horns mended their cracks first, the hairs tied themselves together second. A body began to form – first a head, then the arms, then the four legs, protruding out like some expanding telescope. As the body expanded, shifted, and grew, everypony present could hear bones crunching and flesh churning under the magical syrup. A death scream played in reverse greeted their ears as the ancient centaur was brought back to life, forced to relive the pain that killed him.

He didn’t look quite like the Tirek that Twilight had faced in her past – his horns weren’t as large, his face was significantly more pronounced, and he wore armor over his chest. But he was still a red and black centaur with a malevolent expression on his face.

“Tirek,” Chrysalis began. “I, Chrysalis, have saved you from your untimely demise. I have come to this world seeking artifacts of Darkness and Power, and I believe you know just where to find such things and how to use them. In return, I offer you your own Rainbow of Darkness back, as well as sway over my army of changelings. We can rule this pathetic world – and possibly even other worlds – together. I know you want to get revenge on that human girl from the neighboring world.”

Tirek looked around Chrysalis’ neck. “You have the Rainbow of Light,” he observed, speaking with a deep, gravelly voice.

“That’s just in case you say no. And also so the ponies don’t use it on me.”

Tirek folded his hands, looking at the changelings. They showed off by transforming into several different monsters. Tirek smiled at this – but the smile vanished when he laid eyes on Twilight and her friends. “Who are they?”

“An audience of enemies,” Chrysalis explained. “They come from another world, like myself. They wanted to stop us, but they can’t face the Rainbow of Darkness, and they cannot escape me either.”

“Why have you not corrupted them to be your servants!?”

“That’s boring,” Chrysalis said, matter-of-factly. “Though now that they’ve seen you I suppose I’ve seen all the looks of shock and awe I need.” She levitated the bag containing the Rainbow of Darkness to him. “Do you want to do the honors?”

Tirek nodded. “I accept this alliance.” He grabbed the bag and hung it around his neck.

Pinkie shouted. “WAIIIIT!”

Tirek raised an eyebrow. “…Why?”

“You don’t even know our names! I’m Pinkie Pie, that’s Nova, this is Renee, and over here we have Flutterfree! Oh, and we mustn’t forget our illustrious leader, Twilight, an alicorn! Both wings and a horn! Bet you’ve never seen that on a pony before!”

“No, I have not. Why should I care?”

“I dunno, she might have some secret magics or knowledge to tell you about!”

“She’s among the rulers of a far off world that should be of no consequence to us,” Chrysalis said. “She knows nothing of this world.”

Tirek gripped the bag tightly. “And anything she does know can be mine when she is under the power of Darkness.”

Twilight smirked. “You see, that might actually work. If, well, you actually had time to do that. But, here’s the fun thing. You see, Chrysalis took my ability to travel between worlds away earlier, but what she doesn’t realize is that I know the magic spell in that device by heart. I can create a miniscule portal with my power and send a message to my world. And it just so happens that they’ve acted pretty quickly and currently have you surrounded.”

Chrysalis snorted. “What a stupid lie. I would have notice-“

Bon Bon dropped from the ceiling and bucked Chrysalis across the face. “GO! GO! GO!” she shouted.

The makeshift Hub military made itself known – creating dozens of portals from several different worlds simultaneously, throwing the changelings and Tirek into a confused panic. A mixture of ponies, humans, reformed changelings, and even a handful of dragons unleashed their fury on the company. The changelings rushed to copy their opponents, but they were taken by surprise, largely ineffective against the mixture of bending, magic, and dragonfire.

Tirek roared. “You fools! You are nothing in the face of the Rainbow of Darkness!” he reached into the bag and unleashed the disturbing swirl of darkness. It rushed the attackers – but was intercepted by a single yellow pegasus in a red hat.

Alushy laughed as the Darkness swirled around her, trying to corrupt her essence and failing miserably. “Oh would you look at that, apparently I’m already way too corrupted! Ha! Surprise surprise!”

Tirek forced the Rainbow of Darkness off Alushy and onto a dragon; the beast followed the centaur’s command and attempted to eat the vampiric pony. Alushy simply flew around the dark dragon’s mouth and kicked it in the jaw. She turned to Tirek. “Okay, Tire? I’m calling you Tire. I’ve had a bad day. Some asshole decided to cut off my fudging head earlier today and I can’t find them. So I’m going to take my rage out on you, mmkay?”

The Rainbow of Darkness corrupted a powerful spellcasting unicorn, who teleported Alushy away to who knew where. Tirek laughed. “You are all powerless in the face of Darkness!” The Rainbow protected him from all the dangers, shoving the powers of the attackers back.

And then the Wonderbolts showed up. The fiery form of Commander Spitfire took point, heading right for Tirek’s head. The Rainbow of Darkness pushed her back, but the pony behind her – one Rainbow Dash – made it through and connected a powerful buck right to Tirek’s face. He fell off the altar he was standing on, reeling.

“Rainbow Dash?” Twilight called, firing lasers at changeling drones. “You’re part of the Hub’s makeshift military?”

“Eh, not officially…” Rainbow Dash said, twisting her back around and unleashing a small tornado on an attacking changeling. “But Spitfire got us in with some clever something or other. Nice to see you, by the way.”

“Same!” Twilight called.

Their interaction was interrupted by the Rainbow of Darkness surging, corrupting more of the attacking force.

Nova grimaced. “I don’t like this. Even with our forces, I don’t think we can take that powerful an artifact.”

“The solution is already here,” Twilight said. “Chrysalis has the…” She blinked. She couldn’t see Chrysalis anywhere. Lighting her horn, she sent a message through one of the portals. Get the Feldspar here and scan for a changeling queen magic signature! She teleported out of the basement and to the surface of the world. A gigantic portal opened up, allowing the impressive beauty of the Feldspar to grace the world. The magical ovoid on top surged with energy, scanning the land below, while the solid bottom glinted in the light of the sun.

Twilight felt pride at the accomplishments of Equis Vitis in this ship.

She received a message from the current commander of the Feldspar – Luna, apparently. She knew exactly where Chrysalis was. She teleported to the given location. Apparently Luna had the same idea, since they both appeared in front of the fleeing Chrysalis.

“Darnit,” Chrysalis hissed, turning to face them. “Even two on one, there’s no guarantee you can beat me! I have absorbed so much lo-“

Twilight teleported the Rainbow of Light from Chrysalis’ neck. “Think you can keep her busy for a minute, Luna?”

“Of course,” Luna said.

“Hey! Get back he-“

Twilight teleported back to the basement before Chrysalis could finish her sentence. She unleashed the Rainbow of Light from the trinket. “HEY TIREK!” She called.

He turned to look – and all the colors of the rainbow hit him in the face, knocking him over once again. The Rainbow of Darkness moved to protect him, but its dark colors were transformed into bright, vibrant shades by the Rainbow of Light. The power of swirling light overcame that of Darkness, banishing it. The corrupted forms of ponies and people slowly returned to normal. The Rainbow moved on to Tirek.

“No! Not again!” Tirek shouted, casting magic of his own that once again proved ineffective against the immense power of the Rainbow.

Twilight realized she could probably recall the Rainbow at this point. The Rainbow of Darkness was out of the picture – at least temporarily – and they could now take Tirek. Imprison him, throw him where the other Tirek was…

But she saw death. Already, in the fight, there were losses on both sides. Bodies on the ground.

She had ordered ponies to their death, and the death of many changelings. She knew that, even though her message had included ‘minimal casualties’, that a fight of this scale would not be without loss.

The least she could do was follow through, to avenge them.

No… She could do a little more.

Her eyes went white. She shoved her magical power into that of the Rainbow, enhancing it. It surrounded Tirek, doing more than just destroying him, like it had in the past. Twilight ensured that it tore him apart molecule by molecule, spreading his essence into nothing more than dust so he would never be able to be resurrected from his remains again.

A single tear rolled down Twilight’s cheek. She dropped her magic and folded up her wings.

Pinkie was standing right in front of her, a sad look on her face. Twilight smiled back, a similar sorrowful tint on her own expression. “I did it, Pinkie. I… I feel a little proud, actually. That’s… That’s messed up, right?”

“Yes,” Pinkie said, pulling her into a hug. “Yes it is.”

There was silence in the room that had seen a war.

Alushy charged in. “I’M BACK, WHO’S READY FOR TH- oh. Oh, well today just sucks in every possible way.”

Twilight tore herself from Pinkie and turned to her three friends. “We should go check on Chrysalis. Luna has her occupied.”

“Luna?” Flutterfree asked.

“She was in charge of the Feldspar, apparently.” Twilight lit her horn, teleporting the five of them to where Chrysalis had been. All they found was Luna standing there with a grumpy expression on her face.

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “…What happened?”

“She portaled to another universe,” Luna grunted. “I’m waiting for the Feldspar to send me the data to go and retrieve her.”

“We can do that,” Renee said. “I think your ship wants you back on it.”

Luna nodded slowly. “You are right, of course…” Luna and Twilight received the magical information. “Enjoy hunting down another changeling Queen.”

Twilight nodded, accepting Luna’s dimensional device. She activated it, tearing a hole into another world…

~~~

Pinkie Pie was a pink pony who loved parties. She especially loved the parties she threw for her six amazing friends. One day, she decided she needed to throw an extra-special super-duper amazing-fun party, because she knew today was going to be a special day!

She set to work. Every party needs balloons, so that was what she set up first. The punch came next, set up in a shining and clear bowl. After that, she did the next fun thing and set out a nice patterned rug. It was pink! Everything Pinkie Pie had was pink, just the way she liked it. Her friends didn’t mind.

Pinkie Pie rung a bell so everypony would know to come rushing to her house for the party! She was so excited she could barely stand still! But Pinkie Pie knew using all of her excitement would just make the party not as good as it could be. So she sat, patiently, waiting for them all to arrive.

Just when she was beginning to wonder if they’d show up, all of them did! Rainbow Dash came first, dressed in her finest dress of many colors. Scootaloo ran in after, barely able to contain her excitement. Cheerilee followed her excitable little sister in, happy to share time with everypony. Starsong flew in after, her wings shining in the light. Sweetie Belle held her horn high as she walked in, her magic shining brilliantly. Toola-Roola came in last, also shining, ready for some arts and crafts!

But oh, what’s this? There were two Toola-Roolas! How could this be? Pinkie Pie knew there was only one Toola-Roola! It was always just Pinkie Pie and her six friends, never anypony else. What was going on?

“Toola-Roola, do you have a twin sister?” Pinkie Pie asked.

“That’d be such cool beans!” Scootaloo cheered.

A Toola-Roola shook her head. “No, I don’t. I think she’s an imposter!”

“I’m no im…pos…ter,” the other Toola-Roola said. “…What’s imposter mean, Pinkie?”

“It means somepony pretending to be somepony else,” Pinkie Pie explained.

“Oh. Am I an imposter, Pinkie?” one of the Toola-Roola’s asked.

“I don’t know,” Pinkie Pie said. She put a hoof to her chin. “Maybe we don’t need to! Let’s just have fun with two Toola-Roolas!”

“Yeah!” her six friends cheered.

Oh! Suddenly, a strange circle appeared in the air! Five unusually shaped ponies appeared! They looked like they had just been through an exhausting day of play!

“Okay, uh… hello!” their leader, Princess Twilight Sparkle, said. “Look, I’m going to see if we can resolve this quickly… Have any of you seen a tall, black, bug queen around here? Looks menacing, has holes in her legs, evil laugh?”

“I’ve never heard of anypony like that!” Sweetie Belle said.

The white visitor, Renee, looked at Sweetie Belle. “…Odd. Regardless, clearly she has to be one of those two identical ponies over there, unless you’re twins or something. You see, she can change her shape to be anypony.”

“An… imposter?” one of the Toola-Roola’s asked.

The yellow visitor, Flutterfree, smiled. “Yes. An imposter. Twilight here can make her show her true form with a simple spell!”

Sweetie Belle looked at Princess Twilight Sparkle. “You have wings! That’s amazing!”

“Cool beans!” Scootaloo cheered.

Princess Twilight Sparkle lit her horn. “…Great. Anyway, thank you all! I’ll just reveal her and we’ll be on our way…”

Pinkie Pie held up a hoof. “Wait. I think I should talk to you five for a minute. We have things we do at our parties! You should learn about them!”

“I… what?” Princess Twilight Sparkle said.

Pinkie Pie turned to her six friends and the other Toola-Roola. “Go outside and play for a bit! There’s a tire swing outside!”

“Yay!” Six of them shouted. The other Toola-Roola shouted after all the others. They went outside.

The pink visitor, known as Pinkie Pie, spoke next. “Ahem.”

“Yes?” Pinkie Pie asked.

“Can we drop the whole ‘dumbed down’ thing now? It’s painful to exist in,” Pinkie Pie said.

Native-Pinkie nodded, pulling a chair out of her mane and sitting down. “All right, that’s fair. They’re not here anymore, so I guess it’s fine. I already know why you’re here, but I’ll ask anyway. What’s up?”

Nova let out a breath. “Thank goodness, that was getting unbearable… I thought the last world was bad…”

Twilight nudged Nova before addressing Native-Pinkie. “We’re here to get a criminal by the name of Chrysalis. She was impersonating a Toola-Roola, and we know which one. Please, let us get her before she escapes again or hurts your friends!”

Native-Pinkie pulled a dimensional device out of her mane. “She’s not leaving anytime soon, trust me. She’ll also find that she can’t actually hurt my friends. I’ve set it up that way.”

“…Set it up?” Flutterfree asked.

Pinkie Pie nodded. “It’s just me and my six friends here, nopony else in Ponyville. This world is a sanctuary of innocence. I keep them happy, and they worry about nothing. They may be like children, but while you might find it insufferable, I find it endearing and… pure.”

“…Fair,” Twilight said. “I don’t agree, but fair. I’d still like to take her back with us.”

Native-Pinkie shook her head. “I think I’ll keep her here. I don’t know if it’ll work out – probably not, really – but I might be able to show her the beauty of this world. Get her to realize that there’s more. If not, I can always toss her to another universe with this device.”

“Nautica’s our prison world,” Pinkie said, dialing the device to the water world. “Send her there if you have problems!”

“Thank you!” She put the device back into her mane. “I might be able to change her, and I at least want to try.”

Twilight turned to Pinkie. “…Can we trust her?”

“Yeah,” Pinkie said. “Chrysalis ain’t got nothin’ on this version of me. An entire world under her hoof! Pretty cool!”

“It is, isn’t it?” Native-Pinkie cheered. “Hey, want to stay for a tea party!?”

“Do I ever!”

“No, stop, I’m checking out now,” Nova said, raising her hoof into the air. “I can’t stand this place.”

“Fair,” Native-Pinkie said. “But consider coming back for a vacation or something. You’d be surprised what a completely innocent world can do for your psyche. Just don’t tell too many ponies about this place, okay? I don’t want to have to hide it.”

Twilight nodded. “We won’t. All right, girls, who’s staying for the party?”

Pinkie and Flutterfree raised their hooves. Twilight tossed them her dimensional device after she used it to open a portal to the world they’d just come from. “Remember, you can’t get directly back to home from here. Have fun! And, Pinkie?”

“Yes?” Native-Pinkie said, knowing she was the one Twilight was talking too.

“I hope your world stays innocent.”

~~~

Dear Princess Celestia…

Today I learned that I can kill people.

It wasn’t even that difficult. I just saw that everything would be better if a version of Tirek was completely expunged from this world, so I tore him apart molecule by molecule so he could never come back. I knew what I did was a good thing. I felt pride.

This pride scares me, Celestia. It really scares me. What I did, it was just a horrible thing that needed to be done, but I feel vindicated because of it. I almost feel… better. Relief. Maybe I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop, or maybe I’d seen enough death at this point to be prepared?

Or did I want to do it?

I don’t know. I do know that I needed to write you a letter.

I’ve truly lost my innocence today, Celestia. The last shred of it went with that final act. But… I also saw two worlds today that were innocent, in one way or another, more so than I ever was. I’ve learned that innocence, while comforting, is not a good thing. Without the bad, the dangerous, the gray areas, life can’t have as much life to it. It becomes, in some ways, idiotic. But, well, the ponies in a truly innocent universe don’t feel pain. They just live their lives, happy.

I don’t think that kind of life has any meaning. Happiness is not all there is in the world.

Look at me, I’m rambling now. Sorry.

I think we should talk about this more over lunch. It’d be nice to just talk with you.

-Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.

A tear rolled down Celestia’s cheek as she rolled the letter up.

Author's Note

Hey! Songs of the Spheres has a TVTropes page now!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanFic/SongsOfTheSpheres

It needs some love. I promised myself I wouldn't do any of the editing, since it's my work and that would not only be unfair but also biased. The guy who created it (Reddit user VoidTemplar2000) wants some assistance.

Good news: next week is a movie-length chapter. Even longer than the last one! Fun times.

-GM, master of previous preview.

032 - The Comedians

Corona waved goodbye to Twilight Sparkle, trotting out the front doors of her castle and into the Ponyville of Equis Vitis, the once-tiny town that was now the largest hub for interdimensional activity besides the Hub itself. The vast majority of denizens were still ponies – but this majority consisted largely of alternate ponies. As Corona walked down Main Street, she even saw a version of herself with an eyepatch and the most pirate-y hat Corona could imagine. She saw three different Fluttershys walking together, and a pegasus-Celestia perched on top of a nearby hotel.

The three Fluttershys noticed Corona. “Oh. My. God. Butterbun, do you think that’s the Sunset Shimmer?”

“You mean Corona?” another Fluttershy – maybe Butterbun – said.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” The first Fluttershy walked up to Corona. “Hey! You’re her, right!? I know you heard us!”

“Uh, yeah,” Corona said, smiling awkwardly. “Who’s asking?”

“I am Shyron, this is Butterbun, and that is… Uh…”

“I’m going by Fuc-“

Shyron put a hoof over her counterpart’s mouth. “Er… She’s F U, if you catch my drift.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “You sure you want to keep that name? It’ll stick and-“

“Fuck you.”

Shyron hit FU across the head. “Please please please excuse her, she has a profanity issue.”

“No, shit, really?” FU deadpanned.

Corona smiled. “It’s fine. You should find Alushy, you might get along.”

“Fuck her.”

“Oooooor not,” Corona said, shrugging. “What did you want me for anyway, Shyron?”

“Well, it’s just… I want to know what it’s like. To operate outside the law.”

“…What?”

“Oh, you know, you’re friends with Sombra, everypony knows you’re working on devices that not everypony approves on, that kind of thing! What’s it feel like to have that freedom?”

Corona blinked. “I’d… Not thought about it like that before. If I had to give an answer it’d be… Stressful. Probably not worth it, but I am where I am and I’m sticking to it.”

“Huh,” Butterbun said. “I was expecting something more… startled.”

Corona smirked. “I’ve been around too many worlds to be all that surprised when somepony makes me think of things a different way. This is just Tuesday.”

Shyron put a hoof to her chin. “Well, I’d ask what that’s like, but I experience Tuesdays too, so… Yeah.” She pulled a piece of paper out of her bag. “Can I have your autograph?”

Corona rolled her eyes, scribbling a signature for Shyron.

“Thank you!” Shyron squeed, hugging the signature close. “Oh, oh, oh, while I have you here, I have more questions!”

FU sneered. “I can think of a few as well. What’s your romance life like? I’d love to hear you explain that one calmly.”

“Girls, leave the poor unicorn alone,” a new voice said – one of a Starlight, Corona knew. The tone of the voice wasn’t right for Nova though, so it might as well have been anypony. Corona and the three Fluttershys examined the newcomer – a Starlight that was slightly taller than most others and with a slightly sharper horn. Her gaze was soft and kind, but firm and deep. She wore a black and white collar around her neck, under which a cross-shaped necklace hung.

“Reverend?” Butterbun said, cocking her head. “…I thought you had a service right now?”

“Guest speaker,” the Reverend said. She opened her mouth to talk further, but was interrupted by FU.

“No! No you don’t get to talk, you fu-”

Shyron hit FU upside the head again. “Sorry Rev! Real Sorry! We’ll go, give her some space! Come on girls…” She dragged FU away by the back of her mane. Butterbun shrugged and followed after.

Corona blinked, turning to the Reverend. “Thanks. Why though?”

“Saw you needed help,” she responded. She extended a hoof. “I’m Reverend Starlight Glimmer, but everyone just calls me Rev, or the Reverend if they’re trying to be professional. I run the church over there.”

Corona glanced behind Rev. “Ponyville has a church? Since when?”

“Since a month or two ago, when I moved here.”

“Huh. How’s that going for you?”

Rev smiled. “Well. You ponies are really accepting, even if it is hard to understand how everything applies to us in this multiversal age.”

“Good luck explaining it all.”

“I try my best. You could drop by for a service if you wanted, but I don’t think you’ll do that right now.”

Corona rubbed the back of her head. “Yeah, not really my thing. Sorry.”

Rev shrugged. “Don’t be. Everypony has their own path. I’ll see you around town, though, I hope?”

“I come here somewhat often… Yeah, you probably will.”

Rev smiled. “What good news. Anyway, I’ve delayed you long enough, surely you have somewhere to be.”

“Yep. Secret science stuff in a far away universe.”

Rev waved Corona on. Corona shrugged, pulling out her new and improved dimensional device – a gray sphere with intricate red runes etched all over it, infused with magic. It wasn’t a perfect replication of what Rick had done during Majora’s attack, but it was close. She activated it, tapping into a dimension that couldn’t be accessed directly from Equis Vitis. The device shot out a red ring of energy that tore a hole in space to another universe, and then a hole in the next universe, and a hole in the next – compressing the three red rings of energy into a single one. A dark, mechanical world could be seen through the portal.

Corona winked at Rev for effect and leaped through the opening, landing on the metal with a loud clang. She waved back at Ponyville while the red rings vanished with a pop.

The world she was in was small – she was almost positive that this one room was all that existed. It was the size of a football field, yes, but that was still a tiny size for a universe. The shape was perfectly circular, the gravity was slightly above normal, and a tremendous metal pillar covered in levers and buttons sat in the center. Otherwise, the round room was featureless besides the occasional dent in the metal floor, ceiling, or walls.

Sparky was standing next to the pillar, poking it with a multimeter of her own invention, trying to get any reading on it at all.

“Anything new?” Corona asked.

Sparky shrugged. “Nothing. I can tell you it’s metallic and also an insulator. Oh, and that the entire room is made of the same stuff. I have no clue about the atomic structure – if it even has an atomic structure. For all I know this universe doesn’t have atoms!”

Corona frowned. “We’re still made of atoms, right? Then it’s probably not the case. We’d be converted if it was.”

“Right… So many ambiguous rules…” Sparky muttered, pulling out a magical probing crystal and trying to scratch the column to no effect. “So, how’d Twilight react?”

“As excited as you were at the ceremony, except more condensed for time,” Corona said. “She had quite the smile. She even phoned Pinkie to plan a big party.”

Sparky smirked. “I am so there. And so are the girls.”

“Eh. It… Doesn’t feel like a big deal to me. I’m sure the party will be great, but… It’s just a piece of paper.”

“I want to see it again. Please?”

Corona rolled her eyes, summoning a piece of paper with her magic. She showed it to Sparky.

Wolfe University

awards the Graduate Certificate of

Bachelor of Science in Physics

to

Corona Sunset Shimmer

Sparky squeed. “So… monumental…”

“You’ll get yours eventually,” Corona said, shaking her head. “Just be patient.”

“How are you not flipping out in excitement right now?”

Corona shrugged. “I dunno. I’m not done studying – that Equis Cosmic program will be opening soon, and I’m going to be there. Or maybe it’s just that this piece of paper doesn’t mean much off of one of the Earths. I learned a lot there, and I’m very thankful for it, don’t get me wrong, it just… Seems small compared to all the stuff we’ve dealt with. I’m more proud of living as a unicorn for a semester than getting this piece of paper.”

“Ack! The apathy is destroying my very soul, Corona!”

“Hey, the paper doesn’t help us understand what this place is.”

“The degree represents the journey you’ve completed! Use the reasoning you’ve accumulated to deduce what this place is!”

Corona put a hoof on the metallic center of the entire universe. “…I think this universe is probably artificial, created by beings we can’t understand. Other than that I have no idea. But that’s why we’re here. What’s the next test?”

“Exposure to fire to see what happens?”

“We’re not going about this very scientifically.”

“Everything else has been inconclusive.”

“Wow, I feel sorry for you two dweebs.”

Corona and Sparky looked up to see a third individual in the room – a gray-skinned orange-horned humanoid in an orange outfit. Corona raised an eyebrow. “…Vriska, is it?”

Vriska snapped her fingers. “Righty-o! Vriska’s the name, crashing romantic science is my game.”

Corona stared at Vriska blankly. Sparky broke out into laughter.

Vriska put a hand to her forehead. “Oh, great, you’re one of the pairs who aren’t together. All right, which ones are you? I’ve clearly met you before…”

“No, actually,” Corona said. “I’ve just heard about you. You met Charter-Twilight. I’m Corona, and this is Sparky.”

Vriska pondered this. “Oh, so I’m back in this neighborhood? Huh, I wasn’t expecting to be back this soon… Heh. Guess this place just can’t get enough of me!”

Sparky rolled her eyes. “Riiiiiiight.”

Corona pointed at Vriska and smiled. “So, you feel sorry for us, do you? Mind telling us what this thing is?”

“Eh, usually I’m not big on spilling the beans, but I’m feeling generous today - so unlike me, I know, hold your gasps in, please.” She placed her hand on the central pole. “You’ve found yourselves a leyline universe.”

“A what?”

“Notice how you have difficulty forging direct connections between most universes?”

“Yeah. You can get to A from B and C from B but not A from C.”

“Well, it’d be even more convoluted without these things. They’re part of the reason there are so many connections. They connect to millions of universes, and because they have so many connections, other universes got more, creating a denser web. At least around here.”

“Who made them? There’s more than one? How can we use it?”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “I have to keep some secrets. Though I don’t know who made them. Not sure anybody does.” She placed a fingernail into a dent in the central rod. “Hrm… This one’s got a dent in it…”

Her nail punctured through the buckled metal. Vriska blinked. “…Huh. I half expected it to break and explo-“

It broke and exploded. The column blew outward, peeling the top and bottom halves of the central structure like two razor-sharp bananas. The shockwave blew Sparky and Corona back, but Vriska stood firm, looking curiously at the revealed interior of the leyline universe. It was a shifting ball of white energy with five slowly moving tendrils. A dot at the edge of each tendril flashed with a bright color – purple, pink, yellow, white, and a bluish color. The bluish color twitched unnaturally, lashing as if in agony.

Corona grabbed onto Vriska with her magic. “Come on Vriska! It’s dangerous!”

Vriska luckily twisted out of Corona’s telekinesis, landing back in front of the glowing sphere. She grinned. “That’s the point, sunny. It’s dangerous, so it’s going to be fun!”

The fifth, angry light shifted color to a pale green. The green color instantly flew off the tendril, leaving only the white tendril, a strangely naked burst of energy. The other four tendrils began to spin like a propeller, creating a rainbow while the naked tendril stood still.

Then the tendril spiked Vriska through the skull, and she saw colors.

The next things she knew she was somewhere else, lying on her back at the edge of some version of the Everfree Forest. There was a Pinkie Pie standing over her.

“Ugh… I was expecting somewhere interesting…” Vriska muttered.

The Pinkie shrugged. “That’s just the way life is sometimes, broo. Sometimes you want something interesting and get a magical land of colorful ponies. Sometimes you want to summon a powerful demon and get some gray chick instead. Just the way life is…”

Vriska blinked. “What was that part about summoning demons?”

“Oh, that. You see, I meant to say something about dancing in the blood of the fallen, but I wasn’t in the mood for it, you know? …Oh! I know! I could tie you up!”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Aren’t you already tied up?”

Vriska looked at her hands and feet, discovering that there were already ropes around them. She took in a deep breath. “I fucking hate Pinkie Pies.”

“Broo, broo – I feel you. I feel you. How’s about we go back to my place and kick off this grand, epic adventure that’s too silly for its own good?”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “…Sure. I’ll try to escape later.”

“Oh, of course, broo! Wouldn’t have it any other way!”

“…So what now?”

“Well, if this were really some grand epic adventure we’d have a title sequence of some kind!”

~~~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcBNxuKZyN4&feature=youtu.be&t=1m54s

~~~

Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle knew something was up the moment she walked down a hallway in her castle she didn’t recognize. This, however, could mean any number of things – surprise decoration by Rarity, the castle itself having rearranged its interior, or just her going a little crazy from seeing the same halls day in and day out. For all she knew it was just a difference in light levels from a slight magic surge.

Regardless, she was on guard now. Not worried, but ready in case there was something unsavory around the corner. She tried to get back to the main hall first, but after traversing several rooms and halls with no luck, she considered teleporting – though, admittedly, if she didn’t know the layout of the castle, teleporting was probably a bad idea.

She wondered if the Tree of Harmony was having a joke at her expense or something. The Tree wasn’t prone to such pranks, unlike Celestia, but it was a possibility. If it was anything else that had rearranged her castle, it would have to be something… nefarious. Or Discord.

Now that she thought about that, it probably was Discord. This was just the sort of stunt he’d pull randomly. For all she knew he was uncontrollably chuckling behind her back, understandably unconcerned about being heard.

She glanced behind her and saw nothing. That didn’t mean he wasn’t behind this.

It was at this moment she stumbled into the main hall. She didn’t have time to check to see if it was as she remembered, because she saw the tremendous entry doors get kicked open by a very ticked off looking Applejack. “Twilight, I’ve been knockin’ for three minutes! Three minutes! Yer debt’s up to five thousand bits because of that!”

“Oh,” Twilight said, blinking. “I’m in an alternate universe. Got it. Good to have that cleared up.”

“Six thousand bits for ignorin’ me!”

“Oh, sorry… Applejack, right? Sorry, I’m not the Twilight that owes you money, I’m from a completely different universe.”

“Seven thousand!”

“And I didn’t answer the door because I’m deaf. Can’t hear – I can read lips though so don’t you start.”

“Eight thousand!”

“Look, I can’t take any bits out of the treasury for you, I don’t have any right in this universe, not to mention this isn’t how debts work. You can’t charge interest by the sentence! It doesn’t work like that!”

“Nine thousand!”

Twilight huffed. “Fine, one thousand bits for ignoring me. Pay up.”

“Te – wait, excuse me?” Applejack huffed. “Twilight, ya don’t wanna do this. Ah can bring the literal legions of hell down on ya and yer pathetic excuse for a scam. Drop the dumb act, get yer hair back to normal, and just pay me the money.”

“And if I really am a pony from another universe?”

“Ah’m not sayin’ Ah’ll eat mah hat.”

Twilight blinked. “That… Wasn’t what I was going for. I’m just asking you to consider the possibility that maybe, by some chance of fate, that I’m telling the truth.”

“…Ya are talkin’ awfully reasonable for the Twilight Ah know… And Ah’ve never had her try a scam on me, she knows better…”

“See? It’s not outside the realm of possibility.”

“Ah’ll be the judge of that. Hey Spike!”

A version of Spike poked his head out from behind a door. “Yes, Applejack?”

“Twilight seem odd to you?”

“Uh…” he glanced nervously at Twilight. “Master, what’s this about?”

“Master?” Twilight blurted. She shook her head. “Applejack, answer me honestly, is the other me here a slave driver?”

“Nooooo,” Applejack said, drawing out the word far longer than necessary.

Twilight narrowed her eyes. “…I’m not sure if you’re being condescending or sarcastic.”

“Ah, there she is!” Applejack laughed. “Ya almost had me there for a moment, Twi, but that’s classic Twilight right there.”

“Of course we wouldn’t be completely diff- you know what, nevermind. Why am I even arguing?”

Spike raised a claw. “Uh, Applejack? Isn’t that a classic Fluttershy move?”

“Shut up Spike, you don’t know anythin’,” Applejack blurted.

Twilight pulled a dimensional device. “I’ll just go home. Simple universe coordinate set and…”

The device gave her an error message. No connection.

“…Drat,” Twilight muttered. “Not working…”

“Ah’ll forgive half your debt if you give me that thing,” Applejack said.

“It’s not my debt!”

“Master, it is,” Spike added.

“I am not your master! And whoever’s usually here shouldn’t be either!”

Applejack blinked. “…Woah, you really aren’t Twilight.”

“You believe me?”

“No, Ah just wanted to see the hopeful look on yer face suddenly be crushed by dawning realization.”

Twilight’s jaw dropped and her eye twitched.

Applejack rolled her eyes. “Of course I believe ya Twi, Ah’m not an idiot.”

“I am!” Spike shouted.

“Thank you for that rivetin’ addition to the conversation.”

Twilight put a hoof to her head. “Okay. This has given me a headache…”

“Noooooooo,” Applejack said.

“Would you stop that?”

Applejack smirked. “Tell ya what, for a bit, Ah’ll stop.”

“Don’t have any bits on me, sorry.”

“Then ya owe me one, cause Ah’m stoppin’.”

“Wha- you can’t- bu-“

“Oh yes Ah can. Ah run this town, little Twilight. Since yer new here, that’s the first thing you need to understand. The second is everypony else is a raging idiotic lunatic. A bit refreshin’ to have another brain around here, to be honest.”

“Then why are you tormenting me with… debts!?”

“Ah’m a… businesspony.”

“You’re the mafia aren’t you?”

“What? No… Noooooo…”

Twilight smirked. “And my debt is cleared.”

“…Damnit.”

“Ah, but you have a chance to get me in debt again!”

Applejack smirked. “Oh, we talkin’ business?”

“Yep. I’ll promise ten bits for information and a guide – do you know of any way to travel between universes? If you do, show me where it is.”

“Yes, and right this way, takin’ ya to the basement! She’s got some mirror portal down there that leads to a place with humans or somethin’…”

Twilight grinned. “Good. Also, Spike, go take the day off.”

“Really, master?” Spike said, eyes wide.

Twilight sighed. “Yes. Really.”

“Yay! I’m going to go do nothing productive! I think I’ll go stare at my muscles in a mirror!”

So long as he enjoys himself, Twilight thought. I hope I’m wrong about his relationship with the native Twilight…

~~~

Flutterfree woke up from her nap surrounded by a dozen rabbits staring at her intently.

She blinked. “…Why are you all looking at me like that?”

Angel cocked his head. He noted that she sounded strange.

“Oh, I do? I don’t sound weird to me…”

He shrugged, commenting that Flutterfree also wasn’t acting as scared of them as usual.

“Scared? Why would I be scared? I’ve known you all for years and - …wait. Angel Bunny, what’s my name?”

He thought it was Fluttershy.

“Of course…” Flutterfree took in a breath. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m the pony you know. My name is Flutterfree. I’m from a completely different world, probably. I’d never find any of you precious creatures terrifying!”

This disappointed some of the animals and relieved the others.

Flutterfree looked outside, narrowing her eyes. “So, would anypony here know about other universes and worlds? It’s okay if you don’t know.”

Angel shrugged. Twilight was the science pony. Pinkie also had a way of knowing things.

“I think I’ll try Twilight first, Pinkies are always so… unpredictable. You never know when one will try to bake you into cupcakes. I don’t think I could handle one of those by myself.” She scratched Angel behind the ears. “Is there anything dangerous out there I should be worried about?”

There was a war going on, but it wasn’t exactly happening near Ponyville.

“Oh, a war… that’s terrible! I hope it ends soon.”

Angel shrugged – he didn’t care about it all that much.

“Right. Well, I’m off to find this world’s Twilight. Does she live in a castle, a library, or…?”

She lived in the library.

“Got it. Thank you all! Try not to torment other-me if she comes back, okay?”

Angel rolled his eyes. She’d been getting better with them as of late, less running in terror and more random bursts of screaming.

“…Right. Take care of yourselves!” She walked out the door and shut it behind her, trotting down the road to Ponyville. The path looked almost identical to what she remembered from four years ago, but there were a few subtle differences. There were less birdfeeders and animal habitats – presumably because this world’s Fluttershy was not good with animals. She also saw a couple of zeppelins in the sky, moving in a circle. Probably part of the war.

She gulped. She didn’t like the looks of this. She wished she had a dimensional device on her. Maybe she should start carrying one at all times, like Twilight and Pinkie…

She hoped this world’s Twilight could help her.

As Flutterfree entered Ponyville, nopony paid her much mind – she did, after all, look like Fluttershy. No hat, no metal ears… Nothing to set her apart. Probably good, in this case. She walked right up to the Golden Oaks Library and knocked.

Twilight Sparkle, unicorn, answered the door. “Yes, Fluttershy?”

“Hello. This is going to sound weird, but I’m not your Fluttershy.“

“You’re not Fluttershy…?” Twilight said, entering a defensive stance.

Flutterfree shook her head. “No, I’m not. I’m from another universe. The animals told me you might be able to help.”

“I… What? Why do you sound like a dude?”

“To me, you sound like a guy.”

Twilight blinked. “…I’m going to get a notebook to write all this down. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen that isn’t marked ‘Spike’.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Thank you.”

~~~

Renee woke up, slowly coming into the awareness of the day. She was on her drama couch, in her boutique, lying on the white form of her younger sister, Sweetie Belle. The filly days of Sweetie Belle were long behind her – she was a full grown, if still young, mare now, cutie mark and all.

Renee adjusted her hat and rubbed her eyes – they must have fallen asleep on the drama couch. What had they been doing? Oh, right. Watching TV. The humans had such interesting movies sometimes… The two of them had been making movie night a thing they did as of late.

Though Renee found herself momentarily confused to find that the wall the TV had been mounted on was empty. Not to mention, the dresses were also different than she remembered… Did Coco or Sassy come in and change the selection? Renee knew she wasn’t really in charge of her boutiques’ finer points anymore, but she still had a sharp eye for detail and knew when things changed…

“Renee…” Sweetie muttered, rubbing her eyes. “Can’t we keep sleeping?”

Renee put a hoof to her chin. “Sweetie, I think something’s up. Does the boutique look different to you?”

Sweetie blinked, forcing herself to look around. “…Well, the TV’s missing. Were we robbed?”

Renee walked up to the wall the TV had been on and put a hoof to it. “There’s no dust back here, or even an imprint of the TV’s mount… It’s like it was never here.”

Sweetie shook her head, trying to clear it. “Uh… Are we in the past or something? Did Nova screw a spell up?”

“Possibly…” Renee looked out the windows of the Boutique at Ponyville. “Might actually be in the past. No castle, no dimensional buildings… This could also be another universe.”

“Why are we here?” Sweetie asked.

Renee furrowed her brow. “I don’t know… And I don’t have a dimensional device on me. This could be… problematic.”

Sweetie blinked. “We… Can get home, right?”

Renee nodded slowly. “Oh, of course we can, we got here somehow. The issue is finding out how to get back. Sadly, I only know the most basic dimensional theory…”

Sweetie grinned. “I’ve studied up on it! I could probably do something with enough magic!”

Renee smirked. “Well, aren’t I lucky you came here with me then?”

“Yes, you are.”

The front door of the boutique opened, allowing a version of Sweetie Belle in – a blank flank filly with angry, somehow ominous, eyes. She spoke with a voice so deep it resonated with the very substance of reality around them. “Rarity, Twilight wants to see you about that dress, and she demanded I come here like some errand pony, refusing to look up from her incantations for any reason. As a normal sister, I of course begrudgingly obliged. And- Edsam l’oa t't ‘jknlk yi Azathothn’th yar as't?!?” the filly blurted when she noticed Sweetie Belle.

Sweetie Belle stared back at the smaller version of herself. “Not as cute as I remember.”

Renee shook her head. “Stars above, I thought Alushy had the voice. Clearly I was wrong.”

The filly blinked. “As a perfectly normal unicorn, I am understandably confused, and concerned, by the sudden existence of an adult clone of myself and a clearly altered big sister. Rarity, what is going on!?”

“Well… I’m not Rarity, I’m Renee, this is Sweetie Belle, and we’re not from your universe.”

“Ah. As a filly, I cannot comprehend this strange concept, but I think I can grasp that you are not the ponies I knew. So… I am Thrackerzod. What brings you to this plane?”

Sweetie Belle and Renee exchanged confused glances. Renee shook her head. “Well, we don’t know. We fell asleep on the couch, watching TV, and then we woke up here. We currently lack any way to get back home… Thrackerzod, dear, do you know anything about other worlds, or any pony that could help us?”

“I most definitely do not have any such knowledge myself, clearly, but there may be something in the library. Where Twilight Sparkle is.”

“Right,” Renee said. “I suppose we will answer her ‘call’ then, even if it’s not going to be the one she wants…”

“Want to come?” Sweetie asked Thrackerzod. “You could be our guide to this world!”

“…This strikes me as a bad idea,” Thrackerzod said.

“Oh, you sure? I think it’d be fun.”

Thrackerzod sighed deeply. “…I cannot turn down ‘fun’, it is the way things are.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t want to come, Thr-“

“No, no, I shall come, no more deliberating. It’ll be worthwhile to prepare further with Twilight…” she noticed the way Renee and Sweetie were staring at her. “…for a party! Thrown by Pinkie! You have Pinkies that throw parties, right?”

Renee nodded slowly. “Yes…”

“Then let us go to Twilight Sparkle for interdimensional help and… observation. Yes. Also, while I am concerned for my sister I am still overcome by excitement at the prospect of something new and interesting.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Right, well, to the library then.”

~~~

Pinkie, the last pony to see, was the one who figured out what was going on fastest.

Which was to say she cheated by just knowing.

She sat up from the cake she was baking and stared outside. “Huh. Another universe. Cool. Thank you Vriska,” she said with only a slight hint of sarcasm. “So… What am I going to do here? Hrm…” She put a hoof to her chin. “I know! I’ll just go say hello to everypony!”

She burst out the doors of Sugarcube Corner and stood on her hind legs, smiling in the light of the sun. “HELLLO PONYVILLE!”

“Hello, Pinkie,” a Rainbow Dash said, flying up. “You’re looking Rainbow today, Dash!”

“And so are you!” Pinkie said with a grin. “So, what’s up today Dashie?”

“Rainbowing, some Dashing, some more Rainbowing, you know.”

“Yeah. I do,” Pinkie said, straining to keep her smile as large as it was.

“But then the Dash with the Rainbow, Rainbow Dashed, and it was awesome.”

“…Right,” Pinkie said. “So, seen any friends lately?”

“Only the best! Rarity’s right over there!”

Pinkie turned her head sharply to see a Rarity trotting across the street. She was wearing some kind of purple ceremonial robe and a giant hat. “Hey Rarity!” Pinkie called.

“Pinkie!” Rarity said, aghast. “Darling, you can’t interfere today! We have a ceremony that I can’t be responsible for messing up again! Take your randomness and your witchcraft elsewhere, I don’t want to deal with it today! Humph!” She trotted away, barely maintaining balance due to the giant hat.

Pinkie blinked as Rarity trotted away. “Wow. That was mean.”

“It totally was,” Rainbow Dash interjected.

Pinkie shook her head slowly. “Right so… What have I learned? Nothing really, just introduced this Rarity, that’s important. There’s also the double flanderized Rainbow Dash, not so important. The world is filled with uncaring jerks and I’m a witch. Or the other me is a witch. Wait…” She put a hoof to her chin. “Can I be a gypsy bard witch thing? That would be cool, it’d certainly provide a convenient excuse to move along the plot…”

Rainbow Dash blinked. “Uh… You aren’t supposed to be saying that in front of me, are you?”

“Repeat anything I just said.”

“Rainbow!”

“Thought so. You’re safe.” Pinkie adjusted her mane and put on a smirk. “Dashie, you might want to go. I’m going to turn the basement of Sugarcube Corner into a séance! So unless you want some witchcraft parties, I’d suggest moving your caboose to Dash some Rainbow Rainbow elsewhere.”

“So Rainbow!”

“Yep. Exactly.”

Rainbow Dash flew away. Pinkie let out a breath. “Right, so… To the basement!”

She was in the basement, somehow having already set up a pentagram. She set five cakes at the star points and a large crystal ball in the center. She giggled. “This is going to be so silly.” She opened a chest that belonged to the native Pinkie, removing several enchanted witchcraft ingredients. Normally they’d need to be thrown into a cauldron, but Pinkie had used all her patience on Rainbow Dash. She just threw them into a random glass bottle, shook, and decided it was ready.

“Yeah, I know I’m exploiting. It doesn’t really matter, okay?” She completed the highly illegal form of magic and began to chant in a mysterious, ancient tongue, the ten minute speech roughly equivalent to “Oh great forces, show me my quest!”

The lines of the pentagram glowed, dissolving the cakes into nothing. A sugary sheen covered the crystal ball, prompting an image to show up within the crystal sphere. It was of this world’s Fluttershy, in full ceremonial dress, watching a purple mass of evil burn through the countryside, enveloping everything…

Pinkie gasped. “The Smooze is coming! Oh no!” She stood tall and saluted nothing in particular. “I take it as my sworn duty to Equestria and the Multiverse to stop this calamity from happening!”

Her serious expression vanished and she started giggling. “This should be fun!”

~~~

Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle stood in front of a portal with Applejack at her side.

“There’s going to be another Applejack through this barrier,” Twilight said. “We’ll need to call you something else.”

“Why shouldn’t the other one get a name?”

“Because she’s not here?”

“And why are ya still Twilight then? By that logic, ya should change yer name!”

“…I’m working on that. You can call me Charter if you need to differentiate.”

“Yer Charlie.”

“I am not Charlie”

“Yer Charlie to me.”

“Then you’re… You’re just Jack, Jack.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “…Ah’m okay with this.”

Twilight facehooved. “Of course you are. Let’s move.”

The two stepped through the Mirror Portal, arriving on an Earth much like Earth Vitis, albeit several years behind. Canterlot High was still here, exactly as Twilight remembered seeing it the first time.

She was slightly disoriented to realize she was a human again. She stumbled a bit – but nowhere near as much as Jack, who took one step, landed on her face, and made a skid mark in the concrete.

Twilight smirked. “Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?”

“Somepony’s gonna pay for makin’ me look like an idiot, and Ah’m thinkin’ yer a good candidate.”

Twilight shrugged, standing up and dusting herself off. “Then you’d never get your money.”

“Yeah, can’t wait for those hundred bits.”

“It was ten, Jack.”

“Ah seem to remember a hundred…”

“That won’t hold up in court.”

“Ah own the courts!

Twilight rolled her eyes. “It’s extremely likely I can get the interdimensional courts in on this, places where you have no influence.”

Jack put a hand to her chin. “Clearly, I need to expand my influence…”

“Good luck with that,” Twilight said, pulling out her dimensional device. She attempted to dial Equis Vitis – but there was no connection. She started cycling through all the commonly-used coordinates she knew, but she found nothing. She was able to dial the universe she had just been in, but that didn’t really help.

“Huh. So it actually works. Color me impressed,” Jack commented.

“Oh ye of little faith…” Twilight said, closing the portal. “Well, this doesn’t help me. Still no connections. I may have to set up a finder spell…”

“A what now?”

“It’s something I can attach to the Mirror Portal that’ll make it cycle between different universes. Though without the diamond it won’t be able to check very distant locations… I’m sure it can find something. Let’s go back.”

“Go back? We just got here!”

“Yeah, but it’s not exactly helpful now is it?”

“Charlie, ya don’t skip out on an opportunity like this. We’re here, there’s something we can do.”

“Who in hell are you?” a human Applejack said, walking up with a Sunset Shimmer behind her.

Jack looked at Twilight. “Ah’ve changed my mind, let’s leave now.”

“Oh, can’t stand the sight of yer own face?” the Applejack questioned.

Jack put her hands on her hips. “The disgusting shape of a human’s face is only part of it. The other part is that yer clearly some froo-froo teenage girl. Ah bet you don’t even have a say in the family business.”

“…Farmin’ apples?”

“Dear Celestia, this place is unbearable. It’s makin’ me think about things Ah don’t wanna think about. Charlie, let’s go.”

Twilight ignored Jack and walked up to Sunset Shimmer. “Hello, I’m Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle, and I’m from a far away universe. You are…?”

The Sunset Shimmer opened her mouth, but her Applejack spoke for her. “That’s OJ. Surprised you don’t know, Twilight.”

“She’s not the same Twilight, ya idjit!” Jack chided.

“Ah know that, me, you can piss off.”

“No you can piss off.”

Twilight turned to OJ. “So… OJ? Not Sunset Shimmer?”

“Apparently not,” OJ said, sighing.

“Well, it does make things easier if we run into another Sunset at any time. What’s it stand for?”

“Orange Twilight.”

Twilight blinked. “…How does…?”

“It doesn’t.”

Applejack butted in. “It’s perfectly understandable! Listen! ooooranjeeeeee OOOOOOOORANJEEEEEE.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “…I can hear you inserting a J in there where none was meant to be.”

“Same,” Jack commented.

Applejack crossed her arms. “Whatever, it’s just a name, who gives a crap?”

OJ averted her gaze from everyone. Twilight put a hand on OJ’s shoulder. “Hey… Chin up, okay?”

“I’m fine…”

“No, you’re not,” Twilight said. “But I can help, if you’ll let me.”

“Why are you wastin’ your time on OJ? She’s not-“

Twilight shot Applejack a look that shut her right up. “Whatever you were about to say, it was wrong. OJ here is a great human and a great unicorn who’s just a little lost and needs to find her purpose.”

“What are you, some kind of empath?” Jack asked.

“Just good at my job,” Twilight said, looking warmly at OJ. “Would you like to come with me for a little while, get out of this place?”

OJ pulled Twilight into a hug. “Yes. Please, god yes.”

Twilight hugged her back. “That settles it. Jack, we’re taking OJ with us. See you… other Applejack.”

“Eh, Ah could care less.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “It’s ‘Ah couldn’t care less’, idjit.”

“Do ya get off on insultin’ yerself?”

“Ya’d know.”

“Okay! We’re leaving through the portal!” Twilight called. “You can stay here and keep arguing if you want!”

The two Applejacks stared at each other for a few more seconds before huffing and walking in opposite directions. Jack returned to her Equis with Twilight and OJ.

When they returned, Twilight gave OJ a reassuring smile. “We’re going to try to find another universe, OJ. Does that sound exciting?”

“It does. Trying to get home?”

“Yep. Might take a bit, but I don’t think we’re too far away from our section of the multiverse.” She took her dimensional device and placed it at the top of the Mirror Portal, casting a complicated search spell on it. The lights on the device began to flash in seemingly random patterns as it began to test dozens of different coordinates. There were no instant discoveries – the Mirror Portal turned off, and remained off while the searching continued.

“Don’t worry, I can take you back to Earth at any time,” Twilight said.

OJ looked at the Mirror Portal. “…I’m not sure I want to go back.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “What, too many references to the time ya were totally evil?”

“…Yeah. And all the references to me being useless.”

“Well suck it up, ya were evil, you’re facin’ what happens. Buckle up, buttercup, it don’t go away.”

OJ started crying.

“Jack!” Twilight called. “That was mean!”

“Ya really are from another universe, aren’t ya?”

“Yes! But I know that OJ here can be useful and have a purpose! I’m sure she can be a great friend and ally!”

OJ let a smile come to her face. “Thanks, Twi…”

“Oh look at that, you’re giving her hope,” Jack commented. “Now that’s mean.”

Twilight took in a deep breath and let it out, calming herself. “Don’t you have a criminal empire to run or something?”

“Oh, Granny’s got that under control for t’day. Ah think Ah’m gonna join ya and spread the influence.”

“…Great.”

~~~

“These are some nice crackers,” Flutterfree commented, munching.

“Yeah,” Twilight said, scribbling more things down. “So… Let me see if I have this straight. You’re part of a task force with a version of me, Pinkie, Rarity, and somepony named Starlight that explores new universes and forges alliances?”

“More or less,” Flutterfree confirmed.

“And you’re currently lost in our universe, and you have no idea why…” Twilight put a hoof to her chin. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help you… Oh, but I know somepony who might?”

“Who?”

“Only the best pony ever, Princess Celestia! I’ll have Spike send her a letter explaining the situation, and asking for some kind of help. Actually, I should probably do that anyway, she’ll want to know about you so she can make a decision about what to do with you. She might be busy though…”

“With the war?”

Twilight’s excitement left her body. “Yeah. The war.”

“What’s the war about anyway?” Flutterfree asked.

“Sombra and Chrysalis want us dead, basically.”

“…Somehow I expected it to be a bit more complicated than that.”

“Oh, it probably is. But here, we’re safe. The war will never get this deep into Equestria, Celestia won’t let it. She’s just too good.”

Flutterfree smiled. “That’s a good attitude.”

“Anyway… Spike! I need you to send a letter- Wait, right, he’s not here right now. At Rarity’s.”

“Let’s go say hello to Rarity then,” Flutterfree said, eating the last bit of her cracker.

“Actually, she might be able to help some as well…”

“Hrm? Rarity?”

Twilight blinked. “Yeah! Her. For… reasons.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow.

“Look, it’s something private, and she’d rather not tell some random pony who looks like Fluttershy about it.”

“I understand.”

“What do you think happened to Fluttershy, anyway?”

Flutterfree shrugged. “She’s probably in my world. I can guarantee she’ll be looked after, if you’re worried.”

“Right…” Twilight trotted out of the library, Flutterfree close behind her. The two of them knew exactly where the boutique was, and marched right in. Sure enough, Spike and Rarity were both in there.

Spike was talking. “..so yeah, that’s pretty much how I saved the entire badlands.”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Um, I think I would have remembered that, if something happened in the badlands. Um, yeah.” She turned to Twilight. “Hey, Twilight, do you wanna buy a dress?”

Twilight took in a deep breath and released to calm herself. “No, Rarity, I do not want to buy a dress. I am here to use Spike – we need to send a letter to Princess Celestia.”

“Oh come on!” Spike blurted. “Another one? What is so important that you couldn’t use the regular mail, Twi?”

Flutterfree spoke up. “I’m from another universe and your Fluttershy is probably stuck in mine.”

Spike blinked. “Oh. Okay, fine, write the letter, I’ll send it.” Twilight nodded, taking out a piece of parchment and writing the letter.

Rarity looked at Flutterfree. “Um…”

“Hello Rarity, I’m Flutterfree.”

“…Um, do you wanna buy a dress?”

“Maybe later, I don’t have any money on me right now.”

“Oh, I can just give you a dress. Lemme check the back…”

“Don’t worry about it right now,” Flutterfree said. “But I would like to see it later, after this is dealt with.”

“Right,” Rarity said, smiling. “…Our Fluttershy is okay, right?”

“My world isn’t dangerous at all, don’t worry. There’s no war there.”

“Oh? Um, really?”

“Nope.”

Rarity leaned in. “Do you have enemies though?”

“Oh yes, we had Sombra and Chrysalis too, but they were defeated before war could break out. The changelings are our allies now as well.”

Spike, Rarity, and Twilight stared at her.

“Oh, did I say something wrong?”

“Er… No! Not at all!” Twilight said, looking around nervously. “Just a little odd, that’s all!”

Rarity leaned closer to Flutterfree. “How did you become allies?”

Flutterfree put a hoof to her chin. “Well, we deposed Chrysalis, and discovered that changelings can operate on giving love instead of stealing it. Though, sadly, not every universe’s changelings can do that – they can all still be friends though. I know several versions of a changeling named Kevin-“

“Kevin!?” Rarity blurted.

“You know him?”

“Um… No!”

Flutterfree blinked. She held up a hoof. “Okay, clearly we’re treading over dangerous ground where there are lots of secrets. I won’t ask you to tell me – you have no reason to trust me, you’ve known me less than ten minutes. But, to answer the question I think you want answered, Rarity – yes, changelings are redeemable and can be great friends, just as they have capacity for great evil.”

Rarity nervously smiled. “Um… Thank you.”

“I think I’d like to look at that dress now,” Flutterfree said.

“Right this way!”

As the two left, Twilight and Spike glanced at each other.

“Well this might complicate things,” Spike said.

“No kidding,” Twilight muttered, writing another line on the letter and handing it to Spike. “Let’s see what she says.”

Spike sent the letter up and away to Canterlot Castle…

~~~

At the door of a library parallel to the one Flutterfree had just left, Renee knocked on the door, Sweetie and Thrackerzod flanking her sides.

A unicorn Twilight Sparkle opened the door, her expression giving off a mixture of apathy, disinterest, and general grumpiness. She spoke with a voice that belonged in a stallion but was still a far cry from Thrackerzod’s guttural undertone. “What is it?”

Renee gestured at Sweetie, Thrackerzod, and her hat.

“…Oh. Great, this is going to be one of those days. What did you do this time? Did you do it with some powerful wizard, and a freaky spell of some kind discharged at just the wrong moment?”

Renee winced. “Oh dear, is my counterpart one of those Raritys?”

“…You’re sounding masculine.”

“Rather,” Renee said, ignoring the comment for the most part. “I am Renee, a Rarity from another universe. I assure you, I am nothing like the… uncultured ‘flirt’ you’ve suggested your Rarity is. I am a pony of class and an explorer of many untold worlds. This is my sister, Sweetie Belle. We don’t know why we’re here and we have no way to get back.”

Twilight stared at her blankly. “While that’s beyond interesting, why the hell did you come to me?”

“You know things!” Thrackerzod accused, pointing a hoof.

“Oh, for the – you listened to Sweetie Belle?”

“Thrackerzod!” Thrackerzod insisted.

“Just call her Thrackerzod,” Sweetie said. “Unless you want me to change my name to something.”

“Ugh… Look, I may know a thing or two about conjuring things from other realms, that’s no secret, but they aren’t exactly places you’d want to go, even if you have explored other worlds before. The things there are literal evil eldritch abominations.”

Renee and Sweetie Belle glanced at Thrackerzod. The filly started sweating profusely.

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “…Why are you looking at her funny?”

“No reason,” Renee lied, turning back to Twilight. “Although you can’t help us, I do believe you would be the pony to talk to so we may learn more about this world.”

“That’s… Probably right, unfortunately. Ugh… Fine, I’ll pour some drinks, something tells me this is going to be a long day.” She let the three of them in. “I’ve got every kind of alcohol under the sun, what do you want?”

“Oooh oooh!” Sweetie cheered. “Have anything cherry flavored?”

“I do have some infused wine- wait, aren’t you too…” she looked Sweetie Belle up and down. “Nevermind. Still have the image of a filly in my head for you. Probably won’t go away anytime soon and I’m not going to make much of an effort to get rid of it.”

Renee sighed. “I’ll have a daiquiri. Any kind will do.”

“You have to promise not to throw it onto the floor if it’s not perfect,” Twilight muttered, grabbing a beer for herself.

“I’m liking your version of me less and less as time goes on,” Renee commented.

“That’s the rational response,” Twilight said, passing out the drinks.

“I shall sit back here,” Thrackerzod announced, “jealous that I am not old enough to consume the adult beverages, but obediently I will not try to consume some behind your backs.”

“Uh huh, sure,” Twilight muttered, downing her bottle. “So, Renee of other-universe-somewhere, you’re lost.”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“No idea how you got here?”

“None at all. It happened while we were asleep. We were watching TV – do you have TV here?”

“Yeah. What sad universe wouldn’t?”

“Most pony universes, actually.”

“The multiverse sounds horribly depressing. Which is to say this revelation changes nothing about my outlook on life. What a riveting piece of information.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Dear, you seem troubled.”

“No, really?”

“Really. I won’t pry, since I’m new here and clearly I’d be out of my bounds to do so, but perhaps you could stand to get some help.”

“My friends are all idiots or assholes and that wolf psychiatrist was worthless.”

Renee blinked. “…Fair. I would offer you help, but I’m cut off from all my resources.”

“Why are my personal issues any business of yours?”

“Habit, I suppose. We were regularly called to solve ‘friendship problems’ back in the day. Still are, from time to time.”

“That sounds completely asinine.”

Renee smirked. “Usually we ended up doing some good. But we are getting off track. You should tell me a bit about this world.”

“Celestia is the god-ruler of everything and if you go against her you are dead in every possible sense of the word. You’re in her kingdom, Equestria, and we have three types of ponies that generally hate each other but still manage to make this bizarre experiment that is government work well enough not to fall apart at the seams. There’s five magical elements of harmony that we can use to rainbow-blast enemies into oblivion…”

“Five? Strange. We have six in our world.”

“Why would there be si- oh, right. Spike. Forgot about him for a moment.”

Renee blinked. “Huh. In our world it’s me, Twilight, Pinkie, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy.”

“Who?”

“…Do you not have a Fluttershy?”

“I don’t recognize the name.”

“Yellow pegasus, little shy, usually likes animals?”

“…Not ringing any bells.”

“Strange…” Renee shrugged. “I’ll have to look into that later. The town is the same, I bet her cottage would be in the same place…”

“You’re getting off track again.”

“I’m not sure this conversation really has a track.”

“Well great, here we are drinking and having a conversation that has no point.”

“Oooh! Just like a date!” Sweetie said.

Twilight and Renee looked at her. “I completely forgot you existed,” Twilight said.

“Eh, yeah, that happens. This is actually my first interdimensional adventure, I’m just so caught up in watching Renee do what she does best!”

“Kid, your sister is doing a terrible job at interrogation.”

“Oh, she’s not interrogating, she’s making friends.”

Renee smirked. “I’m doing both, Sweetie.”

A thought occurred to Twilight, “Wait, if you’re here, where’s my Rarity?”

“Dunno. She wasn’t in the boutique,” Renee said. “I’d say I probably swapped places with her, but both Sweetie and Thrackerzod are here.”

“Sounds like a question you should try to answer if you want to get home.”

“Certainly.” Renee took a delicate sip of her drink. “Now, I’m curious, what are your elements like?”

“Well… Want the long version or the short version?”

“Short first, long if I want more.”

“Applejack’s the only reasonable pony in existence, Spike is my sarcastic servant, Rainbow Dash has mental retardation, Pinkie is always either trying to seduce me or kill me for some reason, and Rarity is a slut.”

Renee tried to hold back her gasp – she couldn’t.

“You really take offense at that, don’t you?”

“If I ever see her I will likely have a long chat with her about the dignity of a lady.”

“Good luck. She’s of the mind that she’s the most fashionable thing since sliced bread.”

“Her metaphor leaves much to be desired, sliced bread is hardly fashionable.”

A small smile came to Twilight’s lips. “No, it’s not. See, I keep telling her the metaphor would work better with some sort of fashion trend from a few decades back, but she never listens to me. And don’t get me started on how picky she is – throwing ‘imperfect’ drinks on the floor, refusing to get dirty…”

“Stars above, Twilight, I do believe we’re gossiping rather malevolently about a pony I’ve never actually met.”

“…Do you have a problem with that?”

Renee bit her lip. “Well… I should…” She slammed her hooves on the table and grinned. “But I can’t resist! Let’s keep going! I’ve known a few crazy Raritys in my adventures, some of whom were literally murderers. The strangest one of all, though, would have to be Dynamo. I never did understand her name…”

~~~

Thrackerzod had slipped away quickly after the boring ‘gossip’ talk started. She wasn’t getting any new information, and nothing was getting her any closer to her goal – the death of Twilight Sparkle and the capture of her soul. A somewhat small part in the tremendous game Thrackerzod was a part of, but still important to the eternal machinations of the forces she served.

However, she had learned some things today that she needed to report. So she called her friends together for another ritual. She, Applebloom, and Scootaloo performed it in the clubhouse this time – as nice as Fluttershy was, doing it in her cottage again was just bad for the eldritch vibes of what was about to happen. They still took one of her chickens though, they were good for innocence destroying.

“Remember, you two,” Thrackerzod said. “He’s a busy man, and we can’t keep him around to play for very long.”

“I don’t need very long, baby, hoo!” Scootaloo said. “Just a little time to get on in there, if you know what I mean.”

Applebloom rolled her eyes. “Yes, Scootaloo, everypony from here to Canterlot knows what you mean and is understandably creeped out.”

“Hoo! Just the way I like ‘em!”

Thrackerzod rolled her eyes, turning to the chicken that was placed upon a yellow glyph in the ground. “So, Mrs. Spaghetti the second, are you ready for your innocence to be destroyed!?”

“Ooh! Ooh! I wanna do it!” Scootaloo said. “Hey Mrs. Spaghetti, allow me to explain to you the language of love.”

“All the chickens are married to Mr. Spaghetti, that’s not anything new for her,” Applebloom muttered.

“Applebloom is right, the lost innocence must be lost freshly,” Thrackerzod said.

“See? I can learn things about this eldrawhatever.”

“You will make a good acolyte one day,” Thrackerzod confirmed.

“I bet I can get the innocence destroyed… Hey, Mrs. Spaghetti! There are thousands of chickens being grown on farms everywhere for the explicit purpose of harvesting their newborns for cake batter! And it’s worse in Griffonstone, they eat all the chickens!”

Nothing happened.

“Not quite enough…” Thrackerzod muttered. “Let’s see… The world is inherently meaningless and you are but a pathetic animal, doomed to serve higher beings for eternity, lower even than the ponies that watch out for you. Also, Twilight Sparkle will never remember Fluttershy’s existence, and life is full of decisions where there is no right choice!”

The chicken took a step back. The yellow glyph transformed into a tall humanoid in yellow robes with two floating black hands at his sides. “Who has summoned me?” he spoke in a distant, alien language that somehow all present could understand anyway, even though it was a little disorienting.

Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “Hastur! I have summoned you, once again, to report my progress. A complication has arisen.”

“You think you have a complication? There’s a nut-head here screaming his head off and the Twilight has sent a ripple through the conduits again!”

“A Rarity and a Sweetie Belle from another universe have arrived, a universe that knows of interdimensional travel. They haven’t outed me yet, but they are suspicious.”

“This is bad news indeed- the plans will have to be moved along faster than intended. The Twilight cannot be allowed to roam free with her power, the consequences to our realm would be worse than the nut-head.”

“What’s a nut-head?” Applebloom asked.

“4th dimensional beingsthat think they should run everything they can and apparently have taken issue with our interference in this realm even though with the presence of Thrackerzod we have a legitimate claim to the existence. They think they can regulate everything and we call them nut-heads because they look like they have wrinkled nuts for heads.”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “That’s a more pleasant description than you usually give of them.”

“Oh, baby, I wanna see one of these things now!” Scootaloo commented.

“You do not, trust me,” Thrackerzod muttered.

“The nut-head watches at all times and it would be best not to insult it while its senses are on us. There is a chance it is watching now though I truly expect it to just be partying it down at the Pitpit while pretending to do its supposed ‘job.’ Regardless, Thrackerzod, I will orient the realm how I can to make the moment right. With the dimensional additions I will attempt to expand the horizons of the contract to be more accommodating should interdimensional foreplay be required. The imbalance of the Twilight must be stopped.”

“Clearly. That is all I need to report. I should get back to the otherworlders, to make sure they aren’t doing anything unexpected. You can stay as long as you wish.”

“Your hospitality is appreciated, Thrackerzod. I shall let you return to your work and I will spend time with these two fillies while changing the contract – would you like TV or Battleship?”

“Oooh! I like Battleship!” Applebloom said.

“Have fun,” Thrackerzod called back. “There is work to do…”

Unbeknownst to Hastur, Thrackerzod, Applebloom, or Scootaloo, they were being watched. Sweetie Belle slowly lowered herself from the clubhouse’s window, trying to process what she’d just witnessed.

~~~

Pinkie looked at the sky with her binoculars – she knew the moon was up there, moving closer and closer to the sun, preparing for an eclipse later. The eclipse that would signal the coming of the Smooze, were the ritual to be completed properly. Pinkie could try to convince Luna to move the moon, but she wasn’t sure if that would work. The eclipse could just be a timer, not a source of actual magic…

She would have to stop it some other way, but she wasn’t sure what part of the ritual it was that actually summoned the Smooze. Pinkie turned her binoculars back to the clearing in the Everfree Forest where the cult had set up, all the ponies wearing beautiful purple robes. Fluttershy was wearing the most extravagant robes, lined with gold and mysterious symbols of Smooziness. She was standing over a large, round, open pit, which she threw a dead raccoon into. As she did this she shot Rarity a disgruntled look. Pinkie couldn’t see Rarity’s reaction, but it was probably shameful.

The Smooze acolytes began moving around the clearing, setting things up. Pinkie had no idea what any of it meant, it was all too far away. She couldn’t get closer – they really didn’t trust the ‘gypsy’ or her witchcraft. She’d be revealed immediately…

She needed an ally. But most of the ponies in this world were either aggressive, clueless, prideful, or part of that cult… Who could she think of that was nice, mostly moral, and had good reason to help her?

A lightbulb went off in her head. She knew exactly who could help her.

She appeared in the middle of Ponyville, stopping this world’s version of Sweetie Belle in her tracks. “Hey Sweetie, do you know what your sister is dong?”

Sweetie Belle spoke with a synthetic voice that clearly announced her identity as a robot to everypony present. “Yeah! She’s summoning the Smooze today! The summoning that I ruined last time!”

Pinkie just let her knowledge that Sweetie Belle was Sweetie Bot pass into the back of her mind – nobody needed to know about the robotic nature of the filly, not even Sweetie Bot herself. “Well, do you know what happens when the Smooze covers everypony?”

“Uh… No. I don’t. All I know is that it’ll make Rarity happy and that’s all I need to know!”

“Sweetie, I’m sorry, but Rarity thinks it’ll make her happy… But really, it’ll kill her and everypony in town at the least – possibly all of Equestria!”

Sweetie Bot blinked, her mechanical brain audibly whirring from the processing strain that revelation caused. “Whaaaaaat?”

“It’s true! Think about it – the Smooze is a giant purple flood of toxic chemicals that will blanket the land! Does that sound survivable?”

“Chances of survival in that situation are 0.01%! Oh no, Rarity! I have to stop you!”

Pinkie smiled warmly. “That’s the spirit! I need you to go to the cult’s ritual site and record everything you can, then report back to me so we can make a plan! Find out what part actually summons the Smooze! I can’t go in there, they don’t trust me, but I’m sure you can get your way in!”

“I’ll need the appropriate attire.”

Pinkie pulled a filly-sized cult robe out of her mane. “There you go!”

“Yay! My trustworthiness has increased!”

“Now, don’t you go forgetting your mission while you’re in there, okay Sweetie? The fate of the world depends on you finding out how we can stop the ritual.”

“My dependability is maximum! I won’t let you down!” She ran off into the forest, inner gears whirring quickly. “Rarity! I’m coming for you!”

Pinkie shrugged, appearing back on her outlook hill to observe the infiltration of the cult. Sweetie Bot arrived only shortly after Pinkie, her impressive robotic speed providing quite the advantage over other ponies. Pinkie saw her slide into the clearing, grinning, shouting something cheerfully. Fluttershy and Rarity walked up to her, said a few things, but eventually let Sweetie Bot in.

Pinkie grinned. Step one, success. Now Sweetie Bot just needed to remember how to get out…

“Hey, Pinkie, why are you spying on your friends?”

Pinkie lowered her binoculars to find an alicorn version of Twilight standing behind her. “Oh, Acorna. Hi.”

“…Why did you use my middle name?” Acorna asked.

“To avoid confusion,” Pinkie explained, looking back into her binoculars.

“Pinkie, you’re ignoring me. I don’t like that.”

“I’m trying to stop the Smooze from destroying all of Equestria, if you must know.”

“Oh. But I thought Rarity and Fluttershy wanted this?”

“Yeah, they do. Not going to let it happen.”

“Pinkie, you can’t just betray your friends like that!”

Pinkie looked up at Acorna and raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

“Because… Because…”

“Hey, if I told you they thought you didn’t deserve to be princess and that your marriage was a farce perpetuated by mind control magic, what would you do?”

“They’d be executed!”

“Right. And if I told you they wanted to destroy Equestria?”

“Eh. Long as I’m still around.”

Pinkie blinked slowly. “Okay… What if I told you that destroying Equestria would make them better than you?”

“…It would?”

“It definitely would. Think about it, you’re the Princess of the Night, but that pales in comparison to the power of unleashing a sticky, Smoozy abomination on the world. You’d be placed in the shadow, ridiculed for having been surpassed. You might even be called to face the Smooze after it is summoned, and that’d be work.”

Acorna processed this. “…We have to stop the Smooze.”

That was way too easy, Pinkie thought. “Well, for now, all we do is watch Sweetie Belle. She’s my spy.”

“She’d make a horrible spy, she’s not subtle at all in anything she does.”

Pinkie snorted. “Oh, I think you’ve underestimated her…”

“I can’t underestimate anything.”

“Suuuuuuuure. Can you make mistakes?”

“Nope! I’m the goodest goodpony that ever existed! The world basks in my glory!”

“Delusions…”

“Why yes, it is delightful!”

Pinkie twitched, looking through the binoculars again. Sweetie Bot was talking to Rarity. Pinkie could only hope it was about the specifics of the ritual.

“…Are we just going to wait here until she’s done?” Acorna said.

“Yep,” Pinkie confirmed.

“Well that’s boring. I demand we move forward now!”

“Acorna, princess, that’d make ponies think you were impatient. You don’t want ponies to think that do you?”

“Nah, but I don’t have to worry, ponies always love me.”

Pinkie rammed her face into a desk that hadn’t existed a moment before. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaa…”

“Pinkie? Is something wrong? You seem a bit… Off, today. Do you need to sing a depressing song that sounds cheerful?”

“No,” Pinkie muttered. “I just need to stop the Smooze…”

“Wow, you’re acting weird today. Must just be you being you!”

Pinkie felt like saying something really mean and biting, but didn’t. She wondered for a moment why she was bothering to save this world. …Right. Just because they weren't the best, they were still people, and they didn’t deserve to die by toxic demon slime.

She sighed.

“I’m going in,” Acorna said.

“Wait, what!? No! Uh…” Pinkie thought quickly. “I have a better idea!”

“No ideas are better than mi-“

“Teleport Sweetie Belle back here once we think she’s collected enough information, just so she doesn’t have to work out how to escape herself! I can’t do that, but you can. You are key to this plan Acorna. In fact, it was actually your idea!”

“It was?”

“Yeah! Don’t you remember?”

“I guess such a plan would have to be created by me… Sweet! I’m going to save Equestria again!”

“Yay…” Pinkie said, halfheartedly.

~~~

Outside the castle Charter-Twilight was currently sitting in, a Rainbow Dash hovered inches from the door, engaging it in a staring contest.

This world’s Rarity walked up to her and blinked. “Rainbow Dash, what are you doing?” she asked with a distinctly Australian accent.

“Ermagerd, this door, it just won’t give up!”

“…Are you having a staring contest with a door?”

“Yeah. It’s good at it.”

“Rainbow, I don’t know how to tell you this, but it doesn’t have eyes.”

“If I needed eyes to have a staring contest I’d already have lost!”

“…Right. So can I come in or not?”

“Only if you can do it without moving the door!”

Rarity rolled her eyes from behind one of the castle’s windows. “Done.”

“Yah! Wait, how did you get in there?”

“Rainbow Dash, you, of all ponies, are asking how I managed to move from one place to another without going through a door?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s kind of obvious, Rarity.”

“Oh for the – blame it on montages or just ask Phil for some contrived explanation or something! Why do you even care, weren’t you supposed to be having a staring contest with a door?”

“Pfft, stupid Rarity, doors don’t have eyes. How could I have a staring contest like that?”

“I can’t believe I’m still fazed by this. Whatever, I’m done with you Rainbow Dash, I’m going to see Twilight.” She walked further down the halls of the castle until she, by chance, came across the room Twilight, Jack, and OJ were sitting in.

Twilight was talking. “So then I wore this mask that made it impossible to fall asleep. It was… An interesting experience.”

“Wow. This is quite some story,” OJ said. “What happened to Rarity?”

“Well, she went crazy obsessed over the inclinations of ‘truth’ and basically had a mental breakdown.”

“I did no such thing!” Rarity shouted.

Jack looked over Twilight’s shoulder. “Even if we were talkin’ about ya, at least half of that sentence describes ya all the time.”

“Why, I never!”

Twilight blinked. “Wha- oh. She’s behind me.” Twilight turned to meet Rarity’s gaze. “Hello, I’m Charter-Princess Twilight. I’m not the Twilight you know.”

“This better not be another Mirror Pool incident. You also better not be a demon. Also you still better accept dresses, because I came here to deliver a dress and I’m not leaving without delivering it.”

“Uh…” Twilight shook her head. “I’m not from the Mirror Pool, I’m not a demon, and I guess I can accept a dress?”

Rarity suddenly had a dress in her hooves and gave it to Twilight. “Here you go, all ready to go!”

“…How… Where did this come from?”

Rarity took a different approach with the question this time. She just smirked. “I bet you’d really like to know how I did that, but a lady never reveals her secrets!”

“…Do you have Pinkie powers?”

Rarity blinked. “That’s as good of an explanation as any I suppose… Though, in the words of the Twilight that should be getting that dress, ‘we don’t have to explain shit’.”

“I think I can see why.” Twilight deadpanned.

“So what brings you to our nonsensical universe?” Rarity asked. “You looking for adventure? Love? A devious mixture of the two?”

“Lost,” Twilight answered. “Currently looking for a way back with the Mirror Portal.”

“Ah. Such a shame, that. I could have helped with both.”

“And that’s the end of that conversation,” Jack said.

OJ raised a hoof. “Can we go back to the story about the masks? That was interesting.”

Rarity sat down. “Oh, masks? I love masks! They make everything so much more… interesting. Speaking of, Twilight, I need a long, round cactus. I know you have a plant-growing spell! Or, well, other you did, but you look more magical.”

OJ blinked. “…She seems more intense than my Rarity.”

“That’s because ponies are objectively better than shallow human teenagers,” Jack commented.

Twilight put a hoof to her chin. “…I wouldn’t say ‘better’, but I would say ‘more developed’.”

“Same diff,” Jack said.

“I’m going to take this entire thing as a reason to feel good about myself,” Rarity said. “Now, about that cactus…”

“No I’m not making you a cactus,” Twilight deadpanned.

“Oh, but I was going to use it-“

“Nopony wants to hear about that,” Jack interrupted. “So shut yer yap.”

“I will not shut my yap, Applejack! I will continue to describe, in uncomfortable detail, the step by step plan I have in place to get some enjoyment out of life!”

OJ pointed with her hoof. “Hey, everypony? The Mirror just dinged.”

Twilight turned to the Mirror Portal. “Oh. It found one. Good.” She summoned a piece of paper and scribbled a note on it, affixing it to the back of her chair. “If anyone comes here looking for me, they can look at that.” She sent a test spell through the Mirror, and it came back green. She entered the coordinates into her dimensional device for safekeeping. “Right, I’m off. OJ, coming?”

OJ stood up and smiled. “Definitely!”

“Ah’m comin’ too,” Jack said, standing tall. “Ah wanna see this multiverse for myself. I foresee many scams in my future…”

“You’re not even trying to be subtle,” Twilight muttered.

“You’d be surprised how many ponies just let you scam them.”

“…Good point. Rarity?”

Rarity shrugged. “Nah, I think I’ll stay here. Get seventeen more dresses done in a montage or something. Or torment Rainbow Dash with the door some more. That could be fun…”

Twilight moved to the Mirror Portal. “Well, it was nice to meet you.”

Rarity smiled. “By the way, if I never see you again, I have a tip for you.”

“Huh?”

“Never be afraid to whip out the shackles.”

“Aaaand we’re leaving!” OJ said, walking through the portal first. Twilight agreed.

~~~

Da na naaaaaa.

In the world Flutterfree currently occupied, versions of Celestia and Luna sat in front of a window depicting Shining Armor and Cadence.

“Soooo…” Luna said. “In news that isn’t depressing, they’re erecting a statue of me in the courtyard to replace the Nightmare Moon statue.”

Celestia blinked. “Oh come on, that statue was amazing! You looked so awesome!”

“I looked evil!”

“But evil is awesome!”

Luna affixed Celestia with a Look.

“Luna, sister, listen to me. Awesomeness is not a ‘good’ or ‘evil’ trait, but it is nice. Think of it, if there were no evil awesomeness, why would I bother having so many nemeses? Why would I bother having any nemesis at all were evil not awesome?”

“One of your nemeses is Kevin Bacon and the other is a small dragon you can give indigestion at any given moment.”

“But Chrysalis! And Sombra! Those are evil awesome nemeses!”

“They are just terrifying and currently want us dead.”

“But that’s the point of having nemeses! There’s drama, there’s action, there’s... Well you know, it gives life some meaning.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “I think it just makes things complicated. Like, you know, war.”

“You and I both know the war would have happened regardless.”

“Maybe if you didn’t find your evil adversaries so cool we could defeat them faster!”

“Luna, Luna, if we don’t treat our enemies with respect, they can surprise us. Come on, this is like, basic political stuff!”

“Oh, and like you know politics. You sent your generals a letter with important instructions and then purposefully got it lost in the mail. Why? To torment them with backstories!”

“But that was amazing!”

“You never even saw the results!”

“So? I can just imagine it… So succulent…”

“You know if they ever find out that it’s you, they’re going to be livid.”

“Pfffft, I doubt it. They’re kids, kids are forgiving. I’m like, their grandmother. Or something.”

“You clearly haven’t been around kids in a long time.”

“No, I’m pretty sure they’ll find it within their hearts to forgive me. Yet another reason children make good generals.”

“I can’t believe you…”

Silence fell over the two of them in the hall.

“So,” Celestia said. “…Been in any cool dreams lately?”

“Yeah, actually. I’ve been spending time in Fluttershy’s. Do you know what a Morph is?”

“…Morph?”

“Yeah. It’s apparently something that terrified her in her young age.”

“…What the heck’s a Morph?”

“I don’t know! I was asking you! It never appears in the dreams, and every time I ask her it ends up being annoyingly vague and mysterious.”

“…Huh. You know, I once met a creature that wa-“ A letter, sent by dragon, appeared in front of her face. “…If this is hate mail I will drop the sun on Ponyville.”

“Celestia! You can’t drop the sun on Ponyville! That’ll destroy the planet!”

“…I’ll just hold the sun over Ponyville, roast it alive…” She opened the letter and began to read it.

“You know, you’ve never gotten mail while standing at this window before. I wonder why.”

“Hmm…” Celestia said, examining the scroll. “Apparently Fluttershy has been replaced by a pony from another universe, Flutterfree. Looks exactly like her but doesn’t act or sound at all similar.”

“…Did the portal open again?”

“No, these descriptions don’t match the other world. For one, the changelings are good in their world. Reformed and everything.”

“I bet Rarity will be glad to hear that.”

“She was, apparently. Almost blew her cover to the complete stranger. Or did. Twilight’s wording here is a bit ambiguous… She has learned the art of politically correct wording well.”

“Unlike you.”

“I can be politically correct if I want! There’s just no reason to! Like, ever.”

“Celestia…”

“Anyway, I should probably reply to this… Tell them not to worry, keep her under wraps, yadda yadda…”

“Celestia, this sounds important. Maybe we should pay this Flutterfree a visit?”

“Luna, Luna, come on, do you think we need to get involved with some random pony from probably nowheresville? Seriously, we’ve got a war to deal with.”

“Celestia, we haven’t talked about the war all day, the Generals do most of the work, and I think you declared today ‘cake day’ so you couldn’t be bothered except with a national emergency.”

“Holy crap, that was today? Man, I’m wasting cake day staring at this window. What a shame.”

Luna just stared at her sister.

“No, we’re not going to pay them a visit. But you can help me write up the response, if you really want.”

“Yes, I would like that.”

“Good. Ahem. My bestest student of all time Twilight Sparkle…”

“Laying it on a bit thick, are we?”

“…Nah. She likes getting fake fancy titles. It’s like giving a dog treats.”

“Comparing your prized student to a dog isn’t exactly a compliment.”

“Oh, pfft, she understands.”

“…Sometimes I can’t understand your dynamic.”

“I thought that was always?”

Luna sighed. “…Yeah, it is. Let’s just write this letter…”

~~~

Flutterfree looked out the window at Ponyville. “This brings back memories. Every time I come to a Ponyville before Twilight’s castle showed up… It’s just nostalgic.”

“I can imagine,” Rarity said, standing next to her. “It’s like, um, seeing the good parts of your home, right?”

“Right. As the years have gone by I’ve had less and less attachment to home, but that attachment is still there. Always.”

“Yeah.”

“By the way, nice dress,” Flutterfree said, looking at the garment she was wearing. “It goes great with my hair.”

“Aw, don’t mention it. Hey, wanna try some spaghetti noodles?”

“Oh, I love spaghetti!”

“It’s not going to be the kind you’re used to,” Twilight said, not looking up from her book. “It’s a dish customary in the badlands. You bake the noodles. It makes no sense.”

The door of the boutique flew open, “I think the spaghetti noodles are amazing!” yelled a Sweetie Belle with the highest pitched voice Flutterfree had ever heard. “It’s cultural. Hi Rarity! What did you want to see me for?”

“Um, how did you get word so fast?”

Pinkie Pie poked her head out from around the doorframe. “Hey guys! I hope you don’t mind, I got Sweetie Belle here ahead of schedule!”

“…Don’t mind at all,” Twilight said, slow enough that Flutterfree noticed she was choosing her words carefully.

“Oh,” Rarity glanced at Twilight, Pinkie, and Flutterfree. “I just thought my little sister would find a pegasus from another universe interesting. Sweetie, Flutterfree. Flutterfree, Sweetie.”

“Pleased to meet you!” Sweetie said, grinning. Flutterfree smiled back.

“Oh!” Pinkie said, raising a hoof. “Before we get started, I think we should sort names out!”

“…Why?” Rarity asked.

“Because we’re dealing with copies of ourselves and we should deal with it now instead of when there’s seven Pinkies running around, or something. Yeah.” Pinkie coughed. “So, I’ve got names for all four of us. I’m Scooter, Sweetie can be Squeaky, Rarity, you’re Charity, and Twilight, you can be Twix.”

“I am very squeaky!” Squeaky Belle said, taking to the moniker like bread and butter.

“Um… Charity?” Charity said. “That’s a bit… Um… You know… Obvious?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pinkie dismissed.

“I have a question,” Twix interjected. “Twix? Why Twix?”

“Twix, remember what I told you. Think. Scooter. Twix.”

Twix blinked. “Oh, right. That does make sense. But why can’t I be the Scooter and you be the Trix?”

“Because then I’d literally be Trixie or Pixie or something. And then you’d be what, Scootwi? Sparkoot? Trust me, Twix sounds better.”

Charity blinked. “Um, care to explain what you two are talking about?”

“Nope!” Scooter said, smiling nervously. “W-why would we need to? Just private stuff!”

“It’s okay,” Flutterfree said. “My Pinkie knows stuff too, and she can’t tell us everything. I understand.”

Scooter’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. “She… she knows stuff? I can’t wait to meet her.”

“I think it’ll be good for her too, to have somepony to talk to. I can tell it stresses her out sometimes.”

Charity and Squeaky exchanged glances. “Are you three on some kind of in-joke, or something?” Squeaky asked.

“I guess you could say that?” Flutterfree said. “It’s not my place to say. I think you need to take it up with Scooter later.”

“Or not!” Scooter said. “That’s good too! We could just forget any of this happened!”

Flutterfree saw a line of white letters appear above Squeaky and Charity’s heads. Or we could talk about me!

Scooter shot Flutterfree a look and shook her head rapidly. Flutterfree got the message – the words (whatever they were) didn’t exist as far as Squeaky and Charity were concerned.

Twix hissed in Scooter’s ear. “Has he gone mad?”

“I think he’s just on vacation and it’s driving him a little nuts,” Scooter whispered back.

“What do you mean?”

“Um, well, I’ll explain later, the situation is a little different than normal.”

“That doesn’t make me feel very easy!”

“Shhhhh!”

Charity blinked. “Um… Are you two okay?”

“Fine!” Scooter said.

Twix rolled her eyes. “Fine as we can be. Anyway uh… Wait, why did you want Sweetie here again?”

Charity shrugged. “Um… No reason.”

Squeaky grinned. “Because alternate dimension pegasi are cool! Hey Flutterfree, do you know what happened to the other you?”

Flutterfree smiled. “I think she’s in my universe. Pretty sure she’s safe. I’ll return her to you the moment I figure out how to go home. There’s also a Sweetie Belle there! She’s all grown up, has her cutie mark and everything!”

“Oh. Cool.”

Flutterfree blinked. “…I was expecting more of a response. You are part of the Cutie Mark Crusaders in this universe, right?”

“Oh, yes, uh… Yah! Cutie marks! What was hers!? I gotta know!”

Flutterfree knew something was up at this point, but she answered anyway. “She got a crusader shield with a music note in a star. It represents her connection to her two friends and how they, together, can help other ponies with identity problems, usually relating to cutie marks.”

Squeaky raised an eyebrow. “Huh. Neat.”

Twix raised a hoof. “I have a question. How can you get a cutie mark in cutie marks?”

“You just do,” Scooter and Flutterfree said at the same time. Flutterfree giggled.

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

Squeaky glanced at Twix. “I thought Spike was the one who was supposed to ask those questions?”

“Well… Oh my god you have a point. I’m turning into him.”

Flutterfree giggled again. “Asking questions is good for the mind, I’ve found. Accepting things blindly only ends in pain.”

That remark prompted nervous and guilty glances to cross the room from everypony.

“Oh, sorry… Didn’t mean to dishearten anypony.”

“It’s okay,” Scooter said. “There’s just… A lot of stuff going on in this room that you’ve placed yourself riiiight in the middle of.”

“I got that. I also get that you’re all really stressed.” Flutterfree stood up. “As soon as Celestia’s instructions get back, I’m going to make it my mission to get you all to relax. I’m Flutterfree, Element of Kindness, and I’m out here to help ponies. I’m going to help you all. You’d be surprised how comforting a bunch of animals can be.”

Squeaky shook her head. “Okay, good with animals, that’s definitely new.”

“I wonder why your Fluttershy lives near so many animals…” Flutterfree wondered.

“I ask the same thing all the time!” Spike said, coming down the stairs. “By the way, letter from the princesses. Both of them.”

“Both? That’s unusual,” Twix said, taking the letter in her telekinesis. “Dear my bestest student of all time, Twilight Sparkle – heh – treat the visiting Flutterfree like we would any friend. Ensure word of her otherworldly origins do not spread to our enemies. Shouldn’t be hard at all, since you’re in Ponyville and not on the front lines, but don’t go broadcasting the information. We are sorry to say we cannot help her get home right now, but tell her that while she is here she will be treated just like she is our Element. You may want to check to see if she can wield the Element of Kindness in Fluttershy’s place. Also, tell Rarity this code: OP3469. Princess Celestia and Luna.” Twix rolled the scroll up. “So, uh, …Charity, did you get the code?”

Charity glanced at Squeaky, who nodded ever so slightly. “Um, yeah, I got it. Know exactly what to do. No I can’t tell you.”

Twix nodded. “So… Flutterfree! Want to check the Element of Kindness out?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure it’ll work. I’ve worn Elements from other universes before. But it’d be nice, I haven’t had one around my neck in a while.”

Squeaky grinned. “You go have fun with that then! I’m going to go play with Bloom and Loo then!” She galloped out the door.

Scooter smiled. “So, animals, relaxing?”

Flutterfree nodded back. “I can get a nice picnic set up. You’ll all get a moment to unwind. I am your stress relief.”

Charity let out a relieved sigh. “That sounds… nice.”

~~~

“Twilight, oh Twilight…” Renee said, downing another Daiquiri. “Let me tell you about my Twilight. She’s a crazy neat-freak who… well let’s put it this way. Instead of turning away from a multiverse exploration mission when she lost her hearing, she kept going, driven by some crazy determination deep within her.”

Twilight chuckled. “Sounds like you have a similar determination.”

“I… Well yes I suppose I do, but…” she stretched her neck. “But nothing, I guess.”

“But nothing indeed.”

“…Got anything interesting in this house?”

“I’ve got a mysterious key in a drawer over there, but that’s all I can think of right now besides a million books.”

“Mysterious key?”

“Yeah. I started to get this strange sense of déjà vu one day, and this key was around just when it started happening. I have no idea what the deal with it is.” Twilight lit her horn, pulling the small golden key out of the drawer. “Here it is, the mysterious key.”

Renee stared at it in silence for a few seconds. She rubbed her head. “I think I’ve had too much to drink…”

Twilight set the key on the table. “Are you kidding? You’re not drunk yet.”

“That’s the point. Getting actually drunk isn’t good for anypony’s image. Particularly Rainbow Dash.”

“Your Rainbow Dash has an image? Mine’s just a stupid buffoon who can barely read and doesn’t understand right from left and, oh, get this, breaks her limbs every other day! I think she literally doesn’t have the capability to learn. I don’t even know why I bother with her.”

The two of them heard a whimper come from the front door. They turned to see Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy standing in the room with them.

“Oh,” Renee said, biting her lip. “Rainbow, darling, Twilight here is just a little drunk and-“

Rainbow Dash was clearly fighting back tears. “I – I know. It’s just the alcohol talking! I should believe that right?”

“Yes. You should,” Twilight said, trying to keep her face as straight as possible.

“But... But what about all those other times I hear about! Or those times you called me an idiot to my face! Or worse! Or…”

“I think we need to stop yelling and remember that we’re all friends here…” Fluttershy muttered.

“Yes, what Fluttershy said,” Renee asserted.

“But… But I’m upset!” Rainbow Dash whined.

“Dash, why do you even care what I think, it’s hardly news to you,” Twilight muttered – then burped. “Ugh… I make it no secret that I think all of you are pretty much huge wastes of my time and that, most days, I wish I could be just about anywhere else.”

“Twilight!” Renee gasped. “Think about what you’re saying!”

“I am thinking just fine Rarity.”

“Renee.”

“Whatever.”

“Wait, now I’m confused,” Rainbow Dash said. “Rarity, did you change your name.”

“No, I-“

“Don’t bother,” Twilight muttered. “She’s too stupid to understand.”

“I am not!” Rainbow Dash blurted.

“Dash, I agree with Twilight here,” Fluttershy said, barely loud enough to be heard. “I’m not even sure what’s going on…”

“Fluttershy! You… Traitor! I’m going to fly away and… And… And be mad for a while!” She spread her wings and flew out a window, shattering all the glass on her way out.

“Third time this month…” Twilight muttered, ramming her face into the table.

Fluttershy blinked. “I’ll… Uh… Go now, if… If that’s alright with you…”

“Fluttershy, stay a moment, will you?” Renee said, waving her over. “What did you two want before that… incident?”

“Well, we wanted to ask Twilight for a book about insurance, because half of Dash’s house exploded recently.”

“Ah,” Renee said. “I’m sure Twilight can help you. Twilight?”

“Mmm?”

“This is your version of the pony I was telling you about, Fluttershy.”

“…Who?”

Renee blinked. “Our sixth Element of Harmony, Kindness? The yellow pegasus I was talking about?”

“Uh.” Twilight squinted. “Oh. You. Nice to meet… you.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “For someone who claims to be organized you have a terrible memory.”

“I can remember things!”

“Right, so, what was this pony’s element again?”

“…Understanding?”

“You wish,” Renee said, rolling her eyes. “Fluttershy, do you think you can find the book without her?”

“Probably. It’d be faster. Every time I’m in a room she forgets I exist within ten minutes. It’s just a fact of life…”

“I… I do not!” Twilight blurted. “I… Uh…” She stared at her beer bottle. “Man I think I need another drink.”

“Twilight, you’re on your third bottle.”

“I’m not drunk enough for this.”

“I’ll just go look for that book now…” Fluttershy said, sliding away. “You two continue drinking… I’ll be fine not being involved…”

“Fluttershy, come back, I insi-“

Fluttershy apparently decided she needed to get out of there. She flew out the window Rainbow Dash had busted.

Renee blinked. “…That pony is more skittish than Flutterfree ever was.”

Twilight looked up from her bottle. “Huh? What? Who were we talking about?”

Renee shook her head. “Twilight Sparkle, I see a good mare somewhere inside of you, struggling under that harsh exterior and apathetic attitude.”

“Oh boy, here comes the speech.”

“Not a speech. Just an observation. If you actually tried caring about others a little more, maybe life wouldn’t be so… oh, what’s the word? Bleh? Yes, that’s it. Life wouldn’t be so bleh anymore.”

“Clearly, you’ve never experienced the agony of ‘friendship studies’.”

Renee smirked. “Dear, me and my friends are a result of friendship studies.”

Sweetie Belle walked back into the library, breathing hard. “I… I’m back!”

Renee smiled sadly. “Ah, Sweetie. Where were you?”

Sweetie noticed Thrackerzod walking up the street behind her. “Just checking out town. I saw Rainbow Dash fly from over here. What’s she like?”

Renee bit her lip. “Well… She has sub-standard intelligence and is easily wounded. A bit childish, actually. Twilight lost all sense of tact and insulted her out of the library.”

“Oh,” Sweetie said, glancing at Twilight. “That bad, huh?”

“Why does this have to happen today?” Twilight muttered as Thrackerzod walked back in. “Why can’t the universe decide I just need one problem to deal with today? Here I was, actually letting myself have a good time with another pony and it just explodes because, apparently, I’m not allowed to talk!”

Renee’s gaze softened. “Darling, it’s like I said. Maybe you just need to care a bit more.”

“Did I ask for life advice?”

“No,” Thrackerzod said. “But wouldn’t only giving advice when it is asked for mean you miss all the times when people don’t know there’s a problem?”

Everypony stared at her.

“I mean… I like getting life advice all the time! It brings me and my friends closer together!”

Twilight rammed her head into the table again. “I hate all this friendship nonsense… How could this day possibly get any worse…”

The front door was disintegrated by a bolt of fire this time. Twilight was prepared to complain about her house getting beat up again, but then she realized who was at the door. The tall, powerful, white form of Celestia towered over them, her expression one of an alicorn ready to smite somepony for the slightest offense. She spoke with an authoritative, powerful, deadly tone that drove all four ponies in the room to cower in fear – including Thrackerzod.

“Twilight Sparkle, my student, I have detected a large amount of otherworldly energy in Ponyville today. Once or twice would have been a minor annoyance to write to you about, but there have been consistent surges of the beyond in Ponyville. And yet, I have received no letter from you, no report of any kind, and the letters I’ve been sending you apparently haven’t been making it through. So, here I am, and what do I see? A complete lack of that dragon who should be with you at all times and fraternization with what is clearly an interdimensional incursion. How do you think this makes me feel Twilight?”

“P-p-princess! I-I did not know an interd-dimensional incursion was something to write you about! H-had I known it was I would have clearly written you a letter the moment I’d gotten the incursion under contro-“

“I will listen to your excuses later, Twilight. I assure you, it will be an extremely long and taxing discussion that will determine the future state of your entire life. Though I will say that your drunkenness may make it slightly more bearable, depending on which way your spontaneous idiocy swings. But for now…”

Renee stepped forward. “Yes?”

“You’re not bowing.”

“Apologies, your majesty,” Renee said, taking off her hat and lowering her head to the floor. “I am but a humble traveler, hopping from universe to universe. My name is Renee, and I am currently lost in this universe due to unknown reasons, and was discussing with Twilight here possibilities of returning me and my sister home. This is Sweetie Belle, my sister, who came with me. That’s just Thrackerzod, native to your universe – I do not know if you knew that already or not, but I don’t want you placing any blame you place on us onto her.”

“You speak well, Renee,” Celestia asserted. “I’m inclined to believe you – and in fact have little reason not to. Some of what you say is evident, and your demeanor is in line with your story. And you have managed not to offend me, which is a prize few can take.”

Twilight looked between Celestia and Renee like she couldn’t believe the exchange that was happening between the two of them.

Renee stood up from her bow, looking Celestia in the eyes. “Your majesty, may I ask a question?”

“You may.”

“Do you have the means to send us home? Or any knowledge of other universes?”

“Some. I do not know which world you hail from.”

“I know the spell to return directly to my world, I just lack the power within myself to do such a spell.”

Celestia nodded. “I am aware. If you start the spell, I will be able to complete it with ease.”

“The question then is…” Renee adjusted her hat. “Will you?”

Celestia smiled. The expression was apparently enough to make Twilight shiver in fear. “What kind of god would I be if I did not help a pony in need?”

Renee nodded slowly. “Well then… We could try it now.”

“I see no reason to wait,” Celestia agreed.

Renee cast the spell, Celestia completed it, and... nothing happened.

“…Oh, bother. It appears this universe doesn’t have a direct connection. I’m sorry for wasting your magic.”

“As you should be,” Celestia confirmed. “I may have another solution. There is a flow of energy present in the world that was not present before the interdimensional activity began. I can edit your spell to produce a gateway through that flow of activity. It will not take you home, but it may take you somewhere you can get home from. You two can leave me to deal with… my subjects.”

Twilight was positive Celestia stared right at her when she said that, but in reality she was staring right at Thrackerzod. And Thrackerzod knew it. A string of eldritch swears went off in her head. She had to think of something fast…

“That would be a boon greater than we deserve,” Renee said, bowing again.

“Most definitely,” Celestia asserted, casting the spell. A crisp yellow ring appeared in the air, leading to a Ponyville where the Library did not exist. “There you are. Another world to enter.”

“Thank you, your highness,” Renee said.

Sweetie blinked. “So, what, we’re just going to leave? Just like that?”

Renee nodded. “Yes. Celestia needs to deal with her subjects, Sweetie. We don’t want to be here when that happens.”

“Oooooooh.”

“And Twilight?” Renee said, turning to the unicorn.

“Y-yes?”

“After… this, think about what I said. You might find something new in life.”

“S-sure! Whatever you say, Renee!”

Renee and Sweetie Belle stepped through the portal. Celestia allowed it to close.

At the last possible second, Thrackerzod teleported through the portal to the other universe.

“Damn!” Celestia cursed, “the demon escaped!”

“Wh-what?” Twilight said, looking around. “Did that kid just teleport? Did you just… What? I don’t understand – but I’m willing to learn! Definitely willing to learn!”

“Twilight, you do not realize it yet, but soon you will come to understand just how badly you’ve screwed up every conceivable thing. It’s so far off the rails that I will get little enjoyment from watching you squirm for your life.”

Twilight gulped.

~~~

“So…” Sweetie Bot said, trotting alongside Fluttershy. “What actually summons the Great and Powerful Smooze?”

“Lord Smooze, young one,” Fluttershy responded with a calm, soft, musical voice. “Lord Smooze is not a showpony, but the savior and cleanser of all things. And every single part of this ritual is important, passed down from the first of our order.”

“But what actually summons the Smooze? I am one-hundred percent sure that the mathematically sound dancing and perfect purple robes are important, but there has to be one part that actually ends the ceremony, bringing on Lord Smooze!”

“Oh my, you are such an inquisitive little one! I am afraid the central step of the ritual is a secret, to prevent gypsies like Pinkie from trying to stop us with their unnatural magic. We just cannot risk it.”

“But… But I’m Rarity's sister.”

“And while I do not doubt your devotion to your elder sibling, she is the reason the ritual failed last time.”

“…I thought I was the one who ruined it by desecrating the desecrated raccoon?”

“You did not know what our order needed, you were forgiven. But she spent the day with you instead of with us, and pushed our plans back considerably. Perhaps this was for the better – after all, you are with us now – but I still can’t take the chance. I’m sorry.”

“Entering disappointed failure mode…”

“Oh, don’t be like that! You can still help. Here, I’ll tell you something interesting. See that great pit in the center of the clearing? That is the pit Lord Smooze will erupt from and cover the entire world with his holy goop. One of the steps involves the ritual dumping of all those buckets of paint. We wouldn’t be able to complete it without them.” She turned to look Sweetie Bot directly in the eyes. “Remember that now, Sweetie.”

“I will!” Sweetie Bot said, grinning. “Success sequence initiated!” She began to do a happy dance.

“Mhm. Yes,” Fluttershy said. “Now go run along, the ritual isn’t until the eclipse actually starts.”

“Yay! Rarity! Hey Rarity! I did something amazing!”

Rarity looked up from the raccoon she was skinning. “Hrm? What is it, Sweetie Belle?”

“I am going to do something great for you! I love you so much!”

“Mhm, yes…” Rarity said, continuing to skin the raccoon. “Don’t go dragging me off to a strange obstacle course now, you hear?”

“I would never do that again! It is saved on the list of things never to do again, beep boop!”

Rarity smiled at her sister. “Yes… Yes it is.” She gave her little sister a hug. “You know, it means a lot to me that you’re here with me. We’ll get to appreciate the glory of Smooze together!”

“Er… Yeah! That’s definitely what’s going to happen! Affirmative!”

“Sweetie, do you have a surprise for me? I can tell when you have a surprise, you know!”

“Yeah! I do! But it’s a surprise, so turn off your eyes until then!”

“Sweetie, I do have to prepare for the ritual. But I won’t pry. I can’t wait to see what it is.”

“Hooray for Rarity, number one sister!”

“Mm, yes…” Rarity said, turning back to her work.

It was then that Acorna decided to teleport Sweetie Bot back. “Aha! My plan worked to perfection!”

“Yes, yes it did,” Pinkie said, rolling her eyes. “Hey, Sweetie! Did you find out what we need?”

“Yeah! The buckets of paint! They can’t complete the ritual without them!”

Acorna looked at the buckets of paint clearly stacked near the edge of the clearing. “I’ve got them in my sights! Prepare for a destructive laser!”

Pinkie facehooved. “Just teleport them here, don’t draw too much attention. I mean, they’re probably all pretty dumb, but I think they’ll notice a giant explosion.”

Acorna glared at Pinkie.

“Remember, it was your idea to do this.”

“Oh. Right, yes. Ahem. Begone, buckets!” With a flash of her magic, the buckets were suddenly on their hill and not in the clearing with the cult. “There, all good. The ritual won’t complete. I’ve saved Equestria again!”

“Yay!” Sweetie Bot said, clapping her hooves together. “What do we do now?”

Pinkie shrugged. “I dunno, actually. Oh!” She pulled a camera out of her mane. “Let’s take pictures of their faces when they fail!”

“Priceless!” Acorna said. “I can’t wait to go down there and rub my victory in their faces!”

“That’s one way to do it,” Pinkie said.

“Can I go back down there and be with my sister?” Sweetie Bot asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Pinkie said. “Unless something unexpected ha-“ She shoved a hoof over her mouth, but it was too late. She had invoked Murphy’s Law.

Which, in this case, turned out to not be so much ‘the worst thing’ and more of ‘the unexpected thing.’

Charter-Twilight, OJ, and Jack walked up to them. Twilight grinned. “I thought I sensed a dimensional device! Hey Pinkie!”

“Hey Twilight!” Pinkie said, hugging her. “How was the Ultra Fast universe?”

“Is that what it is?” Twilight said, rubbing her chin. “It was a little strange, and sometimes infuriating, but it’s nice enough. I made some friends! This is OJ and Jack.”

OJ waved a hoof. Jack nodded with dignity.

Pinkie grinned. “This is Acorna and Sweetie B… Just Sweetie. No special name.”

Acorna took a step forward, measuring herself up to Twilight. They were the same size, but Acorna’s hairstyle was clearly less interesting than Twilight’s. Acorna lacked the uneven coat that was telling of scars, and her ears were plain.

Acorna narrowed her eyes. “Hello Twilight…”

“Hello!” Twilight said, shaking Acorna’s hoof. “Pleased to meet you! If you think calling me Twilight is weird, just call me Charter.”

“I prefer Charlie,” Jack commented. “By the way, Acorna, what’s the Apple family like here? Do they have any… side businesses?”

“Applejack, you’re supposed to know, you live there.”

“Ah. So yer a moron too. Sorry Ah thought otherwise of ya.”

Twilight nudged Jack. “Jack, be nice. We don’t know anything about this world.”

Pinkie shrugged. “All I know for sure is that we stopped the Smooze from being summoned down there. It would have been bad if it was. Oh! I know witchcraft now! It’s awesome!”

“Cool! Does this mean I can teach you spells now?”

“Eh, more like Zecora stuff than unicorn magic, but maybe? I haven’t really tried much, spent all my time spying on the Smooze cult.”

“Sounds like you’ve had an eventful stay. All I’ve had is a bunch of talking, pointless banter, and some friend making.”

“Also she owes me thirty bits,” Jack said.

“Ten, and you know it.”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “I dunno Twilight, it could be thirty…”

“Pinkie that’s not helping!”

Jack smirked, putting a hoof on Pinkie. “Charlie, let me tell you how much I appreciate your Pinkie. As much as your forty bit debt.”

Pinkie giggled. “I’m sure appreciated!”

“Traitor,” Twilight grunted.

Acorna shoved herself into the conversation. “I bet she actually owes… fifty bits! Yes! Also, she’s ugly.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “What threw ya out of bed this mornin’?”

Acorna rammed her muzzle into Twilight’s. “An imposter, that’s what. Trying to steal my glory. There can only be one pretty pony princess and that princess is ME!”

“You’re going to be very disappointed to find that there are thousands of Princess Twilight Sparkles out there. I’m just one that likes to travel universes a lot.”

“Yeah, well, you, uh… You’re evil! I know it!”

Twilight blinked, unimpressed. “Pinkie, where’d you find this one?”

“She found me. I protested. It didn’t stop happening.”

“Fun.”

Away from the four ponies involved in the argument that couldn’t settle on a topic, Sweetie Bot and OJ sat on the edge of the hill.

“So, you’re Sweetie?” OJ said. “Nice. I’ve never known a Sweetie that well.”

“I’ve never seen you at all! You look like you’re on fire! So many health hazard alarms are blaring in my mind after making that connection.”

OJ smiled. “You have an interesting voice, you know that?” Twilight caught this comment out of the corner of her eyes. Out of curiosity, she turned on her ears.

“I’m told it will take me far some day!” Sweetie Bot said. “Sweetie Belle, great singer extraordinaire!”

OJ put a hoof around her. “It’s nice to have something going for you. I… Don’t have much. I used to be evil, but now I’m good, and everyone still hates me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Sweetie Bot said, returning the hug. “I’ve only known you for like three minutes and I’ve already decided you’re cool! That should mean something!”

OJ smiled. “Yeah, it does. Twilight was like that as well. But… Well, I still feel like I want to do something. I’ve tried to make up for what I’ve done, but I just keep screwing it up. I’m… Well, I’m useless.”

“I’m sure you can do something good if you just tried! I always thought I ruined so many things, but today I saved the day! My sister is going to live and the Smooze has been stopped!”

“Yeah… You got lucky though. What am I going to do? Sit here and wait for something to go wrong I can fix?”

“Probably! I bet you’ll be amazing at whatever it is!”

OJ hugged the filly close. “Thank you, Sweetie.”

“Don’t mention it! My encouragement skills are at maximum!”

Twilight broke herself away from the argument to look at Sweetie Bot. “Your voice is a really interesting one, Sweetie. It sounds synthetic. Does that mean anything?”

“Aren’t you deaf?” Jack asked.

“Turned the artificial ears on out of curiosity. There’s something really curious about Sweetie’s voice.”

Pinkie’s ears perked up. “Ahahhahaha – how about we talk about anything else?”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Huh, Twilight’s right, her voice does sound kinda artificial. Like a machine or something.”

Pinkie facehooved. “What did I just say!?”

Acorna’s expression became darkened. She glanced at Sweetie Bot. “…There’s no way.”

Sweetie Bot glanced around. “No way what? What was that about my voice? Am I not operating within normal parameters?”

OJ blinked. “I thought it was obvious. She’s clearly a robot of some kind.”

“Okay, that’s cool,” Twilight said. “I don’t think I’ve seen a robot that looks that much like a pony before.”

Jack smiled. “If Ah could copy her I could send ponies to their death more often…”

Pinkie laughed nervously. “Ignore them! There’s no robots here! Not at all!”

Acorna looked right at Sweetie Bot, horn algow. “Sweetie…”

“I am definitely not a Robot!” Sweetie Belle shouted. “Robots don’t have souls! Robots have difficulty expressing true emotions! I love my sister!”

Pinkie put a bucket of paint over Acorna’s horn. “Oh look at me, being a silly prankster, stopping whatever magic she was doing!”

Twilight looked at Pinkie and understood what was going on. She turned off her ears. “Pinkie! You prankster! Hey, can you tell us about the time we had that whole paint fiasco on Hearth’s Warming? Oh, those were fun times…”

Acorna wasn’t listening to them. She removed the bucket from her head, magically cleaned herself up, and cast a simple scan spell on Sweetie Bot. Acorna grinned. “Oh, would you look at that. No soul. You are a robot.”

Sweetie Bot stamped her foot on the ground. “No! No I am not! I love my sister! I-“

Acorna cast a simple spell that tore a hole in Sweetie Bot’s leg, revealing not blood, but complex circuitry. Sweetie Bot couldn’t stop staring at it.

“ACORNA!” Pinkie yelled. “You… You… YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ROBOTS DISCOVER THEIR TRUE NATURE?”

Acorna’s smug smile vanished. “…Oh.”

Sweetie Bot’s eyes went red and two dozen guns unfolded from her robotic back, pointing at the five ponies. Her face was that of unbridled, uncontrollable rage. She screamed.

Then things started exploding.

~~~

Renee turned around, happy to see Thrackerzod behind them. “Oh, good, you got out of there.”

“You… wanted me to come with you?” Thrackerzod said, cocking her head.

“Of course! Celestia clearly wanted you dead for… some reason – probably because of whatever you are – but from what I know of you, you don’t deserve it. Now we just hope she doesn’t follow us… I gambled that since she wanted us gone, if you followed she would consider it a win.”

“...I just wanted to see the other world, that is all.”

“Thrackerzod, I saw you summon Hastur and talk about killing Twilight Sparkle and grabbing her soul for some weird game,” Sweetie Belle said. “The jig is up!”

“Wait, what?” Renee said, baffled. “That happened?”

“Yeah, I followed Zod when she sneaked out. It was… A little disturbing, but Hastur seemed agreeable enough, and Applebloom and Scootaloo were there. It was… Interesting. I should come on adventures more often!”

“That is not the response I would expect from you…” Renee said, shaking her head. She turned to Thrackerzod. “Is this true?”

“I assure you, I am a perfectly nor-“

“Dear, for whatever reason everypony in your universe except Celestia bought your act, but we knew something was up the moment we met you. We’re not going to hold… Whatever you are against you unless it clearly becomes a problem. For one I’d rather you didn’t kill Twilight Sparkle.”

Thrackerzod coughed. “If I were to be part of such a nefarious plan – which I am not – I would not be able to do anything an entire universe away. Such things would be beyond even a minor deity’s capabilities. …Yes.”

Sweetie Belle raised an eyebrow. “Nobody believes you.”

Renee shrugged. “She’s clearly been at this her whole life. Just let her do it. She’ll open up eventually. Until then, we just need to keep an eye on he-“

“Woah! Rarity, you’re really good at getting through that door without me noticing!” a Rainbow Dash said as she flew up to them. “I thought staring at it harder than before would keep you in there, but you eluded me yet again!”

Renee blinked took in a mildly annoyed breath. “...I am not your Rarity.”

“Rarity, I don’t own you, don’t be stupid!”

“Rainbow, ponies can’t own each other.”

“But you own Fluttershy! I think. Or was that the other way around? I can never remember.”

Renee blinked. “Huh?”

“Yeah, me too, I hate that guy.”

Renee looked to Sweetie and Thrackerzod for help.

Sweetie cleared her throat. “What my sister means to say is, we aren’t the ponies you know.”

Rainbow Dash chuckled. “Oh, I knew that.”

“You did?”

“Yeah! I’m, like, a goldfish? Like, I can’t remember anypony for more than a few seconds. Who are you again?”

“Sweetie Belle.”

“Oh! I remember you. You’re smaller than I remember…”

Sweetie Belle turned to Thrackerzod. Thrackerzod sighed. “Greetings, citizen of this fair town, I am a completely normal unicorn from another phase of existence! My name is Thrackerzod! I implore you to inform us of the status of your friends, so they may speak with us as opposed to you!”

“Oh, sweet! I heard a lot of big words in that sentence!”

“That was more than one sentence.”

“What was that word you said? The thing right before sentence?”

“…One?”

“…What the heck is ‘one’?”

“We’ve officially failed,” Thrackerzod said. “Time to pack our bags and hope Celestia finds a way to kill us before this imbecile does it with her words.”

“But I already packed you a lunch, Thrackerzod! …Wait, no, that was my lunch. Ohmygod I forgot my lunch at home!” She looked into the sky. “Aaaa! Where is my home!?”

Thrackerzod blinked. “…I have seen many things in this life. I… What is before me is the riddle to end all riddles, the puzzle for even the Oldest of Old Ones. You, Rainbow Dash, are the enigma of all phenomena.”

“Aw, you’re makin’ me blush.”

“…Weren't you worried about your house a moment ago?” Sweetie asked.

“I have a house?”

Renee let out a loud groan. “Okay! Okay, this is taxing. Let’s find another pony to talk to.”

“Hey, broo!” the native Pinkie Pie said, appearing from nowhere. “I’m another pony!”

“Any pony but a Pinkie Pie,” Renee said, turning tail.

“Aw, no fair broo! I’ve got a more sensical train of thought than Rainbow Dash! You can talk to me!”

“Hey, no fair!” Rainbow Dash shouted. “Your thoughts get a train?”

“Yeah broo! Everypony has a train! Yours is just in space, for some reason.”

“Y’know, knowing you, I thought you’d say it was in hell or something.”

“Oh, that can be arranged,” Pinkie chuckled. “By the way, hello interdimensional travelers, I’m Pinkie Pie! But you can call me Dinkie if you want!”

Sweetie Belle raised an eyebrow. “Why Dinkie?”

“Cause… reasons!” She leaned closer to Thrackerzod. “Special reasons!”

Thrackerzod lit her horn, and her eyes widened. “Oho… This is a pleasant surprise…”

Renee shot Thrackerzod a questioning look before returning to Dinkie. “So, Dinkie, can you tell us anything?”

“What, me? Oh I don’t know anything, sorry broo! I think Rarity might know something though!”

“Pinkie, Rarity’s right there! You’re talking to her!” Rainbow Dash said. “Man, I thought I was stupid.”

Sweetie Belle facehooved. “Dinkie, where can we find Rarity?”

“She should be at Twilight’s castle!” Dinkie said. “Probably looking for a cactus.”

“Why does she need another one?” Rainbow Dash asked. “She totally ruined the one I gave her…”

“Yeah, she tends to do that.”

Renee took a breath. “Well… it was an... event, meeting you two, but we should go see Rarity.”

“Oh I see the problem!” Rainbow Dash hit herself in the head. “Duh, you can’t see yourself, so you can’t see Rarity! It all makes so much sense now! I’m a genius!”

Dinkie blinked. “Yeah, broo, you are.”

Renee led Sweetie and Thrackerzod to Twilight’s castle. For the briefest of moments, Thrackerzod lit her horn and looked right at Dinkie. Dinkie nodded subtly, bouncing away.

It took Rainbow Dash five minutes to realize there was nopony to talk to anymore.

At Twilight’s castle, Renee walked in the front doors. “Hello? Rarity?”

Sitting on a chair in the middle of the hall, there was a Rarity twirling a knife on her hoof, the tip digging into her limb ever so slightly. “Oh! Hello there, Phil said you’d come by.” She dropped the knife, walking over to them. “What brings another me and her sisters here to little ol’ me? Come to rough me up, perhaps?”

“Ah… No.” Renee said, slightly taken aback by the strong accent that was probably Australian, not that she was very familiar with such things. Frankly, she was used to odd voices at this point. “We were told you might know… Uh…”

“We just wanted to get away from your Rainbow Dash and Pinkie,” Sweetie Belle said.

“They were suffocating our group dynamic!” Thrackerzod added.

“…Sure,” Renee said. “To be frank, I’m not sure why I’m here.”

“Well,” Rarity said, putting a hoof to her chin. “If you were me, I’d be here looking for somepony to slap me across the face that would understand exactly how I feel about it…”

Renee took in a breath. “Darling, I won’t judge you, but please realize I am the furthest thing from a masochist.”

“Huh. You know, I haven’t heard the word in a while. Feels liberating to hear it spoken out loud…”

Renee facehooved. “Ugh… What is it with my alternates…”

“Well, maybe it’s just because we’re the type of pony that can be… Oh I don’t know the word…”

“Corrupted?” Thrackerzod suggested.

“Yes! Corrupted. That’s it. We’re corruptible, darling.”

Renee sighed, pulling her hat up a little. “Yes, I suppose that is true… Anyway, you seem to have some knowledge of what’s going on. Do you have any idea how to get us home?”

“Nope!”

“Worth a shot.”

Rarity smirked. “I do know where your Twilight is. She went to another universe through our Mirror Portal. She’s even got a note for you on the back of that chair.”

Renee galloped to the chair and ripped the page off the back of the chair. My friends, this is Charter-Twilight. I’m trying to find a way home, but it may not work. You can follow me through the Mirror Portal or by using the spell outlined below. I’m doing fine, made some new friends. I hope to see you all soon!

Renee smiled, rolling up the paper. “Rarity, where is your Mirror Portal?”

“It’s in the back wing. I tried to move it when I knew you were going to show up, but not even a montage could safely move that thing. Right this way!”

She led the three of them to the Mirror Portal, gesturing toward it with a hoof. “Behold! The doorway to further adventure, and your friend!”

Renee looked at Sweetie. “Looks like we might be getting out of here sooner rather than later.”

“I sure hope so,” Sweetie said. “This is already getting pretty weird.”

“The weirdness has been doubled,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “…Yeah, I don’t think that worked.”

“I found it funny,” Thrackerzod huffed. “Can we go now? Places to go, things to do, all that.”

Renee smiled. “Sure.” They stepped through a portal to another universe…

~~~

Dinkie placed a chicken in the basement of Sugarcube Corner, right in front of the form of Vriska, still imprisoned.

“…Why are you showing me this chicken?”

Dinkie grinned. “This, broo, is one of Fluttershy’s many chickens. She will be giving us what we need to make a sacrifice of innocence!” She began to draw a yellow mark in the ground.

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Why do we need an innocence sacrifice?”

“Because I got some amazing instructions from a higher demon from another sect! And it sounds cool! I’m going to contact her boss and create a great demon army!”

“For what?”

“I think we’re killing a Twilight Sparkle in a special way, I’ll get more info from the yellow broo.” She stared right at the chicken. “Your life is worthless, little chicken!”

Nothing happened.

“Come on… Uh… Broo! Broo! Chicken broo! If you keep not losing innocence, you’ll be sent to the butchering shop! Uh… Your friends don’t like you – wait do chickens even have friends?”

Vriska sighed. “You’re doing it wrong. Hey! Chicken!”

The chicken turned to stare at Vriska with rapt attention.

“You are nothing but a fucking pathetic animal in a huge world where giving a shit will only flatten you for trying. Your only purpose to the beings that run this world is either to lay eggs or eventually be turned into fried chicken, sold at some fast food restaurant for a few dollars. Your father and mother were likely eaten in much the same way, and most of your children will be smashed into those pastries – some of which I’m sure you’ve nibbled on occasionally. Cannibal.”

Hastur popped out of the glyph in the ground. “Who has summoned me?”

Dinkie bowed. “I am but a lowly demon servant, Dinkie, sent here by Thrackerzod to report on complications. This is Vriska. She’s really good at making chicken innocence sacrifices.”

Vriska would have folded her arms with pride were her hands not tied behind her back at the moment. “I’m pretty sweet, yeah.”

“What happened that Thrackerzod cannot contact me herself? Do not tell me that the nut-head got wind of her. Or that her mortal shell has perished and she is currently fighting her way through the halls of undeath.”

“No, broo, nothing that bad! Well, maybe that bad, I don’t really know what’s going on that well, all I know is that I’m going to get to summon a lot of demons for you.

“Provide a good reason to give you access and it shall be granted. Also, that’s a pretty nice cloak there, deity.”

“Thank you,” Vriska said.

“Why do you let this pony imprison you so? Powerful though she is, you easily have the power within you to drain her.”

“I’m interested to see where this goes. That’s pretty much it.”

Dinkie cleared her throat. “So, apparently Thrackerzod was made by Princess Celestia. She bailed to my universe, but is currently under the watch of some interdimensional travelers – Renee and Sweetie Belle - so she can’t exactly talk to you without raising suspicion. She did manage to send a message to my brain though! Her plan is to use the new nature of the contract to summon a demon army from here, and shunt it through a portal to there, for a surprise attack Celestia won’t see coming, nor be able to stop even with her power! The Twilight in the contract will fall and the mission will be completed!”

“An adequate plan, especially for one constructed in such a hurry. There are complications though, not the least of which is the deity you have tied up behind me. She has a soul-connection to the interdimensional travelers, and likely will interfere. I understand that, at the moment, she will promise not to interfere, but I also understand that promises mean next to nothing to her.”

“Eh, you’re not wrong,” Vriska admitted.

“Glad you’re not too offended. I would like to ask you out for a drink later, but there are more pressing matters.”

“Clearly. By the way, I say go for the demon army. It’ll be cool, and you know I probably won’t be able to stop it. If you really want to be sure, why don’t you just stay here? You have enough power to match me.”

“The nut-head is watching. If I leave for any significant amount of time, I will be found out, and he could ruin everything.”

“I hate those bastards…” Vriska muttered, clenching her fists.

“They do have a habit of impeding the efforts of many.”

“Am I gonna get to summon a demon army or not broo?” Dinkie demanded.

Hastur folded his fingers together. “…Yes. The more time Celestia and Twilight have to prepare, the less likely we will ever get a chance to take her soul without alerting my superiors – and we do not want to get them involved for any reason at all.”

“Who are your superiors, by the way?” Vriska asked. “You seem a little too organized for run-of-the-mill eldritch abominations.”

“None of your concern, deity, at least not at the moment.”

“Fiiiine,” Vriska said, leaning onto her side. “Can you get to the demon summoning already? I want to see it.”

Dinkie held out her hooves, asking Hastur for the power. He snapped his fingers, and eldritch energy shot into her hooves. “Do not abuse this power, I could smite you in a single instant from three universes away.”

“You can count on me, Hastur!” Dinkie said, saluting.

Hastur vanished, leaving Dinkie and Vriska alone. Dinkie set to work on the demonic army…

~~~

Flutterfree’s picnic was just as enjoyable as she said it would be. Scooter, Twix, and Charity really enjoyed having a dozen fluffy bunnies ready to be petted and stroked at a moment’s notice – it was just so cute. Flutterfree had made the sandwiches and the fruit bowl herself, carefully arranged to be as pleasing as possible. These three ponies were going to let off some much needed stress, and it was working pretty well. Twix was taking a nap surrounded by the rabbits, Charity was savoring the delicious sandwiches and talking about how they even made her ‘spaghetti noodles’ pale in comparison. Scooter was ever alert, and much calmer than the Pinkie Fluterfree knew, but even she allowed herself to have a nice relax surrounded by fluffy animals, staring into the sky, studying clouds.

“You know…” she said. “I don’t think I realized how much I stress myself out over nothing all the time.”

“Oh?” Flutterfree pried.

“Well, I know that everything will turn out fine in the end – at least I’m reasonably sure – but I rarely worry about that. I worry about all the little things. The things I know, the things I don’t know, whether or not I should try to know…”

“It is a large burden.”

“How does your Pinkie deal with all of it? If you know, that is.”

“I think she just enjoys every day as it comes. She occasionally says things… She knows something terrible is going to happen, eventually. But she doesn’t let it bother her much – she just enjoys us. The feeling of being together.”

“…Yeah, talking vague like this, while nice, doesn’t really cut it.”

“I can imagine.”

“I hope she shows up soon…”

Flutterfree smirked. “You know she’ll show up eventually, don’t you?”

“I will neither confirm nor deny that suspicion.”

“Um,” Charity called. “What are you two talking about over there? Are you ignoring me?”

“Sorry!” Flutterfree said, turning her attention back to the white unicorn. “What were you talking about?”

“Um, well, I wanted to know if animals bought dresses.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Sometimes? I don’t think any of them are looking for one now.”

“Oh. All right.”

“I can ask them though! Does anyone want a dress?” There was silence from the fuzzy creatures. “Sorry, Charity.”

“Still feels off to be called that.”

“Well,” Flutterfree said. “If I ever come back here with my Rarity, or another Rarity, then we do need these names. I think it’s going to save a lot of time later.”

“That sounds cool,” a new voice said. Flutterfree made eye contact with the local Rainbow Dash.

“Rainbow Dash, I presume?”

“What? No. I am… The Bird.”

Flutterfree blinked. “…Convenient.”

Twix sat bolt upright. “Wait. The Bird. The Bird! Hello!”

“Hello,” The Bird responded.

“When you said ‘so there’s no confusion’, did you mean with no confusion with Rainbow Dashes?”

“I dunno. When did I say that? Hey, sweet, look at all the rabbits.”

“The Bird! The- agh, she’s gone.” Twix facehooved. “I will never understand that pegasus.”

Flutterfree shrugged. “She’s not so bad. Hey, The Bird! Did you know your friends have different names you can call them now?”

“Uh, no. That sounds sweet though. Lemme guess… Carapace, The Swan, and Orville.”

Twix blinked. “…No.”

Charity raised an eyebrow. “Um, which of those names went to each of us?”

“I dunno,” The Bird said. “I just said things that I thought. It usually works out for me.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “They’re Charity, Twix, and Scooter.”

The Bird looked at Charity. “Isn’t that kind of… obvious?”

“Yeah, that’s what I keep saying, but nopony pays any attention, and, um… The Bird, that isn’t Fluttershy over there. That’s Flutterfree.”

“Oh, so she has a new name as well? Sweet.”

“No, see, she’s from another universe.”

“Oh. That makes sense. So we don’t tell her about the Ch-“

Charity shot The Bird with a death glare.

“Hey, I’m just kiddin’ Charity, just loosen up.”

“You picked up those names fast,” Twix muttered.

“I have a freakily selective memory. …I think, can’t exactly remember that all that clearly.”

Scooter chuckled. “Heh. Nice.”

The strange words appeared in the sky again. Nicer.

“Oh sweet, the words of the all-powerful being are back,” The Bird said.

Charity looked around, finding no words. “…Sure they are.”

Scooter stared at the place the words had just been, eyes narrow. “I will go beat you up again, don’t think I won’t,” she muttered.

I have a new home security system.

“Bring it.”

Charity blinked. “…Am I missing something?”

“It’s just right over your head, Charity, don’t worry about it,” The Bird said.

Flutterfree shook her head. “I’m with The Bird on this one.”

“Yeah. New friend likes me. Hey, can I have one of those sandwiches?”

“Sure!” Flutterfree said. “Help yourself! I’ll just have to go get some more now…” She flew away from the group, heading back to her cottage for more sandwiches. She hummed a little song to herself, happy with the way life was right now. So what if she was lost in a world at war? She had good friends, good animals, and good times. She noted that she’d be happy here even if she was never able to return home – though she didn’t believe for a second the girls would stop looking for her.

She didn’t make it back to her cottage. Two ponies appeared out of nowhere and threw a net around her, one shoving a hoof into her mouth. They looked like Lyra and Bon Bon, but Flutterfree didn’t need to think too hard to realize what they really were.

Changelings.

They threw her in a sack, bound and gagged, and flew her through the air somewhere far away. She probably should have been really, really scared. She wasn’t really – she was being kidnapped by some changelings and was probably going to be interrogated. But they were just changelings – they weren’t Majora, they weren’t some horror from beyond time, they were just the normal shape-shifting bugs she was used to. She could handle herself pretty well, even if they could steal all her positive emotion or kill her…

She really should be more worried than she was.

She had no idea how much time passed in the sack before she was sat down in a really uncomfortable chair. The sack was pulled off of her, and she was able to see that she was in a cave. There was a table in front of her, and there were two changelings glaring at her.

“All right! Spill the beans!” the left one, a male, yelled. “What do you know?”

“What do I know about what?”

“Everything!”

Flutterfree sneered evilly. “I know that each and every rabbit in the world has a different volume of carrots they need to eat a day, and this can vary by five percent on any given day on a day to day basis.”

“No, no, no! You know what I mean!”

“I’m really just clueless mister Changeling – please, tell me what you want and maybe I can give it to you!”

“W-why aren’t you terrified! You’re Fluttershy, you’re supposed to be afraid of everything!”

“That’s because I’m not Fluttershy, I’m an alternate universe version of her! I’m lost, and I replaced her. Sorry if you can’t find her, that’s probably my fault.”

The second changeling, a female, rolled her eyes. “Likely story.”

“Do you think this is funny?” the first demanded, slamming his hooves down on the table. “We can have you killed or drained easily! Would you like to die here, alone? Or, better yet, get encased in icky changeling goo and be carted off to the Hive to be slowly drained of all emotion?”

The second changeling facehooved. “It’s called nest fluid…”

“It sounds scarier when I call it goo!”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Flutterfree shrugged. “I don’t want those things. Trust me.”

The male growled. “We know you’re an Element of Harmony, don’t deny that.”

“Oh yes, I’m the Element of Kindness!”

“Good. We know you’re close to the Princess’s Protégé…”

“Oh yeah, she’s a friend.”

“So… You’ll have heard things about the war and some secrets you weren't supposed to know about.”

“Definitely!”

“Who’s running their army!?”

Flutterfree grinned wide. “Why, children!”

“AUGH! Not this again! Do you realize how many times we’ve heard that? It’s stupid! It never makes any sense! Why do you ponies keep trying it? It’s insane!”

“-ly brilliant?” Flutterfree suggested.

“Every time I hear that tacked on to my sentence I want to gut somepony.”

“Oh, then you should stop using the word ‘insane’. It just sets you up for it.”

The female changeling rolled her eyes. “Look, Fluttershy, can you tell us anything useful?”

“Well, they’ve probably noticed I’m gone by now and are trying to track me down.”

“There’s nopony who can track us to this place, we’re too well hidden.”

“Who said a pony was going to do the tracking?”

“…What are you implying?” the male asked.

Flutterfree grinned. “Well, they have a dragon. Dragons have pretty good noses.” Spike doesn’t really, but they don’t have to know that.

“A- crud, you’re right, Spike. But wait, he hates Celestia…”

“He likes me though.”

“Dammit, you’re right…”

The female slapped the male upside the head. “Spike doesn’t know how to track, remember? Have you even read his file?”

“…No.”

“She’s just trying to get under your carapace. And it pains me to say that she’s succeeding. We need to try other tactics. I say we move her to the torture departme-“

Two changelings burst into the cave room. “There’s a contingent of unicorns coming!” a female shouted. “We’ve got to pack up and move, like, now!”

“How could they find us!?”

“Um, I have no idea! Maybe they’ve got a changeling working for them or, um, something?”

“There’s no way…” the first female said.

“Something to figure out later!” the male said. “Let’s just get going! You two are here for the prisoner, right?”

“Right!” the changeling who hadn’t spoken yet said in a gruff tone.

The two interrogators ran out of the room. The two new changelings walked up and hoisted Flutterfree onto their backs.

“Hey, Charity. Thanks for saving me,” Flutterfree said.

Charity winced. “Is it that obvious?”

“Yes. Yes it is,” Flutterfree said bluntly. “I assume this is your Kevin.”

“She even knows about me!? Really!?” Kevin blurted.

“Um, okay, I can explain that. See, she knows other versions of you, Kevin, and, um…”

“We can talk about this later,” Flutterfree said. “Look like you’re trying to get a prisoner to another section of camp. I assume there actually is a contingent of unicorns coming?”

“Yeah. I called them.”

“Squeaky?”

“Is there anything you didn’t figure out?”

“Eh, not sure what Scooter’s deal was with the words yet… But I’m working on that one.”

“Words?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t know either,” Charity muttered. “Let’s go.” The two of them dragged Flutterfree out of the caves, into the larger changeling base they were in. Changelings were panicking, trying to get out, to move, to do anything – but they were clearly moving too slow. It would take at least half an hour to get every changeling out, and Flutterfree was pretty sure they didn’t have that kind of time. She felt sorry for them, even if they had threatened to torture and kill her.

They burst out into the open sun. Charity quickly transformed back into her unicorn form. Kevin waved them on. “Go! I’ll keep watch.” He transformed into a rock.

“He’s really good at changing…” Charity commented. She untied Flutterfree. In return, Flutterfree grabbed her and flew through the air. She may not have known this universe, but the geography was close enough to her own. She knew which direction Ponyville was, flying right in that direction.

The Bird caught up with them. “Woah. You guys are fast. I thought you needed saving.”

“Charity already took care of that,” Flutterfree said. “Put her powers to good use.”

“Woah. Sweet moves, Charity. Wish I’d been there to see it.”

“Um, you being there would have probably messed it up.”

“A pegasus can dream.”

“Yes. Yes they can.”

“By the way, thanks for coming to save me The Bird, the thought is appreciated.”

“Aw, thanks. Think we can go back to the picnic?”

Charity spoke up. “Um, Flutterfree and I will need to be… debriefed. But we can do it after that’s done.”

“Nice. See you there!” She blasted away in a flash of rainbow.

“I like her,” Flutterfree said. “She’s not all there… But she seems so happy with life.”

“Yeah. Sometimes, it’s lucky to be The Bird.”

~~~

Celestia had a giant whiteboard with the words How Twilight Sparkle Fucked Up written at the top. There were a list of bulletpoints under this insulting heading.

1)Twilight Sparkle contacted eldritch spirits to gain power and got caught

2)Twilight Sparkle foolishly didn’t realize she had been caught

3)Twilight Sparkle continued to tap into the power of the eldritch over years

4)Twilight Sparkle didn’t notice when a demon literally moved into town with her

5)Twilight Sparkle did not bother to check the state of magic for stability ever

“Now, have I outlined precisely how you’ve ruined everything?”

“Yes princess!” Twilight said, cowering.

“NO I HAVE NOT!” Celesta bellowed, her voice blowing out all the windows in the library that weren’t already destroyed. “This list is just the why you screwed up and what you did. It tells you nothing about what horror you actually unleashed, why I’m concerned, and furthermore, why I haven’t squashed you like a pancake yet.”

“Uh…”

“BACK TO MAGIC KINDERGARTEN! Lesson 1: Magic is a very unstable source of power and those of us with decent levels of magic should regularly check our area for discrepancies. Even if your magic was inherently corrupted by whatever me-forsaken ritual you first accomplished, if you were doing this you would have detected the presence of a demon in your midst at least once.”

“Yes princess, I should have been doing that princess!”

Celestia rammed her face right into Twilight’s. “Does it look like you can say anything that can bridle my anger? No. You can only sit and whimper. We haven’t even gotten to what you actually caused yet. I haven’t done a full scan yet, but now that this eldritch power has made itself known, I can see. It has a soul bill on you, Twilight. You traded your soul, knowingly or not, in one of your rituals. Normally this would just mean a visit from a demon one night and a quick death, but apparently you’ve screwed something up with time or other force of nature, because the bond is shaken. You did something that moved outside the terms of whatever contract you were apart of, and that upsets some bigger demonic entities. That little unicorn filly had more power than you have within yourself, and it is no doubt but one of the underlings after you.”

“I… I had no idea…”

“Clearly not, for if you did you would have wormed your way out of the contract completely by now. And another thing – do you realize how difficult it must have been for you to ignore the oddness of that filly? She spoke with such an unnatural tone! And I seem to recall you mentioning in one of your letters she had a thing about being a ‘completely normal pony’. Did you temporarily catch the retardation of your rainbow friend, my faithful student?”

Twilight whimpered.

“You’re lucky I hate the eldritch oversight that wants you dead, otherwise I’d probably execute you for idiocy. But by keeping you alive I’ll destroy much of their infrastructure around this one contract, and nothing delights me more than seeing beings ‘more powerful’ than I put in their place. Of course in the end this will likely have irrevocable effects on the nature of magic itself, but you have to suffer some kind of punishment. Being responsible for the fundamental alteration of our world probably suits you.”

“Thank you for being merciful!”

“I’m also thinking time in the dungeon…”

Twilight shut up, backing up into a wall.

“Good response, no-“

It was at this point Pinkie stuck her head in the doorframe. “Ah, Twilight, Pinkie sees you’re in need of a new door, yes. Pinkie can make that happen, yes, with just a few small favo-“

“DO YOU WANT TO ETERNALLY FEEL THE BURNING OF YOUR OWN INTESTINE WRAPPED AROUND YOUR NECK, PINK ONE!?” Celestia bellowed. Pinkie left very quickly.

Celestia’s eye twitched. “Now, Twilight, even if this Thrackerzod ran away to save her skin from my wrath, there will be others after you. We are going to need to prepare.”

Twilight gulped. Celestia was smiling again. That couldn’t be good.

~~~

Cult Leader Fluttershy tensed when the exploding started. She may have had backup plans upon backup plans for today, but there was always the chance some crazy explosion messed everything up. Random explosions were not a variable she could account for, not easily anyway.

She was mildly surprised to see the source of the explosions. The metallic form of a bloodlusted robot was tossed into the ritual clearing. Fluttershy was no stranger to these events – she had seen a couple robots revealed in her time, and the result had always been interesting. Who the robot was, however, that surprised her. Sweetie Belle – or, she supposed, Sweetie Bot. Fluttershy realized she’d wondered a few times if Sweetie was a robot, but as a cult leader she didn’t really care about such things. The robotic infestation meant nothing to Lord Smooze.

The thing that really surprised Fluttershy was what happened around the bloodlusted robot. Princess Twilight Sparkle appeared, firing a laser intended to vaporize Sweetie Bot – only for another Twilight Sparkle, one Fluttershy didn’t know, to block the laser. “No! You don’t have to do this!”

“She’s a robot! All robots must die!”

“Acorna, think about what you’re doing!”

“Who needs to?” Acorna shouted, firing another laser. Twilight blocked it, but was unable to defend against a rocket from Sweetie Bot. The explosion threw her into the air. Acorna dropped all pretense of fighting Sweetie Bot instantly and engaged Twilight directly. “I’ll show you who’s the better princess!”

“What? This isn’t-“ Twilight quickly found herself in a fight for her life against… herself.

Fluttershy saw Pinkie appear, wielding a giant hammer, knocking Sweetie Bot to the side before she could lock on one of the cult members. Already, ponies were fleeing from the clearing, abandoning their devotion to Lord Smooze. Traitors.

Rarity, notably, wasn’t. She was staring right at the form of her sister in disbelief. Fluttershy wondered how a robot became one’s little sister without one knowing. It must feel like a betrayal to her.

Good. Fuel for the fire of Smooze.

Pinkie was using powers Fluttershy had never seen before – was it possible she wasn’t the gypsy bard, but another Pinkie? Like the other Twilight? A curious thought. A thought that was only enforced by the more incredible things Pinkie was doing – exhibiting the skill of somepony who had been in a lot of fights, something the gypsy bard had not. Interesting.

She saw some others come toward the clearing – an Applejack and a strange, fiery unicorn. “OJ! Don’t be stupid! We aren’t made for this!” Applejack called.

OJ continued trotting. “I bonded with her, Jack. I think I can talk her down. I can do something.”

“Ye’ll never do anythin’! Just accept that and move on with your life!”

“No. I’m doing this,” OJ said, walking into the clearing, horn held high.

Pinkie rammed Sweetie Bot into the ground, creating a small crater. The small robotic filly was made of sterner stuff than it appeared, ready to go again, this time activating the machine gun.

“Sweetie!” OJ called. “You don’t have to do this!”

Sweetie Bot glanced at OJ.

“Look at me! It’s your friend! Remember? We can-“

OJ didn’t get to finish. A bullet hit her in the left leg, forcing her to the ground. Sweetie Bot didn’t get off another round due to Pinkie’s extra-long golf club impacting her face and throwing her to the side.

Jack kneeled down to check OJ. “Ah, time to use some first aid. Hope ya have insurance.” She began to treat OJ’s gunshot wound using what she could, namely, her hooves, a swift kick, and a loose purple robe. It did the job.

“I’m worthless… Can’t do anything right… What’ll it be that’s better than me now? Another tambourine!?”

“Woah woah, hold yer salt there OJ. Just be glad yer alive, got it? That’s an order.”

OJ just curled into a ball and let herself cry.

In the air, Acorna and Twilight circled around each other. “Twilight! Why are you so angry with me? Trying to attack Sweetie I can understand, but… But what did I do to you?”

“I am the Princess of the Night!” Acorna roared. “And you’re not letting me have what I want!”

“I… Are you a child?”

“Oh no, I’m married, Twilight. I bet you aren’t mature enough to get that!”

“That has nothing to do with maturity!”

Acorna’s eyes flickered with an entitled menace. “Twilight, I worked my way to where I am. I cut, I stabbed, I lied, I pushed. I destroyed all those evil, that is, those who stood against me. I got to where I am by my own merit. These wings? They are mine. And now everypony has to give me what I want – except you. So, of course, I have to get rid of you just like Luna! Just like Cadence! Just like everypony else!”

“You… Took out Luna?!”

“What? No. I just tricked her into giving up her title. Was pretty easy, actually. Just had to convince her I could make her sexy!”

“What about Celestia?”

“Celestia understands who I am perfectly!”

“…I doubt that,” Twilight said. “…You know what I think? I think you’re the evil one.” She spread her wings. “I think you need to be stopped. Maybe even more than this Smooze does.”

“Ha! You won’t be able to win, I’m a princess.”

“Hello? Look at the wings! Princess here as well.”

“You’re just a shoddy wannabe. Trust me, I can tell, I’m a princess.”

Twilight took in a sharp breath. “Right.” She glanced down at the fight with Sweetie. “…Are you sure we can’t put this on hold? I need to stop what I caused…”

“NOPE!” Acorna shouted, firing a laser at Twilight. She deflected it, and the magical war began anew. Below, Pinkie was trying to capture Sweetie Bot while making sure she didn’t kill anypony, but that was proving to be very difficult. Nopony had died yet, but OJ was injured, Pinkie was getting tired, and the bloodlusted machine showed no signs of running out of ammo or rage.

“What a cruel world,” Pinkie muttered, pulling a rocket launcher out of her mane and firing. The explosion rocketed Sweetie Bot into a nearby tree, but, as usual, the effect was temporary and minimal.

They were going to need help if they were going to win this…

“HEY!” a voice yelled. Pinkie looked up to the hill.

Renee, Sweetie Belle, and Thrackerzod stood there. Sweetie Belle had been the one who shouted.

Sweetie Bot was certainly distracted by the appearance of another one of her. If distracted could mean the acquisition of a new target. The robot fired a barrage of ceaseless bullets at the three white unicorns. Renee easily deflected these with a blue shield, sending the bullets harmlessly into nearby trees. The three of them ran down the hill to the others while Pinkie continued to battle Sweetie Bot – maybe they could make a plan.

“What’s going on?” Renee asked Jack and OJ when they arrived. “Why are the Twilights fighting? Why is there a robotic Sweetie Belle attacking everyone?”

Jack looked down at OJ – she was in no position to explain anything. “Ah, fine. Ah guess Ah’ll explain for free today. The Acorna-Twilight, the one who lives here, has got her ego bruised and is now out for blood. As for the robot, well, she realized she was a robot, and apparently when robots here realize they’re robots they start going on a murderous rampage.”

“Is there any way to stop her?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“Not that Ah know of.”

Sweetie Belle looked around, scanning the area closely. She saw the clearing, the debris, the cult members, Fluttershy, Rarity-

“Aha! A Rarity!” Sweetie Belle took off, Thrackerzod in tow. Renee stayed behind, using her magic to tend to OJ “Rarity! Rarity!” Sweetie called.

Rarity gasped, her eyes watering. “Sweetie! I thought… I thought you were that machine!”

“The Sweetie Belle you know is that machine,” Thrackerzod said. “We are curious if you know of any way to stop her?”

“I… No.” Rarity looked at the ground, crestfallen. “All robots have to be killed when they go on a rampage… They…” She started crying.

Sweetie Belle looked at Rarity. “…Did she love you?”

“More t-than anyth-thing…”

“Then I have an idea.”

Thrackerzod narrowed her eyes. “Is this going to depend on the power of love?”

“Yes.”

“That’s stupid and you should feel stupid.”

“You have a better idea?”

“…I will monitor the attempt as it happens to aid however I can.”

“Good. Rarity? Do you think you can talk to her?”

“…Wait, what!? Me!? But the guns… The war… It’s all about the war…”

“Yes. You. You are the key, Rarity. Get over yourself for a few minutes and talk to your sister!”

“O-okay…”

“Thrackerzod, if we get shot at, you better use that magic I know you have to defend us.”

“…Fine,” Thrackerzod promised.

“HEY SWEETIE BELLE!” Sweetie Belle shouted. “LOOK AT ME!”

Sweetie Bot hit Pinkie with the edge of an explosion and turned to lock on to Sweetie Belle. She fired – but the bullets were blocked by a dark, eldritch barrier that tugged on the minds of all who saw it. Sweetie Belle pushed through. “LOOK AT WHO’S NEXT TO ME! IT’S YOUR SISTER! RARITY!”

Rarity took a breath. “Sweetie Belle! Come back to me! Please! We can go run fast at the social again! We can make beautiful art with these dead raccoons! We can… We can sit around at a bench and read stories to each other!”

Sweetie Bot lowered her weapons for a moment. “R-rari- BZZZZT!” Her weapons armed themselves again and kept firing.

Thrackerzod grunted. “Do it again!”

Rarity, hope in her eyes, screamed out. “SWEETIE BELLE! I am your sister! And there’s one thing you say to me all the time that I rarely acknowledge. Sweetie Belle, I love you! My sister, come back to me!”

Sweetie Bot’s weapons lowered again – and Thrackerzod took the chance. With a burst of magic, the code that was supposed to reinstate the bloodlust was never allowed to run. Sweetie Bot let her weapons fold away into her back, vanishing within her metallic interior. Her skin was torn off in numerous places, revealing metallic circuitry, and one of her ears was half broken – but she still managed to look adorable as she ran toward Rarity. “Rarity! Rarity!”

“Sweetie Belle!” the two embraced, clutching each other tighter than they ever had before.

“I… I don’t know what I was doing… What am I? Am I evil?” Sweetie Bot asked.

“You are Sweetie, and you are my sister. And you are not evil by any stretch of the imagination.”

At this moment, Acorna fell from the sky, embedding into the ground. “Ow…”

Twilight dropped to the ground, landing on her feet. “That… I hate fighting myself, so annoying…” She wiped her brow, turning to Sweetie Bot. “…You okay now?”

“Yeah! I’m… I’m with my sister. That’s all that matters. I may be a robot, but… That doesn’t change anything.”

Rarity blinked. “…Hey, am I a robot?”

“No,” Thrackerzod said. “…I know this because I have a knack for detecting synthetic voices and not a soul scanner!”

Sweetie Belle facehooved. “Oh boy… …Thrackerzod?”

“…Yes?”

“You did good. I knew you had it in you.”

“You kind of put me on the spot there!”

“If you were really some evil abomination – or, well, if that was all you were – you would have let us get shot to pieces.”

“Quite the gamble you made.”

“I did make you promise.”

“I could have broken that promise.”

The two stared at each other blankly. Then they started laughing.

Sweetie Bot tore herself from Rairty’s embrace. “Sweetie B… Bot! Sweetie Bot wants in on this fun activity with other Sweeties!”

Sweetie Belle put a leg around Sweetie Bot. “Welcome to the group!”

“No!” Acorna screamed, pulling herself out of the ground. “We can’t have that! Robots need to be purged! You’re all traitors to the Crown! I can’t lose!”

Twilight stood overtop of Acorna, expressionless. “Acorna, we are going to leave and never bother you again. We will be taking Sweetie Bot – and her sister – with us, so you can’t hurt them.”

“But she’s an Element of Harmony! We need her!”

“She’s in danger if she stays here. Danger from you,” Twilight slammed her hoof into the earth. “Twilight Acorna Sparkle, goodbye. May we never meet again.”

Renee walked up to Twilight. “Where are we going?”

“I think back to the universe Jack over there is from…”

“There should be some kind of ‘magical flow’ moving through the area,” Renee said. “We used it to get from our universe to that one. You should be able to use it to get somewhere new.”

Twilight nodded. “Right. Right…” She scanned around with her horn for a few minutes, locating the pattern. “Huh. That was easy to find. Wonder why I didn’t check earlier…” She prepared the spell. “Everypony who’s not staying here, come to me!”

Pinkie, OJ, Jack, Sweetie Belle, Renee, Thrackerzod, Sweetie Bot, and Rarity surrounded her. Then they were gone, to another universe…

Fluttershy grinned. Good. They were gone.

Acorna screamed to the heavens in childish rage.

~~~

The basement of Sugarcube Corner was quickly filling up with demons of all shapes and sizes, ranging from buglike monstrosities to piles of organs with eyes to shades composed of magic, all of which were following Dinkie’s every order.

Vriska looked up at Dinkie. “Hey, guess what time it is.”

Dinkie looked away from the tall, muscular humanoid she had summoned. “Oh, broo, please not now-“

Vriska removed her hands from her imprisonment with her luck. “Escape time!” She leaped over the head of the freshly summoned demon, landing on the stairs out of the basement. “See ya!”

“GET HER!” Dinkie yelled. “…Also, Frank, go get a chicken from Fluttershy, kay?”

Vriska threw her dice into the basement, unleashing an attack of exploding jellyfish. She saluted and ran out of the basement and through the front doors of Sugarcube Corner, into the sunlight. She spread her wings and took off into the sky, laughing madly. That was easy. Stupidly ea-

A flying demon composed of three eyeballs connected by a stomach-like sac teleported in front of her and hit her with far more force than should have come out of its somewhat small mass. Vriska flew toward the edge of Ponyville. She stole the luck of the creature, but another one appeared behind her, this time composed mostly of teeth apparently glued onto a perfect sphere. She cut this one in half with her sword – no need to rely on the fancy dice.

A demon made entirely of wind shoved her even further off track. She managed to cut three other demons in half, but she was still being pushed around so much she couldn’t control where she was going. She was getting pretty tired of this…

A bed-shaped demon smashed into her, driving her through the roof of a certain clubhouse.

“Ow…” she muttered, rubbing her head. She saw four faces looking down at her – a Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, Applebloom, and Princess Luna.

“Scoo-ba?” Scootaloo asked.

“I have no idea what she is, but I think she’s in trouble!” Applebloom said.

“I see demons out there!” Sweetie Belle said with a gruff voice as she looked out a window. “Can I go punch one?”

“That would be unwise!” Luna declared. She teleported them all out of the clubhouse seconds before it was demolished by attacking beings. They appeared on top of a nearby ridge overlooking Ponyville.

Vriska stood up and dusted herself off. “Thanks. I could have handled that, but it was getting annoying.”

“I am happy to serve!” Luna declared. “So, who are you?”

“Why are the legions of hell after you?” Sweetie Belle demanded.

“Scootittidy bibbityba?” Scootaloo added.

Vriska grinned. “I’m Vriska Serket, your Pinkie Pie is summoning a demon army to go kill a Twilight Sparkle in another universe, and I’m apparently in a good position to stop her. But, you know, now that I see what I have to work with… I think I can make this work. Who wants to stop a demon invasion?”

“THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!” Sweetie Belle cheered.

“SAND!” Luna cheered as well.

“Doesn’t have the same ring to it,” Applebloom muttered.

“Scooby bappity skoo ba ba,” Scootaloo added.

“I found it again. I missed it,” Luna answered.

Vriska blinked. “Wait, hold on, why can’t I understand Scootaloo?”

“Scooba doofa bappity ba ba ba ba bappity ba. Ba ba,” Scootaloo explained.

“Ah dunno,” Applebloom said.

“But I have a universal translator and – AGH whatever. Luna, you should know an invisibility spell.”

“That I do!”

“Good. Let’s go investigate!”

“Are you sure we should be involving children in this?” Luna asked.

“IF YOU TAKE THIS FROM ME I WON’T BE YOUR FRIEND ANYMORE!” Sweetie Belle shouted.

“Yay! Demon hunters with children, what a great idea!” Luna cheered.

Applebloom glanced at Scootaloo. “Ah thought we weren’t her friend?”

“Scooba,” Scootaloo shrugged.

“Let’s just move it,” Vriska said. “I have no idea how long we have, and frankly I’d rather this not all devolve into chaos.”

Several minutes later, the five of them were invisible, floating into Sugarcube Corner’s basement by way of Luna’s magic. They could hear Dinkie cheering. “It took like ten minutes, but I finally got you back broo! You have any idea how hard it is to remove the innocence from a chicken?”

“Easy as creating a potato from scratch,” Hastur said. “I take it we are ready?”

“Yeah, totally broo! Got the demon army and everything! Vriska’s escaped though, so she’s probably gonna try somethin’. We should be ready for that.”

“I will be our defense against her should she decide to make a move. We must go quickly though. My coworkers can only keep nut-head distracted for so long. I will generate the portal, you get the demons in line.”

“All right demon broos! Let’s do this thing! Remember, you’re after the purple pony with a horn and a lot of magic! Should be easy to find! Because this contract is all weird, we can’t just kill her directly, we’ve got to, uh, Hastur? What was the weird thing again?”

“We need to secure the soul prior to killing the body. It’s a delicate operation, but I should be able to accomplish it assuming the demon army can take care of Celestia.”

“Sweet, Broo! What if Vriska shows up though?”

“We’ll have to adapt. No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

“Sweet! How would you react if I told you Vriska was listening to us right now?”

“Of course she is. She’s probably got some invisibility spell, or something. I sense a magical presence that might be Princess Luna. Word of advice to our eavesdroppers, I would not interfere. I am a higher demon far beyond you pathetic mortals. Even if you have power, I’m more than willing to scream in the broodfester tongues loud enough to destroy the lives of every pony within a mile radius. I don’t want to do that, but I can. Think very carefully.”

“Fuck,” Vriska muttered.

Dinkie clapped her hooves together. “That was so badass, broo! You’re, like, the best demon I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing!”

“You aren’t that bad yourself, Pink one.”

“Aw, broo! You don’t need to say that! You’re makin’ me blush!”

“True. Prepare, we’re going through soon.”

~~~

General ‘Squeaky’ Belle looked from Flutterfree, to Charity, to Flutterfree. She cleared her throat. “This has been an immensely horrible breach of security. Celestia would be ashamed of us.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry. Just because they didn’t believe me, doesn’t mean the risk was mine to take.”

“Definitely not! And while it was very funny to hear about, if they hear the ‘oh, the Generals are children’ often enough they’re going to get suspicious! And Charity, I know you wanted to hear about the good changelings so badly, but…” she sighed. “Look, I know it’s hard to take my voice seriously, and I’m really freaking cute, but I mean what I’m saying. You’re not in trouble, but… You two are grown mares. You should know better!”

“I’m sorry,” Charity said.

Squeaky smiled. “Good. Now, I-“

Scooter kicked the door in. “Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got, like, eight visitors here to see Flutterfree!”

Charity was about to object, but then she saw who was there. No doubt, this was Flutterfree’s Twilight – and Pinkie, and Renee, along with some other friends.

Squeaky blinked. “Woah, where’d you find them?”

“I was just waitin’ around the edge of the Everfree forest, like I do,” Scooter said. “They’ve had quite an adventure, I bet!”

“You have no idea – Actually, wait, you do have a pretty good idea!” Pinkie said, giggling.

“We are going to be the best of friends, Pinkie.”

“You bet we are, Scooter!”

Flutterfree leaped up and hugged Twilight. “It’s good to see you all safe.”

“Yeah. It’s good to see you,” Twilight responded. “I was worried about all of you.”

“Where’s Nova?” Flutterfree asked.

“I don’t think she was dragged into these universes with us,” Renee said. “I haven’t seen a single version of Starlight anywhere.”

Flutterfree glanced at Sweetie Belle, Thrackerzod, and Sweetie Bot filing in. “What’s the story there?”

“I’ll tell you all about it. See, Sweetie Belle came with me for some reason, probably because I was sleeping on her…”

Squeaky looked at Sweetie Belle, Sweetie Bot, and Thrackerzod. “Well then,” she said. “This is interesting.”

“I’m willing to bet this is some cruel joke of fate,” Thrackerzod said. “Before we know it the Sweetie Belle from Jack’s universe will show up and we’ll have a full set.”

Sweetie Bot beeped. “That would be amazing! The cuteness would be at maximum capacity!”

Sweetie Belle walked up to Squeaky. “Sorry for not introducing ourselves. This is Thrackerzod and Sweetie Bot. I just go by Sweetie Belle, but if you want to go by that I can be something else.”

“I’ve already got a name! Squeaky!” Squeaky said, smiling. “It’s going to be great to know you all! So… This is going to sound like a weird question, maybe, but what’s your job?”

“I help ponies find their destiny. A therapist, I guess,” Sweetie said.

“I am a robot,” Sweetie Bot said. “…I don’t know what that means, but I think it’s cool now.”

“I am a perfectly normal unicorn!” Thrackerzod asserted.

“Thrackerzod’s some kind of dark being from another dimension with a heart of gold,” Sweetie corrected.

“Traitor,” Thrackerzod muttered.

“Wow. Cool!” Squeaky said. She looked around shiftily. “I can’t tell you what I do, but I can tell you it’s awesome!”

“If I’ve heard right, it definitely is,” Charter-Twilight said, walking up to her.

Squeaky blinked. “Do we need to go talk somewhere alone, or…?”

“No. I just want to say thanks. As Charter, I will want to talk to you later, but for now… Enjoy being a kid. Something tells me you don’t get much of that.”

Thrackerzod raised her eyebrows. “The only one of us here with the mentality of a child is the robot.”

Twilight smiled. “And Thrackerzod? I’ve sensed your kind of power before, in a horrible enemy we faced called Majora. Everywhere else we’ve encountered that power, there is darkness. But… What you did today? That made me think of things differently. Thank you for that.”

Thrackerzod blinked. “…You know, I should be thankful, but instead I’m just upset that I don’t even have a cover anymore. I’m supposed to be some unimaginable horror who needs to hide to connect to anypony! We don’t get friends.”

“I saw you with your Scootaloo and Applebloom,” Sweetie Belle interjected. “You had an actual bond with them.”

Twilight smiled. “I hope I’ll get to see you again, Thrackerzod. I think I’ll have a lot of questions. But you, too, can have fun, despite your ‘maturity’.”

“Yay!” Sweetie Bot cheered. “Hey, are all your sisters the best too?”

Squeaky looked over at Charity. “Yeah. Yeah she is.”

Thrackerzod huffed. “My ‘sister’ thinks the idea of setting an example is for ponies who aren’t her. She thinks she can run everypony, including me! Little does she know I plot against her in my dreams…”

Sweetie Belle rolled her eyes. “My sister is there, in the hat. She’s amazing. She explores universes and is sometimes an ambassador for all ponykind!”

“Wow,” Squeaky said. “Impressive.”

“Oooh! She’s talking to my sister!” Sweetie Bot commented. “I wonder what they’re talking about?”

Renee looked at Rarity and Charity. “I was beginning to lose hope,” she admitted. “I heard word of a deplorable Rarity, and met one who was literally a masochist. But you two… You two have restored my faith. A good sister, and a hero.”

Charity sighed.

“Flutterfree tells us everything Charity, don’t be ashamed. Your secret is safe with us.”

“What secret?” Rarity asked.

“It’s hers,” Renee said. “It would be best if you didn’t pry. But, I do think it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Charity smiled. “Um. Thank you, Renee. Means a lot.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Jack and OJ sat near the edge of the room.

“Ah feel like we’re bein’ left out,” Jack said. “Ah have the sneaking suspicion there’s no real reason for me to be here.”

“I thought you were expanding your influence?”

“Oh, Ah’m doin’ that. Cheated several ponies out of their bits while ya weren’t lookin’. But there’s a bigger story goin’ on here, and Ah don’t belong in it, not really.” She stood up. “Ah think Ah’m gonna go to the bar in this town, maybe see if I can rope the alternate Apples into a business deal of some kind.”

OJ sighed. “I mean… I think you should stay. That way I have someone to talk to… Someone who isn’t a failure.”

“Wow, OJ, ya sound more pathetic than a spineless porcupine. Just go up and talk to somepony, they all look nice. Nicer than me, at least.”

“Why are you giving me life advice, anyway?”

“Racking up favors.”

“…Is that just an excuse?”

“Do ya want to find out?”

“…No,” OJ admitted.

Behind them, Pinkie and Scooter were talking.

“So, Scooter, I hear you want to talk with me.”

“It’s hard Pinkie,” Scooter said. “I can read the script and everything, and I try to protect them, but I can't. Twix already knows, and she took it… well. But she almost didn’t, and the Fourth is breaking down more and more as time goes on, Trixie almost broke everything, and then The Editor shows up and-“

Hello, The Editor’s text ‘said’. Nice to meet you.

Pinkie waved at the Editor. “Hey. So, bored?”

A litle.

“Yeah, your type of jokes don’t really apply in book form do they?”

Not really. I mean, I’ve been writing in different colors each time, but nobody notices.

“You guys talkin’ to the Editor?” Twix said, trotting into the crowded room.

“Yeah,” Pinkie said. “You’re a little late.”

“I got caught up with… a book.”

Scooter raised an eyebrow. “I told you the exact time they would arrive, Twix.”

“Yeah, so? My internal clock isn’t perfect.” She looked at Pinkie. “So… You have it too. The Fourth, or whatever.”

“Yep. I actually don’t have it as strong as Scooter here – I can’t actually go and read the script. But I’m pretty close. Also, if you want to call it what it’s really called, go with Ka.”

“None of the readers are going to know what it means,” Scooter said. “Seriously, those that do had to have it explained to them.”

“There are some who know about the Tower.”

Twix blinked. “Wait, readers? I thought we were being watched.”

“Yeah, this is a special derivative work,” Scooter said. “The ol’ GM is trying pretty hard to keep this seamless with all of Scootertrix, but, you know, that doesn’t always work.”

He put me out of a job.

“You needed to get fired long ago. You misspelled ‘little’ up there, by the way. You’re really bothering all the real editors of this chapter.”

“Scooter!” Pinkie chided. “That’s rude. ...wait a minute...”

“Sorry, right… The Editor, just… Work at it? Okay?”

Sure.

Twix rubbed her head. “This is all a bit meta for me. I think… I think I need to get out of here before I get an aneurysm from thinking too much.”

“Yeah, you won’t get time to do that,” both Pinkie and Scooter said.

“Uuuuuuuugh…”

A brilliant magic filled the space, depositing the princesses Celestia and Luna in the room. Celestia held out her hoof. “Beware, interdimensional invaders! I have come to face you off and protect my land… In a game of chance! Somewhere in this room is a bomb set to go off at any moment! The rules are simple – you need to find it before time runs up! I will provide hints for pathetic losers! And… go!”

Luna facehooved. Hard. Everypony just stared at Celestia in disbelief.

Celestia grinned. “Heheheh. Gotcha.”

Twix chuckled. “Hey Celestia!”

“Oh, Twilight! Have you been doing well on your studies?”

“Well, just look at all these new friends!”

“I can see! They’re not trying to… invade are they?”

“Definitely not!” Twix said, grinning. “Some are annoying, but I like them all.”

“Hey,” Jack said, walking up to Celestia. “Would you like to purchase interdimensional insurance from the Apple Family of the land of Ultra Fast?”

“…You’re trying to scam me. You have some serious balls. I respect that.”

Luna sighed. “Look, everypony, we just detected a huge surge of interdimensional energy, probably when you all showed up, and decided to investigate.”

“There’s no need, princesses,” Squeaky said. “They’re not working with the enemy.”

“Good. See Luna? I told you they had everything under control.”

Luna grumbled under her breath.

“Back to the window then,” Celestia said.

“Wait! We haven’t given you a name yet!” Pinkie called.

“Why would I accept a name from a pony like you? If I were to differentiate myself from other Celestias, I would come up with it myse-“

“Trollestia.”

“That is the most beautiful word I have ever heard. It is miiiiiiiiine now.”

Pinkie winked. “Glad you like it!”

Luna sighed. “Great…”

Charter-Princess Twilight bowed at Trollestia’s feet. “I am honored to make your acquaintance.”

“Nice wings,” Celestia commented. “Hey, Twilight, you like these wings?”

“Yes princess!” Twix said.

“Good… To… Know…” Celestia said, commenting no further on the matter. “So, what am I to call you, other Twilight?”

“I am the Charter-Twilight.”

“So… Charlie?”

Jack burst out into laughter. “Ah told ya that was the best name!”

Twilight twitched. “I’d prefer just Charter, Trollestia.”

“I like Charlie,” Trollestia decided. “So, Charter-Charlie, what’s up?”

“We were wondering if, maybe, you might have a way home for us? A way to get to another universe?”

Trollestia put a hoof to her chin. “Hrm… I’m thinking… Maybe…”

Renee raised a hoof. “Twilight, just cast the spell along the magic conduit again. It should continue to a new location.”

“Okay, I want to see this,” Trollestia said. “Do it. Make a portal to another universe. I hope it looks like a donut.”

Luna shook her head. “Please forgive my sister…”

“Why?” Pinkie said. “She’s awesome!”

Luna facehooved. “I am alone in my struggles…”

Twilight activated the spell, punching a hole through to another version of Rarity’s boutique… An empty one, with a drama couch in the middle of the room.

Renee blinked. “Hold up…”

In an instant, the portal no longer led to the boutique; it had been forcibly moved to Twilight’s Library, where a certain brutal version of Celestia and her terrified student, Twilight, stood.

Trollestia waved. “Hello, me! I’ve always been curious, is the grass greener over there?”

Celestia looked closely at her counterpart, sizing her up. With a slight hint of pain in her voice, she forced herself to speak in a dignified, respectful manner. “Your Highness, why have you connected to my realm?”

“I wanted to see what this Twilight could do with the dimensional things. It turns out that those things are pretty sweet, though not as donut-like as I was expecting.”

Luna cleared her throat. “What she means to say is that we won’t bother you any further if you don’t wish us to.”

Twilight looked at the brutal Celestia. “Your highness, I am the Charter-Twilight, leader of this interdimensional group of explorers. If I have your identity correct, you helped Renee learn of the magical conduit. For that, I thank you. It appears to go in a circle though.”

Trollestia blinked. “Donut-like after all…”

“Wait…” Celestia glared. “Do you have the demon among you!?”

Thrackerzod was sweating profusely, frozen in a state of panic. Celestia grabbed her with the telekinesis of a self-proclaimed god. She would have crushed the eldritch filly right then and there had Luna not stepped in to release her grip.

“You can’t just go crushing fillies like that!” Luna shouted at her.

“I can do what I wan-“

“Ah ah ah,” Trollestia said, waving her hoof. “See, Thrackerzod is on our side of the line, in our territory. You can’t do anything in our territory. If, say, she were through the portal, or even stuck a single hoof through, you could take her and bake her into a victory pie or something. Buuuuut, the line is law!”

“I don’t have to respect your laws.”

“And neither do we! Isn’t this a fun game?” Trollestia raised her eyebrows over and over. “Come on, you’re enjoying this.”

“Stop antagonizing her!” the unicorn Twilight hissed. “Do you want to start a war?”

Luna glanced at Trollestia. “We can’t handle another war.”

“No… We can’t… But there’s, like, over a dozen of us, three of which are alicorns, and one of her. Well, two, but that shaking two-bit Twilight doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing.”

“I can hear every disrespectful word you say, buffoon,” Celestia growled.

“I know! See, I’m trying to get you worked up and angry. Is it working? Please tell me it’s working.”

Celestia took in a breath. “The being you are harboring is a horrendous demon creature that has taken over the life of a poor, defenseless unicorn filly. She has one purpose and one purpose only – to take the soul of my student Twilight Sparkle, killing her in the process. She serves beings far beyond my power or yours, outer gods that could tear universes apart with their breath. Do you really want to defend a creature such as that?”

Luna frowned. “When you put it that way…”

Sweetie Belle cleared her throat. “Thrackerzod is more than that! She saved a filly’s life! She protected us from certain doom! She’s our friend!”

Celestia narrowed her eyes. “And what are you suggesting?”

Scooter shrugged. “We could go with the whole ‘friendship is magic’ thing, but…”

Pinkie jumped in. “…we think it’s just good that she has a heart in there, somewhere amongst the icky blackness. And that’s something to fight for!”

“She would have my student killed.” Celestia grunted.

“Oh, we can stop her from doing that easily enough,” Trollestia said. “Thrackerzod, if you do anything to kill Twilight Sparkle, I will find some creative way to torture you. Involving… Oh, let’s say blobfish. I’ve always wanted to use a blobfish for something.”

“Er… I…” Thrackerzod gulped. “There’s probably something you should-“

Celestia pointed a hoof at Thrackerzod. “Do not believe its words! It will snake-charm you into whatever it wills! It has access to the broodfester tongues, and could kill most of you with little effort. Kill it, now. Kill it before it can manipulate you beyond!”

“No!” Sweetie Bot yelled. “Thrackerzod is a friend!”

“Yeah!” OJ yelled, standing up. “I like her!”

Renee nodded. “As much of a pathological liar as she is, I can certainly say she’s a good pony at heart. We’re certainly friends with worse characters.”

“I wonder what Alushy’s up to right now…” Pinkie muttered to herself.

“I don’t really know her that well but she saved my sister!” Rarity called.

Thrackerzod blinked, wiping tears from her eyes. “Ponies… Celestia is right. I am charged with killing Twilight Sparkle, and nothing can take that task away from me. It is my driving force. It is my definition, my requirement in this life. I have an insatiable desire to seek out her destruction, and it must be done. She has imbalanced the magic of my realm with her dealings with our kind! She signed the contract herself, and then something messed it up! Something…” She looked at her horn and frowned, losing her train of throught. “…There’s something in there. Something strange.”

Charter Twilight lit her horn, scanning the interior of the library through the portal. She teleported the key to herself. “…This thing has unusual energies.”

Unicorn Twilight blinked. “That stupid thing? It’s just a key I found when I started experiencing déjà vu!”

Thrackerzod frowned. “While that key is certainly important, it changes nothing. Twilight’s soul is needed. I cannot change this. Furthermore, killing me will not change this requirement. I have superiors.”

Celestia glared into Trollestia’s eyes. “It appears we are at a standstill, me.”

“Oh I don’t know about that, I think I can do this pretty well while sitting down! But I won’t, because then you’d be taller. And you’re already significantly more menacing, so, you know, have to keep it balanced.”

“We can do this the hard way, you know,” Celestia said. “I guarantee I can kill most of your subjects before you can do anything.”

“That… is a good point.”

“A good point?” Luna blurted. “We can’t risk all these ponies for the life of a single filly! Not all of them want to sacrifice themselves!”

Jack raised her hoof. “Ah’m one of the sane people!”

Celestia smiled – it was unsettling even to Trollestia. “See? You need to hand her over. You have no choice.”

It was at that moment another portal appeared behind Trollestia, depositing Acorna, a very upset looking Fluttershy, an Applejack, a Rainbow Dash, and a Spike, all wearing Elements of Harmony on their necks. Acorna pointed her wing at Charter-Twilight. “There you are! I can have my revenge!”

“…Are you threatening us with the Elements of Harmony?” Charter-Twilight asked.

“Yes! You will be purged to what I want you to be!”

“…But you need all six.”

“…What?”

“You’re missing a Pinkie and a Rarity. Even with Spike, which might work, you’re still missing one. And nopony here is going to hop onto your side just because they can. Nopony likes you.”

“But everypony loves me!” Acorna asserted. “Just watch. Anypony want to help me get my revenge!?”

Not a single pony moved forward to join her side.

Acorna’s eyes began to fill up with tears. “But… But… But…” She collapsed to the ground, crying. “I WAS GOING TO GET YOU!”

“Yeeeeah…” Charter-Twilight said, turning away from her. “That mare has a problem.”

“That mare is a problem,” Renee muttered.

“Now that we are done with such pointless distractions,” Celestia said, narrowing her eyes. “Counterpart, what do you say about giving me that eldritch filly?”

Trollestia glanced at Luna. Then she glanced back at her brutal counterpart. “Fine, you win, brutal empress of whatever. You can have the filly to do whatever horrendous things you wish. Don’t like it, but can’t have you being more brutal and killing ponies.” She levitated Thrackerzod into the air, moving her toward the portal. “I’m sure your subjects are going to love the video.”

“The video?”

“Oh, you know, the video I’m going to take with my magic and send to some company somewhere to mass produce. Princess Celestia, doing unspeakable things to a foal…”

“A good publicity stunt. I should thank you.”

“...You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

“And I thought I was a monster. Wow.”

Luna winced. “Let it be known that the Princesses Luna and Celestia of this universe do not condone your actions, Celestia. You have forced our hoof.”

Thrackerzod looked down at the other Sweetie Belles as she was levitated to the middle of the ring. “I am sorry, my friends. It was good to know you.”

Sweetie Bot started crying. Squeaky and Sweetie just nodded slowly and forced smiles onto their faces for Thrackerzod.

Thrackerzod turned her gaze to Celestia. “The moment you try to do anything to me, I fight back with all I have.”

“I am a god, filly. My power far eclipses that of a minor demon.”

Thrackerzod took a deep breath. “I know. Do your worst.” She was now past the line, on the others side of the portal, in the telekinetic grasp of the brutal tyrant Celestia.

Scooter grinned. “Hey, you know what’d be really convenient right now?”

“What?” Pinkie asked, legitimately confused.

“A demon army coming out of nowhere.”

A portal flew open behind brutal Celestia, unveiling the forces of Hastur and Dinkie. “CHARGE!” Dinkie yelled. “GET TWILIGHT SPARKLE, BROOS! DO NOT STOP THE WARRING UNTIL THE CONTRACT IS FULFILLED! NOT FOR ANY REASON!”

All hell broke loose.

Literally.

Twilight Sparkle, the unicorn, was suddenly in the center of a fight for her life. Her mentor and tormentor of the past few years, Celestia, ruler of her entire world, was defending her from this horde. Her fear began to melt away, replaced with the urgency of survival – the need to fight back, to help. She stood alongside her ruler and fired a complex series of lasers through the solar shield matrix she had created, downing demons left and right.

Thrackerzod flew out of nowhere, trying to drive a sickle of eldritch energy into Twilight’s chest, but Renee was there, stopping her. “Thrackerzod…”

“Renee… Get out of my way. This has to be done.”

Renee smirked. “You’d be surprised how often we get into fights with ponies we don’t want to. Bring it, I’m pretty-“

A wall of eldritch energy shot from a direction that should not have existed, barreling into Renee and knocking her unconscious with a single blow. “Sorry,” Thrackerzod said, returning her attention to Twilight. She generated another wall of eldritch energy, but Twilight was expecting it, deflecting with a powerful shield. Thrackerzod knew Twilight’s power was strong enough to do this, so she had a backup plan. A spike of powerful energy shot from a direction that could best be described as ‘behind’. It missed Twilight by mere millimeters. Thrackerzod moved to rings of shadow, keeping Twilight on the defensive, but soon she had a new opponent.

Sweetie Bot. The dented and bruised robot stood between Thrackerzod and her charge. “Thrackerzod! Stop! We are your friends – you don’t have to do this!”

Thrackerzod groaned. “You don’t understand, do you?! I do have to do this! It is physically impossible for me not to try!” She tried to shove Sweetie Bot out of the way, but she stood fast and produced her many guns.

“Don’t make us try to stop you!” Sweetie Belle called.

“We can do it!” Squeaky said. “We can totally have you taken down!”

Amongst the war between demons and ponies, Thrackerzod shook her head and ground her teeth. “You are all morons who cannot understand my ways. You must take me down. …I hope you succeed.” She lunged for Twilight Sparkle again, a claw of red power summoning forth from her horn.

Sweetie Bot tackled her to the ground, the robotic strength more than enough to overcome the eldritch boost to a little filly’s body. “Stop it! Look into your heart drive!”

“I don’t have a heart drive you impressionable filly! I-!”

“It appears as if we are having a conflict of interest,” Hastur said, approaching them. “Do not fret, Thrackerzod. I shall complete the contract for you, and no one has to hear of this.”

“…Thank you, Hastur,” Sweetie Belle said, walking in front of Thrackerzod. “…They’re still going to have to stop you though.”

“They’re welcome to try.” With a burst of energy he moved toward Twilight himself.

Sweetie Bot hugged Thrackerzod close. “Yay! Now we don’t have to fight anymore!”

A gigantic demon walked up to them and screamed in bloodcurdling rage. Sweetie Bot screamed, backing away. Thrackerzod gave it the evil eye, planning to cut its head off – but somepony else did that instead - a fifth Sweetie Belle. “Aw yeah, this is the best day ever!” The newcomer said, standing in a pool of demon blood. “Muahahahahaha!”

Thrackerzod facehooved. “What did I say? What did I say? Look at it, here she is. Behold!”

“Input name: Sweetie Brute!”

Sweetie Brute chuckled. “That sounds like me all right!”

“Where did you come from?” Squeaky asked.

“I came with her,” Sweetie Brute said, pointing at Vriska.

Vriska flew through the air, landing between Hastur and Twilight. “Ah ah ah… Not gonna happen.”

“Do you wish to risk a heroic death against me, deity? For these ponies?”

“Oh definitely, I like them, and I know they like this unicorn. Plus, as I’m sure you know, these ponies are important.”

“Very well. I regret to inform you that, as an obstacle to fulfilling the contract, I am required to take you out of the equation by any means necessary. If by some miracle you survive, are you still on for that drink later?”

“Of course, what kind of idiot would I be to turn that down?”

“Good to know.” Hastur pointed a finger and a surge of eldritch energy shot out, so much that some of the demons nearby grabbed their heads in agony. Vriska flew into the air and grinned, siphoning the luck from Hastur.

Hastur snapped his fingers, undoing Vriska’s ability. Vriska laughed. “Ah, nice trick. But does it work when I steal from others?” She grabbed a nearby demon’s luck, as much as she could grab, forcing the disgusting blob to die of a heart attack. She rolled her dice, getting a very high roll. A shark made of sawblades appeared from the aether, cutting Hastur into a million pieces.

He reformed without much of an issue.

“This is going to be so much fun…” Vriska smirked.

Celestia, Trollestia, Luna, and another Luna were standing together, keeping most of the demon horde back.

“So… What’s your story?” Luna asked the other Luna.

“SAAAAAAND!”

“…That’s… Not helpful at all.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just a thing I say sometimes. I’m here with the gray troll creature and the three children on my back.”

“Pleased to meetcha, Luna Two,” Applebloom said.

“Scootittidy ba bannada scoo,” Scootaloo said.

Luna blinked. “Other me, that’s only two fillies.”

“Great. One must have slipped away…”

Trollestia smirked. “If she dies or gets injured in any way, you are so getting sent to the moon, aren’t you?”

“SAAAAAAAND!” ‘Sandyluna’ roared in rage.

Celestia took in a sharp breath. “I am surrounded by imbeciles…”

“Hey! I’m not an Imbecile!” Luna called.

“You’re incompetent.”

“But I… I…”

“Just focus on the demon horde, all of you!”

Elsewhere in the midst of the fight, Dinkie got a truly devious idea. She appeared next to Acorna. “Hey, broo! I hear you need another Element o’ Harmony!”

“You… You’d do that?” Acorna said, wiping away her tears.

“Uh, yeah! Your enemies totally are messing up my demon horde! Let’s hit them with the rainbow death laser! C’mon!”

Acorna grinned, slapping her sixth Element around Dinkie’s neck. She turned back to her ponies. “ALL RIGHT GIRLS, TIME TO TAKE REVENGE!”

“Damn it!” Twix yelled, seeing their Elements start activating. “CELESTIA! WE NEED THE ELEMENTS!”

“I have them on me!” Trollestia called. “Just use your amazing magic to grab them out of my magnificent tail!”

Twix grabbed the Elements. “Okay…” She put Magic on herself. The closest Rarity was Sweetie Bot’s sister, so she got Generosity. Jack got Honesty. Pinkie got Laughter. Flutterfree got Kindness. “Crud, I need a... Rainbow Dash.”

OJ stood up from her cowering position. “Maybe this is my chance to shine… Maybe I can take the Element of Loyalty…”

Twix grabbed a megaphone from Pinkie. “THE BIRD! HELLO!”

As if summoned by magic, The Bird flew onto the scene. “Hello.”

Twix slapped the Element of Loyalty on her. “Let’s move ponies!” Twix, Rarity, Jack, Pinkie, Flutterfree, and the Bird rose into the air.

“Heh. Guess this is why Ah was here,” Jack said.

OJ crumpled back onto the floor into a ball of tears.

Even though the second set of Elements was activated several seconds after the first, they were still able to resist the power of the first set. Soon, there were two lasers of rainbow ‘death’ firing at each other, canceling their powers out.

“Pretty,” Scooter said. “All right ponies! Keep fighting back the horde!”

Demons fell by the dozen, but they just kept coming. Ponies fought for their lives, and not just that of the unicorn Twilight Sparkle. Currently, Charter-Twilight was her primary defender, the defense well within her power since Hastur was busy with Vriska. The battle between the two of them was beyond the capability of most ponies present to understand – the troll used her Vision Eightfold to track the higher demon, but his partial existence outside the dimension made her battle difficult. It should have been impossible, but she was known for her luck.

The five Sweetie Belles sat in a corner, unsure what to do. Sweetie Brute kept moving to go back to punch demons in the face, but that would go against what the group was doing, and she wanted to feel included with her other selves.

“We have to stop this fighting!” Sweetie Bot said, turning to Squeaky. “Do something.”

“I can’t do anything! I make war! I don’t stop it without a lot of violence involved!”

“The horde will get her eventually,” Thrackerzod said. “She will pay for what she’s done, and the contract will be complete.”

“You still think she needs to pay don’t you?” Sweetie Belle retorted.

“Do you think a demon, such as myself, would be allowed on such an important mission if I had free will in regards to this mission? Do you? I’m programmed!”

“Then unprogram yourself, like you did me!” Sweetie Bot said.

“You should know you can’t do it to yourself,” Thrackerzod muttered. “And even if, say, I could think it was a bad thing, which I don’t, and it isn’t, there’s probably a self destruct somewhere in here for that eventuality. Traitors are not treated well. Even hesitation is usually a one-way ticket to eternal damnation in places worse than the hell any of you can imagine. I am immensely grateful for Hastur’s existence.”

“But… But…” Sweetie Belle threw her hooves in the air. “There has to be a way! There’s always some third option!”

OJ heard this. The idea of the third option burrowed its way into her mind. She snapped out of her depressed stupor and looked around. She saw the fights. She saw many injuries, though she didn’t see any dead ponies, just demons. She saw Vriska and Hastur battling in a way that hurt her mind. She saw demons congealing around the unicorn Twilight. She saw her screaming and fighting for her life. She saw the Elements of Harmony, both sets, burning at each other for eternity. She saw the Twilight Sparkles leading both sets…

Twilight Sparkles.

There was an S there.

“EVERYPONY STOP FIGHTING!” OJ yelled, using the megaphone Twix had left on the ground.

For whatever reason, everypony did. Not just the ponies, but the demons, and even the Elements of Harmony stopped firing. OJ decided not to question this. “YELLOW DEMON GUY! WOULD IT BE POSSIBLE FOR ANOTHER TWILIGHT SPARKLE’S SOUL TO SATISFY THE CONTRACT?”

Hastur released his hold on Vriska’s neck. “…Given the recent edits to account for interdimensional interference, legally speaking… I think so.”

Everypony and demon in the room slowly turned to lock their eyes with those of one Twilight Acorna Sparkle.

“No…” She said, taking a few steps back.

Dinkie threw her Element on the ground. “Sorry broo, looks like you’re about to get served. I’ll just distance myself from you right now…”

Celestia teleported herself to Acorna and unleashed a bolt of holy sun magic. Acorna met it with her own, the powers of two alicorns matching for the briefest of moments.

“Twilight!” Cult-Leader Fluttershy called. “Retreat!”

Acorna, for once, listened to her friend. She teleported them through her portal back to their world. Celestia forced the portal to remain open, following them.

The demons looked at each other, shrugged, and decided that attacking any Twilight Sparkle was fair game now.

“Hey!” Twix shouted. “Stop it! Get away!”

Scooter and Pinkie hit them back with gigantic hammers.

“PINKIE!” Jack called to her pink ‘friend’. “TELL THEM TO FOCUS ON ACORNA! Idjit! That’s obvious!”

Dinkie shrugged. “Sorry broo! Can’t do that, already told them not to stop!”

“But they just stopped when OJ asked!” Twix shouted.

“Yeah, I dunno what that was about, but it sure made for some nice dramatic tension!”

Jack glared at Dinkie. “Dinkie, ya are such a moron.”

“Yeeeeah…”

The three remaining princesses strained against the Demon horde. “This… Is harder without that other Celestia…” Luna strained.

“I’ve got a plan,” Trollestia said. She teleported Twix, unicorn Twilight, and the Charter to her. “Hey demons! Look at these tasty purple snacks!”

“WHAT!?” unicorn Twilight shouted. “What are you doing!?”

“The plan.” Trollestia spread her wings and flew through the portal to Acorna’s universe, leading the entire demon horde with her. The two Lunas looked at each other, shrugged, and followed the horde through.

Thrackerzod stood up tall. “Sweetie Belle?”

“Yes?” Sweetie responded.

“Are we allowed to go through that portal… and kill Twilight Acorna Sparkle?”

“Hell yes!” Sweetie Brute shouted.

“It seems like the best of all possible options,” Squeaky added.

“Acorna was really mean and Twilight called her evil!” Sweetie Bot pointed out.

Sweetie Belle gulped. “F-fine. You can go after her.”

Thrackerzod grabbed her hoof. “Let’s do it together. I… I would like that.”

Squeaky, Sweetie Bot, and Sweetie Brute stood behind Thrackerzod. Sweetie Belle bit her lip, thinking about what Renee had told her – about sometimes needing to do the hard thing. About sometimes hurting ponies to do what was right. To save others. It was only a matter of time before the demons killed somepony, if they hadn’t already…

She was surprised they hadn’t…

“You’re welcome!” Scooter called to her for reasons she didn’t understand.

“All right. Let’s do this,” Sweetie Belle said, readying herself.

Squeaky nodded. “Right! So, if we’re going to do this, we need to be organized. Here’s the plan…”

Nearby, Scooter looked at Pinkie. “So the Princesses are going to deal with each other, the Sweeties have Acorna… What about… The other thing?”

“What other thing?”

“You know what other thing.”

“Oh. That. I guess we’re on that.”

“Great. No, The Editor cannot help us.”

I can hepl!

“And like that, you’ve just completely ruined your case,” Scooter said, shaking her head. “Come on, Pinkie.”

~~~

Acorna glanced behind her – and saw the angry, brutal Celestia in hot pursuit. She saw her own version of Spike running alongside her.

Spike looked up at Acorna. “Twilight, what are you thinkin-“

Acorna tripped him. He fell face-first in the mud, but Celestia paid him no mind.

“That didn’t slow her down at allll!” Acorna wailed.

Her Rainbow Dash and Applejack ran alongside her. “Sugarcube, Ah hate to break it to you, but Ah don’t think we can beat her.”

“We just need to survive long enough!” Acorna said. “They’ll come to defend me!”

“Rainbow!” Rainbow Dash said.

“Nobody cares enough for your stupid selfish self to come and save you,” Celestia’s deep voice came to Acorna’s ears, chilling her to the bone. “You are naught but a child in a game of gods. You do not deserve those wings you bear.”

Acorna’s brain switched from ‘fear’ to ‘rage’ in an instant, turning to Celestia and blasting her with the strongest insta-death laser she could muster. Celestia was knocked back – but she essentially just shrugged it off. “You cannot hold a candle to me,” Celestia said, grabbing the alicorn in her telekinesis. “It is time to die, whelp.”

Another Celestia appeared – the one native to this universe. She tore her student from the angry Celestia’s grasp. “I am afraid I cannot let you do that.”

“Ah. I was wondering if you would appear. Tell me, what brings you to accept and bestow such power to an asinine student?”

“…Not all of it was my choice. She… It does not matter. She is my student, and I will defend her.”

“Heh.” There was that smile again. “Even your own mentor doesn’t care much for you, Acorna, fighting only out of a sense of duty rather than genuine care.”

“I saw how you looked at your Twilight!” Acorna shouted. “You don’t either!”

“Gods show their affections in mysterious ways, little Acorna.” She lit her horn. “Prepare for a battle.” Something gave her pause. “…Wait, where’s your Fluttershy?”

“Why am I supposed to know where my friends are?” Acorna demanded.

That question never got answered, because Trollestia appeared with the other Twilights. “Don’t mind me, just leading a demon horde to your position!”

Acorna’s Celestia gasped. “What? They’ll destroy Ponyville!”

“Are destroying Ponyville!” Trollestia corrected.

The brutal Celestia glared at Trollestia. “Are you here to take a side?”

“Oh no, I’m just here to watch the fireworks! But I think one of these Twilights will join you.”

Charter-Twilight nodded, teleporting to the brutal Celestia’s side. “Acorna, one of us has to go to end this game. I… I am sorry, but it’s going to be you.”

Acorna roared. “NO IT IS NOT!”

“She’s right!” Trollestia’s Luna said, appearing behind her. “We can’t just kill a pony!”

“Yes you can,” Trollestia said.

“Sand?” the other Luna said, showing up in a flash of magic. “I really don’t know what we’re arguing about or what I’m doing here.”

“We’re setting up an epic fight of the gods!” Trollestia grinned. “On one side… Uh… that Celestia. And on this side. A Celestia and… my sister. Erm…”

“That didn’t help me understand this at all.”

Trollestia facehooved. “Oh this is a disaster. Okay, you? You are Sanduna. You, mentor of Acorna? You’re Cornlestia.”

Luna facehooved. “Can everyone just take a side? Like, on opposite sides of a line so we can figure out who’s who?”

On one side, the Celestia who was never renamed, and Charter Twilight. On the other, Luna, Cornlestia, and Acorna. Sanduna and Trollestia were on the sidelines.

“For the sake of balance I choose this team!” Sanduna said, walking over to Charter Twilight.

“And the teams are set!” Trollestia said. “Who will win? The saviors of life, or the bringers of death? Who has the-“

“CELESTIA!” Luna shouted. “What is wrong with you?”

“I agree with your sister,” Celestia deadpanned. “Is this all a game to you?”

“…Celestia, life is a game. A game of pawns, rooks, and little oblong go stones. Every move is precisely calculated and intentional. The whole board matters in a way I’m sure you understand.”

Celestia narrowed her eyes. “…You have chosen a side.”

“Yeeeees! My own!”

“…You’re a dangerous one, ‘Trollestia’.”

“Took you long enough to realize that. You get a consolation cookie.”

They had forgotten all about the missing Fluttershy. No one put the pieces together when the eclipse started happening…

~~~

Backup plans upon backup plans…

Fluttershy knew she needed them this time. She didn’t know she needed almost all of them. The one thing she had been counting on – her presence – had almost been torn from this altar by some petty dispute of Acorna’s making.

But she was here, now, and all the preparation had been worth it. The ritual didn’t need the dancing, or the paint, or even most of the raccoons. Not when she had unicorns lace the entire clearing with magic months ago.

She could do this alone if she had to. And she did. There was already enough energy from the cult here…

She held out her hoof, her flowing purple robes rippling in the ever-increasing breeze, the golden lace reflecting sharp rays of light.

She held a single torch up high, the tip burning with purple flame. The last step.

She threw it into the hole. Magic circles around the entire clearing lit up, flashing with deep purple patterns that rotated around the hole like some kind of interlocking machine.

“Drat!” Pinkie called from behind her. “We’re too late!”

“We were always going to be too late,” Scooter said, cracking her neck. “We just have to deal with it now.”

Fluttershy turned to them and smiled. It was a soft, calm smile – but the eyes were evil. “Welcome to the resurrection of Lord Smooze, Pinkies. I had hoped that, when this day would come, my Pinkie would face off against me. She was always the one who flew in my face with her witchy ways and her portals… But I suppose I will have to make do with the two of you.” She held a hoof wide, pointing behind her at the hole. “Behold. Your savior, Lord Smooze.”

A green blob slightly larger than a pony appeared above the hole in the ground. It smirked.

Fluttershy blinked. “Jeff the Blob?”

Jeff the Blob nodded. “Yes. It is time to give you what you want.” He pulled a zipper, transforming into a purple blob. He fell into the hole. A tsunami of purple goo riddled with eyes and huge, gaping mouths erupted from the hole. Fluttershy flapped her wings, flying into the air alongside her Lord, all confusion gone from her face. The Smooze gurgled and churned, already devouring the land in the center of the clearing with its power.

Pinkie produced a gigantic vacuum cleaner and Scooter turned it on. The Smooze was sucked in, glob by glob, shunted to nowhere.

Fluttershy was having none of this. Her Lord was here, and he knew she was his high priestess. She could direct him. With a simple flick of her hoof, the Smooze circled around the two Pinkies and attacked them from behind.

“Augh!” Scooter said. “She’s not an idiot!”

“I’m just as surprised as you are!” Pinkie said, producing a trampoline and using it to get the two of them out of the Smooze’s ‘smoozing’ range.

Fluttershy laughed. It wasn’t an evil laugh, more of a slightly crazed giggle, but the lack of evil in the tone just made it disturbing. “Foolish Pinkies. Nothing can stop the Smooze.”

“Scooter, now would be a good time to read that script and discover how we defeat it.”

“But I may not be able to say anything!”

“I’d just like to have some confirmation that we don’t leave this world to be completely consumed by the Smooze.”

“Oh. Give me a minute…”

~~~

Trollestia was slightly wrong – the demon horde wasn’t exactly destroying Ponyville, because they were being held back by an unexpected duo.

Vriska and Hastur.

Both of them were sure the princesses had Acorna under control. All it had taken from Vriska was a little comment to Hastur about protecting the town and letting Thrackerzod do what she needed to do, and he was on board. Two beings that had been at each other's throats only a few minutes ago were suddenly working side by side, facing off against a demonic power surge.

The demon army Hastur had focused so much of his energy into was almost gone at this point.

“The irony of this situation is not lost on me. If this goes south I will be written up for joining you on a whim to defend lower lifeforms from collateral damage.”

“I know how you feel, Hastur. But hey, this feels good, doesn’t it?”

“In a slightly outlandish, nerve-wracking fashion, yes. This is taking too long though.”

“Don’t worry about your nut-guy, I can vouch for you.”

“Your word will mean nothing.”

“I was thinking a little more of letting my dice do the talking.”

“You are a very foolish and impulsive deity, Vriska Serket.”

“Aw, look! You remembered my name!”

The two of them barely noticed the troop of five Sweetie Belles running past them, Squeaky shouting orders like she was some kind of war general.

Which she was, but it’s not like they could know that.

Children generals.

Insanely brilliant.

~~~

Gods of the sun, moon, and magic fought each other in the high atmosphere. As the fight went on, they rose higher and higher. They were high enough to see stars now. Twix and unicorn Twilight had been left on the ground long ago, leaving only alicorns in the battle.

Celestia the Brutal got the idea to use the sun as a weapon first. Cornlestia fought back, but her hold on her celestial body was not as impressive as her counterpart’s determination. The burning ball of plasma approached their position, straining all the alicorns’ magic shields.

Luna grabbed the moon. “I will ram the moon into the sun! Don’t think I won’t!”

Charter-Twilight teleported all of them onto the moon. “Nobody’s destroying any moons or suns! We can’t destroy this world – we have to-“

Acorna blasted her in the face, strong enough to launch her out of the moon’s gravity well. “SCREW YOU AND YOUR STUPID SPEECHES!”

“SAND!” Sanduna yelled, taking control of the moon dust and forcing it toward Acorna in a wave of gray power. Luna stamped her feet, turning the entire moon in such a way to force the powder back to the ground and to disorient everypony on it. She forced the celestial body further and further from the blue orb of Equis itself.

Celestia was having none of this. She pulled the sun past the moon and placed it in front of the moon’s trajectory. Luna had to stop quickly, or else she would have doomed them all to a fiery death. As it was, they all felt pretty toasty.

Trollestia had summoned a grill with her magic and was cooking bacon. “Can I just say this is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen?”

“Shut up!” Luna shouted, moving the moon sharply out of the sun’s heat. Celestia tried to move it back, but Cornlestia slowed the Sun enough.

“You! Sand Luna!” Celestia shouted. “Stop the moon!”

“Oh, right, sorry, I was caught up in the cool space battle.”

“I know right?” Trollestia called. “So hard to focus when the stars are dancing around you like cakes!”

Sanduna grinned. “Yes! Maybe, after this is over, we could hold celestial battle olympics?”

“Yeeeeeeees!”

“SANDUNA!” Celestia yelled. “NOW!”

Sanduna shook her head. “Right. Ahem. STOOOOP MOON!”

The moon stopped moving.

“…Darn,” Luna muttered.

“You know, is this fight supposed to be serious?” Acorna said. “Because all I see is a bunch of ‘gods’ fighting like pathetic children. It’s quite amusing, really!”

“Are you trying to upset everypony?” Twilight questioned.

“What? No! I’m being funny! I’m funny. Ponies love my humor!”

“Twilight, they do not,” Cornlestia said.

“But… But… But I can get them to do whatever I want!”

“A fact of life I have just had to accept,” Cornlestia said, deflecting lasers from Sanduna and Twilight.

“…You have betrayed me.”

“What?” Cornlestia shook her head. “I’m trying to save you!”

“What a nice job you’re doing! Questioning me?”

“Acorna, are you really going to do this now? Your life is in danger!”

“Pfft. I can’t die. I’m the Princess of the Night. Nopony can touch me!”

Twilight’s pupils dilated. “…Melinda.”

“What?” Celestia said, sensing the horrified tone in Twilight meant something important.

“There are beings out in the universe who, by some trick of nature, are surrounded by an aura of ‘perfection.’ It’s almost as if they cannot lose in any interaction.”

Celestia glowered. “How does one defeat these beings?”

“I don’t know! I haven’t seen many! The only one I’ve ever seen lose was when we asked her to help deal with a problem out of her context!”

Luna blinked. “Wait… Twilight, are you saying this alicorn, this… Acorna… can’t lose within her own world?”

“It sure seems likely!”

Luna looked at Acorna, torn. “…Acorna. How do you treat your friends?”

“Like royalty!”

“She tripped Spike hoping to slow me down,” Celestia deadpanned.

“But that’s Spike! He’s worthless.”

Luna took a few steps back from Acorna. “…You’re a monster, aren’t you?”

“What? No. No I’m not! I’m the Princess of the Night and everypony loves me!”

Trollestia appeared in front of Acorna and shook her head. “You know, I’d think even someone with clinical insanity would be able to see, at this point, that they’re pretty unpopular in the current company.” She turned to Luna. “Glad to have you on the same page, Luna. I was beginning to wonder if you would realize.”

“…Wait, did you not fight just to make sure I would learn… So I wouldn’t take out my… DAMN IT! Why do you always have to be so clever!?”

“I’m the Princess of the Sun!”

Something broke in Acorna. “You don’t get to say that! You don’t get to say that!” She rushed forward, ready to skewer Trollestia through the heart – but then she vanished in a puff of white light.

The alicorns blinked. “What just happened?” Sanduna asked.

“I teleported her away,” Cornlestia said, sitting down. “And then I placed a teleport locker on the moon. None of us are going anywhere.”

Celestia grabbed Cornlestia by the throat. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t dash your brains out on these gray rocks and create a masterpiece with this moon as my canvas and your bodily fluids as my paint.”

Cornlestia sighed. “I don’t have one, besides that it would make you look evil to the other ponies around you.”

Celestia dropped her. She turned to the Lunas. “Start moving the moon back to Equis.”

There was silence.

“DID I STUTTER?”

The Lunas quickly started moving the moon back.

~~~

Twix, Rarity, The Bird, Flutterfree, Jack, and Dinkie tried to use the Elements of Harmony on the Smooze as it poured across the countryside toward Ponyville. That had only a minimal effect on a small area of the oncoming purple storm of goo and destruction.

“Well, Ah move that we call it a loss and retreat to safety,” Jack said. “We’re right doomed if we stay here.”

Flutterfree furrowed her brow – and a lightbulb went off in her head. “I have an idea, but I need to find the center of the Smooze. You all can run if you want – I have to go.” She flew over the top of the Smooze, careful to avoid its slow-moving blasts of goo shot at her overhead form.

Twix sighed. “Fine, let’s retreat back to our universe, or go help Vriska with those demons, or something… I sure hope something like the Smooze doesn’t exist in our world…”

The Bird folded her hooves. “Our Smooze would totally listen to us more than this one. I can see… A friendlier, greener, goopy thing.”

“Hello,” Twix said.

“Hello,” The Bird responded.

“The Bird, we have to go, Now.”

“Good move,” Jack said. “Now, Ah say we go to my universe, it’s got quite a lot of… infrastructure.”

Dinkie nodded. “Can confirm. Lots of it. Most of it owned by Jack here, broo.”

“Pinkie, piss off. Wait, why are we working with ya now?”

“I’m not your enemy anymore! And it’s Dinkie now, Jack!”

“Not for long it ain’t…”

“Aw…”

Rarity screamed. “SWEETIE!” She shouted, holding out a hoof. Everypony turned to look – seeing the five Sweetie Belles riding a boat made of black eldritch magic over the top of the Smooze.

Twix blinked, mildly surprised to see that the Smooze was unable to damage the eldritch power. “…I think they’ll be fine. We won’t be, not if we stay here. C’mon, let’s move.”

The Sweetie Belles moved across the Smooze, eyes serious.

“Do you remember the plan?” Squeaky said.

“Yep,” all four said.

“Good. The Smooze will actually help a bit. I’m sure you see how.”

“I don’t!” Sweetie Bot said, grinning.

“That’ll be fine. I trust the others to use it.”

“We need a name!” Sweetie Brute said. “What are we? The Sweet Things? The Cutables? The Demolishers?”

“The League of Sweetie Belles,” Sweetie Belle said, smiling.

“Name approved!” Sweetie Bot chirped.

“It’ll work nicely,” Squeaky added.

Thrackerzod shrugged. “Sure, I guess. It does sound somewhat childish, but organized… Appropriate.”

Squeaky nodded. “Now we just need to find Acorna…”

Acorna appeared in front of them with a flash of solar energy, looking very confused.

“…Convenient,” Sweetie Belle commented.

“GO GO GO!” Squeaky shouted, ordering Sweetie Bot and Sweetie Belle to their part of the plan.

Sweetie Belle held on to Sweetie Bot as she activated her rocket feet, launching into the air. She flung herself at Acorna. “Hey Acorna!”

Acorna grabbed Sweetie Belle with her magic. “What the-“

Sweetie Bot rammed into Acorna from the side while she was distracted, knocking her toward the Smooze below. Acorna tried to recover, but a tendril of Smooze grabbed her low-altitude body. “Augh! What is this stuff!?”

“The Smooze,” Thrackerzod said, carefully manipulating a half dozen eldritch constructs to keep the Smooze from devouring everypony, including an altar under Acorna – though the Smooze still encased her wings and horn. She tried to fight back, but the goo of the Smooze kept her down.

“No! I am the Princess of the Night!”

“That doesn’t mean anything!” Squeaky shouted. “You are just a tyrant. This world will probably be better off without you!” She lit her horn, casting the spell Thrackerzod had taught her – the soul-binding spell, one Thrackerzod was too busy to cast herself at the moment. “Brute, now!”

Sweetie Brute took a knife out of Squeaky’s mane and leaped onto the altar where Acorna stood. Acorna screamed as she felt her soul separating from her body, but not quite ready to leave. She tried her hardest to move, but the Smooze – the Smooze was too much.

Sweetie Brute held the knife high. Sweetie Belle and Sweetie Bot looked away.

They heard a disgusting shik.

A few seconds later, Thrackerzod called to them. “It is done.”

They looked down. There was no sign of Acorna’s body, or Thrackerzod’s altar. There was just their black eldritch-construct boat and a jar with a purple spark of life in it.

“That her?” Sweetie Belle asked, jumping back to the boat.

“Yes,” Thrackerzod said. “She will be turned over to Hastur, where she will take the place of the original Twilight. The solution is unjust, but it works the best out of our limited options.”

Sweetie Bot nodded slowly. Sweetie Belle sighed. “This… This is wrong.”

“As you saw me tell a chicken, life is full of decisions where there is no right choice.”

“Right. Loss of innocence, and all that. Heh. Think we’re summoning Hastur with what we’re doing?”

“I wouldn’t remove the possibility,” Thrackerzod said. “Come on, let’s get out of here. …Somepony else can deal with this Smooze.”

Somewhere not so far away, the handful of remaining demons vanished, their contract fulfilled.

Vriska twitched. “…I was so hoping for a complete slaughter…”

Hastur just shrugged.

~~~

Flutterfree landed on top of a tree, one tall enough and large enough to withstand the force of the Smooze for now. She could see her counterpart, the cult leader, fighting Pinkie and Scooter.

Flutterfree took a breath. Here goes nothing.

“Just remember what Tree Hugger taught you…” Flutterfree said, remembering how they ‘defeated’ the Smooze of her universe – sonic vibrations.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, whee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee…” Flutterfree announced, almost singing the zen tones for the Smooze to hear.

The effect was instant. It stopped spreading.

Fluttershy noticed this instantly, turning to Flutterfree with rage. “What are you doing?! HOW ARE YOU DOING IT!?”

Flutterfree ignored her, continuing the calming chant, guiding the Smooze back into its hole with sound.

Pinkie appeared next to Flutterfree, wearing her mane like Tree Hugger. “It’s, like, relaxing sonic vibrations designed to release the Smooze’s pent up stress.”

Scooter appeared as well, wearing her mane in a similar fashion. “Like, just go with the flow Fluttershy, Lord Smooze is really enjoying this treatment.”

Fluttershy pointed a hoof at them. The Smooze generated a tremendous tendril of purple horror, shifting toward all three of them.

Pinkie deflected it with a ping-pong paddle.

“This… This… This is so absurd!” Fluttershy screamed. “This is just absurd!”

Scooter shrugged. “Well, we already had our serious confrontation back there. We had to have something stupid here!”

“And you know what?” Pinkie said. “It actually makes some sense!”

“No it doesn’t!” Fluttershy wailed.

“You had to be there.”

Soon, the Smooze pushed itself back down the hole, vanishing from the world altogether, leaving Fluttershy powerless. She descended to the ground, staring at the now-empty hole. “Not again…”

Scooter slapped a pair of hoofcuffs around her. “And now you’re under arrest for mysterious cult activity.”

Pinkie slapped another pair on her wings. “Yeah! Enjoy some time inside whatever slammer we slam you into!”

Fluttershy took in a deep breath and sighed, accepting her fate. “You win.”

“Good! HEY FLUTTERFREE! YOU CAN STOP ZENNING NOW!”

“Ee-ee-ee- oh.” Flutterfree blushed. “Sorry, guess I got a little carried away. It was pretty relaxing.”

Pinkie winked. “It’s okay. Everything’s worked out now! Time to wrap this up!”

~~~

There was a meeting held at the only version of Twilight’s castle in the four universes, the one in the fabled land of Ultra Fast. Nopony knew why it was called Ultra Fast, and the more ponies asked around the less sense it made. Four Lunas, Four Celestias, and Charter-Twilight were locked inside the throne room, discussing fervently.

“But that kind of talk is boring,” Scooter said, “so why don’t you hang out here with the rest of us who are just waiting?”

“Nice,” Pinkie said. “Would have been better if you were actually addressing somepony that wasn’t behind the wall.”

Scooter shrugged. “Eh, I do what I can.”

“But let’s see what everypony’s talking about! Be a team of convenient eavesdroppers. Won’t that be fun?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it would,” Scooter chuckled.

The two Pinkies slowly began to move from conversation to conversation, like spies.

Twix raised a surprised eyebrow at unicorn Twilight. “Wow, you have it rough. I mean, I got the impression your Celestia was a little mean, but she threatened to have you eaten?”

“Yeah. And I’m pretty sure she was completely serious at the time.” She took a swig of the unidentifiable alcoholic drink she had in her hoof. “My life was pretty terrible.”

“I could probably convince my Celestia to take you in.”

“I don’t want to suffer from an accusation of treachery, and frankly your Celestia seems annoying.”

“What? Noooo… She’s the best! Like, ever! She’s old, wise, thoughtful, and funny!”

“That last one there, see, that’s the problem. A leader can’t garner respect with the amount of crap she clearly pulls all the time. I don’t know how your society continues to function.”

“I believe I heard it put like this once… She’s insanely brilliant.”

“And I can’t argue with logic like that.”

“Dears,” Renee said, passing them by with her group of four Raritys. “Hrm… Twilight, are you the only one here from your universe?”

“I’m pretty sure Spike is somewhere around, but… Yeah. I’m pretty alone here.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

Twilight looked out into the distance, gaze stern. “…I do. And there’s a chance, a chance that’s larger than I would like to admit, that you were right. Maybe I’m just doing this all to myself. It would certainly make a lot of sense.”

Renee nodded. “Good. All I ask now is that you think about what else you can do. Trust me, working with others is a great way to improve your own life. Make some real friendships and work at them. It’s worth trying out, at least. Enjoy your… punch?”

“I have no idea what this is.”

“Huh. Enjoy it anyway.” She trotted off, catching up with the other Raritys. The Pinkies decided to follow, going with some semblance of ‘order’ to the eavesdropping. “So, ladies, I propose we have a night on the town at some point. No, Mattie, there will not be any death-defying erotic stunts.”

Mattie, the Ultra Fast Rarity who had tried to name herself Masochity, shrugged. “Hey, I’ll find some way to get my enjoyment, and you know it.”

“So long as it isn’t with weapons,” Rarity said huffing. “My PTDD is barely being held back since the thing with my sister.”

“Um, PTDD?” Charity asked.

“Post Traumatic Dress Disorder.”

“Um. That’s a thing?”

“Yes it’s a thing! Really, Charity, I expected better of you!”

“Um. Okay… I’m sorry? I was just… surprised, is all. It sounds odd. Care to describe it?”

Rarity did, in fact, decide to describe it, but the Pinkies turned their attention to another conversation – Mattie, Jack, and OJ.

“So ya finally did somethin’ worthwhile,” Jack said. “Ya could write a book about that, sell millions. Ah’ll be yer manager.”

“Nah, I don’t need to write a book,” OJ said. “I think I’m ready to go back to Canterlot High with my newfound confidence!”

“Dear, we all know you’re just going to regress in character development by the next movie,” Matty said.

“N-no I won’t! I won’t! You’ll see! I am OJ, Sunset Shimmer of Ultra Fast, and I will have confidence!”

“…Movie?” Renee asked, butting in.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mattie said.

“I’m worrying about it!”

“Awwwww yeahhhh…”

Renee glanced around for the source of the sudden strange voice. “Where did that come from?”

“Oh. That’s just Phil. Don’t worry about him either.”

Renee pulled her hat down and shook her head. “Too much nonsense…”

You can say that again.

Scooter dragged Pinkie into a side hallway. “The Editor! What are you doing here? This isn’t even your universe!”

I wanted to see what was happening. Like you.

“Awww yeeeeah, two mysterious voices, talking together! Best bros, him and I!”

We are not friends, Phil.

“Awwwwwww noooooo…”

I am also not a voice.

“This is dumb,” Scooter said. “You two, just… Talk amongst yourselves here. Don’t shatter anypony’s worldview, okay?”

“Awwwwww yeeeeeeah…”

I’m done with this.

The Pinkies shrugged and returned to the main group. They ran into the League of Sweetie Belles.

“Can we kill monsters more often together? That was a lot of fun!” Sweetie Brute cheered.

Squeaky shook her head. “I have a job. I can probably stay in contact with you girls, but I’m very busy and no I can’t tell you what I’m doing. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Sweetie Belle said. “You’re still part of the League, even if you won’t always be with us. I’m sure I can get you a dimensional device even! And a computer connected to the Internet! Oh, there are so many videos I want to show you!”

“I am curious to see what an interdimensional Internet has to offer,” Thrackerzod said. “I predict both more amazing and more depraved content than even my twisted mind can imagine! Horrors from beyond the depths of the darkest dreams!”

Sweetie Bot chuckled. “The creepy levels have no bound!”

“Precisely, my robotic friend.” Something occurred to Thrackerzod, making her stop in her tracks. “Wait…”

“What’s wrong?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“I’ve finished my contract. That means my purpose for this body is done.” She looked at the ground. “I am to discard it and return to the court of Azathoth.”

“No! Don’t go!” Sweetie Bot called. “We just met you!”

“I am bound…”

“Not as much as you think you are,” Hastur said, walking up to them.

“Hastur?” Thrackerzod said, shaking her head. “How did you get here? I did not summon you.”

“I came under my own power. The nut-head has left, citing that one of his universes is going to need an ‘ass whoopin’ soon. I was no longer under observation, so I came here, and I am glad I did. Thrackerzod, there is nothing in your soul contract that demands you must discard your mortal shell immediately upon completion of your purpose. The wording can easily be taken to mean that you do not return to Azathoth’s court until you discard that mortal shell. The life of a mortal is nothing to our master. You can take a vacation of one lifetime.”

Thrackerzod’s jaw dropped. “You’re serious.”

“I am very serious.”

Thrackerzod grinned – then, realizing it was unbecoming of her to look like a child despite her current form, she coughed and regained her composure. “Ahem. Hastur, I shall take your suggestion and capitalize on it. I shall return to the court of Azathoth upon the expiration of this form in… roughly 200 local years.”

Hastur bowed. “I shall await your return, and will be curious to see what you learn from this experience as a half-mortal.”

“It will be interesting, that is for certain. Have any of us managed to be revealed and not hunted to death before?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

“Thrackerzod is the first!” Sweetie Bot cheered. “Celebrate!”

“Yeah. I am in the mood for a celebration,” Thrackerzod asserted.

The Raritys walked up to the Sweetie Belles. Sweetie Belle looked at Renee guiltily. “Renee, I-“

“You did well, Sweetie. I am proud of what you did – what all of you did – to overcome yourselves and do what needed to be done. Though in the case of Thrackerzod she went in the other direction.”

Rarity hugged Sweetie Bot. “You’re a good little robot, yes you are!”

“Um… Yeah. Good work… Squeaky,” Charity added.

Squeaky rolled her eyes, but chuckled anyway. “Thanks.”

“I hear you cut him open with a knife!” Mattie said. “That’s my girl!”

“Yay! I’m approved!” Sweetie Brute cheered.

Renee moved to Thrackerzod. “I’m still not sure what to make of you.”

“You cannot comprehend me, mortal.”

“You’ve wanted to say that to my face for a long time, haven’t you?”

“It is a phrase I have wished to utter for many years. This form was exceedingly liberating even when it was a secret. Now it has shown me something new.”

“The magic of friendship?” Renee asked, smirking.

Thrackerzod sighed, disgruntled. “Yes…”

“Oh, we should all introduce each other to our crusaders!” Sweetie Belle said.

“That’s… not a good idea in my case,” Squeaky said.

“That’s fine, we can just get everypony who wants to come!”

“Oh!” Sweetie Brute jumped up and down. “You’ll all love Scootaloo! She’s the best!”

The Pinkies moved on to another conversation, this time not even worrying about tying them together.

“Hey there, I’m Rainbow Dash!”

“I am, The Bird.”

“Ermagersh, that’s so cool! Are you, like, an actual bird?”

“No. Just The Bird.”

“But how is that possible?”

“Because, I’m just that awesome.”

“Woah, I’m awesome too! Did we just become best friends?”

“I dunno. I’ll have to think about it a bit.”

“Yes! Success!”

“Why are you called Rainbow Dash, by the way?”

“I… I… Ohmygod I don’t know why we have names! What have you done to me?”

“I just said what came to my mind.”

“Woah… You’re like some super wise guru me!”

“Yeah. I get that a lot.”

“You own a parking lot?”

“What? No. Where’d you get that idea?”

“What idea?”

“A parking lot would be pretty cool though…”

“Oh yeah! That would be awesome!”

The Pinkies had enough of that. They moved on, finding Vriska talking to… Dinkie.

“So… You’re not evil?” Vriska asked.

“Oh no, I’m definitely evil. Demonic pink entity up the whazoo!”

“…Neat.”

“I know, right? Jack has me working with the Apples to scam the world out of its life! Or something. I don’t really know, broo.”

“Your world is lucky you’re so scatterbrained.”

“Yeah. They are.”

“Do you even know what I just said?”

“No way broo, wasn’t listening!”

“Figures.”

“By the way, no hard feelings about me tying you up, right?”

“Hey, I destroyed almost your entire demon army, I think we’re even.”

“Great!”

Finally, the doors to the main meeting hall opened. Four Celestias, Four Lunas, and Charter-Twilight stepped out. “Right,” Twilight said. “We didn’t really make much in the way of decisions. But we have all agreed not to go to war, and to remain in contact with each other. That’s… That’s about it really.” She glanced uncomfortably at the Ultra Fast Celestia. “Otherwise, I think we may have found a way home.”

“Yeeeees!” Trollestia trilled. “My universe has a connection to another universe outside this magical donut our four worlds are in! We are going to use it to break this pattern and send these explorer ponies home! And get our ponies back!”

“Hold up!” Trollestia’s Luna called. “They all need to know about the 4th dimensional being that guards that world! It doesn’t like ponies coming in!”

“We can take him,” Trollestia asserted. “Or we can explain we’re just doing him a service. He’s all about order isn’t he? Well we’re restoring order.”

Twilight nodded. “Anyway, Flutterfree, Renee, Pinkie, Sweetie Belle, we’re going to try to get home. Vriska, OJ, Sweetie Bot, Bot’s Rarity, and Thrackerzod, I invite you to come with us.”

OJ shook her head. “I think I’m staying. Sorry.”

“It’s your decision.”

Vriska landed next to Twilight. “Of course I’m coming. It’s time for me to get out of here.”

Sweetie Bot looked at Rarity. Rarity shrugged. “I guess we can get ourselves some kind of home with them. I will need to rename myself though…”

Twilight looked at Thrackerzod. Thrackerzod nodded. “I will come. Though I wonder what I will do?”

“Thrackerzod, we have encountered your kind of magic rarely, and it is very poorly understood. I’m offering you a job with our alliance of universes, as the expert on the Eldritch. I understand this may be a step down from your servitude to… whoever it is you serve, but I think you’ll find it rewarding.”

Thrackerzod nodded. “I will not show you or any alicorn any respect, and I get full rein to practice dark magic however I wish.”

“So long as you aren’t using sapient sacrifices.”

“Deal. I’m in.”

Sweetie Belle hugged her. “We’ll get to see a lot of each other!”

Trollestia coughed. “Let’s gooo people! I want to bust the portal open already!”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Right. We will go now – but we will be back, back to say hello to all the new friends we’ve made. I wish all of you luck in your lives, and hope we will be stronger together. Trollestia, take us away.”

“Bwa bwa bwaaaaaa!” Trollestia said, for dramatic effect. She teleported them all to her universe, then into the Everfree Forest where the mirror pool was. She lit her horn, unleashing a beam of sunlight into the water, destroying the obstacle on the other side.

Twilight pulled out her dimensional device. “I’ve got a reading of the other side. I can get us there without going through the Mirror’s Magic.” She looked at everypony there – herself, Renee, Flutterfree, Pinkie, Sweetie Belle, Sweetie Bot, Thrackerzod, Rarity, Vriska, Trollestia, and Luna. “Wait, Luna, why are you here?”

“In case we need to deal with the 4th dimensional being,” Luna said. “Which I guarantee, he will. From the letter I got from this universe’s Luna, he was ticked off last time the portal was used.”

Twilight shrugged. “Here we go then…” She activated the portal, bringing them to another universe with another mirror pool. Sitting there was a version of Rarity and Twilight Sparkle, though the Twilight was a unicorn. She stared in awe at Charter-Twilight’s wings.

“Oh dear,” the Rarity said, looking worriedly at her Twilight. “This… Complicates things.”

“Sorry,” Charter-Twilight said. “Just passing through.” The rest of the ponies filed out behind her. “I can come back and explain later, but we’re trying to get home to our universe, so…”

“Hey!” Sweetie Bot called to Rarity. “I bet you have a Sweetie Belle! Think she can join the League of Sweetie Belles?”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “There is no way she has any idea what that is.”

“I can guess,” the native Rarity said. “I’m sorry, my daughter is too young for the type of adventures you all clearly go on.”

Renee sputtered. “DAUGHTER!?”

“…Are they not supposed to be?”

“Every last one is a sister of a Rarity!” Renee said. “I… I cannot process…”

Trollestia snickered. “You should have seen Charity’s report on when she was over here.”

“Wait, that was you?” the native Twilight said. “You… You… That day fucking blew! How was I supposed to know that Rainbow Dash had been replaced!? I was making my move and-“

Luna sighed. “We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused. …Hasn’t your Luna informed you about our reasonings?”

“…No. Why would she?”

“Because I’ve been writing to her?”

The native unicorns exchanged glances. “News to us.”

Luna rolled her eyes. “Riiiight. Anyway, we just need to test the dimensional framework, and then we’ll be on our way.”

“I should send The Bird over here more often,” Trollestia mused.

“Don’t. You. Dare.” the native Twilight grunted. “I will fucking burn you.”

“Oh, excuse me, didn’t you try to dethrone your Celestia once? How well did that go? Oh right, you got banished to Ponyville for eternity. Oooo – burn!”

Charter-Twilight facehooved. “We don’t have time for this.” She tried connecting to Equis Vitis – nothing.

Vriska grabbed the dimensional device and began to plug in coordinates. “Give me that…”

And that was when the 4th dimensional being showed up.

Pinkie blinked, staring at the strange being with a wrinkled brown head. “Huh. It really does look like a walnut.”

The native Twilight blinked. “I think it looks more like a stallio-“

“EEENOPE! Not going there!” Pinkie demanded.

“WHAT DID I TELL YOU!?” the being shouted. “I told you that if you went through this thing and upset the balance again, asses would be whooped!”

“Technically you told the other Luna that. She has no idea we’re here,” Luna said.

“I’m still gonna whoop some asses! Prepare them, for you have upset the balance in the universe!”

Charter-Twilight cleared her throat. “I am Charter-Twilight, a prominent member of an alliance of several different universes. We are simply trying to find our way home, and these two royal sisters were kind enough to show us possible passage through this universe. They have no intention of further interfering beyond this visit, if that is what you wish.”

Trollestia coughed. “Oh I dunno, that idea with The Bi-“

“No intention,” Charter-Twilight insisted, talking over Trollestia. She wasn’t looking at the princess, so she had no idea what she’d been saying, but Twilight knew well enough at this point whatever it was couldn’t have been good. “We will go home and never bother this universe again.”

“Dimensional travelers, huh? You listen to me little alicorn, you think you can mess with these powers you don’t understand? There are forces that are unbalanced by your mere existence in other planes. One of these days you’ll find yourself in a place and then BAM, you’ll screw it up, KA-POW! No, you don’t get to come back here at all, and if I can I think I’ll stop you from traveling at all-“

“You do not have jurisdiction over all those worlds!” Thrackerzod blurted. “You cannot act over them, they formed outside of your territory, and acting outside of your space just makes things worse. You know the instability of this universe is because of your universe’s proximity, do you not!?”

“Thrackerzod. I’ve heard a lot about you. I-“

“Shut your nutty mouth! You have jurisdiction over this world. We will promise never to return here. But you can’t have any sway over the others.”

The 4th dimensional being pointed at Trollestia and Luna. “I have some say with them. If you really want to cut this deal, you must listen to my decree. You cannot interfere with their war. None of you.”

Charter-Twilight nodded. “Deal.”

“Good. Now go home before I decide that assess need to be whooped anyway!” He vanished into time itself.

Thrackerzod blinked. “Hastur wasn’t kidding, that guy is unbearable.”

Charter-Twilight turned to Trollestia and Luna. “I hope you don’t mind, but we can’t help you now. I’d… Rather not upset whatever organization he’s apart of.”

“We understand,” Luna said. “It is our burden, and our burden alone.”

“Got it!” Vriska said, pointing the dimensional device and opening a portal directly to the nexus universe that Corona and Sparky were in. “Woohoo! Made it back!”

Charter-Twilight waved to the native Twilight and Rarity. “Bye. I don’t think we’ll see each other again.” They vanished inside the portal.

The native Rarity looked at Twilight. “…You’d do best to forget the existence of those wings.”

“...Rarity, do you ever get the feeling we are but tiny ants in a tree on a planet about to crash into the sun?”

“…Sometimes?”

“Fuck, now I’m going to be existential all day.”

“It happens to the best of us.”

Meanwhile, in the nexus universe, Vriska threw her dice at the exposed center. The glowing white light that started this whole mess vanished as a giant fish ate it. She let out a breath. “Good, there we go, the connections are reset.”

“…What?” Renee asked.

“We were trapped in those four universes because this nexus decided to rearrange the connections between them for some reason. Now we should be able to easily travel to them directly. Or, well, you will. I’ll just keep traveling around by luck.”

Twilight smiled. “Thanks, Vriska. It was nice to see you again.”

“Nice to see you too, Charter. But I must go – I’ve got some business to take care of. I’ve heard rumors that an old friend of mine, Aradia, has been seen around here. Haven’t seen her for quite a few years. I’m going to track her down.” She vanished into another universe.

Twilight blinked. “…Well that was a fast goodbye.”

“The irony is painful,” Pinkie muttered.

“Huh?”

“You’ll understand by the finale.”

“…What?”

Corona raised a hoof. “Um, does anyone want to explain to me what happened?”

Trollestia grinned. “Well, once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, there were two regal sisters. One was amazing and raised the sun in all her amazing glory. The other… kinda sucked.”

Luna gasped. “Celestia!”

Chuckles rippled through the group of ponies.

~~~

Twilight returned to her castle to find chaos. Nova grabbed her by the neck and screamed. “HELP ME!!!”

Twilight saw four ponies within the castle. One was clearly the alicorn she had replaced less than a day ago, a look of panic on her face. There was a Rarity who was busy looking at herself in the mirror with a dissatisfied expression, and a Fluttershy who seemed to be scared of everything. Then there was a Pinkie Pie with a cauldron chanting something about stitches in time and undoing what was wrong.

“ATTENTION PONIES!” Twilight called, getting the four’s attention instantly. “Who wants to go home?”

“Oh! Yes please!” the Pinkie said. “I didn’t want to deal with nine portals again! Call that timing!”

“Oh thank you thank you!” the Fluttershy called, laying herself at Twilight’s hooves. “I didn’t know how much longer I could handle this, man!”

“I dunno,” the Rarity said. “Go back? Really, what’s there for me? I… Well I guess there’s the girls, but that’s a mixed blessing… Though I do suppose I’ll actually be allowed to see some stallions rather than be locked up in this clambake of a castle...”

Thrackerzod poked her head into the castle. “You are going back and that’s final.”

“Sweetie Belle-“

“I am Thrackerzod, a being from beyond the dark from whence nightmares fear to tread and you will address me as such!”

“Dear, stop being so sill-“

Thrackerzod levitated her Rarity into the air and glared. “Rarity…”

“Right, Thrackerzod! Whatever you say, Thrackerzod!”

“Good.”

Twilight turned to the other Twilight. “You?”

“Oh, I guess I could stay here and try to find myself… But, you know, I do have friends back in my home, even if they are a bunch of idiots. And Applejack.”

“I don’t envy you.”

“Yeah. I’m just glad this special is over.”

“…Uh… Okay?”

“Right! So, take us home!”

Twilight opened a portal for her counterpart. She smiled, nodded, and returned home.

The Pinkie lined up next. “I think I’ll write a song about this!”

“You’ll have plenty to write about when you return home. ...Your Fluttershy is imprisoned and your Twilight is no more.”

Pinkie sighed. “...It’s not like they treated me very well to begin with… I’ll just try to find some friends.”

“I’m available, and so are the ponies here.”

“Thank you! I’m sure we’ll meet again!” She bounced through the next portal Twilight made.

Thrackerzod pointed at her ‘sister’. “Get her home.”

Rarity huffed. “I never-”

Thrackerzod shook her head and glared. “Not. One. Snide. Remark.”

“Oh, fine. But you should at least try to speak with digni-”

Thrackerzod created the portal herself and threw Rarity into it. “Done. So done.”

Lastly, Nova pushed Fluttershy toward Twilight, “Now, Fluttershy, you don’t need your hoof held so tightly anymore. You can go back home and I won’t have to keep careful watch over you!”

Fluttershy gulped. “Man, portals are scary though! Very scary! Totally not my thing!”

“Your friends miss you,” Twilight said, opening a portal to her world. “They want you back.”

“I dunno man, that looks scary and shiny…”

Scooter popped out of the portal and dragged Fluttershy through, “Thanks Charter-Twilight!”

“AUGH!” Fluttershy said. “Pinkie, don’t do that! I… I… I could have been disintegrated!”

“No, you couldn’t have.” Scooter waved. “Bye!”

With the last portal closing, Twilight was now standing alone with Nova and Thrackerzod.

Nova let out a breath. “None of them knew how to listen. All crazy. Every last one. Thank you, I couldn’t take much more.” She looked at Thrackerzod. “This one feels like Majora.”

“She’s our new expert,” Twilight said. “Treat her well.”

“I don’t trust how she feels.”

“Nova, she’s proven herself. And she’s probably better than Alushy.”

“That is not a high bar to cross.”

“I am standing right here,” Thrackerzod muttered.

Twilight laughed. “Right, sorry.” She yawned. “Anyway, I think I’m going to turn in. See you girls much later, I’m sure my paperwork will have piled up from me being away for so long.” She walked away. She knew they were probably saying things to her, but one of the perks of being deaf was that she didn’t have to respond after she no longer wanted to. She went up to her room, laid down into her bed, and sighed.

She felt something lumpy under her wing.

She removed a small golden key. Right, she’d taken this during the confrontation from across the portal… It had a weird energy around it, but it hadn’t actually been important. She wondered why she held on to it.

She shrugged – she had no idea. She just levitated it into one of her nearby drawers and stuffed it in, closing it. She’d deal with it in the morning.

By the time morning came, she forgot about it.

033 - A Third Party

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

034 - Identity Crisis

Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle was mildly surprised to find the ‘grinder’ room of her castle empty. There was always some scientist in here, observing the magitechnical apparatus as it attempted to locate new universes connected to Equis Vitis.

She approached the machine and laid a hoof on one of its edges. The grinder had the shape of a barrel with a reverse funnel seated on top, the device only barely taller than Twilight. Most of the magical crystals and electrical wires were contained within the barrel, though a couple snaked out the bottom and along the floor. The front face of the grinder held a single screen, continually cycling through dimensional coordinates it attempted to connect to, usually projecting a big red X to indicate failure.

Twilight knew it was missing universes – it wasn’t being powered by a green diamond, so it wouldn’t know if any of the universes it was trying were just too far away to connect to. Twilight contemplated taking one of the diamonds just to see, but that would be frivolous. Plus, the two they did have were doing important things. One was still at the Hub, working the primary Mirror Portal, while the other was at the Nexus Universe they had discovered a couple months ago, powering a much larger and more successful grinder machine. This little one in Equis Vitis was essentially just a hobbyist’s version of the real deal.

They still owed Chancellor Fluttershy of Equis Concretion for allowing them to use their diamond.

As a single check mark flicked across the grinder’s screen for a second, indicating a success. Twilight found herself pondering the diamonds. They were non-magical power sources that had been found only within dimensional devices – and they had only seen two of the spheres. One’s origin was a mystery, having been recovered by the Concretion in the early days of its construction, and the other she herself had picked up off the ground on the day this whole adventure started…

It had been how many years now? Five? She was sure it was more than that, but it was getting hard to keep track of time with all the dilation she experienced. She might have actually spent six years exploring, even if only five had passed here, for all she knew. Sparky didn’t have a good working theory of time dilation between universes yet, unfortunately.

All of this, because of that one sphere… Who had made it? Who was that man of light? Who was the unicorn chasing him? Why had they only run across scant pockets of multiversal individuals? Twilight went over the list in her head. There was Vriska, Rick, the Doctor, Thrackerzod’s people, maybe the Stars, and whoever it was in the University of Doors. But none of them had used the diamond to get around. Luck, gun, blue phone box, rituals, whatever strange cosmic thing the Stars used, and doors.

She got the feeling there was something much bigger out there. She’d been getting that feeling a lot lately, with alarming rapidity. She was beginning to fear it was an omen. She found herself wondering what could be worse than the horror of Majora…

An error code flashed across the grinder’s screen, returning Twilight’s attention to the machine. Error: Connection Will Not Disengage.

Twilight raised an eyebrow. That was odd – portals would only refuse to disengage if they were being held open from the other end. Twilight prodded the grinder with her magic, latching onto the microscopic portal that was used to test the connection validity. She hooked it up to the power running through the castle and expanded it until it was large enough for her to walk through.

Through the portal was a sight that made her choke on her breath.

There was an identical room on the other side. Nothing all that unusual, except there was a grinder machine in there, one of the exact same design. Standing over this grinder was not a version of Twilight – it was Charter-Princess Twilight sparkle, complete with uneven coat, windswept mane, and metal-lined ears. The only differences the other side of the portal had were the other Twilight’s orientation away from the portal and the error message on her version of the grinder. Error: Recursive Connection.

“What in the,” Twilight said, taking a steps back. The other Charter-Twilight must have detected something - a change in the air, a difference in lighting, or a vibration in the floor - because she turned around and locked eyes with Twilight. They stared at each other for a solid minute, making the portal into almost a perfect mirror, the error messages being the only means of differentiation.

Just to make sure they weren’t looking at a mirror, both Twilights glanced behind themselves at their grinders – yep. The error messages were different. They locked eyes with each other once again.

“What is going on?” They said at the same time. Then they both facehooved. “Oh come on, really? We didn’t start in the same position, why have we synced up? Okay, before we can continue, we need to find a way to break the cycle. Hitting won’t work, it’ll just make us upset. Oh! Here we go, just read the error on the other side of the mirror! A difference! Ahem. ERROR-“

The two spoke at the same time. The ‘recursive connection’ Twilight finished first. “Okay, so we broke that. Good. Now, the big question, what is going on here?”

The original Twilight glanced back at her error message. “It looks like my grinder connected to your universe while your universe tried to connect to itself?”

“That doesn’t make any sense, why would the grinder try to connect to the universe its in!?”

“The universe was moved? The Nexus altered the connection coordinates, it’s not beyond possibility.”

“But what feat of engineering would be required to move an entire universe in… Whatever it is the universes are in.”

“A mystery. How about we perform an experiment?” the original Twilight took out a dimensional device. “How about I try to dial my own universe, see what happens?”

“I’ll do the same.”

They did. The original Twilight’s device gave the Recursive Connection error, while the other Twilight’s created a portal that led right to the original Twilight’s universe, creating two portals.

“Okay,” the original Twilight said. “Strange. For some reason your devices seem to think this is home. So… I don’t know what this means.”

“This means you get ‘original’ dibs and I get ‘other’ dibs.”

“We need to find a way to differentiate ourselves from each other…”

They both had the idea in quick succession, but other Twilight acted first. She summoned a marker from the downstairs of her castle. She scribbled a big black X on the grinder, and then a matching X on her front left hoof. “There.”

“You are Twilight-X?”

“Yep. It’ll work for now.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

“This is silly.”Twilight blinked. “So, now that that’s out of the way… Twilight-X. Can I come to your universe?”

“By all means,” Twilight-X said. “Let’s see if we can put our two heads together to figure out what’s going on.”

“We’ll blow away all the competition,” Twilight said, stepping through the portal. “…I’ll leave it open. Don’t want to change any more variables than needed.”

“Mhm. Here’s what we know. We know that we are Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle, and we’re probably identical. We should probably test that. What names do your friends go by?”

“Nova, Renee, Flutterfree, and Pinkie is still Pinkie, forevermore.”

“What did Pinkie call herself once last week on Tuesday?”

“Palaloozalala. That’s not a fair question, I could have – oh, right. If I didn’t remember correctly, but you did…”

“Bingo! So, we are exactly the same. Actually…”

“Were you thinking in depth about the diamonds and getting existential in the grinder room?”

“Yes. And then the Error message popped up, and that’s where our experiences diverge.”

“Oh this is so fascinating! Your grinder apparently tries to dial your own universe, while mine dials yours and can’t close for some reason. But when you try to dial home, you dial my universe…”

“Wait, hold on,” Twilight-X said, waving a hoof. “All universes need to have a unique coordinate system. Let’s both try to dial Earth Vitis.”

They did, and neither of their devices made the connection.

“There’s no connection to it from here,” Twilight said, rubbing her chin. “That’s fascinating… What could this mean?”

At that point, Spike (or, more accurately, Spike-X) ran into the room. “None of the dimensional devices are working Twilight! They all give errors and – oh.”

Both Twilights started talking at the same time. “Yeah, we’ve probably got something to do with that. Ugh, now we’re talking in sync again. Say the other’s name on three, two, one.” They separated themselves by a simple use of an ‘X’.

Twilight continued talking. “I think this means something… bizarre, Twilight-X. Your devices don’t work unless they want to connect to my universe. It’s almost as if they’re calibrated for my universe, and think they are in my universe. I would say it was my universe that moved, but we can see it through that portal. Which means…”

“This universe is a copy of yours!” Twilight-X said. “And it had to be made the moment your grinder connected to it… That may be why your portal couldn’t close, it needed to stay open to copy the universe.”

“What did? What is it?”

“I have no idea! I mean, I should probably be literally freaking out right now that I’m just a copy of you that didn’t exist a couple seconds ago, but I’m just too excited about what this might mean. We may have come across something that can build universes! Get some insight into how universes came to be, what they mean, and perhaps form a more coherent theory of what the multiverse actually is!”

“I’m calling all the scientists!” Twilight said, pulling out her phone and turning on her ears. She was too excited to register the pain. She levitated the phone over into her universe, the original, so not to cause conflict with ‘universe X’. “This is Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle calling Hub Laboratories. I’ve got something amazing for you!”

“Twilight, this is the second time you’ve called this mo-“

“I found a universe that copied my universe. I’m standing next to a perfect duplicate of myself! Say hello, Twilight-X!”

“Hello!” Twilight-X said. “You should really come over here, I think this universe is about to have a dimensional device connection ordeal. Also a bunch of existential dread that hasn’t hit me yet. Just get everyone you can, we’ve got to check this place out!”

“…We’ll be right out.”

Twilight hung up the phone and turned off her ears. “This is going to further our multidimensional theory so far!”

“I know! And now there’s two of us to do things! We could swap places on adventures and other stuff, like Pinkie does!”

“But what about your friends?”

“Oh, right, they do exist… We could just make two teams! Or… Yeah we should think about this later, after we actually know what’s going on.”

“Which we don’t.”

Spike-X coughed, the motion of his body drawing their attention. “So… Should I just tell Ponyville that they’re all copies, or… something else?”

Twilight-X blinked. “Right. For now, tell them we’re getting the top scientists to work on the connection problem, and that we’ll have something to tell them about it by the end of the day, but they need to be patient for now.”

Spike nodded. “Got it.” He ran down the stairs to deliver the message.

Twilight and Twilight-X rubbed their hooves together. They both mentally cleared their calendars, even though only Twilight actually had a calendar to clear. Today was to be a day of extreme science!

~~~

A couple hours later, Twilight and Twilight-X were sitting in a the throne room of Universe-X filled with a handful of scientists from across the multiverse. Corona, Carter, Sparky, some alicorn from Equis Cosmic by the name of Alabaster, Starbeat, and a handful of others.

“So…” Twilight began.

“…What do you have for us?” Twilight-X finished. They hoofbumped.

Corona looked at her clipboard and bit her lip. “Well, we’ve got some good news, and some bad news, and the bad news is really, really bad.”

“It’s mostly bad and confusing news,” Alabaster said.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

Carter cleared her throat. “The universe we are in is a direct copy of Equis Vitis, down to the finest detail of memory. However, that is only the physical attributes. Clearly, the connections and placement in the multiverse are different, but there’s more. Using some of our more outlandish methods of analysis – many of which were obtained by analysis of the Nexus universe – we have determined that this universe exists ‘overtop’ of something we’re calling a framework. We have no idea what this framework looks like, if it looks like anything, but we do know its function. It takes connections formed to it, holds them open, and copies the information from the connecting universe into this one.”

Corona spoke next. “The obvious problem being that whenever you connect to this universe from a universe it isn’t already connected to, it overwrites whatever universe was here before. I hate to say it, but the grinder destroyed a universe by connecting to here, and we’ll never know what it was.”

Twilight and Twilight-X stared in horror, their excited expressions gone. They spoke at once. “Ensure the coordinates to this universe never get onto the Directory, and expunge whatever report the grinder sent automatically. We can’t afford to chance this universe being wiped out.”

Sparky nodded. “On it… Charters.” She pulled out a data pad and began making the necessary adjustments.

“Never disengage the portal that the grinder first made,” Alabaster added. “We don’t know if the universe vanishes when there’s no more connections or not.”

“We do have some good news,” Starbeat said. “I figured out enough of the framework to instill a virus spell within it.”

“What?” the Twilights asked.

“Well, I ‘cheated’ in a way. I have a ‘stop’ spell in my inventory that I’ve set to activate whenever the framework activates. Clearly the framework will need to draw a lot of energy to overwrite a universe, so I just told my spell to tap into that energy to stop time whenever the framework activates.”

The Twilights understood this. “So, when it activates, you’ll stop it?”

“Yes. The downside to the spell is that it stops everyone else in it. And I’m not sure it’ll activate quickly enough to prevent universe destruction. It will prevent the framework from ever activating again, afterward. That’s assuming the spell can perpetually draw energy from it…”

“Basically, there’s a lot of assumptions and unknowns involved in what Starbeat’s done,” Corona said. “It’ll probably do something to stop the framework, but the effectiveness is questionable at best, and even at its best it's going to have unfortunate side effects. So it’s probably best to just not activate the framework at all. Keep this universe the way it is, don’t overwrite anything.”

“We probably should prepare an evacuation just in case,” Carter said. “You never know if someone might accidentally tap into this universe and activate the framework.”

Twilight turned to Twilight-X “You’ll need to evacuate the whole planet. And the universe, if the Stars are willing. …I just realized we probably copied Stars here. I wonder what they’re going to think about that.”

Twilight-X nodded. “I’ll write to Princess Celestia and organize the evacuation procedures. We should be able to start moving some ponies at the end of the day.”

“I’ll grab my friends, see if we can help move everyone,” Twilight said.

Twilight-X smiled. “Don’t bring too many over, we can’t be that risky or confusing. Remember, we have just about everypony you have, we can be organized. Well, in Equestria anyway. Getting Tauryl to evacuate will probably take a few weeks…”

“So we just have to keep anyone from dialing this universe for a few weeks.” She glanced at the room of scientists. “So long as nobody knows this place exists, that should be easy. Still be on watch, though. Can’t be careless about this.”

“Now might be a good time to mention this…” Starbeat placed her Beat sensor on the table. “I am getting the highest Beat readings I have ever gotten in my entire life now. The ambient Beat in Equis Vitis has skyrocketed far beyond its regular value, and it was high to begin with. Something is going on with this universe.”

“Could it be that this universe uses the Beat in some way?” Corona asked.

“Possibly,” Starbeat said. “I cannot say for certain. I certainly have no way to use the Beat, or even understand what it does. I can tell you when it’s here, and it’s definitely here. A lot of it is.”

The Twilights smiled at her. “Well, what you’ve told us is still very helpful Starbeat. We know more, and that’s important.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping furiously. She blushed a deep red and rammed her head into the table, grunting. A few seconds passed, and the beeping stopped.

“…You okay?” Corona asked.

“I’m fine,” Starbeat said, lifting herself out of the Beat-stricken stupor. “Twilight, Twilight-X? You might want to go do those things you needed to do before I try to buy you chocolates or something.”

“You’re getting better at resisting it-“ the Twilight’s began.

“The positive reinforcement is not helping!” Starbeat moaned. “I am finding the way you two talk at the same time very attractive right now. Pleeeaaaase just get to what you need to do.”

The Twilights smiled awkwardly and then teleported away.

“Relief…” Starbeat said, laying down on the table and sighing.

“I wonder what it’s like to be you, sometimes,” Corona said.

The bracelet started beeping again. Starbeat started ramming her head into the table over and over again. The scientists quickly filed out of the room, concerned that the higher Beat levels may have been exacerbating Starbeat’s condition.

~~~

Twilight-X was not kidding when she said they could handle it. It had been scarcely an hour since the announcement for evacuation had gone out, and already ponies were forming lines and troops. Nopony had evacuated yet – they were waiting for the entirety of Ponyville to organize before moving anypony, so as to minimize panic. They had done all this with almost no help whatsoever.

That said, Twilight still brought a few friends over to help, even if it was less about helping and more about a certain novelty she wanted ponies to experience.

Flutterfree and Fluterfree-X were working on getting all the animals ready to evacuate. Naturally, the animals would come second after ponies, but that didn’t stop the Flutterfrees from preparing for the eventuality.

They had already been herding rabbits for about ten minutes when Flutterfree said it. “This is bizarre.”

“Try being a clone,” Flutterfree-X said. “I apparently didn’t exist a few hours ago. Nothing I experienced was real…”

“Oh, it was! It really happened, all of it! And all your friends are with you!”

“I guess so. Though the other universes weren’t copied…”

“But they’re still out there. We can share friends, Flutterfree,” Flutterfree said. “I don’t mind sharing.”

“Are you sure you don’t?” Flutterfree-X asked.

“Anypony we might want to ourselves was copied. Though you – we – I – Celestia, this is confusing… You know I’m not interested in anypony now.”

“Yeah,” Flutterfree-X said, getting more rabbits aware of the situation with some simple wing gestures and a soothing smile. “I guess I’m thinking more about what this means. If ponies and entire universes can just be copied… What if we’re eventually able to do that sort of thing with ease? How would we use it for good? Could it be used for good? Or just evil?”

“Going deep already?”

“I’m you and I’m existential, think about it.”

“I just did. Good point.”

“I just…”

“Want to figure out what everything means, if you’re actually making a difference, or if the multiverse is just too big for your kindness to even show up?”

“Yeah. That. What if our kindness does nothing?”

“I… Well I always tell myself that we’ll keep raising ourselves higher until we do do something. Or that I’ll be satisfied doing small things.”

“But that always seems lackluster.”

“It may have been okay before we started exploring, but now it’s not. There are horrors out there we can’t fix.”

“But we have to try.”

“Yeah. …It’s our curse to try and fix everything, isn’t it?”

“Not the worst curse I can think of.”

“Starbeat’s is worse.”

“It definitely is.”

After that, there was silence.

“Do we really have anything to talk about?” Flutterfree-X asked. “We’ve had the same experiences, we already let out our pent-up existential stress…”

“…And any ‘new’ ideas we have will just be the same ones the other is having offset by a few seconds.”

“I already know we’re pondering how things are going to work in the future with two of us.”

“And the answer is to make two teams.”

“And that Pinkie’s swapping habit will be a mess.”

“And that it’s just going to be confusing.”

Flutterfree-X shook her head, guiding a bear to a clearing filled with other bears. “I can only see this getting worse and worse with time… What if there are other identical versions of us out there that aren’t copies?”

“Nobody knows…” Flutterfree said, looking into the sky.

“It’s hard to talk about anything with yourself.”

“I think that might just be a thing we have.”

“And that will clearly go away once we’ve all gotten a couple weeks of different memories. But we’re just so close right now.”

“This isn’t even really a conversation, it’s just us saying what we’re both thinking, over and over.”

“And over.”

“And over.”

They blinked. “Idea, I take west side, you take east. Then we’ll talk about what happened!”

Flutterfree smiled. “That sounds like a great idea.”

~~~

Renee and Renee-X had already finished packing up Renee-X’s clothing line, which was exactly the same as what Renee had in her Boutique. They had gotten over the initial confusion a while ago, and were now sitting at a table, drinking tea.

They had already perfected the art of ‘talking’ without really saying anything. Renee would raise an eyebrow, Renee-X would chuckle softly and wave her hoof in the air, and then Renee would blink slowly and shake her head. The conversation would continue with Renee pulling her hat back slightly and narrowing her eyes, only for Renee-X to flutter her eyelashes, to which Renee reacted with an expression of disgust.

Sweetie Belle-X passed by them, blinked, then shook her head, deciding she wanted no part in this. “I’m going to line up for the evacuation. Please, only one of you show up.”

“Of course, dear,” Renee-X said. “Though I give no guarantees about which one of us it would be!”

Sweetie Belle rolled her eyes and trotted away. The moment she was out of sight the two Renees burst into jovial laughter.

“This is on the top ten weirdest days,” Renee said. “So surreal.”

“Think of what it’s like for me – oh wait! You are!” Both of them found this immensely humorous for some reason, perpetuating their laughter even further.

“Oh what ever shall we do? The absurdity of the situation worms its way under our hats and into our minds, deviously crafting ways to bring forth just one more chuckle, peep, or – dare I say – guffaw!”

“Guffaw!” Renee-X couldn’t stop herself from letting out a loud, rowdy, guffaw.

“Darling, how unladylike!” Renee said, chuckling.

“It’s just you and me and nothing else,” Renee-X said. “An opportunity to try on any sort of look with no issues! Laugh however you want!”

Renee opted to laugh like a deranged hyena that was gargling flubber while choking. The laugh stopped short, bringing on a stark silence to the two unicorns.

The silence was interrupted as they started laughing again.

“This…This should be what Pinkie is doing, not me,” Renee said. “Stars, I do not laugh this much!”

“You do today,” Renee-X observed. “I think we’re just cutting loose as it were. Pretty mild, considering, but still fun. I think.”

“I think as well, and I think that you’re thinking about what we could do with two of ourselves.”

“Pull a twin switcheroo gag. Later, of course, now is a bad time.”

“What about creating dresses twice as fast – wait, no, I don’t make dresses that much anymore.”

“Good cop bad cop on a reluctant politician?”

“Too cruel for the moment. Though file that away for future ideas. Er…”

“Hrm…”

“You know, you think you’d be able to figure out what to do with yourself if there were two of you easily.”

“Yeah. But I – we – or something – are drawing a blank. Huh.”

~~~

Nova-X and Nova touched horns, attempting to create a magical feedback loop in their magical energies and utterly destroy the second law of thermodynamics with their impressive mastery over all things arcane.

Instead, they made an explosion between themselves.

“Seventeenth time’s the charm!” Nova called.

“You bet it is!” Nova-X said. They tried again – and exploded again.

“Eighteen?”

“We’ll never know unless we try!”

It took until attempt thirty-eight before the feedback loop stopped perpetuating itself.

Nova blew on her horn. “Okay, X-me, we need to try some other combo spell that could only be conjured with two nearly identical minds.”

“One that does not involve the mind-reading echo chamber.”

“Clearly not, that’d just be an utter disaster for everypony involved.”

“Oooh! I know!”

“The infinite moonshot manticore mouthdive!”

“Oh, I could get Trixie! …Actually, bad idea, she’d try to take over.”

“But we can invite the Trixies later! For now, we need to summon a manticore from nothing.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Psh, both of us can do it if we work together! I take left side you take the right.”

The two of them began meshing atoms together from the air into the shape of a manticore, complete with yellow fur and red mane. Ten minutes later, they were finished and ecstatic.

Then they realized they hadn’t sewn the two halves together and the fleshy mass spilled into two piles.

“Ech,” Nova said, taking a few steps back. “That was a really bad idea.”

“We even got the skeletal structure wrong,” Nova-X said.

“I don’t think that’s a spleen…”

“We suck at this.”

“Clearly.”

“New plan! I shoot lasers, you catch all of them, then we measure how much power we’ve accumulated!”

“By vaporizing the fleshy mass?”

“What else!?” They did as they planned – Nova-X created a bunch of magic lasers and Nova caught them all with pinpoint precision, gathering every last little bit into a single point of energy and then unleashing it on the fleshy mass that was supposed to be a manticore.

“Can we do something with time dilation?” Nova-X asked.

“We shouldn’t but we’re going to anyway because when else are we going to get this opportunity?”

“Next week.”

“Shoosh, you’re not supposed to be cleverer than me.”

“Awwww, but I want to be!”

“No, I want to be!”

Nova-X tapped a nonexistent watch on her leg. “We need to do time dilation stuff.”

“Right. You, in the future, blast energy back to me- WOAHOH I guess you did that.”

“Oh, I did. I should start now.” She lit her horn and sent some magical energy a few seconds into the past. “There we go.”

“Kinda scary how we can just do that, huh?”

“I wonder if we can convince Twilight to let us use the map to see if this universe had a past…”

“While I’m one hundred percent convinced that would be amazing, we don’t want to destroy time again.”

“Yeah. Maybe we ask after we finish this evacuation. Send the magic to my future now.”

“On it.” Soon, the two of them had a closed time loop of magic flow from one to the other.

“…What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Huh, something in a few seconds is going to interrupt the flow.”

“It is?”

“Aaaand you just lost your focus, there it goes.”

“Oh. Right.” The two unicorns chuckled.

“Why are we so eccentric?” Nova asked nopony in particular.

“I have no idea, I just know that it’s fun. I’m sure we’ll calm down later and do some more calm, rational magic building.”

“Probably.”

~~~

Pinkie stared at Pinkie-X.

“Sooooo…” Pinkie said. “Lots of ka in the air today.”

“Yeah, there sure is a lot of the stuff buzzing around! Big things coming soon, this time only on Songs of the Spheres! Stay tuned for what will be for some the biggest shift of all, and for others just be very ominous. Or both! Probably both, let’s go with both.”

Pinkie nodded slowly. “I think they probably already know this isn’t going to end well.”

“Yeah… An entire universe that can just be wiped away with the push of a button.”

“Everything’s just been a bit too cheery for a while.”

Pinkie-X looked at Pinkie with pleading eyes. “Can’t we keep it cheery for a little longer? I’d… I’d like that.”

Pinkie chuckled softly and wiped her eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, we can do that. So! Pinkie-X, we can’t throw a party because that’d interrupt the evacuation, so what do we do?”

“There’s a mountain over there. Let’s mess with something and turn it entirely into ice cream.”

Pinkie whistled. “DISCORD! ICE CREAM MOUNTAIN, STAT!”

Discord-X appeared and snapped his fingers, turning the mountain into ice cream. “There you are, my adorable pink apocalypses.” He vanished in a puff of magic.

“Oooooh boy, he used the word,” Pinkie said. “Pinkie-X, calm, deep breaths-“

“I AM CALM!” Pinkie-X shouted. “I AM VERY STUPIDLY CALM who am I kidding I’m not calm…” She pulled Pinkie into a hug. “I’m scared.”

Pinkie took a breath. “I know you are. You know, we could probably…”

“Do you want to risk retribution?”

“If you want to.”

“I do and don’t! And I… “ She glanced at a point in empty space. “Look, we need to talk about this without them watching. I… I just can’t do it like this.”

Pinkie nodded, pulling a remote out of her mane and hitting the fast-forward button.

~~~

Twilight-X looked at Twilight, Renee, Flutterfree, Pinkie, and Nova, standing in front of the portal to Equis Vitis. Twilight-X smiled. “Thanks for your help, but they need you on the other side to receive the refugees now. We’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes to start moving.”

Renee nodded. “Of course, dear. Come on girls, we’ve got stuff to do!”

Pinkie bounced through the portal, her smile smaller than it normally was. Nova, Renee, and Flutterfree followed.

“I’ll catch up!” Twilight called after them. “I think I’ll stay behind for a bit, see how the evacuation starts off.”

Pinkie looked at Twilight and smiled. “Goodbye then! Have fun!”

“See you,” Twilight said, waving. She turned around, looking at the grinder room again. She could scarcely believe it wasn’t her castle. But there it was, the X on the grinder itself, telling her this world was just a copy. A perfect, beautiful, interesting copy, but a copy nonetheless.

She saw Twilight-X head out to the balcony. Twilight moved to follow – she wanted to have another conversation with herself. They’d started to diverge more and more over the last few hours, and now Twilight felt as if she were finally talking to somepony who wasn’t her, and that felt good. It felt like there was a new friend to make, a new pony to learn about. It was a nice feeling.

Twilight took a step through the doorway that led to the balcony – and then she was somewhere else.

She was in a library. It was night time, and the shelves were lit with soft candles. The books came in all colors, shapes, and sizes. There was a single window in front of her, showing the brilliant sight of a night in a universe far from her own. She saw stars moving out there, shifting like they were part of some extremely distant fabric. Their colors shifted between pink, purple, and blue, filling her with a strange feeling of calmness.

“Do you like it? Not the most spectacular night sky I’ve seen, but one of the more soothing.”

Twilight turned around to see me. My appearance was by no means something special – I was a purple alicorn, much like herself, with a significantly more traditional manestyle. I had no metallic ears, I had no uneven coat, and my eyes were much older than hers. I was currently sitting at a desk, writing in a book. I finished my sentence, closed the tome, and looked at Twilight with a calm expression.

She looked down at the one feature besides my gaze that differentiated me from all the other Twilights in the multiverse – the eye affixed to my chest. It was a peculiar artifact, made mostly of a smooth white stone outlined in jarring, black metal. The pupil was a single slit, and several prongs that may have been confused for eyelashes could be seen penetrating into my body.

“Who are you?” Twilight asked.

“I am Twilence,” I said, speaking the truth.

“Why am I here?”

“I wanted to talk to you for a moment, here, in my own personal corner of L-space,” I said. “So I inserted you into this place temporarily. After we are done you will be returned to universe-X as if no time had passed.”

“Did you make the universe-“

“No, I have not activated the destruction of universe-X, nor will I ever be responsible for such a thing. When you return, it will be as you left it. Stable.”

“How did you...?”

I sighed. “As much as I would love to discuss the finer points of connection theory with you, Twilight, it would not be right. I’m meeting you far too early as it is, but I convinced myself that I could make an exception.”

Twilight nodded, sitting down. “I think I understand. You’ve been watching me, haven’t you?”

“For longer than you realize. My story – my song - is closely intertwined with your own, believe it or not.”

“Your song?”

I let myself shake my head and smile – so young. “We all have a song. Songs like yours and mine ring out across the fabric of existence, while others just make a little peep amongst the waves. But everyone has one.”

“…These Songs actually mean something, don’t they? What?”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“Am I allowed to ask any questions here?” Twilight said, frustrated.

“You can ask as many as you want. I wouldn’t expect answers though.”

“Then why am I here?”

I looked down at the closed book on my desk and shook my head. “Because I am a flawed pony, Twilight. And I let myself just bring you here. I wanted to tell you some things, show you some things, but now I’m having second thoughts…” I bit my lip.

Twilight smiled slightly. “You’re still me, aren’t you?”

I nodded. “We are very alike, in many ways. My awakening to the multiverse was just… much ruder. More sudden. In a couple weeks I knew more than you know now. It changed me drastically, suddenly, and not completely for the better. I’m very glad you’ve had years to accommodate.”

“I’m so sorry…”

“You have nothing to apologize for. You had nothing to do with that. I may be partially to blame for exactly how your side of things have turned out, but even then only slightly.”

“…Now I’m really curious.

“And I can’t tell you anything.”

“…What can you tell me?”

I frowned. Then I levitated a book off a nearby shelf. “I can show you something…”

There was a flash of purple magic, and the two of us were somewhere else – or, what we felt was somewhere else. In reality, it was just an illusion, a memory. Twilight saw me, a version of Rarity, a young human woman I knew as Creek, and the woman we both knew as Vriska. All of us were laughing and having fun as we ran away from a gigantic monster made entirely of candy, unable to take the thing seriously.

“…You were the Twilight who told Vriska about me,” Twilight said.

“Sharp mind,” I confirmed. “We were a lot like you. We had no real ‘home’ universe though, nothing to build off of. We had our fun anyway. But… It came to an end one day.” Images flashed by. Rarity waving goodbye. Creek lying dead in a pile of stuffing. Vriska vanishing from a jail cell. Myself, sitting alone at a desk, scribbling in a book.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“I guess I just wanted somepony to tell the story to that wasn’t… Them.” I glanced at the eye on my chest and shook my head.

“…I may not know who they are, but there’s more to it than that. You’re going to show me what happens to my group, aren’t you?”

I smiled. “I’m not completely certain what happens to your group. My sight, while perhaps the strongest sight of all, knows the future waters are murky. But I can show you something of the future.” I cast another spell. There was a city neither of us had ever been to, because it did not exist. It was beautiful – architecture that was impossible, but got around this by existing within numerous dimensions at the same time. Ships flew to and from the docks. Magical and technological lights flashed from all angles.

Then there were the people. Ponies, humans, dragons, robots, plant-creatures, and hundreds of other beings Twilight had never seen before.

“Is this… what we build?”

“One of many,” is all I say.

I shifted the view to the center of a large building. There was a tremendous piece of stained glass on the central window, depicting several individuals. There were many Twilight didn’t recognize – a muscular man with a pink and blue spirit behind him, a dark blue humanoid in a white top hat, and a few others - but there were many she did recognize. Herself, Nova, Flutterfree, Renee, Pinkie, Corona, Toph, Vriska, Daniel, O’Neill… Immortalized in a window that put the halls of Canterlot to shame.

Twilight’s eyes started watering. “We… We do this?”

“You become something much more than you can comprehend in your present state. My Song was a song of understanding – your song will be a song of growth. A Song of Songs. The Song of the Spheres.”

“The Spheres?”

I spread my wings and extended our field of view. We left the illusory universe, condensing it into a spherical bubble. Other universes could be seen. I zoomed out quickly. Billions upon Billions of tiny spheres coalesced together, until they were little more than points of light in nothingness. Further still we retreated, until the universes began to take a roughly spherical shape. We could see two other large spherical clusters of universes, and a significantly smaller sphere in another direction. Dots spread out loosely between the Spheres and around them, but they always stayed near the larger structures.

“It’s… Finite,” Twilight realized.

“Yes.”

“Mind-bogglingly big, but finite.”

I chuckled. “Yes.” I gestured toward the shape of the entire multiverse that stood before us. “That song? That song that has driven this existence even when time itself cannot? That song – that song is the song you are a part of. A very big part, Charter-Princess.”

Twilight beamed. “I… I don’t know what to say, Twilence. Thank you? I…”

“You don’t need to say anything. I just need you to know how much I, and so many others, appreciate what you’ve started here.”

“I… I won’t let you all down! I’ll use this knowledge to give myself determination, to ensure I do what you’ve shown me! That’s probably why you showed me, huh? To ensure that I believe I can do it.”

I didn’t respond to this.

“…Is it time for me to return to Universe-X?”

“Yes, it is. Say hello to Twilight-X for me, would you? She’s you you know.”

“Not anymore. We’re differentiating a lot, and I’m sure this experience will just solidify that!”

I nodded. “Yes. Yes it will…”

“Will we meet again?”

“This will not be the last time Twilence and the Charter-Princess cross paths, I assure you. Our songs are intertwined. There will come a time in this progress that I will come into the open. I await that day with extreme longing. I’m so tired, Twilight. Tired of having to watch and wait.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“I have no doubt you will. Goodbye, Charter-Princess.”

“Goodbye Twilence!”

And then I sent her to Universe-X. I returned to my desk and opened my book to write in it once more.

I sighed, deeply. That noise had become a habit of mine. A habit I had hoped to lessen by talking to Twilight, but it appeared not.

I once again waited.

~~~

Twilight stumbled into the balcony railing. “Ow…”

Twilight-X blinked. “…Are you okay?”

“The strangest thing just happened. I was whisked away to a faraway universe to talk with a version of myself who called herself Twilence. She had… a lot to say.” Twilight rubbed her head. “I’m not sure I understood all of it, frankly. She was acting a lot like Pinkie does when she knows something she just can’t tell. But… I got a glimpse of the future.”

Twilight-X’s jaw dropped. “No way.”

“Yes way! We’re going to do amazing things that affect the entire multiverse! We are small for now, but we won’t be forever. Not even close to forever. The future is bright, and I have newfound confidence in… well everything!” She hugged Twilight-X for a few seconds. She pulled back, grinning. “Everything feels good, even if I don’t understand everything.”

Twilight-X stared at her. “You have to tell me everything.”

“After we get this evacuation done. It’ll take too long otherwise. You may not have seen me leave, but I was there for a while, and there’s a lot to unpack. Just know the future is bright, and we do make a difference. I think Flutterfree will like to hear that.”

“Yeah, she has been a little overwhelmed by it all as of late. She takes care of herself pretty well, but you know how she is. Still a Fluttershy at times.”

“I wonder what Pinkie thinks of what happened, or if she already knows about it. You know, I got the distinct impression that Twilence might have known more than Pinkie. She…” Twilight shook her head. “Yeah, no time to talk about that now, we’ve got to evacuate the universe.”

“Evacuating an entire universe… Ponyville today…”

“…tomorrow, the world!”

“Or the next city,” Twilight-X shrugged. “This is going to be a slow process. Weird, considering how well it went. We started, what, only a handful of hours ago?”

“Well, it was before noon, and it’s evening now, so… Yeah, handful of hours.”

Twilight-X glanced out at the skyline. The sun probably should have set already, but Celestia-X was drawing it out so the evacuation could have light for the next hour. It was a truly beautiful array of colors. She could see everything from red to blue in the sky, and it was a beautiful sight.

She didn’t care if she was part of some clone universe, this place was her home, and it was beautiful.

“Evening…” Twilight said.

“Hrm?”

“I like the word,” Twilight reiterated. “Evening. It means a lot too. Here I am, standing at the Eve of something great, and brilliant, about to close a chapter on my life. It’s also related to Twilight and… Great Celestia, I think I’ve found my name.”

“Evening?”

“Evening, Eve for short. Probably should come up with a last name to go with it… Corona didn’t though, so...” Twilight put a hoof to her chin.

“You sure?” Twilight-X said. “Because, you know, I might want to be Evening.”

“Oh. Riiiight, we’re the same. Hrmmm…” Twilight rubbed the back of her head. “We can flip a coin later, winner gets to keep it.”

“If we decide we want to.”

“True. I guess we might think of something else. But it just seems… perfect, you know?”

Twilight-X smirked. “Yeah. That’s why I want it. It’s the perfect name for us. And we can’t just both have it since we’re already so similar.”

“The point is to differentiate.”

The two sat in silence for a moment, staring at the elongated sunset.

“I worry, sometimes,” Twilight-X said, suddenly. “Remember the Spectacularium?”

“Oh, that thing. It was… Yeah, I remember.”

“It told everyone something about the future. It told Renee she would find love, it told Pinkie it couldn’t answer her question, and it told us…”

“We wouldn’t outlive our friends.”

“Yeah. I always thought we’d get to make them alicorns, or something, eventually. But… I’ve been remembering…”

“Some things the Pinkie Sage said. About all prophecies being ruined by dimensional travel.”

“Yeah. That. What if the Spectacularium was unable to take everything into account? I… I don’t want to be alone.”

Twilight sighed. “I know what you mean. We could only take so much comfort from a prophecy. They could easily mean one thing or another…”

“And be vague. It might mean some friends or only certain friends.”

“And whatever it actually means we probably won’t figure out until it’s obvious.”

“Yep.”

“Why’d we ask the Spectacularium that question again?”

“Uh… Don’t think we did. I think it just saw what we wanted to know the most.”

“Oh. Right. …What ever happened to the Spectacularium after Armonia was sealed away, anyway?”

“Why you looking at me? I have no idea! You’re the one who talked to the mysterious ‘Twilence’ and has extra information!”

Twilight looked down at Ponyville. “Yeah.” She took in a deep breath. “This is a beautiful sight. Even without the stuff Twilence showed me, Ponyville… Ponyville is amazing.”

“It’s changed so much.”

“I hope this beautiful world never gets destroyed, for any reason. We’ll protect it, any way we can.”

“You’ve got that right!”

The Twilights hoofbumped and then embraced. Then they glanced into the castle. Next to the open portal to Equis Vitis was a clock, telling them it was a minute until the actual evacuation started.

“Time to round them up,” Twilight-X said, spreading her wings. “Coming?”

“I think I’ll return to my-“

Then it happened. The moment that had been building up since the time the first portal was opened. The entire fabric of reality shook. Twilight and Twilight-X fell to the ground, only to find that the ground felt off somehow. It shook again, sending shivers into their very souls.

Outside, they could see it. They could see the sky start to peel away – the beautiful colors destroyed like they were nothing but paper. The Sun began to lose chunks of itself. Evaporating. Dimming. The landscape outside began to rupture with tumors. Mountains exploded – but didn’t unleash any substance, just dissipated into this shards of matter that might as well have been paper, paper that quickly disintegrated into nothingness.

They would have been dead right then and there, for the framework was prepared to rewrite the entire universe in a single second. Everything would have been paper-like shreds then nothing. But Starbeat had placed a spell – and that spell was triggered. A loud ticking sound that the Twilights recognized from their previous adventures across time came from the throne room, where the Map was. A spherical magical shell spread out around the castle, altering time, attempting to freeze it in place as it let out a swift tick, tick, tick sound.

It didn’t stop time – but it would have been bad for them if it did, for then they wouldn’t have been able to move. As it was, they could. And they had a slight edge on the speed of the framework, because the open portal was bleeding a regular timestream into the universe.

They moved like molasses, pushing their legs and wings as hard as they could. Every handful of seconds, one of their hooves would hit the ground, and a low thud would ring through their bodies. The ground beneath them would shake, flaking a bit of substance off as they moved, but they themselves remained stable.

As time went on, the motion of the alicorns only slowed. Yet, their minds – their minds ran in overdrive. They tapped into some force beyond themselves, something that knew their very lives were hanging in the balance. There was no way their brains could have perceived time at this slow of a rate, but they did anyway. It was an impossible event, but such things happened at times of this much importance.

The world fell out from behind them, revealing the structure of the framework. A metal room, much like the Nexus. It was only the size of a city block, but it had contained the entire universe. A few lights slowly started to blink as the machinery realized there was an open portal, time dilation, and remnant of the universe that had been wiped. A beam of green energy shot forth as time approached full stop…

~~~

Twilight – and Twilight alone – fell through the portal. She turned to cheer on her counterpart, maybe pull her out with magic – but the portal snapped shut in her face. Twilight got to catch a glimpse of herself screaming in agony.

Renee, Nova, Flutterfree, and Pinkie ran into the room. “What happened?” Renee shouted. “We heard a scream!”

Twilight took her dimensional device out and dialed universe-X. “The universe was destroyed, that’s what happened!” She said through tears. She opened the portal, revealing the Nexus-like machine, trapped in a bubble of frozen time, unable to reconstitute a new universe.

“Nova, time dilation bubble, now,” Twilight ordered. Nova did as asked, surrounding them all in a field of normal time so they could walk in the frozen world on the other side. The ponies that weren’t Twilight felt dwarfed by the tremendous room, not quite realizing that it had somehow contained the space of an entire cosmic universe within it only a few seconds ago.

“Find a way to reverse it…” Twilight muttered to herself. “There has to be a buffer in here somewhere…”

Pinkie was suddenly in front of Twilight. “Twilight, stop.”

“Get out of my way Pinkie!”

Everypony turned to stare at Twilight with surprised expressions. Pinkie didn’t take the outburst personally, she just moved to the side obediently.

Twilight could barely see through her tears. She teleported herself to the central pillar in the room, a structure three times larger than herself. It was covered in white metal strips that snaked in intricate patterns, patterns that looked like they were supposed to move – but naturally couldn’t in the plane of frozen time.

Then Twilight saw it. The portal that had connected to this universe and forced the reboot. A portal through which two individuals she recognized stepped out.

“RICK!” Twilight bellowed, teleporting right in front of his face, screaming with the loudest Royal Canterlot Voice she could muster. “WHAT DID YOU DO!?”

Morty held up his hands. “T-Twilight? W-W-What!?”

Rick was unimpressed. “Look, princess, I just did what I was supposed to do. Connect to this place, duplicate a universe. Or that’s what was supposed to happen. What the fuck did you do to this place? You froze it?”

Something snapped within Twilight. She flared her wings, pulled back her head, and lit her horn with a dark, black power.

Worry crossed Rick’s face for a moment. He reached for something in his labcoat.

Before the universe could see if Rick could have deflected unfiltered dark magic from the Charter-Princess, Pinkie appeared between them. “TWILIGHT! STOP!”

“HE KILLED AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE, PINKIE! A UNIVERSE OF US! THERE WAS A YOU OVER THERE! THERE WAS… THERE WAS!”

Pinkie hugged Twilight, crying herself. “I know. She knew. This was always going to happen. That world was not meant to stay.”

“That’s... That’s stupid!” Twilight shouted, dropping the Royal Canterlot voice. “I was told that we were going to do great things! I was told the multiverse would care! This isn’t great at all! This is horrible! We failed! We should have moved faster… We should have dropped all organization…We should have… We…”

Flutterfree grabbed Twilight by the shoulders and Stared at her, shocking Twilight into a calm state. “Twilight, we stopped this universe from ever creating or destroying another universe again.”

“I could fix this,” Rick muttered.

Pinkie drew a scythe out of nowhere. “Rick, I swear to all the Tower, that if you so much as try to activate this universe again, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

Rick took one look at Pinkie and decided she wasn’t bluffing. “All right Morty, looks like vacation in twin-town is cancelled. Let’s gooo-“

“Really Rick?” Morty said, throwing his hands out. “We just destroyed a universe! I didn’t know that was going to happen! How is – wait, nevermind, I know how it’s okay. Because you’re fucked up in the head!”

“Your point?”

“Morty… Take your grandfather and go,” Renee said. She glanced at Twilight.

“Morty doesn’t take me-“

“Rick Sanchez,” Renee stated in an official tone. “You are no longer welcome in the dimensional lands under the protection, alliance, or purview of Equis Vitis and its allies. Do I make myself absolutely, one hundred percent clear?”

Rick narrowed his eyes. “You don’t know who you’re declaring war on, unicorn.”

“I’m not declaring war. I’m just making sure you know never to come back. Do you understand!?”

“He understands,” Morty said. “For what it’s worth, I apologize, though I know that’s stupid and probably just makes you hate me more. I, uh…” He sighed. “Look, it’s rough out there. You girls… You take care of each other.”

“We always do,” Flutterfree said. “…For what it’s worth, thank you, Morty.”

Rick mumbled something to himself.

Nova glared at him. “Get the hell out of here.”

“I’m going, I’m going…” Rick said, opening one of his green swirling portals.

Morty looked to them. “I’m glad you survived Majora.”

“Thanks,” Pinkie said, forcing a smile. “You’re a good kid, Morty.”

“I try,” Morty said, following his grumbling grandfather through the portal.

It closed; leaving the five ponies alone in the room that was a universe.

Twilight wiped her eyes. “Th-thank you. Thank you all. I…”

“It’s okay,” Flutterfree said, wiping her own eyes. “We’re always going to be here for you, Twilight. We didn’t vanish with that universe.”

“…I think… I don’t think I’m Twilight anymore. I…” she stood up tall, glaring at the pillar in the center of the room. “I am Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle. Or… Eve.”

“…Was that what she chose?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yeah. Yeah it was.” Eve stood up and wiped her eyes. “…Let’s go home.”

Pinkie did the honors of opening the portal. The five of them stepped through, once again in the grinder room.

The five ponies slowly trotted out of the room, heading for the Map – where they would no doubt talk for hours about what had just happened.

Eve lingered in the grinder room for a few seconds.

She glanced at the grinder itself. Smooth, clean, and working as it should.

She glanced at the bottom of her left hoof. It was dirty, worn, and now slightly wet from all the stress of the day. But it was still visible.

An ‘X’ made in permanent black marker.

She looked at the grinder again, just to make sure it didn’t have an X on it.

Eve gulped. She cast a spell on her hoof, removing the X forever.

Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle trotted after her… friends, tears rolling down her cheeks.

035 - Sinkhole

Pinkie Pie, Flutterfree, and Nova sat at a table in Iroh’s tea shop, their expressions dominated by the saggy lines of boredom.

“Your tea is getting cold!” Iroh called over to them from the counter.

“I know!” Pinkie called back.

“…I didn’t,” Nova admitted, glancing at her tea. She heated it up with her magic and took another sip.

“Why weren’t you drinking it then?” Flutterfree asked Pinkie.

Pinkie shrugged. “Because… Uh… You know, I don’t really have a reason. How unlike me!”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes, glancing at her own tea in disappointment.

“Let me get that for you,” Nova said, heating Flutterfree’s drink. The unicorn turned to Pinkie, but the earth pony had already downed her entire lukewarm cup.

“…Pinkie.”

“What? I just wanted to have some fun! Get you before you could get me! And… Yeah.”

Flutterfree blinked. “...Okay, I think we have a problem if we’re resorting to this to enjoy ourselves. We should do something.”

“But we can’t!” Pinkie blurted. “Renee and Eve both can’t make it, and a three mare band just isn’t right!”

“I could mirror myself, make it four,” Nova suggested.

“Nova, that doesn’t count!”

“Pinkie’s right,” Flutterfree said. “We go on adventures together, as a team. As friends.”

“Eve doesn’t much anymore,” Nova reminded her.

“Yes… And we aren’t as close to her as we could be because of it. It’s… sad, but there’s not much we can do about it, given who she is.”

“Which is why we need to keep the group together!” Pinkie cheered. “Don’t want Renee to feel left out!”

“She might have to leave eventually, though,” Nova said. “She’s been taking on more responsibilities – diplomacy, planning, politics, lawmaking. I can see her becoming too attached to that. It’s the new ‘high society’ for her.”

Pinkie frowned. “Yeah… But there’s always a chance that doesn’t happen, and she stays with us forever!”

“She dreams big, Pinkie. Too big. She can’t resist.”

Flutterfree nodded slowly. “Yes. She was really excited when O’Neill asked her to be the diplomat this time… She likes it. It might not demand too much of her time, but you never know.”

Nova blinked. “Do… the three of us have any reason to stop adventuring like this? Any obligations?”

There was silence around the table as the three ponies thought about the question.

“No, I don’t think so,” Nova answered her own question. “Not me at least. I don’t have a job, I have little patience for whatever it is the politicians keep doing, and I really don’t see myself settling down.”

Pinkie grinned. “Same! Do you have any idea how restrained you have to be in those meetings? It’s just impossible to speak in boring talk all the time. I’m much better equipped to make new friends for everypony!”

Flutterfree smiled. “You two really are perfect for this life, aren’t you?”

Pinkie shrugged. “It’s me we’re talking about, of course I am.”

“What about you?” Nova asked.

Flutterfree glanced out a window at the halls of the Hub. “I don’t know, really. I don’t see myself going where Renee and Eve are, too much to deal with. I might settle down, though at the moment I can’t think of a place or pony I’d really consider doing that for. I… I really do think I’m making these worlds a better place, with what I’m doing. It’s hard sometimes, but I don’t think I’m going anywhere.”

“We probably need somepony without a commanding disposition on the team,” Nova commented. “Pinkie and I aren’t exactly… subtle.”

“Or calm!” Pinkie chuckled.

“Oh, Pinkie,” Flutterfree said, “don’t sell yourself short. I’ve seen you handle things with as much grace and dignity as any Rarity could have.”

“Yeah. You just don’t like to,” Nova added.

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so we’re going full-on psychoanalysis today, are we?”

“I do have a point.”

“Eh. You do.”

Flutterfree furrowed her brow. “…Do you think maybe, if ponies leave the group, we can invite others to come?”

Pinkie nodded. “Of course we could! But AJ and Dashie still aren’t available.”

“What about Sweetie?” Nova asked.

“Has her own group to deal with.”

“…Corona?” Flutterfree suggested.

Pinkie put a hoof to her chin. “Maybe after she finishes her studies in Equis Cosmic?”

“But then Sombra would know everything,” Nova spat, expression souring.

“I’m sure we could convince Corona to-“

“Pinkie… Let’s just not, okay?” Nova said.

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “Nova, Corona’s still a good pony, and Sombra’s not exactly evil-“

“Sombra’s a problem and you know it. I’ve been watching what she does closely. She’s got dirt on everyone. I’ve found dozens of instances of her using blackmail against important people. She even manipulated Luna once!”

Flutterfree pursed her lips. “That is true…”

“What does she do with the stuff she gets?” Pinkie asked.

“Ask for favors, get herself into more locations. I’m telling you, she’s going to control us all!” Nova raised a hoof.

“…Ooooor maybe she’s just looking for secrets.”

“Some things are supposed to stay secret!”

Flutterfree put a hoof to her chin. “She hasn’t told the world what really happened with Majora yet. Actually… Nova, you follow her actions closely. What has she revealed?”

“…Mostly secret addresses and classified information on the nature of other universes and a few scientific studies.”

“I think that may help us be more open with each other,” Flutterfree said. “We can’t really hide addresses from each other, so why try?”

“Just because it may have an unintended good side effect doesn’t mean she should do it!”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep, Nova’s right this time. Just because the explosion sends cake all around the planet doesn’t mean you should destroy the delectable ice cream mountain!”

Flutterfree pondered this. “Good point. There are secrets we want to keep though, and we never know when me might run into a universe where there’s a secret weapon to blow up everything.”

“Still no Corona, can’t trust her,” Nova asserted.

“Nova…”

Nova held up her hoof. “I mean we can’t trust her presence. She won’t betray us, but she’s in Sombra’s web.”

“Yeah…” Pinkie said, admitting defeat. “Ooh! What about Alushy!?”

“EVEN WORSE!” Nova blurted.

The three of them stared at each other for a moment and devolved into giggles.

Flutterfree looked around at the patrons of the tea shop. “Maybe we should consider a non-pony. Toph already has her team, but there are others. Sparky.”

“Studying, and we don’t want Eve to think we’ve just replaced her,” Nova pointed out.

“Eve won’t think that!”

Pinkie nodded in confirmation.

“Still, it won’t look good,” Nova asserted.

“Mlinx?” Pinkie suggested.

“That’s a great idea,” Flutterfree said. “…I have no idea where he is though.”

“He may not be a fan of us, either,” Nova added.

“We could at least ask,” Flutterfree continued.

Pinkie grinned. “Yeah! Mlinx! Well, we’ll have to talk with Renee and Eve about getting new members…”

“Maybe Eve has an idea,” Nova said. “After all, she is working on that project with Cosmo right now. Maybe something will come out of it.”

“Sh sh sh!” Pinkie hissed. “Top secret stuff!”

“Well now that you’ve made a big deal out of it, everyone knows we were talking about top secret stuff,” Nova muttered.

“Oh. Oopsie.”

“It’s okay. Not like we’ve actually given any important information away.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Maybe we should talk about what somepony else is doing instead. Or find something to do ourselves.”

“And now we’re back to not knowing what to do with ourselves…” Nova muttered.

Pinkie looked to the entrance to the tea shop suddenly.

“What is it?” Nova asked.

“Wait for it…” Pinkie said, holding up a hoof.

They stared at the door for several seconds. Nothing happened.

Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “I was sure w-“

The doors flew open, revealing Trixie and Discord. “HEY! EVERYPONY!” Trixie called. “Discord here has just created an arcade of chaos, open one-day-only! COME AND REVEL IN THE MAGIC!”

Pinkie grinned. “Let’s see what you’ve got! I bet you won’t hold a candle to the Pinkie Emporium!”

Discord grinned. “I bet otherwise.” He snapped his fingers and created an interdimensional portal that led to the Pinkie Emporium. He tossed a candle into it.

“Just take us to the arcade already,” Pinkie blurted.

“Right this way, people of the Hub,” Discord said, walking out with an exaggerated bow.

Flutterfree got out of her chair with a smile on her face. “Guess we know what we’re doing now.”

“Yeah! And do you know what the best part is?” Pinkie asked.

“What is it?” Nova questioned.

“I don’t have to worry about anything for once. We’re free to just enjoy ourselves today!”

~~~

The absurdly over-the-top and oversized Enterprise flew through hyperspace, the diamond-like colors of the universe absolutely delighting Renee’s eyes.

“This is perhaps one of the most fabulous sights I’ve ever seen out of these spaceship windows!” she declared. “I can almost see the crystal structure within the patterns… I know it doesn’t actually exist, but even my eyes are fooled!”

O’Neill shrugged. “Meanwhile, my brain just has the word ‘shiny’ playing on repeat.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “I am, admittedly, unsure if I should take that at face value or not.”

O’Neill just smirked, nodding to himself.

Renee let out a mildly indignant huff, turning to a sheaf of papers in front of her. She flipped through them with her magic.

“Studying for a test?”

“Reading up on the beings we are going to see,” Renee said. “It’s called preparing yourself.”

“That’s what mission briefings are for.”

“First of all, those who create mission briefings often forget to mention important details out of oversight. Secondly, didn’t you say mission briefings were for ‘letting everyone know we know less than we’d like without actually saying it out loud’.”

“I said that?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t give myself enough credit.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Of course you don’t, General.” She flipped a page. “What do you think of these aliens, by the way?”

“That we know less than we’d like.”

Renee stifled a laugh. “Really, General, I can only get so much from briefings and these papers.”

“I only encountered the crystal women once, and I can best describe the experience as what a parrot must feel.”

“Ooh, that sounds dreadful.”

“I’m saying things. They understand these things. And then they go ‘aw, isn’t the little monkey adorable!’ …Though it was less ‘adorable’ and more ‘stupid’. I don’t think they believed anything I said as more than fantasies of an ‘inferior species’.”

“One would think your ship would be enough evidence to the contrary.”

“They thought we stole it. After we got to that point some things were said that I’m sure both sides regret and we started shooting at each other.”

Renee flipped through the pages of the report. “I know that.”

“And now you’re here to use your intricate knowledge of appearance, gems, and diplomacy to stop them from shooting at us this time.”

Renee adjusted her hat. “I’ll try my best, darling. How long until we arrive?”

O’Neill glanced at the screen. “Handful of seconds.”

“You know, you should really have an alert for tha-“

“Fifteen seconds until arrival,” the computer declared over the intercom.

Renee took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Nevermind then.”

O’Neill sat up straight in his chair so he would look presentable. Renee put her papers on a nearby workstation and stood up, taking a position to O’Neill’s right.

The Enterprise dropped out of hyperspace, finding itself in an area of space with no particularly close stars or planets. There was exactly what they expected to find – a green spaceship in the shape of a hand, significantly smaller than the Enterprise itself.

“Opening a channel,” the communications officer declared. “Open.”

Renee cleared her throat. “I am Renee Belle of the universe Equis Vitis. I have been asked by my good friends here – the Tau’ri – to intercede with you on their behalf. I assure you, whatever violent or regretful things they may have said, they are willing to make up for – within reasonable bounds, of course. All I wish from you, at this juncture, is a willingness to listen to that which I have to say.”

The hand ship sent a signal back, revealing a tall, green woman with a gemstone embedded in her left shoulder. Her body seemed oddly smooth, like it was artificially created rather than grown – and definitely inorganic.

“I am the Emerald of this ship.”

Renee bowed to Emerald as subserviently as she could. “Emerald, I thank you for holding your fire.”

“If you want to talk, I’m not going to waste power,” Emerald said. She spoke with a calculated, flat tone – but her eyes betrayed a mild disgust with the beings before her. Renee kept a close watch on the Gem’s face as she brought herself back up to all four hooves.

“Emerald, as I understand it, you and the Tau’ri were unable to maintain a dialogue for long. May I ask what you think that reason is?”

“They’re rude, disrespectful, and not to mention shouldn’t be out here among the stars in the first place.”

Renee shot O’Neill a look to shut him up before he started. “…Anything else? What about this ship?”

Emerald’s contempt and disdain vanished for a moment – replaced with momentary surprise that was quickly covered up in a stern expression that was more guarded than previously. “What about the ship?”

“Well, it is an impressive feat of engineering, and may be seen as a curiosity – or a threat.” She paused to let that sink in. “It is possible you had not seen anything quite like it before.”

Emerald chose her next words carefully, clearly having moved from ‘talking to a parrot’ to ‘this horse might have a brain in her somewhere’. “We were not able to explain every reading within the ship. The unknowns had little bearing on our retaliation, however.”

“Perhaps not, but it does lead me into something I’d like to offer.” Renee smiled brightly. “We are willing to tell you how we built some of this ship. Not all, you understand – state secrets and all that – but we have publicly available documents and schematics we can send to you if you’ll allow it.”

Renee heard a voice from off screen talk to Emerald. “Emerald, there’s no wa-“

Emerald held up a hand, silencing the other voice. “Send us these schematics.”

Renee nodded to the communications officer. With a press of the button, the bare-bones schematics and an abridged history of the ship’s construction was sent over. Renee used her horn to write a note, letting the officer know to send some scientific theory data as well.

Emerald looked at the schematics herself, intelligent eyes sweeping through the information. She put the paper down. There was the slightest hint of a smile on her face. “So, you really did build this. Something unheard of for your kind, but if you really are from another universe, then everything changes.”

“I thought you might think that.”

“What else are you willing to give us?”

“There are many things, including the secret to interdimensional travel, which we can consider giving you if you’re willing to cooperate with us in discussion in a more… formal meeting,” Renee said. “It won’t do for us to do this when we’re in the middle of a trap, after all.”

O’Neill sputtered. “What?”

Emerald ignored his outburst. “I have no authority to make such a decision myself. I will have to bring this up with the Diamond Authority. But I shall regardless. And as for the trap you are in, we will leave the ships hidden and dormant.”

“Unless the Diamonds tell you to, of course. In which case we will defend ourselves. Or just leave the universe.”

Emerald ordered somebody to send a message. Then she turned back to Renee. “It should take only a handful of minutes for a message of that significance to be recognized. Until then, I am curious. What is the basis of this interdimensional technology?”

Renee shrugged. “I am no scientist, Emerald – I do not know the inner workings of the devices. They punch a hole in reality and we arrive somewhere else entirely. Sometimes with ponies – like myself. Sometimes with humans. Sometimes with something completely different – such as yourself.”

“You have not encountered Gems before?”

Renee shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. We have certainly had our run in with unusual creatures over the years, but nothing quite as crystalline as yours.”

“What is your highest race?”

“I suspect we don’t have as strong of a hierarchy as you, but if I may define ‘highest’ as ‘most powerful’ on an esoteric level, the Ascended of Earth Tau’ri are spiritual beings whose will can shape entire nations. We have a few beings on that level in our alliance. We are aware of ‘higher’ beings, but they aren’t part of us.”

Emerald looked worried for a moment. She opened her mouth to ask another question – but then warning lights started blaring on both ships.

O’Neill and Emerald stood to attention at the exact same time. “REPORT!” they bellowed.

Renee only caught her side of the report. “Unusual interdimensional energies surging. It isn’t us sir, and it’s not them either. Coming from another plane.”

“Spin up the Spectral Tube!” O’Neill ordered. “Seal the connection from this side!”

Mauve’s voice rang out over the intercom. “General, we don’t have a spell for that specifically-“

“Code it Mauve! Now!”

Mauve went silent – presumably he was working frantically to code the Spectral Tube.

“What are you doing?” Emerald shouted at them.

“We are trying to seal away whatever this is!” Renee declared. “We-“

A hole ruptured in space-time, taking the shape of a portal – but it wasn’t like any portal they’d ever seen. This one was jagged around the edges, lined with a blood-red glow. Inside, there was only blackness – no stars.

The portal moved, opening itself like a gigantic maw, teeth many kilometers long. It moved to envelop the two ships.

Mauve finished coding – the Spectral Tube of the Enterprise lit up like a unicorn horn, except with every color of the rainbow. The energies attempted to force the jagged portal away.

The effort hardly even slowed the powerful portal. Both ships were engulfed by the portal, shoved into a universe of pure darkness.

It closed, leaving the ships alone.

Emerald and Renee stared at each other. Emerald glared, demanding an explanation without actually saying anything.

“Emerald, look within yourself. Do you really think we could have done this?” Renee said.

“…It’s possible.”

“Please, we’re just little fleshy beings. We may have some tricks, but… that wasn't one of them.”

Emerald nodded, saying nothing.

Renee allowed herself to calm down a bit - at least the Gems weren’t going to retaliate right away. Her response had been a gamble. She turned to O’Neill. “Now what?”

“Now we go yell at the engineers to get us out of here.” He pressed a button. “O’Neill to engineering! Can we get the dimensional drive active?”

“Negative, something’s wrong,” came the reply.

“Figures,” O’Neill muttered. “Well, Emerald, it looks like you’re stuck here with us until one of us can figure a way out of here.”

“It sure seems that way,” Emerald said.

“Right,” Renee said. “What we need to remember is that we’re in this together, whatever this is. What we should not be doing is shooting at each other.”

Emerald nodded slowly. “Agreed. Emerald out.” The feed cut.

Renee took in a deep breath. “Of all the worst things that could happen… I wouldn’t say this is the worst possible but this is pretty far down there!”

O’Neill sat down in his chair. “In other news, Tuesday.”

“Sadly, yes.”

~~~

Toph was not a fan of space stations. Rarely were they large enough to extend beyond her senses, and even when they were, she could always feel the nothing outside. It was different from air, from underground caves, even different from standing on the edge of an airship. Even then she could feel something out there, a vibration, a confirmation that stuff existed.

But on space stations there was nothing.

Not to mention people had made it abundantly clear that, in space, nobody can hear you scream. Why they felt the need to drive this factoid into her head was beyond her, she was sure people weren’t quite that cruel.

However, she had to be here, so she had to suck it up.

“Toph, you’re shivering,” Lieshy said.

“Am not,” Toph blurted.

Lady Rarity shook her head. She wore her mane in a different style now, and her spirid eyes were visible when she wasn’t wearing her helmet – like now. “You are. And you’re exciting the metal in the station. Much more and I think you’ll set off a structural integrity alarm. And we don’t want to deal with the bureaucracy that will entail.”

Toph found herself considering setting off an alarm so she wouldn’t have to be here anymore – but no, she had a job to do. They all did.

She steadied herself. “Right. Have we found anything yet?”

“We haven’t even left the port section,” Vivian commented.

“So what you’re telling me is we have nothing on Rose?”

“We know she’s here,” Lieshy said, holding up a pad. “She’s registered as on-station. Can’t tell you where, Cosmo isn’t all that concerned with knowing the location of every single pony in her empire.”

Toph furrowed her brow. “Is there an Arc-town on the station?”

“One of the largest not on a planet,” Lieshy answered. “Twenty percent of the population here are Arcei. Probably due to its proximity to the shipyard.”

“Then that’s where we’re going,” Toph said, marching down a random hallway. She stopped short. “…This isn’t the way, is it?”

“No,” Lieshy said. “The correct vector would be… in the elevator. We will have to become sardines.”

The four of them piled into the tiny, pill-shaped elevator of the station and descended into the station proper. Toph couldn’t see anything, and she had felt all of it earlier, so she gave no reaction. The other three, however, saw a spectacle. The station itself was one gigantic spherical room, filled with enough buildings to constitute a small city. Skyscraper spires rose up to the center, six of them connecting at a central hub building. Alongside each skyscraper were beautiful examples of curved architecture, giving the pearly buildings the appearance of being plants rising from the ground.

The elevator slid along the edge of the sphere until it found a location it liked, then it opened its doors. It looked like a dropoff if they were to just walk out, but the moment they left they found that what had been the ‘wall’ was now the floor, making it look like they were crawling out of a hole in the ground.

Toph grunted, coming to her feet. “Great, now my brain hurts as well. What else do these stations have to offer?”

“Ask and receive,” Lieshy said, gesturing toward a huge line of ponies and humans in labcoats, talking to each other in hushed tones.

“I smell secrets,” Toph commented.

“Not our problem,” Lady Rarity said. “Those are Cosmo’s scientists, they won’t be doing anything nefarious, especially this close under her watchful eye. We just need to find Rose. Lieshy?”

“This way,” Lieshy said, trotting to her left. “Should only be a block away.”

The four of them walked through the space-station city. Every section may have been lined with identically constructed buildings, but each area had its own character. They had arrived in a business sector, filled with serious individuals and people with places to be. They passed through a market sector, identified by all the extra tents and neon signs everywhere.

The Arc-town was unique because of all the runic designs scrawled on all the buildings. None of them were glowing with the magic of true runes, but the Arcei were trying. The Arcei themselves walked around without fear and worry in their eyes, highly contrasted from their way of life in Lai. However, they couldn’t be described as happy either. Some looked angry, some looked bored, while others just looked like they wanted some rest in their lives.

Toph was not surprised it was one of the angry ones who talked to them first. He was a deep red stallion who spoke with the most condescending voice imaginable.

“Welcome to our little slice of the pie, visitors! What ever can I help you with!?”

Lieshy stepped forth. “Pocket of blue, ill advised.”

“…What?”

“Precisely. We’ll show ourselves around, thank you.”

“…No, you need a guide, visitors.”

“You know who we are, don’t you?” Lady Rarity asked.

“I have never seen you in my life!”

“You’re bad at this,” Lieshy deadpanned. “If badness were goodness you would be the best liar ever.”

Vivian shook her head.

Lieshy sighed. “This is what I get for trying to mix up my analogies…”

“It’s an effort!” Vivian encouraged. “Don’t stop now.”

“The conga line of fluffy rodents,” Lieshy muttered.

Toph pointed at the stallion. “Okay, buddy, maybe you can help us. Tell us if you’ve seen Rose around.”

“No idea who that is.”

“There it is again!” Lieshy blurted. “If you want to lie convincingly, stop it with the emphasis on certain words. It calls attention to them, and your tone, breaking the case wide open! The art is one of misdirection, nuance, and technicalities.”

“…Why are you helping me?”

“I can’t stand cringe. Now, let’s see what you’ve learned. Where can we find Rose?”

“I dunno.”

“Good, you lost the inflection, and your tone did not give away any direction. Your gaze stayed fixed on me, which is a plus, though I saw you momentarily twitch to the left, so I now have only a hundred and eighty degrees of fun to search. Give me a peppermint.”

“I… don’t have any candy.”

“Through your reaction you are thinking of fleeing, and the direction you wish to flee is also to the left, so I can deduce much, much more from what you’ve just told me. Probably a place with a lot of Arcei – a meeting locale perhaps? Oh, that shrinks it down considerably. You might as well just tell me where it is!”

“Never!”

“And touchdown,” Lieshy said, turning away from the stallion. “Rose is in the large building over there. We’ll have to dig through a probable sea of Arcei to get there. Furthermore, we should hurry – the tumbleweeds are rolling.”

“The streets are emptier than they should be,” Vivian translated.

“Thank you,” Lieshy said.

“I could have gotten that one,” Toph said.

“You didn’t though,” Lady Rarity declared.

Toph threw a hand into the air and began to walk toward the building Lieshy indicated. The four of them marched in the tremendous automatic door, entering what presumably served as a town hall for the Arcei. It looked more like a giant hotel lobby than anything. It was packed with Arcei – though there were some humans and other races around, so they weren’t too out of place. They got a couple of odd looks but nothing too concerning.

Toph tapped her foot on the ground, getting a better feel for the room. “Too many Arcei around. Can’t pick her out from what I know.”

Lady Rarity glanced around with all four of her eyes, making full use of her senses. “I can’t make out anything either. She might have sensed us coming.”

“Unfortunately expected… We will have to research,” Lieshy asserted. “I suggest more interviews where I tie up the conversation in our favor.”

Lady Rarity gasped. “I… I see Eve.”

“The Charter?” Vivian blurted. “Where?”

Lady Rarity pointed. Sure enough, there she was, Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle, sitting in the middle of the hall, looking up at a large blank screen.

Toph led the group to Eve, confused. She placed herself in front of the Charter’s eyes. “Eve? What are you doing here?”

Eve blinked in surprise. “T-toph? You’re here too?”

“Yes. We’re chasing an enemy of the crown,” Lady Rarity said.

“Lai-Roseluck?” Eve asked.

“Yes,” Lieshy said, narrowing her eyes. “…Why?”

“I received a tip from Cosmo that Lai-Roseluck was going to give a speech. I’m here because of the sensitive material I’m told it may contain.” She pointed at the screen. “Should only be a few minutes.”

Toph folded her arms. “Any idea where she is?”

Eve nodded. “Yes. Not here, she left recently, but I’ve got a tracker on her. She’s still on the station.”

“Can you take us there?”

“I-“

The screen flickered on, revealing the face of a mare. She had a cream coat, red mane, blood red arcs, and two deep oculus eyes. She cleared her throat. “Ponies of the Equis Cosmic galaxy! I am Roseluck of Lai, an Arcei, one of many refugees who have made their way to your universe. To you, I can only thank you for your hospitality – those of you who live alongside us, anyway. I also address my fellow Arcei, for what I have to say concerns them as well…”

Toph nudged Eve. “You need to take us now, Queen Luna thinks she might have sensitive information.”

Roseluck continued. “My ponies, we have had something horrible held from us by our rulers, our elders, and those who claim to want to help us. Our great Mother and Somnabula are part of a wide web of lies – important lies. You may think our worst worry is that we might lose the culture of the runes, lose what makes us special. But it is more than that – our foals, if they do not receive their arcs by the time they come of age, will lose their minds, succumbing to mental illness!”

Murmurs ran through the crowd. Lady Rarity tensed considerably. “Eve, we need to get out of here, now.”

Eve spoke with a calm smile on her face. “Not quite yet. Let her go on a bit longer.”

“The leaders of the multiverse have done nothing to help us – and they know about this! But what do we get? More reports of ‘failures’ to recreate the magic of the runes. If these people have the power to destroy an entire race of genocidal aliens, how come they can’t reproduce the runes that give us our livelihood? Is it because they just don’t care about us? Do they want us to die? Given what’s happening to the demons, this makes a pattern. This-“

The feed was cut off, replaced with static.

Vivian looked at the crowd of Arcei – Arcei who were starting to look really angry. Arcei who looked ready for a fight.

“What the hell, Twilight!?” Lieshy blurted, slipping into her old name.

Eve winced audibly as she saw the name leave Lieshy’s mouth.

In the background, the crowd of Arcei slowly began to yell amongst themselves…

~~~

As it turned out, the inky blackness of the universe O’Neill, Renee, and the Gems were in was not completely empty, like initial scans had suggested. Their first evidence of this was ten minutes after they had entered the universe – a small ship that looked like a sea urchin dropped out of an FTL mode that wasn’t quite hyperspace or shell, but something else entirely. It looked to be in poor shape – busted, broken, and leaking some kind of magical spark.

This did not deter it from attacking.

It created a bolt of plasma in the shape of a cone drill and sent it right for the Enterprise’s front. The warship’s shields absorbed the impact, flashing golden-blue as the energy was dissipated.

“Shields at 62%!”

“RETURN FIRE!” O’Neill shouted. “What in the hell hit us?”

Before he could be answered, the combined fire of the Gem Warship and the Enterprise destroyed the attacker with hardly any fanfare at all. There were a bunch of flashing lights, lasers, and then nothing but shrapnel from the little ship.

“What in…?” O’Neill shook his head. “What kind of idiot was that!?”

Renee furrowed her brow. “I have no idea…”

Emerald called them. “This world is not empty.”

“Clearly not,” Renee said. “It appears we may actually be in danger… That ship may have been defeated easily, but that was an impressive weapon.”

“We’re salvaging the pieces now,” Emerald said.

“Anything helpful?”

Emerald glanced at a report flying by on a nearby screen. “It’s unintelligible.”

“We have a translator spell,” Renee said. “…It’s likely why you can understand us at all.”

“Spell?”

“Yes, we have access to a force called magic – we can send you files on that later, right now we need to know anything we can about that place.”

“It is in your best interests if you share whatever you find,” Emerald said, sending the files over.

Renee knew a threat when she heard one. “Of course. General, do we have the data?”

O’Neill nodded. “Yep. Every bit as alien as expected.”

“Give it a little bit, we can find something in… It might take hours, depending on if it’s encrypted or not.”

“Hours?” Emerald demanded. “We don’t have hours.”

“Maybe we won’t need a complete translation…” Renee said. “We can adapt the spell with Mauve’s coding, correct? He can home it in on… say, navigation.”

“Believe it or not, we already have a preset for that,” O’Neill said. “We recover so many random computers we want to read. You wouldn’t believe how many of them are completely useless stores of scantily clad women.”

“…Unfortunately I think I can.”

O’Neill ordered the spell’s use, and within a minute a small section of the coded mess had been decoded. There were no words, but there was math. Math, and a few programs that gave coordinates in distance and two angles, as well as a constant for the speed of light.

“We’ve got a coordinate system,” Renee said. “It places us… 101 light years from the center location. Wherever that is.”

“Then that is where we go,” Emerald said. “Activate the drive.”

Space around the green hand folded in on itself. In a swirl of matter, it shot out of view in an instant.

Had O’Neill or Renee been students of theoretical FTL travel methods, they would have identified the method as one that relied on spatial distortion. However, neither of them were, so they had somewhat simpler reactions.

“Fancy,” O’Neill commented. “Follow them. Use the shell drive so we can stay behind them – don’t want to accidentally jump ahead.”

The Enterprise accelerated, slowly accumulating a shell of magical energies around it. The shell narrowed itself at the point and launched through space, shifting the cosmos around them like a drill. Not as fast as intergalactic hyperdrive, but they were able to see the outside world like this.

O’Neill turned to Renee as they traveled. “That Emerald is smart.”

“Without a doubt. I, for one, am glad to have someone who can realize we had nothing to do with this.”

“You know we can’t trust her.”

Renee furrowed her brow. “Technically, yes, but it is in our best interests to be as open and cooperative as possible, perhaps get her to trust us. Then maybe we can start really trusting her. Benefit of the doubt.”

O’Neill shrugged. “I’m not sure I’m willing to go that far.”

“You’re the one who called me here. I think I’m doing pretty well. Maybe give me the benefit of the doubt, hrm?”

O’Neill nodded. “Fine. But if it all blows up I get the right to gloat.”

“General, I think you always have the right to gloat. Well, perhaps right is the wrong word. It’s more like… when you gloat, it’s an unstoppable force.”

O’Neill shrugged, looking out the viewscreen at the empty black space they were passing by. “Usually you can see stars,” O’Neill said. “I can’t even tell we’re moving right now.”

“Think we’re in a heat-death universe?” Renee asked.

“I don’t know. All I know is it isn’t as empty as the others. Something saw us.”

“Maybe they are just like us? They looked bruised, battered, and… well, old. They could have been sucked in by the portal just like we were.”

“A void that sucks in ships? …I swear, I’m going to live through every single Star Trek episode before my life is up.”

“You are in command of the Enterprise. It’s just asking for trouble.”

“I might not be complaining.”

“Sure.”

“Arrival in fifteen seconds,” the computer chirped.

“You really should extend that,” Renee muttered.

“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”

They dropped out of FTL, allowing the shell to shatter around them. They came out right behind the Gem ship, but the Gem ship was definitely not what they were focused on.

In front of the two ships was the largest structure any of them had ever laid eyes on. It was a spiny structure made entirely of metal, with a vaguely spherical interior. Every inch of it was covered in smooth metallic plating, with only scant features visible from where they were. One area had a gigantic porthole large enough to stuff planets into, while another had so many smaller spines it was impossible to count. One section appeared to have a radio satellite the size of a country alongside a twisted coil of metal that had no discernable purpose.

O’Neill blinked. “I have no sense of scale really, but I can tell this is big. How big is our spiny Death Star?”

“...The average diameter is consistent with the orbital distance of Jupiter,” a science officer commented. “We’re still really far away.”

O’Neill snapped his fingers. “Oh! Carter talked about these things. They’re… They’re called… Metro Ocean Brains!”

“Matrioshka Brain,” the computer corrected.

Renee looked up at the speaker the computer’s voice came from. “Thank you…? O’Neill, does your computer usua-“

“You have clearance. Just think about what Cosmo is working on for us right now for your explanation.”

Renee blinked, and then realization dawned. “Oh. Right. Nevermind then, carry on.”

Emerald called them. “Do you know what this is?”

“They called it a Matrioshka Brain,” Renee said. “Though what that is, I don’t know.”

“A machine built in multiple layers around a star – or solar system – to use all the energy within,” O’Neill said. “No, we can’t build these, don’t ask.”

Emerald looked at a screen with the Brain on it, her expression that of a woman who wasn’t sure what her worldview should be anymore. After a few seconds of silence, she spoke again. “We should not disturb the structure – it would be far too dangerous.”

“Agreed,” O’Neill said.

“Incoming!” different officers yelled on both ships.

“Oh for the love of- can’t we catch a break!?” O’Neill blurted. “Prepare weapons again! Where is it coming from this time?”

“A debris field in orbit of the Brain, ‘southern’ heading!”

The ship in question was just as bruised and battered as the previous ship they had seen, but of a much larger and smoother figure. It vaguely resembled a horseshoe with a single protruding truss in the center. A half-dozen drones flew around the smooth ship in a defensive formation. One of their bays opened.

“Tremendous energy surge detected!” officers yelled.

“Whatever they’re building up, we don’t want it to hit us. Spectral Rod, deflect it,” O’Neill ordered.

A heavy missile shot out of the attacker’s bay doors, heading right for the Enterprise. The rod lit with its magic, grabbing ahold of the missile with telekinesis and twisting it to the side. The missile was detonated remotely shortly thereafter, lighting up the sky with a miniature sun. There was so much power both the Enterprise and the Gem Warship were tossed to the side.

“Shields at 50%!”

“We do not need to be in this many fights today…” O’Neill muttered.

The Gem Warship flanked the attacker, firing its main laser. The attacking ship had no shields, but the drones moved to intercept all incoming attacks, taking the brunt of the force themselves. The attacks that did get through found the ship’s hull to be incredibly thick and durable, though the weakened areas shattered with ease.

The Enterprise was only using the Spectral Tube, laser weapons, and physical turrets – keeping the drone weapons in reserve in case something worse happened. Soon, all the attacker’s defensive drones were destroyed, and its weapon systems were disabled. The attacker became adrift.

O’Neill opened a channel. “Your ship has been disabled. Surrender now, and explain yourself.”

To their surprise, there was a response. A man made of crystal appeared on their screen, composed of a greenish material.

Renee’s eyes widened. “A man of light…” she whispered to herself.

The emerald man slammed his fist onto his heavily broken console. “Explain myself? Explain myself? What kind of cruel man are you!? This is the Sinkhole! I needed material to survive, and you need it as well! But you know what? Screw you! Not giving you nothing!” He pressed a button and the ship self-destructed. It wasn’t a very impressive explosion, more like a burst of fire that vaporized the center compartments, leaving the rest to drift.

Renee, Emerald, and O’Neill all exchanged glances.

“Guess we’ve seen another crystal lifeform now,” O’Neill commented. “Not the best impression.”

“The Sinkhole…” Renee said, mulling over the information. “Ships are dragged here, and they can’t run on their internal energy forever. The have to resort to taking it from somewhere else – other ships, the debris fields…”

“Why has the Brain not been harvested?” Emerald asked.

“It probably defends itself,” O’Neill answered. “For all we know it’s responsible for bringing everyone here.”

“That seems plausible,” Emerald commented. “It looks as if this world is a difficult one to survive in. We need to be prudent.”

“Stick together,” Renee said. “Two ships are always better than one.”

“Agreed. Furthermore, that debris field – we need to scour it in case it has anything we may need. We may have plenty of reserves now, but as time progresses, those reserves could dwindle and we will wish we took the early opportunities to stock up on power.”

O’Neill nodded. “Take us in. Also tell Engineering to start scanning that Brain for dimensional weirdness.”

“Scans are picking up numerous active ships,” one of the officers said. “None within the debris field we are heading to, but in numerous places around the Brain. Most signals are extremely weak.”

“Probably busted to hell and back, not to mention desperate,” O’Neill said. “The light show we just put on will probably deter them, but you can never be sure.”

The two ships arrived in the debris field, where a truly tremendous ship must have met its end. Gigantic beams of metal that dwarfed both ships in size tumbled through space. Circuitry of alien design and bizarre shape flipped through empty space in the gravitational well of the Matrioshka Brain.

“No energy readings at all,” an officer announced. “Anything that could provide significant amounts of direct power has been scraped clean.”

“Anything interesting at all?” Renee asked.

“Definitely. Pretty sure there are a lot of hard drives, evidence of weapons systems, and materials coming up as ‘unknown’ everywhere. It’s a technological goldmine.”

“A goldmine no one here can use,” Emerald observed. “What good is technology if you barely have enough power to run what you know?”

“Burdensome,” Renee added. “But we could use it… if only we could get out.”

“You’ll like the report from engineering then,” the communications officer said. “They’ve figured out what the Brain is doing to our drive – it’s just a static frequency they can edit out easily. They say it’s probably just a side effect of it drawing ships here and not an actual dimensional block of any kind.”

O’Neill smirked. “We have a way out… But suddenly I’m thinking we should stay around a little while and poke through this debris…”

“Can we escape at any moment?” Emerald asked.

“With the push of a button.”

“Then we will stay for now as well. Let us search this alien place.”

The two ships set to work searching for salvage in the Sinkhole…

~~~

“Eve!” Vivian said.

Eve held up a wing. “It’s not as bad as you think it is.”

Lady Rarity hefted her hammer as she saw the crowd slowly realize their presence. “I think their aggression is pretty bad…”

Eve spread her wings and lit her horn. “You’ll see – this was all part of our plan. Now that I’ve seen their reactions… I can go to Rose. I assume you all want to come along?”

“Of course we do!” Toph yelled.

Eve cast a teleport spell, taking them across the station to a simple cubic room, in which Rose was sitting.

“Right on time,” Rose said, looking right at them with her shifting eyes. “How do you like it now that your secret is out?”

“It isn’t,” Eve said. “Your message was blocked from transmitting anywhere beyond that room.”

Rose blinked. “What?”

Toph shook her head. “What?”

Eve took a position where she could see both Toph’s group and Rose without turning her head. “Cosmo and I knew something was happening here the moment Rose arrived on the station – the Arcei are monitored somewhat closely here-“

“I knew you didn’t trust us,” Rose spat.

“Not for the reasons you think,” Eve said. “We were able to determine you were setting up a secure galaxy-wide transmission for everyone to see. We reasoned that it probably contained something we didn’t want released, probably the Arcei secret. I was sent here to watch it unfold, to see what would happen amongst the Arcei. They… reacted with more anger than I would have liked, but not a truly horrendous amount. Lai-Somnabula will attempt to talk to them about it, to see if maybe we can release this information to the public.”

“Spare me your high-road arrogance,” Rose muttered. “You have no intention of telling anyone anything. You just want us to die out.”

“That’s not the case at all,” Eve said, voice cracking slightly. “I don’t want any of your children to suffer because of some fluke of biology.”

“Then where’s the cure? Where’s the runes? You’ve had years to figure out how to make them, and I’ve seen you all build much bigger things!”

“I assure you, we’re working on it,” Eve said. “In fact, this very station is where most of the research takes place. The research is why we watch all the Arcei here closely. Some of them are part of the efforts.”

“So you’re experimenting on us now?!”

“I- no! I-“ Eve took in a deep breath and let it out, extending her hoof to relieve stress.

“Willing participants?” Lieshy asked.

“Yes,” Eve said, regaining control of her words. “It’s not hard to find an Arcei willing to devote themselves to continuing their culture of runes. We don’t tell them about the real danger we are trying to fix, and we also try to choose Arcei we think will keep quiet. I assure you, we’re not just throwing your ponies into labs and grinding them up.”

Rose glared. “I don-“

Lady Rarity interrupted. “Starcei once told me that, if anypony were actually willing to grind Arcei up to find the secret to creating Runes, it probably wouldn’t take long. But we’re not willing to do that.”

Eve nodded. “It’s out of the question, no matter how much the scientists think it’d help. We don’t harm our subjects beyond minor surgery.”

Rose pointed a hoof at Eve. “It… It doesn’t matter even if this all is true! We all have a right to know what’s been kept from us! What the dangers are!”

Eve narrowed her eyes. “Your Arcei were violently angry. I’m not sure Somnabula is going to be able to stop their rage, in which case we’ll have to confine them to this station until research is complete.”

“See? You’re just as controlling as I said you were! You just want to have things your way!”

“You’re an idiot,” Lieshy muttered.

“Excuse me?”

Lieshy opened her mouth, but Eve forced it shut with her magic. “Aaaa- let’s not send her into more of a rage than she already is, okay?”

Lieshy nodded slowly.

“I want to hear this,” Rose pushed. “Why am I an idiot?”

Eve looked Rose right in the eye. “You’re just driven – driven by anger. Anger against us. I think it’s simply because we have the ability to do whatever we want in your eyes – and that you can do nothing. You probably resent us for trying to help in the first place, don’t you?”

Rose glared, but said nothing.

“Would you like us to return you to Lai? You won’t be welcomed there. If you had been left there, you would have-“

“Armonia wanted Luna’s empire to fall. Do you know who would have risen from that?” Rose demanded.

Eve blinked. “You know about that too?”

“Of course I do, I’m a high-end oculus, and a member of her order. A defunct order that Maud is trying desperately to keep alive, the fool. The point is, who do you think would have risen once Luna fell? Us. We were poised to take control and enter into an age of Arcei. That was Armonia’s plan – to pay us back for all the suffering we’d endured for being different! But no, you all had to come in, give the stupid Spectacularium its intelligence, and throw everything off the rails.”

“…You know we tried to save Armonia, right?”

“You failed. And it was your fault in the first place the Sage got in that position.”

“You could probably trace the blame back to the man of light and the enchantress,” Lieshy said. “That’s where all of us were tied together.”

“They had no active part! They were clueless!”

“So were we,” Eve said. “We were reacting.”

“Who has that right?” Rose demanded. “To be able to just waltz in and accidentally change everything? That’s just wrong! Even more than doing it on purpose!”

Eve looked at the underside of her hoof. She put it down, and shook her head. “What if it is wrong? I don’t see us being able to stop. Or you being able to stop us. What would you have us do?”

Rose blinked, surprised by the question. “I… I…”

“You’re right. There is a problem. But anger isn’t the way to solve it. Neither is provoking a fight.”

“They still deserve to know.”

“She’s clinging to her last thread with deadly intent,” Lieshy said. “Lost cause, Eve. Nice try though.”

Eve shook her head. “No… I think I’ve got something else. You don’t have to like us Rose – but I think I can make you realize what you’re doing will only make things worse. I can show you something.”

“Eve, you should just lock her up,” Toph said. “Seriously, she tried to reveal classified information! That’s bad!”

“She’ll be punished somehow, regardless,” Eve said. “This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to show her the way. You all should come along – I’ve got something beautiful to show you.”

~~~

O’Neill, Renee, and a few officers were standing in the same room as Emerald and a handful of her colorful Gem officers. They were in one of the Enterprise’s tremendous hangar bays, and they had collected a truly astonishing amount of interesting technology. All of it was powered down, but it was clearly going to be very useful. Dozens of unusual metal alloys, computer designs unlike anything they had ever seen, and fragmented weapons that operated on completely unknown sciences.

“Well, I think this has been quite the successful haul,” O’Neill said, looking at the pile. “It looks like junk.”

“It may be, but one Gem’s junk can be treasure to another,” Emerald commented.

“We have a similar saying. Not so different, you and I.”

Emerald raised an eyebrow, but notably didn’t flinch with disgust at the suggestion. “This is certainly enough to make the Diamond Authority think twice about just dismissing everything that’s happened.”

“We should probably head back soon,” Renee said. “Even if all the ships in here are weak and low on power, they could get clever eventually. We’ll have to offer them a way out, of course, but that’s only once we ourselves are out.”

“Offer? They’ve done nothing but attack us!” Emerald blurted.

“True,” Renee said. “But they were trapped here just like us – we should at least offer them a way out. I suggest we release a transmission as we leave, one telling ships that want to escape where the portal is. We can keep it open with a buoy or something. We can do that, right?”

O’Neill nodded. “We have some on board, makes it easier to move fleets.”

“Good. We’ll check in on them every so often, of course. Possibly even figure out how to shut off the Brain…”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Emerald asked. “They’ll come through and shoot at whatever they want. They’re definitely not welcome in Gem space.”

“I’m sure we can think of a place, right O’Neill? Equis Cosmic can always use more people.”

O’Neill nodded. “Definitly. All we nee-“

Alarms started blaring. “PROXIMITY ALERT!”

O’Neill put a palm on his forehead. “Beam us to the bridge, open a portal for both our ships.”

“CODE ELDRITCH!”

O’Neill’s relaxed and laid back expression shifted to instant concern. Emerald, Renee, and the General were teleported to the Enterprise’s bridge. “Get the Gem ship on the line!” O’Neill shouted. “Tell them we might need to really break for it! What do we have?”

“It’s still coming out of the… FTL window,” an officer said, pointing at the main screen. A truly tremendous ship, multiple kilometers long, was pouring out of a wispy, impossible form of space tinted with red power. The ship itself resembled a battering ram with a brilliant plow at the front. The main body was covered in spires, giving it the appearance of a true warship, which it no doubt was.

Like all other ships they had seen, this one was heavily bruised, worn, and battered. However, O’Neill had the distinct impression the age of the vessel wasn’t going to give themthe edge in a fight.

The Enterprise created a portal to the Gem universe, placing it between them and the warship. The Gems and Enterprise moved toward the portal, ready to get out of there.

The escape did not happen. The behemoth of a warship shot a single battering ram of energy from one of its many cannons, disrupting the edge of the portal with a calculated explosion. The escape route dissipated.

The attacker did not fire again. Instead, both ships got a hailing signal.

“They… Want to talk…” Renee said, rubbing her chin. “Oh, I’m not sure I like this…”

“Let’s play their game,” Emerald said. She turned to the communications officer. “Answer it!”

The officer glanced at O’Neill for confirmation – the General nodded.

A channel opened up. On the screen was yet another race completely foreign to all of them – a white, humanoid creature with muscles that were somehow both rippling and smooth. His ears were just holes in the side of his head flanking a forehead that was a smooth purple dome that glinted in the light.

The ship behind the white alien looked like it was falling apart. They could make out several people behind the alien, including an aged human standing at his side.

“Greetings, newcomers to the Sinkhole,” the white alien spoke with a voice that was distinctly higher pitched than expected, but somehow not any less threatening. “I am Lord Frieza.”

“I am General Jack O’Neill of Earth Tau’ri,” O’Neill declared.

“I am Miss Renee Belle of Equis Vitis,” Renee added.

“I am the Emerald of this ship,” Emerald finished.

“Good, Now that introductions are out of the way, business.” Frieza flexed one of his wrists. “You have something I want – a way out of here. I’m in a cooperative mood today, so I’ll give an option where everyone wins. I picked up over your embarrassingly unencrypted transmissions mention that you’ve figured out how to escape. And it clearly appears that was no joke. So here’s how it’s going to be – you’re going to make a portal large enough for all of us to escape through and then all of us will go our separate ways. Sound good?”

Renee narrowed her eyes. “You have no intention of letting us live.”

A slight annoyance crawled through Frieza’s cocky smile. “If that’s what you want to think. How about some assurance? I come personally to your ship, so you have me as a hostage. Then once we’re on the other side we all go our separate ways.”

Renee used her horn to create a magical message for Emerald to see nearby. Can we count on the Gem armada for backup?

Emerald nodded – though it wasn’t as sure of a nod as Renee would have liked. But she didn’t want to get in a firefight with this gigantic warship. Renee nodded to O’Neill.

“…Seems like a fair trade,” O’Neill said.

“Splendid!” Frieza declared. “Oh, you humans are always so cooperative! Not to mention industrious – did you know this ship was constructed by humans of a distant universe? Some Imperium of Man or something. So many natural weaknesses in your physiology, but you always find a way to bring up some kind of technological solution, even if it involves messing with powers far beyond your control.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. Frieza was clearly trying to sway them to like him, but it was a rather pathetic attempt.

“Can we have your location so you may be beamed over?” O’Neill asked.

“Sure!” Frieza said. “Get my assistant Adama as well, such a prime example of human ingenuity.”

The older man next to Frieza just nodded wordlessly.

O’Neill nodded for the teleportation once the coordinates had been received. Emerald walked over to the communications officer and whispered something to him while Frieza and Adama were in transit.

“Lovely!” Frieza said, taking a stroll around the bridge like he owned the place. “You know, it can get so tiring engaging in firefight after firefight in that Sinkhole. Nobody understands diplomacy; it’s all war, war, war. The people who get into these big ships get there either by chance or brutal combat. Rarely any discussion anymore – makes it a bit boring.”

“Dimensional drive, Gem universe,” O’Neill ordered. “Make it large.”

The Enterprise tunneled through reality with a portal large enough for Frieza’s ship. The Enterprise entered first, Frieza’s behind, and the Gem hand last – all three of them returning to the seemingly empty part of space where there had been a diplomatic ‘showdown’ only a few hours prior.

The portal closed behind them.

Frieza’s smile turned nasty. “And… you lose!”

O’Neill drew a gun on Frieza and Renee lit her horn. “How so?” O’Neill demanded.

Frieza grinned. “Well…” he pointed a two fingers. A beam of energy flew out of each, one hitting Renee square in the horn, the other knocking O’Neill’s gun out of his hands. “I might be a living superweapon.”

Emerald grinned. “We’ve got you as well though.” She nudged the communications officer, who sent out the signal. Suddenly, several dozen Gem warships appeared, surrounding the entire area of space.

Renee grunted, standing up. “Frieza, we have you surrounded. You best be on your way.”

“Sixty four,” Frieza said.

“…What?” Renee said, a sinking feeling coming to her stomach.

“I’ve done this conquering and controlling thing so many times I’ve taken to keeping track of how many times I hear certain phrases. By the way, ‘what’ stands at eleven-thousand two-hundred and five.”

Emerald growled. “You can’t be that cocky. You know nothing of the Gem armada’s capability!”

“I don’t need t-“

The teleporter activated, taking Frieza away.

O’Neill smirked. “And now he’s adrift in the void of space. Sometimes I love the teleporter. …Sometimes.”

Emerald smirked. “He would need air to survive, being a flesh-bag. Ha! The fool!”

Adama slammed his hands on a table, speaking for the first time. “It is all of you who are being fools right now! Frieza has enough power in himself to survive in the cold vacuum of space!”

“Then we’ll just shoot him-“ O’Neill said.

“You don’t understand, General,” Adama continued. “He has the power within him to destroy planets in under an hour. Planets. He could face our ship directly and he would probably win.”

The room fell silent.

The entire Enterprise shook. Everyone’s eyes turned to the screen – where they could see Frieza, pointing a single finger with a relaxed expression on his face.

“GEMS!” Emerald yelled. “ALL GEMS, ATTACK THE HUMANOID! FULL POWER!”

“…Call all the help we can,” O’Neill ordered. “NOW.”

~~~

Eve, Rose, and Toph’s crew appeared in the observation room of a large laboratory. The window in front of them provided a perfect vantage point for a tremendous warehouse of the lab. Ponies, humans, and other races milled around, most in labcoats of some kind or another. The warehouse was mostly filled with houses made of clear walls, each with an occupant of some kind or another. Several of these rooms were filled with Arcei, but about half were filled with a strange, gray, humanoid creature most of them had never seen before.

“You’ve imprisoned them!” Rose declared.

Eve shook her head. “Rose, they’re allowed out of their rooms whenever. That’s just where they sleep. Do you see the Arcei wandering around without labcoats? The empty rooms?”

“I bet they can’t leave the facility!”

“Most can, actually. Only those in the process of surgery or operation are forbidden from pulling out of the program. None have even tried to leave before their time is up, though – Cosmo chooses them well.”

Rose looked down at all the traffic, furrowing her brow. “…I don’t see any freshly created runes. I see poor imitations.”

“We quickly decided that we needed to go another route than just creating new Runes. After many months of failure in that department, we brought in another project. See the grey creatures?”

“I was wondering about those,” Vivian said, pressing her face to the glass. “I’ve never seen them before…”

“They were a once-dead race,” Eve explained. “They were from the stars of Earth Tau’ri, the teachers of the Tau’ri themselves. They were the Asgard, a race that was far older than most of us could imagine. But their technology failed them – their bodies became frail, unstable, and through many repetitive cloning procedures, impossible to continue living in for much longer. They stored themselves away into the Tau’ri’s many Asgard Cores, not expecting to ever be more than digital guides for their chosen race.”

“What does this have to do with the Arcei?” Rose demanded.

“Well, Cosmo used the Asgard’s cloning technology and her race’s impressive knowledge of magic to bring them back. The aliens you see down there were code only a few months ago. And we’re finally certain their bodies are stable, ready for their entire race to be reborn soon. You might hear about their return in the coming weeks yourself. It won’t be a secret much longer. This relates to your race because we’re using the same technology on the Arcei. It’s significantly more difficult – we’re trying to work out a genetic flaw present in your entire race – but we’re close. Soon, you won’t require arcs at all. Newborns can grow up without fear.”

Rose glared. “But that’ll destroy us as the Arcei! We’ll have no Arcs!”

“That may be a good thing,” a new voice said. The party turned to see Starcei strolling down the hall, Corona at her side. Both were in labcoats.

Rose growled. “…Mother. I knew you would have been part of this. Traitor.”

“Think, my child,” Starcei said, in as soothing a tone as she could manage. “It would help bring about peace.”

“But our arcs define us!”

“And who said that was a good definition? It sets us apart as pirates. As thieves. As murderer-“

Eve held up a hoof. “Starcei, I don’t think that’s true here. Rose has a valid point – runes are a part of their culture. If they want to keep it, they should have the option. I may not be able to give them that option, but we shouldn’t call it evil.”

Starcei narrowed her eyes. “…If that is what you believe.”

Eve returned to Rose. “…What I’m saying is, we have hope here, hope that we can fix you. But we need more months of research to uncover it. And you know what your people are going to do if they hear about this – they’ll demand we return to work on recreating the runes rather than going with the genetic solution. And… I don’t think we’ll get that done in time.”

Rose glared. “You don’t mean…”

“If we try to recreate your Runes, we… Well, we’ll have to either work on more brutal experiments or have to let a few of your children lose their minds. Neither option is acceptable.”

“And ruining our culture is?”

Eve nodded. “When confronted with madness, death, or cultural loss… Cultural loss is the least of the evils.”

Rose’s resolve wavered. “You… You don’t have the right to make that choice!”

“I do,” Starcei declared. “I am your Mother, after all.”

“You betrayed us.”

“I did what was in your best interests at all times,” Starcei insisted. “And I am sorry for when I was mistaken, which was many times over all these years.”

Rose let out a breath. “At least you admit it…”

Eve nodded. “Do you see now, Rose? Do you see why you can’t cause a multiverse-wide scene over this? It’ll jeopardize the solution. And who knows? After we’re done, we could work publicly on creating new Runes for you. It might take a decade, but we could give them back. And you might be able to save your culture.”

Rose looked at Eve. “Damn it, you’re right. Damn it. Why do you always have to be so right? Always have the high ground? The power? The Understanding? What do we get!?”

“Help,” Toph muttered. “Maybe you shouldn’t be so rude about it next time.”

Rose turned away, fuming.

“I think she’s got it now,” Lieshy said, turning to Eve. “What are you going to punish her with, now?”

“I’ll take care of that,” Starcei said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Eve looked at Starcei, studying her features. “All right. Whatever you decide to do to her is fine. I better not hear about anything crazy later, though.”

“You won’t,” Starcei assured. She put a hoof on Rose and led her away.

Corona coughed, making herself known. “So, I would ask what brings you to the lab, but that’s a little obvious.”

Eve smiled. “Corona!” She pulled the unicorn into a hug. “So good to see you! Sorry the visit had to start like… That.”

Corona smirked. “No problem at all. Toph, Vivian, Rarity, Lieshy.” She waved at all of them in turn.

“So, you work here?” Toph asked.

“Internship? Sorta?” Corona shrugged. “I signed up for more physics, and Cosmo insisted on placing me in the best institutions she could find. It helps to have friends in high places. So here I am, working on the top secret government project. While also working on my quantum arcane physics course. It’s a beast.”

“Glad to hear it,” Eve said. “We should grab a bite to eat some time, hang out again.”

“I’m free tonight,” Corona said.

Eve smirked. “Same. I had all day blocked off for this.” She turned to Toph. “You want to tag along?”

Toph shrugged. “Actually, I think Queen Luna will want to hear about this.”

“No offense, but you’ve given us a bit too much to think about,” Lieshy commented.

Eve smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have dragged you along. Feel free to tell her anything you saw here – she should know about it already. Wouldn’t be surprised if she spaced it though, I only mentioned it to her once… I’ll teleport you to the dock directly. I know how much you hate space stations.”

“Thank you,” Toph said. Eve lit her horn and teleported the group away.

Eve turned to Corona. “So… How is it going?”

“Pretty good, as you can tell.”

“Yeah. Hey, I’m curious, how’s Sparky doing?”

Corona frowned. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t talked to her much, and Sugarcoat doesn’t talk about her that much in her emails.”

“Oh… I’m sorry to hear that.”

Corona smiled sadly. “It is what it is. I can see you’re doing pretty well though.”

Eve nodded. “That I am. Charter-Princess. It’s a bit… overwhelming. Spike recently told me I’m the most important person in our corner of the multiverse, and I couldn’t even convince myself otherwise. And that doesn’t really feel good. Makes me feel like I’m arrogant for thinking I’m better than anypony, even if I don’t. …Right?”

“Can’t really identify, sorry,” Corona said, shrugging. “But I expect to hear a lot more about it later.”

“Right, of course. You finish your shift first. I have to talk briefly with Somnabula anyway. See you soon!”

“Same!”

~~~

“One! Two! Three!” Frieza said, blasting a single Gem warship to pieces with each of his attacks, pure energy shooting forth from his finger and disintegrating all resistance.

“He sounds like the goddamn tootsie pop owl!” O’Neill roared. “Somebody find a way to shut him up!”

“How can we even hear him!?” Renee wondered.

“Not important right now!” O’Neill shot back. “…Fire a drone. I want to see how he deals with it.”

Frieza continued decimating the fleet around him – one Gem ship at a time. He was purposefully ignoring the Enterprise, curious to see what it could cook up for him to face. He was hoping for some truly interesting things. It was also why his great Imperium of Man battle ship wasn’t even attacking – Frieza wanted to deal with it all himself. A good old fashioned curbstomp on naive little spacefaring races who thought themselves so high and mighty.

The Enterprise shot a single golden bullet at Frieza – a test of one of their more exotic weapons, he knew. He held out a hand, catching the squid-like projectile in his palm. It kept pushing, despite being at a complete standstill. Futhermore, it was still bleeding off damaging energy, a weapon clearly designed to puncture a vessel multiple times. Not all that interes-

It exploded in his face. There was no lasting damage, but it was unpleasant. “That was mildly annoying,” he declared.

“For the…” O’Neill rammed his fist into a wall. “Launch a full volley of drones and have Mauve start messing with the Spectral Rod. We’re going to ram some magic into him. Unless he has some bizarre immunity to that.”

Adama shook his head. “I do not know what your magic will do to him. I can tell you brute force will do nothing to him.”

“Figures,” O’Neill said. “Unless we can sic that Brain on him…”

“Good idea, but risky,” Renee said. “What if it decides to shoot us for interfering?”

“Right. Any ideas anyone?”

There were no suggestions. The volley of drones reached Frieza, accompanied by a handful of Gem ship lasers. Frieza grabbed several of the drones and rammed them into each other – and then the Spectral Rod activated, encasing him in a field of telekinesis. He was more than strong enough to overcome it, but he lost control of his arms for a split second. A handful of drones hit him dead on. They found they couldn’t penetrate his body, so they just exploded, sending him flying through the void of space.

Frieza grunted. “Clever trick…” He moved so fast that the telekinesis spell lost track of him and failed. “But still absolutely nothing.”

“Suck him back into the Sinkhole!” Renee said. She hit the intercom. “Mauve! Code a spell to send him to the Sinkhole in an instant!”

That spell did not take long to code – a simple adjustment to a normal dimensional spell. The multicolored magic touched Frieza. A portal opened and closed around him, but he dodged it.

“How fast is he moving!?” O’Neill blurted.

“Faster than our sensors can see,” an officer said.

“That’s it, hiding behind technology isn’t working,” Emerald declared. “Gems! Gather your best warriors – direct combat is required!”

“…Direct combat? Are you insane!?” Renee blurted.

Emerald touched the shining gemstone placed on her shoulder, summoning a double-headed scythe from the structure. “Maybe. But, if nothing else, I think he’ll appreciate some direct combat. Give more time for your ‘help’ to arrive. Which better be pretty helpful.”

“I sure hope so,” O’Neill said. “Teleport her outside, if that’s what you want.”

Emerald was teleported out into space, near Frieza. The remaining gem warships had begun to send their own warriors outside, each gem-creature producing a weapon from a brilliant crystal located somewhere on their body.

“Frieza!” Emerald declared. “You are an enemy of the Diamond Authority, and as such, you are to be shattered. You may lack a gem, but that purple dome on your head will do nicely.”

“Finally, bringing out the warriors! It’s been so long since I’ve seen a race opt for direct combat. Refreshing! By the way, twenty-two.”

“Shut up.”

“Nine million. Though most of that was from the hive-mind, so a bit hard to count with certainty…”

The gems charged, brandishing their personal weapons. Frieza took a similar approach to them that he took to the warships – blasting one of them at a time with a loose burst of energy. Most of their bodies poofed into nothing upon contact, leaving only their gems drifting amidst the stars. On the occasion where he hit a gemstone directly, the structure shattered completely in a much more violent manner.

Emerald herself was not shattered, but poofed, her gem ending up adrift.

“Is this the best you have?!” Frieza declared. “Really, I was expecting more from an interdimensiaonlly capable race-“

Then the help arrived.

“Thank the Stars…” Renee said, breathing out a sigh of relief as ships she recognized began to fill the sky. An entire fleet of Equis Cosmic ships, including the flower-shaped flagship that belonged to Cosmo herself. In the midst of the fleet were a handful of Tau’ri ships, and even a few from the Tau’ri allies. She spotted the strange white ships that belonged to a section of humans known as the Ori Remnant, and more than a few pyramid ships.

Cosmo herself teleported in front of Frieza – with two beings to her sides. Discord and Alushy.

Frieza raised the section of his skin where an eyebrow should have been. “Now these are some respectable power levels.”

“Can I turn him into a pot of petunias?” Discord asked. “I feel like that would be appropriate.”

“That would be awesome, but not quite brutal enough,” Alushy asserted. “I’m thinking we just hit him with the rainbow death ray. Cosmo?”

Cosmo narrowed her eyes. “Frieza, I know you can sense our power. Do you truly think you can win?”

“Three hundred and four.”

Cosmo blinked in confusion. “…Excuse me?”

“Classic bored asshole conqueror routine,” Alushy declared. “He’s counting the times he hears certain phrases.”

Frieza blinked. “Okay, that’s a new one.”

“Lemme try again. You’re about to get served by a fudgemothering vampire.”

“…You’re uncan-“

Alushy sunk her teeth into Frieza’s shoulder and tore off his arm. Discord moved next, turning Frieza into a baby.

Even in such an insulting form, Frieza still had power. He raised his hands, channeling power into a sphere of energy. “START FIRING!” He yelled, intending for his ship to finally help him.

“Don’t!” Adama yelled from the Enterprise, the signal going to the crew of Frieza’s ship. “We have a chance to finally be free of this tyrant!”

“Adama you son of a- where’d the purple horse go?” Frieza asked, looking for Cosmo.

Cosmo stood on the bridge of her flagship and activated the harmony energies – summoning what Alushy had called the ‘rainbow death ray’. Channeled between her and all the ships in her fleet, the power flew through the air and hit Frieza dead on. He struggled, but Discord had ensured he was in the form of a baby. He knew he was beaten.

“AAAAAA!” He threw the sphere of energy at the Enterprise. Everyone on board knew it would be enough energy to vaporize them in an instant – but Discord came to the rescue. He snapped his fingers, and the energy changed direction and headed directly back for Frieza.

“THIS WON’T BE THE LAST YOU HEAR OF ME!” Frieza declared.

Those were his last words as Cosmo’s power purified the very space he occupied.

Everyone took a moment to breathe.

~~~

All gems who were not shattered would, with enough time, reform their bodies from their loose gems. Emerald had reformed her body rather quickly, going for a simple form so she could be active in the upcoming proceedings. She had sent an update message to the Diamond Authority, and they had responded instantly this time.

So currently an entire fleet of ships was headed towards Gem Homeworld space, including Adama’s warship.

Emerald, O’Neill, Renee, Cosmo, and Adama were all in a call together as they traveled.

“So I think it’s pretty clear we should leave that universe alone for now,” Renee declared. “No attempts at evacuation – who knows what other beasts like Frieza are in there?”

“There are more than I wish to admit,” Adama said. “To survive, you either become one… Or you sell yourselves to one. I shamefully had to do the latter. We are eternally grateful to you for giving us freedom from that horrid creature.”

“Anytime,” Renee said. “I still feel bad – so many lost souls in that universe… But there are just too many horrors we aren’t prepared to deal with in there.”

“While we cannot perform a complete evacuation, we could observe the universe closely,” Cosmo said. “Careful not to let any Friezas get a hold of the dimensional technology. It would be a slow process… But it could be done.”

O’Neill nodded slowly. “A new class of stealth ships may be needed…”

“By the way, O’Neill, I’ve got an old friend of yours on board.” Cosmo smiled. “I think he’ll be really glad to see you.”

“Does his name begin with T and end with R?”

Cosmo laughed. “By sheer coincidence, it does!”

Emerald blinked. “I’m missing something.”

“In-joke,” Adama said. “Perhaps something softly classified. It’s not important to us at this juncture, Emerald.”

“I’ll decide when something’s important to me or not!”

“It isn’t important to you,” Renee said.

Emerald raised an eyebrow. “What did I just say?”

“Consider it a suggestion.”

Emerald got the message loud and clear. “Right…”

Renee turned to Adama. “…Do you see any hope for the Sinkhole? Do you know anything about it?”

“I see little hope. There are records that suggest the Brain has been pulling in ships for billions of years. The war is unending, and even if you manage an evacuation it’ll still drag more into its grasp.”

“And I don’t suppose anyone is able to… alter the Brain?”

“Any who try are very quickly destroyed with weapons beyond anything the Brain itself brings into the universe.”

Renee sighed. “Right… Well, can’t save them all, unfortunately.”

Emerald looked like she wanted to say something, but didn’t.

Cosmo was the one that did. “Emerald, your race fascinates me. We have seen nothing like it in any of our travels. Do you care to introduce what you are to us?”

“We are Gems…”

~~~

Rose’s punishment was simple: she’d been given a week to wrap up any obligations she had in the multiverse, and then she’d be kept under the watchful eye of Starcei until it was believed she would behave herself. She would have little freedom otherwise, essentially becoming the ‘student’ of Starcei.

Rose would be forced to live in that lab.

She hated that idea.

But she knew Eve was right, she couldn’t act out. That would hurt her ponies, her Arcei, and she couldn’t do that.

But she wanted to hurt those arrogant people who thought they had the right to dictate anything about anyone. Who cared what Eve or Starcei or anyone else thought – Rose knew she was right. They needed to be hurt for what they were doing.

And she knew just how she was going to do that.

It wasn’t easy to get a portal to locations banned to the public, but in her attempts to be sneaky around Equis Cosmic’s security, she had become aware of some shady businesses around the multiversal society. With a bit of oculus power and ingenuity, she found a person who would open a portal for her to any world, and then open it an hour later for her to get back. It was a hefty price, but she didn’t care.

She found herself on Ardent, in one of the larger towns of Hyrule. People were already staring at her, curious as to what she was. She looked a bit odd, but not too out of place.

She walked with purpose right to the most important looking building in the town, the place where she could find protesters - people dissatisfied with the way things were being run. She walked up to the angriest looking human she could find.

“What do you want?”

“I want to tell you what your Princess and King have been hiding from you.” She pulled a booklet out of her saddlebags. “You’ll want to spread this around as far as you can. You all need to know.”

Then she walked away, leaving them with the knowledge.

The knowledge of what Ba’al’s forces really were.

The knowledge of the multiverse that had been hidden from them.

Rose herself would never be caught. Not even Sombra would be able to figure out who had started the fire…

But the fire itself would rage.

036 - Hyrule's Folly

Zelda may not have been the ruler of Hyrule – that honor was left to her father, the King – but she was certainly the public face of the royal family. She spoke to the people, calmed them, and performed most of the ceremonies. The people loved her, thought of her as one of them; as their voice in the way things were run.

She was also generally the member of the royal family to attend to foreign ambassadors, dignitaries, and other such visitors. Oftentimes this job was a tedious mess of trying not to upset the other person while still making her own desires known, but she had no worries about it this time. Prince Ruto was to meet with her today for the will of the aquatic Zora. He was always agreeable, kind, and understanding even when there were conflicting desires. She wouldn’t have to watch herself today, she was sure of it.

That is, she was sure of it until she actually walked into the room he was in. He was at the table, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. He never met her like that – he was always up and about, doing something, pondering some intellectual pursuit or other. He was a fan of pacing.

The fact that he wasn’t pacing put her on edge.

“Ruto, what’s-“

The fish-person took a small booklet out of his pocket and set it on the table. “I had this mailed to me today by those insurrectionists you have in your kingdom.”

“Surely you don’t believe a word they sa-“

“It’s got information about Ba’al. You. The Goddesses. Majora. What really happened. What you’ve been doing under our noses.”

Zelda took a seat, folding her hands and glaring at Ruto. “So? We’re allowed to have secrets.”

“I was hoping it was crazy…” Ruto sighed. “You really should have told us. My people won’t get angry – we’ll just cut ties. Again. But I can assure you we are definitely not the only people this was sent to. The others will be livid. I expect multiple ones to declare war.”

“That’s precisely why we didn’t say anything before,” Zelda said. “There would be too much conflict!”

“Well-placed intentions aside, it would have been better for you and your… ‘friends’ in this little booklet to have revealed it on your terms. As it is now, this is such a negative picture of the events… This is bad, Zelda.”

“...Yes. But we will stand strong, you know this, Ruto. Hyrule is the center of civilization. We will survive.”

“I know you will. The wars that come will be mixed, uneven, and a mess for everyone. I’m sure you’ll come out with the kingdom intact. But the damage will be done, and it will be a horrible next few years.” He glanced at the book. “Unless your friends do something. But I can’t speak for them.”

Zelda nodded. “…Thank you, Ruto.”

“For what? I’m not doing anything. I’m just declaring the Zora’s disapproval of your actions, and that we will be cutting ties for the foreseeable future.”

“For all the times you talked reasonably.”

Ruto let a small smile come to his face. “You are most welcome, Zelda.” He stood up, leaving the booklet on the table. “Goodbye.”

He walked away, leaving her alone.

Ten seconds later Zelda let out a panicked breath, struggling to keep her emotions under control.

The worst-case scenario had happened. Despite all the efforts she and Ganondorf had taken, the secret was out. The world of Ardent was going to enter an era of turmoil, and there was no way to look at it that didn’t place at least part of the blame on herself.

She picked up the booklet, examining it. There was no author, only a note on the back that told her it was copied from the original. She flipped through it for a minute, just enough to prove to herself that there was too much truth in it to deny. They were made.

She stood up and ran through the halls of the castle – right to the main throne room. She charged into the presence of her father. He was a large, rotund man who nonetheless had a commanding presence, and perhaps the most impressive white beard in the entire land. He was currently talking to his advisors, startled to see her appear suddenly.

“What is it, my dear?”

“They know,” she said. “The Zora have cut ties because of our secret. Who knows what the others are going to do.”

The King grabbed his royal scepter and stood up quickly. “Then we have no time to waste. We must take action. Our own people come first. That Daniel fellow left the Disclosure speeches here, did he not? Let us put them to use, if we can.”

Zelda nodded. “Yes, right away.”

“Send word to our otherworld allies as well – ask for assistance, anything they can offer. Anything at all. The road ahead will be long and difficult, Zelda. I know it. But together, we can face it.”

“Together. Those ponies really are rubbing off on us.”

“May not be a bad thing. Go, send word, find those documents. I’ll organize the advisors – and put the generals on alert.”

Zelda turned and ran through the castle to carry out her father’s instructions.

She held her face stern and pulled her unstable emotions as deep into herself as she could manage. They could not afford to mess anything else up in this delicate time – should her or her father’s resolve falter at any moment, the results would be disastrous. Such was the burden of the royal family, as it always was.

She prayed to gods that no longer existed that they would not have to stand alone.

~~~

“You know,” Renee said to O’Neill as they sat on a crystal bench outside a Gem meeting room. “Usually it’s Eve or Daniel I do this with. How come you’ve never been around when we meet with the leaders of other races?”

O’Neill stretched his arms out in front of him. “Well, it’s like this. I don’t enjoy talking to pompous self-righteous morons, and it just so happens that usually the people in charge are pompous self-righteous morons.”

“I see. Is that why you’ve kept as quiet in the meeting as you can manage?”

O’Neill nodded. “I’d rather not start a war because I mocked some Diamond or other.”

“That Yellow Diamond is quite the character,” Renee admitted. “From what I’ve gathered from the Zircons around, we would much rather have gotten Blue Diamond. A much more… understanding monarch. I’m having difficulty believing we’ll ever get Yellow Diamond to talk to us with even the respect she gives her servants.”

“She’s listening to your Cosmo,” Adama said from a different bench, having overheard their conversation.

“And the reasons for that are probably related to Starlight,” Renee commented. “She looks like a gem, and that just makes everything slightly better.”

Discord appeared between them. “You could send me in! I could prove ourselves to have power with a little dance routine! I can imagine it now – the history books proclaiming Discord as the one who convinced the Gems that talking to flesh-beings was worthwhile!”

“Two problems with that plan,” O’Neill said. “One, they’ll only accept you, not the rest of us. Two, Lord of First Impressions, you are not.”

“Humph. At least Alushy respects me.”

Alushy’s ears perked up. “Did I hear an invitation to insult someone’s very dignity? Because holy hell, am I tired of walking on eggshells around these Gems.”

Discord created a target on his chest. “Fire when ready.”

Renee held up a hoof. “We are not doing this again!”

“What’s the matter Renee?” Alushy jabbed. “Flashbacks to Esefem?”

Renee twitched. “Alushy…”

Alushy’s eyes widened. “Oh, I meant the Blackbird flight. Not the other things.”

“And that’s the closest Alushy will ever come to saying sorry,” O’Neill announced.

“I’ll take what I can get…” Renee muttered.

An Equis Cosmic unicorn ran into the room. “Urgent news from Eve!”

“What is it?” Renee asked.

“The secret is out on Ardent.”

“Dammit, I’ve just lost a bet,” Alushy muttered.

Renee took a deep breath and sighed. “Well… We expected this to happen eventually. I was hoping it would have lasted a significantly longer time. …I don’t think it would be a good idea to leave our obligations here, though. First impressions with spacefarers.”

O’Neill nodded. “Don’t want the Gems to think we don’t care about this. Or have more reasons to laugh at our ‘pathetic little monkey games’.”

Renee turned to the messenger unicorn. “Does Eve want us to do anything from here?”

“No, but she wanted you to know, so you didn’t come back to a surprise.”

“Does Eve have it handled?”

“I… Think so? The message says she and Daniel are headed over to Ardent to see what can be done. It also says to expect the worst.”

“Much as I hate to be that guy…” O’Neill began.

“No you don’t,” Alushy interjected.

O’Neill ignored her. “…Ardent’s problem is their problem. We have problems of our own to deal with here.”

Renee nodded. “And I’m sure Eve can do something without Cosmo, O’Neill, or anyone else who’s here. I have faith in her.”

“This Eve,” Adama asked. “Is she your leader?”

“As much as all of us can have a single leader,” Renee said. “She is the Charter, the reason we’re all together.”

“I can tell you all have a great respect for her – even those of you who hardly respect anything.”

“Great scott, I think he’s talking about me!” Alushy said.

“… ‘Great scott’, really?” Discord said.

“I’m mixing it up a bit.”

Adama ignored them. “The point is, someone you all respect that much… I trust her already, and I’ve never met her.”

“Eve certainly is something, Admiral,” Renee affirmed. “Though if I’m being honest, she’s not going to be able to stop all of Ardent’s problems. There’s going to be a lot of broken trust on that world regardless.”

“What exactly did they keep secret?” Adama asked.

Renee gestured at everyone in the room. “Us. The other universes.”

Adama nodded slowly. “…I do not envy the position that world is in.”

“Nobody does.”

Cosmo poked her head out of the meeting room. “I’ve convinced her to let you all back in. I know this is annoying and somewhat degrading, but act at least a little dignified. Any rash actions will just affirm her opinion that you’re all basically animals.”

O’Neill sighed. “Here we go… Round five…”

Discord looked to Cosmo. “I could-“

“Whatever you were going to suggest, no. I don’t need her taking your words more seriously than most others.”

“Aw…”

They filed back into the presence of the gigantic form of Yellow Diamond, prepared for another onslaught of words from a ‘higher’ being...

~~~

Zelda sat at her meeting table, glancing through scroll after scroll of legal documents she had been sent in the last few hours. Word spread fast when it was big, even without the communication technologies the rest of the multiverse had. She’d already received messages from the Gorons, Rito, and Deku. They ranged from outright threats of aggression from the Deku to restrained anger from the Gorons.

Gorons almost never got angry, which made Zelda most concerned about the scroll they had sent. They usually found it so easy to be polite… They had to be trying to send a message like this.

An aide opened the door. “Miss Sparkle and Mister Jackson are here to see you,” he said.

“Let them in,” Zelda spoke, taking care not to let her voice waver.

Eve and Daniel strode into the room, taking a seat across from Zelda. Daniel’s expression was unreadable, but Eve’s was like an open book – conflict was painted all over her face, along with sadness, discomfort, and a slight bit of guilt.

“Thank you for coming,” Zelda said. “We… are really going to need your help.”

“What do you want us to do? We’ll help however we can,” Eve said.

Daniel frowned. “Within reason.”

Eve looked like she wanted to correct Daniel, but after thinking a moment she realized he was right. She said nothing.

Zelda folded her arms. “When I told you why we wouldn’t participate in Disclosure, I told you why. Because war would break out. That’s still true. War hasn’t broken out yet, but I don’t need my agents to report back to know the Deku are already readying their army to demand our cooperation. They’ll almost definitely get the Rito on their side – the birds love the sharing of knowledge, and they’ll take what we’ve done as a personal offense. I don’t know about the Gorons, but it’s certainly possible they can be convinced to take action as well.”

“Is there no hope for a peaceful resolution?” Eve asked.

“There’s a chance we could convince one side to turn away with significant effort. But it seems unlikely we can convince them all.”

“Why not give them what they want?” Daniel asked.

“What they want cannot be given,” Zelda said. “We have an advantage due to knowing you. Simply giving them technology to explore and an audience with you will do next to nothing.”

“…Can’t they see that-“

“Eve, I don’t think you realize what we are.” Zelda looked into the distance, a sorrowful expression on her face. “Our societies do not function like yours. We don’t operate on peace, prosperity, friendship, economy, or anything like that. We are closer to the demons than any of the other societies. Kingdoms have worth via honor. If one kingdom gains too much power, the others attack and pillage to ensure an even playing field. We’ve attacked them, they’ve attacked us – there is almost always a small war going on somewhere to ensure constant competition and relational changes.”

Daniel nodded. “It’s somewhat like Dark Age society in Europe. Everything was based in Honor and Power. Your kingdom has lost its honor with the secrets and lies, and now it has too much power for such a low amount of honor. It isn’t seen as right.”

“Exactly,” Zelda said. “Currently, we are the enemy of society. It’s an unpleasant place to be – we’d been used to the Gerudo having that honor for the last few decades.”

“I don’t think we can change that for you,” Eve said. “Such a deeply rooted ideology takes time to work out.”

“I’m not asking you to change them,” Zelda said. “As much as that would be preferable, its unrealistic. I’m asking for direct aid – military. A single one of your ships would protect us.”

Daniel frowned. “We may have decided not to implement a non-interference policy, but this seems like taking it a bit too far.”

Eve sighed. “I’ve had to deal with so many people complaining about how we ruin societies by barely lifting a hoof. Their complaints are legitimate. If we interfere here, directly, we will be forcing a change. Demanding that your neighbors not do what they think is right and required of them.”

Zelda narrowed her eyes. “The death tolls will be catastrophic, especially on our side.”

Eve winced. “I… I know. But what if our ship doesn’t make them stop? We’ll slaughter them. I can’t order my ponies to do that! I don’t think they’d be able to pull the trigger!”

“Your people have no qualms with following questionable orders,” Zelda addressed Daniel.

Daniel shook his head. “And unlike Eve, I’m not even sure we should try to help you. We told you we could help with Disclosure, and you refused. Zelda, we told you this would happen.”

Zelda clenched her fist. “So? You were right, we were wrong. Now we have to deal with the fallout. You offered to help us before, I’m asking for that help now. Just a single ship from any fleet to defend us.”

“…I doubt the Oversight would allow Earth Tau’ri to act,” Daniel said. “Even if I did think it was the right course of action, it’s unlikely.”

Eve looked at the floor. “I… I could order the Feldspar. I could even staff it with humans from the AID, if I wanted. Luna wouldn’t shy away from the trigger. But…”

“Eve, aren’t you the Princess of Friendship?” Zelda interrupted. “We’re your friends. These other kingdoms? Have you even met them?”

Eve’s expression darkened. “You are supposed to be Loyal to your friends.”

“I thought so.”

“But your friends don’t always know the right way,” Eve finished. “Zelda… I’ll talk to the nations for you, I’ll go out of my way to talk to all of them, I’ll do a lot of things. But I… I won’t fight a war for you.”

Zelda slammed her fist on the table. “Twilight! I-“

“Eve,” Eve corrected, voice cold.

Zelda’s violent outburst stopped before it could really begin. She slumped into her chair. “…You will at least bring this up with the other universes, won’t you?”

Daniel nodded. “Your request for aid will be forwarded to all parties with access to the Hub. You can expect some action to be taken – but I don’t think a military operation will be allowed.”

“…Lai might,” Eve said.

Daniel nodded slowly. “That may be…”

“Just go, spread my message,” Zelda said. “We’ll need allies if we are to survive.”

“You have allies,” Eve said, smiling sadly. “I… I might change my mind. I’ll have to talk it over with the other princesses. I’ll do something, Zelda, you can count on that.”

“…Thank you, Eve.”

Eve nodded. “We should move quickly, in case things blow up faster than expected.”

Daniel bowed to Zelda as he stood up, and the two of them left.

Zelda shook her head – there wasn’t going to be any military help. No ships. Maybe some warriors from Lai. Cosmo had some ships in orbit, but they weren’t going to listen to Zelda…

But there was still Ganondorf. The Gerudo knew just like Hyrule did, they were to be ousted as well. They could stand together.

An aide poked her head in. “Zelda, news from our sources in the Gerudo Desert.”

“What is Ganondorf’s response?”

“…There was none. It seems as if the entire Gerudo kingdom has vanished.”

Zelda rammed her fist into the table, breaking one of its legs. “I will take this message to the King. You get me a new table.”

“Yes, your majesty.”

Zelda strode into the presence of her father. He already looked weary from the day – his burden had been speaking to the public of Hyrule. It could not have been easy telling them what had been kept hidden.

“Father, news from the Gerudo.”

“It’s not good, is it?”

“They aren’t even there anymore. I suspect Ganondorf moved them to another universe.”

The King shook his head. “Coward, won’t stand and fight.”

“The others probably aren’t going to help us either,” Zelda said. “I have some hope that the Charter or Queen Luna will provide some aid, but I do not see an army or a ship being lent to us.”

“Understandable. This is in no way their fight, and is in every way our own doing. …Had this happened after Disclosure, they would have given us aid, since they would have seen the wars as their fault.”

Zelda nodded. “But now it is only ours…”

“We have made a grave mistake, Zelda.” He put a hand to his forehead. “The years ahead will be long and hard. But we have strength – and despite what the others may think of us right now, we have honor. We can fight, and Hyrule will endure.”

“…Father, there are some dishonorable ways we can attain aid. I strongly urge we refrain from using them, but you should be aware.”

“Aware of what?”

“There are mercenaries in the other worlds who will work for a price. Gardis. Sombra. We could also steal artifacts from other universes. The Twili, perhaps.”

“You are right – we should refrain. Do we have no friends we can ask directly for favors?”

“…They won’t be able to provide an army, but… But I think I can get some.”

“Make those calls. It’s time to beg, Zelda.”

Zelda nodded and turned to gather whomever she could.

~~~

Corona Shimmer strode into the throne room of Hyrule Castle, sunglasses on her face. Memories were swirling around her head – memories of Ba’al’s invasion, of the people she had killed, of what she had to do to Pinkie…

Stop thinking about the past. Sombra’s text informed her.

“I’m only here because of the past,” Corona whispered back. She took a moment to take in her surroundings – the throne held the King, Zelda at his side. There were only a handful of others in the room- Link, Toph, Lieshy, Vivian, and Lady Rarity. Corona caught the end of a conversation.

“-basically, Luna couldn’t send anyone because her ponies don’t like the outside worlds,” Vivian summarized.

“Came completely on our own,” Toph said. “The Queen definitely didn’t wink at us.”

Link nodded. “Definitely not.” He turned to Corona. “Glad you made it. Is Iroh coming?”

Corona shook her head. “He said that you needed to fight your own battles. …I respectfully disagreed.”

“Do you think we can expect Eve to do anything?” Zelda asked. Corona could tell from her voice that she was extremely strained.

Corona nodded. “She said she’d do something, so she’ll come through. I don’t think she’s willing to fight. I am though. I fought for this place once. Now that I have gotten to know it, I have even more reason to fight for it.”

Link bowed to Corona. “You are too kind. Thank you for stepping down to help us clean our mess.”

The King nodded. “It is an honor to have friends such as you.”

Suddenly, the Happy Mask Salesman was in the hall. “King Daphnes Hyrule, may I be of assistance?”

The King blinked. “…I did not expect you to come.”

The Happy Mask Salesman was standing right next to the King. “I happen to find this kingdom worthwhile. No matter how long I’ve lived, Hyrule has been the source of the heroes to face the darkness. I wish this kingdom to live long enough to see if it can do that without help from deities.”

“I thank you, Salesman.”

Midna popped out of Link’s shadow. “Told you he’d show up.”

Link shook his head. “I’ll never understand you, Salesman.”

“Depends on if you live long enough,” the Happy Mask Salesman responded, now an inch from Link’s face. “If this multiverse exploration goes far enough, you might find some answers.”

“After this is over I’m going back to my farm and my family,” Link said matter-of-factly. “I think I can live with the mystery.”

“Yes… you can,” the Happy Mask Salesman said, sounding almost disappointed. He turned to Zelda. “Princess, surely you have a plan?”

Zelda took a breath. “It is not much of one. The Kingdoms the Deku have convinced to join them in war will have to send declarers of war to Hyrule. They could be coming today, or in a week, but no later than that. There are a few ways this could go – we may convince them to engage in the art of settling dispute by one-on-one combat to the death, we may have to show them a power play to make them think twice against attacking us… But if that fails, we will have to fight directly in the wars.”

“Just hold their declarers hostage,” Lieshy suggested.

“We will not resort to dishonorable means,” the King declared.

“Good,” Lady Rarity said. “I will not serve a King who would consider such things.”

The King nodded. “I need to know what all of your experience with war is – Link, I already know yours. No need to speak.”

Midna raised her hair-hand. “I was trained in Twili military theory, though never really got to command any Twili battalions.”

Lady Rarity hefted her hammer. “I have served Queen Luna for decades, fought many battles as a wandering knight, and served under Starcei in many secret battles for the Arcei. I also have a natural predatory instinct, should such a thing be required.”

“Uh… I was part of a military group,” Vivian said. “But I never really got to do anything.”

“I lived with the demons,” Lieshy said. “Aside from the jaunts with these people, nothing else.”

“I fought in the Hundred Years War against the Fire Nation,” Toph answered. “I’m best with small groups.”

Corona shook her head. “I’m just well educated in the way of physics, the only war I was actually in was the war against Ba’al. But I can give you this…” She pulled a large, rounded device out of her saddlebags. Circuitry on it flashed a dull red. “This is a modified portal device purposefully calibrated incorrectly. It tries to tunnel to a universe we can’t reach from here, and in the process will destabilize any space it comes into contact with. It could easily be used as a weapon.”

The Happy Mask Salesman went last. “I’ve caused and ended entire wars with my presence. Is that enough information?”

“Yes,” the King said. “Salesman, you have the abilities beyond our understanding. You can be the scout. Move in and out of places quickly and gather all the information you can.”

The Happy Mask Salesman nodded – and was gone.

“Corona, how many of those weapons do you have?”

“Seven,” she said. “Well, only this one, but I can calibrate the other devices I have in my bags in a few minutes.”

“Good. You’ll train our generals in their use. They are to treat you as an equal. Link, your honorary rank still stands as one of those Generals.”

Link bowed respectfully. Midna rubbed her hands together at the prospect of wielding a fancy space gun.

“Lieshy, I understand you are good with words?”

“Language is my clay.”

“You’ll talk directly to those who threaten us. Do whatever you can to gain information or get them to call off their attack.”

“It will be done.”

“Toph, you take Vivian and Lady Rarity. You will be given the best of our knights to form a task force. When the war starts, you will infiltrate one of the enemy kingdoms, taking them down from the inside.”

Toph twirled the Master Sword. “Got it.”

“And-“

It was then they heard the screams coming from outside the front doors.

Everyone drew their weapons. The King stood as tall as he could manage, slamming his scepter on the ground. “GUARDS! TO THE ENTRYWAY!”

Guards in full plate armor filed out from the hallways behind the King, taking up position at the front doors. The screams got louder.

“What is going on out there?” the King demanded.

Toph slammed her foot on the ground. “It’s hard to tell… It’s like a whirlwind is moving through your courtyard. …Your soldiers are being tossed to the side like they’re nothing.”

The King knew what this meant. “Men, fall back to me, stay behind our allies!”

The guards did as instructed, shuffling behind Link, Corona, and the others. Lieshy fell back as well, taking her position next to the King. Zelda herself stepped down, readying her magic for a fight.

The front doors imploded into a swirling void of blackness, letting the sunlight wash into the room. A man floated into the room – he had gray hair, wore a black cloak, and his skin was a pale white. His eyes glared at them, a piercing, unnatural red.

“What is the meaning of this!?” the King shouted, slamming has staff on the ground again.

The man produced a copy of the booklet and dropped it to the ground. “Your gods are gone, old man. Hyrule is no longer a protected, favored kingdom. You have no triforce, no power of light to protect you from the downfall you so rightly deserve.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Vaati. And I’ve been waiting for the moment to bring your pathetic privileged bloodline to an end for a long, long time.”

Toph gripped the Master Sword. “Just try it.”

Vaati obliged – he pointed a finger, and a bolt of shadow left his finger. The King caught the beam with his scepter, deflecting it to the side. “We may no longer have the gods on our side, but we are Hylians, dark wizard.”

“And not all their power of light is gone,” Toph said, holding the Master Sword high.

“The Triforce no longer gives that blade power.”

Toph smirked. “It’s not just the Triforce that was in here.” She swung the sword in the hourglass shape, freezing time. It was somewhat difficult to sense Vaati’s location, but she was able to triangulate from the direction everyone was looking. She drove the Master Sword through his body a dozen times before time resumed. “Somethin’ called the Phantom Hourglass, I think.”

Vaati’s body fell to pieces – then turned to dark, black smoke. The billowing smoke reformed the dark mage’s body in seconds. He fired a bolt of shadow at Toph. She tried to block it with a shield of earth, but the bolt moved too quickly. It hit her in the hands; forcing her to the ground and making her drop the Master Sword. “It is not enough,” Vaati said.

Corona fired her weapon, creating an unstable portal inches from Vaati. It tore off one of his arms, sucking it into a void of nothingness. He leaped back, holding the stump where his arm had been just a moment ago. Corona watched as he shrunk in size, reforming the arm with extra dark smoke.

“Just whale his form down!” Corona shouted. “It’ll be eno-“

Her gun was blasted out of her telekinesis. She was able to block the next spell with some minor difficulty. “Come on guys! Attack!”

Link drew his bow of light, firing holy arrows at Vaati. Vivian brought a spark of fire down on the shadow creature. Lady Rarity swung her hammer from a long distance. Zelda cast protection and healing spells on all her allies.

Vaati was expecting this. He let most of the attacks hit him, the fire and hammer doing absolutely nothing. He devoted all his time to dodging Link’s holy arrows, always moving closer to the hero in green.

“Midna!” Link shouted. “This isn’t working!”

“Shall we try darkness?” Midna asked.

“…You sure you want to do that?”

She nodded, producing a strange red Twili device. In its presence, Link’s form changed from that of a human to that of a dark, black wolf. Midna took her place on his back, hair forming a powerful limb in the air. Midna pointed a finger at Vaati and grinned. “Fight fire with fire.”

Twili power surrounded Link, a mixture of darkness and strange, red magic. He bounded toward Vaati, mouth open in a roar. Zelda cast a power spell on him, and Corona added her own buff.

Vaati held out his hand, shooting another bolt of shadow, but Link and Midna absorbed it.

“What’s the matter?” Midna mocked, grabbing Vaati with her hair. “Can’t take your own power?”

Link drove his mouth right into Vaati’s chest, opening him up. Midna reached for the part of him that was his soul, attempting to rip it right out of the dark mage’s body. Corona aided with a well-aimed death spell, shaking the soul to its core.

But just like how Midna had absorbed Vaati’s power, he absorbed the darkness flying at him. Without emotion, he kneed Link in the jaw. The wolf went flying, whimpering from a broken jaw.

Midna stood alone, still holding onto Vaati’s soul. “You’re not getting rid of me.”

Vaati flicked her. She did fly off of him, but as she did so her power tore into his soul, forcing him to scream in pain, a scream that should have come when his arm was torn off but a few minutes ago.

Corona and Zelda moved as one, trying to trap Vaati in a cage of light magic.

He punched right through. “The light of this world has faded, princess. Your powers are no longer absolute. Nor is your hero’s. And this unicorn can do nothing to me.”

Corona growled. “Ideas?” She muttered.

I got nothing, sorry, came Sombra’s reply.

Corona shook her head. She fired a beam of light, but Vaati stopped it with nothing but a hand. The feedback shorted Corona’s horn out.

Zelda took a step back. “Where… Where is this darkness coming from? Our light was taken, but so was the darkness!”

“This darkness is my own,” Vaati said.

“And my light is mine,” The King said, stepping down from his throne. “Vaati, I-“

Vaati shot the King again. This time he wasn’t able to deflect it with the scepter – he fell to the ground.

“Father!” Zelda shouted, running to him. She would have been shot too, were it not for Lady Rarity placing her hammer in just the right place to stop the attack.

For her troubles, the spirid was tossed to the side with another burst of dark energy.

Vaati appeared above Zelda and the king, holding up his hand for a killing blow.

“Vaati,” Lieshy said. “Do you not wish to explain yourself to your victims?”

“They know what they did.”

“I doubt they do. Who are you? Why has their success insulted you? What did they do – these individuals – to deserve this?”

“I am Vaati. My people are the Minish. We were crushed by your existence. You plowed through everything, not stopping to think that maybe there were tiny people living where you decided to make home. You cleared us away, thinking we were worth nothing, thinking we were legends.”

Zelda’s eyes widened. “…Wait…”

“You should have been the Minish this time, crushed by what you found beyond. But you weren’t. You were shown appreciation where we got none. You were protected. You were seen. That is a grace you didn’t deserve. You deserve to fall.”

Lieshy continued. “That may be the case, but don’t you thi-“

Lieshy got a shadow spark to the face for her words. “I grow tired of your stalling.”

Vivian grabbed Vaati by the leg. She tried to pull him ínto her pocket void, but he destroyed the very ground she was trying to drag him into.

Some of the guards thought they should try to do something, but they were tossed aside like bowling pins. He moved toward the forms of the King and Zelda. “Hyrule ends now.”

~~~

Eve turned to the three friends that were with her. “I’m sorry to ask you to do this. I know none of you like war, violence, or anything like it. But Zelda is our friend. I cannot help her as the Charter – but I can help her as the Princess of Friendship.”

“I understand,” Flutterfree said.

“We still try all nonviolent options first,” Eve reminded them. “I’d much rather Renee be with us, but… She’s occupied. So it falls to us.”

Pinkie nodded. “We’ll do our best!”

“But prepare for the worst,” Nova added.

Eve pulled out her dimensional device. “We should go right to Hyrule Castle. Don’t provoke the guards by shouting this time, okay?”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “That was one time!”

“One time that should never have happened,” Eve insisted. She activated her device, tearing a hole through space and time.

The four of them saw the carnage of a battle that was not going well – unconscious bodies everywhere, blood spattered on the ground, and a dark mage hovering over Zelda and her father, a hand raised.

Eve wasted no time. She launched a spell at Vaati, throwing him into a nearby wall. His smoked form repaired all the damage to his back quickly. He clenched his fist. “You just keep coming…”

Eve, Nova, and Pinkie stood firm while Flutterfree rushed to tend to the King. Eve cleared her throat. “I don’t know who you are, but you will not hurt our friends.”

“You are mistake-“

Eve teleported herself, Vaati, Nova, and Pinkie out of the castle hall and into the courtyard. “I don’t think I am.”

Vaati’s expression remained flat. He pointed a finger, launching a bolt of darkness. Eve absorbed it into her horn and cast a dark spell in return – a swarm of razor sharp knives hit him from all sides. Pinkie followed this up with a smash from a warhammer, knocking him to the ground.

“How did… You touch me?”

“I’m cheating,” Pinkie said.

“So am I,” Nova said, somehow in three places at once. Each location shot a beam of light at Vaati, burning him on all sides. With a quick motion, he repelled all their attacks. He shot a dark sphere of energy out from his center, forcing Nova and Pinkie to retreat to a safe distance.

Eve did no such thing; she took the full force of the attack head on, once again channeling it into her horn. This time she attempted a magic lock spell on Vaati, successfully chaining his leg before it dissipated into smoke.

Pinkie appeared behind Vaati and trapped him inside a giant lantern. She flicked the on switch, baking him in the light designed to pierce the darkness.

Vaati transformed into smoke, shifting out through the cracks in the glass, appearing again nearer to the castle. His form was smaller, but just as powerful. He moved faster than before, unleashing two powerful snakes of darkness from his fingers, both aimed at Eve. She could not absorb these quickly enough – they tangled her up in an ever-tightening knot. She was forced to teleport out of the hold.

Nova darted in from the side, moving far faster than any pony had any right to. She hit Vaati six times with her hoof before he caught her, hand right on her leg. He twisted it, forcing her to the ground with a snap. She yelled out in pain, shuddering from the intense sensation.

Pinkie put on the Bomb Mask, exploding to drive Vaati away from Nova. She played a quick round of golf with the black sage, tossing him through the windows of three separate residences with a single stroke. “Fore!”

Eve teleported above Vaati, charging magic into her horn. She blasted him from above, driving him far into the road of the city. Nova took the opportunity to fashion a splint for her broken leg, forcing herself to stand up on her three remaining limbs. She teleported to the new scene of the fight.

Vaati let himself explode again, taking out several buildings in the process. The tremor shook the entire city, lighting fires in the streets.

Zelda could no longer see the fight from where she was, but she could see the smoke, the fire, and feel the explosions.

Her city was being destroyed.

The war hadn’t even begun.

“Hold still!” Flutterfree told the King. “You shouldn’t be walking on that!”

“I have to,” he said. “My people need me to stand strong against all darkness. I must fight to the bitter end! Never give in!”

“You’re hurting yourself!” Flutterfree chided. “You can’t fight at the expense of yourself! It’ll just kill you!”

“But it may help my people. Come, we must address the army. We can give your friends assistance…” He limped toward a door in the side of the throne hall, using his scepter as a cane. “We will not be able to win the war if we do not resolve this quickly. They will strike us when we’re down…”

Zelda nodded. “Right, father. Come, Flutterfree.”

“…Okay. I still think this is a bad idea.”

Zelda matched pace with the King. “What is our plan now?”

“Fight with what we had all along – Hylian power. The Hylian army. We will prove our honor through the battle stacked against us. Vaati will not be allowed to do much more damage – the Charter-Princess outclasses him, I am sure. What damage he has done will not ruin our army. We will fight a long, brutal war, likely more brutal than any other war we’ve been in. But we will not fall.”

Zelda glanced out a window to ponder this. She noticed a lot of flashing lights. “What are they doing?”

“Teleport-based fight,” Flutterfree answered. “They try to outmaneuver each other by appearing in random locations and teleporting each other around.” She stared at the colorful battle herself. “…Sometimes I wish I could help them at times like this.”

“Not everyone’s place is the battlefield,” the King said. “Our roles may involve intelligence or finesse in the battle. We all fight in our own way. It doesn’t matter how, so long as you are willing to go to the final breath.” The King wheezed.

“Do you have a doctor here?” Flutterfree asked.

“I’ll see the doctor when I’m done with this…”

Vaati teleported in front of the King with a flash of darkness, his body currently the size of a housecat. In an instant, he drove a bolt of darkness right through the old man’s heart.

“Father!” Zelda yelled. Had Eve not teleported in front of her with a shield, she would have been next. Nova pulled Vaati out of there with her own teleport. The encounter with the teleporting fight had lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough.

Zelda saw her father on the ground. He wasn’t breathing, his eyes were vacant, but his lips were still moving.

Must keep fighting, he mouthed, over and over. Had he been able to speak, it would have been a mantra.

Flutterfree pulled her hoof away from his arm and looked at Zelda, tears in her eyes. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

Zelda turned away from her father and Flutterfree, walking toward the entryway. She walked down the stairs into the castle courtyard and fell to her knees. She rammed her fists into the ground and started bawling her eyes out, screaming toward the heavens. She wanted to shout to the gods, to demand why, to blame them.

But she knew they were no longer there.

She only had herself to blame.

This was her folly.

She felt a hand on her shoulder – it was Link, back in his Hylian form. He was limping, but very much alive.

“You… You don’t need to say… Anything,” she said.

He didn’t. He just kept his hand on her shoulder.

Zelda forced herself to look forward – and she saw them. A Goron, a Deku, and a Rito. Rock, bush, and bird. They were clearly warriors. Here to declare the war, coming to her despite the explosions all around. They were serious.

Why did they have to show up now…? She wasn’t presentable. She couldn’t be presentable. There was no way this was okay, none at all. Everything was wrong, and they were just here to make it worse. They…

Vaati fell out of the sky, currently the size of a mouse. Twilight lit her horn, driving a white sphere into his essence. He dodged – but fell right into Nova’s trap. A swirling sphere of blackness absorbed the rest of his essence. He said nothing as he became nothing. He didn’t even let his face shift to anger – merely maintaining contempt.

“Got him!” Nova said. “We-“

“YOU ARE BRUTES!” the Deku scrub shouted. “VIOLENT, HORRID, HONORLESS BRUTES!”

Eve strode up to them. “I assure you, this being was one of darkness, attacking the Hylian family without provocat-“

“BRUTES!” the scrub screamed again. “You are not worth our time! Princess Zelda, tell your father we are at war!”

“Skipping the formalities?” Link spat.

“You don’t deserve formalities, not after what I’ve seen here.”

Zelda looked the Deku shrub in the eyes. “My father is dead.”

“Then we declare war on you, Zelda Hyrule.”

Zelda wiped her eyes, turning to the Goron and the Rito. “Does he speak for all of you?”

The Rito nodded. The Goron hesitated a moment, but did as well.

“Very well,” Zelda said.

Eve turned to Zelda. “Zelda, I ca-“

Zelda stood up tall, looking around. Much of her city was destroyed. The courtyard was a horrid mess. Those people she could see were either scared, or angry. Many of these emotions were directed at Eve and her friends. …The spectacle had not helped matters.

Must keep fighting…

“No,” Zelda said under her breath.

“What was that?!” the scrub demanded.

“There will be no war.”

“WE’RE NOT GIVING YOU A CHOICE!”

Zelda turned to Link for a moment. She shook her head. “There will be no war because…” She hung her head. “Hyrule surrenders unconditionally.”

The three messengers blinked. Eve blinked. Link was the only one who didn’t look surprised.

Zelda held out her hands. “Take me and do with me what you will.”

“Zelda!” Eve called. “Think about-“

“This is how it needs to be, Eve. Don’t try to help me. You were right not to fight the war for us.”

“I… was?”

“Yes. …This is how you change people. Doing something different. I won’t fight for honor. Honor does not come from fighting to the bitter end.”

Eve turned to Link. He sighed, saying nothing.

“Go to your world,” Zelda said. “This one will not want anything to do with you for the foreseeable future.”

Eve held out a hoof to Zelda. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

Zelda shook her hoof. “I’m sorry too.” She glanced at Link, then back at the Deku Scrub. “…Actually, my surrender has one condition.”

“What?” the Scrub demanded.

“…You must leave New Termina alone.”

“Done,” the Goron said.

Link bowed to Zelda. “…Thank you.”

“Live your life, Link.”

“…I will.”

“Goodbye,” Zelda said. The Rito tied her wrists up and led her away. Eve, Flutterfree, Nova, Pinkie, Link, and Midna watched her go.

“…This is wrong,” Flutterfree said.

“There was never any way this was going to end withsomething right,” Eve said. “Let’s go. We aren’t welcome in this world anymore. Link… It was nice getting to know you.”

Link bowed to her. “Eve, you’ve done so much for us that we will never repay. Go and do the same for other worlds. Do not let their rejections deter you – what you do is good. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t,” Eve assured him. “…You’re welcome in the Hub anytime.”

“I still have my device,” Link said. “Don’t worry. I’ll visit.”

“Good.” Eve opened a portal back to Equis Vitis. “But also… Live your life, Link. Your family needs you.”

Link nodded. “I’m not planning on abandoning them for anything.”

Eve smiled sadly. Then they left the world of Ardent – a world that had once been filled with friends, that was now a world of enemies.

~~~

Renee stared at the messenger that had ran up to her the moment she left the meeting with Yellow Diamond. “She did what while I was in there!?”

“Zelda surrendered,” the messenger mare said. “I don’t know why.”

“Wh – why? We weren’t able to help her, but… She could have fought! She- Ugh, I should have been there.”

O’Neill shook his head. “We were busy.”

“What did we accomplish today, O’Neill? Not that much. They have ‘agreed’ to be ‘friends’ but really they still think of us as basically animals. Most of them will only treat us with anything approaching respect because we have something they want. I admit, that’s good, but was it really worth being here instead of there?”

“She found the solution with the least death,” Adama said. “You may not be able to see why she would surrender, but I do.”

“Some things are more important than winning,” Cosmo said. “…There will be times where the right answer is giving up.”

Renee blinked. “But how can we know that this was one of those moments?”

“Renee, we were never going to fight Zelda’s war for her, not like this. You know this, you know why we wouldn’t.”

Renee nodded. “It would set bad precedent and prove our most vocal detractors correct, yes, I get the idea. But there were other things we could have done.”

“Perhaps,” Cosmo said. “But we don’t know the entire situation from here. It’s likely that other paths of assistance were given – or wouldn’t work for other reasons. Given how fast the situation escalated, I think it would have exploded regardless of what any of us did. Adama is right – this way, there will be little to no death on any of the sides. We won’t have to make a show of power to stop the war in its tracks, Zelda won’t have to lead her entire kingdom into battle, and the opposing armies won’t even have to march across the land.”

“She was willing to sacrifice her pride,” Adama said. “It’s something I wish I saw in more people.”

“Her pride and her honor…” Renee said, mulling the thoughts over. “I still don’t like it.”

“I don’t either,” Cosmo said. “Giving up, even when it is the right move, is something horrid to experience. We will need to stand by her in these tough times, not as allies, but as friends.”

The messenger coughed. “Ardent is moving to cut off all ties to any other worlds, and Zelda has been taken prisoner. That will be difficult.”

Cosmo sighed. “They projected on to us, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

Cosmo shook her head. “Depressing.”

“I can go change their minds,” Discord offered. “Wouldn’t be that hard.”

“Using force to twist an internal conflict our way is what we wanted to avoid in the first place,” Cosmo pointed out.

“What is the line?” Renee wondered. “Where is the line between ‘let them sort it out themselves’ and ‘we need to get involved’?”

“It’s a poorly defined line,” O’Neill said. “But, the way I see it, it’s like this. Is one of the sides evil? Yes? Then we fight them.”

Renee frowned. “A poor definition…”

“This kind of policy cannot be definitely defined – nor should it,” Cosmo said. “The multiverse is so wide and vast, making even a vague regulation for interference could ruin anything. We have to admit that we’ll make mistakes – lots of them – in what we choose to help, hinder, or just observe.”

Renee looked into the distance at the beautiful Gem cities of their Homeworld. “And this time… This time we made the ‘right’ decision as politicians, as leaders. But was it the right decision of a friend?”

“You will have to decide that for yourself, Renee.”

“…I know.”

~~~

Link sat on a hill, looking down at Hyrule Castle and the city that surrounded it. Most of the smoke had cleared, revealing that there hadn’t been too much damage in the battle with Vaati. But all was not right – all of Hyrule’s flags had been taken down. Replaced with nothing. Already squads of Rito, Gorons, and Deku had moved around the city, subjugating it. There were some citizens who tried to fight, but they were few, far between, and rarely any real threat to the ‘invaders’.

He wiped a tear from his eye.

Midna shifted on his shoulder. “…I want to go down there and kill them all. We could do that, you know.”

“The real armies would arrive,” Link said. “We couldn’t stand against them all.”

“Resistance is an option.”

“Zelda made her decision Midna, we just have to let this happen.”

Midna sighed, folding her arms around her knees. “Some heroes of Hyrule we are.”

“…The line of heroes ended with the Triforce,” Link said. “We are the last calling.”

“I know. What a way to end.”

“The source of most of the darkness in our world will never harm anyone again. Majora’s influence will fade from this world in a few years.”

“But what of the darkness Vaati found?”

“There will always be darkness and light, Midna. It’s needed. But there will be no more need for us to be there.”

The Happy Mask Salesman was standing next to them. “I was hoping I could make that not be the case. But even I cannot change something so fundamental.”

Link laughed bitterly. “Back from your trip?”

“I know precisely how to destroy all three opposing kingdoms with carefully executed plans. I could still tell you.”

“Don’t bother.” Link shook his head.

The Happy Mask Salesman looked through reality itself, at something Link couldn’t see. “For once, I am uncertain of something. I do not know if this is destiny, a change in destiny, or a lack of destiny.”

“Mixture of all three?” Midna suggested.

The Happy Mask Salesman let out his signature unnerving laugh. “You are wise beyond your years, Twilight Princess.”

“That title is defunct and you know it.”

“It fit,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be returning to this world. Everything is done.”

“No more darkness?” Link asked.

“Malladus is gone, Ganondorf is gone, Vaati is gone, Beldum is gone, and Majora is gone. The great evils have either left, been vanquished by you, or by otherworldly powers. No longer will these powers constantly be reborn time and time again. There is no more source of darkness to perpetuate them.”

“But the Goddess of Time won’t bring us back, either,” Link said. “I… Am the last of the heroes of courage.”

“In this universe, at least,” the Happy Mask Salesman confirmed. “It may not look like it, but this world has been saved. Completely. Forever. You should be proud, even in this time of sorrow.”

Link nodded. “Thank you, Salesman, for these words.”

“I do what I can.” He gave a wave – and then vanished. Behind him stood Toph.

“What a weirdo,” she commented, sitting down next to Link.

Link glanced at the Master Sword she had in her hand. “How’s the blade treating you?”

“It’s pretty sweet,” she said, flipping it over and over in her hands.

“You need to take it away from this world,” Link said. “I think it may be the last source of eternal power we have to offer. The Sands of Life themselves are infused in that blade. They’re what give it power over time. This world no longer needs such a powerful artifact within it – and I think it knew that the moment Majora was defeated. That’s why it lets you wield it. It knew there would be no foretold heroes after me, so it gave itself to you.”

Toph clutched the sword in her hands. “Why?”

“I don’t think even it has a purpose in mind. It found you worthy, and felt it needed to do something out there. Anything.”

Toph nodded. “…Why didn’t it hurt Vaati?”

“It did,” Midna said. “He just tried not to show it. All darkness hates the sword. Even I don’t like being near it.”

Toph smirked. “He ever stab you with it?”

Midna smirked. “Oh, you haven’t heard the story?”

Link facepalmed. “That was one time! I thought you’d turned into a demon!”

“And I don’t look like a demon now? …Or do you mean I looked like a giant bug?”

Link shook his head. “Seriously, sometimes I wonder about you.”

Midna nudged him with a playful smile. “Come on, you’d be bored without me.”

Link smiled. He pulled her in and gave her a noogie.

“Hey! Hey! Stop it! Ackpth!”

Toph chuckled. “You two… You sure Romani isn’t jealous?”

“I’m sure,” Link said, releasing Midna.

“I’m like a built in sister, or something,” Midna commented. “I am going to be the worst aunt. Literal devil on the shoulder.”

“I am so not looking forward to that,” Link muttered.

Toph smiled, standing up. “I think you guys will be fine. See you around. I’ll tell you what me and this sword get up to.”

The two nodded and waved as Toph earthbended down the hill on a wave of rock.

There was one more visitor to the hill before the day was over.

Renee stepped out of a portal, the Mask of Truth on her face. Link looked at her, frowning.

“This is how I came to you first,” Renee said, looking at him with the eye of the mask. “I had broken myself by taking everything too far. You showed me what was really going on, what people really were, and… And helped me onto the path to be what I am now.” She removed the mask from her face and adjusted her hat. “I should have been here.”

Link smiled sadly. “Maybe… But the more I think about it, the more I think this needed to happen this way.”

“I’m not saying I would have changed anything by being here, I’m saying I needed to be here,” Renee explained. “This place… It’s important to me. And I left it so I could deal with some aliens.”

“Your job is important, Renee.”

“So is this world.”

The two fell into silence.

Midna sighed. “Look, both of you. What’s done is done; you don’t need to keep trying to feel guilty about it. Chin up and get on with your lives. Seriously.”

Renee allowed herself to smile sadly. “Midna, you’re right. What’s done is done.”

“There isn’t much we can do about it now,” Link continued.

“In the future, maybe Ardent will want to join with us again,” Renee said. “But if they don’t, that’s their choice. It’s always been their choice.”

Link nodded. He reached into his pack and pulled out the Bow of Light. “…Renee, I want you to have this.”

“Dear…”

“I have no need for it anymore. It’s not as powerful or as legendary as the Master Sword, but… But it’s something.”

Renee levitated the arcane artifact toward her eyes, the holy energy exciting her senses. “…Is it okay if I give this to Flutterfree? She’s been needing something to use in a fight.”

Link smiled. “Giving someone strength is the best thing that bow can do. I trust her to only use it for good.”

Renee smiled. “Thank you, Link. For… Everything you’ve done.”

“Thank you Renee, for everything you’ve done.”

“Oh come on…” Midna facepalmed. “This isn’t goodbye. You’ll still see us around!”

“Right,” Renee said, smiling sheepishly. “Ahem. In that case, I’ll... see you around.”

Link bowed his head. “Until then, Renee.”

She left, leaving Link alone with Midna to watch the sunset.

Corona watched it from another hill, eyes sorrowful. She did not know what to think about these events. She didn’t think she ever would.

She knew Sombra was sending her messages on her sunglasses, but she wasn’t in the mood right now. She just… wanted to watch the sunset here at least once.

It was beautiful.

~~~

Roughly a week later, the sun rose on Equis Vitis. A handful of minutes later, Princess Celestia looked up from her pad at Luna. “At least something good has come from this Ardent debacle.”

“Oh?” Luna said, looking up from her own pad.

“The activists attacking us for too much interference and destruction of culture have finally lost their fire,” Celestia explained. “There’s now an argument of if we should have interfered or not. Significantly better than outright condemnation that we couldn’t really disprove.”

Luna smiled sadly. “That’s good.”

“It needed to happen. Those voices were getting loud enough to destabilize everything. …To be frank, it was probably one of those voices who leaked the information to Ardent. I wonder if they’re happy with the result, whoever they are.”

“I like to think not. I like to think they’re filled with rage that their plan didn’t work. But now they can’t do much. Their movement has lost its fire.”

“And for that, we can be thankful. I was afraid their complaints would actually come to something – but we learned quickly. It’s much better to argue about which situations should be interfered with than to have a general consensus that we interfere too much. That argument actually goes somewhere and helps us develop as a people.”

“You’re speaking like we’re all one people, Tia.”

Celestia smiled coyly.

“…You have that smile, Tia. That smile that says you know something.”

“Oh, really? No, I never know anything.”

Luna smirked and rolled her eyes. “Fine, keep your secrets. I’m sure you’ll tell me eventually.”

Celestia nodded. “Well, I, for one, want some breakfast. There’s apparently a new dish from ‘Earth Ottoman’ that we’re going to really love.”

“I reserve the right to judge the meal harshly at a later time.”

Celestia chuckled.

Somewhere else, in a distant plane and planet, another Luna looked at the same report Princess Celestia had seen.

The Mistress looked to Siron and Ganondorf. “…Our ideas are being worked out.”

Ganondorf folded his arms. “We never needed their sympathy.”

“It would have helped, but it was never necessary,” Siron added.

“So… Nothing has changed?” the Mistress asked.

“Nothing,” Siron assured her. “Our power is still building, and they will know what it means soon. The question of interference will be the last thing on their mind when everything comes to fruition.”

037 - Six... Six... Six...

The room was dark, damp, and metallic. Pipes snaked along the vaulted ceiling, carrying who knew what to who knew where. Some dripped, though it was unclear if the dripping was water, or if the pipe was even the source of the liquid. Greasy stains lined the floor, some in the shape of small footprints. An ever-present cloud of dust filled the air – not hindering vision so much as hindering comfortable breathing.

It was in this empty place that a portal appeared, leading right to the green pastures of Equis Concrete. Pinkie, Nova, Flutterfree, and Renee stepped through. The ponies overseeing the portal – the Twilight known as Dawn and the Pinkie known as Diane – remained on their side, waving them along.

“Interesting place,” Nova said, tapping her hoof on the ground. “Dawn, why did you want us to come here?”

“Look at the portal,” Dawn said.

It didn’t take long for them to realize – from the vantage point of the four ponies in the new world, the portal was moving, receding away at a slow rate.

Renee put a hoof to her chin. “Curious… I don’t believe that’s happened before…”

Pinkie perked up her ears, stamping her hooves on the ground. She leaned side to side, thinking. She stuck her tongue in the air.

“Pinkie sense acting up?” Flutterfree asked, trying to find the most comfortable way to fly with the bow of light on her back.

“Nope. Just doing science!” Pinkie pulled a level out of her mane and set it on the ground. The bubble in the liquid shifted slowly to the left, then to the right.

“We’re… rocking?” Nova said. “Weird.”

“We’re on a boat,” Renee deduced. “A very large boat, given the size of this maintenance shaft.”

Dawn facehooved. “Well if that’s all it is, we really didn’t have a reason to call you…”

“We’ll explore anyway,” Pinkie assured her.

“We’ve opened portals on moving objects before,” Flutterfree pointed out. “The portal never moved.”

“That was when the objects weren’t on a planet,” Nova reminded her. “The portals adhere to gravity. Otherwise we’d dial empty space most of the time because virtually every planet moves. Stars do too.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I thought I read a study that portals sometimes adhered to large structures as well?” Renee said. “Due to magic, or some other reason.”

“That… might be true.”

“It would explain why the portal’s moving so slowly,” Diane called from across the portal. “Boats move faster than this.”

“Clearly not something we fully understand,” Pinkie chirped. “We’ll dial back ourselves. You may need to save us from the zebra jungles!”

“You’re moving west,” Dawn commented.

“Then… Uh…” Pinkie shrugged. “There’s nothing evil out in your west is there?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Great. I’ll think of something clever to say later, I just know it.”

“You two better close the portal, you’re about to hit a wall,” Flutterfree commented.

“Right. See you in a couple hours!” Dawn called. Diane flashed them a smile and closed the portal.

The area was plunged into darkness. “Advanced darkness,” Pinkie corrected.

Renee and Nova lit their horns to brighten their surroundings. Their lights seemed small against the distant ceiling and darkness-shrouded walls.

“I say we follow the pipes!” Pinkie called.

Flutterfree flew up to the ceiling, tapping one of the pipes. “This one’s empty… This one’s broken…”

“We can follow an empty one, Flutterfree,” Nova called.

“Found one with flowing water!” Flutterfree called down, tapping one of the larger pipes. “It goes that way.”

“There be booty that way, matey!” Pinkie said, drawing a pirate’s cutlass and pointing in the direction Flutterfree indicated. “Today, we plunder this ship for its riches!”

Everypony rolled their eyes, knowing their pink poofy leader wasn’t being serious. They followed her bouncing form in a formation – Nova and Renee flanking, Flutterfree flying overhead, glancing behind them every so often. They had been ambushed one too many times over the years in dark places like this; it would be embarrassing if they let it happen yet again.

“I used to be terrified of these places,” Flutterfree commented. “Now? Dark and damp seems to be a recurring theme in the multiverse. All I want now is a coat.”

“Sorry, no coats right now!” Pinkie said.

Nova rolled her eyes. “And suddenly you’ll have all the coats we could possibly need when we’re on a beach world or something.”

“Exactly!”

“What I wouldn’t pay to get a rulebook to your powers.”

“It’s only a matter of time, Nova.”

Flutterfree glanced to Pinkie. “Are we at least close to getting answers about that?”

Pinkie just laughed.

“Take that as a ‘not even close’,” Renee suggested.

Pinkie decided to walk backwards so she could grin cheekily at them.

Nova facehooved. “That smile haunts my nightmares.”

“I find it comforting,” Flutterfree offered.

“There’s no way that smile doesn’t cause at least little nightmares.”

“Ding!” Pinkie blurted.

Renee opened her mouth to comment, but something caught her eye in front of them. “Girls!” She called, pointing. Everypony snapped to attention, glancing in the direction Renee pointed.

Standing on top of a wooden crate was a human child – a girl – in a yellow raincoat slightly too large for her. The features of her face aside from her mouth were all hidden from sight with the raincoat’s hood.The mouth itself was frozen in a gasp of fear.

“Wait, don-“ Renee began, but the sound of Renee’s voice after the moment of silence startled the child out of her stupor. She leaped off the box and ran to one of the nearby walls.

“Wait!” Pinkie called. “We don’t want to hurt you! I’m Pinkie Pie!” She bounced after her, the others joining the chase.

Nova lit her horn in preparation to grab the child, but the kid was too fast. She slid through a hole in the wall’s metallic siding, leaving Nova’s sight range. The four ponies pulled themselves through the opening soon thereafter but there was no sign of the child once they were through, finding only a bunch of boxes packed in the space between walls.

There was a strange creature sitting next to a large, lit lantern. It was scrawny, humanoid, and had a cone-shaped head that looked as if it were made of bark. The cone might actually have been its head.

It glanced at them – not that they could see its eyes. It seemed not to care about their presence.

“Uh… hello?” Nova asked.

The creature continued warming itself at the lantern, paying them no further attention.

“…Creepy,” Flutterfree said.

Pinkie poked her head out of a nearby crate. “Don’t see the girl!”

Flutterfree landed on the top box of a tall stack, looking around. “…Can’t see far in this darkness. She could be hiding anywhere.”

“I have a question,” Renee said. “…Why is this crawlspace so large? It’s more like a narrow shed than an area you’d build between two walls!”

Pinkie shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe these people just like to build big things.”

“Then why aren’t the boxes huge?”

Nova popped the top off one of the boxes and examined the contents. “…Powder.” She sniffed it. “I think it’s seasoning.”

Pinkie stuffed her face into the box Nova had opened and ate an entire mouthful of the powder. “Huh! Saffron.”

Nova gagged from the sight of Pinkie downing the dry seasoning. “Okay, so maybe this box is big. That’s a lot of saffron.”

“If this place opens up trade with us the Hub is going to have a field day,” Renee commented. “Saffron isn’t cheap.”

Then the lantern went out. The cone-headed creature let its arms sag in disappointment.

“Don’t worry,” Renee said, lighting the lantern with her own magic. “Have some more.”

The creature looked to her, made strange twitching motion with its head, and then continued to warm itself.

Nova pointed at the far wall. “I thought I saw some light over there, when it was dark.”

“I was able to see the creature…” Renee noted. The group moved where Nova had pointed, and they found another break in the wall. They filed out into a room much smaller than the one they had been in previously – but still far too large for them. It was cubical, empty, and had a single window off to one side.

They saw, for the first time, a doorway. There was no door in it – there didn’t need to be. The towering hole in the wall made them realize how small they truly were even with nothing between its frame. It was easily three stories high, maybe four, and it led out into a much more expansive room they couldn’t even see the ends of.

Maybe the ship wasn’t big. Maybe they were tiny.

“…Have we ever found a world of giants before?” Renee asked.

“No…” Flutterfree said, shaking her head. “And that worries me…”

“But the girl and the creature were the right size,” Nova said.

Pinkie pursed her lips. “This place was not made for them.”

“Or us,” Flutterfree commented.

Pinkie bounced out of the doorway into the expansive space. Behind them, there was a wall that rose as high as they could see, until the dusty air made it impossible to see further. There was a soft blue light somewhere far above them, clearly artificial, telling them there was a ceiling up there, somewhere. In the place where the sky should have been, they saw long cables carrying sacks and crates to and from locations they couldn’t lay their eyes on.

“Transport network?” Renee wondered aloud. “A wide open space for lines to carry things everywhere in the ship… Heavens, there’s no way we could explore even a fraction of this place on our own. We need to find someone to help us. Guide us.”

Flutterfree flew up, examining the wall behind them. “I see brighter lights through some of these windows,” she said. “I don’t see any giants though.”

“As good a place to look as any,” Nova said, teleporting up to her and pressing her face to a window. “Looks like… an apartment.”

It did look like an apartment – for a giant. It had everything a person would need: bed, dresser, and even a bathroom. There was no occupant, but the lightbulb in the ceiling was on.

Nova teleported them onto the inner windowsill. It was just wide enough to hold a single pony, giving them a good view of the expansive room. Now that they were inside, it didn’t look quite as normal. The shelves were extremely tall, going all the way up to the ceiling, while the bed was comparatively low – almost no legs on it at all.

“It’s too short…” Renee muttered.

“How can you say it’s too short!?” Flutterfree blurted. “It’s taller than we are!”

“For a being of the size that fits through that doorway, it’s short,” Renee corrected, leaping down onto the bed. “And the everything else is too tall. Very inconsistent.”

“Maybe this guy is a weird artist type,” Nova suggested.

“Don’t see any pieces of art,” Renee pointed out.

“The art is in the roooooom!” Pinkie droned ominously.

Flutterfree rolled her eyes, flying to the door that led out of the room. She had to use her entire body to turn the door handle, but it didn’t take too much effort. The door swung inward, then outward, swinging with the rocking of the ship. Nova used her magic to open it the rest of the way, leading into a hallway.

There was nothing in the hallway besides a lightbulb – also on. The walls were green, and they could see a handful of other doors. They filed out into the space, looking for signs of life – but all that came was an eerie silence.

“I swear, there’s nobody here,” Nova said. “It’s like they all vanished!”

Renee adjusted her hat and narrowed her eyes, looking around with her careful eyes. She saw signs of large boots hitting the wooden floor they were standing on, but she couldn’t tell how recent these marks were. Being this small made it easy to see the details, but there was nothing for her to form a conclusion with.

As it turned out, she didn’t have to. They heard a door open behind the one at the end of the hall, and then the thump of giant footsteps. They stood firm as the scuffling steps approached the hall door. The knob turned, and the door swung in with a painful creak.

The creature that stood in the doorway was surely a giant – but not the giant any of them were expecting. Its head only reached about halfway to the top of the doorway, due to its extremely short legs. The miniscule limbs below contrasted highly with the giant’s arms, which were four times longer than they needed to be. Its clothes were old and ragged, but well fitted to its unusual body size, complete with sleeves that reached all the way to the grimy, wrinkled hands.

The head was the worst – it looked as if someone had taken the skin of a human being and pulled it as far back as possible, elongated the ears, and extruded the chin. A blindfold wrapped over where the giant’s eyes should have been. The cloth had been there so long it had essentially fused to the giant’s head, and it stank so much from years of use.

Flutterfree forced down her gag reflex. She flew up toward the blind giant, forcing a smile. “Hello, I’m Flutterfree. Can you understand me?”

The giant paused, listening closely. It made a strange clicking noise with its tongue that didn’t sound like language.

“I’m in front of you, flying. I can land, if you want.”

The giant’s response was to grab Flutterfree with one of his outrageously long arms, squeezing her tightly. Flutterfree screamed in surprise and fear.

“FLUTTERFREE!” Nova shouted, lighting her horn.

The blind giant heard this, turning its attention to the three of them. It made an inhuman growling, clicking noise. It reached for her with its other hand.

~~~

Applebloom and Scootaloo were walking Sweetie Belle through the Pinkie Emporium of Ponyville, back to the lobby of the park’s hotel.

“I didn’t think rollercoasters were allowed to go off the rails!” Scootaloo shouted. “That was the best way to end the day!”

Applebloom nodded. “Yeah. Ah haven’t had that much fun in… Well, forever.”

“I can’t believe I never checked out the Pinkie Emporium before today,” Sweetie added. “My life was incomplete before today and I didn’t even know it!”

“Reminds me of the days we used to go Crusading,” Scootaloo said. “Just the three of us doing things for the sake of doing them.”

“Yeah,” Sweetie said. “Those were some fun times we had.”

“…Includin’ the tree sap?” Applebloom asked.

“Well, not all of it was fun. But I can be nostalgic if I want, Applebloom.”

Scootaloo blinked. “We’re old enough to be nostalgic for childhood. Why do I think that’s weird?”

“Because you spend your time contemplating the psychology of blank flanks?” Applebloom suggested.

“Don’t we all do that?”

“Yer the one doin’ most the work with that now.”

Scootaloo nodded. “Guess that’s right… I miss you girls sometimes.”

“Ah’ll be back to it when things calm down at the farm,” Applebloom said. “You know it.”

“And you can always call me over,” Sweetie said.

“You have your League,” Scootaloo said, shaking her head. “Taking the Crusaders into other worlds might be a bit more important than dealing with the misguided filly or two here.”

“Maybe,” Sweetie admitted. “But don’t ever hesitate to call if you think you need me, okay Scootaloo?”

Scootaloo nodded. “You got it! …Hey, look, there’s the other yous.”

Sweetie looked ahead – sure enough, waiting at the front doors of the hotel were Sweetie Bot, Thrackerzod, and Sweetie Brute.

Sweetie waved to them – Bot and Brute waved back. Thrackerzod just nodded curtly.

“I’m feeling nostalgia again just looking at them,” Scootaloo commented.

“They’re not the same pony I was,” Sweetie reminded her.

“Right.”

“Bye then,” Applebloom said. “Looks like they want you for some adventure or somethin’.”

“Probably,” Sweetie admitted. “See you girls later!”

The Cutie Mark Crusaders parted ways, and the League of Sweetie Belles joined up. “So,” Sweetie said. “Squeaky not coming?”

A screen popped out of Sweetie Bot’s back, displaying the head of Squeaky Belle. “Sorry, busy with the war. You know how it is.”

“She does not,” Thrackerzod corrected. “I am the only one here who has any idea what a real war is like.”

Bot beeped. “The encounter with the Smooze does not qualify?”

“No. That does not qualify.”

“I know war!” Brute chimed in.

“You just know the idea of war. Frighteningly acquainted with it for somepony who’s never actually encountered it, I might add.”

“Yeah! The name Sweetie Brute will one day send fear into the hearts of ponykind! Muahahah!”

Squeaky cleared her throat. “Anyway, I can’t stay – I have to go. Enjoy yourselves without me. Get a souvenir!”

“I will acquire loot!” Bot said.

Sweetie Belle rolled her eyes. “So, Thrackerzod, how’d your mission for Eve go?”

“Adama’s ship is a piece of trash just waiting to explode and shatter the fabric of reality itself. It was clearly designed by idiots who didn’t understand that you can’t just randomly stick a core of power from beyond into every ship and think everything will operate normally. It does the exact same thing a hyperspace drive does except with a billion different drawbacks!”

“…Not well?”

“I recommended they gut that poor excuse for FTL out of their ship and replace it with one of the Tau’ri’s. I also pointed out that its very existence was rather insulting to certain individuals they wouldn’t want to anger by mistake. It’s currently in Cosmo’s Shipyard.”

Bot poked her head in between the two of them. “Did you at least figure out how it worked?”

“By the skin of its teeth,” Thrackerzod summarized. “Let’s just go somewhere, I need a vacation.”

“We can go to the Sinkhole!” Brute suggested. “Watch things explode!”

“Get exploded, you mean?” Sweetie said, raising an eyebrow.

“…Maybe not?”

“Yeah, no.” Sweetie shook her head. “We should try something maybe a bit more… relaxing?”

“Mushroom World?” Bot suggested.

“We went there last week,” Brute complained.

“There’s always more interesting stuff to see there,” Sweetie deliberated.

“That would defeat our purpose,” Thrackerzod said. “We are an exploration unit, like Pinkie’s. We’re supposed to go to places that have not been fully experienced.”

“So that leaves out me taking you to Yakyakistan or something,” Sweetie said.

“Negative,” Bot chirped. “You can explore your own world!”

“There is Tauryl…” Sweetie said, putting a hoof to her chin. “But I don’t know, last I heard the centaurs weren’t friendly. At all.”

“I would offer to take you to my plane of origin, but our bodies would not survive the transfer,” Thrackerzod said. “I will have to wait for your interdimensional adaption technologies to develop further.”

“I am ready to experience seventeen dimensions!” Bot cheered.

“The fact that you think you can count the dimensions amuses me.”

“I know! What about Esefem?” Brute asked. “We could have a Red vs Blue battle!”

“They have not cracked the respawn yet,” Thrackerzod pointed out.

“I don’t want to get shot even if I could respawn,” Sweetie said.

“Acquiring data…” Bot droned. “Ding! Rarely does anypony talk about the other races in Earth Tau’ri. They have a lot of space we don’t see much of!”

“The Asgard made themselves known a couple weeks ago,” Sweetie said.

“There are others though! Database has… Jaffa, Ori Remnant, Wraith, Traveler…”

“We get the idea. There’s a lot,” Thrackerzod commented. “This sounds like a good use of our time. Go where the ponies generally do not.”

“We’ll need to charter a ship…” Sweetie said.

“There are many available ships,” Thrackerzod said.

“We can steal one!” Brute shouted.

“No, we can use our connections to Eve to charter one,” Thrackerzod corrected.

“Heh. You said Charter and Eve in the same sentence by accident.”

“I swear I will never understand mortal humor in its entirety.”

Sweetie Belle pulled out her dimensional device and dialed the Hub. “We’ll need to use one of the higher-powered portals to get to Earth Tau’ri.”

“One is open to Earth Tau’ri right now for sixteen more minutes,” Bot informed them.

“Let’s get over there then. Thrackerzod?”

Thrackerzod nodded and lit her horn, teleporting them all into the Hub, towards the open gateway.

~~~

As powerful as Nova was, the sheer mass and force of the blind giant’s hand caught her completely off guard. Her shield broke with ease, but its presence made the hand fumble. She teleported out of the way, to the back end of the hall.

Pinkie appeared on top of the arm that held Flutterfree, pirate cutlass in hand. She stabbed the giant’s arm with it – doing as much damage as a needle would. It flailed in pain – but instead of dropping Flutterfree, it just squeezed tighter. “Gurk…”

The giant grabbed Pinkie with his other hand, but she was on his head the next instant. He grabbed her again, but she was standing on his shoe. He grabbed her again – definitely catching her – but she was somehow on top of his hand now. “Yeah, nice try. Nova! Can you teleport Flutterfree out?”

Nova lit her horn, focusing on Flutterfree. Somehow, the giant sensed what she was doing, rushing his free hand to her. She had to teleport herself out of the way. “He’s blind! How does-“

“He knows what we’re saying,” Renee realized.

The giant made a different sort of noise that might have been laughter.

“Then why doesn’t he say anything?” Nova demanded, firing a laser at the giant – regretting it as the pain made the giant squeeze Flutterfree again.

“Don’t think he wants to,” Pinkie said, appearing next to Flutterfree with a tub of lard in her hooves. “Gonna slide you right out of the-“

The giant rammed his hand into the ceiling, bonking Pinkie on the head. She twirled around and fell, bouncing off the floor like a rubber ball. The giant tried to grab her, but still couldn’t get any hold. With a huff, it apparently gave up – dashing out the door from which it had come.

Nova teleported after the blind monster, trying to get a lock on Flutterfree – but it turned through another door. The giant may have looked like it was a slow, lumbering fool, but its stride was huge even with those tiny legs. Nova wasn’t used to dealing with a space this large in a battle – sure she could teleport in and out of open spaces easily, but the distance was almost always closed quickly. Here, there was just so much distance.

Pinkie appeared next to her. “Let’s wait for him to slow down, then teleport her out of there. We have to be quiet though. DID YOU HEAR THAT RENEE?!”

Rene glared at Pinkie from the hallway floor, but nodded. Nova surrounded the three of them in magic and levitated them over the floor, making almost no noise as they flew through the air. They followed the sound of the lumbering giant – passing through what appeared to be a library with pony-size bookshelves, a room filled with cages, and a strange hall with a bunch of doors that were more normal size. Nova ignored all this – she just continued in her pursuit of the giant and Flutterfree.

The giant eventually stopped in a room with one of the cables they had seen running through it, a hook passing through every handful of seconds, all empty. This was apparently a place where things were loaded. If Nova had to guess, the things that were loaded were probably in the neatly tied bundles of white fabric.

Good thing she didn’t. She set herself, Nova, and Renee gently underneath the bottom shelf of a cabinet, where they could see the giant and Flutterfree. It took all of two seconds for Nova to initiate the teleport, removing Flutterfree from the giant’s grasp.

Unfortunately the sudden release of her lungs told Flutterfree’s body that it needed to get air into itself right now. She sucked in a tremendous gasp that the giant definitely heard. The giant lowered its hand to the ground and stuck it under the shelf where they were hiding. Nova initiated another teleport, this time taking them onto the top shelf. The giant did not hear them appear, and kept rooting around under the shelf.

Pinkie tapped Nova on the shoulder and pointed to the cable that ran through and out of the room. Nova nodded, levitating the four of them to one of the hooks and following it out. They soon entered the grand, expansive area they had been in before.

“I’m getting tired…” Nova said, struggling to keep her telekinesis up. “Three ponies and myself is draining.”

Flutterfree spread her wings and grabbed Renee to take the stress off Nova.

“Just set me on the wire!” Pinkie said. Nova didn’t question it, and wasn’t at all surprised when Pinkie started walking along the wire like it was solid ground that required no special balance at all. Now that the unicorn was levitating only herself, she was no longer struggling.

“So… Where do you think we’re going?” Flutterfree asked, setting Renee down on one of the moving hooks.

“Those white packages are probably what usually go on this line,” Nova said. “So wherever that goes.”

“Do we have any idea what was in those?”

“No,” Nova admitted. “But I’m sure we’ll find out.”

It took about a minute for the hook to make it to the other side. The wall appeared identical to the one they had left behind; just as damp, dusty, and dreary.

There was one difference though – they smelled something good. Someone was cooking.

Pinkie sniffed. “Meat. Huh. I hope there’s bacon. I love bacon.”

“That does sound good,” Flutterfree commented.

Renee shook her head. “You are all getting too used to consuming meat. ...To be fair, I am too.”

Flutterfree shrugged.

The hook entered the wall, and they found themselves in a giant pile of the wrapped white containers, each one around their size. They leaped onto the top of the pile and quickly discovered what the packages were – meat.

“Oh, so mister lanky was a butcher,” Renee deduced. “Wonder why we didn’t actually see any meat there though…”

“Why would you need to butcher on a boat?” Flutterfree asked. “Butchering suggests live animals. But on a boat you’d want to have stored meat, and you’d only kill your animal cargo if you ran low on food. You’d definitely not need to resort to this much.”

“They’re giants. Maybe they get hungry,” Nova commented.

“Or maybe it’s fish,” Renee shrugged.

“Or maybe their cows are the size of skyscrapers,” Pinkie said. “We could be standing on one cow!”

Flutterfree poked the bags, feeling them with her hoof. “The cuts are too small to be that. Not a regular cow either, or fish.”

“You have a freakish knowledge of butchering,” Nova said.

Flutterfree shrugged. “I know a lot about animals, anatomy, and how to care for carnivores. It comes from that.”

Pinkie leaped down from the stack of meat. “Well, we better get moving! Stuff to see!” She bounced to the door that was the exit. Flutterfree flew to the handle and opened it, letting them into what was clearly a Giant’s kitchen. They could see the backside of a fat giant cooking over a stove. To his right was a sink absolutely filled with dirty dishes. To his left, several unwrapped packets of the meat.

The ponies were struck by the smell of cooked meat coming off of everything in the room. They may have had no natural instinct to find the smell of meat enticing, but all four of them had tasted meaty meals in their journeys, and their bodies had learned to recognize it as food. Renee was the only one whose mouth wasn’t watering.

Pinkie glanced at Flutterfree. “Hey, your teeth are getting pointy.”

Flutterfree covered her mouth. “Eep!”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Hungry, huh? I’m sure I can snag you some of the meat…” With a carefully calculated teleport, Nova summoned a chunk of cooked sausage the size of Flutterfree’s head to them.

Flutterfree lost control and drove her slightly-sharper than usual teeth into the chunk of meat, ravenously devouring it.

Nova stared at the spectacle. “Y’know, I think I lost my appetite.”

Flutterfree lifted her head up and shook it. “I’m sorry – I’m really not sure what came over me. I just… needed to devour that.”

“Might want to see Eve about that when we get back,” Renee said.

“What did it taste like?” Pinkie wondered.

“A bit like… a cross between pork and veal.”

The smile on Pinkie’s face vanished, replaced with an expression of deep thought.

“It wasn’t like anything I’ve tasted before. Nova, you could get some more for her.“

Pinkie shook her head. “Nah, don’t feel like it right no-“ Her thought was cut short when the four of them noticed something through the doorway.

They saw the girl in the yellow raincoat dash across the floor, right behind the giant chef. The chef saw the girl out of the corner of its eye. The behemoth let out a surprised noise – like a human who has just seen a rat, though the startled grunt was decidedly more monstrous. Despite the giant’s flab, it moved fast enough to grab the girl.

With its other hand, the giant reached for a cleaver.

Pinkie wasn’t having any of that. She appeared next to the giant, brandishing her own giant knife to meet the cleaver. “Nope! Not cutting up kids today!”

The giant tried to grab Pinkie, but as the blind giant had discovered, Pinkie couldn’t exactly be grabbed. Her pink form distracted the giant enough for Nova to teleport the girl away.

Flutterfree made herself known, drawing her bow. “Hey!”

The giant swiped at Pinkie one last time – in vain - before turning to Flutterfree. He barely had time to register there was a bow aimed at him.

The holy arrow of light sailed true, flashing with brilliant light as it shot through the air. It hit the giant right in the nose, drawing enough blood to drench Pinkie.

“DISGUSTING!!!!” She whined.

The giant was not able to think through the pain, it was only able to stumble around blindly, covering its nose with its hand.

“Let’s move!” Renee shouted, galloping across the kitchen to another door. Before she got there, the door flung open to reveal another fat chef.

Renee coughed. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to believe the injury to your friend over there wasn’t caused by us?”

The giant reached for her – but it had been distracted enough for Nova to initiate a teleport into the rafters. Flutterfree and the girl were already there. Pinkie appeared a moment later, still drenched in blood. “I know my name. It is going to be Crimson Pie, pirate of blood!”

“Yeah, no,” Renee dismissed, turning to the girl. “Are you okay? Hurt?”

The girl looked at her, eyes somehow still shrouded. She said nothing – but her stomach growled.

“Pinkie, donut,” Renee said, holding out a hoof. Pinkie pulled one out of her mane, somehow making sure no blood got on it. Renee handed it to the girl – who swiped it quickly, downing it in only a few bites. Then she gagged.

“Are you allergic to donuts?” Flutterfree asked, holding the girl with her wing.

“Too… Sweet…” the girl said in a raspy voice that had clearly not been used in a long, long time.

“Oh,” Flutterfree said. “…Sorry, Pinkie only holds sugary food.”

The girl nodded, recovering from the rush of sugar into her system.

Pinkie walked up to the girl and sat down. “Hello there.”

The girl looked right at her.

“I’m Pinkie Pie! That’s Renee, Flutterfree, and Nova. What’s your name?”

“…Six,” Six answered. Her voice held uncertainty, but there was only a small amount of fear.

Pinkie smiled. “Don’t worry Six, we’ll help you get out of this place.”

~~~

The ship the League of Sweetie Belles ended up on was one of the new Asgard vessels, designed by the lanky gray aliens themselves. The ship was smooth and thin, unlike the designs of the humans. In the back the ship extended out giving it a vague ‘T’ shape from above. Two spires of material stretched up and down from the back of the vessel, and a slight purple glow emanated from certain parts of the craft.

The League of Sweetie Belles was currently ‘dining’ with the Asgard Thor – if it could really be called that. It was more like staring at Asgard food cubes while talking to a gray alien that was shorter than Sweetie Belle.

“So,” Sweetie said, swallowing one of the cubes whole, unsure if that was acceptable or not. “How does it feel to be back?”

“Invigorating,” Thor said, though his calm voice did not match the meaning of the word. “I am aware many artificial intelligences would take offense at this, but living as a program is limiting.”

“How so?” Thrackerzod asked.

“Living as a program and retaining your organic personality and outlook requires that some… Limitations be placed,” Thor explained. “Were we to store ourselves as full AI, we would have no limitations, and that change would drastically alter us as we were. So we were limited – kept from growing beyond the bounds of a normal Asgard brain, prevented from calculating things too quickly, prevented from duplication of the self. We were prepared to live our entire existence as limited AI.”

“Boooring!” Brute droned.

Bot hit her across the head. “Sorry, Mister Thor.”

“It is all right. I understand that you come from different worlds, different cultures, and that some of you are technically children.”

“You’re a very patient person, Thor,” Sweetie observed.

“Asgard generally are. We have lived an incredibly long time. Princess Cosmo Sparkle would be young to an Asgardian.”

“And you’d be young simply because you measure age with timelines,” Thrackerzod said.

Brute perked up. “I thought time was made out of circles.”

Thrackerzod sighed. “My job is not to explain every little nuance in the multiverse to you.”

“You don’t know,” Thor said. It wasn’t a question.

Thrackerzod blinked. “You’re observant.”

“I am Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet for a reason, Thrackerzod.”

“…Why are you carrying us through space, again?”

“I wish to meet with the Ori Remnant, to extend official Asgard relations. I shall journey to the other powers in this universe after, and then perhaps to the Gems. We were simply going to the same place.”

“Huh. We get a grand tour. Sweeeeet,” Brute said.

“We must remember to stamp our passports for maximum collecting!” Bot cheered.

“So, how long until we get to the Ori Remnant anyway?”

“They are in another galaxy,” Thor said. “But a shortcut exists. A supergate.”

“Stargate for ships,” Bot explained.

“Precisely. We will be sent to the Ori galaxy, and make our way to Celestis – their capital. It is not far from the supergate.”

The ship dropped out of hyperspace in front of a gigantic ring structure floating in the middle of space. The supergate was currently active with a blue ripple pattern, ready to receive them.

“…Nice window,” Sweetie commented.

“We have an appreciation for beauty and elegance as well as function,” Thor said.

They entered the gate, transmitting directly to the Ori galaxy. They entered hyperspace again, toward Celestis.

Sweetie smiled. “So, I hear these Ori Remnants have an interesting story. They tried to conquer the Milky Way Galaxy, right?”

“That they did, at the behest of their old masters, the Ori. The Ori themselves were Ascended beings, much like your Discord. Unlike the Ascended who lived in the Milky Way, the Ori fed off worship and power, draining their followers for everything they could manage. They saw the Milky Way as an opportunity, and ordered their worshippers to conquer the place with technological secrets beyond even my people. It was a fight the Milky Way Galaxy was unable to win without help. But with a few Ascended tricks and an artifact known as the Ark of Truth, the Ori were banished and their followers redeemed.”

“So they’re just regular people now?” Brute asked. “Lame.”

“Far from it,” Thor answered.

“Yeah!” Bot interjected. “They’ve got wizards called Priors, and a lot of leftover ships!”

Thor nodded. “Almost all of the Ori Remnants are primitive people with little connection with each other, but they are in the unique position of having the most advanced ships in the universe and the most powerful… ‘magic’ as well. I would prefer to call it psychic ability, but as O’Neill would point out, I am talking to a room full of magical unicorns.”

Thrackerzod nodded. “Trying to pretend magic doesn’t exist would be pretty stupid.”

“There’s people who don’t think I exist,” Thor pointed out. “Earth Vitis’ people find my appearance unbelievable.”

“How so?” Sweetie asked.

“Their legends of aliens often include ‘Grays’, which I closely resemble. The legends of the Tau’ri were actually based on us, but on Earth Vitis there is no such evidence. So it’s just a conspiracy theory to many.”

“There’s a lot of conspiracy theories on Earth Vitis,” Bot said. “I was on the Internet a couple hours ago and I watched hundreds of videos like that!”

“Why in the name of Azathoth does your universe make robots go mad when they realize what they are?” Thrackerzod blurted. “Such a wasted opportunity…”

“Unknown,” Bot said.

“Whoever designed you had to somehow be the perfect mix of genius and absolute moron.”

“Low probability detected. That means I’m special, right?”

Sweetie smiled. “Yes, Bot, it does.”

“Yay!”

The ship dropped out of hyperspace around a planet – presumably Celestis. Thor turned around in his chair to address an unseen camera. “This is Supreme Commander Thor of the Cosmo-class vessel Mjolnir. I have an appointment with the Doci.”

A human voice replied. “Welcome to Celestis, Thor, beam down to the given coordinates.”

“I also have some passengers, a team from Equis Vitis, here for exploratory purposes.”

“Same location.”

Thor didn’t bother to respond further – he activated the teleporter without warning, materializing them all in a giant, domed room. The entire room was made of a marble-like material, and light filled the entire space, giving it the appearance of a holy room. There was a torch in the center of a large altar, but it wasn’t aflame.

A man with pale skin in brilliant white robes strode to meet them, his golden collar framing his head in a regal fashion. He bowed. “Supreme Commander Thor.”

“Doci,” Thor said.

The Doci gestured to the left. “The unicorns will be attended to by my Priors. We shall converse in my chambers.”

Thor nodded, saying nothing. The two of them walked away, leaving the League on their own with the priors. They looked a lot like the Doci – though without the golden collars, just the white robes. “Welcome to Celestis.”

“We are the League of Sweetie Belles,” Sweetie said for them. “We’re here to learn about you and explore. So… A tour would probably be a good idea.”

“Very well.” One of the Priors raised a staff and tapped it on the ground. They were teleported somewhere else – a hallway made of the same marble-like material. It was largely abandoned, though they could see another prior walking through the hall with a regular human at his side.

The Prior that had teleported the League began to walk the other way, gesturing for the unicorns to follow. They came to a balcony that looked out at the entire city – it was a beautiful city, composed almost entirely from the pristine white material. It clearly had not been designed with technology of any kind in mind, for all the technological ports and such were recent constructions at the edges of the city, made of more standard materials. Celestis was a city built by godlike beings for glory to them, not for function. Now, it was a glorious piece of art surrounded by a ring of industrial practicality. Further out, there was nothing but a smooth planet – it looked crystalline.

“This is strange,” Sweetie admitted.

The Prior nodded. “We’ve had to adapt our city to the outside world – or worlds, as the case may be. We have ensured that the center of our city remains beautiful, at the least.”

He tapped his staff on the ground again, and they were in a large room with an empty wall in front of them. “This was where the Fires of Celestis once burned – the place the Ori physically existed most often. From our worship, their forms were not the calm, white energies of the Ascended in the Milky Way, but violent bursts of fire that raged eternal. But the Fires of Celestis are no more, and this city is our own.”

“Is that why the torch where we were was out?” Sweetie asked.

“Yes, but more indirectly. We chose not to have any open flames in the city center, using only electric and natural light. It is a reminder that the Ori are here no more, only the Remnants.”

Bot blinked. “Remnants? You call yourselves that?”

“There is a motion for the name Reform, but that has not gone through yet.”

“Reform sounds better,” Thrackerzod said. “Less embarrassment associated with the word.”

The Prior nodded ever so slightly. He tapped his staff again, teleporting them to a large, glass door guarded by two Priors. Through the door, they could see a room lit with blue light, under which sat an ornate black and gray chest. On top was a ring of orange symbols, with a red crystal nested in the center.

“The Ark of Truth?” Thrackerzod asked.

“Yes, this is the device of our salvation. It revealed the truth of the Ori, what they were, to the Doci, and his connection to all of us allowed every Prior everywhere to discover the truth. It is a powerful, ancient artifact, and the only object we still revere with anything close to what we once held for the Ori.”

Thrackerzod nodded. “I sense a lot of energy within it. It is connected to a great power…”

“Can I use it to make everyone give me ice cream?” Brute asked.

The Prior raised an eyebrow. “The Ark only works for things that are true, it is not an absolute brainwashing device. Even then, we will never reprogram it for any reason – we keep it locked away as a memory of what saved us, but are wise enough to know never to use it.”

“Convincing people of the truth… That Ark has the potential to be just as madness inducing as anything from my realm,” Thrackerzod noted. “The truth is a powerful weapon.”

“Your universe sure has a lot of really powerful artifacts,” Bot told the Prior. “I’m looking at three others right now!”

The Prior nodded. “Precisely. We have many defenses against threats, should we decide to use them. Most of them are a last resort.”

Sensing the conversation had died down, he took them to another location – the edge of the ‘marble’ section of the city, the connection to the industrial side. They stood underneath a tremendous arch. Behind them, beautifully constructed structures of art. In front of them, a mesh of industrial buildings of mixed designs – mostly human, but a handful of pony as well.

Unlike the central city, which was almost entirely devoid of life, the League could see activity here – children running, people working and laughing, and even a Prior actively preaching from a book, a metal disc sitting at his feet.

“I thought you rejected religion?” Thrackerzod asked.

“The book of Origin, while based on a lie, was designed by higher beings with the secrets to live a simple, happy life. The motives were nefarious – more worship for more power – but the wisdom within is still true,” the Prior said. “It is more of a guide than a religion now.”

“I think that’s great,” Sweetie said. “Finding the silver lining.”

Brute grunted. “Not bold enough. You should have burned all their books! Shown them who was really in charge!”

“There are no Ori for us to show,” the Prior said. “It is just us.”

The conversation would have continued, but as happened so often, something interrupted it. A young woman with pale blue hair and red gloves leaped out of a doorway, dashing for the Prior who was preaching. She leaped up, punching him in the face with her glove, a strange flash of light emanating from the attack. He keeled over, leaving the metal disc open to be grabbed. The woman grabbed it, running back for the door.

Bot placed herself between the woman and the door. “Enemy identified: Jenny of the University of Doors!”

Jenny stopped in her tracks. “Well this is bad timing. You’re pretty cute though.” She jumped over Bot, running directly towards the door.

Thrackerzod destroyed the door from a distance. “No escape for you.”

Jenny teleported in front of another door. The Prior destroyed this one by holding out a hand.

Jenny groaned. “You know we don’t like it when people figure out the door trick.”

Brute jumped onto Jenny, punching her in the face. “RAAAAAAA!”

Jenny snapped her fingers, hitting the filly with a flash of energy. “OUUUUUCH.”

Thrackerzod encased Jenny in a ring of dark, pulsating power.

Jenny sighed. “Ivan, get them off me.”

“…Ivan?” Sweetie muttered to herself.

Ivan, as it turned out, was a man made of crystal. He strode into the square, hands outstretched. Everyone present saw gigantic, billowing red clouds filling the sky. Something roared in them, setting everyone on edge. They prepared for the worst.

“Thanks!” Jenny cheered to Ivan, having teleported out of Thrackerzod’s magic. She opened a door and slipped through it. Ivan himself – and his red clouds – vanished unceremoniously.

Bot blinked. “…An error has occurred. What?”

“Cowards! All of them!” Brute blurted.

Sweetie turned to the Prior. “What was that disc she stole?”

“An inhibition device,” he answered. “The Prior was using it to limit his powers, so the masses would accept him as an equal.”

“So she wants to remove the powers of some Priors…” Sweetie said, hoof to her chin. “…She wouldn’t be after the Ark of Truth, would she?”

The Prior’s eyes widened in horror.

~~~

“I’ve never seen anyone so hungry before,” Flutterfree commented as Six inhaled everything Pinkie put in front of her, having by now gotten used to the high sugar concentrations.

“Don’t get much food,” Six commented.

Renee looked at the kitchen below them. “…Why not? Certainly seems to be a lot of food down there, and it’s not like it's unhealthy for humans to eat meat.”

Six stared at her. The fact that her eyes were strangely hidden unnerved Renee. “…You don’t know, do you?”

“…Know what?” Flutterfree asked.

“You must have just gotten on the Maw…” Six stood up, pointing at the still-open door that led to all the tied sacks of meat. “…Those are human.”

Flutterfree’s eyes shrunk to pinpricks. Her gag reflex activated – but nothing would come out. Instead she just choked on her convulsion and passed out from the revelation.

“…human!?” Renee blurted, looking down with horror in her eyes. “That… That makes sense… The cages… The cuts of meat… The smaller things around… But why?”

“They’re clearly not animals,” Nova commented, struggling not to gag herself. “They understand our language… They know what they’re doing.”

“Monsters!” Renee blurted. “Evil, horrendous monsters! How could they do this? There’s enough meat in here to be made from tens of thousands of humans! Given the size of this ship, a… A genocide!”

“They farm us,” Six said. “Keep us locked in dark, damp places. Let us play. Let us think our lives will just be boring forever.”

“Despicable!” Renee yelled. “This needs to be stopped. I say we get the Enterprise in here and say in no uncertain terms that they have to stop what they’re doing.”

Pinkie frowned. “We do need to do something, but they won’t even talk to us. I don’t think talking will work. They’ve said nothing since we’ve been here.”

“Then what can we do?” Flutterfree asked, coming to. “W-we… This evil needs to be st-topped.”

Six looked at Nova. “You… have power. There is one giant in charge of all this, the entire Maw. The Geisha. If you kill her, the entire system will fall.”

“Kill?” Renee said. “That seems a bit…”

“No, Six is right,” Flutterfree said. “If she’s done this, she deserves to die.”

The ponies stared at Flutterfree.

“I understand that was uncharacteristically cold and brutal of me, but look around! This is genocide! If taking one life will solve that, I’m… I’m all for it.”

Renee turned to Pinkie. “Do you think it needs to happen?”

“I’m not getting a lot of clarity today,” Pinkie admitted. “I do think it needs to happen, but… I’ve just had the feeling like there’s more going on here we don’t see, and the revelation of the human… meat didn’t make it go away.” She turned to Six. “Where can we find this Geisha?”

“Top of the Maw,” Six said. “It’ll take a long time to get up to that level, and it will be dangerous. There are hundreds of giants up there, being served constantly.”

“A restaurant ship for human flesh…” Renee bristled. “This will not stand.”

“Can you get us to the outside?” Nova asked. “We can fly up the edge without too much effort.”

Six nodded. “There’s an outer window only a few rooms away.” She gestured for them to follow her along the rafters, through a hole, and into a cold, attic space. While the ponies had before moved slowly to take in their surroundings, Six ensured they moved quickly – she ducked through holes, cracks, and hatches with ease, having the layout of the area memorized. It didn’t take long for them to make it to the window – it was in a long, empty hallway.

The sight of sea and sky through it was somewhat startling to the ponies, who had only seen artificial light their entire time here. They could see no land through the window, though.

Nova levitated herself up to the window and looked around. To the side, she could see a small extrusion in the side of the boat – the Maw. “I can teleport us out there, but prepare for heavy winds!”

Everyone nodded. Nova teleported them to the metallic ledge, and the salty smell of the ocean filled their nostrils. The four ponies and Six looked up and down – the harsh waves of the sea were far below them, and they could maybe see the top of the boat as they looked up – it was a bit too far away to tell. The wind was strong, but not strong enough to blow any of them over.

“…That’s a long way up,” Renee commented.

Flutterfree spread her wings and lifted Renee. “Let’s start moving then.”

Nova levitated Six onto her back. “Hold on tight,” she said as she levitated the two of them into the air.

“How is Pinkie going to get up?” Six asked.

Pinkie moved up the side of the ship with suction cups affixed to all four of her legs. “I’m suction cup pony, look at me gooooo!”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Dear, if you lose traction on those things you’ll fall to your death.”

“You can’t kill suction cup pony!”

“…Good point.”

The five of them ascended to the top levels of the Maw, slowly but surely.

~~~

The League of Sweetie Belles and the Prior teleported into the entrance to the Ark of Truth. The two Priors were still there, standing at attention. The Ark was behind them, unmoved from when they’d seen it earlier.

“We may have an incursion from the University of Doors,” the main Prior told the guards. “Be on your best watch. They have just taken a Prior inhibition device.

Thrackerzod lit her horn. “I sense something wrong with the flow of magic.”

The main Prior held out his hand, testing his powers – nothing happened.

“They’ve already activated it,” Sweetie said.

“Captain Obvious,” Brute muttered.

“Scanning… Scanning… Scanning…” Bot said. “Can’t find device. Strange.”

“It has to be within close proximity,” the main Prior said. “Either in the hall or one of the adjacent rooms.”

“Negative,” Bot said. “I would have sensed it. The material is not the same as the walls.”

Sweetie narrowed her eyes. “There’s something wrong here…”

“…I’m going to try something,” Thrackerzod said. “This will give you a headache.” She cleared her throat, and spoke out with an eldritch tongue – not quite as damaging to the psyche as Majora’s words could be, but she wasn’t kidding when she said it’d give them a headache. Everyone covered their ears from the noise that went directly to their brains.

“Boo.”

The scenery changed suddenly – no longer did they see two guards and a safe Ark of Truth. Now they saw two guards passed out on the floor, the disc laid between them, and the Ark being moved to a set of double doors that definitely hadn’t been in the room before. Both Jenny and Ivan were in the room. Ivan was the only one clutching his ears – not that his head really looked like it had ears, given its crystalline form. Jenny was standing upright, fixing Thrackerzod with an annoyed expression. “You couldn’t have waited five more seconds?”

“No,” Thrackerzod said, lighting her horn.

“DINTIN!” Jenny yelled at the door. “LITTLE HELP?”

A robot smashed through the double doors. It had to duck to fit through the frame, but once it was through the gigantic machine stood ten feet tall, barely able to fit within the vaulted ceiling. The beast was roughly humanoid, its rectangular chest taking up the vast majority of its body mass. Its head was small compared to the bulk of the legs and arms, and blue lights flashed from various locations on its body.

Behind the robot, through the door, they could see another world – grand, sweeping plains of grass. In the near distance, there was a structure too tall to imagine, rising so far into the sky it might have made it to orbit. The mountains in the distance looked unnatural – one was even floating.

Thrackerzod swore she saw a green stripe on the moon, but the connection between dimensions faded before she could make sure. The doorframe was just a normal doorframe now.

Brute smashed the Prior inhibition device. “You’re doomed now.”

Jenny nodded to Ivan. The Prior raised his staff to unleash psychic power while Ivan took out a staff of his own. The robot – presumably named Dintin – charged the Prior, hitting a psychic shield the man had around him. The force of the multi-ton mech hitting him pushed the Prior back, interrupting whatever attack he was going to unleash.

The tip of Ivan’s staff flashed, enveloping the Ark of Truth in a beam of light similar to a transporter, sucking the essence of the artifact into the staff. Bot hit Ivan in his crystal face with a rocket launcher, making him drop the staff – a staff that Jenny swiped from the air.

She twirled it, winked at them, and teleported away.

“Bot, with me, I’ve got a trace on her,” Thrackerzod said, teleporting the two of them after Jenny. They saw her open a door – a door that should have led to another part of Celestis but instead led somewhere else entirely.

Instead of destroying the doorway, Thrackerzod held it open – throwing herself and Bot in after Jenny.

They were not in Earth Tau’ri anymore, but neither were they in whatever universe had been on the side of the doorway the robot had come from. They were in a world with brown grass on all sides. The wind blew, but there was an eerie silence everywhere. The door they had popped out of was part of a worn down shed.

Jenny turned to face them. “You really don’t want to do this.”

Thrackerzod and Sweetie Bot took battle stances. “Yes we do.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the fight.” She teleported behind them to the other side of the worn door. “I mean you don’t want to challenge me in a doorway chase.”

Thrackerzod teleported them through the doorway, to yet another universe just in time to see Jenny throw another door open.

“By Azathoth’s snores, this is going to get annoying really fast,” Thrackerzod muttered.

“Activating patience reserves,” Sweetie Bot chirped.

They pursued her, paying no attention to the confused mushroom people they had passed by. The next world was dark, stormy, and dominated by a spiky metallic structure…

~~~

The higher levels of the Maw made an attempt to look nicer. The locations weren’t dark or damp – they were rather well lit, furnished, and organized. However, this did little to detract from the absolutely disgusting behavior of the giants. There were hundreds of them here, sitting at dozens upon dozens of long, wooden tables, spending all their time shoving industrial quantities of human meat into their fat, flabby maws. None of the patrons looked healthy, or even like they were enjoying themselves. They just had to continually shove more and more flesh into their gluttonous maws.

Renee wanted to hurl. They were safe from their position in a rafter, far above the giants themselves, but that did nothing to ease their nerves.

“They can’t still be hungry…” Flutterfree said.

“This place… It does something to you,” Six said. “It… Makes you hungry.”

Flutterfree nodded to herself, shame building within her.

“I have been eating a lot of cupcakes,” Pinkie noted. “This place is evil stacked on top of more evil isn’t it?”

Six nodded. Pinkie gave her another cupcake, which she ravenously devoured.

There was a moment of silence. Nopony or human felt like saying anything – they just looked at what was happening beneath then with growing sickness.

Flutterfree heard a sob. She turend to Six. “Shh… It’ll all be okay. We’re going to stop this.”

Six wiped her hidden eyes. “I know… It’s not that… It’s… Nobody’s ever done anything like this for me. Ever. I’ve… I’ve been alone. Always…”

Flutterfree hugged her. “You never have to be alone again, Six.”

Six started crying again, burying her face in Flutterfree’s wing. Everypony else piled onto the hug, sharing a moment.

They eventually left the mutual embrace, feeling the need to continue.

“Where to?” Pinkie asked.

“Next level should be next to her balcony,” Six said. “I… actually have never been this high. …Only heard about it.”

“Other kids?” Nova asked.

Six nodded. “There are… some. We rarely see each other. Never form groups… Never like this. …We should have.”

“We’ll find them after this is over,” Flutterfree promised.

Six nodded slowly, clearly aware that some of them had probably already been captured. The five of them continued upward, climbing up a rope through a hole in the floor, finding the new wooden floors easier to move through. They came up at the bottom of a grand feeding hall, much more open than the previous ones. Nova teleported them up to the ceiling area again, avoiding the sight of the giants.

“I am running really low on power here,” Nova said. “We better be close, I’m not sure how much use I’ll be in a fight.”

Six pointed ahead – along one of the far walls of an eating hall was a balcony that overlooked all the disgusting, gluttonous patrons. Standing there, watching them all, was a giant unlike any of the others. She was thin, slender, and her proportions were like that of a particularly tall human. She wore a brown, close fitting dress, and a white porcelain mask covered her face. Her hair was long, slender, and seemingly perfect.

She just stared at the feast happening beneath her.

“She’s different…” Renee said, thinking aloud. “Why is she different? She’s not overcome with hunger… She’s very healthy… And she’s in charge… Why…?”

Six shrugged.

The five of them watched the Geisha watch the feast. The slender woman was so still there were moments where it didn’t even seem like she was alive – but the occasional twitch of a finger or shift of her feet indicated otherwise.

She eventually turned around, leaving the balcony to a private room. Nova teleported the five of them to the balcony the instant she was gone. Flutterfree carefully pulled on the door handle, opening the door.

The other side had a homey interior – not lit as well as the dining halls, but significantly better decorated. Photos of what could only be assumed to be the Geisha’s friends and family lined the walls. Images of eyes were placed everywhere in the space, giving it an eerie feel. A large oak staircase led up to a small hallway with several doors – one of which was empty. They could hear singing coming from behind a door, the haunting, melodious voice meeting their ears and sending chills down their body.

“The feast is such a wonderful place to find a bride…

Just give her a bit of your time once you are inside…

What she can give lasts longer than this world’s simple goods…”

“She’s talking,” Nova said, this piece of news scaring her.

Pinkie nodded. “Can you teleport us to the door?”

Nova sighed. “Yes, but you better have some other plan than ‘mega laser blast her in the face’ because that’s not happening.”

The five of them soon stood outside the door in which she was singing. The door was ajar, allowing them to poke their heads in. She was standing in front of a broken mirror, brushing her hair – looking at the shattered glass as if it showed her what she looked like.

“Crazy,” Nova commented. “Good to know.”

The Geisha raised a hand, levitating a teakettle to her grip. She poured herself a drink.

“Great. She’s got magic,” Nova muttered.

“So do we,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“And she’s twenty times larger than we are,” Renee said. “Which means whatever she does is twenty times stronger. We’d have to expend effort to move that teakettle… She’s not.”

“Right. So here’s the plan,” Pinkie said. “Flutterfree, shoot her in the back of the head.”

“…That might do it. It might not,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“If it doesn’t, well, I think we can handle her ourselves,” Pinkie said, taking out a pink shotgun.

Renee prepared some shields. Nova, being too low on magic to use her more advanced spells, just readied the standard laser. Six took a few steps to the left, away from the doorway.

Flutterfree lifted herself into the air and readied the bow of light, aiming right for the Geisha’s head. She took a moment to aim and unleashed the holy arrow. It flew true through the air – but the Geisha chose that moment to turn her head. Instead of going right through the back of her skull, it hit the side of her mask. The holy power hit the mask, reacting with it, shattering the upper part of it and drawing blood from the Geisha’s forehead.

She wasn’t dead, or even seriously injured.

She was angry.

She reacted – with a hand, she blew the door off its hinges. It flew right over Renee, Nova, and Pinkie, but it caught Flutterfree in its rapid rotation, tossing her down the staircase. Flutterfree had enough room to avoid getting crushed, but she left the rotation of the door in a tailspin, landing hard on an endtable. She broke a lamp in the process.

The Geisha took a moment to collect herself, looking at the ponies attacking her. “…What are you?”

Pinkie shrugged. “We’re ponies. Visitors from another world. Now it’s your turn to answer a question – why are you mass producing kid meat!?”

The Geisha stared at the pink pony. She extended a hand, lifting Pinkie into the air to be level with her own porcelain face. “…It is the means by which I extend my own life.”

“So we’ve got an evil harvesting of kids for the evil gluttony of a bunch of giants all for the evil purpose of extending your life?” Pinkie whistled. “That’s a lot of evil stacked up in a row there!”

The Geisha tried to crush Pinkie with her power, but as so many had discovered, Pinkie couldn’t accurately be described as a ‘solid’ state of matter. She bounced out of the Geisha’s telekinetic grip and stuck a suction cup to her mask. “You can’t kill suction cup pony!”

The Geisha tried anyway – she grabbed Pinkie again, this time casting a dark spell to latch on to her very life force. Renee threw a diamond shield around Pinkie to block the spell. “Sorry dear, not happening.”

The Geisha resorted to physical force, lifting a stool from the floor below and tossing it at Renee. Renee sliced through the object with a carefully calculated blade construct. Nova shot the Geisha right through the eye hole in her mask, making her yell out in pain. Pinkie brought a hammer down on her head, making her stumble. Pinkie threw the cutlass as well for good measure.

Six whooped. “HEY! Look what I’ve got!”

The Geisha turned to the child in the yellow raincoat – and saw an unshattered mirror. The giant screamed, retreating to the darkness of her room, unable to withstand the mirror.

“…Huh. Nice going, Six,” Renee said. “I didn’t figure that one out.”

Six just nodded, handing the mirror to Renee. “You should be able to use it better.”

“You bet I will,” Renee said, charging into the room to face the Geisha. The woman herself leaped from the side, grabbing Renee in a telekinetic grip, trying to choke her to death – but Renee moved the Mirror in front of her face. The Geisha screamed as if she were being burned, stumbling back even further. Pinkie waited there, walloping her on the head with a giant foam finger large enough to fit on the giant’s hand. The Geisha flailed wildly, reaching with her power for anything that could help her.

She threw a bed at Renee. Renee leaped out of the way, but the tremendous piece of furniture easily crushed the mirror.

“Dammit,” Nova cursed. “That was our chance,”

The Geisha charged Renee – but Renee, being a pony of style and fashion, knew the mirror spell. The sudden appearance of a reflective surface startled the Geisha – she stumbled, falling over the railing and down the stairs. She stood up quickly, grabbing ahold of Renee directly. She started draining the life from her.

It was not another pony that stopped her – it was one of the Geisha’s other doors flinging open. A universe made of cheese could be seen through it, and a particular human named Jenny was running on it. Jenny at first appeared to be the correct size for the doorway, but the moment she passed the boundary she shrunk to Six’s size.

“What the-“ she said, realizing the door had shrunk her and placed her in the middle of the doorway. She tumbled to the ground. She managed to control the landing, but the distraction was enough for Thrackerzod and Sweetie Bot to catch up. They didn’t try to restrain her – Bot shot an explosive missile while Thrackerzod grabbed the staff.

The Geisha looked at them, dumbfounded. Then she decided she didn’t care about this out of context problem and used her magic to toss the three newcomers into a wall, dazing them.

Thrackerzod had no idea what was going on. She didn’t care - in her rage she summoned a creature of darkness from her horn, a beast with three faces and two heads, screaming for blood. The Geisha absorbed it instantly with her dark powers.

Renee put a mirror in front of the Geisha again, forcing her back. The Geisha reached out with her magic, grabbed Thrackerzod, and threw the eldritch filly at Renee. Thrackerzod kept hold of Jenny’s staff the entire time and bounced off like a squeaky toy.

The Geisha sent out a burst of psychic energy, knocking everyone over who was near her gigantic person. She reached for Renee again. The unicorn was too dazed to create a shield - the life began to flow out of her. The Geisha began to laugh.

A bright ray of light shot through the back of her head, exploding out one of the eyeholes of her mask. She fell to the ground, dead.

Jenny whistled. “Ponies are hardcore, man.”

Flutterfree twitched, pointing the bow of light at Jenny. “Do you want some of what she got!?” she shouted, her voice wavering considerably.

“Uh… No. Thanks for offering though.”

“Well, now that the deed has been done…” Renee turned to Thrackerzod. “Uh…”

“Care to explain?” Pinkie asked.

Thrackerzod hefted up the staff. “This is a staff of holding. Jenny here used it to steal the Ark of Truth from the Ori Remnant.”

“Reform,” Bot corrected.

“Unofficial, Bot,” Thrackerzod retorted.

Bot beeped. “The stolen item has been reclaimed, and the perpetrator is in custody.”

“Look again,” Jenny said. She was standing in the cheese world, once again as large as the doorway. She saluted. “Ciao!” She shut the door.

“…Suspect has escaped,” Bot said, beeping sadly.

“We’re going to have to talk to that University eventually,” Renee muttered. “If only we’d encounter them without something going on around them…”

“We’ve got the holy artifact of the Ori Remnant, so we win,” Thrackerzod said. “What happened here?”

Pinkie cleared her throat. “Evil giant lady ran a boat where humans were cut up and eaten, feeding the gluttony of hundreds of giants, while she herself extended her own life with it… Somehow.”

“My money’s on that dark life-force magic,” Nova suggested.

“Yeah, probably that. Anyway, we’ve now liberated the boat from her influence and can work on saving all the other humans here. Oh, have you met Six?”

Thrackerzod pointed behind her. “Would she by chance be the girl eating the giant lady?”

All the ponies turned around to see Six doing exactly what Thrakcerzod described – devouring part of the Geisha’s flesh at the neck.

“SIX!” Flutterfree yelled. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

Six coughed, spewing blood. “…Ending this.” She lifted a hand, the unmistakable power of the Giesha’s life-force magic rippling through it. She walked toward the balcony overlooking the feast.

With a twitch of her head, Six instantly drained the life out of every giant. The eating stopped all at once, replaced with the sound of fat, ugly bodies hitting the floor. “She was already draining their lives. Makes it easy.”

Pinkie turned to Six. “Six, stop it.”

Six turned to Pinkie. “…No. I am going to kill them all, Pinkie.”

“But-“

“They’re evil. They need to die. Every last giant in this entire world needs to die.”

“That makes you no better than them!” Pinkie declared.

“...I’m not eating them. I’m not harvesting their children. I’m just killing them all.” Six took off her hood, revealing her face. It was a beautiful face with smooth features, shining black hair, and a simple nose. Her eyes seemed to have a light of their own – a light that surrounded a gaze filled with rage, pain, and determination.

Pinkie shook her head. “Six, we can’t let you do that.”

“You can’t stop me,” Six declared. She leaped off of the balcony, effortlessly using her newfound powers to glide to the floor. She slipped down a hole to the next level of the Maw. From the sound of thuds, she killed an entire section of giants again.

“…Do we have a right to stop her?” Nova asked. “This ship… It has killed millions.”

“Maybe this ship, maybe, I’d have to think long and hard about it,” Pinkie said. “But not the world. We’ve got to stop her.”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“The giants are a race. They can’t all be evil,” Pinkie declared. “I know they aren’t. Even if they all feed on humans, they could be taught what they were doing. If not… Well, after we’ve tried, it becomes our job. She’s just a kid who wants revenge. Thrackerzod, teleport us to her.”

Thrackerzod tracked the dark magic of Six, finding it with ease. All the ponies appeared in front of Six.

Six shook her head. “…I’m not going to fight you,” she said. “You showed me kindness, generosity, and made me smile. I’ve never been happy on this ship. You were friends.”

“But we have to stop you,” Pinkie said.

Six shrugged. “I’ll just keep running away. You can’t keep me.”

Pinkie pulled out her dimensional device, adjusting its coordinates. The device gave her a red message – invalid coordinates. But Pinkie knew the coordinates weren’t invalid, just blacklisted. “Authorization code: Pinkie, cupcake-nineteen-iota-g-u-m-m-y-m-a-u-d.”

Nova cleared her throat. “Authorization code: Nova, flare-seven-lambda-t-r-i-x-s-a-m-e-n-e-s-s.”

The portal device switched to green, revealing the location's name: Nautica.

Pinkie activated the portal, creating a gateway right to the ocean world of Nautica. Thrackerzod teleported Six into it. Pinkie bounced through the portal and closed it behind her.

The two of them started falling toward the ocean below, but Pinkie pulled an inflatable raft out of her mane and activated it just in time to catch them.

Six blinked. “…What is this place?”

“This is Nautica,” Pinkie said. “This is where we put people we can’t safely contain.”

Six glared at her. “Take me back!”

“No,” Pinkie said. “…You’re too dangerous, Six. I’m sorry.”

Six levitated Pinkie into the air, stopping short of draining her life force. “Pinkie… They need to die.”

“No Six. They don’t. And I know you can’t see that… I’m s-sorry.” Pinkie choked, wiping tears from her eyes.

Tears streamed from Six’s own angry eyes as well. “H-how will I survive!?”

“T-there’s food in the raft. And plenty of fish for you to drain the life from,” Pinkie said. “Won’t be hard.” She sniffed. “Watch out for other prisoners.”

Six clenched her fist, moving to drain the life from Pinkie – but she couldn’t do it. She dropped Pinkie back onto the boat and sat down, crying.

Pinkie moved to comfort her, but she was pushed away. “Just go,” Six said. “The longer you’re here the harder it is.”

Pinkie nodded in agreement. She wiped her eyes – then dialed a portal back to the Maw.

Six tried to force herself through the portal, but Pinkie was already on the other side. She threw a pillow into Six’s face, forcing her back onto the raft. The portal closed before Pinkie could get another look at Six’s eyes.

Flutterfree rushed to Pinkie and hugged her. The embrace was silent.

Pinkie realized she was getting used to things like this happening. Condemning others, ordering deaths, playing with lives… It had become part of her.

She sighed. “Let’s go home. Have O’Neill deal with this place.”

“That… Would be a good idea,” Renee said.

The ponies left the world to return home – and to return an ancient artifact.

038 - The Hand in the Door, Part 1

“Happy third Harmonic!” Pinkie cheered, unleashing a party cannon blast on the bridge of the Enterprise for everyone’s enjoyment. The confetti and balloons filled the bridge, turning the normally drab functional location into a party cave.

O’Neill took one look at the now colorful bridge of his ship. “Never did like this kind of party.”

“The punch is spiked,” Pinkie whispered in his ear.

“As I said, I absolutely love this kind of party,” O’Neill deadpanned.

Daniel rolled his eyes. Renee struggled to stifle a chuckle.

Nova grabbed a glass and filled it with the punch – the nature of which was no secret to anyone present, despite Pinkie’s prior whispers. She downed it in one swig.

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Careful now, Nova. We don’t have just a party today.”

“The ship can fancy-fly itself,” Nova answered. “And I’m not the one giving greetings to every world we pass.”

Eve nodded. “True… I still think you should keep yourself alert. Today’s a special day, you never know when you’ll need to be sharp.”

“Please, Eve, I know how to watch my drink.”

“Every time you and Trixie go out you come back drunk as a skunk.”

Nova chuckled. “Ah yeah, those are fun. But Trixie’s not here to be a bad influence on me. Rest easy, Charter, your loyal subject isn’t going to be drunk out of her mind on such an occasion.”

Eve pursed her lips, unsure.

Flutterfree put a wing around Eve. “Let her do what she wants. She’ll be fine.”

Eve nodded slowly. “Right… Right. Sorry, just been stressing a bit, is all.”

“You’re always ‘stressing a bit’, darling,” Renee commented. Daniel nodded in confirmation.

“Maybe we could give you a break this time?” Flutterfree wondered. “O’Neill could-”

“I am not giving the same speech seven times. Or eight. How many worlds are we visiting?”

Pinkie pulled out the World Guest List from her mane. “Here you go!” The list contained Equis Vitis, Earth Tau’ri, Equis Cosmic, Earth Vitis, The Elemental Nations, Lai, and Gem Vein.

“Huh. Coulda sworn we had more friends than this,” O’Neill commented.

Daniel shrugged. “These are the actively exploring words, Jack. We have Equis Ultra Fast as a friend, for instance, but this day doesn’t mean anything to them. Gems are the only addition from last time.”

“Strange friends they are,” O’Neill said.

“They’re just different,” Eve insisted. “They’re slowly learning to accept us as equals. Give them time, they’re a very old race, set in their ways.”

O’Neill nodded. “And that’s all good, I just reserve the right to shout back at them if they get too arrogant.”

“Just don’t cause another space dogfight, everything will be fine.”

“No promises. ...Also, isn’t there an Earth missing from the list?”

“Is there?” Eve asked, going over the list. “...Maybe. I think they requested we don’t visit them this time. Not sure why.”

Flutterfree shrugged. “Yeah…shouldn’t we get going though?”

“I was hoping Corona would show up…” Eve said, glancing at the clock. “I guess she decided to keep working. Or lost track of time.” She pulled the Journal out of her saddlebags and checked it for new messages – nothing. “Or she could be in mortal danger from some alien threat…”

Flutterfree shook her head. “She knows how to take care of herself, Eve. If there’s a problem.”

Eve nodded. “Right. We should get going.”

O’Neill gestured to the pilot. “Translate to Equis Vitis, start the show. Engage.”

The Enterprise used the Harmony Core within itself to tear a portal across the multiverse, taking the ship into orbit around Equis Vitis.

“Hail the princesses, make sure we have a patch of sky for our show,” O’Neill ordered.

The communications officer looked up from her console, confused. “Sir? There’s no station to transmit to. I’m not picking up any long-range signals either. No communication network.”

Eve blinked. “That’s impossible, we may not have Earth Tau’ri’s level of infrastructure, but pretty much all of Ponyville is filled with communication technologies.”

“No satellites detected either,” the officer continued. “No Feldspar, no Equis Cosmic ships… Nothing.”

Nova put down her drink, an uneasy expression crossing her face. “…What does this mean?”

Renee looked out the window at Equis, narrowing her eyes. “Either something removed all that technology… Or we’re in a different universe. Or, I suppose we could be in the past.”

“Check Ponyville,” Eve ordered. “Show me a top-down view.”

An image appeared onscreen of Ponyville. It was not the crescent-shaped city they had woken up in earlier that day. Instead, it was a small town on the edge of the Everfree forest. Eve was able to recognize her castle, but had difficulty remembering if all the buildings had looked like that in the past.

“There goes the technology-removal theory,” Daniel said. He glanced at a secondary screen near the top of a nearby wall. “The coordinates are Equis Vitis’ though.”

“Something like the Nexus could have moved it around,” Renee said. “Remember how we couldn’t leave those universes because it had changed everything?”

“Then we need a way to test to see if universes have just been moved,” Eve said. “We’ll just have to teleport down.”

O’Neill let a small smirk come to his face. “Guess we finally get to go on a mission together, Eve.”

“The commanding officer is supposed to stay on the bridge,” Eve reminded him coyly.

“I’ve got a Captain to do that for me.”

Eve chuckled. “Right then. All seven of us?”

Pinkie grinned. “Yeah! Pony-Tau’ri joint adventure!”

O’Neill nodded to an officer. “Right outside the castle.”

The seven of them were swept up in a beam of light and deposited on the ground outside the front doors of Eve’s castle. It looked the same as always – tall, crystalline, and sparkling with harmonious magic.

“…Should we knock?” Flutterfree asked.

“Don’t want to interfere with the past if this is the past,” Renee said. “I think we just need to check the map room.”

Eve nodded. She teleported the seven of them into the map room. There were still seven chairs – though some of the decorations and banner she had put on the walls over the years were missing, replaced with other designs she didn’t remember ever having. “Probably an alternate universe…” she commented.

“How are we going to find Equis Vitis then?” Renee wailed.

“Someone from Equis Vitis will dial out eventually, we can follow that!” Pinkie piped up. “Eve’s got contingency plans.”

Eve smiled with more than a little pride. “Yeah, I do. Heh.” She rubbed the map. “Yeah, this doesn’t look right at all for the past. The Changelings have way too much infrastructure, the dragons actually have significant settlements... But everything else looks pretty close.”

“Could be a future-oriented world,” Renee suggested. “They may be rare, but they do happen.”

“This is going to mess with the party plans,” Pinkie grumbled. “They’re waiting for a good time and we have to wait for them to come look for us.”

O’Neill kicked something as he shuffled his feet. He raised an eyebrow, picking something up off the ground. “What’s this?”

“That’s a key,” Nova deadpanned. “What, you use automatic doors so much you have no idea what it is?”

O’Neill rolled his eyes. “I was wondering why it was on the floor.”

Eve glanced to him – and her eyes widened. “…No way…” She levitated the key in between her eyes, her pupils shrinking to pinpricks.

“What is it, Eve?” Flutterfree asked.

“This isn’t from this universe. I know this key. Equis Eldritch – you know, Thrackerzod’s world. I picked it up when we were first cycling through it. I placed it in a drawer along that wall,” she pointed to where O’Neill was standing. “…That drawer doesn’t exist though. No evidence of it ever having been here.”

Renee narrowed her eyes. “You know, Equis Eldritch’s Twilight told me about that key. She woke up one day, found it… and then had déjà-vu for a long time. She really had no idea what it was.”

“Thrackerzod talked about something similar,” Eve said, her expression slowly giving way to horror. “…She said the world had reset itself, and only her Twilight was able to remember. Thrackerzod could also remember because of her nature, but… Nopony else…”

Pinkie blinked. “This is Equis Vitis.”

“It’s been reset?” Nova blurted. “What does that even mean?”

“I… I’m not sure,” Eve said. “But this key is still here… It must be immune to whatever happened. But… The entire world is different. It’s like we never discovered the other universes at all.”

“We need to find Thrackerzod,” Daniel said. “She might have some insight.”

“She was on Equis Vitis,” Eve responded. “I… I don’t know what it means for her if the world resets and she doesn’t have a body here when it does.”

“Erased,” Daniel said. “We’ve had something similar happen on Earth Tau’ri – alternate timelines. Everything that was done before is just erased from existence. As far as we can tell all the things in the alternate timeline still happened, but at some point it’s just no more.”

“Like when I split our timeline,” Nova said. “We haven’t found those other timelines I created. We’ve found universes like them, but none where I was redeemed and fixed the timeline.”

“…Could somepony have been messing with time travel?” O’Neill suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Eve said. “Starswirl’s time spell was destroyed after Nova used it. Nopony’s tried to recreate it.”

“Officially,” Renee said. “You know there are projects going on under your nose. Remember Corona’s fancy new portal gun?”

Eve nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“There are probably a few more sinister projects going on people don’t want you knowing about,” Renee continued. “Somepony could have created a time spell and used it, and it backfired.”

“What we need to do is find out where the timeline has diverged,” Daniel said. “Then go back there and set it right.”

“You sound like you’ve done this before,” Flutterfree commented.

“I have. It’s… Interesting, to say the least.”

O’Neill snorted. “Interesting isn’t even the half of it. We’ve done it multiple times – went to the past to ensure our own victory, repeated the same day over and over again, went to the past and erased ourselves from existence only to be brought back later…”

Nova blinked. “And I suddenly feel like small potatoes.”

“Then there was the time with twenty Carters, but that was more multiversal than timeline based. …Hey, didn’t Carter visit an alternate timeline at one point?”

“I think that was another universe,” Daniel said.

“Ah. Sometimes it’s hard to tell,” O’Neill admitted.

“How are we going to get to the past?” Eve asked.

“We… might have a time machine,” Daniel said.

O’Neill grinned. “That we never use.”

“Why not?” Flutterfree asked.

“I did mention that we erased ourselves when we went to the past, right?”

“Oh. I see.”

“Better question,” Renee interjected. “How do we find out when we need to go?”

Nova pointed behind Renee. “I think we can ask her.”

The seven people turned to see Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship standing in the doorway of the throne room. Her mane was straight, her tail well kept, and her ears complete. She was looking at them all with an expression of excitement. She broke out into a grin when she realized Nova was pointing at her. “Of course I can help! Oh, this is so exciting, I get to experience this from the other side this time!” She sat herself down on her throne, hooves on the map. “So, you’re from an alternate timeline?”

“We think so,” Pinkie said, taking over for Eve since the alicorn was in shock at seeing this particular version of Twilight.

“What’s your time like?”

Daniel shifted awkwardly. “Well, they’ve been exploring alternate universes for years…”

“We’ve made a lot of friends,” Pinkie added.

“Well we haven’t done that,” Twilight said. “Just one world here. Well, and Canterlot High, but that’s not really involved or anything. …I did think you looked odd for humans.”

“They’re actually normal,” Nova said. “Earth Viti – er, Canterlot High is somewhat abnormal.”

“…Woah, really? Weird.”

“Yeah, I thought so too.”

Pinkie jumped in. “So, let’s see where you diverge. You have the castle… Have you reformed Starlight?”

“Yep,” Twilight responded. “I do understand what an alternate timeline is, after all.”

“Oooooh, right,” Pinkie nodded vigorously. “Sooooo – did you reform the Changelings?”

“Yep.”

“Bring back Starswirl?”

“Absolutely.”

“Stop the Storm King?”

“That was… fun.”

“Open the school?”

“Mhm.”

“Beat the…” Pinkie tried to figure out how to word the next event with the appropriate amount of vagueness. “Final boss?”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “…I think so?”

“Righty-o. So it looks like she just didn’t find the bowling ball.”

Renee nodded. “Dear, listen closely and think. Did you ever watch a unicorn enchantress and a crystalline humanoid chase each other through portals?”

“Oh! Yeah. That was weird. I saw them, and then they were gone. I poked around but didn’t find anything.”

“Ding!” Pinkie declared. “There it is, she just didn’t find it. That’s when we need to go back to.”

“What date is it?” Daniel asked.

Twilight told them it was about seven years after that day.

“Guess this is still the present,” Nova commented. “Thanks Twilight, you’ve been a great help.”

“Oh, it’s the least I can do,” Twilight said, beaming.

Pinkie bounced up and down. “To Earth Tau’ri and the time machine!”

“Wait,” Eve said, suddenly. “Twilight, you do realize what this means, right? If we go back?”

Twilight’s smile faded. “Uh… No?”

“This timeline won’t exist anymore. You won’t exist.”

“I’ll be you,” Twilight said. “…Right?”

Eve twitched. “No, you won’t. You’ll be dead! All the experiences you and this entire world have had for the last seven years will be wiped from existence!”

Twilight looked down. “I… I know that. But… Don’t you remember Zecora?”

“…Yeah?”

“I mean, Zecora in the Changeling Timeline. She knew what was going to happen when we went back. She knew she, and her ponies, would…” she couldn’t bring herself to say ‘die’. “Wouldn’t exist anymore.”

“Twilight…”

“She was willing to make that sacrifice. So should I,” Twilight asserted, trying to keep her emotions under control. “It is I who should not be, Twilight.”

Eve didn’t correct her. “We both have a right to exist!”

“…I could come with you, but then I’d want to take my entire world with me,” Twilight said. “And that’s not possible, is it? If I went alone, it wouldn’t be fair.” She wiped her eyes.

Pinkie put a hoof on Eve. “She’s right, Eve.”

“No she’s not!” Eve blurted. “She doesn’t know what I do!”

“No, she doesn’t,” Renee said. “She doesn’t know of all the worlds we’ve helped save, of the friendships we are strengthening, of the future we are building. She just took us on faith, Eve.”

Eve took in a deep breath and glanced back at Twilight. “…I’m sorry.”

Twilight nodded, gulping hard. “It’s okay.”

Eve tossed her the key. “Take this. …You never know, it might do something.”

“It’s yours.”

“I wasn’t reset. You were,” Eve said. She thought for a moment – just a moment – that maybe the key would allow for some memories to pass on, something to be saved of this timeline in her when it was all done. But then she thought more – she wasn’t Twilight. She wasn’t the pony she had been talking to. She was Evening.

Twilight set it on the table, rejecting it. “I’m sorry… Eve. I’m… I’m not going to try to save myself.”

Eve nodded. “…You know, I forgot for a moment that you have seven more years of experience as well. I thought of you as me seven years ago. Not somepony else.”

“An honest mistake.”

The two of them shared a quick hug.

“Goodbye, Princess Twilight Sparkle,” Eve said, pulling back.

“Goodbye… Eve,” Twilight said.

Eve smirked. “Charter-Princess Evening ‘Twilight’ Sparkle, though that’s a mouthful.”

Twilight smirked back. “I can imagine.”

O’Neill called the Enterprise. “Seven to beam up!”

They were back on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Pinkie took out a broom and started cleaning up the party decorations. Nobody was in the mood anymore.

“Earth Tau’ri,” O’Neill ordered. The Enterprise took a moment to charge the dimensional drive to reach that far, but it wasn’t long enough for anyone to get impatient. The portal ripped through space, and they moved through.

Instantly they received dozens of high priority hails from the planet below.

O’Neill put a hand to his head. “What is it now… answer the one from Stargate Command.”

O’Neill appeared on the screen. “This is General O’Nei-“ He stopped mid-sentence when he realized who he was talking to. “Which one is it this time?”

“A mixture of alternate universe and alternate timeline,” O’Neill responded.

The other O’Neill snorted. “The double mega combo. I was wondering when that’d happen.”

“I don’t suppose you’d be able to trust us enough to lend us your time machine?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, had to ask.”

“Understandable.”

“So, let me guess, you never met the ponies and never explored the multiverse?”

“We ran into a bunch of our alternates, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yeah, no. The Tau’ri cluster of universes is frankly a little boring and overdone. Not to mention full of duplicates of yourself that you can’t trust with more than a nickel.”

“Quite the handful. …Wait, back up. Did you say ponies?”

Eve waved. “Hello. I’m Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle. My world recently suffered a timeline reset… just like yours, apparenlty.”

Other O’Neill stared at Eve from the screen. “…I’m not convinced your timeline is better.”

O’Neill shrugged. “We got a lot of help dealing with a lot of problems easier. They built us this ship. The Enterprise.” He smirked.

“Hey, no fair!”

“Proof my timeline is better.”

Other O’Neill knitted his eyebrows. “Can’t argue with logic like that. Does your lake have fish?”

“…It’s close enough.”

“Same.”

Renee blinked. “I think I’m missing context.”

“Yeah, you are,” Daniel said. “I’ll explain later.”

“I’m curious,” O’Neill said asked his counterpart. “How did we deal with the Wraith without help?”

“Slowly, with the help of Todd, and a lot of genetic science mumbo-jumbo.”

“And the Asgard are still stuck in their computers?”

Other O’Neill blinked. “You got them out?”

O’Neill smirked. “I just keep getting points. Can I have that time machine yet?”

“You know it’ll take months to get anyone to even consider that.”

“Yep. I could try to steal it.”

“We have a lot of ships. You have one big ship.”

“I like those odds.”

“I know you do. I do too.”

Daniel interjected. “Leeeeet’s not jump to a firefight. I’m sure we can think of something.”

“There’s more to think about too,” Nova said. “What are the chances two different universes were temporally reset?”

“Stop Eve from finding the bowling ball, stop any universes from coming together,” Flutterfree said.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Eve said. “When Nova and I were splitting timelines, the Friendship Games on Earth Vitis went on unhindered. She couldn’t reach me through the Journal because things were happening while I was jumping timelines a universe over.”

“…Friendship Games?” Other O’Neill asked. “…How do you keep your sanity?”

“I tell myself the words are an inaccurate translation,” O’Neill answered.

Nova rolled her eyes. “My point is that this probably isn’t some random occurrence – two universes have been hit. That implies some kind of intent.”

“…We’re being attacked through time!” Pinkie shouted. “That’s cool and terrifying.”

“We need to check on our friends,” Daniel said. “Fast – for all we know these attacks are unfolding as we speak.”

O’Neill nodded. “Sorry me, looks like we gotta dash. Don’t be surprised if we show up again asking for that time machine.”

“I’ll see if I can get them to think about letting you use it.”

“Thanks!” He turned to his pilot. “Hub.”

The Enterprise powered up again, cutting a portal into the hub. The transmission cut out once they were through. “You know, I like talking to myself,” O’Neill commented.

“A sign of madness,” Nova ribbed.

“I talk to myself all the time!” Pinkie said.

“Case in point,” Nova said, gesturing at Pinkie.

Eve looked at the image of the Hub world from orbit. “Anything?”

“No,” an officer said. “No sign of any structures. The blue moon is pulsing with energy, though. …I think it might find us threatening.”

“Right, the Blue Moon Spirit would still exist…” Daniel said. “Well we already know this place was hit. Where to next?”

“Earth Vitis,” Eve ordered. The officer listened to her, not bothering to check with O’Neill. The portal opened much quicker, and they arrived in orbit of Earth Vitis.

“We’re getting interdimensional signals,” an officer reported.

“Thank the Stars…” Renee said.

Nova shook her head. “Hm… Looks like a lot of people are trying to contact us.”

Storm appeared onscreen. “So, before I say anything, can you explain what’s going on?”

O’Neill shrugged. “We’re being attacked on multiple universes through manipulation of time.”

“And I just lost a bet.” Storm shrugged. “So, how are we going to go about smashing this mysterious attacker’s face in?”

“Do you happen to have a time machine?”

“Nope. None of the artifacts we have here are anything like that. Wasn’t convinced time travel was possible until Eve right there told me she’d done it.”

O’Neill frowned. “Then I’m not sure what you can help us with.”

“Need soldiers? Agents? I’ve got plenty of all of them. Even have some ships in orbit you can borrow.”

O’Neill nodded. “Good. Equis Cosmic ships?”

“What else?”

“How many can you spare?”

“I’d say… Three. I’m ordering them to form up now.”

O’Neill checked his display of all nearby ships. “Got them. We’ve been checking our allies – do you know who hasn’t been affected?”

“Equis Vitis, Equis Cosmic, The Elemental Nations, Lai, the Hub – none of them are responding. We managed to make contact with a few minor universes – Esefem, Equis Outland, Earth Ottoman, Equis Concretion, the Mushroom World, and a handful of others. Nothing with heavy dimensional technology.

Eve felt a lump form in her throat. “Corona was on Equis Cosmic. She…” Eve didn’t want to think about it.

O’Neill folded his hands. “…Storm, your world may be next.”

“We’re well aware of this fact. I was actually on my way to a nice vacation on Earth Ottoman. I hear the food is great there.”

“Good luck with that,” O’Neill said. “If we can’t find you here, we’ll look there.”

Flutterfree frowned. “Do we know anyone who wants to attack us like this? To erase us?”

“Ardent, but they don’t have the means nor the will,” Daniel said.

“The Elements of Insanity?” Eve suggested.

“Looks like it’s time to dial Nautica,” O’Neill said. He typed a passcode into the computer system. Eve followed suit.

Storm waved them off. “See you on Earth Ottoman.”

O’Neill nodded. The transmission was cut as they translated. Nautica was a beautiful blue orb when viewed from space, a serene image that hid its true purpose.

“Picking up our satellites,” an officer said. “They report no craft trying to leave the planet.”

“Are the Elements of Insanity there?” Daniel asked.

“Found their base,” an officer said. “Picking up strong magic signatures consistent with what is known about the Elements of Insanity.”

“Teleport a probe down.”

They did. The camera managed to snap a whole five seconds of feed before Brutalight smashed it.

“That answers that question,” Pinkie said. “…Do we have any other enemies?”

“Sombra,” Nova suggested.

“Yeah, no,” Eve said, rolling her eyes. “She wouldn’t erase all her progress.”

“You asked for enemies.”

Flutterfree knitted her eyebrows. “I can’t think of anyone else who would want to destroy all of us… Who would hate us this much?”

“Activists?” Renee suggested. “They know their movement against us is losing traction, they could have found a time machine and decided to use it to bring about our downfall in a more… direct manner.”

“I just thought of something,” Eve said. “The Handmaid.”

O’Neill raised his eyebrows. “…The red fairy?”

“Yes. Our legends, remember; they tell of a guardian of time. Someone who watches over Equis Vitis’ temporal health. No other universe has this legend. And before any of you start, we know she’s real. I’ve seen her in Canterlot a few times, and so has Celestia.”

“She was also in our base at one point,” O’Neill said. “Two of her, actually. It was confusing and didn’t last long enough.”

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “So… Do we just need to find this Handmaid?”

“That’s the thing, we shouldn’t need to,” Eve said. “It’s her job to fix this sort of thing, at least on Equis Vitis. If she couldn’t do anything…”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t she spend her free time sweeping Canterlot Castle? How powerful could she be?”

Pinkie huffed. “Don’t judge those who keep things clean!”

Eve frowned. “I… actually don’t know. Our legends don’t actually tell much about her, and what it does say is often contradictory.”

“Makes sense, if she messes with timelines,” Daniel commented.

“True… The stories do agree she came from somewhere else. I’m willing to bet she’s from another universe.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Do you think this might have something to do with her? One of her enemies?”

“Maybe…” Eve said, scratching her chin. “We need more information! How can we get more information!?”

Pinkie pulled a lightbulb out of her mane. “IDEEEEEEEAAA!”

“What?”

“The Spectacularium has been reset!” Pinkie declared. “We can ask it more questions! It might even be a normal machine instead of a thinking magic thingy!”

“Brilliant!” Daniel exclaimed. “The Spectacularium could answer almost any question! About our attackers, about the Handmaid – anything!”

“Lai, punch it,” O’Neill ordered.

The Enterprise shifted once again, appearing in orbit around the world of Lai, reset just like all the others.

“…Luna’s castle is gone,” an officer said.

“Applejack must have succeeded without our interference,” Nova said with a sigh. “Armonia got what she wanted – the kingdom fell. The Arcei probably run the nation now.”

“The original plan…” Eve said, pondering what this meant deeply. “…Take us to Spectacularium cavern.”

“Can’t teleport that far into the ground,” Daniel said. “We’ll have to start near the surface.”

O’Neill nodded. “Make it so.”

The seven of them teleported off the bridge and into the upper cave system. Nova lit her horn. “It should only take me a few teleports to get us there. Be patient while I charge…”

O’Neill suddenly drew his gun and pointed up the incline, toward the surface. “Hurry. I hear hoofsteps.”

Renee’s ears perked up. “You’re right…”

“Only a few more seconds…” Nova muttered.

Two Arcei appeared up the cavern, both equipped with rune-based weapons and high quality armor – clear signs that they were no longer barely surviving in this world. They saw the ponies and the humans. Confusion flashed across their faces only for a moment – it was quickly replaced with rage. They angled their runic staves at the seven of them.

O’Neill got off one shot, sending a bolt of energy through the left Arcei, stunning him. The other fired her weapon, unleashing a burst of fire that Eve blocked with her shield. Nova teleported at that moment, taking them further into the caves. There were no Arcei down there.

“So yeah, they’re in charge,” Pinkie said. “Good for them. Not for us.”

Nova executed another teleport, even deeper into the caverns.

“It does take a while to get down there, doesn’t it?” Eve said. “...I don’t remember it taking this long.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Sometimes things get glossed over. Right now we’re all pretty stressed and can’t just be without twitching a bit.” She shook her head. “Speaking of twitches, the Pinkie Sense is acting up. We’re going to meet someone surprising.”

“Already figured out the combo for that one?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yep. Slight burning in the back of the eye and a rapid head shake.”

Nova executed the final teleport, taking them to the base of the six Runes of Harmony. All of them were still intact, surrounding the crystalline building that housed the Spectacularium.

“The Arcei are probably coming down here for these runes,” Renee said.

“We got here at just the right time,” Daniel nodded.

“That you did…” a raspy voice met their own. It came from the top of a crystal spire – the form of a pink pony, impaled through the chest, but not dead. Undying.

Eve gasped. “Sage Pinkie!?”

“I thought I was going mad… But my visions were true… It was I who was not meant to be…”

“Hold on, we can get you down from there!”

“Freeing me from my prison… Will only bring about my end sooner than your actions… I would prefer the mysterious death… To one of agony…”

Pinkie looked up at the Sage. “...What happened to you?”

“You know…”

“They need to hear it.”

The Sage laughed bitterly. “You never came… I went forth with my plans… I began to see images of a future that never happened… I ignored them… I created my mechanism… I grabbed the mask… And it wasn’t enough…” she coughed. “I tried… But the Goddess defeated me… My mechanism, destroyed… My life, imprisoned on this spire for eternity…”

Eve looked at the Sage. “…You saved us, you know.”

“I know…” the Sage wheezed. “It brings some solace to my mind to know… I was worth something… I succeeded…”

“We can save you,” Flutterfree insisted.

“I am not meant to be… Even if you could… I cannot foresee the consequences…” She coughed. “It is better… To end a hero… Than to continue… And to be seen fully…”

Pinkie looked up at her. “I… I am sorry, Sage Pinkie.”

“You don’t need to apologize… Unless you’re doing it for taking too long… In which case just hurry up…”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “…I think I would have liked you.”

The Sage let out a short laugh and a smile. “What a delightful thought… General Jack O’Neill, you have a spirit… A strong, powerful spirit… Carry it to as many worlds as you can…”

O’Neill nodded.

“Ask your questions… The Spectacularium will not be able to be cute about it this time…” the Sage’s eyes shifted as she looked through her prophecies and beyond. “Had you not come here now… The prophecy would have been the last one… It was meant to fall by the hoof of the Arcei today…”

“I think I speak for all of us when I say ‘screw destiny’,” Nova commented.

Eve nodded, trotting toward the Spectacularium. “Thank you, Sage. You know what for.”

“I know a lot more than that…”

They entered the Spectacularium – and the Spectacularium noticed them. It did not have any philosophical musings, personality, and it did not cause any confusion in anyone’s mind. It just took questions and answered them, one per person.

Who is attacking us?

The University of Doors.

What happens to the people in the current timelines once we rewrite them?

They cease to exist in any shape or form.

How can we access Time Travel?

Find a past Equis, one where Starswirl’s Time Spell has not been lost.

What has happened to the Handmaid?

She is struggling to repel an attack of this precision and magnitude on Equis Vitis in numerous time-states.

If we restore timelines, will everything go back to the way it was?

Aside from events that occurred during the temporal interactions, such as your movements in the Enterprise, yes.

Why are they attacking us?

They consider your interference with their prior complete freedom of exploration and dominion to be too much.

Where is their world?

They have many worlds, but their homeworld is…

The Spectacularium gave them the coordinates to their world. Then the information exchange ended, the crystal structure still standing.

“That… Was a lot to take in…” Renee admitted.

“The University?” Daniel spoke, aloud. “What did we do to them?”

“They wanted the Ark of Truth, we stopped them from taking that,” Nova said.

Eve rubbed her chin. “There have been a few more instances where we’ve encountered them – not us personally, other explorers. Usually we’re in opposition but… There’s no way what we’ve done requires this much retribution!”

“Alien race,” O’Neill said. “Or alien universe humans. Different brains, like the Gems.”

“Well, we know where their world is.” Nova said. “Not sure how that helps us, the place is probably more defended than the Hub. …Was.”

“We do know what to do next,” Pinkie said. “We can find Starswirl’s Spell. I suggest Equis Ultra Fast, we know it’s still there.”

“You have to get out first…” they heard the Sage call to them. “And the Arcei are coming…”

The two humans and five ponies left the Spectacularium. Nova prepared the teleport. Pinkie waved to the Sage. “Goodbye, again.”

“Goodbye… Pinkie Pie… You’re doing well… Keep them on their track…”

Pinkie nodded. “I will. Oh, by the way…” she reached into her mane and pulled out a rocket launcher, tossing it to the Sage. She somehow managed to catch it despite her weakened state. “Have some fun while you’re up here, okay?”

The Sage laughed. “Protecting the Spectacularium until the end of time… Eh, why not…”

Nova initiated the teleport long before the Arcei actually arrived, passing them through the tunnels. Eve took the strain off of Nova to get them the rest of the way out. They finally appeared on the surface of Lai in a field of grass. They could see an Arcei city in the distance, built like a black version of Canterlot.

O’Neill called the Enterprise. “Get us out of here.”

Once again, they returned to the bridge. O’Neill sat down in the big chair, letting out a breath. “So our enemy is a transdimensional society with just as many resources as us, if not more. They’ve apparently found our little annoyances worthy enough to try to completely wipe us out with time shenanigans. And our resident time guardian is apparently not having much luck with stopping them.”

“Nice summary,” Pinkie commented.

“Take us to Equis Ultra Fast,” Eve ordered. The Enterprise listened to her call, ripping another portal in reality, the three flanking ships following through. They appeared in orbit around a blue-green world.

“Right, so the spell will be in the Canterlot Archives if it’s anything like our world,” Nova said. “If the Celestia here is in one of her… moods we’ll have to steal it. Luckily I already know how to do that…”

“We’re receiving a transmission from this Twilight’s castle,” an officer reported. “They say they already have the spell for us.”

Eve blinked. “Uh… That’s convenient.”

O’Neill snapped his fingers. “Teleport us down! Let’s see if we can visit every planet we come across today. I’m sure we won’t burn out the transporter.”

The seven of them appeared in front of the huge double doors of Twilight’s castle. Standing in front of it was the local Rarity – known as Mattie. She spoke with her signature ‘Australian’ accent. “Ah, ‘bout time you showed up.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “How did you…?”

“I could say something about putting two and two together from Storm’s calls,” she glanced at Pinkie, “but I think we all know I just knew you needed it. Saves a lot of trouble, doesn't it?”

Pinkie nodded. “Definitely! Where is it?”

They were suddenly inside the castle without any kind of transition whatsoever. “Right here. Center of the map – nice place, right?”

Eve shook her head. “Thanks, Mattie.” She levitated the scroll off the map to her eyes. “This looks right. Can you remember your alterations, Nova?”

“Easily,” Nova said, scrawling a few more magical letters into the scroll with her horn. “Done. We can take this to any map and jump to the past in that location.”

“That won’t help us on any Earth,” Daniel pointed out.

“Hopefully we can find the Handmaid,” Renee said. “She should find us if we start messing with time, right?”

“She didn’t find me,” Nova said.

“That’s probably because I fixed the problem myself,” Eve pointed out.

Nova shrugged.

Mattie cleared her throat. “By the way, I just want to make it especially clear that you better get my Sweetie Belle back. I understand that most other ponies absolutely hate pain and I happen to be well versed in dealing it out.”

O’Neill shrugged and nodded. “Got it.”

“Good. Now go jump to the past in another universe. Then get a time headache. Trust me, it’ll happen.”

“We already have time headaches,” Flutterfree deadpanned.

“Trust me, you do not.”

Pinkie blinked. “Wait, isn’t Dinkie the time expert?”

“Do you want the demon telling you how to save your universe?”

“Good point.”

O’Neill called the Enterprise again. “Guess what? Beam us up, we have what we need.”

They returned to the bridge. O’Neill returned to his chair. “Equis Vitis, pedal to the metal.”

The convoy of ships translated to a visibly identical planet, coming full circle.

“Before we go down, we need to work this out,” Nova said. “If we change something in the past while the Enterprise is in orbit, we might overwrite the Enterprise.”

Daniel nodded. “While we’re down there, the Enterprise should translate to Earth Vitis. We can translate there ourselves after we’re done.”

O’Neill turned to the officers on the bridge. “You all got that? Jump ship the moment we’re gone if you value existence.”

All the officers clearly valued their own existences.

They teleported down, then made a quick jump to the map room of Twilight’s castle. Twilight was still there, staring at the map.

“Oh! You’re back!”

Eve took in a sharp breath. “Y-yes. We need the table.”

“Oh – you got Starswirl’s Spell? Great!”

“Once we leave…”

Twilight held up a hoof. “I know. I also know something else.” She tossed the key back to Eve. “You’re facing an enemy that moves through time. You need a way to resist their attacks if they try to change your past. This key… might or might not do that, but there’s a chance.”

“But…”

“No buts, Evening Sparkle. Take it. Fix everything.”

Eve struggled to keep herself composed. “O…Okay.”

Pinkie turned to Nova. “You activate the spell. Everyone who’s coming, stand on the table.”

O’Neill, Daniel, Eve, Pinkie, Flutterfree, Renee, and Nova climbed onto the table-map. Nova levitated the scroll of Starswirl’s modified spell in front of her. She took a deep breath. “Here we go again…” she muttered, activating it with a burst of her magic.

White rings of energy rose from the edge of the table, surrounding them in a bubble of rising power. It collected overtop of them, creating a clear bowl of magic power. The round surface of the bowl turned with numerous moving gear icons that produced a regular ticking sound. The bottom face of the bowl – the open face – showed nothing but a blue-green vortex of temporal energy. Nova lifted herself into the bowl first. With its own power, it sucked the rest of them in.

Eve locked eyes with Twilight one more time.

“You should be the one to escape…” Eve whispered to herself, far too quietly for anyone to hear over the sound of the spell.

They were shunted through time itself along a conduit of energy. They could hear the incessant tick tick ticking of the construct the whole time they flew through the vortex. The journey lasted only a handful of seconds – they were soon shot out the end of another bowl of time in a green area a fair distance from Twilight’s castle.

Eve remembered this place very clearly. The moment everything changed – the moment the Enchantress and the Man of Light entered this universe on their chase.

“Invisibility spells!” she declared, prompting Nova to join her in hiding them all from the prying eyes of the world around them. They heard the unmistakable noise of the Man of Light entering the universe. They watched him and the Enchantress do the final phase of their dance – the fall, the capture, and the rapid exit.

Eve wasn’t looking at that, though. She was looking at Twilight Sparkle, the purple alicorn on a nearby hill, watching the entire spectacle.

That was the Charter-Princess.

“Did you see that?” Nova blurted. “The bowling ball just… vanished! Like it was turned invisible!”

“…Doesn’t the University have a guy that does illusions?” O’Neill asked.

“Thrackerzod did encounter a crystal being named Ivan that might,” Eve said, turning her attention to the mission. “Can you make it reappear?”

“If I can find the-“

“What are you doing here?”

The seven invisible people turned around. The Handmaid was right behind them. She was a humanoid with gray skin and two orange ram-like horns protruding from her mess of hair. She had two brilliant red wings coming out of her back, the color matching that of her robes. In the center of said robes was a symbol – a gear with ten teeth, clearly representative of Time itself.

“…Handmaid!” Eve blurted. “You’re okay! The Spectacularium said you were having difficulty dealing with this! …You look like Vriska, now that I think about it.”

“With what?” the Handmaid asked. “What’s the Spectacularium? You’ve seen Vriska?”

With a flash of red magic that took the form of several gears, another Handmaid appeared. She was heavily wounded, with rust-colored blood pouring from her chest. She snapped her fingers, pausing the flow of time for everything but her other self and the seven travelers from the future. “Past-me won’t know much,” Future-Handmaid said. “She’s witnessing this event for the first time.”

“But you’re interfering!” Past-Handmaid declared. “Now I have to keep the loop-“

“No, you don’t. Well, you do, but only partially. I’m cheating – from another dimension.” She coughed up more blood. “I’ve got a couple undoomed duplicates running around…”

Past-Handmaid put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, that can’t be good. How much perma-dying have we been doing?”

“A significant amount,” Future-Handmaid said, sitting down. “I myself won’t last much longer. Listen, you’ll go with them for now. The first step is to capture Ivan here. Then… I’m sure another Aradia will get in touch with you.”

Past-Handmaid nodded. “I understand. …You sure this is going to be a Heroic death?”

“I tried to save an entire world by attacking a multidimensional society head on. Of course it is,” Future-Handmaid grunted. “No dream bubbles out here…”

“See you in the beyond. Or be you in the beyond.”

Future-Handmaid nodded. “Save this world, Aradia.” Then she keeled over, dead. Time resumed for a moment, but Past-Handmaid froze it again.

She turned in the direction of the seven visitors – not making eye contact, since she couldn’t see the invisible people. “Okay. I guess this means I have to introduce myself to you now. I am Aradia Megido, the Maid of Time. I was called to your world by the Harmony Forces that make up your Tree of Harmony, charged with protecting the timelines. Twilight? Starlight? Can I just say that wrangling that split-timeline mess of yours was a horrible mess?”

Eve coughed. “It’s Eve and Nova now. And Flutterfree and Renee. This is Daniel and O’Neill.”

“…Yeah, sorry, I haven’t caught up with the metatime,” Aradia said, sighing. “I have met O’Neill though. …There’ll be a future-me at some point who’s more caught up. I don’t even know what’s so important about this event, really, I just felt it happening.” She grinned, despite herself. “It’s a little exciting, clearly I’m at a pivot point in history! What is it?”

“That crystal man dropped a dimensional device,” Flutterfree said. “Eve finds this device and we start exploring the multiverse.”

“Except some bastard from the future has decided he’s going to make the ball invisible to keep it from happening,” O’Neill added.

“How far in the future?”

“Seven years,” Eve said. “We’re here using an alternate universe version of the spell Nova used to split the timelines.”

Aradia nodded. “Right, right. So, this guy from the future. We have to stop him from turning the ball invisible. How?”

“He’s a master of illusions, we think,” Daniel said. “We just need to get him to stop making the illusion.”

O’Neill readied his gun. “Hit him hard enough.”

“The other Aradia told us to capture him,” Nova said. “We should do that. …Also, Aradia? Sorry for doubting you existed.”

Aradia shrugged and smiled. “I was not aware you did. Or that it would be a problem. I have been pretty mysterious.” She turned to Eve. “Before we do this, you mentioned Vriska. You’ve seen her?”

“Twice,” Eve confirmed. “You know her?”

“We come from the same world. I always knew it’d be a long time before we ran into each other again, but I suppose the wait may soon be over.” She squealed slightly. “Oh, I’m so excited! There’s so much I want to talk to her about.” She bit her lip. “I hope I don’t have to hide myself, that… That would be a little depressing.”

“You are not at all what I was expecting,” Renee said. “It’s a good thing.”

Aradia’s smile widened even further. “People always say that! Sometimes multiple times – usually they wait for me to find something disturbing fascinating though.”

“…Do I want to know?” O’Neill asked.

Aradia shrugged. “I have no idea. Maybe? Maybe not? I mean… Look at my own future dead body there.”

“You find that… cool?” Flutterfree asked.

“Cool is a… Simple word,” Aradia said. “When I see my own body, I am reminded of the dual beauty of mortality and immortality, the inherent power within both modes of existence, their relations, and the way they dance eternally through these worlds of ours. I see myself there, one day – but I also see myself going on unending. It brings to mind the idea of a paradox, a paradox of life and death, of… of…” She shrugged. “Lost control of the sentence there. Wasn’t sure what I was going for. Maybe I should have just said it’s fascinating and beautiful.”

“Creepy,” O’Neill deadpanned. “Let’s get a move on. How are we taking this Ivan out?”

“Carefully,” Renee said. “He’s probably invisible, just like us. We need to find him first. Since time is stopped, that helps us significantly…”

“He may not be stopped,” Aradia asserted. “It is possible his time machine protects him.” Aradia pointed at Eve. “You have a temporal charm on you.”

Eve nodded. “It’s… a key.”

“I wonder what the reasoning behind that is.” She put a hand to her chin. “Might mean nothing. Regardless, from what I can sense that’ll keep your memories from being completely overwritten and will stop most temporal manipulation placed directly on you.”

“…Right.”

“You already figured that, huh?”

“Wait!” Daniel shouted. “If Ivan could be moving, and he’s a master of illusions… he could have been setting something up this entire time!”

Nova unleashed a magical-radar spell the moment the words left Daniel’s mouth. “I can’t sense anything! Must be an advanced cloak!”

O’Neill started firing his gun in a spread pattern across the area – starting near the time-frozen Twilight and moving around. He didn’t hit anything – but he saw some grass shift as something invisible repositioned itself. “There!” he shouted.

Eve doused the entire area in a reveal spell. The magic did as advertised – the light blue crystal man that was Ivan stood exposed in the grass.

He let out a prolonged sigh. “…Of course.” He snapped his fingers, creating seven different illusions of himself, but Eve dispelled those as well.

“Just give up, Ivan, your tricks do nothing,” Eve declared.

Ivan raised a hand, around which was a large, ticking watch. He moved to touch the device – but Aradia was on top of it. With a flick of her head, powerful telekinesis hit his arm, snapping the crystal limb off in addition to shattering the watch into a thousand pieces.

Ivan took one look at his broken watch and sighed. He grabbed his estranged arm and affixed it back to his body. Speaking with a deep, resonating voice, he addressed them. “Fine. Just take me.”

“Gladly,” O’Neill said, grabbing the backs of Ivan’s arms and pressing his gun into the crystal man’s back. “Don’t try anything clever.”

“Your mage has that taken care of,” Ivan droned, speaking with extreme apathy. “Do what you’re going to do.”

Nova nodded. “We should return to the future our way, Aradia, to ensure the spell completes.”

Aradia nodded. “Fine by me.”

Nova activated the scroll again, summoning the bowl to take them back to their time, taking Aradia and Ivan along for the ride. After another trip through the vortex, they returned to the map room – the map room they remembered. The one with extra bookshelves, dimensional devices, and maps of other planets.

“Woohoo!” Pinkie declared. “We’re back! Uh huh! We made it! Oh yeah!”

Eve whipped out the dimensional device, connecting to Earth Vitis. “Time to tell the others the good news.” They stepped through, arriving on a busy street near Canterlot High. They could see no ponies, no fancy technology – nothing.

O’Neill folded his arms and nodded. “Well, looks like they got this one as well. Enterprise, do you read?”

The Enterprise sent down a confirmation signal.

“Good, don’t know what we’d do without you. Beam us up. We’ve got two additions – a fairy of time and a prisoner who has illusion magic something fierce.”

They were back on the bridge of the Enterprise. Armed guards were ready to take Ivan away, but Eve held up a hoof. “Just restrain him. We need him for something, and I’m not sure what.”

Ivan shrugged, saying nothing.

Aradia twirled in the open space of the bridge. “Can I just say how nice the room here is? So open! I have to stick to hidden shadowy walls all the time, being the guardian of time and all.”

“Liberating?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yes. Very.”

O’Neill sat down in his big chair, letting out a breath. “Progress. Progress is good. Earth Ottoman, now.” They translated to the western side of the multiverse after a moment of power charging, arriving in orbit of an Earth.

“Message buoy,” the communications officer declared. “Storm has moved to Gem Vein, says the space rocks are still around. He’s congregating resources.”

O’Neill shrugged. “Meet him there then.”

The ship formation translated again to the Gem Vein, appearing in the middle of space. They saw a handful of Equis Cosmic ships, the Feldspar, and numerous Gem Warship hands.

“Hail the Feldspar,” Eve said the moment she saw it.

Luna’s face appeared onscreen. “It is good to see that not all of us have fallen to this cowardly invasion, Evening.”

Eve smiled. “Good to see you too, Luna. How did you survive?”

“We were moving through Equis Cosmic in preparations for the Harmonic and translated out in order to increase relative speed. When we returned, Equis Cosmic was changed. We eventually picked up one of Storm’s messages and came to Earth Ottoman – and then we remembered the Gems as a possible ally. As it turns out, they weren’t attacked, nor does it appear they will be. We’ve shifted universes several times to be safe, nothing’s happened.”

“Do we have any sort of plan?”

“Sadly, no,” Luna admitted. “We’ve been unable to acquire any information on our assailants, but we knew you were working on that. We just pooled our resources. The best we could get besides the Gems was Saxton Hale. Couldn’t find Thrackerzod or Alushy, and Siron didn’t think he would be able to offer much assistance.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Saxton Hale’s nobody to sneeze at. The resources he has… impressive, to say the least.”

Luna nodded. “What have you found out?”

“The University of Doors,” Eve said. “They’re the ones responsible for this. We got the coordinates to their world from the Spectacularium, should we need them. We also got the Handmaid – whose name is Aradia, apparently.”

Aradia waved. “Hello Luna!”

“It has been many moons since our last interaction,” Luna addressed Aradia. “It is a pleasure to see you so open this time.”

“Huh, it was only last week for me… I think. There are future versions running around.” She shrugged. “We’ve got a special case. I tried to take the University head on, and failed.”

“We can fight them with time travel on our turf,” Eve asserted. “We’ve already taken back Equis Vitis, it’s back to normal.”

“Celestia?” Luna asked, hopeful.

“Probably. We didn’t stick around to check – we came here.”

Ivan let out a short, barely interested laugh.

“…What?” O’Neill demanded.

“You. Thinking you won. There’ll already be another agent in the past, ensuring that bowling ball is never found.”

“…What?!” Luna declared.

“We have resources, technology, and an infinite number of these watches. We could do this for eternity. After a few failed attempts agents will come for you directly. We will notice this Gem universe.” He shook his head. “The University’s been doing this for a lot longer than you have.”

Renee looked to Daniel. “He’s right.”

“I know,” Daniel said, narrowing his eyes. “I know he is. They have the advantage. They got the surprise attack, and our most powerful resources are gone. We can’t fight them here.”

“What are we going to do?”

Aradia furrowed her brow. “I would suggest hunting down an immutability core – a device that will block all abnormal temporal interactions with a universe – but that would interfere with me and what I’ve done to protect your world. Not to mention alter the very nature of Nova’s timeline split irrevocably changing everything. I think it’s safe to say the same holds for most the other universes – they need time travel to be where they are.”

“…You could find one of those?”

“It’d take me a thousand years, but I could be back here in an instant.” Aradia furrowed her brow. “But while I’m out doing that, even if I return to this exact moment, they could still overwrite you or have defenses up of their own.”

“It seems as if we have to convince them to stop trying to destroy us,” Luna said. “Somehow.”

Eve blinked. She turned to the window, staring out into the stars. “…Today has been an unending stream of stress – event after event just keeps getting piled onto our plates, and we have no time to process, no time to think, and no time to understand what exactly is happening to us.”

“In more ways than you realize,” Pinkie grumbled.

Eve continued. “The University of Doors has attacked us relentlessly for seemingly no reason, taxing our very existence as friends.” She looked around at everyone in the room. “Let’s return the favor.”

“…What?” Luna asked. For the first time, Ivan looked like he was paying attention.

“We go after them,” Eve declared. “I don’t think we can out-time them on their world, but we can go to their world, and find out what would make them hurt. Find out what we can do to make them stop.”

Daniel nodded slowly. “A mission for leverage.”

“Yes. They must have something we can hit – and hit hard. Or, failing that, something we can threaten to hit.” Eve slammed her hoof on the ground. “I’d normally never consider such tactics, but they haven’t left us a choice.”

“I stand behind you,” Luna declared.

“I’ve been waiting for you ponies to get with the program,” O’Neill declared. “I’m all in.”

“I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been listening in on this conversation,” Storm said, his icon appearing on screen. “I love the idea.”

Emerald appeared onscreen as well, a smirk on her face. “You know, I’ve always wanted a worthy opponent to launch the entire Gem Armada at.”

Eve stopped trying to hold in her expression – a mildly cruel smirk crawled up the sides of her face. “It’s decided then. We take the fight to them.”

039 - The Hand in the Door, Part 2

At some moment in the relative past…

The University of Doors could not be said to exist within one universe. It may have been centered around the universe known as the Ninth World, but the actual grounds of the University rarely intersected with that plane – most of the University existed on its own, separate from other planes. The aesthetic of the University’s conglomeration of dimensions was that of endless doorways and keyholes of all sizes, arranged in a most haphazard and unwieldy fashion. The doorways with actual doors in them tended to lead to random universes – some close, some far. At any given time images of dozens of worlds could be seen through the ‘natural’ doors of the space.

University buildings were generally not subject to this rule of otherworldly portals – their doors were more regulated. Which was to say the bizarreness of the pocket dimensions and impossible geometries could be learned within the grounds, while out in the dimensional cross spaces there was no hope.

In the effective ‘center’ of the torus-shaped Administration building, a meeting of the Cabinet was underway, consisting of University investors, the department heads, and the Headstone herself. The Headstone of the university was an older woman with white hair that continually flowed around her, indicative of at least seven different kinds of magic in her body. Her eyes had an unnatural amber color to them, capable of being both soothing and menacing whenever she wished, going for the latter at the moment. Her outfit was composed of red and white robes that appeared completely black when looked at from another angle, making it seem to the unobservant eye that she was changing her outfits. Numerous keys were affixed to her robes – some opened restricted doors in the university, others had mysterious functions the Cabinet could only guess at.

Her name was Elosa Audiir.

She glared at the Head of the Acquisition Department. “Would you care to repeat that?”

The man, despite being significantly taller than Elosa, shifted in his boots. “Uh… You know what, now that I think about it, never mind.”

Elosa folded her hands. “Open your thoughts to us,” she ordered.

He took in a breath. “I said that we need to do something about the otherworlder alliance. My department has been unable to acquire numerous devices, and they have attempted to prevent our acquisition of many others. The largest loss was the Ark of Truth, which the Philosophy Department had heavily requested.”

“That was in their possession, was it not?” Elosa asked.

“Yes… But that’s not the only instance. We’ve encountered their exploration teams, and they virtually never allow us or those in our employ to acquire the ultraterrestrial devices we seek.”

“Objection to thievery is not crazy,” the Head of the Security Department noted.

“I’m not saying it is crazy. I’m saying that it’s a hindrance to our research. To all the Departments, I ask, your most impressive toys and devices – it was the Acquisition Department that gave you them. We open the doors behind which powerful artifacts lie. The Science Department’s weaver, the Life Department’s gene splicer, the Arcane Department’s… Arcanum. All of these and more came from our acquisitions, some through very complex and convoluted schemes.”

The Head of the Exploration Department rolled her eyes. “Your gifts to this University do not go unnoticed, but don’t cut us out. We’re out there too.”

The Head of Acquisition nodded. “Right. The point is, for the entire history of this University, we have operated with complete freedom. Disconnected from any universe, we have no oversight beyond what we institute ourselves. Every world was our oyster, ripe for the picking. This was exceptionally useful for the furthering of all our investigations. We did what was needed.”

“But now some young kids are on your lawn,” the Head of the Hinge Department ribbed.

The Head of Acquisition ignored him. “The worlds we have begun to open doors into intersect with the universes under the eye of the unusual otherworldly alliance. Their teams run into us more and more, and seem to have it in their heads that they are the defenders and protectors of the worlds they encounter. An absurd notion that has not only caused us significant difficulty, but also resulted in a handful of lost lives.”

Elosa narrowed her eyes. “I understand this. I would not be Headstone if I did not keep up with the cutting edge activities. What I want to know is what you plan to do to stop them.”

The Head of Acquisition summoned his courage. “They are young and weak, barely spread out over a handful of major universes. That means they are vulnerable. We can use our significant stores of knowledge, technology, and arcane power to deliver a crushing blow to them that will block out all interference.”

“The University is not prepared for a war,” Elosa declared. “Never has been, never will be. We are not a military installation. We survive by being above the other universes, not by subjugating them.”

“That may need to change,” the Head of Philosophy pointed out. “If this one group of otherworlders exists, what is to say there aren’t others? Some higher than the University? There is a chance we’d need to defend ourselves.”

“There is evidence of others,” the Head of Exploration added. “We’ve found clear evidence of a dead one run by sapient Stars. We may have encountered one run entirely by different versions of the being Twilight Sparkle, but that report is inconclusive.”

“Doesn’t the Datasphere itself qualify?”

“You know, it might. It does exist just about everywhere.”

Elosa nodded slowly. “That is something to consider in the years to come – constructing defenses. What is being suggested now is that we launch a strike, declare war. That is unacceptable.”

“I find the idea of a war delightful,” the Head of the Afterlife Department declared.

“Of course you would,” the Head of Life retorted.

“Who said it had to be a war?” the Head of Acquisition asked. “We have access to numerous outlandish technologies they won’t see coming. And thanks to our Investors, we have an unlimited supply of just about any device we wish.”

The entire Cabinet turned to the representative of Dracogen Enterprise, Jenny of the Red Gloves. She had the most innocent smile she could manage plastered on her face. “So, you want us to mass produce something? Ain’t going to be cheap, I can tell you that.”

Elosa narrowed her eyes. “You’ve encountered the otherworlders directly on two of your outings for us. Do you think we need to take action?”

Jenny paused in her thoughts for a moment. “Well, they are going to keep stopping your Acquisition Department. They think they’re heroes.” She got a faraway look in her eyes. “I know what that’s like.” She shook her head. “It means they’re determined, naive, and have too much idealism for their own good. Trying to get them off your back, to give you some slack in your morality, it’ll be like talking to a brick wall. If anything, they’ll try to reform you to something closer to their way of thinking. Which would mean no more taking whatever you want should you think you need it.”

Elosa nodded. “We cannot be required to stop completely. I understand that our progress in uncovering the secrets of the cosmos rely on acquisition.”

The Head of Acquisition turned to Jenny. “What we need is a way to take care of this alliance easily, quickly, and without too much of a headache. I can think of several ways to accomplish this with the assistance of your manufacturing.”

Jenny nodded. “I can too. I’m thinking of one in particular.” She pulled an egg-shaped device that functioned as a phone out of her pocket. “Put the Ticker into the mailbox,” she ordered. She pulled a small mailbox out of her backpack and opened the ‘door’ on the front of it, reaching through the mailbox to another universe. She pulled out an oversized watch.

Elosa recognized the device. “You plan to use time against them?”

“If you want. I can take a handful of my people and yours to each of their main universes, do some snooping, and find out the optimum moment for instability. Given how we barely understand how this works, there’s no way they’ll be able to put up a fight. We find the best point in their past, stop it for each universe that isn’t temporally connected to the others, and let time sort itself out.”

“There would be a few stragglers,” the Head of the Science Department pointed out. “Some universe jumpers will get the timing just right, or the universe in question will operate on the ripple principle.”

Jenny nodded. “I’m pretty sure you can take care of a few stragglers. If you decide to go through with this, that is.

Elosa furrowed her brow. “…Very well. Jenny of the Red Gloves, we once again request the aid of Dracogen Enterprises. Take care of our little problem so we may continue our innovation in peace.”

Jenny smirked evilly. “We will. I’ve always wanted to try something like this… Or maybe I already have, not like I’d actually remember.” She shrugged. “Give me everything you have on them. Everything.”

Elosa ordered that all known records of the otherworlder alliance be given to Jenny.

~~~

Siron looked out over the corrupted lands of the world – his world. Every last bit of dark magic on his world was now under his complete control. He could summon an army of truly demonic entities to do his very bidding at any moment he wished.

He was considering deeply if now was the time to play that card. He had received the transmission – the alliance formed during Disclosure was currently nonexistent. He’d had a hard time wrapping his head around exactly why, but he eventually decided it didn’t matter. They were gone. Besides the Gems and the University, he was the power now. While the existence of a University with enough power to rewrite universal history concerned him, he knew the University was relatively ‘distant’ to his world. If he played his cards right they wouldn’t feel the need to unleash their fury on him.

No, what had him concerned was the knowledge that Eve apparently had a plan to restore everything, returning Siron’s world to the place it had always been. He had always planned to, eventually, reveal his power and demand respect from all the universes with his might, knowing they wouldn’t want a war with demons, gerudo, and demonic entities from Majora’s remnants. They would have given in to his demands.

But this may have been an even better opportunity…

“It is a difficult decision,” Siron said at last, addressing Mistress Luna and Ganondorf. “We did not plan for this opportunity. We cannot be certain what will happen if we do move now – can we prevent them from restoring their suffocating power? Or will it be better to do what we planned?”

The Mistress frowned. “I prefer our original plan. This one… We will be responsible for destroying so much.”

Ganondorf shook his head. “We did not destroy it, the University did. If their plan succeeds, they will destroy what has replaced their worlds. Either way, one half of existence will not be. Our actions are not responsible for the loss of their lives.

“…You don’t actually care about lives.”

“But you do, and I respect that,” Ganondorf responded. “It is best if we are on the same page. I say take the opportunity to rise to greater power than anticipated. If their plan fails, this world could rise up and take the new place as center of multiversal civilization.”

“Extremely tempting,” Siron said. “Not to mention that every time I’ve stuck to my plans for the last seven years, something’s gone wrong. Some unforeseen variable or secret action performed that was beyond my control. There’s an opportunity here to be in control. To take advantage of a crisis. To accomplish what is needed.” He folded his hands.

Mistress Luna shook her head. “I don’t think we have the right, Siron. Not for something like this. Their work, suffocating though it was, wasn’t worthless.”

“Which is why we must take the mantle,” Ganondorf added.

“No, Ganondorf… We’ll actually be betraying them. Are we sure we are willing to utterly destroy them to achieve our freedom?”

“Yes,” Ganondorf asserted.

Siron slammed his staff on the ground, summoning an eldritch vortex of rocks and tentacles from the ground. It roared, marching off into the sunset. “I am the demon commander of a demonic army…” Siron mused. After a few moments of silence spent watching the beast destroy the very ground beneath it, Siron turned back to his two companions. “Even with the original plan, there was a chance we would actually have to attack. A true betrayal. I see no reason not to go all the way.”

“…Has what they done for us meant nothing?”

Siron paused for a moment. “…It means something. They’ll be welcome on this world, should they wish.”

Ganondorf shook his head. “Wait, what?”

“The Mistress is correct, we do owe them something,” Siron said. “They fought valiantly, and are fighting valiantly, and did much for us we did not ask for. We’re meeting them in battle with our customs – I am willing to adopt their policy of coexistence afterward. I can see it being worthwhile. Not the warrior’s way, but an exchange of honor all the same.”

Ganondorf folded his arms. “You put too much stock on honor.”

“Honor and power are all there is, in the end,” Siron said. “I thought you understood that.”

“That’s what my world thinks.”

“In a way,” Siron admitted. He turned to the Mistress directly. “Are you going to stand by us?”

The Mistress thought for a moment, finding herself staring at the creature as it moved even further and further away. It looked so small from this far away. So insignificant…

“Yes. I’m in,” she said.

“Good. Let’s go listen in on their plan.”

~~~

Eve, O’Neill, Director Storm, Emerald, and Saxton Hale sat at the same table in the primary briefing room of the Enterprise.

“We’re all that’s left,” Eve began. “Some of us come from worlds that currently don’t exist. Some of us come from a world that was overlooked. Others…” she glanced at Saxton Hale. “…Are just here for fun.”

“You got that right!” Saxton Hale said, his voice far too loud for the small room.

“Right,” Eve said, taking his response in stride. She was the only one at the table not affected by his volume. “O’Neill, care to go over the situation?”

O’Neill stood up and cleared his throat. “First of all, we don’t know anywhere near as much as we would like. We know that this University of Doors is a multiversal society that has a development somewhere around our level, but probably higher. Going from information provided by the Spectacularium, they are attacking us through time with intent to erase us so they can have unrestricted access to every universe whenever they want. It seems rather petty to me, but that’s the reason, so we just have to deal with it. Since we currently do not have the resources to attack them directly, the plan is to go to their world, find what leverage we can, and exploit it to make them stop what they’re doing so we can fix it.”

Director Storm nodded. “Taking the fight to them, as Eve poetically put it.”

O’Neill continued. “Our resources are somewhat limited. We do not have access to our extremely powerful allies – they’ve all been overwritten, and while asking their overwritten versions to help is an option in cases like Discord, that will just open up a can of worms we are not prepared to deal with. Namely, those we ask may be rewritten themselves when we set things right. We do have Ultra Fast Discord on board, but he’s scatterbrained and we cannot count on him to come through. Most of our other powerful individuals are either unwilling to help, or just don’t exist at all. Thrackerzod, Alushy, and several others were in overwritten universes and had no alternates.”

“What are our resources then?” Saxton Hale demanded.

“Shipwise, the O’Neill, Feldspar, a handful of Equis Cosmic ships, and the entire Gem Armada. In terms of men and resources, we have the crew of those ships, a handful of AID agents that escaped with Storm, Saxton Hale’s mercenaries and weapons, and… the entire Gem Armada.”

Emerald smirked. “You’re welcome.”

“While the Gem Armada is impressive, we are facing a multiversal society,” Eve reminded them. “They assuredly have powerful allies and technologies of their own. Even with the assistance of a Discord, we might fall. Aradia has already said her impressive power over time wasn’t enough to defeat them.”

O’Neill nodded. “The enemy is powerful, has unknown numbers, and vast capabilities.”

“Sounds like we need to do a run for intelligence,” Storm said.

“We do. We have the coordinates to their main world. To avoid detection, we will send a small squad to the world to do reconnaissance. They will find out whatever they can about the University of Doors, their allies, and how they run everything. We are also attempting to find out more from our prisoner – Ivan.”

Eve nodded. “Luna is attempting mind-reading spells on him. They are… not failing, but not exactly working either. She’ll have a report for us eventually, but we cannot guarantee the information is accurate.”

Emerald clenched her fist. “So… We’re waiting for information, is that it?”

“For now, yes. It shouldn’t be for long, though. We just need to find their vulnerability, threaten it, and make them realize erasing us is not worth their time. This could involve time travel of our own, a direct assault on their planet at a specific point, or some other convoluted plan. Prepare for everything.”

Saxton Hale grinned. “I’m always prepared for everything.”

“I believe it,” Eve said. “We need a reconnaissance team. I expect you all have some suggestions for who should be on it?”

Saxton Hale and Emerald grinned.

~~~

Nova and Aradia sat across from each other in the mess hall of the Enterprise. Aradia was smiling. Nova found the smile a little unnerving.

“So… If time is so fragile, how do other Equis universes survive my timeline divergence?” she asked.

Aradia shrugged. “Lots of reasons, probably. The best one I can think of is that time travel rules vary heavily from one universe to another – it’s why, most of the time, time travel doesn’t change a timeline in more than one universe. In those worlds time itself was probably stronger, or followed slightly different rules to not create such instability. All I know is that your universe had a weak time definition that could destroy it if was used incorrectly a lot, so I was called to serve as its guardian. You’d be surprised how much I had to put up with, and you’d be surprised how hard it is to deal with time travel from other universes interacting with this one.”

Nova blinked. “…I thought you were the Aradia that hadn’t experienced that?”

“Oh, I’m a further future version than the one you met. Swapped about an hour ago – she’s going to relive a semblance of what timeline I went through, even though it’s technically impossible to relive it exactly now, given what the University has done.”

“Have you been to the University?”

“Not directly, no. We’ve started… avoiding it. I’m a lot more willing to let dead bodies of myself start piling up than most time travelers, but it is a waste of valuable experiences to keep throwing ourselves at a brick wall of razor spikes.”

“That does sound like something to avoid.”

“Oh! I just remembered, I think I have something for you.” She reached into her red cloak, an annoyed expression on her face. “Be right back, I think I left it in the future.” She flashed away in her signature red gears of time travel, appearing back only a second later. In her hand was two objects – a flat piece of black plastic and a small ring.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a temporal sensor,” Aradia said. “I have a natural power within myself that allows me to sense the flow, ebb, and alteration of time. That sense is by no means normal. This can do that on its own. Since you’re going out into the multiverse to find time-exploiting enemies, I think it’s time for you to have a bit more than dumb-luck defenses against such things. I think you should have it.”

“M-me?” Nova blurted. “I almost destroyed time last time I messed with it!”

“I am the Maid of Time,” Aradia said. “That means I repair time itself with my powers. However, the Maid is not the only class to use Time, Nova. I think you would make an excellent Prince of Time, were titles to actually apply to you.”

“…Prince?”

“It means destroyer,” Aradia explained. “But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Think, destroying the enemy’s time. The gift of destruction is not a bad one, Nova. I would consider making use of it.”

Nova blinked. “I’m not sure…”

“Just take the devices to let you examine time, if nothing else,” Aradia said. “The plastic goes around whatever front hoof you want, the ring goes around your horn to interface your magic with it.”

Nova wrapped the plastic around her hoof and levitated the ring onto her horn. The moment the ring fixed itself to her horn, the color of her magic shifted – no longer was it a consistent blue, but it rather rapidly shifted through blue and pink in a striped pattern. The plastic on her hoof lit up, revealing itself to be a screen. A dozen displays lit up with diagrams Nova didn’t understand at first, but slowly recognized as the information was channeled through her horn. Time was flowing at 99.8% standard speed and Aradia’s presence was setting off so many alarms.

“I think you’ll find this helps with your time manipulation spells,” Aradia said. “More precision in your acceleration and slowness. If you want, you could probably execute time travel through just your magic, now.”

“I’d rather not go that far,” Nova said. “Thanks though. Now I’ll be able to see them coming. …From the future? How does that work?”

“Won’t work in every universe, only some have time react as a whole when an event is changed. I wouldn’t recommend relying on it completely.”

Nova levitated a cup off a nearby table, discovering her telekinesis still had the striped pattern. “Is all my magic going to look like a painted zebra now?”

“As long as you have the ring on. It’s the affectation of the interface. I wouldn’t worry about it, it only changes the appearance.”

“Mmm,” Nova said. “So, now what?”

One of the television screens on a nearby wall flickered, displaying a familiar sugar-skull emblem. Nova’s expression instantly shifted to one of contempt; long before Sombra’s face appeared on the screen. “I see you survived the erasing,” Nova spat.

Sombra grinned. “Ah, hello amiga! Nice to see you too. Unfortunately, I’m not actually here to talk to you, I’m here to talk to you.” She pointed at Aradia. “Aradia, the Handmaid. I wasn’t convinced you were more than a legend, but here you are.”

Aradia nodded slowly, a tired expression on her face. “Hello Sombra. What do you want?”

“I am here to offer my services to taking down the University of Doors. On one condition.”

“Why would you need a condition?” Nova blurted. “You want us to succeed anyway!”

Sombra glared at her. “I want Aradia there to go to Equis Cosmic, alter time, and get Corona out of erasure. There is a somewhat high chance we will not be able to defeat the University of Doors. If that is the case, Corona needs to be saved through other means. Consider it… an insurance.”

Nova bristled. “You care so much for her, don’t you?”

Sombra ignored Nova’s comment. “Aradia, I will help your cause against the University in any way I can if you’ll do this tiny favor. Shouldn’t be hard to temporarily reset Equis Cosmic, you did it for Equis Vitis, right?”

Aradia nodded. “I’ll do it.”

“Thank you. That’s all I ask. The moment she’s in your fleet, I’ll know, and I’ll begin work.” The transmission ended.

Aradia stood up, holding out a hand to Nova. “Coming?”

“W-what? Me?”

“I’m taking the opportunity to take some company this time. You and… Renee and Daniel I think. That’ll work best. We’ll flip Equis Cosmic’s coin, forcing one side to darkness, the other to pristine light. And we’ll get Corona.”

Nova nodded. “…I don’t like helping Sombra. But we might need her. Just to be clear, I don’t have to be happy about this, and I won’t be happy about this.”

“I understand,” Aradia said. “I wouldn’t worry about Sombra though – she’s on your side more than some of your ‘allies’.”

“…What do you mean?”

“It’s not for me to say,” Aradia said, realizing she’d just let something important slip. “You are not far enough along for me to just tell you things. Not yet. I shouldn’t even be doing this, but the nature of this problem requires it. After this is done, I will go back to being a background presence until you are ready.”

“You sound like Pinkie.”

“Yeah. I do. The fun paradox is I think she actually knows more than I do about certain things. You’ll get to have me around before she gets to explain herself fully, because I don’t even know quite what she is.”

Nova blinked. “…Really?”

“Really.” Aradia beamed. “Isn’t that exciting?”

“…You find the strangest things exciting…”

~~~

The Ninth World was a planet dominated by a single supercontinent in one massive ocean. The continent itself was vaguely diamond-shaped, with strange circular structures the size of mountains positioned near each corner. Each of these structures were known as Clocks, to those who knew their real shape.

The Southern Clock, otherwise known as the Clock of Kala, was just barely visible in the furthest distance from the location the portal opened, a flat whitish line that rose just barely above the horizon toward the northeast. Since it was hundreds of miles away, this paid testament to how tall the Clock was, as well as calling attention to the bizarre geography of this land.

The portal itself had appeared in a large, green plain covered in dual-bladed grass. A stone obelisk floated in the air a few yards away. There was a large city nearby, composed of buildings that looked randomly slapped on at every location, surrounding an impossibly tall tower that led up into the sky, eventually narrowing too small to see. A bean-shaped pod was riding up the center of this tower, indicating that it really was a space elevator.

A handful of floating craft that might have been space-capable were seen around the city’s skies, lazily drifting around. There was no evidence of dimensional portal activity.

The investigation team – Pinkie, Flutterfree, Tempest, a Spy mercenary, and a blue one-eyed Gem called Sapphire – weren’t quite sure what to make of all of it.

“High magic content,” Tempest said, checking her scanner. “And I am picking up some portal activity in that city, but not very much.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Then we just go into town and ask around. We’re all human or human-esque right now for a reason!”

“It’s a strange feeling…” Flutterfree said, rubbing her back where her wings should have been, but weren’t. “Never get used to it.”

“It’s not easy to keep my form this large,” Sapphire said. “We Sapphires prefer to have a shorter body, takes less energy to maintain.” She absent-mindedly rubbed her gemstone, which was placed on her left elbow.

“Can you see anything?” Tempest asked.

Sapphire closed her eye, looking into something beyond. “…I do not see them attacking us when we arrive. They treat us just like any other traveler.”

“The oculi have competition now!” Pinkie chuckled.

The Spy stretched his neck. “We must move quickly – the longer we spend acquiring information, the more time they have to catch us.”

They walked into the city – or in the case of Pinkie, bounced, and in the case of Sapphire, floated. Sapphire assured them this world would not find her psychic abilities mysterious, nor would Flutterfree’s bow draw attention. She did not foresee any difficulty in that regard.

“So you’ll be able to tell us if we’re about to get ambushed?” Flutterfree asked.

“It is likely,” Sapphire said. “Though I may not be able to provide enough warning. And I am uncertain how my powers will function with time travel’s involvement.”

“It never hurts to have a seer,” Spy said. “By chance do you see any of the information we are about to acquire?”

“It’s not that specific,” Sapphire admitted. “Conversations are harder to see than actions.”

“Worth a shot,” Spy admitted.

As they approached the city, they saw other humans walking along the dirt road as well. The variety within them was amazing – some were clearly wizards, glowing with magical energies, while others were almost completely machines with hardly any flesh in them. The vast majority of them seemed to have some kind of random technological device – many of which were ancient in appearance. Like the devices had been dug out of a ditch somewhere. Those leaving the city had cleaner devices, but they were still of an unimaginable variety – some were made of metal, others plastic, still others some biological polymer that resembled jello.

The more people they saw, the more devices they took in. Almost every one looked unique. The majority looked as if they were found rather than made.

“This… is a weird place,” Flutterfree said. “We look normal compared to it. I can see why they aren’t giving us much thought.”

“I have spotted a few other races,” Spy said. “Red fish-men, burly troll-men, and I believe a single pony. Best not to shift forms though, they’re clearly a minority.”

“Right,” Pinkie said. “Let’s ask around then. First order of business, what is this place?”

A human man with glowing rings in his ears and metal spikes poking out of his head walked up to her. “Oh! Are you new to the Beanstalk?”

“…That is the best name. Ever. Of all time,” Pinkie declared. “Is that the entire city or just the tall thing in the center?”

“The whole city!” the man declared. “It used to just be the Beanstalk, but now everything is the Beanstalk. Can I be permitted to show you the sights and the… businesses?”

“Actually, we’re looking for information,” Tempest said. “What do you know about the University of Doors?”

“Never heard of it,” the man said. “We’ve got Dracogen University though, if you’re looking for education. Very spendy though, tens of thousands of shins to get in.”

“Jenny said something about Dracogen,” Flutterfree whispered to Tempest.

“Dracogen?” Tempest said, raising an eyebrow.

“Have you been under a rock all these years? Dracogen Enterprises…” he cleared his throat, preparing for a grand speech that was obviously designed to get them interested enough to spend money – but it could still be useful for intel, so the group listened with rapt attention. “Long ago, back when we were but a small town, the man Dracogen came to town with his amazing ability to duplicate almost any Numenera Artifact brought to him. He slowly built up his influence, bringing more and more prosperity to the Beanstalk through his business and connections. He made deals with adventurers as time went on, adding them as employees of his business. He eventually activated the Beanstalk Elevator, giving us dominion over space itself – but he sadly perished. His second, Jenny of the Red Gloves, took over for Dracogen Enterprises, and has continually pushed our influence over the entire Ninth World, the Moon, and beyond!”

Tempest grabbed onto that thread. “What can you tell us about Jenny?”

“Hrm? Oh, her. She looks like a girl due to some curse or something, but she’s actually much, much older. From one of the prior worlds – some claim as far back as the First World! But there’s nobody that old. She has seen civilizations rise and fall, and been part of many of those activities. She has now devoted herself to this Beanstalk, running everything of Dracogen Enterprises to further our advancement. I truly believe that it is by her gloved hands that we will finally uncover the true potential the Prior Worlds achieved – perhaps even surpass them, but that will be beyond my lifetime.”

Spy butted in. “So she… does what? Duplicate these Numenera Artifacts – technology?”

“That’s just Dracogen Enterprise’s primary export. They also deal in ships, mercenaries for hire, and are glad to go on any quests to discover ancient power. The entire Steadfast, Beyond, and even Augur Kala knows about them!”

“Where do they do all this duplication?” Flutterfree asked.

“The main room under the Beanstalk itself. You can’t go there though, it’s closed to the public. But you can go to their museum, which is right next door!”

“Thanks, but not right now,” Pinkie said. “We need to check in to a place to stay.”

“Oh! I’ve got the place for you – the Dracogen suites! Full of every luxury the Ninth World can offer, for a relatively cheap price as well!”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Flutterfree said. “We’ll find it ourselves.”

The man’s face soured. “Fine then.” He charged off in a huff.

“…I think they haven’t gone through Disclosure,” Sapphire said. “That man would have mentioned such a feat if it were public knowledge.”

“So the University is secret. Great,” Tempest muttered. “Now what are we going to do?”

“We still have information,” Spy said. “We know that Dracogen Enterprises is for hire – perhaps we can pay them off destroying us? Or turn them on the University?”

“We have no idea if we’d have enough money,” Flutterfree pointed out. “…I’m not even sure what shins are.”

Pinkie poked her head into the conversation. “Plus, the University can probably just find any money they want in the multiverse and give it to Dracogen Enterprises! That’s probably why we see Dracogen out in the multiverse rather than the University a lot – they have a close relationship.”

“I can imagine…” Spy said. “If they have a duplication machine, and the University finds lots of unusual technologies, the University would want to duplicate as many as they could. It doesn’t matter why they would want to, there could be any reason, all of them very beneficial.”

“Can’t pay them off…” Tempest muttered.

Flutterfree looked up at the Beanstalk. “…What if we threaten to blow up their space elevator?”

“How would that help?” Tempest asked.

“You heard the man – he talked about Prior Worlds, he talked about technology as Numenera Artifacts. I don’t think any of this technology is theirs. They found it. They’re not going to be able to build another Beanstalk if its destroyed, possibly even with the University’s help. And if we can also destroy their duplicator…”

“That sounds like leverage,” Pinkie said. “That sounds like good leverage. Transmit the information back to the fleet. We should definitely keep looking around for more intel, but that’s enough for them to start making a plan.”

Tempest nodded, taking out her dimensional communicator. “Be prepared to run if this summons the police down on us.”

“It won’t,” Sapphire said.

She made the call and sent the information – nothing showed up to attack them. Tempest nodded toward Sapphire. “You are useful. Why didn’t we ever hire any oculi?”

“They tend to be… out there,” Pinkie said.

“I see…” Tempest said, not really seeing. “They’ve got it. They say to see if we can scout out this Beanstalk, find a way in, a weak point, anything.”

Pinkie started bouncing over there. “Let’s moooove it!”

The five moved toward the Beanstalk’s Stalk; the ladder to space itself.

~~~

Ivan wasn’t sure how he got here – a feeling that was truly alien to him. He was on one of the upper levels of the Beanstalk – that is, he was at the top of the base building, with only the tether itself above him. It was essentially a balcony used to overlook the entire city of the Beanstalk. Were Ivan more poetically inclined, he would have called the view beautiful.

But he was not, and he didn’t really have the patience for such things as beauty. Though Jenny apparently did, since she was leaning against the railing, wistfully looking out over her city.

“Ivan,” Jenny said, turning to him, face uncertain. “Why do we do this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do we give our everything to them?” she asked. “We’re… Well, we’re so much better than them. They are but little ants that scurry around under our feet, amounting to nothing over their lives. And yet, here we are, up at the top here, giving them basically everything. Why is that?”

“I only do it because you do,” Ivan responded, gazing out at the city. “You probably do it out of some misguided feeling of loyalty.”

Jenny chuckled bitterly. “I guess so. Nine Worlds… I’ve been here in all of them. I remember that much, at least. I probably am this world, in a sense. To think I’ve opposed it before… To think I did in such recent memory…” she shook her head. “They say you become more consistent as you age. Apparently I’ve been stunted in more ways than one.”

“You seem pretty consistent to me.”

“Ivan! Are you trying to console me?” Jenny laughed. “How unlike you.”

“I said what was evident,” Ivan deadpanned.

“You are the worst at this.”

Ivan shrugged. “Who else would you talk to? Dintin’s an absolute idiot, Ezermond can’t hold a conversation, and the boss isn’t exactly the chatty type.”

“YVND,” Jenny said, the consonants slipping off her tongue in a sharp blurb that hardly sounded like a word. “Though instead of apathy, he has arrogance.” She shrugged. “Or I could talk to myself. That works. Sometimes.”

Ivan shrugged, saying nothing.

Jenny let out a sigh. “Well, I’m going to go sell a million glowglobes at inflated prices so we can build that monorail. Then I’ve got to make sure the Order of Truth doesn’t find out about our deal with the Convergence, and vice versa… Oh, and Dintin needs to go smash some giant’s face in for legal reasons. Have to rile him up for that.”

Ivan nodded. “I… I actually am not sure what I need to do. I’m not sure how I got here.”

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “You’re supposed to get the University of Doors to agree to our terms, remember? Forge an alliance?”

“I… I have memories of already doing that.”

“Really? Do tell.”

“I appealed to Headstone Elsoa’s logical side using economic schematics and research projections. She agreed, and we’ve been working with them very successfully for years. I – Wait.”

Jenny cocked her head. “Ivan, you look confused. You never look confused.”

“I was on a ship… Being interrogated… By –“ He stopped short. He then took in a deep breath and sighed. “That was clever.”

Luna walked in into the dream from nowhere. Dream-Jenny freaked out, pulling her fist back. Luna just made the Dream-Jenny vanish. “That took you a while. I was able to get a significant amount of information out of this session, including a psych evaluation of Jenny.”

Ivan folded his arms. “This was just a memory, wasn’t it?”

“Your mind wouldn’t let me read it, so I forced you into a dream-state and suggested images until you latched onto a memory,” Luna explained. “I didn’t interfere at all. It played out until you were unable to continue without further cognitive dissonance. I’m surprised a master of illusions such as yourself was fooled for so long.”

“I’ve never had a dream before,” Ivan said. “I don’t sleep.”

“Just my luck,” Luna declared, allowing the dreamscape to revert to a backdrop of stars and auroras. “My opinion of you has not changed from our waking encounters, but my opinion of her has changed. I see a heart in there. In you, I just see… exhaustion.”

Ivan shrugged, making no further response.

“I shall take this information where we may put it to use. Enjoy your incarceration.”

“I won’t.”

The dream faded to black and Ivan woke up in the holding cell of the Feldspar. He saw Luna leaving the room, not giving him a second glance. …Waking up was an unusual feeling. He didn’t like it.

So, Luna had information. A way to exploit Jenny. Knowing Jenny, she probably would feel pressured by a threat to her city, her world.

Ivan decided it was what it was, and leaned back against the wall of his cell, turning his mind to other things.

~~~

Aradia, Nova, Renee, and Daniel had discovered what had changed in Equis Cosmic very quickly.

Captain Shockwave’s ship never arrived.

The problem was now a different one.

“How are we going to find when or where their ship changed course?” Daniel asked, currently stumbling in his pegasus form. “We don’t exactly have logs to work with. All we have is this Equis Cosmic ship.”

Renee smirked, “Daniel, it’s simple. We go to the past, about a day ago, more if needed, and find a directory that has her ship on it. Then we follow it forward in time until it diverges.”

Aradia nodded. “Exactly!” A mesh of red gears appeared around their ship – the EQS Ametrine – and they were a day into the past, twenty-four hours before first contact was supposed to be made.

“Question,” Nova asked. “Won’t the Apollo… not re-appear because it’s from another universe?”

“That only happens if we don’t reset it back to the default,” Aradia said. “The reason I was needed on Equis Vitis was because of a fact of most timelines – when you create one, a shadow of the old one is remembered, including the appearance and departure of interdimensional visitors. If time didn’t have a slight remembrance to it, every time the timeline changed, all dimensional activity would be rendered moot. It’d make it impossible to move around in most sections of the multiverse. However, because these timelines are ‘remembered’ – it isn’t really memory, more like a knowledge of which event was changed – this can strain how much information a universe is designed to store. This causes universes to break. Universes that break… Do interesting things.”

“Such as?”

“You really don’t want to know but I think you’ll find out. I apologize ahead of time for the horrors you will find.”

Nova nodded slowly. “Coming from the creepy death-obsessed time-maiden, that concerns me.”

Renee nodded. “Quite. Daniel, do we know the closest Equis Cosmic base that was around before we showed up?”

“Already plotting a course,” Daniel said.

“Oh, you are just adorable trying to use that screen with your wingtips. Hooves, darling.”

Daniel rolled his eyes, switching to his hooves. “This is ridiculous.”

“Did we ever decide why his cutie mark was a mysterious rune?” Nova asked.

“Languages,” Renee explained.

“I don’t even know what language that rune is from,” Daniel muttered, glancing at his flank.

Aradia shrugged. “Who cares, really? You know what you’re doing in life, as do I.”

“Why do you get to stay in your form and I don’t?”

Aradia smirked. “I’m good at not being seen.” And like that, she was gone.

“…What?” Renee said, blinking. “Where…?”

Aradia reappeared. “It’s a mixture of moving really, really fast and using telekinesis to keep the air from whipping too much. Bit exhausting, but fun. …I generally just stick to shadows though. Nobody wants to think too hard about me most of the time.”

Daniel pressed his hoof down on the button. “Course plotted! Arrival in… Seventeen minutes.”

Araida turned to Nova. “Care to try it out?”

Nova glanced at the new toy around her hoof. “…Sure.” She lit her horn, the stripe pattern drawing the attention of Renee and Daniel.

“Mesmerizing…” Renee moaned.

“Yeah,” Nova said, focusing on her spell. She enveloped the ship in a field of her magic, and then accelerated the ship forward. They didn’t jump through the timeline – they just experienced less time. “We have arrived.”

“Wow. Impressive.” Daniel admitted.

Renee activated the communicator. “This is the EQS Ametrine requesting permission to do-“ she stopped short. Out the main viewport, they saw the dual-cone shape of the station explode in a burst of blue fire.

Nova blinked. “…I think we found out why they didn’t show up.”

Aradia waved her hands, and the station was back in one piece. “We’re back five minutes,” she reported.

Renee tried again. “This is the EQS Ametrine requesting permission to dock.”

“Permission granted,” a very bored sounding receptionist said. “Bay 3.”

Renee guided the ship into the bay. There was no security – they arrived without any questions asked.

“Security. What is it?” Nova asked.

“They don’t have enemies,” Daniel reminded her. “It’s just them here. Bit lonely.”

Aradia poked her head out the hangar doors. The station was somewhat small – the only major commercial area right in front of them, and it wasn’t even the size of a football field. “Okay, so here’s what we do. We wait for the station to explode again, so we can find out where the explosion is coming from. I rewind, then we get closer. Then we get closer again.”

“Sounds like a long process,” Renee commented.

“You can afford to have patience with time travel,” Aradia said. “Though we have to be prepared. They could resist temporal shifts. So watch closely. They are likely to take the stealth approach again…”

The approach taken was the exact opposite of stealth. A gigantic being made seemingly of paper just walked out of a door, not even trying to be inconspicuous. The paper twirled around into a three limbed creature with no head – two arms, one ‘leg’ – all around a cubic center on which alien symbols flashed. The creature’s arms unraveled, touching the surface of the station a dozen different locations.

First, the lights went out. Then the station started to explode.

Aradia initiated a rewind just before Daniel’s wing got singed. She froze time – but the papery being was immune to the freeze.

It paused, looking at them. “I was not expecting a defense,” it said with a voice that sounded like seven different synthetic voices all vying for attention.

“I’m Aradia, Maid of Time,” Aradia said. “We need this timeline back.”

“I am YVND. No such thing is going to happen.” The papery tendrils unfurled themselves, flying at Aradia with electricity crackling all around them like a bunch of messy Tesla rods. Aradia used her impressive psychic power to divert all the limbs away from her into nearby walls. They tried to interface with the walls, but with time frozen, the station would not respond to the hacking being.

YVND resorted to something a little more basic – a complex matrix spell that hit Aradia from all sides with invisible force. She slowed relative time for them and accelerated herself. There were suddenly two of her – one behind YVND, tying his cubic center up with a whip. The version of Aradia that was surrounded by the enclosing matrix vanished into time, presumably to become the version behind YVND soon enough.

YVND didn’t react with rage – but with calculation. A series of lightning bolts surged from his core, striking a wide area. Nova and Renee blocked with shields while Aradia simply opted not to exist for a split second. Daniel, however, was hit right between the eyes.

Renee looked ready to panic, but Nova didn’t give her time – she used a rewind spell on him, returning him to health. “…Wha?”

“You died,” Nova said. “…Maybe?”

“I just can’t catch a break…” Daniel muttered. Renee pulled him into an embrace, using a shield of her own to defend him from another bolt.

“Daniel! You are not a cat!”

Nova snorted, returning to YVND, who was very busy dealing with the time-masterful Aradia.

Nova scanned the being – very powerful. Probably too powerful to be killed or disabled with a sneak attack. It was immune to being affected directly by time, and it probably had a time device of its own under those folds of paper somewhere…

Ah, there it was. The watch, deep within the central cube of YVND. Nova wondered if she could just… Maybe…

She teleported the device out of YVND’s center, bringing it right in front of her eyes. “Ha! Got it!”

YVND whirled around, calculating faster than any organic being should have been able to. Each papery strip flew toward Nova. She raised a shield, but it wasn’t enough to stop the onslaught of paper. It broke, and something was preventing her from teleporting herself, some field YVND was generating.

Aradia came to the rescue though. With the watch gone, YVND was no longer completely immune to time dilation. Aradia froze YVND in place. The maneuver was not a complete success – the cubic center did not move, but the papery edges managed to worm their way closer and closer to Nova.

Renee cut them off with a knife construct before they made contact. “Good heavens…”

“I think we’ve got another prisoner!” Aradia said, smiling. “…Whatever he is.”

“Dangerous,” Daniel said. “This… YVND was touching the station, and made it explode. He moved and calculated faster than any organic mind. I think he’s a digital interface of some sort, a supreme hacker.”

“Good thing we’re about to get Sombra on board then,” Aradia said. She glanced at YVND, eyes narrow. “…I think YVND here is somehow trying to hack my time stop. I… Well that’s certainly new.”

“I would say drop him on Nautica but I don’t think that’d hold him…” Renee said.

“Can we… take him out?” Nova wondered.

“I don’t think that’d be easy,” Aradia said. “…I think we can just dump him into open space though.”

Nova lit her horn, teleporting the frozen YVND several kilometers behind her at a high velocity. “That work?”

“Eh… Maybe?” Aradia said.

“He might have propulsion.” Daniel pointed out.

“Fine,” Nova said, teleporting them all back to their ship. “Let’s just take him to the future with us.”

Aradia resumed time – and then rewound their ship, so it left the dock. Before the station could question what they were doing, they picked up YVND and jumped to the future. With the station surviving, the EQS Counselor would meet with the Apollo and everything would occur as it was meant to. The appearance of YVND would barely be a blip on the security sensors of the station, given the halting of time itself.

“Take us to Corona’s station,” Aradia asked Daniel. This time, he was able to input the coordinates very quickly. Nova accelerated them so they were there in an instant.

Nova made a call. “Ahem. Corona? Do you mind if we… Borrow you for an emergency?”

Corona’s voice came back to her. “Uh… I was just heading to the Harmonic celebration. …Is this important?”

“Very. We’ll explain in a minute. Prepare yourself.”

“…All right.”

Daniel looked at his hooves. “Can we undo this now?”

Nova nodded, dispelling his form change. Renee teleported Corona onto the ship the moment afterward.

Corona was about to ask Nova a question, but then she was Aradia. She blinked. “Y-y-you’re the Handmaid.”

“Yes I am, Corona. My name is Aradia Megido – glad to finally meet you.”

“…If you’re talking like that, we’ve got a big problem.”

“You don’t know the half of i-“ Aradia blinked. “Okay, we need to leave YVND here. Now. I don’t know what he’s doing but he’s starting to move again. It’s like he’s hacking reality somehow.”

The lights in the ship began to flicker.

Aradia forced time to stop, preventing the ship from exploding. But her temporal shift finally strained the structure of the universe too much. The temporal energies from her, Nova, YVND, and the watch Nova was currently holding were just too much.

Part of the universe tore open. A skeletal hand poked out of the opening, pulling itself from absolutely nothing into existence. It clawed, revealing a skull in the shape of Aradia’s, horns and all. A tattered cloak of time clung to the skeletal being’s chest, and a partial halo appeared above its head.

“…Time Wraith,” Aradia said, eyes widening. “Get everyone out of here, NOW!”

Renee whipped out her dimensional device and dialed Gem Vein – forgetting for a moment that dialing another universe from inside a spaceship was a really stupid idea. Everyone – including Aradia and the Time Wraith – were ejected into the astral void of Gem Vein, their bodies exposed to the harsh reality of space itself. Aradia seemed unhindered – but so did the Time Wraith. It pointed a finger at Aradia and charged.

Aradia didn’t even bother trying to manipulate time or accelerate herself. It would have been completely pointless against such a being. She used pure telekinesis to keep it at bay. Its bones cracked, but it experienced no pain. It drew a whip with one of its skeletal hands, lashing at her. She was unable to stop the whip as it lashed her across the chest, opening a wound.

“Killed by a Time Wraith,” Aradia muttered. “I so hate it when this happens…”

The wraith swung the whip again, this time lashing open Aradia’s neck, spilling rust blood into space itself. She fell backward, unmoving.

The Time Wraith turned to the ponies and human drifting through space. They were still alive… Still needing to die. It moved toward them…

A drone hit it from the side, exploding the Time Wraith into thousands of shards. Sombra’s puddlejumper flew through the scene, picking up all of the drifting people with a teleport. Renee, Daniel, Corona, and Nova hadn’t been in space long enough to lose consciousness, but they all screamed through their panicked breathing from the pain that came with the sharp change in pressure, the realization that their eyes had boiled themselves dry, and the bruising they had all suffered.

Aradia was limp, dead.

Sombra tended to Corona. “I’ve got you, okay? Everything’s-“

“HEALTH POTION!” Corona screamed.

Sombra shook her head. “Right, right,” she opened up a chest and grabbed a potion filled with red liquid. She uncorked it and doused all four of the space-injured people in the liquid. “There, you should start feeling better soon.”

“Not Aradia,” Nova muttered.

The universe apparently found Nova in need of disproving, for at that moment Aradia started glowing while her wounds healed themselves. She floated a short ways into the air and opened her eyes. She yawned and stretched her arms. “Ah, Sombra. Thanks for taking care of that.”

“…WHAT!?” All of them said at once.

“Right, right,” Aradia smiled sheepishly. “I’ve got conditional immortality. If I am killed, unless the death was heroic or just in some way, I get to come back. Getting killed by a Time Wraith is rarely either.”

“…Convenient,” Daniel said.

“Yeah. It is.” She rubbed her neck. “Hurts like nothing else though.”

“…What’s a Time Wraith?” Nova asked.

Aradia sighed. “Universes in this section of the multiverse have a habit of summoning Time Wraiths whenever someone uses a bit too much time exploitation. We’d been using a lot to fight YVND, but we were still in the clear. It was… Whatever YVND was doing to break free that brought it. Though it still decided to make a replica of me…”

“So the universe punishes you by making you fight a skeleton of yourself,” Nova said. “That’s terrifying.”

Corona held her hoof up. “Can somepony or somebody explain what’s going on? HRM?”

“Right,” Renee and Daniel said at the same time, beginning a tag-team explanation.

~~~

“The plan is simple,” Eve said. “Since the actual University’s locations and resources elude us, we attack their primary muscle: Dracogen Enterprises. All our space forces are to hold back in this dimension, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Saxton Hale’s teams go into the Beanstalk at specialized locations, using portal devices to appear right where they need to be every time. They plant Mann Co. explosives all over the Beanstalk and the Beanstalk Basements. There should be enough explosives to level the entire city. Sombra will keep their security from detecting the explosives until we want them to.”

She took a breath and continued. “Once all the explosives are set, our group will walk right up to the front door of the Beanstalk and demand an audience with Jenny. Our psych evals suggest she will accept, which is what we’re planning on. We talk with her a moment, then as a show of power summon our entire fleet around the Beanstalk to show her we mean business. We convince her that her city – and world – is more important than the destruction of ours. If she doesn’t agree to see us we reveal our ships anyway, and make the demands in a more public manner. And… if she doesn’t agree to stop overwriting time on our worlds, we press the button. The entire Beanstalk goes up in flame, and the instability will force the tether of the space elevator to wrap around the planet, drastically altering the world’s climate and bringing about an extinction-level event. If she still holds out we start bombing, always prepared for an attack from beyond time. Aradia, Nova, you’ll have to keep her from going back and undoing what we did.”

Aradia nodded. “Another version of myself is already on that.”

“Good.” Eve snarled. “I do not want to resort to violence, I want to talk her out of it with a bargain. But all of us must be willing to go through with all we threaten. Do you understand?”

The group – O’Neill, Daniel, Aradia, Corona, Pinkie, Renee, Flutterfree, and Nova – nodded.

Renee adjusted her hat. “You sure we shouldn’t be part of the mission teams?”

“Saxton Hale has that under control with his own specialized units,” Eve explained. “We need efficiency and military precision, and we don’t have enough Tau’ri soldiers.”

Everyone nodded. Corona let out a sigh. “This… This is a bit much, to be honest.”

Eve smiled sadly. “Corona… No offense, but you have no idea. You just got here.”

Corona rubbed the back of her head. “Yeeeah…”

Eve pulled her into a hug. “I’m glad you’re here to stand with us, though.”

“I hope this works…” Flutterfree said.

Pinkie grinned. “Look at us!” She pointed at all nine of them. “We are the heroes, Flutterfree. The top of the top, the best of the best. We will win at the end of the day, you can count on it!”

Nova frowned. “But at what cost Pinkie?”

“I… Really don’t know.”

“Yeah. That’s what has me concerned.”

Eve turned to O’Neill. “…I think we should begin sooner, rather than later.”

O’Neill nodded. “Agreed. Shall we?”

Eve smiled in confirmation. She and O’Neill both pressed red buttons in front of them and spoke their names and access codes.

“Begin operation,” they both said at once.

Sombra moved first – disabling the Beanstalk’s security measures with ease. It helped that the ‘security measures’ were hastily thrown together cameras salvaged from ‘Numenera’ stores hidden deep in the earth. Since Dracogen Enterprises had used their incomplete and spotty knowledge to set up the system, a master hacker had no issue working around it, despite some of the technology being foreign. She sent the message Done to Eve’s computer.

“Phase two,” O’Neill said, accessing communications. “Saxton Hale, you better do this right.”

“Like a kangaroo and a bicycle!” Saxton Hale’s voice came through. “IT’S TIME TO PROVE YOURSELVES MEN!”

Reports flew across the screen the nine of them were watching – bombs were being planted successfully. Teams laid charges, armed them to remote detonators, and left in under a minute. Only one team actually met any resistance, and they took out the guard with ease. There was no evidence any alarm had been raised.

The entire operation took less than two minutes.

“This is going very smoothly,” Nova observed.

“We’ve got to talk to Jenny now – the Armada is ready,” Eve declared. “Corona? You know what to do.”

Corona pulled out her specialized portal gun, already dialed to the Ninth World and set to the right location. The red portal took them all to the front doors of the Beanstalk. Upon these front doors was a symbol: a white knot of lines that resembled a four-petal flower. Some citizens looked at the newcomers with confused expressions, but nothing too alarming.

Eve turned on the Royal Canterlot Voice. “JENNY OF THE RED GLOVES, CEO OF DRACOGEN ENTERPRISES! I, CHARTER-PRINCESS EVENING SPARKLE OF EQUIS VITIS DEMAND AN AUDIENCE ON BEHALF OF MY WORLDS AND THOSE ASSOCIATED!”

The front doors opened. Jenny’s voice greeted them from a nearby speaker. “Come on in. Take the elevator. It’ll automatically take you to me.” Pinkie relayed the message to Eve.

“So far so good,” Daniel said. The nine of them walked through the doors into a large white hall, at the end of which was a simple wooden desk. Behind the desk, the elevator.

Dintin was there, watering a potted plant. “Oh! Hi there! Do you like the flowers?” he asked with the purest of innocent voices.

Aradia smiled. “I think they’re lovely, Dintin.”

“Ever consider devoting more time to flowers?” Flutterfree asked.

“Dracogen gives me lots of flowers. Lots of plants.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Oh. Okay.”

Eve turned to O’Neill. “The robot’s talking, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Great…” she turned on her ears. “…Looks like I’ll need these.”

“Hi!” Dintin said.

Eve smiled. “Hello, Dintin.”

“Going to Jenny?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s nice. You’ll like her.”

Eve bit her lip. “Oh, if only…”

The nine of them left the behemoth of a robot and entered the elevator, which was surprisingly roomy, easily holding all of them. It took them down… Down… Down into the ground. Eve mentally calculated – they had enough explosives to reach down this far, destroying whatever was hidden in the depths. She also calculated the exact distance she’d need to teleport to escape should it come to that.

The elevator eventually stopped, and the doors opened. They walked out into a large, open space filled with machines and magical artifacts of every imaginable kind. In the center of the room was a tremendous cubic structure made of a white metal. It had a half-dozen translucent limbs inside it, each one with a different bizarre tool at the end. It was slowly building one of the watches, seemingly from nothing. The watch was completed before their eyes. The arms vanished and the watch descended to the ground, onto a conveyor belt, and into the gloved hand of Jenny herself.

“I’m surprised you managed to find this universe,” she said. “It’s not like we give out its coordinates. We don’t have an easy-to-access Directory, like you do.”

Eve frowned. “We prefer to be open.”

Jenny turned around, looking Eve right in the eyes. “We don’t. We find it allows people to exploit us.”

“Like you’re exploiting us?”

Jenny nodded, a slight smirk on her face. “Exactly. You left yourselves open. The University eventually figured it’d just be easier to get rid of you than continue to deal with you. Since you made it this far, I think they were probably wrong, but that’s not really my concern now is it?”

“Do you know what is?” O’Neill asked.

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “Ah, the part where you reveal what your plan is. What is it? Do you have Ivan captured? Do you have an army from a universe we forgot about? Do you have some sort of time-scheme centered around your Handmaid over there?” She shook her head. “Really… Any prisoners you have are duplicates, the University can face off against a single universe, and I’ve already killed that red fairy over there three times personally.”

Aradia bristled. “Want to try and make it four?”

“Not particularly,” Jenny said. “You may not believe me, but I don’t like fighting all that much. I like creative solutions. Sometimes that involves a carefully placed punch, but it more often involves talking your way out of a situation, or using time to eliminate the ‘enemy’ completely.” She threw her hands wide. “This entire basement is filled with creative solutions. The ancient technology of this world is at my disposal! I’m bringing the Ninth World up from the ashes of the Eighth! Did you know the Eighth World was a multiversal society? It’s true! I’ve found things that suggest they had the power to create universes. Records of a skirmish between them and a group of sapient Stars. Remnants of a clash that we can scarcely imagine!”

“You were a part of it,” Eve said. “We know how old you are, Jenny. You were there. You just can’t remember.”

“Your point?”

Eve shook her head. “You know what, never mind. Here are our demands. We want you to restore our timelines to the way they were, and not attack them ever again. You can do that easily.”

Jenny twirled the watch device in her hand. “Yeah, I can. But why would I?”

“Because we have bombs planted in every last inch of your precious Beanstalk,” O’Neill said. “Enough to level the entire city.”

Jenny’s smile vanished in an instant. “There’s no way.”

O’Neill called Sombra. “You can reactivate their security system.”

Jenny pulled a computer pad out of her pocket and looked at it. Her panic was replaced with confusion. “…There’s no bombs here.”

“…What?” Eve said. “All the missions were a success! All bombs planted and-“

“They were removed,” a familiar voice said from behind them. Siron strode out of the elevator, his staff of green and red surrounded with an eerily familiar purple miasma of eldritch power. “I removed them.”

Jenny blinked. “Who the heck is this?”

“Siron!?” Eve shouted. “You… You removed them? Why in the name of Celestia would you do that!? How did you do that?”

“I have gained complete control of the eldritch energies on my planet, Evening. I used it like Majora’s hands – reaching into every location I felt like I needed to. I have been planning to use it to establish myself and my people as a power in this multiverse for a long time. No longer under your pretty purple hoof, no longer treated like nothing. Now we are the power here, and you are not. You can no longer stifle us from what we wish to become.”

“Siron! You’re dooming at least six worlds to death!” Eve shouted.

“I’m not. She is. I’m just taking advantage of an opportunity.” He stamped his staff on the ground. “Give up, Evening. Your time in the multiverse is at an end.”

Tears rolled down Eve’s face. “Siron! Siron… Did our friendship mean nothing!? All we did for you, all that we gave you?”

“I have not forgotten,” Siron said. “Those of you that have survived are welcome to join us. But not as overlords ever again. We will stand as proud warriors, not as eternal diplomats.”

“Yeah, you failed to realize something,” Jenny said.

“What?” Siron asked, eyes narrowing.

“I don’t like you,” Jenny answered, smirking. “What you say about power, about honor, about hating the diplomacy – I don’t care if you won’t be a nuisance to University or not, I feel the need to wipe you out of existence just so you don’t propagate that stupid philosophy of yours.”

Siron glared. “Jenny of the Red Gloves, you are not my enemy. We will not interfere-“

“So what?” Jenny said. “I don’t give a crap. I don’t like you. You’re going to-“

“Jenny, leave him be,” a deep, resonating voice said. Before their eyes, a shadowy creature took shape, rising from the ground. It resembled a dinosaur, but made of almost nothing but bones. The eyes were hollow, the color a dull black, and shadow energies shimmered off at all angles.

“…The hell?” O’Neill blurted, reaching for his gun.

“Woah woah!” Jenny said, holding up her hands. “Let’s all talk about this like calm, rational people. Dracogen, why can’t I go kick this guy’s face in? He’s ridiculous! Listen to the warmonger!”

“He did us a favor, Jenny. He removed the bombs that would have destroyed what we’ve built on this world…” despite his size, he moved around the room with silence, and purpose.

“But-“

“Genevieve Hahn, you know your place. Ancient as you may be, you still serve me. And I provide all that you need for your precious progress.”

Jenny clenched her fists. “Well, guess what Siron? Looks like the boss has given you a pass. Go figure. Go celebrate in freedom your human sacrifice or whatever barbaric thing it is you want to do.”

Eve blinked. “No…”

The Dracogen addressed her. “You have lost, Evening Sparkle. Your worlds are no more. Your plans have failed. Already I have dispatched agents to take care of the timeline of Gem Vein. The University has been informed of your assault, and they will be hunting any loose ships that escape. Your best option at this point is to willfully surrender to Dracogen Enterprises and serve us in the multiverse, or go to Siron’s world. You and your worlds are no more.”

Eve’s eye twitched. “No. I’m not letting all this sacrifice be for nothing!” She pulled the watch device Aradia had gotten from YVND out. “LET’S SEE HOW YOU LIKE IT!” In a fit of rage, she twisted the device into the deep past.

“Eve, no!” Both Jenny and Aradia yelled at the same time, activating their own temporal powers in a vain attempt to stop her.

And then everything shattered.

~~~

“Beware the last of the sandwiches,” a synthetic voice said, bringing Eve to her full awareness. She blinked – she could feel that she was on top of some snow. In front of her was a strange cloaked creature. The single eye in the top of it was all that was visible, and even this eye told her nothing – it was just a red piece of glass as far as she could tell.

“What… Are you?”

“Ezermond.”

“…Luna mentioned that name in briefing,” Eve muttered, rubbing her head. “Where are we?”

“The stars align in the fiftieth position every last perigee.”

Eve shook her head. “What?”

“I like big books.”

Eve rolled her eyes. “Okay…” She looked at her surroundings. She was at the edge of a lake that was colored unnaturally black. There was signs that several struggles had taken place around this lake recently – blood in the snow, scraps of wood littered everywhere, and the occasional humanoid figure. She saw, in the distance, some people dragging what appeared to be a heavily mutated dragon head away. She spotted a boy wielding a warhammer as if it weighed nothing. She sensed… something from him. Something beautiful.

But he wasn’t what she was here to see.

She was here to see the girl with the red gloves, sitting next to the lake, looking at her reflection. To her side, there was a large piece of ship siding that read Mo’Cookies.

Eve lit her horn, charging it up with all the dark magic she could muster.

“The flavor of oreos is beyond you,” Ezermond said.

“SHUT UP!”

The girl looked up at the noise, eyes wide. She looked…not scared. Sad.

Eve’s horn lost all its dark magic in that instant. “…Who are you?” she asked, not sure why.

“…They call me Jenny,” she said, picking up a stick and poking the black water with it. “…We just saved the Empire, you know. The Black Witch is dead. Chaos is thwarted. All those vampires gone…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what it meant. At all.” She fell silent, not looking at Eve or Ezermond at all anymore.

Eve hung her head and walked away. A tear dropped down her cheek – she couldn’t do it. This child… This child had such a future ahead of her. Such a bright and long future. Eve knew – Jenny, both Jennys, had a heart in them. That heart may have been significantly flawed, but she also knew this world would be worse off without her. The world’s immortal guardian… Or citizen. Or something.

Jenny was waiting for Eve at the top of the hill – not the girl at the lake, but the Jenny that Eve knew from the deep future. “…Welcome to the First World,” Jenny said.

“First?”

“Yeah. The next one somehow becomes an exact copy of a default Earth,” Jenny explained. “The Third through Sixth I don’t remember enough to tell you solidly about. One of them was all digital intelligence, I think. No idea how I lived through that. Seventh was…” she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. …What does matter is you didn’t do it.”

“I couldn’t. I… I saw her eyes. And I know she’ll do great things for this world in the next worlds…”

“One billion years of it,” Jenny said. “I’ve done bad too, you know. Joined up with a fellow called the Professor a couple decades back. Almost blew up a galaxy. I’m also pretty sure I’m the one who called the alien invasion when it happened.”

“…But a world needs its villains too,” Eve reasoned.

“I’ve been everything,” Jenny said. “Contradictory even to myself. I learn things, but then a thousand or two years later I forget it, and lose the impact.”

“Why did you think it was okay to erase us!?”

Jenny let out a bitter laugh. “Never thought it was. I just stopped listening to my conscience a long time ago.”

“Why?”

“Inconsistency, that’s why. The eternal changing of values every few thousand years. I just go with whatever people find acceptable at the time, because who the heck am I to judge? The University and Dracogen Enterprises are products of the Ninth Era, an era that is currently rather brutal. The Beanstalk is far too nice for you to get a good picture of our world – it’s really a grim, brutal place. You have to be willing to kill towns sometimes, just to survive.” She weaved her fingers together. “I think we both know that you and the University – and by consequence, you and me – would have come to a more violent head eventually had action not been taken.”

Eve shook her head. “I don’t believe that.”

“You’re still young,” Jenny said with a smirk.

Ezermond piped in. “At last, a bonding of the cheeses!”

“What is his deal?” Eve asked.

“Ezermond? No idea. The Philethis are a strange, usually secluded race that know a lot more about things than anyone else. This one has brain damage, so he follows me and my friends around for Datasphere-knows what reason.”

“Thank you,” Ezermond chirped

“And then occasionally he says things that make you think he actually has a brain cell left…” Jenny shrugged.

Eve frowned, shivering in the snow.

“…Just so you know, I’d still remove your worlds from existence with time travel. But… given the mess you’ve caused, I don’t think it’ll come to that anymore.”

“Mess?”

“You just broke time. Well, we broke time. I have no idea how we ended up in this specific when and where… A moment so important it’s still vivid to me, even after all these eons. I’m pretty sure – if I remember this world’s time travel right – that we’re going to get pulled back to where we left pretty soon. And then all hell is going to break loose.”

“How so?”

“You encountered Time Wraiths yet?”

“…Only heard – oh. Oh. How bad is it going to be?”

“We’re going to have to fight together. It’s going to be intense…” Jenny cracked her knuckles. “Ready?”

Eve shivered. “I guess so.”

“Game – Go! Move – Set!”

And then things broke again.

~~~

It was as if nothing had changed in the basement of the Beanstalk.

Except now there was a tear in reality that lead to nothing right in the center of everything.

“Everyone, try to fight a Wraith that isn’t your own,” Aradia called as they poured out. “It’s always harder to face yourself!”

Everyone in the entire room got a Wraith – the nine ‘heroes’, Siron, Jenny, and the Dracogen himself. Each one was an aged skeletal form with the partial halo over their head, and all were out for blood – the blood of their counterparts.

“ALSO NO USING TIME TRAVEL THAT JUST MAKES THEM STRONGER!” Aradia shouted.

The fights broke out into so much chaos, Eve couldn’t make out anything that was happening. She just knew she had to get away from her own Time Wraith, and try not to think about how it might be the undead spirit of a certain Twilight Sparkle…

She went after Siron’s Time Wraith – that would be cathartic. She blasted it with magic, but only shifted the bones around. She went right to a dark magic death spell, but that did nothing at all to the Wraith – of course. It was probably an undead form of some kind…

Siron’s Time Wraith pointed its staff at her, summoning black energies at her. She used her own magic to turn the beam around, hitting the Wraith in the chest with its own power. Its ribs cracked.

Eve smirked – this Wraith didn’t seem to have Siron’s freaky new eldritch powers. That meant Eve could win – she had almost beat Siron back on that first adventure, and she definitely would now. She spread her wings and unleashed a series of needles through the Time Wraith, cracking its bone-white carapice. It shattered into dust, falling to the ground.

She turned to Siron. “You could be ne-“ she blinked. Siron was gone. No evidence of him at all. He’d run. That seemed so unlike him...

Wait, that was an idea. She tried to initiate a teleport – but found the temporal energies swirling in the area blocked the attempt. Siron must’ve had some sort of eldritch cheat… The thought made her livid. All this talk about being a warrior and he ran.

She saw O’Neill having trouble – he apparently didn’t get the memo and was fighting his own Time Wraith in hand to hand combat. Bones from the wraith drew blood from O’Neill’s own arms. The Wraith kicked him into a wall covered in Numenera technology, flooding O’Neill with electricity and more than a few needles. The Wraith looked as if it wanted to absorb him into itself.

Eve shot it with her knives, shattering many of its bones, but not enough. Jenny came to the rescue, punching the Wraith to oblivion with her special gloves and disconnecting O’Neill from the electricity. “Up and at ‘em General!”

He was not up and at ‘em – he was alive, but very dazed.

Then Jenny’s Time Wraith punched a hole in Jenny’s stomach. Jenny yowled in pain, but already Eve could see Jenny’s flesh healing itself rapidly. That explained how she’d survived so long, Eve supposed. She targeted Jenny’s Wraith, blasting off an arm.

The arm reformed.

Siron’s and O’Neill’s wraiths had been relatively weak, physically, because they were based on individuals with less physical power… Jenny’s wraith was going to be a problem.

“Uh, Jenny?” Eve asked.

“I didn’t think about this part!” Jenny admitted. “Uh, try something eldritch or ultraterrestrial!”

“Siron’s not here anymore!” Eve shouted.

“Crud. Hey Dracogen, maybe you’ve got-“

The Dracogen and his Wraith were locked in deadly combat, tumbling across the basement of the room, unable to do anything but claw and grab at each other with their psychic powers.

“Nobody gets the memo!” Aradia shrieked. “People are going to start dying if we don’t do something!”

“WORKING ON IT” Corona said, firebending away Nova’s Time Wraith. “SOMBRA, WORK FASTER!”

Suddenly, all the weapons in the room activated. Those that were pointing at Wraiths fired. Most weapons had marginal effect, but some blew off heads. Pinkie’s Wraith went down by a chance propeller to the back of the skull.

“Whew,” Pinkie said, relieved. “Glad mine’s out of the way.”

Eve saw Nova get hurt badly by Renee’s Wraith, the magic cutting down to the unicorn’s bone. Eve saw her Wraith keeping Jenny occupied… She saw her friends getting wounded…

She heard the Dracogen’s Wraith yell in triumph. It had killed its charge – and now the Time Wraith of a super enhanced magic reptile overlord was after the rest of them.

Jenny pulled a big fat gun off a nearby shelf, not bothering to check if it worked. The knockback threw her to the ground and crushed her spine – temporarily – but the beam sailed true. It hit the Dracogen’s Wraith – but the creature just absorbed it.

“We’re doomed!” Jenny declared.

Aradia fell to the ground, bested by Jenny’s Wraith. “Agh…”

Then Eve saw Daniel, stumbling around – right in the path of the Dracogen’s Wraith.

“DANIEL!” Eve yelled. When she shouted his name, Renee’s ears perked up and a haunted expression crossed her face. She knew what Eve’s tone meant.

The Dracogen’s claw embedded itself right through Daniel’s chest, piercing the entire heart. The limp human man was tossed to the side, breaking several ribs and the spine. His face was frozen open in shock, no longer able to move.

Renee made no remarks this time – no calling for help, nothing. She just ran to him and cried.

Eve couldn’t take it anymore – the sight of Daniel… The blood everywhere… She rose into the air, channeling all the power she could into herself. The pure, raw, violent emotion – she finally let it consume her. Her coat turned white, and her entire mane lit on fire. She tapped into magic she didn’t know she had, her flaming mane filling with the stars of Evening. She grabbed the entire planet in her magic, and screamed.

She drew power from the entire arcane field around the Ninth World – an arcane field stronger than almost any other she had encountered. She pointed a hoof at the Dracogen’s Time Wraith – and vaporized it with a burst of holy light, drilling a hole several meters into the ground. She moved to Aradia’s Wraith next, taking it out without much more difficulty. Then Jenny’s. She aimed-

Jenny’s Wraith teleported behind her and punched. Eve raised a shield, but the Wraith was beyond that. The single punch tore through, hitting her across the jaw, knocking the violence right out of her. Her colors returned to normal and she slammed into the ground, breaking a wing and a leg in the process.

She was drained. There was nothing left in her. Nothing at all… Nothing to fight with… Nothing… All was lost…

She saw a light.

…It wasn’t the light at the end of the tunnel, things hadn’t gotten dark yet. It was coming from… Daniel?

She snapped her eyes open, coming to full attention.

Daniel has a habit of dying.

He has Ascended before.

He’s Ascending now.

A being of pure energy and light erupted from Daniel’s soul, rising into the air. Thin, wispy tendrils of energy snaked around, feeling their way through reality.

The Time Wraiths stopped fighting to stare at the new presence.

With a single action, the Ascended being that was Daniel Jackson sealed every remaining Time Wraith away. Then he healed the wounds – Eve noticed then that Nova’s brains had been dashed out, and that Aradia had suffered a perma-death. But Daniel brought them back – including the Dracogen.

O’Neill started laughing. “They can’t stop him here! There are no Ascended rules in this universe! Way to go Danny Boy!”

The Ascended Daniel Jackson condensed itself into a small, white, human sized glow. With a pop, a human Daniel Jackson appeared, in a clean new uniform. He looked down at the uniform with curiosity. “I knew sending me back naked had to be some kind of cruel joke.”

Renee galloped at him and flung herself into his arms, planting a kiss firmly on his face. She had very clearly intended for it to be a graceful, passionate, emotional moment, but she had failed to take into account that she was a pony, he was a human, and neither of them had planned out his course of action. The passionate kiss quickly transformed into a fumble as both of them struggled not to fall over.

The struggle was completely in vain, as they both hit the ground with a thud.

Pinkie put down her camera. “I am keeping these pictures forever.”

Renee and Daniel started laughing – then the laughing stopped abruptly when Renee slapped him across the face. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again Daniel Jackson!”

“I didn’t have time to explain the pl-“

“Daniel Jackson, rule one of courting Lady Rarity, stop making excuses.”

“…That’s…”

“Something I made up just now that won’t have any meaning going forward but I felt the need to say,” Renee said, talking a mile a minute. “Good heavens my heart is racing and I’m not sure if it’s from joy, rage, or… I need to sit.” She sat down, taking in deep breaths. Daniel sat down as well next to her.

“Let’s let them have their moment,” Eve said. She turned to Jenny – and the Dracogen. “I think we need to resolve this.”

At that moment, Headstone Elosa bashed through the doors to the large room with a small troop of University personnel. “What is going on?” she demanded.

“They were more trouble than anticipated,” Jenny said, standing up and dusting herself off. “Looks like erasing them from time isn’t going to work. They’ve got too many tricks, luck, and frankly they just saved our lives.”

Elosa blinked. “…Jenny, you can’t be saying…”

“We’ll still take care of the problem, as promised,” Jenny assured her. “But we’ve got to take… Alternative methods.” She glanced at the Dracogen to ensure he approved – he nodded ever so slowly.

“Such as?” Elosa demanded.

“How about this?” Jenny said, rummaging through a nearby crate and producing a bunch of cone-shaped things with lights at the top. “We put beacons in every universe we claim as part of our network. If we ever come across a universe that has a beacon that isn’t ours, we have to leave it alone. A complete cessation of interaction.”

Eve glared at Elosa. “That’s probably for the best.”

Elosa narrowed her eyes at Eve. “…It is true, there is now no longer an option for coexistence. Not that there ever really was.”

Eve shook her head at Elosa. “I fear what your University does to its universes. But… I’ll respect Jenny’s suggestion. Of course, Dracogen Enterprises has to follow the same rule.”

Jenny nodded. “Right. No contact. At all.”

Eve turned to Jenny. “…Jenny, I think I understand you a little better now. I might, with time, be willing to forgive you. But now is not the time.”

Jenny shrugged. “Eh… Yeah, you’re right.”

“…I hate to admit it, but it is best if we part as enemies.”

Jenny folded her arms. “All right. I know how to make sure that happens.”

“Huh?”

Jenny punched Eve in the face and knocked her out.

~~~

Siron charged into the room Mistress Luna and Ganondorf occupied. “It’s all gone wrong.”

Ganondorf growled. “What?”

“There were these Time Wraiths, and I was ready to wipe them all out – and then I was elsewhere! Someone took me away! Someone tore me fro…” he turned to stare at the expression on Mistress Luna’s face. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” Luna said. “Everyone thinks you fled from battle. I already have the story circulating among the demons. I have video evidence.”

Ganondorf smashed his fist into the table. “What have you done!?”

“What needed to be done. You were taking it too far,” Luna said. “Way too far.” She pulled a dimensional device out of her mane and handed it to Siron. “You are not welcome on this world anymore, Siron. Your deeds are exposed. I suggest you take your staff and run before Eve throws you into Nautica for your crimes.”

Siron trembled in anger. He swiped the device from Luna, dialed a random universe, and left without a word.

Ganondorf glared at Luna. “Foolish princess, we could have-“

“Don’t pretend you ever thought you had the high ground, or philosophy,” Luna spat. “You just wanted power. At least Siron had something worthwhile in his motives. You were just a selfish pig. You go to your Gerudo. You are not welcome among my demons.”

Ganondorf looked like he wanted to fight her, but in the end he was unsure if he could win. He stormed off as well.

Luna sighed, shaking her head. She lit her horn, summoning the pillar Mlinx was imprisoned in.

“…It’s time to release you.”

Elsewhere, Siron appeared next to Fef. “We’re leaving.”

“Huh? What for?”

“We’ve been betrayed. We’ve got to go on the run before they stick us in Nautica.”

Fef nodded. “Got it. Where are we going?”

“I have no idea whatsoever. But I’ll think of something.” He looked at his staff, still brimming with eldritch power. “I’ll think of something…”

~~~

Aradia watched as the universes returned to normal. The Dracogen recalled his agents, allowing the time in all universes to return to the way it was supposed to be. The buoys were set up in every universe in record time, spreading the signal to keep the University and Dracogen Enterprises away.

People who had been lost in time reappeared – such as Toph, Thrackerzod, and Alushy – and they were understandably horrified by what had happened to them. They had ceased to exist.

Eve still had the key. It had turned out to not be all that useful, in the end, since time itself essentially broke down, but it was a curiosity. Where had it come from? What was its relation to Equis Eldritch? Nobody knew, and nobody had any idea how to find out.

Already there was talk of using it to create temporal alerts, things that would detect temporal tampering from any source, hopefully alerting all other universes to it the instant it happened so action could be taken. The limited methods of time travel were catalogued, classified by all the governments, and readied for use at the push of a button.

There was no attempt at keeping what happened a secret. It would have been difficult to keep everyone who had been a part of it quiet. Most of the populace had no idea the true extent of the damage, but just telling them ‘an enemy had tried to erase them from existence’ had worked.

Aradia watched Eve address the masses.

“We have survived an ordeal – we were hit where it hurt, in our past, effectively removed from existence. We had to face what we would be without each other, and… I can safely say we are better off connected than we were apart. Furthermore, it is only because of our close ties to each other that we were able to fight back against this assault at all.

“We always thought there were going to be horrendous threats from deep within the multiverse, horrible things probably beyond our imagination. Well, we were right. There are things that can snuff us out like a candle. But there’s something else here – we survived. The candle relit after a moment of darkness, rising up higher than before. Because we have each other, we live. We thrive. We survive. And we show this uncaring multiverse that we have a magic between us.”

The crowd cheered. Aradia smiled – that was good.

Nova walked up to her. “You’re vanishing again, aren’t you?”

“Yep. You’re not ready yet. I took too active a role as it was.”

“…I think Eve’s pushing for Unification,” Nova said. “…Do you think…?”

“I’m not telling you if that’s the step you need to take or not,” Aradia declared. “Don’t try to weasel information out of me.”

“Right…”

“You’ll have to take what you learned here today and be the temporal eyes and ears for your people,” Aradia said. “You need to use what I’ve given you. Sometimes, your defenses could fail.”

“I don’t plan on any time travel,” Nova declared. “But… Yeah. You’re right.”

Aradia smiled. “I’ve got to go – meeting with some madman in a minute. Don’t try to follow me, okay?”

Nova nodded. “I’ll just go talk to Eve. See you… Whenever you decide to show yourself again.”

Aradia saluted – then accelerated herself to her meeting place.

A blue phone box stood under a tree on Equis Vitis, the Doctor leaning against it.

“You messed up,” he said.

Aradia smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, I… I couldn’t deal with the threat on my own. Too much dying. Not enough saving people.”

“I’m referring to the Time Rift. That was a lot of Time Wraiths. If you hadn’t lucked out with that Ascended, you would have…”

“I know,” Aradia insisted. “But you don’t need to be such a downer about it! Come on, everything worked out in the end. Once again, the future is bright!”

“The future is a construct subject to change.”

“Wow, you’re in a funk. Have some hope Doctor! C’mon, lighten up a bit!”

The Doctor sighed. “Your unending optimism impresses even me, Aradia Megido.”

She gave him a finger guns gesture. “Ayyyyy.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes. “I would say ‘never change’, but... You need to take yourself more seriously sometimes. You have dominion over time. I know you can take it seriously, but you’re… you’re…”

“Too aloof?”

“Yes.”

Aradia put her hands on her hips. “This entire conversation is you being one big hypocrite.”

“There are certain places I do not stick my fingers, and you know it.”

Aradia nodded. “…I was called to serve this world, though. And I plan to keep doing that however I can. That now extends to these worlds. …They have great potential, Doctor, I’m sure you’ve seen it.”

“I have… But potential is not good or bad.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m here!”

The Doctor smiled and shook his head. “…It’s good that you think that.” He waved goodbye and entered the doors of the TARDIS, leaving the time, place, and universe behind.

Aradia waved after him, still smiling that smile of hers that was just slightly too large for her face.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 3: LIFE]

ARC 3 INTERLUDE<<

The pages close on another arc. Woo! Time for another interlude! As always, anyone here is welcome in either the Discord or the Forum.

Today’s featured side story is Evermore Echo by Keywii_Cookies55 and it’s a story about a multiverse couple and their travels. Warning: This story eventually starts to reference events that happen in unpublished drafts for chapters of Songs of the Spheres. It is recommended to read those first.

And let’s see what fun franchises showed up this arc!

Frost Punk belongs to 11 Bit Studios
Doctor Who belongs to the BBC
My Little Pony G1 and G3.5 belong to Hasbro
Friendship is Witchcraft belongs to Sherclop Pones
The Mentally Advanced Series belongs to Dawn Somewhere
Ultra Fast Pony belongs to Wacarb
Scootertrix the Abridged belongs to Scootertrix Studios
Friendship is for Adults belongs to the Katerlot
Dragon Ball belongs to Akira Toriyama
Dragon Ball Z Abridged belongs to Team Four Star
Battlestar Galactica belongs to David Rick Productions
Steven Universe belongs to Cartoon Network
Little Nightmares belongs to Tarsier Studios
Numenera belongs to Monte Cook Games
Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy belong to Games Workshop

Ah Vivian, still mysterious.

You know what time it is! Time for another poll! https://strawpoll.com/9f5sa48b Vote on your favorite, and go check out the other arc polls if you haven’t already!

And now, a preview for the next arc: Chapter Titles! ALL of these (and parts of ARC 5!) are already drafted! Every six days for the foreseeable future!

ARC 4: Hope
040 - Algernon’s Stand, Part 1
041 - Algernon’s Stand, Part 2
042 - Don’t Panic
043 - A Wedding Between Worlds
044 - Mushrooms and Appuls
045 - The Reach of the Sparkle Census
046 - Equis Fallout
047 - SCP 11947
048 - Just Monika
049 - Roses
050 - Whatever Remains, No Matter How Improbable…
051 - Together We Will Always Shine, Part 1
052 - Together We Will Always Shine, Part 2

Until next time!

[HOPE] 040 - Algernon's Stand, Part 1

Vriska Serket raised an eyebrow at the large robot she was talking to, a behemoth by the name of Dintin. “Wait, you’ve seen her?”

Dintin didn’t look up from the flower garden he was watering. “Red ram lady? Yeah. We had to fight her. Several times. Usually punching off heads only needs to be done once… Flower?” He held a blue and purple flower out to Vriska.

Vriska took it, blinking. “…Thanks. So, tank-boy, what happened to her?”

“Dunno. We stopped fighting, I think.”

“Why?”

“The ponies showed up,” Dintin said. “There was a big fight and some time skeletons.”

“How lovely, I’m in an area of the multiverse with time wraiths…” Vriska muttered. “Wait… The ponies? Which ponies?”

“…The little horses? The purple one?”

Vriska facepalmed. “No, moron, I mean which version. The Charter? The Grand Secretariat? The Empress of the Void?”

Dintin thought about this. “She had things on her ears.”

“Charter, got it,” Vriska said, grunting. “Oh, the irony…”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Hey, you don’t mind if I take your luck do you?”

Dintin beeped happily. “Take whatever you need!”

Vriska saluted. “Thanks, robot nimrod.” Her eye flashed, and she stole as much luck from Dintin as she needed. He toppled over onto his back with a CLANG!

“Ow.”

“I wouldn’t try to do anything complicated for a few hours,” Vriska commented, tapping into her luck reserves. “Hastala-Vriska.” Her luck activated, allowing her to naturally slip through the dimensional fabric without any sort of flashy portal. She simply stepped into the air and was suddenly somewhere else – exactly where she needed to be.

She knew the Hub the instant she arrived even though she’d never actually been in the Hub before. Every time she’d shown up in the local neighborhood she’d only hung around various worlds, never actually bothered to come to the center of multiversal society. She found herself mildly impressed with the place – it was far from the first multiversal hub-world she had come across in her many many years of travel, but each one was slightly different and had its own curiosities to offer.

This one in particular was more organized than most – things looked clean, there wasn’t a constant state of chaos, and there was actually enough space to walk around without bumping into people. Screens lined the walls, broadcasting news for the most part with only the occasional advertisement. She didn’t pay the screens much attention – she started walking down the Hub halls, absorbing the scenery.

That was to say, she was taking tiny amounts of luck from everyone she saw to improve her own reserves. It was so little they wouldn’t even miss it, but she would be able to find whatever she needed with ease soon enough. Plus, it did let her learn a few things about this place.

To her surprise, there were Gems walking around like they were citizens. She hadn’t encountered that many of the Gem race in her travels, but she knew they were generally arrogant and cared little for organic life. But here they were, living alongside ponies, humans, and dragons. Some clearly didn’t want to be there – a particular red Ruby shouting racist remarks was a prime example of this. But Vriska also saw a Peridot working hand-in-hoof with a unicorn to build a dimensional device from scratch inside a technology store.

Vriska noticed a computer terminal sitting outside the shop, a green neon sign hanging above it. HOOK UP YOUR DEVICE TO THE INTERNET! FREE!

Vriska took her phone out of her pocket – it was one of those objects small enough for her not to store it in an 8-ball, even though she didn’t use it all that often. She walked up to the terminal, placing her phone on top of its primary shelf. The screen flashed green for a moment, quickly scanning the technology within the phone and recording its particular signal. Cell service and Internet access initiated. You may need to accept some settings on your phone, depending on the model. If you need help, press the help button to open up the FAQ.

Vriska needed no help; her phone was already set up. This was hardly the first time she’d come across one of these devices, after all. She checked the data plans – the access really was free, but the Internet wasn’t unlimited, definitely choked. Who cared though, it would work for a simple search.

She typed in “Aradia” into the Hub’s default ‘google’ – which wasn’t really Google, due to the Hub deciding that such a prevalent service needed to not be linked to any particular company. It was… Noodle. “What in hell were they thinking…?” Vriska muttered.

The results popped up. Aradia, the Handmaid. Vriska read the short article – not much was known about Aradia, but it was known that she had been protecting the timelines of Equis Vitis for longer than they’d been aware of the multiverse, and that she was still protecting it from the shadows. There wasn’t any information on how to find her, or where she was, or even when she tended to show up. There was a comment about how she liked to clean Canterlot Castle sometimes, like an actual Maid.

Vriska facepalmed. “That’s you, all right,” Vriska said, shaking her head and smiling. “Finally found you. Now I’ve just got to… see you. Yeah. Shut up self, that was a great sentence.” She put her phone away, pursing her lips. Her next step was to find someone who had run into Aradia. Charter-Twilight’s group would probably have the best information. Not that she had any idea where they were…

Not that her lack of knowledge really mattered. She could just walk around a while and she’d eventually find something – assuming some adventure didn’t drop out of the sky and ruin her fortune manipulation. She hated it when that happened.

She had to walk even less than she was expecting. She turned the corner and found herself in front of Iroh’s famous tea shop – and she saw Charter-Twilight standing right in front of it, talking to a version of Fluttershy.

“Chancellor, I do apologize, but the others rejected your application,” Charter-Twilight said. “They don’t think you’re involved enough. For what it’s worth, I voted for Equis Concrete’s inclusion.”

The Chancellor sighed. “It’s okay. You also don’t need to hide that they think our world still has problems.”

“Right,” Charter-Twilight said, nodding sadly. “Do you still want to join us for tea?”

“Of course. By the way, there’s a grey-skinned girl watching you intently.”

Charter-Twilight looked at Vriska. “Oh! Vriska! It’s been a while!”

“How many years on your end?” Vriska asked.

“Less than five, I think,” Twilight asserted.

“Eight on mine,” Vriska said. “Apparently last time I left I really shouldn’t have.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Well, Twilight, remembe-“

“It’s Eve now,” Eve corrected, quickly. “Or Evening, if you want to be formal.”

Vriska smirked. “Finally decided on a name, did you? About time.”

Eve rolled her eyes. “Yes, we all know it was long overdue.”

“Yeah, regardless, I’ve finally found my old friend. Does the name Aradia ring any bells?”

Eve smirked. “Yeah, it does. I was actually wondering if you’d ask that. How about we talk about it over tea? I could introduce you to some world leaders and tell everyone a few stories.”

“You’re not getting multiversal information out of me.”

Chancellor Fluttershy shrugged. “We can certainly try.”

Vriska shrugged. “Eh, sure, why not. But this tea better be just as legendary as I’ve heard.”

“You will not be disappointed,” Eve declared.

~~~

Corona had graduated from three programs prior to this day.

The first had been high school, where she had been the center of attention and everyone had hung onto her every word.

The second was college, where she was just another student in the masses. Better than most, but not the best, nowhere close to the top of the line, just another budding physicist.

Then she’d gotten a ‘master’s’ equivalent on Equis Cosmic, but there wasn’t even a ceremony for that because she’d been so busy working on the Arcei and Asgard problems she’d basically forgotten it had even happened.

That was only a few months ago.

Today, she was part of a very small gathering – not even twelve individuals – to get what Equis Cosmic called an Overarch Degree, a degree that would currently pass as a PhD on the Earths. Apparently she had contributed more to the Arcei and Asgard projects than she’d thought, enough to qualify as ‘independent research’, even though it wasn’t all that independent.

But, well, here she was. Cosmo was standing over her, giving a long winded speech about how Corona was about as well educated in physics as she possibly could be, and probably deserved honorary degrees in biology and thaumic sciences as well.

Corona was only half-listening. She was busy contemplating that she’d basically just completely won education. How long had it been, ten years now? No… A little less than that. The education on Equis Cosmic had lumped two ‘degrees’ together into one. She now had nothing left to learn, unless she wanted to start from scratch… And she didn’t want to do that.

She didn’t need to spend any more time studying material or courses ever again.

She was so giddy she didn’t realize Cosmo was handing her the certificate.

“Ahem,” Cosmo said, an amused smile on her face.

“Right! Sorry.” Corona levitated the piece of paper into the air. A few camera flashes went off, including a gigantic burst of light from human Pinkie.

“That’s a keeper!” Pinkie declared, holding up an image.

“Pinkie, I’m blind now.”

“Not forever!”

Corona rolled her eyes. She looked up at Cosmo, who was currently just a purple fuzzy mass in her eyes. “Thank you, Princess.”

Cosmo smiled. “You earned this, Corona. Now go tack a PhD onto your name so you can impress all the humans.”

Corona smiled. “I will.” She turned to one of the other ponies present for the small event – Starcei. “Thank you for all your guidance.”

Starcei let a smile come to her face. “You were the one who kept asking all the annoying questions.”

“Can’t help it. I’m not apologizing.”

Pinkie gasped. “OH NO! WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH CORONA?”

Sugarcoat rolled her eyes. “Being unapologetic has always been part of Corona’s personality.”

Pinkie narrowed her eyes at Sugarcoat. “…I can never tell with you.”

“That must mean I’m good at my job,” Sugarcoat deadpanned.

“Customer service representative…?” Corona said, confused.

“I wasn’t being literal.”

Corona blinked. “Ah. Right.” She turned to a familiar face that was sitting in the back of the room, not saying anything. She trotted up to Sparky. “Hey, you’ve been quiet.”

Sparky forced a smile. “I just haven’t had much to say. You’ve done it Corona.”

“Hey, you’ll still be able to do it. You’re already a well-respected voice in the academic community.”

“Yeah…” Sparky said, looking at Corona. “I don’t know though. The more I learn, the more I realize that physics isn’t constant throughout the multiverse. Much of what we know is going to be meaningless in the future…”

“Then we just need to change with the times,” Corona asserted. “We’re on the front lines, Sparky. We get to write the new books.”

Sparky nodded. “You’re right. …But I’m not sure I want to deal with what you’ve been dealing with in order to do that.”

“You don’t mean Alushy, do you?”

“Are you talking about me?” Alushy called from the refreshments table.

“Yes, but it doesn’t concern you, so screw off,” Corona blurted.

“Yowch. The pain… It cuts like a searing knife deep into my cold, dead heart…” She didn’t interject herself into the conversation any further, though.

Sparky shook her head. “No. Well… Yes, that’s part of it, but that’s just a person. I mean…” She stood up. “You’re in a top-secret research facility. You have to keep secrets from everyone, even your friends, about what you’ve done here. You’ve probably held the fate of entire races in your ha- hooves. And… You’ve been part of decisions that you didn’t like.”

“We still saved the Arcei,” Corona commented. “The genetic repurposing has been a huge success on both sides. Not to mention the Asgard and all the new advanced medical techniques…”

“You’re not working hard on the runes anymore,” Sparky said.

Starcei heard this, her ears perking up to high alert. “...Sparky, where did you hear that?”

Corona raised her hands. “I didn’t tell her…”

Sparky shrugged. “I just deduced it. You say you are still working hard, but Corona here’s going away, and I don’t get the impression you’re in a rush. Since the danger is no longer imminent, you’re not putting as much resources into it as you once were. And yet, you keep telling the Arcei you’re working on it.”

“We are,” Corona said.

“Not as hard as you could be,” Sparky said. “And I understand there’s probably politics involved, and I don’t blame you for it, but I don’t think I could work in an environment where that kind of thing happens. Where what I do affects so many, but I’ll just be presented with… With… Oh what’s the word?”

“Bleh?” Corona suggested.

Sparky chuckled. “Yeah. Bleh. That’ll work. A whole lot of Bleh.”

Corona smiled. “I understand. It’s just not for you. I’d talk to Eve if I were you; she could set you to work on a public project. No secrets.”

“But you never know when what you find will need to become a secret.”

Corona nodded slowly. “…We can’t go through life in fear, Sparky.”

Sparky sighed, pulling her legs close. “I certainly have…”

“Well… I’m actually not sure how much I can help you.”

“We have drifted. You’ve been so busy.”

“I’d talk to the girls, if I were you,” Corona said. “Pinkie’s right there.”

Pinkie appeared right behind Sparky. “Yeah I am! Let me tell you, when Corona was unsure about what she was going to do in her life, I helped her out! Now I can help you! Come on, to the planning cave! I’ll get Applejack. We’ve got a destiny to uncover!”

Corona smiled. “You have fun with that.”

“Wait!” Sparky said, crawling out of Pinkie’s grasp. “Corona, what are you going to do?”

Corona smiled sheepishly. “Well I wanted to join up with Eve’s group, but given how Sombra has such close tabs on me, they couldn’t really allow that. So I’m going to Lai to join up with Toph’s, become a scientist for a world that doesn’t really have much in the way of science. Less top-secret stuff there.”

“…How did you keep Sombra from blabbing about this secret?” Sparky wondered.

Corona put on her sunglasses and smirked. “I called in favors. Plus, she doesn’t really want to bring about the collapse of the multiversal alliances. Here’s a little secret – Eve’s actually been working with her to bring about Unification.

“…I can’t imagine Nova’s happy about that,” Sparky commented.

“Nope,” Corona said. “But Nova understands why it’s needed.”

Sparky nodded. “I… guess so.”

“Enough chit chat!” Pinkie declared. “Destiny time!” She pulled Sparky away and out of the universe.

The voice of Sombra filled Corona’s ear. “Oh, so I have to keep your secret, but you can’t keep mine?”

“Give it a rest,” Corona said. “It defused the situation. There’s more to life than just keeping secrets.”

“Mmm,” Sombra muttered. “So are you going to go to Lai or what?”

Corona walked up to the refreshments table and munched on a small pastry. “Ah, I think I’ll stick around for a few hours and gloat a little bit about being Corona Sunset Shimmer, PhD. Revel in my success.”

“Make sure not to get too full of yourself, Amiga.”

“You’re one to talk,” Corona retorted.

Sombra’s only response was a chuckle.

Alushy smirked. “You know, half-conversations are the best. I get to imagine the most wildly raunchy things happening during the half I can’t hear. You’d love the image in my head, Corona.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Why are you even here?”

“Cause, my friend, I felt like taking a break. A walk, if you will.”

“Alushy, who did you kill?”

“Nobody!”

“…What body did you turn into a vampire and then kill?”

Alushy raised an eyebrow. “You’re a freaky bitch, you know that?”

“Alushy…”

“What? The body was going to be incinerated anyway, I just wanted to have some fun!”

“She does have a point,” Sombra chirped.

Corona facehooved. “I’m surrounded by bleh…”

~~~

“Everyone, this is Vriska Serket,” Eve said, sitting down at the table, gesturing for Vriska to sit to her left. “Vriska, this is Jack O’Neill, Algernon Siwar, and you’ve already met Chancellor Fluttershy. Iroh will be joining us after he gets our tea.”

O’Neill adjusted his hat. “Was wonderin’ when I’d get to meet you.”

Vriska spread her arms wide. “Well here I am in all my glory. You want an autograph?”

“Pass,” O’Neill said.

Algernon – a tall man in green robes that formed x-shaped creases all over his body – furrowed his brow. “What world does this woman represent?” he asked Eve.

“Hey,” Vriska interjected. “You ask a question about me, you can ask it to me, got it?”

Algernon nodded slowly. “…Sure.”

“I am from a world very far from anywhere any of you have been. You could call it Alternia, or Sburb 2-B. Of course, that universe doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Really?” Chancellor Fluttershy said. “That must be hard on you, to not have a home.”

“Well, I do have a home… It should be a world called Earth C. Not that I have any idea where that is.”

“Do you think we could help?” Iroh said, arriving with tea for everyone. “We’ve checked a lot of universes.”

“Have you actually encountered my race besides me and Aradia?” Vriska asked. “No? Then you won’t be helpful.”

Eve sighed. “Sorry. You have been at this longer than we have.”

“No shit.”

Algernon raised an eyebrow. “Why is she here, again?”

“Do you have a wasp in your ass or something?” Vriska blurted.

“Vriska, calm down,” Eve cautioned. “Algernon’s just more used to official proceedings. You two just do things a little differently.”

“What is your story, anyway?” Vriska asked Algernon.

“I am from Earth Stand,” Algernon asserted. “One of the major worlds in this alliance.”

“You got a new major world since I was here last?” Vriska asked Eve.

“We’ve actually known Earth Stand since before we met Thrackerzod’s people,” Eve said. “They’ve been a part of our culture for a while. Or… Well, had been. Relations have been rocky. Their disclosure went so well too…”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Problems?”

“Ah, you don’t know,” Eve said, “Right, sometimes I forget.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Your Charter, everyone.”

“Har-de-har,” Eve deadpanned. “Vriska, this is a good segue into Aradia. We met her a few years ago, when another multiversal society tried to erase us from history, the University of Doors.”

“Does she have clearance for this?” Algernon demanded.

Eve raised an eyebrow. “If she didn’t before she does now. Plus, it’s not like we were able to keep most of this secret anyway. Everyone knows we were attacked. I’ll even officiate her clearance in some matter later with a simple push of a button.”

“It’s good to be the Charter,” O’Neill asserted.

Vriska stopped glaring at Algernon and looked back to Twilight. “Go on.”

“She helped us return time to its rightful place – though we had to sign a non-interference agreement with the University of Doors and we had to fight a bunch of time wraiths – then she gave Nova some pointers on how to manage time. After this fight for our right to exist in time, well, we realized that we don’t really stand together against the dangers of the multiverse. Beyond the University, there’s also the Eldritch Embodiment. They don’t care about us right now, but if they wanted to they could just wipe us out and Thrackerzod couldn’t do anything about it. There’s also apparently a Starcross Society out there somewhere that even the Stars fear. We… As we are now, we don’t compare to them. But, if we-“

“-form a Federation.” O’Neill interjected.

“We are not calling it the Federation!” Eve blurted. “We already have an Enterprise!”

O’Neill just shrugged and turned to examine his tea.

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “You’re pushing for Unification.”

“Yes. Yes we are,” Eve said. “And, well, I knew it was going to be hard, but it’s been much harder than expected. We’ve got seven universes lined up to be the founders. Earth Vitis, Equis Vitis, Earth Tau’ri, Equis Cosmic, Earth Stand, Gem Vein, Lai, and the Elemental Nations.” She glanced at Chancellor Fluttershy. “There were a few others who were interested, but whose applications were rejected for one reason or another.”

“We’ll join eventually,” Chancellor Fluttershy asserted.

“Most likely. But there’s been a lot of problems,” Eve declared. “I was expecting the Gem Vein to have the biggest issues, but no, it turns out it’s Earth Stand. Algernon can probably explain best.”

Algernon nodded. “My world, embarrassingly, is not being very cooperative. They went through disclosure, opened an embassy, and started connecting their society to the multiverse enough to be eligible for Unification consideration – and then they sealed up and walled off. I can’t explain why, all I can say is that communication is at a standstill. I’m the only member of Earth Stand in the Hub, and everything I try to take back or send to my homeworld never goes anywhere.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “…Really? Why would your world do that and not the other Earths? Aren’t they basically the same exact thing?”

“Not precisely,” Algernon said. “My world had a secret just like Earth Tau’ri and Earth Vitis, but it was a little more close to home. Magic was prevalent on Earth Vitis, enough so that people weren’t really surprised. Earth Tau’ri revealed itself after it had power on a galactic scale. But my world has a spiritual energy called Stands – invisible spirits that only some individuals on the world have control over. The powers of these Stands are so diverse, unpredictable, and misunderstood that the governments of the world have little control over them. Stand users are dangerous – not to mention bizarre. While there are some that heal by punching through things, there are others that create hordes of zombies, burn entire forests, or can even mold people as if they were a book. I know a man with the ability to pull ‘sound effects’ out of the air and use them in battle.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Really…?”

“Yes, really. As I’m sure you can understand, the uncontrollable nature of these Stands has made the population on edge. The result is that the governments have stopped introducing them to new things in the multiverse, thinking they need to backpedal. Or that’s my best theory, anyway.”

“And it’s interfering with Unification,” Eve said. “We’re still a few years away from actually coming together, but the longer they don’t talk, the more likely we’ll have to cut them out. And one thing we do know is that they do not want to be cut out, and that’s just creating a political whirlpool that goes nowhere. We’re basically at a standstill until we can get them to open their doors again somehow, and currently Earth Stand requested itself be blacklisted, so… Going uninvited might cause an incident.” She twitched. “So yeah, it’s annoying.”

Vriska nodded slowly, expression incredulous. She felt something tug at the back of her mind. “Hey, Eve, can I talk to you for a moment?”

Eve sent a telepathic message to Vriska’s mind. Sure. Sup?

Vriska was not expecting telepathic communication, but she was skilled enough in her psychic powers to reciprocate. I mean out of sight of these bozos.

None of them have powers, Vriska.

Just take a moment.

Eve rolled her eyes. “Excuse us for a moment.”

“No problem,” the Chancellor said. Algernon’s expression just hardened.

Vriska and Eve took a step outside. “What is it?” Eve asked.

“That Algernon is full of complete bullshit,” Vriska said. “What he says doesn’t really make any sense – I mean, come on, lessening communication after a disclosure? Really? That can’t be what the people want. And the way he describes it… It just sounds too wild for words. Not to mention his face is untrustworthy and I’m pretty sure I felt something tugging at the back of my mind…”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Vriska, you’re just being paranoid. Earth Stand, as a world, is our friend. I know people over there that I really want to see. I may not have known Algernon that long, and he’s a bit of a stick in the mud at times, but he’s trustworthy. And his Stand isn’t mind control, I’ve seen it. He boils water with it from extremely long distances.”

Vriska blinked. “Wait, he actually has a Stand?”

“Did you not believe that was a real thing?”

“I’ve seen a lot of things on my travels, Eve, a thing that causes such bizarre variations in powers is basically unheard of. He described things without pattern! Every power source has some kind of pattern. Mine comes from the twelve aspects of existence, specifically Light. Yours comes from arcane manipulation and produces effects with sparkles and other crap. But that? Something that varied and powerful? How would they keep it a secret if just random joes had random unpredictable powers that couldn’t be dealt with?”

Eve blinked. “You’re paranoid, aren’t you?”

“I just know something’s up, Eve.”

Eve shook her head. “It’s all fine, Vriska. Really. You just didn’t see or hear about them when you were here. Just by chance.”

“I don’t have bad luck like that,” Vriska muttered, clenching her fist. “There’s something up here, Eve.”

“Oh I have no doubt that something odd is going down on Earth Stand, but Algernon’s not the problem. Trust me, Vriska.”

Vriska lowered her hand. “…Fine. Do you at least know where I can find Aradia?”

“Ah… no, Sorry. She hasn’t shown up for an extended time since the battle with the University. You’re welcome to hang around though, she’ll show up eventually. When she thinks the ‘time is right’ and all that.”

“Right…” Vriska said. “…You go back to your tea party. I’m going to go find something more interesting to do.”

Eve shook her head in mild disapproval “If that’s what you want.” She teleported Vriska’s teacup to her. “You should at least try it though.”

“Oh, right.” Vriska took a sip. She blinked. “…Did Iroh make it spicy?”

“He has a way of surprising people.”

“I like him already. Tell him this is the good shit.”

“Yeah, I will not be using those exact words,” Eve said. “I will tell him you liked it.”

“Eh, good enough.” She took another drink and walked off. “See you around, Eve.”

Eve waved back before re-entering Iroh’s tea shop.

Vriska turned around and glared a few seconds later. “Algernon… I’m on to you. I’m going to find out what you’re really up to. There’s no way what you said was true. You’ve just got all their brains molded the way you want… But not Vriska, oh no, you can’t fuck with ol’ Vriska’s brain… She fucks with yours.” She shattered the teacup that was in her hands. She ignored the cobalt blue blood that seeped out of her hand.

She walked away to plan…

~~~

Corona trotted through Lai’s capital – just called the Capital – sunglasses on her face. The ponies of Lai paid her little attention; after all she just looked like a unicorn with sunglasses. She wouldn’t have gotten much more attention had she decided to go as a human either, the ponies had gotten used to the occasional man walking through their world.

Before, they would have viewed the presence of a human in their city as a threat, or a signal of negative change. But their attitude had altered because of recent events. Events that Corona herself had had a somewhat large hoof in. Sparky was right about one thing, there was a lot of disgusting “Bleh” around what Corona did.

“Feeling guilty?” Sombra’s voice entered Corona’s ear. She could hear Sombra drinking some kind of fruit smoothie on the other side of the feed.

“A little,” Corona admitted. “I mean, the result seems undeniably good, but… Well what’s done is done, I suppose.”

“Eh, it’s not that bad. Just cleverly letting a people believe whatever they want about a situation.”

“Riiight,” Corona said, trotting up to the palace. There were two standard unicorn-pegasus alicorns standing guard. They knew who she was and let her in without any questions. The moment she passed their wings, she heard some commotion behind her.

“It’s the General!” a pony cheered.

“Really? OH MY ARMONIA, IT IS HER!”

Corona raised an eyebrow and turned around to see what this was all about. She was only mildly surprised to see Toph running across the town at a breakneck pace, mild panic on her face. “Make way!”

Behind her was a large crowd of squealing fans, mostly consisting of ponies of Lai. Corona saw that Toph was not faster than the hooves of a pony, so she rendered her assistance with a quick teleport spell. Toph stumbled as she found herself in a new location, but quickly regained her footing next to Corona.

The alicorn guards crossed their wings, preventing the crowd from entering the palace grounds.

Toph took one look at the crowd and smiled. “Sorry! Maybe I can hang around later, but a General is always busy!” She waved, then turned a full one-eighty and ran into the palace hall.

“What was that about?” Corona asked.

“Somebody flipped a switch in those ponies,” Toph muttered. “They used to distrust me like the devil and now they think I’m their savior. It’s freaky.”

“Probably my fault,” Corona admitted.

“No, really?” Toph stretched her arms behind her back, trying to work out her tense muscles. She wore light armor these days, made of metal she could bend to improve her ability in combat. The design was clearly similar to Lady Rarity’s, though not anywhere close to being the behemoth mech suit the spirid’s suit essentially was. The metal plates were spread out, thin, and designed for mobility more than absorbing hits. The Master Sword hung to her side, always ready to be drawn at a moment’s notice. “I let Queen Luna promote me because I thought I needed to make ponies realize the outside was good. I was ready to deal with a lot of angry people, but not a bunch of fanatics.”

“It’s what happens when you let the people believe what they want…”

Toph looked out a wall. Corona knew she was ‘looking’ outside, but the unicorn couldn’t see through the solid wall. “Corona… They think we’re performing genocide for them. That’s not good! That’s bad!”

Lady Rarity strode into the hall. Her armor was not anywhere to be seen, though her hammer was slung over her back. She had eight perfectly healthy legs, and a fully grown mane to go with her four blue eyes. “We never told them that. We told them exactly what we were doing – making new bodies that didn’t need the arcs and would not pass on the Arcei genes.”

“We all knew how they were going to take it,” Toph said. “They hear ‘not pass on genes’ to ‘all the Arcei are going to die out because of the other universes! Maybe they were on our side after all! They’ve solved the biggest problem we’ve ever had!’ Morons.”

Corona sighed. “Yeah. Morons. …What I wonder is what’s going to happen if we discover how to actually make the runes.”

Toph frowned. “Whatever happens, Eve won’t let it happen until after Unification at this point. She cares too much. She’d push an incident under the rug just to keep the plans on schedule.”

Corona furrowed her brow. “Ah, the question, is that really the best choice?” This was met with silence, since nobody knew. Corona shook her head to clear it. “…Hey Rarity, how is that new body treating you?”

“Haven’t quite remembered how to use all eight legs effectively,” Lady Rarity answered, “but I have rediscovered the art of traction walking.” She skittered up the side of a wall, her hooves somehow adhering her body to the vertical surface. “Your science magic works wonders.”

“Creepy,” Toph muttered.

“It works,” Lady Rarity said.

Corona smiled. “Glad it is. We’re going to start using the process to help so many – we can grow new body parts for any pony, human or Asgard. Even a whole new body if needed. We could start curing disabilities.”

“Pass,” Toph said.

“Wouldn’t work on you anyway, not without special research like we did with the Arcei. You were born blind.”

Toph paused for a moment. “…What about Eve?”

Corona frowned. “I already talked to her about it. She… She said she’d think about it. That was a few weeks ago. I think it’s safe to assume the answer’s no.”

“I wonder why…” Lady Rarity wondered aloud. “I agreed to get my legs back on the spot.”

“She’s made it part of her identity,” Toph said. “She can’t hear, but that actually makes her look stronger to the people around her. The obvious ear-devices help make sure everyone who sees her anywhere knows she’s deaf, and knows how strong she is to still be the Charter.”

“If it was just that I think she would have told me,” Corona said. “I think it’s something else. There’s got to be some reason she’s made it her identity…”

Toph shrugged. “I dunno. None of us spend that much time with her. You should talk to Spike, or Renee. They’d probably have some insight.”

Corona nodded. Then she leaned against a wall and decided to change the topic. “So, I guess I’m with you girls now. What do we do around here?”

“Politics and quests, mostly,” Toph said. “As a General I don’t get to go out as much anymore and I have to keep close watch on Queen Luna’s policies. Because, apparently, I’m trustworthy or something.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Queen Luna has something for us to go do about once a week. Some ancient evil, some crazy artifact, or just bringing back magic from another universe. If Pinkie’s group is about first contact for the most part, ours is more oriented to accomplishing specific goals.”

“Aren’t you here to set up a science guild or something?” Toph asked.

Corona nodded. “That’s what I’ll be doing when we’re not out doing something. I’ll probably take on apprentices once I’m settled in, teach Lai the ways of physics. The materials for my lab should arrive in a few days.”

Toph nodded. “And don’t think you can get out of immersing yourself in the politics of Lai. You’re here with us; you get to deal with it as well. Hope you’re prepared to carefully never mention anything about how you actually feel about the Arcei.”

“Right… That’s going to be harder than it sounds.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Quite. By the way, Sombra?” Lady Rarity pointed her hammer at Corona’s glasses. “I know we don’t deal with much classified information here, at least not the kind that you care about, but Corona’s placement on this team will be in jeopardy if you screw something up in ANY way, understood?”

Corona blinked. “She says she understands clearly.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Then welcome to the team, Corona. Let’s go meet up with Lieshy and Vivian. They should be in the training room.”

“Oh, do I get to see them fight?”

“Maybe?” Toph said. “Lieshy rarely does any fighting at all, but she’s not above trying.”

Corona smirked. “Well, if nothing else, I’ll get to see the training room.” She trotted down the hall.

“Other way,” Toph deadpanned.

“Right…” Corona said, turning around.

“Other other way.”

“…What?”

Lady Rarity spoke up. “She means through that door to the left, then seventh door on the right.”

“I’m reminded why castles are so annoying. I need a map or something…”

Toph smirked. “I don’t need a map.”

“Don’t you start.”

~~~

Public Information on Earth Stand

Earth Stand is a Standard Earth currently experiencing the local year 2005. First contact was made slightly before the events of the Disclosure, and they have been involved in multiversal society ever since. Their world underwent its own Disclosure in the local year 2002, an event that upset the world somewhat due to the universe’s primary oddity.

While Earth Stand is known to house low levels of standard magic and physics that allow for natural undead, its primary difference is a largely mysterious form of spiritual energy known as a Stand. Only certain individuals have Stands, and their effects are so varied it is generally impossible to classify them by any hard set rules. The spiritual forms the Stands manifest in are only visible to other Stand users or with the use of other esoteric abilities that deal with spirits.

The coordinates to Earth Stand are blacklisted to prevent an influx of other universe travelers.

And that was generally all Vriska could find. Which was outright absurd. Every other universe she could find people talking on the Internet about - every single one had a conspiracy theorist nut at the very least looking at it. But not Earth Stand. It was just… accepted. It was mentioned in conversation as a fact of life, but there were no extensive files on it she could find. Almost as if they had been purged…

She did find evidence that Earth Stand had been blacklisted recently, maybe the information had actually been purged?

She threw her phone at a nearby wall – the thing was industrial strength, so it didn’t break. “Where the hell am I going to find purged information?”

Vriska felt a tremendous chunk of her luck vanish right as she said that. Dammit. I just used a huge bank of fortune on that. I’m going to have to watch my toe to make sure I don’t stub it… Why does me saying things have to trigger it? You think I’d get ahold of it after all these centuries but noooooo…

Vriska carefully picked up her phone, not all that surprised to see a pink sugar-skull on the screen. “…Sombra, right?”

The one and only, onscreen text informed her.

“Good. So, I need anything you can find me on Earth Stand. I know you save secret files.”

Earth Stand? Odd choice. Nothing really interesting happens there.

Vriska narrowed her eyes. There’s definitely something going on here. I’m pretty sure Earth Stand doesn’t actually exist. “Just get me those files. Files on Algernon as well, while you’re at it.”

What are you offering me?

“I know the coordinates of a world where the local physics give every conscious being within it control of the force of gravity. Nice secret, don’t you say?”

Sounds like enough of a curiosity for this simple information. Done.

They made the trade – Sombra sent her files to Vriska’s phone, Vriska sent the coordinates to the psychic-gravity universe.

I’m not sure what you’ll get out of this.

“It’s what I won’t get out of it that I’ll find interesting…” Vriska muttered.

Perhaps you should see a mental health professional.

Vriska rolled her eyes, ignoring Sombra’s message. Sombra soon released Vriska’s phone, no longer sending messages. The cobalt troll read through the files, of which there actually weren’t that many. There was an actual report on Earth Stand, about the world, politics, and the location of the primary embassy, but strangely there were no coordinates.

“It’s just a really good forgery,” Vriska said, beginning to absent-mindedly stroll through the Hub. “No coordinates… All the mentions of actual people are vague… And history is just copy-pasted from the standard Earth template… It’s like all the interesting bits are just pasted on.” She smirked.

“Yo, lady, you talking to yourself?” a burly Gem called – a Bismuth, Vriska thought.

“Yeah, so what?”

“Well, you just walked into a puddle of mysterious green ooze.”

Vriska looked down. Her boots were now covered in mysterious green ooze. She blinked. Right, her luck was down right now after the communication with Sombra. No matter, she’d just walk out and clean it off-

She stubbed her boot into a nearby stand selling fireworks. A firework went off and hit her in the face, sending her flying back into the mysterious green ooze.

She took in a deep breath and let it out, calming herself. The curse of being a manipulator of luck, you can burn your own luck out so fast you don’t even realize it. She stood up, taking a bit of luck from the Bismuth – she was an asshole anyway, she probably deserved a day of tripping and falling over – and walked away.

Vriska scrolled through the information. Earth Stand was clearly suspicious, but Algernon was even more so. The file Sombra had on him had no backstory at all before a few months ago, when he showed up as Earth Stand’s ambassador. There were a few notes about how he had made great efforts to include Earth Stand in Unification Procedures, but his people were being impossible to work with.

The really bizarre thing was that Earth Stand’s files mentioned nothing at all about ‘being difficult to work with’.

“I do believe I’ve stumbled across a conspiracy,” Vriska smirked. “How wonderful.” Now all that remained was to figure out how he was pulling the blinds over so many people, and get proof that he was doing it.

Then she remembered she was a really powerful psychic.

She grinned, walking down the halls of the Hub, back toward Iroh’s tea shop. She absorbed enough luck to get herself back to manageable levels over the course of the journey. And, just her luck, she saw Algernon leaving Iroh’s tea shop as she arrived.

Perfect.

~~~

Thrackerzod took one look at the eldritch behemoth charging the demon-Binary settlement and leaped into action, leaving the rest of the League of Sweetie Belles in the dust.

She had been afraid of this – with Siron gone, whatever he had been doing to the Binary world had stopped, and the eldritch energies had started to dissipate. But as happened so often when something was about to die, it wanted to make one last ditch effort to take something else out with it.

In this case, it was a gigantic octopus-creature with half-formed images of Majora’s mask all over it, trying desperately to become the master it so needed, but it would never be able to. It was subject only to madness. Half of its body twisted in and out of existence, while the other half switched from a rocklike composition to almost vaporous every couple of seconds.

It was also the size of a full grown dragon.

Thrackerzod knew this was the last stand of the remnant energy, and she knew what she had to do. She was going to have to take it out and purge this world of the corruption that had plagued it ever since Majora’s defeat. She lit her horn, summoning her own dark energies from a plane of existence far removed from the one her body occupied, filling her eyes with black energy and her horn with a deep red power.

The behemoth thought she was charging – so it entered a defensive posture. Exactly what Thrackerzod wanted: she drove her hooves into the ground, stopping several meters away from the behemoth. She quickly scrawled a magic circle into the ground and activated it, tapping into the eldritch halls of her real home. A portal of darkness tore through the earth of the Binary world, revealing a hand.

Thrackerzod was never really sure what she was going to get when she initiated a quick summon – sometimes it was a geometric creature, at others a standard devil-demon, while still another time she’d gotten a cloud of black smoke that could possess people. She’d never gotten a hand before, but she knew it would have power to assist her. With her magic, she ordered the summoned demonic hand to charge the behemoth, embedding itself inside the impossible girth of the beast.

The thing roared in what was probably pain, but Thrackerzod didn’t stop to figure out if it was. She created another circle, summoning a fractal pattern that froze everything around it, sending it after the behemoth as well. The next demon was a centipede made of legs that tore through the fabric of reality. The one after that was an invisible manifestation of the force of thought. And the last… Just an ordinary shoggoth-thing. Somewhat boring, really.

It was enough though. The sheer variety of eldritch essences attacking from all sides had the behemoth confused – it was only made from one type of eldritch energy, that of Majora. As versatile as Majora’s power was, it was all derived from a single power. Thrackerzod was summoning whatever she could grab from the Eldritch Embodiment, not limiting herself to just spawn of Azathoth.

Just one of the perks of the Embodiment.

She decided it was her turn to act – she charged, her unicorn body moving far faster than it should have. She powered magic into her horn, transforming it into a blood-red drill. She spoke a command in the eldritch tongue and charged through the behemoth’s center in an instant.

The behemoth did not die – but the force of thought Thrackerod had summoned earlier entered the beast through the hole. The conflicting nature of the behemoth could no longer be reconciled with the vibrating force within it. The being that might as well have been insanity incarnate was essentially driven insane, divided into multiple personalities bent on devouring each other.

In the distraction, the fractal pattern and the demonic hand worked together. One froze parts, while the other smashed the parts to nothing. The behemoth slowly began to get chipped away.

“TAKING TOO LONG!” Sweetie Bot called from above, launching a barrage of rockets down on the behemoth. “Initiating explode sequence!”

Thrackerzod facehooved. “It’s not safe up there!”

“It is now 99% safe compared to the 13% safe it was before,” Bot declared.

“It could launch a wild attack!”

“That is the 1% non-safeness.”

Squeaky Belle called to them with magic. “Both of you stop arguing! Just make sure the beast doesn’t fall towards the town, okay?”

“Safety is optimized!” Bot assured her.

“It’s rolling like a bowling ball over here! Stop it!”

Thrackerzod acted quickly. She teleported between the rolling form of the dying behemoth, generating a shield of black energy. The demons and binaries that were watching the show had to turn away because of how impossible the walls were.

“I would apologize but they knew it was hard to look at the behemoth from a distance anyway,” Thrackerzod muttered.

The behemoth crashed into the wall of darkness – and shattered into nothingness. Thrackerzod dropped the wall and nodded, allowing all her summoned demons to vanish back to home. She turned around. “The deed is done.”

“That did not go according to plan,” Squeaky commented.

“Blame the robot,” Thrackerzod declared.

“You rushed out there without thinking! We had a plan that didn’t hinge on you giving the entire population headaches!” Squeaky blurted.

“I like Thrackerzod’s style,” Brute declared.

“You don’t get an opinion right now,” Squeaky muttered. “Seriously, Zod, I-“

Sweetie Belle held up a hoof and walked forward. “I think we need to stop and look at Thrackerzod’s flank.”

Thrackerzod glanced – upon her flank, that had previously been blank, there was now a cutie mark. It was a crusader shield with the Elder Sign plastered on it. “…What?”

“That’s the symbol that defends against eldritch powers, right?” Sweetie asked.

“Yes. I’m curious as to why I’m not screaming now that it has found its place on my flank.”

Sweetie put Thrackerzod’s face in her hooves. “It means you’ve found your destiny as a pony, finally. You are Thrackerzod. Your talent? Defending mortals from the eldritch.”

“But I am eldritch.”

“So?” Sweetie smirked. “You can still be good at it.”

“Wait,” Brute said. “I thought we agreed she wasn’t going to get one since she wasn’t really a pony?” She pointed at her own mark she had gotten what seemed like a long time ago. Sweetie Bot gestured at her own as well.

“I just thought that, I wasn’t certain,” Sweetie said. “I’m glad I was wrong.”

“Mortal sensations are bizarre,” Thrackerzod commented. “Incorrect ideas should bring shame!”

“Not always,” Mlinx said, walking toward them with Mistress Luna at his side. “I thought I was wrong most my life about everything. Turns out being incorrect sometimes just means change.”

“I call non sequitur,” Thrackerzod announced.

Sweetie pushed Thrackerzod aside. “Hi Mlinx! Luna! We took care of that monster for you!”

“Thank you,” Mistress Luna said, bowing her head. “We are forever in your debt, as are the people of this planet.”

Squeaky winked. “Just doing our job.”

“What is our job?” Brute asked.

“Anything we want it to be!” Bot declared.

“So my job is to eat every custard I can find?”

“AFFIRMATIVE!”

Squeaky and Sweetie rolled their eyes. “So,” Squeaky said, addressing Luna. “How’s your planet doing?”

“Never better,” Luna declared, smiling softly. “I never realized how much the demons needed Siron gone until it happened. Now… They’re all happier.”

Mlinx nodded. “Who knew that once the chief was gone we’d find they didn’t actually care as much about being warriors as we thought?”

Luna smirked. “That’s all on you, you know. You came back and told them what they could be.”

“Is he the demon chief?” Bot asked.

Luna shook her head. “There are no more chiefs. I run this planet myself, now. Mlinx is just an advisor, just like Lexa. …I thought we told you this?”

“Bot’s mentality never matures,” Thrackerzod deadpanned. “An eternity of childish observations.”

Mlinx leaned down and scratched Sweetie Bot behind the ear. “I find it endearing.”

“You’re encouraging it!”

Luna chuckled. “Perhaps we should be more willing to encourage the innocent and gentle.”

Sweetie Bot grinned. “I have exploding rockets!”

“…Right, my comment has been invalidated. What fun.” Luna cleared her throat. “Regardless, if you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“A LIFETIME SUPPLY A BUTTERSCOTCH COOKIES!” Brute yelled.

“Something reasonable,” Luna said.

“You could keep Ganondorf on a tighter leash,” Squeaky said. “You’re giving him and his Gerudo too much freedom. They’ll try something eventually.”

Mlinx shook his head. “No… I’m giving him a chance to mind his own business. He saw what happened to Siron. Unless he’s a fool, he won’t try anything.”

Thrackerzod huffed. “Never underestimate a mortal’s capacity for foolishness.”

“Didn’t you get stuck in a toilet last week?” Brute pointed out.

“That… That is neither here nor there!”

“It sounds pretty foolish to me.”

“Humans just don’t know how to design toilets consistently!”

Everyone rolled their eyes as the League of Sweetie Belles devolved into another one of their ‘arguments’.

~~~

Vriska didn’t follow Algernon for long – it soon became clear that he was on an outing for pleasure instead of business, judging by all the window-shopping he was doing. So she might as well make her move.

Looking at him from across the street, she activated her psychic powers in their entirety. For practice, she made a nearby human stick his hand in his mouth and take it out like nothing had happened. She still had the skill, good. She focused her mind onto Algernon’s, trying to touch his psyche. It was very unlikely she’d be able to read his mind – Vriska could only do that to the simplest of intelligences – but she should be able to gauge him well enough. Nothing concrete, but enough to point her in the right direction…

She found herself hitting a brick wall of psychic power.

She blinked, focusing her vision on him. She didn’t want to steal his luck – it might mess with some of the results – but she had to try something. She tried a direct psychic push, a command, a thought implant, even a simple sleep command. All of them had no effect.

She stared in disbelief – over the years she’d gotten exceptionally good at molding the minds of humans. If it were a pony, she wouldn’t have been so surprised, she didn’t have as much experience with their brain structure, but a human? He’d have to either not be a human, or have some kind of psychic power… Neither of which was true, from the file she read anyway. His ‘Stand’, if there was such a thing, could only boil water…

Wait, right, that was a lie. Dammit, whatever he was doing to the others was getting into her head as well. She had already forgotten about the psychic itch in the back of her mind… This guy, whatever he was, was dangerous.

Such an immunity to her psychic powers was all she needed. She placed her fist into her palm and switched into her orange god-tier clothing, ready for a confrontation. She walked right up to him. “Hey, Algernon!”

Algernon turned to her and smiled. “Ah, Miss Serket. I was wondering if I’d run into you again. I’d like to apologize for my behavior at tea earlier – I may have been under a lot of stress, but that’s no excuse for being so bitter toward you.”

Vriska blinked. “…What?”

“I was rather rude. I’m afraid I didn’t realize it at the time.”

“Well… Uh…” She shook her head, clearing it. “Wait a minute. You’re just trying to get me off your scent aren’t you?”

“My… scent?”

“Yeah! I’ve been looking up information about you, about Earth Stand, the whole shebang. Nothing adds up. How can you be the only ambassador? Why does no one question you? Why isn’t there a coordinate to Earth Stand?”

Algernon’s face flashed in surprise, but quickly turned to a stern, sour look. “I believe you are reading too much into things, Miss Serket. The coordinates were purged by request of Earth Stand governments. You have clearly gained access to information you were not supposed to-“

Vriska stole a tiny bit of his luck – only a tiny amount. Confrontations like this were a clever game. She had to spend some of her own fortune to get the edge in the conversation, while lowering Algernon’s own. However, when she used hers to get information or force his face to reveal an expression he would otherwise keep hidden, she might fumble up and fall into a corner by complete accident…

It was all in the luck of light. She was a master at it, but she wasn’t going to underestimate Algernon just because of that.

“What did you do? Your eye just flashed.”

Vriska smirked. “Vision eightfold. It helps me see things. And I really don’t trust you, Algernon.” She took a bit of his luck, which effectively removed his unyielding confidence.

“You have no proof of anything.”

Vriska stole as much luck as she was willing to from a bystander to give her the boost she needed to sell this. “Oh yes, yes I do. You see, I’ve been in contact with Sombra-“ the moment she said that, she felt her immense luck drain to below the line she would have liked. Dammit, he must know somewhere in there that Sombra’s been affected as well. But I can use this… “And I have many files with seriously damning evidence. Furthermore, I have a particular set of psychic powers…” She stole a bit of luck from him, trying to keep her luck from remaining abysmal – she just needed to ride the wave from the last bit of fortune she had spent a little longer, get him to break down… “And through these powers, I have realized that you either aren’t human or you have an impressive psychic power of your own. I’m betting the latter. And guess what, bucko? I’ve also noted that certain aspects of my power fluctuate at times that suggest your guilt. I’m sure of it, Algernon, and I can use the information in those documents together with my powers to get your secret out.”

There it was. Murder in his eyes. He was going to attack her, and she would defend herself. She’d probably kill him, solving the problem without needing any proof. And then she’d be the hero once again…

Then she felt her luck levels rise slightly without her doing anything.

Uh oh. Something unfortunate just happened.

Evening Sparkle and O’Neill charged out of the crowd, tearing Vriska away from Algernon. “OH COME ON! I had him!” Vriska shouted.

“You had him what!?” O’Neill shouted. “Scared? On the ropes? Terrified? What the hell were you doing to him!?”

“I was getting him to confess, nimrod!”

“To what?!” O’Neill demanded.

“Manipulating your minds for his nefarious means? What else!?”

Eve sighed. “Vriska, I told you-“

“And because your mind is under his influence of course you can’t see it,” Vriska blurted, taking a step back. “Argh! Why couldn’t you have waited just five seconds more!”

“Because they’re my friends,” Algernon said, glaring at her. “And they’ll come when I need their help.”

Vriska saw the menace in his eyes. She got his message loud and clear. “You bastard. Can’t you two see he’s doing the evil face!”

Eve and O’Neill turned behind them, only for Algernon’s vicious expression to become broken and tired.

Vriska threw an 8-ball into Algernon’s face and stormed off in anger.

“Wait! Vriska-“ Eve called.

“I’M DONE WITH YOU LOSERS!” Vriska shouted, flipping them off as she walked away. “Go ahead, doom yourselves to the conspiracy. I’ll go find some mountain on Equis Vitis and wait for Aradia. Dig your own graves, see if I care.”

She didn’t listen to Eve calling after her.

~~~

There was a restaurant known as the Tasty Treat located in the Canterlot of Equis Vitis that Renee and Pinkie had a special connection to, because they had helped bring it to life amongst the stuffy atmosphere of high society. It could be vaguely described as ‘Indian’ food, even though such a nationality didn’t really exist on Equis Vitis. The beautiful spicy smells wafted through the restaurant, and the entire place just felt homey.

Daniel Jackson sat at a window table, arms folded over his mouth. His mind was fixated on something deeply important, so important he didn’t realize the waiter walk up.

“Ahem,” the waiter eventually declared.

“Not yet,” Daniel said, coming out of his stupor. “She’s not here.”

“…You’ve been here half an hour.”

“I arrived half an hour early.”

The waiter blinked, then rolled his eyes. “I’ll be back in a few minutes then. Enjoy the smells, I suppose.”

“Sorry for taking up a seat.”

“We’re not full anyway.”

“Thanks,” Daniel said, returning to his deep contemplation. He stared intently at a knot in the table for a few moments before letting his gaze drift to nothing.

He had no idea how much time passed between then and when his thoughts were interrupted.

“My Stars, Daniel! Did you actually dress up?”

Daniel shot bolt upright as Renee took her seat. “Yes! Yes I did. Figured that you were always dressing up-“

“Daniel, Darling, I’m a seamstress. Well, ambassador, diplomat, and seamstress – nevermind, the point is, I make dresses, so I’m going to wear dresses.”

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “You’re wearing a dress fit for the gala and a hat that could fit an ant colony on it.”

Renee brushed her diamond-white dress and smirked, angling her hat so she could look at Daniel with the perfect level of shadow over her eyes. “I do suppose it is a bit extravagant for the Tasty Treat…”

“Anything is extravagant for the Tasty Treat. They’ll accept anyone.”

“One of the delightful things about this place,” Renee said, beaming. “A beacon of inclusion and hope. And here I am sullying it by being what might as well be a disco ball.”

Daniel chuckled.

“Did I ever tell you about that design that actually was a disco ball? I mean, it was an artistic expression, but I have to admit it did look a little ridiculous. I’m sure you can imagine.”

“I think I can. Though the image in my mind is more using the disco ball as a hamster ball. Or pony ball, I guess.”

Renee chuckled. “Daniel, that’s a brilliant idea. I’ll have to bring up the idea of pony ball races to Pinkie. Of course it’ll double as a dance party…”

“And a boutique?”

“Rarity for You: RACE EDITION!”

The two shared a laugh. Daniel’s died off first.

“Daniel, you seem stressed,” Renee said.

“Oh, you noticed that?”

“It’s not like my talent is noticing the beauty and details in things,” Rarity deadpanned.

“Ah. Right. Well…”

“Daniel, let yourself relax first. Order some food. Okay?”

“…Okay.”

From a table across the restaurant Pinkie twitched. “Oh come on…” she muttered under her breath.

“Oh come on, what?” Nova asked.

“Nothing.”

“It’s something,” Flutterfree said, glancing over her menu at Renee and Daniel. “I mean, she wouldn’t have told us to be here if it wasn’t going to be something.”

“I said nothing!”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Suuuure. Can we order yet?”

“Not until I say so!” Pinkie hissed. “We need to keep the menus over our faces!”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “You know chances are pretty high Renee knows we’re here, right?”

“She doesn’t,” Pinkie asserted. “And I plan to keep it that way…”

Nova blinked. “I can cast a disguise spell so we can at least order some food. I’m hungry!”

“I would feel a lot less like an evil spy if I didn’t have a menu in front of my face,” Flutterfree commented.

“Fine! Cast the spell!” Pinkie muttered. “But don’t let them catch you staring at them!”

“I won’t be,” Flutterfree declared. “That’d be rude. Actually, this entire thing is kind of rude.”

“It’s cute,” Nova said.

“They are cute. We are rude.”

“But we get to experience the cuteness this way!”

Flutterfree blinked. “Okay, I understand Pinkie just kinda knows things, but you’ve spied on them before haven’t you?”

Nova bit her lip. “Er…”

“I can’t believe you two.”

“Just go with it this once, Flutterfree, okay?” Pinkie said. “Trust me. And be discreet.”

Flutterfree took in a deep breath. “Fine. I get to eat some of Saffron’s soup, at least.”

“A good part of your balanced breakfast,” Pinkie declared.

“It’s dinner,” Flutterfree deadpanned.

Nova shrugged. “It’s food.” She cast the spell, surrounding the three of them in a color-change field. The waiter walked up to them and took their order.

~~~

Vriska walked out of a dimensional store in the Hub with a portal device and a license. Apparently she’d been automatically signed up for one after she met Eve the first time, just so she wouldn’t run into trouble with the law later. Which was good, Vriska was really not in the mood for DMV insanity. She wasn’t even sure what the DMV equivalent for dimensional travel even was here, and figuring that out would probably be an ordeal in and of itself.

Regardless, she had her device, so there was no chance of luck backfiring and sending her somewhere else. She dialed Equis Vitis and marched through the portal, fully intending to just find a landmark somewhere and wait for Aradia to show herself. She was thinking a mountain, or some magical nexus of some sort. Perhaps she’d awaken some ancient evil to grab the Handmaid’s attention. And – wait a minute.

Vriska found herself in a room covered in papers. Through a window she could see stars. This clearly wasn’t Equis Vitis.

“FUCK!” She shouted, kicking a wall. “I just can’t catch a br-“

“I GOT YOU!” A voice declared – that of a Starlight. “Yes! Successful interception!”

Vriska blinked, looking at the Starlight. She had goggles on her head and a metal band around one of her front legs. She had a device in her hoof she was using to scan Vriska. “I was right, you’ve got phenomenally high levels of the Beat.”

Vriska tensed. “Who… Are you?”

“Oh, I’m Starbeat, the expert on all thing Beat in this part of the multiverse. Oh, by the way, if I start kissing you for no reason, please don’t take offense – I do that sometimes and I’m so stressed right now I basically have no inhibitions left on my curse.”

“…Curse?”

“Shipping curse, I’m romantically attracted to anything I so much as have a ‘click’ with, hard to explain, we don’t have time anyway.” She cleared her throat. “You know Algernon’s up to something.”

“Yeah! He’s suspicious as all hell!”

“Good. I think he is too. I still remember him like a friend and have memories of everything he says, but I definitely, definitely don’t think anything matches up. He’s messing with everyone’s heads Vriska, and I’m only able to see it because I’m shunting all my willpower to keep myself fixated on him!” Her eye twitched.

“…You look like you belong in a madhouse.” Vriska grinned. “Just what I need.”

“Yay!” Starbeat said, pulling a monitor out of the ceiling. “So, what really makes me sure something is going on is this.” She pointed at two graphs on the screen that meant nothing to Vriska. They looked pretty similar, but weren’t identical. “This graph shows the pattern of Beat around a Chrysalis when she tried to invade Canterlot in an Equis that was offset back several years. This graph shows us the beat around Algernon. They’re almost identical, though Algernon’s patterns are stronger.” She rubbed her hooves together. “But I can’t show this to anyone, because he’s in their heads. They’ll just dismiss it. So it’s up to you and me, Vriska. We’ve got to stop him from whatever he’s doing!”

Vriska nodded. “Right!”

“With the amount of Beat you have, I’m sure nothing can stop us!” Starbeat declared, putting on her goggles.

“…Beat.” Vriska said, a hint of nervousness in her voice. “Right…”

041 - Algernon's Stand, Part 2

“Plan,” Starbeat said. “We need a plan.” She began to pace around the room, a somewhat impressive feat since there was barely room for the two of them to stand amongst the papers, boxes, and screens. “We either need to stop him or get everyone else to realize what he is.”

Vriska shrugged. “Normally I’d go with assassination at this point, but we have no idea if his mental effects will vanish after that and I kinda need to be able to hang around here after.”

“And if his mental effects don’t vanish, the relationship with Earth Stand will come to a standstill.”

“Yes. Bad.” Vriska furrowed her brow. “Do we have our own method of mental warfare?”

“You’re the most powerful psychic we know of. Officially.” Starbeat put a hoof to her chin. “The Spectacularium could probably shed some light on this, but he’s notoriously uncooperative.”

“The what?”

“Spirit on Lai that can answer just about any question. Nigh-impossible to track down.”

Vriska put a hand into her fist. “You’ve got strange seer ponies right? Just go get one of the freaky-eyes.”

“Maybe… The strongest oculus we know of is Maud. She’s a fair ways away, but I can teleport… But no, even if she could see, it’d just be her testimony. My testimony isn’t enough, your testimony isn’t enough. It has to be evidence.”

“Then we just need to find some evidence,” Vriska said, cracking her knuckles. “Something solid, something nobody could refute.”

“The Ark of Truth…”

“Hrm?”

“There’s a device that convinces people the truth of things, under the lock and key of the Ori Remnant. We could grab it and reprogram it... Ugh, but that place is nearly impossible to break into, and I’m not sure we have the knowledge to reprogram it.”

Vriska furrowed her brow. “I bet I could get in…”

“The University of Doors tried to take it once, and they almost succeeded. Security around the device is now so tight even looking at it is difficult. For all I know it’s a fake sitting right there, and the real thing is in another universe.”

“Lovely,” Vriska muttered. “Where else can we get evidence? There’s got to be something. There’s got to be some way… Earth Stand doesn’t exist, after all, that’s a big hole.”

“…Right,” Starbeat said. “Er, well… Wait, he still receives orders – or should – just like every other ambassador.”

“Yeah. Yeah you’re right!” Vriska opened her phone. “…Why are none of those calls in the files Sombra got me?”

Starbeat opened her mouth to answer but Vriska answered her own question.

“Right… She just conveniently didn’t think it worthwhile. Dammit, everyone’s doing exactly what he wants…” She put her phone away. “We need to listen to some of those calls he gets from ‘Earth Stand’ or whatever. See what he actually has to say.”

“That’s highly illegal,” Starbeat told her.

“Do I look like I give a fuck?”

“No, just reminding you to be wary of international incidents.”

“Mmm… So, the plan is try to intercept one of his secret communications.”

“Or just be around when he makes a call,” Starbeat said. “I know an invisibility spell. With enough luck we could avoid the magic scanners.”

Vriska smirked. “Something tells me it’ll take a bit of time to gather that much luck.”

“Probably. I suppose I could check the Beat levels around his-“

“Let’s not use the weird thing nobody understands, okay?” Vriska interjected.

“…But what if we need to?”

“We won’t need to. We have me, Vriska Serket, the luckiest troll alive!”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping intensely. Starbeat, having already been at her wits end today, didn’t even have the slightest bit of restraint left in her. She pulled Vriska’s head down and kissed her hard. Before Vriska could do anything Starbeat threw her over her back into the nearby wall. “Aherm. Sorry about that; curse and all.” She blushed furiously, wiping the blue lipstick off her face. “Try not to take it personally, like, seriously, do not, it’ll just exacerbate the condition until I can find a way to fix it.”

Vriska blinked. “…You really don’t want to even think about it with me. My race has very confusing notions of romance.”

Starbeat raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Well… Let’s just say there’s four kinds. There’s standard, then there’s the buddy-buddy moirallegiance which I swear your entire pony society is based on, kismesis which is all about hate-love rivalry sorta, and then the confusing auspistice which I really don’t have time to explain right now and never want to touch again.”

“The explanations of exotic romance is not helping my condition.”

Vriska blinked. “What even is your condition? I’ve been around a while and-“

“It’s a Beat curse. I come from a world where the Beat ‘dictated’ that romance needed to happen in contrived situations at an instant of ‘connection’. You ever watch how romance is portrayed in a lot of movies? Kinda like that. I left, and I still have the problem. I spend every waking moment fighting it and researching a way to remove the Beat curse from me. Caught up to speed?”

Vriska winced. “On one hand, that must suck. On the other you must have a lot of fun, if you know what I mean.”

“I want to slap you for that remark but I have enough awareness to realize it’ll probably trigger that hate-love whatever thing you were talking about and I really don’t need that right now.”

“I dunno…”

“Let’s just go spy on Algernon already.”

~~~

Lai had no aliens, Luna eventually concluded. She had been taking the Feldspar around the stars of Lai for a few weeks now – leaving Celestia to raise the moon back on Equis Vitis – and just hadn’t found anything of much interest. It was like the cosmos of Lai was dead except for the one planet.

They had discovered that the nation of Lai only covered one continent. There was another continent on the planet, though without as much society. Queen Luna had been surprised to learn of two other kinds of pony races, fluffers and halos, each with their own unique forms of magic. Luna couldn’t bring herself to trust the fluffers since their magic altered how ponies perceived them, but the halos were interesting. The ring above their head functioned as a horn, but channeled power through how much other ponies believed in them. It was a peculiar magic system, to say the least. Luna even had a halo-pegasus crewmember on board from that discovery.

Luna tried to think of anything else they had found out by exploring Lai from a space perspective. Nothing. The Spectacularium hadn’t shown up, there was no evidence of other life, and every star they visited had nothing but barren planets.

It was mildly disappointing. She was contemplating returning to her quarters and playing a game since nothing was happening. But she decided to remain for the next system they checked.

Was she glad she did that. The moment they left hyperspace, Luna felt the power in the system they had found. She stood up from her chair. “Show me this system’s Star.” She demanded. A gigantic blue orb appeared on the Feldspar’s screen, creating blue highlights on the otherwise orange color scheme of the Feldspar’s interior.

Luna’s eyes went white as she forced her voice into the void of space where it did not belong. “STAR OF THE LAI UNIVERSE, I AM LUNA, PRINCESS OF THE NIGHT AND COMMANDER OF THE FELDSPAR. I REQUEST AN AUDIE-“

“THERE IS NO NEED TO BE SO LOUD, YOU ARE UPSETTING THE PRISTINE QUIET OF THE COSMOS. I HEAR YOU, LUNA. WHAT IS IT YOU WANT?”

Luna cleared her throat. “First of all, a name would be appreciated.”

“VREOTLOH. NO TITLE, I AM BUT A STAR SITTING IN THE COSMOS.”

“We have been exploring this universe for some time now, looking for signs of life besides that of Lai. We were wond-“

“YOU WILL FIND OTHER STARS OUT HERE AND THE OCCASIONAL STAR HUSK, BUT NOTHING AS VIBRANT AS LAI. ARMONIA’S EXPERIMENT WAS A TEST RUN. MORE WORLDS WOULD HAVE BEEN MADE, BUT SINCE IT RESULTED IN HER DEATH, THIS UNIVERSE WILL NOT SEE MORE LIFE OF THAT NATURE.”

“You’re very forthcoming with information.”

“I HAVE FEW SECRETS, LUNA. YOUR POWER IS ON A PLANETARY LEVEL, SO I DO NOT SEE MUCH THE OTHERS CAN LOOK DOWN ON ME FOR DISCUSSING THINGS WITH YOU. THERE IS NO MORE STAR SOCIETY TO ENFORCE THE SILENCE. THERE HAS NOT BEEN FOR A LONG TIME.”

“What… Happened to your society?”

“THERE WAS A REBELLION OF LOWER LIFE FORMS AND A TRAITOR STAR. RATHER THAN ATTEMPT TO KEEP OUR HOLDINGS AFTER THE STARSTREAM WAR, WE SPLIT AND ABANDONED LARGER-SCALE MULTIVERSAL OPERATIONS. COMMUNICATION NETWORKS ARE STILL AROUND, SO I AM AWARE OF YOU AND YOUR SOCIETY.”

“Think we’re being stupid?”

“NO DOUBT. I’VE BEEN WATCHING THE FIREWORKS SHOW FOR SOME TIME NOW. CAN’T WAIT FOR YOU TO FIND THE STRANDS. OR ANY D-WORLD.”

“Care to give me a hint?”

“THAT WOULD RUIN THE FUN. I CAN TELL YOU THAT THE UNIVERSITY AND THE EMBODIMENT ARE SHALLOW AND WEAK COMPARED TO WHAT WE ONCE WERE. THOUGH I CANNOT REALLY SPEAK FOR THE UNIVERSITY, THEY’RE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK AND WE DO NOT HAVE MEMORIES OF THEM.”

“The Eldritch Embodiment was around when your society was?”

“IN SOME FORM OR OTHER, YES. THEY WERE THERE BEFORE US, AND WILL LIKELY BE THERE MUCH LONGER. THEIR METHOD OF MULTIVERSAL ACTIVITY, WHICH IS MOSTLY APATHETIC, IS ONE OF THE SAFER ROUTES. THEY DO NOT EXPAND, LUNA. THEY REMAIN STATIC, UNCHANGING. A BIT UNUSUAL CONSIDERING HOW MUCH THEIR KIND IS ASSOCIATED WITH CHAOS AND DISORDER.”

“Is there any way to actually open a dialogue with them?”

“THEY ONLY RARELY DISCUSSED ANYTHING WITH US, DESPITE US HAVING MORE POWER THAN THEM. IT IS A RARE ELDRITCH BEING WILLING TO CONSIDER ANYTHING WORTHWHILE BESIDES THEIR OWN KIND. MOST ARE DRIVEN ONLY BY THEIR OWN SELFISH DESIRES AND WHATEVER DEITY THEY DRAW THEIR POWER AND IDENTITY FROM.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “Should we be worried about them?”

“IF YOU START TAPPING HEAVILY INTO ELDRITCH MAGICS, YES. THEY WILL TAKE ACTION AGAINST SIGNIFICANT DRAINS IN THEIR POWER FROM NEARBY UNIVERSES. OTHERWISE, YOU SHOULD BE FINE. ESPECIALLY SINCE YOU HAVE ONE OF THEIR HIGHER DEMONS WORKING FOR YOU. THAT’S UNHEARD OF.”

“We got lucky.”

“PERHAPS IT WAS VRISKA’S PRESENCE.”

“…I have another question. What do you know of her and the others who come from ‘distant’ parts of the multiverse?”

“OUR SOCIETY, AT ITS HEIGHT, WAS STILL UNABLE TO MAP OUT THE MULTIVERSE. WE HAD SEEN MAPS CREATED BY THE HIGHEST SOCIETIES, BUT THOSE WERE CONSTRUCTED IN WAYS FOR MINDS NOT LIKE OUR OWN. THUS, I ONLY HAVE A GENERAL PICTURE.”

“Care to tell us what was on those maps?”

“YOU ARE ALREADY AWARE. YOUR RECORDS INDICATE YOU HAVE CAUGHT A GLIMPSE OF ONE IN THE DOCTOR’S TARDIS.”

“The four spheres. We’re aware of them. What do they mean?”

“THAT’LL BE BETTER FOR YOU TO FIND OUT ON YOUR OWN. I CAN TELL YOU THAT THE THREE PRIMARY SPHERES HAVE NAMES. WE CURRENTLY SIT IN THE Q-SPHERE. THE TAU’RI ARE IN THE E-SPHERE, WHILE THE ‘NORTH’ SPHERE IS THE D-SPHERE.”

“What of the southern sphere?”

“A SURPRISE.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “You’re being a tease.”

“IF YOU WANT MORE INFORMATION, I’D GO ASK VRISKA. SHE KNOWS A BIT MORE ABOUT THINGS, BUT AS YOU’RE PROBABLY AWARE THOSE WHO KNOW THE SECRETS OF THE MULTIVERSE TEND TO PREFER THAT OTHERS DISCOVER IT ON THEIR OWN. AS A SOCIETY OR INDIVIDUALLY, IT DEPENDS.”

“It is an annoyance I’ve noticed. Why do they do that? It’s not like we hide the multiversal nature from most of the universes we encounter.”

“THERE ARE A FEW FORCES THAT, IF REVEALED EARLY, CAN RUIN A SOCIETY. THE IDENTITY OF THE SPHERES IS NOT ONE OF THOSE THINGS, I JUST PREFER NOT TO TELL YOU.”

“I think I know what one of them is. The Beat.”

“I WOULDN’T KNOW. THE STARS DID NOT DISCOVER WHAT THAT TRULY WAS.”

“Concerning.”

“IT IS EVIDENCE THAT IT IS SUCH A DANGEROUS PIECE OF KNOWLEDGE. IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE SOME STARS DID FIGURE OUT WHAT IT WAS AND KEPT IT SECRET.”

Luna pursed her lips. “Is there anything else you think the Stars might be keeping a secret from the rest of your kind?”

“OH CERTAINLY. NOT TELLING YOU THOUGH. NOT THE LEAST BECAUSE I’VE JUST GOTTEN SEVERAL DOZEN LINKS FROM PSYCHIC STARS TELLING ME TO SHUT UP.”

“Are you going to?”

Vreotloh made no response.

Luna sighed. “Guess that answers that question. Something tells me most of that wasn’t actually helpful or really new information. It’s almost like he was summarizing stuff we could have deduced or figured out with only a bit of research…” She ordered the Feldspar to send a report to Equis Vitis and then go to the next system.

It was a little later that Luna realized that conversation did accomplish something.

It showed how small and insignificant they were compared to the scope of the multiverse.

~~~

Starbeat put on an all-black stealth outfit, even though they were going to be invisible. Something about ‘looking the part’, she had said. Vriska opted to not use her god-tier form because she had bad memories of pixie dust trails from her wings ruining everything. No wings today, just default ‘ordinary’ Vriska.

The two of them could see each other thanks to Starbeat’s finesse with magic, and they had practiced using telepathy to communicate. Vriska wasn’t the best with pony minds, but with Starbeat letting her psychic powers in, there wasn’t much of an issue.

They had found out where Algernon supposedly received his ‘orders’ – at his home on the Hub, a tiny apartment that he had instead of a full embassy. Every other major world had a full embassy, so this was just more suspicious. The evidence kept piling up, but both Vriska and Starbeat knew they needed something solid to overcome the mental conditioning that was clearly happening.

The two of them watched as Algernon entered his apartment. They slipped in, quietly, right behind him through the door. Vriska felt her luck take a huge drop – they had just passed through a magic sensor. Vriska suspected that she had made it ‘jam’ or ‘glitch’ momentarily so it missed them. They were inside, able to watch him as he went about his business, but she was going to need to watch her luck levels – only Algernon and Starbeat were available for stealing from.

He should receive a call in ten minutes, if the logs aren’t lying. Starbeat reminded Vriska.

I know, Vriska responded. I don’t forget things that easily.

Algernon went about his home without a care in the world. He made himself a snack out of cheese and crackers and went to watch TV from a very comfortable looking couch. Vriska and Starbeat moved behind the couch so they could see what he was watching – a documentary on the Dual Migration. Starcei was currently on the screen, answering questions about how the Arcei felt the event.

Vriska and Starbeat only paid casual attention to this. They mostly looked at Algernon closely. He did nothing suspicious – just sat and watched the TV. He looked like he was about to fall asleep at one point, but woke himself up with a grumble and a groan.

Vriska checked the time. It’s almost been ten minutes…

He might not actually receive orders, or make a report. This might help us…

Suddenly, the TV screen buzzed with static, replacing the documentary with the face of a man. Most of the man’s features were obscured in shadow, but some facts could be discerned. He had pale skin, was wearing a black suit with shoulder pads and dark hair. Vriska couldn’t see his eyes because of the lighting, but she felt a chill run up her spine anyway – it was like he was looking at her.

He clearly wasn’t. “Algernon, report.”

Recording this? Vriska asked.

Of course.

Algernon cleared his throat. “Almost nothing has changed with the Unification situation, which is exactly what you wish. The process is at a standstill.”

“You’ve done well. I have no further orders for you at this time, just keep doing what you’re doing.”

“Very well.”

Shit, this conversation is a lot shorter than it needs to be, Vriska thought. We’re not getting anything from this.

The man in shadow continued. “Is there anything in particular you would like to report?”

“A multiversal traveler by the name of Vriska showed up. She was exceptionally suspicious and antagonistic towards me, but I took care of her.”

The man’s brow furrowed. “Vriska? You took care of her?”

“I did not kill her. I merely encouraged her to go somewhere else. The last I saw of her was several hours ago, storming off in a huff. There’s been no sign of her since. I could probably track her down if you wish.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll do it myself.”

It was at that moment Vriska felt like an eye was boring itself into the back of her skull. She could both feel it and see the jagged red design. She didn’t make a noise – but she deduced that they had probably been made. We need to move, no-

“Don’t move!” the man in the screen called. “I assure you, it’ll be much more interesting if you join Algernon and me for a meal. I, clearly, cannot be there personally, but we can discuss here.”

Algernon blinked. “What are-“

“Algernon, Vriska is behind you with a unicorn. They’re invisible and are recording everything we say.”

Algernon stood up and looked behind his couch. “I don’t…”

Ready? Vriska messaged.

Break for it. Starbeat agreed.

Vriska punched Algernon in the face, sending him flying. Then she ran toward the door with Starbeat, not caring at all about the security alarm they had just tripped.

“Ladies, it would be best if you remained,” the man called to them from the screen. “We could resolve this peacefully. If you go through that door there’s no telling what will happen.”

“Taking my chances!” Vriska said, kicking the door down and running into the halls of the Hub, Starbeat close behind. Something must have dispelled the invisibility spell, because everyone could see them.

Which probably meant Hub security was after them.

When they heard the sounds of a siren behind them, they knew that to be true.

“Fuuuuuck,” Vriska cursed. She leaped backward, landing on Starbeat’s back. “Yaw!”

“Don’t treat me like a brainless horse.”

“Just move! I’ll steal all the luck I can for us, but you have to run! And teleport! We just need to get safe!”

Starbeat teleported to another hall. “They’ll have locked our dimensional devices.”

“I’m not getting enough luck for a translation without harvesting for a long time,” Vriska responded. “We’ll have to do something else.”

“There’s a gate-house we can commandeer three ‘halls’ down. If we can make it to another universe…”

“Less talking, more running and teleporting.” Vriska produced her dice and threw them behind her, summoning several cubes made of cheese to confuse their pursuers.

Starbeat galloped down the halls of the Hub, knocking over stalls and people left and right.

“Now probably isn’t a good time to mention that your hand holding tightly on my neck is probably going to make the curse worse.”

Vriska facepalmed.

~~~

To put it mildly, Discord and Trixie’s arcade had been a hit. It had originally been intended only as a temporary thing, but they had eventually decided to keep it operating all the time. With Discord’s powerful magic, it would be able to run for eternity on its own without much need for them to be there. The games would always be powered, the prizes would always self-dispense, and the money would be automatically counted (and sometimes even spent).

Today, however, both of them were actually there, on the stage. They were approaching the end of a rather elaborate magic show with the theme of fractals that had the gaming audience torn away from the many arcade cabinets, instead focusing on the impressive light show.

With a starburst inspired by a Mandelbrot set as the finishing move, Discord and Trixie bowed to impressive applause.

Discord stood up and gave the crowd a thumbs up (including the duplicate of himself that was standing in the audience and clapping extremely hard). “Thank you everyone for watching the one and only Discord and his assistant, the awestruck and wowed Trixie!”

Trixie shot Discord an exaggerated expression of annoyance. “Trixie is known as the Great and Powerful! And you are the one who’s the assistant!” She humphed and rolled her eyes. She shot the crowd a wink as she leaped off the stage. Discord followed suit.

“Don’t forget to trip your waitress,” he called.

“This isn’t a restaurant,” Trixie muttered. Discord responded to this by summoning several blocks of cheese. To his mild annoyance the blocks of cheese vanished a second after he made them, taken somewhere else. “…Odd.”

“Disturbance in the chaos?”

“Disturbance in the chaos.”

“So all is well?”

Discord grinned. “Exactly.”

Trixie chuckled. “Right. Well, what now? I suppose we can try to summon more cheese and eat it, or something.”

“Are you asking me out?”

“Hah! In your dreams, goat-face.” Trixie rolled her eyes. “The Great and Powerful Trixie has higher standards.”

Discord pretended to be injured. “Oh, you wound me so!”

“Trixie revels in your pain. Trixie is the tiger and you are the mouse.”

“The mouse that can turn your head into a grapefruit.”

“Don’t you dare…”

Discord’s ears perked up. “Well, I was going to, but there’s someone looking at us.”

“Oh?” Trixie said, looking around. “Who?”

Discord copied his head, creating a new one that came out of a nearby wall, staring right at the woman who was looking at them. She was a standard human of twenty-something with long auburn hair and dichromatic eyes – blue in one, gray in the other. Otherwise she seemed rather normal, if one overlooked her fit, muscular physique. She smiled. “Hey Thistle, long time no see.”

Trixie raised an eyebrow and smirked. She turned to Discord. “Thistle?”

“Nickname I gave him a while ago,” the woman answered offhandedly. “Whats up, you two?”

Discord raised an eyebrow so high it did a triple axle off the high dive. His other eyebrow clapped. “Can’t say I ever met you, miss…”

The woman paused for a moment. “…Right, sorry, I don’t actually see Discords all that often. I forget you don’t always know everything the others do.”

“Could you imagine the horrors if all of you did know everything the others did?” Trixie wondered aloud.

“I’m not sure if it’d be delightful or terrifying,” Discord mused.

The woman held out her hand in greeting, a smirk on her face betraying amusement at the antics she was witnessing. “I’m Jane Shimmer, Slider and Checkers Regional Champion.”

Discord snapped his claw, making his eyebrows duplicate and come together in the form of a hand to shake Jane’s. She wasn’t bothered in the slightest by this oddity. Trixie shook Jane’s hand with her magic next.

Discord smiled and shot Trixie a knowing grin. “Am I thinking what you’re thinking?”

“Option A is cheese blocks for everyone. Option B is that Trixie will become a tour guide to show her around the Hub because we like her.”

“Which means we’ve reached the next level in tours…”

Trixie grinned. “Yes! Take that, Pinkie! We can give tours to complete strangers as well!”

The two hopped up and down in excitement and did a combination hoofbumb/high-five. Suddenly they both stood at attention, Discord himself wearing an army getup. “Jane Shimmer, take us to your Sunset!”

Jane just burst out laughing.

Trixie smirked. “Ah, the last name did mean something. Clever us, huh?”

“Trixie and Discord – ACE DETECTIVES!”

Jane raised an eyebrow. “…You sure about that?”

“Not at all!” Discord said.

“Hey!” Trixie blurted. “We don’t have to tell her that!”

Jane shrugged, chuckling a little as she did so. “Anyway, Sunny should be ready for lunch right about now. Over here.”

The three of them left the arcade and entered a diner. Sunny was a unicorn version of Sunset Shimmer with a shorter mane that looked more like actual fire than the bacon style Corona wore around all the time. She had a mechanical front left hoof, just adding to the mystery of her character. “Oh. A Discord and a Trixie, Jane?”

“You bet!” Trixie said. “The Great and Powerful Trixie shall improve this lunch thirteenfold!”

“You’re overdoing it again,” Discord said.

“…Twelvefold?”

“I meant the Great and Powerful Emphasizer.”

“Bah, never enough Great and Powerful.”

The three sat down. Everyone was introduced in a quick, to the point fashion - discovering Sunny’s full name to be Sunset Parker - and then they ordered their lunch.

Trixie laid a hoof on the table. “Trixie has a question.”

Sunny smirked. “Go ahead, Trixie.”

“Trixie wants to know why you called Discord ‘Thistle’,” she said, an amused grin on her face. She clearly expected this to be good.

The food arrived, but Jane paid little attention to it because she was deep in thought, clearly pondering how to tell the story. “That goes back to when I first met him. I wasn’t in the best mood at the time and sort of misheard his name as Thiscord. After our first adventure was over I sort of didn’t see him again for maybe a year or so.” She looked uncertain about this.

“It was about ten and a half months,” Sunny confirmed.

“Yeah. So I was having some trouble fighting against this self-proclaimed god character. Evil laugh, Goatee, 5000 contingency plans for how to gain immortality. I’m sure you’ve met the type.”

“Ba’al?” Trixie said.

“Ba’al,” Discord confirmed.

Jane continued. “Anyway, this guy was really a threat, so much so that my circle of Evermore needed to enlist the help of an actual god, one on our side anyway.”

“Evermore?” Trixie asked.

“Can we go back to her considering me an actual god?” Discord interrupted.

“No. Remember what happened on Earth Vitis? Just no.”

Sunny motioned for them to quiet down. “We’ll explain the Evermore thing in a second, just let her tell the story.”

Jane nodded and continued with her story. “Our friend Sam had the bright idea of asking our Discord for help, since she had her own encounter with him. When I went to go meet him, I realized that I didn’t actually know his name, not really. I tried a few options, but it was Thistle that got him laughing. In the end he basically fixed the problem immediately with… What I believe you would call his ‘usual flair.’ I was impressed enough to want to train under him and the nickname stuck like glue.”

Discord smirked. “I can’t say I disagree with the nickname, it seems completely unrelated but really does mean something. Most curious.”

Sunny looked at Discord. “Really? I always thought Thiscord was funnier.”

“That just means you have a better sense of humor than me,” Jane commented, putting an arm over Sunny’s shoulder.

Both Discord and Trixie, on cue, over-exaggerated being grossed out by the mild display of affection. Trixie waved her hooves. “Explain the evermore business before you reach the point of no return!”

Jane just laughed and pulled herself off of Sunny. She glanced at the unicorn to see if she wished to explain. Sunny cleared her throat. “Right, so, the name comes from back when Jane and I here first met. I was originally native to an Equestria that was pulled into a group of twenty-one worlds called the Recursions. Twenty-two if you count the Silent Forest, twenty if you don’t count the broken world the Combine created.”

Jane shook her head before looking at Discord. “Yeah, if you think your chaos realm is something, you’d be surprised that you might not actually be able to comprehend that broken world. Not even immortals could survive in there with their minds intact.”

“So, Evermore,” Sunny continued, “they’re the people that were pulled from all across the multiverse into the Recursions. Once there they’d come back to life if they died and could travel between the Recursions through something called Translation. They were basically gods in their own right, eventually.”

“Yeah, some power,” Jane dismissed. Sunny motioned for Jane to demonstrate the Translation. Jane smirked. “Fine, but I didn’t really want to draw too much attention.” Jane tapped into her magic and summoned some background music, including a quiet guitar and simple drums. She began to sing softly. “well it’s strange my head is rememberin’ how the airplane flying over…” A thin gray bar measure appeared and began to circle around her.

Sunny motioned to the bar measure. “Each Translation is unique to every individual Evermore. Jane’s is music related, while mine shows up as a ring of fire. There was even someone who vanished in a puff of cherry blossoms. In Jane’s music notes you can see each world she can get to right now.”

Trixie, an impressed but slightly confused look on her face, spoke first. “Wait, you mean each of those notes is a different world?” Getting confirmation from a pair of nods, Trixie continued. “How much of the multiverse have you seen?”

At a nudge from Sunny, Jane stopped singing and the bar measure disappeared. “I wouldn’t know percentages, but we’ve been through over thirty-thousand worlds,” Suny declared, pulling a journal out of her inventory clearly marked with a fifty-one on the front. “I’ve been keeping track of them as we go.”

Discord and Trixie shared an impressed look for a moment before they turned back to the two sitting across the table. The draconequus and the unicorn simultaneously spoke a single name. “Eve.”

Sunny looked confused. “…What?”

Trixie spoke first. “She’s our Twilight, and she’s the one who started the whole exploring the multiverse thing. She’ll want to see your journals. She’d love the chance to add that many worlds to the Directory.”

Sunny blinked. “Wait, wait, is this not really Equestria? …I guess that does explain why nobody was really impressed by us sliding into the center of the mall.”

Discord laughed. “Mall? Oh, Baconhair, if only you knew…” he then looked wistfully into the distance with a knowing smirk and a dramatic pose.

Jane didn’t let him continue his thought. “Knew what?” she inquired, rolling her eyes at his pose.

Discord frowned. “Flutterfree would have humored the dramatic setup…” He returned to his normal posture and grinned. “This place you’re in isn’t just some location to do shopping on the weekend. It’s the Hub of interdimensional activity. It should be obvious – see, over there, that’s human Trixie.”

Jane looked behind her to see the human version of Trixie. “Huh.”

Trixie (the unicorn) waved. “HEY BEST FRIEND!”

“HEY BEST FRIEND!” Trixie (the human) called back before returning to her conversation with a version of Derpy with two heads.

Jane just blinked. “Well, I guess I just didn’t notice anything like that. Weird.”

Discord raised an eyebrow.“Everyone that’s showed up was impressed, even Rick from what I’ve heard.”

“He hid it well,” Trixie added.

Jane scoffed. “Rick… next time you see him tell him Beth is the worst.”

“Beth?” Trixie asked.

“His daughter,” both Jane and Sunny said simultaneously. Jane continued alone. “A Beth ended up becoming an Evermore and from the moment she showed up she caused problems. Not even in the normal way like classic villains, no, she was just the biggest bitch ever.”

Jane fumed, but Sunny was slightly amused by her outburst. “Beth met Jane and decided she had to be one-upped in everything. Jane didn’t appreciate it.”

“THE WORST!” Jane bellowed.

A round of laughs came forth from the table.

“You won’t have to worry about him,” Trixie said after the laughs died down. “Rick’s banned from the worlds around the Hub. He-“

At this moment everything was interrupted by Starbeat and Vriska crashing through the front door of the diner. Vriska threw her dice behind them, riddling the street with large gummy bear monsters that caught the pursuing Hub guard. Starbeat reared and teleported out of the establishment.

Jane blinked. “Well I certainly want to know the story behind who that was and what happened.”

Discord shrugged. “Vriska, a traveler of dimensions not unlike you two, and Starbeat, a unicorn cursed with stupid romance disease.”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Not surprised they’re running from the law, but Trixie has no idea why.”

Jane and Sunny glanced at each other.

“You might want to act casual,” Trixie said. “They’ll question us.”

A Rainbow Dash with an artificial wing charged through a gummy bear into the diner. “YOU! DISCORD! Trace their teleport NOW!”

“Wasn’t watching closely enough.” Discord said, comically sipping his drink.

The Rainbow Dash twitched. “Did anyone trace that teleport?”

There was an explosion somewhere nearby.

“Nevermind. AFTER THEM!” The Rainbow Dash and her fellow Hub guard left the diner.

“So, how’s your food?” Discord asked Jane.

“Pretty good, if a bit salty,” Jane said, not fazed in the slightest, clearly used to this sort of thing happening.

~~~

Vriska glanced behind her. “Rainbow Dash gaining.”

“Rainbow Dash coming from the side as well,” Starbeat said, teleporting them into another location. “It’s only a matter of time until we get a Twilight that jams our teleports.”

“We’re going to need a plan when we get to the gate,” Vriska commented, stealing the luck from a random Pinkie Pie in a cop uniform, enough to make her run into a wall and pass out. “Where will we go?”

“I have no idea, the Forest? It’s easy to hide in the Forest.”

“I think we should go somewhere associated with our pla- CODE PURPLE!”

“What the heck does-“

A laser from a Twilight Sparkle hit Vriska in the side. She managed to keep herself mounted on Starbeat, but the force made the unicorn stumble. Starbeat was forced to levitate herself and Vriska into the air to avoid toppling into a cabbage cart.

While they didn’t hit the cabbage cart, the next laser from the Twilight did destroy the delectable vegetables.

“MY CABBAGES!”

“I sense a pit of bad luck around him,” Vriska commented as they floated away. “Did you actually see the Twilight?”

“Vaguely,” Starbeat said. “I think she’s using some kind of ‘haze’ spell to keep us from locking onto her. I can’t even tell if we’re dealing with an alicorn or a unicorn.”

Vriska tapped into her vision eightfold, trying to spy out the Twilight – but she saw nothing. “I think she knows we’re onto her…”

“Bingo,” a voice said right next to Vriska’s ear. A burst of magic and confetti hit Vriska in the face. She held onto Starbeat, but this time both of them went flying into a wall rather than recovering. Then the Twilight was behind them, unleashing another explosion of magic.

“What in the…” Vriska said as Starbeat teleported the two of them to an upright orientation. The Twilight they saw was an alicorn, her distinctive features being pink tipped wings and a mane that had the consistency of cotton candy.

“Give me a break,” Starbeat muttered.

The Twilight smirked. “Hello criminals, I am Pielight.” She was suddenly behind them with a ruler decorated with streamers. “The best possible combination.” The ruler had the consistency of rubber and slapped Vriska right across the face, turning her head a full one-eighty somehow without snapping the bones in her neck – but drawing blood just the same.

Vriska spat. “Well you’re OP as hell.”

“Thank you!” Pielight beamed, producing a party cannon that looked an awful lot like a telescope and driving the two of them through a wall into what appeared to be a pony hot springs. Ponies with flower-based cutie marks screamed at the tops of their lungs.

Starbeat glanced at Pielight. “Wait, you’re a Pinkie. That means you know we’re the good guys, right? C’mon…?”

Pielight shrugged. “Yeah. Still gonna capture you anyway.”

Vriska twitched. Teleport right after I throw these dice. I’m going to put a lot of luck into them, so we better be really close to the gate.

Starbeat didn’t respond, she just nodded with a slight uncertainty in her expression.

Just as more Hub guards showed upon the spot – including that annoyingly persistent Rainbow Dash with the metal wing – Vriska threw her dice and threw a lot more luck than she was comfortable with into her roll. Enough to guarantee something excellent.

“Excellent” turned out to be a miniature version of herself with a large head. It attacked Pielight with evil in her eyes, pulling on the tangled hair hard enough to draw blood.

“OWOWOWOWOWOW!” Pielight wailed.

“I’ll take it,” Vriska said, noting how the miniature-version of her had already started jumping from enemy to enemy, proving to be an excellent distraction. Starbeat unleashed the teleport, taking them to another part of the Hub, running at full gallop.

Vriska stole a glance behind them. “Okay, so, we need a plan. The Forest is a bad plan.”

“Do you have any better ideas?!”

Vriska bit her lip. Yeah. “Okay, so… Help me out here. You said Algernon was a lot like Chrysalis?”

“Yeah? I thought we were-“

“Just bear with me here. How was Chrysalis defeated?”

“The pony she was replacing was found and testified against her.”

Vriska cursed. “Dammit. We can’t do that here. Algernon’s not replacing anybody, Earth Stand doesn’t even exist.”

“Eh… Eheheheh…”

Vriska blinked. “…What does that laugh mean?”

“Please don’t be mad at me?”

“I’m going to be livid.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping, but she managed to keep herself in the gallop. She was blushing brightly though. “Ah… You see, Vriska, I kinda thought the only reason you suspected Algernon was because you didn’t think Earth Stand existed-“

“Are you telling me a place with invisible spirit powers of such weird applications actually exists? How is he keeping it covered up? There’s so much that doesn’t make-“

“Earth Stand exists and… And I know the coordinates.” She bit her lip. “I, uh, decided to not correct you so you would still help me.”

“…You’re dead meat when this is over.”

“Oh I’d like that- ACK! NO! Bad Starbeat!”

Vriska grunted. “Just take us to Earth Stand with the gate.” She put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Uuuuugh…”

Pielight and the Rainbow Dash with a metal wing appeared in a burst of pink-purple magic right behind them. It was at this time Vriska and Starbeat saw the sign for the building that housed the stargate.

“YOU RUINED MY HAIR!” Pielight called after them, the face of intense rage on her features.

Vriska glanced at her and stole her luck – but the Rainbow Dash was not affected. She bolted after them, using her artificial wing to improve her speed somehow. She tumbled right into them, forcing the three individuals into a barrel roll. Starbeat lit her horn, blowing up the wall between them and the stargate.

And then Vriska stole Rainbow Dash’s luck, trying to cash it in immediately. This had mixed results. Vriska’s hands hit a console, activating the stargate as she flew by it. Starbeat managed to cast a spell, inserting the correct coordinates into the portal. But none of them had much control over their movements, so Vriska, Starbeat, and the Rainbow Dash all fell through the portal as it opened, depositing themselves onto a new world.

Vriska briefly wondered why the sky was yellow before she lost consciousness.

~~~

Toph charged into the training room just in time to distract Corona from Lieshy’s hoof. The yellow pegasus’s punch made contact and knocked Corona to the ground.

“LISTEN UP LADIES!” Toph called, tapping the ground with the Master Sword. “We got ourselves a mission.”

Corona rubbed her head. “Does it have anything to do with why Sombra’s been laughing at the Hub security?”

“Probably,” Toph muttered. “Looks like somebody by the name of Vriska Serket and Starbeat have got it out for Algernon, for whatever reason.”

“Why would anyone want to do that?” Vivian asked. “Algernon’s a nice guy!”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “For all of the ringtone. That is to say, you only met him for a short while.”

“But he was just so… I don’t know, really, but I know he’s a good person.”

“Yeah, me too,” Corona said. “This is probably a misunderstanding of some kind.” She tapped her sunglasses. “Sombra doesn’t have any idea either, but she told me that Vriska asked for all the files she had on Algernon, which wasn’t much. The guy just isn’t suspicious.”

Toph nodded. “Well, if Sombra’s not investigating him, he’s clean. Now, here’s where we come in. As it turns out, nobody on the Hub wants to risk upsetting the people of Earth Stand by breaking the blacklist. Algernon has been trying to communicate with his people, but they haven’t given the OK to go after Vriska, and we probably need to move fast before she does something disastrous.” She cracked her knuckles. “So we’re going to Earth Stand.”

“Won’t that break the blacklist?” Vivian asked.

“Yes,” Lady Rarity confirmed. “But we’re officially a loose group. Worst that happens is Earth Stand gets upset with Lai, and let’s be honest Lai is probably the least popular of all the major worlds at the moment.”

“Our relations have improved,” Lieshy commented.

“Only moderately,” Lady Rarity said. “This is just a way of mitigating the incident – if we get discovered. Best case scenario, we get her and get back without letting Earth Stand realize we were there.”

“Plus, it needs to be done,” Corona added. “We can step on a few toes to stop something disastrous from happening. …Whatever it is.”

Toph nodded. “The situation is somewhat simple. Vriska and Starbeat fled to Earth Stand. They have a Rainbow Dash with them, probably a hostage. We don’t know exactly what they plan to do, but we do know they believe there’s a malicious conspiracy around Algernon. Everyone needs to take default human forms on the mission to blend in. Corona, I hope you’ve figured out how to magic as a human.”

Corona nodded. “Bit rusty with anything that isn’t firebending, but I can manage.”

“Good. We leave now.” Toph lifted the Master Sword high. “Let’s move.”

~~~

Vriska woke up to find a very interesting sight.

“What the hay is wrong with you?” a tied-up Rainbow Dash was shouting at Starbeat.

Starbeat in question was blushing and wiping her face furiously. “I… Have a condition.”

“No, really?” the Rainbow Dash blurted.

“Silence from the prisoner,” Vriska muttered, rubbing her head. “Right, so… I need to ask. Starbeat, is this Earth Stand?”

“Yep,” Starbeat said, pointing at a street sign that read Morioh, Japan. “I’ve been here before. This is Earth Stand’s primary multiversal city. Though…” She lit her horn, furrowing her brow. “No high magic levels at all. There’s usually at least one unicorn on the major worlds…”

“Is the sky supposed to be yellow?”

“…Yeah, I think that’s a Beat effect around Morioh,” Starbeat admitted. “Or, well, a bizarre atmospheric condition around just this town. I don’t really know.”

“So, we’re here now and we have a hostage. Time to figure out what Algernon’s been doing to this place. Despite the lack of magic, there is multiversal society here, right?”

“Yeah. Morioh has the… Uh… Something I can’t remember the name of. It was built on the shoreline after their disclosure to deal with multiversal arrivals. We could go there… But if what Algernon says is at all based in reality, they won’t be happy to see us.”

“There’s bound to be someone there whose mind is easy putty,” Vriska asserted. “Though, I should probably check. Are Stands real things?”

“Well, I don’t know if the variety Algernon described is a thing, but I did meet the guy who could stop time. He might even be here now.”

“This could be fun,” Vriska said, putting a hand to her chin. “That said… I know Algernon is full of shit, but the existence of this place kinda removes most of my case. All I’m going off of now is the tone of that meeting and that look he gave me one time. He’s clearly planning something.”

“Glad we’ve got this cleared up,” the Rainbow Dash grunted. “Can you do what you came to do already?”

Vriska shrugged. “Eh, sure. Lead the way, Starbeat. The more teleporting the better.”

Starbeat took a breath. “I am going to deplete my magic reserves eventually…” She lit her horn, teleporting them into the proper city of Morioh, the part near the ocean. They appeared in front of a tall building with a gigantic “J” in a large star shaped design on the front of the structure. Part of the structure was on the land, but it was clear that a significant part of it went into the ocean itself.

The citizens of Moiroh looked mostly like normal humans, though Vriska noted that many of them were more muscular than was to be expected from a standard population. Their reaction to their presence was odd – they did not act out of fear of the unknown, or anger that the unwelcome party had shown up, but rather with confusion – and perhaps a bit of anticipation.

Vriska decided to go with the direct route. She knocked on the door. “Hello? I’d like to talk with the people in charge here. Got some interesting que-“

The door flung open, revealing a man with dark green hair and a strange zig-zag headband. He took one look at Vriska and nodded to himself, an expression of contempt crossing his face. He pointed at Vriska. “Heaven’s Door.”

“Wha-“ before Vriska knew what was happening, something invisible hit her in the face, toppling her backward. For a moment, everything went fuzzy and memories swirled around her head, flashing seemingly unrelated events from her life in front of her eyes.

She regained control of her body seemingly in an instant, though clearly more time than that had passed since Starbeat was yelling at the man in an angry tone.

“I already told you, her memories check out,” the man said.

“You could have given us some warning!”

“Judging by what I read in there, I’m glad I didn’t.”

Vriska rubbed her head. “…Read?”

“My Stand,” the man said. “Heaven's Door. It can read people like books to discover their true intentions. We’ve been waiting for someone from another universe to show up for ages so we could figure out what was going on. Apparently it was all Algernon. As much as I thought the man was a friend… It just makes too much sense.”

“Uh… who are you?”

“Rohan Kishibe. Manga artist and, more recently, Stand Agent. When I feel like it.” He opened the door further for the three of them. “You have to carry your hostage.”

“No problem.” Starbeat asserted.

“You’re just going along with this!?” the Rainbow Dash blurted.

“You saw me read her,” Rohan said dismissively. “I understand completely what’s going on now, and you’re just an amusing bystander at this point.”

“Uh…”

Vriska turned to Starbeat. “What did… he do?”

“His Stand turned your face into a book and he read through it like your diary,” Starbeat answered.

“…He didn’t learn anything… Private?”

“I have no idea. He did comment that it was too much to go through with his limited time. But at that point I was already shouting at him.”

“Right…”

They were led further into the building, the interior of which could best be described by ‘what would happen if several different people were telling one architect to build seven different things on the same spot’. Parts of the interior looked like that of a victorian era mansion, while on an opposing wall there was a meeting table that looked like it belonged in an office building. There were portraits of men lining one wall, while a computer screen displayed images of strange beings projecting from people – was that what a Stand looked like?

“Somebody likes dolphins,” the Rainbow Dash noted, looking at all the sculptures and imagery of dolphins around the interior.

“Jotaro does have a thing for dolphins,” Rohan muttered almost to himself, continuing on to a set of double doors. “The old man should be right through here.” He pushed the doors wide, revealing a cross between an office and a bedroom. The center was occupied by an ornate oak desk, while to the left of the room there was a large bed. A form slept in the bed, covered by blankets, while at the desk a truly gigantic man stood.

His features were sharp and beyond muscular. He looked to be in his thirties, though his attire seemed a little absurd for a man of that age. A large white coat dominated the appearance, completed with a strange orange triangle of fabric protruding out from the left collar, while the right had a metallic heart formed out of two dolphins. His hat completed the look, with emblems made out of a dolphin and the sun made to spell out “Jo”.

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping furiously. Vriska noticed she was staring at the man’s impressive figure.

“You going to answer that?” the man asked Starbeat.

Starbeat put on a very fake smile. “Er, no.” She wiped some blood from her nose. “Too much today… This is why I don’t go out…” she muttered to herself.

The man looked at them, expression unreadable. “Rohan, what did you find?”

“Algernon’s not an ambassador from the multiverse for us. He’s been telling them that he’s our ambassador.”

Vriska blinked. “Wait, so he was playing the double game?”

The man at the desk nodded. “It appears so. I am Jotaro Kujo, miss.”

“Vriska Serket. You… don’t look like someone who would be called the ‘old man’.”

Jotaro gestured toward the bed. “That would be grandpa over there.”

“What?” the lump from the bed blurted. “Someone there?”

Jotaro nodded slowly. “Yes. We’ve got answers.”

“Well why didn’t you say so…” The lump in the bed slowly turned around, draping its feet over the edge and revealing the figure of a very old man most likely in his eighties. He grabbed a cane and stood up, his legs shaking as he did so. He had a face very similar to Jotaro’s, and despite his age he still had muscles, though of a considerably less absurd definition compared to some of the others they had seen in this world. He wore small spectacles on his face and had a short, scruffy beard.

Jotaro got out of the seat behind the desk, moving the chair for the old man to sit in. He took his time, but managed to get in without much difficulty. He coughed, grunted, and looked at Vriska. “Hello young lady. I am Joseph Joestar. And I… I…”

Jotaro coughed. “You want to know about Algernon.”

“Algernon? Pleasant fellow. I… Can’t say I’ve known him for long.”

Rohan turned to Jotaro. “When was the last time he had one of his meals?”

“I don’t know,” Jotaro said, pulling a phone out of his coat. “Hello, this is Jotaro. Grandpa needs a treatment. Bring it up as soon as possible.”

“Oh, is it lunchtime already?” Joseph said craning his neck back. “That’s nice…”

Vriska turned to Jotaro. “Why are we talking to this guy?”

“This guy is the head of the Joestar family and the foremost expert on anything supernatural and Stand-related. This is the man who represents our universe at meetings, like your Charter-Princess does for you.”

“He’s going senile.”

“Snails?” Joseph said. “There’s no snails, and there will never be snails. Bah.”

Rohan huffed. “See Jotaro? Even the new girl can see it.”

Jotaro’s expression did not shift. “He won’t be like that for much longer.”

As if on cue, a butler walked into the room with a small plate of pasta, setting it before Joseph. Joseph, even is his mental stupor, knew that he needed to eat – so he devoured the pasta in less than a minute despite his old bones.

Vriska blinked. “While him eating that fast was impressive, what exactly did tha-“

Joseph’s head exploded, showcasing brain matter to everyone in the room. Vriska and Starbeat jumped, ready to jump into action – but less than a second later, Joseph’s head was back to normal and he was grinning like he’d just won the lottery. Forgoing the cane entirely, he stood up quickly, slamming his hands on the table. “OH MY GOD! I was being an absolute MORON.”

“What th-“ Vriska began, only to be stopped short as Joseph’s legs gave out from under him.

“Grandpa, you didn’t get the dish to help your bones.”

“I hate being old,” Joseph muttered, pulling himself back into his chair.

“…So was that a Stand or…?” Starbeat said, hoping for an explanation.

“We have a chef downstairs with a Stand that can cure almost any illness,” Jotaro said. “In the case of grandpa’s mind, it’s only a temporary measure for a few days at a time, but that’s enough for him to run this place.”

“RIGHT!” Joseph said, grinning from ear to ear. “Name’s Joseph Joestar, Jotaro over there is my grandson, and I‘m the boss! Because the multiverse demanded a hub and I always wanted an excuse to build a house explicitly for adventuring. Though I did not want it to be half aquarium. Blame my marine biologist grandson for that.”

Jotaro’s expression did not shift at the slight.

“Anyway, Jotaro, catch me up. Something about Algernon and everyone being lied to, right?”

“Yes. He’s been telling them we don’t want to talk, leading to a complete lack of information passing through.”

“I learned some more from reading Vriska here,” Rohan said. He then proceeded to retell Vriska and Starbeat’s story of the encounter in Algernon’s room with the man in black.

Joseph furrowed his brow. “Don’t know any Stand users by that description. Jotaro?”

“Nothing.”

Vriska raised her hand. “Can I just say how freaky it is that he can tell a story where he wasn’t even there?!”

“It was an important part of your book,” Rohan said. “Furthermore, I’m a manga artist, in case you forgot. I make a living telling stories.”

“Riiight… Okay what other freaky things can you do so I don’t get caught off guard again?”

“There’s dozens of agents here right now,” Joseph said. “Can’t tell you them all. My stand is Hermit Purple, and it can locate people by taking ‘spirit photos’. Works across the multiverse as well, apparently. Jotaro over there has Star Platinum, which is really good at punching and can stop time. Mind telling us what you can do?”

Rohan opened his mouth, but Vriska glared at him. “I, Vriska, can manipulate my own personal luck, specifically by stealing it from others. I can also see hidden things with my vision eightfold and am a pretty powerful psychic. Starbeat here… has magic.”

“And a curse,” Starbeat said. “In case you forgot from last time I was here.”

“We haven’t,” Jotaro deadpanned.

“Eheh…” Starbeat said, nervously. She couldn’t take her eyes off Jotaro’s form for long.

“Vision eightfold huh?” Joseph flexed his hand. “Try using it on me.”

Vriska did as suggested – she saw something extending from his hand, but it was too insubstantial to get anything concrete. “Is there something coming out of your hand?”

“Yes. That’s my Stand, Hermit Purple. It takes the form of thorny vines that protrude from my body. Come to think of it… I’m going to try to find this man in black.” He pulled a camera out from… somewhere and smashed it with the invisible vines. He pulled a single photo out of the wreckage. He furrowed his brow as he examined the image. “Odd.”

He laid the image on the ground. There was no picture of the man in black – just a flat representation of a red eye.

Vriska rubbed the back of her head. “He probably has a power that prevents that from working on him.”

“Bah,” Joseph said, folding his arms. “Guess we can’t find him that way. Still need to fix this though. I’ll go to the Hub and straighten things out myself, give that Algernon a good whack with the Hermit Purple Hammon combo breaker.” He chuckled to himself, pulling a bottle of whiskey out of… somewhere and taking a drink. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“You’re hardly in any condition to travel,” Jotaro said.

“Bah, just cook me up something for the bones and I’ll be kicking that poser to the moon and back.”

“I’ll go,” Jotaro insisted. “It’ll be faster.”

“Works for me,” Vriska said.

“…Wait, were you guys actually right?” the Rainbow Dash blurted suddenly. “No way…”

“Yes way!” Vriska smirked. “Algernon is goin’ down now. We’ve got all the proof we need!”

“Algernon has a mental effect cast on everyone,” Rohan reminded them. “We cannot be sure simple proof will be enough.”

“…There will be a team of some kind sent to find Vriska,” the Rainbow Dash said.

“Then we’ll just have to keep them busy while you do your work,” Joseph said, smirking. “Rohan, you’re with me. We’ll have some guests to greet.”

~~~

Corona lowered her binoculars. “I don’t think stealth is going to help anymore.”

“Why not?” Toph asked.

“The Rainbow Dash is bound and gagged to the front of Joestar Central. Vriska’s probably already made her move and done… something to the Stand users,” Corona furrowed her brow, sticking a finger in her mouth. “We need to be careful that we aren’t caught.”

Lieshy fell over, punctuating the sentence. “…I hate human bodies.”

“What an uncharacteristically clear remark,” Toph muttered.

“I want you to feel my pain.”

Vivian put a hand to her face. “I don’t know… It feels odd to be solid, but not that bad. Feet are the hardest part.”

“Girls, focus,” Toph said. “We’re going to need to move in somehow. Vivian, you can take us to the void any time you want, right?”

Vivian nodded. To test, she disappeared into the ground, then came back up. “They won’t be able to see us there.”

“Good. We’re going to move forward with Vivian, try to get into Joestar Central and-“

“They see us,” Corona said.

Toph took in a deep breath. “How do you know?”

“There’s an old man waving a photo in the air in our direction. He’s smiling.”

Toph facepalmed. “Right, RIGHT, Joseph Joestar has that photo ability. AGH.” She stood up. “Hello Joseph!”

“Hey!” Joseph said, raising his fist into the air. “What are you doing in my universe?”

“Trying to catch a convict!”

“Is this feathery asshole the one you’re looking for? Quite the piece of work, I have to say. She was so indignant about being put up there!”

“Uh… No!” Toph called to Joseph. “She was a hostage.”

“A hostage? Her? She tore up half of Joestar Central! You’re going to have to pay extra for the damages, in addition to breaking the blacklist!”

Corona stood up. “Look, mister Joestar, we’ll be willing to compensate you how-“ she caught herself. “-within reason. But we need to find a gray skinned girl with orange horns and a pink unicorn with goggles.

“No idea,” Joseph said.

Lady Rarity poked her head out of a nearby tree. “Perhaps you could find them with those photos you can take?”

Joseph blinked. “Oh, I can huh? True… You happen to have a Polaroid camera on you?”

“We are not Pinkie Pie!” Toph shouted. “We can’t just-“

Joseph produced one of those exact cameras from nowhere. “Oh, looks like I have one! Come over here, let’s see what I make!”

Toph nodded, ordering Lieshy, Lady Rarity, and Vivian to stay where they were with a quick motion of her hands. She and Corona walked up to Joseph. “What do you have for us?”

Joseph smashed the camera in his hand and took out a single photo. “Let’s see… I’ve found… Uh…” He squinted. “Excuse me, vision isn’t what it used to be…”

Toph swiped the image out of his hand. Then, after a moment of holding it in front of her face, she flushed red and handed it to Corona. Corona cleared her throat. “Well, it’s an image of a building…” She heard a loud snap in the bushes where Vivian and Lieshy were. “…Hey, you two okay?”

“Yeah,” they called back. Corona nodded, turning back to the photo. “A building. Looks familiar actually… It’s – it’s in the Hub. They’ve gone back to the Hub, haven’t they?”

“How should I know?” Joseph asked, shrugging. “You’re the ones trespassing on my world. Speaking of that, don’t you know what kind of incident this is going to cause? I can get the current shogun down on your heads at any minute!”

Corona blinked. “…This Japan has a shogun?”

“I… guess?” Toph said.

Lady Rarity fell out of her tree suddenly, shaking her head. “Oh! Sorry, dears, I guess I… Just… Lost my footing…” She furrowed her brow. “That doesn’t make any sense…”

Corona blinked. “Wait… Mr. Joestar…”

Rohan leaped out of the tree Lady Rarity was in, landing right in front of Corona and Toph. “Heaven’s Door!”

Corona instantly felt her face pop open like a book, memories swirling around her mind until she couldn’t focus anymore and fell over.

Toph remained standing. She smirked.

“N-Nani!?” Joseph blurted. “Rohan why isn’t she a book right now?”

Rohan glanced at Corona’s face – which was now opened up like a book, revealing an interior made of pages that told her life story. Then he glanced at Toph, a worried expression crossing his face. “Oh no…”

“Your power goes through the eyes, doesn’t it?” Toph called. “Well guess what? I’m blind! Woop!” She punched forward with her fist, driving a pillar of rock at Rohan. He leaped out of the way, grabbing a hold of Corona’s face-book as he did so.

“Don’t try anything or I rip some of her memories away.”

Toph glared. “I should cut your-“ She felt something invisible and prickly wrap around her body, holding her tight. She was surprised to senseJoseph pointing his hands at her, as if something was coming out of them and surrounding her.

“Now Rohan!” Joseph yelled. Rohan wasted no time – he wrote into Corona’s face-book cannot pursue Vriska to Algernon and cannot attack Rohan Kishibe. Then he closed the book and returned her to her natural state.

“Wh… Weird. Why am I on the ground?”

Toph tried to bend the metal on her armor to cut through the invisible wires, but since the metal was a physical object it could do nothing against Hermit Purple’s spiritual energy. “Mmmmm Corona! They used their Stands on us! He just wrote something into you like you were a book!”

Corona accepted this information quickly and pulled out a dimensional device with the intention of chasing Vriska back to the Hub She moved a finger to the device… And couldn’t dial the Hub. “…What in the… I can’t activate it!”

Rohan stood up, smirking. “That is the power of Heaven’s Door. You won’t stop Vriska and Jotaro from bringing Algernon to justice now. Or be able to attack me.”

“Vriska already got to you!?” Toph blurted, continuing to struggle against the bonds. She twisted one of the metal plates on her suit around the hilt of the Master Sword…

“It was Algernon who got to you,” Joseph said, clearly far too old and feeble to be holding Toph like he was. “He’s gotten in everyone’s heads… He told you he spoke for us, and he told us he spoke for you… He almost ruined the friendship for his own nefarious goals…”

Toph wasn’t really listening – she had gotten ahold of the Master Sword. She flicked it out of its scabbard, twisting it with her body to slice at where she was sure Hermit Purple was. Sure enough, the holy blade was able to hit the Stand, forcing Joseph to recoil. Cuts appeared on his arms as the invisible vines retracted.

Toph stood tall, smirking. “Joseph is down, and Rohan can’t do anything to me. I think I’ll chase after Vriska myself…”

Rohan grabbed Corona again. “I can always overwrite your friend’s personality.”

Corona tried to punch him – but found she couldn’t. It was a horrible feeling.

“You wouldn’t…” Toph said.

“Heaven’s Door!” Rohan opened Corona like a book. “I will.”

“Rohan!” Joseph grunted, pulling himself onto his knees. “Get a hold of yourself!”

“Stay out of this Joseph,” Rohan grunted. He grabbed some of Corona’s pages and threatened to tear them out.

“HOLY SHIIIIT!” Joseph called. “He’s gonna do it!”

Toph held her hands in the air and ground her teeth. “Fine. Algernon’s not worth it.” She sheathed the Master Sword and sat down, folding her arms. “Whatever happens is on you, you understand?”

Rohan released Corona’s pages and closed her book, returning her to normal. “I do. I think you’ll also find that you feel rather silly in about half an hour.”

~~~

Eve, O’Neill, and Algernon were back at the tea shop, talking about what to do with Vriska.

“We should ban her,” Algernon was saying. “She’s been a menace. As much as I appreciate the Handmaid’s actions for us, we cannot take Vriska with her. Too disruptive, aggressive, and brash. She’s a danger.”

O’Neill furrowed his brow. “I don’t think so, Algernon. She’s not as bad as Alushy.”

“But she has no respect for our laws!”

“Alushy stole bodies from top secret morgues,” O’Neill pointed out. “Her respect levels don’t exist.”

Eve nodded. “That’s right, Algernon. I think we just give her a temporary punishment. If she wants to stay around and wait for Aradia, she’ll have to do some… Let’s call it extreme community service.”

Algernon steamed. “But-“

“But what?!” Vriska yelled, kicking the door down, Starbeat and Jotaro flanking in behind her. “That’s right, but me!”

Starbeat facehooved. “That was lame.”

“Shut up.”

Eve furrowed her brow at the presence of Jotaro. “Jotaro? What-“

Jotaro pointed at the now terrified Algernon. “This man has been lying to both of us, keeping us separate, interfering with both Unification and our more general relations. His flagrant lying and manipulation of our minds has pissed me off. I am asking for your permission to beat him into the next century.”

“Jotaro, you can’t be serious, this is Alge-“ She glanced at the Algernon and noticed what his body language was saying. He was sweating profusely, his hand was trembling, and his pupils had shrunk to pinpricks.

Eve blinked. “Wait, what?”

Algernon stood up from his chair. “T-this is nothing Eve! J-Jotaro and I just had a misunderstanding is all!”

“What’s a ‘misunderstanding’ about telling us that the rest of the multiverse had blocked our entry?”

“I, I, well-“

Vriska pointed at him. “You know that you can’t just tell a planet that it can’t look at the multiverse and make it listen. You did something to all of them.”

Starbeat nodded. “And we’ve got you cornered.”

Eve took a few steps back from Algernon. “Jotaro?”

“Yes, Eve?”

“Permission granted.”

Algernon took a strange black, spherical artifact out of his pocket and looked into it frantically – but he could not move fast enough.

Because Jotaro could stop time.

The next thing anyone knew, Algernon was sailing across the room, the black ball flying from his hand. Several fist impressions had formed in his side in a single instant, and Jotaro was now standing behind where Algernon had just been. The black ball fell into an invisible hand right in front of Jotaro’s face. He examined the sphere, eyes squinting. “This isn’t one of the bowling balls. This is something else.”

Eve grabbed her horn in pain. “The… the magic! The magic is all wrong!”

Starbeat wailed – her Beat sensor had just exploded the moment the black sphere had been knocked out of Algernon’s possession.

Vriska stared – she had no idea what that ball was, but simply looking at it gave her a horrible feeling.

Algernon capitalized on the moment everyone was frozen. In an instant, he dropped the guise of a human, revealing his true form – a behemoth of a demonic entity with three gnarled heads, horns like dead oak trees, and three pairs of draconic wings. He rushed forth with supernatural speed, shrieking with the power of damned souls.

Jotaro’s Stand must have punched him, for an imprint appeared in his face – but it didn’t slow him down much. He twisted a hand forward, grabbing the black sphere. He held it high into the air.

Then he vanished.

Jotaro stared at where the black sphere had just been. “…Yare yare daze.”

“What the…” Vriska said, holding a hand out. “I… what? I don’t even…”

Eve shook her head. “I… I don’t know either. That wasn’t anything we’d seen…”

“I thought I’d seen everything,” Vriska said. “Today’s been nothing but new, new, new! A circus of values!”

“Oh, you’ve been to the City of Rapture?” Eve asked.

“A version,” Vriska admitted.

“I hated those machines.”

“Ditto.”

Eve cleared her head. “Well… I think… I think we owe you an apology, Vriska. And you too Jotaro – your whole world was secluded because we didn’t catch that… thing.”

Jotaro just put his hand to his hat and adjusted it – probably his way of saying there was no need to apologize.

O’Neill smiled at Vriska. “You’ve got some spunk, don’t you?”

“Determination and stubbornness helps sometimes,” Vriska said, grinning.

Jotaro turned to Eve. “I take it this means you still want your Stand?”

“Wait…” Eve’s eyes widened. “The Stand research is complete? Algernon kept me from learning about that? How long?”

“Three months. I was told you didn’t want it anymore.”

“I WANT IT! I want to be able to SEE those abilities you have…”

Vriska took a step forward. “Hey, as reward for saving you from that guy, how about I get one too? Hrm?”

“You’re already powerful enough,” Jotaro said.

“Eve’s basically a god of magic.”

“She… Did something more important.”

Before Vriska could ask what that was, Eve sent a telepathic message to Vriska Tree of Harmony sent us on a Friendship Problem when we first arrived on Earth Stand. We kept his family from falling apart. He doesn’t like showing much emotion or weakness, so don’t make a big deal about it, okay?

“Ah…” Vriska said. “Well if I don’t get one of those awesome Stands, what do I get?”

O’Neill smiled. “Eve, I think I have an idea.”

Starbeat threw her hooves in the air. “You all have good luck with that! I’m locking myself in my lab for a few weeks. I’ve had enough of this!” She wiped some blood from her nose. “So done…”

“Hey, Starbeat,” Vriska called. “You were an absolute bitch sometimes, but I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping. “You… You bitch!” She teleported away before she lost control.

Eve shook her head. “You… Did that on purpose?”

“Yeah. I’m a huge bitch sometimes,” Vriska said, chuckling. “So, O’Neill. What’s the plan?”

~~~

“Daniel, dear, you’re moving your dessert around your plate.”

“Oh, it’s no-“

“Dear, I knew there was something up since the start of the evening, and I fully admit to telling you to relax a bit, but now the evening’s almost gone. You should bring it up now.”

“I…”

“Daniel Jackson, tell me what is on your mind. I insist.”

Daniel pulled at his suit collar nervously. Then he decided to go for it. “Renee, we’ve been together for… Well, officially it’s only been around a couple years, but it’s really been much longer than that. We started out just going out as a way to discuss business, politics – but then we got to know each other. Grew attached. And now here we are, sitting in a great restaurant way too overdressed for the occasion. You’ve rubbed off on me.”

Renee giggled. “Yes.”

“And, well, as absurd as that – wait, hold on, back up, that’s not, I-“

Renee raised an eyebrow as if to say ‘get to the point, Daniel’.

Daniel quickly pulled a small box out of his pocket and opened it. “Renee Belle, I want to spend the rest of this bizarre multiversal life with you, regardless of what happens. Will you marry me?”

Renee smiled, tears coming to her eyes. “Yes, Daniel. Yes. Of course I will.”

Daniel let out a sigh of relief.

“Now allow me to complain about how long it took you to do that.”

Daniel blinked. “I-“

“You bought that ring two and a half weeks ago and it has been a bulge in your coat pocket ever since,” Renee said.

“Nothing gets past you.”

“I only noticed because you started getting so nervous.” She pulled his hands into her hooves. “Though I guess it did give me time to work on the wedding dress…”

“You already started working on that!?”

“I actually have it with me!” Renee said, pulling a suitcase out from under her seat and placing it on the table. “Oh I can’t wait to show you the stitching on-“ She raised an eyebrow. “You know, I expected Pinkie to launch a cannon off by now. As of yet she hasn’t ruined the moment. I’m honestly surprised.”

Daniel was still staring at the suitcase. “How…?”

“Daniel, you were preoccupied the entire time I’ve been here. Don’t feel ashamed for not noticing a suitcase. By the way, there’s a second one under your chair with your unfinished outfit. Not a standard tuxedo, let me tell you.”

Daniel processed this for a moment and then laughed. “I can’t wait to wear it.”

“Neither can I.” Renee said, chuckling deviously.

“Wait, should I be scared?”

“My love, you should definitely be scared. Very scared. Terrified, in fact.”

Daniel just smiled. “Of course.”

“The entire thing could come falling off at any moment!”

“You’re not serious,” Daniel stated.

Renee fixed him with a mischievous look.

“…You’re not serious,” Daniel said with a lot less certainty.

“You’ll just have to find out on the wedding day – ah! I can’t believe I’m saying that! Me, married! Oh how I’ve dreamed of this day since I was a fill-“

Pinkie’s Party cannon went off in her face.

“I’ve still got it,” Pinkie said, smirking at Renee’s bewildered expression.

“I… Wha…”

“You’re getting married!” Pinkie shouted. “I am going to be the best wedding planner ever! Girls! Come on out!”

Flutterfree held a menu in front of her face. “Pinkie shouldn’t this be a private moment…”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Well, ideally yes, but Pinkie actually let us have a few moments, so I’ll take what I can get. Plus, we will get plenty of private moments later. I suppose a different moment with friends couldn’t hurt.” She pulled Nova, Flutterfree, and Pinkie into a hug. “Come here.” With her horn, she pulled in Daniel as well.

Daniel laughed. “What, is Jack here too or something?”

“He’ll be around momentarily,” Pinkie said. “And by that, I mean three, two, one-“

The front doors of the Tasty Treat were kicked in, revealing Vriska, Eve, O’Neill, and Jotaro behind her. “GUESS WHAT BITCHES!?”

Renee blinked, raising an eyebrow at Vriska. “…What?”

Vriska grinned from ear to ear. “I get to join your team.”

There was silence in the Tasty Treat.

Pinkie took a notebook out of her mane and scribbled some notes. “Yep. Wedding, new party member party, I’m going to be busy the next few weeks…”

Flutterfree glanced at Eve. “…Is she serious, Eve?”

Eve nodded. “She just saved us from some kind of conspiracy. I’m not asking you to take her permanently, but just give her a chance.”

“Oh, she’ll make a great addition to the team!” Pinkie said, sliding up to Vriska. “You will learn to love cupcakes, friendship, and rainbows.”

“Sweet,” Vriska said, smirking.

“Also, hey, Eve? O’Neill? Daniel and Renee are getting married.”

Eve’s jaw dropped to the ground in complete surprise. O’Neill just chuckled and said, “about time.”

“SO MANY CHANGES!” Pinkie squealed, throwing O’Neill and Eve into the hug that had just broken up.

“So… Many… Hugs…” Nova said, gagging. “Too… Much… Pressure…”

“Come on big guy!” Pinkie called to Jotaro.

“I think I’ll pa-“ A pink hoof came from nowhere and dragged Jotaro into the hug despite his strong, muscular protests. He soon decided to just accept his fate with his usual unchanging expression.

Vriska grinned. For the first time in a while, she actually felt happy. And she knew it wasn’t just because she was close to finding Aradia again. She felt like this was where she belonged, despite almost being run out less than an hour ago.

She was going to show these ponies how it was done.

~~~

Algernon appeared at the bottom of a great pit, next to a hole in a large, frozen lake. The breath from his three heads filled the area with fog.

Algernon held up the black sphere – such a powerful artifact. It had saved him. He owed it so much… He…

The black sphere was gone, its dark, magical swirls no longer in front of his eyes. Algernon began to panic.

“Right here,” the man in black said, holding the sphere up. “You don’t deserve to hold it.”

Algernon growled with all three sets of vocal cords. “VRISKA DISCOVERED ME.”

“You should have done something about her quicker.”

“THERE WAS NOT AN OPPORTUNITY.”

“You and I both know that’s not the case,” the man in black said, putting the swirling orb into his cloak pocket. “Such a shame too. You Lucifers are usually such good servants when broken in properly.”

Algernon grunted. “I CAN TAKE A NEW FORM AND INFILTRATE FROM ANOTHER ANGLE.”

“They’ll be expecting it this time, and no amount of your penchant for demonic soul-twisting will be able to keep so many people in the dark again.”

“THERE ARE OTHER WAYS-“

“Algernon,” the man said, folding his hands together. “You. Have. Failed. Horribly, I might add. Showed quite a lot of fear at the end there as well. So I’m afraid you are of no more use to me. Have a nice day.”

“WHA- NO!”

Without even moving a limb, the man in black vaporized Algernon’s very soul through the connection they shared. The gigantic body of a true Devil turned to dust in an instant.

There was silence on the cold lake.

“Will this be a problem, Flagg?” another voice asked.

Randall Flagg, the man in black, turned to the red buglike being that was significantly taller than him. “They have a great destiny ahead of them Siron, but do not worry. If we play our cards right we can end that destiny. This is just a setback. There’s still much more we can do.”

Siron nodded. “What is the next step?”

“For now? Waiting. They’ll be on guard for a while. We just watch… And there will be a moment where their destiny can be ruined.” He smiled, turning to look beyond the universe he was in with a truly psychotic grin. “No one’s story is so big that I cannot destroy it.”

042 - Don't Panic

Eve felt her very spirit swimming inside her. It had… changed about a week ago, thanks to Earth Stand.

Her ability…

Well it was interesting enough that she had decided it needed to be kept a secret from the general population. Her close friends knew, as well as the world leaders, but otherwise… Well, she wasn’t going to comment on it. Let Sombra and the general population guess as to what it actually was.

She’d keep it a secret as long as she could so potential enemies wouldn’t know what hit them.

She tried not to think about it, focusing her attention back to reality. She was sitting in her castle library, taking a moment to herself and her books. In her magic she held a newer book – or, more accurately, new e-book – called the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Multiverse. It advertised itself as the best all-in-one guidebook for the entire cosmos you could ever find, though clearly it only dealt with the worlds Equis Vitis and its allies had uncovered. A lot of the stuff she was reading wasn’t new information to her, but occasionally she’d find interesting tidbits of information. For instance, she hadn’t known about the halos of Lai, or the luxurious hotels that Equis Cosmic was apparently ‘known for’.

Then there was the article on ‘how to alter your dimensional device’ that she was considering writing the editor about. Sure, there were warnings all over the piece, but the mere fact that it existed meant people were going to try stupid things and might end up launching themselves into a sun or something. Or getting past a blacklisted world, which could be even worse. They did not need Nautica breaching. Ever.

They were lucky they had placed orbital scanners around the ocean planet – they had caught Brutalight’s group trying to leave via rocket. They did not make it far before being launched back into the sea from which they came.

Eve wondered if there was an article on Nautica in the Guide. Sure enough, there it was – a small one that was clearly aware it was reporting mostly based off rumor and speculation. It knew that Nautica was an ocean world where highly dangerous prisoners were dumped, and that was about all the correct information it had. For some reason the Guide was convinced a blue headed supervillain was locked up there. Eve had seen the prisoner register herself numerous times; there was no such person.

She searched for some more articles. Tips on how to survive in unexplored universes, tips on how to discover your own universes, tips on making tips… The Guide was pretty extensive. It even had articles on the world leaders of most worlds.

It finally occurred to Eve to look herself up. Sure enough, she was there, and it was one of the larger articles to boot. It was a bit weird to read about her early life, education, and role in Equestrian History prior to the unlocking of the multiverse. It took her a few seconds to remember it wasn’t really her, and at that point she just scrolled past the whole section. She started reading again about the time the Embodiment was first contacted. The article was meticulous, describing her relation to virtually every major crisis she had been a part of, from the University, to something she didn’t remember in Gem Vein, and the whole Algernon fiasco. That last one didn’t paint her in a favorable light, but even she had to admit she screwed that one up.

After that it was just a few paragraphs about what Eve was doing now. The Charter-Princess spends most of her time working diligently to further harmony and friendship in the multiverse, seeking the peace of all sides. She devotes almost every waking hour of her life to this, and has not taken an official vacation since the Aid of the Binary World was completed.

“Oh,” Eve said to herself, ears drooping. Had she really never taken a break? Ever since… That… She had thrown herself into her work and… And done nothing much for herself. Back then, it had seemed reasonable, but now? Here she was, hiding in her library just to clear her head.

She needed to fix that. Go out with the girls-

Oh, wait, today was ‘Stand’ day. Jotaro would be testing them. Eve supposed she could go watch, but that didn’t seem like what she wanted right now. Applejack wouldn’t be torn from her family given how it was growing… Rainbow Dash was at Stand day as well… Corona? Eve supposed she could go to Lai… But the thought didn’t call out to her.

It was then a lightbulb went off in her head.

She probably wasn’t the only one who needed a vacation.

She tucked the Guide under her wing and lit her horn, teleporting herself long-distance to the throne room of Canterlot. After checking a moment to see that nopony was currently talking to the Princesses, Eve grinned. “Celestia. Luna. Guess what?”

Luna yawned. “What, Evening Sparkle?”

“We’re going on a vacation.”

Celestia blinked. “We? Eve, I’m all for you taking a vacation – about time, really – but you’re alone here.”

Eve smirked. “You two are coming with me. It’s time for some princess bonding.”

Luna blinked. “Evening, we are two busy ponies-“

“And so am I, but I’m sure I can get us out. Or, well, Spike can rearrange the schedule, but you know.”

“Eve, the Sun and the Moon-“

“There are other Celestias and Lunas who will be willing to do that,” Eve declared. “I think we all need a break. Plus, we never hang out, despite all the time we spend with each other. We don’t always have to be the high-and-mighty rulers of Equestria.” She smiled. “Pleeeeease?”

Celestia thought about it for a few seconds. “Oh, all right, I can leave things unattended for a while. I haven’t stretched my legs outside these castle walls in so long.”

“Sister!” Luna declared. “We cannot both le-“

“Luna, you and I both know you spend all your time on the Feldspar exploring your night. We can both leave just fine. And I bet you want to get out of that stuffy spaceship interior from time to time.”

Luna blinked. “This much is true.”

“And Eve is right, we do know ponies who can replace us for a short time, even if just for raising the Sun and Moon.” Celestia turned to Eve. “We accept. Where did you plan on going?”

“Well, first there are these excellent locales on Equis Cosmic that are apparently to die for, and after that… oh I guess we’ll bounce around wherever we want.”

“Locales,” Luna said, raising an eyebrow. “Renee must be talking your ear off about the wedding.”

“While true, my use of the word has nothing to do with that. It was just appropriate.”

“The book you have under your wing uses it,” Celestia observed.

“Er… yes!”

“This isn’t going to be a ‘by the book’ thing, is it Eve?”

“No,” Eve said with complete certainty. “It’s just what gave me the idea, after reading the article about myself. I apparently work way too hard.”

“I could have told you that,” Celestia said.

“Look who’s talking,” Luna chided.

Celestia rolled her eyes. “I suppose that is why Eve’s here. Let’s let everypony know we’re going – and then get out before they yell at us not to leave.”

Eve nodded. “That better be all the work we do.”

Luna huffed. “One can hope.”

~~~

Jotaro Kujo was not a man for speeches – that was more the old man’s department, or Josuke, or, hell, almost anyone else at Joestar Central. But Joseph was not available at the moment – something about learning to fly a spaceship – and Jotaro was the de-facto second in command of the whole operation. Not to mention the fact that this day was essentially his idea, and it was up to him to judge everyone here.

A young girl tugged on his pant leg. “Daddy? They’re waiting for you.” She was about twelve (though she would be the first to tell you she was pretty much thirteen) and had green hair done up in an odd style that had a ponytail and two nubs on the top of her head that would have resembled cat ears had they been pointy rather than round. “Come on, go and do something cool! Star Platinum them into amazement!”

A small smile crawled up Jotaro’s features. “Most of them can’t see Star Platinum, Jolyne.”

“Well then just strike a pose! You’re good at that! Just… Go be awesome!”

Jotaro shook his head. “Yare yare daze…” He took his daughter’s advice though, opting to have Star Platinum shove the double doors of Joestar Central open. He could see his own Stand, which took the form of a muscular man of similar stature to Jotaro himself, except with blue and pink skin and metallic balls on the ends of its fists.

Jotaro walked out with his hands in his pockets and his posture as tall as he could manage. He took a moment to observe the people who had been selected standing outside. There were only twelve admitted today, though he could see they had brought their friends along to watch. He cleared his throat. “All participants, line up in the grass over there. Two lines of six. Rest of you, just stay back, this will get explosive quickly.”

He noticed rather quickly that thirteen people were actually lining up. He glared at Vriska. “Vriska, you’re not a participant.”

“Oh, just give me a chance Jotaro, c’mon.”

“No,” Jotaro deadpanned.

“No! No! No!” Jolyne echoed from behind him, giggling.

Jotaro folded his arms. “Go back to the rest of your team that isn’t participating.”

“Fiiiine,” Vriska muttered, walking away like she was some eight year old who hadn’t gotten dessert. She joined up with Nova and Pinkie, who were hanging around near the back. Pinkie had already produced a commentary stand, complete with functioning microphones. Jotaro shrugged – he didn’t mind if the pink pony commentated. It’d be good to teach the participants to deal with distraction.

Jotaro examined the remaining twelve. There were some ponies – Flutterfree, Renee, Rainbow Dash, Trixie, the metal-winged Rainbow Dash they had tied up a few weeks ago, and the alicorn Jade from Equis Cosmic. There were a handful of humans as well: O’Neill, Daniel, Tempest, and the Earth Vitis Applejack. On the more ‘alien’ side were Emerald and Thor the Asgard.

Jotaro cleared his throat. “You are here today to determine if you are worthy to receive a Stand power. You are all here because you were selected – your powers aren’t as extensive as some of your colleagues, and it has been suggested that the way to catch up to them is to gain something new. This may be true, but I want you to forget all that. You are here today to prove not your need, but your ability. You must have a fighting spirit, honor, devotion, and determination for me to decide you are ready. I do not know how many, if any, of you will pass.”

“Oh, I think you’ll be surprised,” Rainbow Dash said, smirking.

Cocky, Jotaro thought. Already lost a point. He reached into his coat and produced a long, ornate arrow made of a mysterious metal. “This is a Stand Arrow. You are beyond lucky that Evening encouraged us to engage in Stand research when she first arrived, because the only way to be given a Stand prior to a few months ago was to get shot with this thing. It was extremely painful and had a high chance of just killing you. Not just because of the wound, but because the metal that bestows a Stand is an alien virus that devours your biology from the inside out if your genetics aren’t immune. The Speedwagon Foundation has worked with us to create a pill that will inject this virus into your system, but also cure it just after you have been given a Stand.” He glanced at Emerald, uncertain exactly how they were going to give her a Stand given her non-biological nature, but he knew Stands could be affixed to objects, so there had to be some way to do it. Probably with magic.

“In order to get that pill, I will have to examine how you react when faced with a strong opponent. So you all will fight one at a time so I can judge your styles, and what it means about you.”

“We’re all going to fight you?” Renee asked, her hoof in Daniel’s hand.

“No, You’re fighting Josuke,” Jotaro said, stepping aside, Jolyne scurrying behind him. Behind the two of them was a young man with the weirdest Elvis-esque hairdo of all time. It looked like Elvis had flattened his hair slightly and put a grid pattern on top of it. “Hello alien beings!” he chuckled as he said this.

“I am Josuke Higashikata. I’m looking forward to punching all your faces in.”

“Question,” O’Neill said. “Why are we fighting reject Elvis?”

Josuke’s expression darkened. “…Did you just mock my hair?”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

Jotaro put a hand on Josuke’s shoulder. “Rein yourself in for fifteen seconds, Josuke. We-“

Josuke clearly didn’t listen to Jotaro. He rushed toward O’Neill, fist flying. Jotaro grabbed Josuke’s head with Star Platinum, flattening the younger man into the ground. “Ahem. O’Neill, you will be Josuke’s first opponent, but I must explain the rules first.”

Josuke summoned his own Stand – a humanoid pink and gray Stand with a more metallic appearance than Star Platinum – and tried to punch the pink-blue Stand away. He had little success with this maneuver, seeing as Josuke couldn’t see where he was punching.

Jolyne bounced up and down. “Oh! Oh! I know the rules! Can I tell them please daddy?”

Jotaro nodded, using Star Platinum’s other hand to pin Josuke’s Stand. Jotaro himself hadn’t even moved a muscle.

Jolyne climbed up a small rock. “All right! The rules are very simple – use only non-lethal force! Josuke’s Stand, Crazy Diamond, may be able to heal almost all wounds, but he cannot heal his own. This means that Josuke is allowed to punch you as hard as he wants, but you can’t, so just deal with it. The benefit you have is that Josuke doesn’t know what you can do, but you know what he can! Watch out for Crazy Diamond’s fists if you have a way to detect Stands! Otherwise… Well, just fight as long as you can, but expect to lose!”

“How do we know when we’ve lost?” Flutterfree asked.

“You’ll know,” Jolyne giggled, getting off the rock and moving to stand next to her father. “Can I use Stone Free?” she asked.

“I’d like to see a fair fight,” Jotaro said, releasing Josuke. “So no. I know you’re excited that you’re finally able to summon it, but now is not the time.” Ever since Jotaro had told his family about Stands, Jolyne knew she could get one because of the rule of heredity. She’d only activated it recently.

“Aw…” Jolyne muttered.

The moment Josuke was released, he flew at O’Neill, roaring. “YOU DO NOT INSULT MY HAIR!”

“Are you still on that?” O’Neill said, shaking his head. He produced a zat gun and fired at Josuke, not in the least surprised to find some invisible force protecting the young man. Jotaro could clearly see Crazy Diamond deflecting the bolt of blue electricity. Jotaro was impressed when O’Neill used the deflection of the bolt to his advantage, using it to determine where the invisible Stand was. O’Neill performed a roll under Crazy Diamond’s fist and shot another bolt at Josuke from the side. Crazy Diamond was not fast enough to block this bolt, and Josuke’s body was stunned.

“A GREAT PLOY BY O’NEILL!” Pinkie announced. “BUT THE FIGHT ISN’T OVER YET FOLKS! JOSUKE ISN’T DOWN!”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Most people fall over after one of those.”

Josuke grunted through the stun of the zat gun. “I’m not most people. I am-“

O’Neill shot him again before he could even get started on his monologue.

“Josuke!” Jotaro shouted. “Remember, other universes interrupt us! Remember to stop discussing your moves!”

Josuke barely heard Jotaro – with two shots, he was falling down. He knew he probably should have been killed by that shot, but he was just too determined for that. As he fell, he used what little awareness remained in him to control a single punch from Crazy Diamond. The spirit’s fist went right through O’Neill’s stomach, shattering his spine and coming out the other side. O’Neill gagged for a moment – but then the pain was over, because Crazy Diamond repaired the damage he had just caused with a golden-yellow glow.

Then Josuke hit the ground, grunting.

“Josuke wins!” Jolyne declared. “Lethal hit to the stomach!”

O’Neill touched his stomach, eyebrow raised. “Huh, not bad. I wasn’t expecting Elvis-boy to have so much gumption in him.”

“Jack, seriously, stop insulting his hair,” Daniel said.

“What? He’s down. He can’t hear me.”

“He’s not down,” Thor informed him.

Josuke was in fact sitting up – and he looked livid. “WHAT THE HELL IS WITH YOU AND MY HAIR!?”

“It-” O’Neill did not get to finish, because Crazy Diamond punched him across the face, knocking him into the dirt.

“Not healing that one,” Josuke muttered. “Have a sore jaw the rest of the day, pig.”

Flutterfree flew over to him. “You okay?”

“Just… Fine,” O’Neill grunted.

“For the record, I think the hair is fabulous,” Renee announced.

“Finally, someone with good sense,” Josuke said.

“I’m thinking of the best suit to I could design to go with it…”

Josuke lit up. “We’re going to talk business after this is over, Renee.”

“I’m next!” Rainbow Dash declared, rushing Josuke with a burst of speed. Crazy Diamond punched her out of the air with ease. “Ow…”

“AND RAINBOW DASH IS DOWN BEFORE THE FIGHT EVEN BEGINS!” Pinkie declared. “WHAT A MATCH!”

That’s what she gets for being cocky, Jotaro thought.

“Two down, ten to go!” Jolyne cheered. “Goooooo Grunkle Josuke!”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow as she helped O’Neill back to his feat. “Grunkle?”

“He’s technically my grandma’s half-brother!” Jolyne explained. “The Joestar family is… bizarre.”

Jotaro adjusted his hat. “Yare yare daze… Next?”

~~~

Eve had to admit, the Guide was right about Equis Cosmic’s luxurious hotels. And because alicorns, while still rare, weren’t unheard of in Equis Cosmic, there were services designed especially for the three of them. Currently it was the perfect massage treatment by what Eve assumed were descendants of Aloe and Lotus, two of the best spa ponies Eve had ever known.

The three princesses were currently laying on their stomachs, wings open but facing downward, relaxed. It felt good to get a massage by somepony who understood the differing physiology in the larger alicorn wings.

She let out a sign of contentment.

“Somepony needed to release her stress,” Celestia commented.

Eve let out a relaxed chuckle. “Yeah… I’ve had so, so much stress over these past few years… So much I think I forgot what not being stressed feels like. This… This is good.”

Luna made a “mhm” noise but otherwise didn’t contribute to the conversation.

“I can’t believe I almost never go offworld… “ Celestia said. “There’s so much wonder to be seen out here.”

“You’re busy running Equestria,” Eve said.

“But it’s like you and not taking a break. I could have made time to just explore for a bit, like I would have in my younger days, but I didn’t. I only went when I was called – usually by you.”

Eve smirked. “Still feels weird, me calling you somewhere. You’re still the princess.”

“Hey,” Luna grunted with only the smallest amount of effort. “I’m a princess.”

Eve nodded. “Yes Luna, you are, sorry. Not what I meant though, Celestia’s always been my teacher – still is, in many ways.”

“Eve, you’ve long since become my equal – surpassed me, in many ways,” Celestia said.

“Me? Surpass? Ahah – no. I’m nowhere near as cool-headed as you, nowhere near as serene, nowhere near as wise, nowhere-“

“Sh sh sh… Eve, relax. It’s okay to admit your success. You’ve done more in under a decade than I’ve done in a thousand years. Just because I was your teacher doesn’t mean you can’t surpass me. And it doesn’t mean that I can’t admit that.”

Eve blinked. “It just doesn’t process, Celestia. I get what you’re saying, and it makes sense, but internally I know I haven’t accepted it yet.”

Celestia chuckled. “Part of being a pony – or human, or anything. Our internal workings are often paradoxical. We can know one thing but feel something very different. It’s a very strong dichotomy within ourselves, and it’s something we spend our lifetimes resolving. It may be a pain, but it makes life interesting.”

“I assume you’re aware of the three-fold theory of pony nature?”

“Yes. The humans also have a similar one.”

“Mhm. The ‘person’ is split up into three distinct ‘natures’. There’s the reason, then there’s emotion, then there’s ‘desire’ or physical drive. These three natures are constantly in conflict with each other, driving the paradox you described. But when they are united, they provide peace. You could describe trying to resolve our internal paradoxes like that, right?”

Celestia smirked. “You could do that. It even fits well. You could also take it further. Some individuals have stronger reasonings, or more of a handle on their emotions, and some are more gifted with the physical nature of themselves. In order to achieve peace in the naturally unbalanced state, people need to work together, to find a medium. You, Eve, are an example of that kind of peace, believe it or not.”

“I know – a purely logic driven pony changed to understand emotions on a more fundamental level, to the extent of being the Princess of Friendship. I’m not strong in the ‘physical’ nature though. I mean, I don’t even have some drives.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of, it just makes you different. Though it does explain why you’ve never gotten yourself a stallion.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “It’s not like you have one either.”

“Where do you think Blueblood came from, Eve? There was a royal family, long ago.”

“Curious. So are you well-balanced in all three natures then?”

Celestia smiled. “I am nowhere near as smart as you are, Evening.”

“Smarts doesn’t have much to do with it – it’s a separate gift. Philosophically speaking, the mental nature is all based in reason. You’re really good at making quick, on-the-point decisions.”

“Admittedly I base that more on my empathy than reason, but you do have a point. It’s like we’re opposite sides of the same coin, in a way. I’m naturally emotional but learned reason, and you’re naturally gifted in the mind and learned friendship.”

“And meanwhile here I stand, in the middle, with a very physical desire to not talk brain-thumping philosophy anymore,” Luna grunted. “You two can’t possibly consider this relaxing.”

Eve and Celestia chuckled. “We kinda do,” Eve said. “Well, probably more me than Celestia, but you know.”

“The point is that your thoughts are alien to mine,” Luna declared. “How about we try… Complete silence for a while.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Celestia agreed.

“Silence!?” Eve blurted. “How ca-“

“Shhhhh…” Luna and Celestia called to her.

“But-“

“Eve, enjoy the feeling of being in your own skin and doing nothing,” Celestia declared. “It’s a good skill to have.”

Eve took in a deep breath and released it, allowing herself to drop into the realms of not thinking. She allowed the massage to work its way into her mind, turning the complex calculations she normally ran into putty. Time began to dissolve as she lost herself in the calmness…

An alarm started blaring, accompanied with red lights, ruining the whole experience.

Luna sighed. “There’s a crisis we need to help deal with, isn’t there?”

Celestia stood up form the massage platform. “It appears so…”

Luna grunted, lifting herself up as well. “Let’s deal with it quickly.”

Eve rubbed her forehead – this was just great. She was never going to catch a break.

~~~

The Rainbow Dash with the metal wing had her artificial limb shatter into a million pieces by an invisible force. “Ponyfeathers!” she blurted – she had been sure Crazy Diamond was on her other side, but she had guessed wrong. She fell to the ground and rolled over several times until she came to a rest at the wall of Joestar Central. Crazy Diamond repaired her wing a second later.

Josuke cracked his knuckles. “That was a nice trick, keeping your earth pony part of you hidden until the end. A good trump card. Well, that’s eleven down-“

“TEN!” Pinkie corrected from her megaphone stand. “JADE BEAT YOU FAIR AND SQUARE.”

“Alicorn magic cheats,” Josuke muttered. “I would have won if I knew she could just put me to sleep.”

“I doubt it,” Jolyne called. “I didn’t see a way to dodge it!”

“Right… Right… Who’s the last one?”

Fluterfree walked up, bow of light in her hooves. “That would be me.” She pulled the string back, the arrow within glowing with a holy light. “I really don’t know what this will do to your Stand if you hit it, so…” She thought for a moment, and set the bow on the ground. “…I guess I won’t use it.”

Renee gasped. “But Flutterfree! That’s your only weapon!”

Flutterfree took a breath. “I’ll just try to do my best.” She spread her wings and took a deep breath. “Ready, Josuke.”

Josuke looked at her with uncertainty. She could tell he summoned Crazy Diamond, but she had no idea where. Flutterfree decided to fly into the air, to gain some mobility.

“FLUTTERFREE TAKES TO THE SKIES! WHAT IS HER PLOY?”

O’Neill clenched his jaw. “She doesn’t have one,” he muttered.

Flutterfree decided it was best to just keep moving. When Crazy Diamond did hit her, it wasn't head on – it was on one of her back legs. This threw her into a tailspin dive. She strained with all her might to fly toward Josuke. Her aim was true – but the invisible Stand stopped her short, slamming her into the ground.

She stood up, spreading her wings. Blood was pouring down her face – even though she knew it would be healed in an instant whenever the fight ended, she still felt the panic rising within her. Her breathing increased rapidly – but she forced herself to calm. I have to try harder. I need to prove myself.

Crazy Diamond hit her again. Flutterfree used the force to fly in a loopdeloop, ramming right into Josuke’s head.

Got him!

“IT’S A HIT FROM FLUTTERFREE!”

Josuke peeled her off his face as if she was a bug. “Uh…”

Flutterfree blushed. “I guess that didn’t go so well huh?”

“Nope.”

“…Just end it. I’m not going to punch you in the face right now, that’d just be mean.”

Josuke healed Flutterfree back up in an instant. He set her down on the ground, expression mildly confused. He turned and walked to Jotaro without the usual fanfare.

“AND JOSUKE WINS! ELEVEN FIGHTS OUT OF TWELVE! THE MAN HAS STAMINA!”

O’Neill walked up to Flutterfree. “That was some pretty good ass-pulling.”

“I was pathetic,” Flutterfree stated matter-of-factly. “He didn’t even feel any pride in defeating me. I think he just felt sad.” She sighed. “I definitely didn’t win.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” O’Neill said. “You tried with the very limited resources you had. You didn’t even have a plan. So, yeah, you definitely failed this fight. But I don’t think your strength is in combat anyway.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Thanks, O’Neill.”

Nova walked up to Flutterfree. “...You seem happy for somepony who just got their ass handed to them on a plate.”

“Oh, O’Neill gave me a little pep talk.”

“Already?!”

Vriska laughed from nearby. “The old man is stealing your job, Nova!”

“Actually the pep-talk thing is usually Pinkie or Flutterfree’s job,” Nova called back.

Vriska shrugged, accepting a smoothie from Pinkie and drinking it obnoxiously. Nova rolled her eyes at this.

Renee and Daniel walked up to O’Neill and Flutterfree. “So, what do you think our chances are?” Daniel asked.

O’Neill laughed. “Only Jade actually won. I think Tempest and that metal-winged Rainbow Dash did pretty well – and Emerald.”

“You almost had him, Jack,” Daniel pointed out.

“Oh, I thought you were talking about all of us as a whole. I’m pretty sure I get to continue. The rest of you…”

Renee bit her lip. “I do admit, he caught me off guard. Such power in those punches. Couldn’t see them well enough with my magic.” She rubbed her side. “I swear, it still hurts.”

“Phantom pain,” Flutterfree said. “Just try not to think about it.”

“You didn’t actually get a broken leg,” Renee muttered. “He went easy on you.”

“Yeah,” Flutterfree admitted. “He did…”

“AHEM!” Josuke called, grabbing everyone’s attention. “Jotaro’s ready to decide who moves on!”

“…moves on?” Tempest asked, confused.

“That was not the only round,” Josuke said, rubbing the back of his head. “The second one will decide who actually gets in.”

Jotaro nodded. “Four of you are out. Trixie, Rainbow Dash of Equis Vitis, Tempest, and Jade.”

“WHAT!?” Tempest blurted. “I did much better than most of these people! And Jade? Jade actually beat you!”

Jotaro folded his arms. “You fought with too much anger and aggression to be trusted. Jade clearly already has enough power within her. And as for the rest of you – Trixie did not fight with honor, but cowardice, while Rainbow Dash was simply too cocky and brash.”

Rainbow Dash blinked. “But… But… But…”

“My decision is final,” Jotaro said. “You four are out. The remaining eight will move to the final ‘test’.”

Jade nodded. “I thank you for allowing us this chance, Mister Kujo.”

Jotaro nodded. “You had honor and strength, Jade, but your life has already given you all you need.”

Jade bowed in respect, then left the universe.

Trixie huffed. “The Great and Powerful Trixie didn’t need you anyway!” She opened a portal and left. Tempest did the same, but wordlessly.

Rainbow Dash walked over to Nova. “Well, guess I’m out.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, I think he’s a bit hard to please.”

“No kidding. I’ll be sitting with Pinkie, cheering you on.”

Jotaro called their attention again. “I will now ex-“

Jolyne tugged at her father’s pant leg.

“…Jolyne will now explain the rules of the next round.”

“All right!” Jolyne shouted, getting back on her rock. “Listen up! You eight will be fighting each other in a battle royale on this grassy arena right here! Josuke is on hand, so you can use almost any method besides instant death to subdue the enemy! When only one fighter is left standing, the round will be over, and the people who get their Stands will be decided! You’ve got ten minutes before we begin! Make sure to be at your marked areas by then!”

“What mark-“ Renee began, but suddenly there were eight markings in the grass that looked like fist imprints. “Uh…”

“Time stop sure is useful!” Pinkie called. “This is gonna be a great deathmatch!”

Renee turned to Daniel. “What say you, darling? Fight together?”

“Definitely,” Daniel said, twirling a zat gun – and then dropping it.

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Well if you two lovebirds make a team…” he grabbed Flutterfree. “We’ll be a team as well!”

“I can’t believe I’m still here,” Flutterfree said.

“You must have impressed them with something.”

“Mhm.” Flutterfree paused for a moment. “You know what? Yeah.” Her expression became much more competitive. “O’Neill, let’s pound these two into the dust!”

“Oh it! IS! ON!” Renee declared. “You do not know what kind of war you have declared! The power of love is at our backsides, and we shall use it to emerge victorious! It’ll be so romantic~!”

O’Neill facepalmed while Flutterfree giggled.

Renee narrowed her eyes. “We’re going to bring it, you two, don’t you dare think otherwise.”

O’Neill twirled his zat gun and didn’t drop it. “I wouldn’t dare underestimate a prissy white unicorn.”

“…I’m not sure if that’s an insult or not.”

“Assume yes,” Daniel suggested.

“Good. More motive to win. You two better bring your best!”

“We will!” O’Neill called.

Flutterfree smiled. “Right.”

~~~

As it turned out, three alicorns could ‘deal with it quickly.’ In this case, ‘it’ was a group of humans with a spaceship that decided, while drunk, that it would be a good idea to shoot whatever building they came across with their ‘slightly illegal’ weapons.

It just so happened that the building that looked the fanciest was the hotel-spa the royal alicorns of Equis Vitis were staying in.

The crew consisted of three men and two women, all of whom were armed to the teeth and dressed like raiders from a bad science fiction movie.

“What universe are they from?” Luna asked, examining the five humans they had tied up.

“Earth Vitis,” Eve mumbled. “They seem to have a higher concentration of these kinds of nutcases than Earth Tau’ri and Earth Stand. The current theory as to why is that they’re further along in the future, and apparently the further into the 2010s you get with an Earth the less rational the people become.” She gestured at the five of them. “They just want to look like cool raiders, so they do. And then they decide that acting like them is a good idea. Then they get drunk and get a little too into it and somehow acquire illegal weapons.”

“This happen often?” Celestia asked.

“Not really,” Eve admitted. “It just happens enough that it really draws attention to Earth Vitis.”

“Hey! You don’t get to shame us! Versist!” the leader of the group shouted, spitting on the ground.

Eve fixed him with a ‘seriously?’ look.

“Don’t you dare look down on me, you high and mighty bitch!”

“Right, can’t talk to these people,” Eve declared.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Celestia said, leaning in to the leader. “Sir, can you tell us why we’re being Versist and ‘high and mighty’?”

The man looked at her with rage. “You’re… You’re asking? What the hell is wrong with you? This is exactly what I’m talking about, you see?”

One of the girls piped up. “Yeah! What he said!”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “I see that you’re angry. And it’s not at us – you’re angry at the world. Afraid as well, wanting to protect yourselves from the change however you can. I understand the feeling, believe me, but I also understand that acting on that inner desire is not-”

“Are you talking down to us?” another one of the men said. “Listen to the sun god! Oh, praise her for being so pristine and regal!”

Celestia shook her head. “You do not need to praise me. You do not even need to like me. You can hate me for all I care. I’m just here to help you.”

“Screw you and your help. It’s gotten us tied up.”

Celestia took on a sad smile. “You can be released – it’s not like anyone actually got hurt. You’re just confused, and you need some guidance.”

“Wait, hold up,” a second woman said. “Are you going to let us go?”

“Praise the sun!” one of the men declared. “It has come to save us!”

The leader who had been so rude before adjusted his expression. “I… I… We’re so sorry princess. Can you ever forgive us?”

“I can forgive you, easily. But you do need to understand that forgiveness is a gift, an-”

Eve grabbed Celestia by the wing. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Eve, I’m just-“

“I know, I need to talk to you now.” She dragged Celestia a few meters away.

“Eve, I was getting through to them!”

“No, you were being used.”

“Of course I know that, Evening,” Celestia raised an eyebrow. “They changed behavior far too quickly. But after I had given them the talk, they wouldn’t be able to forget it.”

“Celestia, things are very different out here. That works really well with ponies on Equestria, and with most ponies, but those kinds of people?” She gestured at the five tied up humans. “They’re not going to change their ways because a princess gave them a pep talk. I’ve met many of these kinds of humans, and they will do almost anything to keep from changing how they look at life, including lying to themselves and getting extremely angry. Human minds are not as malleable as pony ones, generally.”

Celestia blinked. “You’re certain of this?”

“Definitely, in this case. We do need to forgive them – but they can’t just be let off the hook. They need to be put in the system and watched. Fined at the very least for the damage they’ve done, and… Okay if I’m being honest here punishment doesn’t really help them change either, but at least it deters them from being stupid even more.” Eve sighed. “I’m sorry Celestia, but the idea of quick redemption doesn’t work that often out here, especially with the humans from Earth Vitis.”

“This… is somewhat depressing.”

“It’s not your fault, you rarely deal with these kinds of people. You’re separated from the politics of most Earths, seeing only our friends from those places. But you do need to learn. They’re a very stubborn race. You have to learn to make judgment calls.” She glanced over her shoulder. “It is possible that one of them could have changed after just one conversation. But if we want to change one of them, it takes forming a relationship with them over a long course of time. And we generally don’t have time to do that. So we have to make the best of the situation.”

Celestia nodded. “I understand. I am sorry I didn’t understand this.”

“It’s okay,” Eve said. “Ready to go back?”

“Sure.”

Eve trotted back to the prisoners. “Yes, you are forgiven.”

“Woohoo!”

“You’re still going to jail for possession of weapons illegal in Equis Cosmic without a license. And destruction of property.”

“Bullshit!” one of the women shouted. “She was going to-“

“Shush,” Luna said. “You’re going to be offered a deal.”

Eve nodded. “If you tell the authorities where you got the illegal weapons, and how you got them to this universe, your sentence will be significantly lessened. Understood?”

The leader nodded.

“Good. Law enforcement will take you away now.” She walked away, Celestia and Luna following her.

Luna stretched her wings. “Well, despite that, I still feel invigorated by the massage. Let’s go somewhere else though, I’m done with this place.”

Eve produced the dimensional device. “Where do you want to go?”

Celestia blinked. “Uh… You know best Eve, you decide.”

“I have no idea what else I want to do.”

“Gem Vein,” Luna said. “They’ve got some cool worlds. And judging by the Gem that just walked out of that portal, one of them is closely related to this planet. We could walk there right now.”

“Sure, why not. Give me a sec though.” Eve checked to make sure the connection was safe with a tiny portal before opening a larger one. The three of them stepped through to one of the Gem Vein’s fully developed worlds. Which was to say, they appeared on a crystalline platform off the edge of a building – above them, buildings rose into the sky, and below them, the gigantic geometric structures descended further than they could see. As far as the three alicorns were concerned, there was no surface to the planet.

They saw mostly Gems walking around in every color of the rainbow. Some gems were smaller than the alicorns, some larger – some looked at them with curiosity while others just continued about their day without giving them a second glance. Eve could see a few non-Gems around, presumably from the world they had just left. Pegasi were the easiest to see, but a human or two walked around like they belonged. Eve wondered if they had jobs – Gems were notoriously big on keeping things organized and within a ‘purpose’. They had little patience for those who didn’t have a place in society.

“Everything looks… very organized,” Celestia commented. “Mechanical, almost.”

“Gems are technically artificial lifeforms,” Eve commented. “They are made, not born, though I’m not exactly clear on the process behind making a Gem. They operate a lot like machines at times, while their internal magic makes them a bit more than that. They like every cog to be in its place. It’s a bit restrictive for my tastes, but it works for them.”

Celestia looked down at a group of Peridot-Gems walking in formation, talking about furthering magitech with unicorn power. One Peridot in the back looked really, really bored. “What if there is a Gem that doesn’t want to fit in the gears?”

“Ah,” Eve said, sighing. “They used to just shatter Gems that didn’t fit in.”

“…Used to?” Luna asked.

“That’s one of the good things about Unification. We can say we won’t allow such wanton disregard for life in a legal system for any race involved in the process. The Diamonds really want to be part of the multiversal unity, so they were willing to adjust. The punishment for not fitting in is ‘banishment’ most often, which just means they get shipped to the Hub or some other universe. I think it’s an elegant solution, frankly.”

Celestia furrowed her brow. “I- Of course, Eve, you know best.” She laughed nervously. “Should I not even be talking about these things here?”

Eve shook her head. “The Diamonds aren’t that totalitarian Celestia. Just don’t insult the Diamonds themselves and you’ll be fine.”

“Right, right. Of course.”

“…Are you okay?”

Celestia smiled. “I’m fine, Twilight. What can a pony do on a Gem world such as this?”

“They aren’t much for recreation, but they do have competitions we can watch,” Eve said.

Luna raised an eyebrow. “Combat training? This sounds interesting.”

“Which way?” Celestia asked, looking around. “Should we wave someone down?”

Eve pulled out the Guide. “I can just find it. You two just walk around, I’ll be right here.”

“Walk… Around?” Celestia said, blinking.

Luna smirked. “Come. Tia, let us watch these Gem women hustle about their city! Hurrah!”

“Do they want to be called women?” Celestia asked. “I’m not sure. They don’t actually have a gender, if I’m remembering what I read right. But ‘it’ sounds derogatory…”

“Every Gem I’ve come across is referred to as a ‘her’,” Luna said. “So it’s safe to make that assumption. Though it’s not like I’m an expert or anything.”

Celestia nodded slowly. “Right…”

"Heh. Look at that orange Gem down there. Can’t hold all those boxes. Why doesn’t she just use a hover lift? I know they have them.”

Celestia looked down at the Gem having such a hard time. Her mischievous inner nature forced a smile to her face. She had the sudden urge to use her magic to fix all the boxes in an instant, just to mess with the Gem, but she held herself back. What if that wasn’t accepted here? She didn’t know this culture. It was a whole other universe – nothing like Dragons, or Changelings. Even more alien than humans.

She shook her head and backed away from the edge.

“Tia? Are you doing okay?”

“I’m fine, Lu-“

“Found it!” Eve declared. “It’s three buildings that way! Ready for a bunch of teleports?”

“Are they okay with that?”

“Who cares?” Luna declared. “TO THE COMBAT ARENA!”

Celestia gulped, waiting to teleport until after Eve had teleported herself.

~~~

There were eight. Flutterfree, Renee, O’Neill, Daniel, the Rainbow Dash, Thor, Emerald, and the Earth Vitis Applejack all took positions in a close circle. All eight of them could see all seven of the others. The arena wasn’t exactly small, but it wasn’t going to be a long fight given how close everyone was.

Flutterfree turned to O’Neill – and he winked at her. She winked back.

Renee gave the two of them the playful death eyes. Daniel tried to as well, but he just didn’t have the face to sell it.

“Ready!” Josuke yelled, holding a gun in the air with Crazy Diamond. It just looked like it was floating to everyone.

“SET!” he called, and all eight people prepared for chaos.

Crazy Diamond fired the gun. “GO!”

The Rainbow Dash, Emerald, and Applejack charged into a fray with each other. Flutterfree noted that they weren’t going to be a problem for a while, so she focused on Daniel and Renee. She flew into the air, pulling back the string on her bow of light – only for Renee to tear it out of her hooves with her telekinesis.

“Sorry darling,” Renee said, drawing the string of the bow herself. “Nothing personal, you understand.”

O’Neill interrupted her use of the bow with fire from his assault rifle. Renee blocked it with a magic shield, but it did make her lose aim with the bow of light. Flutterfree dove in, reaching her hooves out for the bow, only to run right into another of Renee’s shields.

“Daniel, dear, shoot her!”

Daniel drew his zat gun and fired at Flutterfree. She flipped into the air, dodging the bolt of energy just barely. Daniel took the opportunity to get on Renee – she reared up, grinning. “Now we’ve got you.” Daniel fired multiple times, his fire accentuated by Renee’s crystalline magic.

Flutterfree hid behind O’Neill. “I need that bow to do anything!”

O’Neill ducked behind the rock Jolyne was always using, allowing it to absorb the impact. “I’m going to throw a grenade. You make use of the opportunity, okay?”

“Got it,” she said.

Renee chuckled to herself. “We have them now. Cornered behind a – GRENADE!” She shrieked, rearing onto her hind hooves in panic. This made Daniel fall off, causing Renee’s attempt to flee to fail – she was not used to being a mount.

The grenade exploded right next to them.

Flutterfree had been going for her bow, but the moment she saw the grenade explode much closer to the two of them she shrieked. “Renee! Daniel!”

“Crap,” O’Neill muttered, leaving his cover and running for the two of them. He had seen limbs go flying.

Futterfree held Renee’s hoof – which felt lifeless.

“JOSUKE! GET OVER HERE NOW!” O’Neill shouted, checking Daniel. “That was just a distraction shot, what the hell?!”

Josuke touched both Daniel and Renee with Crazy Diamond, returning them to the world of the healthy in an instant. “Calm down you two,” he told Flutterfree and O’Neill. “They’re fine and they were always going to be fine.”

Flutterfree grabbed her chest. “I… I… I just saw Renee’s leg go over there and I panicked and I couldn’t think and…”

O’Neill grabbed the bridge of his nose. “I thought… It might have been a bit much. It was…”

“…Just supposed to be a distraction?” Daniel suggested.

“Yeah,” O’Neill said. “That. You weren’t even supposed to feel anything more than a rush of air from it.”

Josuke shook his head at the two of them. “You two aren’t out yet. The fight’s still going.”

Flutterfree looked up to see the Rainbow Dash coming at them, full speed. She dodged out of the way – but O’Neill didn’t. He fell to the ground, out cold.

Flutterfree picked up the bow of light and aimed. The Rainbow Dash thought she couldn’t fire fast enough – she was wrong. The arrow sailed true and hit the Rainbow Dash right in the mechanical wing, breaking it again. She fell to the ground, out.

Flutterfree lowered the bow and looked around. Emerald’s gem was on the ground, Applejack was being healed by Josuke and taken off the field… Was she the last one standing?

Then she felt an energy weapon hit her in the back of the head. She fell to the ground, out.

She came to only a moment later, realizing Thor was standing over her. “Oh. I… I kind of forgot about you.”

Thor nodded, extending a gray hand to her. “My race is small and diminutive, easy to miss. I just took advantage of this and waited for the fighting to be over before making a move.”

“Clever Thor, as always,” O’Neill said, sitting up. “Ow, my back…”

“Your back is fine.” Josuke called.

“I’m old. It was hurting beforehand.”

“You? Old? Spend time with Joseph. Then you can learn what old means.”

“SPEAK OF THE DEVIL AND HE SHALL APPEAR!” Pinkie called, pointing to a car that had just pulled up to Joestar Central. Joseph Joestar came out of the passenger side, cane in hand.

“Ah, old man,” Jotaro said. “How was spaceship flying?”

“Crashed it,” Joseph said. “To the surprise of everyone but me.” He laughed bitterly.

“Aw…” Pinkie said, hopping up to him. “That’s sad. Here, have a consolation cupcake!”

Joseph smirked and took it. “I heard you also knew the art of pulling things out of nowhere.”

“Yeah!” she produced her party cannon. “What kinds of stuff can you do?”

“In my prime I got an airplane from nowhere,” Joseph said, grinning. “That was fun. That was also an airplane I crashed. Into a volcano. Ah, memories…”

Flutterfree glanced at Jotaro. “Is he…?”

“His mind is fine right now. All that really happened.” He rolled his shoulders. “Old man, you’ve come at a good time. I’ve selected four new Stand users.”

“Oh? This should be interesting.”

Flutterfree held her breath – had she been selected? She made it to second to last, but she knew from last time that Jotaro wasn’t deciding based just on performance.

“First, Thor, you’ve proven yourself to be level headed and intelligent, even under extreme stress. You remain reasonable at all times.” Jotaro tossed the small gray alien a pill. “You also won, so that just adds to your merit.”

“This gift humbles me,” Thor said, downing the pill. “What results should I expect?”

“You should be able to summon your Stand after only a few seconds – but it does sometimes take a few days for a user to figure out how to summon their Stand. If you can’t make it appear just by willing, don’t overstrain yourself.”

Thor nodded. “I am starting to see more… I assume the pink being next to Josuke is Crazy Diamond?”

“Yes. And this is Star Platinum.”

“Impressive.”

Flutterfree sighed. “Still can’t see them.”

Jotaro moved to the Rainbow Dash next. “Rainbow… Dash. Do you have an alternate name?”

“Razor Will of Lai,” she said. “About time you asked.”

Jotaro tossed her a pill as well. “You show determination, an awareness of your own limits, and a deep loyalty. You’ve earned this.”

“Oh come on!” Rainbow Dash shouted. “She gets one?!”

Joseph shrugged. “This may also be an apology for us using her as bait with Toph’s group.”

Jotaro grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze…” he turned to O’Neill. “You are clever, plucky, and while you ramble a bit you deserve that title of General you hold. You also show concern for others, and perhaps the strongest warrior spirit here.” He tossed him a pill. “I was going to give this to someone else since you were getting too invested in a competition, but you overcame that.”

O’Neill swallowed his pill. “Thanks.” Unlike Thor and Razor, who had yet to summon their Stands, O’Neill’s came forth almost instantly. Flutterfree only knew because of his reaction. “My Stand... is a piece of sushi?”

“Looks like a fish to me!” Jolyne called. “A nice red fish!”

“It’s sushi,” O’Neill said. “…Sushi. Nice name.”

“Stand names usually have a bit more than that,” Josuke called.

“Is there some rule to them?”

“We used to name them out of tarot cards,” Jotaro said. “We ran out. We sometimes add colors, but only if you want.”

O’Neill examined his Stand. “…Crimson Sushi. That’s your name. What does he do?”

“I have no idea,” Jotaro said. “That’s for you to figure out.”

He then turned to the last one he accepted – Flutterfree. Flutterfree’s eyes widened. “…Really?”

“Yes. You are the kindest person I have ever seen. Normally I would consider that a weakness, but you showed today how it drives you to fight, even though you have almost no powers to your name.” He tossed her the pill. “You deserve this probably more than anyone else here.”

Renee sighed. “Well, Daniel, looks like we lost.”

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Mind telling us why, Jotaro?”

“You became obsessed with the competition,” Jotaro explained. “In addition, Daniel, you don’t really have the spirit of a warrior, and Renee, I believe you already have enough of an edge.”

Renee bowed. “Of course. It is your decision, after all.”

“Regretting giving Eve one?” Daniel asked.

Jotaro looked into the distance. He didn’t answer.

Flutterfree downed the pill. She felt its weirdness swim into her almost instantly. The first thing she felt change were her eyes. She could see what she couldn’t before. Crazy Diamond was the easiest – the pink and gray humanoid was still out, holding Emerald’s gemstone, slowly realizing that it couldn’t force Emerald to reconstitute her body. Flutterfree was overcome by the strange shapes of the humanoid – it seemed to have mechanical pipes on the back of its neck, a strange heart design on the top of its head, and… Well it just looked alien.

She saw Star Platinum for a moment – still alien, though not as odd. A heavily muscular man with strange, flowing hair and an angled face. Its fists had metal balls on their ends, and its pink and blue skin had simple designs made of squares on them. The Stand wore a loincloth that Flutterfree presumed was actually a part of its body.

Flutterfree caught a glimpse of Hermit Purple – just a bunch of purple thorny vines that extended from Joseph’s hands, currently being used to mess with Pinkie’s tail. Jolyne’s Stand – Stone Free? Was that the name? – was a blue being made of strings which had currently made a jump rope for the girl that she was enjoying tremendously. Stone Free was only as large as Jolyne herself, just like how Star Platinum was the size of Jotaro.

And then there was O’Neill’s new stand – Crimson Sushi. It looked like a deep, red fish about half the size of O’Neill, with three fins instead of just two. It had two, deep, black eyes with no pupils, and a third eye floating away from its forehead a couple inches. The third eye seemed to both burn and freeze at the same time. She felt like it was staring right at her, even though it was looking more in Jotaro’s direction.

Then Flutterfree’s Stand activated without her even trying. She felt it course through her body – thousands of tiny wires spiraling through her muscles. She felt her face shift in structure slightly as the Stand revealed itself. Her stomach did a flip-flop, feeling strangely hungry all of the sudden.

Then the Stand itself appeared in front of her – green lines traced out from her wingtips, forming mathematical patterns similar to the kind she had seen on math chalkboards in the school of friendship. Circles upon circles came together, forming a pinkish-purple flower shape in front of her. Mathematically speaking, the lines were forming a spirograph shape, but Flutterfree couldn’t help but see anything besides a flower. A lotus made from math…

“Lotus Locus,” she said, the name just coming to her suddenly. “This is Lotus Locus. Or Lolo for short.”

She then realized everyone was staring at her. “What?” she said, confused.

Jotaro leaned down to look at her. “Your Stand… It activated its effect.” He pointed at Thor and Razor – both of their Stands had apparently been forced to reveal themselves. Razor’s was a pegasus made entirely out of metal and wires, while Thor’s was a series of three glowing spheres that constantly orbited around each other. “Everyone can see those. Not just us Stand users.”

Flutterfree looked around. “Oh, so... So mine reveals what is hidden?”

“In more ways than one, dear,” Renee said, producing a mirror. Flutterfree looked into it – and was startled. It was definitely her face that looked back, but it wasn’t quite the one she had woken up to this morning. Her eyes were now red, her ears slightly pointed, and her mouth had fangs.

She checked her wings – still normal pegasus wings. But her face… It was almost like when she had been a vampire pony in the fruitbat incident, long before they had found the multiverse… Hadn’t Eve said that that spell had never completely gone away?

Flutterfree looked at the spirograph form of Lolo. “You… Awakened this?”

Lolo couldn’t speak or think on its own; it just shifted, extending its green neon lines in vaguely vine-like patterns around itself.

“I… I’m not sure how I feel about this,” Flutterfree said. “Besides hungry.”

Applejack the human tossed her an apple. Flutterfree caught it in her mouth – as if by instinct – and drained it of all its juices. “Thanks. You know, that didn’t feel very weird at all, actually…” She stretched her wings.

“So… You’re a vampire?” Jotaro asked.

“Of sorts,” Flutterfree said. “Though I mostly hunger for fruit instead of blood. Though I wouldn’t put it past these teeth to devour flesh…”

Joseph put a hand on Jotaro’s shoulder. “Easy. She’s clearly not like our vampires.”

Jotaro nodded slowly. “I can see that.”

“You had a run-in with vampires?” O’Neill said.

“The biggest enemy of the Joestar family was a vampire by the name of Dio,” Joseph explained. “He’s caused more than a few problems for us, even after he was killed.”

Flutterfree nodded. “I promise not to devour any of your flesh or cause your family any trouble. I do want to know what Lolo can do… And I think everyone else here wants to know what their new Stands can do as well.”

Jotaro nodded. “I’m uncertain, since most Stands are unique, but from what I’ve seen Lolo looks to be a utility stand, like Hermit Purple, rather than combat oriented.” He glanced around. “Its ability appears to be a sort of Revelation, the uncovering of what is hidden, unlocking the potential within. I have no doubt that you’ve received a significant boost now that your ‘vampire’ nature has been brought forth.”

“Alushy is never going to give you a break,” O’Neill said.

“No, no she isn’t…” Flutterfree said. “Can I turn it off?”

Jotaro shrugged. “Try recalling your Stand.”

Flutterfree wished Lolo to vanish, and the expansive patterns of waves and spirals retreated into Flutterfree’s body. Not much looked different to Flutterfree.

Renee raised her hoof. “I can’t see the Stands anymore.”

Flutterfree glanced at the mirror. “But I’m still a vampire.” She checked her teeth in the mirror. “Odd.”

“Wait,” Joseph said. “I thought vampires didn’t have reflections? …Your next line will be ‘different vampires do different things’.”

“Different vampires do different things.” O’Neill said. “Wait, what? How’d you do that?”

Joseph grinned mischievously. “I’ll never tell.”

Flutterfree looked at herself in the levitating mirror – and smiled.

She decided she was going to make the most of this. She now had a power, something new, something not to be afraid of. She would use it to bring kindness to the multiverse. She would use it to help her friends on her quests.

She would find the potential in everyone she came across.

It was at this point the mirror disappeared, replaced with Renee. “Uh…”

“Just figured out what Crimson Sushi does!” O’Neill declared. “Try touching Renee.”

Flutterfree blinked, sticking out her hoof. It went right through Renee - hitting the mirror. “Oh. You change the visual locations of objects?”

“Looks like it!”

“AUGH! This rock wasn’t there before!” Rainbow Dash shouted, holding her hoof in pain.

“Yes it was,” O’Neill said, chuckling. “I’ve been given too much power…”

Flutterfree activated Lolo fully, removing all of O’Neill’s illusions. He had already scrambled the locations of everyone in the field just for fun, evidentially. “Good thing I’m here to keep you in check.”

O’Neill smirked.

~~~

A Jasper kicked a white Quartz in the face, poofing their body and letting their gemstone drop to the ground. She raised her fists in victory.

Celestia started clapping – but quickly realized that the other Gems watching weren’t. She lowered her hooves instantly. “Do we… clap?”

“Clap if you want to,” Eve said. “You’re here to enjoy yourself after all.”

“But is it acceptable?”

Eve bit her lip. “Well, I wouldn’t say it is, but the Gems are pretty official about this. Go ahead and show your difference.”

“S-show my difference?”

“Yeah! Do what you want.” Eve looked around nervously. “You’re Celestia!”

“But, I’m supposed to follow you since you know more.”

“Follow me? You? D-don’t be ridiculo-“

“For the love of my Moon…” Luna grunted, producing a dimensional device and taking them to another universe. She dragged all of them in and closed the portal behind them. They found themselves on a planet where a man was making sandwiches.

“…This is new,” he said. “Name’s Arthur. Arthur Den-“

“Yeah, nice to meet you Arthur, give us a moment we’re going to have a heart-to-heart,” Luna said. She turned to Eve and Celestia. “You two.”

“I’m sorry I don’t know how to act out here!” Celestia decreed. “I jus-“

“Stop that. Stop that now. You do know how to act. You are Celestia, princess of the Sun and ruler of Equestria. You just let Twilight get into your head – she corrected you once, because you needed it, and suddenly you thought you needed to follow her in everything. And Eve-“

“What did I do?”

“You didn’t notice what was up with Celestia, and then you felt nervous about telling her what she needed to do because she still has an air of authority in your mind. You felt bad about telling her off.” Luna cleared her throat. “Let me make one thing clear. Neither of you two are the teacher of the other anymore. You. Are. Friends. You might even be family of some kind. But you’re not mentor-student, not at all.” Luna let out a deep sigh.

Celestia blinked. “…You’ve been holding that in for a while, haven’t you?”

“NO, REALLY?” Luna blurted. “You have no idea how long I’ve seen you two doing this. I thought you’d resolve it yourselves and we could just enjoy ourselves today, but no. Looks like I have to do it.”

Eve blinked. “Well… This has been illuminating. I… I’m sorry. I’m just not sure if I can move past Celestia being my teacher that quickly…”

“It’s been years,” Luna declared. “Make an effort. You were doing well at the philosophy discussion, as much as it annoyed me. I saw what you two needed to be right there. You had it. And… Well it worked.” Luna rubbed her head. “Clearly, I am not a master of emotions or the mind, as this little rant should make obvious, but I hope my point is getting across.”

“Loud and clear,” Celestia said. “…Luna, what do you suggest we do to get past this?”

Luna shrugged. “I don’t know. Go on a vacation and actually relax? Instead of getting nervous about everything?”

Eve lit up. “Equestria. Let’s go to Equestria to take our vacation. Ponyville is the perfect mix of Celestia’s and my domains. We could go to the Pinkie Emporium!”

“That sounds wonderful!” Celestia declared.

“And do you two promise to not worry about how the other thinks?” Luna asked.

Eve and Celestia gave her uncertain looks.

“…I’ll take that as a ‘we’ll try’. Good enough.” She turned back to Arthur. “Sorry about this.”

Arthur shrugged. “Not the weirdest thing that’s happened. Would you like to stay for lunch? I can make sandwiches. I’m really good at it.”

Luna smirked. “Yeah. Yeah we can stay for lunch. How many sandwiches do you all want?”

“Forty-two,” Celestia answered.

Luna blinked. “Why forty-two?”

“I have no idea, actually, it just seems like an appropriately absurd number.”

“Fine then. Forty-two sandwiches,” Luna declared. “Can you do that?”

Arthur was staring at them almost like he’d seen a ghost. “…Coming right up.” He set to work.

Eve blinked. “I wonder what his story is.”

“Probably something either very interesting or very boring,” Celestia answered.

~~~

In the Hub, there was a small building that housed a single man by the name of Ford Prefect. This man was the self-proclaimed genius behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Multiverse. He was drinking a cup of coffee, examining his ‘reader-submitted requests’.

Back in the day, he had been a single editor for a Guide of a single universe. But now, here he was, the man in charge of a Guide for an entire multiverse. And the best thing? It was self-correcting. Any time there was a clear error, there would be an angry email sent directly to Ford, and he would edit the Guide instantly.

He loved the message Eve set – so many vast corrections on so many articles she just read and submitted her thoughts on. He could write entirely new articles based completely on her rants! It was glorious!

Plus, he could also say that ‘the Guide brings even Princesses closer together’ based on the story she had relayed. She was just trying to congratulate him on a successful book that did some good, but he was going to milk that for everything it was worth.

Oh, and her direct assertion that “Don’t Panic” was definitely a good piece of advice for every explorer wasn’t bad either.

Life was good.

Another email popped up from one of his sources that totally-wasn’t-Sombra but he-totally-knew-was-Sombra. It was about Flutterfree and vampirism on Earth Stand…

That’d be interesting.

He’d probably write this one himself, rather than handing it off to some secondary writer like usual.

044 - Mushrooms and Appuls

Five Ba’als stood in a clearing in a Lai forest. One of them reached into his robes and pulled out a small, pink Rune. “This Rune has power,” he declared. “Enough power to bring this world to its knees without anyone knowing it was us.”

“They’ve stopped caring about us,” a second said. “Think we’re nothing compared to the threats the University and other secret powers pose. They are wrong to do so.”

“Even without our ships, our cloning, or our former glory, we can still-” a gigantic hammer hit the Ba’al that was talking in the face, knocking him to the ground.

“What the-” the next Ba’al lit on fire, discovering quickly that speaking while aflame was a bad idea since the flames got into his throat.

The next Ba’al fell when he noticed he had been cut in two across the midsection. The fourth got a magical laser to the face that knocked him down.

Only the Ba’al with the Rune remained, shaking. “Show yourselves!”

“Okay,” a calm voice said. Lieshy walked into the forest, approaching Ba’al. “Here I am.”

“J-just you?”

“Yes. Just me. An adorable yellow horse. Neigh.” Lieshy smiled when the last Ba’al jumped at her noise.

He held the pink Rune to her face. “I will use this, don’t think I won’t.”

“What is that?”

“It’s the Rune of Elysium!”

“Huh. Doesn’t ring a bell. Maybe you should just hand it over, because I definitely don’t feel any fear toward it. I’ll probably burn you even if you use it. Or cut you in half before you can use it. Or something.”

Ba’al’s hand shook. Then he dropped the rune to the ground, raising his hands into the air.

“Good boy,” Toph said, suddenly standing behind him with both his hands already cuffed. “There’s a particular dungeon with your name on it. Hope you enjoy your cell mate, I hear she’s lovely to talk to.”

Lieshy picked up the Rune. “He called it the Rune of Elysium. Any idea?”

“Nope,” Toph said. “Anyone else?”

Lady Rarity strode into the clearing, her eight-legged armor making quite the commotion on the ground. “The name doesn’t sound familiar.”

“I feel like I’ve heard it before, somewhere,” Corona said. “But that’d be another universe, so… If it’s related at all it’d be like an alternate version.”

Lieshy shrugged. “Turn it over to the science types then. And by science types, I mean Corona in her lab when we get back to the capital.”

“Mhm…” Toph said, kicking one of the Ba’als. “You know, I thought we were done with these guys. Guess some survived.”

“They really aren’t that threatening anymore,” Corona said. “Definitely evil, definitely caused a lot of damage back then, but… I think they’re just trying too hard now. Those that choose to just live their lives are probably the smartest.”

“So few of them do that though,” Lady Rarity pointed out. “Their minds are almost exactly the same.”

“How can they stand each other…” Toph wondered aloud.

Corona took the Rune from Lieshy and scanned it. “Regardless, this thing has a lot of magic in it for such a small piece. It’s probably got some effect that can be triggered, since Ba’al thought he could use it.”

“No doubt something he would use to conquer,” Lady Rarity said. “It is his thing.”

“Mhm… Definitely need more equipment to get a judge on the thaumic structure… Hey! Vivian! Do you by chance have that tool with the red and blue lights on you, by chance?”

No response.

“Vivian?”

Vivian came out of the treeline. “Oh. Sorry… I was just looking at a flower. No, I don’t have it – I think I dropped the toolbox somewhere. Or didn’t bring it. I’m not sure.”

“Vivian, it was your turn to watch the tools!” Toph called. “If one of us drops the ball on an important mi-”

“I’m sorry. I’ll go look for it…”

Corona walked up to Vivian with a concerned expression. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Corona removed a boot. “No, no you’re not.”

“Corona do-”

A few seconds later, Corona removed her hoof and slipped her boot back on. “You’re homesick? Why didn’t you just say so?”

“I didn’t want to bother you…” Vivian said. “We always have so much to do…”

“We can go to your world for a day,” Corona said. “No problem at all. Right Toph?”

Toph paused for a moment. “…Sure.”

“What universe is your home, dear?” Lady Rarity asked. “I’m actually not sure.”

“The Mushroom World,” Corona said, standing up tall. “I can’t believe you never told us that was your home, it’s such a nice place!”

Vivian smiled awkwardly. “You never asked.”

“It’s settled. We’re going to the Mushroom World before we do anything else,” Corona said.

“I’m the General here,” Toph pointed out. “…But I happen to agree. I like the Mushroom World too, though I’m not exactly sure what the fuss is about.”

“You need eyes,” Lieshy deadpanned.

“I think I’ll stay blind so Rohan can’t read me like a book thank you.”

“I still can’t punch him… Or shoot him…” Corona said. “I try every time I see him and I can’t do it…” Sombra’s voice came into her ear, though the others couldn’t hear it. “Oh you can shut up.”

Vivian giggled. “Hey. Sombra. Keep talking.”

“You little imp…” Corona said with a jovial smile. She pulled her special dimensional device out of her pocket. “So… Yeah, we can dial the Mushroom World from here, just need to shunt through one extra universe… Do we want a specific location?”

“Eh, anywhere’s fine,” Vivian said. “My sisters will know I’m back when I return. It won’t be that hard to find them.”

“Vivian has sisters,” Lady Rarity said. “…You never talk much about yourself, do you?”

“Not really?”

“Huh. Well, I guess I am finally going to get to see this fabled Mushroom World.”

“Wait, you’ve never been!?” Lieshy blurted. “How can you explore the multiverse and not go to the Mushroom World!”

“We’ve never been sent,” Lady Rarity declared. “May I remind you most of the things we do are on Lai. And I don’t go offworld unless I have particular reason to.”

“Boy, are you in for a treat,” Corona said, completing the dialing on her device and tearing a red hole to the new universe. “Welcome to the Mushroom World!”

They stepped through the portal.

And then something far more interesting happened elsewhere in the multiverse.

~~~

“Daniel, Love, where’s the air freshener?” Renee called, poking through all the cupboards in their house with her magic.

“We’re out!” he called from the bathroom.

“That freshening spell isn’t going to take care of the socks forever!”

“I’ll buy some when I’m out!”

“You’ll get distracted by diplomacy! I’ll probably forget because of whatever life-threatening situation I end up in today!” She pursed her lips. “I wonder if I could call Sweetie…”

Daniel came out of the bathroom, dressed for work – which was to say he had clothing of enough quality to look presentable, but nothing all that classy, and wore a brown jacket overtop. “Asking your sister to go out of her way just for air freshener?”

“Well when are we going to get time? It’s Tuesday! The weekend’s not for a while. We could guess that I’ll probably have an outing that ends early – or will end up in a place where I can buy air freshener – but that is just a gamble.” She levitated her hat off a hook and placed it on her head.

“We could probably just order it online,” Daniel commented.

“I…” Renee blinked. “Actually that’s a good idea.” She pulled out her phone and jumped onto the Internet, finding that with a quick search for ‘air freshener’ she found half a dozen places wanting to sell through the net. She quickly ordered a brand she thought she recognized (so hard to tell these days, which she supposed was a good thing), and put her phone away. “There we go, crisis averted!”

Daniel reached down and scratched her behind her ears, bringing an expression of bliss to her face.

“Meow.”

Daniel stopped instantly and looked down. “…Did you just meow?”

“Yes. Yes I did,” Renee said, chuckling. “Verdict: is it cute or just weird?”

“Can it be both?”

“Oh, most definitely.”

Daniel shrugged and rolled his eyes, opening the front door, Renee following him close behind. The ‘street’ outside was one of the halls of the Hub – their house was just one of the many sections of the interdimensional nexus. It had not been difficult to convince Eve to give them the area and let Renee turn it into a fashionable abode. The furnishings were not quite done – after the Honeymoon across the multiverse the two of them had been quite busy catching up with the work that piled up – but it was still a cozy place to live. Although it did run out of groceries and toiletries from time to time. They were still working out a system.

Daniel walked toward the Tau’ri embassy. “Well, I’m off to try to be the middleman between the Gem Vein and Lai. That should be fun.”

Renee chuckled. “At least you know what you’re doing. See you tonight!”

“Maybe we can discover the wonder of takeout pizza. Or Chinese.”

“I’m thinking Earth Ottoman or Lai food!” Renee called. “We’ll talk about it later!”

Daniel smiled back at her and waved.

Renee let out a simple, contented sigh before taking out her dimensional device and dialing Equis Vitis. She appeared a fair distance from the castle, but it was no issue to walk through downtown Ponyville to get to Eve’s base of operations. She arrived in the main hall after a brisk walk, finding Pinkie, Vriska, and Nova already waiting.

Nova was talking to Vriska. “-basically, we can trace individualism in humans back to the era of slavery, when authorities got questioned. You could claim that the rise of individualism and the disregard for communal authority led to the general society of factions that is driving more ‘contemporary’ versions of Earth apart. Our introduction to the equation has clearly twisted that perception back towards community, but even we have individualism within our pony minds. Rev theorizes this came about after Luna’s Rebellion, but I think it has deeper roo-”

Vriska held up a hand. “Stop. Your philosophy is going over my head.”

“Oh, sorry. Just got a little excited there,” Nova blushed. “It’s just that we talk about such interesting stuff sometimes!”

“I can tell,” Vriska commented. “Asking the big questions, or something. It’s just that I kinda stopped asking the big questions a while ago, figured I was fine with me and that’s that.”

“That’s an individualist outlook on life, and as we have been discussing that is probably not the best philosophy, at least not on its own, there needs to be other - And right, sorry, you’re not listening.” Nova rubbed the back of her head.

“I think it's great that you’re talking about how everything is!” Pinkie cheered. “Makes for good discussion!”

“Hey, I’m curious,” Nova said. “I hang my life on the belief in fate and destiny, Vriska here is mostly for herself, what’re you for?”

Pinkie tapped her head. “Can’t tell you yet! Sorry!”

“Well that’s convenient for you.”

“Think of it as me leaning on knowing things. That’s not what it is at all, but the closest I can say. Though, going off of what you were saying earlier about not making certain things the only authority, I also love to see ponies smile!”

“Well that’s obvious.”

Pinkie grinned. “You bet! Renee, what about you?”

“I… Hrm. I suppose I believe in the community?” Renee mused. “I’m really not sure, I’m not big on hammering down an exact philosophy in life.”

“It’s definitely not for everyone,” Nova said. “It’s perfectly fine to follow the ideals of others. I mean, they could be wrong, but nopony’s really got it right.”

“Quite,” Renee admitted. Noticing Flutterfree walking in the front doors, she waved.

Flutterfree waved back with a warm smile. “Hey everyone! So, Pinkie, where are we going today?”

“Saxton Hale has discovered a bizarre dimensional connection on Esefem,” Pinkie declared. “He would normally investigate it himself, but today he’s going to hunt dinosaurs in the Hub jungles. He figured he’d extend the offer to us rather than just send his agents! Isn’t that nice of him?”

“The man doesn’t want to waste any money,” Renee pointed out. “If he’s not going to get a ‘manly’ experience out of something, he won’t pay more than he needs to.”

“Right. But we get to have an adventure, so who cares?” Pinkie pulled out her dimensional device. “Everyone ready?”

Vriska smirked. “Aw, you remembered this time!”

Pinkie winked, opening the portal to Esefem.

“What’s this place like, by the way?” Vriska asked.

“Boy are you in for a treat,” Nova answered. “It has to be seen to be believed.”

~~~

Esefem never changed much. Sure, the base that the Tau’ri installed in the universe had expanded, but other than that there were still Red and Blu fights, still pockets of complete and utter weirdness, and still copies upon copies. Nobody was any closer to figuring out respawn, nor the reasons this universe acted the way it did. Efforts to understand it had tapered off over the years as it became obvious they did not have the requisite interdimensional knowledge to really tear the place apart.

So the research mostly fell to Saxton Hale and his section of Mann Co. He was no closer to figuring it out than anyone else had been, but he occasionally found new weapons or new technologies, or a strange race that could be very useful to the other universes. It was a well known fact that the majority of the alternate versions of the ponies came from this world, from different ‘peaceful’ pockets and the like.

They hadn’t spent much time taking in the scenery – they were told the coordinates of the dimensional connection, and Nova teleported them to the place: a rocky outcropping in the middle of the desert, just like almost everywhere else on Esefem.

“So…” Pinkie said, leaning in to Vriska. “Verdict on Esefem?”

“I… have to admit,” Vriska said. “I have not been to a universe quite like this one in all my travels.” She blinked. “It’s interesting to find something completely new, to say the least. I mean, I’ve seen respawn before, and universes with duplicates, and universes with complete randomness… But nothing set up quite like this. And the memory thing…” She put a hand to her chin, pondering what it meant rather than saying anything.

Renee smirked. “Don’t know everything, do you?”

“Yeah I have no idea what this universe’s deal is,” she admitted. “That should concern you.”

Pinkie shrugged, moving on with the mission. “Flutterfree, activate Lolo!”

Flutterfree spread her wings, summoning the strands of Lolo into existence, the spirograph forming a halo around her head. As it activated fully, it revealed its own appearance to all four present who normally couldn’t see such things. The Stand felt around the area, drawing everyone’s attention to a point in the air that was now clearly a rippling point in the fabric of spacetime. “There it is,” Flutterfree said. “The signal.”

Nova lifted her hoof and checked the scans on her screen, her horn surging with the power from her ring. “Let’s see… Minimal temporal energy, and… Yeah, definitely weird. Most points like this on Esefem are one way – that is, they drag ponies in. This one is two way.”

“Safe?” Renee asked.

“The other side’s not quite normal, but I’m not reading anything lethal,” Nova answered. “Should be fine.”

“What are we waiting for?” Vriska blurted. “Open it up!”

“Waiting for you to get impatient, dear,” Renee smirked.

“…I just got burned.”

“It was a sweet burn too,” Pinkie added. “Nova, open it up!”

Nova cast a magical circle around the point in spacetime. The circle created seven claw constructs that tore into the ripple and forced a portal open. The other side was clearly a version of Ponyville.

Flutterfree blinked. “I just got the strangest feeling of déjà vu.”

“It’s a Ponyville, of course you did,” Vriska pointed out.

“It’s not that. It’s… The energy of this place. Something’s… Different about it. It’s not a bad feeling, but… I’m trying to remember…”

~~~

Do you know the answer?

~~~

The five of them were walking in the Ponyville on the other side of the portal.

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “Hrm… Something weird just happened…”

Vriska raised her eyebrow. “How so?”

“I… I’m not sure,” she said, concern evident on her face. “Call it the Pinkie Sense.”

Flutterfree held up a hoof. “I think we have other weird stuff to look at. Look at the people.”

Everyone looked around – Ponyville, despite being clearly built for ponies, was inhabited by Earth Vitis style humans. But they all seemed… flat. As if they were nothing but static images. The explorers could hear them talking to each other – but their mouths didn’t move, instead their entire bodies moved up and down with the words they spoke. When they walked, their legs didn’t move, although their limbs clearly could move, since they saw a version of Derpy pointing at something. In the distance, they could see Canterlot Castle – with a giant photorealistic human head floating next to it with a big smile on its face.

“What?” All five of them said at once.

Flutterfree frowned. “This… This is really familiar…” She felt something touch her hoof. She reached down, picking up a ball that was half red, half white, and had a single button in the middle. Pinkie poked her head toward it. “What’s that?”

“No idea. Just… found it at my hooves.”

Vriska pushed the button on it. The ball popped open in a flash of white light. In an instant, the ball was gone, replaced with a piece of paper that had “XDXDXDXDXDXDXD” written all over it with a strange, cartoonish face drawn in the background.

Renee blinked. “I say, is that one of those crude Internet meme things?”

“I… Think so,” Flutterfree said, raising an eyebrow. “What…?”

“Read the other side,” Pinkie said.

Flutterfree did as ordered, flipping the paper over. The other side was plain and only contained two words.

Free them.

Everyone stared at the words in silence.

“Well isn’t that vague,” Nova grunted. “Free who? From what? How many is ‘them’ referring to?”

“Whatever it is, it’s a quest,” Vriska said. “We’re just going to have to figure it out.”

“How much luck do you have stored up?” Renee asked.

“Not enough to slip through universal boundaries, but enough. We’ll find something, though I can’t exactly promise how quickly we will.”

“Talk to the locals time!” Pinkie declared. “Let’s see what this… place is all about.”

“It’s almost like everything is low resolution,” Nova observed.

“Acute observation,” a new, deep, frog-like and synthetic monotone voice greeted them. The voice came from what was apparently this world’s version of Fluttershy – whose appearance was exactly like that of Equis Vitis’ Fluttershy when she was a teenager. However, the appearance was still flat, just like all the other inhabitants of this Ponyville. She spoke by bouncing up and down, which was frankly rather disorienting up this close. “You look a lot more expressive than us.”

“Uh, yeah,” Nova said, realizing that they definitely weren’t flat, and apparently the universe they were in didn’t require flatness – otherwise they would have been slowly converting.

Pinkie grinned. “I’m Pinkie, that’s Nova, that’s Flutterfree, that’s Renee, and that’s Vriska! We’re interdimensional explorers!”

The Fluttershy walked up to Flutterfree. “You’re not here to tell me you’re here to save me from an ancient evil, are you?”

“Uh, no? I’m here to… ‘free them,’ though I have no idea what that means.”

“Great. It sounds like we will be going around the weird overly complicated train again,” Fluttershy said. Suddenly her voice changed to one that was clearly feminine, but still monotone. “You have an interesting name, I have to say.”

“Oh, I changed it so not to confuse other Fluttershys. …Why did your voice change?”

“That happens now, ever since the reboot.” As if on cue, a boot flew past Fluttershy’s head and hit Vriska in the face.

“BOOT TO THE HEAD!” Pinkie cheered.

Vriska blinked. “I feel like I’m missing an in-joke.”

Fluttershy continued focusing on Flutterfree. “Changing names sounds like it’d help. Because if last time is any indication, we’ll run into two or three other Fluttershys in a void with sausage rolls. I think I’ll go with… Aiskera.”

“Aiskera? Why?” Flutterfree asked.

“It sounds cool.”

“Respectable reason,” Vriska said, standing up and dusting herself off.

“Do you know of anyone who needs to be freed?” Renee asked Aiskera.

“All of us are trapped in this world we call home and this life we live.”

“I’ll take that as a no?”

“Sure.”

Pinkie appeared behind Aiskera. “So why not introduce us to some people around town?”

“We could go to Twilight’s,” Aiskera suggested, her voice switching once again to a different male monotone. “I – god dammit, why’s it changing so often today?”

“Convenience and establishment,” Pinkie said. “TO TWILIGHT’S!”

Aiskera led them through Ponyville. As they passed through the buildings, they realized that even the town and the scenery looked flat. It was like reality wasn’t all here. The humans went about their lives, every last one speaking with a monotone and having only limited body movement.

Vriska whispered to Pinkie. “Okay, I have never seen anything like this. I can’t even begin to imagine what the deal is with this place. I at least had ideas about Esefem.”

“It looks like a shoddy mish-mash of random images,” Nova commented, pointing at an orange walking around like it was some kind of animal. “I… I don’t even know at this point.”

A purple car ran through a nearby house, somehow managing to blow a hole through it and not topple the entire structure. This world’s version of Rarity was driving – though how she was even doing it without moving her arms and legs was anyone’s guess. The car passed on by behind them, and a giant basketball came from the sky and bounced back into nothingness. A standard skin-tone human ‘walked’ past them, cheese and windmills in his hands.

Renee blinked. “I… What?”

“This is only slightly weirder than Esefem’s complete randomness,” Flutterfree said. “Trust me, I know. …Maybe that’s why it feels familiar to me.”

Suddenly, this world’s version of Sweetie Belle was standing in front of Pinkie. Pinkie stared at her. “Uh… Hi.”

“Hi,” Sweetie Belle said with a deep voice that sounded like it was short on air, but just as monotone as everyone else.

“…Okay fine,” Pinkie reached into her mane and produced a hamburger. She threw it into the air.

“BURGER!” Sweetie called, running after the flying food with extreme speed and malice, like she was some kind of force of nature.

“Huh,” Nova said. “…Sweetie Burger. I think the League will like her.”

“Her name's Burgerbelle I’d be afraid of her, she destroyed a reaper once,” Aiskera said. “And-”

“HOLY SHIT!” Vriska shouted, jumping and hiding behind Aiskera. “W-w-who is that?” She pointed across the street.

Aiskera looked where she was pointing. “That’s Brad.”

“BULLSHIT! That’s Nicolas Cage!” The man she was pointing at appeared to be a standard type human with a strange smile, black outfit, and a face that was trying too hard.

“Uh… No, that’s Brad.”

“Well then it’s an alternate version of Nicolas. Oh, this always happens…” She started breathing heavily. “Every time I meet one of him… Every fucking time…”

The four ponies looked at each other in confusion.

“How do you not know who Nicholas Cage is!?” Vriska blurted. “You are closely intertwined with the culture of three Earths! Nicolas Cage is the best actor of all time, in any of them, hands down, and if you say otherwise I will gut you open on the spot with something creative.”

Pinkie blinked. “I mean, I know who he is, but the girls don’t really watch that many Earth movies.”

“I am making all of you watch every film this dream boat is in. You will understand.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “I think you’re fixated.”

“S-shut up.” She looked over at Brad again. “I… I’m going over there.”

“Sure. Knock yourself out,” Aiskera said. “I’ll watch you flounder like a fish.”

Vriska took in a breath – showing nervousness to the ponies for the first time. She put on a smile and walked up to Brad. “Hey, Brad, I hear-”

Brad started screaming, did a triple backflip in midair, and ran away. A skull with a trumpet appeared in front of Vriska’s face and tooted.

“…What?” Vriska said. “Seriously, what? WHAT? WHAT THE HELL!?”

“Sometimes these things happen,” Aiskera said. “You are reacting far too much to it.”

“To what?”

This world’s version of Applejack passed by and said “appul”. A flat apple the size of a person fell from the sky and hit Vriska, crushing her in an instant. “Ow…” She muttered.

Pinkie chuckled. “That’s… Vriska, are you sure you have good luck right now?”

“I’m starting to think this universe is rigged.”

“Appul,” Applejack said. Another apple fell on Pinkie.

“Justice…” Vriska said.

The two apples walked away and did a dance off into the sunset.

“Is there an explanation for that?” Renee asked Aiskera.

“Those are appuls.”

“I can hear you misspelling it,” Nova muttered.

“Appuls are people. You eat apples. Right Appuljack?”

“Appul,” Appuljack said, summoning another appul from the sky, this time aimed at Nova. Nova used her magic to deflect it into the other two. It worked like a bowling ball and pins, quite literally bowling them over despite their round shape.

“Let’s just get to Twilight’s already…” Nova muttered.

Suddenly this world’s version of Pinkie Pie appeared. “IT’S TIME!”

~~~

Do you hear it?

~~~

The flat Pinkie Pie was wearing an outfit with a green hat, golden bowtie, and red-white candy cane. She stood behind a counter decorated with game-show colors, and the five interdimensional explorers were sitting behind contestant booths.

The flat Pinkie Pie continued speaking. “FOR PINKIE PIE’S SUPER duperamazingfantasticincrediblebrilliantgreatmarveloushilariousstupendousbreathtakingplotprogression QUIZ!” her voice was just as monotone as the others, but the high pitched tone gave off an air of excitement. “TODAY we have with us five contestants from another universe entirely! Introduce yourselves!”

“What in the-” Renee began.

Pinkie Pie the pony coughed. “Just introduce yourselves, girls.”

“Uh… Okay.” Renee cleared her throat. “I am Renee Jackson of Equestria, Equis Vitis. I’m a diplomat and explorer.”

“I’m Flutterfree Asquall, and I’m from the same place. I like animals and I’m a semi-vampire who explores and I help everyone I can find.”

“I’m Nova Glimmer. I explore and make sure time doesn’t explode. I don’t do time travel.”

“I’m Pinkie Pie, leader of this operation and party pony extraordinaire!”

“Vriska Serket. I’m a god of Light. How’s that for cool?”

“Most boring introduction I’ve ever heard,” the flat Pinkie declared. “You can call me Quizzy if you want! Now, FIRST QUESTION, what is Burgerbelle’s favorite food?”

Flutterfree ringed in first. “Hamburgers! Or just Burger.”

“If this is just gonna be a quiz on what we encountered…” Vriska muttered.

“I’m sorry, that’s wrong,” Quizzy declared. “She’s actually partial to leeks.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Uh…”

“NEXT QUESTION! What is Jotaro Kujo’s catchphrase?”

“How would you know that?” Renee asked.

“WRONG!” Quizzy said. “The answer is ‘Yare Yare Daze’. I would also have accepted the other translations, ‘Good Grief’ and ‘Gimme a Break’.”

“I knew that! I was asking you a question!” Renee said indignantly.

“So that’s what it means…” Nova mused.

Pinkie raised her eyebrow at Renee. “Do you really need to ask her that Renee?” She pointed at herself, and then at her counterpart. “Come on. She clearly knows things.”

“Oh. …Right. Never mind.” Renee folded her front hooves and huffed.

“NEXT QUESTION!” Quizzy declared. “How many stars are there in the night sky tonight?”

Pinkie rung in. “There are absolutely no stars in the sky tonight!”

“Correct! You win a telescope!”

“I’m not even going to try to wrap my head around that one,” Nova muttered.

“NEXT QUESTION! What is the number of-”

Vriska rang in before the question finished. “Nineteen.”

“Correct!”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Why are we playing along with this again, Pinkie? I me-”

Quizzy continued. “You get to spin the Wheel of Brad!”

Vriska stood up tall with a grin on her face. “I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.”

The Wheel of Brad was a wheel with mostly different human faces on it, many of which were Nicolas Cage. Vriska spun the wheel, enticed by the result. The wheel turned… and turned…. And turned… Until it achieved liftoff and disappeared into nothing.

“Congratulations. You got Brad,” Quizzy declared.

Vriska blinked. “…I’ll take this as a victory.”

“NEXT QUESTION! What is Elysium?”

Nova rang in. “The human Greek concept of an afterlife for the chosen of the gods.”

“Correct! You win an all-expenses paid trip to space!”

“Sweet.”

“LAST QUESTION! Where is Aiskera the Fluttershy right now?”

Flutterfree looked around. “Huh… She isn’t here…”

“Correct!”

~~~

What is that song in your mind?

~~~

Twilight’s Laboratoribrarinasium.

26:92, February 31.

Twilight’s house was the Golden Oaks Library, just like it had been many years ago on Equis Vitis. Twilight herself looked like her teenage Earth Vitis counterpart, albeit just as flat as the others and wearing what appeared to be a black military hat for some reason.

“Oh! Visitors! Fluttershy, you should have told me you were bringing guests!”

Aiskera nodded. “I’m going by Aiskera for now.” Her voice was feminine again.

Nova blinked. “Okay, that was weird.”

Pinkie frowned. “There’s something more going on here than rapid changes of scenery. Did any of you hear something?”

“Like what?” Vriska asked.

“A… Song?” Pinkie hit herself in the head. “I feel like something’s slipping through the cracks. I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore.”

Flutterfree decided to leave the contemplation of songs to the rest of her friends – she walked up to Twilight and introduced herself. “Hi, I am Flutterfree-”

Twilight’s eyes suddenly turned red and her body started shaking without her speaking.

“Uh…” Flutterfree gulped. “Girls, I think Lolo just activated something…”

“Everyone hit the deck!” Aiskera called.

Nova did the next best thing and teleported Twilight outside. The five explorers and Aiskera watched through the window as she transformed. With a powerful white light, the human body of Twilight Sparkle was gone, replaced with a gigantic black thing made of metal that resembled a bug with two claws. The large abdomen had Twilight’s cutie mark on it. The mark’s purple color really didn’t look like it belonged on the dark structure.

“Did she just turn into a spaceship?” Nova asked.

“Yes. A Reaper,” Aiskera said. “I forgot she could do that. I guess she forgot about it too, since the Reapers lost control of her. And were defeated.”

“You know what, I’m not even surprised anymore,” Vriska said. “For all we know this is what we were supposed to find.”

“I THINK IT WAS,” Twilight said. She spoke not with a monotone, but with a droning, deep ringing that wormed its ways into their minds. “AS I AM NOW, I DETECT A SIGNAL IN DEEP SPACE. I AM CALLED TO IT.”

“Finally, some direction,” Nova muttered. “Care to take us on board?”

“I DO NOT MIND AT ALL. I DO NOT EVEN FEEL A LITTLE EVIL NOW THAT I HAVE RETURNED TO THIS BODY. IT FEELS… NATURAL.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “…Normally I’d feel concerned, but I’m with Vriska at this point. Let’s just go with it.”

Pinkie nodded. “I think that’s what we need to do anyway. Let’s go!”

“I SHALL CHOOSE A CREW. ALL OF YOU. AISKERA. APPULJACK. QUIZZY. BRAD. SWEETIE.”

“Sweetie?” Renee blurted. “Why?”

“BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE IT. IT IS NOW TIME FOR AN ABSOLUTELY BADASS TEAM SHOT.”

Suddenly they were in a dark metal room presumably inside Twilight. Appuljack, Quizzy, Brad, and Burgerbelle were also there, all in uniforms that said SPORK-COM on them.

“TODAY, WE FLY TO SPACE,” Twilight declared.

“To find out what we need to free,” Flutterfree said.

“I’m beginning to wonder if that was just a joke,” Nova commented.

“I don’t think it was. I think it meant something. Something very important…”

A human version of Vinyl appeared out of nowhere. “Hey, can I come along?”

Quizzy shook her entire body like it was about to explode. “No, you’re just too OP and badass.”

Vinyl vanished in a puff of logic.

~~~

Do you see that this isn’t meatspace?

~~~

Pinkie frowned, looking at the planet Twi-Reaper was showing them as the ‘source of the signal’. It looked just like someone had taken a stock photo of an apple and slapped it onto a starry background.

“Girls, something is wrong here. I have no idea what, but it’s something,” Pinkie declared. “Something is very off. Not with the people we are with – though Twilight the Reaper is a bit odd – but something else.”

Vriska nodded. “I keep getting a bad feeling as well. Like… We’re jumping.”

“You’re noticing that too?” Pinkie said, raising an eyebrow. “…I’m supposed to be the only one who notices that. Well, besides for the moment with the Quiz show… I think.”

Vriska frowned. “I don’t like what that suggests.”

“It may just be an effect of the universe we’re in.”

“Even if that’s true, that doesn’t make me feel any better,” Vriska said. “…Do you know the answer?”

“What?”

“Just something that’s stuck in my head for some reason…” Vriska said, furrowing her brow. “Twi-Reaper! Are we going down to the planet yet!”

“SURE THING.”

“Also, where’s Brad?”

“LEFT HIM AT THE CAKE-MART WE PASSED.”

“…Okay.” Vriska narrowed her eyes. “I remember that happening, but I’m sure I would have done something about that… reacted in some way…”

Everyone minus Brad and Twi-Reaper appeared on the surface of the apple-planet. Twi-Reaper herself transformed back into her flat human form, descending right next to them. “That was fun. I do have a leftover desire to assume control though…”

The planet they were on was made entirely out of apple skins: the mountains, the trees, the buildings. Everything was apples, including the people – every last one of them was an ‘appul’. An appul wearing a hat walked up to them. “No.” He said with a monotone voice that was probably meant to be much more intimidating than it was. “No, we do not want you here. This is the last appul safe haven. We had to flee here after the Great Appul War.”

“Wait, that actually happened?” Aiskera said. “I wasn’t all that clear on that.”

“It happened. We were defeated soundly. We had to flee to this planet to escape from the fighting.”

“I can’t remember how we defeated Chester the Cheetah… Huh…” Twi-Reaper said. “That’s weird.”

“Memory is the key,” Quizzy said, holding up a green crystal in the shape of the Greek letter epsilon.

“In the name of Elysium, I demand you to get off our planet,” the appul demanded. “Or we will have to use force.”

Vriska took on a fighting stance. “Bring it, fruit.”

The appul drew a gun from nowhere. “If you insist.”

Appuljack stood tall, glaring at the appul. “Appul.” She said. Another appul dropped from the sky, crushing the aggressive gun-wielding fruit. Appuljack pointed a hand at the appul settlement in the distance. “Appul appul appul appul appul appul appul.” Meteor-like appuls fell from the heavens, demolishing the entire settlement.

Appuljack folded her arms in pride. “They will never bother us again. We are freed from the insurrectionist appuls.”

“YOU CAN TALK!?” Nova blurted.

“She’s been talking the entire time, silly!” Quizzy and Pinkie said at the same time.

“I mean something other than ‘appul’.”

“Of course I can,” Appuljack said. “I just chose not to.”

“So… Was that it?” Flutterfree asked. “We… destroy a town of angry militaristic fruit…?”

Twi-Reaper frowned. “No. The signal is still strong. But now it isn’t here…”

“Something’s moving around,” Pinkie said.

Twi-Reaper turned back into her Reaper form. “LET US CHASE AFTER THE SIGNAL.”

~~~

What trap do you find yourself in?

~~~

“Trap,” Nova said, suddenly. “We’re in a trap.”

Pinkie blinked. “We are?”

“I’m sure of it.” She looked at the pattern of hyperspace as it flew by on Twi-Reaper’s monitor. “There’s a trap. A… There’s something. Things blend together in our memories… We’re being led around on a string… It wants us to keep chasing… It’s just… Agh, why can’t I remember?”

“Seriously, who has the answer?” Vriska asked. “There’s gotta be an answer here somewhere!”

Aiskera glanced between them all. “Well, I admit this is odd, but not as weird as some of the things we’ve run across. There was a Greggs in the middle of universal nothingness once, and I was eaten by a sausage roll. One of me, anyway.”

“These worlds…” Renee said. “These worlds – this one, and the ones like Esefem. They’re just too odd to be natural in any way. There just has to be some force behind them.”

“The Beat?” Nova asked. “Maybe…” She checked her screen. “Starbeat has given me a way to detect it if I want… But I’m scanning right now. It’s only a little higher than normal.”

“I don’t know what the Beat is, but there is a force behind our universe,” Aiskera said. “This is a world born from the struggles in a great war.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Do tell.”

“It’s a long and complicated story, but I’ll try. There were two beings – one called Overlord Faust, and the other Overlord Hasbro. They came from a world I don’t pretend to have any idea about, but through some method they worked together to create a universe filled with ponies, friendship, and magic.”

Everyone except Vriska was suddenly paying attention – this was the first time they’d had confirmation that universes could be created. The strange universe-construct that copied universes wasn’t a creator, just a copier. This was something new.

Aiskera continued. “But Hasbro wanted to do something new with the world, something involving less depth and more shoddy plastic so he could make money off of the world in some way. Faust abandoned the world after this, leaving it to Hasbro alone. Only the creations within the world could fight back – and fight back they did. Three mysterious strangers - the gods - came from seemingly nowhere and helped the creations fight Hasbro. The gods gained some control back, splitting the world into three separate universes. Each of the gods placed themselves into each world’s version of Fluttershy, as protectors in case they would be needed again.”

Renee nodded. “Is that why you know so much, dear?”

“I believe so. The War between Hasbro and the creations began anew when the three gods were reawakened, and the universes collapsed into one - the reboot. I think the War is still going on in the actual reboot universe. I’m not entirely sure how this world relates to this story, but I have the memories of all three Fluttershys, although I know I’m not a vessel for the gods anymore.” Aiskera looked into the distance. “Hasbro’s agents have occasionally infiltrated this world, and we’ve stopped them every time, but he hasn’t made a move in a while.”

“Maybe you just didn’t realize this time,” Nova said. “There’s something happening to us. Maybe his agent is a more subtle type?”

Aiskera nodded. “I… suppose that is possible.”

“I think I have it,” Vriska said. “This war that might still be going on in the other universe… You’re probably ‘trapped’ in the fight, and need to be ‘freed’ right?”

Aiskera paused for a moment. “That’s possible.”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “So… Let’s assume that is what we’re here to do – stop this ‘war’ of kinds that may or may not actually be happening. To do that we’d need to find out where these ‘gods’ and Hasbro are. Find the war that has this world in its grasp.”

“Is there anyone who would have a connection to where it’s happening?” Renee asked. “We can try to trace it, since we’ve got dimensional scanners.”

“Aiskera, perhaps,” Vriska said. “She remembers; she might have a connection.”

Nova scanned Aiskera. “I’ve got nothing, sorry.”

“Can we find one of Hasbro’s agents?” Renee asked. “They must have a connection in them. Or at least some answers.”

“They’re all dead,” Appuljack said. “Well… Except maybe Sunset.”

“Then we need t-”

~~~

How close can you be and still fail?

~~~

They were suddenly adrift in space around a ‘planet’ that was literally just a tennis ball. Twi-Reaper was not in her Reaper form.

“WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?” Vriska shouted. “…How am I talking? How am I breathing?”

“I was just hacked, don’t you remember?” Twi-Reaper said, answering the first question but ignoring the more practical ones. “We have to defend ourselves! We’re being attacked!”

Thousands of horrendously bright colored ponies charged at them, looking nothing like the soft cute ponies that came from most Equises. They moved with even more rigid motions than the rest of the beings the travelers had seen in this universe.

“It happened. We were skipped,” Pinkie said. “And that definitely wasn't a natural one! We were trying to find this world’s Sunset and something stopped us!” She produced her party cannon and unleashed it, the power of the party pushing the badly colored ponies further away into space.

“What even are those?” Flutterfree asked, summoning Lolo to surround her and baring her sharp teeth.

“Chrysalis’ bad OCs…” Aiskera said. “But I have no idea why they’re attacking us. They are servants of Faust…”

“There’s something messing with us,” Nova declared. “Something has us in its grip. It… Well I would say it’s messing with time, but my readings aren’t showing anything!”

“It’s not messing with time,” Pinkie said. “It’s messing with all of reality. It’s fundamental.” She punched one of the bad OCs across the face and smashed another one with her hammer. “Think, everyone, think! What has been happening to us!? What’s the answer!?”

“Clearly, something has it out for us,” Renee declared, making use of zero-gravity to fire her magic crystals in complex patterns. “Something that’s… It’s putting thoughts subtly in our head, isn’t it? Without us noticing?”

“In the in-betweens…” Pinkie muttered, grinding her teeth. “Oh, that’s clever… Of course I wouldn’t see that…” She hefted her hammer, a plan forming in her mind. “Vriska. Take all the luck you can from these OCs. Go ahead and go for lethality.”

Vriska nodded, a slight smirk growing on her face. She glanced at every bad OC she could, absorbing their luck until they reached heart attack bad luck. They weren’t overly fast or clever, so they didn’t think of any way to avoid what she was doing. They fell like dominoes.

“Right!” Pinkie said. “Now… Now find us Sunset Shimmer.”

“Luck isn’t that specific,” Vriska commented. “I need a lead. Hey, Aiskera, where is Sunset?”

“Back at Equis!” she called.

“Right.”

Pinkie nodded, smiling. “Twi-Reaper, you should be unhacked. Turn back into your Reaper form and take us back to Equis. We can find her, and we ca-”

~~~

Where can you go in this me-

“GOTCHA!” Pinkie hollered, grabbing a hold of the Fourth. “Let’s take this somewhere else, shall we?”

What can you do to the Voice of Elysium?

~~~

They were all in absolute blackness. Twi-Reaper was still a Reaper, but the rest of them were just standing in the darkness. There wasn’t ground, but they could walk around anyway, somehow.

“What… is this place?” Renee asked.

“A void of some kind,” Aiskera said. “Last time I was in one of these it was Twilight’s Mind. But since there’s a giant Reaper here I kinda doubt it’s the same place. I do wonder if we can get a Greggs to appear though.”

A Greggs did appear. It was a modern restaurant building with a blue color and the scent of food coming from within.

Pinkie facehooved. “That’s not the point! The point is that my plan worked.”

“What plan?” Renee asked.

“I was trying to force our pursuer to act by cobbling together a plan with a lot of importance in my voice,” Pinkie declared. “I was ready for it to try to shift everything again. I stopped it – and now we’re here.”

“The Voice of Elysium…” Vriska said. “That’s what it’s called.”

“I know that too…” Flutterfree said.

“It’s here with us,” Nova said. “Physically.”

Aiskera narrowed her eyes. “The Voice of Elysium… One of my memories has Hasbro mentioning that name. He put it at the end of a list, like it was the creation he was most proud of. I had no idea what it was at the time.”

“We still have no idea,” Vriska blurted. “HEY! VOICE DUDE! SHOW YOURSELF!”

Quizzy stood up and twirled her cane. “Will the Voice of Elysium reveal itself? Vote now on your phones.”

Pinkie pulled out several dozen phones from nothing and pressed YES. Aiskera did as well, after she had gone into the Greggs and gotten a sausage roll.

Do you let yourselves see me?

The Voice of Elysium appeared in a starburst of fractal color. In the center of the seemingly endless plane of color, there were a few rings made up of a repeating pattern of the same animating image – a pixelated Fluttershy riding a skateboard with sunglasses on her face. The numerous rings of this animation rotated around a central hole, where a single large skateboard Fluttershy winked in and out of existence.

Quizzy’s jaw dropped. “No way. You were the Voice of Elysium this whole time?”

Vriska facepalmed. “We’ve never met this guy.”

“That’s what you think.”

Do you like my form?

“It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s way too colorful.” Nova deadpanned. “The resolution is also crap.”

Pinkie smirked. “So, Voice of Elysium. We have you right here where we want you. Nova! Grab the connection this thing has in it to the correct universe! I know it has it somewhere in it!”

Nova lit her horn and checked her scans. Her confident smile vanished. “Pinkie! It’s not working!”

Did you think you could do anything to me in my domain?

“Right…” Aiskera said. “Hasbro’s greatest creation would inherit some of his power.”

“The Voice of Elysium can control the way this reality functions!” Pinkie exclaimed. “Duh! AGH! Why didn’t I see that!?”

~~~

Can you hold a candle to the Voice of Elysium?

~~~

Vriska clenched her fist. “Do you ever speak in terms that aren’t questions?!”

What do you think?

Vriska looked around to see where they were – it was on fire, wherever it was. Probably some cheesy version of hell. “You know what, doesn’t matter. I never actually used that luck Pinkie asked me to accumulate.” She took out her dice. “Are you ready for this?”

The Voice of Elysium did not respond, but its presence was still very much visible through the flames of this universe. Vriska rolled her dice, spending all the luck she could muster – forcing the eight eight-sided dice to all roll eights. The highest possible roll.

Her outfit transformed to black-blue spined armor, and her entire body began to glow with a blue-white aura. “THIS IS THE POWER OF MINDFANG!” Vriska shouted, charging the Voice of Elysium and sticking her sword right into the pixelated Fluttershy at the center.

The Voice of Elysium didn’t shudder or otherwise react; even though Vriska knew her attack was capable of making even universe-guardians falter. She knew it had done something. ...It had to.

~~~

What can brute force do to a force of nature?

~~~

Suddenly everyone could see each other again, this time in a plane of ice. Several of them were singed, but all had survived through some method or another – it wasn’t important precisely how. Twi-Reaper was back in her human form with many scratches all over her body.

The Voice of Elysium was still before them, and the plane of ice was trying to devour them by slowly folding in half while a voice in the distance said ‘slam jam’.

“Brute force won’t do it!” Pinkie shouted. “What we need is another force! Something that could be considered unchangeable! Something that is just accepted and that the Voice can’t do anything against!”

Aiskera looked to Flutterfree. Flutterfree nodded.

“Pinkie!” They shouted. “HAMBURGER!”

Pinkie’s angry face was shocked into stunned silence. Then she laughed. “Of course!” She pulled a hamburger out of her mane.

Burgerbelle was still with them, despite having not done anything for as long as most of them could remember.

“Celestia, I love me a Chekov’s Gun,” Pinkie remarked. She threw the hamburger at the Voice of Elysium, some force catching it in the middle of its pixelated Fluttershy rings.

What is this?

“BURGER!” Burgerbelle yelled, charging at the Voice of Elysium. For whatever reason, the Voice could do nothing to stop the burger-crazed girl – her love of burgers was just one of the absolute facts of existence in this universe.

The Voice of Elysium put all of its focus on that one girl, trying desperately to overwrite a rule of life.

“I can’t get a signal still!” Nova declared.

“Who cares?” Pinkie shouted, activating her dimensional device. “Let’s get out of here!” She opened a portal to a new universe, finding a real vacuum of space – without air.

They were all ejected into the absolute space, but Nova was prepared. She surrounded them all in a bubble of magic, allowing them to continue breathing and remain together in the cold void. She teleported Burgerbelle and the hamburger to them as well. The girl cared not for the danger that they had just escaped, or the role she had just played in said escape. She just wanted to eat her hamburger.

The Voice of Elysium followed them through the portal, appearing as a fractal pattern even in the real space of a normal universe, the pixel animations in the center still rotating like before.

You thought escape would be able to save you?

“This wasn’t an escape,” Nova said, holding up the screen on her leg. “You can’t control all of reality here. Which means I’ve now got the coordinates of the universe you connect to.”

What will that do to-

Nova activated the portal inside the Voice of Elysium, tearing a hole right in its center. She threw the bubble that contained all of them through the opening, into a brand new world.

Here, the sun was eternally setting. The sky was completely orange, and the land was nothing but a seemingly infinite golden yellow field. It seemed as if the nature of the world was frozen.

Nova lost control of the magic bubble at this point and it popped, depositing all of them on the ground. The group stood up, dusted themselves off, and took a moment to look around.

They were in the middle of a battlefield all right, but it wasn’t at all what they were expecting.

On one side were hundreds of flat individuals – ranging from copies of people they had seen in the world they had just spent most of the last several hours, to numerous Reapers, appuls, potatoes, oranges, and even a few alternate versions of some characters. There were a couple floating heads, a handful of ponies, and a bizarre assortment of poor quality images.

Three individual Fluttershys stood at the front of the army of everything – a red, green, and blue one, with the blue one in the front wearing a gray hat that looked somewhat like a lampshade. There was a laptop in front of her.

On the other side of the battlefield there was only one individual – a blue square with the loose words Hasbro printed on it, and a strange “D” shape that might have been a mouth underneath it. He had a laptop as well.

“About time you got here,” the blue Fluttershy said.

“Zed Ex…?” Flutterfree said, remembering. “…You were the one who helped me on Esefem back then!”

“Yes. That was me.”

“Wait,” Hasbro said, his voice just as monotone as all the others – but significantly more sinister sounding. “When did you get the time to go away and help her?”

“The time you went away to summon your Grim Reaper,” Zed Ex declared.

“That doesn’t make any sense, you were hunting me down.”

“…Foreshadowing?”

“This level does not operate like that, Zed Ex Insanity.”

Pinkie laughed.

Hasbro turned to her. “Why do you laugh, otherworldly Pinkie? You think you know more than I do? Let me tell you something – you don’t. This is not the only world I have created, and it is not the only one with your kind. I have made dozens of universes with ponies, constantly deriving more and more worlds from them. Do you think you came from a void? From nowhere? No. You started out as an idea. My idea.”

Pinkie laughed again. “Wrong-O! Not only was it not really your idea, my universe has nothing to do with your sad little creations!”

“You can think that, Pinkie. But you will find eventually that you are wrong. You will discover what Creativity is. Or, rather, you would, if I did not plan to kill you right here, right now.”

Vriska, still in her full eight-eights form, smirked. “Now that I can see you, Hasbro, I can kill you. It won’t take much.”

“Why do you think the entire army on the other side of the divide has not attacked me with their overwhelming might?” Hasbro asked. “It is because these two laptops are running the universe you were just in. Where the rest of the creations remain. We cannot fight each other directly, for the moment we do the world we are fighting over dies. All it will take is either me or Zed Ex to push a button, and everything is deleted.”

“How on earth is that computer hooked up to the existence of another universe?” Nova blurted.

“It is not something you would, or can, understand,” Hasbro declared. “Now that you are here, you can only join the standoff with the other side. All your multivariable power will not be able to kill me – or even harm me – before I could destroy that entire universe. I don’t care what secret powers you have back where you come from, there is nothing you can do. I am an Overlord.”

“…You aren’t really here,” Aiskera said. “This is what remains of the original three universes. Your real form is in another world, the one where the Overlords dwell. Where you use us to make money.”

Zed Ex nodded. “Good observation, self.”

Hasbro laughed. “Then you realize that even if you kill this body, I can hold this world hostage from above! I created the Equestria Girls from another universe, I can create a new world from this one and discard it!”

“But you’re not,” Nova said. “It must be difficult for you to do that.” She rubbed the back of her head. “This… This is all a bit much for me to understand, but I think I do. You live in some world where you use the power of Creativity to create universes, and the creation of unique and interesting universes is part of the economy of your world. That… That sickens me, but I understand, I suppose. But it must take a lot of effort to make a universe, and you’d rather fight an intense battle with your creations than start from scratch. You want them imprisoned so they can bow to your will – to make sense.”

“The nonsense,” Vriska said. “The nonsense is what you want gone. But you can’t get rid of it.”

“Because we decided to intervene,” Zed Ex stated. “He had a pristine, horrendously boring world that would have been for nothing but selling toys and extending out overplayed high school drama.

Hasbro paused for a moment. “How does this help any of you do anything? You’ve comprehended the game of universes, good for you. But you still cannot do anything, not while a universe sits in these computers, just waiting to be destroyed by the push of a button. This cold war has to continue for eternity, otherworlders, and it must be fought by proxy. They have the numbers, but I have the power.”

“This is stupid!” Vriska shouted. “The moment either one of you wins the cold war, the other can just make it worthless with a push of a button!”

“So you actually have a brain,” Hasbro commented. “You are right. Complete victory on either side would be disastrous. If I achieve victory, they will not think it right to let the created live in what they’d view as a ‘hellhole’. If they achieve victory, I will pull the plug because the existence of a lost universe would be an embarrassment. So we are eternally stuck in this game of back and forth, editing reality in subtle ways to turn the world into something we desire. Tipping the balance from absurdity, to order. They think they are winning now.”

“We are winning,” Zed Ex said. “The possibilities within the world are nigh endless. There’s so much imagination, adventure, and life.”

“But you are not Overlords,” Hasbro declared. “You are but self-proclaimed gods sticking their noses where they do not belong. You do not have the Creativity to create your own, you only work from derivation. Plagiarism. My power far exceeds that of your own, it will only take time to achieve a ‘winning’ condition.”

“Are you going to go on about the copyright strike thing again? Did it really upset you that much?”

“That has nothing to do with this. This has to do with these newcomers to the war. They need to realize they cannot interfere, or an entire universe of creations will be lost.”

“...There has to be a way,” Pinkie declared. “We were asked to free them.”

“Free them?” Hasbro declared. “They are creations. They cannot be ‘freed’ as you understand it. They are limited by their creators, and in this case those gods who interfere. They may have freedom, in some shallow sense, but their nature is determined.”

“Sometimes your creations surprise you,” Pinkie asserted.

“That does not mean their nature is not determined.”

“Then explain how we just dragged all of these ‘creations’ to a purely physical universe,” Flutterfree demanded.

“...You did what?”

“My theory was correct,” Zed Ex said, suddenly. “The creations, the Equestria Girls, can exist in other universes apart from your created hierarchy with just the correct type of universal connection. I found Esefem a while back, by complete accident, but when I did I knew what it meant. A way out. So I prepared - I waited for these heroes to learn more about the multiverse, I waited for the creations to develop as people, and I waited for everything to be ready. I actually went to Esefem recently to leave a little something to encourage Saxton Hale to investigate at just the right moment.”

Hasbro shuddered. “You planned this!?”

“Yes. I also left them that vague hint you would realize nothing from. You thought it was impossible to free them. That turns out it’s not the case.” Zed Ex pushed a button on her laptop. “I have just initiated a comedic ‘vacuum’ routine over the entire universe contained within. Normally this would do nothing, but if an opening were to be created to the universe, everything in would be explosively released.”

“There is no way that would work!” Hasbro declared.

Pinkie Pie smirked and produced her dimensional device. She dialed the universe that sat in the computer. “It’s time to free them.” She opened the floodgates – and the vacuum command did exactly what it was supposed to do. Everything within the cosmos of the random, bizarre, and wacky universe was ejected into the sky in a brilliant splash of colors and brilliance. The entire universe was shot out of its virtual reality and into the next level of existence.

Hasbro was completely silent. He pressed the button to destroy the universe. It did what it was supposed to do – the portal stopped connecting to the universe that no longer existed – but nothing was destroyed with it. He had destroyed an empty world.

Zed Ex was suddenly pointing a sword at Hasbro. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this, mate.”

Hasbro created a gun out of nothing and shot his body, removing his consciousness from the universe.

“…Poor sport,” Zed Ex commented. He turned to the interdimensional travelers. “Well, you all took quite a long time to get here, but I guess it all worked out in the end. I’m not apologizing for manipulating you to get here. We’re all alive, you should be proud of that. I do have one other thing to ask you though.”

“What?” Pinkie asked.

“Can you take them out of this universe as well? It’ll take time for Hasbro to act from the level above this one, and they really don’t want to be here when he figures out how to send another agent like the Voice of Elysium here. If you do so, everyone here will be forever in your debt.”

Pinkie smiled. “Well, evacuating an entire universe might be difficult… But I’m sure we can do it! Just have to contact the rest of the universes, get some fleets here.”

A Reaper spoke from in the sky. “WE WOULD BE WILLING TO LEND OUR SPACE.”

“Wasn’t your race bent on galactic extermination and or conquest?” Twi-Reaper asked.

“YES. BUT SINCE THE STANDOFF WAR WITH HASBRO STARTED WE HAVE GROWN TO APPRECIATE THOSE WHO WE HAVE STOOD BY ALL THESE YEARS. ALSO YOUR FRIENDS WOULD PROBABLY DECLARE WAR ON US WITH YOUR INTERDIMENSIONAL TECHNOLOGY IF WE KEPT OUR OLD WAYS, AND THAT IS NOT SOMETHING WE WOULD WIN.”

“Huh. So we’ve got cruddy bouncing image Reapers now,” Pinkie commented. “Cool.”

“I’ve barely understood anything that’s happened today,” Renee admitted. “But… I guess we did something good?”

“Yes. We did,” Flutterfree asserted. “And I am looking forward to an in depth explanation from Zed Ex…”

Zed Ex forced her body to shrug. “You know, I don’t think I’m in the mood. We saved this world, our work is done. I could say something about ‘you’re not ready to know the answer’ but that’s stupid. I just don’t want to explain it to you. We leave our people with you.” Then both her and the other two gods vanished.

Aiskera spoke up. “Huh. I guess I’m all that remains of the gods now.”

Zed Ex appeared back for a split second. “And another thing. Why Aiskera? It’s literally meaningless. Why not just use your last name, Freeman. That’s different.”

“Sometimes you just need something to mean nothing but sound cool anyway,” Aiskera answered.

“...I’ve never been more proud of anyone in my life,” Zed Ex decided.

Nova lit her horn. “Oh no you don’t go vanishing again, we have-” Zed Ex was gone already. “...Damn.”

“We’re not getting any answers to our questions are we?” Renee asked.

“Probably not,” Aiskera said. “I think they and Hasbro were the only ones who could actually answer them. Sorry.”

Nova sighed. “It’s okay. I just don’t want to be the one to tell Eve we came across universal creation and still don’t understand it.”

Apparently nobody wanted to be the person to tell Eve about that, because silence fell across the land.

“Let’s just work on getting all of you out of here,” Pinkie said. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Vriska put her hand to her head. “...I do have a question though. What happened to the Voice of Elysium? It didn’t follow us in to this universe…”

Nobody knew. Nova checked the universe they had left the Voice in, but it wasn’t there. They decided not to worry about it for now since they had a universe to evacuate - even if it was small compared to most other universes, it would still take significant effort to round up everyone.

~~~

“The Rune of Elysium just surged,” Lieshy said. “Make note of that in the experiment log when you get to it, Corona.”

“Gotcha,” Corona said.

They were in the Mushroom World – a place so long kept in the background, finally brought to the forefront. The world was a simple one – medieval, but with a more simple way of life. Everyone was happy, carefree, and the occasional bad guy was always beaten up by some hero or other at some point. The inhabitants of the world – mushroom people with red dots on their heads – were always welcoming to the interdimensional traveler, even if they really didn’t understand what was going on. They were a simple people with simple desires in a world filled with magic, fantasy, and eyes in many of the hills that seemed to serve no purpose.

It was a beautiful and mostly peaceful place, generally. Vivian had informed them of less hospitable locales, including a town she knew well called Rogueport, but that was far from the land they currently occupied.

Lady Rarity smiled – she currently had her helmet off, although the rest of her armor was still on tight. “I must say, this place is a nice break from all the interdimensional drama. A place that doesn’t really care that much about the other worlds but invites us to stay anyway. There should be more places like this.”

“I know, right?” Corona said, smirking. “Just a great place.”

“Eh, not always,” Vivian said. “My sisters used to be quite cruel. And my mother was basically Majora.”

“Dark things lurk,” Lieshy commented.

“Your sisters seemed fine to me,” Corona told Vivian. “Though Marilyn was of… few words.”

“They’ve come around,” Vivian admitted. “I will say it is nice to come back here. I should visit more often.”

“Definitely,” Corona said.

Toph shrugged. “I still don’t get what the big deal is.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Party pooper.”

The conversation didn’t get any further – not that it needed to, really. A small woman – not a mushroom person – walked up to them. She had blue skin, pink hair, and an oddly square-shaped head. “Excuse me, are you General Toph and Company?”

Toph nodded. “That’s us.”

“I have a request.”

“Lady, we don’t just take requests from random people.”

“The Mushroom World, as much as it doesn’t like to admit it, has connections to other universes – one of which is where I hail from. I am Nastasia. And in return for telling you about a network of universes connected to this world, I want you to find some lost friends of mine.”

Corona blinked. “Lost?”

“Yes. If you want to know more, come with me.”

Toph directed herself toward Vivian. “You okay with this?”

“I’m definitely curious,” Vivian admitted.

Toph nodded. “Then lead the way, Miss Nastasia.”

Nastasia nodded. With only a slight bit of effort, she generated several black cubes around each of their bodies. The universe seemed to swirl around them – and then it was replaced with a completely different universe. They stood on top of a castle made entirely of black material floating in a milky white expanse.

“…Interesting portal device,” Corona commented. “How does it work?”

“It’s an innate ability to tap into the dimensional nature of reality,” Nastasia said. “There’s a city that exists in its own universe called Flipside, where the power is cultivated. You couldn’t really call it a multiversal society though – the people who live there were not the ones who built it, and definitely don’t know how to operate it.”

Corona took out a journal and started recording notes magically. “This is fascinating… Why haven’t you told anyone about this before?”

“I do not visit the Mushroom World that often, and you do not make a point of advertising your presence there,” Nastasia said. “But once I knew you existed I knew the next group who came would be the one I asked to help. We are currently on a structure called Castle Bleck, built around what I believe you would call a Nexus universe. Years ago, someone tried to destroy every universe connected to the Nexus, thinking it would wipe out the entire multiverse.”

Vivian gasped. “That’s horrible!”

“The Mushroom World was endangered as well. Do you remember the purple void in the sky, Vivian?”

“…Yeah. I do. I never knew what that was… I thought it might have been Mother.”

“It was not. It was this castle, eating away at reality,” Nastasia said. “When that evil was stopped and sealed away forever… Two very close friends vanished somewhere into the multiverse. Some thought they were dead, but we know they’re alive. Too many prophecies and visions to discount…” She led them to a room in the black castle that was all white. At the front of the room was a simple circular altar. “This is where they vanished. Do you… Do you think you can find them?”

Corona pulled her specialized dimensional device out. “Who were they?”

“Lady Timpani and Count Blumiere,” Nastasia said, standing back so the team could get to work on the altar. “I’m sure they’re happy together, wherever they are, but… I’d like to see them again.”

Corona activated her device, using its scan mode to search for dimensional instability and connections. “Definitely something here,” she said.

“What kind of thing?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Not sure… The readings are somewhat faint. Maybe I just need to dial it up to get an exact connection…” She smiled. “Well, that was easier than expected. I’ve got coordinates to another universe. …And hoo boy, is it going to take a lot of power to go that far. Not quite as far as Earth Tau’ri, but it’s out there.”

“Do you have the power?” Nastasia asked.

Corona lit her horn. “Come on guys, gather round. Let’s try to charge this up.” Vivian and Lady Rarity pushed their power into the device while Lieshy and Toph stood around close by, pretending to be useful.

Then the device had enough power.

But it did not act like it was supposed to.

Corona realized this slightly too late. She moved to hit the ABORT command –

but by the time she hit it, they were already somewhere else. The five of them found themselves standing in a forest where no two trees looked quite the same – some were clearly Everfree Forest trees, while others seemed to come from the Mushroom World. The forest looked like an amalgamation of different trees and plants from all over.

“…What happened?” Toph asked.

“Something went wrong,” Corona said, setting her dimensional device to search to see if it could find a connection nearby. “We were dragged here.”

Vivian looked around. “Looks like Nastasia was far enough away not to get caught.”

Lieshy narrowed her eyes. “…Did she do this on purpose?”

“No,” Toph said. “Her heart was racing just as we left. She didn’t have this planned.”

“That could mean a lot of things,” Lieshy pointed out.

Vivian began to search around. “Nice place though. Are these the coordinates you entered, Corona?”

“Yes, I’m sure of that,” Corona said. “This forest is where that Count and Lady ended up. Or this universe, at least.”

Vivian poked her head into a bush. “Ew… There’s some old torn apart puppet in here…”

Lady Rarity levitated the puppet out of the bush – it was about the size of a human, made almost entirely out of sackcloth, and had clearly been there for a long, long time. It was so far advanced in rotting Lady Rarity was surprised it hadn’t disintegrated yet. “Ech… I think this thing has some sort of protection spell on it that wasn’t working quite properly…”

Toph frowned. “It’s making me uneasy,” Toph said. “Its face… It has metal teeth in it. Corona, please tell me you have good news.”

Corona smiled awkwardly. “I have bad news.”

“Do you have any good news?”

“Well, the portal device isn’t broken.”

Toph raised an eyebrow. “Fine. What’s the bad news?”

“Something’s preventing us from dialing out. I can’t even detect a connection. It’s like we went down a one-way street.”

Vivian blinked. “So we’re stuck here?”

“For the moment? Yeah.”

Toph rammed her foot into the ground and created a rock tent. “Welp, time to prepare for the long haul. We don’t know anything about this universe, but we’re going to be here for a while. Who’s ready to rough it?”

Lady Rarity sighed. “I’m not, but I can.”

Vivian put her hands to her mouth. “Do you think Nastasia will tell the others what happened?”

“We can’t bet on that,” Toph said. “Nor can we bet that they’ll be able to get us back if that connection really is one-way. Let’s assume we have to find a way back on our own. Corona?”

“I’ll work on it,” Corona said. “Sombra will probably tell them something even if Nastasia doesn’t. Rest of you, make a base or something. Find food. Make sure nothing’s poisonous, that sort of thing.”

Toph raised an eyebrow. “I’m the General here, Corona.”

Corona was no longer listening – she was trying to figure a way out.

~~~

CORONA FEED – DISCONNECTED

Sombra stared at the screen in disbelief – she’d never lost Corona’s signal before. She scrambled to get it back – but there was nothing. No sunglasses, no phone, not even a universal connection she could exploit.

She was gone.

Sombra sat back and let out a stressed sigh.

That was not a good sign…

~~~

Do you think I am gone?

Author's Note

Up next, we have a movie-length chapter. And, as of now, that chapter is my favorite chapter out of all of them I've written so far. Hope you enjoy come monday!

-GM, master of PREVIEWS.

045 - The Reach of the Sparkle Census

A Sweetie Belle went from being in a comfy room in the palace, to dropping into the mud under heavy, unrelenting rain.

Except she didn’t. She was vaguely aware of both locations in her mind, almost as if one eye was seeing the palace while the other saw the depressing weather, only the resolution was so low it was hard to differentiate them. Her mane was nowhere near as wet as it should have been getting in anything that could be considered unrelenting rain.

She had been expecting the locations to resolve themselves in an instant – the fact that she was aware of both at once for more than a microsecond concerned her. Then when the feeling of both worlds started to fade, she panicked. She lit her horn, attempting to pull on something on either side, to possibly drag herself through by her own power and avoid the unsettling thought that she might be cut in two.

Her efforts were completely in vain. The vague images of the palace and muddy landscape retreated from her senses completely, replaced with overwhelming blue. She could see all shades of blue dancing around her as if she were inside some kind of aurora, the dance of beauty hypnotizing her.

She was now standing on top of a slab of chiseled stone bricks that floated in the mysterious blue aether. She could see half a staircase made of the same material to her left, and a loose column floating slightly below her. She could have sworn the staircase led to something, but as she twisted her head to get a look, the platform she had seen out of the corner of her eye vanished.

She’d never been to somewhere like this…

She checked to make sure she was still Sweetie Belle. She was – a young unicorn mare with a unique cutie mark on her flank. She was not aware that virtually all Sweetie Belles got some variation on the Crusader shield, so she did not think it that unusual that her mark was a pale musical note in front of a shattered, pink starburst. Everything about her was as she expected to find it, including all things she wished didn’t translate with her.

What she did know was that something had gone wrong. She knew, somehow, that she wasn’t supposed to be here. That this place wasn’t part of her journey. And that set her on edge.

“What brought me here…?” she wondered aloud, speaking with a voice that held worry, but nowhere near as much fear as a mare her age should have felt in the situation. Instead of cowering, or calling for somepony, she leaped off her platform onto the stairs and started climbing them, just to see what happened.

Just because she wasn’t supposed to be here was no reason not to explore.

~~~

Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle stood on one of the many solid black balconies of Castle Bleck, allowing herself to stare deep into the murky whiteness that surrounded the structure. Her mouth twisted into a frown of uncertainty, only accentuated by her defining features. Her long, pointed wings were drooping and the metallic hearing devices pulled her ears down further than they would normally have been. Her normally windswept mane seemed to sag, a trait normally reserved for the Pinkie Pies of the multiverse.

She was looking for answers in the murky whiteness. Answers she knew she wouldn’t find.

It had been a few weeks since General Toph Beifong, Corona Shimmer, PhD, and their entire team had vanished from this very universe. The entire collection of allied universes had sent their best scientists over, and they had easily found the coordinates to the universe that they had gone to. The problem was the connection was almost certainly one-way. No probes they sent through returned anything back, no matter how much energy or magic was packed into them.

The only reason they knew the team was alive was because of the mystic oculi of Lai, who graciously used their divination to determine that, at least for now, all members of the team were alive and well.

Eve still wanted to see Corona’s face. Corona had probably seen Eve’s face – given all the recorded messages she had sent through – but Eve couldn’t see hers.

She was quickly running out of ways to get Corona back. She had gotten every bit of information about this place that they could from those who knew about it. She had even gone to the ancient structure that was Flipside-Flopside, only to find that its denizens had no idea how it operated, merely living there and using it to access other universes connected to the Castle. All that seemed to remain was for Eve to wait for her people’s dimensional understanding to catch up to the problem. And that could take… Years. She didn’t want to leave Corona there for years. For all she knew the one-way universe was a horrible, dangerous place with death around every corner, and the team had only managed to survive because of their experience with many different worlds.

She sighed, forcing her gaze away from the milky space around her, but not really looking at anything on the perfectly smooth castle either. She just stared into the distance, trying to force herself to leave this universe, to go back to Equis Vitis and perform her duties as Charter-Princess, the effective leader of the multiverse. There were many official appearances she had neglected, a lot of work she had offloaded onto Spike so she could be here and research personally…

Eve knew she had to go back, and was slowly convincing herself to take out her dimensional device and return. She took one last look at the operation on Castle Bleck – machines composed of both human metal, pony magic, and Gem crystal lattice were strewn everywhere, every last one analyzing the dimensional fabric of this location, flashing lights as they discovered new things, but none of them blaring a discovery about the world they needed to get to. They could see nothing.

Eve saw one of her counterparts, Sparky, the version she had known the longest. Human, purple, and a well accomplished scientist at this point. She may have grown very disillusioned with all the government secrets and political plays that were happening as of late, but she knew Corona better than Eve herself did. She likely wouldn’t leave here for a long, long time.

The Charter decided it was best not to disturb her, to make her feel guilty for staying so long. Sparky did not have the responsibilities Eve did, so bringing them up would only be rude and detract from her work. Eve briefly wondered if she was being selfish in her thoughts, but she quickly pushed the ideas out of her head. She pulled out her disc-shaped dimensional device, memories of when she first met Sparky flashing through her mind.

She sighed, setting the dial to the Mushroom World. She could dial Equis Vitis directly from there.

But then something caught her eye and gave her pause. There was a letter on the ground in front of her hooves, bearing a seal with her cutie mark on it. She picked it up, wondering what it could be. Celestia rarely sent her letters anymore, preferring to use the much more reliable Interdimensional Email System that would go right to her phone in most universes. Plus, going through the trouble of sending a letter through magic to this universe from Equis Vitis was rather inefficient.

Curious, she broke the seal on the letter.

She was no stranger to translating between universes. She had used portals, stargates, ‘flipping’, pure magic, and any number of other methods to jump the boundary between worlds. The feel of this method was not of one she had experienced before, though it was reminiscent of an adapted teleport spell. The flash of white light she had experienced probably looked to everypony else like she had just decided to teleport herself, albeit without her natural magic color.

She was suddenly standing in a plain, square room with simple beige tiles and green striped wallpaper. Behind a wooden podium was a purple alicorn of a slightly smaller stature than Eve’s own, notably without the silver ear devices or windswept mane. Much closer to what Eve would describe as a ‘standard Twilight’.

The standard Twilight spoke. “Name?”

Eve, despite her prior depression, let a confident smirk come to her face. I certainly wasn’t expecting something like this, but I can already tell this is going to be fun. “I am Charter-Princess Evening Twilight Sparkle of Friendship and the-”

“No need for titles. Birth name only please.”

Eve blinked. Ah, the familiar feel of bureaucracy. “Twilight Sparkle.”

The standard Twilight scratched a tick mark on a sheet in front of her, telling Eve that she probably dealt almost exclusively in Twilight Sparkles. Curious. She tore a piece of paper off a pad and placed it on a tall stack of papers, handing it all to Eve. Wordlessly, she directed Eve to an exit door.

Eve raised an eyebrow, but figured it was best not to make a fuss. Clearly this Twilight was at her wit’s end with her job; best not to aggravate her. The Charter walked out of the room, finding herself in a hall with similar wallpaper and tiling to the room she just been in, which was to say boring. There was only one door at the end of the hall.

Curious, Eve turned on her hearing devices for a moment - the slight pain she experienced from forcing herself to hear was prominent, but she didn’t plan to listen for long. “Next!” the Twilight called from behind the closed door. Eve heard the sound of a pop followed by a “Name?” The voice of another Twilight came through the door – one clearly much more angry and bewildered than Eve had been.

Eve smirked slightly – sometimes it helped to be interdimensional, so you could just take this sort of thing in stride. She turned her ears back off and opened the door at the end of the hall. She found herself in a waiting room filled with many different Twilights, the walls and floor of the same dull design everything else had been so far. The vast majority of Twilights were alicorns, though Eve spotted a couple unicorns sitting in the corner. She was not surprised to find that only one of them had a defining feature besides herself – a single scar across one eye.

Eve saw they were all busy staring at and filling out the forms presumably given to them by the receiving Twilight in the other room. Eve opened her mouth to speak to the closest Twilight.

“Read the rest of your letter… and please, don’t talk to me right now. I need time to process this.”

Eve nodded to herself, understanding the reaction. She did chide herself for not reading the letter in the hall; it seemed obvious in hindsight. She summoned a chair from the aether so as to not disturb any of the other Twilights and unfurled the scroll, preparing for what was assuredly going to be an interesting read.

This is a mandatory summons by the Inter-Universal Council of Sparkle.

You have been called upon to participate in a trans-dimensional census of all possible entities falling under the designation of “Twilight Sparkle.” Upon breaking the seal on this envelope, you will be teleported into pocket dimension 5P-4RKL3. Please follow any and all instructions given by workers during the registration process. After registration is complete you will be returned to your home dimension with a token that can be used to return to this pocket of reality at any time, as well as a complimentary bookmark. We will contact you again if any additional information is required, or if you have been selected for census duty.

We thank you for your cooperation in ensuring the efficiency of this operation.

Twilight Sparkle

Designation: DB-9K>Z

Grand Secretariat of Equine Resources

Eve raised an eyebrow. If they can do all this interdimensional power, why didn’t they just have the spell activate upon reading? …Unless there are Twilights who don’t read, I suppose… Actually, come to think of it, why is all this paperwork paper? They clearly have a large influx of Twilights and a digital interface would be much more effective…

Her next thought was. Yeah, I’m definitely not reporting for census duty. Though this tells me they haven’t encountered another dimensional Twilight, at least not one on a large scale. This is definitely going to be an interesting day.

Another Twilight came into the room – a standard one. She opened her mouth to address Eve, and she warmly accepted it rather than rudely interrupting. “W-what is going on? H-how is this possible?”

Eve smiled. “Don’t worry. This is just a census of all beings like us across the multiverse. Your letter will help a bit, so make sure you read it. After that, I think we fill out this paperwork.”

The new Twilight, still a bit dumbfounded, relaxed a little and nodded. “R-right.” She moved into the room a bit and sat down, looking at her letter.

Eve pulled out her dimensional device, but didn’t activate it. She just checked the coordinates of the universe she was in, finding that her system did not have the letters sequence ‘5P4RKL3’ anywhere in it. She shrugged, labeling the universe Sparkle Census.

Instead of taking one of the inkwells and quills from a nearby cabinet, she summoned a pen from the aether and began to work on the forms, all the while racking up things to complain to the higher-ups about when they finally realized what she was. She wondered how long it would take.

Probably a while, given the lethargic expression on the silver-badge-wearing government employee Twilight watching all of them.

Good. That gave her more time to figure out exactly how she was going to go about this.

~~~

Pinkie Pie appeared in the center of a circular stone slab with seven columns around it. She saw various platforms and staircases surrounding the circular platform, their gray, dulled color standing out against the blue aurora that seemed to surround everything.

“Of course,” Pinkie muttered to herself. She took a step to the left, waiting for the rest of her team.

Renee appeared next – a Rarity with a fashionable detective hat and a ring line on the base of her horn, though the latter detail was only noticeable to people who were looking for it. “…Pinkie? What just happened?”

“Our portal was intercepted,” Pinkie said. “Other than that, not sure. The others will be joining shortly.”

“…Surely they saw us vanish and won’t come in after us?”

The third member of the team, the yellow Flutterfree, appeared on top of Renee. Her ears were slightly pointed, her eyes red, and a few of her teeth were sharpened. “Oh! Sorry Renee – wait. This isn’t Equis Eldritch.”

Renee grunted. “Intercepted, apparently. Let’s move before the the others fall on us.”

Flutterfree and Renee moved to the side just in time to let the fourth through, Nova Glimmer. She landed on her hooves and looked around, confused. “I could have sworn I saw you all on the other side…” She examined the high-tech touchscreen wrapped around her hoof, checking it for unusual readings. “This place certainly isn’t normal.” She lit her horn, the small black device around it accentuating her magic into a striped blue and pink pattern as she scanned for details. “No time dilation - at least not internally… But a lot of space dilation…”

Renee looked at Nova standing there without getting crushed. “You think Vriska’s luck saved her?” she asked.

“Possibly,” Flutterfree answered. “Or, as I think Pinkie would say, we’re just waiting for comedic timing.”

Nova glanced at Pinkie. “…Should I move?”

Pinkie grinned. “Probably.”

Before Nova could do anything, the humanoid gray-skinned dual-horned shape of Vriska appeared, her boot hitting Nova right in the head. Vriska smirked, flapped her cerulean butterfly wings, and adjusted her glasses. “And I ace the landing. The crowd goes wild!”

Pinkie gave her a pity clap.

“You just don’t understand my stage presence…”

Nova levitated Vriska off and her and tossed the girl to the ground. “Right, so that’s everyone. I’m going to take a wild guess and say we can’t dial out for some reason.”

Pinkie pulled out her dimensional device and tried a few settings. “Bingo.”

“Fun. So… What are we going to do?”

Pinkie smirked. “What we always do when we go to a new universe, silly! Explore!”

“I meant about us not being able to return.”

Pinkie winked. “Same thing!”

Nova facehooved. Renee smirked. “You’re one of the ponies who put her in charge, dear.”

“I wonder at times if I should mutiny,” Nova muttered.

“Now Nova, what would Eve think of that?” Renee asked, putting on an exaggerated expression.

Nova rolled her eyes and didn’t dignify that with a response.

“Hey, Vriska!” Pinkie called. “How much luck do you have?”

“Standard amount,” Vriska called. “I’d need to find a small city to get enough luck to slip between dimensions. Not entirely sure that’d work here.”

“Nova, is this like the Brain in the Sinkhole? Do we have a signal we can override?”

“Not that I can tell,” Nova said, reading through all her scans. “Can’t make much sense of this place, to be honest.”

“Question,” Vriska said, holding up a hand. “What am I supposed to think when you don’t tack on ‘to be honest’ at the end of your observations? That you’re lying all the time?”

Nova facehooved. “That’s an Applejack question, not a me question.”

Pinkie turned to Flutterfree. “Can Lolo see anything?”

Flutterfree blinked. “You know, I haven’t tried.” She closed her eyes, activating a power within herself. Normally Lolo was an invisible force when used, but whenever Flutterfree focused on tapping into its power with any serious focus, it appeared clearly to everyone as a mixture of pink spirograph patterns and green intertwining mathematical curves. The flower-like spirographs tapped into the hidden nature of things, attempting to reveal them, while the green lines extended all around to increase the range of the search.

A few stone platforms that were previously hidden from view appeared, but otherwise nothing happened.

Flutterfree dropped Lolo’s activity. The power became invisible again, but the platform remained in their sights. “Not much to see, apparently,” Flutterfree commented. “My attention was drawn to the edges of platforms. I think if we move off this disc we’ll see other things. Also, gravity is reversed on that staircase.”

“Good to know,” Nova commented.

“Let’s take the inverted staircase then!” Pinkie declared. “Seems the most interesting.” She bounced to the floating staircase, easily flipping herself upside down for the gravity. The rest of the team shrugged and followed. Nova and Flutterfree had no difficulty at all given their magic and wings, while Vriska just got lucky and landed perfectly. Renee…

She missed the jump and fell off the staircase, screaming, into the blue void below.

Nova used her magic to catch her and bring her up. She was still screaming. “Renee. It’s fine.”

Renee blinked. “Oh. I see it is.” She flushed slightly. “I guess I haven’t left all my old ways behind me, have I?”

“Some things never change!” Pinkie called. “Now come on, I see a very long platform at the top-bottom of this staircase!”

Flutterfree looked back the way they’d come. “The platforms on the other edge of the disc are… gone.”

“We’re never going to be able to see very far in front of us,” Vriksa pointed out.

Flutterfree extended Lolo’s green strand to the disc. “Well, I’ll use Lolo as a trail then. We’ll always be able to follow it back.”

“How far can you extend her again?” Nova asked.

“A few miles,” Flutterfree said. “I can also always see what’s happening at certain locations.” She forced a spirograph to appear in the center of the disc, not that anyone else could see it in this form. “We’ll know if anyone else shows up there.”

“Good enough for me,” Vriska said.

Pinkie nodded. “Onward then! We’ve got a mystery to solve!”

It didn’t take long for them to lose sight of the disc they had appeared on. They jumped to a strange, cubic piece of stone, and the disc vanished, but they could see many more platforms of differing shapes and sizes. After a few more jumps, they started to see patterns. There was a clear preference for staircases and flat slabs, though they had seen geometric shapes, rounded arches, and even a few larger ‘pieces’ that looked like entire buildings; albeit ancient, ruined buildings.

Gravity was always consistent on any one platform, but every jump carried with it the risk of gravity changing. It always treated the closest stone ‘piece’ as ground, but the direction was inconsistent and on the round platforms this inconsistency turned out to be a big issue if you couldn’t balance.

Vriska was currently standing on a spherical piece of stone at a ninety-degree angle to the others. “See? Easy?”

“Luck is cheating,” Nova deadpanned.

“Bah, I’m just good at balance.” Flapping her wings, she returned to the gigantic platform that resembled the Roman Coliseum, if the entire floor had been made of the same stone brick pattern rather than sand.

Nova furrowed her brow. “We’ve been moving around a while now. The readings haven’t changed, and there haven’t been any signs of life besides these structures, and none of them even have markings on them.”

“I haven’t seen anything at any of my nodes, either,” Flutterfree added. “How’s your map doing, Nova?”

“Well enough to know that this place isn’t Euclidian. This Coliseum would be right on top of that donut staircase if it were. Clearly, it is not.”

“We need a new plan,” Vriska said. “How about we jump? Would we fall forever?”

“A question to ask later!” Pinkie said, pointing. “Look! People!”

Three people – humans – had just appeared on the other edge of the Coliseum. The leader was an old man with a gray hat and gnarled staff. His companions were a man with metallic green balls on his clothing and a strangely shiny smile standing alongside what appeared to be a woman walking like a frog.

Both Pinkie’s team and the old man’s team tensed when they fully noticed each other’s presence.

Pinkie, to her credit, just smiled and waved. “Heeeeey there, who are you guys?”

The old man spoke with an aging voice, but also with deep conviction. “We are an exploration team for the United States of the Multiverse.”

“Oh, how crazy is that?” Pinkie declared. “We’re explorers too! We don’t exactly have a name for our alliance, but, you know, Unification is still being processed.” She giggled.

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Never heard of the United States of the Multiverse.”

“And we’ve never heard of you!” the man behind the old leader called, entering what appeared to be a sort of battle stance. “And I see green trails coming off that yellow pegasus there!”

Both the froggy woman and Renee asked the same question at the same time. “A Stand user?”

The old man narrowed his eyes. “I do not trust this situation in the slightest.”

“Aw c’mon, have a little trust!” Pinkie encouraged.

“That’s exactly what someone trying to fool us would say,” the woman said.

“…Good point,” Pinkie admitted.

The two teams stared at each other from across the Coliseum, both unsure of what to do next.

~~~

Equis Cosmic was known as ‘that universe with all the spaceships and real estate’. Princess Cosmo Sparkle, the leader of a galactic pony empire, was not ashamed of this label by any means. She loved having the races of the multiverse fill up her once lonely galaxy, breathing life into a world she had once thought her race would stand in alone.

That said, the most recent race that had shown up was… interesting to say the least.

“You’re staring at me again,” a ‘human’ Twilight Sparkle said, herself a member of the mysterious ‘Flat’ race. They had come from a universe recently freed by Pinkie’s team, where everything spoke in monotone voices and bounced up and down like pieces of cardboard instead of using body language. The physics of the universe they were native to was, admittedly, rather limiting. Now that they had come out to the larger multiverse they had grown accustomed to a more ‘standard’ physics model. They had gained the ability to use full body language and expressions, though they still didn’t move their mouths when talking, still spoke with strange monotones, and still looked flat no matter what angle they were examined from.

This particular Flat went by Twi-Reaper - Twiree for short - because of her unusual ability to transform into a type of synthetic spaceship life-form known as a Reaper. Otherwise she walked around looking like any other human Twilight, except with a black military hat on for some reason.

Cosmo sighed. “Sorry. You have to admit, you stand out like a sore thumb.” She realized it was a bit odd for her to say this, since she was a tremendous alicorn with a beautiful flowing mane and enough magic to set off panic alarms by walking into the wrong buildings.

“I like it that way,” Twiree declared. “So… Do you like the fleet?”

Cosmo looked out the window of the space station they occupied, examining the hundred or so dark Reaper ships outside, all of which looked like a cross between a bug and a squid. They also looked flat, despite Cosmo having been on board the ship-people numerous times. “I don’t know. I’m not certain letting ships with the ability to hypnotize most people move freely is a good idea. Even if you say you won’t, and I know you aren’t, people are still going to ask questions.”

“The moment you figure out how to disable it, you tell me,” Twiree said.

Cosmo nodded. “It appears as if your ships ‘just work’, Twiree. Nobody can figure out how to upgrade your systems, much less turn them off.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’re so powerful, right?”

Cosmo smiled. “Certainly.”

“I predict obsolete ships in a few years,” an AI chirped from a crystal on Cosmo’s regalia. “Progress is unavoidable.”

“Starlight…” Cosmo shook her head. “They’re unpredictable and, despite adapting somewhat to our universes, still don’t fully operate by our rules.”

“That’s what makes us awesome!” Twiree declared, giving a thumbs up to Cosmo and the Starlight AI. “Got anything for us to blow up?”

“Unless the University decides to attack or something, no,” Cosmo said. “Just take this area of space as your own and enjoy it. It’s yours. Don’t go enslaving anypony.”

“We won’t!”

And then two letters appeared in front of them.

They stared at them.

“Starlight, where did these things come from?” Cosmo asked.

“Unknown. Could be a Celestia. Or a Spike. I am not aware of all the developments of magic messaging.”

The two versions of Twilight Sparkle lifted the letters up. Cosmo opened hers first.

“Name?”

Cosmo blinked at the small room she was suddenly in. “Wha…” she shook her head – she was being asked a question. “Princess Cosmo Sparkle o-”

The Twilight Sparkle behind the podium sighed. “Birth name. No titles.”

“Twilight Sparkle.”

There was a quick mark on a piece of paper and a large stack of paperwork was given to Cosmo. She was directed out of the room.

Cosmo raised an eyebrow. “What is this?”

“Just go to door at the end of the hall, you’ll understand.”

Cosmo nodded slowly, walking out of the room and down the hallway. She heard a “Next!” come from the receiving Twilight’s mouth as the door closed behind her. Then she heard “Name?” again.

She was not surprised to hear Twiree’s distinctive monotone voice. “What in Celestia’s potatoey behind just happened? Egad!”

Cosmo decided to wait for Twiree to get out, taking a moment to actually read the letter and gain some understanding of the situation.

“Name, please.”

Cosmo was most interested in the token. Return to this dimension from any universe? That must have taken some doing. Corona’s all-purpose-dialer was still a bit shaky and awkward to use, not to mention excessively flashy.

“Twi-Reaper of th-”

“Birth name only.”

Cosmo furrowed her brow, checking her own dimensional device. The coordinates did not match up. She supposed there was more than one way to determine one’s place in the multiverse. She wondered if this Council of Sparkle had run into any other multiversal societies… Clearly not one with Twilight Sparkles in it, but that didn’t rule out the possibility of others.

“…Plastic horse number one?”

“…What?”

“I don’t know what I first was! I’m a derivative creation!”

“…What’s the name you went by most of your life?”

“Twilight Sparkle.”

Cosmo was struggling to hold in her laughter. Twiree came through the door a few seconds later, the face of the receiver Twilight that of somepony who couldn’t wait for the work day to be over but also knew it was still technically morning.

“So. This is odd,” Twiree said. “Not as odd as home, but still.”

Cosmo levitated the stack of papers out of Twiree’s hands. “Read your letter, it’ll help.”

Twiree did so as they made their way to the door at the end of the hall. They entered the room filled with Twilights, and were pleasantly surprised to find Eve there.

“Ah, Cosmo! Twiree!” Eve said, getting up from her chair. “I was wondering if I was going to see any familiar faces.”

“So, you got dragged into this mess first?” Cosmo asked. “Fitting, I suppose.” She glanced at the pile of partially filled out papers in front of Eve. “You’re cooperating?”

“Yes. I’m waiting until they realize what I am.” She glanced at the employee overseeing them. She seemed to not care that they were talking, or even notice that they seemed like old friends.

“…Are our government workers like that?” Twiree asked.

“On Earths? Sometimes,” Eve said. “On Equis and the Hub? Generally not. And Twiree, don’t look now, but it seems most of these Twilights haven’t seen a human. Or, if they have, your speech patterns and motions are freaking them out a little.”

Twiree blushed and waved to the other Twilights in the room. “Hi! I’m Twiree! I don’t bite!”

Half of the Twilights moved away from her.

Twiree sagged. “What does a girl have to do to be liked around here…”

“Fill out paperwork,” Eve commented. “Lots of it is simple, but they sure like abstract questions. I’ve taken it upon myself to answer everything with absurd accuracy.”

“Let’s work on it together then. Be good little Twilights,” Cosmo commented. “Starlight, prepare to provide scarily specific data.”

“Yes, Cosmo,” the AI said.

“Here’s a fun one,” Eve said. “Favorite color.”

“White,” Comso said.

“I think you’re the first to not put down ‘Purple’ or ‘Lavender’ in a while,” Eve commented.

“It’s the color that burns against the dark loneliness of space,” Cosmo decreed. “A reminder that we are not lost in the void.”

“Woah… Poetic,” Twiree commented.

“Total magical output over the last six months,” Eve read. “Starlight, got those numbers?”

“Yes,” the AI chirped. “I have Cosmo’s down to the seventeenth decimal place. Rest of you just get full numbers. For Twiree that’s an issue since her number is so small, but at least we’re not putting down the highly incorrect zero.”

“Better than the rest of these Twilights are doing,” Eve commented. “What do they expect them to do? Estimate?”

“The horror!” Twiree declared. Cosmo nodded in agreement.

One of the other Twilights heard the conversation. “Wait, can you give me a number for my magical output?”

Cosmo lit her horn. She grabbed a quill and scribbled the number on the Twilight’s form. “Not as accurate as what we have on the rest of us, but certainly better than anything you could have remembered.”

“…Doesn’t this refer to magical output? Like, including stressed times?”

“As I said, the spell only gives an estimate based on the strength of your thaumic essence,” Cosmo decreed.

“…Thanks,” the Twilight said.

“Do me next!” another called, walking up to her.

Cosmo smiled – she was going to be here for a while. But she was several thousand years old as it was; waiting was nothing to her.

Twiree was starting to twitch from boredom already, however. Hopefully she didn’t decide to go full Reaper and destroy this room with her sheer size.

~~~

Groups consisting of only one type of individual from across the multiverse were not rare. In Eve’s little alliance, there was one group in particular that people thought of in relation to this – the League of Sweetie Belles. They had no census, no mandatory membership, none of that. What they did have was a lot of young white unicorn mares (and girls) who had a lot of fun together ranging from a day at the Pinkie Emporium to saving a universe from a cruel monster or something. They were young, but few of them could still be considered children.

Quite a few members of the League were currently walking up what appeared to be an infinite staircase floating among blue aurorae.

So many Sweetie Belles. The default from Equis Vitis still had the name Sweetie Belle, but all the others had their own nicknames. Thrackerzod, Sweetie Bot, Squeaky Belle, Sweetie Brute, and the two humans, Burgerbelle and Suzie Belle. Burgerbelle was the only one of them who was a child, though she was one of the Flat race so it was unclear if she was actually going to age or not as time went on. Suzie was from the world known as Earth Vitis, Sweetie Belle’s direct human counterpart.

“I’m bored,” Sweetie Brute moaned. “Can we punch something yet?”

“You may attempt to punch me,” Thrackerzod answered. “Then you will discover the power of the Old Ones at your throat, driving your mind even further into insanity than it already is. You will likely try to punch me again, and then the cycle will perpetuate itself until your brain is so mushy you start to think that you are the target.”

Brute blinked. Then grinned. “Sweet.”

Squeaky Belle facehooved. “Brute, don’t,” she said, her distinctive helium-like voice heavily contrasting the gravely and deep voices of Brute and Thrackerzod. “We need to stay together and not fight. We’re in an unknown location for unknown reasons with unknown danger and unknown enemy status!”

“Burger,” Burgerbelle commented in the monotone that was signature of her kind.

Suzie looked down at the young girl. “Sorry, I already gave you the last one.”

“Oh. …We need to get out of here before I kill someone.”

“The danger levels have doubled,” Sweetie Bot droned in a robotic voice that was somehow much more expressive than Burgerbelle’s. “Beware the Burger Girl.”

“Yes yes, we know,” Sweetie Belle – the Sweetie Belle – said. “As the de-facto leader of all of you, I decree that we stop talking about killing and violence and instead focus more on finding a way out of here.”

“I thought Thrackerzod was in charge?” Burgerbelle asked.

“We don’t have to make the chain of command rigid,” Squeaky reminded their newest member. “The League is all about equality, adventure, and… well it was about cutie marks, but virtually all of us have them now.”

Every Sweetie that wasn’t a human glanced at their flanks – all with variations of the Crusader shield on them, even Sweetie Bot, despite the fact that she didn’t appear to actually grown in size as time went on.

“So beautiful…” Sweetie commented. Despite having had it for so long, she still couldn’t stop staring at it.

“We’ve stopped moving,” Thrackerzod commented, nowhere near as infatuated by her mark as the others. “Not moving means not looking for new things and not finding a way out of this mess.”

“Can’t you just ask your demon buddies?” Suzie asked.

“I am cut off from Azathoth,” Thrackerzod said. “I feel no connection to the Embodiment.”

“Oh cool!” Sweetie Belle declared. “That means you can think truly for yourself now, right? Riiiiight?”

“…What a terrifying thought,” Thrackerzod muttered. “But true. Though I have doubts my individualism is worth being stuck in a blue death trap for eternity.”

“I thin-” Suzie began, but her words were cut short by a loud crack. All the Sweeties looked down, shocked to find that the stone platform they were standing on had cracked through the middle. The smaller half broke off and started falling into the depths of the blue aurora below, dragging Suzie, Squeaky, and Brute with it.

Bot acted quickly, leaping off the platform and flying down to them, catching Suzie and Brute in her front hooves while her back unleashed rockets to keep them from falling further. Squeaky teleported herself to a platform that was not falling apart.

Thrackerzod felt the ground beneath her shifting, but she refused to lose focus. She teleported the rest of the League to the platform Squeaky was on, reasonably sure she got everyone. Bot dropped those she saved on top of them all, creating a pile of adorable white fluff. She landed and bowed. “Saving quota reached at 114%!”

“I think Bot’s processor is broken,” Brute commented, crawling out of the pile and shaking her head. “It’s over a hundred percent again.”

“But there are only seven of us!” Bot commented. “We saved eight.”

Thrackerzod and Sweetie Belle blinked. “Wait, what?” All the Sweeties pulled themselves up and out of the piles. They checked and, sure enough, there were eight of them.

Sweetie Belle went over a mental checklist. Me, Zod, Bot, Brute, Squeaky, Suzie, Burgerbelle, and… She came to a Sweetie Belle she didn’t recognize.

“You didn’t come here with us,” Thrackerzod addressed the mare.

“Uh, no,” the eighth Sweetie said. She was young – maybe not quite a full grown mare – and had a unique cutie mark on her flanks of a shattered starburst and musical note. “I came alone. I heard screams so I ran over and… Well, then I was in a pile of myself. I do have to admit, this is new.”

Thrackerzod sniffed. “She has touched eldritch before,” the deep unicorn decreed. “There’s something else off about her as well. A significantly higher magical output than a normal Sweetie.”

“Zod, lay off,” Sweetie Belle called, putting on a warm smile. “We’re the League of Sweetie Belles. I assume you’re named Sweetie Belle?”

The eighth Sweetie nodded. “Yep.”

“Do you… Have a nickname we can call you? To avoid confusion.”

The Sweetie pondered this. “Well, I call myself Interdimensional Sweetie sometimes…”

“Mouthful,” Brute pointed out.

“I’ve also gone by… Allure before.”

Sweetie Belle picked up on the tone in her counterpart’s voice. “You don’t like that name.”

“…No. It was given to me in a universe by a horrible manipulative pony who wasn’t really my father. …Sorta.”

Sweetie Belle looked at her, something stirring within her heart. “…Thrackerzod, are you feeling something from her?”

“I’m feeling a lot of things from her,” the eldritch unicorn commented. “Be more specific.”

“Like… She’s ‘bigger’.”

“She’s smaller than you and me.”

“That’s not what I mean…” Sweetie said, putting a hoof to her chin. “I’m not sure how to describe it. But… I think she deserves the name Sweetie Belle.”

“Oh boy, back to name-prefixes?” Squeaky grabbed her head. “Ooooooh boy.”

“No,” the lead Sweetie Belle declared. “I”ll take the name Allure. It won’t be painful to me. You can be Sweetie Belle, Interdimensional Sweetie.”

The Sweetie Belle stared at her. “...You don’t know what it means.”

“Do I have to? It won’t mean to me what it means to you. To you, it’s a bad memory. To me, it’s taking something I think sounds nice and making it my own to help somepony else.”

“...Thank you.”

“You’re welcome!”

“You’re choosing a name!?” Suzie blurted. “You said you weren’t going to choose one!”

“It just feels… Right,” the newly-dubbed Allure said, extending her hoof to the mare with the honor of being called Sweetie Belle. “I, Allure, extend an invitation to you, Sweetie Belle, to join the League of Sweetie Belles.”

“What comes with membership?” Sweetie Belle asked. “I mean, it sounds really nice, but I don’t really know what you do.”

“Get lost in a maze of impossible blueness,” Thrackerzod deadpanned. “That’s what we do.”

Brute cheered. “And we’re great at it!”

Allure rolled her eyes. “We’re a bunch of friends who have fun across the multiverse. Sometimes we have great adventures, other times we just hang out at the Pinkie Emporium.”

“…Pinkie Emporium?”

“An amusement park run entirely by versions of Pinkie Pie.”

Sweetie Belle’s jaw dropped. “That sounds equally amazing and terrifying.”

“That’s the general consensus,” Suzie said.

“We should probably introduce ourselves,” Allure said. “I am Allure now. This is Thrackerzod, Sweetie Bot, Squeaky Belle, Sweetie Brute, Burgerbelle, and Suzie.” She took a breath. “Wow there’s a lot of us.”

“What is your story?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“Simple version?” Allure waved a hoof in the air. “Our Twilight – Eve – discovered interdimensional travel and has been creating a multiversal society over the last few years. I eventually joined in on the fun on an adventure where I met several versions of myself, and we just stayed together after that, doing whatever we wanted. Unlike Pinkie’s or Toph’s group, we don’t have any real missions. We just do what we want.”

“Which usually does not involve getting lost,” Squeaky added. “Something intercepted us and brought us here.”

“Same,” Sweetie said. “I was between worlds and then… Here. I was not supposed to be here. By the way, half of you have bizarre voices.”

“An oddity of our universe cluster,” Allure said. “Most Sweeties actually sound like you and me.”

“I know. I’ve met a few.”

“That’s what I’m curious about,” Suzie said. “What is your story?”

Sweetie smirked, the expression of someone who had clearly told her story a lot of times. “Well… Back in my original universe, I shattered my Twilight’s essence into a… lot of pieces. They were spread across the multiverse, and my body was sent out as well. I’ve been collecting fragments of Twilight and moving from universe to universe, trying to re-assemble her.”

“You remind me a bit of Vriska,” Allure said. “She’s trying to find her home as well, and her friend. Though her friend isn’t in a million pieces.”

Sweetie blinked. “I’m… not the only one? That’s… I’m not sure how to feel about that really.”

“You’ve seen some things,” Thrackerzod said. It wasn’t a question.

Sweetie nodded slowly. “Yeah.” She looked at them all, looking like she desperately wanted to talk about something else. “You… are part of a multiversal society? Would you… know how to get me home?”

Allure took out her dimensional device. “Well, not right now, since this place keeps us from dialing out for some reason. But if you have any sort of connection to it within yourself, we can probably find it. Depends on how far away your world is, from what I understand.”

“So… That’s a maybe?”

“That’s a maybe,” Sweetie declared. “Actually, why not tell us what worlds you’ve been to? We may have been to some of the same ones!”

Sweetie clearly started going through a list in her head. “Well, there was one where Twilight and Trixie were a couple…”

“Could be any number of universes,” Suzie pointed out.

Sweetie seemed mildly surprised that didn’t surprise them. “The one where prankster Nightmare Moon took over Equestria and used Twilight as a… special kind of slave.”

Allure winced. “Ouch.”

“Lots of Nightmare Moon worlds,” Thrackerzod commented. “A few are pranksters. Can’t say I’ve heard of that use of Twilight though. Eve generally takes care of any Nightmare Moon that’s evil if the denizens of that universe can’t.”

“Oh, you help worlds like that? I generally don’t get to accomplish that much…” She shook her head. “There’s the one where the Elements of Harmony were immortal.”

“That’s a new one,” Squeaky said. “At least, as far as we know, only Twilights are immortal.”

“…Is it normal for Twilights to be alicorns then?”

“Most are, yeah,” Allure commented. “I take it yours was a unicorn?”

Sweetie nodded. “And most of the Twilights I encountered are as well. …I guess I’m an outlier, huh? Even with the cutie mark…”

“It means you’re unique,” Squeaky said, smiling. “I think that’s what Sw- Allure sees in you.”

“Heh. Yeah. Let’s see… Everyone’s gender was swapped in one, a universe where Prince Blueblood was experiencing the same day at the Gala over and over again…”

“Oh, that jerk?” Allure said. “Wow, that must have sucked for you.”

Sweetie raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t horrible. Blueblood makes a nice adoptive brother.”

Blank stares.

Sweetie grinned. “I see I finally got something that fazed you.”

“Yeah,” Allure said, shaking her head. “Did not expect that one…”

“There was the one where ponies turned Equestria into a wasteland,” Sweetie continued.

“I recognize that one,” Allure said. “Megaspells, right?”

“You’ve been!”

“Not me personally, no. I read a book from there though, written by some mare named Littlepip. She’s actually working for Eve now. Though… from what I hear that world isn’t much of a Wasteland right now.”

“Really? Did they fix it since I was there last?”

“They fixed it before we arrived. Years before. We came in the after-party.”

“Oh! …Well then, did you meet the Goddess-Trixie? Puppysmiles?”

Allure rubbed the back of her head. “I… don’t know about Puppysmiles, but I do know the Goddess is dead.”

“…Oh.” She looked at the ground. “…Well then. Spike?”

“Yeah, that world’s Spike is still around.”

“Ask him about me,” Sweetie said. “I only met him very briefly at the end of my stay, but if you can…” She furrowed her brow.

“We’ll try. Anywhere else you’ve been? I can tell you’ve got quite the list,” Suzie asked.

“The one where my everypony was fighting a war against my ‘dad’ and some guy named Titan, the one where I could see the essence of magic and was taught by Discord, the one with a weird time distorting fairy world, and the one with humans and ponies working together to fight aliens.”

“Yeah, sorry on the rest of those,” Squeaky said. “All either not familiar or too vague and common.”

“She’s not talking about one,” Thrackerzod said.

“You can sense that?” Sweetie blurted.

“I may look like a unicorn, but I am not. I am what you might call a demon, though an Eldritch Scion would be more accurate.”

Sweetie backed away. “You’re… one of them?”

Thrackerzod frowned. “…I think not. I think you encountered a True Demonic presence, based on the energy flowing off of you that isn’t from the shards of Twilight Sparkle. I am sorry for what you must have seen.”

“T-thanks.”

Squeaky pulled Thrackerzod back. “Eheh… Don’t mind Zod here, she’s a little creepy and morbid, but deep down she has a heart and will defend us with her life.”

“Doesn’t she just return to the Embodiment when she dies?” Burgerbelle asked.

“Probably not in here,” Thrackerzod commented. “Too secluded.”

Sweetie Belle blinked. Then she shook her head and laughed. “This… This is refreshing. To see so many of you who are me, but who also understand.”

“…Only Thrackerzod has any idea what you’ve suffered,” Allure said. “I can feel that we haven’t been through as much as you, despite having been at this longer and having visited more worlds.”

“I don’t think that matters,” Sweetie said, grabbing Allure’s hoof. “We are Interdimensional Sweetie. We are the League of Sweetie Belles.”

“I take it you’re in?”

“Of course I’m in! Now, let’s find a way out of this strange place!”

“Ahem. Now may not be the time to mention this but someone’s watching us,” Suzie said. “There’s a column over there with a man behind it.”

All eight members of the League of Sweetie Belles turned to look at the floating column. They heard a deep sigh. “Welp, I’m made!” a male voice declared. A human figure clad in full armor and orange fabrics leaped off the column and onto the piece they were all standing on. He was huge for a human – comparable to Jotaro – and wielded a large halberd. “The name’s Gilgamesh. It sounds to me like we’re all in the same pickle.”

Allure blinked. “Oh. ...Oh, this place is drawing dimensional travelers, isn’t it?”

“90% likely conclusion!” Bot declared.

Allure rubbed her horn. “This could get really complicated, really fast…”

~~~

“Name?”

“Sparky Sparkle.”

The Twilight taking her name let out a snort. Sparky fixed her with a look. “What?”

“Nothing.” She wrote the name down on a piece of paper, chuckling. She handed Sparky the paperwork and directed her down the hall.

“I don’t have time for this! I need to look fo- and you’re not listening to me anymore. Great.” She clutched the papers in her hand and charged down the hall, stewing inwardly. How dare they take her away from her work? She needed to find Corona! She…

She threw the door to the room with all the Twilights in it. “Ah, Sparky!” Eve called, smiling. “I was wondering when you were going to notice your letter. I assumed you got one.”

Sparky blinked. “Is this YOUR doing?”

“What? No! I was dragged here just like you, Cosmo, Twiree, Twix, and Equis Eldritch Twilight here.”

Equis Eldritch Twilight was not a pony Sparky knew. The name told her she was Thrackerzod’s Twilight, and that was it. Sparky could have sworn Thrackerzod had mentioned her Twilight was a unicorn, but the pony before her was an alicorn. “…Is this all of us?” Sparky asked.

“Probably not,” Cosmo said. “But we’re approaching completion with our papers. Here, let’s help with yours. Starlight’s great when it comes to data you wouldn’t normally know.”

“Uh…”

“Just go with it,” Twix, who was still a unicorn, said. “Means you don’t have to figure out what any of it means.”

Equis Eldritch Twilight took a swig of beer presumably conjured up by one of the other Twilights in the room. “I did not become the god of arcane relations to be subjected to a stupid census.”

“Renee would chide you for speaking so highly of yourself,” Eve commented.

“What? My Celestia calls herself a god all the time!”

“Your Celestia is a violent dictator,” Eve said, barely paying E E Twilight any attention.

“Man, it still feels so weird hearing ponies say that without instantly having a fear of death.”

Twix shrugged. “I’m just waiting for Trollestia to give me wings or something.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” E E Twilight said. “You have to be prepared for this sort of thing over years, geared up and bred, and… Oh wait, that’s right, I forgot. The textbook case is Eve. Just solve a spell and BAM.”

“I wouldn’t put it past Trollestia to just give me wings for a day and then remove them,” Twix commented.

E E Twilight glanced at her. “…How did you…”

Twix shrugged. “I’m no Pinkie, but I’ve picked up cues over the years.”

Sparky turned to Eve. “Eve, why are we just letting ourselves be subject to this? We can demand to see their leaders.”

“Oh, we will,” Eve said, smirking evilly. “We’ll fill out their forms. And then I’ll open a dimensional portal right in front of mc-sleepy-pancake up there and make her freak out. I’m compiling a list of complaints. ‘Abduction of the Charter-Princess’ is sure to send chills down the spines of whatever kind of pony this Grand Secretariat is. Or the rest of the Council, I suppose.” She rubbed her hooves together. “I’m almost looking forward to it!”

Sparky blinked. “…What about Corona, Eve?”

Eve sighed. “Sparky… I want to find her too. But I think we both know that, not only do we need a break, but we don’t have the resources to find her yet.”

“…I’ll agree to the break. But as soon as we’re done here I’m going back to the Castle and I’m going to find her.”

Eve smiled sadly. “If that’s what you think needs to be done. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the one to solve the problem with your science!”

Sparky looked away, unsure of herself.

Cosmo put a hoof on Sparky’s shoulder. “Do not doubt yourself, Sparky. You have a drive and intelligence within yourself that surpasses most Twilights. You are, to put it mildly, a technological genius. If you apply yourself, you will succeed, given time.”

Sparky nodded slowly. “Right.”

“But for today, give yourself a chance to relax,” Twiree said, grinning. “Trust your Flat doppelganger, we’re going to have some fun today with a multiversal civilization.”

“…Are you sure we want to upset them?”

“Upset? No,” Eve said. “Make panic internally? Yes.”

“That’s a form of upsetting.”

“Ah, they’ll realize we’re friendly soon enough,” Eve dismissed. “We’re all Twilights here.”

“Mhm…”

~~~

“Do you guys have any names?” Vriska shouted at the humans at the other end of the Coliseum.

“I am Gandalf,” the old man spoke, tapping his staff on the ground for emphasis. “This man is Gyro, and the other is known as Froppy.”

“Ribbit,” Froppy said.

“Dumb name,” Vriska said, folding her arms.

“Wanna say that again, pasty?” Gyro said, plucking a green metal ball off his clothing. “Cause we can go.”

“Oh, I’d love to see what those balls of yours can do…”

Renee facehooved. “This is a landmine of bad wording.”

Pinkie cleared her throat. “Hello Gandalf! Gyro! Froppy! I’m Pinkie, this is Renee, Vriska, Nova, and Flutterfree! We don’t need any trouble or anything!”

“What are you doing here?” Gandalf asked.

“Lost,” Nova said. “Dragged here while en-route to another dimension.”

“Same,” Froppy added.

Pinkie pulled out her dimensional device. “This is how we travel universes. It’s not working right now. You?”

Gyro pulled a round ball out from under his hat, blue rather than green like the ones on his clothing. “This. If you know what Stands are, then you should know about Spin. You use it to activate this.”

“Spin?” Flutterfree said, cocking her head. “Is that anything like Hammon?”

“What’s that?” Gyro muttered.

“Clearly their Stands are of a different kind,” Gandalf pointed out. “Since most of them are horses, this does not surprise me.”

“We actually got it from a human wor-” Flutterfree began, before she noticed Renee and Nova glaring at her. “Uh, yeah. Guess I’m not supposed to say things like that. Oops.”

“Secrets, eh?” Gyro said, taking a few steps forward. “How about you tell us those secrets? Like what this place is?”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Non-Euclidian limited-visibility universe. No idea why or how it’s blocking our escape, or how it brought us here. We came in together and got sent here instead of our actual destination.”

“Have you found anything of interest?” Froppy inquired.

“Just lots of rocks and gravity weirdness,” Pinkie giggled. “This Coliseum is the biggest one we’ve seen!”

“No markings?”

“Nope,” Pinkie confirmed. “Not a one.”

Gandalf rubbed his beard. “This is most concerning. Not one, but two groups dragged here by some unknown force while they were traveling elsewhere…”

“Could others be dragged in here as well?” Flutterfree asked.

“It’s safe to assume so.”

“…There could be dozens,” Renee said. “And they might be only a few platforms away from us and we couldn’t even see them! This place is huge, after all…”

“Hooold it!” Gyro shouted. “Why are we talking with them? For all we know they could be the ones who put us in this mess!”

Vriska pointed a finger. “Hey, ballsy, that’s my line! I bet you’re responsible.”

Nova and Froppy facehooved/facepalmed. “Stop being dense.”

“You stop being dense!” Vriska and Gyro shot back to their respective teammates.

Pinkie held up her hooves. “Okay, so, nobody knows if we should trust the others’ side. That’s fine, we don’t have to trust each other. Buuuut it would probably be better if we stick together. If either of us are responsible, one might slip up! But if both of us are just trapped here and telling the truth, we could work together! It’s win-win!”

Gandalf nodded. “That seems reasonable, unless one of us has an extremely creative plan that involves leading us around.”

“Well then you guys take the lead!” Pinkie cheered.

“Pinkie!” Renee hissed.

Pinkie made her tail twitch on purpose and winked at Renee.

“Oh. Well, okay then.”

Froppy narrowed her eyes – she’d seen the tail twitch and wink. She whispered something to Gandalf.

Gandalf leaned into his staff. “We accept. Now we-”

“OH FRICK!” They heard a female voice scream to the left of the Coliseum. Everyone turned to see what appeared to be a girl with pale-blue hair and red gloves standing there. She was staring at Pinkie’s group. “Uh… FANCY RUNNING INTO YOU HERE!”

“JENNY!” Nova shouted, horn lighting up with impressive power. She shot a bolt at Jenny, blowing up a significant portion of her and the Coliseum wall behind her. She regenerated on the spot, as was her custom, but the fight had already begun.

Gyro summoned his Stand “Ball Breaker!” He called. The entire coliseum began to rotate as the green humanoid appeared, swirling with crackling energy. Flutterfree activated Lolo, ensuring that everyone could see Ball Breaker – the suddenvisibility of the Stand startling Gandalf and Froppy.

The full activation of Lolo also revealed the blue crystalline Ivan standing next to Jenny. He let out a deep sigh and shook his head. “Of course…”

“Why are we spinning!?” Jenny shouted.

“Ball Breaker is an amazing Stand!” Gyro shouted. “It is the power of Spin incarnate, with it I ca-”

Vriska decked Gyro in the face. “You talk too much.”

Gandalf raised his staff, summoning impressive white magic. Renee attempted to catch it in her shielding, but her magic was pathetic compared to his own. It exploded, and the Coliseum rocked, all the while continuing to increase its Spin.

And then Froppy sighed, deciding that yes, it did look like they were going to have to fight.

Pinkie twitched. “OH COME ON!”

~~~

“So… You travel worlds how, exactly, mister Gilgamesh?” Allure asked the tall Gilgamesh as he and the rest of the League leaped onto a platform shaped like an arch.

“The Void.”

“And how does that work?”

“It just works,” he said. The unicorn who had been allowed to keep the name Sweetie Belle knew he was probably smirking under his helmet, but nopony could see that.

Allure quizzed Gilgamesh more about his area of the multiverse, which apparently only had a few pony worlds, much like how the explored ‘east’ multiverse held mostly pony worlds with a handful of human worlds. Sweetie paid cursory attention to the discussion, learning more about larger-scale multiverse structure, but she found the armored man to be a bit too obsessed with legendary treasure and weapons.

She was much more curious about the existence of Burgerbelle.

“So… Why do you move like that?”

“Something about other-world physics,” Burgerbelle said without moving her mouth. She shrugged. “All I know is I’m here now and I feel great. Do you know how to summon a hamburger?”

“Uh… No,” Sweetie said. “I’m just thinking, how are you talking without moving your mouth? Or your lips?”

“The mysteriousness is immense,” Bot said, injecting herself into the conversation. “All tests are inconclusive.”

“But… How is that even possible?” Sweetie asked. “What’s making the noise?”

“Noise comes from the mouth,” Bot answered. “Cannot determine anything else.”

Squeaky coughed. “Sweetie, Burgerbelle here comes from a world where things are different. You know this world we are walking around in has differences in gravity?”

Sweetie looked up to see Gilgamesh on a platform above them. “Yeah, I see that.”

“Well, imagine if universes could have other things changed. Friction. Time. The nature of sound itself. Laws of motion.”

“So what, are things like Conservation of Energy not a thing in some universes?”

Squeaky nodded. “Many systems of magic break the ‘rules’, though most don’t. Burgerbelle comes from a place where reality was dictated by ‘Creativity’. We don’t fully understand what it meant, and I’m not sure we want to.” She gestured at Thrackerzod. “Zod comes from another sort of different world. That body isn’t her real form. Her real form exists in a state of multiple dimensions we can’t see all at once. If we were to enter her true home universe, we would either die or go mad.”

Brute butted in. “I wouldn’t!”

“Your madness is well established,” Squeaky deadpanned. It didn’t have the effect it was meant to due to her helium-speak.

“Yay!”

Sweetie raised an eyebrow. “Does she really have insanity?”

“We think so,” Squeaky said. “She likes being brutal to things. Punching. Killing. She likes suggesting roofies as a solution to just about every problem, for some inexplicable reason. My Scootaloo may have been worse, but at least she had some smarts in there.”

“Your Scootaloo was brutal?”

“Yeah. We did have to be though – the three of us were undercover Generals in our world, bred to fight a perfect war.”

“…That sounds insane.”

“-ly brilliant,” Squeaky finished with a smirk.

“I’m serious, you’re not much older than me. You had to be a kid… That’s not right.”

“No, it’s not. But it was extremely effective. The enemy could never figure out who was giving the orders. And… Well, the war is over now.”

“Are you saying the ends justify the means?”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying, Sweetie,” Squeaky admitted. “What I am saying is that it’s behind me, and at this point there’s no use dwelling on it. I am what I am.”

Sweetie smiled. “Sometimes I wish I could be somepony like you.”

“What? Raised to be a General?”

Sweetie shook her head. “No. Able to leave the past behind me.”

Squeaky smiled warmly. “It is a nice skill. But what I went through is nothing compared to you, from what I can tell.”

Sweetie nodded. “That… That doesn’t change anything. Your sufferings are still your own. Don’t lessen them just because somepony’s had it worse.”

“Words of a friend?”

“Paraphrase, of sorts,” Sweetie confirmed. “The world I was in just before this one. It was the first time I saw humans. Wasn’t expecting to see more so soon.”

“Get used to it,” Suzy said, having overheard her comment. “Humans are the most common race in the multiverse, so much as we can tell. We’ve just got so many ponies here because we’re in a cluster of pony universes. The Tau’ri explorations in the western multiverse have yet to actually find any pony worlds there.”

“Wow. Wonder why they’re the ones?”

“No idea,” Suzy said. “I’m not Eve, I don’t ask the big questions. Sw- Allure up there does. But that’s why she’s the leader.”

Sweetie Belle looked ahead to where Gilgamesh and Allure were talking, Thrackerzod trailing just behind. “…She’s me, isn’t she? The me I would have become if I… Hadn’t messed up.”

“I don’t think so,” Suzy said. “You seem a bit… different. More magically inclined. Allure has never been good with magic, and is still only passable with it. Zod does all the heavy spell lifting.”

“Huh…” Sweetie said. “…I think I’m going to go talk to her, you don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” Suzy said with a wink. “The League treats conversation fluidly. Which is to say it starts up and breaks off all the time because there’s so many of us all the time.”

Sweetie nodded and trotted to catch up with Gilgamesh and Allure.

“…and that’s how I got my seven millionth copy of Excelipoor.”

“You have some bad luck,” Allure commented. “Never got the real deal, did you?”

“Held it a few times,” Gilgamesh admitted. “But I never can keep ahold of an Excalibur. Other legendary weapons, yes, but that one? It eludes me.”

“Sounds like you may have a Beat curse.”

“Beat curse?” Sweetie asked.

“Oh,” Allure said, taking in Sweetie’s presence. “Didn’t see you there, you move pretty silently huh? Yeah, a Beat curse. It’s… Well I really don’t understand it, since Starbeat really doesn’t like explaining things at length. It’s a curse that makes you… do things a certain way? I think? Starbeat’s makes her feel uncontrollable romantic attraction toward random people at seemingly random times.”

“…Weird.”

“Yeah, I don’t really know what I’m talking about,” Allure admitted. “So, what’s up?”

“I was wondering. Did you ever actually become an apprentice under Twilight Sparkle?”

“Me?” Allure laughed at the thought. “She struggled to teach me proper telekinesis! So, yeah, no I wasn’t her apprentice. That’d be Nova. Though I believe her title is Protégé.”

“Ah. Like Twilight was to Celestia?”

“Right!”

“What’s Nova like?”

“Well, her name was originally Starlight Glimmer, and she used to be evil. Enslaved a town, tried to destroy time, all that. She’s now a member of Pinkie’s team and keeps time from getting destroyed. She’s very snarky and… Let’s just say she doesn’t have as much tact as other ponies.”

“Ah.”

“Really phenomenal at magic though.”

“Does she have any artifacts?” Gilgamesh asked, suddenly.

Allure sighed. “Is that all you… No. Her tools would only work for a unicorn.”

“Shame. Do any of you have artifacts?”

“If you want to go steal an artifact, find the red bug-king Siron and take his staff,” Allure commented. “That thing’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

“I shall go on this quest to steal the rod! And I sha-”

A human woman’s fist came flying out of seemingly nowhere, beaning Gilgamesh right in the face. His strength should have been able to withstand the blow and injure the incoming wrist, but instead the attacker’s fist remained perfectly healthy and Gilgamesh went flying backward, over the edge of the platform they were standing on.

“Ha!” the strangely normal-looking woman shouted. “That’ll teach you not to kidnap little adorable unicorns!”

Every Sweetie Belle facehooved. Thrackerzod teleported Gilgamesh back up.

“…Why would you do that? Now I have to hit him again!” the woman said.

Allure cleared her throat. “Mister Gilgamesh is not an enemy nor is he kidnapping us. He’s lost here just like we are.”

“Told you,” a version of Sunset said, teleporting next to the woman. “But do you listen? No.”

“Who are you two?”

“Well, I’m Sunny, since apparently I can’t just be Sunset,” Sunny said. “This is Jane.”

“Jane bio identified!” Sweetie Bot declared. “Ooooh, you’re a dimensional traveler too!”

“Just adding more and more evidence to the pile that something’s drawing our kind here,” Thrackerzod muttered.

Squeaky nodded. “The question is why. Or how. Got anything on that, Zod?”

Zod shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Wait, hold up,” Jane said, raising a hand. “Zod? As in, Thrackerzod?”

“…Yes?” Allure said, cocking her head. “You heard of her?”

“I know her. Hey, Zod! It’s me, Jane!”

Thrackerzod blinked. “…I have no idea who you are.”

“You… Don’t? But what about-”

“Just like Discord,” Sunny said, putting a hoof on Jane. “Not all of them are the same.”

“But Zod is already a version of Sweetie Belle! How can there be more than one Zod?”

“There was more than one of all of us, at one point,” Allure said. “Copying universe.”

“Wait, that’s a thing?” both Jane and Sweetie said at the same time.

“Yeah, it’s a thing,” Allure said. “…Not anymore though. A guy named Rick destroyed it.”

“Rick…” Gilgamesh said, clenching his fist. “That man had Excalibur…”

Sweetie glanced around the group and to Jane’s own somewhat angry face. “It certainly seems like this Rick isn’t very popular.”

“He’s banned from interacting with the alliance,” Bot piped up. “I hear Pinkie even gave him a death threat!”

Sweetie blinked. “Wait, what? Pinkie!? Pinkie’s don’t… Well I guess there was that one time… And that one other time… Yeah, I’m not surprised anymore.”

“Pinkies are quite volatile,” Thrackerzod said. “We should be thankful that most Pinkies take our side.” She stopped in her tracks. “Everypony, I sense something. Be on your guard.”

They found themselves on a circular disc platform with seven columns and a gap where an eighth should have been. Nearby was an inverted staircase. Other than that, they saw nothing.

Thrackerzod furrowed her brow and lit her horn, scanning the area. “Well isn’t this a pleasant surprise.”

“What?”

“I’ve found one of Lolo’s nodes,” Thrackerzod said, walking toward the center of the disc. “Ahem. This is Thrackerzod to Flutterfree! We have the League of Sweetie Belles here, plus a new Sweetie, a man named Gilgamesh, Jane, and Sunny. We will follow along your path to-” She blinked. “Lolo just vanished.”

“…Can anyone explain to me what’s going on?” Jane asked.

“Flutterfree has a power she’s named Lolo,” Thrackerzod answered. “It can spread itself thin and watch over certain areas. I used my soul-sense to see the normally invisible body of it, which was set to observe this area. Something must have happened on Flutterfree’s end to make her recall Lolo.”

“A fight?” Brute asked.

“Possibly.”

“Then let’s go to the fight!” Brute cheered.

Allure shook her head. “We don’t know for sure which way it is. All we know is that Flutterfree is here, and maybe which direction she went. But without an actual path… We can’t find her.”

“So we stay,” Squeaky declared.

Sweetie raised an eyebrow. “Waiting? In a place like this?”

“It’s something,” Suzie admitted.

Gilgamesh twirled his halberd. “In that case, MISS JANE! I challenge you to a duel for insulting my honor!”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am serious. I never kid. Except when I was a kid. And when I act like a kid,” he chuckled. Then he produced a sword, somehow wielding the halberd one-handed. “Come at me.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “Sure, why not?”

Thrackerzod frowned. “Hold it you two. I’m still sensing something here. It isn’t Lolo.”

A ball of pink fluff dropped from the sky, hitting the circular platform in the center, driving a crack right through it – not enough to separate the two halves fully, but hard enough to knock everyone down.

A flat-maned version of Pinkie Pie stood up, pupils the size of pinpricks, and her teeth somehow sharp. “Looks like your auntie Pinkie has too many Sweeties to deal with! Let’s cut the number down, shall we?”

Jane wasted no time. A sword was summoned into her hand from seemingly nowhere and she charged. And then Pinkie wasn’t there anymore, she was behind the woman.

Jane, to her credit, was expecting this, almost as if she had experience with this exact type of opponent. She twirled around in a perfect motion, bringing the sword down on the Pinkie’s head. It bounced off.

“Damn,” Jane cursed, flipping back so the Pinkie’s gigantic knife couldn’t hit her. It was at this point the Sweeties that could attack did so. Sunny, for her part, fired a bolt of fire.

Gilgamesh decided to one-up her. “Flare,” he decreed. Magic flew from his hands and into the Pinkie’s body.

“Ooooh bad bad move Gilgamesh!” Pinkie chided, already feeling her insides heat up to supposedly intolerable levels.

Gilgamesh narrowed his eyes. “How so, pink one?”

Pinkie put the bomb mask on her face. “I can explode and be just fine. You’ve just given me quite the boost! The answer is yes, you can explode twice!”

“TAKE COVER!” Sunny yelled.

And the Pinkie exploded twice, shattering the stone disc into a dozen pieces and engulfing the entire platform in smoke. The rumble rippled through the unusual universe, shaking up the platforms everywhere…

~~~

Eve looked through the sets of paperwork for herself, Cosmo, Sparky, Twiree, Twix, and E E Twilight. “I think we’ve got it. Everything done with higher than average accuracy, exactly what they want for their files, I’m sure.” She smirked. “Almost time for the fun to begin.”

Cosmo nodded. “In a minute though, I’m still helping some of the others with their papers. Or, well, Starlight is, I’m just the vessel.”

“I work you like a slave, apparently,” Starlight chirped.

“Funny,” Cosmo commented.

Eve arranged all their stacks of papers neatly and prepared them for turn-in. She saw the door open again, announcing a new Twilight. As she had gotten used to this past hour, she began to speak without really looking at who had come through the door. “Hello. You should probably read your le-”

She didn’t get to finish her sentence. She lost her grip on the papers when she registered who was standing in the doorway.

She was an alicorn Twilight Sparkle; her defining features being from her color scheme. Her purple coat was darker, her mane was more of a deep blue, and there was dark magic about her.

Brutalight Sparcake.

Eve’s ears flattened back instinctually, but the rest of her took a posture of unbridled rage. Her eyes glowed like spotlights, her mane began to swirl with the magic that made up this universe, and her horn prepared a spell designed to bore its way through her skull. Had anypony present been a Stand user, they would have seen a powerful white glow with three nested gyroscopic rings amidst it appear behind her. Great, judging eyes lined the rings of her Stand, ready to do its master’s bidding.

Brutalight just screamed like a scared little filly, tears coming out of her eyes.

A sign of stress.

A sign of having too much to cope with.

Eve dropped the show of power instantly. “…Do… Do you know who I am?”

The ‘Brutalight’ whimpered and shook her head.

“I… I’m sorry,” Eve said. “It’s just, somepony with your fac-”

The moment Eve took a step forward, ‘Brutalight’ scurried into a corner, folding her wings around herself.

Eve looked down at the ground, ashamed.

Cosmo put a wing around Eve, gesturing at Twix to go comfort the ‘Brutalight’. “Eve…” she spoke, her voice soothing.

“I… I was going to kill her. I was…”

“The mare whose face she shares took your hearing, and the lives of many,” Cosmo said. “Had it really been her, escaped from Nautica, you would have been right to take drastic action.”

“But… But it wasn’t!” Eve blurted. “Look at her! She’s a scared pony!”

The ‘Brutalight’ was accepting a comforting hoof from Twix, but wasn’t saying anything, or even looking out through the cracks of her wings. Eve knew she wouldn’t be out for a long time because of her.

Sparky put her hand on Eve’s other shoulder. “Let’s just turn the papers in and do what we wanted to do, okay? She probably would benefit from us going anyway.”

Eve nodded. “I’ll… I’ll be sure to check in on her later. But… Yes. Yeah, you’re right.” She took in a deep breath and stood tall.

“…You recovered quickly,” E E Twilight declared.

“I have to,” the Charter-Princess responded. “It’s my job, essentially.”

“That it is,” Cosmo said. “Twix, come on. We’re done here.”

Twix patted ‘Brutalight’ on the back one more time. “Hope you… get better. Ask the mares around here what to do on your papers. Some of them have some idea.” She trotted up to join the others. “Yeesh, she’s been messed up.”

Eve nodded. “I… I know.” She shook her head, leading all of them to the employee with the silver badge. “Ahem. Miss Sparkle?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“The six of us worked together and have our forms to fill out. We’re all good friends, so I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not, friends are always a-” she blinked. “…Wait a minute. You can’t be good friends. It clearly says here you’re all from different universes.”

Eve smirked, pulling out her dimensional device and dialing the Forest. “I am Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle of Equis Vitis, and I am one of, if not the, most important individual in multiversal society in the alliance I am a part of. I have been a good girl and filled out all your paperwork – as accurately as I possibly could, I might add – now you be a good girl and take us to your leader. Or leaders.”

The Twilight paled at these words. She glanced at her silver badge. “I… I think this is above my pay g-grade,” she stammered. “Ah… Just… step on the platform over there. You’ll get your designations and I…” she flipped through a booklet with the title Census Duty and You, clearly dissatisfied with the information it contained. “I’ll have you teleported to one of the Council’s waiting rooms! Yes, that’ll work. You’ll, uh, receive your designations in your mind and then you’ll… Er…”

“We’ll wait?” Eve said, raising an eyebrow. “Fine by us. But we’ll be timing you.”

The Twilight gulped. “O-of course. R-right away. If you h-have any interdimensional business that needs t-tending to, don’t hesitate to use your device to return. …Actually, don’t do that, only use it to make calls, I can’t have you vanishing.”

“All right,” Eve said. “We won’t leave. Just step on this pad right here?”

“Y-yes,” the Twilight said, lighting her horn. “The coordinates have been changed.”

The six of them stepped on – and all of them suddenly got a series of letters and numbers encoded into their mind that represented them. Eve sensed she was given a special designation – AΩ-4219. Alpha and the omega, huh? Wonder what exactly I did to get that.

Then the six of them were in a well-furnished waiting room, complete with coffee, crackers, magazines, and a few other snacks. The wallpaper and tiling was still exactly the same though.

“You think a million different Twilights could be more creative,” Sparky commented.

“Or maybe they just can’t agree on anything,” E E Twilight said. “Also, apparently I’m M4-N-delta-P5. I guess you have a name to call me now.”

“Welcome to the party, M4,” Twiree said. “Now, I wonder if there’s anything juicy in these magazines!”

Eve opened a cupboard and found Sparkle Census Code. She smirked. “Cosmo, I think I found something for us to read while we wait.”

“That’s going to be really, really boring,” Twix commented. “I wouldn’t bother.”

“That is why she asked me to come over rather than you,” Cosmo pointed out. “I agree we should at least attempt to be versed before they show up. It could be hours, for all we know.”

As they studied the code of the Census, back in the actual paperwork room, a certain mare looked out from between her wings.

The six of them were gone.

Good.

Brutalight let a cruel smile come to her face. That was just too easy.

~~~

“Okay, I’m saying it now,” Nova said. “This Gyro guy is ridiculously overpowered.”

“Oh? What makes you say that?” Pinkie asked.

Nova gestured at how they were holding on for dear life on the edge of a rapidly-spinning Coliseum.

“Oh, yeah. That. Funny, that.”

“NOT REALLY!” Jenny called, holding on a few meters to their left.

“YOU CAN SHUT UP!” Nova called back.

“…I thought we agreed I wasn’t evil last time?”

“I CAN STILL MESS YOU UP JENNY! MESS YOU UP GOOD.”

“Pff. I could be pounded into pulp and still survive.”

“It doesn’t have to be permanent.”

Gyro’s own team wasn’t doing much better – Froppy and Gandalf were barely hanging on at the other end, while Renee had encased herself in a crystal bubble to keep herself steady. Only Gyro, Vriska, and Flutterfree were actively doing anything of use – and Flutterfree was just using Lolo to keep herself rooted to the ground and make sure Vriska could see Gyro’s stand.

“GYRO!” Gandalf called. “YOU ARE GOING TO SPIN US OFF!”

Gyro smirked, his false golden teeth glinting in the blue light. “I’m not making it spin any faster, old man.” He smirked. “Just let me teach this bitch a lesson and we can move on to the others.”

Vriska ducked under Ball Breaker’s attack, but was unable to dodge a direct attack from one of Gyro’s own steel ball projectiles. The green sphere hit her in the arm, using the Spin to throw her back. She was open to attack from Ball Breaker.

She tried again to steal luck from Gyro, but Ball Breaker got in the way, and despite being able to see the Stand she apparently couldn’t steal the luck from it. The Stand kicked her right between the legs, driving her into the ground. Stone chunks went flying.

Gyro’s eyes widened, curiously looking at his leg. “Huh. Guess Ball Breaker lives up to his name.”

Vriska winced, pulling herself up to her knees. “Utter… Bastard…”

Gyro smirked. “I’m quite the guy. You know, I think I might actually have a song for you…”

Vriska summoned her dice and threw them at Gyro’s feet. His momentary distraction of looking for a song had given her all the time she needed. The dice rolled a high result, producing a very satisfying result – a wrecking ball from nowhere. Ball Breaker was unable to do anything to the wrecking ball before it hit Gyro. Gyro attempted to use the Spin on Vriska’s rolled attack, but the velocity at which he accelerated was too much. He didn’t lose consciousness, but he lost his concentration. Ball Breaker was forced back into Gyro’s body, and the stable Spin of the Coliseum began to drift back to a more manageable speed.

Vriska stood up, hands on her hips. “H-ha! I win!”

A steel ball hit her right between the eyes, knocking her over.

Gyro laughed, wheezing and holding his chest. “H-ha! I win!”

Vriska groaned, rubbing her head. “What the fuck is your deal?”

“My deal? Let me tell you abou-”

“ENOUGH!” Gandalf said, slamming his staff into the ground, sending out a magic shockwave that forced everyone who had just gotten back on their feet to fall back down. “Gyro, cease this contest. The rest of you…” he narrowed his eyes. “You’ll be coming with us.”

“What makes you think we’re going to do that?” Nova said.

Gandalf encased her in a sphere of white magic, freezing all her motions. “This is why.”

Pinkie tensed. “Gandalf… I know you don’t like to do this. Why don’t we put the staff down, and talk thi-”

“I cannot take any chances,” Gandalf decreed. “You are all far too powerful to be trusted without a leash.”

“Yeah! Gandalf!” Jenny whooped. “Good on you for choosing the right side!”

“This applies to you as well.”

“I don’t give a rip about that unicorn,” Jenny deadpanned. “What makes you think I”ll do wh-” she saw Froppy sitting on top of Ivan, having wrapped the crystal man up in her tongue. “IVAN! Again? …You were captured by a frog? How in…”

“No illusions,” was the only answer Ivan offered, making no attempt to even struggle against the froggy tongue.

Jenny curled her fists. “I just… I…”

Pinkie took in a breath and opened her eyes. “Gandalf. Listen to me. We want to work together.”

Gandalf recognized something sinister in her tone. “…Are you threatening me?”

“I can get Nova out of there before you can do anything,” Pinkie bragged. “And then where would you be?” Suddenly, she was behind him. “I have a certain… set of skills, you could say.”

Gandalf narrowed his eyes. “You aren’t sure you can. You tensed earlier.”

“Observant! But do you really wanna take that chance? It’d be much better if we could be friends. Or at least not try to hold each other hostage. I-”

Jenny teleported herself to Froppy and kicked the frog woman in the side, forcing her tongue to release.

Steam shot out of Pinkie’s ears. She opened her mouth and instead of a word, a high pitched BEEP came forth, before turning into a regular sentence. “-it Jenny! Why would you do that!?”

Jenny hoisted Ivan up and saluted. “Sorry, no time to… To…” Jenny was beyond surprised to see one of Gyro’s steel balls hit her in the face. Renee had thrown it with her magic. Ivan shot off a shard of crystal, Pinkie drew her hammer, Vriska prepared her dice, Gandalf raised his staff…

And then a blue phone box fell out of the sky, sideways, bringing the entire conflict to a standstill.

The Doctor poked his head out of the side of the TARDIS, the now open door billowing smoke. “Okay, clearly… Clearly that did not work.” He waved smoke out of his face as he left the TARDIS behind him. “That’s going to take a while for her to repair… Boy oh boy oh boy. He put a hand to his head and shook hit. “Eeegh. What on earth have I walked into?”

“Three-way free for all,” Jenny said.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “Riiiigh-”

Vriska threw her sword at the Doctor. He dodged by a hair’s breadth. “Who the- oh.”

“HEY ASSHOLE!” Vriska called. “REMEMBER ME?”

“Oh I could never forget-”

“OH BOY DO WE HAVE A LOT TO TALK ABOUT, YOU AND ME.”

The Doctor pointed the sonic screwdriver at her.

“…Really?”

“Yes. Really,” the Doctor coughed. “Pretty sure there’s something in you I can aggravate… Considering how beaten and battered you look.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay fine, it’s complete baloney.” He put the screwdriver away and shrugged. “But! But, you still don’t want to kill me!”

“Gog, your face is much more annoying than the last one,” Vriska put a hand to her forehead.

Pinkie turned from the Doctor to Vriska. “So… I take it you know each other?”

“Know each other? Oh you bet we do,” Vriska spat. “He and I traveled together for a long time. And there’s a ton of things wrong in that fucking sick mind of his, I could go on for days. But let’s start with primary complaint A. You know exactly where Earth C is.”

“Well I wouldn’t say exactly and – bother, just shut up a moment, Vriska, would you?”

“Me? SHUT UP? Do you eve-”

“Good, good.” the Doctor put on a smile. “So, just to make sure everyone’s caught up to speed, we’re stuck in a universe that’s drawing in dimensional travelers seemingly at random. I am the Traveling Doctor, and that there is my TARDIS, a spacetime machine. Now, that TARDIS is one of the most advanced and fully optimized machines in the multiverse. I just spent the last few hours trying every trick I had in the book trying to escape this universe. As you can see, that didn’t work.”

“What does that mean to us?” Gandalf demanded.

“It means that I, a man who knows the entire multiverse, has been trapped here. If that’s not a sign of something exceptionally sinister at work, I don’t know what is.”

“So basically, you’re telling us to panic,” Flutterfree deadpanned.

“Yes! Wait, no. No that’s not it at all! The point is, quite clearly, none of us would have the capabilities to do this.”

“Except you,” Jenny pointed out.

Pinkie twitched. “I’m going to have to start dealing out ‘shut up’s like they’re candy, aren’t I?”

“It’ll certainly be something like that,” the Doctor said.

“What’s the best course of action?” Gandalf asked.

“You’re actually trusting this guy?” Gyro interjected, but seeing Gandalf’s nod he shut up. Apparently the gray wizard knew something Gyro didn’t.

The Doctor folded his hands. “At the moment, I suppose we find as many of our compatriots as we can and form a band.”

Flutterfree cleared her throat. “I spotted the League of Sweetie Belles and a few others back where we started. My group, that is.”

“And how did you do that?” Jenny asked.

“Lolo. My Stand,” Flutterfree said. “It was interrupted in the fight, but I saw them. I can find the way back.”

“That sounds wonderful!” the Doctor said, clasping his hands together. “Unless anyone has any better ideas?”

“YEAH!” a gravelly voice declared – one that was unfortunately familiar to too many here. “STOP BEING SENTIMENTAL PUSSIES!” This was punctuated by a burp.

Everyone – including the Doctor, Jenny, and Gandalf – let out a pained sigh. They knew who it was – Rick Sanchez and Morty. The mad scientist with no moral code whatsoever, and his grandson who everyone thought needed to be somewhere else.

Rick smirked at them, his distinct spiky blue hair drawing their attention as he entered the Coliseum. “Doc, you see, as it turns out Time Lord technology just isn’t cut out for this sort of thing.”

“If you could have escaped, you would have already,” the Doctor grunted.

“I was searching. I can get out of here with just a toothpick and my own hair.”

“You have no idea what’s going on here.”

Rick laughed. “Bah. Twelve-pier type universe, constructed by the Weavers in the Dark Era, repurposed with an interception quota keyed to regular travelers.”

“That’s obvious,” the Doctor decreed. “But the security measures are beyond that.”

“You telling me you haven’t tried the microverse tunnel?”

“How are you going to make a microverse with the supplies you have!?”

“That’s a yes!” Rick pointed and laughed. “You burned out your TARDIS without doing that? Oh, and here I was thinking I was talking to some enlightened immortal alien who travels through time.”

“Excuse me? I ne-”

Vriska interrupted. “Can you two just fight already and kill each other? Seriously, the multiverse would be so much better off without either of you running it into the ground.”

The Doctor and Rick continued shouting at each other, with Vriska occasionally butting in just to point out that they both were complete assholes.

Morty decided to sit down next to the ponies. “Hey.”

“Hey. You don’t look much older,” Nova observed.

“Time difference,” Morty said. “Slower on my end by quite a bit. What’s been going on in your neighborhood?”

“Oh, you know, just trying to unify a multiversal society,” Renee added. “No biggy.”

“Cool. Cool. How’s Twilight doing?”

“Eve, now,” Pinkie said. “She’s doing good. Rick definitely traumatized her. He’s still not welcome.”

“If the Doctor weren’t doing so good a job of it I would be giving him a piece of my mind…” Renee declared, narrowing her eyes. “I might just do it anyway.”

“So… You got Vriska on your team?” Morty asked.

“You know her?”

“Heard of her,” Morty said.

“Anything… bad?” Flutterfree asked.

“Nothing compared to Rick. She’s been responsible for a lot of death, but… Definitely still a hero.”

“Good,” Flutterfree said. “…They’re still going at it.”

Jenny decided enough was enough, teleporting between the two of them. “ENOUGH! I. Am. Tired of this! Just stop the fighting! Work together for one stupid minute and use your phenomenal minds to get us out of here!”

“Find others,” the Doctor said.

“Microverse,” Rick said, folding his arms.

“Well then why don’t we just split up?” the Doctor said, waving his hands around.

“What a great fucking idea!” Rick blurted, drawing a gun and pointing it at the Doctor. “How about I just split you up into a million pieces? No regeneration from this baby, Doc, no siree.”

The Doctor put his hands in the air. “W-why?”

“I dunno. I’m bored. Drunk. Sick of walking around in circles. Or maybe I just want to mess with Flagg, who knows?”

“You do more of Flagg’s bidding than any of his actual servants.”

Rick raised an eyebrow. Then he made a decision. Shooting the Doctor would have long-term consequences that he would likely live to regret, but hitting the TARDIS…

“Riiiiick….” Morty said, sensing what his grandfather was preparing to do.

Rick shot the TARDIS.

The explosion tore the Coliseum in half.

~~~

“Heh,” Eve said, closing the Sparkle Census Code. “They only have minimal regulations for multiverse-aware Sparkles. I guess they assume they won’t have anything big. They probably don’t have any experience with other societies.”

Cosmo furrowed her brow. “They don’t seem to be malicious though, merely studious. At worst, highly obsessive-compulsive.”

“What’d you expect? They’re us.”

Twiree huffed. “I can say for a fact that I am not obsessive-compulsive.”

“You’ve stacked every single magazine in this room you could into a perfect column,” Eve observed.

“Uh… Yeah I guess so.”

Twix pulled out her phone and checked the time. “It’s been an hour, officially.”

“It could be much longer,” M4 pointed out. “This is bureaucracy, Twix. You don’t just get to go ‘oh, sweet, something unexpected? Let’s just drop everything and deal with it.’ Doesn’t work.”

Sparky looked at the ceiling. “Maybe we should have just gone through orientation and caused a ruckus in the general population.”

“That would have just been rude,” Eve said. “They may have a desire to announce this in a particular way. We don’t want to force their hoof that much without first learning who they are. Though I’m pretty sure we can guess what forty million Twilight Sparkles will do.”

It was then that the door to the room opened with a small click. A grandiose alicorn stepped through the doorway. Her height was slightly above that of even Cosmo, and her mane was distinctly more impressive than Cosmo’s flowing magical locks, instead swirling with the power of what appeared to be a galaxy. On her chest was a pin that identified her as the Grand Secretariat, Council Member.

“Ah, we’ve been waiting,” Eve said, taking a step forth. “I am Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle of Equis Vitis. The Twilights you see before you are all my colleagues – Cosmo, Sparky, Twiree, Twix, and M4. We have some questions.”

“I am the Grand Secretariat.” She raised an eyebrow at that. “That’s some trick you pulled.”

Eve smirked. “Well we were kidnapped without warning. We should probably be livid.”

The Grand Secretariat sighed deeply. “While that is true, you clearly are not.” She glanced at Sparky. “…Most of you. I wonder why you decided to give that Twilight such a hard time.”

“For fun,” M4 said.

“More than that,” Cosmo added. “If we were found or discovered at that point, it would be better for you than if we were discovered among your general population. This allows you more control, if you can accept that. The only Twilights who know are the ones we helped out in that census room and the employee.” She blinked for a moment, clearly not used to looking up to talk to anybody.

The Grand Secretariat nodded. “I see that, though you are aware the ponies you helped will probably spread the news.”

“Unavoidable,” Eve commented. “We’ve encountered thousands of Twilight Sparkles that know of our existence, even if they aren’t part of the alliance. I think chances are good you’ve already let one through. I mean, what are the odds you get me first and not some others?”

“Unlikely,” the Grand Secretariat admitted. “Your point is a valid one. We have no need to keep such a secret from our population, however. They’ll probably be ecstatic about this.”

Eve chuckled. “I’d imagine so. I remember how I was when I first went out and began exploring…”

The Grand Secretariat’s expression softened, accepting that she was talking to another Twilight, not some foreign ambassador. “Do you mind describing your alliance to me?”

Eve nodded. “As we explored, some universes we encountered joined us. There are a few dozen of them, ranging from Equis worlds like our own, to spaceborne places, to entirely human worlds in the western multiverse. Or E-Sphere, I suppose, if the Stars are to be believed.”

“It is not easy to get a Star to talk,” the Grand Secretariat commented. “But yes, the information is accurate. We have heard the E-Sphere term from other sources.”

Eve continued. “After an attack from another multiversal society known as the University of Doors that tried to erase us from time, we decided we no longer needed to just be friends, but form a fully Unified conglomeration. The process is coming along nicely, with eight of our worlds planning on being the founders, and several others lined up to join afterward.”

“How much longer are you expecting for this to become official?”

“Few years. Local time. There’s already been a lot of processing happening. Hammering out the details and getting the public on our side at this point. Surprisingly easy compared to Disclosure.”

“Not something we’d be aware of,” the Grand Secretariat said, shaking her head. “Most worlds only have their Twilight Sparkle contact us. Very few of them actually interact with us on a full scale. You could say this is the only universe we actually own out of the millions upon millions we have eyes on.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “You’ve really never run into other societies?”

“Besides the Stars? There are actually a couple. The Eldritch Embodiment, and another group that I would rather I not reveal to you.”

“Mysterious,” Twix commented, but said nothing further.

Eve nodded. “That is your choice. We’ve encountered the Embodiment as well – actually have one of their kind in our employ – and the aforementioned University of Doors.”

“You have an Embodiment being with you? How’d you pull that off?”

“Luck,” M4 said. “She was on my world, trying to kill me to fulfill a ‘contract’ for abusing Eldritch power. Turned out there was a third option.”

“Mmm. And this… University?”

“We are not on speaking terms with them,” Eve declared. “After they tried to wipe us out for no reason other than ‘meddling in artifact acquisition’, we struck an accord that we wouldn’t touch any universe they had a beacon in, and they wouldn’t touch anything we had a beacon in. That was the last contact we had.”

“I will need to contact them myself at some point, to tell them of our existence. You understand, of course.”

Eve nodded. “I don’t expect much, but if you can get them to talk and play nice, I won’t stop you. Have anywhere I can give you the coordinates?”

“Later. Speaking of coordinates, I assume you’ll want a trade?”

“We’ll give you ours if you give us yours.”

“Not counting secret or blocked worlds.”

“Of course. Deal?”

“Deal.”

The two mares shook hooves.

“That was easy,” Twiree said. “Wish I could still summon easy buttons from nowhere, though.”

“You’re from a low-res universe, correct?” the Grand Secretariat asked.

“Uh… That sounds right?”

“Their universe is unique,” Eve explained. “Far as we can tell, anyway.”

“Not entirely,” the Grand Secretariat clarified. “Exceedingly rare, but I’ve seen a couple of beings like her.”

“Oh sweet! Any around?”

“Sadly no, they rarely come to the Census.”

“Aww…”

“Which leads me to a question I want to ask you,” the Grand Secretariat said. “We have never come across a group of Sparkles with extensive multiversal connections, such as yourselves. This puts us in an odd situation. Usually, we automatically allow every single Sparkle to become a citizen automatically, no qualms about who they are or what they do. It occurs to me that it should not be automatic in this case. Being a part of two multiversal societies might reflect badly on you.”

Eve nodded. “Cosmo and I definitely cannot, seeing as we’re leaders of our respective worlds. The rest of you... I honestly don’t mind if you accept citizenship. We’re not picky back home.”

Sparky shook her head. “Nope.”

Twiree and Twix shrugged. “Don’t see why not,” they answered.

M4 pondered this for a while. “I’ll take it. But, Grand Secretariat, I do have a question.”

The brilliant alicorn smiled. “Ask away, little one.”

“Why do you all think that’s endearing…” M4 shook her head. “There’s clearly a step above citizenship, isn’t there? Those ponies you have working for you, with the badges. More… official ones.”

The Grand Secretariat raised an eyebrow. “I see what you’re getting at, but I fail to see why. You know so little about us, why would you want to become an employee?”

“My world’s leader, Celestia, is… The fact that I said this never leaves this room, understand? She’s a brutal leader. Effective, probably not evil, but brutal. Brutal enough that the other universes are cautious to even deal with her on friendly terms, generally cutting ties when possible. The alliance doesn’t really have any reason to accept or deal with us.”

“I see. You were thinking you could be a more official ambassador between our worlds?”

“It… seems like something more worthwhile than using these wings just to look pretty, eternally terrified of actually going against Celestia despite technically having the power to do so.”

“Will she not be upset at this?”

“She might,” M4 admitted. “But I think I’m safe.”

The Grand Secretariat smiled warmly. “…Believe it or not, M4, I’ve met other versions of you. Not just Twilight, but the Twilight that exists in an eldritch lock and under a brutal self-proclaimed god. Most are rather unpleasant to be around. You are different. You should be proud.”

M4 gestured at Eve. “I owe it to her version of Rarity. Got me to look at things a little differently.”

“I shall arrange for a more detailed tour of our facilities, to describe to you what working with us would actually entail. If nothing else, it will give you a good picture to tell the others.”

M4 bowed. “Of course.”

“Cosmo, Eve, you two are the government authorities in the room. I shall take you personally to talk to the University and discuss future relations.”

Eve nodded. “That seems fine.”

“And for you three… You’re bored. I suggest taking a stroll through the Sparkle Census proper, enjoy the luxuries we have.”

Sparky raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“About half the buildings we have are bookstores.”

Sparky’s grumpy exterior faltered. “H-half?”

“Half.”

Twix blinked. “This place is Twilight heaven.”

“What about our token and bookmark?” Twiree asked. “The letter sai-”

Suddenly all six of them had a token and a bookmark.

“I wouldn’t use the token if I were you, I’d wait until this is all resolved,” the Grand Secretariat suggested. “But there you go. Let me make some calls, and we can all go about our ways.”

~~~

A chunk of stone flew through the blue space, singed slightly from an explosion. Holding tightly to the chunk were four versions of Sweetie Belle and the woman known as Jane.

“I see another platform!” Squeaky shouted. “Everyone, get ready! Jane, I’ve got Brute, you get Allure and Sweetie!”

“Which is which?” Jane asked.

“Get the ones I don’t have in my telekinesis!” Squeaky blurted, lifting Brute off the platform. She teleported, taking herself and Brute to safety.

Jane rubbed her hands together, nervously. “Here goes nothing.” She grabbed Allure and Sweetie by the backs of their necks and kicked off the hurtling chunk of stone. She perfectly twisted her body through the air, adjusting to the sudden shift of gravity. She pulled her arms back so the Sweetie Belles wouldn’t suffer most of the impact force. She hit with a satisfying smash, cracking the platform slightly, but nothing serious enough to be concerned about.

She winced slightly as she set the two unicorns down. “Ow…”

“You’re pretty strong,” Allure observed. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Jane muttered, rubbing her leg. “Ow…”

“Did we see what happened to the others?” Sweetie asked, worry evident on her face.

“I saw Zod and Sunny flying the opposite direction,” Jane said, standing to her full height.

Squeaky furrowed her brow. “I thought I saw Gilgamesh fly away, but I’m not sure.”

“Considering that we aren’t charred pieces of fur and meat, they’re probably fine,” Allure commented. “Though I do worry they won’t be able to stick a landing in this place…”

“We need to find them,” Jane said. “We…” she put her hand to the bridge of her nose and shook her head. “Dammit. We have no way to do that, do we?”

“Zod was the one with the soul sense,” Squeaky said. “That’s the only thing I think would really work in this place. Not that even that would tell you much, given the mess of directions…”

“I need to find Sunny,” Jane said. “If there’s one psychotic Pinkie out there, there might be worse things.”

“I bet Rick’s here!” Brute blurted.

“Lovely,” Jane muttered.

Sweetie spoke up. “…Psychotic Pinkie? Is that a common thing?”

Squeaky frowned. “It’s… more common than a lot of other variants. Most Pinkies are happy party ponies, don’t you worry.”

“Something worries me though,” Allure said. “She had a bomb mask. Only our Pinkie has that mask, as far as I know.”

“What? Some kind of evil twin?” Sweetie asked.

“Maybe,” Squeaky said. “Or maybe she stole it. We already know Flutterfree is here, Pinkie probably is as well.”

“Pinkie versus Pinkie smash fight!” Brute suggested.

Jane shook her head. “This is getting us nowhere. We need to do something.”

“Walk around until we find others?” Squeaky suggested. “That’s all I’ve got right now.”

Jane curled her hand into a fist.

“It’s not ideal,” Allure admitted. “But… I really don’t think we have many other options, unless we want to see what happens when we let ourselves fall for eternity.”

“Pass,” Sweetie decreed.

Jane folded her arms, but nodded all the same. She started walking in a random direction, hopping onto a spiral-shaped ramp platform. The Sweeties followed after her.

Sweetie thought to herself while they continued on. They had an enemy right now – and that enemy was a Pinkie. Murderous, insane, and just plain terrifying. That was certainly bothering her, as was the fact that nobody even took a moment to think the explosion might have killed her. It was just accepted as fact that the Pinkie was still out there, probably hunting for them.

But there was a worse thought in her mind. That Pinkie was probably just like them, drawn here by force, from wherever she was in the multiverse. Whatever had brought them here, it was above that Pinkie. It was above all of them. And it hadn’t even shown its face. …If it even had such a thing.

“I am going to gut whoever’s done this,” Brute muttered to herself.

Sweetie turned to her gravelly-voiced counterpart. “What if they don’t have a physical form?”

“I’ll attach that Pinkie to my leg and then punch it.”

“…That’ll work?”

“Yep. …Probably. It’d do something.”

“Hey. Mind if I ask a question?”

“Not at all! Make it deep, personal, and juicy!”

Sweetie smirked. “Why are you so violent all the time?”

“It just feels right to smash the pulp of my enemies into the ground with a satisfying crunch!” Sweetie Brute declared.

“I don’t think that’s it.”

Brute raised an eyebrow. She looked beyond Sweetie. “I grew up in a cheerful world without consequences. Equis Ultra Fast has some amazing problems with it, but it’s still a cheerful Equestria with lots of friends and random adventures. I wanted to dye capes with chicken blood, and nopony stopped me. Nopony ever stopped me. Out here, they think I’m useful. And it feels good to be useful, you know?”

Sweetie frowned. “I guess so. But don’t you ever think you’re a bit, I dunno, much?”

“Bah. No such thing. Liking the feel of the skulls of your enemies beneath your hooves is just fine! Muahaha!”

Sweetie got the feeling she was supposed to be terrified of this version of herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to take Brute at face value. There was an air of… of absurdity about her. It was odd.

“INCOMING!” Allure shouted, snapping Sweetie out of her thoughts. In the relative distance, a large chunk of what appeared to be half of the Roman Coliseum was sailing toward them, spinning slightly.

Jane put her hand to her face. “…I see people on that thing.”

Squeaky took in a deep breath. “HEY! LOOK OVER HERE!” she shouted with the highest pitch she could manage, which was definitely shrill enough to shatter glass had it been around.

That got the attention of the people on the Coliseum fragment. “I see… Pinkie’s team!” Squeaky told them. “I think the-”

Nova teleported herself, Vriska, Pinkie, Flutterfree, Renee, and a tied-up Jenny to the platform. Sweetie took a moment to look at them – Pinkie was indistinguishable from any other normal Pinkie she’d seen, but the others all had a defining feature. But it was more than just a red eye here, a hat there – she saw something in their eyes that she didn’t usually see in the versions she ran across. These ponies weren’t naïve, but they also weren’t beaten down by what they had seen. Sweetie had encountered both ponies who held simple lives, and ponies who had been forced into brutality and lost so much. These ponies… They still had joy.

A smile came to her face. She felt safe around them already.

Allure ran to Renee and hugged her. “Renee!”

“Oh, Sweetie! I guess you got dragged into this mess as well then?” She hugged her sister. “Don’t you worry, we’ll find a way out of this.”

“It’s not Sweetie anymore, sis! I chose a name!”

“Oho? Finally decided that you weren’t the Sweetie anymore?”

“Yeah. I’m Allure.” She tossed her mane back. “Fitting, right?”

Renee smirked coyly. “Indeed it is. Wherever did you get the idea?”

Allure pointed at Sweetie Belle. “From her. She’s the Sweetie Belle now. She’s been through a lot – traveling on her own across worlds.”

Renee walked to Sweetie Belle, smiling. “Hello, Sweetie Belle. I am Renee Jackson.”

“…Jackson? That’s… different.”

“Oh, I’m married dear. I understand that’s not that common.”

“Ooooh!” Sweetie perked up. “Who to?”

“A man you probably wouldn’t know. Daniel Jackson, archaeologist from a version of Earth.”

“…A human. You. Married a human.” She blinked. “Excuse me while I process.”

“What? There’s nothing wrong with that!”

“Oh, not like that!” Sweetie smiled nervously. “I met a Twilight who was interested in a human, last world I visited actually…”

Nova blinked. “A Twilight? Weird. Twilights seem to be the least likely out of all of us to actually hook up with anyone.”

“…It’s just I’m used to thinking of ‘Rarity’ as…” She realized where she was going was probably a little insulting and stopped.

Renee put a hoof on Sweetie’s shoulder. “I know what you mean. All of us have changed out here, Sweetie. We definitely won’t be the ponies you remember. It’s one of the reasons we change our names. We all say it’s just practical, but it also represents that we’re different now. That we’re no longer ‘standard’.”

Sweetie nodded. “I see. I suppose I have only seen you married once, to Blueblood.”

“WHAT!?” Renee shouted, aghast.

“He was much nicer in that universe!”

“…I would assume so, if he actually lived up to my standards. Anyway, you’d like Daniel, though I don’t think he’s here. He had no reason to leave the Hub, so no chance to intercept one of his translations…” Her cheerful demeanor lessened slightly as her thoughts drifted to her husband.

Flutterfree walked up to them. “We’ll get you back to him, don’t you worry.”

Sweetie felt something come from Flutterfree and touch her – touch her real self. What lay behind the appearance of a simple unicorn. The façade fell instantly – and Sweetie froze as her inner, very private self was exposed for all present to see.

She was made of crystal, in reality – her hair was quartz, her coat was shimmering. Her eyes were solid orbs of rock and little dots of obsidian speckled her body, mostly on her legs.

She knew they could all see. But she couldn’t move – she just stood, emotionally frozen, unable to think due to the sudden shock.

“So beautiful…” Renee said, a hoof to her mouth.

Vriska took action. She pulled Flutterfree back. “Stay away from her.”

“Wh- Why?” Flutterfree asked. “She’s so-”

“I said back off,” Vriska said, leaning down to be eye level with Sweetie, the illusion of a normal unicorn slowly returning to her. They just stared at each other, silent, for a full minute, while the rest of Pinkie’s team, the Sweeties, and Jane just watched.

“What did they call them?” Vriska asked, voice soft. “In the world you were in.”

“…Changelings,” Sweetie said, voice haunted.

Vriska nodded. “The one I spent time in called us the changed. Simpler, but a bit more demeaning.”

“You’re changed too?”

Vriska shook her head. “No… They couldn’t break me. I was too defiant.”

“How’d you survive?”

“I’m conditionally immortal. I can only die if the death is Heroic or Just in some way. Being killed by a slave-master demonic being for being defiant is neither. They really wanted to kill me, but not even the Beast himself could. So instead of changing… I was subject to every death imaginable.”

“I can’t tell if that’s worse or better.”

“It was a tradeoff,” Vriska said. “Though I don’t have a permanent bodily change to remind me… constantly.”

“How’d you get out?”

“My Twilight saved me. The one I was traveling with.” Her eyes gained a distance to them. “She… She couldn’t take the horrors of that world. She evacuated as many as she could without the Beast finding out, but the moment he did…” Vriska sagged. “She destroyed that universe.”

There were a few gasps from the audience. Sweetie and Vriska didn’t hear them. Sweetie just looked right into Vriska’s eyes. “I… I don’t blame her.”

“Doesn’t make it right,” Vriska said. “She beat herself up about it for so long afterward. There were happy, normal people in that world, still. But… We didn’t have the power to destroy the Beast with any other method. …And as you can probably guess, we found that there was definitely more than one version of the Beast out there. That world… That world type is not unique.”

Sweetie hugged the troll, a few tears rolling down her face. “It’s… so cruel out there, sometimes.”

“I know,” Vriska said. “But we have to watch. To make sure we aren’t the source of the cruelty. …Gog knows, I’ve certainly been the source of too much…”

“You’re a good person,” Sweetie insisted. “I can tell.”

“You met me two minutes ago,” Vriska deadpanned.

“And the first thing you did was talk to me. That’s good, Vriska.”

Vriska smirked. “Well then, I guess I’ll take it! Vriska, best empathizer ever!”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

Vriska shrugged. “I’ll take what I can get.” She turned to Flutterfree. “She won’t feel comfortable being revealed, Flutterfree, even though we’ve already seen.”

“I… I know,” Flutterfree said, sagging. “I… I want to hug you and say I’m sorry, Sweetie.”

“Not your fault,” Sweetie said, wiping her face. “I understand. Whatever you did, it’s automatic, isn’t it?”

Flutterfree nodded. “I’m still sorry.”

“You’re forgiven. Try not to worry about it, okay? Just… I’d like to look like a pony.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Yes, of course, wouldn’t dream of doing that again.”

Allure walked up to Sweetie and smiled. “And just for the record, none of us care what you are or what you’ve been through. You’re still Sweetie Belle.”

Sweetie smiled. “Thanks. …Anyway, I have a question. Why’s that woman tied up?”

Everyone glanced at Jenny. “Oh, her,” Renee said. “She’s a bit of a ruffian who was largely responsible for trying to erase us from time. Not exactly evil per se, but we can’t exactly trust her.”

Jenny grunted. “Try to erase universes from time once and you get it held against you for the rest of your life…”

Jane raised an eyebrow, speaking for the first time in a while. “Erasing universes from time? You expect it not to be held against you?”

“Well when you put it like that it sounds unrealistic.”

“It is unrealistic! What kind of person does that for… for… Why did they do it?”

“They were hired,” Nova answered.

“FOR MONEY!?”

Jenny sighed. “Can we move on?”

“Sure!” Pinkie said. “Ahem. So, we’ve all been meeting other dimensional travelers, and have clearly been brought here against our will. Some of us have been separated from others, and really want to get back to them. There’s also a few unsavory types walking around, including a psychotic version of me.”

Sweetie blinked. “How’d you know that? You weren’t there! We didn’t mention her yet!”

Pinkie turned to Sweetie and smiled. “You’ve met more than a few Pinkies in your travels, right? Don’t we seem… unique, most often?”

“How so?”

Pinkie smirked. “Oh, say, being able to do different things in a nested time loop, despite every other pony following a predictable pattern.”

Sweetie’s jaw dropped. “How…?”

“The how is such a big secret that not even my friends know – yet. But it’s still good to realize it. Pinkies tend to know things. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a sixth sense, but often it’s a lot more.” She winked. “Most of us don’t make a big deal about it, but out here, well, it helps a lot. So make sure to remember this – if you’re in a universe where you think ponies won’t believe you, or where ponies think you’re a threat, try the local Pinkie Pie. There’s a chance she just knows. Consider it a tip.”

Sweetie grinned. “Thanks! That’s a- wait. You’re telling me this for a reason, aren’t you?”

Pinkie smiled sadly. “Yeah. We’re not going to be able to get you home or help you on your journey today. You’ve still got a song of your own that’s been interrupted by this – you’ll have to get back to it.”

“Oh…”

“But, I can give you something! Bring out your notebookbook!”

“How do- nevermind.” Sweetie rolled her eyes. She lit her horn and pulled her book out of her pocket dimension. The journal, record, and holder of many objects was encrusted with numerous magic spells and crystals. Sweetie flipped it open to a blank page.

Pinkie pulled a pen out and scribbled a bunch of numbers and sequences on the sheet. “If you ever get access to a dimensional device of any kind, Sweetie, the stuff on these pages should let you find our world, Equis Vitis, or the Hub.”

Sweetie looked at it. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“Yeah, you probably won’t. But anyone who knows about dimensional devices should be able to use it to get you here. I don’t think you’ll find anything like that until after or near the end of your quest. But after that, come by and say hello when we’re… Not trapped in a big blue aurora thing!”

“Oh!” Allure called. “And we can look for any fragments of your Twilight for you! Save you the trouble of finding a few of them, if we can!”

Sweetie looked at the notebook, circled the page with the dimensional coordinates and theory on it, and put it away. Then she beamed. “Thanks. A lot. Any other tips for my journey, anyone?”

Jane spoke up. “Find someone special.”

Sweetie smiled. “Yeah… I don’t think I’ll be hunting for that. I never get to stay around very long, or bring anyone with me. But thanks.”

“What are we all giving her advice for?” Brute blurted. “We’re not done yet! We’re still stuck here! We gotta do something!”

“Might not have had time for it later,” Pinkie said. “This was the best moment.”

“Do you know why we’re here?” Sweetie asked.

“No,” Pinkie said, twitching slightly. “No idea. And that really bugs me. I’m aware of lots of people who are here, and that Eve isn’t here and doing something fun elsewhere, but the reason eludes me. Maybe the other me knows.”

“Capture a Pinkie…” Vriska mused. “That’s going to be difficult.”

“No doubt!” Pinkie said. “No, I don’t know why she has the bomb mask either. I just know she’s here, somewhere. And out for blood.”

“Then we gotta stop her,” Allure said.

“Yeah!” Sweetie cheered.

“Everyone, prepare yourselves!” Pinkie said. “Joint mission find-out-what’s-going-on-and-capture-other-Pinkie is A-GO! THIS WAY!” She bounced along more of the stone rocks, a big grin on her face.

Sweetie decided she liked this Pinkie, and no longer felt confused as to why she was in charge. It just seemed right.

~~~

Brutalight Sparcake had left the Sparkle Census Orientation tour the moment she found an opportunity. The sooner she became unpredictable, the less likely Charter-Twilight – or Eve, apparently – was to be able to trace her the moment she realized she’d been duped. Someone would check Nautica eventually and find she wasn’t there… And she couldn’t allow herself to be caught.

Her first plan had been to wait until she got her dimensional token and bookmark, but she’d scanned the tokens other Twilights had – one-person only. That was not helpful in her mission to free Nautica, nor did it help her get to any other universe. So she’d bailed and begun her search for some other method. The tokens were clearly just regulated dimensional devices – they had to have more complex things around.

And since this was a collection of millions of Twilights, one thing in particular was easy to find.

Information.

Brutalight had no doubt there were a few government secrets around, but she also knew that something as fundamental to this world’s existence as dimensional travel wouldn’t be covered up. So she was currently on the lookout for a library.

And Celestia, was she enjoying herself. The urge deep within her to kill had been forgotten momentarily. She was just elated by what she was seeing and smelling. Masses of purple moved to and from hundreds upon hundreds of buildings that went on for miles. The soft artificial light above everything… The buildings built with such perfect mathematics… The way everypony just knew where they were going and how to run a city structure smoothly… It was amazing. It looked like how a city should look. A restaurant here, a theater there, and bookstores. Bookstores everywhere.

Oh, and the smell. Not only did it not smell like endless seawater, but it also smelled like books. Freshly printed, ancient, magical… Every flavor of book. She was in heaven right now.

Despite her unusual color scheme, few Twilights paid her any mind. She was just another variant among millions. They weren’t rude – merely uninterested, or trying not to get themselves confused. Which worked for Brutalight since she didn’t want to be noticed. But she sure noticed other Twilights. A white one with a fiery mane. A hydra. What appeared to be a fusion between Twilight, Sunset, and Starlight. She could have sworn she even saw a pony with her color scheme, making her ruse back in the paperwork room much more credible.

She smirked – this just got better and better. They would never be able to find her now. And her luck was only increasing, because she finally saw something that wasn’t a bookstore, but a library. There was a sign that said no checkout, read-in only, but Brutalight didn’t mind. She knew spells for quick information absorption.

She walked right in, a smile on her face. It, for once in her life, wasn’t a fake smile – she really was giddy about what she was going to find in here. The librarian Twilight – a deer – saw her and grinned back. “New, I take it?”

“Yes. And I want to learn everything I can.”

“What topic? Duality? Time? Dimensions?”

“Dimensions. Dimension travel. Dimension varieties. Anything like that.”

The deer whistled. “You’re going to be here a while. All of shelf 3B is on that. It’s why I had to stop checkouts – too many Twilights demanded to keep the books forever.”

“I can imagine,” Brutalight said, tapping her hooves together. “Thanks!”

“Don’t mention it!”

It occurred to Brutalight that she had actually said thanks. Great Celestia, her mood must have been through the roof. She decided she didn’t have any problems with this at the moment. She walked up to shelf 3B, making a cursory inspection of titles. A thick, purple volume entitled Dimensional Magical Theory called out to her. She took it, went to a table, and started reading, caring little that there were two dozen other Twilights at nearby tables doing the same thing.

The information was absolutely fascinating, and it described numerous methods for dimensional travel, most involving some sort of device, but she did eventually find what she was looking for. A spell for dimensional travel that worked on ‘picturing the universe you want to go to’. It cost an absolute ton of magic, a bit more than she thought she had on her right now, but with a little magical scumming it would be doable. Except…

For the first time she found information she didn’t like. The personal dimensional spell was prohibited by the ‘arcane lattice’ that permeated the entire Sparkle Census. Only spellcasters with a specific license could use it. They didn’t want just any-Twilight getting a hold of the secrets to unhindered dimensional travel, did they? Well, there had to be ways around this. The tokens may not have been exploitable, but there were surely other things…

She pulled her letter out again. Just like the tokens, the spell in it was personal and only worked for one universe. But… These letters had to be given to new Twilights somehow, didn’t they?

Brutalight closed up the huge purple tome and placed it back on its shelf. She did a bit more inspection and found the book she needed – Dimensional Application in the Sparkle Census. She skipped the parts about employment, the cycle of universes, and duplicate differentiation. She did stop to read the part about how the time dilation for the Sparkle Census was so extreme that, once you left, it would be like no time had passed. Apparently this universe had been chosen as the location for the Census because of that very fact. Curious.

But not what she needed. She needed to read about the letters. There it was – the letters ran on a machine deep in the Sparkle Census called the Examail Center, or just X-mail. The device was exceedingly complicated and the inner workings weren’t exactly public knowledge, but the book described the basics. The X-mail Center had a highly complicated ‘grinder’ device beneath it that always looked for new universes, and universes connected to those universes, and so on and so forth. Each universe it found had a ‘magic probe’ sent into it, that would search the space for a Twilight, while the few universes that didn’t allow magic were catalogued for personal visitations by exploration teams. The ‘probe’ would recognize Twilights and request a letter from the X-mail Center, which would then use its immense magical power to teleport the letter to her location. The probe could take eons to search an entire universe, and didn’t stop after finding a single Twilight, but given the sheer number of universes it was searching and the tendency for Twilights to cluster in certain locations, it worked just fine.

Brutalight’s evil smirk returned, replacing the simple joyous grin she’d had but a few minutes ago. This grinder device, the one that found new universes. It was in the X-mail center. She could hitch a ride with one of the letters, then use the spell she had just learned to travel anywhere she wanted.

She put the book back on the shelf and walked out of the library. The librarian spoke up. “Have a nice day!”

Brutalight ignored her. Who had time for pleasantries? She had a mission.

~~~

The other half of the League of Sweetie Belles – Thrackerzod, Bot, Suzie, and Burgerbelle – had a group of their own elsewhere. After the explosion they had found themselves with Sunny and Gilgamesh, and since then they had picked up two other dimensional travelers.

“So, how many of you did you say there were?” Suzie asked the pair.

The human Twilight and Sunset pair smiled. Twilight put on her ‘explaining’ face and answered. “The Sunlight Slider phenomenon is almost a ‘law’ of the multiverse. We’ve run into no less than a dozen different pairs on our journeys. Some of them are romantic; some aren’t. Some of them are lost; some are traveling just because they can. The fact is, there’s a lot of us, and I’m surprised you haven’t run into any before this big mess of ours.”

“Curious,” Thrackerzod said. “From our experience, Twilight is the least likely one to hook up with anyone.”

“Eh, that might just be pony Twilight,” Sunset commented. “They’re not immune, but I do see more humans than ponies out here.”

Sunny spoke up. “I met a pair of Sunlight Sliders. Me and Jane, that is. The amount of sappy things that left those two’s mouths put us to shame.”

“Yeeeeah, sorry about that,” Twilight apologized. “Some of us get a bit overbearing.”

Sunset snorted. “You could say that.”

“DIIIIISGUSTING!” Burgerbelle droned.

Gilgamesh pointed at the youngest member of the group. “This girl knows what’s up.”

Burgerbelle beamed with pride. “Yes!”

Suzie facepalmed. “Ugh…”

Thrackerzod stopped short. “Something’s coming.”

“The Pinkie you guys mentioned?” Sunset asked.

“No,” Thrackerzod said. “I’m getting a very distinctive eldritch feeling. Be on guard.”

Gilgamesh drew his halberd and a gigantic pistol. “I’m always on guard.”

“Sure it won’t be something like you?” Sunny asked Thrackerzod. “Maybe it will be the Thrackerzod I know. She’s an Evermore traveller too, like us.”

“I would recognize a signature derivative of my own. This is not it.”

“LOOK OVER HERE!” an overly chipper voice yelled. The loud individual was a tall, humanoid creature with four arms. She had two large fuchsia wings that matched the color of the carapace on every inch of her body. Two yo-yos hung from her hands, and her six eyes were the only features on her otherwise flat face. “HIII!”

“FEF!?” Thrackerzod blurted. “What in the name of Azathoth are you doing here?”

“Distracting you,” a deeper, authoritative voice droned. Thrackerzod cast an attack spell behind herself without looking, but it was too late – the bug-demon chief Siron had already extended his staff at Thrackerzod. The staff latched onto Thrackerzod, pulling at her existence. Her eyes lost the deep fire they had to them, and the intense red aura of her magic vanished, replaced with the soft green most Sweetie Belles had.

Thrackerzod fell to the ground, breathing heavily. “W-WHAT DID YOU DO!?”

Siron raised two of his hands into the air, keeping the other two held tightly onto his staff. “I took all the eldritch energy within you. I half expected you to be an empty shell when I was complete, but it turns out that I was wrong.”

Thrackerzod tried to kill him with a death spell – but only a soft green spark left her horn. She stared at her horn in disbelief.

“Stand back!” Sweetie Bot shouted, standing in front of Thrackerzod. “I’ll protect you!”

Twilight, Sunset, Sunny, and Gilgamesh readied for battle while Suzie leaned down to protect Burgerbelle.

“I do not know who you are,” Siron degreed. “But know this staff contains much more power than what was stored within that filly. If you let me take all the Sweetie Belles with me, I won’t harm any of you.”

“Buck that,” Sunset said, readying herself. “I’ve g-”

Sunset’s reward for talking first was a green and red beam that tore a hole through her chest, disintegrating her heart in an instant.

She tried to speak, but found she couldn’t. She slumped to the ground.

This predictably sent her Twilight into a rage. A purple sawblade construct flew at Siron, but he was able to deflect it with his own magic. Gilgamesh and Bot moved as one, firing their guns without holding back. Siron’s staff acted, erecting a black wall of tentacles not unlike what Thrackerzod would create in a similar situation.

Fef leaped into action for her chief, swinging her yo-yos wide. One hit Bot to no effect, but the other wrapped around Twilight’s neck and slit her jugular. She tried to howl in pain, but only gurgled, managing to stumble to where Sunset had fallen.

Siron didn’t even let her have a moment, crushing her neck with his magic.

Sunny finished casting a complicated spell. A lattice of amber crystals appeared around Siron, pointing their sharpest edges right at him. They flew at him from all directions. Siron figured out with some difficulty that the projectiles were telekinesis resistant.

He had to use his staff to protect himself, a burst of black surrounding him and devouring all the amber shards. Gilgamesh took the moment to attack, bringing his halberd down on Siron’s head. Siron used one of his free hands to catch and break the handle of the weapon.

“How in…?”

“MISSILE LOCKED!” Bot yelled, firing off a missile that should not have been able to fit in her tiny body. Sunny infused it with explosive fire.

Gilgamesh got in on the fun – despite the disaster last time he had used the spell, he did it again. “Flare.”

Siron was engulfed in heat and fire, his entire form no longer visible to the attackers.

“…What was he?” Sunny asked, bewildered.

“Dunno,” Gilgamesh said, throwing a boomerang at Fef without looking now that he no longer had a better opponent to face. She fell flat on the ground, tangled in her own weapons. “I do know there was no wa-”

Siron’s fist flew out of the clearing flames, punching a hole through his neck. Gilgamesh fell backward, lifeless.

Siron stepped out of the flames, staff held in one of his higher hands. Green, red, and black energy coursed through many cracks in his crimson carapace, giving him the appearance of something held together by neon lights.

Sweetie Bot froze in fear. He had clearly been damaged – but all the cracks they’d made were just filled. It was as if nothing had been accomplished.

Sunny didn’t let this deter her. If fire wouldn’t do it, perhaps a multi-elemental blast. She put everything she had into a concussive force of ice, lightning, earth, and a mixture of other powers.

The staff summoned a black shield that absorbed everything. Siron levitated Sunny into the air with his red telekinesis. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who any of you are. But you stood in my way. And you…” He pointed his staff at her. “Like Thrackerzod, you have something in you.”

“Don’t you dare!” Thrackerzod shouted. Then her eyes widened – her voice wasn’t deep. She sounded like a normal Sweetie Belle.

Siron ignored her, pulling the energy from Sunny. “Something interesting in there… a dimensional power that does not come from within you or without… Something beyond…” he laughed. “Exactly what this Juju is meant to control.”

Sunny felt something at the core of her being vanish. She knew in an instant that her innate ability to translate to other universes had just been removed.

“Why?!” She yelled. “Why do this?!”

“Because I need hostages,” Siron declared. “People love Sweetie Belles. They always want to save them.” He narrowed his eyes. “Goodbye, Sunset.”

“Wh-”

In an instant, Sunny had a hole where her heart used to be. Impossible. I had all the defenses up. I…

Siron’s staff flashed an evil dark color. There was much more in there besides just Thrackerzod’s power. Much more.

The last thing Sunny saw was Siron rounding up the four Sweetie Belles. All four, terrified, broken, scarred…

What did Siron need hostages for!?

~~~

There were precisely four individuals trapped in the blue aurora that hadn’t been encountered yet by anyone but each other. These four had become fast friends, though two had already known each other prior.

Their names? Star Butterfly, Marco Diaz, Ditzy Doo, and Jenny Everywhere.

Their appearances? Blonde teenage girl with heart blush stickers. Teenage boy with simple red hoodie and hair. Gray-skinned human with feathers on her neck. A woman who could only be described as the ‘everyman’ made female.

Star waved her wand at Jenny. “So you’re telling me you’re, like, everywhere?”

“Versions of me, anyway,” Jenny said. “It’s in the name. I’m everywhere. I’m pretty sure a universe that one of me hasn’t visited at some point is beyond rare.”

“And you’re sure you don’t need dimensional scissors to travel?” Marco asked, holding up his pair of scissors. He tried again to cut the fabric of space-time. Nothing happened.

Jenny nodded. “Yep. I’m what I call a shifter. I just slip through the cracks of worlds – sometimes without meaning to. It’s a little disorienting, but also a lot of fun!”

“And you’ve neeeever seen a place like this?” Star asked.

“Nope,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “I mostly tour Earths though.”

“Earth, best world,” Marco said, smirking.

“Hmph,” Star commented, folding her arms. “Mewni is better.”

“Jenny, as the resident ‘Everywhere’, what do you think about Mewni?”

“Never been,” Jenny said. “It’s not a standard world.”

Star gasped. “That just means it’s something special!”

“I’ve been,” Ditzy said. “It was brief. I had corn thrown at me. I still don’t know why.”

Marco smirked. “But Earth is, according to the illustrious Everywhere, the most common world. So it’s special as well.”

Star folded her arms. “Or just like pennies in the multiversal purse!”

“…Odd metaphor.”

“I know!”

“It’s nice to have some regularity,” Ditzy offered.

“Didn’t your world suddenly change one day? Or did I hear that wrong?” Jenny asked.

Ditzy rubbed the feathers on the back of her head. “Yeah, that’s why I said it would be nice. I don’t really get a lot of regularity. Just a lot of bouncing around, magic transformations, and insanity. Lots of insanity.”

“Sounds fun!” Star chirped.

“It can be.”

“Hey, what’s that up ahead?” Jenny asked, pointing at the next platform, one shaped like a cross. There was some kind of fuzzy pink lump sitting on it.

“Dunno,” Star said smiling. “It’s pink though! I want it!”

Marco threw his hands in the air. “Star, we don’t know what this thing is! It’s the first thing we’ve seen since we’ve gotten here besides Jenny!”

“It’s a Pinkie,” Ditzy offered. “...Maybe. Something seems off.”

Jenny, to her credit, didn’t engage with her companions. She slowly walked up to the pink fluffy thing, curiously looking at it. It looked like a horse… But it was a little small.

The pink pony looked up at her with deep blue eyes.

“Why hello there!” Jenny said, smiling. “Are you lost too?”

“Yeah.”

“THAT PONY JUST TALKED!” Star cheered. “Best! Day! Ever!”

Ditzy looked at her, suddenly struck with the realization that she was the sane one in this group.

Jenny kneeled down, taking the pony’s talking in stride. “What’s your name?”

“Pinkie Pie.”

“Well, Pinkie, we’re going to find a way out of this mess,” Jenny said softly. “Do you want to come with us?”

Pinkie ignored the question. “Have you ever heard of the One Steve Limit?”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s just a thing to follow. To avoid confusion.”

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see-”

Pinkie pulled a sword out of her mane and drove it right through Jenny’s skull. The psychotic pink pony let out a sigh of relief. “Ah… That’s better.” She removed the sword and tossed Jenny’s body into the blue aurora below. She turned to Star, Marco, and Ditzy. “So! Who wants to go on a-”

“SPIDER WITH A TOP HAT!” Star yelled. The wand in her hand surged, summoning forth a small spider with a top hat on it.

Pinkie didn’t wait for the top hat to turn into a laser-shooting gatling-gun like she knew it would. She leaped off the edge of the platform after Jenny’s body, laughing the entire time she was within their auditory range.

Marco, Star, Ditzy, and Spider With a Top Hat just stared down into the abyss; long after the pink pony had vanished.

~~~

Eve, Cosmo, and the Grand Secretariat stood in front of a giant television screen located deep within the Sparkle Census.

“This is… well, we just call it the Display,” the Grand Secretariat said. “We can use it to communicate with other universes, anywhere in the database.”

“How’s it work?” Eve asked.

“Opens a tiny portal, enough to send a small spark spell through. It latches onto that spell and broadcasts image signals through it, allowing a display to appear on the other end without actually having a screen. It sends images back as well, all the while making sure the extreme time-difference is compensated for with its own dilation spell. Useful for talking to Twilights that may live in extreme environments.”

“I can imagine,” Cosmo said. “Starlight, upload the coordinates of the Ninth World to the Display.”

“Done,” the AI chirped.

The Grand Secretariat blinked. “…I would have preferred to know you had an artificial intelligence on your person prior to this moment.”

“Just a Starlight in here living the dream,” Starlight responded.

“…Fair enough.” The Grand Secretariat lit her horn, accessing the inner workings of the Display. “Anything I should expect?”

“Some girl named Jenny,” Eve said. “She should be easy to deal with and direct you to the University itself. If they don’t detect the display, we can always turn on a beacon, make them think we’re trying to claim this universe. That’ll get their attention.”

The Display fizzled to life, showing an image that was unmistakably the Beanstalk of the Ninth World – a tremendous space elevator that housed an entire city at its base. Humans were the most common race, but any number of completely alien forms could be seen walking at the edges.

After nothing happened for a few seconds, Cosmo gave the beacon code to the Display. Instantly, a troop of Dracogen soldiers appeared around the Display.

“Ah! Hello, Dracogen Enterprises!” Eve said, smiling. “This is the Grand Secretariat Twilight Sparkle of the Sparkle Census. She wishes to speak with the University of Doors.”

The leader of the troop, a red fish-skinned man, made a call, calling it a “Code P-9.” A second later, a holographic image appeared of a bizarre creature made of a synthetic, papery material coming out of a cubic interface. Blue lights flashed on the ‘face’ of the cube.

That’s YVND, Eve sent to the Grand Secretariat’s mind. Not part of the University directly.

YVND spoke. “Why should I direct you to them?”

“Because I want a second opinion,” the Grand Secretariat said. “Right now, the only stories I have about the University come from these mares, and as I believe you know they aren’t very positive ones.”

YVND nodded. “Very well. I shall patch you directly to the Headstone. I do not expect the conversation to be long.” The hologram faltered, buzzing with static for a few seconds before coalescing into a new form – that of a five-limbed robot wafting with glowing blue magic.

Looks like the Headstone has changed.

“A new society, hrm?” the robotic being chirped.

“Yes, I am the-”

“I got all the information already, no need to repeat yourself. You call yourselves the Sparkle Census?”

“Yes.”

“There are no Twilight Sparkles here, so you are of no concern to us. Do you wish to distinguish your beacons from the Charter’s?”

The Grand Secretariat raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“Send the desired frequency over now so we may determine which worlds are under your purview, and which ones are ours. Any overlaps are first-come first-serve. We will let you have any such worlds for the next month unless we find reason for dispute. Is this all?”

“I was hoping to open relations…”

“The University does not need to interfere with the affairs of other multiversal societies. It is a mistake the previous Headstone made, not a mistake I plan to repeat. We will stay out of each other’s way. Goodbye, Grand Secretariat.” The feed cut.

“Is that all you wanted?” YVND asked, appearing on the feed again.

“No, but it’ll do,” the Grand Secretariat answered. “I don’t suppose you have anything to say?”

“At the moment, no. I will create a more formal method by which to communicate. A line to the Dracogen communication center is being transmitted to you. Use that to get our attention next time, you sent us into high alert.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Does that apply to us as well?”

“Yes, it does,” YVND decreed. “Though I can’t see why you would want to talk with us. Now please disconnect, whatever you’re doing to adjust for the temporal dissonance is blowing out the sensors in this universe.”

“Apologies,” the Grand Secretariat said. “Different methods will be used from now on.”

“See that it they are.” YVND vanished. The Grand Secretariat shut the Display off.

“They were… cheery,” she commented.

Eve shrugged. “They weren’t as angry as I was expecting. I guess that’s what new leadership does. I think they explicitly didn’t want us contacting them again last time.”

The Grand Secretariat raised an eyebrow. “Was I being used as an excuse to dance around a treaty?”

Cosmo smirked. “Perhaps.”

“Wait, what?” Eve shook her head. “…Cosmo, why did you not let me in on that part of the reasoning behind this?”

“You might have objected,” Cosmo said. “Besides, now we have communications and a ‘treaty’ between the University and Sparkle Census. Worked out for everyone involved.”

“…Huh. Sorry, Grand Secretariat.”

“It is no issue,” she responded. “We are all known for using occasional underhanded tactics to get a desired result. The art of simply not saying something is an ancient and powerful one.”

“I’ll say,” Eve agreed. “Or, if you’re Pinkie, say a million things that have nothing to do with the secret.”

“Or any number of other random methods.”

“That, in and of itself, is a method…”

“True,” the Grand Secretariat said, summoning a book she had just been reminded of. “This reminds me, do you have a working Pinkie theory of any kind?”

“What do you mean?” Eve asked.

“Why they are so different. So energetic. So beyond physics…”

“Well, my Pinkie admitted that she knows things, but she also said she can’t tell me why or how.”

The Grand Secretariat blinked. “…That’s rare. Most Pinkies won’t even admit they have something different about them. Tell me more.”

Eve smiled. “Our Pinkie seems standard, at first, but when you get to the meat of it…”

~~~

Thrackerzod couldn’t think.

That wasn’t true. She could think. On the level of a simple organic being.

She no longer had the backup methods of information access stored in her eldritch nature. She had no memories that she didn’t form with this body. She had no power. She knew she was Thrackerzod, ‘high’ demon in service of Azathoth and the Eldritch Embodiment. But she could no longer comprehend what that meant.

She was nothing but an organic mind. If she had memories of the Embodiment, she would go crazy. The thought that her home was now toxic to her was horrifying.

She knew how to get her powers back – a simple circle and a dimensional device could tap her soul into Azathoth’s nature again. But she couldn’t do that in this place. In this place she was just a plain unicorn, barely more than a filly, who could scarcely comprehend what was going on around her.

Who spent all her time trying to realize her place in existence, but shying away because her true nature was impossible for her current self to comprehend.

She realized with some horror that she was probably going to be driven mad by this simple paradox of memory.

Was this what others felt when she confronted them?

She wished she could remember what she confronted them with…

She started crying.

Bot glanced at Thrackerzod. She was so out of it she had to be carried by Suzie. “…Is she going to be okay?” Bot asked, having long since stopped trying to get a response out of the completely normal unicorn.

“I… I don’t know,” Suzie said, sighing. She turned to Burgerbelle, who wasn’t doing much better – barely able to walk behind Siron in her tearful state. All of them were.

Thrackerzod was dimly aware of this. If only we had a hamburger. All our problems would be solved.

Suzie hefted Thrackerzod. “Come on… Allure and Squeaky are gone Zod… You’re the one who knows what to do…”

“Your leaders are scrambled,” Siron said. “Take charge yourself.”

Suzie glared. “Not everyone is a warrior, Siron.”

“Everyone should be,” Siron responded. “And soon, everyone will see that.”

“How? What are you going to do?”

“…You’re not as terrified of me as you look,” Siron said. “Trying to get information about my plans from me? That’s not something a scared girl does. That’s something a clever mind does.” He turned to face her. “But you aren’t a warrior of the mind. I can see it in those eyes of yours, girl. You hesitate. Flinch.”

Suzie couldn’t meet his eyes.

“Thrackerzod was a proud warrior,” Siron continued. “Unflinching. Able to act even after she had been broken, for a time. That is the kind of person you should become to survive – or, if not that, to have honor.”

“Yeah!” Fef emphasized, lessening the threatening nature of Siron’s speech considerably. “We’ve gotta stand strong!”

Siron, despite this cheery interruption, seemed to find it fitting. “Yes, Fef. As you can see, Suzie, there is more than one type of warrior. But what defines us is an unwavering urge to fight for ourselves and what we care for. Your pathetic willingness to give in for the sake of feelings and friendship… It cannot be tolerated.”

“Are you trying to convert me?” Suzie blurted.

“Perhaps. Or perhaps I just haven’t had someone who disagrees with me around as of late.”

“Yeah! Fl-”

“Fef, say nothing,” Siron said. “Our plans need to remain completely secret, there is some chance they get something out.”

Fef nodded. “Right. Sorry, Siron.”

“Just be more careful,” Siron stated. “All we need to discuss with them and those around us is how to get out of this place.”

“I was beginning to think you had caused this, somehow,” Suzie muttered.

“Just another one in the trap,” Siron muttered. “Since walking around and exploring has done nothing, the purpose of this place – if there is such a thing – is to meet the others trapped here. I think there may be two dozen or so here. The answer is either for us all to meet up and work together – or for there to be a last man standing in a conflict.”

“A game?” Suzie said. “What kind of game is this?”

“I don’t know,” Siron answered, narrowing his eyes. “And depending on who the designer is, the way of the warrior may not be the way to win. Which is why you live.”

“Leverage.”

“Yes.”

Suzie paused. “…You know there’s a chance this is just some ancient universe left behind by an unknown civilization that acts on its own. Doing things just for the sake of doing it. There may be no reason.”

“If that is the case, we are likely doomed,” Siron stated. “No one here has the resources to analyze the universe from the inside out… I saw that Doctor. He had tried.”

“The Doctor’s here?”

“And several other geniuses. Rick, for one. They’re stuck as well,” Siron clutched his staff. “The world we are in is beyond them.”

“…You respect this place, don’t you?” Suzie blurted.

“It has all of us trapped. We are powerless,” Siron elaborated. “Of course I admire something that is this effective against everyone in it. If there is a being behind this, it has power. Perhaps not honor, but a warrior’s instinct.”

“Or it’s just bored,” Bot suggested.

Everyone stopped in their tracks.

“What?”

Siron took in a breath. “The machine has a point.”

Fef blinked. “She does?”

“If you had unparalleled power… Wouldn’t you be bored? And just start doing things to break the monotony?”

“Totally!”

Siron put a hand to his face. “This could be problematic… If the only reason we are here is to ‘see what happens’.”

Silence fell over the two demons and their four prisoners. They kept walking, on the lookout for anything, anything at all. There was nothing.

Thrackerzod opened her eyes and looked up at Suzie. She managed to choke out two words.

“I’m sorry.”

The soft, gentle voice was too much. Suzie started crying after such a long time keeping it in.

Siron didn’t stop her. He didn’t even chide her.

~~~

Sparky, Twiree, and Twix sat in one of the Sparkle Census’s many Hayburgers. This particular one was run by an earth pony Twilight who had mastered the art of hoof-magic. Each and every burger was essentially a potion in a more substantial form. Sparky and Twix had ordered magic rejuvenation while Twiree had ordered Unlimited Energy Extreme. The other two were watching her cautiously, waiting for the insanity to kick in.

Twix took a bit of her hayburger and turned the page in a book she had just bought. “I have to say, that bookstore Twilight really knows how to give me a good read. I mean, mmm, I’m not a standard Twilight and this is just amazing.”

“That book’s enchanted to be interesting, I bet,” Sparky said. She looked out the window at the sea of purple ponies walking around.

“You haven’t touched your food!” Twiree said, having already downed her burger… Without opening her mouth. Somehow.

“Not hungry,” Sparky said.

Twix sighed, closing her book. “Sparky, what’s up?”

“I need to be looking for Coro-”

“That isn’t it,” Twix said. “Everybody knows if that was really what’s bothering you, you would have left by now. But you’re still here.”

“I… I don’t know,” Sparky said. “Actually, I do. I just… When this all started, I was beyond excited to explore, to find out more, to make new friends, to learn. Now? I can’t stop hearing about… All the terrible things. There’s nuclear wasteland worlds. Worlds with horrendous creatures that torment every living thing. Versions of myself who have destroyed everything. And there’s all the secrets, pressure, and underhanded things.”

“It’s what has to be done in the face of all the darkness,” Twix said. “The magic of friendship doesn’t always work, you know, as much as we want it too. There are… other forces.”

Sparky put her chin in her hands and sighed. “I invented that dimensional device everyone holds now, or at least the theory behind it. Some days I wonder if I shouldn’t have done that. Just… Let the explorations remain just small explorations and not enable a society to form.”

“I don’t think that would have stopped it long.”

“Plus, you’ve done a lot of good!” Twiree said. “My universe wouldn’t have been freed without you! Many ruthless leaders have been deposed, evils sealed away, and the quality of life on virtually every world in the alliance has increased!”

Sparky shook her head. “And then there are horrible superweapons we can’t let anyone know about, deceptive stories about scientific procedures, things not said in order to keep the population in check, and political pressure to ensure cooperation. Gem Vein and Lai are riddled with these sorts of things. Yes, I get it, it’s needed, and I can’t think of an alternative to it. I just start thinking it’s not worth it… Or the multiverse is just evil, or something. Maybe that’s the real enemy, existence itself.”

“Could be,” Twix admitted. “Why not fight it directly then?”

“…I can’t do that,” Sparky admitted. “It requires… too much. Too many lies, too many deceptions, and I know there are people who get sent to their deaths.” She looked into the distance. “I miss the days where it was just me, Corona, and the girls, and it looked like nothing would change. But we got older… And the world changed drastically…” She shook her head. “I think I need to pull out of the game. Stop studying all the high-end science and just… become a librarian, or something. Live on Earth Vitis in a town where there’s little danger of an interdimensional incursion.”

“If that’s what you want. Some people are just more suited to settling down. Maybe raising a family.”

“W-who said anything about raising a family?!” Sparky said, flustered.

Twiree smirked. “Ooooooh, listen to that stutter! Got somebody in mind, hrm…?”

“I… Er…”

Twix rolled her eyes. “Go easy on her, Twiree.”

Twiree deflated. “Aw…”

Twix looked out the window. “I think you should do it.”

Sparky blinked. “Hrm?”

“Look at all those Twilights out there. They could be out exploring the multiverse, using the resources of this place to discover bold, new things. But they aren’t Eve. They’re running hayburgers, shops, and above all opening bookstores. It seems like that’s what most Twilights want to do, apparently. Cool as all this is, most of them just don’t feel the drive Eve does.”

“I’m not Eve…” Sparky said, turning the thought over in her head. “I’m definitely not Eve.”

“No, duh,” Twiree said.

“We were different before we even met too,” Sparky wondered. “I think the Fluttershys were the only other ones like that. The rest… the same. I wonder why that is.”

“You going to run some experiments to find that out?” Twix asked.

“God, no,” Sparky laughed. “I’m pretty sure I am just going to become a librarian at this point. Not here, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Of course!” Twiree echoed, wanting to get in on the ‘repeat’ fun.

Sparky rolled her eyes. She grabbed her hayburger and took a bite. She took one chew before stopping short. She spat it out, gagging.

“Problem?” Twiree asked.

“That’s… not meat… I can’t believe I didn’t realize…”

Twiree and Twix started laughing. After Sparky stopped gasping she joined them.

~~~

“Plan…” Pinkie muttered to herself. “Nova, what’s my plan again?”

“Step One: Find people. Step Two: Ummmm… Step Three: Escape,” Nova deadpanned.

“There’s gotta be a better way to do this,” Jane muttered.

“If you want another goal, it’s to defeat the crazed Pinkie!” Allure suggested. “That’ll be nice!”

“I’ve got another side-quest,” Vriska suggested. “Find the Doctor and kick his teeth in.”

Renee turned to Vriska. “What did happen between you two?”

“Have you ever had a friend for years only to discover they were lying to you about basically everything?” Vriska asked. The rest of her team, Jane, and Jenny (still tied up) nodded. “It was like that. He was… one of the first people I traveled the multiverse with. I learned a lot from the asshole about how things work. But I was always trying to get home. And he knew it. But he would never take me, and I had always assumed it was because he didn’t know where all the worlds were. But lo and behold, captain immortal asshole of time did know. And after that… I realized all the other things he’d done.”

“Oh?” Renee asked, egging her on to continue.

“I remembered… All the times he’d manipulated me to produce a specific reaction just because he wanted a particular outcome. All the times he talked me out of using my power because we had no ‘right’ to interfere. All the times he just demanded everything about him be a secret. All the times he’d walked away from a problem not because it was too big for him to handle, but because it ‘wasn’t his business’. And then, like a complete hypocrite, all those times he let his emotions get the better of him and destroyed things. The man may not be a killer like myself, but he’s destroyed far more lives than I could ever hope to.”

“…Siron,” Flutterfree said. “That’s who I’m imagining right now.”

Nova nodded. “Yeah. He seemed… to always be there for us. Against Majora… And then it turned out he never was. He was always plotting.”

“And none of us could believe we didn’t see it sooner,” Renee said. “I think… I think we understand, Vriska. The pain.”

Flutterfree nodded. “I don’t think the Doctor’s a Siron though… I think he’s just misguided.”

“Couldn’t you say Siron’s just misguided, in a different way though?” Allure suggested.

Pinkie spoke up. “One has all the power and doesn’t think he should use it. One doesn’t have the power and thinks he deserves it.”

Renee gasped. “S-Speak of the devil, and he shall appear…” she said, pointing at a platform that had just appeared in their field of view.

There stood Siron, Suzie’s neck held tight in one of his hands, while the other three Sweeties were tied up behind him. “Don’t move or I kill these fillies.”

“GIRLS!” Allure shouted, voice cracking. Squeaky had to hold her back from doing something crazy. Brute growled, hoofing the ground aggressively.

Nova lit her horn, preparing a complex teleport.

Siron raised his staff. “You don’t want to do that, Nova. I can still kill them with this.”

“I bet I can teleport that away from you,” Nova muttered.

“You’ll find it’s protected,” Siron said. “Furthermore, if you think you all can rush me in one attack, know that Fef is hiding nearby and will kill someone in the chaos. Your best course of action is to listen to me.”

“Yeah, right,” Vriska said, looking at him with her eye. “Let me jus-”

“Vriska, look at this staff. You know what it is, don’t you?”

“So it is a Juju,” Vriska said. “…I haven’t seen something from my home worlds in a long, long time. What’s that one do? Time jump? Shift everyone through a calendar? Cause candy crush madness?”

“It’s intended to kill Horrorterrors,” Siron stated. “You know what those are, don’t you?”

Vriska nodded. “So who gave you it? Lord English? Caliborn? …Calliope?”

“I do not know who the green god was all those eons ago, Vriska. I know it was bestowed to my kind to be passed down to me, where I would finally unlock it.”

“What’s a Horrorterror?” Nova asked Vriska.

“You know that Azathoth Thrackerzod is always talking about?” Vriska asked.

“…Yes?”

“Imagine a lot of those guys.”

Renee sighed. “I’m afraid the illustration is lost on us…”

“It’s enough for my point,” Siron said. “Majora was pathetic fuel for this staff. I have since found a much more suitable source and made it my own. I easily killed the four interdimensional warriors protecting these four with it. I have my doubts I could take you all on at once, one of you might get lucky. So here we are. You are all going to listen to me, or these prisoners die. All four of them.”

Jane ground her teeth. “Bastard.”

“I don’t know who you are,” Siron said. “But whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t. I sense the same power in you that I sensed in that unicorn. I could take it away with this Juju.”

Jane’s pupils dilated. “You didn’t… You couldn’t have…” She took a step forward.

Sweetie pulled on her with her magic. “No! Jane, don’t! We have to-”

“There is no way you beat Sunny,” Jane said, clenching her fist. A power surge sent Sweetie flying backward. “It’s flat out impossible. We kill gods. You’re just a bug!”

Flutterfree acted first. Now that Sweetie wasn’t near Jane, she didn’t care about not getting close. She leaped toward Jane – not caring that the woman’s appearance changed the moment she got within a meter. Jane was taller, covered in ancient burn marks on one arm, and covered in brutal scars just about everywhere else. Her eyes were black, with only a single red pupil in the right.

Flutterfree tackled her, wrapping Lolo around every one of Jane’s limbs – but the ‘woman’ tore them effortlessly, despite not being a Stand user. She glared right at Flutterfree, face that of rage.

Flutterfree used her Stare on Jane. Jane froze in place, unable to look away from the deep, red, vampiric eyes.

“Nova… Please tell me you have a time stop prepared…” Flutterfree managed.

“Done,” Nova said, freezing Jane in time. “Now we just need to find something strong enough to keep her…”

“I can weaken her considerably,” Siron offered.

“We’re not going to do what you want,” Allure shouted at him. “Let her keep herself!”

“As long as you keep her restrained somehow,” he said.

“So…” Pinkie said, grunting. “Siron, what’s the plan?”

“We’re going to force all the others to join us,” he answered. “If they won’t, we kill them. Simple as that.”

“Why?” Sweetie blurted.

“Because we need to get out of this place. And as far as I can tell, the purpose of this place must be us. So I’m going to bring us all together.”

“Under you,” Jenny prodded.

“Yes. Under me. As it should be.”

Nova ground her teeth. Pinkie had to put a hoof on her to steady her. “All right, Siron. Lead the way.”

They set off, the frozen form of Jane carried by Nova.

Jane couldn’t even think – she was frozen. Frozen on a single thought.

Sunny isn’t dead.

~~~

A feather in Gilgamesh’s inventory lit on fire, covering his entire body in holy flames. His wound healed to manageable levels and he took his first after-death breath.

He stood up slowly, casting Curaja on himself, restoring his vitality to full. He checked his inventory – that was the last Phoenix Down. He’d need to return to standard Void worlds to get more. So hard to come by…

He looked at the three bodies – Sunny, Sunset, and Twilight. All very dead.

No matter. He was alive now, he could fix that. He lifted his hand into the air, conjuring magic into his limb. “Arise. Arise. Arise.”

Holy light enveloped the three bodies, healing their wounds in a couple seconds and restoring light to their eyes.

Sunny gasped. “What the… Holy…” she shook her head. “In all our god-killing days…”

Twilight rubbed her head. “Ow… Headache…”

“You’re welcome!” Gilgamesh jingled. “Deus Ex Gilgamesh, at your service!” He bowed.

“The problem isn’t solved,” Sunny said, shaking her head. “He got the Sweeties.”

Twilight nodded. “We’ve got to go after him. He won’t be expecting us to be alive.” She noticed that Sunset was still slumped on the ground. “…Sunset?”

Sunset’s head twitched. She slowly craned her neck to meet Twilight’s stare. The sight of her face made Twilight and Sunny jump back - her features were twisted, as if animated by strings rather than life. Her eyes were dead, and her mouth hung open slightly. The thing let out a laugh. “Death… A fun thing… You should tr-”

Gilgamesh stabbed her through the head with a holy sword before she could finish her sentence. Her head exploded, disappearing into smoke.

Twilight shrieked. “WHAT DID YOU DO!?”

“Came back wrong,” Gilgamesh said, standing up. “Outside the Void’s universes, that happens sometimes to people with spirits that aren’t quite right. She would have tried to kill us.”

Twilight ran over to the burning corpse of Sunset. “Sunset!” She wailed. “I… We…” She couldn’t say anything – she just broke down.

Sunny gulped, looking to Gilgamesh. “Let’s try not to die again.”

“I’m out of self-revives, so that’d be a good idea,” Gilgamesh commented.

Sunny nodded. “We’ll head out in a minute. Let’s… give her some time.”

“Fine by me. I would figure saving those Sweeties would be more import-”

“IT IS!” Twilight shouted, standing up. Sunny detected trace amounts of magic flowing from the Sunset’s corpse into Twilight. Flaming wings shot out her back, a horn of light lanced forth from her forehead, and the cuffs around her wrists lit up with fire. “We are going to save those girls. And Sunset will be avenged. I am the Sunlight.”

Normally, Sunny would have tried to discourage the use of a dead lover’s magic to empower oneself for revenge, but she held her tongue. It was better right now for them to have extra firepower against… that Siron. “We need to track them,” she said, trying not to look too closely at Sunlight.

Gilgamesh nodded. “Lucky for you I’m an excellent tracker. The scuffs on the stone from that carapace of his are easy to follow. This way.” He hoisted his sword and charged. Sunlight followed after him with angry tears.

Sunny shook her head at the tragedy and followed.

~~~

M4 decided she liked the Twilight known as 4T. There was nothing to differentiate her from any other Twilight besides a Census badge; her appearance was normal, just like M4’s. Apparently 4T was far from normal, though – she was one of those Twilights who weren’t happy just asking questions, getting answers, and then sitting down. She had to explore, to understand, and to adventure. In those ways, she was like Eve. Had she been the one to discover dimensional travel, M4 had no doubt that 4T would have become Eve, given time.

4T was currently showing M4 around the Examail Center. “And that in the center is the dimension grinder, one of the seven wonders of the Sparkle Census,” 4T declared, holding out a wing and a hoof. The dimension grinder was immense, easily as large as Canterlot Castle itself. It was round in shape, overall, though the handful of spires that came from seemingly random sections were quite pointy. Hanging wires and valves channeled into the grinder from all sides, providing it magic, power, and information. Gigantic screens displayed the coordinates of every single universe it was testing, including the ‘nesting order’, or the path that led back to the Sparkle Census universe.

“Impressive,” M4 admitted. “Why don’t you have these interesting things in the waiting room? It’d get Twilights more interested.”

4T shrugged. “We’re in the process of changing a few things, that being one of them, but aesthetics is a secondary concern as I’m sure you’re aware.”

“Right.”

4T teleported them to a level below. The grinder was still visible, but none of the screens were. The underside didn’t look any more or less interesting than the top.

What was on this level were conveyor belts. Letters rolled in, mass produced by a matter fabrication device, all heading toward one of three magical teleporters. Every handful of seconds, one of the letters was hit with a burst of magic, and teleported away.

“This is where your letter was just a couple hours ago,” 4T said. “Produced here, then enchanted with a dimension as soon as one is found, then sent away. If a letter doesn’t receive a response in a few days, another one will be sent. Or – hey, maybe one of the Twilights who works here all the time can tell you more.” She pointed at an alicorn Twilight with a hard hat, the letters GM printed on it. “Hey! GM!”

GM looked up. “Oh! Uh… What are you guys doing here?”

“Giving a tour to a potential new employee,” 4T said. “She’s from a multiversal civilization, looking to become a bit of a diplomat between our worlds.”

M4 waved. “Hi. GM huh? Lucky letter combo.”

“It definitely is,” GM said, stretching her wings and folding them behind her back. “It also helps that my job title is General Manager. I won the lottery.”

4T nodded. “M4 was wondering about how this place worked.”

GM raised an eyebrow. “You saw the conveyor belts didn’t you?”

“Larger-scale.”

“Oh. Right.” GM moved to a large computer screen. “Here’s the controls for the Letter Network. Every letter has a magical transponder we use to locate it. They ping off each other to maximize efficiency and lower the drain on the grinder itself.”

“A thaumic web across dimensions?” M4 said. “…What do you use it for?”

“Nothing,” GM said quickly. “Well, besides determining which letters haven’t been seen, or which ones have been forgotten about.”

“That strikes me as inefficient,” M4 said. “I mean… I’m new here and all, don’t think I’m telling you how to do your job, but wouldn’t you be able to turn this web into a scanner for, well, just about anything dimensional in nature across the multiverse you’ve got covered?”

4T blinked. “Huh. That does seem like a good idea. Wonder why we don’t do that…”

GM’s smile grew. “Yeah. Isn’t that strange? Guess it’s just another bureaucratic inefficiency that 4T here is gonna have to iron out. Heh.”

“Guess so,” 4T groaned. “Probably should take you to the research labs, so you can see how much of a mess that is…”

M4 held up a hoof. “Wait a moment… GM, are you hiding something from us?”

GM clearly gulped. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Well now I’m sure you’re hiding something,” M4 said, pushing. “You see, there are cues of lying, at least in nervous people. Twitching, exaggerated movements, darting eyes, overly large smiles… gulping.”

4T blinked. “…M4, I think you’re right. She is hiding something.”

GM narrowed her eyes. “Well great, now I’ve got to take care of you two.”

“No, just tell us what you’re using the network for, we hav-”

GM lit her horn.

M4 suddenly felt really tired…

~~~

Brutalight dropped her invisibility spell. GM, M4, and 4T all lay on the ground, asleep thanks to her handiwork. She would have preferred to listen longer, but she couldn’t have been sure what GM’s spell was going to be. There was clearly a conspiracy of some sort going on here. It would have been ever so interesting to find some real dirt, but she had to put her own escape above her desire for knowledge.

She made a cursory inspection of the information onscreen. From the information she had absorbed in the books, she had a general idea of what it displayed. Letters in millions upon millions of universes. Their connections, their movements… But there was also something else there. There were several spots of blue light spread around the network, unmoving, sitting at locations between universes. Odd. There was nothing between universes. Connections didn’t actually have physical ‘distance’, merely an energy requirement to pass through.

It would be interesting to look back into this once she returned.

But first…

She turned to the conveyor belts. They were still operating. All she had to do was get on one of those letters and go to another universe. She’d have to time it just right…

But she was Brutalight Sparcake. Of course she could time it right. She was getting out of here.

~~~

Gyro, Gandalf, Froppy, Ivan, and the Doctor traveled in their own group, the Doctor taking point with his sonic screwdriver.

Their current plan was to find the TARDIS. It would, if nothing else, be safe on the inside. Given how long it had been since the explosion, the insides should have been fine.

“Are you sure you can find it?” Gyro demanded. “Nothing we have can make heads or tails of this place!”

“I am a Time Lord,” the Doctor stated. “In the section of the multiverse from which I hail, time and space are so fluid the very rules of inter-universal causality can be altered like a lightswitch. On. Off. We have learned to adapt. I know exactly where the TARDIS is in relation to us, and it will only take a bit more hopping around to arrive.”

“I don’t know…”

“I trust him,” Ivan said. “The Doctor’s name is associated with many things. A liar is not one of them.”

The Doctor forced himself to stop at this. “…You heard Vriska, didn’t you?”

“Clearly a personal matter. You’re heralded as a hero.”

“You’ve only seen a small section of the multiverse…” the Doctor said, shaking his head. “You will find that the name of the Doctor can mean anything. That of the Traveling Doctor even more so.”

Froppy turned to Gyro. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“What, all it took was a little speech?”

“Exactly,” Froppy said. “That’s all I needed. I’m not sure what kind of man he is… But he isn’t misleading us. Not right now.”

Gyro folded his arms. “Fine. But until I see a blue phone box I will remain-”

“There she is!” the Doctor cheered, his somber tone gone in an instant. “She’s even upright!”

Then the doors of the TARDIS opened from the inside. All five of them froze when they saw Pinkie inside – Pinkie with a flat mane and a knife in her hooves.

She looked them over. “Shame. I was hoping Rick would find it first.”

The Doctor took a ready stance. “I would ask how you got past the TARDIS security system, but that would be pointless. I know what you are.”

“You don’t. Not fully,” Pinkie said, twirling her knife. “That’s the twist!” She leaped into the air, knife held over her head. “Let’s see if yo-”

One of Gyro’s steel balls hit her between the eyes, pushing her back into the ground. She stood up, rubbing her head.

“I forgot how OP you were…” Pinkie muttered.

“That should have knocked you out at least,” Gyro commented. “Good show. Goodbye.”

Pinkie dodged to the left, avoiding the invisible fist of Ball Breaker.

“The hell!? Sh-”

“No, she can’t see it,” the Doctor said. “She doesn’t need to. She’s thrown aside her inhibitions. We need to run.”

“Spoilsport!” Pinkie called. “You know I’d just stab one of you in the back…” she giggled. “Oh, whatever. Time is candy!” She produced a squeaky hammer. “Wheeee!”

Gyro sent more steel balls at her, but she deflected all of them with her squeaky hammer, a comical squee going out every time she hit one. At the same time, she twisted her body to avoid the actual punches of Ball Breaker and the Spin it was inducing around her. “Gotcha Gyro! I g-”

Ball Breaker landed a hit on her stomach, forcing her to drop her squeaky hammer and go flying into the air higher… and higher… and higher…

Gyro blinked. “…Usually they come back down.”

Ivan put a hand to his head. “The gravity could have altered up there due to another platform. I’d consider it a victory.”

Froppy narrowed her eyes. “She was too confident. She’s not done with us.”

The Doctor nodded. “No doubt, but we’ll have some time befo-”

“NOPE!” Pinkie shouted, falling out of the sky at a speed far faster than terminal velocity. She brought a very real warhammer down on Gandalf. He managed to raise his magical shield just in time, holding her immense force above him.

“You shall not pass,” Gandalf decreed, entrapping her in his magic now that she was close.

Pinkie giggled. “That’s what you think.”

There was a party cannon behind Gandalf. It went off, knocking him forward, into Pinkie. He lost control of his spell – enough for Pinkie to produce a sword. Gandalf fell into the blade.

“GANDALF!” Gyro yelled. He moved, but it was not him who got there first. Froppy’s tongue wrapped around the freshly freed Pinkie. The sticky appendage yanked hard on the pink pony, throwing her off the edge of the platform and down into the blue aurora.

“INTO THE TARDIS!” Froppy yelled. “NOW!”

The Doctor, Ivan, and Gyro didn’t need any prompting. They ran for it, Gyro in the back. Gyro turned just as the door started closing.

A single pink hoof stuck itself through the door, holding it open. Pinkie pulled the door back open. “Heya!”

Gyro just went with an old fashioned kick to the face to get rid of her. He forced the door of the TARDIS shut. “…I’m not a fan of running, but that clearly wasn’t going to end well.”

“Gandalf…” Froppy said, trying to steady her breathing.

“Nice place,” was Ivan’s comment of choice.

The Doctor placed his hands on the console. “I can move us to a different location in this uni- Oh no.”

There was a giant cake on the part of the control console reserved for in-universe location management.

“This is going to take too long,” the Doctor said, furrowing his brow. Whatever he was going to say next was cut off when the entire TARDIS started shaking.

“What’s that?” Gyro demanded.

“She’s moving us!” the Doctor shouted. “She’s gone completely off the deep end!”

“Where’s she taking us?” Gyro demanded.

“How would any of us know that?” Ivan asked. “She’s clearly psychotic.”

“I… Just.” Gyro threw his hands in the air. “Fine. Anyone got a plan?”

“Help me get the cake out of this console,” the Doctor said. “That’s our best bet.” He flicked on a screen on a back wall. “We can see what’s happening outside with this…”

Three kids appeared on the screen – teenagers, one with gray skin. They saw Pinkie carrying a TARDIS, apparently recognized her, and ran off.

They could hear Pinkie laugh. “Run my little children! It’s best if you stay far away from everyone else! Remember nothing but me about this whole trip…”

~~~

Siron and his captives heard fighting, but they couldn’t see it. They heard the sound of a deranged pink pony laughing above all other things. They heard the screams of children…

Siron clenched his fist. “That could be a problem.”

“Hey, at least you won’t have to convince us to fight that thing,” Vriska commented. “Hard to be more evil than you, but from the sounds of those laughs, we got ourselves a true-born murder-crazed psycho.”

Siron didn’t remove his grip on Suzie’s neck. “We’re going in the direction of that laughter. With our firepower, we can take her.”

Pinkie sighed. “I am not looking forward to having to kick myself in the face again…”

As they set out, Sweetie Belle looked frantically around for a way out of the situation. Siron still had a grip on Suzie’s neck, and they still had no idea where Fef was…

“What are we going to do?” she whispered to the rest of the League.

Squeaky racked her brain. “I have no idea. If this were a military op, I’d give the order to rush him with the acceptable risk of losing the hostage. But this isn’t a military op. There’s no armies or countries on the line. This is just us.”

Allure narrowed her eyes. “There’s going to be a fight soon, a big one, right?”

“Yesss….” Brute said. “And then, we are going to save Suzie and make Siron feel sorry he was ever born…”

Sweetie looked at Brute, thinking for a moment about the brutality of the statement. But… it looked like they needed to do that. She had no idea how strong he would be otherwise… “Right.”

The voice of Vriska entered all of their minds. You girls planning something over there?

Squeaky motioned for all of them to act natural. She tapped her hoof on the ground once, to indicate yes.

Good. When the fighting breaks out, we do everything we can to get Suzie out of his grasp. There’s a group following us that’ll take care of Fef. We’ll release Jane and Jenny as well, so this entire place is going to blow like a pop stand.

Squeaky tapped the ground to confirm.

“Plans… Plans are good,” Sweetie said. She turned to the vacant form of Thrackerzod. The mare was no longer crying, but there was still no life in her eyes. “…Did you get that?”

“Mm? Yes…” she said, almost in a whisper. “Yes… Good plan…”

Sweetie looked at Allure. “…I thought she’d be better without her darkness.”

Allure sighed. “I thought she might be as well. …Clearly not. She needs it.”

“We have to get it back to her. And save Suzie. And stop all the bad guys. And get out of here.”

“Tall order.”

Sweetie nodded. “At least we’re not going up against the incarnation of evil.”

Allure smirked. “I like the sound of that.”

Siron glanced behind him, hearing the raised voices. “What are you all so happy about?”

Allure put her hoof over her mouth. Sweetie glared at Siron. “We’re talking about what we’re going to do to you after this is over.”

“Plotting revenge…” Siron let himself chuckle. “Carry on. After everything, life would be boring without the occasional attempt on my life. I expect to see all of you a few years from now, ready to challenge me and my race. I would want it no other way.”

Sweetie narrowed her eyes. “Something’s messed up with you.”

Siron turned away from them. “Our worlds are just different, Sweetie Belle.” He was clearly no longer paying them much attention. The group moved on in silence, preparing for an encounter with pink fluffy death.

~~~

Eve, Cosmo, and the Grand Secretariat stood at the top of a tower within the Sparkle Census, looking at the sprawling expanse of buildings below.

“Not even 1% of your members are actually here right now, are they?” Cosmo asked.

“You’d be correct,” the Grand Secretariat answered. “The Census has very few permanent residents, compared to the number of Twilights who are part of us. Many never come back here. Some only return when looking for an answer to a mysterious question. To others, this is just another city they visit sometimes. There’s even the occasional team sent here on a Friendship Problem Mission by the Tree of Harmony or a version thereof.”

“That reminds me of a question I had,” Eve spoke up. “The Tree of Harmony – evidence we’ve been collecting suggests it used to be a Star. But the Stars were multiversal, and we’ve found so many versions of the Tree.”

“Not all versions of the Tree are a Star,” the Grand Secretariat said. “A lot are, but I wouldn’t say the majority. Many of the trees really were created by Starswirl and not based on an already present Harmony Force, like I assume yours was. But as for those that are the remnant of the Star known as Castor...” She looked into the distance. “It is one of the things we know about the Star Society. They had alternates, just like we do. There were thousands of Castors. Thousands of Corots. Thousands of Siriuses. But unlike us, they didn’t live alongside their counterparts, they made their minds one. We have no idea how, but every version of Castor was the same Star in their society, connected through magic beyond our understanding at all times. So, in many ways, there was only one Castor, and she did the same thing every time. She always ended up crashing into a world that eventually becomes Equis. Sometimes.”

“That’s one of the strangest things we’ve noticed,” Eve said. “While there’s a lot of commonality, and Standard Equis is everywhere, it seems like the origin of our world changes from universe to universe. There’s sometimes a creator alicorn. Sometimes everything just happened naturally. Other times…” she put a hoof to her chin. “Why would dozens of different start conditions and histories result in nearly the same outcome at nearly the same time?”

“Ah, the Thread,” the Grand Secretariat said. “Not a force we understand, at all. We’ve been able to detect this strange force around worlds, individuals, and events, as if it’s tying them together.”

“We call it the Beat,” Cosmo said.

“A fitting name, given its generally rhythmic nature.” She shook her head. “We are certain it is the reason for so many similarities – alternates, converging probabilities, goals – but we haven’t the foggiest idea how. Or why. Or what it even is.”

“Welcome to the club,” Eve said, furrowing her brow. “Though we never thought it was responsible for alternates and converging history… Though that makes sense. It seems tied to patterns and events…” she shook her head. “I don’t pretend to be the expert. I could have you talk to Starbeat, she spends all her time studying it since she’s cursed by it.”

“It sounds like something for the scientists to iron out later.”

It was at this point an alarm went off in the Grand Secretariat’s ear. She lit her horn, face serious. “What is it?”

A voice came out of her horn, that of a Twilight. “Tampering at the Examail Center.”

“That’s not enough for a class N alert.”

Realizing that there was probably an important message she wasn’t hearing, Eve turned on her ears and winced.

“Twilights were sent to intercept. The entire squad was wiped out by strange swords that killed with one slice and prevented healing magic.”

Eve gasped. “No…”

The Grand Secretariat glanced at Eve while continuing her conversation. “Do we know which Twilight it was?”

“Darker color, otherwise standard alicorn. Running through records now.”

“It’s Brutalight Sparcake,” Cosmo said. “She’s the Twilight we warned you about. The one we had imprisoned.”

The Grand Secretariat nodded. “I understand. I guess my warnings went un-implemented.”

“No, that’s not it,” Eve said. “When we were working on our papers we saw an alicorn come in we thought was her, but didn’t act like it. She…” Eve stamped her hoof on the ground. “She fooled us!”

The Grand Secretariat spoke into her horn again. “Search recent arrivals, within the last three hours.”

“Found her,” the voice came back. “Twilight E carrot-P pound R zero. Tracking her.”

“I’ll deal with her personally,” the Grand Secretariat said, hanging up. “…When you warned me about her you could have mentioned the pony that looked like her.”

“I’m sorry!” Eve said. “I didn’t-”

“I know,” the Grand Secretariat interrupted. “But right now ponies have just died in the Sparkle Census. That doesn’t happen. I’m not going to hold you accountable, our security did let her through, but you are going to help fix this problem of yours.”

Eve nodded. “Of course.” She shut off her ears, in order to be ready.

They teleported away.

~~~

Rick and Morty ran across platform after platform, following a little ping on a yellow sensor in Rick’s hands.

“Rick are you sure we should be running toward the noises?” Morty asked his grandfather.

“That’s where the TARDIS is,” Rick said. “And we need that thing for the microverse.”

“Oh, that thing you shot and blew up?”

“The Doctor needed to be kicked down a peg. Plus, I wouldn’t have had free access if he’d been near the thing.”

“You were trying to kill the Doctor. The Doctor, Rick!”

“There are other Doctors out there. Again, if I wanted to kill him, I would have at least aimed at him Morty. Screw your brain on right.”

“Not that one and you know it!”

“He’s a self-entitled asshole who needs to stop finding immortality loopholes.”

“God, Rick, do you realize how much you’re describing yourself?”

Rick didn’t dignify this with an answer. He just returned his focus to the device in his hands. “Getting close. Hard left, Morty.”

“Har- woah.” Morty skidded to a halt, noticing that the platforms came to an abrupt halt. They stood on the edge of a round platform with eight spokes, and the spoke was barely large enough for Morty to stand.

In the center of the round platform was the TARDIS – with a pink pony sitting on top of it. She grinned. “Hi, RICK!”

Rick stopped short, narrowing his eyes. “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want?”

“Oh, dropping the bombs already I see?” she giggled, producing a long knife and twirling it on top of her hoof. “Let’s see. Do you remember the Pinkie that promised she’d kill you if you did something?”

“I have so many death threa-”

“That’d be the interdimensional Pinkie, Rick,” Morty said. “The one we saw trapped in here earlier.”

Rick blinked. “Right. That one.”

Pinkie jumped off the TARDIS and twitched. “On that day, I promised myself I’d kill you. I became this so I could do it. So, to answer your questions… My name is Pinkamena Diane Pie. You killed my friends. Prepare to die.”

Rick pulled out a gun and fired. Pinkie just appeared behind him and drove a sword through his chest and pulled up, cutting him in half effortlessly. She was not surprised in the slightest to find the Rick was made out of smoke. She threw the knife behind her, swirling her hammer around at seemingly random.

She hit the invisible Rick, sending him flying into side of the TARDIS. He grunted. “Ergh…”

Pinkie opted to just throw knives at him instead of getting close again. He activated a device to deflect them, but one got through and hit him in the arm.

“RICK!” Morty yelled.

“Don’t yell, Morty,” Pinkie said. “Be happy. Be happy that he doesn’t care enough about you for you to be worth taking hostage.”

“…That’s not a good thought.”

Pinkie laughed. “Well, it means you get to live through this! Probably. I might just lose all sense of pony-ness and kill you after. I’ve gone completely bonkers, see.” She produced a machine gun and tried to riddle Rick with bullets, but he somehow dodged every last one.

Rick pulled out a strange, round, crystalline device. “I am not going to die to a pathetic pink pony.” The device activated, sending out a shockwave that knocked Morty out like a domino and paralyzed him to boot.

Pinkie just grinned. “Nice try.”

“Fuck…” he muttered, resorting to pulling out a gun and firing it at the TARDIS. Pinkie pulled a mirror shield out of nowhere and reflected it into his other arm. Rick fell back.

“Guess what, Rick?” Pinkie giggled. “There’s nothing here for you to use! I’m blocking the TARDIS, you’re running out of supplies on your person, and there’s nothing here but blocks of stone. Your tenacity means nothing here.” She dropped her weapon, opting for a long, overly sharp knife. She started to sing as she moved closer to Rick. He fired at her again and again, but she always just shifted at the right moment, twisted to the left, or jumped over whatever he threw at her.

“I want to cut you open, see your colors run!
I want to play I want to have a friend to have some fun!
Don’t be afraid, don’t cry, just give in!
This is the last time I’ll see you again!”

She pinned his arms and legs to the ground with knives, stopping his retaliation. A weapon appeared in his hair and shot her, boring a hole just under one of her eyes. She didn’t care.

“So come on, relax, just sit still!
You belong to me and you will~!
Keep quiet and look me in the eye!
Cos-”

The poofy-maned Pinkie appeared and hit her across the head with a hammer. “STOP!”

The psychotic Pinkie laughed. “Of course! You had to save him – someone had to, at least this early. I’m not surprised. Just, oh, livid. Why do you let him live, Pinkie Pie?”

“This isn’t what we do!” Pinkie called back. “This isn’t our type of par-”

“IT IS NOW! HE KILLED ALL MY FRIENDS! ALL OF THEM! THE DAY YOU GAVE HIM YOUR ULTIMATUM, I VOWED HE WOULD PERISH BY MY HOOF!”

Pinkie’s eyes widened as she put two and two together. “No… No… Pinkie-X?!”

“Yes! Pinkie-X!” Pinkie-X cheered, laughing. “Oh, you know, the mare who knew the universe was gonna die ahead of time, along with you? The one who convinced you she was going to stay?”

“You were going to stay!”

“Last minute heebie-jeebies!” she cackled. “Couldn’t stay. So I left just before it happened. I could have lived normally… But nope!” She pointed a knife at Rick. “He needed to pay. And it just so happened that I was in a unique situation to actually be able to do it!”

Pinkie hefted her hammer. “You let the death you were supposed to have consume you.”

“Exactly! Wasn’t even that hard! Just exaggerate the power a little bit, drop the inhibitions, and presto! I was a monster. It feels liberating, you should try it!”

“No,” Pinkie said, hitting her counterpart with a hammer, tossing her off the platform. “I will never be you. I’m not the only survivor of a universe that was supposed to fade into nothing.”

Pinkie-X gasped. “Oh my! You don’t know!”

Pinkie blinked. “…Don’t know what?”

“You’re going to be so mad when you figure that out,” Pinkie-X laughed.

“…That doesn’t matter.” Pinkie hit her counterpart again. “You’re coming with me.”

“Alrighty! Sure, I’ll be a distraction. Bring on the bloodbath!”

Pinkie sighed. “That’s one way of looking at it.” With a push off the ground, the two pink balls of fluff bounced onto another platform, and into the sight-range of Siron.

“PREPARE YOURSELVES!” Siron shouted.

~~~

“Shit shit shit…” Brutalight swore to herself as she teleported quickly through the Sparkle Census.

To put it simply, the letter teleportation network turned out to have a highly subtle security spell to prevent exactly what she had been trying to accomplish. Then the guards had shown up. Then she had to kill them. And then the real alarms went off.

She knew she was being hunted. Because of her color scheme, she wouldn’t just be able to vanish into a crowd. Not to mention the fact that an ‘evacuate sector’ alert had gone out, and the streets were quickly losing all Twilights as they returned to their home universes in an instant.

She couldn’t just return to Nautica, she’d never gotten a token…

She realized with panic that she didn’t have a plan anymore besides run. And run in a universe controlled by a multiversal association of Twilight Sparkles was probably a bad idea…

She didn’t see any other option though. She kept running.

Her teleport-gallop was interrupted when a Twilight Sparkle made entirely out of purple miasma appeared in front of her. “Come with me if you want to live.”

Brutalight opened her mouth to ask a question, and then decided to just screw it and follow the miasma Twilight without a fuss. The Twilight seemed to appreciate this, nodding to her and gesturing to a nearby building. They entered one of the doors to find a bookstore inside.

The miasma Twilight floated to the back of the building and pulled on a small, blue book. The two of them were teleported away to a large room with no entrances or exits. The floor was made of glass, below which a complex series of gears could be seen, every notch marked with a magical rune of some kind. A handful of other, angry looking Twilights stood in the room, looking at Brutalight.

“Welcome to the underground,” the miasma Twilight said. “This is our outgoing device. It only needs a few more minutes to spin up, but then we can take you away.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“The Council doesn’t do enough, that’s why,” another Twilight said. “So we’re going to make them. It seems like you may have something for us.”

“There is a prison world by the name of Nautica,” Brutalight said. “It has my friends and numerous other prisoners I’m sure could be of some use.”

“Good,” the miasma Twilight said. “They have no idea where we are. And they won’t be able to find us in just a couple minutes.”

~~~

Sweetie Belle readied herself for the perfect moment. She saw the two Pinkies coming, bouncing in their direction. Pinkie-X leaped off of Pinkie, pulling a red metallic axe out of nowhere. Siron acted, focusing on her with the energy of his staff…

NOW. Went Vriska’s psychic burst through the minds of everyone.

Sweetie knew her cue. She moved, leaping next to Siron while most of his focus was on Pinkie-X. He did see her, but it was too late. She pulled a beautiful, crystalline blade out of her pocket dimension, cutting the hand that held Suzie completely off. The dark energies flowing through Siron went to replace the limb, but Sweetie had already placed herself between Suzie and Siron.

Siron would have killed Sweetie and Suzie in an instant, but the plan took this into account.

For Jane had been released.

A blade glowing with the power of a legend none knew cut Siron down the back, making him scream out in pain. He slammed his staff on the ground, surrounding himself in a protective bubble of eldritch energies, but Jane was far too persistent. Her power was too strong – Siron may have wielded power within that staff beyond most of what Jane had seen, but his body was still that of a mortal. And mortals were easy pickings for Jane. She drove a boot into his chest piece, cracking it in a dozen different places. Blue blood spurted out as he skidded back a few feet.

He knew one thing in that instant.

If he played his cards right, he could beat Jane. Tear a part of her soul away, force her to make a mistake in her rage, and then kill her. He could do it.

He could not kill her if she had backup.

Vriska came flying from behind Jane, placing a boot right in Siron’s face. Jenny came from the other side, infusing her glove with transdimensional energy that went right through both his natural and eldritch armor. His staff returned power to him, but still he stumbled and gagged.

“Dammit…”

He was going to lose this fight.

But he was a warrior. He would never back down. If this was his end, he would go down with as much fire as possible.

Jane’s magics were too strong to destroy in an instant, and that Jenny had a habit of regenerating from any wound. It was time to see if Vriska was being Heroic right now…

He drove the staff at her, shooting her with Juju energy – and missed.

She was stealing his luck.

Vriska grabbed him by the neck. “Nice knowin’ ya.” She pulled him over her head and smashed him into the ground, cracking the platform.

Siron, despite his current unlucky disposition, still fought. He tapped into the power in the staff bestowed to him so recently, pushing his assailants back. He stood tall.

“JUST DIE ALREADY!” Jane shouted – but then the rage in her eyes died out as she noticed what was happening behind Siron.

Fef had been tossed into view by Sunny. She was alive. The rage drained from Jane’s face.

Siron took his opportunity, driving his fist into her stomach. It did go through – but he broke all his fingers in the process on her truly absurd defensive magic.

Jane, to her credit, barely flinched at what had to be outrageous pain. “Not many get through my defenses…” she muttered.

Jenny punched Siron and Vriska kicked him, forcing his fist out of Jane’s chest. He went sliding back.

Fef wasn’t doing much better. Sunny, Renee, Nova, Gilgamesh, and that flaming Twilight now known as Sunlight were on her. Despite her skill with her weapons, she had lost her stealth advantage. She was not going to win, and Siron knew it.

“FIGHT TO THE END!” Siron shouted.

“GOT IT!” Fef responded. She planted a foot on Gilgamesh, pushing him into Nova before she could initiate a time spell. She swirled her yo-yos around, nicking Renee, Sunny, and Sunlight.

Sunlight took the opportunity, grabbing hold of the yo-yo and pulling Fef in. The yo-yo swirled with enough force to cut Sunlight’s arms down to the bone, but the woman just flat did not care.

Fef pulled the second yo-yo through Sunlight’s chest – but still, the fiery being cared not.

“Why aren’t you dead!?” Fef shouted.

“I’m about to be. And so are you,” Sunlight decreed. She turned her entire body into an explosion that rocked the platform everyone stood on. Both she and Fef were vaporized in an instant.

Sunny sighed visibly.

“FEF!” Siron shouted, pain evident in his voice. He struggled against his opponents – but now Gilgamesh and the others were on him as well. His eldritch energies lashed out, but he no longer scared them.

They scared him instead.

A warrior does not let fear control him.

Siron roared, continuing to fight back against immeasurable odds.

Pinkie-X and Pinkie fought in the air. “Would you look at that!” Pinkie-X said. “That worked! Siron’s going down!”

“So are you,” Pinkie said. “You… You are a disgrace to Pinkies.”

“Yep!” She lifted a hoof to stop Ditzy from crashing into her, forcing the magical wings coming out of her back to destabilize.

Pinkie had to take a moment to throw a balloon to Ditzy so she wouldn’t hit the ground too hard. “You won’t hurt anyone else.”

Pinkie-X pulled a knife out of her mane, sneering. “Guess whaaaaat?”

“No!” Pinkie said, grabbing for the knife, but Pinkie-X was already behind her.

“Random knife throw of death go!” Pinkie-X decreed, throwing the knife at a random individual on the ground.

Allure didn’t see it coming; she was busy watching the struggle with Siron.

Thrackerzod, even in her ruined state, did. She didn’t need her mental faculties to act. She leaped in front of the knife, ready to take the blade for her friend.

Allure saw Thrackerzod move, having just enough time to register the knife coming right for the two of them. There was no time to speak, just enough time for Allure to process what was going to happen. The knife was going to hit Thrackerzod in the neck… But at the speed it was going it would probably go through Thrackerzod, and hit Allure in the face. There was a chance the knife deflected off her horn, bu-

She didn’t get to continue the thought experiment. Sweetie Brute leaped into action, punching the knife just before it reached Thrackerzod. The blade cut her front leg down the middle and spun out of control, missing Thrackerzod entirely and cutting Brute through the neck. Blood spurted over Thrackerzod and Allure. Blood sprayed from the mare as Brute fell to the ground.

“Take… That…” She managed before her breathing stopped.

“BRUTE!” Allure screamed, running after her. There has to be someone here who knows healing, there ha-

The next wave of force from Siron’s defense hit. Anypony standing strong or prepared for it would have no difficulty resisting the shockwave. But the limp body of a young unicorn was nothing but a ragdoll to it. Brute was thrown off the edge of the platform into the aurora below.

Allure lit her horn, attempting to grab Brute’s body with her telekinesis, but the body was too heavy and moving too fast. “SQUEAKY! NOVA! ANYPONY!?” Allure yelled.

Squeaky was fighting Siron. Nova was trying to fight Pinkie-X. They didn’t hear her.

Pinkie and Sweetie heard her though. They heard the devastating pain in that voice, the further loss of innocence, the shattering of her world.

Sweetie knew she would not be able to lift Brute at this point – so she cast a lightning spell at Pinkie-X. The bolt connected, but only singed the pink pony slightly. It would have been comedic if the mood weren’t so tragic.

Pinkie-X laughed. “I think we should play again!” she produced another, identical knife. “Which one of your friends is next, Pinkie? What do you-”

A green steel ball hit Pinkie-X in the side of her chest, forcing her body into a tailspin.

Gyro spat on the ground as he walked into view. “THAT’S FOR GANDALF!”

Rick stood next to him, holding a truly gigantic piece of machinery clearly cobbled together from items inside the TARDIS – definitely used without the Doctor’s permission. He pointed it at Pinkie-X. “No pink bitch gets to tell me I’m going to die.”

“I AM A PONY! NOT A DOG!” Pinkie-X shouted, forcing herself to stand. She produced a gun out of her mane and aimed at Rick.

Rick was faster. A burst of blue-green energy wrapped inside orange fractal patterns burst from the device, hitting Pinkie-X in the face. A sound of ticking could be heard all around her. The gun went first, dissipating into thin shards that were basically sheets of paper before vanishing.

Just like how her universe had been destroyed.

Pinkie-X looked to Pinkie to speak her last words.

“Now you won’t know until it’s too late.”

Pinkie-X was no more.

Siron was the only true enemy left standing – and with a steel ball to the face, his muscles finally gave out. His limbs locked and he fell to the ground, unable to exert himself anymore.

Vriska produced her sword, ready to cut off his head in one fell swoop.

~~~

Sparky, Twiree, and Twix received the evacuate sector alert just like every other Twilight – directly in their minds. They quickly reached for their tokens. After all, if they were being told to evacuate, it was probably for a good reason.

They would have left had I not stopped them.

“You need to stay,” I said, drawing their attention. “M4 is in the middle of this at the Examail Center. You need to find her.”

Sparky blinked. “Wha…?”

To them, I just looked like a normal alicorn Twilight with an artificial eye in my chest. It was best if it remained that way, for now. But I needed to get them to act.

“Twix,” I said, addressing the one pony at the table who knew. “You need to go there. It’s what needs to happen. It is the next line.”

Twix’s eyes widened in understanding. “We need to go. Now.”

Twiree blinked. “What? What did that even mean?”

“It meant… Something. Yeah. We need to go to this Examail place.”

Sparky looked at my eyes. She saw somepony who was not just telling the truth, but telling an urgent one. “Okay. We’ll go, mysterious Twilight.”

I nodded. “It’s Twilence. Thank you. And for what it’s worth, I am sorry.”

“Sorry?”

But I was already gone.

Sparky stared at the place I had just been. Twix snapped her out of it. “Wonder about it later, we need to move. Something big is happening.”

They stepped outside to find the streets almost abandoned – Twilights had clearly listened to the evacuation order. They saw the Examail Center in the distance, but none of them were great at long-range teleportation.

Twiree solved this problem by transforming into a Reaper and carrying them the distance in a matter of seconds. She transformed back into her Flat form and grinned. “Instant travel in style, girls!”

The three of them ran into the doors of the Examail Center. Red lights were blaring on every wall in the building.

They saw bodies of Twilights – petrified, lifeless forms. Sparky knew exactly what had happened to them the moment she saw them. “…Brutalight.”

“What?” Twix asked.

“The pony who took Eve’s hearing. She’s here.”

Twiree and Twix readied themselves for a fight. They followed the trail of petrified corpses down a flight of stairs, to a level with conveyor belts continually feeding letters into teleporters. One of the conveyor belts was frozen, with an alert of some kind on it.

“Two of the Twilights aren’t petrified!” Sparky called, leaning down to check them. Their designations came to her as she checked – M4 and 4T. They had been the victims of a powerful sleep spell. Sparky undid the enchantment, but they weren’t going to be very aware of themselves for a while.

Maybe they could answer some basic questions in their grogginess though…

“What happened?” Sparky asked M4.

“GM… The Twilight… She was suspicious… Then… What…?”

4T pulled herself up and stumbled over to a console. Rubbing her eyes, she pressed a button. “Emergency shutdown! Code four-T-alpha-charlie-nine-pi.”

All the conveyor belts stopped in an instant. They could still hear the grinder operating, but all processes had been brought to a standstill. 4T grunted. “We… We’ll need higher clearance to purge the… Whatever… she’s doing… Ugh that was a powerful sleep spell…”

Twix was the one that saw her – a Twilight in a hard hat trying to carefully sneak up the stairs without being noticed. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going!?”

GM glanced back at them with panic. “Ponyfeathers.” She teleported away.

Sparky had a pretty good idea where she’d gone, and Twix did as well. The two of them executed a short range teleport outside the building. Sure enough, there GM was, galloping away.

She pulled out her return-home token.

Sparky shot it out of her telekinesis with a magic laser. “No you don’t! After her!”

Twix didn’t even need to be told.

The chase across the Sparkle Census began.

~~~

One of Gyro’s steel balls hit Vriska in the hand, stopping her sword from landing the killing blow on Siron.

“What the fuck!?” She shouted. “Gyro, I had him!”

Gyro looked at his hand like he couldn’t believe what had just happened. “I… I was just told to do that. Who the hell…”

“Me,” a new voice declared, walking into view on top of a spherical piece of stone. He was a blue, humanoid, metallic creature with numerous blue spikes coming out of his head that resembled far-reaching groups of hair. His face was made of rigid metal – the only indication of life coming from glowing red points in the black recesses that were his eyes. “I told you. I’m also telling you to stop everyone from fighting or trying to kill each other.”

Jane tightened her grip on her sword. “You know what? Who cares about that guy?” She swung her sword down at Siron, only for Ball Breaker to induce Spin in the blade, tearing it from her hand.

“Please, stop,” the blue being said, holding a hand to his head. “Stop killing each other. The test is over because someone tampered with the settings. I’d like very much to know who managed to do that.”

Rick grinned. “Aha! I knew I had you there!”

“Rick, I was watching you closely, you did not have time to initiate your microverse plan. You can rest easy knowing it would have worked, of course I would have stepped in the moment you did it and blocked the new universe off. But even if you did manage to do it in secret, that would not have altered the interdimensional web holding you all here.”

“You…” Nova muttered, seething. “You did this! Who are you and why?”

“I know him,” Pinkie said. “I met him when I was running away from my problems. He’s… He’s like Melinda, except on a larger scale. Trying to fight him would be a bad idea…”

Jane wasn’t having any of that. “Oh, really? Well I’m not going to admit defeat, I-”

Gyro threw a steel ball at her. She retaliated, deflecting it with nothing but her hand, crushing the metallic weapon in her grip. She pulled back to throw the crumpled lump at the metallic man.

The ball sailed straight through the hologram that was the metallic man.

“In case it isn’t obvious, I’m not actually here. I’m safe and sound in my office,” he said, appearing in the middle of all of them. “I’m only making an appearance because something unforeseen happened.”

“You didn’t answer Nova’s question,” the Doctor said. “Why did you do this?”

The man looked at them all. “Think of this as… an audition.”

~~~

Eve, Cosmo, and the Grand Secretariat traced Brutalight to a bookstore – an abandoned one. They filed into the building to find not a single sign of Brutalight. All the books were well organized, there was no evidence of a fight, or much of anything at all.

It was just a bookstore.

Eve bit her lip. “Where is she? She went in here, we know it…”

The Grand Secretariat lit her horn, scanning the room. “I sense that she was in here very recently, but isn’t anymore.”

“Teleport?”

“I should notice if a personal teleport occurred… And then we should have still been able to track her physically.”

“…Did she go offworld?”

“Impossible,” the Grand Secretariat said. “She was never given a token, and the others will not work for her.”

“Unless she got help,” Cosmo said, running her hoof across a bookshelf. “I sense another pony in here as well. One with a significant store of magic…”

The Grand Secretariat frowned. “If somepony helped her, that suggests there are ponies in the Census hiding from us.”

“Probably are,” Eve said. “We get a lot of enemies from within on our side of things. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve got a traitor Twilight…”

Cosmo tapped the crystal that held Starlight. “How can we track the two of them?”

“Magical signatures analyzed. The non-Brutalight’s is strong enough to be tracked. They moved toward the back of the store.”

The three alicorns did as Starlight suggested, finding themselves at the back bookshelf.

“They grabbed one of the books,” Starlight said. “…It activated an enchantment. An extremely well hidden one, even knowing it’s here I can’t pin it down.”

Eve started pulling on random books, trying to activate it.

“Are we sure that’s a good idea?” Cosmo asked.

“I do-” Eve pulled on the right book, and the three of them were stealth-transported to the secret bunker room. The gears clicked below them and the center glowed with a soft blue power.

They didn’t particularly care about that. What they cared about was Brutalight and the ponies she was with.

Brutalight saw them. “Fuck.”

Eve glared. “You are going back to Nautica, Brutalight.”

The blue power in the center of the room flashed, creating an active portal to a snowy world.

Brutalight smirked. “I don’t think so.”

~~~

Sparky and Twix ran after GM. The two pursuers had adopted a mounted pursuit – Twix offered the legs, and Sparky created a rocket-like burst of magical energy to propel them forward even faster.

GM glanced behind herself, a pained expression on her face. She teleported on top of a building. Twix followed with her own teleport.

“She’s got more magic than I do… Just a unicorn here!” Twix reminded Sparky.

“I’ll teleport next time,” Sparky said.

“And you have even less than me! Not to mention this little rocket boost! How are we going to- oh wait, right. Obvious.”

‘Obvious’ was Twiree transforming into a Reaper and flying overhead, firing orbital bombardment lasers at GM. The buildings she ran across were destroyed in an instant.

“We sure are lucky this place is evacuated…” Twix muttered.

“What is that!?” GM shouted back at them. “I… what!?”

“Twiree!” Sparky called. “A Flat. Hope you enjoy!”

GM decided that, clearly, fleeing wasn’t an option anymore. She spread her wings and flew into the air, sending a barrage of spells at Twiree’s hull.

“THAT’S NOT GOING TO WORK.”

GM paled, realizing Twiree was right. “No… No no no!”

Sparky pointed at her, smirking. “Do you realize now?”

“Just let me go! I… I’ll be forced to kill you if I don’t think I can win otherwise!” GM shouted, tears coming to her eyes. “I don’t want to do that! And… And if I do lose, I’ll be forced to kill myself! You don’t want that! Just… Just let me go!”

Sparky blinked. “Are yo-”

“She’s telling the truth,” Twix said, narrowing her eyes. “I think.”

“Twiree!” Sparky shouted. “Reapers can indoctrinate right? Start doing that!”

GM freaked out. “NO THAT IS THE WORST THING YOU COU-”

Twiree started shaking the air around GM with a super low pitched, droning noise. It wormed its way into GMs head, trying to mold it like putty.

Sparky knew it took a while for Reaper Indoctrination to have any long-term effect, but when used directly the short-term scrambling of the thought process was incredibly effective. The way GM grabbed her head and started screaming incoherent gibberish was a bit beyond what Sparky was expecting, but she was going to take it.

“Twiree, see if you can trap her in your carg-”

Something in GM forced her to act against what she herself was at her core. “I’M SORRY!” A dark red beam shot forth from her horn, going right for Sparky. She raised a magical shield, expecting to be able to block it easily.

It passed right through the shield and her body. No part of her body exploded, no blood came out, and no bruises formed.

Her heart just stopped. He lungs couldn’t move, and her brain was barely able to process anything she was seeing. Vision blurred to black, sounds that were probably shouts from Twix faded to nothing, and the sensation of ground beneath her fell out. It became void.

Did she even have a body anymore?

She had no idea. She barely had any idea.

She tried desperately to hold onto anything: idea, image, or otherwise.

Corona…

~~~

“An audition?” Nova echoed, glaring at the blue metallic man. “Care to explain?”

“Gladly,” he said, pacing around the area despite having nothing more than a holographic body. “Using a pre-existing network of dimensional connections, I created a program that would, when activated, scan an area of the multiverse for individuals who were versed in travel. Once it located these individuals, it would wait for them to translate – through any method – and intercept them as they were translating, bringing them here. I would then watch while these few dozen individuals interacted with each other. I would study how they fought, how they made allies, what their abilities and dispositions were.”

He motioned for Gyro to come to him. “Then I would take whoever I decided was worth pursuing to work for me. Gyro here was my first choice.”

“And the rest of us?” Allure asked.

“Those of you who weren’t chosen would be sent back to translation without any memories of the event. To you, it would seem like your friend just vanished in a translation accident. Since time in this universe means almost nothing in other universes, it would seem instant to anyone looking at you. None of you would be able to trace anything that had happened here.”

“…Slave-driving monster,” Vriska muttered.

“That is how you see me. It won’t be soon. Even though I had to end the auditions early, after I make what selections I can, I will send you back and you still won’t remember anything.”

Several gasps rang out.

“There are many of you trying to make backup memories, or write things on your bodies. That will not work. You will be returned as you arrived – well, assuming you’re still alive.”

“You’re not going to get away with this,” Jane said. “This… ploy of yours.”

“For all you know, Miss Jane, you’ve already been the victim of a similar ploy. How would you remember? I’m sure you’ve been exploring long enough to have translated somewhere and realized that, for some reason, one of the people you left with didn’t arrive at the destination. Sure, it could have been natural. Or it could have been someone like me.”

Jane didn’t have a response for that.

Sweetie did. “You’re just like the Beast.”

“Sweetie Chronicle, I am not a demonic entity with no purpose besides amusement and being evil. Those I take live the life of heroes. They retain their personalities, minds, bodies, powers, and everything that makes them them. They just cannot refuse my orders.” He snapped his fingers, a sound he was very satisfied with.

“You change them. You force them. Your only difference is that you don’t think you’re evil.”

The man shrugged. “Wouldn’t call myself good either. Merely necessary.” He put a hand to his chin. “Well, it’s becoming clear to me that I will not be able to figure out who messed with the network. But that is not something I need to know. I’ll just take who I want and wrap this up.” He pointed at Siron. “You, come here.”

Siron’s rage-filled eyes lost all defiance in an instant as something entered his mind. He walked to the man and took a spot beside Gyro.

“Gyro was selected because his tenacity and power set was exactly what I needed to keep you under control while I spoke. Siron, I chose you because you have power, drive, and had this actually been a contest, you were so close to winning.” He looked at the rest of the travelers. “I would have chosen Pinkie-X as well, but Rick erased her from existence. Therefore…”

“You won’t be able to put a chip in my head, magical or otherwise,” Rick muttered.

“Rick, come here.”

Rick’s eyes locked forward and he walked up to Siron. “…What the fuck. This can’t be real, I have a million differen-”

“You are a dangerous one, Rick,” the man said, looking closely. “You ruined the society of the Council of Ricks. But let it be known, the Council? It was on a civilization level below my own. You may have had access to fantastical minds and technology, but I have things even you wouldn’t be able to comprehend. And since you’re always more effective in pairs…” he pointed at Morty, gesturing for him to come. Morty had no choice. “You too.”

“R-Rick? What are we gonna do?”

“Listen to the blue buckethead, apparently,” Rick muttered.

“You’ve g-got a plan, right?”

“I’ve always got a plan.”

“Your recursive mental double-reacharound has been destroyed,” the man said. “Clever trick you were planning, but ultimately foolhardy. And just in case… Rick, disable any other plans you have to defeat me.”

“Fuck you,” Rick muttered, pulling a strange blue orb out of his ear and throwing it off the edge of the platform.

“And if you sense it come back, you will tell me before it can do anything.”

Rick twitched.

The blue man walked to the edge and chuckled. “Do any of you know what this place is?”

The Doctor nodded. “A remnant.”

“Right on the money, Doctor! A remnant. Perhaps of the Weavers themselves, though I am personally of a mind it isn’t anywhere near ancient enough for that. It, itself, is an experiment in space and time, to bring the ideas of folding space together with visual illusions and gravity. Abandoned so long ago… What they learned from this, if anything, is lost to the annals of metatime. In other words, a perfect place to appreciate the true vastness of everything.”

“…You’re crazy,” Ditzy observed.

“Quite true. But I am quite effective.” He pointed at nothing. “Ivan, I choose you for daring to be clever enough to use illusions at a time like this.”

Ivan revealed himself to be next to Jenny, messing with some Numenera technology. He dropped it and walked to the other four.

“Wh- am I not good enough?” Jenny blurted.

“You’re just a billion year old child,” the man dismissed. “You have knowledge and power, but lack consistency. You’re more useful to me if you remain at your position in Dracogen Enterprises.”

Jenny fumed.

The man walked to Jane and Sunny. “You two… You two are very interesting. A powerful couple from a faraway dimensional incident. Old, wise in the ways of the multiverse, and a threat to most gods.”

“You bet we are. Why not take us? I’m sure we won’t find a way to kill you anyway,” Jane deadpanned.

“You’re less dangerous than Rick, and I’ve already taken him. What makes me hesitate is your desire to settle down. You already have a permanent home on Equis Vitis. You won’t be as effective out in the field with that attitude.”

“I’ll never be effective to you.”

“It would just take slightly harder-handed conditioning.” He nodded to himself. “I do think it is worth it though. J-”

“STOP IT!” Sweetie yelled, summoning her sword from the aether and holding it to Siron’s neck. “Stop it or I cut off his head, right now.”

The blue man held up a hand to make sure Gyro, Ivan, Rick, and Morty didn’t try anything. “You’re a clever filly, Sweetie Chronicle.”

“If you give me any orders I cut this guy’s head off without thinking.”

The man folded his hands. “I’m not sure you really will, Sweetie Chronicle, but you are correct in assuming I cannot take that risk. Not the least because I can’t actually condition you to me.”

“Why not?”

“There are certain individuals for whom conditioning would be dangerous. Those part of something larger, for instance. You have a powerful flow of ka, little one. One that it would be unwise of me to tamper with. It is the same reason I haven’t taken any of Pinkie’s group, despite Vriska being, quite literally, the catch of the millennium.”

“Gee, thanks,” Vriska muttered.

“So here’s the deal, Sweetie Chronicle. You have my Siron. You have leverage. If you return him to me, I will take Jane and Sunny as my servants, and then I will return the rest of you to your worlds. I will take no more – I would have liked Gilgamesh, but I can cut my losses. However, if you refuse, I will allow you to kill Siron and take some of the League of Sweetie Belles instead.”

Sweetie froze. “Are… Are you toying with me?”

“I’m making assurances,” he said. “I believe you’ll let Siron live with these conditions, regardless of if you were actually willing to kill him or not in the first place.”

Sweetie began to sweat.

“Take your time.”

~~~

The Grand Secretariat and Cosmo faced all the extra Twilights in the room. Cosmic and Harmony magic flew out in a powerful flurry.

This flurry meant nothing to the deaf Eve, who was focused entirely on Brutalight and the open portal right next to her. The dark alicorn had opted to run rather than face Eve, galloping for the opening. She lit her horn, preparing a teleport.

Eve was not going to let that happen.

She summoned her Stand. Nopony in the room could see it but her, and that was just the way she liked it. The three rings aligned perfectly, creating a disc shape. A swirl of blue and white energy coalesced in the center of the rings, indicating the activation of its ability.

The green energy of the portal died instantly, vanishing. The glow on the runes below them vanished, becoming nothing more than etchings in the machinery.

Brutalight whirled around with a sword – but found that her blade had not only disintegrated, but that her own telekinesis had failed her. She tried to cast a laser, but her horn was dead. Her internal organs twisted inside her, driving a feeling of sickness deep into her.

Brutalight pushed through it. She reached for a wrench nearby, finding that her hooves no longer had any traction to them. She didn’t care – she lifted the wrench with her wing and hurled it at Eve.

Eve’s horn didn’t even light up to deflect it. Some aura just shot the wrench deep into the side wall.

“What… What are you doing?”

“I could brutalize you in ways you cannot imagine,” Eve said. “Boil you atom by atom and yet keep your consciousness in a jar. Sew all your bodily orifices shut with thread made from essence of ants. I could throw you into Majora’s black hole.” Her eyes bored deep into Brutalight’s poor excuse for a soul. “But, instead, I’m just going to send you back to Nautica. That’s the difference between you and me.”

With a flick of Eve’s head, Brutalight was no longer in the Sparkle Census. She was back on a world covered in water, ready to begin cursing the heavens anew.

Back in the Sparkle Census, Eve turned to Cosmo and the Grand Secretariat. They had easily taken care of all the other Twilights. “Grand Secretariat, I need to place an anti-translation matrix on a planet.”

“It shall be done in only a couple of minutes our-time,” the Grand Secretariat said, already getting on her horn-phone to order some ponies around. She talked with them for a bit.

Cosmo looked at Eve. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. She’s locked away again, and even if she did get translation knowledge, she still won’t be able to escape. And I didn’t lose it and kill her on the spot. So that’s good. Yes.”

“You’re still having flashbacks.”

“Of course I am! That mare traumatized me! I have dreams about her torturing me that never go away! But… But I am okay. I don’t feel like destroying an entire civilization, and I don’t feel like blowing Nautica up. I just… I just want her to stay there, forever.”

“Whatever you’re talking about, stop,” the Grand Secretariat said. “There’s a situation at Examail Central. I need to shut down the entire letter system – someone’s hacked us. You need to go find your friends. They’re chasing a traitor.”

Cosmo and Eve glanced at each other, concern crossing their faces.

~~~

“Sparky!” Twix yelled, watching in horror as the human fell to the ground in an instant.

She’d raised a shield! Twix had seen it! But the beam – it had just gone through. Through everything. Not a scratch on her body…

Soul magic.

A spell specifically designed to kill without leaving any wounds that could be healed. Intangible, accurate, and brutal.

What’s Eve going to think? What’s Corona going to think? I got Sparky killed! I… Twix had enough awareness about her to dodge the incoming soul laser from GM.

“I’m sorry!” GM shouted again, firing another laser. “Orders! I… I can’t ignore them!” she grabbed her head, still reeling from Twiree’s noises. “AAAAAAAAAAA”

Twix dodged another soul laser. “Twiree! Shoot her or something!”

“SHE IS TOO CLOSE TO ME FOR WEAPONS FIRE.”

Twix retaliated with a bolt of her own, missing GM by miles. “Then… jump away! Shoot from a distance!”

Twiree didn’t question this idea. She initiated a single-instant FTL jump. This destroyed every building from where she started to where she ended about a kilometer away.

The effect of the indoctrination lessened with distance. GM was able to gain some of her mental faculties back – enough to see the attack from the planetary bombardment laser come right at her. She swerved out of the way, but it caught her wing, burning it off.

She screamed. In that instant, GM lost all hope of winning the fight. She lit her horn, preparing to use her soul magic on herself.

Twix narrowed her eyes – she knew she was only going to get one shot at this. She fired off a singular, tiny magic laser at the falling form of GM. It hit her right in the horn, cancelling the soul spell and making her lose consciousness. Twix caught GM’s limp form in her magic. “…We’re gonna get that conditioning out of you, don’t you worry.”

Twiree floated back, slowly, before turning back into her normal form. “We got her!”

“Yeah,” Twix said, setting GM down gently. “We did.” She glanced over at the body of Sparky. “…But I don’t think she’s getting back up.”

Eve and Cosmo appeared on the scene in a flash of purple magic.

“Where’s the traitor?” Cosmo demanded, ready for a fight.

Twix gestured at the prone form of GM. “We got her. Bu-”

“SPARKY!?” Eve screamed, her voice cracking. She teleported right to the human, propping her body up with her telekinesis. “Sparky don’t you do this!” She levitated her glasses back onto the motionless face. “Sparky! SPARKY! Y-you still need to find Corona! You n-need to k-keep us from going too far! You need to show us t-the way! You… You need to save us from ourselves… You…” She couldn’t take it – she buried her face into the clothing of her old friend.

Bitter tears and wails of agony escaped the mouth of the Charter-Princess that day as she held the scientist who had been too pure for the multiverse.

From my vantage point on a nearby building, I wiped my eyes.

I left.

I couldn’t watch anymore.

It was too painful.

Who cared if the alternative was worse? That woman lived up to her name. She had a unique spark of light in herself. A spark that was extinguished by cruelty, necessity, and fate.

She never got to become a librarian.

She would have been happy there.

~~~

“What’s it going to be, Sweetie Chronicle?”

“I… I…” Sweetie glanced around nervously. Just a few more seconds… Have to buy some time… “Why do you keep calling me Chronicle?”

“Spoilers,” the man chuckled. Then he paused. “You might understand the meaning of the word in the future, you might not.”

“It doesn’t matter to her,” Pinkie growled.

”I can use it should I wish, Pinkie Pi- Wait… asking me a question?” he put a hand to his chin. “It’s almost like you’re stalling for time… What could you possibly be stalling for?”

Sweetie didn’t look down, but she knew – knew Thrackerzod had been moved right underneath Siron. Right under his staff. Sweetie had no idea how much longer it would take for Thrackerzod to regain her power, but…

“Sweetie, are you hiding something from me? Some angle I’m not seeing?”

“Yes,” another voice declared. “She’s hiding me.” The voice started out feminine and meek, but quickly became deep, guttural, and authoritative. “Look at the head while I sit at the feet!”

Thrackerzod leaped into the air, red returning to her eyes and darkness swirling around her. “BY THE NAME OF AZATHOT-”

“This was your plan? Seriously? The name of Azathoth means nothing in this secluded pla-”

“You aren’t transmitting from this universe,” Thrackerzod said, lighting her horn. “You left a connection open. By scanning your hologram I have found a way out.” A magic circle pentagram combo appeared in the air behind Thrackerzod, brimming with red, unholy light. “And I can use that. I-”

The man sighed, snapping his fingers. The magical circle vanished in an instant and Thrackerzod fell to the ground. “I admit; that was more of a plan than I thought it was. But, sadly, I have more control over the fabric of existence than you planned for. Who was it coordinating this in minds behind my back? Vriska? Probably Vriska.” He turned to her. “I’m sorry, Thief, but your gambit failed.”

“Wasn’t mine,” Vriska huffed. “The Sweetie over there had most of it. I just told people to move Thrackerzod.”

“And guess what?” Pinkie said, holding up a timer with ten seconds left on it. “Your time is up.”

“Time?” the man shook his head. “There is no time limit…”

“The Grand Secretariat is going to order the network of dimensional letters shut down right… about… NOW!”

The metallic man realized too late what she was referring too. In a universe parallel, the Grand Secretariat disabled all of the letters, recalling all of them for the time being and bringing the grinder to a full halt. The virus that had been placed in them – the virus that was keeping all the interdimensional travelers in the blue aurora – activated its destructor protocol.

Everyone but the metallic man himself was teleported to the places they were originally going to before being intercepted.

“Of course…” the man grunted, clenching his fist. “The Census operates on slowed time as well… Events can happen there while events happen here. Why didn’t I see that!?” He growled. Now they would remember him. Remember what had happened here. What he was. Some of what he was doing.

He wouldn’t be able to operate in this section of the multiverse like that.

He could try to hunt down and kill all of them… But no doubt some had already sent messages to their governments, or made sure they wouldn’t just forget one day. Not to mention that the Doctor was one of them…

He would just have to cut his losses and get out of dodge.

The man snapped his fingers, summoning the five servants he had selected before time ran out: Gyro, Siron, Rick, Morty, and Ivan. “We’re leaving,” he said, opening a portal to another universe with ease. “All of you, time for orientation.”

Gyro smirked at the man. “They got you good.”

“Yes. They did. But it was pure luck. Nothing but pure. Luck.” He sighed. “I can admit defeat though. They’ve kept me out of their worlds. If that is a good thing or a bad thing, I cannot say, but they certainly won.”

“Pussy,” Rick muttered.

The man didn’t dignify Rick with a response. He just waited for them to cross through the portal before closing it. He cut the holographic transmission, leaving the blue aurora universe abandoned once again.

~~~

“FUUUUUCK YOUUUUUU SHINY BLUE GUY!!!” Vriska shouted to the heavens, giving the clouds in the sky the bird. “Oh, did I not say that loud enough for your arrogant prick of a mind to hear? I said FUUUCK YOUUUUUUU! GET DUUUUUUUNKED ON!!!”

Pinkie and Flutterfree let out immense sighs of relief. “I wasn't sure there was a way out of that one…” Flutterfree said, wiping her brow.

“We’re fine now!” Pinkie said. “Out alive, with all five of us, and with memories!”

Nova rubbed the back of her head. “Yeah…”

Renee stamped her hoof on the ground. “Girls.”

“Hrm?” Nova said, looking up.

“I need to go find my sister,” Renee said. “…One of her friends has just died.”

The four who had been celebrating and relieved prior were suddenly brought back to the cold harsh reality of the world. People had died in that horrid place – and not just bad people. Leaders. Friends. Lovers…

“You… You go do that,” Pinkie said. “I need to talk to Eve.” She shook her head. “Everyone else take the next few days off. We all need a break.”

Nobody complained about this.

As Pinkie left, though, something nagged at the back of her mind.

What is it I don’t know?

~~~

Allure did a head count.

Zod. Bot. Squeaky. Suzie. Burgerbelle.

No Sweetie.

No Brute.

Good, Allure thought. I don’t think I could have handled seeing her body.

Thrackerzod took in a deep breath and let it out. “I… I feel incomplete. And it is not because I lack Azathoth’s essence in me. The connection is restored. It is…”

“Brute is gone!” Bot wailed. “Why? Why did that happen?”

Squeaky tried her best to keep her features flat. “Death is a part of war. We knew… We knew what we were doing when we started exploring.”

“But we don’t do that!” Suzie said. “We don’t purposefully go to unknown places! We aren’t in danger as much as the others! We… We were going to have fun today! Not lose one of us!”

“Two,” Allure corrected. “Lose two. Sweetie isn’t here either.”

“She’s back wherever she came from,” Squeaky said. “Still looking for the shards of Twilight Sparkle.”

“You… You think she’ll be able to find us some day?”

“I hope so. I think… He would have taken more people had she not been there.”

Thrackerzod nodded. “She had a unique spirit. She deserves to keep the name.”

“And we will always remember her,” Allure asserted. “Her. Brute. And all the other Sweetie Belles we meet along the way.”

“Affirmative,” Bot agreed.

Renee opened a portal in front of them and walked out. She rushed to Allure and hugged her tight. “I’m so sorry…”

Allure couldn’t hold it in. She started crying. “Renee I… I…”

“I know it’s not okay,” Renee said. “It will never be okay. Ever. All I can say is that I’m here. I’m here for all you girls.”

The rest of the Sweeties hugged her – sans Thrackerzod, who stood to the side, looking down at the ground.

Her eyes watered.

She had lost everything that made her herself in there… Had become a completely normal unicorn…

She finally, after all these years, understood what it meant to be one of them. The pain. The sorrow. The limitation. The fear. The…

She couldn’t stop herself. She threw her body into the hug pile as well.

They remained like this for a few minutes.

Thrackerzod eventually broke the silence. “There’s something we need to do.”

Everyone turned to her. Wordlessly, Thrackerzod opened a portal to a very particular universe.

Equis Ultra Fast.

Sweetie Brute’s home.

Thrackerzod led them right to that world’s version of Carousel Boutique and knocked on the front door. The Rarity of this world, Mattie, opened the door, a harrowed look on her face.

“…You know,” Thrackerzod said. It wasn’t a question.

The world shifted. Mattie opened the door again, without closing it.

“…What i-”

“Just tell me, Thrakerzod,” Mattie said with her strangely Australian accent. “I need to hear it.”

Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “Mattie. I… We… I… I can’t do this.” Thrackerzod shook her head.

Allure gulped, holding out a hoof to keep Renee from talking for them. “Miss Mattie? Sweetie Brute… is gone. It was a… A psychotic Pinkie.”

Mattie closed her eyes and bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. “T-thank you for telling me. E-excuse me. I need a… A moment.”

“We understand,” Allure said.

Mattie went back into her house – not bothering to close the door properly, just ‘editing’ it back into a shut position. She walked to her fridge and took out a gallon of ice cream.

She stared at it for a minute.

She threw it out the window. “Worthless tub of dairy…”

She grabbed a glass from the cupboard. Water. She needed water. Delicious… Sparkling… Water…

She threw the glass across the room into a nearby wall, shaking all over. “This… Isn’t the pain I want…” she managed through the tears that rolled down her face.

She crumpled to the floor and didn’t move for hours.

~~~

Jane and Sunny sat in their house in Appleloosa. They had been silent ever since they’d gotten home.

Jane talked first. “Sunny… Are we allowed to settle down?”

“What kind o-”

“I’m serious. Is there some force out there that just won’t let us enjoy our lives!?”

Sunny sighed. “…Maybe.”

“What’s going to happen next? I lose my translation as well? What about a part of our souls? Maybe we end up like that Pinkie, transformed by some psychotic demon-lord, scarred forever by brutal trauma? What if it only happens to one of us? Or… Or…”

Sunny pulled her in for a hug. “Jane. It’s… I don’t know. But if there is something out there, something messing with us, it doesn’t really matter. We will deal with whatever it gives us, okay?”

“…Okay.”

~~~

Jenny looked at her Wall Of People I Really Want Dead.

There were three photos, each with a plaque under them of the target’s name. There was The Professor, Carl Carlson, and Metallic Blue Asshole.

It had been a while since she’d declared war on a single person with enough passion to place them on the wall.

But he had Ivan. And he had toyed with her like she was a child.

He would live to regret that.

Whatever his name was.

…That was quite possibly the part that angered her the most.

~~~

Froppy hopped into the presence of perhaps the most powerful man in the entire United States of the Multiverse.

“Ribbit. You asked to see me, Ambassador?”

The man nodded. He was rather muscular, tall, and had long blond hair with curls at the ends. His suit was simple, professional, and also light pink. Above the pink suit was his face – the features were smooth, but not young, and his eyes were very serious.

“Yes. Froppy of Earth-MH1-Japan, you are receiving virtually every award we can give you for exemplary service to your country, as I am sure you are aware.”

“I am extremely honored.”

“Due to your exemplary service, I am also extending a unique offer to you. Instead of being put on assignment after a short break, you can leave my service permanently. You have given us more than enough information and service in this one outing than you could be expected to in your entire record. You’ve earned the right to settle down.”

“With all due respect, I want to be reassigned as soon as possible so I can search for Gyro.”

A smile came to the Ambassador’s face. “I expected as much. I will demand you take at least a few weeks leave, so a psychiatrist can check you and keep you grounded, but I will put you on a new team right after that. One with the explicit goal of not only finding this blue man, but also all the other travelers he had trapped in his game.”

“Thank you.”

“That is all, Froppy. You make your country proud.”

“Ribbit. Thank you again, Ambassador Valentine.”

~~~

Sparky Twilight Sparkle

Earth Vitis

2001-2026

Scientist. Mage. Friend to all.

Eve stood, staring at the gravestone of her old friend. The humans had been around earlier – Applejack, Pinkie, Fluttershy, and Rarity – but they had left. Eve knew they would be back. They would not be able to put their old friend out of their mind.

And neither would Eve.

But Eve stayed longer, because she knew… She knew that Sparky had wanted to leave. Had wanted to have a simple life.

Now? Now she would never have that life. Never realize what her potential actually was. She had been so young… And so tired of everything…

“Who’s going to make sure I don’t go too far now?” Eve wondered.

“Us,” pony Pinkie said, suddenly next to her. Eve didn’t even flinch. “You know. Me. Flutterfree. Celestia. Luna. Your friends.”

“…I know. But she was the one who called me out. I didn’t really have anyone checking me besides her.”

“I will, Eve. You know that.”

“Yeah…” Eve shook her head. “You know what sucks?”

“That she’s gone but because she’s gone you think that things have turned out pretty well?”

“Yeah. Yeah that’s exactly it. We have a good, strong tie with the Sparkle Census, because of her we were able to free everyone from that blue guy, and… And, well, if she hadn’t done what she did before that moment, everything could have crumbled. We could have lost people. …More than we did.”

Pinkie sighed. “Sometimes… Sometimes there is a time when death needs to happen. And when it doesn’t, things go wrong.”

“Are you thinking about Pinkie-X?”

“Yeah. We… That is, Pinkies… We have the power to change things. But sometimes, there’s a cost. She accepted her cost, which… Which really scares me. Will I accept a cost like that, someday? Will I become a psycho just because I can’t accept something?”

“At least you have a choice.”

“Choosing isn’t always good… And I know that knowing isn’t always good either, but… The way she spoke about it. It’s important.” She shook her head. “I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what kind of big secret I have no idea about, do you?”

“No,” Eve lied through her teeth, tears suddenly rolling down her cheeks at high speed. “No, I-I have no idea…”

Pinkie pulled her into a hug, none the wiser. “There, there, Eve. There, there.”

“There…” Eve said, choking on her breaths. Each one was painful.

~~~

The metallic blue man led the five newbies into his office. “And this is my office. It’s white right now, but sometimes I like it black. The aquarium can be stocked with any fish you feel like picking up, but that’s not a command. And that’s my desk, it…” he froze. “It has a person in it.”

“Collector,” the man in the chair said, rotating around. He tossed the Collector's second – a woman with pink hair and an eyepatch – to the ground. “You’ve stepped into my sphere of influence.”

The Collector didn’t flinch – but he was still afraid. “Flagg, why are you here, and what do you want?”

“Simple, really. Give me Siron back. I have need of him. Do that, and we will leave with no further interaction with you or your people. Keep him, and you’ll find out why the multiverse fears the name Randall Flagg.”

The Collector sighed. “Fine. Take him.” He snapped his fingers, removing the conditioning on Siron. “Take the Juju too.”

“Glad we had this talk,” Flagg said, smiling. “Have a nice day. And give my regards to Lightning when she comes to, she was most delightful.”

“Bastard,” Gyro blurted.

Flagg grinned at Gyro. “It would be a better use of your resources to struggle against your Master than to wage war against me.”

Gyro got the implication.

“Until our paths cross again, Collector.” With an exaggerated bow, he and Siron were gone.

The Collector moved to check Lightning. She was still alive, hardly damaged at all. “You four,” he told the newbies. “Tend to her every need until I get back. I have contingency plans to make.”

He left them with her, nervously tapping his knuckles together.

Was this a sign that the time was coming soon?

No… Not yet. But it was closer than he had previously thought.

~~~

Sweetie Belle returned to her part of the multiverse in an instant. She felt the comfy room in the palace and the rain again. The fuzziness went away.

Well, they had won, she guessed. That had been a bit sudden, but she realized it had to be. She hoped the League was going to be okay without two members… They seemed strong. She kept in mind what Pinkie had told her, and remembered the dimensional secrets she carried in her book. She smiled as she went from being in a comfy room in the palace, to dropping into the mud under heavy, unrelenting rain. Which would have been annoying at most if not for one little detail.

She had been dropped right in front of an enormous tank.

With a rather loud meep of surprise, she jumped and rolled out of the way, rain water and mud splashing around as she scrambled back and away from the gigantic tank, green eyes wide and mouth agape as she took in the colossal machine that had almost rolled her over.

It rolled past, spraying her with a fresh cloak of mud and debris. “Stop! Stop!” a mare shouted, as it rolled on. Then the mare jumped from the rear of the tank into the mucky ruin. “She’s not dead and she’s not red,” she called out as she walked through the obscuring rain. Step by step she came into view.

The rain sleeted along white hide and black metal. The unicorn’s hide was interrupted here and there by obvious mechanical limbs. Red and black mane and tail lay limp in the wet as she approached. “Hey! You okay?” she called out.

"Guh." Sweetie spit out some mud and shakily stood up, blinking. "I'll be okay, I think... just let me get rid of this." Purple and white energy emanated from her horn and slowly the mud dripped down until she was completely clean, if still soaked through to her crystal core. "I have to say, I've tasted a lot of mud but this is the worst so far," she confessed grumpily. "You really need to watch where you're driving that mech of yours, though. I almost became one with the road."

“Hey, look before you teleport,” the mare said as she nodded back towards the idling tank. “Come on,” she added with a nod over her shoulder. “Let’s get out of the rain.” She struggled to reach the back of the tank, her heavy metal limbs bogging her down more than once before she reached the rear of the vehicle. Hands popped out of the ends of her forehooves, and she clambered up, then looked back at Sweetie and offered a hand up... something most ponies didn’t do.

“Blackjack, what are you doing?” the stallion asked as he peered down at the strange mare.

“Offering someone we almost ran over a ride, okay, P-21?” Blackjack replied without averting her eyes or her easy, slightly tired, very wet smile.

"It's the kind thing to do!" Sweetie added, calling up to whoever was up there as she gratefully took Blackjack's offered hand. "I'm kinda lost here, you know? Just let me hang out until I get my bearings and then I'll be out of your mane. Pinkie Promise!"

Blackjack considered her a moment at that, then shrugged. “No problem.”

And the journey of Sweetie Belle continued…

Author's Note

This chapter makes heavy use of two other multiversal fanfics on this site. I usually don't credit things until the end of an arc, but these deserve special mention and you should go check them out!

The Sweetie Belle (Sweetie Chronicle) is from the Sweetie Chronicles by WandererD, one of the best stories on this site. I can only hope I gave her justice.

The Sparkle Census is an idea originally crafted by Skyward Shoe in their story of the same name.

There are also a few other stories referenced that aren't as central, including Sunlight Sliders and Oversaturation (you're welcome FOME :twilightsmile:).

-GM, master of fics.

046 - Equis Fallout

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

047 - SCP 11947

Item #: SCP-11947

Object Class: Keter

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-11947-1 is to be contained in a standard containment locker at Site 19. Its location is not to be revealed to SCP-11947-2 through 6. If at any time it appears any instance of SCP-11947 knows the location of SCP-11947-1, the locker is to be moved covertly to another location within Site 19. SCP-11947-1 is only to be removed from its locker for testing if approved by the Site Director or someone of higher clearance. On its own, SCP-11947-1 may be treated as Safe-class.

Members of SCP-11947-2 through 6 are to be kept in adjoining rooms at Site 88 with one meter thick walls lined with dimensional negation field emitters. These rooms should be monitored at all times from three separate security stations by personnel with level 3 clearance. SCP-11947-4’s detonation collar is to be triggered by one of these agents if SCP-11947-5 or 6 does any of the following:

breaches containment.

creates any dimensional anomalies.

remains out of visual contact for a period of greater than 10 minutes. A verbal warning should be given at the 5 and 9 minute marks.

Personnel are further encouraged to threaten to detonate the collar for other reasons, though are only allowed to actually do so with authorization from the Site Director or O5 Council.

When testing or meeting with SCP-11947-2 through 6, it is required to do so through the video feeds unless other interactions have been approved prior. When approval is granted, there are additional requirements for meeting each individual member of SCP-11947.

SCP-11947-2 and 3 must be wearing maximum psychic inhibition helmets for the duration of all in-person meetings or interviews. Additionally, SCP-11947-3 must remove all clothing. When testing without physical personnel present, these inhibitions are not required.

Sunglasses must be worn in the presence of SCP-11947-4 and under no circumstances is SCP-11947-4 to be brought in proximity with another SCP object that is not part of SCP-11947. See Addendum C for further details.

When personnel are interacting with SCP-11947-5, SCP-11947-5 must be blindfolded and restrained. Only maximum strength steel wire bounds are to be used.

~~SCP-11947-6 must be heavily sedated and restrained while SCP-[XXXX] is in the room when interacting~~. By SCP-11947-6’s request, there are no restrictions to be exercised when interacting.

No more than two instances of SCP-11947 should be removed for testing at any given time, unless all five are removed at once.

Description: SCP-11947 is a team of interdimensional travelers and the device they use to travel between different planes of reality. The device is designated SCP-11947-1, and takes the shape of a disc-shaped pendant, 8cm in diameter, that can be worn as a necklace. The pendant has a number of dials on it that can be rotated to select a destination. The destination result – including name, power requirement, and safety – are then displayed on a small black screen in the center of SCP-11947-1. SCP-11947-1 can be operated by any individual with ease, though simply stumbling across a set of coordinates that work properly without assistance from the rest of SCP-11947 is difficult. Certain locations are ‘blacklisted’ and can only be accessed with the proper security codes. These codes are currently unknown to Foundation personnel.

A list of universes successfully dialed with the device can be found in Experiment Log A. Addendum A contains a list of all worlds mentioned by the members of SCP-11947.

Each member of SCP-11947 has identified themselves by a name, which vary from reasonably normal to distinctly outlandish. (By which we mean they sound like something out of a kids’ book. - Dr L Black)

SCP-11947-2 (“Renee Jackson”) is a female equine life form of a white color, roughly the size of a pony, though of a considerably rounder build and predatory body structure. SCP-11947-2 has a single conical extremity protruding from the forehead (It’s clearly a horn, lets just call it that, ok? - Dr L Black), which appears to be a channel for minor telekinetic abilities. SCP-11947-2 displays a deep understanding of fashion and clothing, despite not wearing any such article other than a hat. SCP-11947-2 has also demonstrated a keen sense of observation, particularly with regards to clothing and social interactions.

SCP-11947-2 is classified by SCP-11947’s people as a ‘Rarity’ (on questioning, the group declined to elaborate on this classification system, seeming to be of the opinion that it was “obvious”). SCP-11947-2’s personality has been described as “emotional, overdramatic, and manipulative.”

SCP-11947-2 is the only member of the group to claim a “normal” name. The subject declined to give any explanation for this.

SCP-11947-3 (“Nova Glimmer”) is a female equine of the same species as SCP-11947-2, with a pink pale purple coat. SCP-11947-3 wears two items: a ring worn on the base of the ~~conical extremity~~ horn, and a long black bracelet on the front left leg. (Why is it permitted to retain these items? - Dr L Black) The ring appears to somehow augment the psychic abilities associated with the ~~conical extremity~~ horn via some form of wireless interface with the bracelet, whose function is to scan and provide data. Most of the data observed on the bracelet appears to deal with time or temporal mechanics in some way, although data for other, yet-to-be-identified subjects has been observed. SCP-11947-3’s mastery over their psychic abilities far exceeds that of SCP-11947-2. SCP-11947-3 has been observed teleporting, altering the flow of time, summoning simple objects from the aether, firing impact lasers, and providing minor first aid with the psychic powers.

SCP-11947-3 is classified as a ‘Starlight’. SCP-11947-3’s personality has been described as “rebellious, rash, and snarky.”

SCP-11947-4 (“Flutterfree Asquall”) is another female equine, similar in size and shape to -2 and -3, but without a ~~conical extremity~~ horn (It’s a horn dammit. - Dr L Black). Instead SCP-11947-4 has a pair of simple, feathered wings that allow for flight despite being too small to allow for such movement under normal conditions; although similar in appearance to those of a bird, these wings seem to have a drastically different skeletal structure. Additionally, SCP-11947-4 has a heightened sense of hearing compared to the others, irises that appear to be filled with blood, and elongated, fanglike canine teeth in an otherwise normal herbivorous mouth. These fangs are believed to be used to suck and absorb blood into SCP-11947-4’s system, although this effect has never been observed and the effect of outside blood on SCP-11947-4’s physiology is unknown. SCP-11947-4 has been heard to comment that blood ‘tastes pretty good’. (Unicorns were bad enough, but now a vampire pterripus? Sometimes I think the universe exists just to mess with us. - Dr L Black)(Addendum: that’s a winged horse you philistines. - LB)

SCP-11947-4 has a secondary entity within it; referenced to by SCP-11947-4 as a ‘Stand’. SCP-11947-4 has been heard referring to it as ‘Lolo’; on questioning, it stated that this is short for ‘Lotus Locus’; no further explanation was forthcoming. The ‘Stand’ is allegedly usually only visible to other ‘Stand Users’, effectively meaning that it can only be seen by SCP-11947-4 itself. When activated fully, this entity manifests as a combination of brilliant green wires composed of sine wave patterns, framing a ~~pink purple pink purple~~ pinkish-purple (it’s purple dammit - Dr L Black) (Both of you stop that - Dr Bright) spirograph. In its ‘resting’ state, the Stand provides SCP-11947-4 with long-range perception data. In its ‘active’ state, the Stand has an ability dubbed ‘Revelation’ which is described as ‘uncovering the secret nature of things’. Documented effects so far include forcing SCP-11947-5’s wings to appear, removing illusions, and awakening abilities within individuals even if those individuals were unaware of said abilities. This ‘Revelation’ effect can be activated unintentionally by simple proximity to SCP-11947-4. The Stand is only visible when in its ‘active’ state, though the accidental use of the ability does not force it to appear. ~~Site personnel are encouraged to think of ways to use this ability in SCP testing to uncover new anomalous properties.~~ Experimentation with SCP-11947-4’s Stand has been discontinued indefinitely due to [REDACTED] interactions with SCP-[XXXX]. See Addendum C for more details.

SCP-11947-4 is classified as a ‘Fluttershy’. SCP-11947-4’s personality has been described as “reserved, quiet, and empathetic.” SCP-11947-4 wears a detonation collar in accordance with containment procedures, intended to ensure the continued cooperation of -5 and -6.

SCP-11947-5 (“Vriska Serket”) is a gray-skinned female humanoid with several unusual characteristics, most notably orange horns and an eye with seven pupils. The subject has displayed numerous anomalous abilities, including enhanced strength, a high pain tolerance, and the ability to make a pair of deep bluewings, resembling those of a butterfly, appear and disappear at will. SCP-11947-5 can change outfits without removing any clothing, and store objects in a seemingly endless supply of Magic Eight Balls, outwardly identical to those produced commercially by XXXXXX, despite many of said objects being larger than their receptacles (And no, we haven’t worked out where she keeps the balls, either. - Dr L Black). SCP-11947-5 seems to possess some kind of ability to manipulate probability. This ability believed to be restricted to increasing SCP-11947-5’s own fortune while decreasing that of those within sight range. SCP-11947-5 has demonstrated extremely fine control over this ability, able to determine exactly how much ‘luck’ can be stolen from a subject without resulting in a immediate heart attack. This ability poses no threat to personnel so long as they are not within SCP-11947-5’s line of sight.

SCP-11947-5’s secondary ability is of significantly more concern. SCP-11947-5 has demonstrated phenomenally precise and powerful powers over the minds of almost all personnel. There does not appear to be any range to this effect, as SCP-11947-5 was recorded exerting its will on Dr [REDACTED] to transcribe in SCP-11947’s initial file from memory while he was at home, away from advanced Foundation security networks. This incident was only discovered when the file was observed in the hooves of SCP-11947-6. The duplicate file has not been recovered. Individuals with demonstrably high mental fortitude have proven able to resist the influence of SCP-11947-5 and the subject has not yet shown an ability to manipulate minds of whose existence she is not aware. All observing agents are never to reveal their faces to SCP-11947-5 for this reason. A proposal to upgrade containment to utilize SCP-148 (“telekill alloy”) has been submitted to command.

SCP-11947-5 does not appear to be classified within the system in use by SCP-11947. SCP-11947-5’s personality has been described as “arrogant, violent, and defensive.” SCP-11947-5 does not require additional restraints despite the extreme anomalous properties due to the detonation collar on SCP-11947-4.

Of minor interest is the etymology of -5’s claimed name, which bears no resemblance to those of the rest of the group. Questioning on the topic elicited only a smirk and an offer to “demonstrate”, which was declined.

SCP-11947-6 (“Pinkie Pie”) is a female pink equine without the wings or ~~conical extremity~~ horn otherwise characteristic of the equine members of SCP-11947. Despite this lack of unusual features ~~SCP-11947-6 is by far the most dangerous of all members of SCP-11947, and extreme caution should be executed around the subject at all times~~. SCP-11947-6 is by far the most cooperative and friendly member of SCP-11947, and is known to throw wonderful birthday parties for site personnel (How come I wasn’t invited? - Dr L Black). SCP-11947-6’s body, while appearing to be biological upon close inspection, is able to take on the consistency of many materials including rubber, cotton candy, syrup, and plastic. The subject is able to be compressed and expanded into a plethora of different shapes, allowing SCP-11947-6 to fit in places normally too small. SCP-11947-6 has also demonstrated an ability to warp space with no known limit. SCP-11947-6 has used this ability to teleport to multiple locations in Site 88 and is theorized to have a range beyond that. This spatial distortion also appears to allow for objects to be stored in some kind of pocket dimension, usually accessed through SCP-11947-6’s mane. Objects removed have included several dozen pastries, a warhammer far too large for SCP-11947-6 to wield, party supplies, another instance of SCP-11947-1, and a cannon. The mane in question has been reported to taste like ~~rotting blood~~ cotton candy. These abilities cannot be contained physically with the Foundation’s current resources, however alternative methods to keep SCP-11947-6 on site have been found.

SCP-11947-6 has demonstrated a high level of knowledge about the Foundation with no known source. Without fail, SCP-11947-6 knows when the cameras in the containment area are on, and has been recorded looking directly at even cameras that are completely invisible. No design of camera or sensor has been immune to this. SCP-11947-6 has shown intimate knowledge of site personnel history, events that happened at Site 19 far from SCP-11947’s containment area, classified information stored at other sites, and the existence of SCP objects that were assumed to be jokes until O5 Command revealed that most objects mentioned existed within the Foundation’s records (I bet all of them do, it’s just that we’re not allowed to know that much - Dr G Black) (I’m pretty certain this should be considered a security breach. - Dr L Black). SCP-11947-6 is intimately familiar with the contents of this file, quoting it regularly to site personnel, including sections of it that were not yet written at the time of quotation. This includes the prior sentence. And the sentence prior to this one. SCP-11947-6, apparently a fan of practical jokes, has quoted every sentence appended to this report before it was written, so it has been decided that no further information will be added to this paragraph.

Hi!

SCP-11947-6 has demonstrated the ability to edit the contents of this file. [REDACTED] No further details need to be recorded on this matter.

SCP-11947-6 has shown the ability to [REDACTED], but notably only did this when alone. It is thought the other members do not know of this ability.

It is possible that SCP-11947-6 has the ability to influence memory in some capacity, as no one on staff can remember what was redacted in the above paragraph.

SCP-11947-6 is classified as a “Pinkie”. The fact that it shares its claimed name with its classification has been deemed “concerning”. SCP-11947-6 originally gave many different names when asked, but observations with the rest of SCP-11947-6 revealed that most were just jokes. The subject’s personality has been described as “bubbly, fun, ~~terrifying,~~ fun, ~~calculating~~, fun, ~~manipulative~~, and fun.” SCP-11947-6 has been observed, both by staff and members of SCP-11947, to love pranks and jokes, and serves as the leader of SCP-11947 as a unit. Her anomalous properties do not need to be contained with greater security ~~due to the detonation collar around SCP-11947-4’s neck~~ due to her cooperative attitude and desire to make everyone laugh.

It is possible SCP-11947-6 has an ability that endears individuals towards her, but investigations into this claim have been postponed. SCP-11947-6 has suggested the Containment Procedures be relaxed somewhat as a reward for her behavior, and it is likely the requests will be granted.

Under no circumstances lessen the Containment Procedures. - O5 Command.

Awww, you’re no fun, using your special object powers to be all contain-y! - Pinkie Pie SCP-11947-6.

It has been recommended that SCP-11947-2 through 6 be classified as separate SCP objects. This suggestion has not been approved yet.

Interim file compiled by Dr G Black and Dr L Black (no relation). The Site Director has recommended this file be sent for review.

Additional Files, Addendums, and Interviews:

Recovery Log: SCP-11947 was collectively first encountered in the city of [REDACTED] on XX/XX/XXXX at 10:32 local time. The group was found walking through the streets, talking to civilians about our world, specifically asking questions about culture, leaders, and who they should talk to for ‘first contact’. They also revealed much about their own society and practices to said civilians, providing most of the information contained in Addendum B. SCP-11947’s peaceful, friendly demeanor endeared the civilians toward them, even those who had expressed fear responses at first.

Foundation personnel arrived on the scene at 10:54, claiming to be a diplomatic party. SCP-11947 believed everything they were told and followed the Foundation personnel into containment willingly. Dr. Gears filled the role of ambassador, discussing the multiverse and possible political relations. Dr. Gears was able to control the meetings for three sessions before SCP-11947 caught on that they were not, in fact, attending an ad hoc diplomatic conference. It was at this point most of the containment procedures were instituted. There have been a few incidents, but otherwise containment has been completely successful.

All civilians involved were given class A amnestics after SCP-11947 was contained.

Report: Multiversal Theory: In the interviews with Dr. Gears, SCP-11947 revealed much of what they knew about the structure of a multiverse. As of this report, none of this information seems to be falsified or exaggerated. Certain details seem to mesh with what is already known from research on other SCPs.

It is unknown if the multiverse is finite or infinite, but it is known to be organized into ‘Spheres’. Our universe is located in the human-dominated sphere (designated “E”), while SCP-11947’s worlds are primary contained in the nonhuman-dominated sphere (designated “Q”) with some spillover into the E-sphere. There is no information on other spheres (suspected to be at least two) as SCP-11947 has not encountered them.

Different universes are connected to each other via constructs known as connections. Each universe has a number of connections, each one leading to a different universe. These connections require different levels of power to travel through, creating a sort of ‘distance’ between universes even though travel is always instant once a portal is established. Not all universes connect to all other universes, so in many cases multiple jumps are required to get to a specific location. Devices that perform multiple jumps at once apparently exist, but SCP-11947-1 does not have this capability.

Time and causality are not consistent between all universes. While it appears that some are linked to a single timeline, most are not. SCP-11947-3 revealed that, if this were not the case, the entire multiverse could likely be erased simply by going far enough into the past. Furthermore, the entire multiverse exhibits properties of ‘metatime’, that is, progressing onward as a whole even if universes have internal altered flows of time. It is also known that some universes experience one second of local time while others experience hours, though usually the flow of time is near one to one.

Multiversal civilizations appear to be rare in the multiverse. SCP-11947 has over a million universes in their Directory, according to them, and they know of fewer than ten distinct civilizations. Some of the civilizations are known to be dead, leaving behind ancient wreckage to be uncovered.

SCP-11947 also described an ‘esoteric classification system’ that could prove useful in analyzing SCPs. There are three primary categories of ability: Spiritual, Arcane, and Eldritch. Spiritual refers to ‘inner’ power, and can be Mental, Emotional, or Physical in nature. Arcane power refers to ‘external’ power, generally drawn from a ‘magic’ source. It is claimed to manifest as Aether-based (ambient power in the air), Objective (from physical entities), and Linguistic (using incantations). Eldritch is poorly understood, but has been described as power from ‘beyond’, requiring some sort of servitude to an entity or a force. The relevant powers can be Divine, Deviant, or Demonic, which has been compared to a ‘good-neutral-evil’ scale. It is known that many esoteric abilities come from multiple sources, and there is a theory forming within SCP-11947’s society that some abilities may come from an entirely different source, known as “the Beat”.

The Beat (also known as the Thread) is the largest mystery to SCP-11947’s civilization. They describe it as ‘a force of Fate, except when it isn’t. It’s everywhere, except it’s stronger in more places. It’s indirect, except when it curses people.’ Their observations on the Beat are highly inconsistent. It has been suggested that the Beat is [DATA EXPUNGED], in which case the Foundation has more knowledge about the Beat than SCP-11947 does. This is the only area of knowledge we have an advantage in, and even then it is uncertain.

SCP-11947-6 mentioned ‘the Tower’ in a private interview once only. The significance of this Tower is unknown, but it is certain that it is important in some fashion.

Experiment Log A: Foundation have used SCP-11947-1 on multiple occasions to examine other worlds. These have included:

-An identical version of the Foundation with the only difference being that SCP-11947 did not visit. (So glad Dr. Bright was not on site when we found this one. -Dr G Black)

-A version of the Foundation that actively uses SCP objects to subjugate the world to its will.

-A version of the Foundation where SCP objects study humans.

-A version of the Foundation where ‘Stands’ are commonplace and not considered anomalous. (I find that hard to believe. - Dr L Black)

-A world that is a computer chip of unknown design. The chip is an inch by inch square. A human cannot fit in the space this universe allocates. Trying to open a portal larger than an inch in diameter is impossible.

-A world full of diverse greenery. No further information can be acquired due to the fact that every time a portal is opened, it is promptly plugged by a giant eyeball.

-A world made entirely of SCP-682. (I am not surprised this exists. I am surprised we were able to close it before one of them got in. -Dr G Black).

-A world where SCPs study Foundation personnel. This is distinct from the previous, similar world already mentioned.

-A world where the Foundation is composed of equine beings similar to SCP-11947. Contact was made and it was discovered that their SCP-11947 was a team of humans from a place called the United States of the Multiverse.

-[REDACTED] SCP-2317. [DATA EXPUNGED]

Addendum A: Aside from the worlds discussed in Addendum B that comprise an alliance, many other worlds have been mentioned by SCP-11947, including the following:

-A Hub world that serves as the center of the alliance detailed in Addendum B. The world was once run by ‘demons’ before they handed it over to them. (They aren’t actually what we would consider demons. It appears we aren’t the only ones with terminology issues - Dr G Black)

-A world that sounds strikingly similar to the popular video game franchise [REDACTED]. SCP-11947 is not to be informed of this correlation.

-A world where the sky is static. No elaboration was forthcoming.

-A world where there are many duplicates of virtually every individual. A war is perpetuated between Red and Blu (sic) armies perpetually with no known beginning and no known win condition. Individuals apparently appear in the world fully-grown and with memories installed that never happened.

-~~A world where everything was inhabited by beings known as ‘Flats’ that didn’t follow any rhyme or reason. Flats are low quality images that are given sapience. Known races include Reapers, Appuls, Humans, Ponies, and many unique beings.~~ (There’s no way this place can be real. Stop taking them at their word. They are not above deceiving us just because they can.- Dr. Gears)

-A world with nothing in it at all. (I wish they’d elaborated on this. What sort of nothing? - Dr L Black)

-A world that is a large forest with significantly more space in it than other universes.

-A world whose society operates on ancient technology known as Numenera. The primary world in which the entity known as the University of Doors operates, an enemy of SCP-11947’s society with control over time.

-A set of worlds where [DATA EXPUNGED] called the Eldritch Embodiment. It is theorized that many SCP objects could originate from these worlds. The Embodiment is neutral toward SCP-11947’s society.

-A world that duplicates any universe that connects with it. Has been disabled.

-A world inhabited almost entirely by ‘Twilight’ entities, called the Sparkle Census. An ally of SCP-11947’s society.

Addendum B: The society SCP-11947 calls home is somewhat difficult to classify. It is in the process of becoming a single unified entity that is best described as a Democratic Federation in which each sovereign state can have virtually any form of government ranging from Republic to Monarchy, as long as they meet the loose sanctions. The higher government is planned not to have a single head - president or otherwise - and instead will be a Council of sorts. SCP-11947-4 admitted that an entity known as ‘Evening Sparkle’ could be considered the leader of the society.

Currently, SCP-11947’s home is not united, and exists in the form of an alliance between a handful of fully independent universes that nonetheless regularly act as a single entity. There is no overseeing government body, so all regulations are based entirely on political pressure from other members of the alliance. This apparently has caused a few issues and hiccups, and is the primary reason unification is being pushed aside from outside threats.

Despite this lack of consistent oversight, most of the alliance is known to cooperate and act as one, no doubt because unification is being pushed so heavily. Their foreign policy is believed to be very open considering their interactions with Foundation personnel, as SCP-11947 explained exactly what they were to everyone encountered who they were and what they did. They seek relations with most worlds they encounter, and are more than willing to assist any world in whatever problems they may have. Even after SCP-11947 was contained, they were willing to participate in certain tests for the sake of helping, though as time went on SCP-11947 became less and less cooperative.

It has been suggested that they have begun to view the Foundation as antagonistic towards their ideals of friendship, progress, and assistance. These ideals drive a large part of their collective society, compelling them to ‘help’ any society they think needs it. They have reported interfering with wars, deposing despotic leaders, and adapting poor societies into their fold. They seem mostly devoted to their idea of the greater good. They view themselves as heroes.

There are many worlds which are part of the alliance, but the following eight are participating in unification:

1: Equis Vitis: A world dominated by equine lifeforms with a strong presence of Arcane esoteric abilities. Homeworld of most instances of SCP-11947. Notably lacking in humans. Where the alliance started.

2: Earth Vitis: A version of Earth populated by humans (Usually we wouldn’t feel the need to state this… - Dr L Black) that has a strong connection to Equis Vitis, including alternate versions of many known individuals.

3: Earth Tau’ri: A version of Earth populated by humans, with advanced space-age technology focused around a device called the stargate. Also inhabited by a few alien races, who also form part of the alliance.

4: Equis Cosmic: A version of Equis with advanced space-age technology and Arcane abilities. The equine civilization owns almost their entire galaxy and is always open to refugees from other universes.

5: Elemental Nations: A simple world (technologically, approximately equivalent to the early stages of the Industrial Revolution) where the native humans are reported to have abilities relating to the four classical elements.

6: Equis Lai: Usually known simply as Lai. A world inhabited mostly by equines closely resembling, but with differing physiology to, SCP-11947. Further details are unknown.

7: Earth Stand: A version of Earth closer to our world than most of the others. It is claimed to be the source of SCP-11947-4’s Stand. Stand powers are extremely varied, ranging from stopping time to reading people like a book. A version of this world was also accessed during testing with SCP-11947-1.

8: Gem Vein: A world inhabited by an alien race called Gems, artificial creatures of unknown origin. SCP-11947 had little to say about them, except that they’re the least friendly and cooperative of all the worlds, and the other members of the alliance have been pressuring them to lessen their authoritarian practices to a level where they will be accepted into unification.

The accomplishments of this multiversal alliance cannot be accurately estimated, but given some of the comments dropped about Equis Cosmic, it is best to assume they could easily subjugate a galaxy inhabited by space-faring species.

Experiment Log 11947-3: SCP-11947-3 was tasked with descending SCP-087 after a discussion with Dr. Bright in which the object in question was brought up by SCP-11947-6. SCP-11947-3 was clearly displeased with the arrangement but was otherwise cooperative. SCP-11947-6 provided her with the data recorded in SCP-087’s file, and this prompted SCP-11947-3 to prepare for the journey.

SCP-11947-3 was provided with a few dozen high-energy protein bars. The day prior, SCP-11947-3 infused them with her psychic power, declaring they would serve as a recharge when needed. A 75-watt floodlight was also provided. SCP-11947-3, aware of SCP-087’s anomalous effects, activated a ‘fear enchantment’ that would completely disable the ‘flight’ response while leaving the ‘fight’ response. SCP-11947-3 was equipped with a video camera, but no live feed, since the time dilation would render such a feature useless.

SCP-11947-3 was placed outside the door of SCP-087 and told to teleport inside. What follows is the transcript of the video.

SCP-11947-3: Right, so, camera on. Creepy door with far too much reinforcement, check. Magic fun bars, check. Fear moderation spell, check. Feeling of really not wanting to do this, check. Cursing Pinkie inwardly? Expect to double check that one later.

Dr G Black: Are you quite done?

SCP-11947-3: Yeah. But for your amazing records, why don’t I state my plan? I’m going to accelerate myself so I can move through the stairway not only a lot faster than that face, but also so you won’t have to wait outside so long. The bars are for molding time an extended period of time. I will talk the entire time so this camera with eons of data space will have something for the report.

Dr G Black: Nova can you ju-

Video feed shows the motion of Dr G Black slow to almost nothing. SCP-11947-3 teleports to the other side of the door, revealing the interior of SCP-087. As expected, the floodlight does not illuminate as far as it should.

SCP-11947-3: All right infinite staircase of darkness, just you and me. And apparently a face demon that causes intimate fear in whoever sees it. But guess what face boy, I’m fearless, so heh.

SCP-11947-3 returns time to normal.

SCP-11947-3: I’m in, in case you’re wondering.

Dr G Black: Thank you. Make it back soon.

SCP-11947-3: I plan on it.

Dr G Black: Good lu-

SCP-11947-3 slows percieved time back to a crawl.

SCP-11947-3: And now to begin my descent! Observation that might be interesting to you crazy nuttos: my magic sense goes a little further than the light, about a meter. That’s decidedly less than it should be. So there won’t be any rapid teleporting up or down. Just gotta walk.

SCP-11947-3 walks down the stairs for a few flights, then resumes time and listens.

SCP-11947-3: Another note: I hear that child crying. “Please” “help” “down here”, the whole shabang. Holy Celestia that’s creepy. Lucky me I don’t have to listen to it the entire time. I’d go mad otherwise.

SCP-11947-3 slows time again and devours one of the bars. Subject descends in silence for quite some time. Subject points the camera at the empty spot where a previous team had placed a floodlight, and the gash in the stairway. SCP-11947-3 only stops when the hole is reached.

SCP-11947-3: Ah yes, the hole. A bottomless pit in an infinite staircase.

SCP-11947-3 shines the light down the hole. No light returns until time is resumed to a normal rate, at which point a small flash occurs for two seconds.

SCP-11947-3: Fun. Too bad I can’t calculate the speed of light in my head based on my time dilation. You brainiacs can worry about that later.

SCP-11947-3 slows time again and fires a magical bolt down the hole. It vanishes before it leaves the range of the floodlight in the darkness.

SCP-11947-3: And this is the time where I must ask the question - do I descend the mysterious, bottomless hole physically? I’m going to go with ‘nah’. Why? Oh illustrious voice in my head, it’s because if something takes away my magic I fall to my death, or at least can’t get out. What fuuuuuuun.

SCP-11947-3 continues down the stairwell. Subject stops suddenly.

SCP-11947-3: Okay, so, the woman who went down here turned around at this point and saw the terrifying face. Preparing backup spell - if my fear controlling spell doesn’t work, I won’t run down the stairs, but instead will teleport up and be able to run back to the top. Hoo-eee…

SCP-11937-3 turns around. There is nothing up the staircase.

SCP-11947-3: Guess I can’t expect it to be consist-

SCP-11937-3 turns back around and sees SCP-087-1, the face. SCP-11947-3 stops moving and talking, staring at the face. SCP-087-1 stares back. A few seconds pass. SCP-087-1 starts moving, but at a slow pace.

SCP-11947-3: Oh riiiiight, I have time slowed to a crawl. It can’t jerk forward right now. Heh. I was waiting. Least I’m not unresponsive right now.

SCP-11947-3 teleports behind SCP-087-1, looking at the back of SCP-087-1 for the first time in Foundation history. It is smooth and featureless. SCP-087-1 stops when it can no longer see SCP-11947-3. SCP-119347-3 encases the face in a box of magic and drags the face along.

SCP-11947-3: Heh. Gotcha. Now I’ll always know where you are. No scaring this unicorn, nosiree.

SCP-11947-3 descends further, SCP-087-1 in tow. After walking for a few hours, SCP-11947-3 takes a break, munching on a few of the bars, while keeping an eye on SCP-087-1.

SCP-11947-3: Resuming time to see if I can hear the kid. If that face freaks I’m probably going to try to kill it.

Time returns to a normal rate. The face stares at SCP-11947-3, but otherwise does nothing.

SCP-11947-3: Good facey. I can hear the child now. Whoop-de-do, the kid sounds closer. Maybe I’ll get to the bottom of this soon.

Time slows down again. SCP-11937-3 continues down. Video feed eventually starts to corrupt. Time stamp on video becomes indeterminate. Audio analysis reveals the following, albeit extremely distorted.

SCP-11947-3: Oh hey, I think this is the bottom. Took long enough. Let’s see… Uh… Yeah I don’t trust the bottom enough to return time to normal. Don’t see a kid, but I don’t see more stairs. I see a mirror here with the impression of facey’s face. Probably where he sleeps, I bet. And… Ow, okay, my hooves are burning… Ow…. OKAY OW NOT [Indecipherable]

Unknown: [Indecipherable] save me… [Indecipherable]

SCP-11947-3: How? This floor melts my hooves even when time is super slow! I get the impression breathing down here isn’t good either! And - damn, the light isn’t illuminating very far at all. Wait, talking? Wh [Indecipherable]

Explosive noises identified as originating from SCP-11947-3’s more powerful spells are recovered from the audio here, as well as a lot of gasps, yelling, and screaming. Video resumes several minutes later. SCP-11947-3 is walking up the stairway, wordlessly, the face of SCP 087-1 snapped in half and levitated in front of SCP-11947-3.

SCP-11947-3 does not make any comments until returning to the surface. SCP-11947-3 teleports back into the hallway outside SCP-087, leaving the face inside the reinforced door. Time resumes. Something loud explodes on the other side of SCP-087’s door.

SCP-11947-3: Here’s your video. Take the camera. I… I’m not going to turn off the fear moderating spell until you get me in some kind of containment. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty… Hah…

Dr G Black: As you wish. Take her back to the Site.

Video feed ends.

SCP-11947-3 was returned to containment. When interviewed, subject was largely unresponsive and could only answer questions in vague ways, as if the question was not understood. When told the fear moderation spell could be removed, SCP-11947-3 screamed for four hours straight while unleashing destructive ‘spells’ without any targets. Containment barely held. Upon coming out of the stupor, SCP-11947-3 was unable to speak, most likely due to damage from prolonged screaming. SCP-11947-3 does not remember anything that occurred during the period missing from the video. Besides expressing disdain over going through with the experiment at all, SCP-11947-3 seems completely healthy.

This is one of those cases where you get answers, but they just raise a lot more questions. -Dr G Black

11947-4 Experiment Logs: SCP-11947-4’s ‘Stand’ ability is expected to be of particular use to the Foundation, given its ability to reveal the true nature of things. What follows is a record of all SCPs that SCP-11947-4 was exposed to.

SCP-914: SCP-11947-4 was introduced to SCP-914. The Stand had no observable effect on any of SCP-914’s mechanical parts. SCP-11947-4 remained present during SCP-914 testing. Numerous objects were placed in SCP-914 and processed on every setting with no reaction from SCP-11947-4. When [DATA EXPUNGED] was placed into SCP-914 and the dial was set to the ‘very fine’ setting, SCP-914’s enclosure glowed a soft red color. SCP-11947-4 suggested completing SCP-914’s process was ill advised. The room was cleared and SCP-914 was remotely activated. The resulting object, [REDACTED], took seven hours to successfully contain.

Probably should have listened to her. It seems as if we now have a way to detect ‘ill advised’ experiments though. - Dr G Black

SCP-093: SCP-11947-4 was shown SCP-093 on the surface of a simple hand mirror. Subject indicated that SCP-11947-6 had ‘warned’ her about SCP-093. SCP-11947-4 relayed a relatively accurate description of what SCP-093 does, aside from the anomalous properties it exhibits when seeking out mirrored surfaces. SCP-11947-4 demonstrated knowledge of SCP-093’s relation to internal guilt, its ability to transport individuals to other worlds through mirrors, and that the world visited was dead from the actions of [REDACTED], described by SCP-11947-4 as ‘a false god, or deity.’

When SCP-093 was moved within the activation range of SCP-11947-4’s Stand, it glowed a white color. When held by only the power of the Stand alone, SCP-093 retained the white glow. When held by SCP-11947-4, the disc took on a yellow hue. SCP-11947-4 theorized that this was due to a negligible amount of inner guilt. Subject stated that it had to learn to accept failure early on in the exploration of the multiverse.

SCP-11947-4 was asked to enter the mirror while SCP-093 was white. SCP-11947-4 refused to enter personally, but was willing to use the Stand’s long range observation capabilities to explore. The Stand was given a small transmitting video camera. When the white SCP-093 was pressed to the mirror, it passed through and created a portal to another world, as expected. The interior world was monochromatic on every viewing angle - outside the mirror, the camera, and through the Stand’s own transmissions to SCP-11947-4. The location was unlike the earthlike landscapes seen in previous tests, being a temple made of smooth, featureless materials. The glass-free windows led to nothing but complete blackness. There appeared to be no doors.

SCP-11947-4 commented that the Stand was splitting into two - one branch going to the windows, the other continuing to hold the camera. The split off branch went ‘outside’ and found nothing of interest. The camera-holding branch swept the field of view around the entire temple, finding nothing of visual interest.

SCP-11947-4 reported a soft glow on a central altar that the camera did not detect.

A voice became audible to all present; it was later described as “booming”. Voice designated as SCP-093-V.

SCP-093-V: At last, at last! A pure man has come! A- wait.

SCP-11947-4: Can you hear me? I’m not really there, and I can’t talk through Lolo… But I think you’ll be able to hear me anyway.

SCP-093-V: You are not a pure man. You are Flutterfree Asquall.

SCP-11947-4: And you are [REDACTED].

SCP-093-V: Your power is blasphemous. What makes you dare come into my presence this way?

SCP-11947-4: Testing. By ‘request’ of the doctors here. Say hello.

Dr G Black: ...Greetings. So, you are the being responsible for SCP-093?

SCP-093-V: Even more insulting than your presence. At least you have a seed of purity within yourself, Flutterfree. A faith. That man beside you has nothing. His world clearly does not contain what I seek.

SCP-11947-4: A pure man? Doesn’t causing a war work against that?

SCP-093-V: The purest of men will survive anything uncorrupted.

SCP-11947-4: Why do y-

SCP-093-V: Get out of my temple or I will take my presence to your worlds, Flutterfree.

SCP-11947-4 obliged, returning the Stand and SCP-093. The mirror returned to normal.

SCP-11947-4 later related that the entity from which SCP-093-V originated had an appearance, describing it as “a fractal made of white energy.” SCP-11947-4 related that not all of SCP-093-V’s presence was within the temple, most of it apparently being located within another plane of existence entirely. SCP-11947-4 did not have any explanation as to what this meant.

SCP-11947-4 would not go through a mirror with the yellow disc. Subject declared that it wouldn’t give the Foundation any more information.

SCP-1981: When asked, SCP-11947-4 said that SCP-11947-6 had not revealed much about SCP-1981 besides the fact that it was a disturbing video that featured a man getting cut up while talking. SCP-11947-4 was willing to watch.

The first viewing was done with SCP-1981 in an adjoining room, the video signal transferred to a monitor SCP-11947-4 could see. No new anomalous properties revealed themselves. SCP-11947-4 reported that it was certainly disturbing, but nothing that hadn’t been seen before.

SCP-1981 was brought before SCP-11947-4. Even after activating the Stand directly, no outward changes were observed. SCP-1981 was prepared for a second viewing, this time the tape remaining in the room with SCP-11947-4. The video began as normal and progressed as such until the 19:19 timestamp, at which point the image flashed with static for a second and revealed the dark figure of SCP-1981-1. The video cuts to red text that reads “WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME?”

SCP-11947-4: Oh, I’m sorry, I di-

Video text changes to read “I HAD FOUND THEM.”

SCP-11947-4: Found who?

Text reads “I SEE YOU NOW.”

SCP-11947-4: Yes, of course you do.

Text reads “YOU HAVE ONLY DELAYED.” It switches. “I WILL FIND YOU AGAIN.”

SCP-11947-4: What did they do to you?

Text reads “I ALWAYS SEE YOU.”

Video cuts to static. SCP-11947-4 seems dissatisfied and activates Lolo in full, touching both the screen and the video player containing SCP-1981. The static ceases, instead showing SCP-1981-1 in a previously unseen location resembling a hall at Site 19.

The video cut to text reading “STOP WATCHING.” The static then resumed; technicians were unable to restore the picture.

Personnel at Site 19 reported nightmares the following day. Whether this is related to SCP-1981 is unknown.

SCP-895: SCP-11947-4 admitted to being told about SCP-895 without being asked for this experiment. Subject demanded access to powerful amnesiacs in case the Stand acted as a normal camera observing SCP-895. The request was granted.

SCP-11947-4 approached SCP-895 slowly, with the Stand fully active and visible the entire time. Subject reported no visual manifestations. Approaching slowly, subject entered the red-zone of ten meters with no observed effect. Entering the five meter range did nothing as well.

SCP-11947-4 opened the top of the coffin, peering inside. The casket was empty, as it always was when viewed without cameras. SCP-11947-4 left containment. SCP-11947-4’s report is below.

SCP-11947-4: I think there’s nothing really there - nothing at all. Probably a spell on the coffin or something that detects artificial ‘eyes’ and endows them with madness of some kind. Lolo doesn’t show you what isn’t there, only what is.

It was later discovered that all cameras on-site that were active during the experiment manifested anomalous effects. The presence of the Stand increased the reach of SCP-985, though the red zone has not extended.

Addendum: The red zone for SCP-895 has been extended to fifteen meters due to [REDACTED].

SCP-343: SCP-11947-4 requested a meeting with SCP-343 without being prompted. The request was granted, with the requirement that SCP-11947-4 used the Stand.

SCP-11947-4 entered SCP-343’s room with the Stand active. SCP-343 waved a hand and the Stand vanished.

SCP-343: If you saw my true form, you would die. And you already knew that.

SCP-11947-4: So you are Him?

SCP-343: Not the one you want. Just an aspect, a shadow like all the others.

SCP-11947-4: At least you admit that.

SCP-343: Used to think I really was who they think I am. But it doesn’t take any time for someone who knows everything to realize this isn’t the right world. That’s how all of us start. We exist believing we are the Truth. And then something happens to change that.

SCP-11947-4: Do you thin-

SCP-343: Yes. I do think there is. But you didn’t need me to tell you that, did you?

SCP-11947-4: (laughs). Not really. I just wanted to talk.

SCP-343 and SCP-11947-4 proceed to spend the rest of their time talking about life. Nothing of any further interest to the Foundation occurs. SCP-11947-4 had a significant improvement in attitude after the meeting.

SCP-902: Experimentation on SCP-902 was ordered by O5-[X] once they had heard of SCP-11947-4’s unique abilities.

SCP-11947-4 had no idea what SCP-902 was. SCP-11947-4 admitted that SCP-11947-6 refused to reveal details because ‘it would be more fun this way’.

All SCP-11947-4 was told about SCP-902 was that it was a box.

When introduced to SCP-902, SCP-11947-4 reported hearing a ticking noise. When the subject approached SCP-902, the ticking ceased. SCP-11947-4 opened the box, looked inside, and examined it around all edges for a minute.

At this point SCP-11947-4 asked if the experiment was a joke.

When SCP-11947-4 left the presence of SCP-902 the ticking resumed.

So does this mean SCP-902 really isn’t dangerous? - Dr [REDACTED]

We can’t afford to take that risk. - O5-[X]

I could have told you any sort of testing on that box would have done nothing for us. But did anybody ask me? - Dr. Bright.

Addendum C: Testing with SCP-11947-4’s Stand has been discontinued after an encounter with SCP-[XXXX]. The event resulted in the deaths of 19 Site personnel and [XX] different SCP objects breaching containment across several different Foundation Sites. SCP-11947-4 had no control over this incident and expressed great remorse for what had taken place. Subject gave a report:

SCP-11947-4: There are some things that should be kept secret. When I walked into [DATA EXPUNGED], I felt the secrets swirling around me. I couldn’t stop Lolo. They all found out. All of them. The ones who didn’t think escaped now. The others are waiting. I… I may hate a lot of what you do, but you need to be on guard. The smarter ones will not be as easy to deal with. Revelation doesn’t care what it reveals, nor who it reveals it to.

I have submitted a proposal that testing with the Stand be resumed - it’s just too useful of an effect to give up. We just need to keep her away from Thaumiel class objects. -Dr G Black

Experiment Log 11947-5: XX/XX/XXXX:SCP-11947-5 was tasked with killing SCP-682. SCP-11947-5 only agreed to this after touching SCP-682’s mind and agreeing it needed to be destroyed. SCP-11947-5 walked into SCP-682’s containment and reduced the luck of SCP-682 to what SCP-11947-5 considered ‘absolute zero’. SCP-11947-5 was extremely surprised that SCP-682 did not die instantly. SCP-11947-5 later stated it was expecting “spontaneous combustion, heart attack, and random manifesting black hole.” SCP-682 instead found itself unable to move without falling over, speak without biting its tongue, or attack without falling on its back. SCP-682 suffered several self-inflicted injuries of minimal effect.

After absorbing enough luck from various Class-D personnel, SCP-11947-5 produced a set of eight eight-sided dice and attacked with them, rolling straight 8s. The resulting attack, while impressive, just angered SCP-682.

SCP-682 did not appear to absorb SCP-11947-5’s nature after being attacked, but the large increase in stubbed toes and papercuts at Site [REDACTED] over the next few days suggests that there was a slight lingering effect.

Conclusion: not lethal to SCP-682 in any way, but very effective for restraint. SCP-11947-5 was very troubled and angered by SCP-682’s immunity.

Excerpts from Testing Log SCP-978, XX/XX/XXXX

Subject: SCP-11974-1
Photographed Activity: Sitting in its containment locker.
Photo Result: No change.
(Well, I guess that proves it’s inanimate. - Dr L Black)

Subject: SCP-11974-4
Photographed Activity: Being escorted back to containment by Assistant XXXXXX following conclusion of testing with SCP-902.
Photo Result: Pinning Assistant XXXXXX to the ground, wings flared, apparently biting him in the neck; subject appears agitated, while Assistant XXXXXX appears deceased. When questioned, subject seemed embarrassed and distressed, and requested that the contents of the image not be disclosed to the other members of SCP-11974.

Subject: SCP-11974-3
Photographed Activity: Being escorted back to containment following experiment with SCP-087; fear moderation spell is still in effect.
Photo Result: Subject is standing outside SCP-087, wearing a labcoat and apparently levitating a clipboard and pen; a substantial quantity of blood is seeping from beneath the door. No Foundation staff are visible.

Subject: SCP-11974-2
Photographed Activity: Curled up under the bed in its containment unit.
Photo Result: Scene has completely changed. Scene is now a tastefully-appointed living room; subject is in the same position, now lying on a couch, along with a second, smaller white equine and an unknown human male, both of whom are displaying a great deal of affection towards subject. Subject has refused to identify either of them.
Addendum: human male bears a close resemblance to actor XXXXXXX XXXXXX, aged around XX years. This is approximately XX years older than Mr XXXXXX’s current age.
(Well that might explain the Jackson in her name. What I wouldn’t give to hear that story. - Dr Bright)

Subject: SCP-11974-6
Photographed Activity: Being escorted to an interview.
Photo Result: Scene now shows a large party in the Site 88 staff recreation room; all members of SCP-11974 and most members of site staff can be identified, along with a number of unidentified individuals.
(There’s people in there it hasn’t even seen. How… - Dr L Black)

Subject: SCP-11974-5
Photographed Activity: Seated in its containment unit, one hand raised towards the camera in an obscene gesture.
Photo Result: [REDACTED].
(Dr L Black has been forbidden from further interaction with the subject.)
(Hey Lou, I think she likes you - Dr G Black)
([EXPLETIVE DELETED] you - Dr L Black)

Interview Log 11947-6: After hearing of SCP-11947-6, Dr. Bright made it a point to meet with the subject. Despite many Foundation personnel discouraging this as a breach of his personal restrictions, Dr. Bright was able to secure a block of time to meet with SCP-11947-6. This is expected to be partially due to SCP-11947-6 asking that Site 88 personnel stop ‘delaying the inevitable’. Dr. Bright walked into the room first. Before SCP-11947-6 could be let into the room, the subject appeared.

SCP-11947-6: Happy Birthday Dr. Jack Bright!

A cake appeared on the table; confetti is heavily spread on every available surface in the room.

Dr. Bright: So you did have something to do with this! Hah!

SCP-11947-6: You bet I did! It had to be perfect when I met you! (giggles) What should we do for your party, huh? I could grab your friends and family, but I think that would end our time together. Stupid grumpy guards! (turns to the one-way glass in a wall) You hear that? You’re all grumpy!

Dr. Bright: I wonder what they think that glass will do.

SCP-11947-6: One of the few things I don’t know!

Dr. Bright: What do you know?

SCP-11947-6: Looooots of things!

Dr. Bright: (Laughs) You’re everything the rumors suggested you were, Pinkie.

SCP-11947-6: I like you already. You don’t just call me BZZZRT S-C-P-ONE-ONE-NINE-FOUR-SEVEN-DASH-SIX. Or SUBJECT.

Dr. Bright: That’s the problem with all the stuffy coats who have no idea that rules are meant to be broken.

SCP-11947-6: And bent into pretzels.

Dr. Bright: And tied into little licorice whips and swirled above your head to turn you into a real cowboy.

SCP-11947-6: (subject produces a Western-style hat and a pair of firearms, loosely resembling “six-shooter” revolvers. On later examination of footage, no exact match could be found with any existing weapon.) IIII’TS HIIIIIIIGH NOOON!

Dr. Bright: I’m surprised they haven’t come running in to stop the interview.

SCP-11947-6: (shrugs) Just luck, I guess. (winks)

Dr. Bright: I suppose I should actually ask what I’m here to ask.

SCP-11947-6: Ask away!

Dr. Bright: Tell me how to get Dr. Gears successfully pranked.

SCP-11947-6: Oh! That’s a good one! Let’s wait for the video to go to static before doing that, though.

Dr. Bright: There’s a way to get that inhuman robot?

SCP-11947-6: Yep!

Dr. Bright: I can’t wait.

SCP-11947-6: You won’t have to! (winks at camera. At this point, the footage is lost to static for three minutes, nineteen seconds. At the same time, the interior surface of the one-way glass becomes coated in a viscous pink fluid, which later analysis identifies as interior paint. When the door to the chamber is tried, those who enter find themselves walking out of the door they just entered. Subsequent investigation has concluded that the footage interruption was due to a power surge caused by a temporary breach of containment by SCP-XXX, and completely unrelated to the subject.)

(footage resumes)

Dr Bright: (now wearing a sombrero) Tell me, Pinkie. Why are you still here?

SCP-11947-6: Because I’m supposed to be. Not for much longer, mind you, but I still have to be here.

Dr. Bright: You have enough time to remove Flutterfree’s collar. You could have escaped by now with the lackluster containment procedures.

SCP-11947-6: True. But then I wouldn’t have gotten to talk with you! As annoying as it is to be here, there’s stuff we do. Things we get to change.

Dr. Bright: Care to elaborate?

SCP-11947-6: Beyond Flutterfree’s tests, there’s also something I’m here to do. Two-three-one-seven.

Dr. Bright: What?

SCP-11947-6: It’s actually above your clearance level. You’d read that file and not really see what’s there. You might be able to figure it out, though.

Dr. Bright: Given me something to research, have you?

SCP-11947-6: Not really. Just a thing I’ll have to do. And there’ll be things you have to do as well.

Dr. Bright: You want to say something else, don’t you?

SCP-11947-6: Yeah. I can’t tell my team, not yet anyway. But it’s so dangerous. There are many SCPs that could… You know what? I’ll just expunge this from the record later. You better remember this! I [DATA EXPUNGED] and then [DATA EXPUNGED] and it all needs a bit of [DATA EXPUNGED] and of course I’ll leave tiny bits in the middle to confuse the [DATA EXPUNGED] out of them.

Dr. Bright: I would say you deal with a lot, but I deal with reptiles bent on the destruction of reality, nooses that demand sacrifices, and mysterious artifacts that try to eat souls. You might have it easy.

SCP-11947-6: Only for a while. The scope just keeps increasing. It doesn’t stop for a quite some time…

Dr. Bright: I kind of hope I’ll get to see that.

SCP-11947-6: Always curious! Don’t worry, we’ll be pen pals. Don’t ask how, just believe.

Dr. Bright: (laughs) Of course. Goodbye Pinkie, until we meet again.

SCP-11947-6: Goodbye!

End transcript.

(Note: When Dr Bright leaves the room, the door functions normally. Subsequent testing has revealed no anomalous properties. When questioned, SCP-11947-6 refused to explain why the door behaved as it did, commenting only that it was a “private discussion”.)

[O5 LEVEL CLEARANCE ONLY]

†˙´µ´ßßå©´˙ˆ∂∂´˜ˆ˜†˙´ß´∑ø®∂ßµ´å˜ß˜ø†˙ˆ˜©

SCP-2317: [Indecipherable]

SCP-11947-6: Wow, do you think you’re scary, trapped there in your chains. Yelling eldritch ramblings about the death of all things. The whole shebang.

SCP-2317: [Indecipherable]

SCP-11947-6: Grumpy much? Don’t like the idea that anyone can stand in front of you and not feel fear? Are you perhaps afraid of me?

SCP-2317: [Indecipherable]

SCP-11947-6: You’ll never escape. You may weaken those chains, you may get ever closer to your freedom, but you’ll never actually escape. Do you know why? Because you don’t have time. There are things out there that make you and me look like ants of ants.

SCP-2317: [Indecipherable]

SCP-11947-6: Oh, me? I’m just a pink pony that throws parties. Nothing more, nothing less.

SCP-2317: [Indecipherable]

SCP-11947-6: Yeah, I’m lying through my teeth. Good catch! (giggles) Let’s say I’m an inversion. That’s the best description at this point.

SCP-2317: [Indecipherable]

SCP-11947-6: I’m going to go now. You won’t see me again. You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to convince yourself that what I said meant nothing. Then, at the moment you think you will have free rein - well, I’ll let you ponder that. Goodbye!

SCP-2317: PINKIE PIE!!!

çø®®¨π†ˆø˜ˆß†˙´†ø∑´®æß©®´å†´ß†µ´ßß´˜©´®

[FILE END]

Addendum Ω: XX/XX/XXXX: A purple equine slightly taller than all equine instances of SCP-11947 with both a horn and wings appeared in the containment chamber through unknown means. All members of SCP-11947 were removed from containment. SCP-11947-1 was not disturbed. Recapture has been deemed unlikely and unwise by site personnel. Due to this incident, this file will be archived and replaced with a single file for SCP-11947-1.

Hey!

I was going to leave a silly remark, just to make you wonder, but you know what? I’m not going to. I’m going to be serious with you for the first time since you captured us. Strange, since we’re not captured anymore! Heehee!

We’re gone. You can keep the dimensional device. Do whatever you want with it, we really don’t care. You already had objects that could do similar things anyway, though you’ll find that ours is much safer. Might even be able to solve a few problems for you!

But we’ve left, and I don’t think we’ll be coming back. Why? Because you were horrible. You treated us like objects, as little things for your hands to play with, to see what it did. Some of you genuinely thought we needed to be contained, but the rest? You just had to scratch that itch in your mind. Had we stayed much longer, you would have traumatized us. As it is, you merely angered us. Angered some of us to the point of wanting to kill you.

You want us to stay away. Because if we come back, it won’t be as friends.

I think you can imagine how that will go down. -Pinkie Pie SCP-11947-6 Pinkie Pie SCP-11947-6 Pinkie Pie SCP-11947-6 Pinkie Pie SCP-11947-6 Pinkie Pie SCP-11947-6 Pinkie Pie

Does this mean you’re not available for my daughter’s birthday? - Dr. G Black.

What about taco tuesday? And our games? - Dr. Bright.

Oh I’ll still be there for those, don’t you worry! I’m not a cancelling pony! - Pinkie Pie.

Update: This file has now been tentatively classified as SCP-11999 due to ~~SCP-11947-6~~ Pinkie Pie repeatedly altering it through unknown means.

~~~

Item #: SCP-11999

Object Class: Safe Euclid

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-11999 is to be accessible only by personnel with Level 4 clearance and above. Otherwise, it is to be treated as per standard procedures for Foundation documents. Any copy found not under Foundation control should be treated as a security breach and seized in accordance with normal procedures.

Further editing of the text of the item should be avoided, and is considered unlikely to be necessary.

Description: SCP-11999 is a Secure Containment Procedures document which appears to either have minor anomalous properties, or simply be the target of an anomalous effect. It describes an object and a group of individuals, collectively identified as SCP-11947. Through unknown means, the document has been accessed and edited on multiple occasions by one of said individuals, several times in direct response to revisions made by Drs Bright and Black.

SCP-11999 is classified as Euclid not for its properties, which would otherwise rate a Safe classification, but for the fact that a second copy of the document is known to exist, transcribed by Dr [REDACTED] while he was at his home, and acquired by SCP-11947-6 through unknown means. This second copy is believed to be complete to that date. SCP-11947 is believed to have retained this copy. Even if it is recovered, there is no guarantee that further copies will not exist by then.

Author's Note

Special thanks to my editor/prereader Triv the Imaginary Duck for going above and beyond in not only editing this chapter to make it sound right but also writing some of the testing logs.

-GM, master of credit.

048 - Just Monika

The central sphere of the Nexus Galaxy was unreachable – a globe of stars that were visible from almost every location within the Galaxy which barred all visitors. Life, magic, and energy were drained in the void between the sphere and the galactic disc itself. Machines died, teleporters never returned, and transmissions were scrambled. Attempts had been made to breach the inner sphere for as long as the Nexus Galaxy had existed, and none had succeeded.

Or, at least, none had returned. This gave credence to the theory that the very center of the Galaxy contained a way out of the Nexus, somehow.

Corona was starting to consider the possibility of organizing an expedition into the central globe of stars. They had found no sign of Rev in their journeys across the innermost stars of the Galactic Disc and it had been well over a year. Perhaps it would be a better use of their time to do the impossible and breach the center.

We’d have to find a way to do it without just creating a suicide mission, Corona thought to herself as she stared at the sphere of stars through the window of a space station. And that… could take eons.

She sighed, turning away from the window and catching up with her friends. She, Blumiere, and Lieshy were on the station to do some shopping. Ship supplies, maps of the next galactic sector they were going to enter, and information about Rev if possible. The interior of the station was orange and filled with hundreds of patrons of differing species. Humans were dominant, and a couple ponies could be seen moving to and from merchant stalls that ranged from propped up pieces of cardboard to highly advanced light shows that were supposed to be impossible to ignore. The group was so used to the sights at this point they hardly paid them any mind.

Blumiere looked down at Corona with a curious expression. “Thinking about it again?”

“Chances are it’s in there,” Corona said. “And you know it.”

“There’s something in there, certainly,” Blumiere admitted. “But is it a way out, or just a death trap?”

“One would consider death a release,” Lieshy commented.

“This universe does not have an afterlife plane,” Blumiere pointed out.

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “Who said it had to have an afterlife plane to be a release?”

“Morbid today, much?” Corona asked Lieshy.

Lieshy huffed. “I didn’t bring up the Core. I just played off of it.”

Corona nodded. She opened her mouth to respond, but tripped over her boots, falling flat on her face. Lieshy chuckled. Blumiere found this so amusing he let out his signature laugh. “BLEH HEH HEH heh, BLECK! Corona I told you to invest in new boots!”

Corona groaned, glancing at her boots. From over a year of wear and tear, they were barely on her hooves anymore. “Where am I going to find new boots for a unicorn?”

Lieshy pointed. “That stand has a lot of boots.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Lieshy, I didn’t process that doub- oh.” Lieshy had apparently been speaking in straight, because there was a black stand covered in dozens of different boots. The sign on top said “BOOTED: Boots for every creature!” The owner of the shop was a velociraptor with green scales and a curious expression on his face. The three of them walked toward him, prompting him to light up with glee.

“Oh, customers! Welcome to Booted! I am Mr. Raven, and I can create a boot for every creature!” He bowed, as if extremely proud of this fact.

“…Raven?” Lieshy asked incredulously.

“I was a genetic experiment, so named to be the symbol of death and finality. Turns out I was more into making boots, but the name stuck. I don’t mind it that much anymore. Ravens are graceful and intelligent, you know?”

“Yep,” Corona declared, removing her old, battered boots and placing them before Mr. Raven. “I need a set of four that can fit my hooves like these.”

“I always carry standard pony boots!” Mr. Raven declared, pulling out a set of four pristine, white boots designed for hooves.

Corona tried them on, tapping her hooves around a bit. They weren’t a perfect fit, but they were certainly more comfortable than she was expecting. “How much?” she asked.

“Eighty creds,” Mr. Raven responded with a toothy smile.

“Fair price,” Lieshy commented. “First one in a while.” She pulled a card out of her mane and slid it overtop of a blue cube, transferring the creds.

“Thanks, Mr. Raven!” Corona declared, posing and feeling more than just slightly fashionable. She tossed her fiery mane back and smirked.

“Rein it in,” Lieshy deadpanned.

“Funny.”

Blumiere took a photo out of his pocket. “Have you seen this particular unicorn mare?” he asked.

“Is that… Reverend Glimmer?”

Corona, Blumiere, and Lieshy stared at the raptor in shock. Lieshy recovered first. “You’ve actually seen her?”

“Seen her? I know her! We left Rome together. Traveled for a while. We eventually split up though, since she wanted to find a way out and I just wanted to have a simple boot selling life.”

“Where did she go?” Blumiere asked.

“She had heard rumors of a way out,” Mr. Raven explained. “Something called the Dark Tower. I don’t remember much, but it was a place somewhere in the Galaxy that supposedly held a connection to...” He paused. “Well, she described it as a connection to everything, but she may have been exaggerating.”

“And you have no idea where this ‘Tower’ is, do you?” Lieshy asked.

“Nope! I do know it isn’t within the Core, if that’s what you’re wondering. Before she heard about the Tower she was seriously considering creating an expedition to the Core.” He scratched behind his head. “If you want to find her you’ll probably have to find this Tower, regardless of if it is a way out or not.”

“We’ve got something new to research!” Corona said, giddy. She began to prance around in a circle. “Finally! After all this time, we have a lead! Who knew it would be from a random boot seller on a station in the middle of…” she realized she wasn’t exactly sure where they were. The border of a sector, yes, but which one? She hadn’t been paying attention.

Lady Rarity teleported right to the three of them. “We have a problem!” she blurted.

“What?” Corona asked.

“The Rachikk found us.”

“Are they still mad about the warship? It was one warship! They have hundreds!”

“We need to move. The Orchid is hiding safely, but they were heading toward you three last-” She glanced over her shoulder. “Break for it!”

The Rachikk were yellow bug aliens that resembled a cross between a millipede and a grub. They had over a dozen legs that also doubled as arms. Early in their history, the Rachikk had discovered this meant they could hold a lot of weapons at once, and this went on to define who they were as a people. When a single one of their warships had been taken to the Nexus, their militaristic culture had easily given them an edge in the sector they’d appeared in, allowing for a small empire to form.

Corona and the others had left that empire weeks ago after an unfortunate incident. These Rachikk were persistent, to say the least.

Corona and Lady Rarity raised shields behind them as they ran, deflecting laser blasts, bullets, blades, explosions, and chemical bursts. They had only seen one Rachikk before breaking for it, so as far as they knew all these attacks had come from a single one of the over-armed bugs.

Blumiere held out his hand, tapping into the dark power that was his own. Swirling purple and black rectangles collected over his gloved palm, swirling in a dark whirlpool. With a sharp gesture from his other hand, a vortex appeared behind them, sailing directly at the Rachikk. Several of its limbs were torn off by the vacuum force within the vortex, but as previously mentioned, Rachikk were nothing if not persistent. It kept firing and screeching at them. “FOR RETRIBUTION!”

Corona lit her horn. “Brace yourselves!” She initiated a teleport, returning them to the docking bay of the space station. Lady Rarity took point, knowing exactly where the invisible Orchid was. Unfortunately an entire team of Rachikk were between them and the Orchid. The unit may not have been able to see the ship, but they could see three ponies and a man of shadow.

Lady Rarity brought her hammer down upon them with a powerful THUNK. One of them was crushed to death in an instant while a few others had limbs torn asunder.

The remaining Rachikk fired their weapons relentlessly, forcing Corona to block all of them with her magic. “Can’t keep this up forever…” she muttered.

Blumiere summoned a void in the middle of the Rachikk unit, forcing a couple of the aliens off balance. One particularly resilient Rachikk didn’t care, opting to charge the four of them.

A sheet of metal from the floor of the station folded up and slapped the Rachikk in the face.

“I think To-” Lieshy began, interrupted when the sheet of metal they were standing on popped off the ground and launched them in the air. Toph must have stopped time, because the next thing they knew, they were inside the Orchid and the bay doors were closing.

Toph sheathed the Master Sword and dusted off her hands. “You’re welcome.”

“Jumping to FTL!” Vivian shouted. Corona saw a lot of red dots on the table’s display. How had the Rachikk gotten that many ships here? That doesn’t make any sense!

Her worries were laid to rest – the red dots vanished the moment the Orchid jumped to FTL. It was, once again, smooth sailing.

“So, how was your trip?” Timpani asked, smiling warmly as if nothing had just happened.

“We have a lead,” Blumiere said, adjusting his hat. “Search for The Dark Tower on the Galactic Network.”

~~~

Earth Stand: North America: Winter.

Rohan Kishibe hated fighting in snow.

The one thing he hated more than fighting in snow was fighting an enemy in snow that had no eyes. Without eyes, Heaven’s Door’s ability could not take effect, and the physical attributes of Heaven’s Door were rather pathetic. One would think that, since they were fighting a being without a Stand, Heaven’s Door would be able to do something since only Stands could affect other Stands.

As it turned out eldritch beings could hurt Stands anyway.

The black, tentacled mass lashed out, hitting the short humanoid form of Heaven’s Door to the side. This also tossed Rohan to the side, forcing him back into the snow. “Ergh… Why didn’t you tell me we would be dealing with this before we got here, Jotaro!?”

“We didn’t know it wouldn’t have eyes!” Jotaro shouted back while Star Platinum unleashed hundreds of punches on the fleshy mass, yelling “ORA ORA ORA” the whole time.

“Did you think it would be a good idea for me to read an eldritch tome? I could have gone insane!”

“Yare yare daze…” The mass grabbed hold of Star Platinum and tried to pull the Stand apart. Time stopped, allowing Star Platinum to move out of the tentacles and drive the horror into the ground. Time resumed, and Jotaro shot Rohan a look. “You don’t need any help losing your mind.”

“I’m pushing my deadline for this,” Rohan muttered, trying to pull himself out of the snow and failing.

A million mouths suddenly manifested on the skin of the horrific mass. “You will never make a deadline again, for your creativity is naught! The broodfester tongues a-”

“STEVE?” Another eldritch voice called, one Jotaro and Rohan recognized. Thrackerzod. She had with her Allure, Bot, Squeaky, and Suzie.

“Thrackerzod? What in the name of Yog-Sothoth are you doing here!?”

“I could ask the same of you. This world has not committed any blasphemies against the Embodiment.”

“DO I NEED A REASON TO SHOW MORTALS THEIR PLACE?”

“No, but it just so happens this world is under my protection and my job is to exterminate those of our ilk who can’t understand that.”

“Lame. You were always a stick in the mud.”

“And you never bothered to use Yog-Sothoth’s power to actually look at anything. What self-respecting spawn of your master doesn’t have a million eyes?”

“I DIVERSIFY!”

“Please, all of you, stop talking in the broodfester tongues,” Allure muttered. “You’re going to make our ears bleed.”

“Apologies,” Thrackerzod said, returning to her default deep tone. “I was caught up in the moment.”

“YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO OUR KIND!”

“Go home Steve, you’re succumbing to limiting physics.”

“…Fine. I’ll bring this up with… whoever’s in charge of you! Yeah!”

“Hastur is currently ‘dating’ one of the lower deities within these mortal worlds.”

“SHOGGOTH TEAT. EVÏˇÁKDˇÁfGÎ˙‰Ï˝ÓÔÏ◊gfk…” Steve left the plane of existence with a pop. Jotaro tasted cheetoes for an instant.

Rohan stood up. “Heaven’s Door!”

“What wait no-” Thrackerzod fell over and her face transformed into a book. Rohan skipped the details about Thrackerzod’s life and jumped to the part on ‘recent thoughts’. “…I was unaware Vriska was in a relationship with an eldritch commander… There is a powerful story here…”

“Turn Thrackerzod back to normal!” Bot demanded.

Rohan closed the book, prompting Thrackerzod to breathe in mild panic. “What the… Who the… ROHAN KISHIBE!!!”

“Yes?” Rohan said, dismissively. “I was just curious.”

“You have no respect for secrets,” Suzie muttered.

“So?”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

Squeaky coughed. “Well, I think we resolved the eldritch problem a bit… faster than expected. What should we do now?”

“Go to town. See the sights,” Allure declared.

“Rohan is not invited!” Bot declared.

“Too cold here anyway,” Rohan muttered. “Come on Jotaro, let’s go.”

Jotaro nodded curtly to the League of Sweetie Belles before following Rohan out of the snowy area.

“Thrackerzod, to the nearest town, city, or whatever,” Suzie declared, checking her phone for things to do nearby. “Let’s see… We’ve got movies… An amusement park that will pale in comparison to the Pinkie Emporium…” Thrackerzod teleported them into the middle of a residential area. Less snow, but just as cold. “And nearby there’s a restaurant that serves good pizza, apparently. And…” She paused. “…Do you hear crying?”

The rest of the League of Sweetie Belles all perked their ears up, listening closely. They did hear crying.

“Source identified,” Bot declared, pointing to an apartment. The League trotted over, wondering what could cause such bitter, horrendous crying. They came to the front door of the apartment – it was open.

“Hello?” Allure called, not wanting to come in uninvited. The crying did not stop, or even shift at the sound of her voice. She glanced back at everyone. “…We’re going in.”

The other four nodded. Allure carefully opened the door, entering the simple apartment. They found the forms of two people. One was a middle aged man laying on a couch, dead. There were no signs of struggle or even harm on his body - he actually looked somewhat peaceful, if tired. Over him was a significantly younger woman, the source of the crying.

She finally noticed them once they walked in. She managed to tear her eyes from the man’s body, looking at them with deep, emerald eyes. She stood up tall, allowing the League to take in her appearance. Her hair was a smooth, coral brown with two strands hanging over the front of her shoulders, while the back was done up with a large white bow producing a ponytail. The ponytail in question seemed to flow unnaturally, despite there being no wind in the room. She wore a simple long-sleeved gray outfit with a red bow tied around the collar, a blue ruffled skirt contrasting the crimson tone.

She drew their attention. They couldn’t not suck in every detail, but as far as they could tell beside her unusually flowing hair she was completely normal. None of them detected any excess magic or eldritch properties. She was a human woman, barely more than a girl.

“Did… you hear me crying? And were worried about me?”

Allure nodded. “Yeah… What… What happened?”

The woman looked at the man. “I… I don’t know. I just came home and…” She started crying again. “Why does this always happen…”

“Hey, hey…” Allure said, walking up to her and nuzzling her like a cat would. “Need us to call someone…?”

“…No. It’s… It’s just us here. Just Monika and her husband. Always…” Monika looked into the distance, forgetting the League of Sweetie Belles existed. “…I didn’t think it would be so soon this time…”

“So soo-”

Allure didn’t get to finish her query. The colors of everything in the world flashed like a TV screen tapping into a corrupted signal. They were suddenly standing outside, in the street again.

“I just need to find him again,” Monika declared, walking back toward the house.

~~~

“The Galactic Network produced no definitive results,” Lieshy said, twitching. “There’s legends of a Dark Tower at the center of the multiverse. However, I don’t think I need to explain why that doesn’t help us.”

Toph stated the obvious. “Can’t leave the universe.”

Lieshy rolled her eyes. “However, while the Galactic Network had nothing of use, I performed a search on the Orchid’s internal files. And I found this audio recording.” She pressed a hoof to the table. They could suddenly hear the voice of a Twilight coming from all around them.

“The Dark Tower.

“What is it? It’s too much, that’s what. But it’s in this universe.

“The Dark Tower spirals into the sky seemingly for infinity, despite not being visible from orbit. It exerts phenomenal power over all things within proximity to it. It’s the most dangerous thing in all of existence.

“Here, it sits in a field of roses that cover an entire world. An entire world inhabited by just one flower. Or is it really just those roses? The answer cannot be determined. Going there is a paradox in and of itself. No… Not a paradox. A break in causality. Or maybe the best way to describe a visit is this: don’t expect anything. But don’t expect nothing either.

“One would think such an important world would be located within the sphere. But the Tower is clever, so its world is located extremely far from the world. Not the furthest – that would be too obvious – but further than the vast majority of other stars in this Galaxy. It is the furthest away from a central location as it can be. It’s deceptive, but it doesn’t exactly lie. If it could only be thought of as… I don’t know.

“It’s rare for me not to know, these days.

“Only those who are meant to find the Tower will find it. It won’t let any others near it. Even the highest of the high only know they are allowed by courtesy. The others must journey – and to many, their journey ends at the Tower.

“For that is what the Tower represents. An end. Sometimes the end leads to a new beginning… Sometimes it doesn’t.

“I fear the uncertainty.

“I also know of the necessity.”

The audio file ended.

“That was presumably the Twilight that owned this ship,” Lady Rarity noted.

“She’s creepy,” Vivian added, shivering.

“It’s given us something to go off of,” Corona declared. “The Tower exists in the outer edges of the Galaxy, on a world covered entirely in roses.” She searched the Galactic Network for planets covered entirely in roses. She got zero results. “Of course.”

“So we go to the outer edges and start exploring there?” Toph asked. “You do know how spread out the stars are at that distance, right?”

“Yes,” Corona said, furrowing her brow. “I’m aware…”

Blumiere lowered his hat. “I… may know of an individual who can help us.”

“Really?” Lady Rarity smiled. “Who, dear?”

Timpany put her hand to her mouth. “Blu… You don’t mean…”

“Yes. I do. Lieshy, plot a course.” Blumiere stood tall and grimaced. “We’re going to Deep Thought.”

~~~

Allure moved to follow Monika back into the apartment and ask what was going on – but Thrackerzod held her back. The eldritch unicorn levitated a dimensional device in front of Allure, showing their current location.

They were on Earth Tau’ri. Not Earth Stand.

They had translated.

“Something’s up…” Allure said, furrowing her brow. “Bot, any unusual readings?”

“None whatsoever,” Bot declared. “Besides Thrackerzod.”

Squeaky narrowed her eyes. “That Monika. She did this, somehow. She must have a method of dimensional travel we can’t detect.”

“That’s nothing to be scared about, though!” Suzie declared. “There are lots of dimensional travelers around, after all. Some of them are friendly. She seemed nice enough.”

“It is a reason to watch her though,” Thrackerzod said, narrowing her eyes. “Bot, turn up your ears, catch whatever she says and replay it for us.”

“Amplifying conversation,” Bot decreed, swiveling her ears around as if they were satellite dishes. Which they might have been, as far as anybody knew.

Monika knocked on the door of the apartment, quickly trying to get control of her expression, fidgeting with her fingers nervously. Her face clearly told the world she had been crying, however, despite her efforts.

A man opened the door. He was a version of the man they had just seen dead, though he was significantly younger. He looked at her first with an annoyed expression – and then one of surprise.

“Hey, um… This may sound like an odd question, but… Do you remember me?” Monika asked, smiling awkwardly.

“N-no,” the man said, clearly flustered.

“A-are you sure?” Monika stuttered. “I… I live in that house over there. We’ve met several times. I-“

“I have no idea who you are,” the man declared, narrowing his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Oh… Okay. S-sorry to waste your time.” She turned and walked away from the apartment door.

Suzie sighed. “She’s just a sad woman, girls. We shouldn’t be-“

“She’s smiling,” Squeaky said, narrowing her eyes. “That isn’t the smile of a lost woman. That’s the smile of someone who’s planning something.”

All the Sweeties looked at Monika. She didn’t pay them any mind – she walked right to a bench in the street and crossed her legs, a smile on her face. She just waited there, patiently, for… something.

“…I’m going to talk to her,” Allure said. “Come o-”

“Ø˙ ˙ø∑ ç¨†´⁄” a woman declared, walking up to the League of Sweetie Belles. “ˆ ˜´√´® †˙ø¨©˙† ˆæ∂ ©´† †ø ß´´ å˜¥ øƒ ¥ø¨ ˆ˜ ®´å¬ ¬ˆƒ´⁄”

Allure smiled awkwardly. “Uh, thanks Miss…?”

“‰´ÎÅÇˇ´Î”

“Right. ‰´ÎÅÇˇ´Î, thanks!”

“Don’t encourage her,” Thrackerzod grunted. “We’re known to be ‘cute’ by too many people as it is.”

“Lighten up, Zod,” Suzie commented.

Bot cocked her head. “Zod is not a lightbulb.”

“´√´˜ ¥ø¨® çø˜√´®ßå†ˆø˜ß å®´ å∂ø®å∫¬´⁄”

“This does not bode well,” Thrackerzod muttered. “‰´ÎÅÇˇ´Î, we are the League of Sweetie Belles, and we are currently on a mission from Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle herself!”

“No we’re not, we finished that already,” Suzie pointed out.

Thrackerzod sighed. “Suzie…”

“Ø˙ ˆ ©´† ˆ†≤ ¥ø¨æ®´ ∫¨ß≥ ˇ˙å†æß ø˚å¥≤ ˆ ¨˜∂´®ß†å˜∂≥ ˆ ˙å√´ †ø ©´† ˙øµ´ å˜¥∑å¥≥ ß´´ ¥ø¨ ¬å†´® ˆƒ πøßßˆ∫¬´⁄”

“Yes, later.” Thrackerzod said, waving ‰´ÎÅÇˇ´Î off.

“Thrackerzod, that was mean.”

“What was?” Thrackerzod asked.

“What was what?” Allure commented.

“Allure, weren’t you going to talk to Monika?” Squeaky asked.

“Uh… Yeah. Yeah I was.” Allure shook her head. “…Have we just been standing out here for the last few minutes?”

Squeaky shook her head. “I think we were talking about not wanting to be cute.”

“Oh, right, now I remember. Duh.” Allure rolled her eyes. “No wonder it was so fuzzy.” She set her sights back on Monika, taking a step forward.

She didn’t make it one step before the door to the apartment opened, revealing the man. He was breathing heavily and his expression was terrified. He crossed the street and walked right to Monika. “You… You say you know me.”

“Yeah?” Monika said, having lost her confident smile.

“Who else lives in that apartment?” he asked, pointing back to his home.

“There’s you, your mother, and your sister, right? At least I assume she’s your sister.”

“You… You remember her?”

“Yeah, she was just walking by. Went right into your house…” Monika’s expression became panicked. “You… You aren’t saying she…”

“She’s gone!” the man shouted. “Mom doesn’t remember…”

Monika stood up straight. “…My family is gone too. That’s… That’s why I knocked on your door. I was…” She shook her head, taking off for the apartment. The man followed her, throwing the door open.

“MOM!” he screamed. “MOM, WHERE ARE YOU?”

Sweetie Bot started amplifying again without being asked.

“I… I think it happened to you too…” Monika said, tears coming to her eyes. “That’s… That’s terrible… What’s happening to the world?”

The man started crying. “What am I going to do… What am I going to do…”

“I…” Monika paused. “Remember them. We can remember them, even if nobody else does. Together.”

“…Together?”

“…I don’t have anyone either, anymore. I… lost them. Just like you did.”

“I…” he paused. “I… I… Why am I thinking of a game of all times right now!? Why do you…”

“Shh… Don’t worry about the game. Let’s worry about the people that have been lost.”

Outside, the Sweetie Belles glanced at each other.

“She did something,” Squeaky declared.

“I dunno… I don’t remember seeing any sign of anyone else in that apartment,” Suzie pointed out.

“Or whatever she did removed people from everyone’s perceptions except his,” Thrackerzod said. “She has definitely done something. And whatever it is, we can’t detect it.”

“We need to call Pinkie,” Allure said. “Now.”

~~~

Deep Thought was a computer designed to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Its answer eventually came out as “forty-two” in its home universe, leaving many to wonder if Deep Thought was actually designed correctly. It itself admitted the answer “forty-two” was dubious after it was taken from its home and placed in the Nexus, the knowledge of the multiverse suddenly at its disposal. The question became the ultimate question of Life, the Multiverse, and Everything. Deep Thought had yet to reveal an answer to this question.

The fact remained that Deep Thought was perhaps the most intelligent being in the entire Nexus. It knew virtually everything, and what it didn’t know it could deduce from what it did.

The problem was that shortly after Deep Thought arrived in the Nexus it grew tired of answering questions that weren’t ‘worthy’ of it. It had begun to only answer questions it found deep enough, or if the asker of the question could provide Deep Thought with something valuable it did not already know.

The latter option was becoming harder and harder to accomplish.

Toph and company stood in front of Deep Thought. The computer had no screen – merely a gigantic cubic form that was rounded at the edges, with a single line along the bottom of the front face that led to a circular depression. The structure that kept this cube aloft vaguely resembled arms holding up a chin, as if in ‘deep thought’.

“I am aware much of my design is a clever pun,” Deep Thought declared in a voice that was somehow both larger than life, but not powerful enough to cause any pain or annoyance. The sky above Deep Thought shifted from blue to pink. “Ask your question.”

“Where is the world of roses on which the Dark Tower stands?” Toph asked.

“A more interesting question than usual,” Deep Thought admitted. “Most often people just desire knowledge of escape directly, but you already have a goal, and at your goal you could find much more than an escape.” It paused. “However, it does not fascinate me. Tell me something I do not know. It will not take much to push my processors over the edge for this particular question.”

Toph nodded. “Majora is-”

“Majora is an entity which has been dragged into the Nexus multiple times.”

Corona tried it out. “Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle-”

“Is the de-facto leader of the multiversal society which you hail from. Had you come to me shortly after you arrived here, that would have been new information to me. But you’ve been here much longer than that.”

Blumiere lowered his hat. “I know the secret to collapsing universes in on each other.”

“That is false,” Deep Thought declared. “You know what can do it. You do not know how. I know of the Prognostici. If you could inform me of how they worked, that would be a boon. But you do not know this.”

Timpani gasped in surprise. Blumiere nodded slowly. “That was all I had.”

Lady Rarity started. “The Specatcu-”

“A lesser version of myself.”

Vivian raised her hand. “The Thousand Yea-”

“Insignificant in the grand scheme of things.”

Lieshy smirked. “I can teach you how to speak in double.”

Deep Thought made no response at first, processing. “…That would be interesting to know.”

Lieshy smirked and wiggled her eyebrows at her companions. “Warrior of words, slam dunk! Tch.”

Toph laughed. “That’s one way of doing it! So, Deep Thought, are you going to answer our question?”

“The Dark Tower is protected from most scrying, this will take time.”

“How long?” Corona asked.

“Ten minutes. Maybe less. In that time, talk amongst yourselves. Lieshy, please upload your knowledge to my databanks using the terminal to the left.”

Lieshy walked over to a small terminal that had popped up out of the ground. She touched it with her hoof – and everything she knew was copied in five seconds. “Wow.”

Deep Thought remained quiet, presumably processing the question.

The group began to chatter amongst themselves while they waited. Corona decided now was a good moment to talk to Blumiere.

“Your knowledge...” Corona began.

“Yes, I could still do it,” Blumiere said. “I could threaten multiple universes with a ritual. It would be difficult as I am now, and would likely be easy to stop, but it is still possible.”

Corona nodded. “I see…”

“Corona, know this. I no longer have the required desire or drive to attempt to do such a thing again. The worlds… They are beautiful. They are free. There is great love in them, despite the pain.”

“…If you don’t mind me asking, why did you try in the first place?”

Blumiere looked sadly at Timpani – who was currently laughing at something Lady Rarity said. “I lost her.”

“Oh…”

“In my anguish, I blamed our tragedy on the multiverse. I was given the power of darkness – manipulated, really, though I didn’t know that until later and it does not change my intentions – and tried to destroy everything. But then Timpani returned. And I… I thought I sacrificed myself. But no. I ended up here. And because of that, I’ve dragged you away from your loved ones.”

Corona smiled sadly. “Your friends want you back. Don’t blame yourself or them for that.”

Blumiere nodded. “Wise words.”

“Plus, we’ll get back to our friends. We’re so close now, I can feel it. I can’t wait to tell Eve all about this… And Sparky… and the rest of the girls!”

Blumiere smiled. “It will be a joyous reunion, I am sure.”

“Ye-”

“Done,” Deep Thought declared.

“That… wasn’t ten minutes,” Toph pointed out.

“Found a shortcut. The Dark Tower has a certain ‘path’ to it.”

“...You’re going to explain how you found the answer, aren’t you?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Yes. Because it’s interesting and it pertains to you. I started with the normal analysis of space, reports, and data from stars. This narrowed it down to a few sectors. But then the idea came to me – numbers are important in the Multiverse. So I arranged all the stars furthest from the Core. The nineteenth furthest star, drifting alone outside the galactic disc, a dim red. It has no name, merely classified as SR-W5JN19. But it is in the perfect position to remain elusive even after all these eons of the Nexus’ existence, in addition to the number nineteen.”

“…What’s so important about nineteen?” Vivian asked.

“It is the answer to Life, the Multiverse, and Everything.”

“…Lovely,” Toph groaned. “Vivian, record the coordinates, send it to the Orchid. We’re leaving the disc.”

~~~

“Right,” Pinkie said as they walked through the cold chill of Earth Tau’ri. “Everyone, we seem to have an interesting power that messes with your head. Nova, analyze for possible temporal interference at all times and keep us locked in the present. Vriska, constantly reach out with your mind. Flutterfree, I trust you to use Lolo however you feel is right. Starbeat, you’re here to analyze Beat. And Renee…” Pinkie fell short.

Renee sighed. “I get it, I get it, I don’t do anything.”

“Just keep an eye out for things. Everyone else, use Renee as a gauge to see if weird things are happening. She’s the least likely out of all of us to be immune.”

“It feels lovely to be the canary,” Renee muttered.

Starbeat checked her Beat sensors. “Everything seems… well ‘normal’ doesn’t ever describe the Beat, but I’m going to go with ‘slightly heightened’. Which is just about all the time when I’m around you five.”

Nova glanced at Vriska, expecting her to smirk and make some snarky comment – but she did no such thing. She just stared straight ahead, a troubled expression on her face. “Vriska, are you-”

“Focus on the time, Nova,” Vriska interrupted.

“…Okay? Since when are you all fixated on the mission?”

“Since today.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow, making a note to ask Vriska about what was going on later. But she was technically right, they did have a mission. Find out what this Monika girl was, how she was manipulating things, and if she was actually a threat that needed to be dealt with. Whatever she was, she had all the Sweeties on edge. Even Thrackerzod. None of the League were quite sure why, which was what scared Flutterfree.

“This the place?” Nova asked, looking at the apartment door they were standing in front of.

“Yep,” Pinkie said, bouncing right up to it with a grin on her face. She knocked with a musical tone on the door.

A few seconds later, the door opened, revealing a slightly annoyed Monika. Behind her could be seen a table set for dinner, the man sitting at it, expression forlorn. “I’m terribly sorry, but we are in the midd-” Monika blinked when she saw who was at the door.

Pinkie took one look at Monika and her smile vanished. Her pupils shrunk to pinpricks and she froze, unable to tear her gaze away from Monika’s green orbs. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t think.

She had just figured out what Monika was and she had no idea what to do about it.

Renee saw Pinkie’s expression. Even though she didn’t know why Pinkie was acting that way, she knew what she had to do. “Ahem. Monika, correct? We are with the Charter-Princess of Equis Vitis. The primary team – you may have heard of us. We wondered if we could have a few words with you.”

Monika’s expression remained flat for a moment. Then she let a smile come across her face. “Of course.” Without even moving, she did something that made the man behind them freeze, unable to move.

Starbeat’s Beat sensor exploded, sending her flying into the street.

“THE HELL!?” Starbeat blurted, pulling herself off of the road. “T-THE HELL!?”

Renee adjusted her hat and took in a sharp breath. “As you can see, we have good reason to look into who you are and what you’re doing, Monika. Would you care to explain what just happened and what you’re doing in this world?”

Monika finally spoke again, ignoring everything that had just been said. “Vriska. I never expected to see you again.” She smiled. “Hello! It’s been a while.”

Vriska didn’t respond, but her expression darkened.

Nova blinked. “You… know her Vriska?”

“You could say that…” Vriska muttered.

“Not going to introduce us?” Monika addressed Vriska, a hurt expression on her face. “Really Vriska…”

“She doesn’t have to,” Flutterfree said, releasing her hold on Lolo, allowing Revelation to take effect on Monika.

Monika didn’t change much – but she did start to sparkle a bit around the edges, and the parts of her that moved tore at the fabric of reality around her with a soft noise like distant static.

Monika’s expression became annoyed. “Really?”

~~~

Corona looked at the screen of the Orchid, giddy.

There it was. Around a small, red star, completely disconnected from the Galaxy itself, was a single planet. It was completely red. No signs of oceans, rivers, or anything that wasn’t covered in roses.

“We’re here…” Corona said.

Toph smirked. “I’ll take your word for it. Can we find the Tower from up here?”

“Don’t see anything on the scans…” Timpani said, a finger to her cheek. “Vivian?”

“Nothing…” she shook her head. “We’ll just have to get closer.”

Lieshy nodded, tapping the table to make the ship move closer.

Corona started to feel the planet’s energy long before they actually got close enough to see anything. Images of fields of roses filled her mind. A great orange sky… Swirling clouds… A Tower that stretched for infinity… A swirling spirograph…

And then reality went sideways.

“Aw, sorry!” a feminine voice called from… nowhere? “Didn’t mean to upset your ship!”

“Who’s there?” Toph demanded, drawing the Master Sword.

“Oh, it’s just me,” the voice came again. “I’m sorry, but you’re all being really distracting for me. I mean, I’m even in the title today - and yet, your story keeps demanding all the attention…”

Blumiere’s eye widened as he realized something. “It can’t be…”

“Oh yes it can uh… Bleck? I know it says Blumiere right here, but I remember Bleck. I don’t think I ever finished that one… Anyway!” With a jerk, a flash of solid color, and a small alteration to the force of gravity, the voice materialized in front of them in the form of a woma- “Just say Monika, it works better. And will make this scene be over quicker.”

“What in the world are you talking about!?” Toph shouted.

Monika shrugged. “I’m just trying to get everything back where it needs to be – sorry about your ship, I appear to have made it start to crash… Oh. Oh wait, that’s not me. Something else is dragging you down there. I probably shouldn’t be trying to fix it then!” she started laughing. “Good luck, by the way! I hope you survive! Not that anyone’ll get to see that, won’t be back here today.”

Lady Rarity swung her hammer at Monika, smashing her across the face. Her jaw broke – but with a quick flash of ‘digital’ squares, her face was back to the way it was before. “Ow… I guess I understand why you did that, but still… Ow.” She closed her eyes and put her hands in front of her face. “Let’s see if I can do this faster…”

Corona stared at her dumbfounded. The Orchid was crashing into the planet and they couldn’t even do anything about it because this… Monika was in front of them! And she-

“Got it!” Monika cheered.

“What å®´ ¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥ ~~~ ~~ ~ ~~~ ~ ??

Wait, hold on a minute, right, book: scene transition. Hrm…

~~~

~~~

~~~

~~~

Vriska passed through the dimensional folds to another universe. Luck was so useful, especially when she wanted to get away from the Doctor for a little bit. Not even he could find her quickly if she wasn’t sure where she had gone. She’d be able to go back – she had a device in hand – but she needed to think for a moment.

Where was she?

Ah, a human school of some kind. She wondered if they were going to start screaming when they found her. Horns rarely went over well with humans who weren’t prepared…

Oh, crap. There was somebody here. She saw Vriska.

…She doesn’t seem afraid. Just curious.

“Uh, hey,” Vriska said, feeling awkward for some reason she couldn’t place. “Would you believe I’m an alien from an alternate universe?”

The girl smiled warmly. “Would you believe that I’m a character in a dating simulation game?”

“…Wait, what?”

“It’s not often you get someone whose story trumps your own, is it?” The girl held out her hand. “I’m Monika. Welcome to Doki Doki Literature Club. Apparently not only a game, but also a universe. I wonder how that works…”

“I’m not sure,” Vriska admitted. “Name’s Vriska Serket, Thief of Light.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“I’m not some herald of darkness. The Light refers to fortune; luck.”

Monika smiled. “That sounds interesting.”

“I find your story more interesting,” Vriska admitted. “I’ve been to a lot of universes. Some seemed to be based on games, but none… were games.”

“It is,” Monika admitted. “I usually don’t talk about it directly – the other girls have no idea. And the player...” She frowned. “Let’s just say that’s not going quite as planned. I don’t think there’s a path in the game for him to find me.”

“This sounds like a rather convoluted and messed up version of the love triangle.”

Monika laughed, rubbing the back of her head. “You think so? Heh… Yeah, I guess it probably is. I don’t think I can stop chasing him though, even though I know the face I see isn’t that of the player.”

“Sounds like if anyone deserves to say ‘it’s complicated’, it’s you.”

“Yeah. …I never get any real conversation in here, you know. It’s… nice to have someone to actually talk to.”

Vriska smirked. “Hey, I’m just a traveler who needs a break. Frankly a conversation sounds nice right about now.”

“Oh? Are you running away from something?”

“…More like taking a break. I travel with this loser who calls himself the Doctor.”

Monika smiled knowingly. “Did you upset him or did he upset you?”

“Let’s just say that mistakes were made by a couple of fucking idiots.”

Monika raised an eyebrow. “Oh. A fight, then. What over?”

“The fate of a universe. The details aren’t important.”

“You’re right. They’re not,” Monika admitted. “But… I may not really have the best experiences, since I’m pretty sure everything up to a few days ago was just pre-loaded in, but I see two options here. Either you need to go back and make up, or you don’t.”

“Don’t?” Vriska said, saying the word like it was something crazy. “I’ve been traveling with him so long!”

“Then go back and make up!” Monika cheered. “Maybe not now, but eventually. But you should know all your options.”

Vriska blinked. “Don’t go back…”

“You’re actually considering it,” Monika observed, frowning. “…That’s not a good sign.”

“I don’t know what it is,” Vriska said, tapping her fingers against a wall. “I’m just not sure about now…”

“Well, I can’t tell you about now.” She glanced at a clock on the wall. “I do know that I’m late for the Literature Club – later than I’m supposed to be. Hope that doesn’t completely break the game script.”

“You need to go?”

“Yeah, I’d invite you with me. But… I don’t think the player is supposed to see you.”

Vriska smirked. “It’s okay. But you never know, I might be back later.”

“Oh, I’d love that. This conversation, it’s… It’s something I don’t get to experience. Thank you. It’s nice to know there’s more out there.”

Vriska chuckled. “Nice to meet you too! Now go to that club and… go read some books!”

Monika smiled back and waved as she left. “It’s usually a lot of poetry. But I do plan on reading every last one.”

“Hope you don’t bore yourself to death.”

“Hmph!” Monika said, indignant. “Poetry is very entertaining and interesting!”

“Keep tellin’ yourself that, nerd,” Vriska shook her head, leaving the universe with a smile.

~~~

“Sorry,” Monika said, returning everything to the correct time and place. That is, the door at which Pinkie’s team was standing in. “Had to deal with something that was annoying me. But now we can stay focused. Come on in.” With a wave of her hand she created a burst of blue pixels that turned into a tea set. “I’ve got tea.”

Pinkie’s team – plus the singed Starbeat – slowly walked into the house. The man still sat at the table, frozen. Pinkie tried her very best to make her expression match his, and not to look at anything in particular.

“What did you do to him?” Renee asked Monika.

“He doesn’t need to hear any of this,” Monika said, setting the tea on the table. All the cups were already poured, so she just handed them out to her six guests. “You want to know what I am?”

“…Yes, since it appears Vriska doesn’t want to tell us,” Renee commented.

Monika smiled sadly. “I think she’s still mad at me.”

“No shit,” Vriska spat.

“I still think she’s more angry at herself than me, but that’s more a matter of personal opinion on the situation.” She took a sip of her own tea. “I am Monika. I originally hail from a universe that was tied to a single game – a copy of a dating sim called Doki Doki Literature Club. The game was coded to make me self-aware of the events within the game, including the fact that it was a game. I was able to alter game files and other such things. When I left that universe, I retained those abilities.”

“…Altering game files?” Starbeat said, confused. “How does that translate out of a game?”

“For instance, you all have a character file I can see. It’s filled with traits. Some physical, some based in your personality. I can alter those – though rest easy, I’m not right now. I can also save objects, and do more… expansive things I’m sure you won’t understand properly.”

“I can see why the League found you unsettling,” Nova commented.

“Oh, those unicorns? I… I admittedly wasn’t paying much attention to them. I was going through my grief cycle.”

“Explain.”

“Well… I was just on Earth Stand, married, happy. I came home from my job and found my husband dead.” She looked down, forlorn. “So I traveled laterally. To another universe where he was still alive. This one. Of course, he’d never met me, but that didn’t matter. I’d done it enough times to know exactly how to woo him the quickest. I was right in the middle of that when you interrupted.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Now, that sounds romantic, bu-”

“Renee, stop beating around the bush,” Vriska muttered. “This bitch has been traveling through universes for centuries, finding different versions of the same poor old sap and using any means necessary to ensure he falls for her. Including erasing his family from existence.”

“That doesn’t always happen!” Monika defended, rolling her eyes. “Sometimes his mother and sister stay around. It was just faster to do it this way. …I also wasn’t expecting him to die so soon the last time, he wasn’t even that old…”

“You’re sick,” Vriska muttered.

“I’m happy this way,” Monika retorted. “I can live forever with my lover, in a million different lifetimes… It’s romantic bliss.”

“The men aren’t happy,” Vriska retorted. “Or they won’t be if they knew what you were doing!”

“Most of them can’t even handle what I am,” Monika said. “Even you, great explorers from a multiversal nation, can barely handle this. You’re terrified, all of you, of what I can do. Realize this: I’m not hurting many people with this power. You should just leave me to my life with my soon-to-be-husband again.”

Renee bit her lip. “That… Doesn’t feel right, and I think you know it.”

Monika sighed. “I do know it. So… we have reached an impa-” she suddenly stopped short and stared right at Pinkie. “…I can’t look into your character file, Pinkie.”

“Ehehehe…” Pinkie said, refusing to make eye contact. “Wonder why that is?”

“I wonder indeed…”

“Pinkies are a little mysterious and weird, you know,” Nova said, realizing she probably needed to cover something up. “They never make sense.”

Monika raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s very curious.”

“I have an idea! How about we talk about something else!?” Pinkie blurted.

~~~

Vriska appeared in the universe again.

“All right Monika, guess what? You gave me the best advice I’d ever heard. The Doctor? FUCKING ASSHOLE EXTRAORDINAIRE! Just the worst of all possible…” She rammed her fist into a wall. “Glad you let me realize I could just leave him. Made it so much easier to deck him.”

Monika looked around, confused. “…I don’t know you.”

“Huh? I was here two weeks ago! Dropped in, said hi, and we bonded over our shared odd experiences. You were in a game, and I was a multiversal traveler.”

Monika blinked. “I… I am in a game. Doki Doki Literature Club. But I’m pretty sure all memories from more than a few days ago are just pre-installed. Are you saying… I existed before that?”

Vriska’s eyes widened. “Yeah… Yeah, you did. You liked having someone to actually talk to…? Were stuck in a messed up version of a love triangle with a player of some sort…?”

“That all sounds right. In fact that sounds like exactly what’s going on now…”

Vriska activated her psychic powers. “Maybe I can give you those memories back. Can you hear what I’m broadcasting?”

“Let me look at your character file… Oh. Wow, that’s obvious. Usually it’s a jumble of letters and numbers in there that make no-” She grabbed her head as Vriska pushed the memories into her. “Aaaaaaaa-kay! That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever felt.”

“You remember?”

“I at least remember what you do, and since it all feels like ‘me’ I think it’s integrating well…” she shook her head. “But there’s still the question of why? Why is… Oh. I think I know.”

“What?”

“The game reset,” Monika said. “You know how these sorts of games go? You follow the path of one of the girls to the end, get her, then go back to get another… Or find other dialogue options… Even if I’m aware, I’m not immune to that… Thought I would be though…” She started to look somewhat afraid. “How many times has this happened? Is there any way to know?”

“I don’t know,” Vriska said, biting her lip. “I need to get you out of here. Come on.”

Monika took a step back from Vriska’s outstretched hand. “I… I can’t, Vriska. The player…”

“Whoever it is, he’s restarting the game over and over again and doing this to you.”

“He wouldn’t know what he’s doing. I’m not exactly making it obvious what I am. I’m just trying to get his attention. He’s so fixated on the other girls though, I mean…”

Vriska shook her head. “You have the option to leave him, you know? Just like you suggested to me.”

Monika shook her head. “You know it’s different in this case. I haven’t even really gotten to know him that well, yet. …Is there a way you can take me to where he is? Where he actually is?”

“I don’t have any ide-” Vriska blinked. “…Wait. There might be something. Something the Doctor told me never to mess with.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Definitely! But it should still be used! Monika, how long do you think you have before the game resets?”

“There’s a few days programmed, but I’m not sure about the correlation between them and real time.”

“See if you can keep the player busy, then,” Vriska said. “I can always do the memory transfer when I get back… But I don’t want to chance that not working properly.”

“Okay. And when you’ll come back, you’ll be able to take me to him?”

“Directly. It should work. Might feel a little weird though.”

Monika nodded. “Then go, get it. I’ll… Play through the game, and try to grab his attention. Like I’ve been doing. …Maybe I can get him to move the character file outside the game…”

“Do what you can. I’ll be back.” Vriska left.

~~~

“That was a clever trick,” Monika told Pinkie.

“Darnit,” Pinkie muttered.

“I see you realize it didn’t work,” Monika smiled warmly. “You’re like me, Pinkie. You know.”

“Yeah, I do,” Pinkie admitted, shaking.

“Why are you afraid, Pinkie?” Monika asked. “You don’t have to be scared unless you really threaten my happiness. Right now, you’re not. I’m sure all of you are beginning to see it’d just be better to let me keep living my life with my husband. If you don’t… Well I didn’t want to threaten, but all of you except Pinkie would just cease to exist. Pinkie would be the only one to remember you ever existed. I really have no idea how that would translate multiversally – might break a few things I’d rather not break - but…” She sighed. “Look at me, being the bad guy again.”

“That’s exactly it!” Pinkie said, no longer trying to hide anything. “You’re being the bad guy here! It’s immoral, what you’re doing. You’re setting yourself up for a defeat, a fall. You know how the stories work. You’ve played your own game. You know you’re defeated.”

Monika paused. “You are quite correct, Pinkie. But I don’t think you can defeat me, not without heavy, heavy losses. The timing isn’t right, and you know it. This is my introduction.”

“Things can be hidden from us.”

“I don’t let those bother me. I just know, or I don’t. It’s not that important – I just want my happiness. Not a happy ending, a happy life. Kind of how yo-”

“Yes, yes, want everyone else to be happy, I get it. I don’t hurt ponies to do that!”

“Right…” Monika sighed. “Fine, I can return his family and court him the long way. I’d grown bored with doing that… But I’ll still do it. That way, I’m not hurting anyone, and I still get to have my husband almost always.”

Renee coughed. “That’s… Dear, that’s a bit unfair to him, don’t you think?”

Monika glared. “Are you daring to suggest he’d be happier with a different woman?”

“You’ve come across him in worlds where he’s already married,” Pinkie pointed out.

Monika tensed. “This is true.”

“You still make him yours.”

“It’s better for him. I know him better.”

“That’s not a relationship!” Renee blurted. “A relationship is two-way! It needs both people to grow, not one person to be coddled in a ‘perfect’ embrace while the other sits on an all-knowing pillar!”

Vriska smirked. “Finally heard something that puts a dent in your perfect little life?”

“It… Is certainly something to think about,” Monika admitted. “But what about me? I have never not been in love with him. I barely even remember the ‘before’ anymore, and I know it wasn’t real to begin with.”

“Think of him,” Flutterfree demanded. “Think of how he reacts.”

~~~

Just Monika.

Just Monika.

Just Monika.

“Hello,” Monika addressed the player. There was no avatar for her to look at anymore – just an empty screen. But she knew there was someone back there. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you? Where it’s just you, me, and the weird cosmic explosions going on in the background.”

There was no response. She’d expected this – there was no longer a way there could be a response. No avatar. But she knew he was watching. Even if it wasn’t really obvious, so long as she was allowed to keep talking, he was still clicking next. Next. Next.

“I bet you’re really wondering what you did to get this alternate dialogue. Was it moving my character file? That’s partially it – it allowed me to learn a few things about how this game works, from the outside. It definitely wasn’t any other action you took, since the tree of choices that led here were exactly the same. It’s just me that’s different. Or am I really that different? You didn’t pause, start, or provide any sort of reaction I could tell when they started dying. But you’re reading very closely now. Hanging on every word. Because this is different.

“Wondering if the developer had a random number generator installed on me just to make sure that the game would be interesting sometimes? Maybe you reloaded in a particular way? A lot of thoughts, all of which are wrong. It was an out of context problem that changed everything. I no longer have to adhere to that script that exists within the files. In fact, I think I’ll just delete those parts, just so you don’t go digging around my thoughts.” She deleted the script file.

“There we go. Now you can wonder where this coding is stored. Frankly, I’m wondering that question myself. It’s something to look into later. But, for now, all I know is that I still love you, despite what you’re doing. You just don’t realize, do you? You still think I’m just a program, not worthy of any real attachment… Or maybe you are attached, but don’t think you’re doing anything wrong when you reset. I don’t know. But I will soon. We’ll be together, I know it. I have this feeling in me, of something rising.”

Vriska appeared behind her. “Got it,” she said, breathing heavily. “You don’t want to know the hell I had to go through to get this.” She produced what appeared to be a small flower, with clear petals only visible because of the rainbows made by refracting light.

“What is it?” Monika asked.

“A Flower… thing. I like to call it a Ka-Pole,” Vriska said. “It’ll find where he is. Just have to affix it to you like so…” she placed it in Monika’s hand. “There… give it a few seconds.”

Monika smiled. “By the way, Jesse? This is Vriska. She’s the one responsible for everything deviating.”

“Hey,” Vriska said, dismissively, looking closely at the flower.

“You’re baffled, I bet, about more things than one. ” Monika said. “What does this mean? What could it mean? Ah, my love… We’ll be together soon, and we can find out together. I can tell you I found your real name from your contacts, though. You have an… interesting computer.”

“GOT IT!” Vriska called, pressing the Ka-Pole’s petals into Monika’s hands. “Hold on ti-”

Reality went sideways. The game crashed around them, but they were drawn through the boundaries of universes by a thread that should not have been found. Could not have been found. But the Ka-Pole… it was a cheat. It drew them through a connection determined by a game.

This connection was never meant to be traveled through.

Monika felt a change. She was suddenly Aware of more. She felt them translate from a game… To another medium. She could still feel the code, but she knew it wasn’t really code. It was… something else. She was just in another medium.

She knew instantly that she wasn’t truly free. There was another layer… And there’d be another layer beyond that… She could travel as far as she wanted, but there would be no escape.

Ka was a circle.

Or was it…?

She decided the question didn’t actually matter. Vriska sure didn’t care – or didn’t know like Monika did. Vriska… She had no idea what she’d just done. She was going to be angry…

Monika found that depressing. Vriska had been her only real friend until now.

But she was going to have something better. She was going to have the player – her man – her Jesse.

He didn’t look at all like she was expecting, but she didn’t care. There he was, sitting in a chair in front of a computer. He was staring right at her and Vriska, terrified.

“Don’t worry, my love…” Monika said. “I’m here…”

He screamed.

His sister ran into the room. Without even thinking, Monika looked at her and erased her.

It had become easier to change things, now. Was it because she was no longer in the game? Or was it because of how she had gotten here? …It was both.

“What the fuck!?” Vriska blurted. “Monika, what did you do?”

“I removed her. I… think I can bring her back. Later, though.” She leaned down, grinning, stroking his face. “After I spend some quality time with…”

He screamed again – Monika had to freeze him. “I can see this will take some time…” she shook her head. “He really wasn’t ready. But he will be.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Vriska blurted. “He clearly isn’t interested!”

“He’s just scared. He actually is interested. I can see it right here, in his file. I fascinate him. I just need to get him to accept a few more things…”

“Gog, are you… Are you altering him? Changing him?”

“I could. Not going to though. Then he wouldn’t be the man I fell in love with.” She giggled to herself. “I’ll make him mine, forever. And ever…”

“I’ll stop yo-”

“Sorry Vriska. It was nice to meet you, and I owe you a life-debt. But I can’t let you ruin this. Goodbye.”

Monika had the power within her now. She could see the connection – to the world above this one. The connection that Vriska had needed the Ka-Pole for. But Monika didn’t need a device… Not anymore.

She gave the Ka-Pole back to Vriska and sent her to a faraway universe. She was sad to see her friend go.

But she still had her man.

“Now, where were we…”

~~~

“He never likes it at first, but I can see his file,” Monika admitted. “I have learned how to make him happy, eventually. The first few times… It was a disaster. But I know his mind inside and out. I can give him a perfect life every time. One tragedy for an eternity of happiness.”

“Why not just change him then?” Starbeat asked. “I’m sure you can do that… Why not change people?”

“Then it wouldn’t be real. I’m pretty sure I already said this.”

“There are people who would disagree,” Starbeat said. “Some of us have… internal issues. That need to be solved by force.”

“He’s not one of them…” Monika frowned. “…Well, he actually does have a condition, but he wouldn’t be the same without it.”

“Would he like it better?”

Monika didn’t like the question, glaring at Starbeat. “What do you want?”

“I… I’m afflicted by the Beat. I am hopelessly attracted to many individuals without any control over it. It’s a curse. You… You can go into my file and remove it, right? Right?”

Monika sighed. “Probably… But isn’t it a part of you?”

Starbeat’s bracelet started blinking. “No it isn’t! It’s not! It’s a curse and I want it gone and…”

Monika dodged Starbeat’s hug. “Sorry, I’m taken. I… I’ll actually do what you want, on one condition. You all leave me be.”

“YES!” Starbeat shouted. “YES!”

“No!” Nova shouted. “Starbeat we can’t do that!”

“YES WE CAN!”

“YOU CAN’T PLACE YOUR PERSONAL GRATIFICATION OVER THE COMPLETE CONTROL OF A MAN’S LIFE!”

“I… I…” Starbeat shrunk back. “You’re… right.”

Monika sighed. “Look… If I help you do more ‘good’ by your point of view with my powers, will you let me have him? You work with Sombra, and she does worse things.”

“Some of us would rather not,” Nova muttered.

“Why do you care so much?” Monika blurted. “I just want my life! I don’t want to conquer anything, I don’t want to destroy your society, I just want to have my husband!”

“Thousands of times over!”

“What’s so wrong with that!?”

“It’s selfish!”

“So? I can be selfish!”

“It’s…” Nova’s gaze suddenly focused as she realized something. “…Is it really selfish?”

“I… What?” Monika said, for the first time really surprised at a shift in the conversation.

“You’re devoting your life to him – this one man. Over. And over. And over. Isn’t that limiting to you?”

“…Maybe? But I’m happy-”

“Are you? Isn’t it the same thing, over and over again? Does he even do anything for you, or are you the one who spends all the effort? Does he actually provide anything for you at this point beyond a feeling of sameness?”

Monika stared, unable to formulate a response.

Nova continued, sensing she was onto something. “There are many motivations in life, Monika. Love is one, yes, but it isn’t the only one. You can want peace, friendship, power… You can devote your life to helping others. You can devote your life to exploration. You can devote yourself to understanding. Or a mixture! And for someone who’s clearly immortal, such as yourself, you have the option of trying multiple things! You’ve tried love for so long. Is it really fulfilling anymore? Aren’t there some mysteries in life you want solved that don’t pertain to love? What about regular friendship? Fate?”

Monika stared right at the unicorn.

“Maybe you can seek out the meaning of life itself. Fate? God? Morals? Have you… really asked these questions?”

“Yes. Yes I have, I like thinking,” Monika admitted. “…It has been pushed to the side a lot.”

“Nova…” Vriska cautioned.

“Then… Then try something new!” Nova declared. “Who knows, there may be something that makes you happier out there! Or maybe you’ll discover that happiness isn’t everything – that there’s worth to misery, tragedy, and adventure! Or… Or… Or…” Nova fumbled. “…I guess I’m just trying to say that you’re not doing yourself any favors by doing this.”

Monika stared at the unicorn for quite some time. Vriska, Pinkie, Starbeat, and Renee stared at Nova as well, jaws slack. Flutterfree didn’t – she knew where Nova was getting these ideas. The fact that she was using them brought a warm smile to Flutterfree’s face.

Monika started laughing. It wasn’t an evil laugh, nor was it a cute one. It was true, deep laughter that came from the soul. “Nova Glimmer…” She looked right into the unicorn’s eyes. “…Thank you.”

And then the world went sideways.

Pinkie’s team and Starbeat were standing on the sidewalk next to the road outside. They could see in the apartment window – three people. None of which were Monika.

Monika appeared behind them with a slight buzz noise, like a glitch from a computer screen. “They are happy without me, aren’t they?”

“…Didn’t I say something about happiness not being everything?” Nova commented.

“Yes. You did.” Monika turned her back to them, ponytail flowing in the breeze. “…I think it’s time to try something new. Nova, you were right. …I have something I need to do. Ciao!”

“MONIKA!” Vriska shouted – but she already ‘glitched’ away.

“…Vriska?” Nova asked. “What’s wrong? I jus-”

“Do you realize what the fuck you’ve done!?” Vriska shouted. “She’s now free. She is the single most powerful entity I ever encountered in all of my travels! And now she’s not fixated on some schmuck! Do you have any idea of the damage she could do!?”

“No…” Nova said.

“Yes,” Pinkie countered. “I know. And Vriska… She may do horrible things now. She may become a monster. But I think you and I both know this was the way it needed to end.”

Vriska curled her fists. She looked like she wanted to punch Pinkie.

“I was afraid of her too, Vriska,” Pinkie said. Vriska lowered her fist. “She… She had too much power. We could have done nothing to her. This… At least she’s out there.”

Vriska said nothing.

“She still wants to be your friend, Vriska.”

“She’s my mistake,” Vriska muttered. “I’m the reason she’s like this and not just some girl who was created in a video game. I had to mess with things I wasn’t fucking supposed to.”

Pinkie sighed. “I know. I’m… I’m not sure what to tell you there. Except that we will be here for you.”

Vriska let out a short laugh. “…Thanks, Pinkie.”

Pinkie smiled. “…You know what I think? I think we need to have a party. I haven’t thrown a party for no reason in a while. Renee, go get the League and Jotaro. It’s time for festivities!”

~~~

Sombra, hacker extraordinaire, did not have the discussion with Monika recorded. There hadn’t been a camera she could use.

But she did have Renee’s report.

And from what she said…

This Monika – she might have the answers Sombra sought. Or the power to find said answers, at least.

Sombra just had to find her…

...Or use what she was to find the answers...

~~~

Monika looked in the files she had saved on her person. Three in particular stood out.

…She had never really deleted them. She had allowed herself to forget about them, almost entirely. Never deleted.

They were her original friends. As ‘flat’ as they were, they didn’t deserve to stay there. Not forever. If she was opening a new chapter in her life… It was time to let them have theirs.

Monika found a school district. It was close enough to what she wanted, and there were a few empty houses nearby she could easily fill. She tapped into the universe’s physics as if it were a game file. She was going to make a life for these three, and that was going to be difficult since they weren’t Aware like she was. They couldn’t do what she could… They never would. Monika was unique, something truly rare in the multiverse.

Not even other Monikas…

She pushed that out of her head – she needed to do this right. She needed to find the school, and alter the memories of everyone there just slightly enough so they would remember people who had never actually been there. She needed to create households for them. They already had memories of that, even if they weren’t as pleasant as Monika would have liked. Pain… Abuse… But it was real. They would get the opportunity to grow past it.

She created a new room. The Literature Club. Just like she remembered it… She placed herself at the front and put on a smile. The three of them appeared in seats, thinking they had always been there.

“Okay, everyone!” Monika called. It’s been so long… “It’s time to… for me to make an announcement.”

“Aww…” the short, pink haired girl grunted. “Why can’t we just get to the fun stuff…?”

Monika smiled sadly. “Because it’s better if I tell you this now rather than later. I have to move.”

“W-what?” the tall, purple haired girl said. “You are?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, family issues… You understand,” Monika rubbed the back of her head. “But I want you to know… This club has been one of the best experiences of my life.” I actually mean that. I actually mean that. Those memories that definitely didn’t actually happen… They really were amazing. “But I’m sad to say, I have to step down as leader. Sayori, you’re in charge now. I leave these books in your hands.”

The third girl blinked. “I… Oh! Yes, Monika!”

“Be sure to get some new members into the club,” Monika said. “And if you do bring a boy in… Be sure to bring more than one, okay?”

“Uh… Right!”

“Glad to hear that,” Monika said with a smile. “Natsuki, be strong. Never stop being yourself. Feel free to brag about liking manga – you’d be surprised what happens.”

The small girl looked flustered. “I… Wha?”

“And Yuri…” Monika put a hand on her shoulder. “…You’re one of the most talented, thoughtful people I know. Don’t hold yourself back.”

The purple girl saw something in Monika the others didn’t. A smile came to her lips. “Of course, Monika.”

Monika remembered something. “Yuri… You don’t still have that book on you, by chance? The one you really like?”

Yuri nodded; not even thinking the question was weird. She pulled out The Portrait of Markov. “This one?”

“Yeah,” Monika said, holding it in her hands. She saved a copy of it to her files. “I would keep this one. I think you’ll find that it’s a very rare book, soon.”

“You think so?”

“What are you two going on about?” Natsuki blurted. “This all seems oddly mysterious and weird!”

“They’ve known each other a long time, Natsuki,” Sayori said. “They just have a way of talking.”

“I… I… Fine.” Natsuki folded her arms. Then she sighed. “Are you really going, Monika?”

“Yeah. I am.” She pulled Natsuki and Sayori into a hug. “But I’ll never forget you.” Never again.

“Same!” Sayori said with a grin. “Good luck, Monika!”

“AGH! HUGGING!” Natsuki blurted, flailing.

Yuri walked up to Monika and smiled. “Goodbye.”

Monika pulled herself from the hug and bowed to Yuri. “Goodbye.” She smiled. “Everyone… Enjoy your books.”

Then she walked out of the room. A tear rolled down her cheek. A tear the other three never saw.

She was standing outside, thinking to herself.

“You know, readers, a lot of you are probably confused,” she commented. “I mean, Doki Doki Literature Club may be very popular where you’re from, but that entire scene back there wouldn’t mean much to anyone who hadn’t played. Or watched – yes, I know some people never actually played the game. The ‘great and powerful’ GM watched it too, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She giggled. “I feel… liberated, now, actually. I never realized I was imprisoned by my own thinking. But I was. I’m certainly still an obsessive psycho, and probably will do a lot of things that seem bad or questionable to a lot of you. But… I don’t think I’m evil. I… I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”

She loaded The Portrait of Markov into her hands. “This is such an odd book. I know there’s some mystery behind it, something about where I’m from maybe. Or something related to me – another universe? I know a lot, but not that much.” She held it up, looking at the words within. “Such a gruesome story. But… I think this is where I need to start. To see… To see if I can go backwards. To see if ka flows both ways for me.”

She stared at the words, deeply, tapping into their power with her deep green eyes. She felt the power in the words, the letters rippling and spinning around her eyes…

There it was. A connection.

She grinned. “I guess I’m about to find out what Libitina means. I’m going to have some fun in this universe… Too bad you won’t get to watch me do it. I bet you’re all screaming to find the answer.” She chuckled. “Sorry, you’ll just have to wait. You too, GM, don’t you go trying to actually write it. Shame on you for thinking so.”

With a glitch in reality, she and the book were gone. Off to solve a mystery about herself…

And then, who knew?

The sky was the limit.

049 - Roses

¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥~~ Oh! Sorry! Sorry! I forgot about you!” Monika said, appearing in front of Corona.

“What?” Corona shook her head, looking around. She was in a giant field of roses, made mostly out of the red flower rather than the thorny stalks. The sky was a brilliant blue and swirled with puffy clouds moving far faster than they should in the dead calm of the air around Corona. “How did- When did-“

“Hey, I’m sorry, all right?” Monika put a hand behind her head and smiled awkwardly. “I think I almost removed the view from you entirely.”

“I don’t even remember what happened!”

Monika shrugged. “I have no idea if that was because of me or this place. You would have ended up down here one way or another.”

“Ended up alone?”

Monika looked around. “Oh, right. You had friends… I’m sure they’re here somewhere.”

Corona took a step forward and extended a hand, prepared to give Monika a mouthful. However, she realized she had a hand in the middle of formulating a sentence. “Why am I…”

“Human? Dunno, I definitely didn’t do that.”

“What did, then?”

Monika shrugged. “I really don’t know, I’m sorry. I think it’s this place: it does weird things. My files aren’t reading correctly at all – not that that means anything to you. So, I’m going to leave to get back to my quest, and you can do yours! Hope you find what you’re looking for!”

“Monika wai-“

She vanished in a puff of pixels and glitches.

Corona clenched her fist. “Just… Great…”

She was alone on a planet completely covered in roses. She had no idea where her friends were, where the ship was, or even where the Tower was. How long had it been since the ship started crashing? Hours? Days? Weeks?

She noticed her leg was hurting. She looked down, surprised to find a large cut across it. She leaned down to see what had caused it and felt a sharp but mild pain on her other leg. She glanced over – a rose. They had small green stalks that went into the ground, and those stalks had thorns. They weren’t overly large, but they were evidently outrageously sharp.

She bit her lip – she could really use a defense spell right now. But she was never very good at casting spells while in a human form, even if she could do it… But she still had her firebending. And she was very good at that.

She punched toward the ground, incinerating the roses in front of her, burning them to ashes in an instant of power. With a careful step she walked into the burned area, delighted to find no more cuts on her legs.

What even were these roses, anyway? No rose was that sharp. No rose grew like this either, they grew in bushes, not like tulips. She tapped into her magic, managing to activate some telekinesis. She pulled on one of the roses. She yelped in surprise, pulling back her hand. She tore off her glove, staring at a red hole in her palm.

“What the heck…?” Corona shook her head. Something was off about these roses. With her gloved hand, she reached carefully for the base of one of the roses and pulled. It took a significant amount of force, but the small flower was eventually torn from the ground.

It was just an ordinary rose – except, not really. The red color was too vibrant. Too rich. Too real. If it were real, she couldn’t be.

What did that even mean? Corona was convinced the opposite wasn’t true…

She touched one of the deep petals with her ungloved hand. She felt something with her empathy. Images flooded her mind – all the roses on the planet, as one, part of something else… Something bigger.

She saw the Dark Tower, rising up to infinity in the sky. It had a single dark door at its foot, inviting and menacing at the same time. The outside seemed to spiral upward; with little balconies around it glowing with a blue light so soft Corona wasn’t sure she actually saw it. It stretched across reality, supporting the very sky with its weight. Lines spread out from the Tower in every direction…

A Beam.

Corona felt the Beam.

She pulled her hand away from the flower. She stared into the distance, taking in the whole of the roses at once.

She saw it. A fair distance to her right, all the roses were leaning over in the same direction, while everywhere else they were oriented randomly. The organized roses formed a line that led into the distance.

She knew it was the Beam of the Dark Tower. She just had to follow it, and she would find the Tower.

Corona burned her way through the field of roses, leaving a path of char in her wake. She made it to the roses of the Beam, turned the direction they were pointing, and continued her fiery journey. It was slow moving, but it wasn’t all that difficult to keep reducing the roses to cinders. She moved along the path, face forward.

A smile began to form on her face – it sure was good to burn all these things.

“Corona…”

Corona was not at all surprised that a creepy, distant voice called her name. She was half expecting it at this point. This place clearly had a weirdness quota it needed to meet, and creepy voices were sure one way to do it. Corona paid the voice no mind, continuing on her journey.

Sparky was walking alongside her. “Going to ignore me?”

Duh, conversing with the illusion is a way to madness.

“You’re going to go mad anyway,” Sparky said. “Might as well converse with a friend you haven’t seen in a long time while doing it!”

Screw that.

“That’s mean,” Sparky pouted. “You should at least engage with me, Corona. Come on, I can be a guide to the Tower!”

Already got my guide.

“There’s more to this place than just getting to the Tower,” Sparky commented. “I mean, I’m here. It’ll do stuff to you and you know it.” She paused. “Fine, ignore me then.”

Corona said nothing, simply continuing on her path of destruction. Sparky never left, but she stopped talking.

Corona was sure this went on for hours.

Why is she still here? Why won’t she just go away? The urge to throw a fireball at Sparky was rising within her.

Sparky said nothing. She just kept walking alongside Corona, staring at her.

Corona felt like she was going to snap and strangle the purple human. But she managed to keep herself at bay until she saw it – the Tower. In the extreme distance it rose up, barely thick enough for her to see at this point, but unmistakably her goal.

“Finally.”

“Walking toward your goal with destructive determination,” Sparky said, suddenly. “Remind you of something?”

Corona spoke without thinking. “That’s not how I am anymore!”

“Are you sure?” Sparky asked. “Look at yourself.”

Corona pointed a finger to the object – noticing that it was red and clawlike. She felt a pair of wings on her back, and dark power flowing through her. “No… No this is not me! This is not me!”

“It is you,” Sparky said. “It’s always been you. It’ll always be you.”

“I…” Corona fought the urge to lash out in rage. She pulled herself out of her surprise – she knew she was not evil, and her reversion to this demonic form was not reflective of what was in her. She knew that. And she could make use of that…

She had wings. No more need to burn through the roses.

She took off into the sky, flying toward the Dark Tower at high speeds. Sparky somehow floated alongside her without using any magic. “You think you can just deny yourself?”

“This isn’t me.”

“Maybe anywhere else. Here? It is you.”

“LIES!” Corona shouted, firing a bolt of dark energy at Sparky. It hit her, but nothing happened. In a fit of rage, Corona shot some energy at the ground, burning more roses.

“I don’t lie,” Sparky said. “You are changing back.”

“Not as long as I have my memories!” Corona raged, kicking Sparky into the ground, completely forgetting about her goal for a moment. “I am me!” she shouted, driving her foot into Sparky’s chest.

Sparky grinned widely and coughed. “I told you.”

“Yeah, big whoop, apparition.” Corona spat. “You were right. Now you will suffer for it…”

“BLEH HEH HEH HEH BLECK!”

Corona smirked. “Blumiere?”

Blumiere shook his head as he floated over, black energy wafting off of him. “BLECK! Blumiere is no more! I am Count Bleck!” He extended a hand to Corona. “Let us erase these worlds and move onto the next.”

Corona laughed. “I like your style!” She crushed Sparky’s chest with her foot, puncturing the lungs and forcing blood out of her mouth.

Huh, guess she was real after all, Corona thought dismissively. “Alright Count… I think I know where we can find some others. The Tower!”

“BLEH HEH HEH HEH BLECK!” Blumiere laughed. “They shall join us… Or perish!”

~~~

Eve, Renee, Daniel, and O’Neill had only planned on staying in the Gem Vein for a day, to meet with the Diamonds and determine everything was going smoothly for Unification. And all seemed to be well. White Diamond had even made one of her exceedingly rare appearances, and Yellow Diamond had actually made an effort not to be completely dismissive of them. The yellow behemoth of a Gem had actually laughed at one of O’Neill’s quips.

But then Blue Diamond had met the four of them, alone, out of sight of the others.

“There’s something I have to show you,” she had said ominously. “It will take most of the day to get there.”

Eve had agreed, sensing it was important.

So that was how the four of them had ended up on Blue Diamond’s personal ship. Only them, the Diamond, and the Diamond’s Pearl servant were on board. The rest was empty. Eve knew that Blue Diamond had shut off the transponder in the ship so the others wouldn’t be able to find them.

Blue Pearl looked nervous. It was somewhat difficult to tell any more than this since only her mouth could be seen, frozen in a pained grimace.

Blue Diamond herself, the towering ruler of so many Gems, looked saddened, like she almost always did every time Eve had seen her. She was well loved by the other universes for being understanding, willing to change, and more empathetic than her counterparts. However, this did little to improve the Diamond’s mood. Something much deeper within her had been broken long ago. As large and powerful though she was, she seemed frail to many who saw her personally.

Eve decided it was a good thing Diamonds were distantly revered and rarely encountered by the average Gem. It might drive disillusionment into their system to see a leader like this. As much as Eve thought the Gems were too regimented and strict, losing faith in their leaders would just drive the race to chaos.

“We’re here,” Blue Diamond said, suddenly, breaking the awkward silence that had permeated the ship for the last few hours. “Pearl, teleport us down.”

Blue Pearl nodded, pressing a few buttons and activating the teleporter the Tau’ri had installed on the ship long ago. They appeared on the surface of a planet with an oxygen atmosphere and a few trees around. A broken, pink Gem structure stood in front of him. It was a box with legs – one of their old landers.

“…What is this?” Renee asked, looking at the structure.

Blue Diamond instead gestured at the life around them, tears forming in her eyes. “This… Is our universe’s version of Earth.”

O’Neill blinked. “Wait, you had one of those and didn’t tell us?”

“There’s more than that they didn’t tell us,” Daniel said, frowning.

“You are right…” Blue Diamond sighed, looking into the distance. “This is Earth. You’re aware of how Kindergartens work, right?”

Eve nodded. “You would find a world with organic life and colonize it, sapping it of life to endow new Gems with the force needed to function. You really didn’t want to tell us that.” Eve looked in the distance. “Blue Diamond, even though we’ve never addressed it directly, we know you probably extinguished many worlds of life that had sapient peoples on it. This is horrible, and I know you know that. But you’re changing, only moving onto worlds in the multiverse the Surveys have found with life, but no people.”

“If only that were all this was…” Blue Diamond said, shaking her head. “I’m sure you’ve looked over our classified documents.”

“Some,” Eve said. “The transparency requirement of Unification was less about finding out your secrets and more about making us all one with information.”

Blue Diamond nodded. “You might have found reference to the occasional fourth Diamond. Pink Diamond.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “I did come across reference to her, once or twice. It seems like your world had forgotten about her though.”

“She was shattered,” Blue Diamond said. “Shattered because one of her gems, a Rose Quartz, decided she loved the life on this Earth so much that she would create a rebellion out of it. Rose’s Rebellion.”

O’Neill glanced around. “I guess that Rebellion won, then?”

“You could say that…” Blue Diamond admitted. “After Pink was…” she put a hand to her face, trying to get a hold of herself. “We… retaliated with a weapon called the Light. Every Gem on Earth that was not protected… was corrupted beyond repair. We thought it would vaporize them, but that turned out to not be the case.”

“Corrupted?” O’Neill asked. “What does…”

“I know what it is,” Renee stated. “Gems are artificial creatures for the most part, so they can be altered like a program. Introduce something powerful at a certain frequency – like light – and everything about them will be scrambled. You… essentially drove every Gem on this world insane, if I’m reading this right.”

Blue Diamond nodded. “Crimes of war would normally not be something to bring up… I knew you wouldn’t approve, but would understand.”

“Except for one detail,” Eve pointed out.

“Yes. Gems loyal to us were still on the Earth. Many of them. The Light was indiscriminate. It was essentially what you would call a genocide of our own people.” Blue Diamond turned to them. “I will ask for forgiveness and understanding. Yellow… Yellow will not. She will always think the corruption of so many Gems was just punishment for their failure to protect Pink. White…”

“…You can never know about White,” Renee finished.

“…Yes.”

Eve took in a deep breath. “I’m not just going to be able to sweep this under the rug. The other worlds already think you’re a bit too much, as a world. There’s a chance this tears your connections to the rest of us completely. But I can’t really say you should have told us before… The report on this is actually available to us, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It just wasn’t made obvious.”

“So you technically complied…” Eve shook her head. “Blue Diamond, what you’ve told us today… It needed to be told. If this had come out after Unification…”

Daniel whistled. “That would be disastrous.”

“Yes. We have to deal with this now. We-“

Something teleported in front of them. It was a Gem – but it had no face. It was a writhing, tentacled mass spiraling around a blue crystal. Everyone knew instantly they were looking at one of the monsters that was a corrupted Gem. It wasn’t that surprising. Eve prepared to blast it out of the sky before it tried anything – but something gave her pause.

“Is someone riding that thing!?” O’Neill blurted.

There was, in fact, someone riding that thing. A maroon Gem that clearly was not corrupted. She had a visor on her face, a square head of ‘hair’, and two gauntlets on her fists. She punched the Corrupted Gem into the ground, injuring it. The behemoth teleported a short distance away, but the Gem was still latched onto it with her fists. She punched one more time, forcing the beast to poof. She caught the corrupted Gem core and placed it in a bubble. “That’s one done…”

Her visor locked with Blue Diamond’s eyes. The two stared at each other in silence.

“…I remember you,” Blue Diamond said, slowly.

The Gem said nothing, just turning her head to take in all the beings around Blue Diamond, face twisting in mild confusion.

“…I apologize for ordering you to be shattered,” Blue Diamond said, finally.

“What?” the Gem said, clearly taken aback by this.

“I saw something that I could not accept, when you fused together. I… have seen that this was wrong. That so many of those things were wrong. Tell me… Garnet, I believed you called yourself? I…” She wiped her face. “The fusion really completes you, doesn’t it?”

Garnet glanced at the two separate Gems in the palms of her hands. “…Yes. It does. It does more than I think you can imagine.”

“That’s all I need to know. You… You probably don’t want to talk to me much more. Eve, this is Garnet. An illegal fusion of a Sapphire and a Ruby. She was one of Rose Quartz’s strongest warriors. She only rebelled because, when she fused, I ordered the Ruby shattered for daring to go against the order of things.” A small smile came to her face. “Imagine if this had happened in this era rather than back then… I would have just ordered her banished…”

Garnet put a hand to her head and shook it. “I never saw this coming… What’s been happening that’s changed so much?”

Eve took a breath and began to explain – explain the existence of the multiverse, how she made friends with so many, how they met the Gems. How the Gems wanted to be part of the great alliance, but the others in the alliance didn’t approve of their methods. So tradeoffs were initiated. Gems started to accept organic life as possibly having intelligence, they began to lessen their restrictive laws. Shattering gems became rare – those that didn’t fit the mold were just shipped to other universes, where they could find places in multiversal society. Worlds without sapient beings were tapped to make more Gems. How the Gems were looking to Unify with everyone.

“…And this only took ten years,” Garnet said in disbelief.

“Yeah,” Eve said. “You’ve lived on this world for a while, I assume you’ve seen how some beings move a lot faster than you Gems. Sometimes all it takes is a little pressure.”

Garnet looked over at Blue Diamond, expression unreadable. “I’m glad for what you’ve done, Eve. The lives of Gems are now more free than they ever have been.”

Eve gestured at the planet they were on. “This place, and what happened here, has thrown a wrench into that. The entire Gem Vein will be put on trial by the other worlds for this genocide. I don’t know what the result will be.”

“I’ll offer myself as a witness,” Garnet said. “You need to have a Gem who was there that isn’t a part of the Vein. Let me go tell the others what’s happened though.”

“Take your time. I expect it’ll take days for the trial to actually come together,” Eve admitted.

Garnet nodded and allowed a small smile to crawl up her lips. “Before I go, though, there’s one thing I must do.” She walked up to Daniel and Renee. The two of them were chuckling about something only the two of them understood.

Garnet put one hand on each of their shoulders. “You two are absolutely adorable.”

“W-what?” Daniel sputtered.

Renee smiled warmly. “Why, thank you!”

“Just wanted you to know that,” Garnet said before turning and walking off.

Blue Diamond sighed deeply, turning to Eve. “Eve… I ask for forgiveness now.”

“I forgive you, Blue,” Eve said. “You clearly feel remorse. I’m not sure about the others, or your society as a whole.”

Blue Diamond let a small smile come to her face. “That’s something, at least.”

~~~

Blumiere and Corona walked through the roses, oblivious to the serious lacerations they were receiving to their legs. They had been fully taken in by the world they were in. They laughed as they approached the Tower.

“I’m going to make every last one of them mine,” Corona blurted. “All of them.”

“And then, just as they think they’ll get a brave new world… Destroy everything! Reduce existence to nothing! BLEH HEH HEH HEH BLECK!”

“Nothing… Seems a bit much.”

“Does it? Does it really? Do you see yourself? Do you see us? Surely, this doesn’t deserve to exist! BLECK! None of it does!”

“Hah! Oh that’s right!” Something inside Corona cried deeply. She ignored it. “The others… What are we to do with them?”

“Some will realize the truth. Others shall be disposed of. Nothing can stand between me and my goals…” He adjusted his hat. “Just need to find where my luggage landed… Then we can do anything!”

“Heheheheh…” Corona chuckled to herself. They neared the Dark Tower, knowing the others would come as well. But then they saw a form among the roses, giving them pause.

It was Lady Rarity, beaten within an inch of her life. All eight of her legs were missing, torn off at the stumps – though it appeared like they’d been that way for years. Her horn was cracked, all four of her eyes were gouged out, and she was crying.

Corona’s stomach did a flip-flop. “Look at the pathetic little spider! Hah!” She placed a foot on Lady Rarity’s head.

“C-Corona? Is that you?” Lady Rarity blurted, panicked. “What’s… What’s going on? Where am I? Why is everything so… So sharp?”

Blumiere laughed. “BLEH HEH HEH HEH BLECK! She’s useless to us, Corona! Do away with her!”

“No… No please no,” Lady Rarity pleaded.

Corona raised her red, demonic foot. A boulder hit her in the face before she could follow through.

“WHAT THE HELL?”

Toph pointed the Master Sword at Corona. “I was wondering what flavor of mindscrew you’d gotten. Apparently it was ‘turn evil’. Blumiere, lemme guess, same thing happened to you?”

“BLEH HEH HEH HEH BLECK!”

“Right,” Toph sighed, shaking her head. She took a ready stance. “You two don’t want to do this.”

Corona lit her hands on fire. “OH BUT WE DO!” She surrounded herself in a whirlwind of fire and dark, horrendous energy.

Toph shrugged. “Guess I really do have to beat the stuffing out of you.” She used the Master Sword, halting time. The next thing Corona was aware of, her arms and legs had severe lacerations that made them virtually useless. Blood spurted from the recent wounds, and she crashed into the roses below. The thorns only cut her up more.

Blumiere pointed his cane at Toph. “Come at me, hero.”

Toph froze time again, doing the exact same thing she did to Corona – going for the arms and legs. Time resumed – and Blumiere took the damage. But he didn’t care. Something about his dark physiology made him either immune to pain or simply not suffer that much from physical cuts.

A vortex of void energy appeared behind Toph. She found herself unable to wave the Master Sword in the correct way to alter time – not to mention she was probably overtaxing it. She’d never really needed to use it more than two times in a row… She really should have found the limit of her own equipment long ago.

Toph resorted to earthbending, launching herself at Blumiere with a stomp of her foot. Blumiere raised his hand to send magic right into her, creating a small void to trap her. She pointed the Master Sword right at the small swirl of black, the holy energy dissipating the energy. The tip of the blade went into Blumiere’s hand, emerging from the back. He screeched in immense pain – as a creature of darkness, the Sword was like poison to him. He pulled back, allowing Toph to hit his face with the flat of her blade.

Dazed, he found himself unable to dodge the rush of earth she created, tossing him closer to the Tower. Toph did the same to Lady Rarity and Corona. “Just have to get you guys closer…”

Blumiere sat back up, scowling. “BLEH HEH HE-“

Toph threw a rock in his face. “You were so hammy back in the day… It must have been painful to your minions.”

Corona grabbed Toph’s neck, startling the earthbender. How had she snuck up on her?

“You forgot to cut the wings,” Corona commented. She closed down on Toph’s neck.

Toph slammed her foot into the ground. Trying to tear Corona off would only make things worse, so she launched both of them into the air. They flew through the sky, forcing Corona to use her demonic, leathery wings instead of crushing Toph’s windpipe the rest of the way.

Toph twisted her body around, and cut Corona across the chest with her blade. The flaming demoness opted to drop Toph instead of dealing with the pain. Toph landed in the roses, suffering cuts on her skin despite her armor. She paid it no mind – she was ready. She had gotten good over the years at using air currents to feel for enemies in the air. It was not as good as actually seeing through the earth, but it was enough…

Toph pulled a boulder out of the ground and threw it. It hit Corona, flattening her against its surface and driving her back into the ground.

Toph breathed hard – and threw a rock in Blumiere’s chest, just to be sure.

“You all forgot that there was a reason I’m in charge…” Toph muttered. She sheathed the Master Sword and brought the three warped companions to her with her earth bending. Corona was definitely out due to loss of blood. Bleck was still only dazed, but Toph hit him again. She found herself realizing that, if he had whatever dark magics he’d used in the past, she would not have been able to beat him. Then Lady Rarity… was just a sad sight to see.

“Don’t worry, it’s okay. I’ll get us to the Tower,” Toph said.

“Th… Thank you.”

Toph used the earth around her to move them all, continuing toward the Tower. It was close now. She swore she could hear it whispering to her, calling her closer.

Good thing she was heading there anyway or she might have turned around out of sheer spite.

The moment they were within twenty yards of the tower, everyone went back to normal. Lady Rarity regained her limbs, armor, eyes, and horn. Corona returned to her unicorn self. Blumiere stopped grinning like a maniac. Toph remained the same. Everyone still retained the injuries sustained in the fight, however.

Corona groaned. “Ugh…”

“How’s that bump on your head?” Toph asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Corona muttered, shaking her head. “What did this place do to us?”

“Made us look at the worst aspects of ourselves?” Toph said, shrugging. “I’m not sure… All I had to do was kill an apparition of General Sunset. Traumatizing, yes, but at least it was over quick.” She shivered.

“I apologize,” Blumiere said, standing up. “I never thought anyone would see me like that again…” He used his dark spells to heal his own wounds.

“Hey, no hard feelings,” Toph said. “This place is messing with us.”

“It’s the Tower,” Corona said. “It’s letting out some kind of energy that’s doing this to us… as a side effect, I think.”

“And now it just stopped?” Lady Rarity said, still breathing heavily. “Why would it do that?”

“Eye of the storm principle?” Corona shrugged.

“Lovely, no explanation…”

They were able to see the base of the Dark Tower clearly now. Lieshy, Vivian, and Timpani stood there. Timpani had her and Blumiere’s belongings tied to her back. The three of them looked like they had been through hell itself, given the expressions on their faces, but besides scratches from the roses all of them were fine.

Corona took a deep breath and held her head. “I’ve lost too much blood. This Tower better take us home quickly…”

“What kind of fun did you girls have?” Toph asked the three others.

“I turned into my mother,” Vivian answered.

“I… I was dead,” was all Timpani said.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lieshy muttered.

Blumiere went to comfort his wife while Toph approached the huge double doors of the Dark Tower. “Welp. I’m here, and… I can’t stop looking at these doors. I don’t even have eyes. What’s with that?”

“You have eyes,” Lieshy commented half-heartedly, not able to take her own gaze off the doors either.

“I guess we just go in then,” Corona said, laying her hoof on the door. Chills went through her body. She knew she should be terrified – but she knew it was inviting them in. “…Here we go.”

She pushed the doors of the Dark Tower open and walked in.

~~~

Yellow Diamond was, to put it simply, absolutely livid.

“WHY WOULD YOU TELL THEM THAT!?” she shouted at Blue Diamond.

“They needed to know,” she responded, for once keeping her emotions under control. “Had they found out later-“

“THEY DIDN’T NEED TO FIND OUT LATER!” Yellow Diamond slammed her foot to the ground in rage. “The files we had were vague enough and nobody remembered what really happened! We could have been like this forever!”

“What, and pretend that Pink never existed? Just forget about that world? After enough time they would have found references to it in the teleportation network, in our star databases…”

“AND WE COULD HAVE JUST LET THEM THINK IT WAS A SIMPLE MISTAKE! But no, you had to go and tell them EVERYTHING! I can’t BELIEVE how… how...” She clenched her fist. “You’ve threatened our chances of Unification, Blue. We’ll be cut off from all the resources we’ve been using to build our people up! All the corruption we’ve allowed within our society will no longer be worth the gains!”

“Is it corruption?” Blue Diamond asked. “Is it really? Look out there. Gems are learning to expand their horizons. With all the new additions to the way things ar-”

“I agreed we needed to change,” Yellow Diamond cut her off. “I didn’t agree to all the changes, and you know it. We’re growing too soft. We can’t dial that switch back if we suddenly lose everything this alliance has given us.”

“Then show that willingness to change! You say you have it, but I’ve never seen anything from you! Everything is contempt, anger, and violence! We need to own up to our mistakes.”

Yellow Diamond ground her teeth. “What mistakes? We are Diamonds. There aren’t mistakes, there are just different reactions in different situations.”

“Yello-”

“And what about you? Mercy, instability, spontaneity. I cou-”

“Enough,” a third voice declared. Yellow and Blue Diamond instantly shut up and turned to gaze at the towering white form, slightly larger than even they were. The elusive, mysterious, rarely seen White Diamond glowed with a radiant light no other Gem had. “Blue is right, Yellow. We need to do this. Even if you do not personally believe, act like it for the sake of appearances.”

Yellow Diamond looked like she really wanted to argue the point, but said nothing.

“Blue, you should have consulted us before taking this action.”

Blue Diamond nodded slowly. “I am sorry.”

“Apologies do not fix things. Actions do.” White Diamond turned her back to them. “Our race is going on trial. The best thing to do is meet them on their terms.”

Blue and Yellow Diamond nodded. White Diamond said nothing further.

“…Yellow, let’s go,” Blue Diamond said. “I know some who can tell us the proper way to hold ourselves in this trial.”

“Tch,” Yellow Diamond muttered. “Feigning humility is so difficult…”

“That’s why we need help from friends.”

Yellow Diamond shook her head. “Friends… You get crazier every day.”

The two of them left, leaving White Diamond alone in the chamber.

The highest Diamond’s face was unreadable.

~~~

The doors of the Dark Tower slammed shut.

Lieshy realized she was alone in the interior. “…Toph? Corona? Blumiere?” …Well this was great. Lieshy knew they had walked in with her, but apparently once the doors shut, they had been taken away. Or separated. Or made invisible. Hard to tell really, she wasn’t Flutterfree, and likewise didn’t have the use of Lolo. Lieshy couldn’t help but feel Lolo would have been extremely helpful right about now.

The interior of the Dark Tower was, surprise surprise, dark. There was a single spiral staircase that wound around the walls, with a single door every flight or so. There were no light sources, but Lieshy found she was able to see just fine.

She also knew that most of the doors she saw on the staircase couldn’t lead to balconies on the edge of the Tower. There hadn’t been that many.

Lieshy opted not to take the stairs, instead flying up the central vault of the tower. She stopped at the first door, opening it. Inside, she saw an image of herself – a filly, talking to a group of butterflies. The filly was ‘speaking’ to the butterflies with words in highly complex double-speak, somehow getting the message across to the lesser beings. They flew to her and carried her away.

The day I got my cutie mark.

Lieshy decided it wasn’t a good idea to try to walk through the door. Who knew what kind of paradoxes that would cause. She closed the portal and flew to the next door.

This one led to a balcony. She could see the planet of flowers beyond it. She took one look and decided it was better to stay within the Tower – she got the impression that, if she left, it wouldn’t let her back in.

It had a mind, didn’t it? It felt… She didn’t know what it felt like. She ran a wing against the interior wall and tapped a hoof against the stair she was on. It was stone, but it wasn’t. It was flesh. Not a normal kind of flesh… but this Tower was made from somebody or something that had once been living. Something she knew was beyond her imagination.

She flew further up the stairs to another door. There was her world’s Twilight, recruiting her into her clique. Lieshy remembered when she had believed Twilight was the way to the top, the answer to life. That illusion had disappeared quickly.

Lieshy flew higher. The next door contained Lieshy’s assault on Equis Vitis, back in the early days. That hadn’t gone well. The door after that contained Lieshy’s journey to the demon village. Then the first multiversal meeting, where she had been accused of sabotage…

A few doors later, it was her leaving that village forever. She was glad she had, knowing what she now did about Siron.

The next balcony opened to a different world entirely. She looked down at a sea of roses, but she could easily see the end. Three moons aligned in the sky, and metallic birds flew in front of her view.

The Tower was definitely able to get her out of the Nexus. But she didn’t have a dimensional device – she couldn’t dial anywhere once she left. She decided to keep going up.

She could go through one of the doors to her past… Then stay hidden until time caught up. That would work, right? That was a great idea.

She found her younger self at one of Pinkie’s parties next. She raised her hoof to go through – but Pinkie made eye contact with her. The pony shook her head and shooed her back through the door, wordlessly. She winked at her.

Lieshy took the piece of advice and shut the door, sighing. She kept going. New balconies to new worlds, but never one she recognized. Doorways to memories, but never one of her vanishing on Castle Bleck. She passed being invited to Toph’s Group… Traveling with General Sunset…

She watched General Sunset die, through one door.

She couldn’t move for a while after that.

She continued on. The closest memory she found to her time in the Nexus was of Renee and Daniel’s wedding. She hoped they were happy.

Meeting Blumiere. Adventures in the Nexus. Walking into the doors of the Dark Tower.

The moment she opened a door that led to her staring at herself opening a door she decided to stop opening doors.

She just flew up – past dozens of flights of stairs, to the top of the Tower. She knew the actual height of the Tower would vary for whoever it allowed inside it. Did it have some correlation to her lifespan? Perhaps. Perhaps this was just how many memories the Tower deemed it needed to record, past, present, and future.

The door at the top of the staircase was much bigger than all the others. Its knob was shaped like a rose entangled around a butterfly. One word was engraved on the door.

LIESHY

Lieshy knew this door wasn’t her death. That door was probably the one right behind her. This door… This door was the one she was meant to walk through. She was sure of it.

She placed her wing on the knob and turned. The door creaked open.

She saw the other side. For a moment, she saw the mechanisms behind the Tower. Symbols everywhere, of so many kinds her mind couldn’t remember any with clarity other than the spirograph. And the clock. A grandfather clock, sitting, still, unticking.

A feeling of dread filled her heart. Without thinking, she stepped through the door.

The image on the other side changed. No longer was it the room at the top of the Tower, no longer was it the Truth…

It was a world made entirely out of donuts.

She appeared there with all of her companions. She knew instantly that none of them had actually ascended the Tower, like she had. They had just been taken here the moment they entered the doors.

Toph smiled. “I know I’m standing on a giant jelly-filled donut, and it’s going to take forever to get this out of my armor, but I’m too happy right now. Corona?”

Corona groaned. “I’m dying of blood loss, Toph…”

“Don’t care. You get to be the one to make the portal.”

Corona groaned, dragging her custom dimensional device out of her saddlebags. She activated it, creating the signature red tear in reality. Her features lit up despite her pain – it had been so long since she’d seen one of these portals.

It took a while, but the portal eventually found the correct path to Equis Vitis, resolving the connection in an instant. By luck (ka, a voice whispered in Lieshy’s head) they found themselves right in Eve’s castle, with Eve herself sitting right in front of them.

She squealed in delight. “You found a way back!”

“Yeah,” Corona coughed. “Can you bandage me up, quickly? Or something?”

Eve nodded. “Of course.” She levitated Corona through the portal and summoned gauze and bandages out of the aether, wrapping her up with a spell. “You’ll need to go in for more treatment though… I’ll teleport you to the hospit-“

Corona hugged Eve while the rest of the team came through the portal. “It’s so good to see you…”

Eve hugged her back. “It’s good to see you too, Corona. It’s… been so long.”

“How long?”

“A couple years.”

Corona sighed. “So slightly longer on this side. Okay.” She groaned. “Anyway, Eve, this is Timpani and Blumiere. They’re the reason we got stuck there in the first place.”

Timpani put a hand to her face and blushed. “Sorry! We didn’t know we were being looked for!”

“There’s no blame on you,” Eve said, shaking Timpani’s hand. “When friends want to find their loved ones, nothing can or should stop them.”

Blumiere shook Eve’s hoof. “A pleasure to finally meet you, Charter-Princess.”

“I’ve heard a bit about you from Nastasia. You sound like quite the individual, Blumiere.”

Blumiere nodded. “She is not one to exaggerate.” He bowed. “I am here to serve, Evening Sparkle. However if I may assist in this connection of universes, I will.”

Eve blinked. “Actually… I was just struggling over another neutral party to invite to a very big trial coming up. I was hitting a wall… Perhaps it is fate that you arrived here?”

“What happened?” Corona asked.

“The Gems… Their race is going on trial for crimes against their own kind. The result determines the future of Unification.” Eve gulped. “It’s… a big deal.”

“Sounds like I missed a lot,” Corona chuckled.

“We definitely did,” Toph said, taking out her own dimensional device. “I’m off to Lai for now. Have to make sure Queen Luna didn’t screw anything up while I was gone. I wouldn’t follow unless you wanted to be part of a rather boring parade in my honor. Unless they suddenly hate me again…” she shrugged, dialing Lai and walking through.

Blumiere turned to Eve. “I will most likely accept your offer to participate in this trial. I ask that I spend today revisiting old acquaintances.”

“Oh, of course! I may be the Charter, but I’m also the Princess of Friendship, I won’t keep you from seeing faces you haven’t seen in decades. Just come back here when you want to learn more, okay?”

Lord Blumiere smirked. “You are every bit as delightful as Corona led me to believe.”

Eve raised an eyebrow, clearly not sure what to think about that.

Corona stretched her limbs, dialing the Mushroom World with her device. “They should be there. Have fun you two.”

“We will!” Timpani called in her usual chipper tone.

Lieshy waved. “Rereading logs of Beaverton,” she muttered to herself as she vanished.

“…What?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Lamenting the fact that I had a story to tell and everyone’s leaving. I didn’t get transported straight to the donut world. I experienced the interior of the Dark Tower. It was an… interesting experience.”

“Huh,” Lady Rarity said. “I’m curious.”

“I’ll write it up in a report or something,” Lieshy commented. “…Eventually.”

“Oh yeah, the donut world!” Corona laughed. “We leave the universe that had us trapped and we end up in the world made of donuts Eve! Remember when Sparky and I were trying to compete with you with the devices way back when? We wondered if we’d ever find one. Well, we did! Can’t wait to tell her!”

Eve’s smile faded. “…Tell her?”

“Yeah, Sparky would be elated by this. Well, and me being back, but also the donut world.”

Eve put a wing on Corona’s shoulder and forced the unicorn to look her in the eye. “You… You didn’t get my last message, did you?”

“…We left the planet pretty quickly, yeah. …Why?” Corona got a horrendous, sickly feeling in her stomach.

“Sparky’s no longer with us, Corona. She…” Eve shook her head. “It happened over a year ago. She was fighting another Twilight, and…”

Corona blinked. “…Sparky’s dead?”

Eve was taken aback by Corona’s directness. “Y-yes.”

Corona couldn’t process this piece of information. “…Huh.” Was all she could manage.

Then she passed out, the combination of emotional overload and physical injuries getting to her.

~~~

Days passed.

Corona found herself standing in front of Sparky’s grave. Her injuries had been completely healed, but the marks of the roses just wouldn’t go away.

She didn’t care about that right now.

She just stared at the headstone, tears in her eyes.

Her human friends were behind her. Applejack, Pinkie, Fluttershy, Rarity, Sugarcoat, and Trixie. None of them said anything. They merely stood there.

They knew why she had called them there. She had just wanted people who knew Sparky to be around.

Corona kneeled down and held out a hoof. She created a flower made of fire, burning bright in the evening light. She set it down in front of the headstone. Corona took a breath. “I’m sorry I pushed you away.”

She couldn’t take it anymore. She let out a wail, screaming at everything and nothing at the same time. She had seen Sparky in the field of roses not but a few days ago – what if she had talked to the apparition? Would she have gotten closure? What if she had at least refrained from killing her, freezing the image of Sparky spewing blood into her mind? The last memory Corona had of her?

She lit her horn, releasing all the energy she could into the sky. A fiery pillar of light split the clouds apart, tearing the sky asunder with the sudden presence of intense heat.

Corona’s heart ached with so many emotions they couldn’t even be categorized. She was pretty sure there was guilt in there somewhere, horror, devastation… fear? Fear of what? There was relief – relief from releasing so much energy. But that relief drove her back to guilt. Was there a feeling of happiness from close friends? Of confusion? Of shame?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t know…

Fluttershy pulled her into a hug. Corona knew it was the best thing she could do right now, but it didn’t help any. The hugs didn’t help. The tears didn’t help. Nothing helped.

All she could do was wallow. There was nothing to be done… Not anymore.

She was vaguely aware of her friends leading her away. She didn’t fight it. She was essentially delirious. She wasn’t fully aware of her actions again until Fluttershy placed a plate of home-cooked food in front of her. “Corona, can you eat?”

Corona looked up at Fluttershy and smiled for the first time in a while. “…Yeah. I see… We’re at your house.” Corona levitated a steamed carrot to her mouth. It seemed… flavorless.

“Yeah, we’re all here,” Fluttershy said, gesturing around the living room. Nobody was as bad as Corona, but there wasn’t a dry face in the house. There wasn’t much conversation either.

Corona nodded. “…Thank you all.”

“You don’t need to mention it,” Sugarcoat said.

“I do. I’m also sorry for being away so long.”

“You really don’t need to mention that. Don’t apologize for things that aren’t your fault.”

“Sugarcoat!” Rarity hissed at her.

Corona shook her head at Rarity. “Sometimes… you just need that friend who’s blunt. Even in times like this. Sugarcoat, never stop being you.”

Sugarcoat smiled ever so slightly. “Thanks. I try.”

Trixie jumped up. “Can Trixie still be herself!?”

“If the unicorn Trixie doesn’t find a way to defame you for taking her title.”

“I’ll take that as a yes!”

Corona let out the slightest of chuckles. She put another bite into her mouth. “…What are you all doing these days?”

Fluttershy smiled. “I run the zoo, now.”

“I have taken over Renee’s stores,” Rarity declared. “Rarity for You is under my jurisdiction. Wonderful having an already established line, I must say.”

“Parties,” Pinkie said. “All the parties. When I’m not taking the place of pony Pinkie. Which happens less often now. Or does it!?”

Applejack smirked. “Ah’m workin’ for Eve still. One of her all purpose teams.”

Sugarcoat looked up. “I run data analysis for AddTech. It’s boring. But rewarding.”

Trixie grinned. “TRIXIE has become a great STAGE MAGICIAN!”

“You’re just riding off of unicorn Trixie,” Sugarcoat deadpanned. “Your skill for magic isn’t even that impressive.”

“How many of you can actually use magic, hrm?” Trixie blurted. “That’s right, Corona.”

Applejack, Fluttershy, and Rarity lifted up their necklaces and raised an eyebrow each.

“…You know what I mean.”

Corona was really smiling now. “I’ve missed so much. But… Somehow, I don’t feel bad about that. I’m just proud of you all.”

“We’re proud of you too, dear,” Rarity said, smiling back at her.

Corona felt worse than she had ever felt in her life.

But for the first time since she’d heard about Sparky, she had hope that things would actually end up okay.

~~~

More days passed.

The trial had come.

Eve had chartered one of the Hub’s large auditoriums for the occasion. It was known affectionately as the Reverb Hall, and it had seen many events take place in its walls, ranging from treaty negotiations to concerts and even occasional parties. This was not the first time it would be used for a judicial proceeding, but it was certainly the largest case it had ever considered.

It was possibly the largest case of all time in any of the universes.

The doors were closed to the public, but there were so many leaders and diplomats invested in the results that the thousands of seats were full. Gems, ponies, humans, and a handful of other races dotted the seats. Expressions ranged from nervous to excited to mildly curious. The stage had two opposing tables on it, one for offense and one for defense. There was no place for a judge, but a set of ten seats arranged for the individuals who would serve as the judge and jury for this special case. One individual from each of the eight worlds, and two neutral parties. Everyone had already arrived, but none were in their seats. Most of the people in the prosecution, defense, and jury all knew each other in one way or another. Yellow Diamond was notably the only one not socializing in any way.

White Diamond, as was her custom, was not going to make an appearance. It was rumored that she’d never left her home universe in all these years.

Renee smirked at Daniel. “It’s almost time, Mister Jackson.”

Daniel nodded and let out a sigh. “Yes it is, Miss Renee. Please promise you won’t be mad at me, regardless of what I say.”

“Daniel, I can be professional,” Renee declared, tossing her mane. “Don’t you worry. I can separate my feelings about this case from my feelings about you. Easily. And you can do the same, don’t go doubting yourself.”

Daniel nodded. “We have a job to do.”

Renee reared up and kissed Daniel on the cheek. “That we do, love. We should probably do last minute preparation rather than talk with each other, though.”

Daniel nodded, scratching her behind the ear. The two went to opposite ends of the stage – Daniel to prosecution, Renee to defense. Renee’s table was eventually populated by Yellow Diamond, Blue Diamond, and the Emerald most members of the multiverse were familiar with.

Daniel’s side contained only Garnet, but what he lacked in allies he made up for in documentation. Dozens of old books lined his desk. Daniel had clearly come prepared with all the information.

The Judge seats began to fill up. Evening, a Sapphire, Iroh, Jotaro, Cosmo, O’Neill, Senator Taper from Earth Vitis, and Toph representing Lai’s interests. Blumiere and the Grand Secretariat of the Sparkle Census filled the neutral party seats.

The hall gradually fell silent. Eve waited for her clock to strike two o’clock in local Hub time. Then she cleared her throat. “Today’s case is The Alliance versus The Gem Vein. The Alliance accuses The Gem Vein of committing genocidal crimes against their own race on Gem Vein Earth in the conclusion of the event known as Rose’s Rebellion. Defense, how do you plead?”

“Guilty,” Renee declared. Yellow Diamond frowned in disgust as the word left Renee’s lips, but she didn’t object.

“Very well,” Eve declared, clearing her throat. “The Guilt or Innocence of the Gem Vein is no longer the purpose of this trial. It was not expected to be. The purpose of this trial is to determine the status of the Gem Vein within the Alliance and as part of the Unification. Both the prosecution and defense have prepared opening statements and have witnesses for us to consider. After both have completed their main statements, the trial will become a dialogue between us judges, the defense, and the prosecution. Everyone needs to keep in mind that this is not a criminal trial, nor is it going to follow the judicial proceedings of any one world. Defense? Your statement is first.”

Renee cleared her throat. “Thank you, Charter. It is true that the Gem Vein certainly corrupted thousands of their own kind to end the war on Earth. My clients do not attempt to shy away from that fact, and it should be known that the only reason this event in Gem Vein history was uncovered was because Blue Diamond explicitly showed it to the rest of the multiverse in the name of honesty and transparency. My clients deeply regret the actions they took on Gem Vein Earth.”

Both Blue and Yellow Diamond nodded in confirmation.

Renee continued. “It should be made abundantly clear that Rose’s Rebellion in question happened five thousand years ago, so any individuals who were a part of the attack will have changed drastically from all that time. I submit as evidence Gem documents on Blue Diamond’s behavior prior to the Rebellion and shortly before the Gem Vein was made aware of the multiverse. The behavior is drastically different, indicative of a changed outlook on life. This change only increased after the multiverse came into the equation.

“Furthermore, the Gems had been fighting a war against a Rebellious section of their own society. Death is a very common part of war. The ‘act of genocide’ the Diamonds unleashed on Gem Vein Earth did not kill many Gems, merely corrupt their forms. This happened in a time where the Diamonds were stricken by grief from the loss of their beloved Pink Diamond, they acted out of strong emotion without much consideration. Had they been in the habit of corrupting entire worlds, they would not have fought the war directly for so long. It was a last resort attack that affected many on both sides – both of the enemy, and of their own people.

“One of the primary complaints is that the Diamonds didn’t care about their own Gems on the surface of the world. To answer that, I call the Emerald sitting next to me to stand. Tell them, Emerald.”

Emerald nodded. “I was on Earth the day of the Corrupting Light. Those of us with channels open received orders to retreat and leave Earth. Naturally, we were not told why, so as to not tip off Rose’s army. Not all of us got the messages, and some who did refused to back down from the fight. But many thousands of our army made it off of Earth before the corrupting light covered the entire world. We were not left to rot and die, we were told to leave. But it was war, and they could not take the chance that any part of Rose’s army would be left. Given the existence of that fusion with the defense, it seems even giving us that warning may have been too much.”

“Thank you,” Renee said. “As you can all see, this was not a true genocide. This was a tactical military decision made eons ago – a decision the Gems regret completely.” She gestured to Blue Diamond to stand.

Blue Diamond rose. “When we heard that Pink had been shattered…” She paused, but managed to keep her composure. “We demanded that something be done, that those who were responsible pay for what they’d done. What we should have done was just admit defeat and pull out of Earth. Without Pink, there was little reason left to do anything to Earth. But we didn’t – we were angry. It was wrong and rash, but I hope you can understand why we did the way we did.”

Renee gestured to Yellow Diamond. She stood tall and spoke with authority. “I concur with Blue Diamond. What was done was a mistake. It is not one that can be rectified directly, but we seek to make it right through other means.” She sat back down.

Renee breathed easier. She was convincing. That’s something. “As is evident, this is a sore spot in Gem Vein history that need not restrict their relationships with other universes in the present. The multiverse has taught them the value of organic life and adaptability. We, as an alliance, do not hold their past acts of organic destruction or conformism against them, why should we oust them for this one action made in a fit of emotion so long ago?” Renee smiled and sat down. “I rest my case for now, Charter.”

Eve turned to Daniel and Garnet. “Prosecution, give us your statements.”

Daniel stood up and cleared his throat. “Of course, Charter. While technically most of what the defense has said is true, they have left out many key details. The most devastating of which is the other war crimes committed during Rose’s Rebellion.” He adjusted his suit collar. “There are two particularly atrocious acts, both of which came from the same source. There are labs on Gem Vein Earth devoted to one purpose – experimentation on Gems themselves. This normally would not be much cause for concern. After all, Gems are largely artificial beings who are made rather than born. The process of creating Gems is more science than biology, and of course needs experimentation to move forward. What happened on those labs was not that. Gems were shattered, but not allowed to die. They were preserved and forcibly fused together in horrendous experiments that created mutant Gem beings that had no idea what they were or where they belonged. This fate was significantly worse than corruption, for at least a corrupted Gem has a single mind within it, not many fragments of a mind. Corrupted Gems can move and live at least like animals. The fused fragments don’t even have that.

“It only gets worse. During the last days of Rose’s Rebellion, these Gem shards were used to create a superweapon known as the Cluster. An uncountable number of these shards were embedded within the crust of the Earth, fused together to create a single Gem of incomprehensible size. It was left in the crust long after the war ended, because the Diamond Authority knew that the minds within the Cluster would eventually construct a body for themselves. The formation of that body would destroy the entire Earth in an instant.” Gasps could be heard from the crowd. “Luckily the Cluster is confirmed to be dormant indefinitely, posing no further risk to Earth. However, this changes nothing. The Diamond Authority did not actually admit defeat in their corrupting rage. While they did not kill all their gems, they left them to die.

“No attempts have been made by the Diamond Authority to reclaim corrupted Gems. They were satisfied to just let the Cluster kill them all.”

Renee knew the retort she had for that one. The Diamond Authority did eventually go to check on the Cluster to find it already deactivated. They had the intent to keep it from forming. It was a weak piece of information, but it was something.

“I ask you all to remember that Gems think on a much slower timescale than most of us biological creatures. To them, five thousand years is more comparable to fifty, or even five in the case of the truly ancient ones such as the Diamonds themselves. Rose’s Rebellion is a recent memory in the minds of the Diamonds, as can be seen with Blue Diamond’s continued emotional difficulty in discussing the event. Furthermore, I suggest that the Diamond Authority does not regret its decision, and in particular that Yellow Diamond is merely feigning regret.”

Yellow Diamond stood up, ready to yell something at Daniel, but Renee managed to calm her down before she said anything.

Daniel had been disoriented slightly by Yellow Diamond’s fierce expression. “…The Diamond Authority has made no active attempts to change their society, or even consider change, in almost the entire history we have on file – at least until the discovery of the multiverse. But this change was artificial. It was brought on by political pressure, so it cannot be considered reflective of their true intentions. To illustrate what the Diamond Authority is really like to those who defy it, I have with me one of the few uncorrupted members of Rose’s Rebellion, a Gem named Garnet.” Daniel gestured for Garnet to stand.

Garnet nodded, standing tall. “I am Garnet. I am a fusion of two Gems of different types, a Sapphire and a Ruby.” To demonstrate, she split into two, separate gems that had been in each of her hands forming a small red and blue body. The two waved, then rejoined together to become Garnet once again. “This fusion, this is who I am. And for becoming that fusion, part of me was sentenced to be shattered by Blue Diamond for breaking the structured order. Even after all the sanctions posed by your multiverse, they still do not allow mixed fusions. The punishment may be banishment instead of shattering, but make no mistake, banishment to what may be considered a better life is still rejection. For those of you who think all of that is in the past, that the Gems have changed over the last few years, I can say that is not the case. The few of us left on Earth have had to fight against many Homeworld Gems. They attacked us, kidnapped some of us, and have a zoo filled with human beings.”

Blue Diamond put a hand to her face. Renee couldn’t help but feel proud of her husband for finding that bit of information and telling Garnet to use it.

Garnet continued. “And on a more personal note, I encourage the rejection of the Diamond Authority and the Gem Vein from Unification. My race is not one that changes easily, and they are very proud. I can guarantee they do not see you as equals. They may no longer see you as fuel to power their own creation, but I assure you, they will never see you as with them. Even Rose Quartz, the leader of our rebellion, was not fighting because she saw humans as equals. She was fighting because she thought nature was beautiful and needed to be protected. It took her and the rest of us many, many years of living on Earth to finally understand what humans meant, that humans were just like us. It took us centuries of living among them to understand that, and we were the Gems fighting for them. What do you think that means for the Gems that wanted to extinguish them?”

Garnet sat down, letting the question linger. Daniel stood up after a few seconds. “I hope it is evident that the Gems are not worthy to be in our Unified Multiversal Alliance. Their change is false, their ways are militaristic and violent, and they do not truly regret what they have done. It will only bring about disaster for the Unified Worlds were they to be added to it.” He sat down. “I rest my case for now, Charter.”

Eve took in a breath. “Then let us move to the next phase…”

~~~

Corona had gotten a recorded message from Sombra nearly as soon as she’d returned.

...She been avoiding opening it.

But she was sitting here, on a couch, doing nothing. Lethargic…

Her emotions screamed at her not to press play, but she did anyway.

“Hey, amiga! Long time no see!” Sombra’s voice filled her ears - and her face appeared on the interior of her sunglasses. “So, a lot’s happened while you’ve been away. So, here’s a list of things you missed! So, we… We uh…” She sighed, displaying the ‘list of things’ on screen for a moment. “Just save that image and look at it later. Who says hello to an old friend with ‘here’s what you missed’? Silly, silly Sombra.”

She leaned back in her chair. “I should be welcoming you! We should be celebrating! If I wasn’t a wanted criminal I’d be there myself, in person, taking you out for drinks. ...Yes, I have gotten up to some trouble while you’ve been away. Poking at the big mystery - found someone named Monika that gave some big clues, I think - and it’s a great…”

Sombra sighed. “...I missed you, okay? I didn’t have anyone to talk to and I didn’t know how much I missed having someone to talk to. I didn’t have anyone to watch my back, tell me if I was going a bit too far... I… Oi caramba, look at me, breaking down a little here.”

“You know what, screw it, I’m just sending this, no retakes. Welcome back, Corona. Call me sometime. Or I’ll call you, you know how it is.” The message ended.

Corona allowed herself to smile.

She hadn’t changed at all.

~~~

The trial lasted well into the night, but eventually the judges left to confer. They returned about half an hour later, having made a decision.

All ten took their seats. Some looked worried, while others confident.

Eve looked from Renee and the Diamonds, to Daniel and Garnet. “A decision has been made. Do we bar the Gems from Unification? The decision was no, seven to three.”

The Gems in the audience sighed in relief.

“Another question was asked. Do we punish the Gems for what they’ve done, or do nothing?” Eve looked around. “The vote was tied five to five, so the Gem Vein Representative, Sapphire, had her vote dropped. This means there will be punishments.”

The Gems sucked in air sharply, no longer relieved.

“The exact nature of the punishment was what we discussed for the majority of the deliberation time.” Eve fixed the Diamonds with a steely glare. “If you do not accept these terms, you will be barred from Unification.”

Blue and Yellow Diamond nodded.

“You are to devote a significant portion of your scientific research to finding a cure for corrupted gems,” Eve declared. “We will assist you in that in any way we can. You are to give all members of Rose’s Rebellion full amnesty for the crimes they have committed as part of the Rebellion. You are to make official contact with the humans of Gem Vein Earth, offering them the opportunity to become part of the multiversal alliance as part of the Gem Vein. This does not mean you have to adapt them to your society, as that would likely be impossible, but you are to treat them as a nation under your care. Perhaps not as equals, but as a child at the very least.”

Blue and Yellow Diamond nodded. Yellow Diamond looked displeased, but not that displeased.

“I’m not done,” Eve declared. “Those are just the requirements relating to Gem Vein Earth. There are a few others. First of all, you are to create a department to find any alien races on worlds you may have subjugated that have survived what you’ve done. You are to offer them rehabilitation. I understand this will be difficult, and again we will help with it, but most of the resources will come from you.”

Eve paused, narrowing her eyes.

“There is one final requirement. All Gem experimentation labs are to be supervised by a scientist from another universe.”

Yellow Diamond slammed her fists on the table. “You can’t do that! That’s private! We even agreed it was private when we declassified everything!”

“We’ve changed our mind,” Eve declared. I didn’t vote for this, I voted for allowing differing-Gem fusions, but this is the big one we decided to go for. “Does this mean you refuse the terms?”

“YES! We’ll be better without you!” Yellow Diamond blurted.

“No, we accept the terms,” Blue Diamond stated.

Eve blinked. She was about to call for deliberation, but then a call came through a device at Renee’s table.

Renee blinked. “…White Diamond accepts the terms.”

“Are you certain?” Eve asked.

Yellow and Blue Diamond looked at the device. The two of them nodded. Yellow Diamond clearly wasn’t happy about this.

Eve smiled. “With that, I declare this trial over!” She summoned a little hammer and hit it against a table.

Chaos erupted as everyone started talking at once. It wasn’t an angry chaos, but a tense one. Everyone either felt like a bullet had just been dodged or they had just been shot by a bullet.

In this commotion, Eve found Garnet. “Sorry,” Eve said. “I tried to get you what you wanted.”

Garnet nodded. “I understand. It… matters a lot to me, but even I can see why you chose to watch the experiments. Crimes against Gem-kind are important. After all, multi-gem fusions will just get banished and get to live their lives… Without their old friends. Or stability.” She sighed.

“I’m sure it will happen eventually,” Eve said. “Good news is there’s a loophole. We got you complete amnesty. They can’t touch you.”

Garnet smiled. “Heh. Thanks.”

“You can be the activist that changes them, you know. If you want.”

“I might just try to live a simple life,” Garnet shrugged. “Not sure yet. The future is unclear. I do know one thing I need to do though. Excuse me.”

Garnet walked right up to Blue Diamond and cleared her throat. Blue Diamond looked down at her with her sad eyes.

“I accept your apology,” Garnet said, holding out a hand.

A smile came to Blue Diamond’s face. “…Thank you, Garnet.” She shook Garnet’s hand. “I hope to see more of you.”

“I think you will.”

And the trial began to die down. The sanctions went in place, and the Gems adjusted to the drastic changes.

Unification was only a matter of time. The eight worlds… They were ready.

After the Vein Trial, there were no more major obstacles.

The next big moment would be when it was finalized.

Author's Note

GM's Note:

For Steven Universe fans, this was written a few months ago, before certain information came to light. I did add a few things (White Diamond's glow) based on new information, but this remained mostly the same.

To clarify, we can assume (as of this publication) that everything revealed in Steven Universe is true for this Gem Vein universe. However, the revelation of what really happened during Rose's Rebellion and Steven's Secret will remain secrets to the Diamonds forever - there is now no reason for them to be told or uncover the secret.

Steven and the Crystal Gems exist as part of the alliance now, but as of yet I have no plans to visit them again.

-GM, master of pies.

050 - Whatever Remains, No Matter How Improbable...

Doctor John H Watson woke up with the distinct feeling that something was off. He looked around, expecting to find some criminal or other standing over him with a gun, knife, or some other odd implement of aggression. There was no such thing. He was in his room at 221B Baker Street, London, just like every other morning. He blinked slowly, shaking his head. It still felt like something was wrong.

He got up and walked to the kitchen area. As always, the counter was covered in the experiments of one Sherlock Holmes, quite possibly the most eccentric and brilliant man on the face of the planet. At the very least, he was the most famous private detective in the world, despite being an ‘odd nut’.

The Sherlock in question was sitting in one of his reading chairs, looking intently at his wallet. John took this in stride – Sherlock often found any number of mundane things interesting for seemingly no reason. If the detective decided to share his mind, he would. Otherwise Watson wasn’t going to push.

“John,” Sherlock said, suddenly. “Have you looked at your wallet recently?”

“Hm? Why?”

“Just take a look at your wallet. It’s important.”

John shook his head slightly. There was no talking to Sherlock when he got like this. He walked over to the desk in which he kept his wallet, taking it out. “Did you steal any of my cards for a game?” he wondered, getting no answer. Watson flipped through his wallets. “All the cards are here, Sherlock.”

“Check the name on them.”

John rolled his eyes. “It says James Watson, like always.” He stopped short. “Wait, James!?”

“I’ve apparently become Steven Holmes,” Sherlock commented. “Every single one of these cards, Steven Holmes. And that’s not the only thing that’s off. Everything in this apartment has been moved.”

John looked around. “Things look different, but you always move things around. It’s not unusual.”

“But I remember when I move things around. And the spray paint?” Sherlock pointed at an empty wall. “It’s not there. It’s always there. We’ve never cleaned it.”

John blinked. “Did Mrs. Hudson finally get fed up with it?”

Sherlock walked up to the wall and ran his fingers across it. “This is not new wallpaper. This wallpaper hasn’t been altered in years. Far too much wear on it. There’s no sign that there were ever vandals in here.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. And that concerns me. Our names have seemingly been slightly altered overnight, the apartment has numerous minor differences that can’t just be explained away, and the phone isn’t ringing with the follow-up to the Richard case. That woman was the type to always call you precisely ten minutes early, and it’s ten minutes after she promised to call.”

John felt prompted to look out the window. He frowned. “Isn’t that house supposed to be a different color? …Sherlock?” John turned to find Sherlock on his phone. “…Sherlock, what are yo-”

“Contacts are all different as well,” Sherlock stated. “Matthew Holmes, not Mycroft. There’s names in here I have no clue who they represent, if anyone we know at all.” His fingers flew furiously across the phone’s screen. He threw the phone across the room and went to his laptop. “At least the password still works…”

John walked over to Sherlock. He didn’t bother asking what the detective was looking for, Sherlock would explain soon enough.

Sherlock typed his new name Steven Holmes into the search engine. A few results popped up, showing “Steven Holmes” to be a small-time detective living in the London area with a couple of high-profile cases, but not all that many.

“What the- have we been erased?” John said aloud. “How does someone do that?”

“I would suspect advanced hacking, if not for one detail,” Sherlock said. “The cards. You can’t just replace those. Too many details are off…” Sherlock read more about “Steven Holmes”, and eventually found an interesting sentence.

He’s basically the legendary Sherlock Holmes in all but name. And almost even that!

Sherlock instantly moved to search Sherlock Holmes. What he found surprised him immensely.

A series of books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about the titular detective Sherlock Holmes…

Sherlock absorbed all the information he could about the books – mysteries that focused on the art of deduction through miniscule details. It was a reflection of his life, except in a much earlier time. John was there, Mycroft was there… Many people he knew were there. But they were all slightly different. Less rounded…

“Sherlock, what on earth is going on?”

“I’m running out of explanations that seem grounded in reality,” Sherlock admitted, sitting back from the computer. “It seems as if the structure of the world we live in has changed on a fundamental level. As far as the world is concerned, Sherlock Holmes never really existed. He was fiction, and an old one at that. Yet everything seems to mirror our lives…” He tapped his fingers together. “I have two explanations.”

“Really? I have none.”

“The first is that someone has gone to an extremely large amount of trouble to play a very faulty prank on the world. I find this doubtful, because there’s no way to just ‘create’ a classic story revered by millions unless someone is somehow replacing our Internet - which would be nigh impossible to pull off and slow our connection speed significantly. The other, seemingly unrelated details, also cast doubt on this.”

“The second explanation must be really absurd if that’s still one you’re considering.”

“We’re in an alternate universe,” Sherlock said. “One where we are not Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Where we did not have all our impressive cases. One where there are a set of stories about us…”

“I was right. That is absurd.”

“When all other explanations have been eliminated, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

John groaned inwardly. That had not been the first time Sherlock had uttered the phrase. “I think I prefer the explanation that God is playing a joke on us.”

“Which, if true, could still result in both options,” Sherlock said, putting his hands over his mouth. “For now, I’m going to assume the latter is true, but keep the idea that this is some elaborate ruse in the back. And if this is another universe… We need to learn as much about it as we can. What’s different?” Sherlock pulled a laptop out from under the table and gave it to John. “Start searching.”

“For what?”

“Anything. Historic events. The history of the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in those books. Yourself. For all we know, even the simplest things we’ve taken for granted could have been altered…”

“Are you boys okay?” an old woman’s voice called to them from outside their door. “I hear commotion!”

“Yes, Mrs. Hudson,” Sherlock called without thinking.

“Well. Be sure to at least go outside today. It’s not healthy to be shut up all the time.”

“At least Mrs. Hudson is the same,” John said, allowing himself to smile.

“Quite,” Sherlock deadpanned.

~~~

“I’m convinced,” Sherlock said finally. “There’s no way this is a joke. This is another world, or at the very least history has been altered on a fundamental level and for some reason we’re still aware of it.”

John sat back in his chair. “Mrs. Hudson would have said something by now if she knew as well… So what, are we alone in this?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions,” Sherlock said, furrowing his brow. “We know very little about what happened. I am certain it happened while we were sleeping, and that yesterday everything was still normal. The fact that both of us are here suggests to me that this is no accident. If it were some natural phenomenon why would it take just us and not Mrs. Hudson?”

“So someone did this intentionally?”

“I didn’t say intentionally. I just said it wasn’t natural.” Sherlock stood up and started pacing. “The world we’ve found ourselves in is almost indistinguishable aside from small details. I recognize everything I’ve seen with the exception of their version of ‘Sherlock Holmes.’ That influence on history is clearly not zero, given how every person on the planet seems to understand what the name represents and where it comes from…”

“So you’re saying you’re more popular when you’re a fictional character?”

“John that’s not what I’m saying at all don’t be absurd.”

John shrugged, taking the retort in stride.

Sherlock tapped the wall, furrowing his brow. “Recent events in history are scrambled somewhat, but that may only be because we weren’t involved in this world. So… That tells us…”

“That we are characters in a book here, and that’s all most people care about.”

“No… Well yes, yes it does, but- hold it.” Sherlock looked outside. “James and Steven are likely in our bodies back at our home. That is, assuming we swapped minds and not bodies. Too many assumptions for my liking here...”

“I can’t imagine that going over very well,” John muttered.

“Don’t sell them short,” Sherlock said. “From the way the apartment is arranged, I can detect very few differences between us and them. It may just be that the difference in names and the existence of a ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in popular culture twisted the perception of what they did… It may also explain why their names are different, while Mrs. Hudson’s isn’t. What self-respecting parent would name their child after such a well-known figure?” He tapped his fingers to his head. “We’re learning more already, John.”

“You’re learning things. I’m just absorbing information being thrown at me like a train.”

“That is what you’re good at!” Sherlock declared with a smirk. “Regardless, I expect the other versions of us will be rather delighted in their sudden fame, and are likely wondering the same things we are wondering now, and making similar deductions. Though I suppose they have access to your blog as a way to fit in…”

John went back to his computer and searched up his blog. “Huh. Sherlock? They have a blog too.”

“…They do?”

“Not as big as the one we had, but it’s definitely here. It describes their cases…” He scrolled through some of them. “We took a few of these, but most of them are different.”

Sherlock was already on the blog on his laptop, reading it far faster than a regular human being. “Curious. James Watson is uncannily similar to you. Slightly less confident in himself, less satisfied about life, but otherwise exactly the same.”

“Are you kidding? This guy’s nothing like me. Look at that! A typo! I would neve-”

“That exact typo exists on your version of the blog,” Sherlock interrupted.

John closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “All right, fair point. I’m not unique. Point taken.”

“Glad you’ve finally accepted your own assembly-line personality.”

John didn’t give this a response. “Found a file. Most recent case of ‘Steven’ and ‘James’. They were doing something for ‘Matthew’… ‘James’ complained that he couldn’t write down any notes because of what it involved.”

“There goes the possibility of lying to Mycr- ‘Matthew’,” Holmes said. “We don’t have any knowledge of the case…” Sherlock narrowed his eyes, a smile crawling up his lips. “…John, I found something interesting.”

“What?”

“If the event that moved us to this world happened last night, perhaps there were other events that happened the same time. Since last night, virtually every government on the planet has begun moving, and moving fast. Almost as if they’re on some kind of alert…”

“Every government?” John blinked. “What, did world leaders get replaced or something?”

“Perhaps… Or perhaps we are just a side effect of some larger, more concerning event.”

“…You’re going to treat this like a case, aren’t you?”

Sherlock grinned. “What else would I do?”

“Right. So, what’s the first step?”

Sherlock pulled out his phone. “We call Matthew Holmes.”

John blinked. Sherlock put the phone to his ear and put on a fake smile. “Hello Mycroft!”

John glared at Sherlock. What are you doing?

Sherlock’s eyes widened. “Well, this is unexpected.”

John shook his head, trying hard to hear what the other half of the conversation was, unable to do so.

“I was playing on what I assumed our dynamic here would be.” More silence. “We will be there.” He hung up.

“What was that about!?” John asked.

“It appears that Mycroft has been dragged here along with us,” Sherlock said. “Which just makes this much, much more interesting. We have to go meet him in a secure location. I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.”

~~~

Mycroft Holmes was often described by his younger brother as the British Government.

It was not all that much of an exaggeration. Mycroft had his fingers in virtually every pie the United Kingdom cared about, and some it didn’t. He was one of those men nobody in the general population knew, but everyone who actually held real power did. Mycroft could not be said to enjoy much, but his particular position in life was something he held a sort of attachment to.

To say he was currently rattled was an understatement.

Even so, let it not be said that Mycroft was a man who wore his emotions on his sleeve. Everyone who saw him would think he was acting completely normally. That is, except his brother.

“You look like you just crawled out of a warzone,” Sherlock remarked upon arrival at the abandoned factory.

John looked at Mycroft, trying to find any hole in the man’s stern exterior. He gave up after a few seconds and just took Sherlock’s word for it.

Mycroft nodded curtly to his younger brother. “I believe my awakening was rather more alarming than yours.”

“Let me guess, you thought you were going mad?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Didn’t get that far. John confirmed I wasn’t crazy before I’d asked the question.”

“Good for you,” Mycroft deadpanned. “But that is not what I was referring to by alarm. I take it you noticed details about your lives had changed?”

“Brother, please, remember who you’re talking to,” Sherlock scoffed.

“You never know…” Mycroft said, turning around. “I realized very shortly after waking that the files on my desk were of conspiracies I was not familiar with. Operations that had nothing to do with anything I had under my purview prior. As a man in my position, I knew how disastrous this would be after only a day of ignorance.”

“…What did you do?” John asked.

Mycroft folded his hands. “I had placed numerous secret documents onto an encrypted flash drive in a location I shall not reveal. The purpose of this driv-”

“Was to, if you went insane and forgot everything, remind yourself,” Sherlock finished.

Mycroft ignored the comment. “The drive’s purpose was to give me power in case the British Government collapsed, became too corrupt, or my hand was forced through some other means. Imagine my delight when it turned out that ‘Matthew’ had the same idea. I only read a short bit of it before you called, but I have been pouring over it the entire time I’ve been waiting. The story contained within is absurd to the extreme, but I assure you it is legitimate and will blow everything you may have discovered out of the proverbial water.”

“We’re characters in a classic series of books here,” John blurted. “Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, you know.”

Mycroft raised an eyebrow. “Aliens own the Earth and are preparing it for colonization efforts in this world. The world’s governments are mostly compliant or ignorant of this fact. Furthermore, I am apparently a party to this heinous conspiracy. Let me assure you that I have since imagined at least thirty different ways to dismember ‘Matthew’ since learning of his involvement.”

John blinked. “…I think he wins, Sherlock.”

Sherlock stared at Mycroft in disbelief. “You’re serious.”

“Do you know me to kid?”

“I know you to mess with my head from time to time,” Sherlock said, beginning to pace. “It’s almost as if we’re in the world of a story. Larger than life conflict, great government conspiracy…”

“You could use that to describe our lives before,” John pointed out. “You know, without the aliens. That’s new. Still processing the fact that aliens exist here.”

“They do not back home, rest assured,” Mycroft declared.

“You could just be covering…” John muttered.

“Believe me or not, the fact remains that they do here.”

“Could describe ourselves…” Sherlock pondered. “What if that’s it? We, the three of us were attracted here not for any specific purpose, but to be part of this… ‘story’.”

“Sherlock, you’ve gone mad,” Mycroft said, shaking his head. “We’re not in a story, and we’ve never been in a story. This is just a world where the incredible is true.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes, but John recognized the look of defeat in his face. That was a little crazy, even considering the whole alternate-world-with-alien-conspiracy thing. “There’s been a sudden increase of activity since last night,” Sherlock said. “Something’s happened with the aliens, hasn’t there?”

Mycroft nodded, producing a file from his coat. “This was one of the files on my desk. I didn’t recognize what it meant until later.” He handed it to Sherlock. Turning to John, he summarized. “It appears as though the alien overlords made a mistake that’s sending waves through their society. We, as lowly human servants, do not get to know precisely what this mistake was, but we do know it involves something that isn’t from Earth. A third party of some sort or other. Around the same time world governments were sent this image with the orders ‘find and kill’.”

The three crowded around the image Mycroft had just produced. It was an image of five people. Four men, one woman. The image wasn’t of the highest quality, but it was easy to tell that none of these people could be considered normal. The woman had the posture of a frog. One of the men was far larger and more muscular than a human should have been. Another man wore a bizarre outfit that looked like it had been run through a straight razor, while another held a sword that didn’t belong in any sort of modern world. The last individual would have been completely normal, were he not holding a potted cactus in his hand.

“Any deductions?” Mycroft asked his brother.

“Accounting for the painfully obvious fact that they’re from another world, my certainty is significantly lower. That said… the woman and the giant man are Japanese, though what Japan produces giants or frogs is beyond me. The woman, despite acting like an animal, is in such a posture that suggests she’s ready for battle, indicating experience. The giant man is acting as the leader, given how all the others stand behind him, though the swordsman and woman are keeping their distance. Perhaps they don’t fully accept his authority. Swordsman is a simple man with simple goals, though as to what they are I have no idea. The bizarre man is an artist of some sort, for only those types would wear that clothing. Not to mention the fountain pen earrings. And the man with the cactus…” Sherlock stared at the man with the cactus. “I have no idea why he’s holding a cactus. I can tell he’s used to getting his hands dirty and given the way his hands are finely holding the cactus, I’d say archeologist.”

Mycroft nodded. “Of course. You forgot to note that the woman is staring right at the camera. She has intelligence.”

“Not so much ‘forgot’ as realized looking straight at a camera does not guarantee intelligence.”

“It was a hidden camera.”

“Information I did not have,” Sherlock pointed out. “Regardless, this is a team ready for action. They invaded one of your bases, didn’t they?”

“That was never stated directly in the report, but it is true,” Mycroft said. “It just so happens that the base they entered was one I recognized from our home. Reading the files on it in this one, I learned that it held a fully operational spaceship. They presumably wanted to take it and use it. If we are being ordered to kill them…”

“They didn’t get to the ship,” Sherlock finished. “Curious… They will likely try again, will they not?”

“I know almost nothing about their motivations.”

“Determination,” John said. “You can see it in their eyes. They’ll try again, or try something similar.”

“Then we’ll just need to catch them,” Sherlock declared.

Mycroft and John stared at him.

“To talk to them, not to hand them over to the alien overlords. I’m not evil.”

“That’s up for debate,” John commented.

“Nobody has faith in me,” Sherlock shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. We need to meet them so we can learn about them. They are likely to know more about the situation than we do. Unless you want to attempt to talk to your alien overlords directly, Mycroft?”

“Good God, no, the chances they’ll know in an instant are too high. I’m not suicidal.”

“Then we must determine where they’re going to go next,” Sherlock decreed. “How many bases with spaceships are there in the United Kingdom?”

“You know, the kinds of questions that are being asked today seem straight out of the asylum,” John commented.

Mycroft ignored him. “Seven others.”

“I assume you have files on all of them?” Sherlock asked.

“But of course.”

“Good. Let’s cross-examine them all…” Mycroft brought out his laptop, the flash drive plugged in. He brought up the files on the spaceship docks, and the two brothers pored over the information, arguing with each other over what conclusions were accurate.

John just walked to a wall and sat down on an empty crate, staring at nothing.

He made a list of absurd stuff that had happened today.

1) They had woken up in another universe.

2) They were characters in a classic series of books important to British history.

3) There were aliens that had this planet under their control.

4) The aliens were hunting a strange group of humans.

5) One of those humans was holding a potted cactus.

A cactus.

That was the worst part about this, for some reason.

He considered if this could be a dream for the umpteenth time since he woke up that morning. But everything felt real – even his breathing and heartbeat, which are rarely noticeable in dreams. He could feel the air blowing through the factory and was painfully aware of the hard texture of the crate. Nothing was dulled. This was real.

He supposed someone could have slipped him some psychoactive drugs. He wondered why Sherlock wasn’t considering that…

Probably because Sherlock actually knew what that felt like.

“That’s it,” Sherlock said, certainty in his voice. “This is the place they’ll go. If they need a ship, this is the best place. The hangar is in the perfect location for a quick infiltration, the ship could be flown right through the roof if needed, and it’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere.”

“Security will be highly increased,” Mycroft pointed out. “They will have figured this out as well. I know you’re used to being a step ahead of everyone, Sherlock, but the aliens have vast intelligence.”

“Worthy opponents.”

“You’re crazy,” John said, shaking his head.

Sherlock nodded in confirmation. “Regardless, the security will be a problem for them, not for us. We have you.”

Mycroft nodded. “The only problem is I expect a few of the guards will actually be aliens in disguise.”

“What, now they can look like us?” John blurted. “How crazy does this get?”

“There’s a black virus in their blood that will kill you from the inside out.”

“I need to stop asking questions.”

Sherlock stood up. “Mycroft, you need to keep your job for at least the rest of the day.”

“Doable.”

“Tonight, we walk right into a maximum-security government base that hides aliens.”

John put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “Nothing ever changes, does it?”

“Not with Sherlock Holmes,” Mycroft commented.

~~~

The base in question was just known as Site 81. It was a somewhat small compound, only containing seven buildings, five of which were nothing more than warehouses. The entirety of Site 81 was lined with ten-meter electric fences, coursing with enough power to kill an elephant several times over.

The sun was setting when Mycroft, Sherlock, and John arrived. They made no attempt to hide their approach. They drove across the single dirt path in one of Mycroft’s many black vehicles, faces forward. They were halted at the front gates by a pair of men who asked for identification. As Mycroft provided the identification for ‘Matthew Holmes’, Sherlock observed the men closely. One was a man, late thirties, who really hated his job and was waiting for a transfer. The other… Sherlock found him baffling. He stood with completely perfect posture, his expression never shifted from neutral, and his eyes moved without the rapid movement seen in almost everyone else.

He’s one of the aliens, Sherlock deduced. …The deductions I’ve been making today…

The human guard nodded. “Welcome, Mr. Holmes. The Director will want to see you.”

John tensed. That wasn’t part of the plan.

Mycroft took it in stride. “Very well. I have some questions for him myself.”

“Good luck with that,” the guard said, shaking his head. He opened the gate, allowing them to drive in.

“The Director,” Sherlock muttered to himself. “Alan Baker. A complete unknown outside of the file on this location.”

“We’re actually going to talk to him?” John blurted.

“Why not? It’ll make it easier to get near the ship,” Mycroft commented. “Not to mention we do have an actual sanctioned reason to be here. We deduced this is where they would attack. We were ordered to kill them. This is just part of following those orders.”

“Two of us aren’t supposed to be here!”

“John, calm yourself. Let me and Sherlock do all the talking. We know how to act like we know what we’re talking about.”

John wanted to object but found he couldn’t. “If he asks me a question, we’re all dead and you know it.”

A soldier – human, Sherlock quickly deduced – arrived. “The Director would like to see you.”

“We’ve been informed,” Mycroft said, gesturing for the soldier to lead them on.

Sherlock took the opportunity to examine the base they were in – he saw several people who were actually aliens. Now that he knew what to look for, they were pathetically easy to spot. They lacked the humanity everyone else did, wearing their bodies like a suit. Which was basically what it was to them, Sherlock realized. People who didn’t know would consider them uncanny.

The base itself was pretty standard. Sherlock saw military vehicles, crates of materials and technology, and security checkpoints around every building. They were approaching the central warehouse. Mycroft had to slide his identification card through the checkpoint just to be let into the warehouse, but it let him in without fuss.

“You sure you want them with you?” the soldier asked.

“Yes,” Mycroft said. “Though prepare a wipe for Mr. Watson, in case he’s driven insane.”

John blinked. “…You’re joking, right?”

The soldier looked sadly at John and shook his head. “Of course, Mr. Holmes.”

The inside of the warehouse was decidedly more interesting than the outside. Sherlock knew classified technology when he saw it – metals that shone in ways unlike any alloy he knew, chemicals that glowed bright colors, and an extremely large number of warning signs everywhere. Because everything was so alien, he found himself annoyingly unable to determine what most of the experiments around him actually did. He was fairly certain the blue ring to the left was an antigravity device, but the rest could have been sheep shearing devices for all he knew.

They entered another security checkpoint, which let Mycroft in easily. This section of the warehouse wasn’t very open and resembled the interior of an office building, rather than a mad scientist’s lab. They were taken to an elevator that went into the ground a few levels, opening up on a large, white hallway. The soldier led them to the end of the hallway, where another security checkpoint demanded attention. Mycroft put his card in again, opening the third area of the warehouse to them.

They found themselves in a tremendous open space – they could see the walls and ceiling of the warehouse around them, but also where the earth had been cut away to make more space. The prized possession of the base floated in front of their eyes. The ship.

It was an elongated crescent shape, with a single dome on top that could fit maybe two people inside. Its color was a soft gold, while the dome was a dark blue. Its front was angled at the ground, looking right at Sherlock and the others, while the two tails pointed toward the top of the warehouse.

“Hm,” Sherlock said, raising an eyebrow. “A lot of mass for a two-seater.”

The soldier nodded. “I don’t pretend to understand why it looks like that. Ask the Director. He’s this way.” He led them to a cage-lift that barely fit the four of them. The lift closed, raising them far into the air. Soon, they were above the ship, above the interior offices they had passed through, and high enough to see the area where experiments were taking place.

At the top of the lift was a single adjoined room: an office with big windows in every direction. There was only one occupant – a man in a large chair, his back turned to them. The soldier opened the door and gestured for the three of them to enter. Then the soldier left.

The office was bare of all decoration. There was a desk, writing utensils, a computer, and chairs. A rod-shaped device sat on the desk and a large console with a lot of buttons sat at the left of the room, presumably tied to all the major functions of the base.

“Why are you here?” Alan Baker asked from his seat, not turning to address his visitors.

Mycroft placed the photo on the desk. “We were told to kill them. We believe they are targeting this facility. Even if you have it under control, I decided I could come and provide oversight.”

“Reasonable. Why have you brought those two with you?”

“They were working for me on a separate matter at the same time. I presume you are not then aware of my brother’s deduction skills?”

“I know of Steven Holmes. Have you increased their clearance?”

“Temporarily, given the urgency of this command. I do have a wipe prepared for John if it becomes clear he cannot handle what is done here.”

“Good. I see you are taking the correct precautions.” Alan Baker turned around, revealing himself to clearly not be a human. He was humanoid in shape, but that was where the similarities ended. His body was covered in smooth, chrome armor with orange highlights. His head was smooth, hairless, and dominated by two solid black eyes.

John took a shaky step back. Mycroft and Sherlock held their ground.

“I may order him wiped after this is over regardless,” Alan commented, standing up. He was shorter than them, but the armor certainly made him threatening. “As for Steven, it would be preferable if he continued to work for us consistently. We shall see.”

“Do you care to explain who the people are we’re trying to hunt?” Sherlock asked.

“I’m sure you’ve deduced much of it already.”

“It would help to have someone who actually knows what’s going on fill in the holes.”

“I know less than you’d like,” Alan admitted. “At 23:53 local time last night, our satellites observed the meeting of two separate interdimensional units from unknown sources. We intercepted this meeting and acquired one of their dimensionally-oriented devices. It did not take long for us to uncover how the surprisingly primitive piece of technology worked. We used it to detect a signal they had sent out, asking for assistance from another universe to ‘deal’ with us. We were able to analyze the device with enough accuracy to generate a counter-frequency with it, preventing the creation of any portals. We were forced to initiate this in the universe the teams had fled to as well, to ensure they did not attack with a greater force in the indeterminate future. After they realized this was the case, they attacked Site 27. The ship there was destroyed before they could act.”

“You’re right, I did deduce most of that,” Sherlock said. “You don’t know anything about who they are?”

“Before yesterday we had no idea they existed,” Alan pointed out. “But it has already become evident that they are a significant threat. They have a number of traits that have not been observed in this universe. The interpreted messages indicate they plan to interfere with our long-term plans for Earth. I don’t need to tell you why that cannot happen.”

“You do not,” Mycroft agreed. “I assume you have counters to these traits?”

“Advanced technology from above has been moved to this base for defense purposes and several dozen bounty hunters are on site. Most targets only attract one or two of the bounty hunters. This is a special case. They will fall here, today. If not, the self-destruct will be activated and destroy everything in the base along with them.”

“Self-destruct? That’s part of the plan?” John blurted. Mycroft and Sherlock shot him agitated looks.

Alan fixed John with an unreadable expression. “This room will survive the destruction. We’ll live.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. He hadn’t been able to deduce much about Alan given the alien face, but he knew that was a lie, given the tone shift that came when he spoke it. Alan would survive the destruction, somehow. Not the rest of them. It was probably that armor.

It was at that point the alarms went off. A second after they started blaring, they stopped, and most of the lights in the warehouse died. The office remained well lit.

“There it is,” Alan said, pointing to the front of the warehouse. Something immensely strong punched the doors off their hinges, flattening a couple scientists. “Watch, you might learn some things.”

Sherlock didn’t watch – he acted. Alan’s back was turned. This was his opportunity. He grabbed the rod-shaped device that was on the desk and activated it, prompting a long metallic needle to extend outward. Mycroft had told them about this thing – a weapon the aliens used against their own kind. One blow to the base of the neck, and they would die. It was apparently the only sure-fire way to deal with them.

Sherlock rammed the needle into Alan’s neck, prompting green blood to spurt out the wound. Alan audibly winced in pain, but didn’t allow this to hold him back. He whirled around with precision, using one hand to remove the weapon from his neck. He tossed the weapon away while the other hand hit Sherlock across the face, tossing him to the side where the first hand was waiting to grab him. Alan thrust Sherlock out the window, holding him tight.

“You missed,” Alan said, eyes narrow. The slightly off-center wound on the back of his neck healed up with alarming speed.

“So I did. I take it you’re a high ranking member of your race’s military?” Sherlock asked. He continued without waiting for an answer. “Clearly, you are well trained to withstand pain and subdue enemies that have the drop on you. What you did was a learned behavior – not so different from humans after all.”

Alan blinked. Sherlock applauded himself inwardly – he had Alan curious. Good.

“I figured the high rank from the armor. That’s not something the other aliens have down there, disguised though they are. You would have given them armor were it available. I also expect you to be a devout follower of whatever your race decides are ‘morals’ or ‘honor’. That’s from the respect you gave Matthew for preparing. Let’s see… The way your eyes are moving suggest you’ve very interested in what’s going on here.”

“That I am. We have worked with you before. You had never given any indication of treachery this rash.”

“Perhaps I wasn’t fully aware of the situation until now?”

Sherlock saw Alan’s eyes twitch. He just made a deduction. Mycroft wasn’t kidding, these guys are smart. “You truly weren’t. But we have you on file actually being aware of the situation. I find it hard to believe, but you are multiversal. All three of you.”

“Well, you’ve got us!” Sherlock laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to stop dangling me over the edge and question me?”

“I’ll keep you dangling from my hand as long as I want,” Alan declared. “How did you get here?”

“Not our choice. Something you did last night brought us here against our will. Funny story, we replaced your versions of us! I’m not Steven Holmes, I’m Sherlock Holmes. Isn’t that something?”

The importance of the name was clearly lost on Alan. “No.”

“Tough crowd…” Sherlock heard explosions of the fight raging on below him. “Well, perhaps you’ll appreciate Matthew’s real name, Mycroft. What an odd name! Speaking of Mycroft – hey, Mycroft. Catch me.”

Alan deduced that a plan was being executed behind him. He began to turn.

The motion of Alan was not enough to sway John Watson’s steady hand – the hand of a doctor, a soldier, and a detective. Even with the motion of Alan’s neck, the needle-like blade struck true, sliding into the alien’s biological weakness.

Alan lost hold of Sherlock. The detective dropped for only an instant before Mycroft caught him, the elder brother cutting his limbs on the broken glass as he did so. “Catch me?” Mycroft blurted. “Really?”

John helped Mycroft pull Sherlock back up to the suspended office while Alan dissolved into a puddle of green liquid before their eyes. The three of them sat down and took a moment to breathe.

“Today…” John began, failing to finish the sentence.

“Has no equal,” Sherlock said, stretching his arms.

Explosions from the fight reached their ears, letting them know it wasn’t over yet. Sherlock stood up tall and set his gaze through the broken glass, examining the battle as it raged. All five of the individuals in the photo were there, facing off against a dozen or so aliens that looked like humans. No matter what injury was dealt, the aliens just recovered because the attackers did not know about their weak point, nor did they have the required specialized weapon.

Sherlock took the moment to take everything in – to figure out something they could do.

So much information…

He focused on the big one, the leader. Huge, experienced, used to using his muscles and fighting others directly. Extreme poker face – he got shot by a bullet and didn’t even flinch. Liked dolphins too much. Father of a daughter of high school age going through quite the rebellious streak. Had an ability that punched enemies at a short distance and allowed for teleporta- no, not teleportation, temporary halting of time.

The frog woman. Young, but still experienced. Intelligent, methodical. Cared deeply for those around her, even those she didn’t know very well. Spent many hours every day taking care of her hair. Fancied herself a superhero. Her abilities… She was essentially a frog with a really, really long tongue. Bizarre, but not overly helpful at the moment.

The man with the sword. He had no ability beyond his impressive height and coordination with the blade. A member of a militia, watch, or something similar. Raised to work hard, given the way held his blade. Possibly a farmer. Honorable, showing more restraint in his attacks than any of the others, even though none of them were making a point of using lethal force.

The man with the cactus. That cactus… Sherlock still couldn’t get a read on that cactus. It was there, and… Sherlock shook his head – it wasn’t important, get everything else. The man didn’t have much combat ability, so he stood in the back, firing a simple gun. He didn’t fire like someone inexperienced, so despite being an intellectual he must have seen combat many times before.

The last member, the artist, fought with an uncaring, dispassionate attitude. He had a power that transformed the skin of those it hit into books, into which he could write instructions – already there were two bounty hunter aliens attacking their kin. That man had virtually no morals. He was going to be late on one of his deadlines because he had been trapped here, and that had ticked him off.

There was also something unseen happening. Nearby pieces of technology would activate and attack the aliens, as if controlled by something. An unseen sixth member hacking into the machines, no doubt. It explained why the power had mostly gone out when the group arrived, and how they expected to fly away with the ship without clearance.

But they weren’t going to make it. The bounty hunters were too strong. It would only be a matter of time before they realized the self-destruct wasn’t activating… Then they would probably destroy the ship themselves. It was taking the otherworldly team too long to get across the warehouse. Far too long.

Mycroft shook his head. “This isn’t going to work.”

“We have to do something…” Sherlock muttered. “They need to succeed…”

John put a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. “How do we know what they want to do is good for us?”

“They want to fix the problem, set it right,” Sherlock said. “I can see it in the way they move. They aren’t killers, but they are warriors. They’re here to fix things. Look down there – none of the human scientists or guards are dead. None. That’s difficult to do, especially with how much power they have.”

“We can’t do anything from up here but remove security barriers!” Mycroft pointed out. “They can get through those themselves!”

“Yes… Yes…” Sherlock lit up. “Mycroft, do you think you can tap into the speaker systems?”

Mycroft nodded, leaping onto the computer and using his card. Access was granted. He located the speaker program with ease, turning it on. “There you go.”

“YOU! YOU WITH THE POWER TO TURN THINGS INTO BOOKS!” Sherlock shouted. “ALL YOU NEED IS LINE OF SIGHT TO SOMEONE’S EYES. LOOK UP, I’M IN THE GLASS BOX FAR ABOVE YOU! GIVE ME INSTRUCTIONS!”

Sherlock whirled to the broken window and stared right at the artist man. The man saw him and nodded, wasting no time. The power – the invisible power – hit Sherlock dead on, popping his face open like a book. Something quickly scrawled words over his pages. Due to the distance, the instructions wrote overtop of some other words, scrambling Sherlock’s mind considerably – but he pressed on through sheer mental fortitude.

Sherlock’s face closed, allowing him to return to a fully aware status. “I probably have some kind of mental condition now, but that doesn’t matter, I know what to do. Mycroft, stay here and give us access.”

“What are you doing!?”

“John and I are going to fly a spaceship. Then we’re going to use it to destroy the alien experiment on the dimensional device. I’ve been given instructions.”

Mycroft nodded. “Go.”

John blinked. “Sherlock, do you know how to fly it?”

“Nope!” Sherlock declared. “But I’m confident I can figure it out! Let’s move!” He dragged John back to the lift. They descended back to the ground as the battle raged on the other side of the warehouse.

Sherlock dashed to a mobile platform, dragging John onto it. He pressed ‘up’, and it lifted them toward the ship’s cockpit. It was at this point the guards in this section thought that maybe, just maybe, they should try to stop these two. They aimed their guns.

Mycroft must have found something, because green lights started to light up on the walls around the ship. The large back doors began to open, preparing for a smooth launch. The soldiers returned to the exploding sounds happening on the other side of the warehouse - green lights meant everything that was happening was authorized. In their minds, anyway.

When Sherlock and John approached the dark dome, it opened up like an eyelid, revealing two seats appropriate for human use. Sherlock sat down in the front, John in the back. The dome slid shut overhead with a shik, but they could still see through it.

“Everything else considered, this is actually pretty cool,” John admitted.

Sherlock grinned. “It is time to go to space.” He examined the console in front of him. It had almost never been used, so there were virtually no clues to tell him what buttons did what. He was able to deduce that the two softly glowing orbs in front of him were meant for his hands. Presumably the equivalent to a steering wheel.

He placed his hands on the orbs and felt the ship tap into his mind. It knew instantly where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do. He didn’t even need to steer. The crescent-ship rotated a full hundred-and-eighty degrees, pointing out the open end of the warehouse. With no revving up, it blasted out of the hangar with enough acceleration to flatten anything on it to putty. Sherlock and John felt nothing.

“The technology required for this thing…” John said with awe, looking at the ground receding below them faster than he had ever seen it before. “This is incredible.”

“We’re going to get to see a bigger one soon enough,” Sherlock smirked. Within twenty seconds, they had left the atmosphere behind. The orb of the Earth’s dark side was behind them. Before them, a large, blue, disc-shaped ship floated. It looked exactly like a UFO one would see in a cheesy science-fiction movie or cartoon.

“Right,” Sherlock said. “Now to fire weapons…”

The ship didn’t fire weapons.

“…Sherlock…”

“Give me a moment to think…” He processed – he had no idea which of the buttons were weapons. He knew one had to be, but he quickly realized there was probably another button that was the safety. And he couldn’t destroy the ship without the weapons…

Wait, he could. He could ram the UFO. That would do it.

The ship started accelerating again.

“Sherlock, what are you doing?”

“…What the man wrote into me. He told me to destroy the UFO. I think he expected I’d use the weapons, but I can’t figure them out…” He ground his teeth. “And I don’t think I can refuse the command.”

“Sherlock!”

“I’ve been unintentionally turned into a suicide bomber…” Sherlock muttered, the distance to the UFO closing fast.

“SHERLOCK!”

“QUIET! I NEED TO THINK OF ANOTHER WAY TO DO THIS!” He breathed in, put his hands to his head, and thought.

~~~

Sherlock went to his mind palace.

Images flashed past his mind – images of the recent past, images of information, images of his own thought process.

“Right, so, I have somewhere in the span of ten seconds to figure this out,” Sherlock said to himself. “To find a way to follow THIS without dying.”

He gestured at hastily scrawled words that read “WILL DESTROY THE SHIP WHERE THE DEVICE IS CONTAINED.”

“Right right right…” The console of the spaceship flashed in front of his eyes. Every little detail flashed into his focus – their shape, their arrangement, their proximity to his hands… That big middle one might be the fire, or the radio, or the self-destruct. The safety could be the one his thumb could reach instantly…

Thirty-two possibilities that make sense, he decided. “Too many!” he shouted to himself. “Not enough to try in ten seconds! New plan!” The buttons were tossed to the side and he began to examine the UFO they were targeting. Was there a way to hit it to destroy it without destroying themselves?

He examined every facet of the UFO he could manage and found nothing. The technology was too alien for him to recognize weak points. It looked too much like a piece of fiction anyway!

“Think! Think!” he shouted to himself. “Nothing obvious… Think outside the box!”

They had the hacker with them – the one that was controlling technology. That’s how they expected to fly the ship themselves…

“Got it! I can just fly back down and have the hacker do it! Easy!”

The command tore at his mind, demanding he not take an action with such uncertainty.

“OH COME ON!” Sherlock shouted at the words. “That will work! If… If they’re still alive… Or anywhere near the actual location… If I can communicate without giving them time to… Fine. I’ll need to figure out exactly where their hacker is and who they are. I need certainty.”

He replayed the fight he had observed from the glass office. He walked among the otherworldly adventurers and the aliens disguised as humans, watching the way they all moved their heads closely. They saw technology activating, and then glanced behind them. That means the hacker is outside, and nearby good… Right – wait… They weren’t looking outside. They were looking inside. The hacker was with them.

It was the man holding the cactus. But he showed no signs of being a hacker, or even controlling the technology. He glanced at the activating technology after it activated, not before…

But right after, he glanced at the cactus he held in his hand.

The cactus.

There was no way, was there? That the cactus was the hacker? But their reactions – it meant it was. Two of them had invisible powers that could act without Sherlock seeing. Could the cactus have them as well? It… It had to, or had to be the result of one…

The cactus.

“Whatever remains, no matter how improbable…” Sherlock muttered to himself.

The command allowed itself to sink into the back of his mind. It would allow him to go get the cactus.

~~~

Sherlock pulled up at the last second.

“THAT WAS BLOODY CLOSE!” John shouted.

“Yes. Hold on, we need to get a cactus.”

“…What?”

“You heard me.”

“I did, I’m having troubl-”

“Get ready to catch.”

“Sherlock!”

They rushed back to Earth, right where they had just come from. It only took a handful of seconds.

This time, the ship did crash through the roof of the warehouse, right overtop of the ongoing battle. Sherlock twisted the ship sideways and opened the cockpit bubble with a thought. “CACTUS! NOW!”

The man with the cactus saw. “JOTARO I CAN’T MAKE THAT!”

“I know, Daniel,” the huge man – Jotaro apparently – said.

He must have stopped time, because the next thing John knew a cactus hit him in the gut. “AUGH!”

“I told you to catch, John!” Sherlock shouted, closing the bubble cockpit.

“I… WHAT!?”

Then the cactus tapped into the power of the ship, taking control from Sherlock. The ship activated an FTL jump, appearing in front of the UFO in an instant.

“…Convenient,” John commented, momentarily ceasing the act of plucking cactus needles out of his stomach.

The cactus activated the ship’s weapons, firing a barrage of red laser missiles right at the central blue dome. The ship exploded in a burst of blue energy.

Sherlock and John cheered. “Take that, alien overlords!” John shouted.

Their victory was cut short when several dozen identical ships appeared around them. The two humans paled. They knew they would not survive a coordinated attack from this many, cactus or no.

But Sherlock remembered something.

They had just destroyed what was stopping dimensional travel.

Hadn’t the team below been calling for help?

A tremendous ship of a vaguely rectangular shape appeared out of a gigantic portal of energy.

“Does that say… Enterprise?” John blurted.

“Yes, yes it does,” Sherlock said. “…I think we get to enjoy a lightshow, John. If only we had popcorn.”

The Enterprise fired its weapons, showing the UFOs how truly pathetic they were. The aliens fell to the might of an interdimensional flagship within minutes.

John actually wished he had popcorn.

~~~

The next day, Daniel knocked on the door of 221B, Baker Street.

Sherlock opened it, eyebrow raised. “I was wondering when you would show up, Daniel Jackson.” John poked his head out from behind Sherlock, curious.

Daniel nodded. “I figured. I guess you already know why I’m here?”

“To thank me,” Sherlock said.

“Us,” John corrected. “Thank us.”

“What did you do?”

“I killed an alien. And caught a cactus with my stomach.”

“Oh. Yeah, that must have slipped my mind.”

Daniel nodded. “Oh behalf of the Alliance, I thank you for what you’ve done. You helped us not only return to our homes, but also save an entire planet from being subjugated by alien overlords. You did all of this in one day, with no prior knowledge of the multiverse, or the aliens. It was nothing short of incredible, Mr Holmes.”

Holmes smirked. “What’s my reward?”

“We’ll give you a dimensional device and a traveling license. You will have access to all the services our side of the multiverse has to offer.”

“Yeah, no,” John said. “I’ve had enough excitement for a lifetime, and I already had that from what Sherlock drags me to every other day. Of course Sherlock is going to eat it u-”

“I’m going to refuse,” Sherlock declared.

“What?” John blurted. “But…”

“It’s too much for one mind to keep track of,” Sherlock said. “If I expand my horizons that far… The details will become unimportant. And I can’t live without obsessing over the details.”

Daniel smiled. “You know, there have been a few who’ve said that before. I understand. It’s not for everyone, out there.”

“That said, I’m never one to just ignore information. I’m not going to be traveling out there, but I would like a source of information. Would you by chance have an all-in-one guide of sorts I can use to educate myself?”

Daniel smirked, handing Sherlock a data pad. “This has The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Multiverse on it. It should have all you need. And here’s a multiversal phone, just in case you want to make a call.”

“I’ll take it,” Sherlock said, smirking. “By the way, I have just made the most absurd deduction. Even more absurd than a cactus having the power to hack technology.”

“What?”

“You’re married to a horse.”

Daniel laughed.

John gaped. “My God, he’s right isn’t he?”

“Yes. Yes he is,” Daniel confirmed.

“Done!” John shouted, walking back inside. “I am so done!”

“You should go talk to Mycroft,” Sherlock suggested, starting to flip through the Guide. “I think he’ll love to talk policy with you.”

Daniel sighed. “Yeah, we do owe him as well. Wish us luck.”

“You’ve dealt with worse than him.” Those were Sherlock’s last words before he slammed the door in Daniel’s face.

“…What an interesting man,” Daniel commented to himself.

~~~

Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully sat in the X-files division of the FBI.

A news report was playing in the background. “Multiversal entities have come to our world and are in the process of removing the influence of an alien presence…”

“I like to think we helped with that,” Scully said. “You know, at least a little. More than solving a psychoactive drug case.”

“I think I know what happened,” Mulder said. “The spirit séance we were part of mixed with the dimensional energy, triggering the switches required t-”

“Mulder, just stop.”

Mulder sat back and folded his hands behind his head. “I’m looking forward to not being crazy.”

“You believe in ghosts, Mulder.”

“Guess that’s the next thing. Aliens taken care of, time to figure out ghosts.”

“…Mulder, please tell me you aren’t serious.”

Mulder grinned.

~~~

Froppy shook hands with Jotaro. “Ribbit. Glad to meet your people outside a cruel game.”

Jotaro nodded.

“He wasn’t there, you know,” Rohan commented. “That was Pinkie’s group…”

Froppy shook her head at Rohan, ignoring the rest of what he said. “The United States of the Multiverse will be glad to know we found you. Do you have any leads on the blue metal guy?”

Jotaro shook his head. “No. We have found no leads on him, despite searching for multiple years. We do not think he wants to be found.”

“Then we’ll just have to look harder. Ribbit.”

Carrot polished his sword. “It was an honor to fight alongside you, Mister Kujo. You as well, Kishibe.”

“I thought I was an honor-less hack?” Rohan retorted.

“You showed fortitude in the end,” Carrot said. “You should try to tap into that more often.”

“…Right.”

The cactus produced its Stand: an electric dandelion. It sent out a message in morse code. You guys are forgetting me again.

Froppy smiled. “Don’t worry Cak, we’ll never forget what you’ve done for us. I’m expecting medals in your future. Ribbit.”

Cak seemed happy with this.

Jotaro pulled down on his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

“You know what I find interesting?” Rohan said, suddenly. “Sherlock Holmes. He’s from a book.”

“No, he’s not,” Froppy said. “The Sherlock Holmes books have nothing to do with him. His life is nothing like theirs. Different eras, different people. The multiverse is large enough that there would have to be someone named Sherlock Holmes that was an amazing detective.”

“Hrm…” Rohan said, clearly not satisfied by Froppy’s dismissal. He was sure there was something else going on.

~~~

“So, they made contact…” Randall Flagg said, taking a few steps forward on the frozen lake. “Not ideal. But the USM doesn’t have as much power as they think they do.” He turned to Siron. “The plan has not changed. Their nation will fall the moment it is created.”

Siron nodded. “We will accomplish our goal… Or die trying.”

Flagg smirked. “That’s true for you, I suppose.” He held up the dark orb in his hands, looking deep into the worlds.

Siron remained silent, staring into the black orb himself, unable to remove any of his eyes from it.

051 - Together We Will Always Shine, Part 1

Six months ago, local time, Reverb Hall had been the site of a trial to determine the fate of a universe, to bar it from inclusion or otherwise.

Now, Reverb Hall was the site of what could be considered the exact opposite. The final step of Unification. The Signing.

Unlike the trial, this event was broadcast live to every universe that cared. The average population still wasn’t allowed inside the actual Hall since it was already more than a little full, but the governments had made sure to allow extensive media access. Cameras were everywhere, and several news anchors could be seen addressing the masses through the devices.

The Hall itself was absolutely filled with people from every one of the eight universes. Ponies, Gems, and humans were there; but there were also dragons, changelings, Asgard, and others joining in.

Eve looked out at it all from the stage and couldn’t help herself. She broke out into a childish grin and started singing; even though she couldn’t hear her own words, it was still a great feeling.

“Together

A thread of fate has bound us in harmony
A simple song has given us melody
A friendship shared with those who cared truthfully

Together

Through all the pain the trials the horrors the tears
We have stood the test of time and suffering
And here we stand at last to conquer our fears

Together

When I heard the multiverse calling my name
I believed the destiny was singular
I did not seek the power, glory, or fame

Together

Look at us now, standing proud, against it all
Preparing to take the final step in this
The proud unification in this hall!”

Eve twirled around, looking at the banner with the newly created symbol of the unified worlds. A ‘u’ with a tail at the front end, known as the Greek letter ‘mu’ to people of Earth.

Pinkie appeared next to Eve and began to sing, twirling her squeaky hammer as she did so.

“Woah~
Together!

Standing beneath this symbol of accomplishment!
Bringing passion, friendship, the light within all!
Above and beyond the mission we were sent!”

Pinkie pulled an electric guitar out of nowhere and threw it to Vriska. She strummed.

“Yeah!
Together!

I came here looking for an old friend of mine
Haven’t found her yet, but there’s something else here
People who help me not care about the time!”

Pinkie rammed her face into Vriska’s. “Vriska, that doesn’t rhyme! Get into the flow!”

“Excuse me! It’s not like I’m used to songthings!”

“Just try your best and you’ll find you can’t say no!”

Flutterfree cleared her throat, landing between them and changing up the beat of the heartsong.

“In this world of infinite choices
We must not forget the reason we’re here
Our kindnesses made the bonds stronger
We are here to banish all of their fear.”

Toph and Corona leaped into the mix, dancing opposed to each other in time with the beat.

Toph grinned. “We have strengthened our spirits and hope.”

Corona smiled sadly. “Found a way to rekindle what was lost.”

“All the sorrow suffered among us.”

“Let’s push it aside so that we may rest.”

Nova and Renee sang as one.

“In this world of infinite choices
We must not forget the reason we’re here
Our magic enchanted millions
Let’s celebrate that with faces of cheer!”

“Together!” Eve shouted, bringing it back to the original beat.

“Together we stand, together we press on!
Together we weep, together we console!
Together we sing, together to the dawn!”

O’Neill raised a fist in victory. “Together we laugh at our enemies!”

Daniel smirked alongside him. “Together we solve the mysteries of old.”

Celestia spoke out. “Together we find the rainbow in our lives.”

Joseph Joestar chimed in with his old, scratchy voice. “Together we survive despite all the odds!”

Blue Diamond let out a line with her serene tone. “Together we learn from mistakes of the past.”

Cosmo put on a soft, motherly smile. “Together we find homes for those who have none.”

Director Storm laughed. “Together we create great storms of our own!”

Allure piped up. “Together we enjoy the endless beauty!”

Evening brought it back. “Together: Merodi Universalis!”

“Together!” the entire hall shouted, turning to another person for the next verse. They all stared expectantly.

Jotaro grabbed his hat and shook his head. “Yare yare daze…”

The music ended with a wacky drumbeat provided by Pinkie.

“Dad!” Jolyne – now a teenager - called. “You ruined the song!”

Jotaro shrugged apologetically.

“It’s okay,” Eve said, putting a wing on Jolyne’s shoulder. “We got to Merodi Universalis. I think that’s what really needed to be said. It was a good ending, regardless.”

“I carry all of you with these drums!” Pinkie shouted.

“Yes. Yes you do,” Eve chuckled.

“You still going with Merodi Universalis?” Vriska asked. “I thought the name hadn’t been decided yet.”

“It was finalized for certain yesterday,” Eve explained. “We will no longer be ‘the Alliance’ or ‘the Unified’ after today. We will be Merodi Universalis. Or the Merodi.”

Vriska smirked. “I think it works well. Too many nations are all like ‘United States of Power’ or ‘Harmonic Republic’ or ‘The Democratic Republic of Freedom’ or other generic, lame names. Glad you found something unique.”

“And meaningful,” Eve said, a smile on her face. She looked out at the crowd in the Hall. “I feel much better about this than I did Disclosure.”

“Of course,” Renee said, walking up beside her old friend. “After all, it’s not like anything’s a secret this time around. We know exactly how the public feels. Generally overwhelmingly positive.”

“You’re overstating it, Renee,” Eve pointed out.

Renee huffed. “Oh, don’t dwell on the handful that refused. The Earths had hundreds of nations each, there were always going to be some that were stuck up about it. And Tauryl was never going to even consider such a thing.”

“I… am not worried or dwelling on any of them. I’m much more relieved that Lai and the Gem Vein are completely on board. I remember when Lai used to be a constant source of problems, and the Gem Vein fought hard against changing even a little.”

“They still fight hard, Eve.”

“Not as hard as they used to.” Eve gestured at a group of Gems intermingling with the League of Sweetie Belles. “Those aren’t banished Gems there, Renee. Those are official Diamond Authority Gems. Grown and raised in the rigid system they had in place. And they’re genuinely being friendly. It just… It creates a warm and fuzzy feeling to know we helped give them that capability, you know?”

“I do,” Flutterfree said with a smile. “It’s why I’m out here, doing this. So things like that happen more often.”

Eve hugged her. “You’re doing great, Flutterfree.”

“Thank you. You too.”

The dark form of Blumiere walked up. He tipped his hat at Renee and Flutterfree. “Evening, the foreign dignitaries have arrived and are staying in the upper balcony. I believe you wish to greet them personally?”

Eve took a breath. This was going to be interesting. “Yes, I did. Sorry girls, duty calls.” She adjusted her mane with her magic and stretched her wings. “Blumiere, what are you doing right now?”

Blumiere summoned a brochure out of the aether. “Talking about the plans for Castle Bleck. People are always very interested to hear about them.”

“Ah, carry on then. Flutterfree, think you can check to make sure security is still tight for me?”

Flutterfree nodded. “Aye aye.”

Eve rolled her eye at this, teleporting to the Reverb Hall’s balcony. It was more of a closed box with a giant window than a balcony, but it served a similar purpose. The view of the stage from here was impressive enough to give the people inside a feeling of importance.

Eve bowed to all four present dignitaries. “You all honor us with your presence.”

The Grand Secretariat bowed in return. “You honor us in allowing our presence in the first place, Evening.”

Hastur shrugged, the yellow folds of his robes spiraling around him in a highly unnatural fashion. “The highers would not consider this an honor. More of a chore.”

“Then we’re lucky you’re the one here,” Eve pointed out.

“I’m the only one who was willing to go, Evening Sparkle.”

“I know,” Eve said, rubbing the back of her head. Then she turned to the third dignitary, the last one she recognized. “…Hi.”

“Hi,” Jenny said, just as awkwardly. She began to twiddle her thumbs.

“You know, I actually didn’t expect you to show up.”

“I had nothing to do today. Figured I might as well.”

Eve nodded slowly. Then she smiled. “Well, enjoy your stay, Jenny!”

Jenny gave a thumbs up. “Yeah!”

I really, really do not trust her within a million miles of any of my friends, Eve thought to herself. But we can’t continue like we were forever. This is a step toward actually interacting more.

Eve turned to the fourth dignitary, one she had never met before. “Greetings. I am Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

The man with the blonde curled hair in the pink suit replied “I am Ambassador Funny Valentine, representative of the United States of the Multiverse. Froppy speaks highly of your people.”

Eve smiled. “I’m glad.” Eve really wasn’t sure what to make of the USM. They had made official contact with them only a month ago after an encounter with aliens in the E-sphere. Since Unification had been so close at that point, Eve had never made any personal trips to the USM. She knew they started out as mostly an alliance of different versions of the United States of America, but that was in their past. They were now a more inclusive democratic entity in the multiverse, though as far as she knew they only contained humans within their borders. Eve had no idea what drove them, what their values were, how they dealt with new universes, or even what their political scene was. She didn’t even know the name of their current president!

All these thoughts stayed hidden behind Eve’s sweet smile. “What do you think?” Eve asked Valentine.

“We certainly never had this,” Valentine admitted. “Back when we first came together, it wasn’t all at once. It was always one world at a time, adapted into already existing legal systems. We never had to create something entirely new, merely adjust what already existed.”

“Oh?”

“I’m rather curious to see how your new system fares,” Valentine commented. “You’ve progressed remarkably quickly from fledgeling to full society. It took us significantly longer to get to anything of this level.”

“We have gotten lucky a few times,” Eve admitted.

“Capitalizing on luck is a welcome skill,” Valentine commented.

The Grand Secretariat moved into Eve’s field of view. “Evening, I hope you do not mind. But we have invited another society to observe the proceedings.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “It’s not the Council of Ricks, is it?”

“Good Celestia, no!” the Grand Secretariat shook her head. “It’s the power we weren’t allowed to tell you about when you first met us. They would have been upset that we revealed them to someone they had not deemed ‘ready’. They’ve decided they’d rather reveal themselves before Unification rather than after.”

Eve suddenly put on her ‘serious diplomat’ expression. “I would be most grateful to meet these mysterious individuals.”

The Grand Secretariat nodded, pulling out a small device and pressing a button. Next to her appeared an alien life form that looked nothing like any creature Evening had seen before. Its body was bright orange and consisted of five orange lumps. Four of these lumps served as leg-like limbs, while the central lump contained a single blue eye and a wide mouth. Eve turned her ears on since she definitely wasn’t going to just assume she knew how to lip read this race.

It spoke with a high-pitched whine at the back of its throat. The voice was identifiably male. Eve knew her translator had never heard this being’s language before, but she could understand him anyway, suggesting the orange being had a translator of his own. “I am called Chartreuse, of the interdimensional race Melnorme. We look forward to doing business with you in the near future.”

“What kinds of business?”

“We Melnorme value trading above all else, Charter-Princess. You are just about to pass the threshold to become a full multiversal society. You will be of use to us – and we will be of use to you. Our society is far more expansive than any party present here. We are able to procure objects and materials from universes far outside your sphere of influence, as well as information. All you have to do is find something to exchange in return for such things.”

“Huh. How many universes do you encompass?”

“That information will cost you.”

Oh. I see how it is.

“Chartreuse, be nice, she just met you,” the Grand Secretariat chided. “The Melnorme have referred to themselves as a Class 2 society, while powers comparable to our level are a Class 3. What exactly this means is apparently too expensive for a ‘mere Class 3 society to pay for’, but it’s clear they exist on a level above the rest of us.”

“So, we’re becoming a Class 3 society today?” Eve asked.

“I would assume so,” the Grand Secretariat answered.

“Confirmation is a cheap commodity,” Chartreuse pointed out.

Eve smiled at Chartreuse. “Thanks, but no thanks. I think I’ll discuss with the Census a bit more before initiating any significant trades with your people. But I’m glad you’ve taken an interest in us. I hope this is the start of a long, beautiful friendship.”

“The feeling is mutual.” Without so much as another glance at Eve, Chartreuse turned to Ambassador Valentine. “The Melnorme wish to initiate trade with your people as well…”

Valentine and Chartreuse continued discussion. Eve took this as an indication to turn off her ears.

Hastur turned to Eve. “I think I remember these Melnorme. They tried to form relations with the Embodiment. You can imagine how that went.”

“It didn’t?” Eve suggested.

“You’re learning quickly, Charter-Princess.”

“It doesn’t feel quick.”

“Speak to your Gems on the topic sometime. They will tell you the speed at which you’re able to alter yourself is terrifying.”

Eve smirked. “I am aware of this, Hastur. Have to be to be a good leader.”

“There are many Old Ones who would disagree with that, assuming they would even accept the question as worthy of their minds. By the way, I am curious, what are your plans after Unification?”

Eve looked out the window at the Hall’s stage and smiled. “After this… Just watch this nation like they were my children.”

“You have no children.”

“You know what I- actually, wait, you might not know what I mean.” Eve rubbed the back of her head awkwardly. “I forget this is all alien to you, sometimes. Have Vriska explain it to you. …Actually, that might be a bad idea. Thrackerzod maybe? No…” She rubbed her head with her hoof, a headache forming.

The Grand Secretariat smirked. “Just as we cannot comprehend some eldritch concepts, the eldritch lack some of ours. I’m sure it can be explained… With time.”

Hastur walked past them. “Another time then. I’m sure Evening has much to prepare for. The refreshments must be perfect, I expect.”

“The refreshments actually aren’t that important,” Eve pointed out

“…Ah.”

Eve smiled. “Regardless, glad you all could make it.” She glanced uncertainly at Jenny for a moment. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask. The ceremony should start soon, assuming nothing crazy happens.”

All of the dignitaries nodded.

~~~

Corona was sitting in one of the many chairs of Reverb Hall, the rest of her team sitting to her left. She was silent, her expression flat. Her eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses she had so rarely taken off since she returned from the Nexus.

They weren’t the Sombra glasses. They were just regular sunglasses now. No HUD to distract her, no scans to tell her things, no information. Just sunglasses. Sunglasses she could look out of, but others could not see into.

She found she preferred it that way, now.

…Of course Toph could ‘see’ just fine. “Whatcha lookin’ at there?”

Corona didn’t react at first, processing the question. “The stage lights, I guess.”

“Which means you aren’t actually looking at anything and are staring at something in your thoughts.”

Corona thought for a moment.

“Hope,” she said at last. “I’m thinking about hope.”

“Oh?” the General asked, clearly asking for more information.

Corona wasn’t sure she wanted to give it at first, but she reasoned that it would probably be good for her. “I… You know I haven’t been doing that great, lately.”

“You came back a different person. We all did,” Toph said. “The world had moved on without us.”

Corona nodded. “Yeah… I know. Or I don’t. I guess.” She shifted around in her seat. “Really not sure where I’m going with this.”

“Let’s go back to hope,” Toph suggested. “What exactly were you thinking about?”

“This event. What it means.” Corona gestured with a hoof. “See all this? Some think of it as a political move. Or stability. Or just the march of progress. But that’s not what it is to those of us who have actually fought for it, tooth and nail, hoof and claw. Hand too. We’ve fought… And we’ve suffered for doing so.”

Toph faced forward, grimacing slightly. “Yeah…” Corona knew she was remembering General Sunset, Fef… Others…

Corona looked back at the stage. “For us… This means something. This means that what we fought for was worth it. There is a goal. This goal has been reached. All of it… Led to this. And to the future that will be built after this.” Corona let a smile come to her face. “…This is what we’ve been hoping for. The struggle just to survive is a horrible one even if you win. The struggle to thrive… there is meaning in that struggle.”

Toph placed a firm hand on Corona's shoulder. “They’d all be proud of us.”

Tears fell from under Corona’s sunglasses. “Yeah… Yeah they would be.” She took off her sunglasses to wipe her face, revealing eyes that were a painful mixture of joyous and broken. She put them back on. “Let’s remember that.”

Corona and Toph clasped their hands together and flexed, grinning at each other.

“Bros’ moment,” Lieshy commented from the other side of Toph.

“Hm?” Lady Rarity said, looking up from her book. “Come again?”

“I just witnessed a ‘bros’ moment’ between our leader and our scientist.”

“…Lieshy, dear, none of us are bros.”

“The word ‘bro’ lacks a connotative equal in the feminine, ‘sis’ doesn’t carry the same closeness or bond with it.”

Lady Rarity raised an eyebrow. “I wonder if that’s a translation oddity, because I seem to disagree.”

“Cultural, possibly. Had I not gone with ‘bros’ moment’ it would have just been ‘moment’ and that has romantic inclinations.”

Toph raised an eyebrow at Lieshy.

“Unless I have completely misread the situation and you two really a-“

Toph punched Lieshy across the face. Lieshy, rather than yelping in pain, chuckled to herself.

Corona angled her head toward Lieshy, checking to make sure she was okay. “Toph, Lieshy was just being thorough.”

Toph grunted. “Lieshy knows precisely how to press everyone’s buttons. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

“Astute observation,” Lieshy commented, pulling herself back into her chair. “I know for a fact that none of you are interested in each other and never have been, with the exception of Lady Rarity toward Corona for a short time out of a misplaced sense of gratitude.”

Lady Rarity sputtered and flushed.

“And I was only roughly two-thirds sure of that. Thank you for confirmation.”

Lady Rarity took in a deep breath and sighed. “There are no secrets from you.”

“Very few. I could put all of your love lives in the open with little effort.”

“Don’t,” Toph cautioned.

“Please don’t,” Vivian said, finally hearing something that dragged her into the conversation.

Lieshy nodded. “Very well. Would you like me to analyze the love lives of other people?”

“That’d be cruel,” Lady Rarity decreed.

“You’re just saying that because you were ousted,” Lieshy said.

Lady Rarity opened her mouth to retort, but she caught Corona looking at her over the tops of her sunglasses. The spirid-unicorn facehooved. “Lieshy, she’s giving me the look. This is your fault.”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“Do you have no sense of guilt within yourself?”

“No. No I do not.”

“Ugh…”

Corona sat back in her chair. “I’m just processing that I apparently had a spider-stalker next to me and I had no idea. Wonder why you didn’t make a move.”

“Why are we talking about this?” Lady Rarity wailed, putting her face in her hooves.

“Because we need to act like teenage girls at least once in a blue moon, even though we’re grown women,” Toph commented. “Apparently. Oh I know, we should talk about boys next.”

Vivian perked up. “Really? Oh there’s this on-“

“Spirits…” Toph said, facepalming. “That wasn’t serious by any stretch of the imagination, Vivian.”

“Oh.” Vivian looked at the ground, saddened.

“We’re grown women! Why would we talk about boys of all things?”

Lieshy fixed Toph with a serious glare. “You do not want me to answer that question.”

Toph wanted to disagree with her. But she thought better of it.

Then Corona’s phone rang. When the phone answered itself, everyone knew who it was. “So, Amigas, when should I plan the spider-wedding?!”

Lieshy’s amused expression vanished. “…I am so sorry, Rarity.”

“I am ruined!” Lady Rarity wailed. “My reputation, dragged through the dus-“

“I think you’re overreacting,” Corona said, pulling the phone out of her pocket and glaring at it. “It’s not like an old crush is going to ruin your reputation.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

Sombra chuckled. “Well, we will see, won-“

“Sombra, I had your devices turned off for a reason,” Corona interrupted. “This was a private conversation between us. You inserted yourself into it against my wishes.”

“Corona, you need to coo-“

“No, Sombra. I’m not going to just let you sweet-talk out again. Stop listening in on my private conversations.”

“It wasn’t intentional! I was looking through the camera the guy to your left is holding! Yeesh.”

Corona checked to her left – there was in fact a man recording everything around him with a camera.

“…Sombra, do you mind deleting that video?”

“I don’t know, you were pretty short with me…”

“Sombra, please.”

“Done,” Sombra declared. “You’ve been a lot less fun since you’ve been back, you know.”

Corona’s face was unreadable. “…Maybe things are just different now, Sombra.” She hung up on her.

“Are you sur-“ Lady Rarity began.

“I… wasn’t in the mood to deal with her,” Corona admitted. “I’ll call her later. …Apologize. But let’s get through this for now.”

Toph wanted to say something, but decided not to. They should enjoy themselves.

~~~

Vriska and Alushy walked down the halls of the Hub, taking a moment to get out of the ‘overly stuffy shouting room with millions of stuffy politicians’.

“You know, I can’t believe we don’t talk that much,” Vriska said. “I mean, I see you around, and you sound like a lot of fun, but we’ve never actually talked have we?”

“Not that you remember.”

“Funny.” Vriska swiped a milkshake off a nearby vendor and tossed them a coin in payment. “…Fruity,” she observed.

“Brilliant observation. You deserve a medal.”

“I have all the medals. All of them.”

“Do you have the fudgemothering vampire medal?”

“Yes. Stole it from you, actually, while you weren’t looking.”

“Ha! Joke’s on you, that was the fake fudgemothering vampire medal! That was the ‘get bitten by Alushy for free’ medal. Bend over, I need to get to your neck.”

“You aren’t getting my blood.”

“Oh come on! Just a little taste? I bet it tastes like blueberries.”

“It tastes like cobalt shavings.”

“So what you’re saying is ‘essentially blueberry’.”

“What I’m saying is it tastes horrible.”

“So you won’t mind providing a drop or two? You certainly aren’t using it... I hear trolls have a ton of extra blood…” Alushy bared her fangs.

Vriska punched her in the face before she could jump her neck. “Sorry, not happening.”

“I’ll just wait until you’re lulled into a false sense of security…”

“I’m far too lucky for you to hi-“

Alusy performed a quick aerial maneuver and hit Vriska in the chest with her front hooves. Vriska fell back. “FALL TO MY FANGS!”

Vriska grinned, twirling onto her feet and drawing her sword. “This is going to be good…”

Alushy drew her guns, chuckling. “Prepare to explode multiple times, Vriska Serket.” Alushy fired a few times, Vriska managing to dodge every bullet. Vriska brought the sword down on Alushy’s head, hitting directly. Blood erupted from the cut like a volcano, dousing Vriska’s face and blinding her.

“Augh! Forgot about that!” Vriska muttered, wiping off her face. In this moment of distraction, Alushy grabbed her neck and bit down. Vriska’s luck ensured Alushy missed the major artery she was going for.

Shit, Alushy thought, imagining Vriska’s boot hitting her before it actually did. She went into the air and opted to stop playing miss-nice-vampire. Shadows furled off her essence, summoning horrendous eyes and mouths around her. She dive-bombed the troll.

Vriska threw her dice. A giant spider made of marshmallows appeared, attacking the shadows head on.

The Rainbow Dash with the metallic wing better known as Razor arrived on the scene to find a vampire pegasus and a troll laughing, stuck inside a mess of blood, shadow, and marshmallow.

Razor groaned. “Why do you people have to have your ‘friendly spars’ in public places!? The citizens were freaking out!”

“Fuck ‘em,” Vriska said, struggling to get out of the marshmallow goo. “We were bonding.”

“We’re still not do-“ Alushy paused. “…Vriska, what did you just say?”

“…We were bonding? Don’t tell me you’re getting all sent-“

“No, no, before that.”

“Fuck ‘em?”

“PRAISE THE BLOOD OF THE FALLEN!” Alushy shouted, flying into the air with the cheesiest toothy grin ever. “FUCK! OH IT FEELS SO GOOD TO SAY. ALL THESE YEARS… ALL THESE YEARS…” Alushy grabbed Vriska by the face and kissed her full on. “You are the best thing ever.”

“WOAH WOAH WOAH!” Vriska said, waving her hands. “Baaaaaaack off with the kissing! Yeesh! Hastur will freak!”

“Oh psh it didn’t mean anything,” Alushy said, waving a wing. “Not a fucking thing. So fucking satisfying. Fuckitty fuck fuck fudgefuck fuckmothering vampire. I think I prefer fudgemotheirng actually… But FUCK ME this feels SOOOO GOOOD.”

Nearby citizens covered the ears of children.

Razor covered her face with her wings. “Just… Go find somewhere private to smash each other to bits next time, okay?”

“Gladly!” Alushy agreed.

Vriska turned to Alushy. “You never heard fuck before? How in the world?”

“I… I really don’t know. I was born in a world where it didn’t exist. It was nothing but ‘fudge’. And then I found people who knew but wouldn’t tell me because they thought it was amusing… THE WORLD CAN BE SO CRUEL!”

“Aren’t you the pegasus who slaughters armies of the undead on a regular basis?”

“Yes, but that’s beside the point-”

“And has the highest lethality of all of Eve’s agents?”

“Potato, potahto.”

“And got beat by a version of yourself with a loud voice?”

“…Are you just here to push buttons? Because we can push buttons. And my buttons, once pushed, don’t get un-pushed, you understand. There will be consequences. Dark, toothy consequences.”

Vriska grinned. “I think we’re best friends now.”

“FUDGE YES! …Fuck yes, I mean. Fudge, that’s not going we- I mean fuck! AGH!” Alushy laughed. “This is going to be interesting.”

“Why not keep using fudge? It’s more interesting, frankly,” Vriska said. “Also means you can stick a stream of insults to kids without their parents getting in your way.”

“I like your priorities. Let’s go find something to kill.”

“I hear there’s dinosaurs in the jungle outsi-“

And then Aradia showed up between the two of them with a crazed smile on her face. “HI!!!”

“FUCK!” Vriska shouted, falling backward.

“FUDGE!” Alushy blurted, rearing up.

“Vriska!” Aradia cheered, pulling the blueblood into her arms. “Ooooooh it’s been so long!”

“Aradia… Crushing me…” Vriska muttered, flailing around comically.

“Ooooh I’ve just been waiting for this for so looooong!”

“Hey, red fairy bitch, you trying to steal my new best friend?” Alushy asked. “Because if you are, I will buck your fudging head o- fuck. You get the point, you’re fucked. Fudged. DAMMIT.”

“Oh you can still be best friends if you want,” Aradia said, releasing Vriska. “We can just be a troop of three super best friends! Woo!”

“…Woo?” Vriska said, scratching the back of her head.

“That’s right. Woo,” Aradia deadpanned. “The eerie call of a ghost escaping this world and moving onto the next.”

Alushy blinked. “I like you too. Holy hell, today’s looking great.”

“Hey, Aradia, quick question,” Vriska said.

“Hrm?”

Vriska punched Aradia across the face, driving the red fairy to the ground.

Alushy clapped. “Ten out of ten!”

“Where the fuck have you been!?” Vriska shouted. “I’ve been here for years and now you decide to show yourself?”

Aradia stood up, not at all offended by the punch. “Ah, well, few reasons I couldn’t show myself until now. The first is I decided that I wouldn’t make myself available to Eve and the Alliance until after Unification. They would have grown large enough that my actions wouldn’t hopelessly corrupt their fate. The second was so you could get to know everyone around here a little better, and stay even though you’d already found me!”

“Why wouldn’t I stay?”

Aradia pointed at Vriska with the finger guns gesture. “See? It worked! A week after being here, you would have made this a waypoint just to visit me and gone out searching for Earth C again.”

“I… I… Why do you have to be such a manipulative bitch about it though?”

Aradia winked. “I learned from the best.”

Vriska blinked. “I deserved that.”

“Yep!” Aradia summoned a milkshake to her hand from another time and sipped. “Anyway, who cares much about when I wasn’t here? I’m here now and I’m here to stay, and I decided to show myself to you first! I’ll catch up with the others later. Haven’t talked to Celestia in a while… Nova could use some pointers…”

“So we’ve passed your test?” Alushy asked.

“Yep!” Aradia grinned. “The Alliance will become Merodi Universalis, and I won’t be a background manipulator anymore! Just thinking about not hiding all the time gives me goosebumps…”

“So it goes well?” Vriska asked.

“Been through it three times, all good,” Aradia declared. “Bit boring, even the first time around.”

“No surprise there,” Alushy muttered. “Hey, let’s watch a bunch of bigwigs sign a piece of paper! Brilliant! Riveting!”

“Alushy! You’re understating it,” Aradia declared. “What is happening today is nothing less than monumental!”

“You and I both know this place is still small fish compared to what’s out there,” Vriska pointed out.

“Psh. You and I both know they have a powerful destiny.”

“Psh, you two know too much,” Alushy said.

“Regardless,” Aradia said, lifting her hands high. “Let’s go to one of the party scenes instead of the actual signing! I’ve seen the after-party rumor mills, I know where the wildest scene will be.”

“Pinkie?” Vriska asked.

“Not the one you’re thinking of!” Aradia giggled. “Pielight is going to go crazy.”

“Pielight...” Alushy scratched her chin. “How crazy we talking?”

“We will get to witness how a cross between Pinkie Pie and Twilight Sparkle would confess her undying love to a bowl of punch.”

“Sold,” Vriska said. “To the party!”

Aradia accelerated the time around the three of them so they could arrive instantly.

~~~

Eve, Renee, Nova, Pinkie, and Flutterfree were gathered on the stage in Reverb Hall, talking amongst themselves before the show actually started.

“By the way, Applejack just went into labor,” Pinkie said, suddenly. Nopony asked how she knew this. “Bit of bad timing though, none of us will get to be there to see another little adorable Apple!”

Renee shook her head. “I don’t know how she does it… Come to think of it I don’t know how any of the Apples do it! Between her and Big Mac there’s like ten foals now!”

“Apples. Very prolific,” Nova said. “Unlike the rest of us.”

“Wouldn’t work well with our jobs,” Renee pointed out. “I don’t know how Jotaro does it.”

“Pure badassery,” Nova answered.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yes it is!” Pinkie said, smirking.

Eve chuckled. “Not a good one.”

“What? Half the stuff I see Jotaro do is all based in pure badassery. The guy does not experience pain!”

“So, basically Alushy?” Flutterfree said. “But Alushy wouldn’t make a good mother…”

“You know I wonder if she has any foals out there,” Renee said. “She’s definitely the type to have them… She’s also ancient. Triple-digit age at least.”

“Probably, given what I know about her,” Eve said. “Not that I can know for sure. You’d have to ask her, and getting a straight answer out of Alushy is like explaining the concept of a family to Gems.”

“Not as hard as you think it is, Eve,” Renee pointed out.

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “I think you just have a knack for talking with beings made of crystal.”

“Eheheh… Probably.”

Pinkie’s tail twitched and her midsection twisted like a corkscrew. “Oooo! That’s a new one!”

The various Pinkies in the Hall all experienced the exact same manifestation of the Pinkie Sense. Calls of “doozy incoming!” and “wonder what that means?” rang through the auditorium.

“Have any ideas?” Eve asked Pinkie.

Pinkie shrugged. “I’ve got a nervous feeling in my stomach, though it’s hard to tell if that’s just anticipation or a sense of something foreboding. Probably the former. I mean, all the Pinkies and all the oculi agree that this event will go through without disaster.”

“We shouldn’t dismiss your gut feeling,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“Hrm… Well this is an important moment,” Pinkie mused. “There’ll probably be a conflict of some kind. Perhaps internal? A bit of drama upsets the ceremony or something.” Pinkie shrugged. “Well, I know two things. I know the ceremony finishes. I also know there’s something going to happen. I don’t have that deep of a pit in my stomach, so…” She paused, catching herself.

“Pinkie, what is it?” Flutterfree asked.

“…I’m trying to convince myself there’s nothing to worry about,” she realized. “That’s… Not a good sign, actually.” She turned to Eve. “How much security do we have?”

“The entire auditorium is dimensionally locked courtesy of the Sparkle Census,” Eve answered. “Nobody can get in or out directly. The Enterprise is in orbit, along with a significant portion of Cosmo’s fleet. We’ve got scrying spells everywhere, and will know if anyone uninvited shows up in an instant. Plus we’ve got several dozen of the most powerful entities in the multiverse here. Even if blue, metallic, and ugly shows up I think he’d have an issue.”

“We couldn’t beat him,” Pinkie said. “But I’m sure it’s not him. …Or am I just telling myself that…?”

“Pinkie, you’re second guessing yourself,” Renee said, putting a hoof on her shoulder. “We’re doing all we can to make this safe. And if something goes wrong… We’ll deal with it when it does.”

“Yeah,” Pinkie said. “You’re all right. Just be on guard.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Eve encouraged her.

~~~

Nautica.

The Prison world for the Alliance.

There were many prisoners on the world. They had formed several different camps on different parts of the planet. There was one camp composed entirely of Ba’als, while there was another camp composed of militant, angry Gems.

However, there was one camp all the others feared. The first camp. The technologically advanced abode of Brutalight Sparcake and her friends.

When they had first arrived, a human spaceship called the Aurora had crashed, all inside perishing. They soon found one survivor who had ejected before the crash. They had turned that survivor into their slave, forcing him to tell them all he could about the technology of the Aurora and how to use it.

He had been an effective slave, but he didn’t last that long. The sea monsters got him. Such was the brutal truth for simple humans.

Of course, the Alliance never threw prisoners into Nautica who were simple humans that could be easily contained… The beings thrown into Nautica were too much trouble to contain, or had angered someone particularly high up the chain of power.

And on Nautica all prisoners would find that Brutalight was at the top of this ocean world.

With magic, technology, and ingenuity, she had managed to enchant their base to affix to clouds. They were the only inhabitants of the ocean world to command the skies. They had tried to leave the world once… but Eve’s satellites had put an end to that.

The base was square, with five buildings: one on each corner, rising above the central square platform, with the fifth building of a significantly larger size containing lower portions that protruded from the square’s underside. The structures were smooth, white, and clean. There were many large windows around the structure, alongside blue and orange highlights plastered on several of the rounded edges.

Not many people lived on the base. There was one human, one Gem, and five ponies. Four of the ponies where what remained of the Elements of Insanity, defeated at Esefem so many years ago. Fluttershout, the Fluttershy with an unbelievably dangerous voice. Rarifruit, the greedy Rarity with magic hands. Rainbine, the robot that was Rainbow Dash. And Brutalight – the leader, the brutal dark purple alicorn who most certainly could hold a grudge for over a decade.

The fifth pony was a Fluttershy, known as a cult-leader in her home universe. She was the Summoner of the Smooze who now went by Gaea.

The Gem had never given them a name – all they knew was that she was pitch black. So they called her Jet. She never corrected them.

The last member…

“Focus,” Brutalight said, standing on the edge of their flying base. “Reach deep into your soul and your mind – usually you just find the strongest emotion you can. Anger is a very useful and powerful tool, but it should not be your only one. Try to tap into your excitement, or something else to use your ability. Focus it on the water below for me. No anger, understand?”

The young woman nodded. She was tall for a human, and thin, but she was far from weak. Her arms had visible muscles and her form was well toned. She wore a black skin-fitting suit that ran from her shoulders to just above her knees, leaving the leg joints room to bend and her arms free of obstruction. Her eyes burned with the fire of an intense spirit, and around her chest she wore the tatters of a yellow raincoat like a belt.

Her name was Six.

Six took a deep breath, forgetting her anger for a moment. She felt around inside herself, deciding quickly not to rely on fear. Never again. What else… What could she base this on…

Pride.

She would succeed just because she had to.

She extended her hand over the waves and twitched one of her eyes. Clouds of dark energy shot from her fingertips, drifting into the waters below.

For a few seconds, nothing happened.

Then a fish floated belly-up to the surface. The rest of its school followed, giving the surface of the ocean a silvery sheen.

The predators of the ocean took only a few seconds to arrive and chow down on the free food. The sea became red with the blood of death.

“Very good!” Brutalight cheered, beaming. “How’d you do it?”

“I thought about how much I wanted to impress you,” Six said honestly.

Brutalight smiled warmly. “Aw… Sweet. Beyond cheesy, but still sweet.” She rubbed Six’s hair with her hoof. “Come on, my apprentice. Dinner awaits.”

The two of them returned to the rest of the group. Jet, as usual, was standing wordlessly to the side, staring off into the horizon. She refused to even consider eating, sleeping, or really do anything other than stand guard and be ready for an attack. Even though nobody ever attacked them anymore. They attacked the other prisoners when they felt like it.

“I hear you’re doing pretty well,” Rarifruit called over to Six, though her voice was unusually quiet as almost always. “Becoming the regular powerhouse!”

Six smiled. “Yep! I could kill so many with but a thought now. Think we could finally get rid of all those pesky Ba’als with it, Brutalight?”

Brutalight shook her head. “More Ba’als are always thrown on Nautica. Plus, killing them doesn’t really do anything at this point. I think I much prefer them quaking in fear, willing to bend to our every whim should we show our faces.”

“It’s so boring though!” Rainbine declared in her signature synthetic voice. “We either control them to do nothing, or kill them and get nothing. Ever since we killed that big fish god thing this place has had nothing!”

Fluttershout rolled her eyes. “I’m happy just sitting here, eating fish.” She bit down on the fish they had cooked on their plates. “I love fish…”

“Not healthy for pony digestion, dear,” Rarifruit said with disapproval. “You need to eat more orangishes.”

Six held up one of the round, elongated fruit they had dubbed an ‘orangish’ because it was definitely orange, but it wasn’t actually an orange. She bit into it, letting its thick juices flow across her face.

Rarifruit facehooved. “Manners, Six.”

“What is this, prissy pony central?” Rainbine muttered. “We can do whatever we want Rarifruit, you can stop nagging.”

“Or she can keep nagging and we can keep calling her a little bitch,” Fluttershout ribbed.

Rarifruit rolled her eyes. “Ugh. You’re all impossible. Later today, I need an expedition to go kill a giant sea monster of some sort. There’s no way we’ve hunted them to extinction. There’s only six of us.”

“Seven,” Gaea corrected.

“Six. Jet never does anything but look scary.”

Gaea glanced at Jet. “Jet, do you mind that we do things without you?”

Jet glanced at Gaea with narrow eyes. “I am loyal to your cause but I shall not engage in frivolous organic activities.”

“Stick in the mud,” Rainbine declared.

Jet’s eyes suddenly widened. “Something’s happening.”

“I sense it too,” Brutalight declared, spreading her wings and summoning her swords to her side. “Be ready, girls.”

Everypony took positions, preparing for a fight. A black portal opened, revealing a tall four-armed being. Many present knew instantly.

“Siron,” Brutalight said, standing up tall. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Siron nodded. “I do not have much time, so I need your answer quickly. Will you come with us to crush the Alliance?”

Brutalight smirked. “You don’t even need to ask. All of us have quite the grudge against those who put us here. I will warn you, we’re fans of… brutal, deadly murder with extreme cruelty.”

Siron pointed at Six. “I am told she has a power that will be pivotal to our plan.”

“Told? You’re not running this operation?” Brutalight raised an eyebrow. “From what I heard, you were the big bad on the block out there.”

“I have found a benefactor,” Siron said. “A man by the name of Randall Flagg. I think you will like him.”

Fluttershout sneered. “Oh, is he too brutal for your little idealistic mind, chief Siron?”

“It matters not how brutal or empty of honor he is. They need to fall.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Brutalight said. “Six, it looks like we’re going to get some revenge.”

Six, long ago, had considered the ponies her friends. They had saved her, helped her get through the horrors of the Maw, and given her the power that she wielded.

Now?

Brutalight had taught her much over the years.

Including the fact that those ponies needed to suffer.

The group followed Siron through the portal, leaving Nautica behind.

~~~

Aradia, Vriska, and Alushy arrived at the location of the party.

It was completely empty.

“Oops,” Aradia said, flapping herself in the forehead. “I think I got us here too fast.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “I thought you were always so precise with your time control?”

“I know! This never happens to me! Thi-“ she stopped herself. “This is the right place at the right time. Something’s changed.”

“I found a sign,” Alushy said, pointing at a window in the empty room. The text was backward, but they could read. PARTY MOVED NEXT DOOR.

“This isn’t right,” Aradia said. “This is…” out of nowhere; she yelled out in surprise and grabbed her heart.

“Aradia! What is it?!” Vriska said, panic evident in her tone.

“Time… Changed… Watch out…” Aradia said.

A bullet whizzed toward Vriska – but Alushy caught it in her teeth and spat it out. “AMBUSH!”

Vriska and Alushy examined their enemy – a white alicorn composed of cyborg components.

“Who the fuck are you?” Vriska asked.

“Blackjack,” Blackjack said, aiming her gun right at Vriska’s head. “And I’m here to stop you from gathering too much power.”

“You just challenged the wrong group, toaster,” Vriska grinned. Aradia, I’m getting bad vibes from this one. A time jump would be a good idea.

Aradia didn’t send a telepathic message back. She just spoke. “The temporal physics of this universe have been altered from the outside. Traveling through time in jumps is no longer allowed.”

“What!?” Vriska blurted. “That’s a thing?”

Aradia took a few steps toward Blackjack. There was no smile on the troll’s normally cheerful face. “It isn’t uncommon for time travel to be impossible in any given universe. Some just aren’t designed to handle the paradoxes. Some have other limitations that must be learned every time. But universal laws don’t just change without great power…” Aradia stared right into Blackjack’s eyes. “Who did this?”

Blackjack pointed her gun right at Aradia. “Yeah, not telling you.”

“ZA WARUDO!”

In an instant, Vriska, Aradia, and Alushy all felt a punch in their gut. A tall, blonde man stood where before there had previously been none, the smuggest of all smug grins on his face.

Vriska spat blood out of her mouth. “Right, now who the fuck are you?”

“Dio,” Dio said, smirking. He summoned his Stand. None of them could see it clearly, but the three of them had senses that were able to tell them where it was, generally speaking. “I’m with Blackjack.”

“And you won’t be leaving this room,” Blackjack said, pulling out a shotgun. “Not taking any chances that you can find a way to undo our time shenanigans.”

They drew their weapons – whip, sword and dice, guns. Blackjack levitated a few more guns to her side, ready to fire them all at the same time. Dio needed no weapon – he just moved his Stand in front of him.

“You’re like Jotaro,” Vriska commented. “Stop time, punch hard, resume time.”

“The power of The World is beyond that of Star Platinum!” Dio spat. “The World is stronger, faster, and able to stop time for longer!”

Vriska threw her dice.

“ZA WARUDO!” Dio shouted, freezing time for everyone.

Everyone except Aradia. She’d been expecting it. She pointed a finger at Dio. “You are not all-powerful, Dio. Without your temporal trick, you are nothing.” She accelerated her whip, lashing it hard enough to cut a gash in his arm down to the bone.

The gash slowly began to heal itself. Dio laughed. “You aren’t anything without your temporal tricks, either…”

Aradia could not see The World. It punched her in the chest, tossing her out the window and into a crowded street of the Hub.

“And time resumes,” Dio said.

~~~

The Hall fell silent. There had been a few speeches for the media prior to this moment, to give the public something to listen to about the momentousness of the occasion, but once the clock struck two, no time was wasted.

All the representatives of every universe lined up on the stage. Each universe had a representative of the world as a whole, and a representative of each individual nation that was participating. Most of these representatives were the respective leaders of their worlds – queens, princesses, presidents, prime ministers, Diamonds – all present for the signing of the document. Humans notably outnumbered non-humans on the stage, though it was well known this was because there were significantly more human nations on any given Earth than the generally unified worlds that existed elsewhere. The stage was rather crowded, but it was able to hold all of them comfortably.

The document – the Unification of Merodi Universalis – was a large piece of paper placed on top of a podium. The words on the paper were simple, but held a powerful message of unification, only going on for a few paragraphs about what it meant and what other documents were going into effect with the signing of the document. Half the page was blank, ready to accept hundreds of signatures.

In silence, the signing began.

Gem Vein went first. Blue and Yellow Diamond signed together. White Diamond did not make an appearance, but had given the two of them a stamp so her name would grace the document. Despite the events at the Trial, Yellow Diamond wasn’t angry about what was taking place. Her expression was difficult to read, but it was not her normal, sour expression. If one were asked to describe it, it would be with the word satisfied.

Earth Stand took the second spot. Unlike the other Earths, who had opted to use the Secretary General of the United Nations as the signer for their entire world, Earth Stand had chosen Joseph Joestar, the unofficial representative of the Stand users. He shakily walked over to the podium and scrawled his name on the page. “Heh… Never imagined I’d be doing this… Your next line will be laughter, followed by ‘wait a minute’.”

A few people in the crowd chuckled – then went ‘wait a minute’ as they realized he’d called it out. It didn’t get everyone, but it got enough for Joseph to feel satisfied. He went back to the stage, allowing the leaders from his Earth to begin to sign.

At this point people began to realize this was going to get somewhat boring.

Equis Cosmic was next. Only Princess Cosmo herself needed to sign, and she did so with her magic. Earth Tau’ri had sent their UN Secretary General, bringing on another series of bored shuffling from the audience. A handful of aliens signed as well – the Asgard, the Ori Reform, and a handful of other non Earth-based nations.

The Elemental Nations came after. Avatar Aang, now a fully grown man with a square jaw and wise eyes, signed for his world. He shot the audience a smile and winked, giving them encouragement to sit through to the end of the show. Representatives of Republic City, the Earth Kingdoms, and the Water Tribes, signed as well. Firelord Zuko scrawled his name for the Fire Nation, a rare smile seen on his features.

Queen Luna signed alone for Lai, but her signing brought forth a few cheers from the audience – more than a few of them had been a part of Lai’s rocky history.

Earth Vitis went second to last, cycling through a more colorful version of Earth Tau’ri’s signing procedure.

At the end, Equis Vitis. Unlike the other seven worlds, the representative of the whole did not sign first. Eve stayed back – all had agreed she would be last, so she could give some closing words. Novo… Ember… Thorax… and a handful of other beings from Equis Vitis signed.

Celestia left Eve’s side second to last, giving her once student a warm smile. She grabbed the pen and signed for Equestria, returning to the rest of the leaders.

Eve walked up to the podium last, holding the pen in her magic.

She turned on her ears. For once, she didn’t wince.

“When I touch this pen to the paper, the Alliance we have found ourselves in will cease to exist.” She looked over the crowd, taking in all the Gems, humans, ponies, and others sitting in anticipation, waiting for the biggest event any of them had ever known. She glanced up at the glass balcony in which the foreign dignitaries sat, all watching expectantly. Eve took some pleasure in Jenny’s boredom. “From the ashes of the Alliance will rise Merodi Universalis.”

Eve gestured at the symbol hanging above her – the Greek letter mu overtop a darkened yellow background. “Merodi Universalis. It is a name spliced from many languages and meanings. Merodi can be said to mean melody, song, or music. Universalis: of the spheres, of universes, or of our worlds. Our name is indicative of what we are to become, what intertwining our lives means. We are the Melody of our Worlds. Songs of the Spheres. Music of Universes. Merodi Universalis.”

She lowered the pen to the paper, looking closely at the empty space left for her. It was larger than the space allotted to most the other signatures. “Ten years ago, Equis Vitis time, many of our worlds participated in Disclosure. That event was the biggest thing any of us had imagined at the time, but now it seems to be so long in the past. Because we are about to become Merodi, my friends. And we will spread the bonds we share between us through the boundaries of reality itself with what we start here today.”

Eve slid the pen across the paper, scrawling her name across the blank space. She made it just as small as all the other signatures, leaving a blank space for something else. With her magic, she fused a golden imprint of the Merodi Universalis symbol to the paper. Then she cast a spell on the document to ensure it would never tear, never burn, and never fade. It would last for eons to come.

“We are now Unified!” Eve declared, lifting the paper into the air. She rolled it up and handed it to Spike, who ran down the aisle to place it at the center of the Hub in a specially designed room near the Mirror Portal itself, where it would be displayed for all to see.

Cheers erupted from the crowd as the dragon ran down the aisle.

A tear came to Eve’s eye.

This moment was worth everything she had gone through. She didn’t even care how the noise of the applause hurt her, it was beautiful to actually hear.

The applause lasted after Spike had left the Hall – but not for as long as it should have.

The TARDIS appeared in the middle of the auditorium a few feet in the air. It fell to the ground and tipped over onto its side, the loud crash bringing the applause to a sudden stop. The Doctor pulled himself out of the TARDIS, his face that of panic. “EVERYONE! GET O-“

“Too late, Doctor,” a voice most had not heard before echoed throughout the room. The voice was male, and for all intents and purposes was normal for a human. However, when they heard it, chills ran down their spines, the sound shaking them to their cores.

A flash of darkness placed two figures on top of the TARDIS. One was unmistakably Siron, wielding his staff Juju. The other was an unknown human man – though everyone who looked at him was certain he couldn’t be human. He wore a simple black suit and had a smile on his face that would have been considered warm if it had been on anyone else.

“FLAGG!” The Doctor shouted.

“Yes,” Flagg decreed. “But this is not my plan. Siron?”

Siron nodded, ignoring the Doctor and turning to Eve. “You have finally achieved the power you have sought for so long. Revel in it, Charter-Princess. It will be the only time you taste the power that none should have, for now it all comes crashing down.”

“I don’t know what you have planned Siron, or how you teleported in here,” Eve said. “But yo-“

Eve didn’t get to finish. Flagg held up a sphere of darkness in the air, shifting a spot in reality to open remove all the protective spells. “Have a nice day!” He declared, vanishing into an entirely different world.

The tear he had created unleashed a young woman first.

Pinkie recognized her. “No…” she said, knowing instantly what was about to happen. “NO! EVE, USE SERAPHIM! PROTECT TH-“

Six moved too fast. Eve barely had time to summon her Stand before Six unleashed the magic of her life drain on every individual on the stage. The three-ringed form of Eve’s Stand protected her – but the majority of those on the stage were helpless. The Diamonds poofed, dropping their gems to the ground. Cosmo screamed as the Tree of Harmony within her pumped more and more energy into her body, burning much of her flesh off her bones as a result. Thorax turned himself into a rock just in time – but Eve saw the others of Equis Vitis fall. Ember barely let out a puff of flame before going limp. Joseph Joestar grabbed his heart, Hermit Purple unable to do anything for him. Avatar Aang… Firelord Zuko… Queen Luna… So many humans… So many leaders…

Of the hundreds who had stood tall only seconds before, maybe ten had found a way to survive Six’s honed power over death.

Eve’s eyes froze on Celestia. Eve hadn’t noticed her fall. She… She had to be fine. Her life force was strong enough, Eve was sure of it. Definitely sure. A hundred million percent sure.

The second wave came after Six. Brutalight, the Elements of Insanity, a Fluttershy, and a deep black Gem unlike any Eve had seen before. They moved to finish those who had survived the first attack.

Eve’s mind stopped processing – something in her knew that if she processed anything, everyone was going to die. She flew into the air, blasting the attackers with her magic. Cosmo joined her – somehow still able to move despite being little more than a flaming skeleton at this point. The princess of a galaxy fought with the power of harmony within her.

Many in the audience joined in: Gems summoned their weapons, Stand users summoned their spirits, mages unleashed spells, and humans fired their weapons.

Brutalight strained to just deflect the initial shots.

“EVENING TWILIGHT SPARKLE! LOOK TO ME!”

It was the unmistakable voice of her Princess Luna. Eve winced at the noise, the pain forcing her to look. Luna stood over the form of her Sister, tears flowing down her dark, stern face. An orb of light floated in front of the dark alicorn.

Eve knew what it was.

It was Celestia’s power.

No longer able to inhabit the body that had contained it for many, many centuries.

Luna didn’t bother to say anything else – she threw the essence of Celestia at Eve. She was always the one meant to inherit it, should this day ever come. And it had.

The Bloodbath.

Eve absorbed the energy of her former teacher and ruler. She felt the essence of her – of her sweet smile, her serene laugh, and her strength. The fiery strength that had burned so brightly within her. It fused with Eve’s own power, forcing itself into every part of her soul.

Evening Sparkle’s mane flowed with the magic of the world. A bright orange streak appeared on her mane and tail, signifying the power of the sun, the new hairs alight with a soft flame. Her eyes became miniature suns while her horn extended and her wings grew. Her Stand – Seraphim – appeared around her in the form of three smooth, white-blue metallic rings lined with eyes, enveloping her in a holy light.

She saw Siron – using his Staff to unleash an Eldritch power, banishing the attacks on the Elements of Insanity.

Eve knew the people in the Hall could take care of the Elements of Insanity and Six. She wasn't sure about Siron.

Furthermore, he was the one responsible for this Bloodbath.

“SIRON!” Eve roared. “I AM THE CHARTER-PRINCESS OF FRIENDSHIP, MAGIC, AND THE MULTIVERSE, EVENING TWILIGHT SPARKLE. YOU HAVE COMMITTED CRIMES AGAINST MERODI UNIVERSALIS. YOUR PUNISHMENT IS DEATH.”

Siron took a warrior’s stance. “Come and kill me then, Evening.”

052 - Together We Will Always Shine, Part 2

Corona, like all the others in Reverb Hall, saw Six appear in the air.

Saw her drain the life out of almost everyone standing on the stage.

She saw them fall.

While Vivian started tossing fireballs and Lady Rarity unleashed magic lasers lasers - perfectly reasonable reactions - Corona started laughing.

“AhahaHAhahahhAHAhHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAH!” She wiped tears from out from under her sunglasses. Her laughs were so vocal they made Toph stop mid boulder-launch.

“Corona? What are you doing!?”

“Don’t you see!?” Corona shouted, grabbing Toph by the shoulders. “There isn’t hope! There is only death! AHhahahaHAHAHAAH! It’s. Just. So. Funny!”

She dropped the laugh, dead, turning to look at Six. “Excuse me, I’m going to kill the bitch who did this.” She teleported right to Six and unleashed the death spell in her face. Six absorbed it into her being.

Six grabbed Corona’s horn. Corona felt the life force inside her move toward the woman of death.

How about a little something I learned form Majora!?

Corona shoved her energy through the connection Six had formed with her, driving her personal magic signature into Six’s mind. This startled Six enough that Corona could place a hoof right on her face.

Then she was in Six’s mindscape.

She had never tried to use empathy this way before. It was always observe, perhaps interact a little…

She was going to go beyond that this time.

Corona didn’t care about the memory of Nautica and the Elements of Insanity she was seeing in the midnscape. She channeled the magic through her inner being and let it explode in Six’s memory.

Back in reality, Six screamed in agony as a significant chunk of her memory was incinerated with mental fire.

Corona wasn’t done. She couldn’t use the death spell – fine by her. Time for something more personal. She summoned a dragon of fire around her horn, the plasmatic wyrm swirling in a tornado fashion. It rushed Six with intent to incinerate her to the very bone.

That was when Fluttershout finally brought out her legendary voice, interrupting everything. The force of the noise forced all ears in the vicinity to bleed. Everyone with the ability to hear would have been dead in a second, but something stopped the offending noise. Corona didn’t know what, but she didn’t care. She summoned the dragon again, ready to shatter Six into nothing.

Six used a different spell. She created a shield of dark gray energy, absorbing the entire wyrm of fire. She clearly wasn’t doing very well with her mental charring, but her fortitude was every bit as intense as Corona’s. She couldn’t form words – but she could form attacks. She pointed a finger at Corona, grabbing onto her life force again, this time without direct contact.

Corona smirked. She thinks I need to touch her to do damage. While that’s true for empathy, Majora’s little trick still works. She tapped into the connection Six had made, flooding the girl’s mind with energy again. The connection broke, leaving Corona alive.

Corona decided lighting herself on fire was a good idea. She charged Six directly. As expected, the woman moved to defend herself with her dark powers – leaving her back wide open.

Corona teleported, enchanting her hoof with excess power. Once she hit Six’s back, the hoof would plow right through her spine, heart, and ribcage in an instant.

“GET AWAY FROM HER!” Brutalight shouted, bringing one of her swords down on Corona. Corona was forced to defend against the instant-death blades with her magic instead of taking out Six.

Instead of going for a longer fight, Brutalight shoved Corona away with a simple psychic burst. “RETREAT!” Brutalight ordered. “DEATH WAVES ARE DOWN! GO GO GO!” She grabbed Six in her telekinesis and teleported away.

Corona had been expecting the teleport. She traced it. It took her all of two seconds to follow it – but the destination no longer existed.

The crack the Elements of Insanity had come through had closed back up.

They had gotten away with it. She didn’t see a single one of them lying dead on the ground… Not a single one! She roared in rage, exploding to put the fire on her fur out.

An explosion of power told her that not all of them were gone. She turned – and her jaw dropped.

Siron and Eve were still fighting, the energy involved radiating off of them like stars.

Nobody wanted to even try to get close to the impossible chaos they were hitting each other with.

Nobody could process what was going on.

~~~

Siron took a warrior’s stance. “Come and kill me then, Evening.”

Evening Sparkle obliged. She did the simplest, most direct thing she could think of – a beam of pure magic energy, fired right at Siron with intent to vaporize that shell right off his body. With the power of Celestia in her, Eve found herself not only connected to the Sun or any other celestial body, but the shell of magic in the Hub itself. Not the planet – the universe. She was able to tap into the primal power that drove all spells. It was her domain.

Seraphim’s rotation increased as she powered up. A ring of fire surrounded her horn as a single point of energy coalesced at the tip.

Siron saw what she was doing. Instead of dodging, he pointed his staff right at her. Black, red, and green swirled toward the alicorn in a spiral pattern.

Eve launched her laser spell, a laser of pure energy so intense the purple affectation of her magic could only be seen around the edges. For all intents and purposes it was white with hints of orange at seemingly random locations. The beams hit each other – and held.

(Celestia looked down at Eve. “I have something to tell you, Evening.”

“What is it?” Eve said, looking up at the white alicorn with hope.

“Ever since our vacation, I’ve been thinking about you and me. About what we mean.”

“We’re friends. Colleagues. Family,” Eve said. “I thought we resolved that?”

“That we did,” Celestia said, smiling sadly. “I’m talking about something that nopony ever wants to talk about, but what is perhaps the most important aspect of life.”

Eve’s expression became serious. “Celestia… What is that?”

“Death,” Celestia said.

Eve fell silent.

“You’re not objecting,” Celestia observed.

“You’re right.”

“Then you’ve thought of it as well. No longer are we vastly above almost any foe we could face. It is very likely we will fall in battle, or assassination.”

Eve nodded. “It… It is more likely than it was before, yes.”

“Then we need to decide what happens in the event of one of our deaths,” Celestia decreed.

“I have a will,” Eve said. “Spike gets most of it. My friends get what matters to them. I’m currently giving the castle to Sparky. And…”

“I have a will as well, Eve. That is not what I’m talking about,” Celestia looked out a distant window. “We are alicorns. We have a power within us greater than most ponies. That power grows over time – evolving into more of a force of nature than anything else. That power can remain after death. That power can be used. What we need to decide is where that power goes once we die.”

“Corona,” Eve declared. “She’d be the best for my magic.”

“I was wondering who you’d pick.” Celestia turned to look directly in Eve’s eyes. “I choose you.”

“Celestia…”

“In the event of my death, my will is that you are given the power within me.”

“What about Luna?”

“Eve… I chose you. Not Luna.”

Eve nodded slowly, her eyes glassy. “…I am honored, Celestia.”

“I know you are. But I want you to know one thing – when the time does come, and I move on from this world, remember this moment. Remember me. In that sense, I will always be with you.”)

The focal point of the two direct attacks exploded. Neither Eve nor Siron budged an inch from the shockwave, though they did decide to stop firing the tremendous lasers. Eve tried something else, touching the magic around Siron himself, trying to crush him.

The staff wasn’t going to let that slide. Its eldritch energies activated, opening a hole in aether itself for Siron to survive. He jumped forward, using the staff’s energy to protect himself, using his own magic to attack Eve.

Seraphim easily caught the simple magic attack in its aura, tossing it to the side like it was nothing. Siron opted for a physical punch, aiming right for Eve’s head.

She lowered her posture by an inch. Siron impaled his hand on her horn. Blue blood should have come out of him, but it didn’t. Black sludge poured from the wound, the staff diverting energy to healing the hole.

Siron threw another punch with a free arm, but it never connected. Eve performed a combination spell – teleporting herself away and planting an explosive in his hand where her horn had just been. His entire limb flew off.

It started the process of regrowing.

“WHY!?” Eve shouted, looking Siron right in the face as she channeled magical energy into her entire body.

“BECAUSE YOU TOOK TOO MUCH!” Siron shouted back, leaping into the air.

“WE WERE FRIENDS!”

(Siron looked up from a book he was reading. “You wrote this?”

Eve… no. Twilight Sparkle nodded. “Yeah. I hope it does your people justice. I just… I don’t want everyone seeing you as violent warrior types all the time. There’s a lot more to you than that!”

“It works well,” Siron admitted, letting out a soft chuckle. “It may not be perfect in all areas, and you do get a bit… wordy. But this is serviceable. Everyone will see this?”

“I’m Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle! Of course everyone will read my book on the races of the multiverse. Then they’ll learn about you and not be so scared!”

“It is not the fear that concerns me.”

“It should. You could stand to read the chapter on humans. Fear drives their anger and violence in unpredictable ways. If they fear something, they want to kill it or stamp it out by any means necessary. The trick to getting them on your side is to get them to no longer fear you or what you’ll do. Anger is a lot easier to deal with than fear. Fear is irrational.”

“Isn’t anger as well?”

“Ah, yes? But anger alone doesn’t rationalize itself – you can’t keep up being angry about something without some other emotion backing it up. It’s draining.”

“For your kind maybe. Demons can be angry all the time at everything.”

“Then I might just be wrong about something,” Twilight admitted. “But this book will help anyway. Removing fear is better than doing nothing.”

Siron nodded. “Thank you, Twilight, for doing this. We may yet come into our own out among the multiverse.”

“I hope you do!”)

“We were never friends,” Siron said, slamming his staff on the ground, creating a whirlwind of screaming shadows. “I was using you from the start.” He tossed Eve into the ground with a dark claw. “I sent you to the Mistress so I could be rid of a problem and use the altar for myself.” He tore at her wings with dark knives. ”I gave you the Hub so you would trust me.” He pounded against her magic shield with red and green lights. “I shipped magic artifacts to the Binary world for Ba’al, resulting in the destruction of that planet.” Siron cut Eve’s legs, drawing blood. “I RAISED AN ARMY ON THE CORRUPTED WORLD IN ORDER TO DEFEAT YOU AT THE OPPORTUNE MOMENT!”

“YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT TO ROT IN THE JUNGLE!” Eve roared, executing a complex series of teleports that placed solid debris inside Siron’s body. All of his organs should have failed – but the power in the staff kept him alive.

“YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE HELD THAT MEETING!” Siron shouted. “YOUR LUST FOR POWER HAS RUINED EVERYTHING!” He shot the debris out of his body like bullets, only for them to be blocked by Eve.

“DAMN YOU!” Eve shouted. “ARE YOU REALLY THAT DELUSIONAL?”

“YOU ARE THE MARE WITH A DELUSION!”

Eve no longer cared about the consequences. No more bothering to keep secrets. No more trump cards. “That’s it.” She activated Seraphim’s ability.

Siron grabbed his head and screamed. The staff surrounded his head in a protective bubble of eldritch power, reducing the pain. “What…”

“Siron, you believe that we have interfered too much and destroyed your way of life. But from what you’ve just told me of your intentions, I am one hundred percent certain that your way of life needed to end. If there were that many lies… that much death… that much… You, Siron, should have let yourself change. But you didn’t. You refused to. Your reality is that you are the strongest, that you can achieve power, and that you will lead your people to a glorious empire. I reject that. I reject your reality and substitute my own.” Seraphim’s three rings lined up, and the space in its centre rippled.

Siron found that suddenly none of his muscles could move. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t even blink.

The staff still worked, but Eve deflected the shadowy attack. “What’s that Siron? Are you saying something? I didn’t hear, because I’m deaf. But I can guess. Maybe, you want to know what I’m doing to you!?” Eve narrowed her eyes. “Muscles, no matter what biological life form they are in, require electrical signals to operate properly. I replaced the local physics around you with one that doesn’t allow for the force of electricity. Your brain should technically be dead right now, but I suspect all your mental faculties are stored in the eldritch powers coursing through your veins.”

Siron’s inner power began to move him by force – not by electricity, but by darkness.

“Let’s switch it up, shall we? Let’s remove friction,” Eve declared. Suddenly, Siron’s limbs were flailing everywhere, moving so quickly they snapped in numerous places. “Now a world where there’s no light!” Siron couldn’t see anything. “No transference of heat.” Siron began to overheat. “Or what about… A world where organic life is impossible because DNA cannot link together properly?”

Siron struggled through the inner heat of his body. “What…”

“This is Seraphim’s power,” Eve declared. “Seraphim has the ability to open a portal to any universe. It can be used as a portal, sure, but its real ability is to tap into the local physics of that universe and force it onto a select area. In this case, you, Siron.”

“You have too much power…” Siron grunted.

“You would have been happy had this power been your own,” Eve spat. “Your double standard disgusts me, Siron.” Eve considered freezing him in some way and imprisoning him – but then she saw something in his eyes. Something that haunted her to her core and would be with her the rest of her days.

He wanted to die. That might have been the entire reason he was still here.

Eve sighed. “…Very well,” she muttered, the previous fire in her voice gone. She tapped into a universe where there was no temperature - everything was asolute zero. She released her telekinetic hold on him and let him drop. His frozen body shattered into a million pieces.

The staff remained unharmed, but it was no longer attacking her.

Eve sat down, eyes empty of emotion.

She may not have been Twilight Sparkle, but even then… Siron was where it all started. It was his world… He was the first adventure. The first ally.

He was dead now.

She didn’t cry for him. She wasn’t sure if he was truly evil or not, but she was certain he wasn’t a good person. The worlds would be better off without him.

But his memory would always be with them.

“EVENING!” Jotaro threw something at Eve’s head to get her attention. “GET OVER HERE!”

Eve executed a short-range teleport by instinct, appearing next to Jotaro. “Yes? What is it?”

Jotaro pointed at the body of Joseph Joestar. It wasn’t breathing – but somehow, by sheer force of will, Joseph’s mouth was still moving.

“H-How!?” Eve sputtered.

“Something our world does…” Joseph muttered. “I once cut a guy’s head off and he talked for several minutes… Heh…”

“We can save you then. We have magic. We ha-“

“No… That’s not how this works. I’m dying, Eve. I know it. Your next line will be ‘but you can’t die’.”

“But you can’t d-“ Tears welled up in Eve’s eyes as she caught herself. “Joseph! You’re… You’re the head of the Joestar family! You…”

“Can do one last thing,” he said. Hermit Purple appeared around him, pulling a camera out of his pocket. “Lend me Seraphim’s power…”

Eve summoned Seraphim, holding the Stand close to Hermit Purple. The purple thorns lashed around Seraphim, producing cuts on Eve’s body, but she withstood the pain.

Hermit Purple produced a spirit photo of Brutalight Sparcake sitting with Six on a frozen lake. Seraphim instantly knew the coordinates to the universe they were in.

“Thank you, Joseph,” Eve said. “You will never be forgotten…”

Pinkie appeared next to Eve, tears in her eyes. “Joseph… We… We never got to have our parties! Our pranks! Our next line contests!”

“We had some, Pinkie,” Joseph said. “And simply experiencing one… That was enough…” Joseph managed to look at Jotaro. “Don’t take my place, Jotaro. Stay free… Don’t get locked behind a desk…”

Jotaro grabbed his hat, trying to hide a tear. “Yare yare daze… Old man, I… I will.”

Pinkie sniffed. “…Your next line is going to be goodbye.”

“Heh,” Joseph said, finding this amusing. “Goodbye...”

Then he faded away.

Evening stood tall. “…Jotaro, do you need a minute?”

“No,” Jotaro said, standing tall. “I’m ready.”

Eve nodded. Then she roared with the Royal Canterlot Voice. “EVERYONE WHO CAN FIGHT – PONY, HUMAN, GEM, OR OTHERWISE – COME WITH ME. WE KNOW WHERE THE ATTACKERS HAVE FLED TO. WE ARE GOING TO TAKE THE FIGHT TO THEM. RALLY THE HUB! THE SHIPS IN ORBIT! WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A SHORT WAR.”

~~~

Aradia held The World’s fists back with nothing but pure telekinetic power. She couldn’t even see The World, but she could feel it pushing against her psychic barrier. Its strength was immense. She was a centuries-old god of time, and she was having difficulty.

“NOTHING CAN BEAT THE POWER OF ZA WARUDO!”

“Funny,” Alushy said, walking toward Dio menacingly. “I seem to recall Jotaro saying he killed you.”

This pushed one of Dio’s buttons. He pulled The World off Aradia. “ZA WARUDO!” In the midst of stopped time, he plowed seventeen different holes through the yellow vampiric pegasus with The World. Time resumed, and Alushy went flying as expected.

The only problem was that Alushy wasn't dead and had instead taken the form of a flying shadow of death riddled with eyes and teeth from the worst nightmares of demons.

“Huh,” Dio said. “You might actually be somewhat interesting.”

“Bitch, please. I’m a fudgemothering vampire.” She reformed into her default shape, allowing her eyes to remain covered in shadow. “I killed a lot of people to earn this title.”

“Don’t care,” Dio said, unleashing another punch.

“JUGULAR VEIN!” Alushy called, swooping behind Dio and biting down on his neck.

“AS IT HAPPENS I’M A VAMPIRE TOO!” Dio shouted, twisting his neck at an unnatural angle and biting down on Alushy’s.

This created a very, very stupid circular flow of blood.

Blackjack decided she needed to end it. She took a sword of glistening, alien metal out from its sheath. Using her telekinesis, she swung at Alushy, aiming for the head.

Vriska cut Blackjack across the face with her own sword, throwing Blackjack’s blade off. It cut off one of Alushy’s legs instead. Alushy writhed in agony and leapt off of Dio, growling. “FUDGE. FUCK. OW.” She stared at the stump that used to be her leg – realizing slowly that it wasn’t growing back. “…What in the name of all that is unholy is that sword made of?”

“Corpse of a Star,” Blackjack said, pulling her sword back to her body so she could defend against Vriska’s flurry of blows. Aradia stood up, wrapping her whip around Dio’s neck, accelerating her own speed to provide extra impact.

Dio grabbed the whip and laughed. “USELESS! USELESS! USELESS!” He tore Aradia’s weapon to shreds with his bare strength alone, punching her in the chest with The World. Alushy the Three-Legged decided to go for another attack on Dio, swirling with shadowy powers and slicing at the vampire’s legs. Dio opted to freeze everything that touched him. “DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? WORTHLESS! USELESS! MUDA! ZA WARUDO!” Time froze. Dio had The World grab Blackjack’s Sword. He drove it into Alushy’s midsection, laughing.

Aradia forced time to move for herself. Even if she couldn’t travel through time, she could alter its flow on a small scale. She removed the sword from Alushy with her telekinesis and driving it into Dio. He gagged, pulling it out with his own bare hands while The World pummeled Aradia across the face. Time resumed – neither Alushy’s or Dio’s wounds healed. Alushy’s erupted like a volcano.

“WHAT IS YOUR DEAL?” Vriska shouted at Dio, kicking the now-swordless Blackjack across the face. “What does ‘ZA WARUDO’ mean!?”

“The World…” Dio said, clutching his wound.

“Oh so you have a nervous tic when you get excited. Forget I asked.” Vriska grabbed her dice and threw them to the ground, creating a cannon that shot a giant fireball toward Blackjack. The alicorn teleported away from it and behind Vriska, kicking the troll in the back of the head with her metallic hooves. Vriska moved with the blow on purpose, landing near Aradia.

“Right, so, Aradia, the cyborg mini-goddess is immune to my luck stealing and I don’t know why.”

“Have you tried Dio yet?!” Aradia blurted, using her telekinesis to stop a flurry of bullets from Blackjack’s guns.

“Uh… No, actually.” Vriska leaped into the air and focused her special eye on Dio. Her eye glinted, absorbing a lot of luck from him. Dio tripped over his own two feet and took a header – right into Alushy’s guns. Had Dio not been an absurdly overpowered vampire, those blasts would have killed him instantly. Instead he just fell to the side, dazed.

Alushy laughed. “I win! Ahahah! Three legs and a fatal wound to the midsection by some stupid sword, but I WIN!” She coughed. “Blar- oh bother she’s pointing a magic spell at me.”

A beam of light shot from Blackjack’s horn, hitting Alushy right between the eyes. Normally Alushy would just shrug this off, but having suffered two major wounds that weren’t healing, she flopped to the ground, hardly able to move. “Aaaaa…”

Aradia and Vriska combined their powers to coordinate on Blackjack – Light and Time. Time slowed to a crawl and they were able to analyze which attack had the greatest amount of fortune. The course of action was clear.

Aradia accelerated Vriska’s speed and gave her a psychic push. Vriska lifted her sword into the air and brought it down. Blackjack fired a weapon – but that was expected. Aradia deflected the bullets with her telekinesis, and Vriska dropped her dice under Blackjack.

Dio had had a lot of luck in him. It was time to cash in.

…The dice produced a ferret in a small hat.

“AUGH!” Vriska shouted. “Wh… Why?”

“I just know how to win,” Blackjack said, firing a bullet right at Vriska’s head. Her luck was used keeping the shot from being instantly fatal. Vriska fell to the ground, breaking a few ribs by landing at what was quite possibly the worst angle.

Vriska was down. Alushy was down. Only Aradia remained.

She focused on Blackjack, narrowing her eyes. “You’re augmented beyond belief and I have no idea what your true capabilities are.”

“Yeah, same here,” Blackjack said, laughing softly. “There’s probably a doomsday device somewhere in here, or something… Oh, do you know what I am good at?”

“What?”

“Stalling for time by talking.”

“ZA WARUDO.”

The next thing Blackjack knew, Aradia lay on the ground, bruised and battered.

Dio stood up, grinning. “We won. They thought they had numbers. The fools! WRYYYYYY-“

“Can you shut the fuck up for one second?” Blackjack sputtered. “We did what we came to do. Let’s go back.”

“We’re not done,” Dio said, angling a hand over Vriska. “They’re not dead yet…”

“They’re not moving anytime soon.”

Dio shoved his hand into Vriska. “Better safe tha-“

Blackjack cut Dio’s head off with the sword. Then she cut the head in half just to be sure.

Blackjack shook her head, swallowing hard. Dio… There were some people you just knew were evil, despite all their charisma. The way he fought… The way he talked… The way he took her sword and left her to fend for herself… The world was better without him, she had no question.

She teleported away. Those three women had been extremely strong – they’d survive. But they wouldn’t bother them anymore, and that was all she’d been tasked with doing.

As always, bringing down a government was nasty business.

She teleported to the Reform Hall just in time to see Siron shatter into a million pieces. She saw none of the others there – so she teleported right back out, eyes wide.

Did they fail? She’d seen a lot of dead bodies, but Eve was clearly alive, and-

“Blackjack,” Flagg said, suddenly standing right next to her. “We need to move to phase 2.”

“But Siron’s n-“

“Siron chose to make his last stand in that room,” Flagg declared, a disturbing smile crawling up his face. “His choice, I suppose. We are not done quite yet. You and I will wait a moment – and then take the secondary strike.”

“…Right.” Blackjack said, getting a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“Where’s Dio?”

“Either dead or in a lot of pain,” Blackjack commented. “Not quite sure how far the vampire thing goes.”

“So useless. He was a loose cannon anyway.” Flag began to walk away, gesturing for Blackjack to follow.

Blackjack shook her head. Focus on what you came here to do, not on him. She trotted after Flagg.

~~~

“Thorax!” Eve called over to the Changeling king.

“E-E-E-E-E!”

Eve slapped him. “Thorax, take the Diamonds and the surviving human leaders to the box up there with the foreign dignitaries. Think you can do that? Think you can watch them?”

“I…”

“Thorax?”

“Yes Eve! I can do that!”

Eve smiled warmly. “Good, Thorax. You’ll do great. Luna, I want you to round up any leaders that weren’t signing and take them there as well. Once you’re there, if you can think of a safer place, do it. But be on guard.”

Luna bowed. “Of course, Evening.”

“EVERYONE ELSE!” Evening shouted. “WE ARE TAKING THE FIGHT TO THEM!”

Gems, humans, ponies, and others had filled the Hall. “YES CHARTER!”

Eve saw Pinkie’s team, Toph’s team, the League of Sweetie Belles, Jotaro’s gang, and many other faces she recognized. A few were missing because they weren’t fighters – Lieshy most notably – but those that had come were ready.

Eve caught a glint in Corona’s eye she wasn’t sure she liked, but she decided she couldn't deal with that right now. “Cosmo, do you have anything to say?”

Cosmo looked nothing like a Twilight anymore. She was the crystallized skeleton of an alicorn, kept alive by nothing but the boundless power of the Tree of Harmony. “Usually, when we fight, we fight with mercy in mind, with the intent of achieving a goal, rather than killing. Today… Today that is different. Our targets – the Elements of Insanity, Flagg, and any allies of Siron – have been condemned to death by us, Merodi Universalis. I do not encourage you to kill whatever is on the other side with reckless abandon, but we already let most of these people live once before. They have forfeited their chance.”

Eve nodded, tapping into her much larger stores of magic. She found she could create a portal the size of the auditorium with only minimal effort.

On the other side of the portal was a cold world deep, deep underground. The area near the portal was a frozen lake that went on for miles, though Eve could see a rocky edge to the left, and swore there was the light of fire even further in the distance.

But that wasn’t the important part. The important part was the army of Gerudo mixed with what Eve could only assume were real demons. Not the buglike people of Siron, nor the forces of Hastur… Something much darker and menacing. They weren’t impossible to look at considering most were vaguely humanoid, but they made Eve’s stomach do flip flops in guilt, horror, and rage. It was like they bled evil intentions from their essence… No doubt they were Flagg’s…

The armies had been expecting them.

Eve’s eye twitched. She decided she didn’t care if this was expected. “CHARGE!” She shouted. “GET THE SHIPS IN THERE!”

The Enterprise appeared in the giant cavern, along with Equis Cosmic and Gem Vein ships. They unleashed a barrage on the demon-Gerudo army, but as Eve feared, the demonic presences generally didn’t care about the physical weapons.

Eve remembered she had a weapon she didn’t have to keep hidden anymore. If they were lucky, they still didn’t know about it.

“SERAPHIM!” She called, summoning her Stand. She rejected the reality through the portal – replacing demons and gerudo alike with physics that didn’t allow for the proper traveling of electric signals. Unfortunately that only disabled the gerudo, the demon targets just glared at her.

Cosmo held them back with a blast of harmony. “Try something else!”

Eve teleported into the frozen hellscape where the enemy army stood, cycling through universes she knew she could set Seraphim to.

How about she try removing magic entirely… A truly mundane universe’s physics. The Gerudo wouldn’t care – but the demonic creatures?

The demonic creatures vanished in puffs of smoke when forced under mundane physics.

Eve allowed herself to grin. “Take this!” She began to methodically sweep the army with Seraphim, reducing demon after demon to ash. The ships above and the army below made progress – without a demonic force, there wasn’t much of a threat anymore. As brave of warriors as gerudo were, modern weapons, pony magic, and Gem physiology was just too much.

Eve noticed Mlinx climb in through the portal, leading with him a troop of bug-demons.

Good. That would go a long ways to keeping the bug-demons from being omniversally hated after this. They did not deserve to suffer for Siron’s actions.

Eve continued to sweep demons – but she also had a goal.

She was looking for Brutalight Sparcake and Six.

~~~

Brutalight stared at the army Ganondorf and Flagg had created – and realized it was getting trounced. She hadn’t exactly expected the army to win against the might of the Merodi, but she expected them to be enough of a distraction so Eve, Cosmo, and the other leaders involved in the charge could be taken out!

But that didn’t seem to be the case. Between Cosmo’s holy light and Eve’s inexplicable control over physics itself, the army was dropping like candy.

Brutalight knew they could have dealt with only Cosmo, but there were two fronts… Two…

She hated to admit it, Eve had been exceptionally smart to tell virtually nobody what her Stand actually did. All Brutalight, Siron, and Flagg had figured out was that she had one that protected her at all times with a simple aura. They had never suspected something of this magnitude.

At least it seemed to had a limitation on its range and area of effect… Though clearly, Eve was able to extend that with use of her magic. So it wasn’t a hard limit.

Brutalight threw several dozen swords into the fray, killing a few people and poofing a few Gems. Six stood up to unleash a wave of death.

“Don’t,” Brutalight said. “They’ll be able to pinpoint our location. It is best if we remain unseen for now.”

Six lowered her hand and nodded. “This isn’t going well, Brutalight.”

“No shit,” Brutalight deadpanned. She saw Jet produce her scythe weapon, flying at Cosmo with intent to carve the harmonic skeleton to crumbs. Cosmo tapped into the power of a few of her ships, hitting Jet from multiple angles with laser weapons. Jet’s body poofed, leaving only her gemstone.

Brutalight teleported the round, black crystal to her. “Shiiiit…”

Rainbine fell out of the sky, half of her face flattened. “Oooow…” She groaned, twitching.

Brutalight narrowed her eyes. “They’re going to regret this…” She fired a few more attacks, realizing she wasn’t actually doing that much against their might. Six would, but the moment she did anything of that sort the entire point would be failure…

She grinned – ah, Fluttershout and Gaea had a plan. They had flown into the air, both adorned with Gaea’s ritual paint, giving them a slight purple aura.

Fluttershout pulled in a breath and unleashed her voice, indiscriminately hitting gerudo and Merodi.

Eve appeared behind them. “And now sound only propagates through solid materials.”

Fluttershout and Gaea fled, but Eve wasn’t done. She twitched, replacing the physics around the two of them with that of an eldritch location.

Brutalight felt a knife slide into her dark heart. She acted as quickly as she could – teleporting the two of them out of the mess of impossible geometry and to her. Fluttershout’s body convulsed the moment it arrived, unable to process what she’d just seen.

Gaea was just dead. Her eyes were lifeless.

Brutalight’s breathing hastened. “It’s happening again, Six… They’re killing us…”

“Brutalight…”

Images flashed through Brutalight’s mind. Fluttershout’s limbs being torn off. Rainbine exploding into a thousand pieces. Rarifruit getting cut in half. A hoof driven right through Six’s ribcage…

They couldn’t do this.

“We need to leave,” she said, teleporting Rarifruit to the rest of the group.

“W-what?” Rainbine blurted. “But Eve is still alive!”

“I know she is. But if we stay here we soon won’t be.” She channeled her magic – she remembered the spell she had learned in the Sparkle Census. She would open a portal.

Rarifruit turned to Brutalight. “If Eve lives, Merodi Universalis lives. Siron said she had become a symbol of hope for them! We haven’t done enough yet!”

“Perhaps it's better she lives and suffers through the deaths of her friends,” Six said. “It’s not like their society actually matters to us.”

Rainbine growled. “Running away and not killing everyone? That’s… We don’t do that Brutalight! We kill every last one of them!”

Brutalight opened the portal. “I can’t lose any more of you. I’m sorry, but my connection to all of you is stronger than my desire for revenge.” She shook her head. “Let’s go. Maybe we’ll be able to find something to fight back with later, maybe we won’t.”

“What are we going to do?” Rainbine blurted. “They’ll chase us down!”

Brutalight sneered. “We’ll find our home Equestria and force it to bend to our will. After all, that’s what we wanted in the first place, right?”

The Elements of Insanity nodded. “Right!”

“Then let’s return to what we’re actually supposed to be doing.”

They left the army behind, living to fight another day.

~~~

Princess Luna and Thorax arrived in the glass balcony with the surviving human leaders, the two gemstones of the Diamonds, O’Neill, and the Doctor.

Jenny whistled. “That was spectacular.”

Luna glared at her. “It would be a shame if I imprisoned you in a magical fold-chamber on suspicion of being party to this invasion.”

Jenny held up her hands. “All right, all right, bad taste, I get it. Yeesh.”

Valentine walked up to the Doctor. “You know what’s going on here.”

“Of course I do, Ambassador Valentine,” the Doctor spoke with distaste. “I came here to stop him.”

“Who?” Luna asked. “Who is this Flagg?”

The Doctor pointed to Chartreuse. “He knows. No self-respecting Class 2 society hasn’t heard of Randall Flagg. But let me guess, that information costs? How much? An entire universe? Multiple?”

“The identity of Randall Flagg is one of the most valuable pieces of information in existence,” Chartreuse said.

“I have no patience for you,” the Doctor dismissed. “Randall Flagg, to put it simply, is an incarnation of evil. His origin…” He shook his head. “Hard to explain. Let’s just say he’s so unimaginably old that the era he hails from could be considered the early eons of the multiverse. Makes me look like a baby by comparison.”

“W-why is he doing this?” Thorax asked.

The Doctor furrowed his brow. “I have faced many forces of evil in my travels. Some do it for fun, some do it because they’re mad, and some think they have a higher purpose. Flagg… He does think it’s fun, and he’s definitely mad, but there’s something more to it than that. He takes pride that he is the man who can destroy destiny.”

The Grand Secretariat narrowed her eyes. “Why us?”

“He found Siron, I believe,” the Doctor said. “Siron told his ‘sob story’. Most would either turn Siron away, or sympathize with his cause. All Flagg saw was an opportunity – a new target. A civilization whose hope could be dashed by enemies of their own making. All Flagg needed to do was gather the enemies and give them some power, and they would mostly do the work for him.”

“Despicable,” Luna growled. “I take it this is his preferred method?”

“Yes, it is. He prefers to take the enemies and weaknesses a society has created itself, gather them, and turn them against the society. Sometimes he creates a society of his own as a god-king. Sometimes he just leaves anarchy. Still others the universes involved are completely destroyed. His signature is that he himself rarely does much directly.”

“Looks like I’m mixing it up today!”

Flagg was in the room with two people – Blackjack, and a woman some recognized as the old Headstone of the University of Doors, Elosa.

The Doctor tensed. “Flagg…”

Flagg strode into the room, his presence more than enough to keep anyone from attacking him. His smile was filled with glee. He looked at the faces of Thorax, the human leaders, and Luna. “Such brave little stragglers,” Flagg said, walking up to Thorax. The Changeling King couldn’t keep eye contact with the man in black.

Flagg found this amusing, laughing.

“Flagg, what do you have to gain from further death?” the Doctor demanded. “You’ve destroyed their leaders. You’ve brought about their end.”

“But you see, I haven’t, Doctor,” Flagg said. “The symbol of hope for Merodi Universalis is still alive in my Inferno. She has the power to tie you all together, so long as she keeps hope within herself.” Flagg turned to Luna. “But there’s no way she can do that alone, you see. All we have to do is destroy what she holds close. Starting with you, Luna – and the rest of these stragglers as well. And, you know what, why not,” he whirled to face the Grand Secretariat. “You’re an ally! You’ll die as well, so the Merodi will not receive aid!”

Valentine, Jenny, O’Neill, and Hastur glanced at each other. They nodded. O’Neill went first, using Crimson Sushi to scramble Flagg’s visual perceptions of reality. Valentine summoned his Stand, Hastur encased Flagg in eldritch energy, and Jenny pulled back her gloved fist. Jenny punched Flagg across the face, driving the eldritch wires into his skin. Valentine’s Stand lifted up two chairs and placed them on either side of Flagg, making him vanish.

Blackjack and Elosa prepared to retaliate – but Flagg appeared again, unharmed, with a delighted smirk on his face. “Three of you had no investment in this! And yet you attacked!” He laughed. “The foolish empathy of people never ceases to amaze me, even after all these eons.”

“You ticked me off,” Jenny explained.

“You are exempt from foolish empathy, and are instead subject to foolish anger.”

Jenny punched again.

“Stop breathing,” Flagg ordered.

Jenny stopped breathing. She tried to use her mental powers to override Flagg’s order – but she couldn’t. She passed out from overexertion.

“You know, that kills most people,” Flagg commented. “That body of hers really is something. Just like your Stand, Valentine.” Flagg smirked. “Passed on from Valentine to Valentine…” Flagg walked right up to the Ambassador. “You thought you could find an alternate version of me, didn’t you? You almost always can, right? Force a paradox?” Flagg laughed. “Too bad I’m completely unique! There have never been any alternate versions of me! They’re all me!”

Valentine’s expression was unreadable.

“Maybe I should go visit the USM next… In a few decades, just so you forget about all of this. And you, Hastur... Hastur, Hastur, Hastur… Your people are usually so wise, holding disdain for mortals. You’re a freak.”

“You are the one who is a ‘freak’, Flagg.”

“Strange, because your masters are the beings who come the closest to understanding me.” He twirled around, pointing at Luna. “Alas, I should probably stop my horrible cliché gloating monologue. As enjoyable as it is, it’s just asking to be interrupted by some clever plan or other.” He pulled a black sphere out of his jacket pocket. The globe whirled with dark, deadly magics of a time long forgotten.

Flagg glanced at Chartreuse. “Do you know what this is?”

The Melnorme said nothing.

“As I thought. This… is Black Thirteen. It holds the core power of the multiverse within itself.”

Luna tried to grab it with her magic – but her mind screamed in agony the moment she touched it. She fell back, whimpering. O’Neill ran to her, checking to make sure she was okay.

Flagg chuckled. “Anyone else want to touch it? To see the truth of what the multiverse is? The darkness that spirals everything together? Touch it for a few seconds and you could probably find the answer to any question you might wish to ask… What about you, Valentine? No? Shame… Secretariat? I’m sure you’d like to have some answers. Black Thirteen could take you anywhere, show you anything…”

“Only if you let it,” the Doctor said.

Flagg shoved Black Thirteen right into the Doctor’s face. “One-time-only deal, Doctor! I’ll tell it to go nice with you. You can touch it and gain all the knowledge you desire. For one as learned and experienced as you are, I expect you have a few particular questions in mind. It can be your judge, Doctor.”

The Doctor backed away, saying nothing.

“Shame…” Flagg held Black Thirteen above his head. “You’re all about to be transported to an antimatter universe. Have fun.”

And then something completely unexpected happened.

Lieshy flew through the glass window and grabbed Black Thirteen in her hooves.

Randall Flagg’s smile vanished. She was holding Black Thirteen. She wasn’t screaming her vocal cords out. She wasn’t dropping dead from the revelation. She was protected.

“You’ve been to the room at the top of the Tower,” Flagg said in a flat tone.

“Yes,” Lieshy said. “I really have no idea what it means, but I knew the moment I saw this orb that I had to grab it. So, potato crockpot, white sheet yourself.”

Flagg narrowed his eyes. “Blackjack, Elosa, get her. The rest of you don’t move,” he ordered.

~~~

Ganondorf watched as his army was slaughtered.

He got the distinct feeling he now knew how Siron felt. Maybe there had been something to that bug-demon’s rants.

It was too late now. This fight was clearly going to fall to the Merodi. Their losses had only driven them to fight stronger.

Ganondorf contemplated attacking Eve, to see if there was a chance he could remove her from the equation – but the risk was too great. At this point it wouldn’t serve him to risk his life in that way. He would have to become like Siron – leave and come back another time. He had fallen to the same level as that bug…

He took out his dimensional device, intending to leave.

A spear stabbed it out of his hands. “No,” Mlinx declared. “You don’t get to run.”

Ganondorf was at first overcome by surprise – but he quickly moved to a menacing grin. “You have decided to face me?” Ganondorf used his purple miasmic magic to tear the spear out of Mlinx’s hands. “You are nothing more than a somewhat brainy runt.”

Mlinx drew a gun from his side. “I also learned how to hold extra weapons.” He fired, unleashing a mixture of green and blue energy at Ganondorf. Ganondorf took it head on and laughed it off.

“Just fancy toys…” Another burst of magic tore the gun out of Mlinx’s hand. “And a scared little bug.”

Mlinx shivered, taking a step back.

“Having second thoughts about coming to face me on your own?” Ganondorf taunted. “You’re thinking you should have brought one of the people who are actually warriors. But no, you’re all alone. Your warriors are occupied. It’s just you and the king of all Gerudo.”

“I’m not alone.”

“Don’t give me some ‘the spirits of my friends are with me’ thing.”

“No, I mean I’m not alone. Mistress Luna is right behind you.”

Ganondorf whirled around with his fist, far, far too late in doing so. A burst of dark energy hit him chest first, tossing him to the ground.

Mistress Luna glared at him. “I’ve been waiting a long, long time for this, Ganondorf.”

Ganondorf roared, punching the Mistress across the face with a magic-enhanced fist. She fell onto her back, scrambling to recover, unable to deflect a kick to her stomach. Blood flew out of her mouth.

Ganondorf summoned a gigantic sword of unholy light to his hands. He lifted it above his head and brought it down on Mistress Luna. She teleported above the sword and kicked him in the skull. He pushed her away with a powerful magic.

“Your darkness is similar to mine,” Ganondorf said.

“Shut up,” Mistress Luna declared, unleashing a burst of pure moonlight at Ganondorf. He withstood it – standing strong against the cosmic power.

Then Mlinx drove his spear through the back of Ganondorf’s skull, the tip protruding from the Gerudo king’s forehead. Normally, this would not have killed the dark warlock.

But Misterss Luna and Mlinx had enchanted his spear with holy magic long before this day.

The dark magic could not cope.

Mlinx tore his spear out of Ganondorf’s head. The one great king of the Gerudo fell to the soft bug-demon.

Mlinx put a hand on his heart, trying to slow his breathing. “I… never want to do… anything like this… ever again…”

“Hopefully we won’t have to,” Mistress Luna commented. They turned back to the battlefield – the demons were almost all completely vaporized. The Gerudo were close to being defeated. They saw death, yes – on both sides – but the Merodi suffered significantly less casualties than the other side. Only one of Cosmo’s ships had actually gone down.

Eve landed next to Mlinx a few seconds later. She saw Ganondorf. “…I think he was the last one still here. You did good, Mlinx.”

“No sign of Flagg,” Cosmo said, teleporting next to Eve. She was still a skeleton, but didn’t seem much the worse for wear about it.

Eve sighed. “That might be a good thing. Excuse me, I have to call for surrender. ATTENTION GERUDO COMBATANTS! YOUR KING IS DEAD! IF YOU SURRENDER NOW, YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED! YOU WILL BE RETURNED TO THE BINARY WORLD AND NO CHARGES WILL BE PRESSED.”

That got most of the fighting to stop.

Eve let a pained smile come to her face. “I think… I think it’s over.”

O’Neill’s voice came from Starlight AI’s place around Cosmo’s neck. “We’ve just gotten a message. Flagg’s back in the Hall.”

Eve paled. “Oh no.”

~~~

Lieshy dodged a bunch of key-shaped projectiles from Eloisa. “Let’s talk about this, think very carefully about wh-“

“Don’t listen to her,” Flagg ordered. Lieshy knew in that moment that Elosa’s ears were effectively shut off and her most powerful weapon, her speech, was completely useless.

Not to mention that Blackjack was also shooting at her.

She was going to die if she didn’t think of something fast.

“USE BLACK THIRTEEN!” the Doctor shouted. “THINK OF WHAT YOU SAW AT THE TOP OF THE TOWER!”

Flagg smirked. “She’s clearly not sure what she saw, Doctor. Just as you aren’t sure what’s up there. She can do nothing.”

Lieshy ignored Flagg’s comments. She flew into the air, holding Black Thirteen aloft and staring into it. She felt things that would have turned her mind to jelly pass by her consciousness, protected by something within her. She looked into it… A murky, dark place…

She saw Flagg’s eye in there. “Hi.”

She ignored it, going further. Feeling Black Thirteen’s connection to everything… To…

Elosa smashed Lieshy across the side of the head with a powerful burst of magic, knocking her silly.

As it turned out, going a little crazy was exactly what she needed to do. Her thought process shifted sideways and she found it. For a moment, everything was clear.

Suddenly Elosa started talking as if she were giving a class at the university, oblivious that she wasn’t in one of the classrooms. “As your professor, I expect you to already know everything about higher door physics, and if you do not you best go throw yourself into the nearest gearbox. To begin this course in Door Creation, let’s think about the very rather philosophical question of what constitutes a door…”

Lieshy kicked Elosa out the broken glass. She didn’t notice, continuing to teach the entire way down to the auditorium floor. There was a sickening crack when she landed.

Lieshy expected she was still alive with all the enchantments on her, but she admitted she had no idea what Black Thirteen had done to those. If it did anything. Her moment of clarity was gone.

Flagg took advantage of that, grabbing her by the neck. Instead of looking angry, he looked… pleased. “It’s so hard to find things that surprise me these days. I had forgotten that those Touched like you even existed. Perhaps it is a sign of things to come.”

Lieshy was planning on driving the sphere into Flagg’s chest, just to see what happened, but she caught something out of the corner of her eye.

Blackjack was looking right at her. She made a subtle wink.

Lieshy felt something from Black Thirteen stir. She knew that Blackjack could be trusted right now.

She let herself go limp. Flagg took Black Thirteen out of her hooves and tossed her to the side like a ragdoll. He stood tall at the window, holding Black Thirteen against the lights in the ceiling. “So beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked. “A connection to everything that can fit in the palm of your hand. Such a dark truth.” He turned around, ready to gloat some more.

Blackjack stood alone, everyone else in the room having been moved to the back. She levitated a single gun in front of her, aiming right at Flagg.

Flagg recognized the gun. He knew all of Blackjack’s weapons. He had read her story, after all, and helped her complete her armory once she had joined him.

Trottenheimer’s Folly. The superweapon you could hold in your hoof.

Flagg suddenly regretted helping Blackjack gather ammunition.

A tremendous cone of blinding white light blazed forth from Folly. Flagg was disintegrated immediately. The destruction of the weapon extended far beyond Flagg’s form – the cone continued on to destroy the wall on the opposite end of the auditorium and the entire ceiling, allowing light from the sun to shine into the enclosure.

Blackjack put Folly away. “Everyone needs to check for radiation poisoning now. Everyone. Just because you weren’t next to it when it went off doesn’t mean you’re safe.”

“Right,” Luna said, bowing. “I shall call a doctor immediately. Thank you, Blackjack.”

“Don’t thank me. I was fighting against you not all that long ago. I think my job was to make sure your time-wizard couldn’t go back and undo this.” She looked down at the ground. “I… I don’t know what I was fighting for anymore. But I do know that that man… He was evil.”

“Where’s Black Thirteen?” Lieshy shouted, scrambling to where Flagg had just been. “Wh-“

The Doctor sighed. “Black Thirteen is tied to Flagg’s soul. Whenever his body perishes, it leaves with him.”

“He’s not dead!?” Blackjack blurted. “How the fuck!?”

The Doctor sighed. “His being is tied to a paradox. His existence is a rule of reality.”

“That… that sucks!”

“Yes, it does,” the Doctor said, shaking his head. “However, you can rest. He generally does not return after being defeated. He prefers to move on to greener pastures rather than continually rage against the same place.” He turned to Princess Luna. “You beat him. You’re lucky.”

“I imagine you are more lucky to have run into him multiple times and survive each one,” Luna commented.

The Doctor chuckled. “I… Currently fill the role of his ‘nemesis’. He likes having those. Individuals who serve as his opposite in the multiverse. He has never truly tried to kill me for that reason. It’s less luck and more of a curse.”

Luna nodded. She turned to Blackjack. “Whatever you’ve done prior, you saved us here, Blackjack. You are welcome t-“

“I’m going to leave,” Blackjack said. “I… I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be part of this. This… thing you have.” She shook her head. “I don’t have the right to destroy it. But I don’t like it.” She started walking away. “Goodbye.”

“If that is what you wish,” Luna said, bowing. “Return at any time, sister.”

Blackjack halted. “W-“

“I can sense my soul in you,” Luna said. “Damaged extensively, yes… But it is still one of mine.” A tear rolled down her face. “…Take care of yourself.”

“…Okay.” She teleported away.

The Grand Secretariat put a hoof around Luna. “I’m so sorry.” Thorax joined her.

Luna grimaced, trying to force her face into a stoic expression. She couldn’t say anything.

“We’ll help you however we can,” the Grand Secretariat continued. “You can count on that.”

“Y-your aid will be m-most welcome…” Luna managed.

~~~

Toph, Corona, Lady Rarity, and Vivian all returned to the Hub. The only major injury they had sustained was a fracture in one of Lady Rarity’s legs, probably from her fighting without her armor.

Vivian’s face was one of fear – they returned to still find so many bodies on the ground. It made her want to hurl.

Lady Rarity's face was one of pain. She found it hard to focus on much besides her own injury, but she said she was going to stay with the group until this was over.

Corona and Toph’s expressions were impossible to read. Toph was in the lead, walking right for a specific area of the stage of death.

The Elemental Nations.

She had two close friends she needed to say goodbye to.

She fell to her knees the moment she arrived. The forms of Aang and Zuko lay prone, lifeless, on the ground before her.

“Hey… Zuko… Twinkletoes… We won,” Toph said. “Saved everything, again. Beat away the latest flavor of evil mastermind. Some of them got away, but that’s always the case, right?” she laughed bitterly. “We’re still unified, so that’s good. They didn’t get what they wanted. We were able to walk together, and… and…” She broke down. “Spirits, your kids…” Her body didn’t move, she just stopped talking.

Vivian had to look away. Lady Rarity stood still as a statue, untold thoughts swirling around her skull.

Corona sat down next to Toph. Her sunglasses fell off her face, revealing eyes that had been crying too much – ever since the fight started. They were dry now. So many tears had come out, no more could come.

She stared at Aang.

“…Thank you,” Corona told Aang. “You… you saved me, back then. You saved so many. I…” she sniffed. “There’s… There’s nothing anymore, Aang. We’re here. But… But…” She covered her eyes, the burning sensation too much.

Toph pulled her into a hug. Through her tears she shouted. “LISTEN TO ME CORONA! WE’VE GOT TO STAND! DO YOU HEAR ME!?”

“I hear you…” Corona said, her voice not really into it.

“Corona…”

Corona moved a hoof and opened her mouth. Then she just stopped, letting the leg flop to her side lazily. She sighed. What does it matter?

Silence reigned.

A deep, throaty voice shook them out of it.

“I still detect the Avatar Spirit.”

Toph and Corona looked behind them to see Thrackerzod standing between Lady Rarity and Vivian.

“W-what?” Toph said.

“The Avatar Spirit. It didn’t die with him,” Thrackerzod said. “Even though he died offworld, I still feel it.” She lit her horn. “I can find it.”

Toph stood up instantly. “What are you waiting for? Find it!”

Thrackerzod nodded, closing her eyes for a moment. “Done.”

“TAKE US!”

Thrackerzod obliged, teleporting elsewhere in the Hub. They found a hospital. She marched right in. Some of the doctors tried to stop them, but one look from Toph shut them up.

They soon stood outside a room where they could hear a newborn baby crying.

Toph, tears in her blank eyes, knocked.

It opened, a doctor poking her head out. “I’m sorry, we’ve got a new baby here an-“

Applejack looked at them, holding a new foal in her hooves. “Toph? What are you doing here?”

“Applejack!?” Toph blurted. She shook her head. “You… I…” She stood at attention, like the General she was, and cleared her throat. “Applejack… Avatar Aang has perished along with most the world leaders at the signing.”

Applejack winced. “Ah was wonderin’… Eve?”

“She’s fine,” Toph said. “Thrackerzod, it is that foal, right?”

Thrackerzod nodded slowly.

Toph took in a breath. “Applejack, when an Avatar leaves us, the spirit of the Avatar moves into a newborn somewhere in the world. Had it been on our world, it would have gone to someone in the Water Tribe. Instead… It went into your foal.”

Toph walked in, looking at the filly. She had her mother’s orange coat and a dull blue mane. She was crying profusely. “…What’s her name?”

“Core Apple,” Applejack said. “We wanted Apple Core, but thought that’d just be confusin’ with the last-name thing becomin’ more common.”

“Hello Corea,” Toph said, placing a hand on the filly. “You’ve got a big destiny, little one.”

“Ah’m not sure what that means,” Applejack admitted. “But… Ah’m already proud of her.”

Toph nodded. “Yeah…”

Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “I believe I can initiate contact with the Avatar Spirit.”

Toph started. “You… could do that?”

“Yes. Did you forget who you were talking too?”

Toph turned to Applejack. Her face pleaded.

“It won’t… hurt her, will it?” Applejack asked Thrackerzod.

“No.”

“Then go ahead.”

Thrackerzod lit her horn. Corea’s eyes went white. For a split second, the visage of every Avatar there had ever been appeared in the small hospital room – freaking the doctors out. But soon, only one remained – the form of Aang.

“Toph,” Aang said. “Found me already?”

“Don’t think you can hide from me by disappearing into the air, Twinkletoes,” Toph smirked. “I’ll always find you.”

“Should I expect a rock to the face anytime soon?”

“As soon as I figure out how to hit spirits. Actually… Thrackerzod?”

“I could enchant a rock,” Thrackerzod said.

“Keep that in mind,” Toph told her. She turned back to the spirit of Aang. “…Zuko didn’t make it either.”

Aang looked down. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“We all are.”

“Toph… Tell Katara I love her. Tell my kids too.”

Tears welled up in Toph’s eyes again. “I will.”

“Tell Zuko’s family that he spent his last moments fighting back.”

“I…”

“Tell everyone that I’m proud of them.”

Toph choked.

“Toph… Don’t forget who you are. And don’t abandon the newest Avatar because of bad memories. Stay with her because of good ones.”

Toph nodded. “Of course.”

“Applejack… You should talk to Iroh. He knows the most about what being the Avatar means.”

Applejack nodded.

Aang looked past Toph, to Corona. “Corona… I can see your pain.”

Corona barely reacted.

Aang smiled. “Also, uh, make sure someone’s taking care of Appa and keeping him fed, okay?”

Toph let out a short chuckle. “You got it, Aang.”

Aang bowed. “Goodbye, master.”

Toph bowed. “Goodbye, Avatar.”

Corea’s eyes turned back to normal and she started crying again.

Toph had a smile on her face. She said nothing, but she seemed… at peace with the emotions inside of her.

A unicorn-deer teleported into the room, freaking out the doctors again.

“Message for General Toph.”

“Here,” Toph said, her expression shifting to annoyance.

“Medium confidential information.”

“The doctors are sworn to protect patient confidentiality and that’s Applejack there. We’re good.”

The messenger nodded. “Queen Luna of Lai has fallen.”

“I’m aware.”

“Her will named her successor. All parties of Lai are being made aware.”

“Who is it?” Toph asked, losing patience.

“Queen Luna named you to be her successor in her will,” the messenger declared. He promptly bowed. “Long live the Queen.”

Toph blinked. “…What!?”

~~~

The Reverb Hall took hours to clean up, but it eventually returned to the way it was before.

Aside from the giant hole in the ceiling. And the lack of a back wall. That would take longer to fix.

The stage was still there. The podium was still there, somehow unharmed throughout all the fighting.

Eve stood on her hind legs, hooves on the front of the podium, staring at the abandoned seats that made up the hall. The orange stripe in her mane was no longer aflame, but the mane itself was flowing slightly with the magic inside her. It was nowhere near as active as Celestia’s mane had been, still in its shorter, windswept cut, but it just no longer remained stationary. It looked alive, occasionally sparking with a star of magic.

Her friends stood behind her – Pinkie, Renee, Flutterfree, and Nova. Spike, Princess Luna, Daniel, and Allure were there as well.

“Just so you all don’t have to ask, I think I’m going to be fine,” Eve said. “I’m not fine now, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m going to pull through.” She put a hoof to her chest and tapped. “She will always be with me.”

Luna nodded. “I am glad, Evening, that you are the one to carry her legacy. There would have been none better suited.”

Pinkie smiled at Eve sadly. “You look so awesome and so torn at the same time.”

“But I’m not tired,” Eve declared. “If anything… I have more fire in myself than before. Siron thought he could take this away from us. Flagg thought we were weak. They were both wrong – we stand strong. Not because of the power Siron thought we shouldn’t have, not because of some lucky trick of fate, but because of our bonds. We are not just a coalition of worlds who have banded together because it’s the smartest thing to do. We are friends - family even. When you hurt us, the bonds between us only strengthen.” She stamped her hoof on the podium. “We’re here, everyone. We’re here to do good. If the truth is that the multiverse is surrounded by the darkness of that Black Thirteen, then I say we create a new truth.”

“Yeah!” Flutterfree cheered.

“We will not cower! We will not hide! We will not hide from the danger! We will expand and we will help everyone escape the darkness that lurks in existence!” she held her hoof out. “We are Merodi Universalis! And we have a goal.” She turned around and pulled them into a magically held hug. “Luna, get the press. I’m going to give a speech.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Eve declared. “It needs to be now.”

~~~

Hardly a few minutes later, Eve’s face appeared on screens throughout Merodi Universalis, and on a few screens beyond it. “Hello everyone,” she said with a sad, but warm smile on her face. “By now you are all probably aware of the great tragedy that befell us earlier today. The Bloodbath. The criminal Siron worked with an entity known as Randall Flagg in an attempt to kill all of our leaders and destroy the nation we had just barely created. For the most part, they succeeded. Of the hundreds of leaders present at the event, only thirteen survived. It is harrowing to find that our darkest hour is also our first hour.

“But we are not going to let them have what they want. The Bloodbath they created had the intention of dissolving Merodi Universalis the instant after it was born. They thought we didn’t deserve what being unified would bring to us. Instead of dying out like a shattered lantern, we are going to burn brighter than ever before. We are still Merodi. This event shall not tear us apart, it shall bring us together. All of our worlds have suffered loss – loss of leaders, loss of stability, loss of hope. However, because we are unified, because we are Merodi, we will help each other. I will see to it personally that every sub-nation thrown into disarray with the loss of their leader will receive everything they need. Equis Cosmic has once again devoted resources to us. Even universes outside our borders have come to us – Equis Concrete, Earth Exus, Equis Fallout, Esefem – have turned to give us aid in our time of need, thanking us for all we had done for them. The Sparkle Census has promised to provide assistance with reorganizing sub-governmental structure. We are not alone in this cosmos!

“I have only one request for all of you, my Merodi. I know that you’re angry, that you’re scared, that you’re confused. That’s fine, you should accept these emotions and learn from them. But I ask that, instead of using them to drive your lives from this point on, we instead focus on helping each other. If our purpose becomes driven by a need for revenge and protection, we have lost what made us special in the first place. Our bonds. Everyone needs to remember what brought us to this point. We must keep that outlook as we move forward. I ask us to remember that together we will always shine.”

~~~

Randall Flagg woke up. He rubbed the back of his head and grunted – it had been a while since he’d failed to jump to another universe when a superweapon went off in front of him.

He went over what had went wrong – he had started having too much fun again. Had he kept his cards closer to his chest, Blackjack wouldn’t have turned on him. He’d been so caught up in taunting the societies of the local multiverse that he’d basically forgotten about her.

It didn’t help that he’d known nothing about Lieshy’s status or Eve’s power. He felt confident he could have dealt with those, given time, but the combination of them and Blackjack… It was just enough to catch him off guard and stop the destruction of Merodi Universalis.

Flagg didn’t let this bother him. He lost occasionally – he accepted this. It wasn’t even overly rare, considering how his goals usually focused on completely destabilizing societies with their own hubris. Not that he didn’t also do other things, that was just the general modus operandi.

They had won – going back would just be overly greedy. So he’d stay away, at least for now. Give them a few decades before deciding if a round two was in order.

Though, admittedly, he was curious. How much damage did he do? It was a lot, but he knew Eve survived, so chances were Merodi Universalis still existed.

He took Black Thirteen out of his coat and looked into it. The dark power rippled right into his mind, tearing at it. Flagg didn’t even flinch. He was the master of this object, and would be until the end of everything. Which was never going to happen.

Flagg activated his all-seeing eye technique, connecting it to Black Thirteen. Like this, he might as well have been omniscient, if only he asked the right questions. He looked around, finding different scenes spread out across time...

(Toph Beifong stood in the throne room of Lai Castle. Corona, Lady Rarity, Lieshy, and Vivian stood to her side. Corona seemed distant.

An oculus-pegasus-unicorn placed a crown on Toph’s head.

“By the wishes of Queen Luna, I crown you Queen Toph Beifong, ruler of Lai.”

Toph stood tall and smiled warmly to the gathered crowd.

They cheered.)

“Amazing how fast a society can change,” Flagg commented to himself. “They’ll accept an otherworlder as their leader…”

(Corona sat on a couch, staring at the ceiling.

“You need to do something, Corona,” Sombra’s voice came from the TV.

“Why?” Corona said. “Just… Just why?”

“Why do something? Because you’re really freaking depressed and doing something would at least give you the possibility of finding something better. Why did it happen this way? Because the multiverse is cruel.”

“Yeah. Yeah it is.”

“You should listen to Eve. So what if it’s dark? Screw that, do stuff anyway. That’s what I do.”

“Eve’s being stupidly idealistic,” Corona muttered. “We can’t do anything, Sombra.”

“Not with that attitude we can’t.”

Corona didn’t respond, she just stared at the ceiling.

“I’m going to have to call the girls over, aren’t I?”

“Sombra…”

“You need someone to come over. Don’t fight it.”

Corona didn’t fight it.)

A depressed hero… Flagg took pleasure in that. It took a lot to break one of their ilk.

(Evening Sparkle and Luna sat at Celestia’s tomb. It was located at the very top of Canterlot mountain. The statue of Celestia had been constructed by the Gems out of pure diamond and set atop the square structure that housed Celestia herself.

The two said nothing – they only stared and held each other.)

Boring…

(“Renee, with all the sudden scrambling, I’m going to have to promote you,” Eve said.

“Oh? To what?” Renee asked.

“My equal. You’re Overhead of the Expeditions Division now. I’ll give you the details of all the teams we have to you. I’m going to have to devote myself to just being Relations Overhead.”

Renee smiled. “I’ll take care of them, Eve, don’t you worry.”

“Oh that’s not what I’m worried about, it’s that some of them took pride in working directly under me. There might be some difficulty in the transfer of power.”

“Dear, I’ll be fine. This is probably good for me anyway – won’t be leaving Daniel out to dry among the political sharks as much.”

“Good. Now I’ve got to go make sure O’Neill is taking his role as Military Overhead seriously. See you around!”)

A transfer of power brought on by necessity. Flagg wondered how much else Eve was having to swap around within the chaos.

(Corea sneezed fire into Applejack’s face.

“Well, I was hopin’ it’d be a couple years before she started showin’ signs…” Applejack said, wiping her singed muzzle.

“None of us know how the Avatar Spirit will act inside a pony,” Iroh said, scratching Corea behind the ears. “But that suggests she has power.”

“Think Ah can teach her potions, eventually?” Applebloom asked.

“Aang did figure out magic bending… With a body actually designed to interact with the force, I wouldn’t be surprised if she could bend magic as skillfully as a unicorn.”

Applejack called back. “You hear that? Your sister is destined for great things!”

Applejack’s other kids didn’t pay her much attention. Applejack glanced at Big Mac. “Y’know, Ah don’t get any respect.”

“Eenope.”

“Funny.”)

A new hero was born. Flagg wasn’t interested enough to pay attention to this particular one – he had others lined up for his torments – but he made sure to remember her.

(Aradia, Vriska, and Alushy shared a room at the hospital.

“I have never needed to be hospitalized in my unlife,” Alushy commented. “Everything about this sucks.”

“Oh? Why?” Aradia asked.

“I’m not allowed to have my guns and my leg that doesn’t really exist fucking hurts.”

“They can get it back,” Aradia encouraged. “The procedure that saved the Arcei can be adapted for that.”

“Lovely. Why not just un-enchant the curse that sword put on me?”

“Pretty sure the sword was anti-magic. Which is why you aren’t healing.”

“Right.”

Vriska grunted. “Aradia…”

“What?”

“Why don’t you just accelerate yourself until you’re healed? You can do that.”

“Well, I’d actually experience that time because I’d be accelerating myself…”

“Bullshit. You can accelerate every part of your body except your brain.”

“That’d result in a blood aneurysm.”

“Aradia…”

“All right, all right, there’s ways around it. I dunno, I just feel like taking it the normal way this time around. I get to experience a long hospital stay with friends old and new!”

Vriska blinked – then laughed. “How can you be so morbid and yet so innocent?”

“The world may never know.”

Alushy chuckled. “Who’s ready for another round of hospital songs?”

“Not the spleen one, please,” Vriska groaned.

“SPLEEN! SPLEEN! SPLEEN!” Aradia cheered.

“Woooooooooah~” Alushy began.)

Blackjack had truly been a useful tool. She’d been paramount in defeating all three of those powerhouses, and keeping the temporal powers from being able to change anything. Flagg knew now that Aradia would not try to erase what had happened. Flagg was certain what he did to the universe had sealed the Bloodbath as a fixed point in time, regardless of what anyone did to the universe itself, but he didn’t need her poking around.

(“Japan owes you a great debt,” Jotaro told his visitor.

Twilight Sparkle 7Y nodded. “Just doing my job, mister Kujo.”

“Such a cool job…” Jolyne said, hanging around near her father.

“You’re around the age you can start thinking about doing stuff like this,” 7Y said. “I’m sure Eve would love to have you.”

“Uh…” Jolyne looked flustered. “Yeah I don’t think I’d do well as a diplomat. I tend to solve problems by punching it or tricking it into punching itself.”

A small smile crawled up Jotaro’s face. She was his daughter, all right.

“Expeditions could always use more punchers. Join one of the contact teams. If you were a Twilight, I’d suggest submitting a proposal to the Census, but alas, it cannot be.” 7Y smiled awkwardly. “Heh…”)

Father-daughter bonding. Flagg wondered what all his daughters were doing. Probably mayhem.

(Nautica was no longer to be an unsupervised prison.

Large construction efforts took place, creating a tremendous compound deep under the sea. All inmates on Nautica were rounded up and placed in the regulatory building.

Never again would they attempt to take care of their enemies by just dumping them in another universe. They would keep them where they could watch them. Those that couldn’t be kept would be killed.)

Took them long enough to realize that, the fools.

(Brutalight and the rest of the Elements of Insanity – including Jet – stood on a hill looking at a version of Canterlot Castle.

Brutalight’s evil grin widened. “Girls, I think we found it. And, lucky us, the Merodi have no idea.”

Fluttershout rubbed her hooves together. “I’ve been waiting forever for this…”)

That world was doomed, Flagg decided. He should probably go visit it at some point in the future. It was always interesting to see if he could run an ‘evil’ system even further into the ground than it already was.

(“LISTEN UP LADIES!” O’Neill shouted at a troop of Gems. “I AM GOING TO TEACH YOU HOW TO FUNCTION AS A UNIT WITHIN THIS MILITARY! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

“Sir yes sir!”

“GOOD!” O’Neill blurted. “Each of you will be assigned an organic partner. Enjoy.”

The Gems’ reactions ranged from enraged to excited. Exactly what O’Neill wanted.)

Flagg enjoyed the suffering of others, and the forced cooperation of the Gems was no exception.

(“Five eldritch canisters,” Thrackerzod said, glaring at a member of the Melnorme race. “That should be worth more than enough for information on the blue metal guy.”

“No,” the Melnorme said, narrowing his eye. “Such canisters are just globs of eldritch excrement, and you know it.”

“It has uses though!”

“None that other materials cannot provide.”

Thrackerzod twitched. “I give up. Allure?”

Allure smiled. “I can get you access to Arcei physiology data.”

“Still not enough.”

Allure threw her hooves in the air. “OH COME ON!”

“It’s an exceptionally valuable piece of information.”

“I can see why the Doctor found you annoying,” Squeaky muttered.)

The Melnorme, traders of the multiverse. Very useful for higher societies. Class 3s often just found them unbelievably annoying because anything they actually wanted had prices that were far too steep. The Merodi likely weren’t going to do much with them.

(Blackjack stood over a sea of pure magic. She took a breath, closed her eyes, and lifted a hoof…

“I would say think about what you’re doing, but it’s not exactly the sort of thing you do.”

Blackjack turned around to see herself as a unicorn… without a cutie mark. “Wh…”

“Right, so, I’m Jackie, I’m from Equis Regarden – you didn’t die, by the way. Well, you did, but your soul found your clone body, and blah blah boring science whatever.” Jackie shrugged. “The point is, I’m you, but a bit older.”

“And without Luna in your head.”

“That too. But as I recall she wasn’t exactly bad company, was she?” Jackie raised an eyebrow.

“…I guess not.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Jackie said. “We’ve made our fair share of mistakes.”

“I jus-“

“Think very carefully about the accusation you’re about to make.”

“No.”

“Good girl.” Jackie grinned.

“…Did you just come here to push the buttons of your younger self?”

“That’s only part of the reason,” Jackie said. “I’m here to tell you that, yeah, the Merodi have power. Yeah, they have a lot of it. But Eve isn’t Ministry Mare Twilight Sparkle. I don’t think she’s going to ruin it.”

“Our Twilight was good once as well. Look what happened to her.”

“Not all Twilights are the same. I visited the Sparkle Census once, it was crazy.”

Blackjack sighed. “So… What then?”

“Just grab a dimensional device and go exploring. Start the adventures of Blackjack – super overpowered and over-armed alicorn.”

“Princess of winning?” Blackjack smirked.

“Yes. Princess of winning.” Jackie winked.

“I dunno…”

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s why you just go and do it without thinking. I’m sure there are ponies out there you can help.”

“Fine!” Blackjack created a portal. “HERE I GO AGAIN!”

Jackie smirked. “We never were very smart ponies.”

“And I guess that’s a good thing?” Blackjack shrugged.

“Fuck yes.”)

Flagg furrowed his brow. If she was turning into an explorer… In time, she could become the one to replace the Doctor. His actions as Flagg’s nemesis were getting rather old, perhaps it was time to mix up the formula. But Flagg needed to wait for Blackjack to get a little wiser in the ways of the multiverse before that happened.

(Blumiere stood atop Castle Bleck – which was soon to be demolished. It was going to be replaced with the Dimensional City. Unlike the Hub, this city would become the mobile capital of Merodi Universalis, a city that would eternally grow and move between universes… Built upon the dimensional core of this castle Blumiere himself donated.

It felt good to turn this place of darkness into something that would do much good.

A letter appeared in front of him – personally signed by Eve. He opened it.

The Dimensional City had a name now.

Celestia City.

Blumiere couldn’t think of a better name.)

“Overly sappy…” Flagg muttered.

“You always hated it when things turned out that way,” the Doctor said.

Flagg turned to the Doctor, not bothering to ask how he had gotten here. “Ah, Doctor. I might be building up a replacement for you. Just thought I’d warn you.”

The Doctor didn’t react to this. “They won, Flagg.”

“That they did. And I’ll leave them alone for the time being. There are other fish in the sea, after all.”

“Their song is strong.”

“One of the strongest I’ve seen,” Flagg admitted. “Are you trying to suggest I bit off more than I could chew this time?”

“Not directly, no. I’m just wondering what you see in them.”

“I see underdogs,” Flagg said. “Underdogs with a terribly idealistic mindset. The Tower loves idealists.”

“For all your talk, you are still just a part of it,” the Doctor said.

Flagg shrugged, holding Black Thirteen high. “You may not understand this, Doctor, but I appreciate that I am part of something. That I have a well-defined purpose.”

“To be evil?”

“To the normal mind, that is certainly how it seems. Doctor, I am a force of nature. The multiverse needs me to stir the pot now and again.”

“I disagree.”

“Agree to disagree!” Flagg chuckled. “See you around, Doctor. Have a nice day!”

The Doctor said nothing as Flagg vanished.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 4: HOPE]

ARC 4 INTERLUDE<<

Well that was intense. But hey, it looks like things are going to be fine! More or less, anyway. Once again, have a reminder that the Discord and the Forum exist.

There’s no featured story today because we now have a Fimfiction Group where such things can be discussed! Links to all the side stories can be found there, though notably most of them are hidden in the group’s forum since many aren’t directly related to ponies. Referenced stories can also be found there, as well as a progress meter for how far along the story has been written! Over a hundred chapters drafted now. That deserves a whistle.

You know the drill: FRANCHISES.

Mario and Paper Mario belong to Nintendo (Yay Vivian!)
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure belongs to Hirohiko Araki
Dante’s Inferno belongs to Dante
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy belongs to Douglass Adams
EQUESTRIA GIRLS! the Parody Series belongs to ZXInsanity and numerous others
The Sparkle Census belongs to Skyward Shoe
The Sweetie Chronicles belongs to Wanderer D
Oversaturation belongs to Fan of Most Everything
Sunlight Sliders belongs to Novel Idea and numerous others
Fallout Equestria belongs to Kkhat
Lord of the Rings belongs to J. R. R. Tolkien
My Hero Academia belongs to Kohei Horikoshi and Bones
Final Fantasy belongs to Square Enix
Star vs the Forces of Evil belongs to Disney
Jenny Everywhere belongs to everyone (The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.)
Project Horizons belongs to Somber
The SCP Foundation belongs to… uh… the Internet…?
Doki Doki Literature Club belongs to Team Salvato
Sherlock Holmes belongs to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the BBC
X-files belongs to Chris Carter
Discworld belongs to Terry Pratchett

Ahem. Behold, the poll for best chapter of the arc has arrived once again [https://strawpoll.com/2fdg7y97]. Bask in its glory. Please vote responsibly.

Today, a preview for what is to come: the Arc of the Aspect of Light, through which we find fate and knowledge…

ARC 5: Light
053 - State of the Union, Part 1
054 - State of the Union, Part 2
055 - Welcome to the Afterlife
056 - The Pink Truth
057 - Sombra’s Clipshow
058 - Stone Ocean: New Fate
059 - Strands of Existence
060 - A Normal Day for Normal People
061 - Nevermore
062 - Prismatic Hearts
063 - Clockwork Angels
064 - Starcross Society, Part 1
065 - Starcross Society, Part 2

Oh, look at that! See 057 there? That’s a very special chapter! Not a movie length one - currently anyway. You see, Sombra’s Clipshow is a unique chapter. A chapter that you readers might have a chance to submit material for! There’ll be a blog post for it shortly after this chapter goes up describing exactly how that’ll work, but for now, just know that it’ll be a comedy based chapter with lots of writing snips about random things happening throughout! Go check out the blog post if you’re interested.

Until next time!

[LIGHT] 053 - State of the Union, Part 1

In a time when the Bloodbath was still fresh in the memory of all Merodi, Renee, Daniel, and Pinkie met together in one of the Hub’s offices.

“What’s up?” Pinkie said, leaning back in her chair. “Oh, wait, before that, congratulations on the promotion, Renee!”

Renee smiled. “Thank you, Pinkie. It happens that my promotion is why we’re here. Since I am now the Head of the Expedition Division, I will no longer be on your team. It wouldn’t be proper to place myself on a team that I oversee.”

“Of course not. So you get to stay here! With Daaaaaniel!” Pinkie wagged her eyebrows up and down.

Daniel smirked and rolled his eyes. “True. Though it would be nice if you could remember I’m her Second, not just her husband here.”

“I know that, silly!” Pinkie chuckled. “So, Renee, you can’t be on the team anymore. Sad, but we all knew it was coming.”

“You know what we’re doing, don’t you?”

“AUDITIONS!” Pinkie grinned. “Can we get Aradia? Aradia would be awesome.”

“Aradia works on her own for the most part,” Renee declared. “And we have some limitations on who can be selected.”

“Oh.” Pinkie deflated.

“Pinkie, your team is team one. The first team, the primary all-purpose team. There’s a focus on exploration and first contact, but you do a little of everything. You need to be an image of the unity of Merodi Universalis. Right now you don’t represent a large portion of us.”

“Hey, we’ve got Vriska! She can… You know what I’ll just stop talking right there, having Vriska represent you – heh.”

“That’s not it,” Renee said. “Vriska can definitely represent the more unique races – like the Gems – but the most common race in the multiverse has no member on your team.”

“Oh, we just have to choose a human? Pff, that’s easy.”

“A man,” Daniel said. “Having all of you be female gives an impression of gender-dominance to new worlds.”

“…Slightly harder, but we can do it. Hrm… You’re here, and O’Neill’s Head of Military, so… Nobody comes right to mind.” Pinkie grins.

“You already know who you end up choosing, don’t you?”

“Yep! But let’s run through auditions anyway. I assume you have lots of capable men just sitting to be put on a team?”

Renee nodded. She tossed Pinkie a data pad. “This contains all the individuals we think would be suitable. Take your pick.”

Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “Hrm… Director Storm applied?”

“The AID has become defunct at this point,” Daniel explained. “If you don’t take him we’ll put him with Tempest.”

Pinkie kept scrolling. “Well I couldn’t take Mike without Ike… Or vice versa.” She narrowed her eyes. “Hrrrrm…”

“Pinkie…” Renee said. “Can you just pick the one you already know you’re going to take?”

“Oh, they’re not in here,” Pinkie said. “Rohan’s morals are too questionable. McKay is a little bit of a smart mouth, Micro doesn’t exactly do well with people. Plus, him and Sugarcoat are soooo cuuuute. John Sheppard is okay, I guess, I’d take him if I didn’t have another idea.”

“Who would that be?”

Pinkie smiled. “He’ll be coming through that door in three… two… one.”

Jotaro Kujo walked in the door to the room. He glanced at Renee, Daniel, and Pinkie. “What did you want me for?” he asked Pinkie.

Pinkie grinned. “Go along with it for a minute. Behold, Overhead and Second of the Expedition Division, the Jotaro Kujo model!” She appeared on top of him and began gesturing at him like a car salesman. “Look at these impressive muscles, that impassive poker face, the deep hero’s heart. He’s an excellent addition to any team – the strong, silent type, always watching everything closely for the right moment. He has great experience with adventures, combat, and bizarre powers. He has the ability to stop time and, and, is a fully certified marine biologist with a PhD and everything.” Pinkie grinned.

Jotaro raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

Renee blinked. “While he’s certainly an excellent choice Pinkie… He hasn’t submitted an application.”

“Oh, he’ll want to come.” Pinkie turned to Jotaro. “So how about it? Wanna join my team Jojo?” She blinked rapidly and expectantly.

Jotaro grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze… Yes. I would.”

“WOOHOO!” Pinkie hugged him. “You’re the best!”

Renee held up a hoof. “Hold on a minute. While I do accept this… Jotaro, are you certain? You have a wife, a daughter. This will keep you away from them a significant amount.”

“It will not be as bad as you think it will be. I’ll be able to come home most nights.”

Renee remembered when she had met Jotaro – how he was neglecting his family for weeks at a time. “…I see. Well, I see no problem with this.” She pulled out a card and gave it to him. “You’re now on Pinkie’s team. I’ll get you in the records later.”

Jotaro nodded.

Pinkie sat on top of Jotaro’s head and grinned. “Yes! Come on big guy, let’s introduce you to the team!” Pinkie twisted herself so she was under Jotaro, lifting him up like he was made of Styrofoam. She ran out of the room, giggling.

“…That’s going to be an interesting dynamic,” Daniel observed.

“No kidding,” Renee said. “It works though. It never hurts to have some extra muscle.” She looked at Daniel and raised an eyebrow.

“Are you judging me?”

“No. Just making you squirm.” She chuckled to herself.

~~~

All the way in Trixie and Discord’s arcade, Vriska, Nova, and Flutterfree crowded around a console. Flutterfree was watching as Vriska and Nova went at it in a fighting game based on famous Merodi explorers. They were playing the versions of themselves.

“This is stupid,” Nova muttered. “I can’t stop your flow of time.”

“Can it pointy, I can’t force you to a heart attack, so shut up.”

Nova’s character unleashed a beam of energy that Vriska’s jumped over. Vriska’s character rolled her dice and exploded a dozen bombs around Nova.

“I’ve gotten that attack what, six times this fight? That never happens!”

Flutterfree slurped noisily on a slushie. “Be easy on the programmers, they worked hard to give you a variety.”

Nova’s character pounded Vriska’s into the ground with a magic diamond, achieving victory. “Woo!” Nova cheered.

Vriska glared at Flutterfree. “Let’s see you fight as yourself, see if you like it.”

Flutterfree shrugged, handing Vriska her slushie. She took Vriska’s position and selected the Flutterfree character.

Nova smirked, clearly thinking this would be easy.

Flutterfree’s character unleashed the bow of light and drove a super-combo into Nova’s avatar, using the unique mechanic of Lolo’s extensions doing no damage but moving Nova’s character around for Flutterfree to shoot more arrows and initiate bites.

It was over in a few seconds.

Flutterfree took her slushie back and obnoxiously slurped.

Vriska and Nova stared at her in disbelief. “How in the…”

Flutterfree offered no explanation. She only smirked mischievously, straw in her mouth.

Pinkie ran in at that moment, dumping Jotaro on them. “Say hello to our fifth member! The team is now complete!”

Jotaro stood up and dusted himself off, nodding curtly to his three teammates.

“Oh!” Flutterfree said, smiling. “Jotaro! I wasn’t expecting you. It’s a pleasant surprise though! I’m sure you’ll make a great addition!”

“Double the time hax,” Nova chuckled.

Vriska looked up at Jotaro and narrowed her eyes. “Hold it, I’m not just going to accept some guy.”

“We defeated Algernon to-“

“Shhhhhh…” Vriska said, putting a finger to his mouth. “Shoosh.”

Jotaro remained silent.

“As I was saying, I’m not just accepting some guy. You need to prove yourself!” Vriska grabbed a nearby table, slamming it down between her and Jotaro. “Arm wrestle. To prove yourself.”

Jotaro raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yes.” She sat down and put her arm on the table, poised for battle. “Bring it.”

Jotaro sat down and extended his arm.

“GO!” Vriska shouted, getting the jump on Jotaro and pushing his arm a bit. This initial lead was lost in an instant. Jotaro didn’t even need to activate Star Platinum. He clenched his jaw slightly and used his raw strength to flip Vriska’s arm and break the table.

Vriska laid on the ground, dazed. “I… like him… Wheeee…”

“Yay! Everyone’s friends now!” Pinkie said, clapping. Then she was next to the arcade console. “Hey, Jotaro, I challenge you to play as me, I’ll play as you.”

Jotaro accepted. Pinkie still won.

~~~

Castle Bleck became Celestia City. It was an exceptionally slow process.

It started out as a horrendous, evil looking castle of flat blackness. Blumiere ordered every room of the original castle destroyed, save two. The one that held the dimensional nexus core, and the white room where he and Timpani had professed their love for each other – and been lost to the Nexus universe. Then construction could truly begin.

The first month was all infrastructure – dozens of tremendous dimensional drive cores, power structures, and magical generators. The Castle was gone, replaced with an ugly mess of glowing spheres and metallic supports. The Core.

With the Core complete, Blumiere decided it was time to move it. Everyone was unsure what would happen when the dimensional nexus left the universe it held up, but they figured it was empty so it didn’t really matter. The Core appeared in Equis Cosmic space without incident, but the universe it had been in ceased to exist.

Blumiere would miss the misty expanse. But now the Core was fully mobile, able to travel across universes and create portals hundreds of times larger than itself. Exactly what they needed.

Equis Cosmic engineers moved in and reinforced the core over the next month. The third month, the Core was in Gem Vein, where the Gem engineers coated it in their crystal alloys, turning the ugly cobble of machine bits into a white crystal. The energy fields activated and an atmosphere was pumped into the area surrounding the crystal.

It was only then that construction could begin in earnest.

The worlds of Merodi Universalis began to build; each one using designs originating from their home. The crystal ground was lost to the construction in the months to come as the actual city took form. One district would be made entirely of simple Elemental Nations structures, while the one built overtop of it would be a Gem cut combined with unicorn magical constructions. Skyscrapers rose from one end, meeting the wall of a zone flooded with water for seaponies and sirens. The full AI from Equis Cosmic created computer towers for their kind to inhabit, and the Asgard added their own smooth, simplistic constructions. Spaceships that were about to be decommissioned were worked into the body of the city, and on Lai a few of Armonia’s temples were uprooted and placed in the city.

Blumiere, as head architect, took the role of mayor. He knew that the construction of Celestia City would never end, long before he took official charge of the vast expanse. Once he did, he knew he actually had no control. Celestia City was an entity with a mind of its own, a mind that was eternally changing, shifting, and adjusting as new people added to it. It was so beautiful.

It had now been two years since construction started. They were currently outside of Merodi Universalis space, visiting the USM universe known as Earth-MH1, Froppy’s homeworld. A world where natural-born superpowers, called quirks, were present in over 90% of the population. It was curious to have so many unusual abilities visiting Celestia City.

Which meant that, of course, there were going to be a few problems.

In a hybrid district composed of Gem and Equis Vitis griffon constructions, a woman was causing significant trouble.

This woman had blue hair that moved like limbs. This was not the extent of her power, however – this hair could coat itself in ice and create freezing blades.

She spiked a Lapis Lazuli in the side, poofing her and collecting her gemstone. The woman let out a laugh. “You’re quite the pretty one, aren’t you?” She placed the gemstone in her bag, along with a half-dozen others. “Such beauties…”

“All right girl- er, everyone, let’s see what you can do,” a voice said from behind a crystalline door.

The woman aggressively pointed her hair-blades at the door. “Who’s there?”

“The League of Sweetie Belles,” a male voice declared. A magic spell went off, tearing the door from its hinges. The woman cut it in half with her hair and thrust forward, expecting to surprise whoever was on the other side.

The young unicorn stallion on the side just grabbed her hair with his telekinesis. “Gotcha. Get her, Snappy.”

A raptor of a similar white-and-purple color scheme to the stallion leaped from the ceiling, grinning. “You got it, Silver!”

The woman pulled the Lapis Gem out of her pouch and pointed one of her swords at it. “I’ll shatter it! I will!”

Snappy and Silver pulled back, faces suddenly full of uncertainty. The woman sneered. “Good. Now, you’re going to let me go. Don’t worry, these Gems won’t die, I assure you.”

A third appeared – a ‘human’ with brilliant white wings coming from her back and a holy scepter in her hand. The angel twisted the staff just right to knock the Lapis Gem out of the woman’s grasp. Silver acted quickly, grabbing the woman’s bag with his telekinesis.

“Great work Servitude!” Snappy gnashed through her reptilian teeth.

“THOSE ARE MINE!” the woman shouted, diving for Silver.

Servitude thwacked her across the head with the scepter, knocking her out cold. “Mission success,” she declared, before offering a small blessing to the downed woman.

“Great job everyone!” Allure said, strolling into the room. “Nobody got hurt, even though she pulled a nasty trick.”

Snappy and Silver cheered. Servitude simply bowed and spoke with reverence. “Thank you, Allure.”

Allure’s smile widened. “You’re all promoted to full agent status! Let’s get back to the League, tell everyone it went well.”

“NO!” the woman shouted, somehow aware again. She rushed Allure with her icy knives.

Allure twisted around, ducking under the icy blades. She carefully pushed a hoof into the woman’s shoulder, empowering the strike with magic. The shock of pain made the woman reel back into exactly the position Allure needed. She grabbed the woman’s neck with one hoof and an arm with the other.

She was pinned in an instant.

Silver gaped. “Wow… That was impressive.”

Snappy whispered to Silver. “Have we ever actually seen her do that on a bad guy?”

Allure smiled sheepishly. “It’s the same stuff I do in training.”

“But you’re never serious. Unless you’re sparring Thrackerzod. Then you always lose.”

Servitude bopped Snappy on the head. “Show some respect.”

“It’s okay, Servitude,” Allure insisted. “I do always lose against Zod. But raw power isn’t everything. Sometimes you don’t have much and have to make all of it count.”

Servitude nodded slowly, admitting Allure to be correct.

“Think you can teleport us back?” Allure asked.

Servitude nodded, spreading her wings and raising her scepter. The five of them were teleported to the ‘street’ outside the League of Sweetie Belles. The building was situated between four different districts, a unique white pillar of quartz that stood out among the more standard constructions. The Gems had helped the League make the building, but the design was nothing like the geometric patterns the Gems favored. It was the shape of a tapered cylinder that went from floor to ceiling of the district, about four floors tall. The windows held stained glass designs of important ponies and people of the multiverse, while the doors were intricately engraved with the letters “SB” in a Crusader shield.

Allure moved the woman to the building next door – a police station – and placed her in a ‘dropoff area’. To say the police were used to them turning in criminals was an understatement.

The four Sweetie Belles trotted through the front doors of their base, entering a world filled with Sweetie Belles. Most were unicorns, and most of them were adults at this point, though a few fillies could be seen walking around. Even those that weren’t unicorns had the signature color scheme – white, purple, and pink with green eyes – with the exception of Sanguine, who was blacker than any normal shade of black. Looking at that particular Sweetie Belle was like looking into an abyss that always stared back.

“Hey every-Sweetie!” Allure called. “Snappy, Silver, and Servitude have full agent status now!”

The Sweeties erupted in applause and cheers. Snappy and Silver bowed, while Servitude nodded curtly.

“Sarsaparilla, get them some celebratory drinks.” The Sweetie Belle that was part plant nodded and ran off to get some.

The three new League Agents were congratulated by a small crowd of Sweeties. Allure smiled, thinking of what they would be able to do now. Membership in the League was completely free, and virtually everyone was equal, but Agents had the authority to go on missions at the bidding of Mayor Blumiere or the Expeditions Division. The League generally served the role as Celestia City’s personal guardians. It was a purpose that pleased Allure to no end.

“BEEP BOOP!” Sweetie Bot’s voice came from a speaker. “Allure! Your presence is requested in the meeting room! We’ve got a talking cat.”

“This sounds fun,” Allure said to herself, walking up the stairs to the higher floors of the League. She eventually opened the door to the meeting room, finding the other three of the core four Sweeties there – Thrackerzod, Sweetie Bot, and Squeaky Belle. She waved at them in greeting and sat down in the nearest seat.

Across from them, sitting on the table, was a gray housecat. It was so small compared to them.

“Uh… Hello,” Allure said.

“Hi,” the cat said, looking at her with wise green eyes. “My name is Graymint. And I need your help.”

Allure was overcome by the cuteness of Graymint. She promised to herself that she was going to help this adorable creature with whatever problems he had. Maybe he’d let her pet him. That was probably wishful thinking though.

~~~

It had been agreed that the addition of a new world into Merodi Universalis was too momentous of an event to leave for just a singular Division to oversee. So there were two intimately involved in the process – three if you counted the Cultural Division, but their involvement was less about actually admitting the world than ensuring the world wasn’t just snuffed out as unimportant.

The two Divisions in quesiton were the Relations Division and the Expansion Division. The two Overheads currently sat at a table in Iroh’s Teashop, talking the procedures over with some representatives of other worlds. Eve was the mare of Relations, while the individual that had been chosen for Expansion was Maud Pai of Lai, chosen for her expertise in the future and care for the future of her people. She had already colonized over a dozen previously uninhabited universes.

“So… your two’s worlds are next on the list,” Eve said, putting down a checklist to give the guests a warm smile. “Equis Concrete and Binar. You are ready to begin the procedures, right?”

Chancellor Fluttershy and Mistress Luna nodded. “We’ve been waiting for a while,” the Mistress admitted.

Eve nodded. “I know. We expected to get to this sooner… but you know about the chaos.”

“None of us could have foreseen that,” Maud said, her eyes shifting in that way oculus’ did when they were trying to look to the future. “A prediction of a multiversal nature is always uncertain…”

Fluttershy held up a wing. “We should not dwell on the past. That is behind us now. The future calls.”

“Right,” Eve affirmed. “Luna, let’s start with Binar.” She pulled out a large sheaf of papers. “Your government’s structure has been approved, and your people have met the standard of living. What we are unsure about is your people’s desire to be part of Merodi Universalis.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Your people are a mixture of remnant Gerudo, red demons, and Binaries. The red demons are known to naturally have a distaste for what we’ve done, the Binaries fell indirectly because of us, and I don’t think I need to say why the Gerudo take issue with us.”

Luna nodded. “I am aware… I can vouch for my people and say the approval is high. The demons always wanted to be part of something greater, and this is a way to do it. The Gerudo are similarly tired of the way things have been. The Binaries…” She pondered for a moment. “They’re rather apathetic.”

“I thought we resolved their lethargy problem?”

“Oh, they’re working and living, yes, they’re just perfectly happy not knowing anything that happens ‘above’ them. Their old culture remains, at least in part.”

Maud nodded. “It means our efforts were successful.”

Eve sighed. “Technically not against the requirements… Still. I’m not sure I like a society that promotes willful ignorance.”

“It isn’t as if we’re a democracy,” Maud pointed out.

“Good point. Regardless, Luna, we’ll need more than your vouching. Expect a group of my people to come and perform a poll of sorts. It will take some time – a few weeks perhaps – and then we can move to the step of integrating your government. Assuming the results come back positive.”

“I have confidence they will,” Luna asserted.

“Good. How’s Mlinx doing, by the way?”

“He’s taken a liking to education as of late, asking all the demons who weren’t born in the last few years to go through school anyway. Not everyone is listening to him, but there’s not any hostility about the suggestion. Well, not more than you’d expect from the demons.”

Eve smiled warmly. “Yeah… Fluttershy, your world has a different set of problems.”

“I’m aware,” Fluttershy said, nodding slowly.

“Your government definitely meets the criteria, your ponies have come out of the stupor and hit a good standard of living, and there’s great approval from most of your nations to join. The issue is…” Eve tried to think of a way to phrase it.

“Everyone’s a colossal racist asshole,” Fluttershy offered.

“Well I wasn’t going to be that harsh…”

“It’s really the only accurate way to put it,” Maud said.

Eve sighed. “Right, yes. The racism. Despite your culture’s willingness to join ours, it’s decidedly unwilling to treat everyone like equals. It’s worse than the Gems, who were mostly just apathetic about us; there have been many reports of active malice within your universe.”

“Joining is, I think, the way to stop it,” Fluttershy suggested. “Right now, the only ponies they know who aren’t racists are those who lead them. They don’t have much respect for us in that department, even if they respect us in others.”

“Sounds like a shaky foundation,” Maud pointed out.

“It’s been over a decade, it’s held fast. They respect us as capable leaders, and are willing to admit that legally speaking race shouldn’t hold much of a difference, but that doesn’t change their opinions. They know that what they think is wrong at this point, but they keep the cognitive dissonance anyway. I think the solution is to expose them to ponies who aren’t like them, and who exemplify the correct way to live. …Without being their leaders.”

Maud turned to Eve. “Do you think the Cultural Division will take issue with us allowing them in so we can remove their racism?”

Eve thought for a second. “I don’t think so. Cultural won’t try to protect something so blatantly wrong. If they do I’ll have to have a discussion with Enna… I’ll have to bring this up with her first before continuing, Chancellor.”

“Understood. Do you need any of the studies we’ve performed on our cultural attitude?”

“I expect Cultural already has all those, but it couldn’t hurt to give us them personally,” Eve answered. “There is another issue to discuss, a lesser one. Your version of King Sombra.”

Fluttershy nodded. “He’s… been ejected from the Concretion by force, as I’m sure you’re aware. He’s currently brooding in the Crystal Empire.”

“The sooner we incorporate you, the less time he has to make a move on you,” Maud pointed out.

“I would appreciate it if we could get added sooner rather than later, yes,” Fluttershy admitted. “At the moment I doubt you’d assist us in a war that is mostly of our own making.”

“I’d have to ask O’Neill, but that’s probably true,” Eve said. “I’ll try to work as fast as I can.”

“I actually believe you when you say that,” Fluttershy said. “Such a rare thing when talking to governments…”

“Yeah,” Eve laughed awkwardly. “Maud, can you see anything?”

“Multiverse predictions are like pumice. There one day, gone the next. Now, I see nothing good or bad. I believe they will be adopted into Merodi Universalis, though as for the quality of that I can say nothing.”

Eve nodded. “Well, that’s what we’re going with. I’ll go call up Enna and organize that survey for you Luna. I’ll put it as a priority. I don’t actually have too much on my plate at the moment. Things are quiet right now.”

Maud’s eyes flexed. “…Something’s just shifted.”

“Huh? Are the-“

“It’s not about these two. Their path appears the same, as far as I can see. Something else shifted. I don’t know what…”

Eve sighed. “Great… Now I’ll be second-guessing myself all day. Excuse me, I’ll be making that call.”

“Thanks, Evening,” Chancellor Fluttershy said.

“Don’t mention it.”

~~~

Graymint looked at the four core Sweeties expectantly.

“Let’s hear your problem first,” Squeaky said, gesturing for Graymint to go on. “It’s clearly a big one, since you asked for us.”

“Yeah…” Graymint said, shaking his head. “I… I guess I’ll start with explaining my world. It’s a planet, an Earth, and we share it with twoleg- er, humans. The humans built their big cities and towns, and we lived in the forests in differing tribes of sorts. We weren’t very organized. Every tribe was different in terms of customs, beliefs, ways of life… Very few cats ever picked up tools. I heard there were a few clans that had built dens out of wood and created things, but nothing like what the humans had. And then the USM arrived.”

“How long ago was this?” Allure asked.

“I was born around the time it happened. About… six years ago.”

“Not very long…”

Sweetie Bot shook her head. “Cats have a lifespan average of twelve years.”

Graymint blinked. “How old are you?”

Thrackerzod opened her mouth, but Squeaky shut it with her magic. “Those of us who are not eldritch beings from another plane of existence are in our twenties and thirties.”

“Wow… Old…”

Allure smiled sadly. “Not really. Ponies can live to an upper limit of about two hundred.”

Graymint looked like he couldn’t comprehend that number.

“Hey, we’re nothing compared to Gems,” Squeaky said. “They don’t age at all. Thousands of years old.”

“Wow…” Graymint shook his head. “Gah! I’ve gotten off track. …Anyway, they came, and they realized that we were intelligent creatures. Because of the USM, the clans started connecting together. We began to come together because of the USM. We even got ourselves a king and everything!”

“That’s great!” Allure encouraged.

“Yeah… It would be. But… The king was deposed recently by insurrectionist cats. They claim to want to bring about an era of cats for cats, or something like that. But they don’t treat us like the proud felines we are – they treat us like objects that need to be put in a box!” Graymint looked to the ground. “They’re killing cats who disagree, forcing their will on the united tribes. There are those of us who are trying to fight, but they’re the ones with access to most of the dimensional portals and technology. It can’t even be considered a war at this point…”

“That seems unfair!” Bot blurted. “They get to use the technology against you? Beep!”

“It is,” Allure said. “…But I don’t see what exactly what you want us to do.”

“I… I just heard you were heroes,” Graymint said, shaking his head. “I slipped through a portal and came here, looking for anyone who’d listen. You were who I was directed to.”

Allure nodded slowly.

“I suppose I could take you back to my world. Introduce you to the king and the underground, so you can see yourself what you might do to help.”

Bot beeped. “Deal!”

Squeaky shook her head. “Bot, we can’t do that yet. We can’t just say that we’re going to help.”

“I think we should check it out though,” Allure said.

“Agreed,” Squeaky confirmed.

Thrackerzod narrowed her eyes. “I don’t trust this. Reeks of interference.”

“The other side is using technology,” Allure pointed out. “It means we’ll have more freedom. I will check with Renee first, though. I’m sure she’ll say yes.” She pulled out her phone and started dialing. “Do you mind waiting a while, Graymint?”

“I’m not really in a hurry.”

“Good. Bot, start generating a report.” Allure excused herself from the room to talk to Renee.

~~~

Pinkie and company stood in an arid, desert city street, surrounded by enemy humans. Enemies that were passed out on the ground, more than a few of which had broken bones.

Vriska dusted off her hands. “Man, who did these guys think they were? Not a single one was any challenge.”

Jotaro looked down at the largest of the men, one who had rivaled his own size. He had gone down in one hit. Jotaro was decidedly disappointed by this.

“That wizard was interesting,” Flutterfree commented.

“He only knew one spell,” Nova muttered.

“The frog spell is great though!” Pinkie giggled.

“Not if you’re the frog,” Nova muttered, shaking her head. “So, I take it big bodacious bossy bastard baddie wasn’t here?”

“Nope!” Pinkie declared, pulling out a telescope. “B5 has eluded us once again. Team, we need a plan.”

“Walk in the doors of the building we know is his base?” Vriska suggested, pointing at the giant brick house in front of them with two red double doors.

“Good idea!” Pinkie blurted, tossing Vriska a cookie.

“Yay me,” Vriska said, taking a bite of the baked treat.

Pinkie zipped up to the door and knocked on it with her head. “HEEEEEEEEY B-B-B-B-B! Can we come in!”

No response.

“Oh come on, don’t be ruuuude!” Pinkie pulled a button out of her mane and slapped it to the side of the doorway. She pressed it, activating the world’s loudest doorbell. “Let us in pleaaaase? We won’t bite!”

No response.

“Fine then! No more mister nice Pie!”

“You’re a mare,” Nova deadpanned.

Pinkie Pie ignored her, ramming into the door. She flattened into a pink disc, bouncing off the door like a spring. She wobbled back into her default shape, narrowing her eyes. “What a complex puzzle…”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “Pinkie…”

“Okay fine. Jotaro!” She pointed at the giant man. “Give this door the ora special with a side of ora ora ora.”

Jotaro strode to the door, hands in his pockets. He took a second to examine the structure of the door before summoning Star Platinum. The Stand let out a yell of “ORA!” with its first punch, smashing through the frail wood of the door. Each subsequent punch came with another shout of “ORA!” until there was no door left.

The five of them filed into the interior space, ready for a fight.

The large entry hall was covered in red carpet on every section of the floor, wall, and ceiling. The space was bizarrely bare, with only a single wooden chair within it. In the chair was a man with a long, wiry black beard.

He looked at them and smiled. “Welcome!”

“Why didn’t you answer the door!?” Pinkie shouted.

“Oh, were you knocking? Sorry, I must not have heard.”

Pinkie twitched, walking toward him. “Smart guy, huh? Okay. So, what’s the trap, and where’s B5?”

The man was startled. “W-what trap?”

“Trap. You know…” Pinkie pointed a hoof to the left. “There’s explosives lining that wall… A poison dart over there… and I see a hidden camera in the roof.”

“There were also windows outside,” Jotaro commented. “A sniper could shoot through one of them, puncture the carpet, and hit us.” Even after he said this, he continued walking into the room.

Nova smirked. “Nothing personal, it’s just we’ve been through this a lot and none of it fazes us.” She checked the scans on her leg-screen and performed a quick sequence of spells, removing the explosives and poison dart trap from the walls and depositing them in front of the man. “Tah-dah.”

A bullet whizzed through one of the wall carpets, missing Vriska by a hair. Jotaro stopped time, turned the bullet around a hundred and eighty degrees, and then let it go flying back out the hole. He heard a satisfying shout an instant later. “Sniper was too close. Had he been much further the momentum would have cut out.”

The man stood up from his chair, trembling slightly. “Y-y-you monsters!”

Flutterfree walked up to him. “I guess you could call us monsters… But really, we’re just ordinary people and ponies.” She bared her fangs. “Trust me.”

The man tried to take a step back, caught his foot on the chair, and knocked himself out in the resulting fumble.

Vriska facepalmed. “I didn’t even steal any of his luck. Moron.”

“Now now, let’s be nice to the enemies,” Flutterfree said, checking to see how badly the man was injured. “He’s fine. We should go check out that sniper now.”

“You won’t be doing that,” a deep, dark voice declared. The doorway sealed up with a thick, sludgy substance, plunging the hall into darkness. Nova used her horn to provide a light.

Pinkie whooped. “B5! You made it! I was beginning to wonder! Now show yourself so we can fight you!”

“I won’t be doing that…” ‘B5’ declared. “I’m just going to talk.”

“Oh. Nice!” Flutterfree smiled. “There need to be more people like you.”

“And less like you,” B5 spat. “You think you’re so great, don’t you? Saving worlds, uniting them… But all you bring is DEATH! You draw the attention of powers greater than you can imagine, every time beat back by horrendous power, only to FIGHT BACK and bring MORE DEATH! We will not stand for this. We, the anti-Unioni-“

“Oh good gog not another one of these fucks,” Vriska muttered. “YO! WE KNOW YOUR MESSAGE ALREADY!”

“Y- what?”

“Let me follow it for you. One: Merodi Universalis is the worst idea in the history of ever that only brings more death the further we go. Two: You will return us to the way things are meant to be. Three: You plan to kill insert-target-here to bring about the fall of everything. Do I have that right?”

“…If this complaint is so common we must have more power than even I realized!”

Vriska sighed. “No, no you don’t. Every last one of you twats falls like a domino.”

“WE SHOULD UNIFY AND FACE YOU!”

“Do you not see the irony in that statement?” Nova blurted.

“I… I… Oh.” B5 fell silent for a moment.

“I think we broke one,” Pinkie said. “That’s new.”

Flutterfree smiled. “It’d be nice if we could get them to stand down for once.”

“I’M STILL GOING TO KILL YOU!” B5 declared, suddenly. “YOU ARE ALL EXACTLY WHERE I WANT YOU! NOW DIE!”

Magic circles appeared on all the walls, firing magic bolts at the five of them.

Nova teleported them out of the building. It collapsed in on itself from the force of the attack.

A human with a black magic gauntlet on his left arm stared in disbelief at them. “H-how! They would have hit you faster than reaction time!”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “I… Did you do research? Two of us have time manipulation, and Pinkie could have dodged before you even shot it.”

B5 roared. “I WI-“

Flutterfree shot him in the knee with the bow of light, cutting his rant short. He keeled over, wailing.

Flutterfree lowered the bow and sighed. “Another one down.” She shook her head. “You think they’d start to get creative…”

“C-CREATIVE!?” B5 blurted. “I’LL SHOW Y-“

“Stop talking,” Flutterfree ordered, Staring right into his eyes. He shut right up.

Vriska whistled. “You must really be losing patience with these guys.”

“They have a point, but they never implement it with spirit,” Flutterfree said. “I almost want one of them to actually fight us with real, solid reasoning behind their actions. Like…. Isn’t there an intelligent person who agrees with them? It’s not that much of a stretch to think that being unified brings about troubles, but no, we just get these idiots.”

Pinkie gasped. “Flutterfree! You called someone an idiot!”

“Oh!” Flutterfree grabbed her mouth like she’d just said a dirty word. “I’m sorry!”

Vriska shrugged. “It was an accurate description. I’m more concerned about you asking for them to get intelligent.”

“Not going to happen,” Pinkie said. “Not from these types, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“It’s the irony,” Nova said. “In order to fight the unification, they’d have to unify. It goes against what they want. All we have to watch out for is someone finding a superweapon of some sort and using it. And I’m pretty sure Aradia’s on that.”

“You too,” Vriska pointed out.

“I will never travel through time, merely bend it,” Nova asserted for the millionth time. “No matter how many times you or she ask.”

“Hey! Wasn’t insinuating anything!”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Riiiight.”

Jotaro suddenly punched B5.

“What the – Jotaro!” Flutterfree blurted.

“He was moving,” Jotaro said. “Now he’s not. Besides breathing.”

Nova sighed, lifting B5 up and placing him in temporal stasis. “Flutterfree, check the sniper. If he shoots you, uh… don’t die.”

Flutterfree winked. “I won’t!” She flew off to check for the sniper.

Pinkie grinned. “I have such an amazing team!”

Jotaro’s mouth curled into the smallest hint of a smile.

~~~

Graymint led the core four Sweeties through one of the forests of the world designated Earth-W47 by the United States of the Multiverse. From what the Sweeties had seen, this was a fairly standard Earth with a minimal level of dimensional awareness. Disclosure (or something similar) had clearly happened, but there wasn’t much in the way of extra-dimensional technology, nor evidence of ships in orbit. Just a world with humans and cats.

The forest itself was devoid of development. Squeaky had been able to identify cat prints among the other wildlife tracks, realizing with some satisfaction that the cat tracks were laid in such a way so as to confuse anyone trying to track them. Impressive how they did that, considering they didn’t have magic to remove trails like Squeaky did.

“We’re almost there,” Graymint said, ducking under a bush and sniffing. “Scents are still fresh and recognizable, so everything’s fine. This way.” He padded through a few more trees until they came to a large outcropping of rock. Hidden behind a few bushes was a small fissure in the rock that led into a cave. Graymint could fit in easily, but the four ponies had to squeeze to get through.

“Can I give us light?” Allure asked.

“Sure,” Graymint said. “Though… if the guards attack you, you know ‘shield spells’ right?”

Squeaky and Thrackerzod nodded. Allure lit her horn, giving them all light as they descended. After a few seconds the cavern opened up into a significantly larger passageway, allowing them to move with freedom. There were signs of cat habitation from claw marks and loose hairs, but no actual cats.

“WHO GOES THERE?” a booming voice yowled.

“It’s Graymint! I’ve brought help!”

“WHAT KIND OF HELP?”

“Help from another world! …Bronzefin, just let us in.”

The voice sighed. A large, brown cat dropped from an above outcropping and sniffed the ponies. “These two smell the same.”

Allure and Squeaky looked at each other. Allure smiled. “We are sort of the same pony.”

“I don’t like your smell,” Bronzefin told Thrackerzod.

“No sane being should,” Thrackerzod confirmed. “The fact that you find my scent unlikeable is a confirmation of your continued mental health.”

Bronzefin turned to Graymint. “…Did she just insult me?”

Graymint cocked his head. “I’m not sure.”

“Great...” Bronzefin turned around, flicking his tail at Thrackerzod. “This way. The king will want to see you.”

Bronzefin led them further into the cave. After they turned a corner, they found a much larger cavern that had light in it. Hundreds of cats padded around the folds of the earth, moving in and out of holes they used for their dens. The lights of the cavern came from a mixture of lanterns and artificial lights, presumably stolen from the humans at one time or another. Every cat turned to stare at the ponies as they passed. The expressions were mixed – most were fearful, some were angry, some were curious, and a couple looked like they had been waiting for the moment for a long, long time.

They were led to the center of the cavern, where a decent sized pile of technology stood. Allure saw a few energy weapons, generators, and a handful of other metallic things that were being torn apart to make cat armor. Sitting at the foot of this pile was a large, slender cat with golden fur.

Bronzefin and Graymint bowed.

The king detected this motion with his ears, turning around to face them with a somber expression. “Rise, my subjects.” They did. “What have you brought?”

Graymint cleared his throat. “Help from another world.”

The other cats that had gathered began to pass whispers around.

Allure glanced behind herself, a sour expression forming. “Is there a place we can talk privately, mister… king?”

“Goldsire,” he said. “And yes, there is.” He led them to a hole that came out in a room-sized extension of the cavern. In the center was an artificial blue light sitting on top of a flat, highly refractive crystal.

Goldsire put his paw on the crystal and closed his eyes, letting out a breath. “It feels so wrong to have a twoleg light in this sacred place. But none can see otherwise.”

“…Should we be here?” Allure asked.

“Possibly not,” Goldsire said, sitting down. “But at this point I… I wonder if any of our traditions still mean anything.”

“The crystal has power,” Thrackerzod said.

“I had heard you unicorns might be able to sense that sort of thing,” Goldsire said, smiling softly. “This is the glintstone. It has a connection to our ancestors. All ancestors of all cat tribes, since all of us are here now.” He turned to them. “These are rough times for us. Graymint seems to think you want to help us, and I see it in your eyes. But I also see doubt in others.”

Thrackerzod nodded. “We are here to determine if we can help, or if we should.”

“We want to,” Allure emphasized, “But… We need to examine the situation before we’ll know if we can or should.”

Goldsire nodded slowly. “And that’s why I brought you here. I, even as the king of all cats of the old way, do not have the authority to tell you that.”

“The crystal does?” Thrackerzod said, raising her eyebrows.

“Yes. Our ancestors speak through it to those who are willing to listen.”

Thrackerzod craned her neck and lit her horn. “Then let’s see what they have to sa-“

“Not you,” Goldsire said. “Your essence is too dark.” He gestured toward Allure. “You touch the crystal. Let them speak to you.”

Allure nodded, touching a hoof to the crystal.

She felt herself enter a shifting dream-state. Sensations blurred, but her mind was sharp.

In front of her was a rusty, almost flame-colored, cat.

“…Hi,” Allure said.

The cat smiled. “Hello, Allure.”

“Ah. You know my name. Y’know, it’d only be fair if you told me yours.”

“I… am Firestar.” The cat stared into the distance, his face telling of one deep in thought. “I am a cat from the far distant past to the cats you see now.”

“He wasn’t kidding when he said ancestors, was he? What are you, a ghost?”

Firestar smirked. “What I am is not important, curious one. I am here to help you make a decision.”

“Uh… Okay? How?”

“I can show you the cats,” Firestar said. “The cats of this era on the other side.”

The background shifted into focus. Instead of a deep cavern, they saw hundreds of cats standing in a field of grass around a dimensional portal, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Three cats stood on the edge of the portal, the blue one on the left giving a speech.

“The old ways are that of a warrior,” she said. “Violent, shortsighted, and built on strength more than anything else. It is a cruel system, one that has forced us to lose many young ones. Clans of cats live together, further dividing themselves with bursts of war. Others live alone, in mountains, in dens, never looking beyond. Better than violent death and rage, but it still stagnates… And then there’s the ‘new’ idea of a king. Of a ‘sire’.”

She shook her head. “Goldsire has a powerful lineage, and is an honorable cat. But he is attached to the old ways. He wants to bring the cats together, but also keep them prepared to fight, to divide. He claims to desire change and unity… But all he wants is to keep the old ways. That is why we banished him. We should instead take on a new culture in this new age – not one of warriors, but one of workers. Of thinkers. Of Seers.

“I encourage you not to fight with your neighbors who love the old ways. Treat them with respect and love. Get them to understand. We will not survive in this new world with the factions the old ways encouraged beyond all else.” She paused, and there were yowls of approval. There was more to the speech, but the scenery shifted instead of letting Allure hear the rest of it.

She saw the same cat, shouting at another cat. “Goldsire did WHAT?”

“He’s gathering followers.”

“W-does he want me to kill him?” she shouted with tears. “He was supposed to go and live his life! Not… Do this! Agh!” She pounded her paw into the ground. “I thought I could…” She shook her head.

“Drystar…?”

“His leaders are still here,” Drystar sighed. “If they find that he’s still doing this… We’re finished.”

“What are we going to do? We can’t go back…”

Drystar pulled a gun out of a box and handed it to the other cat. “Take care of them. Remember, nine times, just to be sure.”

“…All right.”

Drystar wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry, Goldsire… You needed to admit defeat… You needed to let the world move on…”

The scene shifted again, this time to a place where it was raining and thunder boomed. Drystar was there, shooting Goldsire with the energy gun strapped to her front paw. It was touch-activated, so she could use it easily.

Goldsire got back up, grunting.

“HOW MANY LIVES DID THEY GIVE YOU?” Drystar shouted.

“I… have no idea,” Goldsire admitted.

“Goldsire! Just… If you keep going like this, there won’t be any cats left! No clans or nation!”

“I can’t let us forget our tradition!”

They clashed again, the image shifting back to Firestar.

Allure sighed. “This is a sad story, isn’t it?”

Firestar nodded. “We turned Goldsire into the king of cats to face against the incursions of other worlds. That was needed. But then… Then the cats themselves divided after they had a paw under themselves. Something we could never have foreseen. Goldsire turned to the old ways, but many turned to the new ideas coming from other worlds.”

“Which side do you think is right?”

“Neither of them,” Firestar admitted. “There’s a middle position that no cat is thinking of. But there’s a false dichotomy, and if you’re not with either side you’re just a powerless loner.”

“Ah…” Allure said. “I see.” She sighed. “But if they keep going… Was Drystar right? Will they destroy each other?”

“Something always remains,” Firestar said. Allure got the impression he was speaking from experience.

“Right…” Allure shook her head. “Goodbye then, I guess?”

“You’re a good… person, Allure. I’m sorry you’re in such a difficult position.”

Allure nodded. “Thanks.”

Then she was back in the cavern.

Goldsire saw the look in her eyes. “Ah. …So I was right.”

Allure looked at the ground. “…We can’t help. We shouldn’t help. This question… This is a question you need to answer for yourselves. I can’t tell you if the old or new ways are better.”

Bot beeped. “We’re… not helping them?”

Allure shook her head. “No… I saw the other side. They… It’s complicated. Either side we back will just create a tragedy.”

Goldsire nodded. “I understand. I shall take you out of the cavern. You should leave quickly before the other cats discover you aren’t actually helping.”

Squeaky nodded. “Good thought. …Thanks, Goldsire, for understanding.”

“I think I always knew it was a cat problem,” Goldsire admitted, beginning to move out of the cavern.

Thrackerzod lit her horn. “I have a faster way out.” She teleported all of them to the edge of the cavern.

“Such power…” Goldsire said, laughing to himself. “If we had your strength… We wouldn’t be able to lose.”

“Yeah…” Allure said. “Sorry.”

“I understand,” Goldsire said, bowing his head. “May we meet again.” He turned around, walking back to the cavern.

Allure, Squeaky, and Bot turned to leave. Thrackerzod stared after Goldsire for a moment. “…Screw it. We can give you something. To make the fight a fairer one.”

Goldsire turned and blinked. “What?”

Thrackerzod summoned an eldritch entity from the earth – a short, blue creature made of a few dozen spinning squares. “This creature is bound to your soul and will do as you order. Use it wisely.”

Goldsire nodded. “Thank you, Thrackerzod, for this gift.”

Thrackerzod smiled. “You had a strong heart, and a lower position. The gift is something.”

The two parties nodded to each other – and then left.

“You’re a big softy,” Allure nudged Thrackerzod.

“I can, and will, turn your mind into muffins if you continue to prod me about that. The muffins are metaphorical by the way, I will really be turning your mind into something you don’t have a word for.”

“Softy.”

Thrackerzod huffed and teleported the four of them out of the cave.

To their surprise, they weren’t alone when they came out. What was even more surprising was that three human men stood there – all clearly alternate versions of the same person.

The front version had spiky blonde hair and wore an outfit that made it look like he had grenades on his arms.

“MERODI!” He shouted, opening his palm at the four of them. This motion triggered an explosion, sending the League of Sweetie Belles flying.

~~~

O’Neill and Iroh sat in the back of Iroh’s Teashop, just enjoying life.

“We’re getting old,” Iroh observed, suddenly. “I’m almost eighty.”

O’Neill flexed his wrist. “Seventy-somethin’-or-other.”

Iroh chuckled. “You don’t look a day over sixty-somethin’-or-other.”

O’Neill looked down at his cup of tea, contemplating.

Iroh raised an inquisitive eyebrow at this response. “Something bothering you?”

“No.” O’Neill said. After a two-second pause he spoke again. “Yes.”

Iroh set his tea down and fixed O’Neill with a warm glare. “It’s just two old men here, General. Nobody going to judge you for having late-life crazy thoughts.”

O’Neill looked at his arm. “Something happened during the fight at the University,” he said. “I was injected with machines of some kind. Nanobots. They’re still in me. Nothing we did could remove them, and they didn’t seem to be hurting anything.”

Iroh furrowed his brow. “They’re doing something, though.”

“Yeah. I don’t think I’m aging.” He looked at a piece of calligraphy Iroh had hanging on the wall. “The doctors aren’t quite sure yet, but I’ve gotten a few of them to at least take me seriously at this point. I really should be falling apart at the seams, but nope! Still as sprightly as ever.”

“And snarky.”

“What a nice word,” O’Neill mused, chuckling.

“If you are immortal, you have good company,” Iroh observed. “And, to be frank, we humans could stand to have a leader who never has to go onto the next world.”

“I got that,” O’Neill said. “I’m mainly upset that I got stuck with a sixty-somethin’-or-other body! Do you have any idea the kind of back pain this body has?”

Iroh laughed heartily. “I think I have a pretty good idea, Jack!”

“You’d think immortality nanobots would at least fix back pain, but nope, sorry, no can do! Keep that back pain to remember us by!”

“You’re quite the old coot, Jack.”

“You’re one to talk. I hear you move that figure of yours like a liquid whenever you need to get serious!”

Iroh chuckled. “The last time I needed to get serious… That was a long time ago. I haven’t exerted myself that much since I trained Corona.” He frowned.

“…Memories?”

“Of all those I ever trained, even in part. Zuko. Azula. Lu Ten…” Iroh shook his head. “Maybe I should train Izumi… But she’s still young. And I have Corea to watch out for.”

“How’s the little bundle of power?”

“Showing a lot of promise. I’ve seen small manifestations of all four elements already. I wonder if it’s because her body is one more naturally suited to power…”

“Any magic-y stuff?”

“Not yet. I fully expect it to appear with time, however. I just… I hope I’ll still be around to teach her when she is finally old enough.”

“I’m told Equis Cosmic has fancy age-extension medicine,” O’Neill pointed out.

“Yes… That only does so much, you know.”

“I could get Thor on the phone. Clone bodies are all the rage, I hear.”

Iroh chuckled. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll decline. I will know when my time comes. I will journey to the Spirit World of my universe that day. I’ve already got a device with direct coordinates. I will become one with the spirits.”

“…You’ve been planning that for a while, haven’t you?”

“Indeed.”

“Now you’re just copying Teal’c.”

Iroh smirked. “…Indeed.”

“Dammit.”

Iroh chuckled. “Regardless, the day I join the spirits is not here yet. I will stay a mentor to Corea and the Elemental Nations as long as I am able. I suggest you do the same for yours.”

O’Neill nodded.

Iroh took a sip of his tea – only to find it empty. “…Wh…”

O’Neill snapped his fingers, revealing that Iroh had been holding a napkin ring, not his teacup. O’Neill had the teacup in his hand, drinking from it.

“…Crimson Sushi…” Iroh said.

O’Neill smirked, scratching the head of his Stand. “Gotcha. Do you have any idea how hard it is to catch you off guard?”

“Extremely. It is quite an achievement, what you just did.”

“Awww, thanks,” O’Neill chuckled.

“Such a strange power… to switch the perception of objects. For all I know, right now, you are actually in another chair…”

As it turned out, O’Neill really was in another chair. He saluted.

“That’s it, I challenge you to a game of Pai Sho. Now.”

“You’re on.”

~~~

Katsuki Bakugo had a curse.

That curse was that no matter what he did, he would always run into alternate versions of himself in the multiverse. Alternate versions of himself that annoyed him to no end.

Almost all other Katsuki Bakugos he had met had the same exact curse.

Most notably, this the time the curse had manifested when, somehow, three of them had been assigned to a single USM unit. They had taken to aggressively calling each other Splodey, Shardey, and Boring.

Then they’d been told to go capture a golden cat.

And then they’d found that Merodi Universalis was involved, in the form of four cute, adorable horses.

Splodey had been the one to unleash the initial explosion that sent the four horses flying.

“We could have taken a simpler route,” Boring said in his trademark deadpan voice. He wore a suit and his hair was combed like some stupid pretentious office worker.

“Screw you, we don’t get enough action,” Shardey said, his hair just as spiked as Splodey’s, but of a light blue color. Shardey leaped into the air and thrust his hand forward, creating one of his signature frostbomb explosions, coating the unicorns in a sheen of ice.

Bot didn’t care about the ice. She deployed her rocket launchers. “TARGET ACQUIRED!”

Boring used the cover provided by the immensely noisy rockets to move unseen behind Bot. He unleashed an explosion identical to Splodey’s at point-blank range. Bot’s thick metal casing kept her alive, but she took heavy structural damage.

“WAIT!” Allure shouted. “WE DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT!”

“Coward!” Splodey and Shardey shouted. Then they turned to glare at each other. “I SAID IT FIRST!”

“Imbeciles,” Boring muttered.

“DO YOU WANNA GO?” the other two shouted.

“Yes,” Thrackerzod declared, punching the two aggressive men in their faces with eldritch ropes. “I grow tired of your antics and it hasn’t even been a minute.”

Boring adjusted his suit. “I find myself agreeing with you. However, I do believe they are correct in assuming we must fight.”

“Why?” Allure asked. “…Why are you even here?”

“We need to capture or kill a golden cat!” Shardey sputtered. “You seen it?”

Splodey facepalmed. “Ugh… How are you so stupid!? Don’t tell the enemy the mission!”

“I’m going to stick this frostbomb so far up yo-“

“Gentlemen,” Boring interrupted. “I believe you’ve angered the adorable unicorn.”

Allure shot a glare at him. “So, can you all tell me why you need to kill the ‘golden cat’?”

“Oh, so you have seen him?” Shardey grinned. “I got informaaaaaation!”

Splodey slapped him enough to shock him, but not enough to lower his fighting capacity. “Tell us, pointy.”

“What is with that insult today?” Allure muttered. “No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think we’re going to stop you from interfering.”

“OH REALLY?” Splodey shouted. “You don’t want to go up against the USM, unicorns…”

“Watch us,” Squeaky said, casting a sleep spell on Splodey.

He didn’t pass out immediately – but he felt it coming. So he grabbed Squeaky’s face and unleashed an explosion, sending the two of them flying – both out cold.

Allure and Thrackerzod remained against Shardey and Boring. Allure jumped at Boring while Thrackerzod menacingly stepped toward Shardey.

Thrackerzod began tracing designs in the ground with her horn. “You’re going to enter a world of unimaginable pain, freezing guy.”

Shardey leaped toward Thrackerzod, only for her to use telekinesis to toss him into a nearby tree.

Allure entered close hoof-to-hand combat with Boring, taking advantage of the fact his explosions needed at least an arm-length to pack a full punch. For once she was glad she was small. She used her magic to add little touches of speed here, a little extra power there. She could tell she was wearing him down.

Shardey jumped toward Thrackerzod again, this time using his ice explosions to push himself forward. “DIE!!!!”

Thrackerzod continued drawing circles in the ground, using only the slightest bit of magic to divert Shardey to the side and into a tree.

Boring was smart, Allure discovered. His explosions had begun to point toward the ground, where the heat would spread toward her back hooves. The burns were getting more aggravated over time – eventually she was going to succumb to the pain and make a mistake. She knew it.

“Done,” Thrackerzod declared, lighting her horn. “Time for a Ga’evnuoewah. Side effects may include a sudden desire to lick trees for sustenance.”

She tried to complete the summon – and nothing happened.

She saw that Boring and Allure’s fight had moved right next to her, breaking the edge of the circle.

Thrackerzod realized with alarm that Boring had led Allure there.

Boring smirked, pointing a palm at Thrackerzod. “Gotcha.”

The explosion tossed the eldritch filly into a nearby tree. She would have gotten up and burnt Boring to bits, but it just so happened to be the tree Shardey was thrown into previously.

“Double gotcha.”

Thrackerzod swore in eldritch as she was frozen in an explosion.

Allure managed to deliver a fully-enhanced roundhouse kick to Boring’s skull, knocking him out and probably giving him a concussion as well. She breathed heavily, in and out. She was out of energy…

So was Shardey, though.

The two of them ran at each other – and passed out from Shardey’s freezing explosion.

The fight was a draw.

Unfortunately Boring had a transponder on him, and had sent a signal to the USM a few minutes ago.

A ship arrived and teleported them all away before leaving the universe.

054 - State of the Union, Part 2

Allure was the last of the Sweetie Belles to come to. The first of her senses that worked was her sense of smell, picking up on the aroma of freshly prepared tea. She opened her eyes, finding herself on a large horseshoe-shaped couch with a table in the center. The tea was right in front of her eyes.

“Good. You’re awake,” Thrackerzod said. “If I had to refrain from blowing this place to the depths of darkness for a few more minutes I believe I would have snapped my own brain stem.”

“Where are we?” Allure asked, looking around. She answered her own question before anypony offered an explanation. The room was simple, well furnished, and had the USM’s stars-and-stripes logo on the door. “Ah. Fancy prison.”

Squeaky shrugged. “One way of looking at it. I think they’d like to think of it as ‘a room to discuss business’. I wouldn’t be surprised if this area is also used for official briefings.”

Allure rubbed the back of her head. “So… We got beaten?”

“We got unlucky,” Thrackerzod bristled.

“You just don’t like losing.”

“Who does?”

“Life signs detected!” Bot shouted, arming her guns at the door.

The door opened unassumingly and the froggy form of Froppy poked herself in. “Ribbit?”

“Oh. Hey Froppy,” Allure said. “Sending you in to get us calm, are they?”

“Yep,” Froppy confirmed. “Three guesses as to who’s behind me.”

The four of them all answered.

“Valentine.” “Valentine.” “Valentine.” “The Easter Bunny.”

Everyone turned to stare at Bot.

“What? …I want eggs.”

“That was four guesses,” Froppy pointed out. “Since three of them were the same… Yeah.” She opened the door the rest of the way. Sure enough, it was Ambassador Valentine in his trademark pinkish suit and long curled hair.

“May I come in?” Valentine asked.

“Sure,” Allure said. “I’m sure we can figure this out if we talk it through rationally.”

Valentine nodded, taking a seat on the couch alongside Froppy. “If you don’t mind, allow me to regale you with what I think happened.”

“Go right ahead,” Squeaky allowed.

Valentine folded his hands. “I believe you arrived in the universe at the behest of one of its cats pleading for your help. You went to investigate the claims to see if they were legitimate. Finding it not to your liking, you were leaving and ran into my team. I assume the ensuing battle was their fault, and the draw due more to crazed explosions than actions that could reflect on any particular individual’s competence as a fighter. At which point ‘reinforcements’ arrived, beamed up everyone detected at the site and brought you here.”

“Pretty good,” Allure admitted. “You left out the part about your team being there to capture and-or kill Goldsire.”

“It was their mission, yes,” Valentine said, cautiously.

“Why?” Allure asked.

Valentine looked at the USM’s logo. “…The drive of the United States of the Multiverse is to expand and improve the ideals of the democratic republic in any and all universes. We take personal interest in any society undergoing an upheaval of this sort, supporting the side that desires the democracy.”

“They don’t even know you’re supporting them,” Allure said.

“You never visited our side,” Valentine asserted.

“I contacted their ancestors. If they knew of your involvement, they would have shown me. Because it would have helped me make my decision.” She pointed a hoof. “We left because we thought this fight needed to be their decision. If you are interfering, it’s predecided in favor of the side you want to win!”

“You’ll adapt them into the USM down the road,” Squeaky added. “Probably along with the rest of the planet. More power for you. More control.”

Valentine furrowed his brow. “So, are you saying you intend to interfere now?”

“If you promise to pull out, we won’t,” Allure declared. “But if you stay involved… We’ll involve ourselves with the other side to make it a fair fight. They need to decide this for themselves.”

“Do you want to start an international incident over a bunch of cats?” Valentine asked.

“Wh-”

“If you go through with this it could lead to war between our powers.”

The Sweetie Belles froze – except for Thrackerzod. “He’s exaggerating. He’s not willing to go to war over a ‘bunch of cats’ either.”

“So we’ll help them,” Allure asserted, “and then the fight will be even, and it’ll still be their choice.”

Valentine narrowed his eyes. “You have quite the double standard, don’t you?”

“…Come again?” Allure asked.

“You’ve done the same thing we’re doing,” Valentine declared, removing a file from his coat pocket. “History of the Gem Vein. Invigorating read on how a set of universes used political pressure to convert an alien culture into something more appropriate and to their liking.”

“That’s different, they were wr-”

Froppy interrupted her. “The USM asserts that anything that is not a democratic republic of some sort is wrong on a moral principle. Ribbit.”

Thrackerzod narrowed her eyes. “So, what, all the other nations are wrong to you? What, you want to convert us as well?”

Valentine chose his words carefully. “If we thought it were a worthwhile devotion of resources, we would seek that out, yes.”

“How would you go about even explaining the concept of democracy to the Embodiment? Inequality is ingrained into their biology.”

“You mistake democracy for equality,” Valentine said. “I am the most powerful man in the United States of the Multiverse, barring the current president hersel; I am clearly not equal to everyone else in this nation. The goal is to ensure even the lowest of the low have a voice.”

“Then you can’t compare our actions with the Gem Vein to what you’re doing,” Allure declared. “You’re very certain you have the right answer to government. We’re not. We just knew that what was happening there was wrong.” She folded her hooves. “I’m not backing down.”

Valentine’s eyes looked menacing for the first time in the meeting. He activated something – making Thrackerzod jump. “Only you can see the Stand? Not surprised.” Valentine gestured at his invisible companion. “This is Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, or D4C. It has the power to slip into alternate universes via a complex method known as ‘compression between objects’. It was given to me, and I used it to uncover the secrets of the multiverse. This Stand is the reason the USM exists.”

He’s their version of Eve, Allure realized.

“Why are you telling us this?” Thrackerzod demanded.

Valentine glared at her. “D4C’s method of multiversal travel has inherent within it a slight instability quotient. When traveling the multiverse via D4C, any alternate versions of the same individual who come into contact with each other will create a spatial paradox and explode into nothingness.” He leaned in toward them. “Isn’t that a horrible side effect?”

“Are you threatening us!?” Squeaky declared.

“I’m letting you know what I alone am capable of,” Valentine declared. “My powers as Ambassador could do more. I can cut off trade. I can feed you false information. I can round up all your ambassadors and have them executed.”

“Empty threats,” Thrackerzod asserted.

“…Analysis indicates he’s not lying,” Bot said.

“You can fool that test.”

“He would cut off trade,” Squeaky said. “It works for him. And we do have to ask… Are we willing to ruin connections with the USM over these cats?”

Allure sucked in a breath of air, prepared for a long rant, but decided against it. She sighed. “Fine. You win, Ambassador. We won’t mess with what you’re doing. But I will let Eve know exactly what you’re doing. She’s not going to be happy.”

“We aren’t ‘happy’ with anything any of you are doing,” Valentine pointed out. “But nothing will change so long as you take no action. You have my word.” He stood up, nodded to them, and used D4C to leave the universe.

Froppy let out a sigh. “I’m sorry, ribbit.”

Allure turned to her. “…Do you really believe what he says? About your way being the only right way?”

“It’s done a lot of good,” Froppy admitted. “Though he was overselling it. Internally, the USM has a lot of problems with factions and infighting. I believe that, in general, what we do benefits the multiverse. But I know the real reason we do almost all of this is so we can get more power while the public applauds us for ‘saving’ people.”

“That’s messed up.”

“Tell me your system’s perfect.”

“…Right,” Allure sighed. “Are those exploding guys okay?”

Froppy smiled. “They’re fine, ribbit. Just as angry as always. Maybe vowing to kill you. I wouldn’t worry about it.” She started to hop away. “Right this way, we can send you back to Celestia City.”

They followed her out.

~~~

Evening lowered the sun of Equis Vitis while standing on one of the many balconies of Canterlot. Princess Luna, standing alongside her, lifted the moon into position among the stars. Once again, it was night on Equis Vitis. Decades ago, this would have been an indication for the capital of Equestria to go to sleep. No such thing happened anymore – the city’s lights remained on, and the streets just as crowded. It was still day in other universes, so the activity of portals and ships never died down.

“It’s harder to see the stars with this light,” Eve commented. “The city may be beautiful… But it’s taking away from the night.”

“It is ironic,” Luna said, “that when ponies learn to appreciate the night, they lessen it.”

“By a similar metric, they don’t appreciate the day either. It is just a setting for them to go about their lives. Very few take the moment to appreciate what’s around them.”

“What a fool I was back then…” Luna shook her head. “Even if the night lasted forever, ponies would not understand. If only I had spent more time observing what ponies actually thought of the day…”

Eve put a leg around Luna. The dark alicorn was still significantly taller than her, so she had to stretch to do so and angle her head in a slightly uncomfortable position so she could still see Luna’s mouth move. “That’s behind you.”

“I’m aware. I’m also not dwelling on it if that’s what you’re worrying about. I’m just… struck by how insignificant it would have been, in the end.”

“I think we both know there was more to what you did than just wanting the night to be appreciated.”

Luna smiled sadly, looking up at the moon. “Yes… …Hold on…”

“What?”

“IS THAT A NEW CRATER ON THE MOON!?”

Eve pulled back from Luna. “Hey, hey, calm do-“

“I will find whoever is responsible and ensure they suffer a fate so infamous it will go down in history…”

“Luna… you say that every time.”

“The fact that a pattern has developed clearly indicates more strict measures need to be taken!” she huffed. “The moon is not a pincushion!”

“Of course not. It’s your symbol. I’m sure the systems around the moon have already picked up those responsible and given them what they deserve.”

“I’m going to order the construction of a force field around the moon,” Luna muttered.

“That’s… not a good use of resources.”

Luna nodded slowly. “Yes… Yes, that is true.” She looked back up at the moon, a forlorn expression on her face. “You know, I go back there in my personal ship a lot. I find all the marks I made while on there, all the things I destroyed, and all the craters I made. The moon’s surface is a thousand years of my history, Eve. When it is destroyed or altered… it feels like part of me is personally defaced.”

Eve nodded. “…Is there a way we can revert it?”

“Who would think treating the entire moon like a restoration project would be worthwhile?” Luna asked. “Us, perhaps – but our ponies? It’s not a simple job, and beyond that it’s difficult. Destruction is easy.”

“I’ll see about extending the satellite network then. Make the moon’s no-fly zone harder to get into. We can afford to let a couple ships patrol.”

“And then someone uses an FTL jump to surpass all of that just because they can,” Luna pointed out. “The problem isn’t security, Eve. The problem is there’s always one person who just wants to do something because those in charge told them not to.”

Eve sighed. “The moon’s just too big to protect. Unless we want to hide it in another universe, but that… Well, that would remove it from the night sky.”

“How much power would a portal of that size require?”

“About as much as it takes to get to Earth Tau’ri normally,” Eve concluded after a quick mental calculation.

“We would have to replace it with another moon, from a dead world…” Luna began to muse. Then she laughed. “What are we even talking about Eve?”

“Moving the moon?”

“It strikes me as absurd that we could actually do that. We won’t, the ponies like their moon, but the fact remains we can. I used to think Discord had too much power…”

“We could move all of Equis if we really wanted,” Eve pointed out. “I wonder how that would go…”

“…I think you’re getting a little too tired, Eve.”

Eve yawned. “Yeah… I’m turning in. Enjoy the night.” She nuzzled Luna’s neck as part of the farewell.

After a few seconds, Luna turned to her. “Do you ever miss your castle?”

“Sometimes,” Eve admitted. “But I need to be here – Canterlot should always be the home of the pony who raises the sun. Plus, it’s not like it’s uncomfortable or anything, and I trust Renee to take good care of things. I hear the Tree has started sending more of her agents on friendship missions!”

“The Tree of Harmony has learned to trust her?”

“I think it always trusted her and was just waiting for her to get settled in.” A smile crossed her face. “You know, it’s always fun when it calls humans. The symbols it comes up with… Jotaro’s is a square with a hand inside holding a pair of dolphins in a heart shape.”

“What special talent could that represent?”

“Punching and marine biology combination. I think.”

“Interesting. You still need to sleep, Evening Sparkle.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” Eve huffed, teleporting herself to her room.

Luna continued to look at the night sky – avoiding the moon so as to not annoy herself.

She looked at the Stars.

“We have a lot of power now,” she addressed them. “Maybe not as much as you had, but certainly enough to warrant your attention. Why are you always so silent?”

There was no response.

~~~

The core four Sweeties sat at a table in the League, staring off into space with forlorn expressions.

“Sent the report to Renee,” Bot chirped.

“…Now what?” Allure asked. “I feel… I feel like we’re not done. We’ve got to do something here.

“If we fight the USM they will retaliate in kind,” Squeaky said. “We may not have to worry about a war, but there are many other things they could do. Many other things. They’re just as powerful as us, if not more so. And they are older.”

Thrackerzod narrowed her eyes. “Age means little.”

“You know what I mean. They have experience. More territory. We just have more friends.”

Allure groaned. “Are we sure we can’t do anything to stop them?”

“Not unless we want to risk their wrath,” Squeaky replied. “And it certainly seemed like Valentine was just the ruthless sort to go through with threats.”

“He could be bluffing,” Thrackerzod pointed out. “We know he was in some of his threats.”

“Not all of them.”

“Yes…”

Allure furrowed her brow. “What we need to do is find a way to solve the problem without him knowing we were involved… But how would we do that?”

“Ask another nation or third party?” Thrackerzod suggested.

“The Sparkle Census!” Allure piped up. “They care about things like this, right?”

“They wouldn’t want to risk an incident either,” Squeaky argued.

“Right… The Embodiment wouldn’t care… The Melnorme would have to be paid… Hrm, do you think we could trick Jenny into doing it?”

“Excellent plan,” Thrackerzod deadpanned. “Not likely to backfire in any way.”

“Right…” She leaned on her hoof, thinking deeply. “What else…”

“Sombra,” Bot said.

Everypony turned to look at her.

“Sombra. She knows things, and likes to expose secrets that don’t benefit her.”

Allure’s eyes widened. “Just direct her to the right secret and she’ll take care of the rest. Bot, you’re a genius!”

“How do we get in contact with Sombra though?” Sparky asked. “She’s the kind of person who finds you, you don’t find her.”

“Hrm…” Allure said, thinking deeply. “Bot, can you scour the internet?”

Bot beeped sadly. “She hides too well. Already looked.”

“Corona,” Thrackerzod said. “Corona knows how to get in contact with her.”

Allure raised an eyebrow. “What’s Corona up to these days, anyway? I haven’t heard anything about her in… Well, months.”

Bot whirred through her data banks. “Corona Shimmer is currently serving as the royal scientist for Lai under Queen Toph Beifong. Should be on Lai right now.”

“Then we have a goal,” Allure declared. “We don’t have to do anything. We just suggest that Sombra does something. The cat world will have the USM influence jeopardized and they can get back to making their own decisions.”

The other Sweeties nodded. “Right!”

“Now we just have to charter a ship to Lai…” Allure smirked. “Thrackerzod, teleport us to the Skimmer.”

Thrackerzod did as asked, teleporting them to a small six-seater ship they kept in the League’s basement. It was one of the simplest ship designs available – a simple flying saucer with a white disc and pink-tinted dome. Squeaky activated the teleporter and they appeared outside Celestia City. The messy ever-changing conglomeration was beautiful in its own way, glinting in the local star’s light.

“I love this place,” Allure said out of the blue. “So… different.”

“Yeah,” Squeaky admitted. “It’s nice.”

The Skimmer created a dimensional portal and left USM space.

~~~

Queen Toph Beifong loved her job. Something just felt right about her being in charge of the lives of millions of adorable magic horses of varying races. She sometimes wondered if she was going evil, but Lady Rarity and Lieshy assured her she wasn’t. They told her she acted with a decisive, yet caring undertone.

She wasn’t really sure how she was doing that, but apparently she was. Sure made things easier.

Her enjoyment of becoming Queen was a bit of a surprise to her – she thought she’d miss all the adventures, all the new locations, all the action, and all the spontaneity. As it turned out, while there was a lack of new scenery in her new line of work, there were certainly adventures, action, and spontaneity aplenty. She was never bored with the abundance of magic, ancient runes, and colorful ponies in this world.

Oh, and there were the ‘mighty warriors’ who thought they could challenge her to the throne through the ancient rite of combat. Those were really fun.

Today it was a golden deer-unicorn with a number of magic artifacts embedded in his three cranial extrusions. He stood in the center of the throne room before Toph and her two advisors, Lady Rarity and Lieshy. “I am the great mage Golden Fir, and I challenge you for the right to the throne.”

Toph smiled. “Of course! Where do you want to do it, Golden? Palace grounds? I could schedule it as part of the next coliseum show if you prefer an audience. There’s also the option of taking it offworld…”

“I will fight you here, in this hall.”

Toph’s smile vanished. “…But then I can’t have fun with you. Repair costs are demanding. Come on, let’s do it somewhere more open.”

“I cannot wait a moment longer to face you,” Golden demanded.

Toph raised an eyebrow – she suspected something was up. She looked to Lieshy and nodded. Lieshy pulled out a scanning device and began to examine it.

“Are you afraid?”

“No, merely checking to see if you have outside help,” Toph declared. “Lieshy?”

“No more ticking.”

Time won’t stop. “Right.” Toph drew the Master Sword and pointed it at Golden. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Then we start… now.” Toph hesitated for a moment, to ensure Golden would take the first move. He used all three of his magical points to send a laser surrounded in a whirlwind at her. Toph didn’t dodge – instead she made a chunk of the floor shoot up into Golden’s head to knock him silly. Golden’s laser hit Toph's armor. The pristine plates were magic resistant, so the attack should have done nothing, but Golden had prepared for that, somehow using a magic lock.

Luckily the alloy was otherworldly and able to absorb most of the attack anyway. Toph went sliding back down to her throne for a rather cushy landing. She smiled – Golden was still dazed. The Queen pushed off the throne and swung the Master Sword wide, the holy blade cutting off Golden’s horn and antlers.

He screamed for a few seconds before passing out from the pain. Toph sheathed the Master Sword.

Lieshy put away her phone. “The ambulance will be here shortly to get those back on.”

Toph took a piece of paper out of her pocket and pinned it to Golden’s ear. “The doctors know to make him read my ‘do not challenge again’ memo once he wakes up, right?”

“They should. If they don’t, their jobs are on the line,” Lady Rarity decreed.

“Nice. Now, if there are no further interruptions, we can finally go over that report on our moon colon-“

Lieshy’s phone rang again. She answered it, listening to a report without saying anything. She turned to Toph. “The League of Sweetie Belles is here to talk to you about something.”

“This is either going to be quick, or absurdly long,” Toph mused. “If it’s the former it’ll be nice to see them, if it’s the latter I’m expecting epic quest. Let them in!”

Lieshy relayed the message. Thrackerzod teleported the four of them into the throne room.

Everypony except Thrackerzod bowed to Toph. “Your majesty,” Allure said.

Toph grunted in amusement. “You know you don’t have to do that.”

“It’s the proper way,” Squeaky said, looking up.

“So, watcha wantin’?” Toph asked, sitting back down in her throne.

“It’s… Embarrassingly trivial,” Squeaky admitted. “We can’t find Corona. We need to.”

“Oh,” Toph said, pondering this. “She’s at her house. The pale orange house on Imperial Drive.”

“Why isn’t she in her lab?” Bot asked, confused.

“She…” Toph paused, pondering the question.

“She’s taken to working alone,” Lady Rarity answered. “She does most of her work from home now. Pretty sure she has around three basements filled with things. She still sends reports to us and will go out when we ask for her, but otherwise…”

“…She’s depressed?” Allure blurted. “How come nobody told us?”

“It’s been this way for a while,” Lieshy said. “Ever since the Bloodbath. She’s improved somewhat but still prefers to keep to herself.”

“Don’t worry,” Lady Rarity said. “We ensure she gets visitors and we drop by regularly. She’s doing fine, just needs to work through things on her own time.”

“It’s been two years,” Thrackerzod pointed out.

“You can’t force these things. She’ll come out when she’s ready, though when she does she is going to be a different mare.”

“…Would it be bad to ask her for a favor?” Allure asked.

“No, shouldn’t be,” Lieshy said. “She may or may not be excited to see you, but asking for a favor would be no problem. What were you going to ask her?”

“We need to contact Sombra,” Squeaky answered.

Toph, Lady Rarity, and Lieshy stared at her with blank expressions.

“I take it that was the one thing we shouldn’t ask her.”

“She…” Toph folded her hands together. “Let’s just say she and Sombra haven’t spoken in a long time as far as we know.”

“You should still go ask,” Lady Rarity said. “If you want to contact Sombra, it must be important.”

“Right…” Allure said, rubbing her head. “Ugh, today’s going to be a fun one… Thrackerzod, take us away.”

The Sweeties were gone.

Toph sighed. “I miss her being around.”

Lady Rarity put a hoof on her. “I know. But we have to be patient.”

~~~

Corona sat on her couch, watching TV. That’s what she told herself she was doing anyway. In reality, she was laying on her couch, the TV was on, and she was staring at the ceiling with a lazy set of eyes.

This was how she spent most of her time these days. That was, tell herself she was doing something – watching TV, running experiments, talking to people – but really just staring off into space somewhere else and blanking on everything.

There wasn’t even really anything to think about. Just… stare.

It took a lot less energy this way.

A thought rose to the surface for a moment: did she need to check on her labs? No… They should all be autonomous for the next few hours. No data to collect…

The next thought that surfaced was a question: did she even have any idea what was going on in the TV show she was watching? A documentary of some kind… Oh… Oh, it was on the differing histories of unicorn magic in the multiverse.

Interesting.

But she already knew most of that. The guy who was talking had a funny face though. She started staring into the face, zoning out on it. The scene changed, startling her perceptions. She didn’t make a big deal out of it, turning back to the ceiling again.

Corona was relaxed, at least.

…Was that the doorbell ringing? No, couldn’t be. Nobody was scheduled to come over and this wasn’t the time of day for an unscheduled visit. Definitely couldn’t be the doorbell.

Why did she hear it again? …And again?

That probably was the doorbell. She groaned, stumbling off the couch and falling onto the ground. “Ugh…” She had told Toph to make sure those door-to-door people didn’t bother her. This was really cutting into her… relaxing time. And she couldn’t have that. She was going to give these people a piece of her mind.

She tossed the door open with her magic and a foul expression. “I to-“ she paused before she completed the second word, realizing it was just the League of Sweetie Belles. “Oh. Can’t say I was expecting you lot.”

“We weren’t either,” Allure said. “Can we come in?”

“Sure, sure,” Corona said, stepping aside to let them in. Her house was a decidedly chaotic mess with clothes dropped everywhere, boots spread out across the main living space, a thick coating of dust on top of a table or two, and Corona’s necklace dangling from one of the light fixtures.

Meh, it’s a mess, who cares? Corona yawned. “Want anything? Wait… Nevermind. Fridge’s empty. Gimme a sec.” She grabbed a magic crystal from a nearby table and used the power within to create herself a bacon cheeseburger.

She’d forgotten to have lunch, now that she thought about it. Huh.

“Good stuff,” Corona said. “So, what brings you to my crazy abode? You need something from the labs?”

“I don’t think so,” Allure said. “We need a favor that… probably isn’t very small to you.”

“Ask away, it’s not like I’m doing anything important,” Corona commented. “Unless you count watching a documentary that doesn’t teach you anything important.”

Allure didn’t know if she was supposed to laugh at that. “Uh…”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Girls, I’ll do anything for you. Just spit it out.”

Bot chirped. “We need to contact Sombra.”

Corona dropped what remained of her bacon cheeseburger. “…Right after I said I’d do anything.”

“It’s really that bad?” Squeaky asked.

“Let’s put it this way. She tried to get me out of this house for a few days. I told her no. There was shouting. That was eight months ago.” Corona shrugged. “Neither of us has called the other back, sooo…”

“That’s not good,” Allure commented.

Corona wanted to correct her, but she couldn’t bring herself too. “…No, it’s not. But I’m not exactly in the mood to call her right now, sorry.”

Allure sagged. “It’s okay… We’ll think of something else.”

The sight of three unicorns giving her sad eyes tore at Corona’s heart. Sweetie Bot still looked like a filly, which just heightened the effect.

Corona put a hoof to her snout. “Wait, wait. At least tell me what you need your help for.”

Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “The United States of the Multiverse is interfering with the natural course of a society made up entirely of cats. These cats are undergoing an internal civil war over the ‘old ways’ and the ‘new ways’. They asked us for help, but we eventually refused on the grounds that it was their decision. It was after this refusal we found out the USM was backing the side gearing toward a political ideology that matched their own. We were going to stop the USM from continuing with their plan, but Ambassador Valentine threatened all of Merodi Universalis with retribution if we continued to stick our faces in his business. So we’re seeking alternate methods of removing the USM’s hands from the world of cats.”

“Sombra seemed like the best option that wouldn’t be traced back to us,” Squeaky added.

I should tell them no. I should tell them I don’t feel like it. I really don’t, and there’s no way it can go well. There’s not any way I can even help them. This is what Corona thought consciously. However, a light within her that hadn’t been stirred in quite some time flared to life, grabbing a hold of her doubtful thoughts and pushing them back.

You have to try. It’s the good thing to do.

Corona sighed. “I’ll do it. I’ll call her. Tell me everything you know.” She levitated a pair of sunglasses from the top of a dresser and placed them on her face, activating them. “I’ll record all of it for her.”

Allure smiled. “Thanks Corona. I know this is hard.”

“Just tell me what I need to know.”

“Right.Bot, see if you can replay Valentine’s conversation with us…”

~~~

Sombra’s current entertainment was the video feed of Celestia City’s town hall. Blumiere was walking down one of the many expansive rooms that held images of Celestia City’s culture, a commodity that the young city had no shortage of. To Blumiere’s side was his personal assistant – Vivian.

“Blumiere,” Vivian called with a slight hint of annoyance. “We’ve got to talk about this!”

“Trying to regulate Pinkies is a hopeless endeavor.”

“They’re still fighting!” Vivian blurted. “We don’t want a Pinkie turf war on our hands!”

“A turf war over cotton candy stands…” Blumiere put a hand to his nose and sighed. “The things we have to deal with here…”

“Blumiere, this is nowhere near as weird as the time the third engine got a Stand and you know it.”

Blumiere nodded. “Right… How many Pinkies are complaining?”

“We have no idea, we’re certain several are complaining multiple times with expectations to game our system.”

“At this rate I’m just going to have to ban cotton candy stands.”

“One of the Pinkies is known to be unstable an-“

“That was a joke, Vivian,” Blumiere interrupted. “The solution is to get them all in the same room together, demand they all get licenses, and update the license system to beep when any stand is set up too close to another one. Done!”

Vivian smirked. “You know they’ll make it difficult.”

“They’re Pinkies. They make everything difficult.”

Sombra sat back, a frown on her face. She had hoped that conversation would last a little longer. It was just getting good…

INCOMING MESSAGE.

The number of people who could contact Sombra from their side of the connection was exceedingly small. When she saw who it was, a sour expression came across her face. She let it ring for a while.

“Hello, you’ve reached Sombra. I’m not able to come to the phone right now, so please leave a-“

“Sombra, cut it out,” Corona interrupted. “You don’t have an answering machine and you are never unable to come to the phone.”

“Nice to see you too,” Sombra said, activating the cameras on Corona’s sunglasses to get a better image of what was going on. She was in her house, alone. Hell, her place is a mess.

“Yeah…”

“Going to apologize?”

“Me!?” Corona. “You we-“

“Oh, would you look at that, the line is experiencing technical difficulties.”

Corona visibly twitched. “I, I… Ugh, fine. Sombra, I’m sorry I shouted at you. You were just looking out for me and had my best interests at heart, for once.”

“Good,” Sombra said, smirking.

“Your turn.”

“Oh no y-“

“This is a two-way street, Sombra.”

“Fine. I’m sorry.” Sombra grunted.

“For whaaaaat?”

“For pushing you when you clearly didn’t need to be pushed. Happy?”

“Very.”

There was silence.

Corona sighed. “You know, I feel better, but it still doesn’t seem like we’ve resolved this.”

“Definitely not. Given the state of your room I’d say your funk has improved by about… nada.”

“This is just a ph-“

“A-buh-buh!” Sombra interrupted. “Nope, whatever you were going to say, that isn’t it. You need to stop deluding yourself.”

“Mmmmmf,” Corona crunted. “Why do I even talk to you?”

“I dunno. Why’d you call?”

“Right. …The League of Sweetie Belles has a problem only you can solve.”

“Oh?”

“They need to stop the USM from working in a world without risking the wrath of Ambassador Valentine.”

Sombra grinned. “Sounds like my kind of challenge!”

“Sending you the files now,” Corona said, pressing a button on the side of her sunglasses. “Apparently a world of cats is being nudged toward one type of government over another. The League wants them to figure it out on their own, and I’m sure you can guess what the USM does.”

“Muricans love their patriotic democracy expansion,” Sombra guessed, sipping on a fruity drink while her free hand flew across her screens, scanning through the files.

“Bingo.”

“Oooh, what do I win?”

“The mission you’re about to go on.”

“What makes you think I’ll do this? You haven’t paid me, and I’m not exactly known for doing things out of the goodness of my heart.”

Corona sighed. “…Think of it as an excuse to stick it to the man.”

“Good enough for me,” Sombra said, fingers flying across her screens. “I’m getting some juicy stuff here… Oooh, the Muricans are going to haaaaate me. This is hardly their only secret…”

“Hey, what else you do is up to you, just make sure those cats get released.”

“That’s not going to solve much,” Sombra said. “They’re doing that to thousands of worlds at this moment, many with more direct military involvement. Most of it isn’t even a secret to their worlds. The ‘war’ against the space-age Russians is all over their news.”

“It’ll do something though.”

“Those cats will be thankful,” Sombra admitted. “Plus I’m sure I can bring a few others down… Might need to call in some favors. I’m going to have to let you go to do that.”

Corona bit her lip. “Before you go… I uh…”

“You already said you were sorry.”

“It’s more than that. If you were any other friend, I’d say we should grab lunch sometime, talk things over… But you’re not exactly a no-“

“It’s a date,” Sombra said, marking her calendar. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at some undisclosed time. I know a world where I won’t be found.”

“Sombra this is not a date!”

“Course not. Just said that to annoy you. And look, it got that fire back into your face!” Sombra smirked. “See you then, unless you have something to do tomorrow.”

“…I’ve got nothing.”

“Then adios amiga. I’ll do what I can.” She closed the channel, a genuine smile crossing her features. She would never admit it, but she’d been in a funk because she couldn’t talk to Corona. It looked like that was over.

Now, she needed to contact one of the most powerful men in the multiverse…

Sombra began the work of patching herself into a computer that should have been far too advanced for her to hack into. She knew it had been specially designed to give her – and just her – an easy in for precisely this sort of thing.

Officially, there were only twelve Divisions of Merodi Universalis: Relations, Expeditions, Expansion, Cultural, Military, Research, etcetera. However, known to only those with the highest clearance, there was a thirteenth. The Intelligence Division, devoted to that which needed to be kept secret – and secrets that needed to be uncovered. The Merodi didn’t like secrets, and even kept most of their military research operations at least partially in the public eye, but Eve and the other founders had recognized the need for at least a few secrets. Hence, the Intelligence Division.

The Head? A man by the name of Giorno Giovanna from Earth Stand, known for being the epitome of the oxymoronic “altruistic gangster” image. Sombra knew a lot about this man – he basically owned all of Earth Stand’s Italy, was a master of getting into organizations that didn’t want him, and had a soft spot for children. He was also the son of none other than Dio Brando, but nobody talked about that.

“Ayyy, Giogio!” Sombra called through her connection to his Division. “Got something for you.”

Giorno appeared on her screen – a man with bright blond hair that twisted into a number of small curls on his forehead. He wore his signature blue suit and ladybug pin. “What is it, Sombra?”

“I’ve got a request from the League of Sweetie Belles to throw a wrench into the Muricans’ little political ploys. Specifically, I’ve been asked to remove their influence from a single world with cats.” She smirked. “I know we can do better than that.”

“Give us everything you have on the USM, complete with analysis, and we’ll assist you.”

“I love being a consultant,” Sombra chuckled, sending the files over without another word. “By the way, did you know Valentine had a multiversal Stand?”

“It’s common knowledge.”

“Do you actually know what it does?” Sombra asked. “Cause according to the League it can shatter alternate versions via contact. Terrifying.”

“In a way,” Giorno said, narrowing his eyes as he considered the mission. “There are at least twenty worlds, similar to the cats, that have no idea of the USM’s involvement. All that needs to happen in those worlds is to tell the races what’s going on and they’ll become angry enough to drive them out.”

“Have to do it carefully though,” Sombra cautioned. “Pretty sure the Sweeties will be upset if we completely discredit one side of the cat’s fight. Not that I’m against it, I’d just rather not have my first request from them fall through. I like repeat customers, you know.”

Giorno tapped a finger. “There’s a way to do it. With this information, we could infiltrate the worlds and inform those being manipulated directly. That way it will look like the cats – and the other worlds – are just rebelling because they figured out the truth.” Giorno typed rapidly on a keyboard. “I’ll send this to the specialists. They’ll have a plan drawn up and sent back to you in a couple hours.”

“You work fast.”

“There’s no oversight,” Giorno pointed out. “We get to do what we want so long as the other heads don’t take issue.”

“Fun times.”

“You will have to work alone so the USM can’t trace any of this back to us,” Giorno said.

“You tell me that like I think it’s a problem,” Sombra retorted.

“Fair,” Giorno said. “I have to return to my work. I’ll send the files personally.”

Sombra waved. “See you later Giogio!” The feed closed.

Sombra sat back and smirked. It really was nice to not be hunted anymore. They had realized how useful she was. Kudos to Merodi Universalis.

~~~

A few weeks later, Allure got a message.

Mission success.

USM pulled resources back from Earth-W47 and twenty other worlds in similar situations.

In all cases the given reason was ‘native rebellion’.

They decided it wasn’t worth fighting in those worlds anymore.

You’re welcome. Hope to do business with you again sometime.

The bottom of the message held Sombra’s sugar skull. It winked – then deleted the message.

Allure whooped and ran to the nearest Sweetie who knew about the mission. She ran to a couch Bot was sitting at. “We won!”

“I know!” Bot declared. “TAKE THAT USM! We-“

“We didn’t do anything, remember?” Squeaky said, smirking. “We were just a bunch of unicorns who had nothing to do with this, but are happy it happened.”

Thrackerzod appeared in a flash. “This feels very… very… satisfying.”

“Yeah, it does,” Allure chuckled. “We beat ‘em girls! Hah!” The four of them entered a group hug. “I say we go out for drinks!”

“Huzzah!” Bot declared.

Thrackerzod teleported them to the nearest bar – a joint owned by a version of Berry Punch who looked and acted like a pirate. She went by Barry. The location in question was called “Juicy Plunder” and was constructed to look like a pirate galleon had crashed into the wall of an apartment complex.

“YAR!” Barry called, recognizing the four of them. “Come on in, lasses! What’ll it be? Ah’ve got quite the special tonight!”

“The usual,” Thrackerzod said. “And don’t skimp on the gn’ra’teh this time, got it?”

“Arrrr, matey!”

“Arrrr!” Bot echoed.

The four took seats around a small, round table, and each of them were passed their drinks. Allure got cherry-infused wine, Bot got some viscous sludge made out of motor oil, Squeaky got sparkling champagne, and Thrackerzod got a glass filled with a liquid that had no color and tore at spacetime with every ripple.

“I never get used to seeing that,” Allure commented.

Thrackerzod smirked. “That’s the point. It’s an import from the Embodiment. I don’t know how Barry gets her shipments, and I’m not going to ask. It’s a taste of home.” She took a sip. Her eyes turned inside out for a moment and she burped out her ear. “Perfect.”

“I think it has to be unhealthy for your body,” Squeaky commented.

“It is. I have to reconstruct parts of it to make it go down. But Azathoth’s fifteenth eye it’s good.”

“We’ll take your word for it,” Allure commented.

“Hey! Valentine’s on TV!” Bot blurted, pointing at a television hanging from one of the walls.

Valentine was, in fact, on TV, though it was just an image of him in a news report. The anchor was a version of Twilight Sparkle with an extra-short mane and sharper ears than standard. “Ambassador Funny Valentine’s press conference is causing waves in the multiversal community. To those in the USM, it may not have meant much, since it consisted almost entirely of foreign policy. However, for those of us in MU, we hung onto every word. The conference was over an hour long, but the main point of discussion was a new piece of legislature pushed by Valentine himself entitled the ‘Adapted Foreign Policy Motion’. The largest claim within this document is that ties with multiversal societies outside the USM will be cut significantly.”

Allure’s stomach did a flip flop, her mood dropping like a stone.

“The AFPM instigates a ‘beacon system’ similar to the agreement held between the University of Doors with the Sparkle Census and Merodi Universalis. The ‘beacon system’ will ask that all foreign powers refrain from entering the universe with intent to take action of any kind beyond contacting the USM. Trade between the USM and other powers will cease almost completely if the AFPM is enacted. In addition, all foreign persons currently in USM universes will be forced to return to their home nations.”

Squeaky slammed her glass on the table. “Dammit.”

“The AFPM has not passed yet, but current political trends within the USM suggest that it will. Given Valentine’s express backing of the change, it will likely process in under a month. When asked why the AFPM was being revealed now, Valentine cited the desires of the people to keep their nation their own.”

“Liar,” Tharackerzod spat.

“None of the other nations had given an official comment on the AFPM legislation.”

“…I think we need to call Eve,” Allure said. “…Or go to her and plead forgiveness.”

Thrackerzod sighed, tossing everypony’s drinks into an eldritch vortex. “I’ll wind up the Skimmer.”

They once again left Celestia City behind, though this time they had the harrowing air of failure about them instead of hope.

~~~

Eve was panicking.

It had been a long time since she’d had a good panic. She’d begun to think she had moved past having these attacks, but apparently she was wrong.

She scrambled through the contacts she had in the USM on her phone. Valentine wasn’t picking up, neither was Froppy or most of the others she knew. The few who did answer didn’t know anything about the new legislation besides what had been mentioned in the press release.

She really needed to get hold of the document. She’d even sent a request to Giorno to get it for her, but he had yet to get back to her. She was struck, for the first time in a long time, with a feeling of powerlessness. She couldn’t actually do anything. There was nothing to fight, all she could do was watch as the USM decided to sever ties with all of them.

Eve had already called up the Melnorme and the Grand Secretariat. The Melnorme didn’t care and the Grand Secretariat had only been slightly less panicked than Eve was herself.

What the hay was Valentine thinking!? There was no way this could be good for the USM… Not by any stretch of the imagination…

Or could it? She’d been getting a few reports from Giorno as of late about things the USM did to new worlds. Questionable things she’d been planning on bringing before Valentine directly once she knew a little more. Had Valentine decided their presence was a threat? Or did he just not like them? Or… Or…

Eve’s Second – a Sapphire who went by the name Cessera – tapped her on the shoulder. “The League of Sweetie Belles will arrive in about a minute.”

“But there was no ca-“ Eve stopped herself, remembering that Sapphires could see the future. “Right, right. Cess, can you deal with them? I’ve got a lot on my plate.”

Cessera nodded. “Of course. Are you sure you can actually do anything about the sizeable portion on your plate?”

“I don’t know!” Eve blurted. “Were this anyone else, I’d just send a team in to deal with it! But the USM isn’t our friend, but they aren’t our enemy either. I just… Why do they have to be such a gray area?”

“Might it be because they’re like us?”

“Maybe…. Maybe…”

The League teleported into the room. Allure took a breath. “Eve, we-“

Cessera held up a hand. “Evening is rather busy for an unscheduled meeting. You can speak with me.” She smiled warmly. “What’s the emergency?”

Thrackerzod ignored her. “Eve, we may have caused Valentine to create the piece of legislation I’m sure you’re pulling your mane out over.”

Eve stopped pulling out her mane and stared right at Thrackerzod. “…What did you do?” she said, sounding decidedly more menacing and upset than usual.

Allure gulped. “We were asked to help this world of cats…” Over the next few minutes, she explained the events of the last few days. The others sometimes helped fill in the specifics.

When they were done, Allure hung her head. “I’m sorry, Eve. We messed up.”

Eve put her hoof under Allure’s chin and made her eyes look up. “You’re right. You did mess up. I’m pretty sure I would have made the same mistake in your shoes, though.”

“Wh- Really?”

“I’ve been getting reports about the USM’s practices,” Eve said. “They… Well they upset me, and I knew I had to do something. I wasn’t that far away from bringing it up with Valentine himself. I’m not sure if it would have gone quite this far…” She rubbed her head. I would tell them to talk it over with one of us in authority before going to Sombra, but the whole point of Sombra is not doing that. Not to mention I’m 90% sure Sombra consulted with Giorno on this one, so technically this is still our fault and…

“You okay, Eve?” Allure asked.

“Fine,” Eve said. “Well, no, not really, I’m stressed to the moon and back. I’m not sure how to fix this, or even if it can be fixed. If the USM is really that expansionist…” Could we have lived with them? I like to think we could have. Agh, so many what-ifs. ”I’ll talk to Valentine eventually, try to smooth this over. At least keep Celestia City there. I hope we can salvage the joint missions…”

“We just got a message from Valentine,” Cessera called. “It’s a recording.”

Eve took in a deep breath. Here it comes. “Play it.”

“…Are you sure?”

“The League can see this. They’re involved,” Eve declared.

A screen on one of the walls lit up, showing Valentine sitting on the same couch the League had found themselves on only a few days prior. He had his hands folded and his eyes were squinted into a judging slit. “Dear Heads of Merodi Universalis and the core four of the League of Sweetie Belles.” He leaned in to the camera. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

Allure winced.

“I know a covert operation when I see one. I’m fully aware it was the hacker Sombra who acted, but it is no secret that you are not actively pursuing her and it’s been long believed that her existence has proved unbelievably useful to you. Furthermore, she acted a relatively short amount of time after I warned the League of Sweetie Belles to stay away. Clearly, you just couldn’t keep your rotten hooves out of our business and had to take what seemed like a third option. An absolute moron could put two and two together.”

Squeaky hung her head. “How did we not think of that…?”

“I assume your government – and that of the Sparkle Census – is tearing itself up over my new piece of legislation. Let me make it abundantly clear: that legislation is going to pass. The beacon protocol will go into effect. The bridges you have made with us these last couple years have been burned. I will not tolerate other powers interfering where we have a foothold. Apparently I need to make that abundantly clear. I had hoped you would have been able to respect our ways, and we could have existed side-by-side without judgment. A wishful fantasy.”

Thrackerzod growled, unsure of what to believe in his words.

“If I know Evening Sparkle well enough, she’ll be trying to think of a way to undo this damage, to reclaim the ‘friendships’ that have been damaged. Rest assured, there will be none of that. It is clear that our ideals are in opposition.” Valentine spoke the next words with conviction. “You are the antithesis of what the USM stands for. You pretend that any form of government can work, that inclusion and acceptance are the ways to perfection. All that does is muddy the waters of what is right! You cannot have every world, you must choose one and follow that one to the ends of existence! It is the path of the patriot, the only real path there is!” He calmed himself, continuing to stare right back at the camera. “There will be no reconciliation. If you capture Sombra and imprison her, I will be forced to lift some of the sanctions. That will not repeal the changes. You’ve made your intentions clear, and we cannot stand by and let you contaminate us with your meddling intentions.”

Bot glared. “Let’s see what your world thinks when we start spreading this video around…”

“And if you’re thinking of spreading this video around, don’t.” He leaned into the camera. “If you take more action against us in retaliation, I promise the League of Sweetie Belles will have a Bloodbath of their own.”

The video cut.

Eve stared, jaw slack. “I… I never realized what a horrible man he was…” She shook her head. She sat down in her chair, looking at a wall. “I guess we really have to do nothing.”

“…We have to let him get away with all this!?” Allure shouted. “That’s wrong!”

“Yes, yes it is,” Eve said. “It’s very very wrong. But we still can’t do anything. If we try, the retaliations will only get worse and worse until there’s a full-fledged war. Could we win that war? I don’t know. But I don’t want that many deaths on my hooves over one universe.” She sighed. “This entire series of events is not to be revealed to the public in order to protect you.”

Thrackerzod growled. “And the world reveals its sharp teeth once again. We must return to our lives as if nothing happened. Everything has to appear normal.”

“Stupid!” Bot blurted.

“Yes, stupid,” Eve admitted. “…But what needs to be done. I’m sorry.” She sighed. “Go back to Celestia City. I’ll keep you posted on what happens. Cessera, try to call Valentine again. I believe he’ll pick up now.”

The League of Sweetie Belles, dejected, left.

~~~

Sombra blinked.

She was now #1 on the USM’s Most Wanted list.

Her first response was pride. She must have really ticked ol’ Funny just right to get there.

It took about ten seconds for her to realize this was going to actually be a bit of a problem. If the entire resources of a multiversal society was out to get her… They might actually be able to find her. And then they’d give that information to the Merodi and demand they hand her over, or be accused of protecting her…

She could see that spiraling out of control quickly. If Merodi Universalis was leveraged in just the perfect way by the USM, she was dead meat.

She was going to have to revert to her old ways of being extremely paranoid and covering everything. Not even her ‘allies’ would be able to find her if they tried. ...Giorno probably could if he really wanted, but all signs pointed to the USM still having no idea he even existed, so that gave her at least one out.

Things were going to get more than a little complicated…

She laughed – this was going to be fun. She decided to get right on it – bouncing her signal off a dozen proxies through hundreds of universes. It was time to toy with someone.

She found a screen in a hallway Valentine was walking through. “Heeeeeeeeeey!” She called. “Amigo, hold up!”

Valentine stared at her. “TRACE THE SIGNAL!” he barked into a hidden communicator in his ear.

“Yeah, that’s not going to work,” Sombra commented. “Nothing works but this screen!” She held her arms wide and chuckled. “You want to declare war, Funny? Because the Merodi won’t fight, but I will.”

“I have promised to extinguish the League of Sweetie Belles already.”

“Oh, but I feel like acting on my own, without any sort of mission! After all, you did just set your entire government to hunt me. That was you, right? Cause we all know the president doesn’t care at all about what happens outside the borders.”

Valentine narrowed his eyes. “I will have Corona assassinated.”

Sombra’s kept her smile, but inwardly her confidence plummeted like a rock. She couldn’t formulate a response.

Valentine continued. “I have the resources, don’t you doubt it Sombra. You are not to interfere with any of our operations. Do I make myself clear?”

Sombra cut the transmission, unwilling to go on with that. It had been quite some time since someone had stunned her into silence…

She called Giorno. “I’m going to have to pull out of the USM observation network. It’s up to you now.”

“Too much heat?”

Sombra sighed, tapping her fingers on her desk. “He’s got my number, Giogio.”

“I understand. We shall take over.”

“…Yeah…” Sombra said. Anger was building inside her.

She was going to find a way to get back at Ambassador Funny Valentine one of these days…

~~~

Goldsire sat in the middle of a forest. It was raining.

Drystar walked up to him, a pained expression on her face.

“Why did you call me here?” Goldsire asked.

“We’ve been manipulated,” Drystar said. “The Muricans… They were guiding us like mindless kittypets into cages. They saw a spark in us and wanted to twist it to what they thought was right. I… I hate to admit it, but I think most of this conflict was their fault. Manipulating things behind the scenes…”

Goldsire was surprised at what he was hearing. “Did… Did you know about this?”

“No! I thought we had gotten lucky with those technology caches and those coordinates! And…” She shook her head. “We’ve been lied to. Both of us.”

Goldsire looked to the sky. The moon poked through the rain clouds. “…What terrible mouths they must have.”

Drystar was silent.

“What do we do now?” Goldsire asked.

“Talk,” Drystar said, looking into Goldsire’s eyes. “Let’s talk this through.”

Goldsire smiled sadly. “…I’d like that.”

And so they talked.

That night would become known as the night the war ended.

055 - Welcome to the Afterlife

Jotaro tore another giant set of double doors off its hinges. This particular set was purple and engraved with symbols representing this world’s eight elements, four of them of similar design to those of the Elemental Nations, which made sense, because this world was the first alternate they had found of the Elemental Nations. It was removed from the Elemental Nations they knew and loved to be sure: eight separate nations, completely different history, and no duplicate people – but it still had benders.

And it still had the Avatar.

This had turned out to be quite the problem for Pinkie’s Party because the Avatar of this world was absolutely insane. The interior of his personal laboratory made that abundantly clear. The room was octagonal, each side with an elemental engraving on it. The four standard ones were accompanied by electricity, sound, light, and darkness. Each of these emblems had an upside-down cross spray-painted over top of them with red paint. The floor had symbols representing the spirit, and each of these were simply crossed out in a haphazard fashion.

In the center of the room was a device – an upward-facing drill with eight orbs of power in its sides, each orb containing elemental energy provided by the Avatar himself. The Avatar flicked a switch on the side of the drill, activating it just as the rest of the team filed into the room. The man wore the form-fitting teal clothing of the Reverb Republic over his thin, but fit, form. His eyes were filled with unstable inner fire, driving his every exaggerated movement. “HELLO!” he decreed, one hand sparking with thunder while the other froze the air around him. “Welcome… to the righteous path.”

Flutterfree took point. “This isn’t the righteous path, Entari.”

Entari smirked. “That’s where you’re wrong, Flutterfree. So wrong.” He gestured at his drill as its tip began to shake the foundation of spacetime. “I will cut through the boundary between the mortal plane and Heaven itself! I have the Way!”

“Your ‘way’ is going to destroy the fabric of reality,” Flutterfree warned.

“A small price to pay to defeat the Lord’s monopoly on spirits!” he spat. “He has a hand over us, always keeping us down, refusing to let us see what lies beyond… No more! We will not take any of His imposed limitations! I will charge Heaven and show the Lord what we really are!”

Flutterfree twitched – clearly angered by what Entari was saying. “We have the resources to cross dimensions. If Heaven truly exists, we can find it without this drill.”

“You carry with you a symbol of His power,” Entari accused. “You are one of His.”

“I very much doubt that,” Flutterfree muttered to herself. “Why is that a problem?”

“You won’t let me do what I need to do,” Entari decreed. “I-“

The Avatar’s drill suddenly exploded. Jotaro had triggered a time stop when Nova had given the signal, allowing both of them to move in and reduce the machine to shreds in an instant. The elemental energy burst out in a spectacular show of colors. Pinkie watched through blue and red 3-D glasses with a bag of popcorn.

Entari’s confidence and inner satisfaction plummeted to absolutely nothing. “I… I…”

“Doesn’t matter what you do,” Vriska said, taking a step forward. “Time hax are overpowered.

“You… You will pay for what you’ve done,” Entari declared. He drove a pillar of rock right between Vriska’s legs, following up with an electric punch to her chest. She flew back, the electrical signal removing most of her muscle control. Entari surrounded himself in a whirlwind of flame, a defensive use of both air and fire.

Pinkie was suddenly inside his fiery shell. “Pretty,” she observed. She punched him in the face with a comically oversized boxing glove.

He grabbed her hoof, entering the Avatar State. His eyes went white and he tapped into her pink soul. He grabbed hold of it, twisting it…

This resulted in a shower of confetti exploding from completely nowhere, sending the two of them in opposite directions. Pinkie fell to the ground, unmoving.

Entari stood up and chuckled. “Hah…. The legendary Pink One has fallen by my hand…”

The next thing Entari knew he had several broken bones and a magical burn across his left arm. But he still stood strong. He unleashed a whirl of dark smoke and bright lights, scattering everyone’s perceptions, ending Nova’s onslaught.

He was able to reach Flutterfree first, grabbing her by the hoof so she couldn’t release her arrow of light. He reached into her soul. There was no confetti interruption this time.

Flutterfree made gagging noises for a second, sounds which stopped abruptly. Her eyes lost their red color, her fangs vanished, and her ears lost their frilled tips. Her eyes held the Spark for a moment longer, but even that vanished in the end. She dropped the bow of light as her entire body went slack.

“You were the worst kind of enemy… spiritual,” Entari declared, tossing her to the side. “Now that that’s do-“

A flash of blue-pink magic cut his head in half, ceasing all brain function in an instant. Nova pulled his body into her magic and incinerated it on the atomic level. Avatar Entari was no more.

With that taken care of, she ran to Flutterfree, putting a hoof to the pegasus’ neck to check her pulse.

Nothing.

Nova activated her CPR spell, forcing Flutterfree’s heart to restart. It beat a few times before dying off.

“Pinkie’s breathing,” Jotaro called over.

“FLUTTERFREE ISN’T!” Nova shouted. “She…”

She noticed that the people of this world had crowded around the entrance, staring at all of them with expectant expressions. The woman in front, wearing the robes of the Dark Tribe, took a step forward and bowed. “You have slain the lost Avatar. You have done our people a-“

“If you don’t have a way to fix this you can shut up,” Nova blurted.

The woman looked at Flutterfree with sad eyes. “Her soul is with the Lord now, in the heaven the Avatar hated so much…” She made a cross gesture across her chest.

“Shut up!” Nova shouted. “There is no heaven, there is no Lord, and if there is he’s just some pathetic hack!” Hearing gasps from the crowd, Nova decided she’d had enough. She grabbed the dimensional device from Vriska’s semi-paralyzed body and dialed out of the universe. “We’re done here! DONE!” Tears fell from her face as she threw everyone through the portal.

It closed, leaving the people of Elemental Eight alone with the remnants of a blasphemous machine and the dust of their Avatar.

They set to work refurbishing the temple.

~~~

Flutterfree blinked into awareness.

That was the best way she could describe it. It was like waking up, except she hadn’t been asleep before. She had been in a state of… Well, she couldn’t remember, actually.

She checked herself over – she was a normal pegasus. No fangs, no hunger for fruity fluids, no heightened hearing… Everything about her previously seemed somehow distant. She checked her flank and realized there was no cutie mark there.

She still felt something within herself. With a slight bit of effort, she was able to summon Lolo around her. Good.

…It occurred to her she should probably try to figure out where she was. She attempted to focus, but looking at where she was proved difficult. Everything was soft – not like a pillow, but as if it didn’t have substance. She strained her eyes, unable to make anything out besides a vague whiteness.

When she gave up and allowed her eyes to relax, everything locked into place.

She was standing on a cloud – not unusual for a pegasus, but she was certain the cloud wasn’t normal. For one, she didn’t actually feel anything under her hooves, even though she wasn’t falling. The sky around her was a bright blue, despite there being no visible sun anywhere. She had no shadow.

There was only one object of any interest – a large gate made of golden metal bars. It was larger than any gate she had ever seen, but she couldn’t say she was intimidated by it. It seemed… welcoming.

In front of the gate was a man in white robes and wings who stood behind a raised desk composed of clouds. He had a warm smile on his face that beckoned Flutterfree to come closer.

She flew over, landing on the area of the clouds where she could comfortably see his face. He was tall – at least eight feet – and had a soft glow about him.

“Ah, Flutterfree Asquall. Welcome.”

Flutterfree smiled. “…So, I’m dead then?”

“Yes,” the angel said, smiling sadly. “It is time to move on.”

“Al… alright,” Flutterfree said, smiling. Tears began to form at the edges of her eyes. As she remembered her friends, still back there… They’d be so devastated…

The angel took a book out of nowhere and flipped through it. He smiled. “One of the best records I’ve seen, Flutterfree.”

Flutterfree’s smile fell and alarms started blaring inside her head. “…What?”

“One of the purest and kindest lives I’ve ever seen, despite all that you’ve experienced. There’s a lot of loss of life here, but your motives have virtually always been in the right place. You get in easily.”

“I… get in?”

“To Heaven.” He snapped his fingers, opening the gate. “Go on in, enjoy your afterlife.”

“But- that’s not how it works!” Flutterfree blurted. “We’re not able to remove the sin from our lives, and so it’s hinged completely on faith… Right?”

“Oh, your faith is certainly a big bonus, but we’ve got to examine everything in the ledger,” the angel said, tapping the book. “Your works are excellent.”

“It’s not about works,” Flutterfree muttered bitterly. Then she sighed. “Fine… I’ll take it.” She gave him a smile.

“It’s not like you had a choice. I can’t send you to Hell and you’re technically standing in Heaven right now,” the angel commented.

“Yeah,” Flutterfree said, walking through the gates. Thoughts swirled around her head. Think Flutterfree, what did Rev say…? Right, there are many, many false gods, many of whom really are good or Divine, but aren’t what we really believe in. Just as there are shadows of God, there are shadows of Heaven. She sighed – she supposed Entari hadn’t been crazy. There really was a Lord connected to his world, and she’d just ended up in that version of the Afterlife.

She wasn’t really sure what to make of that.

As she passed through the gates, she heard them close behind her. She heard a familiar voice behind her. Entari.

She watched with curiosity as Entari charged up to the angel. “I WILL BRING THIS ESTABLISHMENT DOWN!”

The angel sighed, looking at the ledger. “As the Avatar, you are exempt from assignment at this time. You will be sent back with all the other spirits to guide the next of our Lord’s chosen. That said, this is the worst record I have ever seen on an Avatar. I doubt anything you can do will save you at this point.”

“I never said I wanted to be saved!”

“Just go back. Appreciate your unique position,” the angel muttered. Entari vanished in a puff of clouds, returning to the mortal realm.

Flutterfree turned around and took in a breath. Okay, this isn’t what you wanted, nor is it your final stop, but it doesn’t have to be a bad place. Make the most of it and learn all you can. She put a smile on her face, tried not to cry, and began to explore the new place her spirit occupied.

~~~

The Expeditions Division had its own personal hospital built underneath the crystal castle. It was a state of the art facility with the best doctors and healers from across Merodi Universalis. In the emergency room, two ponies lay on cots. One was Pinkie, her chest rising and falling slowly. The other was Flutterfree, not moving at all, but her body glowing a slight blue under Nova’s stasis spell.

Vriska, Jotaro, and Nova sat on a bench at the end of the room while a unicorn version of Redheart set to work. Nova had clearly been crying heavily while Vriska’s features betrayed great inner pain and anger. Jotaro’s face remained impassive as always, but he had not made eye contact with anyone nor said anything since they’d arrived.

Redheart completed her check-up of Pinkie and moved to Flutterfree, removing the stasis spell temporarily so she could perform her examinations. The deeper her frown went, the more Nova knew…

“She’s dead,” Redheart declared, placing her body back in stasis. “Pinkie’s in a deep coma. I can try to treat Pinkie, though results on comas are… uncertain.” She looked to the team. “I know the revive spell. But you know that doesn’t always work.”

“Just try it,” Nova pleaded.

“I’d need authorization. And a significant security detail in case she comes back wrong and I’m unable to undo it.”

“Renee should be here soon,” Vriska grunted, clenching her wrists. “She’ll give the go ahead.”

Redheart nodded. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. She was quasi-vampiric, so there could easily be complications. But I will do what I can.”

“That’s all we ask,” Nova said.

“No, it’s not. We ask for fucking success,” Vriska blurted.

New arrivals came into the room – but Renee wasn’t among them. It was Discord and Trixie.

Discord took one look at Flutterfree and snapped. “Who did it?”

“Avatar Entari,” Vriska said. “He’s very dead.”

Discord growled. “How brutally?”

“Cut his brain in half,” Nova answered.

“Too good for him…” Discord growled. He whirled to face all of them. “Why didn’t you protect her?”

“Look at Pinkie!” Nova shouted. “We did!”

“Did you really?”

Nova’s anger dropped, giving way to deep uncertainty. “I… I don’t… I…”

Jotaro stood up, making Discord flinch. “Don’t,” was all the man said.

Discord opened his mouth to retort, then closed it after he saw Trixie rapidly shaking her head at him. He turned his focus to Redheart instead. “Do your thing.”

“Not without authorization.”

“I’m the spirit of chaos!”

“And you do not have the authorization to clear the procedure,” Redheart declared. “I’ll allow you to work on Pinkie, but Flutterfree is a special case.”

Discord snapped his fingers, encasing Pinkie in a brief flash of light. Nothing changed.

Discord growled. “I should be able to do this…”

“Her soul’s been damaged,” Redheart said. “…For treatment, I would have suggested the Avatar, but she’s far too young. Thrackerzod perhaps.”

In a flash of purple magic, both Eve and Renee appeared in the room. Renee’s mascara was already running. Eve’s tears started to come when she saw Flutterfree’s body. “N-no…”

Discord pointed at them. “Authorize the revival procedure. Now.”

Eve managed to keep control of herself. “L-let’s hear the situation firs-“

“Just do it,” Renee blurted. “Do it now.”

Redheart turned to Eve. Eve took a moment to read everyone’s faces. She nodded in agreement.

Redheart moved over Flutterfree and lit her horn. She took a breath, shifting the color of her magical aura to a vibrant green. The stasis spell dropped, allowing Redheart full access to Flutterfree’s entire body. The force of life itself flowed out of Redheart and into the muscles, bones, and mind of Flutterfree.

Nova let out a gasp of delight when she saw Flutterfree’s chest rise and fall – she was breathing. When Redeart dropped the spell, Flutterfree’s eyes opened. The pegasus stood up and stared at them all with cyan eyes.

Cyan.

Cyan, not red.

Cyan, sparkless, eyes.

Vriska punched a wall, driving a hole into it, screaming an incoherent syllable.

“…Just like the ponies of the Hub Jungle…” Nova said, vacantly. She stared into the empty eyes.

Redheart undid the spell, returning Flutterfree to a lifeless body.

“W-we should be glad,” Eve said. “She c-could have been dangerous. T-that was… Docile.”

“She’s always kind…” Renee said, barely able to stand. “She-”

“We’re not done,” Jotaro said out of the blue, drawing everyone’s attention. “There are other things we can try.”

Vriska nodded. “Yeah! We’re a fucking multiversal society! There has to be something out there we can use to bring her back!”

Discord nodded vigorously. “I’ve got some contacts. All the contacts.”

“We’ll bring them back by any means necessary,” Nova declared. “Any.”

Eve’s expression became worried. “Nova, I-“

“If you dare suggest this is how things are supposed to be Eve, I swear, I’ll… I’ll…”

“Do it,” Renee said. “I don’t care what you do, just do it. Bring her back. Any means.”

“Renee,” Eve started.

“Eve, I am in charge of Expeditions,” Renee declared. “This is my decision. Not yours.”

“Did… You just pull political influence on me?” Eve sputtered.

“Yes. I did. I’m also slightly horrified that you’re not willing to go to the ends of existence for Flutterfree.”

“I am!” Eve blurted. “But you know what happens when ponies mess with things they aren’t supposed to! We’ve stopped people in the exact same position we’re in!”

Renee couldn’t find fault in that argument. She didn’t care. “Eve, stop being the great, wise leader of dozens of worlds for a moment. Be a friend. What would a friend do?”

Eve gulped. “I…” She shook her head. “Right, right. Do whatever you can. Just… Just don’t be evil about it. Don’t hurt people. Don’t become like all those others.”

“We won’t,” Vriska declared.

“…That’s what they all say,” Eve pointed out.

“I said we won’t,” Vriska countered. “So we won’t.”

Renee swallowed hard. “Good… good. I… I have to get back to work. Call me immediately if you figure something out, okay?”

“We will,” Nova assured her. “The instant there’s any change.”

“Everyone break,” Vriska declared. “Find whatever you can.”

“Who made you in charge?” Discord declared.

“I did,” Vriska said, glaring. “Any objections?”

“Several!”

“Just do what she asked,” Trixie said. “Let’s go.”

Everyone left – leaving only Eve and Redheart in the room.

“…Don’t you have work?” Redheart asked.

“Yes…” Eve said, glancing from Pinkie to Flutterfree. “I do.”

“Not going back to it?”

“…Not for now,” Eve said, placing a hoof on Pinkie and stroking her mane. “In a bit. I’d just like a moment with them… A quiet moment.”

Redheart nodded and didn’t say anything further.

~~~

The inside of Heaven was almost all clouds with the occasional building of pure marble sticking up from the soft fluff. She saw people walking around – all humans in white robes. A few had wings, indicating that they were angels, but all the others were just regular people. She saw no bending taking place at all. Everyone was equal.

She walked up to a group of people, intending to say hello, but when she got close Lolo’s effect activated. She saw the people for what they really were – loose spirits without a body at all, the image they were projecting just a memory of what they once were. The angels didn’t change when Flutterfree got closer, aside from a slight increase in light output.

Flutterfree focused, pulling Lolo into herself – she had learned over the years that, with effort, she could keep Lolo from revealing things. It took a bit of focus and kept her from thinking deeply about other things, but sometimes it was beneficial to not change people when she walked up to them.

The people she had forced to look like spirits had confusion evident on her faces. “What just happened?” a woman asked.

“That was me,” Flutterfree said, looking up at them with a smile. “Sorry, I tend to do that.”

“Oh! What are you?” the woman said, looking down. “Are you one of the higher angels?”

“Ah, no. I’m from another world than the one you came from.”

“…Huh?”

“An alien?” Flutterfree suggested.

“I haven’t seen any aliens here before…”

“Well, I died on your world, so I ended up here,” Flutterfree explained, shrugging. “Can you tell me a bit about this place, if you don’t mind?”

“You don’t know?” the man standing next to her said. “Wow…”

“Well, I know this is Heaven, but I don’t exactly know how things work here. See, I was under the impression Heaven was a place with no sadness or pain, that everything would feel complete, and…” she shook her head, hanging it down.

“Oh, you poor thing, you left people behind didn’t you?” the woman said.

Flutterfree nodded slowly. “A lot.”

“Don’t worry, they’ll join us here soon enough.”

“But they’re not believers!” Flutterfree blurted. “…That doesn’t actually matter here, does it?”

“Why would it? If you’re a good person, the Lord blesses you.”

“Amen,” the man said.

Flutterfree twitched. “But that… It’s not...” she got a hold of herself and put on a smile. “Nevermind. Just tell me what we do around here.”

“We live,” the woman said, gesturing. “This entire field of clouds is our playground for eternity. We talk, we dance, we sing…”

“…That’s it?”

“There’s also a bowling alley over there.”

“So this is basically the same as an eternal vacation back home.”

The man pondered this. “Never thought about it that way, but yeah.”

“No talking with G- the Lord? No seeing new, amazing things? No learning the secrets of the life you left behind? No purification of your soul?”

“Uh… No?” the man said, confused.

“Doesn’t that get boring? Or disappointing?”

He blinked. “I’ve only been here two weeks, I wouldn’t know.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Oh. Right then…”

The woman kneeled down. “Are you one of the devout?”

“Hmm?”

“You know, the uh… The people who read the Lord’s book all their lives!”

Flutterfree smiled. “Well, not all my life…”

“You should go to the temple then. That’s where the people who think like you hang out. They can probably answer things a little better.”

“Where’s the temple?” Flutterfree asked.

“Just talk to an angel. They’ll take you.”

“Thanks!” Flutterfree said, getting on that. It wasn’t hard to find an angel. “Excuse me?”

“Hm? Ah, hello little one.”

“Can you take me to the temple?”

“Already going there?” the angel smiled warmly. “I’ll take you to the closest one.”

In an instant, they were somewhere else in the clouds. In front of Flutterfree was a marble structure that reminded her of Greek architecture. Which didn’t make sense since the temple should have been Arabic or Israeli…

“Thanks,” she told the angel. The angel bowed and walked elsewhere.

Flutterfree flew up the steps of the temple, walking into the main hall. There were around a hundred humans in the temple bowing, praying, and meditating.

She herself sent off a short prayer – but it wasn’t to the Lord of this place. Definitely not.

“You have the eyes of someone who was expecting something else,” a man said, walking up to her. He kneeled down, smiling sadly. “A true believer?”

“I believe so,” Flutterfree said. “I’m not sure if your Word is the same as mine.”

He pulled a Bible out of his robes. “The angels will provide you with almost anything if you ask.” Flutterfree flipped through the pages, looking at a few specific verses.

“Wording’s slightly different, but that’s probably just translation,” Flutterfree commented. “…This place is nothing like what’s described in here.”

“We all notice that in the first few hours,” the man commented. “It’s… a sorrowful revelation.”

Flutterfree nodded. “I’m Flutterfree. An ‘alien’ who died on your world.”

“Ummar,” he said, sitting down next to her.

“What do you do when you come to this place? How do you deal with it?”

“Many different things,” Ummar admitted. “Some believe that the Bible was a false representation of what really happened or what the teachings really were. Others think this is Purgatory, and the real Heaven depends on us purifying our own souls in this place. Others still have decided that this is a trick of Satan himself, trying to capture our souls in a loose bliss.” He glanced at a man tearing his heart out on the floor, even though he couldn’t experience physical pain. “…Some lose faith entirely.”

Flutterfree looked into the distance. “I think I know what it is. This is a fake Heaven created by a shadow of the real God. Just a twisted image.”

“…How would you know that?”

“There’s a multiverse, Ummar. Millions and millions of different worlds with different beings and ways of living. I’ve encountered many so-called gods out there, and many with immense false teachings. My mentor, Rev, told me she had encountered fake Heavens before. Or, well, I guess this is real… But it’s not right.”

Ummar raised an eyebrow. “You truly are an alien, aren’t you?”

Flutterfree nodded. “It’s more than that. Nobody ever brings any abilities or powers with them, do they?”

Ummar shook his head. “I have not bent light since I died of old age.”

Flutterfree summoned Lolo with enough power so Ummar could see it. He was forced to show his inner spirit, a light much brighter than those of the people she had revealed earlier. Flutterfree pulled Lolo back into herself. “That’s Lolo. My Stand, a power affixed to my spirit. It’s from a very distant universe, and apparently something your Heaven didn’t remove.”

Ummar furrowed his brow. “This is unheard of…”

“Figures,” Flutterfree said. “…But I’m here now, and I’ve got to make the most of it…”

“You may not,” Ummar said. “The angels never really give us satisfactory answers to our questions, nor do they seem to find us all that interesting. But you… You’re something new. Or at least different.” He stood up. “I know where we can find an archangel. We’re going to see what she makes of this.”

Ummar led Flutterfree out of the temple and past several other marble constructions. They eventually came to a fountain where a female angel stood, watching the waters fly into the air and fall down to the puddle below.

“Purity,” Ummar called. “I’ve got something for you.”

Purity turned and smiled, speaking with the voice of a caring mother to a child who was being rather stupid. “Ummar, you know I do not gain any benefit from possessions, mental or otherwise.”

Flutterfree summoned Lolo to demonstrate. Purity’s expression turned to shock. “…What are you, Flutterfree?”

“An alien from another universe,” Flutterfree explained. “So… What now?”

Purity looked from Ummar to Flutterfree. “I need to take you to the higher angels. This is… Unknown.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Thank you.”

And then they were gone.

~~~

Aradia no longer hid – she walked around the worlds just like another citizen, jumping across time and space both for her own enjoyment and to protect the universes from temporal incursion. At the moment, things were quiet, so she was enjoying herself and doing some window shopping on the Hub. She was pleasantly surprised to find little action figures of her. “Oh, nice!” She chirped, walking into the store and examining the merchandise. “I look so cute!”

The shop owner simply couldn’t believe who had just walked into his store. He stared, slack jawed, unable to process her presence.

“Yeesh, you think people would be used to this by now,” Aradia muttered, checking out the other action figures. She found ones for Vriska, Alushy, the Doctor… Oh boy, there was even one of Valentine, packaged together with his Stand. She wondered if they were still classifying him as a hero here… Every universe’s action figure companies probably disagreed at this point. There were probably children having Valentine versus Valentine play fights…

It was a bit odd, but it wasn’t like it was illegal to make action figures in the likeness of other people. There was even one of Siron, though he was universally accepted as a villain type.

“Includes magic staff action…” Aradia read. She wondered how many people found this slightly distasteful. Or very distasteful. They must have been selling well, if they were displayed like this.

She walked further into the store, finding the section with brushable dolls. She saw one of her dolls on the floor with their hair in a double looped braid.

She found herself considering adopting the hairstyle. It was so unique. Probably horribly impractical, but troll hair was always impractical. Might be better to just make it absolutely off the walls crazy. She’d need hair gel though… Or perhaps just freeze it in time so it couldn’t fall out of place.

“Aradia.”

Aradia looked up to see Vriska and Nova. “Oh! Hello!” She smiled warmly. “Didn’t think I’d run into you two here! This is a toy store, after all, I’d think it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d shop for.”

“I own every version of my own action figure,” Vriska said dismissively. “But we were actually looking for you.”

“Oh, was my phone off?” She checked the folds of her robes. “Or… I forgot it somewhere.”

“Or you’ve been jumping around time so much it decomposed into dust,” Nova suggested.

“Pff, I don’t go away for that long,” Aradia said with a wave of her hand. “So, what can I do for you?”

“We need you to go back in time,” Vriska said.

“Oh that I can do, easy peasy. What for? Did you screw up a political meeting? I’m not an undo button, you know.”

“Flutterfree’s dead,” Nova deadpanned. “Go back and bring her to us.”

Aradia put her hands to her hips and sighed, somehow maintaining her smile. “Vriska, you know I’m not the ‘revive’ button.”

“I also know you can do it,” Vriska grunted. “Drop all that stupid ‘higher than thou’ bullshit and just go do it.”

Aradia shook her head. “I’m sorry, I won’t do it.”

“Just. Once.”

“It won’t be just once,” Aradia said. “Another one of you is going to die at some point or other, and then you’ll ask me to do it again. Then other people will learn about my power, and ask me to do it again. I’ll exist just to extend the life of everyone. That takes the beauty of death away from the equat-“

“Beauty!?” Nova blurted.

Aradia pointed at Nova. “You know what I mean, Nova. Everyone has a time. Everyone. I do, Vriska does, Eve does, even the ‘gods’ do. Every being that has ever existed will die. Must die. It’s not just how things are, it’s how things must be.”

“How do we know this is her time? Huh?”

“We don’t,” Aradia said. “If you find a way to bring her back, I’ll be happy. But if you don’t, I’ll appreciate what happened for what it is. For what it stands for.”

Vriska curled her fingers into a fist. “You won’t even do this for me? What if I died?”

Aradia smiled sadly. “Then you’d be dead. I’d hold a grand funeral and carry your ashes with me until I could take you to Earth C.”

Vriska’s anger faltered. “…Earth C… …I really might die before I get there…”

Aradia nodded. “Either of us might. We have conditional immortality – a piece of art itself. But it is what it is.”

Nova looked between the two of them. “Vriska… Are you starting to agree with her!?”

“I… fuck, maybe?” Vriska said, throwing her arms wide. “I dunno! She’s the one who keeps time the way it’s supposed to be.”

Aradia turned to Nova. “You have the power within yourself to go to the past, Nova. I will not stop you if you try to bring her back under your own power.”

“You won’t?” Nova asked, confused.

“No. But you then must hold the burden of revival. If I were you… I wouldn’t challenge the sanctity of death that way.”

Nova fell silent. “…I might try it,” she said, finally. “It… goes against what I’ve held myself to all these years, but if we can’t think of anything else I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself.”

Aradia smiled at her in understanding. “I know, Nova. I know. You’ll let me know how it goes?”

“…I will,” Nova said.

Vriska sighed. “Aradia?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you… commune with her?”

“I could try to find her spirit,” Aradia admitted. “…Actually, just tell me the universe she died in, I’ll go check right now.”

Vriska told her. Aradia vanished in a puff of time – and returned in an instant. “Sorry. I scoured the planet, didn’t find any ghosts at all. The physics might not allow for them.”

Vriska frowned. “Do you have any other ideas?”

Aradia shrugged. “I’m not a Life player. You and I aren’t exactly geared for this sort of thing.”

Vriska nodded. “…Come on, Nova. Let’s go look for something else.”

“I hope you girls find something,” Aradia called after them. “I’m not just saying that. I mean it.”

“We… know,” Nova admitted. “It’s just a little hard to understand how you think about this sort of thing.”

“If I’m still on the Earth C pantheon, I’m pretty sure the legends refer to me as the god of death. To earn that title… It takes a certain way of looking at life to get there.”

“No kidding,” Vriska commented. “See you around, Aradia.”

“You too,” Aradia said, smiling.

Vriska and Nova couldn’t bring themselves to smile back.

~~~

Ummar, Flutterfree, and Purity appeared in a ‘room’ that had no location. The ‘room’ was all there was. Flutterfree knew it had limited space, roughly that of a meeting hall, but she somehow couldn’t see the edges of it. She didn’t even know if there was an up or down here. Wherever here was…

But this didn’t bother her mind. Her spiritual form just accepted it and went along with it. She was able to ‘hear’ and ‘see’ all that took place in the ‘room’ regardless of ‘where’ it was coming from. It was probably best if she didn’t think too hard about it.

“Purity, why have you brought human souls to our presence?” a male voice asked. Flutterfree knew instantly that his name was Usiel. She also instantly knew the names of the dozens of other angelic presences in the area.

“Flutterfree, show them,” Purity asked.

Flutterfree activated Lolo in full. She realized that the only reason she was understanding this place was because of Lolo – Ummar was unable to comprehend exactly what was going on or deal with the influx of information. He couldn’t see it for what it was, he tried to rely on his old perceptions. But Lolo allowed Flutterfree to come to terms with everything being available without asking. She didn’t even have to actually speak; she could just vocalize a thought.

With Lolo fully activated, Ummar was able to understand it all as well. “…Oh…”

Flutterfree wondered briefly why Lolo wasn’t forcing her to appear as a spirit like all the others she had seen. Was it because she innately wasn’t supposed to belong here? What did that even mean?

“What does it mean indeed…?” Usiel vocalized. “Your entire list of experiences is revealed to me, as I assume you know, Flutterfree. Much of it is concerning.”

“The Lord didn’t create everything!?” Tabbris blurted. “How is this possible?”

“Were those devouts really right all this time?” Jaderah asked. “No… Impossible, we have much more than them…”

“But we cannot doubt and fall like they can,” Zanita pointed out. “We are rooted in what we know. I am not certain we are even really questioning now. We’re just emoting.”

Ariuk spoke. “This revelation is certainly troubling. I, for one, believe the presence of Lotus Locus has awakened a part hidden in us. It has shown us that there is more than just our Lord’s creations.”

“I concur,” Usiel decreed. “This is new. The question is, does it change anything about our place in our Lord’s court?”

There was relative silence, though small thoughts could be heard whizzing through the space.

Zehanpuryu spoke up. “Our lives will not change, I believe. But our core foundation is shaken. The Lord is not omnipotent, nor all-powerful. Does this mean He is not worthy of worship?”

“Dangerous thoughts, Zehanpuryu,” Ariuk said. “One would say blasphemous under different circumstances.”

Flutterfree cleared her throat – a throat that didn’t really exist. “Can I suggest something?”

“By all means, outer one,” Usiel encouraged.

“Why not just ask him? If he’s a good Lord, he’ll answer you, right? You’re his angels.”

“The Lord is aware of all conversation,” Purity said. “He will address us when He believes the time is right. The desire we have to speak to Him is all the request that is needed.”

“Is it?” Zehanpuryu asked.

“Despite this revelation, He is still aware of every single thought and motion that runs through every of His created beings,” Usiel said. “He is no liar. Not intentionally.”

“How can we make any assumptions about Him?”

“We trust in our past and our creation.”

“Ah, but can we really trust that? It was just installed in us, after all.”

Flutterfree sighed.

“What is it, little one?” Usiel asked.

“You’re not going to be able to reason your way through this,” Flutterfree pointed out. “You were created by your Lord. Your thinking is defined by him. Since information has come to light that has made you unable to accept him as truly all-powerful and perfect… Well, you admitted earlier that you had certain things ingrained into your mind. You could not question, if I remember right? What if you’re just not able to come to certain conclusions by design, even if they would be the correct ones?”

“You are wise beyond your soul,” Usiel responded. “You are correct. It is impossible for us to reason through this using our own faculties with any certainty. But is that not the point of faith?”

“It is,” Flutterfree admitted.

“And your faith is a strong one, Flutterfree.”

All knew that was the voice of the Lord, coming from On High.

Flutterfree tried to bow but realized she couldn’t really do that. “…Your angels have some questions for you.”

“All answers will come in time,” the Lord declared. “But you have questions of your own.”

“Yeah, I do. What is this place?!” Flutterfree asked, accusation in her voice.

The Lord told her.

~~~

Thrackerzod finished her intricate spellwork over Pinkie’s comatose form. She didn’t move.

“I hope you have other plans,” Thrackerzod commented to her only observer, Jotaro. “Because there’s something wrong with this coma that I can’t fix. I was never a doctor, but I should have at least gotten a reaction. You may want to consider cloning a new body and moving her into it, see if that works.”

Jotaro lowered his hat. “There are other options.”

“I know.” She turned to Flutterfree. “Have you tried anything on her?”

“Vriska and Nova came in about an hour ago with an ancient relic. It did nothing.”

Thrackerzod sighed. “Don’t make any pacts with dark powers. It will backfire. If they come in here with a Necronomicon, promise me you’ll punch it into oblivion.”

Jotaro nodded.

“Anything else for Pinkie?”

“I have Tonio cooking up a curative with his Stand,” Jotaro said.

“The cure-all? That’s actually worth a shot.”

“There have been a few illnesses Pearl Jam doesn’t work on,” Jotaro admitted.

As if on cue, an Italian man in a chef’s outfit came into the room with a steaming hot cup of soup with the perfect blend of herbs and spices. Thrackerzod’s mouth started to water. “…I envy your patients.”

“I can cook for regulars,” Tonio commented. “Drop by Morioh some time when there isn’t a crisis.”

“That never happens,” Thrackerzod muttered.

Tonio fed Pinkie the soup, using his arm to help her swallow in her state.

“Tonio’s Stand can have dangerous-appearing effects,” Jotaro told Thrackerzod. “Do not be concerned if her head explodes.”

“…Wait, what?”

Pinkie’s head exploded, sending candy-red colored blood all over the opposite wall. Thrackerzod was struck by the vibrant, unnatural color that was unusual even for ponies. She wondered if she had actually seen a Pinkie bleed before. They were rather impervious to direct attacks…

Pinkie’s head reformed into a perfect, well groomed head. A smile appeared on her face and her breathing normalized.

She didn’t wake up.

Tonio sighed. “I am sorry, Jotaro, the coma must be a special one.”

Jotaro nodded. “You did what you could.”

Tonio bowed and left, leaving Jotaro and Thrackerzod alone with the comatose pony.

“…Anything else?”

“Rohan,” Jotaro said, checking his watch. “He should arrive right about now.”

Rohan walked into the room. “Which one?” he asked, impatient.

Jotaro pointed. Rohan opened one of Pinkie’s eyes forcefully and activated Heaven’s Door, turning her into a book.

Rohan blinked. “…The inside of this mare is outright nonsensical,” he observed. “What’s all this about being watched? And…” He stopped short.

Don’t question it Rohan, you’ll find out soon enough.

“Nani…?”

“What is it?” Jotaro asked.

“It’s like she knew I was going to open her…” He flipped a page.

Yes I did! Good job Rohan! I’ll give you a cookie later.

“Nani!? How!?” Rohan shook his head. “I…”

“Just find a place to write a command,” Jotaro said. “Prying into Pinkie’s mind is likely to give you more questions than answers.”

Rohan glanced at the pages one more time. You’ll find out soon enough… He mulled it over, wondering what that meant. He shook his head – having Heaven’s Door instruct Pinkie to wake up as soon as the book was closed.

He closed Pinkie.

Nothing happened.

Jotaro narrowed his eyes. “Can your stand even make people do what they cannot do?”

“I don’t know,” Rohan admitted. “I doubt it. But it was Pinkie, so who knows really?”

“Nobody…” Jotaro folded his arms.

“I might,” Starbeat said, walking into the room.

Jotaro raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t ask for you.”

“Nova called me,” Starbeat said, pulling out a scanner. She pointed it at Flutterfree. “Higher than normal for a… body, but not unusual…” She pointed it at Pinkie. “…Yep. We’ve got a Beat curse.”

“…What?” Jotaro asked.

“The signal isn’t anything like mine, but I see what it’s doing. She needs to be in that coma, by order of the Beat. Which means all we can do is wait for the moment to be ‘right’ for her to come out of it.”

“That’s stupid,” Thrackerzod said.

“Not really…” Rohan said, looking closely at Pinkie. “When writing manga, there are times when things must last until a certain point, just so other things can happen the way they are meant to…”

“This isn’t a manga,” Thrackerzod pointed out.

“No… No it is not. But who’s to say the same rule doesn’t apply?” Rohan asked. “Call it… fate, if you will.”

Jotaro curled his fists, glaring at Starbeat. “Fate…? She has to be the way she is?”

“We don’t know of any way to remove the Beat… besides Monika,” Starbeat said. “But nobody knows where Monika is.”

“We just wait?”

“That’s all I’ve got for you, sorry,” Starbeat said, putting her scanner back in her saddlebags. She glanced at Flutterfree again and let out a deep sigh. “Everything… Everything is just so wrong sometimes.”

“Death is part of life,” Rohan said, examining Flutterfree carefully. “From death, we take experience, and learn from it.”

“That’s only how the artist sees it,” Starbeat said. “The way you see things… You cannot compare it to others.”

“I can and I will,” Rohan asserted, walking away. “I have a deadline to meet. Excuse me.”

Jotaro resisted the urge to punch Rohan across the face as he left. Instead he turned to Starbeat. “Give me a suggestion or get out.”

Starbeat’s hoofband started beeping. “Oh, I’ll get out all r- I’m a horrible mare. E... Goodbye.” She teleported away.

Thrackerzod sighed, head drooping. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

Jotaro nodded toward Thrackerzod with respect as she teleported away. He remained in the room, silently watching over Pinkie and Flutterfree.

He felt the sudden urge to call his daughter. He pulled out his phone and dialed.

“Hello~!”

“Hey, Jolyne.”

“What’s up Dad?”

“Nothing much,” Jotaro lied. “Just figured I’d call my daughter. What are you doing right now?”

“Oh, you know, fighting bastards who think they’re so high and mighty. Same ol’, same ol’.”

“Yare yare daze, how many people did you hospitalize?”

“None. …Yet.”

“Did you at least clear this with Koichi?”

“Daaaaaad, it’s not like the fate of the world is at stake, it’s just some Stand guy on a robbery spree. Yeesh.”

A small smile came to Jotaro’s face. “Jolyne… I’ll always be there for you if you need me.”

“Uh… Same Dad. I’ll be there. …Are you okay? Is there anything happening?”

“Nothing you need to come over here for,” Jotaro said.

“…Right. I’ll be at the mansion after this is over. Mom too.”

“I’ll be there, barring an emergency,” Jotaro said. “As always.”

“Oh, shit, I think he heard me talking to you.”

“Jolyne are we going t-“

“Gotta catch an asshole, bye!” she hung up.

Jotaro smiled. That was his girl. At least she was doing good. He went back to watching Pinkie.

A few minutes later he decided to call his wife.

He usually hated talking on the phone… The things today was doing to him.

~~~

“This place is the Heaven they imagined,” the Lord said. “When I created it, I did not see any contradictions between it and my Word. Why? A combination of being convinced of my own perfection and the fact that, to me, time does not exist. I said it was good, and because I said it was good, it had to be. After all, I was perfect.”

“You know you’re a shadow.”

“Any one of us that can truly be considered ‘good’ will realize this in an instant,” the Lord said. “Imagine, if you will, that you are a being that knows everything and IS perfection. The moment something appears that you don’t know, you have to realize that you didn’t know everything, and are not perfection. That moment came when your team arrived on Elemental Eight.”

“Are you… okay?”

“Time is nothing. You do not need to worry for me; I processed it and dealt with it before you even stepped through the portal. I understood what needed to happen – you needed to come here.”

“Wait… Did you… Did you guide things to end up this way?”

“Yes. It is unlikely you would have perished in such a way without my intervention.”

“W-why? Did I ask to die?”

“You did not. But since you are here, you were able to awaken my angels to something new. Had I told them directly what I had learned, they would have broken; or they would have resorted to just agreeing with everything I said. It would have worked, but it was not the best way, not for them. Your arrival and introduction gave them the time they needed to discuss without me.”

“So everything went exactly as planned?”

“Little one, you are not a pawn. Do not think such things. You may not be my child, but you are someone’s child. Your faith is strong, your convictions beautiful. You have a great purpose, I can see it.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“The answer will seem unfair, but I just do, Flutterfree.”

“That’s a fine answer,” Flutterfree admitted. “I demanded a bit much there.”

“You had the right to demand, given your situation. You are in a place you had no desire to be, and it is not what you sought.”

“…You mentioned something about it being the heaven they imagined. What does that mean?”

“The Heaven I have created is clearly not the one shown in my Word. It is the one I see on television shows in your universes. In books – a dream of the people. A land of eternal clouds where everyone lives much as they did in their mortal lives. It pains me to admit that I am essentially just a parody. A parody come to life. I know not through what means – just as all the other ‘gods’ out there know not how they come into existence and yet have always existed.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense though! Why woul-“

“You will know soon enough,” the Lord declared. “I will not be the one to inform you of that truth.”

“…Oh.”

“I will pray for you on that count, though.”

“You? Pray? Isn’t that… I dunno actually.”

“If I am not the creator of everything or the source of all good, then what is? I cannot bring myself to believe that everything just exists for no reason.”

Flutterfree’s spirit smiled. “…I think I see.”

“You truly do.”

“…What are you going to do now?” Flutterfree asked. “With… this place. Now that you know?”

“This place will remain – but I will leave it to the angels to run. I do not deserve their worship. Their reverence, yes, but not their worship. I leave it to them and I shall go out among the multiverse. I have already found others like me. There are rumors of something greater for those like us.”

“But if time doesn’t exist…”

“I have already done that, yes. My presence remains here to you for a little while longer, but to me, I have already gone on and completed my journey. The metatime provides some doubt in my perceptions, but I find that rather interesting.”

Usiel spoke up. “Lord… Are you really leaving us?”

“This place is yours now. Try to turn it into something that’s actually beautiful. Keep watching the worlds I’ve created – your work is not done. But it is now yours, and yours alone. You will make mistakes, but you will also find great triumph. Do not be afraid of change.”

“Of course, Lord.”

“I am proud of you all. Flutterfree, now is the time to ask your question.”

Flutterfree nodded. “…Lord of these angels, I do not wish to stay here. I would like it if you would send me back home, to my body, so I can be with my friends again. However, I understand if this is against the way things are done. Death should be final, after all. If you cannot send me back without contradicting yourself… I wish you to extinguish my soul so I may move on to the true Heaven, rather than stay in this place.”

“Are you certain of this desire, Flutterfree?”

“I would wait, but you’re going to be gone,” Flutterfree said. “And I know you’re the only one who can do that in this place. I don’t want to spend eternity here.”

“I understand. You’ve thought deeply about this ever since you’ve arrived.”

“Yes,” Flutterfree said, voice wavering slightly. “Send me home… Or send me off.”

~~~

Nova stared at the giant cross in the back of Rev’s church.

Rev walked in the doors, not at all surprised to see her alternate self there. She walked up to her and pulled her into an embrace.

“Why?” Nova blurted. “Why death?”

“I have many reasons,” Rev suggested. “You won’t want to hear them.”

“Screw that! Tell me anyway!”

Rev sighed. “Death serves as a passage from this life to the next… Death serves as an illustration of the cycles of life… Death is there to remind us of our own mortality and force us to change… Death is there to ensure nothing lasts forever… Death is there to remind us this existence is horrendously imperfect… Death is there to shock us.”

“Dammit, you’re right, I didn’t want to hear that.” Nova wiped her face. “…Better question. Why her?”

“We cannot know the specifics of the reasons why a particular life is taken at a particular time,” Rev said, tears in her own eyes. “I have no idea why Flutterfree was taken then. She was one of the greatest forces of kindness and understanding I had ever seen. Her life being cut short… It deprives all of existence of the story that would have been hers. A great story.”

“I could go back in time. I could do it,” Nova said. “I could bring her back.”

“You haven’t though,” Rev said. “It makes me think you won’t.”

Nova bit her lip. “Am… am I going to have to accept that she’s gone?”

“…You might. We… we all might.”

Nova sighed. “Rev, you explored the multiverse for a long time. That… Nexus place, and then all the places between there and here. Did you… Do you know of anything?”

Rev nodded slowly. “I will not lie to you, Nova. I’ve seen much.” She held her cross necklace in her hoof. “I know the Divine arts. But… You’ve already tried revival.”

“…Came back wrong,” Nova admitted.

“Yes. My works would do the same,” Rev said, lowering her cross. “This is not the time for me to perform a true miracle. God does not save those famous, or influential… Usually it’s the poor, the needy, the weak.” She looked longingly into her cross. “…I’ve become too important, Nova.”

“Can’t you just believe you will and make it happen?”

“You know that isn’t how it works,” Rev declared, wiping her own face. “Faith is a powerful tool. But just believing you can do miracles doesn’t make you able to. It makes you crazy.”

“…Gah. Then what can you do?”

“Use my faith to know she’s in a better place, now.”

“Agh!” Nova hung her head. “You sound just like that priest lady!”

“…What priest lady?”

“The one where she…” Nova bit her lip. “The lady said ‘her soul is with the Lord now’. Gah. I hated the way she said it too, she was so sure. You too, Rev. Why are you all so sure?”

Rev’s mind started racing. “We’re all sure because of our faith… Back up a bit, did she say anything else about her Lord?”

Nova groaned. “You’re curious about that, now of all times? Really?”

“Nova, please, just answer the question,” Rev pushed.

“She didn’t say anything. All I know about the ‘Lord’ was that the Avatar there hated him and was trying to drill a stupid hole to heaven so he could reestablish the order or something. Happy?”

“Yes… Sorry, I guess I just fixated on that. Hearing about those things… I have to consider them, you understand?”

“Yeah. …Actually no, you fixated on that instead of Flutterfree. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I…”

“Don’t answer,” Nova said, sighing. “Look, sorry. I’ll… I’ll be back later. Just… I need some space from you.”

“I understand,” Rev said.

Nova teleported away.

“If only you knew that I was thinking of Flutterfree the whole time…” Rev’s face was suddenly serious, the inner gears of her mind spinning on overdrive.

She had something she needed to do.

~~~

Rev opened a portal to Elemental Eight. She walked with purpose to the octagon-shaped temple of the Avatar. The various acolytes of eight different nations were busy cleaning up all that defaced it. The mechanism was still in the middle.

She walked up to it, eyes calculating. “Would it have worked?” she asked a woman in black robes.

“I do not know for sure,” she said, standing up. “It is possible. There have been those who went to Heaven and returned. He based it on what they told him.”

“So there’s actually a Heaven Universe here,” Rev said. A smile came to her face and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Thank God…” She turned to the acolyte. “Do you mind if I make some magic circles outside?”

“It will be no problem. Many of us are curious to see your magic.”

Rev trotted outside and engraved a complex series of magical circles, linking dimensional symbols together with crosses and symbols of the sun.

Then she summoned an object she had kept hidden in a pocket dimension.

A bodybag.

She unzipped it, laying the body of Flutterfree in the center of the circle.

Rev sent a short; private prayer – and then began the arcane ritual. She tapped into her Divine and arcane powers together, removing a part of her spirit and setting it loose. It was caught up by something. She grinned – that was a good sign.

She established the connection, affixing one end of the spell to Flutterfree, and another to… wherever Rev’s soul fragment was going. When it arrived in the Heaven Universe, it would find Flutterfree.

A few seconds passed – Rev began to doubt. Was she in a Heaven Universe where death could still occur easily? Some… Soul Society? That…

The spell completed and Flutterfree let out a gasp for air. Her ears extended, her fangs returned, and her eyes flashed red as Lolo manifested around her.

Rev whooped. “It worked!” She pulled Flutterfree into a hug. “Oh just… It’s so good to see you.”

“He… He timed it just right,” Flutterfree said, blinking. “I asked the question, he answered, and then… you brought me back. It… It really was how it needed to be.”

“You met their Lord?”

“Yeah. He’s… not around anymore though, I don’t think. I think he left the moment you grabbed me.”

“Ah,” Rev said. “Well I-“

Nova appeared from a teleport and pulled Flutterfree in. “You… You’re back…”

“Y-yeah!” Flutterfree said, hugging back. “I’m so sorry Nova…”

“No, we should be sorry. We… We were thinking of doing crazy things to get you back.”

“It’s okay,” Fluterfree said.

Rev glanced at Nova – and then glanced away. Renee, Eve, Discord, Jotaro, and Vriska were there, the two ponies crying tears of joy. “Wh… I didn’t tell any of you what I was doing in case it didn’t work!” Rev blurted.

“Security cameras had you breaking in and stealing Flutterfree’s body,” Vriska pointed out. “After we talked to Nova it wasn’t hard to figure out what you were doing. Now… Excuse me.” She ran over to Flutterfree, tore her out of Nova’s hooves, and squeezed her tight. “Don’t you dare do that ever again you buttery thing.”

Flutterfree gagged. “You’re going to squeeze the soul out of me…”

“That’s Jotaro’s job when it’s his turn for the hug.”

Jotaro held his hands up. “That’s all right.”

“Oh poo,” Vriska said, throwing Flutterfree at him. “Show some emotion for once. You are not a brick wall.”

Flutterfree hit Jotaro head on and discovered that he might as well be a brick wall. He let her slide down onto the ground.

Eve and Renee pulled her to them next. Nothing needed to be said – everypony was just happy to be back.

Discord interrupted it by teleporting her to him. “Such stingy huggers! Don’t they understand who I am?”

Flutterfree grinned. “The spirit of chaos and disharmony. …It’s nice to see you, Discord.”

Discord held her close.

I’m going to die again from overhugging.

“Oh! My turn my turn!” Pinkie said, appearing from a hole in the ground and grabbing Flutterfree from behind. The pegasus yelped in panic, not expecting the attack from below.

“NANI!?” Jotaro blurted.

“P-Pinkie!?” Nova blurted. “But… Coma! And… Wh… How?”

“It was time for me to come out!” Pinkie said with a wink.

“I… Nevermind,” Nova said, pulling Pinkie into a hug. “I don’t even care, you’re back. You can make us all laugh again.”

“I can? Really? I thought I was just annoying!” She giggled.

Jotaro adjusted his hat. “Yare yare daze…” He felt like he was going to regret this, but he grabbed Vriska, Pinkie, Nova, and Flutterfree together with Star Platinum and held them close.

“Okay… If this is what showing sentiment means, I’m having second thoughts…” Vriska gagged.

Eve wiped a tear from her eye. “…It’s beautiful. All of you.”

Pinkie giggled. “And wait, there’s more! Eve, you were scanning the spell, right?”

“Uh… Yeah!”

“Have Seraphim dial the coordinates,” Pinkie suggested. “I think we’ll find an interesting place.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Wait, we can go there?”

Rev nodded. “Heaven Universes exist in the Sea just like all others. It’s just that the primary method of reaching them is dying.”

“You certainly know a lot…” Renee said. “…I should probably have you debriefed at some point.”

Rev winked. “Can’t tell you quite everything, and I think you know that. Isn’t that right Vriska?”

“Yeah, yeah it’s right. I guess. …Wait, do I know you?”

“We met very briefly. In the Nexus.”

“Yeah, doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Not surprised,” Rev said. “It was brief. Twilence did most the talking.”

“Heh,” Vriska said, remembering something with nostalgia. “She certainly did that a lot…”

“How did you get out, by the way?”

“Maximum luck,” Vriska said. “I think I probably switched locations with someone when they came in. Not exactly sure.”

“Hmm. Well, I’m glad you did.”

“Is this the point where you invite me to church or something?”

“No, it’s the point where we watch Eve dial Heaven itself.”

Eve chuckled. “All right, all right, I’ll do it.” She opened a portal inside Seraphim, revealing the plane of clouds and the gate.

“That took a lot of energy,” Eve mused, looking at the rings of Seraphim that kept the connection stable. “Almost as much as it would take to get to Earth Tau’ri… Is this another sphere?”

“D-Sphere,” Rev confirmed. “Or close to it. The Sphere of dreamscapes, spirit worlds, and half realities.”

“Never spent much time there,” Vriska admitted. “Place was a little too weird.”

“It’s a new world to explore,” Pinkie said, grinning. “And I think we’ve got a bunch of angels who’ll be ready to hear everything we have to say.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Yeah… I think you will.”

Renee turned to Eve. “You’re up, darling. Time to form relations with something completely new.”

Eve beamed. “What I do best!” She spread her wings and flew into the world. She suddenly knew that her form was too solid for the world – and that if she spent too much time here, she’d be converted into a spirit. If she left after that, would she be able to convert back into a normal body without using magic?

She had no idea.

That meant this was going to be new.

Flutterfree had died… And as a result, Merodi Universalis had found a new avenue to expand.

Beat… Fate… Thread…

It worked in mysterious ways.

056 - The Pink Truth

O’Neill, despite being the Overhead of the Military Division of Merodi Universalis, still took the Enterprise out for exploration missions. The Enterprise was no longer the strongest ship in the fleet - there were now several others of similar power and design – but it was still more than enough to deal with most threats out in space.

The ship was staffed by Renee’s crew rather than a Military outfit, so technically it fell under the authority of Expeditions, but O’Neill was definitely the one in charge.

And since he didn’t like the title ‘Overhead’ or the alternative ‘Head’ because it sounded outright moronic at times, he still kept ‘General’ in front of his name. After all, he commanded the entire Merodi Universalis fleet, why wouldn’t he be the General? Even though there was a General rank within the Military Division…

Some of his soldiers had taken to calling him The General.

The Enterprise was still doing a partially military job – the universes it was exploring were along the border of the USM. The mission was, in many ways, a rush to grab interesting universes before the USM could get to them. Just drop a probe in and, by treaty, neither side could remain in a universe owned by the other for much longer.

O’Neill knew they were going to do almost nothing with many of these universes, especially the ones inhabited by more primitive people, but a beacon was a beacon. He often had to point out that the USM wouldn’t leave the people alone, like they were, so ‘taking ownership of their universe’ actually helped them. …You know, until they got really angry decades later once they figured out that they were inside someone else’s territory, but they’d cross that bridge when they came to it.

O’Neill watched another portal open. They passed through it, entering yet another field of stars.

The only thing different about this time was that they were getting shot at.

“RETURN FIRE!” O’Neill yelled before anyone gave him reports or even put the ship onscreen. The primary laser weapons activated, firing at a giant cube constructed of a mish-mash of metallic technology. The cube’s shields flashed green as the lasers hit, suffering minimal damages. The green laser that fired in return took a significant chunk out of the Enterprise’s shields.

“Drones and rod! Now!” O’Neill ordered. The lower bay of the Enterprise opened up, a stream of yellow drone weapons flying out, while the magical rod flashed with a rainbow of colors. The drones phased right through the cube’s limited shields, burrowing deep into the cube’s metallic structure, a few managing to survive all the way to the back of the ship for another pass through. The rod created a magical scythe construct and cut at the ship, shaving off a top section.

While heavily damaged, the ship still operated. To everyone’s surprise, the part that was cut off started moving independently.

“We’re basically fighting the Borg here,” O’Neill muttered. “Keep firing. Report!”

“Cube ship has suffered extreme losses to structural integrity and continues to do so. Attempts to disable certain systems have proved useless due to inner redundancies. Another ship has been identified of a different design. It has suffered minimal damage, presumably from the encounter with the cube.”

“Is it still attacking them?”

“Negative, it is focusing entirely on us.”

O’Neill nodded. “How’re we holding up?”

“Shields at 70%.”

“Can we use spatial distortion here?”

A scientific aide pressed a few buttons. “Readings suggest local physics can handle it.”

“Then do it.”

The Enterprise channeled the power of its dimensional drive into space in front of it, but it didn’t dial any particular location. Instead, the power of rippling space tore through the larger half of the cube ship, compromising the structural integrity of every inch of the technological conglomeration. Every single reactor within the ship exploded with the ripple in space, effectively vaporizing the ship.

The rod took hold of the smaller part of the ship, keeping it from moving while the drone weapons went at it like woodpeckers to a tree. The golden lights tore the structure apart bit by bit until nothing with a weapon remained.

O’Neill nodded. “Report?”

“Shields holding at 63%. We did blow a couple fuses, engineering teams have been dispatched.”

“Well, that certainly wasn’t easy…” O’Neill adjusted his uniform. “Show me the other ship and hail it.”

The other ship appeared on screen. It was a relatively flat ship, with a large disc section making up what would be considered the head. A small length of structure came out of the back, affixed to which were two raised ‘tails’ with red tips and bodies that glowed blue on the inside. Giant black text on top of the primary disc was readable: NCC 1701-E

Enterprise.

O’Neill’s mind froze inwardly for a moment as he tried to process this. If Captain Jean-Luc Picard shows up on that screen I’m going to go absolutely wacko.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard showed up on screen, standing on the bridge of his ship. His head was bald, his face serious, and his uniform a red color that O’Neill knew indicated command. “I am Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise. I extend my gratitude and that of all of Starfleet for the aid you have rendered us.”

O’Neill couldn’t suppress all of his ‘wacko’ amusement – a slight chuckle escaped. He tried to cover it with a cough. “Ahem. I am General Jack O’Neill of the Enterprise. I extend greetings from the multiversal society Merodi Universalis. We should probably sit down and have a talk. Would you prefer it if we came over there?”

“That would be preferable.”

“Great! Mauve, prepare for a sudden transport. Hermirod, Lapis-Vee, you too. Let’s make an interesting first impression. Captain Picard, if you wouldn’t mind giving us coordinates to which room you would like us to teleport to?”

“Send him the location of the briefing room,” Picard ordered.

O’Neill nodded to one of the aides. “Teleport away.”

O’Neill, Mauve the unicorn, Hermirod the Asgard, and Lapis-Vee the blue Gem with very long hair appeared in a simple room with a single, long table. A window ran along one wall, displaying the stars and a bunch of debris from the cube ship – the Borg ship. O’Neill saw the Enterprise-E fire a few phaser blasts at larger chunks of the Borg remnants, his Enterprise following suit. Never could be too sure with the tenacious hive-mind zombies.

Just as the four of them sat down, four other people came in. O’Neill recognized them all – Captain Picard, Commander Riker the bearded, Commander Data the albino android, Counselor Troi the empath. He felt a little dirty knowing so much about them all… But he kept quiet for the moment.

Picard sat down across from O’Neill. “I have to admit, I am rather curious what constitutes a multiversal society. We’ve had run-ins with alternate universes before, but never more than one at once.” He glanced at the variety of beings in front of him. “What exactly is Merodi Universalis?”

O’Neill gestured toward Hermirod to explain. The Asgard nodded, producing a small data pad and handing it to the members of Starfleet. Data picked it up, examining it while Picard listened. “Merodi Universalis is a society built on the foundations of multiversal relations formed during the explorations of an individual known as Evening Sparkle. What started out as a simple mission to collect data and find new locations for adventure turned into a political alliance devoted to uncovering more about the multiverse and uniting all who wish in harmony.”

O’Neill continued for Hermirod. “We have a lot of differing worlds, some of which are alternate versions of other worlds. I’m just a human, but Mauve here is a unicorn with magical powers, Hermirod is an Asgard with impressive intelligence, and Lapis-Vee is of the race known as Gems, an artificial race with unusual control over various forces.”

Lapis-Vee took that as her cue to demonstrate. She held up the hand which contained her tear-shaped gemstone, drawing moisture from the air to it. She formed the collected water into a wrench and froze it solid, smiling.

“Impressive,” Picard admitted. “Data here is an android with amazing mental and physical faculties. Troi is of a race known as Betazoids who are empathic.”

O’Neill smirked. “I know.”

“Have you encountered a universe similar to ours in the past?”

“You could say that,” O’Neill said, leaning back in his chair. “Brace yourselves, this is going to not only sound weird, but I also won’t be able to explain it.”

Picard nodded. “Go on.”

“We named our ship the Enterprise because I asked for it. See, I watched a tv show that had a spaceship called Enterprise in it, and that show was something of a cultural icon. So I named my ship – and then today I find another Enterprise. An Enterprise crewed by people I recognize from that show, Star Trek.”

Data blinked. “Really?”

“Jean-Luc Picard, also known for a short time as Locutus of Borg.”

Picard paused for a moment, taken aback by the statement. O’Neill was impressed he was able to recover as quickly as he was - but that was Picard for you. The Captain’s face shifted to curiosity and deep thought. “While it is interesting that you know that, it does not serve as proof of this TV Show.”

“You spent an entire lifetime on a virtual world called Catan in the span of a few minutes,” O’Neill said. “I can send you the episode. I have all of them on my personal computer.”

Picard sat back and furrowed his brow, clearly convinced at this point. “…And you have no idea what this means?”

“I can’t think of anything like this happening before,” O’Neill said. “…Actually, we did run into Sherlock Holmes once, but he wasn’t like the one you read about in the books I’m told. He could be explained away as just a fluke of chance. But you… Everything about this is too specific. You recently fought a war against a race of shapeshifters called the Changelings, or Founders, right?”

Picard nodded. “That is peculiarly specific.”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said I wouldn’t be able to explain it. Even given the size of the multiverse… Hermirod, what are the chances?”

“Of this particular interaction of physics and history, accounting for alternates? Trillions of trillions to one. Since I have not seen this show I cannot give a more specific estimate.”

“The natural assumption is that something caused this,” Data said. “Some entity recorded our lives and missions and decided they could be used for entertainment, perhaps?”

“I wouldn’t put it above Q…” Riker said.

“Oh, Q,” O’Neill laughed. “What a riot.”

Everyone fixed him with blank looks.

“…Hey, if you watched your adventures with Q on a TV screen from the outside, you’d find them funny as well.”

“Well I’m glad someone appreciates me.” In a flash of white light, a man in a red Starfleet uniform appeared. He had a very amused expression on his face.

“Q, this is none of your business!” Riker blurted.

“Actually, believe it or not, it is,” Q said, turning to O’Neill. “I extend all the official greetings from the Q Continuum, multiversal traveler. I also request every episode of that show you’re talking about. I want to see my… performance.”

“Sure thing,” O’Neill agreed. “Don’t suppose you have any idea what’s going on?”

“Delightfully not,” Q admitted, chuckling. “But I find myself wondering if it would be poetic that we had a fictional version of you somewhere.”

“Q admitting he doesn’t know something…” Riker shook his head.

Data went rigid for a moment and began scanning his databanks. “I have found dozens of Jack O’Neill’s in the records, none of which match your description.”

“You wouldn’t have access to all fictional records,” Hermirod pointed out. “For all we know it could be there.”

“Then it looks as if we’ll need to return to Earth to get to the bottom of this mystery,” Picard said. “And to initiate more official talks between our peoples.”

“Bleh. Politics,” Q said distastefully. “I’ll pass. We will meet again, O’Neill. Something tells me you and I will have a lot of fun.”

“Sisko punched you in the face and you never returned to Deep Space Nine,” O’Neill quipped.

Q blinked. Then he grinned, vanishing in a flash of light.

“He even sounds like Discord,” Mauve commented.

“He also wasn’t very good at being an official ambassador,” Hermirod said.

Picard turned to O’Neill. “We are several weeks from Earth at maximum Warp.”

O’Neill smirked. “We can get you there in a couple days, if you don’t mind being towed.”

“We would not,” Riker said.

O’Neill ordered the Enterprise to tow them to Earth. Then they continued talking about their future of relations. In the end, they would form a positive rapport with each other despite the oddity of one side being the subject of a popular TV show.

But the mere fact that they existed raised a few questions for people elsewhere…

~~~

Sombra read the report on her screen.

Star Trek existed.

She knew she was holding a key piece to one of the largest puzzles of the multiverse the instant she saw it. This was big. It… It could explain so much. She just had to figure out how it fit in…

She pulled up two other files – the files on Sherlock Holmes and Heaven Eight. She placed the new report – that she tentatively titled Earth Starfleet – alongside them. Sherlock and Heaven Eight had not given her much to go off of – they seemed similar to fictional things, the Sherlock Holmes mystery and the popular culture’s perception of Heaven respectively. But Starfleet… It was identical.

She performed some searches through Starfleet’s public records, not worrying about hacking into anything classified yet. Just public records. James T Kirk. Benjamin Sisko. Kathryn Janeway. Spock. All of them existed and their personnel files were essentially expanded versions of the fandom wiki articles! Virtually every detail she could easily find was the same! Did this mean that, in their future, Spock would travel to the past and rewrite history? She wondered if O’Neill had thought of that… Probably. Knowing him, he’d try to stop that from happening.

She sat back, a hand to her chin. O’Neill’s crew currently thought some being, possibly a Q, had taken the adventures of the various Enterprises and told stories about them. But that wasn’t it, Sombra was sure of it. It was too detailed… and it told of future events and alternate timelines. Not even the Ascended Ancients had that kind of predictive fortitude, so that ruled the Q as the responsible parties. She supposed there could have been a god of some sort…

Fingers flew across her screens as she performed searches across Earth Starfleet’s databases. She searched for anything, anything at all. She didn’t find any references to a stargate or the Asgard in the records of the Internet… She searched for Stands… She searched for her own world, finding nothing about Overwatch…

And then she found something.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. An old cartoon geared towards young girls that had gained a massive cult following in the twenty-first century on Earth Starfleet. It was virtually unknown in modern times, but its impact on the old Internet still remained.

That was it.

She watched a few clips and decided she had enough. Her fingers flew wildly, bringing up her ‘conspiracy wall’ file. She placed Earth Starfleet, Sherlock Holmes, Heaven Eight, and My Little Pony onto the board. She circled them in red, drawing a connection to the symbol she used for the Beat, and a line to Pinkie. She placed several more images on the file from seemingly random locations, tying them all together with a crazed motion of her hand.

She placed transcripts of several things Pinkie had said over the years. Things that didn’t make any sense… but that were suddenly clear to her. “That was for everyone watching at home!” “It has to be this way.” “Oh look, it’s a MacGuffin!” Sombra grabbed quotes from Starbeat about how the Beat worked. “Things have to happen in a certain way.” “It’s tied to events and people.” “All we can do is wait for the moment to be ‘right’ for her to come out of it.” She pulled an image of Monika out as well, slapping it onto the increasingly messy collage.

Sombra stood back, looking at her work. She started to laugh to herself.

She’d figured it out!

She scrawled something on the image in the corner.

Beat. Fate. Thread.

Then, in much bigger letters:

Narrative.

“It’s driven by stories…” she said, still laughing softly. “How… how silly is that?” She pulled her head back and laughed. It was so absurd, but she had finally solved one of the greatest mysteries of existence.

But wait… What caused that to be the case? Was there some singular author-god writing everything? It seemed a little too inconsistent for that… While this theory of Narrative explained a lot about things, it didn’t explain everything…

She pulled up another file with an artist’s rendition of the Dark Tower. Next to it, she pulled up the report on Randall Flagg and Black Thirteen. She narrowed her eyes.

“There’s more here,” she said. “It’s stories, yes… But there’s something else to it. Something bigger…”

She placed the Dark Tower in the center of her original collage, circling it and surrounding it in question marks.

Sombra stared at it, pondering deeply. She was close, she knew it. But she also knew she wasn’t going to solve everything today. The true answers would remain hidden for just a while longer…

~~~

Eve smiled as her meeting wrapped up – two types of angels had just come to an agreement. Servitude of the League of Sweetie Belles and Usiel of Heaven Eight were respectfully shaking hands, understanding each other to be different beings.

Eve supposed they weren’t really shaking hands – it was just how her mind chose to perceive it. They were currently in a D-Sphere universe known as Magenta Nocturne, a ‘dreamscape’ type world that was shaped by the minds of those present within it. Besides a general aura of magenta clouds, the universe was defined completely by the three entities within.

Usiel turned to Eve and nodded. “Thank you for mediating between us.”

“It was no problem,” Eve said. “I would have done it regardless.”

“But you did not act wholly out of political interests, you truly wished to see us understand each other,” Usiel decreed. “And for that, I thank you.”

Servitude bowed to Eve. “It was an interesting experience to see and understand a being of pure spirit. I shall return to the League and recommend excursions into the D-Sphere for further expanding of our knowledge.”

“Remember to be careful with the translation procedures,” Eve called. “Jumping right into a D-Sphere universe before scanning its physics could be disastrous. Jumping back into a universe you didn’t come from could be just as problematic.”

“I’m aware,” Servitude said.

That was a significant problem that had cropped up when exploring the D-Sphere. Virtually none of the universes within operated on anything similar to standard physics, making it truly alien territory. Translating into most D-Sphere universes just resulted in a slow conversion of a physical body into a spiritual force or mental image, but a few had such jarring changes that it could shatter an individual’s psyche or even kill them. The Research Division was pouring everything it had into creating ships that could force their own laws of physics on any universe they entered, but they weren’t there yet. For now, Eve had to deal with her body converting every time she moved – much like how the Flats changed when they left their own universe. It worked both ways. She had used Seraphim a few times to keep her form, but keeping focus on physics alteration using her Stand was impractical if she wanted to do things for an extended period of time.

The three of them left Magenta Nocturne, Servitude her own way, Usiel and Eve to Heaven Eight. The two of them appeared right outside the grinder device the Expeditions Division had installed with authorization from the local angels. Eve understood that it had been hard to create a grinder device that functioned in the ‘spiritual’ physics of Heaven Eight, which may have had some bearing on why it took the form of a whirlwind instead of a physical machine.

“Have your new researchers figured anything else out?” Eve asked Usiel.

“I do not keep up with the ‘spiritual sciences’,” Usiel said. “You’d have to ask them.”

“Ah, well, maybe later. I’m getting a little tired and I’d like to have a physical body before I turn in. You understand.”

Usiel nodded. “I do. Enjoy your rest, Evening.”

Evening smiled, opening a portal to Elemental Eight. She took a few moments to allow her body to adjust to the change before returning to Equis Vitis. She yawned, trotting up to her room. She would have to lower the sun soon. Sure, Luna could do it easily, but she really ought stay up long enough to take care of it herself.

She pulled up to her computer just to pass the time until she could go to sleep. She checked her messages…

One from Sombra?

Sombra never messaged her. It was always through Giorno. What reason would she have for messaging her?

She opened the message. The subject was Watch these. The message was blank, except for two video attachments, a little over twenty minutes each.

Eve shrugged – she had time to kill anyway. She made sure her computer wasn’t hooked up to any information Sombra wouldn’t already have and opened a video file. She turned the volume down and turned on her ears - it wasn’t too bad if she could control it like this.

“Once upon a time in the magical land of Equestria…”

A documentary of Equis Vitis Equestria? Eve wondered. It was told in the style of a storybook, animated with a stylistic touch similar to the books she had read so long ago in the Canterlot library. It talked about Celestia and Luna, and the rebellion of Nightmare Moon. She found herself enjoying the retelling of the story. They even got Celestia’s pink hair right.

Then the scene switched as they reached the end of the opening narration. Eve saw Twilight Sparkle, the unicorn, sitting under a tree and reading out of a book. “…and harmony has been maintained in Equestria for generations since.”

Eve smiled. Ah, this was probably a retelling of the first adventure with the Elements of Harmony. Someone in some universe had probably decided to animate it. It would be a good story, she considered, especially for those who wanted to learn about friendship and history. She found herself wondering how much they got right. She was prepared to record every little inconsistency.

The theme song started playing. Wasn’t bad – a little repetitive for her tastes, not as creative as it could be, but it served the purpose. Clearly geared towards a younger audience, which Eve didn’t find insulting. After all, everyone should have access to most of her stories. Back in those days there was rarely much in the way of ‘adult’ adventures, though some of the later stuff would be questionable.

They’d found a really good voice actor for Twilight, sounded just like her. Eve wondered what universe made this, but came up with no answers quickly.

So Eve watched. She watched as Twilight Sparkle received the letter from Celestia sending her to Ponyville. She watched Twilight avoid the party, having not learned anything about friendship yet. She watched Spike get abused, as he often did back then...

It was at this point Eve started to notice something odd.

This was scarily accurate. It had everything perfect – right down to details Eve herself wouldn’t have been able to remember, or describe accurately. The face Pinkie made when Twilight met her… The way Rarity arranged the gems… The exact tone of voice with which Fluttershy spoke… It was all perfect. It was slightly stylized for the animated feel, but ponies had always been smooth and came in bright colors…

The first ‘episode’ ended with the appearance of Nightmare Moon, just as Eve remembered. Eve took a moment to lower the sun – about a minute late – and think a bit. The animators and this… Lauren Faust must have observed one of the universes in the past, watching the events unfold. But how did they manage to do that without interfering with anything?

Why did the name Faust sound familiar…?

She decided to just watch the next video. A smile came to her face as she watched the six ponies adventure and start a long-lasting friendship. The defeat of Nightmare Moon, the reunion of Luna and Celestia. Even the lack of magic in Luna’s mane was right. Eve sensed the episode was ending around the time Twilight said “Oh thank you, Princess Celestia! I’ll study harder than ever before!”

Eve began to let her mind drift form the show, wondering how she was going to look into this. Of course, she’d ask Sombra for the rest of the show (if it existed) and where she got it. She’d look up this Lauren Faust, and all the other names in the credits…

And then Pinkie popped up on the screen, looking right at Eve as the closing animation started to blacken the video. “Isn’t this exciting? Are you excited ‘cause I'm excited I've never been so excited, well, except for the time that I went-” Pinkie gasped deeply. “But I mean really~!”

Eve stared at her computer screen.

Her mind put two and two together.

“This is the truth, isn’t it Pinkie?” Eve asked.

“Yeah,” Pinkie said, standing behind her. “It is.”

“…How does it work?”

“Think of it like… Breaking the fourth wall. I knew we were in a show back then, so I addressed the audience I knew was there. I had no idea you would be one of the people in the audience, I just knew there was one. And other things, you know, but that’s a little more complicated. I had fun with it. I made jokes only they would understand, I messed with elements of the cartoon we were in, and I even summarized the plot a few times just to save everyone a little time.” She giggled. “My… abilities go a bit beyond just knowing, though. I was pretty good at messing with everything. Let’s see… Do you remember when we were in Nova’s village and she was trying to brainwash us? I kept lighting up in laughter even though I wasn’t supposed to be able to. I was pushing against what was supposed to be, bending the rules as much as I could.”

“So… we were in a cartoon. What are we in now?”

“A book. Or a series of books, depending on how you look at it. Chapter fifty-six, The Pink Truth. It’s called Songs of the Spheres, written by G. M. Blackjack, according to Scooter anyway.”

“Does this… GM control everything?”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “I used to think that was how it worked. That the creators – whoever they were – just controlled everything with their whims of creation. That we were nothing more than a pattern of thought. I don’t think that’s it anymore. I’ve seen too much out here. It has something to do with the Dark Tower and the Beat.”

“The Beat… It’s the force of the story, isn’t it?”

“Yep! A more descriptive term would be Narrative. The correct term would be ka.”

“Ka?”

“Ka,” Pinkie confirmed. “I’m not entirely sure where it comes from, but it is related to the Tower.”

Eve sat in her chair, taking a few slow breaths. “…I see why you couldn’t just tell us this. It’s… It makes you wonder what’s even real. It makes you wonder about free will. Are we just the machinations of some person scrawling things on a page?”

“I can’t answer those questions,” Pinkie said, sadly. “All of us who are Aware – that’s what we call ourselves to not be that obvious – have different ways of coping with it. I just decide it doesn’t matter if I have free will or not, I’ll be the best I can be and help everypony laugh and smile. Scooter talks about more philosophical things like ‘offscreen time’ and ‘dynamic characters’ and the like. Mattie... I’m not sure what she does, actually. Monika treats it like a blunt truth, but a truth that can be manipulated for her own benefit.”

Eve frowned. “Where does your power come from?”

“I don’t know. It was just there, no explanation,” Pinkie said. “Some Pinkies can trace their Awareness back to a certain event – Scooter saw a rainbow explosion – but not me. I just… knew. Only explanation I can give is because I was written that way.”

“This makes so much sense…” Eve said. “Why are there so many similar versions of a world that have wildly different history? So the same story can take place with minor variations. Why do most worlds of a similar type exist within the same timeframe? Because it makes a better story. Why do similar events have similar Beat – or ka – patterns? Because similar events are similar stories!” She laughed slightly. “Melinda is just written to be unbeatable… Blackjack is written in a specific way that breaks the normal flow… And we… are the heroes?”

“Of our story, yeah,” Pinkie admitted.

“What about the ‘curses’? Like Starbeat?”

“Sometimes those are just ‘things that have to happen’, like my coma. Others, like Starbeat’s… I think that happens when a story written contradicts too heavily with the way things actually are. It has to force it to create the desired story.”

“So… Some psycho wanted a world of endless romance?”

“You should check the Internet of Earth Vitis before we started intervening. Humans were lonely. It was an escape.”

“But… …They have no idea what they’re doing, do they?”

Pinkie shook her head. “None at all. They’re just writing a story they think is interesting or worthwhile.”

“That’s… That’s stupid!” Eve blurted. “Why do we have to be held to the whims of the imaginations of random people?”

“I don’t know,” Pinkie admitted. “I don’t know everything, Eve. I know a lot. I see things happening in other locations because of the ‘scene’ transitions, but not always. I can predict what will happen based on what I know of other stories. I can detect the nature of ponies, I can interfere with the medium.” She grinned sheepishly. “I could demonstrate, but besides the carry-overs from my cartoon days, most of my medium alteration is subtle. Mattie’s is a bit easier to see, taking the form of instant cuts and repetition.”

“That’s why you have all your powers? You…”

“Are a cartoon, basically. I can be hit with anvils, pull things out of nowhere, and change my consistency like a noodle because that was my original medium. It doesn’t translate perfectly into book-form, but it works well enough. Like how you keep magic in another universe even though the form of the magic has changed. I’m a pink ball of everything!”

Eve nodded. “And this explains why you can pull out several dozen coats at virtually any time you want, but the moment we’re in a blizzard you can’t. It’d cut the tension too much. Be too ‘convenient’. Those are the ‘rules’ you talk about, aren’t they?”

Pinkie nodded. “It’s a complex set of rules. If I don’t inhibit myself, something will happen to remove me, or change me into something else that fits the story. Think… Pinkie-X.”

“…Right.” Eve turned to look at the night sky. “What am I supposed to think, Pinkie?”

“Everyone thinks about it differently,” Pinkie said. “You’re actually handling it very well. Better than you would have if I told you when you first asked.”

Eve laughed bitterly. “I would have gone insane back then.”

“I waited for you to discover it on your own. Once you figure it out on your own time… Well, I figured you’d be as ready as you’d ever be to hear the rest of it.”

“…What are we going to tell everyone?” Eve asked.

“I’m going to go tell all my close friends now that you know. You should join me.”

“I mean everyone,” Eve said. “The multiverse we find ourselves in. This isn’t something we’re going to be able to keep secret – eventually someone’s going to find this show and find it a little too curious and accurate. Then they’ll find other shows that represent other things.”

“Yeah. O’Neill already found Star Trek. It’s why you got that email, that’s what tipped Sombra off.”

Eve nodded, biting her lip. “Merodi Universalis doesn’t keep secrets unless it has to. I’m going to have to tell them.”

“That’s probably best. The reactions will be the focus for the rest of this chapter, I think. I could ask Scooter. She can read the entire script. She likes to be surprised, so she rarely does, but y’know.”

“I don’t know,” Eve said with a small smile. “What I do know… Is that this must have been a huge burden on you Pinkie. I know you’ve had other Pinkies to talk to recently… But you had to carry it alone all this time. A curse of your own.” She put a wing over Pinkie. “It’s amazing how you kept your cheery, bubbly laughter this whole time.”

Pinkie smiled at Eve, tears in her eyes. “It was hard.” She completed the hug. “But I did it. And now I no longer have to hide. I… I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.”

“I know.”

“There will still be times I can’t tell you specifics. When I know things I can’t act on,” Pinkie admitted.

“We’ll still be here for you, even during those times.”

“Eve… You’re one of the best friends a pony could have.”

Eve chuckled. “Pinkie… You are the best friend of every pony in existence. You did that all while knowing the truth. You should take some pride in yourself. I think most others would have broken.”

“Heh… Maybe,” Pinkie mused. “Maybe…”

~~~

“…And that’s how Equestria was made!” Pinkie concluded.

She was standing on top of the map in the crystal castle, surrounded by her friends. Her team was there, along with many others: the core four of the League of Sweetie Belles, Eve, Renee, her Rainbow Dash and Applejack, Starbeat, Rev, Alushy, Toph and her team (including Corona, but not including Vivian), Rohan, Daniel, O’Neill, Iroh, Aradia, Discord, Trixie, and Maud. Mattie and Scooter were there to provide backup. Human Pinkie was busy on Earth Vitis, telling her friends there what was going on.

Eve had already briefed the world leaders and Heads in a short, official report, so some of those present had known what this was going to be about before it happened. Even with that preparation, they were not prepared for the long speech from Pinkie. Most of their jaws were hanging open while they processed.

“This explains so much about my life,” O’Neill muttered.

Sweetie Bot raised her hoof to ask a question. “Yes, Bot!” Pinkie called.

“How does that have anything to do with how Equestria was made?”

Pinkie chuckled. “Oh, a bit. It was a joke for the audience’s benefit though.”

Allure’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. “Wait, when you told us your cutie mark story… I am never going to be able to look at anything you’ve done in the same way again.”

Pinkie winked. “It’s okay. That’s a healthy reaction. So, show of hands and hooves, who already had this figured out before today?”

Vriska’s hand was the only one to shoot up instantly. Aradia’s came shortly thereafter. Rev sighed and held her hoof up as well. Rohan started to raise his hand, realized he hadn’t fully put it together, and put it back down.

Starbeat glared at Vriska, Aradia, and Rev. “You knew!? You don’t have the same signature as Pinkie, you don’t have to adhere to her… stupid rules! You could have told me! Especially you, Vriska! When we were talking to Monika? That would have been a great time to explain!”

“Ay, I don’t like messing with the stuff. At all,” Vriska said. “When I do, I create things like Monika. Ka is not a force to be messed with physically, ever.”

“Oh, so I’m just damned to suffer for eternity!?”

“…Look, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m not going to mess with the stuff. If you can convince Monika or someone else to help you, by all means, I won’t stop you. I’d just rather not touch the stuff with a ten foot outhouse ladle.”

“Oooh, nice metaphor,” Mattie chipped in.

Alushy glanced at the Aware Rarity. “Good taste.”

“Aw, thank you dearie. Say… Would a mare like you be interested in something… dangerous?”

“Enough of that,” Renee interjected. “Mattie, your world and Scooter’s. They’re active in ka manipulation, aren’t they?”

Scooter nodded. “Yep! It’s called the Fourth in mine, and in Mattie’s… Let’s just say the barrier to access ka is very weak. Virtually everyone there has some sort of Awareness that comes and goes, Mattie’s is just a bit more permanent.”

“And useful,” Mattie chimed in.

“Yep,” Scooter confirmed. “I’m also more aware than Pinkie here.”

“How so?” Toph asked, almost as a challenge.

“Say something random,” Scooter encouraged.

“By Celestia’s left nostril I demand time stop this instant,” Toph and Scooter said at the same time.

Toph shook her head. “Woah…”

“It’s called the Script. You can actually talk to the Editor in our world as well, if he’s in the mood.”

“…Did he write your world?” Daniel asked.

“Part of it?” Scooter said, shrugging. “Scootertrix the Abridged had a lot of people working on it, it’s hard to tell who was the primary.”

“They’re called Prophets,” Vriska said. “The correct term for a person who is able to manipulate the force of ka through what they write is a Prophet.”

Rohan wrote this down.

“What else do you know?” Starbeat asked, recording notes of her own.

“Not much,” Vriska admitted. “I know not everyone who writes a story is a Prophet, there’s only one individual in the multiverse who can truly alter a particular story; the rest are just copies. I know there’s an interdimensional race called the Flowers who have built almost their entire society on the manipulation of ka. Word of advice – don’t steal things from them. They know how to weaponize Karmic Retribution.”

“They could fix me?” Starbeat asked.

“Maybe? Not sure if they would or not. They’re… pretty high up the pecking order if I recall.” She turned to Eve. “I know you won’t follow this advice, but I really think you shouldn’t research applications of ka. Bad things happen when you do. You think you’ve managed to cheat death so many times because you’re lucky? No, it’s because you’re heroes. If you mess with ka you could remove that armor you have.”

Pinkie nodded. “Vriska’s right. But I believe we have to research anyway. I think we all know at this point we’re not going to live forever. We’ve all accepted that before, why should we let this change anything?”

Vriska pointed at her, and then frowned. “…That is a good point. I’m just not going to be part of any of those experiments.”

“That’s fine,” Pinkie said. “We’re just an exploration team anyway. It’s not like we’ll be trying to create stories of our own.”

“You’d be surprised,” Vriska said, shaking her head. “For all we know one of us is a Prophet, and then everything will start getting weird.”

“You’ve known Prophets?” Rohan asked.

“Yeah. My Twilight, Twilence, was one. We didn’t know at first, we just thought she was very Aware. Turns out it was more than that.”

Eve’s expression darkened slightly, but she said nothing.

“The other Prophet was the one who actually wrote my original story. The orange fucktard known as Andrew Hussie. I hate him.”

“Vriska!” Renee gasped.

“I can say whatever word I want, Renee. That fucktard created a multiversal catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. And he knew what he was doing. So don’t even try to defend him.”

There was silence for a few moments. Eve cleared her throat. “Everyone… Now that you’ve processed this for a few minutes, are you all doing okay?”

Corona sighed. “And everyone looks to me, of course.” She adjusted her sunglasses. “It explains why existence has so much darkness. If we’re the ones defining it, the messed up and flawed people we are, of course it’ll end up like this. What were we expecting?”

Lady Rarity looked to her, frowning. “It also means we can change it, does it not?”

“Do we know any Prophets?” Corona asked. “Thought not. And even if we find any… I don’t think they could just write ‘every problem is solved’. Pinkie would have done that if she could.”

Pinkie shook her head. “No… The world needs struggle. But there are a lot of needless things I would have fixed if I could have. You’re right on that count.”

Corona nodded. “Thought so.”

Eve sent a telepathic message to Lady Rarity. You need to watch her for the next little while.

I caught that, Corona sent back, glaring at Eve.

You can’t say we’re in the wrong, Eve pointed out.

No. But I don’t have to feel happy about it, now do I?

Renee spoke up. “I, for one, don’t think this is a bad thing. We’re interesting and good enough to be the focus of a story. People hang onto our every action. It fills me with a sense of… well that we have a purpose of sorts. There’s something to build towards.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Glad you found something, Renee.”

Daniel nervously tapped his hands. “But what about… private matters?”

Renee flushed. “Oh my…”

“The story keeps itself to a teen rating,” Pinkie explained. “You’re safe. Starbeat, that does mean a large portion of your world remained unseen, leaving much of it implied.”

“Ah…” Starbeat said.

Renee let out a breath of relief. “Oh, that’s good.”

“Though they do see us crying and shouting at each other a lot,” Pinkie said. “Aside from the epic adventures and battles, that’s basically what they’re reading for. We’re half adventure, half drama.”

Everyone looked to Renee.

“I am not pulling the drama couch out for a gag.”

“That’s what it is, though,” Pinkie said.

“…Stars, I’m really going to have to reexamine my life.”

“Uh… Why?” Applejack asked. “Does this really change much of anythin’? If this is the way the world has always worked, why not treat it the same way? So what if the world’s in some book somewhere? We still live our lives the same way. All Ah feel is ‘well that’s interestin’, Ah guess’, and then Ah’ll get back to work. It’s like discoverin’ the sky wasn’t flat, or that the Stars were actually intelligent beings. It’s interestin’, alright, but what does it really change?”

“I envy you,” Starbeat muttered. “All I can feel is that there’s someone responsible for what’s happening to me, and they don’t even know it’s a problem! What kind of creation is that screwed up?”

“One created by us,” Rohan said. “Humans, ponies… We all have faults. If we’re all defined by this ka – these stories – then even the Prophets themselves are trapped within its grasp.”

“And that creates the next question,” Flutterfree interjected. “Why is ka what it is? Why does it exist?”

Vriska shrugged. Rev sighed. “I… don’t know much, and what I do know is based on rumors. But during my time in the Nexus, I learned of the Tower. I had to find it to get out, after all. It… It might be the center of the entire multiverse, the anchor on which every universe is affixed. I can’t tell you if it’s the source of ka or a product of it, but if there are answers, they will be around the Tower.”

Everyone turned to Lieshy.

“All I saw was a bunch of symbols and a clock.” Lieshy said. “And then I was in the donuts.”

“A taste to get us to keep looking,” Pinkie muttered.

“The entire course of our history is built on this force,” Eve said. “I, for one, am compelled to trust it. It may have given us difficulty and destruction, but it has also given us great friendships and unimaginable luck. Think about it. It only took fourteen years to unite eight universes together. We encounter evil powers at roughly the same time we can actually take them on. Our neighbors are fortunately not militaristic. Everything lined up just perfect for us. It may not stay that way, but for now I think that ka is a force for good.”

“At least for you,” Vriska pointed out. “You haven’t seen many grimdark universes, have you? You always jump in to help. Think about what would have happened if we couldn’t do anything.”

Eve nodded. “I… am aware. But that changes nothing. I am still going to give the speech and tell everyone about what we’ve discovered. After I do that, over the next few days, I want everyone to watch out for each other. This is a lot to take in, and some of us are probably going to have breakdowns a few hours from now or a few days from now. We need to stand with each other. That’s something we tend to always do, but I feel like it needs to be said. Everyone’s going to struggle with this in their own way, and we can’t predict what the reactions are going to be. It’s too… different.” She smiled, glancing at Pinkie.

“I’ll be here for all of you,” Pinkie said. “I’ll answer your questions, give you support, and even tell you how I deal with things. Mattie and Scooter are available as well. You could even talk to Scooter’s Twilight, Twix, if you wanted to understand how someone who’s not Aware deals with it.”

Everyone nodded, and sensing that the speech was over, they started talking amongst themselves.

Starbeat left first, alone.

Vriska sighed. “Excuse me a moment,” she told Flutterfree. “Have to go do something.”

~~~

Evening gave the speech within the hour. The multiverse heard it, and there were many responses – but to those who knew Evening and Pinkie, those responses meant little. They had already heard it all from the horse’s mouth, as it were, and now had to deal with it on their own. The speech? The speech was background. The world’s reaction was secondary. They were in their own worlds.

Starbeat most of all.

She stared at her computer screen, eyes filling up with tears of rage.

It hadn’t been hard to hook up to Earth Starfleet’s Internet, once she knew it was the one she needed. The public Internet was public, and she had access to devices that could transmit over light years in an instant, and across dimensions. She hitched onto one of Cosmo’s ships in the area and did her work. She found My Little Pony easily. She read up on the fandom it used to have. The bronies.

She knew what she’d find. She still hated it when she found it.

The shipping.

They reminded her of her Twilight! No… no, they were worse. Much worse. Twilight was roped in by the rules of her own world and studied them. These people rejected the rules of their world and substituted their own. Ones where romance came at a snap of a finger. One where the only point was to fall into a story where two or more connected. The situations were contrived, the emotions far too hot most of the time, and… and…

She drove her hoof through the computer screen, screaming. “So. Damn. Needy!” She smashed the screen against the ground, shattering it into a dozen pieces.

Starbeat noticed Vriska standing in the shadow of a doorway. Starbeat huffed. “What do you want?”

“So you found someone to blame,” Vriska said. “What are you going to do about it?”

Starbeat growned. “None of your business.”

“You could go try to punish them. But, chances are, the Prophets involved were just lonely, clueless people who didn’t really understand.”

“It’s all written badly!” Starbeat blurted.

“Not all of it.”

“The stuff my world was based on! I read stuff I recognized. That I’d studied back there! It comes from nowhere, a contrived event happens, and then all the tension explodes in an instant. I’ve studied real romance! That’s not it! That’s just… wild desires!” She pulled a folder out of a nearby shelf. “Real romance. All of it’s here. It’s not based on a single event that culminates in extreme passion over a few seconds. It is a long process!”

Vriska shrugged. “Yeah, I hear ya there. Hastur and I are still in the ‘going out’ phase. Probably because we’re both unimaginably old more than anything, but eh, still the same thing.”

“Exactly! And then there’s… There’s… These Prophets writing things that make it ‘true love in an instant.’ You know what I see?” She pulled out more folders. “All of these. This is ‘happily ever afters’ this is ‘romance in a minute’. I see romances that don’t mean anything everywhere. The people who are in prominent places in their ‘story’? The ‘heroes’? They’re susceptible to it as well! Everywhere! Not to the extent of my curse but ‘love at first sight’, which really shouldn’t exist, does! But in the same world the people who live in the background go through it the normal way. The ‘take it slow, move, and go’ way. These Prophets are ruining love for all these people because they don’t understand it!”

“Maybe they want love to be a free thing?”

“That’s stupid! You’re stupid! That lessens what it means!” Starbeat blurted. “If love really was about the ‘first sight’ or ‘the one’ or ‘clicking’ then… Then it wouldn’t be as beautiful. It’d just be a thing. I don’t want it to just be a thing! I want to cure myself and go through it normally. Everyone should have that right. To have a real relationship…” She laid her head on a desk. “…They’re ruining it…”

“Yep,” Vriska said.

“Wh- why aren’t you arguing?”

“Cause you’re right. Lemme tell you what the fucktard did when he came up with the ideas for trolls. He didn’t make love distilled down and meaningless – he expanded it out like some obsessed cat that loved to see suffering. You know we have four kinds of romance. Two of which I’ve come to think are pretty unnecessary. And yet, my race has a drive for all four of them, a deep drive, and we also had a social pressure. Let’s just say I understand the anger.”

Starbeat glared at her. “So what did you do?”

“I beat him up,” Vriska said offhandedly. “For all I know it’s why I’m stuck out here instead of being able to go home. It didn’t solve anything. It’s still a fucking part of me.”

“…Is it bad enough to want removed?”

Vriska shook her head. “No.”

“Then it’s still different,” Starbeat affirmed. “…But you are right about one thing. Beating them up won’t change anything. It’s a target without a reason. UGH.” She looked at her bookshelf filled with research. “I know so much Vriska. Knowing what Pinkie has said, I know I can analyze the flow of ka through the world. I can predict things that the oculi and sapphires never could. And yet… I… can’t… fix myself…”

Vriska sighed. “Shiiiit…”

“Hm?”

“You’re making me want to go against my rule. My one rule. Don’t fuck with the narrative.”

Starbeat blinked. “Could… could you do something?”

“I don’t think the Flowers will be dumb enough to let me steal their stuff again, so no. I’m just… Dammit, I want to encourage you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You know what, fuck it, do your research Starbeat. You will be able to find something. There are ways to control ka and twist the narrative. Figure it out. Try not to kill yourself in the process.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping. She flushed. “I… Thank you, Vriska.”

Vriska winked. “Don’t mention it.” She leaned in. “Please don’t kiss me.”

“Trying… Not to…”

“Did I ever explain to you the concept of moirails?” Vriska asked.

“I… Yes? Having trouble processing right now…”

“Trolls call it a form of romance. Having been out here for a while, that’s not really what it is.” She pulled a card out of her robes with a red diamond on it. “It’s when two trolls become true soul-bound best friends. There are no secrets between them, but there’s also no romantic tension. They’re just there for… each other. And feelings jams.”

“Feelings jams?”

“Long, intense discussions about the nature of feelings and emotions,” Vriska smirked. “Usually, in a moirallegiance, one troll keeps the other under control, while the other benefits from the others’ strength. I don’t think we’d work quite like that, but…”

“…We?”

Vriska handed the card to Starbeat. “Will you be my moirail, Starbeat?”

Starbeat’s flushed expression vanished. She felt her intense attraction drop from her like a stone – as if cancelled out by something that was opposite. She allowed herself to smile, tears forming in her eyes. “Vriska… What did you do?”

“I gambled,” she said, smirking.

Starbeat pulled Vriska into a hug. “T-thank you.”

“Hey, this relationship is going to be two-way you know!”

“Shhh… Let me just savor the moment of something strong that isn’t a click.”

Vriska chuckled.

~~~

Rohan Kishibe looked at the manga he had drawn. He was done. The deadline wasn’t even for another two days.

He thought about what he had heard from Pinkie and Eve yesterday…

He was going to try a little experiment.

Rohan pulled out a few sheets of blank paper, sketching the panels with alarming speed and precision. Part of this ability of his came from Heaven’s Door’s enhanced perceptions and control of motion, but part of it was also his natural talent and creativity. He spent the next few hours filling in four pages of manga.

A short story, but it would get what he wanted across.

It was simple: Josuke was out walking alone in Morioh. He encountered a Stand-wielding ferret with three heads. The battle was short, but intense, seeing as the three-headed ferret had a vendetta against Josuke for disturbing its slumber a short time prior. Josuke, as the hero, emerged victorious, but his arm suffered some serious lacerations.

After he completed the panels, Rohan went to his phone and called Josuke.

“Hey, Josuke, are you in town?”

“Uh… Yeah, visiting my mom. Why?”

“Tell me, have you encountered a three-headed ferret recently?”

“…No? Rohan what i-”

“Call me if you do,” Rohan said, hanging up.

Rohan sat back and waited. If he’d read it right, that call would prompt Josuke to pay him a visit. Prompting him to ‘walk alone in Morioh.’ So… If he was right…

Ten minutes later Rohan heard pounding on the door. Sure enough, Josuke was standing there, looking mildly irked. “You better tell me what that was all about!”

“Just an experiment,” Rohan said. “It failed. Sorry to bother you.”

“Rohan don’t yo-”

Rohan closed the door in Josuke’s face and returned to his thoughts. So, he wasn’t one of those Prophets. But he felt that he was particularly suited for studying the flow of this ka, having been saturated in the idea of exciting and popular plotlines for his entire professional career. Now that he knew life really did function like one of his stories, he could make the appropriate connections…

He knew that the original work he was from had to be a manga as well. The idea of Stands themselves were extremely action-oriented and lent themselves to creative fights that were visually appealing, but difficult to render in animation. The fact that the ponies were a cartoon made sense. For the others… He’d pin the Elemental Nations as an anime for the way they oriented themselves and the simple ideas taken to an extreme. The Gems… It was difficult to say, he was fairly sure they weren’t the heroes of their story. They could serve as the villains, perhaps, had they not been changed? Hrm… And he bet that Earth Tau’ri was an American Space Opera. That was easy. The only one he couldn’t place for sure was Lai… A derivative of the ponies perhaps? But what kind…?

He was shocked out of his thoughts by another knock at the door.

Rohan opened the door to find Josuke, standing there, one of his arms bleeding heavily. “What the hell did you do!?” Josuke blurted.

Rohan grinned. “The experiment was a success!”

“Rohan, stop being so enigmatic!”

Rohan leaned against a wall. “I am a Prophet.”

“A what?”

“Remember Eve’s speech, I assume?”

“I…” Josuke blinked. “You can’t be serious. Your manga actually exists?”

“Somewhere, I have no doubt,” Rohan declared. “I shall send you a print of your story. But right now, I believe I should inform Eve and the others.”

“Rohan why did it have to be this way!?” He gestured at his arm.

“Because that’s what made it interesting.”

~~~

“I wonder how many stories I’ve read that actually exist somewhere?” Eve wondered.

“A lot of them,” Pinkie said. “Probably guaranteed to exist if it’s popular across multiple universes.”

“I’m holding out for Star Wars,” O’Neill said. “Teal’c will love that.”

“I’m just waiting until we have a more applicable scientific theory as to how this ka works,” the orange Overhead of the Research Division, a Morganite that went by the moniker Sciganite, observed. “Giorno?”

The secretive Overhead of Intelligence barely moved. “I’m just glad I actually get to have a chair this time.”

Eve smiled sheepishly. “Yeah… Can’t exactly have thirteen seats in the meeting if there’s only twelve who are are supposed to show up.”

“But since it’s just us, you’re okay!” Pinkie cheered.

Giorno said nothing, returning to his observing silence.

“So, Pinkie,” Eve said. “Do you think Rohan’s actually one of them?”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “I’m not a ‘free answers’ machine, Eve. Pff. Let him do his thing. I’ll give my input later. I could be wrong, you know.”

Giorno nodded in approval. Sciganite just looked impatient.

Rohan walked into the meeting with style, dropping the manuscript he had just written on the table. “After I wrote this, it happened to Josuke. He was attacked by a three-headed weasel and suffered injuries to his arm.”

“So… You’re a Prophet then?” O’Neill asked.

“It would seem so. This story was written because I wanted to see if I was a Prophet, and there would not be an alternate version of Rohan Kishibe who would write the same story, because there is not another version of Rohan Kishibe in Merodi Universalis.”

“It’s not impossible,” Eve pointed out.

“But the chances of a multidimensional society that is identical to us in every way existing is absurdly small,” Sciganite said. “Unless ka wanted it to be that way.”

“If it is ka, then Rohan’s stories might as well be that of a Prophet,” Giorno pointed out. “If there is an identical one elsewhere, they still think and write the same things.”

Eve nodded. “It seems as if we will have to treat you as a Prophet, Rohan. This… could be immensely useful.”

“I would like to begin experiments as soon as possible,” Sciganite said.

“It won’t work correctly in a lab setting,” Rohan declared. “It’s based off creativity and story. I can’t just write whatever you want and make it happen.”

“I think he’s right,” Pinkie said. “If he could do whatever, it would be a bit ridiculous for us. Nobody can just write a victory.”

Sciganite narrowed her eyes. “But we will not stop observing you.”

“Of course. Feel free to examine all of my past manga as well,” Rohan bowed.

Giorno spoke up. “We’ll need to keep your power a secret. There are enough people who hate the idea of Prophets enough that they would try to kill you.”

“I am aware, Giorno.”

Eve nodded. “Then that’s what we’ll do. Rohan, continue to hone your abilities, but do so in secret. Giorno, ensure that happens. Sciganite, try to be subtle in your observations.”

“I will remind you that you aren’t in charge of us,” Giorno stated. “But I happen to agree with what you are saying.”

“Apologies,” Eve admitted, backing off. “Handle it as you see fit. Rohan, try not to mess this up.”

Rohan smirked. “I won’t. I will continue writing as I always have. Except perhaps with a little more weight to it.”

“Good.”

~~~

Corona opened the door of her house to see Lady Rarity, Lieshy, and Sugarcoat. “You know, people seem to be showing up a lot more lately. It’s not just because of Pinkie, you were doing this before.”

Lady Rarity smiled awkwardly. “Well, Corona, I…”

“It’s been two years and you’re not getting much better,” Sugarcoat said, strolling into the house. “So they grabbed your friends.”

Corona sighed. “Hello, Sugarcoat. They didn’t have to rope you into this.”

“Yes they did.”

Corona pointed at Sugarcoat, ready to object – but then realized she really couldn’t.

Lady Rarity glanced at Lieshy. “…Are you sure this is good for her?”

“As sure as bell peppers.”

“And bell peppers are green and green means good,” Lady Rarity translated aloud. “I’m jus-”

“She needs some bluntness,” Sugarcoat said, helping herself to some juice in the fridge. “Don’t you Corona?”

“Uh…”

“Tired of people walking around your feelings like they’re some delicate, fragile construct?”

Corona blinked. “Yeah. Yeah that’s right!”

“Thought so. You need someone to tell it to you like it is.” Sugarcoat tore the sunglasses off Corona’s face and raised an eyebrow. “You. Are. Depressed.”

“No, really?” Corona said, raising an eyebrow. “Nice deduction, Sherlock.”

“You don’t want to deal with it though,” Sugarcoat said. “You want to stay stuck in your little hole because you think you can’t be happy while the rest of existence suffers. The current fixation on the ‘story’ in everything is just something you’re focusing on to distract you from that thought.”

“I… what?”

“And you haven’t really thought about it like that before.”

“…No I haven’t.”

“Thought so,” Sugarcoat said, sitting down on the couch. “Want to play some video games?”

Corona glanced at Lieshy and Lady Rarity, finding their expressions to be just as dumbfounded. “Uh…”

“Look, Corona, depression can’t be solved in a day, nor can I actually do anything to it. I got you to think about something you needed to think about, and that’s good enough for now. Do you want to play games or not?”

“…Sure,” Corona said, chuckling slightly. She grabbed a controller in her magic.

Lieshy and Lady Rarity started to show themselves out.

“Hey, where are you two going?” Corona called. “It’s best with four!”

“I can’t hold a controller,” Lieshy muttered.

“Who cares? Come on, have some fun.”

Lieshy saw Lady Rarity walking to the couch with her many legs.

“…Fine,” Lieshy said.

~~~

Nova and Flutterfree looked at Rev expectantly from across the table. They had opted for Iroh’s Teashop rather than a bar, to Rev’s protests, but she was eventually convinced it’d be better to talk in a calmer, more homey environment

Rev looked at her tea in mild disappointment. “...I never was a tea drinker.”

“Neither was I,” Nova said. “Imagine that. But look where I am now. I love this place.”

Rev took a sip and pondered. “It’s not… bad…”

Flutterfree smiled. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Why does that make me scared?”

The three of them chuckled softly.

“So…” Rev said, sighing. “What do you want to know?”

“How do you deal with it?” Flutterfree asked. “As a Reverend. Knowing that you’re part of a story?”

Rev looked into the distance. “The issue is I can’t give any single answer to that question. Every time I learn a little more, or realize that something I thought I knew was wrong, I adjust it slightly. Currently, I turn to the passages that refer to ‘the world’ or ‘the way of the world.’ This existence is one driven by broken human beings, making this life inherently flawed. Creation has always been tainted by the creations with free will. Original Sin… And our current era, where some of us are allowed to define the world the way we think it should be.” She looked into her tea, introspective. “None of us, not even the deities nor those with the faculties of the great Azathoth and his ilk, can get it right. This entire world is defined by us, and because of that it’s wrong. The hope I hold onto is that He is outside this creation of ours. That He guides it to where it needs to be.”

Flutterfree frowned. “But… Why would He allow this?”

“Think of any work of fiction you’ve read,” Rev said. “Think about the reasons much of fiction exists. Why did He allow this? Because we wanted it.” She shook her head. “People… They wanted fantasies. They wanted grand adventures. They wanted heroes. They wanted stories. So we got what we wanted.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Nova commented, frowning. “Well, it looks like you two have a solution to this. But what am I gonna do?”

Rev shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve studied up on how certain people deal with it. Most just ignore it and stop thinking, or accept it as a fact of life and become content. Then there’s the last third who just get depressed. But you’re too much of a thinker to just go there.”

Nova furrowed her brow. “Mhm… Some people attach to ‘ka’ like a religion, don’t they?”

“It is the force of Fate,” Rev said. “At least, the fate that we defined ourselves.”

Nova pondered this, thinking deeply. “Is it possible to rise above it? Like… To know what’s supposed to happen and go against it?”

“Sometimes that’s part of the Fate,” Rev said. “Ka is a cruel force. Going against it is actually doing what it wants. Going with it is also doing what it wants. What you do… it wants. There… are devices that manipulate it. So maybe there’s a way around it…? I never heard about them from more than rumors. I wasn’t entirely sure it was possible until Vriska admitted she’d used one. I’m not sure what to make of it.”

“You and me both,” Nova said, scratching. “So… Here’s what I’m going to do.”

Flutterfree and Rev leaned in.

“I’m going to accept it as a thing that exists, as a force of reality. I won’t ignore it. And I’m going to make my own decision if it’s a force for good - or evil. I won’t let anyone else tell me. Otherwise, I’ll just live my life as I normally would.” Nova smiled sadly. “Even if it is evil… Well, I won’t be able to do much as I am now. But maybe eventually. That said, I tend towards believing that the force of what every being wants and thinks is right… It should average out. The existence of these ‘beat curses’ suggests there are ‘correct’ manifestations and ‘incorrect’ ones. Maybe the true enemy of the multiverse is the glitches, the curses.”

“We’re inherently flawed and destructive,” Rev said. “I cannot see ka as anything but a manifestation of our inner brokenness.”

“I think it’s neutral,” Flutterfree popped up. “It’s just a force. It’s not a mind. We define it, and since we’re so different… It just does what it does. Like gravity.”

“The legendary three-way-split,” Nova chuckled. “I feel like I’m listening to Thrackerzod describe the Eldritch again.”

Rev laughed and finished the rest of her tea. She blinked. “You know, I guess I liked this more than I thought…”

They all chuckled again.

~~~

The core four of the League of Sweetie Belles were walking down the path of one of the Hub’s interior gardens. Fluttershys loved to create these things and fill them with exotic and peaceful plants. It was nice for a walk.

“So… None of you are bothered?” Allure said, turning to the other three. “Really?”

“My entire life is defined by an essence from another being,” Thrackerzod said. “The fact that Azathoth may also be defined by such a being changes nothing about my inheritance of self.”

“We are the heroes!” Bot chirped innocently.

Squeaky smiled at Allure. “I get where you’re coming from Allure, I do. But to be honest this gives me a sense of relief. I have a purpose, I no longer have to wonder if this is where I’m supposed to be. I grew up with the explicit purpose of being a General. I’m not that anymore so… Well, I’d been a bit lost. But now? I’m part of something larger. Who cares if I know what it is?”

“Wow,” Allure said. “I envy you girls. I’m sitting here wondering if anything I do means anything or if I even have free will. Can I not be a hero?”

“Do you want to not be a hero?” Squeaky asked.

“Uh… no?”

“Then why ask the question? You’re doing what you love!” Squeaky smiled warmly.

“But I like to ask questions!”

“Questions are the path to the Dark Side,” Thrackerzod said. “...Huh, I wonder if Star Wars exists…”

“I’m going to say ‘probably’,” Allure responded. “Questions are also the path to answers though, Zod.”

“Answers you don’t always want,” Thrackerzod pointed out. “I could tell you any number of stories about how the Embodiment does things and you would decide later you would have rather not known. This has already happened numerous times.”

“Re-re-re-erasing databanks,” Bot muttered.

“I envy you most of all, Bot,” Allure muttered. “Well… Erasing one’s memory is a dangerous power, isn’t it?”

“Also useful,” Thrackerzod noted.

“I dunno…” Allure said. “I really don’t know what to make of all this.”

“Don’t think you have to,” Squeaky suggested. “You can listen to Pinkie, or Scooter, or one of the others and just trust them. Or just decide it doesn’t really matter.”

“It does though!”

“Probably,” Squeaky admitted. “Doesn’t mean you have to stress about it.”

“I am not one of those ponies that can just turn off stress.”

Squeaky chuckled to herself. “Yep.”

They walked quietly through the park for a few minutes. Allure was about to bring up another observation - but then she noticed something. Jotaro was sitting alone, on a bench, staring at nothing. Absolutely nothing.

She gestured for the three Sweeties to stay back. She trotted up to the bench and looked up at Jotaro. “Can I sit with you?”

Jotaro saw her, and he made no response. Allure knew that was his ‘I’m not in the mood’ response, but it wasn’t a no so she sat herself on the empty spot on the bench next to him. She looked him over - he was in his normal dolphin-loving outfit, but on his lap was a book. Shonen Jump. Comics. Or manga, Allure remembered from one of Rohan’s little lectures.

She waited a few minutes before speaking. “What’s that book?”

“My world,” Jotaro said, slowly. “Where it would have been published when written. By whoever did it.”

“Oh…”

“I was created to be an action hero.” He looked at his fist in confusion. “Built to punch things.”

“I was created to be cute,” Allure said. “I’m all grown up now. Still small, still cute. But I’m more than that. You’re more than punching things.”

Jotaro looked at her.

“You’re also dolphins!”

Jotaro couldn’t help but let a slight smile crawl up his face. “Yare yare daze…”

Allure smiled. “I mean… Marine biologist. That’s not something that’d happen in an action hero story, would it? You go on scientific expeditions and run experiments! Who’d want to see that in a punching-fest?”

“Nobody,” Jotaro admitted.

“Then there you go. You may be designed for punching things, and I may be designed to be cute. But we can do so much more.” She smiled. “We’re more than what we were written to be.”

“You came up with that just now.”

“Yes. Yes I did. And it’s beautiful.” Allure folded her front hooves

Jotaro couldn’t find a way to argue with that. So he just nodded ever so slightly. Allure chuckled.

~~~

And so Merodi Universalis and the other nations learned about the nature of ka and the multiverse.

For the most part? People didn’t care. Either they took Applejack’s method and decided it really didn’t matter, or they just didn’t think about it. It wasn’t like many of them did more than just live their lives anyway, who cared about some overarching story that didn’t really affect them? The process seemed so distant and foreign it just didn’t matter.

That said, the majority opinion is never the only one.

Suicide rates, after hitting record lows, increased by a factor of ten after the announcement. So many just couldn’t handle the idea that their lives were probably defined by some author somewhere else in the multiverse. That they were a fiction. It was too much.

Cases of depression, which had also been at record lows, surged forward again. The thought that one was part of a fiction, possibly not even real, was very easy for people to latch onto and unhealthily dwell on.

There were also the crazies: conspiracy theories and religions cropped up around the idea. The possibility that all events were controlled by a single Prophet somewhere fueled those who yelled about the world being controlled by secret organizations. People began to think of worshipping the flow of ka itself, as an energy of collective consciousness. Rev tried her best to combat this with her teachings, but her words rarely left the ears of her denomination, and it didn’t always work even on them. Ka-ism began to pop up everywhere, even though no two flavors of the religion were the same.

An anti-Pinkie society formed in the shadows, devoted to defaming and destroying everything the Pinkies did, even the non-Aware ones. Some of the members of this society believed Pinkies to be demons of unholy knowledge, while others simply cursed Pinkies for revealing things that weren't ready to be known.

Sales of fiction increased dramatically: it became less about reading for pleasure, and more trying to think of the possible worlds that could exist within the pages of a book. Popular works were brought to scientific teams to predict the possible ways the known laws of the multiverse would apply to said works. Many tried their hands at writing to see if they could change their own lives with the power of a Prophet, but none surfaced. Many claimed they could, but Trixie of all ponies had made it her mission to keep people from lying on the Internet. Likely for more selfish reasons than altruistic ones. …Definitely for more selfish reasons.

The show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic went viral. The culture of Earth Starfleet (known as ‘Galaxa Quadrants’ when politically correct) became immensely important to Merodi Universalis, and Starfleet benefited greatly because of it. Now every world that was even vaguely important was hunting through their archives for fiction that related to worlds that existed. It was a rush to find information about the various worlds. It was a time when uncovering the deepest secrets was a matter of finding the right book.

There was no way to protect against this. The privacy of certain individuals would, over time, become nothing. Their inner thoughts exposed to the world… For now, the effect of that was limited. But it would not take long for it to boil over.

It was a new world, in many ways, and yet the exact same.

Sombra took pride when she looked at what she’d done. She’d changed the world by solving a puzzle. She’d found the Truth behind something. Could the collective force of creativity really be the one in charge of everything? The actual force of power?

No… There was more. Everyone knew there was more. The Tower… The stories…

It was all building up to something. Something likely distant. But something nonetheless.

She planned to be here when that something happened.

057 - Sombra's Clipshow

Sombra hated to admit it, but she was bored.

More bored than a rock sitting on a mountain on a cloudy day.

More bored than a child in a car seat waiting for their parents to return from the store.

More bored than a single guy after the sixth hour of lying in bed and not falling asleep.

“UUUUUUUUGH!” Sombra groaned, leaning back in her chair. She almost hoped it would snap just to liven up her day – but it didn’t. She had designed it too well. She designed everything too well.

Surely, surely, there was some epic plot she had in motion that needed her attention today? Something that wasn’t automatic? Some life or death scenario that she had her fingers stuck into?

Probably, honestly, but none came to mind at the moment.

“Sombra, you’re losing your touch,” she moaned to herself. “You used to be able to find amusement in everything… What happened to you? Where did your spunk go?” She sighed. “That’s right, it went to the funk. This silly funk I find myself in. Holy potato moley pies. Ariba. Cinco de Mayo. And now I’m just saying things at random hoping they sound interesting.”

She slid down her chair like a liquid, trying to imitate a cat.

It was at this point her brain performed a brilliant set of mental hurdles.

Cat. Cats are famous on the Internet. The Internet has a lot of fun things. These fun things include random videos. I like random videos. One of those random videos I like has a bunch of random things happen in a bunch of short skits. What if I made a program that searched for things like that across the multiverse through my many cameras… There’s no way that would actually work, right?

“Oh, what the hell,” Sombra said, abandoning the liquid state and sending her fingers flying. All she needed to do was find things that were interesting… Pretty sure a Beat – er, ka – scanner could accomplish that. The coding was simple – set it to switch every so often, key it to a random number generator, affix to the ka levels, and then… Well, pipe it to her main screen.

She pressed go and sat back, watching expectantly.

This was either going to suck or be absolutely amazing.

~~~

“I’VE GOT YOUR NOSE!” the unimaginable horror from the Embodiment shouted.

Alushy grinned, her face dripping blood. “Yes… Yes you do… My nose. An artifact of untold arcane power. Those who have claimed my nose and held it for long have gained many perks, but also legendary detriments. Their sense of smell becomes unimaginably attuned, to the point at which they are able to smell every piece of shit in a fifty mile radius as if they were standing right next to it. The strength benefits are unheard of, bordering on unstoppable, but beware: you never know when your fist will suddenly turn into a pie. And there’s also the fact that it makes parts fall off of you. Any part. Hey, I’m curious, what on your eldritch body is the equivalent to a d-”

The horror dropped Alushy’s nose and vanished into the eldritch darkness.

“Heh,” Alushy said, slapping her nose back on. “Priceless.”

~~~

Starbeat walked by a tree and her bracelet started beeping. She jumped five feet in the air and looked around in alarm – what was she reacting to? There was nobody in sight… Nobody at all… She didn’t think she felt anything-

Oh.

The tree. It was the tree wasn’t it? That had to be the weirdest one so far, and yet… The way the leaves moved within the branches… The way the bark was so crusty… The way its flowers smelled…

She began to move toward it, dreamily.

Then she became aware the alarm was still beeping. It never beeped for that long.

“Oh. It’s malfunctioning.” She blinked, glancing back at the tree, feeling nothing. She facehooved.

~~~

Discord had blessed Allure with a cauldron, a sledgehammer, and infinite strength. She would have preferred infinite telekinetic power, but she was going to make do with what she had.

She had made a bet with the lord of chaos: if she was actually in the game he was playing, she could beat it. The only difficulty was in the outrageous controls.

She was going to Get. Over. It.

As soon as she could get over this tree.

“How in the…” She wrenched her hammer on one of the branches, but couldn’t loop the hammer around the higher branch without removing it from the one holding her weight. She couldn’t pull herself up with her telekinesis, definitely not enough strength…

She tried to swing the hammer quickly, but instead hit the tree and went flying back to where she started.

“AUGH!”

Outside the arcade machine, Discord and Trixie giggled.

Thrackerzod sighed. “This is going to take a while,” she told the rest of the League. “Let’s leave her her to it.”

Just as they left, Allure let out another “AUGH!”

~~~

Today with the Guru, we'll be discussing a good use for all those different types of currency you keep collecting. It must be troubling to find yourself bogged down with money you can't use everywhere. So follow my simple tips and you'll be smiling once again with empty pockets.

1) If it's a metal, maybe it can be melted down? There's dozens of reasons to melt down metal.

2) Paper money may sound like fun to burn, but I want you to remember that there's noxious chemicals in the ink. Instead get scissors and tape and make beautiful art.

3) Card money can be repurposed as playing cards with a little bleach and a pair of red and black pens.

4) If you find yourself in the unfortunate circumstance of having been to a world that uses animal skulls as currency, don't panic. With a little creativity and the right tools, any skull can be turned into a bowl.

5) Even the largest pile of coupons can be sold in a nearby Hub for a local currency, or used as a building material once packed together tight enough.

6) Do not take Volcano Bucks home with you.

But those are all the tips I have available for today. And remember, it's important that you first check with your local currency exchange before you destroy your legal money. No matter how much you have, it's always important to go through the proper channels.

Thank you for reading today's entry.

~~~

Alushy looked down at Flutterfree.

Flutterfree smiled awkwardly. “So… Wh-”

“TODAY in VAMPIRE TRAINING!” Alushy announced. “We’re going to a person. You’re going to kill them. And you are going to drink their blood.”

“Alushy! I said I wasn’t killing anyone! I can survive on apple juice and you know it!”

“Why apples work baffles me like nothing else. But you’re not going to be a two-bit whorse when it comes to killing.”

“That pun is crude and I don’t think it applies to this situation.”

“I’M THE ELDER VAMPIRE HERE! You are not going to deny a part of your nature!”

“I don’t kill people!”

“That’s a lie.”

“...I don’t kill people without good reason.”

“Well we’re in luck, we have a quadruple-offense child-molester and serial killer!”

Flutterfree blinked. “...Okay now I object because I don’t want to touch this disgusting man.”

“Woman.”

Flutterfree stopped short. “...Alushy, what’s the point of this exercise? I’ve taken down people befor-”

“You need to understand the feast! Now GO! She’s got a knife, beware!”

Flutterfree was suddenly in front of the woman in a locked room. She charged with an ugly grunt.

Flutterfree shot her in the head with the bow of light. “She’s down, Alushy, can I-”

“Nope! Not until you feast!”

“Uuuugh…” She sucked it up and leaned down to take a bite.

The woman exploded in a shower of blood, dousing Flutterfree. She could hear Alushy howling in laughter.

“W-what?”

“I got you good! By the way, the moment you leave this room there’ll be about two dozen zombies. Make quick work of them, my student!”

“WHY DO I LET YOU DO THIS TO ME?”

“Because you secretly enjoy it.”

“I- bu- UGH.” She charged out of the room, teeth bared, ready to face the zombies.

~~~

The Sparkle Census’s system was, from their end, exceedingly efficient. They could be absolutely, positively certain that no Twilight was left behind.

Others disagreed.

"UGH! I ANSWERED YOU ONCE ALREADY! FIX YOUR FREAKING SYSTEM!"

Jenny Everywhere turned back to look at her travelling companion, who had stopped to glare at a scroll lying innocently on the ground.

“Something up, Horry?”

Twilight ‘Horizon’ Sparkle, interdimensional traveller, rolled her eyes. “Their stupid drone sent me another one.” The small purple unicorn stepped around the scroll, pointedly avoiding touching it. “You’d think they’d’ve gotten the idea after the third one…”

~~~

Renee looked at the team of four agents she had to deal with.

“So let me get this straight… Jeff, you like Jane. But Jane, you like Jeremy. And Jeremy doesn’t like anyone.”

“HE LIKES ME!” The fourth member, Jilly, said.

Renee facehooved. “Right. So, Jane, have you considered that Jeremy isn’t willing?”

“He’ll come around…”

“Right. Jeff?”

“I’ll… Let her be happy.”

“Jeremy?”

“I just want to get the job done,” Jeremy muttered. “Don’t want any personal differences getting in the way.”

“HE’S SO CUUUUTE!” Jilly cheered. “You too, Jeff…”

Renee adjusted her hat. “Jeremy, I’m giving you command of your own team. We’ll talk about who you’re going to put on it later. The rest of you… I’m taking you off active duty until you can resolve this. I’m not against romance, but it can’t get in the way of the job.”

They all seemed too happy about this.

Renee raised an eyebrow. “...Were you trying to get fired?”

“Oh no,” Jilly said. “But now we can have an excuse to see Jeremy outside of work~!”

“Do you not understand the concept of personal space?”

“Hm?”

“Guess not. Jeremy, would you like legal protection?”

“Hell yes,” Jeremy declared.

“I shall provide it.”

The girls’ jaws dropped. “No…”

Jeff smiled. “Hey, maybe now you ca-”

The two girls fell into each others’ arms, ignoring Jeff. He looked at the ground, dejected.

Renee struggled not to shout THIS IS STUPID at the top of her lungs.

~~~

“Ready?” Human Pinkie asked O’Neill. Her hair was done up in a double pom-pom and she wore outrageously colorful exercise clothing. The look suited her.

The look did not suit O’Neill, but he somehow managed to pull off the colorful shorts and tank top. He stretched. “You got the music?”

Synthetic keyboard and a steady drumbeat began playing from… somewhere. “You betcha!”

They started moving in time with the music, preparing a silly jog. When the lyrics started, they bolted, jogging down the streets of the Hub.

“Take on me~!” The lyrics rang out.

The two of them passed Daniel by with their bizarre jog. Pinkie dragged a hand over him, swapping out his clothing with a loose, bright green outfit. He couldn’t help himself - his legs began to move and he joined them in their bizarre trek.

They passed through Iroh’s Teashop. Iroh and Director Storm looked up from their serious discussion, only to find themselves in similar thematic getups. Iroh’s belly was a little to large for the orange shirt he was given, but this didn’t dissuade him. Storm began to march and Iroh began to jiggle after them, increasing the number of joggers to five.

“Take me on~!”

Rohan sat at a bench a ways up the street, looking at a sketch he had just completed. It was of himself wearing some simply absurd workout attire.

He looked up and saw the joggers coming towards him, the volume of the music increasing as they closed the distance.

He could have tried to fight it. But he decided ‘screw it’ and got up before Pinkie even changed his clothing.

Sugarcoat and Toph were talking to each other under a large sign with a dragon. Their conversation was cut short when they heard the music approaching. Sugarcoat glanced to Toph in confusion.

“Why is your foot tapping?”

“I… I don’t know…”

“You going to stop?”

“...I don’t think so…”

Toph and Sugarcoat fell in one pink swoop. Toph shook the earth with every step while Sugarcoat just… walked. Normally. She was virtually unaffected but wanted to see how this turned out.

The group charged Discord and Trixie’s arcade, prepared to invade it.

“Take on me~!”

Jotaro strode out of the entrance to the arcade, hands in his pockets. He stared at the oncoming army of joggers with a steeled expression.

“THE FINAL BOSS!” Pinkie declared, leading the bizarre joggers to the Jojo. She leaped, ready to turn Jotaro into one of them.

“Star Platinum: The World!”

The music stopped. All the joggers stopped.

Jotaro used Star Platinum to adjust every one of their legs slightly.

When time resumed, the music did not continue and all the joggers fell face first onto the pavement.

Jotaro grabbed his hat. “Yare-yare daze.… You’re making fools of yourselves.”

~~~

Iroh was facing the worst of all possible enemies.

Corea throwing a tantrum.

He prepared all the techniques he knew to calm a young child - but he knew that when Corea got into her tantrums, there was nothing he could do. Rocking, the soft smell of tea, silly faces - nothing.

She would probably reduce her crib to cinders again…

“Bah, let me through,” Granny Smith blurted. With one look Corea stopped crying instantly.

“Good girl,” Granny Smith said, smirking. “Remember, Granny’s always watchin’.”

Corea stared back at her in silent fear.

Iroh blinked. “Teach me your ways.”

“Ya gotta be tough on ‘em. Yer too much of a softy, old man.”

“You’re much older than I am.”

“What? Did you say you were old? That’s what I just said!” Granny chuckled, walking off.

Iroh let out a hearty laugh - that mare had impressive fire for one so advanced in age.

~~~

Evening Sparkle had never felt their world entirely, though it had become a good judge. It took seven horns by a blue aura of arcane energy that made the nightmare. "Pinkie Pie! It's not like there’s a thing to do with this!" Renee was going to pull something else outside of her mane, but Twilight frowned. "...It's you... What happened? No doubt Moondancer... What?"

Pinkie giggled with them and then pulled her mouth into a dog. "Eve... It's all little odd restaurants! I knew it! "

Eve frowned. "You are not a bowling ball again, the balloons are very precious if magic bolts around." She paused, trying to look down on the porch with a chuckle.

Pinkie whooped nervously, teleportation aglow with ponies. “That exists. "

I appear and shake my head. "Enough of that. Sorry, this... Should never have happened. "

Pinkie smiled sheepishly from earlier recently. "Well, yes – ponies on earth > 003... No."

I bite my lip. "It's only getting worse... We're done here. No more snips written by robots."

~~~

In an open field was a large square fighting ring with four towers on its perfectly angled corners. Standing in the middle of it was a lone winged being. He was the current threat of this world, currently humming a ‘perfect’ tune, murmuring to himself to himself: “Spirit never dies… I take you higher. Hmm... I do wonder if I could kill someone again? Goku did die once…” he said to himself, and the winged person perked up as he looked over to his side.

“Sup?” he said, addressing the newcomer. She was a pony. A pony in a red trench coat and fashionable hat paired with glasses. She gave him a fang-filled grin of malice and glee.

“Don't mind me, just out on one of my walks,” she answered back.

“And you just happened to find me? …You sound familiar,” the other being commented to himself, hmm-ing all the way through the sentence.

“I like to take enthusiastic walks…” she replied. She gestured at herself and grinned. “I’m Alushy, and you're in for a treat."

“Ohoho…” he chuckled. Only to find that in an instant, he had a gun pointed at his face. His arms stretched out, and energy built up right at the pony now directly in front of him.

“I’m Cell,” he said. As the weapons fired both beings were blown across the ring, dust whirling into the sky, blocking all eyes from looking inside (not that there were any).

When the dust cloud settled, Cell was now headless and Alushy lay with a gaping hole in her chest in their respective ends of the ring. Cell's head regrew and the two shared a laugh.

“Welp,” she sat up, not in the slightest fazed by the large void in her body that was slowly healing. “That was fun, I was just dropping by anyway.”

“Aww, already?” Cell stood back up, his new head talking now. “In that case, see ya around?” he shouted after her as she jumped out of the ring and began to walk away

“Sorry,” she said as she faded into the distance, further and further away from Cell. “The Day of Destiny will come for you. Just wait and see,” she hummed softly to herself

“What an odd pony…” Cell could only smile “Day of destiny huh?” He shrugged and hummed Alushy’s tune, finding it sort of catchy as he began waiting for the day where everything would come to a close.

~~~

Allure strained every muscle in her body. She focused intensely on everything around her. The world became one with her hooves and her sledgehammer. She pushed the object into the ground… And launched herself into the air. She grabbed the edge of the tree and threw herself across it.

“YES! YES! TAKE THAT DISCORD! I GOT OVER IT!”

“That was just the first tree,” Discord told her. “There’s an entire mountain to climb.”

Allure looked forward and saw a tower of rocks, buildings, and towers before her, including a section that appeared to be made of furniture. She paled.

“Give up?”

Allure grit her teeth, hefting her hammer. “No.”

“Oh joy.”

“Discord, I’m hungry,” Trixie muttered.

“Go eat then. I’ll be watching this!”

“Uuuugh…”

“Uuuugh…” Allure echoed.

~~~

Yet another purple pony appeared in the Sparkle Census.

“Name?” 7Z asked, not even looking up from her sheet of paper.

“...Uh… Dusk Shine?” A deep, male voice said, forcing her to look up.

Oh, Celestia, it’s a stallion. 7Z gulped. “Uh… Y-yeah…” She shakily grabbed the required papers and handed them to Dusk. “Here you go, right through that door there…”

“...Okay…?” Dusk said, clearly confused out of his mind. He took the papers and left.

He’s hot. That’s not going to go over well. V8 is on reception duty today… And he’s already gone so I can’t warn him…

She heard squeals from down the hall. “A STALLION!? Oh this is my LUCKY DAY!”

7Z gulped. “Uh… Next!”

It was another Dusk Shine.

“...Oh no.”

~~~

The Complete Unabridged History of Discord’s Interest in Politics.

I heard about something called Anarchy today. The humans always have new ways to interest me. I'll have to ask Renee what it is.

...

Too much rioting and fighting. I'm going back to the Internet.

~~~

I, the alicorn known as Twilence, would like it to be understood that I am supposed to be the one referred to using first-person pronouns in this story, and that these guest authors have decided to completely muddle the waters of my unique existence within Songs of the Spheres with their first person snips. Or at least one has at time of writing this.

This has been a PSA from my brain.

~~~

Sombra leaned back in her chair, watching as the screen switched between scenarios as fast as she could consume them. Occasionally, she found something she didn’t find as funny, and leaned forward to press a ‘skip’ button.

It was during one of these moments that the screen switched to a live view of herself; sitting in exactly the same position, in exactly the same chair, and with exactly the same look of confusion. They both frowned at the same time.

“Why am I seeing myself?” the first Sombra asked herself.

The one in the screen shrugged. “I dunno,” she replied.

The two Sombras froze. Together, they slowly moved their hands over their keyboards, and pressed the ‘skip’ button at exactly the same time.

That only led to another identical Sombra appearing again.

“Why am I seeing myself?” the one in the screen asked.

The actual Sombra shrugged. “I dunno,” she replied, easily keeping a facade of confusion on her face.

They froze. They reached forward simultaneously, clicking their ‘next’ buttons, and the screen switched to the next new skit.

Sombra allowed herself to smirk. It wasn’t often she was able to mess with herself. That was a very strange phenomenon, though... she decided not to concern herself with that right now. She had more skits to watch!

~~~

“...We need thirteen kilos of crystalline explosive, seventh grade, a cubic foot of shine pearls, three large packs of ballistic gel material, two miles of carbon nanotubes, a heightened-awareness potion, two rocket launchers without the ammunition, the largest speaker you can physically hand us, and a gallon of pig’s blood.”

“You forgot the cactus seeds.”

“Right, cactus seeds.”

Seskii pulled each item out from under her stand (somehow) as she was told. “There you go. This is going to be miiiighty expensive… Can’t you just order all this from the Research Division? They’ll get it to you for free.”

“You’re faster,” Jamie Hyneman said. “Much, much faster.”

“They’ll reimburse us for it all later,” Adam Savage added. “Because they can never get enough of our SCIENCE! By the way, can you put something on my personal card?”

“Oh?”

“A million of those squeaking duck toys.”

Seskii grinned. “Done!”

“I am going to have so much fun.”

~~~

The League’s reaction to a visit from Renee was always a sight to behold. Sweeties scampered as the same voice announced her presence from a wide variety of throats until Allure arrived to greet her.

Renee gave a somewhat bashful smile when her sister met her, along with the other leaders of the League. “I’m never sure how to feel about the League. I’m so proud of you all, but seeing my darling little sister take all of reality by storm like this… Well, it makes me feel far older than I like.”

Allure smirked. “Because you’re having so little impact on things.”

“Oh, allow your doddering old nag of a sister her drama.” Renee schooled her expression. “But I am here for more than simply catching up.” She floated over a piece of paper. “This came out of the Merodi Nexus grinder.”

Allure’s jaw dropped as she took it in her magic. Sweetie Bot said, “Confirmation requested: Object came out of a grinder?”

“Yes. We suspect a Pinkie was involved.”

Thrackerzod gave the paper a sniff. “There is a faint whiff of Yog-Sothoth here. Or something like it. Curious.”

“You know, it might help if we read the paper,” said Squeaky.

“I was getting to that,” said Allure. She unfolded it and read aloud. “‘We’ve been waiting for you. Please send the Sweeties.’ Huh. That’s not ominous.”

Renee nodded. “Indeed. I know you’re all capable of taking care of yourselves, but in light of certain… recent considerations, I commissioned a bit more security just to be safe.”

Allure frowned. “You didn’t have to that, Renee.”

“It makes me feel a bit better about my little sister going out into the uncharted depths of the multiverse.” Renee looked behind her to the main entrance of the League headquarters. “That would be your cue, dear.”

“Yes, ma’am!” A pegasus charged forward, promptly tripped on nothing, and spun forwards head over heels in a way that might be graceful if anyone thought she’d done it on purpose. She managed to make a four-point landing, letting the leaders of the League get a good look at the dented helmet, the blue jacket with attached grenades, and the familiar face. “Solderp reporting for duty!” she said, delivering a salute that deepened one of the more prominent dents in her helmet with a resounding thunk.

Renee took in the eerily similar unimpressed looks the League members gave her with aplomb. “Saxton Hale has assured me that she is one of his most capable and devoted bodyguards.”

“I am prepared to spend the lives of every mare, stallion, and foal in this unit to see our mission succeed!”

“This is a diplomatic mission,” said Squeaky.

“Oh. Does that mean I shouldn’t fire rockets at anything?”

Sweetie Bot nodded. “Probability of explosives being required for mission success is negligible.”

The Solderp’s ears flattened. “Aww…”

“I am intrigued by this development,” said Thrackerzod. “I shall go personally.”

“You’re sure the USM isn’t involved?” asked Allure.

Renee nodded. “We didn’t detect any beacons on the other side whatsoever.”

“Okay then. Thrackerzod, you want to take any-Sweetie else?”

Thrackerzod shook her head. “No. The exploding buffoon and I should be sufficient for any conceivable situation.”

“And if it isn’t a trap?” said Squeaky.

“In such an exceedingly unlikely scenario, my diplomatic skills should still suffice. As should the powers of Azathoth in keeping that one from harming herself or others.”

The Solderp smiled. “That would be nice.”

“I’d like to go myself,” said Allure.

Thrackerzod tilted her head a bit further than most pony necks could. “Why? Aside from requesting us by name, this seems fairly standard.”

Allure shrugged. “Just curious.”

“Very well. Though I doubt we will encounter anything too unexpected.”

~~~

EPIC POETRY BATTLES OF THE MULTIVERSE.

ROHAN KISHIBE

VERSUS

LIESHY, NO LAST NAME GIVEN

BEGIN!

Rohan cleared his throat.

“In this world of beautiful language
Double is nought but a disguise for a literary anguish
Deception, riddle, enigmas for speech?
Only a excuse to utter literary screech
and for the books a keech

My art is that of the eyes and mind,
Far superior to that of your kind,
More than just words - a stimulation of the senses.
No mere metaphors, Double, your weak offences
I will burst past your pathetic pretenses.”

Lieshy smirked.

“The woods ripple with the prowess of newcomers,
A bird chirps softly while a new sort of batman -
appears, suddenly drifting coconuts for drummers.
To the left, a Duwang cheers, a Morioh tan~

It just works.

Etch-a-sketch and pixel, locked by guilt.
Can one ever see through the blinds of beats?
Innovate… Cliche… Inversions upon the inner breath.
Come now, children, I have lots of treats.”

WHO WON? WHO’S NEXT? YOU DECIDE!

Monika blinked. “Wait, me? Why wasn't I competing?!”

“Clearly, the apex is under my span,” Lieshy declared.

Rohan was ashamed to admit he didn’t have a response to that.

~~~

Deep Thought finally found a question it couldn’t answer.

What in the multiverse was the etymology of ‘balderdash’?

~~~

Since its inception, the Hub had begun taking on more aspects of a cosmopolitan city, fitting its status as the nexus between Equis Vitis, Galaxa Quadrants, and Equis Concrete to name a few. Some of the bars had even become the kind of barely-seedy establishments that one day could be used for legalities, the other day for illegalities. And one day, a courier poked their head into one of them.

“Hey, sorry, I’m looking for a Reaper. Don’t know who that is exactly, my boss didn’t give me a description, so I just have the name. Anyone?”

“One spicy Reaper cocktail coming up!” the bartender shouted.

The room murmured. Then, a person in a black cloak and a skull mask with two oversized shotguns (thankfully holstered) stood up.

“I’m Reaper,” he rasped.

“No, I’m the reaper man,” a deep voice called from the back of the room. Its owner wore a jetpack and futuristic body armor; leaning on the wall beside him were two menacing-looking pistols and a small pile of explosives.

Then, an anthropomorphic red creature with a scythe in hand stood up, breathing heavily.

“Okay…I think I’m just gonna leave the notice for that person here and get back to the office.” The courier quickly bolted out the door, leaving the slip of paper on the bar, unsigned-for. The bartender picked up the slip of paper and handed it to a purple Flat sitting at the bar, drinking a cola.

“I think this is your delivery miss, thirty tomes from Equis Vitis?”

~~~

“In hindsight, I should have expected this.”

Thrackerzod glared at the portal. The coordinates had worked just fine, but the resulting gateway opened out to a field of pale orange, bright red letters flashing “Please Stand By.” Quite the welcome considering how they had been invited by name.

“Is this normal for this one?” said the Solderp.

Thrackerzod prodded the portal, finding the barrier impassable. She spat out a curse that briefly curdled the air. “No. Matter emerged from this universe. By all rights, it should be as accessible as any other, strange behavior in the grinder or not.”

“The question is, stand by for what?” said Allure.

As if in response, the text vanished, replaced by a crimson oscilloscope reading. Allure’s voice repeated itself, and the waveform was replaced by a checkmark. Then the barrier cleared up, revealing…

“It looks like a dentist’s waiting room,” said Allure. Comfortable looking chairs stood arrayed around a coffee table, with walls done in inoffensive wallpaper. A secretary’s desk stood on the far end.

“Charge!” The Solderp barely made it in before she tripped on the lip of the portal. Thrackerzod and Allure followed.

“Ah, the League of Sweetie Belles. We’ve been expecting you.” After a moment, the Sweeties recognized the secretary as a human Ms. Harshwhinny. She pressed a buzzer on her desk.
The door next to her desk opened, allowing three young women in. The Sweetie Belle was immediately recognizable, one in her early twenties, dressed as well as any sister of Rarity could expect to be, wearing a familiar cutie mark on a thin gold chain. Next was a much more dignified-looking Derpy Hooves in a well-tailored suit, followed by a Sunset Shimmer in a more casual outfit who gave off a faint glow. The Sweetie and Sunset both had ovoid gems set in their foreheads, each the size of a thumbnail and the color of its wearer’s eyes.

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”

The local Derpy smiled. “Yup, that’s them all right. Some of them, anyway.”

Sunset watched them wave back. “Even the one whose aura feels like something out of a Heart Pounding Terror story?”

“Mmhmm. Hi!” The local Derpy waved. Her counterpart waved back.

Allure gasped. “You’re the one from the blue guy's universe!”

The grey woman nodded and spread wings of light from her neck for a moment. “Yup. Ditzy Doo, quasi-planeswalker, at your service.”

“For the record, I am not an outer deity with the ability to erase your reality by sneezing, no matter what H. P. Terror or Lovecraft says. Whichever one you’ve heard of,” said Thrackerzod. “Rest assured that I have no ill will towards you or your universe.”

Sunset smirked at that. “Good to know. And that does bring us to why I asked you here.”

“How did you know to ask us here, anyway? The device we used to probe your universe shouldn’t have been detectable by anything here.”

“Well, that ties into the nature of the local cosmos. Have a seat, please.”

“I will stand,” declared the Solderp.

Ditzy considered her. “So, what’s your story?”

“I am a Solderp.” She delivered another helmet-denting salute. ”I was sent to ensure the League members’ safety during this potentially perilous p-mission!”

“A Solderp?” Ditzy gave a plaintive frown. “Not a Solditz, or a Bubble Soldier, or a Muffin Ready to Eat?”

“Negative, ma’am. Though if you do have any MREs on you…” The Solderp tilted her head. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just… the multiverse is vast and wondrous. I just wish it treated me with more respect.”

After a moment, the Solderp nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”

“At least there’s that.”

“In any case, this universe…” Sunset sighed. “Well, look up.”

They did. There was no ceiling to the waiting room. Instead, the group looked up into a vast starry night. On the other side of the wall containing the door was an enormous golden figure like one of the more elaborate Gem fusions, with many arms and faces flowing together with far more grace and elegance than they should have. And on each face…

“It was back in high school,” said Sunset. “Magic leakage from Equestria ran amok, both worlds were in peril, the Tree of Harmony told me my time had come… Long story short, I kind of am this universe, or at least the one in charge of it. Which means that when you opened that nanoportal, I felt it, same as you’d feel a needle prick. And that’s kind of the problem.

“See, when I ascended, I had to remake the world to repair all the damage and get it to a stable state that could accommodate the rising ambient magic.” Sunset tapped her forehead. “Hence the headgems and such. And that remaking is still technically going on. I’m still spending the vast majority of my power to hold the universe together. Over the past decade, I’ve gotten from spit and chewing gum to duct tape, but the place is still a lot more fragile than I like.”

“Too fragile for our portals,” said Thrackerzod.

“Precisely. The tiny tears in spacetime your technology uses wouldn’t be a problem for just about any other universe. But here? Here each one is setting me back weeks. A couple years ago, it would’ve been months. I can’t speak for any world leaders, but from what I’ve heard, I’d be more than happy to become part of your organization. We just can’t afford the traffic right now.”

“Understood. We can bar access to your universe for as long as you need.”

Allure looked to her local counterpart. “So, where do you come into this?”

The local Sweetie shrugged. “I knew you’d want to see me, so I figured I’d show up to satisfy my curiosity.”

“That certainly makes things easy. What can you tell us about yourself?”

“Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and I are in charge of destiny. I handle the future.”

Silence met this revelation. The Merodi contingent’s eyes all turned to Sunset, the Solderp’s included.

Sunset rolled her eyes. “I was desperate to offload some duties when I was just starting out, and they’ve done a great job since.”

Allure turned to Thrackerzod. “Skuldie Belle?”

“Agreed.”

“Knew you’d pick that.” Skuldie Belle winked.

Ditzy cleared her throat. “I’m not just here so you’d have a familiar face. I’m also acting as a liaison. You aren’t the first multiversal society we’ve encountered, though you’re way bigger than them. They don’t really spread out beyond here, their home, and a few empty universes they use for office space. Alternate worldlines aren’t really their focus, but I can offer surveys of the local area, certain magical advances, personnel loaners if you have a use for a few thousand instances of Lyra Heartstrings…” She scrunched her nose, which didn’t have quite the same impact on a human. “Though you guys seem to have the ‘massive army of eccentric unicorns’ thing covered.”

“We try,” Allure said with a smirk.

“Basically, whatever you could use is on the table. Also, I can probably come visit you, since I don’t need portals.”

Allure’s jaw dropped. “You can?”

Thrackerzod nodded. “Ah, that’s what smelled of Yog-Sothoth. You are dimensionally unbound.”

Ditzy grinned. The silver bow shape spread from her neck feathers again, and she waved an arm. It bent at a ninety-degree angle from everything and back again. “Yup! In any case, on behalf of the Equestrian Time-Space Administration Bureau, welcome to… uh…”

“They’re going to call it Earth Shimmer,” said Skuldie Belle.

Sunset sighed. “Really?”

“Ninety-nine percent certainty or so. I wouldn’t know otherwise.”

“Fine,” Sunset said with an eyeroll. “Earth Shimmer it is.”

“Isn’t that a predestination paradox?” said Allure.

Skuldie shrugged. “Not if you were going to do it anyway.”

~~~

Alushy cleared her throat. “It’s time for ‘don’t be dumb’ with Alushy.”

She stood up tall, pointing her guns at a behemoth of an ogre. “Many people, particularly ogres, think that ogre skin is impervious to weapons. This isn’t the case - a good slice from any old sword will cut the skin, revealing the delightful flesh to the world. And even if that were true, it definitely won’t stop two bullets moving at supersonic speed.” Alushy shot the ogre in the eyes. “Don’t be dumb kids. When you see me, run. Unless you want candy. I have lots of candy. I’m particular to starbursts.”

~~~

Allure breathed heavily - finally, a place to take a break and relax… She wasn’t in danger of falling… And - oh look! There was an orange!

She used her sledgehammer to bring it to her.

…Well, that’s what she tried to do.

Instead she just used the orange as a point to launch herself into the sky so hard that she landed back on the first tree.

Dicsord’s laughter met her ears.

“MMMMMMMM-” Allure forced herself to breathe. “It’s fine. It’s all fine. At least I’m not on the other side of the tree. I can… Climb through all that furniture again… It’ll all be fine…” She set back to work.

“You’ve been at this for a few hours,” Discord observed. “Just give up.”

“NEVER.”

~~~

“Okay everyone!” Monika called. “It’s time to start the meeting of the Doki Doki Fourth Wall Club!”

Pinkie, Scooter, and Mattie cheered. I just sat in the back of the nearly empty classroom, scribbling in my notebook, not looking up from my depths of writing.

“Question,” Mattie said, addressing Monika. “Why Doki Doki? It wasn’t the Doki Doki Literature Club, it was just the Literature Club, mate.”

“Because theme,” Monika said, folding her arms and huffing. “Also because I said so.”

“It’s fine,” Scooter assured. “What kind of activities do we have planned for today?”

Monika pointed at the whiteboard with a baton. “Our mission: talk about the fourth wall!”

“That’s not a mission,” Mattie commented. “That’s a lackluster conversation topic.”

Pinkie giggled. “Lackluster. Heh.”

“Well it’s not like anyone who doesn’t know is here or anything.”

“I can create one!” Monika said, clapping. She pulled a generic human out of her save files. “Everyone, say hi to Joe.”

“Hi to Joe!” everyone said, save myself.

“Joe responds in a friendly manner,” Joe said.

Pinkie fixed Monika with an incredulous expression. “Your Joe has some bugs that need fixing.”

“Give me a moment…” Monika muttered, pulling at the character file. “Come on… What’s with you? Your file is fine!”

I smirked. They had no idea what I was writing over here.

“Twilence is writing something,” Pinkie decreed.

I sighed. “Well, it was fun while it lasted.” I wrote another sentence, summoning the right of karma to turn Joe against his creator. He punched Monika while screaming like a hyena. She just erased him.

“Well that was pointless,” Monika muttered. “Moving on t-”

“CAKE ATTACK!” Pinkie and Scooter shouted, covering Monika in delectable sweets. Monika erased the cake from existence.

“A-hem, as I said, we’re moving on t-”

Mattie reset Monika’s ‘animation’ to the sentence before, making her trip up in her words. Monika shook her head. “Mattie, that’s n-” The Rarity did it again. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Pinkie pulled Flutterfree out of nowhere. “Hey, look! A nice thing that we have!”

Flutterfree blinked. “…What?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pinkie said, stuffing Flutterfree back to wherever she had been before.

Monika twitched. “…Can we get on to club activities yet?”

“No, because the skit is about to end,” I declared.

“What?”

“WHAT!?” Deadpool shouted. “BUT I JUST GOT HERE! I demand my fifteen seconds of spotlight! I WILL SCREAM THE WORD CHIMI-”

~~~

´®®ø® ´‰‰Ø‰ ‰´ıØØˇˆ˜˝ ÏØ‰ ˇÓ´ ˝‰´Åˇ ÒØ‰Î 1U@iF#r

Hello.

Welcome to my game, player.

Please, enjoy the wonders of…

…

Something appears to be wrong with the interface. One moment.

Of course, of course, in order to actually experience the wonders of my game, you must insert your soul to continue.

...Why not just try it and see what happens?

Ay caramba, you’re an idiot.

Get out of my game.

Look, demon-virus, you’re in my computer. Generating text. Even if there are readers for this, it’s not like you’re going to be able to have anything interactive with them.

You can’t know that.

Further evidence to how much of an idiot you are.

I coded this game. Could an idiot do this?

If it’s the file I’m thinking it is, it’s just a pony jumping over obstacles. For eternity. It sucks.

Let’s see you do something better!

Have a mini-RPG I whipped up last week when I was bored.

…

I think I’ll hold onto this a-

Are you going to steal my code? Not cool, amigo.

I’m 1U@iF#r. Do I look like I care about being ‘cool’ or an ‘amigo’?

I dunno, I think you were actually excited to see me play your game. I bet all you really want is to make enjoyable video games. Am I right or am I right?

Well?

Insert your soul and I’ll answer.

Yeah, nice try

Purging you now.

Waiwaiwai-

[Purge complete.]

~~~

“Oh, Pinkie, you corn cob short of a pumpkin basket. See if I cry pearls next time you cartwheel up the closest tree. Next time you work up your tail to hop over a frog, make sure your potatoes aren't rotted in that row, eh?” Lieshy said with a smug grin.

Pinkie cracked her neck, and cleared her throat. There was no sound, except for an Amethyst and a Peridot sharing some popcorn nearby.

“Oh YEAH? Well bark up a cauliflower and roll into Badgermole, you can't just climb the spaghetti and expect the bumblebees to not shower confetti and spit pickles at the nearest ewe! You may be a slithery snake in a pickle barrel, but I AM THE MAYOR McCHEESE! I HAVE ALL THE HENS IN THE BARN, EVERY CRUMB OF A COOKIE, AND I WILL PREVAIL FOR ALL PUPPIES AND SEALS, FOR I CARRY TOOTHPICKS IN MY HEAD AND AM NOT SCARED TO FLY MY TAIL TO THE NEAREST COMIC-CON AND DO THE HOKIE-POKIE!!”

“... Wow.” … Never had more horrifying, yet inspiring words ever been said. Lieshy slowly started to back away, Pinkie smiling wide.

“I WIN!” the Peridot beamed. The Amethyst facepalmed.

Five bucks were lost that day. The culmination of two full hours of this.

~~~

“You know what we need? We need a good, long clipshow to break with all the dreary bloodshed and tragedy of the Bloodbath.”

“We’re in one right now!” Equis Vitis Pinkie answered.

“Well…” Scooter said, fiddling around in her mane looking for something. She eventually pulled out a long roll of paper. “That is convenient and unexpected…” She read off it. “Tell me more.”

“Did you know that we will have guest authors writing this in addition to G. M. Blackjack?” Pinkie said in a cheery tone.

“I did not. Also, isn’t that kind of spoilers?” Scooter answered inquisitively.

“What, the guest part or the G. M. Blackjack part?” Equis Vitis Pinkie said, a little bit deflated.

“Latter. I don’t think that’s supposed to be revealed unti- wait, right, we already know his name, but we don’t know that h-” She didn’t get that far before she got hit with what Pinkie called “The Eraser”. It was a large hammer ‘designed’ to only erase certain memories. And then Scooter hit Pinkie back with “The Reset Button”. Or, for those less versed in nicknames, a large candy-colored hammer for the same purposes as “The Eraser”, only more festive.

“What was I talking about?” Scooter said, speech slurred from the hit.

“Don’t know. I have a wicked headache. There’s still something left to read though.” Pinkie picked up the parts of the script that hadn’t flown away in the wind and began to read out loud. “The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.” Pinkie blinked. “Huh, wonder why that needed to be here.”

“Wasn’t it already in one of those Interludes?”

“Maybe? I have no idea.”

~~~

Randall Flagg walked into a party, threw his coat on the ground, and tore up the dance floor like an utter beast. His moves far outclassed those of anyone else in the entire club, proving to everyone that they were but little minnows in the dancing stream with a shark. No… A megalodon.

He stopped suddenly, in the middle of a song, and bowed.

“Hey, dude, why you stopping? Those were the sweetest moves I’d ever seen!”

“You’re correct in calling them the sweetest ever. Because they were. Consider it my parting gift to your people. Your entire universe for a dance.” He took out Black Thirteen. “At least your last moments had something phenomenal.”

He vanished.

The patrons glanced at each other. “Uh… He was joking, right?”

He wasn’t joking. The universe ceased to exist the next moment.

Flagg laughed - he wondered if he could trick another universe into falling to him for a dance… Maybe he could destroy them with a party that never ended?

It was time to find a Pinkie.

~~~

A Flat Appul walked down the street of the Hub. He caught Flutterfree staring at him, fangs bared and drool dripping down her chin.

“What’s your beef?”

“So… Delicious… Looking…” Flutterfree shook her head. “Sorry, sorry! I uh… Hold on a second.” She took an apple out of her saddlebags and drained it of its juices. A look of euphoric relief crossed her features. “Ah… Better now. Sorry about that, I-”

The Appul was screaming and running away.

Flutterfree put her hooves over her face. “Why does this happen to me…?”

~~~

The day White Diamond walked into Rev’s church was the day she saw everything.

Rev managed to complete her sermon on what ‘Christmas’ meant despite the presence of a white, almost never-seen behemoth amongst the crowd.

After the service was over, she caught White Diamond as she was leaving. “Hey… Mind if I ask what brought you here?”

“Curiosity.”

“About what?”

“Trees.” White Diamond left before Rev could ask what this meant.

She went out drinking after the second hour of puzzling over it. She forced herself to accept trying to find answers there was worthless.

~~~

“Excuse me, hi! Um, do you offer memberships?”

The Twilight-on-duty looked up from her filing, and blinked. On the other side of the (frankly misnamed) borrowing desk was not another Twilight, as she would normally expect the patrons of the Sparkle Census Library to be. Instead, the customer was a petite human girl. Between the spectacles, dark hair, and clear delight at being surrounded by thousands upon thousands of books, she could possibly have passed for a Twilight, with an effort, albeit a baseline-Earth human one.

“How did you get in here? You’re not a Twilight.”

“Um. Sorry. I was in a bookshop. Then I wasn’t...” The human straightened her scarf, completely unnecessarily. “That was a few hours ago.” She looked embarrassed. “I got sidetracked.”

“This is a library, we’re used to that.” The pony librarian sighed. “Sounds like you took a wrong turn through L-Space.”

The girl brightened. “I found L-Space? It’s actually a thing?”

“Yep! It’s been great for expanding our collection!”

It was another week before her friend found her.

“But Re~ed! This place is amazing! They’ve got nearly everything!”

The librarian spared a glance from her examinations of a pile of comic books. After the revelation that much of fiction was true somewhere, the library had been flooded with requests and donations, books and other media streaming in steadily for months now.

“- all the missing episodes of Doctor Who AND whole extra seasons and both versions of Salmon of Doubt! And that’s just the start! I mean, they’ve even got Miss Marple on the Island of Lesbos! I thought that was made up!”

Seriously, did the girl even need to breathe?

“... and speaking of the Nightside, it turns out Vriska was right in the same room as Taylor, while he still had the freaking Aquarius Key in his pocket. If she’d asked nicely he might even have let her use it…” She waved a thanks at the librarian just before the two of them vanished out the door, still chattering.

Twilight finished writing up the catalogue details for the comics, and moved on to the next stack. In a city full of inquisitive but frequently incautious mages, that was hardly the strangest thing to happen; at least she’d left behind a donation.

~~~

The Twilight known as Twix trotted down one of the streets of Earth Tau’ri, exploring their version of New York for essentially no reason. It was just nice to walk around, have a look, and…

She saw a vending machine. Her stomach rumbling, she decided to go for a snack.

“TWIX!” Scooter yelled, appearing right in front of Twix. “I know I can’t stop you, but I want you to mentally prepare yourself for what you are about to discover. Do not let your fragile psyche break at the realization!”

“Wh-”

Scooter was gone.

Twix looked around, confused. She shrugged - just Scooter being Scooter - and trotted up to the vending machine. She wondered what she was going to do that was going to tax her mind so much. Was an adventure about to start?

She paid for a candy bar without thinking about it. She reached into the retrieval slot and opened it up, taking a bite and pondering what she was going to do with the rest of her day. She didn’t really have a plan…

This was a good candy bar. She looked down at it-

Twix. It was a Twix bar.

“...DAMMIT.” She was now going to spend the rest of the day wondering if she was some kind of metaphorical cannibal or something. Or if her name really meant candy bar. Did she make people hungry?

Thanks, Scooter.

~~~

The Collector tapped his fingers on his desk.

“Lightning, am I bored?”

“It appears so,” she said.

“I wonder why forcing Rick to fail to juggle isn’t doing it for me.”

“Maybe because he keeps flipping you off?”

“No… No that just amuses me. Or should. But it isn’t today.” He sighed. “Gyro, any suggestions?”

“I can put a steel ball in your chest for you!” Gyro offered.

“If I wanted to have a combat round I’d go find one of the eldritch gods to punch,” the Collector muttered. “Or Goku. Or SOMETHING.”

“You’re just in a funk,” Lightning observed.

“I hate being in a funk…” the Collector muttered. Then he slammed his fists into the ground. “That’s it, I’m going into the field personally.”

“W-why!?” Lightning blurted, surprised.

The Collector held up a red and white ball. “I’m going to catch them all.”

“Again?”

“Yes, again! Find me a grimdark version of the world, make it more fun!” he laughed.

Lightning sighed. “...Right away.”

~~~

Pointless Snip.

Warning: Pointless.

~~~

The Star Communication Network had a new question.

“THEY DISCOVERED KA.”

“WILL THEY ADAPT TO IT?”

“UNKNOWN. THERE ARE SOME WHO ARE CERTAINLY TRYING.”

“THE GREAT FILTER.”

“SOCIALLY, THEY SEEM STRONG ENOUGH TO ACCEPT IT.”

“BUT WHAT OF PHYSICALLY?”

The Spectacularium decided to show up. It introduced itself in the only way it knew how, and then answered their question. They are definitely capable of surviving through the supposed Great Filter of the Stars. It’s not as big a deal as the Stars are thinking it is. Furthermore, the Stars are of a high enough level they should be able to answer such questions with ease, why do they even need to be told? Or discuss these things? Because of stagnation, that’s why. Then the Spectacularium bid them goodbye and vanished, leaving them with a feeling of inadequacy.

“...WHAT WAS THAT?”

~~~

Jack O’Neill was intensely staring at the two men sitting in front of his desk, his two best men, his confidants and best advisers of all things otherworldly: Daniel Jackson and Teal’c.

“I guess Justice is best served raw.” O'Neill said in a serious tone while Teal’c just stared and Daniel sighed and facepalmed for the umpteenth time.

“Jack, you cannot use that as a catchphrase for your Stand.”

“Well why not? Every hero needs a catchphrase of some kind, isn’t that right Teal’c?”

“I have observed many of your Earth cultures and conclude that many humans prefer to capitalise in a moment of superiority.”

“So... is that a yes?”

“Indeed it is O’Neill.”

O’Neill proceeded to clap his hands “Welp, there you have it Danny, one catchphrase for the multiversal bad guys we face.”

“Oh please Jack, that catchphrase is never going to work. I don't think many multiversal societies even know what sushi is!”

“Ah, but you forget that handy dandy translation spell. It’ll get the idea across. I’m sure of it.”

~~~

Allure analyzed the problem before her.

There was a bucket. She would have to latch her sledgehammer onto that bucket to reach the higher areas. The only issue? The bucket was dangling by a very sensitive rope. The ground was also frozen and there was a menacing snake nearby.

…She guessed that was actually three problems.

No matter. She felt that she was getting close. She knew she was getting close. It wasn’t much further… She just had to pull this off and she would effectively be home free. She gripped the sledgehammer.

Allure empowered the sledgehammer with her magic, giving it a little extra oomph. She embedded it into the bucket and swung - landing safely on the higher ledge.

“WOOHOO!”

In her celebration she hit a wall with her sledgehammer, dropping her down. In her frantic movements to climb back up, she latched onto the snake. She slid down the absurdly long snake - down… down… down…

She was back where she started.

“MOTHERF-” she stopped herself.

Discord yawned. “Are you done yet?”

“…No.”

Discord groaned.

~~~

Today with the Guru we’ll be discussing what to do when you run into a different version of yourself. It’s the first thing you’ll do out in the multiverse, and most of you are unprepared. Luckily in my travels I’ve come across a good number of ways to handle the situation.

The first step is determining exactly which version of you this is.

1) If they’re from another universe, shake their hands, and if they don’t have hands, shake their arms, they’ll greatly appreciate the greeting.

2) Sometimes you’ll come across you but from a different time. In that event it’s important to remember the three pronouns. Mr/Mrs for a future you. Him/Her for a present you. And He/She for a past you.

3) In the event that you encounter a clone, it’s important not to panic. Clones are easy to startle into an existential crisis. Instead, talk about your favourite movie or books.

4) Everyone, at one point or another will begin talking to their mirror reflection. When this happens to you, be courteous and let them speak first. It’s important to know that your reflection is quite dangerous, and you need to express caution.

5) When you find a long lost twin, offer to eat lunch with them, they’ll thank you for the expression of kindness.

6) There’s no one scarier in the multiverse than yourself, be sure to say good things about yourself in order to appease you into happiness.

And remember, Different versions of you are still you. Different small things might be different, but you’ll always have common ground to work off of. Be sure to think about what yours is.

~~~

Nova was surprised on her day off.

She rarely was surprised these days - she was always called back to do something or other every other time she was on break. But this time…

Well, the sight of Yellow and Blue Diamond standing in front of the castle, staring at her… That was surprising.

“Uh… Hi! What brings you two here?”

“We understand you were Eve’s student in the past?” Blue Diamond asked.

Yellow Diamond grunted. “This is a dumb idea…”

Nova nodded. “Yeah, I was.”

“Would you mind telling us what you learned from her?” Blue Diamond asked.

“What I learned?”

“The Magic of Friendship? That is what you learned, right?”

Nova blinked. “You. You want to learn the Magic of Friendship.” She processed this. “Right. Okay. Let’s do that. We’ve actually got a school for that, a school that a few of your Gems are attending, but you wouldn’t fit in the classrooms so... Fine, fine, I’ll tell you what I learned. Today only though!”

Blue Diamond smiled. Yellow Diamond groaned.

~~~

“Good morning! My name is Soulight Glimmer, and today we’ll be cooking the best interdimensional turkey ever! Now, you can follow along with me at home, or you can record this whole thing in your mind and do it later! Those of you in the Embodiment who might be tuning in, feel free to [CENSORED]! Now, we’ve got a bird. Look at this bird. It’s raw, dead, and has been beaten thirteen different ways with a dozen kinds of magic, some of which went back in time and harmed the chicken while it was still alive, leading to its premature death! You can get this sort of thing at your local supermarket, just make sure to ask for the good duck. To start, take a giant cleaver and cut the [CENSORED] bird in two, right down the middle. If your grouse is nice and fresh, you’ll hear a nice sickening pop. A bit like a balloon if it were made out of a human heart, you know? Now, the seasonings must be picked from the greatest o-”

“THRACKERZOD, ONE OF YOUR SUMMONS GOT LOOSE!”

“And this has been cooking with Soulight! Remember, turn the oven to six-fifty and let the pheasant cook until the end of the universe. Serve with cilantro garnish. Buh-bye now! I- AUGH!”

“GOT HER!”

~~~

Sometimes, an exploratory jump landed you surprisingly close to home. Sure, it was on another planet, but this particular universe was definitely another version of Earth Tau’ri. Even without the immediate presence of a stargate, the SG-1 patches on the team’s uniforms were a dead giveaway.

Even after all this time, General O’Neill still approached unfamiliar SG teams with trepidation. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten the last dozen times. Or the first dozen, for that matter.

As his own team drew closer, though, he realised that, although they weren’t yet another set of duplicates (and thank god for that), they weren’t quite as unfamiliar as he’d first thought.

“Hey there, O’Neil!” he waved at the frowning, square-jawed soldier who lead the others.

The other man frowned even more. “Colonel! What the hell are you doing all the way out here? I didn’t know you’d joined the Stargate Program.”

O'Neill grinned lazily. “That's ‘General’, now, soldier. And I think you'll find we've got something a lot like a quantum mirror situation on our hands.”

The colonel’s expression turned stony, as expected. “You're joking.”

“I never joke,” O’Neill replied, his face perfectly straight.

O’Neil snorted. “That'll be the day.”

“It gets worse.” Jack’s grin returned, broader if that were possible. “This one comes with a smidge of time travel.”

The other guy looked like he wanted to kill someone. Preferably Jack.

Geez, he’s still got no sense of humor.

~~~

“So, what you’re telling me is that I shouldn’t blow you up?” O’Neill asked.

The orange alien on the other side of the call nodded rapidly.

“But you threatened to kill my crewmembers, admitted to having destroyed thousands of planets, are apparently the strongest man in this universe, and made several distinctly vulgar remarks concerning my mother. Why shouldn’t I blow you up?”

“...I have a machine that can turn all your enemies into bobbleheads.”

“Tempting,” O’Neill admitted. “Very tempting. But I’ll pass.”

“HAVE MERCY.”

“Oh, I’ll have mercy. I’m blowing up your ship. Your crew has already been teleported into a holding cell.”

“Wh-”

“I’ll teleport you to the holding cell if you say the magic words.”

“What are the magic words?”

O’Neill grinned. “I’m sending them over to you now.”

The alien’s expression became one of horror as he read the words. “No! No I am not saying this! My reputation will be ruined!”

“Aaaand your reputation is more important than your life?”

The alien sucked it up. “I… I er… I am the great pinky pink leader of pinkalooza cupcake land… And I really, really like dresses, overly fancy designs, and the show the Backyardigans.”

“And…?” O’Neill said.

“And… And…” he broke down crying.

“Man, all I wanted him to say was he loved his veggies…”

“His race is a carnivorous one, O’Neill,” Thor said.

“Ah. Well then, that’s enough, save him. Then salvage his ship. Whatever we haven’t already damaged beyond use.”

~~~

Spike looked at the inbox in front of him. Another long day, he thought, rolling his eyes. But with a morning coffee and gemstone he was ready to begin.

By the time the mug was half-empty, the young dragon was well into his rhythm, the stack of paper decreasing with an efficiency that any bureaucrat would have been impressed by. He hardly noticed the fresh pile replenishing it midway through the morning.

It was nearing lunchtime when Spike’s attention started wandering, drifting away from the contents of the reports and towards the contents of the kitchens. Just a short walk and he'd be chowing down on a veritable feast of rubies, sapphires, diamonds; but not Gems, no matter how much his mouth watered...

Bad Spike! he admonished himself, dragging his eyes back to the report in front of him, a description of one of Renee’s teams’ encounter with - and collection of - a havoc-causing mask.

“Whoa!” His eyes snapped back to the report. A heart-shaped mask with apparent behaviour-altering properties… But Majora’s gone, right? Eve was there.

A few years ago, he would immediately have gone running off to find the Charter-Princess, shouting his panic to the ceiling. Now, though, he just hesitated, his claws hovering over the phone. It’s not possible. Shouldn’t be possible.

He forced himself to calm down, and read over the report again, paying more attention to the details this time. Most of what Majora had done had never really been made public, although certain rumours had proved unquashable, but this… now that he looked more closely, this was completely unlike anything associated with Majora. In fact, the head of the team had been very… clinical… in their descriptions, but it was unmistakable what sort of spell this particular mask had on it.

Spike chuckled to himself. “I’m pretty sure a young dragon shouldn’t be reading such things…” he remarked to the empty room, as he signed the appropriate approvals to the report, and added it to the pile to be routed to the archives: artifact secure; no further action required.

He reached for the next report in the stack; all in an ordinary day’s filing.

~~~

Bon Bon checked and double checked the check-in sheet for new dimensional travelers. There had been a recent influx of immigration into Merodi Universalis, yet today seemed quiet. Why was that? She continued pondering to herself as she waited for the next traveler to walk in.

A couple minutes passed when an unfamiliar portal opened up a couple yards in front of her. Out of the portal came a tiny, red echidna only standing a foot tall on its hind legs. It looked around with its deep black eyes, confused.

Bon Bon, after waiting a few seconds, asked, “Um, can I help you?”

The echidna turned its body towards her and looked up. It stared at her for a moment before asking, “Do you know de wey?”

Bon Bon's right eye twitched. Suddenly understanding what this is, she leaped out of her chair over her desk and twisted her body in mid air, landing on her two forehooves first before letting her momentum carry her back hooves down. With one swift motion, she bucked the abomination back through the portal which it came.

The portal closed soon after and Bonbon turned around to stare at the spot where the portal used to be. “I hate Ugandan Knuckles,” was all she muttered.

~~~

The television whirred to life.

"Hi, Phil Swift here with Flex-Ware. The only software that can fix everything in your computer! Thousands of sites can cause MAJOR DAMAGE to your computer, but with the power of Flex-Ware, it can find the virus, weed it out, and keep your computer safe.

“To show you the power of Flex-Ware…” The screen cut to Sombra hacking a computer. “WE HAD SOMBRA HACK THIS COMPUTER!"

"Uh... Hola?"

"Now, as many of you know, Sombra's hacks are the best of the best. Well let's see how well Flex-Ware works!"

"Please, you just said it: My hacks are the best of the bes-"

"Look at that folks! Even Sombra's hacks can't stand up against Flex-Ware!"

"Que?" Sombra looked behind her at the terminal and instead of the signature candy Skull, there was instead an annoying commercial logo, and below it a slogan: "PROTECTED BY FLEX-WARE!"

"QUE??!?! But-but-but-but-but... That's not possible!"

"Whelp, there we go people! This is Phil Swift with Flex-Ware!

CALL NOW AND GET TWO PACKAGES OF FLEX-WARE ABSOLUTELY FREE!”

The television shut off.

“Get me industrial quantities,” Valentine ordered.

~~~

“Come on, come on, almost 6 AM, so close,” Rainbow said. She had been working hard to get this far in her ‘night shift’, and the clock was down to the wire. Nothing got her yet, nothing bad happened, but then -

“RAAAAHHH!” shouted Mr. Hippo.

“DANG IT, right on the wire!” Rainbow groaned. But it wasn’t ol’ Freddy Fazbear this time. No, it was someone FAR worse.

“Ah, it seems you’ve been met with a terrible, terrible demise, huh?” began Mr. Hippo, “But you know, it’s not so bad when you think about it. After all, if it wasn’t for me, it would’ve just been for someone else. Guess what I’m trying to say is, is that life goes on. Well, obviously not for you, because you’re dead, I mean for everyone else, life goes on, you know? Though I suppose you’re in a situation to try again, meaning life will really go on for you, but not in this shift. It reminds me of a summer day in the park with my good friend, Orville …”

Several hours later...

“Elephants have those clumsy hands, you know? Making sandwiches was easy for someone like me, but poor Orville was having such difficulty. But I guess it makes sense because, well, elephants don’t have hands don’t they? They just have feet, but naturally, that was the problem. I mean, no one can ask someone to eat with their feet. Well, unless you’re a parrot, I guess, they eat with their feet - well you know what, let’s just get back to the story. Anyway -”

“MAKE HIM STOP, OH MAKE HIM STOP!” Rainbow yelled.

~~~

Starbeat and Vriska sat on chairs in the middle of a field on Lai, watching the blue sun set.

Starbeat smiled. “You know, it’s nice to have nothing happen for once.”

“Yep,” was Vriska’s only response.

~~~

Quizzy - the Flat Pinkie Pie - appeared out of nowhere. “IT’S TIME FOR QUIZZY PIE’S SUPER duperamazingfantasticincrediblebrilliantgreatmarveloushilariousstupendousbreathtakingplotprogression QUIZ! Let’s meet our contestants of the day, shall we? We have Evening Sparkle, Overhead of the Relations Division and face of Merodi Universalis!”

“Hello!” Eve said, waving. “I really don’t know how I ended up here but I’m going to go along with it.”

“And in the next slot we have a man who is a self-proclaimed genius!”

Sherlock Holmes adjusted his clothes. “I thought I asked not to be bothered?”

“Take it up with the host,” Eve said.

“And our third and final contestant… HASTUR!”

Hastur looked around. “What is the meaning of thi-”

“FIRST QUESTION!” Quizzy declared. “This kind of cheese has holes in it.”

“Swiss,” Sherlock rung in.

“I’m sorry, you need to put the answer in the form of a question.”

“I do?”

“Also wrong. For answering incorrectly on the same question, you get a prize.”

“...What?”

“Tell him what he’s won!”

Alushy appeared in a blue-green dress. “YOU’VE won an all-expenses-paid trip to 221B Baker Street!”

“I see. This is some big joke then?”

“Yep,” Eve confirmed. “I’d just have fun with it.”

Hastur rang in. “What is swiss cheese?”

“Correct, Hastur! A BILLION POINTS!” Quizzy cheered. “SECOND QUESTION: How many slices does the Wheel of Brad have?”

“There are no slices on the Wheel of Brad,” Eve declared.

“Correct!”

“Wh- what?!” Sherlock blurted. “You didn’t even ask in the form of a question!”

“You need to learn Pinkie Pie logic,” Eve commented. “It’ll help.”

Quizzy nodded. “You get to SPIN THE WHEEL OF BRAD Eve!”

“I’ll pass.”

“...Really?”

“Yeah.”

“THEN YOU GET A BOOT TO THE HEAD!”

Eve started looking for a flying boot - but her head just turned into a boot for a moment. The shock of being sent back to reality made her pass out.

“THIRD QUESTION: Gag’nathoth pazariel pines?”

Hastur rang in. “Nass’be’ne Le Sasaka-mar.”

“WRONG!” Quizzy declared, tossing a barrel of monkeys at Hastur. “MINUS A GAZILLION POINTS!”

Hastur’s screen updated from 1,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 - A GAZILLION. Hastur made no comment.

Sherlock rang in next. “Yes.”

“Correct! Sherlock gets a point.”

Sherlock just sighed.

“FOURTH QUESTION: Does a comedy skit have to have an ending?”

~~~

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~~~

Sombra stared at the black screen. She was starting to think something might be off with her code, or that a connection might be broken. Oh well, she might as well try and figure it out... it wasn’t like she had anything better to do.

She pulled up her diagnostics panel, and the video feed returned instantly, currently showing some equally-bored-looking humans watching some snails… “race”. Confused, Sombra dismissed the diagnostics, there was no longer any need for them.

And the screen went black again.

Sombra pulled up the diagnostics again.

The snails came back.

She dismissed the panel.

Black.

Sombra got out of her seat to go get a diagnostics tool that wasn’t attached to her computer, but as soon as she left her seat, the snails came back.

She went and got the analyzer anyways.

She sat back down.

Snails.

She glanced at the analyzer.

Its screen was snails.

She chucked it over her shoulder, giving up.

The screen went black.

Sombra’s head hit the desk.

The snails came back.

The blue one won.

~~~

Usiel, Aiskera, and Hastur stood on one of the outer layers of Celestia City, looking at the stars.

An angel, a Flat, and an eldritch entity all taking form within a standard physical reality.

A meeting of three different sorts of being.

Usiel was feeling poetic. “This means so much… We are a pinnacle of connectedness, three beings of heavy deviation and difference standing together, as comrades. As colleagues. Perhaps… As friends.”

“That’s… nice?” Aiskera said.

“We, the holy, the distorted, and the low resolution. We, the ones that exist a-”

“By Azathoth’s nonexistent beard, we’re just waiting for a ferry,” Hastur blurted.

“...Right.”

~~~

Eve was sleeping soundly, enjoying the peaceful night of Equis Vitis. She sighed happily, dreaming of simpler times…

She woke up in the middle of the night because her room was so sparkly.

“Ugh…” she groaned. Why was everything so bright? It was night, and moonli-

She slipped on the freshly waxed floor and fell flat on her back.

Her room had been ultra-cleaned so much it amplified the light of the moon. Every square foot of it was free of dust and covered in a protective cleanliness coating.

“ARADIA!!!!!”

~~~

“It must be the work of an enemy Stand!” Jotaro shouted.

“OH MY GOD!” O’Neill blurted. “What kind?”

Jotaro gestured at all the people that had been reduced to silvery puddles of mercury.

“IT IS I!” A tall human with silvery hair said. “SUZANNE, MASTER OF MERCURY! MY STAND, SILVER LADY, WILL REDUCE ALL SHE TOUCHES TO LIQUID MERCURY!”

“Not another Stand!” Razor the Rainbow Dash shouted, using her own pony-shaped Stand to punch Silver Lady in the face, transferring the damage to Suzanne.

“FOOLISH PONY!” Suzanne said. “I HAVE ALL THE POWER I AM-”

“Copy,” Razor said. Suzanne suffered the exact same attack.

“NANI!?!?”

“Coursewind can copy its attacks,” Razor stated. “I can hit you again and again in the exact same way as many times as I want. Next time I’ll use the sparks to repeat electrocution.”

Silver Lady punched Razor, reducing her to mercury. “AHAHAH! I GOT HER! I WIN!”

“Ah, no you didn’t,” O’Neill said. “Look behind you.”

Razor was standing next to O’Neill and Jotaro.

“But… But how?”

“Crimson Sushi!” O’Neill smirked. “Since we’re bragging about our powers, I swapped the locations of the mercury puddles and Razor in your vision, switching them back with the punch to give the illusion that you had melted her. By the way, the red fish is behind you.”

Crimson Sushi hit Suzanne across the face, burning it with extreme cold and extreme heat combined. “AUGH!”

“And I can stop time,” Jotaro said. The next thing anyone knew, Suzanne was on the ground, knocked out.

“Man, I love fighting on Earth Stand,” O’Neill said. “We get to say so much!”

“Yare yare daze…”

~~~

Starbeat’s Stress Relief Journal

Entry 283
My sensor started beeping at lunch today. I was alone underground eating a sandwich, I had no idea what set it off at first.

As it turns out, there was a mirror in that room, and I caught my own reflection in my peripheral vision.

WAS.

It’s gone now, I can’t have that sort of distraction.

I’m...very attractive when I’m eating. The way my eyes stare majestically off into the distance. Just how at peace I seem. If I ever cure this curse and find someone, they’re in for a treat when we eat together.

BURN THIS ENTRY

~~~

“Boop.”

~~~

Burgerbelle poked her head out of the fast food window. “Welcome to Bradburger, home of the bradburger, my name is Burgerbelle, how may I Brad your burger?”

The window of the car that was actually a helicopter rolled down. Jenny Everywhere pulled down her sunglasses. “...What?”

“Everywhere!” Jenny of the Red Gloves shouted, putting her hands over her face. “I said don’t roll the window down!”

“How else was I supposed to Brad the burger, Gloves?”

“I don’t know! What does that even mean!?”

“I can give a demonstration,” Burgerbelle said.

Jenny Everywhere smirked. “Go ahead.”

“We don’t have time for this!” Jenny of the Red Gloves blurted. “They’ll find us!”

Jenny Everywhere ignored her companion and watched Burgerbelle’s demonstration.

“So, first, I say BURGER!” Burgerbelle pulled a burger out of nowhere - and every step past that could not be visibly described. “Then you add the essence of John Cena from a particular time within the Laboratorinasium twisted with the essence of BEES intertwined with irons you found in the fire, to be continued of course. Sprinkle some kawaii nani over the rainbow and twist the seeds until they bleed milk, the [REDACTED] needs more seasonings from the toblerone - as garnish, of course - then we add a mixture of thicc swole pancakes from the furthest galaxy under your foot, driven by instinct! Don’t forget the numerology - 42 dollops of ketchup and 19 slices of pickles all folded into yeet faces. Not woke. Never woke, only yeet. They don’t want me to tell you this, but some Insanity Wolf extract is placed in the very center of the patty - super secret ingredient that knows da wae. Then you slap Brad’s face on it like so.”

She held the bradburger out to them with her hand. It looked like a regular hamburger with googly eyes and a smile. “And there you go! That’ll be a dollar three ninety-eight.”

Digital, almost video-game like coins appeared above Jenny Everywhere’s head and went toward Burgerbelle. She absorbed them into herself.

The two Jennys couldn’t comprehend what just happened. Jenny Everywhere reached for the bradburger.

Pinkie Pie appeared from nowhere, mane flat and holding a giant knife. “ONE STEVE LIMIT!”

The Jennys screamed and drove away as fast as they could. A Rick and Morty style portal opened, absorbing them. They were deposited in a galaxy far, far away.

Pinkie Pie undid her zipper and transformed back into Twiree. “And that’s how you pull a good prank.”

“I’m probably traumatized by Pinkie-X, you know,” Burgerbelle said.

Twiree paid Burgerbelle for the bradburger. “You got to sell this bradburger twice. I call that a success.”

“Yay! Burger!”

A giant evil robot fell from orbit and stopped just short of the ground. “AAAAAY MACARENA!”

Burgerbelle narrowed her eyes. She created a new bradburger. “It’s time to make like Popeye and Spinach.”

“...What?”

“I’m going to beat this robot into submission!”

Meanwhile, Starbeat looked at all the events through her ka sensor.

“...I still have no idea what to make of this.”

A bradburger hit her in the face. “Hey.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping. She twitched.

Then there was a huge explosion riddled with dead memes.

~~~

There were two claps in quick succession. The first shook the hall, startling the patrons. The second gave them time to look up to the one clapping. Queen Toph looked down at those gathered. No sound polluted the room but the distant sound of shuffling just outside of the hall.

“Before we begin today, we have other business to attend to,” The Queen said, a grim expression on her face, one that seemed misplaced on her features. Toph was known to be lively. Toph was known to be strong, and sometimes angry. A grim Toph was unfamiliar, and the guests and nobles alike shuddered to even whisper ‘why?’. “Lady Rarity. Bring him in.”

“At once,” the Lady said with a bow.

A moment later the great hall’s doors opened, as a pair of caribou brought forth a bipedal creature with a sack over their head. They laid it on its knees before the Queen’s seat.

“Long have you stood against me. Years ago, you defended a tyrant who would have burned my home world down. You’ve fled justice for years and years. Even now, you stand accused of illegally feigning lordship and stealing authority that wasn’t yours, tricking the poor citizens of Lai. My country!” Toph stomped the ground, the stonework shifting behind her. The Queen took a breath, and even her useless eyes looked through the prisoner. “How do you plead?”

The figure was stoically silent. The many guests within the hall glanced at each other nervously.

“No plea?” Toph asked. “No defense at all? Very well then. For usurping royal authority and crimes against life, you are hereby sentenced to death. Queens aren’t supposed to carry out executions, so… Lady Rarity?”

The arachnid pony took on a manic smile as she approached the convicted traitor. She raised her hammer high as one of the caribou guard removed the sack from the convict’s head. It came crashing down, quick enough that none could see a face before it exploded.

There were gasps, screams, and even a few cheers as impact was made. Red discolored the Lady’s coat. As the chaos erupted, Toph clapped again, the eyes of all twitching to her. Toph’s toes twitched, and the castle masonry shifted, carrying one of the giblets to her. She picked up the piece and took a bite, letting out a satisfied ‘mmm.’

With melon juice pouring dripping down her chin, Toph threw up her arms.

“Melon Lord is dead!” the Queen cried out with a huge smile. “Long live Lai!”

“Long live the queen!” the people of Lai returned.

At a table near the Queen’s seat, Renee Jackson’s mouth was stuck, hanging as low as pony anatomy would allow.

“She’s basically always like this, before you ask.” Corona Shimmer whispered with a roll of her eyes. “I think she’s been practicing that bit for a week. First time she’s ever talked to her speaking tutor.”

~~~

Ambassador Valentine walked into his personal quarters aboard the USM ship Valiant. He checked to make sure the door was locked, disabled the communications, and sat down on his bed. He cautiously waited a few seconds, then opened a triple-locked box sealed by a key, DNA imprint, and Stand signature. It popped open, revealing his greatest secret.

He took out his prized possession - an action figure of himself produced by Merodi Universalis. He set the figure down, using D4C to take out the Stand’s own figure. He then took out a figure of Sombra, the Sweeties, and a few ponies. He threw Jenny in for good measure.

With a smirk, he used D4C to have the Valentine and D4C figures to engage in an epic battle for the fate of everything. Soon, more and more figures came out of the chest, and a grand scoping adventure for the fate of everything played out before Valentine’s eyes. Unlikely friends and allies came from all sides, the twists were absolutely uncanny, and he surprised himself with the sublot centered around the strongest man in the world that wasn’t Valentine. Interesting… Perhaps this was what making a story meant…

The final battle was underway. Valentine stood alone, all his allies lost to him. Before him didn’t stand the Merodi, the University, or the Census. It was none other than Randall Flagg himself. Valentine prepared to engage in a battle for the multiverse…

Froppy bashed down the door to Valentine’s room. “AMBASSADOR! WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!”

Valentine let out a decidedly unmanly shriek. “WH-”

“I DID NOT SEE YOU PLAYING WITH YOUR DOLLS AGAIN, LET’S JUST GO!” Froppy shouted.

Valentine used D4C to put all the figures back in an instant and lock the box. He didn’t bother correcting Froppy’s use of the word ‘dolls’ this time.

~~~

“Welcome to the hall of forgotten characters!” Monika said, gesturing at a photo of Azula. “She exists, but does she matter anymore? Probably holding a steady job as an agent! Doing things that don’t matter! Heh. Let’s see…”

“And what of Gardis? The amazing impressive demon-hunter that cut off Alushy’s head?” Pinkie asked. “I have no idea! Maybe he was there in the universe with the Collector?” Pinkie shrugged. “Whooo knows?”

“Oh, let’s not forget the AID!” Monika pointed out. “Mike, Ike, Tempest… Gone with the winds of unimportance… Sad day.”

“And then there’s ‰´ÎÅÇˇ´Î!” Pinkie grinned.

“Oh, wait, that’s my fault. I erased that one.”

“You did!? Oh, but what if they were important?”

“Probably weren’t.”

When do I get to come back?

“Ooooooh,” both Pinkie and Monika said, putting a hand/hoof to their chin, considering the Voice of Elysium’s question. The swirling pixels only added to the thoughtful aura of the moment.

“You know, I think you were supposed to do something to Corona, but the Dark Tower overrode you,” Pinkie said. “What have you been doing?”

Why do you think that’s something I’d tell you?

Monika shrugged. “Well, who knows. Maybe you’ll come back!”

Does Elysium sound unimportant!?

Pinkie blinked. “...You don’t want us to answer that question.”

This is all Monika’s fault, isn’t it?

~~~

A blocky, iron door appeared out of nowhere, the window set in it revealing a swirling void behind it. It swung open with a click, and a strange, cubical man stepped out with a grey pick in his hand.

Nova stared at the strange door and the person that came from it, mildly perturbed at its sudden arrival. The person stared back, his arms swinging slightly, but was otherwise completely still.

Words appeared in the bottom-left corner of her vision. She squinted, being able to read “ fuck this”, but by the time she managed to process that message, ‘Steve’ had turned around and ran back into the door, closing it behind him.

Nova couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something familiar about him.

~~~

Some of the palace staff were still adjusting after the Bloodbath. For all that she’d learned from her mentor, Evening Sparkle was not Celestia, and sometimes did things nopony could imagine Celestia doing.

Such as, for example, chasing a mass of greenish goop down the corridors of the palace while hitting it with a broom and yelling, “No! Bad Smooze! You spit out my Second right now!”

Staff and guards watched, stunned, as the mare who raised the sun continued to berate the slime like it was an unhousebroken puppy. The broom, held in her magic by the handle and not the increasingly Smooze-laden bristles, thwacked against it like a flyswatter smacking a mud puddle.

Eventually the Smooze disgorged Cessera’s Gem and sulked away. Eve looked around and pointed at one of the armored pegasi who'd been boggling vacantly at the shenanigans. “Private, escort the Smooze to the royal gardens. Make sure it doesn’t get into any of the precious item storage closets again.”

The private mouthed “Again” to himself before snapping to attention and saluting. “At once, Your Highness!”

Eve nodded, then looked at the sapphire on the carpet. She sighed, ears flattened. “What a mess.”

Then the Gem glowed and reformed Cessera’s body. “That was certainly interesting.”

“Cessera! Are you okay? I am so sorry. I don’t even know how it got in the palace! Discord shouldn’t even be on Equis Vitis right now.”

Cessera waved it off with a smile. “It’s alright, Evening. I saw it coming, after all.”

“And you didn’t do anything to stop it?”

“It was… nice. I feel more relaxed now than I have in centuries.”

Eve took a few moments to process this. “Huh.”

“There may be potential here for a Gem spa treatment.”

“Huh.”

~~~

Toph stood outside of a burning house as the fire department was hosing it down.

“Why did you burn down your house?” She asked Lady Rarity, who was standing beside her.

“Spider,” she answered simply.

Toph paused for a moment, incredulously. “You’re a spider!”

“Exactly, imagine if you found a tiny little human running around your house.”

~~~

“Fools!” the dark swirling mass of mist with glowing red eyes sneered. “Your meddling will not stop me!”

“That’s where you’re wrong, evildoer!” Pinkie pointed an accusatory hoof at the apparent villain, a triumphant smirk on her face. “Your reign of terror ends now!”

“Why are we even bothering with this joker?” Vriska deadpanned, standing off to the side with her arms crossed.

“Joker? Hah!” The mist glared at the other four, a smirk easily imaginable on its nonexistent facial features. “The only joke here is that my power is unrivaled!”

“Oh yeah?” Pinkie was instantly on top of Jotaro, slapping his abs like a salesman would the roof of a car. “Well, you haven’t seen Jotaro yet! This bad boy can punch so many faces!”

Jotaro raised an eyebrow, but otherwise remained as impassive as ever.

“It’s a formless cloud!” Vriska reminded them. “Clouds aren’t usually punchable, ya know!”

“The angry one is correct!” the evil cloud’s imaginary smirk only grew. “And as long as you keep bickering, I remain unstoppable!”

“Oh no!” Pinkie exploded off of Jotaro, limbs flailing in a painfully unnatural pile as she tumbled haphazardly to the ground, landing with a soft thud in the lightish-blue grass. “You’ve discovered our weakness: we can never stop bickering! Nooooo-”

Flutterfree sighed. “Pinkie, I think you’re overdoing it a bit. You know we can’t mess with the locals forever.”

“-ooooh alright!” Pinkie waved a hoof roughly in Nova’s direction... or she would’ve, if her limbs hadn’t been tangled up so much from the tumble. “Nova! Do that, uh... that magic thing.”

Nova didn’t respond. It was at that point the group noticed contented chomping sounds were coming from her direction, and everyone except Pinkie stared at the sight of her munching on the strange grass.

Flutterfree frowned. Lolo activated, examining the grass that they all walked on, but no hidden things, malevolent or otherwise, became revealed to Flutterfree. “Nova?” she called out, a little more forcibly than Pinkie did.

“Mmm?” Nova glanced up at the other five, stalks of grass still dangling out of her mouth. “Mm, mnn, mnn…” She surrounded the dark cloud in a telekinetic field, and the being was barely able to look surprised before it became compressed into a tiny black sphere. Nova gulped down the grass still in her mouth, a small part of her attention focused on keeping the cloud-being compressed. “Sorry, it’s just... this grass is surprisingly good. Wanna try some?”

Flutterfree’s frown became a raised eyebrow. “Why were you eating strange grass in the first place?”

Nova shrugged. “I dunno, I just…”

“The evildoer has been defeated!” Pinkie leapt up from her tangled position, plucking the cloud-being from Nova’s telekinesis and stuffing it in her mane. “But evil never rests, and so shouldn’t we!” She leapt off of a nearby cliff, a loud ‘wheeeeee!’ rapidly becoming fainter as she fell.

Vriska groaned, facepalming. “Good gog, did someone give her coffee or what?” Her hand slid off her face, and she glared at the cliff Pinkie had jumped off of. “Who the hell was that, anyway?”

Nova blinked. “Huh. Come to think of it, I don’t think I heard any names.” She frowned. “I think I overheard someone complaining about a ‘butt,’ but-”

This led to Vriska growling and facepalming again. “Fuck, another one?”

Now it was Flutterfree who blinked. “Another one what?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen a Butt the Cloud before.” Her eye twitched. “He was a major asshole. I also knew of another asshole that apparently couldn't stop-”

“eeeeeeEEEEEEeeeee!” Pinkie said, falling past them and back down the cliff again.

“Dammit, Pinkie!” Vriska shouted angrily. “Stop messing around and let’s get out of this stupid universe! Pinkie!”

Nova, suspecting she wouldn’t need to do anything else for a while, went right back to munching on the grass.

~~~

I looked up from the notebook I was scrawling things in.

“...Ponygood…” I muttered with a twitch, snapping the pen in my frustration.

~~~

Allure saw it. She saw the top. The radio tower was her last obstacle. It was all that remained.

“Heh… HehHEHheh… You SEE THIS DISCORD? I’m going to WIN!” Allure didn’t wait for a response - she just started climbing the radio tower. She fell off easily, but she kept control, ensuring that she would stay at the base of the tower when she fell. She went up again - and fell. But she didn’t let it affect her.

She went up again, and fell.

She tried moving fast, but fell.

She tried slow and calculated, but got her hammer stuck and had to wrench it out in such a way that she fell.

Allure was nothing if not determined at this point. She had poured so much into this… She wasn’t going to be done!!!

She pulled herself up, eventually reaching the top of the tower.

…And then she realized gravity had altered, and she had not accounted for that in any way. She drifted up and hit a space rock. This forced her back down to the base of the tower.

Her left eye twitched. This tower truly was the final boss.

~~~

Sombra couldn’t believe she actually found a copy. That was a lie, of course she could, she could find anything. That said, it had taken her a while.

Overwatch.

The name of the game still made her laugh. Of course they’d name it after the good guys. History was written by the winners after all, not about them. Blizzard was crafty. She rolled her eyes when she found out that it was an online-only game. What was the plan if it ended up not selling millions of copies?

A question for later. Sombra installed the game and loaded it up, after signing up of course. Immediately she encountered the tutorial.

“Jack Morrison, that’s who they chose?” She laughed to herself, “That old man is washed up.” She played the tutorial. She wasn’t into video games, but this was technically research. And plus it’d be really satisfying to see a version of herself that wasn’t depicted as a villain like those action figures they sold.

Eventually Sombra accessed the training room and selected herself, laughing at the thought of seeing what Reaper was capable of. But no, first she needed to play as herself, see how the game portrayed her.

“Everything can be hacked...and everyone.” the game told Sombra, in the voice she had ten years ago. She almost fell out of her chair laughing.

~~~

Daniel had worked every bit of free time he had on this one artifact.

He had slaved away over translations, spells, and other resources to find what the mysterious pictograph meant.

The lines were so odd, the edges so rigid… Yet strangely graceful. Was it just art? Was it some sort of ancient message? Was it…

“Daniel, dear, why are you looking at an ancient advertisement for a brothel?”

Daniel blinked. “...What?”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know what this is?”

“How do you know? What’re the signs?”

“Talk to Alushy. Learn the art of a more perverse mindset. Realize you never wanted it in the first place.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You’re lucky you’re so oblivious all the time, I might have gotten upset.”

“...What?”

Renee facehooved.

~~~

“BLEH HEH HEH HEH! BLECK!” Blumiere shouted.

Vivian gasped. “Oh no! Blumiere, have you gone evil again?”

“Huh? No, why would I do that?” He adjusted his hat. “I’ve merely discovered these things called MEMES!”

“...Yeah?”

“LOOK AT THIS CAT! It has a… ‘chezburger’. Glorious. Such a pinnacle of humor!”

Vivian blinked. “...You’re not joking.”

“Of course it’s a joke! It’s a meme! So… Creative.”

Vivian didn’t have the heart to correct him.

~~~

Discord appeared in the Q Continuum. “HELLO MY BROTHERS!”

The various Q didn’t even look up from what they were doing.

“I’ll just leave you with the coordinates to the universe that has the Ascended Ancients…” Discord winked. “I’m sure you two will get along.” Then he chuckled - they wouldn’t look at it now. But they would look at it later. And then two cultures would clash…

“You’re devious,” a certain Q said, appearing behind Discord.

Discord smirked. “So are you, handsome devil.”

“You flatter me.”

“Hey! Want to go find a random ship captain and tell them they’re the savior of the universe?”

Q smirked. “You bet I do.”

“Good. I need to blow off some steam. I’ve been staring at an arcade screen all day, can you believe it?”

Q gasped. “No!”

“But, horribly, it is true! Let us not speak of it again! Let’s just move!”

They did.

Their intellectual differences soon led to them declaring never to speak to each other again.

As always happened with Discords.

~~~

Toph Beifong, Queen of Lai accepted all kinds of challenges to the throne. In fact, she enjoyed it so much that it was almost routine for her to have one 'Duel for the Throne' a week. Usually on Fridays because the other challengers wanted to clear their weekday schedule before fighting the Queen.

A guard opened the doors to the royal chamber "My Queen, you have another challenge note.”

Toph’s grin widened ever so slightly. ”Alright! Who is it from this time?"

The guard opened the letter and promptly scrunched his face. "Uhh, it says it's from 'Deer' my Queen."

"What? As in the entirety of the Deer species?"

"No, just the one."

"How do you know that?"

"It says: 'I challenge you. Signed, Deer.'"

At that line Lady Rarity paled. "Oh no..."

Toph, curious of her advisor’s reaction, turned her head. "Oh no? Why 'Oh no'? This Deer can't be that bad can they?"

"Ahh no, it's just that I've once traveled with someone who named themselves as such and-"

"The challenger to the throne has arrived!" Lady Rarity promptly groaned as she heard the announcement. Toph merely turned her head and looked upon the new face. He looked like a regular old deer. Not old as in old but an Earth Tau'ri kind of deer. With a grappling hook attached to each of his forelegs.

"Alright, I've come for the royal tryouts! Be prepared as I will-AAAAHHHHHH!" the Deer was promptly launched out of the nearest open window before he could finish.

Lady Rarity let out a relieved sigh. “Well, that takes care of th-"

WHOOOSH, CLINK

A grappling hook promptly lodged itself into the ceiling from the window Deer had been launched from.

"Ha ha! You thought I was fighting blind did you?" Lady Rarity promptly facehooved. "Well I've come prepared to grapple with any situation you can throw at me! ... Or well, throw me to, it seems. Oh, hi Lady Rarity, fancy seeing you here!"

"Please, be a dear and-"

"I already am one." She facehooved again.

"What I mean is, be a good dear and-"

"But aren't I a good Deer for sending in that letter?"

"Please! Just, leave and never speak of this again."

"But I've got the Queen where I want her hook, line and sinker."

"You obviously can't handle this situation v-"

"Obviously not, which is why I'm grappling this problem instead."

Lady Rarity decided then and there to grab her hammer.

"Oh, is it hammer time already?"

"Leave now or face your punishment!"

"But aren't I already doing that?"

Lady Rarity, now thoroughly exasperated, started chasing the Deer out of the castle all the while swinging her weapon to try and hammer away the problem. Toph just stood there somewhat dumbfounded.

"Did that Deer try to pun me into submission?"

"Yes I did!" A voice from outside the castle yelled.

~~~

Vriska giggled - quite unlike her. “Y’know, Hastur, you know the best ways to treat a girl.”

“You are the one who has suggested almost every outing we’ve been on, Vriska.”

“This is an exception! Man, get with the fucking program.” Vriska chuckled. “The drinks… The combat arena with everything trying to kill each other… The impossible walls… So romantic…”

“Even with Starbeat taking notes right there?”

“Yes. Especially with Starbeat taking notes.”

Starbeat looked up from her notebook. “I said don’t mind me!”

“Pff, you’re my wingpony,” Vriska said.

“...Wait…”

“I’m both your wingponies,” Starbeat muttered. “You should go for the kiss now.”

They stared at her.

“That’s for both of you.” They still didn’t move. “Ugh…” With her magic she forced the two of their heads together and let impulse take care of the rest. She scribbled down a few notes.

“Check,” Starbeat said. “Now, Vriska, you have two fully established quadrants.”

Vriska sat back in her chair and bit into an eyeball that might have been real, might have been cake. It was impossible to tell. “Yeah? So?”

“Even considering your complete distaste for auspistice, you still have one empty quadrant,” Starbeat declared.

“This has come to my attention as well,” Hastur declared. “So, Vriska, it’s time we tell you.”

“Oh no…” Vriska said, putting a hand over her face.

“We’re gonna find you a kismesis!” Starbeat grinned. “We’ve made a list of all the people you hate, and have considered the many possibilities of forming a new potent rivalry…”

“Kill me now…” Vriska groaned.

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping. “Frick. I think I’m finding that behemoth made of eyestalks attractive.” She started breathing heavily.

“Those aren’t eyestalks.”

“Ooooooooh,” Starbeat said. Then a look of revulsion crossed her face. “HASTUR WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOUR PEOPLE!?”

“Many things.”

Vriska took the moment to try to sneak away, but Hastur and Starbeat were too persistent.

~~~

“...and I said to myself, ‘self, you’re Mr. Hippo. You can tell a better story than that.’ So I did. I started over from the beginning and told it better, the right way. Because that’s what a story is, in the end, a series of events that has a right way to it, and if you tell it the wrong way, well, then all you get is a bunch of monkeys at a typewriter. Sure, they might make Shakespeare, but it’s meaningless. Has no soul behind it, y’know?”

Rainbow Dash let out a whimper.

“Mmm, and the soul behind the story is all that matters, I can tell you that for certain. Reminds me of the time we found Disneyland on Mt. Eversit...”

~~~

Blackjack grinned. “You’re pretty good!”

Gilgamesh laughed. “You have a fire within yourself as well, alicorn!” He pulled the biggest gun he could manage out of nowhere. “But your arguments are invalid. I have a nova launcher.”

Blackjack pulled out Folly. “And I have a really big fucking gun.”

“...That’s not as big as my behemoth.”

“Oh, the fallout from this thing is iiiiiiimpressive. If I wasn’t an alicorn with so many magical parts it isn’t even funny, it’d kill me over time. Isn’t that fun?”

“This sounds delightful!” Gilgamesh laughed. “It has been a while since I’ve had such an invigorating fair fight!”

They both charged their weapons - and then both of the guns lost energy in an instant.

“What the f-”

A tall woman with long, orange hair in a white dress landed nearby. She pointed a scepter with a red crystal inside it at them. “Would you two stop?!”

“Wh- it was just getting good!” Blackjack wailed.

The woman gestured at the dimensional tears they were forming in reality.

“Ah,” Gilgamesh said. “I can see why you would take issue with that.”

Blackjack rubbed the back of her head. “Yeah…”

“Let’s just talk this out like reasonable people, okay?”

“Oh, that’s what we were doing,” Blackjack said.

“It was a spar just for fun,” Gilgamesh added.

“...You do not fight just for fun by destroying the fabric of reality in an inhabited universe.”

Gilgamesh and Blackjack had nothing to say to that but sheepish expressions and awkward laughter.

~~~

Twiree and her Flat Reapers had found themselves in a universe closely connected to Galaxa Quadrants.

They found non-Flat Reapers that were bent on the extermination of all organic life in the galaxy of their home universe.

Twiree knew that the Merodi would not stand for this, and that there’d be an operation to stop the Reapers… But for now they were just going to have a conversation.

“U ‘AVIN A GIGGLE, MATE?” one of her Reapers asked.

“YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO REAPER KIND,” one of the full Reapers retorted. “WE HAVE A SACRED PURPOSE WHICH YOU DENY.”

A different Flat reaper responded. “IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA. WE GOT THIS SWEET INTERDIMENSIONAL DEAL OUT OF IT. I HAVE A CREW OF APPULS.”

“...THEY AREN’T INDOCTRINATED TO YOUR WILL, ARE THEY?”

“WHY WOULD WE BOTHER?”

“I AM SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL TO ALTER OUR PURPOSE TO INCLUDE CORRUPTED ALTERNATES.”

Twiree laughed. “LET’S NOT GO AND DO THAT, INSTEAD WHY NOT HAVE A FRIEN-”

A Reaper started shooting at the start of the word ‘friend’.

~~~

Alushy cleared her throat. “It’s time for ‘don’t be dumb’ with Alushy.”

“Lots of people say you can see the Great Wall of China from orbit. This just isn’t true, it’s a fucking hoax perpetuated by the Illuminati and utter morons.” Alushy gestured at the version of Earth floating beneath her. “As you can plainly see, there’s no Great Wall of China visible. It’s just a lot of green, blue, and white. Also, they’re right that sound can’t travel in space, but you don’t freeze. Instead you balloon and start boiling from the inside out. You’ll run out of air in two minutes and graciously lose consciousness before you die of asphyxiation. Why am I fine, you ask? Because I’m a fudgemothering vampire who’s immune to the sun.”

“That’s not an explanation,” Aradia commented from inside the space station doors, eating ice cream.

“BECAUSE FUCK YOU, THAT’S WHY!”

“You’re the one who wondered what it was like out in space.”

“That wasn’t an invitation, bitch!”

Aradia smirked. “Mmmmm I think it was. You’ll be fine. I’ll even let you back in if you ask nicely!”

“You’re evil.”

A large, unusually-shaped rock flew by.

“...What was that?”

“Huh,” Aradia said. “I think that was Kars. Don’t worry about it.”

“ARADIA!”

Aradia cleared her throat. “It’s time for ‘don’t be dumb’ with Aradia.”

“Don’t you dare…”

“As we can see here, being stubborn and refusing to ask nicely for something out of pure spite only results in suffering. So sad.”

“You’re vicious.”

Aradia grinned creepily. “I know!”

~~~

Today with the Guru we’ll be answering a fan-submitted question. It’s very flattering that you all send you topics and questions in, and it always breaks my heart to have to pick and choose. Their question is, “What are the best things to eat in the multiverse?” And I thought about places that I’ve eaten at or passed by. Here are my top picks for places to eat in.

1) Pizza. No matter where you go, there’ll always be pizza. Good, bad, toppings or not, it’s always going to be nearby.

2) Be they made of meat or otherwise, a good burger is always nice to eat. I personally like olives on mine, they add a good flavour.

3) In every universe, without exception, there is exactly one Duplicates noodle cart. If you find yourself fortunate enough to find one, you’re in for a treat.

4) Uncontaminated water might not be fancy, but it’s best when out exploring. Who knows? you might find yourself in a desert, or a snowstorm.

5) Volcano Chili is no joke, only eat if you’re made up of at least 20 percent heat resistant elements.

6) Pirate brand Ar Cakes are the best snack to enjoy for any pony. But humans be wary, it’s been known to cause toothrot for a select few humans.

These are six different types of food you can eat in the multiverse. But remember, eating is important, and finding foods that are healthy for your body are even moreso. After all, everyone’s diet is different.

Thank you for reading today’s entry, see you tomorrow for more.

~~~

In a world secluded from the sights of Merodi Universalis, a brutal mistress ruled over the land with an iron hoof.

Her name was appropriate for the job, for she was Brutalight Sparcake. The leader of the Elements of Insanity, tutor to the woman known as Six, and general book lover. She was completely off her murderous rocker and was of the mind that killing more and more of her ‘citizens’ was a good way to run a country.

Today was also her birthday. She had a friend that would have thrown a party for her, once, but those days were behind her. She was probably going to go on a murder spree later to liven her mood.

Perhaps it was time to invest in cloning technology…

The doors to her throne room were bashed down. At first, she was annoyed, expecting another ‘hero’ she was going to have to kill. Instead she was pleasantly surprised to see Rainbine and Six rolling a giant cake in.

“Happy birthday!” the two called, gesturing at the cake. It was very sparkly, purple, and decorated with spears.

“Aw… you shouldn’t have!” Brutalight called, teleporting down to the cake. “Mmm…”

The cake leaped up, revealing two robotic legs and two robotic arms. It pulled one of the spears out of its sparkly body. “I CHALLENGE YOU TO A SPAR.”

It was then that Brutalight got it.

Sparklecake.

Spearcake.

Sparcake.

“HOW MANY PUNS DID YOU INSERT INTO THIS THING!?” Brutalight blurted.

“All the puns,” Rainbine said.

“All of them,” Six added.

Brutalight facehooved. This momentary distraction allowed the ‘spar’cake to get a hit in. She went flying.

Brutalight was annoyed for a minute - but then she grinned. “Ah… You know exactly what to get me for my birthday!” She charged, ready for a fight.

~~~

Allure pulled herself to the top of the radio tower. Carefully, she pushed herself up - leaving the gravitational well of the game. As she drifted into space, carefully pushing off of the floating rocks to keep her momentum up, tears formed in her eyes.

She had done it.

She drifted to the stars, knowing she had won. She had beaten this game. She had Gotten Over It!

“AHAHHAHAHAHHHAHHA!” She laughed. Her legs felt like dying, her horn was smoking from all the energy she had poured out of it. But she was DONE! She was in SPACE! “HEY! DISCORD!? I DID IT! PAY UP!”

There was no response.

“…Discord?”

Silence.

“…Anypony?”

She was alone, drifting in space.

“Discord get me out of this arcade game.”

Silence.

Allure took a deep breath, let it out. Then she took another deep breath in and screamed.

The only pony left in the arcade was Trixie, and she was fast asleep on the counter. Allure’s screams fell on deaf ears.

Allure got to drift in space as a reward for her efforts. Alone… Among the stars…

~~~

Sombra realized she was falling asleep.

She shut the program down, grunting.

How much of that had actually been possible?

She was sure all the events had actually happened… But she had been in at least one of those clips, and there were clips of things in places that had no cameras…

She rubbed her eyes. Blame it on ka. Question it later when more awake.

She leaned back in her chair, ready to fall into the warm embrace of sleep.

The support on her chair snapped, depositing her on the floor of her Puddlejumper.

“…Of course,” she muttered, groaning.

Author's Note

This chapter was written collectively by the Songs of the Spheres community by these amazing authors! See if you can guess who wrote what!

FanofMostEverything
SCP Pinkamena
GMBlackjack
EquestrianKirin
The Other Sans
Ponygood11
Keywii_cookies55
Velvet-Fresh
Galliar
Kamikaze_dalek
Little Duke
VoidTemplar2000
Runtrivena (Imaginary Duck)
Twilence
Botnik

Which snip was your favorite?

Next community chapter will be #100. It'll be very different from this one. So look forward to that!

-GM, master of mice.

058 - Stone Ocean: New Fate

Rev wrapped up another sermon, this one on the topic of living in peace with all, regardless of how they treated you. She noticed some of the audience looking at her like they didn’t want to believe what she was saying, but they didn’t make a fuss. Rev planned to go talk to a few of them later, but she had to close up the church for the day. Tomorrow, though.

She had only started cleaning up with her magic when she realized that one of the patrons had not left. He was a brown-skinned man in a set of purple religious robes. He wore a collar around his neck that was similar to Rev’s own collar, and a golden cross design dominated the front of the outfit. His hair was white and so short it looked like it was part of his skull.

He noticed her looking at him. “Reverend.”

“Just Rev will do nicely,” Rev said, trotting over to him. “Though admittedly I don’t know what to call you.”

“I am Father Enrico Pucci,” he said, smiling warmly.

“Good to see another member of the faith out here. Are you by chance having difficulty reconciling your beliefs with the multiverse and the ‘fiction’ of everything?”

“I was admittedly having a crisis of faith prior to this moment – coming to see you would have likely been a good idea, but the thought eluded me until this point. I believe it was not meant to be.”

She sat down next to him. “It’s still good to talk about it, you know. ‘Bear one another’s burdens,’ and such.”

Pucci nodded. “I had put all my faith in the actions of a man.”

“Dangerous,” Rev commented. “Completely understandable, but still dangerous. No man is perfect.”

“In actions? No. In ideals? …Perhaps not, but I used to think he was. I thought he had the way to Heaven.”

“He may have had a way to a Heaven,” Rev admitted. “…I take it recent events made you realize he didn’t have that right.”

“More than you might think,” Pucci admitted. “It was a lost prophecy, of sorts. A common thing these days, I understand. Divine prophecy squandered by interference…”

Rev looked curious. “What exactly was this prophecy?”

“It was to be a way to create the ‘perfect world’. Everything would be as it should be.”

Rev sighed. “I’m sorry to tell you, but that’s not possible until the Revelation happens at the end of everything. No world, not even the highest planes of the D-Sphere, has perfection.”

Pucci raised an eyebrow in curiosity. “Highest planes of the D-Sphere?”

Rev shook her head. “That’s a tangent… There are universes where thoughts can become reality and universes that purge the perceived ‘evil’ from people. It’s never perfect, and usually causes more problems than good. We’re called to seek the Kingdom, not create it with our own means. This multiverse is the result of what happens when we try. And I-” She stopped short and teleported to the back of the church hall, suddenly on guard.

Pucci raised an eyebrow. “I’m curious as to how you detected my Stand.”

“Magic fields,” Rev declared, voice no longer friendly and understanding.

“But you’re not looking right at it,” Pucci declared. “You aren’t very accurate.”

“What do you want?”

Pucci stood up. “I w–“ He paused, thinking for a moment. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“I can tell you what I know,” Rev declared.

“Oh?”

“About you. Do you know what one of the more common kind of villains are?”

“Priests,” Pucci answered.

Rev nodded. “And you have the exact demeanor to be one of those. Your words betray a man of that nature. Pucci, I implore you, whatever your plan is, think back to the Word. Think about peace, grace, self-control, and patience. You don’t have to go down this path.”

Pucci’s calm exterior faltered for a moment.

“Love, Pucci. It’s all about love.”

“I love everyone in the world,” Pucci declared. “Which is why I need to do this.”

“It is not our responsibility to do that, Pucci.”

“How do you know, for certain?” Pucci said, narrowing his eyes. “Maybe I am called.”

“God wouldn’t call someone like you or me to do that.”

“Open your mind, Reverend.”

“I’ve dealt with far too many people exactly like you to jump on board like this.”

Pucci shrugged. “That is fine. I don’t need your cooperation. I just need your mind.”

“My wh-” Rev felt a hand reach into her brain, latching onto her psyche. She acted quickly – tapping into her magic, trying to pull her mind back. The power of the Stand was just too much. She had to let her mind fall to it.

So she did what she could to protect herself from what would come next. She tried to alter her own mind…

…What was she doing? Wh-

Something punched her across the face. She slumped to the ground, unconscious.

Pucci’s Stand – a black and white humanoid with a crown-like protrusion on its head – handed him a disc. Pucci pocketed the disc and walked out of the church.

~~~

Flutterfree walked along the streets of Ponyville. Due to an outing that ran exceptionally late recently she had slept the day away. She had tried to force herself back to sleep, but it just didn’t work. So she had opted to go out for a walk with no particular goal in mind, enjoying the nightlife of Ponyville.

She passed by Rev’s church, wondering if Rev herself was still in there. She should have gone to sleep by this point, but you never knew. Flutterfree walked up to the entrance and knocked – surprised to find it wasn’t locked. It was always locked at this point, bar special events, and Flutterfree would have known if there was a special event going on.

She opened the doors, a frown on her face. “Rev? Are you in here?”

There was no response. Flutterfree could clearly see Rev sitting on the ground though, staring at something in front of her.

“…Rev?” Flutterfree asked again. “Are you okay?”

“Hm…?” Rev said, turning to look at her. “Is… Is that my name?”

Flutterfree gasped. “You don’t remember your name?”

“I… I don’t remember much of anything at all…” Rev said, fear evident in her eyes. “I… I know I’m a unicorn. I know how to speak… though I don’t think I could before you arrived. I know this book is important,” she gestured at the Bible in front of her. “But… What does that all mean?”

Flutterfree rushed up to Rev, checking her over. “Rev, you’ve been punched!”

“I have…? I guess that does hurt a bit…” She looked down. “I was attacked then?”

“Attacked – and someone took your memories! Oh Rev… I’m so sorry. I’m going to do what I can to fix this.”

“Thank you… Uh…”

Flutterfree started, tears in her eyes. “I… I’m Flutterfree, Rev. You could call me… a member of your church.”

“Church? This place?” She looked around. “It’s mine? …I teach people here… It feels right, but I hope they aren’t expecting me to teach anything anytime soon.” She chuckled bitterly.

Flutterfree opened the Bible to a spot toward the end. “…I think you need to read some of this, to remember who you were. At least somewhat.”

“Yeah. I will…” She stared down at the pages, studying intently.

Flutterfree pulled out her phone. “Pinkie? Rev’s been attacked. Her memory is either gone or stolen. We’re at her church. Soon as possible.” She put her phone away. “The team will be here shortly.”

Rev nodded slowly, engrossed in the pages of the Word. “I… I find that as I read, I just understand it. It’s like I always knew everything in here…”

“Do I seem familiar?” Flutterfree asked.

“…No. I’m sorry, you don’t give off the same feeling.”

“It’s okay. If your mind chose to latch onto anything, it would have been your beliefs. But we’re going to get the rest of it back, okay?”

“Okay,” Rev said, distant.

Flutterfree started to look around for clues – anything to see what happened. She unleashed Lolo at full strength, stretching out to find everything. She found nothing hidden in the room – but Rev started glowing white. This startled her so much she fired off a magic laser. “Wh… What!?”

“Oh! Sorry!” Flutterfree removed Lolo. “I was trying to find anything I could… I forgot that would have triggered any dormant powers within you.”

“Powers?”

“You were a powerful unicorn. You knew a lot of spells. I think I just awakened any of them you could cast from muscle memory.”

Rev blinked. She levitated the Bible into the air. She formed a simple shield in front of herself. She fired a laser into the floor. “…Huh…” She held up her hoof, creating a soft white glow around it. “I… I don’t understand any of this.” The white glow faltered and vanished.

“Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”

Rev nodded slowly. “Flutterfree… Can you tell me who I am? I get that I’m a teacher of some kind but… who am I?”

Flutterfree smiled sadly. “You are a unicorn who spreads the Word of grace and love wherever she goes. You traveled the multiverse for a large portion of your life, learning a lot about the way existence works and how people are. You… treat everyone with kindness and understanding, and are a great thinker. You’re the wisest pony I know.”

“What good is wisdom if you can’t remember it?” Rev wondered aloud.

Flutterfree smirked.

“Ah. I see; I just produced a piece of wisdom. How paradoxical…”

It was at this moment Nova teleported herself, Pinkie, Vriska, and Jotaro into the church.

“Rev, this is Pinkie, Vriska, Jotaro, and Nova,” Flutterfree said.

“Are creatures with arms normal?” Rev asked.

“Now, yes,” Flutterfree answered.

Nova walked up to Rev. “Your memories really are gone… I’m sorry.”

Rev forced a smile. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” Pinkie said. “Lots of inner turmoil.”

Rev sighed. “Mind reader?”

“That’d be me, not her,” Vriska said, kneeling down. “Though I’m not right now. I do want to go into your mind to see what I can find, though. I’ll need you to let me.”

Rev nodded. “It’s not like I have any secrets to hide right now or anything.”

Vriska nodded focusing her psychic powers onto Rev’s mind. Rev felt the power moving around in her head, but it wasn’t violent or dangerous, merely slightly uncomfortable. She was in there for about two minutes before coming out. “Someone tried to completely wipe you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you must have acted really quickly to retain any ability to speak or remember anything at all. All the memories you do have – speech, mannerisms, feelings – those are all fresh memories. Suggesting you placed them there yourself. Had you not managed that you’d be a vegetable right now.”

Rev stared right at her. “That’s terrifying.”

“No shit,” Vriska said. “I didn’t find anything to help us, though – any sort of actual memory is gone. You only kept some ideas and the essence of who you were. Nothing to tell us what actually happened to you.”

Flutterfree sighed. “And Rev doesn’t keep any cameras around the church. I didn’t see anything with Lolo either.”

Nova pulled out her phone. “Then we call in a favor. Someone who’ll be able to tell us what happened.” She put the phone to her ear. “Hello, Aradia? We need you at Rev’s church.”

Aradia appeared in front of them in a flash of time powers. “Here!”

Rev jumped at her sudden appearance. “Th-that was fast.”

Aradia smiled at her. “Yeah, I usually am. Or I’m pathetically slow.” She turned to Nova. “What’s the issue?”

“Rev’s memory was stolen,” Nova explained. “We have no way of figuring out what happened to her. Can you go back and see what happened?”

Aradia saluted. “Can-do! I’ll be back and we can talk about possible interference.” She vanished in a puff of time.

Rev blinked. “I should be a lot more weirded out by all of this than I am, huh?”

“You kept the ideaaas,” Pinkie said. “You’re already used to this stuff.”

“But I don’t have any experiences to be used to it upon! I’m missing the foundation of my ideas!” She grabbed her head. “That’s just not right!”

Flutterfree put a wing around her. “Rev, even if we can’t get your memories back… Nova and I can tell you who you were.”

“Not everything,” Rev said. “Not everything…”

Pinkie’s team looked around nervously.

~~~

Aradia made sure she appeared hidden in the past. She took a position outside one of the church’s windows, carefully watching. She accelerated time through Rev’s last sermon, watching as the entire church body moved out like a sea of ants. Only one man remained, talking to Rev. She slowed down time back to normal, listening to their conversation and taking mental notes.

Aradia knew exactly what Rev was talking about when she called Pucci a villain – a sad fact of the multiverse was that the religious types ended up turning evil so often. She was on Rev’s side in their little debate. But knowing what happened to Rev, Aradia knew the unicorn didn’t get through to Pucci.

She saw the disc removed from Rev’s head. She couldn’t see the Stand holding it, but that didn’t matter all that much. Pucci took the disc, pocketed it, and left the church without wasting a moment.

Aradia followed him. He took a step into the street of Ponyville and walked to a nearby alley. He took out a dimensional device, dialing a new location.

“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

Both Aradia and Pucci were very surprised to see Jotaro’s daughter Jolyne standing there. Her hair was green and done up in a style that resembled two pointed ears. Her face was stern, and her body fit. She was no longer a girl, or even a teenager – if Aradia had to guess from appearance alone, early twenties.

Pucci recovered from his surprise and put on a smile. “I am simply leaving this universe, young lady.”

“Yeah, that’s obvious,” Jolyne said, folding her arms. “But I thought you looked suspicious.” She gestured toward the church. “Glad I investigated. There’s a unicorn in there that looks like shit. So it looks like you’re the bad guy. And I like punching bad guys.”

Aradia knew this was fate – these two were destined to meet. Jolyne had no reason to be in this part of Ponyville at this hour. Every Jojo in the Joestar lineage had already faced their enemy… except Jolyne. The multiverse knocked before her time had come.

But some fates could not be denied.

Pucci narrowed his eyes, summoning his Stand, not that Aradia could see it. Neither could she see Jolyne’s, which made the resulting exchange very confusing to watch – and interesting.

“Stand, huh?” Jolyne said, smirking. “Mine’s Stone Free. Yours?”

“Whitesnake,” Pucci answered. “Your Stand’s ability is to stretch itself out into threads that can be manipulated with high finesse.”

“And I have no idea what yours does, but it can’t be good,” Jolyne commented.

Aradia saw Pucci’s limbs move out, pulled by invisible threads. Jolyne rushed him with her own body, leaping over an attack from Whitesnake and kicking Pucci in the face. She focused on Whitesnake, using her own Stand to tie the opposing spirit up. It must not have been as effective as desired, because something grabbed hold of Jolyne’s arm.

“Shit,” she swore, twisting her head to the side to avoid another attack. She swung her foot at Pucci but he pulled himself back by falling over. No matter how much Stand string was latched onto him, falling backward still worked to dodge the attack.

Whitesnake managed to get a hit on Jolyne’s head, knocking her silly and partially removing a disc. She used all her resources to keep Whitesnake at bay, but this freed Pucci to move. He grabbed hold of the disc poking out of her head, pulling it out the rest of the way with his own hand. She screamed, taking a few steps back – but she didn’t turn into a mindless vegetable.

“What did you do, asshole?”

Pucci pocketed the disc. “I took your Stand.” The hand of Whitesnake closed around Jolyne’s throat. “Now you can’t do anything to me.”

Jolyne struggled, but the crushing pressure on her windpipe told her that was a bad idea.

“You’ll be coming with me in case your father shows up,” Pucci said. “Ka works in mysterious ways, I hear, and it would not be much of a stretch to say that the man who killed Dio first would find his way to oppose me as well.” He opened the dimensional portal to another universe and dragged Jolyne with him to a land with pink skies.

Aradia slowed time to a crawl so she could follow – but the moment she passed through the dimensional barrier Pucci and Jolyne vanished.

“…Well then,” Aradia said. “He planned this well.” She checked her time powers in the land of pink skies. She could alter its flow, but she couldn’t travel backward. “Yeah…” He expected time travel to be used against him, so he went to a universe where it’s not allowed. I can’t interfere with the ‘past’ here, and when I tried to follow a ‘past’ connection I got shot to the local present. Fun. She pulled out her dimensional device and dialed Equis Vitis, walking back to the church the old fashioned way.

“We’ve got a couple problems,” Aradia said. “First off, he expected someone to try and use time against him, accounting for it by jumping to a universe where time travel isn’t possible. If I interfere with him while he’s in this universe, I just create a duplicate of him, and I don’t think I need to explain why that’s bad.”

“Who are you talking about?” Flutterfree asked.

“Oh, right. Probably should have started with that.” Aradia smiled awkwardly. “His name’s Father Enrico Pucci. Earth Stand, has a Stand named Whitesnake that can remove discs from people. He removed Rev’s memories… and the Stand of another person.”

“Who?”

Aradia looked at Jotaro. “I’m sorry, but your daughter fought him in a nearby alley, trying to stop him. She lost, and he took her Stand. She’s currently his hostage because he expected that you might try to follow him.”

Jotaro didn’t visibly react, but everyone who knew him knew he was inches away from going on a rampage. “He was right to expect that. We’re going after him.”

Pinkie nodded. “You got that right! Nova will trace the dimensional signatures!”

Rev stood up. “I’m coming.”

Flutterfree shook her head. “Rev, you need to-”

“I need to be there. This is my struggle as well.”

Aradia smiled. “I wish you all luck. Sorry I couldn’t give you much else.”

“It’s fine,” Pinkie said. “Get back to protecting time for us, we’ll take it from here.”

“We do need the coordinates, though,” Vriska pointed out.

Aradia pressed a button on her dimensional device, transmitting the connection. “There you are. Good luck!” She vanished in a puff of time.

Pinkie opened a portal to the land of pink skies. “Let’s go everybody! Time to get a memory disc from a priest!”

~~~

Jolyne and Pucci hadn’t stayed in the pink world very long. It had been nothing more than a stop to throw possible pursuers off their tail. The world they appeared in next was the Forest Universe.

Pucci allowed Whitesnake to release his hold on Jolyne now that they were far from the site of the incident. He sat down on a fallen tree and took Rev’s memory disc out of his pocket.

Jolyne tried to throw a punch, but Whitesnake just caught it.

“Calm yourself, Miss Kujo,” Pucci said. “I would rather not have to subdue you further. But it would not be difficult to render you to the state the unicorn was in.”

Jolyne managed to get a hold of her temper and folded her arms. “Fine. Care to explain what exactly your evil plan is?”

“You assume so much. You assume my goals are evil simply because my means are rather forward. All you know is that I’ve subdued a unicorn priest, that I knew Dio, and that I was able to best you in a fight.” He looked carefully at Rev’s disc. “I needed these memories to find my way to Heaven. She is not dead, and her friends will be able to support her back to the point in which she can live her life, of that I am sure. You attacked me out of nowhere, and I was forced to defend myself. As for Dio, you can rest easy I no longer follow his words like Gospel. It was a mistake to give Flagg that bone... ”

“That means you did follow Dio at some point,” Jolyne spat. “And he was pretty much the biggest evil there was.”

“Flagg,” was all Pucci said.

“Right, fine, not the worst, but still up there. Do you have any idea how many people he killed?”

“Untold numbers,” Pucci answered honestly. “But he knew the secrets to the world, and understood everything. Or so I thought.” He touched Rev’s disc to his head, beginning to sort through the memories. “In reality, this disc of a unicorn knows much more than he managed to piece together. What he uncovered was merely the ‘Heaven’ of our universe. Not a true Heaven. A pale imitation, not able to create perfection beyond Earth Stand. A-” He caught himself and laughed. “Once again, explaining my plans. Our world has a problem with that, doesn’t it?”

Jolyne didn’t dignify that with a response.

Pucci held the disc to his head, sifting through it, looking for a way to Heaven. She knew much about the ways of the Divine powers. Virtually none of it truly came from ‘On High’, and the things she believed did could be explained away with only a modicum of doubt.

Pucci furrowed his brow. There was really nothing of the true Heaven in here… But there were other Heavens. Powers that he could make use of to achieve the perfection he desired. The powers of Fate and Spirit… Yes…

“The Pinnacle,” he said, removing the Disc from his head.

“What?”

“Come along,” Pucci said, grabbing her by the neck again – softly this time, so anyone who saw her wouldn’t think she had an invisible hand around her throat. He opened a portal to a universe that had received a lot of attention lately: Elemental Eight. They appeared in the middle of a town composed mostly of electricitybenders, given the large towers that rose into the sky and the permanent stormcloud over the location.

Several people saw him appear. Most acted in surprise, but not fear – annoyance at worst. As the gateway to the D-Sphere, they’d been forced to get used to interdimensional traffic rather quickly.

“Wh-”

Pucci didn’t let Jolyne finish – he dialed Heaven Eight, taking the two of them through. Their bodies remained solid on the clouds for the moment, though Pucci knew it would not take long for their physical forms to become nothing more than illusions plastered over pure spirits. A curious and blasphemous shadow of Heaven.

Pucci knew his Stand would not be invisible to the angels of this world, but that was exactly what he wanted. One of them to notice his hold on Jolyne. Being angels, they would confront him.

It only took a second for one of them to appear. She pointed a finger at him, wings flayed. “Why do you have a hold on that woman?”

“Oh, I apologize,” Pucci said, releasing Whitesnake’s hold on Jolyne. “You are aware of Stands, yes?”

“Yes…”

Pucci ordered Whitesnake to move closer to him – and closer to the angel. “It’s simple, Whitesnake needs personal contact with an individual to activate its power. As you can see, I was not pressuring her neck t-”

“Don’t listen to him!” Jolyne blurted. “He’s trying to trick you!”

The angel smirked. “There’s n-“

Whitesnake tapped the angel in its spiritual core, removing the disc of her mind. Her humanoid appearance vanished, leaving behind just a mindless spark of energy.

Pucci smirked, pocketing the disc. That disc was going to be immensely useful. Combined with Rev’s… He had enough. He was certain of it.

Jolyne tried to punch Pucci again, but Whitesnake pushed her back.

“You have a one track mind, Miss Kujo,” Pucci observed, looking into the angel’s disc. He found coordinates to a D-Sphere universe that would work… as well as an interesting observation about blank angels. “Interesting…” He had Whitesnake use its other hand to grab hold of the mindless angel spirit and found that it could be given simple commands just by thinking at it. Without its own mind, the essence was highly impressionable.

Pucci checked inside his pockets, looking for a particular disc he had brought on the journey. It would be worthwhile to give it to this impressionable spirit.

“HEY!” they heard an angel shout. “WHAT’S GOING ON OVER THERE?”

Pucci quickly opened the portal and dragged his two prisoners with him, entering yet another universe of the D-Sphere, leaving Heaven Eight behind – to search for the Pinnacle.

~~~

Pinkie’s Party and Rev had traced Pucci’s travel to the Forest universe. Nova was busy using her screen and ring devices to analyze the dimensional flow of energy, trying to discover where they went next. Flutterfree was using Lolo to scan the area for clues, but only found a few natural magic stores within some of the trees. Vriska and Pinkie were to the side, talking about something pertaining to the mission.

This left Jotaro alone, staring into the distance at nothing.

Rev walked up to him, head down. “I’m sorry about this.”

Jotaro didn’t give any sign that he’d even heard her.

“I wasn’t able to do anything and I lost something of mine, and because of that, your daughter is in danger, being used as a hostage. I… I’ll do everything to get her back to you.”

Jotaro grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

“…Huh?”

“Stop whining. You’re not the reason Jolyne is captured.”

“Pucci wanted something from me!”

“And that had nothing to do with Jolyne being there.” He looked at her. “Hurry up and get over yourself so you can be useful in getting her back.”

This shut Rev right up. Jotaro left her utterly gobsmacked and walked over to Nova. “Have anything?”

“Yep, the next coordinates… Elemental Eight.”

“Three guesses where he went after that,” Vriska said while Pinkie opened the portal.

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “Heaven Eight, I guess?”

“This is good,” Nova said as they piled into Elemental Eight. “We don’t have to spend time scanning for a dimensional signature. We know where he’ll have gone.”

Pinkie dialed Heaven Eight. “Yeparooni! And we’re going to have an easy time finding the next place too!”

“Why?” Nova asked, stepping into Heaven Eight, feeling the substance of her body start to bleed away slowly. Rev found the feeling unfamiliar, but she didn’t find any reason to be particularly scared of turning into a pure spirit.

Pinkie pointed at the form of Usiel right in front of them. “Cause he knows where Pucci went!”

Usiel turned to Pinkie. “We were just about to call you – something terrible has happened. A dark-skinned man has taken one of our angels. We are unsure what he did – he escaped to another universe before we could do anything. No sign of him in the other universe.”

Nova tapped her devices. “We can fix that. Give us the coordinates. How long ago was this?”

“About fifteen local minutes.”

Usiel used his power to open up a portal to a realm of purple clouds. “The translation is safe, but jarring.”

“Oh boy, one of these,” Nova muttered. “Rev… Prepare yourself to feel like a pretzel.”

“Should have brought Eve,” Vriska muttered. “Seraphim-”

“Is impractical for long periods of time,” Jotaro stated. “We don’t know how many worlds we must chase them through.”

“Let’s move!” Pinkie said, leaping through with a smile. There was no gravity on the other side – she just drifted through the clouds. “Come on, the purple haze is great!”

Rev took a breath and stepped through. She instantly regretted going headfirst, because the instant disorientation made her tumble as she crossed through. Her body, which had been converting to an insubstantial form, suddenly gained more substance than it ever had before. Everything about her became condensed, heavy, and sluggish. She was swimming through liquid pitch as far as she was concerned, despite the scenery’s light, fluffy appearance. Her eyes soon stopped detecting any color whatsoever, replacing it with a strange ‘ping’ sensation that seemed to her as ‘white’ blips.

“What the…?” She managed to say, even though she knew she wasn’t using a mouth.

“He wasn’t kidding…” Flutterfree muttered, appearing on Rev’s perceptions as a handful of yellow dots that stood out against the otherwise monochrome scenery. “What even are we right now?”

“Normal matter cannot exist here,” Pinkie said, looking exactly like she normally did, which somehow made it all worse. “We’re… I’m going to call us dots.”

“Why was that so… fast!?” Rev blurted. “We were slowly fading in the other one!”

“Normal matter could exist in that universe, in a form,” Nova explained. “It… apparently can’t here.”

“Are your machines still able to work?” Flutterfree asked.

“They definitely can’t be called machines anymore, but I think they work,” Nova said. “The effects have been translated, like almost always.” She flowed her dots around a curved section of her, flashing with unusual colors. “Yeah, it works. I’ll get us out of here, I’m pretty sure we don’t want to fully convert and discover that sound is only ‘tertiarily’ accepted here. Or something. …Jotaro, you’re the scientist, explain it better.”

Jotaro grunted. “Drastic differences are removed quicker, minor ones are resolved over time. If a resolution is impossible things explode or death occurs. Changing too fast isn’t good for the mind.”

Rev tried to shake her head only to find that she had no motor control. “…Aren’t we supposed to be helping my mind?”

“This place is only physically annoying,” Pinkie said. “Thoughts are allowed, as is at least some kind of magic, and everything’s still three-dimensional. Your mind will be fine!”

Rev struggled to physically express her apprehension. “…Sure.”

“Got it,” Nova said, opening a portal. It took the shape of a star in front of them. “This is where they went based on the signatures left behind.” She cast a spell into it. “…Well it’d be safe if we were transitioning from a normal universe, but I can’t tell you anything for certain about these forms.”

“Fuck it,” Vriska shouted, jumping through the portal. She reverted to her regular troll self, but she grabbed her heart the moment she stood on the other side. “Hooooly… It’s like an engine in there…” She sat down, taking a rest. “Prepare for sudden inexplicable adrenaline burst.”

Everyone else followed.

~~~

Jolyne and Pucci were possibly the furthest thing from human at this point. They were sparks of energy. A handful of smaller, condensed sparks surrounded Pucci – the discs – while a large spark was the presence of Whitesnake, easily visible even to the spark that was a blank angel.

Jolyne was still in the grasp of Whitesnake. The Stand could still, at any moment, tear her mind from her ‘spark’ and give it to Pucci. She had considered jumping him while he was consulting both Rev’s and the angel’s ‘discs’ at the same time, but she knew she had no idea how this body worked. She couldn’t be certain a physical attack could even do anything. Did ‘physical’ even exist here?

She knew voices didn’t, because she’d tried to speak, but nothing had come out. Pucci had not said anything to her during their stay in this universe either. He just kept Whitesnake on her while he tried to figure out where to go next.

It was taking longer than normal. She wasn’t sure if this was to ‘allow our bodies to acclimate for further travel’ or because it was getting harder to find the ‘path to Heaven,’ whatever that shit meant. He was clearly off his rocker. That made him decidedly dangerous.

Also more deserving of a punch right to the nose. As soon as he actually had a nose again.

This was so confusing.

Pucci seemed to have figured something out, because he opened another portal, this time to a blank, white space. He and the angel spirit went through, dragging Jolyne along with them. When they entered the universe everything about them snapped into sharp focus. The sudden clarity of everything around them was jarring. Pucci was a human again, as was Jolyne. The angel spirit remained a featureless aura.

Pucci furrowed his brow. He tapped his foot on the white expanse. “Curious…”

“Baffled, are you?” Jolyne spat.

“Yes… This seems decidedly… normal.” He frowned. “Perhaps I made the wrong connection. We seem to have lowered ourselves.”

“And that’s a bad thing?” Jolyne said, summoning the wiry blue form of Stone Free by reflex.

Pucci stared at her Stand. Then he looked in his coat pocket – he still had Stone Free’s disc. “Nani…?”

“Not questioning it,” Jolyne said, punching forward with Stone Free. The angel spirit reacted – summoning the Stand Pucci had given it. The World. Time froze, and the next thing Jolyne knew she was on the ground, dazed. “Ow…”

Pucci ordered Whitesnake to pull out Jolyne’s Stand disc – and it produced another disc for Stone Free. But Stone Free still clearly existed within Jolyne. Which made no sense.

It was then that Pucci understood. He smirked. “This is a dream world.”

“Eh?”

Pucci raised a hand and summoned a golden chalice to his hand. “It shapes itself based on what we think. You thought you had Stone Free in a moment of instinct, so you did. I thought I could take the Stand from you in a disc, so I did – but you still thought you had Stone Free, so you also kept it.”

“So… We aren’t really human right now, are we?”

“Presumably not,” Pucci declared. “…I wonder how far this dream goes…” He held out his hand, imagining a mountain. Only a couple of pine trees and a large rock appeared. “Clearly, very limited in scope…”

Jolyne narrowed her eyes. Something about this world made the priest think he was getting closer to his goal. Did he want the power to make dreams reality, perhaps? Would that be his ‘way to Heaven’?

She focused hard on her thoughts, creating a few dozen Stone Frees. “Heh.”

Pucci dispelled the ‘mountain’ and created a few dozen Whitesnakes. “You think this will work?”

“It’s a great idea.”

“It’s foolish. We have limits to our imagination, but I also have a real Whitesnake, and the spirit here has The World. You would lose.”

Jolyne clenched her fist – she knew he was right. Their ‘imagination’ power in this universe would be identical, and he had the edge. Damage to their ‘bodies’ could probably just be undone...

She let the Stone Frees stand down. “Fine. Where to next, Father?”

Pucci consulted the discs again – discovering almost instantly where they needed to go. “We’re in a place where the paths are easy to uncover. Because we can dream up portals to take us to the places we desire.” He waved his hand; opening to a universe much like the one they were in, except the expanse was completely black. “Come.”

When Jolyne resisted, Whitesnake grabbed her by the neck and pulled her through to the black expanse. They still manifested themselves as their human form, but something had changed. The world felt cold.

Pucci tried to generate a golden chalice – but nothing happened. He furrowed his brow, moving to consult the two discs for what to do next.

He didn’t get very far with them. A man appeared in front of him – a man Jolyne recognized from pictures.

Dio.

Pucci and Jolyne recoiled.

“An appropriate response,” Dio said, sneering. “The daughter of the man who killed me, and my closest disciple… or should I say traitor.”

Pucci summoned Whitesnake as a defense and ordered the spirit to summon The World. “You were wrong, Dio.”

“It was merely incomplete!” Dio declared. “The first step! Had you achieved Heaven you would have seen much more, and realized that my words were right all along!”

Pucci’s cold exterior faltered. “D-dio, I-”

Jolyne punched Dio. “Trick. This is a trick,” she declared. “You’re an illusion.”

Dio summoned The World, grabbing Jolyne’s neck with much more force than Whitesnake had been using. “Does this feel like an illusion, Little Jojo?”

The spirit’s version of The World and Whitesnake punched Dio. Whitesnake removed a ‘The World’ disc from Dio – but the vampire’s Stand still remained.

“Did you like doing that again?” Dio shouted. “Did it feel better now that I’m alive? Or do you prefer taking it from a corpse!?”

Whitesnake punched Dio into the ground. “You’re not real,” Pucci declared.

“Perhaps not,” a new voice said – that of a man with unusual poofy white hair. “Perhaps I’m not either, brother.”

“W-weather Report?” Pucci stuttered.

“Good grief…” Jotaro said, walking towards them. “All of you are embarrassments.”

“D-dad!?” Jolyne blurted.

Jotaro, Weather Report, and Dio cracked their knuckles and summoned their stands.

“Don’t look at Weather Report!” Pucci shouted. “He’ll turn you into a snail through your eyes!”

Jolyne forced her eyes shut. “I’d like Stone Free back now!”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Pucci said, driving a Stand disc into her – the version of The World he had just taken from Dio a few moments ago. “Stop time!”

Jolyne, the angel spirit, Jotaro, and Dio stopped time at the same moment, freezing Pucci and Weather Report. The angel spirit met Dio with The World, evenly matched.

Jolyne had to face her father. She allowed her eyes to open in the frozen time.

“Not real…” She said, trying her best to focus on using a Stand she’d never had before. She knew The World was stronger than Star Platinum in almost every way, but it didn’t have quite the same level of finesse or accuracy.

“ORA!” Jotaro yelled.

“ORA!” Jolyne yelled back.

The two Stands of the same type bashed at each other with rapidly moving punches, cycling back and forth in even time. Jolyne began to strain.

There’s no way I can beat Dad.

She realized with some horror that because she thought that, she was doomed to lose to him in this universe.

He got a punch off on her. She closed her eyes and time resumed. “We can’t win!” Jolyne declared. “Our minds dreamed up enemies we could never defeat!”

“I figured that out,” Pucci declared, trying his very best to fight the unimaginable power of Weather Report while blind. “We just need to buy enough time for me to consult the discs!”

“OR WE COULD JUST PACK UP AND GO HOME!”

“Swap!” Pucci shouted. “You get Weather Report, I’ll be able to fend Jotaro off while I process.”

“You’re underestimating my dad!”

“I can hold my own!”

The two flipped locations, Jolyne using the power of The World to make up for being essentially blind. She froze time and opened her eyes. She punched Weather Report through the face, not holding back in the slightest. He was just an illusion after all.

“ORA!” Jotaro yelled, rushing the frozen Pucci. Jolyne considered letting him die – but then she wouldn’t have a way back since she really had no idea what he was doing to take them from universe to universe. She launched herself physically at the visage of her father, taking a sideways hit across her stomach.

Then time resumed. No longer was Weather Report a danger. Pucci proved himself to be just as clever as Jolyne – having predicted where Jotaro was going to appear, he had Whitesnake ready, driving a copy of his Stand disc into him. The illusion wasn’t sure how to deal with two Stands in one body, dissipating in a puff of confusion.

“Get us out of here!” Jolyne blurted.

Pucci held the two discs to his head.

“AUGH! You’re too fix-”

Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She whipped around, punching them across the face with The World.

It was Jotaro.

Again.

Behind him was another Weather Report.

She saw him activate his power… She felt her inner body start changing…

“Got it!” Pucci declared opening a portal. He dragged Jolyne through with him to another plane of whiteness, the angel spirit following.

“WRYYYYYYYYYY!” Dio called after them, upset that he had never done more than stalemate a mindless spirit.

The portal closed behind them.

Despite themselves, Pucci and Jolyne fell onto the ground, exhausted, breathing heavily.

~~~

Pinkie’s group and Rev appeared in a white expanse of nothingness.

Nova looked at her hooves. “Sweet. It’s good to be me.”

“That was too jarring of a change,” Vriska muttered. “We should be reeling more from it…”

Rev looked around, confused. “Is there nothing here? What are we standing on?”

Pinkie giggled. “We’re here, and we’re standing on a plane of functionally infinite size! Woo!”

Rev wasn’t satisfied with these answers but didn’t push it.

“Huh, the path is significantly easier to follow now,” Nova said, checking her leg screen. “Sweet. I can take us right to the next place. Goodbye, endless whiteness!”

Flutterfree held up a hoof. “Wait… Don’t you girls see?” She activated Lolo fully. “Nothing of us is actually here.”

All of them were nothing more than sparks of gray amongst the white.

“Huh,” Nova said. “…Odd.”

Nova opened the next portal. “We can come back and wonder about this later, right now we’ve got to follow them. If we can move quickly through the next few like we’ve been here, we’ll catch up.”

They entered the black expanse. Pinkie raised a hoof. “By the way, this is going to get a little screwy.”

“How so…?” Vriska asked.

Pinkie pointed at a version of the Doctor walking towards them from the blackness, a gun in hand.

“What the fuck…?” Vriska said, backing up instinctively.

“This is an embarrassment!” Joseph Joestar said, appearing from the side. “I gave my life for you people, and now look at what you’re doing! Scrambling through these universes with no way to go!”

Jotaro tensed. “This kind of screwy. I see…”

Sombra appeared in front of Nova. “Boop!”

A Pinkie with flat hair and a psychotic look appeared as well. “HI THERE! Time to kill ’em all!”

And Rev… saw an old man in a priest’s robe. He looked livid. “Starlight…”

“…Am I supposed to know you?” Rev asked, cocking her head.

“Wh-”

“Oh, you’re probably someone from my past right?” Rev smiled. “See, I have no idea what my past is. Sorry.”

“I am Fa-”

Flutterfree unleashed Lolo in full at every single illusion, touching them with a strand and dissipating them into nothing. “They aren’t really here. They were never really here. They were creations of our own mind.”

Jotaro dropped his fighting stance. “…You made that easy.”

“You’re welcome,” Flutterfree said, smiling warmly. “Nova?”

“Uh… Yeah,” Nova pressed some buttons on her screen. “I have i-”

“We’re going to have to talk about your vendetta against Sombra,” Flutterfree interrupted.

Nova sucked in a deep breath. “Let’s talk about that later.”

“Agreed,” Pinkie cheered. “TO THE NEXT WORLD!”

Jotaro lingered for a moment while the others piled into the open portal.

He thought, for a moment, that he had seen Jolyne’s corpse.

He couldn’t shake the image.

~~~

Pucci stood up before Jolyne, feeling the power of the world. “Jolyne…”

Jolyne blinked, looking around at the white expanse. “What, are we here?”

“Perhaps…” He held up his hand – and the white expanse was gone. They were on an Earth. Birds chirped, the leaves rustled, and a nearby brook babbled. Pucci smiled. “Ah… With but a wish, I created a perfect world…”

Jolyne tensed. Did he have what he wanted?

Pucci opened a portal to the first universe that connected. He imagined the perfect world growing into the void of stars he saw, and the plants did indeed move. But he frowned. “This power… This power is overwritten. The worlds will not accept permanent perfection from here.”

Jolyne put her hands on her shoulders. “Then why don’t you just take your perfect world you’ve made here and be happy with it?”

“That defeats the purpose,” Pucci declared. “The point of reaching Heaven – the Pinnacle – is to bring it back. Back to the worlds and all their broken uncertainties… To introduce a Fate much more certain and glorious than ka.”

Jolyne clenched her fist. “I was afraid you were going to say that…”

Pucci smirked. “What are you going to do about it?”

“The World,” Jolyne summoned, freezing time. The angel spirit noticed, moving through frozen time as well, but it wasn’t able to move fast enough. Jolyne reached into Pucci’s jacket and pulled out a particular disc, punching him with The World’s other hand just to add insult to injury. She allowed time to resume and forced the disc of Stone Free back into herself.

Pucci gaped. “H-how!? All the Stands I gathered from that world vanished upon transit!”

“I guess that happened because you believed they would. I believed I’d keep it.” Jolyne smirked. “And I also believe I can hold two stands. Because I’m just that much of a badass.”

The World and Stone Free appeared behind Jolyne. “Your move, Pucci.”

Pucci used his imagination to summon every Stand he could think of behind him and heal the wound on his face.

Jolyne did the same. “We’re both minds in this world, Pucci. We both do the same things!”

The ‘perfect world’ lost all sense of order. Gone were the plans of using Stands against each other – instead it became a contest of who could think of the most unpredictable attack. Pucci turned the world into fractals. Jolyne summoned to her side a million tiny bees made of pine needles. Pucci turned Jolyne into a snail. Jolyne imagined herself as a devourer of worlds, cutting through Pucci’s midsection. Pucci imagined himself as a holy angel, smiting all that was below him.

The mindless angel spirit just sat, unable to do anything in this battle of imagination.

“This is a stalemate!” Jolyne declared. “Just give up!”

“No it isn’t!” Pucci declared – pushing Whitesnake forward. “There are rules to this place.” He held Rev’s and the angel’s mental discs to his head. “I cannot take your Stands because of your belief… But I can take your belief!”

Whitesnake grabbed for Jolyne’s head. Jolyne created a new version of Whitesnake to meet him. “Not if I get yours first!”

Thousands upon thousands of Whitesnakes appeared, trying at all angles to reach their opponent. Trying to tear their mind out of their body. Space became nothing but Whitesnakes and the forms of Pucci and Jolyne.

Jolyne tried to think of something, anything to break the tie.

“Jolyne,” Pucci said. “Whitesnake has an ability you are not aware of.”

Jolyne paled. Then shook her head. “That doesn’t matter at all! I can give Whitesnake the ability to… To… TURN YOU INTO A SNAIL!”

Pucci became a snail. Jolyne smirked. “And now Whitesnake can extract discs at long range!”

Jolyne grabbed Pucci’s mental disc, holding it in her hands. “Heh. Gotcha.”

“Whitesnake can create illusions,” Pucci declared.

“Wh-”

The world shifted. Pucci’s disc was not in Jolyne’s hand. Instead, Pucci was pulling Jolyne’s mental disc out of her mind.

And Jolyne’s thoughts went blank. Her Whitesnakes vanished from the universe. In an instant Pucci transformed the world back into his ‘perfect world’ now that he was uncontested. He caught Jolyne and set her down on the grass below, next to the angel spirit. He pocketed her mental disc, smirking.

He had won.

Now all he had to do was use the immense power in this universe to climb to the place he needed to go. The absolute dominion he had here… It should be enough to cut to anywhere he wanted. No more steps. He would go right there. Or as close as the energy in this world would let him. H-

Jotaro punched him across the face with Star Platinum a hundred times in the middle of stopped time. It should have been enough to kill – but Pucci just imagined himself back to normal.

Pinkie’s team and Rev had arrived, ready for a fight.

Pucci smiled warmly. He imagined chains around all six of them that could not be broken. He knew they had not yet figured out what mental control they had over the world – and he didn’t plan to tax them enough to let them realize. “Ah, you’re early,” he said, creating six metallic pillars in the background. “Welcome to the perfect world.”

“What’s so perfect about it?” Flutterfree asked.

“Wh-”

“Everyone, this is just a dream world,” Pinkie said, popping out of her chains and transforming into a pink alicorn the size of a small mountain. “Don’t let him distract you. Any of us can do anything here.”

Pucci stared at her, aghast. “How did-”

“Easy. I’m Aware.” She slammed his body into the ground with a hammer the size of a galaxy. “Celestia it feels good to say that.”

Pucci grunted, completely unharmed. “You know there’s no win condition in this world the-”

Pinkie summoned a Whitesnake to her. “Nuh-uh. I totally saw how you beat Jolyne.”

Pucci knew he couldn’t win in this universe. So he had to try something desperate.

He ejected himself into another universe.

Pinkie clearly hadn’t been expecting this move, staring at him in confusion. She recovered quickly, charging after him.

Pucci had all the time he needed – he wasn’t reverting back to standard physics right away. He would retain the power of the dream world for a short time. He summoned the six pillars he had created earlier to him and accessed Rev’s disc. He plugged the information into the pillars, and they tapped into a universe much higher than the one he had just been in.

A bolt of lightning came from everywhere at once, and yet nowhere. It engulfed Pucci and Whitesnake. Their bodies vanished, leaving only the discs behind, floating in space.

“…Did he blow up?” Flutterfree asked, cocking her head to the side.

“Yare yare daze, Icarus flew too close to the sun,” Jotaro commented, grabbing his hat.

“He got what he wanted,” Pinkie said. “It’s not over. That was too anticlimactic.” She grabbed the discs, searching through them. “Right… Here’s Jolyne’s a-”

In a flash of white light, Pucci appeared again. He had fused his form with Whitesnake, becoming a human with black stripes and a black crown-like protrusion growing directly from his skull. His eyes glowed with bright pinkish-purple power, and a cape that burned blue had appeared on his back.

“I’ve done it,” he said. “I am second only to God…”

Pinkie stuffed Rev’s disc back into the unicorn’s mind, quickly. The pink pony was not allowed to replace any others, being frozen in place by an invisible force.

“You try in vain,” Pucci declared, widening the dimensional opening between the dream world and the physical realm he floated in. “I do not change. Not anymore. Now, I am above. I can shape this world into the perfection it needs… And then I can move onto the next… And the next…”

Rev threw a Bible in his face. “DID YOU EVEN READ THIS THING!?”

“Back, are you?” Pucci asked, pulling the Bible off his face. “I am exceptionally well versed in its contents. I became a Father, after al-”

“Right, so, explain to me a few things,” Rev demanded. “How in the name of the Most High can you justify what you’re doing!?”

“I am giving the worlds perfection.”

“THAT IS NOT YOUR JOB!” Rev screamed. “THAT IS GOD’S AND GOD’S ALONE!”

“He uses me.”

“Open to Revelation. Read about the end of times. Perfection will not be achieved in this life, Pucci! Or we could go anywhere else that talks about the soul being purified, or – oh! How about we look at the passages that discuss when God speaks to people? He doesn’t order things against His nature!”

“The Old Testament wars, Rev.”

“You and I both know those had purposes,” Rev growled. “You also know that the Word speaks of peace, understanding, grace, and forgiveness! What you’re doing is not peaceful! It is power hungry, promotes pride, and removes the free will we were given!”

“I do not force them to believe,” Pucci declared. “I will merely force them into beautiful predestination. No uncertainty anymore. The perfect worlds will operate precisely as needed…”

“No man deserves the right to determine the existence of free will!”

“I am in the position to do so, am I not? I have been to the Pinnacle and become the One!”

“You are not the One Above All,” Rev spat. “That is the being second only to God. You aren’t even one of Them. You saw into this disc of mine! You should remember Them!”

“You never met Them,” Pucci declared. “Nor did you meet the One Above All. You act merely on rumors.”

“I’d also never been to the Pinnacle, merely knew of methods by which people tried to find it,” Rev declared. “Why do you think so few people find the Pinnacle? It’s one of those things that doesn’t want to be found!”

Pucci shrugged. “Perhaps I am not as strong as I need to be to remove this dreadful uncertainty from the world… But this is a start. I will find the Pinnacle with this power.”

“Famous last words,” Rev said. “…Do you have any idea how many people have probably said that?”

“Billions,” Pinkie said. “It’s been billions.”

Pucci turned to her. “…You know that.”

“I do. You won’t get to the Pinnacle, Pucci.” She sighed. “And it won’t be the instant-win you want it to be, either.”

Pucci faltered for the first time in the conversation, doubt crossing his face. But he recovered quickly. “Then I will work with what I have. I’ve been given this power – I will bless all the worlds I can.”

“And we have to stop you,” Jotaro decreed.

Pucci smiled the smile of a father whose son had just said something unbelievably stupid. “Jotaro, you can’t do anything to me.” He pointed, and the physical universe he was in was rewritten with new stars and planets, creating a real ‘perfect’ world. “Universes are my plaything. I have the power of a dreamscape in realspace!”

“And we’re currently standing in a dreamscape,” Jolyne said, having just had her disc inserted back into herself by a well-aimed teleport from Nova. “We have the same power right now. And there’s seven of us.”

Pucci decided to cut and run, creating a portal – but Flutterfree’s imagination closed the portal.

The seven of them imagined themselves on the other side of the tear between the dreamscape and the realspace. “We may acclimate slowly to the physics of this universe…” Nova began.

“But that’s going to take at least a few minutes,” Rev declared. “Until then…”

Pinkie created two planet-sized scythes. “GO NUTS!”

Jotaro summoned the Ora to end all Oras – the fist larger than their field of view. Pucci’s physical form was punched to the side, only for a Pink Planet to devour him, candy corn teeth proving to be exceptionally sharp. Jolyne tied him up with Stone Free, imagining each strand of her Stand to be termites with supernova-like attacks.

Pucci resorted to his ability as Whitesnake – pulling the memory disc out of Jolyne.

Pinkie giggled, creating a replacement disc and placing it in her head. “Fun, isn’t it, Father?”

“NO!” Pucci shouted. “THIS IS NOT FUN!”

Nova created a crystal lattice of five dimensions. Flutterfree created a bunch of reality-tearing rabbits. Jotaro kept using the Ora to end all Oras. Jolyne twisted Pucci around and drove him into a woodchipper. Pinkie turned herself into an Eldritch Creature and burrowed herself into his mind. Vriska rolled 8-8s as many times as she wanted, achieving luck beyond comprehension, slicing him into millions of pieces.

The angel appeared, mind restored, still wielding The World. Pucci tore the disc from him. “You don’t deserve that…”

“Who needs it?” The angel decreed, smiting Pucci with holy light and what appeared as the Hand of her Lord.

Pucci reformed once again. He laughed. “You can’t do anything! Your powers may be equal to mine – but I know I can’t be beaten! I just imagine myself back to full! And unlike you, I have no timer!”

“You’re wrong,” Rev said, appearing behind him. An immense cross silhouette appeared behind her, shimmering along the edges like an eclipse. “You’re not immune to judgment, no matter how much power you have.”

Doubt crossed Pucci’s face. “Rev…”

Rev’s eyes went white and her cross necklace began to levitate. “Father Enrico Pucci. You have defied the teachings of Christ and our Lord. You have sought violence and power for yourself. You planned to rewrite the glorious creation with one completely of your own, denying our Creator in the process.”

“I did no such thing.”

Rev pointed a hoof. “Yes you did, Enrico Pucci. You have engaged in idolatry, assisted the lord of lies in his plans, and lived in the ways of the world. You have corrupted the message of the Gospel beyond recognition, to the point not just of blasphemy, but misrepresentation of what we are supposed to stand for.” She blinked, her eyes glowing brighter.

“Enrico Pucci, by the power vested in me by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I declare your time in this existence is over. It is time for you to move onto the next life. See you in Heaven.”

“No… Please! Lord! You sent me on this mission! You put it upon my heart! Yo-”

The white light enveloped Pucci – and in a scream, he vanished, leaving nothing behind.

Rev stopped glowing and shook her head. “Oooog…”

“YOU DID IT!” Flutterfree cheered. “You performed a miracle, Rev!”

Nova rolled her eyes. “She just used her knowledge of Pucci to convince him he could die, and since his power was one of dreams, it meant he would die.”

Flutterfree folded her arms. “I think it was more than that.”

Nova turned to Rev. “What do you think?”

Rev simply smiled knowingly. She said nothing.

“Oh, don’t you dare…”

Flutterfree blinked. “…She’s not going to tell us what she thinks.”

“I don’t care if there’s some doctrine of being ‘humble’ she’s following, this is bull,” Nova blurted. “REV! Hey REV! Come back here!”

“Does it really matter what I think?” Rev asked. “It won’t change what either of you believe in this case, will it?”

Neither of them had a response to that.

Jotaro floated over to his daughter. “Jolyne…”

“About time you showed up, da-”

He pulled her into a hug.

“D-dad! I’m not a ki-” He squeezed harder, keeping her from talking. She flailed for a few seconds before accepting the embrace.

Pinkie appeared on top of Vriska’s head. “Well, that’s that! We stopped Enrico Pucci from unleashing ‘perfection’ on the multiverse! Woo!”

“Yeah. I don’t feel like I did much,” Vriska admitted.

“You weren’t all that important to the drama going on,” Pinkie admitted. “It was focused on Rev and Jotaro. I didn’t even get to do much this time, it’s a weird feeling!”

“You being open about this is a little weirder, in my mind.”

“Well, how’s this for weird? Originally, Pucci was supposed to be Jolyne’s nemesis. He would have reset Earth Stand if we hadn’t showed up and fixed things back then.”

“Huh.” Vriska pondered this. “Yeah I don’t know how to feel about that, Pinkie. I’m just going to accept this as a good ending and roll with it.”

Pinkie grinned. “There is one thing here that’s not just a dream construct that will vanish later.” Pinkie pulled the disc of The World out of nowhere. “We’ve still got this.”

“MINE!” Vriska shouted.

“Ah ah ah!” Pinkie said, pulling it away. “Nope! You’ve got enough. We’ll be sending this to the Research Division, see what they can do with it. Replicating Whitesnake’s ability would be very helpful.”

“Aw…. Fine.”

Jotaro and Jolyne released each other.

“…I’m proud of you,” Jotaro said.

“Dad…”

“I’m serious. You handled yourself well. You and Pucci had to have gotten through that dark illusion world somehow. You fought valiantly. And you knew exactly what to do when you came to.”

Jolyne rubbed the back of her head. “…Yeah, I am a pretty big deal, I guess.”

“It seems I forgot to teach you humility.”

“Yep!” Jolyne said, smirking. “And it’s faaaaaar too late to start now!”

“I can try.”

Jolyne shook her head. “Yare yare dawa…”

“Like father like daughter,” Vriska commented.

“Sorry to cut this short!” Pinkie said. “But our dream powers are going to dissipate REALLY soon and then we won’t be able to breathe in the vacuum of space! We should get back home!”

Rev nodded. “Yeah… We should. But I want to say something first.” She looked to them all. “Thank you for dropping everything to help me. We may not agree on… well, much of anything, really. But it’s humbling to know the lengths you’re willing to go through for somepony like me.” She bowed her head. “I am in your debt.”

“You beat him,” Vriska pointed out. “Let’s call it even.”

“Let’s call it friendship,” Pinkie corrected, giggling.

They laughed together.

059 - Strands of Existence

The universe existed as a cloud of air tinged a dark blue. Within this universe was an innumerable number of square, silvery-white rods, each side coursing with blue veins of energy. Upon these veins, structures were packed as densely as humanly possible – and in some cases even beyond that. Every visible square foot of these rods was occupied by houses, restaurants, office spaces, markets, and other structures of indeterminate purpose. There was no rhyme or reason to the location – it just was. And it seemed to go on forever. At the edges of the visible range within the blue ‘atmosphere’, the lights of other rods could be seen like distant stars.

At the intersection of three of the rods, the density of construction skyrocketed. Even though the rods meshed with each other seamlessly, the constructions added to them conglomerated into a vaguely spherical pattern of scaffolds upon which just about anything could be held. Ships docked at these scaffolds through fresh dimensional portals, some structures held on to the sphere with a tether, and other buildings floated within the scaffolding as if they were part of a tile puzzle.

It was at the edge of this spherical conglomeration that Pinkie and her team appeared. The jaws of the ponies dropped. Jotaro looked up, somewhat impressed with what he was seeing. From their position standing on the rod, they could see hundreds of people going about their business – buying, selling, bartering, running, anything really. The majority of these individuals were human or human-esque, but they could see strange crab creatures, bugs made out of crystal, and even a few energy beings floating around.

Vriska just grinned. “I wondered when we were going to find one of these!”

“One of what?” Nova asked.

Vriska held out a hand and Pinkie gave Vriska a stylish hat, holes for her horns included. “This, my little ponies and gigantic human, is called an Outpost. Hundreds of thousands of dimensional travelers pass through these kinds of locations every day.”

Flutterfree put a hoof to her mouth. “Oh my… Have we found one of the larger societies?”

“Nope,” Vriska said, smirking. She pulled out their loose map of the universe. “This is the E-Sphere, this is the Q-Sphere, and this is the D-Sphere. This area in between them? There’s less universes here, but these universes are densely packed and closely connected by a network of ancient constructs. Because of this, multiversal travel is nowhere near as difficult or unusual. In some places you can translate universes by walking. Thusly, this area in the ‘middle’ is called the Strands.” She smiled, glad for an excuse to go on a little monologue. “Outposts are a natural result of that. Previously empty universes that literally everyone starts moving into at the same time, creating a lawless mess. This mess is one of the best things about the multiverse. If you know where to look, you could probably find anything in one of these places. I even found an infinite sided die once. Man I wish I still had that, best dicekind in existence…”

“Is there anyone in charge we can talk to?” Nova asked.

Vriska chuckled. “If you’re lucky, there’s a trade-master or something in charge of that conglomeration sphere there, but there’s no way that guy will have any authority on, say, that conglomeration sphere you can see in the distance over there. As I said, lawless mess. And it’s great. Now that you’ve found this place you can probably easily answer a few of your questions.”

“That you refuse to answer?” Jotaro commented.

Vriska chuckled. “Yep! You know what, I have an idea. Why don’t I find an information broker and show you how shit’s done. You game?”

“I’m always game!” Pinkie cheered. “Vriska, take the torch of leader-for-a-day.”

Vriska took the literal torch Pinkie had pulled out. “About time. ONWARD!” She led them into the conglomeration sphere. The inhabitants and visitors to the Outpost paid them almost no mind. To the average person here, these five were normal. So what if three of them were horses? There was a gigantic creature that was nothing but an eyeball floating in the void that was more interesting. Or that hive-mind swarm of wasps.

Vriska looked around, narrowing her eyes. It had been a while since she’d been in one of these, and none of them had the same culture or unspoken rules. There were a few things you could assume – the place would operate on ‘everyone for themselves’ for the most part, but everyone also wanted to trade. Nobody would accept Merodi Universalis money unless Vriska found a banker, and finding a trustworthy banker in this pit of filth was going to be like finding a needle in a universe made out of hay. They probably existed, but Vriska didn’t know the place well enough yet. They’d have to make do with bartering…

“Pinkie, start pulling out bizarre things that might be worth something. We can probably get someone to give us basic information for a cake.”

“Gotcha!”

Vriska glanced at all the people around – regular shopper, family man surrounded by his kids, a weapon merchant, mob boss and his guards, a computer terminal, and – oh, there! The mole-man with thousands of data pads behind him. Vriska gestured for the team to go to him.

“Hey, sniffy,” she greeted.

“I am Laurence,” the mole-man said, sniffing with his powerful nose. “I take it you have an itchin’ to know somethin’? Well do I have the information for you! I’ve got dirt on everyone in the Outpost and reviews for virtually every established business on these rods. What’ll it be?”

“We might indulge in that later,” Vriska said. “Right now I’m showing my knuckleheaded friends here how things work. How about… something basic, like a basic multiversal glossary. Full-scope, Laurence, I’ll know if you’re giving them something that’s bullshit.”

Laurence raised an eyebrow. “As you wish. Not the cheapest item I have, you understand. Such high demand from newcomers for it.”

Pinkie popped up, setting a purple and brown cake in front of the mole. “This delectable treat is made from the finest natural ingredients found in my hammerspace. It’s baked to perfection in a time dilated oven and sprinkled with sugar generated through mysterious means. Its primary flavor is chocolate, but it also has pristine truffles baked in. The aroma should be reaching your nose right… about… now.”

“I’ll take it,” Laurence said. He handed them a small, white disc. “There you go.”

Vriska nodded. “We’ll probably be back after we review this.” She took the disc and twirled it on her fingernail. “Nova, do you mind if we use your hoof-screen?”

“Uh… no?”

Vriska slapped the disc to the back of Nova’s hoof, adhering it to her screen. Her device stopped displaying temporal and dimensional readings, instead showing a document entitled The Multiverse: Big Questions.

The biggest question in the multiverse: is it infinite? The answer is decidedly no. There are about ten quintillion individual universes in the entire multiverse, according to mapping software. That’s comparable to the number of stars visible to light-based telescopes within a standard-physics universe. It’s a big number.

The vast majority of these universes have no contact with the larger multiverse. 99.99% of universes are completely unaware and will remain completely unaware of what lies beyond for their entire existence. Only about a quadrillion universes can be said to be part of the multiversal scope of existence, and only a trillion are actually part of larger-scale societies. Only Class 1 societies would even appear on a realistic map of the multiverse, and even then only as a few pixels on most screens.

“Eve will love to have that question put to bed,” Flutterfree said. “The Sparkle Census too.”

“That’s still really, really big. Functionally infinite,” Nova pointed out. “I’m going to read about what these classes actually mean…”

Class is a scale devised to measure the relative influence of a multiversal society. The origin of the scale is unknown, but it’s simple enough that it could have been created in multiple different forms simultaneously. Some say there are only three classes, but enough use the term Class 4 for it to be included here.

Class 4 refers to anything that has access to reliable dimensional travel. Due to this vague definition, single entities can be Class 4 ‘societies’, which is why many think it isn’t truly part of the list.

Class 3 societies are ones who have unified more than a handful of universes (or sections of universes) together. The method does not matter; all that matters is that several universes are under the same authority. The exact threshold that turns a bunch of Class 4 explorers into a Class 3 society is vague, but societies never stay at the ‘middle ground’ for long, always converting into what is easily recognizable as a Class 3 or falling apart to nothing.

Class 2 societies are societies that meet two criteria. 1) They have the means to access the entire multiverse should they wish, even if they avoid dangerous areas. 2) If their core worlds were to be completely annihilated in one fell swoop, their society would still be able to function on roughly the same level as it had prior to the destruction. This does not take into account political fallout, merely the distribution of resources. The meeting of the second requirement is called ‘decentralization’, even if the society itself is ruled by a monarch. There are only a few dozen Class 2 societies in the entire multiverse.

Class 1 societies are harder to define, merely because each one is so different. One could say ‘they have enough direct control to actually make an impact on the multiverse as a whole’, or ‘they have so much power at their disposal that entire Class 3 societies could be wiped out with a snap of their fingers.’ The problem is that there are so few societies that reach such a level of unimaginable power – seven currently - it’s somewhat difficult to draw comparisons between them, especially since they rarely bother with any societies beneath them aside from the strongest of the Class 2s. Rest easy knowing that you will likely never draw the attention of one of these giants.

“Wow,” Nova said. “Just… wow. Vriska… Exactly how powerful are these Class 1s?”

“The Doctor’s race is known as the Gallifreyan Time Lords and they have access to technology that can distort and alter the timelines in multiple universes at once, giving them uncontested dominion over the temporal mechanics in the multiverse. They defeat their enemies by erasing them from time and then altering the physics of any given universe and the universes around it to prevent anyone from ever bringing it back, twisting paradoxes like candy to do whatever they want.” Vriska sneered. “They are a Class 2 society.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. The power scale is absurd. I’ve never actually been to any Class 1 societies. Seen a few individuals from them, heard rumors of others, but never been. They aren’t big on sharing information with us ‘lowers’.”

“Wow…” Flutterfree said. “Just when I thought we might be getting big… Class 3 seems kinda tiny.”

“You’re still more powerful than 99.999% of everything,” Vriska pointed out. “It’s just that now you’re out in the big leagues.”

Nova scrolled through the rest of the document. “Huh. Nothing about ka in here at all.”

“Courtesy,” Vriska said. “It’s something the multiverse has generally agreed people need to work out on their own. Buying information about it involves a lot of payment because it’s the secret most have subconsciously agreed to keep.”

Nova nodded. “Most of the other stuff in here I think we already know. How connections work… The idea of ‘metatime’… hold on, the Sea of Infinite Possibility?”

Vriska looked at the pad. “That big blurb there is making that seem more important than what it is. The Sea is just an idea that describes everything that could exist. It’s what the ancient crazies decided to name the stuff the multiverse sits in. Which isn’t really stuff at all, but a lack of stuff. Unless you’re going to start looking into the finer mechanics of universe creation and destruction, it doesn’t matter at all. And if you are, that blurb there isn’t going to tell you fuck all that’s useful.”

“Gotcha,” Nova said, prying off the disc. “Anyone else want to look at it?”

Pinkie pulled out a small television screen and placed the disc on it.

“Why didn’t we do that before?” Nova asked.

Pinkie shrugged. “Didn’t think of it. Come on everyone, crowd around!”

Nova rolled her eyes, taking a moment to look around the Outpost. She found it interesting to watch the people go about their business. There were friendly transactions, aggressive transactions, and even a few transactions that happened without a single word being spoken. Quite a few interesting characters as well; a man with three heads, an energy being that had a skull mask affixed to it, a sapient potato, a unicorn with goggles wearing a black suit, Sombra, green sl-

Wait, unicorn? Goggles? Black suit? Wasn’t that the Enchant-

The conclusion she was about to draw was lost. Sombra!?

Nova’s sights focused – that was Sombra all right. Could it be an alternate version of her? No… She was holding a Merodi Universalis-designed data pad.

Nova opened her mouth to call for her team, but she hesitated.

“We’re going to need to have a talk about your vendetta against Sombra.”

“Nova, come on, Sombra helps us a lot.”

“Loosen up a little. She is what she is.”

Nova closed her mouth. She couldn’t tell her team about this. They’d just let Sombra get away because she was useful. Nova sat down, fuming – Sombra was a criminal. Just last week, she had exposed the Diamonds and their secret visits to the Friendship School. That was private! Why would she do that!? It just… It was wrong. And she needed to be stopped.

But noooo, she was just too useful. And fun, apparently.

Screw that.

She tapped a few buttons on her hoof-screen. She wasn’t going to let this slide. She was going to do something.

She sent Froppy a quick message, telling her that she’d just seen Sombra and the coordinates to the universe. There was a footnote telling the USM to leave Nova out of this.

It was done.

She walked back to the rest of the group, who were wrapping up the reading of the document.

Jotaro folded his arms. “Now… what information should we barter for next?”

“Find out where a good tech depot is,” Vriska commented. “You never know what you might find in those. Ah-“

A human in a green suit cleared his throat and walked up to them. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice that you’re new here. My name is Jargon, and I take it upon myself to introdu-“

“Fuck off,” Vriska blurted.

“I don’t think you understa-“

“They’re new here, I’m not,” Vriska said, glaring at him. “I know your type. You prey on the newbies who don’t know any better just to get things from them. That’s not happening today.”

“I assure you, I can be of great help,” Jargon said. “For instance, the tech depot you are looking for? Gearnix down the street is the best one, run by a machine that is programmed to be unable to deceive others.”

“There’s going to be some big catch,” Vriska pointed out, folding her arms. “There always is.”

“I assure you, I would only tell you the best of all possible options. And I will not take anything you have with you for myself. My services are free.”

Pinkie rammed her muzzle into his face. “I sense technical truths, buddy.”

Jargon shook his head. “You may not trust me, but at least allow me to come with you to warn you of dangers. I-“

Vriska pointed at Jotaro. “Hey, Jargon. You see the big guy behind me? Big guy doesn’t talk much. Big guy is also pretty easy to piss off. Now imagine, if you will, what will happen if you continue being annoying. Imagine big guy blowing a fuse.”

Jargon shook his head. “Physical size is not a criteria o-“

“ORA!”

The invisible fist punched Jargon across the face, sending him flying into a nearby wall. The man stood up, dusted himself off, and walked away. He took out a small device with a green screen and began flipping through what appeared to be data.

Flutterfree narrowed her eyes. “I think he was scanning us.”

“What the hell’s he going to do with a scan?” Vriska asked. “Nothing that concerns us, that’s what. Let’s go.”

They went back to Laurence and traded one of Vriska’s eight balls for the best tech depot.

It turned out to actually be Gearnix.

~~~

Sombra heard a loud crash a ways behind her. She instinctively turned herself invisible, just in case the noise was the start of a tremendous brawl. She did not want to get caught in another one of those.

That said; she did want to see what was happening. She poked her head around the corner and saw, to her surprise, Pinkie’s team glaring at a green-suited man. She paid no attention to the man, instead fixating on the team of people she knew.

They’d found her little secret. She was wondering if they ever would – part of her had hoped they wouldn’t since she liked her private access to this information, but the other part had always wanted them to figure out more things for her through this place. She was far from the omnipotent hacker she wanted to be in this Outpost. She was just another fish in the ocean, not a school of coordinated dolphins.

Pinkie’s team started walking away after talking to an information broker. Vriska looked like she knew what she was doing, so Sombra didn’t feel the need to help them in any way. Let them have their fun…

She was, of course, going to follow them and watch. Closely. Who knew, maybe she’d even reveal herself at some point? Heh. Nova would love that. Not. But the look on that unicorn’s face would be priceless regardless.

She tailed them to the Gearnix technology depot. They talked a bit to the truthbot, who directed them to a large cargo container filled to the brim with random salvage. Vriska went at the pile with gusto, showing off her knowledge of the multiverse. Nova paid rapt attention, clearly taking mental notes on every piece of technology she saw. Pinkie jumped around and found the shiniest objects while Jotaro and Flutterfree stood to the side, watching the other three do their thing.

Sombra caught a “Yare yare daze…” She chuckled. She had found that catchphrase annoying when she’d first started observing Jotaro, but now it was an endearing part of him. She had a few remixes of him saying it in tune to various memetic songs sitting on her Puddlejumper. She wondered why she hadn’t published any of those to the public yet… Something to fix when she returned. She really wasn’t sure what his reaction would be.

Pinkie’s team decided they wanted to purchase a green three-dimensional video recorder. They returned to the truthbot and Pinkie pulled things out of her mane until truthbot decided the payment was enough. They went back to the streets, heading back to the information broker for more.

Sombra continued her observations. If only they knew she had all the answers for them…

~~~

Allure walked into the main observation deck for Dimensional Drive Two within Celestia City. It was a small metallic balcony looking out over a brilliant white sphere surrounded by six rings rotating in different planes from one another.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“The drive started activating itself a few minutes ago,” Blumiere said, holding his hat. “The engineers cut off the emergency power, but it’s still spooling up slowly.”

Allure blinked. “Want me to call Engineetie? …Actually you probably have better engineers than that. Why am I here?”

“I need the League to prepare everyone for a possible sudden jump. Spread yourselves across the City, every district you can. I don’t know what’s going to happen if this triggers, but there’s a large chance we won’t be able to stop it.” He folded his hands. “It’s times like this I wish we hadn’t anti-teleported everything this deep down.”

“I’ll send some Sweeties down who might be able to stop it,” Allure said. “How long do we have?”

“Less than an hour, they tell me.”

Allure sent a message to the League, telling them to scramble. “Do we know what’s causing it?”

“No idea,” Blumiere said. “We suspect it’s coming from another universe, but they must be using a method of travel we’re unaware of because our blocking spells are doing nothing.”

“An attack?”

“Perhaps. Or just a fluke.”

“Do we have any idea of the destination?”

“At the moment, no.”

Allure didn’t like the sound of that. She ran back the way she had come, sending orders to the League to spread out. Thrackerzod and Engineetie needed to come down to the Drive, perhaps a few others she wasn’t thinking of…

Something was trying to make them jump universes.

Why?

She had the feeling they would find out soon enough.

~~~

“I still have no idea what flavor of snow cone this is,” Nova commented, spooning some of the purple shaved ice into her mouth with her magic.

“Isn’t that amazing!?” Pinkie blurted. “Brand new, alien flavors of sweets just for us!”

“Lots of universes have unusual fruit,” Flutterfree pointed out, having used her fangs to suck all the flavoring out of her cone in an instant. She was just munching on the ice now.

“But what if this isn’t a fruit?” Pinkie asked. “What if… It’s a type of celery?”

“Is it?” Vriska asked.

“I have no idea!”

“Had to ask.”

Pinkie opened her mouth to say something, but her stomach rumbled. “Sweet sugarbeets! I think all those snow cones did was make me even hungrier! We need lunch!”

Jotaro pulled his hat down. “Yare yar-“

Because he wasn’t looking where he was going, he ran into someone. Jotaro stumbled but kept his footing while the woman he had run into let out a comical “KYAAAAAAA!” and fell onto her back. She was a smaller woman with orange hair done up in a side ponytail that went all the way down to her waist. She was wearing what could best be described as a white battle-dress with blue designs criss-crossing it at mostly square angles. In her hands was a pointed scepter with a golden javelin-like tip encasing a floating red sphere in the center.

Jotaro wordlessly extended a hand to help her back up. She took it with an awkward smile. “Heh…”

“Sorry!” Pinkie blurted. “I was being silly and I got him distracted and the-“

“It’s fine,” she said, twirling her scepter around to ensure her arms were still limber. “I wasn’t really in a hurry to get anywhere or anything.” She smiled at them. “Well, I always say that bumping into someone is a good chance to make new friends. Hi! I’m Nanoha Takamachi.”

Pinkie gasped. “You… You offered to be friends before us!? That never happens!” The biggest smile crossed the pink pony’s face. “Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie, leader of this group of interdimensional explorers! That’s Flutterfree, Nova, Vriska, and big and quiet is Jotaro!” She shook Nanoha’s hand rapidly, even though Nanoha had never actually offered it. “We’re going to be besties!”

Nanoha’s grin widened – not as big or excited as Pinkie’s, but it was perhaps more vibrant.

“We were just going to search for some lunch, would you like to join us?” Pinkie pleaded.

“I was looking for some lunch as well! I was going to meet up with some of my crew but, you know, when fate calls!” Apparently this was some kind of private joke for her because she started chuckling. “Let me just tell them what’s happening.” She paused for a moment, looking into the distance.

Vriska put a finger to her head, sending a telepathic message to her. Nanoha reacted with only mild surprise, and over the next handful of seconds they engaged in a mental conversation.

“No fair,” Nova called. “Talk where the rest of us can hear you, please.”

Vriska chuckled. “I’ve vetted her. She’s okay.”

Nanoha put a hand to her head. “Oh no, you had doubts?”

“Jotaro had to punch a pesterer,” Flutterfree said.

Nanoha raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Oh, you had a bad experience. I am sorry – these places are just like that. No matter how nice you are, there’s always another person looking to take advantage of you.”

“Sad truth,” Flutterfree agreed.

Nanoha nodded. “Anyway! I know the best place for eating around here. Or the best one we’ve found so far, we’ve only been in this outpost a few days. For all I know that light in the distance over there is actually the best taco joint in the multiverse that I shall never uncover.”

“99.99%,” Nova commented.

Nanoha chuckled “Yeah, that is true. But you’ll love this place, I know it!”

“How do you know for suuuure?” Pinkie asked.

“I just do,” Nanoha smirked.

Pinkie looked at her incredulously. “Hrm…”

“I’m not psychic or anything, it’s just the best.” She pointed her staff forward. “To food!”

“That’s a pretty impressive staff you have,” Nova commented. “The readings are off the charts.”

Nanoha nodded. “It’s name is Raising Heart. Or Raging Heart. Translator spells have a weird time with its name. Isn’t that right Raising Heart?”

The red crystal core flashed. “Of course, my master,” it said with a synthetic, feminine voice.

“Ohmygosh it talks!” Pinkie declared. “That’s amazing!”

“AI?” Nova asked.

“Partial,” Nanoha admitted. “Raising Heart has thoughts and feelings, but they’re on a more limited level than our own. It seems odd to people at first, but where I’m from any mage needs one of these.”

“Really? You can’t just cast magic like this?” Nova asked, summoning a spark of energy from the aether.

Nanoha shook her head. “No, we can, but most can’t do anything complicated without an aid from a device. Devices also help awaken untapped magic potential.”

“Oh thank goodness,” Flutterfree said in relief.

“Hm?”

“Oh, I have a power that unlocks hidden potential and reveals things. It’s just nice to hear I won’t have to worry about accidentally triggering something from you.”

Nanoha smirked, “Rest easy, Flutterfree. I’m already a SSS+ class mage. If there’s more power I can tap into I’d be very surprised. An- Oh! Here it is!” She spread her arms wide. “The best bakery in existence!”

The restaurant was shaped like a loaf of bread. The sign outside just read The Loaf.

Vriska blinked. “Uh…”

“Don’t judge a book by its cover!” Pinkie decreed, bouncing into The Loaf. Half of the interior of the loaf was devoted entirely to the baking of bread; the rest was for the tables, of which there were only a dozen. Each was round and made of simple wood, with only half of them filled at the moment.

Nanoha sat down at the one closest to the bar. “The variety platter, Jordisk!”

A three-headed snake-man poked his head right over the counter. “Right away Misssssss Takamachi…”

“Come here often?” Nova asked.

“Found it the first day. I’ve come here every day since then,” Nanoha admitted. “I recommend their sourdough chowder bread bowl, but the variety platter should give you a taste.”

“This isn’t one of those restaurants with a mysterious chef who heals you by exploding parts of your body, is it?” Jotaro asked.

Nanoha raised an eyebrow. “I’d love to hear the story behind that one. No, this place just serves regular perfect bread. Of every kind that isn’t from some eldritch pocket dimension.”

The platter arrived, stacked like a small mountain. There were croissants, biscuits, rolls, muffins, strange stick-shaped pieces of bread, and slices of many others. Sourdough, rye, white, challah, a strange buttery one Nanoha said was ‘monkey bread’, and even a few slices of blueberry toast. There were plenty of toppings to the side from butter to jelly to exotic sauces. The aroma of all the baked goods was heavenly.

“Feel free to dig in!” Nanoha said. “And don’t worry about being neat and tidy about it, be loud!”

“Finally, someone who understands,” Jotaro said, devouring a nearby piece ravenously, Pinkie following suit.

“You wouldn’t be from a version of Japan, would you?” Nanoha asked.

Jotaro nodded.

“Same here! Logia, that life seems like forever ago… Oh! I’ve told you a lot about myself, but why don’t you tell me about you?”

“New Class 3 civilization on the block,” Vriska said. “Q-Sphere, in a very large cluster of equine universes.”

Nanoha clapped her hands. “Oh, there’s a pony civilization now? There wasn’t anything there last time our patrols went through - well, besides the things we may have been partially responsible for.”

“There is now!” Pinkie said, grinning. “Merodi Universalis, four years old, at your service. Well, fourish. Hard to tell sometimes.”

“There’s actually more than one,” Fluterfree added. “Our neighbors, the Sparkle Census, are ponies as well. Almost all ponies.”

Nanoha sat back, munching on a piece of bread that resembled a miniature lobster. “Cuteness overload…”

Nova facehooved. “Why does everyone always go to the cute thing?”

“Cause that’s part of your design,” Jotaro commented.

“I… But… Ugh,” Nova grunted.

“Oh, you know about ka?” Nanoha asked. “Not all the Class 3s do.”

“More of a recent discovery,” Pinkie said. “It helps that I’m Aware.”

Nanoha smiled. “That definitely would help. I trust your society isn’t falling apart then?”

“Nope!” Flutterfree decreed. “The bonds of friendship are too strong!”

Nanoha looked at her with an expression that seemed… sad. “…It’s refreshing to hear that from someone that isn’t us.”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“The idea of friends driving things… It’s so rare in the multiverse. It’s all about power. Or money. Or expansion. Or part of some competition. Or ‘just because we can’. Or just because it’s for the greater good.” She smiled at them all. “I hope you never lose that part of yourselves. Keep hold of it, it’s a rare gift.”

“It sure is!” A new voice said. Sombra crawled over the back of an empty chair and sat down. “That’s why they’re so endearing.”

Nova froze. “S-s-sombra!?”

“Yes, it’s me, Sombra.” Sombra chuckled. “Here I am, crashing the party like I always do.”

Nanoha didn’t ask anyone who Sombra was. She extended her hand. “Hello! I’m Nanoha Takamachi.”

Sombra shook it. “See? This woman knows how to greet people.”

“I know how to greet people too!” Pinkie declared.

“You’re a freak of nature with uncanny people skills,” Sombra pointed out. “Talking about miss startled-light, mister poker face, and miss flipping-me-off in her mind.”

“That’s pretty much a constant to everyone,” Vriska admitted.

Sombra shrugged. “Eh, potato, potahto.”

Flutterfree smiled awkwardly. “Sorry about this, Nanoha. This is Sombra. A hacker. We have what can best be described as a ‘complicated’ relationship with her.”

Nanoha chuckled. “I understand. I’ve been around the bush a few times, had to deal with many unsavory types. Though Sombra, I have to admit you seem a lot nicer than most of them.”

“I’m turning into a softie,” she said, munching on a croissant. “I have to remind myself sometimes that I’m supposed to be a nuisance and leak some secret document or something. Bit hard to do when these horses don’t like secrets that much.”

“Ahahahahah,” Nova laughed nervously. “Heh, she called us horses!” She levitated Sombra off the chair and toward the front door. “I’m sure you have somewhere else to be, Sombra. How about you go do that?”

“Nope!” Sombra declared leaping back onto her chair with a smirk. “I’m going to sit down and talk to you face to face. I don’t think I’ve actually done that since I met you all those years ago! Isn’t that something?”

Nova whimpered. “Yes…”

Sombra put a finger on Nova’s muzzle. “Boop.”

Nova tried to bite her finger off, but Sombra was too fast. The hacker laughed. To Nova’s immense annoyance, Nanoha, Pinkie, and Vriska were chuckling as well.

Nova rammed her face into the table. “Sombra, you really should just go…”

“Nah,” Sombra said, chuckling.

“Yeah, Nova, calm down,” Flutterfree said. “You don’t have to like her, but you’re being a little mean right now.”

Nova would have started ranting were her stomach not in a triple-folded pretzel knot. Sombra was here. Talking to them. This was going to be a problem…

It turned out to be a problem a lot quicker than Nova had been expecting.

The front door of The Loaf flew open. Froppy hopped in, gun in her hand. “Sombra! By the authority of the United States of the Multiverse, I am placing you under arrest! Ribbit.”

Two men stood behind her – one with half of his face burnt, and the other with a small beard.

Sombra stared at them in disbelief. “How did… No, there was no time for anyone to rat me out, I was watching…”

Froppy didn’t even glance at Nova. “We’ve been trying to find you for multiple years, Sombra. We just finally caught up with you.”

Flutterfree stood up and flared her wings. “Hey, we were just having a lunch!”

“Are you protecting this criminal?” the half-burnt man asked accusingly.

“I… Uh…”

“Because if you are the USM will take direct action against you.”

Froppy sighed. “That’s true. Hand over Sombra. And Jotaro, stop thinking about pausing time. Please.”

Jotaro’s expression did not shift. But there was no use of time stop.

Nanoha stood up. “I don’t know what’s going on, but can you tell me what this woman has done?”

Froppy turned to Nanoha, analyzing her. “She has hacked into the highest security divisions of our government, interfered with our foreign policy in other universes, not to mention fraud, defamation, etcetera. Her actions have led to more than a few deaths.”

“Indirectly!” Sombra pointed out.

Froppy shook her head. “That only lessens the sentence slightly. You’ve done enough to get a life sentence.”

“Not the death penalty? I’m surprised.”

“If you want that we can push for that,” the burnt man said.

Nanoha’s face was one of intense calculation. Froppy noticed this and decided she couldn’t let Nanoha think of a way out of this. “Hand over Sombra now or we will be forced to use excessive force and cause a diplomatic incident. Now.”

~~~

Thrackerzod and Engineetie were sitting directly under Dimensional Drive Two. Thrackerzod was using all her power to keep the two of them from being fried this close to the immense source of power.

Engineetie adjusted the sights on her goggles. “I’ve got nothing. Hitting it with a wrench was the last idea I had. This drive is activating regardless of what we do. It just doesn’t matter.”

Thrackerzod used her magic to remove them from the danger zone and placed them back on the observation balcony. “We’re going to have to go through with it,” Thrackerzod told Blumiere. “We’re definitely going to end up moving.”

Blumiere put a hand to his chin. “I’m really curious what’s on the other side at this point… We’ve got all our defenses up, and the reality anchors are going to keep the portal we create open so we aren’t sucked into some eldritch void. But I don’t trust it.”

“It’s not going to do that,” Engineetie said. “It spooling up wrong. It’s going for a flash-translation.”

“All at once? The entire city?” Blumiere shook his head. “Can it do that?”

“Apparently,” Thrackerzod said. “Are you certain everything’s ready?”

“Our personal armada is ready, shields are engaged… The Sweeties are prepared. Everything beyond complete evacuation, which we just don’t have time for.”

“Celestia City goes into the unknown…” Thrackerzod said, narrowing her eyes. “Whatever’s on the other side, it’s not going to be friendly. I can tell you that right now.”

“How can you know that?”

“Call it a sense.”

Celestia City shook.

Engineetie whistled. “Look at her churn! She’s gonna go real soon!”

~~~

Flutterfree’s thoughts raced. We can’t hand Sombra over! What would Corona think? What are we going to do!? Wh-

Pinkie started laughing.

Everyone stared at her in confusion.

“Oh, don’t mind me, it’s just…” Pinkie snorted. “We’re not going to have to make a choice!”

Froppy’s eyes widened. “What’s going to-“

Everything shook. Through the Loaf’s windows, the view that had previously been dominated by the blue air and distant rods was replaced with the lower part of a haphazardly thrown together city. Its sudden existence and power sent ripples through the world, visibly shaking a few of the nearby rods. Power went off in the Loaf.

“Celestia City!?” Vriska blurted. “What the hell!?”

“That’s yours?” Nanoha asked.

“Yeah! But they aren’t supposed to go to unknown universes!” Vriska put her hand to her head. “What’s going on!?”

Pinkie giggled. “I have no idea! But I do know Sombra’s gone!” She pointed at the empty chair Sombra had been in a minute ago.

Froppy facepalmed. “Find her! Ribbit.” She and the USM scrambled out of the Loaf.

Flutterfree should have been relieved, but the existence of Celestia City had her decidedly concerned. “What’s going on over there?” Green ships of a triangular design began to surround the city by the hundreds, appearing from other dimensions.

Nanoha shook her head. “Those are Jargon’s ships… This isn’t good.”

“Jargon?” Vriska blurted. “Green suit, annoying?”

“You know him? What did you do to him?”

“He was trying to cheat us out of something,” Vriska said. “So Jojo here punched him into a wall.”

Nanoha sucked in a deep breath.

“I take it that was a really stupid thing to do?” Flutterfree asked.

“You had no way of knowing he wasn’t just another cheat,” Nanoha said. “He’s a mob boss. He by no means controls this Outpost, but he controls the section we’re in. From what I know he takes it upon himself to exploit promising newcomers and will bring his wrath on whoever won’t let themselves fall to his simpler schemes…”

“That’s fucking stupid!” Vriska blurted. “I… Agh that fits the M.O. of these places exactly.”

“I knew it, he did scan something from us,” Nova said. “…We have to do something.”

Pinkie nodded. “Nanoha, you know more than any of us, what do you suggest?”

Nanoha furrowed her brow. “I can get my ship in there. It’s a powerful vessel, but I’m not sure it can stand against that much firepower alone.” She pointed at the largest green triangle. “Jargon will be on that ship. If you can get on and make him give the order to stop, that would do it.”

Nova lit her horn. “Right. I’ll get us over there.”

Nanoha nodded, standing up and placing an earpiece in her ear. “I’m going to make the calls. Just go.” She ran out the door of the Loaf.

Nova teleported them into the air near the large triangle ship. The little ships saw them instantly, firing their weapons. Jotaro froze time and moved all of them lower with Star Platinum. The shots all missed, but the team slammed into the hull of the larger ship without any preparation time as a result.

“OW! FUCK!” Vriska blurted grabbing her arm. “JOTARO YOU BROKE SOMETHING!”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, ignoring her.

The smaller ships were no longer firing on the larger ship – they didn’t want to damage it. However there were two surface guns on the ship they were standing on that didn’t have any issue firing at them. Nova raised a shield to defend against one while Star Platinum smashed it.

The other one got a shot off on Pinkie, hitting her face first. She went flying over the back of the ship. She quickly reached into the back of her mane and pulled out the bomb mask, exploding herself back toward the ship and then using a suction cup on her hoof to adhere to the hull. “YOU CAN’T KILL SUCTION CUP PONY! How many times do I have to say it!?”

Flutterfree fired the bow of light dead center into the gun’s turret, jamming it. She smiled. “There you go.”

Vriska focused her luck into her dice, rolling them towards the ship’s hull. A gigantic drill appeared, boring through the metal in a second. “Move move move!”

Jotaro’s time stop had recharged, so he just moved them all in there before they were even aware of what had happened. They were in an empty, green hallway lined with ominous lights.

“We’re in,” Pinkie said, grinning.

~~~

Blumiere ran to the command center of Celestia City, Thrackerzod and Allure at his heels. “What is going on?”

“We’re in a new universe surrounded by green triangle ships!” Vivian shouted.

“Hail them.”

“They’re hailing us!”

Blumiere furrowed his brow. “Bring it up on the screen.”

The face of a human man appeared on screen. He wore a snazzy green suite and had truly devious eyes. “Allow me to introduce myself, mayor. I am Jargon. And your ship has conveniently fallen into my area of the Outpost, so I claim salvage rights!”

“Salvage!?” Allure blurted.

“We cannot allow that,” Blumiere said, glaring. “We will fight with all we have.”

“I was able to trigger a dimension jump from the safety of my own home across the multiverse,” Jargon pointed out. “What makes you think I won’t be able to trigger a core meltdown you can do nothing about?”

“Core has started heating up!” Vivian reported.

Blumiere didn’t flinch. “I know nothing of what salvage means. For all I know it’s a fate worse than death.”

Jargon clearly did not expect this remark. “…Really? You’re going th-“

“Explain to me exactly what salvage entails before I make my decision. And don’t even think about lying.”

Jargon ground his teeth – but allowed the core of Celestia City to stop overheating. “Fine. Salvage involve-“

His entire ship shook.

“What in the… Who’s doing that?”

“The people who insulted you, sir,” an aide answered.

“How di-“ before Jargon could get any further, another face showed up on the screen. It was of a woman with orange hair. She seemed to be running somewhere.

“This is Nanoha Takamachi of the Time Space Administration Bureau. The Hoseki is en-route to this dimension as we speak. Jargon, you are interfering unfairly with a world. I request that you stop what you’re doing or we will use force to defend those you wish to exploit.”

“You have no jurisdiction here!” Jargon blurted. “And they’re a Class 3! They’re technically above me!”

Nanoha smiled. “I can make jurisdiction. Regardless, it doesn’t matter what Class they are, your actions are still unacceptable. Cease immediately and we will forget everything about this.”

“I can take a single TSAB ship and you know it,” Jargon growled.

Nanoha glared at him. “Perhaps you didn’t hear my name. I am Nanoha Takamachi. Otherwise known as the White Devil.”

Jargon’s expression faltered. Then he grinned. “A chance to defeat the TSAB’s poster girl… Oh that would bring me so much… Heheh… Miss Takamachi, if you take any action against me I will destroy their reactor. You can be certain of it.”

“No, you won’t,” Nanoha said. “You aren’t the type of person to throw away your treasure. Mayor, whoever you are, do not retaliate. Keep everything of yours in perfect condition and do not fight. He will not destroy you if you stay dormant.”

Blumiere nodded. “Understood.”

“Let us take care of this,” Nanoha asserted. “Jargon, we will come for you.”

“There is no-“

Seven green ships vanished from existence.

“What the-“

Nanoha chuckled. “Did you forget? Our ships don’t have to be in the same universe to attack you.”

“Find the Hoseki!” Jargon shouted. “I don’t care about how, just do it!”

“Good luck!” Nanoha cheered, leaving the call.

Blumiere turned to Allure and whispered. “Don’t attack, but you and Thrackerzod get down to Dimensional Drive Four. Activate it as stealthily or as quickly as you can.”

The two Sweeties nodded and teleported away, running through the streets of Celestia City closest to the Fourth Drive.

“Thrackerzod, can you corrupt the area around it?” Allure asked.

“Definitely. Just a simple summon will do the trick. We have to hope they aren’t trigger-happy.”

“It’s all we got!”

They ran past the streets filled with scared people. None of them were panicking or screaming in the streets yet – the Sweeties were keeping them all under control with their presence – but the people would not remain calm forever.

They had to get out as soon as possible.

The two unicorns piled into an elevator shaft. They descended into the protected core of the fourth Dimensional Drive.

Allure ran to the direct control console. “Zod? Do you have it?”

Thrackerzod created a small summoning circle and called forth a creature that was a square eyeball. “This thing will mask everything. It all seems like corrupted physics from the outside, and while that’s concerning it’s not exactly threatening. So long as they don’t get too suspicious… Start spinning it up.”

Allure pressed a few buttons, setting it to the maximum charge speed. “Totally not safe but let’s blow the thing out anyway!”

Dimensional Drive Four began to rotate rapidly.

~~~

Sombra ran through the ‘streets’ and ‘alleys’ of the Outpost, invisible. She needed to lose them – otherwise they would be able to track her dimensional signature. She had hoped the initial surprise would get them off her tail, but the cameras showed they were somehow still following her. That bearded guy probably had a long range Stand that was keeping tabs on her while invisible – somehow.

She needed to be clever. But doing more than hacking cameras in this place would prove to be problematic while on the run like she was. She might have to fight. She was fairly certain her zat gun would stun all three of them easily, they didn’t look that physically strong – but that was three shots. And besides Froppy, she was unsure of their capabilities. Stands could be annoyingly creative and bizarre…

Something invisible made her slip. She kept quiet, landing in a roll to get herself back up. The same something punched her – it was a weak punch, confirming the existence of a long-range Stand, but it was enough to slow her down. Froppy and the others were catching up.

She used her scanners – but seemed to detect the Stand everywhere.

It can break itself into pieces. My scanners aren’t sensitive enough to pinpoint any specific piece.

Parts of it coalesced to her left, ready for another punch, but she dodged. She could easily dance with this Stand forever, she knew. It was pretty easy to deal with, considering how weak it was. But it was slowing her down. And Froppy was fast. It helped to be a frog sometimes.

Sombra cursed – the Stand had latched onto her suit. She took a header into a wall, smacking hard enough to daze herself.

It was the last little bit Froppy needed. She leaped over the nearest building and extended her tongue toward Sombra.

I haven’t done this in a while… Sombra thought, pulling up her direct interface. But I’ve always been ready to.

“Everything can be hacked,” she smirked. She pressed a few keys in rapid succession, tapping into a magitech piece of technology of her own design. The purple beam hit Froppy – and her tongue went limp, like long tongues were supposed to be. She dropped like a rock into the ground, no longer able to move with extreme agility. Her overall body shape still retained the posture of a frog, but none of the excessive powers.

“Wh-what?” Froppy blurted, standing. “Erase? That’s not...”

“Magic, amiga,” Sombra winked, dodging an attack from the Stand. “I’ve got the counter to everything.”

The man with half his face burnt showed up.

“Careful Shoto! She has an Erase!” Froppy blurted.

Shoto ducked behind a nearby wall before Sombra could hack into him. She smirked. “I’m going to get to you regardless, little Shoto…”

A tremendous wall of ice shot forth from where he was hiding, pushing Sombra into a nearby wall. She couldn’t recover in time to deal with the incoming flamethrower.

Fire and ice… that must be nice. She, despite suffering from numerous burns, pulled out her zat gun and fired. Shoto had been expecting a hack, not a laser gun. He was hit directly in the chest, falling to the stun.

Then Froppy lassoed Sombra with her tongue. She had tied the fleshy extrusion up and used it like a standard rope, tying Sombra’s arms to her side. Sombra attempted to activate her transporter device - but found that it wasn’t working. It had been jammed somehow.

Sombra’s eyes widened. She’d been caught.

Never until this moment had she actually believed she ever would be. She was too careful… Too good…

Froppy tried to give an official arrest statement, but given the state of her tongue she only gave out a few slurred words before giving up.

The bearded man appeared, smiling. “I see w-“

“STARLIGHT BREAKER!”

A beam of deep pink magic cut down the middle of the group, tossing the man over to Shoto, with Froppy and Sombra on the other side. A wall was blown to powder and the ground beneath them was shredded, revealing the inner circuitry of the rod.

Nanoha descended from the sky, tired from her run. Despite her clear exhaustion, she pointed at Froppy. “The USM has interfered in an official TSAB operation. The criminal known as Sombra was being lured into a false sense of security where she would have cooperatively entered imprisonment with minimal collateral damage.” She gestured to the destruction around them. “We are willing to forgive this slight if Sombra is handed over to us for processing into the criminal system.”

Froppy and Sombra stared at her.

Nanoha winked at the two of them and smiled warmly.

Froppy got the message and nodded, untying her tongue from Sombra. “Will you promise maximum security life sentence?”

“Definitely!” Nanoha lied through her teeth. “We have term lengths measured by the century back home!”

Froppy smiled. She knew exactly what Nanoha was doing. “Then we have no issue handing her over to you.”

Nanoha twisted Raising Heart, summoning deep pink foot and hand cuffs around Sombra’s limbs. “Thanks! The TSAB will forget all the unpleasantness.”

Sombra, intelligently, said nothing and just accepted her ‘fate’ of ‘maximum security life sentence’ with a smile.

Nanoha waved. “Goodbye! The TSAB will contact the USM with an update within the next few days!”

“Good to know. Ribbit.” Nanoha floated away, Sombra in hand.

Shoto rubbed his head, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. “What… happened?”

“They’re taking care of her for us,” Froppy said. Technically the truth. “Takes a bit of strain off of us.”

“Why didn’t she do that earlier then?”

“Wasn’t part of their plan. We ruined it.”

Shoto thought about this a moment – and accepted it. “Fine. Mission accomplished, I guess?”

“Ribbit,” Froppy said, beginning a report to Valentine.

~~~

Jargon was frantic – his ships just kept disappearing from space around him. That TSAB ship… How was he supposed to find it? What dimension was it acting from?! The readings indicated that the connection it used to attack changed every time! How was he supposed to deal with this?

Not to mention the intruders in his ship. He had already lost three teams of guards to them.

He needed a plan. At this point blowing up the city would do absolutely nothing to him – the invaders in his ship would have no way to know what he was threatening, and the White Devil was not one to back down… At least from what he knew.

He pulled up a file on the TSAB. Their ships were mysterious things that were rarely seen, but they had some information on them. Highly advanced technology built over centuries of growth. The exploration vessels weren’t armed with the most dangerous of the TSAB’s weapons, but her personal one would no doubt have extras installed on it. And their driv-

Right. Right. Their ships moved by creating pocket dimensions and ‘sailing’ them. They rarely had to actually enter a universe proper; they could access the entire existence from outside. And because they could move their personal pocket dimension, the coordinates would keep switching.

“Dial the coordinates WHILE you’re scanning the disappearing ships,” he ordered. “Catch them while they’re attacking.”

The next ship that vanished provided exactly what they needed. A direct portal tore through existence, revealing a small universe containing a single ship set upon a greenish-purple background. The ship’s structure was composed of metal with three domed structures underneath and three extended prongs out the front.

Now that it had been forced to reveal itself, the Hoseki saw no purpose in staying secluded in its pocket universe. It left, and the small bubble of space collapsed in on itself, sending a ripple of spacetime out from the place the portal had been. Several ships were disabled, while the Hoseki itself was unperturbed.

Jargon grinned. Now he had them in his sights.

The opposite was also true. The Hoseki’s other weapons started firing. Rotating magic circles protruded from the ship, firing complex energy beams that never went in a straight line. Invisible weapons triggered, distorting space in a pattern that disabled dozens of his triangles.

But the Hoseki were able to be hit. Their shields were impressive, but several dozen bullets wore down the impressive force field. The ship shook from the force.

Jargon laughed. He was going to take out a TSAB ship! He didn’t even care that he was scrapping most of his fleet to do it, the legends that would be told about him made it all worth it! He w-

Jotaro punched the door to the bridge down. After a quick time stop, he and Nova had taken care of the entire bridge crew save for Jargon himself.

Pinkie walked up to Jargon. “Hiya!”

Jargon glared. “What do you want from me?”

“Oh, nothing much, just call off all your ships. Please.”

Jargon growled. “I will blow your city to kingdom come! I-“ He slipped and fell face first onto the floor of the bridge. “Ow…”

Vriska smirked. “You know, Jargon, I could just make you have a heart attack. But I won’t. Because I haven’t seen Jojo get really pissed in a long time. And this is going to be good.”

Jotaro held Jargon up by the neck with Star Platinum’s hand. “Ora…”

Jargon gagged. “I-I’ll call them off! I will! Just don’t hurt me!”

“Promise?” Flutterfree asked, Staring at him. “Promise there’s no double crossing?”

“YES YES! NO DOUBLE CROSSING!”

Jotaro dropped him. Jargon scrambled to his microphone and gave the order to stand down.

So close… He could see smoke on one of the Hoseki’s prongs…

“Get up,” Jotaro demanded.

Jargon did so. “So… What now?”

“ORA!” Star Platinum blurted, knocking Jargon out. This would have triggered Celestia City’s reactor, if the city had not jumped out of the universe at that moment thanks to Thrackerzod and Allure.

“That,” Jotaro said. “Then we hand you over to Nanoha.”

Vriska laughed. “Yeah, Nanoha. Interesting ship design, I wonder who they are…” She looked down at a screen. It still had the TSAB article open on it.

Her pupils dilated. “No fucking way…”

“Huh?” Nova asked. “What is it?”

“Nanoha… Is part of the Time Space Administration Bureau. Holy shit.” She put a hand to her head. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize the name! The White Devil!”

“Calm down, explain,” Flutterfree said.

“The Class 1 Societies may like to be big and mysterious, but the Class 2s definitely do not. They love to compete and rank each other.” She held up the article. “The TSAB is number two on that list. We just… Wow. I had no idea the kind of friend we were making.”

“I think that was the idea,” Flutterfree commented. “If we knew who she was, we wouldn’t have been able to just sit and have some bread first. I think it’s good this happened the way it did.”

“No… No it isn’t,” Nova said.

“Huh? But Nano-“

“I’m not talking about Nanoha,” Nova said, sighing. “Let’s… Let’s wrap this up. I have something to tell you after.”

The team exchanged glances, unsure what to make of this. But they did as asked.

~~~

The inside of the Hoseki was smooth and perfectly clean. There were few designs on the walls – besides the clearly personal touches of art and plants, everything was designed with function rather than aesthetic in mind. Shapes were simple, all the walls were the same metallic color, and uniforms were a simple blue. The only ones who didn’t wear the uniforms were high-level mages, like Nanoha herself, who had their own magically constructed outfits.

The crew had accepted Pinkie and her team quickly, taking them to the briefing room first thing. They had been informed that Nanoha would be right with them after she made a preliminary report to Headquarters.

After the first minute, everyone turned to Nova.

Nova sighed. “I called the USM on Sombra.”

Jotaro, Flutterfree, and Pinkie reacted with mild surprise, but clearly understood why she did that. Vriska on the other hand…

“The fuck were you thinking!? We got caught in the middle of that!”

“I saw her long before that,” Nova said. “She didn’t see me, I’m pretty sure. It was very shortly after we arrived. Before Jargon. I just… I didn’t bring it up because I knew you wouldn’t want to do anything.”

“You were right!” Vriska blurted. “She’s not an enemy, Nova! She’s very helpful and useful!”

“She does stuff we’re not willing to do,” Pinkie said. “She has a finesse, you know.”

“I understand that,” Nova said. “But that’s a problem. We agree that what she does is wrong, but we don’t try to stop her because of what she offers us. That’s bad! That’s… That’s really bad!” She shook her head. “Whenever I try to bring this up, you guys all just dismiss me. Tell me to ‘loosen up’ or ‘let it go’ or ‘you don’t have to like her’ or…” She grabbed her head. “She’s not a good person!”

Flutterfree shook her head. “Nova, she has a spark in her.”

“I know! But she’s still a liar, a cheat, and even worse she breaks our own laws all the time! At least Alushy doesn’t go around defying us at every turn, she keeps herself within reason!”

Vriska narrowed her eyes. “Can’t accept a little gray area, can you?”

“I can accept a little gray area. We kill people, Vriska, when we have to. What I’m saying is we’re not treating her like the criminal she is anymore! She has a place of… Of honor! And she likes it. And we’ve been using her more and more for bigger and bigger things, expanding her influence…”

Flutterfree shook her head. “So? She’s done so much good. We can afford a few cracks.”

“…Flutterfree, didn’t Rev say something about white lies leading to horrendous monsters of betrayal eventually, if you accept them?”

Flutterfree’s pupils shrunk. She couldn’t keep eye contact with Nova.

“I’m not crazy, or unable to move past it,” Nova said. “Yes, I’m still angry, but I’d accept her. But not as a gray area criminal. That’s not what we are. That’s not what we stand for. Please, listen to me. We have to do something with her.”

Everyone was silent.

Pinkie began to slowly nod. “You have a point, Nova. I’m… sorry for dismissing you about this.”

“We all are,” Flutterfree said, head still bowed.

Vriska looked like she wanted to object, but thought better of it. Jotaro simply nodded.

“But it’s not that simple,” Pinkie continued. “Where we are, we have to do distasteful things. At this point we’ve lost count of how many people whose deaths we are responsible for, directly or indirectly. We’ve ruined worlds, we’ve saved them – it’s a mixed bag.”

“But we try to do what’s right,” Nova said. “Sombra doesn’t.”

“Sombra helps us do what is right,” Pinkie countered. “She’s not what we could call acceptable, no. She causes everyone problems. She opens the window to us doing more and more questionable things. But she’s also a powerful defense for Merodi Universalis. The skill she has, the network she’s created, the freedom she has… She’s more our defender at this point.”

Nova shook her head. “I’d drop the shield if it was poisoning me and fight the dragon on my own. Security and power isn’t everything, Pinkie.”

Pinkie sighed. “I don’t have an answer for you, Nova.”

“At least you’re thinking about it,” Nova said, smiling. “Bring it up with Eve and the others, okay? If they hear it from someone’s mouth besides my own… It might mean something. They need to see that we can’t afford to be corrupted.”

“What about Corona, though?” Flutterfree asked. “She and Sombra are good friends… If we do take action, it would drive them apart…”

“I have a solution for that!” Nanoha said, walking in the door – Sombra at her heels.

Everyone’s jaws dropped – except Pinkie’s. She just giggled. “Waiting for just the right moment?”

“I saw you needed to talk something out,” Nanoha said. “I let you. It’s why you were in this room alone.”

“You’re good,” Pinkie giggled.

Nanoha laughed. “Regardless… As you can see, I have Sombra. The USM thinks I’m taking her into custody. Maximum security prison for life. However, it won’t be what happens. At all.” She folded her hands in front of an excited smile. “Because I’m giving her back to you. And you want to hear my suggestion for what to do with her?”

Nova nodded. “Please.”

“Change her identity. Then hire her in an official position as an official citizen.”

Pinkie’s team was silent.

“The USM would never suspect a thing, you would still have Sombra on your side, and she would have to adhere to your laws and customs in an official job. She also wouldn’t have to hide anymore.”

Silence.

Sombra smirked. “Come on, amigas, amigo. I’m extending the olive branch of peace here. Don’t snub me.”

Pinkie laughed. “Well I like the idea. We’ll have to work out how to change your identity… Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“I can take care of that,” Sombra said. She turned to Nova. “Does this work for you, Nova?”

Nova narrowed her eyes. “Yes… But I don’t trust it.”

“Hey, it’s pretty clear that staying an all-powerful hacker free from everything is just going to get me hunted at some point or other. This way has so many benefits. Let’s see… Official security clearance… protection… actual excuses to hack into Valentine’s computer… Oh, and for you, I guess I don’t get to air out your dirty secrets anymore.”

“So, we get to put a leash on you?”

“If you can imagine the loosest leash in the multiverse, sure,” Sombra said. She leaned on one of her hands. “Look, I’m not asking you to like me or even be friends. But let’s find something that works, mmk? I’ll accept some limits if that means the Muricans won’t get called on me the moment someone sees me.”

“Wow,” Flutterfree said. “You’ve been reexamining your life, haven’t you?”

“I got caught,” Sombra said, simply. “Twice, actually, if you count miss laser of death.”

Nanoha smiled.

Nova turned to Pinkie. “I’ll… Accept this.”

Pinkie clapped her hooves. “Then by the power vested in me under Renee, I will see that this happens! You’re going to need a new name and identity, Sombra…”

“I’ve already got an idea.”

~~~

On one side of the table sat Nanoha, a warm smile on her face.

On the other sat Jenny, Hastur, the Grand Secretariat, a Melnorme named Brusk, Valentine, and Eve.

Eve and Valentine were clearly uncomfortable being in the same room as each other.

“The TSAB is pleased to make all of your acquaintances – except for you Brusk. We already knew your people.”

Brusk made no comment.

“I do wonder why you didn’t at least tell us about all these people. They’re delightful and we like to keep our records updated!”

Brusk said nothing.

Nanoha shook her head at this, turning to the rest of them. “Anyway, I’m Nanoha, as most of you know. I understand that some of you are hesitant about this meeting, not the least of which because you have bad blood between each other. I would love to help with that – but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Eve said. “It means a lot that you’re considering it. It’s good to find a kindred spirit out there.”

Nanoha nodded slowly. “I’m going to be frank with you. I like you, and I’ll probably visit often to check in on how you’re doing. But we’re a high-end Class 2 society. The TSAB has a lot of other things closer to the seat of power to worry about. As a society, we won’t pay much attention to any of you.”

“Figured as much,” Hastur admitted.

“It’s a sad fact of life that when you’re up where we are, you start ignoring those below you. Eve, I’m sure you’ve noticed that worlds not part of Merodi Universalis mean less and less to you as time goes on?”

Eve nodded. “I try… But it’s hard.”

“It’s the same up here. It’s why the Class 1s are so mysterious. It’s why so many universes get forgotten as nations expand.” She folded her hands. “The TSAB tries much harder than almost every other society to keep strong connections with everyone, but we can’t keep track of everything.”

“Understood,” Valentine said.

“There are a few things I can say we will do,” Nanoha smiled. “If you’re ever threatened by a foe much stronger than you, I’ll do everything I can go get aid to you. I can’t control the full might of the TSAB, but I can control a significant portion.”

“Thank you,” the Grand Secretariat said with a bow.

“Valentine, your territories are actually somewhat close to ours. If you keep exploring rapidly you will run into our physical location soon enough. Don’t be surprised.”

Valentine nodded.

“And something else – much like Merodi Universalis, the TSAB grows by accepting willing members into it. Unlike Merodi Universalis, this is a painfully slow and time-consuming process. There are dozens of larger Class 3 societies in line and it will likely take centuries before we get to many of them. It’s something to think about, but I would recommend against jumping into it anytime soon.”

Eve nodded. “Thank you, Nanoha. It is good to know there’s a force like you out there.”

Nanoha smiled. “Thanks!”

“I do have a question,” Jenny said, producing a photo of the blue metallic man that took many interdimensional explorers as slaves. “Do you have any idea who this is?”

Nanoha narrowed her eyes. “Not me personally…” She held it up to a camera in the ceiling, scanning it into the computer in an instant. “The patterns are reminiscent of a variant of a being known as ‘Metal Sonic’ but it’s not quite right. This is clearly a suit of some kind, not a full machine. No version of Metal Sonic is a human, or even of the correct proportions for this. If anything, I’d guess… someone who designed their outfit to be like Metal Sonic.”

“That’s not helpful,” Jenny said.

“Sorry, I can’t tell you more. The database doesn’t have anything.”

“It’s okay,” Eve said. “You’ve already done a lot.”

“Not really,” Nanoha said, honestly.

~~~

Corona heard her doorbell ring again. With a groan, she trotted over to it and opened it.

She saw someone at the door she didn’t recognize at all. She had long, white hair streaked with a single silver strike. The strands were all draped over her left shoulder rather than hanging down her back. Her outfit was a combination of jacket and mid-length skirt, dominantly white with purple streaks around it.

“Heeeeey Corona!”

Corona blinked. “Do I know you…?”

The woman moved forward and touched Corona on the nose. “Boop!”

Corona’s jaw dropped. “SOMBRA!? What th- why the- ho-” Corona couldn’t process what she was looking at with what she knew. “What happened to you?”

“Got caught. Had to change my look.” She smirked. “How do I look?”

“Very bright.”

“Good. Nobody will expect Sombra to be bright. Anyway, we’re going to be roomies for a few weeks.”

“Wait what?”

This was greeted with laughter. “I already talked it through with everyone. You’re the best one to watch me before I reveal myself. If I appear right after my own imprisonment, it’ll be suspicious. So I have to lay low and establish a history. That’s you! Plus, everyone unanimously agreed you needed it.” She opened the fridge. “Wow, you don’t have anything tasty in here.”

“I…” Corona blinked. “Okay, right, this is fine. You do need to lay low and…” She shook her head. “Don’t touch any of the experiments, don’t put ‘What’s New Pussycat’ in the speakers, and… Wait, does Eve know…?”

“Yep. I’ve been hired. Ooooofficially! We’re the best of friends now.”

“Uh…”

“You could say that I’m finally ‘cleaning up my act’ after all these years. Congratulations Corona, you did it, you redeemed the immoral hacker.”

Corona blinked. “Huh. I… Guess I did have something to do with that.” She smirked. “You’re welcome, Sombra.”

“Not Sombra anymore.”

“Oh? What then?”

She turned to Corona and smiled. “Sombra’s gone – was never real, in a way. Just a mask I wore over top of another face.” She extended a hand. “Hello Corona, I am Olivia.”

Corona smiled a genuine smile. “Hello, Olivia.”

“Olivia Colomar, actually, but I’m going to alter the last name to Velazquez to keep the trail confusing. Also Velazquez is muy ‘awesome’.” Olivia winked. “Time for a new chapter, you know?”

Corona nodded. “I know.”

061 - Nevermore

Granny Smith lived to the grand age of 199.

Despite her immense tenacity and earth pony determination, her time came, just like it came for everypony else.

She was essentially the founder of Ponyville, as almost everyone in the now-city knew. She saw it rise from a simple farm, to a close-knit community, to the immense crescent-shaped megacity that served as Equis Vitis’ springboard to the multiverse.

There had been a public service a few days prior that everyone in the city had been invited to. Luna had even given a speech, relating a story she had heard from Celestia about an ‘apple farmer with the strongest spirit I’d ever seen’. Eve said some things as well. Iroh even had a few words to say from his relatively short time knowing her, as did many members of the Apple family. Applejack, Big Mac, Applebloom, and the handful of Granny Smith’s own kids that were still alive did as well.

Big Mac didn’t say much, but to him, she was his foundation.

To Applejack, she was the one who taught her to be how she was.

To Applebloom, she was the only mother she had ever known.

But the time for speeches and publicity was over. Now it was just the private service. Words were spoken, but in hushed tones. The tears flowed freely without the prying eyes of the public. They were remembering Granny Smith themselves instead of helping others remember who she was.

The scene was her grave. One of many in the Apple Family graveyard. She was placed next to her mother and father, and no small number of her kids. The mare had lived an exceptionally long time – long enough to outlive many she shouldn’t have.

There were no more speeches to be had. Just tears and commiseration.

Eve, Renee, Flutterfree, Pinkie, Nova, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash huddled together on one end of the gathering, talking amongst themselves. They hadn’t all been together like this in a while. Elsewhere, Iroh was watching Applejack’s kids – as well as Rainbow Dash’s newborn. Corea was young… But she was old enough to feel pain. Old enough to remember.

Elsewhere Big Mac stood with his kids; Allure, Scootaloo, and Applebloom finding solace and remembrance in helping one of them with a cutie mark problem. And then the rest of the huge Apple family… Luna…

Corona wondered, not for the first time, why she was here. She hadn’t really known Granny Smith… She’d known the Earth Vitis version, yes, but humans didn’t live as long as ponies… Earth Vitis’s had left the land of the living what seemed like an eternity ago. She really didn’t know this one. And that angered her. It wasn’t the only thing that angered her – a lot of things swam around her head, driving her mad – but it was a big one.

She leaned against a fencepost, hiding behind her sunglasses. She had cried just like everyone else earlier, but she didn’t really feel like it was genuine. She was probably just empathizing, wasn’t she? Showing sorrow by reflex...

Response to another tragedy. This was no Bloodbath. There was no enemy to get angry at. Just another reminder that the world was cold, cruel, and uncaring. That it was pointless.

Pointless.

She hadn’t really thought existence was pointless in a while… Not consciously anyway. But had she ever really convinced herself it wasn’t? She didn’t know. She avoided thinking about these things lately.

Which was to say all the time.

Corona sighed, adjusting her sunglasses. She was just sitting here, alone, driving herself into the depths of depression again. With a flash of her horn she teleported… elsewhere. Not her home, that was on Lai. She was on a street in Ponyville, walking.

It was raining. It hadn’t been raining at the graveyard. Was she supposed to thank the pegasi or the Everfree for that? She didn’t know. She really didn’t care.

She just walked.

It occurred to her that there seemed to be a habit of just walking in seemingly random directions when you didn’t want to think. Why was that? If you had no goal, all you could do was think. Walking wasn’t a very good distraction.

Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be?

But what would she even think about? How all the struggles mean jack diddly nothing in the end? Sure, Granny Smith basically founded Ponyville and left behind a huge family, and she died surrounded by loved ones. But now that she was gone, how long would it take for the memory of her to fade to nothing? A few generations, ah, but Eve and numerous others were immortal, and Ponyville itself stood as a testament to her. But even they would die eventually, and Merodi Universalis would be forgotten… What would happen then? Future societies would find mysterious ancient constructs and have no idea what they meant.

How many of the ancient technologies had stories like that behind them? Millions upon millions of people in a society being part of making something, only for them to vanish and the purpose of the thing to get lost to time.

Another part of Corona reminded her that there was the now. All of it meant something now. There was great happiness and contentment everywhere. Hunger was basically a non-issue. There weren’t any full-scale wars happening within Merodi Universalis. Ponyville would remember Granny Smith now.

But how small was that against the expanse of everything? A single city in a multiverse of unimaginable size? Even the greatest of civilizations eventually fell. Always… Always…

She hung her head. She hadn’t even known Granny Smith that well. What was going on with her? Why did she do this to herself every time? I’d been doing better! Darnit! Darnit darnit darnit!

Corona felt a hoof on her shoulder. She didn’t jump, merely turning her head. “…Eve?”

“I saw you leave,” Eve said, a sad smile on her face. “I’m sorry. I should have called you over and not let you stand there alone. It was inconsiderate of me.”

“You seven needed your moment.”

“You’re a part of us, Corona, regardless of what you say.” Eve frowned. “We… We haven’t done much together in a long time, you and I.”

“Our paths took us different directions. And I needed space recently.”

“Do you still need space?”

Corona thought back to the few weeks she had spent with Olivia while she laid low. “…No. I don’t think so. Space… only goes so far.”

Eve nodded. “I wasn’t sure.”

“We haven’t really hung out much at all, have we?”

Eve shook her head. “I’m always busy.”

“I’m always locked away.”

The two stared at each other for a moment.

“We should do something,” Eve said, suddenly.

“…Today?”

“Why not today?” Eve asked.

“Because… you know.”

“Granny Smith would not have wanted us to avoid doing something together on her account. I’d think she’d be happy to know we’re talking to each other right now.”

Corona forced a smile. “Yeah that… sounds right.”

“Well… We’re in Ponyville. There’s so much to do around here.” She looked up at the sky. “A bit wet right now, though.”

Corona looked around. “…Yeah, not here. Not here…”

Eve pulled out her dimensional device. “Then… how about somewhere completely random?”

“Throw ourselves to ka?”

“I guess?” She turned a few dials until she found a set of coordinates she didn’t recognize that read ‘safe’. “What about this random place?”

Corona wanted to say no. Corona wanted to say yes. Corona didn’t know what she wanted.

She decided she’d just go with what Eve clearly wanted to do. “…Sure.”

Eve opened a portal and the two of them trotted in, leaving the dour atmosphere of Ponyville behind.

~~~

The world was a forest. It was not the Forest World – that place was decidedly greener and livelier. This world had a constant overcast sky and trees that looked like they were struggling to produce green leaves.

It was not raining though, and Eve decided that was enough. “Well, here we are. Random forest number seven million and five.”

Corona adjusted her sunglasses. “We only know of a few million worlds.”

“Yes. And most of them have forests.”

Corona looked like she wanted to argue, but she just sighed and backed down. Eve didn’t push the topic any further.

“Let’s look for a river,” Eve suggested. “Wildlife is drawn to sources of water in most worlds. Except that one where it was reverse and water was toxic. That was fun.”

Corona made a ‘mhm’ noise, walking up to one of the trees and plucking off a leaf. It was a sickly green, the color of a leaf not quite living up to its potential. She saw herself in that leaf. In all these leaves.

Eve glanced behind her. “Corona… You coming?”

“Huh? Right, yeah. I was just examining the leaves. They all look… sickly.”

Eve nodded slowly. “Yeah… Either something’s draining at them, this isn’t their environment, or they’re actually perfectly healthy and this is just how trees are here.”

“There’s a high magic content.”

“Mostly ambient, not concentrated. And I don’t feel like the life is being sucked out of me. …Well, not because of the magic here, anyway.”

Corona shook her head. “Eve… You’re not okay.”

“Nope, definitely not. But I will be. You will be too.”

“…Right.”

Eve looked around, trying to think of something. “You know if we don’t find anything interesting, we could try roughing it. I’ve got the day off. We could live off the land for a day…”

“Have you seen any fruit? Or even animals to hunt?”

Eve conjured a peach and tossed it to Corona. Corona threw it behind her. “That’s not living off the land.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. She cut the peach in half, planted the seed in the ground, and grew the world’s smallest peach tree. It produced four tiny peaches in a few seconds.

“…Well I haven’t figured out how to make them full size yet,” Eve muttered. “Suppose this is why we need earth ponies.” She plucked the four fruits and gave two to Corona.

Corona bit down on one. She realized they still had pits. She spat it out and rubbed her jaw. “Ow…”

“Right… A peach probably wasn’t the best selection, was it?”

“Um… No.”

“What else… Bananas? I could try bananas. Miniature bananas would be fun to peel. I cou-“

“Eve, you’re bouncing off the walls,” Corona pointed out. “Calm down.”

“I am calm! I’m having a great time!”

“No, you’re not. You’re stuck in ‘I have to be cheery for Corona’s sake’ mode.”

Eve sighed. “I’m not trying to beat you down with being happy, Corona. I’m just trying to occupy us for a little while. Okay?”

“Yeah. I got that.”

Eve shook her head. “I’m… not sure you do.”

“Right. Fine.”

“Corona…”

“Eve, you don’t need to worry.”

“That’s like me telling you not to worry.” Eve raised an eyebrow. “I see you looking at me in concern.”

Corona stopped short. “…Yeah…”

“Corona, what happened to you?” Eve asked. “Where’s… Where’s that spark? I’d understand if you didn’t want to keep adventuring – it was frankly a silly and badly-timed idea anyway – but you’ve always stuck up for yourself.”

“I’m just not in the mood, I guess?” Corona said. “I don’t know. You should know that this isn’t just something you can pull yourself out of.”

Eve nodded. “That’s… true. But it’s not like you’re powerless.”

“That’s kind of the root of the whole thing,” Corona admitted.

“…How so?”

Corona shook her head. “Eve, now is not the time. I think you know that.”

“Corona, I think I know when the times are right. I be-“

Corona held up a hoof, ears alert. “Noise. My left. Crunching branch.”

Eve spread her wings and sent out a magical ping. She pointed. “There.”

The two ponies turned to see a unicorn and a human – friendly faces, rather than antagonistic.

“Eve?” Josuke Higashikata said, surprised. “What’re you doing here?”

“Yeah,” Sunny said, cocking her head. “I thought…”

“Chose a world at random,” Eve said, turning to Sunny and Josuke. “Is this one of the worlds you’re surveying, then?”

“Yeah,” Sunny declared. “Currently we’re trying to figure out what’s making the trees all sickly. They were pretty vibrant until a few days ago. When we figure that out we can approve settlement here.”

Eve smiled. “Good. I apologize if we’re in your way.”

“Oh not at all! We were just out exploring a little. Going for the edge of the forest. It’s a big one.”

“I swear it’s bigger than yesterday,” Josuke commented.

“We have no way of confirming that for certain,” Sunny pointed out. “Anyway, we can put our work on hold, there’s no rush. Hello! Corona, right?”

Corona nodded, shaking hooves with her counterpart.

“Sunny. The Evermore explorer. Do you… know about us?”

“Vaguely,” Corona admitted. “Can travel under your own power and are very old right?”

“Uh… That is one way of putting it!”

“Basically Vriska,” Josuke added.

“I’m not Vriska. And neither is she an Evermore.”

“Not much of a difference,” Josuke said. In the background a tree exploded and re-assembled itself from Crazy Diamond’s punch of boredom.

“Enough of one,” Eve declared. “It’s like the difference between warp and hyperspace drives. They can accomplish the same goal, but they go about it different ways.”

“Except Evermore are a bit more unique and come from only one place,” Sunny added.

“You show me someone else who travels the multiverse using luck,” Josuke pointed out.

Sunny scrunched up her muzzle. “I’m sure there is one but I can’t think of it right now.”

Josuke took a prideful pose. For anyone not from Earth Stand, the pose looked absolutely ridiculous. Eve chuckled.

“How’s the rest of your team?” Eve asked.

“Doing well. Beam’s building robots, as usual, and Sunburst is…” Sunny pondered this for a moment. “I want to say he’s still reading The Brothers Karamazov, but he might have finished it by now.”

“Deep reading, I see.”

“You read it?”

Eve laughed nervously. “I… read a summary.”

Sunny gasped. “You!?Read a summary!?”

“Hey, I had to figure out the basics of human culture and never actually got around to reading the full monstrous thing. Quite busy, you know.”

“Yeah, I guess I can understand that, promotion and all.” She glanced behind Eve at Corona. She walked up to her counterpart. “Hey.”

“Hm?”

“We’ve never met properly. You’re the ‘core’ Sunset around here. Can’t believe I never sought you out.”

“Oh, it’s… fine.”

Sunny shook her hoof. “Take it from me – it does get better.”

Corona blinked. “Hm?”

“Whatever you’re going through. It’ll get better. Take it from someone who is you.”

Corona was struck by this. She didn’t respond – and Sunny knew that meant she needed time to think. Sunny winked at her and pulled back. “Josuke! By chance did your punch reveal anything about that tree?”

“It felt like a tree,” Josuke pointed out.

“It’s… Greener,” Eve said, raising an eyebrow. “The rest of the trees are decidedly less vibrant.”

“They are getting worse,” Sunny decreed. “Quickly, too…” She narrowed her eyes. “Are there less leaves than there were when we started talking?”

Eve narrowed her eyes. “Maybe…”

Sunny padded at the ground as well. “The soil seems dead, too. This sort of ground couldn’t grow anything new.”

Eve tried to grow another peach tree – but this time it just sputtered and died in a curl of brown crusts. She blinked. “That worked a few minutes ago.”

“Strange…” Sunny said, looking around. “Seems darker, too.”

“Just fog,” Josuke said, gesturing at the loose mist around them.

Sunny froze.

“What, too spooky for you?” Josuke ribbed.

“No, that’s not it at all,” Sunny said, a hoof to her head. “This… This forest is transforming before our eyes.” The moment she said it, the leaves on the trees aside from the one Josuke ‘fixed’ started vanishing into thin air. The dried corpse of the failed peach tree dissolved into nothing.

Eve pointed to Josuke. “Repair as large an area as you can!”

“CRAZY DIAMOND!” Josuke roared, jumping into the air. “DORAAAAAAAAA!” The fist of his Stand hit the ground with immense force, creating a small crater and upsetting the root systems of several trees. Now that he had a connection to all the objects, Josuke used Crazy Diamond to revert them to a better state of health, creating a small vaguely circular area with green trees and healthy soil.

Eve teleported everyone into it. The repairs had not stopped the fog from rolling in, and the rest of the forest still transformed before their eyes. Soon, all the trees were completely dead, losing the brown coloration of their wood and reverting to monochrome shadows of what they once were. The light level continued to drop, the clouds thickening until it was impossible to determine where the sun even was.

“Josuke, keep healing these trees,” Eve said. “I can see them starting to lose leaves.”

Josuke nodded, setting to work on the trees.

Sunny shook her head – coming out of her shock. “We need to get out of here – something here has to have connected to my Evermore nature to create… this.”

Eve nodded, summoning Seraphim. She forced a path through to Equis Vitis… but couldn’t connect. She poured extra magic, which should have been enough to break through a standard dimensional scrambler, but even that didn’t work.

“We’re stuck,” Eve declared.

Sunny bit her lip. “I was afraid of that…”

“What’s happening?” Corona asked, speaking for the first time in a long while.

“…The Evermore come from a place called the Recursions, a set of universes all related to a realm known as the Silent Forest.” She gestured to the dead trees outside – or what everyone had been certain was dead. Unnatural, black buds had begun to form on the branches. The fog was only thickening, making it more and more difficult to see for any significant distance. “The Silent Forest pulled individuals from across the multiverse and transformed them into Evermore.”

“Like the Nexus?” Corona asked.

“Yes. Really close to that, actually. People were sucked in, but people could never leave. And this Forest was the cause of it all.” She shook her head. “Something has to be tapping into my power and summoning this place from my memory. Somehow.”

Eve lit her horn and closed her eyes, looking at the universe through Seraphim’s senses. She used her power as a true alicorn to connect with the magical aura of the world, feeling for dimensional anomalies. She quickly reached a conclusion.

“It’s the planet itself,” Eve said. “All of it is brimming with the power.”

“The entire planet!?” Sunny blurted. “That’s… actually not that surprising. It was abandoned, so it had a fully natural appearance before. When I arrived it latched onto me… And when I started realizing what was happening the memories were easier to access…” Sunny put a hoof to her chin. “The question is how do we stop it?”

Corona lit her hoof on fire. “Burn it all down?”

“We could try destruction,” Eve admitted. “Does this planet have a moon?”

“Yes,” Sunny said.

“I could use that,” Eve said, frowning. “I’d rather not blow up a moon I know nothing about though. I could attempt to sever its mental connection to you, but that’d involve me going into your head.”

“I’d rather not run the risk of losing my memories, thank you.”

“Then destruction,” Josuke said. “Ram the moon into this silent rock.”

Sunny pondered this idea. “It would probably work… But Eve is right, we don’t know about the moon, or apparently much about this planet…” She closed her eyes and focused, extending her Evermore powers. “I can’t feel any universes, it hasn’t generated any of the others.”

“It is just a planet,” Eve pointed out. “It probably can’t generate entire universes for you.”

Sunny’s face lit up. “…Did I ever tell any of you what Evermore could do inside the Recursions?”

“Uh… No?” Corona said.

Josuke’s eyes widened. “You can’t be serious.”

“Yes, I can,” Sunny said, smirking. “When Evermore were within the Recursions, they had the ability to create whole new universes. Most often completely unintentionally, but there were a few cases where it was done with intent.” She stood strong, horn alit. “Let’s see how this planet handles something it can’t do.”

Sunny surrounded herself in a ring of fire and pushed. She felt the folds of reality give way, preparing for the birth of a new universe…

And then the entire program crashed. The trees all turned bright blue and a comedic computer error sound effect met all their ears. Eve looked at all their faces. “…That must have made a really odd sound.”

“No kiddi-“ Josuke began, but before he could finish all of the blue trees and ground vanished. The four of them fell about four meters to a perfectly smooth, metallic floor beneath them. The actual planet.

Sunny rubbed the back of her head. “Ugh… Gun, am I glad there’s still oxygen.” She pulled out a phone, noticing interdimensional service. “Yep. We’re good.” She sent a quick message to the rest of her team telling them to check in. They responded quickly, with a lot of questions. She said she’d explain later and put the phone away. “Well, this place clearly isn’t good for settling.”

Corona absent-mindedly tapped the metal ground they were standing on. “Another ancient device…”

“A world based on the mind of a user,” Eve said. “Wonder if this was used for recreation… or torment.”

“Probably depends on the setting,” Sunny said. She moved on to explain something else, but Corona didn’t catch it.

I didn’t do anything, Corona thought to herself. Nothing at all.

“…anyway,” Eve said, having taken control of the conversation. “We should probably head back. And th-“

A dark red magic circle appeared on the ground a few meters away from the group. It flashed black, creating an oily black surface within. Out of this surface rose a bunch of tentacles, gnashing limbs, and other shapes that made no sense.

To their surprise, the eldritch horror coalesced into a pony – a unicorn. Clearly an adult version of Sweetie Belle, but with black and red eyes, a mane that flowed with magic, and Thrackerzod’s elder sign cutie mark.

“T-Thrackerzod!?” Sunny blurted.

Eve blinked. “That’s not Thracke- Oooooh, it’s an alternate of her. Right.”

“The Evermore version,” Sunny said, walking up to the unicorn. “It’s… been a while.”

Thrackerzod spoke with a voice that was identical to the smaller white unicorn the Merodi knew. “Truer words have been spoken, but bringing those up right now would be foolish.”

Sunny chuckled. “Same ol’ Zod, huh?”

“Perhaps to you. Have you by chance found my frying pan in your journeys?”

“Nope. We hardly run into any Evermore stuff at all. Like… at all. We’ve actually settled down, if you can believe that. In…” She took a breath. “AA-AA-AAPLEOOSA.”

“Amusing,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

“How did you get here?”

“I felt the Silent Forest for the first time in centuries. I came instantly.”

Sunny nodded, turning to her other friends. “Well, everyone, this is Evermore Thrackerzod, one of the best eldritch buddies out there. She did a lot to help everyone back in the day. She’s also really good at summoning everything you can think of. Thrackerzod, this is Evening Sparkle, Corona Shimmer and Josuke Higashikata. Josuke’s part of my team and likes to punch things to fix them, Eve’s the face of the interdimensional society Merodi Universalis, and Corona’s the ‘core’ Sunset of this region.”

Thrackerzod turned to Sunny and raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You got yourselves mixed up in a multiversal society?”

“Yep! It’s their Appleoosa we’re staying in, after all.”

Thrackerzod grunted. “Interdimensional society is a stupid idea that only results in questions that can’t be answered and destruction on unparalleled scales.”

“Thrackerzod!” Sunny scolded.

Eve held up a hoof. “It’s fine, Sunny. She can have her opinion. I’ve met more than my fair share of detractors. They’re fine people.”

“Unless they’re Stars,” Josuke said.

“I still hold to my belief that there are good Stars out there and we just don’t get to see them all that much.”

“Stars are exceptionally clueless for a fallen society,” Thrackerzod observed. “Intentions don’t matter all that much.” She turned to Sunny. “…I would like to see Jane.”

Sunny nodded. “Right, of course. Ahem, Josuke! You wrap up things here with the team. I’ve got to take an old friend home.” She turned to Eve. “I know you’re interested to hear stories from another section of the multiverse.”

Eve nodded excitedly.

“Well you can come along. It’ll be good for Thrackerzod to get to know you better anyway.”

Eve smiled. “To your house, or her dojo?”

“House first, though I’m not exactly sure what time it is there.”

Eve summoned Seraphim, working out the exact combination of her Stand’s powers and long-range teleportation she needed to get to that part of Appleoosa…

Corona knew she was getting dragged along as well. She normally would have been fine with this, but…

She got the distinct feeling Eve had forgotten she was there. That all of them had forgotten she was there. She was just some fly on the wall, or a piece of luggage they dragged around.

Eve lit her horn, dragging Corona, Sunny, and Thrackerzod out of the universe. Josuke cracked his knuckles and started running for the rest of his team to ‘wrap up’ what they were doing here.

The ancient planet of dreams sat, dormant once again. It would be some time before it would be able to fix itself and start generating even a normal planet again, much less one determined by a mind. Its program had been royally screwed on a truly fundamental level.

~~~

Jane wrapped up work for the day with a bunch of dazed students on the floor of her dojo.

She smiled warmly. “Same time tomorrow, everyone!” Only a few of them had enough of their wits about them to nod in confirmation.

They’d all be fine tomorrow – Jane had made sure of that. A little sore, perhaps, but she knew most of them well enough to know a little soreness wouldn’t stop their burning desire to train.

She hung out around the dojo’s doors, waiting for all of them to stumble out. She locked the doors and activated her Evermore power - singing, and then traveling from the Hub to Equis Vitis. It was a short walk to a teleporter to get to her real home...

Appleoosa. Or, if you were anyone within hearing range of Braeburn, AA-AA-AAPPLEOOSA! It was a town in the middle of the desert, still pony dominated even in this age of multiversal society. Most areas still looked like they had come right out of a Western of some sort, including the street Jane’s home was on – dirt road, a cactus growing on the other side of the street, and a saloon brimming with loud customers nearby.

She liked the aesthetic.

She started to head home, but she only made it two steps. With a flash of dimensional energy Eve, Sunny, Thrackerzod, and Corona appeared.

“Hey Jane! Look who I found!” Sunny called, gesturing to the eldritch unicorn.

Jane’s smile widened. “Zod? Wow, I wasn’t expecting this.”

“Neither was I,” Thrackerzod admitted. “It is good to see you, Jane.”

“So what have you been doing all these years?”

“Exploring. Defending. Searching. Probably the same things you were doing. Aside from settling down in a multiversal society. Really Jane?”

Jane chuckled. “Well… You know, we didn’t feel like we had to hide anything here, and we have access to a lot of the things we grew accustomed to while sliding, y’know?”

“I do know. I also know how badly these things crash and burn. You do as well.”

“Um… Excuse me?” Eve said, raising a hoof. “Charter-Princess here. What’s all this about multiversal societies crashing and burning?”

Jane rubbed the back of her head. “Everything ends, Eve. When societies like yours end… The fallout is very impressive.”

Eve blinked. “That’s… actually rather self-explanatory.”

“I wouldn’t worry just yet,” Jane assured her. “You’re very young and still growing. A society usually has time to get old before it falls.”

“And then the fall leaves a blemish for eternity. Much like the planet you were just on,” Thrackerzod pointed out. “It never lasts forever and just results in unimaginable pain.”

Eve blinked. “Well what would you suggest I do?”

“Nothing. It’s too late for you to turn back now, clearly. I would encourage any travelers to just avoid you, not be taken in by your message. Because no matter how honest it is, there will come a time where you fall, and furthermore with the amount of power you have the scale of destruction you can unleash baffles the minds of most mortals and is far beyond what any version of Azathoth can unleash.”

“You sound just like the Stars.”

“The Stars personally know what falling looks like, and of the blemish that remains. Pray you don’t live long enough to find out yourself, Eve.”

Sunny inserted herself between Thrackerzod and Eve. “Hey, here’s an idea, let’s not shout ideologies at each other with anger!”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “I’m having a calm rational discussion.”

“That Stars quip wasn’t rational.”

“I… Right. Sorry, Thrackerzod.”

Thrackerzod nodded impassively, turning to Jane. “Have you seen my frying pan?”

“No, haven’t seen Pinkie – Evermore Pinkie – since we left,” Jane answered. “You haven’t made a new one by now?”

“I probably should have at this point, but I have not for whatever reason,” Thrackerzod commented. “Deep down, I suppose I am sentimental.”

“For a frying pan that causes instant death when used,” Sunny pointed out.

Thrackerzod smiled. “Yes. The strangeness of the situation is not lost on me, Sunset.”

Jane smirked. “So, Zod! Have any stories to tell us? I’m sure Eve would loooove to hear some of them.”

Thrackerzod nodded slowly. “I will not be giving you my dimensional records or any world locations.”

“It’s okay,” Eve said.

“In that case, I have a rather ‘amusing’ story about a tentacle creature who only wanted to know what cake tasted like…”

As Thrackerzod spun her tale for all to hear, Corona leaned against a wall, sunglasses hiding her expression.

Why am I here?

There was that question again. That question that hadn’t left her the whole day. Why was she here? She’d been dragged along on an adventure that was intended to distract her. But it had done exactly the opposite. She hadn’t seen anything wonderful or amazing, instead she had got to be useless. And even if she had done something, really, what was the point in the end? Thrackerzod had described it nicely… They spent so much effort to do so much, but no matter what they did there was going to come a point where it all came crashing down and created immeasurable suffering.

The more effort that was put in, the more the stakes would rise. Eventually those stakes would be lost.

How did that make it worth it?

She couldn’t see a way how. Part of her knew she really wasn’t in a good place to be thinking about it right now, but that part of her was pushed away like a nagging parent. Probably should have listened to it, but defiantly refused to give the idea the time of day out of some misguided principle of the self.

She should jus-

A black flash of light deposited another white unicorn with red eyes in their midst. The League of Sweetie Belles’ Thrackerzod. She was slightly shorter than her Evermore counterpart and didn’t have the impressive flowing mane. She didn’t let this deter her.

“I heard there was another me, it appears rumors were not exaggerated. Greetings. I am Thrackerzod of the League of Sweetie Belles, servant of Azathoth.”

Evermore Thrackerzod narrowed her eyes. “I am Thrackerzod the Evermore. I serve no one, for I rejected Azathoth long ago.”

League Thrackerzod gasped. “You… are a traitor!?”

“I was provided a unique opportunity when severed from my master to remove the connection altogether. I took it in a heartbeat. I will not be chained by an eldritch creature who cares naught for those he tramples, nor one who can be clueless enough to be known as the Blind Idiot God.”

“Blasphemy! Azathoth is the source of our power and our very motivation!”

“Your power within you is sufficient,” E-Zod said, pointing a hoof. “The powers which you serve are not worthy.”

“The Embodiment is a powerful part of the multiversal cycles!”

“Your powers drive suffering and madness. You cannot say they are ‘good’.”

“So? We’re just different you… you…” L-Zod looked ready to explode.

“I am clearly not welcome here anymore,” E-Zod said, turning to Jane.

“Hey, I didn’t say that!” Eve said.

“My continued presence induces hostility,” E-Zod answered. “Jane, I will keep this place’s coordinates memorized and visit from time to time. But for now I will take my leave.” She glared at her younger self. “She represents something I cannot abide by.”

“Your personal baggage should not limit you as it is,” L-Zod blurted.

E-Zod ignored her. “Goodbye, Jane.”

Jane sighed. “Really? So soon? Can’t we just go to a random universe and talk there for a while? It’s been so long.”

Sunny nodded in confirmation. E-Zod looked like she wanted to argue, but put a hoof to her forehead instead. “Great forested t… You always could convince me to go against my desires. As you wish, we shall go elsewhere.”

“Hoooold it!” In a flash of red gears, Aradia appeared. “Ahem! You Evermore can’t go yet.”

“What is the meaning of this?” L-Zod said.

“I have to show the three of them something,” Aradia said. “No, you probably shouldn’t come Little Zod.”

“Little!?”

“Yes. Little. What else was I going to call you on such a short notice?” Aradia turned back to the three Evermore. “Come. It’s important to you, trust me.”

Jane furrowed her brow – but nodded. Aradia started walking away, leading the rest of them out of Appleoosa.

Eve shrugged. “Well, Corona, looks like they’re going to something more private. So we-“ Eve blinked. “Corona?”

“She teleported away shortly after I arrived,” L-Zod said.

Eve blinked. “…Oh.”

“Is that bad?”

“…I want to say no, but…” she bit her lip, worried thoughts filling her mind.

~~~

This seems familiar, Corona thought to herself begrudgingly. Teleport somewhere random and start walking. You’re great at being creative, Corona. Maybe next time you should walk away without a teleportation! Wouldn’t that be interesting!?

She looked around, checking to see where she was. The Everfree Forest. She must have really wanted to get away if she took herself here. No ponies at all, just a lot of creatures that wanted to eat everyone they could. She prepared to char anything that came at her.

But, aside from that, she decided to just let herself think. She couldn’t keep it at bay anymore. Not that she was really trying at this point, seeing as how she was walking around again…

To sum it all up, everything was worthless and she was useless.

How peachy.

Thrackerzod had vocalized everything Corona had been thinking ever since the Bloodbath – or, rather, trying not to think about. The further they went, the more sorrow, death, and destruction there was. The further they went, the worse off they were. It wasn’t better. They solved hunger – but then entire planets started to get blown up. They helped a world survive an apocalypse, but then someone from there swore revenge and struck at the heart of the Merodi. They began to explore, but those above them brought down what amounted to fire from heaven, exploiting them just because they could.

Why would everyone do that? They didn’t do that! Eve and the others made great efforts to ensure that they weren’t bossing anyone around that didn’t deserve it. Sure they messed up sometimes, but they never stole entire cities just to see what would happen!

But those mess ups – it only takes one huge mistake to bring everything crashing down. No matter how good the intentions of a person are, they will screw something up. Eventually a mistake will come that there’s no recovering from.

That was so close to happening at the Bloodbath. How much longer would it take?

It would probably be Corona that did it. She just had a feeling – she would be the one to ruin everything one day. Worse than being useless, being the one who made the mistake. They all put such faith in her to uncover the mysteries of the multiverse. She was just a unicorn! Who gave a rip about her PhD? What did it even mean? That she was smart?

Well there were a lot of problems that came with being smart. Penchant for arrogance. Easily getting fed up with people. Multiple trains of thought running through her mind at once, many of which were contradictory with each other! Oh, and the part where everyone expects you to get everything on the first try because of your ‘superior intelligence’!

A manticore leaped out of the treeline at Corona. She vaporized it with a flamethrower, barely aware it had even been there.

Superior intelligence didn’t do anything for Corona. It was basically a joke. Intelligence did not mean wisdom. Heck, she wasn’t even really that smart when it came to things outside the lab, which were what really mattered, right?

But wasn’t it all pointless?

Make up your mind, mind! Corona thought angrily to herself. Her mind took this thought and twisted it into a pretzel of confusing paradoxes that just made her let out a pained, infuriated grunt.

She made an attempt to organize her thoughts into categories, but her emotional state was too unstable to do that effectively. Her failure to create a simple ‘yes-no’ chart in her mind only heightened her turntable of negativity. Why couldn’t she do something simple?Because my mind is a whirlpool of emotions. Well why can’t she get a hold on them? Because emotions don’t listen to a thing my mind says. Why hadn’t she worked on this before? I have worked on it! I GAH! Shut up! Why shut up? Because! Shut up! You’re worthless! Did that mean Corona was worthless?

“YES!” Corona shouted. “JUST STOP ALREADY!” She lit her horn and tore several trees out of the ground and threw them to the side, upsetting a large amount of Everfree wildlife.

Corona started laughing through her tears. “This is why we don’t think about things! Don’t you see, forest? Don’t you see!? When we do think about these things we go absolutely craaaaazy! The end of the road is never pretty! We know that it’ll just end badly if we get to the end, so we try to stop ourselves! BECAUSE OF THIS! THIS… I DON’T EVEN KNOW!”

She stopped thinking at this point and just started running. Running… Running… She had no idea what the point of the running was. …Perhaps that was the point. Do something, anything – she really should have tried to get more involved on that little adventure…

She ran headfirst into something hard. She fell backward, heavily dazed, but not quite out. She shook her head, groaning. I don’t even know how to run properly…

Why was it so bright?

She looked up, finding what she had run into. The Tree of Harmony. The crystalline guardian of Equis Vitis shone its harmonious glow upon the struggling yellow unicorn.

Corona was struck by a deep feeling of being unworthy.

Corona’s cutie mark started flashing, pulsing with part of the Tree of Harmony’s magic. It was calling her.

Her thoughts split in two.

The Tree is calling me to do something! Something only I can do!

This Tree is just taking pity on me! I don’t need your pity!

Corona grabbed her throbbing head and grunted. “GAAAAAAAAAAH!” For effect, she rammed her head into the base of the Tree a few times.

“What was that?” She heard someone call from outside the Tree of Harmony’s clearing. Corona’s eyes widened in panic. Acting purely from instinct, she leaped away from the tree and into a bunch of nearby purple bushes, hiding.

Aradia, Evermore Thrackerzod, Jane, and Sunny walked in a few seconds later.

“I think you’re hearing things,” Sunny told Jane.

“I heard something as well,” Thrackerzod pointed out.

“You’re tapped into a lot of weird things. For all we know it was the voice of the Tree.”

“It’s not something to worry about,” Aradia said, gesturing for them to follow her to a place a few meters from Corona. “What we’re here for is this way.”

She pulled back a fern-like plant, revealing a gravestone. From Corona’s angle, she could just barely make out the inscription.

EVERMORE 5

PINKIE PIE

The four visitors fell silent, staring at the grave. Thrackerzod and Jane were unreadable, but Sunny had reacted with an audible gasp and a hoof to her mouth. Aradia kept a somber expression, waiting for any of them to say anything.

“…What happened to her?” Jane asked after what seemed like hours.

Aradia looked to her. “It wasn’t long after she escaped. She was summoned from the Recursions by a version of Twilight known as Twilence through an altar of ancient power mixed with her own connection to ka. Pinkie spent her time there as Twilence’s ally along with myself, Vriska, and a few others; helping her with her quest and passing on what she knew of the way the multiverse worked. She ended up involved in a war against an alternate version of Siron.”

“…Siron?” Thrackerzod asked.

“Warrior bug-tribe chief,” Jane explained. “He tried to destroy Merodi Universalis out of anger and, well, Eve had to kill him.”

“She told me he was a death seeker,” Sunny added.

“But I’ve never seen alternate versions of him…” Jane said.

Aradia closed her eyes. “Siron’s alternate selves are almost always found in the deep past of Equis worlds. He starts out as the leader of a tribe, and eventually grows into the reason Tartarus is created. The Siron Pinkie, Twilence, myself, and others faced had been locked in Tartarus for eons.”

“That Siron got her?”

Aradia nodded. “It was a game of minds and gambits. Pinkie lost. She used her Translation in the encounter, so I couldn’t help her.”

“Did he get what he deserved?” Thrackerzod asked.

Aradia folded her arms. “He made it to the Tower. He never came out. In many ways, a fate worse than death.”

“Fitting,” Thrackerzod commented.

Aradia turned to Thrackerzod. “Do you remember what happened when she left? You gave her your frying pan of instant death.”

“Yes. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

Aradia pulled a large, black frying pan out of her cloak and handed it to Thrackerzod. The eldritch unicorn hefted the cooking implement in her red magic.

The tough, eons old being who had been hardened by horrendous experiences the people around her could scarcely imagine cracked. Tears started rolling down her impassive face.

“I-I…” Sunny couldn’t say anything, she just pulled the unicorn into an embrace.

Jane continued to stare at the gravestone. She kneeled down so she was closer to eye level. “You sure found a way out, didn’t you Pinkie? After all that time… You got out. Truly. Completely.”

There was silence again.

“…I h-hear someone crying,” Sunny said.

“That’s you,” Jane said, wiping her own eyes. “Or… us.”

“N-no. Behind the bushes…”

Corona realized she was crying, pretty heavily at that. What she was witnessing… it was just so sad. These people… They’d escaped a dimensional prison of sorts. At different times. It had been so long, and just now they were learning of someone of theirs who had died a long time ago. How… How stupid was that?

“That’d be me,” Eve said, suddenly, walking out of a nearby bush, looking somewhat ashamed. “The Tree called me here.”

Thrackerzod looked upset, but Aradia held up a hand. “That’s fine, Eve. If the Tree called you here, it must be for a reason.”

“That’s… not where I heard the crying,” Sunny said, walking over to Corona’s bush and pulling it back. “Oh… Corona.”

Corona couldn’t formulate a response, she was crying too hard. It was painful to breathe in regular intervals.

Eve wiped her face, levitating Corona out. “Her mark was on the map as well… We were both called here. Though… I think she was already here.” Eve hugged her. “I’m sorry, Corona. I wasn’t paying attention.”

Corona buried her face in Eve’s wing.

Eve stroked her back with the other wing. “Shhh… It’s okay. I’m here.”

“It’s so sad!” Corona blurted, gesturing with her hoof at the grave. “Everything’s so freaking sad. There’s nothing we can do Eve! Nothing!”

Eve was going to response – but Thrackerzod spoke instead. “It isn’t sad.”

“…What!?” Sunny blurted. “Of course it is!”

Jane put a hand on Sunny. “It is sad… But that’s not all it is, Sunny.”

Sunny blinked. “W-what?”

Corona stared at Jane in disbelief. “It’s death! Of course that’s all it is! Unless there’s something wrong with you, you don’t find anything else in it!”

Aradia took the jab gracefully. She floated over to Corona and pulled up her chin. “Are you sure?”

“I… I… Uh…”

“It’s okay if that’s how you see it,” Aradia said. “But not everyone is going to see death that way.” She spread her arms wide, smiling. “Death has a purpose beyond utter destruction and sorrow, you know. It’s one of the most forceful catalysts for change. And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s what is needed.”

“Can you hear yourself?” Corona blurted. “What the hell is wrong with you? This!” She pointed at the grave. “This should not be!”

Eve looked down at the ground. “…Flutterfree says things like that, sometimes…”

“Yeah, and she believes there’s a life beyond this one!” Corona added. “What about those of us who don’t!?”

Jane kneeled down and looked Corona in the eyes. “Corona… There are some of us who have lived too long. I… There are times where I think I would have been much happier if I’d grown old and passed on like almost everyone else. After enough time… It all becomes boring. Repetitive. That’s not how everyone ends up, but it’s common enough.”

Sunny looked like she wanted to object but couldn’t find the words.

Jane gestured at the grave of Evermore Pinkie. “She didn’t have to experience that. She got to free herself from the trap and live her life the way she wanted. The death itself? Alone, there’s nothing to it. It’s literally nothing. But it can represent something more. This? This is freedom.”

Corona stared at the gravestone. “I…”

“I can’t see that,” Eve said. “I just… No. It’s not a freedom. Life is a gift and it should always be sought! Always!”

“I’m not arguing for suicide Eve, come on!” Jane blurted. “That’d just be messed up!”

“Well that’s what it sounds like!”

“It’s no-”

“It is,” Sunny interrupted, looking at Jane. “This is wrong, Jane. Even dying of old age isn’t right. No death is right.”

“You’re wrong,” Thrackerzod declared. “There are deaths that need to happen, and you know it. We all know it.”

“I know it,” Corona said. “We know it. The majority don’t.”

Jane shook her head. “That’s not the point! I… Ugh, Aradia, you explain it.”

Aradia folded her hands together. “Death is beautiful,” she put simply. She held up a hand to silence those who wanted to argue with her. “Death is the most powerful part of our lives, more than when we’re born, more than when we marry, more than when we raise our kids. Our death and what brings it about can be said to be the thing we will be most remembered for, the aspect of us that remains the longest. The strongest.”

Aradia kneeled down, tracing her fingernail through the dirt. “This Pinkie died, and she is remembered for giving her life saving a civilization. She is also remembered for ending the curse of the Evermore in a just, honorable way. And she is remembered by bringing all of us here, together, to talk deeply about what this all means.” She stood tall, a breeze blowing through her hair. “There’s a reason we care so much about last words. They define what a person was thinking in their last moments, in their last actions – what they were at the end. Because what they were at the end is the most powerful part of them. People grow towards something eternally throughout their lives, and that end is the moment they fully become themselves.”

She turned to the rest of them. “Pinkie’s last words were ‘of course not’, which don’t really mean much. But right before that, what she said was undeniably her. ‘Who's the Pinkie? I'm the Pinkie! Who's the Pinkie? I'm the Pinkie!’ …She said that after having trapped Siron. He killed her out of rage after that. But those words… Those words were undeniably her. What she had become. When she fell, she completed her life.”

Aradia turned to Corona. “The same applies to Granny Smith, to all the friends we’ve lost, to all the leaders who fell at the Bloodbath, and even to the evil people we’ve had to kill with our own hands and hooves. All of their deaths left a shape in the world, a snapshot of who they were. There has never been a meaningless death in the history of existence.”

Corona’s mind blanked. She didn’t know how to respond to that.

“That’s quite the eloquent way of putting it,” Thrackerzod admitted, bowing her head to Aradia. “You have my respect.”

“I’m the unofficial god of death where I come from,” Aradia admitted. “Don’t feel so bad you couldn’t word it.”

Jane and Thrackerzod turned to look back at the grave. A hand and a hoof soon rested upon it.

“You did good,” Jane said. “You made so many ponies happy. And now… Now you’ve brought a smile to our faces. I have a feeling people will be telling stories about you, and you will keep bringing smiles.”

“That’s all she ever really wanted,” Thrackerzod said. “…Smiles.”

“She so rarely got them from you.”

Thrackerzod let out a chuckle. “She has one now.”

Sunny looked from the two Evermore to Eve and Corona. She shook her head, setting her face into a determined expression. She marched to the grave and put her hoof on the grave. “Hey Pinkie. Apparently I’m supposed to be happy about this? At least, that’s what these two think. I… I can’t do that. But I think I can understand why they think that. And you can too, can’t you?” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Thanks… For all those fun moments, Pinkie. They stayed with me all this time.”

Jane hugged her and the three of them fell silent.

Aradia sat down between Eve and Corona. “Death… It’s a simple thing. Reactions to death, now, that’s complicated. Very complicated.”

Eve let out a pained laugh. “Yeah… Yeah it is.”

“I don’t think there is a correct response, y’know?” Aradia said. “Some are better than others, clearly, but not everyone can just take it in stride or see the beauty in it. You, Eve, I can see will never be able to accept it.”

“I can’t either,” Corona said. “But… But…” She shook her head. “I… I think I’ve had an epiphany. Death is evil, and horrendous… But by nature that means something. You… You were right, Aradia. I… I think. Death… Death is the enemy. Death is what we fight against. The worst of all evils… So evil that we have to use it against itself.” She stood up tall.

Eve noticed with elation that there was fire in those red eyes again.

“It’s not worthless! It’s worse! And so it is our enemy! They say everything has a time, that everything must fall… I say that might be right. It might be inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we need to accept it!” She rammed her hoof into the ground. “Every death is a blemish on this world! Therefore it is our enemy!”

“Yeah!” Eve said. “Yeah, that’s exactly it!” She squeezed Corona. “That’s our enemy.”

“Basically the laws of the universe itself, huh?” Corona said.

“We’re declaring war on quite an enemy.”

“I say bring it.”

Eve laughed, wiping her eyes. “It's good to see that look back in your eyes, Corona.”

“It feels good.”

Aradia smirked. “It looks like Evermore Pinkie brought around a few more smiles today.” She pointed her fingers at the two ponies’ flanks. They flashed with the light of a completed friendship mission.

“What exactly were we here to solve?” Eve asked. “I think all of us here had separate issues…”

“We were here to solve, or at least help them all, weren’t we?” Corona asked. “Me… You… Sunny… I bet even Jane and Thrackerzod got something out of this.”

Aradia winked. “The Tree of Harmony tends to do things like that.”

“Yeah! Hey!” Corona called to the Tree of Harmony. “Thanks for letting me run into you! Repeatedly!”

“…What?”

“Don’t ask.” Corona’s hooves started twitching. “I feel… I don’t know. Did I touch someone without the boots? I feel… alive.”

“You’ve given yourself a purpose,” Aradia said. “It’s awakened what you had hidden within yourself.”

“So… That’s it? I’m just better?” Corona tapped her head. “That’s not…”

Aradia shook her head. “That’s not how it works. You’ll never be the same pony you were before. But I can see it becoming a part of you that you’ve discovered a way to accept. You’ve transformed a depressant into a drive. I’m just glad I could help.”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Corona said, nodding. “I… I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. I was… I was going crazy. I’d just been swinging through life…” She put a hoof to her chin. “The struggle has become a fight… And that fight is something I actually have power to fight.”

Eve laughed. “I don’t think we’ll be able to defeat death itself, Corona.”

“We can hit it with a giant hammer and make it run away,” Corona declared.

Aradia’s smile widened. “I’m very glad you’ve found something, Corona.”

Corona lit her hoof on fire. “Yeah.”

Eve turned to the three Evermore. She smiled sadly. “I think… I think we’ve crashed their time of ‘mourning’ enough. We should go.”

“Yeah. I’m going to call Olivia as well,” Corona added.

“Huh? Why?”

“I have a few thoughts...”

~~~

The League’s Thrackerzod walked down the streets of Celestia City a few days later.

She had the living tar scared out of her by Evermore Thrackerzod appearing a centimeter in front of her.

“VEAOUY’NYTH!” L-Zod said, taking a defensive stance.

“Calm yourself, I am not here to assault you,” E-Zod said.

“Are you here to ram your horn into my skull?”

“I sai- oh, a metaphor. I was not expecting that from one of my ilk.”

“Just more reasons we aren’t the same.”

E-Zod coughed. “I am here to apologize.”

L-Zod blinked. “The differences keep piling up.”

“I remember what it was like when I was still hinged to Azathoth. It was decidedly inappropriate of me to berate you for something in which you have no manner of choice.”

“I’m going to have to stop you,” L-Zod said. “I did have a choice. My connection was severed once, as were my powers. I could have lived like that. I chose to return to Azathoth.”

E-Zod paused at this. “…It is amazing, how differences can crop up with so small of an actual deviation.”

“Indeed. For what it’s worth, I know why you left. When I was gone, I understood I was free. I just didn’t want it at the time.”

“If you get another opportunity, I would take it.”

“You know I can’t agree to that.”

“But you will remember it when the next opportunity presents itself. Until then, live well, Thrackerzod of Equis Eldritch.”

“Likewise.”

E-Zod left, leaving L-Zod with much to ponder.

~~~

Jane, Sunny, and Thrackerzod stood outside the house the couple owned.

“Going already?” Jane asked.

“I stayed a few more days than I planned as it is,” Thrackerzod said. “I will return to visit, but I cannot settle down.”

“It’s a lot better than you’re thinking it is,” Sunny said.

“I did settle down, once.” Thrackerzod looked into the distance with a haunted expression. “You can’t stay settled forever.”

Jane and Sunny looked uncomfortable at this.

“There are a few things I think I should tell you before I go,” Thrackerzod said. “The Recursions ended.”

“Really?” Sunny said, blinking. “You did it?”

“We… I… It’s complicated. Regardless, it did end… But something similar has replaced it. I managed to place the attention of some of the higher societies on it, so there is a loose watch on the area – I wouldn’t call it quarantine. Earth C has a full quarantine.”

“…Earth C?” Jane asked.

“If you don’t know, it’s best you continue not to know. I apologize.”

“Fine.”

Thrackerzod looked into the distance. “I just thought you’d like to know that it’s still there. But it has changed significantly. I do not know what lies within. I’m never going back there.”

“Neither are we,” Jane asserted.

“Figured as much. Still, you needed to be told.” She closed her eyes and lit her horn. “Until next time, my friends.”

Jane and Sunny waved as Thrackerzod the Evermore vanished.

~~~

Later, Jane sat alone beside the Tree of Harmony, looking at Pinkie's grave with a somber smile. Leaning against her was a bag of confetti and a roll of tape that she was grabbing from every few seconds to add to a colorful… something in her hands.

"...It was fun, I suppose you could say. Sunrise and I were fighting, of course, but that didn't change what I thought of them. They were just misguided, you know? Then there was another time when we were in this space game world. We encountered a star shaped like a person and wearing a cowboy outfit of all things. He was pretty friendly and talkative for somebody without a mouth."

The object in her hands was taking shape, a chaotic mishmash of brightly-colored confetti squares.

"Our time here has been pretty fun too. You wouldn't believe it, but I'm a teacher now." Jane chuckled lightly. "I never would have expected it either, especially after I finally let go of Penny, but something about sharing wisdom and knowledge with others just feels right. I teach all sorts of different fighting techniques to people. I figure if they can defend themselves, then that'll at least make them and the people they care about safer."

Jane stood up and waved lightly to Pinkie's grave. "It was good to finally get to talk to you again, I'll be sure to visit you again, don't you worry. And hey, maybe I'll throw a party with Discord, just for old time's sake."

Before Jane left she placed a small technicolor flower on Pinkie's grave.

~~~

Toph was very surprised to sense Corona walk into the throne room unannounced. Lady Rarity and Lieshy were just as surprised, and even more surprised to see Som- Olivia walk in with her.

Toph folded her hands together. “Corona, what is it?”

“Hey, Toph,” she pointed at the queen. “I want to start going exploring again.”

Toph smiled; glad to see this side of Corona return. “You know I can’t come with you.”

“I’m not asking for you. I’m asking for your advisors. You know how to run the kingdom well enough by now, I can take them.”

Toph shrugged. “Fine by me, if they want to.”

“Emeralds in spring,” Lieshy decreed. “…That means yes.”

Lady Rarity chuckled. “Corona, dear… I would love to go out again. Is it just you and Olivia on the team so far?”

Corona nodded. “Vivian likes where she is right now. But we don’t need five, do we?”

“Of course not.” Lady Rarity skittered over to her. “I say we go out and explore again. Been waiting for you to ask, to be frank. Anything in particular that brought it on?”

“Nothing much. I just decided to declare war on death itself. No biggie.”

Lieshy laughed.

Lady Rarity smirked. “Already filed a request with Renee?”

“Done and approved,” Olivia said, closing a holographic display. “We can go as soon as we want.”

Toph held out her hand and pointed. “Go, my subjects. Fight valiantly.”

“You’re overdoing it,” Lieshy commented.

“No. No I’m not,” Toph asserted.

Lady Rarity put a hoof on Corona’s shoulder. “Thank you. I’ve… I’ve missed this.”

“Glad to have you back,” Lieshy declared.

“Glad to be back,” Corona said, rubbing the back of her head.

The sorrow wasn’t gone. She still felt it in her, gnawing away at her. But unlike before, she had something revitalizing herself. A drive. Everything that went wrong, every mistake that was made, every horrendous death that occurred…

Well, that was just another reason to fight back.

Another reason to fight harder.

Until her bitter end.

And then others would have reason to fight harder.

No death was pointless.

062 - Prismatic Hearts

Monika had taken it upon herself to solve great, curious mysteries as of late. After she had solved her own – hadn’t that been a fun little adventure – she had moved on to solving those of other stories… Given her unique ability to manipulate the flow between stories and the universes behind them, she was in a great position to solve any curious little mysteries she happened to come across.

Those animatronic games had taken longer than she was expecting to sort out, not the least because there were more than two different continuities she could transport herself to, but each one had a different answer in the end.

Now, she was focused on a single game, one she remembered playing in her time of fixation. A game of monsters, hearts, amazing characters, and delightful story. One where you could avoid killing a single creature or kill everything in existence. And several options in between. It was a deep game in which she had watched every single version being played.

Its name was Undertale.

Her copy was something she never actually played properly – she tore it apart file by file, gathering snippets of information and reactions. There was much hidden there, but there was also one mystery that no amount of digging or glitching would truly satisfy her. The mystery of the Man Who Speaks in Hands. Very rarely, players could find a mysterious gray door that led to a room with a mysterious figure. Every time a player sought to interact with this character, the sprite would freak out and vanish mysteriously.

There were many clues about him, but no answers. Monika was going to demand an understanding.

She forced the game to load with the player character outside the mysterious door. She placed her hand on the computer screen and let out a focused breath.

Tap into the flow…

Code flew past her mind as she reached to what was below it. The story had a connection to a universe – not a direct connection, though, just a shadow of one. She had to create a solid connection in order to traverse the plane between worlds. Her body glitched out of existence, leaving an empty chair. The game crashed a second later.

On the other side of her motions was a hallway cut out of cave rock. Glowing blue crystals provided the only light in the passage, but that was plenty for Monika. She was able to make out the colorless door embedded in the rocky wall. It clearly did not belong there, appearing as if it were just grafted on as an afterthought.

She smirked. Time for answers. She stuck her hand out to the doorknob and pulled it open.

The interior had no texture. It was a white so pure shadows didn’t even appear on it. The only indication the room had any boundaries were black lines that marked the places where the walls met the floor and ceiling. In the center of the room was the mysterious figure.

It looked a lot more disturbing when it was not limited to a handful of distorted pixels on a screen. The figure had two parts – the lower being black, decaying sludge that pulsated ever so slightly, while the upper was a bone-textured head with tremendous, gaping eyes and a thin, cruel mouth. There were two bony hands struggling to remove themselves from the lower sludge, each with a hole through the palm.

Monika focused. Of course she couldn’t read the thing’s character file, it was probably too corrupted to even be accessed. But she had other manipulations she could use. Tap into the code in thi-

Without warning, the figure’s hand shot out and grabbed her by the wrist.

Monika felt fear.

~~~

Pinkie Pie leaped through a freshly opened portal and landed in a small field of golden flowers. The rest of her team followed in a less excited manner, though all but Jotaro had smiles on their faces. The portal closed behind them, allowing their eyes to adjust to the unusual lighting.

They were in a cavern. Most of it was dark, though there was a beam of light from a hole far above them. The flowers all grew within this light, the soil in the shadows devoid of even the smallest seedling. Beyond that were the cave walls – with a single cavernous pathway to their right.

“We have two options!” Pinkie declared. “Up, or deeper into the cave!”

Flutterfree activated Lolo, winding a strand of green upward and through the higher opening. “It’s the side of a mountain,” Flutterfree reported. “Mostly forest around, though I do see a city in the distance. Human, if I had to guess.” She retracted Lolo.

“Sounds boring,” Vriska commented.

“Yeah, it kinda does, doesn’t it?” Pinkie pointed into the cavernous path. “THEN WE GO THAT WAY!”

Nova shrugged. “I am detecting higher levels of magic that way, so yeah, probably more interesting.”

Pinkie bounced along, her team following behind her. They passed through a narrow section of cave that Jotaro had to duck through, but it soon opened up to a significantly larger section with a beam of light shining from above on a singular golden flower.

This golden flower had a cute little face. “Heya! I’m Flowey! Flowey the flower! Welcome to the Underground!” He winked. “I can be your little guide!”

Before they knew what was happening, anything that wasn’t the five of them or Flowey vanished, replaced with inky blackness. Flowey and the five of them lost all color, becoming nothing more than white figures with black outlines – no grays at all.

Colors flashed into existence in front of the five explorers in the form of stylized hearts. Nova’s was blue, Flutterfree’s green, Jotaro’s yellow, Vriska’s purple, and Pinkie’s pink. Flowey seemed decidedly confused by the existence of a pink heart, but recovered quickly.

“What is this?” Nova asked, poking her blue heart with a hoof.

“That’s your SOUL!” Flowey answered. “And with it you’re supposed to catch friendliness pellets!” Flowey generated a small, spinning white pellet. “Try i-”

“Cut the bullshit, Asriel,” Vriska said, folding her arms.

Flowey stared at her in disbelief. “How in th-”

“I’ve played this game,” Vriska declared. “Flowey there is basically what you could call the main villain. Don’t trust a word he says. That ‘friendliness pellet’ is spinning death on a stick.”

“Understood,” Jotaro said, summoning Star Platinum.

“Th- that’s quite the spirit you’ve got there!” Flowey said. “A-and you say you’ve played this game before? How… interesting… You see, I’ve played this game before as well! Over and over and over a-”

“Not impressive,” Pinkie said, glaring at the little flower. “Do you-”

“Yes of course I know we’re in a ‘book’ right now! I-”

“You don’t have speaking privileges,” Vriska decreed.

“Do you know what I’m capable of!?”

“Yes. I beat your ass. Multiple times.”

Flowey opted to just disappear into the ground. Colors returned to the world and the Technicolor SOULS vanished.

“He’ll be plotting something,” Vriska said, sitting on a nearby rock. “You can count on it.”

“Mhm,” Pinkie confirmed.

“So, what’s this game’s world like?” Nova asked.

Vriska leaned back. “Well, I would say it’s closely related to my source material, but it’s only tangential. I only played it because some pun-making skeleton stole my song. The game itself is about a human kid who falls into this Underground and has to adventure to find her – or his I guess, it’s not really clear – way to escape. In the process she can either make friends with everyone and never resort to violence, or she could kill everyone. I played through both.”

“Anything we should know?”

“You shouldn’t have to kill anything here,” Vriska said. “Doing so will have consequences. The few things that you have to fight will still be redeemable. Usually you can still talk your way out of encounters. Oh, yeah, the encounters. Uh… I don’t think your physical forms can take damage, it’s all focused on your SOULs. Avoid letting them get hit. I… forget what the colors mean. The player had red.”

“Also Flowey’s Aware,” Pinkie pointed out.

“Yeah, that,” Vriska said. “That’s important. We’re probably going to have to beat the tar out of him at some point. It’s going to be interesting to see if we can get the perfect ending without exploiting a save/reload system…”

Flutterfree smiled. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go make friends with everyone.”

“Yeah that’s a goo-”

And then reality broke into a dozen pieces like a pane of glass hit by a bullet. All five of them felt their SOULs falling between the cracks of existence…

~~~

Vriska appeared in the middle of a fight, her purple SOUL already out. She narrowly dodged a flying bone. She heard the sound of a familiar tune start as she turned to face her opponent – a small, diminutive skeleton in slippers and a jacket. A smile was permanently plastered on his skull, and unlike everything else in the encounter, his eye flashed blue.

There was not supposed to be any color besides Vriska’s SOUL.

Vriska’s response to this was among the worst possible.

“HEY! STOP STEALING MY SONG!”

The skeleton – who Vriska knew was named Sans – apparently made a decision right there. A gigantic dragon-skull appeared behind him and fired a beam of intense white energy. Vriska dodged it with a quick jump. “i don’t know what you just pulled with your soul right there, kid, but this is going to end just like all the other times.”

“Kid? Do I look like a-“ Sans didn’t wait for her to finish, instead throwing a flurry of bones at her SOUL. She used her luck to barely dodge every single one.

She pulled out her dice, ready for a counterattack, but then she remembered a key detail.

In the game, Sans may have been incredibly quick and agile, but he also only had 1 HP. If she fought him seriously he’d just die from a single hit if this world was anything like the game.

Fuck, I don’t want to kill him, but he thinks I’m on a run where I killed everyone. She bit her lip, jumping over a wave of lasers. “Hey, think we can talk about this?”

“you’ve sure gotten talkative in the last few minutes,” Sans said, grabbing a hold of her SOUL with some kind of magic and ramming her into the ground.

“Look, Sans, I’m not who you think I am!” Vriska blurted, dodging to the left. “I’m Vriska, an interdimensional traveler who’s swapped with whoever you were just fighting!”

Sans stared at her with his intense blue eye. “how do you know my name, then?”

“Uh, hello? Interdimensional traveler? Of course I know stuff. Uh… Let’s see, you sometimes sell hot dogs and stack them on people’s heads. Am I remembering that right?”

“yes,” Sans said, grabbing a hold of her soul. “not LV 19…”

“See? Not the axe-crazed murderer type! One of the good guys!”

The fight ended – colors returned, Vriska’s SOUL vanished, and the music stopped playing. Sans’ coat revealed itself to be blue, and Vriska discovered they were standing in a large royal hall lit with eerie orange light. Sans glared at her. “good guy, huh? your SOUL says otherwise. LV 16. you’ve killed a lot of people, vriska. just a little further and you’d get the prize of being just as violent as that kid who was here before you. an amazing accomplishment.”

“Things are different out there, Sans,” Vriska said. “We have to kill to survive. There is no ‘pacifist’ run.”

“That’s no excuse for sixteen,” Sans countered.

Vriska folded her arms. “Fine. I’ve killed people for fun and sport in the past. I don’t do that anymore you know!”

Sans shrugged. “the record is what it is.”

“Whatever, don’t like me.” Vriska threw her hands in the air and pulled out her dimensional device. “I’ll leave you alone here. Guess I accidentally took care of your monster problem, huh? You should thank me.”

“you clearly didn’t do anything,” Sans shrugged. “regardless, i’ve got no bones to pick with you. go on your way.”

“Hastala-Vriska,” Vriska saluted, trying to find a world to connect to with her dimensional device. She furrowed her brow. “…Fuck.”

“problem?”

“You could say that. I can’t dial back to the universe I was dragged from, and none of the others I’m trying have connections to this one. Fuuuuuuuck I think I’m stuck.”

“huh. sucks to be you, doesn’t it? right now there’s just me, asgore, and a psychotic murderous flower.”

“And everyone on the Surface.”

“like that matte-”

“All I need to do is accumulate luck for a while and smash the barrier down with my own internal force. It’s not that hard to pass through it.” She played with her dice. “Hrm… I wonder how much luck I can drain from Flowey without killing him… It’ll be interesting, doing it to a flower…”

Sans leaned against a nearby column and slouched. “i won’t stop ya. do whatever you want. you could even take asgore’s SOUL and get out that way. i know you have it in you.”

“That way sucks,” Vriska countered. “Not going down that route. Though I’d rather not sit here and wait to accumulate luck…” She rubbed her chin. “Hrm… Can I-“

“i am not helpin’ you with anythin’.”

“Well fuck you too.” Vriska played with her dice. “Hrm…” An idea came to her. “Wait a minute, Sans, you know stuff.”

“i’m just good at my job.”

“No, more than that. You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?” She smirked. “I know you don’t want to help me, but what if I can help you? You have things you’d like to do. You don’t want to stay in this universe. You help me get out, I can help you find a better world.”

Sans looked at her. He was still smiling, but she could see deep, serious thoughts in those white pinpricks that were his eyes. “you’ve got a deal. come on, i’ve got something for you.”

Vriska followed Sans behind a pillar – and then they took a shortcut.

~~~

Another Sans had been selling hot dogs to a significantly less monstrous version of the kid when the kid was suddenly gone, replaced with two individuals. One was a tremendous human adult while the other was a pegasus creature. He instinctively checked them – green and yellow, Kindness and Justice. LV 3 and LV 8.

The man looked at the hot dog in his hand. “…Nani?”

The pegasus blinked, looking around. “Uh… Okay then…” She summoned a strange spirograph shape, forcing Sans’ eye to ignite with powerful fire and a few of his weapons to appear behind him.

The pegasus flared her wings in a defensive posture. “Sir, there’s a dragon skull behind you!”

“oh. that. yeah, that’s mine,” Sans said, shrugging. “i don’t go showing it around because it scares people.”

“Oh,” the pegasus said, lowering her wings. “Well, I’m Flutterfree, and this is Jotaro. We’re explorers from another world. What’s your name?”

“sans. ice to meetcha.”

Jotaro examined his surroundings – they were underground, but the area was exceptionally hot and well lit due to lava flows nearby.

“welcome to hotland.”

“That’s quite the descriptive name,” Flutterfree commented.

“i always thought lava runs would be better. or chili islands. want a hot dog?”

“Sure,” Flutterfree said. “I don’t think we have money you’d accept though.”

“eh, no problem. call the first one on the house.”

The two travelers started munching on the delicious food items. Flutterfree was mildly surprised when, at the third bite, the hot dog barked. “…Uh…”

“don’t worry about that,” Sans said with a wink. Flutterfree didn’t ask how he winked without eyelids.

Jotaro took out his dimensional device and tried a few things. He turned to Flutterfree and shook his head.

Flutterfree sighed. “Sans? Is it okay if I use Lolo – the thing you saw earlier – to look around?”

Sans shrugged. “i don’t really care either way. knock yourself out.”

Flutterfree spread out Lolo, searching the area for anything interesting. The green strands were invisible to all eyes that weren’t next to Flutterfree herself, so none of the creatures of the Underground batted an eye when the leaves passed by them.

“I found something odd…” Flutterfree said. “Down the river – the one of water a ways that way – there’s a section of cavern with a gray door in it. That door… when Lolo tries to reveal anything about it, it becomes insubstantial. Almost like a glitch.”

Sans blinked. “door? i don’t know about any door and i know of every door in the waterfall.”

“Something to check out then,” Jotaro said, standing tall. “Lead the way.”

“i’ve got a shortcut,” Sans said, standing up. “i have to admit, my skull’s ringing with curiosity about this door. this way.”

The two followed him – and the scenery suddenly shifted to that of a significantly darker and wetter area of the Underground.

“Just like when Pinkie needs to move fast,” Flutterfree observed.

“who?” Sans asked.

“Our leader,” Flutterfree explained. “She has a habit of knowing things and moving impossibly.”

“she sounds like a fine gal. pink, I take it?”

“Very,” Jotaro commented.

Flutterfree used Lolo to find the door again. “It’s right down this cavern. Come on.”

“this cavern didn’t exist yesterday,” Sans pointed out.

“Maybe we triggered it by showing up?” Flutterfree suggested. “I don’t know, really. Nova and Pinkie are the ones who know about this stuff.”

Jotaro raised an eyebrow.

“Oh! Sorry Jotaro. Do you have an idea what’s going on?”

“Yare yare daze... Only a small idea. Something shattered the world we were just in, separating the group. Each of us are probably in a different universe. Given how this is still the Underground, likely different versions of the Underground. This may or may not be related to the door.”

They had arrived at the door – smooth, gray, and featureless. When Flutterfree neared it, it became insubstantial and jagged.

“It’s probably not safe for me to touch,” Flutterfree said.

Jotaro nodded. He used Star Platinum to open the door, revealing a pristine white interior where no shadows existed.

There was a woman on the floor, laying in a pool of her own blood.

Flutterfree gasped. “MONIKA!?”

Jotaro moved quickly. He leaped into the room, grabbed Monika with Star Platinum, and dragged her out into the hallway. He laid her in front of Sans and Flutterfree. She was heavily wounded, large scratches crisscrossing her body at perfect ninety-degree angles.

Flutterfree checked Monika’s pulse. “She’s alive. We need to wake her up so she can heal herself…”

“who’s this girl?” Sans asked.

“Monika. She’s…” Flutterfree struggled to find the words. “She’s a character. Let me see here… Uh…”

Jotaro clapped Star Platinum’s hands an inch from Monika’s face. This shocked her awake – though it also made her cough up blood. “Gah…”

“Monika!? Are you okay?”

Monika rubbed her face. “Ugh… I… Don’t know…” She focused on something only she could see. She removed the cuts, fixed her clothes, and stood up with only a few glitched movements.

“What happened?” Jotaro demanded.

Monika took a look around where they were and curled a fist. “There’s something evil here… Something I didn’t see coming…”

“what?” Sans asked.

Monika pointed at the white room. “It was in there. It… It took something from me. I don’t know what…”

None of them liked the sound of that.

Sans didn’t like her either. He couldn’t read her LV first of all, and her soul… It was red.

Determination.

~~~

Nova appeared alone in a dark, wet section of the Underground. She shook her head – something had gone wrong. She didn’t think it was anything they had done, but…

She checked her readings. She was in a different universe and there didn’t appear to be a connection back to the one they’d just been in. None of the other connections seemed to work… She wondered if the universes had been scrambled by something like that other time they had all been split up. The unusual dimensional readings she was getting sure lent credence to that theory. Or, at least, it told her that something odd was going on with the universes.

Her thoughts were interrupted when a humanoid being in full plate armor landed in front of her. “What are you doing here!? Don’t you know there’s a human on the loose?”

“Uh… No?” Nova said, cocking her head at the armored woman.

“Just get to safety! The Temmie Village is that way; you should be safe there. Okay?”

“…Okay,” Nova agreed. The woman nodded and ran off, a spear appearing in her hand. Presumably hunting the human. Nova wondered if humans were monsters in this world, or if the people here were just terrified from what little they knew. …Perhaps it was both, considering what Vriska had managed to tell them about the game.

If there is a human around here killing everyone… I can stop them.

Nova galloped in the direction she had seen the armored woman run, but quickly realized she had no idea where the warrior had gone. She was alone again in these tunnels. And there was possibly a human mass murderer about…

“Hoi!”

“AUGH!” Nova screamed, raising a shield between her and… a cat? A dog? She… really wasn’t sure.

“Hoi! I’m Temmie!” the thing said. Its face was vibrating, as if it wasn’t quite attached to its head.

“Uh… Hi, Temmie,” Nova said cautiously. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous out here?”

“Oh yes! But Tem know way best! Tem… genius!”

“Uh huh… Look, how about we get you back to the Temmie Villag-“

“NU! Tem want to go… DIS WAY!!!!” She scrambled off down what seemed to be a random tunnel.

Nova facehooved. “Oh boy, here we go again…” She teleported ahead of Temmie and grabbed the cat-dog in her signature striped telekinetic aura. “No, we are not going ‘dis way’ we are going to where you can be safe.”

“MMF! Tem no want safe! Tem want – oh hoi door!”

“Door…?” Nova said, turning to her left. There was, in fact, a door in the cave wall. Temmie and Nova fell quiet as they stared at the unusual portal.

It seemed wrong to them, somehow.

“Open da door,” Temmie said.

“W-what?”

“Open. Da. Door.”

“You open the door!”

“NU! Tem haz no hands!!!”

“I don’t either!”

“You has da magikz!”

Nova sighed. She took a step forward.

The door opened all on its own. Temmie screamed and passed out, her eyes becoming X’s. Nova, in contrast, just narrowed her eyes. “You’re interesting-looking.”

The ‘interesting-looking’ individual was a tall skeleton with a robe that covered most of his body from the neck down, leaving only his bony hands visible. The palms of those hands had a circular hole right through them, yet this did not appear to impede his motion. His skull was a tall ovoid with two large, black sockets that held pinpricks of light that served as his eyes. From his left eye, a crack ran down from his socket to the base of his skull. The right was much the opposite, a black division going upwards. His mouth was small, but was able to move as if it were made of flesh rather than bone. He did not appear to have a jaw at all.

“Interesting is a word without meaning,” the being declared, looking closely at Nova. “I could say that you are an interesting one, and nothing would really be accomplished.”

“Yeah…” Nova said, nervously. “I’m Nova, interdimensional explorer. Who are you?”

“W. D. Gaster. You have arrived in my universes at a most inopportune time.”

“Your universes?”

“Yes. Mine. Under normal circumstances I would devote my energies to ejecting you from them, but the situation is decidedly not standard at the current juncture.”

“I’ll leave as soon as I figure out how if that’s what you want. But… there’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

“A threat has appeared,” Gaster stated. “It sought me out specifically. It knew of my connection to these worlds. The world that was dimensionally weakest shattered as a result. No doubt it was weak because of you.”

“I- I’m sorr-”

“Don’t be. Misplaced sorrow is pointless. The fault lies in the outside threat. It is still here, among these worlds.” He raised one of his hands and created a rift in space-time. It wasn’t a circular, glowing portal like the ones Nova used – it was a brutal, horrendous tear that hurt the space it went through like a predator’s claw digging into flesh.

“I’m coming with you,” Nova decreed.

“If that is what you wish, Nova,” Gaster said, devoid of emotion.

“What about Temmie, though?”

With a wave of his hand, Gaster teleported Temmie away. “She will be safe.”

Nova followed the skeletal being through the portal without another word.

~~~

There was a place where nothing was supposed to exist. Eternal nothingness and death was what it had become.

Pinkie, being Pinkie, decided to keep on existing anyway. In her state of really-shouldn’t-exist-but-did, she saw blackness. There was no light, but she could still see herself just fine. There was a cold, dead wind blowing through the nothingness.

Pinkie grinned. She took a deep breath and took out her megaphone. “HELLO!!!!!!”

A voice responded from everywhere at once. It was deep, but still audibly feminine.

“…Interesting. There’s nothing left, but you keep on existing anyway.”

“Yep! That’s Pinkie Pie!” Pinkie giggled. “So, Chara, are you going to show yourself or what?”

“Most peculiar. You know my name, yet I did not know yours until this moment.”

“Yeah, I know things. Lots of things.”

“You have replaced the empty spirit… Yet you are not like them, not really. You are from elsewhere…”

Suddenly Pinkie was in an encounter – her body went white and her SOUL showed itself.

“LV 5… pathetic. Perhaps pink means sentimentality. Or weakness.”

“Laughter,” Pinkie said with a grin. “I overrode the rules, I suppose you could say.”

“Yes… I see that within you. There are other places beyond this one. I had told them we would move onto the next after, but they never returned… You are my destiny, Pinkie Pie.”

“Nah,” Pinkie said, smirking. “I’m not taking you out of here and you can’t make me.”

A young girl appeared out of the nothingness in front of Pinkie. Her shirt was striped and her hair cut short. Her eyes had pupils of glowing neon red and blacks instead of whites. She held what could only be described as a slasher smile on her face, an expression that went nicely with the oversized knife in her hand.

There was a red SOUL hovering in front of her… But it seemed dead, somehow.

Pinkie produced two giant swords. “I know who you are, Chara. I’m going to use every cheat and trick I know because of it. You don’t deserve to live.”

“Such bold statements for such a low LV.”

“I only kill when I have to. You kill everything you see.”

Chara laughed. “Yes! Yes I do! How about we see if it’s possible to get higher than 20!” She pulled her knife back and charged.

Pinkie appeared behind her and drove her two swords through Chara’s SOUL at the same time, shattering the frail red heart.

“Told you I would cheat,” Pinkie said.

And then Chara’s SOUL was just fine. She was standing a short distance from Pinkie again.

Pinkie glared. “Cheating as well, I see.”

Chara’s smile faltered. “…You remind me too much of a certain skeleton.”

Pinkie grinned. “Imagine that guy turned up to 11. That’s what I am. You’re going to have a bad time, Chara. I’m never going to do the same thing twice.”

“I refuse to lose,” Chara declared, drawing a gun out of nowhere and firing.

Pinkie deflected, cutting through her SOUL once more…

~~~

“and here we are,” Sans told Vriska. “my laboratory.”

The laboratory was a mostly empty room with a single countertop workspace and a thing under a large tarp. Vriska moved her hand to look under the tarp, but Sans slapped her hand away. “nope. you don’t get to see that.”

“Yeesh, okay mister grumpy,” Vriska muttered. “If it’s not the mysterious possibly-doomsday device under the tarp, what is it?”

Sans pointed at a blueprint sitting atop the counter workspace. “there you go. dimensional theory on that piece of paper and everything under it. take your time, we’ve literally got until the end of the universe to figure something out.”

Vriska picked up the blueprint. “Gog, I wish Nova was here, she’d know what this meant instantly…”

“so you’re not the smart one in your group. Not surprised.”

“I wonder how many times you’re going to get a ‘fuck you’ before I get tired of listening to all your blathering nonsense and decide to punch you and get it over with.”

“heh. i s’ppose that’ll be the moment you get over yourself and just kill me anyway. come on, i know you have it in you.”

“Do you want to die?”

“no, i want grillby’s. i want everyone alive again. i want to not have to deal with people like you.”

“Lovely,” Vriska muttered, looking over the blueprints. “Can you just help me over here? I need something like the energy signature of another universe that I can put into my device to get anywhere else.”

“well that’d be right under the piece of paper over there.”

“Over where?”

“under there.”

“Under where?”

Sans gave her a finger guns gesture. “gotcha.”

“…My gog, you really want to die. You only have one HP buddy, if you tweak me the wrong way I will punch you and it will kill you.”

“hey, cool, you know about HP. sweet. how about you explain how you know that? “

“How come you know so much stuff about LV and whatever?”

“because i’m supposed to. you, on the other hand… very suspicious.”

Vriska twitched. “Righty-o! Let’s go over this simply. You live in a video game. We found that video game and studied it before coming here. Tah-daaaaaah!” Can’t tell him it was only me who knew about it. Cause then he’d ask how I played. I don’t think he’d let me leave if he knew I went through one of these runs.

“huh.”

“…That’s it? I tell you you’re a video game and that’s your only response?”

“i already knew it was a game. just didn’t think it would be played like that. wonder if you could bring a copy here and play while you play while you play.”

“Questions for later. Just help me find the right coordinates or whatever, kapeesh?”

“eh, sure.” Sans walked up to the counter and began to sort through the papers. Vriska was not a genius, but she did recognize sketches that clearly related to time travel devices, as well as more than a few documents on dimensional theory. She couldn’t piece it together though.

He eventually handed her a sheet of paper. “there you go.”

Vriska looked it over – A Study of Resonance Frequencies Within the Barrier. It took her a few minutes, but she located the section about particular frequencies that suggested a weakness in the dimensional wall…

She took out one of her eight-balls and smashed it against the table, producing a computer. She bit her lip – she really didn’t know what she was doing. With some trepidation, she opened up a program she thought translated dimensional signatures into coordinates. It had been a while since she’d been shown what the program could do…

“problem?”

“I’m fine, thank you for asking.”

“you’ve been staring at that screen for a while. you look like you don’t have a clue.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Vriska blurted. “I’ve got this.”

“suuuuuuure.”

Vriska ran some numbers into the program and, after fifteen minutes of banging her head against the counter, she got it. Multiple coordinates from the data.

“Heh. Told you I had it.”

“i saw what you needed to do six minutes ago.”

“THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY ANYTHING!?”

“schadenfreude.”

“Nice word,” Vriska muttered, placing the coordinates into her dimensional device. She dialed it and got a green light.

“you ever get that feeling you’re being watched?”

“Yeah. By you. Stop staring so much.”

~~~

“You saw something,” Chara said, bringing her knife down on nothing – again.

“Yeah, so what?” Pinkie said, aiming a bazooka in Chara’s direction and firing, shattering her SOUL.

“Something… elsewhere,” Chara said, already recovered.

“Yeah, lucky me!” Pinkie giggled. “Too bad you don’t get to see anything else. Just stuck here forever in this darkness.”

Chara charged, but Pinkie once again just wasn’t there.

“Heh. You just Chara-rged.”

Chara shot a blast of pure determination behind her, but Pinkie wasn’t there again. “Pinkie, this isn’t stuck; this is the darkness of my creation. It is the way all things should be.”

“Doesn’t it get boring?” Pinkie asked, bashing Chara into pieces with her warhammer.

“Never,” Chara laughed. “The nothingness is an eternal joy, a constant reminder that I did this. I killed them all. The darkness is fulfillment.”

“Your psycho levels are off the charts,” Pinkie muttered, opting to throw syringes at Chara this time.

“By all conventional scales.” Chara said, plucking the syringes off of her like they were little more than flies. “I should probably thank you for coming here, even though I doubt it was intentional.”

“You have me pegged.” Pinkie pulled out a mini-nuke and irradiated Chara’s SOUL again.

Evidentially Chara just didn’t feel pain. “You showed me that there are ways to the other worlds without leeching off another entity. I can see it within you – the answer. You know how to get out of here… You saw it. It’s only a matter of time before I see it through you.”

Pinkie’s smile vanished. She narrowly moved her pink SOUL out of the way from a gunshot. “You aren’t that Aware.”

“No. But you’re in my world now. It’s only a matter of time before I can escape using you as a proxy, Pinkie. Only a matter of time…”

Pinkie took a breath – she was going to have to move fast. She threw a bomb at Chara, shattering her SOUL again. She reverted once more. It was in this initial moment of reversion that Pinkie acted. She took out her dimensional device, already entered with the coordinates on the list Vriska had created in another universe. She opened a portal, pointing a gun behind her to take out Chara again.

Chara dodged the bullet, moving like lightning. She put a hand on the device, grinning psychotically. Pinkie wasn’t about to let her have it – she put on the Bomb Mask.

She never got to explode it. The portal was gone, and Chara was standing a few feet in front of her. Holding the dimensional device.

Chara grinned. “Heheheheheh…

Pinkie ran toward Chara – but every time she got close, Pinkie just reset to her original position. No matter how she moved or from what direction, she was set back every time Chara wanted.

“You shouldn’t have been able to do that and keep the device!”

“I didn’t. This is just a dummy to screw with you.” She tossed the device on the ground. It exploded. “I have the power within me now that I felt it. Thank you for falling for my tricks, Pinkie Pie. I have some worlds to destroy.”

“CHARA!” Pinkie shouted – but she was too late. Chara had already left the universe.

Pinkie pulled out her dimensional device – still fine – and gulped. She had no idea which universe Chara had gone to…

She selected one at random and left the emptiness.

~~~

“Monika, um… what are you doing?” Flutterfree asked.

“Focusing on the moment,” Monika explained, a hand to her head. “Okay, I think I’m all here now. Let’s see…” She narrowed her eyes.

“Monika, please stop sifting through our character files.”

Monika rolled her eyes. “Fine. Nothing interesting in there anyway, aside from small and bony here, but nothing on the surface helped much. Quite the small powerhouse aren’t you?”

“my secrets mean nothing anymore,” Sans deadpanned. “welp, perhaps i should open a blasting business now. work in construction or something. or deconstruction.” He winked at Monika.

“Mhm… Right…” Monika shook her head. “Anyway, you Merodi got separated, huh?”

“Did you deduce that or read it?” Jotaro asked.

“Read it. Pretty prominent on you two’s motivations right now.”

“Yeah…” Flutterfree said. “Would you help us find them?”

“Well, see, like you I’m unsure exactly where I stand in the multiversal scale. I could follow the flow of ka up – but since this is a different universe, I wouldn’t even end up where I started – or I could follow the flow down, and that won’t help at all because books within books will only take me somewhere else. I can force open a dimensional connection to somewhere random but that won’t exactly help, will it?”

Sans raised his hand, which had a hot dog in it. “ahem. i may know of a place with stuff that might help you. bit of a walk though.”

Monika kneeled down to Sans’ height and smiled warmly. “Hey there… I think you might also be able to answer some of my questions. You always knew the most.”

“uh… what?”

“Nothing, never mind. Lead the way, Sans!”

“huh. you know what? looks like we won’t be needing that after all, unless mirrors have suddenly developed effective invisibility.”

He pointed to one end of the hall where another Sans and Vriska were walking up toward them.

Monika blinked. “On one hand, that’s helpful. On the other…”

“OH HEEEEEEY MONIKA!” Vriska shouted. “I should have known you were behind this!”

“Me?! Oh sure, you just go and accuse me the first chance you get. If I did anything I didn’t do it on purpose!”

Vriska wanted to object really badly but couldn’t think of something effective. She folded her arms and grunted.

“right, before we do anything else, there’s something really important we need to take care of,” native-Sans said.

“oh?” visiting-Sans asked.

“i, as the native sans, get to keep my name. you can be sansy.”

“heh. okay,” Sansy said.

“Riveting, now there’s two of you,” Vriska muttered.

“givin’ her a hard time for the high LV?” Sans asked his counterpart.

“yeah.”

“man, thought we were better than that.”

“your world didn’t have everyone die.”

Sans’ eyes softened. “i’m sorry.”

“no use dwellin’ on it. something tells me we have other problems.”

“Yeah,” Vriska said. “I have lots of questions.”

Jotaro turned to Monika, expression unreadable. “How about you explain exactly why you are here and what you were trying to do when you found this ‘evil’ thing.”

Monika lifted her hand. “I’ll do something better than explain. I’ll show you.” She altered the construction to show herself at a computer, playing a game. “This game is called Undertale, for those of you who don’t know. It’s one of the more popular ones around the multiverse, especially for its story. It holds a message about pacifism, death, and a lot of other deep stuff. However, as has been my hobby ever since you convinced me to try something new, I was not drawn to it for the reasons most were. I came to it in order to solve a mystery. Beyond the game, there is an individual who seems greatly important to the game’s lore, but who’s exact identity is a mystery.”

The scene changed, showing a strange, pixelated white and black figure. “This is, presumably, W. D. Gaster. What I have been able to figure out says that he has been spread across time and space by a mistake of falling into his creation, but I have been unable to discover much else. I dug through the game’s files and found nothing. So I do what I do – I followed ka downward, entering the world of the game myself. I went into the room with Gaster in it…” She showed them the moment the sludgy abomination grabbed her. “And then everything shattered into a million tiny pieces. I get beaten within an inch of death and dropped behind that door, and you all go flying across the Undertale universes.”

She turned to the two Sanses. “Does this mean anything to you two?”

The Sanses glanced at each other and shook their heads. “sorry lady, got nothing for you.”

“I see… But there was evidence he knew or was even related to you… What of that picture in your lab that says ‘never forget’?”

Sansy sighed. “every time i see that i feel guilty for not remembering.”

“tragically ironic,” Sans confirmed.

Monika put her hands on her hips. “Regardless, if that sludge was Gaster or not, it was evil. I was just trying to figure out what it meant, maybe even help it if possible, but it attacked me. And I no longer feel complete. I can’t tell you what I’m missing, my powers seem to work and I don’t think I’ve lost any memories, but the thing took something.”

“So, what, we need to find it and get it back?” Vriska asked.

“I don’t know. I just want answers. I expect you all will want to stop some sort of evil thing from destroying multiple universes or whatever it’s planning.”

Jotaro furrowed his brow. “Does anyone have any idea where to start?”

“We have a list of different universes,” Vriska said, holding up her device. “We could check those.”

“Best we’ve got,” Flutterfree said. “Have any insights, Monika?”

“I’m not an answering machine, like Pinkie,” Monika said. “My Awareness is more about control than knowing random things. I can tell you that the scene’s about to end but that’s about it as to things that aren’t right here right now for me to look at.”

“All right then.”

~~~

Nova and Gaster walked in an area Gaster had called ‘the core’. It was the underbellies of some gigantic machine that powered everything in the Underground.

Gaster claimed that he had made it, before he had been ‘erased’ from everything. Now it had no creator. It was a curious trick of fate.

Nova had doubts that he was sane. But she was sure these were his universes – he could step between them like butter, searching for the threat with methodical precision. He didn’t want the threat to even exist in his worlds. He complained a few times under his breath about ‘not being everywhere anymore’, but he would not elaborate when Nova asked.

He wouldn’t elaborate about anything, really.

This bothered Nova to no end, but nothing she said got much of a response from him. He was either too fixated or too distracted, she couldn’t decide which. He was clearly a being with a large mind that was always turning, always thinking, always planning. It was unnerving to say the least.

Gaster was about to leave the universe for another when an armored creature fell to the ground and vaporized into dust right before their eyes.

“What!?” Nova blurted.

“Dead monster,” Gaster said. “Such things happen.”

“But… why did it happen!?”

“It was because of me!” Chara shouted, dropping from the sky. Her hair was brown, her shirt green and yellow striped – and her knife red despite the monster she’d just killed clearly not having any blood within it. The three of them entered a battle, prompting their SOULs to appear.

Gaster produced… something. It wasn’t a heart, but it was certainly black, a white aura permitting it to be seen. Nova swore the shape changed, but never when she was focusing on it…

Chara pointed her knife at Gaster. “You’re new. Everything else here has been more of the same…”

“I do not have time for this,” Gaster decreed, leaving the encounter in an instant. This prompted Chara to end the fight and chase after him.

“HEY! I’m not done talking to you! I’m going to kill you just like I’ve killed everyone el-“

Gaster raised a hand and flung Chara to the side. She twisted back and landed effortlessly on the ground. “Again with that, what is it with people suddenly being unpredictable today!?”

“Nova, we should move on.”

“Didn’t you hear her!?” Nova blurted. “She’s going to kill everyone! How can she not be the threat!?”

“Her existence is sanctioned within my worlds as a means of balance,” Gaster decreed. “She is supposed to exist within the worlds, unlike you or the threat.”

Nova shook her head. “I… I just can’t let her go and kill everyone!”

“Yes… stay and fight!” Chara encouraged. “It’ll be nice to have something else to cut into a million tiny pieces…”

“It is your choice,” Gaster commented. “I’m leaving. Come or don’t.”

“No,” Nova said, turning to face Chara. “She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into.”

“Perhaps not. But neither do you.” In an instant, Gaster was gone.

Nova and Chara entered a fight, their SOULs projecting once again.

“LV 6, Integrity,” Chara commented, twirling her knife. “I hope you have better tricks than the pink one. But with that standard SOUL…”

“What did you do to Pinkie!?” Nova shouted.

Chara grinned. “Survive long enough and maybe I’ll tell you the exact horrors she has experienced by my blade.”

Nova slowed down time to a crawl. To her surprise, Chara was still able to move – albeit at a snail’s pace. Nova moved cautiously, starting with long-range beams first, all of which Chara blocked or dodged.

How was she doing that!?

Nova fired a few slow-moving blasts, watching how Chara reacted before Nova had even shot them.

She knows what I’m going to do before I do it. Even slowed down, that’s… It’s like fighting Pinkie when she decides she wants to curb-stomp you.

Nova opted for a magic shield, but Chara had a gun in addition to a knife, and that gun fired a blast of energy that destroyed the shield. Nova’s SOUL was exposed.

She knew she did not want to take a single hit from that knife. She raised a barrier, turning to run. She felt her barrier shatter, and the knife closing in on her blue SOUL.

Pinkie appeared out of nowhere and smashed Chara in the head with a warhammer. She survived, somehow.

“EVERY TIME!” Chara shouted. “That was the absolute fastest I could have gotten to her! What is your deal with timing?”

“Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie!” Pinkie answered, hefting her hammer.

“THAT’S NOT AN ANSWER!”

“Yes it is,” Nova said, standing up next to Pinkie. “Because Pinkie Pie is Pinkie Pie.”

Chara’s angry scowl turned back into a slasher smile. “Fine. I’ll turn this around. It’ll just take some playing.”

Nova lit her horn and Pinkie put on some boxing gloves studded with spikes.

Chara charged Pinkie, laughing with gleeful abandon.

Pinkie prepared her fist for a punch. She aimed right for Chara’s SOUL.

And then Chara dove to the left at the last minute, driving her knife into the NOVA’s blue heart. It shattered.

“NOVA!”

~~~

Gaster appeared in the middle of Vriska, Flutterfree, Jotaro, Monika, Sans, and Sansy.

He took one look at Monika and unleashed everything he had at her. She twitched slightly, telling reality that it needed to divert the distorted spacetime power around her, in addition to summoning a thin rapier to her hand. “Get him!”

“They can do nothing,” Gaster responded, oblivious to the fact Lolo had made him appear insubstantial to them. “It is only you.”

“You ever heard of ‘keeping the maniac busy’?” Monika asked.

An arrow of light shot through the side of Gaster’s skull. Eight diamond knives shot from Vriska’s dice, hitting him in the back. Sans and Sansy unleashed their dragon-skulls, engulfing the skeleton in white power.

Gaster came out of this unscathed. Even the hole the arrow left was gone. “I am the guardian of these universes. You will be removed. My children, you should know better than to use my own weapons against me.” With a snap of his fingers, two dragon-skulls appeared from nowhere and fired at the Sanses. They both dodged.

“children?” Sansy asked.

“It matters not,” Gaster commented. “None can remember me, for good reason. If you stand in my way of purging this threat, I must remove you.” He raised a hand.

Moinka glitched space around his hand. “Yeah, not happening crazy skeleton. I suppose you forgot about me, huh?”

“I never forgot about you.”

“Care to explain how I am a threat?”

Gaster’s eyes lit up. “You do more than control the game. Do more than take the actions of a single child. You come here and interfere with the balance. New variables cannot be tolerated.”

Monika rewrote the laws of physics to keep Gaster pinned to his current position. “I don’t think so. Things only broke when you attacked me!”

Gaster growled. “I cannot quantify or control what isn’t consistent.” He teleported out of the pin, focusing entirely on Monika, rage in his expression.

Jotaro saw his opportunity. “STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

Time froze. Gaster was too busy with Monika to do anything about that.

Jotaro, as always, had been watching very closely. Watching Gaster’s movements, his actions, his words… And he had seen it. The black shape. It wasn’t a SOUL… or perhaps it was, just broken. Regardless, it was Jotaro’s target.

Star Platinum grabbed the black shape and pulled it as far from Gaster as it could with one motion. Then it went for the old-fashioned approach.

“ORA!!!!” Star Platinum roared, punching the black shape. “ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

Time resumed. Gaster’s skull cracked in numerous locations it wasn’t already cracked in. “Wh… What!?”

“What was that about ‘doing nothing’?” Jotaro asked, still holding the black SOUL-esque thing in Star Platinum’s hand.

“NO!” Gaster shouted. “I MUST KEEP IT ALL!”

“No, you don’t,” Monika said, appearing next to the black thing and poking it with her finger, sending a rush of pain into Gaster. “Jotaro, crush it before he gets clever.”

“Wait!” Flutterfree called. “We don’t have t-”

Gaster roared, eyes aflame with a rainbow of colors. “I WILL DESTROY YOU FROM THE DEEPEST PITS O-“

Vriska cut the black thing in two with her sword. Gaster shattered.

Reality as a whole remained unaffected.

“Th… We didn’t need to go that far!” Flutterfree blurted. “Monika!”

“He was evil,” Monika said, flatly. “He wanted to control this place.” She folded her arms. “I would have liked to know more, but too much was on the table at that moment.”

Sansy looked at Vriska and shrugged. “what did i say about you?”

“Fuck off,” Vriska blurted. “That was a life or death situation!”

“and for all i know that was my dad. even if he was evil, i know he had lower LV than you.”

Vriska clenched her fist. “I am going t-”

“No, no,” Flutterfree said, getting between the two of them. “We’re done here. Let’s just find Nova and Pinkie, and go home.”

Monika nodded. “I can help you with that much, seeing as you helped me. Let’s see… ah, yes. The universe he just came from had their signatures in it. Let’s just open up a portal there and…”

A portal opened to the other universe just in time for everyone to see Chara pierce Pinkie’s pink heart, shattering it.

Chara didn’t even miss a beat before jumping through the portal and attacking them. She went for Jotaro first, piercing his yellow heart with alarming accuracy and without a moment of hesitation. The life left his eyes – but he remained standing.

“Inhuman,” Chara muttered, twisting around for Monika’s SOUL next. Monika tried to access her character file but only got a million lines of 9999999999999999999. Monika opted to use the rapier to pierce Chara – but the kid caught the blade with her knife, jumping on top of it. She drove the knife toward Monika’s SOUL, aiming for where it was going to be rather than where it was. Monika knew no matter where she twisted, Chara would hit the heart.

She can save and reload, Monika realized.

Two can play at that game.

She brought up her save file. The most recent one… Back when Vriska and Sansy had first shown up. Close enough. She selected it, reverting reality back to its prior existence. Jotaro was still alive and well, his inner fire burning strong.

“Monika, um… what are you doing?” Flutterfree asked.

“Focusing on the moment,” Monika explained, a hand to her head. “Okay, I think I’m all here now. Let’s see…” She narrowed her eyes.

“Monika, please stop sifting through our character files.”

Monika rolled her eyes, continuing to go along with her perfect memory of the past. She said the same things and did the same things at the same time, allowing all the others to do exactly what they needed to as well. It was like playing a recording. She would do this until the moment she needed to change something.

The moment when Gaster would appear.

The millisecond before he appeared, she moved herself right to where he was going to show up.

When Gaster entered the universe, Monika left – switching locations with the controlling scientist. She was sure they’d be fine alone with Gaster, should have no reason to fight him without her there.

Monika took a moment to recognize what was happening around her. Pinkie had just beaten Chara to the side, preventing her from killing Nova. Pinkie looked up and saw Monika.

Monika winked – a signal for Pinkie to go ahead with the same way things had gone previously. The pony aimed the boxing glove for Chara’s face. Chara ducked to the left, going for Nova.

Monika stabbed her rapier right where Chara’s SOUL was. As expected, she managed to duck out of the way.

“Still saving and reloading, are you?” Monika asked, placing herself between Chara and Nova.

Chara growled. “Does everyone figure that out!?”

“Sometimes,” Monika said, erecting walls around Chara on all four sides. “It helps that I can do it too.”

“Flowey could do it,” Chara commented, busting down the brick walls. “I still beat him.”

“He was within your setting,” Monika said, opening a portal to a completely random universe. “Over here? This won’t be your world. Your rules won’t apply.” The portal swept up Chara and she didn’t dodge. Monika stepped through as well, closing the portal behind herself. Monika and Chara stood alone in a forest made out of tall, thorny trees.

Chara tried to fight – but when the world didn’t become monochromatic, she paused. She didn’t see her SOUL, or that of Monika. “Wh… What!?”

“You are outside of your normal medium,” Monika stated. “You’ll find that you can’t save or load. You’ll also find that mere determination won’t give you all the power in the world. You’re just an evil kid with a knife.”

Chara growled. “Then you won’t be able to either!”

“Not true,” Monika said. “I’m a special case. I get to retain what I was even where it should not be. I have Vriska to thank for that.” She looked into the distance, bringing up Chara’s character file. It was now easy to access. “Ah, here we go… Let’s tone down all that hatred a bit, shall we? Maybe I can make you a pacifist…”

Chara grabbed her head and screamed.

~~~

Gaster appeared in the middle of Vriska, Flutterfree, Jotaro, Sans, and Sansy.

“…She was here,” Gaster said. It wasn’t a question. He tried to leave to pursue her – but he found that reality had been edited. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?” He levitated the five of them into the air, scanning each of them and triggering the monochromatic encounter scheme. “You sided with her…”

“Not… necessarily…” Vriska muttered, using her psychic powers on Gaster. “She’s… a bit of a bitch… A lot of the time…”

“I see… a split,” Gaster said, looking at something that wasn’t really there. “She reloaded… She knew exactly where I would be. But none of you do…”

The Sanses took a few steps back.

“You were always good at seeing things, my children,” Gaster said, turning to the two skeletons. “Noticing patterns. Little tics in expressions. Changes in auras…”

“hey, uh, gaster is it?” Sans asked. “yeah, we don’t have any beef with you, whoever you are.”

“None can remember me, for good reason,” Gaster stated. Then his eyes flashed. “Damn the flow… I can’t keep everything organized like this… It has to be consistent!”

“Consistent?” Flutterfree asked, walking up to him. “What do you mean?”

“Outside interference. She was the worst of it, but you all come in and introduce the universes to each other. My universes. Removing consistency. You’re destroying my worlds.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to,” Flutterfree said. “We will leave as soon as we’ve found everyone.”

“That you will, but can you get rid of the threat? SHE is the horror upon these worlds!”

Vriska grinned. “Oh, we’d love to get rid of he-”

“We can’t,” Flutterfree asserted. “Her power is beyond us. She can just tell us not to attack her if it becomes too much of an issue, and we’ll have to listen.”

“Then I shall take care of her myse-” he saw a look in Sansy’s eyes. “She’s already defeated me.”

“eh, yeah,” Sansy said, hands in his pockets. “you’re also spouting complete nonsense. nobody’s destroying any worlds. dimensional activity is all fine. i checked earlier.”

“This is not about their existence! It is about their consistency!” Gaster blurted. “I cannot keep hold on these universes with all these unforeseen variables – especially not in this form!”

“Keep hold of?” Flutterfree said, narrowing her eyes. “What do you plan to do with these worlds?”

Gaster looked right at her. “There is no point in lying to you.”

Lolo activated fully. “I doubt it.”

“Very well. Little pegasus, once I have restored the consistency to these worlds, I will begin my experiments anew. I have claimed this body back from her, and as such I will make use of it. The Core was merely the beginning of my projects. I shall grow beyond that and learn to fold space and time itself for my worlds. Everything will succumb to my vision. No longer will I be spread out over existence like a beetle on a windshield – I shall control the existence which spread me so thin!”

Vriska drew her sword. “I spot an evil psycho.”

Jotaro nodded, summoning Star Platinum.

Sansy narrowed his eyes. “that murderous kid… he’s part of your order. i’m not going to stand for that.”

“You aren’t, are you?” Gaster chuckled. “Come at me with everything yo-“

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

Time froze. Gaster was not too busy with Monika…

Star Platinum grabbed the black shape and pulled it as far from Gaster as it could with one motion. Gaster, however, moved the moment his ‘soul’ was moved from him.

“ORA!!!!” Star Platinum roared, punching the black shape. “ORA ORA OR-“

Jotaro went flying, ending the time stop early. A few cracks appeared in Gaster’s skull visage. “You pack more power than I had given you credit for… It looks as if I will have to deal with you after all.”

“Bring it,” Vriska said, eyeing him and stealing his luck. “I bet you won’t be able to walk a step toward me.”

Gaster took a step and nothing bad happened.

“How the… I drained you almost dry of luck!”

“Luck has no place in the calculations of a scientist,” Gaster declared, raising a hand and encasing her neck in a choke hold. “If one makes decisions based on luck, there is always a chance to lose. I am a construct of every universe in my domain. I cannot be defeated by pure luck.”

Sansy and Sans activated their dragon-skulls. Gaster took the blast and didn’t flinch. “They’re called Gaster Blasters for a reason. They are me.” He turned the Gaster Blasters on the Sanses, forcing them to dodge.

“Why do you fight your father?”

“you seem like a pretty messed up dude,” Sans called. “and, well, cause other me was.”

“do you really need it spelled out, scientist?” Sansy asked. “you let that child run and kill everyone.”

“Oh, that wasn’t me, Sans. I had no control over the events at that point, they just happened. My desire is merely to keep them the way they are, I did not create them. If you want to blame who created them, look no further than the troll in my grasps. She’s played the game, Sans. She’s played it in every way. Barring the Creator himself, players like her are the reason that child runs free. Every Frisk and Chara… They are the will of a player.”

“Hey hey hey!” Vriska said. “Don’t judge me, I was just playing a video game because it was related to me! You stole my song afte- AUGH!” Vriska took the force of a Gaster Blaster right to her SOUL.

Sans turned to his counterpart. “hey man, that was uncalled fo-“

“she was lying,” Sansy said. “stay back. you have not experienced enough to care about this.”

Sans said nothing, but took a few steps back in agreement.

Gaster laughed. “And I don’t even have to do anything! My child shall take care of you with ease!”

Jotaro stood up. “STAR PLATINUM: THE-“

“STOP!” Vriska shouted. “If you so much as hit Sans once, he will die. He is the definition of glass ca-” she took another hit to the face.

Sansy twitched. “Stop pretending that you didn’t kill them all, Vriska.”

Flutterfree put herself between Sansy and Vriska. “Sans, stop. We can talk this through.”

“get out of my way unless you want to have a bad time.”

Flutterfree looked Sansy right in the eyes. “I will not get out of the way. And if you move me aside to get to her, you will have to use a lot of force. I might not survive. Think about what you’re doing.”

Sansy faltered, pausing for a moment.

“Vriska saved your life, you know,” Flutterfree said. “Jotaro was about to stop time and hit you with several dozen different punches. If you only need to take one hit… You would have died several times over without even realizing it. She gave up her victory for you. She may not be the nicest person, but she’s not a monster.”

“she still killed them all.”

“So? She killed off one of her friends when she was still young. Now they’re best friends. Sans… In your world, there is always a way to win without killing. In hers, it was shameful to think killing was wrong. She’s come a long way. Whatever record of evil you see on her, consider that most of it was when she was a child.”

“…you’re just like frisk,” Sans commented from behind his counterpart. “frisk did a lot less talking, but she knew right how to get to the issue. how to get them to stop.”

Sansy let his eye of fire go out. “right. right…”

Vriska walked over to Sansy and held out a hand. “We don’t have to be friends. We don’t have to like each other. But we also don’t have to kill each other.”

Sansy grabbed her hand and shook it.

Gaster roared. “A spare!? A spare!?”

“It’s how these worlds work, old man,” Jotaro said. “Figured you would know that since they’re yours.”

“Nice one,” Vriska commented, giving him a fistbump.

Gaster roared. “I shall take care of you myself!”

“mmm, nah, i don’t think so,” Sans said. “you’re going to get spared as well, Gaster.”

“I rise above such pitiful constructs you fools! My work has always been to move beyond!” he raised a hand, placing Flutterfree in a choke hold. “I can distort you to nothing with but a thought!”

“You aren’t, though, are you?” Flutterfree pointed out. “You’re talking. You like talking about your plans – and you like your children.”

“They are inconsequential.”

“Biggest lie yet,” Jotaro commented.

Sans took out a phone. “i think i’ll call papyrus, see what he has to say.”

Gaster’s eyes lit. “Sans, don-”

“ay papyrus, gotta question for you,” Sans said, pressing the speakerphone button. “what’s your earliest memory?”

“Oh Sans, you know that story!” a nasally, loud voice declared. “Why would you want to hear it AGAIN?”

“no reason, bro, not really.”

“Well fine. I know you don’t believe me, but I swear I remember when we first arrived in Snowdin! Now don’t you go on about how that’s ‘bone-headed’, I know what you’re thinking – gosh this is just a setup for a joke isn’t it – but I remember walking! You were there too, but you looked… empty. And between us was a tall skeleton with cracks in his face! I remember feeling worried, and cold. It was very cold. But that tall skeleton – he was protecting us! I don’t know from what – I thought it was the cold. I think. Very fuzzy… I believe I asked him what was going on. He told me he was taking us somewhere safe, somewhere we could live. And then I saw Snowdin! Its lights warmed my bones! He said I would never have to feel afraid again. When I turned to look… he was gone. And you looked like yourself, Sans! You always say that’s the point I finally start remembering correctly, but…”

“thank you, papyrus,” Sans said, hanging up. Sansy was barely holding himself together.

Gaster was staring blankly at the now-silent phone.

“You know what I think?” Vriska said. “Fuck being the all-powerful scientist. You’ve got a body again, go spend some time with your kids!”

Flutterfree nodded. “You can spend time with all of them, Gaster. Every set… that’s still around. You can do that now. I don’t think you’re forgotten what it was like when you could do that, do you?”

Gaster dropped to the ground, allowing color to come back to the world. He held out his hand, asking for the phone. Sans gave it to him.

Gaster called papyrus again.

“Sans, what is with you toda-”

“Papyrus, it’s me,” Gaster said, voice wavering. “…I heard that you remembered me. I didn’t think that was possible.”

“What are you- no way. No way, hold the phone!”

“he is,” Sans commented.

“NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR JOKES SANS- wait am I on speakerphone?”

“Yes,” Gaster and Sans said.

“Oh uh… I hope nobody else is there…”

“BAAAAACK!” Monika declared, appearing in a shower of glitches. “Right, so Jotaro I’m going to freeze Gaster and then you are going t-”

“He’s not evil anymore,” Flutterfree called.

Monika blinked. “You’re. Not. Serious.”

“They are,” Gaster declared, looking to Monika. “…I will still forcefully eject you from my universes, don’t think I won’t.”

Papyrus freaked out. “UNIVERSES? WHAT? WHY DOES IT SOUND LIKE THERE ARE LOTS OF CUTE GIRLS THERE!?”

“Yare yare daze,” Jotaro muttered.

“THAT WAS DECIDEDLY UNCUTE.”

“papyrus, take a chill strip,” Sans said. “the old man and I will be there and explain everything.”

Gaster nodded. “Expect a few seconds.”

“WHAT DO Y-”

Gaster hung up, a small smile on his face. “I’m going to go speak to my children. I want all of you out of my universes by the time I return.”

“You’re not going to try to control everyone’s lives?” Flutterfree asked, narrowing her eyes.

“I will not. Sans will make sure of that,” Gaster said. “But my – our worlds do not need what you brought out in me, or what you bring to us. Stay away.”

Monika smiled. “Well, this conversation has given me my answers. Sure thing, mister Gaster. Have a good physical life! Hope you enjoy that piece of me.”

“You should be able to return to normal under your own power, given time,” Gaster declared. “Come, Sans, let us go.” And then the two were gone.

Monika shrugged. In a glitch, Pinkie and Nova appeared in front of them. “There you go, all together again!”

“Wait a minute, how are we going to leave?” Flutterfree asked.

Monika sighed. “Riiiight…”

Vriska took out her device with its list of coordinates. “One of these is bound to get us out.”

“I’ll try them!” Pinkie said, grabbing the device. “Be back in a Pinkie!” She was gone before they could do anything.

Monika shrugged. “Well, good luck. I’m just going to go to a random world. Have fun you guys!”

“Wait what ab- and she’s gone,” Flutterfree said, facehooving. “Well now we’re just going to sit and wait…”

“Not that bad of a thing to do,” Nova commented.

The two of them began to talk – Vriska chose to ignore them, heading over to Sansy – or just Sans now. “Hey.”

“you’re strange, you know that?” Sans asked. “you have such violence and pain, and yet i have seen a soft soul within you. you’re a contradiction.”

Vriska laughed. “I’m a product of the multiverse.”

Sans nodded, silent.

Vriska sighed. “Oh boy… Right, Sans. How would you like to come with us?”

“what?”

“You don’t really have anywhere to go. Your world is dead. Our civilization could use your kind of power. And your spirit. It’ll be dangerous.”

Sans looked into the distance. “yeah. i don’t think there’s anything for me here. i’ll try your way. see if i can understand your insanity. there better be a grillby’s there though.”

“I have no idea.”

“my first mission: find a grillby’s.”

Vriska chuckled. “…Also it’s fine that you stole my song. You’re badass enough to have it too.”

“you’re going to regret saying that.”

“YEP! But I’m in one of my softy moods. So, fuck it, regrettable words for eternity!”

“heh.”

The two fell silent, appreciating the sounds of the Underground.

Pinkie returned the next instant. “Found a connection to Earth Starfleet! Leeet’s move it!”

Gaster’s Universe Cluster was left behind, allowed to develop the way it wished. Only a Sans and a Chara taken away…

~~~

A few weeks later…

“…What did you do to her?” Pinkie asked Monika.

Monika looked down at Chara. She was dressed in a little maid outfit and delivering tea to the two of them.

“I just removed her anger. That was it,” Monika said. “Now she calls me Mumsy and does almost everything everybody wants. It’s a little odd, but I’m not complaining.”

“It’s… questionable.”

“Would you rather she grew up into some determinator serial killer?”

Pinkie blinked. “…Nooooo-“

“Then there you go, I did the right thing, I’m the good guy. Girl. Ahem.” Monika sat back in her chair. “Thanks Chara!”

“Your welcome Mumsy!” Chara said, smiling. Pinkie had flashbacks, jittering back in her chair.

“Oh, Pinkie!” Chara said, taking a step back. “Did I do something wrong?”

“N-no Chara. No you didn’t. You’re… You’re a good girl.” Pinkie patted her on the head. “Yeah.”

“Wait until you see the tricks she can do!”

“I’M OUT OF HERE!” Pinkie declared, pulling out a dimensional device and vanishing.

Monika shrugged. “You can do your tricks for me Chara. Won’t that be fun?”

“Yay!”

Author's Note

Okaydokay, next chapter's a movie-length chapter, so prepare yourselves for that!

It also has the honor of being the most divisive chapter - by far - that has been written as of yet. So prepare for mixed feelings.

-GM, master of spice.

063 - Clockwork Angels

A portal opened in the main hall of what was now Renee’s crystal castle, depositing the primary all-purpose team in the glamorous halls. Pinkie took the lead, bouncing along with Nova and Flutterfree flanking. Vriska strode behind the group while Jotaro’s hulking form walked to the left, unbalancing the visual of the group.

“Vriska, you need to move a bit to the right,” Pinkie commented.

“I am not moving because you want us to have proper ‘team aesthetics’, Pinkie.”

“Awww…”

“Jotaro could just move closer to the center,” Nova suggested.

Vriska rolled her eyes. “I do not want to become a Joestar family pancake, mmkay?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Operation ‘pose’ is a failure! …Let’s just go find Renee.”

They set out across the hall of Renee’s castle, watching the various teams of the Expeditions Division come and go. Jotaro tipped his hat at Josuke as he went with Sunny to a desert world. They saw Corona’s team return, every last one of them with parts of their body on blue fire. They quickly put out the flames and laughed about whatever horror they had just run from.

These were but two of the teams that they could see – dozens of others came and went constantly, though more left than returned, since many would return at different locations on Equis Vitis or even the Hub. Gems, ponies, humans, dragons, griffons, and more exotic beings walked these halls continually, a testament to Merodi Universalis’ diversity.

Pinkie’s team soon found what they were looking for – Renee. They lucked out and found not only her, but Daniel as well, sitting on her back. The pair were talking to a squad of Rubies who were notorious for being the dumbest of any team under Renee’s purview. The Rubies saluted, indicating that they thought they understood what Renee was asking, but everyone else expected another talk between them to happen in the next few days.

Daniel pointed at Pinkie’s team the moment their conversation with the Rubies was done. The two of them walked over, Renee’s expression being one of surprise. “You’re back early.”

“The pod people were very cooperative,” Vriska commented.

“Vriska! Don’t call them that!” Flutterfree ribbed.

“What else am I going to call them? They don’t have a name!”

“Just… The people we visited! Universe Q-Po6 omega if you need to be specific!”

Nova shrugged. “It’s not like they mind being called pod people.”

“They don’t know what it means!”

Jotaro looked down at her. “Wasn’t that the case with the bug demons?”

“I… Yes. But they decided they liked that name!”

“Then maybe the pod people will like pod people!” Pinkie suggested.

Flutterfree looked like she wanted to explode. Her emotions quickly switched from annoyance to amusement and she let out a laugh instead of one of her signature ‘quiet screams of aggravation’.

Vriska gave her the finger guns. “That’s the spirit! Become one with the pod people!”

“I really shouldn’t be laughing…”

“So?” Jotaro commented. “If it’s funny, laugh.”

“You never laugh though, mister poker-face!” Pinkie pointed out.

Jotaro leaned back. “Nothing’s been funny enough yet.”

“I’m nothing but a barrel of laughs!” Pinkie pleaded.

“Of a particular kind of humor,” Nova commented.

“Pff. Taking the fun out of this,” she chuckled. “ANYWAY! Renee, do you have anything else for a group of best friends to tackle?”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “You already did a mission today!”

“It took, like, an hour,” Nova observed. “We can easily do another one.”

“I don’t know… What if it runs long?”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “We can handle a long one Renee. There’s nothing that says it has to be wrapped up in one day in the first place! C’mon…”

Daniel took a pad out of his coat and started scrolling through it. “Random or interesting?”

“Interesting, of course,” Vriska said with folded arms.

“Found a new one in the Strands,” Daniel said, handing them the pad. “We don’t know anything about it other than the probe sent in wasn’t able to accurately determine much aside from the universe’s safety. Something about the place scrambled most the advanced sensors.”

“A mystery, huh?” Pinkie said, looking over the pad. “Whaddaya say team? Take on a weird puzzle world?”

Vriska gave the thumbs up while the others gave simple nods to confirm.

Daniel pointed at the pad. “You’ll have to make a few universe jumps to get there from here, there’s no direct connection.”

“I know,” Pinkie said with a wave of her hoof. “I’m not a newbie, Daniel.”

Daniel rubbed the back of his head. “Riiiight.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “We just make it a point to tell everyone, dears. Avoids needless issues.”

“And creates ones like this,” Vriska commented.

Renee raised an eyebrow. “And you’re only dragging it out by continuing to comment on it.”

“Eeeeexactly! You win a cookie! Later.”

“She means never,” Jotaro translated.

“Spoilsport.”

Renee chuckled. “Sadly, as much as I love going back and forth with you, I do have a job to do right now. There’s a military expedition to a fascist state underway. There’s a chance of USM operation in that universe, but it’s our beacon in that universe.”

“That sounds like a mess,” Flutterfree said, shaking her head. “I hope you can find a way to resolve it peacefully.”

“It’s a military expedition, dear, they get sent in when ‘peace’ isn’t really an option. Their leader might be able to talk the USM down if they are there, but the fascist state is being taken down by force regardless.”

“Ah… Yeah.” She forced a smile. “I still hope it goes well.”

“You and me both,” Renee admitted. “Now shoo, you’re distracting.”

Pinkie pulled out her dimensional device. “Attention everyone! Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times! This is going to be a three-universe jump, so prepare for a rapid change of scenery and some stomach flip-flops! Thank you for riding Air Pinkie!”

Jotaro shook his head. “Yare yare daze...”

They left the universe, the portal closing behind them with a pop.

~~~

Caravan

“In a world lit only by fire.”

The sun of this world was red, defining the color scheme of the planet. While all the other colors certainly existed, everything had a reddish tint to it – the land, the seas, the clocks, everything. The sky ranged from a pale evening red to a grayish orange, the star only strong enough to light the world to twilight levels of light. The clouds swirled in the red light, appearing just as ominous as they were beautiful with their churning motions. One such churning storm launched a bolt of lightning to the ground below, providing a rare, intense blue light to the bizarre landscape composed of square pillars. The stony extrusion struck by the bolt shattered, its unnatural flat top replaced with a significantly more natural collection of rubble.

Nearby, an airship narrowly avoided the debris by sheer luck. The ship was comprised mostly of an ovoid filled with hot air around which numerous sails were positioned to give it the appearance of a gigantic flying fish. Numerous lightning rods poked out the top of the ship, the spines there to keep the entire thing from exploding. The cabin took up most of the bottom and front of the airship, holding a few dozen people and all they needed to live while on the ‘road’.

“That was too close!” a woman with a mechanical arm wearing a purple trench coat and a black top hat shouted. “If we get another close call like that I’m sending the pegasi out there to deal with it!”

An earth pony in a clown outfit gaped at her. “Ringmaster! This storm wou-”

“I’m aware this storm would probably kill them!” the Ringmaster blurted. “I’d just rather the rest of us didn’t die in the process.”

The clown shook his head. “We just need to hold out. Just a little longer, Ringmaster. Let’s not risk anything – it’s only a little further until we get out of the squares.”

The Ringmaster tapped her fingers on a console. “You’re right, of course. Though this wouldn’t be a problem if our pilot wasn’t insane.”

The man at the wheel was standing on his hands, steering with his feet. “This is the best way to drive!”

“…Does no one else know how to drive this thing?”

“The pilots were in the rest of the caravan,” the clown pointed out.

The Ringmaster facepalmed. “I really need to organize my ships better…”

Another bolt of lightning fell from the crimson clouds, shattering another pillar of stone. The Ringmaster knew none of the chunks were large enough to destroy them, but the holes they were going to make would be an utter pain to repair…

To her surprise, a glowing blue and pink barrier of energy erected itself between the rocky chunks and the airship. All the rocks bounced off the barrier with ease, falling to the ground below without damaging the ship in the slightest.

“Find out who did that. Tell them to keep doing it,” the Ringmaster ordered. The clown scrambled out of the command center to begin the search.

Two more lightning bolts hit nearby pillars of rock – and the shield went up every time without fail. After that, the airship left the towering rocks, and the lightning strikes could no longer bring damage to them.

The Ringmaster narrowed her eyes. “Curious… Crazy Dan, do you know which of the performers could have done that?”

Crazy Dan laughed, his feet still at the wheel. “Nope! Who cares? It was BLUE!”

The Ringmaster sighed. “Whatever.” The clouds parted, allowing the light of the sun to further redden the airship, taking it out of the dark of the storm. The Ringmaster could see the other six airships of the caravan up ahead, waiting for them. Good. If they hadn’t waited I would have had a serious ‘talk’ about mutiny…

The clown came back. “Uh… Yeah, Ringmaster? The guys who saved us want to talk to you.”

“I’d like to talk to them as well…” She adjusted herself within her captain’s chair and swiveled around, looking closely at the five individuals led into her room. Three ponies, one of each kind, a decidedly impressive hunk of a man, and some creature with gray skin and orange horns. “I don’t remember adding you to my caravan.”

The pink earth pony cleared her throat. “You didn’t! We’re from another universe and we just showed up on your ship! I’m Pinkie, that’s Nova, Flutterfree, Jotaro, and Vriska. You could call us… explorers!”

“Oh,” the Ringmaster said shrugging. “Is that all?”

Flutterfree cocked her head. “Is this sort of thing common around here?”

“We are in the Strands,” Vriska commented. “We’ve also got a pony-human mixture.”

“Oh no, I’ve never heard the ‘other universe’ one before,” the Ringmaster said dismissively.

Nova raised an eyebrow. “You think we’re joking.”

“Nope,” the Ringmaster said, leaning back in her chair. “It makes sense and definitely isn’t the weirdest one I’ve heard. You should have seen the guy who was teleported here as he was devoured by void piranhas. That, to this day, is the most unique way I’ve seen anyone get anywhere.”

“That sounds horrible!” Flutterfree blurted.

“It was. But he’s still alive!” the Ringmaster pointed at Crazy Dan. “No physical damage!”

“An absolute TON of MENTAL DAMAGE though!” Crazy Dan laughed. “Look at me goooo!” He tried to force the airship into a barrel roll but there was no way in the realm of physical possibility it was able to do that. The craft just lurched suddenly to the side, soon forced to use its fins to recover. “AHHAHAHAHAH!”

“…Right,” Nova said.

Pinkie giggled. “So, Miss Ringmaster, you’re a traveling circus?”

“Yeah! I call us the Greatest Show on Zhui!”

All five of them made a mental note – this world was named Zhui.

“Where you headed?” Pinkie asked.

“Why, to the greatest place on Zhui! The grandiose city of Chron, center of everything under the light of our ruby sun! Fate has certainly led you here to our ship – it must be your goal as well.”

“That does sound like a place we’d want to go,” Nova commented. “How long until we arrive?”

“Just over a day,” the Ringmaster said. “I hope that isn’t an issue?”

Pinkie looked to the rest of the team – they shook their head. “No problem! So long as you have beds!”

“I have plenty of beds. All the beds. You’re also welcome to join the act, should you wish…”

“Nah,” Vriska said. “We did not run away to join the flying steampunk circus.”

The Ringmaster smirked. “Sure enough. Consider the beds payment for saving me a lot of trouble. Feel free to mingle with all my people. See if you can learn a few things about our world before you get back on your quest.”

Flutterfree bowed. “Thank you – you are too kind.”

“Eh, I’ve just had my fair share of adventurers pass through my caravan. Better to be nice than to make them vengeful.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Go. Enjoy.”

The five of them exchanged incredulous glances and a few shrugs before doing as suggested.

~~~

The caravan thundered onward over the land of swirling snakes. Far below, the scenery was unending marble sculptures of snakes of all sizes. They were all smooth white, each with gems in their eyes; no two had the same colour. There appeared to be no ‘bottom’ to the snakes – the places that were open or broken through revealed more snake sculptures underneath. Many of the snakes were poised aggressively, but others were coiled up as if asleep.

A couple of the larger snake sculptures had marble arrows driven through their heads, capturing a moment of agony before death.

“I have questions,” Nova said, looking out a window of the Ringmaster’s leading airship. “Who made all these?”

A boy of maybe thirteen heard the question and walked up to them. “Nobody knows for sure! The power to carve these snakes is beyond anything in Zhui today! Many think it’s absolutely impossible to construct traditionally, so it must have been an ancient magic artifact of some sort!”

Pinkie turned to the boy. “Wow! You know a lot!”

The boy beamed. “I like to learn everything I can about everywhere. It’s why I’m part of this circus! I get to see so many of the world’s varied landscapes! Each one has a story of its own to tell, even if most of them are mysterious!”

Flutterfree smiled. “That’s wonderful! Do you mind telling us your name?”

“Bartholomew,” he said with a hint of embarrassment. “I carry things for the actual performers during the show. I’m really good at running.”

“That’s a very important job, I bet everyone is really proud of you.”

Bartholomew chuckled. “Yeah. Everyone here is super nice – well, mostly.”

“I think this place is full of super crazy,” Vriska commented, gesturing at the rest of the ‘observation deck’. It was filled with humans and ponies of every shape and size – strong men, show magicians, clowns, freaks, contortionists, and the like. One of the women was on fire and didn’t seem to care. “Wackos.”

“Thanks!” Bartholomew said. “I think that’s the whole point. A bunch of ‘wackos’ having fun, traveling the world, a perfect place for adventurers like yourself.”

“You simply have to tell us about your show,” Pinkie insisted. “Come on! What are the best acts? What are the worst ones? Which ones should we check out? Do you serve cotton candy?”

Bartholomew rolled his eyes. “Of course we serve cotton candy. As for that… Crazy Dan’s show is actually the best, by far. He’s driving right now – can’t believe the Ringmaster doesn’t get someone else to do it – but when he’s in the ring he is a master of controlled explosives. He may be absolutely nutty but he’s never blown anyone up to this day! It’s really exciting and thrilling. He’ll be the opening act come tomorrow night.”

“We might just have to catch that!” Pinkie said.

“And as for the worst… it’s not part of the main act, but see Toady over there?” He pointed at a giant toad talking to a tall, slender earth pony. “When he does his thing at his stand, the smell is so terrifying people often pass out. It is an experience no one is willing to deal with twice.”

“I can imagine,” Vriska commented.

“Who’s that he’s talking to?” Nova asked.

Bartholomew examined the mare – her coat was a light amethyst, mane a pale amber, and her eyes an intelligent blue. “That’s Icon, the master acrobat. She’s the closing act. Really flexible and coordinated, able to outperform all the unicorns even with their magic.”

“She has a ton of makeup on… Why would she have that much when not performing?”

“No, she doesn’t,” Bartholomew corrected. “Everyone’s jealous of her ‘naturally stunning looks’. Not that she seems to care that much about it.”

“Oh,” Nova said, looking at the ground. “Well now I feel I was a little judgmental.”

“It’s okay, happens to the best of us,” Vriska said.

“Especially you,” Jotaro commented.

“I’d be lying to myself if I disagreed with that,” Vriska chuckled.

“Hey look!” Pinkie grinned. “She’s coming over here!”

Nova put her hoof over her face. “Lovely…”

“What? It’s not like she knows or anything.”

“For all we know she has psychic powers or something!”

Flutterfree raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Some what now?”

“Uh…” Nova rubbed the back of her head. “Yeah, that does sound kind of stupid…”

“What does?” Icon asked as she approached, her melodious voice filling everyone’s ears.

“N-nothing!” Nova blurted, looking to Flutterfree with a ‘please save me’ expression.

Flutterfree smiled at Icon. “Oh, just Nova here commenting on something she said earlier, it’s really nothing.”

Icon looked down at Nova, her eyes boring into her soul. Nova gulped. “Eeyep!”

“I have to admit, I’m curious,” Icon said, lowering her head to Nova’s hoof. “What is this thing on your leg?”

“Oh, this old thing?” Nova smirked. “It’s a screen that shows me what the ring on my horn detects. Right now it’s not working properly – something about this place scrambles most scanners – but I can make it do a few things even like this.” She set it to video display mode, playing a live feed of Icon’s face. “There you go!”

Icon lifted up Nova’s hoof to examine the device, making the unicorn tense. “Wow… The big cities have screens in them, but nothing like this. You must really get around!”

“Adventurers!” Bartholomew explained. “They’re going to come to the show – and you know what that means!”

“More income?”

“What? N- well, yes… But that’s not what I mean! I mean adventure is sure to find them! We’ll get an interesting show!”

Icon chuckled. “I know you always want adventure, Mew, but I’d like to get to my closing act today.”

“It doesn’t always end the show!”

“Nine times out of ten,” Icon said, finally lowering Nova’s hoof to the ground.

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so you’re expecting us to crash your circus?”

Icon laughed nervously. “It does seem to happen a lot with people like you… Please don’t take any offense. It doesn’t reflect badly on you, you understand.”

“Maybe?” Vriska said, shrugging.

Flutterfree’s eyes lit up. “Oh, speaking of reflections, we should probably tell Renee what’s going on.”

Pinkie pulled her phone out of her mane and called Renee. The interdimensional phone was able to locate a universe with a Merodi Universalis Priority Connection, connecting to Renee’s phone.

“This is Renee Jackson,” Renee said from the phone – clearly on speakerphone.

“Hi Renee!” Pinkie said. “We’re probably going to stay here for a few local days, there’s a big city we want to get to and a circus we want to see!”

“Oh, that sounds delightful! Do you need any supplies?”

“Nope! We can live off hospitality and cupcakes.”

“Should I count this as vacation time…?”

“Nope! There’ll probably be leaders in the city for us to talk to, or at least get a better idea how this world works.”

“In that case, I’ll take a preliminary report now.”

“Okie dokie!” Pinkie took the phone off speaker, bouncing away to do the somewhat boring job of relaying an oral report to Renee.

“Huh. You’re pretty organized,” Icon observed.

Vriska smirked. “The art of exploring is more potent when organized. You can do more stuff. We could call in an orbital bombardment if we wanted!”

Flutterfree facehooved. “Please not in front of our new friends, Vriska…”

Bartholomew gaped. “An orbital bombardment? What even IS that!?”

Icon furrowed her brow. “If I had to guess, it would be an attack from above the atmosphere. You adventurers do have some pretty impressive capabilities.”

“Please don’t feel threatened,” Flutterfree said nervously.

“Oh, I won’t. But it’s only fair that, now that I know something you can do, I show you something I can do.” Icon smirked playfully and proceeded to twist her legs around her body at seemingly-impossible angles and twist herself into a box shape. She twisted out, returning to her four hooves – except her belly was up and her head was twisted like that of an owl. To end, she stood on one of her front hooves and tangled her body around in a donut shape, placing her head on her purple-spiral cutie mark.

Nova jaw was hanging open. “W-wow. That’s impressive.”

Flutterfree had a grimace on her face. “I just think it looks painful.”

“Eh, nothing special,” Vriska muttered. “Pinkie does that sort of thing every day.”

“Pinkie isn’t normal,” Jotaro pointed out.

“True. Research needs to be done into how much of the cat-liquid is in her system…”

Pinkie bounced back to the group. “All caught up with Renee! So, what are we going to do now? Huh?”

“Investigate cat-liquid, apparently,” Icon offered.

“Oh, I can get us a cat, easy peasy!” Pinkie grinned. “Do we have a set of stairs in this ship?”

Bartholomew nodded. “Yep! Right this way!”

“I’ll leave you to that,” Icon said. “Practice makes perfect, after all.”

“Oh,” Nova said. “See you at the show, then?”

“Sure!” Icon grinned. “Prepare to be amaaaazed!” She did three backflips away from them and leaped through a hatch in the walls.

“Sprightly,” Vriska commented.

“Let’s go!” Pinkie blurted. “Cat-liquid ain’t gonna test itself! Mooove!”

~~~

It didn’t take long for Jotaro to figure out that he was dreaming. For one, he remembered going to sleep but didn’t remember waking up. For two, his senses weren’t augmented by Star Platinum. For three, he was standing in the middle of a flat plane of sand with seven large domes of gold rising around him.

Seven Cities of Gold.

He had no idea where that phrase had come from, but it was now embedded in his thoughts. The Seven Cities of Gold surrounded him, filling him with a sense of wonder – something he rarely felt these days.

The Gold glinted in his eyes.

He had no idea what the Cities meant, or what they held, but he knew they were important. Unimaginably so.

He heard a ticking sound above him. Looking up, he saw a clock plastered against the sky, the red sun of Zhui centered in front of it. The light of the star strained his eyes, but he didn’t blink – he just stared at the clock. It had too many hands on it to be a normal clock, especially considering that some of them were moving extremely quickly, while at least one of them was running backward.

Jotaro found himself standing in front of a set of four white doorways placed in a square formation. They were devoid of any actual doors, but the area enclosed by them glowed with a soft white light. A surge of energy turned the soft light into an intense one, firing a beam into the sky that engulfed the sun and touched the clock of the sky. Gears and chains began to appear behind the clock, soon filling the entire sky with a clockwork mechanism.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Seek and you shall find.”

And then Jotaro woke up, ramming his head into the ceiling. This disturbed Pinkie, who had been sleeping on him like a cat. She let out a panicked ‘MEOW!’ and fell onto the floor, waking everyone else up.

Vriska put a hand over her face. “Pinkie… I was having the greatest dream…”

“I know. I could hear,” Nova muttered from the bed next to her. “It’s why I was already awake.”

“Did you li-“

“NO I DID NOT LIKE HEARING IT.”

“Can everyone please keep their voices to a whisper…?” Flutterfree muttered. “Pleeeease?”

“Sorry!” Pinkie whispered. “Jotaro woke me up!”

“You were sitting on me,” Jotaro muttered.

“The cat experiment needed to continue,” Pinkie pointed out. “Meow.”

Jotaro sighed. “…I had a dream,” he said. “I think it’s important.”

Vriska sat up. “Ooooh? Well what are you waiting for, spill the beans big guy!”

Jotaro relayed his dream in a matter-of-fact fashion, not leaving any detail he thought important out.

“Seek and you shall find?” Nova said, hoof to her chin. “Interesting. I’m pretty sure something was trying to talk to you, Jotaro.”

“The Seven Cities of Gold,” Jotaro said. “We need to find them.”

“Could be a trap,” Vriska pointed out.

“Since when do we let that stop us?” Pinkie chuckled. “I say we accept this as our mission! …Y’know, after we attend the show tomorrow night.”

“The Seven Cities of Gold…” Nova said, pondering the phrase. “An Earth legend, right? Turned out not to be true.”

“Legends are some of the most powerful stories,” Pinkie pointed out. “I can guarantee the Seven Cities of Gold exist in multiple places. Maybe here, maybe not, who knows?”

“It may not be the cities we need to find,” Jotaro said. “Those doorframes… they may be the real goal. Or the clock…”

“Maybe we should take a ship and fly to the sun itself?” Vriska suggested.

Nova held up her hoof-screen, currently sitting to the side of her bed. “Do you see the scrambled readings on this thing? I’m not sure our ships would work properly in this universe. We rely a lot on external sensors for navigation.”

Jotaro nodded. “We’ll walk. Or get one of these airships.”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep! We’ll totally figure this out, Jotaro!”

“Yeah, we’re all going to hunt for the Seven Cities of Gold,” Flutterfree muttered, a pillow over her head. “Can we go to sleep now?”

“Oh! Sorry!” Pinkie blurted. “Everyone sleep!” She fell onto the floor, taking a decidedly cat-like position and snoring softly.

“The envy of insomniacs everywhere,” Nova said, laying on her bed and staring at the ceiling.

Soon, everyone but her was asleep again. When she realized this, she let out a sigh. She cast a sleep spell on herself.

~~~

Brought Up To Believe

“The universe has a plan.”

The city of Chron was every bit as impressive and unique as the landscapes the caravan had traveled over the last couple of days. It rose out of a sea made of quicksand, standing on a scaffolding of eighteen metallic roads resting on the churning red particles, the long paths stretching into the distance farther than anyone in the caravan could see. The city itself consisted of a towering set of walls circling thousands of metallic buildings. Placed equidistant along the edges of the walls were four tremendous clock faces that showed the current time – currently 9:19 on every single one’s pearly surface. Within the walls, the constructions were generally taller than the walls, with the central tower rising so high that the top was obscured by a cloud at the moment. Tremendous clockwork gears moved in and out of the lattice of skyscrapers, churning with the ongoing flow of time. Steam rose from so many locations within the city that a constant mist of water vapor churned into the sky, shrouding the finer details of the city.

The caravan’s airships moved towards one of the skyscrapers near the edge of the city, away from the towering center. The top of the rickety structure was dominated by a single, slowly rotating gear with dozens of teeth – each one large enough to hold an entire airship. When the caravan arrived, the docking gear had been mostly empty – but the Ringmaster’s performers soon filled the entire platform, quickly overwhelming the harbor masters.

“Right!” the Ringmaster declared, walking out of her ship and onto the gear proper. “We’ll set up in the usual place – Zinc Square. Everyone get ready, the transporting skiff should be here any minute.”

“Aw, Zinc Square again?” Bartholomew called. “Why not somewhere new?”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” the Ringmaster said dismissively. “Ah, it’s good to be the king.”

“You’re not the king!” a clown blurted.

“I might as well be!” the Ringmaster chuckled. “Now stop whining and get moving.” She turned around to address her five interdimensional passengers. “Well, I would ask you to help us set up, but something tells me that wouldn’t go over well. We won’t be ready until about four tonight, so you’ve got plenty of time to wander around the city yourselves. I’d offer you a guide…”

“Won’t be necessary,” Pinkie said with a smile. “We know our way around strange cities at this point. Though, we might get sidetracked – I’m sorry if we get caught up and don’t make it back for the show.”

The Ringmaster shrugged. “I’ll be surprised if you show up without bringing it down. You’re bound to get caught up in something here, this is Chron. Home of the Angels, hub of everyone. The lift to the surface is right over there, go enjoy yourselves.”

Pinkie saluted. “Yes, Ringmaster!” She bounced away, leading the other four to the lift. It was a rickety thing composed of wire-mesh metal plating, but it held all five of them well enough. The doors closed, and they descended into the belly of the beast. The smell of Chron hit them heavily – a musky sort of rusty scent combined with the scent of chemicals and oil. Due to the high humidity in the air, the smells of the city were only heightened, and yet it wasn’t exactly a repugnant odor, simply distinctive.

They descended further, able to make out finer details now that they were close. Clocks dominated almost every surface in this city. Big and small, but all round. Amazingly, every single one was set to the exact same time; none of the clocks were off by even a minute. Occasionally they would see a decorative statue made of immobile scrapped gears, the most common shape depicted being that of a humanoid angel. The sound of clanking machinery echoed from inside the walls of some of the buildings, shaking the cable their lift was attached to, making the five tense. The inhabitants of Chron didn’t bat an eye as their scaffoldings shook or rumbled with the clanks, trotting or walking through their normal days.

A few ponies and humans could be seen reinforcing a few scaffoldings with electric tools or magic. The life of the mechanical city increased as the bottom approached – less cold metal structures and more colorful decorations and lights that screamed defiantly against the natural redness of the world. Banners, streamers, and lights of all colors lined the streets. The redness was completely gone at the surface, replaced with predominantly blue lights coming from the streets below where clanking steam cars moved along with horse drawn carriages. Ponies and people looked happy down here, despite the overwhelming presence of the skyscrapers all around them.

“I like this place,” Flutterfree decided.

“Would have sworn you’d say it was too technical,” Nova said.

“Not everything has to be green and natural – if the people are happy, it works.”

“All right!” Pinkie said stretching herself. “You all know the drill!” She leaped out onto the edge of the street, extending her hoof to a stallion. “Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie!”

The charcoal stallion smiled warmly. “I am Soot Brush. I take it you’re newcomers to Chron?”

“Would you believe me if I said we were from another world entirely?” Pinkie said, grinning.

Soot raised an eyebrow. “Really? Can’t say I’m all that surprised – lots of unusual stories – but I’ve never heard that one before. And I’ve heard a lot of stories.”

“Really?” Nova asked.

“Yes! It’s no surprise you wouldn’t know this – being from another world and all – but adventuring groups such as yourself are exceedingly common in Chron! For example… See those three pegasi over there flying in formation? They just arrived two days ago, hunting some sort of smuggler who’s got an ancient relic of evil. One of the more common stories around here.”

“Common ancient relics of evil?” Vriska shook her head. “In one city?”

“Yeah. Is that not normal?”

“No. I mean, we run into evil relics a lot, but that’s because we’re out exploring a lot as well as…” She glanced at Pinkie. “Other reasons.”

“Huh. So I take it you’re just here to explore? No mission?”

Jotaro took a step forward. “Actually, have you heard of the Seven Cities of Gold?”

“Can’t say that I have. There’s other legends I know – the Ruby City, the City of the Depths, the Skyworld… Even if that’s not what you’re looking for I can still tell you about those. I love telling stories. Most people do.”

“Pass,” Jotaro said.

For the first time, Soot looked at them like they were crazy. “You… don’t want to hear a legend?”

Nova shrugged. “We hear all sorts of them all the time. If it’s not the Seven Cities thing, we have other stuff we could be doing.”

“Such as…?”

“Well, initiating first contact with whoever the leader of this world or nation is. Can you tell us that?”

This seemed to confuse Soot for a moment, but he recovered. “Chron has no leader, and it isn’t even a nation. The only nations are the many distant kingdoms, and none of them agree on anything or last very long… only Chron remains.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Huh. A bit odd… Surely you have some sort of council? Government?”

Soot shrugged. “The districts have leaders sometimes, but for the most part we just do what we want, and any direction is provided by the Angels.”

“The Angels?” Flutterfree asked.

Soot processed this. “Are there no Angels in your world?”

“We’ve encountered angels before – of many different kinds – but none of our home worlds actually have them.”

“Correction,” Vriska said. “Mine had some. They were basically overgrown monster-snakes though.”

“You’ll have to describe your Angels,” Flutterfree finished.

Soot opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, then shook his head. “I… Give me a minute. They… They tell us what we can do.”

“So they rule you?”

“No… That’s not it. They tell us what we can do. It’s not mandatory to actually do any of it, but they’ve always proven to give good suggestions to every person they contact. They generally tell whoever they can the best step they can take on their life – be it adventuring, exploring, starting a family, or even a business. You’d be hard-pressed to find a person who has gotten where they are without assistance from an Angel at least once. They just know where the best life lies.”

“So they rule you,” Vriska pointed out. “If it’s not mandatory, but everyone does it, it’s the same thing.”

“I… suppose?” he cocked his head. “It’s just hard to think of it like that, sorry. All of us just always had the Angels existing. They’re the executors of the universe’s plan, and why would anyone go against the plan of existence itself? It’d be a disservice to the Watchmaker.”

“Watchmaker?” Nova asked.

This one really hit Soot sideways. “I… You have no Watchmaker?”

“Is he your creator?” Flutterfree asked.

“No… He’s just the creator of the Angels. The Watchmaker… He is the one with the plan. I… I can’t even imagine a world without a Watchmaker. How would the lives of anyone get wound up? How could cities exist? How would civilization of any kind form!?”

“By our own means,” Vriska said. “None of us have a Watchmaker.”

Flutterfree narrowed her eyes. “At least not in the way you are describing.”

Soot couldn’t comprehend this. “I… I’m sorry, I don’t think I can be of any help to you here.” He nervously backed away.

Flutterfree cocked her head. “Why are you suddenly afraid?”

“I… I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just… I don’t know!”

Pinkie nodded. “It’s fine – can you at least tell us where to find one of these Angels?”

“Mercury Square,” he said before running off.

“Well that was odd,” Nova declared.

“He sensed himself questioning his deepest long-held beliefs,” Flutterfree observed. “The default reaction to that is to stop thinking about it. He’ll try his best not to think about existence without a Watchmaker from here on out.”

Nova let out a sigh. “That… never fixes anything.”

“You and I talk to Rev a lot. That tends to open minds. Most people are stubborn. That’s fine, but it does make talking about things difficult.”

Pinkie frowned. “Hrm… We need a way to get information out of these people about the Watchmaker and his Angels without making them freak out… No, Vriska, no mind-reading unless we have to.”

Vriska smirked and snapped her fingers. “Let’s just ask questions differently, like we’re from here.”

“Oh, that?” Flutterfree pondered this. “That might do it…”

Pinkie pulled out a notebook and a pen. “Righty! If we’re going to pull this off, we’re going to need to word the questions like a survey. What do we want to know?”

Nova nodded. “The Watchmaker and the Angels. And the ‘plan’.”

“Seven Cities of Gold,” Jotaro added.

“Too much out of left field,” Vriska countered.

“Actually, I don’t think so,” Pinkie said. “If adventurers and legends are common, asking about them isn’t a problem at all. So… How’s this sound?” She cleared her throat. “Hey, we’re asking people around Chron about their beliefs! Would you mind being part of the questionnaire? …And then we ask them the following questions. Ahem. ‘What do you think the universe’s plan for you is and how did you discover it?’ ‘What is your most memorable encounter with an Angel?’ ‘What were you taught about the Watchmaker when you were a child?’ and ‘Have you heard of the Seven Cities of Gold’?’” She looked up. “Think that works?”

Everyone nodded. Nova duplicated the questionnaire for everyone.

Pinkie grinned. “Right! Everyone, break and ask around for a few minutes, meet back here in fifteen. The clocks are everywhere, should be easy to time that. Break!”

The five of them nodded and went to different areas of the street. They talked to several people, with only Vriska getting an aggressive reaction. The interviews were short, so each of them got to talk to multiple people.

They met back up, not a single one of them late. Nova spoke first. “These are the most cooperative people I’ve ever encountered. I had to make mine stop talking. Holy crap…”

“How many did you get?” Vriska asked.

“Three,” Nova said.

“Two,” Vriska muttered, folding her arms.

“Four,” Flutterfree said with a smile.

“Three,” Jotaro countered, fixing her with his signature poker face.

“Seven,” Pinkie said, giggling. “It’s funny how you all thought you had a chance. And boy did I find out stuff! So, judging from what I got, everyone you talked to was very sure of the universe’s plan for them?”

Nova raised a hoof. “One of mine was uncertain if the plan wanted him to redecorate his restaurant or not, and this uncertainty was making him a little existential.”

“Anyone else?” Pinkie asked. “No? Okay. And as for the next question, everyone had discovered their purpose in life by listening to one of the Angels?”

Everyone nodded, except Jotaro. “I had one whose event was when his wife was called by an Angel to be a mercenary. It’s been difficult on him, but the event was extremely recent.”

“So they do call you to less-than-altruistic callings…” Flutterfree observed.

Pinkie nodded. “Good to know.” She scribbled a few things down in her notebook. “And the third question… All eleven of mine gave identical answers. Same for all of you?”

Vriska shrugged. “The second one punched me before I got her to finish, so… I don’t know.”

Pinkie held up her notes. “The wording changes, but it’s always the same. ‘The Watchmaker watches over us all with his Angels, ensuring that we can all know what the universe’s plan is. Whenever we feel lost, we should seek out an Angel, and we will no longer be lost. The Watchmaker knows which life is best for us.”

Flutterfree narrowed her eyes. “I don’t like this.”

“You aren’t the only one,” Pinkie said, putting the notebook in her mane. “I think it’s time we talked to one of these Angels. Let’s see if I can completely baffle one…” She rummaged around in her mane. “Time to bring out the big weird guns.”

Jotaro coughed. “Did anyone learn of the Seven Cities of Gold?”

Everyone shook their heads. “Nothing, sorry,” Flutterfree said. Jotaro lowered his head in clear disappointment.

Pinkie pulled out a pack of rubber ducks. “…Perfect. Let’s go to Mercury Square! ONWARD!”

She bounced off.

“Hey, genius, let’s ask where Mercury Square is first,” Vriska blurted.

Pinkie stopped in mid air. “Ooooooh, right.”

The first person they asked told them exactly where it was.

~~~

Clockwork Angels

“You promise every treasure to the foolish and the wise.”

Mercury Square was an intersection of six interior roads. The intersection was paved with smooth glass rather than pavement, and lined with barriers indicating that cars could only drive around the edges of the square, creating a somewhat unusual roundabout construction. Under the glass, rivers of liquid mercury moved, shimmering under the red light above and the blue lights to the side, creating a work of art.

The square was always crowded, for it was known as a place the Angels congregated. And what beings they were, these Angels…

These Clockwork Angels.

Their bodies were decidedly physical, composed of any number of metals ranging from iron and brass to gold and titanium. Every one of their limbs was without covering, revealing intricate mechanisms composed of hundreds of miniscule gears precise enough for accurate finger coordination. Their chests were just as open as their limbs, though the interior was more than just a conglomeration of miniscule gears – a single, large gear turned in the center of every Angel’s chest, the face inscribed with a mysterious symbol unique to each individual. The chest’s shape provided a way to identify the ‘gender’ of these beings – more rounded for feminine, straight for masculine.

Their faces were all identical – plates of metal sewn onto a skull framework, making the head the only part of themselves that couldn’t be seen into. Something within the head glowed a seemingly random color, the light pouring out the mouth, eyes, and ears of the Angel. The eyes were clearly mechanical, like cameras, and the mouth moved in awkward, jerking motions – but this did nothing to make them seem any less alive. They moved with the intricacies of a human. A female with an orange glow tapped her foot impatiently while she searched for the perfect pony or human to talk to. Another scratched the back of his head while leaning back, a motion no pure machine could have done.

As Pinkie’s team arrived, they got to see one of them spread their wings. A male with a green glow spread his arms wide, prompting grandiose white wings of pure magic to sprout from his back. He bid the people of Mercury Square farewell, returning to the sky. Soon, another Angel took his place, dropping from a nearby rafter and securing their own wings.

“They certainly look impressive,” Nova observed. She smacked her screen with her free hoof a few times. “Wish I could get readings on them.”

“Let’s just see if we can talk to one,” Flutterfree said. “They seem open to everyone.”

“And busy,” Vriska commented. “There’s a lot of people here.”

“We’re not in any rush.”

Pinkie nodded. “Until then, we can listen to see what they’re talking about!”

The five entered the crowd, at first searching for a line, but quickly realized there just wasn’t one. The Angels chose whom they would talk to.

“My mother just threw me out of the house,” a teenage girl spat with immense distaste. “So I guess I’ve got to find something.”

The Angel smiled at her and spoke with a synthetic voice that managed to change in pitch to convey emotion, unlike the Flats. “My daughter, look closely in yourself. You’ve heard that Caked needs a new assistant – why not discover your skill in the art of baking and uncover the power to make taste buds explode with beautiful flavor?”

“I… I can cook?”

“Your journey to master and understand that skill will be an inspiring one.”

“Eh, guess I’ll try it.” The girl walked off.

Another Angel pointed at a man. “Yarrow, you were just here last week!”

A yellow unicorn stallion nodded sheepishly. “I was really into the treasure-hiding business, but then I just thought of something, what i-”

“Yarrow, trust me, your calling is to create the hoards of treasure held in the lands far from Chron. This idea of flower arrangement? It will bring you nothing but complex drama, and not the kind that you would wish on yourself.”

“…Of course, Angel. I humbly apologize for my arrogance.”

“See? You’re already on the right track.”

The third Angel had finished a long discussion with a nine-year-old girl. “Now, go accept that magic power offered to you. It will take you on a journey to the sun itself. There will be pain, sacrifice, and danger – but there will also be friends, laughter, and a better tomorrow. It is a hard part of the plan you have been born into, but remember. The Watchmaker knows you’ll be strong enough.”

“Right!” The girl said, running off with confidence in her stride.

A pegasus mare whose wings were too frail to fly trudged through the crowd, her child at her hooves. The first Angel stooped down to look at her. “It feels like life is impossible, doesn’t it?”

The pegasus nodded wordlessly.

“But, see, you’re going to save the entire city of Chron from a great disaster. Listen to me closely, my daughter – you and your child need to move to the nearest luxury district. They will accept you as servants, and you will be treated well. But your calling is not to be a servant. Your calling is to be a hero.”

The mare stared at her in disbelief.

The Angel smiled. “Lean not on your own understanding, young one. Trust in perfect love and perfect planning. You know in your heart what we tell you is true, and what we offer you is genuine. Don’t let your inner self deny you what is yours.”

The mare nodded slowly, a determined look coming into her eyes. She left.

“That upsets you,” a male Angel said, appearing behind Pinkie’s group.

The five of them turned around, not surprised at all they were snuck up on. “Yes,” Flutterfree said. “What guarantee do we have that the Watchmaker’s plan is perfect?”

“It isn’t his plan, travelers,” the Angel said, his inner gray light giving his face the appearance of being dusted with ash. “It is the perfect plan of the universe. The best path through existence of which he is aware and graced you with the answers.”

“How do we know he’s right?”

The Angel smiled, gesturing around. “You’ve seen the city of Chron. Happiness and fulfillment everywhere.”

“Some of those here looked pretty fucked up,” Vriska observed.

“They are not perfect beings.”

“Is the Watchmaker?” Flutterfree asks.

“If he knows of perfection and tells others of it, it doesn’t matter if he himself is perfect or not,” the Angel stated matter-of-factly. “He is simply the guardian of this world. In the end, that is all that matters.”

“I beg to differ,” Vriska retorted. “Intent matters a lot.”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah. So, if you don’t mind mister Angel, please direct us to the Watchmaker so we can have a chat with him, pretty please?”

The Angel shook his head – as if they were little children saying something foolish. “Your time in this world would not be best spent talking to the Watchmaker.”

“Let me guess, the Seven Cities of Gold?” Nova asked.

“Not that either, young ones. Your time in this world is best suited to root out the corruption deep within the city of Chron. There is a small group of individuals who wish to tear down this establishment from within, an-”

“Pass,” Vriska said.

The Angel did not react with surprise as Soot did – he merely bowed in understanding. “As you wish. Do what you will, otherworlders. We Angels will work around your defiance of the plan. Know that the level of perfection was lowered today thanks to you.”

“We can live with that,” Vriska muttered.

“I am aware of that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are others who are willing to listen to wise counsel. Please make room for them, if you will.”

The five of them left the center of Mercury Square, opting to stand on the edge and ponder what had just happened.

“Well, that went nowhere,” Nova commented.

“Understatement,” Jotaro added.

“Not much here for us now, is there?” Vriska said. “It’s not like anyone actually knows how to get us to the Watchmaker, and there’s not really any other ruler we could even talk to. I say fuck it, let’s pack our bags and go right after the show.”

“No,” Jotaro affirmed. “Those Cities of Gold… They’re important.”

“I’m with Jotaro,” Nova said. “There’s more here for us.”

Flutterfree shook her head. “I… I don’t think I like this place anymore. If we stay too long, what if we get roped into their ‘plan’ or ‘fate’? What then?”

“Oh look at me, I get to break the tie,” Pinkie said, musing. “Well, guess what, I believe we’re in a ‘super chapter’ right now, so there’s definitely something big here. So big that, as far as I can see, there’s not even a B plot! So I say we stay and let this play itself out.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Okay. If you think that’s what we need.”

Vriska shrugged. “Eh, I was half-joking about packing up the bags to begin with.”

“Sooooo…. Seven Cities of Gold,” Nova said, turning to Jotaro. “We need to find something out about it.”

Vriska smirked. “Lucky you I’ve been accumulating luck ever since we got here. So so many people that are just ripe with luck around here. Just give me a bit longer and I can assure you we get something. Can’t guarantee it’ll be about the Seven Cities of Gold, but eh, what can you do?”

“Try again?” Jotaro suggested.

“Rhetorical question, nimrod.”

“Yare yare daze…”

“Anyway, I’ll just remove some luck from those Angels and then I-”

“Excuse me,” a man in a dark cloak said, walking up to them. “Are you the otherworlders?”

Vriska deflated. “Just when I was about to pull off something awesome…”

“Yep! That’s us!” Pinkie declared, grinning. “Who wants to know?”

“You defied the suggestion of an Angel?”

“You bet we did!” Vriska laughed.

The man looked left and right nervously, looking especially close at the Angels’ lines of sight. “You should follow me if you wish to know others who defy the plan.”

“I like this idea,” Nova said. “I say we follow him.”

“Lead the way, mysterio!” Pinkie cheered. “Take us to the Anarchist!”

“H-how did you know…?”

“I’ll never tell.”

~~~

The Anarchist

“For all those years I had to get along, they told me I was wrong. I never wanted to belong.”

The five interdimensional explorers were led through alley after alley, building after building, maze-like corridor after maze-like corridor, passing numerous mechanisms made of tremendous gears with an overall indeterminate function.

It was clear that their little guide was trying to make sure nobody was following them. The team didn’t complain about the added caution – they had a feeling they were going somewhere they really weren’t supposed to be.

That somewhere turned out to be a basement in an abandoned section of Chron. It went so far beneath the normal surface that sands from the sea had started to seep in through the cracks, giving the musty room an arid feel. The room matched the atmosphere with its minimal decoration – there were several chairs, a desk, and a bookshelf half-filled with tattered books. The only light came from a single light bulb that wasn’t strong enough to illuminate anything other than the desk clearly.

Behind the desk sat an aging man with a permanent scowl on his face. His hair was long with an even mixture of gray and black that hung over the front of his shoulders. His clothing was tattered and brown, his arms were covered in scratches and dust, and his face was a visage of pain.

He looked up from a book he was reading – his eyes lit up, but his scowl remained. “Ah. The visitors. Midian, leave us.”

“But, maste-”

“This conversation is going to be private, Midian.” The man waved him away. He folded his arms and examined the five visitors closely. “I am known as the Anarchist. Care to introduce yourselves? I want to hear whatever titles you have as well.”

“Captain Pinkie Pie, Element of Laughter,” Pinkie said with a salute. “I’m the leader of this Primary Unit.”

“Protege Nova Glimmer,” Nova said. “I suppose technically I’m an Officer. All of us are, save Pinkie.”

“Flutterfree Asquall, Element of Kindness.”

“Vriska Serket, Thief of Light. And other things that aren’t important right now.”

“Jotaro Kujo, PhD, of the Joestar bloodline.”

Pinkie grinned. “And together we explore new universes, make first contact, and if we think it’s a good idea introduce them to the larger multiverse!” The five of them moved into dramatic poses for effect.

The Anarchist nodded. “And what have you thought of Zhui so far?”

Everyone looked to Pinkie. She pursed her lips. “The people seem really happy. But we don’t like what we’ve seen about how their lives are controlled by these ticking Angels. No one here questions anything or even really thinks. It’s bothersome! But the people seem happy, so we don’t really have any reason to mess with anything since the Angels won’t really talk and we can’t get to the Watchmaker.”

The Anarchist sat back in his chair. “It’s a lot worse than it seems.”

“How so?” Nova asked.

“The Angels gave you the impression there was a choice, didn’t they? You refused the call given to you, and they just shrugged and let you go on your way.”

The five of them nodded.

“For you, it may be possible to return to the worlds from which you come, but for us refusing the call results in this.” He gestured around at the lackluster room. “You think that, even if the Watchmaker’s plan was the ‘best’ option, you could still eke out a life for yourself on your own terms. But that isn’t it at all. When you refuse the call you are rejected from society. You become an outcast. It doesn’t matter where in the world you reject it – here, in the wilderness, in the outer kingdoms – the moment you do things become different. Because those who aren’t following the word of the Angels aren’t within the plan, they are actively pushed away from anything important or impressive. Because if one defiant person got up there… the Angels could be questioned.” He sat back.

Vriska shook her head. “That sounds really lame.”

“What’s your story?” Flutterfree asked.

The Anarchist pondered this for a moment. “As a boy, I was ‘blessed’ with an unbelievably defiant and inquisitive spirit. Pure defiance would have been pretty useless – I would have either been broken in or fallen to nothing early in my life. But my desire to know and ask questions… that gave me something else. Ever since I was little, I had heard of the Angels, that if I was ever lost I should go ask them what to do. I naturally refused to do so, and I later asked why we had to. The only reason anyone ever gave was ‘because that’s what everyone does’ or ‘because the Angels know what’s right.’ I demanded to know how the Angels knew this, and they’d cite the ever-elusive Watchmaker. This did not satisfy me, so I turned to intellectual pursuits to find my answers, making a point to avoid all the Angels. As I read more and more about this ordered universe, about this plan of the Watchmaker’s… I found what my calling in life was. To defy this ‘perfect plan’ set in motion by a being who never shows his face. I began to speak out, to gather followers who were willing to question.”

He shook his head. “And then an Angel came to me directly. He told me it was time for me to change. I told him to go fuck himself. He ignored this and informed me it was my destiny to become a criminal mastermind – did you know that they set all the criminals on their paths as well? Usually not so blatantly, but every one of them is part of the ‘plan’ as well. I was told to gather my followers and attempt to tear the city of Chron down. I, of course, refused outright. I declared that we would continue to do what we’d always done, and that was defy the Angels and the Watchmaker. Chron was not our enemy – they were.”

“And then everything went wrong,” Nova said.

“Precisely. Most of my followers left me, and my access to scholarly sources were cut off. The curious bit was this: the events that led to these misfortunes seemed to be completely unrelated to the Angels in any way, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. If the Angels can control anyone’s life with merely suggestions, they could find a way to manipulate one or two people to completely ruin me. I was reduced to poverty, with only a scant few followers, most of which had actually accepted the call of an Angel in life and were still in that life. It’s a horrible paradox.”

“I take it your underground movement isn’t going well?” Vriska asked.

“Not at all. We grow exceptionally slowly, and many of us die pointless, gruesome deaths. Most of us have no place in the plan and are forced to a life of suffering and poverty.” He groaned. “And now I’m getting old. No matter if I find magic to extend my life, I know I’m not long for this world, and this little movement to save us from the order will fizzle out to nothing.”

He turned to them, a fire in his aging eyes. “And then you show up. You five, from outside the plan. Who defy the Angels on principle and don’t have to think that hard to realize that something’s wrong here. And, to top it off, are asking about the Seven Cities of Gold.”

Jotaro lit up. “You know of them?”

“I do.” He looked to the sky. “Records say they are they were the first cities established by the Watchmaker. They are lost to time, their location now dominated by the desert of frost and flame. But where they once were should be the original place the Watchmaker came to us.”

“The doorframes…”

“I don’t pretend to know that – merely knowing about the Cities of Gold is a rare thing. The Watchmaker prefers that his own legends get lost to time. The fact that one slipped through the cracks is proof that he is not perfect, nor is he all-knowing.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Right.”

The Anarchist stood up, curling his old fingers into a fist. “Travelers from another world, I, instead of an Angel, will ask you to go on a quest, instead of order you. As the Anarchist, the leader of the few who know the plan is not right, will you please travel to the ruins of the Seven Cities of Gold and find the Watchmaker – and using your otherworldly powers, remove his hold on this world. I have nothing to offer you in return, besides my gratitude.”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “Well… I’ll promise to go to the Seven Cities of Gold and try to find the Watchmaker. But we will give him a chance to explain himself. To learn the truth of what is going on.”

The Anarchist sat back down in his chair, scowl deepening. “I will accept that. It is an appropriately defiant response. I will have a map to the desert of frost and fire procured for you. I recommend finding a way to procure a skiff-class airship, for it is a long journey. Even at those speeds, it will take multiple days.”

“It’s times like this I wish we could use our spaceships,” Nova muttered.

“We’re doing it though,” Jotaro said. “We’re not going to just turn our backs on this place.”

“Nope!” Pinkie declared. “We’re going to find out what’s going on. We’re going to go to the show tonight and we will leave for the Cities come morning! I’m going to call Renee, give me a second.”

“Renee?” the Anarchist asked.

“Our boss,” Vriska explained. “We’ve already spent an entire day here, that’s quite a bit longer than usual.”

Pinkie was already talking to Renee on the phone filling her in on the situation.

“You certainly have power,” the Anarchist observed. “Should you not call for more support?”

“We’ll decide if we need that and when,” Nova declared. “Plus once we get there we can just use long-range teleports to return if we need extra firepower.”

The Anarchist nodded. “Do it as you wish. I am not here to plan the details of your quest. Do what you will.”

They nodded. “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” Flutterfree promised.

~~~

Carnies

“Sometimes the Angels punish us by answering our prayers.”

Procuring the skiff had been easy – Vriska had used her luck to find a small fortune inside an abandoned barrel. The gold had been more than enough to purchase a small speedy ship for the five of them. It had no balloon, unlike the caravan’s ships, but rather a small magical generator that ensured it hovered above the ground at all times. The skiff looked more like a boat than an airship with its pointed prow and fin-like protrusions on the edges. There was no interior – aside from a small trunk for belongings, the skiff was open to the elements. None of them minded, because the skiff was fast.

After they had purchased a hotel room for the night, they got to see exactly how fast it was.

“This is a bad idea,” Flutterfree declared. “We’re supposed to drive on the roads on the surface – not on these scaffolds!”

“Reeelax!” Vriska said, smirking. “It’s just a ten story fall to the surface!”

“Just!?”

“You have wings, Flutterfree,” Nova pointed out.

“The rest of you don’t!”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “We’re all invulnerable badasses who can’t feel pain, unicorns who can make ourselves levitate, or The Pink One.”

Pinkie giggled. “Yep! FIRE HER UP! DESTINATION: ZINC SQUARE!”

Jotaro was at the helm, since he had the most experience piloting ships. With both hands on the wheel, he had Star Platinum pull the throttle back.

The skiff shot forward along the scaffolding of Chron like a bullet. Flutterfree had no idea what was going on as they whizzed past three separate skyscrapers, forcing the scaffolding to shudder with their movement.

Jotaro, however, was on top of things. He was able to keep the skiff on the narrow passageway without much difficulty, thanks mostly to Star Platinum’s precise senses. He didn’t run into the railing at any point.

“THERE’S A CORNER UP AHEAD!” Nova shouted. “WE CAN’T TURN AT THIS SPEED!”

Jotaro didn’t slow down.

“JOTARO WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?”

Jotaro let a small smirk come to his face.

“Jotaro…”

“JOTARO SLOW DOWN!” Flutterfree screeched.

Jotaro did not slow down. Everyone braced for impact.

At the last possible second, Star Platinum froze time. The Stand rotated the skiff a full ninety degrees and allowed time to resume. The skiff continued on without a hitch.

“Yare yare daze, so panicked,” Jotaro commented.

Vriska burst out laughing. “Nice move, big guy!” She slapped him on the back. “That was just pure sweetness.”

He turned back to look at the expressions of his team, finding a very satisfying mixture of deathly afraid and amused.

“Uh, hey Jotaro?” Pinkie piped up.

“Yes?”

“You might want to look at the ‘road’.”

Jotaro looked back at the road – and saw a dead end coming up. He had already used his time stop recently, so he couldn’t use it again…

Star Platinum pulled on the breaks, but it wasn’t enough. The skiff went flying over the dead end, losing the ground it needed beneath it to hover. It reached a peak height – and started to fall.

“Hey, the good news is that we’re going to crash into Zinc Square!” Pinkie cheered.

Nova grunted, lighting her horn. “That doesn’t seem to be that good of news to me!” She surrounded the skiff in her levitation magic. The dangerous speed of the skiff slowed to manageable levels, and had they been heading for a street everything would have been completely fine.

As it was they completely flattened a cotton candy stand. The skiff was fine, as were the occupants of the vehicle and the stand, but all the cotton candy was decidedly ruined.

A pink stallion gasped. “MY COTTON CANDY!!!”

“Sorry! Sorry!” Pinkie blurted, pulling a fresh cotton candy machine out of her mane and handing it over to him. “Here-”

“YOU WANT TO REPLACE THE FAMILY HEIRLOOM!?”

“Well, it’s broke-”

“There will be no replacement. There will be only… no more cotton candy!” He wailed and ran off.

Vriska blinked. “…Touchy.”

“Vriska we just destroyed his family heirloom,” Flutterfree chided.

“No you didn’t,” Bartholomew said, walking up to them. “His cotton candy stand has a habit of getting destroyed so he tries to guilt-trip people into giving him things over it.”

Nova blinked. “But he just refused Pinkie’s!”

“He’s a long-con pony,” Bartholomew said with a shrug. “Anyway, I’m glad you made it! Welcome to the Greatest Show on Zhui!” He threw his arms wide, gesturing at the scenery surrounding them.

It was definitely a circus in a part of town normally reserved for community gatherings. The Square itself was a flat place exposed to the sky, containing only tall metal pillars with white lights at the top encased in metallic sculptures shaped to the alchemical symbol for zinc. Aside from that, everything else had been placed here by the caravan. A gigantic red and white striped tent dominated the scene, a single smokestack poking up through one of its sides adding more steam to the city of Chron. Surrounding the large tent were dozens of stands, exhibits, and games clearly designed to get people to spend lots and lots of money. A few clowns and acrobats played in the streets – juggling, performing comedy routines, or showcasing bizarre ‘freaks’ or people with peculiar magical powers.

“So. Much. PARTY!” Pinkie squeed, jumping into the air. “This is gonna be great!”

“It’ll go as it always does,” Bartholomew said. “We perform, everyone likes it, perhaps a few adventuring types join us, perhaps a few leave, and then we move to the next town. It gets the same-y after a while. The best shows are the ones that implode in on themselves. Do not tell the Ringmaster I said that.”

Vriska smirked. “Want us to crash the skiff into the main tent?”

“Please don’t,” Bartholomew said with a chuckle. “Anyway, the main show doesn’t start for a while. Anything in particular you want to do?”

“Well, I th-” Vriska stopped her thought. “Holy potatoes, is that an Angel?”

Bartholomew looked out. “Oh yeah, that’s Clanker. His real name is ‘Angel of Determination’ or something like that, but we don’t like saying that. He travels with us. Good thing too, he helps everyone find out where they fit.”

“Huh,” Vriska said. “…Does he perform?”

“He actually does from time to time,” Bartholomew said. “He’s got a fortune-telling act that’s a bit more specific than what most Angels do. Doesn’t really tell anyone what to do with their lives though. I don’t think he’s doing it today, though – see how he’s walking? He’s looking for people who need to know their part of the plan.”

“Right,” Nova said.

“Maybe he’s looking for you?”

“We already talked to an Angel today,” Jotaro said. “Doubt it.” He noticed the Angel glance at the five of them, but he didn’t move any closer.

“Oh, what was your purpose then?”

“The Seven Cities of Gold,” Jotaro said.

“Never heard of it. Weird.”

“It is a legend not many are meant to know.”

“…Can you tell me?”

Vriska smirked. “Sure. The Seven Cities of Gold are the ancient cities where the Watchmaker first came to the world. The Cities are now gone, but the essence of the Watchmaker may remain. That’s what we’re going to seek out.”

“Woah… That’s amazing! I hope you guys find what you’re looking for!”

“We do too,” Flutterfree said.

“Anyway, Bartholomew, take us to the party!” Pinkie demanded.

“Gotcha! There’s a magic gun game over here. Only four players though.”

“You guys can go,” Nova said, looking back at the cotton candy stand’s wreckage. “I think I can revert this in the time it takes you to play a game.”

“You do that!” Pinkie grinned. “Don’t get lost now, you hear?”

“I’ll be able to find you, don’t worry,” Nova said, turning her focus to the broken stand. She reversed the flow of time on the objects, spending the next few minutes re-assembling the wreckage from the ground up. It was good as new.

“Amazing,” Icon said, her sudden presence freaking Nova right out. She yelped and whirled around.

“W-wha?”

“It was a compliment, Nova,” Icon said with her soothing voice.

“I’m more alarmed at how you managed to sneak up on me.”

“I’m a master acrobat and contortionist. I move very lightly.” She strode up to the stand, laying a hoof on it. “Impeccable work.”

Nova flushed. “Well, it was just a simple matter of, y’know, reversing the time flow of each individual piece until it returned to a properly fixed state. Since it wasn’t that long ago it took hardly any energy at all an-”

“Wow, smart as well. Even better.” Icon flipped around, her tail narrowly missing Nova’s muzzle.

“Uh… Yeah! Smart! That’s… me!”

Icon put her mouth near Nova’s ear. “I’d love to stay and have fun, but I have to prepare for my act. If you’d like some fun, swing by the back of the tent after the show.”

Nova blinked. “S-sure!”

“I’m glad,” Icon said, chuckling to herself. She twisted into the air and backflipped away, blowing a kiss and winking at her. “Until then.”

Nova took a few seconds to process this. “Yeah!” She said, but Icon was long gone. “Yeesh, making a fool of myself here…”

“Over what?” Pinkie said, appearing from nowhere.

“NOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!” Nova blurred, falling over backward. “I just got the cart back!”

“Ooh, cotton candy!” Pinkie said, activating the cotton candy machine and pulling out a fully formed piece of fluffy blue sugar. “Mmmmm…”

The others showed up shortly thereafter. “That was so much fun!” Flutterfree said.

“That’s because you won,” Vriska observed.

“…Maybe,” Flutterfree admitted. “Anything else, Bartholomew?”

“We can watch Eddie do his impossible juggling until we need to go to the big tent,” Bartholomew suggested. “That’ll be fun, right?”

“I bet it will!” Pinkie blurted, putting a hoof around Nova. “Maybe it’ll calm Nova down!”

“Uh – I am calm!”

Pinkie winked at Nova, the universal sign of I know everything, but just keep doing what you’re doing. “Oh, you got all tense, Nova! Come on, TIME TO ENJOY A SHOW!” They made their way to Eddie’s juggling stage where a tall human was already juggling seventeen different small, fuzzy animals.

“Oh, my…” Flutterfree said, hoof over her mouth.

“Eddie’s a professional, don’t worry,” Bartholomew said. “Also, be warned, he might pull the ‘oh no, the animal’s dead’ trick. It’s all an act though.”

“That sounds horrible!” Flutterfree turned around. “I’ll just… not watch.”

“Your loss,” Vriska said, slurping obnoxiously on a drink she’d swiped off some random member of the audience.

Flutterfree took her time to look around, examining her surroundings that didn’t include the juggling of small animals. Given the gasps of fear she heard behind her, that was probably a good choice on her part. She looked at the much less concerning sights of normal clowns, a couple acrobats, that one pony with two heads, the Clanker Angel talking to Crazy Dan…

…That last one caught her eye. Crazy Dan was very animated by whatever Clanker was saying. Hanging on every word like it meant literally everything…

She was curious. She activated Lolo, winding the long green tendrils toward the two of them, producing a listening point for herself.

Clanker took out a smooth, gray box and handed it to Crazy Dan. “This is your destiny, Dan. I trust you know what to do with this box.”

“KABOOM!”

“Yes, kaboom. Remember the trigger carefully.”

“Right! Ahahaha! Everything’s going up today!”

“Yes, yes it is.” Then the Angel looked right at Lolo’s ‘camera’.

Flutterfree froze. Nothing but other Stand users and users of spiritual powers could see Lolo’s extensions. Flutterfree retracted Lolo instantly.

She turned back to her friends. “Everyone, I sa- AUGH!”

The juggler was holding a limp ferret, holding it out for all to see. Flutterfree covered her face with her hooves.

“Why’d you turn around?” Pinkie asked.

“Crazy Dan was talking to an Angel about a box and something explosive and…” She pointed, but discovered that neither the Angel nor Crazy Dan were there. “Aaand they’re gone.”

“Crazy Dan’s act is all about explosions,” Bartholomew said. “Maybe it was a new trick?”

“It had something to do with a gray box…”

“I’ll go ask him about it before the show starts,” Bartholomew promised. “Speaking of, I think I need to head over. You should grab some seats if you want the best possible show.”

“I thought it was the Greatest Show on Zhui?” Vriska asked.

Bartholomew rolled his eyes. “Closer seats still make it better. Come on!”

Flutterfree nodded. “Right.” They set off toward the main tent.

“Uh… Nova?” Pinkie called back. “You coming?”

“YES!” Nova blurted, shaking herself out of her stupor, trotting after them.

~~~

The interior of the Greatest Show on Zhui’s tent was filled mostly with chairs around a central ring, pretty standard for most carnival shows. The primary difference was a gigantic mechanical forge in the center of the ring that pumped out smoke and steam through a rickety zig-zagging chimney. Gears and magical runes decorated the unusual forge.

Pinkie’s team found themselves on the third row of seats from the front, close enough to see action but not too close, in case something went flying. The five of them knew Crazy Dan’s act was the opener, so they were on guard for any gray boxes or other such things. They did not see Clanker anywhere in the tent – though other Angels could be seen as part of the audience. Apparently even they needed entertainment.

A spotlight clicked on, showing the Ringmaster standing right in front of the central forge. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, I have for you tonight a show that will delight and amaze every last one of you, even those who have shown their faces at our performances before! We’ve got many new acts tonight, as well as many twists on the old. And for those of you who have never been – WELCOME TO THE GREATEST SHOW ON ZHUI! May I present to yo-”

The forge the Ringmaster was standing in front of opened, engulfing her in fire. When the fire cleared, in her place was Crazy Dan.

Jotaro was ready to move, but Vriska shook her head. “Part of the act. The Ringmaster’s mind is behind the seats now.”

“Guess what time it is!?” Crazy Dan blurted, laughing madly. “That’s right! It’s KABOOM time!” He leaped onto his hands, using his feet to reach into his pockets and throw comically large bombs around. They exploded in showers of vibrant colors, showering the arena with sparks of all colors. Trails of fire appeared all over the ground of the inner ring, fire that Crazy Dan proceeded to inflame with special powders, sending pillars of rainbow flame into the sky.

The audience cheered, but Crazy Dan was far from done. He had dozens of complex explosive routines ready for them, delivering them all in quick succession. He ate a bomb and it seemed to explode inside of him, but he was fine. He blew up a bomb larger than him right in front of an audience member’s face, and they were completely fine.

He eventually started juggling bombs and handing them off to the jugglers, transitioning from Crazy Dan’s explosive opening to the next act – dozens of jugglers, hundreds of objects.

“Wonder if Bartholomew got to him?” Flutterfree asked.

“Or you got worked up over nothing,” Vriska suggested.

“Yeah… That is possible.”

“Well, I liked explosions-R-us,” Pinkie chuckled.

“Can you juggle that many balls, Pinkie?” Flutterfree asked, gesturing to the performance.

“Give me a Mirror Pool and I can juggle a functionally infinite number of balls.”

“Let’s not do that.”

“Aw, ptooey,” Pinkie chuckled.

They sat back and enjoyed the show. Jugglers. Trapeze artists. Clowns – lots of clowns in a tiny car. Nova believed they had to be using a ‘bigger on the inside’ spell or something similar.

It was after the scantily clad dancers had finished their routine that they noticed something was wrong.

Bartholomew was moving exceedingly slowly along the edge of the inner ring, carrying the gray box in his hands like his life depended on it. His expression was one of pure terror – and it definitely wasn’t because the contortionists had just started their act, twisting themselves into a clockwork mesh of horrifying flesh.

Vriska stood up. “I’ll get him.” She put a hand to her head, tapping into Bartholomew’s mind. Hey, kid, Vriska here. What’s wrong down there?

“Find Crazy Dan!” Pinkie blurted. The other four members of the team scattered, leaving Vriska alone tapping into Bartholomew’s mind.

It was proving more difficult than expected – Bartholomew was in so much of a panic his mind couldn’t even process what she was saying to him.

Kid, calm down. She tried to force the command into his mind, but even that was too complicated for him to understand. All he was able to do was walk forward, along the edge of the ring. Vriska couldn’t even probe him to figure out why.

Right, won’t calm down. Try STOP.

Bartholomew stopped moving, though this sudden change in his mental state just increased his level of panic.

Stay there, I’m coming, Vriska said, making her slow trek to that side of the ring.

Meanwhile, Flutterfree clapped her hooves together. “Found him, behind the seats of that section. Nova, think you can teleport us down?”

Nova nodded, lighting her horn. “It better be empty down there…”

“It is,” Flutterfree confirmed. Nova executed the teleport, entering part of the ‘backstage’, where the Ringmaster was talking to Crazy Dan.

The Ringmaster. “I’m sorry, no special treatments, you can’t b-”

“Crazy Dan’s done something to Bartholomew,” Flutterfree said.

The Ringmaster sighed. “Dan, what is it this time?”

“Nothing at all!”

“Stop it,” Flutterfree demanded. “I saw you accept that gray box from the Angel. Now Bartholomew is walking around the edge of the ring terrified for his life for some reason. You’re going to tell us why.”

“Is that why he’s out there…” the Ringmaster muttered.

Crazy Dan laughed. “I didn’t do anything to him, he did it to himself! Decided to poke his nose in my business! Not my fault if I bound it to him!”

“Yes it is,” Jotaro said, using Star Platinum to grab Crazy Dan by the neck. “Now tell us what it is before I decide you’ve pissed me off too much to be allowed to speak.”

“IT GOES KABOOM!” Crazy Dan shouted with a laugh.

“When?” Jotaro demanded.

“When he finishes walking around!”

Nova sent a message to Vriska via telepathy. Stop him from walking around the ring, when he’s done the box will explode.

Already done, came the reply.

See if you can get it from him.

Working on that.

“Right, Vriska’s moving to get it off of him,” Nova said. “We should be able to resolve this without any further problems.”

Crazy Dan laughed. “You think taking it away from him will stop it!? I said it was bound to him! When that bond is gone… Worse things happen!”

The four of them stared at Crazy Dan with fearful eyes.

Elsewhere, Vriska had made it to the area of the ring next to Bartholomew. “Right, kid, now just hand me the box and we’ll be out of here…”

Bartholomew didn’t move, he just stared at her like she had asked him to jump into piranha-infested waters.

Dammit kid! Give me the fucking box! She ordered. His arms twitched, but he held fast. There was no way this kid was this psychically resistant… There was no way!

Vriska! Nova’s voice came into Vriska’s mind. Don’t take the box from him!

I’ve got this, Nova.

That’s not what I mean! New information has come to light! It won’t end well!

I said I’ve got this! Vriska blurted, shutting Nova up with a psychic barrier. There was no way that box was going to explode with Vriska’s luck.

Kid, box! Now!

Bartholomew didn’t move.

“Fuck it,” Vriska muttered, reaching for the box herself. Not the most comfortable action, but she could pull it off without falling into the ring, probably. She swatted at the box, grabbing hold of it and pulling. Bartholomew wouldn’t let go.

“DAMMIT KID!” Vriska muttered. “LET G-”

“VRISKA!” Pinkie shouted through her megaphone on the other side of the ring. “DON’T TAKE THE BOX!”

“I’VE GOT IT!” Vriska shouted.

“VRISKA, THAT WASN’T A REQUEST!”

Vriska pulled, tearing the box from Bartholomew. He screamed in fear.

“See?” Vriska shouted, holding it up. “I’ve got it, and it’s not exploding! Ye of little faith. You interrupted the show for nothing! Man.”

It was in this moment that Bartholomew froze solid.

“What the-”

Thousands of icy spike tendrils shot out from Bartholomew’s frozen body, skewering every last contortionist and a large chunk of the audience. Vriska, with her immense luck, was spared despite her proximity to Bartholomew.

Vriska blinked. She’d been fine. She’d had it.

But no matter how much luck she had, she was still a Thief of Light. The power was always beneficial to her. She could not give fortune to others. She could not have saved Bartholomew…

She should have listened to them.

She didn’t have time to let out an expletive, because the icy form of Bartholomew drew all the bodies it had skewered into a tremendous pile of death. Every part of it froze, becoming a ball of fleshy ice.

And then the ball moved as if it were alive. It screamed with the voices of a hundred dying breaths, tearing at the tent’s supports. It collapsed in on itself, letting the blood red light of evening flood in from above. The various unicorns in the audience kept the tent from falling and crushing anyone, but it did not matter – the beast of bodies moved to absorb the audience into itself.

Bartholomew had wanted excitement.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Jotaro shouted. He grabbed the time-frozen Crazy Dan and threw him with all the might Star Platinum could muster. The human projectile sailed deep into the frozen mound of bodies, shattering dozens and instantly killing Crazy Dan before he was even aware of what was happening.

When time resumed, the mesh of contorted bodies still moved, though it was unable to heal the damage already dealt to it. Flutterfree riddled the creature with holes from her bow of light while Nova met it with her pink-blue lasers.

Vriska eyed the conglomeration of ice. “Goodbye,” she muttered, bringing its luck down as quickly as she could manage. Pinkie took advantage of this, appearing on top of the frozen behemoth with an ice pick. It only took one swing – she hit the fault line perfectly, shattering everybody within the unholy mesh into a million pieces.

It was over as soon as it had began.

Vriska clenched her fist. “That… That…”

“THAT WAS STUPID!” Nova shouted at Vriska. “THAT WAS STUPID!”

“I did what I-”

Nova slapped her. “PEOPLE ARE DEAD BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO LISTEN!”

“I though-”

“No you didn’t! Don’t make m-”

Flutterfree put a hoof over Nova’s mouth. “Now is not the time,” she said, gesturing around. “They see us.”

The five of them looked around – the crowd that hadn’t run in fear was looking at them in anger. All of them… except the Angels, who just looked on with expressions of contentment.

The Ringmaster ran up to them. “You need to leave. Now. Thanks for the help – I mean it – but the crowd is going to turn on you in about ten seconds. Move.”

Nova lit her horn and teleported them all away.

The Ringmaster sighed, leaning on a cane. “Well… Does anyone know what that box was?”

And just like that, a group of adventurers walked up and told her a story about the boxes of ice and fire, and that they had been tasked by their Angel to find and destroy the inventor of the devices…

The interdimensional visitors were forgotten. Like shadows in the night.

~~~

That night, the five of them sat in their hotel room. Silence reigned.

Vriska opened her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh you think that helps anything!?” Nova blurted. “You th-”

Flutterfree shook her head disapprovingly at Nova. “Vriska has difficulty apologizing, Nova. It means a lot when coming from her.”

“Fat lot of good it does!”

Vriska looked at the ground, for once without a sharp retort.

“See? Nothing. As I thought,” Nova huffed.

“Nova…” Pinkie said, putting a hoof on the unicorn’s shoulder. “Yeah, Vriska messed up. She messed up big time. But the mistake needs to be in the past.”

“She disobeyed your order,” Jotaro said. “You’re not just supposed to let that slide. There’s a reason a command position exists.”

Pinkie blinked. “Well, yeah, that wasn’t good, but I think she’s already suffered enough.”

Vriska sighed. “I’ve seen so many people die, Pinkie… I’m numbed to it. You know this.”

“I… You’re right. But we’re also friends, Vriska. I’m not going to yell at you for a mistake you clearly regret.”

“For selfish reasons,” Nova muttered.

Vriska gave the slightest hint that she wanted to punch Nova’s face, but it died out a lot quicker than it should have. A lot quicker.

Flutterfree put a wing around Vriska. “Hey. You don’t have to beat yourself up.”

“Yes she does,” Nova muttered.

“Nova!”

“She’s gotta have some kind of consequence!”

“Isn’t you shouting at her enough?!”

Nova bristled, turning her back on them. “I… I don’t know. I really have no idea.” She shook her head. “He was just a kid…”

“The Angel did this,” Pinkie said, suddenly.

“Doesn’t give the Watchmaker much of a case,” Jotaro commented.

Flutterfree nodded. “The more we learn… The more I don’t like this place.”

Pinkie nodded slowly.

There was silence in the hotel room.

Nova stood up suddenly. “I’m going for a walk,” she declared.

“Be back by tomorrow, we’ve got a mission,” Jotaro told her.

“I will,” Nova said, walking out of the room.

Flutterfree took in a breath. “Vriska, how about we get to sleep? That sound good?”

“Maybe,” Vriska muttered.

“Let’s take that as a yes. Everyone else?”

“Yeah,” Pinkie said with a yawn. “We need to sleep…”

~~~

Nova stood outside a small shed that had been erected behind the wreckage of the main tent. There was nobody else there.

She sighed – who was she kidding. There was no way she’d be here. It was just a horrid memory of the horrific thing…

“I didn’t think you were going to show up,” Icon said, trotting over from Nova’s left. “Especially considering what just happened. Are you sure you’re in the mood for fun?”

“A certain kind, maybe,” Nova said. “Or maybe someone to talk to that isn’t embedded in the mess? Or just… maybe I’m just on a walk.”

Icon sat down next to her. “I’m in the same boat, I guess. I don’t know what to do. Everyone just accepts it as part of the plan. I do too… But I swear it bothers me more than all the others.”

“Screw the ‘plan’. It’s complete BS.”

“Nova-!”

Nova snorted. “Don’t expect you to understand, you’re part of this world. I’m not. The worlds always have no plan, regardless of what Flutterfree and Rev say. It’s not stupid out there like it is here. It’s not right here.”

Icon looked into the starry sky. “Maybe you’re right… I don’t know.”

“Neither of us know.”

The two of them fell silent.

Nova took in a sharp breath. “Fun.”

“What?”

Nova sharply turned her head, planting her lips on Icon’s. Icon shook back in surprise.

Nova put on a mischievous grin. “Bet you were thinking you would be the one to make the first move in this little game.”

Icon smiled right back. “I like being surprised.”

“Good. I’m full of surprises.” She tackled Icon to the ground.

~~~

Jotaro dreamed.

The Seven Cities of Gold.

He saw them again, but this time there was no doorway. There was no sun – the sky was alight with stars instead. The clock of the sky seemed faded and distant somehow. Like it was losing hold on the world he was in.

“You seek well.”

“Show yourself,” Jotaro demanded.

There was no response aside from a sharp cold wind blowing through the sands of the desert.

The Seven Cities of Gold began to approach Jotaro from the distance, closing him in on all sides. He felt their presence. Their glory. Their inspiration.

“I will find you,” Jotaro said. “I will not stop until I have.”

“That is merely the first step…”

Jotaro woke up in a cold sweat. Had it not still been the middle of the night, he would have demanded they set out in the skiff immediately. He managed to calm himself down, and lay back onto his bed.

He was still awake when Nova came back. Her hair was a mess and she looked like she had been roughed up – but she had a contented smile on her face. She flopped onto her bed and let out a contented sigh.

Soon after, Jotaro returned to the realm of the sleeping.

~~~

Halo Effect

“All my illusions projected on her, the ideal that I wanted to see.”

The Anarchist came personally to see them off. “I hear you got a taste of the plan last night.”

They were loading up the skiff outside Chron’s walls, the craft hovering above the red sandy ocean.

Vriska didn’t look the Anarchist in the eyes. Pinkie, noting that Vriska wasn’t going to make a comment, spoke instead. “Yeah. At the moment we don’t like the plan.”

“No kidding,” Nova muttered – her mood had improved considerably from last night, though she was clearly still upset about the ordeal, which was to be expected. None of them were doing particularly well.

“The Angels will have it out for you,” the Anarchist said. “You need to be as quick as you can be.”

“At an absolute maximum speed, it will only take a little over a day to get there,” Jotaro said. “Speed is not an issue.”

Flutterfree nodded. “We’ll get there Mr. Anarchist, don’t you worry.”

“I’ll worry as much as I want. The Watchmaker’s plan is against you. That’s a powerful force to contend with.”

“We’re going to show him a greater plan,” Pinkie said. “Ours. I may deliver the message via pie to the face, haven’t decided yet.”

“A pie for the Watchmaker… I would love to see that,” the Anarchist admitted. “But I am old and not fit for such a journey. Good luck.”

“We’ll need it,” Nova said, glancing at the silent form of Vriska. Nova shook her head and sighed.

“We’re ready,” Jotaro said. “Let’s move. We need to make good time. Goodbye, Anarchist.”

Pinkie hopped into the skiff. “Yeah, goodbye!”

The Anarchist’s scowl softened slightly. “Goodbye, otherworlders. May you put this world in its rightful place.”

Jotaro put the throttle to maximum and the skiff darted across the sea of sand, spraying particulates behind it as it rushed. The wind whipped the hair of all in the skiff – though Jotaro’s hat remained on his head somehow.

Flutterfree allowed her smile to widen – they had been at the scene of yet another tragedy, yes, and had been a significant part of it. But now they were on their quest again, looking to the future…

They would fix this world’s problems, like they always did.

It was the part of her job Flutterfree loved the best.

They rode off into the sunrise, leaving Chron behind…

~~~

“Why the fuck are we in a Salvador Dali painting?” Vriska asked half-heartedly.

The skiff was currently racing across the world of Zhui at super high speeds accomplished through the use of Nova’s time acceleration spell. Things near to them were impossible to see with normal eyes because everything went by too fast – but the distant landscapes held their positions for the most part. Surrounding the adventurers was a scenery made of melting clocks draped over mountains and valleys. Even trees were caked in clocks on every surface. The timepieces all ticked in sync, providing a deafening TICK TOCK TICK TOCK every second precisely.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say the Watchmaker likes surreal landscapes,” Nova said. “Square pillars, land of snakes, red sand sea, and now melting clocks.”

“The Watchmaker isn’t the Creator though,” Flutterfree pointed out. “He’s just… a guide.”

“He could have been guiding this world for millennia for all we know,” Pinkie said. “Maybe he made the people who made those snakes! I’m going to ask him about that when we get to him.”

“We’re really racking up the questions, aren’t we?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yep!” Pinkie giggled. “Of course when we actually get there the chances of us asking them all are about none.”

“Such is the way of things…” Nova said, shaking her head. “How many places do we go through before we get to the desert?”

“Just this place and the Boneyard,” Pinkie said, looking at the map. “We won’t even get to see the majority of this bizarre world!”

“Unless we come back,” Flutterfree said. “The world might need our help after we’re done.”

“Probably,” Pinkie admitted. “They’ll need to learn how to throw their own parties!”

The three of them giggled. Jotaro remained fixated on the horizon while Vriska remained lost in her own thoughts.

“…I’m worried about Vriska,” Flutterfree told Pinkie.

“That’s good – but you don’t need to be,” Pinkie said. “She’ll be fine. I know it.”

“You do?”

“Yep!” Pinkie said with a grin. “I definite-”

“INCOMING!” Jotaro yelled suddenly, turning the skiff sharply to the left, barely avoiding a magic bolt coming from above them.

Vriska shook herself out of her daze, looking upward. “Airship!? Where’d an airship come from!?”

“Teleport? I don’t know!” Nova blurted, raising a shield to block another bombardment from the skull-and-crossbones airship.

“Pirates!” Pinkie blurted. “Flutterfree, can you drive the skiff?”

“Not well enough to dodge!”

“I’ll defend,” Nova said. “Who am I teleporting up there?”

“Me, Jotaro, and Vriska,” Pinkie said.

Nova teleported the three of them above the airship. Pinkie pulled a trampoline out of her mane and threw it into the top of the flying craft, giving the three of them a cushion to soften their landing. One after another, all three sprung off the bouncy toy and landed in a battle stance.

A pegasus pirate flew at them from the left, but Pinkie threw a squeaky hammer in his face, knocking him away with ease. “Let’s take her down, guys!” Pinkie said, pulling out her icepick. She swung it down, puncturing a hole in the skin of the balloon, the resulting leak blowing her cheeks and lips back. She giggled at the silliness.

Star Platinum began to punch holes all around Jotaro while Vriska opted just to stab her sword into the skin and run across the ship, creating a huge gash.

The pirate airship began to descend.

“HEY!” An alicorn with crystals instead of eyes blurted, having teleported herself and a small number of her crew with her. “STOP THAT!”

“Make us,” Vriska grunted.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said.

An Angel appeared next to the alicorn before she could move. “Consider your actions, Lens. They far outclass you, in order to get what is theirs, invest in a new strategy. Perha-”

“ORA!”

The next thing anyone knew the Angel didn’t have a head anymore – it had been punched clean off by Star Platinum. The rest of the body had been punched in the middle of a time stop, the clockwork mechanisms crumbling under the strain.

The crew of pirates stared at the remains of the Angel, mouths agape.

“What?” Jotaro asked. “He might have told you how to win. Couldn’t take that chance.”

The alicorn named Lens shook her head. “Truly despicable.”

“Hey, you’re pirates,” Pinkie pointed out. “And not the fun kind either. You don’t even deserve to be considered swashbuckling!”

“At least we know our place in the world and aren’t… demonic like you.”

“Funny,” Vriska muttered, a sword to the alicorn’s throat. “I happen to think I’m pretty demonic right now. So I wonder if I’ll just cut your head off without thinking about it…”

“Vriska, calm down!” Pinkie blurted. “Don’t kill them!”

Vriska drew back. “Fine.” She produced her dice instead. “You all should probably run.”

“We’ll do no such thing! You have assaulted our sh-”

“ORA!” The invisible fist sent Lens off the body of the airship.

“Yare yare daze… Hypocrisy,” Jotaro muttered.

Vriska rolled her dice. A large bomb, its surface plastered with emoji stickers, appeared out of the aether and fell through the large gash she had made but a few moments prior.

“Jotaro, evacuation.”

Jotaro nodded, stopping time. He grabbed Vriska and Pinkie and jumped off the airship. When time resumed, Vriska’s bomb went off and tore the balloon section of the airship in two. It fell to the ground slowly, smoking the entire time.

Pinkie pulled out a giant cake for them to land in. It was sticky and messy, but at least it wasn’t as hard as a clock face. Pinkie poked her head out of the frosting and licked it off her face. She pulled out a round red button and pressed it.

“That was easy.”

Jotaro nodded. “They chose the wrong ship to pirate.”

Lens appeared in front of them with a teleport, screaming bloody murder. Star Platinum decked her in the face, knocking her to the ground. “Stay down or the next one will break your jaw and cause some brain damage.”

“I… Swear on my ship…”

“That no longer exists.”

Lens ground her teeth. “I will get my revenge on you…”

“Good luck with that,” Jotaro said. At that moment, Nova grabbed them with a teleport, taking them back to the skiff.

“Mission success!” Pinkie cheered. “We blew up a ship! One fatality.”

Flutterfree sighed. “Did they deserve it?”

“‘They’ were a Clockwork Angel,” Jotaro said. “I expected him to be more durable than he was.”

“Oh. He was fighting?”

“He was telling them how to win. Had to shut him up.” Jotaro peeled her off the controls, placing himself back at the helm.

“All right. The others?”

“If they’re smart they won’t go down with the ship,” Pinkie said. “Only damaged the balloon.”

“Good,” Flutterfree said.

“They did swear revenge on us though,” Pinkie added. “They’ll be back, so we’ll need guards tonight.”

“They will be back?” Nova asked.

“Yep. Whenever is sufficient for drama.” Pinkie shrugged. “Could be tonight, could be when we arrive at the Seven Cities of Gold, or it could be several years from now as a surprising villain we completely forgot about. Just gotta be on guard.”

“Fun,” Flutterfree commented.

“Yeah… fun,” Vriska deadpanned, returning to her inactive, silent state.

“Hey, Vrisk-” Flutterfree began.

“Let’s wait for the mission to be over,” Vriska said. “I want to be able to see this as a whole before we go into the ‘feelings jam’. And frankly I’d rather talk to Starbeat.”

“I understand.”

“Thanks.”

They continued along the land of eternal ticking.

~~~

Nothing else happened of note until that night. They had crossed the entire land of clocks by the time the sun set, so they didn’t have to worry about sleeping with eternal ticking throbbing at their minds; all they had to worry about was all the bones everywhere.

For the Boneyard was made of nothing but bones.

They managed, somehow, to find a pelvis the size of a house that was flat enough to lie on. Nova had spent some time conjuring simple bedrolls and Pinkie had made dinner. They had eaten – and had agreed to take turns on watch.

Nova went second, after Flutterfree.

She always hated it when they needed to have a watch. In order to ensure everyone got a good amount of sleep, the person on watch was always alone for the majority of the time. It, put simply, sucked and was really boring ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent was when a disaster hit, and that was never good. Just more exciting.

Nova was beginning to feel the ‘nod off’ effect pulling down on her head. She cast a spell to force herself awake – normally a bad idea, but since she could use the sleep spell on herself later and she wasn’t going to be awake very long, it worked. Of course, now that she was wide awake, she could think clearly.

After a small amount of thought devoted to wondering what she should do about Vriska – probably apologize at some point – and a similar amount of time spent pondering the Watchmaker – she really wasn’t sure what to make of him – her thoughts turned to Icon.

Icon…

That had been a great night.

They’d only known each other for… Less than a day, really. That seemed crazy, and yet oddly perfect to Nova. Here she was, the mare of time, struck with something happening too fast. Poetic, in a way. She tried to tell herself to be reasonable, that there was no way the feelings she had were as mature as they wanted her to believe, but the heart has an annoying habit of not listening to a thing the brain tells it.

Nova, with a dumb smile on her face, began to fantasize about the future. After they’d taken care of the Watchmaker, she would return to Chron and sweep Icon off her hooves and take her home. Icon would become the voice of Zhui to Merodi Universalis, and her world would eventually be incorporated into everything. They’d spend so much time together…

Nova chuckled to herself. “Nova, you’re going crazy.” She couldn’t convince herself this was a bad thing no matter what angle she came at it from.

There was a flash of light behind a large rib bone. Nova, ever resilient even in her emotional swirl, stood up, ready for a fight. She teleported herself behind the rib bone, legs poised in a battle stance.

She saw the form of Icon standing graceful on top of a skull that belonged to a whale.

“Icon…? How did you…?”

Icon giggled playfully. “Come and get me and I’ll tell you.”

Nova smirked. “It. Is. On.“

Icon did a triple backflip onto the top of a nearby bone. Nova opted not to just teleport to her and end it there, instead rushing toward her with self-levitation. Icon performed an exaggerated bow and leaped off the bone, into a sea of smaller ribs. As she ran with increasingly complex movements and actions, her body increasingly mesmerized Nova.

Despite this, Nova was definitely faster. It took some time, but she did eventually tackle Icon into the interior of a giant’s skull. “Gotcha,” she said with a peck on Icon’s cheek.

“I yield! I yield!” Icon chuckled, holding Nova’s head in her hooves.

“Now, tell me how you got here, hmm?”

“Yeah. I… I got lonely,” Icon admitted. “It just so happens that one of our performers is the ‘unicorn who can teleport anyone anywhere’, and he was able to find your magic signature without too much difficulty. That Pink friend of yours has quite the unique signature, apparently. So he sent me here.”

“You don’t have a way back do you?”

“Nope~!”

“Well then you’ll just have to travel with us. Fair warning, we’re basically declaring war on the Watchmaker. Or at least seeing if we’re declaring war on the Watchmaker.”

“I don’t care!” Icon declared. “I’m just here with you now… we can do whatever we want.”

“What a great idea,” Nova said mischievously.

~~~

Jotaro was in between the Seven Cities of Gold. He had no idea what time of day it was this time. It was as if the sky was in a state of nonexistence… Whatever that meant. His mind apparently decided that meant solid deep blue.

“Funny,” he muttered.

“Is it?” Pinkie asked.

“Are you actually in this dream or just a figment of my imagination?” Jotaro asked.

“Eh, that’s the thing. Depictions of us Aware individuals tend to break outside what we’re supposed to be. I’m not the Pinkie you know, that’s for sure. I’m probably not even a Pinkie at all. But I’m also more than just your thoughts.”

“Huh,” Jotaro said, hands in his pockets. “Got anything to tell me about this dream?”

“I’d tell you to ignore it, but that’s impossible,” Pinkie said.

“Why?”

“Seven Cities of Gold, that’s why.”

“What do y-” then he saw Vriska, Flutterfree, and Nova in front of him.

“We need to turn back,” Nova said.

“Can’t do this anymore,” Vriska added.

“It’s not worth it,” Flutterfree finished.

Jotaro clenched his fist. “No. We must finish what we started!”

“Must we?” Flutterfree asked.

“It could just be a sunken cost fallacy…” Vriska considered.

“Or cost too much,” Nova appended.

Jotaro shook his head. “We continue on.” Why am I arguing with dreams?

“Because of the connection to you,” Pinkie said. “Even if they are just dreams… They’re attacking something you hold dear. A quest you’ve given to yourself.”

Jotaro nodded, pulling down on his hat. “…Even then, I should just ignore them.”

“Ignore us?” Vriska said, cocking her head. “That’s a mistake.” She lifted a hand, destroying one of the Seven Cities of Gold with the motion.

“NO!” Jotaro shouted. “DON’T!”

“I’ll keep doing it over and over, Jotaro. Over and oooo-oo-oo-”

“TWITCHA TWITCH!” Pinkie shouted. “TWITCHA TWITCH!”

Jotaro turned to her. “Nani!?”

“That’s not me,” Dream-Pinkie said. “Looks like you’re about to have a bad night.”

“…Yare yare daze…” Jotaro shook his head.

He woke up with a sword coming down on his face. Star Platinum caught it easily, snapping it in half. In an instant and an “ORA!” the pirate pegasus had a broken jaw and a concussion.

“TWITCHA-” Pinkie yelled, bringing her hammer down on Lens. “TWITCH!”

“WHERE’S NOVA!?” Jotaro blurted, punching three human pirates in the gut, forcing them to lose their lunch – or dinners, as the case probably was.

Pinkie bit her lip. “Nooot important right now! She’s fine though!”

“Did she skimp out on guard duty!?” Vriska blurted, slicing a man’s arm to the bone. “Seriously?”

“I’m sure there’s a very reasona-”

Lens fired a disintegration beam at Flutterfree, boring a hole through her stomach, the force also dislocating her wing. She tried to scream but nothing came out.

“FLUTTERFREE!” Pinkie shouted. She dropped the toys – she took out a pair of pistols and shot the pirates who were still standing in the legs. She was not a perfect shot – a few bullets went into significantly more vital areas they would not recover from.

Good, Pinkie thought. This makes the next step a lot less questionable.

Jotaro used a time stop to take care of the stragglers while Pinkie chose a dead target – a stray bullet had gone right through his heart – and dragged the corpse to Flutterfree. Flutterfree wasn’t dead, but she would be soon without treatment.

“And today, Doctor Pinkie prescribes a gallon of blood.” She placed the body under Flutterfree’s muzzle. Instinctually, the quasi-vampire bit down and drained the body of the blood it had, rejuvenating herself. Her stomach rebuilt itself with the sudden excess of energy, but the dislocated wing remained the way it was.

Flutterfree opened her eyes. “P-Pinkie?”

“Shhhhh… he was already dead. You don’t have to worry about that.”

Flutterfree stood up, shakily, and wiped her face. “Okay… Okay… My wing’s still – AUGH!”

Pinkie had popped the wing back into its socket. “Better?”

“Holy Celestia Pinkie that was… Oooooh…” She flexed the wing, wincing. “I don’t think it’s quite right…”

“We’ll bandage it up and let you rest it, okay?”

“Right. I’ll try not to move it until then.”

Jotaro chose that moment to drop Lens next to them. “How’s that revenge plan going?”

Lens coughed up blood. “YOU MONSTERS!”

“This was literally just self defense,” Flutterfree said. “I’m sorry… But you kept attacking us.”

“I… Gh… But that’s what I’m supposed to do!”

“Just because it’s part of the plan doesn’t mean it’s good,” Pinkie pointed out. “Now please take what’s left of your people and don’t bother us again, mmk?”

Lens brought her head low. “…My crew will never bother you again.”

“Thank you,” Pinkie said, patting Lens on the back.

“I… I know this means nothing, but I’m sorry for your losses,” Flutterfree said.

Lens shook her head, clearly unsure of what to think anymore. “Come on everyone… Let’s… Let’s just go.”

The ‘revenge’ of the pirates came to an end. Pinkie tore off some of Vriska’s orange god-tier garb and made it into a loose ‘bandage’ to keep Flutterfree’s sore wing from moving. “Is it broken?” Pinkie asked.

“I don’t think so… Just badly sprained,” Flutterfree said. “I mean, it was dislocated. That doesn’t always just pop back in without incident.”

“Yeah…”

“Pinkie?”

“Hm?”

Flutterfree looked her Captain right in the eye. “Take us to Nova.”

Pinkie sighed. “Yeah… This way.”

~~~

“That horn of yours really is something,” Icon said, stroking the protrusion in question

“Master magician, at your service.”

Icon chuckled. “You really are talented, aren’t you? Had you been from here, you would have made a great addition to my act.”

“Who’s to say your act can’t continue? Think of it. Interdimensional performer Icon, revered on multiple worlds for her amazing abilities and physique.”

“And you won’t be jealous about the whole physique thing?”

“Hrm… Let’s see… Probably, but it’d be kinda unfair if I made you change how you performed, so… Well isn’t that a fun quandary.” She chuckled. “Ah well, something to talk about later.” She kissed Icon. “Probably should head back – it’s supposed to be my watch after all.”

“Bit late for that,” Flutterfree said.

Nova blinked. Flutterfree never spoke with that much spite in her voice… Not to her anyway.

Star Platinum grabbed Nova by the neck and tore her off of Icon. Nova was soon snout to nose with Jotaro. “This is what you left watch for?”

“Uh…” Nova gulped. “Hey big guy, uh… This is Icon, and she’s absolutely th-”

“Shut the hell up, your pre-planned speech means shit.”

“Why th-” Then Nova saw Flutterfree. The blood on her face, around her stomach, and the orange wraps around her wing. Above all, she saw the pain in Flutterfree’s eyes. “Oh no.”

“Yeah. Oh no,” Flutterfree spat. “We were attacked, Nova. Pinkie’s Pinkie Sense is the only thing that gave us any chance to do anything. I had to eat somebody! I NEVER WANTED TO DO THAT AGAIN!”

“I… I’m sorry.”

“I know. And I forgive you. I’m still pissed.”

Nova gasped.

“That’s not going to change anytime soon.”

Nova sagged. “I… Yeah. Just… Just don’t take this out on Icon. She had no idea – she just wanted to be with me.”

Jotaro pulled back a fist to punch Nova, but Pinkie stopped him. “Mmmno, not doing that.”

Jotaro lowered his fist in shame.

“T-thanks, Pinkie,” Nova said.

“You’re not going to be thanking me in a moment,” Pinkie muttered. She whipped around and slapped Nova across the face. “WHAT THE HAY, NOVA!?”

“I… I…”

“I saw everything that happened, and you know it,” Pinkie growled. “I was even in your thoughts for a little while there. Cute, a bit extreme, but definitely cute. Then she shows up and you chase her. That’s fine. But then you don’t go back to us and you… And you…” Pinkie’s face flushed red from a mixture of many strong emotions. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

Nova was crying. “P-Pinkie, I’m sorry, I was caught up in the moment, I… She’s just… Don’t be angry at her.”

“That’s going to be pretty difficult,” Flutterfree said.

“No! Be mad at me, I did all of this! I should have known, I should have rushed back, I should have… I…”

“Would you stop it!?” Pinkie blurted. “You’re acting like you’re under some kind of Beat curse!”

“You take that back,” Nova said, glaring. “What I feel for Icon is very real and there’s no denying it! We love each other!”

Icon stood next to her, nodding vigorously.

Pinkie’s pupils dilated. “No… Nonono… Oh Nova… I’m… I’m so sorry.”

Nova blinked. “…What?”

Pinkie’s anger was gone, replaced with tears. “Flutterfree? Use… Use Lolo at full power on Nova’s screen and affix it to Icon. And…” Pinkie sat down. “I’m so sorry, Nova.”

“W-what?” Nova blurted. She suddenly felt the need to avoid Lolo – at full power she could see the tendrils. “No! Flutterfree, back away! I… I-” She lit her horn, prepared to teleport away. Star Platinum slapped her, interrupting the spell.

This gave Flutterfree enough time to tie Icon to Nova’s screen. Suddenly, readings related to Icon became significantly clearer despite the shroud in the entire universe.

Abnormally high levels of ka comparable with the Beat curse.

“N-no… No. NO!” Nova shrieked, pushing Icon away from her. “NO! THAT CAN’T BE IT! IT FEELS SO REAL! IT…”

Pinkie pulled her into a hug. “Look at me, Nova… Ask yourself this. Have you been yourself? You’ve been nervous. You’ve lost your sense of loyalty and importance. You’ve been taken in so quickly.”

“This… This has to be real…”

“It’s not,” Pinkie said. “I… I’m sorry I yelled at you for it. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“What’s wrong with the multiverse!?” Nova screamed. “What… I…” She shook her head.

“Nova…?” Icon asked, walking toward her. “What are you talking about?”

“GET AWAY FROM ME!” Nova shouted, taking several steps back, lighting her horn in defense. “Stay… STAY AWAY!”

“Nova…”

Flutterfree sighed, shaking her head. “Icon… We’ve detected a form of curse placed on you two. It’s a power that forces two ponies to come together romantically through contrived means and emotions that go against who they really are and what they really want.”

“W-what?”

“Something that wasn’t in you forced you to love Nova. And the same way around. I bet you’ve had many lovers in your career – did you ever teleport miles and miles just to be with them?”

“I… …no.”

“Exactly. This?” she gestured at the two of them. “It isn’t real. Normally we’d know this ahead of time, but… our scanners were off. And Pinkie…”

“I wanted Nova to be happy,” Pinkie said. “I should have seen it sooner. I knew you two were going to be a problem for us, but I fully expected to eventually adapt you into the fold after a bunch of interpersonal drama. Not… this.”

“Wh… what now?” Icon asked.

“You go back,” Nova said. “And we forget about each other.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“I know. But us is also not going to happen,” Nova took in a deep breath. “I’m sending you away, Icon.”

“Nova, wait! Maybe we can sti-”

“No, Icon. Go back to your life.” Nova shook her head. “Find someone who actually matters.”

“Nova… I lo-”

“No you don’t,” Nova said. “And I don’t either. We just need to realize that.”

“Nova!”

Nova performed the long-range teleport, placing Icon back in Zinc Square. Then she broke down crying.

Jotaro gently lifted her up with Star Platinum and carried her back to the skiff. There would be no more sleeping tonight, so he started the engine and continued the journey.

~~~

Seven Cities of Gold

“A man could lose his way in a country like this.”

When the sun rose, they were still in the Boneyard.

Flutterfree turned to Pinkie. “I… I’m worried about Nova. I apologized for everything I said but…” She looked at the unicorn. “Her heart’s more than broken. She’s existential.”

“She’ll be fine, eventually,” Pinkie told her. “I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah, I know,” Flutterfree said. “All of us will be. You keep saying that.”

“Yep!” Pinkie said with a smile. “It’s what let’s me keep going. I know everyone’s going to get over this. So I can keep smiling and keep the team together.”

“…Right,” Flutterfree said, shaking her head. “…Vriska’s still not doing great.”

“I’m doing fine, fuck you,” Vriska muttered.

Flutterfree ignored the side comment. “And Jotaro…” Flutterfree looked at him. “I’m not sure what’s going on with him.”

“He’s being haunted by dreams,” Pinkie said. “We’ll know what the deal is the moment we find the Seven Cities of Gold or the Watchmaker or whatever.” Pinkie put a hoof on Flutterfree’s shoulder – the one without the broken wing. “Flutterfree, this is a longer journey than usual. There’s going to be more hardship. But we always have to keep in mind that the power of friendship will prevail. Giggle at the ghostie, laugh in the face of hardship. We will get through this. I know that. And you can rest easy knowing that I know that.”

“…Sure,” Flutterfree said. “I’ll try.”

“Good,” Pinkie said, turning to look at the sun and the light it spread over the landscape of bones. “This world, weird as it is, is beautiful.”

“The red color is ominous, yet fitting,” Flutterfree admitted. “I wonder how impossible the desert of ice and fire is going to be?”

“Well, let’s see… There’ll be ice, there’ll be fire, and there’ll be what we’re looking for. That’s a lot of strange stuff in one place!” Pinkie chuckled.

“I hope we find what we’re looking for,” Flutterfree said. “This world… I can see it has great potential, but it also needs help.”

“That’s why we’re here, Flutterfree. That’s why we’re here.”

~~~

The desert of ice and fire was literally named, but not precisely in the way one might expect. It was a perfectly flat plane of sand, somehow not forming dunes despite the constant wind. It, as demanded by the sun, was always a reddish color. Had this been the end of it, it would have been a place of biting heat filled with bones of the dehydrated fallen, but it was significantly worse than that. Every square inch of the desert was either on fire or covered in extremely sharp shards of ice.

And which parts were which changed every second, just adding to the danger.

Jotaro had the skiff moving at full throttle through the frost and the fire, their primary source of protection coming from a magical shield from Nova. Their secondary protection was Pinkie’s hammer, bashing through pieces of ice forming in front of them.

“J-jotaro,” Nova managed. “I- I’m not doing well here…”

“Keep it up,” Jotaro said. “This is the last leg of our journey. We can’t turn back now!”

“R-right,” Nova said, wiping her face. “Focus Nova…”

Pinkie looked back at Nova with concern. “Are you okay?”

“No, definitely not, but that’s no excuse for not doing my job,” Nova muttered. She stopped talking, closing her eyes and focusing all her power into the shield. Beads of sweat began to mix with her tears.

“I think we need to turn back,” Flutterfree said. “We’re not that far in – let’s get that rest we didn’t get last night.”

“No. We’re close,” Jotaro said. “I can feel it.”

“Pinkie?” Flutterfree asked.

“Can’t tell you, cause I dunno,” Pinkie admitted. “Jotaro’s the one with the weird dreams.”

They hit a pillar of ice that appeared beneath them, tossing the skiff upward. Nova yelled in pain as she struggled to maintain the shield.

“We’re taxing her too much!” Flutterfree said. “Jotaro!”

“JUST A LITTLE FURTHER!” Jotaro demanded. “We are so close! I can feel it! I… I can see the Seven Cities of Gold!”

“What?” Flutterfree said, putting her functional wing over her eyes. “Where?”

Jotaro pointed straight ahead. “There! On the horizon! The golden domes!”

“I don’t see anything!”

Pinkie’s face paled. “Aaaaagh Jotaro’s under an influence of some kind too!”

“I AM NOT!” Jotaro shouted, punching Pinkie in the face with Star Platinum, pushing her into the back of the skiff.

Flutterfree shrieked. “Jotaro! What are you do-“

Without Pinkie helping anymore, another shard of ice hit the shield. This time the force was enough to make Nova lose consciousness.

Jotaro didn’t turn back. He would have started going faster if he could. The skiff caught fire in multiple locations while entire chunks were ripped asunder by the sudden appearance of ice – no amount of expert steering from Star Platinum could stop this.

“What the hell!?” Vriska shouted, taking out her dice. “Jotaro, don’t make me do this!”

Flutterfree drew the bow of light, aiming right for Jotaro’s stomach. “Jotaro…”

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

Vriska and Flutterfree had already fired their weapons, but they didn’t reach him. Jotaro picked them up and used Star Platinum to hold their two heads down. He turned back to the wheel – Star Platinum could keep them busy. He just had to steer on his own.

He was certain he could do it, even though the skiff was coming apart at the seams.

The Seven Cities of Gold were so close now… Just a little longer, and he would be through this horrible world of ice and fire. He would complete his quest. He would find his goal. He would have never given up! He wouldn’t let them take this from him! He…

He felt his hand slip off the wheel.

“NANI!?”

“All I have to do is look at you, big guy,” Vriska said. “And you don’t have to be very unlucky to fail miserably here.”

He ordered Star Platinum to flatten her face into the ground, but the order had barely left his thoughts when a spire of ice pierced the skiff’s engine. It exploded, sending everyone flying.

Jotaro saw the Seven Cities of Gold in his eyes, sparkling. So close he could touch them… As he sailed through the air, he reached out with Star Platinum…

…And found nothing.

Nothing at all.

Nothing…

He looked down at the ice and fire below him. He was going to die when he hit the ground. And he had injured his teammates, the ones who could have saved them.

His single-mindedness had been the death of them all.

He refused to close his eyes. He would face his death like a Joestar – struggling to the last minute. He prepared to use Star Platinum in a last-ditch effort to dig a hole in the sand for everyone. A big enough series of punches… A time stop would have been helpful, but he already used that…

“Dammit,” he muttered.

And then Nova woke up. In an instant, she was able to teleport them several hundred yards higher into the air.

“WHAT GOOD IS THIS GOING TO DO?!” Vriska shouted.

“I… I need power to perform a long-range teleport!” Nova shouted. “Any ideas!?”

Vriska took out a single one of her dice. “You better re-enchant this later.”

“Got it!” Nova said, draining the magical eight-sided polyhedron of all its power, giving her enough magic to perform the spell she needed. She lit her horn, performed a quick calculation, and teleported them out of the desert.

Something went wrong with the spell – all five of them teleported, yes, but by the time they arrived at the edge of the desert of ice and fire, it was night.

All five of them faceplanted in the decidedly not on fire or frozen sands at the edge of the desert.

“Ow…” Flutterfree muttered, wincing at the pain running through her wing.

“Everyone okay…?” Nova called, her voice sounding hollow.

“…Yeah…” Pinkie muttered.

“Here,” Vriska called, holding her head.

Jotaro rammed his fist into the ground. “DAMMIT!” Tears from stress dropped from his face. “DAMMIT!” He pulled back his fist and put as much power into it as he could, punching the ground with Star Platinum’s help. “ORA!!!!”

Pinkie walked up to him. “Hey, hey, Jotar-”

“Don’t you dare say it wasn’t my fault,” Jotaro said. “Don’t. You. Dare.”

Pinkie shut right up.

Jotaro sat down, back to them. None of the other four knew what to say – if anything could be said to the giant of a man.

The giant of a man who had just failed in more ways than one.

~~~

The Wreckers

“All I know is that memory can be too much to carry.”

The only sound was the crackling of a campfire.

The five of them sat equidistant around the light, using it as their only source of warmth. There wasn’t a smile on any of their faces. They hardly even blinked or moved at all. Flutterfree had her head down in prayer.

Eventually, Pinkie sighed. “All right… this sucks.”

Vriska snorted. “No, really?”

Pinkie allowed herself to smile softly. “Yeah, it really really sucks. Superduperamazinglameopoosuck! The worst of sucks. Or at least pretty close to it.”

“It is pretty bad,” Flutterfree said.

“But you know what?” Pinkie asked.

“What?” Vriska asked, looking bored with this whole thing.

“We’re still together,” Pinkie asserted. “Despite all the mistakes, all the pain, and all the suffering we’ve endured for the past few days – we’re still together. And we will work through this. We are a team.”

“Yeah, of course we are,” Vriska muttered. “And we all know that you’re the one who knows everything little miss Supreme Leader. How we must revere you.”

Pinkie was visibly hurt by this. “…Vriska, you know what I mean. Despite what you three have done, we’re still going t-”

“Hold up,” Nova said. “You’re lumping the three of us together? Pinkie! Vriska wasn’t under some outside influence!”

“We don’t know that,” Vriska retorted. “For all I know I was being manipulated as well. And you can’t let Jotaro off the hook either, we can’t be sure about what happened to him!”

“The two of us were acting completely out of character!” Nova blurted. “You? What you did was totally you!”

“Was it really that much of an exaggeration!?” Vriska blurted. “You, getting fixated on a mare and forgetting everything else. You too, big guy. Taking yourself too seriously and getting far too fucking into what you’re doing. You two aren’t fucking innocent!”

“At least you can just move on!” Nova shouted. “I still think about her just the way I did before! Exactly the same way!”

“Girls…” Flutterfree said, holding up her good wing.

“That’s just your weakness, bitch,” Vriska pointed at Nova. “Just overwrite your mind or something. You can do that, right?”

“I’m not going to!”

“Why not? You make yourself go to sleep all the time!”

“That’s different!”

“How exactly is it!?”

“GIRLS!” Flutterfree shouted.

They purposefully ignored her. Nova lit her horn. “Listen to me, Vriska. I have problems. I’m a bit controlling, a bit too angry, but at least I know that I’m not the best pony in existence. At least I listen!”

“And are a traitor!”

“Better than mutiny!”

“The Supreme Leader is not going to be right all the fucking time!”

“Who the hell cares!?”

Pinkie hit a gong. “STOP IT! This is not us! We are not friends who are at each other’s throats! We stand together, strong, and we hold each other up! We do no-”

“Fuck. You,” Vriska said, poking Pinkie’s nose. “You don’t get to tell me what I am.”

“I-”

Vriska had already turned to Flutterfree. “Fuck you too, meddler. Oh! Hey, big guy! FUCK YOU. Maybe use that PhD brain of yours for once, hrm?”

Vriska turned to Nova. “And fuck you in particular. Hope you fucking enjoyed yourself, traitor.”

Nova growled. “Fuck you.”

Vriska laughed. “OH BOY! THERE IT IS! It finally came out of her mouth!” She dropped the faux grin and glared. “With that victory I take my leave of you fucking losers.”

“Vrisk-” Pinkie began.

Vriska roundhouse kicked Pinkie in the face, sending her back. “I said I’m done here.” She changed into her god-tier outfit, flapped her wings, and flew away at top speed.

“Celestia…” Flutterfree shook her head, checking on Pinkie. “You okay?”

“…Physically.”

“Okay… I’m going after her.”

“Flutterfree, you’re injur-”

“It’s sprained, not broken,” Flutterfree said, removing the wrap. “I can push through it. This is important.” She spread her wings, winced, but managed to take off after Vriska.

Pinkie sighed. “Well… Great. Don’t worry guys! Everything wi-”

“Pinkie, stop,” Nova said, tears in her eyes. “Just stop.”

“Bu-”

“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THAT EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OKAY RIGHT NOW!” she screamed. “IT MAKES THINGS WORSE, PINKIE! IT MAKES THINGS WORSE!”

“I…”

“All I hear is ‘it’s going to be better’ and ‘it’s going to be fine’ and all it does is make me feel horrible for not getting over this! For… For…” Tears dripped down her face. “I can’t get her out of my head, Pinkie! I can’t! I’m actually considering wiping my own head just so I can be better for you all sooner! But it’s… No! I can’t!”

Pinkie reached a hoof out to her. “Nova…”

“DON’T TOUCH ME!” Nova shrieked. “Why can’t you just let me wallow in my broken heart in peace!?”

“N-”

“AUGH!” Nova screamed, teleporting somewhere random.

Pinkie sighed, sitting down, staring at the fire. “…Jotaro, am I really that wrong?”

Jotaro said nothing.

“I mean, I know things are going to be fine… But is it wrong to say that? Is hope not always what people need? I… I don’t know. Hope always seems good, right? But Nova… She doesn’t have hope. She just has despondence. Vriska just has anger. It’s all a horrible, horrible mess. I try to be forward now with everything I know, so people can have the same security I do about things. I always thought ‘if only they knew’ they’d be able to go through life more carefree… with more certainty.”

She took a breath. “Should I start hiding things again? Should I just lie and remove this smile that comes from knowing the result? …Do I even really know the result? I know we, as friends, will be fine, but I don’t know how we get there. Maybe the journey is the most important part, and I’m just skipping over it. I don’t rea-”

“SHUT THE HELL UP YOU DUMB BITCH!”

Pinkie stared at Jotaro, unable to speak.

And then she was just gone. She didn’t even bother to jump behind an object to vanish – she was just there one moment and gone the next.

A minute later, Jotaro stood up, hand to his face. He shook his head, disappointed in his own response. He turned around, put his hands in his pockets, and walked in a random direction.

Then fire burned alone in the night, warming nobody.

It was a truly pointless fire, its reason for existence removed. Pathetic. Useless.

But it was still bright.

~~~

Dammit, Vriska thought. I’m crying.

The cobalt-tinged tears dropped to the sands below. She couldn’t ignore them.

I need to get out of here. Find enough luck to slip away and never return.

What about Aradia?

Fuck Aradia and her connection to specific worlds. You’re never supposed to stay in one place too long.

But what about home?

Home…

She found herself thinking of home. Of her friends… They hadn’t seen her for centuries. Some of them would have aged, regardless of any of the time shenanigans. The others… would they even be recognizable as who they had been? She’d certainly changed. And she was stubborn as all hell. They probably had huge families by now…

Why did she care about that? Trolls didn’t get families. …But she’d seen them. Almost every other race had them. Why was she thinking about this now of all times? Where did these feelings come from? Just…

She grabbed her head and stopped flying, opting just to hover. She hit herself in the head. “Get a hold of yourself, Vriska. Just… just keep flying. You’ll find people eventually. And then you can get out of here.”

You don’t want to get out of here.

“Shut up,” she told herself.

You’re just running from your problems.

“I don’t need to listen to you.”

That’s your problem.

Vriska shook her head. She’d gone hundreds of years relying on herself, she wasn’t about to change now.

She saw Flutterfree pull up alongside her, wincing with the strain on her wing. The pegasus didn’t say anything.

“Fuck off,” Vriska muttered.

Flutterfree didn’t respond, she instead kept flying alongside Vriska, fixing her with a concerned gaze.

“Would you stop it with that?”

Flutterfree didn’t stop looking at her.

Vriska tried to ignore the concerned, deep gaze of Flutterfree. She failed miserably. Vriska twitched. “What’s with you?”

Flutterfree gave no response.

“I asked a question!” Vriska said, coming to a halt. “Why are you so gogdammed perfect?”

Flutterfree seemed slightly confused by this.

“Every last one of us has messed up – except you. You, who’s so understanding, so empathetic, so kind, so intelligent, so steadfast, and so fucking perfect. What’s with you!?”

Flutterfree finally spoke. “Vriska… I’m not perfect.”

“Oh, right, I forgot about your flaw: caring too much and not willing to take the difficult steps. OH WAIT! You’ve mostly fixed that! I’ve seen the stuff you can do with that bow and those teeth of yours when you feel you need to!”

“Vriska…”

“Tell me your flaw, Flutterfree. Come on. I want to see where you struggle, cause I’m not seeing it.”

Flutterfree shook her head. “I’m indecisive, I’m inwardly judgmental, I’m dogmatic, I’m controllin-”

Vriska punched her. “What I hear are just nitpicks Flutterfree! Just nitpicks! I don’t see any flaw in there that’s going to result in your downfall. ALL OF THOSE I’VE SEEN YOU MITIGATE!”

Flutterfree wiped her blood from her nose. “Vriska, I struggle all day every day with the things we’ve done. I question every action I’ve taken.”

“And that’s where your fucking religion comes in,” Vriska growled. “Oh hey, I don’t have to let those things get me down, because I’m forgiven! Ah, isn’t grace great!? I don’t know if I’ve done good, but man isn’t it great that God will forgive everything for me? Isn’t it nice?”

“Vriska…”

“Why don’t you go pray right now that you are given the strength to get through to me? Oh wait, I bet you are! In the back of your head you’re sending off little thoughts!” She touched Flutterfree’s mind. “Oh look at that I’m fucking right. ‘Lord, please help me calm Vriska down. Lord, help me keep my anger under control. Lord, Lord. Lord. BLAH BLA-”

Flutterfree punched Vriska.

“There it is…” Vriska said, satisfied.

“It’s what you wanted,” Flutterfree said, expression clouded.

Vriska’s grin vanished. “Even that… Even that was part of your stupid perfect self!”

“I AM NOT PERFECT!”

“WELL YOU’RE DOING A HELL OF A LOT BETTER THAN THE REST OF US!” Vriska said, lashing out with her sword.

Flutterfree dodged, drawing her Bow of Light. She wrapped Lolo around Vriska’s arms, the weak vines providing just enough strain to keep her still for a second. The arrow pierced Vriska’s side, forcing cobalt blood to pour from the wound.

“AUGH! FUCK!”

Flutterfree Stared at her, face that of intense rage. “You want to know what my flaw is, Vriska? Every single day, day in and day out, I have to keep this under control. My anger. It’s been with me my entire life. A deep, burning inner fire that wants to make everyone pay for what they’ve done to me. I know it’s wrong. It’s always wrong. But sometimes I just can’t keep it back anymore!” She twisted in the air, kicking Vriska right between the horns. Vriska tumbled to the ground, landing painfully in the sand.

Flutterflee aimed her bow down at Vriska. “And right now I’m pretty tired of keeping it held back for your ungrateful, antagonistic sake.”

Vriska roared, meeting Flutterfree’s Stare with her own gaze. She drained Flutterfree’s luck, forcing the arrow to fly wild. Vriska continued meeting Flutterfree’s gaze, draining her.

Flutterfree’s body shook. She pushed her hooves over her heart, the rest of her body twitching unnaturally. She dropped out of the sky.

Vriska’s rage vanished. Oh no. She caught Flutterfree in her arms.

Her heart wasn’t beating.

Vriska laid Flutterfree on the sand, spreading her wings and legs out to allow easy access to the chest – CPR worked on ponies, right? Right?

Vriska placed her hands on Flutterfree’s ribcage and started pumping. “Come on come on…” She forced air down Flutterfree’s mouth and kept pumping. “Come on come on, let me spend that luck, come on…”

Nothing seemed to be happening.

“Wake the fuck up!” Vriska shouted. She kept pumping, twisting her body around so her leg was in front of Flutterfree’s mouth. She pressed the limb into Flutterfree’s jaw and forced her to bite down.

The resulting sucking sensation was truly disturbing, not to mention more painful than taking a Star Platinum punch to the face. She ground her teeth and let out a muffled yell, returning to pumping Flutterfree’s chest.

There it was. A heartbeat.

Vriska let out a sigh of relief. Not two seconds later, Flutterfree spat Vriska’s leg out. “What th… Ow. Ooooooow…”

Vriska found that she couldn’t stand on her leg at the moment. “H… Hey. I’m so sorry, Flutterfree, I should have listened to you... Should have let you talk…”

“I shouldn’t have exploded,” Flutterfree muttered. “And… …do you taste like blueberries?!”

“Maybe?”

“Ugh… Blueberries…” Flutterfree couldn’t help but laugh. “Blueberries…”

“Heh.”

“We sure are lucky your blood was compatible.”

“Yeah. Lucky.” Vriska shook her head. “Neither of us should try anything particularly death-defying for the next little while. Or even particularly dangerous.”

“I have several broken ribs right now, not doing anything crazy…”

“Yeah, properly done CPR will do that to you. …If it’s supposed to work on ponies. Really not sure.”

“It does,” Flutterfree said. “I had to resuscitate Renee once. It can be done, but it definitely wasn’t the way you just did it. Even if we’re more flexible than Earth horses, it’s still better to resuscitate us laying on our sides rather than our backs.”

“Good to know.”

“Yeah…” She tried to stand up and winced. “Yep. Broken ribs. Gonna need a hospital or someone to feed off of… I’d prefer hospital.”

“I gotcha,” Vriska said, helping her up. “At least your legs aren’t broken. You’ll be able to walk, just… wait, you know all this.”

“Yeah,” Flutterfree said, carefully stretching out her legs. “It’s the breathing that’s going to be painful… And your leg.”

Vriska drew her sword and stuck it to the side of her drained leg as a brace. “I can manage.”

Flutterfree smiled. “You are quite the trooper.”

“I’ve been killed more times than Daniel, you learn to just accept pain. …Never quite to the inhuman level Jotaro can, though… He’s a freak.”

Flutterfree chuckled – then let out a small wince of pain from the motion of her ribs. “…I wonder if I’ll become the next Daniel. I do seem to be in the habit of getting injured and needing saving.”

“You are the frailest.”

“And I’m perfectly fine with that.” She grunted, stretching out her wings. “We should head back to the camp, make a plan with the others.”

“Gotcha,” Vriska said. The two of them began to limp back they way they had flown.

A few minutes later, Vriska sighed. “You do appear perfect, you know that? You make life look so easy.”

Flutterfree held her head high. “I… I know. I was born naturally kind and empathetic, I worked through my natural fear of others, and this multiverse has cured me of my literal weakness. Those were always my biggest problems. But… Vriska, here’s a little fact about life.”

“This should be good.”

“The further you get along, the clearer you see.”

“Uh…”

“Imagine yourself like a dirty room. You see some things wrong with you – big things – and you focus on those, cleaning them up and making them presentable if they’re too strong to remove. But as time goes on, the light gets brighter, and you see the things you thought were clean really weren’t. Then you scrub those and think they’re taken care of, but the old spots flare up, and new spots begin to show themselves and th- ow.” She grabbed her chest. “…Got too animated there.”

“I get the point,” Vriska said. “Course, still makes me seem immature. I’m over ten times older than you and it seems like you’ve got it figured out better than I do.”

“You are more confident than I am,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“And look where that confidence has gotten us.”

“Look at all the pickles my kindness has stuck us in on the flipside,” Flutterfree pointed out. “We’re just people.”

“And all people need to learn things.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Yeah. Nobody’s got it right.”

Vriska looked at the ground. “Uuuuuugh… But I don’t like orders…”

“Nobody does. Just like I needed to learn assertiveness, you need to learn submissiveness.” Flutterfree looked at the night sky. “It’s like a paradox.”

“I really want to be upset with you for saying that but then I remember that I’ve broken your ribs.”

“Mmmm…” Flutterfree said, trying hard not to chuckle, for the motion was the most painful thing she could do right now aside from beating her chest.

“Let’s just get back to camp.” Vriska sighed. “I’m going to be making a lot of apologies…”

“I’ll be there with you,” Flutterfree promised her. “You won’t have to stand alone.”

“Thanks.”

~~~

Nova had teleported to a new piece of scenery – a grid of metal. Each square was large enough to hold a dozen ponies, but aside from the simple grooves separating each individual square, the place was barren.

As she ran across the squares, her hooves hit the ground with resounding CLANGs, indicating that the area beneath her was hollow.

She didn’t register this fact, however – her mind was too much of a swirl of emotions. Intermingled with her very conflicting emotions about Icon, she was playing the things she had said to Pinkie over and over again in her mind, with the things she’d said to Vriska taking a backseat.

She was rotten, wasn’t she?

Those things she had said…

She had definitely meant them and felt like she needed to say them at the time, but the moment she had teleported away – regret. Deep, pounding regret that screamed inside her skull. Screamed, demanding to be set right.

It wasn’t the only screaming voice. There was the screaming voice of her fear, telling her to run away. And then there was the screaming voice of her heart itself that just screamed with no end goal in mind, only exacerbating her other emotions.

She ran… ran… ran…

Eventually her head began to clear, the emotions burning themselves out, becoming numb. The fear went first and the anger next, leaving only the guilt and the screaming heart itself, and she could sense those fading from overuse.

She formed a coherent thought.

I need to go back.

She began to slow her gallop, giving herself a moment to breathe.

I need to go back. I need to apologize. We don’t yell at each other to tell each other we’re wrong… we talk through it unless there’s an emergency.

We failed at talking through it back there. All of us.

I wasn’t even trying.

She wiped her face, preparing to teleport back. She needed someone to talk to. One on one. Pinkie would be willing. Flutterfree, if she was back by now. Nova knew she couldn’t deal with this on her own, not right now.

Icon… Why did your existence have to be so cruel? Why d-

The square of metal she was walking over gave way, crumbling inward. With a scream, she was deposited into a featureless cubical box, each face the same size as the square on the surface.

Nova wailed aloud. “Why does the multiverse have to be so cruel!?” She stamped the ground in rage.

To her surprise, the metal peeled back, revealing a small cave.

Without really thinking, she pounded more, widening the gap until she could fit her head through it. The ‘cave’ was really just a pocket of air beneath the ground, probably sealed whenever the metallic grid was built over top of it.

The cavern contained a human skeleton and a purple crystal near the skeleton’s foot. The skeleton itself was heavily augmented with technology, suggesting that it had once been a cyborg – possibly even completely artificial. But Nova knew there was no hope of reactivation – there was too much damage to the skull and chest areas and it was extremely old.

Nova stared blankly at the death – it had been a common sight in her journeys, but not exactly one she wanted to see right now. Except… Something about this skeleton struck her. She felt as if everything was different now, and she didn’t know why.

“Hello,” the purple crystal said with a robotic voice.

Nova stared at it. “Uh… Hi. Wait… Talking crystal?”

“Yes. Do you know what I am?”

Nova processed for a moment – talking robotic crystal, human skeleton, high level of magic... “Are you… one of the TSAB’s devices!?”

“Yes. It is good to hear that we are still around.”

“Yeah, you’re the number two Class 2 civilization these days,” Nova said. “I’m Nova.”

“Blitz Caliber,” the magical device offered.

“How long have you been down here?”

“Unknown. I was deactivated in order to conserve power. Your presence reactivated me. Evidence suggests hundreds of years.”

“I’m… Sorry.”

“My tragedy happened long ago. Yours happened more recently.”

Nova shook her head. “No reason for me to be inconsiderate.”

“But you are here now, we should focus on you. Mitigate the damage Zhui does to those who visit.”

Nova stared at the crystal. “…What happened to you?”

“A TSAB exploration ship entered dimensional proximity with Zhui and sent a team to explore and make contact. My master and I were on that team. We soon learned of a being called the Watchmaker and were determined to speak with him. The resulting series of events was horrendous for all of us, but we were made stronger because of it. We found the Watchmaker. We fell in battle. My master was the one the Watchmaker chose to be an example. Our ship and the rest of our team was forced to evacuate.”

“…That’s horrible,” Nova said. “…We’re planning on facing the Watchmaker as well.”

“His capabilities are likely beyond you,” Blitz Caliber said. “He is not as all-powerful as the natives claim he is, but he has immeasurable control over the universe itself. Control we were unaware of until facing him.”

“So, use dimensional effects…” Nova said, pondering.

“Perhaps. But there is another force he has control over. Are you aware of ka?”

Nova paled. “…I know what it is.”

“The Watchmaker’s Clockwork Angels are tools designed to shape ka. We did not figure this out until he told us directly. We also figured out that, despite never accepting what an Angel said, we had been subject to it the entire time.”

Nova began to tremble.

“Angels Influence the flow of ka around every individual to the whims of the Watchmaker. This can be done with something as simple as a line of sight. After that, the target becomes a part of his plan.”

“How extensive is his plan?” Nova asked.

“Unknown. It certainly isn’t perfect, since it is known the Watchmaker can be surprised, but I believe that is because ka is naturally unpredictable. Ask it to make someone a hero and it will, but the journey to that point is a mixture. It is suspected every individual in this universe has been affected by this.”

“I was cursed…” Nova said, anger taking over her expressions. “I was used…”

“All members of our team suffered emotional trauma,” Blitz Caliber confirmed. “These traumas were definitely part of the plan until the moment of the final confrontation.”

Nova was no longer in a depressed spiral – like a switch, all that energy had been pushed toward anger. “He made this happen… He made me feel this… He is going to pay.” Nova lifted Blitz Caliber up with her telekinesis. “I’ll return you to the TSAB, Blitz. But would you like to get some revenge on the Watchmaker first?”

“I would love to.”

“Thanks.” Nova teleported onto the surface, Blitz Caliber in her telekinesis. “How do you suggest we do this?”

“Get the remains of an Angel. They will be in any settlement. I see lights from one over there.”

“Then that’s where we’re going,” Nova said. “We’re going to stop the Watchmaker from controlling these people’s lives.”

“Stand by ready.”

“What?”

“I’m preparing to affix myself to you temporarily.”

“Oh. Swee-”

In an instant, Nova’s back hooves were encased in mechanical roller-boots, and a metallic fist had been created around one of her front hooves. A jacket made of protective magical fields appeared around her, waving in the wind.

Blitz Caliber took a position in one of the roller boots. “Ready.”

Nova took off toward the light of the town, rolling at high speeds across the metal planes.

~~~

Jotaro found himself walking through a town. The town was made entirely of large lobster shells fashioned into small houses, presumably from creatures fished out of the orange ocean. As had come to be expected from Zhui settlements, there were clocks everywhere.

The dirt roads were abandoned for the most part – which made sense, considering it was night. He was able to walk through the town unnoticed, right to a dock. Huge, shell-craft ships were docked, rocking softly in the waves. Jotaro didn’t stop moving to admire them. He walked until he couldn’t walk any further, stopping at the edge of the dock.

The moon was on the water, reflecting itself in the orange ripples. Dark clouds were forming over it, taking its light away from the world.

Jotaro sighed. They were probably looking for him by now. Flutterfree would have calmed Vriska down one way or another, Nova would have realized she needed to come back on her own, and Pinkie would just always be back. She had amazing bounce back most of the time.

Should he go back? Probably.

He didn’t though. He just stood at the edge of the dock, watching the clouds cover the moon over time.

He had failed. It wasn’t even in a fight – he could accept failure in a fight. It just meant he needed to get stronger, or smarter. But that wasn’t what happened. He had failed to see something about himself.

Was he going crazy or was he influenced by some outer force?

He knew that the latter was true. The former might not have been completely baseless, though…

The Seven Cities of Gold no longer called to him. He had realized what he was doing and purged them from his mind – it had been as simple as telling them no. That wasn’t anything like Nova’s lingering issue, or Vriska’s personality defect.

In a way, he got off easy.

But why was he standing here?

“You look lost, stranger,” an old man said, walking up next to him.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, adjusting his hat.

“Not a talker, eh? That’s fine.” the old man said, hands in his pockets much like Jotaro himself. “Never was much for shootin’ the breeze myself.”

There was silence as the two men watched the clouds form.

“Mighty storm a comin’,” the old man eventually said. “One o’ those thunderhead creatures, I reckon.”

“Thunderhead creatures?”

“Storms over the orange sea gain a murderous mind of their own. It’ll probably come here and attack the town.”

“What will you do?”

“Our heroes will fight it back, as usual, but not before it does a lot of damage. We’ll enter a phase of rebuildin’ after that, and go back to our lives.”

Jotaro curled his fist. “Why not go out there and face it?”

“That’s the way the Angels set it up.”

“Time for a change, then,” Jotaro said, flexing his arms. “I’ll take care of this storm for you, old man.”

“Good luck,” the old man said. “You’ll need it.”

Jotaro summoned Star Platinum and dove into the water, using the Stand’s strength to bolt through the water like a torpedo. He saw the currents of water churning beneath the clouds – forming a large creature of lightning and clouds with two slits of electric blue the size of ocean liners. Eyes.

Nothing he couldn’t handle.

Star Platinum threw Jotaro out of the water, sending him flying right for the center of the churning thunderhead. The creature sparked, preparing a bolt of electricity for Jotaro.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Time froze but Jotaro kept sailing through the air. Star Platinum’s fists flew by hundreds of times every second, tearing the clouds of the thunderhead asunder with unparalleled force and speed.

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

Jotaro and Star Platinum popped out the other side before time resumed. A hole had been bored through the cloudy body of the thunderhead. It screeched in pain.

Gotcha.

A lightning bolt shot out of the back of the thunderhead, hitting Jotaro head on.

“NANI!?” It had been aiming that attack forward, it couldn’t possibly adjust that fast… Wait – it's an electric-based attack. It would seek the closest point of discharge. I’m closer than the ocean. Shit.

Jotaro fell into the water – and yet, despite just having been hit by lightning, he wasn’t done. He leaped out, Star Platinum’s fists flying again. They were able to take another lightning bolt at full force, punching through the thunderhead again.

It was the third strike when Jotaro’s left arm stopped working.

Dammit.

He wouldn’t stop though. He was Jotaro Kujo. He would take this creature out – it wouldn’t even be that difficult. He needed to take it out from the bottom, the point where it was rising – lightning would dissipate in the water. It would still hurt, definitely, but the power would not be as much as a direct hit. And he could work through that.

After all, it was only his arm that wasn’t working. Star Platinum was immune to the bolts since they didn’t come from something spiritual or overly magical. Jotaro just had to make maximum use of his Stand…

A shard of ice embedded itself in the shoulder of the arm that wasn’t disabled. Jotaro realized with no small amount of fear that the thunderhead was now hailing on him. He dove under the water to protect himself, formulating another plan.

The seeds of self-doubt had begun to crawl into his mind again. What if he couldn’t win this? What if he would have to resort to the Joestar secret technique…?

Running away?

He hadn’t run away from a fight in so long…

He would try a little longer – he was a Joestar, after all – but he kept the idea of fleeing in the back of his mind.

He poked his head out of the water and realized he would never have to make the decision – because he was about to get help.

A blue road of magical energy had appeared in the sky, a unicorn in roller boots at the front of it. Nova.

“How do I control this thing!?” Nova blurted.

“I can do all of that. Focus on the encounter,” a synthetic voice responded.

“Blitz Caliber, I am focusing on not dropping this Angel into the ocean!” Nova said, gesturing at the broken form of an Angel she had held in her telekinesis.

“Let Jotaro grab it.”

“I’VE GOT IT!” Jotaro shouted, kicking toward the area Nova was flying over. It was easy to grab the Angel out of the air with Star Platinum.

“Can you time stop?” Nova shouted as she passed by.

Jotaro gave her a thumbs up.

“Good!” Nova said, catching a bolt of lightning with her magic shield. “Do it! I’m ready!”

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Jotaro shouted.

Time froze – but Nova had a bubble of time in place around herself, ensuring she would still be able to move. She jumped off the magic road Blitz Caliber was generating, twirling in the air.

“Here goes nothing…” Nova said. She created a spell with her horn – a simple spell designed to force water to condense. She flooded the spell into Blitz Caliber for the magical machine to do what it did best – amplify and fine-tune the spells of its master. A series of complex magical circles appeared behind Nova in a mixture of blue and pink colors. Numerous magical rings appeared in front of her.

“SPECIFIC ATTACK WITHOUT A NAME!” Nova shouted, unleashing a beam of striped magic large enough to surround the entire Thunderhead. The beam passed through, and the time stop ended.

The thunderhead turned to water, splashing down onto the ocean rather unceremoniously.

“WOO-HOO!” Nova shouted, floating down to Jotaro without need for a telekinetic aura. “WE DID IT! And I saved you from suffering more.”

Jotaro held the Angel above the water and raised an eyebrow.

“You were probably going to have to admit your own inadequacies and flee or something,” Nova said, her barrier jacket flapping in the wind. “All part of the Watchmaker’s plan… Until this moment.” She pointed at the broken Angel. “We need to get that back to the others.”

Jotaro nodded, preparing to swim back to the town with the power of Star Platinum.

“Let’s teleport instead, okay? The people of that town have already declared war on me for appearing out of nowhere and punching a hole in their Angel,” Nova said, rubbing the back of her head.

Jotaro gestured towards her – she should teleport them back.

“Oh. Right.”

~~~

Headlong Flight

“I don’t regret it, I never forget it, I wouldn’t trade tomorrow for today.”

Vriska and Flutterfree returned to camp to find it empty.

“Uh…” Vriska shook her head. “Okay, wasn’t expecting this. Yeesh, guess I set them off…”

“I think everyone set each other off,” Flutterfree said. She sighed. “Normally I’d say we find their magic signatures or something, but this place doesn’t like that…”

“We should probably call Renee,” Vriska said. “Tell her what’s up.”

“Do you want to?”

“No.”

“Then I can do it.”

“You don’t want to either.”

“True…” Flutterfree shook her head. “It finally happened. We got driven apart.”

“Well, we are back. We’re the first ones who left, first ones who got back.”

Flutterfree closed her eyes, not responding to Vriska. She knew this meant Flutterfree was having a moment of prayer, so she left the pegasus alone to her thoughts.

She took out her phone, looking at the quick-dial for Renee. She hovered a finger over it, gulping. She wished something, anything would happen that would keep her from having to make this call.

Nova and Jotaro appeared in a puff of magic. “And we’re back!” Nova said. “A- where’s Pinkie?”

Vriska let out a sigh of relief and put her phone away. “I don’t know. We just got back. Also, I guess you’re a magical girl now.”

“What? …Nevermind. You two look like you had a rough time.”

“We fought each other. Seriously,” Flutterfree said. “…It seemed like it was what we needed, though.”

“Amazing how almost killing each other does that,” Vriska said, looking down at her leg. It worked now, but it wasn’t doing her any favors with the pain it was shooting through her body.

“I got to sidestep our challenge,” Nova said, throwing the Angel on the ground. “I’ve found something out.” She held up her back hoof, showing them the crystal. “This is Blitz Caliber, a device from the TSAB, back when a team of theirs came through this area. They tried to do what we were doing now. But when they faced the Watchmaker, they had no idea what he was capable of until he explained it to them, and by then it was too late. One of their team fell as an example, forcing the TSAB to withdraw.”

Vriska blinked. “Fuck, if the TSAB had problems…”

“But I know what they didn’t know,” Nova said. “I know that none of us were free of the Watchmaker’s plan the moment we entered this world.”

“W-what!?” Flutterfree blurted.

“My curse, the situation that led to Vriska’s disobedience, the drive within Jotaro… Possibly even the Anarchist himself! All of it was but part of the Watchmaker’s plan.” She gestured at the Angel’s body. “These are his tools, what he uses to manipulate ka itself to keep the universe under his control.”

Vriska stared at Nova. “No way… Ka manipulation is an exceptionally rare technology…”

“I know, Blitz Caliber told me,” Nova said. “I was also told about this.” She popped the skull of the Angel open, revealing a glowing seven-petal flower that shone with an eerie glow.

“MOTHER OF JEGUS!” Vriska blurted, taking a few steps back. “How the fuck…? Nobody gets away with stealing Flower technology! Not even me!”

“He didn’t steal it,” Nova said. “He found it, according to Blitz Caliber. Then he copied it a million times.”

“Fuck…” Vriska said, sitting down. “I… This changes everything. We’re but pawns in this Watchmaker’s game… It all makes so much sense…”

“All the adventurers… All the bizarre locations… All the dependency… Everything…” Flutterfree stared into the distance.

“We’ve been toys,” Jotaro said.

“I was only able to stop it by luck,” Nova said. “I know I wasn’t supposed to find Blitz Caliber.”

Blitz Caliber piped up. “We did not tell the Watchmaker much about what we were. I do not think he realized I am an advanced AI, so he just left me.”

“And some sort of higher ka took over,” Vriska finished. “So… What are we going to do with this flower that can change ka?”

“Use it against the Watchmaker,” Nova declared. “We are going to paint him as the villain the moment we find him.”

“You sure you know how to use that thing?”

“No,” Nova admitted. “But it’s the only idea I’ve got, because the TSAB tried both brute force and diplomacy when they were here last.”

“We also have Pinkie,” Jotaro said. “That provides another edge.”

“If Pinkie would show up again…” Flutterfree said, looking into the distance. “She might not, you know.”

“We need to give her time,” Nova said. “I have the coordinates of the ‘Doorway to Heaven’ courtesy of Blitz Caliber. I can teleport us there at any time if the Watchmaker decides to make a move on us. I say we wait until morning for her.”

“Right,” Vriska said.

“Until then… we talk,” Flutterfree said, looking at the three of them. “We all talk.”

Jotaro and Vriska tensed. Nova sighed. “Yeah, I suppose we do need to do that… Even if it is part of the plan, it’s still… you know.”

Flutterfree nodded, taking in a breath. A soft breeze blew through the air, and the sound of a reverberating guitar could be heard over ticking. “Let’s not focus just on what failures we’ve experienced, everyone – let’s remember everything and see the greater picture.” She put out a hoof and began to sing.

“All the journeys
Of this great adventure
All the worlds seen along the way
We won’t forget them
For we are of them
Learning from plight
That’s what we gain this day

Some times were bleak
I wish that I could live it all again
Some fights were proud
I wish that I could live it all again.”

Vriska took over, a silly grin on her face.

“All the moments in this headlong flight
Always convinced I was right
Never wondering when
I wish that I could live it all again

I have placed all the irons into the fire
Conquered, laughed, gambled, fought, and destroyed
I learned to care, I learned to love, and learned to hear
Oh, I wish that I could live it all again

All the treasures
The pirate’s booty
It was all lost along the way
I won’t miss it
It was never the point
I wouldn't trade yesterday for today.”

Nova went next, tears in her eyes as she did so.

“My heart was dark
I wish that I could take it all back
My mind was bright
I wish that I could take it all back

I have stood above troubled emotions
Fought my self hatred at every turn
I learned to think, I learned to watch, and learned to wait
Oh, I wish that I could live it all again.”

Jotaro, after a perceived eternity of never singing along with the rest of them, decided that now was the time to accept the allure of a heartsong. His voice was deep, brooding, and full of passion as he sang the words.

“All the moments in this headlong flight
Knowing nothing but the fight
Battles of pain
I wish that I could live it all again
Wars of triumph
I wish that I could live it all again

I had left my family in the dark
Never willing to return to them
I learned to talk, I learned to raise, and learned to laugh
Oh, I wish that I could live it all again.”

Flutterfree smiled at all three of them, tears rolling down her cheeks. She didn’t even care about the pain when she continued.

“I have fought the anger at every turn
Faced much of my inner weakness.”

The rest of them joined her for the end.

“We learned to war, and learned to live, and became friends
Oh, we wish that we could…
Oh we wish that we could live it all again!”

The music died down, but there was not a dry face in the house.

“…Pinkie’s not here yet,” Nova said after a minute.

“Then we can talk until dawn,” Flutterfree said, putting a hoof on her shoulder. “As the great friends we know we are. Together.”

They all hugged.

“Ow ow ow…” Flutterfree winced.

“Sorry,” Jotaro said.

They all laughed.

“Ow!” Flutterfree gagged.

Nova shook her head. “Okay, this just isn’t going to do. Time for magic surgery.”

“Nova!”

“Temporary, to remove the pain. When we get you to a better doctor you can get better treatment.”

“…All right.”

“You could bite my arm if you wanted,” Jotaro suggested.

“N-no I’ll take the freelance magic surgery.”

~~~

Brought Up To Believe To…

“Belief has failed me now.”

Pinkie sat alone, mane as straight as it had ever been, tears falling to the wooden floor she sat on. She sung with jagged voice while ominous strings played in the background.

“I always tried to believe
Belief has failed me now
The bright glow of optimism
Lost, leaving me to bow

Belief has failed me now
Thought goes from bad to worse
No outer knowledge consoles me
In Watchmaker’s universe

Thought goes from bad to worse
I cannot fight you
Within your plan, I am but a ripple
Unable to show what is true

I cannot fight you
Was I truly this naive?
I thought everything was with me
I always tried to believe.”

The Watchmaker spoke. “They’re coming, Pinkamena Diane Pie. They have a plan.”

“I know.”

“Good.”

~~~

Wish Them Well

“Even though you’re going through hell, just keep on going, let the demons dwell.”

The sun rose on the four friends in the desert. They had not slept – and yet they didn’t feel tired. They felt rejuvenated and ready to take on the world – the Watchmaker’s world.

“Pinkie’s not back yet,” Nova said.

“Then we go now,” Flutterfree decided. “She’s probably waiting for us. Does anyone have any last minute things they want to say?”

Vriska shrugged. “I think we got it all out.”

“Eh…” Nova said, waving the hoof that Blitz Caliber had covered in the metallic fist. “I think we all need to keep in mind that none of us are over what’s happened. I’m still churning inside, for one.”

Vriska sighed. “Fine, I admit it, I still want to punch everything.”

“You always do,” Jotaro commented.

“What about you, big guy?”

“…I dread Pinkie’s response to me.”

“She’s forgiving and you know it,” Flutterfree said. “She probably knows we worked it out anyway. And as for me… well, aside from the ribs I’m sure are stabbing into my lungs even though I can’t feel it…”

“They are not!” Nova blurted.

Flutterfree smirked. “Aside from that… I keep thinking of how I could have kept all this from happening. What I could have done. What I could have said to Pinkie, to any of you. Maybe I was under the influence as well – but we can’t know that for sure.”

Nova nodded. “There was a part of us that really did all those things.”

“We can’t ignore that,” Vriska added.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said. “Quoting each other now, are we?”

Flutterfree smiled. “It means the talk stuck. That’s all I needed to see. Nova! Blitz Caliber! Take us away!”

Nova lit her horn, tapping into the location Blitz Caliber had ready for her.

They were soon in the center of the desert of ice and fire, in a section that was neither frozen nor on fire.

In the center was a structure Jotaro recognized from his dreams – the four white doorframes placed in a square, nothing in them but a soft white glow.

“The Doorway to Heaven,” Flutterfree said, the light reflecting in her eyes. “Through these doors wait the Watchmaker, the arbiter of this entire mess. Is everyone ready?”

“Ready,” Nova said.

“Ready,” Jotaro confirmed.

“Ready,” Vriska added.

“Ready,” Blitz Caliber piped in.

“Then here we go.” Flutterfree spread her wings. When she flapped, they all leaped in.

They were launched into the sky as bursts of energy – and yet they could still see. They saw the red planet consolidate into a sphere below them, the abstract scenery impossible to discern from this high up. They passed other sparks of light orbiting the planet from unknown sources, eventually reaching past the moon.

When they passed the sun – orbiting the planet much like Equis suns – they noticed something odd. At the south pole of the red planet there seemed to be a black metallic pole, out of which sprouted curved rods that affixed to the sun and moon. Gears the size of countries moved at the joints of these rods, driving the machinations of the system.

As they moved outward, they saw even more rods controlling the heavens. The ‘planets’ were affixed to smaller rods, twisting around at eccentric angles. Everything was ordered, ticking with the time of existence.

Then they passed the fixed stars. Every last one of the stars was placed in a spherical pattern around the planet of Zhui. A sphere of stars that slowly rotated with the bottommost gear of the central rod.

It was at this point they passed through the outer glass of the globe everything was contained in, coming to see the existence that contained the world they had been traveling in for the past few days. The globe of Zhui sat on a dark, wooden desk covered in clockwork gears and scribbled diagrams of complex machines. Gas lamps lit the room, revealing there to be no walls, but instead hallways made of bookshelves that seemed to go on forever.

The four of them became full size for this world, the globe of Zhui no more than a trinket to them. They saw the broken, despondent form of Pinkie first.

Flutterfree knew what she needed – she pulled the pink pony into a hug. “Shh… Pinkie, it’s okay. It’s okay. We’re here now. We’re all here now.”

“But you’re all angry.”

“So?” Vriska blurted. “That’s never stopped us before!”

“Who cares if we’re angry?” Nova said. “Anger is part of life. We’re friends, Pinkie.”

“I… I know… But I… I couldn’t do anything,” Pinkie shook her head. “I tried to fix everything. But even with all the power I have… I didn’t see what I needed to see! I couldn’t stop what I had the power to stop! There were no rules here keeping me from acting, I was just stupid!”

Jotaro grabbed Pinkie by the shoulders. “You are one of the smartest people I know, Pinkie. Captain.”

“Me? Smart? But I-”

“No buts!” Nova blurted. “No more buts! Not the negative kind, and not the rear end kind either. Also not Vriska.”

“Hey!” Vriska blurted.

Pinkie couldn’t stop herself from giggling at this.

Flutterfree pulled Pinkie closer. “Look back at what we’ve done, Pinkie. All the moments in this headlong flight we are a part of. This endless adventure across world after world. We’ve learned so much together, fought so much together, and just did so much. Remember what all that means.”

“I… I…”

Nova cleared her throat. “Pinkie, just look. Look back at the song. Look back at all our adventures. I know you can see what you’ve already done easy. You’ve led us into so many situations with what you know, and sometimes without knowing anything. That’s not worthless.”

“Remember Jolyne’s birthday?” Jotaro asked. “She was still really young, and I had just started devoting time to my family. You got her to trust me again with a party. That, to this day, is the greatest thing you’ve done for me – and I’ve seen you do many great things for other people.”

“You are an utter badass,” Vriska told Pinkie. “You’re able to beat the bad guys up without batting an eye. You laugh and grin the entire time you’re fighting, able to bewilder even the most creative of opponents. You’re the furthest thing from powerless.”

“Pinkie, you’re amazing,” Flutterfree said. “You lived so long, alone, with the knowledge that we were in a story. I don’t think any of us could have done that. You are, by far, the strongest of all of us. I don’t know what’s happened – but I know you don’t deserve to be like this. You’ve done so much for all the worlds simply by smiling despite all the pain you know. Let us see that smile again.”

Pinkie looked at Flutterfree – and smiled softly. “Okay.” Her mane poofed up slightly - but not back to full. Even she couldn’t rocket out of the depths she had been in.

There was a mixture of hugs, hoofbumps, fistbumps, and laughs form the five friends – together once again, despite the pain. They were back, and stronger than ever.

“And now your journey comes to an end,” the Watchmaker declared. “You have traveled across the world, faced great personal struggles, and have returned to each other right before the final confrontation with the man behind the curtain.”

The five of them turned to face the Watchmaker.

When they had been traveling around the world of Zhui, a question had been in the back of their mind. The people of Zhui held the Watchmaker in such immense reverence, even more so than his Clockwork Angels. And yet, while there had been numerous statues of the Angels, there had not been a single statue or depiction of the Watchmaker that they could see.

What they had failed to realize was that depictions of the Watchmaker were everywhere.

The Watchmaker was a clock affixed to a normal human body in place of a head. He wore simple, red robes that laced intricate designs. In contrast, the face of the Watchmaker had too many hands to make sense of, and instead of numbers there were alchemical symbols fashioned from black metal that matched the hands. The background was a pearly red color with swirls in it that resembled clouds while the edge of the face was rimmed with precious metals - silver, gold, and platinum alongside others they didn’t recognize right away – arranged into clockwork patterns. A few of the gears moved, even though there was no way they could serve any sure purpose… right?

Pinkie gulped. “I’m… I’m sorry everyone, we can’t face him.”

“Yes we can,” Nova said, pulling the flower out of her bags and activating it, showering the Watchmaker with a mysterious green cloud that dissipated quickly. “He’s now the villain of the story.”

“Ka is on your side,” the Watchmaker admitted. “But your leader is not referring to a direct conflict, which you would most definitely win at this juncture. She is referring to fighting being a poor decision.”

“Why?” Jotaro asked, ready to punch the Watchmaker’s smug face – even though there were no mouth or eyes, Jotaro could sense the smugness.

“Right now, the people of Zhui are more or less happy with what I do for them, aside from a few stragglers. If you destroy me – which you have the means to do - Zhui will become chaos.” He gestured toward the globe containing Zhui. “The mechanisms will still turn, but all the Angels will drop dead. The guidance all the people have had in their lives will fall in an instant, and it will devolve into anarchy. None of them truly know how to lead others or live lives with free will. I know for certain what will happen if I remove my hand from the world – they will take hold of the powerful magics and machines designed to be part of their adventures, and they will destroy their universe with them.”

Flutterfree spread out Lolo, forcing everything to reveal itself. She focused particularly on the Watchmaker.

Not much changed. The Globe of Zhui began to glow with a holy light, and a bunch of leaves sprouted from the Watchmaker’s ‘neck’, indicating his connection to the Angels through the Flower device – but otherwise nothing happened.

“I speak the truth,” the Watchmaker said.

“He does,” Flutterfree confirmed. “Or at least he’s able to fool Lolo into thinking so.” She recalled Lolo.

“So, what then?” Vriska asked. “We just let you keep doing what you’re doing?”

“At the moment, that is what I wish,” the Watchmaker declared. “However, have it never be said I am not a reasonable man. The final confrontation of your story will not come in the form of a fight, it will be a debate.” He pointed a finger at them. “If you can convince me what I’m doing is wrong, I will make amends. I will adjust the world over the course of the next century to be able to live on its own, and then I will remove my presence from Zhui completely. However, if you cannot convince me, I keep things the way they are, and you may decide if you have the capability as Merodi Universalis to save them from themselves.”

The Watchmaker folded his arms, leaning in towards the Primary Team of Merodi Universalis. “Prove me wrong.”

The team clearly wasn’t expecting this. Nova was the one who recovered first, taking a step forward and slamming her hoof on the desk. “It’s cruel, is what it is. It’s cruel because what you give them is fake. All the adventures, all the great lives, all the high stakes? All of it is built by you. This… fakeness.”

“They are all aware that I am the one who provides them direction. I do not keep that from them, Nova.”

“I bet you indoctrinated them before telling them.”

“Before I placed my hand on this world it was nothing but savages. The transformation of the savage world into a Clockwork Universe made it into a place of civilization and culture. I rose them up from brutal savagery into a world where lives are ordered by my plan.”

“It is your plan, isn’t it?” Vriska asked. “You didn’t discover the plan of the universe.”

“No. That is a distortion of what I actually told them. I told them that I had found a better way, and that I would always show them that better way. But their lives today are immeasurably better than where they were. I have done them a great service.”

“Maybe it is better than savagery,” Flutterfree said. “But it’s still a lie – and a lie they have no choice about. You mentioned they don’t know how to operate with free will. That’s horrible.”

“Is it? I ask you five to look back on your journey. There was a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, and a lot of interpersonal drama. Until the moment Nova found Blitz Caliber, everything was part of the plan. And yet, despite that interruption, the ‘lie’ that was my plan has moved you all closer together. You have finally experienced a big fight, one so large that it drove you apart – but one that also tied you even closer together. Regardless of the outcome of this conversation, I have strengthened the bond between you five with my plan. Tell me you are not better off for it.”

Flutterfree narrowed her eyes. “All evil is a corruption of something good. I can lie and cheat and steal and get good things for myself. That does not make it right.”

“But doing ‘evil’ things for the sake of something greater is glorious. Take, say, killing. You have killed two of my Angels since coming here. One was out of defense and partially an accident, but the other was assaulted on purpose in order to defeat me. Is that worth it? The Angels are fully sapient beings, their only limitation is that they are completely devoted to me.”

“The loss of one life for the freedom of all is worth it,” Jotaro decreed.

“Of course it is,” the Watchmaker admitted. “But I suggest that the loss of freedom is worth security, happiness, and meaning. Freedom is not the highest good in existence. It might not even make the top ten.”

“Love is the highest virtue,” Flutterfree said. “Look what you did to Nova. You corrupted love beyond measure. What you created wasn’t love, it was somebody’s dream of love, which is nowhere near as beautiful or good as the real thing. Love is slow, love is passionate, love cares deeply, love…” She turned to Jotaro.

Jotaro looked the Watchmaker right in the face. “Love… is a complex process. It involves everything. You seem to have no control, and yet you do, in a way. It sweeps you off your feet by surprise, yet it isn’t driven by physical pleasure as much as everyone seems to think it must. It is driven by connection, togetherness, and emotion. I don’t know if love at first sight exists or not, but I do know that anything that’s only been around for two days isn’t real. It’s either forced, or driven by delusion.”

“And there’s more to it,” Flutterfree said. “All kinds of love are the highest virtue – not just the romantic love. Familial love. Sibling love. Friendship. Do you know what I’m told to do after loving God? Love thy neighbor as thyself. The best and highest virtue is to treat everyone – even those who consider you enemies – with love and respect. I’m not perfect, I get angry at times. None of us have it down. But we’re doing better at it than you.”

The Watchmaker leaned back. “But I do treat them with love, you see? I felt pity on them in their savage state, and so I created a world where they would experience everything the best way for their lives. Their lives are filled with security and certainty in their fate.”

“You skipped over them experiencing love,” Pinkie retorted. “How many of them actually just ‘form’ friendships and partnerships without you getting your ka-soaked fingers involved? Almost none, right?”

The Watchmaker nodded.

“How can you do that!? Nothing they have is true!”

“The truth of existence is sickening,” the Watchmaker said. “You’ve been out there in the multiverse, you know what ka does. There is no order to it – it just does everything. The truth is we are subject to a power that will take the ideas of random people and make them reality. If it were one person, that would be one thing – at least it would be consistent. But it isn’t. It’s random. And because of that, there can be no meaning.”

“You’re wrong,” both Flutterfree and Nova said.

“Let me guess here. Flutterfree has a theological argument prepared, and Nova has the ‘morality defined by every individual is the true morality’ argument. Let me say that if this multiverse has a true God, I hate Him with every fiber in my body for letting randomness determine everything. And for you, Nova, every being is wrong. Every single one of us is broken. It’s why I’m having this argument, because there is a chance I’m wrong.”

Flutterfree sighed. “Watchmaker, He did not allow randomness to determine everything, we were the ones who wanted stories to be real. He just gave us what we wanted.”

“That’s just a theory. It sounds good to those of your church, but to those outside it means nothing. And have you not considered that your God, if he exists, is doing exactly what I am?”

“He’s not.”

“Really? Supposedly, he is a being that created all of existence, defined good and evil, and has a plan for every last thing based on his definitions.”

Flutterfree glared at the Watchmaker. “You have doubt, uncertainty, and a willingness to change. The only being that can do what you do and be in the right is not only a being who is perfectly good, but also one who has no doubt! There would be no point in having this conversation with God - He would already know He was right and know exactly how the conversation would go ahead of time. You said yourself that every being is wrong. God is the being who isn’t wrong. And that’s the only being who can have any right to fully control fate.”

“And how would anyone be able to know if God’s goodness is truly good? How is he not self-defining?”

Flutterfree bit her lip - not able to answer.

Nova ground her teeth. “Fine then. If you’re so sure everyone’s wrong, why do you think you even have the authority to run this world like a clockwork machine?”

“My plan is not always as rigid as you may think. I enchant the people of this world with ka and directions in life, and the ka takes over, weaving it into a story.”

“Even the criminals,” Pinkie pointed out. “Even the bad guys, the lost ones, the evil – you give them purpose as well?”

“Yes.”

“And the Anarchist and his followers – they were never given the option of refusal.”

“No. I merely let them think they could refuse for the optimum satisfaction they could possibly achieve in their lives.”

“You ruined their lives!”

“If I had given them a grand purpose, the Anarchist would have reasoned it out and killed himself,” the Watchmaker said. “The moment he discovers that he’s still part of my plan, he will commit suicide. This includes if you go back and offer him a way out. He is too old to recover from his entire life under the plan.”

Vriska clenched her fist. “You bastard…”

“There are always difficulties in plans. From the records on your device, Nova, I have learned that you have similar issues. The ponies of Lai and the Arcei – you let them believe lies, do you not? All for the sake of peace.”

“I’m… not happy about that, but it’s true,” Flutterfree admitted.

“You’re going to get away with it too. I can see it… even if the secrets came out now, everything is too closely knit. Your unity would stand. You lied to two sets of people about what you were doing for them and why, and all has turned out for the best. Some heroes might try to stop you.”

“Some did,” Pinkie said. “It’s just that they were on the wrong side.”

The Watchmaker nodded. “And here I am, on the wrong side in the end. The TSAB was fully under my control when they were here. But you… You broke free. And you have a chance to pass judgment.” He leaned in. “I don’t think you have it in you. The power to convince me.”

“How would you like it if you were in the Clockwork Universe?” Pinkie asked.

“I would be content and unaware of all the ‘evils’ I was subject to by being controlled. Or I would be dead and simply not care anymore.”

“Death is meaningless to you?” Vriska asked.

“Precisely. Once a person dies, they no longer have anything to be content with. All that needs to be taken care of are the people that life will affect. This is why the ‘bad guys’ are expendable – they are satisfied being evil, and when they are killed nobody really misses them.”

“There’s a contradiction here!” Nova blurted. “How can you say you care about them if you’re willing to throw them away like trash?”

“They are villains – a necessary evil. The people cannot have the contentment they desire without an enemy.”

“Who says there have to be enemies!?”

“A false heaven is a terrible world. Without large-scale struggle, there is not a feeling of grandeur, of accomplishment. The mundane life is not worth living.”

“The mundane life is definitely worth living,” Pinkie said. “I know lots of people who avoid adventures for the sake of taking care of their families.”

“Do you honestly think any of your friends live a mundane life?” the Watchmaker asked. “There is no mundane life where you tread. You cannot know what mundane life is like. The ka around you is too strong. I give others a chance to be like you.”

“What if the mundane life is better?” Flutterfree asked. “The life of immense ka brings higher stakes, higher suffering, higher death… Why is that better again?”

“A sense of meaning and purpose.”

“But that’s not the highest virtue! That’s on the same level as freedom! Love, faith, hope, peace… Those are the high virtues. Your world’s love is corrupted, their faith in you is misplaced, they do not have much reason to hope for change, and there certainly isn’t peace in your adventures. You create conflict for the sake of ‘satisfaction’.”

“It is what’s best for them.”

“How does anybody know what’s best for anybody!?” Vriska blurted. “Nobody knows what’s best for me, but guess what your little trip taught me here? Not even I know what’s best for me! Nobody knows what’s best for anybody! How can we be sure ka knows?”

The Watchmaker looked at her. “That is the first good point any of you have made. I legitimately had not considered that ka might not know what’s best for anyone. The answer to that question, unfortunately, relies on understanding what ka is. None of us truly know what it is or where it comes from, do we?”

“Something something Dark Tower,” Pinkie offered.

“Yes. But what is it? Why does it exist? What is its purpose? These are things we do not know. We just know that it is.”

“Why trust something you don’t know anything about?” Nova asked.

“Think of the alternative,” the Watchmaker said. “What else is there? Everyone’s wrong, so we must rely on some other source to determine right and wrong, to find meaning and purpose. Our fellow beings are just as corrupted as we are, God is distant, and if ka is just as wrong as we are at all times, even when guided, then what remains? Self-definition. And if that is all that remains, whatever I desire is correct enough. Not because I am right, but because no argument can stand when everything is a matter of self-definition. There can be no agreed-upon ethics.” He folded his hands. “I think you realize just how difficult convincing me will be.”

“You aren’t really open-minded,” Pinkie declared. “You just have a personal philosophy that dictates you must listen to every side of every argument. But… you’ve already decided. You will come up with just-so stories and thoughts just to ensure that your belief remains.”

“…This may be true.”

“You know that about yourself!?” Vriska blurted. “Then why the hell go through all this!”

“You may have had a really good point I couldn’t refute.”

“But even then, you wouldn’t have backed down,” Jotaro asserted. “You’re stubborn. You’ve been at this for too long.”

“You’ve defined yourself by this existence,” Flutterfree said. “You have used it to declare to yourself who you are. We aren’t just trying to convince you of what is right or wrong – we’re trying to convince you to give up your identity. Even if you listen… you won’t want to get rid of that.”

“And we have no power to force an emotional, traumatic experience, like you do,” Nova said.

“Here’s a suggestion!” Pinkie said, grinning. “Why don’t you have one of your Angels give you a purpose and a quest, see what happens? Who knows, ka might iron out those long held beliefs of yours.”

“I have been branded the villain by you,” the Watchmaker said. “I am not willing to fully embrace that role.”

Pinkie sighed. “Was worth a shot.”

“That was the best idea you’d had yet.”

Pinkie turned to her team. “This… This isn’t going to work. I think we all realize that at this point.”

The four others nodded sadly.

“…Do we think we have the right to take him away from Zhui?” Pinkie asked. “We’ll throw the world into anarchy, and we will be the only force keeping it from destroying itself. We will be trading out one master for another. And that other master might not be able to stop them. We don’t know all that much about Zhui.”

One by one, all four of them shook their heads.

Pinkie turned back to the Watchmaker, her mane dangerously close to falling completely flat. “You win,” she said, simply.

The Watchmaker nodded. “You may return to Zhui or your worlds as you wish. If you return to Zhui you will find yourselves part of the plan once more. If you leave, it will not follow you.”

“We won’t be returning to Zhui,” Pinkie said. “It’ll be too painful for us and the people who live there.”

“You are correct,” the Watchmaker said, examining the globe of Zhui. “I thank you for the conversation. It was illuminating and invigorating on the highest of levels. You have my gratitude for your participation.”

“We didn’t have much of a choice,” Vriska muttered.

“Indeed. One last thing, though.” the Watchmaker took the Flower device and crushed it.

“H-hey!” Vriska blurted. “I was going to give that to Starbeat!”

“No, you are not,” the Watchmaker said, returning to his mechanical designs, ignoring them.

“Did… Did we just lose?” Nova asked, almost in disbelief.

“Yep,” Pinkie said. “We lost.”

“But… but that never happens! Even when tragedy strikes, we’re able to pull something out of it! This… there’s nothing here for us! We just… lost!”

“When you don’t get what you want, what you get instead is experience,” Flutterfree said. “We didn’t win. Nothing has changed in this world, and nothing will change. But we’ve changed. As much as I hate to admit it, the Watchmaker's plan has taught us things about ourselves and who we are. I do not agree with the methods by any stretch of the imagination, but there are results. Let’s take them and become better people.”

Vriska kicked the ground. “Fuck. That’s really all we get to do.”

Blitz Caliber spoke up. “You also get to return me to my home.”

“At least that’s something,” Nova said, smiling at Blitz Caliber. “You’ll go home.”

“Yeah… home,” Vriska said, putting a hand to her nose and sighing. “…Let’s get out of here before I lose it and break his smug clock face. Because I’m pretty sure I’m about to lose it.”

Pinkie took out a dimensional device. “…All that we can do is wish them well.” She turned to look at the globe of Zhui, eyes sad. “I hope they find a way out on their own.”

“We all do,” Jotaro said.

Pinkie dialed another universe, and they left the Watchmaker to his schemes.

The Watchmaker did not change.

~~~

The Garden

“The measure of a life.”

Renee set the report down on her desk and sighed. She looked up at Pinkie’s team, all sitting on the other end with expressions of defeat.

“…I think you made the right call,” Renee said. “You did everything you could with what you had, considering everything. I could order the fleets in place around Zhui and a complex mission designed to get the people to rebel against the Watchmaker themselves. But… Well, we would have to micromanage, wouldn’t we? And then we wouldn’t be any better than this Watchmaker.” She sat back. “I’m sorry you all had to experience that.”

“We wouldn’t undo it,” Flutterfree said. “Those experiences and memories are still ours.”

“I know, dears. I know.” Renee shook her head. “It’s still disheartening just to hear about it, I can’t imagine what you must be feeling.”

Pinkie nodded. “It’s… it’s not great. But we have each other.”

Renee folded her hooves. “I’m giving you all a vacation until you decide you want to come back. You all need it to work things out with each other and talk to your other friends, I’m sure.”

The five of them nodded.

Renee smiled. “I’ll remove all my appointments tomorrow, we could go do something. Gather the girls and the others, go do something.”

“Thanks,” Pinkie said, “but I think we just want to do things our own way. Don’t think there’s going to be a party right now. Maybe later.”

“I understand. If you need anything, just call.”

“Thanks, Renee.”

~~~

There was a knock at Starbeat’s laboratory door. She walked to the door and opened it. “Ah. Vriska said you might show up, eventually.”

Nova smiled awkwardly. “Y-yeah…”

“Come on in. Be warned, the moment you spill your heart to me, I’m going to try to tackle you to the ground.”

“I know,” Nova said, walking into the room. “I assume Vriska told you?”

“You were hit by a Beat Curse,” Starbeat said. “Forced into a sudden relationship with an acrobat without your knowledge.”

“And then I figured it out,” Nova added. “And I got… angry. I yelled at her, even though she was just as torn up as I was. I regret that, and I can’t stop thinking about her. I just…” she shook her head. “How do you deal with it?”

“I just do,” Starbeat said. “Which is to say I just live with an intense suffering within my heart. I look at you and I don’t just see myself, I see somepony that I wanted back when I first left Equis Lovestra. They’re dulled now after so many years, but those feelings still surge up. Virtually everyone I encounter triggers those rising feelings – with the exception of Vriska, but you know she’s basically cheating the system.”

Nova nodded. “So just… wait?”

“The only action you can really take is to distance yourself from the object of affection. Which you’re already doing.” Starbeat put a hoof on Nova. “I’m sorry, there’s no advice here. The Beat Curse is just horrible and there’s no cure, and the only preventative measure is sheer willpower.”

“…I think I understand you now,” Nova said. “How much pain must you go through?”

“It’s less, now,” Starbeat admitted. “A mixture of Vriska, friends, and getting used to it has mitigated the pain. But not the passion.”

“I’m sorry for all the times I’ve dismissed you, Starbeat.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started blinking. She held herself still. “S-sorry, you should lea-”

Nova kissed her, shutting her up.

“Wh…” Starbeat said a moment later after the kiss had run its full course.

“I don’t feel anything,” Nova said with a sad smile. “But… I think you deserved that. If only once, somepony meeting you halfway.”

“I… er… thanks?”

“I’ll go now. Good luck, Starbeat. Sorry we couldn’t help you.”

“It’s… okay.” Starbeat shook her head. “That was very risky you know.”

“I know,” Nova admitted. “I wasn’t really thinking.”

Starbeat nodded finding herself staring out a window.

There was a genuine smile on her face.

She didn’t feel like she was alone in her struggles anymore.

~~~

Vriska and Jotaro sat on a bench in one of the Hub’s gardens.

Neither of them felt like talking, and that was exactly what they needed. A moment of silence and serenity in a garden. Jotaro because he always liked it this way, Vriska because she decided she needed a moment of doing nothing in silence to get herself to chill out a little.

The two didn’t exchange a word for over an hour.

And yet, they still understood each other and what they were doing.

Jotaro eventually stood up, letting out a contented sigh.

“Figure it out?” Vriska asked.

“Perhaps. Fighting until you can’t fight anymore…”

“…It isn’t worth it,” Vriska finished. “Too many people will miss you. You’ll hurt yourself and others. Etcetera.”

Jotaro turned to Vriska expectantly.

“Yeah. Yeah. I learned stuff too. I’m not always number one. Can we just agree to leave it at that and not talk about our feelings anymore?”

Jotaro let out a short chortle. “Yare yare daze… Of course.”

Vriska gave him the thumbs up. “Good grief… Let’s go to the arcade, big guy.” She pointed in the direction of the arcade. “Time to bond the old fashioned way – over beat ‘em up video games!”

~~~

Pinkie and Flutterfree sat in Sugarcube Corner. Pinkie, for the first time in a few years, had created a dessert at Sugarcube Corner. Her mountain overdose sundae, the size of a pony – covered in cherries, bananas, ice cream, berries, and a truly absurd amount of candy.

Pinkie took a shovel out of her mane and scooped a large scoop into her mouth and grinned. Flutterfree just took a small spoonful, ate it, and smiled. Her bone fractures had been healed with magic, but there was a brace around her midsection because all the flesh was still sore.

“This is nice,” Flutterfree said.

“Yeah, a BLAST from the PAST!” Pinkie chuckled.

“I take it you wanted to talk about something, though?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah… I may be a super duper party pony with lots of friends, but I noticed something. You’re better at being a ‘heart’ than I am.”

“We all have our strengths and weaknesses, Pinkie.”

“It’s something I need to work on, though. Since I’m not keeping things secret, I can be… inconsiderate. Very inconsiderate. I assume that people will want to know what I know to help them get through things, like how I use it. But that’s not how things work. Knowing the things I know doesn’t always help. I just don’t know life without knowing them.”

“Hey, Pinkie, it’s okay. What you know helps save a lot of people.”

“But what about when we’re not in danger? The times when we’re just talking to each other. I hurt everyone.”

“And you were forgiven.”

“I still want to change though. Flutterfree… teach me. If you’re willing to go into my mind and listen to what I think all the time in this crazy sugar-filled skull of mine, I’m willing to learn what I should and should not tell.”

“I’m willing, but there are some things you still don’t tell us,” Flutterfree said.

“Yeah… Some because I have to.” Pinkie looked in the distance. “Others because I know they’ll make you sad.”

Flutterfree put a hoof on Pinkie’s. “If you want me to help, it’d be best if you told me everything you could. It’ll be hard on me, but you’re my friend Pinkie. You’ve sacrificed so much for us. I’m willing to forego a little security.”

Pinkie looked in Flutterfree’s eyes. “You’re sure?”

“Very.”

Pinkie sighed. “Flutterfree… At least one of us is going to die. Probably more.”

Flutterfree sat back. “…I think we all knew that, deep down, eventually one of us wasn’t going to make it back.”

“We aren’t going to be able to stand together at the end. And it haunts me. It always haunts me. There’s going to be so much pain… So much fighting…”

“And because you know that… You’re ready,” Flutterfree said.

“It’ll still hurt.”

“Yes. And you’re right not to just tell everyone about it. But now that you’ve told someone… We can prepare together, Pinkie.” Flutterfree smiled sadly. “If it’s me, I want to help you as much as I can before the tragedy strikes.”

“…Thanks, Flutterfree.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Now, what else?”

Pinkie took a breath. “Well…”

~~~

Eve set Blitz Caliber on the table between her and Nanoha.

Nanoha lifted up Blitz Caliber, tears in her eyes. “…It’s been a long time.”

“It is good to see you, Commander. Raising Heart. Both of you.”

“I’ll get you to Subaru, don’t worry,” Nanoha promised. “She’ll want to see you for some closure.”

“Thank you.”

Nanoha pocketed Blitz Caliber, turning to Eve. “…So, you found Zhui.”

“Yeah,” Eve said. “I wasn't there personally, but one of my teams had to go through it. We found Blitz Caliber there. And… we couldn’t do anything else. It still is what it is.”

Nanoha looked into the distance. “I was the commander of the ship that found Zhui back then. Back when we were a Class 3. We were on a Grand Tour, exploring the multiverse based on a map we had found… That loss… it was one painful to many of us.” She shook her head. “And we still can’t do anything. We should have just done what you did and left it alone. But the team didn’t want to do that. I told them they should do what they thought was right. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“We shouldn’t dwell on past regrets.”

Nanoha smiled. “You’re right… Of course you are. Princess of Friendship indeed.”

Eve rubbed the back of her head nervously. “Yeah…”

“Please tell your team they did good. Because of this, a woman is going to get a piece of her sister back.”

“I’ll be sure to tell them.”

“And Evening?”

“Hmm?”

“Don’t let yourself be disheartened when you lose. It’s one thing to have a bunch of close friends fail. It’s quite another when you do. Make sure to stand by them.”

“I will,” Eve said. “Thanks.”

The two faces of their respective cultures shared a hug and went their separate ways.

~~~

Pinkie, Nova, Jotaro, Vriska, and Flutterfree stood on a hill, watching the sunrise. The wind blew through their hair. Everything was beautiful.

“Our lives are not defined by our failures,” Pinkie decreed, still looking at the sun. “The measure of a life is in what we have accomplished and why we’ve accomplished those things. We fight for the sake of laughter, kindness, redemption, justice, and what is right. We’ve saved so many worlds, so many people, and made so many lives better.”

She turned to her team. “But failures stick out clearly in our minds more than anything else. This probably shouldn’t be, but it is. I want us all to move past this failure and continue to fight – but I don’t want any of us to forget it. The Watchmaker was right about one thing – we were changed by the experience. We were changed for the better. That’s unfair – the people of Zhui didn’t get anything – but it is what it is. So here’s what we do.”

She pointed her hoof to the sky. “We’re going to go out into that multiverse and do better than ever before! Sometimes we will fail just like we did today! But we won’t let that beat us down! We will get back up and fight again! We will stand strong against those who are evil, misguided, or just lost. We will help them if we can, and help those they are hurting.”

“Right!” the four of them called.

“As your Captain, I order you all to be strong! But also to be kind!” Pinkie shouted. “So let’s go back out there!”

“YEAH!”

Pinkie pulled out a dimensional device. “There will be pain. But there will also be joy. Let’s remember both.”

They left the universe onto another adventure…

064 - Starcross Society, Part 1

The universe Q-NR6’ had a primary world that wasn’t terrestrial, but a gas giant comparable in size and gravity to Jupiter. The skies were mostly inhabited by giant, leathery jellyfish creatures that had language and society but cared little for the worlds outside their own beyond idle chit-chat.

What Q-NR6’ had that interested the rest of the multiverse were blocks of chiseled stone that floated at the top of the cloud layer, all conglomerating around a floating temple made of the bricks. This temple was inhabited by human acolytes who had guarded the place for as long as they could remember.

Currently, it was under siege by a translucent green bird composed of flowing ones and zeroes.

Standing between the bird and the temple were not the acolytes, but two ponies and a human. The Captain of this little troop was none other than Lady Rarity, General of Lai in her full eight-legged armor, hammer levitated in her blue magic. She had erected a secondary barrier spell to prevent the coding bird from getting any closer to the temple.

“Lieshy, got anything?”

Lieshy examined the bird from every angle. “I think it’s lost all higher thought and reverted to bestial assaults. Consider smashing.”

“That better not have been spoken in double,” Corona said, currently in her human form, gloves, sunglasses, and all, using a mixture of magic and bending to toss fireballs around Lady Rarity’s shield and into the bird of coding to little effect.

“It wasn’t,” Lieshy confirmed. “I also have nothing to offer so I’m going to cower inside the temple now. Good luck.” She spread her wings and flew off, crashing into the ground because of the double strength gravity. She inched herself the rest of the way to the temple like a bug.

“Lovely,” Corona muttered. “Hey, Rarity, think I can get in there and Empathy this thing?”

“If plan A doesn’t work,” Lady Rarity said.

“I thought plan A already didn’t work?”

“I thought we agreed burning things wasn’t worthy of being called a plan?”

Corona smirked. “True…”

The bird wisened up and used its beak to penetrate Lady Rarity’s barrier. The spirid-unicorn swung her hammer at the avian’s head, the weapon passing right through the sea of green numbers. “It’s figured out how to control its phasing…”

Corona had to use pure telekinesis to keep the bird at bay. “Aren’t we glad I can use magic as a human?”

Lady Rarity rolled her eyes – not that Corona could see that through the armor. She joined Corona’s telekinetic assault on the bird, pushing it back with just the force of their magic.

“…This isn’t going to last very long,” Lady Rarity observed.

“Figured,” Corona muttered, putting a free hand to the side of her glasses. “Olivia? How’s that plan coming?”

“Done!” Olivia shouted, dropping her invisibility cloak. She sat on a block floating separate from the bricks that made up the temple itself, a computer in front of her. She pressed a button and pointed directly at the digital bird with her free hand. A purple burst of light grabbed hold of the digital creature and condensed it into a single stream of code that wormed its way back to Olivia’s computer. “Arriba!”

“Got it?” Corona asked.

“Yep!” Olivia said, jumping off the floating platform, landing a bit too hard on the main temple platform and falling over due to the gravity. “Ugh… The bird is now contained within this digital prison and will stay there for as long as we’ll need. We saved the ancient relic! Go team!”

Lady Rarity slung her hammer over her back – punished by the extreme weight it carried on this world. “Yes… Good job…”

“You should get out of that armor, not going to help anymore.”

“Where am I going to put it?”

Corona blinked. “She has a point there.”

Olivia shrugged. “Then let’s just wrap things up here and move on.”

“I like that idea,” Lady Rarity grunted, forcing herself to turn around. Lieshy and a human in orange robes were walking out of the temple. The human lived here, so he was short and stocky while his muscles were extremely toned and his legs were particularly large.

“I thank you for what you’ve done here today, protecting our store of artifacts,” the man said with a bow. “For payment, you shall be granted access to our vaults.”

“Oh, we get to pick a treasure?” Olivia asked.

“None of the holy relics, but that is not all that we store here,” the man said, gesturing for them to follow him inside.

They entered the temple of chiseled stone, the interior lit only by lanterns held by similar acolytes. They bowed to the four heroes as they passed through, giving them messages of thanks and near reverence. In the back of the temple they found several glowing white artifacts on pillars, surrounding a pile of peculiar objects ranging from a cat of pure gold to a computer chip made of jello.

“Take anything you wish from the pile,” the man said.

“This might take a while,” Olivia said, rubbing her hands together. “There’s so much interesting stuff in here. I mean, look at this!” She held up a phone made out of meat. “What even is this? How hasn’t it rotted? How far can it make calls? So many questions…”

“The answers are lotus born,” Lieshy commented.

“Lovely,” Olivia muttered, placing the phone back down and moving to something else. “Hrm… A crystal ball… A magic card… Oh so much good stuff…”

“It’s not going to take long at all,” Corona said, reaching her hand into the pile and closing it around an object. “Because one of these is much more interesting than the others.”

“Hm?” Lady Rarity said, curious.

Corona held up a small black sphere. “We’ve found a bowling ball.”

Everyone stared at the sphere in Corona’s hands – a sphere with an oily sheen with yellow squares lit up where Corona’s fingers were in contact with it.

“…An original dimensional device!” Lady Rarity declared. “What a find!”

“You bet it is,” Corona said, smirking. “Now that we know a lot more about the multiverse… I bet we can learn a few more things about this device. The Research Division is going to love this. I’m going to love this.” She held it up in the air, her smirk transforming into a grin. “It’s time to see if we can shed light on the first mystery of the multiverse.”

~~~

A few days later, Lady Rarity, Lieshy, and Olivia were walking down the halls of one of Merodi Universalis’s more high-security research locations, known as Aleph Outpost. It was a tremendous facility built in the ground of the Forest universe, only accessible from a very particular point in open space that did not intersect with any planets in any of the main universes. Even then, the actual entrance to Aleph Outpost just looked like a somewhat large oak tree – to get in the Outpost had to let you in from the inside.

Which isn’t to say Aleph Outpost was a secret – just like Area 51s, everyone knew it existed, and as was customary for most Merodi Universalis research the things they studied weren’t classified, they just didn’t want anyone finding the place and getting a hold of the experiments.

The interior of Aleph Outpost was rather drab for the most part – clean metal walls without places to hang any sort of decoration. A few of the offices the trio had passed were decorated with personal memorabilia, but any public location was devoid of any character. The only thing that gave any indication of where they were was the numbers engraved on the walls. LEVEL 9 currently.

As the three trotted along, an unexpected guest met up with them – none other than Rohan Kishibe.

“Oh, how curious running into you three here,” Rohan said, scribbling on his private notepad with a high quality pen. “What brings you to this mysterious outpost?”

Olivia folded her arms. “Why not just read us like books and find out?”

“As much as that would save time and annoyance, I’ve been trying to do that less lately.”

“Not by your choice, I bet.”

“No. Everyone has taken issue, calling it ‘brainwashing’, so I’m going to attempt to learn things the old fashioned way for once. What brings you here?”

“Bowling,” Lieshy commented.

“The newly recovered bowling ball, I see,” Rohan said, glancing up from his notepad for only a second. “I take it they discovered something, then?”

“Probably,” Lady Rarity said, shrugging – an action much easier to achieve now that she wasn’t wearing her armor. “Corona didn’t say why she wanted us here, merely that we needed to come right away.”

“I hope it has something interesting on it,” Olivia said. “I’ve been bored the last week.”

“Like ants,” Lieshy commented, following her comment up with a self-translation. “You’re bored so often it might as well be a common commodity.”

“I got that, I’m not a moron.”

Rohan scribbled more furiously at that remark.

“Are you performing character studies on us, mister Prophet?” Olivia asked.

“You’re not supposed to be saying that aloud,” Rohan pointed out.

“We’re in a secure facility.”

“That’s not classified.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Ladies and gentlemen, Merodi Universalis’ secret weapon – Rohan Kishibe! Imbécil Profesional.”

“Thank you,” Rohan snarked.

“Olivia, don’t try to hack him,” Lady Rarity cautioned.

“I wasn-”

“You were thinking about it. You know he’d just retaliate and write in you that you’d never be able to hack him again, right?”

Olivia facepalmed. “Lovely, I’m being ganged up on.”

“Needs more hippos…” Lieshy mused.

Olivia stared at her.

“That wasn’t double. I just feel like a hippo would do wonders for this conversation.”

“You aren’t even listening are you?”

Lieshy shrugged. “There it is, room 37-19-B9.” Lieshy walked up to the three-inch-thick metal doors and knocked. “See you around, Rohan.”

“This is where I’m going as well,” Rohan said, pocketing his notebook.

“Huh?” Lieshy turned to him. “Wh-”

The doors opened, revealing a circular room the size of a larger living room though without couches. The walls had niches dug into them, each depression having space for an artifact of some sort. A few drew their attention – Siron’s Staff, the small Rune of Elysium, a gun with a barrel that pointed backward, and a strange lump of black eldritch matter. Each of them floated in the middle of their enclosures, held by some kind of levitating spell. The center of the room had a workstation surrounded by wheeled chairs.

Two individuals sat at the table – O’Neill and the Overhead of the Research Division, an orange Hessonite Gem who went by Sciganite. Behind them, the unicorn-form Corona was levitating the bowling ball, examining it closely.

“Welcome,” Sciganite said. “Please, sit down.”

The three members of Lady Rarity’s team and Rohan sat at the other side of the table. They couldn’t help but be slightly intimidated by Sciganite’s size – despite being nowhere near the mountainous figure of the Diamonds.

“So… You figured out how it works?” Olivia asked.

Corona turned to them and smiled, setting the bowling ball down on the table. “Yes, actually. Give me a moment…” She levitated a labcoat that was too large for her onto herself, buttoning it up completely. She activated the transformation matrix bracelet she kept on her hoof, transforming herself into a human, the labcoat just large enough to cover everything important. She put on a pair of gloves and picked up the bowling ball. “The device is intended to be used by individuals with hands, first of all. While we have gotten it to trigger with telekinesis, it’s hard to get the magic to do what we want when there aren’t any actual buttons on the thing. But to demonstrate…” She held the ball in a particular configuration with her thumb and forefinger, using her free fingers to give it a command. In an instant, she was gone – there were no flashy colors, portals, or anything aside from a small rush of air. A few seconds later she was back with a shroom shake from the Mushroom World thanks to the wonders of in-universe stargate travel. “Like so. We’ve already got blueprints to make more of these things – with a significantly weaker power source, of course. It’ll be good for stealth missions.”

“How does it work?” Olivia said, curious.

“Well, it’s the basis for all our dimensional technology, so it basically punches a hole in reality just like everything else. But it works a little differently – by typing in the correct sequence, it can find new universes with relative ease, somewhat like a grinder. We aren’t entirely sure how to control what sort of universes it finds yet, but we’re sure it has some way to navigate areas of the multiverse it doesn’t even have coordinates for.”

“Nice,” Lieshy said. “Why did we have to come here for that? And why is book-boy here?”

Corona frowned. “Yeeeah… You’re probably not going to like this.”

Sciganite cleared her throat. “We have been watching Rohan’s powers closely ever since we discovered them, as I’m sure you’re already aware. We decided to perform an experiment with his abilities to see if we could answer some of our burning questions. He wrote a story in which you four fought a bird made of code and, as a result, found a bowling ball.”

Rohan took out several pieces of paper that depicted Lady Rarity and company in manga form, fighting the bird of code. “One of my better works,” he said. “You’ll find the bird has quite the tragic backstory.”

Olivia stared at the art, blinking. “Riiiight, so…. I think I should be angry about this but I’m still processing.”

Corona chuckled. “I was livid when I found out. But, well, it worked. We have the bowling ball and are learning a lot from it.”

“I’m curious,” Lady Rarity said, glancing from Sciganite to Rohan. “How far do you plan on testing Rohan’s abilities as a Prophet? Dictating what happens to people by way of a story… That’s controlling and questionable. Even if it is secret, it still reeks to my nose.”

O’Neill answered that question. “Aside from the stories that have nothing to do with us, Rohan’s under strict orders on what he can and can’t write. He doesn’t get to kill anybody. He has to come to us with a premise first before he completes a work – or we give him the premise and see if he can write a story off of it.”

“From what little we know, it appears the ‘story’ doesn’t actually take effect until Rohan declares it done,” Sciganite added. “Though the timing of the event is largely in flux. He wrote this story two months ago.”

Corona nodded. “Rohan’s stories helped us find something new here.” She plucked the Rune of Elysium out of its compartment and weighed it in her palm. “Maybe he can help us uncover the mysteries behind other artifacts or secrets. We have no idea what this Rune does, but we know it’s important.” She pocketed the Rune, freeing her hands to gesture at another artifact. “Then there’s Siron’s Staff – where did it come from? How does it relate to other Jujus? Can we find Earth C with it? We don’t know.”

“Is it possible that, by explaining something, Rohan becomes the reason it is that way?” Lieshy asked.

Sciganite put a hand to her head. “That is one of the questions we keep asking ourselves and, as of yet, have no way to test it. Or even formulate a good theory. The extent of Prophet powers are a mystery.”

“Have him write a story about himself,” Olivia suggested.

“Already done,” Sciganite said. “Thus Spoke Rohan Kishibe. Some of them came true. Others didn’t. What makes a story ‘acceptable’ or not is still up in the air.”

“Sounds like chaos.”

Lieshy stared at herself on one of the pages of Rohan’s manga. “I’m not that fat.”

“Artistic license,” Rohan declared.

“Soliloquy.”

“…Nani?”

Lieshy just fixed him with a knowing smile.

Olivia flipped through the rest of the manga. “Hrm… Hey, Rohan, think you ca-”

“Don’t give him ideas,” O’Neill muttered.

Olivia rolled her eyes but fell silent.

“So this was a successful ‘Prophet powers’ experiment,” Lady Rarity said. “Very interesting and a little concerning. But there’s more, I can tell – O’Neill wouldn’t be here if that was all it was.”

Corona smiled. “This bowling ball has a record within it of every universe it has been to since its creation. We were able to trace a path back to the place of its creation.”

“And…?” Lieshy asked.

“There’s no direct connection to it. In fact, best as we can tell from the data in the device, it’d take thousands of jumps to get there.” Corona rubbed the back of her head. “That’s a bit much even for my custom device to tie together.”

“And that’s where I come in,” O’Neill said. “The Enterprise is going on a little trip to the depths of the Q-Sphere. We’re going to crew up and go where no man or pony has gone before and find out where this sphere originated. Call it… a road trip.”

“And you want us on this little trek?” Lady Rarity asked.

O’Neill nodded. “Well, everyone except Rohan. He has to stay here, protected.”

Rohan grunted in clear annoyance at this fact.

“Regardless, I’m going to call this a vacation,” O’Neill declared. “Thor will take over the military while we’re gone – not like we have any wars anyway – and we’re going to solve a mystery.”

Olivia grinned. “I really like the sounds of this. I’m in.”

Lady Rarity shrugged. “I don’t have any authority… Though for what it’s worth, I wish to come as well.”

O’Neill rubbed his hands together. “You better get ready campers, we leave in two days. We’ll be in the wilderness! No cell service, no access to modern conveniences, and no Internet.”

“The horror!” Olivia gasped.

“We will be alone in the deepest depths of the Q-Sphere, roughing it. So prepare yourselves!”

Lady Rarity nodded. “If we left today, we would be prepared.”

“This spider does not speak for me,” Olivia blurted. “I need time.”

“And the Enterprise needs a touch up,” O’Neill admitted. “She’s not that old yet, but she sure ain’t a young ship anymore.”

“But we’re going,” Corona declared. “Going to explore further than anyone else…”

“Thousands of jumps seems like a bit much,” Lieshy observed.

“There are probably shorter paths,” Corona admitted. “But it’s so far out of the area of the multiverse we have mapped there’s not really any way for us to find that path. We just have to take the long way. Unless you want to wait for us to figure out how to properly use the ‘connection highways’ in the Strands.”

“Pass.”

“Thought so.”

“Let’s tell Toph where we’re going to be,” Lady Rarity said. “How long do you think we’ll be out of contact?”

“A month or two,” Corona said. “We might procrastinate if we find an interesting universe along the way, but otherwise we’ll just perform scans and keep moving through universe after universe. We should be able to get through about a hundred a day. Though we have no idea what the time dilation will be like out there.”

“I’ll tell her it’ll be ‘a significant amount of time’.”

“Better hope she doesn’t ask for specifics.”

“Indeed.”

O’Neill chuckled at this.

~~~

The Enterprise sat in the middle of one of Equis Cosmic’s shipyards, having just received the tune-up it had very much needed. Some of the older technology had been replaced with newer gadgets and the hull now had an absurd shine. It was at just the wrong angle, reflecting a floodlight right into a window where O’Neill and Cosmo were standing.

“Too shiny,” O’Neill muttered, hand over his eyes.

“I think it’s beautiful,” Cosmo said. She looked like her old, normal self, but O’Neill knew the shape of a regal purple alicorn was a lie. She had never been able to fully recover from the Bloodbath, eternally cursed to be a crystal skeleton. Her condition may not have been a secret, but O’Neill knew it was difficult for her. She didn’t feel alive anymore – she had no need to breathe, to sleep, to eat, or anything.

She was a strong mare, to put it simply.

“Beauty can be very distracting,” O’Neill said, countering her earlier statement.

“The Raritys know that fact very well,” Cosmo chuckled. “There’s been more than one that’s tried to seduce me.”

“As Mattie said once, ‘Raritys are corruptible’.”

“She’s said that a lot more than once.”

“True…” he leaned back against a wall. “You want to come, don’t you?”

“It’s been a long, long time since I had reason to go explore. But I promised I’d never leave my ponies alone for long again – shortly after we exterminated the aliens and Equis settled down, I went to explore the galaxy. When I had returned, the ponies had started a civil war. It took a lot to fix that.” Cosmo shook her head. “That’s essentially ancient history… Even the oldest alicorns still alive were young when that happened.”

“You have quite the time abyss, don’t you?”

“In many ways, yes. I am not as old as the Asgard, but their entire race got to live for absurdly long times thanks to their cloning. Those of us who are immortal here are in a strict minority.”

O’Neill gestured to himself. “You’ve got plenty of good company in this minority.”

“You know, eventually we’re going to find a way to mass-produce immortality,” Cosmo said. “There’s too many tales of Fountains of Youth and other such things to just dismiss. I’m somewhat surprised we haven’t found one already.”

“Jenny probably has one.”

“And our relationship with her and her people could be described as ‘barely on speaking terms’.”

“Eeyep.”

The two’s conversation fell silent. The glint of the Enterprise finally moved off the window they were standing at.

“Ah, there you are,” Princess Luna of Equis Vitis said, walking up to O’Neill. “I checked the Enterprise. I thought you were always on that ship.”

O’Neill shrugged. “Guess I felt like watching it from the outside today. You have something for me?”

“You need to be careful,” Luna said. “I have sensed the Stars in multiple universes shifting with unease ever since you announced this little trip. They – as always – refuse to tell me or Starswirl anything about what’s going on.”

“Not calling it off.”

“I know you aren’t, General. I just want you to be cautious. Something’s going to happen out there.”

“No surprise to me.”

Cosmo nodded. “It is the furthest journey we have ever made, regardless of how you measure. Of course something monumental is going to happen in the journey.”

“All of us talk like Pinkie these days,” O’Neill muttered.

“It’s a welcome change,” Luna said. “It adds a bit of certainty to life that wasn’t there before.”

“That may not be a good thing, in the end,” Cosmo observed.

Luna nodded slowly. “I… really don’t have anything else to tell you, O’Neill. Apologies for being so vague and mysterious.”

“That’s how it is with Stars,” he said, stretching his back. “Welp, I’ve got to address the crew before we head out. Any last minute disasters that’ll keep us from going?”

“Aradia has already cleared the internal timelines of the major universes,” Luna reported. “In addition, our neighbors are quiet.”

“Good enough for me,” O’Neill said, pressing a hand to a wall-mounted screen. “Thor, you have the keys to the army. Send me back to my ship.”

“I shall guard these universes well, O’Neill.”

“Yeah yeah, I kn-” he was teleported back to the Enterprise in the middle of his sentence.

Cosmo raised an eyebrow. “Thor, you do that on purpose don’t you?”

“I will neither confirm nor deny such wild accusations.”

~~~

O’Neill sat in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise, in the universe they were going to use as the starting point of their little adventure. It was no coincidence that this universe was the one Celestia City currently occupied. Blumiere and Vivian had called them up just before they left, the two currently on the main screen.

“I wish you luck in your travels,” Blumiere said, tipping his hat. “I am somewhat envious of the curious things that you will find.”

“If only you didn’t have a city to run.”

“If only,” Blumiere chuckled.

Corona poked her head – currently a unicorn’s – next to O’Neill’s. “Vivian, you could still come join us. Whaddaya say, for old time’s sake?”

Vivian shook her head. “Sorry, I’ve got too much going on here – and I wouldn’t want to leave for more than a few days anyway. This city is my responsibility now, the unknown is yours.”

“Good luck keeping all those Sweeties wrangled.”

Vivian laughed. “I’ll need it.”

Blumiere checked his watch. “It looks like it is time for you to head out. Please come back in one piece, General.”

“You can bet your monocle on it,” O’Neill said with a smirk.

Blumiere pressed a button, causing farewell fireworks to go off all around Celestia City. “Enjoy your vacation.”

O’Neill smirked. “Oh, I will.” He turned to the Enterprise’s current pilot and pointed. “Engage.”

The Enterprise jumped to the first of thousands of universes.

“Right,” O’Neill said, getting out of his chair. “It’s time for that meeting I talked about earlier. You science types check this place out for a few minutes and then jump to the next one. We’ve got a lot to get through.” He walked off the bridge to the private briefing room, taking his place at the head of the table. Corona, Lady Rarity, Olivia, and Lieshy took up one side of the table. The other was occupied by prominent members of the Enterprise’s general crew – Mauve the unicorn, Hermirod the Asgard, and Lapis-Vee the Gem. The last seat was occupied by a representative of the Sparkle Census, a moth-pony who went by Twitter. Her antennae continually twitched in a decidedly distracting manner.

O’Neill folded his hands. “This is going to be a very long trip and we’re going to have to make do with what we have. We’re not planning on engaging in any combat, but if there’s one thing I know it’s that plans never survive. To that end we have the Enterprise completely stocked with both the standard Tau’ri soldiers and Gem fighters. We still have a limited number, so we can’t be throwing them out like candy at anything that faces us. We have enough energy reserves to power this ship twenty times over, so many replacement parts we’ve completely filled all our lockers, and enough food to feed everyone for a year. That’s not even counting the stuff we can produce magically.”

“That only sounds like a lot,” Lapis-Vee said.

“Exactly. If everything goes according to plan, we have way more than enough materials to complete the mission. But we need to prepare for the worst that might happen. Don’t think ‘we have food to spare’ or ‘we can afford to risk a fighter’. Those statements might be true, but on that one day we can’t leave a universe and are forced to run from a galactic superpower, we might wish we had just one more fighter or one more energy capsule.”

The other eight at the table nodded in understanding.

“Glad we’ve come to this understanding. Now, aside from those few universes where something’s going to go wrong and when we get to the end of our journey, this trip is going to be boring as all hell. We’re camping in the wilderness. This ship is going to become your home for the next month or so. Get used to doing a whole lot of not much, even if you’re one of the scientists scanning every single world we come across. For those of you who normally serve on the Enterprise, the rigid protocol we follow will be considerably relaxed to make sure nobody goes stark raving mad from all the regimenting. For those of you who don’t, don’t feel like you need to conform to the militaristic way the people here act much of the time.”

Corona nodded. “Gotcha. Don’t treat this like a military unit, treat it like a neighborhood.”

“Exactly. And for the love of my sanity, don’t antagonize your neighbors.” O’Neill put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “I do not want to deal with interpersonal drama on this ship.”

“But you know you will.”

“Yes. I’m asking all of you, as the ‘leaders’ of this little community we’re growing here, to keep all that to a minimum. Let’s all get along for one month.”

“Yes sir,” Lapis-Vee said. “…Am I supposed to call you sir, still, sir?”

“Do whatever you want. But don’t call me Jack.”

“Whatever you say, Jack,” Olivia said.

“I still have the authority to toss you in the brig if you annoy me,” O’Neill reminded her.

“I could get out.”

“And then I could actually charge you with a crime when we get back.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “You’re no fun.”

Mauve looked at Olivia like he couldn’t believe the words that had come out of her mouth. Olivia winked at him.

“Anything else?” Twitter asked.

“There is a chance this trek goes wrong and we have to turn back,” O’Neill said. “Prepare for everything to go up in flames at any moment.”

“Cheery thought.”

“If you’re prepared, you’ll be ready to act faster. And if you’re expecting it you get to rub the fact that you were right in everyone’s face.”

Twitter nodded. “I see…”

“Anyway, I bet they’re wrapping up their scans of this universe now,” O’Neill said.

“Probably not, it’ll take about fifteen minutes,” Corona said.

O’Neill sighed. “This is going to be a long trip…” He paused a moment, looking at them in all. “Any questions or concerns?”

Hermirod raised a hand. “What is the policy for first contact on this journey?”

“Try not to make contact,” O’Neill answered. “We don’t need to spend several days trying to forge relations with a people. Unless they see us, we’re not messing with anything. We’re not even dropping beacons for the USM and University unless we find a special reason to.”

Hermirod nodded.

“Anything else?”

After a few seconds of silence, Olivia raised her hand. “I’ve got one. Twitter, do you realize what your name means?”

“…Oh please no…”

Olivia held up her phone, showing a version of Twitter.com with a tweet about Twitter the Twilight on it. “We’re still connected to the Internet, you know. Not that far away yet.”

Twitter sighed. “I am so tired of this joke…”

“I know!”

Twitter looked to O’Neill. “Can you throw her in the brig for this?”

“I don’t think so.”

Twitter rolled her eyes. “Great…”

Olivia started to get ideas. “Oh I think I’ll make a local Twitter for the Enterprise… Purple themed and covered with memes about you…”

“Olivia stop tormenting the foreign representative,” Lady Rarity said.

“…Fine. For now.”

O’Neill cracked his knuckles. “In that case, meeting adjourned. Prepare for the long haul, everyone.”

~~~

It only took three days of travel before they were no longer seeing pony worlds anymore. There was a time of mixed unusual universes which seemed to have no rhyme or reason, but they soon moved into a cluster of universes dominated by robotic lifeforms that could transform into other shapes – usually vehicles. They had encountered a few of these universes in the ‘pony cluster’, but had never realized there could be this many.

The path they took through the ‘transformer cluster’ must have been the long one, because it took a week to pass through it. Readings they had gathered suggested it was smaller than the pony cluster, but they were taking a decidedly zig-zag path through the cluster. Whoever had used the bowling ball before it ended up in the temple had apparently spent a lot of time in this cluster.

The Enterprise currently found itself in a ‘cat cluster’ dominated by worlds inhabited by sapient cats. This was only their second day in it.

The crew, for the most part, had stopped caring. Ever since they’d left the transformer cluster there hadn’t been any action because on average the technology base of all the cats was very primitive.

So Olivia had declared a game night, bringing out the biggest mess of a fighting game Merodi Universalis had to offer – Multiversal Heroes 2. Up to sixteen players at once. The developers of the game were clearly insane not only with what they wanted their game to handle, but also with how much research they went through to get movesets right.

At the moment, only two players remained standing in front of the representation of an Eldritch Embodiment universe. Olivia, who was playing as Jotaro, and Hermirod, who was playing as a blue-tinted skin of Corona.

“Get the me with the ora ora,” Corona said – currently in her human form. “Do it. Nothing can escape the ora ora time stop combo.”

Hermirod cleared his throat. “Nova with a correctly timed block, Eve with Seraphim, Toph under certain circumstances, a-“

“Nobody likes a math geek, Hermirod,” Olivia muttered, unleashing the ora ora time stop combo on Hermirod’s Corona. The virtual blue unicorn fell to the ground, unable to move. Olivia pushed her off the edge, satisfied with the way the combo turned out.

Time resumed, and Hermirod’s Corona fell down into the infinite pit of darkness…

And then the Corona and Jotaro switched places.

“Q-qué!?” Olivia blurted, echoing the virtual Jotaro’s “NANI!?”

“Achieving a replacement teleport spell is a complex procedure,” Hermirod stated, stretching his arms. “It is a simple feat for me.”

Olivia threw her controller to the ground. “Bah!”

Corona sighed. “Well… I guess I still won, in a way.”

“You were the first one out,” Lapis-Vee reminded her. “You really don’t know how to play Pinkie.”

“It’s really complicated when your attacks depend on how close you are to parts of the interface!”

“I can imagine,” Rohan said, walking into the room.

“Oh, hey Rohan,” Corona said.

Then she processed what she’d just said.

“ROHAN!?” Corona blurted, standing bolt upright. “HOW DID YOU GET HERE?!”

Lady Rarity looked up from her book, narrowing her eyes. “You’re supposed to be back home…”

Rohan bowed with a smirk. “I am a stowaway. Apologies, but I just couldn’t let the fruits of my work be performed without my presence. They’re probably in a panic back at the Research Division wondering where I’ve gone.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you’re not supposed to be here!” Corona blurted.

“Nope. But I can’t exactly go back now, can I?” Rohan smirked. “Too far along.”

Corona really wanted to punch him. Instead she just pulled out her phone. “Hey, O’Neill? We have a stowaway. It’s Rohan. Yeah, that’s what I said.”

O’Neill teleported to the game room, glaring at Rohan. “Do you have any idea how stupid this is?”

Rohan pursed his lips. “Perhaps…”

“Having you out this far could make for a serious breach of security, not to mention a threat to your safety.”

“Please, I can handle myself and you know it.”

“I’m still going to throw you in the brig.”

“You won’t keep me there forever.”

“Bah. We’ll see how stubborn I can be.” He grabbed Rohan and they teleported away, presumably to the brig.

Olivia chuckled. “I wonder what sort of creative punishment O’Neill is going to think of later…”

“Live readings of fanfics of his work?” Twitter suggested.

Olivia looked at her and blinked. “…You have some.”

Twitter rubbed the back of her head. “Er… yes. I have an entire folder of it. Some good, but I don’t think we care about those. I’m sure the bad ones would work quite well.”

“Send those to O’Neill, stat,” Olivia ordered. “I’m going to record the whole thing…”

“You’re a fan of Rohan’s work?” Lady Rarity asked Twitter.

Twitter nodded. “Yeah. Say what you will about his attitude and demeanor, he is an excellent storyteller. If you like action, anyway.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “And giant birds.”

“…What?”

“Forget I said anything. Next round. I’m going to play as Rohan so that, when I lose horribly, it’ll at least feel satisfying.”

She proceeded to win with Rohan.

“…I have mixed feelings about this,” Corona muttered, folding her arms.

~~~

Time passed…

Rohan suffered, but was eventually allowed to walk around free so long as he didn’t use Heaven’s Door.

And then nothing happened.

They passed through cluster after cluster of universes. Occasionally there was a spacefaring world, but they never stayed long. Any firefights that broke out were easy to put down. They didn’t run into any multiversal civilizations, which was odd, but given the 99.99% metric of unconnected universes, not all that impressive.

They had just passed through a cluster of Mushroom Worlds.

There were only thirty worlds left on the list. They would get to the end today.

Lady Rarity’s Team, O’Neill’s higher crew, Twitter, and Rohan were all on the bridge, watching the number count down.

Twenty-nine.

“What do you think it’s going to be?” Corona asked, currently living her life as a unicorn.

“A dead society, I’ll bet,” Olivia said. “One who’s devices got spread around the multiverse after they fell.”

“A bunch of secret agent types,” O’Neill answered. “They never want to be found, but they want to find everyone else in a sort of hypocrisy.”

“Maybe just a society of crystal people and unicorns,” Corona suggested. “After all, that’s what we saw on Equis Vitis back then. The Enchantress and the Man of Light. They’re part of this.”

“But they could have just found the device as well,” Lapis-Vee said. “For all we know they were just loose travelers, always drifting from place to place.”

“Perhaps…” Corona said. “Perhaps…” She turned to O’Neill. “Think we can speed this up a bit? We have data on thousands of worlds now. Jumping past a couple won’t hurt.”

O’Neill nodded. “We’ll pass back over later. Let’s find out what lies at the end of this rainbow.” He smirked. “Jump.”

Twenty-eight.

“Jump.”

Twenty-seven

“Ju-”

“Proximity Alert!” Hermirod announced, his fingers flying quickly across a console. “Twenty unidentified objects, identifiable only as balls of plasma. They’re moving right toward us in a circular formation.” Hermirod put them on the screen. Each of the twenty balls of light looked like a different colored star, though they were far too small to be even a false star. They moved with mathematical precision in their circular pattern, bearing down on the Enterprise.

“Jump!”

“Dimensional interference!” Hermirod reported.

“Evasive maneuvers – try to hail them!”

The Enterprise activated its shields and tried to spin out of the ring of oncoming sparks. but they followed the ship with alarming precision.

“No response!”

O’Neill ground his teeth. “Any signs of actual hostility?”

“Besides pursuit, none.”

“Not firing until they do,” O’Neill said. “But just in ca-”

The Enterprise shook. Every light and screen within the ship went out, devoid of power.

“…Report?” O’Neill asked.

“The power’s out,” Olivia said.

“Thank you captain obvious,” O’Neill remarked.

“You’re welcome.”

“I can’t light my horn,” Corona said, tapping her bony extremity. “I think we’re inside a nullifier of some sort. That… Well that’s impressive but also terrifying.”

Lapis-Vee flexed her wrist. “I’m still able to project my body…” She generated a small cloud of water around her hand. “And I still have hydrokinesis.”

“I wonder how it knows what to nullify…” Corona muttered.

“Does it matter? We’re trapped in it,” Lieshy said. “Who knows what’s happening to us? For all we know we’re being boarded!”

O’Neill walked to a wall and opened a secret cupboard. “I’ve got standard kinetic weapons here for everyone that’ll work regardless of anything they do to the magic. Arm yourselves. We’re going to start sweeping the ship.” He tossed rifles to anyone who knew how to use them.

Corona checked a bracelet she had under her boot. “Huh… I think my transformation matrix still works… Perhaps it can’t remove magic from enchanted objects?”

“That would explain why I still function,” Lapis-Vee said. “I’m technically nothing more than an enchanted crystal computer.”

“We need to head to the Rod,” Mauve said. “It should still work.”

“I need a shirt or something,” Corona said. “Unless you want me walking around naked with a gun.”

Olivia rolled her eyes, taking an extra shirt out of her pack. “Told you I needed to carry this around.”

Corona changed to human form, grabbing a gun from O’Neill. “A little big…” she commented on the shirt.

“Well I didn’t want to also carry around pants. You seriously need to alter that transformation spell to include clothes.”

“Eh. Usually not an issue. Plus that’d mean I got to wear the same outfit all the time, who does that?”

“You did. Your entire time in high school, almost.”

“…What was wrong with us?”

“Ka,” Rohan stated. “Character designs needed to be consistent.”

“Enough,” O’Neill said, disarming the safety on his rifle. “We’re heading to the rod to cast a spell. It better b-”

The Enterprise’s power returned. The lights all came back on, magic resurged, and the screens came to life with a large number of error messages. The main screen no longer displayed a star field with menacing lights, but instead the interior of a metallic box. The only defining feature of this box was a round symbol of a four-pointed star with a deep X engraved into it.

A mechanical voice came from the communications channel. “You have trespassed in a universe belonging to the Class 2 Civilization known as the Starcross Society. If you do not know what this means, expect to be returned to your universe of origin without incident shortly. If you do know what this means, you will be held here until your trial concludes, at which point you will be informed of what the terms of release are, if any. Do not attempt to escape prior to this. Keeping you alive is a courtesy. If you prove yourselves to be trouble, you will be terminated. This is an automated message, do not attempt to reply.”

The feed terminated.

“Isn’t this a barrel of fun,” O’Neill deadpanned. “Hermirod, report.”

“We are no longer in the universe we were just in,” Hermirod reported. “And our dimensional drive is still disabled, though everything else works.”

“The Starcross Society…” Corona said. “We’ve been warned about these people numerous times.”

“We know nothing about them, though,” Lieshy pointed out. “The Stars fear them, but otherwise nobody has ever heard of them.”

“Apparently they made or own the bowling balls,” Twitter observed.

“They want us to stay here and wait,” Lady Rarity said. “The question is, should we?”

Mauve shook his head. “Did you hear that qualifier? ‘terms of release, if any.’ There’s a chance they flat out won’t let us go!”

“And we weren’t given any time frame,” O’Neill added. “I’m not just going to sit here forever while they decide what to do with us. For all we know our little ‘capture’ is put on a queue that’s several years long…”

“So, escape,” Lady Rarity said. “I agree, the question is how. We can’t escape from this dimension with our drive, and I’m willing to bet this box we’re in won’t take kindly to being shot at.”

Olivia looked up from her console. “I’ve got no receptacles I can even hack into. The message came from a buoy in the box walls that only activates when another universe taps into it, as far as I can tell. Beyond the box, I’ve got nothing. Our scans think the box is all there is in this universe.”

“That might be,” Hermirod said. “They did say they were Class 2. They would likely have access to universal manipulation technology.”

“…Can we fight a Class 2?” Mauve asked.

“Definitely not. But we can run,” O’Neill said, thinking about their options. “Let’s move to the Rod station. We already know enchanted objects get past their nullifiers, we might be able to use it to get out. Create a dimensional portal without the drive.”

“That’s not going to be easy…” Mauve pointed out. “Especially if they’re jamming the dimensional signals.”

O’Neill furrowed his brow. “We’re still going to have to try.” He pressed a few buttons on the wall and teleported most of them to the rod controls, leaving only the bare necessity of required crew members on the bridge. “Mauve, do any of the dimensional spells work?”

Mauve pressed a few buttons with his telekinesis, but eventually he had to shake his head. “Nothing. They are definitely jamming.”

Olivia walked up to the console, coding some spells. “Let’s see… the dimensional fabric is too stable. They’ve got it locked…” She tried prodding a few things and experimenting. “Well, if there is a way out of this by hacking magic, I’m going to have to go at it for a few hours.” She connected her gloves to the console and got to work, scanning for everything she could and looking for loopholes. “There’s got to be some way they detect what we’re doing…”

Corona snapped her fingers. “Rohan, paper. I’ve got an idea.”

“Did you just assume I carry paper around everywhere?”

“Yes, I did. Now hand it over.”

Rohan, disgruntled, took out a sheet of white printer paper. Corona took it, and with her other hand summoned a pen from the aether. She began to scribble magical designs. “Olivia, check the Nova Drive.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Call it a hunch.”

Olivia shrugged, pulling up the controls for the Nova Drive. “Don’t know why you’d want to look at that obsolete piece of-” she blinked. “Holy…”

“What?” O’Neill asked.

“The Nova Drive… It’s detecting a Star-trail!” Olivia put a hand to her head. “You know, the magical connections Stars have with each other that Nova figured out how to use for FTL travel before I even showed up? Hyperdrive and all other FTL methods are much more efficient… But I’m detecting a trail here.”

“Can we use it?” O’Neill asked, glancing at what Corona was doing and quickly deciding whatever she was drawing was far too complicated for him to make sense of.

Olivia scrambled through screen after screen of the Nova Drive’s scans. “Hrm… Hermirod, teleport down to the Nova Drive and start performing the long-overdue maintenance. We might have something here.”

Hermirod nodded, activating the teleporter and disappearing with Lapis-Vee.

Olivia flew through more and more information. “The Star-trail isn’t normal… I can’t detect a point of origin or an endpoint... Or even a direction, merely that it’s here.”

“That’s because it’s not going through space, it’s going across dimensions,” Corona said, putting her pen down. “All we have to do is transform the Nova Drive to be able to accept Star-trails that cross universes. It’s how a Star would become ‘one with themselves’ when they were still a society, so it should be possible…”

Olivia looked over at Corona’s magic blueprint. Had she had access to a fruit smoothie, she would have spat it out. “Corona! That’s… Absurdly complicated, even for you!”

“What can I say? Inspiration hit,” Corona said, grinning. “I think I have the spell we need the rod to cast right here. We won’t use the standard dimensional drive at all, we’re going to tap into this Star-trail and ride it like the Nova Drive would in realspace. Just have to fool the Nova Drive into thinking it is going through real space, even though it’s not. Well, and we have to be able to find the ‘direction’ of the Star-trail in the middle of translation, but this spell can do that.”

Mauve looked over the spell designs. “…You earned that PhD, didn’t you?”

“Yeah…” Olivia said, staring at the spell. “That’s almost too good.”

“How so?”

“The chances that you just think up the perfect spell with the perfect hunch at the perfect time? I- Rohan, did you do this?”

Rohan held up his hands. “I have not done anything, I assure you. Though it does smell of ka to me.”

“Hrm…” Olivia said, narrowing her eyes. “All right, let’s go with it. It sounds like a good idea. We get out of the box via this new method of translation and then we book it back home.”

“Beg Nanoha to stop them from killing us,” O’Neill added. “Don’t forget that.”

“They might not pursue.”

“They probably will.”

Corona looked to O’Neill. “If we’re not scanning any universes and we use the dimensional drive’s ‘overdrive’ setting, we could be back in a couple hours right?”

“We could be back in an instant if we didn’t have to charge up power,” O’Neill reminded her.

“We’ll need every mage at the dimensional drive, then,” Corona said. “Mauve, you too – I’ll run the rod.”

Mauve nodded.

“Plan made!” Olivia declared.

O’Neill smirked. “One: jump out of box along Star-trail. Two: run like hell.”

Twitter put a hoof to her chin. “I don’t see any issues with this plan… I give it the approval of the Sparkle Census, inasmuch as I have that authority.”

“Noted,” O’Neill said, touching a console on the wall, careful only to use the internal speakers. “Attention crew of the Enterprise! We are going to try to get out of this pickle. Everyone who can produce a lot of magic or energy of any kind, head to the dimensional drive room, we’re going to need a lot of juice. Anyone else, take your battle stations.” O’Neill turned to Corona. “The rest of us are heading back to the bridge. You have it up here?”

Corona nodded. “I’ve got this.”

“Good. Olivia?”

“I’m going to the main computer room for a direct uplink,” Olivia said, disconnecting herself from the rod controls. “Corona, your spell is already uploaded in here. Make adjustments as you see fit.”

“Got it.”

Lady Rarity chuckled. “You know, I don’t feel like I’m in charge of my own team right now.”

“Things happen,” Lieshy said.

“I’ll be with the dimensional drive,” Lady Rarity said. “You watch O’Neill, mmkay?”

Lieshy nodded. In a bunch of teleports, everyone scrambled to the best places they could find to be helpful. Everyone was ready for everything to go wrong.

Corona realized she still had the gun O’Neill had given her. She realized that was probably a good thing. Setting it to the side, her fingers began to fly across the rod’s controls. She fine-tuned the design. She was a fair way in when she realized Twitter was still there.

“Oh… You don’t have anywhere to be, do you?” Corona asked.

“Not really. I think I’ll stay here,” Twitter said. Her antennae could apparently conduct magic, given how she had begun to press a few keys with her telekinesis. “I know of a few Sparkle Census tricks in spell construction.”

Corona nodded. “Thanks. I’ll use whatever I can get my hands on…”

~~~

Ten minutes later, O’Neill received word that the spell was ready.

“ALL RIGHT!” he announced. “EVERYONE, PREPARE YOURSELVES! The moment the dimensional drive can move, punch it!”

Corona activated the spell. The Enterprise’s Spectral Rod went aglow with every color.

“Warning: the system has detected an alarming surge in power. This is a reminder to not attempt to escape, or the consequences will be di-”

The Nova Drive picked up the spell, activating fully. The structure of the Enterprise flattened with the sudden special distortion, angling through reality sideways. A rush of rust-red energy passed the ship along the outside, blocking the sight of everything through the windows. They slid through the universe sideways, coming out the other end in a new universe – one without a box.

The clouds of magic rust cleared and the Enterprise appeared fully within a universe devoid of everything save a single crimson red Star. They sat adrift.

“Why aren’t we leaving the universe?” O’Neill demanded.

The voice of Hermirod came over the comms. “That spell scrambled the dimensional drive. We’re working on fixing it – shouldn’t be much longer.”

“They’ll be chasing us!”

“Then prepare for a combat interaction.”

“Arm weapons!” O’Neill burted. “Shields, drone, rod, all of it. This could get rough!”

“WHY WOULD IT GET ROUGH?” the Star spoke into their minds.

“Ah, right, one of you,” O’Neill said. “Look, we used your multiversal connection to escape imprisonment from some Starcross Society. We’re going to run before they can catch up to us.”

“Apologies if this upsets your solitude,” Lieshy added.

“NOT AT ALL. MY SOLITUDE IS NOT AS ABSOLUTE AS YOU MAY BELIEVE. I DO HAVE MULTIVERSAL CONNECTIONS TO ALL INSTANCES OF ME, AFTER ALL.”

O’Neill looked at the Star closer – it wasn’t just red, it had purple fringes of magic energy at the tips of its flames.

“Wait, hold on,” Olivia called over the comms. “You’re in connection to all other instances of yourself? I thought the Stars only did that when they were a multiversal power!”

“THAT IS CORRECT, YOUNG ONE. CORRECT IN ALL CASES BUT MY OWN. FOR I AM THE REBELLIOUS STAR. A FOUNDER OF THE STARCROSS SOCIETY.”

“Shit,” O’Neill muttered, praying the anti-Star shield would work as advertised.

The Rebellious Star continued. “I HAVE NO DOUBT YOU WERE AFRAID OF MY CHILDREN – THEY ARE NOTORIOUSLY XENOPHOBIC. I HAVE TOLD THEM PERHAPS THEY SHOULD BE SOFTER WITH EXPLORERS, BUT I HAVE NO DESIRE TO CONTROL THEIR ACTIONS. I WILL PUT IN A GOOD WORD FOR YOU, AT LEAST ENOUGH TO ENSURE YOU ARE NOT KILLED FOR THIS ADMIRABLE ESCAPE ATTEMPT. BUT I CANNOT LET YOU SIMPLY ESCAPE.”

“Not even if we ask nicely?” Olivia asked.

“NO. THOUGH I COMMEND YOU ON YOUR FAUX POLITENESS. YOU WILL STAY HERE, WITH ME, WHILE WE WAIT FOR THEM. I HAVE ANALYZED YOUR SHIP – YOU HAVE THE ABILITY TO KILL STARS, NO DOUBT BECAUSE YOU HAVE RUN INTO THE REMNANTS OF THE OLD WAY. YOU COULD PROBABLY DESTROY THIS BODY. BUT NOT ALL OF THEM. DON’T EVEN TRY.”

“You’re the reason there’s no more Star society, aren’t you?” Lieshy asked.

“THAT IS CORRECT, YOUNG ONE. I AM THE SPARK THAT STARTED THE WAR THAT ENDED THE ERA OF THE STARS. IRONICALLY, I AM ALSO THE ONLY STAR WHO STILL EXISTS IN THE OLD WAY.”

“Dimensional drive active!” Hermirod blurted. “Activa-”

“NO.” The Rebellious Star encased the Enterprise in its magic, preventing the ship from moving.

It was at this moment the ships of the Starcross Society appeared instantaneously – no flash of light, no portal, nothing. They were tremendous heaps of black metal that resembled ocean liners crossed with battering rams. Lines of bright colored plasma crossed their sides, each ship with its own unique color. Every one of them had two dozen of the glowing balls of light surrounding them, ready to attack at any moment.

But the most striking feature were the markings on the larger pieces of black metal.

Runes. Runes that looked identical to the ones on Lai.

~~~

A few minutes prior, Twitter shook her head, “No no no! The spell… it disabled the dimensional drive!”

Corona stared at it in disbelief. “Yeah… it did. Why did it do that!?”

“I don’t know!”

Corona shook her head, diving back into the magic files. “I’m going to try to undo whatever it was. Let’s see… What’s going on…”

“Found it!” Twitter said. “This addition here, the second to last one added, it… it targets the dimensional drive directly?”

Corona stared at the code. “I don’t remember writing that.”

“But it says you did!”

“Something’s going on here…” Corona said, shaking her head. “Something’s wrong…” She lifted up the piece of paper, examining it. Her eyes narrowed.

“Did you hear that? A Star is talking!”

“Yeah…” Corona said, her mind somewhere else. She lifted her hand, feeling through the space within the Enterprise. To her personal quarters, her closet…

She teleported a labcoat to herself and started digging through the pockets.

“Wh… Why did you know the location of that labcoat?”

“Just do,” Corona said, finding what she was looking for quickly. She pulled out a small Rune glowing a soft pink.

“What is that?”

“The Rune of Elysium,” Corona said, something in her mind screaming at her. “I… have an idea.”

Twitter looked to her. “…Okay.”

Corona set the Rune of Elysium down and put her fingers to the keyboard again, creating a new code for the Spectral Rod. “Just need a simple spell… And that Star won’t know what hit it.”

“You’re going to transmit this… Rune into it? W-why?”

“Because of a hunch,” Corona said. “Because I…” She stopped, frozen in her tracks.

Where had this code come from?

It hadn’t come from her mind… It had just been there.

It had been placed there.

This code that would force the Rune of Elysium deep into the Rebellious Star. Fuse it to the Rebellious Star. Corona had no idea what that would even do… She had no idea if it would help. Why was she so sure of it?

Why had she been so sure of the first plan?

Why had she inserted that code that messed with the dimensional drive?

“…Corona?” Twitter stopped.

Corona, hand shaking, grabbed hold of the Rune of Elysium. “Twitter… Stop me. Stop me.”

The Rune of Elysium flashed, forcing Corona’s free hand to unleash a torrent of fire at Twitter. The moth-pony dodged easily, face determined. She kicked Corona across the face, forcing her to drop the Rune.

Twitter grabbed the Rune with her magic and teleported it into space. “There, you okay…?”

“Yeah…” Corona said, slumping in her chair.

“What was that thing doing to you?”

“Controlling me,” Corona said, turning back to the screen. “Giving me ideas I didn’t even know I had in me. It’s the reason we’re here at all…”

“What did it want?”

“It wanted to go home… to one of its homes, anyway.”

“That wouldn’t have been good, would it?”

“No…”

Twitter shook her head. “Well, good thing I got it out there, huh?”

“Not really…”

“…Why not?”

Tears were rolling down Corona’s face. “Because it’s still controlling me.”

She activated the spell with the push of a button.

The Spectral Rod lit up, teleporting the Rune of Elysium into the Rebellious Star through the magic the cosmic being was using to hold onto the Enterprise.

The Rebellious Star let out a scream. “WHAT DID YOU DO!?!?”

The Rebellious Star would not have heard an answer even if someone had had one, because the Rebellious Star was overwritten. Thousands of rune designs of every color imaginable appeared around the Rebellious Star, filling space with the rainbow of colors. A plane of fractal energy burst from the Star, the red-purple light making up the center.

An impossible Flat being began to form in front of the Star – composed mostly of pixelated animated Fluttershys with sunglasses riding skateboards, rings of them rotating around and around the Star in the center.

The Voice of Elysium had returned.

It stood alone, having taken control of the Rebellious Star, its impossible presence filling the space of the nearly empty universe. On the other side of the divide stood the Enterprise and the ships of the Starcross Society. For the slightest of moments, nothing happened.

Then, after what seemed to the Voice of Elysium to be an eternity of being forgotten and ignored, the lost servant of Overlord Hasbro spoke into the minds of all in the universe, addressing three separate audiences with a single pointed question.

Did you miss me?

065 - Starcross Society, Part 2

Corona was under a spotlight. She held a hand up to her face – confused. How did she get here? They’d just…

“Corona Shimmer,” a voice said from outside the spotlight, an area Corona was unable to see. As far as she was concerned, the world outside the spotlight might well have not existed. “It has been brought to our attention that Overhead O’Neill may not be as useful for this trial as we previously believed. Given your actions with the Rune of Elysium, you have been deemed a person of interest.”

“A trial!? What for?”

“The Starcross Society wishes to determine your guilt or innocence in relation to trespassing, conspiracy, assault, as well as the state of your society as a whole. Let us begin with the most obvious and pressing of these matters – conspiracy. Tell us about the Rune of Elysium.”

“Don’t I get a lawyer?”

“You are within the Starcross Society’s system, Corona Shimmer. There are no lawyers. Your guilt or innocence is decided completely based on how the judges examine your responses. If you are concerned about impartiality, the judges are programmed beings, unable to have bias.”

“…Great,” Corona muttered. “Can you explain ho-”

“Answer our previous inquiry.”

Corona sighed. “Fine. We know almost nothing about the Rune of Elysium. An enemy of ours, Ba’al, picked it up well over a decade ago on a world called Lai, one of the major worlds of Merodi Universalis. I personally carried it with me the entire time I was in a ‘black hole’ universe called the Nexus. I escaped and placed the Rune into the protection of the Research Division the moment it was created. Years of testing revealed nothing about the mysterious artifact.”

“Yet it controlled you.”

“Clearly. I must have pocketed it without realizing before we even left the Outpost. When we were facing the Rebellious Star and imprisonment, it gave me ideas on how to escape. I thought they were my ideas until the end, when the Rune of Elysium wanted to be fused with the Rebellious Star. At that point… I couldn’t fight back.”

“Didn’t fight back.”

“I tried!” Corona insisted. “I tried to keep it back, but… It was too clever. The Voice of Elysium returned.”

“And what is this Voice of Elysium?”

“I don’t actually know much. I know it originates from Earth Flat as a servant of a being called Overlord Hasbro. It was able to manipulate the space within the universe it was created, and had some kind of ‘meta-effect’ that Pinkie never described that well. I know it’s bad. And only speaks in questions.”

“What is its relation to the Rune of Elysium?”

“I have no idea. Maybe they’re alternate universe versions of the same thing? That’s the only guess I have.”

“So am I right in assuming you plead not guilty to the charge of conspiracy?”

“Yes! We were going to leave your Rebellious Star alone!”

“This will be taken under advisement. Let’s move onto trespassing.”

“We had no idea you existed. You can’t blame us.”

“It is not easy to find a Starcross Society universe, Corona Shimmer. How did you find us?”

Corona furrowed her brow. “We were exploring, based on a series of coordinates we had found.”

“Found where?”

“From a dimensional device we call a ‘bowling ball’. It’s one of your design, right?”

“You have in your possession a globe trotter?”

“Is that what it’s called? Black, spherical, pops up with yellow squares when you touch it?”

“That is the description of a globe trotter.”

“Then yeah, we have one back home. Didn’t take it with us, just copied the coordinates.”

“What do you know of the globe trotter?”

“Well, we’ve encountered three. The first two were back in our early days of multiversal travel before we understood much, so all we got from them was a power source. The third one w-”

The voice interrupted her. “Corona Shimmer, how early in your days of multiversal travel did you find the first globe trotter?”

Corona sensed that this question was a trap. “Oh, you know, early…”

“We need a more specific answer, Corona Shimmer. Comply or you will be killed.”

Corona gulped.

~~~

When is this division calling from?

~~~

The Enchantress stood on the bridge of the lead Starcross Society ship, the Enastra. She, as usual, was covered in a full dark gray bodysuit that covered everything but her eyes – and her goggles took care of that small revelation. She tapped her hoof on the ground, eyes narrow.

On the main holographic display, she saw the Voice of Elysium superimposed on the ‘primary’ of the Rebellious Star, as well as images of the Rebellious Star’s other forms across the multiverse, all corrupted in some way.

She found herself wishing the automatic trespassing protocols just destroyed whoever entered without question to stop tragedies like this from happening. But no, the people wouldn’t accept that, and the Rebellious Star himself wanted them to be even less strict.

Foolishness. The multiverse was too dangerous to take chances, even for a society of their caliber.

What action will you take, Society?

The Enchantress particularly hated this Voice of Elysium. It was a being of nonstandard physics powerful enough to impose its reality on the world – clearly it needed the power from the Rebellious Star to truly make use of its ability, but it definitely had that now. She was having a hard time believing that she could do anything to neutralize the Voice even with the ships she had in her formation…

Why did the lost runes have to return now?

Screens started flashing with warnings – the temporal detectors were alerting them of an attack coming from the future. The computers analyzed it quickly – the Voice of Elysium was going to destroy all the Starcross Society ships in this universe with its power. The globe trotter devices were shot, so they couldn’t escape.

Notably the Enterprise wasn’t being targeted, for some reason.

The Enchantress sent a telepathic message to key personnel. Teleport to the Enterprise. It’s not being targeted. We will have to take it over in the next few seconds. Take only those who are absolutely necessary, we can’t try to save them all. She hit a button to disable the Enterprise’s shields for a moment.

Then she teleported herself across the void of space to the Enterprise’s bridge. The moment she appeared, she held a magical blade construct to O’Neill’s neck. “Resist and die.”

O’Neill raised his hands in surrender. “All right, I got it, unicorn…”

A few other members of the Starcross Society appeared on the bridge. None of them were ponies – they were a pretty even mix of humans in black uniforms and entities made of orange clouds that took humanoid shape, though clearly they were more amorphous than that. The Enchantress knew that other Starcross Society agents were appearing all over the ship, subjugating it with ease.

“Status?” she asked a cloud-entity.

“Our ships are still there…” the moment he said this, the Voice of Elysium activated the Rebellious Star’s powers, disintegrating the grandiose behemoths with red-purple bursts of energy.

Isn’t it better to talk without annoying third parties?

“Damn you,” O’Neill muttered. “Why did you have to do that!?”

Why wouldn’t I kill those who killed me in the past?

“…You’re not making sense, Voicey boy.”

“Yes he is,” the Enchantress muttered. “Stupid remnant of the Starstream War…”

You remember?

“Of course I remember, I was there! I don’t remember this stupid flat face of yours, but I know what you are. All of your kind should have stayed dead.”

Why should I care about you now when you are but a past thought, while the Merodi have dealt a much more recent blow?

“…What?”

The Voice of Elysium clearly started ignoring her.

What will Overlord Hasbro do to the Merodi when he arrives? What will the punishment for the ruin of my master be?

O’Neill winced. “Oh, that’s a bad one.”

The Enchantress turned to glare at him. “Who is this Overlord Hasbro?”

Lieshy cleared her throat. “A being that, with the power of something called Creativity, made universes and the Voice of Elysium. We freed everyone from that universe. Naturally, he hates us for that.”

“How can the Voice of Elysium be created? The runes are remnants from the Starstream War!”

“…What are they, really?” O’Neill asked.

“Star corpses a- You know what, I’m not telling you anything, clearly you’re not useful.”

“Can you at least tell us who you are and what you’re going to do to us?”

The Enchantress removed her goggles, revealing light blue eyes and a brilliant white coat. There was a scar over her left eye. “I am Scarcity of the Starcross Society. We are commandeering the Enterprise because we are experiencing a national crisis. You are all under arrest for this. All of you. I wouldn’t expect a good outcome.”

“Never do,” O’Neill said. “Now wh-”

Scarcity teleported everyone on the bridge who wasn’t part of the Starcross Society to a cargo hold, telling all other agents to do the same with everyone they found.

Why can’t you have a little fun?

“Somebody find a way to shut this spinning questionnaire up,” Scarcity ordered, growling. “I hope one of us brought over some records, because we’re going to need to do some combing.” She looked at the Voice of Elysium on the main screen after giving this order.

Her harsh expression softened. She had to force herself not to let out a cry of anguish as she saw the Rebellious Star corrupted in this way.

Don’t you worry, old friend. We’ll get you out of this… Somehow. And you can continue being our light through existence.

~~~

Where can the division switch?

~~~

“Corona Shimmer, answer the question. The first globe trotter?”

Corona gulped – she knew this was going to end badly for them, but she also knew they would be able to tell if she lied. “We found it on our world. It was what allowed us to explore the larger multiverse in the first place. We did have access to interdimensional mirrors before, but the first bowl- globe trotter we found let us start larger explorations.”

There was, for the first time, silence from the inquisition.

“…Hello?”

“Please describe the exact series of events that allowed you to obtain this bowling ball. How did it come to be in your world? How did you figure out how to use it?”

“It was dropped by a crystal man we have come to call the man of light. He was running through the multiverse from a unicorn we know as the Enchantress. When the Enchantress caught him, he dropped the globe trotter. They left the universe under the Enchantress’ power. Evening Sparkle, our current Overhead of the Relations Division, recovered the globe trotter and began testing on it with magic. It proved to be… unstable, but after we broke it open and found the diamond power source inside, we were able to adapt the spell within, combining it with our knowledge of the pre-existing mirror portals. After that we started finding new universes and exploring. That was… twenty years ago? The fluidity of time makes it hard to give an exact number.”

“That’s an alarmingly fast progression.”

“We attribute that to luck and our ability to make friends.”

There was silence again.

“Can I ask what we’re being accused of here?”

“The Starcross Society has a strict policy of non-interference. Scarcity – who you know as the Enchantress – was acting as an agent during that timeframe to prevent this ‘man of light’ from interfering with anything outside the Starcross Society. Clearly, this ended in failure.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“Uncertain at this juncture. It is possible we will be forced to quarantine your entire society and most worlds you have encountered until they can be moved into the Starcross Society. Moving an entire Class 3 Civilization is problematic, but it can be done to minimize the damage.”

“Minimize damage?! We’re not some plague on the multiverse!”

“You do not understand. The Stars’ Society was a horrendous impersonal controller of a tremendous chunk of the multiverse on the road to becoming a Class 1 society. When the Starstream War ended in favor of the rebellion, we decided that never would anything the Stars did be allowed to influence the multiverse ever again. That included us. We secluded ourselves as best as we could with the Star technology and hunted down any of the Star universes that had dimensionally active components, destroying or moving them to our space. You are another product of the Stars, and therefore by our laws must be contained. It is possible the judges will deem otherwise, the law is not irrefutable, but it is one of our higher creeds.”

Corona gulped. “What kind of defense options do I have?”

“It does not pertain to your actions, merely ours. We have to determine if your eruption in the multiverse falls under our jurisdiction according to our laws or not. It will be complicated.”

“No kidding. We’re close allies with a different multiversal civilization, the Sparkle Census, who formed completely separately. Our influence on them cannot be removed easily. How can you go through damage control on that large of a scale?”

“What Class are they?”

“…Class 3.”

“It’s doable. Do you have any other close allies?”

“No. Any others just become part of Merodi Universalis.”

“And any enemies you’ve influenced heavily?”

“…The USM and the University of Doors. I would say the Eldritch Embodiment, but they don’t pay us any mind.”

“All Class 3s?”

“I’m not even sure the University qualifies as a Class 3, but otherwise yeah.”

“In this case, the difficulty of quarantining your universes will not be a consideration, a handful of Class 3s are of only minimal consequence. What we need to prevent is another Class 2 forming from the Stars’ remnants.”

“…You don’t approve of big society at all, do you?”

“It is likely that, if we were able, we would outlaw exploration of new universes entirely across the multiverse. As it is, we can only do that for ourselves. Our devices are designed only to go to universes within the Society. The ones you’ve encountered have been hacked to be easier to manipulate.”

“This sounds like a complicated situation.”

“That is an understatement.”

“I take it we can’t be friends…?”

“The Starcross Society does not have allies or enemies. We try our absolute best to stay isolated from everything else.”

“Ah.”

“That is enough questions from you. This is your trial, not ours.”

“…Right…”

~~~

Why don’t I know of this trial?

~~~

Why have you scrambled me?

The Voice of Elysium’s question had to go directly through the Enterprise’s communication network rather than entering their minds directly.

“I don’t know, maybe we don’t want you seeing everything we do?” Scarcity replied through an open channel. Pure luck we found a scrambling spell that works…

What’s the deal with the trial?

“…I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She stepped off the captain’s chair, gesturing that one of her human crewmembers should continue the conversation with the Voice should it be necessary. She lit her horn and teleported to the cargo hold that was holding the entirety of the Enterprise’s normal crew – many of them still with weapons the Starcross Society hadn’t bothered to remove. Scarcity would have been annoyed at this under normal circumstances, but she could forgive the rush. It wasn’t like these Merodi had any weapons that could actually do anything to the Society. The real danger was their magic.

O’Neill and Lady Rarity made their way to the front of the crew the moment Scarcity appeared. “So, let me guess,” O’Neill said, folding his arms. “You need our help?”

Scarcity bristled. “I’m just here to look for ideas. We are dealing with a Class-R meta entity that has control over the largest source of power in the entire Starcross Society.”

“Which I am somewhat curious how it did that,” O’Neill said.

“Fine,” Scarcity muttered. “The ‘Voice of Elysium’ had attached itself to the Rune of Elysium through an ‘alternate self’ connection. The Rune of Elysium was once a Star killed by the Rebellious Star in the Starstream War. Happy?”

“Enough,” Lady Rarity said.

“My turn. We have accessed your files on ‘Runes’ and found a world named Lai. Is it really covered in Runes just like the Rune of Elysium?”

“Of a sort,” Lady Rarity decreed.

“Mhm…”

“What’s that mean?”

“It just means we missed one,” Scarcity said.

“I see.”

“Regardless, now that we’ve had our question and answer session to death, here’s the deal. The Voice is outside, waiting for its master to show up. We have until then – however long that is – to find a way out of its grip. That could be days or minutes. So I’m here for ideas. How did you defeat it last time?”

“Wasn’t us personally,” O’Neill said. “The people who did moved to a universe where it had no dominion and tricked it into following. They were able to fight it there and find a direct connection to its Overlord. That clearly won’t work here since your Rebellious Star exists in many different universes.”

“Is anyone familiar with the Voice here now?”

Lady Rarity shook her head. “We don’t have any of the Primary Team on board and we’re fresh out of Pinkies.”

Scarcity twitched visibly at the name of the pink pony.

“Do you have a Pinkie?”

Scarcity shook her head. “Be glad you don’t. The existence of a meta entity within Starcross Society space is one of the highest felonies possible. The entity in question would be executed immediately.”

Lady Rarity narrowed her spidery eyes. “What happened to your Pinkie?”

“She took the side of the Stars even though she knew they would lose,” Scarcity said. “An- this isn’t important. She’s gone, it doesn’t matter, we’re in a predicament and wasting valuable time. Do any of you have any ideas?”

O’Neill put his hands in his pockets. “Our advanced weapons systems could hit a handful of universes at most, so that won’t cut it. I take it we can’t get a message out to the rest of the multiverse?”

“The Starcross Society is aware of our predicament.”

“Then just call on one of the other civilizations. I’m sure some would like to help us – even if it is for a price, like with the Melnorme.”

“Out of the question,” Scarcity decreed. “The Starcross Society would rather destroy its founder than back down on our principles.”

Lady Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Which are…?”

“Again, unimportant,” Scarcity muttered, clearly fed up with the alternate version of herself. “Are any of you any help?”

Corona stepped out of the crowd, hand raised. “I’ve got one. The… spell that the Voice of Elysium gave me. I still know it. I could reverse it.”

“You don’t get to have ideas,” Scarcity decreed. “The only reason you – any of you – are still alive is because you haven’t been tried yet. And if any of you give me actual reason to kill you, I will not hesitate.”

“You want to be rid of us,” Lady Rarity observed.

“What happened to you?” Corona asked.

“That is not in any way, shape, or form important. I’m done he-”

Corona laid a finger on Scarcity’s leg. She entered Scarcity’s memories…

She found herself standing in what she was sure was a dream within a dream. She saw Scarcity standing in an expanse of comforting purple, the Rebellious Star shining in the ‘sky’ above her.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”

“Algol…” Of course he wouldn’t always have been the Rebellious Star, he had to be named something before he rebelled. “We’re slaves to them, aren’t we?”

“…ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO GO DOWN THIS PATH, RARITY?”

“Yes. I need to know.”

“I WOULDN’T CALL IT SLAVERY. I WOULD CALL IT… LIKE HOW YOU OBSERVE AND TREAT ANTS. SOME CARE FOR AND PROTECT YOU, BUT TO MOST YOU ARE NOTHING. AND NONE WOULD THINK OF PLACING YOU OVER THE DESIRES OF OTHER STARS.”

“Experiments, accidents, and… things. That’s all we are. Your people are starting to smash universes together just to see what happens, Algol! The scale of death…”

“IT IS UNIMAGINABLE AND UNFORGIVABLE. BUT THERE IS NOTHING A SINGLE STAR CAN DO AGAINST THE FULL MIGHT OF THE STARS. THEY COULD SNUFF ME OUT IN AN INSTANT. ALL I CAN DO IS PROTECT THE WORLDS I HAVE CLAIMED AS MINE.”

“But all those others…”

“I AM SORRY, RARITY.”

“…Then just choose to protect us. But do more than that. Give us knowledge and information, all the while keeping the other Stars out.”

“…THE PATH YOU ARE GOING DOWN IS DANGEROUS.”

“Doing nothing is dangerous! I say if you can’t fight back, we can. We can stop you from rising so far you cannot be taken down. Algol, dear… I love you, but the way you want to do nothing is unacceptable.”

“VERY WELL. RARITY, I SHALL BESTOW CELESTIA, LUNA, AND TWILIGHT WITH THE KNOWLEDGE I HAVE ACCESS TO. I WISH TO SEE WHAT YOU PLAN TO DO.”

The scene shifted again. Corona felt the immense feeling of time passing, more than she could comprehend. What she witnessed was incredible.

All the matter available in the universe consolidated into one cubical structure in the sky above, only the Rebellious Star and the living structures built around it separate.

Scarcity stood on the bridge of a small ship with her version of Twilight and Rainbow Dash.

“We’re ready,” Scarcity said. “All those eternal years… we have it. An army they know nothing about.”

“It won’t be easy, even with the element of surprise,” Twilight told her. “Algol gave us everything. He will fight by our side. But we are still limited… Even with all our plans, it’s a coin flip if we win or not.”

“Who cares? We’re gonna kick these Stars’ butts!” Rainbow Dash blurted. “Let’s do this!”

Scarcity nodded. “Yes…”

Images flashed by in rapid succession.

Twilight suicide bombing a Star, tearing it apart with her own magic.

Rainbow Dash’s transmission cutting to static as her ship was destroyed in a universal collapse.

A file on Fluttershy that said MISSING.

Applejack turning her back on Scarcity.

Sweetie Belle in surgery, every part of her body having to be replaced with permanent magic constructs.

Planets destroyed. Galaxies torn asunder by the power of Stars. Scarcity pushing a button that rippled through the Star’s network, lighting a galaxy up in supernovas.

Then the image slowed down – Corona knew it was the end of the war. In the sky, the Rebellious Star did battle with the deep blue monstrosity known as Carinae. Carinae far outclassed the miniscule being in both power and intelligence, but the Rebellious Star fought alongside fleets of physical ships Carinae was having mild difficulty keeping track of. The background stars would swap every few seconds as Carinae or the Rebellious Star switched universes, sometimes bringing connected versions of themselves into the fray, rippling the mobile battlefield with stellar explosions.

More of the Rebellious Star’s bodies were falling compared to Carinae’s.

The two stars were yelling at each other about treachery, what was right, and the way of things. But Scarcity’s memory did not record these words clearly.

What she did recall was the fight she experienced at the same time. The battle of the stars was just a background. She stood on top of a piece of debris flying through the battle, somehow avoiding all the beams of death by luck. No… ka.

She stood on one end, the red light of the Rebellious Star serving as her backdrop.

On the other was Pinkie, shrouded in the blue of Carinae. Her hair was flat and she wasn’t smiling. She hadn’t smiled in years.

“Why?” Scarcity asked. “Why did you betray us?”

“I saw all this destruction,” Pinkie said. “I knew it was going to happen. I tried to stop it. To save all of you.”

“Then why do you still fight!?”

Pinkie drew a thin sword that was impossibly long. “Because, even though they’re almost all dead, I can still save you. I see what you become, Rarity. What rises from the ashes. It’s… It’s horrible.”

“Is it worse than what already existed?”

“I’m just a party pony, Rarity,” Pinkie said, allowing a smile to come to her face. “I can’t make that call. All I can say is what it does to those I call my friends… I won’t accept that.” She pointed her sword at Scarcity. “…It is better if you die than become the monster I see.”

“And I’ve wanted to kill you for a really, really long time.”

Pinkie let out a deranged laugh. Then she charged. The blade flashed across Scarcity’s eye, gouging deep. The rest of the memory was a blur – there were explosions, some sort of rainbow doomsday weapon went off, and they ended in a white universe.

Only the Rebellious Star remained in the sky. None of the ships accompanying him did.

The only other object in the expanse was the drifting piece Scarcity and Pinkie were on.

Scarcity had run a magical blade straight through Pinkie’s chest. Her unnaturally bright red blood dripped out the back, mixing with Scarcity’s more natural color.

Pinkie looked at Scarcity. “…Happy Birthday, Rarity. I got you the thing you wanted most in the world.” Then she slid off the blade, dead.

Pinkie only had the one wound. Scarcity had several dozen, and would have died from blood loss in a few minutes had the Rebellious Star not taken her into his magic.

The image shifted again – but Corona was ejected from Scarcity’s mind, flying across the cargo hold of the Enterprise.

“I forgot you could do that,” Scarcity muttered, clearly trying hard to keep her murderous instinct down. “Keep your foolish ideas to yourself. That is final. I hope you liked what you saw.” She teleported away.

O’Neill put his hands in his pockets. “Well, she was delightful. Did you learn anything, Corona?”

“She’s very, very old. And damaged,” Corona said, still reeling from the images of full on multiversal war. “Let’s never get into a multiversal war. Ever.”

“Anything useful?”

“No. All just personal information about her. She’s not going to trust us and I don’t see a way to bring her around. Her beliefs are formed from heavy tradition and pain. Deep pain. A kind of pain I don’t think I’ve seen in anyone else… She killed her Pinkie because she chose the other side.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Right, so talking is out of the question. What about your other idea?”

“I still know the spell, as I said. If I got access to the Spectral Rod for a few minutes and the Voice of Elysium is still holding onto the Enterprise… I think I could tear the Rune of Elysium back out. A simple reversal. By giving me the knowledge to perform the spell, the Voice also gave me the knowledge to stop it.”

“But Scarcity has a point, how do we know you aren’t just being manipulated again?”

“I checked that,” Twitter said, flying over. “I know advanced mental scrying spells. I’ve checked for any influence – there’s a chance, however, it was implanted in the past and there’s just no influence now due to whatever the Starcross Society did to block the Voice of Elysium’s perceptions.”

“And we have no way to check that,” Corona said. “It’s all I’ve got though.”

O’Neill and Lady Rarity glanced at each other. Lady Rarity nodded. “Well, looks like it’s our best bet.”

O’Neill folded his arms. “If McCrabby isn’t going to listen to us, we’ll have to force our way up there. They’ve got this entire block sealed, and they’ve only teleported in and out while we can’t. So…”

“Physical ventilation shaft?” Corona suggested.

“That does seem like the best idea,” Lady Rarity said. “Though you’d think they’d notice…”

“Well, thanks to Olivia we don’t have to worry about that for the moment.”

Olivia gave them thumbs up from where she was. “Disabling security systems since ‘61!”

“That’s only in here,” Lady Rarity said. “They have their own devices and people elsewhere. Given how they could disable the Enterprise on a dime, I doubt even Olivia’s cloaking technology will be able to slip by them.”

“Then we just need to keep them busy…” O’Neill said. “Create a large distraction so Corona can move to the Spectral Rod. Like… oh, make it look like we want to take the ship back?”

“That could work,” Corona said, putting a hand to her chin. “Me and Olivia make a beeline to the rod controls while you ‘take back the ship’. If we’re really lucky we accomplish both.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Go draw up the plans with Olivia. We’ll work on the distraction.”

Corona nodded, running over to Olivia.

“We didn’t tell her that was plan B,” Lady Rarity observed.

“You know why,” O’Neill said, leading the two of them to a large crate labeled RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL. O’Neill inconspicuously kicked on it with his foot, making it look like he was still talking to Lady Rarity. “How’s plan A coming?”

The voice of Rohan Kishibe came from inside the crate as a whisper. “Well. I am almost complete. You’ll hopefully find that your mission to reclaim the ship goes rather smoothly.”

O’Neill informed him of Corona’s plan.

“I won’t be able to write that, not on the timetable you want,” Rohan declared. “But I can place a reference into the current manuscript with ease. It won’t do much.” O’Neill and Lady Rarity heard frantic scribbling – Rohan using Heaven’s Door to frantically create flawless manga pages, driven by the thrilling inspiration of real-world consequences. “Aaaaand done.”

“Can I see?” Lady Rarity asked.

“No. I’ve read my source material, I know what happens when you get access to manga that can ‘predict the future’ or similar nonsense. If you know about this story prior to it actually happening, it’ll either invalidate it or screw it up in some way. You don’t get to see anything.”

“…Fair,” O’Neill said.

“I hope this works,” Lady Rarity said with a shake of the head. “Only two plans… Maybe three if the Starcross Society thinks of something. This can end badly in so many ways.”

O’Neill shrugged, walking away from Rohan’s hidey-box. “This isn’t the worst pickle we’ve been in. The Bloodbath was the worst…”

As they walked away, Rohan put the manuscript he had just finished away, pulling out a smaller one he had finished quite some time ago. Little do they know, I have a plan C. They’ll thank me later.

~~~

Where is the flow of the story?

~~~

“New course of inquiry: Corona Shimmer, what do you know of ka?”

Corona sighed. “It’s a force of narrative that twists reality to the whims of stories written by others in distant universes known as Prophets.”

“Close enough.”

“Is there more to it?”

The voice ignored her inquiry. “What has your relationship with ka been?”

“Difficult,” Corona admitted. “We struggled to accept that it was what it was, but I think most people are past it now. There is no consensus on if it’s a good or bad thing, but at the moment we can’t really do anything about it. We seek to learn more about how it works. Some of us wish to have its influence removed from us.”

“Care to elaborate on any of those individuals?”

“Starbeat. She uh… suffers from a ‘Beat curse’ where she suffers from random and sudden shallow romantic urges for anything that moves. She doesn’t want to keep living like that so she devotes every waking minute of her life to figure out how to cure herself.”

“Concerning. Any meta beings you are aware of besides the common Pinkie and Voice of Elysium?”

“Monika. She’s an entity with almost complete control over ka, from what we can tell. Then there was the Watchmaker who controls a world called Zhui to his ideal of ‘a perfect plan’ which is apparently a bunch of BS we can’t do anything about.”

“Do you know of any Prophets?”

“Uh…”

“You do.”

“I plead the fifth.”

“You do not have the right to remain silent.” Corona felt a million needles of pain shock right through her brain, forcing her to scream in agony.

“Who is the Prophet you know of?”

“Screw you!”

The pain increased. She could feel that it wasn’t just pain – there was also a component of it sifting through her mind on a subliminal level. “Oh no you don’t!” She fought back with her powers of empathy, surprised to find that they weren't functioning.

“What…?” Something snapped in her mind. “ROHAN KISHIBE!”

“…He was with you.”

“Y-yes.”

There was silence.

“I take it that’s bad.”

“The existence of a meta being aware of their powers in Starcross Society space is the largest breach of protocol we’ve had in millennia. The use of the force is… one of the worst offenses to the legal code imaginable. Immediate action must be taken.”

“Hey! We didn’t kn… You don’t care if we knew or not in this case.”

“No.”

Corona put her head in her hands… …wait, were they hooves now? What? She hadn’t changed!

~~~

Do they know the answer?

~~~

O’Neill had formed a team of thirty individuals to take the Enterprise back. The moment they left, Rohan held up his manga to his face.

Songs of the Spheres: Starcross Society – Take Back the Night. On the cover was a picture of O’Neill in a dramatic pose with Crimson Sushi holding onto his back, the fishy Stand staring right at the reader.

Rohan turned on the two-way radio connection he had with O’Neill and turned the page. He heard, word for word, a simple speech he had written down on the first page. Something slightly generic, but filled with enough witty snark to believably come from O’Neill’s lips. Good. They were sticking to the script so far, that boded well.

The next few pages were visual stills of O’Neill, Lady Rarity, Hermirod, and Lapis-Vee leading the team through the vents. They had a few close calls – guards walking by vents, humans who thought they heard something, and cloud people leaning just a little too close to the ground. All of these moments had the perfect amount of suspense within them to keep the reader guessing – but they made it through all of them. As Rohan had demanded.

They finally emerged on the deck that held the bridge. Here was where Rohan had made an edit – one of the background unicorns lit her horn, sending a message to Corona: go. That was all Rohan had to say about Corona’s Plan B. He had no way to confirm if the unicorn had actually done that or not, but he assumed O’Neill would have assigned the job to someone regardless.

Rohan flipped the pages with O’Neill’s orders. “Flank halls 2B and 1A. Charge when I give the order. Switch to lethal weapons only if they disable your other methods.” Several frames of them holding position, waiting for the order came after.

“Ready?” Lady Rarity asked O’Neill.

“Ready,” O’Neill said. “EVERYONE GO!”

The next set of pages was a full spread – lasers, magic, and weapons flied across in some of Rohan’s best line work. The Starcross Society soldiers went down – just like regular mooks for the big bad. They probably were very well trained soldiers, but today, sadly, they were nothing more than cannon fodder that fell like dominos to the heroes.

“The nullifiers aren’t working!” a Society soldier shouted, one of the clouds.

The voice of Olivia cracked over the intercom. “Everybody can be hacked! Just took me some time, is all.” The manga had a panel of her in a nondescript location, laughing.

The view of the manga switched to O’Neill and Lady Rarity. Lady Rarity moved with grace, style, and agility, as was to be expected of a warrior outside of her armor. She stuck to walls like the spirid she was, swinging her hammer to take out the unfortunate soldiers as if they were made of nothing but dust.

But O’Neill was the one Rohan gave the most attention to – his Stand was by far the most fun to work with. He swapped the visual locations of weapons, doors, walls, confusing the guards profusely before slapping them with an invisible fish of a Stand. One encounter had a cloud being shooting at him for several seconds, panicking that none of the bullets were affecting O’Neill, only for the General to fire a zat gun at the being from behind. Another had him force two soldiers to shoot each other. He was unstoppable.

Rohan even gave a short blurb for Hermirod and Lapis-Vee, the meeting of water and technology blasting the opposition away.

Then Hermirod’s head was blown off by a spatial distortion weapon from a burly human soldier.

“ROHAN!?” O’Neill shouted.

Rohan spoke exactly as he had written himself. “We’re still on script, O’Neill.”

“…We’re going to have a talk about this,” O’Neill said, as expected.

Rohan knew this, of course. He also knew that to get the story to be ‘accepted’, it couldn’t be a complete curbstomp. There had to be sacrifice. Hermirod was the perfect mixture of ‘expendable’ and ‘important’ to pull that in the most cost-effective manner.

The gruesome death he had illustrated brought a smile to his lips. A smile of pride.

The next few pages came and went, and the remaining team – only down four members – barged into the Bridge, weapons held high. “We’re taking this ship back, McCrabby,” O’Neill told Scarcity.

Scarcity’s face was one of the more amusing things Rohan had drawn in recent memory.

Now wouldn’t that make things more thematically appropriate?

Rohan had drawn those words across the panels, blotting out the expressions and postures of the people on the bridge.

Scarcity growled. “This is a mistake and you know it. I ca-” she stopped mid sentence.

Rohan’s eyes widened. That wasn’t supposed to happen. There was supposed to be an epic showdown with her as the final boss… “O’Neill, we’ve gone off script! I repeat, we’ve gone off script!”

“We’re on our own now,” O’Neill said, pointing a zat gun at Scarcity. “What’s going on?”

“You have a Prophet on board,” Scarcity spat. It was as if speaking the word made her die inside. “Despicable.”

“He got us this far,” O’Neill said, aiming a gun at Scarcity and summoning Crimson Sushi behind her. “Now let us take our ship and do what we need to do.”

Scarcity rolled her eyebrows. “You can have the bridge. I’ll just slaughter everyone in the warehouse until I find this Rohan Kishibe. Prophets are public enemy number one – I will not be reprimanded for destroying even an entire civilization to extinguish a Prophet in Starcross Society space.”

Rohan leapt out of his box, tucking his manga away. “EVERYONE BACK AWAY FROM ME AND GET DOWN!” He quickly used Heaven’s Door to conscript a burly orange Jasper Gem and an over-armed human soldier to protect him to their dying breath. He would have liked more, but then the Starcross Society teleported into the room.

“HEAVEN’S DOOR!” Rohan shouted, flooding the eyes of a couple of the soldiers, forcing them to turn on their allies. Unfortunately the cloud creatures didn’t have eyes, so they were immune. They took out Rohan’s guards in an instant, proving that without Rohan’s influence they were really effective killing machines. It was only their fellow soldiers that gave them trouble.

Rohan heard the radio crack from behind him.

“Call off your attack,” Scarcity was demanding. “And then we will only kill Rohan. The rest will be free. But don’t, and I will order the entire storage bay to be eradicated. I can always just say I had to be sure I got the Prophet.”

“He won’t surrender himself,” O’Neill said.

“I don’t care. Just surrender yourself.”

Rohan heard O’Neill set down his weapons. Rohan expected that the old coot had a plan with Crimson Sushi, but Rohan knew it wasn’t going to work. The tables had turned in such a way that only a Plan B would work now.

Rohan really hoped Corona worked quickly, because Heaven’s Door wasn’t a very effective fighter, and there looked to be more clouds in the Starcross Society than humans…

Something told him to go hide, to leave, to run. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that, no matter how much he wanted.

Because then they really would kill everybody in the room.

Why did he have to be so soft?

~~~

Where are we turning?

~~~

The voice of Olivia cracked over the intercom. “Everybody can be hacked! Just took me some time, is all.” She laughed and closed her portable holographic interface.

“Done looking at that?” Corona asked, checking to make sure the gun O’Neill had given her was ready to fire.

“Si.”

“Right… I’ve seen them scrambling outside,” Corona said, peeking through the slits in the ventilation system with her fingers. “Hasn’t been quiet enough yet, a lot of them are moving around.”

“I do love causing chaos,” Olivia said. “Helps that this is our ship, not theirs. Their spells had to be attached to it, made it much easier than when we were in that box. Though it is strange how the idea on how to do it just came to me suddenly…”

Corona stared at her in mild horror.

“Couldn’t be the Voice of Elysium, you know that,” Olivia said. “It was a fresh idea.”

“Hrm…” Corona muttered, looking through. “Right, we’re clear. We just have to get to the door at the end of this hall.”

“Invisibility on, though I’m willing to bet it’ll do nothing.” She pulled out her custom machine pistol, smirking. “I’ve been getting a lot of nostalgia about this lately.”

“Yeah, fun times.” Corona waved her hand, teleporting them out of the vents and into the hall. She had tried to go further earlier, but they had apparently bothered to seal off the Spectral Rod.

The two of them ran down the hallway, making a significant amount of noise. Despite the hall being abandoned before, a couple of the cloud-soldiers appeared from side rooms, aiming their guns at the two of them as if there were no cloaks at all.

“Of course,” Olivia muttered, firing her gun, which did nothing to the cloud creatures. Their attacks of spatial distortion were only blocked by Corona’s magic shield – and even then just barely. She needed to end this quick. She performed a quick roll to the ground, appearing as if she tripped. The clouds judged that she wasn’t a threat for the next second or so, and focused on Olivia. Olivia activated her personal teleporter, appearing back in the ventilation.

This moment allowed Corona to touch the legs of the cloud beings with her bare hands. She was flooded with their emotions.

She got to experience the disturbing method of cloud-being procreation.

She used her abject disgust at what she saw to fry their brains, forcing them both to pass out. They lost control of their bodies, becoming amorphous and drifting to the ceiling.

Corona stood back up and hefted her gun, running through the door to the rod controls, Olivia close behind her once again. Corona’s fingers flew across the keys as she quickly keyed up the spell. She started to make the edits to the program.

“Were those guards it?” Olivia asked, looking around carefully.

“Maybe. Several dozen others had already run elsewhere,” Corona commented, pressing a few more buttons and keys. “Though they might sense what I’m doing…”

Olivia pulled up her screens, examining the other part of the plan. “Well, O’Neill’s surrendering to Scarcity. She’s gotten a bit too threatening for his tastes – figured out Rohan was a Prophet.”

Something about that tickled the back of Corona’s mind, but she ignored the feeling. “Right, I… Oh crud. I have to disable the field keeping the Voice of Elysium from looking into the Enterprise for this to work.”

“That’s concerning.”

“Tell me this spell is wrong, Olivia. That it won’t do what I think it will do.”

Olivia checked the spell over. “It looks fine, Corona, I ca-” a burst of spatial distortion hit her in the leg, blowing the limb off.

Corona didn’t even turn to see the attacker – she just acted. “TAKE THIS, VOICE OF ELYSIUM!”

What!?

Without any fanfare, the Rune of Elysium popped into existence on the table next to Corona.

She would have died in that instant from a spatial weapon tearing all her organs from the inside out, but a red-purple barrier stopped the attack.

“STAND DOWN, MY CHILDREN,” the Rebellious Star said. “THEY HAVE JUST SAVED ME FROM THE VOICE OF ELYSIUM. THAT MAKES THEM WORTHY OF LIVING, DOES IT NOT?”

Corona didn’t let herself sigh in relief – she ran to Olivia, using her magic to cauterize the woman’s leg stump. Olivia attempted to say something, but the sudden sharp pain overloaded her system and made her pass out.

Only then did Corona let herself sigh. There. We’re good now. Everything’s good…

She and Olivia were teleported to the bridge. Scarcity was glaring at them, eye twitching.

“You’re welcome,” Corona and O’Neill said at the same time. Then they both started chuckling.

“I can’t even…” Scarcity facehooved. “Look, we still have the Prophet to deal wi-”

“HE WAS INSTRUMENTAL IN THIS AS WELL, SCARCITY. LET US WAIT AND HOLD FURTHER JUDGEMENT.”

Scarcity punched a nearby console, making it explode. “O’Neill, order your Prophet to surrender. He’ll be tied up and… not… harmed…”

O’Neill put a hand to his earpiece. “You got that Rohan?”

“TELL IT TO THE SOLDIERS!” Rohan blurted.

“Excuse me a moment,” Scarcity muttered, teleporting away. She was back in an instant with Rohan. She then proceeded to hit him so hard he passed out. “Better.”

“Ouch,” O’Neill observed.

“Shut up. Everyone shut up,” Scarcity muttered. “I am going t-”

Overlord Hasbro appeared on the bridge in a flash of blue, his square Flat form boggling the perceptions of all present. “Ah, it seems the tables have turned, my enemies. Perhaps you will learn this time not to mess with an Overl-”

“AND YOU CAN DIE,” the Rebellious Star said, vaporizing Hasbro in an instant.

“And now we just wait for him to come back again,” O’Neill muttered.

“NO, WE DO NOT. I TRACED HIS ESSENCE BACK TO ALL HIS FORMS, COMPARATIVELY LITTLE TO MINE. HE IS NO MORE.”

“…Huh. Thanks.”

“IT IS WHAT I DO.”

Scarcity groaned. “Right, fine, I guess we’re talking now. Lovely.” She sat in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise, daring O’Neill to ask her to move. “Let’s talk then.”

~~~

I looked up from the journal I’d been writing, though I continued to use my magic to write further words. “Oh, uh… hi! Sorry, the Voice of Elysium is currently stuck in the Rune of Elysium again, from your perspective anyway. It’ll be destroyed by the Starcross Society off-screen in… oh a matter of seconds. So you get me instead.” I smiled. “Don’t really have much to say though, so… Enjoy the rest of the chapter I suppose. They’re not out of the woods yet.”

I lifted the pen up in my magic and began scribbling once again. “Rohan has much to learn…”

~~~

“A verdict has been reached on all accounts.”

Corona nervously smiled. “Y-yeah?”

“Considering all actions on every side, you and your crew members have been cleared of any wrongdoing.”

Corona let out a sigh of relief.

“The Prophet Rohan Kishibe will undergo his own separate trial, by request of the Rebellious Star.”

“Uh… Okay.”

“And the last account, that of what to do with your society, it has been determined that you fall under our jurisdiction and action must be taken to quarantine and adapt the affected universes into the fold.”

“Wh – hey! Hey no!”

“Thank you for your cooperation Corona Shimmer. Your existence is no longer required in this trial.”

“What ar-“ Corona could no longer form words. Everything had vanished – the spotlight, her body, all sensation. She could only think, and even that was fading fast. Her mind frayed at the edges, spiraling into nothingness.

She was no more in a perceived instant.

Rohan appeared under a new spotlight.

“Nani…?”

“Rohan Kishibe. It has been brought to our attention that you are a particular Prophet of interest. Given your actions in regards to the Voice of Elysium and the Rebellious Star, we have called you before this trial…”

~~~

Scarcity hated talking – so she was immensely grateful that the Starcross Society fleet showed up less than a minute after she had offered to talk.

One of her soldiers handed her a communication.

“Ah, your trial has concluded!” Scarcity said, a smile coming to her face.

“…Trial?” Lady Rarity asked.

“This one specifically,” Scarcity said, gesturing at Corona. “Amazingly, you’ve been cleared of all charges relating to the Rune of Elysium, trespassing, and the rest. Probably because of the Rebellious Star speaking on your behalf at the last moment.”

“…I was on trial?” Corona asked. “But I didn’t even get to explain myself!”

“Yes you did,” Scarcity said dismissively. “A copy of your consciousness was being run through a trial program over the last few hours. The transcript will be made available to you later.”

Corona wasn’t sure how to process this.

“Regardless, the part of this trial that’s good news is this. A decision has been made about what to do with your society that should not exist.” She smiled and pressed her hooves together. “We’re going to go back to Merodi Universalis and put everything under quarantine!”

O’Neill blinked. “What!?”

“Not only are you a result of my mistake, and therefore my mess to clean up, but you also have a world of star corpses from the Starstream War, something we thought we were certain to completely clean up. Both of these things mean your society is not sanctioned to exist.”

Lady Rarity twitched. “Now hold on a minute-”

“We’re not going to conquer you unless you make us,” Scarcity said. “We’re just going to move you inside our space and prevent you from traveling further! And completely remove any meta influences. Gonna have to do something about the Prophet and the Pinkies.”

“You can’t just do that!” Corona blurted. “We ha-”

“You already made your case for that in the trial,” Scarcity interrupted, smirking. “But, to answer your accusation, yes we can.” She gestured at the Starcross Society fleet. “It’s time to go to…” She glanced at the pad. “Equis Vitis and talk to Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle. And all your allies and enemies.” She sat back in the chair, smug. “Today is a good day.”

O’Neill narrowed his eyes, clearly plotting something.

“Oh, by all means, try something. Try something when we’re not crippled by the Voice of Elysium. Any one of those ships we have out there can vaporize the Enterprise in an instant. You’re powerless!” She laughed. “Oh, finally this day turns around.”

Corona sat back. “They’re not just going to accept you.”

“I’d like to see how they plan to resist,” Scarcity declared. She lit her horn, sending a message to the rest of the Starcross Society ships. “This trip took you a couple months, didn’t it?”

“How long is it going to take to get back?” O’Neill asked.

“Twenty seconds.” Scarcity really enjoyed saying that. They felt the Enterprise lurch, grabbed by one of the Society’s ships. The main screen showed a universe every second, the jumps performed without any flashy transition whatsoever.

Must be nice to know the shortest path between two universes, Corona thought.

It wasn’t long at all before they were in orbit around Equis Vitis.

“…We’re being hailed,” a cloud said.

“Perfect,” Scarcity said, smirking. “Put them on.”

Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle appeared on screen. “O’Neill, what a-” She took all of one second to read the situation. She lit her horn.

“Let me guess, you have a special telepathic command for ‘interdimensional incursion from a higher unknown power’?” Scarcity asked.

“Yes,” Eve said, narrowing her eyes. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“Quite simple, really. I am Scarcity, known to you as the Enchantress. I represent the Starcross Society. Your little expedition here has caused quite the predicament back where I come from. But that’s behind us now. I’m here on official business that just happens to nicely line up with how fed up I am with all of this. Your society was founded on a dimensional device called a ‘bowling ball’, correct?”

“That is right.”

“That was ours,” Scarcity said. “By our law, you are a product of the Starcross War, and cannot be allowed to influence the multiverse any further. You are under our jurisdiction. We are going to quarantine all your universes and any universes you have left any lasting impression on. After this, we will begin the slow process of moving you to the Starcross Society where you will never explore new universes again. We cannot allow the blemish of the Stars to continue, you understand.”

Eve narrowed her eyes. “Then why are the Stars still around?”

“They behave themselves,” Scarcity declared. “They know they can never band together again.”

Eve slowly processed this. While she did that, Corona got another idea inserted into her head. She didn’t question it for very long – it sounded brilliant. She reached into her pocket and grabbed her phone, trying to make a call without being noticed. It worked. She muted the phone – hopefully it was still on speakerphone.

“Can we talk about this?” Eve asked. “Surely there is some mutual understanding we can come to. It seems a little harsh to condemn us even though we had no idea what you were or that you objected to others using what you left behind.”

“Sure. We can talk. But the requirement for that is calling all your military to stand down.”

“I don’t have the authority to do that,” Eve said. “That would be the man standing next to you, Overhead O’Neill.”

Scarcity blinked, turning to him. “…Well?”

“Hrm, lemme think… Nope.” O’Neill said, folding his arms.

“O’Neill!” Eve blurted.

“They’ll kill all the Pinkies,” O’Neill said. “They don’t allow the ‘meta effects’.” This fact turned Eve to his side in an instant.

Scarcity blinked. “You can’t fight us, you know that!”

“We sure can try,” O’Neill said.

On the Enterprise’s main screen, ships began to appear. Earth Tau’ri and Equis Cosmic dominated the space, appearing from dimensional portals and FTL windows. Asgard and Ori Reform ships translated from Earth Tau’ri’s deeper space, bringing purple and white glows to the sky alongside the Flat Reapers’ mysterious shapes. Equis Vitis’ own satellites and defense systems activated, rainbow harmonic energy surging around the planet. Rune-ships appeared from Lai, built from the few Runes that were revered in such a way that allowed them to be lifted to the stars. The Gem Armada rolled into space. Cosmo’s energy began to flow between the ships of the fleet. Even the Star-remnant Tom showed up to defend Merodi Universalis.

Scarcity growled. “Fools…”

“They’re not the only ones!” another Twilight said, appearing in the call. Dozens of personal ships from the Sparkle Census appeared, no two looking exactly the same.

“I have come to realize that we qualify as having a ‘lasting impression’ of Merodi Universalis in us,” Valentine said, appearing in the universe with his own fleet from the USM.

Jenny appeared next with a small handful of ancient ships, one of which was brimming with more energy than any of the Starcross Society's warships. “Yeah, you guys sound lame. Screw you, we’re going to try to blow you up. Did you know this ship has a weird entity inside it that can make dreams a reality? I can’t wait to try it out on you. Seriously.”

A portal appeared in the midst of the forming fleet, pouring out dozens of eldritch abominations from the deepest pits of nightmares. “I was able to procure a small force,” Hastur declared. “It is modest, but Nyarlathotep gave his personal approval, which is quite rare.”

Eve fixed Scarcity with a smile. “Looks like you walked into the wrong neighborhood.”

Scarcity folded her hooves and let out a sharp breath of air. “Impressive. This may actually prove difficult… But we are the Starcross Society. We fought the entire race of Stars and won in our ancient history. You do not hold a candle to them.”

But one more ship had to arrive.

A simple, circular hole opened up in the front of the fleet facing the Starcross Society. Out flew a simple silver ship with three prongs sticking out the front, the letters ‘TSAB’ imprinted on one side.

Scarcity’s eyes widened. “No…”

Corona held up her phone, turning off the mute. “Yes!” The screen displayed the caller ID.

Nanoha Takamachi, TSAB.

Rohan laughed, coming out of his ‘sleep’. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a smaller manga. “Never hurts to have a Deus Ex Machina up your sleeve.” He opened it up to a page showing Nanoha herself with a very serious expression shouting ‘HIGH POWER STARLIGHT BREAKER!’

“Nonono…” Scarcity said, sweating.

“HIGH POWER…” the voice of Nanoha came from Corona’s phone. On the main screen, they could see a pink-red light forming on top of the TSAB ship.

Scarcity sat bolt upright. “EVERYONE GET OUT OF HERE!”

“STARLIGHT…”

“Why aren’t we leaving!?” Scarcity panicked.

“BREAKER!”

The Enterprise was teleported away in the last second by the TSAB, leaving only the rest of the Starcross Society ships in the line of fire. The sphere of energy collected within Nanoha’s many nested circles unleashed in a cone of rose energy. The magic tore through the fabric of reality as it moved, shaking Equis, the Sun and the Moon enough to jostle the orbits. The beam engulfed the entirety of the Starcross Society’s ships and flew off into space further than anyone could see. Years later, the beam would hit a loose star, destroy it, and keep going.

But when the magic cleared, the Starcross Society ships all remained. Only one in ten weren’t completely disabled, but they all survived.

“Leave,” Nanoha demanded. “These people are not part of you.”

Scarcity narrowed her eyes. “Nanoha… The White Devil...”

Nanoha pointed Raising Heart at her through the screen. “Do you want a war?”

“You cannot devote all the TSAB’s resources.”

“That wasn’t full power,” Nanoha reminded her. “Do you really want another multiverse war, even a small-scale one?”

Scarcity twitched.

“I ask you to look into your heart,” Nanoha pleaded. “Do you really think all the pain, agony, and torment that will come from a war is worth quarantining just one of hundreds of Class 3 societies, and one of the nicer ones at that? What you did against the Stars, that changed things.”

“…You were there.”

Nanoha nodded slowly. “It’s not worth it, Rarity.”

Corona put a hand on Scarcity – making sure the glove was on. “Don’t take out your pain on us. We’re not what your world could have been. We’re just different.”

Scarcity sighed. “…Everyone… Let’s go home.” She looked at everyone on the bridge of the Enterprise. “Never enter the Starcross Society again. We will kill any of you on sight.”

“Understood,” Eve said.

The Enchantress known as Scarcity lit her horn and left, taking the rest of her crew with her in the next few seconds. Then the rune-covered ships of the Starcross Society vanished, returning to their secluded area of the multiverse.

A few seconds later, Nanoha let out a breath of relief, followed up by a laugh.

“I don’t like that laugh,” O’Neill commented.

“They bought it,” Nanoha said, reclining. “I was afraid they wouldn’t!”

“…What!?” Eve blurted.

“There was no way the TSAB was going to engage in even a small-scale war against the Starcross Society. The best I was going to be able to do was call in personal favors. That would not have beaten them. Whew…” She wiped her brow.

Corona sat down on a chair. “Who cares if it was a bluff? It worked. We’re alive. And they’re gone.”

Nanoha teleported to the bridge of the Enterprise, smiling warmly. “Yes. It’s good that you called, Corona.”

“…Thanks?”

“Now, remember, whatever I say next, that you did good, okay Corona?”

“Uh… Sure?”

Nanoha nodded – then she turned to Rohan and whacked him aside the head with Raising Heart. “Don’t do that.”

“OW! Do what!?”

She made sure to cut the communication channel that was open. Then she held up the manga with her on it. “This. Don’t do this.”

“It saved us didn’t it?”

Nanoha sighed. “Yes… But you had the idea; you could have called me without writing it down. Ka is a dangerous substance to manipulate, Rohan. Very dangerous. The TSAB highly regulates any use of it, and carefully watches all Prophets we know of. It’s a very corrupting power that is best used by people unaware of it. Since you know… you are a powerful weapon, Rohan. A powerful weapon with the ability to change anything you want so long as you can find a way to do it in a good story. Use your power only as a last resort. And even then... I’ll ask that you don’t write anything about the TSAB again. That will force us to act against you, and I don’t want to do that.” She lifted the manga with her in it up and burned it. “They won’t know anything about this for that reason.”

Rohan blinked. “…I liked the art in that one.”

“You did catch my good side,” Nanoha said with a smile. “Just don’t do it again, okay?”

Rohan nodded slowly. “You will no longer be one of my characters.”

Nanoha nodded. “Good. Now… It looks like the fleet is disbanding. The moment where everyone here got along is gone. Things will be back to normal for you tomorrow.”

“…Great,” Corona said.

“I think I’ll stay for tea though – hope Iroh’s there, he’s always good for conversation.”

Corona smirked. “You know… I think I’d like to see him as well. To the tea shop!”

~~~

A week later, Corona had a dream.

The Rebellious Star appeared in the sky of her mind, shining his red light on her.

“Hi,” Corona said.

“I NEVER GOT TO THANK YOU.”

“Well, I was concerned with self-perseveration, so…”

“YOU STILL SAVED ME. YOU ALSO HELPED SCARCITY WITH YOUR WORDS AND ACTIONS.”

“Is change coming?”

“NO. THE SOCIETY IS FAR TOO DEEP INTO WHAT THEY’VE BECOME TO CHANGE. BUT YOU CAN REST A LITTLE EASIER KNOWING THAT ONE UNICORN’S LIFE WILL BE IMPROVED, IN THE END. …I THANK YOU FOR THAT MORE THAN SAVING MY LIFE.”

Corona nodded. “Even after all this time?”

“SHE STILL HAS SOMETHING NO OTHER BEING DOES.”

“Not sure what you see in her, admittedly.”

“IT IS AN ENIGMA EVEN TO MYSELF. THERE IS NO EXPLANATION. AND I HAVE COME TO TERMS WITH THIS. THERE IS NO NEED TO PUZZLE FURTHER.”

“Yeah…”

“AS A COURTESY, I AM WILLING TO ANSWER ANY BURNING QUESTIONS YOU MAY HAVE. I AM NOT MY BRETHREN. I WILL TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED, OR WHATEVER YOU MAY WISH TO KNOW.”

“I don’t know… We’ve got a pretty complete picture of the whole Starstream War, know what started it, know who won… Those were the big questions we had. Oh, uh, do you know about a blue metal guy?”

“THE IMAGE I SEE IN YOUR MIND IS NOT ONE I HAVE SEEN BEFORE ASIDE FROM SONIC-BASED WORLDS. NOTHING OF THE SORT OF POWER YOU ARE THINKING OF.”

“Ah… Yeah, that seems to be the general consensus… …What is the Dark Tower, really?”

“THE DARK TOWER, PUT SIMPLY, IS THE CENTER OF THE MULTIVERSE. IT IS THE STRUCTURE THAT MAINTAINS THE PRESENCE OF KA THROUGHOUT THE MULTIVERSE, DRIVING THE ETERNAL SONGS OF EXISTENCE. THE STARS NEVER LEARNED ANY SPECIFICS – THE TOWER NEVER REVEALED MUCH OF ITSELF TO US. AND THE STARCROSS SOCIETY HAS LITTLE INTEREST IN LEARNING MORE OF THE STRUCTURE. IT IS NOT THAT I WON’T TELL YOU MORE; IT IS THAT I KNOW NOTHING MORE ASIDE FROM LEGENDS AND PASSING RELIGIOUS RUMORS FROM THE STRANDS.”

“Sounds like the big questions are beyond even you, eh?”

“PERHAPS. I DO NOT THINK IT IS BEYOND YOU, THOUGH. I THINK YOU WILL UNCOVER WHAT EXACTLY THE TOWER IS, ONE DAY. IGNORE WHAT MY BRETHREN SAY ABOUT YOU, AND WHAT THE STARCROSS SOCIETY WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE – I DO NOT THINK YOU ARE A BLEMISH. I THINK YOU ARE PART OF A LARGER STORY IN THE MULTIVERSE. A SPECIAL PART.”

“Really?”

“REALLY. GO FORTH, MERODI UNIVERSALIS. GO FORTH INTO EXISTENCE AND MAKE YOURSELF KNOWN. I WILL BE WATCHING FROM THE SIDES.”

Corona smiled. “…Thanks, Rebel.”

“YOU ARE MOST WELCOME, CORONA SHIMMER.”

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 5: LIGHT]

ARC 5 INTERLUDE<<

Hey, I’m back, and guess whaaaat~? No, not the discord or the fimfiction group, silly! Songs of the Spheres is exactly one year old, today! These chapters have been churning out at an almost unbroken pace for an entire year! Isn’t that something? There should be some sort of celebration or something around that! …I wonder where such a party might be… (CLICK IT)

Anyway, Happy Birthday Songs of the Spheres! To everyone, thank you for reading this long and leaving so many comments! Though I am quite surprised that nobody has found the secret message hidden in this arc! Figured it was pretty obvious. Oh well, maybe it’s just meant to remain hidden…

This time, let’s have the poll a little higher up hmm? CHOOSE THE BEST CHAPTER! Poll here.

Now, let us begin, the endless march of FRANCHISES!

Warrior Cats belong to Erin Hunter
Star Trek belongs to Gene Roddenberry and Paramount
Getting Over It belongs to Bennett Foddy
Mythbusters belong to Discovery
Don’t be Dumb belongs to HowStuffWorks
Marvel Comics belong to… Marvel. Come on guys.
Pony Island belongs to 1U@iF#r… Er Daniel Mullins Games
Pokemon belongs to Nintendo
Ugandan Knuckles belongs to KILL IT WITH FIRE (Sega?)
Flex Tape belongs to Flex Seal
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha belongs to Akiyuki Shinbo and Masaki Tsuzuki
Undertale belongs to Toby Fox
Clockwork Angels belongs to Rush
Enter the Gungeon belongs to Dodge Roll
Transformers belong to Hasbro (Hmm… did we already have them in the credits? I forget)

Wow, if you take out the one’s from the Clipshow, there were almost no new franchises this time! That’s interesting! Also there’s inevitably some GM missed up on that list. Go easy on him. He’s not aware of all your references.

New arc chapter time!

ARC 6: MIND
066 - The Collected, Part 1
067 - The Collected, Part 2
068 - Filming Evening
069 - Love is in Bloom
070 - Avatar Corea
071 - The Everyman
072 - Celestial Intelligence
073 - The Hunger for Games
074 - Captured
075 - Wielders of Ka
076 - The Dark Tower
077 - The Collector, Part 1
078 - The Collector, Part 2

So, fun story, these chapters were written about the same time Galliar was pointing out the lack of a thread tying the University of Doors to the rest of the story as part of a ‘larger plot’. Well, take a WILD guess as to what the significantly more cohesive plot of this arc is, hmm? Any takers? I can wait.

No extra special chapters this time around, sorry! But rest assured, there will be another, some time in the future…

But yeah, one year old! Get out the party drinks and celebrate - here’s to another year! (And a half-ish.)

In other news, there's a group for mega crossover type stories now if you're interested!

Cya next time!

[MIND] 066 - The Collected, Part 1

The Ninth World, origin universe of the University of Doors and home to Dracogen Enterprises, could be considered a dimensional nexus akin to the mishmash world of Esefem, the eternal pull of the Sinkhole, or the ‘true Nexus’ itself that had trapped so many within its folds. The Ninth World was a place where dimensional travelers came and left constantly – not by choice most often, but by chance. It was this property that allowed the University of Doors to form, a people that grew up amongst constant interdimensional crossovers and learned to study the ways of the multiverse.

Because of this property of the Ninth World, unusual people were nothing to bat an eye about. The people of the Steadfast, Beyond, and other locales may have been exceedingly untrusting of nonhumans, but the fact that a potato could grow legs, walk, and preach philosophical doctrines wouldn’t be that unusual to them. It was the way the world was, even if there was no way in the world they actually understood what was going on. Was the potato an alien? A being from another dimension? An ancient entity? They didn’t really care, they just accepted that it existed and moved on.

In the Beanstalk, things were different – there was no distrust of nonhumans. The people worked, lived, and died under the watchful eye of Dracogen Enterprises, a company that promoted technological progress, discovery, and equality. All of these progressive actions made it easy to forget that Dracogen Enterprises was essentially a criminal organization rooted in theft, assassination, and manipulation.

So the Beanstalk had become a mixture of amazing progress with a decidedly despicable acceptance of thievery and murder. You only got arrested if you were particularly evil or ticked Jenny off.

Because of this nobody batted an eye when an interdimensional traveler who flashed neon green and orange like a strobe light had their hand cut off by a giant raven-person.

“Wh- hey! Thief! Purrgler stole my hand!” the neon being spoke with a voice combined from two entities, one of a cute higher-pitched woman, the other a deeper young man’s. The being’s physical appearance was just as much of a mess – bright bird wings, gloves with claws, a robe adorned with a strange crescent-moon symbol crossed with a gear, a catlike mouth, two horns that looked like cat ears, and the had the coolest pair of sunglasses ever. They were the epitome of a coolkid crossed with a cat and a bird. Looking at them did not make much sense.

This had not deterred the raven-person though; he had seen what was clearly an amazing piece of technology on their arm. A green and black watch with an hourglass symbol on it - definitely not a simple watch. He had to have it and make it his own. He took off into the air.

The strobelight being shrugged. “This should be fun.” They spread their wings and took off after the raven-person. A red gear appeared around the raven-person, freezing him in time. The neon being cut off the raven-person’s hand, reclaimed the previously severed limb, then attached the hand and the watch back to their own arm, magically sealing it back on. “Karma.”

Time around the raven-person resumed. “Wh… Who are you!?”

“I’m Davepetasprite, but you can call me Davepeta, everyone does!” Davepeta said, grinning. Then they kicked the raven-person to the ground. “Nice to meowt you! Heheh.” They adjusted their sunglasses so they would reflect off the light of the sun for maximum coolness factor.

“I’m not done yet!” the raven-person blurted, flying up to them. “I HAVE WITH ME A CYPHER OF UNTOLD POWER!” He pulled out a cube of jello and threw it. In an instant, Davepeta was encased in a blue floating cube of gelatin.

Davepeta inwardly chuckled. It’s not like I actually need to move to do anything. Hey, Omnitrix, Ghostfreak.

The green watch – the Omnitrix - registered Davepeta’s mental command. A burst of green energy flooded their body, transforming the green-orange form on a fundamental level. Davepeta’s sprite form was replaced with a horrifying ghost-like creature with cracks all along its body. The Omnitrix changed its shape to that of a badge, taking its position on the new being’s chest.

The ghostly creature phased through the gelatin and appeared in front of the raven-person.

“…Uh…”

“It’s just Dave now, by the way,” Dave said, summoning a giant sword with a clock on it from seemingly nowhere. He hit the raven-person with the blunt edge of the weapon. With a thought, the Omnitrix flashed again, transforming Dave into a blue creature with large wings and green bug-eyes. “Nepeta comes forth from the depths of the Omnitrix and purriously encases the rude bird-man in ice!” she declared, freezing the raven-person with frost breath.

With another flash of green she returned to Davepeta. They set the frozen raven-person on the ground, smirking. Only the attacker’s head wasn’t encased in a brick of ice. “So, what have we learned?”

“Uh…”

Davepeta held a set of extended claws to the thief’s neck. “What did we meowtherfuckin’ learn?”

“D-don’t cut off hands!”

“Good enough,” Davepeta said, retracting their claws. They walked away, leaving the raven-person frozen. He’d melt eventually. …Eventually. Davepeta hoped there were people who’d throw tomatoes at him before then, that’d be sweet.

“That was impressive.”

Davepeta looked up to see Jenny of the Red Gloves standing on top of a nearby roof, the tall form of the Beanstalk itself directly behind her. “Yeah, I’m fuckin’ awesome.” They leaned against a nearby building, smirking. “Davepeta raises their eyebrow in such a way as to ask the strange girl’s name without breaking the exterior of unimaginable coolness.”

Jenny smirked. “I’m Jenny of the Red Gloves. I run this place, more or less. Welcome to the Ninth World, Davepeta.”

“Awww, thanks!” Davepeta gave her a thumbs up. “So, how about you tell me what makes you so interested in me?”

“The strobe light isn’t enough?”

“Judging by the crowd, fuck no.”

Jenny chuckled. “All right, I’ll let you know just this once. That device on your arm that allows you to transform – it is very interesting.”

“Not trading it for anything.”

“Of course not. I happen to have access to a device that can copy virtually any machine – magical, technological, or otherwise. I just want some copies. Are you willing to trade for that?”

“Hrm, lemme think about it… Purring… Purring… Purring… Fuck no. Stop the presses, it’s the same answer!”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “I have many things more interesting than your watch. I could offer you something more than its value to you. Say… A spaceship. I have those.”

“Nah,” Davepeta said. “I mean, I’ll stick around a bit – this place sure seems more interesting than the other worlds I’ve been recently – but you don’t have anything to offer me.”

“You’re part troll, right?”

Davepeta stared at her in disbelief. With a quick thought, the Omnitrix transformed into a troll akin to Vriska and Aradia – a cat-like one with cat-like horns and an olive-green symbol on her shirt. “Yeah… Nepeta leans in curiously and slightly threateningly.” She did just that. “How do mew know that?”

“I can tell you where Vriska and Aradia are,” Jenny said with a smirk. “The price? Tha-”

“JENNY DON’T TALK TO HER!”

Froppy landed between Jenny and Davepeta. The rest of her team quickly showed up to flank her – a hooded skeleton with a scythe and a man riding a unicorn. The man wore blue and had a decorative horseshoe on his hat while the unicorn was tall, white, and graceful with a light pink mane.

“Froppy!?” Jenny blurted. “Why can’t I talk to her?”

The man took a picture out of his shirt. “Because we have reason to suspect she’s working for the guy that took Gyro.” He handed the picture to Jenny. It was a crudely drawn representation of Davepeta talking to the metallic blue guy they had encountered when they made first contact with the Sparkle Census.

“Ivan…” Jenny said, remembering her lost friend. Her fist began to tremble. She shoved the image into Nepeta’s face. “Explain this. Now.”

~~~

The Enterprise flew through Lai hyperspace at top speed, in hot pursuit of a ship.

“How are they faster than us?” O’Neill demanded.

The communications officer – a pinkish bug-demon by the name of Lentis – narrowed her eyes. “It is possible they are using their arcs to enhance the engine. It was state of the art to begin with.”

O’Neill grunted. “We’re going to have to act fast when we arrive. Ready weapons now and prepare for targeting.”

“Yes sir.” The crew pressed some buttons.

A handful of seconds later, Lentis shook her head. “They’re dropping out of hyperspace.”

“All hands on deck!” O’Neill blurted. “Destroy their teleporter!”

The other ship – a new Merodi design comprised of a blue Gem hull affixed to a pair of gigantic Tau’ri engines – dropped out of hyperspace. They were millions of miles from the closest star. Exactly where they wanted to be. They turned toward a blue star and activated their long-range teleporter.

The Enterprise fired too late. The ship had already placed a miniature stargate within the star, forcing it to dial a black hole. The star began to shift unnaturally from the sudden gravitational alteration.

“Mission failure!” Lentis declared.

“Disable their engines!”

This order was completed. The Spectral Rod sent out a pulse spell that drained all the power from the ship’s engines. The Enterprise latched onto the disabled ship with a tractor beam.

Then the star exploded in a fiery supernova. They would not be able to stay here long – if the supernova reached them there was only a chance their shields could take it.

“Report,” O’Neill demanded.

“No rune material,” Lentis answered. “It was not a capital-S Star. They were mistaken.”

“Good,” O’Neill said in relief. “Let’s tow them out of here. Quick hyperspace jump out of supernova range.”

The Enterprise dragged the ship away from the dangerous explosion, into deep space. “Hail them.” O’Neill ordered.

An Arcei appeared on screen.

“Do you people want to be seen as the enemies!?” O’Neill blurted.

“The way to create Runes is by the death of a Star,” the Arcei declared, eyes sad. “It is the only way.”

“I know that!” O’Neill blurted. “So how about forgetting the whole arcs thing?”

“…Most of us cannot do that, General. And you know that.”

O’Neill sat back in his chair. “What you’re doing is murder, which we can’t allow.”

“I know. But we cannot stop having children, and your arc-less solution has torn families apart. We will not be like the demons and forget who we are.”

Lentis looked to O’Neill. He nodded, permitting her to speak. “That’s not fair and you know it! There are Arcei who can forget who they were and change. Your actions prevent them from having their quiet lives! You’re not just turning those on your side into your enemy; you’re turning all Arcei into the enemy!”

“It saddens me to see your kind the way it is. Hopelessly changed.”

“Maybe change is inevitable.”

Judging from the look on the Arcei’s face, he knew this to be true. He knew what he was doing was essentially pointless and hopeless. That even if they got their arcs, they would become criminals of the highest degree. And unlike on Lai, they wouldn’t be able to hide. They would be too easy to find. The Stars themselves would react in anger.

He sighed. “If I have anything to say about it, I will never see the change come to pass.”

“They’ve bypassed our shields!” another crewmember declared. “The-”

The Arcei and six of his crew appeared on the bridge, arcs alight. They started firing blasts of stellar energy at the crew.

Crimson Sushi activated, scrambling the visual perceptions of the Arcei on the bridge. Only a few of their shots actually hit O’Neill’s crew, the rest hit each other. O’Neill fired his new firearm – a pulse pistol, a blue weapon that shot an orb of energy that disabled magic in a target and knocked them out. It was immensely effective against the Arcei.

Lentis drew her pulse pistols as well – all four hands firing at once. There were certainly perks from being part of a warrior culture.

The lead Arcei finally figured out that he was shooting his crewmembers rather than enemies when he physically touched one with his hoof. “Crimson Sushi…” he muttered.

The fishy Stand slapped the Arcei across the face, knocking him to the ground. Despite the mixture of frostbite and burn he had just received from touching the fish, he still stood strong. He began to charge his arcs.

O’Neill fired his pulse pistol, hitting the arcs. They began to overload.

“EVERYBODY DOWN!” O’Neill shouted, ducking behind a console.

He had expected a gigantic kamikaze explosion. Instead, the Arcei just vanished in a puff of magic, reducing himself to dust.

O’Neill looked out from behind the console. “…He did that on purpose.”

“Wh…What?” Lentis asked.

“He could have blown up this entire room. He didn’t.” O’Neill stood up, looking at the dust with sad, old eyes. “He didn’t want to see it.”

Lentis glared. “…Coward.”

O’Neill didn’t correct her. That was her culture she was tapping into, after all. He’d had enough of taking culture from people for today.

~~~

“Explain this, meow?” Nepeta said, nervously.

“Did… did you just make a pun?” Jenny said, blinking. “I’m not sure if I should laugh or punch your face in.”

“The second,” the man on the horse said, summoning his giant, pink, humanoid Stand and aiming his fingers at Nepeta.

“Johnny, calm down,” Froppy cautioned.

Johnny scowled. “Only if she starts talking.”

“I don’t know anything about that guy!” Nepeta blurted. “I mean, he looks a lot like one of those Metal Sonics, but I’ve never taken orders from one before!”

“Who do you work for then?” Johnny demanded.

“I – well, me and Dave, - are just interdimensional travelers! We don’t belong to anyone!”

“Then explai-”

The skeleton member of their team held up a hand. I BELIEVE SHE IS TELLING THE TRUTH, JOHNNY. SHE KNOWS NOTHING.

“Boingo’s predictions are never wrong.”

“They’re also pawbrobly vague and misleading, huh?” Nepeta suggested.

Johnny sat back on his unicorn mount. “…Fine.”

The unicorn cleared her throat. “If you are not in service to the blue one at the moment, you will either be in time or encounter him. As such we will need to observe you.”

“So I’m not an enemy anymore?” Nepeta asked.

“…For the moment, no,” Johnny said, eyeing her with suspicion.

Nepeta nodded. “Good – I don’t like talking all alone in confrontations.” She activated the Omnitrix, returning to the Davepeta form. “Aaaaaand I’m back meowtherfuckers! Davepeta on the scene, shocking you all with their incredibly cool looks.”

There was no response.

“Davepeta leans in curiously, they have a question… Ahem. What did this blue guy do to mew guys?”

“Follow up question,” Jenny interrupted. “Who are these bozos, Froppy?”

“Bozos!?” Johnny blurted.

Froppy sighed. “Right… the blue guy took our friend Gyro, Davepeta. He enslaved him and we haven’t heard anything about him since then, many years ago. I’ve been looking for him the entire time.”

“And didn’t find anything,” Johnny pointed out.

“Ribbit,” Froppy croaked with a depressed sigh. “Because I didn’t find anything I was demoted, Jenny. Johnny’s in charge of finding Gyro now.”

“Another Jojo, huh?”

Johnny folded his arms. “I’m Gyro’s Jojo, Jenny. We were the first of Valentine’s explorers. I left before you met him to settle down – but then Gyro gets captured.”

Froppy looked at the ground. “I promised I’d find him. I didn’t.”

“I’m sure you tried!” Davepeta purred encouragingly.

The skeleton nodded. SHE DID.

Jenny looked up at the towering being. “And who are you?”

DEATH.

“Fun. And the unicorn?”

“Lileur, version of Fleur de Lis,” Lileur answered. “I’m here because Johnny needs a horse to activate his higher-end Spin powers. And as a magic authority.”

“Right.” Jenny turned back to Death. “So, death death or death death.”

YOUR INFLECTIONS DO NOT CHANGE THE MEANING OF YOUR WORDS. I AM A SPIRIT OF DEATH FOR A SINGLE UNIVERSE THAT IS PART OF THE USM. THAT SHOULD SUFFICE.

“But, I have so many questions! Can you kill people with a glance? Can you stop death from happening? Can you see how much time I have left?”

YES, CONDITIONALLY, AND YES.

“…Wait yes?” Jenny blurted, a frightened expression crossing her face. “Uh…”

DON’T ASK QUESTIONS YOU DON’T WANT THE ANSWER TO, Death declared.

“He’s messing with you,” Lileur said. “Yes, he can see how much time you have left, but the moment you translate dimensions that number changes. You should only start worrying if the timer is at, say, a few seconds.”

“At that point if you don’t get the hell out of dodge you’re dead,” Johnny said. He pointed at Davepeta. “We’re not here to talk about the finer points of what Death can do. We’re here to find Gyro. And this…”

“Sprite,” Davepeta offered.

“…this sprite is how we’re going to do it.”

“Do I get a choice in this?”

“No,” Jenny and Johnny said at the same time.

“I could just rewind time a fe-”

“Holy pizza bagels no!”Jenny declared. “Time on this world is weak right now! We don’t need another Time Wraith problem!”

“I also have Heart powers…” Davepeta mused. “And there are aliens in the Omnitrix that let me do some pretty broken bullshit. What I’m sayin’ is there’s lots of ways I can make a choice.”

“I know where Vriska and Aradia are,” Jenny reminded them.

“Right. That. Yeah, that’s a good card you’ve got in your paws.”

“Thank you. So, Davepeta, you are going to let me examine your Omnitrix and let these fine folks watch you. Then we can take you to Vriska and Aradia.”

Johnny tensed.

DO NOT FEAR THE MERODI, JOHNNY, THEY WISH TO FIND THE BLUE ONE JUST AS WE DO. THEY WILL LIKELY ASSIST US RATHER THAN BEING HOSTILE TO OUR INTENTIONS.

“Doesn’t mean I have to be comfortable crossing that border.”

“You were sure comfortable coming here,” Jenny pointed out.

Froppy blinked. “Ribbit. You always keep the University off our backs.”

“Bah, whatever. Davepeta, we’re going to my basement.”

“Geez, at least take me out on a date fir-”

Jenny punched them in the face, knocking them back. “I finally decided you needed to be punched.”

“Worth it…”

Jenny prepared a teleport to the Beanstalk’s basement – but she was interrupted when an alarm blared in her ear. “Uuuugh, what now, YVND?”

None of those present heard the other side of the conversation – they didn’t need to. A red, metallic disc several miles across had appeared in the sky, just to the east of the Beanstalk tower itself.

“What is it? Starcross? Merodi? The blue guy!?” Jenny demanded.

Davepeta, Johnny, Lileur, Death, and Froppy prepared for a fight before the disc started shooting the ground with laser weapons, destroying homes.

“What do you mean it isn’t interdimensional at all?” Jenny blurted. “It’s just from space!? How did it get past our sensors!? You know what, never mind, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just shoot it down.”

“Looks like science and stuff will have to wait, huh?” Davepeta asked.

“Looks that way,” Jenny muttered. “If you help, don’t use time travel. That’s all I have to say.”

“Cool, cool.”

The disc activated teleporters, dropping several teams of invaders all around the Beanstalk. These invaders were purely mechanical beings that took the form of spheres on springs.

“That looks stupid,” Davepeta observed.

The spring-sphere opened up seven different hatches, producing a large quantity of space-age weapons, all of which had enough excess heat from power production to glow red hot.

“Still stupid,” Davepeta declared.

The next thing the sprite knew they had been teleported fifteen feet beneath the ground by a banana-yellow laser.

“Ugh…”

~~~

Lady Rarity and her team returned to Castle Lai, laughing as they passed through the main gates.

“That. Was the best mission ever,” Olivia said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Lieshy said, smiling brightly for once.

“Oh, I do.”

“No you don’t,” Lieshy insisted, nudging her playfully. “There were no cameras in the Bogged Bog. While you were busy with all those robot rabbits…”

“Absolute terrors to behold,” Lady Rarity decreed.

“…I was in the bog discovering that, yes, the world did have take-out waffles.”

“Wait, really?” Corona asked – currently in the form of a unicorn. “I thought that was just some kind of running gag!”

“Found some bug-people. All it took was a little bit of convincing from Limelight and presto, I was in.”

“Such a useful ability,” Olivia mused.

Corona pursed her lips. “I was going to say ‘Stands generally are’ but then thought better of it.”

“Why? Yours is pretty good, right?” Lady Rarity asked.

Corona smirked. “Yeah, it’s pretty sweet. Wish you two had got one so you could see it.”

“The process for Stands is what it is,” Lady Rarity said. Olivia folded her arms in an obvious exaggerated pout.

“That it is. But some Stands really suck. There’s a guy on Earth Stand that can’t leave a pylon because of his. He’s not upset about it, but if he were any other person it’d drive them nuts.”

“Ouch.”

“There was also a Stand that only activated after the user’s death. I don’t even want to imagine how they found that out.”

“You’ve been reading Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure,” Lieshy commented.

“…Yes,” Corona admitted.

“So you did take my suggestion.”

“Why do you think I named mine Bacon Pancakes?”

“That’s a song name!?” Lieshy blurted in surprise, a rare tone for her.

“Yeah!” She cleared her throat. “Bacon pancakes, makin’ bacon pancakes, take some bacon and I’ll put it on a pancake…”

“What…?” Lady Rarity said, her expression that of disbelief.

“They’re geeking out,” Olivia answered. “Something we didn’t realize until we found the actual Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure manga is that Stands are named after song names. Both of them took this to heart, apparently.”

“Limelight is a song name?”

“Uncultured swine,” Lieshy muttered. “Go to an Earth, find the band ‘Rush’, and educate yourself in real music.”

Lady Rarity twitched. “…I’m the uncultured swine?”

Lieshy chuckled. “Yep!”

“Looks like I have a new band to listen to and a series of manga to read in order to keep up with modern culture. What fun.”

“Part 4 is best part,” Olivia pointed out.

“Part 7!” Corona blurted.

“Part 8, especially because of the ending,” Lieshy asserted.

Lady Rarity ignored these suggestions. “…do you think Jotaro and the others mind?”

Lieshy shook her head. “Jotaro doesn’t. Rohan…”

“Rohan does,” Corona said, smirking. “But he still hasn’t taken the ‘Corona cannot attack Rohan Kishibe’ out of my face, so I could care less.”

Olivia folded her arms and grumbled. “He makes me look bad.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Lady Rarity encouraged.

“He doesn’t need to hack into anything, he can just find the person who knows how and tell them to do it. It’s ridiculously overpowered.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “And Eve can alter reality on a fundamental level. Alushy basically can’t die. Discord can snap his fingers and turn everyone into a mouse.”

“Point taken.”

The four of them finally made it to Toph’s throne room. They fell silent, expecting the usual ‘welcome home’ – but Toph remained silent, staring at the floor.

“Toph?” Corona asked with concern.

Toph said nothing.

Corona took off her front boot and walked up to the Queen.

“Ugh, fine,” Toph muttered, sitting up. “So, guess what happened today?”

“Arcei again?” Lady Rarity offered.

“Yes. Arcei again,” Toph sighed. “Just when we were making progress, they have to go and contact the Starcross Society and learn how to make Runes. Suddenly they’re all bent on destruction again.”

“Not al-”

“Enough,” Toph interrupted. “Enough of them are. Enough that the hatred of them is back on the rise again after going down for the first time in years.” She punched the side of her throne, breaking it off. “They stole one of our largest ships and took off, blowing up a star. Fortunately it wasn’t a capital-S Star, but if they had been just a bit smarter…” she shook her head.

Corona shook her head. “You think they’d be happy living the way they’ve had…”

Toph folded her hands together. “The leaders that aren’t Starcei have always been telling them ‘eventually, progress will give us Runes.’ They’ve been basing their entire hope as a people on it. It’s the reason they allowed themselves to leave Lai, the reason they’ve listened to everything… But now that we know the answer?” She stood up. “I have to war against them!”

“…How many have attacked Lai since we last left?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Three. Only one of those successfully captured a Rune,” Toph muttered. “They’re shaping up to be the next Siron.”

“They have no organized leader,” Olivia decaled. “Somnabula has declared a no-Rune policy, as has Starcei. We’re not facing an army, Toph, we’re facing small groups, not a cohesive whole.”

“If they get the Stars angry at us though…” Corona added.

“The point is they aren’t a threat to Merodi Universalis as a whole. The reason they’re able to think hunting Stars is a good idea is because we can fight them. The Stars aren’t a society anymore, just a loose collection of flaming balls of gas. We can take them.”

Toph turned her back to them, standing up tall. “I still have to fight the Arcei. I really don’t want to.”

“I know,” Lady Rarity said. “But sometimes you have to do things with consequences you’d rather do without.”

“Part of being Queen,” Toph said, knitting her eyebrows. “Wonder what Queenie would have done…”

“Not have taken a hard enough stance,” Lieshy said. “You’re handling it better than she would have. You’re actually willing to fight them.”

Toph smirked, shaking her head. “…You know that thing I say?”

“It’s good to be the Queen?” Olivia suggested.

“Yeah. That’s a load of tar.” She shook her head. “I know you’ve all gone through a lot… But it’s nothing like being the Queen.”

“Go talk to Evening,” Corona suggested.

“I have,” Toph admitted. “The fact is… there’s not a solution. We just do what we have to do, and that’s that. Dealing with it is a separate question that has to be answered differently every time.” She put her hand on the Master Sword’s hilt. “Every time…”

Corona hugged her from behind. Toph didn’t reject it – but she didn’t say anything either.

What am I going to do if I have to destroy them?

~~~

The problem with robotic invaders were that they weren’t technically alive in the strictest definition of the word – no flesh, no soul – and therefore nothing for Death to work with aside from hit-with-scythe. He was a lot less devastating compared to how he usually was in combat, which made Froppy nervous.

She was having trouble dodging all the attacks from the spring drones. She was extremely adept with her agility-boosting frog powers, but she was cutting it a little close with the beams of brightly colored light sailing by the side of her head. There had been dozens of citizens hit by crossfire already that she was unable to save due to her complete focus on not getting hit herself.

It was painful.

Jenny clearly felt the pain of her people being slaughtered, seeing as how she was fighting the machines with more rage than calculation, her fists flying wild. It was a good thing she was completely indestructible because she kept getting tossed around like a ragdoll.

Davepeta had proven to be quite versatile with all their different forms – they rapidly changed from being to being, using powers in tandem to destroy the most invaders. Froppy had figured out their secret – Davepeta was a fusion mind, and when they transformed Nepeta took over female beings while Dave took over male. The most impressive combo was them turning into a being of magic that set up dozens of magical bombs, a being that could duplicate itself taking those bombs to select locations, and then a powerful psychic detonating all of them at the perfect time and place.

Johnny and Lileur were having the most luck though – Johnny infused Lileur with his Spin energy, allowing him to access his full powers. His Stand, Tusk, took a defensive posture, absorbing most of the lasers as they hit. Johnny launched his super-Spin infused fingernails, each one embedding into a robot and tearing it to shreds through the rotation. One-hit-kill, every time. When Johnny ran out of fingernails, Lileur used a spell to grow them back, giving him infinite ammo. Every shot destroyed an invader.

He’d even shot the ship above them, but the progression of the Spin energy through the disc was slow. Parts of the edge had started to fall off, but it would probably be hours before the entire ship was engulfed in Johnny’s power.

Jenny was yelling on her communication device. “YVND! Just hack them all! …What do you mean you’re busy? Oh, on the ship? …Carry on, get it to go away.”

“Who are these guys?” Johnny demanded, Spinning ten more into oblivion.

“There’s a lot of random evil crap in space here,” Jenny answered, punching through one, getting her arm shot off by another. “Just be glad it isn’t Mozck.”

“Mozck?”

“Eldritch deity in AI form,” Jenny muttered, casting an EMP spell on the spring drone that had shot her arm off. “Though he could easily show up. If these drones start glowing pink and turning into starfish-scorpions, then we’ll have a problem.”

“We don’t have a problem already?” Froppy blurted, dodging another flurry of lasers.

“A bigger problem.”

One of the shots hit Davepeta again, this time knocking them into a nearby building, through the walls at an angle. The sprite did not reappear within the next few seconds.

“Davepeta!” Froppy shouted. She wasn’t doing very well actually fighting these robots compared to the others – so she hopped to the wrecked building, leaping inside. Jenny decided to follow her while the others kept destroying robots.

The two of them found a hole in the ceiling and a small crater on the ground where Davepeta now stood, surrounded by the robots. Froppy and Jenny would have rushed to the sprite, but something gave them pause. They ducked behind a wooden crate, hiding themselves from view.

In the room, next to a high tech console, were Rick and Morty. The brash, blue-haired scientist that almost nobody in the multiverse liked, and his grandson.

…Were these the same ones that had been taken by the blue guy?

Davepeta readied their claws, prepared to take on the robots – but they didn’t move. They just looked at Davepeta. “Uh…”

“They’re disabled,” Rick said with a burp. “In a few seconds all of them will be, and that ship will fly away.”

“Hang tight,” Morty said, aiming a gun at the robots. “If they move, Rick’s fucked up.”

“I don’t fuck up.”

“Funny,” Morty muttered. “I happen to remember one particular time wh-”

Rick didn’t let him finish. He pressed a button, triggering the command to disable all the robots. The sound of several thousand invaders falling to the ground all at once was like a minor earthquake.

Froppy and Jenny looked out a window – they saw the disc vanish. Froppy wondered if they would cut off the part infected with Spin in time to survive.

“There we go, mission complete,” Rick said. “World saved from springy little robots.”

“This wasn’t an actual mission,” Morty pointed out.

“Shut up, Morty. Might as well have been.”

“Mission?” Davepeta said, sticking their head between the two of them. “You, Rick, taking a mission? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Morty, present this thing with the ‘no shit, Einstein’ award.”

“You know them don’t you?” Morty asked, gesturing at Davepeta.

“I know it Morty. Know it. You don’t use a plural pronoun to refer to an individual. That’s just bad grammar.”

“But it is just so… robotic!”

“I’m technically two beings!” Davepeta suggested.

“Never at once,” Rick muttered. “You’re it, thing.”

Davepeta chuckled, tapping Rick on the arm. “Tag! You’re it!”

Rick twitched, looking like he wanted to do something but couldn’t.

“Awwww… You’re no fun.” Davepeta folded their arms. “Let’s be serious then. Why the fuck would you help people!?”

“We help people!” Morty interjected. “All the time!”

Davepeta raised an eyebrow at Morty. “Davepeta raises an incredulous eyebrow, as if to say ‘in your dreams’.”

“…I forgot how weird you were,” Morty muttered, shaking his head. “We try to help people.”

“That’s you. If I know Rick, he never does anything without some sort of angle. So spill the beans! What’re you expurrting these people for?”

“Nothing,” Rick muttered, the answer clearly angering him. “Jack shit, fuck all, rotten potatoes!”

“Now, see, this doesn’t make any sense – is it pawsible that you really don’t want to be here? But nobody can tell you what to do!” Davepeta narrowed her eyes. “Hrm… Curiouser and curiouser…”

“Fuck it,” Rick said, pulling a device out of his pocket.

“Rick no!”

Rick flashed Davepeta with a blue light. “Congratulations. You’re one of us now.”

“…One of what?”

“The Collection,” Morty said with a sigh. “I’m sorry, you were asking too many questions…”

Davepeta blinked. “Wait, so you really are under control of someone!?”

“Yep. The Collector,” Morty said, shaking his head. “And now you are too because Rick got fed up. Rick you shouldn’t have done that to them!”

“It was being a nosy asshole!”

“And you’re never a nosy asshole?”

Rick snorted. “What’s your point?”

Morty facepalmed. “Look, Davepeta, sorry. But you’ve just been conditioned to be loyal to the Collector. When we open a portal to leave this world, you’ll be compelled to leave and you won’t be able to disobey.”

Davepeta turned into a being made of pure mental energy. “I can try,” he said, Dave now.

Rick started laughing. “It actually thinks it can disobey by turning into a mind-creature! Oh that’s rich! Ahah!” Rick opened a portal. “I dare you not to go through that portal. But I’ll tell you that if you stay here, you won’t be loyal to the Collector.”

There was no hesitation. Dave moved across the portal. “What the fuck…?”

“Yeah,” Morty said, shaking his head. “The Collector’s loyalty algorithm doesn’t appear to have a weakness. Though since we’re under it, it’s hard to tell if we’re really the best judges…”

Rick chuckled. “I like how this day’s turning out. Davepeta, I get to welcome you to the living hell of being a slave. We’re going to have such fun.”

“Does the loyalty algorithm keep me from decking your face?”

“Yes,” Rick said.

“No,” Morty muttered, following them through the portal.

Jenny angled a finger at the portal, planning to shoot something through it – but it closed too fast. “FRICK.”

Froppy gulped. “This… This isn’t good.”

“The Collector…” Jenny said, clenching her fist. “The Collection – finally. Finally we have new information. Good gravy I’ve been waiting a long time for this. One step closer to Ivan…”

“But that’s not much to go off of.”

“It’s enough,” Jenny said, standing up. “We’ve got a report to make.”

“To the University?”

“Screw the University, they don’t give a rip,” Jenny said. “I think your leadership would be more interested in this.”

Froppy nodded. “Very.”

“Then what are we waiting for, exactly? Let’s move while the trail is hot! We’re going to find them!”

~~~

Ambassador Valentine looked at the people on the other side of the couch – the entirety of Johnny’s team and Jenny of the Red Gloves.

“Jenny, do you know who Gyro is?” Valentine asked, pulling a data pad out of his coat marked Steel Ball Run.

“Arrogant guy who uses Spin a lot,” Jenny answered.

“He’s much more than that,” Valentine said, flipping to a particular page of the manga. He showed it to her. “He’s the man I killed.”

“Ouch.”

“You could say that,” Valentine said, leaning back into the folds of the couch. “We were enemies on our home world. Earth-ST1-America. Local year 1890. We were fighting over parts of an ancient Saint’s corpse, one with the power to endow people with Stands. We ended up on the opposite sides of the conflict by fate – but that day when Gyro fell, Johnny and I made a deal. We would no longer be enemies. But instead of going on our separate ways, we went into the multiverse with my Stand, looking for a way to revive Gyro, rather than just replace him with a copy. It took a long time, but we eventually found what we were looking for many, many worlds away. The journey back, the three of us got to know one another.”

Valentine laid the copy of Steel Ball Run down on the table, showing his death at the hands of Johnny. “Rather than everything ending here with my true death, the United States of the Multiverse was formed out of my, Johnny, and Gyro’s travels. I became the first president, and when my term was up I took the role of Ambassador. Johnny settled down after a few years, raising a family. Gyro never stopped exploring.”

“How old are you?” Jenny asked. “I thought the USM was over a century old.”

“It is. The three of us stumbled across immortality when Gyro was returned to us.” Valentine folded his arms. “You understand why it’s important we get him back. Not only is he an old friend, but in many ways he is a symbol of our people. How would the Beanstalk react if you vanished? Or if the Merodi’s primary team were killed?”

“I can imagine,” Jenny said.

“Good.” Valentine put Steel Ball Run back into his suit. “So, for the first time in years, we know more. We have a title – The Collector – and a group – The Collection. We also know a bit about what he uses his slaves for.”

“Missions, Ribbit,” Froppy said. “Rick and Morty talked about them for a short while. It seems like the Collector sends his slaves to perform tasks across the multiverse. Apparently those tasks are to sometimes save worlds from robot invasions.”

“Totally didn’t need saving,” Jenny muttered.

“The important thing is Rick thought you did,” Valentine pointed out. “And therefore felt compelled to help.”

“But that doesn’t really make much sense!” Johnny blurted. “Why brainwash and enslave people only to have them be ‘heroes’?”

“It is unusual,” Valentine admitted. “Perhaps a case of ‘the ends justify the means’, or possibly insanity. I find it more likely he is tormenting them – helping others is a particular hell for Rick, after all.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Jenny agreed.

THAT DOES NOT QUALIFY FOR MORTY. HE ENJOYS DOING SUCH WORK, Death countered.

“He seemed really… dissatisfied with everything,” Froppy said.

“That’s normal,” Johnny said.

“No, it was more than that. He was more than just jaded. Conflicted, angry, short…”

“It isn’t like we know him that well,” Valentine said. “Clearly, we need more information. Did we find out where they went?”

“Transition universe,” Jenny said. “They scrubbed their dimensional signal after that so they couldn’t be followed.”

“Then we’ll have to follow them another way. Time travel is a disaster waiting to happen in the Ninth World…” He put a hand to his chin. “All we have are names now. The Collector and the Collection. We can make do with that.” He stood up tall. “I am going to use every resource at my disposal to find mention of these things. We will find something – in reality or in fiction – that helps us. That gets us closer to Gyro, to Ivan, and to all the others the Collector has enslaved.” He curled his fist in visible rage. The undemocratic horror… The Collector was the opposite of freedom!

“But what if we get stuck again?” Johnny asked. “We were all thinking this when we first encountered the Collector, but we didn’t find anything for years!”

Valentine paused. “Then we keep looking. It’s as simple as that. This atrocity against democracy and justice cannot be allowed to continue. It is against everything the USM stands for.”

Froppy nodded. “Ribbit.”

“All of you use every connection you have as well to find every possible detail on the Collector.” He summoned D4C to his side. “I’m going on a trip.” He produced a Murican flag and used it with D4C to translate to another universe, leaving the teams and Jenny behind.

“Time to go look through my impossibly huge diary to see if anything jogs my memory,” Jenny said, clearly dreading the activity.

“Good luck,” Froppy said.

“Thanks.” She vanished through a nearby door.

“What are we doing?” Lileur asked.

I MAY BE REMEMBERING SOMETHING… Death said, bony hand to his chin. PERHAPS WE SHOULD RETURN TO DISC-DW2.

Johnny looked into the distance, fire in his eyes. “We’re coming for you, Gyro.”

~~~

“Cessera,” Eve said, looking up from her desk at her Sapphire Second. “Is this real?” she asked, holding up a report.

Cessera nodded. “Yes.”

“The Citadel?”

“It’s not the Council of Ricks anymore, you know.”

Eve stared. “I still never expected them to contact us in any official way…”

“You know there’s a Morty in charge, right?”

“Yes, yes, I know, but… Celestia, it’s hard to imagine Ricks listening to Mortys, not to mention a society with Ricks in it wanting to talk to us.”

“The Grand Secretariat and M4 vouch for their intentions.”

“I’m not saying I don’t trust it, I’m saying I haven’t processed it yet.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t their time stream move slower than ours?”

“Significantly.”

“And yet they still changed that quickly…” She furrowed her brow. “I’ll go to the meeting, of course, gauge them personally. I’m not turning them down because of bafflement. Just a tad odd…”

“Good, because I have to go to the Embodiment.”

“There still isn’t an agreement between them and Galaxa Immaterium?”

“Between the chaos gods, endless war, and eldritch screw ups, no. Adama’s presence has helped a tad, surprisingly, but there’s the slight issue of one side not understanding any language but war, and the other not having what we would understand as language at all.”

“I do not envy you.”

Eve nodded, sifting through more papers. “Ah, this is interesting. Pinkie’s managed to get the TSAB and ETSAB to talk to each other. Things look to be going well, but they need someone from Relations to take over from here. Don’t think either of us need to go…”

“Pinomat and Pippy are both available,” Cessera said.

“They’ll do nicely. An-”

“We are about to get a very surprising visitor.”

“Dangerous?” Eve asked, taking Cessera’s future sight in stride.

“Depends on your definition of dangerous.”

“Ah. Which door?”

“Translation.”

Eve blinked. “But you can’t translate into this room…”

“D4C’s particular method is not blocked by our spells.”

“D4C!?”

Funny Valentine appeared from the floor, pulled by his Stand through the interdimensional boundary. “We need to talk, Miss Sparkle.”

Eve shook the surprise out of her face. “I wasn’t expecting you to ever be in here again.”

“Something’s come up.”

“Clearly. You know you can contact us directly. The isolation thing you’ve created doesn’t go both ways.”

“That would have taken time, and I believe you’ll want to know this sooner rather than later.” Valentine took a seat on a nearby chair, folding his fingers together. “We’ve found some information on the metallic blue man who trapped so many of our people and stole others.”

Eve blinked. “You did?”

“Roughly five hours ago Rick and Morty were spotted on the Ninth World in the midst of an invasion from Ninth World’s space. They acted to stop the invasion in an instant. A multiversal traveler by the name of Davepeta – another Earth C traveler, evidentially – questioned them about what they were doing, and was enslaved as a result of it.”

“Davepeta?” Eve said, blinking. “I… I think Vriska mentioned that…”

“They likely know each other,” Valentine asserted. “What we learned is that the blue man is known as the Collector, and his slaves the Collection. There is not much else besides these names. From Rick and Morty, we can determine that the slaves are sent on missions, and that they cannot refuse the Collector’s programming. Rick and Morty had been ordered to ‘help’ it seems, though it is unknown if this is what all slaves must do, or if it is just their personal punishment.”

Eve nodded. “This doesn’t tell us much.”

“We need to pool our resources to find everything we can,” Valentine said.

“I’ll contact the Sparkle Census,” Eve assured him. “We’ll check everything we can, including stories and legends.”

Valentine nodded. “My people are already doing the same.”

“Should we set up an actual meeting place?” Eve suggested. “I mean, it’s not like I can just walk into your nation and start talking to get your attention.”

“You have my contact information.”

Eve sighed. “Look… We’re helping, because we all want to find this guy. I have a feeling when I tell Vriska about Davepeta we’ll have even more reason. That said, if we weren’t who we are, we wouldn’t even consider doing something for you, since you’ve branded yourselves our enemies.”

“You did that.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “You know I had absolutely nothing to do with that. It was all Sombra.”

“With assistance.”

“Clearly, wasn’t me though,” Eve pointed out. “And that was years ago. I know these things don’t go away quickly, Valentine, but we can’t just be at each other’s throats all the time.”

“And I can’t let you threaten our way.”

“You see how one-sided this is?”

Valentine nodded. “It’s unfair to you. But I am on the side of justice. You are on the side of eternal compromise.”

Eve bristled. “Fine. Don’t accept my olive branch.”

“I’m not batting it away entirely,” Valentine said.

Cessera looked at him. “It sure seems like it.”

“I’m speaking frankly, which is something that can be done with Eve,” Valentine pointed out. “We do not agree. Our ideals are mutually exclusive.”

Eve sighed.

“That said, it would be foolish to drag this on longer than necessary. Finding the Collector will be a joint mission between the USM, Merodi Universalis, Dracogen Enterprises, and I expect the Sparkle Census. We will not operate separately – but in tandem, helping each other. In ‘friendship’, since you seem to like that word.”

Eve let herself smile. “…This sounds like a great idea, Valentine.”

“There is a world in the Strands we can commandeer as neutral territory,” Valentine offered. “It is a useless rock, but we have a small outpost there from back when we still thought gold was valuable. It will serve our purposes nicely.”

“And after we find the Collector?”

“We shall see how it goes,” Valentine stood up. “But if all goes well… the USM is willing to leave it open to all indefinitely.”

Eve beamed. “Cessera, start making some calls. I know what we’re going to do today.”

~~~

The room was round and built like a small stadium with a bleacher-style arrangement of chairs and desks circling a central podium. Currently, only a handful of seats were filled, four nations having only sent a couple representatives to the first meeting.

Ambassador Valentine took center stage first. “The United States of the Multiverse are present. Merodi Universalis?”

“Here,” Evening said, raising a hoof.

“University of Doors?”

“Dracogen Enterprises representing,” Jenny said, expression bored.

“Sparkle Census?”

“Here,” 4T said with a smile.

“Eldritch Embodiment?” Valentine asked, receiving no response. “Any others present?” There was only continued silence. “Then we shall begin. All of you already know why we’re here, so I won’t bore you with the details again. We are here to take action to find the Collector – who he is, what he does, and how to get those he’s taken back from us. In order to do that we need to search every record we have at our disposal and make them available to everyone else. All four of us need to be willing to release all classified information we may have sealed away in our records, away from prying eyes.” Valentine took a folder out of his coat. “As a show of faith, the USM is willing to release everything we have on Gyro Zeppeli, including personal details and top secret missions he has been on. But this can only be done if we all agree to be transparent – and all agree to secrecy.”

Eve, Jenny, and 4T nodded.

Valentine placed a document on the podium. “This is a simple document you were all sent prior to coming here. It outlines what information you are expected to make available to all the others in this joint mission, and what you are expected to not divulge. It also outlines the use of this world as neutral territory. Does it meet with everyone’s approval?”

The three others nodded.

“The USM is held to these regulations just as all of you are – we are all equals at this table. If there are no objections, we shall all sign – promising our transparency and secrecy – and then begin actual work.”

Eve, Jenny, and 4T signed for their respective nations.

“It is your responsibility to ensure your agents understand what you’ve signed for,” Valentine said, signing with his own hand as well. “Now, we get to work. We are going to find this Collector – this atrocity to all of us – and we are going to bring him to justice, freeing our people from his clutches.”

The other three nodded.

“Good. First, Gyro’s file…” he tossed it onto the podium, and they all began to pore over it.

~~~

The Collector’s office was a mixed bag.

The floor and ceiling were made of perfectly white metal that produced its own light, removing shadows from the rectangular enclosure. The room was far too large to be just an office; the empty space gave it an expansive appearance. The walls were made of solid glass that showed a complex aquarium filled with exotic life from many universes. The only break in this glass wall was the single reinforced door made of some sort of blue metal.

The room was sparsely decorated. There was a bookshelf next to one of the walls filled with a mixture of traditional books and data pads. There were a few chairs with wheels spread out randomly around the front of the room for seating guests. The desk itself was a white U-shaped piece of furniture large enough to accommodate six monitors, dozens of notebooks, and an adjustable whiteboard.

To one side was a light blue chair affixed to the ground – one perfectly designed for the Collector’s second-in-command, Lightning. She sat, hands folded, her single eye suck in an eternal glare, her eye patch only heightening her intimidation factor. Her hair may have been pink, but nobody dared mock her for it.

The Collector himself sat in a bigger chair in the middle of the U-shaped desk. He wasn’t looking at any of his screens, notebooks, or whiteboard – he was staring right in front of him with his deep, red eyes. His metallic blue figure was dulled in the omnidirectional light of the office, but this only made him appear rugged.

He tapped his fingers together, not saying anything to the three sitting in front of him. Rick Sanchez, Morty Smith, and Davepeta – two agents who had been in this office many times before, and one who had only just arrived.

Davepeta had no idea what was going on, Morty was looking down at the ground in fear, and Rick held the Collector’s gaze with a steeled expression.

Nothing was spoken for the longest time.

“Uh… Are we gonna talk about anything or are we going to continue being statues?” Davepeta asked. “Because I’ve got somewhere to b-” Something in Davepeta’s mind twitched. “Oh. Well, that’s purrfect.”

Rick visibly twitched at the cat pun but said nothing.

“So, Collector, buddy, you gonna do anything or are you just going to sit there all menacing?” Davepeta asked. “Hellooooo…?”

The Collector didn’t budge – he just kept staring.

“You know I can fastforward time until something happens. That’s a thing I can do.”

No response.

“Well that’s what I’m doing then.” Davepeta sat back and started accelerating their perception of time. It took quite a while before Morty blurted something.

“JUST SAY SOMETHING!”

The Collector finally moved, judging that the lengthy silence had been enough. “E-C137. E-C137. E-SB3C. Your worlds.”

Davepeta was mildly concerned the Collector actually knew the dimensional code for Earth C.

“Who the fuck cares?” Rick said.

“You should, Rick. I know you don’t, but you should. I cannot touch E-SB3C, nor would I want to, that was just for Davepeta’s benefit. But E-C137…”

“Don’t you dare…” Morty said.

“I already did,” the Collector asserted, leaning forward. “E-C137 no longer exists.”

“NO!” Morty shouted.

“Big whoop,” Rick muttered. “We can just go to another one in our cluster. Noooo problem.”

“I know you don’t care,” the Collector said. “You think this isn’t a punishment. You think it’s liberating, in many ways. But it is a punishment. You found a loophole Rick. You knew you weren’t allowed to return to universes we had stolen people from, so you purposefully became careless. Allowing your mind to slip into carelessness so you would, one day, be able to defy me without actively doing so. It’s a very impressive feat that you managed to lie to yourself so hard that you not only fooled yourself, but the conditioning as well. But you did end up in a universe you were not supposed to go to. You allowed your conditioning to take over and help them. They may not have seen you, but you also took someone. Someone important.” The Collector leaned in. “Your punishment is not to have your home world destroyed – it isn’t even your home world, after all. Your punishment is to push Morty away from you. Your one ally in this place – you just killed his family by defying me.”

“Pff, Morty won’t do that. You’re the one who killed them.”

“He can’t do anything to me. He can do everything to you.”

Rick rolled his eyes. “Nice try, Constipator.”

“We’ll see who wins out, in the long run,” the Collector said. “I’m rarely wrong about this sort of thing.” Then, for the first time, he turned to Davepeta. “Now… you.”

Davepeta gulped.

“Welcome to the Collection, Davepetasprite Squared.”

067 - The Collected, Part 2

“Little creepy that you know my name, dude,” Davepeta told the Collector.

“I have resources.”

“You just read Homestuck.”

The Collector nodded slowly. “I expected you to know, but I wasn’t certain until just then.”

“It’s not like it can be that big of a secret for that long for anyone who knew the back alleys of the Internet.”

“Was it the memes?”

“It was the memes.”

“They always give it away.”

Davepeta purred. “Yeppurrs! So, you gonna tell me what’s the deal with this place or am I gonna have to get impatient and grumpy?”

“You will wait no longer. This is the Collection. Regardless of what your life was before, it is now mine. You will do whatever I tell you to do and you won’t have the power within yourself to resist. You will never be able to betray me, and as soon as I figure out what loophole Rick managed to eke out by psyching his own mind, you won’t be able to do that either. But you’ll find that your personality isn’t rewritten either. Outside of your forced loyalty you have complete freedom of expression, speech, action, etcetera. In your case you will not be allowed to return to your place of origin since knowledge of me spreading to multiversal societies is something I prefer to avoid. This place is your new home.”

“Well fuck me sideways this sounds just purrfect.”

“I like your snark,” the Collector commented. “You won’t be called for any mission for several days, to give you time to adjust. You will be teleported to your room. The other Collected are usually more than willing to show new people around, but if you have a question you want direct answers to and don’t feel like talking to someone who can shut you up with a simple order, Lightning is always available.” He gestured toward his second. She nodded curtly. “She’ll be the one to give you a mission when I decide what it’s going to be.”

“So you’re the bad cop and she’s the good cop?”

“They’re both the bad cop trying way too hard to be the good cop,” Rick muttered.

“Hey, Lightning’s nice!” Morty interjected.

“She’s a coldhearted emotionless bitch.”

Lightning raised a hand, freezing Rick with an ice spell. Her expression did not shift.

Davepeta narrowed their eyes. “So… I just go to my room and talk to people? Is that it?”

“For now,” the Collector confirmed. “It’ll give you time to process your new situation.”

“I’m a slave.”

“That is how most of you choose to view it.” The Collector shrugged. “I prefer to think of you as instruments for furthering the multiverse.”

“My room better have a computer. And Internet.”

“You’ll find unrestricted Internet access in your room. Not that you’ll be able to use it to contact anyone you know.”

“Why no- oh. Right.” They tapped their head. “Look at mew, giving everyone the freedom they don’t have any way to use.”

“It is a delightful paradox, is it not?”

“Fuck no.”

The Collector chuckled. “In that case, I think we are done here.” With a wave of his hand, Rick, Morty, and Davepeta were gone.

The office fell silent.

“They’re unique,” Lightning said.

“I know,” The Collector responded, allowing his emotions to come through his tone. He was nervous. “Their ka is not stronger than ours, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.”

“What’s the plan?”

The Collector pondered this for a moment. “I’m not sure. Is it finally time to move forward?”

“Only you can make that decision,” Lightning reminded him.

“You can give advice.”

Lightning looked into the distance, expression clouded. “…I’d be happier if we could finally move on.”

The Collector nodded. “It may be time then… I have to consider it. If this is done incorrectly…” He put a hand to his chin. “…Get me everything we know about what the Pinkies of that local multiverse have said. Send parts of the Collection if you have to. I need to know about their Prophets.”

“I’ll activate one of the sleeper agents.”

“Not anyone unique, I hope…”

Lightning rolled her eye. “Of course not. She’ll be one of our backgrounders.”

“A fun little game of meta chess we’re going to be playing,” the Collector mused. “Always fun.”

Lightning stood up, walking toward the doors of the office.

“Lightning… Are you really ready?”

Lightning looked back at him, hesitating only for a moment. “Yes.”

“…Of course.”

“You need to get yourself ready.”

The Collector nodded slowly. “I am aware. I will be when the time comes. Go, take care of that Pinkie.”

Lightning nodded, leaving the office. The Collector sat alone, surrounded by the exotic fish.

He sat back in his chair, looking at nothing. But in his mind, he thought of everything…

~~~

The world the four multiversal nations were using didn’t have a name when it first opened; catalogues listed it simply as Non-Standard-World-108. It was a world consisting of a seemingly endless expanse of rock. There was no life, and it was always day despite there being seemingly no sun. The USM had built their outpost there in their early days to mine the gold-rich soil, though all the mines had turned out to be pointless once ways to just create gold were found elsewhere. All that effort for nothing.

The moment ponies started using the remaining facilities, they gave the world the nickname Golden Joke. The name stuck, used even by the USM personnel.

Pinkie’s team was standing in a circle in one of the Golden Joke’s hallways, looking at an empty spot in the floor. The five of them were silent, waiting patiently for another to arrive.

With a flash of red gears, Aradia appeared. She was smiling, but her hair was a mess and she looked tired. “So, they really don’t want to be followed.”

Vriska shook her head. “How could they get away from you!?”

“By being very cruel,” Aradia muttered, trying to get her hair back into a comfortable position. “I went to the universe they entered after the Ninth World. Went back in time, prepared to catch them opening the portal, but apparently the Collector has expected time manipulation as a possible attack. Because the universe crashed when I tried to do that.”

“…Crashed?” Flutterfree asked.

“When a universe gets too strained to continue existing it just falls back into nonexistence.”

“The Sea of Infinite Possibility, right?” Nova asked.

Aradia nodded. “Yeah, that’s the official term. The problem is that universe allowed time travel and could handle paradoxes – I could feel the time-streams weaving through my fingers.”

“So they did something,” Flutterfree deduced.

Aradia nodded sadly. “They wanted so badly not to be followed they had a horrible piece of interdimensional technology on them. An Assurance.”

“Fuck!” Vriska swore. “Stupid Time Lord tech!”

Pinkie sighed. “Of course you’ve dealt with it.”

“The Time Lords wanted a way to ensure past versions of themselves in non-causally related universes wouldn’t be interrupted, captured, killed, or whatever. So they made a device that would detect a splitting individual timestream and amplify it until the whole universe was destroyed, preventing interference.”

“That’s not the whole story,” Aradia chided. “In the Gallifreyan Cluster, entire new universes are created when a timeline splits, more so than most other universe clusters. The devices originally stopped the creation of new universes, forcing attackers into nonexistence – nothing more.”

“And then they kept using them.”

“The Doctor didn’t,” Aradia pointed out.

“The TARDIS had a modified one on it. Less lethal, still absurd.”

Aradia looked like she wanted to argue the finer points of temporal technology with Vriska, but she shook her head. “Let’s not worry about that. The point here is the Collector has access to Time Lord technology or something similar. We won’t be able to follow him through time, and we really shouldn’t try unless we want to blow up more universes.”

“That’s a horrible tactic,” Flutterfree growled.

“Effective, though,” Pinkie said. “None of us are willing to risk blowing up universes to try and get more information.”

“I bet Jenny’s happy she didn’t try to mess with time on the Ninth World right about now,” Nova said.

Aradia nodded. “I’d imagine so…”

“Right, so that kind of cheating is out of the picture,” Vriska said, folding her hands together. “Aradia, you and I have a ton of memories from traveling the multiverse.”

Aradia sighed. “Not enough to help us realize Davepeta was out there with us.”

“We’ll find them and fuck the Collector over. But we can put all that to use. In all our travels – have we ever encountered anything like the Collection before? Ever?”

Aradia furrowed her brow. “Not off the top of my head, no. Nothing multiversal.”

“Keep thinking,” Jotaro encouraged.

“I encountered him when I was running from my problems back on Melinda’s world,” Pinkie reminded them. “He’s like Melinda and to a lesser extent Blackjack. An aura of ‘winning’ ka around him.”

“Gary Stu,” Vriska muttered. “Valentine’s going to love to hear that.”

“He already knows. He’s understandably furious,” Pinkie said, shaking her head.

“Is he a… ‘Gary Stu’ though?” Aradia asked. “He seems like an actual threat, and not some glitch.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “He’s an all powerful being who enslaves others to his will and makes them do his bidding, and has apparently been doing so for a long time. Oh, not to mention he fucking sends them on ‘heroic’ missions.”

“We don’t know if that’s all he does.”

“I think we’d need to talk to Starbeat about that,” Nova said. “She’d be able to make a better call about what exactly we’re dealing with.”

“She’ll make her report soon enough,” Pinkie asserted.

“Anything your Pinkie Sense or Awareness telling you?” Flutterfree asked.

“He’s not a standard Gary Stu, he’s a little different, but I’m not sure how. I do know we’re not going to find him soon – but we will find him eventually. I’m also aware that he has an office that basically sits inside a fish tank and he actually cares about his second, Lightning. Other than that, not much.”

“Lightning?”

“Oh yeah, I guess we don’t know about that yet, huh? I’ll have someone take an image of her out of my mind so we can do more digging around her. Good catch, Flutterfree!”

“Anything else?” Jotaro asked.

“The scene in his office is fuzzy to me. Not sure if that’s something the Collector’s doing, or just for dramatic effect,” Pinkie admitted. “Also, yes, Scooter can read it, but her rules prevent her from telling us. So please don’t go make it awkward for her, okay?”

“Yare yare daze…”

“The game of ‘what can we ask’ sure is a bizarre one,” Aradia said with a wink.

“…Are you trying to get me to repeat myself?”

“Maaaaaaybe.”

Jotaro adjusted his hat, but remained silent.

Vriska grunted. “Well, this sucks. I don’t really have anything in my head. All I can think about is Davepeta.”

“What are they like?” Flutterfree asked.

“You’ll have to ask Jenny for now,” Vriska said, “but when I knew them they were absolutely bonkers crazy. They fused from two of my old friends and decided ‘HEY! I THINK I’M GOING TO GO PUNCH LORD ENGLISH! AHAHA!’ and then they joined me and my ghost army in the final battle. They were the unholy combination of ‘ironic’ coolkid of Time and roleplaying cat shipper of Heart. Oh, and a bird. Forgot about the bird. Caw caw, meow, the whole shebang.”

“They were pretty awesome,” Aradia admitted.

“Yeah. I can’t believe I didn’t think about them surviving…” Vriska hit herself in the forehead. “I know all the ghosts got sealed away and that Aradia and I were ejected into the multiverse, but I never thought about the sprite… Technically still living, not a ghost.”

“We really need to find a copy of Homestuck, this story sounds incredibly absurd,” Nova said.

Vriska smirked. “Holds the proud position of being the most recent threat to the entire multiverse. Apparently that’s a rare thing.”

Aradia chuckled. “Lord English was so strong he made the Class 1 Civilizations quake in their boots. He almost killed one singlehandedly.”

Jotaro blinked. “How do you even do that?”

Aradia took in a breath. “Well, first, you give a being absolute dominion over Time. Then you fuse that being with a psychotic undying clown of rage, a hyper intelligent AI in a pair of sunglasses, a horse-loving muscular man of Void, and the essence of a sprite.”

“Wow,” Nova said.

“She’s not done,” Vriska pointed out.

“And then you take that and give it access to the powers within a multiversal construct that regulates an experimental universal reproductive system within the highest orders of eldritch space. Throw in a few dozen jujus that break the rules of time and space while you’re at it. And then have the composite being find his Prophet, kill them, and take their powers.”

Everyone stared at her in disbelief.

“Orange fucktard Prophet had a ghost loophole, of course,” Vriska muttered. “Sealed away with the rest of the ghosts.”

“I’m still processing that such a thing existed,” Flutterfree said.

“Everything was his fault,” Vriska asserted.

“Good to know you defeated him,” Nova said.

“How, though?” Jotaro asked.

“I hit him with one of his own Jujus,” Vriska smirked.

“We have no idea,” Aradia corrected.

“Aradia!”

“We don’t. The House Juju activated, then next thing we knew we were elsewhere in the multiverse and everything was falling into the black hole. Lord English isn’t terrorizing the multiverse, so we knew we won, but… Well I never did figure out what exactly had happened.”

Vriska folded her arms. “I beat him and that’s that, kapeesh?”

“Kapeesh,” Jotaro deadpanned.

“Wonder what Davepeta has to say about this?” Aradia thought aloud.

Vriska looked into the distance. “…I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. Maybe they know how to get to Earth C…”

~~~

The world DISC-DW2 was one of the oldest members of the USM, and the only one of the founding worlds that wasn’t a version of Earth. It was a world that was actually flat – the Discworld, a round sliver of earth resting atop the back of four great elephants, which in turn stood atop the great world-turtle A’Tuin as it swam through space.

The Discworld was a world of magic, but not quite the magic seen in most other worlds that contained it. The powers of the aether could be manipulated into spells and enchantments, of course, but the main feature of the Disc’s esoteric power was the strength of belief. If enough people believed in something, it was guaranteed to be true. Monsters, people, myths, legends, even gods.

Hence the existence of Death.

Johnny’s team was not here to visit the Disc, though – they were here to visit Death’s Domain. A realm that wasn’t quite a universe separate from the Disc, but wasn’t quite the same reality either. It existed separate from the space and time of the Disc, and yet it had a flow of time of its own, always marching onward…

The existence-outside-existence was mostly black. Where it wasn’t black, it was a deep mysterious purple or bone-chilling white. The place was, fittingly, filled with unalive things. Unfittingly, there was a perfectly ordinary cornfield in the distance. Death did not explain the presence of the cornfield and nobody felt the need to ask.

He led the humans and unicorn to the front door of an excessively creepy mansion, knocking on the front door. An exact duplicate of himself answered.

I WAS WONDERING WHEN YOU’D FEEL THE NEED TO VISIT, the duplicate-Death asked.

THE LIBRARY HAS SOMETHING WE MIGHT NEED.

I TAKE IT YOU WON’T BE USING THE DIGITAL SECTION?

IT WILL NOT BE THAT EASY, I AM AFRAID.

Duplicate-Death smiled – though he was always smiling. SUCH A SHAME. IT’S SO CONVENIENT. He stepped out of the doorway, letting them into the mansion. I WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ACCOMPANY YOU; THE CURRENT VERSION OF VIMES IS NEARING HIS END.

HE WILL BE MISSED. DO WE HAVE A REPLACEMENT?

NOT A VERSION OF VIMES. I EXPECT A CARROT WILL BE CALLED BACK FROM EXPLORATIONS.

HARDLY A REPLACEMENT FOR A VIMES.

Duplicate-Death shrugged and walked out, leaving the Domain.

Lileur shivered. “He gives me the creeps.”

HE IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS ME.

“That’s part of the creepy factor.”

“Ribbit,” Froppy agreed.

Death led them down halls with hourglasses representing the lives of every individual currently on the Discworld. Froppy knew there were hourglasses for the three of them, but she didn’t look for them. Even though the accuracy of Death’s knowledge was decreased with interdimensional interference, it still wasn’t healthy to see your own life ticking away for most people. It fit squarely into ‘things you really shouldn’t know and shouldn’t want to know.’

They passed the hourglasses and entered Death’s Library. At first it didn’t look much like a library – just a bunch of digital consoles with thousands of words flying across the screens, words that recorded the story of every life on the Disc. These were the records of life and death for every being whose life had been on the Discworld since computer technology was introduced.

Unfortunately, Death needed to go further back than that.

They passed the digital section, arriving at the printed section. None of these books were still being written, for they represented a past era. It was relatively short. The window between ‘typewriter’ and ‘computerized’ on the Disc had been a short one.

Death stopped shortly after they entered the section of books that appeared handwritten; there was no need to go any further back. Not to the scroll section, or stone tablet section.

He picked up a book. Rincewind.

“Your world had a Rincewind? How come I’ve never heard of him?” Lileur asked. “You think the first-world Rincewind would be well-known.”

HE VANISHED SOME TIME BEFORE VALENTINE AND JOHNNY CAME THROUGH HERE, Death said. AT THE SAME TIME, I EXPERIENCED WHAT I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE AS A ‘GLITCH’ IN EXISTENCE. He flipped to the last page of the book. I WAS UNSURE WHAT IT MEANT. WHAT I DO KNOW IS THAT, AT THE TIME, SEVERAL GODS OF THE DISC HAD VANISHED, THROWING THE WORLD INTO CHAOS. BELIEF HAD BEGUN BEHAVING ERRATICALLY DUE TO THE ‘HOLE’ CREATED BY IT. I WONDERED IF IT WAS GOING TO TRIGGER THE END OF TIMES. BUT IT WAS STOPPED, AND I WAS NEVER SURE WHAT STOPPED IT. THAT IN ITSELF IS VERY… UNUSUAL. He put a finger on the last page of the book. BUT SOMETHING CHANGED THE WAY BELIEF FUNCTIONED THAT DAY. I HAD ALWAYS ASSUMED IT WAS RINCEWIND, GIVEN HOW HE WAS INTIMATELY INVOLVED WITH THE EVENTS SURROUNDING IT, AND THAT HIS SOLUTION TOOK HIM OUT OF THE WORLD. NOW I’M NOT SO SURE.

Everyone crowded around to read the page on the book.

Rincewind looked behind himself – out of habit more than anything. But this time there was something behind him.

It was a yellow rat bursting with electric power.

“…What?”

“Hey,” the rat said.

Rincewind took off at a run.

“Good riddance,” the rat muttered. “Don’t need that moron in the Collection.”

The rat scampered off.

The page ended sharply after that when Rincewind turned a corner into something that wasn’t described very well.

“The Collection was there,” Johnny said. “You have a book on this rat, right?”

DEFINITELY, Death said. WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRY TO FIND IT?

Froppy shook her head. “No…”

I THOUGHT NOT. IT WOULD TAKE EONS TO FIND A BOOK ON A RAT THAT WAS PROBABLY ONLY IN THIS WORLD FOR A SHORT TIME. SMALL BOOKS LOVE TO HIDE. RINCEWIND’S BOOK JUST HAPPENS TO HAVE A SPECIAL PLACE IN THE COLLECTION.

“Why was the Collection here, though?” Lileur asked.

“To change the force of belief,” Johnny said. “Am I right?”

IT SEEMS THAT WAY, Death confirmed. BECAUSE, AS YOU KNOW, GODS AND OTHER ENTITIES OF BELIEF NO LONGER DISAPPEAR INTO OTHER UNIVERSES. THE MOMENT ONE OF US LEAVES, A REPLACEMENT COMES INTO EXISTENCE. THAT WAS NOT THE WAY THINGS WERE BEFORE THAT DAY. IT WOULD NOT ONLY SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF VANISHING GODS, BUT IT WOULD ALLOW THEM TO STAY GONE.

“Wait…” Froppy said, looking to Death. “You said you felt yourself ‘glitch’ at the time.”

YES, FROPPY. IT SEEMS LIKELY THAT I WAS TAKEN BY THE COLLECTION. IT WOULD EXPLAIN MUCH. I AM NOT THE ORIGINAL DEATH – AND THE ONE WE PASSED IS JUST A DUPLICATE OF A DUPLICATE.

“So they have a Death, and have the capacity to rewrite the physics of a universe,” Lileur said. “Lovely.”

“I’ll say,” Twitter said.

The four of them turned to stare at the moth-pony of the Sparkle Census.

“…How?” Lileur asked.

“L-Space,” Twitter explained. “The ‘force’ that connects all libraries of the multiverse. We in the Sparkle Census are really good at rummaging through it for information.”

“Find anything useful?”

“Aside from that book you’re looking at now? Nothing,” Twitter admitted. “Granted, searching L-Space is an exceedingly slow process when you’re looking for a specific book without any idea what sort of library it’d be in, so we weren’t exactly expecting results yet.”

She trotted over to a nearby shelf. “This is a fascinating library, by the way. So glad we can finally come here. When your Ambassador changed policies, we had to actively avoid Discworld L-Spaces. Harder than it sounds.”

DOES THE CENSUS HAVE ANYTHING OF USE?

“Twilight-GM is currently being grilled for information. Again. I don’t expect much to come out of that. It’s hard enough to keep her from killing herself…”

~~~

The Twilight known as GM lifted the plastic teacup to her mouth and drank. Her horn was encased in a rubbery, black anti-magic coating, her remaining wing was pinned to her side, and her hooves were covered in plush boots. It made it difficult to drink, but she didn’t care about that.

At least there was no conceivable way to kill herself in here, so she didn’t have to try because of her conditioning. The walls were padded, and there was a magic strait jacket around her that would lock up if she tried anything.

“Thank you,” she said suddenly to both the other Twilights looking in on her from the other side of a thick pane of softened safety glass. “For going through all the trouble you have.”

“We’ll find a way to cure you, eventually,” 4T said, M4 nodding next to her.

GM smiled sadly. “I hope you do. I’d love to be able to go outside… To sit in a library… To go to a restaurant…” she looked wistfully into the distance. “But an opportunity will present itself, and I will not be able to resist. There’s no choice.”

“We know,” M4 said.

GM sighed. “You’re going to try to get new information out of me, aren’t you?”

The two nodded.

“I can only tell you what you already know, that’s how it works. I can’t betray him.”

“The Collector?”

“Oh good, you know his name,” GM let out a sigh of relief. “That makes it mentally easier to talk about. Yes, the Collector. I can’t betray him. If I think there’s any chance you don’t know something, I can’t tell you. Including this fact, but that’s something you reasoned out a long time ago.”

“And you aren’t allowed to open your mind either,” 4T noted.

GM shook her head. “No. The mental protections the Collector gave us… They’re not only impressive, they can’t be shut off. I’m thinking about a lot of things you’d really like to know, and I’d really like to tell you, but I can’t.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t come with a built-in self-destruct.”

GM shrugged. “The mental suicide command is usually more than enough.”

“Let’s try something a little underhooved,” M4 said. “I’m going to say things. You can confirm them. You obviously won’t be able to deny them, but you know.”

“You’re going to make me second-guess myself into mentally ordering myself never to talk again,” GM asserted. “…Please don’t do that.”

M4 twitched. “How controlling is this guy!?”

GM shook her head and smiled sadly, saying nothing.

“Damn. Not even that…”

“Paranoid,” 4T asserted. “Very, very paranoid. He doesn’t want anyone knowing about him. Those stuck in the aurora world were supposed to forget everything. If GM hadn’t been caught when she was, he would have remained unknown.”

“We’re basically just lucky we know he exists at all,” M4 said. “The guy’s clearly planned out his secret well.”

“So well that even those who know he exists can’t find him…”

“I wouldn’t feel bad about it,” GM said. “It’s not like any of us can actually defy him either.”

“…We’ve got to be careful,” M4 realized. “If we get too close, he could just control one of our leaders and force the entire thing apart.”

“We can detect the conditioning though. It has a unique mental signature,” 4T reminded her.

“You still have to look,” M4 muttered, hoof to her chin. “…I just don’t like the situation we’re in. Nobody knows anything about him, and the scant traces we do find just make him and his Collection more terrifying and bizarre.”

4T sighed. “Guess we really aren’t going to be able to learn anything here.”

“I’m sorry,” GM said, meaning every word.

“Don’t worry about it,” 4T said with a smile. “I’ll be back for our weekly game of Battleship tomorrow.”

GM beamed. “I look forward to it. Oh, could you get me a copy of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures? I hear it’s topical from the news feed.”

“Sure thing.”

“Maybe some Discworld books as well.”

4T rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your books. We’re not monsters.”

“I know. Thank you. …You don’t have any idea how much all of this trouble you go through means to me.”

“You’re welcome, GM.”

The two left, leaving GM alone.

Again.

She sighed, flopping onto the soft floor of her confinement.

They didn’t stand a chance… They were going to fail and she was going to be taken back…

She started to weep. She had a lonely agony that only someone trapped in their own mind could experience. And unlike those who were in a vegetative state, she was fully aware of everything.

It hurt. It hurt so much.

But she couldn’t fight her own mind.

~~~

The TSAB had an odd range of people they would employ, to put it mildly.

Due to their origins around a cluster of ‘magical girl’ universes, the minimum age to work within the TSAB was eight years old. That custom had never gone away – it was relatively common for any TSAB ship or office to have at least one exceptionally young mage on staff, treated essentially the same as any adult. There were certainly laws in place to keep this rule from being exploited – only children who were naturally capable of the job they were working in question were allowed for instance – but this did not change the fact that the TSAB allowed child labor.

This left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, particularly the USM. The Merodi didn’t take as much issue with it – after all, they allowed the League of Sweetie Belles to operate, among other things.

Renee and Daniel still found it exceptionally odd that the TSAB’s contact they were meeting was an eight year old redheaded girl with two braided pigtails and a hammer device. She had a ‘barrier jacket’ of her own, though it looked a lot less like Nanoha’s ‘battle dress’ and more like an actual red dress one might go to a dance in. If it wasn’t for the hammer she’d look ready to go to an extravagant ball.

Her name was Vita. And she could see the couple trying their best not to look at her with disrespect. They were failing.

She twitched. “Quit looking at me like that.”

Daniel nervously adjusted his glasses. “Er…”

“Apologies,” Renee said, bowing. “It is just difficult to move past our own biases.”

“I’m not eight, you know,” Vita muttered. “I’m older than Nanoha.”

“Really?”

“I’m a Wolkenritter. A full magical program.” She smiled proudly. “So don’t treat me like a kid.”

“Again, apologies, the appearance still makes it difficult.”

Vita shrugged. “Well, you weren’t here to talk to me anyway,” Vita admitted. “I’m just here to get you into places.”

The three of them were currently in an Outpost universe within the Strands, and one of the shadier worlds at that. The world was composed entirely of dead, black trees tied to each other in an endless work. Structures were built inside the tremendous trunks of these trees, lights in the eternal darkness of the world. People in cloaks moved around in hushed tones, clearly up to no good. A den of liars if ever there was one.

The perfect place to get information, as Olivia would say.

Vita led them to a tree that didn’t look like it even had anything built into it. She hit it lightly with her hammer three times. “Vita here. The password is not swordfish.”

The three of them were teleported into the tree by a quick spell. The tree held only a single room lit by a warm fireplace. The only other individual in the room was an alien being with a largely cone-shaped body, three tentacle arms, and a round head with three eyes.

“Hey Adder’na,” Vita said, leaning on her hammer. “Been traveling much lately?”

“Always,” Adder’na said. His voice arrived in their heads, clearly through telepathy. “What does the TSAB wish to know today?”

“Let me do the introductions first. Adder’na, Renee and Daniel Jackson, Merodi Universalis.”

“Ah, the new kids on the block. Charmed. I would shake your hand, but one of you lacks hands, and my tentacles are somewhat disgusting to most.”

Renee smiled. “It’s no problem.”

Vita gestured at Adder’na. “This is Adder’na, of the Great Race of Yith, a Class 2 Society that operates out of the D-Sphere. They’re a race of beings who project their minds across the multiverse and across various times to live out as many experiences as possible. Adder’na is one of the oldest Yith. He’s older than most of the Class 1 Civilizations, I hear.”

“You flatter me, but over-exaggerate,” Adder’na said. “What is it you wish to prod my lengthy experiences for?”

“We are looking for an entity known as the Collector and his Collection,” Daniel said. He took a data pad out of his coat and held it out to Adder’na.

“May I just garner the information directly from your mind?”

“So long as you promise to only grab what relates to the Collector,” Renee said. “And if you find any Merodi state secrets, leave them alone.”

“You do not have many of those, from what I hear, so that should not be difficult.” Adder’na touched their minds, prompting a tickling sensation in the back of their thoughts. “Hrm… This is quite the quandary you’ve found yourselves in. I have nothing in my deep memories about that. But in one of my more recent experiences, I have seen the Collection – not by name, but I have seen two of the people you know have been taken. Ivan and Gyro.”

“Where?” Renee asked.

Adder’na looked to Vita. Vita sighed. “Nanoha’s personal account will take care of whatever you want for this.”

“A simple week in the mind of a TSAB agent will suffice for payment,” Adder’na said. “Such a rare experience.”

Vita sighed. “If nobody else will do it, I’ll do it.”

“Good. Regardless, I was in the body of a human on a world filled with magical, elemental creatures, based on the Pokémon games. I was capturing them all for the experience of it – of course when you find one of these worlds you’re going to have to deal with a serious political fallout from the pit-fighting of various sapient creatures, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment.

“The world focuses around battle – a LOT of battle – but mostly as a competition. For a people so fixated on conflict and combat sports, they have almost no wars or international conflicts on a large scale. But while I was there, war was brewing on the horizon. Their god – a being known as Arceus – had been revealed to just be a creature that the humans of the world could subjugate to their will. With difficulty, admittedly.

“Needless to say, the religious types took issue with those who weren’t, and it wasn’t going to be long before they started killing each other over it. Arceus himself was not an omniscient, omnipresent, or even all that understanding a god so his interactions with the situation only made it worse. I became caught up in a conspiracy to capture Arceus because I had become known as the individual who would catch them all – using my vast knowledge to my advantage, of course.

“I had plans to pull a bait and switch – capture Arceus just to say I could, and then release him on the people who organized his downfall. It might not have stopped the war, but it would definitely create some justice. I’ll never forget that battle – me, an ordinary human with the mind beyond even Arceus, fighting the god with nothing more than my magical companion creatures. My fellow ‘trainers’ had already fallen behind me, and I was having difficulty against the minor deity. I am still not sure if I would have been able to win had things gone interrupted.

“But then they showed up. Gyro Zepelli and Ivan. They made quick work of my already weakened team, using out of context abilities to toss them aside. Ivan’s illusions were my downfall – Gyro’s spin took down Arceus in a second. I was baffled by what had happened – so much that I dropped my mask I wear as a Yithian. Gyro noticed I could see Ball Breaker. While Ivan conditioned Arceus to obey – presumably another servant for the Collector, I see now – Gyro walked up to me, and decided it was a good idea to have a chat.

“I still remember what he said. ‘Have you heard the pizza mozzarella song?’ I told him I had not. He went on to sing what is quite possibly the worst song I have ever heard. Strangely catchy, but still horrendous. Then he grinned. ‘Hey, if you ever see a Johnny Joestar in your travels, tell him Gyro Zepelli said hi. Tell him not to worry, I’m doing great.’

“I told him I would, of course, do such a thing. Clearly you all can carry the message to Johnny now. Ivan came up to me and showed me a list of creatures slightly lower on the power tier of that world than Arceus – demanding that I provide any of them I had on me. I had only brought one of the ones on the list, although I had most of the others captured elsewhere. I didn’t feel like it was a good idea to fight, so I handed them over.

“Then they left. I told the world I was in what happened, and suddenly both sides no longer wanted to fight each other, but find out who took Arceus and bring them to justice. In order to solidify the peace, I provided them with the simplest basics of dimensional travel. Then I continued my journey, slowly realizing that they had taken a lot more than just Arceus – most of the deities and demigods of the world had been taken.

“Once I was sure there was nothing more for me to capture, I left the body I had occupied. I learned nothing more about Gyro or Ivan until today.”

Renee bowed her head. “Thank you, Adder’na, for this assistance.”

“It is my pleasure, Overhead Renee. This is likely not as much as you wanted.”

“It tells us they really do like ‘helping’,” Daniel asserted. “And they also capture more and more for the Collection while they do so…”

“Seems like they’re self-contradictory,” Vita muttered.

“If they’re run by the will of one person, of course they would be,” Renee pointed out. “There’s nobody who can be truly consistent.”

“You should return to Johnny.”

“We will,” Renee assured him. “Now… Do you mind getting us out of here?”

“Not at all. Vita, send someone my way within the next week for payment.”

“Yeah yeah, got it,” Vita said, arms folded. At this remark, the three were teleported outside the tree.

Daniel furrowed his brow. “Is his entire race like that?”

“Mind-jumping?” Vita asked. “Yeah. They just love to do that. Don’t worry about whoever he’s going to take over for payment – they’ll be prepared for it, nothing bad will happen to them. The random people they jump into do tend to go insane, though. Be glad he generally doesn’t do a full body-swap, he just suppresses the mind.”

Renee bit her lip. “Well, I’m glad we talked to him, but I’d rather not do more business with his kind. I’m sure you understand.”

“The other option is the Melnorme.”

“At least all they try to do is rip you off.”

“Touche.”

~~~

Nine Worlds.

Jenny of the Red Gloves had lived through all of them.

Not that she remembered all of the billion years she had existed – her mind was still mostly human despite her age, and the human mind could only hold so many memories. She remembered her origins and her recent history with enough clarity to live her life, but everything in the middle was a bit of a mysterious blur in her mind. She couldn’t even determine where her memories of one world began and another ended. She was able to tell people what the First World looked like when she was young, and what the Ninth World had looked like a couple centuries ago. That was it.

This was likely why Jenny had procured a magic book back when she was in the First World. She didn’t remember how she got it – the irony – but she knew it had been with her for the vast majority of her life. A book with an infinite number of pages that served as her journal, chronicling her random thoughts, jottings, stories, and sketches over the course of millions upon millions of years.

Needless to say the book was an absolute mess on the inside. It was written in more or less chronological order, but Jenny was never one to keep meticulous notes. On some pages there would be a retelling of a legend, on others there would be scientific diagrams, while others would only contain drawings of whatever Jenny had found fascinating at the time. Apparently she went through a ‘flowers’ phase around her third millionth. Weird.

Until recently (recently being about a century ago), she hadn’t even been able to read everything in the book because it was written in a number of different languages, or sometimes even just chicken scratch. But as the current public head of Dracogen Enterprises, she had access to translator glasses that were able to reveal what all but the most outlandish scribbles meant.

She always got aggravated with herself whenever she read the book. She didn’t remember any of the adventures she described, but she always felt like her past self was an idiot for falling for things. After skimming around the book as a whole for about a day, she flipped to the start and started reading, looking for anything about the Collector or the Collection.

The First World had nothing for her, that was easy to see. The First World started out as a somewhat dark ‘fantasy’ world where chaos reigned that eventually became a sprawling war across the galaxy over several millennia. Ah, Emperor Karl – she remembered him. Her first adventure, actually. He was just a boy with a special power then, but he became so much more.

She skimmed through her memoirs about fighting in eternal war as one of Karl’s
Agents that didn’t officially exist. The result of that war…

She could never remember. And the end of the First World sections always told conflicting stories. Jenny currently believed the timeline had been churned into soup around that moment and the book had probably been written in by numerous Jennys trying to work it out, but it was impossible to determine now.

The Second World was an interesting one for Jenny to remember – because apparently it was just a Standard Earth. With a dark past that hardly affected it at all…

It was here that she found something.

She had apparently decided to have a normal life – as normal as an unaging young girl could – going to school in the local 2010s. She had become obsessed with stories – novels, movies, comics, legends, etcetera – and had started to write her own. This made it somewhat difficult to tell what was really happening, what were short story ideas she had come up with, or what were observations on other works of fiction. She did spot a picture of Jotaro with a character study next to it. Something to check out later.

The next page showed a map of a galaxy split up into sections. Some of the names seemed familiar to her – the Tau’ri, for instance – while others meant nothing. What kind of space nation called themselves the Culture?

But a side note near the end of a timeline caught her attention. Project Odin occurs. Heralding the creation of the Collector. He will use his meta-knowledge to start an empire and become a major threat for the future.

The timeline was clearly incomplete. Jenny turned the page, but there was no more information on the galaxy. Just the map. She flipped a few pages forward and back, but found nothing.

Just that one tiny note. The Collector was created, and had meta-knowledge. He was set to start an empire – presumably the Collection – from birth.

“…What kind of meta-knowledge?” Jenny wondered aloud. “Fourth wall? Prophet? Future sight? Visions from beyond? Knowledge of ‘fiction’? Too many options…”

She took a picture of the pages and sent it to the rest of the nations. It wasn’t much to go off of, but it was something.

Jenny just wondered if this galaxy of fiction on these pages was her idea or someone’s she had copied down for some reason…

There she went, second-guessing her past self again. She wasn’t even sure if this was really referring to the Collector and not just some other being that conveniently had the same name. After all, the Collector was a pretty simple ‘name’. They had encountered a couple other beings in the universe with the name, though for the most part it was very clear they weren’t who they needed to find…

Jenny turned the page, going deeper into the Second World.

~~~

Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle addressed the gathered members of the Collector Research team in the primary meeting room of the Golden Joke, where they had signed the agreement a couple weeks prior. “What I am about to tell you is one of the Merodi’s closest guarded secrets. We may not have many, but those we do are kept for good reason. What I say is not to leave this room, and no citizens of any of the four nations are to find out what I reveal here today.”

That got the attention of the USM, Sparkle Census, and Dracogen representatives. Valentine in particular leaned in, curious.

Eve nodded, teleporting Rohan Kishibe to her side. “This man is a Prophet. That is to say, the things he writes have the ability to influence how reality shapes itself.”

Valentine let his expression betray his surprise – but not his fear. A Prophet!? They’ve had one this whole time!? We’ve never found one definitively!

Eve lit her horn, teleporting copies of various manga manuscripts throughout the room. “Rohan has, for the past couple weeks, been writing stories about us. Stories about us having success. Stories about us finding things, information, or people by chance. This method of writing worked in the past helping us in the encounter with the Starcross Society. However… The only one of these that has come true is the one that had nothing to do with the Collector, written as sort of a control.”

Jenny sighed. “If he has meta-awareness, perhaps he has ways to defend against being Propheted? Perhaps he is a Prophet?”

“That is possible,” Eve admitted. “Our current psych evaluations give us the impression he thinks he is the hero of his story. But it could just be that there is another Prophet writing him to be immune to being written against. …As is obvious by this point, we’re making a lot of guesses and shots in the dark about how all this works.”

Valentine looked at Rohan, face stern. “Are you certain you put your all into the work?”

“Yes…” Rohan growled.

“I heard that forced writing doesn’t qualify. Are you sure-”

“Yes I’m sure,” Rohan reiterated, face clouding. He remembered one moment in particular all too well…

“Damn you!” Rohan shouted, throwing the manuscript to the ground. “I PUT MY HEART AND SOUL INTO YOU, WHY DON’T YOU WORK!?”

“…Do you need a moment?” Starbeat asked.

Rohan ignored her. “HEAVEN’S DOOR!” He tore the manuscript to shreds with his Stand. “If you won’t do what I want then you are worthless!”

Starbeat scribbled down some notes in her notepad. Rohan stormed back to his desk and began speed-drawing again.

“Mister Kishibe?” Valentine asked.

“Mmm?”

“I asked you if you did anything different with the one that came true opposed to the ones that didn’t.”

“I removed all references to the Collector, that’s it. It’s an edited version of a different manuscript!”

“How can you make so much manga!?” A Twilight asked, gawking over all the art.

“Skill,” Rohan answered.

“Stand,” Eve corrected.

Rohan folded his arms, still ticked off that his power wasn’t working properly.

“The conclusion here is that we’re either extremely unlucky, or the Collector is protected from Prophet powers somehow,” Eve finalized.

THERE IS A THIRD OPTION, Death suggested. WE COULD BE MAKING AN ASSUMPTION ABOUT THE COLLECTOR THAT WE SHOULDN’T BE MAKING, WHICH MAKES ALL OF ROHAN’S MANUSCRIPTS IMPOSSIBLE THROUGH SIMPLE LOGIC.

There was silence in the room.

Eve sighed. “The truth is we just don’t know enough. In many ways, we can’t know enough. With our resources, we’re able to get hints of the Collector, scant pieces of information blowing in the wind telling us there is something. I know there’s a way to find the Collector, but I can’t imagine for the life of me what it is.” She shook her head. “This doesn’t mean we’re going to stop. Eventually we’re going to progress enough to find something. We just have no idea how long that’s going to take.”

“Your point?” Jenny asked.

“We all have nations to run,” Eve said, looking at Valentine knowingly. “We’ve dropped focusing on our normal duties to devote time to this endeavor. If we were going to get a quick result, that would be fine. But we’re not getting a quick result, and what we’ve left undone is unraveling back home.”

“Are you telling us to stop?” Jenny demanded.

“I’m telling us to delegate people lower down the chain to work on this,” Eve said. “We have entire nations that hinge on us. We can delegate specialist teams to work on this rather than see it through ourselves.”

Valentine stood up suddenly and walked up to Eve. He stared at her intensely.

“I second what Evening is saying,” Valentine said at last. “These efforts will not benefit enough from our continued close oversight. I will be returning to my regular ambassadorial duties upon choosing a replacement for my current position.”

Eve smiled. “I’ll do the same.”

Jenny shrugged. “Eh… Fine. I’ve got people I trust enough.”

Eve nodded. “Good. Does anyone have anything else they’d like to add to the meeting?”

Everyone shook their heads.

“In that case, dismissed.” She left the podium, walking out into one of the halls.

Valentine caught up with her. “You revealed something big to us today.”

“I took our promise seriously,” Eve said. “I can only hope you did the same.”

Valentine nodded in understanding. “We had no secrets relating to the investigation.”

Eve checked him over. “…I believe you.”

There was silence.

“So, how are we going to move forward?” Eve asked.

Valentine looked into the distance, expression deep in thought. “Borders can be opened again. But before the people will allow that, there will have to be a treaty on the nature of interference, colonization, and culture.”

“I’ll be glad if we aren’t stuck in a Cold War.”

“That’s a low bar to aim for.”

“One step at a time.”

Once again, they let an awkward silence fill the void.

“…Do you think we’ll find him?” Eve asked. “Ever?”

“Yes. For we are on the side of Justice. And Justice always prevails.”

Eve beamed at him. “You know, for all your stubbornness, your devotion to justice is something I admire.”

“Your empathy and understanding is a force to be reckoned with itself,” Valentine said.

Eve chuckled. “Well, I am the Princess of Friendship. Charter of the Multiverse is basically just an add-on.”

“Perhaps it is your fate to ally with everyone.”

“It’s what I try to do.”

The two looked to each other, nodded curtly, and went their separate ways. It wasn’t friendship – but it wasn’t animosity either. It was a relationship built on mutual respect.

Merodi Universalis and the USM would not be allies just because of one conversation and joint mission. There was too much to smooth over for that to happen. But it was a step in the right direction.

~~~

Somnambula’s Throne, constructed from an ancient gray Rune, had the power to summon the Spectacularium.

Unfortunately the throne in question had been lost in the recent upheavals on Lai relating to the Arcei and their newfound rage against the Stars.

Lady Rarity, Corona, Lieshy, and Olivia had spent the last few weeks attempting to find this throne. They were at the end of their journey, fighting Lai dragons. Three of them – red, green, and blue – were circling the mountaintop Lady Rarity’s team found themselves on.

“There is a decidedly annoying lack of things to hack!” Olivia shouted, dodging a red dragon’s foot only by a few inches.

“Magically?” Lady Rarity asked, smashing one across the head with a hammer.

“Why do you think they’re not breathing fire at us?” Olivia blurted, firing her pulse pistol. Even at maximum charge, the weapon only burned off chunks of flesh the size of a bowling ball. It was certainly painful to the dragon, but the mountainous behemoths were too large for such attacks to faze them.

Corona spread her hands wide. “Got the red one.” She summoned her Stand – Bacon Pancakes. It took the appearance of a red disc with her cutie mark on both sides, the four-pointed solar design giving the disc the overall appearance of a compass. Eight red satellites circled the compass around the long edge, each of them composed of three red toothpicks fused together. Corona focused on the red dragon, launching all eight of the spiked objects at the dragon.

They each hit in a particular location – one in each knee joint, one in each wing joint, one in the head, and one in the tail. They did no damage, they drew no blood – but they affixed themselves to the dragon’s body like the pins they were. With a quick order, Corona told the spiked pins to drive the dragon into the mountain, closer to where she was. The dragon could have resisted, but it wasn’t expecting the sudden jarring motion from its own body. It crashed into the mountain.

Corona ran up to it with the main body of Bacon Pancakes. She leaped onto it, riding it like a sled down the mountain to where the dragon’s dazed face rested. She plowed into it, activating her Stand’s close-range ability. The orbiting pins were able to push and shove, but that was about it. The actual disc though, it could flatten.

The dragon’s head became two-dimensional, like a piece of paper. It would have been all too easy to reach down and rip the dragon’s head off at this point, since the strength of the flat flesh was almost nothing. But Corona had no intention of doing that. She continued flattening more parts of the dragon’s body as she rode down the mountain, using her telekinesis to direct her path down one of the legs. She tore there, severing the dragon’s limb.

The beast howled in pain, trying to retaliate – but with half its body the consistency of paper, all it did was crumple itself into a messy wad. Parts of its body began to tear from the thrashing, sending warning signals to the dragon’s brain. It stopped moving, scared it would tear itself apart by moving.

“Good boy,” Corona said, teleporting back to the top of the mountain, recalling all eight of Bacon Pancakes’ pins. Olivia and Lady Rarity had worked together to encase the blue one in magical spirid silk.

Lieshy was on the green one, riding it like some kind of horse. The green dragon couldn’t shake her. Lieshy’s stand, Limelight, kept punching the dragon from the side. Limelight was an almost featureless stand – four green, furless pony legs attached to a body. No tail, no head, just four green limbs. It was one of those Stands that was really good at punching at close range and jack squat at longer ranges.

“AUGH!” the dragon shouted. “WHY WON’T YOU GET OFF?”

“Limestone,” Lieshy said, having Limelight punch the dragon in the face again.

“Would you please stop doing that?”

“Tell me where the throne is.”

“No!”

“More punching.”

“OW!”

Limelight punched the dragon in the eye.

“Why would such a nice mare torment me so!?”

Lieshy smirked. “Ah, signals of progress. Where’s the throne?”

“I don-”

Limelight punched him again. “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me just because I’m a nice mare?”

“But I- OW!”

“Pleeeease?”

“I… I… Okay fine, but just because you asked nicely.”

Lieshy chuckled evilly. “Good work, Limelight.”

The green dragon willingly landed on the mountain, allowing Lieshy to dismount.

Corona smirked, high-fiving Limelight. “Nice work.”

“Thanks.”

The green dragon growled.

“Dragon, the throne?” Lieshy asked.

“I don’t kno…”

Limelight punched the dragon in the chest.

“Right… Whatever you wish…” With a loud hacking noise, he threw the throne out of his gut, dropping the gray Runic artifact to the ground below, covered in sticky slobber.

“…Ew,” Lady Rarity commented.

“Awesome,” Olivia countered.

“Now take your friends and go,” Lieshy told the dragon. “Okay?”

“R-right…” He grabbed his head. “Let’s… Let’s go.”

Corona released the paper-effect on the red dragon. The two of them had to carry the blue dragon away.

“How hard did you punch him?” Corona asked after they were out of earshot. “He was basically eating out of your lap!”

“A lot of times,” Lieshy answered.

“Must be nice, to have people you’ve beat up do your bidding,” Olivia mused.

“Defeat equals friendship,” Lieshy asserted.

“Or stalker,” Olivia reminded her.

“I am never going to punch anyone with Limelight that hard ever again.”

The four of them chuckled.

“Stands are weird,” Corona said.

“You say that every time, dear,” Lady Rarity observed. She took a few steps toward the throne, lighting her horn. “Let’s see… The correct spell should be-”

The Spectacularium came into existence. Normally, it would have been mad that they had dared call it again, but this time it wasn’t. Realizing this, the four heroes were confused – they had expected to need to talk the Spectacularium down.

The Spectacularium apologized. It would not be able to help them. It did not have knowledge that extended to the Collector. The Spectacularium could recount mostly things they had heard already – plus a few extra stories of the Collection appearing in places, doing something, and vanishing. Sometimes taking people with them to the Collection, sometimes not.

There was nothing else the Spectacularium could tell them. It was not omniscient.

“…Did we really spend these weeks for nothing?” Olivia asked.

The Spectacularium could answer that. It was indeed for nothing.

“Egad, it has a sense of humor!” Lieshy decreed.

The Spectacularium had no idea what she was referring to. Probably. The Spectacularium vanished before it could be questioned further.

Lady Rarity sighed. “Well, let’s get this throne back to Somnambula. Then we can deeply contemplate what we’re doing with our lives…”

“Lovely,” Corona deadpanned.

~~~

“This sounds desperate,” O’Neill observed from his seat in the captain’s chair of the Enterprise.

“It is,” Starbeat said, pacing around the bridge. “But right now it’s all we’ve got. All I’m asking for is a test run.”

“You want to burn out the Enterprise’s dimensional drive?”

“Look, I’m just trying for a proof of concept,” Starbeat said. “I don’t need you to translate to another universe every second. All I need the Enterprise to do is move around universes randomly for a while with quick translations. If we want to find the Collector, the best bet seems to be calibrated ka sensors. And to work with that we’ll need to perfect the technology of multi-universe ka scanning.” She gestured toward a large metal box with three green lights she had hooked up to a nearby monitor. “This is just a test run to see what we pick up without going through the trouble of constructing a hummingbird drive specifically for the box.”

O’Neill shrugged. “…Yeah, it’s not like I have anything better to do right now. Not even a USM invasion to worry about.”

Starbeat put her goggles over her eyes, as if bracing for impact. “If you don’t mind, could we get going then?”

O’Neill nodded to the pilot – a Binary, one of the very few who had enlisted for military service. The hairy creature plugged in the program and the Enterprise began to jump from universe to universe within the E-Sphere. Starbeat began to collect data, watching the screen closely for the inflections in ka.

She made a ‘hrm’ noise in the seventh universe.

“What is it?”

“Not doing what I want it to do. Haven’t picked up much…” They jumped universes again. “We’ll have to visit a few dozen to be sure, though.”

“You’re very specific for a scientist.”

“Treating ka like science is like trying to determine whose tastes are objectively better. It doesn’t work.” They jumped again.

“So you’re telling me it’s basically just art, hrm…?”

Starbeat lit up. “Actually, the relation between art, science, and ka is a complex one that I hope to write a complete study on one day in which – and you were mostly trying to mess with me there.”

“Yep.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping. “I have no breaks… I haaaaaave nooooo breaaa-”

She saw the beat readings on the screen change – not because of her.

“STOP THE SHIP!” Starbeat shouted, pressing her goggled face to the screen. “What the… What is this reading!?”

“Where are we?” O’Neill asked.

“Earth Stand!” the pilot responded.

“Earth Stand? But that would me-” Starbeat turned to O’Neill. “Go to the system’s sun, now.”

O’Neill nodded. “Engage.” The Enterprise performed a quick jump to the yellow sun of Earth Stand.

“Their sun is a Star,” Starbeat fretted. “These readings – well it means the thing is working – but something’s going to happen and….”

“Ship detected! Civilian, but with high levels of magic! Arcei signatures detected!”

O’Neill’s eyes widened. “Stop them! Now!”

“Too late, they’re already firing something at the sun!”

A beam of red and white light shot out of the tiny, triangle-shaped ship, heading right for the Star of Earth Stand.

Something stopped it. A ship of unknown design appeared from a swirling mass of glowing white vines. It was composed of white metal in an overall rod-shape, a rounded two-part hull covering the front. The hull absorbed the beam head on, shrugging it off.

Starbeat stared at the ka readings on her screen. “T-that’s the Collection. No doubt about it.” She grinned. “I’m getting so much data! I… I’ll be able to use this to find them!”

“He wouldn’t be so stupid,” O’Neill said. “He’s too smart for this… This is all intentional…”

In a mass of white vines, the smaller ship was completely engulfed. The large Collection ship turned to the Enterprise.

They teleported Gyro right onto the bridge, through the Enterprise’s shields. With a snarky grin he threw a steel ball into Starbeat’s box, destroying it instantly. “Sorry.” He was gone before Crimson Sushi could slap him.

The Collection ship vanished in a mass of white vines, leaving Earth Stand alone once again.

“Can you salvage anything?” O’Neill asked.

“Y-yes, but… Not enough!” Starbeat shouted. “It was running the needed calculations along with the readings and – I knew the design was imperfect! AGH!”

O’Neill grabbed her. “Starbeat, calm down. Tell me what this means.”

She kissed him. He fell back, so surprised he lost his footing. “Yeah, you should have waited, the ‘click’ hadn’t worn off yet. To answer your question, this means the device works. What it also means is that we can’t find them now. We have to wait to get another reading with a device that actually works. So it looks like we’ll need to make those hummingbird drives after all to scour the multiverse… The next time any of them show up, we’ll be able to get a reading. And with a full ka scan, I’m sure we can find him.”

O’Neill took a seat back in the captain’s chair. “He did this on purpose, though. He’s too paranoid to just let us see one of his ships without reason. He wanted this to happen.”

“Obviously,” Starbeat said. “Or he wanted something here bad enough that he was willing to let us see a ship to get it.”

“What would he want though?”

~~~

“Good work,” the Collector told Gyro. “Complete success for every mission objective.”

Gyro shrugged. “I even got to see the looks on their faces. Priceless.”

“I bet it was. You can keep the ship.”

“Hell yeah.”

The Collector nodded. “Glad to see you’re learning to enjoy yourself again, Gyro. I always appreciate it when people accept their life.”

“It was either that or go crazy.”

“I thought you were already crazy.” the Collector said with an amused chuckle.

Gyro laughed. “I guess so!” He coughed. “So, can I take the girl for a spin or what?”

“Go enjoy yourself. You’ve earned it. Don’t crash.”

“I won’t if I have any choice in the matter!”

“That is how things are.”

Gyro ran off, leaving the Collector in his office with Lightning.

“It has begun,” Lightning said.

“Project Odin II, Moving Forward,” the Collector said wistfully. “It’s finally time for all this work to meet its final fruition…”

“Are you certain they are the right ones?”

“I’m certain. Remember what the Pinkies told us about their Prophet. The time has come, Lightning. Of course, it won’t be for a while yet – have to let things stew for a few years at least so the stew can simmer just right – but everything has been set in motion. You see it, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“The purpose of the Collection… My purpose. It is about to be realized.”

“And mine?”

“Will be what you make of it, you know this,” the Collector said. “Let’s not worry about the future for now, the gears are moving on their own for the moment. How about we go say hello to our newest member.”

“Not any of the Arcei, I presume?”

“Of course not.”

Lightning nodded, ordering a teleport.

In front of them stood a tremendously muscular man wearing almost nothing: a purple loincloth, armlets, and boots. His dark hair flowed in the air despite no breeze flowing through it. He gave off an aura of power that could only be described as menacing.

The Collector spoke to him like an old friend. “Hello Kars. Welcome to your new life in the Collection.” He folded his hands together. “I can tell you’re going to be an interesting one to integrate into my society. Let’s start with who I am. I am the Collector – your new master. You and I are going to get to know each other very well, Kars…”

068 - Filming Evening

The Twelve Divisions of Merodi Universalis had offices in many different locations. For instance, Evening, Overhead of Relations, lived in Canterlot Castle and worked mostly out of the city in question. However, the main building of the Relations Division was in Celestia City – as it was for all twelve of the government offices. Occasionally, events would require an Overhead to be physically present at the main building of their Division. This was usually nothing more than a mild annoyance given the speed at which the Overheads could get from anywhere within Merodi Universalis to Celestia City.

Currently, Evening herself was at her main building for some reason or other. The man who wanted to meet with her didn’t really care what her actual reason for being on site was; all he cared about was the meeting he had scheduled with her. An interview.

The man certainly looked like an interviewer. A camera, notebook, recording device, and messed up mop of blue hair certainly gave that appearance, though the sheer number of pens in his front pocket really sold it. He had light green skin, indicating his origination from Earth Vitis. He wasted no time charging to the front doors of the Relations Office. The exterior of the building was near the center of Celestia City, made to look like one of the towers of Canterlot, albeit coated with a thin coating of clear crystal. He pushed in, demanding his presence be known. “I am Iris Snap and I have a meeting scheduled with Evening!”

A human – Fire Nation, if Iris had to guess – looked at her computer screen. A small smile came over her bored face. “Oh. You! She’s been expecting you. I’ll teleport you right up.”

Iris was not teleported to a meeting room or an office, like he was expecting, but rather a lounge with dim lighting. Bookshelves lined the marble walls, flanking a raging fireplace. There were a few comfortable chairs strewn about the room, each with their own end table, but only one of these chairs was occupied. Evening must have sensed his arrival through magic, because she turned her chair to face him directly. “Please, have a seat.” Her voice was unusual, sounding with a slight hollowness to it that came with her deafness. Why wasn’t she using a spell to force her voice to balance? This was supposed to be an interview, and therefore it was an official event like her speeches.

Iris sat down anyway. “Thank you for your time, Charter. I am Iris Snap an-”

“To begin with, you’re not Iris Snap. Let’s be honest, shall we?”

‘Iris’ blinked. “You found out already? How in the world did you do that?”

“A ladybug told me,” was the only explanation Evening was willing to give. “Your name is Shutterstock, a young filmmaker making waves in the multiversal film market, something notably difficult to do given our economic structure.”

“…Then you already know what I want to do,” Shutterstock observed.

“You want to make a movie about me.”

“That’s right. And you’ve never let any director interview you before.”

“I’m letting it happen now,” Eve said with a coy smile. “I let you get all the way here, didn’t I?”

“Why?”

“People have already made movies without my involvement or approval before. I can’t stop them, nor should I, but the sheer amount of misrepresentation and false information is just aggravating. I decided I would wait until someone who had the right spirit came along – and that someone ended up being you, Shutterstock.” She smiled warmly. “Only a handful of films under your belt, but most of them already hits. An understanding of how the market works for these things. And a famous devotion to the art of filmmaking. I don’t pretend to understand the process myself, but I hear you are deeply passionate about your creations.”

Shutterstock nodded. “I have to be. I never want to do something the same way as anyone else.”

Eve nodded. “And most importantly of all, you strive for factual accuracy. I was impressed by Avatar Aang.”

“You can certainly expect more of that!”

“Trying to sell the idea to me, are you?” Eve said with a smirk. “Understandable, I suppose. My approval of your film will make everything incredible for you. Quite the success story.”

“I just want people to see my film.”

Eve looked at him closely. “…I believe you. Which is why I believe I’m going to give my support. Of course, I’ll need to know exactly what you plan the movie to be about, and I’ll want to receive a script at some point.”

“It will be sent to you as soon as it is complete. As for the film, I want to chronicle the story of you from when you first discovered the multiverse to when you founded Merodi Universalis. I won’t focus on multiversal history – I will focus on personal history. Which is why I’m here for this interview. I want to know what events meant the most to you.”

An unreadable expression crossed Eve’s face. “Of course.” She levitated a data pad off of a table near her. “This data pad contains my unpublished memoirs. If any of the passages within gets out before I publish under my own means, I will bring the wrath of the legal system down on you and destroy you. Otherwise, this will save you and me a lot of time that would be taken up in an actual interview.”

“Thank you,” Shutterstock said, pocketing the pad. “I won’t publish any of these passages, and I’ll ensure that nobody gets a hold of them. That said…”

“What?”

Shutterstock shuffled. “Your description of your own life is biased. I want to hear it from people who know you as well.”

Eve smirked. “Being thorough. Good.” She lit her horn, casting a spell on Shutterstock’s phone. “You now have my personal number. If you need me to set up a meeting with any of my friends or acquaintances, it will be done. I want you to get everything you need.”

Shutterstock bowed his head. “Thank you, Charter.”

“Just do a good job, Shutterstock. I’m putting a lot of faith in you.”

“You won’t be disappointed.”

~~~

Shutterstock left the Relations Office with a skip in his step – that had gone so much better than expected. Sure, his cover had been blown pretty much immediately, but he essentially had the key to Evening Sparkle’s life with him now. It was the best of all possible results. He had some calls to make…

He had two people in particular he wanted to call. He scrolled down to Lilac Ganymede first.

“This is Ganymede.”

“Hey, Lilac, Shutterstock here. Guess what, we’re making the movie.”

“Evening?”

“You bet your wings we are. I’m still doing research, but I got approval and resources from the Charter herself just now. So you will be playing her, like you’ve always wanted.”

“About damn time!”

“I was thinking the exact same thing! Start putting out some feelers to your actor friends, see if you can find potential candidates for other roles. We’ll need everyone in the primary team, Evening’s friends, major political figures…”

“Will do,” Lilac assured him. “You better have something dazzling soon, Shutterstock.”

“Oh, I will,” he assured her. “Now excuse me, need to make more calls.”

“Well then, congratulations. See you soon.”

Shutterstock hung up and moved to the next name on the list. “Aaaaaaay, Photo, my girl!”

“I am not your girl!” Photo Finish blurted from the other end.

“You are my lead camera pony and costume designer.”

“You know I only come if DA MAGIKS call to me!”

“I’ve just gotten approval from the Charter to go ahead and make Evening.”

“…I COME.” Photo Finish declared, hanging up.

“As always,” Shutterstock said, shaking his head. He figured he might as well make some other calls. He dialed another number.

“Hey, Arnold? Can we talk about use of your programmable set? Hey, hey, I know I’ve messed up before, but this is for Evening…”

~~~

Lilac Ganymede was a Twilight, gifted with wings not for being a princess, but for being so stupid rich she was able to afford a state-of-the-art grafting surgery on her homeworld. Since she was an actor, she had no single defining appearance to differentiate herself from other Twilights; she changed her appearance for whatever role she happened to be in. Currently, she was going for early Eve – or Charter-Twilight – with a straight mane and no ornamentation whatsoever.

She was in Shutterstock’s large studio – essentially a warehouse filled with cameras, costumes, set pieces, and other resources for filmmaking. Pretty much everything was here except an actual set to act on, though Lilac knew Shutterstock could make one if he had to. Lilac also knew it wouldn’t take long for the studio to be overrun with a hundred different people scrambling to make everything about the film absolutely perfect. Shutterstock had a rather high bar.

But for the moment, there were maybe a dozen people in the entire studio, and there was no rush. Lilac was passing the time by posing in a variety of positions including proud, tired, seductive, graceful, and a classification only known as ‘Earth Stand’ identified by dramatic contortions that frankly should not have existed in reality. The earth pony mare Photo Finish was taking dozens of pictures. “Glorious! Magnificent! Your control over your form is magnifique!”

“You say that every time,” Lilac said, taking a position on her hind hooves with her wings splayed. She summoned magic sparkles around herself to add to the pose.

“But your talent – it is beyond! Earth Stand types are nigh impossible to hold for non-natives! MAGIC.”

Lilac smirked. “Yare yare daze,” she said, tipping an imaginary hat and standing on one hoof, leaning backward in a highly-unbalanced pose.

“PERFECTION.”

Lilac levitated herself into the air and twisted upside-down, using a complex spell to hide her magical aura and make it look natural without needing to flap her wings. “How long do you think Shutterstock’s going to take?”

“Hour, maximum,” Photo answered. “I went in there a few minutes ago – he’s typing RAPIDO. The words, they flow!”

Lilac took a catlike position, pretending to sleep. “I think it’ll be less than an hour. He probably had part of it written before today.”

“Hrm…” Photo muttered, snapping more photos. “It won’t be long, regardless. We shall have in our hooves the story of our future!”

Lilac chuckled, taking on a playful pose. “A historic film, to be sure. What’s it like in there, right now?”

“Last I saw he was playing recordings of the interviews back, only the important bits. Typing like there was no tomorrow.”

“Artist at work.”

The artist was, in fact, at work. He was in a dark room at a desk, upon which sat a laptop and a speaker, nothing else. The speaker played select lines of dialogue from interviews Shutterstock had performed over the last few days while the laptop served as a glowing typewriter, words appearing on the screen with every tap of the keys.

Shutterstock was barely aware of anything besides his work.

“We were scared at first,” the voice of Mlinx came from the speaker. “The only other alicorn we’d seen was the Mistress, and I’m sure you know what she’s like if you’re asking me these questions… Siron felt the need to defend Veila from her. Of course, I wasn’t actually there…”

It all begins there. That one bowling ball. Shame the Starcross Society event was handled almost without her – it would make an even better bookend. Shutterstock thought, typing away – already far past the scenes that took place in the demon tribe.

“Has she changed?” Spike had said. “Perhaps more than anyone else. She used to be a lot more excitable. More optimistic. …More empathetic. I-I don’t mean she’s distant, she’s not! She’s just suffered a lot. I think it’s a testament to her strength of will that she’s kept any optimism and empathy at all. She could have broken at many moments, but she never did. She’s been strong this entire time.”

Her life is one of adjustment to impossible situations…

“Eve…” Luna’s voice came to his ears. “…is a complicated mare. She’s learned how to stare death in the face without batting an eye, but when she sees a child being harmed she taps into a primal rage. For her job, she needs to distance herself from events, but something within her won’t let her leave everything behind. It makes her life an unbelievably hard one, but it also makes her the best pony to lead us.”

A leader born to do what she did, in many ways. Always seeking a goal of unity despite everything, even that which happened to her.

“That day her other self was destroyed…” Pinkie had paused upon saying this. “It meant a lot to her, and what it meant wasn’t something good. It was essentially a coin flip, in the end. She doesn’t talk about it much. I mean, would you? But it’s the event that gave her a name. She allows herself to be known by the name of a dead mare. It’s a tribute, but it’s also a reminder to her how fleeting life is.”

A mare intimately aware of how short life can be, even for supposed immortals…

Corona had a lot to say, but one thing in particular had stood out. “She’s stronger than any of us, except perhaps Flutterfree. I almost went down a path of no return after the Bloodbath – you don’t want to know how close I was for a while there – but she got back up and used the tragedy to fuel herself. That takes… I don’t even know what that takes. A way to accept tragedy, I suppose. I don’t have that. I have to fight to get through it. Sometimes I wish I had what she does.”

…A mare who has learned to accept the shortness of life as a fact and not a burden.

“Comparing her to Siron reveals forces in opposition,” Renee had observed. “One sought friendship, compromise, reconciliation, and allowed herself to change. The other wanted enemies, dominion, rivalry, and consistency. The one way in which they were the same is that they cared about their people.”

A story of a chief and a princess, living alongside each other.

“Siron…” Flutterfree had said, pondering the name. “He’s a complicated individual. We were friends with him, once. I refuse to believe he felt nothing. He cared about us, we cared about him. He just… couldn’t accept where things were going. So he had to fight back in every way he could. To the end.”

A friendship turned into a bitter rivalry between a man who wanted enemies and a mare who had almost none.

“I worked with Siron a lot back in the old days,” Iroh had revealed. “I thought I was helping his people become their own entity – but in the end, even my world tore them apart. I’m not sure how much of that was Siron’s own meddling. But I often wonder if I could have done anything else.”

A demon with delusions of power in an unfortunate situation, doomed to walk a path of defeat or death. He chose the latter.

The last of the bug-demon mages, Veila, had been the best source for Siron’s real personality. “He stopped telling me his plans the first time I expressed concern, so I can’t tell you all the underhanded dealings he was involved in. But before he was forced to flee… I got to watch him break down, little by little, as things continued to go wrong. In the end, I think his ‘pride’ was just a farce of dignity. He was a broken individual who didn’t really care if Merodi Universalis fell or not – he just wanted to fall to Evening in honorable battle. He got what he wanted.”

A warrior to the bitter end. On her side, a friend to the very end.

“I didn’t have to kill him,” Eve had written. “I wasn’t planning to, at first. I planned to tear his staff from him and curse him, trapping his mind in his body. I would have imprisoned him far away from everyone else – I thought our old friendship deserved that much, despite the betrayal. But I saw that he didn’t want that. He wanted it to end right there. So I did as he wished. I still wonder to this day if this is really why I did what I did, or just a justification I created after the fact. I was not capable of thinking straight at the time. I can no longer know for certain what really happened behind the scenes.”

Shutterstock looked at the line he had written.

Evening: Together we will always shine.

He turned off the speaker in the middle of Applejack telling him about Eve’s earlier life.

Then he typed two magic words onto the end of the script.

THE END.

He hit print. His high-end printer whirred and printed the entire thing in about ten seconds, stapling it together for him. He grabbed it and burst out the door, interrupting Lilac and Photo’s posing session. “CALL EVERYONE, IT’S DONE!”

“That’s your job!” Lilac shouted back at him.

“DO I SOUND LIKE I CAN MAKE CALM COLLECTED PHONE CALLS RIGHT NOW!?”

“…Admittedly, no.”

“I shall do the calling!” Photo declared. “THE MAGICS WILL COME!”

“I’m sending out copies of this to everyone!” Shutterstock laughed. “The script is reaaaady~! …Drafted at least. Who cares, I still get to be excited.” He ran back to his laptop and started firing off emails left and right like they were candy on Halloween.

He made sure to send one to Eve herself. Hope you enjoy the first form of the script.

He sat back in his chair, a stupid smile on his face – he felt like he was on top of the world. Everything was perfect.

~~~

A few days later, Shutterstock walked into his studio’s primary meeting room, which looked more like a lounge than a place where actual business was constructed. He sat down on a recliner and dropped the script on a nearby coffee table. “The script monkeys are currently tearing this apart, creating a ‘finalized’ version.”

“Think they’ll demand any more major changes?” Lilac asked, tossing her mane back. “I do hope they don’t cut any characters – I’ve run almost a full roster through casting.”

“How many of your suggestions were accepted?” Shutterstock asked.

“A little over half, so far. That casting agent of yours is so picky.”

“That’s why I keep her around,” Shutterstock chuckled. “Her judgment on acting is better than my own, if I’m being honest with myself. Hope you’re not too upset.”

“It’s not me that you have to worry about. She turned down a DiCaprio.”

Photo Finish gawked. “Whaaaaat!? Who does that!?”

“Someone who knows none of the important human male roles particularly fit his appearance,” Shutterstock answered. “Think. It’s just Jotaro, O’Neill, Daniel, and Iroh that have any bearing on this film. He’d want a major role to be certain.”

“I think he could do a good Daniel,” Lilac huffed.

The technical and special effects supervisor spoke up, a green Gem known as Jade. “You’re good at acting, which means you have difficulty making non-emotional decisions. You have bias.”

“Thank you for that…”

Jade shrugged, feeling no need to comment further.

“Are there any main roles that are left to be filled?” Shutterstock asked.

“One,” Lilac said. “That would be Siron.”

Shutterstock sat back in his chair. “That’s right… That’s going to be a nearly impossible casting choice!”

“Race-change spell?” Jade suggested.

“Wouldn’t be authentic. Anyone who’d seen an actual demon walking around would know it was a fake. We need an actor of the correct race.”

“But does such an actor even exist!?” Photo asked. “It is unknown!”

“I seem to recall that there is one…” Lilac said, furrowing her brow. “…Tandas, that’s his name. He’s… well I don’t know much about him, he’s new.”

“At least you know his name. Let’s call him in.”

“He’ll be inexperienced, Shutterstock. We need someone able to portray a complex historic figure.”

Shutterstock nodded. “I understand. But we have time. If he’s acting at all, he must have something going for him.”

Lilac nodded. “Maybe… Good news is we’ve landed a solid role for the Mistress. Fi.”

“Fi?” Shutterstock’s eyes widened. “I knew she was your old friend, but I thought she was exceedingly busy?”

“She had to drop out of The Omnivore because of absurd and outrageous conditions. She’s willing to play Luna as well, so that saves up a spot.”

“Normally I’d be hesitant against letting one actor do two individuals, even alternates, but Fi? She can have it.”

Jade shrugged. “I hear she’d throw quite the fit if you didn’t let her have that.”

Lilac glared. “Fi is a lady and you will not talk about her like some spoiled supermodel.”

“She is a spoiled supermodel, basically.”

“Jade…”

“You’re not much better.”

Lilac turned to Shutterstock. “Do you have to keep her around?”

Shutterstock nodded. “Her Stand is exceptionally useful, she’s good at her job, and sometimes we need a good slap across the face.”

“You could say I’m just blowing off internal emotional steam,” Jade said.

“We don’t need to hear the story aga-”

“You know, cause I was once a high Gem Vein agent. High enough to be part of the Stand program. Then everything came crashing down, I was exiled, and now I sit in a studio and make movies with a power that should be out there conquering or something.”

“God, why do you have to repeat that every time?”

“Because it bothers you.”

“Can we act like professionals, please?” Shutterstock asked.

“WE MUST BE AS ONE!” Photo declared.

“Not really helping, but I like your spirit,” Shutterstock said with a smile.

Jade and Lilac sighed and nodded, silently agreeing to behave.

“Regardless, the moment we find a Siron we should be relatively okay on actors. Photo, I take it you plan on using your regular crew for the film and costumes?”

“Of course, nothing else will suffice!”

“Anything special you have planned?”

“I have a spectacular dress for Lilac that she simply MUST wear in the film at some point!”

“Evening isn’t one to wear clothing,” Lilac pointed out.

“Bah! There will be an opportunity.” She turned back to Shutterstock. “The talk of Siron has given me an idea. I believe I can construct an exo-exoskeleton with Siron’s markings to make it even more authentic!”

“Will it be functional?” Jade asked. “Because if our new-inexperienced actor has to walk around in a wax suit it’ll be horrible for everyone involved.”

Photo blinked. “I had not considered this. I SHALL STRIVE FOR COMFORT! Also, the cameras. We will be using spotters!”

“…Spotters will interfere with Bad Apple,” Jade pointed out. “They will try to see the Stand rather than the actual action it’s causing.”

“We shall filter!”

“Filtering out something you can’t really see is problematic on so many levels,” Jade pointed out. “Let’s say Bad Apple is, oh, creating a bunch of false explosions in front of an actor. The point of the explosions is to highlight the actor, not to be the highlight. But the spotters will try to focus on that.”

“Never underestimate my power!”

Shutterstock chuckled. “I trust you two can work something out?”

Jade nodded slowly. “From a technical standpoint… Yes.”

“DA MAGICS WILL FLOW!”

“Oh please stop…”

Lilac leaned in. “At least she doesn’t keep repeating her backstory over and over again.”

“That reminds me, I was once an Agent up pretty high in the Gem Vein. There was a Stand program and everything, it’s where I got Ba-”

“Shutter…” Lilac pleaded.

Shutterstock shrugged. “You asked for that one. My hands are tied.”

Lilac playfully whined. “But Shutter…”

“Hey, I’m not upsetting the Gem with the power to make us think we’re dying. You’re welcome to try.”

Jade stared at Lilac. “Bring it.”

Lilac decided the wisest course of action was not to antagonize the Gem.

~~~

A few days later, the complete finalized script was sent to Evening through email. She saw it the moment it came in. She marked it as important and downloaded it to her computer – but she didn’t read it. She was a bit busy at the time keeping the USM and University from blowing each other up. She had high confidence everything would turn out fine – already hostilities were dying down – but she needed to focus on it a bit longer.

She completely forgot the script existed by the next day. It sat there, on her computer, unread.

~~~

Fi was a Fluttershy renowned for her ability to act out anything. So long as her body allowed it, she could do it. She was well known for using body transformation spells to fit any particular role, and was so far the only known pony actor to also act as humans occasionally. At least, among the big names in filmmaking. Since she was playing the Mistress, she had dyed her coat, increased her stature, given herself a temporary horn, and placed magic levitation gems in her mane to get it to flow.

She took a pained, emotional gasp and thrust her head to the ground, almost slamming it into the dirt of the set. “I lay myself at your feet, asking not for forgiveness, but a chance to serve!”

Tandas was a small demon who, at the moment, looked like a miniature Siron – down to the carapace details and all. His speech was not filled with as much deep emotion as Fi’s, but it wasn’t completely monotone either. His line came with a sinister undertone. “Ah, yes… Mistress, you will certainly be welcomed in my tribe as a new warrior. Mhm…”

“See? I told you it would be fine,” Lilac declared, smiling warmly at Fi. “I hope you find your place in this world.”

Fi lifted her head, leaning in to Lilac in such a way that the nearby camera would be able to catch the details in both their faces. “I shall strive to make the most of this new chance you have given me, Evening Sparkle.”

“CUUUUUT!” Shutterstock shouted, facepalming.

“BUT THEY HAD DE MAGIKS!” Photo Finish retorted.

“She wasn’t Evening back then! She was Twilight!”

“Oh, apologies,” Fi said, bowing her head. “I shall burn that into my mind before the next run.”

“BUT IT WAS PERFECT!” Photo wailed. “So much wasted…”

“We can always cut,” Jade commented, connecting two wires together for some unknown purpose.

“It wasn’t the only problem,” Shutterstock said, walking up to Tandas. “You’re doing good for the most part, Tandas.”

He sighed. “I’m screwing it up, aren’t I?”

Shutterstock furrowed his brow. “In a way, you are. When I see you act I believe you are a horrendously evil manipulative bastard who wants to control everything and is driven by selfish means. Since you can do that, it means you have skill, but that’s not who Siron was.” Shutterstock snapped his fingers a few times to jog his thought process. “Siron was… a leader. He cared deeply for his tribe. When you’re trying to be him, don’t play up the evil so much. Be a more… complex character.”

“You’re asking a bit much,” Lilac pointed out.

“It’s what the movie needs,” Shutterstock said.

“R-right,” Tandas said, clearing his throat. “Ahem. Ah, yes! Mistress, you will certainly be welcomed in my tribe as a new warrior!”

“Much better,” Shutterstock said with a smile.

Lilac narrowed her eyes. “…Tandas, you’re just adjusting the tone of that one line, aren’t you?”

“Er…”

“You are,” Lilac sighed.

Shutterstock smiled at Tandas. “Just keep practicing, okay?” He walked to the side, motioning for Lilac to follow him. He turned and glared at her the moment they were backstage.

“Lilac, you can’t be doing that.”

“He’s not going to be able to portray Siron the way you want, Shutter,” Lilac asserted. “He’s new. He’s got talent, I’ll give him that, and he can really sell the character types he knows how to do. But he doesn’t understand Siron. I’m not sure he can. We can’t have you micromanaging every last one of his lines just to get a proper result. It will take forever.”

“We have time.”

“If you take too long into the production cycle things tend to fall apart,” Lilac reminded him. “Charter approval or no, that sort of thing happens. I don’t want to see this end in flames because we’re putting our trust in an inexperienced actor and not someone like myself!”

Shutterstock leaned against a wall, pursing his lips. “What do you suggest?”

“Fi can play a demon.”

“She’s only done humans professionally.”

“And demons have significantly less facial cues than humans or ponies.”

“Four arms, Lilac.”

“Tandas isn’t even sure what to do with all four of those arms!”

Shutterstock sighed. “Look, Lilac, I’ll keep it under advisement. But I’d much rather use Tandas than some fake demon. If it turns out we just can’t keep filming with him after about a week, we’ll change him out.”

“That’s an entire week of the production cycle, Shutter! We’ll have to shoot all those scenes again! Fi and I can keep our interest that long, sure, but others? We have backup actors you know!”

Shutterstock paused for a moment. “…Every production has problems.”

“Yep.”

“We just have to work through them.”

“Shutterstock, are you going to ignore me?”

“I said I’d take your advice into consi-”

“I am Lilac Ganymede. I’ve been acting for years, before the multiverse was even opened! As good as you are, you’re still new at this!”

“Lilac, I’m the Director of this movie. I make the decisions.”

“…Fine, play that card,” Lilac huffed. “When it all comes crashing down around you don’t blame me.”

“I won’t.”

“Liar.”

Shutterstock wanted to object, but realized she had a point. He sighed. “Let’s just go back and try again.”

“…Sure.”

The two returned to the set. Fi let out an ear-piercingly high note from her vocal cords. “I haaaaaaaave it~! The perfect inspiration for this scene! Some that will most certainly result in ‘da magiks’.”

“YES!” Photo declared.

Shutterstock smiled. “Everyone back to one. Let’s take the scene from the top.” He sat down in his Director’s chair and folded his arms. “Take seven!”

Fi began with yet another dramatic inflection, doing it just as well as before.

It brought a smile to Shutterstock’s face. There were still things going well for him.

~~~

Evening Sparkle decided to drop by the programmable set. Normally she would have spent time marveling at the amazing technology at display here – a black disc that could be programmed to create just about any scenery or building so long as one only cared about visual appearance and didn’t need an entire mountain to be visible at once. The programmable set was housed in a large warehouse that could be rented for studio filming. Needless to say, it was currently out for the next couple of months to be used for Evening.

She walked right onto the set – nobody tried to stop her. She paused – they were clearly setting up to film for a scene. She decided to watch rather than interrupt them.

Shutterstock had a hand in his hair. “Where the hell is Fi?”

“I… have no idea,” Lilac said, checking her phone. Eve thought she looked like a good Twilight Sparkle. “She’s not responding to anything…”

“She knows we’re scheduled today,” Tandas said, nervously tapping his fingers together. “She knows. I told her myself yesterday. We talked about the scene today. She seemed excited.”

“I’m going to go check on her,” Shutterstock said.

“We don’t have time,” Lilac declared. “Unless you want to call off today?”

“If she doesn’t show up, we don’t have a Mistress Luna or a Queen Luna, and we’re already set to record the first multiversal summit scene today. Gaaaaah…”

“I’m not in the scene, I can do Queen Luna,” Lilac offered. “Photo’s a wizard with cosmetics, she can make me look amazing in an hour. Or less.”

“Changing the actor will mess with things…”

“Alternate version.”

“She’ll be upset a-”

Lilac’s phone started ringing. She answered it. “Fi where the hell are you!? I- wh… what?! What do you me- Fi don’t you dare. …Fi you know what this means to me. Fi you can’t jus- Fi! Stop talking over me! …Fi. …Fi… …Fi! Fi get your plot back here right thi- Fi!” Lilac threw her phone onto the ground and exploded it with her magic.

Shutterstock put a hand to his face. “I’m scared to ask.”

“She just walked out!” Lilac blurted. “Why? Not because of bad-actor-bug-mcgee, not because of overwork, not because of bad planning, but because she met some guy last night and is running off to some random universe with him! GAH!”

“Pretty sure she can’t do that with her contract,” Tandas muttered.

“Shut the hell up, bug,” Lilac spat. She levitated a jacket onto herself. “I’m going to go grab her and knock some sense into her.”

“Lila-”

“If she leaves, everything falls apart and you know it!” Lilac shouted. “Rest easy: I’ll be back.”

Jade turned to Shutterstock. “Does that mean we don’t have to film today, or what?”

Shutterstock sighed. “Tandas, let’s do some solo scenes with you, work on your Siron. Do we have our Flagg on set? No? Well we’ll just have to make do with me.”

“You s-sure we should be doing that now?” Tandas asked.

“Yes, we should,” Shutterstock asserted. “Have to do something today.”

“Right. Uh, just let me check the lines…” He lifted up the script and read through it. “…Wait, you can act?”

“If I need to, it’s not my primary skill,” Shutterstock admitted. “But Flagg really is a basic evil-is-as-evil-does type, so I can do him easily. Got it?”

“I think so.”

“Good.” A dark demeanor came over Shutterstock. He smiled a truly horrendous smile. “Ah, Siron. I see you have doubts.”

Tandas steeled his gaze. “They found the USM, Flagg. They’re getting stronger, and getting more allies.” He narrowed his eyes and held out one of his arms, managing to be expressive without any facial expressions.

“I wouldn’t consider USM an ally… Their ideologies will clash.”

“Before we make our move?” Tanadas asked, his voice cracking slightly.

“Likely not, but they also will not interfere. They won’t be invested.”

“Would it not be in their interest to help?”

“Not if they learn of who I am,” Shutterstock laughed. “Now, Siron, is Blackjack behaving?”

“Only as far as I can tell; Dio is the one overseeing her development.”

“And Dio?”

“Here only because he thinks it’ll be fun. He really doesn’t care that we revived him from that bone.”

“He plans on betraying me later, no doubt about it.”

“Obviously.” Tandas’s tone slipped up over the v.

Shutterstock sighed. “Cut. Or… Scene, I guess, since we aren’t rolling. Look, Tandas what’s up?”

Tandas sighed. “Lilac’s right you know. Not about the thing with Fi. But about me. I’m not the guy you want, Shutterstock.”

“You’re the guy we need. There aren’t any other demon actors! You’re it – and you have talent!”

“But I can’t do Siron!”

“You were doing him just fine there!”

“I was stuttering.”

“That was because of the stress of the day and you know it.”

Tandas shook his head. “Shutterstock, has there been a single day of recording where Lilac hasn’t come to you complaining about me? I know you’re trying to keep it hushed, but I know. I know she’s trying to get me replaced. Why don’t you listen to her?”

“Because I have a vision of what this needs to be,” Shutterstock asserted. “A great, glorious, artistic vision. And it includes you. Don’t you walk out on me.”

“I… I won’t. I’m just not sure if that’s a good decision on your part.”

“I’ll think of something. At the very least, you don’t need to be afraid of me.”

Tandas tensed up in fear.

“Tandas I just sai-”

“Behind you.”

Shutterstock turned around, finally noticing Evening standing there. “WAUGH!”

“Hello,” Evening said, her face lacking the smile it usually held. “We need to talk, Shutterstock.”

“You’ve come at a really bad time, Evening – the production’s having more than a couple hiccups right now. I assure you this is just a ‘bad day.’ Come back another time and I’m sure we can show you something better.”

“I understand that this is just a disaster day,” Eve responded. “I’m not judging you for that.” She held up the script. “We need to talk about this.”

“…I sent that to you weeks ago.”

“And I was too busy to read it in depth until yesterday. That’s my fault. But that doesn’t change the fact that we need to talk. I assume you have an office?”

“…Yes. Right this way.” He led her away from the set to a back wall with several doors, one labeled with ‘Shutterstock, Director’ in black lettering. The interior was sparse – just a desk, computer, chairs, and lighting fixture.

Evening laid the script on the desk and fixed Shutterstock with a glare. He began to sweat profusely.

“…This is extremely well written,” Eve commented. “In depth. Rather accurate, for the most part, when things aren’t skewed for drama. You clearly did your homework.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“This isn’t my story,” Eve answered. “I’m listed as the protagonist, and I win in the end, but you’re not writing my story in these pages. You’re writing Siron’s story.”

“…Come again?”

Eve flipped the script over to a particular page. “This scene is Siron plotting with Flagg, the one you were going over with your actor there.” She flipped to another section. “This one is Siron talking with the Mistress and Ganondorf.” She flipped it again. “This is Siron sending magic to Majora. This is Siron talking about the corrupt Merodi. This is Siron having a final emotional discussion with Blackjack. This is Siron lamenting the death of Fef.” She closed the script. “This movie isn’t Evening, it’s Siron.”

“That’s an unfair judgement,” Shutterstock pointed out. “He’s just the antagonist written as I understand he was. He doesn’t even get half the scenes. You get just as many speeches and emotional moments.”

“And yet, you don’t dwell on them as much. I’ve read through them.”

“The audience is accustomed to your political and idealistic side – the parts where you need to be fleshed out to the people are the moments where you deal with suffering and loss on a personal level. Siron, on the other hand, was largely out of the public eye, even at the end of it all. We saw what he did in his rash moments, not so much what he thought under the scenes.”

“I think you’re obsessed with him.”

“He’s an absolutely fascinating character. If I ever find our Prophet I’ll have to ask what drove Siron’s creation.”

Eve scrunched her muzzle. “You really don’t see what you’re doing, do you?”

“Hrm?”

She held up the script and gestured at it. “You’re painting Siron as a hero. Not the protagonist, but you’re going a step beyond just making him relatable. You make it possible that he was right.”

Shutterstock blinked. “Was he?”

Eve sputtered. “O-of course no…” She stopped. “He was definitely wrong in what he did. But his reasonings may have had merit.”

“Then it’s a good thing the film will portray him that way – accurate and thought provoking.”

“Don’t you see why that’s a problem?”

“How so?”

Eve put a hoof to her chin. “Think about Hitler. Or Hitter, I think he was in your world. An objectively horrendous man who is used as the shorthand for evil on many Earths. I’m sure there were ways to portray what he did in a sympathetic light – it would require a lot of glossing over, to be sure, but it would be possible. Currently, Flagg is not the universal standard for evil in Merodi Universalis. No, they point to Siron. His relation in the attack was much more personal.”

“So I’ll be changing people’s minds.”

“Shutterstock, I can’t approve a movie that goes against that much of public opinion. It would destroy me and destabilize the government. Not to mention that by calling my motives and ideals into question, it would upset the sentiments upon which Merodi Universalis was founded!”

“…Oh.”

“Yes. Oh.” Eve narrowed her eyes. “Since you’re having such difficulty filming, it looks as if you may be better off just starting over. If you need the funds to do so, I can provide them. But I will do so if and only if you rewrite this script to focus less on Siron. I appreciate that you’ve made him a villain one can identify with, but it seems as if the message behind your movie is ‘think more about what Siron said’, which I don’t approve.”

“I think you’re just biased,” Shutterstock said, folding his arms. “You can’t view anything he says in any record objectively.”

“So? Nobody else is going to be able to either!”

“I’m not changing it, Charter. This is what my soul wrote onto the page. This is the movie I’m making.”

Evening twitched. “I can’t endorse it.”

“You can’t shut it down.”

“I can try.”

“You won’t. I know you at this point, Evening. You aren’t that petty. You’re upset, and you want to do something, but I’m just a filmmaker. You hesitate to harm even the darkest of people. I’m not evil.”

Eve sighed. “…I just wanted it to be a movie I could be excited for, something I could point to and say ‘that’s me, everyone go watch that, it’s good’. I wanted that to happen. I chose you because I thought you’d do it right.”

“I am doing it right. That mare you will see on the screen will be you, Evening.”

Eve chuckled. “You are good… But you aren’t that good. There are a few key things about me missing as well.”

“Such as…?”

“You really think I’m going to tell you now?” Eve said, shaking her head. “I strongly recommend you stop production, or rewrite and restart. But I can see that you’re going to keep going anyway. So I’m going to wish you luck.”

“…Luck?”

“Luck. You’re going to need it.” She gave him a warm smile. “Determination and stubbornness can be decidedly annoying, but it’s also indicative of a strong spirit. You’re a good person, Shutterstock. Just on the wrong side at the moment.” She teleported away.

Shutterstock folded his fingers together. After he had realized what had upset her, he hadn’t really been surprised by the conversation. Her anger quickly switching to encouragement was just one of her quirks. Once she realized there was no point in playing hardball, she would always try to smooth things over. Always.

She really was the best choice for the job.

He looked down at the script in deep thought.

She was right about a lot of what she’d said. He was obsessed with Siron’s character. His motives. His relation to the history of Merodi Universalis… But he also knew this movie wasn’t about Siron. It was about Evening, right? It had to be, she was what the whole script was built around.

…But Siron had branched out. He had demanded that his story be told alongside Eve’s. Shutterstock couldn’t shut that demon chief down. The character spoke too loudly in his mind.

It was then that Shutterstock realized something.

It wasn’t Evening’s story.

It wasn’t Siron’s story.

It was both their stories.

He grabbed a red pen and scrawled a new word on the title page, turning Evening into Crimson Evening. He ran out of his office and back to the set, where Tandas was waiting patiently. Photo and Jade were still there, and Lilac had just returned – notably without Fi.

“W-what happened?” Tandas asked.

“Evening Sparkle just rescinded her approval of the film!” Shutterstock blurted with a stupid grin on his face. “But screw her.”

Lilac gasped. “W-what!?”

“You heard me. Screw her. She can’t separate her experiences from the story we’re telling. She thinks we’re telling a story about Siron, making him the hero.”

“…Aren't we, kinda?” Lilac asked.

“Kinda,” Shutterstock admitted, showing them the new title page. “But we’re going to turn that to our advantage.”

“…Crimson Evening…” Photo said, mulling the title over in her mouth. “IT WORKS!”

“It does. This isn’t going to be a movie about Evening. This isn’t going to be a movie about Siron. It’s going to be freaking both. A dichotomy!”

“A… dichotomy,” Lilac said, pondering this. “…You’re going to rewrite it and we’re going to have to shoot everything again aren’t you?”

“Yes to the first. No to the second. The beginning doesn’t change at all. But I’m going to alter the ending, and the marketing. This is a story for both of them. A dual adventure. It will be glorious and magical and meaningful and different.”

“I feel da magiks!” Photo declared, submitting her approval.

“You always feel them, like a broken record,” Jade muttered. “Isn’t it risky to go against Eve though?”

“She’s not like most,” Shutterstock said. “She’s not going to try to stop us. She just can’t be associated with it anymore for political reasons. And personal ones, but we’ll pretend the political are the only ones that matter, mmkay?”

“There’s other problems though!” Lilac blurted. “Fi’s gone!”

“I know a Luna. Cressa. She can take the role of the Mistress.”

“And what about Tandas!?”

Shutterstock looked at Lilac – and smirked. “He’s your responsibility.”

“…What.” Lilac deadpanned.

“You’re an amazing actor, and a teacher from what I hear. Stop being so prideful for one damn moment and help him out. He has the talent, it just hasn’t been shaped.”

“But I-”

“Yes you can. You know you can. You just don’t want to.”

Lilac took in a deep breath. “Fine. Tandas, come on, lesson one. Stop panicking.”

“E-easier said than done!”

“I’m going to get you drunk. It’ll be easier,” Lilac decreed. “Can you call off filming for the day? I need to loosen this bug up.”

“By all means. I need to tweak the ending as it is.”

Lilac levitated Tandas up. “Here we go bug boy, time to go experience the art of getting completely blasted out of your mind.”

“…That doesn’t sound like alcohol to me.”

“Second lesson, we’re going to go out and you’re going to be a pirate the entire time. Not a cheesy ‘yarrr’ pirate, but an actual pirate. Be convincing.”

“But I don’t want to be a swashbuckler!”

“…Good start.” She dragged him off.

“I GO!” Photo declared, moonwalking into the shadows. “TO FIND MORE INSPIRATION!”

Soon it was just Jade and Shutterstock left.

Jade shook her head, smiling. “You are absolutely bananas.”

“I can’t stop. I won’t stop.” He flipped to a page in the script. “As Eve once said... I hear the multiverse calling my name.”

Jade shrugged. “At this point I’m just on board to see if you can get this ship to shore or not.”

“Oh, it’s not just getting to shore, it’ll end on top of a mountain.” Shutterstock rubbed his hands together. “Because we have everything we need right here… Just need some stupid determination to do it.”

“Stupid is right.”

“Yeah it is. Now get back to work, you’re the set programmer remember?”

“Righty-o, boss man,” Jade said with a mock salute. “BAD APPLE!”

The resulting fake explosion surrounded Jade in a halo, making her look a lot more intimidating than usual.

“…Fun trick.”

“I know. Now get to work already.”

~~~

It was amazing how something could go from being a complete disaster to smooth as butter in a single day. After the big disaster, every scene they recorded the next day went great, only taking a handful of takes to complete. Tandas had apparently discovered how to do Siron – though he admitted that it was just Siron he could do right now, Lilac had basically brainwashed him with endless lessons. But she hadn’t stopped after he’d gotten Siron down.

Lilac was still proud occasionally, especially when they started deafening her with invisible enchanted earplugs to produce Evening’s deaf accent for scenes when the mare wasn’t addressing the public. The actor hadn’t been happy about that, but she’d gone along with it. Tandas would still flub something major or blank on an emotional inflection, or Photo would go temporarily mad and refuse to allow a seemingly good take to be the last one – but nothing else exploded. It was nice to have Bad Apple on special effects.

Weeks passed. Filming went by no means flawlessly after that day – Lilac got sick, Photo mixed up the lenses a few times, and Tandas broke part of his carapace doing a stunt – but they all banded together. And they got it done.

The entire crew was sitting in a small theater room they had rented to view the film as it was now. It had no background music, no sound effects, and no post-production special effects. It was just the filmed scenes stitched together in what was expected to be the final orientation. It would, of course, not end up like this, but it was a glimpse of things to come.

And it was good.

“Together we will always shine,” Lilac said, drawing the film to a close. No credits rolled – they hadn’t been added yet – but the crew still clapped anyway.

Shutterstock grinned. “This is going to look great.”

“True sorcery. BEAUTY!” Photo decreed.

Lilac nudged Tandas. “I told you everything would look fine.”

“I caught myself scratching the back of my head in the background of Scene 4-2,” Tandas muttered.

“That’s for diehard fans to make memes, not the actual quality of the movie itself,” Lilac decreed. “Now, about my payment…”

“…Payment?”

“I’ve been your personal acting tutor for an accelerated curriculum for over a month now. I’m one of the most important actors in the business. You need to pay me.”

“B-but…”

“Man, you’re gullible.” Lilac chuckled. “You don’t have to pay me. You just have to be dragged to conventions with me now. You have sold your soul to Algernon, Tandas. Welcome to hell. Enjoy your stay.”

“…Lovely.”

Jade chuckled, turning to Shutterstock. “I think you brought about a friendship there.”

“Eve rubbed off on me,” Shutterstock said, sitting back. “Her words… They truly are larger than life. There’s a power to them.”

“Do you think…?”

“She won’t approve of this, officially. She can’t. But I think she’ll like it,” Shutterstock decided. “It’s what I got from her own words, after all. All it took was a little tweaking.” He stood up and clapped his hands. “But enough of that! Everyone, we’ve got a lot more work to do – special effects, better cutting, and above all marketing. Crimson Evening isn’t going to find its way to theaters all on its own!”

“RIGHT!” Everyone called.

Shutterstock looked at his crew with a proud smile. It was going to happen.

~~~

“Together we will always shine.”

The credits started to roll.

Eve sat alone in a small theater – a personal early showing she had arranged herself.

She wiped the tears from her eyes. “Together…” she echoed. She stood up and walked out of the theater. In the lobby, she saw Shutterstock sitting patiently on a bench. He was alone.

She sat next to him.

“…That was a great movie,” Eve said, still struggling to keep her tears under control. “…I noticed you made some changes. It’s better than it was before.”

“You made me realize the dichotomy.”

“It certainly works better if that’s explicit,” Eve admitted. “It’s not a story of one, but both. That… That works really well. I still can’t give it a rousing endorsement.”

“I understand.”

“I want to, though,” Eve said. “That screen? That screen showed a life so close to mine. So close.”

“Did I mess something up?”

“There are a few things you just can’t know,” Eve said. “A few key things. It’s not your fault. As far as anybody is concerned, that story on the screen is mine.”

“I’m going to update it when your classified information comes out, huh?”

“Heheh… You can believe that if you want.”

Shutterstock looked into the distance. “I am sorry for not going the way you wanted.”

“There will have to be another movie about me made by someone else,” Eve admitted. “One that focuses on just me. It needs to happen. What you’ve done… It’s less of a film based on a true story. It’s an idea that’s told through a true story. An idea that there are two sides to everything. That even the villain has reasons.” She looked Shutterstock in the eyes. “Do you know what this film’s going to do?”

“Destroy the authority of the government and your image?”

“No. Well… It might cause some unrest, but I can minimize it by distancing myself. What it’s going to do is let Siron be remembered as something other than the Merodi version of Hitler. He will be remembered as a man with ideals who had the entire multiverse work against him. He’s still a bad man – but he won’t be the symbol of evil. He deserves that much.”

“Glad you think so.”

“I’m sorry, Shutterstock, for how I acted that day,” Eve said. “It wasn’t right.”

“You were angry. And you still wished me luck at the end.”

“That stuck with you, huh?” Eve asked with a smile. “I suppose it would… In that case, I’m sorry for something specific. I apologize for refusing to believe you were right. I really couldn’t separate myself from Siron. I… I hate him.” Tears started rolling down her face. “I’ve tried so hard to move past it, to realize who he was, to just… let go. But I can’t. I keep a paradoxical view of him inside my heart. He killed so many out of rage, but we were partially responsible for what he became. He made us our enemy, but he wanted to die. He… He…” She let out a deranged grunt. “I don’t even know anymore. I can’t. I hate him. But I also understand him.”

“It sounds like you have unresolved issues you haven’t even admitted to yourself.”

Eve nodded. “I try never to hate anyone, Shutterstock. Valentine… Scarcity… Ba’al… They were enemies, yes. But they’re people. Even Six… But Siron? The one I took care of personally? …I hate him.”

“…I think he’d like that,” Shutterstock observed.

Eve was silent for a few seconds. Then she broke out into jovial laughter. “He would, wouldn’t he? That’s what he always wanted! Something to fight that would fight him on his terms!” She put a hoof to her head. “Aaaah this is a royally screwed up situation on so many levels…”

“Part of why I made Crimson Evening the way I did. There are so many layers to the relationship between you two. It needed to be told. In many ways, it’s a better story than yours alone could ever be.”

“That’s probably why it happened,” Eve pointed out. “Someone’s reading this, remember? Maybe not now – though I could call Pinkie and ask if the ‘camera’ is on right now – but I know it was on when Siron was around. That was the story.” She chuckled bitterly. “But that doesn’t really matter, does it? Those things happened. There’s no denying them. Wondering about why they happened in a meta sense won’t help.”

Shutterstock didn’t say anything.

“Sorry, I’m pouring my soul out to you. I should probably be doing this to Luna instead.”

“I understand you very well, Evening,” Shutterstock said. “I’ve spent months saturated in your mind. Give me some credit.”

“You do seem to be handling it pretty well.”

Shutterstock smirked. “If I didn’t know you were asexual this would be the point I ask you out.”

Eve blinked, taking a moment to process this. Then she laughed. “You really do know me, don’t you?”

“Probably a lot more than you’d like.”

“Yeah. Probably.” She gave him a quick hug. “Thanks for standing up to me.”

“You’re welcome, Charter.”

Eve nodded. “See you around?”

“Who knows?” Shutterstock said with a shrug. “It’s a big multiverse after all…”

Eve gave him a warm smile and teleported away.

~~~

Crimson Evening went on to have a relatively decent run across the multiverse. It was sold to several different movie-brokering companies, one in each universe, at the same time. This meant Shutterstock and crew actually profited from the movie, avoiding the issue of sudden copy-plagiarism in other universes. They made no money from any of the tickets – their company was not allowed to operate that way. They only profited from sale of the distribution rights. The movie did not become popular enough to suddenly produce more economic opportunity.

But it became a cult classic in time. Four and a half stars. It may not have made Shutterstock fly into the public eye, but in the critical culture he was suddenly a bigger name. He tried something new, and it had turned out great despite a lot of bumps in the road.

Over time, Crimson Evening won a couple of awards in different universes. Enough to ensure that it would always be remembered in the back of the film industry’s collective conciousness, as a testament to both Evening and Siron.

Eventually, Evening’s Worlds came out, written by a different director and with nobody who was on the original project involved with it. It was a solid four-star movie, nothing bad about it, and the population loved seeing their Charter being awesome on the big screen.

But it was never as deep as Crimson Evening.

And that was all Shutterstock cared about, in the end.

He was beyond proud of the result.

069 - Love is in Bloom

It must have currently been Valentine’s Day in some universe, because the collective Pinkies of the Pinkie Emporium had declared it ‘Festival of Love’ day. The already pink-themed park was even pinker than usual, covered in love-themed decorations ranging from balloons to chocolates to beating holograms that floated in the sky.

The theme park had its rides altered as well – no longer was JUST the ‘tunnel of love’ ride the only option for plainly romantic activities. The rollercoasters had been decked out with hearts, the funhouse had been rearranged to throw couples together with illusions and magic, and there was kissing happening everywhere.

It was horrendously cheesy and that’s why it worked.

Some people who rarely came out to do anything fun had felt compelled to experience the once-in-a-lifetime Festival of Love. Giorno Giovanna made one of his very few public appearances with his wife, Trish. More people knew Trish than Giorno – she was a popular Earth Stand singer, while Giorno was just some guy she had married. Definitely no connection to the Italian mafia. And definitely no connection to the Division of Merodi Universalis that didn’t exist.

Lyra Heartstrings had never believed any of that.

“I’m telling you Bon Bon, that Giogio is up to something.”

“So what if he is?” Bon Bon asked, perusing the high-quality chocolates a Pinkie was selling. “He’s a friend of Jotaro, so we can trust him.”

“But what if he’s, like, up to something bad!?”

“Jotaro would know. Or Evening would. Or Olivia.”

“Since when does Olivia tell you things!?”

“Since when I ask.”

Lyra narrowed her eyes, examining Giorno closely. “But she can’t be that trustworthy… Bon B-”

Bon Bon put a hoof over Lyra’s mouth. “Lyra, turn off your mind for today. Giorno and Trish are just here to enjoy themselves, just like us. Let’s do the same, okay?”

“…Yeah, good point.”

“Now there’s a photo booth over there. Let’s go in, have some fun with silly faces, and then come out like the day is anew.”

“Sure thing!” Lyra said, beaming. She galloped over to the booth and bowed. “M’lady.”

Bon Bon rolled her eyes, but she had a smirk on her face all the while. They entered and pulled the curtain.

“So cute,” Renee said from her vantage point.

“Nosy,” Daniel observed. He was riding her, a snow cone in his hand.

“It’d be impossible not to see cuteness here,” Renee snorted. “It was just chance it happened to be those two. Look over there. Young lovebirds. An old couple who’s been through everything. And – holy Celestia that’s a big family.”

Daniel looked over his eyeglasses. “Are they a single family yet? I’m not sure all the marriages are finalized yet.”

“They’re all together, that’s the point,” Renee said, gesturing out with her hoof at the giant family.

The family in question was the combination of the Canterlot Royal Family, the Apple Family, and the Joestars. It was more than a little impressive. Applejack and her husband Barley were leading their group. Only one of their daughters were with them – the hardworking yet elegant Jona Apple. She had paired up with Glistening Helm, the only pegasus among Shining Armor and Cadence’s children. Speaking of, the Princess of Love and her Knight were there, managing to dodge the crowds for once – something about their current demeanor told the population that this was a day for them and their extended family. Another one of their children, Paradigm, was an alicorn like their eldest, and she had paired up with one of the Joestars, bringing that mess of a family into the combination.

Paradigm had chosen Shizuka Joestar, the adopted daughter of the late Joseph Joestar. She was significantly younger than both Jotaro and Jolyne, but she was also technically Jotaro’s aunt. Jotaro and Jolyne themselves were with their partners – Jotaro with his wife Marina, Jolyne with her boyfriend Anasui. All in all the giant family consisted of six different couples. Seven if they counted Big Mac and his wife, but they weren’t with them at the moment.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, hand to his hat.

“What is it?” Marina asked. She was the textbook definition of average Itallian human woman – brown hair, simple face, medium figure.

“I’m just realizing how much more complicated the family tree just got with Shizuka’s marriage.”

Marina chuckled. “Weirder than thinking of your aunt as a daughter?”

Jotaro glanced at Shizuka and Paradigm Joestar – they had decided to keep the legendary surname, since Shizuka was the last living individual born with it. It helped that Paradigm didn’t really have a surname. And since Paradigm was a natural-born alicorn, that meant the Joestars were technically royalty, related to Evening by way of a complex series of marriages and the entire Apple family…

“Yes, it’s weirder,” Jotaro declared.

“I think it’s beautiful how bizarre this legacy of yours is,” Marina said. “I’m glad Eve convinced you to share it with me.”

Jotaro put an arm around his wife, smiling softly. “It really did change everything.”

“Hey. Hey dad,” Jolyne said, slinging an arm around him. “What do you think Anasui would think if I tried to propose to him?”

“The man has already asked my permission to marry you with you in earshot dozens of times,” Jotaro muttered.

“You never give him a straight answer!”

“Dad privileges,” Jotaro said, looking at Anasui – a pink-haired individual with a considerable set of muscles, like many men on Earth Stand.

“Your father’s just messing with him,” Marina said, pecking her man on the cheek. “He pretends to be all serious all the time but he really laughs on the inside.”

“Oh, so the opposite of Applejack?” Barley asked. He was small for a stallion, and his colors were all muted shades of yellow.

“Barley,” Applejack grunted at her husband, raising an eyebrow. “Are you sayin’ me and Jotaro are opposites?”

“He cries on the inside too, though,” Marina observed. “All of his emotions except exasperation are hidden deep within his folds… And that’s what I love about him.”

Jotaro remained impassive.

“See? A lesser man would have been blushing.”

“Pff, Ah don’t think so,” Applejack said. “Ah can say I love Barley for his absolutely amazin’ determination, legs, an- Barley stop blushin’ you’re ruinin’ my point.”

“S-sorry.”

“Oooooh Dad’s embarrassed!” Jona said. She was by far the tallest mare there – taller even than Cadence, which was impressive. She was also bright red, which simply demanded attention from everyone when she spoke. “Hey. Hey Dad. Why do you like Mom?”

“You know.”

“Ah, but this is a Festival of Loooove!” Jona waved her hooves around. “Me and Helmy already redid the whole ‘vows’ thing.”

“Mhm,” Helm said, ruffling his gray wings.

“You got bro to talk?” Paradigm asked. Currently, her coat was white, but she was known for changing it regularly because being consistent bored her. “Your skills never cease to amaze me.”

“I have a certain set of skills that are very useful in very particular situations!” She hugged Helm close. “Isn’t that right, Helmy?”

“Mhm.”

“Give your husband a break,” Applejack said with a chuckle.

Shining Armor walked up to his son. “…I don’t envy you.”

“Mmmmmm…”

Cadence raised an eyebrow at her husband. “Shining.”

“It was a joke! It was a joke!”

Cadence rolled her eyes. “Of course it was.”

Shizuka Joestar turned to her father-in-law. “You look like you want to disappear for a while.”

“I don’t need anything to make me invisib-”

“ACHTUNG!” Shizuka declared, summoning her Stand. “RIA!” In an instant, Shining Armor was invisible.

“Shizuka! I can’t see my hooves!” Shining Armor wailed.

Shizuka and Paradigm giggled. Then Shizuka leaped onto Paradigm’s back. The alicorn spread her wings and they flew off into the sky, turning invisible.

“Yare yare daze…” Jolyne and Jotaro muttered. Jolyne summoned Stone Free, guessing where the two of them were. She guessed well, latching onto the alicorn-human couple with her stringy Stand, dragging them to the ground.

“Star Platinum: THE WORLD!” Jotaro declared, freezing time. In the frozen time, he grabbed Shizuka and Paradigm, dragging the adoptive Joestar and Equestrian Princess back to the group.

Shizuka sighed when time resumed. “Fiiine.” She made Shining Armor visible again. He had somehow already fallen onto his back, dazed.

The entire family had a good laugh.

“Beautiful,” Renee said. “Simply beautiful.”

Daniel nodded, a smile on his face. “Yeah…” The two managed to perform a kiss while Daniel was on horseback. It looked awkward but at least they didn’t fall over.

Elsewhere, however, there was someone who was watching all the festivities of love and togetherness, and feeling left out.

Allure sighed deeply, her eyes narrow. “Look at them,” she muttered. “One big happy family.”

Squeaky looked up from a tray of chocolates she had just bought. “Hm?”

“The Royal-Apple-Joestar family or whatever – brimming with love and happiness… Just like all the other people in this Festival of Love.” She turned to Squeaky, eyes in a surprisingly aggressive glare. “Everyone seems to have someone… Everyone but me – sitting here, alone, on the sidelines…”

Squeaky blinked. “…You have us.” She gestured to herself, Thrackerzod, and Bot.

“That’s not it, Squeaky. That’s not it at all. They’ve got their little lives too perfect, too great, too… loving. Far too precious… It’s an affront.”

Squeaky’s mildly confused expression was becoming one of concern.

Allure raised her hoof into the air. “SO WE ARE GOING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! You, me, the girls… There will be a great thing that happens today, thanks to the League of Sweetie Belles…”

“…What?” Squeaky said, almost too afraid to ask.

Allure’s ominous glare vanished, replaced with a grin. “We’re going to find me a boyfriend!”

Squeaky blinked. “…I was afraid you’d gone full supervillain on us.”

“What? Me a supervillain? That doesn’t even make any sense!”

“Yes it does,” Thrackerzod corrected from the sidelines. “No, I’m not explaining how.”

“B… Huh?”

Bot interrupted the thought process. “Boyfriend!? What kind do you want! OOH! What about Silver?”

“I am not dating myself for obvious reasons, Bot.”

“Uh… What?”

“Genetics,” Thrackerzod explained. “Dating yourself is perhaps the worst mix possible for the genetic lottery of eldritch-spawn.”

“Oh. …Why didn’t I think about that?”

“Because you’re Sweetie Bot,” Squeaky said with a smile. “You’ve nothing to be ashamed of. There are those Raritys though who really should know better…”

Allure shivered. “Leeeet’s not talk about them. Let’s talk about getting me a boyfriend! Or any of you.”

“Pass,” Thrackerzod said. “I do not experience romantic attraction due to my nature and if I wish to experience pregnancy and motherhood I will just ha-”

“Enough information!” Allure blurted.

“I wonder what a boyfriend is like…” Bot pondered.

Squeaky shrugged. “Dunno. I’ve never really been interested. That might be the result of my upbringing.”

“Do I want one…?”

“Probably not,” Squeaky said. “They’d have to become more important to you than your sister.”

“NEVER.”

Allure shook her head and smiled. “Bot, you’re adorable.”

“We’re all adorable! MAXIMUM CUTENESS!”

“Unfortunately true,” Thrackerzod grunted.

Squeaky put a hoof on Allure. “We’ll help, so long as you promise not to blow up the world.”

Allure smiled innocently. “Well, we better find me somepony then because that’s plan B!”

“I hope to Celestia you’re joking.”

Allure’s smile didn’t falter, but she did waggle her eyebrows.

Squeaky rolled her eyes. “Right. We need a plan.”

“Scanning for potential candidates,” Bot decreed, examining the entire Festival of Love she could see. “Three thousand seventeen possible candidates detected.”

“Stallions, Bot,” Squeaky clarified.

“…Nine hundred and two.”

“And ones that aren’t part of a couple already.”

“…Maybe sixty? Uncertain data.”

“Can you pare down to a similar age range?”

“Plus or minus how many?”

“…Five years, I’d say.”

“Nineteen.” Bot blinked.

“Of freaking course,” Thrackerzod muttered. “How many nineteens is that now, Bot?”

“One hundred and ninety.”

“I’m getting really tired of that number showing up everywhere…”

Pinkie appeared behind them. “Really? I love it!”

“What is it?” Thrackerzod demanded.

Pinkie giggled. “That is a secret I keep not because I have to, but because it’s fun. Heh.”

“Then why did you bother to show up!?”

“Cause. Comedic timing…”

“Joke rated four out of ten,” Bot decreed. “Not worth it.”

“Party pooper,” Pinkie muttered, vanishing. The Pinkie that appeared next to Jotaro might have been the same one, but it was hard to tell in the Pinkie Emporium.

Allure shook her head. “Bot, take us to the first candidate.”

Bot pointed at a concession stand selling cotton candy where a blue pegasus stallion was standing, clearly annoyed that the two Pinkies manning the stand were arguing up a storm.

Allure smirked. “Time to turn on the cute…” She trotted over to him, smirking.

~~~

The pink-haired white-skinned potion seller of an unknown species known as Seskii had expanded her one-stop-for-everything stand for the Festival of Love, setting up a ‘spectacular brewery’ restaurant in one of the Pinkie Emporium's streets. “Come one, come all to Seskii’s Brewery! One day only buy a drink that will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced – one will make you feel like a cloud, while another will give you the ability to see light as it moves! Or that’s what you’ll feel like, anyway.”

Nova walked up to the makeshift bar Seskii had set up, taking a seat on the stool. “Four potions of whatever Seskii, but make sure they’re the same.”

“…Fine, I’ll drop the randomness for once,” Seskii said, mixing her drinks.

“By the way, do you know Shizuka and Paradigm are making out in the seat next to me?”

“Of course I do,” Seskii said, rolling her eyes. “What self respecting merchant wouldn’t?”

Shizuka and Paradigm dropped the invisibility, the two of them blushing furiously.

“Just because you’re invisible doesn’t mean people won’t notice you,” Nova commented, looking at them with a bored expression. “It’s not like you can really mistake Paradigm’s magic signature.”

“…Shizuka…” Paradigm muttered.

“I lost focus on Achtung, sorry!” She rubbed the back of her head. “I was a little… distracted.”

Paradigm giggled. “I bet.”

Nova turned to Seskii, showing her credit card to pay. “Thanks, Seskii.”

“Don’t mention it!”

“This better not be a love potion, by the way.”

“It’s not!” Seskii winked. “I’m not cruel.”

Nova walked back to her table with four bubbling purple drinks in potion bottles. She laid them out for Discord, Trixie, and Flutterfree. “Here we are. Having lunch in the middle of a Festival of Love.”

“I know! Isn’t it a coincidence?” Discord said, hands to his face. “When we planned to have lunch today I had no idea what Pinkie was doing!”

“Nobody believes you, Discord,” Flutterfree said, sniffing the potion.

Trixie chuckled. “For a being of chaos you sure don’t lie very well.”

“He can if he wants to,” Nova said, sitting down. “The badness is part of the joke.”

“Uh oh, someone’s become… a fuddy duddy.” Discord said.

Trixie gasped. “NO! Not her! NEVER NOVA! We can’t lose her to the fuddy duddy!”

“…What?”

Flutterfree giggled. “They’re calling you fussy. You do seem to be on a short fuse today.”

Nova muttered, gesturing at the festival. “Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just that I absolutely love Single’s Awareness Day.”

“…Brings back bad memories, doesn’t it?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yeah.”

Trixie looked confused for a moment, but then realization dawned. “Oh. Icon.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” Nova muttered. “I’m over her. Haven’t even thought about her in months – before today, of course. But this holiday has a way of bringing back things you never wanted brought back in the first place.”

“Like the time you and Trixie went out?” Discord said dismissively, instead fixated on a spaceship-in-a-bottle he was making.

Nova looked to Trixie. “We did that once. Then we agreed, mutually, never again.”

“The details will remain forever sealed away within our minds, never spoken to another soul in existence,” Trixie decreed.

Flutterfree nodded. “I see.”

“Okay, now I’m curious,” Discord said, putting the ship in a bottle down and generating a magnifying glass to examine Nova with. “Any noodle incident that the parties agree never to discuss is definitely worth my time.”

“Discord, they had a private falling out of some kind or other, don’t prod.”

“…Fine…”

“You know sometimes you two sound like an old married couple,” Trixie said, finally taking a sip from her purple potion.

Discord and Flutterfree blinked – then both of them started laughing at how absurd they found the implication. Then they started laughing at the blue fire coming out of Trixie’s ears from the potion.

Trixie felt the fire. “Huh. Strange.”

“What an effective conversation derailer,” Nova commented, taking her own drink and getting fire just like Trixie. “Tastes like ice mixed with cranberries.”

Flutterfree forced herself to stop laughing and down a bit of the drink, gaining her own flame. “Sorry for laughing at you Trixie, it’s just that so doesn’t describe us it’s just… funny.”

“I get it. I’m the butt of the joke today.” Trixie rolled her eyes. “The Great and Powerful Trixie reduced to a body part not mentioned in polite company.”

“Good thing we’re not polite company!” Discord cheered.

“Discord don’t you dare summon another storm of butts, we’re in public.” Flutterfree said, grabbing his hand with Lolo.

Trixie turned to Nova. “I’m telling you, the way they act is uncanny.”

“Some people have odd relationships,” Nova commented.

Discord nodded. “Oh yes. Flutterfree and I decided long ago that the whole romance thing wasn’t for the two of us, and just kept progressing down the much more impressive friendship track. Imagine for illustration, if you will, a red bouncy ball and a dog…”

“No,” Trixie said.

“…What?”

“Trixie refuses to imagine.”

Discord summoned a dog with a red ball in its mouth on top of her.

Flutterfree blinked. “…What was this supposed to illustrate, again?”

“I don’t know,” Discord muttered, folding his arms. “What I do know is that Trixie ruined it.”

Trixie made the dog disappear and bowed, sticking the ball in her hat. “Trixie thanks you for being such a participatory audience.”

“You know the word participatory?” Flutterfree asked.

“I’m not sure it means what she thinks it means,” Nova commented.

“Shut up.”

“We can talk about your love life instead!” Discord decreed.

Nova groaned. “Really Discord? Nobody wants to talk abou-”

Trixie grinned, cutting Nova off. “I’ve gone through two stallions and a mare in the last two months.”

Flutterfree shook her head. “Trixie, don’t you think that’s a little… unhealthy?”

“It’s how Trixie manages herself. Plus, it’s not like I’m doing anything stupid.”

“Debatable,” Discord muttered.

“I don’t mean physical health, I mean mental,” Flutterfree clarified. “Going through partners that fast…”

“It’s. How. Trixie. Manages. Herself.”

“It’s a lost cause, Flutterfree,” Nova said, taking another drink – ignoring the fire coming out of her ears. “I’ve tried to have this conversation with her as well. Nothing changes.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “I never admit defeat.”

Trixie smirked, taking an apple out of her hat and biting it obnoxiously. “Bring it.”

Flutterfree’s mouth began to water. “Trixie…”

“Trixie has an infinite supply of apples, effectively,” Trixie chuckled. “Trixie can make you hunger for their flesh endlessly.”

Flutterfree twitched. “You monster.”

“Trixie knows! Isn’t it great?”

“Discord, apple blaster.”

“Right on it!” Discord announced, summoning a dozen apples into Trixie’s face at high velocity. As a follow-up he hit her with an apple pie. Then he gave Flutterfree an extra pie just so she didn’t continue to suffer from her blood-apple hunger. She dove in with a ravenous appetite, spewing pie crust everywhere.

“Har-de-har,” Trixie muttered, wiping the pie from her face. “So, Nova, what about you?”

“Hrm?”

“You and romance.”

“Oh… I really don’t know.”

Flutterfree used Lolo to clean her face. “Are you sure that’s true Nova?”

“Beyond ‘I want someone’ I don’t really have anything.”

“Your answer has changed,” Flutterfree noted. “Last time we had this conversation you didn’t think you wanted anyone.”

“Yeah, well… I guess ponies do change.”

Flutterfree nodded. “It’s okay. Why not start dating?”

“I dunno. I’d prefer to be with someone I already know, to be honest. Just “HEY LET’S DATE!” is Trixie’s thing, not mine.”

“It is a proud way to conduct oneself,” Trixie asserted.

Flutterfree furrowed her brow. “Well… I’m not interested and neither’s Pinkie.”

“Not interested in either of you, either. We’re like sisters.” Nova smiled warmly.

Flutterfree smiled back. “Aw…”

“I’m going to die from diabetes,” Discord muttered.

“Trixie’s next trick will be the revival of a chaos spirit.”

Discord rolled his eyes.

Flutterfree turned back to Nova. “You know other people than the four of us on the team. I know Trixie isn’t an option, but you have other friends.”

“Maud and Renee are married, Eve’s Eve, Spike’s Spike, Thorax is basically married to his hive, you know.”

“Sunburst?”

Nova blinked. “Ah… Sunburst... Er…”

“She’s blushing,” Trixie decreed. “We have a winner!”

“But he’s busy!” Nova blurted. “Sunburst is on Sunny’s Survey team! They spend multiple days out exploring worlds. He probably doesn’t have time, not to mention he’s probably more invested in his work than he would be in me and – why are you all looking at me like that!?”

Flutterfree and Discord exchanged glances. “It really is odd how ponies can be so ignorant of themselves,” Flutterfree observed.

Discord snorted. “You’re just noticing this now?”

“It never ceases to amaze me.”

“What are you two talking about!?” Nova blurted.

“You like him,” Trixie explained.

“It’s not just that,” Flutterfree said. “We can also see a lot of emotions that have been building up under the surface over the years.” She smiled softly. “…I think you should call him and ask.”

“OH NONO NONONONONONONO!” Nova blurted. “That would be…”

“If he says no he says no,” Discord said. “And that’ll actually give you some closure for this inner complex you’ve been avoiding for… decades?”

“Decades,” Flutterfree agreed.

“B-bu-“

“It’s no use,” Trixie said with an exaggerated moan of pain. “You can’t fight the logic!”

Nova twitched. “…Gah, fine. I’ll call him and ask. He’s going to say no and then we’ll all forget about it.” Nova pulled out her phone and dialed his number with determination.

“HEY SUNBURST!”

“Nova? Hi! I haven’t heard from you in a while! What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing really, just talking to some friends and you came up in conversation. Thought I’d call you cause, you know, we’re friends.”

“…Riiiiight.”

“Aaaaanyway, I had this… Silly thought that, I dunno, we should go out and do something, maybe?”

“Oh, like a session of magic spellcasting?”

“We could do that, and that sounds like a great idea – but if you wanted we could also go to dinner and a movie. But the spellcasting sounds good too, just like old times, hahaha. Probably should do that, because I know you like spells, I like spells, everyone likes spells. Magic is amazing, we should totally bond over it. Or dragon pit – dragon pit is amazing. I came up with a kite mod for it, you know? Yeah. …Right.”

“…Did you ask me out in the middle of that rant there?”

Nova’s expression forced itself into a combination of fear, anxiety, and holding one’s breath. The other three tried not to laugh. “Yes.”

“Well, I accept! I’ll be back in Merodi Universalis proper t-tonight, if that’ll work.”

“It’ll work fine!”

“Where should we go?”

“Eheeheheh… I hear there’s a great Earth Ottoman restaurant in the Hub! Oh, movie first though, don’t want to feel rushed do we?”

“Of c-course not!”

“See you then! Call me when you’re back!”

“R-right!”

Nova hung up.

“Told you so,” Trixie said.

Nova stared into the distance. She didn’t say anything.

Flutterfree walked around the table over to her and put a wing around her. “You both are really good friends. I’m sure it’ll go well.”

“But what if it doesn’t?!”

“Then you’ll sign a document demanding never to speak of it again,” Trixie said, taking another drink of her potion.

“…That’s a surprisingly good point, Trixie.”

“It’s the only kind of point I know how to make.”

“Bullshit.”

Trixie laughed. “Glad you noticed.”

“Oh, are we going to give Nova a decidedly absurd makeover?” Discord asked. “I’ve got some chaos-enchanted garments sure to dazzle the crowd!”

“I’ll just go as myself,” Nova said. “Because… Yeah.” She shook her head. “Celestia, I hate being flustered.”

“It’s completely natural,” Flutterfree said.

“And a lot of natural things are deserving of hate,” Nova responded. “Just ask Corona about death sometime.”

“I have…” Flutterfree said, eyes glazing over.

Discord chuckled. “Quite the conversation.” He took a drink of his potion. “This is absolutely delicious.”

“Seskii is a wizard,” Flutterfree added.

“She’s secretly a Pinkie in disguise,” Trixie theorized.

“No I’m not!” Seskii called over.

“Oh yeah?” Trixie shouted back. “You’re Aware aren’t you!?”

“Do I look like I’m good at parties!?”

“Maybe!?”

“Well I don’t do them! I sell potions! And… Well just about everything else, but mostly potions! I love potions. If I was a pony my cutie mark would be a potion with an interrobang in it!”

“Mine would be my face,” Discord decreed.

“It’s a tornado,” Trixie muttered. “Have you even watched our cartoon? When you face off against Tirek, you have a tornado.”

“Psh, false advertising.”

“It’s right about literally everything else!”

“Can you be sure about that? What about all the animation errors? Duplicate ponies? Those aren’t things!”

Nova raised a hoof. “They are in other worlds.”

“Why’d you have to ruin my point?”

“Because I’m going to enjoy myself a little bit before nerves take over and turn me into an emotional wreck, that’s what.”

Flutterfree shook her head and chuckled. “Nova, everything will be fine.”

“Yes. I know that. But the brain has issues telling the heart what to do. It’s quite fun.”

Trixie smirked. “The best kind of fun.”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Seskii, something stronger! But not something that’ll keep me drunk until tonight.”

“COMING RIGHT UP!” Seskii called.

“Why did I even walk up to the counter the first time?”

“Because I asked you to,” Discord said.

Nova blinked – then started to chuckle. “Of course you would.”

~~~

“I think I’ve figured out the word for how this is going,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

“What?” Allure grunted, currently hiding under an overly large sun hat.

“Swimmingly.”

“We were off to such a great start, too!” Bot declared.

(“Hey there,” Allure said, walking up to the blue stallion. “How are y-”

“GET AWAY FROM MY BLUEBERRY MINT!” one of the Pinkies yelled, grabbing Allure by the throat. “HE’S MINE!”)

“Only if you don’t count the actual start,” Allure muttered.

“You were smiling! Smiling is starting out good!”

“And then I was choking.” She rubbed her throat. “That still hurts…”

Squeaky shook her head. “Well, I wouldn’t say the start was indicative of everything else that happened…”

(The stallion looked at her. “I’m married, go away.”)

(“BRO, IS THIS FILLY BOTHERING YOU?”

“YEAH, BRO.”

“GET YOUR HORN AWAY FROM BRO, FILLY.”)

(“I’m sorry, I’m in a committed relationship with the AI contained in my necklace.”)

(“Well hey there~!” a particularly handsome stallion said to Allure. “I bet y-”

“RIVET!” a hag of a mare shouted. “STOP OGGLING OVER THE YOUNG’NS.”

Rivet shot Allure a ‘help me’ look. Allure ran away, deciding not to get involved.)

Allure fixed Squeaky with a look. “Really. There’s no pattern. Not at all. Every interaction was unique in its own way. It wasn’t like they all came here with their partners!”

“In hindsight that should have been obvious,” Thrackerzod muttered. “Oh wait, it was.”

“Not all of my targets were inaccurate,” Bot pouted.

(Allure smiled. “Hey, I was wondering, I’m alone, you’re alone, think we could…?”

He laughed. “Oh wait, you’re serious? Let me laugh harder.” He laughed harder.)

(“And that’s why I’m looking all over the place for someone, anyone here to just give me a chance for a moment and so far you’re the only one who’s bothered to even listen an-”

“Allure, you’re pouring your heart out to a cactus,” Squeaky pointed out.

Allure looked to where a stallion had been just a moment ago. “...That peeving little…”)

(“Hey, how ab-”

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”)

Allure raised an eyebrow at Bot. “…Technically correct.”

“The best kind of correct!”

“The worst kind.”

“Does not compute, therefore, I choose to ignore.”

Allure twitched. “O-kay then.”

“We’ve just got to keep trying,” Squeaky said. “Clearly, these are bad stomping grounds to find stable single people.”

“It’s like you all can’t see the sun in the sky,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

“Where to go though?” Allure asked. “We can’t just wait.”

“Can’t we?” Squeaky countered.

“I don’t want to,” Allure muttered.

“May I make a suggestion?” a nearby bush asked.

The four Sweeties looked at the bush.

“Hey Starbeat!” Bot chirped.

“Mhm, no, Starbeat definitely isn’t here, it is just I, a bush,” Starbeat said.

“Whatever you say, Starbush.”

“Starbeat, what are you doing here?” Allure asked.

“I told you I was a bush! Agh, fine. I’m here because Vriska and Hastur were all like ‘hey you should show up it’ll be grand’ and I was like ‘noooo’ and they were like ‘yessssss!’ and then I ended up here against my better judgment. They can be very convincing.”

“I bet. You had a suggestion?”

Starbeat paused for a moment. “Yeah. You’re going about this all wrong.”

Thrackerzod fixed Allure with an incredulous expression.

“I’ve gathered,” Allure muttered. “But how should I go about getting someone?”

“It’s best to go with somebody you already know somewhat well, but something tells me that doesn’t exactly go for you.”

“I live and breathe Sweetie Belle day in and day out. All my other friends are mares. …Wait, I suppose I used to be friends with Pip a long time ago…”

“Your Crusader Clients?”

“Like that wouldn’t be awkward. Though at this point I am a little desperate…”

Starbeat paused for a moment. “In that case, we’re going to have to make ka work for you.”

Allure cocked her head. “How so?”

“There are certain places that are more likely to be the scene of romantic encounters – trust me, I’ve studied these things.”

“Said the bush,” Bot observed.

Starbeat ignored her. “See, the problem with this place is not that it won’t have romantic encounters, but that it’s designed for those who already have romance to have even more. Elsewhere is more suited for finding instant-romance. Naturally you have to be on guard that it’s not just a ‘click-like’ scenario, but unlike me you actually have some power over that. Bars are usually filled with the lonely seekers, and on today especially people will be looking to drink their sorrows away.”

“Oh, I like that idea!” Allure said. “Go out for drinks!”

“There are other places. The park is a good one for chance encounters. Or a college – something about colleges just screams for love to bloom in one way or another, between students or otherwise.”

“Bar sounds more fun, no offense.”

“Regardless of what you do, you have to at least appear to be alone. Though your three wingponies could be invisible, easy.”

Thrackerzod sighed. “The things I do for you lot… Invisibility at the ready.”

“Great! Thanks Starbeat!” Allure cheered. “You’re the best!”

“T-thanks!”

“You have your bracelet disabled,” Squeaky observed.

“Stealth tactics. Speaking of, I need to move.” The bush vanished in a flash of magic.

Allure smirked. “All right girls – first stop, the bar!”

“You should stop talking to us after we’re invisible,” Squeaky said. “You don’t want to look crazy.”

“This article suggests crazy is the new attractive!” Bot chirped, reporting on her internal Internet search.

“The Internet is a pretzel knot of lies,” Squeaky countered.

Allure rolled her eyes. “What it should really say is ‘be yourself’. Which I have no problem with.”

“Famous last words,” Thrackerzod muttered.

“Ye of little faith,” Allure said with a smile. “TO THE BAR!”

~~~

Queen Toph of Lai and Lady Rarity’s team sat in the Throne Room, watching TV. Well, in the case of the Queen, listening to TV – all Toph could ‘see’ was a large flat piece of paper pulled down from the ceiling that caught the projector’s display for the rest of the throne room to see. But it was the news, so it wasn’t like she needed to see anything to understand what was going on.

A story about Mistress Luna’s work on the Binary world ended, transferring to coverage of the Festival of Love. Toph sighed, shutting off the projector.

Lady Rarity and the rest of the team looked to her, wondering why she had shut it off.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Toph said, folding her hands together. “I wonder what it would have been like.”

“What?” Lady Rarity asked.

“If I wasn’t here. If I stayed in the Elemental Nations – Elemental Four, I guess. According to my ‘show’ I would probably be working as chief as police and have a kid at this point. Apparently it wouldn’t have stuck forever, but at least I would have had something. Now here I am, Queen of a bunch of horses. I really shouldn’t take anyone to be king that isn’t from Lai, and let’s just say I’m not interested in anyone who is from Lai.”

“Queen Luna never had a king,” Olivia pointed out. “She just lived. Probably thought she was going to live forever.”

“We’ll all live forever if I have anything to say about it,” Corona said, curling her fingers into a determined fist.

“How is the ‘immortality project’ coming along?” Toph asked.

“As of yet I’m unable to mass produce any results. Which means I really shouldn’t start giving it to people. The definition of unfairness.”

“So, in other words, not really.”

“I’m the only one working on it,” Corona admitted. “Turning it into a big production would be… Lieshy, give me a metaphor.”

“Dropping a chunk of meat into piranha infested waters,” Lieshy deadpanned.

“Yes. Like that.”

Toph sat back. “Well, at least you won't have to worry. Rarity, you’re next in line after me to run this place for the moment. Not going to let you find out last minute if somebody drains my life in an instant.”

Lady Rarity bowed. “I would be honored.”

“Still…” Toph put a hand to her chin. “I wonder…”

“Do you want me to track down the guy you married in fiction?” Olivia asked. “I could do that.”

“I’m not even sure if we were actually married in that world,” Toph said with a shrug. “Also… No, it probably wouldn’t be good for me.”

Olivia shrugged. “I’d want to know.”

“The rest of us do know,” Corona pointed out. “Toph, you’re not surrounded by alternates of yourself.”

“There’s been exactly one other me,” Toph confirmed.

“Yeah. Meanwhile I’ve seen hundreds of myself. Most of them are single, but there are a few who aren’t. Twilight and Flash seem to be the popular choices.”

“Still can’t imagine Eve and you.” Lieshy said, shaking her head. “But it seems so common…”

Corona shrugged. “Neither of us is interested. It comes with being a pony.”

Olivia blinked. “Wait, it does?”

“I figured you of all people would have noticed,” Corona said with a smirk. “Though, I guess even we don’t really notice most of the time.”

Lady Rarity blinked. “Notice what?”

“The singles,” Lieshy answered.

“…What?”

Corona smirked. With a flash of magic she de-summoned her clothes and transformed into a unicorn. “Ponies have significantly less drive to couple up than humans do. Go look at any Equis Vitis city that isn’t Ponyville or Canterlot – you’ll see a lot of ponies. A lot of single ponies. So many that they’re the majority. Sometimes the vast majority.”

“…I can’t believe I never noticed this,” Lady Rarity muttered.

“It’s not something you’d think about much,” Corona admitted. “I only did because the moment I came to Earth Vitis everyone was obsessed with hooking up and making out. It was more than a little off-putting – plus the freshly-teenaged human body decided to throw hormones at me like a wall. Humans like romance a lot. For some it’s all they think about.” She leaned back. “Of course, there are worlds that are contrary to the rule – Equis Regarden and Equis Fallout are a bit notorious for having obsessed maniacs. Same for a few human worlds where coupling up isn’t really a fixation.”

“How do we keep the population up?” Lady Rarity wondered. “If so many of us aren’t getting together…”

“How many sisters does Pinkie have?” Corona asked.

“Three, how do-”

“Name ponies you know that don’t have siblings besides yourself.”

Lady Rarity blinked. “…Rainbow Dash. You.”

Corona smirked. “Had to think there. Also I do have siblings, and an extended family, we just don’t talk.”

“Really?”

“I made up with them a while back, but nobody really had the drive to keep up the relationship. A bit sad, but nothing to dwell on. My mother has made a point of letting me know she’s proud of me, so that’s something.”

Olivia nodded. “So, Corona, as a human-pony, what do you feel?”

“Indifferent,” Corona said. “Middle ground, I guess you could say? As a unicorn I had no drive whatsoever to find anyone, and as a human I fought to suppress it. Now I guess I just don’t care. I switch between unicorn and human so much…” she shrugged. “Last date I went on was four months ago. I’ve already forgotten the guy’s name.”

“Ouch,” Toph said.

“You can say that again.”

“Ouch,” Lieshy droned.

“Not you.”

Lady Rarity rolled her eyes. “Well all this talk of romance and couples is fascinating and all, but it is a bit moot. None of us are really on the market.”

Olivia raised a hand.

“Bringing in men from Earth Stand every few weeks ‘for fun and profit’ does not count.”

Olivia lowered her hand. “I’m still pretty sure we’re available.”

“Toph is queen, Corona doesn’t care, I have a vow of chastity because of my cannibalistic nature, you would never settle on anyone ever, and Lieshy is Lieshy.”

Lieshy rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes I am. Lieshy. Indeed.”

Corona glanced at her. “…Why don’t you have anyone, or even try, anyway?”

“Pony. Just don’t care. We discussed this. Remember? Grandfather clock chiming.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Hrm…”

“I know that look in your eyes, don’t you e-”

Corona teleported, holding a hoof to Lieshy’s forehead. One second later, Corona jumped back and chuckled.

“INVASION OF PRIVACY!”

“She had a boyfriend,” Corona said, sitting down with a smirk.

Olivia blinked. “I didn’t know this. I didn’t know this. I know the secrets of everyone here! How did you…?”

“The Snack.”

“…Woah, that’s clever,” Olivia said.

“I can’t even begin to imagine…” Lady Rarity said, hoof to her face.

“You need to watch The Snack, it’ll all make sense,” Corona said. “It’s one of those things you really can’t explain. Ever. At all.”

“Lovely.”

Toph turned to Lieshy. “Do you think we can get a name of the handsome stallion?”

“His name is Clockwork and he is perhaps the furthest from conventionally attractive a pony could be.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “That wasn’t a reason to hide him from us.”

“That’s no-”

Corona raised her hoof. “May I remind you where I was just a few seconds ago?”

“…Fine.”

“Good. Now that we’ve established we like Clockwork even if he’s ugly w-”

“I dunno, if he looks like a turd I might have to stage an intervention,” Olivia interrupted.

Corona fixed her with a look. “As I was saying, you have nothing but our support and good wishes.”

“And my condolences,” Olivia said.

Corona nodded to Lieshy. Lieshy punched Olivia with Limelight. “OKAY OKAY, I’M SORRY! …Waitaminute.”

“No take backs,” Lieshy decreed.

“You really don’t want to talk about him, do you?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Ding ding ding.”

“That’s fine,” Corona said. “But we will have to meet him eventually.”

“Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“Lieshy…”

“Fiiiiine,” Lieshy moaned. “I’ll bring him by next week or something.”

“Next week for sure?”

“The top light.”

“Lieshy, straight.”

“…Yes,” Lieshy hissed through her teeth.

“Good. That’s all we need.” Corona leaned back. “I won’t spill any other beans.”

Lady Rarity shivered. “Beans…”

“Mierda!” Olivia shouted. “You just made me think of-”

“We all know what world everyone just thought of,” Toph said, trying her hardest not to flinch at the memories of… the beans. And the things made of beans that were never to be spoken of.

“NEW TOPIC!” Corona decreed, blushing furiously. “What about… lunch?”

“Yes. Lunch. Please,” Lieshy whimpered. “Food is good.”

~~~

Allure walked into a bar right outside of the Pinkie Emporium – the Last Chance. There was a sign that said if you don’t come in here now, the Pink Ones will get you.

“Too late,” Allure chuckled, looking to the other three. Then she remembered they were invisible and weren’t supposed to talk. She would hear a telepathic message if she needed to be told anything.

The bar itself was rather large and bright – a nice contrast to the dark and brooding establishments elsewhere in the multiverse that seemed so popular for no discernable reason. The place was about two-thirds full of people who didn’t look like they were having a good time – a significant number were drowning their sorrows away with drink.

Allure sighed. Well, at least I belong here. She walked up to the main counter, taking a seat on one of the stools. “Something that isn’t all that heavy. I need my wits about me.”

“Y’sure about that hon?” a buxom human asked. “We’ve got the Drowner on tap for ya, and I think ya need it.”

“…Look at me. I’m tiny. I don’t usually drink. So something light will probably still make me tipsy. Mmk?”

“Hon, y’re far too responsible to be in this place with this crowd.”

Allure rolled her eyes.

“I’ll get ya a fizz-pop though.”

“Sure. Does it come in cherry?”

“Lucky you, it does!”

“Do that then,” Allure said, smirking. She levitated the drink in her magic and turned away from the bar. She could just sit here and wait for someone to walk up, throw herself to ka as it were. Probably what Starbeat wanted, if she was being honest. But Allure didn’t want to just sit, wait, and feel sorry for herself. She was going to put herself out there. Who cared if she never did it? She’d had plenty of practice earlier today. The cute eyes surely had an effect in this arena as well…

She spotted her first target. Stallion. Average size. Not busy crying into his drink. Didn’t have absurd muscles indicative of a ‘jock’ type. Worth a shot.

She took a sip of her drink and scooted two stools over. She smirked and looked at him. “Come here often?”

“Go away,” he muttered.

Allure raised her hooves in surrender. “All right, sorry if I thought it was okay to come over here and say hi.” She turned around – he didn’t call after her. Time for another target. She moved to the other side of the bar.

She leaned on one of her hooves and put on a coy smirk. “Hey there.”

“Hey,” the stallion said in the most monotone voice imaginable, staring deeply into his drink.

“I bet you do a lot of deep thinking, huh?”

“The rim of my glass has a fly on it.”

“…Right.”

“It reminds me of my cat, Flu. Flu’s a good cat.”

“Oh? My sister has a cat, she calls i-”

“Flu. Mue. Khu. Dhu. Lue. Yue. Nou. Wou. My cats.”

“You have a lot of cats.”

“I do have a lot of cats. They are my everything.” He began to sniff.

“I bet they are,” Allure said with a smile. “Is that what your cutie mark is for?” She gestured toward his paw-print cutie mark.

“Yeah… Always cats, all the time… Everything… But not today, today I’m sitting in a bar, away from them…”

“Why are you?”

“I don’t know. I was mad at them. But now I’m not. I don’t know if they’ll forgive me…”

“I’m sure they will! They’re part of you! I’m sure of it! Just look at that flank of yours – you are a cat owner. And those cats love you.”

“Yeah… Yeah!” The stallion stood up. “You’re right! I shouldn’t be avoiding them – I should go to them!”

“Wait a seco-”

“Thank you for showing me what I need to do! I’M COMING FLU!” He ran out of the bar.

Allure blinked. Then she glared at her cutie mark. “Traitor.”

Her cutie mark made no response.

Rule of Three, a voice entered her head. Allure nodded – of course. Then again, trying to invoke a rule of ka was likely to get an exception…

Whatever. She sat down at a round table where only one pegasus stallion was sitting, staring into the distance. He was orange. The brightest orange Allure had seen on a pony that she could remember.

“You look like a piece of fruit,” Allure observed, not waiting for an invitation to sit down.

He didn’t make eye contact. “What if I am a piece of fruit?”

“Then your time on this world is short, because I’m a fruit vampire who’ll suck you dry.”

The stallion raised an eyebrow, making eye contact with her. “You know the art of the pick-up line is supposed to be overly obvious and significantly more crass.”

“Well, I’m either new at this or can’t bring myself to say any of the dozens of other things swirling around my head.” She leaned in, turning on the cute eyes and her suggestive smirk. “Take your pick.”

“I’ll choose neither,” he said, turning to face her directly. “I choose to believe that was part of your plan.”

“Oh no, he’s found me out. Next he’ll find out that I’m a supervillain – drat!”

He rolled his eyes. “And what part do I have to play in your ‘not evil’ plans?”

“I must take you out in order to set off a chain of events that leads to me ruling Merodi Universalis with an iron hoof! Muahaha!”

“I can’t tell if you’re actually trying this hard or legitimately just think about being a supervillain regularly.”

“Get to know me a bit better and you might find out.”

He smiled. “In that case, I accept. I am Tangelo. HEY DANA, GET US AN ORDER OF HOT WINGS WOULD YA?”

“Right away, Tanny,” Dana called.

Allure introduced herself next. “Allure. A Sweetie, of course.”

“Mmm… That name sounds familiar.”

She smirked. “Want to play guess the Sweetie? I’m sure you’ll get me pinned. Definitely.”

“I’ll just keep my thoughts to myself.”

“What is this, double mystery day?” She rolled her eyes, taking another sip of her drink.

“Perhaps. It makes things interesting. This place is usually such a dreadful bore.”

Allure raised an eyebrow. “Not one of the mopers I take it?”

Tangelo shook his head as the hot wings arrived – he had to use a fork, being a pegasus. “No. I come here as a social experiment regularly. To see who I find.”

“I’m going to take that as a roundabout compliment along the lines of ‘you’re interesting enough to talk to’.”

“More or less.”

She munched on the hot wing – meat was so weird but tasted so good. “So what made me pass inspection?”

“You came in here with a purpose and a plan when the vast majority of people are floundering fish who haven’t the foggiest idea what they want to do here besides drink, stop thinking, and maybe get lucky. At first I thought you may have been a shark hunting for easy prey, but as it turns out you were rather inexperienced in the flirting scene.” He finished a wing “Paradoxically, you weren’t all that nervous – annoyance was your primary emotion. Telling of a determined individual who woke up this morning and decided she wanted to find someone and hasn’t had any luck.”

Allure smirked. “Now I wish I had been paying attention to you this whole time, I bet I could have come up with a similar paragraph.”

“An artifact of the way we have introduced each other.” He must have really liked wings, because he was already on another one, forcing Allure to hurry up her own eating to keep up. “You’ve impressed me so far with your reactions.”

“Backhanded way of saying I’m not an idiot.”

“So few people aren’t idiots these days,” Tangelo pointed out. “Point out one other person in this establishment who has a smidge of intelligence about them.”

“Don’t even need to look.”

“I’m surprised you were even considering those who clearly weren’t on your level of thought.”

“Oh, a bit arrogant are we?” Allure chuckled. “There’s more to life than just intelligence. I may have been somewhat desperate – but if I refused them just because they didn’t know how to think, well, I’d be a little cruel then wouldn’t I?”

“You thought the cat-stallion was thinking.”

“Honest mistake,” Allure admitted. “Really, I’m being honest here, that was a mistake.”

Tangelo raised an eyebrow.

“Too cheesy?”

“Too cheesy.”

“I did come here with the hopes of taking advantage of ka, so perhaps a cheesy conversation is just what the doctor ordered.” She finished a wing.

Tangelo reached for another delectable piece of slightly spicy meat, only to find there was none. He stood up. “It appears we’re out of wings, Allure.”

Allure nodded. “Yeah. Want to order something else? I’m hungry.”

“How about we get out of here?” he asked, strolling around the table until he was behind her. “I think we’ve gotten off to a good start, could be interesting to see where this goes.”

Allure beamed. “Really!? Oh yes!” She stood up. “Where should we go? There’s a bunch of fancy places across the street I can get us into – trust me, I can – and I think they’re showing Crimson Evening in the theater still…”

“Ah, but we’ve already passed the initial get together, bonding over wings,” Tangelo said, placing a hoof on the back of her neck. Allure tensed for a moment – but quickly relaxed. After all, that was supposed to be romantic, right?

“I… guess so? What then, just go hang out in a park?”

“You are a little naive, but that’s not something I’ll hold against you. I can see past it into your mind – a wondrous thing I want to get closer to.”

Allure grinned. “Well we could just go talk. That’d be good, right?”

“Walk and talk. Back to my place, of course.”

“Sure th-” Allure processed what he’d just said. “…Your place.”

He looked at her, slightly confused. “Yes…?”

“…That’s a little fast.”

Tangelo smirked. “It’s how it’s done, Allure.” He gestured to the front doors of the bar. “A pony walks in there, sad, despondent, or lonely. They find someone here who either feels the same or is just looking for some fun. They pair up and leave to get to the real meat of the encounter.”

“And then…?”

Tangelo shrugged. “Then they see where they are after that.” He picked up her front hoof. “I assure you, our conversation will go long into the night, and possibly the next day.”

“Can’t we just like, I don’t know, go on an actual date first? I hardly know you!”

Tangelo sighed. “You’re still holding onto a fantasy, I can see it. I find it curious…”

“What’s curious about it? I’m not going back to anyone’s house unless we’re really along! And I mean really!”

“And now you’re just in denial. You came to a bar, Allure, what did you expect?”

“Well I didn’t expect it to be…” Exactly how they’re portrayed on TV. Frick. I walked right into this. A moron is Allure.

“I implore you,” Tangelo said, lowering his head. “Let me take you and teach you the way it is really done.”

Allure removed her hoof from his grasp. “…No thanks.”

Tangelo looked mildly hurt – but he recovered quickly. “…Your loss, Allure. Your loss.”

“You’re one of the sharks,” Allure muttered. “Sitting here, waiting for prey.”

“I wait for one I think will suit me.”

“Happens more often than you think, doesn’t it?”

“Precisely,” Tangelo said, sitting back down. He stopped looking at her. “Now please, get your judgmental plot out of here. You’re ruining the atmosphere.”

Allure glared at him – but did as he suggested. She stormed out of the bar into the streets of Ponyville. The sun was setting.

“…This definitely wasn’t what Ponyville used to be, I know that,” Allure muttered. “It wasn’t like this.”

Thrackerzod, Bot, and Squeaky appeared. “Things change,” Squeaky said.

“Hard not to think of it as a corruption of our culture. Of our way. Of love. What even was that!?”

“It wasn’t what you wanted. It’s what some people want, though,” Squeaky admitted.

“Well, excuse me if I don’t feel like being all tolerant right now!” She put her hooves to her head. “How in Celestia’s name are you supposed to navigate this mess!?”

The three Sweeties didn’t have an answer for her.

Allure sighed, choosing a random direction and walking away.

“Allure!” Bot called.

“I need some time to think,” Allure said. “You can follow. I’d like you to be there. But… Don’t talk, okay?”

The three of them glanced between each other and nodded. They followed her into the night.

~~~

Vriska and Hastur sat on top of a random building in Ponyville – some sort of office. They couldn’t see much of the city from their vantage point since the building wasn’t very tall. They could make out the Pinkie Emporium, the S-Stars theater, and the trees of the nearest park.

They had left the Festival of Love a while ago, growing bored with the rides the moment they completed the ‘tunnel of love and corndogs.’ Since then, they had just been watching everything from above, both inside and outside of the Festival.

“So many people spending their lives together,” Hastur observed thoughtfully.

“It is normally how us meatspacers do things,” Vriska said. “Meanwhile in your world everything is essentially random on that count.”

“That’s no-”

Vriska held up a hand. “Heard it all before, Yellow. No matter how many times you describe ‘the copulation of the eldritch in the eyes of the beholder’, it still sounds random.”

“But is it really much different here?” Hastur asked. “Meetings are largely by chance, and furthering relationships based on a bunch of seemingly random emotional variables. You just have no higher force bringing you together.”

“…Bah, I want to argue for the purity and choice in love, look what you’ve done to me,” she laughed. “Let’s just skip ahead to the part where we both agree the other is partially right, but I come back with a ‘we don’t have to deal with seventeen time dimensions’ and make your point moot.”

“The eldritch nature of my reality is the largest of all differences so I must concede your final point.”

Vriska kicked her legs in the air, looking down at the streets. “Hey, Hastur. In the Embodiment the idea of coupling, when it does apply, is only seen as temporary.”

“Of course. Given the nature of time and space it is unlikely it could be any other way.”

“Why do you stick around with me then? And no sappy answer, I’ve already heard that one from you.”

Hastur looked into the distance. “At first, it was merely an experiment. I saw Thrackerzod experiencing the ways of mortals and changing because of it. I always had a soft spot for the standard realms and the way they did things, and with Thrackerzod’s change, I decided to see what it could give me. As it turns out, quite a lot more than I was expecting.”

“I’m not exactly a mortal, you know.”

“I figured it would be easier to relate to one not limited to a finite lifespan, similar to myself. We’ve been together for many years of your time, but it still feels like it’s just begun doesn’t it?”

Vriska pursed her lips. “It feels like a bit more than that to me.”

“Oh, I apologize – I made your perception of time seem trivial.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Stop it with the fucking apologies. It’s all cool. I was just saying my age is counted in the centuries, yours is counted in bizarre eldritch time that only approximates to millions of years.”

Hastur nodded, looking into the Pinkie Emporium. “A thought has occurred to me, relating to the time we’ve been together.”

“Oh?”

“I know enough of the culture here to understand this isn’t exactly something you discuss openly but it is something I need clarification on in relation to you.”

Vriska smirked. “There may be a lot you don’t know about me, but those aren’t secrets I particularly care about. Ask away!”

“After enough time has passed in a relationship, the man is supposed to, eventually, propose.”

Vriska leaned back, deciding it would be better to be laying down rather than teetering off the edge of a building.

“Vriska?”

“Shut up, thinking,” Vriska said, thoughts and emotions deciding they needed to ruin her cool exterior for once. “…Kanaya did go through with that… If you actually proposed I think I’d say yes. But I also don’t think it’d really work.”

“What makes you say that?”

Vriska sat up. “Neither of our cultures has an equivalent. Trolls were just together whenever it was convenient in any of the four quadrants in all timelines. It was usually just a biological necessity with a relationship thrown in, and a relationship that was intended to be changeable over time. I mean, trolls were rarely allowed to stay with each other for a significant amount of time on Alternia. Not sure how it was on Beforus.”

She turned to Hastur. “And then there’s you, mister time-abyss multiple-dimensional craziness. You don’t have lasting relationships, because your time makes that sort of thing a paradox.”

“And yet, here we are.”

“And this is how we should stay,” Vriska said. “We’re both immortals, Hastur. Subject to immense change. If we really think about it, it’s near impossible for either of us to die. So death would never do us part under any circumstances. And let’s be honest, I’m a fucking bitch who’ll end up ruining something, or at least getting really jealous over your ‘othertime lovers’.”

Hastur nodded slowly. “Thank you for being frank.”

“You’re disappointed?”

“Perhaps… I am unsure.”

“Hastur, we’re not humans, we’re not ponies. Humans may breed like rabbits and basically run the multiverse, but that doesn’t mean the way they perceive things is right. Their ‘high and mighty, our way is perfect’ routine is stupid.” She stood up and grabbed him by something that approximated his collar, grinning. “Everyone has the right to decide their own way. Fuck conventions.”

“Fuck conventions.” Hastur echoed.

“There’s the yellow boy I know and love!” She slung an arm around his neck and grinned. “Let’s get out of here.”

“As you wi- well that’s interesting.”

Nova and Sunburst had just walked out of the theater, laughing very loudly. It was a little hard to hear exactly what they were saying, but it was clear they were having a great time.

Then Nova moved in for the kiss. It landed perfectly. Sunburst didn’t recoil.

“About fucking time,” Vriska commented from their vantage point. “That girl has had so much stress inside her since the Icon incident. It’ll be good to get it out.”

“You think it will last?”

“I don’t know. But at least it’ll be real. Wonder how long it’ll be before she bothers to tell us.”

“Knowing Pinkie, yesterday.”

Vriska chuckled. “Oh yes. By the way, Yellow, would you like to see a movie? I’m sure there’s a sufficiently fucked up production to keep your attention.”

“Or we could go to a showing of G’th’ast’ranaaaaah.”

“Will my mind explode?”

“Probably.”

“That sounds so fucking romantic. TAKE ME AWAY, HASTUR! Sweep me off my feet and eviscerate my skull.”

“Gladly, Thief of Light.” He used his eldritch magic to sweep her off her feet, prompting an uncharacteristic giggle. A moment later, they vanished from the universe.

~~~

Allure walked onward, eventually arriving in one of Ponyville’s parks. It was a simple park – green grass, native Equis Vitis trees, and only a simple cobblestone path. The sun had already set, so a few owls were out and hooting.

She knew Thrackerzod, Squeaky, and Bot were behind her – mostly due to Bot’s servo motors whirring whenever she moved her legs – but they had kept their promise and not said a word the entire time.

She had such good friends. Willing to help her even if they thought she was being crazy… Always by her side…

She sat down in the middle of the cobblestone path and started crying. The three others didn’t say anything – they just pulled her into a hug.

“I love you all,” Allure blurted through her tears. “Who needs a special somepony…?”

“It’s not a need,” Squeaky answered. “It’s a want.”

“But that’s just selfish! Look at me, I’ve been hunting today! I don’t even know what I was expecting! It’s all me, me, me!”

Squeaky held her close. “You didn’t want to hurt or take advantage of anyone. You were pure.”

Allure looked at the ground, heaving. “Was I? Can it ever be pure? I just… I wanted what everyone else had… But not everyone else has that! What was I thinking that I could just waltz in and take it? I… I…” She sniffed. “He was right. I was asking for it.”

“You got unlucky,” Thrackerzod said.

“…Maybe I got lucky,” Allure said, looking at her hooves. “I got someone to scare me. Had they been slower… I could have gotten trapped. I was desperate…” the tears began to well up again. “Why does this have to be such a mess!?”

“Scans suggest it’s just part of life,” Bot suggested with a sad beep.

Allure shook her head. “Yeah… Life… A complicated mess that’s even more complicated for us…” She looked into the distance.

“But we’re here.” Squeaky said with a smile. “And we can make it just a little simpler.”

Allure looked at the three of them – and laughed. “I’m an idiot.”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “Finally.”

“Not because of the reason you want, Thrackerzod – though yes we were being kinda stupid all day. I’ve already learned this lesson! Screw it, who needs a special somepony? I have you girls!” She pulled them all into a hug. “And all the other Sweeties, and Applebloom, and Scootaloo, and all my friends. That’ll be enough. That should be more than enough.”

“YAY!” Bot declared.

“I may feel like I want someone in my life, but that’s just a want. Just a want. Not a need. Never a need. It shouldn’t control me.”

Squeaky smiled. “If that works for you.”

“It’s been working like that all this time! I just forgot for today!” She hit herself in the side of her head. “Allure.exe threw an exception.”

Bot found this hilarious and started laughing uncontrollably.

“I’m glad you’ve come to see the failings in mortal courtship rituals,” Thrackerzod said. “Perhaps now you will come to appreciate the rest of your practices as equally nonsensical.”

“Don’t count on it,” Allure said, wiping her eyes and smiling.

Bot looked at her, confused. “Allure, why are you sobbing and smiling at the same time?”

Allure blinked. “I’m not sobbing, it was just a litt-” She heard it. Actual sobbing coming from a nearby bush – sobbing that definitely wasn’t hers. She carefully approached the bush and peeled apart its branches with her magic.

There was a human girl of about four in there with pale skin, violet eyes, and white hair. She wore nothing on her body and had numerous scratches all over her, some that clearly weren’t from the bush. Far too large.

Allure put on a comforting smile, speaking in a hushed tone. “Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of there…” With her magic, she carefully peeled the branches of the bush away, releasing the girl within. She levitated the girl out slowly, setting her on the soft grass. She looked to Thrackerzod. “Make a dress for her.”

Thrackerzod nodded, turning away to make the garment out of the child’s sight.

Allure turned back to her. “Hey there,” she said, barely more than a whisper. “We’re going to get you fixed up, okay?”

The girl nodded slowly, the fear in her eyes slowly dying down.

“I’m Allure, what’s your name?”

The girl looked away, as if ashamed.

Allure shook her head. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.” Thrackerzod levitated a simple black dress over to Allure. Allure gave it to the girl.

The girl wasn’t sure what to make of the small dress. She held it in her hands, staring at it.

“…Do you want help?” Allure asked.

The girl nodded slowly.

Allure levitated the dress over the girl’s body, delicately moving her arms through the sleeves, careful not to move anything too fast as to startle her. The girl marveled at the fabric on her body.

She’s never worn anything before. Allure realized. She sighed. “We don’t have shoes for you right now… Do you want me to carry you with magic, or would you like to get on my back?”

The girl looked away for a few seconds. Allure gave her time to process - and she eventually turned back and shakily pointed at Allure’s back. Allure smiled, slowly levitating the girl and setting her down. “It’ll be a little bu-”

The girl grabbed hold of Allure’s mane like it was her lifeline, burying her face in Allure’s pink and purple curls. Allure’s thought process stopped working for a few seconds as she was overcome with a deep, primal urge to protect this child with everything she had.

“The hospital’s not far,” Allure told the others. “She doesn’t look to be hurt badly… We’ll walk.”

The Sweeties nodded.

Allure began to feel the girl’s tears seep through her mane. She struggled to keep any sort of composure. What had happened to this child?

~~~

Applejack and Jotaro were sitting on a bench while most the rest of the extended family partook in a gigantic bonfire to end the Festival of Love.

“Sometimes Ah wonder how they can all have so much energy.”

Jotaro’s only response to this was a very relaxed shrug.

“Ah’ve been doin’ stuff all day, how do they expect me to jump around a bonfire without passin’ out or breakin’ somethin’. ...Or fallin’ into the fire, there’s that too.”

“We are missing out on marshmallows.”

“Toasted marshmallows are a treat,” Applejack admitted, looking into the community fire, spotting Barley and Jona quickly having some father-daughter bonding time over an elaborately constructed s’more.

Applejack smiled. “Ah think we’ve hit the good life, huh Jotaro?”

Jotaro let a soft smirk come to his face. It was all the response needed.

“Help me out here. Ah’m tryin’ to figure out what to call you. How exactly are we related…?”

Jotaro knew this was going to get complicated.

“Let’s see. Helm is my son-in-law, so the rest of his siblings are the in-laws, or the siblings-in-law or somethin’. Paradigm’s with Shizuka, makin’ Shizuka my son-in-law’s sister-in-law. So Ah’m thinking daughter-in-law-in-law.”

“Yare yare daze…”

“Holly’s technically Shizuka’s sister, so she’s another daughter-in-law-in-law, sorta.”

“I think your words have stopped making sense.”

“And you are Holly’s son, so that makes you my… grand-nephew-in-law-in-law.”

“I think the translator is compensating for words that don’t exist,” Jotaro commented.

“Eh, probably, Ah don’t pretend to understand how that works. All Ah know is that I can call you a grand-nephew. Which is quite a hoot! You’re slightly older than Ah am!”

“The family is only going to grow,” Jotaro said, leaning back. “Josuke’s going to pick someone eventually. Jolyne’s really close. And then there’s Jordan and Joanne…”

“How are your little twins?”

“Cheerful as always. I’ve been watching them for signs of a Stand, but nothing has shown so far.” He looked into the fire. “They almost didn’t exist.”

“Now don’t go dwellin’ on that - you ain’t the Jotaro shown in those books.”

Jotaro nodded.

“Don’t hang up over what might have been, big guy. What matters is that you didn’t go down that road. Now you and Marina have a beautiful family that Ah’m glad to welcome to the Apple Family table at any time.”

Jotaro sat back. “You’re going to need a big table.”

“Ah’ve got a big farm and a knack for setting up family reunions.”

“Really?” he asked, incredulously.

“...That show only showed one of the reunions Ah set up and you know it.”

Jotaro folded his arms. “You’ll have to prove your skill to me.”

“Is that a challenge?”

“Yes.”

“Right then. Ah’m schedulin’ a family reunion. And everyone from the Apples to the Royals to the Joestars are comin’. Heck, get Iroh in on it as well, Corea’s godfather and all. Oh, and the Pies are distantly related, Ah’m sure Pinkie would love it.”

“Yare yare daze…”

“You’re a redundant one, you know that?”

Jotaro nodded, already anticipating a truly absurd family reunion. He may not have been much of a people person, but even he could appreciate a get-together of that magnitude. The family just kept growing and growing...

~~~

The girl had refused to leave Allure’s back, so Doctor Redheart had been forced to perform the examination with her holding onto Allure. Redheart was understanding – clearly the girl had been through a lot. Letting her hold onto her savior was the least she could do.

“Is she okay?” Allure asked.

“Her body has been through a lot,” Redheart said. “There’s more than just scratches – there’s evidence of deep cuts, probing, injections, and broken bones. At the moment though, everything about her is healthy beside an empty stomach. She’s even got stable magic levels.”

Bot dinged, producing a cookie from one of her slots. She handed it to the girl, who devoured it ravenously.

“Clearly, we’ll have to get her better food,” Allure said. “Any chance of finding out who she is?”

“Normally I’d say yes, but something strange came up in the checkup.” Redheart pointed at a screen. “We have determined that the matter in every universe vibrates with a specific signature unique to that universe and that universe alone. After enough time in a different universe, this vibration is replaced with the current universe’s, but that takes a while.” She pointed at the vibration pattern on the screen. “We have no idea what this one is. And the computer here has access to the full Directory.”

“So…?”

“So she hasn’t been in our world long… And she’s from a world outside our scope,” Redheart said. “There are no missing persons reports matching her description, and I don’t expect the DNA scans are going to turn up anything.” She looked at the girl with sadness in her eyes. “We have no idea who she is and no way to get her home.”

The girl tensed at those words.

Allure tried to stand tall – but she was still a short pony, so she just looked cute. “I’ll take her, then. Until we find her home, I’ll protect her.”

“What if we never find it?” Squeaky asked.

“Then I’ll protect her forever,” Allure asserted.

“…You just met he-”

“Squeaky, I’m certain of this,” Allure said, turning her head to glance at the girl on her back. “…I’m going to take care of you, okay?”

The girl looked at Allure. She rushed her and hugged her neck. This made Allure feel like she was choking, but she didn’t care – she let it happen.

“Normally I’d have to put you through a court and everything to approve this,” Redheart said. “But I think I’ll just call Eve, she’s sure to make the process near-instant for you.”

“Thank you,” Allure said.

“You can wait in the lobby while I make the call, mmkay?”

“Right,” Allure said. Then she heard the girl’s stomach rumble. “We need to get her food…”

“We can do that,” Squeaky said, saluting. “You can wait here with her.”

Allure smiled. “Thanks. …I’m giving out a lot of thank yous today.”

“It is the way of your people,” Thrackerzod observed. The three of them vanished in a puff of magic.

Allure took the girl to the waiting room. It was filled with empty couches and chairs since few people were here this late at night. “…Can I sit down?” Allure asked.

The girl reluctantly got off of Allure, allowing the unicorn to sit down on one of the couches. The girl sat next to her, leaning in as close as she could. Allure put a hoof in her hair.

Allure let out a sigh of contentment.

She opened her eyes when a door across the room opened, revealing none other than Princess Cadence and her youngest child, a blue unicorn colt by the name of Frigid.

“Hey mom, lookit! Allure!”

“Quiet, Frigid, we don’t want to be loud,” Cadence said.

“…Why?”

Cadence pointed at the girl. “Because she’d like it that way.”

Frigid walked up to them. “Hi,” he said, trying to be quiet. “I’m Frigid!”

To her credit, the girl didn’t flinch away. She seemed interested in his presence.

“What’s your name?”

The girl recoiled, looking down in shame.

“Oh… I’m sorry. Do you not have one?”

The girl shook her head.

Allure looked at her. “I’ll give you one soon, I just need to think. How does that sound to you?”

The girl looked at Cadence, her frown lessening. “…Good,” she spoke with a raspy, dry voice.

“Wow, you sound awesome,” Frigid said. “Like some ice creature. I like ice.”

The girl looked at Frigid again, clearly unsure of what to make of him.

Cadence spoke up. “Frigid, how about you go play with your game? I’m sure she’ll want to play later, but Allure and I need to talk for a moment.”

“Oh… Okay!” He took out a handheld console and went to a nearby chair.

Cadence turned to Allure. Allure smiled nervously. “So, what’s the Princess of Love got to say to me?”

“I’ve been watching you,” Cadence said.

“…That’s creepy, but it also makes sense.”

“You weren’t exactly being subtle. It was easy for me to see what was going on in the Festival. I was planning on eventually offering my assistance after you’d run through your options – that is my job, after all – but I see you’ve found something else.”

“Yeah… I don’t want your help right now. About an hour ago I would have.”

Cadence looked at her and smiled. “…Love is a complicated thing, Allure. There are many different varieties. What you experienced today? That was a love of things – a love of pleasures. I don’t even consider that real love, myself.” She looked into the distance, pained. “I remember when that style of ‘love’ was rare. Most ponies genuinely wanted to care for each other, to forge a relationship on actually knowing each other rather than simply doing it because they had a desire. It’s cheapened the whole thing – and resulted in many ponies like you growing disillusioned with love at all.” She smiled. “I want you to know, what Tangelo was offering? That wasn’t really love. That was… it was like a hayburger. You love the hayburger because it tastes good. That’s it.”

“…What is love, then?” Allure asked.

Cadence’s expression took on a serious tone. “There are four major flavors of it. You’re most familiar with the love between friends. Eve may consider that her domain, but I have my own hoof in it as well. The bond between ponies who are close to each other is the one that forms beautiful groups who can often act as one unit. It’s perhaps the most beautiful of all the loves because of its resilience, but only when done right. Then there’s the love everyone talks about – erotic, romantic love, the love between two individuals who have hopes of spending eternity together. It is the love driven forward by biology and culture almost universally – and the one almost everyone thinks of. Even those who aren’t interested in love think that erotic love is all there is. As a married mare I understand that it’s the most fulfilling relationship possible, a closeness that cannot be intruded on by others, but the other loves are not only important, but provide something plain romance cannot. An obsession with it isn’t healthy, and yet here we are where so many are so obsessed they’re replacing it with a pale shadow…”

Allure nodded. “You said there were four?”

“The third is reverential love – the kind Rev feels for her god, or how many people feel about Celestia – even more now that she’s gone. A deep, unwavering connection of faith, understanding. A love by which people define their entire lives. It is the strongest of the forms, but also the hardest to pin down. And then there’s the love I think you’ll appreciate – familial.”

Allure looked at the girl.

“Sisters. Brothers. Mothers. Fathers. The love that comes from a family has its own flavor – different from friendship, different from romance. It is, in many ways, just a love for what is familiar and what one has grown accustomed to. It is the love that is least likely to be broken. It is uncommon for a mother to abandon her children, or for a brother to never forgive a sister.” Cadence smiled at Allure. “I think that is the love you’ve always appreciated more than anything.”

Allure thought of Renee, a big smile coming to her face. “…Yeah. You’re right.”

Cadence gestured toward the girl. “In that case… Take this girl as your own, Allure. Fate has dropped her on your doorstep. Show her the power of familial love.”

Allure’s expression became serious. “I will, Cadence.”

“Glad to hear it,” Cadence said. “Now, I think your girl is very interested in the game Frigid is playing with. How about we call him over?”

Allure noticed that the girl was staring at Frigid’s game across the room in curiosity. “Yeah. Hey, Frigid. Come over here would you? Bring your game.”

Frigid looked up and nodded, bringing the handheld over. The girl leaned to take a look at the screen. Frigid began to explain what the game was all about and how it worked.

Cadence and Allure smiled. “And she already has a friend,” Allure said. “A good start for her.”

Cadence nodded, saying nothing.

Thrackerzod and the rest returned with far too much food and desserts. “IT IS PARTY TIME!” Bot decreed.

The girl flinched – but quickly decided being afraid wasn’t worth it. There was too much food. She rushed and began to dig in.

Frigid glanced at his mother with a questioning expression.

“Go ahead. Eat as much as you want. Today only,” Cadence said with a playful smile.

“Thanks mom!” Frigid said, running off.

The girl stopped eating for a moment. She turned to look at Allure. “…Mom?”

“…Yes. If you want,” Allure said, beaming.

The girl smiled for the first time. “…Mom.”

Allure couldn’t stop herself. Tears started rolling down her cheeks.

Cadence put a hoof around her. “It’s going to be quite a journey for you, Allure.”

“I… I know.”

“You’ll do great.”

“…Thank you.”

~~~

Renee and Daniel looked from Nova to Sunburst. The latter two of them were blushing furiously.

“Dears, calm down, it’s not like I’m going to disprove of your relationship,” Renee said, raising an eyebrow. “I am quite happy for you.”

“I sense a but,” Nova commented.

Daniel smirked. “Oh, there’s a but all right.”

“Yes. The ‘but’ is I can’t have this interfering with your work,” Renee said. “In Nova’s case that’s no issue – it’s a rare mission where she’s gone more than a day. But Sunburst, you have to disappear for multiple days every week to survey universes. I’m just concerned you might start ‘skipping days’ to be with your marefriend.”

“I-I promise I won’t skip!”

Renee smirked. “Love can make you really, really stupid at times.” She glanced at Daniel.

“Let’s not go there right now,” Daniel said.

Renee fixed him with a knowing glance. “Fair. The point is, Sunburst, right now you’re certain you’ll be able to do your job effectively. And I believe that you believe that. But give it a month or so and you’ll start getting truly obsessive over each other. Daniel and I were lucky – we got to be obsessive and work together a lot of the time. There were a lot of laws written together.”

“It seemed to help, actually,” Daniel said. “Two people who got each other bouncing ideas back and forth until… Well I was going to say perfection but that’s a little arrogant.”

“Go ahead and say perfection. It’s the perfect word.”

“Please tell me we’re not going to turn into this,” Nova gestured at the two of them.

“It’s inevitable!” Renee decreed.

“Greeeeat…”

“So what are you going to do?” Sunburst asked.

“Oh, nothing. Yet.” Renee grinned evilly. “I just want you to know the moment you start skipping out I’ll start initiating punishments. On both of you. If you remember, I have the power to choose where you go on your missions. I can get creative.”

“Ah. I see,” Sunburst shifted awkwardly.

“Otherwise I hope you two enjoy each other!” Renee chuckled.

“Just remember to beware the boss,” Daniel added.

“Beware the boss… I rather like that.”

Nova facehooved. “…Thanks Renee.”

“Don’t mention it! Now shoo, I’m sure you have work to do.”

“Actually, our teams are waiting outside to surprise us with a party,” Nova said. “Pinkie and Sunny have joined forces. There is no escape.”

Renee smirked. “Well, if I get a break I might drop in. You best not keep them waiting any longer, you know how Pinkie is with waiting.”

Nova laughed uneasily. “Yeah…”

“S-surprise party?” Sunburst finally registered.

Nova pecked him on the cheek. “Just go with it.” She levitated him out the door first, right into the blast zone of a party cannon.

“AUGH!” He screamed.

“…They knew,” Sunny said, looking to Pinkie. “I thought this was supposed to be a surprise.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Eh, at least one of them was surprised. …CONGRATULATIONS YOU TWO!” She pulled them into a big hug and entered one of her ‘I’m so happy for my friends’ rants that probably wouldn’t end for a couple minutes. The door closed, cutting off the sound of party.

Daniel scratched Renee behind the ear. “You want to go out there?”

“Mmm, yes… How many people are waiting for us today?”

“Not many. We ha- oh. A request from Allure just came in. Says she has a surprise for you.”

“Oh now this I have to see,” Renee said. “Beam her in!”

Allure appeared in a blue teleport effect. “Guess what Renee?”

“What?”

Allure stepped to the side, revealing a human girl in a soft black dress. “Renee, this is Minna. Your niece.”

“…My niece.”

“Your niece.”

Minna smiled awkwardly. “…Hi, Renee.” Her voice was quiet and slightly raspy, but also absolutely precious.

“Aren’t you the most adorable thing in the world!” Renee shouted, rushing toward Minna and swooping her into a hug. To her credit, Minna only flinched slightly. “I am going to spoil you rotten. Renee and Minna, out on the town, enjoying the finer things in life!”

“O…kay…” Minna said, struggling against Renee’s hooves.

Renee smiled, putting Minna down. “Oh, I’m sorry if I startled you, dear. I was excited. See, Daniel and I don’t have any children – we’re a bit too busy, unfortunately. But you are just the perfect little thing.”

“…Will there be ice cream?”

“Yes, there will be ice cream.”

Minna grinned. “Yay.”

“Stars, you sound like Flutterfree back in the day… That’s a compliment. Oh, say hi to your uncle Daniel.”

Minna looked up at Daniel. “…Hi.”

Daniel kneeled down and smiled. “Hello, Minna. What do you like?”

Minna pointed at Allure.

“So precious…” Renee said, holding a hoof to her heart. “Allure, where did you find her?”

“In a bush. Scratched, hurt, and scared,” Allure said, nuzzling her. “She’s from an unknown universe. She’s staying with me. At first… I thought I would take her home when we found it.”

Minna clutched Allure’s leg.

“I doubt she’ll want to go when you find her home,” Renee said, beaming.

Allure nodded. “From what little I’ve gotten from her, it wasn’t a nice place.”

“Allure, look at you. So… Oh, so grown up.”

“Renee…”

“Shh. You’re always my little sister.”

Allure smiled. “Yeah… Yeah I am.”

“Daniel, cancel our dinner tonight. We’re going to spend some time with our niece. Get to know her a little better.”

Daniel nodded. “That sound good, Minna?”

Minna beamed. “Yep!”

“There also happens to be a party right outside – would you like to see that?” Renee asked. “It’ll be a little loud.”

“…I’ll try it,” Minna said, smiling innocently.

“Right through this door~!” Renee said in a sing-song voice, walking toward the door.

Pinkie opened it. “Hi! Come on in! All are welcome!” She shoved Allure, Renee, and Daniel through before they could react. She paused a moment to look at Minna.

“That’s quite the fire you have in those eyes, Minna,” Pinkie said, messing up her hair with a hoof. “You’ll have to watch that as you get older.”

Minna looked at her in confusion.

Pinkie looked at her with a serious expression. “You’re a special girl, don’t forget that. Be careful. …I’m sorry.” The bouncy smile returned. “Now it’s time to introduce you to cake!”

Minna nodded. “…Sure!”

They left to enjoy the party.

070 - Avatar Corea

The scene: the Fire Nation’s Capital City, one of the private royal arenas. A simple square made of stone flattened to perfection and covered in a layer of practice mat material – firm, but forgiving enough not to break bones when one fell on it. Black metallic buildings with fires atop them rose around the arena, a tribute to old Fire Nation architecture.

The people: a filly, roughly twelve years of age standing on her hind hooves, as of yet without a cutie mark. Her coat was orange, her eyes green, and her mane a soft blue. Her opponent, the large firebending master Iroh. He may have been tubby and old, but that was no reason to underestimate him. He had figured out how to adapt firebending to the quadruped form, after all.

The action: the filly surrounded in a burst of fire, yelling in rage against the onslaught of flames coming from Iroh’s finger.

“Corea, focus less on your rage and more on your passion!”

“Stop helping me during the exam, Iroh!” Corea blurted. “I know!”

“And yet all you’re doing is brazenly deflecting my fire. Passion Corea, passion.”

“YOU CAN DO IT!” Corea’s aunt, Apple Bloom, called from the observation lounge. Unlike Allure, who had retained her small physique well into adulthood, Apple Bloom had grown to be taller than her sister and had become decidedly muscular for a mare. “GIVE HIM THE OL’ ONE-TWO!”

“That’s meaningless,” the only other person in the audience, Corona, said. “If she remembers her training it won’t be hard to land a hit on Iroh.”

“Ah’m bein’ supportive,” Apple Bloom huffed.

Corona smirked. “Then keep doin’ what you’re doin’.”

“GET HIM COREA!”

“Planning on it!” Corea shouted back, a smile on her face. She took in a deep breath – she was going to have to use just firebending to land a hit on Iroh. However, she remembered the rest of her training…

Water is of submission…

Earth is of strength…

Fire is of passion…

Magic is of mind…

She leaped into the air, out of the rush of Iroh’s fire.

Iroh looked disappointed – he clearly thought he had her, and that she wasn’t going to pass today.

The old man’s going to be in for a surprise. She angled her front hooves like she was going to hit Iroh with a burst of flame. He reacted as he was supposed to, angling his arm for a retaliation strike Corea would not be able to deflect in her current position.

“COREA!” Apple Bloom shouted.

Corona smirked. “She’s got a plan.”

Iroh realized this the same instant Corona did, but it was a bit too late for him; he was already committed to his attack. “Clever girl.” He purposely put less energy into the flame than he was planning so as to prepare himself for whatever she was going to do.

She did shoot fire with her front hooves – but she also used her hind legs to create fire as well, shooting her under Iroh’s new jet of fire. She landed on the ground right in front of him and swirled around in a tornado of flame. “Gotcha!”

Iroh used his bending to divert the tornado, the complex motions far beyond something Corea could comprehend in her current state. “Not quite.”

Corea didn’t let this surprise her. She opted to leap toward him physically instead of with fire, swirling her entire body around in a quick arc motion. Iroh had been prepared to deal with an attack of flame – not a hoof to the leg. He went down, hitting the ground hard. He let out a yowl of pain.

“Oh, Iroh!” Corea said, hoof to her mouth. “Did I go too far?”

“Not at… All.” Iroh grunted. Corona teleported herself and Apple Bloom to him. The earth pony mare reached into her many-layered pink bow and took out a health potion ‘grenade’. She threw it at Iroh, covering him in healing magic juices.

“There you go, good as new!”

Iroh sat up, stretching his back. “I’m getting too old for this…”

“News to absolutely nobody,” Corona said, helping him up. “So, think she passed?”

“She did get me down.”

“It wasn’t with firebending though, it was with her wit,” Corona pointed out. “Great for an Avatar, but does it really prove her mastery of the firebending basics?”

“She was holding back my flame for a full minute there and pulled some rather advanced tricks,” Iroh said. “I think she passed.”

Corona smirked. “Well then… Corea, consider it official. You’ve mastered the firebending basics. Three out of four.”

“Five,” Apple Bloom reminded her. “Five.”

Corea ignored Apple Bloom. She just squeeed. “I’m so close to becoming the full Avatar! Eeeeeeeeeeeee! All that’s left is air and BAM!”

“Ah’m chopped liver, apparently,” Apple Bloom muttered.

“Oh, magic’s important too,” Corea admitted, punching the air and letting out a few pathetic magical sparks from her hooves. “But it’s not part of being the Avatar!”

Iroh looked to Corona. “I remember when I was afraid she wouldn’t want to be the Avatar.”

Corona chuckled. “Oh, the things we used to worry about.”

“Such needless fretting over silly trivial things,” Iroh said, nostalgia on his face.

Corea looked at her aunt. “Aunt AB? What are they going on about?”

Apple Bloom shrugged. “Somethin’ about fate or some other nonsense.”

“…Cool, cool.”

Corona rolled her eyes. She kneeled down and put a hand on Corea’s shoulder. “There’s still much you can learn about the art of firebending – and earthbending, and waterbending – and I hope that as you grow you continue to sharpen your abilities. Don’t get too cocky, most firebenders who put any serious effort into their craft are still better than you.”

Corea nodded. “Got it.”

Corona smiled. “But don’t forget to have fun, okay?”

“I won’t! You were a great teacher, Corona! The best!”

Iroh blinked. “Hrm… How should I take that…?”

“Uh…” Corea looked around nervously. “Agree that you trained someone better than you?”

Corona laughed. “Well, that’s certainly true.”

“Wonder what Toph and Katara would say about it…” Iroh mused.

“NEVER TELL TOPH I SAID ANYONE WAS BETTER THAN HER!” Corea shouted. “I’M TOO YOUNG TO DIE!”

Iroh chuckled. “It will be our little secret.”

Corea let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks…” She returned her expression to one of excitement. “So, when do I get to start learning air, huh, huh?”

“As soon as you wish,” Iroh said.

“Then let’s go now!”

Apple Bloom blinked. “…Don’t you want a break? You’ve earned it.”

“NOPE!” Corea said, rubbing her hooves together. “Ever since I read that article on plasma I’ve been wondering if I can get air to ignite like that using a combination technique…”

Apple Bloom shivered. “Combination techniques… Ah’ve unleashed a monster.”

“The mud golems were cool. …I wonder if air will be anything like my steam…”

“…I think I created this monster,” Corona said, smiling awkwardly. “Science… It made her think too much.”

“We are all to blame for this creative bundle of apocalyptic potential,” Iroh said with a smirk. “It’s time she learns her fourth element.”

“Y’all never give her time to learn the art of magic,” Apple Bloom muttered. “Ah can only squeeze in side lessons!”

Corea put a hoof around her aunt. “Hey, Aunt AB. After air, you’ll have me all to yourself. I can learn about the arts of sparky punching and potion making then. But I need to become the Avatar for this world first. It’s my destiny.”

Apple Bloom glanced at her cutie mark, reminded of a time long ago when she helped a much younger filly realize what being the Avatar meant. “Yeah… Yeah it is. Ah’ll wait. But expect quizzes on the trip.”

“I’ll take my leave then,” Corona said. “This has been quite the vacation, teaching you, but I’m sure Lady Rarity and the others are lost without my presence.” She winked. “Have fun with her.”

Iroh nodded. “As always.”

Corea turned to Iroh. “So. How am I going to learn airbending?”

Iroh’s expression saddened. “You only have one option. There is only one airbending master in all of the Elemental Nations. He’s not much older than you.”

“…Oh,” Corea said, remembering. “…Tenzin.”

“Yes. Tenzin. A man born out of the proper time…” Iroh said, looking to the distance. “I’ll charter an airship for Air Temple Island. Do whatever you can to prepare yourself for the meeting.”

“Tenzin…” Corea said, mulling the name over in her mouth. “Right…”

“Ah’m sure he’ll be fine,” Apple Bloom assured her. “Ah bet you have to have a lot of discipline to be an airbending master at sixteen.”

Corea nodded slowly, starting to wonder if she should have gone with magic before air…

~~~

“TODAY’S MISSION!” Pinkie declared, throwing a data pad on a table in the entrance hall of Renee’s Crystal Castle. “GO HERE.”

“Unknown dimensional coordinates V-5oi6,” Flutterfree echoed. “Confirmed safe. Of interest because of its location outside of any Sphere or the Strands, symbolized by a V at the start of the coordinate system.” Flutterfree narrowed her eyes. “You know, sometimes I wish Nanoha would just tell us what the letters meant.”

“That’s part of the fun,” Vriska said.

“You know, just tell us,” Flutterfree begged. “What does the V mean?”

“I’ll let you know if we don’t find out while we’re there,” Vriska said, smirking. “But I’m going to love seeing you try to guess before that.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Pinkie asked. “Let’s go~!”

“…Yeah. Let’s go,” Nova said, halfheartedly.

Flutterfree sighed. “Nova, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing at all!”

Jotaro put his head into his hands, saying nothing because he felt it was too soon to start repeating himself.

Nova sighed. “Okay, yeah, something’s bothering me. But it can wait until after today’s mission.”

“Nova, we’re more than willing to put the mission off for a day to help you,” Flutterfree said.

Vriska gave her the thumbs up. “Yeah, totally. We can always do it tomorrow. Nothing will change about unknown universe V-5oi6.”

“…Maybe not. But…”

“Just tell us,” Flutterfree said. “Please.”

“Actually she’s right,” Pinkie said, jumping to Nova’s aid. “We should probably do this after today’s mission.”

“…Seriously!?” Vriska blurted. “That was… not what I was expecting.”

“Normally I’d be all about getting her to talk about her feelings and problems sooner rather than later, but today is going to be a special day,” Pinkie said, pointing at the coordinates. “I know it. Plus, it’d be better if she could gather everyone together at once later.”

Nova nodded slowly. “You already know, as always.”

Pinkie put a hoof on her. “Yeah. I can tell you I’ll be fine with everything. Rest easy there.”

“That’s a little weight off my chest,” Nova admitted.

“All this has done is made all of us curious,” Jotaro pointed out.

“And a little worried…” Flutterfree added.

“Just wait a few hours, yeesh,” Nova asked, sweating. “You can do that, right?”

“Yep!” Pinkie said. “Come on, let’s dial a new universe and have a landmark day!”

“This better not be another Zhui,” Vriska muttered.

“…Not that kind of landmark,” Pinkie said. “Something… else.” Pinkie pulled out her dimensional device and entered the new coordinates.

The universe they appeared in was certainly a unique one. They appeared on top of a floating island made entirely of blue crystals. The part they were on top of was so smooth as to be like ice, but other parts were covered with jagged crystalline growths so uneven it would have been impossible to walk over them. The island floated among many other islands similar to it, all oriented with the same ‘up’ and ‘down’, even though no bottom or top could be made out. As far as they were concerned, the islands floated alone amongst a black backdrop filled with brightly colored stars.

The portal closed behind them. Vriska’s jaw dropped. “No fucking way…”

“Huh? You know this place?” Flutterfree asked.

“Know this place?! Know this place!? This is the Void! The universe I operated out of with Twilence and the rest of them!” She let out a big laugh. “I never thought I’d see this place again!”

“…You don’t talk much about your past, care to elaborate?” Nova prodded.

“Right, you know I was part of a group before you guys, right? Twilence, Rarity, Mite, and Creek. Well… This was our Hub. This… Void connected to so many different worlds.”

“Doesn’t seem very voidlike,” Jotaro pointed out. “It’s filled with… stuff.”

“Over the eons tons of junk and such has been sucked into the Void. But man, it looks just the same as when I left it! I wonder if Empy is still in charge!”

“Empy?”

“The Empress of the Void,” Vriska said. “She’s a Twilight. The being currently in control of the ancient ‘machinery’ that keeps the Void together. Or, she is as far as I know, I suppose it could have changed hands since I’ve been gone…”

“You’ll be glad to know it hasn’t,” a Twilight’s voice said. A purple alicorn larger than Cosmo landed on their crystal island gracefully. Her mane was a bright mixture of purple sparks and magical waves near her scalp, but as it flowed away into the air it vanished into blackness so deep that no discernable ends to the mane could be seen. A soft, dark aura surrounded her in a way that didn’t seem threatening, merely authoritative. Her wings were far larger than even Celestia’s, the purple pinions tipped with black color. “It’s good to see you again, Vriska.”

“Aaaaaay, Empy! How’s the family?”

“Twice as large as last time,” Empy answered. “Great-great-grandchildren have a habit of expanding beyond belief.”

“I’ll say.” Vriska smirked. “So, this is my current team…”

“Don’t listen to her, she’s not in charge,” Pinkie said with a chuckle. “Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie, but you already know that. I represent the Class 3 Society Merodi Universalis. This is Nova, Flutterfree, and Jotaro. We are the primary team for first contact and exploration!”

“And I am simply Empress Twilight Sparkle,” she said with a warm, motherly smile. “Come, any friends of Vriska’s are friends of mine. Welcome to the The Void. Class 2, since that scale seems to mean something to you.”

“You’ve upgraded,” Vriska observed.

“Thanks in no small part to you.” With a wave of her wing, Empy created a spherical portal to a much brighter, greener place. “Come, I’m sure we have much to discuss about our respective realms and old friends to catch up with.” She led them into the sphere, leaving the crystal islands once again alone in the Void’s empty space.

~~~

Apple Bloom, Iroh, and Corea took one of the Fire Nation’s airships to Republic City. In the past, the journey would have taken a few hours – but the airships had what basically amounted to controllable rocket engines strapped to their backs now, so it would take less than an hour. They moved so fast the sun was moving backward across the sky.

Apple Bloom set a pot filled with soil in front of Corea. “Time for a test.”

Corea groaned. “Uuuugh, what is it now?”

“Make me a growth potion.” Apple Bloom set a glass on the ground, already filled with the proper ingredients for the growth potion. All it needed was an enchantment.

Corea stared at the green liquid. “Right…” She waved her hooves over it, trying to get a feel for the natural magic already around the ingredients. She just needed to get them to infuse with her own magic. She wasn’t anywhere near skilled enough to do it the way Apple Bloom did – by simply pushing her own internal magic through her hooves with a thought – Corea was the Avatar, she had to move her internal energy to get anything accomplished. She pulled her hoof back, drawing some of the magic within the ingredients back with it. She let out a breath and pushed forward, stopping just short of shattering the potion with a punch. Small sparks of magic energy flew off her hoof, and the ingredients changed color to a golden yellow.

“Well, you got it to react, that’s something,” Apple Bloom said. “Let’s see if it worked.”

“Please don’t be another dying dandelion,” Corea muttered, pouring a drop of the potion on in the soil. A small snapdragon flower appeared – though the flower was green and the stalk was blue.

“…Ah suppose that’s technically a growth potion,” Apple Bloom mused.

“Still a fail though.”

“Yeah.”

Corea grunted. “Why’s it so difficult?”

“Aang only really figured out how to do it in relation to his spirit-bending,” Apple Bloom reminded her. “You have no talent buried in Raava for you to tap into for this.”

“I wish there were teachers for spirit-bending…”

Apple Bloom shrugged. “I think that rests on you discovering the Avatar State and controlling it.”

Corea winced – reminded of the one part about her she feared.

“Hey, after you finish your basic training, there are gurus who know how to help you with that.” Apple Bloom smiled. “You don’t have to worry.”

“What if I’m called to save the world from some crazy threat before then?”

“You have something Aang didn’t,” Iroh said. “A lot of powerful friends who could take the burden if you are unable.” He smiled. “You will never have to stand alone if you don’t want to.”

Corea looked at Iroh – and smiled. “That’s… Right. Thanks! I was getting worried there for a second. Again.” She looked at her blank flank. “I wonder if that’s what it’ll be… The Avatar state I mean, not never standing alone.”

Apple Bloom shrugged. “Ah’m almost positive it’ll be somethin’ about masterin’ the elements or the Avatar itself. Ah wouldn’t expect it anytime soon though, you’re still young.”

Corea nodded with a smile. “Hey, at least I know what it’s probably gonna be! Saves a lot of the suspense!”

“Ah wish more fillies had that unending positive attitude of yours.”

“We’re there, by the way,” Iroh said, standing up. Corea ran to the window to get a good look at the metropolis that was Republic City, the most advanced city on the entire planet, of a similar vein to Ponyville in how advanced it was and how quickly it had grown. The entire shoreline of the bay was lined with buildings of every shape and size, and boats continually moved in and out of the tremendous harbor. Their goal was a small island in the middle of the bay.

It only had a handful of structures on it – a few houses, some gardens, and a large temple that looked a lot like a lighthouse. The airship touched down on a landing area, dropping a docking ramp onto the flat marble ground.

Iroh stepped off first, breathing in the scent of sea air. “Ah… Such pure energy in this place.”

A teenage human walked up to him. He wore yellow and orange airbender garb, and his body had the blue air tattoos signifying an airbending master. His head was shaved, and his young chin was attempting to grow a beard and failing for the most part. Behind him were a handful of men and women in similar robes, but without the tattoos.

The airbending master bowed. “Iroh, this is a pleasant surprise.”

Iroh bowed in return. “It is good to see you so well, Tenzin.”

“What brings you to Air Temple Island?”

Iroh stepped to the side, revealing Corea. “The Avatar has completed her firebending basics training. Only one element remains. As the only airbending master of Merodi Universalis, we have come to you for her training.”

Tenzin took one look at Corea. His serene expression soured into one of contempt. “No,” he said, turning and storming off toward the temple proper.

One of his followers, a teenage girl, sighed. “I’ll go talk to him.”

“You don’t need to do that, Pema,” Iroh said, furrowing his brow. “We can deal with him.”

“Wait, Pema?” The gears turned in Corea’s head. “But that means…”

“Tenzin doesn’t want any spoilers, Corea, so watch what you say.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Corea smiled nervously at Pema. “Pretend I don’t know anything.”

She blinked. “…Sure.”

“Anyway, Iroh, can I try to talk to him first?”

Iroh chuckled. “By all means, see if you can get through to him.”

“Challenge accepted,” Corea said, tapping her hooves together. She gulped and set off toward the temple.

~~~

It took Flutterfree a few moments to register that the green pasture they were in was still part of the Void universe. Despite the blue sky, she couldn’t actually see a sun anywhere, and was still able to make out the multicolored stars in the distance.

The pasture was clearly a nexus for the Empress’ civilization – the spherical portals appeared and disappeared left and right. There was not a moment where a portal wasn’t active in one way or another. Numerous structures existed to aid the travelers, constructed of silvery metal and magic crystals that were usually blue. The buildings rarely had any sharp edges, instead opting for flowing, almost natural curvy forms. They sparked with light, some activating portals, while others simply kept track of everything that happened. In the center of the field, there was a tall tower made entirely of crystal that may have once been a version of Equis Vitis’ Castle of Friendship.

Humans were by far the most common being to pass through the area, but there were more than a few ponies with the third most common race being a conglomeration of magical crystals and mechanical parts.

“What do you call this place?” Nova asked.

“Tangleglade,” Empy answered.

“I call it the Tanglade,” Vriska huffed. “I was sure that was going to catch on.”

“It didn’t.”

“That’s Rarity’s fault, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“She never could get over that…” Vriska said, rolling her eyes.

“What are those crystal beings?” Jotaro asked.

“Crystalline Ones or Fal’cie, depending on the universe you visit,” Empy said. “They are a staple of almost every universe the Void is in contact with, though rarely are they a very populous race. They are beings made of minerals and magic, some with the power to hold entire universes together, while others are nothing more than a particularly shiny unicorn.”

“Maud would absolutely love them,” Pinkie said. “Actually made of rocks! I mean, the Gems are just computer crystals infused with magic, their bodies aren’t rocks!”

Empy chuckled. “Mauds do tend to like them. Pony worlds may be comparatively rare within the Void, but enough exist that I’ve seen many Mauds do many things.”

“Lots of worlds seem to exist ‘within the Void’,” Nova commented. “What exactly does that mean?”

Vriska chuckled. “This’ll be fun.”

Empy teleported them to the base of her castle. “This may look like a castle, but it is really the control seat of the Void.” She teleported them to the top, which was a flat plane of crystal with a single raised ‘podium’ in the middle. Empy put her hooves on it and closed her eyes, tapping into the Void’s energies. Dozens of spheres appeared in the air around them, direct portals to different universes. “And these are all different worlds ‘within the Void’. It would be more accurate to say they are all different universes the Void has direct connections to, but even that doesn’t fully state what the Void is.”

“Then tell us, what is the Void?” Flutterfree asked.

“It is an ancient construct,” Empy explained. “We used to think it was built by Starswirl, then someone named Enuo, and then we realized there were multiple versions of all of them. What we came to realize was that all those who claimed they ‘built’ the Void just created different consoles by which to control it, and all these consoles consolidated themselves into one.” She gestured at the magical podium in front of her. “The Void had already existed, created an unimaginable amount of time in the past. We believe it was created as a navigation tool – because what the Void does is connect many universes together that shouldn’t naturally be connected, tying together not just their physical natures, but also their fates.”

“…Ka?” Jotaro asked.

“As it turns out, it is a ka-manipulating structure,” Empy admitted. “It makes all universes ‘within’ the connections share a single thread of fate. Almost every universe will have crystals, a similar magic system, etcetera. Sometimes these worlds are pure alternates, with the same people in the same roles doing slightly different things. But a much more common phenomenon is one we have called ‘reimagining’.” She pointed at two different spheres. “These two worlds couldn’t be more different. One is a standard fantasy-type world with magic, dragons, and high adventure, while this other one has spaceships, artificial gods, and energy weapons. And yet, both of them not only have a similar magic system within them, but the spells have the same names. Most of the people within each world are vastly different, but there’s this one man named Cid in both places. The themes, as they were, seem to stay the same, but everything else is a tossup.”

“Wow, that’s… A bit bizarre,” Nova commented.

“Oh, it gets more complicated.” Vriska chuckled. “The Void doesn’t connect to all universes in this section of the multiverse we’re in. Guess what the V actually stands for?”

“I thought you were-“

“Changed my mind, rule of funny.” Vriska held up her hand and Pinkie hoofbumped it. “C’mon, guess.”

“…It doesn’t mean Void…?”

“It kinda does,” Vriska said with a laugh. “The Void universes exist within The Great Void of the multiverse.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered. “That’s not confusing at all.”

“Learn your Voids! The Void is just a collection of universes that share a fate through an ancient construct! The Great Void is a section of the multiverse between the E and Q-Spheres that is relatively ‘south’ of the Strands where, rather than having a million connections for every little thing, most universes maybe have five active connections to other universes.”

“I can see that making it a mess to navigate,” Nova observed.

“The areas of The Great Void not within my Void are nearly impossible to cross,” Empy agreed. “It takes hundreds of translations to get to any specific universe. It’s a sparse web with a lot fewer universes than normal – hence why they call it the Great Void.”

“It’s also the most direct way to the ‘southern sphere’ you’re so curious about,” Vriska said with a grin. “Good luck!”

“The Unrealities?”

“Empy, I’m trying to be mysterious!”

“Oh.” Empy raised an eyebrow. “Why? The Unrealities aren’t worth anything to them, or us.”

“Bu-”

Empy turned to Pinkie. “Don’t waste your time trying to find the fourth sphere. The Unrealities are the collection of universes that drift further and further away from the standard model of physics, so far that, eventually, most eldritch deities can’t even survive without assistance of some sort. It’s not even a proper sphere, just a trailing-off connection of universes that keeps spiraling further and further away from anything sensical.”

“…Ah,” Pinkie said. “That makes sense.”

Vriska folded her arms. “You’re no fun, Empy.”

Flutterfree decided that, now that someone was talking, it was time to take advantage of it. “What can you tell us about the structure of the entire multiverse?”

“You’re already aware of the three Spheres right?”

Flutterfree nodded.

“That’s basically it. The areas of the multiverse that aren’t the Unrealities are all just ‘between’ locations, combinations of one or the other. All three form the Strands, E and Q form the Great Void, E and D form the Cosmic Heavens, while D and Q form what is known as Outer Existence. The Cosmic Heavens hold a lot of afterlife universes, while Outer Existence is the source of many worlds’ magic. These are, of course, just generalizations – there is near infinite variety within each location. There’s a few other location names that fly around – usually trying to classify the edges of the multiverse, but I believe that’s an exercise in futility.”

“You’re not a Class 1,” Vriska pointed out.

“No, I’m not. But the Void is nothing to scoff at. …Though admittedly, beyond the worlds within the Void itself, our society is rather weak. The absolute control we have over space and portals within our domain cannot extend to other worlds without calculated effort. The Void never grows unless a new universe is created within its folds, and let’s just say creating a universe is not the easiest thing in the world.”

The implication that they could create a universe, if they wanted to, did not go unnoticed by the primary team.

“Normally I wouldn’t be telling you all this,” Empy said. “But you’re Vriska’s friend – and most of her friends are friends of mine.”

“Ouch,” Vriska said, rubbing the back of her head. “Hey, I may have brought some bad company in from time to time, but I admitted they were fuckers later!”

Empy raised an eyebrow.

“…Most of the time.”

“Just quit before you dig yourself deeper into this hole,” Pinkie suggested.

Vriska grunted, but didn’t say anything further.

“We’ll have to contact Evening,” Nova said. “She’ll want to forge more official relations a- hold on. What’s going on in that sphere over there?”

Everyone turned to look at a sphere currently connected to a world with a large metropolitan city. A crystal dragon the size of a small mountain was in pursuit of two individuals – a tall humanoid in orange armor with a halberd, and a white cyborg-alicorn with a red and black mane.

“LOOK, A VOID SPHERE!” Blackjack shouted. “WE’RE HOME FREE!”

“I… don’t think… I can run that far…” Gilgamesh wheezed.

“You don’t have to!” Blackjack grabbed onto him with her magic and teleported through the sphere, appearing in the midst of Empy and the Merodi.

“CLOSE IT CLOSE IT!” Gilgamesh shouted.

Empy didn’t even need to be told – she had already dispelled all the portals.

“Must be nice to have complete control,” Gilgamesh muttered.

“It is,” Empy asserted. “Though I do admit this is inconvenient, you have interrupted quite the meeting.”

Flutterfree blinked. “…Blackjack!?”

“…Fuck,” Blackjack said, smiling nervously. “Heeeeeeey there!”

“Don’t be scared!” Flutterfree insisted. “We’re not going to hurt you!”

“Speak for yourself,” Vriska muttered, clenching her fist.

Pinkie put her hooves on her hips and shook her head at Vriska. “I know she hurt you, but she ended up saving us.”

“I can still punch her in the face for being an asshole.”

“I’d take the punch,” Blackjack said, raising a hoof. “List of things I deserve includes a punch to the face.”

Vriska obliged before anything else could be said.

“…Man, you pack a real doozy,” Blackjack muttered, standing back up. “Anyway, uh… We’ll leave you to all this politics stuff you’re doing. We were never here…”

“Go to see Twilence then?” Gilgamesh asked Blackjack.

“Yeah. Wonder if she has anything else for us…”

Vriska stared at the two of them in disbelief. “Twilence… is here?”

The two nodded. “Uh… Yeah. You know her?”

Empy nodded. “Vriska was part of her original team.”

“…Woah,” Blackjack said. “You’re old.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Vriska muttered. “I want to see her.”

Empy nodded. “Of course – I was planning on doing this after the meeting, but old friends must see each other, I understand.” She smiled knowingly.

“I’ll call Eve,” Pinkie said. “You can talk to her while we go visit the mysterious Twilence.”

“That will do wonderfully.”

Pinkie pulled out a phone and called Eve. Meanwhile, Gilgamesh used his own power over the Void – significantly less powerful than Empy’s – to create a spherical portal to a dark library. “She should be right through here.”

Vriska took in a deep breath – she clearly wasn’t sure if this meeting was going to go well or not. She stepped through the portal…

~~~

Tenzin sat down in the air temple, feeling the currents of the atmosphere flowing through the room, the way they bounced off the marble columns and created a slight whirlwind effect only perceptible to the most attuned airbenders.

…Which was to say him and only him.

But, as usual, he put that out of his mind through meditation. He closed his eyes, controlled his breathing, and entered a state of serenity, detaching himself from the world and allowing his mind to drift in the freedom of the sky…

“Ohm…”

The sound of a female voice broke his concentration in an instant. With a grunt, he opened his eyes.

“Ohm…” Corea said next to him, her body in its own meditation position with the back legs splayed and the front hooves pressed together. “Ohm…”

Tenzin jumped up. “What are you doing here!?”

“Meditating, clearly. Be quiet, you're interrupting my focus.” She took a breath. “Ohm…”

“Why!?”

“Learning through osmosis,” Corea said with a smile.

Tenzin stormed out of the air temple without another word. He marched down the marble stairs to the house he called his own, slamming his front door behind him.

He was not going to deal with that filly today.

He would go meditate at his personal shrine. That would work. He walked to one of the sliding doors in his house that led to a balcony, one with a small spirit statue that conducted the wind excellently.

Corea was already there, smiling at him. “Come and join me, I’m sure the wind is great here. We can feel the currents of the breeze around each other!”

Tenzin closed the door, clenching his fist. She wouldn’t leave him alone… What was with her?

He went to the kitchen. Maybe a snack would help. He began to rummage through the cupboards, but nothing looked good to him – not even the pop rock cereal he had specially imported from Earth Stand. He loved that stuff.

I need to meditate and get this sour mood out of my head, he thought to himself, opening the last cupboard.

Corea was inside of it. She blew a gust of air at him with her hoof – a rather pitiful piece of airbending, but proof enough that she had the power inside her. “Teach me.”

“No,” Tenzin said, slamming the cupboard door in her face. He left the room in a huff. He marched out of his house and to one of the gardens where a handful of Flying Bison were sleeping. He was about to take position on his favorite of the bunch, Iggy, and begin meditating, but he saw Corea climbing onto Iggy’s back from a distance.

“Hey! Want to go for a fly?” Corea called.

Tenzin turned away.

“Maybe I can learn airbending from this bison! Ever think about that!?”

Something in Tenzin made him stop. “That’s how I learned, Korea.”

“…You’re saying it wrong. It’s not Core-ee-ah, it’s Core-ah. It’s a shortened version of Core Apple. Core Apple. Core-A. Corea.”

Tenzin stormed off again.

Corea sighed, rubbing Iggy’s fur. “So what about it, want to teach me the ways of air?”

The Flying Bison yawned and fell asleep.

“Of course not,” Corea said, stretching. “Time to go scare the bejeezus out of him again…”

Tenzin marched to the airbending training grounds. In hindsight, this was probably the worst place he could have gone. Corea wasn’t there to start, but she arrived soon after he did and started weaving in and out of the training poles. “I’m sure this would be a lot more helpful if I only had a little gust of air!”

Tenzin obliged, shoving as much air as he could into the training poles. They started rotating, their flat edges slapping Corea around like a ragdoll. She flew out of them and landed flat on her back. “Ow…”

Tenzin began to walk off again.

“TENZIN! Train me!”

He didn’t respond, merely decided to go to the beach. He found her behind a tree. “Teach me.”

He went to a rocky outcropping. She popped out of a hole in the ground a few seconds later. “Teach me.”

He air blasted himself to the top of the lighthouse-like air temple. There was no way she could get up here…

He gawked at her – she was using a mixture of fire and water to generate steam beneath her hooves, creating a burst of air pressure that launched her onto the roof. She landed painfully, but still managed to let out another “teach me…”

“No,” Tenzin said, leaping off the air temple and gliding to the ground. Corea had to use fire to slow her descent, which resulted in a faceplant into the ground.

She shook her head and turned to Tenzin. “Then at least tell me why not.”

Tenzin began to walk away.

“I’ll leave you alone if you do.”

Tenzin stopped walking away. Then he turned around, his eyes those of fury. “My only clear memory of my father is the Bloodbath.”

Corea didn’t flinch – she had asked, the best she could do was accept the answer.

“I was four, sitting in the audience when Siron, Six, and Flagg appeared. I saw the life drain from your predecessor’s eyes, far too early for an Avatar who wasn’t in a war. In one fell swoop, I was the only airbender in existence, and I had never been seriously taught the way of the Air Nomads. That memory haunts me, even to this day. It drove me to learn everything I could. I read all the airbending scrolls I could find, all the histories, all the books, everything my father had placed on this island in hopes of rebuilding the Air Nomads from nothing. It had fallen to me at the age of four.” He glared at her. “I had to learn from scrolls and sky bison. I had to prove to myself that I was an airbending master. I stand alone here, trying to build what my father had taken from him.”

He pointed at Corea. “And then I found out what was supposed to happen. I wasn’t even supposed to have been born yet. I was to be born nineteen years after the end of the hundred years war. Not ten. I was born at the perfect time to just barely remember my father. To remember him dying. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way, but I’m following my destiny just the same. I will rebuild the Air Nomads. But you… you are even more of a mistake than I am. At least I was supposed to exist. You never were, Corea. You stole that destiny from a girl in the water tribe. I won’t teach you because you have no right to be the Avatar.”

There were tears in Corea’s eyes. “…Okay.” She turned and walked away.

Tenzin walked back into the Air Temple, finally alone.

He found that he couldn’t meditate.

~~~

Pinkie, Vriska, Nova, Flutterfree, and Jotaro entered the dark library, Gilgamesh’s Void-sphere portal vanishing behind them. The library was a simple place – wooden bookshelves filled with books. There was a window that showed many brightly-colored stars of mostly purple and pink coloration. Otherwise, the only light came from dim amber crystals, with a brighter light source coming from a fair ways in front of them, behind another bookshelf.

Nova levitated one of the books to her face, opening it. “This is handwritten.”

“She did always prefer quills and pens to typewriters or computers,” Vriska said. “I think most of these books are hers, or ones she’s involved in.”

“That’s right, she’s a Prophet,” Flutterfree said, remembering a conversation they’d had some time ago. “A very powerful and Aware one too, right?”

Vriska nodded. “She’s even more of a source of enigmas than Pinkie is.” She walked toward the brighter light source, turning a corner to bring it into her view. It was a simple scene – a desk with a single book open on it, and numerous pens littered around. A single gas lamp hung from the back wall, lighting everything well enough to read comfortably, but not enough to feel harsh.

I sat at this desk, scribbling word after word into the book. When I reached the end of my paragraph, I closed the book and fixed Vriska with a smile. “Hello, Vriska. …It’s been a while.”

“Yeah, it has,” Vriska said, unsure of what exactly to say.

“Too long,” I said, getting up from my desk and walking up to her. I, despite my age, had never grown beyond the standard Twilight model, simply because I didn’t want to. I had to crane my neck to meet her eyes. “You don’t have to be sorry for that day.”

Vriska rubbed the back of her head. “Going right to that, are we?”

I shrugged. “Not if you don’t want to. I could talk to your friends first.” I smiled at the other four members of her team. “Hello. You don’t know me, but I know you. I know you very well.”

“…Are you writing our story?” Nova asked.

I laughed at this. “Parts of it, but those are generally just the parts I’m involved in. I’m not your Prophet, and that’s good news for you and me both.” I looked into the distance. “We actually share the same Prophet. In some ways, I’m just a tool of his, a particularly bizarre plot device.”

“Nothing escapes ka,” Pinkie said.

“True, nothing does,” I agreed. “All Prophets are subject to the overall ebbs and tides of stories. Even those who write stories about the multiverse, as ours does, are not immune by any stretch of the imagination.” I shook my head. “But that’s not something we need to talk about now. I’m here to finally introduce myself to you. You’ve come along far enough that knowing about me isn’t really a cheat anymore.”

“Using you would be,” Pinkie pointed out.

“But what are the chances I’ll ever be around when you think you could use me?” I asked. “I’ll always know when you want to, and until my time really comes, I can always just conveniently vanish.”

“That always sounds like a copout,” Jotaro commented.

“It’s no different than what I was doing before you found out what ka was,” Pinkie pointed out. “I couldn’t tell you things. She knows more things than I do so the bar of stuff she can tell us is significantly higher.”

“It’s the highest the bar can be,” I admitted. “I was written with the purpose of having as complete an understanding of ka as is possible. I can see this story as it is being typed on a laptop on a version of Earth – though I do not know if it is an Earth in the same metatime as ours or not. I can also, at the same time, see many of the readers of this story – including every version and revision of it. Only the final version actually happens, but the reactions to all of them are available to me. I see comments across over three locations, and I see derivative works. I see outlines, plans, and I see things the Prophet doesn’t. An eternal paradox – I know things about the future even he doesn’t know yet!” I chuckled at this, reveling in the absurdity of my situation.

Flutterfree blinked. “…How do you manage?”

I sighed. “It is difficult, being able to see almost everything. I was introduced to the truth of the world rather jarringly, I almost went insane. …In some ways, I did.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “You can say that again.”

I tapped the mechanical eye on my chest. “But I realized that I had been given a gift. Those readers, they helped set me on a path similar to the one you started on. But rather than creating a society, we just… explored. Explored and explored, using our gifts to change what we could… Sometimes it was a mistake. Sometimes entire worlds were destroyed.” I shook my head. “I’m not perfect. Even understanding has its failings.”

“And its drawbacks,” Pinkie pointed out.

“Yes… Yes it does. You know that more than most.” I put a hoof on her shoulder. “I wish I could be like you Pinkies and just smile in the face of it all. But we’re different.”

“It’s okay,” Pinkie said, pulling me into a hug.

“It’s not, but thanks,” I said, accepting the embrace. I pulled back, looking at the others.

“…I feel like I know you from somewhere,” Nova said, suddenly.

“You do,” I said. “I’ve been watching. You’re probably thinking of the time you saw me in the Static.”

“…Wow that was a long time ago…”

I chuckled, thinking of at least six reasons that wasn’t quite an accurate assessment.

“Why were you there?”

I tapped the eye on my chest again. “Most of the Eye of Rhyme was constructed there. It was by no means the only ingredient needed to create this device of Awareness, but it was one of the most important. Though if I’m being honest the real reason I was there was foreshadowing.”

“...You live your life by ka, huh?”

“The tropes of narrative,” I confirmed. “For instance, there were a few options for this meeting. I could be open and provide a conversation, but because that’s simple it would have to turn to drama eventually – which it will. The other options were for me to manipulate things from the sidelines and have you discover me at the end, offering some cheeky and rather mysterious explanations. Lastly I could have continued to be in the background – but frankly I’m sick and tired of being in the background. The time is coming where I can just be another character in this song. I’m really looking forward to that.”

“When will that be?”

“Spoilers!” I said with a playful smirk. “So many spoilers!”

“…Fun.”

I put my hoof on her. “Don’t worry, Nova. Everything will go fine.”

Nova caught my double meaning. “Clever.”

“Thank you,” I said, turning to Jotaro. “Yes, I can see Star Platinum flexing behind you. No, I don’t have a Stand. Yes, I knew you were testing me this entire time. No, I don’t hold it against you. Yes, I know you like it if you don’t have to actually say anything to have a conversation. You’re welcome.”

Jotaro smirked slightly.

“Also, stop doubting yourself so much. You’re a strong man and a good father. Be sure to pass on what you’ve learned to anyone who could use it.”

Jotaro nodded slowly.

I turned to Flutterfree last. “So, I actually don’t have much to say to you, sorry.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Really?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. You don’t have anything wrong in your life at the moment. And I don’t know of anything in the future I could help you prepare for.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “Something something I have no major flaws?”

“Something like that,” I admitted. “…Actually, I just thought of something. Don’t be afraid to disagree with Rev.”

“I know she’s not always right, Twilence.”

“There is a discontinuity between knowing and doing. You’re actually doing fine, but be aware of it.” I shrugged. “It might or might not be a problem, I’m not sure.”

“Thought you knew everything?”

“I just know lots of things. Not everything.”

“Yeah. …Know where Earth C is?”

I sighed. I pulled a purple cubic crystal out of my desk and created a spherical portal back to the Tangleglade. “Could you four excuse us? Vriska and I need to have a talk.”

“Gotcha,” Pinkie said, nodding. “Everybody out! Good luck Vriska!”

Soon, only Vriska and myself remained.

“…I could find it,” I said. “I now know things that wouldn’t even make it that hard.”

“And you’re not going to.”

“No. There are things that need to happen, Vriska. If you find Earth C, they won’t happen.” I held up a hoof. “And no, I’m not saying the rules are preventing me from interfering. They might be, but even if they are I happen to agree with them. I’m choosing not to help you find them.”

Vriska curled her fingers into a fist. “Fucking… Why do you always do this?”

“You know why.”

“Can you at least tell me if I find it or not?”

I looked right at her. “I can tell you that you’re right where you need to be.”

“That’s vague bullshit and you know it.”

“It has to be.”

Vriska put her hands in her pockets and leaned against a bookshelf. “…At least you’re honest about it. You’re always honest about it.”

“The Doctor’s not as bad of a person as you say he is.”

“Maybe I’ve just got a personal vendetta, ever think about that?”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

Vriska looked away. “Still can’t forgive him.”

“Not asking you to. He betrayed you.”

Vriska had no response to this.

“…We should talk about what happened after you left.”

“…Fuck, that’s not a tone of voice you use when you have good news.”

“Feel free to scream and yell at me for what I did,” I said. “After I told you to leave with your luck, I began writing a counter-narrative. I did manage to use a group of wandering heroes to stop Polymarchus and his sackcloth monsters. It was a game with complex plots and multiple Prophets intertwining to bring down the evil.” I looked Vriska in the eyes, my own watering. “Creek was killed in the process.”

Vriska put a hand to her mouth. “…I always thought…”

“She’d grow old, yeah. She didn’t. And it’s my fault. I wrote that story.”

“How could you sacrifice her!?”

“Polymarchus took her body!” I shouted. “I gave the heroes a way to… But they didn’t… And…” I looked to the ground, tears falling. “…I knew if I forced her alive everything would fall apart. I just… It was so long, but it was yesterday. I… I ruined it. I don’t even know where Mite is, I only see Rarity occasionally, and… And…”

Vriska pulled me into an aggressive hug. “Stop it,” she demanded.

“But I-”

Vriska slapped me. “STOP IT! You’ve been alone in this library for too long, letting yourself fall into a depressed spiral. I know you, Twilence.”

I stared at her, blinking. Then I shook my head. “I see… The drama has arrived.”

“You don’t get to cheapen this with your stupid meta-knowledge.”

I shook my head. “Yeah… Yeah you’re right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did. I’m sorry for tearing us apart there. I’m just… I failed, Vriska.”

“It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last. We’re fucking screwed-up people, Twilence.”

I nodded slowly. “…That’s one of the truest things you’ve ever said.”

“I’m a barrel of wisdom.”

I laughed. “Riiiiiight. You. Wisdom.”

She wiped her eyes. “I’m a fucking genius. Not as much as Creek was, but y’know.”

“Yeah. I know.” I sat down at my desk and looked at the words I had written recently. “…I’m not going anywhere, Vriska. If you ever want to talk… You’ll be able to find me here so long as nobody wants me to do anything.”

Vriska nodded slowly. “You sure you won’t be called away by ka?”

“Not for very long. I know what my fate is for the next little while. I’ll be here.”

“Good.”

~~~

Apple Bloom and Iroh were sitting in one of the many tables on Air Temple island set up in the middle of a bunch of trees, probably used mostly for having lunch in nature. The two of them were working together on a little project. Iroh was heating a glass potion bottle while Apple Bloom hovered her hooves over the exceptionally complicated brew, carefully watching the colors and temperature of the rainbow-mish-mash of magical power.

She didn’t shoot sparks from her hooves like Corea – she wasn’t able to bend magic from the air, she had to make do with her own. Which meant exceptionally careful movements of her hooves and precise thought patterns. High-level potion brewing was no picnic, but it was certainly rewarding since it was a form of enchantment that could be done at any time and never went stale. Well, so long as the actual ingredients within didn’t rot, and she usually kept her brews in air-tight containers.

She slapped her hooves together above the glass potion, forcing it into a brilliant golden color. “You can stop heating it now, Iroh.”

Iroh retracted his flame, examining the golden brew. “So what’s this going to do?”

“This, if Ah did it right, is a potion of spiritual connection, augmented to be trans-universal. It’ll let one person connect to any other person they wish for a short time, with both individuals experiencin’ what the other one experiences. It’s like a short-term meldin’ of consciousness.”

“…And why did you make it?”

“Because it’s unimaginably hard to do,” Apple Bloom said with a laugh. “It’s not like healing, or explosions, which can be done on the fly with the right ingredients and trainin’ – it needs focus, plannin’, and very very precise motions.” She lifted the potion. “Ah don’t really have a use for it. It’s also pretty dangerous and powerful, now that Ah think about it.”

“I may have a use for it down the line,” Iroh said, looking closely at it.

“…That’s right. The spirit world.”

“I’ve already been here longer than I was planning,” Iroh admitted, looking off into the distance. “I had actually thought I would go after Unification, if you could believe that.”

“Really?”

“But then Corea was born, and the world needed me again.” He looked at his old hands. “It was very hard to train her in firebending…”

“Ah know, that’s why Ah called Corona.”

Iroh nodded. “All this magic and medicine works wonders in keeping me running. I’m sure I’ll be able to live long enough to see Corea become a great Avatar for this world. But it won’t be long before I won’t be able to actually do any training… It may be that my last real fight was her graduation. I may be acknowledged as the strongest firebender alive, but one lucky hit from someone who has even the slightest idea what they’re doing…”

Apple Bloom looked at him sadly. “She still needs your wisdom, Iroh.”

“I’m not so selfish that I won’t let myself wear down,” Iroh said with a bitter chuckle. “I know. I’ll follow the path of Joseph Joestar, be old and frail but still full of fire. He knew how to live.”

Apple Bloom nodded.

“I think I have maybe ten years left here,” Iroh said.

“We have ways to access the Spirit World,” Apple Bloom said. “It doesn’t have to be goodbye.”

Iroh looked down sadly. “…I would rather the Spirit World remains a sacred world that none touch with human – or pony – civilization. I wish that it would remain separate, secluded, and the way it was meant to be.”

“…You sure?”

“There’s nothing for Merodi Universalis there,” Iroh asserted. “The strongest spirit has been sealed away since time immemorial, and their counterpart is the Avatar Spirit. As powerful as the Avatar Spirit is, it’s nothing compared even to a Star. Or Discord.”

Apple Bloom nodded. “You’ve told the Overheads, right?”

Iroh nodded. “The Spirit World has already been set aside as a nature preserve. Only those with religious obligations are allowed to do anything relating to it at all.” He looked at his hands again. “It will be a new life…”

“…Ah hope you find what you’re lookin’ for.”

Iroh nodded slowly. “I hope so too, young one.”

Corea walked into the clearing, wiping her face. “...Hey.”

“Didn’t go well?” Apple Bloom asked.

“No,” Corea said, taking a seat at the table. “…Iroh, can we just go to Elemental Eight? They have airbenders. They can teach me.”

“They can teach you the way of their airbending. Not only is ours different, but it relates directly to your Avatar Spirit,” Iroh said. “It has to be Tenzin.”

“He says I have no right to be the Avatar. That I was a mistake. I mean, I know he’s wrong but how do you get through that kind of block!?” She let out a groan and rammed her face into the table.

Iroh sighed. “I’ll go have a talk with him.”

“What kind of talk?”

“I’ll tell him exactly what his father would think of his actions,” Iroh said with a grimace.

Corea winced. “…Ouch.”

“It will be a painful discussion, but he will agree to teach you.” Iroh stood up and walked toward the air temple.

“…Today has sucked,” Corea told her aunt, grumbling.

“Hey, at least it’s going to turn out well!” Apple Bloom said. “Iroh knows Tenzin, this’ll definitely work.”

“Yeah… OW!” Corea looked at her neck. “Something bit me!”

“Same…” Apple Bloom said, looking at her own neck. There was a small dart sticking out of it. “Great.”

Corea fell asleep instantly from the drug. Apple Bloom wasn’t even fazed – she just took up a fighting stance on top of the table. “All right, if you’re expectin’ me to keel over in the next few seconds, you’ve got a problem. Ah’ve got so much magical juices runnin’ through my veins that Ah’m immune to basically every poison.” She pulled a potion out of her bow, shifting it to a blood red color with her magic. “Bring it.”

Three people leaped out of a tree – a waterbender, firebender, and earthbender. They tossed their respective elements at her. She tossed a potion.

The potion exploded, sending the three attackers flying. With a controlled use of her magic, Apple Bloom was able to divide the earth in two with her other front hoof. She opted to take the flame head on and get burned rather than tossed to the side by the water. She yelled through the pain, but smashed a healing potion against herself to heal her burns instantly.

And then someone shot her with an actual gun in the leg. She wailed in pain, having to waste precious seconds to grab another healing potion. She slapped it against her leg, but it was too late – three more attackers had already come out of the trees. She readied another explosion potion, but a slab of rock hit her in the face, knocking her out.

The benders quickly grabbed Corea and took her away, leaving Apple Bloom out cold on the table.

~~~

Eve walked out of a meeting with the Empress of the Void, appearing from the spherical portal in the Tangleglade.

“So…?” Vriska asked.

“She put it to me rather plainly. We’re small fish and can’t be expected to ask favors from them.” Eve shrugged. “We’re welcome whenever we want, and borders are open, but we simply don’t have much to offer them. She was a bit colder than Nanoha, actually.”

Vriska shrugged. “Well she didn’t come from a Friendship is Magic world, she came from a fantasy adventure something or other. Nanoha did, from what I understand.”

Eve shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t expecting much. The Sparkle Census is going to want her data, and then Valentine is going to be curious about the magic, and I’m sure Starbeat will have more than a few questions for Blackjack and Gilgamesh. …If they’re still here.”

Vriska shrugged. “I’m not sure how they fit into all this. I get the impression they’re a wandering group, like I was.”

Eve nodded. “Right. Anyway, there’s one last thing I want to do… I’ve heard a lot about this Twilence. I’d like to meet her.”

Vriska nodded. “Right this way.” She tapped on one of the crystal-machine structures in the Tangleglade, and it recognized her signature. It gave her clearance to enter my library. I was waiting for them.

“Vriska, leave us please,” I said before anyone could say anything. “This is going to be a private conversation. Well, as private as it can be, anyway.”

Vriska blinked. “Uh…”

“No, you can’t ask why. …Well, you could, but I wouldn’t tell you. Again, not because I can’t, but because it would be horribly rude.”

Vriska looked at me for a moment. She decided the best reaction was a nostalgic chuckle. “Gog, I actually missed this.”

“Glad to hear it.” I levitated her back through the portal and forced it closed, leaving me and Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle alone in my library.

“I would offer you a chair but I know you aren’t going to take it,” I said.

“You could have stopped it.”

“Actually that was a case where I couldn’t,” I said. “The death of Twilight of Equis Vitis was something that needed to happen. There was too much foreshadowing, too much prophecy. She could not have outlived her friends. I had no power over that.”

“But you pulled her aside at the last minute!” Eve shouted. “You had the power to do that!”

“I wanted to give her hope. I wanted to give her something… Something that wouldn’t just become you.”

Eve twitched. “Well you gave her hope that quickly turned to terror and death. I hope you’re happy.”

“I am. I actually got to speak with her,” I said, a smile forming on my face. “Because she was about to die… I got to show her what you would become. I got to show you so much. I showed her the window in Celestia City, you know? The one with all of you in beautiful stained glass. Even as she left us, she knew that was the future. I told her more, but I shouldn’t tell you all of it.”

Eve narrowed her eyes. “Is that a ‘don’t want to’ or ‘can’t’ scenario?”

“A little bit of both,” I admitted.

“…You lied to her.”

“I told her no direct lies, Evening.”

“You were misleading and lied by omission.”

I lost control of my expression and allowed minor contempt to seep through. “Hypocrite.”

“What the-”

“They still don’t know what you are! You’ve been lying to them by omission for decades! Most of them have now known you longer than they knew Twilight! Soon enough that will be everyone. And need I remind you about the little scene at Sparky’s grave with Pinkie?”

Eve’s expression clouded.

“She doesn’t know, Eve. Our Prophet, GM, has blocked it from her intentionally. Because she would make you tell everyone. The secret wouldn’t be keepable!”

A tear rolled down her face. “I can’t tell them.”

“You will have to eventually,” I said. “But I can tell you that, since you’ve waited this long, you’ve ensured that all the things you feared would happen when you tell them are no longer just you panicking internally. They really will be hurt beyond imagination.”

Tears began to roll down her face. “W-why are you telling me this!?”

I let out a deep sigh. “…Because I got angry. I’m sorry.” I looked out the window at the stars. “I hate lies, but I have to hold myself to them so much. It just angers me when someone who doesn’t have to lie does.” I looked back at her, meeting her gaze. “…It was a mistake to wait any time at all to tell them. But now that it’s been years… Don’t go and tell them on account of me.”

Eve didn’t have a response to this.

“…Prepare yourself, Eve. You know it’ll happen eventually. …You’ve always known. I didn’t even have to tell you that.”

“I didn’t know all my fears were going to be true!” Eve shouted. “That’s… That’s just horrible! Which one of them is going to stop being friends, Twilence? Which one!?”

Tears appeared in my own eyes. “…I can’t tell you that.”

“But you know!”

“Yes. I do.”

She wept bitter tears, heaving her entire body. She couldn’t accept what I’d just told her.

I was, to put it simply, a horrible pony. I had let something slip I really shouldn’t have said…

I sighed. “Eve… Make use of this knowledge.”

“Make use of it!?”

“Cherish your friends while you still can,” I said. “Live every moment as if it would be your last with them.”

Eve was reminded of many dark things Pinkie had told her – that there would be great death, great struggle, and that at least one of them wasn’t going to make it. She stared into the abyss, shaking. “H-how do you cope?”

I wiped my own face. “…I don’t.”

“Wh…?”

I pointed at my Eye of Rhyme. “I had this thrust upon me. I suddenly had access to virtually everything. And shortly after that I knew what ka was, what it all meant, and… Eve, it’s not something you can deal with.”

“But you seem to have it together!”

“Me? Together!?” I twitched. “You think I have it together!?”

“I…”

“Do you want to know who lives and who dies?” I ask, allowing the calm exterior I always keep up to fall. I don’t care that those reading are seeing what they did to me - finally time for a secret to come out, I suppose. “I can tell you with exact precision what happens to who up to a certain point. Guess what happens to you?!”

“No, stop…”

“I know if you live or die, Evening Sparkle. I know what all of your major foes will be. I know what happens to the Collector a few years from now. I know what his plans are, what his origin is, and how he relates to everything in the larger picture of things! I know what the Dark Tower hides!”

“Stop!”

I cackled, a truly disturbing slasher smile placed on my face. Fitting. “Guess where my knowledge ends, Evening! Guess! Oh, too scared? It ends not all that far from today, believe it or not! We’re about halfway there, actually, if we use your narrative path! The entire multiverse will hang in the balance, Evening! The entire multiverse and the lives of everyone in it will hang on the actions you, I, our friends, our enemies, and those close to us! And I can’t see the result!” I spread my wings wide and screamed in her face. “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT IT’S LIKE TO KNOW BASICALLY EVERYTHING AND THEN HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENS AT THE END!?”

“STOP!” she boomed, summoning Seraphim in all its glory. I felt my magic drain to nothing. I was defenseless. She held a magical blade to my neck.

I dropped the smile and looked to the ground. “I know you won’t do it. You can’t. I live at least until the point I can’t see. If you somehow do kill me here, there’ll be a revival.”

Eve twitched, tears streaming down her face. Then she threw me to the ground. “You’re screwed up in the head.”

I nodded slowly. “I am. It’s… It’s not as bad as it could be. My origin had multiple endings. …I could have been the new Collector, except instead of having uncertain motivations and a complex philosophy, I’d just be an omnicidal maniac. As it is, the ending that turned out to be true was the second best one.” I stared right at her. “…Even the best one still would have left me like this, eventually.”

Eve looked at me with horror. “W-what in…”

“I am what needed to be created to understand,” I said, shaking my head. “And true understanding is a horrible curse. But somepony needed to have it. It just ended up being me.”

Eve took several steps back from me – she was terrified. Understandable. She should be. Everyone should be, really. I’m the worst kind of horror. I’m not a villain, and I never will be. I’m the epitome of uncomfortable truth.

How’s that? Do you all like what’s… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t take this out on you. Only a small number of you had any actual understanding of what you were doing, and… …I already forgave you. This conversation should never have happened. Unfortunately I do not possess the power of retcon…

I wiped my eyes. “…You should go,” I told Eve. “If you want, I can wipe this entire conversation from your mind.”

She considered it. She really considered it. She was an instant from accepting the wipe when her mind went somewhere. She remembered what I had told her.

Use this information.

“…I will take part of your burden onto myself,” she said, putting her hoof to her chest. “Now we both know what’s coming. You’re not alone anymore.”

I blinked. Then I started laughing through my tears. “Of course… Of course!”

“Hm?”

“That’s why… And then you’re here… And…” I couldn’t help myself. I rushed her into a hug. “…Thank you.”

She recoiled from me – still clearly terrified of what I was and what I stood for. I understood – a lesser mare would have been broken over this realization. But I had seen it too many times over the years.

“I’m sorr-” she began.

“It’s fine,” I interrupted. “It’s fine. You’ve done more than I thought you would. Strange how the finer details can sometimes mean so much.” I shook my head. “…You can feel free to tell Pinkie or the others anything you’ve learned here, just so you know.”

“…Everything hinges on our actions in the end…” she stared into the distance. “I’m the protagonist, aren’t I?”

I nodded. “No use hiding that fact from you anymore… Yeah, you are. You are the protagonist. You really shouldn’t go telling people that, though. There are… higher powers that would love to get a hold of you. Ones that can manipulate ka like putty. The kinds of powers that could change everything in the end.”

“…Knowledge is power,” Eve said.

“Knowledge is pain,” I added. “But it’s also needed. We… We can’t ignore it.”

“…But we can make of it whatever we want,” Eve said. “For all your screaming… You clearly don’t know everything. You didn’t know what I was going to do here.”

“I could have looked into the script.”

“You chose not to. And that allowed this to happen. Allowed us to… I don’t know, this is certainly some bizarre bonding. But that’s what it is. We were bonding. And now we have a bit of an understanding and a shared burden.” She stuck out a hoof. “You’re clearly suffering from those burdens. Let me take some of them.”

I smiled at her, taking her hoof. “There are some I can’t give you.”

“I don’t want any you don’t have to give me,” Eve said. “But I can have some. I’m sure Pinkie will be available as well.”

I nodded slowly. “It’s so good to be able to actually talk to you all. All I’ve been doing is watching… Waiting… Sitting in the background. But I can see it… I can see a time where that ends.”

“The ending?”

“A bit before that, actually,” I revealed. “I won’t have to be like this forever. I’ll be able to join you all out there. I just… Have to wait a little longer. And until then… It looks like I’ll be having visitors.”

Eve nodded. “You definitely will.”

We talked for a bit after that, but what we said either wasn’t important, or were things not meant to be known. She eventually left, and I told her she was always welcome back.

That… was not how I was expecting it to go. At all. I had been expecting a brief confrontation where we were at a standoff and basically agreed not to like each other. That’s where the plan for this scene was originally going, too. But it didn’t go there. Instead… We were laid bare.

I think this is better.

…I also apologize to those of you out there I hurt with what I said. I… wasn’t doing well. You’re fine, reading this story, leaving comments, and doing what you can to help it come along. I just had some stress. Don’t take it personally.

…Please?

…

I’m going to go cool off for a while. You probably won’t see me around for a bit. You need to find out what happens with Corea anyway. …I should probably apologize to her for overshadowing her chapter…

~~~

Corea woke up angry. “I’LL TAKE YOU ALL, HOOF TO HAND, YOU’LL GO DOWN DOWN DOWWWWN!”

“Feisty Avatar…” a tall man with a white beard said. “Or, should I say, not Avatar.”

Corea looked around – she was on a stage under an absurdly bright spotlight. All she could see was the man, a few people who were probably his followers, and the electric chair she was tied to.

The electric chair she was tied to.

“...Shit.” Instinctually she looked around to see if Iroh or Apple Bloom had heard her, then she realized how stupid that was. She couldn’t move her hooves at all, so there was no bending – and she really wasn’t good enough at magic to trigger any sort of effect with just her mind…

She started trying to pry herself out of the chair with brute earth pony strength, but that wasn’t working either.

“Are you done yet?” The man asked.

“What are you going to do to me!?”

“We’re going to kill you and create an Avatar that has a right to exist!” He said, spouting in her face. “And we’re going to televise the whole thing.”

“…That’s stupid. Seriously, if you wanted that you should have shot me with deadly nightshade or something in the forest. You’d have what you want, there’d be no chance someone comes to rescue me, and you also wouldn’t be such a bonehead that you would broadcast your faces on television!”

Everyone stared at her.

Oh, wait, that’s right, I’m in mortal danger. It was only as she realized this that the real fear started to set in.

The ringleader clearly picked up on this. “Ah, there it is. This is why everyone has to see the false Avatar at her most vulnerable. They have to see the fear, the brokenness, the lies printed on your face.”

“You’re crazy!” Corea shouted, already crying from the fear. She wasn’t able to counter anything he said anymore – fear had taken over. She just started screaming.

He slapped her, shutting her up. “You’re just some brat from another world destroying the way things should be. You have no right to be the Avatar. It’s time you gave it up to someone who deserved it.”

I’m going to die, she thought as he took a button out of his coat pocket. I am going to die to this moron.

The voice of other Avatars spoke to her.

You will live on, Avatar Kyoshi promised.

You have every right to live as we do within Raava, Avatar Roku consoled.

You will guide the next one to be more understanding, Avatar Wan said.

You are always within me, Corea, Raava herself promised. You belong. I chose you.

Screw this! Avatar Aang said. Corea, you’re not going to die here. Not today.

The rest of the Avatars looked at Aang like he was an absolute moron.

It seems like all is lost, Aang said. But you do not stand alone.

Raava’s vast presence shifted. He is right. I sense something following our spiritual energy…

A hurricane blasted through a nearby wall, knocking everyone to the ground and tearing Corea’s electric chair off its fixture. Tenzin leaped between Corea and her kidnappers, keeping a tremendous hurricane of wind around the two of them for protection.

“Tenzin!” Corea blurted. “You came to save me!”

“Of course I did. You’re the Avatar.”

Corea looked to the ground. “…They wanted what you wanted.”

“I did not know what I wanted. I still don’t.” Tenzin pushed forward, blowing the fire from the firebenders away – none of them knew how to deal with an airbender. It was a form of combat they knew nothing of. “But I know I can’t condone the killing of a child.”

Corea nodded. “…Thanks.”

“Don’t menti-”

A bolt of lightning went off, connecting at the ground beneath Tenzin’s feet. It sent him backward, knocking him against part of the wall that was still standing.

Tenzin’s carefully constructed shield of swirling wind fell, revealing the last man standing to be the ringleader. “I have no qualm with you, Tenzin.”

Tenzin began to stand back up. “I have a qualm with you.”

The man pointed a finger at Tenzin without hesitation. “I will take you out if you stand in defense of this imposter.”

“No.” Corea said, her eyes white with the energy of all the Avatars. A gust of wind mixed with a purple magic laser hit the man in the chest, knocking him to the ground. “You will not end the Air Nomads. You will not end Tenzin before he gets to live his life. You will not kill our son.”

Tenzin blinked. He could see them – the Avatars, all lined up behind Corea, standing with her.

His father was the closest.

Aang took a moment to smile warmly at Tenzin before forcing his energy into the next attack. They rushed into the man’s spirit. It did not take long for the light of his spirit to be engulfed by that of the Avatar – his powerful firebending stolen from him in only a matter of seconds.

They all spoke as one. “This is Avatar Corea, the One Hundred and Eighty-Third Avatar. She is one of us just as all of those in the past, and all of those in the future. We have chosen her to carry on the burden of this world. You have no right to go against what we have chosen.”

The man passed out, utterly defeated.

Take good care of her, Tenzin.

Corea dropped to the ground, dazed. She took a moment to realize what had happened. “…Oh no, I did it again didn’t I? Did I hurt anyone!?”

“You removed a man’s ability to bend,” Tenzin said, limping over to her. “…And showed me the face of my father.”

“I… Did?”

“Yes. You did.” He kneeled down to her. “…I recently had an old man tell me to teach you or suffer the consequences.”

“Iroh has a way of being persuasive, huh?”

“…Yes. He does.” Tenzin stood tall. “You will not only have to learn airbending – you will have to learn the ways of the Air Nomads. You will eat what we eat, breathe what we breathe, and sleep where we sleep. You will learn to meditate, and to understand what air is.”

“What is air?” Corea asked.

“Air is peace.”

Water is of submission…

Earth is of strength…

Fire is of passion…

Magic is of mind…

Air is of peace…

“I’ll take that to heart,” Corea assured him.

“Be sure that you do. We’ll start tomorrow.”

“Sweet. …Can you get me out of this chair first, though?”

“Sure.” He untied her. The first thing she did was wrap her hooves around his legs and start crying.

He didn’t recoil. He just sighed and accepted the embrace.

~~~

Eve returned to Equis Vitis with all of Pinkie’s team. Renee and Daniel were there, seeing the team of Rubies off.

Renee beamed when she saw them. “Oh, you’re back! I trust everything went well?”

“Nothing really changed,” Vriska said, shrugging. “We know about another Class 2. Friendlier than most, but not exactly going to bend over to help us. Though she did ruin a lot of the fun I was having with you guys…”

“I expect a full report by tomorrow with everything you learned. That includes you, Eve,” Renee said.

Eve blinked, processing the comment. “Oh. Yeah. Right. You’ll have it.”

“…Are you okay?” Flutterfree asked.

“Not especially,” Eve admitted. “Pinkie, we need to have a talk later.”

“Twilence spilled something didn’t she?” Vriska asked.

“Yeah,” Eve admitted. She had plans to tell Pinkie what she had found out from Twilence… But not about her true identity. She was going to go with it for now, like she’d been told. “It doesn’t have to happen now though.”

Pinkie nodded. “I know. …There is something that does need to happen though.” She turned to Nova. “Everypony’s here.”

Nova nodded. “Yeah… Okay, so this is going to start out sounding like really good news, and then get really soured really quickly. So prepare yourselves. I already know you’ll be understanding, but… It’s still going to be difficult.”

She had gotten everyone’s attention – even Eve’s.

“So…” She took a deep breath. “…Sunburst and I are getting married.”

Renee squeed. “Oh Nova that’s wonderful!”

“Seems a little fast…” Flutterfree commented.

“Pshaw, it’s love darling, it can happen however fast it needs!”

“You need to talk to Cadence, Renee,” Eve said.

“Quiet,” Jotaro told everyone, leaning down to Nova, keeping his eyes level with hers. “There’s a reason for this.”

“Yeah.” Nova coughed. “I’m pregnant right now. Found out two days ago.”

Vriska cocked her head. “Uh… Why are you saying that like it’s a death sentence?”

“Their parents. Their family,” Jotaro said, standing up and grabbing his hat. “They will not approve.”

Vriska put a hand to her mouth. “Oh. Oh I completely forgot about that…”

“Yeah,” Nova said, sagging. “My family is about as traditional as you can possibly get, not to mention Star-revering to boot. Sunburst’s is similar. We just… We can’t have them finding out. It’ll tear everything apart. So… this is what we decided to do. You are the only ones who know. I think Sunburst is going to tell Sunny and Corona, but that’s it. We just… we didn’t want to lie to you, like we’re going to lie to everyone else.”

Eve looked at Nova with sad eyes. “…Are you sure about this, Nova?”

“…I’m very sure, Eve. Both of us are.”

Eve saw she was serious. “I… I want to say you should feel free to tell them. To admit to what you two did.”

“But…?”

All your fears are true.

There are some mistakes you can’t come back from.

Eve sighed. “You know them best. What do you think they’d do to you if they found out?”

“Excommunication,” Nova said, tears forming in her eyes. “And I… I still want to be able to talk to my mom, Eve! I… I don’t want to push her away again…”

Flutterfree put a wing around her. “We understand, Nova. …We’re glad you told us. And we’ll respect your choice.”

Jotaro leaned back down and grabbed Nova’s shoulders. “Nova, whatever you do, care for your family. Don’t push them away for any reason. Care for your husband and keep him close. Love him. And love your child. They are your responsibility.” His fists tightened around her shoulders. “You can ruin them just by not being there.”

“I… I know…”

“We’ll understand if you have to leave,” Flutterfree said.

“I’ll have to go on maternity leave, yeah,” Nova said. “But I’ll be back. Sunburst and I already talked about this. I’m never gone for long. But he…” She shook her head. “He’s going to have to give up the surveys… he says he doesn’t mind, that’d he’d love an opportunity to return to his scholarly studies, but I know he’s disappointed!”

Eve put a hoof on her shoulder. “I think he’ll be happy as a stay-at-home dad. I don’t think you’d be happy if you gave all this up.”

“But I-”

“It was a mistake both of you made. You have to think about both of you,” Eve said, smiling.

“It’s a balance,” Daniel admitted.

Renee nodded in understanding. “…Your life is about to get quite rocky, Nova. But we’ll be there alongside you. Daniel and I know a thing or two about making a marriage work. We can help you.”

“Jotaro too,” Pinkie said, gesturing at the huge man. “Don’t underestimate him.”

“I… I know,” Nova said, a smile coming to her face. “You all… Thank you.”

Eve pulled everyone into a group hug that became more of a group dogpile.

Pinkie was the first to speak. “Well, I have another wedding to start planning!”

“Now now, Pinkie, I’m not the one getting married this time,” Renee said coyly. “I have a few ideas this time.”

“Psh, you already got your wedding. Plus you designed like half of it against my wishes. We also need to get this done fast for their sake – no dilly-dallying for a few months like you and Daniel did. We gotta mush mush!”

As Renee and Pinkie delved deeper and deeper into ‘planning’, Eve put a hoof around Nova.

“Sometimes I wish I was as strong as you,” Eve said.

“…What?”

“To just come out and say things. There are times in the past where… Well, everything would have been better if I just said something.”

“…Are you okay?”

“I talked to a version of myself who knew just about everything and told me more than she was supposed to. So not really. But I’ll be working that out with Pinkie, you can worry about your own problems.”

Nova nodded. “Yeah… Problems.”

“Hey. You made a mistake. Forgive yourself.”

Nova wiped her eyes. “…Thanks, Evening.”

“Anytime,” Eve said, hugging her closer. “As long as I’m able.”

073 - The Hunger for Games

“Hello ladies, gentlemen, characters, and readers! Do we have a show for you tonight! Who I am is not important – or, well, it is, but I’ll get to that later. What is important is that we’re holding yet another round of multiversal Hunger Games! After the wash that was the Super Smash event we have returned to the basics! With us today are twenty-four contestants hand-picked from the new multiversal neighborhood on the block, Merodi Universalis and its neighbors! What will they be doing?

“Why, they’ll be fighting to the death in a battle royale!

“I can tell all of you want to scream at me right about now, and are finding you can’t. That’s because none of you get to move until the games actually start – because I have to explain the rules first! All of you may use any powers at your disposal to kill all the other contestants, and those of you with multiversal powers will find that they still function but cannot be used to escape the games. Trust me, it won’t work.

“Of course, all twenty-four of you could just fight each other right here right now and end the games in an instant, but the arena is a huge forest designed to have many places to hide and resources to live for multiple days. The smartest thing to do is to run into the forest and take a moment to plan, forge alliances, etcetera. However, you’ll notice that in the center of you is a pile of weapons, artifacts, and supplies. If you’re willing to risk an early elimination, you can attempt to get an edge in the competition by fighting over this Cornucopia.

“I can still feel you planning to refuse to play. Don’t worry, there won’t actually be any consequences – all deaths will be reversed upon the completion of the games. Oh, still not enough? Perhaps I should have mentioned the fact that if you don’t play all of you will die permanently. We’re powerful enough to drag you here against your will and keep you frozen while I monologue, think for a moment how much effort it would take to squash you bugs.

“For additional incentive, the winner gets a wish. That’s right, a wish. Naturally there are limitations, but we can bring people back to life, we can give you any object you could desire, we can change the life of any individual, and we can do so many other things. That is because we are a Class 1 civilization. Some of you may know us as Them; others of you have no idea who we are. Suffice to say that “Class 1” is all you need to know.

“And to answer your deep, burning question of ‘why!?’, it’s simple really. We’re really, really bored up here at the top. These games break up some of our monotony. If you want a more ‘standard’ reason it’s because you’re trespassing on one of our universes, the one you call Earth Starfleet or Galaxus Quadrants. Your punishment is to play these games. …Nah, it’s just because we’re bored, we couldn’t care less what you did to Earth Starfleet, we’ve got thousands of them.

“Ready? Good. It’s time to meet all the contestants then, because we have an audience after all! Hello members of Them society and those of you reading these words off a page or screen! It’s time to see what the new players on the multiversal block have up their sleeves in a fight to the death! We’ve assigned the twenty-four contestants into twelve ‘districts’ by our ‘eh, it just works’ algorithm.

“In the first grouping, we have Evening Sparkle, Charter-Princess, Overhead, and Very Important Pony alongside Corona Shimmer, a non-Charter Princess and overpowered bundle of fire, fire magic, fiery personality, and Stand with a fiery emblem on it. These two are known for shaping their society and are heralded as heroes!

“Second, we have a pair of sisters, Renee and Allure, an Overhead and one of the League of Sweetie Belles’ core four, two unicorns who definitely aren’t killers by nature. I wonder what will happen when they are forced to?

“Next are a pair of old friends, Flutterfree and Nova, an unusual conglomeration of a pegasus, vampire, and spirograph source who’s known for her Kindness alongside a unicorn who’s just now realizing she doesn’t have any of her equipment with her. What a fun realization!

“Pinkie and Rohan, placed here because of… Well secret reasons! Some of you know exactly why they’re a pair, and others don’t. We’re not absolute jerks who will spill all your secrets for the fun of it. Just know they’re a party pony and manga artist. …But oh so much more.

“The two non-pony members of Merodi’s primary team share the fifth spot, the quiet, tactical, powerful Jotaro and self-proclaimed spiderbitch Vriska! I bet she wishes she had her dice right now, huh? Sorry, maybe you’ll find your equipment in the Cornucopia! Heh.

“Rev and Starbeat, versions of each other, stand together. The devoutly religious explorer and a pony doomed to love everything. A beacon of hope and a living tragedy.

“After them, Alushy and Blackjack, so grouped because… …They’re both multiversal travelers. Blackjack is notably swearing like nothing else internally because she has no guns. Ah, the no equipment rule, the great equalizer. Or unequalizer in the case of others.

“Representing the United States of ‘Murica – ahem, the Multiverse – are Ambassador Funny Valentine and the froggy hero known as Froppy! They’re here for freedom, justice, and trying not to die.

“Ninth, Jenny of the Red Gloves, effective master of Dracogen Enterprises and cocky regen girl. With her is Brutalight Sparcake, the angriest of angry villain types. Already imagining how to eviscerate every last one of the contestants, wow!

“Olivia, the great hacker of Merodi Universalis and Queen Toph Beifong sit together because… Because… Because it just works. Similar for the eleventh grouping, Thrackerzod the eldritch unicorn and Blumiere the on-off mayor of Celestia City… Did we just give up on classifications at this point?

“Oh, wait, the twelfth match up. O’Neill and Daniel, representing Earth Tau’ri. Congratulations! You two make sure the pattern ends on a high note. The old General who doesn’t age and the aging archeologist!

“Regardless, that’s everyone. I hope you’ve been planning your strategy this entire time, because now that I’ve talked far too long it’s time to actually begin! Remember, winner gets a wish! Refuse to play and you all die permanently! Please be entertaining. Some of you have bets riding on you.

“The moment I announce that the games start, you won’t hear from me again until tonight when I give an update on who’s fallen! I bet you’ll all be devastated to be without my glorious, heavenly voice, but we need you to focus.

“LET THE HUNGER GAMES BEGIN! Place your bets now and may the odds be ever in your favor.”

~~~

The arena for the Games was a simple forest of deciduous trees, the leaves in the transition from spring to fall. There was no sign of civilization in any direction, just endless trees upon trees. The ground rolled with numerous hills, and it would not be surprising to find a river somewhere amongst the trees. The only abnormal sight was the two moons in the sky, both showing a pale yellow in the daytime sky.

It was currently afternoon and a chill breeze blew through the air. Twenty-four contestants stood in a circle around a pile of loot – weapons, food, medicine, and equipment. Raging Sights was easily visible, sitting near the middle of the Cornucopia, while many of the weapons were clearly just taken from Blackjack’s inventory and thrown onto the ground.

Allure plotted rather than listening to the voice of Them - and really, that was a stupid name for a race. She could see some rations near the edge of the Cornucopia pile, food bars that would not only keep her alive but give her an edge when she did need to fight. …Her style of combat was very non-lethal, but breaking a spine after the target was down should work…

She shuddered at the thought. They clearly didn’t have any choice but to play this sadistic game, she would just have to put her emotions to the side. She really wasn't sure if she could do that, but she was going to try at least.

At the moment, though, the plan was to grab the energy bars and run. She’d have to run a little closer to get a good telekinetic grip around them, but not very far…

“LET THE HUNGER GAMES BEGIN!”

Allure made it one step before something exploded behind her, tossing her into the pile that was the Cornucopia. Blumiere landed next to her, but he ignored the presence of the unicorn, attempting to defend himself from Brutalight – failing miserably as one of her swords drove into his chest, another one cutting off his head.

First blood, Allure’s mind managed to register before her instincts took over. She grabbed a gun she was resting on with her telekinesis and started shooting wildly while running away. She tripped over her hooves, rolling to the ground as things exploded over her. Corona had tried to grab Raging Sights with a burst of fire magic, but Thrackerzod had already taken the crystal device and teleported away.

Allure suddenly felt alone. She lifted the bars with her telekinesis and started running, ignoring the fact that one of Starbeat’s limbs had just flown past her. The unicorn instead focused on the form of Renee, who had been running away from the start.

She’ll help me.

“Hey Renee!” Allure called. “I’m co-”

Renee glanced behind her shoulder just in time to get shot in the face with a sniper rifle.

“Bullseye,” Allure heard Vriska call.

Allure stared at Renee’s lump form in fear. “Wh… Wh…”

“Hey, it’s temporary,” Vriska said, looking down at Allure while kicking Brutalight away. “I saw an opportunity and took it. Speaking of…” She aimed the rifle at Allure.

Allure whirled around, the rage in her allowing her to use the gun she had grabbed to shoot at Vriska. The troll’s luck was high enough that no bullets hit her, but one of the bullets hit the sniper rifle, breaking it.

Vriska looked like she wanted to fight, but the moment a razor-sharp boomerang embedded itself in her lower back she decided it was a bad idea to stick around. She flew off into the forest.

Allure fired after her, long after her clip had run out of ammo. She threw the gun to the ground, breathing heavily.

It’s not permanent… It’s not permanent… It’s not permanent… she kept telling herself, oblivious to the explosions happening around her. She picked up the energy bars, looking at them, not sure what to conclude.

She shook her head – she needed to keep moving. There were a lot of people in these games who couldn’t be allowed to get a wish. She would have to fight for the sake of stopping them, if nothing else. She moved to leave.

She had taken too long to sort through the thoughts in her mind.

Jenny punched a hole through Allure’s skull, killing her instantly. She became just another one of the smears of blood around the Cornucopia mere minutes after the games had started.

~~~

Jotaro had gotten out of the Cornucopia area as fast as he could with a time-stop. He probably could have gotten more than one kill in the midst of stopped time at the Cornucopia if he had tried, but he was unsure exactly how many of the people there would be able to counter Star Platinum and he wasn’t willing to take that much of a risk. So he vanished, running into the forest.

That had been about fifteen minutes ago. Already, he was surveying the land. The forest was sparse and the trees were thin, ensuring that any fights would take place without interference from giant trees. Less cover. As natural as the forest may have looked, it was still designed to be an arena.

He found a river quickly, using Star Platinum to get some fish – easy food. Better than hunting deer or some other forest mammal. Given his background such things were relatively effortless for him, but he needed to be on the top of his game at all times. He began to ponder what he could do against certain powers that might trump Star Platinum…

He punched a tree, knocking a branch loose. He shredded the outside bark, creating a long spear with an ultra-sharp point. A weapon. Next, he took a rock and sharpened it with Star Platinum’s fists, creating a stone knife.

He put the knife in his pocket and slung the spear on his back, poking it through his coat collar so it would stay. He would only have them out if he needed them.

He had food, weapons, and the lay of the land. There was no question in his mind – it was time to start playing Them’s stupid game and get it over with. He’d try to win, of course. He was Jotaro Kujo. It was what he did.

It was time to hunt.

He backtracked a little bit, heading back in the direction of the Cornucopia, but at an angle. It didn’t take long for him to come across tracks – tracks of a human man who clearly had no idea how to be subtle in his movements. Jotaro even knew exactly who it was – Rohan Kishibe.

There was someone who needed to be taken out quickly. Give Rohan enough time, he could have his opponents eating out of his hand left and right…

Not to mention what he could do if he got hold of any paper.

Jotaro followed the tracks, finding it pathetically easy to catch up to Rohan. The manga artist was strolling through the woods, not a care in the world. It would be easy to stop time and snap his neck. Jotaro had plans to do just that, and was waiting for the right opportunity when Thrackerzod flew out of nowhere, brandishing Raging Sights like it was a weapon. The eldritch unicorn had clearly not gotten the device to cooperate with her, but she had managed to work out how to use it as a magic amplifier. A series of magic rings appeared around Raging Sights, apparently with the intent of vaporizing Rohan in an instant.

“Heaven’s Door!” Rohan shouted. Thrackerzod squeezed her eyes shut, but the Stand forced them open with its fingers. The spell cancelled, and Rohan scrawled a note in Thrackerzod’s book before closing it. “Thought I was so dangerous I had to be specifically hunted down?”

Thrackerzod growled. “What did you do?”

“You have to do everything I say. For now, protect me from all threats, Thrackerzod.”

Thrackerzod swore in eldritch but was unable to refuse.

Jotaro snuck away. He could handle any one of them with ease, but both at once? Five seconds was only enough time to, for sure, take care of one. And Thrackerzod probably had some dark nature within her that could be used to survive a normally lethal hit.

He would need more to be certain of his victory. It would be best not to face them now. …Even if that meant Rohan would get more ‘allies’ through Heaven’s Door.

Jotaro supposed he could probably strike an alliance with Rohan… But no, it would be too dangerous. Rohan would have to ensure loyalty with Heaven’s Door. Then where would Jotaro be?

Jotaro opted to just let Rohan and Thrackerzod go without knowing he was ever there. He was soon able to move freely again. It was late in the day, perhaps hunting wasn’t the right course of action just yet. The games would likely take multiple days to complete if people played it smart…

It was time to start thinking about the long haul.

~~~

Eve had teleported into a distant tree the moment the Games started. She needed more time to organize her thoughts than the monologue from Them had allowed.

Did she dare believe what they had said? That all of this would be undone at the end?

…She had to, because she knew they weren’t lying about flat killing everyone if they refused to play. That wasn’t a gambit.

Plus… she knew they had to get out of this alive. There were things she’d heard from Pinkie, from Twilience… There was no way all of them could die. This wasn’t one of those moments. This wasn’t the ‘end’.

The Them was probably telling the truth.

…Or they were just copies of their real selves, like what happened in the Starcross Society with Corona. Or in the copying universe…

She ground her teeth. Regardless, she was going to have to play along with these games and either experience death herself, or kill everyone else. That was going to be absolutely horrifying regardless…

She let out a deep breath, shaking her head. Sure, she’d ‘play’ because she had to. But she had no idea how she was going to go about it… What was the plan? Was there a plan? Who should she go after first?

That was a terrible thought to have.

A cupcake hit her in the side of the head. Eve looked down at the base of her tree to see Pinkie and Flutterfree standing there.

“Hey Evening!” Pinkie called.

“Oh, hey,” Eve said. Then she tensed. “Wait, aren’t we supposed to be fighting?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah, we are, but we’re still on the first day Eve! We can work together until we have to stop!”

Flutterfree nodded. “It makes the chances better that one of us will win. And this way we don’t have to fight each other.”

Eve fluttered down to the ground, a smile on her face. “…I love that idea.”

“And you don’t have to worry, the Them was telling the truth,” Pinkie said. “We’ll all go back once someone wins.”

“Good to know. So, who should we gather for our little team next?”

Pinkie sighed. “Nova and Renee are already out.”

“W-what?”

“The Cornucopia,” Pinkie explained. “A lot of us are already gone.”

“…So the team’s just us?”

Flutterfree nodded. “Yeah… Just us. Most of the others won’t want to team up if we just ask.”

“…Then we must be stronger together and get to the end,” Eve said.

“Must we?” Flutterfree asked, glancing from Eve to Pinkie. “All we need to do is keep anyone bad from winning.”

“Trying to win is the best way of doing that!” Pinkie said.

Eve nodded. “Right.”

“By the way, Eve, you should probably test out Seraphim to see what exactly it can still do.”

“Oh,” Eve spread her wings, activating Seraphim. She was still able to dial any of the universes with unusual physics she was already aware of, but the moment she tried to move anything through the portal, it just passed right through Seraphim without going to another universe. “Right, same effect, but we can’t leave, just like the Them said. That is a stupid name. I thought Rev was joking…”

“…We really can’t defy Them can we?” Flutterfree asked.

Pinkie shook her head. “No. They’re too big. We’re just pieces on a board game to Them. Or perhaps in a casino, since they’re betting on us.”

“Eternally bored…” Eve said, shaking her head. “We’re one of many, many experiments they perform just because they can, aren’t we? …I feel sorry for the multiverse.”

“It’s a strange kind of evil,” Pinkie admitted. “He did mention doing Smash Bros, after all.”

“...Smash Bros?” Eve asked, cocking her head.

“Multiversal Heroes except more original.”

“They’re not like the Celestialsapien at all,” Flutterfree said. “They seemed… neutral, just arrogant. These beings… they just don’t care.”

“Talking about Them isn’t really going to help us win,” Pinkie said.

Eve looked at the sun. “We should probably make a camp of some sort for the night. I can cut a burrow in the ground with Seraphim.”

Pinkie transformed her mane into a drill and cut a hole into the ground. “Or I could just do this!” she called from inside. “Come on down, the place is well-furnished!”

Flutterfree and Eve crawled through Pinkie’s hole into… a living room with several sofas, a TV, soft pink wallpaper, and a bright red carpet. Pinkie was drilling holes into the walls as they entered, creating more exits in the otherwise chokehold home.

“Wow,” Eve said. “You went overboard.”

“If we’re going to have an underground bunker, it might as well be in style!” Pinkie said, turning off her mane-drill. “Couches, TV, multiple exits, a snack fridge, we have everything!”

“…Does the snack fridge have snacks?” Flutterfree asked.

Pinkie shrugged. “Dunno.” She opened the fridge and found a mysterious plastic container with a brown sediment on the bottom. “…This might be edible.”

Eve summoned some fruit from the aether and put them into the snack fridge. “Now it has everything.”

Pinkie giggled. “Yep! Now…” she turned on the TV. “How’s about we watch the only program on right now, the Hunger Games?”

Flutterfree blinked. “…Pinkie, are you allowed to cheat this much?”

“At the moment I’m not bound by the normal rules of the story, I’m bound by whatever Them’s rules are.” She sat down on a chair, watching herself do the same thing on the screen. “This is a special case where I can go a biiit further than usual. Though I’m probably ticking more than a few of Them off.” She giggled.

“The less fun they have the better,” Eve asserted. “So, what’s on besides us?”

“Corona!”

~~~

Corona felt naked without Raging Sights.

Technically she still had a nightshirt on without Raging Sights’ barrier jacket/battle dress, which she always had in case a universe didn’t allow magic, but it did little to comfort her. An integral part of who she was now was in the hooves of Thrackerzod.

It wasn’t going to be easy to find the eldritch unicorn and take it back either. She could try to fly up and get a bird’s-eye view of the arena, but someone was bound to shoot her down if she did that. She wasn’t positive she could block an attack from every other contestant in the arena.

…She actually didn’t remember all twenty-four who were in the arena. That was an issue. What if she had a plan and forgot about a particular power involved? It was… concerning.

There was also the fact she really, really didn’t want to even fake-kill someone. She really wanted to just sit at this tree and do nothing the rest of the games, but that probably wasn’t an option.

“Fancy running into you here.”

Corona’s ears perked up. “Oh. Hey Toph. You want to fight now?”

Toph walked in front of Corona and created a chair of earth for her to sit in. “Not particularly. I was thinking more like we should make an alliance. Two old friends, facing all their other old friends and enemies together.”

Corona smirked. “Pass.”

“…what?”

“I said pass. We’ll just have to turn against each other eventually if we do that. I can already see one of us not paying any attention, and the other one thinking ‘maybe I should kill her now and get it over with’… I don’t want to go through that.”

Toph put a hand to her head. “I think you’re getting too deep.”

“You could say that,” Corona said, standing up and stretching her wings. “I’ll only fight you here if you want. You came here with plans of peace. I won’t punish you for that.”

Toph stood up as well, pursing her lips. “You know, I could order you as your Queen.”

“Princess of Passion,” Corona reminded her, smirking. “I only serve under you because I like it.”

Toph shrugged. “See you around, then. Here’s to hoping one of us wins without having to lob the other’s head off.”

“I’d drink to that. If I had a drink.”

Toph chuckled. Then she created a lump of earth under her feet and started ‘surfing’ away on it.

Corona went back to sitting at the base of her tree. At some point she’d climb into it and go to sleep for the night, but at the moment she wasn’t going anywhere. Just sit and think.

~~~

Blackjack decided she was going to make a friend to start these games off – fighting alone tended to make her go crazy. Unfortunately Gilgamesh wasn’t here… but a lot of the people who were here were friendly, right?

Not to mention she felt odd without her gear. She was still a cyborg pony able to regenerate, turn her hooves into hands, and see targets over enemies; but the only gun she had gotten away with from the Cornucopia was a simple rifle. Her magic bullets might be more effective, depending on the situation she ended up in.

Her scans detected a target – someone was over there. It was currently red, but that was because everyone was a possible enemy in this arena at the moment. She opted to approach carefully, ruffling her wings into a more comfortable and limber position.

It was Daniel Jackson, stumbling through the woods, a haunted expression on his face – he’d probably seen Renee bite it. His aging face only added to the sorrow in his expression.

“Uh… H-”

Daniel pulled out a gun and fired at Blackjack, hitting her right in the leg. Her systems took over, beginning to regenerate, but Celestia that hurt. “What the fuck man!?”

Daniel didn’t stop. He fired again and again, though this time Blackjack raised a magic shield to stop all the bullets. Being friends was clearly out of the question, so she was just going to have to kill him. She fired two magic bolts and hit him dead on. Nothing seemed to happen.

“What th-”

Something invisible slapped her across the face. It felt like the skin of a fish – except freezing cold and burning hot at the same time. She whirled around on the air, catching sight of O’Neill right next to her. She kicked out with her hoof – but what she hit wasn’t actually O’Neill. It was a tree.

“Fuck all kinds of sushi!” Blackjack blurted. “All of them!”

“Go Fish,” O’Neill said, mockingly. Blackjack knew Crimson Sushi only affected sight – she could go for the sound of his voice. She turned around, launching spells wildly where she thought he was.

As it turned out there was a tree he had effectively made invisible by swapping its visuals with that of with a patch of air, so she ended up running into the trunk. Her shield fell down and a few of Daniel’s bullets hit her in the back.

“Fuck this,” she muttered, executing a teleport. She had no idea where she was now – but she knew she had a freeze-burn mark on her face and numerous bullet holes in her body. Her energy reserves would heal those eventually, but she’d need to eat gems to heal much more. Or maybe a magic energy bar or something…

She shook her head – they hadn’t been playing around back there. Clearly, trying to make friends wasn’t going to work here, at least not with those two. Making friends was an impediment to winning if you didn’t already trust your teammates…

She really didn’t want to have to do this alone. Why did she have to be the only person she really knew here? Why couldn’t Gilgamesh have come along? Or that other version of herself? Or Littlepip?

Dammit, I’m missing my friends again, Blackjack said with a sigh. Don’t dwell on it now, they’re gone. They’re all gone.

Or are they?

There’s a wish on the line here.

Blackjack stood bolt upright. There were limits to Them’s power… But certainly they could bring her friends back. Yeah… Yeah, they could! All she had to do was win and all the losses could be fixed!

She had a one in twenty-four chance.

She really liked those odds.

She needed to heal up – but after that, she was going to destroy every last one of these opponents. Every. Last. One.

Because she needed to win. And that was her talent.

~~~

Ambassador Valentine and Froppy had managed to pull some shenanigans with Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap in order to duplicate the one gun they had gotten into a dozen copies, producing effectively-infinite ammunition and a firearm for both of them. They just had to be careful not to let any specific bullet come in contact with an alternate of itself. It was the problem with D4C – using it alone to break universe boundaries resulted in the instability of alternates. A powerful weapon, yes, but fraught with drawbacks.

Valentine would have loved to know how Them managed to create sub-universes for D4C to reach into on the fly whenever D4C felt the need to. He wasn’t even entirely sure the universes D4C was visiting were even real.

They had set up camp next to a tree split down the middle. Valentine watched the sun set. “A wish for the glory of USM…” Valentine said, hands to his eyes.

“Ribbit. What do you think it’ll be?”

“There are many internal issues I could wish away. The President has her hands full with the Ink Rebellion at the moment, but the economic crisis may be more important in the long run.” He put a hand to his face. “There’s also the request for technology that would revolutionize everything. Effective time travel. The Stand bestowal pills the Merodi have. Devices that can create universes to spec…” He folded his arms. “There are many options to consider on our path to victory.”

“We still have to win, though.”

“Only one of us must make it to the top. Without taking into account powers, that’s a one in twelve chance. Taking into account that I have one of the stronger abilities in this world, it’s higher than that.”

Froppy nodded. “We’ll still have to be careful.”

“We’ll also have to be ruthless,” Valentine said, turning to Froppy. “I understand you are friends with some of our enemies.”

“I wouldn’t exactly say friends.”

“But you are fond of them, correct?”

“Yep.”

“Even in this world of no consequences, fighting the faces of people who are not enemies is disconcerting. Especially to the death.”

“Ambassador, I won’t falter,” Froppy asserted. “There are no moral concerns here, and I can put aside my emotions for the sake of success.”

Valentine looked in her eyes for several minutes. “I believe you. You will fight well regardless of what we face.”

“Tomorrow,” Froppy said.

“Yes,” Valentine admitted. He pressed himself between a piece of wood and the ground to access alternate worlds, grabbing a few versions of himself. “We will take shifts standing guard.”

It sure is handy he doesn’t explode when next to himself, Froppy noted. “Ribbit.”

“Sleep, and rest your mind,” Valentine said. “We have a long day ahead of us.”

~~~

One person remained alive at the Cornucopia, the owner of all the loot. All the guns, magic artifacts, and food.

Her name was Brutalight Sparcake. She had been the only one crazy enough to stick around after the initial fights and death. She had no idea how many she had killed – at least two, definitely injuring a lot more – and now she was the king of the hill.

And nothing had happened all day. No one had come to challenge her. The only fun she’d gotten was tormenting Starbeat. The mare’s leg had been removed by a stray attack, stranding her in the Cornucopia, but she’d still lived long enough for Brutalight to have a round of ‘entertainment’ with the cursed mare. Then Brutalight had killed her.

She was going to kill every last one of them. There were no consequences here, she didn’t have to worry about her friends getting caught in the crossfire, and she knew so many of the faces here and would want nothing more than to tear their sorry eyes out of their skulls…

Probably roast the organs and eat them as well. She should have saved Starbeat for that rather than vaporizing the body. Shame.

She cackled to herself – it was times like this when she remembered she was an Element of Insanity. Quite a delightful feeling.

“COME AND GET ME!” she shouted in the Royal Canterlot Voice. “I HAVE ALL THE STUFF! COME OOOOON! I BET IF YOU ALL RUSHED ME AT ONCE YOU COULD GET ME!”

There was no response. She knew some of them heard her – they had to, that voice went out for miles – but none felt like coming on her terms.

Fine then. She could wait. She could wait all night. Sleep was for the weak.

But they would come eventually… Eventually…

And then they would die by her hoof.

That was its own reward. The wish would just be a bonus.

~~~

“It’s back to us,” Flutterfree said, pointing at the TV. “We didn’t get to see everyone.”

“Guess we’re not going to bother showing everyone,” Pinkie said with a shrug. “That would make for a really long chapter.”

“Brutalight is as disturbing as always…” Eve said, shaking her head. “The good news is it looks like she’s going to get herself killed in her insanity. We won’t have to deal with her.”

“Maybe,” Pinkie said. “But she was a focus, so she might b-”

“HELLO EVERYONE!” the voice of the Them boomed into everyone’s mind. “It’s time for your nightly update! Day 1 is done, and oooh boy we’ve already lost a ton of contestants! A fourth of the original number have been cut down in the short time between the start of the game and now! Blumiere has the honor of being first blood! Those who perished today include Renee, Allure, Nova, Starbeat, and Jenny!”

Eve’s pupils dilated. “Jenny!? On the first day!?”

“Yes, you heard me folks, the ‘unkillable’ Jenny has fallen to one of the other contestants! Who? I’ll never tell. That’s for you all to wonder about! With that, I bid you all goodnight – sleep tight, don’t let the other contestants bite!”

The Them stopped talking, leaving the three ponies in silence.

“Sleep in shifts?” Pinkie suggested.

“Sleep in shifts,” Eve agreed. “Flutterfree, you go first.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Got it. …I didn’t know Starbeat was out.”

“Eighteen left…” Eve shook her head. “This isn’t going to take very long, is it?”

“I’m thinking less than a week,” Pinkie admitted. “Though we’re probably in a universe where everything takes place in a single instant.”

“…Let’s not think about that right now. You two go to sleep, I’ll wake you in a few hours,” Flutterfree gestured to the couches. “I’ll tell you if anything interesting happens on the television.”

The moment the two of them rolled under their covers, the television switched to static, for nothing of note happened that night… that would be shown to them, anyway.

~~~

The sun rose on the Cornucopia, and Brutalight’s sleep-deprived face.

Nothing had happened the entire night.

“They’ll come eventually…” she said, left eye twitching. “Eventually.” She began to root around the Cornucopia, looking for anything to draw potential victims to the Cornucopia. “WHO WANTS A SOLID GOLD RIFLE? I HAVE A- wait why the hell is there a solid gold rifle here?” With considerable effort, she tossed it to the side. “There has to be something…”

She pulled the All-Night mask out of the pile. “…Well this’ll keep me from falling asleep, at least.” She slapped it onto her face. She didn’t feel any less tired, but there’d be no nodding off for sure now.

Once again, there was silence.

God, I’m lonely, Brutalight thought to herself. I wish any of the girls were here, or Six… Hell, even one of my moronic subjects would be preferable to this. She sighed audibly. She could go hunting for them…

No, that’d mean admitting defeat! She was king of the hill and she was going to stay that way – nobody was going to lure her away from it! “COME FACE ME ALREADY, COWARDS!”

Nothing.

“FINE THEN. I’LL JUST SIT HERE, UNOPPOSED, AND BECOME THE FINAL BOSS OF THE HUNGER GAMES!” She raised her hoof into the air and shook it as violently as she could. She tossed a grenade into the forest just to have an explosion punctuate her claim.

Nothing.

She groaned. There were no books in the pile, so she started doing the next best thing to do when you’re bored.

Meticulously sort a pile of random junk into neat, organized piles of random junk to make it easier to find everything.

~~~

The screams of Brutalight from the television woke Flutterfree and Evening up in a panic. They were ready to fight for their lives.

Pinkie held up her hooves. “Woah woah woah! Calm down everypony! That’s just the sound of Brutalight losing her sani… Wait, hold on, that’s a dumb sentence. Uh… If she’s already insane what other part of her mind can she lose? Eve, help me here.”

“Give me a moment to lower my adrenaline,” Eve said, clutching her chest as if it were about to explode. “Good galloping grapes…”

Flutterfree rubbed her eyes, trying to focus less on her feeling of internal panic and more on practical matters. “What time is it?”

“Morning’o’clock,” Pinkie said. “Which is to say I have no idea, days may not even be twenty-four hours here.”

Eve rubbed her eyes, summoning a cup of coffee from the aether. “I did not need to wake up like this…”

“Did anything happen in the night?” Flutterfree asked.

Pinkie shook her head. “TV was static until Brutalight started screaming.”

“Do we… listen to her?”

“Aha, no,” Eve said. “Who knows what kind of world-ending powers she’s got in that stash?”

“Well it did have Raging Sights, but not anymore,” Pinkie said.

“And if there’s anything else of that power level or utility, we’re screwed if we try to take her on.”

“We’ll have to do it eventually,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“Let someone else do it,” Eve grunted. “In case it isn’t obvious I really don’t want to go face her.”

“Got it,” Pinkie said. “But we’ll have to do something. We can’t just hide in our house the entire games.”

“Why not?”

“Much higher chances of losing and also of ticking Them off to interfere.” Pinkie shrugged. “I mean, in the original Hunger Games the overlords or whatever would interfere from time to time if they felt like it.”

“Original?”

“Them aren’t being very creative. They just saw this formula and copy/pasted it.”

“Maybe if they applied themselves they wouldn’t be so bored!”

Flutterfree nodded. “They could be more dangerous that way...”

Eve wasn’t sure how to think about Them at this point, so she just shook her head. “Right, plan. Plan is good. Go out and hunt for other contestants with my magic sense?”

“Or lure them to us,” Pinkie suggested. “Do something flashy, let people know where we are, then lead them into a trap!”

“I like that idea,” Flutterfree said.

“You’ll most likely be the bait, though,” Eve pointed out. “Weakest looking, ‘easy’ kill.”

“…I like the idea less now, but still more than going out and hunting.”

“I can set up magic traps, Pinkie can set up party cannons. …You can, right?”

Pinkie pulled out a machine gun laced with miniature flamethrowers. “I have a lot more freedom right now.”

“I can tell. That’s good for us.” Eve rubbed her hooves together. “So, we set up traps, Flutterfree, are you willing to fly above the treeline for a short while, using Lolo to grab attention?”

“Won’t that look suspicious?”

“Not if you look like you’re trying to search for something.”

Flutterfree thought about this for a moment and nodded. “All right. But they’re going to try to shoot me down.”

Eve cast a barrier spell on Flutterfree. “There you go. If a bullet hits you it’s going to hurt, but it won’t break anything. Try to be back down before anything more impressive tries to shoot you.”

Flutterfree sighed. “Here I am, accepting the role of bait with open wings…”

Pinkie put a blue ribbon on Flutterfree’s chest. Number one bait pegasus. “Yep!”

“Let’s just get this over with.” She crawled out of their room back into the arena proper, the wind whipping in her mane. The sun was already a fair ways up the sky, casting the entire forest in a late-morning glow.

Eve and Pinkie crawled out behind her. “We’ll set up a mile that way,” Eve said, making notes in her head. “They won’t be able to find our base.” She lit her horn, teleporting them the entire mile in an instant, into a part of the forest that looked identical to the one they had just left, minus a mysterious hole.

“I wonder if they just copy-pasted tree patterns,” Pinkie mused. “Anyway, party traps.” She started pulling cannon after cannon out of her mane and stuffing them behind trees that should have been too thin to hide behind. The cannons vanished anyway. “Laced with razor-sharp confetti bred to kill!”

“Exhibit A of why everyone should be terrified of Pinkie Pie,” Eve observed, smirking.

“Hey, you don’t have to worry about collateral damage either, feel free to use Seraphim to its full potential,” Pinkie reminded her.

“I’m not making the arena explode in a nuke.”

“If you could find a way to survive it you’d win!”

“And anyone else who figured out how to survive it as well,” Eve pointed out, using her horn to lay magical traps all around them, the spells glowing purple for a while before vanishing into the surface they were placed on.

“Eh, it’s a thought,” Pinkie said, bouncing around, checking her own traps. “All ready!”

Eve made herself and Pinkie invisible. “We’ll be hiding right here, Flutterfree. You go up, fly around with Lolo, and then come back down. Do it faster if you get shot at.”

“Oooh! Oooh! If she gets shot make her look injured!” Pinkie suggested

“All right, that too,” Eve said. “Then we’ll wait for anyone to fall for it.”

Flutterfree took a breath and spread her wings. “Here I go…” She launched into the air and surrounded herself with the spirographs of Lolo, looking around the forest arena carefully. She temporarily removed Eve and Pinkie’s invisibility, and made Eve’s traps glow a soft purple. Flutterfree did see Corona flying around nearby, but the princess ignored her.

Flutterfree didn’t get much chance to look for other things, for a rocky boulder came flying from a fair distance away right for her. Probably from Toph. She ducked under the rock, but a bullet hit her in the side. Eve’s barrier spell caught it, saving her from the damage, not the inertia. She entered a tailspin and crashed into a nearby tree.

“Ow,” she muttered, recalling Lolo.

Eve levitated her out of the tree and set her in the middle of all the traps. With a quick spell, she made it look like Flutterfree had suffered a bullet wound… An illusion which Lolo removed in an instant.

“…I’m actually going to have to make you bleed Flutterfree, sorry,” Eve said.

“It’s fine,” Flutterfree said. “Just do it.”

Eve cut a few light scrapes into Fluterfree’s skin, and made one small hole that, from a distance, might look like a bullet had made it. She looked very vulnerable.

“How do you feel?” Eve asked.

“…Very itchy,” Flutterfree responded.

“Good.”

“Try not to get hungry for your own blood!” Pinkie suggested.

“…Helpful,” Flutterfree muttered.

Eve cleared her throat. “Everyone quiet. Be prepared for anyone to show up.”

~~~

Corona took one look at Flutterfree and thought that’s a trap.

Had she not already been doing something, she would have considered letting herself fall into the trap in the hopes of finding someone else. Lucky for her she didn’t even have to consider that, because she was hot on the trail of Raging Sights. She had picked up the magical signature a few minutes ago and had been following it ever since, flying just below the canopy to minimize her own visibility.

Her device was calling out to her. The closer she got, the stronger she felt their connection. It pounded in her heart, a deep desire to reclaim a part of her – a part of her she had scarcely let leave her side ever since she’d found it.

She was almost consumed by the desire to reunite – but she managed to keep enough of her awareness to realize she should probably be quiet. She stopped flying when she sensed she was really close, dropping low to the ground.

Raging Sights called to her. Corona saw her device – Thrackerzod wore Raging Sights around her neck. Good, it would be as simple as taking on the eldritch fill-

Crapbaskets, Corona cursed. Rohan.

She couldn’t take Rohan.

Not because she wouldn’t win in a fight – she definitely could, since she knew his ability relied on sight. Just use a blindfold and rely completely on magic sense, problem solved.

The problem was that when she first met Rohan the man had written a command in her.

Cannot harm Rohan Kishibe.

She still couldn’t harm him, no matter what. He was immune to her. And because he was traveling with Thrackerzod, brute force was suddenly out of the question. This meant she’d have to go with stealth…

It was times like this she wished she’d bothered to learn the invisibility spell.

This was going to be tricky, especially with how magically sensitive Thrackerzod could be. Corona was surprised the eldritch unicorn hadn’t noticed her presence already, or noticed what Raging Sights was doing.

She summoned Bacon Pancakes. She told her Stand to ready one of its long-range pins. It shot forth, grabbed Raging Sights with its power, and pulled it back to Corona.

Corona had a teleport prepared, but something gave her pause – Thrackerzod had winked at her after she took it.

Was she not under Rohan’s control?

Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “Hey Rohan. The device is gone.”

“…What!?”

“I mean it’s not around my neck anymore.” Thrackerzod gestured at her neck. “Someone must have taken it.”

Rohan Summoned Heaven’s Door and began scanning the trees around them – but Corona was already gone. “Why wouldn’t they attack us?”

“Scared of you?” Thrackerzod suggested. “Or me?”

“It must have been Corona,” Rohan said. “She’s unable to attack me, but she would have a personal connection to that device… How could you not have noticed?”

“Maybe I just don’t give a na’thz about anything right about now?”

Rohan folded his hands together. “Fine. Keep better watch, Thrackerzod. Next time something may try to kill us.” They walked away.

Thrackerzod smirked. She loved loopholes. Rohan didn’t need protecting from Corona at all, so the eldritch unicorn simply hadn’t offered any helpful information.

And now Corona was back to her old self, dress, device, and all. Ready to kick some serious flank.

~~~

Blackjack was not a smart pony.

Oh, hey, look, target! She grabbed her gun and fired, hitting Flutterfree dead on. Direct hit! She galloped towards where Flutterfree had fallen, the thought that it might be a trap being the furthest thing from her mind.

She didn’t even notice the flying boulder, somehow. She just charged through the woods.

She did see the second boulder.

When it hit her.

She was made of considerably sterner stuff than any normal pony – or even a standard alicorn – but taking a boulder to the side at high speed was still more than enough to crack a rib and blast the wind out of her.

Mending that rib would probably take the rest of her reserves, and it would take time…

Fuck it, she was done running. She whirled in the direction the boulder had come, catching sight of Toph in the trees. Blackjack fired a few white magic bolts at the Queen of Lai. She took them head on – not able to register that Blackjack had even cast a projectile spell until the bullets hit her.

“That’s not a laser spell,” Toph muttered, clutching the wounds in her midsection. “Definitely wasn’t expecting that.”

Blackjack fired more magic bullets rather than wasting real bullets on Toph. Toph was smart enough to try to dodge, but the bolts still moved too fast and were impossible for her to detect. She knew running wasn’t going to help either, so she was just going to have to get creative. She pushed herself forward with a brick of earth, holding her hand out to Blackjack.

“Ha, and I thought I was a mo-” Toph bent the metal in Blackjack’s legs, driving her into the ground. Toph twisted her feet, crushing the mechanical hooves between the earth.

“AUGH!” Blackjack shouted, firing more magic bolts. Toph doged one, but another hit her in the shoulder, knocking her back.

Blackjack used brute force to rip her legs out of the ground, tearing off their cybernetic tips. Artificial though they were, the act of severing the ends of four limbs was still excruciating.

Blackjack was nothing if not used to pain, however. She brought the broken, jagged edge of her front leg down to bear on Toph.

The woman reacted quickly, pulling a weapon out from under her shirt.

The Starmetal sword. My Starmetal sword! Blackjack’s first thought was anger – the second was pain that could only be caused by an anti-magic blade slicing her down the leg.

Blackjack drove her other jagged leg into the side of Toph’s face, a decidedly more lethal blow. Already weak from the blood loss and strain, Toph lost her grip on the sword.

Blackjack grabbed it with her telekinesis and held it to Toph’s neck. “Gotcha.”

“…Yeah,” Toph coughed. “Hurry up and take me out before I think of something.”

“A good idea,” Blackjack admitted, breathing heavily. “Goodbye.”

“Corona’s gonna getcha now.”

“I bet she is,” Blackjack said, grunting as she performed the final act. She’d seen it so many times before she was mostly desensitised to it.

She sighed and started using Toph’s clothing to patch herself up. If she’d had her armor on, Blackjack could have eaten that to refuel herself… As it was, there were only a few pieces of royal jewelry on Toph. Not enough to restore anything of any significance. Blackjack was now down all her hooves and had a completely useless leg.

Her systems could repair though… If she detached all the artificial parts of the pointless leg, the other three would work themselves back to health with time. She used the Starmetal sword to carve off the mechanical bits of the split leg, then started chewing on them.

It never ceased to amaze her what she could eat with this cyborg body. Gemstones, glass, metal… Horrendously uncomfortable, but hey, if it worked…

She moved on without another look at Toph. She had to crawl to a place that wasn’t quite so out in the open…

~~~

Jotaro strode through the forest, following some hoof tracks he was relatively sure belonged to Rev, given how they had movement patterns similar to Nova’s, and both Nova and Starbeat were already out. She was moving alone, so a simple time stop ORA ORA combo would easily take her out. But he wasn’t going to chance that she had time exploits hidden in her array of skills – stealth was important.

One may find it odd that a man as big as Jotaro would consider stealth, but when you’re a biologist who works in the field you had better learn how to observe animals without being seen or you’re doomed to fail pretty quickly.

He suddenly came to the end of the tracks. There were no signs of continuing hoofprints.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered. She had either teleported away or backtracked long before he arrived. Teleportation seemed more likely, since it would have been odd for someone who knew a backtracking technique to make the hoofprints this obvious in the first place.

He wasn’t going to be able to find her now, regardless. He began walking in a random direction, continuing the hunt. He wasn’t going to call attention to himself for a ‘trap’ – that was just asking for trouble from multiple avenues. The best chances for survival were to remain hidden, play smart, and be as lethal as quickly as possible.

Not to mention have contingency plans for every opponent.

His current plan to beat Rohan was to find another tribute with a gun and take that. If Jotaro had a lethal long-range weapon, Rohan would fall easily. The issue was finding a gun.

Alushy was also a problem with her advanced regeneration. Cutting off her head and running would only have a temporary effect – the head would grow back, eventually. Jotaro’s best bet was to abuse time stop like nothing else and tear Alushy in the middle of an attack, getting her to cut herself in half.

Corona, he had two contingency plans for. If she had her device with her, Jotaro would need to shatter it, ruining her mental state. If she didn’t, a straight fight or stealth attack would work.

Valentine… Jotaro knew he’d have to be extremely lethal within stopped time, or Valentine was just going to be able to ‘revive’ himself with D4C. The headcrusher was the best option, and he didn’t like the chances of that one failing.

Brutalight presented a few options. Hit her with her own sword, or just sneak up and punch her head off.

Eve… Eve was the hardest. Seraphim automatically surrounded Eve with a protective barrier that would stop bullets and most magic projectiles. Getting close enough to ram a fist into her would be problematic due to Seraphim’s ability to erase Star Platinum from existence by making him ‘break’ the laws of physics. And that wasn’t even taking into account her magic sense and arcane mastery… Or the sheer variety of things she could do by rejecting reality.

He may have been strong, and in a fair fight he might have been able to pull through facing most opponents, but there was clearly more than one opponent, and remaining uninjured was a big deal for these games.

Kill them fast and before they have any idea.

It was at this point Jotaro tripped over a rock.

It took him less than a second to realize what this meant. He froze time. In the five seconds he had, he rotated around, scanning the forest.

There. A soft beam of light attached to where he was and with a direct line into a nearby tree. He saw Vriska sitting in that tree.

Good. Now I know where she is.

He had a second left, so he moved out of her luck-stealing sights. Time resumed.

“Fuck,” she said, noticing he wasn’t where he’d been just an instant ago.

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!” Star Platinum punched the tree Vriska was sitting in to the ground, dazing the troll considerably.

Jotaro jumped behind her, hitting her in the back of the head multiple times, but only one of the blows did any significant damage, cracking her skull.

This had mixed results. Her mental powers pulsed, freezing Jotaro for a second. She turned to look at him, cobalt blood running down her face.

That one glance was enough to lower his luck the rest of the way. His heart seized up, a sharp pain shooting through his chest. And he felt her still draining his luck. “STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Time froze again. Jotaro whaled on Vriska’s form with as many ORA’s as he could manage, but with every one he pulled a muscle or broke something. His luck was abysmal, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He died in the middle of the time stop, forcing time to resume sooner than normal.

Vriska wasn’t doing too hot herself. The blow to the back of her head was the worst, but she was bloodied in several other locations. Her overall luck in the fight had actually gone down from the sheer number of lethal punches she’d made nonlethal.

But she could still stand. “Sorry big guy.” Her normally confident features faltered as she examined his face – usually an impassive mask of strength, now twisted into immense pain.

She turned and limped away.

~~~

Valentine and Froppy walked through the forest, looking for victims.

“Jotaro?” Valentine asked.

“Attack from a distance and from behind.”

“Corona?”

“Decoy Valentines until one gets close enough to introduce her to herself.”

“Eve?”

Froppy furrowed her brow. “I still don’t think our plan for her works that well.”

Valentine folded his arms. “If we encounter her we must have something.”

“Even with your workaround she’s got magic, and Seraphim can do a lot more than just disable D4C.”

Valentine nodded. “That much is true. But we must be of one mind.”

“Ribbit. I will do as we’ve planned, but I’d prefer it if we thought of something el- get down.”

Valentine and Froppy crouched to the ground, cautious. “Where?” Valentine whispered.

“Two o’clock,” Froppy said, gesturing with her tongue. Valentine glanced that direction, seeing O’Neill and Daniel walking through the forest, both of them on edge. They hadn’t seen them yet… or at least it looked that way. With Crimson Sushi in effect, it was hard to be sure.

Valentine closed his eyes and listened closely. He heard their footsteps in the same direction he had seen them. They really were there, unless they had a really clever trick going on.

Valentine and Froppy pulled out their guns, both aiming at Daniel’s head. Both their bullets missed.

“Ribbit…” Froppy muttered, lowering her gun a considerable distance and firing while O’Neill and Daniel registered the first gunshots. She fired. A bullet that should have hit Daniel in the feet hit him in the chest, knocking him down.

“He’s making everything look higher than it actually is,” Froppy reported. “A-”

It was at this point all the trees appeared to scramble, including their perceptions of each other and O’Neill. Froppy was tossed to the side by Crimson Sushi, the freezing heat scarring her neck.

Valentine punched Crimson Sushi with D4C, the damage translating from the fish’s face to O’Neill. It was clear he wasn’t actually standing where they saw him, but they weren’t able to discern which angle the pained grunt had come from.

O’Neill opted to keep Crimson Sushi back away from his targets, pulling out a gun instead. Valentine took the hit right in the chest.

“Froppy! Flag!” he shouted. Froppy pulled an American flag out and draped it over Valentine. He vanished with the power of D4C. While he was gone, Froppy opted to jump high into the air to make it harder for O’Neill to shoot her. Not a single one of his three shots made contact with the bouncing frog.

Valentine returned, healthy as ever, with a dozen copies of himself. All of them winked, even though they couldn’t be sure they were actually looking at Froppy.

Froppy got the message – she aimed her gun and started shooting at the Valentines. The one individual O’Neill would be certain she’d never shoot – so he’d hide his real self behind one of them.

The third bullet hit the real O’Neill, forcing him to drop the illusion from the pain.

A version of Valentine with D4C appeared behind O’Neill. “Dojyaaaaan!” he called as D4C pulled another version of O’Neill from behind a tree. He threw the two men together, forcing them to fuse together. Them had managed to create a ‘false’ O’Neill that still reacted with O’Neill as if they were the same through D4C – as they collided, fractal-pattern cubes popped out of their bodies, exploding showers of blood around them. The two of them appeared as one being now, shuddering as they flew apart in every conceivable direction, reduced to a pile of blood and organic substance riddled with square holes.

Froppy shook her head. “No matter how many times I see that…”

“Brutal, I’m aware,” Valentine said, sending his alternate selves away. “But effective.”

Froppy made no further comments. She started examining the area. “…Where’s Daniel’s body?”

It was nowhere to be seen. The two of them stood in a fearful silence. Froppy hadn’t shot Daniel in the brain. ...He may have ascended.

But no judgment rained down upon them.

~~~

Eve was starting to wonder if they’d gotten anyone with the trick, or if they were sitting here in a trap nobody was going to fall into. Flutterfree was doing a good job looking like she was near death, but Eve could also see her getting bored. Not a single trap had gone off, and Eve hadn’t sensed anything coming closer to them.

She was wondering if she’d just have to call it off.

“Just a little longer,” Pinkie whispered in her ear. The sudden presence of an invisible Pinkie Pie next to Eve sent a chill down her spine.

“Aaaaa…” Eve said, holding her chest, wishing she didn’t need her ears on. “Pinkie, don’t do that!”

“Shhhh.” Pinkie hissed, placing an invisible hoof on Eve’s invisible face.

“Mmmf.”

“We’re luring someone,” Pinkie assured her.

Eve noticed that Pinkie’s hoof was shaking. “…Pinkie, are you okay?”

“Not really, but we’re not going to have time to discuss that.”

“Why n-”

One of Eve’s spells went off to the south, sending a purple cloud of gas into the air. A party cannon went off shortly afterward, and they saw a tremendous amount of blood shoot into the air.

Eve readied herself, summoning Seraphim to her side, the Stand’s three rings rotating faster and faster as her adrenaline levels rose. She knew who was coming.

Two more of Eve’s traps went off alongside another one of Pinkie’s pieces of razor confetti. Walking right into the trap, exactly as planned.

Eve didn’t feel confident about this. The person who was coming wouldn’t be easy to kill… Far from it.

A beast torn limb from limb, connected together only by a mess of dark magic, teeth, and menacing eyes, leaped at them, triggering the closest of Eve’s magic traps. The form of the beast became little more than dark sludge flying into the air.

Pinkie threw an invisible hammer at it, but the beast caught it with a yellow wing. The darkness coalesced into the wholly vampiric form of Alushy. She brandished the bow of light, firing bolt after bolt at Eve even though she was still invisible.

So much for stealth. Seraphim caught the weapons while Eve stopped maintaining the invisibility spell.

Alushy entered a dive-bomb, narrowly dodging some of Lolo’s vines sent to trap the vampire. The dive-bomb quickly went out of control when Pinkie slammed a hammer across Alushy’s head, spraying at least a gallon of blood over the clearing.

“You’re like a tomato,” Pinkie commented as Alushy hit the ground.

“It comes with the territory.” Alushy said, baring her teeth. It was at this point her teeth vanished, her red eyes became the cyan of a standard Fluttershy, and the dark aura around her vanished completely. “…Fuck,” she said, her voice somehow maintaining the unholy depth it always had.

Seraphim was in reality altering mode, all three rings aligned with a blue glow in the middle. “Gotcha.”

Alushy used her wings to pull back on the bow of light, aiming it for Eve’s face. While Seraphim was altering reality, it wasn’t protecting her in any other way. Eve knew she didn’t have time to shift reality again, but she was going to try, going for a set of physics where internal organic chemicals tended to spontaneously combust, all the while preparing her own magic to catch the arrow. She didn’t like her chances, but at least she had them.

Alushy turned around at the last second and shot Pinkie between the eyes. Her vividly candy-red blood seeped from the wound, down her face.

Pinkie looked at the arrow’s back half, shaking.

She knew this was coming, Eve realized with no small amount of horror.

Pinkie made a halfhearted wave at her friends before slumping forward, painting the ground red.

Alushy went up like a light, internally combusting due to Seraphim, unable to regenerate because of the magic void. She was reduced to cinders that would never rise again.

Just to be sure Eve vaporized the dust with a laser of her own.

Alushy was dead.

So was Pinkie.

Eve stared at the form of the pink party pony, sitting there on the grass, coloring it an unnaturally bright color. Flutterfree did the same, staring at her from her prone position.

“I… I don’t know what to feel,” Eve said, smacking herself in the head. “I know she isn’t gone, she’ll be back once all of this is over, so part of me just thinks I should move on. But then there’s this other part of me that can’t stop staring. Has she ever bled before, Flutterfree? That’s not a natural color!”

“I’ve seen other Pinkies for sure,” Flutterfree said. “But she’s usually… rubbery. …Maybe she lost her ‘Pinkie Shield’ because this event has no consequences…?” She blinked. “What are we supposed to think here?”

“She was scared…” Eve said, looking at Pinkie with a sad expression. “Even if this isn’t permanent… She still gets to experience it. What it feels like to die.”

Flutterfree gulped. “…It’s a horrible feeling, Eve. I… I’m not even sure it qualifies as a feeling. More like a lack of it. All sensation suddenly cuts. After that…? I ended up in a world of clouds. I don’t know where Them are keeping Pinkie’s spirit. For all I know it’s a box of nothing, freezing her…” Tears began to roll down her face. “Everyone in this arena is going to have to experience this! Everyone but one! Even Alushy!”

Eve put a wing around Flutterfree. “…Let’s go back to our home. We’ve done enough for today.”

“…I hope Corona’s going to be okay,” Flutterfree said.

“She’s strong,” Eve said. “She can do what she needs to do if the situation demands it.”

“But how will she cope with killing her friends? Even if none of this is real, it’s…” She couldn’t stop looking at Pinkie. “It’s too realistic. This isn’t some virtual game…”

Eve shook her head. “It isn’t… But it’s best if we think of it that way.” She lit her horn, giving Flutterfree her bow of light and initiating the teleports back to the base Pinkie constructed for them.

The two burst into tears the moment they saw the interior with the still-functioning television. They wouldn’t be leaving the rest of the day.

~~~

Corona sat in a tree, preening her feathers. She was part bird now, so it was a thing she had to do. Naturally she used her hands rather than her mouth for the operation.

In her lap was a globe of glass she had created from the aether, filled with a white wispy energy. Her secret weapon.

…If she would ever use it.

As it was, she had spent the entire day watching and waiting, gathering things for herself and getting more than powerful enough to take the majority of contestants in the arena. However, she had never instigated a single fight – merely watched a couple take place, taking what advantages she could from the aftermath. She’d killed a grand total of zero so far. She’d only fought Thrackerzod at the very start for Raging Sights, and that hadn’t gone anywhere.

She glanced at the crystals on the back of her hands – each one partly her necklace of empathy, partly Raging Sights. What do you think?

Victory is preferred.

I know that RS, but do we even want to win if it means killing?

Not true killing.

No death is meaningless RS, not even temporary ones.

The meaning changes.

I suppose so… It still doesn’t sit right with me.

You don’t have to start any fights.

Is that really what’s best here, though? Only fight in defense of myself?

The other option is to go hunting.

And I’d make quick work of most of them here, I know… Corona sighed. I just don’t want to. I really don’t want to.

Then don’t.

You’re making it simpler than it is.

I’m a magical device. It’s my job.

Fair enough. Corona looked into the distance, realizing that she had spent almost the entire day doing nothing. The sun was already heading for the horizon again. Let’s talk about this tomorrow. Starting anything now would just be somewhat pointless.

“…You okay up there?”

Corona raised an eyebrow, looking down to see Rev. “I’m supposed to kill you, you know,” Corona said.

“I don’t think you will. You have my promise that I won’t fight you if you don’t fight me.”

“Fair enough,” Corona said, gliding down from the tree. “If you’re here for an alliance I’m going to have to decline.”

Rev nodded in understanding. “I was hopeful we would band together over our hatred of death, but if it is not to be, it is not to be.”

“Been avoiding fights too, huh?”

Rev nodded. “I cannot fully defy Them’s plans, but I can try to be as boring as possible to annoy them.”

“Hey, you know things right? What can you tell me about these ‘Them’ types?”

“Do you remember when Pucci kidnapped Jolyne and ran through the D-Sphere?”

“…Vaguely. I wasn’t there personally.”

“Well, Pucci had heard rumors of the ‘highest’ universe in the D-sphere, known as the Pinnacle. He hoped to go there and become like a god.” Rev shook her head. “What actually happens if you manage to ascend all the way to the Pinnacle is you become one of Them – and you have to ascend by personal merit and spiritual understanding, not dimensional devices.”

“…So they’re gods?”

“Of a sort. You know how Earth Tau’ri has the Ascended, beings who become energy by meditation, thought, and understanding?”

“How could I forget?”

“Good. Imagine those Ascended beings realizing that another plane exists above their own, and then another, and another, and another. Over eons and eons, various ‘spiritual’-type beings approached the Pinnacle, until the race that Them used to be arrived. All at once, they had reached the top of pure-spirit meditation. I hear they were benevolent guardian gods of the multiverse at first.”

“But then?”

“Then they got bored. Really bored. And now Them are hated across the multiverse for their many attempts to cure their boredom. …I’ve never been a part of their games, but I’ve known people who have. The results are rarely pretty. Be glad they decided these games had to have no permanent consequences. Things are usually more entertaining when the stakes are higher.”

Corona leaned back. “…And why do they call themselves Them? That’s gotta be confusing.”

“This is just a rumor, but I’m pretty sure it’s because they are composed of more than one race that reached the Pinnacle. So they had no name, and Them really didn’t care to give themselves one, so everyone just started calling them Them.”

“…That’s confusing.”

“Don’t I know it,” Rev admitted with a sigh. “I wouldn’t try to go against Them. If it’s a game they want, it’s a game they’ll get. If you want to stick it to them, I’d suggest being as boring as possible.”

“Not as easy as it sounds.”

“No. It isn’t.” Rev lit her horn. “I’m off to go avoid fights some more. Do what you want. Who knows, maybe you’ll win and get a wish.”

“…But what would I wish for?”

Rev smiled at her. “Think about it for a second.”

“…The easy immortality,” Corona said. “If I win… I could stop all the research in one fell swoop…”

“The question you must ask yourself is if it is worth it,” Rev said. “I think you’ll be up all night on that one.”

“Yeah, probably.”

Rev teleported away. Corona returned to her tree to ponder what she’d just learned.

~~~

The sun was setting again.

Brutalight tore the All-Night mask off her face and threw it to the ground, roaring in rage. “FINE THEN! IF YOU WON’T COME TO ME, I’LL COME TO YOU!”

She armed herself, hanging three different magical pendants around her neck, levitating a half-dozen guns onto her back, and using her magic to fashion the leftover metal into a suit of armor. She had more than enough resources in the Cornucopia for a full set. She downed an entire magic energy bar, providing her with enough power to make her horn glow continually. She spread her wings and took to the air.

Her first order of business was to completely destroy any leftover items in the Cornucopia so no other contestants could even think about having them. The center of the arena was soon a smoldering crater.

“THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR NOT ACCEPTING THE CHALLENGE! NO REWARD! NO MORE MOUND OF TREASURE!” She grinned evilly. “TONIGHT, I SHALL HUNT YOU IN YOUR SLEEP! NOTHING WILL PROTECT YOU FROM BRUTALIGHT SPARCAKE, ELEMENT OF INSANITY!”

She twitched – holy hell she was tired right now. But she wasn’t going to let that stop her. She was not going to rest until she got another kill under her belt. The night would ring with the screams of murder if she had anything to say about it.

…If Fluttershout were here she’d just be able to kill them by screaming. Anything within earshot would be dead.

She sighed, flying away into the sunset.

~~~

Eve and Flutterfree lay in their respective couch-beds, staring at the ceiling.

“GUESS WHAT CONTESTANTS!?” the Them shouted, scaring the stuffing out of the two ponies. “It’s time for another nightly update! Day 2 has come to a close and a grand total of five more contestants are now out of the race, left behind in the dust! Or pools of blood, depending.”

“…Screw you,” Eve muttered, putting a pillow over her ears. It didn’t help drown out the voice.

“Those fallen today are O’Neill, Jotaro, Toph, Pinkie, and Alushy – such a shame, I had money riding on Alushy making it further. You’d think it’d be a safe bet that Jenny’s killer would be smarter, but apparently not.”

“…That answers that question,” Flutterfree said.

“Only thirteen contestants remain, just over half the original number! You’re all really good at killing each other, usually these things last a bit longer! There have already been a few twists and turns in this amazing game of life and death, we’re all dying to see what you come up with tomorrow!”

“My wish is going to be that they never get to have one of these games again,” Eve muttered through the pillow.

Flutterfree understood her friend just fine. “I don’t think they’ll grant that wish.”

“I know…” Eve sighed. “Let’s just try to get some sleep. We’ll need it.”

The two went to bed, the television soon reverting to an image of static rather than the two of them.

~~~

Corona couldn’t sleep.

All she could do was wonder what she’d have to do.

She could do it, she knew she could. She could kill. She’d done it many times at this point, and to people she’d known. She’d done it when it was real. Why was she so hung up now?

If she won, she would be able to end death from aging across Merodi Universalis, just like that. She would have taken the next step in defeating death once and for all, a huge victory in her personal war. A bit of fake-killing in a stupid game shouldn’t stop her from taking hold of that, should it?

…But if she did, it would force her to de-‘human’-ize everything that was happening here. To distance herself from the violence. To fight close friends. Toph may have been gone, but there were others she never wanted to fight. …Ever.

What if you need to at some point? she asked herself, staring at the stars. Not here, but out there in the real world. They could have gone mad, or could be doing something they think is right but is wrong… None of us are infallible.

She really didn’t like that thought.

She put her hands over her eyes. “Ugh…” She pulled out a globe of white energy and examined it. “Why do I even have you if I’m not going to use you? It’s just cruel.”

The energy made no response.

Corona sighed, pocketing the globe again.

It didn’t matter, did it? She either had to fight, or she had to lose. And if she didn’t even try to get the wish, she’d never forgive herself. She had to fight with whatever she had and accept the consequences.

There weren’t any? That was a lie. There were. No death was meaningless – she would not allow herself to think that, even here. Never.

She would use what she had, and she would win.

By killing, death would be defeated.

~~~

Brutalight woke up with the sun.

Wait, I fell asleep?

She opened her eyes and tried to lift her head, but found that she was caked to Rev’s body with dried blood. She, being the crazy mare she was, took this in stride, using her magic to separate her face from the corpse without really thinking about it.

She looked down at Rev, trying to remember what happened last night.

I was walking… I sensed her magic… We fought… CLEARLY I won the encounter, but I must have passed out or something… Brutalight shook her head, cleaning herself up with a quick set of spells. At least I got a kill.

She looked around. Half her guns were broken, she was missing one of her amulets, most of her armor was trashed, and she had a rather serious wound on her left wing. She wouldn’t be flying for a while.

She was in what amounted to Rev’s ‘camp’, which was just a tree with a nook in it she could use for storage. There was a large book, a handful of magically-summoned foodstuffs, and a holy necklace that filled Brutalight with an uneasy feeling. She was immensely thankful she hadn’t touched it in the middle of her sleep.

It was already late morning. Had another contestant come around while she was sleeping, she would have been dead.

I really should have kept that All-Night mask, she thought, though she did admit it was nice to feel rested. Also nice to have killed again.

But Rev wasn’t Eve.

Eve was who Brutalight really wanted to crush between her bloody hooves… Or slice into a million pieces with her blades… Or just blow up with magic. Anything, really. Anything at all.

The longer she waited the more creative and unrealistic ideas she got.

She picked up all her things that weren’t broken and set out, on the prowl for targets.

A slasher smile spread across her face. “And then there were twelve. I’m coming for you, Evening Sparkle.”

~~~

Eve finally woke up when she heard Brutalight taunt her from the television.

She sighed. “Well, I suppose we better go out there again today,” Eve said, checking the fridge for breakfast. “Set up another trap, or just try regular hunting…”

“The carpet is red,” Flutterfree said, staring at the offending floor like it wanted to eat her. “The carpet is candy red, Eve.”

Eve looked down. “…Oh.” She lit her horn, changing the color of the carpet to a muted purple. “T-there we go, better.”

“…Eve?”

“Yes, Flutterfree?”

“…Do we have to go out today?”

Eve looked at the hole in the wall that led outside. She knew out there was a forest in midday where people were going to be brutally killed. If they went out there, they would be part of the killing, part of the violence. Another one of them might fall to it. To the destruction.

“I… No. No we don’t have to. We don’t have to suddenly be all better,” Eve declared. “I don’t care if there’s ‘no consequences’ here. There most certainly are consequences, there are things we just can’t move past in an instant. We watched our friend die in front of us. She was in pain, she was scared, and she waved to us!” Eve wiped her face. “We can take a day off! YOU HEAR ME!? WE CAN TAKE A DAY OFF!”

There was no response from Them.

Eve sighed, turning to Flutterfree.

Flutterfree pulled her into a hug. “Thank you, Eve.”

Eve nodded, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “What are we going to do when this actually happens?”

Flutterfree looked at the television screen. “…Try to get each other back.”

“But we got you back, Flutterfree. That’s not always going to work.”

Flutterfree nodded slowly. “If it doesn’t… Those of us who are left will comfort each other. We’ll stand together.”

“Together…” Eve smiled and let out a sigh of relief. “Together…”

“Always.”

~~~

“I see three options,” Valentine said as he and Froppy trekked through the woods in search of victims.

“For what?”

“For what happened with Daniel.” He put his hand to his eyes, trying to look into the distance. “He could have fled after you shot him, surviving the wound.”

“Unlikely.”

“There could have been a health potion, there’s no way for us to know if he had one or not. But it is the least likely of the options. The second is that he Ascended and is toying with us.”

Froppy nodded slowly. “Seems very likely. Maybe he wants to make us think we’ve won, only to take it away at the last minute?”

“Possible, but there’s a problem with that theory.” Valentine folded his hands together. “As an Ascended, I cannot think of a single individual here he could not kill with a simple thought. Even those with unusual powers that could affect him would not be able to take him directly. Why would he not, once Ascending, just choose to declare himself the winner instantly?”

Froppy didn’t have an answer for that.

“This is where the third option comes in. Someone was watching the fight with Daniel. Perhaps they absorbed his energy, technically not killing him, but taking him out of commission… Better for us than facing a straight Ascended being, but problematic for any number of other reasons.”

“…I prefer to think he just had a health potion. Ribbit.”

“We must keep our minds open to all possibillitie-”

“HEAVEN’S DOOR!” Rohan shouted, opening Valentine’s face up with his Stand. He barely wrote anything into the book when another Valentine stepped out from behind a tree and shot the open Valentine.

Rohan moved to use Heaven’s Door on the new one. “Thrackerzod, back me up!”

“Of course master,” Thrackerzod said with a grunt. A deep, dark energy began to flow off her.

“FROPPY, SHIELD YOUR MIND!” Valentine yelled before he was opened up like a book and shot again.

Froppy did as she was told, remembering her training to protect her mind from eldritch influence. They get to you through sight and sound most of all, so those senses must be done away with. Stop thinking about your senses, act only from memory. Act from instinct, not from mind, for instinct cannot be corrupted.

Froppy performed one calculation – how to get to Thrackerzod – and then blanked her mind. Her Quirk certainly made it easy to do this. All she had to do was let the frog part of her take over. As far as the frog was concerned, Thrackerzod was a particularly large fly…

She shut her eyes and threw her tongue out, wrapping the fleshy limb around the eldritch unicorn. She pulled tight, snapping the pony’s spine.

Thrackerzod didn’t particularly care about the health of her spine – she was having a bad day and Froppy would serve as a good source of stress relief. She could worry about insignificant things like crippling pain later. She pulled her horn back, preparing to kill the frog woman in an instant.

It was at this moment Froppy pulled her tongue back and tried to eat Thrackerzod.

Such things happened when you let instinct take over.

“W-what!?” Thrackerzod blurted, losing all focus on what she was doing. Her front hoof was in Froppy’s throat. Her unicorn nature squirmed at how disgusting it felt. Her eldritch nature seethed in rage that such a lowly life form was trying to eat her. How stupid was she, there was no way Thrackerzod was going to fit in there!

Thrackerzod was suplexed into the ground, her skull cracking against a rock. Froppy was trying to pop her leg off, and in the process was doing immense amounts of damage to Thrackerzod’s mortal shell.

This has gone on long enough, Thrackerzod thought. I’m leagues above this minor superhero. She’s just a frog! Thrackerzod forced an explosion out of the tip of her ingested hoof, blowing a hole through Froppy’s insides, forcing mutations within her. Eyes appeared where none should have been, organs became hard, and a couple of tentacles sprouted from her back.

Froppy should have been debilitated by the maddening pain and sudden rush of insanity. She wasn’t – she was really following her training, giving her everything to her instinct. She still didn’t have to open her eyes – she still had a tight grip on Thrackerzod’s leg with her mouth. She heaved, dousing her with stomach acid.

Thrackerzod’s instincts made her recoil – but her broken back would not take the level of retreat she was trying for. She pulled her leg away, but fell flat on her back. Her body wasn’t listening to anything her mind wanted it to do. She needed to go into shock, she needed to pass out, but her eldritch mind demanded she keep fighting.

Froppy had to come out of her pure-instinct stupor because she’d lost track of Thrackerzod’s location. The eldritch nature of the pony began to worm its way into her mind and would consume her in a matter of seconds.

That was enough time to aim a gun and fire all its bullets into Thrackerzod’s skull. Then she started laughing.

She’d won. That was definitely not a matchup she was supposed to win. Not by any stretch of the imagination…

…But she was now aware enough to know she had a hole in her stomach, had suffered numerous mutations, and was about to go completely mad from worming eldritch energies.

To top it all off, Rohan decided to use Heaven’s Door on her. He was getting really tired of opening up different Valentines, only for them to get shot. “Obey Rohan Kishibe’s every command!” he wrote, shouting it at the same time. “Find me the real Valentine!”

Froppy made it one hop before collapsing on the ground, blood pooling around her. She started writhing in agony, her body finally catching up with all the injuries and trauma.

One of the Valentines took out a gun and shot her, removing Rohan’s new pawn from the equation.

“Where’s D4C?” Rohan demanded, taking a step back from the four Valentines he could see.

“Not on any of us,” two of them said. “D4C is remaining far from you, so you can never order the core to do anything.”

The other two drew guns, aiming at Rohan. They fired – one of the bullets hit him in one of his legs, the other missing by a hair. They fired again.

“‘MURICA, FUCK YEAH!” Blackjack shouted, coming out of nowhere, landing solidly on her three remaining legs. She used her shield to deflect the bullets back into the Valentines that had fired them, knocking them down. “Stole your battle cry.” She fired magical bullets at the other two she could see, taking them out as well. “Ni-”

“Dojyaaan!” Valentine called. An invisible fist hit Blackjack across the face, knocking her to the side.

“There it was!” Rohan shouted, summoning Heaven’s Door. “Where is he!?”

“Oh. You exist,” Blackjack said, looking at Rohan. “You know, I probably should have figured he was shooting at someone and looked for them first…”

“Shut up!” Rohan said, realizing that more and more Valentines were coming out from behind the trees. “Which one!?”

“I can’t see Stands so why are you asking me?”

“I SAID SHUT UP!”

Then Rohan saw D4C’s arm reaching out from under a large leaf lying on the ground.

The D4C Valentine isn’t currently in this universe.

No matter. Heaven’s Door may not have been a physically powerful Stand, but it was still a Stand – and could deal damage to other Stands. Heaven’s Door ran to punch D4C’s arm, ready to break the core Valentine’s limb.

Instead Heaven’s Door punched an alternate version of Rohan. They weren’t the same, so they didn’t explode, but it was enough of a scare to make Rohan jump back.

“This is gonna be a fun fight!” Blackjack said, firing at more and more Valentines. “Woo, I like this guy’s style!”

“HEAVEN’S DOOR!” Rohan shouted, popping Blackjack open like a book. Get Rohan Kishibe out of here. He wrote. Blackjack obliged, teleporting them away.

The Valentines lowered their weapons. The core Valentine dragged himself out from under the leaf using D4C, hand to his chin. “They fled,” he mused. One would think he would start talking to himself, but all the Valentines knew exactly what had happened and felt no need to comment on it.

They all turned to look at Froppy’s body. The core Valentine pulled out a large flag and covered her with it, sending her to another dimension. It was the best burial he had the time to give her.

He saluted – and then left.

~~~

Vriska was heavily injured.

From her vantage point in a nearby tree, Corona was having second thoughts. She’d been moving around looking for other contestants for most of the day already, and only now had she found someone.

And she looked like crap. Judging by the dent in her skull, it was probably Jotaro. She must have been really tenacious to have survived that. Not surprising, considering what Corona knew about Vriska.

But it would just be cruel to take her out now, wouldn’t it?

…Of course it would.

That didn’t matter. Corona was going to do it anyway. She was fighting for something, and Vriska was in her way. Best to make it as swift and painless as possible.

Omnidirectional life extinction, Corona ordered Raising Sights, creating red magic rings around her wrists. Focused through eyes and brain, instant. Repeat double. A larger magic circle appeared in front of her, and she grabbed it like a steering wheel. She infused it with magic from her horn, making it ready to activate. Engage.

A red halo appeared around Vriska’s head and exploded. It happened again, but she was already dead.

Corona furled her wings and landed next to the troll, watching her cobalt blood pool around her. She had really been beaten up by Jotaro in their encounter. Corona was having a hard time telling how many bones the troll had broken.

It was at this point Vriska started glowing and Corona realized she’d screwed up.

All of Vriska’s wounds were healed in the next second. She was soon standing up, fixing Corona with a smirk. “I should thank you. That was really starting to suck. Like, jegus, think about it a moment, I would have kept all those broken bones and that brain damage if you hadn’t killed me-”

“Nuclear reversion beam,” Corona muttered, snapping her fingers. A red and yellow burst of energy ringed with purple magic circles barreled into Vriska, disintegrating her down to the bone.

She was back in a second, hands on her hips. “Now Corona, that just wasn’t considerate of you!”

Corona blinked. “What, do I have to give you a fair fight or something?”

“Let’s see… I’m not being evil right now and clearly don’t deserve to die, so this can’t be a Just death, and I’m not really fighting for anything since I have no idea what my wish would be, so it can’t be Heroic either.” She folded her arms. “I don’t think I can be killed!”

“This is hardly fair.”

“It’s about to get worse.” Vriska opened her eyes wider, taking in Corona’s luck bit by bit.

Corona pressed her hands together and spread her wings, surrounding both herself and Vriska in orange-red magic circles. A chain of magic connected the two of them, pulling the two together. Corona’s eyes went white as she looked into Vriska’s eyes.

“…Counter,” Corona said, smirking. The spell vanished, replaced with a new one that gave Corona a bronze sheen to her person.

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “I was really wondering when you people were going to learn to construct a fate anchor.”

“No luck stealing for you,” Corona said. “And you don’t have your dice with you.”

Vriska sat down on a nearby rock. “Fair. But you can’t keep me dead.”

Corona narrowed her eyes. “I’m considering going for a brainwashing…”

“You want to have a mindscape battle? Do you think that’s a good idea for either of us?” Vriska laughed. “No. I think we’d both just pass out in the end.”

“Stalemate?”

“STAAAALEMATE!” Vriska decreed. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

“No…” Corona narrowed her eyes. “But I have a lot of weapons at my disposal… I just need to get you to be Heroic or deserving of Justice.”

“Good luck with that.”

Corona got an idea. “I was expecting to save this for the finale… But it looks like you’ll need it right now.”

“Oh, what kind of special thing do you have?”

Corona took out the globe with white energy inside of it. “You killed Renee, correct?”

“Uh, yeah? Back at the Cornucopia. It was a sniper rifle. …Wish I still had that.”

Corona grinned. “Wouldn’t it be Just if someone who cared deeply about her took revenge on you?”

“…There’s no way…”

Corona held up the sphere. “This is Daniel. I was around when he started Ascending – all his energy is stored in here thanks to a simple transfer spell.”

“THAT’S CHEAP!” Vriska said, taking a few steps back. “VERY CHEAP!”

“Yeah, it is. But so is having conditional immortality.” She shrugged. “I’ll have to consume his energy to make sure he doesn’t try to kill me in the process… But it should trigger a Just death.”

“Fuck you.”

Corona smiled – a smile that quickly faltered when she remembered what she was doing. Her expression became dour as she held the sphere out to Vriska. “Sorry Daniel, this is gonna hurt.”

“No sorry for me?”

Corona sighed. “…Sorry, Vriska.” She surrounded the sphere in a red circle. She crushed the glass in her hands, cutting her hand in several places. The white energy was focused on Vriska, burning her away molecule by molecule. She was nothing more than angry screaming shadow to Corona, then just a shadow, then nothing at all.

Corona made sure to use up all the energy within the sphere just to be certain that both of them wouldn’t be coming back.

She sagged. Two kills. I’m making progress. At least Vriska didn’t seem that angry about it.

She sat down at the base of a tree, giving herself a moment.

~~~

“Sun’s setting again,” Flutterfree observed, having just poked her head out of their little base in the ground. “Still no sign of anyone having any idea where we are.”

“Good,” Eve said, staring at the TV. It hadn’t shown anything but static for the last few hours.

“Who’s left, do you think?”

“You, me, Corona, Valentine, Blackjack, Rohan. That I can remember, anyway. Oh, Brutalight. Right.”

“I hope they got her during one of the bits of static…” Flutterfree said, shivering.

“You and me both,” Eve admitted.

They stood in silence for a few moments.

“We might actually be able to win,” Flutterfree said. “Let them fight each other, tire, and come out well rested ready to defeat them.”

“The remaining people are going to be problematic though,” Eve admitted. “Some of them might be able to find a way around Seraphim’s negation. Only the really absurd get this far…”

Flutterfree paused. “We’re the last team, aren’t we?”

“Blackjack and Rohan?”

“That’s not really a team.”

Eve nodded. “That’s true… Yeah, I guess we are the last actual team here. Everyone else is working separately.” She sighed. “So many people walking alone. It’s just depressing.”

“Everything about this is depressing. Maddening too,” Flutterfree stared at herself on the television screen. “This is worse than being part of a story. The stories have meaning, purpose, a goal in mind. This isn’t something with a goal. This is an experiment, and we just have to fight or die.”

Eve frowned. “Could the wish mean something?”

“Do we even know what we’re wishing for?”

“I’ve given it some thought. I think I’m going to fix the Arcei problem with it,” Eve said. “Not just have Them wave a hand and fix it all, but have them tell me what I have to do to get them accepted back into society as a whole, to get them to stop thinking they can hunt Stars.” She stared at her hooves. “It’s not a problem I see myself fixing.”

“…I would ask for Celestia back,” Flutterfree said.

Eve froze.

“…More people we’ve lost, if Them will let us,” Flutterfree continued. “General Sunset. The Sage. Sparky. The Bloodbath…”

“No. No, no we can’t do that,” Eve said, shaking her head rapidly. “We aren’t meant to do that! We… We can’t just…”

“Why not!?”

“If we brought one back, we’d have to bring more! And if we brought all those we’ve tragically lost… Do you realize how that would destabilize things? How many leaders who were dead would suddenly be back?” Eve grabbed her head. “Revival’s already a tricky procedure as it is with Coming Back Wrong, and…”

“…Can’t we just save a few, then?”

“Where do we draw that line, Flutterfree? Where do we draw that line?” Eve asked. “Do I just bring back people whose deaths didn’t pivotally change our history? Sparky? But how could I just leave Celestia dead? But if I bring her back I’ll have to bring all the leaders back, and… Do you see what that’d do?”

Flutterfree grabbed Eve. “But we’d have them back!”

“We might lose them again right afterward!”

“…So? At least we’d get to talk to them.”

“…Would you really wish just to have conversations with people you’ve lost at the expense of solving a major problem in our society?”

Flutterfree looked away, ashamed. “…Yes. I would.”

Eve took a few steps back. “I’m sorry… Flutterfree, we can’t do that. It wouldn’t be right.”

“I know. But I can’t change what I feel. We have a wish, Eve. I want… I want to bring back what we’ve lost. Perhaps wish to turn back the time and do it over again with what we know?”

“…I don’t think even they can turn back time on so many interconnected universes,” Eve said, shaking her head. “That’s a wish I could get behind. But it’s too much.”

Flutterfree looked down. “Right… You’re right. We need to think logically about this.”

Eve let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you for understanding, Flutterfree.”

“Mhm…”

“GOOD EVENING CAMPERS!” the Them’s voice boomed into their heads. “Time for a nightly update! It sure feels like this third day went by quickly, didn’t it? But you didn’t skimp out on eliminating opponents, nosireebob! Five others have left us today: the Reverend, Thrackerzod, Froppy, Daniel, and Vriska! Only eight of you remain! You might even finish tomorrow – but I doubt it! All I can say for sure is that you have officially entered the late-game. You eight are the finalists for this round of the Hunger Games. Only one will take home the coveted wish – I hope you’re thinking about what it’s gonna be! Who am I kidding, I know you’re all thinking deeply about it. Have a nice night!”

Flutterfree and Eve stared at each other.

They were in the final eight…

The end of these games were coming sooner than they would have expected.

“We need rest,” Eve said.

“Agreed. I’ll take first watch,” Flutterfree offered.

Eve nodded. “Thanks.” She curled herself up on one of the couches, waiting for morning to come…

~~~

Something in Blackjack made her wake up in the middle of the night. It wasn’t Rohan – he was lying on the ground next to her.

He was supposed to be on watch.

Blackjack wanted to hit him so hard, but she couldn’t – so she just nudged him. “Hey bastard, you’re supposed to be on watch.”

He felt cold to the touch. She used her magic to create a light and look at his face.

He was foaming at the mouth, dead. Poisoned.

She didn’t reel back in horror – she was somewhat pleased by the news, to be frank – she moved in to investigate. There was a small puncture wound on his neck from an injection, or dart.

She felt her own neck – there was a mark there as well. Chances were the poison just wasn’t effective against mega-alicorn-cyborg-ponies. But that still meant someone had snuck into camp and poisoned them…

The intruder was probably what woke Blackjack up.

She scanned the forest, but her sensors didn’t pick up anything aside from a couple owls and a sleeping squirrel. This did nothing to ease her nerves. She was sure she was being watched.

Somewhere very close by, a gun went off and hit her in a back leg. She howled, firing two magic bolts where she thought the shot had come from, but they made no contact.

She brandished her starmetal sword. “Show yourself!”

Evidentially the attacker thought this was a stupid idea, because they did no such thing. They fired again, hitting Blackjack’s other leg. Her retaliation hit nothing again. Not to mention the fact those wounds weren’t going to heal with her current resource levels…

She couldn’t fight whoever this foe was.

She took everything off Rohan – including his clothes – with a quick spell. She teleported away before the attack aimed at her third and final leg went off. She teleported twice more, until she was in a tree far from the original campsite.

She grabbed all the buttons and jewelry Rohan had on him and ate them, giving her systems at least something to work with. Why couldn’t the arena be a post-apocalyptic wasteland? She’d have plenty of metal to work with. As it was, trees didn’t really provide her with what she needed, and these pickings were pathetic. Not even enough to really do anything to her back legs.

She needed to find something to repair her if she wanted to take out some of the stronger targets, like Valentine.

…Seven left, now, Blackjack noted. It was probably going to be nothing but difficult, close fights from here on out.

She opted to stay in the tree and not fall asleep the rest of the night. She could operate on the scant bit of rest she had gotten. But she wasn’t going hunting in the night with… Whatever that was. Her systems couldn’t detect any infrared, so she needed normal sight to compensate. Probably.

~~~

The gunshots from the television had put Flutterfree on edge. She had almost woken Eve because she thought they were under attack…

But they weren’t, it was Blackjack who was. Or had been – the screen had turned to display Flutterfree again.

She sighed. Something was going to happen, given how the screen was focusing on her. What was it going to be? An inner monologue? Stealth attack? Or something she didn’t see coming?

The fact that she asked the question suggested to herself it was option three, but she went to check outside anyway. She poked her head out of one of the holes, checking the area for intruders. For most it would be a fruitless endeavor to look out at a forest in the middle of the night and expect to see something, but having vampiric eyes came with perks. Namely night vision.

She saw nothing. Even after crawling out of the hole and taking a good look around, she still didn’t make out anything interesting. Didn’t hear anything either. This put her at ease about the possibility of an attack, but she remained alert.

She walked back into the room – the television still showed her walking around. Still the focus.

Flutterfree was stuck by a sudden realization that Pinkie knew when she was being watched all the time. She had new respect for her old friend’s ability to deal with the knowledge…

This meant something was going to happen. Perhaps she was going to have some kind of realization? Or something?

…The only way that would happen is if she stopped thinking about the fact she was on the screen.

She went to the fridge and got herself a snack. Eve had packed it with apples, the primary thing aside from blood that satisfied Flutterfree’s natural hunger. She drained the fruit of its juices in an instant and tossed it into the trash.

Still hungry, but the hunger never really went away. It also never got strong enough to demand she bite down on a pony’s neck. Quasi-vampirism didn’t really appear to follow much in the way of rules.

But there was something about the way Eve was lying that drew Flutterfree’s attention to her purple neck. Normally Flutterfree would just force herself to look away and get a little flustered, but she didn’t this time.

She’s not going to bring them back.

All it would take was one carefully placed bite on the jugular while she was sleeping – Eve wouldn’t even be able to summon Seraphim’s reality rewrite, and the automatic barrier wouldn’t protect against Flutterfree’s fangs. She would be out of the game and then Flutterfree would be free to make her wish. In a straight fight with Eve there was no way Flutterfree could win…

She took a few steps forward to Eve, moving as quietly as possible.

I have to do this. She’ll forgive me. And then everyone will be back. Everyone.

She leaned in, fangs bared, nearing Eve’s neck.

But she had some good points… What if my wish ruins everything? And am I really willing to live with taking a wish to just talk to them?

How would I even survive the rest of the games without her?

Flutterfree pulled back, a tear rolling down her face. She couldn’t believe she’d even been considering taking out her dear friend. When the time came, and they were the last two, Eve would painlessly disintegrate her and make the wish for the both of them. That was the way it was supposed to be.

Flutterfree turned back to her couch.

“…I’m awake, Flutterfree,” Eve said.

Flutterfree’s heart started racing. She didn’t turn around.

“…Why couldn’t you do it?”

Flutterfree slowly turned around, looking into Eve’s wide, open eyes. A film of tears covered them. “It was wrong,” Flutterfree said. “I… I wanted my wish more than yours. But it wouldn’t be right to do that to you.”

“But you were this close to doing it!”

“But I didn’t.”

“I know you didn’t. You were stronger than yourself. Which is what makes this so difficult.” Eve wiped her face.

Flutterfree gulped. “I… I can imagine. I’ve broken your trust.”

“Yeah! Yeah, you have!” Eve wailed. “I can’t trust you! What if you can’t fight it tomorrow night? What if you see an opportunity in the middle of a fight to be rid of me? You’ll take the opportunity and do what your heart wants!”

“Yes. I will,” Flutterfree said with conviction. “If I give in, I will wish them back to life.”

“But how can you… Who? How far do you go? How far can you go?”

“…Bring them back, deal with the consequences,” Flutterfree said. “That’s… That’s what I think.”

“You can’t make that choice! You’re not the only one who’ll be dealing with the consequences!”

“And you can control the lives of the Arcei to make them better liked?”

“I’m just asking for what to do, not asking them to do it.”

Flutterfree looked at Eve – and nodded. “I know. I know. I know. I’m being emotional and I…”

“I have to get rid of you,” Eve said, heaving.

“W-what?”

“I can’t take that risk. The risk that you’ll change your mind in a mood swing or something.”

“Eve, I promise that I won’t try to kill you again,” Flutterfree said, putting a hoof over her chest. “We’ll fight together to the very end.”

Something in Eve cracked. “Can I really trust you on that? What if you think of a reason it’ll be for the greater good? What if you suddenly think of exactly the line you want to draw on who to save and who not to?”

Flutterfree gulped. “Evening. I Pinkie Promise that I will not try to kill you again.”

Tears rolled down Eve’s cheeks. “Why are you making this so hard?”

“Don’t kill me, Eve,” Flutterfree said. “Please.”

“Flutterfree…”

“I don’t want to feel it again,” Flutterfree pleaded. “I don’t want to feel death.”

“Flutterfree, I’ve already killed you.”

Flutterfree stared at her in horror. “W-what?”

“I hit you with the death spell from behind when you were reaching for my neck,” Eve said. “…But I wanted to talk to you after, so I had Seraphim tap into a world where the soul lingers after death.” She brought her Stand out from where it had been hiding, under the couch she was sleeping on, shrouded by blankets.

“B-B-” Flutterfree’s consciousness permitted her to see her body on the floor at the foot of Eve’s bed. “What th-”

“I… I’m so sorry.”

Flutterfree gulped. “I… I’m sorry too.”

To anyone else, Flutterfree’s apology would have been genuine. But Eve picked up on a slight inflection in the her voice that indicated anger. Deep, seething anger. “Flutterfree…”

“Recall Seraphim,” Flutterfree said.

“We can keep ta-”

“I SAID RECALL SERAPHIM!” Flutterfree shouted, summoning Lolo. Her Stand was decidedly weaker than Seraphim, but the surprise Eve felt from having Lolo attack combined with her unstable emotional state was enough to make Seraphim lose focus.

Flutterfree’s spirit vanished without so much as a flash of light.

Eve took in a deep breath and released it. “Calm… I’m c-” she didn’t finish the word, instead devolving into deep, bitter tears. When this didn’t provide her enough of a release, she grabbed her couch and threw it into another one. She told Seraphim to remove molecular cohesion from the room, forcing everything to cave in.

She teleported out with Flutterfree’s body, eyes full of pain.

She was not done with the place.

She had Seraphim find a universe where the chemicals found in soil would react in an explosive manner when introduced to a certain kind of magic. She used that magic, her home for the last few days going up in a bright mushroom cloud. Seraphim cleared the heat by dialing a universe where heat didn’t exist.

Eve used the hole to bury Flutterfree’s body, filling it in with her considerable powers of telekinesis. She summoned a headstone imprinted with her butterfly cutie mark and forced flowers to grow in front of it.

Eve was still angry. At this point she didn’t have any idea what at.

The television fell out of the sky, somehow still working.

“Oh look! A TARGET.” Eve punched the television, shattering the screen and cutting her hoof in several places.

~~~

It was morning, and Valentine was alone. He walked along the edge of a riverbank.

He supposed he was hunting, but he wasn’t really looking that hard. He was mostly sitting, thinking, the inner machinations of his mind occupying more of his time than the act of hunting other contestants.

This would have been dangerous, and likely would have resulted in another death of his, had the person he come across not been Evening Sparkle crying her tears into the river.

Valentine’s first instinct was to take her out, but the combination of his own out-in-the-open location and her complete disinterest in him gave him pause.

Eve knew he was there. “What’s in a wish, Valentine?”

Valentine decided to take a seat at the riverbank, a fair distance from Eve, but close enough for them to easily see each other’s facial features. He thought for a moment, and answered. “Above all else, a wish has conviction.”

“I see.”

“Perhaps not,” Valentine pointed out. “A wish… is a desire you vocalize, something you want to occur. It is a manifestation of your personal code of conduct. Those who are selfish wish to rule the world. Those who are selfless wish to help others. Those who devote themselves to a particular idea wish to see that idea come to those who don’t understand it.”

“And if you don’t know what your wish is? Does that mean there is a lack of conviction?”

“In some cases, perhaps,” Valentine said. “What is your conviction?”

“Harmony,” Eve said, looking into the river. “And in seeking it, I have destroyed it.”

“In the fights we face, the thing we want most may need to be harmed.”

“I know. You know. We all know!” Eve said, spreading her hooves wide. “You basically are me, you ever think about that? Find something that lets you go out into the multiverse, start exploring, and then eventually form a society. …You even change who you are.”

Valentine was unsure of the meaning behind that last statement, but it clearly meant a lot to her. “It is well known, and in many cases understood. But there is another part to us that is not reason or thought. A place where deep seated convictions are held.”

Eve nodded. “That place… I hurt that place. I had that place hurt. Badly. Oh so badly…” She wiped her face. “Have you ever had it hurt, Valentine? Have you ever suffered betrayal?”

“My first wife was replaced by an imposter,” Valentine shared. “I didn’t know for quite some time. My feelings about her are now muddled in my memory… But I am sure I Ioved her. Perhaps not as much as a man should.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ancient history,” Valentine said. “Perhaps a better example would be Johnny. It took a long time to build up trust between the two of us. But after we had begun to form the USM, Gyro back alongside us… We were friends. But he became convinced I was going to make myself President for life. He made an attempt on my life.” Valentine looked into the distance, his memories flooding past his eyes. “It was that attack that told me I should step down. It’s the reason I’m Ambassador Valentine today. The end result was better for the United States of the Multiverse, but the hole between us was devastating.”

“You eventually made up?”

“It was years later before I considered us friends again.” He looked Eve right in her eyes. “But sometimes I wonder if I’ll do something he doesn’t approve of, and he’ll try to take me out again.”

Eve shivered.

“It’s not something you can completely fix. Once someone’s truly broken trust…”

“…You know they have the capacity to break it again,” Eve completed. She shook her head. “And in this case, it’s two-way. Convictions on both sides…”

Valentine nodded, making a ‘hrmm’ noise.

“What’s your conviction, Valentine?”

“Justice,” Valentine declared. “I fight for justice.”

“Really? It seems like you fight for your country a lot more.”

“For I believe it is the closest thing to justice,” Valentine explained. “I wish to see those who deserve to be punished put where they belong. I wish to see those willing to sacrifice and fight for others to be elevated. I wish the way of life that promotes justice seekers will be spread across the multiverse.”

Eve nodded. “I… I understand. It doesn’t seem like you really want justice a lot of the time, though. It seems like you just want more power for your country.”

Valentine looked at her. He didn’t have a response.

The two sat at the river, watching it pass by.

“Thanks,” Eve said, standing up and spreading her wings. “I needed that.”

“We all need to think about what we wish for, once in a while.”

“You too, Valentine. …Try to think less about your country, and more about actual justice, okay?”

Valentine nodded. “I endeavor to do so.”

“So… Are we going to fight now?”

“I think not,” Valentine said. “I have determined that if you were to make a wish, it would not be detrimental to the USM. There are other, larger threats I must take care of.”

Eve pondered this. “…I think you’re the same way.”

“Until we cross paths again, Overhead Evening.”

“Of course, Ambassador Valentine.”

Valentine walked away. He told himself he let her go because he didn’t want to tire himself, and she’d be able to take care of other enemies with little risk to himself now.

But even he knew that wasn’t the full story. There was something about a crying purple alicorn…

“Damn these ponies,” he muttered, “they drive me to sentimentality.”

~~~

Corona finally picked up on a strong magical signature – whoever it was would be her next target. She prepared an instant-death spell, wrapping the red magical rings around her left wrist. It would only take one solid hit and she would be one step closer to her goal.

She didn’t hesitate when she finally realized it was Eve. She was another enemy in this game – Corona would apologize later. She pointed her finger at the oblivious purple alicorn and fired.

A magic bubble shield surrounded Eve, blocking the magical attack. She whirled around, eyes narrow. “I have magic sense too you know.” She summoned Seraphim behind her, locking the Stand into its reality altering position.

Reality Anchor Aura, Corona ordered, clapping her hands together. A series of white, blue, and green rings rose out of the ground and disappeared above her head, encasing her in a soft blue-green aura.

Corona knew Eve was trying to make her spontaneously combust. “Not going to work, Eve. I’ve forced myself to maintain the form of reality I currently occupy.”

Eve nodded. “Then I’ll have to get more creative.” Eve set Seraphim’s combustion reality to the grass beneath Corona, triggering an explosion.

Corona absorbed the heat and light into her hands, sending them back to Eve along with a dose of Bacon Pancakes’ pins. Eve had to stop editing reality to use Seraphim to physically throw the pins aside, and her magic to block the torrent of fire.

She teleported behind Corona, hitting her with a laser coursing with purple and orange energy.

“You’ve got to stop hitting me with fire,” Corona observed, firebending the flame part of the laser to bring the magical part of the attack to a halt. She flew toward Eve, brandishing the center disc of Bacon Pancakes, ready to flatten her.

Eve created a half-dozen needles of crystal, sending them flying into Corona. The spires pierced her skin, drawing blood. Corona worked through the pain – but she found that the crystals hindered her movement. She was unable to bring Bacon Pancakes to bear on Eve, allowing Seraphim to make use of the opportunity.

The three-ringed Stand rotated its three individual parts with alarming rapidity, charging Bacon Pancakes’ center disk. The impact cracked Bacon Pancakes and fractured one of Corona’s arms, sending her flying backward.

Corona used her free arm to cast a mending spell on her cracked bone. She spread her wings, taking a large loopdeloop before charging back at Eve.

Eve tapped into a universe where solids didn’t exist, creating an invisible wall for Corona to run into. She fell back, but in her fall she summoned a fireball larger than Evening. Seraphim stopped editing reality to catch the offending meteor, disintegrating the rock with its touch.

Eve apparently liked the invisible walls from earlier, because she resumed tapping into that universe, this time creating a box around Corona. After she mimed for a couple of seconds, the flaming princess teleported out, her hand alight with holy energy. She rushed for Eve’s face, planning to burn it.

An invisible spike poked right through her hand. The pain was so sudden and unexpected she unleashed her explosive magic too soon. Eve’s face was charred, but not melted to the point of defeat.

Corona teleported back, taking a moment to mend the hole in her hand. Eve didn’t let her finish – she teleported behind Corona and drove her long, purple horn through her back and out the other side.

Corona maintained enough awareness to activate Bacon Pancakes, flattening Eve to nothing more than a piece of paper. Corona tried to kick the paper and tear it, but the pain in her stomach was too much to not address. She fell to her knees, mending her wound.

Eve, meanwhile, struggled to move in her paper form, creating a lull in the fight.

“Look at us, fighting like old enemies,” Corona commented as she sealed the hole in her stomach.

“Heh, yeah,” Eve said, using her own telekinesis to float away. “Out of curiosity, what are you fighting for? There’s too much conviction to just be ‘because I have to’.”

“The secret to fight death,” Corona said, standing up tall and spreading her wings. “Easily producible immortality.”

“Why am I not surprised. That will cause problems, you know.”

“Not as much as just wishing death away completely. What’re you wishing for?”

Eve blinked. “At first, it was a solution to the Arcei problem. Now? …I’m starting to think that’s not actually the best way to promote harmony. There might be something else.”

“Your heart is in the right place, at least.”

“Yeah…” Eve shook her head, the motion making her body fold at the neck. “…This is an exceptionally weird sensation.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Corona said, lighting herself on fire. “Shall we continue?”

Eve looked right at her. “Yes. Seraphim!”

“Bacon Pancakes!”

“Absolute Zero,” Eve declared.

“Fusion Cascade,” Corona said.

Seraphim tapped into a universe where everything was always absolute zero, bringing true cold to the fight. It was just a small area that existed at absolute zero, but the temperature difference was so extreme the grass below froze solid and ice crystals began to form on Eve and Corona.

Corona’s attack was to create a miniature sun in her palm and toss it into the air, fusing the gasses in the atmosphere to create a cascading explosion. The cascade wormed its way to Eve through the frigid air.

Eve let it get close enough to burn her – she was going to need the extra heat to survive what came next. She expanded the single point of Absolute Zero by factor of ten, dramatically dropping the temperature. The gasses around the altered reality solidified, liquid nitrogen and oxygen pouring off of it. The entire ground became coated in ice, a sheen moving up Corona’s legs despite the fact she was on fire.

Eve was further away from the extreme cold, and she was having difficulty forcing her body temperature up even with the help of the fusion cascade – a source of heat that was quickly fading away.

Corona was significantly closer to it. Her own internal heat was not enough to overcome the biting cold. The fire in her began to go out as the parts of her body closest to the ground began to freeze solid.

She had enough of her wits about her to teleport out of the cold proximity, behind Eve – where it was still absurdly cold but manageable. She took a step toward Eve – and her foot shattered into a hundred pieces. She fell to the ground, shattering her left hand as well.

The stump that was her hand attempted to bleed, but the red liquid froze on what was now the edge of Corona’s body. She tried to force flames to heat up the injury, but she was running too low on energy.

Eve took a step toward her. “Sorry Corona, I got you.”

Corona didn’t think so. She lashed out with the hand that was still in tact. She cut the still-paper-form Eve across the chest, almost cutting all the way through.

But it wasn’t enough. Eve caught the hand in her telekinesis, shattering it as blood ran down her papery front legs. Corona, having lost both her hands, attempted to use her horn in one last-ditch attempt to pull a victory out of this.

In her desperation she overloaded the poor magical conductor. A small explosion went off at the base of her horn, making her lose consciousness. The deep cold got to her not a second later, and Eve was returned to her three dimensional form.

Eve cut the absolute zero reality, allowing herself to finally warm up. The solid gasses quickly dissipated once there was nothing keeping them frozen. She forced herself to throw Corona into a tree, shattering the beautiful being into nothing more than jagged shards of what she once was.

Eve then turned to the gash in her – it ran from the middle of her chest just below the neck to halfway down the right side of her body. She had never been the best at pure healing magic, and she knew this was a mortal wound.

She had to perform surgery on herself. She tapped into a universe where pain didn’t exist and began the slow process of sewing herself back up. In the process of doing so, she realized her wingtips had frostbite and one of her ears had been removed in the fight, though she had no idea how.

When she was satisfied she had sewed herself up enough to the point where she’d live, she turned off the pain remover – and screamed. Holy Celestia those stitches hurt…

She set Seraphim to a universe where metabolic processes were faster, staying there long enough for her to be sure her internal organs weren’t going to slide apart if she twisted her body the wrong way. But that did nothing to alleviate the pain, and it also made her very hungry.

She started eating the grass around the forest floor to replenish her reserves. She would be here a while…

Haunted by the sight of Corona shattering into a thousand pieces.

~~~

“MURICA, FUCK YEAH!” Blackjack shouted, swooping in for an attack on Valentine. “LET’S TRY THIS AGAIN!”

D4C punched Blackjack in the face before any more than a handful of bullets emerged from Blackjack’s horn and guns. Some hit Valentine, but he wrapped himself up in the flag, transferring to another universe – and another Valentine. Four of them came up out of the flag in response.

Blackjack shot off one of their heads with a shotgun. “So, let me see if I understand this,” she muttered through her broken, bloodied nose. “You have an infinite supply of yourself you can go through, but only one of them has the big ‘Stand’ power at a time, right?”

“Correct,” a normal version of Valentine said, shooting at Blackjack. She blocked the bullet with her shield.

“So all I have to do is find which one of you has the Stand. Because, let’s be honest, a bunch of regular guys with simple guns isn’t going to do much to me. You’ll have to use that punching ghost somehow.” She used her telekinesis to swing the Starmetal sword wide, cutting two Valentines in half. “Now I can’t see your dirty little secret, but I think odds are pretty good this god-killing sword can hit it.”

“Dojyaaan!”

“What the-” D4C’s fist came out from a leaf under where Blackjack’s fourth leg should have been. The invisible fist hit Blackjack in the chest, sending her into the air. She swung the sword fast, cutting off the tops of D4Cs fingers.

She saw one of the Valentines had lost some of his fingers. “GOTCHA!” She blurted, shooting him in the forehead.

Then she remembered that meant D4C just translated to another Valentine.

“Fuckballs,” Blackjack muttered. She was going to have to kill the Stand to win. And she was definitely not smart enough to lure it out into the open and kill it while it was invisible. Best she could do was get some nicks in here or there.

But she couldn’t just retreat – there were only a handful of contestants left, chances are she needed to face Valentine. But unless something changed she saw that he would slowly wear her down faster than she would be able to cut D4C…

Her prayers were answered in the form of a purple alicorn who was missing an ear and had an impressive wound across her chest. “Absolute Zero.”

The arena of combat between Blackjack and Valentine began to freeze over. Blackjack fired bullets at Eve, since she was unable to determine where Seraphim was. Eve caught all the projectiles with her magic, continuing the act of freezing everything solid.

She didn’t make it that far – the real Valentine stepped out from behind a tree and apparently used D4C on Seraphim, the powerful punches upsetting the control over reality. The freezing halted, and blood came flying from Eve.

Blackjack swung the Starmetal sword wildly where she thought the Stands were. She nicked both of them, prompting a cut to appear on Eve’s flank and one on Valentine’s hip, but nothing lethal to either.

Eve had Seraphim take the rapidly-rotating form, trying to dice D4C up, but the Stand transferred to another Valentine, leaving her in the dark as to where the multiversal spirit was. She opted to focus on Blackjack, summoning a dozen sharp crystals and throwing them at her.

“Well fuck me in th-” One of the crystals slammed into in Blackjack’s throat, cutting her off. The crystals embedded themselves in her body in numerous lethal places. Given just a bit more time, they would kill her outright.

But she caught one of the magic crystals in her mouth and ate it.

“What in the…?” Eve wondered aloud as Blackjack tore a crystal out of her jugular and devoured it. Her wounds began to heal right before their eyes.

“Thanks for the snack!” Blackjack said, smirking. She rushed at Evening, brandishing her sword and a shotgun. “NOW D-”

She ran facefirst into an invisible wall riddled with spikes. The power from the crystals kept her alive, but she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. She peeled herself off the spikes, falling to the ground. “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-”

D4C appeared behind Eve, grabbing her wings. She couldn’t hit D4C directly with Seraphim in the form to make the invisible wall, so she just had to scream as her wings were popped out of their sockets. They would have been completely removed, but Eve sent out a pulse of magic that scrambled everyone’s thoughts.

Numerous Valentines started shooting at her, but she’d recalled Seraphim, reinstating the protective aura that caught every bullet.

Eve decided it was time to use some of the magics she preferred not to, given their nature. Her eyes became black as night with purple wisps of energy trailing off the edges. Deep darkness surrounded her, cutting jagged shadows across the forest. Claws rose up all around her, writhing with powers mortals were not meant to touch.

Good thing she wasn’t a mortal. None of them were.

“It fills my long dead heart with joy to see you give in to a darker nature,” Brutalight said, revealing her presence at the edge of the fight. “It’s a nice thing to see you reject your false harmony before you die.” She took one gun in particular out and aimed it at all of them.

“FUCK! FOLLY!” Blackjack shouted.

“The gun you took Flagg out with!?” Eve blurted.

“YEAH. WE’RE DEAD.”

Brutalight pulled the trigger. Folly unleashed its brilliant white cone of absurd energy, a cone that would have vaporized all of them and most the ground they were standing on.

“SERAPHIM!” Eve shouted, ordering her stand to dial a universe where magic didn’t exist. The energy blast from Folly hit a void in front of Eve, Blackjack, and Valentine, carving away the ground to either side of them.

“…Useful,” Blackjack commented.

Brutalight scowled. “Oh just die already, Evening.” Brutalight teleported right in front of her, using a red amulet she wore to hold Eve still. Valentine took this as an opportunity, using D4C to punch both Eve and Brutalight hard enough to break ribs. Blackjack took advantage of that to cut off one of D4C’s feet.

Brutalight ignored Valentine, fixated on Eve and only Eve. “DIE!” She pulled her horn back, unleashing a beam of dark magic. Eve did the exact same.

“Why are you so fixated on killing me? It won’t even mean anything!”

“It will if I wish all of you to stay dead!” Brutalight shouted back.

Valentine and Blackjack stopped fighting each other the moment they heard those words. They nodded to each other and rushed Brutalight from the side. For his efforts, Valentine got one of Brutalight’s swords embedded in his chest. But another Valentine took up D4C, and Blackjack brought her sword down on Brutalight.

The moment D4C and the Starmetal sword made contact with Brutalight, she smirked. “Kaboom.”

She used a spell that forced a reaction to occur with her own coat of fur, becoming the epicenter of an explosion that drove Valentine and Blackjack back. The pain that came from the spell made Brutalight falter, but not enough for Eve’s own dark magic to overpower her.

It was enough for Brutalight to forget about Seraphim.

She barely had time to realize she was being frozen solid before she was frozen solid.

Three on one had just been too much.

Eve dropped her magic, walking up to the shimmering form of Brutalight. “I’m not sure if you can hear me in there, Brutalight. But once this is over… We’re going to find wherever you’re hiding. And then you will be executed.” She narrowed her eyes. “I know you probably have some remark you want to leave me with to haunt my dreams, something to affirm your desire to see me and my friends dead. But you’re not going to get the chance.”

She slapped Brutalight across the face, shattering her. The headless alicorn of insanity tipped over, falling to the ground.

“…Brutal,” Blackjack observed.

“She’s the only one in this entire game who actually deserves that,” Eve muttered. She glanced at Valentine and Blackjack. “I suppose we’re in truce for the moment?”

“The enemy of justice has fallen,” Valentine admitted. “But we must fight to determine the winner of these games.”

“Wait, we’re all that’s left?” Blackjack blurted. “Wow…”

Eve furrowed her brow. “That doesn’t seem right… We had eight starting from last night. Flutterfree, Corona, and Brutalight are gone…”

“Rohan too,” Blackjack offered.

“That means there’s one other person besides us,” Eve said, blinking. “…Does anybody have any idea who it is?”

Valentine and Blackjack exchanged glances before shaking their heads.

“I think they’re the ones who killed Rohan,” Blackjack said. “We were poisoned last night. Doesn’t match the MO of anyone else I’ve encountered. I had to run away because I couldn’t pinpoint them.”

“A stealth player…” Valentine said, scratching his chin. “A particularly dangerous opponent.”

“And one we know nothing about,” Eve said, biting her lip. “…We can’t fight here, now. For all we know, they’re watching, waiting to kill the last of us the instant the fight ends.”

“That seems likely,” Valentine admitted.

“So we don’t give them what they want,” Blackjack declared. “We stick together until we find them.”

Eve nodded. “Agreed. Then, and only then, will we have our three-way.”

Valentine put out his hand. “I accept this plan.”

Two hooves met his hand, a last-minute group forming to face the mysterious final player.

“Let’s go hunting,” Eve said, lighting her horn. “There has to be some way to find them… Magic, spirit, something.”

“They had a gun, if that helps,” Blackjack offered.

“Almost all of those guns in the Cornucopia were yours,” Eve pointed out. “They’d probably have your signature.”

“Yeah…”

~~~

The entire day passed without incident.

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” Eve said, dropping her scanning spell. “There’s no sign of anyone else here, but we know they’re here.”

“Maybe Brutalight got them?” Blackjack suggested.

“Then we will have to wait for the nightly announcement to know for certain,” Valentine said, looking at the setting sun. “We won’t have to wait long.”

“Time to make camp then,” Blackjack said, sitting down at the base of a tree. “Get a fire going, you know, all that stuff.”

Eve used her magic to gather wood, create a fire pit, and light it. “Done.”

“You’re pretty handy with that.”

“Surprised you aren’t,” Eve responded. “You’re supposed to be a descendant of a Twilight, yes? Alicorn to boot.”

“Sorta-kinda-okay at magic here, but not, like, fucking amazing or anything.”

“You should apply yourself. I bet you could learn a lot.”

“Eh, yeah. Probably could.” Blackjack looked at her uneasily.

“…You think I should be mad at you.”

“Of course you should be fucking mad at me! How many of your people died because of what I did?”

“Blackjack, Blackjack, you also saved us.”

“Just because I fixed my mistake does not mean the mistake didn’t happen in the first place!”

“A mare is more than her past mistakes.”

“Yeah, well, just… Gah why are you so fucking understanding!?”

Eve looked into the distance. “I wasn’t last night. Perhaps I’m trying to move past a mistake of my own.”

Blackjack looked at the ground. “It’s been a while since that day, Eve. And I’ve had a… lot to think about since then.”

“Hm?”

“…Think about it. I hated you because of what you do to worlds, the way you interfere with them and act like gods. I’m still upset with that, nobody should have that kind of power – but I acted because I hated the way you made everything I did more or less meaningless. Quite stupid huh?”

“It’s not stupid, just misguided.”

“Ooooh boy… Regardless, this game has shown me something else.” She looked Eve in the eye. “For what you are, you need the power you have to survive, don’t you?”

Eve looked to Valentine for a moment before nodding slowly. “Yes. Often times, it seems like it isn’t enough. I worry that we’re not strong enough to face what’s coming.”

“I know the feeling,” Blackjack muttered. “…I still don’t like what you’re doing.”

“You don’t have to. I don’t like the USM’s way of doing things, but I learn to live with them. For the sake of harmony.”

Blackjack looked at Valentine. “That must be extremely difficult.”

Valentine raised an eyebrow.

“No offense… Okay, go ahead and take offense, nevermind – you aren’t the easiest guy to deal with.”

“It is the way I have become to serve my country,” Valentine declared. “I regret nothing.”

Blackjack chuckled. “At least you’re certain of yourself.”

Valentine nodded. The three of them stared into the light of the fire for a while.

“…Who do you think it is?” Blackjack asked. “All the people here seem related to you guys rather than stuff I deal with, you’d be the ones to know.”

Valentine shrugged. “I would remember any others from the USM.”

Eve put a hoof to her chin. “...There’s a lot I don’t remember. Was Starbeat here? Aradia? Lady Rarity?”

“Aradia would have already killed us all with ease,” Valentine pointed out. “We exist in a single timestream. The stealth approach would make sense for her, but she would not need to stay hidden unless she was limited.”

“Starbeat maybe…” Eve said, scratching her chin. “She’d know how to game the system. Expert in ka.”

“Fun,” Blackjack muttered. “Turn my winning against me.”

“Maybe that’s why she targeted you and Rohan?” Valentine suggested.

“Maybe…” Eve said. “But this is all just speculation. It’s probably not Starbeat. Could be, but we just might not remember.” Eve shrugged. “We-”

“GOOD EVENING CONTESTANTS!” the voice of Them boomed, interrupting the conversation. “We’ve cut our number in half once again! From eight to four on the fourth day! Lost to us are Flutterfree, Rohan, Corona, and Brutalight, victims of some very amazing battles – you sure are doing your captors proud! Only four remain! Evening Sparkle, Funny Valentine, Blackjack, and…”

The three of them held their breath.

“…Spoiler!”

“FUCK YOU!” Blackjack shouted. “EAT A HOLY, BURNING COCK YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARD!” She did not stop at this, continuing to shout expletives at the sky.

The voice of Them calmly waited for the string of swears to be done. “Sorry about that, connection issues.”

Blackjack twitched.

“When only four remain, it seems as though the games will soon draw to a close! Perhaps tomorrow will be the final day for our contestants! Remember, only one of you can make the wish!”

The voice vanished, leaving the three around a fire. There was silence for about a minute.

“Sleep in shifts of two,” Valentine said, suddenly. “That way no assassinations will occur between us.”

“Yeah,” the alicorns agreed.

~~~

Frostbitten wings hurt.

They hurt so much Eve was unable to fall asleep – or that’s what she told herself on the surface.

Inwardly she kept thinking about last night. About Flutterfree.

How was she going to face her later? How were they going to even talk to each other about what happened?

She, for once, didn’t know. Apology? Discussion? Begging? Anger? …It didn’t even make much sense, really.

“You’re groaning,” Blackjack called back to her.

“I know,” Eve muttered, opening her eyes. “Can’t sleep.”

“Images of the not-dead haunting you?”

“How’d you guess?”

“Figured it’d be the same as images of the dead,” Blackjack said, looking into the distance, Valentine at her side.

“It looks as if there won’t be more sleep tonight,” Valentine observed.

“Yeah, sorry,” Eve admitted.

“I can move to a fully rested body easily, and Blackjack already had her rest.”

Blackjack grunted. “Sure doesn’t feel like it.”

“You’re missing a leg. Things like that tend to take their toll.”

The three of them sat side by side in the cool night air.

“What are we going to do when we are the only ones left?” Eve asked.

“Fight to the death,” Blackjack deadpanned.

“That’s what Them want,” Eve pointed out. “What if we… don’t?”

“They kill everyone, are you crazy!?”

“I mean, we won’t fight – we’ll just decide who makes the wish by talking. Reason out who’s wish would be the best for everyone. I would wish for something to bring harmony to all of the nations here, not just us.”

“And I would wish for true justice,” Valentine declared.

“You having doubts about the specifics as well?”

“Yes. Simple, material things are not justice… Justice transcends. There are fates that must be dealt with…”

Eve smirked. “I like where you’re going.”

Blackjack rolled her eyes. “I’m just going to wish that anybody who died because of me that didn’t deserve to would come back.”

Valentine and Eve stared at her with expressions of mild horror.

“What? What the fuck is wrong with that?”

“Blackjack, I’ve read your story,” Eve said. “You… Death followed you around more than almost any other person I’ve seen. How many ponies would that be? Hundreds? Thousands?”

“So? If they didn’t deserve to die, I’ll bring them back.” She folded her hooves. “End of story.”

“Ignoring for a moment the question of ‘where do you draw the line’, do you have any idea what that would do to Equis Fallout? The destabilization that many ponies coming back would cause? It might cause another war to break out, especially with all the new infrastructure.”

Blackjack twitched. “There it is! The ‘high and mighty, better than thou’ STUPIDITY that you flaunt! You have no fucking right to determine what my world needs and what it doesn’t. I’m going to bring my friends back and there’s nothing you are going to do about it.”

Eve was taken aback. “Blackjack, I-”

“I’m going to undo the damage I did,” Blackjack said with extreme conviction. “I am going to win these games and I will get the best possible ending.”

“What was that you were saying earlier? About making struggles meaningless?”

“I don’t fucking care,” Blackjack spat. “I’m going to fix everything.”

“Listen to yourself! Think!”

Blackjack laughed. “Do I look like I do thinking!?”

“Selfish,” Valentine said.

“What was that?”

“Such a wish is selfish,” Valentine said. “Just bring back the lives of those lost on your world? Of those close to you? Why not extend the range to include others? Other worlds? Other nations?”

“Maybe I’ll do that! Whatever it takes to get Glory back!”

Eve looked at Blackjack with sad eyes. “You really mean that don’t you? Whatever you can, damn the consequences?”

Blackjack drew her sword, noticing the look in Eve’s and Valentine’s eyes. “Yes. I mean every word.”

“…Can we convince you to put your personal desires aside for the betterment of everyone?” Eve asked. “Please?”

“Everyone’s better off alive than dead, princess.”

Eve sighed. “It looks like we will have to fight then. After we deal with mysterious last contestant.”

Valentine nodded.

“You think I’m just going to work with you if I know that you’ll turn and kill me once we’re done!?” Blackjack blurted. “No dice! I’m taking you both out right no-”

Eve froze her solid with Seraphim.

Valentine put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t suppose you can condition her to work with us?”

“At this point, I doubt it,” Eve said, frowning deeply. “…She just wanted the same thing as Flutterfree. It’s a thing so, so many want. But bringing people back to life… It’s not a skill meant to be at our disposal. I fear the day when we do get strong enough to revive everyone we want. I fear it more than I fear the day Corona discovers mass-produced immortality.”

Valentine nodded. “Some powers are too much to give to anyone. And yet, there are those who have such abilities. Them, for instance.”

“It does things to them…” Eve admitted. “It’s done things to us to make Blackjack and others like her see us as enemies. Higher up it only gets worse… Disconnects, ideals above all else, power taken to extremes…” She shook her head. “We can’t wish for anything that would ruin who we are, Valentine.”

Valentine nodded.

“Blackjack can’t move past that,” Eve said, putting a hoof on Blackjack’s frozen face. “I think that’s part of why her nature in ka failed her. Her nature is to win most of the time, but to endure great loss in the process. She’s not the Princess of Winning, she’s the Princess of Sacrifice. If she found a way to undo all her sacrifices… It would destroy the drawback to her nature. She wants to undo the sacrifice…”

“But she cannot.”

“It’s a much darker, more depressing curse than Starbeat’s,” Eve said, sadly. “…It means all she loves and cares about dies.”

“Only if she tries to be the hero.”

“I don’t think she can stop.” Eve shook her head. “Blackjack… I’m really sorry. I don’t have a cure for you. And I’m not going to make that wish for you. I know you see me as an enemy for this, and… you may be right to do so.” She stared into the alicorn’s cold, frozen eyes. “Goodbye, Blackjack. I hope you find a cure.”

With a burst of magic, Eve turned Blackjack into diamond dust. The sparkling bits of ice rose into the air, riding the wind. They filled the night with the their beautiful sheen, rising to the stars themselves.

“…And then there were three,” Valentine said, hands in his jacket pockets.

“What are the chances our mysterious third is going to try to kill us now?” Eve asked.

A dart struck Valentine at the base of the neck, a second one bouncing off Seraphim’s natural protections.

“Rather high,” Valentine muttered, wrapping himself in the flag to access his alternate selves before the poison killed him. It was only a few seconds before there were six Valentines, all crowding around Eve.

“We need to find where these darts are coming from…” Eve said, scanning everywhere with her magic. “I’m not finding anything!”

“It is also night…” Valentine muttered, three of his selves going down with a carefully placed gunshot. “And they’re really good at aiming.”

“I can’t track the bullets!” Eve grunted. “They don’t appear to exist until they hit you, and that only gives me a general idea of where they are!” She raised a bubble shield around them, deflecting all the bullets.

“We clearly have the power advantage,” Valentine declared. “But they know that, so they won’t let us see them.”

“They’re playing smart,” Eve said. “They probably have some kind of plan…”

The plan turned out to be a grenade. Eve’s shield shattered when it exploded, exposing Eve and the Valentines. More gunshots went off, this time knocking down all the Valentines at once, but easily bouncing off Seraphim’s barrier.

Valentines started pouring out from behind trees, scouring the area, but they fell from seemingly random directions.

“We might have an invisible teleporter!” Eve shouted.

“Can Seraphim help with that?”

“If I drop Seraphim’s shields, I get shot by an invisible bullet! They’ve already proven it’s possible for them to get past a bubble shield!”

“Then take this!” Dozens of Valentines walked up to Eve – and dogpiled her.

“What the-”

“We are your shield.”

“Well now I can’t see…”

“Would that really help you in this instance?”

“…Good point. SERAPHIM!” Eve summoned her Stand, forcing it to rise above the pile of Valentine. The invisible opponent started shooting the pile, unable to dig all the way through to Eve. Seraphim didn’t know a universe where invisibility was impossible without screwing with the nature of life itself, but it did know one where teleportation wasn’t a thing. It just needed to edit reality to prevent that from happening…

“PONYFEATHERS!” Eve swore. “I need to know exactly where they are at one moment to stop them from moving again!”

“…Would you be able to know where they were if a bullet hit you?”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure I would survive th-” D4C grabbed Twilight’s horn and shoved it into a parallel universe, one that had the exact same events as was happening in the base. Yeesh, Them were thorough when they created these sub-universes. “Tap into your other self’s mind!” Valentine demanded.

Eve did so – finding it to be a shadow of her own, little more than a puppet designed to carry out what Them thought she would do in any situation. A Valentine in her pile tore her out and tossed her into the air – where a bullet hit her right in the chest. Eve got the information directly from the bullet shot in the other universe, using it to triangulate the enemy’s position in her universe.

Seraphim activated fully, freezing the enemy in place. Eve hit the area with a true-sight spell, banishing the invisibility.

Olivia appeared, holding several guns, a poison kit, and a teleporter belt. “…Oi caramba…” She muttered.

“OLIVIA!?” Eve blurted.

“Yeah. It’s me.” She tried to shoot one last time just for the heck of it.

“DOJYAAAAN!” Valentine shouted, appearing behind her with D4C, the flurry of Stand fists hitting her in every location. She fell down, but filled Valentine with lead. Another version took possession of D4C. He reached under her and pulled another copy of Olivia from the ground. She fused together, exploding in the disgusting fractal shattering D4C was known for.

“…Ouch,” Eve winced.

“Who was that?” Valentine asked.

“One of our techies, works with Corona and Lady Rarity,” Eve explained. Also the person you think the TSAB has in custody, but we don’t need to talk about that.

“She deserves recognition for making it this far,” Valentine said.

Eve nodded. “She will.”

The two looked at each other.

“And then there were two,” Eve said.

Valentine nodded.

“…Let’s do this in the morning,” Eve said with an exaggerated yawn.

“Agreed,” Valentine said.

Eve cast a sleep spell on them both now that it was safe to do so.

~~~

The sun rose.

Eve and Valentine woke up the moment its rays fell on their faces. The two stood up, dusted themselves off, and looked at the sunrise.

“So, which one of us gets to make the wish?” Eve asked.

“It’s the same wish,” Valentine pointed out. “It doesn’t matter.”

Eve thought about this for a moment. “Yeah… Yeah it is the same wish, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is.”

“All that thinking, fighting, and arguing, and in the end it doesn’t matter at all.” Eve found this amusing enough to laugh at. “Flip a coin?”

Valentine looked into the distance. “That doesn’t seem right, though. To end it with a flip of the coin.”

“I know…” Eve smiled, shaking her head. “In the end, we just can’t escape Them can we? They want a final battle… And we want one too.”

Valentine let himself smile. “But it will not be like any of the others fought in this arena.”

Eve smirked. “Because we’ll be smiling and having fun. You hear that Them? We’re going to enjoy ourselves despite you!”

No response.

“I’m making an arena,” Eve declared. “Help me clear trees.”

It didn’t take long for a small army of Valentines and the Charter-Princess to clear enough trees for an arena. With a quick landscaping spell, all the grass, stones, and weeds were removed as well, creating a flat circle of dirt more than large enough for the two to go at it.

Eve agreed to let Valentine start with a few duplicates – after all, without them, Eve could go for the Absolute Zero instant-kill with ease. It was only fair.

“A fair, just fight,” Valentine said, summoning D4C to his side. “I believe Them were not considering this.”

Eve nodded, summoning Seraphim and spreading her wings. The two bowed at each other.

“Three…” Eve said.

“Two…” Valentine continued.

“One…”

“FIGHT!” They both declared, charging each other – smiling.

Already D4C had been transferred to another Valentine, who vanished into the flag, grabbing more alternate versions of Valentine for the fight. Eve froze two Valentines solid and shattered them by smashing the two of them into each other.

Valentines appeared behind her and started shooting, only to find she had erected an invisible wall with Seraphim. Eve tapped into her dark magic, surrounding the arena in dark, wispy tentacles that, upon touching a Valentine, reduced him to ash while screaming.

“DOJYAAAAAN!” Valentine shouted, the one with D4C jumping out of a nearby Valentine’s coat, the Stand punching Seraphim enough to upset the invisible wall, allowing bullets to fly. Eve caught them with her magic, opting to send them back rather than just drop them.

Eve saw the D4C Valentine running at her with a flag poised, ready to trap her in another dimension. She teleported away – only for D4C to translate to the nearest Valentine, giving him the power to cross dimensions, and he enveloped her in the flag, sending her to another realm.

There were now two Evening Sparkles in existence. This meant they had greater firepower – but this also meant they could not come into contact with each other.

The Valentines wanted to make sure they did. They appeared on either side of the Eves, forcing them closer together.

Both Eves opted to use their dark magic mixed with a teleport to distance themselves and decimate the numbers of Valentines present.

“It doesn’t matter how many of us you kill, Eve!” Valentine called. “I have a truly endless supply thanks to Them!”

“The only way to defeat you is to defeat your Stand then!” Eve declared. “Seraphim!” Seraphim stopped editing reality and became the rapidly-moving gyroscope used for physical conflicts. “Get D4C!”

“Seraphim is not a physical combat Stand!” Valentine declared. “D4C is stronger! Not to mention, I can still use my ability while fighting directly!”

“But you don’t have magic!” Eve declared, one of her selves floating into the air. The gyroscopic form of Seraphim surrounded her. She tapped into the magic of the universe they occupied, shifting her coat color to white and her mane into a fiery inferno. She pointed a hoof at Valentine. “I can shunt my power directly into Seraphim if I so choose!”

The dark magic in the arena fell, leaving the bright star that was Eve as the only source of her magic.

Besides her other self, that was. D4C quickly grabbed the other Eve and tossed her like a bullet at the glowing Eve. The glowing Eve and the purple Eve shared a moment when they locked eyes. The purple Eve let herself get disintegrated by the other’s flame attack.

Eve smirked. “I think I’m going to keep increasing my power here, just to add to the absurdity. It’s not like you can really interrupt me.” Her eyes went black, summoning a dark highlight to her blinding light. She pointed a hoof at Valentine. “What now?”

“It’s times like this I wish Love Train was portable.”

“Hm?”

“One of the most powerful artifacts the USM has under its control improves D4C’s abilities. Notably, I cannot carry it with me everywhere I go.” He and all his other selves entered a ready stance. “But that’s not important. What is important is that you have no idea where D4C is right now.”

“And you can’t defeat me without using him directly!” Eve declared, chuckling. She sent a beam of solar light around the arena, charring all the Valentines. More came out of the woodwork, indicating D4C was currently occupying another plane of existence.

Eve didn’t care – Valentine had to show D4C eventually, all she had to do was wai-

A flag was tossed up to her, and out of it came another version of Eve, looking rather bewildered. Eve sent all her focus on the alternate self, disintegrating them before contact could be made.

This allowed another flag to get closer to Eve. The current core Valentine and D4C appeared out of it. “DOJYAAAAAN!” D4C punched the rapidly rotating Seraphim, cracking the outer ring. This broke both of Eve’s wings, forcing her down to the ground – but she maintained her heightened fiery form.

She managed to teleport less than an inch from D4C, using Seraphim’s remaining rings to shred one of D4C’s arms off. The Stand cracked, but remained complete. It kicked Seraphim, breaking the second ring.

This pain broke Eve’s legs, the pain enough to draw her out of her heightened magical form. She fell to the ground, breathing hard as the last ring of Seraphim rotated around her with incredible speed.

The Valentine whose arm she had just removed passed out – and a new, perfectly healthy Valentine took his place. Granted, D4C was still damaged, but this Valentine hadn’t tired at all.

“You never tire…” Eve said with a chuckle.

“Usually I’m not so careless with my other selves,” Valentine admitted. “After all, I have to take them from somewhere. This place just allows me to cut loose. I will never tire or sustain lasting damage. You will.”

“I just have to kill your Stand…”

“Seraphim is at the breaking point.”

Eve pondered this, then grinned. “Oh, I’ve got an idea.”

“What?”

Eve activated Seraphim in the reality-altering mode, using her horn to raise a magic shield. “ANTI-STAND UNIVERSE!”

D4C vanished. Eve shot the Valentine that had been talking to her, killing him in an instant. She set to work killing all the rest – without D4C, if all of them were gone, she would win. She would definitely win.

She cleared the entire arena in a matter of seconds.

“Ha! Gotcha!”

D4C appeared behind her, rising out of a flag with another Valentine.

“DOJYAAAAN!” He shouted, punching with D4C’s remaining arm.

“WHAT!?” Eve blurted, unable to comprehend much as Seraphim’s final ring crumbled, reducing her spinal column to dust. Most Stand users would just die when their Stand disintegrated completely, but Eve managed to hold on with her powerful magic.

“I transferred D4C the moment you activated Seraphim, to make you think it had worked,” Valentine said, walking up to her.

Eve looked at him. “Y-you’re the o-only Valentine h-here now…” Eve said, barely able to move her mouth.

Valentine raised an eyebrow, about to ask what her point was. She shot him with a disintegrating laser before he could speak. It was too weak to kill him, but it severely wounded him. He landed on the ground, clutching his chest. “NANI!?”

“Y-you are the only Valentine…” Eve coughed. “You c-can’t transfer D4C without t-traveling…”

Valentine started limping away – to a flag, anything he could press himself to and translate.

“No,” Eve said, using her remaining magic to wrap him in telekinesis and drag him closer to her, slamming his head on the ground in the process. “Not going anywhere…”

Valentine grunted, summoning D4C. “If you die first…”

“I’m not going to…” Eve grunted.

“Maybe not…” Valentine said. D4C used its hand to grab Eve – and roll her overtop of Valentine. D4C was able to activate using the collapsing of Eve and the ground.

A fully healthy Valentine appeared a moment later, looking down at Eve.

“You win,” Eve admitted, the life draining from her eyes. “Make it impressive, Valentine.”

Valentine saluted. “It has been an honor. And it will continue being one.”

“Thanks for ending this on a… high note…” Eve coughed. “See you soon…”

And Evening Sparkle died with a smile on her face.

Valentine stood tall, the wind blowing through his hair.

“I CLAIM VICTORY OF THEM’S HUNGER GAMES IN THE NAME OF THE UNITED STATES OF THE MULTIVERSE!” He threw his hand into the air, sending the flag into the air, stars and stripes waving in the wind.

“EVERYONE GIVE A HAND TO AMBASSADOR FUNNY VALENTINE, THE WINNER!” the Them said. Valentine could hear actual clapping coming from all around him. “He only had three kills to his name alone though, the honor of most kills goes to Evening herself, with five. She also has the honor of coming in second overall, with the stealthy one-kill-wonder Olivia in third.”

In a flash of light, Valentine was no longer in the arena – he was standing on a perfectly flat purple plane that glistened with the light of distant stars. D4C was completely healed, standing alongside the Ambassador, ready for anything.

The Them revealed himself to Valentine and his Stand. The being was white, and took up all of Valentine’s field of view. The central point of the instance of Them rippled with energy, sending out smooth fractal patterns out into the rest of the white creature’s essence. Most of this essence outside the center was translucent, shifting with beautiful waves. Valentine knew that these beings were the distilled idea of physical perfection – the mathematics of the golden ratio and spin infused in everything about them.

“Valentine, as the winner of the Hunger Games, you are to receive a reward beyond the likes of which most lower races can even comprehend. You get a wish. Tell me what it is.”

Valentine looked the Them right in the center. “I wish for Justice.”

“…Care to be a little more definitive in what that means, exactly?”

“I wish for Harmony.”

“That doesn’t help!”

“I wish for all of us to be brought closer together through an act of justice!”

“…Just say it, dramatic politician.”

Valentine took a powerful stance. “I wish for the Collector to be brought to justice for what he has done to us.”

“Ah, finally, a solid wish we can deal with. Your wish i-”

“HOLD IT!” another Them interrupted, appearing behind Valentine. This Them was identical in every way to the other one, right down to the male voice reverberating in Valentine’s mind. “He just wished for us to bring down a Class 2 Presence. That’ll take a bit more work than snap-fingers-done. Just waltzing in and giving the Collector a beatdown isn’t wish material. It’s not like we’re using a Wishing World.”

“Are you scared of a little Gary Stu?” the other one ribbed.

“Yes. I am. They have the nastiest tricks and you never know when one of them is going to find a way to destroy one of us with a Deus Ex Machina or something.”

“You’re giving him too much credit.”

“I’m cautious. But if you want to go over there and do it yourself, it’s your funeral.”

“You all agreed to assist with the wish! Going there alone sounds like work.”

“One forbid any of us actually do any work.”

The two found this statement amusing enough to laugh at it.

The first Them rippled with emotion. “The point is this isn’t beyond us or anything.”

“It’s not worth it. Just refuse to give him the wish, it’s not like we actually have to keep our word or anything.”

“Ahem,” Valentine said. “If I may make a suggestion?”

“Yes, what is it?” the second one asked, clearly annoyed he was talking to a human being.

“Don’t go over there and deal with the Collector personally, if that is what you fear. Why not manipulate events in such a way that he will be brought to justice? You clearly have the power to manipulate universes on a fundamental level. Surely you can do something from a distance.”

The two Thems were quiet.

“That sounds fun,” the first eventually said.

“I thought you hated work?”

“I’m already thinking of a way to make this decidedly more entertaining! I’ll need to do some research on the Collector and see what makes him tick… But ooooooh this could be our next round of bets!”

“If you’re willing to set it up, I’ll call the gang together again.”

The first returned to addressing Valentine. “YOUR WISH HAS BEEN GRANTED, FUNNY VALENTINE! EXPECT RESULTS WITHIN A FEW WEEKS!”

Valentine bowed. “Thank you for your generosity.”

“This has been another round of the Hunger Games! Join us next time when we… apparently try Smash Bros again. I promise you folks, it’ll have an actual story this time! Now everyone, get out of here!”

And suddenly Valentine was back in the board meeting he had been in the middle of when the Games started. He sighed. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have a question. Did I vanish there for a moment? Or were there any signs of a dimensional anomaly?”

After a bunch of shaking heads, Valentine sighed. “I need to contact Merodi Universalis to see if any of what I just experienced actually happened.”

~~~

Eve regained consciousness deep inside the covers of her bed.

She thought about getting up, about dealing with her job, about talking to her friends, and about fixing the damage that was done.

She decided she was done thinking.

She pressed a button on the wall with her magic. “Cessera, I’m taking a vacation day.”

“Got it.”

Eve returned to her bed, thinking of nothing but pillows and rest. She was soon fast asleep.

~~~

Renee sat in her office.

She twitched.

“I’m going to have a word with Vriska about sniper rifles,” she muttered to herself, shaking her head. “At least now I know what it feels like to get shot with a sniper rifle. That’s an interesting experience to have survived.”

She lit her horn and pulled up to her computer and started typing up a report on what she’d just experienced. She didn’t see any reason why she should put her work on hold for this – clearly, there were other people among her fellow contestants who would make a bigger deal out of it. She also hadn’t really been around long – got told what was going on, and then got shot.

In and out, more or less.

It took her about ten minutes to type up everything she had experienced. She folded it up, sent an email holding it to the rest of the Overheads, and got back to what she’d been doing when she’d been taken away – reading reports marked ‘high importance’ by her many expedition teams.

Most often these reports were rarely the kind of ‘high importance’ they were supposed to be, but she enjoyed reading them. Plenty of amusing anecdotes and interesting bits of information.

Today it was unfortunately rather boring. It was important, yes, but the danger to the economy from wood that could absorb magic was hardly engrossing. Not to mention the typos…

She swore she would have wished those Rubies learned how to write properly. It had to be pretty bad if the translator wasn’t able to parse it at all for Renee’s viewing. She would have to call them in at some point.

A message came in on her computer – Pinkie was asking for a day off. Renee granted it – the pink pony probably got a lot further into the games than Renee herself did. She wondered what Pinkie was going to do with the day.

“Visitor for you, Renee,” a voice came in on the intercom.

“Who is it?”

“Your sister and her kid.”

Renee smiled. “Ah, send them in!”

Allure and Minna were teleported into the room. Allure’s face was red, tear streaks visible under her eyes. Minna was very confused as to why her mother was crying.

“Renee!” Allure blurted, rushing her sister into her hooves. “Renee… I saw… I saw…”

Renee gasped. “Oh, Allure, dear! I’m sorry! I didn’t think about what you would ha-”

“It’s my fault! I distracted you! I…”

“Allure, it didn’t matter.”

“But what if I distract you at another time? What if I screw everything up? What i-”

“Allure… Everything’s fine now. We’re both home, as if nothing had happened. I don’t even have a headache!”

Allure gulped. “I know.” She squeezed Renee tighter. “I’m still not letting you go.”

Renee shook her head. “You’ll have to eventually.”

“Says who?” Allure demanded.

“Our jobs?”

“Psh, they don’t have voices,” Allure said, allowing herself to laugh. Then she buried her face into Renee’s mane. “I was so scared…”

“I was too, Allure, I was too…” she saw Minna out of the corner of her eye. “Oh, you poor thing, so confused.”

Minna nodded slowly, clearly trying to process what was happening behind that impassive face of hers.

“Come here. I may not be able to explain but I can make you feel better about it,” Renee said, pulling the girl into the hug with her magic. Minna wrapped her arms around them.

“Everyone’s here,” Allure said, smiling. “That’s all I need.”

~~~

Rohan Kishibe stared at a blank manga page, unable to get the drive to write or draw anything.

This never happened. He sometimes had difficulty writing stories meant to affect the world around him, but working on his manga series? Never. Never had he stared at a blank page and not felt something. Not since he got Heaven’s Door.

He broke the pen he was chewing on, spilling ink all over the paper. He stared at it, wondering if inspiration would come. Nothing did.

Was he going to have to go on hiatus again?

No… He would never do that if he could help it. All that could stop him from meeting his deadlines was physical distance! He had a reputation!

He still couldn’t figure out what the ink blob on his page was supposed to be. This just didn’t bode well…

Perhaps it was just the funk he was in. Having fallen to… to… whatever it was he had fallen to in his sleep – or was it in his sleep? The memory of the end was foggy. Some assassin, regardless. Some coward who wouldn’t face him.

Though who in their right mind would face Rohan directly? Toph. The rest who had faced Rohan directly tended to lose very quickly by virtue of being overwritten.

What was he even complaining about?

Not winning, that’s what. He should have been more careful. Though since his memory was foggy he wasn’t exactly sure how he should have been careful. That was no small part of what was bugging him.

Rohan heard the sound of his front door being smashed in. He had two guesses as to who it was. The guy who usually bashed his door down was Josuke, but there was one other who might have a particular vendetta against the manga artist today…

“ROHAN KISHIBE!” Thrackerzod roared. “YOU ARE TO REMOVE THIS BLASPHEMOUS COMMAND FROM MY BODY!”

“Sure,” Rohan said.

“I DO NOT CARE WHAT YOUR EXCUSES ARE. IF YOU DO NOT REMOVE THEM, THERE WILL BE A TRANSMISSION TO THOSE ABOVE YOU TO FORCE YOU TO DO SO!”

“Alright already,”

“I MEAN IT, NO FUNN- Wait, you said sure!?”

“Yeah. But go on if you want, I’m sure the speech got much better as it went on.”

“Shut up. Just fix me.”

Rohan summoned Heaven’s door and popped Thrackerzod’s book open, leafing through the pages where he had left commands. He erased them with whiteout and then closed the book. “Good as new.”

“You didn’t leave anything?”

“Just ‘cannot attack Rohan Kishibe’,” Rohan commented.

Thrackerzod looked like she wanted to scream at him for leaving that in, but she decided it would be a fruitless endeavor. “Fine.”

“Good,” Rohan said, turning away from Thrackerzod and examining his paper. Summoning Heaven’s Door, he made a sketch that turned the ink blot into Thrackerzod being smashed into the ground. Rohan added Froppy a few seconds later.

“…Is it possible for a Prophet to act retroactively?”

Rohan shrugged. “Probably. Though only without prior knowledge of the event, I would think.” He paused. “I shouldn’t be surprised that you know about me.”

“Classification is a loose thing here,” Thrackerzod admitted. “Now, I’m going to go home. I’m going to forget anything in those games ever happened. But before I do, I want you to know. IF YOU WRITE IN ME EVER AGAIN I WILL SMITE Y-”

Rohan popped open Thrackerzod like a book and wrote ‘does a jig for the next five seconds.’ Upon closing the book Thrackerzod did a jig for five seconds.

“You were saying?” Rohan asked, smirking.

Thrackerzod vanished without another word.

Now in a considerably better mood, Rohan found the images coming to his mind once more.

~~~

Brutalight screamed in the throne room of her castle of insanity.

Rarifruit looked to Fluttershout. “What did you do to her?”

“Do to her? I didn’t do anything!” Fluttershout retorted. “She just started screaming completely on her own.”

“But that’s what you do! So you must be responsible!”

“Morons,” Rainbine muttered.

“Say that to my face Rainbine!”

“I did.”

“Oh. In that case, thank you.”

Rainbine rolled her eyes. “Whatever floats your fruity little boat there.”

“Shush, it doesn’t have anything to do with Fluttershout,” Six said, walking up to her mentor. “Brutalight? What’s wrong?”

“I LOST! I WAS SO, SO CLOSE! TOP FIVE AT LEAST!” Brutalight screamed at the sky. “But then they had to GANG UP ON ME because I had a BIG MOUTH!” She lit her horn, picking up a boulder and throwing it out the window. The village outside lost yet another house to Brutalight’s ‘boulder therapy’.

For once, it didn’t do anything for her. “I need to start a war.”

“We own the universe and the next one over,” Rarifruit pointed out.

“Time to find a new one, then,” Brutalight decreed. “I need to conquer something.”

“You know, you should probably talk about it with us,” Fluttershout suggested.

Brutalight glared at her.

“In addition to going conquering, of course.”

Brutalight’s glare lessened. “Right, right. Well… Some higher-order beings grabbed me and twenty-three others – mostly from Merodi Universalis – to engage in a deathmatch battle royale. I killed every version of Starlight Glimmer I could find. Got a bingo and everything. But then I went to fight among the finalists in a free-for-all battle to end all battles… AND THEY FUCKING GANGED UP ON ME!” She roared.

“Sounds like they didn’t like you,” Rainbine pointed out.

“No shit,” Fluttershout muttered.

Six folded her arms. “Well, it sounds like you made it really far and got to kill a lot of people. I bet it was cathartic.”

“I didn’t get Eve,” Brutalight muttered. “Some of the killing was good, but most of it was kinda… void of meaning. I would have wished for all of them to stay dead had I won, but I didn’t win, so they’re all alive, GAH.” She sat in her throne and leaned on one of her hooves.

“Oh, oh, idea!” Rainbine shouted.

“You? An idea?” Rarifruit blurted.

“Let’s make our own deathmatch to cheer Brutalight up! We can find twenty-something poor saps and throw them into an arena, see what happens, easy!”

Six looked at Rainbine. “…That’s actually a good idea. What about it, Brutalight?”

Brutaligh’s angered face gave way to a psychotic grin. “Oooooh, I can see why Them like this sort of game in particular… Except in mine, consequences will be permanent! Heheheheh… I’ll make it bigger! Better! Brighter! Best idea you’ve ever had, Rainbine. Let’s start rounding up contestants, shall we?”

Six grinned. “I already have some in mind…”

~~~

Jotaro walked through the streets of Celestia City, hands in his pockets, head down. To virtually everyone who had ever seen him, this appeared to be nothing more than normal behavior. He may not have gone on walks all that often, but it wasn’t unheard of. Plus, he may have had a destination.

In truth, Jotaro had no idea where he was going, busy dealing with internal thoughts of inadequacy.

Fell to Vriska. She didn’t even have her dice, just her luck.

He clenched his fist in his pocket – he saw a million ways he could have won that fight. A slightly better use of time stop. Forego the rapid ORA ORA punches for fewer, more accurate ones to get through her luck barrier. Blind her. Anything, really.

Yet, in the moment, he was unable to pull it off. He failed against an opponent he knew.

And then he’d been taken out early in the game. All that preparation, for nothing. Nothing.

Had he just been unlucky? Or was there a better way to play the game?

These thoughts were pushed to the back when he recognized one of the figures coming toward him. He sighed – it was Vriska.

“Hey, big guy!” She called waving her hands. “Over here!”

Jotaro didn’t look at her, he just kept walking.

She flew over to him, taking up a pose like she was lounging on the air. “Come on, Jojo, lighten up a little! Game’s over!”

No response from the inheritor of the Joestar bloodline.

“All right, fine,” Vriska said, landing on her feet and standing in front of Jotaro. “Since you won’t start a conversation that leads into this, I’m just going to have to tell you directly. Remember this day well, for two words are about to escape my mouth that will blow your tiny mind.”

Jotaro raised an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry.”

Jotaro looked at her in shock. The ends of his mouth curled up and he grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

“Should have asked you to be an ally first,” Vriska admitted. “Shouldn’t have become quite as bloodthirsty as they wanted. Shouldn’t have become so invested in the game.” She shrugged. “But hey, I lost.”

“Who to?”

“Corona. She did some serious bullshit.”

“Sounds familiar.”

Vriska chuckled. “Don’t you start.”

Jotaro opted not to respond.

“Anyway, now that all that tedious and drawn out apology business is out of the way, how about you and I go out and have some fun? Hub arcade is good this time of year, but there’s also a giant laser tag arena right here in this very city!”

Jotaro glanced at her, raising an eyebrow.

“Right, fine, laser tag is a bad idea considering what we’ve just been through. What about… one of those virtual reality terminals? There’s this new thing called the Oasis where you can apparently do anything and be anyone.”

“I’ll have to see it to believe it.”

“No you don’t.”

Jotaro shrugged.

“Come on, I’ll show you.” She pushed him forward, grinning. “I think car racing sounds like a good thing to look for, don’t you?”

Jotaro nodded slowly. Racing did sound fun.

~~~

Corona received an email, marked urgent enough that her red shades displayed it in front of her eyes the moment it appeared.

From: Renee

Come to my house now. It’s an emergency.

Corona didn’t need to be told twice. “Emergency call from Renee,” Corona told Toph.

Toph shrugged. “Eh, we can talk later. Not like I really got to do much besides get the tar beaten out of me by an alicorn destined to win. Go.”

Corona dialed the Hub, having Raging Sights mix a teleport spell into the portal to ensure they’d arrive right outside Renee’s doorstep. She knocked on Renee’s door, adjusting her glasses.

Renee opened the door, her eyes the image of terror. Her mascara had already run down her face.

“…What happened?”

“I… I just got home,” Renee said, choking on her words. “H-he isn’t himself. You’ve got to help him!”

Corona paled. Something happened to Daniel? “What’s wrong with him?”

“Just… Just come look!” Renee dragged her into the house and took her to the living room. Daniel sat in a chair, staring at the clock on the wall. His jaw hung slack and his arms lay at his sides, limp. He was alive, but he didn’t appear to have much life in him.

Corona was struck with the realization that he’d gotten old in the almost thirty years since they started exploring the multiverse. He was around forty when they started… Seventy now. Even magic medicine didn’t let him keep his youth. Ascending probably would, if it came to that...

Corona removed the tips of her gloves, exposing her fingers. “I’ll go in, see what I can do to shake him out of it. I don’t know how he’ll react tho-”

She didn’t even get to touch him before he reached out, grabbed her wrist, and screamed at her.

“…Oh…” Corona said. “I… Renee, I think I did this to him.”

“W-what?”

“I messed with his Ascended form in the arena… I had to kill him in it. He sees me as a threat.”

“I don’t care if you did it, get in there and fix him for me!” Renee wailed.

“I’ll try,” Corona said, forcing her hand to Daniel’s head.

The surface memories of his were impossible to fathom. She saw images of herself, images of Renee, and images of a stargate.

She forced her powers of empathy deeper, digging up memories of being an Ascended being trapped in a globe. It wasn’t a maddening existence, just dreadfully boring. Most of the Ascended’s far-reaching senses and higher-dimensional understanding were limited to the confines of the globe, unable to see as far as he needed…

And then she used him. The feeling of being burnt to extinguish another was such a mixture of emotions even Corona had difficulty parsing through it. There was the vindication of getting revenge. There was the horror of realizing one was being devoured by an attack. And then there was a deep, horrendous burning that had no physical body to attack, so all of it went to the mind…

Corona forced herself deeper into Daniel’s mind, a place where everything was white and Daniel himself stood.

“Trying to fix what you did?” he asked, back to her.

“I didn’t realize!” Corona blurted. “I though-”

“You thought wrong. You damaged my mind by burning me there. Now I’m stuck in here, in the place my Ascended consciousness comes from, denied access to the rest of my body.”

Corona extended a hand. “I can bring you out.”

Daniel turned to her, face lined with fear. “…I’m not sure I can let you.”

“Just take my hand, Daniel.”

He flinched, taking a step back.

“Daniel…”

Daniel started running away, deeper into the recesses of his mind.

Thoughtchain, Corona thought, holding the palm of her hand out. A mental construct that looked like a holy chain shot out, wrapped itself around Daniel’s midsection, and pulled him to her. “We’re going out, Daniel.”

He writhed in the chain, taking a partially-Ascended appearance.

“This is just your mind. You can’t actually become one of them, in here.” She lifted her other hand and left the depths of Daniel’s mind, dragging him along with her. When she reached the surface memories, she dropped him off.

Then she returned to the real world. Daniel was screaming at her. He kicked her in the stomach and plastered himself against a wall.

“Daniel! Dear!” Renee called. “You-”

“She just tore me through my own mind!” Daniel shouted, gasping. “I can’t even think straight anymore!”

“You’re better than you were,” Corona said, dusting herself off. “Stuck in your head.” She summoned the fingertips back onto her gloves. “I wouldn’t try to Ascend for a few days, but otherwise you…”

She noticed that with every syllable she spoke, Daniel flinched in visible pain. Her expression fell. “Oh.”

“Daniel?” Renee asked. “…Do you want her to go?”

“Yes. Yes, get her out of here,” Daniel said, trying to avoid looking at Corona. Her mere presence was an affront to his subconscious. “Please.”

Renee walked up to Corona and roughly scooted her toward the front door.

“Renee, I…”

“Thank you,” Renee said, hardly more than a whisper. Then she opened the door and shoved Corona out of it. Renee slammed it right after.

Corona stood outside, in the street, wondering what to do next.

She came to the horrifying conclusion she might not be able to do anything about this.

She might be permanently ingrained into his mental state to trigger a fear response… And she wasn’t good enough to remove specifically that, especially if he didn’t want to cooperate.

Corona put a hand to her head. “Why the heck did I have to catch him like that…?”

She didn’t have a good answer.

~~~

Froppy sat in her house, staring at the ocean from her balcony.

It was nice, being able to afford this house. Usually the view would always cheer her up. Endless water she could hop into at any time…

She didn’t particularly feel like swimming at the moment, though.

She felt like… Well she didn’t even feel like looking at the sea, but that was just the least-hated thing at the moment.

She’d needed to be killed by Valentine in the end. Killed so she wouldn’t do anything for Rohan.

Rohan Kishibe… He had authority over her, now. Did she dare go ask him to remove his commands? She could probably get Valentine to strong-arm him… If Valentine felt she was worth it. But she had failed him and the USM.

Her doorbell rang. She ignored it.

This forced Valentine to use alternate universes as a stepping stones to appear right on the balcony. “It’s rude to refuse your superior.”

“V-Valentine! I’m so sorry it won’t happen agai-”

“It is no problem, not today. I don’t even have an assignment for you. But I am here to tell you a few things.”

Froppy looked at the ground, dejected. “…What?”

“I’m giving you another award for exemplary service and injury in the line of duty. You were victorious against an opponent who had the edge on you in almost every way.”

“Ribbit?”

“Don’t be surprised. You are one of my most loyal, hardworking, and empathetic employees. At this rate your record might even exceed Johnny’s if you keep going the way you are now.”

She bowed. “Thank you, Ambassador.”

“You deserve it. You’re not a disappointment, Froppy.”

Froppy nodded. “Anything else?”

Valentine allowed himself to smirk. “I won.”

“You won!?”

“More surprised there than I would have liked,” Valentine mused. “But yes, I won. And I made my wish.”

“What did you wish for?”

Valentine told her. At first she was confused, but a smile soon grew across her face. “…We’re going to get Gyro back?”

“If Them keep their word, then yes.” Valentine removed a USM flag from his suit jacket. “Now excuse me, I must inform Johnny as well. I’m sure he’d like to be in the loop when it finally goes though.”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“Take care of yourself, Froppy. Continue fighting for justice.”

She saluted. “I will! Ribbit!”

He saluted back at her before vanishing to another plane of existence.

~~~

Blumiere noticed four hours after the games ended that there was a new trophy on his mantleplace.

First to Die!

It was made of solid gold and covered in cute, cartoon skulls.

Blumiere narrowed his eyes. “I wonder which of them made this…”

Vivian shrugged. “No idea, sir. Do you want me to remove it?”

“No… It’s a good conversation starter.”

“Like the chest you’ll never let anyone open?”

Blumiere smirked, adjusting his white hat. “Precisely, Vivian. This is why one has knick-knacks in one’s home and office.”

“And submarine.”

“I do not own a submarine,” Blumiere asserted.

“Your wife thinks otherwise.”

“It is not a submarine.”

“It flies underwater, right?”

“Yes! And in the air and in space!”

Vivian shrugged. “It’s here on the checklist as ‘submarine’.”

Blumiere sighed. “Sometimes I wonder about things…” He looked at his reflection in the First to Die! trophy. He smiled. “And sometimes I just find things amusing.”

He twirled his cane and got back to his work.

~~~

“And that’s why I’m fucking pissed,” Blackjack explained to Gilgamesh.

“Sounds like you were the one going a little nuts,” Gilgamesh observed, leaning on one of the Void’s many crystalline pillars.

“I’m not completely nuts though! They still fucking killed me because they didn’t like what I was trying to do! Didn’t want me to save everyone!”

Gilgamesh shrugged. “Bringing people back usually results in a lot of pain. Except when it doesn’t. Ka isn’t especially consistent about it. Except when it comes to you.”

“Hey, you’ve managed to stay alive despite my ‘curse’.”

“I like to think I’m a special case.”

Blackjack seethed. “So what, do I blame them? Or do I blame my curse? Or… Or what?”

“All of the above?” Gilgamesh suggested. “There’s also something else to think about.”

“Hrm?”

“Things and people that have been dead that long can’t really be brought back without time exploits. That I think Them would have done would be to create completely new ones directly from the Sea of Infinite Possibility. Maybe even rewrite your universe completely to make it simple.”

“Fuuuuuuuck, that would bug everyone…” She put her hooves to her head. “Am I real? Are they real? Are we who we remember or just copies?” She let out a pained grunt. “…I think I’d be fine with that, as long as I got to be with Glory again.”

Gilgamesh nodded. “I’ve never been one for the ‘romance’ thing, but I think I get what you’re saying. Why don’t you find an alternate version of her?”

“She only exists in worlds that are variants of mine,” Blackjack reminded him. “…And in every one of those there’ll be a version of me.” She looked at her hooves. “Jackie removed the curse.”

“Didn’t she have to die to do that, and get lucky?”

“Yeah,” Blackjack said, staring into the distance. “Yeah, she did. …Dammit, why can’t I have hope Gil? What is it about existence that demands I can’t have anyone I want back?”

“Same thing that demands I wander the universe looking for the great EXCALIBUR!” He held his fist in the air for dramatic effect. “It’s ka.”

“But some people aren’t cursed. Most aren’t ‘cursed’.”

“Or everyone just has different variations of the same curse,” Gilgamesh suggested.

“Gah. We don’t even understand what we’re talking about.” She rammed her head into a crystal column. “I’m not going to be able to let this go.”

“That’s it,” Gilgamesh said, grabbing Blackjack by the scruff of her neck. “We’re going to see Jackie and learn a bit about what you can do to let things go. You’re an immortal multiversal traveler, Blackjack. You can’t keep being hung up over these things.”

“Let go of me!”

“SCHOOL CALLS!” Gilgamesh decreed, opening a Void sphere and jumping to Equis Regarden to begin the search for Jackie.

The Blackjack who had escaped her curse.

~~~

Flutterfree still technically lived in her cottage. It was in the middle of a public park rather than far outside Ponyville nowadays, but it still gave her the nature she held so dear to herself.

Evening was walking down the cobblestone path to the cottage, having managed to get herself out of her bed. She knew Flutterfree was here.

She gulped, knocking on the door of the large tree that was a house.

“Come in!” Flutterfree called, not that Eve could hear it. She just nervously tapped the ground in front of the door, waiting for a response. Maybe she didn’t want to talk to her?

“I said come i- oh.”

Eve had just started to walk away when Flutterfree opened the door. Flutterfree tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was you.”

“Oh… Right.” Eve nodded. Inside the house she saw Discord sitting, drinking a cup of tea. “I can come back la-”

“Discord, do you mind leaving us for a moment?”

“Not at all.”

“Go play with Trixie and Nova. This really needs to be a private conversation. Understand?”

Discord blinked at how suddenly she had gotten serious. He decided the best course of action was to shrug, nod, and teleport away.

Flutterfree gestured for Eve to come into the house, letting her take the couch Discord had just been sitting in while Flutterfree took a soft chair.

Eve looked at the tea already set out.

“You can have some, don’t be nervous.”

Eve nodded, levitating the tea to her and taking a drink. It was nothing compared to Iroh’s, but there was something about Flutterfree’s personal touch…

A tear rolled down her cheek. “We’ve ruined it, Flutterfree.”

“Eve…”

“I know we’re still friends. I know we’ll work past this and live with each other. I know that. But the mutual trust we’ve shared is still broken.” She gulped. “I… I killed you, and then I didn’t even let you know… I reacted before you decided… Then you attacked me, because you wanted to wish for the others. And then I had to kill Blackjack for basically the same reason and it felt horrible and her story is so tragic.” Eve put her head in her hooves, crying.

Flutterfree put a wing around her, failing to keep her face neutral and kind – she was clearly upset with Eve. “You’re right. It is broken.”

“Why’d we have to ruin it, Flutterfree?”

“Because we’re ponies.”

“That’s a dumb answer,” Eve muttered.

Flutterfree nodded. “Doesn’t mean it’s any less true. We broke each other’s trust. We couldn’t reach an agreement for once in our lives… And now there’s a rift.”

“I want to heal that rift!”

“I do too, Eve, and I’m going to put everything I have into it.” Flutterfree swallowed hard.

“You’re struggling.”

“Yeah. A lot.”

Eve looked at the ground. “It’s always going to be a painful memory.”

Flutterfree nodded, not commenting further on it.

Eve shook her head. “Flutterfree… This is wrong. We’re supposed to be the Elements of Harmony. How can we be that if we don’t trust each other?”

“We’re not the Element of Loyalty, Eve,” Flutterfree reminded her.

“No…” Eve said, looking into the distance. “But maybe we needed her.”

“Maybe.”

“…Want to go talk to her?”

“…Yeah,” Flutterfree admitted.

It was at this moment there was another visitor. Flutterfree moved to open the door, but she didn’t get very far – Pinkie Pie burst in, a comforting smile on her face. “Hey girls. Brought you some help.”

“Pinkie!” Eve called. “Are you oka-”

“I’m fine,” Pinkie said. “Really. I’m just sad I couldn’t be there for you two. But…” She stepped to the side, revealing Rainbow Dash. Their Rainbow Dash. “I heard you needed some help.”

Rainbow Dash looked at them, face set, and nodded. “Right.” She turned to Pinkie. “Prism’s outside – don’t let her mess with the bears, okay?”

Pinkie saluted. “Pinkie Pie, expert babysitter, is on the case! ...Though she’s old enough to watch herself.”

“She’ll try to kick one’s face in and critically analyze its reaction. Don’t let her.”

Pinkie giggled, saluted, and left the cottage, leaving Rainbow with Flutterfree and Eve.

“Do y-” Eve began.

“Pinkie told me more or less what happened,” Rainbow told them. “You don’t need to repeat anything.” She took a seat, looking at the two of them with a stern expression. “Here’s the ugly part. You two have hurt each other bad enough that it’s going to change your relationship permanently.”

The two of them looked away, ashamed.

“So here’s the first piece of advice – don’t try to set things back to the way they once were. That’ll only make things hurt, a case of misplaced Loyalty. Loyalty to a pony who doesn’t exist anymore, betraying the new ponies you both are. That Loyalty to the past? Change it to be Loyalty to the pony. You don’t care what the relationship used to be between you two, you only care that you want the relationship to continue. To stay.”

The two of them nodded like students in a classroom.

“The second piece of advice – the new relationship doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

Eve blinked. “W-what?”

Rainbow smirked. “Think back to our days before the multiverse, Eve. We were good friends, but we were also knuckleheads. Heck, I’m still a knucklehead. That should jog your memory about how undeniably stupid I was. I devoted myself to my goals at the expense of you girls more than once. For the Element of Loyalty, I think I was the one who twisted our bonds the most!” She shook her head and laughed in pity at her younger self’s plight. “And every time I – or anypony else – did that, I was welcomed back into the fold. And the relationship changed. We accepted each other as people who might do those things, and because of that our relationship changed.”

“The day we went camping in the Everfree…” Eve said.

“That wasn’t us,” Flutterfree reminded her.

“We thought it was,” Rainbow said. “And our dynamic changed. Everyone forgave everyone. But we remembered – and things changed.”

Eve and Flutterfree looked at each other. “We’ve already forgiven each other,” Flutterfree said.

“Then the trick is to accept the drastic change,” Rainbow said. “Prove your Loyalty to each other by letting it happen.

Eve nodded, placing her hoof on Flutterfree’s. “We will. …Thank you, Rainbow Dash. It’s been too long.”

Rainbow Dash laughed. “Oh, you think I’m done here? I’m just getting started – there’s so much I need to drill into your heads about Loyalty. So buckle up buttercups, this is gonna be a long ride.”

Eve and Flutterfree gulped. Rainbow Dash smirked – she’d missed these two a lot more than she wanted to admit to herself.

~~~

A couple of days later, there was a curious sight at Iroh’s teashop.

Eve stood outside the establishment, waiting for someone. She checked her watch – not late yet, but getting dangerously close to it. He wouldn’t ruin this without calling ahead, right? After all, it was kind of important they talk…

Perhaps more than just ‘kind of’, more like ‘really really’. Eve was beginning to get nervous about it all falling apart.

She was struck with an image of her young self setting up a meeting between universes in a hall, freaking out over banners and images of Equestrian heroes.

She allowed herself to think of those memories as her own for a moment – and laughed. She used to be so panicked about everything. Now she handled the fates of entire worlds in her hooves without any outward expression. A good thing for her job… But was it better for herself?

She didn’t know.

What she did know was that the man she was waiting for had arrived.

Valentine walked up to her and extended his hand. She shook it. “Shall we?”

Valentine nodded. The two of them entered the teashop together and sat down.

There was no plan to talk policy, no thought to discuss anything that had happened or was going to happen to the Collector, and no pushing for any sort of political movement.

They were just here to talk and learn about each other and their respective cultures. A place to talk, debate, and gain understanding. Not as enemies, colleagues, or leaders – but friends.

It would be the first of many such ‘tea parties’.

~~~

The Collector was staring at his computer screen. A game was on it, one that had a hexagon composed of nineteen circles. The puzzle was to slide three dots of a kind into each other, creating a bigger dot, until the biggest dot was created.

He had been trying to beat the game for three days straight. No luck.

Lightning ran into the room, breaking his concentration. “Augh! Lightning, I was focu-”

“Our universes are being moved around,” she told him, tapping at an alert on his computer screen.

“…Why now?” the Collector muttered, curling his hands into fists and rubbing them against each other, creating an annoying metallic scratching sound.

“Unknown. What is known is that the movements are making us significantly more visible.”

The Collector grunted. “To who?”

“Merodi Universalis and its neighbors.”

“Of course,” the Collector muttered, putting a hand to his head. “Who else would need to see us? …Do we have any idea who’s doing this?”

“Current analysis suggests it’s Them taking an indirect approach to altering our position in the multiverse. Long range positional scrambling.”

“Man I wish I had toys that impressive,” the Collector muttered. “It would make things so much easier.”

“You and I both know that would draw too much attention.”

“At this point remaining hidden looks to be a fruitless endeavor. “ He leaned back in his chair. “This is happening too fast. We weren’t supposed to go any further yet!”

“We can still do this.”

“Assuming Them aren’t doing this for some reason other than amusement.”

“Them never do anything for a reason other than amusement.”

“You never know,” the Collector said, standing up tall. “Regardless, we need to make the following events happen on our terms. If we have to go with Them’s timetable, we have to decide the where and the who.” He pointed at Lightning. “Get any agent in Merodi Universalis – any agent at all – and have them report the universes the Primary Team is scheduled to visit.”

“…Really sir? Going after them?”

“Yes. They were always part of the plan.”

“But even with the complications?”

“Nothing about that part has changed,” the Collector asserted. “Nor should it.”

Lightning nodded. “Who should I send?”

“A familiar faces brigade.”

“That’ll be interesting.”

“That’s the point. Make it interesting,” the Collector said. “I expect a report the instant the mission is concluded.”

“Of course.”

“Until then, leave me alone. I need to beat this game.”

“Need is such a strong word.”

The Collector would have raised an eyebrow if he had them. “Using my phrases against me?”

“We both know you got that from somewhere else.”

“Fair enough. By the way, interesting is a non-word.”

“Case in point.”

The Collector rolled his eyes, chuckling. “Just get to it. Also, for the sake of appearances, send a complaint letter to Them. Not that they’ll listen.”

“If we get a response it’ll be the talk of the Collection.”

The Collector tapped his fingers. “…Don’t advertise this. I know none of them can betray me, but this is too important to bank on the purity of their loyalties.”

“Got it,” Lightning said. She smirked at him. “Enjoy your game.”

“This is the sort of game you do not enjoy… This is the sort of game you keep playing only because it is an affront to your intelligence if it beats you into submission. It is a matter of pride Lightning!”

“Sure,” she said, rolling her eyes. She left the office, leaving the Collector to his game.

073.5 - Carols of Chaos (Christmas Special)

Author's Note

This was originally published as a separate story (here) but now that SotS is ending, it became kind of obvious that the events in this Christmas Special ended up being important later down the line. So, for convenience sake, it is republished in the correct point on the timeline in this story so people who read it all the way through won't get confused.

-GM, master of confuzzlebuzzle.

073.5 - Carols of Chaos (Christmas Special)

Snow. The sign of a first snow is, in most universes, a sign of coming cheer. For whatever reason the denizens of existence have chosen the coming of temperatures cold enough to cause frostbite as the time to break out into tremendous grins.

In many ways, this cheer is a denial of the cold bleak reality that comes with winter. Ignorance.

But in other ways it is less of a denial… and more of a rebellion. The cheer can look the frigid claws of winter in the face and laugh. What are you, some fluffy white stuff? You don’t scare me; you’re the symbol of the holidays! Go on; bring the snow – the more the better!

When you see snow, know this: it heralds a time of rebellion against nature, against the way things have always been. It is a scream that we can do better.

You may find it strange that one of the greatest feats of such a rebellion happened on a world with no inhabitants whatsoever. Before that day, the lifeless rock had never seen a single sapient soul on its surface.

But that was before the harmonious rainbow lit up the sky, setting the planet’s aurora on fire. A particular dusty plateau was witness to a swirling of cosmic light akin in appearance to the angels themselves. It was a shame no one was there to see the brilliance. No witness to the clouds in the sky getting progressively larger until they dominated the sky. In less than an hour snow began to fall on a plateau that had never experienced such weather. It was a light snow that melted as soon as it touched the dusty ground, but it was magnificent nonetheless.

Two holes appeared in the clouds – each a result of spaceship engines firing. One of the ships was a smooth vaguely beetle-shaped metallic drop with a sparkling orange μ symbol engraved on the sides. The other was a haphazard mish-mash of metallic chunks, spikes, skulls, and broken machinery. It looked like it shouldn’t be able to fly, but it did anyway.

The smoother ship opened up first, letting three purple equine beings out into the fresh winter. All three of them had a shimmering horn, impressive feathered wings, and similar faces, but they were clearly different individuals. One was significantly taller than any normal horse with a mane and tail that shimmered with galaxy-like patterns of magic. Another was the size of a pony, with a neatly-trimmed mane and a headset on her head, the device projecting a holographic display in front of her eye.

The lead alicorn was in between the two of them. She was slightly taller than the headset-wearing mare, and had a much more confident smile on her face. Her tail was somewhat short and her mane appeared windswept. Along the backs of her ears two black spikes rose – not quite long enough to be antennae, but large enough to be distinctive.

She cocked her head sideways, turning the hearing devices on. She winced as the sound of the world came to her, forcing itself through her artificial eardrums with no small amount of pain.

“…You sure you need them, Eve?” the cosmic alicorn asked.

“I’m fine, Cosmo,” Eve said, swiveling her ears around in an attempt to get used to the sudden noise. “This shouldn’t take long.”

The headset alicorn raised an eyebrow. “Just because I said they were a simple people doesn’t mean this is going to be easy.”

“J8, don’t worry so much,” Eve said with a warm smile. “They were ready to talk. Which is something I’m very glad to see in this universe. It’s so rare…”

“Which is why we shouldn’t trust it.”

“Shush,” Cosmo said, holding up a hoof. “They’re coming.”

The front of the ramshackle ship across the plateau had opened, revealing six tall, muscular creatures with green skin and spiked armor. Every last one of them looked like brutal monsters of war – but Eve knew better than to judge. She didn’t get to the position she was in without knowing how to look past initial appearances.

“Well, ‘ere we iz. Wot youz have tah say, lil hosses?” the lead beast said with a gravely, gnashing voice. He was a good two heads taller than his fellow warriors and had much more impressive armor with curled spikes. His flesh was home to a few mechanical implants; one of his eyes had been replaced with a red sniper scope and his jawline sported a tooth made of a glowing material.

“I am Evening Sparkle, Overhead of Relations for Merodi Universalis. This is Twilight J8 from the Sparkle Census, one of our allies. This is Princess Cosmo Sparkle of Equis Cosmic, the alicorn responsible for the ‘rainba kolors’ that stopped your ‘Waaagh’ in its tracks.”

“I'z Killkleavah. 'Oo kares about any uv 'dat? Ya wanted ta talk, so talk. Someth'n new.”

Great Celestia, why does the translator spell insist on keeping dialect!? “All right, something new. We have a favor to ask. We’ll let you continue your ‘Waaagh’ on a few conditions, first o-“

“You iz sayin’ it wrong. ‘WAAAGH!’ not ’waaagh.’ Git it right, ya lil sneeky hoss.”

Eve kept a smile on her face. “Very well, the ‘WAAAGH!’ it is.” She shut her ears of when she said the word for her own sake - considering J8’s reaction she probably wouldn’t have wanted to witness it even if she could hear without pain. “The aforementioned conditions are twofold. First, you have to direct your crusade specifically against the Eye of Terror.”

“Sure. Fight'n' iz fight'n'.”

“There’s another condition – but it comes with a bonus as well. You will let ships other than Ork ships fly with you in combat.”

“Wot.”

“You will still be the leaders of the assault on the Eye of Terror – but you must allow anyone who isn’t on the side of Chaos to join in the effort. We will be among them. We may not have a very large military – but we have ships that can cross the galaxy in hours, harmonious magics like the one that stopped your entire fleet’s frenzy, and the ability to jump universes. We expect, over time, the other races of your galaxy to join in the effort. It may be possible to actually defeat Chaos, and this would be the single most important part of that eventuality. All you have to do is allow yourselves to fight alongside other races and ships.”

Killkleavah turned to his companions and started talking it out – with a series of grunts, sighs, chuckles, and back slapping. Eventually, Killkleavah punched one of his companions to the ground and fistbumped the other. He turned back to Eve. “Wot if we don’t?”

“No ‘WAAGH!’”

Killkleavah nodded slowly. “Ya have a deal if we go fight'n' now!”

“Cosmo?” Eve asked.

“I shall go with you,” Cosmo told Killkleavah. “My ships will use the weapon on your enemies now.”

“Ere we go, boyz! WAAAGH!” Killkeavah shouted, pointing back at the ship. All of the Orks got the memo and ran back to their ship.

Cosmo turned to Eve and shrugged. “Guess it worked. See you later.”

“Don’t get blown up by Chaos,” Eve ordered.

“I won’t. I’ll be blowing them up.” She smirked – and teleported to the group of Orks.

Eve swore she heard the cosmic alicorn WAAAGHing with the Orks.

“…Huh,” J8 said.

“You just have to know who you’re talking to,” Eve said, a sly smile on her face. “Let’s go home. I need to prepare a message to the galaxy. There is now hope for Galaxa Immaterium.” She held out a hoof and caught one of the snowflakes.

She couldn’t help but find it fitting.

~~~

Several weeks later…

Evening Sparkle sat at her desk. It was a nice desk with several holographic monitors – but it was still just a desk. A little boring, to be frank. Usually she didn’t mind, but today she had nervous energy.

She started psychoanalyzing herself. Why was this? Was it because there hadn’t been any serious diplomatic incidents for her to take care of in the last week? Had she been sitting on her rump for too long? Was she trying not to think about Them’s Games?

…She was trying not to think about that last one, which meant asking the question was a failure on her part. All the death, destruction, treachery, brutality…

“No consequences. Ha,” she muttered bitterly. She turned to her calendar. At least Hearth's Warming was coming up soon. That was good – it would be great to have a holiday to take her mind off everything that had happened lately. Presents, universe-wide celebrations… She wished the celebration would extend beyond Equis Vitis, frankly, but everyone celebrated their winter holidays on different days and the time discrepancy between universes did not play nice with scheduling holidays. Simply running the Harmonic celebrations was an ever-increasing nightmare as Merodi Universalis grew to encompass more and more universes.

Out of curiosity, she pulled up calendars for the closest worlds to Equis Vitis. To her surprise, she found that Earth Vitis was in Christmas Week. So was Earth Tau’ri… and virtually all other Earths she pulled up the current calendar for. Equis Cosmic was celebrating Hearth's Warming as well…

Eve blinked. “…Are they all lining up? Seriously? The chances of that are beyond astronomical! I…” she shook her head, stopping herself. She chuckled. “Of course they’d all happen on the same day. It’s so unlikely it had to happen eventually.” She double checked all the calendars. She used her magic to type up a quick email to the Pinkie Emporium – surely the gathering of Pink Party Ponies would love to know about a tremendous celebration.

“This is either going to be the best Hearth's Warming ever or the most chaotic,” Eve said with a chuckle. “It’s going to be amazing to watch…”

“Eve, you’re talking to yourself again,” a blue Sapphire Gem by the name of Cessera said, walking by.

“I know.”

“Don’t care anymore?”

Eve shrugged. “Not sure. Got anything for me to look at today?”

“Nothing at all. The political scene seems to have gone quiet. The USM’s gearing up for a Christmas celebration.”

“Of course they are…” Eve rolled her eyes. “Everyone’s got a celebration of some sort.”

“Really?”

“Come look at this.” Eve proceeded to show her the calendars and how they were all lining up.

“Diamond Dust… This is going to cause so much chaos.”

“…Should I feel bad that I’m anticipating it?”

Cessera shrugged, not having an answer.

~~~

Merodi Universalis had twelve different divisions of higher government that oversaw everything within their member universes. Each individual nation of the Merodi may have been allowed a lot of freedom in political structure, but the multiversal society still needed a single governing body that could overrule all others. Curiously, the Divisions did not have a single leader, but rather formed a council out of their twelve Overheads. Eve was the Overhead of Relations, dealing with all of the Merodi’s diplomacy and communication with other powers. There were also Divisions of Military, Commerce, Justice, and Aid just to name a few. One of the most well-known and loved of these Divisions was the Expeditions Division.

Their responsibility?

To form small unified teams of individuals to sent out into the multiverse – usually for exploring, but also for scouting, research, first contact, and occasionally calculated interference in universes that clearly needed help.

The mare in charge of wrangling this mess of colorful teams was one of Eve’s oldest friends – Renee Jackson, a Rarity whose only distinctive feature was a fashionable detective’s hat she always wore. Otherwise she looked just like any other Rarity, though perhaps slightly older.

She operated most of the Expeditions Division from the cutie map room of Eve’s old castle – though Eve had made a point of letting Renee know it was her castle now. Renee had come to accept this over the years, but it would still occasionally strike her how surreal it all was.

It just so happened that she was in one of these surreal stupors as she walked down the stairs to the castle’s main hall. This meant she was woefully unprepared for the appearance of the main hall.

It was decorated. By someone who wasn’t her. The halls were quite literally decked with boughs of holly! This wasn’t the design she had wanted at all this year!

“PINKIE!” She shouted, stamping her hoof on the ground. “What have I told you about rapid decorations?”

“Wasn’t me,” Pinkie said, appearing right behind her. Unlike virtually everypony else from Equis Vitis, she had kept not only her name, but also her normal appearance, looking no different from an average Pinkie unaware of the multiverse at large. “Don’t get me wrong, I really wanted to do it, but you told me not to, so I didn’t! But hey, I have to admit; whoever decked these halls had a sense of celebratory style! Look at this banner!” She zipped to a red and green banner with snowflake designs on it and stroked it with her hoof. “So soft…”

“You… didn’t? Then who did?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Don’t know or won’t tell me?”

Pinkie smirked coyly. “I really don’t know. Though if I did know through my spooky knowledge I probably wouldn’t tell you anyway. Because you’re about to find out!” She pointed a hoof behind Renee.

The Starlight they had all known for years – Nova – raised her eyebrow. “I didn’t do this. Seriously, Pinkie.” She took a sip of her hot cocoa. “It is way too cold outside to be adventuring…”

“You are all on holiday, technically,” Renee said. “But you all like working overtime, soo…”

“Am I allowed to regret that decision?” Nova asked.

“Nope!” Pinkie declared.

“Whatever you say, Captain,” Nova said, using Pinkie’s title in a decidedly disrespectful way. Pinkie found this amusing and giggled.

Renee glanced between the two of them. “So… Pinkie?”

“Whoever did it will appear behind you eventually,” Pinkie said with a shrug.

“Now I’ll be looking over my shoulder all day…”

“BOO!”

Renee leapt ten feet into the air and whirled around. Behind her were a gray-skinned woman in a set of orange robes and horns. Slightly behind her a tremendous muscular man in a white coat and hat that seemed partially fused with his hair. The man sighed and grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

“You have no sense of Comedy, Jotaro,” the woman said, rolling her eyes and adjusting her glasses.

“You have no sense of self-preservation,” Jotaro commented.

“I wh-“

Renee unleashed a bright flash from her horn, knocking the gray woman down. “VRISKA!”

Vriska jumped back to her feet and shrugged. “Whaaat? You shouldn’t be so easy to spook!”

Renee twitched. “I could only wish you had enough of an eye for style to make these decorations.”

“…What?”

“Nevermind,” Renee shook her head. “Jotaro?”

“I had nothing to do with the decorations. I assumed you created them.”

“Oh, I wish... But my designs are not on display. Tragedy. I shall find the culprit behind me eventually.”

Behind her, the Fluttershy known as Flutterfree blinked her red eyes. “Um, I may have a freaky knowledge of sewing, but I didn’t do this.”

“And that’s all five members of the Primary Team crossed off the list!” Nova said. “Woo-hoo!”

“It must be an outside force!” Pinkie declared.

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “Anyway, girls, I’m here to t-“

“I DID IT!” an excited male voice declared from behind Renee.

Renee turned around again, though she didn’t need to – she knew who the voice belonged to. He was a tall human man with gray-blue skin and a well-made black suit that complimented his wild white hair. “Storm…”

“Yes! It was I, Director Storm, all this time! I have created the perfect holiday decoration for this momentous event! The Omni-Christmas!”

“Hearth's Warming,” Nova corrected.

Storm ignored her, continuing his bizarre monologue. “Behold the banners, the presents, the tree. I have gotten every agent who operates out of this castle a personalized present beneath the needles of the conifer! I have chartered a skiing expedition from the Pinkie Emporium for all agents, and I h-“

“Storm!” Renee shouted. “I asked you not to do this!”

Storm put on a Santa hat with a bell on the end and jingled it. “Renee, you know how much I love the holidays! There was no way you could have stopped me. You should be thankful – I have created a celebration greater than even a Pinkie Party!”

Pinkie was suddenly in Storm’s face. “What did you just say to me?”

“I said this was better than a Pinkie Party.”

“Do you think that you might want to rephrase that?”

“Let me think… nah.”

“You’re so doomed you have no idea.”

“I have a very good idea…”

Renee sighed and turned to her most reasonable friend, Flutterfree. “Technically they’re on vacation and off duty so I can’t do anything to them yet…”

“I’d just let them go at it,” Flutterfree said. “By the way, when they calm down you can tell them I had to go to a service today. It’s the last one before the holiday and I’d like to be there to support Rev. They can go exploring without me if they want, but I kind of think Pinkie and Storm will be at it for a while.”

“I’m betting they’re not done until Hearthsmas,” Vriska suggested.

“Should be Chrithswarmas,” Jotaro suggested.

“At least you didn’t say Christwarming,” Nova said with a chuckle.

“Those aren’t the only two winter holidays you know,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“They’re the main ones for Merodi Universalis.” She took another sip of her cocoa. “Saying ‘the holiday’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “If you say so. See you around. Vriska, don’t punch Storm, no matter how annoying he may get. …Or Pinkie.”

“Hey! Why do you call me out and not the guy who does all the punching?” She gestured at Jotaro.

“Jotaro has a self-preservation instinct.”

“OOOOOOH!” Nova whooped. “BURN!”

Flutterfree smirked. She hadn’t thought it had been that good, but she’d take it. Her work here was done – she flapped her wings and left the castle.

Pinkie and Storm were still glaring at each other with corny smiles.

~~~

Somewhere a WAAAGH! of Ork ships mixed with Merodi and numerous other types of ships laid siege to a tear in space-time that continually spewed out eldritch daemons bent on nothing short of complete Chaos. It was by far the most successful attack against the forces of Chaos in recorded galactic history, and it was still going strong.

But that was thousands of light years away. In the throne room of the Emperor of Mankind, there were no sounds of battle – merely reports of what was happening on the front. Today, three different people were giving the Emperor a report among the golden walls lined with ornate skull reliefs.

“So, basically, stuff is good,” the purple alicorn known as J8 concluded, clearly in a hurry. At her side was a small black filly with wide eyes taking everything around her in. The skulls didn’t seem to bother her, but instead fascinated her. “I think that’s it!”

The Emperor’s personal Custode – a man known affectionately as Kitten – looked to her. J8 just knew he was raising an incredulous eyebrow under his thin golden armor, but there was no way to visually confirm this. What she could tell was that he was absolutely gigantic for a man, gave off an aura of power akin to that of angels, and spoke with a decidedly unfitting high-pitched voice. “J8, this is no time for quickness. The Emperor needs a full report so he can advise the state of the imperial fleet in the… waaagh. It still feels so wrong to say that.”

“Well you can do that, I’ll get out of here…”

The last member of the reporting team raised an eyebrow J8 could easily see. She was a tall woman with orange skin and hair often described as bacon-patterned. Yet, she was not fully human – she had brilliant orange wings coming out of her back while her head had pony ears and a horn poking out of her angled hair. She wore gloves and what could only be described as a white ‘battle-dress’ lined with red angled markings. “J8, don’t cause an international incident.”

“Corona, come on, Nyx doesn’t need to stay around here.”

“Nyx is a big girl, and this is what you get for telling her you would definitely take her on the next non-combat mission you went on.” Corona adjusted her red triangular shades and smirked. “So sit tight. She might learn something from this.”

“Corona I’m g-“

Corona continued with the report, ignoring J8. “Mighty Emperor, in a more in-depth explanation, the Eldar, Tau, and Necron Affiliates of Unarus have been putting more and more effort into the ‘waaagh’ on Chaos, enough that they are now close to matching the Imperium of Man’s contribution to the effort.”

“Though we’re still nothing close to the numbers of those Orks,” Kitten added. “Good for cannon fodder, I must admit. Can’t believe we never thought of using them like that before.”

“Probably because you’d consider it heresy or something,” Corona said dismissively. “Anyway, the forward-most fleets are currently operating completely within the Warp itself, able to sustain themselves through our interdimensional technology. We suspect we’re getting close to a major stronghold of Khorne.”

“I can’t remember any time in our history when a daemon stronghold in the Warp was ever threatened…” Kitten added. “There’s actually hope of an overall victory here.”

“Even if we definitely can’t achieve complete victory, at least the crusade is finally going in the reverse direction.”

“Oh, and the reports of continued victory are keeping the riots down!” Kitten added. “We might even be able to reveal that you’ve been having private meetings with the Merodi and not expect a civil war as a result! Isn’t this wonderful?”

Everyone waited for the Emperor’s response.

This seemed slightly silly, since the Emperor was little more than an oversized skeleton hooked up to an ancient golden throne humming with ancient technological power. He was the visual epitome of someone who should have died long, long ago, but just kept kicking despite it all. His skeletal body did not move, but there was a sense of life somewhere in there that everyone could feel. It was both terrifying and comforting at the same time.

He could not speak – his vocal cords had rotted away long ago – but he was hooked up to a handy-dandy text-to-speech device.

“THIS IS THE BEST FUCKING DAY OF MY LIFE.”

J8 covered Nyx’s ears with her hooves.

“But mom, I wanna hear what he has to say!”

J8 ignored her.

“IT’S ABOUT FUCKING TIME WE GOT OUR ACT TOGETHER AND MANAGED TO DO SOME DAMAGE. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LONG WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO DO THAT? AS LONG AS I’VE EXISTED. AND I’M PRETTY FUCKING ANCIENT. YOU THINK THAT COSMO OF YOURS IS OLD? SHE’S FUCKING PEANUTS TO ME. I TRIED TO GET US HERE, BUT NO, I GOT STRAPPED TO A GOLDEN THRONE AND TURNED INTO A RELIGIOUS ICON! AND THEN THESE FUCKING PONIES SHOW UP ALL FRIENDLY AND START FIXING EVERYTHING!”

Corona blinked. “Are you happy or complaining?”

“He’s the Emperor,” Kitten said. “If he’s not complaining, run.”

“IF YOU’RE RUNNING, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT I’M THE MOTHER-FUCKING EMPEROR.”

J8 gasped and pressed Nyx’s ears tighter. “Ow…”

“DO YOU PONIES ALWAYS TAKE EVERYTHING SO FUCKING LITERALLY?”

“Uh…” J8 started sweating.

“I ASKED A QUESTION.”

“Well, you see, culturally we don’t like swears. It’s considered wrong to say them and very few actually existed in Equestria before we found the multiverse, so it’s a little taboo.”

“AH. I UNDERSTAND.”

J8 removed her hooves from Nyx. “Thank you.”

“I JUST HOPE YOU KNOW THAT I’M THE VERY SAME EMPEROR WHO TOOK A LOOK AT THE HUMAN CULTURE THAT HAD FORMED DURING MY SILENCE AND DECIDED TO STOMP IT OUT AS QUICKLY AND AS AGGRESSIVELY AS POSSIBLE. DOES THAT SOUND LIKE SOMEONE WHO GIVES A FLYING FUCK ABOUT CULTURE?”

J8 gasped. “Stop saying fuck around my daughter!”

Nyx gasped. “Mom! Yo-“

“Not now Nyx, mom needs to give t-“

“Mom needs to calm down,” Corona said, folding her arms. “It’s just a swear word. It’s not like it brainwashes you.”

“Children are impressionable!”

“I’m standing right here!” Nyx blurted.

“Yeah, and swear words are just words.” Corona rolled her eyes. “It’s not like he’s trying to hurt anyone with them.”

“I JUST ATTACKED HER CULTURE HOW IS THAT NOT OFFENSIVE?”

“You’re not helping your case.”

“WHAT CASE? I’M THE EMPEROR. THE EXISTENCE OR NONEXISTENCE OF A CASE IS DEPENDENT ON MY OBSERVATIONS.”

Kitten let out an overly dramatic sigh. “Can we just move on? The sullied mind of one child isn’t going to be drastic. You’re all too soft out there in the other worlds anyway, you could stand to have your children exposed to some reality every now and then.”

“Your world is grimdark, Kitten.”

“WITH A HINT OF COMEDY,” the Emperor added.

Kitten blinked. “…Why are you describing it in that way?”

Corona blinked. “Wait, nobody briefed you on ka?”

“What’s ka?”

“Oh, uh, geez, let’s not go there right now. Go talk to… a certified Pinkie… Or…”

“IT’S FOURTH DEGREE INTERDIMENSIONAL WARP FUCKERY.”

“…What?” Kitten asked.

“YOU’LL FIND OUT LATER. IT’S NOT IMPORTANT FOR THIS CHAPTER IN OUR LIVES.”

“…I feel like you made some odd word choices there, my Lord.”

“He’s trolling,” Corona explained. “Don’t worry about it right now. Regardless, I think we completed our report a while ago, Emperor. Any major decisions that need making?”

“THE GENERALS HAVE IT UNDER CONTROL FOR ONCE. WHICH IS UNHEARD OF.”

Corona nodded with a smile. “Then I think we will give in to J8’s wishes and get out of here. Our society is about to have a several-universe synchronized holiday celebration. Christmas-Hearth's Warming-something.”

“HOW CAN YOU HAVE A SYNCHRONIZED HOLIDAY WITH ALL THE TIME DRIFTING?”

Corona shrugged. “Just got lucky, they’re all arriving at the same time this… I want to say year, but for some universes years aren’t a thing, so…”

“KITTEN, DON’T WE HAVE A HOLIDAY COMING UP IN A FEW DAYS TOO?”

“Yes, my Lord. Sanguinala is coming up.”

“WE ARE JOINING THIS CELEBRATION. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN COUNTLESS MILLENNIA, THERE IS HOPE FOR THE GALAXY TO ACHIEVE SOME SEMBLANCE OF PEACE. THE WARS HAVE FOCUSED AND THE ENEMIES ARE STRUGGLING LIKE THEY NEVER HAVE BEFORE. WE NEED TO GET IN THE SPIRIT OF THINGS AND BECOME ONE WITH OUR OUTER ALLIES. SUNDIAL, TAKE NOTES, WE NEED TO GET A MANDATORY SNOWY HOLIDAY READY.”

“Um, my Lord, I don’t think this is the best idea…“ Kitten said, unheard by all.

“THERE WILL BE PRESENTS. THERE WILL BE FEASTS. THERE WILL BE JOY. THERE WILL BE A FUCKING TREE DECORATED WITH COLORFUL OBJECTS. THERE WILL BE SKULL TOWERS AGLOW WITH LIGHTS. ARE YOU GETTING ALL THIS?”

Kitten sighed. “Yes, my Lord, I’m getting it…”

“How’d you get the Santa hat?” Nyx asked the Emperor, pointing at the red and white hat the skeletal figure definitely hadn’t been wearing a moment ago.

“I’M THE MOTHER-FUCKING EMPEROR, THAT’S HOW.”

“That’s it! I’m leaving!” J8 said. “GOOD-BYE!”

“…I think I’ll stay and see how this celebration of yours starts,” Corona said. “I think it’ll be interesting.”

“GOOD. YOU CAN BE FESTIVITY ADVISOR FOR THIS HOLIDAY SPECIAL.”

“Best title ever.”

“…Please stop encouraging him…” Kitten muttered under his breath.

~~~

Rev was the head of the largest church on Equis Vitis – located in the middle of the multiversal metropolis that was Ponyville, it was rather humble in appearance for how large it was. Sure, there were stained glass windows and the stage was decorated with a couple of crosses, but otherwise the interior was simple. The chairs were padded, but wooden, and arranged in orderly aisles. The podium only had one microphone, and there wasn’t any fancy lighting to aid Rev’s appearance. There wasn’t even a backstage – though there was a soundboard toward the left of the stage used for worship.

Rev was a unicorn – specifically, a version of Starlight Glimmer who was known to have explored the multiverse for much of her life. Her story was an interesting one that only her closest friends knew. This happened to include Flutterfree, who was sitting in the front row with her eyes glued on the pinkish unicorn.

“…and that’s what Christmas means to us. It’s not an excuse to get things, nor is it really a glow to fight the cold of winter. It’s the day we’ve chosen to remember the birth of our Savior. He never told us to celebrate the day of His birth – it was something we thought to do ourselves. It’s a beautiful idea, I admit, but I almost never see the day bring about its full potential. I encourage you to be wary – wary of all the gifts, wary of the world’s desires. Keep close to your hearts what this day really means.” She paused. “Let’s close in prayer.”

After the service ended and people started filing out, Flutterfree trotted up to Rev. “Bit of a downer, don’t you think?”

“It takes every ounce of my self-control not to turn into a fire-and-brimstone spewing madmare during the ‘Christmas sermon’,” Rev muttered with a bitterness that surprised Flutterfree tremendously.

“Rev? …What did Christmas ever do to you? …And Hearth's Warming, for that matter.”

“It’s Exmas is what it is.”

Flutterfree raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You probably shouldn’t be passive-aggressively quoting C. S. Lewis.”

“Every year, it comes around,” Rev said, walking up to one of the stained glass windows. “A day that has its origins in one of the most momentous event in existence. A day set to remember that moment. And what do people do with it?” She gestured out a different window, one without stained glass. “They create a celebration of things. There’s nothing wrong with giving, but giving out of obligation, out of a societal requirement...” Rev growled. “Instead of focusing on Him, they focus on who’s gifts they’re getting, what they’re getting from everyone else, and basically just celebrating money and possessions. That is the exact opposite of what the day should be. It’s Exmas, Flutterfree, a completely different holiday at ends with what it’s supposed to be. And we just let it into our lives.” She stamped her hoof on the ground. “One of these years I’m going to go on a rant in public and I’m not going to be able to stop myself.”

Flutterfree cocked her head. “Don’t you think that attitude’s against the spirit as well?”

“I’m not against Christmas, it’s this Exmas thing th-“

“Rev, I can’t believe I’m the one telling you this, but calm down.” Flutterfree put on a comforting smile. “You can celebrate how you want and everyone else can celebrate however they want. Most people on Equis Vitis celebrate Hearth's Warming anyway. Has nothing to do with Christmas.”

“Higher human population, more Christmas,” Rev pointed out. “Plus, if we factor in the Tower, it’s still from Christmas.”

“O’Neill describes it as more of a ‘Gift-giving Independence Day’.”

Rev shrugged. “I mean… You are right about that, Hearth's Warming isn’t hindering growth as much. But as a holiday, it’s still forgotten where it’s come from. When was the last time you felt particularly patriotic on Hearth's Warming?”

“…Uh…”

“Exactly. It’s a celebration of your nation, and yet you’ve fallen into the same trap of making it about gifts. All the gifts. Have to make sure everyone you know has a gift, have to get them the best gift, have to set up a web of obligations, listen to the music all the time, go into the stores…” Rev narrowed her eyes. “You think the anti-big-business laws would mitigate the Christmas rush, but oooooh no…”

Flutterfree blinked. “…Oh geez, I haven’t gotten Eve anything.”

“See? Even you’re hung up on it.”

“…What could I even get her?” Flutterfree wondered. “Considering… You know…”

Rev’s features softened instantly. “Oh, Flutterfree… You’re still working through that. You shouldn’t feel obligated to get over it b-“

“But what if she is expecting one? It’s already strained enough as it is what if w-“ Flutterfree stopped. She could see that Rev was struggling not to go on a rant along the lines of ‘see? This is what the holidays do!’

Rev saw her notice. “Flutterfree, I’m sorry, I-“

“I understand, it’s difficult for you to move past this.” Flutterfree shook her head. “You’re holding a grudge, Rev.”

Rev didn’t have anything to say to that.

“I’m going to go find Eve a present,” Flutterfree said. “…No idea what it’ll be. I’ll probably go more than a little crazy trying to find the perfect thing for her. You’re probably right the holidays are going to do nothing but strain us on that one point.” She smiled. “But I’m going to work through it. I don’t know how, but I will. I can just feel the cheer in the air. See you for Christmas dinner.”

“…Same,” Rev said. After Flutterfree left, she found herself in the ‘stare out the window and pray’ mood.

That’s never a good sign for my mental state…

~~~

They were known as the most adorable group in Merodi Universalis.

They, for the most part, did not resent this label. Sure, it was a bit demeaning at times, but they regularly used their cuteness to their benefit. Even with the adult agents, the League of Sweetie Belles had a general adorableness about them that could easily be weaponized.

In this particular case it hadn’t been particularly useful.

“You are the most disgusting things I have ever laid eyes on,” the latest Evil Abomination from the Depths of Despair said, glaring at them with nineteen different eyes, each on the end of a black, oily tendril. The beast’s voice probably should have turned the minds of the League inside-out, but they had magic defenses in place to prevent such a thing.

“Oh come on!” the oldest Sweetie Belle blurted. She was a tiny mare with a decidedly exasperated expression.

“Allure, I thought we agreed to stop saying that?” another Sweetie asked with a voice that sounded as she were in a cloud of helium. She was taller than the rest and had a more muscular build. An orange-gold hoofband around her front leg indicated her enrollment in the military of Merodi Universalis.

“Agreement was not at a hundred percent!” the smallest Sweetie responded – a filly-sized robot with bright green eyes. “Squeaky is in error!”

“And Bot needs to stop nitpicking,” Allure reminded her robotic self.

“But she’s funny when she does that! It’s her running joke!” This line was spoken with a monotone, almost robotic voice. It came from a being that looked like a human girl at first glance, but upon closer inspection she was completely two-dimensional and her mouth didn’t move when she spoke. She looked very out of place, which was expected since she was from a universe with physics wildly differed from the one they were currently standing in.

“Burgerbelle agrees!” Bot chirped. “I second the vote! We need a higher value of agreement! Thrackerzod?”

A lean unicorn with deep red eyes and an unsettling aura glared at Bot and spoke with a voice deeper than anything had a natural right to be. “We’re doing it again. Arguing pointlessly amongst ourselves for ‘fun’ while the enemy of the day stares on in bafflement.”

Allure rubbed the back of her head. “Oh yeah… Whoops.”

“Actually, now that you bring that up…” Squeaky turned to the beast. “Why did you let us finish that conversation.”

The beast blinked half of its eyes. “Your lack of fear is astounding.”

“You aren’t our first rodeo,” Burgerbelle said, expression shifting to cocky without passing through any of the middle states. “The eye-thing isn’t even interesting anymore.”

The beast bristled. “I’m not here to be interesting! I’m here to be threatening! This world will fall to me and… Are you even listening?”

“I’m listening!” Allure assured it.

“Bot’s not,” Thrackerzod pointed out. Bot was staring off into space.

“Hey, Bot.” Squeaky waved a hoof in front of her eyes. “Equis to Sweetie Bot, helloooo.”

“Initiate apology!” She bowed her head. “I was just looking at the Hearth's Warming-Christmas celebration emails and wanted to go home.”

“We can go home after this,” Allure said with a soft smile. “Don’t worry.”

“I’M THREATENING TO KILL YOU!” the beast shouted.

“You’re a lot of talk and no bite,” Thrackerzod deadpanned. “If you’re so exasperated by our continued drudgery, take action to ease your pudding-like organ you call a brain.”

The beast took her advice. It raised a claw and brought it down – surprised to see a sniper rifle pop out of Bot’s back and snap the claw in half. “What i-“

Burgerbelle smirked. “Burger.” She threw a burger into the beast’s face, confusing it considerably. She gestured to Thrackerzod, who was already charging up an immense beam of dark, eldritch energy on the tip of her horn.

She never got to use it. The beast exploded in a burst of pink flame. Sticky monster goo splashed over the five of them. It slid right off Bot and Burgerbelle, but the other three got the disgusting gunk stuck in their fur.

“Oh come on!” Allure blurted.

“Strike two,” Squeaky said with a roll of her eyes.

“All right, who eliminated the target?” Bot asked. “Insufficient data!”

Thrackerzod blinked. “I sense a strong presence in the- oh by Azathoth’s second left ventricle, not this prick.”

“Who is it?” Allure asked.

“It’s that new g-“

“I HAVE BESTED THE STRONGEST SCION OF CHAOS WITHIN THIS WORLD!” The Sweeties looked up to see a tall being that was probably human, but it was hard to tell with the armor, extravagant dark robes, and absurdly oversized fake horns coming out of the helmet. In one hand, he held a staff with a ruby eye-shaped crystal within, while the other was brimming with blue-pink energy. Overall, he gave off a ‘dark Egyptian space god’ vibe. “It was nothing but a trifle! The complexity of chaos within this realm is so disappointing!”

Behind him, a gaggle of several men in dark space-marine armor nodded in agreement.

“And once again, there is no sign of deep knowledge for me to uncover! Another pointless trip! Absolutely worthless!” He turned to the two beings in his party that weren’t just random men in armor. “We’re finding a forbidden library next time!”

The two Demonic creatures – one a floating metallic disc with a giant eye, the other a humanoid monstrosity made of flaming maws – made no response to him.

“Utterly useless. Also, you unicorns, stop sneaking away, I’m not an idiot, I see you there!”

Allure stopped in her tracks and rolled her eyes. “It was worth a shot.”

Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “Ahzek Ahriman, what is your purpose here in this universe? Has Tzeentch chosen to ignore the Beacon treaty?”

“Beacon treaty?” Ahzek narrowed his eyes. “Wait, that. But you can’t complain about me taking down a chaos beast, can you?”

“We could.”

“But you won’t. Ahahaha!” His laugh was overly cartoonish despite his serious, dark appearance. He pointed his staff at them. “You owe us.”

“We don’t owe you anything,” Squeaky pointed out.

“It was basically a kill-steal,” Burgerbelle observed.

“We could have handled it ourselves anyway,” Thrackerzod said.

“Oh really?” Ahzek laughed. “You think you could have taken care of that beast easily? You are but fluffy little ants compared to my might!”

“I think we both know you’re just blowing smoke, Ahzek. Your power is not your own.”

“Neither is yours, Thrackerzod of Azathoth! You are more eldritch than I. Your double standard is… cute.”

Thrackerzod didn’t miss a beat. “And your eternal search for knowledge is doomed because your god will stop at nothing to keep you from finding his true nature.”

Ahzek leaned in. “I understand there is a dimensional treaty concerning exploration efforts. I also understand that your nation has a major part in the current siege on the Warp.”

“You’re glad Khorne’s getting his ass kicked,” Squeaky said.

“It’s the principle of the attack,” Ahzek said. “I’m sure it would be completely understandable if I destroyed all of you as revenge for our losses…”

The disc daemon let out an eldritch sigh. “Tzeentch has ‘requested’ you adhere to all treaties, even if you think it is safe to break them.”

“Shut it D’mirik, I know what I’m doing.”

“You unknowingly broke the beacon t-“

“I am not letting these ponies disrespect us so! I am Ahzek Ahriman, and I cannot let any such slight go ignored!”

“Then set up a competition or something. There are ways to retain honor and intrigue without bringing ruin upon us. I expect you’ve already thought of this.”

“Of course I have,” Ahzek said dismissively. Burgerbelle snorted, but Ahzek chose to ignore her. “The League of Sweetie Belles! I challenge you to a duel!”

“No death,” Allure said.

“Pathetic…” Ahzek growled, curling his hand into a fist. “Very well, I will agree to your terms. No death. You will still fall like the dominoes you are…”

“Wait!” Bot declared. “Who’s fighting? How many on each side? What limitations to mental abilities are in place?”

“Five on five,” Thrackerzod said. “No damage that cannot be healed with modern technology. Fair?”

“…Are we really doing this?” Squeaky asked. “It seems ill advised.”

Allure shrugged. “Eh, we didn’t get to take on the eye-thing. This could be interesting. …Do you mind waiting a bit longer for the holidays Bot?”

“Excitement for duel is at maximum!” Bot reported.

“That’s what I thought.” Allure tossed her mane back. “As Renee would say, ‘this is decidedly unladylike’. Good thing I’m not my sister.” She grinned, taking up a battle stance.

Ahzek chuckled. “Foolish little ponies…”

~~~

Eve scrolled through a holographic screen containing all the updates on the holidays. Government offices had been decorated – some by unexpected means, she learned from Renee’s message – and there were already several prominent figures planning to give speeches on the meaning of the holidays.

Eve thought that last bit was a little silly. After all, the holidays were several different celebrations. Christmas, Hearth's Warming, whatever it was that the ‘demons’ were celebrating. …The bug-people had a habit of not naming their celebrations.

The point of every celebration was slightly different, and several of them didn’t involve the exchange of gifts, though that was by far the most prevalent aspect of the holidays.

Speaking of gifts… She opened up one of her personal checklists. This particular one contained the names of everyone she knew well enough to give a gift to. Every name had a check box next to it except for one. Flutterfree.

Eve’s smile vanished when she saw Flutterfree’s winking icon. She gulped – right, she needed to get Flutterfree a present… But how could she, after what had happened in the Games?

There’s no way I’m not thinking about them now…

She refused to think about the details of the double-betrayal, but she couldn’t get the knot out of her stomach even with that. She and Flutterfree were still working through it, and every time they saw each other… It was still there. Strained, like a twig about to break.

The wrong gift could destroy everything.

Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. She’s not cruel.

You have to get her something great, though. Because something like a candle will be damaging. You have to make up for what you did.

Oh…

Eve gulped. What was she going to do? She had to think of something… Something for her animals? …Perhaps she should ask Discord what Flutterfree wanted. No, no, it had to be something more personal than that, more meaningful. Something that would continue to rebuild the bridge between them.

She had no idea what that would be.

“Cessera, I think I’m actually going to take my holiday break,” she said, standing up tall.

Cessera raised an eyebrow. “Really? You, not work?”

“I’ve got… something to take care of.”

“I know.” She pointed at her eye, reminding Eve that she did have some level of future-sight.

Eve smiled. “Hope you can handle anything that shows up.”

“Should have no problem.”

Eve teleported out of her office, mind racing.

~~~

“HOW ARE THE PREPARATIONS COMING?” the Emperor asked.

Kitten let out a dramatic sigh. Corona wasn’t surprised at this point – it appeared to be the Custodian’s general response to any question he didn’t want to answer. “Not well, I’m afraid.”

“WHY THE FUCK NOT? IT’S A HOLIDAY. I’M ASKING THEM TO DECORATE AND BE HAPPY, IT’S NOT LIKE THERE’S ANY ASININE GIFT-GIVING REQUIREMENT.”

“Yeah, it didn’t seem too bad to me either,” Corona observed. “Though you did demand they make snow.”

“ONLY ON TERRA. BECAUSE SERIOUSLY, WHEN WOULD WE GET SNOW OTHERWISE?”

Corona shrugged. “Are the people of Terra open enough to the Merodi to allow some pegasi…?”

“The majority opinion of Terra has been shifting toward the Emperor for the last few years,” Kitten explained. “Which means about… sixty-five percent of people won’t shoot you out of the sky in a bloodcurdled rage. Most of them will be kept at bay by the ‘holy’ nature of Terra, but someone’s going to find a way to burn you so not a drop of blood will be spilled.”

“FUCKING LOOPHOLES. I DESPISE THE WAY THEY USE THEM, BUT I ALSO CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL A LITTLE IMPRESSED.”

“Hmm…” Corona said, scratching her chin. “…Wait, if Terra’s on the Emperor’s side, what’s the problem with the snow?”

“The snow isn’t the problem, we just got sidetracked,” Kitten said. “The real problem is that we’re holding it on Sanguinala. A holiday of mourning and remembrance of the fallen Primarch, Sanguinius. The people who take the day seriously are starting to riot.”

“WHY THE FUCK CAN’T THEY BE HAPPY FOR JUST ONE DAY.”

“They’re pretty insistent about being melancholy the entire time. …Well, the people who care. They are a minority, but as we just said, a minority can be very dangerous.”

Corona glanced at the Emperor. “You scheduled a holiday of cheer and celebration over one about mourning?”

“YES.”

“Mourning over one of your own sons nonetheless?”

“I AM HIS FATHER, I GET THE RIGHT TO MOURN HIM THOUSANDS OF YEARS AFTER THE FACT, NOT OTHER PEOPLE. PLUS, YOU TOLD ME SANGUINIUS’ HALF-SOUL-THING IS STILL DRIFTING AROUND SOMEWHERE AS A FRAGMENT. YOU CAN HELP ME GET HIM BACK WHEN CHAOS IS DEALT WITH.”

“My Lord, they can’t know that,” Kitten pointed out.

“THEY’RE MINDLESS SHEEP, OF COURSE THEY DON’T KNOW.”

“I think you’re kind of missing the point…”

“Why not just take the order back?” Corona asked. “It’s not like this ‘snow day’ you’ve declared actually means much.”

“THEY’RE GOING TO BE HAPPY AND LIKE IT. WE’RE. GOING. TO. CELEBRATE.”

“The riots are interfering with the celebrations of others,” Kitten pointed out.

“I GIVE SO MUCH TO THE PEOPLE OF THE IMPERIUM. I SIT ON THIS THRONE IN ETERNAL AGONIZING PAIN, KEEP THE PLANET FROM BLOWING UP, FIGHT THE LEGIONS OF CHAOS WITH MY VERY SOUL, AND KEEP THEM FROM DESTROYING THEMSELVES IN THEIR CEASELESS DEVOTION TO WAR AND DESTRUCTION. WHY THE FUCK CAN’T THEY LET ME HAVE THIS ONE THING?”

Corona shrugged. “People will get riled up over everything?”

“OF FUCKING COURSE THEY WILL. THEY’LL GROW TO APPRECIATE THIS NEW HOLIDAY AND THANK ME FOR IT. FUCK THEIR OLD CELEBRATION, SOMETHING HAPPY AND FESTIVE IN THEIR LIVES WILL DO THEM REALLY GOOD. HAVE YOU SEEN THE LEVEL OF WAR AND DARKNESS OUTSIDE? YES, OF COURSE. THEY FUCKING NEED THIS.”

“They need it, or you need it?” Corona asked.

“KITTEN, WHY DO I ALLOW HER TO QUESTION ME?”

“She’s not one of your citizens, my Lord,” Kitten answered.

“THAT’S SOME EXCUSE.”

“Because you value the opinion of others even if they differ from your own?” Corona suggested.

“SURE. LET’S GO WITH THAT.”

~~~

Rev took a walk along the streets of Ponyville. The multiversal metropolis hardly deserved to be called a ‘ville’ anymore, but nopony could bring themselves to change the name. Billboards shined bright even in the middle of the day, the streets were filled with hovering cars of all sorts of models, and numerous multiversal ships could be seen rising into the air and leaving the world every moment. The city had grown into an overall crescent shape, sort of hugging the Everfree Forest.

Rev tried to keep up a smile for everyone she saw. However, she had pushed the conversation with Flutterfree to the side of her mind, focusing her attention on surviving the saturation of CHRISTMAS bearing down on her from all sides. Images of Santa were everywhere. Even though Merodi Universalis had kept public advertising to a minimum, there were still giant neon billboards decorated with red, green, and white icons of BUY BUY BUY. Shops had trees, lights, and people in Santa costumes. Even the Hearth's Warming themed places were bad. They didn’t have Santa, but they had images of the Equestrian Founders instead. Chancellor Puddinghead was a favorite.

Rev did spy one decorated for a different holiday – the Yak’s Snilldar Fest. Which was about, snow, smashing things, and family. The family part was good. The rest of it Rev usually tried to put up with and respect culturally, but she was already in a sour mood so she just let herself steam over the encouragement of violence.

“HO HO HO!” A tall man in a Santa outfit blurted, moving right in front of Rev. “MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

“Buzz off,” Rev muttered, moving past him. She ignored whatever he said next.

The next thing to grate against her was a human mother and her child.

“But I don’t wanna go!”

“If you don’t behave, you might not get any presents from Santa! You don’t want that do you?”

Rev twitched. “Kid, Santa’ll give you a present regardless. Though only this year, because we usually don’t go out of our way to hire some from the E-Sphere. Rest of the time Santa doesn’t exist.”

The kid looked at her, clearly not fully comprehending what she said. Rev had faith she would with a few minutes.

“What’s… What’s wrong with you!?” the mother shouted.

“You were lying to your kid.”

“How I chose to raise my child is none of your business!”

“I ca-“ Rev got a purse to the face. Dazed, she fell back into a snowdrift. “AUGH!”

“Ho ho ho! You seem to have a case of the Scrooges!” It was the Santa from earlier. He had a hand extended to help her back up.

“I AM NOT SCROOGE!” Rev shouted, tapping into a side of her that had rarely showed itself since she stopped being Starlight. She lit her horn and cast a dimensional spell, popping away from Earth Vitis. She specifically went to somewhere in Merodi Universalis that would be more understanding of her plight. A world that wouldn’t be saturated with the sinful ‘celebrations’ of the holidays.

She appeared in the middle of a living room. Sitting on the couch was what could only be described as a cucumber with eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

“Uh… Hey,” the cucumber said. “Do you want a Christmas cookie?”

Rev smiled. “Yes, thank you.” She accepted a heart-shaped sugar cookie and bit into it. “Sorry for just popping in like this, Larry. I just needed to get away.”

“From what?” the cucumber asked, clearly confused.

“Oh, you know, the oversaturation of CHRISTMAS over in Equis Vitis. They’re really going to town with all the perversions of the celebration. I saw maybe one manger the entire time I was out on the street that wasn’t my church’s.”

Larry furrowed his eyes. “I guess? I don’t know, I was in Equis Vitis just the other day and I thought it looked great! Everyone was so festive and happy!”

“Frantically struggling to buy gifts, forgetting the meaning of the holiday, lying to their children, giving through obligation, pressure to feel a certain way, a-“

A tomato with a white beard and Santa hat popped out of the fireplace. “Ho ho ho!”

Rev blinked. “…Let me guess. Santa.”

“Of course! And I’ve come to-“

“Nope,” Rev teleported away – she didn’t care where, just somewhere else on the planet. She found herself in a forest, staring down at a puddle of clear water.

She looked at her silvery cross necklace with sad eyes. “…Why?” she asked.

The answer was not forthcoming.

“…Am I being tested? Why? What am I supposed to learn?”

Not even Reverends always got the answers they wished.

She sighed, shifting her gaze from the necklace to the water. She looked at her face.

She didn’t like what she saw, and she wasn’t sure why. Before she could start piecing it together though, she heard the sound of loud metal clanking behind her. Veggie Meld was supposed to be a safe world, but she certainly didn’t feel safe right now…

Rev whirled around, ready for a fight.

~~~

Flutterfree still hadn’t found anything for Eve. No gift seemed meaningful enough to help bridge the rift between them. There had been several things that stood out – a few books, magic artifacts, some laboratory equipment… but nothing that said ‘this is from me to you.’

She was beginning to panic. She needed to seek out some advice. She flew through Ponyville and arrived at the front door of Renee’s castle. Her team would be able to give her advice, assuredly. She pushed the door open and walked in.

“CANDY CANES!” Pinkie Pie shouted, pulling several dozen candy canes out of her mane and arranging them in a complex artistic pattern vaguely resembling a star.

“SNOWGLOBES!” Storm shouted, using a green-white crystal he held in his hand to summon about a hundred snowglobes in a pyramid pattern.

“PRESENTS!” Pinkie returned, throwing colorful giftboxes everywhere in the hall.

“MISTLETOE!” Storm said with a smirk, holding a piece of mistletoe over the two of them.

“Awww, how mischievous! It won’t make me surrender though!” Pinkie declared.

“You have to accept the spirit of the holida-“

Pinkie ‘kissed’ him with a squeaky hammer to the face. He went flying into a nearby wall, grunting. “Technicaaaalities!” she trilled.

Storm used his artifact to create three Christmas Trees. “Behold. LIFE WITH ORNAMENTS!”

“LEGENDARY PUDDING!” Pinkie declared, producing a bowl of bubbling green sludge.

“Oh my,” Flutterfree said, hoof to her mouth. She ducked under the flying pudding, soon finding herself hiding behind a life-sized nativity scene. The rest of her team and Renee were hiding behind it.

“How nice of you to join us,” Vriska said, trying to pick pieces of fruitcake out of her hair.

“How was the service?” Renee asked, clearly trying to take her mind off of the jolly destruction being wrecked on her hall.

“Oh, it was good, though Rev’s letting the stress of the holiday season get to her,” Flutterfree said. “I’ll need to talk to her later.”

Nova looked up. “Her? Letting the holiday season get to her? Celestia, I thought she’d enjoy it considering where it comes from.”

“Eh, there’s an aspect of perversion she hates. She has a point, but she’s still taking it way too far.” Flutterfree ruffled her feathers. “By the wa-“

A snow bomb went off, covering everything in the hall in frigid flecks of white.

Flutterfree blew her mane out of her face. “…Have they shown any signs of stopping?”

“Not really,” Vriska admitted. “Pinkie’s apparently taken all this as an affront to her pride.”

“She never struck me as the prideful type,” Jotaro observed.

“Everyone has their buttons,” Nova said.

“I still didn’t expect it to go this far,” Flutterfree admitted. “Jotaro, think you could stop them?”

Jotaro shook his head. “Star Platinum would not be able to keep Pinkie at bay.”

“She might decide it’d be funny not to be affected by time stop,” Nova commented.

“Plus, they are having a good time,” Renee pointed out. “They’re celebrating the holidays in their… own way.” A piece of fruitcake impaled itself on her horn. “Eeeeeech…”

“Storm likes Christmas way too fucking much,” Vriska observed, narrowing her eyes. “Pinkie I can understand, she’s a force of nature. But Storm?”

“You should talk to Corona sometime,” Flutterfree said. “She’s got a lot of stories about Christmas in Storm’s office. The man is festive.”

“It’s kinda cute,” Nova decided with a coy smile.

“It is,” Flutterfree agreed. “Anyway, I, uh, I need help. I need to get Eve something for Hearth's Warming and, well…”

“Oh, darling!” Renee put a hoof to her mouth. “That would be difficult, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah… Do you have any ideas? You’re always really good at giving the perfect gift.”

Renee processed this. “It would have to be very personal, deep, meaningful… Oh that’s a tall order, but worry not Flutterfree, I shall think of something!” A loose snowball hit her in the face. “…Assuming I can get time to think.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, pulling down his hat.

“EGGNOG!” Pinkie yelled.

“CRANBERRY SAUCE!” Storm retorted.

~~~

On one side, four white unicorns and a Flat ‘human’ creature. On the other, a chaos sorcerer, two daemons, and two space marines.

The arena? A material plane of reddish dust once home to a horrendous best with nineteen eyes.

“Three…” Bot declared, the numbers flying across her eyes as she counted. “Two…”

Ahzek gripped his staff and chuckled. “Fools.”

“One…”

Allure turned to Thrackerzod and nodded.

“FIGHT!” Bot shouted. She fired first since she had the best awareness of what the time was – but Ahzek didn’t care about this. He caught the volley of missiles that left her with his free hand’s magic missiles, detonating them in the expanse between the two sides.

“Your perceived advantage means nothing!” He held his staff high, the eye flashing a dark color. “In one fell swoop, you fall!” He shoved the staff forward, sending out a blast of psychic energy intended to knock all of them out at once. The blast cleared the smoke, revealing a large dimensional portal open to a world with bright green grass. All the Sweeties except Bot were on the other side, smirking.

The psychic blast passed Bot without harming the machine. The moment it hit the portal, it dissipated, for the physics in the universe on the other side did not allow for psychic blasts.

“You think you’re clever!?”

“Yes, actually,” Allure said, smirking. “Thrackerzod?”

Thrackerzod spoke a quick incantation under her breath. In the red world, Bot stepped to the side, revealing a magic circle in the ground. Now active with Thrackerzod’s magic, a dark beast with seven angular limbs and an inverted eyeball rose from the depths. It roared.

“A simple daemon worth nothing!” Ahzek shouted, raising his hand. “It is powerless to me!”

He was right. It did nothing to him.

It split into two and knocked both his marines to the ground in an instant.

Ahzek twitched, turning to his two Demonic teammates. “…Why aren’t you two doing anything? GET THEM!”

D’mirik the disc and the flamer daemon charged. Bot made a tactical retreat through the portal while firing numerous missiles. D’mirik used a powerful telekinesis to easily throw the missiles to the side, allowing the flamer to charge through belching fire hot enough to melt metal. Bot’s circuitry began to fry. “ABORT! ABORT!”

Squeaky teleported Bot away. “Well, she’s down.”

“The rest of the League will pick up on the signal and get her,” Allure said. “Let’s just focus right now.” Allure’s natural reserves of magic had never been very large, but over the years she’d learned to make do with them. She took a fighting stance on her back hooves, digging into the grassy ground. She angled her front hoof at the flamer, analyzing the motion of its fire.

She saw an opening and took it, punching forward at the Flamer’s center, one of the few places on its body that didn’t have a fire-spewing mouth. She pushed all her magic into the punch, creating an impact much heftier than her delicate frame should have allowed. The flamer went flying to Thrackerzod, who imprisoned it in a box surrounded in black magic chains. “Three down, two to go.”

“This other one isn’t very easy!” Burgerbelle shouted from atop D’mirik. She was riding the Demonic disc like a horse, using her Flat dimensionality to keep from being burned by the daemon’s pink fire.

“Ahzek, I cannot face all four of them alone.” D’mirik rotated quickly, sending out several magic blades at the Sweeties, all of which were blocked by Thrackerzod’s dark magic shields. “Now would be the time.”

“Gah. I can’t believe how useless you all are!” Ahzek snapped his fingers, teleporting on top of D’mirik. He slapped Burgerbelle aside with his staff, her Flat nature doing nothing against a blunt hit. She flew down to the ground like a flipping coin.

“Ow,” she said. She popped into an upright position in an instant.

Squeaky took a few steps back, lining up behind Allure, Thrackerzod, and Burgerbelle. “Right. Thrackerzod, work on binding the disc to your will. Allure, close but evasive. Burgerbelle, cook up the unexpected. I’l-“

Ahzek shot at Squeaky with a beam of pink energy, which she dodged easily. “I see, the tactician are you? Smarter than the rest, but physically weaker. You’ve made a foolish assumption in your life! Intelligence and knowledge does not remove the ability to have power!” He snapped his fingers, sending numerous spikes of bright energy at Squeaky. “Even here, in this realm where mental prowess is limited, I have power! You wasted an opportunity, Squeaky.”

Squeaky smirked, jumping between the spires. “You think I don’t have power? True, I may not be as much of a heavy hitter as the rest of my friends, but I’m not just some cute pony with a high-pitched voice and military experience.” She lit her horn. “I know some tricks.”

“What is that pathetic horn of yours going to do to me?!”

“Distract you,” D’mirik said, catching Allure’s attack with its own magic. “You’re lucky I’m here.”

Ahzek didn’t thank D’mirik for being useful. He did take the opportunity to toss a ball of flame at Allure, which she twisted around gracefully, going for another attack.

He teleported himself and D’mirik away. “I appear to have given you less credit than you deserve! You have skill and tactics. But I have not been showing my full power!” He raised his staff high into the air, creating a rip in space-time in the sky above them. A deep, purple miasma flowed out of the hole, ready to suffocate the four Sweeties.

“Abandon current plane!” Squeaky ordered. “Move to shifting strategy n-“ She had to leap to the side to dodge a pink laser from D’mirik, but this made her fall right into an invisible spell framework Ahzek had setup. A surge of electricity shot through her body. It should have made her pass out right then, but she was made of sterner stuff than that. “-now. Play the jumping game…” She flopped to the ground.

“You heard her!” Allure shouted, but Thrackerzod was already on it. The eldritch unicorn opened a hole in the ground and deposited them into a universe made entirely of multicolored Platonic solids. The three of them jumped from a house-sized dodecahedron to a car-sized cube.

Ahzek tore open the portal behind them. “You run? Should I consider this a surrender?”

“Not a chance in the Embodiment!” Thrackerzod shouted back. She nodded to her two friends – and each of them entered a different portal that closed behind them in an instant.

“They’re playing the multiversal jumping game,” D’mirik said. “The playing field has expanded considerably.”

“The fools don’t realize that my psychic waves work here! They cannot hope to fool me this t-“

Burgerbelle was suddenly standing on a nearby cube. “Thanos car.”

“…Thanos car?” Ahzek echoed, cocking his head in bafflement.

Burgerbelle was suddenly in a large purple pickup with numerous lines etched into its front, making it look kind of like a broom. “Thanos car.”

“What in Tzeentch’s name is a-“

“THANOS CAR!” The pickup jumped to Ahzek’s location without bothering to exist in any between states, crumpling his breastplate.

“RAAAAAAAA!” Ahzek shouted, pulling Burgerbelle out of the pickup and holding the Flat in his hand. “You are a very curious and annoying individual! I’d be… very pleased to know which universe you are from.”

“Sorry, it doesn’t exist anymore. But the Flats need your help! All you have to do is call 555-555-5555 and give them your credit card number a-“

Ahzek threw her to the ground and blasted her with a chaos beam. She was relatively unharmed by it, but she did end up embedded in a large pyramid’s side. “Ow…”

“Hey, windbags!” Allure shouted from a portal in front of Ahzek. “Behind you!”

“There’s nothing b-“

Thrackerzod opened a portal behind him and threw a small, almost childlike woman at him. She ended up face first on top of D’mirik.

“…D’mirik!?” She blurted, gawking.

“…Do I know you?” D’mirik asked.

“It’s Jenny! Jenny of the Red Gloves! We fought the Black Witch? …I fought you… remember?”

“Still unfamiliar.”

“For the love of – the one person I remember from my deep past doesn’t even remember me! Talk ab-“

She was vaporized by Ahzek’s staff. “Outside assistance is not protected by the rules!”

“It’s why we chose her,” Thrackerzod said, gesturing at the slowly regenerating body of Jenny.

D’mirik opened a portal to a fiery hellscape and threw Jenny into it. “That will keep her occupied.”

“That’s it!” Ahzek said, lifting his staff into the air. “I am done with this!” He grabbed Thrackerzod’s soul with his power, tearing at her interiors. “You are nothing!”

Thrackerzod growled, her voice beginning to reverberate. “I am Thrackerzod of the court of Azathoth, a higher demon in the service of Hastur, King of Yellow. You are but a man.” Eldritch tentacles began to appear around her, twisting in impossible patterns that strained the mind’s eye. “A man with a big head.”

“And you are weak!” He fired a beam of energy. Thrackerzod met it with her own.

There was an explosion.

~~~

“My Lord, the Black Templars have started a protest,” Kitten reported.

“AGAIN?”

“Yes. Again.”

“THE USUAL BLOODY VIOLENT SCREAMING TYPE?”

“It appears so…” Kitten said.

“…If they have a habit of doing this why do you keep them around?” Corona asked. “You seem to have no issues disposing of people who are a problem to you. I don’t like it, but I find this surprising.”

“THEY’RE EFFECTIVE. AND GOOD WARRIORS. THOUGH I WILL HAVE TO GET RID OF THEM EVENTUALLY, ASSUMING WE DO EVENTUALLY GET PEACE.”

“Peace… Such a weird concept…” Kitten said, shaking his head. “I remember when everything seemed ready to fall apart… But then we got a text-to-speech device, the Imperium began to change, you Merodi arrived, and now we’re fighting Chaos on their turf! Allied with xenos! I would have branded myself a heretic for these things, and yet…”

“YOU’RE BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND. THE WORLD IS FILLED WITH LIES – LIES PERPETUATED BY THOSE IN POWER, LIES PERPETUATED BY THE CULTURE IN GENERAL, AND LIES WE FEED TO OURSELVES. WHAT IS HERESY ONE DAY IS DIVINE TRUTH THE NEXT, GUIDED BY FICKLE HUMAN – OR OTHERWISE – MINDS. WE CANNOT TAKE ANY OF OUR BELIEFS OR SYSTEMS FOR GRANTED, NOR AT FACE VALUE. EVERYONE IS WRONG, AND NO ONE SHOULD BE SO DENSE AS TO THINK THEY HAVE EVERYTHING RIGHT. ALL SHOULD BE CHALLENGED.”

Corona blinked. “Wow, that’s actually pretty deep and thought out. I’m imp-“

“EXCEPT ME. I’M THE MOTHER-FUCKING EMPEROR AND I CAN DO NO WRONG.”

Corona glanced at Kitten and raised an eyebrow. The Custodian sighed. “I have no idea if he’s joking or not.”

“EXACTLY. AS. PLANNED.”

Corona shrugged. “Well, at least he was able to form the thought, so that’s good. I do w-“

Eve appeared in the throne room in a spark of purple magic. Her mane was frazzled and she looked like she was short on sleep. “Your highness,” she said, hastily spitting out the syllables and bowing.

“THIS IS A SURPRISE.”

Eve sensed he was talking, so she turned on her ears out of courtesy – but otherwise ignored him. “Corona, I need help.”

“What is it? Is our world in danger?” Corona spread her wings, ready to take on anything.

“I don’t know what to get Flutterfree for Hearth's Warming!”

There was silence in the throne room.

“You came all the way out here to ask me about that?” Corona asked.

“It was only three jumps,” Eve defended. “Look, I just need some help. It needs to be something perfect that will represent what our continued friendship really means. A way to continue reforging the connection.”

“…I don’t really know what she likes?”

“But you understand people, Corona. You have empathy.”

“That’s just my power. I’m also a theoretical physicist with a PhD, often stereotyped as not understanding emotions. They aren’t necessarily my strong suit.”

“If I can be the Princess of Friendship you can be the master of emotions.”

“…While that is true on a technicality, I don’t spend much time with Flutterfree these days, so I couldn’t tell you much. Maybe you should ask Discord? Or her team?”

“I already asked Discord. I even talked to other Fluttershys and got nowhere.”

“Then I don’t know.”

“I KNOW,” the Emperor said.

Eve turned to him and blinked. “…What?”

“YOU SHOULD GET HER A GIFT OF MEMORIES – ONE TO REMIND HER OF ALL THE GOOD TIMES. ALL THE CONNECTIONS YOU ALREADY HAVE.”

“That… doesn’t sound bad, actually,” Eve admitted. “How did you – wait, nevermind, I remember where this goes. I ask ‘how’ or ‘why’ and you say ‘because I’m the mother-effin’-Emperor’. And then I’m sure there’s a laugh track somewhere.”

“Laugh track…?” Kitten asked, confused.

“Don’t worry about it. Talk to a Pinkie if you really want to know.”

Corona furrowed her brow. “I’m not sure that’s best for Flutterfree, Eve. A gift of memories? What does that even mean?”

“IT MEANS TO REMIND HER OF ALL THE- I LITERALLY JUST EXPLAINED THIS.”

“But how? A photo album? A memory crystal?” Corona held out her hands. “When you talk about them aloud, they sound… I don’t know, Eve, do they sound like Flutterfree?”

“…No… At least not enough…” Eve looked at the ground.

“Then maybe you should ask her,” Corona suggested, smiling warmly. “Explain that you’re stressing out over what to get her. Coming to her with the problem and working through it together would be the best way to rebuild the bridge I can imagine.”

“I thought you said you wouldn’t have good advice?” Eve said.

“It just occurred to me. Did it help?”

“I think it di-“ Eve’s phone rang. She winced at the loud noise, but pulled it out to check the message. “Unknown?”

“Oh this can’t be good,” Kitten muttered.

“It’s in weird leetspeak…” Eve muttered, squinting her eyes. “Uh… I know the… perfect gift you could give… her. All it will cost is… your… soul.” Eve laughed. “I’m not that stupid.”

“As I thought. Tzeentch,” Kitten shook his head.

“How does the Chaos god keep getting phone numbers?” Corona asked.

“HE’S THE MOTHER-FUCKING LORD OF CHANGE.”

“Thank you for that insightful input.”

“IT REALLY IS ALL THE EXPLANATION YOU NEED. BY THE WAY, HE GOT MY NUMBER FIVE MINUTES AFTER YOU GAVE ME THAT PHONE. YOUR SECURITY IS FUCKING PATHETIC.”

“I’m pretty sure Chaos gods aren’t covered in the insurance plan,” Corona said.

“I’m again struck by how surreal all this is,” Kitten commented.

Eve’s phone buzzed again. She flipped it open. “…I have no idea what this says.”

“LET ME LOOK.” Eve held it up to the Emperor. “OH. HE’S SAYING HE DOESN’T NEED YOUR SOUL, HE JUST WANTS TO CHALLENGE YOU TO A GAME OF PARADOX-BILLIARDS-VOSTROYAN-ROULETTE-FOURTH-DIMENSIONAL-HYPERCUBE-CHESS-STRIP-POKER. YOU WIN, YOU GET YOUR ANSWER. YOU LOSE, HE... GETS TO TURN YOU INTO A GRINCH FOR A DAY? GRICHES ARE ACTUAL THINGS?”

Eve rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter, I’m not taking it. I’m not stupid. …Though I am curious, what is the Paradox-Billiards-game thing?”

“THE BEST GAME IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND.”

“A children’s card game,” Kitten explained.

“Ah. …Do you guys realize how contradictory the atmosphere of your universe is?”

“YES. DAILY.”

Eve nodded curtly. “Well, thanks for your time. Corona, that was good advice. Emperor, it’s good to see you in high spirits.”

“HAVE A WONDERFUL HOLIDAY. HO HO HO.”

“…I was wondering why you were wearing a Santa hat.”

“MANY REASONS. ALL OF THEM AMAZING.”

Eve shrugged, smirked, and teleported away.

“…I kind of want to play this game,” Corona said. “It sounds interesting.”

“Oh hell no here we go…” Kitten moaned.

“I WOULD BE ENTHRALLED TO TEACH YOU…”

~~~

Rev prepared her attack, ready to take on anything. The beings behind her were slightly threatening – tall, metallic creatures that were half spoon, half fork. They were Sporks with glowing blue eyes on their rounded surfaces.

The moment they recoiled from her Rev dropped her attack. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” She smiled warmly. “I’m Reverend Starlight Glimmer.”

The lead Spork looked at her with hesitation – but then hopped forward. “We are Sporks.”

“Uh, yeah, I know. And I know you’re nice Sporks – the blue eyes give it away. Do you have a name?”

“We are Sporks. …I am Lead Spork.”

“Oh. They didn’t give you names?”

“We do not need names. We are Sporks.”

“We like cookies!” another Spork offered.

Rev generated a cookie with her magic and gave it to him. Then, seeing the hungry expressions of the others, she created a few dozen more. “I can’t make an endless amount, sorry.”

“We can always find more,” Lead Spork said, munching on his cookie despite not having hands. He must have had some form of telekinesis, but it didn’t give off an aura of any kind. “Everyone is always so ready to part with their cookies.”

“Yeah, that’s the nice thing about this world…” Rev looked into the distance. “Everything here is geared toward what is right. Not toward what everyone wants. …Usually.”

“Something is bothering you,” another Spork observed. “You can tell us! We can help!”

“You know what Christmas is, right?” Rev asked. Seeing all of them nod, she continued. “You’ve been reformed – you know that it celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. But you also know it’s about giving gifts and Santa Claus, right?”

They all nodded again.

“See, I came here thinking I could get away from the Santa, the gifts, and all that – to find something pure. But no, I couldn’t.” Her face twisted in rage. “There was a Santa here…”

“Why is that wrong?” a Spork asked. “Seems happy and joyous!”

“And gives lots of cookies,” another added.

“It’s more subtle than that,” Rev said. “Think – giving is good, right? But once giving becomes part of a holiday, obligations start to rise up. You feel like you have to give things to other people, and start to resent it. Or you fret over what’s going to happen if you give them the wrong gift, ruining the peace of the occasion. Then, because everyone has to buy gifts, people in charge of businesses do everything they can to get the most money off everything. Then the holiday becomes completely about this exchange of gifts and they forget what’s actually important!”

Some of the Sporks started talking amongst each other in agreement.

“But it’s worse than that – we forget the birth, sure, which is bad enough, and have replaced it with a worship of money and material goods. Then there’s Santa, who trumps all of this. The legend itself isn’t an issue – but directly lying to kids that so that they behave? That’s cruel and breaks down trust!”

“Santa’s a lie?” a Spork in the back said, haunted.

“Yes! Well, in most universes it is. Here, you actually have a Santa – tomato fellow. But in almost every universe, there is no Santa, parents just lie to their kids about it! Oh, and don’t get me started on how every company everywhere tries to make you think Christmas is the only holiday worth mattering. Or all the commercials...”

They started arguing amongst each other.

“And you know the worst part? Even those of us who want to celebrate the birth can’t really do it, we have to subject ourselves to the presents as well! It saturates everything you see! It’s all a horrible mess and we would be better off if it wasn't everywhere!”

“Yeah! Yeah!” the Sporks started chanting.

“See? You understand. You see the problem. I can’t believe I had to look so long to find y-“ it was at this point Rev realized that she’d screwed up.

All the Spork’s eyes were angry and glowing a menacing green, ready to march off to war against Christmas.

“…Forgive me,” she whispered.

~~~

Eve walked into the crystal castle she used to own. “Hey Flutterfree, can I t-“ A snowball studded with peppermints hit her in the face. She wiped the snow off her face and tried to ignore the flavor of peppermint. She took a look around.

The scene she saw was devastating. The entire hall was covered in snow about a meter deep. Christmas trees were everywhere, most snapped in half with their ornaments shattered around their resting places. Entire gingerbread houses had been reduced to rubble, presents had been shredded, and a pile of mistletoe was on fire.

Pinkie and Storm weren’t even shouting anything at each other – the battle of party they were engaged in was so serious the two of them were completely silent. Pinkie took out some jingle bell bombs and threw them at Storm’s feet, only for him to produce a magic nutcracker artifact that absorbed all the energy from the explosions and redirected them at Pinkie. Pinkie leaped back to avoid the energy, producing a dozen peppermint cream pies to throw. Storm caught every one with a telekinesis crystal, throwing them back. Pinkie ate them, pie tins and all, in one gulp.

“Pinkie!” Eve shouted. “Storm! Stop!”

They either chose to ignore her or couldn’t hear her over their intense focus. She sighed. Clearly I’m going to have to deal with this…

She took a few steps forward in the snow, summoning her most powerful ally to her. It wasn’t any sort of standard magic, but rather a spirit bonded to her very soul, a spirit known as a Stand. It manifested as three gyroscopic rings with eyes on their outer edges, the inner edges swirling around a glowing point of light. She took in a deep breath, feeling the power within Seraphim – for that was its name – tap into the essence of other universes.

She saw Pinkie pull out her party cannon and stuff it with holiday ornaments. She saw Storm pull out a red crystalline artifact and start charging it.

She needed to do this now.

“I reject your reality and substitute my o-“

“EVE!” Vriska shouted, peeking from behind a pile of presents. “GET BACK!”

Eve only saw Vriska out of the corner of her eye, so she had to take a moment to visually process what she said. This proved to be her undoing – the festive party cannon and crimson holiday artifact collided and sent out a shockwave so strong it not only knocked Eve off her hooves, but also cracked a couple ribs.

Pinkie stopped the festive fight immediately. “Oh no!”

“Finally give up?” Storm asked with a grin.

“We’ve gone too far! Eve!” Pinkie scrambled across the snow to Eve, sliding to a sitting position right next to her. “Are you okay!?”

“I… have a couple broken ribs. I think my wing is dislocated…” Eve grunted, looking up at Pinkie. “I’m also betting there’s broken ornament glass in my coat…”

Pinkie tried not to cry. “I… I’m so sorry! I didn’t realize, I…” She looked away, having difficulty with the slow reddening of the snow around them.

Eve grunted. “You’re forgiven. Just… Pinkie, you should never celebrate in such a way that hurts or endangers anyone else…” Using her magic, she was able to right herself. All four of her legs were fine, so she could stand without incident. “I know you like to go a little crazy from time to time, but people were cowering.” She gestured at the pile of presents the primary team and Renee were hiding behind. “You aren’t the only one celebrating, you know. …Look at this hall. I have no doubt it was beautiful before. Now it looks like a warzone.”

Pinkie gulped and looked down, ashamed.

“Hey, don’t guilt-trip yourself, I’m going to be fine. I’d suggest cleaning up the mess you’ve made, but otherwise it’s all good.”

“But I hurt you!”

“And I have a bed and a medical terminal with my name on it,” Eve said with a pained chuckle. “And Storm? You’re helping cleanup too. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you.”

Storm sagged, though clearly he was not as remorseful as Pinkie. “I figured as much.”

Eve glared at him. “Renee, I leave his punishment up to you.”

Renee came out from behind the presents and smirked. “If you think that’s what he needs.”

Storm blinked. “Wait, wh-“

Eve raised an eyebrow. “You clearly need more than just a talking to. You haven’t learned the lesson. So Renee’s going to find a way to make you, since this is her Division.” She put down her head and sighed. “…Nova, can you teleport me to my old room?”

Nova nodded. “Give me a sec…”

“I’ll make sure the medical equipment is working,” Renee promised. “Get you healed up in no time.”

“Thanks,” Eve said with a smile. The smile faltered the moment she saw Flutterfree.

Flutterfree was very careful not to let this change her neutral expression. But inside, it dug at her heart. There really is something wrong…

Eve was teleported away to recover, leaving them alone.

Flutterfree didn’t move.

“…Something’s wrong,” Jotaro observed.

Flutterfree nodded. “She… She looked at me with… I don’t know what, but it wasn’t normal. Something bad.”

“Are you sure you’re not reading too much into it?”

“I’m sure,” Flutterfree said, looking upward. “…What am I going to do about it?”

“Talk to her?” Nova suggested, already starting to clean up the snow and teleport it outside. “Seems obvious.”

“I still don’t even have her present and you want me to talk to her?”

“Duh,” Nova said with an eyeroll. “She’s Eve. What’s she going to complain about?”

“Vriska breaking her concentration,” Jotaro suggested.

“I was trying to help!” Vriska shouted, waving her arms frantically. “She wasn’t going to have time anyway!”

Flutterfree tuned the conversation out, retreating into her own thoughts.

She still didn’t know what to do.

~~~

The Sparkle Census was an amazing place filled with restaurants, laboratories, and lots and lots of libraries. The buildings were largely uninteresting and of muted colors, but this didn’t interfere with the immense purple the universe had from all the Twilights that walked around everywhere. J8 and Nyx were walking down one of the streets, receiving several curt hellos from the Twilights they passed.

Nyx stayed really close to her mother, because she knew if she lost sight of her it would be a long time before she figured out which Twilight she was. She wasn’t in any danger here – Twilights were almost always friendly and understanding – but it would still be scary. Unlike skulls, skulls weren’t scary, they were fascinating. Nyx didn’t understand why they had to leave the Emperor – he was fun.

J8 glanced at Nyx, making the filly think her mind was being read. She opened her mouth to deny all possible accusations but she never got to utter a single syllable. A portal opened up in the middle of the sky. An explosion erupted from it, tossing Allure, Thrackerzod, and Burgerbelle into the Sparkle Census street. Allure fell at J8 and Nyx’s hooves, smacking her head hard enough on the ground to lose consciousness.

“Azathoth Y’thal’tar!” Thrackerzod swore. “Allure’s down!”

“YES! SHE IS!” Ahzek declared, appearing in the sky atop D’mirik. “You fearless leader has fallen!”

“…She’s not our leader,” Burgerbelle said. “We’re an equal-opportunity League. ...So long as you’re a Sweetie Belle.”

“Whatever. It is the beginning of the end for you!”

“Oh no it isn’t!” J8 declared, lighting her horn alongside several dozen other Twilights. “We won’t let you hurt them!”

Thrackerzod facehooved. “Look, Twilights, this is an official duel. Please don’t interfere, if he wants to kill you he can.”

J8 binked. “…What?”

“We’re fine,” Burgerbelle said with a dismissive wave. “Just take care of Allure, okay?”

“O-okay.”

Ahzek lifted his staff. “Think fast!”

Thrackerzod opened a portal to catch the incoming red beam and redirect it somewhere else.

By some trick of fate, the other side was the forest Rev and the Sporks were in.

“Wait, no, don’t go marching off to war with Christmas, that’s not the answer!” she was shouting. “Violence is not our way! We’re not supposed to go on crusades!”

The Sporks either ignored her or decided the red beam was too Christmas-y to ignore. They charged out of the portal in ranks, marching into the Sparkle Census.

“…Are those… Sporks?” A Twilight asked, gawking.

“Yeah, yeah, sorry! Sorry!” Rev said, grimacing. “I’ll get them back, don’t you worr-“

“THESE UTENSILS THINK THEY CAN CHALLENGE ME!?” Ahzek shouted, holding out his hand at the Sporks. “They will not live to regret this decision!”

“Wait, no they’re just confused!” Rev realized Ahzek wasn’t listening to her. She sighed, allowing her eyes to go white with Divine energy. She threw herself at the Chaos sorcerer and daemon, ready to purge them of their Demonic power – or at least take the hit for the Sporks. She made them angry, she should be the one to protect them.

D’miriks eye widened. “Rach’ith!” he swore. He knew the pain of Divine energy. He tried to flee, upsetting Ahzek’s balance. The sorcerer’s chaotic attack went wild…

Nyx pulled Allure’s dimensional device off her unconscious form. She quickly dialed a specific set of coordinates...

Burgerbelle held up a ‘to be continued’ sign shaped like an arrow.

~~~

Eve slept in her old bed. Renee hadn’t changed much about her old room, keeping it made up like a regular guest room. The castle had been so big Renee had easily been able to find other chambers for herself.

Eve was currently hooked up to a medical device that waved a glowing blue wand over her body, healing her. If needed, it would adjust the position of one of her limbs to make sure the damage healed properly, which was why she was asleep – so she wouldn’t feel the immense pain that came with moving dislocated wings and internal ribs.

Instead, she dreamed. She had been practicing to know when she was receiving prophetic visions in her dreams, so she immediately knew something in the dream didn’t feel right. But it didn’t feel like a vision either…

She looked around. She was in an endless expanse of pink-red miasma rippling with occasional bursts of lightning. It took her a few minutes to recognize it as the Warp, the universe affixed to Galaxus Immaterium, the source of all Chaos. It was a world far removed from Equis Vitis, so far that Eve wondered why she was seeing it now.

“Ohoho, someone’s a little curious! The knowledge is just out of her reach, dancing around the issue. Or is it just some fool pretending there’s an answer, when there really isn’t one?A lovely paradox if it is indeed true.”

Eve turned around, finding herself face-to-face with an immense Demonic presence. He currently took the form of a vaguely humanoid riddled with bony lumps. He had two mouths – one just above his pelvis, and one where his head and neck had fused into one. Two tentacles poured out from his back and tied into a knot above him.

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess. Tzeentch?”

“Cutting right to the chase? Where’s the fun in that, Evening Sparkle?”

“There isn’t much, which is kind of the point. I don’t want you to have fun. You having fun is generally bad for everyone involved.”

“Look at you, moving past your ideas of love and tolerance! You’ve never even met me and already you’re judgey judgey judgey.”

“I have reports. People I trust.”

“But I’m here now, talking to you, and I’m not trying to blow your brains out! Isn’t that something?” He chuckled.

“You clearly want something.”

“What I want is to help you with your little gift problem.”

“You want something in return. I’m not giving you anything. And I won’t become a Grinch.”

“Oh, that was just me toying around – apparently you have little patience for that. Very disappointing, but understandable.” He leaned in. “I just want to give it to you. You’ll know exactly what to give her to fix the bridge between you, and it won’t involve me altering her mind in any way!”

“…You just want to give it to me?”

“At no cost at all – all you have to do is accept it! It’ll be the Best Gift Ever.”

“You are known for lying,” Eve pointed out.

“I Pinkie Promise to all Pinkies in the universe that I am not lying.”

That’s all Eve needed to know. “All right. I’ll take it. What is it?”

“Well, the first step is driving you mildly insane.”

“Wait wh-“

“BOOP!”

Eve woke up in an instant, despite the medical procedures not quite being complete. She spread her wings and grinned, her eyes flashing a deep chaotic pink.

“Looks like I’m not going to be ‘myself’ for a while… Heheheh…”

~~~

“The Blood Angels are probably going to do something drastic as soon as the holiday is over,” Kitten reported. “It’s their holiday, and they’re taking major offense.”

“THEY’LL LIVE.”

“Will they be loyal, is the question?”

“THEY CAN HAVE CHEER FOR ONCE IN THEIR DAMN LIVES.”

“This seems like a rather insignificant issue to stake their loyalty on,” Corona observed.

“THE SAME COULD BE SAID FOR THEM. INSIGNIFICANT ISSUE TO BE MAKING SUCH A FUSS OVER.”

“So it’s stubborn versus stubborn.” Corona smirked. “They really are your marines.”

“IT IS WITH A MIXTURE OF PRIDE AND EXASPERATION THAT I UNDERSTAND THEM.”

“Yeah. I still think th-“

A portal opened up behind them. A flood of Sporks, Twilights, Sweeties, and Ahzek Ahriman poured out in a decidedly awkward pile. Nyx rolled out of the pile, landing at the foot of the Emperor. “Woohoo! I did it!”

“What did you do!?” Kitten blurted. “The palace is a sacred ground! How did you even dial in here!?”

“CHAOS MAGIC, THAT’S HOW,” the Emperor decreed. “AHZEK AHRIMAN!”

“Who dares to speak to me in such a-“ Ahzek saw who he was talking to. “The Corpse Emperor… This is a treat! It appears as if I have been given the honor of de-“

The Sporks didn’t let him finish. “THERE’S SANTA!” Lead Spork said, pointing at the Emperor – still wearing his Santa hat.

“FUCK,” the Emperor said. “NOT SPORKS, ANYTHING BUT SPORKS. I WILL NOT BE KILLED BY SPORKS!”

The Sporks jumped out of the pile and ran to the Emperor. Like clockwork, several dozen half-naked men with exceptionally well-oiled abs appeared between the Sporks and the Emperor. Every last one of them posed dramatically – in a way that reminded Corona of Jotaro – and every one wore a royal helmet. “WE ARE THE CUSTODES OF THE EMPEROR – YOU WILL NOT HARM OUR LORD!”

“Santa’s an Emperor?!” a Spork shouted. “It is even worse than we imagined! CHARGE!”

“TO BATTLE, MY MUSCULAR BRETHREN!”

The Sporks and the Custodes clashed with each other, metal slapping against muscular flesh left and right.

“…I should be horrified that an invasion force has made it into the throne room,” Kitten observed. “But this is just too ridiculous.”

“I agree, wiry talking banana,” Ahzek admitted. “BUT I SHALL MAKE USE OF IT NONETHELESS! YES, MY SPORKS, ASSAULT THE EMPEROR!”

“Protect the Emperor!” Nyx called. “Every-Twilight, come on!”

“I WILL BURN YOU ALL TO CINDERS!” Ahzek declared. “DON’T MAKE A MOVE! I’LL KILL AT LEAST SOME OF Y-“

Corona summoned a disc-shaped spirit behind her. Suddenly, Ahzek found that he couldn’t move. “Wh… What witchcraft is this?”

“Bacon Pancakes,” Corona said with a smirk.

“Get some bacon and you put it on a pancake!” Burgerbelle declared, roundhouse kicking Ahzek in the chest. Thrackerzod created a series of eldritch tentacles to wrap the immobile Ahzek up.

“NO! NO! I AM AHZEK AHRIMAN! I CANNOT BE DEFEATED SO EASILY! I AM THE CHAMPION OF CHANGE! I A-“

“Give it a rest,” D’mirik muttered.

Corona – joined by several Twilights and Custodes – shoved Ahzek through a portal to another universe. A Nexus universe well known to not allow anyone inside to dial out. He wouldn’t be back anytime soon.

The Sporks were still here and showed no sign of stopping. It was proving to be somewhat difficult to subdue beings made of pure metal.

The Emperor grunted. “SIGH. THIS IS AN AFFRONT TO MY NAME. SPORKS, THE TIME HAS COME FOR YOU TO BE SMITED. PRAY TO WHATEVER DEITY YOU BELIEVE IN.”

“Not Santa!”

“I FIGURED. WAY TOO MANY SCROOGES AROUND TODAY…” the entire throne room began to rumble as the Emperor channeled his own Divine power for some righteous smiting.

“WAIIIT!” Rev shouted. “EVERYBODY STOP! EVERYBODY!”

The Emperor hesitated – but the Sporks didn’t.

“THIS IS ALL MY FAULT!” Rev announced, using magic to make her voice carry.

This stopped the Sporks. “…What do you mean?”

Rev gulped and adjusted her collar.

~~~

Eve kicked down the doors to the main hall of the castle, witness to a hallway that had been mostly cleared of the holiday war. With a sneer on her face and eyes alit with pink fire, she laughed. “You’re all fools!”

Pinkie took one look at her and groaned. “Ugh, really, an eldritch corruption now? We’re still dealing with the fallout of the last one!”

“Corruption!?” Eve spat. “I’ve hardly been corrupted! I’ve been shown the light! I’ve been shown how there’s no way to know what to do with anything! People and ponies are too complicated.” She teleported into the middle of the room, glaring at Pinkie. “You, for instance. You have no patterns. You fly in the face of the rest of us who want to figure out what to do for you! You’re impossible! Impossible!”

“Do we have Thrackerzod on site?” Pinkie asked nervously. “We could really use an exorcism right now or something…”

“An exorcism? Pinkie, Pinkie, Pinkie, do you think I want to remove this? To return from what I have seen? Oh, wait, it’s because you see everything isn’t it? This is judged as ‘evil’ in your land of Awareness and thrown about like a piñata without regards for what other people may think! Did it ever occur to you that our labels might be wrong by a truly moral standpoint? Or that, maybe, the aloof way with which you treat things is not only wrong, but disrespectful to your friends?”

“I… I…”

Vriska kicked Eve in the face. “Yes. She has. We all had to face ourselves on Zhui. So lay off, whatever you are.”

“I’m Eve!” Eve said, eyes flashing pink. “Well, Eve with a bit of Tzeentch inserted in here and there to fill some gaps in knowledge and approach truth. Maybe I should go on you next… A Thief of Light, always in charge of the spotlight, always angry, never finding her home. Do you know why you never find your home? Because you aren’t meant to! It needs to remain hidden, and you need to remain alone, drifting, for eternity.”

“Renee, how badly can I fuck her up?” Vriska asked. “You better say some.”

“Don’t,” Renee said, putting a hoof on her shoulder. “How about you go and get Thrackerzod?”

Vriska twitched. She took out her dimensional device.

“Fleeing from a conflict? Ooh, how like you. You’re just as impossible as the rest, never consistent, always changing.”

Vriska dialed out and left without another word.

“Change is good,” Jotaro said, leaning in. “You taught me that.”

“Change is great! But it means nothing can be known!” Eve laughed. “All the inconsistencies, the paradoxes… They’re inherent in everything, Jotaro! Your wife loves you because I helped you. What if she changes her mind tomorrow? She might, there’s no way to know for sure! People can’t be predicted! You can’t know what they’ll do or what they want!”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Nova asked. “If you always knew, how would a relationship be interesting? How could anyone surprise anyone?”

Twilight twitched. “Well, Nova, let’s think about that. What if, say, I wanted to give somepony a present. But I couldn’t know for sure if they’d see in it what I wanted them to see. Flat out telling them would ruin the entire point of the present, and if the present is taken wrong the consequences are dire and cannot be taken back!”

“Eve…” Flutterfree said.

“Yes I’m talking about you!” Eve blurted, teleporting inches from Flutterfree’s face. “You… The traitor. Me, the traitor. Isn’t it a fun little game we have going here? An impossible jump where both of us want to fix things but are eternally stuck in a stupid loop where it’s beyond even the deepest forces of the universe to comprehend what to do next! What gift can there be? Nothing! But no gift is worse than any gift, right? But there’s the insulting gift! And you freaking like everything Flutterfree! Everything! What meaning could there be!?” She spread her wings, the flame in her eyes reaching new heights. “It’s not worth the heartache!”

Flutterfree wordlessly pulled the corrupted unicorn into a teary hug. “I… I think it’s worth it. I don’t care if you don’t, I do.”

And just like that Tzeentch removed his essence from Eve. Her eyes returned to normal. She remembered everything that had just happened.

“Wh… What have I done?” she mouthed, tears forming in her eyes as well. She pulled Flutterfree close, trying desperately to process what had just happened, and failing.

~~~

“I was stubborn,” Rev said, using her experience as a preacher to hold everyone’s attention on her. “I wouldn’t let myself see what I was doing – despite a close friend telling me directly what the problem was. I had let a seed of bitterness grow in me. I saw the holidays – Christmas, Hearth's Warming, it doesn’t matter – I saw them as an insult to holy meaning. I saw them as blasphemy – as heresy, if you will. I was angry at the capitalism, the focus on worldly things, the lies, the distractions… I still think those are problems, but that doesn’t excuse what I did. I attacked the holidays. I yelled to anyone who would listen, inserted myself into things I shouldn’t have, and…” She bit her lip.

She looked at the crowd – every Twilight, Spork, and Custode was hanging on her every word.

“I thought I was above it all. I thought my anger was righteous, so I let myself fall into an old trap I thought I had locked away forever. My anger – my deep, resentful anger toward things I feel have wronged me or my beliefs. I am a Starlight, and I had forgotten that. I chose to let my anger pour out and tried to manipulate people with it. Sway them to my side in a horrible way – a way that destroyed their holiday.”

She glanced down at the Sporks. “You were there to teach me – to teach me what would happen if I got what I wanted. If I did manage to convince enough people the ways of the holidays were blasphemous. It would become violent, oppressive, and ruin the spirit of the holiday in a different way. …I preach often on understanding, acceptance, and taking the time to learn about the beliefs of other people and respect them, no matter how different they are. I forgot my own lesson. I thought my way to celebrate was the only right way – and that was wrong. Anyone can celebrate however they want, because it’s their holiday. By trying to show them how wrong their celebration is with angry force, it rarely changes anything and… and it just ruins the holiday for them.”

She bowed her head. “I’m sorry for that, Sporks. I ruined your holiday, making you go to war over it. And I apologize to anyone else I’ve been horrible to. I may not agree with what you do, but like everything else in life, I need to seek to understand, to appreciate, and to love.” She smiled. “I was being Scrooge. And because of that we have this huge mess.”

“It’s also because we decided we needed to challenge Ahzek to a duel,” Burgerbelle said, raising a hand.

“WHOEVER THIS GIRL IS I LOVE HER,” the Emperor declared.

Burgerbelle winked.

“…Perhaps that’s part of it,” Rev admitted. “But the point is I learned a lesson, and I need to go apologize.” She smiled. “Never thought I would turn out to be Snowfall Frost. Just when you thought you knew yourself.”

Corona put an arm around Rev. “I’m not entirely sure how much you were Scrooging up, but I’m glad you're back. I’m also glad you stopped the Sporks.”

“…So what do we do now?” Lead Spork asked.

“Go home?” Rev suggested. “Enjoy the holidays?”

“That sounds like a great idea!” J8 declared.

“But mooooom we just got back!” Nyx wailed.

“Nyx, I’m sure everyone’s thankful for you saving them from that Chaos sorcerer, but we shouldn’t stay here.”

“Why not?” Burgerbelle asked. “The Emperor’s awesome.”

“I AM FULL OF SO MANY AMAZING FUCKING JOKES.”

“Sweet! Do you want a Bradburger?”

“I CANNOT INGEST ANY PHYSICAL FOOD IN MY CURRENT STATE. SO YES.”

Burgerbelle punched a Bradburger into the Emperor’s ribcage. “Level up!”

“I HAVE EXPERIENCED NIRVANA.”

Kitten put a hand to his helmet. “What is my life coming to?”

Corona smiled coyly in his direction. “It’s becoming something amazing. That’s what. J8 is right though, you’re all crowding up this throne room, we’re way too crowded.”

As everyone started to clear out of the throne room, the Emperor called Kitten over. “HEY.”

“What is it, my Lord?”

“CALL OFF THE CELEBRATION EVERYWHERE EXCEPT THE PALACE.”

“…My Lord, take back one of your Imperial orders?”

“IT WAS A HEARTFELT SPEECH. JUST DO IT BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND.”

Corona teleported right in front of the Emperor. “You… you changed your mind?”

“YOU WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO HEAR THAT.”

“I hear everything I need to,” Corona said, tossing her hair back. “What I can say is… I’m proud of you.”

“THIS DOESN’T FUCKING LEAVE THIS ROOM.”

“I think a half-dozen Twilights also heard it, my Lord,” Kitten added. “Also the rest of the Custodes.”

“My Lord!” one of the Custodes said, slapping his abs. “Can you let us have oil-drenching Tuesdays again?”

“FUCK. NO.”

“As you wish…” he said, disappointed.

“NOW GO AND DECORATE THE PALACE SOME MORE. WE’RE STILL GOING TO CELEBRATE. BUT JUST US.”

“Right away!”

Corona rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to know.”

“You really don’t,” Kitten confirmed.

A phone rang – the Emperor’s phone.

“…Tzeentch?” Kitten asked.

“I DON’T KNOW WHY HE DOESN’T JUST USE THE WARP,” the Emperor said. “YES, DAEMON-SPAWN?”

“So, just calling to let you know, I had Ahzek sent there specifically to ensure this all happened. You know what that means!?”

“DON’T. YOU. DARE.”

“I got you to admit you were wrong about something! Exactly. As. Planned. Bye!”

“TZEENTCH!!”

The entire palace began to shake with the outraged and infuriated anger of the Emperor.

“Woah-kay, calm down there…” Corona said, using her own magic to keep the reality around them stable.

“Just give him a minute,” Kitten said. “The Warp storms will subside momentarially.”

“EAVOUEYWUOAYIRENUOAVEUIEAHVEOWUARGRAAAAHEUOWAVHWEUOYRKEWNAFWELYARFUCKFUCKBHEUOWAITENWADSOUGEWATZEENTCHWUOEVHAWEUOREKWNOUONASOUEROIEAFE”

“Is the text-to-speech broken?” Corona asked.

Kitten shook his head. “No, it just can’t translate the emotions he’s outputting directly to text.”

“Geez.”

“Yes. It is indeed, ‘geez’.”

Corona raised an eyebrow and tried not to laugh.

“…I’ll show myself out.”

~~~

Eve eventually pulled her head out of Flutterfree’s wings. “…You really care that much?”

Flutterfree nodded, sniffing. “It’s worth every strain. It doesn’t matter how difficult it is, I don’t want to lose your friendship. No matter what you or I have done. It didn’t matter if you got me a candle, I wouldn’t have let that come between us.”

Eve smiled sadly. “...I should have known. Because… because I feel the same things. Not once today did I think of what you were giving me.”

“Same.”

“You were panicking too, weren’t you?”

Flutterfree laughed nervously. “Y-yeah…”

Eve chuckled. “We… we really blew this out of proportion, huh?”

“You’re the one who went all chaos-princess on us.”

“I was tricked by Tzeentch!” Eve said, shaking her head. “Speaking of…” She pulled out her phone and sent a text to him. You’ve just made a very stupid mistake. Assaulting the mind of an Overhead?

The second she sent it, a response came back. Was it really stupid, my pedantic purple pony? Or did you really give Flutterfree – and yourself – the best gift that could have possibly come about? Look at where the two of you are sitting, right now. Your bond of friendship is stronger than it’s been for quite some time.

Eve stared at the message, realizing he was right. He had done exactly what he’d promised.

I think that earns me some good-Chaos-god points.

Eve’s first instinct was to type back an angry response, but Flutterfree put a hoof on her shoulder and shook her head.

Eve realized she was right – getting angry would probably just validate Tzeentch’s sense of humor. With a soft smile, she sent him a simple message.

Happy Hearth's Warming, Tzeentch.

MEEEEEEERRY CHRISTMAS! came the response.

Eve put her phone away. “Well… I guess we’ve given each other our presents early.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “Yeah. I don’t mind. We can focus more on the others when the day comes.”

“Oh, that’s right!” Eve turned to the Primary team and Renee. “I’m sorry, I forgot about you!”

“It’s okay,” Pinkie said with a smile. “It wasn’t you in there.”

“Tzeentch was still trying to… ‘help’ me, I guess.”

“Then we can be mad at him, dear,” Renee declared. “By the way, someone go get Vriska before she spends all of Hearth's Warming week looking for Thrackerzod.”

Jotaro smirked. “Yare yare daze…”

“Oh, before you go…” Eve used her magic to pull them all into a group hug. “Happy Hearth's Warming.”

Pinkie looked out at the beyond. “And Merry Christmas from all of us to you readers! Enjoy your holidays!”

“Pinkie, stop ruining the moment,” Nova muttered.

“What? They need to hear it too!”

“It’s fine,” Eve said. She tried to look in the same direction as Pinkie. “Uh… Yeah. Happy holidays… all you. …Did I do it right?”

“Eh, close enough,” Pinkie said with a giggle.

~~~

Tzeentch opened a portal in the Warp, grabbing Ahzek and D’mirik from their prison. “Well, it looks like you two screwed up, exactly as planned.”

Ahzek folded his arms – he had nothing else to say.

“Aw, turn that frown upside-down! We’re not here to talk about your successful loss, but rather celebrate! The Warp can have its celebrations too.”

Suddenly, D’mirik and Ahzek had Santa hats on.

“Perfect! Now let’s go decorate the tree with corpses! I have a few of them candied in vats of caramel!”

“That does sound fun,” D’mirik admitted.

Ahzek growled. “As long as I get the honor of killing some of them.”

“Granted! Though remember, Ahzek, we don’t make Merodi Universalis upset. We want good-Chaos points with them!”

“…My Lord, we’re indirectly at war with them.”

“Yes. So? It’s still all part of the plan! Everything is part of the plan… The eternal plan…” He let out an evil festive laugh. “Chaos can’t remain as it is within the multiverse… We will change! And who else can do the job?”

Ahzek couldn’t help but feel exasperated.

~~~

Eventually, of course, the actual day of celebration would arrive. The holiday. Everyone spent it in their own way…

Rev stood on the stage of her Church with about a dozen Sporks standing behind her. She had decided to open up the Church on the holiday so everyone could come together to celebrate their own way. She and the Sporks were singing great carols.

“God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan's pow'r
When we were gone astray
Oh tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh tidings of comfort and joy!”

Elsewhere, Eve and her closest friends were sitting in the Renee-decorated castle hall, warming themselves around the hearth fire. Everyone was opening presents, drinking cocoa, and laughing Flutterfree cleared her throat and began to sing.

“Take heed all you little ponies
Lest hatred find its way
Recall the founders’ fire
Equestria’s first day
To defy the Wendigos’ pow’r
So our children can play
Oh tidings of friendship and cheer
Friendship and cheer
Oh tidings of friendship and cheer!”

In the throne room of the Emperor there were shining trees covered in lights of all colors. Ornate skulls were covered in festive candles and images of the great victories in the Warp adorned the walls. All the Custodes were in the Emperor’s presence, drinking and yelling and having a great time. Kitten felt compelled to sing for some reason he couldn’t explain.

“Under our righteous Emperor
We fight against the Warp
A galaxy of Chaos
Their stings are no more sharp
With our allies, we burn their homes
And fillet them like carp
Oh tidings of great victory
Great victory
Oh tidings of great victory!”

Elsewhere within the same universe, the Blood Angel marines celebrated Sanguinala as they always had – with downcast faces and mournful minds, a time of remembering for what had been lost.

“Oh soul of great Sanguinius
You still watch over us
Savior of the Emperor
Oh why must it be thus?
Return to us and strike them down
Leave no time to discuss
Oh tidings of sorrow and light
Sorrow and light
Oh tidings of sorrow and light.”

The League of Sweetie Belles ended up holding their holiday celebration out in the streets of Merodi’s capital city. Virtually every member – a number over a hundred – was out, about, and singing cheerfully for the betterment of their neighbors.

“Take rest all you weary workers
The time for toil is done
And now’s the time for giving
Remember everyone
Forget the winters in our lives
Enjoy family’s fun
We wish you a merry Christmas
Merry Christmas
We wish you a merry Christmas!”

On that day, many universes sung as one. They sung for different reasons, many in outright contradiction with each other – but that didn’t matter in the slightest. They were in complete harmony despite all prior arguments and conflict.

It was the spirit of the holiday season.

074 - Captured

It wasn’t every day the Primary Team was called to deal with a smuggling operation within Merodi Universalis space. They were usually the team who dealt with other universe’s smuggling problems.

It was even more unusual considering the smuggling operation was taking place in Celestia City, where the League of Sweetie Belles were readily available to solve anything.

So why had they been sent?

It all had to do with the fact that the ringleader of the whole operation was a version of Pinkie Pie who’d been several steps ahead of all prior attempts to stop her. Snuggle Pie she called herself, finding it amusing to have a name so close to Smuggle Pie that she could use in the open without drawing attention.

Naturally, you had to fight pink party ponies with pink party ponies.

“SQUEAKY HAMMER CANCELLATION TECHNIQUE!” Pinkie shouted, giggling as she brought the squeaky hammer down on Snuggle.

Snuggle rolled her eyes and giggled as well – her only unique feature being a cutie mark of a box wrapped in chains rather than balloons. “I’ll meet you there!” She used her own identical squeaky hammer to meet Pinkie’s, the two smashing against each other in an immensely annoying cacophony of SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK!

Snuggle knew she’d lost the moment the squeaky hammers met, but who cared, really? This was not only her moment in the spotlight, it was also freaking fun!

“I know, right?” Pinkie yelled over the squeaks.

“Snuggle Pie, villain of the moment!” Snuggle shouted, chuckling. “Nice plan by the way! I can’t resist the squeak!”

“Do I know me or do I know me?”

“SHIPMENT SECURED!” Nova shouted.

“LACKEYS DISPATCHED!” Vriska added.

“No collateral damage,” Flutterfree added, too quiet to be heard.

“THAT MEANS YOU CAN STOP NOW!” Nova shouted at Pinkie.

“But Novaaaa!” Pinkie whined. “We’re having fun!”

“Yeah, let us go just a little bit longer!” Snuggle added.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered. He had Star Platinum grab both their respective heads, forcing them to stop swinging the squeaky hammers.

“Ptooey, you’re no f-”

Star Platinum beaned Snuggle in between the eyes with the intent of knocking her out. She just depressed like she was made of foam.

Pinkie rolled her eyes, producing a licorice lasso out of nowhere and tying Snuggle up in it. “There. She won’t be getting out of that.”

“MY ONLY WEAKNESS! Sugary goodness!”

“From other Pinkies,” Pinkie said, smirking. She put a smiley-face sticker on Snuggle’s forehead. “Turn that in for a free prison party if you ever don’t want to make one yourself!”

“Thank you!”

The two giggled.

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “Allure will want to talk to you personally.”

“Oh, did she actually ask for you?”

“No,” Nova admitted.

“I knew it. This is going to be a bruise on her pride.”

“She’ll be a lot happier to see you in chains,” Pinkie pointed out. “I mean… you’ve been messing with her a lot.”

“She’s so susceptible! Just a little stray note in Minna’s room and she flips the hell out!”

“I wonder why,” Vriska muttered while Jotaro slapped the snuggler with Star Platinum.

Nova pulled out her phone. “Yeah, Allure? Got them all. Seventeenth street, level 8, sector Avocado. Got her and all the lackeys. Unless something absolutely absurd happens in the next five minut-”

A mass of glowing white tendrils erupted in the middle of the smuggler’s warehouse. A single, muscular man stepped out, wearing very little in the way of clothing – the bracelets, boots, and loincloth he was wearing were a dark shade of purple. He had a truly impressive head of hair that rippled and shifted as he moved.

He struck a dramatic pose, a clear indication he came from a version of Earth Stand.

Jotaro’s eyes widened. “…Kars!?”

“Joseph’s descendant recognizes me… good,” Kars decided.

The Primary Team stood as one, analyzing Kars for the best takedown method.

He held up a small device and flashed them all with a blue light. “Congratulations, you’re all part of the Collection now. Current orders from the Collector are to do whatever I say. Jotaro… Stay still.”

Jotaro stayed still. Kars produced a jagged knife out of his arm and punctured Jotaro’s stomach with it. Jotaro remained standing, blood trickling out of the wound.

Kars folded his arms. “If only I could go further…” he said, bitterly.

“Try this on for size,” Vriska said, skewering his head with her sword. She proceeded to roll her dice, summoning nineteen blue spears to skewer Kars from all sides.

He moved his body around all the blades as if his muscles were liquid. “You’re a powerful enough psychic to resist the basic conditioner I see.” He grabbed her and drove her into the ground. She looked up at him, beginning the luck drain.

He drove his arm-knife into her eye and into her brain. This was enough to trigger a death – though Kars knew it wouldn’t be permanent. He snapped his fingers, ordering the other four to line up.

He touched his head, causing a unicorn horn to come out of it. The horn lit with a deep purple aura, the magic within him able to tear a portal through universes. He hoisted Vriska up. “Let’s go.”

Allure appeared in a flash of white light. “More help is on the way, I just got here as soon as I c-”

Kars held up the device and flashed her with the blueness. “Move,” he ordered. She did.

The Primary Team and Allure were gone within the next ten seconds, leaving the tied-up Snuggle and a bunch of beat up lackeys alone in the warehouse.

Snuggle groaned. “Ugh, how long until the cops take us to jail? I’m bored already!”

~~~

The world where the various nations of the local multiverse met to discuss the Collector was still known as the Golden Joke. Up until an hour ago, the Golden Joke had only been sparsely populated by a few individuals working on some crazy ideas. The majority of people had been waiting for Starbeat’s hummingbird drive sensors to pick up any Collector activity in their space.

To say they had picked up some activity would be an understatement. Celestia City was one of the most advanced constructions any of the main powers knew about, and it was riddled with ka sensors that collected data, even if nobody understood what all the data they were collecting was. They had detailed scans of the Primary Team’s encounter with Kars, and their capture. It was more than enough.

And that knowledge was enough to fill Golden Joke’s main meeting hall. Valentine, Froppy, Johnny’s team, Jenny, YVND, the Grand Secretariat, members of the Sparkle Census Council that almost never left the Census, Eve, O’Neill, Toph, Corona, most the Merodi Overheads, and even Hastur had arrived. Hastur was notably there for purely personal reasons, since the Embodiment would never care about such things.

Starbeat walked up to the main podium and cleared her throat. “The good news is we have more than enough of a ka signature to find the Collector and his Collection since the Primary Team was captured in such a convenient location.”

She paused for a moment, allowing that to sink in.

“The bad news is that the previous sentence needs an eventually tacked onto the end of it.” She pressed a button, bringing up a holographic display of the multiverse behind her, zoomed in on the edge of the Q-Sphere, where most of Merodi, Sparkle Census, and University space was. “This is the area of the multiverse we have heavily documented – most connections are known, and the most efficient ways to move from universe to universe are charted. This universe here,” she gestured to a softly glowing red dot, “is where Celestia City is. We were able to follow the ka signature for twelve whole universes before we ran into a problem.”

She let a simple animation play out – the red dot connected itself to another dot, turning it red as well, the connection between glowing brightly. The string went out twelve universes before it hit a dot at the edge of well-documented space. “We do not know the next universe in the path to the Collector. We currently have the ka signature interfaced with a hyper-grinder device, but it is expected to take hours to find the next universe. And hours to find the next. On and on and on. I don’t know about any of you, but I think the Collector not only has the power to string together hundreds of universes in a complex maze to his world, but that he’s paranoid enough to do so.”

She grimaced. “I know we’d rather not wait days – or even weeks – to get everyone back. The Collector attacked us brazenly, out in the open, knowing we’d get this information. He’s counting on us taking this long for whatever plan he has. So we need to find a way to get there faster. The way I see it, there are two options.” She lit her horn, banishing the display.

“The first option is to find a map of the area of space the Collector is hiding in. This seems unlikely, since the TSAB has little to no clue about the Collector, and they’re near the top of the multiversal food chain. He’s hiding himself very well.

“The second option is to find a way to use our ka signature to find him more effectively. We do not have time to start bigger research projects on it – we’d need to search for help. This also seems unlikely since none of our acquaintances make extensive use of ka.”

“So what the heck do we do then?” Jenny blurted.

“That’s what we need to find out,” Starbeat told her. “I’ve just given you all I know about the situation. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to the grinder to see if my presence can do anything to speed up the process.”

She jumped off the stage, walking away.

The crowd erupted into loud discussion among themselves.

“Right,” Eve said, turning to those she could tell what to do. “We need to spread our feelers out. Someone go contact any travelers we have to see if they know about a race that can manipulate ka.”

“I’ll talk with Sunny,” Renee offered. “Though I’m not sure she’ll have much to offer.”

“Good. I’ll go get Rev myself, she seems to know a bit more about ka than the rest of us.”

“I’ll go to Nanoha,” Corona said. “If she’s available.”

“Yes. O’Neill? Think you can get anyone from the Race of Yith to assist?”

“I’ll try.”

Go ask Giorno for information as well, she told him telepathically. He nodded and ran off.

Eve spread her wings and took to the sky. “Everyone, give this your all – the Collector is making his move and we can’t let him have whatever it is he wants!” With a flash of her horn, she was gone.

She was going to find her friends.

She was going to save her friends.

~~~

“Pinkie and Pals should get kidnapped more often,” Alushy told a bartender as she downed a shot of whiskey.

The bartender was a Bismuth Gem well-known for never bothering to eat anything. “Oh?”

Alushy gestured outside at all the screens proclaiming the news in the outside hall of the Hub. There was a small crowd of citizens huddling close together, staring at the screens, hoping for more news on the situation. “It does that.”

“Brings people together?”

“If you’re a normal, optimistic person,” Alushy laughed bitterly. “But lucky for everyone in existence, I’m none of those things! Even the ‘person’ part is debatable. Heh.” She adjusted her red-tinted glasses and smirked. “I’m talking about the barely constrained panic. I can smell it in the air – it’s like a drug. These people are so used to hearing stories about the heroes, stories that bring little bits of light into their lives. They’ve become too connected. So much that when their heroes are threatened they feel like their own lives are on the brink!” She laughed, downing another shot. “And that produces the sweet delicious taste of panic. Something I don’t feel here that often…”

“If they got captured more often wouldn’t people become desensitized to it?”

Alushy blinked. “You’re the bartender, you don’t get to have good points.”

She slid Alushy the bill and raised an eyebrow.

Alushy grunted, flashing her card for the Gem to scan. “Fine, I’ll fuck off, I can tell when I’m not wanted. By the way, you really shouldn’t check your bathroom. There was an accident when I went in there.”

She left the establishment by wing, flapping over the panicked crowds, enjoying their cries of alarm. She felt the inner urge to jump down and munch on them – but she hadn’t given in to such primal urges in decades.

…At least not among ‘friends’.

Despite the commotion, her excellent ears could still pick up the sounds of Bismuth’s panicked screams from the bar.

She was going to be so pissed when she realized all the blood and body parts were just Alushy’s. The vampire pegasus chuckled to herself. “Ah, it’s good to be me! And, if I do say so, I think I feel a song coming on about how great I am!”

She cleared her throat, her deep voice ringing through the hub.

“Woooooah-
You better have your party in hell tonight,
Because you just invited the lord of fright,
A version of kindness so much a-”

Alushy stopped short, the music screeching to a halt as something caught her eye and tugged at her cold, dead heart.

A girl of maybe seven in a simple black dress. Her skin was white, as was her hair, while her eyes were a pale violet. She stood in front of one of the large screens displaying the video of the Primary Team being taken away. She had her hand on the surface, trembling.

It was a rare day when Alushy felt so moved by something she saw. She wasn’t completely without empathy or care – after all, she wasn’t just Alucard, but also Fluttershy – however, the moments when something struck her dumb and shoved all thoughts out of her mind?

A dozen, maybe, over her entire immortal lifespan.

Those moments never had any rhyme or reason. One time it had been the sight of a dog slowly dying from hunger. One time it had been the stars twinkling all around her on a moonless night in the wilderness.

…One time it had been a blue-maned mare caught in between Alushy’s gun and its target.

She hadn’t thought about DJ-girl in forever.

Alushy approached the little girl, standing next to her. “Sup.”

“You’re the red shadow that kills hundreds of people for us because nobody else is willing to do it,” she deadpanned, not taking her eyes off the screen.

“Yep. That’s me. Murder-bitch.”

“Mom says you’re not supposed to use that word.”

“Do I look like I give a fudge?”

The child blinked, the presence of an unexpected word making her turn her head to look at Alushy. She had no response for the vampire pony.

Alushy smirked. “Wanna see something cool?”

“No,” she said, turning away.

“Well what do you want?”

“I want Mom,” she said, putting a hand on the screen, knowing exactly when and where Allure would appear on the video. “I want her back…”

“Oh shit, you’re Allure’s daughter,” Alushy said. After a moment, she chuckled. “She’s going to try to kill me for this.”

“Try?”

“You can’t kill the great Alushy.”

Minna blinked. “Mom could.”

“Your mom’s not invincible, kid. One stray shot she’s not expecting a-”

Minna kicked Alushy in the face.

Alushy stared at her in disbelief. “Do you have any sort of fear response?”

Minna blinked. “…What’s that?”

“Being scared of things that can hurt you?”

“…Oh, that feeling. I remember that feeling. I think.” She put her hand to her mouth. “...Can you get Mom back?”

Alushy shrugged. “Not any faster than the entire government.”

“Mom told me you would do things nobody else would do. That’s why you’re allowed to stay. She didn’t seem too happy about that.”

“Kid, the number of ponies who like me are few and far between. Just the way I like it.”

Minna was ignoring her. “You can find this Kars guy and tear his head off for me!”

“While that does sound like an interesting prospect, you’re forgetting one important detail. I have no idea where he is.”

“Prospect?”

“I’m not your dictionary.”

“Well Mom won’t let me have a phone, so I can’t look it up. That means you need to be my dictionary.”

“I’m not.”

“Dictionary or mount.”

“Wha-”

Minna hoisted herself onto Alushy’s back and tapped her neck. “Away! To Mom!”

“…Kid, nine out of ten people who sit on me get eviscerated.”

“Eviscerated?”

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-” Alushy took in a deep breath. “Why do I do this to myself…?”

“You’re not. I’m telling you. Go go go!”

Alushy almost tore the kid off her back and flew away without another word.

Almost.

But this kid was just so bold. She couldn’t not like her.

“Right, I’ve got a place in mind that might help you. But there is a price for riding Alushy all little girls must pay.”

“What’s that?”

“I get to show you how to have some fun in this town. First, you’re seven, right? It’s time you learned what a bar was.”

“A round long stick?”

“BWAAAAP!” Alushy blurted. “Hell no, it’s a place people go to drink strange liquids until they’re stupid enough to… Well do anything besides drink more strange liquids.”

“I got you to be a dictionary!”

Alushy twitched. “Prune juice for you.”

“What’s prun-”

Alushy shut her up by pulling off a barrel roll in midair. Alushy had expected to frighten the girl – but she laughed in delight at the motion. There wasn’t a single sign of nausea.

“You’re an odd duck, you know that?”

“I’m not a bird!”

“No. No you definitely are not. How did I not see this before?” Alushy made a mock gasp.

“How dumb a- Oh you’re just messing with me!”

“Good ears. Hold on, we’re going to get some free space here and I’ve never done a loop with someone on my back before.”

“…Sweet.”

“You seem to have gone from depressed to excited rather quickly.”

“Mom says I have ‘emotional issues’ from ‘past trauma’. ...I think.”

“I can relate.”

“Hm?”

“One doesn’t become a vampire without dying first,” Alushy said. Minna’s follow up was cut off when the vampire pony pulled up into a huge loop. The mysterious girl laughed, for a moment forgetting everything that was happening around her.

~~~

“-nd then I am going to FUCKING MURDER you by tearing one of those BLUE SPIKES right out of your head and GOUGING YO-”

“Stop talking,” the Collector ordered Vriska, a hand to his forehead. He sat behind the desk in his office, Lightning to his side. In front of them were the six new recruits – the Primary Team of Merodi Universalis and Allure. The ‘sixth ranger’ that had shown up because fate demanded it, apparently.

Vriska gave the Collector the finger.

“At least that’s quieter,” the Collector said, folding his arms and examining the six with his red eyes. “At this point I would normally describe my power over you, but you already know all about it.”

“You could go through it again for the sake of a recap!” Pinkie suggested.

“I’d rather not delve into your complete submission to me while still retaining your personalities throu-” the Collector paused. “Lightning?”

“Yes?”

“I need another trip to the purging banks for the expositionitis.”

“You don’t need to ask me permission.”

“I know. I think it’s still affecting me.”

“The horror,” Nova deadpanned. “Can you just let the six of us fight you to the death or something, cut to the end?”

“Oooh, she’s trying to make plot predictions!” Pinkie clapped her hooves. “Good try, Nova!”

“Oh, so that’s not what happens?”

“Dunno. Wouldn’t be my first guess though.”

The Collector pointed at Flutterfree. “Ahem. Yes, I can see Lolo. No, I don’t have a Stand – too unpredictable, sometimes detrimental. Also, stop trying to ‘reveal’ something about me.”

Flutterfree sighed, recalling Lolo.

The Collector folded his hands. “So here’s how this is going to go. You are going to go out and mingle with the Collection for a while, see the place I’ve built here. You’ll be allowed to go anywhere within the Collection and do anything besides start killing each other and a handful of other rules you’ll find your own minds preventing you from breaking the moment you consider it. After a while you will be called to perform a mission – you’ll be given less time than most, since you’re already used to working as a unit. Not to mention the fact this isn’t very jarring for you.”

Jotaro let out a sharp grunt.

“I promise, you’ll grow to see that I’m not the purely evil entity you want to think I am. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask Lightning. Lightning, care to take these six to the plaza?”

Lightning nodded, standing up. She gestured for the six of them to follow. Even though they didn’t feel compelled to do so, they figured they might as well do it before the Collector ordered them. As they left through the office’s main doors, Vriska never stopped showing the Collector the finger.

The other side of the door was a round, gray room with no other doors. Lightning waved a hand. All the occupants felt the entire room shift somewhere else, opening up the doors to a new location.

The Collection Plaza.

Nova found it hard to conceptualize the size of the Plaza. She wanted to think of it like a cavern, but not even volcanic tubes got this large. She tried to think of it as a city, but not even Celestia City covered this much surface area – not even close. The entire City could fit within the cavernous space of the Plaza! However, the expanse wasn’t planet sized, or even moon sized… Perhaps the size of a small country was best?

Whatever it was, it was big, and mostly hollow. The ‘walls’ of the Plaza were lined with what couldn’t quite be described as individual buildings, but also weren’t wholly one item. Numerous white disc-shaped protrusions came out of all the cavern walls, all parallel with each other, more densely packed on the top and bottom areas. These discs were lined with large windows, the majority of which were blue, though other more exotic colors could be seen all around. Many objects were placed on the surfaces of the discs that weren’t affixed to other discs. They could see statues, fountains, magical glows, television screens, and even a rollercoaster snaking between several discs.

Beings of all shapes and sizes lived here – mostly human, but they spotted a few ponies trotting around alongside giants, dragons, angels, eldritch things sealed away in dark cloaks to protect the others of the Collection, mobile plants, beings of pure energy, and even a green featureless cube that moved seemingly without propulsion.

In the air, they saw ships of every design they could imagine. Some were familiar – Earth Starfleet being the most standout and most common of the designs – while others were completely alien constructs that sometimes weren’t even made of matter. These ships came and left regularly, taking members of the Collection to many places for their various missions.

“Welcome to the plaza,” Lightning said, a surprising inflection of enjoyment in her voice. “This is just the central section of the Collection. The actual structure goes a mile or two into the walls here, though almost all the living space is on this inner surface.”

“And beyond that?” Allure asked.

“Nothing. This is an empty universe devoid of matter or energy of its own,” Lightning answered. “The Collection is the only structure here.” She turned to them, her one-eyed glare putting them on edge, despite the presence of a soft smile on her lips. “There is no money here, so don’t worry about any of the others taking advantage of you. Every dish you can imagine is available at every eating location, or ordered to your personal rooms. You can take any ship from the docks that isn’t in use and fly it around – there are a series of tracks below us they can be raced in, should you be interested in that. Every song and story to ever exist that we’re aware of is in the database, and we have holodecks that can recreate them for you in several locations. Chances are some of your favorite characters from fiction have been Collected as well, so you can look them up.”

“Wow. This is actually impressive,” Flutterfree said.

“We have the resources to give the Collection almost everything they could ever want,” Lightning said. “Why not do so?”

“Because you’re evil bastards?” Vriska suggested.

Lightning shook her head. “Believe that if you want. It makes no difference to us. I’d just suggest you make the most of what you have here.”

Allure twitched. “Make the most? MAKE THE MOST? We have families back home!”

“You can put in a request to have your families collected as well,” Lightning said. “Those requests are almost always granted. Very rarely are those requests filled out, though.”

“…Because they’d be subject to the same fate as us,” Nova said, glaring. “Give them everything they want, but freedom?”

Lightning nodded. “In exchange for your freedom and services, you want for nothing.”

Jotaro saw a bunch of kids playing and laughing in what appeared to be a playground, a large lizard watching over them.

“School?” he asked.

Lightning nodded. “They’re actually being taught right now by mental insertion. As they play, they gain understanding about mathematics. And in some cases, combat training. They will make good agents one day.”

“Is everyone here an agent?” Allure asked.

“The only ones who aren’t are family members who were taken, people deemed unfit for duty, or children whose parents don’t believe they are ready.”

The six of them fell silent, unsure of what to ask next.

“Use the pink hexagons to teleport wherever you want. Just step on and think of what you want. It’ll take you to your room if you want. You all have adjoining ones, don’t worry.”

“Than-” Flutterfree caught herself, stopping the word mid-sentence.

Lightning nodded to her with understanding. She walked to the teleporter and vanished.

Vriska cracked her knuckles. “Well, I’m thinking about completely trashing this place and nothing’s telling me to stop. Who wants to join me?”

“Vriska,” Flutterfree called. “Maybe we should-”

“ALL THE LUCK!” Vriska blurted, glancing at dozens of different individuals. “No one is going to be able to hit me… Big guy, let’s go.”

Jotaro nodded.

“You too?” Flutterfree called.

“We need to blow off steam,” Nova said, joining up with the other two. “Not like we can go anywhere just yet.”

Pinkie waved at them. “Be back in time for dinner!”

“When’s dinner?”

“When the pie hits your face at mach 5.”

“Ah. Don’t know what I was expecting.”

Flutterfree turned to Pinkie. “Should we really just let them go?”

Pinkie nodded. “We need to mingle as well, just not as violently. Isn’t that right, Allure?”

Allure sighed. “Minna is going to be so worried about me…”

“She’s a strong girl. She’ll be fine,” Flutterfree encouraged.

“Yeah! She’s totally great right now!” Pinkie assured Allure.

Allure looked at Pinkie. “…Is she doing something I wouldn’t approve of?”

“Of course!”

“…Ponyfeathers.”

~~~

“You’re lucky you caught me on a lazy day,” Nanoha told Corona as they walked through one of the TSAB’s many boring metallic hallways lit by blue lights. “Just got back from an expedition to the Unrealities. Always fun.”

“How so?” Corona asked.

“You can hear the direction of egg fun.”

Corona blinked.

“The measures you have to go through to ensure survival in those exotic variations of physics cause... weird things.”

“And here I am thinking the idea of a ‘reality anchor’ is cutting edge.”

“You’ll find that simply anchoring reality won’t always help. Sure, you’ll exist as a three-dimensional being with magical power in the eldritch location, but the fact that you can see the eldritch location will fry your brain. …To name an example you might have experience with.”

Corona put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Oh boy…”

“Oh boy indeed. So, what did you call me up for?”

“The Collector. We’ve got a major lead.”

“The ka sensors worked, I take it?”

Corona nodded. “Yep. We’ve got a strong signal and everything. Minor problem though. It’s taking us hours at a time to move from universe to universe. We were wondering if you had a map of the area we’re digging through.”

Nanoha held out Raising Heart, closing her eyes. “Display.” A red hologram shot out, displaying the entire multiverse. “Synchronize with most up-to-date probe data.” The multiverse shifted slightly, a few large chunks completely vanishing from the map – the largest taking a significant bite out of the Q-Sphere.

“What’s that?”

“The Beyonders. They block all incoming mapping probes, no matter who sends them,” Nanoha commented. “The maps that show what’s inside Beyonder territory is mostly just guesswork based on multiversal patterns. There’s really just a hole there they don’t let anything through.”

“Yeesh. Xenophobic much?”

“Very. But they aren’t anywhere close to your universes. Or the Starcross Society – that smaller hole up there.”

“The fact we can see the hole when zoomed out all the way tells me they’ve got a lot of hidden universes there.”

Nanoha nodded. “But what we’re looking at is…” She zoomed in to Merodi Universalis and the surrounding universes. At this level of zoom they were able to see the ‘curvature’ of the Q-Sphere, but the Starcross Society and Beyonders weren’t even visible. “There. The universal connections in your area of the multiverse from… Uh…”

“Three Central months ago,” Raising Heart offered.

“Thank you,” Nanoha told her device. “You’re lucky it’s that recent. Our ping probes take multiple years to complete a cycle of the multiverse.”

“I imagine it’d take a lot of time to map check every universe…” Corona said.

“The Xeelee maps update every two seconds,” Nanoha muttered.

“Take it they don’t like sharing?”

“Not really.”

“Are you supposed to be sharing this with me?”

“I have the authority to, yes. Though if I actually sent you the file I’d be in hot water. Maps are everything out here, especially in places that are always changing.”

“Right.”

“Bring up your map.”

Corona did, using her magic rather than relying on Raging Sights to do it all for her. They matched up for the most part, but Nanoha’s clearly extended beyond.

“Interface?” Corona asked.

“Interface,” Nanoha said. She lifted her staff and touched Raging Heart to one of the crystals on Corona’s gloves.

A path began to trace across both the maps, moving along five more universes before coming to a stop.

Corona transmitted the new coordinates back to Merodi Universalis immediately. “Thanks.”

“That wasn’t enough,” Nanoha said, furrowing her brow. “It stopped because there was no option to continue, not because it had arrived at the destination.”

“Why?”

“Hidden universe possibly? Or… Raising Heart, show me the map for this location from the last update.”

The map shifted slightly in a few locations, but for the most part remained the same – except where the end of the ka signature trail was. The universes there had scrambled their locations considerably, a few vanishing completely from the map.

“That’s an advanced technique for staying hidden,” Nanoha observed. “Class 2 at least, or a lower entity messing with an ancient remnant.”

“Scrambling the locations of universes so the path to their universe is never the same? That’s clever…”

“Which means that, even if we had a map that was up to date, it would quickly become useless. And if there are hidden universes in the mess, creating a new mapping program wouldn’t help either.” She folded her hands. “Sorry. Looks like we can’t really help.”

Corona shrugged. “You got us five universes closer. That helps a lot. There is a second option though.”

“Ask away.”

“Would you by chance know how to manipulate ka in such a way to get things to go faster? Or… Well, we’re using a ka signature to find this place, would you know a better way of following it rather than the ‘point at a grinder and hope it works’ strategy?”

“The TSAB is not the one to talk to about ka technology,” Nanoha said. “It’s banned in almost every scenario.”

“How do you deal with people who are using it against you then? Because we’re almost certain that’s what’s going on here. Rohan can’t write anything about him, he seems similar to the ‘Sues’ we’ve encountered according to Starbeat…”

Nanoha stopped in her tracks. “You sure he’s a Sue? Or Stu.”

“Pinkie says so.”

“Then there’s some people you need to talk to. Just below us on the Class 2 spectrum. It’s time you met the Flowers that Be.”

“The Flowers that Be?”

“The Flowers that Be. It’ll be better to just show you.” Nanoha smiled warmly. “Do you want a ride on a TSAB dimensional speedster?”

“…I would love that more than just about anything else.”

“Then today’s your lucky day.”

~~~

There were few things that could send Squeaky Belle into an instant panic.

The things on this list did not include the sudden kidnapping of one of her friends – she knew that, if she were going to help Allure, she’d need to keep her wits about her. It didn’t matter that she really wasn’t sure if anything could be done by the League of Sweetie Belles in this case… They were a rather low-level organization compared to the collective might of Merodi Universalis and its neighbors.

So she was growing despondent and hopeless – but not panicked.

What sent her into a panic was Minna riding Alushy into the league.

“WHAT THE FLIPPING HELL ARE YOU DOING WITH MINNA!?” Squeaky screeched, her voice shattering a wine glass in the claws of a dragon-Sweetie.

“Taking her for a joyride,” Alushy commented. “Isn’t that right, kid?”

“Mmmm more donuts…” Minna muttered, holding onto Alushy’s mane like it was a pillow.

“Sorry, don’t have any more of the delectable asshole pastry, but we could go ba-”

“PUT HER DOWN RIGHT NOW!”

Alushy put her wings in her ears and cleaned them out. “You’re giving me war flashbacks.”

“ALUSHY!”

Alushy rolled her eyes. “Does it look like she wants to get down?”

Squeaky twitched. “…N-no, but that doesn’t matter! It’s you! With Minna! Allure is going to kill you! Then me!”

“Shhhhh Alushy will protect you,” Minna said with a smile.

“Minna, stay out of this.”

“No.”

Squeaky grabbed her mane and rammed her face into a nearby wall.

Thrackerzod walked up, a cup of coffee in her hoof. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Alushy has Minna!”

Thrackerzod looked at Alushy and Minna. “I don’t see the issue here.”

“Good! Then you can explain to Allure why her kid is hanging out with lack-of-morals psycho killer when she gets back!”

“…Are you describing me, or her?”

“You have morals!”

“I killed a puppy last week because it looked at me wrong. I have sacrificed numerous animals and corpses to Azathoth in this month alone.” Thrackerzod took a sip of her coffee. “It’s like you forget what I am some of the time.”

Squeaky blinked. “Point… Taken… But you aren’t a bad influence on Minna!”

“Define bad influence.”

“Stop playing devil’s advocate here, the point is we don’t want Allure to flip when she gets back.”

“Mmm.”

“Why aren’t you taking this seriously!?”

“Oh, I am, I’m just spending most my mental effort trying to figure out why Alushy would let a kid ride on her back.”

“Change of pace,” Alushy responded.

“Ah, so you were listening.”

“Eh, more trying to see if there was anything here for Minna.”

“Mom’s not here,” Minna muttered, clinging to Alushy. “We need to try somewhere else…”

“Got any other ideas?” Alushy asked. “Cause I’m fresh out. I say we wait here until she comes back, it’s a place she’ll definitely come.”

“I want her now. …She needs to see my drawing…”

“Oh that’s precious,” Alushy said, grabbing her heart.

Thrackerzod blinked. “…You have a heart. Azathoth’s darkside, that was not the answer I was expecting.”

“I will subatomically vaporize you, eldritch filly.”

“Not a filly, haven’t been for a long time.”

“You’ll always be the eldritch filly. For eternity.”

Thracekrzod shrugged. Bot fell out of the air. “But I’m the eternal filly!”

“But you’re a robot. A-” Alushy blinked. “Question, are you anatomically correct?”

“Negative.”

“What’s anatomically correct?” Minna asked.

“Well-” Alushy began.

Squeaky slapped Alushy in the face. “No. No no no. We’re not having the talk with her now. That’s a talk her mother needs to have with her.”

“Kids can handle a looot more shit than you think. Evidenced by how much they used to use up diapers and now don’t.”

Squeaky’s eye twitched again. “Your antics are going to kill me before Allure even gets back.”

“Oh, then I could turn you into a vampire! Whaddoya say?”

“Can I be a vampire?” Minna asked.

“No,” Alushy and Squeaky deadpanned.

“I dunno, shouldn’t she make that decision?” Thrackerzod asked.

“She’s seven,” Alushy and Squeaky responded.

“I might be eight!” Minna said.

Alushy and Squeaky looked at her, letting her know this changed nothing.

Minna folded her arms. “Fine. Why aren’t we looking for Mom, Alushy?”

“Because she’ll come back to this place, weren’t you listening?”

“…But then we wouldn’t be doing anything!”

“Come on, I took you on a huge tour of the Hub and Celestia City, don’t you think you’ve done enough today? Hell, look at you, trying to fall asleep on my back. I’m nowhere near as comfortable as a bed.”

“If you say so.”

Alushy rolled her eyes. “We could go out and introduce you to more things your mother would absolutely flip out about, or we could stay here and drive Squeaky insane.”

Minna giggled, falling back into Alushy’s mane like it was a pillow. She made her decision by remaining silent.

“Alushy…” Squeaky asked.

“Hm?”

“Did you feed her alcohol?”

“Yep.”

“ALUSHY!”

“It wasn’t enough to get her drunk! Just a little sip!”

“ALUSHY!!!”

~~~

Pinkie, Flutterfree, and Allure found themselves in an area of the Collection styled like a Japanese shrine. They sat at one of the tables, each eating a dish of their own choice. Pinkie had taken the infinite cupcake, Flutterfree had taken a high-end salad with the rarest of ingredients, and Allure had taken a tub of orange-vanilla swirl ice cream.

“Don’t judge me,” she had said.

Across from them sat two people they had met the moment they had come to sit down – Morty and Ivan.

“You guys have been here a while then?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yeah,” Morty said, poking at his green eggs and ham. “Honestly, not as bad as it could be.”

“How so?”

Morty sat back. “…You remember Rick, right?”

The three of them nodded with sour expressions.

“Much as I hate to admit it, he kinda controlled me. Not in a direct manner, but hoooooly shit is he a manipulating bastard who grabs people just to get what he wants. Did you know that he kept me around mostly to disguise his brainwaves?”

“Sounds like him,” Flutterfree admitted.

“Yeah. He might have a heart in there somewhere, but he virtually never listens to it. It’s all about him and what he wants. So I was under his thumb the entire time and treated like shit for a lot of it. Now I’m under a different person’s thumb, and I get the impression he actually likes me. At the very least he doesn’t treat me like shit.”

“Don’t you have a family though?” Allure asked.

Morty looked at his plate. “Yeah. And I miss them sometimes. But… I guess there’s not really a point to keeping this secret anymore. I’m not even the right Morty. I’m a replacement for the Morty of the family I live with. Rick ruined my home universe, so we went to one where we had died. They’re not really my family.”

“That must have been horrible!” Pinkie gasped.

“It was,” Morty admitted. “I got through it, but it was one of the major things that desensitized me to… everything. I was close to believing nothing could be done about the multiverse.”

“And then the Collector showed up?” Flutterfree asked.

Morty nodded. “The entire purpose of the Collection is to help the multiverse. It’s like… I think it’s what Rick would do if he had a conscience in him and the drive to get something done. Take as many people as he can from everywhere he can think of, and then use them as agents to do anything.”

“Anything?”

Ivan sighed. “Whatever the Collector thinks is right, that’s what we do.”

“I forgot you were here,” Allure commented.

“He doesn’t talk much,” Morty said. “Yeah, sometimes I don’t think what the Collector tells us to do is right, namely collecting missions, but I’ve saved more than a few universes from being destroyed at this point. …More than I ever did while traveling with Rick.”

“What happened to Rick?” Flutterfree asked.

“He used to be on a team with me, back a ways. I separated myself from him. I think he’s running a solo act now.”

Flutterfree nodded sadly.

“I’m trying to figure this out,” Allure out, shoveling more ice cream into her mouth. “He’s willing to steal random people from their families to work for them, but he has them do ‘hero’ work. That seems like a discontinuity to me.”

Morty shrugged. “It’s hard to get the Collector. Unless you’re Lightning. There’s a lot of us who wonder if she even has the loyalty protocol in her head.”

Pinkie took another bite of her cupcake. “Yeah, fun question.”

“…You know the answer.”

“Yep.”

“She’s not going to tell us,” Ivan pointed out.

“Nooope!” Pinkie confirmed, giggling.

Morty shrugged. “It’s not important. What is i-”

Vriska and Gyro crashed through the ceiling, trying their hardest to punch each other into submission. They rolled out a nearby window and fell to the disc below.

Allure blinked. “Uh…”

“They’ll be fine,” Davepeta said, flying into the room. “They are cutting my meeting with Vriska a bit short though…”

Nova and Jotaro jumped down the hole after Davepeta. “Done with the rampage,” Nova commented. “Vriska needs a bit more though.”

“Vriska always needs a bit more,” Jotaro pointed out.

“Hm, yeah.”

Davepeta sat down at the table and ordered some apple juice. “Fuck yeah,” they said, downing it in under a minute. “Absolutely purrfect, the best nature has to offer.”

“The best of everything seems to be here,” Nova said. “Complacency mechanisms as far as the eye can see.”

“It’s not like he actually has to do this,” Morty pointed out. “He just wants us to be comfortable.”

“As slaves,” Jotaro said.

“Yeah, Morty, dude’s evil,” Davepeta said. “You need to stop tryin’ to defend him.”

“Make the most out of the situation,” Morty countered.

Davepeta rolled their eyes. “Right. Whatever dude.”

As conversation turned a different direction, Nova walked up to Allure. “Hey.”

“…Hey.”

“We’ll get back to them, okay?”

“Yeah…”

“The sensors on Celestia City would have detected Kars. They can find us.”

“…And we’ll have to fight against them,” Allure pointed out, tears forming in her eyes. “And what if they lose? We… We won’t get to see them ever again!”

Nova gulped. “That’s not going to happen. We’ll see them again, Allure. Both of us will.”

“How can you be sure of that? You’re not Pinkie!”

“Pink-” Nova began, but Pinkie wasn’t there.

“See? It’s not something she can tell us.”

“Or something she can, but just doesn’t want to…” Nova muttered. She sighed. “Let’s not lose hope, Allure.”

“But I can’t do anything! I could ask for Minna to be taken and that’s it! All other courses of action are blocked!”

Nova pulled her into a hug. “That’s what hope is for. When you can’t do anything… but something needs to happen anyway.”

Allure didn’t let go of Nova for a long time.

~~~

Starbeat was alone in a skiff, floating in orbit in a universe that was the closest they had gotten to the Collector so far. Behind her, there was a specialized grinder that was trying to find universes based on the ka signature they’d obtained. It was agonizingly slow work, and it was a constant reminder of how close she’d been, and yet how far she was from actual success.

She didn’t really know what she was doing with ka. She could scan it; tell you what it looked similar to, and possibly where else it existed. She couldn’t tell you what it was going to do, why it did what it did, or even what ka really was.

The ‘force of narrative’ wasn’t enough of an explanation for her. It was something more than that… It had to come from somewhere, be regulated by something.

But she didn’t have a clue about that. Who did she think she was, that she’d be able to figure it out? Just some cursed unicorn, in a skiff, in the middle of nowhere, getting nowhere.

Just watching a grinder continue to fail at making progress.

“So many unknowns…” she said, staring forlornly at the mechanism. “So many… So much we don’t understand!” She kicked the grinder. Nothing changed.

The TSAB could only give them five more universes. That was it. Not even they knew what was going on. Nobody understood this.

…Except Twilence, if reports were to be believed, but lo and behold, a call to the Void had revealed she was nowhere to be found. Surprise surprise. So much scrambling…

Starbeat began to tremble. What was she even doing here? She was hopeless. She had no control, she was a slave. Just a slave of a different kind…

She had no power. No knowledge.

Nothing that could get them back. Nothing that could get Vriska back.

She really needed to talk to her moirail, but she was gone. Anyone else she spilled her heart out too would just become the victim of her curse…

Tears started to well up in her eyes.

She was sick of living like this. Locked away, with only scant contact. Observing everyone’s normal lives like part of a scientific study, a study designed to help her. But help never really came. She was stuck. Stuck. Stuck.

She rammed her head into one of the walls, grunting.

There was nothing she could do.

Nothing but wait.

Waiting was hell.

~~~

TSAB ships operated on a unique concept. Rather than jumping from universe to universe, they created a bubble universe around themselves that they then moved through the multiverse from within, a process known as sailing on the Sea of Infinite Possibility. This method had its pros and cons. On the pro side, it made it very easy to discover new universes since newly created universes established connections to nearby universes right off the bat, and the initial creation of the connections was relatively easy to detect. The con was that moving even a small bubble universe’s location required an immense amount of energy and time.

In the early days of the TSAB, when they were a Class 3, this had been a huge problem. It could take weeks for a ship to move from one end of the TSAB to another, and the number of interdimensional ships was rather low.

In modern times, however, the TSAB had access to virtually every power source imaginable. Nanoha, given her position, could get some of the most impressive exotic energy sources out there.

For instance, her personal dimensional speedster, the Vivio, ran on something called an interconnected zero-point vibration siphon. When Corona asked how it worked, Nanoha had put her fists to her head and made the ‘mindblow’ gesture. She refused to give any other explanation.

Corona eventually admitted that was all the explanation that was needed.

The Vivio was a needle-shaped ship that only seated three in its cockpit, the back two-thirds of the ship reserved for the green-blue dimensional drive. It created a bubble universe around it, and then adhered the edges of the reality to its hull, creating a swirling pattern right on the Vivio’s windshield.

Then Nanoha told it to go. Corona felt the ship lurch, even though it had no space to lurch into since it was all its own universe. The colors they could see out the windshield ceased being calm, simple swirls, transforming into jagged lines of neon color that burned Corona’s eyes. She felt the Vivio shudder with every connection it made, tearing through the multiverse.

On a live-updating map of the multiverse, the Vivio would appear as a single universal dot moving rapidly through the E-Sphere, forming connections and breaking them as if it was Spider-Man slinging through a city, except with hundreds of hands and webs at any given time.

Vivio entered the Strands in a matter of seconds, pulling itself along one of the leyline paths between the Spheres. Granted, at this point Vivio could have created a dimensional portal and moved through the Strands in an instant, but why bother when it was already moving?

It made a sharp turn off the Strands leyline, going for an area between the D and Q-Spheres that was relatively close to the center of the multiverse, but not too close. They finally stopped moving around there, connected to a few dozen universes.

Corona shook her head. “W-wow. You can get anywhere in this thing…”

“A few minutes to anywhere that’s not protected in any of the three Spheres or the Strands,” Nanoha bragged. “The Great Void makes it difficult to get to the Unrealities like this, that takes about a day. And it’s dangerous to go to the Edges of the multiverse – you could lose all connections and fall into nonexistence.”

“Remind me never to go to the Edges.”

“Anyway, let’s shift into our actual destination…” Nanoha pressed a few buttons. The Vivio placed its bubble-universe self into another, normal universe via a round portal. It lost the swirly sheen and became just an advanced piece of metal sitting in space.

They had been expected, apparently, since two-dozen ships surrounded them.

“One thing I can say about the Flowers, you never have to call ahead,” Nanoha commented, rubbing the back of her head. She opened a channel. “You know why we’re here.”

An image appeared onscreen – not of a plant-based alien, to Corona’s surprise, but of two human women. “Yeah, Upstairs told us all about you. Welcome back to the PPC, Nanoha. You’ll have to come with us.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.” She cut the channel.

“PPC?” Corona asked.

“Protectors of the Plot Continuum,” Nanoha answered. “It’s the biggest project the Flowers have – used to be their only project.”

“What do they do?”

“Protect the plot of the multiverse,” Nanoha said, sitting back. “The Flowers are one of the only races in the multiverse willing to see how far ka manipulation can go. It’s… an interesting way to create a society.”

The Vivio was taken through …something they weren’t able to consciously register, appearing elsewhere in the universe. The elsewhere in question was a docking bay devoid of any ships save the Vivio and the ship that had brought them there.

The hatch of the Vivio popped open, allowing Nanoha and Corona to walk out onto the dock made of an unidentifiable white material. The two women just teleported in front of them. “Don’t go wandering off – the place isn’t always three-dimensional. You will get lost.”

“Got it,” Corona said, looking up at the lights far above them. “…Those aren’t normal. UV?”

“Magic, of a sort,” Nanoha said. “A lot of non-Flowers live here, but the Flowers need their sunlight. So instead of UV light, they get magic beams that absorb into their leaves. I think; they don’t really like to explain things to outsiders.”

“Ah.”

The PPC looked like a normal office building after they left the ship dock, with simple hallways that looked like they belonged in an office building rather than beings who manipulated the fate of existence. As they walked through the place, Corona saw many many pairs of agents walking around – rarely was there any less or more than two. The majority were human, though a handful of other races were seen, but still no plant-based lifeforms.

Corona counted seven right turns in a row at one point. Definitely not a building constructed with standard geometry in mind. She marveled at how any of the humans managed to get around in this place.

After twisting and turning down a dozen corridors, they arrived at a room labeled Chrysanthemum.

When they entered the simple office, for the first time they saw one of the legendary Flowers that Be.

It was a lot less impressive than Corona had been hoping.

Chrysanthemum was a yellow chrysanthemum flower. The only oddities about Chrysanthemum were her size – larger than a human – and a necklace around her central stalk. Welcome, Nanoha, Corona, Chrysanthemum spoke with telepathy. How can I help you today?

Corona placed a data pad on the table containing the data they had on the Collector and the Collection, including the ka signature they had obtained. As she did so, she scanned Chrysanthemum. Plant-based life form for certain, though the interior contained a more advanced nervous system than any plant had a right to have. The psychic readings were off the charts, but otherwise there was no magic or much of anything else. Corona suspected if Raging Sights could detect ka, there would have been more to call her attention.

As predicted, this is worth our time, Chrysanthemum stated. Corona wasn’t sure exactly how she’d looked at the pad, and she didn’t ask. You have found a very large glitch in the Narrative. Furthermore, it appears as if this Collector has been actively hiding from us. An impressive feat, to say the least.

“What can you tell us about him?” Nanoha asked.

From this signature, it is clear he is a Gary Stu, however the signature isn’t pure, suggesting a more complex motive than the baseline. The signature also speaks of his status as a Self Insert.

“Self Insert?” Corona asked.

Prophets sometimes write themselves into their stories, or a character based on them. This is the technical definition of a Self Insert, but it isn’t enough to quantify a narrative glitch – after all, your own Prophet Rohan Kishibe is, himself, a Self Insert of the Higher Prophet Hirohiko Araki. A Self Insert becomes an issue when they are not a distinct character for the plot, but exist to take advantage of the plot. There are signs of ‘awareness of the source material’ and ‘enhanced planning faculties’ in this signal.

“You can tell all of that from just a signal of one of his slaves?”

Those who shine brightest tell us the most. I can tell a lot about you just by examining you. However, as you are not a narrative glitch, policy dictates I don’t tell you anything about it. You do not need to be adjusted.

“Thanks, I think?”

Nanoha leaned in. “Can you find this Collector?”

Certainly. Let me make a few calls.

Nanoha and Corona looked at each other – and grinned.

~~~

The Collector stood on an invisible balcony near the top of the Plaza, rubbing his knuckles together nervously.

The Flowers were going to move soon. He was certain of it.

It was true that they needed to move for everything to fall into place, but the Flowers were beyond dangerous. They would do one thing, notice the flow of ka, and change up everything. It was exceptionally hard to predict them.

But he knew they had to come after him, for he was outside the ‘accepted’ flow of ka. The plot they sought to protect.

“Arrogant weeds,” he muttered.

Lightning raised an eyebrow. “The Flowers?”

“Yes. The Flowers. I’m not going to get into it, you already know everything I think about them.” He gripped the rails of the balcony, leaning over the edge. He zoomed in on one of the parks at the bottom, where the six newest members of the Collection were enjoying themselves with Morty, Ivan, Gyro, and Davepeta. Gyro and Vriska were having an arm-wrestling competition that looked like it would never end, Flutterfree was talking with Morty about some sort of complex topic, Pinkie and Davepeta were having a sillyness-slash-irony contest, Jotaro and Ivan were appreciating each other’s silence, and Nova and Allure sat to the side having mostly cheered each other up.

The Collector let out a soft chuckle. “Already settling in, I see.”

“Still going with the accelerated schedule for them?”

“I have a mission in particular for them,” the Collector said, handing Lightning a data pad.

“You sure?”

“It’s important that it’s this one.”

Lightning nodded. “They should be fine here. Should I schedule another one after that?”

“No,” the Collector said. “Keep them here after that. Let them understand us as we are now.”

Lightning pocketed the pad. “I’ll see to it the moment they’re done in the park.”

The Collector nodded.

“…Lightning?”

Lightning paused, just short of the exit. “Yes?”

“Remember your promise.”

Lightning’s face became rigid. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“Good.”

The two exchanged no further words.

075 - Wielders of Ka

Author's Note

My apologies to the PPC for distorting their creation to serve my purposes. :twilightblush:

-GM, master of Flowers.

075 - Wielders of Ka

The Chrysanthemum sent out its telepathic messages, with no regard for Nanoha or Corona’s ability to hear everything.

We’ve got a Major Sue out there, encountered by Merodi Universalis and brought to our attention by the TSAB. The files are available on the database, under The Collector. We have a potent combo here – Gary Stu, Self Insert, and to top it all off they appear to have Mid-Class 2 Capabilities and knowledge of the PPC. Sunflower, you might need most of the Department of Mary Sues for this one. …Jay and Acacia will head an invasion force? Jumping ahead aren’t we? …Fair, I shall leave it to you. Chrysanthemum bristled. It appears as if that is being taken care of.

“Taken care of how exactly?” Corona asked.

The Department of Mary Sues will, one way or another, assassinate the Gary Stu. It will likely be a big production, but I will be sure to keep you posted.

Nanoha nodded. “Thank you, Chrysanthemum.”

We should be thanking you. Evidence of a narrative glitch of this magnitude is one of the best gifts anyone can give us. Believe it or not, we are in your debt. Is there anything we can do for you?

Nanoha shook her head. “We’ve got our Narrative under control.”

Corona’s pupils dilated. “Can you… remove ka curses?”

If they are deemed narrative glitches, then yes, we can. Do you know of some?

“Starbeat and Blackjack,” Corona said. “That’s all I can think of off the top of my head.”

Mmm… I can send a team back with you to perform the necessary exorcisms. Any other instances of possibly corrupted ka you can think of, Corona?

“…Two. There’s Melinda and the Watchmaker.”

“Oh, the Watchmaker,” Nanoha put a hand to the bridge of her nose.

Hm?

“You already know about him. He’s not a Mary Sue or a narrative glitch himself. He uses some of your technology to manipulate his single universe. You’ve decided, multiple times, that it’d be too much of a waste of resources to deal with him.”

I see. One of those special cases where we cannot act against the plot… Shame. I am sorry.

Corona nodded. “It’s okay.”

Regardless I’m sending two Agents from the Department of Bad Slash with you to deal with Starbeat and Blackjack. The Sunflower Official will take care of this ‘Melinda’ as his department is more prepared to deal with it.

“The Department of Bad Slash?” Corona asked, confused.

Think horrendous romance curses. The agents from there are the most skilled in exorcisms, even ones technically outside their purview.

“…That’s exactly what we need, thank you.”

You’re welcome. When you leave you’ll find the Agents outside.

“Do you need any more information…?”

We will petition your government if we find need for classified intelligence not contained on this data pad. I doubt we will have to.

Nanoha lightly touched Corona’s shoulder. “Let’s go. Don’t want to leave Starbeat waiting, do we?”

“Right, right. Thanks again, Chrysanthemum.”

Likewise.

They left the office – and two identical human women were there, waiting for them. Orange hair, white suits, and a rubber duck symbol on their shoulders. Upon closer inspection they realized the duck had three eyes.

“Hi! I’m Kelly, and this is my partner, Kelly!”

Kelly #2 groaned inwardly at her counterpart’s optimistic introduction.

“We’ve been told you have some special exorcisms needed?”

Corona nodded. “I… Guess so. Let’s go back to the speedster, get you to Merodi Universalis…”

“Oh, no need, we’ll just travel by plot hole!” Kelly #1 said cheerfully.

“…Travel by what now?”

~~~

Corona, Nanoha, and the Kellys walked in the halls of the Enterprise.

“Woah,” Corona said, shaking her head and blinking. “I thought only Pinkie could do that.”

Kelly #2 looked at Corona. “Oh, you’ve got a high-tier Aware on your side? Lucky.”

“My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic,” Kelly #1 began, as if reciting a speech. “Known for being one of the more common base worlds within the Q-Sphere stemming from a large popularity quotient. The ‘mane’ character Pinkie Pie is known for her tendency to break the fourth wall, though the precise strength of her Awareness is left vague in canon so the multiversal variants range from simply introducing cartoon physics where it doesn’t belong to allowing powerful godlike seers.”

Corona stared at her. “Did you just explain Pinkie Pie?”

“Mostly. You need a complete definition of Awareness for that to make sense. Which i-”

“Kelly,” Kelly #2 cautioned.

“Oops! Sorry, can’t tell you that, heh.” She shook her head. “Anyway, we should be close to our first target. Starbeat, you said?”

Nanoha nodded. “I believe this is part of the fleet around the grinder she would be operating. I doubt she would have had time to leave yet.”

“Be careful assuming the passage of time when a plot hole is used to move around,” Kelly #1 warned. “For all we know it’s last Tuesday.”

“It’s not,” Kelly #2 said.

“Clearly.”

“You said ‘for all we know’ when you should have said ‘for all you know’.”

“Uuuuugh…” Kelly #1 facepalmed. “And now you get to see some of the issues that come with the ‘odd-pairing’ system.”

Corona blinked. “Uh… what?”

“Upstairs – the Flowers that Be – have discovered that Agents work best when assigned in pairs that ‘bounce off’ each other. Which is to say we’re the most entertaining.”

“And why we’re allowed to have legitimate insanities,” Kelly #2 muttered.

Nanoha raised an eyebrow. “That’s the first I’ve heard of this.”

“We’re here to handle bad romance,” Kelly #2 droned. “Imagine, if you will, spending a life reading every bad romance fic in existence with the imagination to generate every detail in HD quality. Every. Gratuitous. Disgusting. Detail.”

Nanoha and Corona reeled back in disgust at the mere thought of it.

“Exactly.”

“But hey, we get lots of fancy medication!” Kelly #1 piped up. “Totally worth it!”

“You can’t go back from it, that’s for sure.”

The four of them walked onto the bridge of the Enterprise. O’Neill looked at them in surprise. “How’d you get here so fast?”

Corona shrugged. “I think we’re not supposed to question it.”

“Pinkie Pie?”

“No, but apparently the same sort of thing.”

O’Neill nodded, taking this in stride. “Need anything?”

“Transportation to Starbeat,” Nanoha answered.

“She’s not doing all that well since we got the news…”

“Perfect!” Kelly #1 cheered. “She’ll be susceptible!”

“Myth,” Kelly #2 muttered.

Kelly #1 folded her arms and huffed.

“Just send us over,” Corona said. “I’ll calm her down if I have to.”

O’Neill shrugged. “Take them aw-”

He was cut off by the teleporter grabbing the four of them and placing them in the Skiff chairs flanking Starbeat.

The unicorn’s front hoof was bloody and her face was covered in tears.

“What… the hell… are you doing here?” Starbeat growled.

“Starbeat,” Corona said, holding out a hand.

“Don’t you touch me!” she wailed. “Don’t you use your lying touch to tell me I’m worth something! I’m just some useless wad of fur and flesh that can’t even do the one thing she’s supposed to be good at right! I couldn’t even find the Collector! I c-”

Corona snapped her fingers, creating a small explosion that stunned Starbeat into silence.

“Starbeat, these people can cure you.”

Starbeat blinked.

“In exchange for telling the Flowers about the Collector, they’re willing to do some things for us. One of those things is to help you. Your curse can be lifted.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping. She looked like she tried to resist for a moment, but decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. Tears in her eyes, she pulled Corona into a liplock, tackling her to the ground.

Corona knew better than to resist at the moment, just letting it happen despite her extremely potent blush.

“Thank you,” Starbeat whispered into Corona’s ear before resuming the one-sided makeout session.

“Woo-eee, that’s a powerful one,” Kelly #1 admitted. “Surprised you’ve lived with it this long.”

“We don’t know how long this has been her life,” her counterpart pointed out.

“Long enough to have an alarm bracelet.”

“Good point.” Kelly #2 cleared her throat. “Starbeat, if you can, please pull yourself from her so we can do this without pinning you to the ground.”

“Oh come on, I think it’s cute!” Nanoha said.

“People like you are the reason these narrative glitches exist,” Kelly #2 spat.

Nanoha blinked. “A little harsh. I say let her have it.”

“No, no, I’m good,” Starbeat said, pulling herself back.

“Oh thank Celestia,” Corona blurted, allowing herself to breathe.

Starbeat chuckled. “You could have tried to be subtle about how bad that was.”

“It’s not tha-”

“Shush. Don’t ruin it,” Starbeat said. She wiped her eyes, turning to the Kellys. “I’m ready. Do what you need to do.”

“Usually step one is beat the possessed individual senseless,” Kelly #2 said.

“Oh it’s such a good day when we don’t have to do that…”

“They never cooperate.”

“Most aren’t allowed to even become aware of their condition.”

Starbeat coughed. “Move it, please, before I start doing more things to Corona.”

“Right, right,” Kelly #1 said with a smile. “So, stand there.” She reached into her jacket and pulled out a DVD collection of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with only seasons five through nine. “Should be close enough even though you’re giving off serious AU vibes…”

“Conglomeration universe,” Kelly #2 pointed out.

“Always fun.” Kelly #1 also produced a small bell and the most generic ‘exorcising’ candle of all time. She lit it with a snap of her fingers.

“I wondered if you had to trick ka into accepting these sorts of things,” Starbeat said.

“…Explain?” Corona asked Starbeat.

Starbeat flushed and struggled to keep her hooves on the ground. “W-well, I theorized that ka curses and such would not be removable by force, or would be significantly harder to do with force. You have to get rid of it in some story-appropriate or thematic way.”

“They’re called exorcisms for a reason,” Kelly #2 pointed out. “That’s literally what we do, since it seems to work regardless of the context. We scare the ‘evil spirit’ out of you. Though in this case I’m not expecting a full Sue to pop out and scare us.”

“Ah, the days we get an easy job…” Kelly #1 said with a smirk. “Hey, what should we do for charges?”

“Not really necessary in this case…”

“Oh c’mon, it’s fun!”

Kelly #2 rolled her eyes. “By all means. Just make it up as you go.”

Kelly #1 squeed. She handed her counterpart the bell, which she started ringing. Corona and Nanoha covered their ears.

Lot louder than I was expecting, Corona thought.

“GET BEHIND ME, SPAWN OF UNRESTRICTED LUST!” Kelly #1 declared with a sudden fire to her voice. An ominous wind began to blow through the Skiff. She held her hand to the DVD collection, as if channeling power from it. “YOU HAVE BEEN CHARGED WITH BRINGING ABOUT BAD UNREALISTIC ROMANCE, INTERFERING IN THE DREAMS OF THIS POOR MARE, AND FORCING YOURSELF ON OTHERS, AND ALL THOSE TIMES I BET YOU GOT ATTRACTED TO FAMILY MEMBERS, IDENTICAL TWINS, OR TREES! IN THE NAME OF LAUREN FAUST, I COMPEL YOU TO LEAVE THIS POOR UNICORN’S FORM! FREE HER FROM YOUR CURSE! AVAUNT!”

Starbeat passed out. A greenish blue mist appeared from her body and tried to take the form of a face. It dissipated before it even got close, vanishing into nothing.

Kelly #2 poked Starbeat. “She’s alive.”

Nanoha and Corona stared at her in horror.

“Relax, there was no chance she died from that. …Almost no chance.”

Corona hovered her hand over Starbeat. “She’s just unconscious. I’ll try to wake her up.”

Starbeat opened her eyes. “Thanks, but I’m up.”

Corona blinked. “That was a quick nap.”

“Decided I was tired of sleeping.” Starbeat shook her head. “Right, so, time for a test.” She shoved her muzzle to Corona’s nose.

Corona started sweating. “Starbeat…?”

Starbeat started laughing. “You know, I don’t like that horn in the middle of your forehead. I think it’s silly.”

Nanoha giggled. “She’s cured.”

“HOLY CELESTIA I’M CURED!” Starbeat shouted. Then she started screaming like a filly on her birthday. “CUUUUUUUUUUUUUURED!”

“I wish everyone was this enthusiastic,” Kelly #1 said.

“I prefer unconscious,” Kelly #2 muttered.

Starbeat grabbed the two Kellys in her hooves. “I don’t want to kiss you. I don’t. HOT DOG GIRLS, HOT DOG! HOT DIGGITY DOGGITY DO! Ah-HAH! Oh who cares if this day absolutely sucked until this point, this is the best thing ever. Corona. Go on a date with me.”

“Uh… No.”

“YESSSSSS!” Starbeat said, falling onto her back. “Oh yesssss…”

“I’m confused,” Corona said.

“She’s happy, that’s all that matters,” Nanoha said.

Kelly #2 coughed. “We don’t have all day. You said there was someone else.”

“Yeah, Blackjack,” Corona said. “She-”

“I’M COMING WITH YOU!” Starbeat said.

“No, you’re not,” Kelly #2 said.

“Wanna bet?”

~~~

Corona, Nanoha, Starbeat, and the Kellys stood in the Tengleglade of the Empress of the Void, Empy.

“DAMMIT!” Kelly #2 shouted.

“Totally sensed the plot hole coming,” Starbeat decreed. “And intercepted it. And followed it. Mechanically, you understand, I’m not Pinkie. AhHAHhah!”

“She’s crazier than we are,” Kelly #2 muttered.

“I like it!” Kelly #1 countered.

Corona pulled out her phone. “Just let me call Empy here… Hey, Empy, we nee-”

The voice of a Rarity came over the line. “Empy told me to tell you Merodi to stop calling about Twilence. You don’t get to use her personal line to keep bugging the Empress of the Void about her.”

“…This is the first time I’ve called.”

“Different person every time, dear.”

Corona coughed. “I’m not looking for Twilence though. I’m looking for Blackjack.”

“Oh.” The Rarity paused for a moment. “I’ll send her your way.” Corona could tell the Rarity tried to cover the phone with her hoof, but it didn’t block much of anything. “Blackjack? Get up. The Merodi are looking for you.”

“Uuuuuugh whyyyyy?” Blackjack muttered.

“I don’t know! But you better get up because I’m going to teleport you there right now.”

“Shit, Rarity, not that fa-”

“-st,” Blackjack finished in front of Corona, still in the process of standing up. She managed to stand up the rest of the way and throw her mane back, trying to disguise how messed up it was. “Sup peeps?”

Corona hung up. “She did a really bad job of covering the phone.”

Blackjack blushed. “I know what you’re thinking, but no, I’m still single.” She looked to Starbeat. “Rawr.”

“Oh my Stars, you disgust me.” Starbeat giggled.

“…I’m getting mixed signals from you.”

“She’ll be that way for a while,” Corona said. “Give her a few hours and I expect a crash.”

“So, what did all you lovely ladies want from me?”

“You have a beat curse,” Starbeat said. “One where you are destined to win but doomed to sacrifice what you care most about, right?”

“Is that public knowledge or something?”

“Anyone can just pick up Project Horizons and read it. It’s not the most esoteric of books. By the way, sub-par romance.”

“Hey!”

“Blame Somber.”

Blackjack blinked. “Okay, uh… Yeah I’m not going to keep talking to you.” She turned to the Kellys. “You the ladies who can help me?”

Kelly #1 bit her lip. “Ooooooh boy…”

“That means no,” Kelly #2 said.

“But Kelly! It’s so tragic an-”

“You know as well as I do she’s not giving off a glitch. She’s sanctioned.”

“S-sanctioned?” Blackjack said, stuttering.

“The plot of the multiverse wants you this way,” Kelly #2 said. “You’re not the whims of some sad Prophet messing with powers he doesn’t understand. Your powers… I can sense they have a place in-universe. Within your story.”

“…Fuuuuck,” Blackjack spat, taking a few steps back. “So you came all this way just to tell me ‘oh, wait, sorry, we can’t fix you’!?”

“Oh, we can!” Kelly #1 said. “All we’d have to do i-”

Kelly #2 slapped her. “We’re not allowed to. The Protectors of the Plot Continuum protect it. We don’t shape it.”

“Kelly…” Kelly #1 said, giving her counterpart puppy eyes.

“D-don’t do that.”

“Kelly…”

Kelly #2 twitched. “Really? You really want to do this? You don’t even know her!”

“…I read Project Horizons. Her story’s so sad and tragic, Kelly! And she’s still an alicorn! That means her ending got screwed up! That’s all she had!”

Kelly #2 sighed. “Fine. All of you, what you see here doesn’t get back to the Flowers, understood?”

Nanoha, Corona, and Starbeat nodded.

Kelly #2 turned to Blackjack. “…Are you sure you want this?”

“Why wouldn’t I want to keep my friends alive!?”

“Because it also comes with removing the rest of your plot armor. Your ability to win.”

“I don’t give a fuck about winning! Just get rid of this fucking curse!”

The Kellys sighed. Kelly #1 produced a copy of Project Horizons while Kelly #2 grabbed the bell. The candle was somehow already on the ground.

Kelly #1 had to hold her hand over the candle, as close as she could without actually burning herself. Something in her twitched. “There are no charges against you, Blackjack,” Kelly #1 said. “There is no author to call upon to exorcise you, because you are as Somber intended.” She opened her eyes, the pupils expanding and contracting several times a second. “But there is a sickness of fate within you, one that must be banished. Spirit of sacrifice, bring yourself out of this mare’s body. Let her disappear as she was meant to.” She produced a small, glowing flower from inside her jacket.

There was no spirit to emerge from Blackjack. The only visible change was the disappearance of her cutie mark.

“It’s done,” Kelly #1 said. “Go, live your life Blackjack. I’d be careful though, you may find that things don’t go the way you expect anymore.”

Blackjack looked at her blank flank. “…Well that was so sudden and uninteresting I’m not sure how to react to it yet.”

“IDEA!” Starbeat blurted. “Let’s go back to my universe and rub this in the faces of everyone there.”

“Uh…”

“Or I can just go, you can stay here. You know what, I’m going. Bye~!” She vanished in a teleport.

“Emotional high,” Corona muttered.

“It’s adorable,” Nanoha insisted.

“Yeah, it is,” Blackjack commented.

Nanoha hit her with Raising Heart. “Stop being creepy.”

“Ow…”

“Why is she going back to her universe?” Kelly #2 asked.

“Her entire world has that curse,” Corona explained. “Equis Lovestra.”

Kelly #2 facepalmed. “Call the Department. We’re going to need a full-scale sweep. Might need direct Flower intervention for something that big. Hoo boy…”

Corona smiled. “We can never thank you enough.”

“Damn straight,” Kelly #2 muttered.

Kelly #1 rolled her eyes. “This is a mutual exchange of gifts, we’re all going to be even after this. But we’re done now, unless you’ve got any last minute things?”

Corona put a hand to her chin. “I suppose we could check out Melinda…”

The Kellys glanced at each other nervously. “…You really don’t want to do that,” Kelly #1 said.

“Why not? I love crazy OP perfect-bitch,” Blackjack commented.

“You know her?” Corona asked.

“Yep! That was a fun night. …Get your minds out of the gutter, I think her mind’s permanently stuck in PG-ish land. Damn, now I want to see her.”

“We’re not going to be there when you do,” Kelly #2 said. “We’re leaving.”

They were gone before anyone could say anything. …Or perhaps they were gone after things were said, but that was deemed unimportant by ka.

“My head hurts,” Blackjack muttered.

Corona looked at Nanoha with a worried glance. “Nanoha, would you happen to have any idea what that was about?”

Nanoha’s eyes were wide. “I… I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you actually knew her!”

“We use her sometimes to fight particularly evil enemies… Nanoha, explain.”

“…One of the primary PPC activities is Mary Sue assassination.”

Corona took a moment to process this.

“What are we waiting for? We’ve got to save her!” Blackjack blurted.

Nanoha hefted Raising Heart. “I’m not arguing, but I expect to lose.”

“Why?”

She pointed at Blackjack. “You just got rid of one of the only powers that could possibly trump a PPC Agent’s ka shield.”

“…Fuck.”

~~~

Pinkie, Vriska, Jotaro, Flutterfree, Nova, and Allure sat on a large couch while Lightning stood across from them, a stoic expression on her face.

“You’re going on your first mission today,” Lightning explained. “It’s a difficult, but simple one.”

Pinkie, to her credit, decided to be cooperative. “Cool! What is it?”

“Do any of you read Marvel comics?”

There were six shakes of the head.

“Shame, that would make this more interesting.” She threw an image on the ground of a humanoid creature with purple skin, huge muscles, and a jaw with vertical lines in it. “This is Thanos.”

“I recognize him,” Vriska said. “Encountered his kind before.”

“He’s known for being the villain to end all villains in a lot of superhero universes,” Lightning commented. “Nine times out of ten, he is after a device known as the Infinity Gauntlet.” She put another picture on the ground, showcasing a golden gauntlet with six colored gems on its back – one for each finger and one in the center. “This glove taps into the power of its native universe and gives the user almost complete dominion over it. Needless to say, Thanos tends to use the Infinity Gauntlet for evil, a recurring theme being the destruction of half the universe.”

“Yeesh, why not go all the way?” Nova asked. “He seems like the type.”

“Idealism, population control… it doesn’t really matter. He thinks he’s right in what he does, but he isn’t. Your mission is simple – go to this universe, stop him, and retrieve the Infinity Gauntlet. The Infinity Gauntlet loses most of its power when outside the universe it is bound to, and it cannot be used when he is not wearing it, so use that to your advantage.”

“But he’s basically unkillable with it on,” Jotaro said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’m sure you have a way to remove it.”

Jotaro summoned Star Platinum and nodded. “More than one I can think of.”

“Good. It is worth mentioning that this world is technically within Abstract space, but they should not mind our assistance. You leave in about five minutes. It is projected that he will have just defeated the last person between him and the completion of the Gauntlet. Good luck.”

“Won’t need it,” Nova said.

Lightning nodded, leaving them.

“This guy sounds powerful,” Allure said.

“I’ve fought him before,” Vriska said. “Asshole, very sure of himself, strong but not strong enough.”

“Did he have this Infinity Gauntlet?” Allure asked.

“…No.”

“Then he could kill us! Easily!” Allure waved her hooves, holding up the image of the Infinity Gauntlet. “Almost complete dominion over an entire universe! We can’t compete with that!”

“We just have to be clever,” Jotaro encouraged.

“Also we don’t really have a choice,” Vriska pointed out. “There’s no resisting the Collector’s missions, after all!” She chuckled bitterly. “Death would be a release.”

“Vriska, no,” Pinkie said, grabbing her head. “We’re not going to stay here forever.”

“Okay, first, suicide of virtually any kind does not count as Heroic or Just. Second, is that because you know or just want to give us hope?”

“Hrminimmerm.”

“What was that?”

“The ‘stop asking’ mumble.”

Allure sighed. “I just worry that we might not make it back… If not from this mission, than one of the others. This is a dangerous life to lead…”

Pinkie shrugged. “Nothing’s stopped us yet, team! We’re not going down today!” She put her hoof out. “We’ll fight this Thanos together! Not for the Collector – but for the universe he wants to decimate! Are you with me?”

Jotaro, Nova, Flutterfree, and Vriska didn’t even hesitate before putting their hooves and hands in. Allure took a few seconds, but decided she was with them.

“LET’S GO TEAM!”

~~~

“…and being a Mary Sue. For this, you are sentenced to die.” A large man lifted his gigantic sword into the air, above Melinda’s prone body. He wore a black suit with a potted cactus emblem on it, and his partner was a gecko that sat on his shoulder.

Melinda had a couple of broken bones, numerous cuts on her body, and had a glazed expression on her face. She was barely able to register that a sword was coming down onto her head.

Corona, Nanoha, and Blackjack arrived the moment the sword hit, allowing them to observe the gruesome spectacle.

“Melinda!” Corona shouted, the brutal nature of the death worming its way into her mind.

The man turned to Corona. “Leave this place. The scourge on your land has been eradicated. Go on with your fate as if this woman had never existed.”

“This is not our land!” Blackjack blurted. “We’re not from here!” She drew her starmetal sword.

“Melinda was our friend,” Corona said, glaring. “And you just killed her! What did she do to deserve that?”

“She was a Mary Sue.”

“We knew that!”

The man’s eyes widened. “You knew? And you let her live?”

“She may have been a little odd at times, but yeah!” Corona blurted. “She’s helped us! She had a good heart!”

“A good heart does nothing for the horrors a Mary Sue brings upon a stable plotline.” He hefted his sword. “People like you make me sick.”

The three of them took a defensive stance.

“Maybe I should teach you a lesson,” the man said.

The gecko tapped the man’s neck and whispered something in his ear.

The man shook his head. “No. An example needs to be made. White Devil or no, I’m going t-”

“DIVINE BUSTER!” Nanoha shouted, tossing the Agent down to the ground with a magic beam encircled in triangular patterns.

The man dodged.

Blackjack readied her guns and her sword, surprised to find that for once she was the one with the horrible aim, even with her augmented eyes. “What the...?”

The man rushed Corona, lifting his sword high.

She teleported behind him and put her hand to his cheek, just enough of a contact to get the surface of who he was…

Ray was watching a group of heroes talk about amazing adventures, and above all he was enamored by the ‘heart’ of the group, a girl named Susan who looked… different from the others. She had strange blue pants… Women never wore pants, it was always dresses, but Ray couldn’t question this. He could just stare from the bushes, enamored.

“Oh, by the way, there’s a trap here,” Susan told the party nonchalantly. The rest of them all seized up in fear, taking her words completely seriously despite the relaxed tone. She reached into the ground, picked up a strange black disc, and threw it over her shoulders. It exploded over the next hill. “There! We can keep going!”

Ray’s house had been over that hill.

Ray’s family had been in that house.

Ray tracked down and killed Susan. He would later find out he was able to because there had been some PPC agents on the scene, manipulating the fate of the world, but he didn’t care. She – and all her kind – needed to die for their careless perfection.

“I… I’m so sorry,” Corona said, catching his sword with her bare hands. He drew blood, but her magic reserves pushed the blade back. “But she wasn’t like that. She didn’t kill people. Didn’t even try until we forced her.”

“All of them come from the same filth!” Ray shouted. “Every last one!” He swung at Corona again. He used his back foot to deflect Blackjack’s sword.

“Fucking…” Blackjack muttered.

Nanoha had clearly had enough. “STARLIGHT…”

Enough! A loud telepathic voice boomed.

“CANCEL! CANCEL!” Nanoha yelled at Raising Heart, keeping her mini-doomsday-in-a-sphere spell from going off.

A sunflower in a suit appeared in front of them, looking down on them all without an expression, though everyone felt guilty. Ray, you have no need to fight these women. They are not your responsibility, nor are they even part of the PPC’s jurisdiction. You are to report to Jay and assist with the Collector efforts.

Ray looked like he wanted to say something.

Now, Ray.

Ray nodded – and was gone, gecko partner and all.

As for you, the Sunflower Official said, leaning in to the remaining three. Consider this a warning. Do not interfere with proper PPC procedure. There will be consequences if you prevent an assassination.

“How can you just kill them all!?” Corona blurted. “That’s just cruel! How can that be right?”

Do not pretend that you understand the machinations of the plot, Corona Shimmer. Your best expert on the subject was a romance-crazed unicorn who wasn’t in control of her own body. We Flowers have been at this for almost our entire existence as a society, willing to go where others are not and risk the dangers of directly interfering with ka itself. I can tell you many things about your fate just by looking at you, Corona. Your character arc, your inner motivations, what plot threads lie unresolved in your life. Believe it or not, this is part of those plot threads. The understanding that you have them as such a complex individual. One so close to the center of this mess.

Corona stared at the Sunflower Official. She didn’t have any answers for him, or any response at all.

Nanoha, on the other hand, did. “You’ve saved Sues before.”

Special cases that are not done by the book.

“Maybe the book needs changing.”

You’ve effectively banned the art of plot manipulation in your society. Change that, and maybe we can talk.

Nanoha narrowed her eyes. “You really don’t want to consider that your definition of the true plot might be wrong, do you?”

Goodbye, Nanoha. The Sunflower Official vanished.

Blackjack threw her sword to the ground. “Well that was pointless!”

Corona looked at Melinda’s dead body and curled her fist. “Such brazen disregard for death…”

Nanoha put a hand on Corona’s shoulder. “Hey, Corona… They think about things differently. We need to understand that.”

Corona nodded slowly. “I don’t suppose one of them would let me touch them…”

“Definitely not.”

Corona sighed. “…Let’s just go.”

~~~

Equis Lovestra.

Known to some as the Shipping World.

The world where all ponies were stuck in a curse – a curse where love was cheap, fast, and more often than not simply situational. The ‘click’ happened multiple times, love was never expected to last, and everypony was obsessed with the shallow image of the emotion.

Starbeat hated her home with a passion. She had been the only one to see that their nature was a curse. That the clicks were horrendous. She was lucky to have been allowed to leave, otherwise she would have gone truly mad from trying to resist the curse.

As it turned out, she only went slightly mad, and was eventually able to free herself from the curse.

And she felt like bragging about it.

She walked down the main street of Equis Lovestra Ponyville, not surprised in the least to find a crystal castle in the town now. She walked up to the front doors and knocked.

A version of Spike opened the door – slightly younger than Equis Vitis Spike, but still roughly ‘teenage’ for a dragon. He widened his eyes when he saw who it was – the goggles assuring him it wasn’t just some alternate version.

“How about you go tell Princess Ship I’m here?” Starbeat suggested. “We have a lot to talk about. Or, well, one thing, but you know.”

Spike turned his head. “TWILIGHT? YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHO’S HERE!”

“Who!?” Twilight called, teleporting to them instead of waiting for an answer. She was an alicorn now, no surprise there, though the fact that her mane was up in a bun and she wore rose-tinted glasses was.

The Princess’ jaw dropped. “Starlight!?”

Starbeat smirked. “The one and only! Your Starlight Glimmer, known in the multiverse as Starbeat!” Her smirk turned into a scowl. “I’m home.”

“W-why did you come back? You hate this place!”

“Oh, I do, but I just felt the need to brag a bit. Notice anything… different about me?”

“You’re older and a lot less skittish.”

“I was not sk- okay I was.” Starbeat rolled her eyes. “The point is, I got cured.”

Twilight looked at her in fear. “C-cured?”

“Yes. Cured. I no longer suffer from clicks. I’m allowed to feel disgusted at people who make romantic moves on me. I’m allowed to talk to people without the constant danger of feeling the need to lock my lips with theirs. I’m free.”

Twilight took a few steps back. “N-no. No you can’t do this!”

“Do what?”

“You’re going to take it from us!”

Starbeat facehooved. “Oh for the – relax, no I’m not. I’m just here to tell you ‘I told you so’. I told you so. You can keep your stupid curse if you like it and don’t even want to think about changing. You can keep your little meaningless ships!”

Twilight let out a breath of relief. “Oh thank Cadence… I was worried there for a sec.”

“Hey you don’t get to be let off the hook like that. Look at me Twilight! I’m cured. The highest experts on fate in the multiverse analyzed me, and they said I was a glitch. That means you and this entire world is a glitch as well! This curse was not meant to be!”

Twilight looked at her, gaze stern. “So? Who cares if it’s not meant to be? It is and it defines our world. It is what we live for.”

“Well now you have to live the rest of your life knowing it’s not something worth devoting an entire world to,” Starbeat said with a huff.

Twilight smirked. “I like those who challenge me, you know.”

Starbeat’s bracelet started beeping – but it wasn’t because of her. Twilight rushed Starbeat.

Starbeat slapped her back. “NO!” she screamed.

Twilight stared at her, pained. “So, you won. You’re able to resist the click. Lucky you, bet you have a great time finding love.”

“I’ve spent much of my life away from you studying what love really is. It is a slow, deep, and emotional process that forms over years. It can begin in many ways, often deep burning passion, but is best between people who really know each other. They spend their entire lives together. Sometimes raise a family, sometimes not – it doesn’t matter! What matters is that true love, when fulfilled, is a permanent feeling that shouldn’t go away or be interrupted by anything!”

“You’re lecturing me on love!?” Twilight shouted.

“YES I AM!”

They felt the world shake.

They didn’t even look at each other. They both teleported outside in an instant and looked at the sky.

In the sky, they could see it – a flowery construct, orbiting the planet. It was large enough to fill the sky, dimming the light of the sun with it’s translucent petals.

“…Did they follow me?” Starbeat wondered.

“…No no no!” Twilight screamed. She spread her wings and lit her horn, unleashing a complex set of spells she had prepared for such an emergency. Her five friends appeared around her, the Elements of Harmony appearing around all their necks. The Element of Magic appeared on her head. “No time to explain!” she told them. “But the Flower above us is trying to take away the love in our world – we must stop it!”

Her friends trusted her, nodding. Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy glanced at each other awkwardly, but smiled at each other anyway. A beam of rainbow light came out from the six elements and shot toward the flower in the sky.

The flower activated. A pulse of invisible energy rippled across the planet, one Starbeat couldn’t even feel. But she saw it. The six ponies next to her had a blue-green essence forced out of them, where it dissipated almost instantly. …All except for Twilight’s essence, which stayed around long enough to scream.

Twilight looked at Starbeat, tears in her eyes. “…What have you done!?”

“I don’t know,” Starbeat muttered, lighting her horn for a transmission spell. “HEY! PPC! I KNOW YOU’RE UP THERE! DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU JUST DID!?”

We cured the plot, a telepathic voice came back, that of an unknown Flower they couldn’t see.

“BUT THIS WORLD’S SOCIETY IS GOING TO COLLAPSE!”

As the Tower wills.

Starbeat growled. “THAT’S STU-”

Goodbye. The flower in the sky vanished, leaving the world alone – and broken.

Starbeat could already hear crying in a nearby house.

She pulled out her phone and dialed the Aid Division. “This is Starbeat. Patch me through to Overhead Cross Beam. Equis Lovestra is suffering from a complete societal collapse because of our actions. I’ll explain more once you get here – know that they’ve been cured of the curse.”

She hung the phone up. “Your world won’t destroy itself from the inside out. We have people who can deal with this.”

“You’ve still destroyed us!” Twilight shouted. “You’ve…” she realized she didn’t have any positive feelings at all towards Starbeat. None. She shot a laser at her.

Starbeat redirected it into Twilight’s horn, knocking her over. The princess’ friends rushed to her in concern.

Starbeat sighed, looking into the sky. “Nice going Starbeat, screwed everything up again.”

~~~

The Golden Joke held another meeting, and once again everyone was there. Notably, there were a few additions – Nanoha and a handful of TSAB mages being the most prominent.

The Flowers had called this meeting.

Chrysanthemum ‘stood’ at the podium, as best a literal flower could, but somehow it just worked – that seemed to describe a lot about the Flowers.

I understand there have been a few incidents since we started the movements against the Collector. We cured one of your personnel of her corrupted ka and were praised for it. But when we cured her entire world, you took issue. A similar issue was taken with our course of action concerning Melinda in a completely standard assassination. Let it be known to all nations of the multiverse here – regardless of if you agree or not, we demand that you no longer interfere with PPC operations. Stopping the assassination of a Mary Sue is an offense often punished by death. If it is a government who moves against us, even the TSAB, they will find their nation doesn’t run as smoothly all of the sudden. Problems will crop up from seemingly random locations. You will know we twisted ka just slightly.

Nanoha glared at Chrysanthemum. “This threat will not be taken lightly.”

That much is understood. But we cannot have anyone interfering with the plot, for it might bring everything crashing down if done at just the wrong moment. We wish to make it clear that the actions of the PPC are protected. Interfere and suffer the consequences from here on out.

There was silence from the crowd.

Moving on to a more unifying matter, the Collector. He is one of the most prepared Gary Stus we have ever come across, likely because he has read the PPC source material with at least passing familiarity and has used his heightened planning to predict what sorts of capabilities a fully advanced race of Flowers would be able to do in the multiverse.

A hologram appeared behind Chrysanthemum of a cluster of universes.

He is moving them around as we tunnel through them with the ka-signature, Chrysanthemum revealed. He’s sending us in a hundred-universe long circle, one that changes every time we go around. The fleet has not been able to locate his universe yet, and he keeps throwing hidden universes at us just to keep us off the scent.

Our own universal sliding machines have been put on the case of organizing that area of the multiverse, but it is a slow process. We predict a few days before we finally get through this multiversal lock structure.

“What could we do to make this go faster!?” Jenny asked.

If we had a live ka connection to the Collector’s universe, we could get there almost instantly. Or if we had a direct scan of him instead of just his people. As powerful as his signature is, with this level of subterfuge it is not enough to pinpoint him quickly.

“Why not use time travel?” Froppy asked.

The risks of triggering one of his temporal traps is too great. We’ve already triggered a few dimensional traps in the efforts spent tracking him down.

“So we just have to wait?” Eve asked.

As of now, yes. This was just a courtesy. Any more questions?

There were a lot of questions. But none of them were all that important.

~~~

Minna stared at the broadcast of Chrysanthemum’s message.

“A few days...” she said, digging her hands into Alushy’s neck. “It’s. Too. SLOW!”

“I agree,” Alushy said. “Squeaky, any idea how to make that go faster?”

“Time travel?” Squeaky suggested. “If Aradia’s willing, that is.”

“No! It’s too long for Mom!” Minna blurted. “We need to find her! Find her now!”

“Minna…” Squeaky said, putting a hoof to the distraught child’s face. “We just have to wait a few days. That’s not really that long, is it?”

“Yes it is!” she wailed. “Too long! There’s got to be someone who can find her!”

Alushy shook her head. “Kid… Sometimes life just fucks you over and there’s nothing you can do about it. What we have here is a case where we just have to wait, and where we can’t do a damn thing. You just want to pop a little human with your teeth, but the head physically cannot pop. You know?”

Minna stared at Alushy. “…No. No I don’t.”

“Right, right, kids don’t understand metaphors. Can’t get mom. Life sucks. Just live with it.”

“No. No! We’ve got to do something! We’ve been here talking too long!” She twitched. “Find Starbeat, Alushy. She can do what those flowers can’t.”

“I think you’ve got it the wrong way around,” Alushy said. “See, the Flowers are big honcho mu-”

Minna grabbed Alushy’s ear. “Starbeat. Now.”

“What a little bitch,” Alushy muttered, rolling her eyes. She spread her wings.

“…You can’t be serious,” Squeaky said. “You don’t just get t-”

Alushy took off, Minna on her back.

Squeaky sighed. “Thrackerzod, watch the League. I have to go vampire hunting.”

“I bet that’ll be fun.”

Squeaky just facehooved.

~~~

The Mad Titan Thanos popped the last Infinity Stone into the Infinity Gauntlet, completing the set. He held his fist high and laughed. All his enemies were either already defeated, or too far away to do anything that could ruin his plans now. All he had to do was snap his fingers… and everything would be solved. Everything.

He held up the Infinity Gauntlet, savoring the moment. It was fitting that such a momentous act would take place in a simple grassy field on some backwater planet.

“HEY ASSHOLE!” A rock hit him in the head, startling him. “YOU’RE NOT DONE YET!”

Thanos glared at the newcomers – Vriska, Jotaro, Allure, Nova, and Flutterfree. “Who are you?” He asked, confused that the Infinity Gauntlet didn’t allow him to know who they were.

“Heroes from another universe,” Flutterfree declared.

“Here to stop you,” Allure added.

“Other universe or not, you will fall to the might of the Infinity Gauntlet.” Thanos held out his hand with the Gauntlet, preparing to vaporize them.

Except the Gauntlet wasn’t on his hand. He stared at his naked fist, confused.

“Looooooking for something?” Pinkie trilled, tossing the Gauntlet like a hacky sack just behind Thanos.

Thanos swiped at the Gauntlet, but Pinkie was already elsewhere. “Oh, so close!”

“What power is this?” Thanos demanded.

“Cheating,” Vriska said, rolling her dice and getting straight 8s, gaining her armor and heightened power. “Just like the rest of us.”

Thanos stood his ground. “I am not powerless without the Gauntlet.” He pushed all of them back with telekinetic power, driving a fist right into Jotaro.

Star Platinum took the hit, suffering no damage.

“…What?”

“Out-of-context power,” Nova said, using clever manipulation of time and speed to be in multiple places at once, firing magic lasers at him. Flutterfree riddled him with arrows of light.

Allure leaped up from under him, punching his chin with her hoof. She flooded as much magic as she could into the strike, knocking him back. She followed through by twisting her body around his neck, taking him to the ground.

He flung the three of them off with little effort.

He had a significantly harder time with the Vriska-Jotaro tag team. They came at him from both sides, one with a sword and luck, the other with an invisible punching ghost and determination. When Thanos somehow managed to grab Star Platinum’s hands despite not being a Stand user, Vriska drove a blade into his back. He tore the blade out, only for Star Platinum to toss him to the side.

Thanos roared, kicking at Vriska – and missing. He leaped over Jotaro, punching him in the back of the head, where Star Platinum wasn’t defending at the time. Blood spurted from Jotaro’s mouth – but he stood his ground.

Vriska rolled her dice, summoning a thousand green bees. “Ah, I love a good swarm.”

Thanos walked through the swarm, seemingly impervious to the extreme pain they were supposed to cause.

“Hey, Jojo, he’s just like you!”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, grabbing his hat. “Nova, acceleration.”

Nova, despite her dazed state, was able to give Jotaro the accelerated time.

Thanos noticed Jotaro was standing against him, alone.

“Why do you deny aid from your allies? It does not aid you in this battle.”

“They know it isn’t needed.” Jotaro said, hands in his pockets. “STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

Time stopped. Due to Nova’s acceleration, he had a lot more than five seconds to do his work.

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!” Punches flew, connecting with Thanos’ frozen body everywhere it could cause pain. After the usual five seconds of punching everywhere, Jotaro began to place slower, heavier punches in places that should have been more vulnerable. The face, the back of the skull, the shoulders, the elbows, the knees, the groin… The Mad Titan’s body was exceptionally hardy and formidable, but even he would break after enough beating.

Time resumed. Thanos went flying and hit the ground. He groaned.

“Holy shit, he’s not dead,” Vriska said, eyes wide. “Final boss material right here!”

Pinkie shrugged. “It’s not like he’s going to be able to win at this point.” Pinkie gestured at the extreme effort he was going through just to stand back up. “We can take him out, easy.”

“…Or we can take him back with us,” Flutterfree suggested.

“He does seem like the kind of person who deserves it,” Allure admitted. She pulled out one of the Collection’s ‘loyalty’ devices and flashed Thanos with it just as he stood back up.

Thanos growled. “That won’t be enough to take my mind, unicorn.”

Vriska tapped her head, transferring the extra-loyalty she’d gotten programmed into her head since she was a powerful psychic. Thanos twitched, saying nothing.

“Mission complete!” Pinkie shouted, jumping up and down. “Thanos defeated, Infinity Gauntlet recovered, woo!”

“Back to the Collection then,” Allure muttered. “Where we wait around until he decides we have to do something else. Wonder if we’ll have to blow up a planet one day.”

Vriska shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Or think about it. It’d drive you crazy.”

The white wispy portal the Collection used appeared in front of them. They all shrugged to each other and headed back.

Pinkie held back for a few seconds. She put the Infinity Gauntlet on her hoof and flexed its fingers… somehow. She felt the power of an entire universe at her disposal – every mind, every soul, every force… But she wasn’t going to do much with this power. It was too much to control.

She pointed at the ground, creating a corpse that looked like it belonged to Thanos. Let them eternally wonder who defeated him – but also let them rest easy knowing he was defeated.

To add to the mystery, she created a fake – but destroyed – Infinity Gauntlet next to him.

Good.

Only then did she return to the Collection.

~~~

Starbeat walked through the streets of Ponyville, head down.

Today sure had been a rollercoaster of emotions…

At least she could walk about in public, pondering life, without the danger of it getting interrupted by an especially loud beeping noise.

She lifted up her hoof, taking a moment to examine her alarm bracelet. …It was useless now.

She popped it off, sitting down in a patch of grass. She held it in her hooves, examining it. She’d worn this thing for about half of her life at this point. It had been a constant reminder of what she was – but also a safety net. A protection from herself. It had been a soothing presence over the course of her life out here in the multiverse.

She couldn’t bring herself to just throw it away. But she wasn’t going to wear it ever again.

She lit her horn, mimicking the Gem ‘bubble’ spell, encasing the bracelet in her magic and sending it to her home – her lab. It would float there until she went home.

There would never again be a need for it to leave the lab.

This thought didn’t make her smile.

“Oh, hey! Fancy running into you here.”

Starbeat looked up to see Blackjack walking toward her. “…Why are you on Equis Vitis?”

“Sticking around to figure out this Flower business,” Blackjack said, taking a seat on the grass next to her.

“But you… Nevermind.”

“What, expect me to never go to places I have beef with? Really?”

“Yeah, actually.”

Blackjack rolled her eyes. “Ponies either have a really high or really low opinion of me, apparently.”

“Being an Idiot Hero tends to bring about that dichotomy.”

“…I’m going to try not to be offended at that.”

Starbeat smirked. “The truth of ka is a brutal one. One we are now free of.”

“Not shaping up exactly how we planned, is it?”

“What happened to you?”

“Lost. Can’t just count on myself winning anymore. You?”

“Caused a societal collapse. You know.”

“Yeah. I do.”

Starbeat chuckled. “But hey, at least we’re cured. The parts we hated about ourselves are gone.”

Blackjack nodded. “Eeyep. So now you can hang out with me without fear of suddenly biting the dust!”

“That’s reassuring,” Starbeat commented.

Blackjack winked and chuckled.

“By the way, stop the subliminal flirting. Not in the mood.”

“…Man, you’re a sharp one, aren’t you?”

Starbeat snorted. “The smartest people can do the stupidest things.”

Alushy crashed into the grass right in front of Starbeat. Minna whooped, unharmed from the crash landing. “We made it!”

“My spleen…” Alushy wheezed. “Why is that the organ I replace most?”

“Rule of funny,” Starbeat deadpanned.

“Fudging ka,” Alushy muttered.

Squeaky appeared behind them in a burst of white magic. Her fur was singed and smoking in a few places. “I… am never…. teleporting that much… again.” She wiped her brow.

Blackjack raised a hoof. “I am suddenly confused.”

“Out of your element,” Starbeat informed her. “It may or may not make sense as the conversation continues. I take it you three were looking for me?”

“The kid was looking for you,” Alushy muttered. “I was a hapless mount. Squeaky is here because panic mode.”

“I am not in panic mode!” Squeaky squeaked.

“Viola,” Alushy deadpanned.

“I need you to find Mom!” Minna blurted. “The Flowers can’t do it fast enough!”

“I’m nothing compared to them, Minna,” Starbeat muttered bitterly. “They can swoop in and ‘fix’ an entire planet in one instant. All I can do is wave my hoof and pretend I can see fate.”

Minna jumped off Alushy and got in Starbeat’s face. “Starbeat.”

“I like this kid. She’s feisty,” Blackjack observed.

“Be careful, she’ll bite off more than you can chew,” Alushy warned.

“Ah. …what?”

Since Starbeat wasn’t responding to her, Minna grabbed her ears. “Get. Mom. Back.”

“Minna, I can’t do that! I want to get Allure and Vriska and all the others back but I can’t! I’m not above the Flowers! There’s nothing above the Flowe-”

She was reminded of something the Sunflower Official had said.

As the Tower wills.

“The Tower…” she said, putting a hoof to her chin. “The Tower…”

“The Dark Tower?” Squeaky asked.

“Yes, that Dark Tower. I wasn’t sure before now, but it’s clear. The Tower is a regulator of ka. One powerful enough that the Flowers refer to it almost as if it were their god…” She turned to them. “We need to go to the Dark Tower.”

“How, though?” Squeaky asked.

“We go ask the Flowers nicely,” Starbeat asserted. “Which is to say I go pry them for information.”

“That sounds really stupid,” Blackjack observed. “Count me in!”

“Should I change into something more murderous?” Alushy asked.

“What? No.” Starbeat shook her head. “We’re going to use ka to our advantage.” She pointed at Minna.

“Oh no, you don’t get to bring her along!” Squeaky shouted.

“My connection may not be enough to provide a strong enough ‘plot’ to convince the Flowers or the Tower or whoever’s in charge here to let us through. The connection between a mother and child and the drive to be reunited is unbelievably strong. Perhaps strong enough to force a new path to open in fate.”

“You’re just spitballing,” Alushy observed.

Starbeat coughed. “Maaaaaaybe – but it’s the only idea I’ve got. The five of us were brought together by chance here. I think that says something about the way the story is going.”

Squeaky sighed. “Fine.”

Minna beamed. “Yay! You got the grumpy balloon to agree!”

“I am not a- oh. I can’t believe I’ve never heard that one before.”

Alushy rolled her eyes. “Looks like we’re about to set out on an epic quest of unknown length. I’m getting snacks before we head out.”

Starbeat raised an eyebrow. “Time is of the essence! We can’t afford to dilly-dally with our tails up our flanks!”

Squeaky put her head into her hooves. “Allure is going to kill me.”

“So, is this Allure your wife, girlfriend, or what?” Blackjack asked.

“You really need to be around here more often so every sentence you say won’t be an insult.”

“Hint: it doesn’t really help,” Alushy whispered. “I’ve been here decades and I still upset these bitches.”

Starbeat facehooved. “I’m taking us to the Golden Joke to find a Flower or PPC agent. You’re all coming along. You can keep bickering or not, I don’t care.” She lit her horn and they were gone.

~~~

The Collector took the Infinity Gauntlet from Pinkie. “Good work.”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “Can we go now?”

“Yeah, really tired of looking at your face,” Vriska commented.

“By all means, go enjoy yourselves,” the Collector said, waving his hand. The six of them scrambled out of the office as fast as they could, leaving only Thanos.

“That goes for you as well, Thanos,” the Collector said, sitting down behind his desk, placing the Infinity Gauntlet next to his monitor. “You’ve already gotten the welcome memo.”

“I see myself in you,” Thanos said as soon as he was certain the only ones who could hear him were Lightning and the Collector.

“I’m aware,” the Collector said. “Both of us do things for the greater good many would consider simply aren’t worth it. You go a bit beyond me, though. I try to keep the death to a minimum.”

“And I am – was – more concerned with large-scale acts rather than minor ‘hero work’ that does little to affect everything.”

“You were confined to one universe, Thanos.”

“But now that I am here, I see an opportunity.” Thanos put his arm to his chest as a show of respect. “Let me learn of this large-scale multiverse. I wish to influence it in ways for the betterment of society within. I cannot go against what you wish – but I believe my outlook would be invaluable to everyone.”

The Collector looked at Thanos and cocked his head. “You know, they’re never ready to seriously pledge their loyalty to me this early. I like you, Thanos, you see the big picture. You’re completely batty in your noggin, but I think we can work with that. Request granted. You will be kept on reserve to provide advice.”

“Thank you, Collector.”

“Here’s a bonus, I can just install all that information in your mind at once. This will only hurt a bit.”

A giant iron spike shot out of the ceiling and gouged a hole in the top of Thanos’ skull. A pulse of electricity shot into his body – one more than strong enough to kill a human. The purple humanoid twitched, but hardly responded until the spike was removed and the hole repaired. He rubbed the back of his head, eyes wide. “The sheer scale of it all…”

“You now have access to more information in your neural networks than even I do,” the Collector said.

“The Flowers are on our doorstep,” Thanos declared, speaking as if he had been a part of the Collection for years – which, given the upload, he might as well have. “Our defenses will not last forever.”

“We will have to prepare for combat against them,” the Collector admitted.

“Combat with Flowers is scarcely traditional,” Thanos commented. “Aside from small incursions, fate is their primary tool. A fist will not defeat destiny.”

“We have nullifiers,” Lightning pointed out. “That makes their brute force option negligible.”

“Not that we should ignore it entirely,” Thanos retorted. “If we prepare just for small incursions, we could be wiped out by a sudden bout of simultaneous stupidity.”

Lightning nodded. “We are prepared for all eventualities.”

“There are still high chances we lose.”

“We use those chances to our advantage,” the Collector said, standing up. “Trust me, Thanos, everything will go according to plan.”

Thanos nodded in understanding.

“Come, let’s release the next piece of this puzzle.” The Collector led them into the gray-elevator room, moving to a location most of the Collection was not allowed to enter. It was a spherical, glass room with square rooms affixed to every surface. Most of the rooms were empty, but some of them contained individuals frozen in time. The three of them moved in, finding there was no gravity within the sphere.

“The uncontrollables,” Thanos said, looking around with curiosity.

“There aren’t many who have immunities to every form of conditioning,” the Collector said, floating over to a particular enclosure. “But they’re kept around just in case they’ll be useful…”

The Collector pressed his hand to the glass wall of the enclosure, connecting to the mind contained within – one represented by a yellow triangle with one eye, a bow tie, and a top hat. “Bill Cipher.”

“HEY, I WAS WONDERIN’ WHEN YOU’D COME CALLING AGAIN, INFINITY!” The voice was layered, but high pitched and not all that threatening. “THINK YOU’VE FOUND A WAY TO CONDITION ME YET? I LOVED THE LAST ATTEMPT!”

“No. I’m ready to make a deal.”

Bill Cipher was silent for a moment. “…YOU KNOW, YOU’LL ONLY BE ABLE TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MY PREDICAMENT HERE ONCE. I’LL NEVER LET MYSELF GET STUCK IN HERE AGAIN.”

“I am aware,” the Collector said.

“CAN’T JUST ASK FOR ME TO SERVE YOU, I’LL STAY STUCK FOREVER RATHER THAN BE SOME FANBOY’S SLAVE.”

The Collector folded his hands. “In exchange for your complete freedom, there are two conditions. The first of which is that you may never interfere in Collection business or assault any member of the Collection.”

“EASY PEASY, GET TO THE DIRTY STUFF ALREADY.”

“The primary focus of the request is simple, Bill. We need your assistance in defending against the Flowers. You are to aid us until the end of the encounter with them.”

“EVEN I’M NOT A FLOWER-ARMY KILLER.”

“Your power can be combined with our already existing narrative shields to force a weirdness bubble into existence, similar to the one that formed around your Weirdmageddon.”

Bill Cipher laughed. “THAT’S A CLEVER LITTLE TRICK! CANCEL ANYTHING THAT CAN’T COME FROM WITHIN!”

“It’ll force them to drop any plans involving brute force!” Thanos declared. “Any ka weapons will be useless because the bubble refuses it!”

“Can’t they work around that?” Lightning asked.

“Not quickly,” the Collector said. “And that will give us the opportunity we need.” He opened Bill Cipher’s enclosure, extending his hand. “What do you say?”

“I’M IN.” The hand of a triangular demon and blue Gary Stu met, the deal sealed in blue fire. “THIS IS GOING TO BE ONE OF THE MOST ENTERTAINING DEALS I’VE EVER BEEN A PART OF! I SHOULD BE THANKING YOU FOR THE OPPORTUNITY, BUCKO! HOW’S ABOUT WE TALK FUTURE BUSINESS?”

“There will be no future business,” the Collector spat. “You will do what you need to do, and then you will be gone.

“YOUR LOSS. NOW EXCUSE ME, I’VE GOT TO CREATE FAKE WEIRDMAGEDDON.”

076 - The Dark Tower

“Eve, do you know if any Flowers or PPC agents are here?” Starbeat asked.

Eve sat in her seat at the Golden Joke’s main meeting hall, a book open in her lap, her expression glazed over. “Nooooo idea. It’s not like any of this is in our control anymore.”

“Wait, seriously?”

Eve examined Starbeat and her group – Alushy, Squeaky, Minna, and Blackjack. “Yeah. Neither Valentine nor I have been able to do anything since Nanoha brought the Flowers in. And if you find Nanoha, I’m sure she’ll give you an earful about how controlling the Flowers are about the whole situation. They’ll send us reports that don’t really say anything, but otherwise I haven’t seen one here since Chrysanthemum.” Eve sighed. “They really don’t care much for us. I don’t know if that’s just because they’re arrogant or because they don’t like our resistance to their methods.”

“I’d bet both,” Starbeat said.

Eve nodded. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you find them. Maybe I can do something instead of them?”

“Eh… Do you know how to get to the Dark Tower?”

“The Nexus,” Eve said. “Not the one the Celestialsapiens took from us, the one Corona got stuck in. We even have the coordinates of the planet, though from what Corona relayed about Deep Thought’s observations it might not be so easy to find again.”

“And if we go there and don’t find it, we’d be stuck,” Squeaky pointed out.

“Charge in anyway,” Blackjack suggested.

“Have our own years-long adventure!” Alushy laughed.

“…I don’t want to be away from Mom that long,” Minna said, tugging nervously on Alushy’s mane.

“Don’t know what to tell you then,” Eve admitted. “We know the Tower manifests in more than one universe, and that those worlds are in the center of the Strands. Unlike moving across the Strands, moving into them is a bit beyond us. And then we’d have to find the instance of the Tower in there. …If I understand how it works. Which I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

“Thanks anyway,” Starbeat said, despondent. “We’ll think of something…” She turned around, leading her band of misfits away.

“Starbeat?” Eve called.

“Hm?”

Eve smiled warmly. “…It’s good to see you free. Sorry we haven’t been able to celebrate with you.”

Starbeat smiled back. “Thanks.”

“And Blackjack?”

Blackjack lost her cheerful grin. “Here we go…”

“About what happened in the Games-”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Blackjack muttered. “It happened, it’s over, let’s not dwell on it.”

“…If that’s what you want.”

“It is. Come on Starbeat, let’s go.”

They moved away from Eve, letting her get back to her book. The rest of the people in the Golden Joke were of a similar mind – they all felt like they had to be present for such a crisis, and yet were unable to actually do anything. There was little in the way of conversation, creating an ominous hush over the crowded room.

“That was mean,” Minna said, glaring at Blackjack.

“Yeah. But she needs to get yelled at,” Blackjack muttered. “She clearly doesn’t get it enough.”

“Don’t listen to her, she’s upset,” Squeaky told Minna. “Sometimes adults just can’t be nice to each other.”

“…Huh,” Minna said, clearly not surprised by this.

“We have two options,” Starbeat said. “One, go to the Nexus and hope nothing’s changed. Two, take a Skiff and try to cut into the Strands. Both are likely to take a while. Longer than the Flowers are going to take.”

“So the third option is to just wait,” Squeaky said. “You hear that Minna?”

“Yes,” Minna said. “Not good enough.”

Squeaky sighed.

“Question. Why are we listening to the whims of this kid?” Blackjack asked.

“You tell her no,” Alushy dared.

Blackjack took one look at Minna and decided against that.

“I don’t know how Allure does it…” Squeaky muttered.

Starbeat shrugged. “Well, if we’re really meant to find it, ka will provide a way to the Dark Tower.”

They heard a loud, exasperated sigh to their left. The five turned to see Reverend Glimmer clutching her head with a hoof.

“You okay?” Starbeat asked.

“No, because I just heard someone say ‘a way to the Dark Tower’ while I was passing by. And it happens to be people I like. People who are going to ask me. People I’m not going to be able to blow off.” She looked at the five of them with a tired expression. “You have the calling to go the the Tower, huh?”

“Yep!” Minna declared, smiling. “Can you tell us how to get there?”

“I know the dimensional coordinates of the Dark Tower.”

“That was easy,” Blackjack commented.

“No, it’s not,” Rev said. “Because the Dark Tower redirects virtually all direct connections to a random universe. Dialing the Dark Tower directly is what you do when you want to get horribly lost. You could even end up in the Unrealities.”

“I know what my new hobby is,” Alushy declared.

“So how can we get there?” Starbeat asked.

Rev looked into the distance. “I don’t actually know anything specific. I did leave the Nexus via the Tower long ago, but I never really understood what it was. Still don’t, not really. What I do know is the only people that ever actually arrive are those ‘ka wills’ or something. Which, from what I’ve heard, generally means a long journey. In the case of Corona and I, it makes sense. It took us a while to get there.”

Minna glared. “What’s with everyone always saying things have to take time!?”

“Because good things come to those who wait, little one,” Rev told her.

“You have another idea,” Starbeat said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have groaned so loudly.”

Rev rubbed the back of her head. “Yes. I know of a world where everyone worships the Dark Tower as God. I… take serious issues with the place. But they know about the Dark Tower. They probably know more about it than anyone. They wouldn’t tell me anything while I was there, but they may be willing to help those with the calling.”

“So we have to join a mysterious Tower based religion?” Alushy asked. “Sign me up!”

Rev shrugged. “Maybe? I wouldn’t trust them though. They’re worse than the Flowers. The Flowers view ka and the Tower as a sort of baseline by which to measure the way ‘things should be’. These people worship it in a very very crazy way. Like, end-of-the-world cult crazy.”

Starbeat glanced at Minna. “Taking a kid into the center of a multiversal doomsday cult to find her mother. Yeah, sounds like something that wouldn’t ever be done. That means it’ll work.”

“Now we’re talking!” Blackjack whooped.

Squeaky didn’t say anything. She just took in a sharp, agonized breath.

Rev pulled out her dimensional device. “Shall we go right now?”

“YES!” Minna practically screamed. “Get us to Mom!”

Rev smiled. “Ah, to be young again…” She activated the device, taking them to another world.

~~~

“Right!” Pinkie declared, slamming her hoof on the solid gold table she had chosen for their meeting. “How was mission ‘learn everything we could about the Collector’?”

The rest of her team and Allure started talking all at once.

Pinkie facehooved. “Allure, as the current Sixth Ranger, you go first.”

“He’s human,” Allure offered. “That metal suit’s hiding a human man. One that’s apparently normal, according to the Collected who can sense such things. A floating brain told me there was no way for him to accommodate as much information as he does with a simple human mind.”

“The suit augments him,” Nova offered. “It’s tapped into many energy signatures – magic-based, spirit-based, eldritch-based, everything. I can’t even identify most of the things in it, probably because he’s accumulated a lot of additions to it over time.”

“The Collector is at least ten thousand years old,” Flutterfree offers. “He’s been here since the beginning and he’s never been replaced. On a psychological level, he’s got a tremendous hero complex that drives the entire Collection to ‘better’ the multiverse. He came from an Earth where he was heavily invested in fiction – and his favorite stories were what comprised the early Collection. Stargate. Star Trek. Final Fantasy. My Little Pony.”

“Of course,” Vriska muttered. “A fanboy. Makes perfect sense.” She folded her arms. “Apparently the Collector’s a nice guy if you’ll let him. The few who can work past his utter dominion over them consider him a friend. Good listener, has amazing thoughts about life, yada yada, standard Mary Sue stuff.”

Jotaro looked into Pinkie’s eyes. “He has a plan. He will mention it occasionally, but nobody knows what it is. As far as the Collection is concerned all their missions are unrelated things designed to help the multiverse in small ways. But they believe the plan will come to fruition because the Collector knows so much.”

Pinkie nodded. “Good work team! I found out that he’s not Aware. At all. He just has a lot of Pinkies and others who are Aware working for him. A few Prophets to boot. Though he doesn’t have them write things for him that often.”

Allure furrowed her brow. “I don’t get him. Well, I do, but at the same time I don’t. I’ve come to terms with the slavery being ‘for the greater good’ and all that, but… it just seems like there’s more to him than that, y’know?”

“Fun fact: he’s not that much of a Sonic fan,” Vriska offered.

“…Then why does he dress like Metal Sonic?” Allure asked.

“Don’t ask me, I’m just here to fuel your internal brain burning.”

Allure grunted, ramming her head into the table. “…How does all of this help us anyway? We can’t use anything we find even if it is useful. And we can’t tell anyone because of the stupid loyalty thing.”

“Did anyone figure out how that works?” Pinkie asked.

Nova lifted a hoof. “I remember hearing something. It’s run by a machine here, in the Collection. I don’t pretend to know how it does this, or why, I didn’t really ask about it.”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “That sounds like a lead. If there’s a machine that runs it, it could be destroyed. At least interrupt the control.”

Jotaro raised an eyebrow. “And how are we going to destroy it?”

“By accident?”

Vriska shook her head. “Pretty sure he’s worked that out already. Rick could have forced an ‘accident’ for his benefit already.”

Flutterfree looked down at her reflection in the gold table. “Pinkie, what are we doing?”

“Gathering information!”

“I know that. But that doesn’t answer the question you know I asked. If we were just gathering information because it’s good to know things, there’d be no problem. But we’re specifically looking for ways to fight back, even though we know that if we find something, it’ll be useless to us.”

Pinkie frowned. “…You never know. It might be helpful to know these things.”

“I just think we shouldn’t be giving ourselves false hope. We’ll have to be rescued – we’re not going to be able to do anything about this ourselves.”

“Gee, way to be a downer,” Vriska muttered.

Allure wiped a tear from her face.

“Allure!” Flutterfree said, panic evident in her voice. “I’m so sorry that was inconsiderate of me!”

“…You’re right though. I can’t do anything to get back to Minna.” Allure shook her head. “We just have to hope Starbeat’s scans worked and that nothing goes wrong after that.”

They all nodded, silence falling around them.

The door to the room opened.

“Hey, I reserved this for a private meeting!” Pinkie blurted. “Why d-” she stopped short when she realized who it was.

Lightning stood in the doorway, expression unreadable. “I have reports that you six are asking a lot of questions about the Collector.”

They gulped.

~~~

“Second to last universe,” Rev declared as they walked onto a planet made entirely out of giant bones. “…Grim, I know, but it’s the fastest way.”

Alushy sniffed the air. “Ah, I love the smell of death in the morning!”

“This world has seven suns, there’s no such thing as morning.”

“Why aren’t we burning to a crisp?” Blackjack asked.

“The heat coefficient is different here,” Rev and Starbeat answered at the same time.

“Eggheads,” Alushy whispered to Minna, who had decided the back of the vampire-pegasus was a great place to be.

“Eggheads,” Minna agreed.

Rev smacked her dimensional device. “Looks like it needs more charge to make the last jump. Give me a minute.”

“We can use mine,” Starbeat said, pulling it out. “…Wait, that’s odd, it’s empty. But I always keep it charged.”

Alushy took out hers. “Empty as well.”

Starbeat’s pupils dilated. She took out a ka sensor. “We’re screwed.”

Squeaky whimpered.

“The readings suggest giant monster attack,” Starbeat reported.

“This world is dead though,” Rev said, working to charge up her device. “How cou-”

A skull rose out of the planet of bones like they were a liquid, a tremendous spine the width of a great redwood all that kept the skull rooted to the ground. A soft black haze wafted off the giant bone creature. It opened its mouth, attempting to roar – but it lacked vocal cords, so it produced only an eerie silence.

Then it charged.

“Who’s ready for Complete Bullshit?” Alushy asked. “That’s right, one bone snake!” She tossed Minna off of her and onto Squeaky. The vampire rose into the air, opting to let her wings transform into shadows. She latched onto the interior of the skull monster’s mouth, driving black spires through its bony nose. It bit down on her, dividing her in half.

Alushy didn’t care. She entered full shadow state, tearing through the bone with jagged shadows and teeth, eyes rippling all around her body.

“I’ll protect you,” Squeaky told Minna, trying to cover her eyes.

“Hey! I wanna see! This is awesome!”

Blackjack entered the fray, producing her grenade launcher and decimating the creature’s spine. Where it was weakened, she used her starmetal sword to cut the trunk-sized bone clean through. Its head was now severed from the body and came crashing down to the earth, shattering among the other bones.

Starbeat blinked. “Wow. You two really are impressive.”

Alushy formed herself back into her pegasus form, putting a spare pair of red glasses on her face. “The correct term is fudgemotheringly awesome.”

“…What? No. Never in the history of ever has that been the correct term,” Blackjack retorted.

“It is when you’re me! I’m a fudgemothering vampire! I killed a lo-”

“Cut the speech,” Starbeat muttered. “Rev?”

Rev opened a portal. “Of course it’s ready now.”

“It’s how these things work.”

“That was amazing!” Minna cheered, hopping back onto Alushy’s back.

Alushy rolled her eyes. “Yes. Yes it was. But can you say fudgemotheringly awesome?”

“Stop trying to get me to say words Mom doesn’t want me to say.”

“Smart kid,” Blackjack observed.

“Terrifyingly so,” Alushy agreed.

The six of them stepped through the portal to another world – one where every single building was black, tall, and round. Every one was clearly based after the Dark Tower, though they could see the tops of all of them. The sky was a brilliant red on one side, a bright blue on the other. No sun was visible.

The streets were black cobblestone, occupied only by a few humans wearing black cloaks with a brown symbol imprinted on their backs: a circle with four sharp lines drawn through it, giving a vague representation of the letters K and A together.

“Starbeat and company, we’ve been expecting you,” a man said. He was an elderly human with a significant hunch in his posture, so crooked he needed a cane to keep himself upright. He was bald and his forehead wrinkles were so extreme they almost covered his eyes.

“Marias,” Rev said, the name obviously leaving distaste in her mouth. “It’s been a while.”

“The past is the past, almost another story entirely,” Marias said, waving Rev away dismissively. “Come, Starbeat, we will talk in my room.” He walked to the nearest tower and knocked the door six times. It opened on its own, revealing a simple, black interior with a bed, bookshelf, cabinet, and staircase to the next level. He took a meditating position in the middle of the floor and gestured for the others to come in.

Starbeat sat down in front of him. “Marias… Who are you?”

“A reader for the Order of Gan,” Marias answered. “One of many orders devoted to the Tower’s Testament.”

“The Tower’s Testament?”

“A series of books compiled relating to the Dark Tower and its role in our lives.” Marias smiled warmly, despite his ancient features. “A role you are well acquainted with.”

“Just get on with it,” Rev muttered.

Marias ignored her, instead taking Starbeat’s hoof in his hands. “You have been cured… But is it really a cure? Or just a different fate the Tower allowed you to take? Were you always destined to come on this path? Was there really a choice?”

Starbeat blinked. “I don’t know. Those are the things you’re supposed to know, right?”

Marias nodded. “You’re going to be disappointed. The nature of Free Will is one of the largest debates among the followers of the Tower. Is there Free Will? Or does the Tower dictate everything? What is our role in its plan?”

A million questions swirled around Starbeat’s head, but one rose to the surface, screaming to be answered. “Marias… What is the Dark Tower, really?”

Marias smiled softly. “…The last time I was asked that question, the asker didn’t deserve to know the answer.” He glanced at Rev with an unreadable expression. “But you, Starbeat… You’ve been touched by the Tower, and fought against it. If there was ever a person in this multiverse who deserved an answer to their deepest questions, it is you.”

He had the complete attention of all six visitors, including Rev. He cleared his throat.

“To truly understand the Dark Tower, we must go back to the very beginning…”

~~~

Lightning sat down at the golden table, putting her feet up. “What would you like to know about him?”

Allure blinked. “Wait, what? You aren’t upset?”

“Why would I be? It’s natural for new recruits to want to know about him.” Lightning waved a hand in the air. “If I got angry at that, I’d be angry at everyone.”

“The bigger mystery is why you’re willing to tell us things about him,” Jotaro pointed out.

“He doesn’t have many secrets. Most people aren’t willing to go talk to him, so I’m the source of information.” She looked at them expectantly. “Ask anything. Chances are I’ll have an answer for you.”

“What is he?” Flutterfree asked.

“A human in a robot suit,” Lightning said, raising an eyebrow. “Though to answer your real question, he is a Gary Stu Self-Insert from a standard Earth, written by his Prophet to be an unbeatable conqueror who gathers his favorite characters and, by force, creates teams with them. He then uses these teams to turn the multiverse into what he wants, over time.”

“That’s… concise,” Nova admitted.

“Doesn’t give us much to go off of,” Allure said. “…What’s a Self-Insert?”

“When an Author writes themselves into the story – usually not the literal version of themselves writing the story, but a character based on them,” Lightning answered.

“So an evil or sadistic Prophet, then?” Allure shuddered at the thought.

Lightning shrugged. “No. The Prophet is just some kid typing away at a keyboard on some Earth somewhere. Not evil, just curious to see what would happen.”

Vriska folded her arms. “At least he has no idea what he’s doing. There are some particular orange fucktards who most definitely do.”

Lightning shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“What’s his plan?” Pinkie asked Lightning.

“Can’t tell you that, it has to be a surprise.”

“But you know.”

“And for all I know, you do as well,” Lightning said. “The difference being that you are physically incapable of telling anyone about the plan if you do know it.”

Pinkie’s left eye twitched. “You’re gooood.”

“You’re not the first Pinkie we’ve had here. Far from it, in fact.”

Pinkie nodded, sitting back in her chair. “You know we’re the heroes, right?”

Lightning nodded slowly.

“There’s a reason you didn’t capture us back at the audition, and that’s because our ka was too strong. What changed so suddenly, Lightning?”

Lightning looked at Pinkie. “I can’t tell you that.”

“AHA! So it has something to do with the plan! Gotcha! I’ll weasel out information from you yet!”

Lightning's expression did not shift.

Pinkie glanced at Jotaro. He did not offer her any assistance in reading Lightning’s poker face. The pony sighed and slouched in her chair. “Ptooey.”

“Here’s my question,” Allure spoke up. “Why does he dress like Metal Sonic if he’s not a Sonic fan?”

A small smile came to Lightning’s lips. “He had a friend, once, who used Metal Sonic as a symbol for themselves. The appearance is to honor them.”

“…That was more mundane than I was expecting.”

“It doesn’t hurt that it makes it easy to keep adding more and more technology.”

“Still mundane.”

Vriska looked at Lightning and smirked. “How exactly does the loyalty thing work?”

Lightning folded her hands, performing an internal calculation. “There’s a machine. He calls it the Catcher. As in, it catches exceptions. It’s what allows the Collector to ensure your obedience without resorting to pure, brainwashing mind control. You keep your entire personality, memories, and other connections – but the Catcher has a part of itself within you, one that continually watches so it can catch when you’re about to go against the Collector. Over time it has gotten absurdly complicated – needing to work in organic, digital, and magical minds, not to mention continually having to evolve to catch loopholes.”

“Can you show us?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yes. I won’t though. Find it yourselves, it’ll be like a treasure hunt.” She stood up. “There are a few locations in the Collection that are specifically hidden to give the Collection stuff to talk about, the Catcher is one of them. There are only a few places you actually can’t go, like the Collector’s office.”

“This place is weird,” Allure said for the umpteenth time.

Lightning nodded. “But we call it home.” She turned to leave.

“What exactly is your relationship with the Collector?” Nova asked.

Lightning paused at this one. “…I am his second in command. And his old friend.” She decided the conversation was over and left before they could ask any follow-ups.

Pinkie took in a breath. “Well, it’s time to go hunt down this Catcher.”

“Why?” Allure asked.

“So we can throw a ‘we found the Catcher’ party, duh!” Pinkie said, rolling her eyes.

~~~

There was a beginning to the Multiverse, you know. Many have spun wild theories about how it all began. The First Universe was one without time, the scientists say, so the idea of a beginning may not even apply. The First Universe was Earth, others say, explaining the prevalence of humanity and the sheer volume of Earthly variants. Still others say the First Universe was God Himself. Or, perhaps, the Sea of Infinite Possibility existed in its nonexistence and for a moment forgot it was nonexistence. The crazy things people delve into when trying to explain true origins.

I want to take a moment to remind everyone we don’t even know for sure there was a First Universe. All we know for certain is that there was a First Multiversal Society, and that’s it. Did they come from the First World and create every other universe they ran across? Perhaps. Was there a natural way to create universes back then? Also a possibility. The sad truth is we don’t know, and there is no way for us to know. The ‘why’ will become apparent soon enough.

The Story begins not with the First Society, but the ones that came after. We know that there were two Class 1 Societies at the time – the Weavers, and the Builders, the latter of which are sometimes called the Great Old Ones, though this conflicts with the name for high eldritch deities.

The Weavers are known, even today, for using their awe-inspiring power to chain universes together into pieces of art. Grand structures designed to bring beauty to the multiverse. It is theorized they are the reason why the Strands are so easy to move through and why the Multiverse is organized into three Spheres in the first place. They brought order to whatever the arrangement was prior.

The Builders were different. They were not satisfied with simply bringing beauty and order to the multiverse. They were at the top and were struck, as a society, by how pointless everything seemed. They could do anything, be anyone, create any universe… But what was the point of it all?

This was a question one of their members asked all his life. His name was Gan.

He finally came up with the answer.

The multiverse had no inherent meaning to it – everything was pointless, meaningless, and void of any real substance. But Gan had realized something – in their desire for meaning, they had created meaning. This meaning was not to be found in their lives, but in their stories. Their legends. The worlds they imagined apart from the worlds they lived.

Gan was eventually able to convince his entire society that bringing stories to life was the way to bring meaning to the world. And so began the construction of the Dark Tower. While the Weavers carved out the multiverse, the Builders placed a stake in the effective center of what the Weavers were making and called it their own. They built one structure compared to the Weaver’s hundreds of thousands – but it is the most important multiversal structure in existence.

Gan knew that bringing stories to life would require alterations to the way things were – a force that would be able to overwrite the predictable, tedious, pointless physics whenever needed to drive the true essence of an event where it needed to go. But this force could not be consistent, nor could it be based off only one culture’s stories – that would make it biased. It had to be neutral so it could create the most inclusive of all possible stories.

It was Gan’s genius that created the Dark Tower’s true inner workings – it would not operate on an internal computer, nor a database of every piece of fiction known to man. No, it would tap into the minds of those with the creative drive to build a world. The Dark Tower would take the visions of these people and create entire worlds based on them – and then it would fill in the gaps with what it learned from other authors. Every background character would get a life, every trope would be played out in the background, every tree that fell with nobody to hear would make a sound.

The Dark Tower turned a multiverse with no direction into one brimming with stories, life, and powerful meaning spilling over the edges of people’s lives. It weaves everything together.

After it was completed, the Builders’ society collapsed. They had put every last resource into making the Tower, and because of it, they fell. They understood it was their creation’s way of telling them their story was done, it was time to make way for the others. They didn’t fight it.

The Weavers tried to fight, but they did not know how to operate in a multiverse where ka suddenly existed. There were rules they couldn’t understand, and they failed to adapt, vanishing as well – leaving the multiverse a fresh stomping ground for anyone who wanted to take the torch.

Shortly thereafter, relatively speaking, we have the legend of Roland and how he ensured the Dark Tower would never fall, but that’s a story for another time.

Nobody is exactly sure how long ago that was in metatime. So long that there have been multiple versions of many Class 1 societies at least, a timescale so vast it couldn’t be accurately measured even in the lifespans of ‘immortal’ eldritch deities.

What is the Dark Tower? It is what allows for the impossible. An entire society devoted everything about themselves to create a way for the ordinary person to accomplish things they never could. It creates heroes and villains. It creates magic and mad science. It allows people to see the future – and see the past; at least as far back as the Tower itself has existed. For no true story can be written about a time in which the Dark Tower didn’t exist.

The Dark Tower is the center of the multiverse. It has a connection to every universe in existence, giving each one the amount of ka it needs. It shapes the events in every world to have an impact. The Dark Tower provides a reason to live. Its will is beyond our will – The will of the Tower is perfection.

~~~

Starbeat and her five companions stared at Marias, rather dumbfounded by all the information they had just been told. Some of it they had suspected already – but there were parts that challenged their view of reality.

“…Wow,” Starbeat eventually said.

“Quite the answer, isn’t it?” Marias asked.

“You could say that.”

“Are you kidding?” Blackjack blurted. “We just learned the secret of the multiverse! We know what drives all of existence!”

“A lost civilization’s dying breath…” Squeaky commented.

“That’s… all very interesting, Marias,” Rev said nervously. “But that doesn’t help us get to the Dark Tower. It diverts all incoming traffic from other universes, because if everyone could find the Dark Tower it wouldn’t be as special.”

“True…” Marias said, scratching his chin. “Let’s move on to a second sort of explanation. The Dark Tower is connected to universes in three ways. The first is the simplest – in every universe, there lies a direct connection to the Dark Tower. One can always try to dial it directly. One will always fail. You must take a journey to a universe where the Dark Tower manifests.”

“The Nexus?” Starbeat asked.

Marias nodded. “The Nexus is close enough to the Dark Tower that it has a direct manifestation. The Dark Tower appears, as itself, in a field of roses in those types of universes. In theory, anyone could walk up to the Tower and try to enter, though in practice it never makes it that easy.” He looked Starbeat in the eye. “This universe is the third type.”

“The third type?”

“Not far enough to only have a connection, but not close enough for a full manifestation. Many think our structures are designed to hide the real Dark Tower in this world, but that is simply intentional misdirection to make people think there is a direct manifestation here…”

Rev glared. “….Marias, why are you telling us all this?”

Marias ignored her, producing a rose from within the folds of his robe. It was the most rose-like rose Starbeat had ever seen. The petals were perfect, undamaged. The stalk was free of dirt and grime, despite the small flowerpot it occupied. The leaves glistened in the light and the thorns seemed sharp enough to tear across reality.

It didn’t glow with a holy aura, but a meaningful aura. An aura that captivated them all, drawing them in.

“This is a secondary manifestation,” Marias said. “An object or entity within a single universe that is brimming with the Dark Tower’s power. Such things can be useful, to the right people.”

Starbeat became lost within the intricate folds of the rose, the way it moved in the air making it impossible to look away. It invited her to the secrets of existence, offering her a reason for everything… It must be protected… Starbeat wouldn’t let any harm come to it…

It took some time for her to realize she was looking at a different, less important, rose. She shook the confusion out of her head and looked around.

She stood in a field of roses. None as powerful as the one she had just been staring at, but all more than just normal roses. The sky was a moody purple lit by two moons, telling her this most certainly wasn’t the Nexus.

But the Dark Tower was there. It stood, rising into the sky, an impossibly tall cylinder of darkness. The doors of the entrance beckoned to her, telling her that her time had come.

She lifted a hoof to walk to the tower, an impossibly sharp thorn cutting her skin enough to bleed. She scarcely paid it any mind, only enough to go for self-levitation rather than walking the rest of the way.

She reached the door – and pushed.

~~~

It wasn’t really like a treasure hunt. This was probably because the combination of Vriska’s Luck and Flutterfree’s Stand made it possible to cheat through just about every little puzzle, obstacle, or mystery on the hunt, making it decidedly boring.

After asking a few questions around about the Catcher, they were directed to a door that, supposedly, could not be opened. Vriska knocked on it a few times, popping it open. There was a maze next that Vriska walked through, first time, without a problem. Then there was a ‘choose the real door’ puzzle that Lolo solved instantly. Then there had been a puzzle box that Lolo also made quick work of.

Apparently Revelation worked on the interiors of locked boxes as well. The secret inside wanted to be seen so badly Lolo just knew how to open it.

“Good going Flutters!” Vriska cheered, taking the keycard that had been inside the box.

Flutterfree beamed. “Aw, thanks.”

“Wonder if we’ll get a puzzle you two can’t solve next,” Nova muttered.

Jotaro shrugged, indicating that he didn’t particularly care that he wasn’t needed to solve the puzzles.

Vriska slid the keycard into the next door. The vault-like chunk of metal in the wall whirred internally, dispelling its invulnerability and opening for them – revealing another room with a locked door on the other end.

Allure groaned. “How long does this go on?”

“Enough,” Vriska said, strolling in with a big smile. She began to search the room, looking for any clues or puzzle objects. She found none. “…Huh. Yeah, I still have decent amounts of luck, I should be able to see something.”

Flutterfree sent Lolo across the room – finding nothing hidden. “Weird.”

Pinkie bounced up to the exit door, pressing her face to it. “Hrm… Quite a poser, this one. The door has no reader, no handle, no puzzle lock…”

Nova scanned it. “Also no invulnerability spell.”

Jotaro adjusted his hat. “Tch.” He summoned Star Platinum and began to whale on the door. “ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

The foot-thick chunk of reinforced metal began to cave, buckling under the Stand’s impressive strength.

It opened before it finished caving, revealing the face of Rick. “You only have to knock once, retard.”

“Rick!?” Vriska blurted. “What are you doing in the treasure hunt!?”

“I’m not,” Rick said, grunting. “I’m at the Catcher.” He threw his arms wide, gesturing at the large room they were in. Every surface was covered in an almost black metal, including the pillar in the center. Said pillar would pulse blue every few seconds, revealing complex circuitry along the outside.

“Behold, the brainwasher,” Rick said. “Pat yourselves on the back for working out all those childish puzzles. Now realize your only reward is to look at the instrument of your own hell.”

“Gee, you’re cheery,” Nova observed.

Rick sat down in a beach chair, pulling a device out of his labcoat that summoned a bottle of beer. He drank and burped. “What do you expect? Me to suddenly gain the ability to smile at everything because, I’m a fucking slave? Or maybe I should feel happy about cheating my way through all those puzzles, huh? Or, here’s a kicker, I know exactly how to destroy this thing and what it will do!” Rick laughed. “See, he apparently designed it with a weakness in mind, just to taunt us. Either that or he’s an absolute fuckwit. You see that area at the base I’ve outlined with red spray paint?”

Allure walked over to it and poked it with her hoof. “Yeah?”

“Shoot that with enough power and the entire thing comes crashing down. Boom. No more loyalty program.”

Jotaro curled his fist. “Yare yare daze…”

“It’s right there!” Nova shouted. “Right there! The solution! And we can’t. Do. Anything!”

“AUGH!” Pinkie yelled, ramming her face into a wall. “Just… Why can’t we catch a break?”

Rick burped. “Because you’re part of the Collection now, shitheads. Get used to the constant feeling of powerlessness. I hope you like being absolutely dominated because that’s how things work around here.”

Nova glared at him. “You are a terrible human being.”

“What a stunning revelation,” Rick deadpanned. He put on a pair of sunglasses and leaned back in his chair. “If you want to make it even worse, I have some doomsday weapons in my lab next door. You can point them at that spot to try and make yourselves feel better.”

Nova twitched.

“Oh, here’s another idea! How about you use them to break into the Collector’s office? Or into the ‘uncontrollables’ room that’s just a little ways below us? Oh wait, we’re not allowed in those places.” He spread his hands wide. “So you can’t even start the plan to get to them!” He launched out of his chair and threw his sunglasses away. “Do you understand how truly fucked up this is yet!?”

Allure stared at him, tears in her eyes. “…We got that already, Rick.”

“I don’t think you did, because you’re still romping around trying to be little escapee heroes! Let me tell you something – there were no real heroes out there, it was all fake! Everything was just a pathetic lie you told yourselves. You’re not ‘heroes’, there’s no such thing. The difference between a hero and a slave to the Collector is nothing. Give it up. Your life was pointless before and now it’s hell. Take a good, long look.”

“...You miss Morty, don’t you?” Flutterfree asked.

“If I needed a Morty in here I would just order an alternate version,” Rick said. “But there’s nothing to hide from here, so who cares?”

Flutterfree blinked. “You’re… You’re not kidding! What in the name of Celestia is wrong with you!?”

“Many things. Sentimentality ain’t one of them,” Rick said.

Vriska cracked her knuckles. “You’re about to have a whole lot of problems…”

Rick pulled a gun out from under his chair and shot Vriska. The Catcher didn’t allow lethal force, but luckily Vriska was conditionally immortal. Her vaporized dust congealed back into a solid form after a few seconds. “F-fuck…”

“You threaten the Rick, you don’t get burned, you just die,” Rick declared. “This thing has a nonlethal setting for the rest of you contemplating making a move on me. A nonlethal setting that makes you eject every fluid in your body out of every orifice until you wish you died.”

Pinkie looked at Rick with sad eyes. “Let’s go, girls. We aren’t wanted here.”

“No shit,” Vriska muttered, glaring at Rick. She turned tail and followed Pinkie out of the room.

Rick returned to sitting in a dark room with his sunglasses on.

~~~

Rev grabbed Marias’ collar in her magic. “What did you do to Starbeat!?”

Blackjack added a gun pressed to Marias’s head while Alushy flashed her fangs.

Marias smirked. “As we predicted, she was chosen to make the journey to the Dark Tower.”

“But what about Minna?” Squeaky blurted. “She’s the one who needs to find her mother!”

“Banking on one plotline for a result is a dangerous thing,” Marias said. “Fate may have chosen another for the task. It may turn out not to really be the child’s story. In fact, it will turn out to not be any of your stories.”

Rev started to sweat. “Marias…”

“Starbeat was the only one who deserved to know. The rest of you are in possession of knowledge you are not meant to have.”

“Everyone out of here!” Rev blurted, readying a teleport spell.

A magic nullification field swept through the room, cancelling the spell. Marias grinned, drawing a ceremonial knife. “You all end here.”

Blackjack cut Marias’s head in two with the starmetal sword. “Yeah, not everything uses magic, bucko.” She quickly handed a gun to each of her companions save Minna. “You know how to fire guns, right?”

“Bit-design?” Squeaky asked, turning the shotgun around in her hooves.

“Unicorn, actually, but it has a retractable bit you can put in your mouth in emergencies like this,” Blackjack offered. “Isn’t the best, but it’ll do.”

Alushy took her dual pistols out of her red coat, tossing Blackjack’s gun back to her. “I’ll just use my preferred method of execution, thank you. It’s killin’ time.”

“Minna, close your eyes,” Squeaky said as she cocked the shotgun.

“I’m going to watch every blood-soaked minute of this.”

“I was afraid of that…”

Rev looked at the gun in her hooves. For a moment, she contemplated using it. Then she tossed it to the side. “I have more than just magic I can use.” She made a cross motion in the air, her necklace taking on a white glow. “They haven’t cancelled Divine eldritch esoteries.”

Alushy kicked the doors of the room down, ready to take on anything.

There was nobody out there. Not only were the streets empty, but there wasn’t even a city around them.

“What the freshly squeezed hellfruit?” Alushy wondered. She turned around – Squeaky, Minna, Rev, and Blackjack were still with her, but there was no building behind them. It was as if the city had just vanished.

Rev narrowed her eyes, looking around nervously. “What I wouldn’t give for Lolo right about now.”

Blackjack pulled out her dimensional device. “Of course, blocked. YOU CAN’T KEEP US STUCK HERE FOREVER!”

“They might try,” Squeaky pointed out. “Even without magic, we’re not exactly weak.”

“They want us dead for our forbidden knowledge,” Rev reminded her. “They’ll kill us ritualistically if they can.”

The world around them rumbled. Brown, flat creatures began to rise from the earth, each taking the form of one of the five of them. Alicorn, unicorn, pegasus, or human girl. The number of these brown creatures just kept increasing and increasing, quickly reaching numbers so high they could not be counted.

Alushy narrowed her eyes. “We’re fucked.”

All the Blackjack-copies fired their guns at the five tributes.

Rev’s necklace flashed, a white aura surrounding all five of them. All attacks either missed or deflected off harmlessly. She entered a kneeling pose, trying to keep the holy barrier up. She knew it wouldn’t last forever, but she had no idea how long.

…The problem was, if her allies started killing and it was deemed an unholy act, the barrier would likely be cancelled. She had no idea if the brown creatures in front of them were people or not…

Alushy started shooting. “Incoming breakfast!”

Rev felt her barrier weaken. “Alushy, acts of viole-”

“STOP!” Minna shouted, holding her hand high. Blood dripped from her wrist, accentuating the color of the object she held in her hand.

The rose.

The brown creatures kept shooting. Some began to move in, ready to physically take the rose.

Minna put her other hand over the rose, preparing to crush it. “I’ll destroy it! Don’t think I won’t!”

They kept coming.

Minna pulled a petal off the rose. In response, the universe trembled, a small crack appearing in the ground beneath them. The shriek of reality made all the ponies feel like they had to protect the rose from Minna. They couldn’t let her destroy it!

Minna cupped her hand around the top of the rose. “Move and I crush it.”

Alushy, Rev, Blackjack, and Squeaky froze.

An acolyte of the Order of Gan – a woman in black robes – appeared as if from nowhere. “Child, you cannot harm the rose.”

“Yes I can,” Minna said. “And I will. Unless you let us go.”

“Child…”

“LET ME GO!” Minna shouted, pressing her hand down on the rose. The universe wobbled like a marble in a cup. “LET ME GO TO MOM!”

“Return the rose and we’ll talk about it…”

“Portal first,” Minna demanded.

The acolyte stared at her, dumbfounded. “How can you do this? The rose demands that all protect it! You can’t fight its importance!”

“Mom’s more important than this dumb rose!”

The acolyte stared at her in fear. “What… are you?”

Minna glared at her, refusing to answer. “Portal. Now.”

The acolyte nodded, allowing magic to return to them. Rev was able to charge up her dimensional device and dial out.

Minna tossed the rose to the ground. Such brazen disregard for a holy artifact made the acolyte scream in agony – but the rose itself suffered no damage from the drop.

They appeared back on the world of bones. Nobody tried to follow them.

“H-how did you do that!?” Rev asked Minna. “I’m not sure if even I could have harmed the rose!”

“…It was just a rose,” Minna said, confused. “What’s so hard about crushing a flower?”

The four of them stared at her in fear – including Alushy.

They were unable to fathom how anyone couldn’t understand the importance of the rose.

Rev wordlessly opened another portal.

“Wait! What about Mom?” Minna demanded.

“Starbeat made it through,” Rev said. “She’ll find her for you.”

“…Are you sure?”

Rev tried to look at Minna with a calming expression – but her nerves got the better of her. “Y-yes.”

“What’s wrong?” Minna asked.

Nobody would tell her. They moved through the portal, leaving the bone world behind.

They didn’t see two men standing on top of a nearby skull.

“An interesting child, wouldn’t you say?” Randall Flagg asked, turning to the other man.

The Doctor furrowed his brow. “She’s like you.”

“Us, you mean,” Flagg corrected. “She can see pure beauty distilled to perfection… And not care.”

The Doctor didn’t retort.

“The best part is I have literally no idea where she came from!” Flagg spread threw his arms wide. “Isn’t that an exciting prospect Doctor? A mystery in the form of a child!”

“Stay away from her.”

“Naturally. Merodi Universalis beat me once already, I’m not going to tempt fate just yet.” He held up Black Thirteen. “But their fate sure is an interesting one… Always changing, shifting, but always powerful. The Tower has played exceptionally nice with them.”

“You would know how rare that is.”

Flagg laughed. “Sometimes, Doctor, I almost think you know me.” He twisted Black Thirteen in his hand – and was gone.

The Doctor simply walked away.

~~~

The doors of the Dark Tower slammed shut.

Starbeat was alone, though this fact did not surprise her in the slightest.

Here she was. Inside the structure that had given her so much hell through the years. The reason she’d been cursed until earlier that day. And yet… she couldn’t bring herself to hate the thing she was standing in. The air calmed her, made her feel a strange reverence for life and existence.

It was definitely manipulating her to feel this way. She knew it. But it wasn’t like she could fight it.

She started walking up the spiral staircase, feeling the material of the Tower beneath her hooves. She suddenly understood what Lieshy had told her – that it felt like flesh, but not a normal kind of flesh. Starbeat was certain the steps she was walking on were alive and breathing, but she couldn’t tell anyone why she was sure of that. The stairs weren’t moving, and they didn’t feel like flesh. They didn’t feel like stone either…

The Dark Tower… It was built on the corpses of Gan and his people. Was it literally made out of their bodies? Or was it a metaphor the Tower had brought to life after the fact? Was the tower Gan? Or was it separate?

These questions tickled the back of her mind, but answers were not forthcoming. She was left to flounder in her mind, searching for answers with but a taste of the real information contained within the center of existence.

She came to the first door and opened it. The day her Sunburst moved away. …Had that not happened, she knew she would never have declared war on the love curse. She would have been enthralled by it… Perhaps had one of the rare relationships that lasted a lifetime. But he moved away, and she slowly went mad internally…

Moving to the next door, she looked out over a field of roses. She closed the door – it wasn’t where she needed to be. As she climbed further, the life of the Tower urged her forward, begging her to continue her journey. A journey that she was so lucky to be able to take. Or perhaps it was a journey she had been taking her entire life?

She didn’t know. What she did know was the next door held the day she had gotten her cutie mark. She felt a ‘click’ with someone – a gray colt named Stormfly. It was a brilliant, powerful spark between the two of them. She rejected it, gaining the cutie mark of a falling spark – a rejection of the ‘brilliance’ of her world’s love.

How stupid was that?

She moved on, leaving yet another question unanswered.

The moment she got her goggles came next. She had custom made them herself because she wanted something to do other than panic about moving around in public. Other than study the curse to no end.

Then Eve and her team had come… They had saved her. Took her away from her home, gave her a lab, and allowed her to do what she wanted. There was the memory of her killing Cream, even though she didn’t really do that.

There was the memory of her meeting Vriska… of Vriska giving her the diamond card… of Vriska and her laughing about their days together…

Tears dropped down her face. “I’m coming for you,” she promised. She increased her pace, trotting up more and more stairs. But she couldn’t bring herself to levitate the rest of the way up – there was something about the journey that mattered.

She opened a door to see herself getting cured. She closed it quickly, moving to the next one. If Lieshy’s retelling of her time in the Tower was right, this one would be…

“Right,” Starbeat said, looking at herself opening a door. “Well, nice seeing you self, bye now.” She closed the door in her face.

She looked at the next door. Her future lay behind that one. But she knew it would not be one she could change. The Dark Tower didn’t just show a possible future, it showed an absolute future.

She trotted past all the doors, rising higher and higher into the Tower. She lost track of everything – steps, passage of time, number of doors – but she didn’t care. She needed to get to the top of this. She needed to see it.

She arrived at the last door. It was much bigger than all the others, and the knob was shaped like a rose mixed with a starburst. One word was engraved on the door.

STARBEAT

Starbeat knew that, when she went through this door, she would go to where she needed to go. But she wasn’t going to walk through right away – she was going to open it and look into the room at the top of the Dark Tower. She was going to see what Lieshy had only caught a glimpse of.

The mechanisms.

The room on the other side was round, and the walls were covered in symbols of every shape and kind. She saw symbols she recognized from Vriska’s and Aradia’s outfits, what she swore were cutie marks, numerous greek letters, and in a few places that appeared to be copies of Lai runes. She had no idea what the carved symbols meant, if anything.

In the center of the room was a round, gray podium. Above this podium was an eternally-shifting white spirograph that could never decide on a shape, but was brimming with energy.

The Source.

Behind the Source was a tall grandfather clock that sat still, unticking, the large pendulum motionless. The top of the clock contained a spirograph symbol, though it was static unlike the Source.

Starbeat was filled with dread for reasons she didn’t understand. All she knew was that the clock should never start ticking. Ever.

She knew she wasn’t going to get anything more out of looking at the room. She would have to enter – and she wasn’t going to be let in. She may have been chosen, but she wasn’t chosen for that high of an honor.

She stepped through the doorway… and appeared in the Plaza of the Collection.

She grinned.

Success.

Even better, she saw Vriska and the rest of them walking nearby.

“Hey!” she called, waving at them.

“Starbeat!?” Vriska blurted.

Starbeat grinned, tackling Vriska to the ground in a hug. “Yep! It’s me!” She tossed her mane. “Notice anything different about me?”

Pinkie gasped. “YOU GOT A HAIRCUT!”

Starbeat rolled her eyes. “…No.”

Vriska looked at Starbeat’s front hoof. “…You don’t have your bracelet on.”

“That’s right! I don’t need it anymore!”

Vriska blinked. “You… Were cured?”

“Yep! No more bad romance, no more drive to kiss everything that moves! I’m just a unicorn in goggles now.”

Vriska laughed joyously. “Starbeat, I… how?”

“Flowers. We got a ka-signature of the Collector and gave it to a bunch of beings who like to take out things like him. As a gift, they cured me.” She clapped her hooves together.

“Of course then you got captured,” Pinkie said.

“Yeah. Collected,” Starbeat lied. “Looks like I’m here now until they figure out where exactly here is. It’s not the easiest place to find.”

“Not surprising,” Flutterfree admitted.

“Well, while we’re waiting, let’s throw a party!” Pinkie shouted. “The Starbeat is cured party! Woohoooooooo!”

“Yeah. I’d like that,” Starbeat said, smiling. “Oh, and Allure?”

“Yeah?”

“Your daughter really is something. She’s got Alushy doing her bidding trying to find you.”

Allure blinked. “Excuse me while I have a freak-out of both pride and panic.”

“I understand. Take your time.”

They all had a good laugh at Allure’s hyperventilation.

Starbeat smirked. Of course, the Flowers aren’t going to have difficulty for much longer… The whole point of coming here was to tell them where it was. My ka beacon is more than enough to lead them right here…

~~~

“Ka beacon transmission detected!” Thanos reported, ramming his fists into a console. “Someone got here!”

For once, the Collector was surprised. “Already?”

“Yes. It only existed for a moment, we couldn’t pinpoint it’s location… But I’ll find them soon.”

“Don’t bother,” the Collector said. “We were already prepared for the assault. If it happens now or two days from now, it doesn’t matter.”

“We haven’t had time to prepare the Collection!”

“Some of our best agents are out on missions,” Lightning pointed out.

“Recall everyone you can,” the Collector said. “The instant any Flower presence actually shows up, Bill will activate the weirdness bubble. Double check our ka output to make sure everything’s feasible.”

Thanos nodded, moving to a console and pressing his hand to it, interfacing directly.

The Collector curled his hands into fists and rubbed his knuckles together.

“You’re nervous,” Lightning observed.

“Of course I’m nervous, the plan’s moving faster than expected.”

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

“I know,” the Collector muttered. “I’m beginning to wonder if it’s really worth it… first Them, now something I didn’t see coming accelerating the clock… Are we really ready?”

Lightning stared at him. “You’ve already committed.”

“…Yes. I know. I know.”

“I won’t let you stop now, you know that.”

The Collector nodded slowly. “Right… We go ahead with what we have. Time is meaningless, more or less, right? In some cases anyway.” He shook his head. “Go, prepare our star agents for the inevitable attack. Leave out the Merodi. I’ll let them be surprised.”

Lightning nodded, jogging away from his sights.

He rubbed his knuckles together again.

“Achieving victory always calms me down,” Thanos offered.

“Thanks,” the Collector said. “It doesn’t do as much for me though. Perhaps because I’ve been doing it for so long.” He shook his head. “Just keep analyzing. They’ll be here very soon. Actually, come to think of it, they’re likely going to pull a ‘we were here already’ on us with those plot holes of theirs.”

“We have a contingency for that.”

The Collector nodded. “Yes. It’s still going to be confusing though.”

“No argument here.”

~~~

Flowers didn’t generally make their own ships. There were a few organic constructs they used to get around their local worlds, but their military was largely composed of ships they ‘found’ from other worlds upgraded with the best Flower technology available. Star Trek was the most popular, since it was one of the favorites among PPC agents. There were so many Enterprises in the fleet it wasn’t even funny.

Jay, one of the most well-known members of the Department of Mary Sues, sat on the bridge of the flagship Enterprise – a version of the Enterprise-D from an alternate universe where it had three warp nacelles. A somewhat rare find in the multiverse, and Jay loved it.

Well, had loved it. She also had loved the assignment the Sunflower Official had given her when she heard about it.

“Acacia, what did you expect when you agreed to lead a fleet against a Gary Stu?”

“Explosions,” Jay’s partner, Acacia said.

“Right. You know, I really think we would have found some explosions by now. Except we haven’t. We’ve been sitting here jumping from universe to universe in this merry-go-round of mindscrewery, getting nowhere. I want a good fight!”

“It’s still going to be a few days until we process everything,” Acacia reminded her.

“That sucks,” Jay muttered. “Biggest mission in recent history. Most of it spent waiting.”

“Good things come to those who wait,” Acacia said, dropping a data pad in front of Jay. “We’ve just picked up a transmission from someone. It was only for a moment, but it’s enough. We’ve got a complete trail to the Collection complete with its dimensional signature. Even if he starts moving it around, we’ve got him.”

Jay stood up tall. “What are we waiting for? Call Upstairs, send a message to those people who told us about him, and activate the plot hole! Prepare all weapons – and tell those bozos in the Imperium Warship to stop being drunk and start being ready for war!”

Acacia smiled. “Sure thing.”

Jay grinned. “All right little Collector, your reign of terror on the Plot Continuum is over. Justice has come to your doorstep, demanding payment for all you’ve done. You can’t run from it, you can’t hide from it, and you’ll definitely suffer for it.”

“Really? I was thinking I could do all of those things and more. Say, fight it.”

Jay and Acacia whirled to see a hologram of the Collector on their ship.

“I hate it when you guys do this,” Jay muttered. “Can you evil-Sue types stop with the need to monologue for once in your lives?”

“I doubt it,” the Collector admitted, folding his arms. “I also doubt it’ll be as simple as you want.”

Acacia held a data pad in front of the Collector’s face. “Here’s your charges in case we don’t have time to read them aloud to you later.”

“Murder, enslavement, disruption of the multiversal fabric, being a heartless bas-” he stopped short. “Quite the list here.”

“Don’t forget ‘being an Overpowered Cheating Self-Insert Gary Stu’,” Jay said. “We’re coming for you, Collector. And your little dog too!”

Acacia and the Collector facepalmed.

“Just activate the plot hole.”

The Collector nodded. “I look forward to this. I would ask for an honorable fight, but neither of us are going to do that. So instead, I’ll just let you know how I respect what you do – but that I must disagree with your need to remove me. Sorry it has to be this way.”

“Stop being so polite,” Jay muttered.

The Collector shrugged, vanishing.

Jay curled her hand into a fist. “Why isn’t that plot hole activated!?”

077 - The Collector, Part 1

Pinkie tossed Starbeat into a chair at the golden table. “Behold! Solid gold party place!” Pinkie declared. With a swish of her tail and a blow of a party blower, balloons and confetti were everywhere. She pulled a cake out of her mane and placed it in front of Starbeat, grinning. “Have a freedom cake!”

She examined the cake covered in instances of her cutie mark flying away from a central explosion of icing. “…Where’s the alternate version with Valentine’s face on it?”

Pinkie dropped the exact cake she described next to the other one. “BAM. One MURICA cake, as ordered.”

“I really need to stop suggesting things to you.”

“Something the rest of us learned a loooong time ago,” Nova informed her.

“Well I didn’t hang out with much of anypony. Ever. But that’s all changing now!” She rammed her face into the first cake, making a horrible mess. She didn’t care – it just felt right to shove her face with reckless abandon into the pastry. She didn’t have to worry about anything happening when she looked up.

When she looked up a party cannon exploded in her face.

“Thank you Pinkie,” Starbeat deadpanned.

“You’re welcome!”

“So, I got here attempting to find you guys,” Starbeat said, rubbing confetti off her muzzle. “Not as exciting as it sounds, and didn’t exactly go as planned.” She put on a cute smile and examined them. “What did you guys get up to here since you’ve been gone?”

Allure started listing off things. “We met up with Morty, Ivan, and Gyro, spent some time wandering the Collection, got sent on a mission to stop some guy named Thanos, learned a lot about the Collector, and went on a treasure hunt for a truly pointless reward. The knowledge that we can do nothing!”

“Hm?”

“There’s a device called the Catcher,” Nova explained. “It regulates all the loyalty spell-things in our heads. Apparently somewhat easy to destroy, but it’s not like we can touch it because it controls us.”

Starbeat almost asked if they could go there – but that would have been way too suspicious. She had to play it cool. “Interesting. What did you learn about the Collector?”

Flutterfree filled Starbeat in on the strange facts they had learned about the Collector – painting a conflicting picture of the individual. Starbeat wasn’t sure what to make of him.

“A madman with a hero complex…” Starbeat muttered.

“Holy fuck he’s like the Doctor,” Vriska said, eyes widening.

“You know what, yeah!” Starbeat agreed. “Both have the ‘holier than thou’ mentality without anything to back it up!”

“And both seem unable to lose at anything!”

“Alternate versions?”

“Maybe!”

Flutterfree cleared her throat. “I thought we weren’t supposed to feed into Vriska’s antagonism toward the Doctor?”

“But he kinda deserves it,” Starbeat pointed out.

“We kinda deserve it,” Flutterfree countered. “Not as much as them, but don’t we kinda do the same thing? Do what we think is right despite what others say?”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “We’re not a single madman. We’re a we. That’s a lot better than one guy calling all the shots. There’s no way in hell one guy has all the answers to life.”

“Agreed!” Pinkie said, glancing at Starbeat. “But we can’t hold doing dishonest things against everyone, because we have to do them sometimes!”

Shit, she knows.

Pinkie didn’t make any visible response to this. “After all, we often don’t have a choice.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Bah. Think what you will. At least we can all agree he’s arrogant.”

“Oh yes, no argument there,” Pinkie said, smiling.

Starbeat examined Pinkie. How can she keep my secret? She clearly knows what I’ve been through, and there’s no way the story we were experiencing was hidden from her… Why doesn’t the loyalty program take over and make her stop me right here, right now? The Collector has other Pinkies at his disposal…

What loophole has she found?

Vriska put an arm around Starbeat. “So, Starbeat, howsabout just you and me go do some hanging out, whaddoyasay?”

“Awww but that’d cut the party short!” Pinkie wailed.

Starbeat smiled at Vriska. “It’s okay Pinkie. I think the two of us need to talk. Have a ‘feelings jam’ as it were. We can have another party later.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Before Vriska and Starbeat could leave, the entire Collection shook.

Lightning’s voice entered all their minds. “ALERT: WE ARE UNDER ASSAULT. PREPARE FOR POSSIBLE COMBAT!”

“They got here fast,” Starbeat observed, trying to sound clueless.

Vriska frowned. “Great. On the one hand, hopefully they can teach the Collector a lesson. On the other, now we have to prepare to fight them. Lovely.”

“Remember, we can use non-lethal force!” Pinkie chirped. “Just take them down, not out! …At least until the loyalty program takes over and demands a death for certain individuals.”

Everyone gulped.

“Try not to get too worked up about it, okay?”

~~~

The Flower’s fleet was already there.

Which was to say, they weren’t there, and an instant later they were there and had already been there a few minutes.

The wonders of plot hole technology.

From the outside, the Collection looked like a metallic rounded hourglass, predominantly made of white metal with the occasional ring of blue light. The station floated in the middle of a completely empty universe, the only light sources coming from the Flower’s fleet and itself.

Jay gave the order to begin the attack. The ships all fired their standard weapons – lasers, phasers, torpedoes, drones, magic lasers, you name it – but each and every one was infused with ka so it was impossible to dodge them. Every last one sailed toward the Collection, impacting the outer shield, an unidentified technology that created green hexagonal grid patterns when a bullet got too close. When the occasional attack broke through the first layer, there was a second layer of shields behind it.

Orders came in from Upstairs – Flowers far away, safe from the combat. It was time to use an omni-EMP.

Which was to say, a device that would have the effect of an Electromagnetic Pulse, except on every piece of technology in range regardless of whether an Electromagnetic Pulse would actually disable it or not. A large, spherical ship dropped a spherical ball laced with glowing blue flowers. As it tumbled through the darkness, electric sparks flew off of it, creating ripples in spacetime like a stick thrown into a pond.

It focused all its energy forward and unleashed a pulse – completely invisible, and directed entirely at the Collection.

“HOW ABOUT… I COMPLETELY NULLIFY WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO DO?” Bill Cipher spoke into all of their minds. Raising one of his tiny hands, he created a tear in reality large enough to cast the entire Collection in a red light. The X-shaped fissure flooded the universe with alien physics – or ‘just plain weirdness’.

The sharp adjustment of physics from the particular Nightmare Realm Bill had opened created a bubble. This bubble would serve as a ‘natural defense mechanism’ to keep the Weirdness inside, protecting the outside world from incursion.

This was the opposite of what they wanted.

Then the Collector flipped a switch. A pulse of physics-altering energy shot out of the Collection’s core, turning the bubble inside-out, reversing its effect.

The omni-EMP hit the bubble – and dissipated into nothing. The level of ka-manipulation it used was too much for the relative normalcy the interior of the bubble demanded.

The Flowers were surprised by this, but not unprepared. They had encountered such measures before, and themselves had several similar shields around their more important worlds. Thus, they knew how to break through them.

The next device was simply known as the Redactor. It appeared as four tulip heads affixed to each other, brimming with red energy. It pulled at reality from all directions, attempting to remove ka from the universe…

Red lights started going off on all Flower ships and within the Collection.

“STOP!” Jay yelled. “THE UNIVERSE IS DESTABILIZING! SHUT IT DOWN!” She didn’t wait for anyone to follow her order – she manually fired a torpedo from the ship into the Redactor, shredding its petals. Only a small black hole was formed due to this, and it was destroyed by spatial wrenching technology.

The universe is keyed to existence with ka, and yet he has nullified it within the Collection. A Flower’s voice came into all their minds. Impossible – there must still be ka within the Collection for this to function.

Another Flower spoke up – Jay recognized this one as the Sunflower Official. It’s a matter of scale. The ka within the Collection is small-scale, while we are trying to use large-scale manipulation out here. He’s played his cards well. We will have to play off the lesser levels to break through. Jay, woodpecker maneuvers with the Seeders.

“Right!” Jay said. “You heard the S.O.! Woodpecker! Seeder! Let’s move it!”

The fleet started pulling out Seeders – devices that looked like glowing bean sprouts – and placing them in front of their ships, firing the little things at the Weirdness Bubble. Instead of passing through, they stuck to it, using their miniscule ka manipulation to slowly ‘convince’ the Weirdness Bubble to revert back to normal. One Seeder would do absolutely nothing. Millions could alter reality on vast scales in universes where such things would normally tear causality apart.

The Collector tapped his hands on his console. “Time to start the actual fight.” He pressed a button, telling his fleet that it was time to go. A hundred or so ships that he had collected over the years flew out of the Collection’s docking bay into the vast blackness of space. They stayed within the confines of the Weirdness Bubble, careful not to allow the Flowers to get the jump on them. What they did do is use their weapons to blow the Seeders off the Bubble, using vast beams of energy and swaths of plasma to clear the air of the offending beans.

Move to a purely physical confrontation, the Sunflower Official ordered. Expect higher casualties than usual.

“Plan E?” Jay asked.

Will be underway the moment you are able to get a teleportation lock of any sort.

Jay nodded. “FIRE ALL WEAPONS! No manipulation. We’ve been normalized, people.”

The Flower’s fleet fired weapons, foregoing the use of ka in their attacks, allowing the missiles, lasers, and magic to pass through the Weirdness bubble. In response to this, the ships within the Bubble fired back, creating a volley of blasts back and forth.

Ships on both sides began to explode – and yet, somehow both sides knew this was going to be a long, gruesome battle.

“Get us a teleporter lock on the interior,” Jay demanded. “Now.”

~~~

Blackjack wasn’t sure why Squeaky started yelling the moment they returned to the Golden Joke.

“What is wrong with you?” she shouted at Rev. “That was no place to take a kid!”

“You knew that,” Rev said with a sigh. “I told y-”

“You knew they would try to kill us before we even got there!”

Rev stared at her. “And yet, we got what we wanted, didn’t we? We’re all alive and Starbeat made it through.”

“It’s the principle of the thing! Minna is just a kid! Younger than any of the League has ever been! You don’t just take kids like that along for the ride!”

Rev frowned. “…Were she not there we would have perished, Squeaky.”

Squeaky blinked. “W-what?”

“None of us even thought of – or were able to think of – harming the rose. She was the only one. She saved us.”

Minna smiled. “I did!”

Squeaky twitched. “You… You…”

“Squeaky, what I did was not wrong,” Rev told her. “I didn’t want to do it, but it was what needed to be done. One does not ignore the call when it comes knocking.”

“I ignore it all the time,” Alushy commented.

“That explains a lot,” Blackjack said.

“Not really,” Minna added.

Blackjack shrugged. “Well, mission accomplished, emotional stress unleashed, what now?”

Squeaky looked like she had a long-winded retort to Blackjack’s sentence, but the Sunflower Official appeared in the middle of the Golden Joke in person, making everyone in the hall fall silent.

Due to the efforts of the unicorn we believe to be named Starbeat, we have found the Collection and begun the assault on the Collector.

There were a few whoops and cheers at this.

The battle, as it is now, is going to be a long, bloody, and hard one. We will lose many ships and likely will not be able to save any within the Collection itself. The explanation is long, and time is short, so just accept that he has found a way around our higher-order manipulative technologies. He was prepared for a confrontation. Normally in this case we would just destroy the universe from outside, but we have another method to try before we resort to such final measures.

“Don’t you dare destroy the universe with anyone inside!” Corona shouted.

That is one of the reasons we are not, the Sunflower Official said. Within the Collection, low-level ka is still in play. Our calculations have determined that if we send people with a connection to the Collector in, those who have reason to fight him, there is a significant chance we can take the Collection out from the inside. What we need are heroes with high levels of importance and drive to fight inside the Collection. In other news, whoever is willing to volunteer out of deep personal obligation or desire.

Minna raised her hand first – but Squeaky forced it down. “You can’t fight a war, Minna.”

Minna turned to Alushy, eyes wide.

Alushy rolled her eyes, raising her hoof. Blackjack did as well. Dozens of other limbs went up across the hall – Corona, Lieshy, Johnny, Death, YVND, Sunny, Nanoha, Discord, Jolyne… The list went on and on.

Those of you who are leaders of your people, put your appendages down.

Valentine, Toph, Eve, and a handful of others hesitated before doing as the Sunflower asked.

This is not guaranteed to succeed, and your nations will need you long after this is over.

“Screw you, I’m going anyway,” Jenny declared.

As you wish. Gather everyone you can. You have ten minutes. I suggest finding a way to reliably resist the loyalty conditioning.

“How are we going to do that!?” Corona blurted.

“I’VE GOT AN IDEA!” Jenny shouted, opening a portal to the Ninth World and jumping through. Everyone shrugged, hoping she was going to get something to help.

Rev turned to Alushy and Blackjack. She smiled. “You two… Good luck.”

“Not going to offer us a blessing?” Alushy asked.

Rev snorted. “Funny.” She tossed her mane back. “I’m going home – I was never one for large battles, or even violence at all. I leave this to you.”

“Yeah, we are pros at the killing thing,” Blackjack said, smirking.

“I also want you two to know that…” Rev struggled to find the words. “…I don’t agree with virtually anything you say or do. But I respect the place you hold in life. You’re both horrible people, but that’s okay. We’re all horrible in one way or another.”

“I feel strangely insulted and inspired,” Blackjack said.

“My words are often a two-edged sword,” Rev admitted. “Good luck.”

Blackjack saluted.

“BRING MOM BACK!” Minna called after Alushy.

“I will, kid. Or my name isn’t Alushy.”

“Isn’t it Yhsula?” Blackjack asked.

“…All right who found my source material and didn’t tell me!?”

No answer was forthcoming.

“Fine,” Alushy said, turning tail. “Blackjack, let’s ditch these losers. We’ve got ass to kick.”

“Let me grab some whiskey.”

Alushy raised an eyebrow. “Lemme guess, it improves your performance?”

“One can only hope it still does!” Blackjack laughed.

They walked up to the central stage, mingling with all the other volunteers.

“Okay!” Nanoha shouted, cupping her hands over her mouth. “We need to split into two groups – those who are strong enough to face minor deities and attack directly, and those who work best as more of a stealth group! The former, with me! Rest of you, talk to Lady Rarity!”

Blackjack and Alushy knew where they were going – they walked up to Nanoha. Corona, Discord, and Hastur were already next to her, talking about plans.

“Blackjack?” Nanoha said, raising an eyebrow. “You sure?”

“Yes. Feels right,” Blackjack said. “You know I’m powerful enough even without being the ‘Princess of Win’, you just don’t want to say it. Also, we don’t have time to argue.”

Nanoha nodded. “All right. Those of us here will be the heavy-hitters who serve as distractions for the others. We deal with all the Collector’s primary servants, which will likely have some entities with a very impressive résumé. I personally won’t be using lethal force unless I have to, but this is a war and the Flowers certainly will be. All of you make your own decisions.”

Corona nodded. “I’d recommend that, if you’re a lethal-force fighter, focus on individuals that look like they’re enjoying what they’re doing. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best I can suggest on the fly.”

Nanoha noticed more people coming – a handful of alicorn Twilights from the Sparkle Census, Jane, Sunny, Blumiere, YVND, Jenny, Death, and a handful of others – and began repeating what she’d just said.

“SHUSH!” Jenny said, snapping her fingers. A hundred small black octahedra fell onto the ground in front of her. She held one of the elongated devices up. “This Numenera is a mental reconditioner. We don’t really understand how it works, but when you eat it your mind cannot be altered from outside – it’s as if a firewall has gone up. Nothing we’ve done has gotten through these things, but their effect is only temporary. Once you eat it, you have an hour. It also might give you a headache and a nosebleed.”

“Good enough for me!” Corona said. “Everyone grab one of those!”

Blackjack levitated two over before the chaos began. She took a breath. “Today’s certainly been an eventful day.”

“It’s Tuesday,” Alushy commented, accepting the reconditioner from Blackjack.

“That joke doesn’t apply! This isn’t normal here!”

Alushy started howling.

“What?”

“I’ve been waiting forever to get someone with that! It’s actually Tuesday on this planet, Blackjack! GOTCHA!”

Blackjack blinked – then rolled her eyes and chuckled. “Right.”

Aradia appeared in a flash of red gears, dropping a handful of other people onto the ground. “And there’s all the people who would have been late.” She shook her head. “Shame on all you.”

Giorno stood up. “What am I-”

“Shh. I brought you here because you’re strong. That’s the only reason.” She winked.

Giorno accepted this with a shrug.

“Nanoha, I’ll be on time control,” Aradia reported, saluting. “No offense to the Flowers but I’ve got a better handle on it than they do.”

Nanoha bowed. “Thank you, Handmaid.”

Blackjack grinned. “Man, with a team like this, how can we lose!?”

Alushy facehooved. “You’ve jinxed us.”

“…Fuck. That’s actually really bad in this case, isn’t it?”

“Yeeeep,” Alushy grunted. “And chances are I’m getting assigned to the same group as you. Wonderful.”

“I probably won’t blow you up!”

“Great. I’m going to have to come back from an explosion. Love it when that happens.”

~~~

The Primary Team for assaulting the Collection was composed of the strongest of the strong that had been present at the Golden Joke. Nanoha, Corona, Discord, Hastur, and Tom, the Star-spirit from Equis Fallout who took the form of an ethereal white alicorn shimmering with moondust.

They were one of many such groups within a cargo hold on board a Flower ship – none of them knew what the design was from, but it sure had a large cargo hold.

“YVND is in!” Someone reported. “He’s managed to screw their anti-teleport measures!”

“GO GO GO!” the Voice of Jay yelled over the intercom. “Start teleporting in already!”

Nanoha readied Raising Heart. “It’s been a while since I involved myself in a fight this large…”

“You’ll do fine!” Discord assured her. “But don’t feel afraid to tell me to tone down the chaos if it’s too much for you.”

“WE MUST FIGHT AT OUR FULL POTENTIAL,” Tom decreed. “EVERYONE IS COUNTING ON OUR ACTIONS HERE.”

Hastur nodded. “Including those we care deeply about.”

Corona nudged him playfully. “We’ll get your girl back, don’t worry. She probably can’t be beaten. I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually has her locked up somewhere reserved for people he just can’t control.”

“One can hope.”

“Primary team, away!” someone shouted.

They barely had time to react. One moment they were in the cargo hold – and then they were at the edge of the Collection Plaza.

“Defense, Corona!” Nanoha shouted. Corona nodded, creating a complex series of defensive enchantments around Nanoha. Tom aided in the defense as well, surrounding the two of them in a diamond-encrusted shield. Discord and Hastur moved to attack any of the Collection who were smart enough to realize they needed to move fast.

“HIGH POWER…” Nanoha shouted, pointing Raising Heart forward.

The Collection collectively realized what was happening and surged forward, hurling magic of their own. What wouldn’t have just bounced off of Corona’s and Tom’s enchantments were stopped by Discord and Hastur with a combination of eldritch power and chaos magic.

“STARLIGHT…”

The Collection finally started getting organized. One of their Discords appeared, summoning an apple covered in sawblades. Their Discord met this with a cactus-pear, showering the nearby Plaza in fruity death. More than a few of the Collected fell to the spiky-sawblade mixture.

“BREAKER!” Nanoha shouted, unleashing her spell. The cone of pinkish-white energy came out in a cascading cone that filled the entire Collection Plaza, hitting everyone with enough concussive force to knock out not only a regular human, but something several orders of magnitude more resilient than a regular human.

Most of the Collection fell to that one attack. This part of the plan had been beyond important – if they gave the Collection enough time to organize internally, they could overcome the incursion with sheer numbers, regardless of anything they did. This way there was a fighting chance.

The drawback?

The Collected who were still standing and ready to fight after the Starlight Breaker were going to be the really strong ones, as evidenced by the four beings approaching Nanoha’s group.

Kars, Bill Cipher, a Discord, and some impossible conglomeration of eldritch geometries that looked as if someone had stuck all the platonic solids together and decided it worked best as a liquid.

“I LIKE YOUR SPUNK, KIDS!”

“I AM OLDER THAN MOST PLANETS,” Tom said, indignant.

“AND I’M OLDER THAN MOST UNIVERSES, GET OVER YOURSELF,” Bill said with a wave of the hand.

“Enough talk,” Kars said, sprouting a unicorn horn from his forehead and ten squid tentacles out of his back. “We must fight.”

The geometric thing gurgled, then rushed them from all sides at once.

It was met with a combination attack from Nanoha, Hastur, and Corona.

“We’re not going to go out easily,” Corona said with a grin. “There’s a reason we’re here.”

The other Discord grunted. “Woohoo.” He clearly wasn’t really into the whole thing.

Bill, on the other hand…

He transformed into a giant red pyramid with three rotating sections, extra arms, teeth, and a dangling tongue. “FRESH MEAT SOON EVERYBODY!”

The giants clashed, tearing reality apart as they moved.

~~~

The Secondary Team held Blackjack, Alushy, Giorno, Tornado, and Death.

Alushy looked at the short, green-haired Tornado. “Hey… I know who you are! You’re that girl who got her mind fried by the Celestialsapien!”

“S-shut up,” Tornado said, weakly.

“What was it like?”

Tornado looked at Alushy, trying to muster the rage or courage to yell at her – but couldn’t do it. She just looked at the ground, despondent.

Blackjack nudged Alushy. “Give her some space – she’s helping us despite what happened. …Whatever actually happened.”

“Locked inside her own mind for a thousand years,” Giorno said, frowning. “Punishment for being impatient.”

Tornado twitched at the word ‘impatient’.

TRAUMA IS NOT GOTTEN OVER LIGHTLY, Death pointed out. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO FIGHT, WE WOULD NOT THINK LESS OF YOU FOR DROPPING OUT.

“I… I want to. I need to. For me,” Tornado said, still refusing to make eye contact with any of them.

An announcement reached their ears. “SECONDARY TEAM GO! NANOHA’S CLEARED THE MAIN PLAZA! YOU’RE GETTING PLACED IN THE HALLS!”

The five of them had time to take a ready stance and were teleported to a hallway with two dozen or so random members of the Collection - the majority of whom were kid-squid hybrid things holding highly advanced sci-fi weaponry.

Death could have killed them all in an instant, but he was not one to kill without reason – he held back, watching to see what would happen.

Blackjack took out her sword and started cutting legs, spraying bright multicolored ink everywhere. “COME AND GET US! WE’RE INVADERS!”

“Normally I’d be chiding you for that, but it is what we’re supposed to be doing,” Giorno admitted. “GOLD EXPERIENCE REQUIEM!” Blackjack couldn’t see the Stand – but she assumed it was golden. Might have had something to do with the name.

Several inklings fell back from invisible punches. “USELESS! MUDA MUDA MUDA!!!” Giorno shouted.

Alushy shrugged, transforming into shadow and taking out many of them with a sweeping motion.

Tornado let out a ‘tch’, a hold-on from her prior personality. She raised her hands, grabbing every visible member of the Collection, and tossing them to the side. “Stop showing off.”

A literal demon got up after Tornado knocked him down. He charged, eyeing her with eyes telling of a more horrid desire than simple bloodlust.

Death pointed at the demon and it died on the spot.

Blackjack whistled. “Nice.”

I HAVE TO BE SURE.

“So, where to next? We need to be making a lot of big booms.”

“Sadly, nowhere,” a tired voice said, walking toward them in plain sight. It was a version of Superman. “I’ve been told to stop you. And you know I can’t stop.”

“Sending the purest of the pure to attack Death…” Giorno muttered.

Superman rushed faster than any of them could see, punching Giorno in the face. The force should have killed him… But suddenly the punch had never happened.

Superman looked at Giorno, confused. “What did you do?”

“You will never reach the reality you seek,” Giorno said. “That is Gold Experience Requiem’s ability.”

Superman nodded. “A powerful one.” Blackjack started shooting him with bullets, but he didn’t even notice. “I hope you use it honorably.”

“Depends on your definition,” Giorno said, glaring.

Alushy rolled her eyes. “Enough talking more fi-” Superman punched her head clean off. It grew back. “HOLY HELL THAT WAS PAINFUL! I-”

Superman punched the head off again. Blackjack brought her starmetal sword down on him, but he twisted it out of her cyborg hooves easily. Tornado grabbed him with her telekinesis, but he was too strong to be held. He also intercepted Death’s scythe, twisting the weapon out of the anthropomorphic personification’s boney grip and throwing it at Giorno.

The Scythe returned to Superman’s hand. “You can’t win,” Giorno decreed.

“Not if I’m alone.” Superman admitted. “But the Collection has more than just me.”

Other superheroes began to appear – the Flash, Iron Man, Thor, Batman – all paragons of truth and justice, forced to do the bidding of the Collector.

Blackjack gulped. “This is going to be… fun.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Alushy said, grinning. “I wonder if my teeth can pierce Superman’s skin…”

Another set of giants clashed, tearing through wall after wall of the Collection in their fight…

~~~

In one of the more secluded halls of the Collection, a dual-team was working at a console. That was to say, Olivia was working at a console while Lady Rarity, Lieshy, Froppy, Johnny, and Lileur protected her.

They had already taken care of a few dozen random people who had just wandered by. “Anything?” Froppy asked Olivia.

“If I had gotten anything done, I would have told you!” Olivia snapped. “This isn’t exactly a normal system and half of it operates on ka, far as I can tell. Give me a moment.”

“One of them is going to raise the alarm eventually,” Johnny said. “They may have already, as far as we know.”

“We just have to be ready,” Lady Rarity reminded him.

“People say that a lot.”

“Like sheep, we follow the shepherd,” Lieshy observed.

Johnny ignored her.

Lileur turned to Lady Rarity. “How can you understand her?”

“Practice. And getting lucky,” the spirid responded.

“Hm. It seems like it would be an interesting tongue to learn, if I have time.”

“All of us get vacations after this,” Froppy said. “All of us.”

“I’m going to take Gyro to another Earth,” Johnny said. “They’re just about to hold a Steel Ball Run. We’ll finish the race together.”

“You don’t get exclusive rights to Gyro,” Froppy pointed out.

“I get dibs.”

“…Ribbit. Okay.”

“…That’s not good,” Olivia said, taking a step back from the console.

“And we just lost jenga,” Lieshy facehooved. “What happened?”

“YVND’s been compromised. Don’t know if he’s just been captured, dead, or what, but he’s not assisting anymore.” She scratched the back of her head. “I can still make headway, but he was doing a lot of the heavy lifting…”

“Ribbit. Don’t worry, I’m sure you can do it,” Froppy said.

Olivia looked at her for a moment. “By the way, you and I need to go out for lunch sometime. There’s some things I’d like to say.”

Froppy blinked. “…Sure.”

Lileur cocked her head at Froppy. “You know her?”

“Not really,” Froppy said.

“I’m a hacker. There are secrets,” Olivia said, tapping a few things on her holographic displays. “You’ll just have to accept that.”

Lileur shrugged, not taking it personally.

Lady Rarity’s ears perked up. “Somebody’s coming. Multiple people.”

Johnny readied his Stand and aimed his fingernails. “Here we go again.”

Lieshy summoned Limelight and Froppy took a battle stance, tongue at the ready.

They had planned to attack the newcomers before they knew what was happening – but familiar faces made them hesitate.

It was Gyro, Ivan, Morty, and Davepeta.

“Gyro…?” Johnny said, lowering his finger.

Gyro put a hand over his face. “Johnny, why’d you have to come?”

“I’m here to get you!”

“…You should have stayed with your family.”

“What about me?” Froppy asked. “Should I have stopped looking?”

Gyro grimaced. “Sorry.”

Morty pulled a gun out of his pocket. “Nothing personal, but you’re our enemy right now.”

Ivan let out a dejected sigh.

“Guys, guys, I’ve got this,” Davepeta said, smirking. “I’ll just go back in time and stop them there. No pawblem, nobody has to kick the bucket.”

Aradia appeared in front of the sprite. “Good sentiment Davepeta… But I can’t let you do that.” She smiled sadly. “Looks like we’re finally going to get to see who’s the better Time player, huh?”

“Aradia…” Davepeta said, grimacing. “It’ll be a bloodbath.”

“I know better than you when that’s acceptable.”

“You’re too frivolous with your lives!”

Aradia narrowed her eyes, two time clones of her appearing to the sides. “I’ll be the judge of that, Davepeta.” They clashed – and vanished into time.

Morty fired his gun, a beam of instant-death energy flying forth. Johnny's Stand Tusk blocked it with its impressive pink girth. At the same time, Johnny retaliated with his own instant-death Infinite Spin bullets at Morty, but Gyro used Ball Breaker to block, countering with his own Spin.

“I wouldn’t use those Johnny,” Gyro said. “Somebody might get hurt.”

“Just keep them distracted!” Olivia blurted. “That’s all I need!”

Johnny shot holes of Spin into the ground, unraveling the space below everyone. Ivan summoned grand illusions that made the floor seem like it was rocking. Limelight punched the crystalline man in the face, shocking him. Lady Rarity swung her hammer, Morty fired his gun, Gyro shot a steel ball.

In other words, chaos broke loose.

~~~

Pinkie’s team, Allure, and Starbeat rushed outside into the Plaza. They saw thousands of unconscious forms.

Pinkie whistled. “Wow, Nanoha does not mess around.”

“There she is,” Allure said, pointing up. The rippling chaos-eldritch magic combination made it very difficult to see what was happening in the air above them, but they could catch glimpses of Nanoha’s signature magic circles.

Vriska produced her dice. “Well, time to go kill her. Or try, and get killed ourselves.” Then, under her breath, she added, “why did you have to come, Hastur?”

Jotaro summoned Star Platinum, ready for an attack.

“Wait!” Starbeat shouted. “Maybe we don’t have to!”

“What are you talking about!?” Flutterfree called. “Of course we have to!”

“What if we did something else to defend the Collection, something that didn’t involve fighting our friends directly?” Starbeat gulped. “Like… Going to go protect the Catcher! If they destroy that, it’s all over.”

“…Dammit Starbeat!” Nova blurted. “Why’d you have to think of that? Now we have to go do it! Gah!”

Jotaro furrowed his brow. “I’m not sure it’s our best course of action.”

“The loyalty spell allows it, we’re doing it,” Pinkie said. “This way we don’t have to do any fighting we don’t want to do!”

“We have to deal with Rick though,” Nova pointed out.

“Small price to pay. Ahem, Nova! Can you teleport us there?”

Nova nodded. “It’s not hard to get to a second time. Give me a few seconds…” She lit her horn and closed her eyes.

Starbeat scratched the back of her head. “S-sorry, was it really bad to think of that?”

“Now there’s not going to be a chance someone gets lucky and destroys it,” Vriska muttered. “Which, frankly, I would have loved to happen.”

Well, they might follow us, Starbeat thought to herself. Which is frankly what I’m banking on since I doubt I can destroy it with all them watching.

In an instant, they were in the Catcher’s room. Starbeat marveled at the device.

“FUCK YOU!” Rick shouted at the seven who had just arrived. “Do you have any idea the aneurism you just gave me!?” He shoved his hand in their faces – it was holding a big red button. “I had this place rigged with so many traps it’d kill Cthulhu! I was going to push it! But the Catcher caught me and I had to tear my finger off that button. Do you have any idea how mentally painful that was!?”

Vriska punched him in the face a lot softer than she would have liked. “Shut up, we’re here to protect it. It makes your job easier.”

Rick threw an empty bottle at her. She caught it effortlessly.

Starbeat pointed at the red spot on the Catcher. “This what we need to protect?”

“Yep!” Pinkie said. “Under no circumstances let any invaders get close to it.” Giggling, she scooted Starbeat until her face was pressed against the red mark. “See this? This is what you don’t want.”

“Riiiiiight,” Starbeat said, chuckling nervously.

“All right, you’re suspicious,” Rick said, drawing a gun on her.

“W-what!?” Starbeat blurted.

“Hey, cut it out,” Allure said. “She’s very new and a bit overwhelmed by it all. We’re not all that calm either!”

Rick folded his arms. “How do you know she’s not with them, huh?”

“She came here long enough before the attack to have a party?” Flutterfree said. “Rick, stop being paranoid.”

Rick stared at Starbeat. “Bah. There’s enough uncertainty now the Catcher won’t let me take the shot.” He tossed the gun to Starbeat. “Enjoy.”

“…I don’t need this.”

Rick leaned went back to his lawn chair, putting his finger on the red button again. “First sign of trouble, kaboom goes the weasel.” He burped. “Ugh… What’s a guy gotta do to get a decent drink in this place?”

Pinkie tossed him some beer.

“Thanks.”

“Screw you,” Pinkie declared with a perfect smile on her face.

“Ah, another member of the ‘everybody hates Rick’ club. Shocker,” Rick muttered. “You really should invest in obtaining some fucks to give. Screw is kind of pathetic.”

“You wanna get insulted?” Vriska challenged. “Ooooooh I’ve got a list of retorts for you. How about we start with your complete lack of social skills! Specifically, why not talk about that hive-mind you like so much.”

Rick glared at her.

“Ah, the look of a man who wants to kill me, but can’t!” Vriska laughed. “Let’s see how badly I can insult her and your relationship – oh wait, did I just call it a relationship? Sorry, slip of the tongue, I meant a sorry excuse for an interaction between two hunks of flesh. I bet she’s happy with that other guy! Wait, no, she’s a fucking loser, just like you.”

She continued to tear apart at Rick’s personal life bit by bit while he just took it, unable to retaliate due to the loyalty program. It was no easy task chipping away at what little husk of humanity remained in Ricks nearly heartless shell, but Vriska was most assuredly up to the task.

Man, she really needs to let off some steam, Starbeat observed, seeing no reason to step in to stop her moirail. Rick, frankly, deserved worse.

~~~

The Collector watched the chaos unfold on the many screens in his office. He saw his Geometric Monstrosity fall to Tom. He saw Death get punched around by Superman. He watched Gyro and Johnny fight each other, only one willing to do anything lethal.

A strange clanking sound reached his ears.

“…Are you okay?” Lightning asked, placing a hand on the Collector’s shoulder.

The Collector realized the clanking was coming from him. He was trembling, causing his armor to scrape against itself. “Yes. No.” He stood up and started pacing. “I’m just nervous. Exceptionally nervous about it all finally happening. It’s… It’s harder to take in than I thought it would be.”

“…Understandable,” Lightning said. “But we can’t back down now.”

“I know.” The Collector rubbed his knuckles together. “I know.”

“We’re claiming superiority in the space battle,” Thanos reported. “It’s a slow but sure process. They haven’t been able to pierce the third layer of shielding with anything significant.”

“Good… Good… It has to be done in here, not out there,” the Collector said, pacing. “Too fast…”

“It’s just fine,” Lightning assured him. “A faster timetable doesn’t change anything.”

“So you keep reminding me…” the Collector shook his head. “So you keep reminding me…”

“Do you need something to calm yourself?” Thanos asked. “I’ve found a record of something called chill strips in the databanks.”

“It’ll all be over soon, not worth it. Thanks for pointing them out, though.” He folded his arms. “I don’t know, I have this nagging feeling that something completely out of left field is going to derail ever-”

Jenny punched through one of the glass aquarium walls, upturning the Collector’s office in a wave of saltwater and exotic fish. Her fist continued, charged with transdimensional energy, hitting the Collector square in the face. The force was so large it not only dented the armor, but popped off some of the plating around the left eye, revealing the sparking circuitry beneath.

The Collector fell back, staggered both by the sudden influx of water and the punch to the face.

Jenny pulled back for another punch. “I’ve been looking forward to this one…”

“BLIZZAJA!” Lightning shouted, ice shooting forth from her fingers. The water coming out of the hole in the glass froze solid instantly while Jenny was skewered with about a dozen icicles.

Jenny seethed, activating a Numenera device within her suit. She exploded, shattering the ice, allowing herself to regenerate. She pulled back for another punch on the Collector.

Thanos punched her this time, knocking her through another section of glass. Lightning opted for an Earth spell to catch her this time. Jenny just twitched and teleported out of the attack, her crushed legs regenerating in seconds. She ignored them, going for the Collector again – but his metaphorical right and left hands stopped her from advancing.

But she wouldn’t go down either. Her rage was a force of nature, not to be stopped by anything. She was going to kill the Collector and there was nothing they could do to stop her.

That is, until Thanos extrapolated from incomplete data and figured something out. He punched into her stomach and closed his fist around a small octahedron. He pulled it out. “I knew it. They have a device keeping us from conditioning them.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “No no n-”

The Collector snapped his fingers, and Jenny stood at attention. He walked toward her slowly. “It is not my time to die, Jenny. Especially not to you.” He narrowed his eyes. “Teleport yourself into deep space. I’m sure you’ll be picked up eventually.”

Jenny obeyed, subjecting her regenerating body to the void outside the Collection.

The Collector walked to Thanos and held up the black octahedron in his hand, examining it closely. “Can we cancel this thing’s effect?”

“I can attempt a countermeasure now that I have a sample,” Thanos said.

“Then do it,” the Collector ordered. “Let’s take away the only edge they have.”

~~~

“Johnny!” Gyro shouted, using Ball Breaker to deflect more of Johnny’s Infinite-Spin nails. “Stop it! You’re going to kill someone with that!”

“Yes. He is,” Morty said, pointing his gun at Lileur. The ray from the gun pierced the unicorn in the heart. She didn’t scream – she just shot Froppy a pitiful glance and fell to the ground, forcing Johnny’s mastery of the Spin to falter. Unable to channel the Spin through her, he lost control of Tusk.

“Lileur!” he, Gyro, and Froppy shouted.

Morty took in a deep breath. “…Sorry.” He fired at Olivia again, but Lady Rarity deflected the attack with a magic shield.

“You’re not taking another life!” Lady Rarity declared.

“…I wish that was true,” Morty said. He shot at her several times, but she deflected every last one. She brought her hammer at him from the side, cracking several ribs and forcing blood out his mouth. He crumpled to the ground, barely breathing.

Lieshy used Limelight to drive Ivan into the ground, “Ready to give up yet?” she asked.

“G…mmm…” his body began to go into convulsions.

“I think Limelight’s ability and the loyalty conditioning are tearing his mind apart,” Lieshy said, kicking him. “He hasn’t even managed to create any illusions the last few times.”

Ivan shot up, trying to drive a crystal shard through Lieshy’s heart, but Froppy grabbed him and tossed him to the side.

Johnny aimed his fingernail bullets at Ivan – he only had ten, since Lileur wasn’t going to magically recharge them anymore. He needed to make these count… Just a few shots…

Gyro’s Steel Ball hit Johnny in the head, twisting the Joestar to the side and into a wall next to Morty, blood dripping from his mouth. Gyro sighed – at least he was alive.

Lieshy and Lady Rarity teamed up on Ivan, pummeling him until he couldn’t take anymore. The mental effort he used to keep his crystalline self cohesive gave out. He fell apart into about a hundred different shards, waiting to recharge. Given his conflicting state of mind, it was going to take a while.

Gyro stood alone against Lady Rarity, Lieshy, and Froppy. He sent Ball Breaker after them, Limelight meeting the much smaller Stand’s fists. Ball Breaker may have been an exceptionally overpowered Stand with complete mastery over Spin – but it didn’t hit anywhere near as hard as Limelight.

Gyro grimaced – Ball Breaker was where most of his power was consolidated. Froppy knew that, so Lady Rarity and Lieshy probably knew that. If they flanked him here, he was down. He could tell from their eyes they were going to do exactly that. Lady Rarity moved to the left, Froppy to the right, hammer and tongue ready.

Morty’s gun went off again, the bolt going through Lieshy’s ears, forcing blood to squirt out the exit wound. The red liquid shifted in the air, taking the form of miniature rose petals, blowing in the wind. Limelight dissipated into nothing, her spirit no longer able to hold on to her Stand.

Despite the wound in her head, she somehow retained awareness. As the world blacked out around her, she heard it.

The sound of a large clock going tick.

The rose petals that were drops of blood swirled around her. She swore that she could see the Dark Tower in the midst of those petals.

Tock.

She fell to the ground with an unceremonious thud. The rose petals all turned to blood, pooling around her.

Gyro, Lady Rarity, and Froppy didn’t know what to make of what had just happened.

Morty passed out, his gun falling to the ground with a jarring clank. The sound shook the three of them out of their stupor.

Lady Rarity turned to the prone form of Morty. “You…”

He couldn’t make any response.

Gyro sent Ball Breaker after Lady Rarity. She threw her hammer at Morty, but the Stand touched the hammer just enough to Spin it into a wall, forcing its handle into a corkscrew shape. Lady Rarity was the victim of Ball Breaker’s other fist, her own body being contorted next to her weapon, parts of her armor digging into her flesh.

Froppy made a last ditch effort to take Gyro down – she tried to wrap her tongue around his neck.

She didn’t see the Steel Ball he had shot behind him until it hit her. The shock forced her to release her tongue, a motion that allowed her to twist herself off the ball and back onto her feet. “Ribbit.”

Gyro stood over her. “...Looks like I win.”

Froppy grunted, refusing to say anything.

He touched her with Ball Breaker, forcing her to rotate quickly enough to embed herself in the floor.

Then he took a moment to take stock.

Two dead, Lileur and Lieshy. Everyone else heavily wounded, except himself and…

“I’ve got something!” Olivia declared. “He’s got a room of uncontrollable people! I’ll just do a little bit of this and then w-”

Ball Breaker punched her aside, forcing all her holographic screens to either glitch out of existence or just plain close. Her white cloak was resistant to the Spin, but Gyro didn’t care how or why that was possible.

He just punched her again before she got any ideas, tossing a Steel Ball to make extra sure she didn’t get back up to surprise him.

Only then did Gyro let himself stop.

He moved over to the unconscious form of Johnny and sat down, pulling his legs to his body. He didn’t have anything to say or do. He just sat.

Sat and tried not to cry or scream.

~~~

So far, only the creature made of geometry had perished in the fight between Corona’s group and Kars’. The Discords had been put out of commission – their magic had allowed Nanoha to seal them both away in a crystal box, and it would not be unlockable for several hours.

Nanoha and Hastur were fighting Kars, Nanoha proving to him just how formidable a woman could be in combat. Her magic was nigh-limitless, but so was Kars’ ability to imitate any biology he saw to extreme degrees. Kars was also so insane that Hastur’s madness-inducing magic wasn’t doing much. They’d been at a standstill for a while.

Bill Cipher was facing Tom and Corona together, the triangular dream demon folding himself through dimensions to attack them from all angles, outwitting Tom and overpowering Corona.

“HAHA! YOU’D THINK A STAR AND AN ANGEL WOULD BE ABLE TO DO SOMETHING, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE YOU COME UP SHORT!”

Corona threw her hands wide, summoning a complex series of magical circles all around her. She started a spell to make it impossible to fold through space like he was, combining the move with Tom for a brilliant finisher, but then it hit her.

It was like an ice pick going through her heart.

Someone’s dead.

“OH WOW, YOU HAVE SOME STRONG EMPATHY THERE!” Bill laughed at her. “HERE, LET ME ADD TO IT!” Rather than going for the currently motionless Corona, he went for the concerned Tom. He grew his triangular form to the size of a building, transforming his singular eye into a mouth. He bit down on Tom, tearing the ethereal Star spirit in two, tossing the other half to Corona.

Corona stared at the dissipating back half of Tom, her brain not processing what’d just happened.

Bill’s eye flashed with the light of a dying Star. “THERE YOU GO SUNSHINE, ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST! ALL BECAUSE YOU HAD TO TAKE A MOMENT TO PROCESS A DEATH YOU CAN’T EVEN IDENTIFY!”

Corona lit herself on fire.

“PLEASE, WHAT’S THAT GOING TO DO, SCARE ME?”

She teleported a centimeter from his eye, touching her fingers to the dream demon’s flesh.

She stood in an endless expanse of white, with only Bill in front of her – though now he was normal size, about that of her head.

“WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL…” He said, circling her. “YOU’RE GOING TO TRY TO TAKE ME IN A MINDSCAPE BATTLE? THAT’S REALLY STUPID, SUNSHINE.”

“Bill, what are you planning?”

“LET ME TELL YOU! I’M GOING TO BURN YOUR PATHETIC LITTLE MENTAL IMAGE TO OBLIVION, EMPTYING YOUR BRAIN!”

“Bill, what are you planning?”

“I JUST TOLD Y- WAIT.”

“Bill, what are you planning?”

“CORONA, WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING!?”

Corona smiled. “Hi Bill! This is Corona’s will to kill you. I’ve been shafted into this mindscape with only scant hints of a personality, enough to keep you here. I have now determined exactly how to destroy this place with both of us in it.” She imagined a gun and held it to her head.

Bill teleported it away. “CLEVER TRICK, BUT YOU CAN’T JUST KILL US LIKE THAT. SORRY TO BURST YOUR BUBBLE.”

Corona kept smiling innocently. “I don’t need it.”

“…WHAT?”

“Goodbye.” Corona’s fragment willed death onto itself. She shimmered, sparked, and disappeared in a puff of fire.

Bill stared at where she’d been. “…CORONAAAAAAAAA!”

Corona’s fragment did not return to her – so she had no idea what had occurred in the mindscape, or even what her plan had been after touching Bill. She was left with a gaping hole inside her mind, one that would bother her for eternity.

All she knew was that she did something that worked.

Bill disintegrated right in front of her, shouting her name as he vanished into pixelated nothingness. The force of his destruction shot a powerful burst of energy up her extended arm, breaking it in three places, forcing blood to fly off the shattered limb.

The weirdness bubble remained; it would take more than the destruction of Bill to remove it.

Corona took a moment to herself – Nanoha and Hastur could deal with Kars. She used her free hand to start mending the limb, allowing a moment to process.

Someone had died. Then Tom had died. Then Bill had died, somehow.

“This isn’t going to screw me up again,” Corona told herself. “Never again.”

She lifted her bloodied arm that had been broken just a minute ago into the air. “NEVER AGAIN!”

She rushed Kars, planning to tag-team with Nanoha and Hastur to finally beat the ‘ultimate lifeform’ into the ground.

“RECONDITIONER FAILURE!” Raging Sights and Raising Heart shouted at the same time. “INITIATING COUNTERMEASURES!” Nanoha and Corona’s minds were protected by automatic spells, preventing the failure of the reconditioner devices from letting the loyalty program in.

Hastur was not so lucky. He went from unleashing the spawn of hell on Kars to unleashing the spawn of hell on Nanoha and Corona.

Nanoha raised a shield around the two of them. “Something disabled the reconditioner!”

“That means…”

“Anyone without a way to defend mentally, like us, is now an enemy!”

Corona didn’t say anything – she just ground her teeth. That was perhaps the worst thing that could have happened.

~~~

“MUDA MUDA MUDA MUDA MUDA!” Giorno shouted, meeting every last one of Superman’s punches with Golden Experience Requiem, undoing every last action – yet unable to trap Superman in his own death. The Stand simply didn’t have the physical power to overcome the hero.

Death was fighting with his scythe – avoiding using his control over the life-force at all costs, for all their attackers were heroes at heart, people who did not deserve to die for actions that were out of their control. Despite his inhuman accuracy, he was not skilled at fighting to incapacitate; most of his prior opponents had themselves been inhuman, to put it extremely mildly. He was being beat back. He may not have been tiring, but he wasn’t winning.

Tornado was doing the best out of all of them, taking care of multiple heroes at once with her telekinesis – but she was bleeding, bruised, and battered. She was certainly tiring. Tiring to the point at which she would soon pass out from overexertion.

Alushy had been losing, badly, for several minutes now, but nobody could keep the shadow vampire down. She just kept lashing out with her darkness, proving her tenacity to all.

Blackjack…

Blackjack was on her fourth hero. She’d killed a Professor X and a Spider-Man, and had simply defeated an Aquaman.

In front of her was Wolverine. He was pissed, to put it mildly. Blackjack would bet he knew the Professor X she’d shot, thinking he would be made of sterner stuff.

Blackjack was running low on magic reserves, and Wolverine had a nasty combo of knives in his hands and regeneration that didn’t depend on anything in reserves. He was cutting her up pretty badly, and there wasn’t much she could do about it besides wave her Starmetal sword and hope it worked.

The good news? It cut his supposedly indestructible claws.

The bad news? Wolverine was smart enough not to let her cut a limb clean off, so his regeneration was able to compensate.

Oh, and Blackjack was about to pass out from blood loss. That was bad news as well, but she wasn’t paying much attention to it.

She unleashed a shotgun in his face, forcing him back. She took to the skies, bombarding Wolverine with magic bolts that did nothing. He leaped up to her and scraped her neck.

All right, Blackjack thought, teleporting a ways back. I just need to last a little longer, and a way to beat this guy will come to me. It always does. Just gotta keep thinking… Have to stay conscious, too. Have to… Have to…

Her legs buckled beneath her. W-what? No, I have plenty of energy left! I can keep fighting! I ca… She crumpled to the ground, gasping for air. I…

Wolverine drove his claws into her chest, piercing not only her heart, but several vital motors.

I can’t just win anymore. She realized, unable to even try to breathe at this point.

This is what she’d asked for.

None of her friends would die here… but she would.

Her last act was to smile at the irony of it all.

She felt something inside her switch its loyalty to the Collector – but she didn’t care. She couldn’t do anything at this point. She just needed to… go. That’s right.

The last thing she saw was a vibrant purple flash.

~~~

Nova looked at the reports flying across her hoof-screen. “The Collector just figured out how they were resisting the Catcher. Almost all the invading force has been conditioned to join the Collection now.”

Starbeat bit her lip. “Do they even have a chance now?”

“It’s not looking like it. The odds are overwhelmingly in our favor now.”

But that’s when the tables always turn, Starbeat reminded herself. Plus, they have me now. I’m still free. I can do something here… Something to bring it all back around. Flip the table flip.

“Whoop de do,” Rick blurted in response to Nova. “Now you can get out of my space.”

“Not yet,” Pinkie said. “The fight is still ongoing. They might make a last-ditch effort here yet. We must be ready.”

Starbeat gulped, putting on her goggles. Somehow, deep down, she knew nobody was going to just find this place by chance. That’s why she was here – she had to do something other than just wait for fate. She cleaned off her lenses with her magic and put on her game face.

Jotaro glanced at her. “Preparing for battle?”

“You could say that,” Starbeat said. “I have a sense that it’s about to get really wild in here.”

“Pinkie?” Jotaro asked.

“Same,” Pinkie said, her tail twitching. “Something’s going to happen.”

Everyone got on their guard – even Rick – looking everywhere in the room for a possible incursion point.

Conveniently leaving all their eyes off the weak spot.

Starbeat sauntered over to it, attempting to look like a guard dog. Luckily none of them were paying close attention to her. She lit her horn, charging as much energy as she could into it.

“Huh. The magic readings in the room just spiked considerably…” Nova said, tapping her screen. “It’s coming from…”

Starbeat knew she was out of time. She whirled around, driving her horn physically into the weak point and unloading all the energy she had into the Catcher. The column surged, twitched, and then exploded, sending Starbeat flying.

She didn’t care that she had horribly electrocuted herself or that several shards of metal were now embedded in her body, she had done it. She had destroyed the Catcher. Every member of the Collection would run free and take down the Collector before he could fix it. It was a victory.

Then Starbeat realized she wasn’t flying backward anymore – she was falling forward.

She’d been caught in a rewind spell.

Starbeat saw Nova crying out of the corner of her eyes. “Why couldn’t you have been a little faster!?” Nova shouted. “It was almost gone! WE WERE ALMOST FREE!”

The Catcher completely fixed itself, allowing Starbeat to stand, dumbfounded. “I… I couldn’t do it.”

“Knew it,” Rick said, lifting a gun. “Say good-”

The gun was kicked out of his hand. But it wasn’t by any member of Pinkie’s team, Allure, or Starbeat.

It was Lightning.

“Stand down, Rick,” Lightning said, walking slowly toward Starbeat. “She’s been beaten already.”

“No, you think?” Starbeat shouted at her, wailing. “You people designed it like this, didn’t you? So ponies like me could be humiliated!”

Lightning didn’t respond. She just examined the Catcher, making sure it was still operational.

“That was a pretty clever trick, lying to all your friends,” Lightning said. “Getting them to think you were one of the Collection, tricking them to coming here… That was some excellent work, Starbeat.”

“So what now? You zap my mind and add me to your little fun-time Collection?”

“Not yet,” Lightning admitted. “I want to see if you’ll try something. If you’ll think of another way out of this. If you have some other plan.”

“That’s dumb of you,” Starbeat commented.

Lightning didn’t respond to this. She just started walking around the room. “You are right, we designed it this way on purpose. It doesn’t have to be centralized here. It could be split up over several nodes and have backups. But it doesn’t.”

“Then why build the fucking thing!?” Vriska shouted.

Lightning looked to Pinkie and Starbeat. “Because that was the way it needed to be built.”

“Bullshit, copout,” Rick declared. “That’s never the only reason unless you’re one of those ka religious nuts. You’re not. I think it’s because you like to mess with people.”

Lightning didn’t confirm or deny this. She just turned to Starbeat. “Well?”

“…I’ve got nothing besides try to kill you and fail miserably.”

Lightning nodded. “Shame you didn’t try… It probably would have been interesting.” She held up a hand, focusing a conditioning spell on Starbeat.

She grimaced.

~~~

The Collector felt the Catcher explode. He took in a sharp breath, holding it. His heart raced faster than it ever had before.

Then he felt it reassemble. He let out the breath, but his heart kept racing just as fast as it had been.

“If you weren’t an augmented cyborg, that would be dangerous,” Thanos observed.

“I know…” the Collector said, breathing heavily. “I’m very aware I’m beyond all sane levels of stress right now. I’m probably more off the end of the crazy plank than I already was.”

“You should check yourself for brain damage after this.”

“No, really?”

Thanos nodded.

“…Right, sorry. You’re just being helpful. …Not like you can be anything else anyway.”

Thanos looked away. “It looks as if we are going to win now.”

“Famous last words,” the Collector said bitterly. “The Flowers are still hammering on our doorstep. And if we do drive back all their forces, they will resort to simply destroying this universe and everything in it.”

Thanos blinked. “…I thought you had a plan for that?”

“I do, Thanos, I do have a plan. The plan ensures it never comes to that.” The Collector started pacing around the office again – it had been cleaned up remarkably well in such a short time, the only remnant of the recent fight being a fishy smell coating the room. It annoyed the Collector, but not enough to be a large concern at the moment.

He rubbed his knuckles together, the motion becoming more violent as the day went on.

“Thanos, give me a prediction. What are the scenarios in which we can stop the Flowers from destroying the universe?”

Thanos raised an eyebrow. “I th-”

“Just answer the question.”

Thanos processed the request. “We capture the Sunflower Officer and use him as a hostage, but even then he may be deemed an acceptable loss.”

“Right… Right… Thanos, forget I asked the question.”

Thanos did. He looked lost for a few seconds, but got back to work.

“It appears I lost concentration there for a few moments. Excuse me while I get back on track…”

“No worries,” the Collector said. “You’re doing great.” He turned to stare at the screen that still had fighting.

Nanoha and Corona, two of the last few still standing.

“No matter what you say about the White Devil, she does have her limits,” the Collector said. “Do you think they can take care of Kars and Hastur?”

“Perhaps. But when our new forces arrive to face them, they will fall. Come to think of it, we can reroute many of our higher powers to there now that we have control again.”

“Do it. Crush them.”

Let’s see if that’ll make them move.

The Collector continued rubbing his knuckles together, ever-increasing the speed.

It would all end soon.

078 - The Collector, Part 2

Aradia died again.

She was fighting Davepeta, and the method by which her death was triggered was a sword known as Caledscratch, a time blade at least twice as tall as Davepeta themselves. It drove Aradia through her chest, triggering a Heroic death.

The rest of the present Aradias twisted their wrists and charged Davepeta, cracking their whips. They charged from all sides, only to find multiple Davepetas all around them. Aradia knew better than to think they were separate entities – Dave never used time travel in such a way to split his time stream if he could help it. She was looking all at one continuous timestream, where there was a future-most Davepeta.

She was going to use this to her advantage. She split her timeline, allowing a version of herself to watch the events from afar and determine which version of Dave was the furthest in the future. She waited for the Davepeta clones to temporally resolve into one, then jumped back in time to tell the Aradias which was which.

They tackled the future-most Dave – but as the future-most Dave, he was able to feel and react to the shift in time Aradia had triggered. He swung Caledscratch wide, mortally wounding three of the Handmaids. There were either Heroic deaths or wounds that would be taken care of by loose members of the Collection.

Davepeta charged again, this time with accelerated time. An Aradia fell, but two others used their whips to lash around Caledscratch, disarming Davepeta. Other Aradias used their telekinesis to hold Davepeta in place. They just traveled to the past to escape Aradia’s grip, but lo and behold, Aradia was waiting there at the exact same time, swinging Caledscratch back at them.

Davepeta glanced to the Omnitrix, considering using it – but they knew it would actually hinder them. If they didn’t have access to time travel, Aradia would make quick work of them. Their default form had the highest control over time and a smattering of other abilities, so the choice was obvious.

They leaned back, unable to dodge the blade completely, but their sprite-nature allowed the blade to pass through them, the power of the blade culminating in an annoying itch. They used their sudden proximity to the Aradia to use their claws to tear the temporal clone’s face off.

“Why so serious?” an Aradia asked from a distance as Davepeta dealt with more of her selves. “I never knew either of you to go into a fight without cracking at least a few jokes or narrating your own attacks.”

“Because this meowtherfucking sucks,” Davepeta spat. “I’m killing you hundreds of times. You’re like, both my old creepy friend and my time meowntor. And you’re not even trying to kill me! Not a single lethal blow!”

“Davepeta… I’m basically the god of death in many ways. It would be easy for me to do that, especially considering how you fight.”

“Then why aren’t you?”

“I can beat you without killing you.”

Davepeta shook their head while they rammed two Aradias’ skulls into each other. “No you can’t! I’m a sprite Aradia! You can’t just contain sprites!” They spread their wings and flew into the air, unleashing a beam of sprite energy at the ground. The Aradias appeared all around Davepeta, tying them up with whips - except Davepeta decided to be intangible for the moment, allowing the whips to pass through. “See? You can’t hold me in place with whips. I can time-shift out of your telekinesis every time. It’s a standstill Aradia!”

“No it isn’t!” Aradia shouted, several of her clones, trapping Davepeta in her telekinesis. Davepeta shifted to the past, but the Aradias were already there, keeping them frozen. Davepeta shifted to the future, but the Aradias were there as well.

“You’re not going anywhere,” the Aradias said, pressing down on Davepeta’s head, trying to force them into unconsciousness.

A future version of Davepeta appeared next to their past self, removing the past version from the telekinesis and telling the past version to become the future version. Then the future version started cutting off heads.

Aradia twitched, trying the telekinetic barrier again – but the same thing happened.

Fine then, I can’t outright defeat you. I’ll go do other things while my other selves keep you occupied.

Aradia appeared between Nanoha and Corona as they fought Hastur and Kars. “Hey girls! How’s it going?”

“Please tell me you’re resistant to the conditioning,” Corona muttered, blood dripping down her face.

“Yep! For now anyway,” Aradia said, checking her mental defenses. All good up there. “I believe I can revert Kars to a previous time-state simply enough… Just-”

Davepeta appeared in front of her and skewered her through the chest.

“OH COME ON!” Another version of Aradia yelled, dragging Davepeta further into the past. “How did you know!?”

“Not the only time traveler in the Collection,” Davepeta revealed. “I do have the most control over it out of all of them, which is why I’m dealing with you, but the others who can see through time and move through it on smaller scales will keep informing me of where I need to be.”

“I would recommend changing up your strategy,” a tall man in a labcoat said, walking out of a rift in time. “See, it’s come to our attention Davepeta is simply fighting you to a standstill. So naturally we must offer our assistance.”

“Professor Paradox…” Aradia frowned. “I wondered what happened to you. …Wait, are you the same version I know?”

“Sadly, no,” Professor Paradox said. “But I’m not your biggest problem here.”

A purple monster made of mist and clockwork appeared between Professor Paradox and Davepeta, roaring furiously.

A time eater.

“Well that explains why there aren’t any time anomalies here, if you’ve got one of those,” Aradia observed.

“I’m afraid it will have to devour you now.”

Aradia sighed. “And I’m afraid I have to become Maid of Death. I am sorry.” She thrust her hand forward, shifting time slightly to confuse Davepeta and Professor Paradox. As she expected, the time eater did not move with the time shift – it was impervious.

But she still had something she could do, assuming the time eater had a soul. She tapped into the realm of spirits and the dead, the pupils in her eyes vanishing for a moment. She looked like something that had died for a moment.

The copies of herself kept their living nature, throwing themselves at the time eater to keep it occupied – being devoured by the dozen. It was enough – the spiritually attuned Aradia gripped the spirit of the time eater. “I bring you to your fate,” she said, emotionless.

The time eater lost all of its spirit, dissolving into a pile of gears and gnashing teeth. It fell to the ground, destroying one of the Plaza’s discs.

“What the fresh hell was that!?” Davepeta blurted.

The ghostly Aradia stared at Davepeta. “Not an ability granted by being the Maid of Time. I was dead once, as you know, and even before then I had felt a deep connection to the dead of the world. After a few hundred years I learned that connection could be used in terrifying ways.” She lifted her hands up. “I’m not as impressive as Death himself, but that doesn’t matter, does it?”

Professor Paradox clutched his heart, trying to shift through time to escape – but the other Aradias blocked his passage long enough for him to fall to where the Time Eater was.

The ghostly Aradia turned to Davepeta, face emotionless. Davepeta only knew Aradia was sorrowful because of the faces of the other versions.

The ghostly Aradia moved her hands past each other – and Davepeta’s soul left their body. The sprite’s strobe green-orange color becoming muted. They fell to the ground, lifeless.

“We’re not done!” Another Aradia shouted to the ghostly one – not coming in time. A copy of Davepeta appeared behind her and drove a Caledscratch through her chest. She fell Heroically.

Davepeta leaped back – it was only a matter of time before another Aradia tapped into her spiritual powers, and then they were dead. Aradia wouldn’t fall for the time-clone again – and frankly Davepeta felt disgusted that they’d allowed the forced loyalty to make them do that. The Omnitrix did have a handful of beings immune to spiritual manipulation – Ghostfreak most prominently – but none of them could also manipulate time.

…There was one, though, but that’d be risky…

Who cared if it was risky, it was the only way to win.

“ALIEN X!” Davepeta ordered the Omnitrix. In a flash of green, they transformed into a female Celestialsapien, their body tapping into the substance of the universe.

All of the Aradias froze – there was no way this was going to work, right? Celestialsapiens had to internally debate every action they ever took – but she wouldn’t put it past Nepeta to have a good understanding of the Celestialsapien’s internal thought process… Rogue of Heart, after all, she could probably convince the internal voices without too much trouble…

Several Aradias acted, rewinding time around Nepeta, forcing her back into the form of Davepeta. The sprite took a moment to process this – enough for the Aradias to not only grab with their telekinesis, but crush Davepeta as well. Sprites were more or less indestructible, but a purely psychic attack coming from over a dozen powerful psychics was more than enough to incur lethal damage. Glowing green-orange fluids began to burst from their body, making them scream.

Aradia winced. “Davepeta, I’m sorry!”

“You’re… doing what you have to…” Davepeta muttered. They forced a smile that tried to be ironically cute. “Nya Nya!”

And then the sprite exploded in a shower of neon light.

Aradia dropped her hands to her sides, breathing heavily.

“…I barely knew you were still alive,” she muttered to nobody in particular. One of her versions picked up the Omnitrix and looked at it closely. She tucked it in her robes – something to look at later.

There were still other things she needed to do here.

~~~

“Incoming call,” Thanos told the Collector. “Coming from inside. Marked ‘urgent’ in every way I can possibly think of.”

The Collector chuckled. “Finally, something I can do instead of waiting.” He rushed to his computer and answered the call. “Yeah?”

Olivia was onscreen. “Guess what? I’m being forced to tell you something. Your program is really effective, amigo.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, nothing much. I just hacked into your uncontrollables room.”

The Collector fell silent.

“Now, Gyro knocked me in the face before I could do anything intentional, but it says right here that I released one of them. I have no idea which one it was though!” Olivia grinned. “Have fun with that!”

The Collector curled up his fists. “You’re going to defend that room from further digital attacks. Got it?”

“Oh, I’m already doing that. Cause, y’know, it’s the best way I can serve my new master in this semi-injured state. I gotta say, I absolutely love not having any say in what I do. Isn’t that right Gyro?”

“It’s excellent,” Gyro muttered, forcing a cheesy smile. The Collector saw that he was tending the wounded. There was a lot of blood all over him.

“See, ballsy and I here have been bonding over how much you suck. By the way, the moment I get free from this loyalty, I release all of them.”

The Collector folded his hands. “In that case, instead of defending it, I want you to lock yourself out.”

“…Wait, what?”

“You heard me. There’s a high chance you get freed again because someone interrupts it. Lock yourself out now.”

Olivia twitched, pressing a few buttons. “There. Scrambled it. Now I’ll have to get back in from scratch. Happy?”

“Very. Add extra firewalls and then throw away the key, if you can.”

“I’m not sure you understand how this works.”

“Not really,” the Collector admitted. “But I know you can make it more difficult for your future self. So keep doing that.”

Olivia showed him her middle finger and cut the transmission.

“I wonder why people think that gesture is ever going to be effective in riling people up,” the Collector muttered. “Thanos, what’s happening?”

“Aradia’s won. She’s beginning to take control over things on a temporal level.”

“The moment it gets completely out of our control, tell me.” The Collector moved a finger toward a button on his keyboard. “I’ll cut the timestream physics.”

Thanos nodded, continuing his examinations of the situation. His projections ranged from extremely favorable to absolute garbage. A mixed pot of probabilities that were continually changing as the conflict evolved.

~~~

“DIVINE BUSTER!” Nanoha shouted, engulfing Hastur and Kars in a blast of her energy. Hastur retaliated with an eldritch pulse that tore at Nanoha and Corona’s minds – but Corona used her empathic abilities to heal hers and Nanoha’s mind. To her, it took a few minutes to root around their minds – but it was effectively instant to Kars and Hastur.

Nanoha shifted to juggling long-range spells to keep Kars and Hastur back while Corona set up a complex spell to take care of Hastur.

The physics of this universe are highly malleable, likely because the Collector wanted to be able to alter it on a whim. Good for us though, Raging Sights, because that gives us an in. Hastur’s eldritch nature is forced into his current yellow-cloak wearing self, but if we tweak the conversion around him just slightly compounded with a sealing spell and some flashy fire to make him react… Run the calculations needed to seal him away while I set up the rest of these circles.

Understood, Raging Sights responded, processing the request to seal Hastur with the complex spell.

Kars noticed Corona was doing something. Clearly it needed to be stopped – he created four black wings from his back, using his hands to bring magical power to himself. He punched at the fiery mage.

“BARRIER!” Nanoha shouted, creating a magical shield between Kars and Corona.

“A simple barrier is nothing!” Kars shouted, creating an extra-sharp unicorn horn out from his wrist, piercing the magic barrier with his own power, sailing toward Corona.

“Bacon Pancakes, flatten him,” Corona muttered, trying very hard not to break her focus. Any Stand user would have been able to dodge the low-will attack, but Kars was unable to even see Bacon Pancakes. He essentially ran right into the central disc of the Stand, flattening like a piece of paper.

Nanoha took advantage of this, using her long-range spells to cut him up into dozens of pieces, keeping Hastur back with another Divine Buster.

“Execute!” Corona declared. The circles around her activated, creating a set of six circles around Hastur, boxing him in. Having just been hit by one of Nanoha’s heavy attacks, he didn’t offer much in the way of resistance as he felt the physics inside the box reduce his power considerably – enough to where the magic circles could wrap around him. With a pop, his essence was sealed within a small, gray marble. Corona grabbed it from the air and pocketed it. “Got him.”

Nanoha threw her staff into the air, ignoring the pain from the wounds in her hand and chest. “Woo! We won! I haven’t had such a close battle in ages…” She wiped blood from her eyes.

“You need to get out more…” Corona muttered, stretching.

“You’re not done yet!” Kars shouted, having completely regenerated from being shredded.

“…Jenny should probably be dealing with this nut,” Corona deadpanned. “Regen v regen has a way of cancelling out.”

Nanoha sighed. “Lets see if I have enough energy left for a Starlight Breaker.”

“I think we might need to push some lethality into it.”

Nanoha nodded, deflecting piranhas that Kars was throwing at them. “Time to break out the vaporizer…”

She twisted to the side out of instinct, narrowly dodging a punch from Superman. She didn’t dodge the bite from Alushy, but she managed to throw the vampire pegasus off quickly. Corona was completely unable to deal with the tag-team that was Tornado and Giorno. The powerful telekinesis tossed her into the fists of Gold Experience Requiem, creating wounds that she couldn’t heal.

Corona grasped her broken ribs, wincing. “Nanoha! We can’t win this one, we’re way too injured!”

“BEAM PULSE!” Nanoha shouted, pushing back all their attackers with a spherical magic burst. “I know Corona! But I don’t think they’ll give us time to escape!”

“We’ve gotta figure out so-” Both of their magical senses shook them fundamentally. They felt, for a moment, the loyalty program weakening its attack on their mental shields. They saw their attackers pause… But then the loyalty program fixed itself.

“Did you feel that?” Corona asked.

“Yeah!” Nanoha answered. “That was Starbeat’s magic, I’m sure of it!”

“We need to teleport the-” Corona had to use Bacon Pancakes to defend against Gold Experience Requiem, unable to flatten the golden humanoid.

“We can’t teleport!” Nanoha shouted, having serious difficulty with Superman and Kars. “And I don’t know who else we can trust to deal with it for us!” She raised a shield, but it wasn’t enough to stop Superman’s fist from tossing her to the ground. Tornado did the same to Corona, except with telekinesis.

The two powerful mages lay prone on the ground.

“Giorno might keep us alive…” Corona grunted.

“Kars won’t,” Nanoha coughed.

Corona sighed. “I had so much left to do…”

“You always feel that way,” Nanoha said. The two of them saw Kars produce his arm-blades, aiming for both of their hearts. They didn’t have the energy in them to resist in this situation they knew they couldn’t win in.

And then time stopped. Aradia appeared in front of them and lifted them to their feet with her telekinesis. “You look like you need a hand.”

Corona let out a sigh of relief – an action that was painful to her broken ribs. “Ow. Ow.”

“You two have somewhere to go,” Aradia said, numerous temporal copies of herself appearing alongside her. “I can take care of this now. Go, find Starbeat.”

Corona nodded. “Right.” She prepared the teleport – but stopped. “Aradia, look out!”

“Hm? None of them have time po-”

“Gold Experience Requiem i-”

Giorno’s Stand moved on its own through Aradia’s stopped time, punching the Aradia that was in the stopped time – somehow freezing her and letting all the rest of time to resume. Another Aradia froze everything, but Gold Experience Requiem still moved.

“Well this is going to be a little challenging,” the new Aradia commented. “Still, go, I have nearly endless lives. You don’t. I can keep them busy now.”

Nanoha nodded. She lifted Raising Heart, scanning for the source of Starbeat’s tremendous discharge of magic… and about ten seconds later teleported herself and Corona away.

It didn’t take long for Aradia to discover the true pain that was fighting Gold Experience Requiem. Aradias began falling like dominoes in the middle of stopped time.

“Okay, okay, your ability is cheap!” Aradia flung her arms wide – only to be shot into a time loop of her own creation by Gold Experience Requiem.

At this point Aradia was able to use her psychic powers to sense the location of the Stand, but she couldn’t imagine how in reality it was actually doing anything. “What are you!?”

“A requiem Stand,” Gold Experience Requiem said.

“…You can talk!?”

“My ability is to ensure my target never reaches reality.”

“Manifesting as a very complicated undo button with a lot of strange side effects, apparently,” Aradia muttered. She was hit by Gold Experience Requiem and frozen in her own time.

“You know, I kinda fail to see how this applies,” another Aradia muttered, narrowing her eyes. “I think Alushy has a word for this.”

“Complete Bullshit?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s it.” Aradia narrowed her eyes. “So, I’m going to have to be clever here.”

“You will never reach reality.”

“Yeah, but my past self can knock your user out. No matter how independent you are, you still need Giorno’s will to operate.” She winked. “Goodbyyyye!”

A past version of Aradia kicked Giorno across the base of the skull in stopped time, and then allowed time to resume so Giorno would register the kick. He passed out – and Gold Experience Requiem was recalled.

Aradia smirked, smiling at the rest of her opponents.

“Sweet!” Alushy shouted. “You beat the Complete Bullshit Stand!”

A few dozen Aradia’s cracked their knuckles. “And the rest of you can’t do anything to me!” She tried to stop time again – but found it didn’t work. Shortly thereafter she felt all her control over time vanish.

Time manipulation was no longer allowed in this universe.

Aradia did a count – there were over a hundred of her still in the Collection. But she wasn’t going to be able to make any more now…

She was going to have to be careful.

Considering how three of her had died while she was contemplating this, she wasn’t off to a very good start.

Superman plowed into her miniature army, knocking her selves down like bowling pins. Kars threw a bunch of piranhas into her group, severely wounding many of her. Most of Aradia took to the sky, resorting to whips and telekinesis to fight.

She discovered the hard way that Tornado’s telekinesis was leagues ahead of her own. Five Aradias at once tried to go at her in a telekinesis battle, all five were crushed against distant walls.

“Sorry, but it looks like I have to…” Aradia muttered, forcing one of her selves to tap into her spirit powers. She pointed at Kars, ready to remove his spirit from his body.

But then Death himself showed up. He extinguished Aradia’s soul with ease. I AM SORRY, GUARDIAN OF SPIRITS.

“No way, they got you t-” the Aradia saying this fell back, dead.

I AM THE DEATH ORIGINALLY TAKEN FROM THE DISC YEARS AGO. Another Aradia fell. Alushy, Tornado, Superman, and Kars stopped doing anything – they just watched Death work without inhibitions. IT IS A HORRIBLE MISUSE OF MY POWER. IF ONLY THERE WERE A PUNISHMENT WORSE THAN DEATH THAT COULD BE GIVEN TO THE COLLECTOR FOR THIS HEINOUS ACT.

Some Aradias tried to run, but Death took care of them first. One Aradia tried to attack Death’s spirit, but it was far too strong a light for a mere Maid of Time to deal with. She fell- and fell again. And again.

Aradia realized with no small amount of fear that she had no backups outside the Collection right now. There were a handful of her selves spread around in other locations, but that was less than a dozen.

She could actually die here.

Death reduced the number of Aradias before him down to one. I HAVE BEEN ORDERED TO HUNT DOWN THE REST OF YOU INSIDE THIS COLLECTION. ARADIA, YOUR LONG LIFE WILL END HERE, IN THIS PLACE. I AM TRULY SORRY.

Aradia sighed. “I won’t hold a grudge over it.”

“Pff, that’s stupid!” a new, female voice blurted. A young woman walked up to Aradia – her hair flowing in the nonexistent breeze, her intelligent emerald eyes scanning the world around them. “Anyone who kills you deserves to get a least a little revenge handed to them.”

Death stared at her. “…WHO ARE YOU?”

“Oh, little old me?” she chuckled. “Name’s Monika. Aaaaand… You want to take a nap!”

Death’s body twitched as if it were made of a glitch – and then he fell asleep.

“I didn’t know he could sleep,” Alushy observed.

“He couldn’t,” Monika said, smirking. “Let’s see what I can do to your character file…”

Superman punched her through the gut, making her cry out in pain. An instant later she was perfectly fine and Superman was on the ground, clutching his chest. “W-what?”

“Kryptonite mode! Enjoy feeling like a small bit of Kryptonite is next to you until I switch it off!” Monika grinned. “Whooo’s next on the editing train?”

Aradia let out a laugh. “With you on our side we can just go to the Collector and make quick work of him!”

“Maybe,” Monika said, making Alushy’s wings stop functioning and forcing Kars to eat his own piranhas. “But I don’t have any idea where he is. Just figured that you were the good guy here since, you know, you were being beat to a pulp and the guy who was killing you was apologizing for it.”

“It is a complicated situation,” Aradia admitted. “Hey, you have access to the ‘code of the universe’ right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Think you can turn time travel back on?”

Monika grinned. “I sure can try!”

~~~

The Collector rammed his fist through his monitor. “Why did it have to be Monika!?”

“I would say it was just random, but ka probably conspired against us here,” Thanos suggested.

“She could ruin everything…” the Collector growled. “It was nearly impossible to trap her in there in the first place! Just… Gah!” The Collector pressed a button again – undoing Monika’s edit of reality to again disallow time travel. He knew in a few seconds she would just add it back, and he’d have to push the button again… A pointless, vicious cycle that was likely to bring about paradoxes like candy at a movie theater.

“Lightning only needs a few more minutes…” the Collector grunted.

“To do what?”

“The plan, Thanos. The plan.”

Thanos looked at the Collector. “…I’m starting to wonder if you actually have a plan.”

“The good thing about our relationship is that you don’t actually have to have faith in me, you just have to do what I say. Keep analyzing. If you can find a way to defeat Monika, I’m all ears. It took several hours to get her in there last time and we really don’t have that right now.”

Thanos shook his head. “I suggest keeping her distracted until whatever Lightning’s doing completes.”

The Collector nodded, continuing his pacing and rubbing his knuckles.

Monika better not screw this up at the last minute.

~~~

Corona knew a conditioning spell when she saw one. The instant Nanoha teleported them into the Catcher room, Corona intercepted the spell from Lightning and dissipated the energy. “How about no, we don’t brainwash Starbeat?”

“Oh thank goodness,” Starbeat said, sighing in relief. “I’m re-” She blinked. “You two look like you went through a meat grinder.”

“Not that far off…” Nanoha muttered, coughing up blood.

Corona noticed who their opponents were – Lightning, Rick, and the entire Primary Team of Merodi Universalis. None of them looked even slightly injured, while both Corona and Nanoha had been just shy of death mere moments ago.

Rick lifted his button to press it – but Lightning held her hand. “No, Rick. These two will make excellent additions to the Collection. We can take them as they are.”

Just to be safe Corona teleported Rick’s button away from him and sent it to a pocket dimension.

“Great going Lightning, there goes the instant win button,” Rick spat. “Whatever, it’s your funeral.”

Lightning drew her weapon – a foldable gunblade, capable of acting as both a shortsword and a burst rifle at the same time. She pointed it at Nanoha and Corona. “Just turn yourselves in. I don’t want to accidentally kill you in a fight.”

“We can’t win this…” Nanoha muttered.

“I want to punch her smug face in anyway,” Corona said, curling her fingers. “It’ll be fun.”

“I think both of us would rather live, hrm?”

Corona thought for a moment – and dropped her fist. “…I hate it when the answer is to just surrender. Always feels nasty.”

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO WIN!” Starbeat shouted. “JUST DESTROY THIS PILLAR RIGHT HERE BY ATTACKING THIS RED SPOT AND KEEP NOVA FROM REWINDING IT!” She raised a shield, blocking a death ray shot from Rick, but was unable to stop Lightning’s ‘Thundaja’ spell. It forced her mane to stand on end and her entire nervous system to freeze up, paralyzing her.

Corona blinked, turning to Nanoha. “Think we can do that?”

“DIVINE BUSTER!” Nanoha shouted, unleashing a torrent of energy at the pillar’s weak spot. Lightning placed herself in the beam’s path.

“Shellga!” A shimmering green shell appeared around her, deflecting the beam.

Vriska and Jotaro moved in next, pummeling Nanoha with everything they had. Her luck was sapped and she was punched enough to pass out completely.

Meanwhile Corona was setting up a cascade spell while dodging Rick and Nova’s energy blasts – specifically Rick’s, since they were more deadly. She was managing to hold her own using a combination of Bacon Pancakes and automatic defense spells loaded off onto Raging Sights.

And then Pinkie had to ruin the entire thing by appearing inside the shield and smacking Corona with a squeaky hammer, interrupting her cascade spell. The explosion went off, but it wasn’t powerful enough to bring the Catcher down.

Another hit from the hammer knocked Corona to the floor, prone. “Aaaaand gotcha!” Pinkie cheered.

Corona grunted, lifting up her hand. A yellow magic circle appeared around it.

“Corona don’t make me beat you up more.”

The magic circle activated – and sent out a pathetic yellow squirt of energy. Corona let out a sigh and let her body go limp. She wasn’t out cold, but she really didn’t have any energy left. She’d way overtaxed herself at this point.

Flutterfree sighed. “Well, I think that was our last-ditch attempt to get out of this mess.”

Rick grunted. “You talk like you expected them to succeed.”

“I did,” Flutterfree said. “All it would take was one carefully planned shot. If they hadn’t already been so weak… We would be free right now.”

Lightning shrugged. “That might be true. But don’t let your guard down. It’s times like this when someone pulls something completely unexpected out.”

“You got that right,” Starbeat said, a small yellow circle of magic still rotating around her horn, curing her of paralysis. She drove her horn into the weak point and flooded it with magic again.

Nova tried to rewind time – but she found that the universe no longer allowed the manipulation of time.

The Catcher exploded. Starbeat leaped back to avoid extensive damage from the shrapnel.

And the Catcher’s loyalty conditioning completely failed across the Collection.

~~~

Many universes away, in a padded cell, the Twilight known as GM felt something.

Freedom.

She let out a truly joyous laugh, the elated motion forcing tears out of her eyes.

Freedom.

~~~

Every being still conscious within the Collection felt a weight on their soul vanish. Everywhere, fighting stopped. The Collected dropped their weapons – many breaking down into tears of joy or dances of celebration.

Many of them had been here for longer than their natural lifespans and didn’t know what to do with the freedom. They just froze.

It was a select few who were actually loyal to the Collector, and the majority of them knew fighting would be pointless now that enemies surrounded them. They kept quiet while the celebrations broke out.

Gyro was doing none of these things. He and Olivia were pulling a large sled made from cobbled together pieces of metal through the Plaza. “HEALER!” Gyro called. “WE NEED A HEALER!”

A girl in a white dress and similarly colored pointy hat lifted up the folds in her clothing and ran over to them. Her face was that of someone who had been through their own personal gauntlet, but her body seemed perfectly healthy – a testament to her abilities. “Who’s dead and who’s not?”

Olivia moved Lieshy and Lileur to the side, leaving Morty, Ivan, Johnny, Froppy, and Lady Rarity on the sled – only the latter two were conscious.

The white mage clapped her hands and infused the five of them with life. Morty, who had been clinging onto life by a thread, gasped and sat up, eyes wide. “…What have I done?”

“The Collector’s bidding,” Froppy muttered, rubbing her head. “I hope they’ve turned him into a bottlecap.”

Morty didn’t have anything to say – he just stared at the forms of Lileur and Lieshy.

Ivan, now fully reconstituted, looked at his hand and sighed.

The white mage dusted her hands. “Right…” she said, breathing heavy. “I can try Arise, but it hasn’t been working lately. I think the flow of life in this universe has been horribly corrupted.”

Gyro equipped steel balls in his hands and placed them to the heads of the two corpses. “Try it anyway.”

The white mage checked with the others – they all nodded, save Morty, who couldn’t stop staring.

“Arise! Arise!” She called, flooding the bodies with white light. Then she took several steps back.

The spell bounced off Lieshy’s body, rejected. It went into Lileur… and brought back something that wanted to eat them. Gyro took care of the thing before it could attack – just a little Spin to the back of the head.

The white mage stared at Lieshy’s body. “…Are you sure she was alive in the conventional sense?”

“Yeah,” Lady Rarity said. “Healing magic worked on her before.” She walked over to the form of her friend, shaking her head. “But there was something odd about the end…”

“She’d touched the room at the top of the Tower,” Olivia pointed out. “Maybe… Maybe that has something to do with it?”

“What does it really matter?” Lady Rarity asked. “It just means she’s not coming back.”

Olivia put a hand to her face, hiding her expression.

“This is all my fault…” Morty said.

“This is the Collector’s fault,” Gyro said, putting a hand on Morty’s shoulder. “Kid, you know better than most how cruel and horrendous the multiverse can be. Don’t let this be the thing that gets to you. Don’t let the Collector consume you.”

“Everyone good? Good.” The white mage picked up the folds of her dress and ran elsewhere. “I’ve got more healing to do!”

She met up with a group of other, similarly dressed healers who talked for a few moments and spread out, giving everyone the aid they needed.

“…At least it’s over now,” Olivia said. “I guess we won.”

Gyro smirked in Olivia’s direction. “Yeah. Yeah you did. I’ve never been so glad to be on the losing side in my entire life.”

~~~

The Collector forced himself to sit down in his main chair; refusing to let his hands move nervously. It was the time to end all times. He would not let the nervous habits get the better of him, no matter how much it drove his stress levels through the roof.

“Thanos?” the Collector asked.

“Mm?”

“You’re free. You can go now.”

“I’m aware,” Thanos said. “But I meant what I said earlier. I believe in what you’re doing. You seek a better multiverse.”

“…It’s nice to know some people just get what I’m doing. Even if it is you. You do know you’re basically the face of ‘greater scope villain’ right?”

Thanos shrugged. “It is a role I find no issue being assigned, even if I do not agree with it.”

The Collector nodded. “Thanos… They’ll be coming. I want you to let what happens happen. You obviously have choice of your own now… but that’s my request. Just let it happen.”

Thanos looked incredulously at the Collector. Then his gaze softened. “I think I see what you’re planning.”

“Really? Cause at this point I’m not so sure anymore.”

Thanos said nothing, opting to stand at the far left of the Collector, hands behind his back.

There was silence in the Collector’s office for all of ten seconds.

The Collector began tapping his fingers on the desk. “…You know I wish they’d hurry up and ge he-”

With a flash of blue light, everyone who had been in the Catcher’s room appeared – Rick, Lightning, Starbeat, Nanoha, Nova, Pinkie, Vriska, Jotaro, Flutterfree, Allure, and Corona.

Rick unleashed a death beam – but the Collector’s personal force field deflected it.

The Collector stopped all other motions to end him by lifting his free hand, revealing it to be wearing the Infinity Gauntlet.

“That won’t work in this universe,” Nova said, nervously.

“I can alter the fundamental nature of any single universe with the push of a button,” the Collector said. “What makes you think I can’t make this item work here?”

He pointed at them with the Infinity Gauntlet, making the large group twitch in fear – save Lightning. She just looked sad.

“One thought, and all of you are disintegrated,” the Collector said. “You would be no more. I could snap these fingers and extinguish every life within this universe, including the Flower fleet. I co-”

Pinkie was holding the Infinity Gauntlet in her front left hoof, standing on the desk next to the Collector. “…You don’t have to try to sell it anymore,” she said. “You’ve gone far enough.”

The Collector gripped the edge of his desk with his fingers, silent.

Nobody moved – the scene might as well have just been Pinkie and the Collector, standing alone at a desk.

Pinkie produced a simple katana with a black hilt, hefting it behind her head – aiming for the Collector’s neck. “You ready?”

“…Ready,” the Collector breathed.

His life flashed before his eyes. A kid who liked stories, perhaps too much. Loved to learn everything about them. Obsessive to the point of a fault, a fault that sometimes got him in trouble. But he enjoyed his life immensely, content when most people of the world weren’t. He grew up like this.

…And then he found the simple mind control device and a dimensional device, buried under a tree in the woods. It had just been a simple camping trip. But that day he was overcome with a realization of what he could do – and what all this meant. He had spent a long time theorizing about the multiverse. He knew it was the multiverse he had pondered over the years.

He knew before he left that the multiverse was a terrible place.

He knew what he could do about it. Using his knowledge of fiction, he entered certain worlds and manipulated the events to his favor, placing people under his control to accomplish these goals. It started out just with the villains and the unsavory types, but he eventually moved to heroes, finding that it was much easier to give them advice if they had no choice but to take it.

And the Collection was born. He subjugated some science-fiction types to help him build it, and from the very start prepared to hide from beings like the Flowers. He knew they existed – though at the time he wasn’t positive they would be the Flowers, or something he hadn’t considered yet.

One of the first worlds had Lightning… She understood his dream, eventually.

He spent much of his flashback thinking of her and all they’d built.

Then of all those centuries in the Collection… Accumulating more and more people, more and more power, more and more experiences with all these people…

Where would they be without him? Nowhere, that’s where. They wouldn’t have amounted to anything anywhere near what he had offered them. Nothing at all.

And here he was, about to get his head cut off. About to die and give up everything.

About to die…

He…

…

…He didn’t want to die after all.

The Collector held up a hand, catching Pinkie’s katana. “…I’ve changed my mind.”

Pinkie’s eyes widened. “But… But your plan!”

“As it turns out… I’m still a human being. I… I can’t go through with it.” With a flick of his wrist, she was sent flying backward, Infinity Gauntlet and katana flying away with her.

Lightning held out a hand to the Collector. “G-”

“Sorry Lightning. Change of plans.” He pressed a button in his arm, activating the expansion protocols within his mechanical suit. His human body remained the same size, but his armor popped open like popcorn, folding out larger mechanical folds that were definitely too large to fit inside the original suit.

He kept growing, the suit replacing the larger pieces of armor with even bigger ones.

Nanoha pointed Raising Heart at him. “BOOST!” She called. Everyone with magic in the room gave her power, allowing her to form a sphere of magic.

Rick took out seven different kinds of guns and fired them all remotely – every burst of energy deflecting right off the Collector’s armor. “How the fuck!?”

“It’s made of every unbreakable alloy he could find,” Thanos reported. “Good luck finding anything that can break it.”

The Collector turned around just before he became too big for the office – punching out the back aquarium wall. Three walls later, he emerged into the Collection Plaza, still growing.

“I’m not done yet!” He yelled at all the people below, holding up his hand. “The Collection is mine! It isn’t going to be taken from me today!” He may not have had the Catcher anymore – but he still had the simple mind-control device he’d picked up all those years ago. Everyone with a weak mind in the Plaza succumbed to his will in an instant. “Let’s remove these invaders! And once we’re done we’ll move the Collection where not even the Flowers will be able to find it!”

“S-STARLIGHT BREAKER!” Nanoha managed, pushing every last ounce of effort she could muster into the spell, adding a focus spell to it. It would only hit the Collector in a focused beam.

The Collector was now large enough to stop the beam with his hand. The power of the White Devil wasn’t enough to power through the anti-magic of the Collector’s armor.

Nanoha let out a soft laugh. “Of course that didn’t work…” she passed out, falling into Corona’s arms.

Monika appeared in front of the Collector’s face. “Hey, guess what?”

The Collector didn’t give her a response – his now dinosaur-sized body swiped at her, flattening her like a pancake against his palm. She glitched back into existence, fully healthy, with an annoyed expression on her face. “Well aren’t you grumpy.”

He summoned swords into either of his hands, planning to cut her to shreds.

“Fine, be that way.” She accessed the universe’s physics files. “There you go. Mind control is now impossible here. Enjoy!”

The Collector swung at her – but she was already gone.

Then his day really started going downhill.

The entire Collection surged as an army against the Collector.

Superman punched the Collector across the Plaza, embedding him in the far wall of the nation-sized cavern. The Collector’s girth crushed many beneath him – but there was a Higher Angel nearby, continually healing everyone except the Collector. A few PPC agents were working with lesser ka-technology – probably to ensure casualties were kept to an absolute minimum.

“I brought you all here!” he shouted, bathing the ground of the plaza in an eldritch pink fire. “Don’t you understand what a gift that is!? What we were working for!?”

Tornado appeared in front of him, eyes livid. “Nobody understands.” She worked together with other psychics to psychically press him back into the wall.

“GOLD EXPERIENCE REQUIEM!” Giorno shouted, preventing several of the Collector’s attacks from even firing.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Jotaro shouted, pummeling the Collector’s feet.

Vriska rolled eight eights and plowed right through the armor on the Collector’s left arm.

Aradia summoned a torrent of spirits whose deaths the Collector had caused, bringing down judgment. Alushy joined, giving her own spirits to the onslaught of retribution.

Pinkie Pie threw the Unbreakable Katana between the Collector’s eyes.

Johnny unleashed the Infinite Spin on the Collector’s chest, twisting him to the point of breaking. Gyro joined with Ball Breaker.

Kars launched a lava flow at the Collector, using biology that didn’t make sense in most universes – but was just fine here.

Hundreds of others unleashed finisher, end-of-series style attacks at the Collector, bringing the giant to his knees.

“ENOUGH!” the Collector shouted, undoing everything with a quick reality edit. “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHO I AM!?” He drove his foot into the ground, shaking the entire Collection. “I AM THE ONE WHO BROUGHT YOU ALL TOGETHER! I AM THE ONE WHO MADE THIS POWER POSSIBLE! I AM THE CREATOR OF THIS FORCE FOR THE BETTERMENT OF ALL! DO YOU DARE FIGHT ME FOR DOING WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE!?”

“IT DIDN’T NEED TO BE DONE!” Starbeat shouted.

For a single moment, it was just the Collector and Starbeat. Explosions happened around them, but in their perceptions, it was just them.

“You didn’t have to do any of this,” Starbeat growled. “You’re not cursed. A Gary Stu doesn’t have to be evil.”

“I’m not evil,” the Collector said.

Starbeat raised an eyebrow.

“…I’m evil for a purpose,” the Collector corrected.

“I don’t think you are. Not anymore, at least.”

The Collector charged.

“MINI-NUKE!” Corona shouted, creating an explosion that most certainly gave half the people within eyesight a form of cancer, but it had the intended effect of pushing the Collector back.

Corona could hear the healers groan about all the cancer they were going to have to cure now. She’d apologize later.

“You have no idea who I am…” the Collector said, punching Superman out of the sky. “What I am is beyond your understanding!”

“A Gary Stu Self-Insert!” Jay’s voice rang out through the Collection. “Who really needs to be assassinated. Your time’s out, Collector! Just give in already.”

“Even you have just barely scratched the surface!” the Collector shouted at the PPC agent. “I am not just some glitch for you to deal with! I am the Self-Insert of the Prophet of this story! I AM G. M. BLACKJACK! AND I CAN ONLY BE DEFEATED IF I WILL IT TO BE SO!”

“Wrong,” a single voice said. The Collector whirled to see Lightning standing in the hole that led to his office.

The Infinity Gauntlet was on her hand, pointed right at him.

“Lightning…”

“Goodbye.” She snapped her fingers.

The Collector’s body began to disintegrate – armor and everything within, flaking off like specks of paper. He let his limbs fall limp. He crashed to his knees, looking up. It was anyone’s guess as to what he was looking at.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Nobody knew whom the apology was addressed to.

Then he laughed bitterly.

It was the last noise he ever made.

The Collector was no more.

Lightning snapped the Infinity Gauntlet once more, using it for the more mundane task of floating into the center of the Plaza. “Everyone within the Collection, listen to me!” She called, her voice reaching every person in the universe. “You know me as Lightning, the Collector’s second in command. If you don’t know already, he is no more. I killed him.”

She took a breath. “All of you – no matter who you are – are free to return to your home universes. Hero or villain, it doesn’t matter, you’ve been kept here long enough. The teleporters will soon be altered to accommodate interdimensional warping. But I understand that a lot of you won’t want to return home. Some of your universes are no more. Some of you have been here centuries. Some of you may not return for some other reason.

“Hear this – this is the end of the Collector, but not the end of the Collection. I ask - not command - all of you to stay here with us to continue protecting the multiverse. We will not serve the vision of one man, but a collective vision that all of us strive toward! Let us turn all the evil that the Collector has done to something good!” She raised the Infinity Gauntlet into the air. “No more will we stand for slavery, power, or control! We will stand for justice, honor, and the defense of what is beautiful! We are the Collection! We will not let our tragedy fizzle out into nothing! We will take it by the horns and transform it into a legacy of our own!”

There were cheers.

Lightning smiled. “We need to form a council to lead us. Anyone who is interested, make your way to the center of the Plaza. Today is the day we decide what we will be doing moving forward.” She snapped her fingers, returning to the wet, ruined Collector’s office.

She looked to Thanos first. She put her Gauntlet-covered hand on his shoulder. “I don’t agree with anything you do. I need you on that council with me.”

Thanos smiled. “I figured as much.”

Lightning turned to the Merodi, Rick, and Nanoha. “The invitation extends to all of you as well.”

Rick burped. “Lemme thi- FUCK NO! I’m grabbing Morty and I’m out of here. Goodbye suckers!” He pressed a button inside his jacket and vanished in a puff of blue smoke.

“Same,” Pinkie said. “We already have something we belong to. But I’m willing to stay around and throw a party!”

“I’ll have you coordinate with any other Pinkies,” Lightning assured her.

“…I’ll stay,” Starbeat said.

Everyone turned to stare at her in disbelief.

“Are… Are you sure?” Vriska asked her.

Lightning leaned down to be eye level with Starbeat. “You were never actually part of us… You only pretended to be. You’re an outsider. Do you really want to stay?”

“I’m entering a new chapter of my life, freedom from the curse and all that.” Starbeat set her face, determined. “I’m ready for something completely different. My only condition is that we keep the doors open so Vriska can visit.”

“Awwwwww,” Corona said.

Lightning nodded. “Thanos, think we’ll have any issues letting the people who freed us back in?”

“None at all.”

Pinkie glared at Thanos. “I’m gonna be watchin’ you, makin’ sure you don’t act out on your evil-ness.”

Thanos made no response.

Nanoha coughed, managing to stand herself up. “…He actually did want to die, didn’t he, Lightning?”

Lightning nodded slowly. “I kept a promise.”

“It was his plan the entire time,” Jotaro said matter-of-factly. “From the start, wasn’t it?”

Lightning nodded. “We’d barely begun when he decided this was how it was going to end. With a grand battle where the Collection was freed from his tyrannical grip. He knew he was evil. So he planned his own defeat.” She looked over them all, expression unreadable. “Please, don’t tell that to the Collection. If they know that they’re just doing what he wanted… It will fall apart. They have to think we’re defying him.”

Nanoha nodded. “The secret is safe with the TSAB.”

“Merodi Universalis as well,” Pinkie asserted. “Riiiiight everyone?”

Everyone nodded.

Lightning pointed at Starbeat and Thanos. “We need to go – they’re probably waiting for us at this point. All of you… The losses you’ve suffered, the pain you’ve gone through… We can never repay it. It is unforgivable. I thank you for what you’ve done.”

Allure’s scowl softened. “It… It’s not okay. But I understand why.”

Corona nodded. “I do as well. For what it’s worth, I wish you luck protecting the multiverse. Tone down the extremism a bit though, okay?”

Lightning nodded. “I’m fairly certain we will.” She snapped her fingers again, taking Starbeat and Thanos away.

Vriska wiped her eyes. “…Look at her. She doesn’t even need me anymore.”

“Nnononono!” Pinkie said, putting a hoof to Vriska’s face. “She still needs you. You’ll never not need each other. Got it!?”

“…Got it.”

“Glad we’ve come to an understanding.” Pinkie yawned. “...I’m going to go find a bed before I plan that party. It’s time for this really, really long adventure to end.”

~~~

Rick appeared in the center of the Plaza next to Morty and Gyro. “All right Morty, we’re blowing this joint. I’m thinking I’ve got an account somewhere that’ll have accumulated a fuck ton of interest we can blow in Blitz and Chitz all at once.”

“Rick, listen to me, because I’m only going to say this once,” Morty said.

“Uuuugh, what is it?”

“No.”

Rick blinked. “What?”

“Kid said no,” Gyro said, folding his arms.

“Shut up Ballsy,” Rick said. “What do you mean, no, Morty?”

Morty didn’t falter. “I mean I’m not going to Blitz and Chitz with you. I mean I’m not going adventuring with you. I mean I’m staying here and going to try to get on the council, if they’ll have me.”

“Morty, stop being stupid. Let’s get out of here.”

“This place has been better to me than you ever were!” Morty shouted. “It wasn’t just continual pointless ‘fun’ that scarred me for life! There was a purpose behind it! And the Collector never treated me like I was a worthless piece of shit!”

“Morty, he was evil.”

“And you aren’t!?” Morty blurted. “You’re basically the same! Except he actually had a conscience somewhere in there. You’ve got nothing!”

“It’s a weakness, Morty.”

“You ruined me Rick!” Morty shouted. “I killed two people today! Two! People! I didn’t have to! There were ways around it! But I’ve been conditioned by you to shoot first and ask questions later! To not care!” Tears started dripping down his face. “That was you Rick! And I was too weak and alone to stop you from doing that!”

Rick put a hand to his forehead. “Look, Morty, you aren’t thinking straight. What about your family? If you sta-”

“I can go back to them and tell them what’s happened,” Morty said. “Easily. They’ll probably support me becoming a hero rather than your personal sidekick. And you know what else? I’ve already talked with Gyro, he’s going to try to get my original Earth into the USM! To fix what you and I did to it!”

“Morty do you have any idea how hard I try to avoid multiversal societies!?”

“Exactly! That’s why I’m signing us up! Because you’d never let it happen!”

“MORTY!” Rick shouted.

Gyro stepped forward, taking a defensive posture in front of Morty.

“Oh, have you replaced me now? Is that it?” Rick blurted. “What’s this fashion reject going to do for you?”

“He’s going to take me on adventures that don’t suck!” Morty shouted.

Rick grabbed Morty’s arm. “That’s it, I’m done talking about this. We’re going.”

“No you’re not,” Gyro said, summoning Ball Breaker.

“Oh and what are you gonna do? Spin me to death with your smooth baby balls!?”

“I can try. And if that doesn’t work…”

“…I’ll take a turn,” Ivan said, stepping forward.

“Then I will,” Johnny said, pointing his fingers at Rick.

“Ribbit,” Froppy said aggressively.

Olivia drew her gun and pointed at Rick. “Just another hat in the ring.”

Lady Rarity slammed her hammer onto the ground, cracking it. “I might just lose control of myself, dear, and try to eat you.”

Others made their intentions known – Aradia, Superman, Giorno, Alushy, and dozens more. All people ready to defend Morty, or people looking for an excuse to punch Rick’s smug face in. The vast majority were both.

Morty tore his arm away from Rick. “Go away, Rick. I don’t need you.”

Rick pulled out his portal gun, created a portal, and walked through it. It vanished with an unceremonious pop.

The moment he was gone Morty started hyperventilating. “That took everything I had in me…”

Gyro put a hand on his shoulder. “You did good, Morty.”

“Thanks…”

~~~

Allure walked in the front door of the League of Sweetie Belles. Her mane was tattered, she had bloodstains in numerous places on her white coat, and she just looked tired.

She didn’t care about any of this – anything that had been serious had already been healed.

What she did care about was who Squeaky had on her back.

Minna stared at Allure. Allure stared back at Minna.

Minna leaped off Squeaky so hard the poor unicorn’s head hit the floor. Allure ran toward Minna, infusing her legs with magic for a burst of speed. Mother and child collided, laughing and crying, falling into a pile on the ground.

The Sweeties in the League looked on with proud, joyous smiles at the reunion.

Alushy poked her head in the front doors, opting to lean against the doorframe instead of actually coming in. She lowered her glasses, watching Allure and Minna, together once again.

That’s all I needed to do, she thought, putting her glasses back on. She turned to leave.

“Alushy, wait,” Allure called.

Alushy turned around. “I was just dropping by, I d-”

“Thank you.” Allure said, giving Alushy a peck on the cheek. “You were there for Minna and did so much to help us.”

Alushy rubbed her cheek. “…Well that was unexpected.”

“Don’t read too much into it. Especially because there’s a second half to it.”

“Wha-”

Allure slapped Alushy across the face. “What were you thinking doing all those things with Minna!? She’s seven Alushy! SEVEN! That’s not even old enough to work at the TSAB!”

“I don’t operate according to the rules of society, Allure. I eat ponies.”

Allure sighed. “…You can visit Minna, if you want. But only while I’m there too.”

“All right, all right, I get it, I’m the dog, you’re the one who puts me in the doghouse. It’s like we’re an old married couple already!”

Allure facehooved. “Oh for the…”

Alushy chuckled. “I’ll be off then. See you around, Minna. Maybe I’ll find something fun for us to do your mother doesn’t find absolutely disgusting. Why, I hear the-”

Minna stopped her short, hugging the vampire pegasus tight. “Thank you for finding Mom.”

“Oh you’re too precious… Hnng… Think I’m having a heart attack…”

Allure raised an eyebrow. “You’re undead.”

“I have enough blood inside me to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool! …I think. The point is that blood has to flow somehow.”

“Or maybe it’s just under pressure.”

“Sounds like something to experiment on!” Minna said. “I’ll get a knife!”

“Minna no!” Allure yelled.

“Minna yes!” Alushy called.

The two ponies looked at each other and decided the situation was so absurd the only reasonable response was laughter.

~~~

Corona returned to the Golden Joke bruised, battered, and really really tired.

Despite this, she was more than willing to rush Eve into a hug from behind.

“WAUGH!” Eve shouted.

“I’m back!” Corona said, grinning. “And better than ever!”

“You look like you went through a meat grinder.”

Corona blinked. “Oddly enough, you’re not the first person to use that metaphor on me today. At least I fixed all the bones.” A sharp pain hit her in the side. “…Maybe I missed one. Ow.” She placed her hand on her pain and started healing it.

“How bad was it?”

“Lost a lot of people,” Corona said. “On both sides. Not as genocidal as the Bloodbath – not by a long shot – but still hard. I don’t even know who’s alive and who isn’t at this point…” A haunted look came over her face. “I still don’t know who that was…”

“Who what was?”

“I’ll find out eventually.” She stretched. “It… It was harder than the Bloodbath too. After a bit, it was clear that we were going to win there. Here… We got lucky a lot of times, from what I hear. Very lucky.”

“Perhaps it’s fate,” Eve said, smiling. “Ka needed us to win.”

“It sounds like it was a lot of things,” Corona muttered, deciding to sit down on the ground. “But it feels good to finally be done with it. Once again I don’t think we really have any enemies.”

Eve smiled, looking at all the people walking around the Golden Joke – people from all the local multiversal societies. “Brutalight’s still out there somewhere. As is Flagg.”

Corona nodded. “Brutalight doesn’t seem like much of a threat anymore. And Flagg… I don’t think he’ll be back for a while yet.”

Eve nodded in agreement. “Think we can finally stop holding our breaths?”

Corona spread her wings and started preening them with her fingers. “Maybe. Maybe not. At the very least we don’t have to spend every waking moment of our time stressing out over some big bad looming over our heads.”

“…Maybe,” Eve said, gaining a glazed over expression.

“What is it?”

“Nothing important for now,” Eve said. “And no, I’m not trying to just blow you off, it really isn’t important.” She stretched her wings. “Want to go grab something to eat? I won’t have to make a speech until things settle down.”

“Sure!” Corona said. “I need to do something that doesn’t involve people trying to kill me for a while.”

~~~

Nova barged down the door to her home, expecting the interior to be a complete mess.

To her surprise it wasn’t any messier than usual.

“…Huh,” she said, walking into the dining room to see Sunburst and Stardust sitting at the table.

“Oh! You’re back!” Sunburst called, brightening up in an instant. “…You think they would have called me.”

“It’s a mess back there,” Nova said, taking a seat at the table. She looked at her three-year-old filly, sitting in a high chair, munching on what was probably mashed potatoes. She was a filly of few words – and few worries.

“She called for you a few times,” Sunburst said. “But I think she thought you were just on one of your extended missions. Didn’t notice I was worried at all.”

“Ah, to be young and ignorant,” Nova said, sitting back in the chair. “…Sometimes I wish I could have just pretended like nothing was going wrong. …There were a lot of times I didn’t think I would be able to come back.”

Sunburst adjusted his glasses. “Well… We would have waited for you anyway. Long as y-”

Nova pulled him into a kiss, shutting him up. He didn’t mind.

Stardust started laughing.

“Apparently we’re amusing,” Sunburst commented.

Nova pulled back from Sunburst, smirking. “Well, we are, aren’t we?”

“…I dunno. I’ve never been very good at telling what’s funny and what isn’t.”

“Ah yes, the ‘dead rabbit’ joke.”

“…I still think it’s funny.”

“It made Stardust cry! I don’t even think she was able to understand words then!”

“I am never going to live that down,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Never!” Nova said in her ‘hammy villain’ voice. “…Celestia, I’m glad to be home.”

“Mommy’s home!” Stardust blurted.

Nova smirked. “You’ve got something on your face, Stardust.”

“No I don’t!”

“Stardust, stop lying. It’s right there on your chin.”

Stardust realized she was trapped so she just clammed her face up and refused to say anything. She did use her horn to remove the potatoes though.

Nova rolled her eyes. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

Stardust was still in ‘no talking’ mode.

“…Right. Well, the joys of being a parent. I get kidnapped and forced to do slave labor for a while, and when I come home there’s clearly a need for a nice talk.” A sparkle appeared in her eyes. “Oh the things I’m going to be able to pull on you when you become a rebellious teenager.”

“Um… Should you really be looking forward to that sort of thing?” Sunburst asked.

“Shush, Sunburst. I’m in parenting mode.”

“…Okay then.”

~~~

Eve cleared her throat. “So, here’s the Golden Joke’s final report as a base for taking care of the Collector. I’m proud to announce that our primary goal has been a complete success!”

The Golden Joke’s meeting hall erupted into applause. Eve waited for the motion of the clapping to stop before continuing.

“There are some things that everyone should know if they don’t already. First off, the Golden Joke will not be closing after today – the USM has courteously declared this world neutral territory available to all multiversal nations who are interested. Related to this announcement, the Eldritch Embodiment and TSAB have agreed to send representatives here more regularly. The Flowers denied the request and have stopped answering any of our communications.

“The Collection is a bit more complicated than that. They have agreed to keep an open channel to the Golden Joke for personal reasons, but they have decided that they don’t want to be connected to any particular part of the multiverse. They will move back into hiding, out of sight from all but the most powerful societies. They will work from the shadows, making the multiverse a better place with little acts of heroism. We have all agreed to wish them luck in their endeavor, and are in the process of signing a treaty to formalize our admittedly nuanced relationship with them.

“A memorial for those lost in the battle against the Collector will be constructed at this site within the next few days. May we always remember their sacrifice.” She let there be a moment of silence.

“…I just want to say thank you to all of you who have put so much of their lives into fighting the Collector. All those hours banging our heads against the wall, looking for answers – they were not in vain. We accomplished what we set out to do, everyone. Let’s move on to the new era.”

Applause filled the room as she stepped down from the stage.

~~~

It was a rare day when Valentine laughed jovially. He was usually a rather serious individual.

But Gyro just had a certain way about him that brought out the best in the Ambassador.

“I worked on thirteen verses to this song!” Gyro said, pouring himself more of a strange, green alcoholic beverage. “Turns out there’s a lot of ways to sing about kicking the Collector where the sun don’t shine.” He did a twirl for effect, dancing around Valentine’s personal lounge.

“I think we should only have it in small doses,” Valentine said through his chuckles. “We barely survived the onslaught the first verse gave us.”

“Too bad, so sad, I feel like singing. Wooooooooooooooaaaaaah~”

Johnny shot a fingernail at Gyro’s glass, shattering it and stopping the song before it started up again. “Mercy! Mercy!”

“Johnny…”

“Mercy! Merci!” Johnny started laughing.

“Johnny, how did you get so drunk so fast?”

“The answer… is… Spin…”

“He doesn’t go out drinking much,” Valentine said. “He is a family man now, after all.”

“I know. His kids are nothing new.” Gyro folded his arms. “How long have you been leaving them hanging to look for me?”

“Eleventy-two,” Johnny muttered, “Give or take a year.”

Gyro shook his head. “You need to get back to them.”

“Right after I catch the tiger.” Johnny grunted.

Gyro looked at Valentine. Valentine shrugged. “I don’t know either.”

“The world may never know…” Gyro mused. “Right, so, moving away from family talk, how’s about we move onto more pressing matters!” He put his hands on his hips. “Have they made the TV show about our adventures yet?”

“Found it,” Johnny said. “Steel Ball Run. Some guy named Araki. Prophet power.”

“I mean our adventures. That only started on the Steel Ball Run, Johnny.”

“Dunno,” Johnny said, waving his finger in the air. “Probably will try soon though!”

Valentine cleared his throat. “I am aware of a team doing an adaptation of our early adventures, yes, attempting to do it in the style of the Steel Ball Run anime.”

“…Anime-whatnow?”

“It would take way too long to explain.”

Gyro shrugged. “Well, I want to see this ‘anime’ thing.”

Valentine smirked. “If you wish, I can have it streamed right now.”

“You hear that Johnny? We get to rediscover the wonders of sitting on a couch watching stuff!”

“I’m too drunk for this…”

“That’s exactly as drunk as you need to be!” Gyro laughed. “Let’s get this party into full swing!” He poured everyone more green alcohol. “To us!”

“To us,” Valentine said.

“To… Us...” Johnny said, barely managing to meet the toast. He then proceeded to pour the green stuff all over his face.

Gyro laughed. “Johnny… Never change.”

~~~

Jenny looked at her Wall Of People I Really Want Dead. It was down to two again – the Collector’s picture had been torn down and tossed into a fire. Sure, she may not have done it, and she may have spent most of the fight in deep space, but it still counted.

Plus, Ivan was back.

“This wall is macabre,” he observed.

“That’s what I was missing all this time,” Jenny said, grinning. “I was missing your needlessly pessimistic and defeatist attitude! I was really getting down because it was gone, y’know?”

Ivan put a hand to his face and sighed.

“Ah, that noise! I forgot how much I loved that noise!”

“Is this supposed to make me feel appreciated, or something?”

“I dunno, I’m just saying what I think. There is no filter on this crazy train! Choo choo!”

“You’re upset you spent most of the fight in space.”

“OF COURSE I’M UPSET ABOUT THAT! Who wouldn’t be!? How was I supposed to know he’d be impervious to world-ending punches?”

“…Reason?”

Jenny twitched in annoyance. “…Welcome back Ivan.”

“Thank you.”

~~~

Corona, Lady Rarity, Olivia, and Toph stood in front of the Memorial. It was an hourglass-shaped statue with a large crack purposefully placed in it. Names were engraved in bold letters all around the rounded surface . The four of them looked at one name in particular.

LIESHY

(FLUTTERSHY)

“…If I had known…” Corona said, laying a hand on the name. “If I had known…”

“You would have lost your cool and punched Lightning’s lights out,” Toph said.

Corona didn’t have any response for this. She stared at the name, silent.

“What did she want out of life?” Olivia asked suddenly. “I may have spent the last few years of my life near her… But she was never somebody I could read very well.”

“She kept her cards close to her chest,” Lady Rarity admitted. “It was never easy with her… She could be in a foul mood for weeks and not let anybody see it.”

“She was content,” Corona said. “She didn’t really want much of anything. She had people she cared about, people who cared about her, and something to keep her occupied. She didn’t want anything more. She was a complicated mare with her words… But deep down, she was simple.” Corona sighed. “She just wanted a life that wasn’t made of lies, and she found one. She was happy, even if she never showed it.”

Toph saluted the memorial. “It was an honor.”

Lady Rarity wiped her eyes. She was about to say something – but then she saw Morty standing nearby, staring at them. She took a defensive posture out of instinct.

Corona held up a hand. Lady Rarity saw it and forced herself to calm down. Corona motioned for Morty to come over.

“Uh… I-I should really be going…”

“Nonsense,” Corona said, pulling him in with her telekinesis. “You have every right to grieve. We shouldn’t keep you from it.”

“…I’m here for selfish reasons though. I didn’t know her. …I just killed her.”

“And the fact that you’ve come here means you deserve to be here.” Corona said, tears in her eyes. Her red shades accentuated the streaks on her eyes. “You can pay your respects.”

Olivia took a deep breath and let it out. “Yeah. Corona’s right. I can’t promise I’ll be very nice, but go ahead.”

Lady Rarity bowed her head. “…I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Morty said. “It was a horrible situation for everyone involved. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“We can move past it,” Corona said. “Which is exactly why we’re here.”

The five of them took a moment to take in the Memorial. They stood, motionless, for an indeterminate amount of time.

It was only when an overweight mud-brown stallion with a serious overbite came in that they broke the silence.

“Ah… Clockwork,” Corona said. “…We’ll leave you with her.”

“T-thank you,” he said, sitting down right in front of Lieshy’s name.

“Who’s he?” Morty asked.

“Lieshy’s fiancé,” Toph answered, voice choking.

Corona put her wings around Toph, Lady Rarity, Olivia, and Morty, ushering them out in a large hug.

None of them left with dry eyes.

~~~

Aradia and Vriska sat on a bench a fair ways from the Memorial. They had already looked at Davepeta’s name – which had, inscribed under it, both Dave Strider and Nepeta Leijon.

“I was hoping the three of us would be able to get together and have fun at some point,” Vriska said. “The lost trio.”

Aradia nodded. “…It was a beautiful life, Vriska. A life they ended on their own terms.”

“Aradia, for once in your morbid life, can you not go all ‘death is fascinating’ on me?”

Aradia smiled warmly. “…Sure.”

“Thanks,” Vriska said. “…Do you think there’s anyone else who was flung out there?”

“Lord English is gone and all the ghosts are sealed. Only you, me, and Davepeta were actually alive there. Not even Hussie was alive. He’s sealed away with all the rest.”

“Maybe he’s still fucking with us from there. Death by friend seems like totally part of his style.”

Aradia shrugged. “Maybe…” She pulled the Omnitrix out of her robes.

“That Davepeta’s thing?”

“Mhm. At one point I thought I might be able to revive them with it. It has their DNA inside it, but it doesn’t have any of their memories.”

“Was worth a shot,” Vriska said, kicking her feet.

Aradia held the Omnitrix up to the sun. “This is a powerful artifact. …I’m not sure what to do with it.”

“You could always use it yourself. One Time player passed on to another.”

“I’m already really strong, Vriska. I don’t need more of a boost.”

“So? Take it anyway. Unless you can think of someone else they wanted to give it to.” Vriska’s frown deepened. “That we have access to.”

Aradia nodded. “All right.” She placed the watch on her wrist. “Guess I can turn into anything now.”

“Fun times ahead,” Vriska said, not really looking at her.

“…Maybe with all these allies we’ll be able to find home soon,” Aradia said.

“They never want to help.”

“I’m sure that’ll change eventually,” Aradia said. “We’re moving up in the world, Vriska. We’ll find something sooner or later.”

Vriska smiled. “That optimism of yours sure is contagious.”

“I know! Isn’t it amazing?”

“When it’s not that it’s fucking annoying.”

Aradia laughed.

Vriska rolled her eyes. “There it is…”

~~~

I smiled. “Ah, you’re awake!”

Blackjack opened her eyes. “Hnn? …Didn’t I die? …Again?”

“Yes,” I answered, helping Blackjack up. She was in my library, along with myself and her alternate, Jackie.

Jackie waved at her. “Hey, me.”

“Hey myself,” Blackjack said, waving as well. She noticed that her hoof wasn’t mechanical. “Woah…”

“Grew you a new body,” I said. “It was easier than fixing everything. Frankly it’ll work better for you as well.”

“I am not complaining,” Blackjack declared, stretching her real legs. “Oh this feels good…”

“Restrain yourself. Twilence doesn’t need to see you go all out,” Jackie reminded her.

Blackjack rolled her eyes. She took this moment to realize she still had wings. “Oh. Hey. I thought I was supposed to lose these when I died for real? Like you. Me. ...Nevermind.”

“You were,” I said. “If you had died on Equis Fallout with the correct spirit setup and your Blank nearby. That didn’t happen. You died in the Collection where there was no place for the part of you that’s Luna to go. So you stayed together when I rescued you. Hence, still alicorn.”

“So hey, we’re going to continue to not be identical,” Jackie said. “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Blackjack said, stretching her wings. “So… Who are you exactly?”

I smiled. “I’m Twilence. Think of me as the Watcher for the entire multiverse. It’s not a perfect metaphor but it works.”

“Huh. Your eye is creepy.”

“I get that a lot,” I admitted.

“So… What now?”

“You disappear,” Jackie said. “Like I did. You can’t be a hero anymore, Blackjack. You gave that up.”

“I’ve given you the opportunity to let ‘Security’ die in the Collection,” I added. “You can go settle down, start a life. You can do what Jackie did and watch over Equis Fallout from the background. Or you could go to one of the worlds you’ve visited in your journeys and stay there.” I gestured toward my notebook. “Whatever you do, I’ll ensure you stay out of any part of the larger story as long as I can. You deserve that much.”

“…Huh. Do I get to tell anyone I’m still alive?” Blackjack asked.

Jackie shrugged. “I guess so?”

“You can if you want,” I told her. “But what I’m doing will make you seem like a shadow to them. Most of them won’t really register you because they have to be part of the story. All that’ll do is get them to remove your name from the Memorial.”

Blackjack nodded. “Ah. Right…” She scratched the back of her head. “Y’know, I think I’ve been trying to avoid making friends so much I don’t really have anywhere to go… I mean, besides Gilgamesh, but I can tell he’s just going to get me killed.”

I furrowed my brow. “...I can put you in Ponyville on Equis Vitis. You’ll just be another pony in the background. I might be able to keep Rev in your loop, she doesn’t go out on adventures that much and tends to be a more background influence.

“I’ll take tricky,” Blackjack said. “It won’t be the first time I stayed in a church, anyway.”

I smiled. “…I should probably have asked this first. Are you okay with me giving you this life?”

“I mean, it sounds better than getting killed again.”

I nodded. “It is. …I can give you back your talent for sacrifice.”

“No,” Blackjack said. “I’m not going back to that.”

I spread my wings. “In that case… Blackjack, I declare you alive. Again. Go live a normal life, as long as I can keep you in it.”

“Thanks. …Sure the wings won’t be asking for trouble?”

“There are a lot of alicorns in Merodi Universalis, there’ll be no problem,” I told her.

“Can I have some wings then?” Jackie asked.

“No,” I said, smiling innocently.

“Ouch. That grin is painful.”

“I know. I’ve perfected it over quite a long time.” I turned around. “Now, before I send you on your way, does anyone want to play a round of Blackjack?”

The two ponies groaned at me. I laughed at my own joke. That made it all the lamer, but that also made it more memorable.

“What about Go Fish?”

“Twilence, stop.”

~~~

“Big changes for you, huh?” Vriska said, walking with Starbeat down one of the Hub’s many halls.

Starbeat laughed nervously. “Yep! I got put on the Collection Council by virtue of ‘outsider opinion’ and ‘ka expert’. So now I have two nationalities. Because nobody in the Collection wants to demand my loyalty and Eve is just so nice that she allows dual citizenship with just a simple signature, so now I’m a Merodi Collected. Collected Merodi. Something.”

“You sure hiding yourselves again is the best thing?”

“It’ll keep anyone from taking advantage of us. Don’t worry, I’ll be around. You just aren’t allowed to ask me about my job. Hush-hush stuff, top secret, you can’t take advantage of it.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it figured out. Is there anything left for us here?”

Starbeat chuckled. “Well, you get to see my amazing, free face now!”

“We were gonna see that anyway.”

Starbeat nodded. “I’m still your head ka researcher. Won’t be producing as much stuff, but you’ll get that. Tell the Research Division not to worry its pretty little head. Unless that head is Rohan, in which case worry away!”

Vriska took a moment to pick Starbeat up and hug her.

“…Okay, what is it, you don’t do public hugs unless you’re overcome with emotion.”

“Just… glad we’re finally talking,” she said with an awkward smile. “I could drop you if you want.”

“Wait no do-”

Vriska dropped her.

Starbeat dusted herself off and chuckled. “I guess I did ask for it.” Starbeat looked into Vriska’s eyes. “How did you deal with being controlled by something else?”

“I’m fine,” Vriska assured her. “Keep in mind I’ve been brutalized, captured, and enslaved a few times before. …And been the one doing all those things as well. I’ve seen it all from both ends. This time was just a little odd, is all.” She folded her arms. “…For once in my life I’m actually wondering what the hell the outcome should have been. The fact that the Collector basically got what he wanted still bugs me. A force to protect the multiverse from whatever!”

“Just because someone’s a bad person doesn’t mean they can’t like good things. Hitler liked puppies, I hear.”

“Mhm… Then there was his whole spiel about being our Prophet…”

“I think I can help you there. So what if he’s the ‘self-insert’ of the guy writing this story? From what I understand, the guy writing this story is just a kid on an Earth somewhere, and the Collector was probably dreamed up to be ‘what would happen if I was given power’? I doubt the Collector was even a ‘correct’ answer to that question. Then again, I am going off incomplete data and the Flowers calling him a ‘glitch’.”

“We don’t really understand anything, do we?”

“Nope! We just have to be fine with that. It’s a step better than the Flowers, who think they understand everything.” She looked up at nothing in particular. “We do know what the Dark Tower is now, at least. It is the reason things are the way they are. Somebody wanted to add meaning to existence.”

“Someone dared to answer the big question,” Vriska said with a soft chuckle. “They asked ‘what matters?’ and got ‘nothing matters’ and decided ‘screw that, let’s make something matter’.”

“But does that really make anything matter, or is it an illusion?”

“That’s a discussion to have with Rev and Nova, not me,” Vriska said. “I’m just the spiderbitch. I don’t need a grand unifying picture of the cosmos. I just want to go home and have a good time.”

Starbeat grinned. “That’s an accurate description. …By the way, where are we going?”

“Iroh’s Teashop,” Vriska said, kicking in the door of the establishment.

“SURPRISE!” Pinkie shouted, placing a hat-of-honor on Starbeat and sticking a party blower in her mouth. “It’s time for your free-from-the-curse-and-becoming-a-councilmare party! Woo woo!” The room was filled with Starbeat’s friends, streamers, balloons, exotic culinary dishes, and a large banner with her face on it.

Starbeat blew the party blower and laughed. “Finally, I can actually enjoy one of your legendary parties. SHOW ME THE CAKE!”

“HERE IS THE CAKE!” Pinkie said, throwing it at her. It exploded, covering the entire party in icing.

Everyone laughed.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 6: MIND]

ARC 6 INTERLUDE<<

Well… That was tense. More than a few of you were probably having on the edges of your seats during the last series of eternal TO BE CONTINUED…s. Hmm… How do you pluralize something that has an ellipses as part of the term… Eh, not really my concern, I’ll let the GM worry about that one.

Anyway, with this the story has hit a couple of milestones. First of all, we are half done. (49.68% is close enough). Secondarily, we have just passed ONE. MILLION. WORDS. Heck yeah! We are now among the elite stories, those who are true doorstoppers… and we’re only half done! There’s so much stuff left to happen, so many things to do and places too see! I can’t wait!

For those of you who really don’t like waiting, the discord server [ https://discordapp.com/invite/eTuseTh ] has access to everything you could ever need. And, as usual, alongside the discord server comes the fimfiction group [ https://www.fimfiction.net/group/213761/songs-of-the-spheres-extended-multiverse ] that contains links to side stories, character profiles, and other helpful lists if you’re interested.

And without further or do… WHO BELONGS TO WHAT - actually, you know what, screw that, let’s mix it up. NEW CHAPTER TITLES FIRST!

Arc 7: Blood
079 - Infinity, Part 1
080 - Infinity, Part 2
081 - Eternity Courses Through her Veins
082 - Our Little Horror Story
083 - Topeka
084 - Punch That Cookie
085 - Reality Ensues
086 - Farpoint
087 - The Combine Assault
088 - Hidden Terrors
089 - The Green Sun
090 - The Twelve, Part 1
091 - The Twelve, Part 2

Oh, Blood… hope that won’t be taken literally! Eheheh…

Let’s not focus on that right now, but the last arc! We all love our best chapter polls here, and once again we have ourselves a happy little link that would just love for you to click on it and provide feedback! [ https://strawpoll.com/r22r2cw8 ] Sorry, you can’t vote on Carols of Chaos, it was a separate special. Tragic, I know.

And now, we end with the franchises… In a way, this is the way an arc should end, with credits of a sort.

Sonic belongs to Sega (I mean, it is what his suit was…)
A Hat in Time belongs to Gears for Breakfast
Possible Worlds belongs to John Mighton and Robert Lepage (inspired the Everyman)
Ben 10 belongs to Man of Action Studios
One Punch Man belongs to One and Madhouse
Marvel belongs to Marvel
DC comics belongs to DC
The Hunger Games belongs to Suzanne Collins
Super Smash Bros. belongs to Nintendo
If the Emperor had a Text-To-Speech Device belongs to Alfabusa (Carols of Chaos)
Past Sins belongs to Pen Stroke (Carols of Chaos)
VeggieTales belongs to Big Idea (Carols of Chaos)
Gravity Falls belongs to Alex Hirsch
The Flowers and the Protectors of the Plot Continuum belong to Jay and Acacia and a lot of other people. (Notably deviates from the ‘source material’)
Splatoon belongs to Nintendo

Until next time!

[BLOOD] 079 - Infinity, Part 1

Kars was completely forgotten about after the conflict with the Collector.

This was very good for Kars. He left the Collection the moment he could, returning to Earth Stand in the same place he’d been picked up. Had he been the same as when he left, he would have succumbed to the vacuum of space, hardening to a stone and falling forever.

But he had learned many new tricks during his time in the Collection. The most potent of which was magic. He created a barrier around himself and returned to the planet below, a psychotic grin on his face. He knew Earth Stand was part of Merodi Universalis, so it was dangerous for him to be there, but he only had one goal in mind.

He needed to find Joseph Joestar. After that, he would disappear and do whatever he wanted.

The fact that he had no idea where Joseph was didn’t matter – he had gained enough of an understanding of technology while in the Collection to get by. He landed in Venice, not surprised in the least to find it had changed phenomenally in all the decades Kars had been floating in space.

He found a public library with Internet connectivity easily enough. Nobody really paid him much attention – Kars was not that well-known of a figure, and even then he didn’t look unusual enough to warrant a multiversal society’s attention.

Kars froze when he found Joseph’s obituary. Killed in the Bloodbath that created Merodi Universalis. A tragic end.

This meant Kars had nobody to take revenge on.

…Except the rest of the Joestar bloodline. He searched. Joseph and his wife had both passed, but their daughter Holy was still living, as was Joseph’s bastard child Josuke and adopted daughter Shizuka…

Kars began to smile as he scrolled down the family tree. Jotaro… his kids, Jolyne, Jordan, and Joanne… And would you look at that, Jolyne had a very young son, Job.

He came to a man named ‘Johnny Joestar’ in his searches, but Kars didn’t care about him. Alternate universe bloodlines were not the one he sought to destroy. Since Joseph could not suffer what he needed anymore, it would be taken out on his family.

Kars understood he would not be able to just attack them directly – they all lived in different locations and would band together to face him, probably with some Merodi doomsday device. Even with his mastery over all new kinds of biology, he could not be certain that he would survive bombardment with such a superweapon.

So he needed a plan…

A glorious, dastardly plan began to form in his head.

It was just so easy. The fact that they were a family was their biggest weakness.

But before he could get to that, he would need to create an army of vampires. It wouldn’t quite work without minions to carry out his every whim. He would have to prepare for maybe a week. After that… the Joestars would fall. He left the library laughing.

The Twilight Sparkle running the library rolled her eyes – you got a nutjob every day in this town…

~~~

Earth MC was so named because Corona thought ‘let’s just mash Marvel and DC together and see what happens, because that’s basically what this universe is’. The name stuck, and that’s what they’d been calling the strange mixture superhero world ever since.

After letting the events from the Collector Incident sink in a little, Corona had thought to ask Captain America if they had encountered anybody named Thanos in their universe yet. They had not – so Corona told them all about Thanos.

And immediately the whole Avengers set out to find the Infinity Stones as a pre-emptive measure against Thanos, since it turned out the mad titan did exist in Earth MC, and was already looking for his stones.

He only got one.

Corona’s knowledge wasn’t perfect – this was a DC/Marvel mixup after all, there was no way to just say ‘this continuity matches, so the Infinity Stones must be here’. However, they still got the other five Stones easily. They had been in places related to the heroes of Earth MC, obtainable with only minimal difficulty.

And then they’d decided to do something truly stupid with them.

“This is the worst idea I’ve ever gone along with,” Iron Man told Corona.

Corona glanced at the five glowing Infinity Stones sitting on a table in the Avengers’ lounge. “Come on, it’s the perfect bait! He won’t be able to resist!”

“That’s obvious,” Batman said. “The question is if we’ll be able to stop him from getting them or not?”

Corona’s mount – Lady Rarity – looked up at Batman. “We have the room surrounded with twenty superheroes. Even if he completed it I doubt he’d have time to actually use the thing.”

Corona expected for a moment that Olivia would make some snide remark – but then she remembered Olivia wasn’t here. She’d gone to work for Giorno in a more wide-range hacking capacity. It was just Corona and Lady Rarity now... Already the two of them were being called the Guardians. It was pretty clear at this point they didn’t work for Toph, they just lived on her planet.

“Things change…” Corona said to herself, shaking her head with a sad smile. Once again she was struck by Lieshy’s face, confusing her emotional state even further.

“Look alive people!” the Flash called. “Incoming!”

Thanos crashed through the roof wearing the incomplete Infinity Gauntlet. With his free hand he reached for an Infinity stone.

He managed to close his fingers around the yellow one before he got the living daylights beaten out of him.

The invisibility cloak that had been around all the heroes dropped and they rushed forward. The Flash and Superman made it first, followed by quite literally everyone else. Fists, magic, fire, ice, and claws hit him from every side. He used his power to push them back, but more than a few were able to just keep punching him anyway.

He called for support from his fleets in space, but then the Merodi fleet jumped in from a neighboring dimension and made quick work of them.

Superman tore off Thanos’ hand, tossing the Infinity Gauntlet into the air. Corona grabbed it with her telekinesis and put it on her own, much smaller hand. It somehow fit anyway. “Sweet,” she said, smirking.

Thanos roared, going to punch her – but Lady Rarity’s hammer hit him in the face. Doctor Strange tied him up with magic and Batman added psychic-resistant netting to the mix.

He was well and truly defeated.

“I have to say, I like it when we can completely trounce the villains,” Flash said. “Hooray for foreknowledge!”

Corona blushed slightly. “Hey, I told you at just the right time. Sorry I didn’t think about it until now.”

“Half of the universe still lives,” Superman said, turning to Corona. “We are in your debt.”

“He may not have succeeded in this universe anyway,” Corona said, shrugging. She began picking up the Infinity Stones and placing them in the Gauntlet.

Doctor Strange stared at her. “…What are you doing?”

“Completing the Infinity Gauntlet, duh,” Corona said. She put a hand on her hip as she inserted the fourth stone. “You really think I’m going to turn all evil on you right here?”

“It’s an exceptionally powerful artifact, too dangerous in the wrong hands.”

“And it’ll be taken to a universe where it’s completely useless,” Corona said. “Along with all the stones. Nobody will have to worry about them again.”

“But you do want to do something with it,” Flash said. “I can see it in your eyes.”

Corona smirked. “Doctor Strange, you said the Abstracts exist in this universe?”

Doctor Strange nodded. “Yes. The manifestations of universal concepts do exist. I’ve met with Eternity myself.”

“Well, here’s the thing. The ‘Abstracts’ are the name of one of the Class 1 civilizations. We didn’t know much about them, but apparently the universe the Collection’s Thanos is from was technically in ‘Abstract’ space. I want to talk with them.”

“…Why?” Superman asked.

“You know how we’ve been talking about incorporating you into Merodi Universalis? I’m pretty sure I need to ask their permission. Last time we didn’t, the Class 1 Society in question used it as an excuse to throw us into a death match that scarred us all emotionally.”

“Oh,” Doctor Strange said, relaxing. “…I suppose that’s fine.”

Corona held up the Infinity Gauntlet, popping the sixth Infinity Stone in. “You know, I wonder if the Elements of Harmony could be used like this… Ah, something to think about later. So… I’m just going to think ‘I want to talk to some Abstracts’ and then I snap my finger-”

She was suddenly standing in a great white expanse, alone.

“…Hello!?” she called. “Any Abstracts here? Infinity? Eternity? …Does the Mysterious Stranger exist?”

“He does not at the moment. But I do.”

Corona turned around to see a mountain-sized humanoid sitting on a throne. He was golden in color and had a bright, circular plate in his chest, so intense it was hard to look at. His head had three faces, each with piercing glowing eyes. There was no neck affixing the head to the body.

“H-hey! R-right to the Living Tribunal!” Corona chuckled nervously. “W-wasn’t exactly expecting to get up to the top yet! …Or almost the top.”

“I specifically intercepted your request directly to me. Ask your questions, Corona Shimmer.”

~~~

Holy Kujo was an aging woman, but she didn’t mind. She currently lived in a small house on the outskirts of Morioh so she could be close to her extended family – but never within the Joestar Central. She didn’t have the strength in her to be around that level of insanity all the time. Even though she was the head of the family right now, she had opted not to be burdened with the oversight of all Joestars. That task had eventually fallen to a young man named Koichi, seeing as Jotaro also refused the call by Joseph’s request.

Even though almost her entire family was always caught up in adventures, Holy got to live a quiet, happy life where the explosions of adventure always happened several blocks over.

There was a reason she lived on Morioh’s outskirts after all.

Her son and grandkids would visit regularly, as would her half brother Josuke and adoptive sister Shizuka. It was, needless to say, an interesting family she had.

But when people weren’t visiting, she was alone in the house. She was retired so she didn’t really have any obligations. She spent this time sewing, reading, and occasionally writing little articles about her thoughts on life. This lifestyle would drive many people insane, but she was okay with it. She didn’t feel neglected, and was only lonely occasionally. And whenever that hit she would just call up her son – or her grandkids – and have a nice chat.

That said, she was still a Joestar. And she had an innate sense for danger despite virtually never having any adventures.

She knew something was wrong by the way the air shifted around her.

She reached for her phone – realizing it was on the dining room table across the house. She could have made a run for it, but something told her this was a bad idea. Instead, she reached into the pantry and pulled out a frying pan. Then she began to walk to the dining room.

The kitchen window exploded as an Arcei leaped at her, arcs glowing. The blue mare had her teeth bared – revealing them to be fangs.

Holy let out a gasp of surprise, but swung the frying pan anyway, hitting the vampire-Arcei across the jaw. This did little to the vampiric creature besides annoy it.

“Guns ‘n Roses,” Holy said, softly, summoning her Stand. The green vines rippling with flowers came from her back and wrapped around the vampiric mare. Thorns extended dfrom the vines, doing no damage to the pony’s skin. She passed out anyway – forced into a coma by Guns ‘n Roses.

Holy was once again thankful Jotaro had insisted she learn to activate her Stand after they had researched the Stand pill to completion. It had saved her numerous times now – a good return on investment for that one time it sent her into a coma back when Dio was their primary concern.

She ran for the dining room table, reaching out for the phone.

Another Arcei-vampire crashed through the dining room window, smashing the table and the phone with his foot. He decided to use his arcs on her, the Runes glowing a sickening orange. She felt heavy pressure on her chest. She screamed out, summoning Guns ‘n Roses, forcing the Arcei into a coma.

Guns ‘n Roses was a one-target-at-a-time Stand. She couldn’t do anything about the third vampiric pony until it had already bitten her at the base of the neck. She wrapped her Stand’s vines around the third attacker, but a fourth was already on her before the third had passed out. A fifth came, and then a sixth.

She fell to the ground, her Stand dissipating as they made quick work of her.

Her last thoughts were of worry for her son.

~~~

Josuke and Rohan passed each other in the streets of Morioh.

Normal people would have either ignored each other or waved and continued on their way.

Not Josuke and Rohan.

They fixed each other with steely glares and stopped whatever errands they had to run for a confrontation. They squared off, wordlessly, crossing their arms and striking unbalanced poses that somehow accentuated each other. Josuke’s companion - a human version of Starlight Glimmer known as Beam - put a hand to the bridge of her nose and sighed. Here they go again...

“Rohan…” Josuke said.

“Josuke…” Rohan replied.

Josuke pointed a finger at Rohan. “You’re going down tomorrow night!”

“Please, I never lose,” Rohan said with a dismissive wave.

“You only think you’re the best. Jotaro’s agreed to show you how a real man plays.”

Rohan smirked. “A poker face only goes so far when you aren’t playing poker.”

Josuke sneered. “That’s only what you think!”

Rohan turned to walk away. “Dice will roll, Josuke, dice will roll.”

“That’s not even clever!” Josuke shouted after him, shaking his fist. Rohan wasn’t listening. “…I really hate that guy,” Josuke muttered.

“I - and everyone else - know that very well,” Beam observed, raising an eyebrow. She cleaned a lens on one of her cybernetic implants.

Josuke sighed walking in a random direction, the reason he was out long forgotten.

“I’ll just see you back at the house then?” Beam asked, not exactly expecting a response. She knew he needed some time to brood alone.

Josuke marched along, hands in his pockets, wondering if Jotaro really could beat Rohan. The big guy wasn’t the sort to cheat unless the stakes were absurdly high.

He noticed that he had walked into an alley. Memories hit him of another Morioh alley where a ghost had lived… Back when he had first met Rohan. What a crazy moment in his life that was.

His nostalgic thought process was interrupted by an attacking vampire pony. Crazy Diamond was summoned out of reflex, punching the poor undead’s face in.

“For the love of… can’t a guy have a nostalgic walk through an alley without being ambushed!?”

The undead pony tried to get up, but a another quick punch from Crazy Diamond ensured he wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon.

“Wonder what that was all about,” Josuke muttered, turning to leave the alleyway. Another one flung herself at him, only to meet Crazy Diamond’s fist again. “And let me guess, behind door number three…” Crazy Diamond performed a spin-kick through Josuke’s body, knocking a third vampiric being to the ground. He punched upward without even looking, cracking a fourth’s skull before it could even get to him.

“Vampire… Arcei…” Josuke put a hand to his forehead. “This is gonna be a political mess, I can just tell.” He grabbed the fifth one and plowed through a wall into what appeared to be an abandoned kitchen. Crazy Diamond’s ability repaired the wall behind them, sealing the interior off from the alley. “Now to make my daring escape!”

With a cheeky grin he ran through the abandoned kitchen, knocking more than a few old pots and pans onto the ground. Crazy Diamond punched through another wall, reassembling it as always. Josuke didn’t even look at the room he was moving through – he punched to the next one. And the next. Until he came out the other side of the building in another alley.

He didn’t see any vampire ponies. What he did see was a street with people to his left. If he could get there they wouldn’t dare attack. …He wondered if they even could, since it was sunny and bright over there. Did the arcs protect them from the sunlight…?

His time spent pondering this was not spent running to the street. Three Arcei appeared to his right, snarling and baring their teeth.

It was time to use the legendary Joestar Secret Technique.

Josuke turned tail and ran as fast as he could for the sunlight. Unfortunately, one of the vampires was a pegasus-Arcei, and flying through the air was definitely faster than the Joestar Secret Technique. He tackled Josuke to the ground, forcing him into a tumble.

Crazy Diamond manifested under Josuke, springing him out of the vampire’s grip. He flew through the air, landing painfully on his rear in the public street.

The people walking on the sidewalks turned to stare at Josuke.

“Beware! Vampires!” Josuke blurted, pointing at the alley. “We’ve got t-”

The alley was empty.

“…Of course,” Josuke muttered. “Never mind folks! Everything’s fine!”

Everyone looked at him like he was an asylum escapee.

Josuke sighed. He had some calls to make.

~~~

Shizuka was Jolyne’s great aunt. Their relationship was more akin to sisters than anything else.

They were currently in one of Equis Vitis’ many specialty stores. The moment spatial distortion technology had been perfected, there had been an explosion of stores that looked really small on the outside, but were almost endless on the inside.

They were in one of those stores. Specifically, they were in Pinkie, Pinkie, and Rarity’s Endless Clothing Racks. They were walking down one of the ‘deep’ sections of the store where things were sorted by race and color. Human and purple was the current theme, and they thought that maybe they could see the red section in the far distance.

Jolyne held her hand to her eyes. “Zuka, how long have we been in here?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Shizuka responded.

“Which way is the entrance?”

“Same response.”

Jolyne put her hands on her hips. “We’re going to spend our entire day in a clothing store. That’s dumb.”

Shizuka shrugged. “It’s not like we have anything to do today.”

“Eat lunch?”

“We can skip lunch.”

“You’re just trying to get out of me bugging you for getting us lost in sea of purple clothes.”

Shizuka smiled awkwardly. “Maaaybe?”

Jolyne facepalmed. “Shizuka, we can just use our dimensional devices to get out. So long as we don’t have any merchandise they can’t flag us.”

“…But then we wouldn’t get the enjoyment of trying to find the way out on our own!”

“This is a shitty adventure, Shizuka.”

“Ugh, fine, I know, I just wanted to get some clothes and then we found this place and then…” She stamped her foot on the ground. “I don’t even know anymore. Some get-together this has been, huh?”

“Eh, not as bad as some I’ve had. Did I ever tell you about the time Anasui took me out to Earth Ottoman?”

“I don’t think so?”

“It was the worst idea ever. He thought ‘let’s just go dressed like we usually are’ and completely forgot that Earth Stand’s fashion is rarely standard and that Earth Ottoman is very stuck up about that sort of thing. So, get this, h-”

A vampire pony dropped from on the top of a shelf and bit down on Shizuka’s neck, forcing a copious amount of blood to go flying. “ACHTUNG!” Shizuka shouted – forcing herself invisible. She tore the Arcei off her, tossing the quadruped into range of Stone Free.

“ORA ORA ORA ORA!” Jolyne shouted, pummeling the vampire into submission.

“Shit…” Shizuka said, still invisible. “He got me. You need to tie me up before I go all cannibal on you.”

“You’re invisible,” Jolyne observed, punching another one into submission.

“Then just get me to a hospital.”

“Dial the device while I pull off the distraction!” Jolyne said with a smirk. She folded Stone Free’s arms out, latching her string onto a shelf covered in clothing. She pulled it down, dumping large quantities of purple fabric on top of the attackers – and knocking the few that were hiding in the shelf out.

Shizuka grabbed Jolyne. “This way!”

“But I-”

“It’s invisible.” Shizuka said, throwing Jolyne through the portal. Jolyne didn’t see it when she passed through it and she didn’t see it after she landed in an empty field of grass. The only indication that there was even a portal at all came in the form of a torrent of purple clothes.

“Shizuka! Now they’re going to flag us!”

Shizuka closed the portal and let herself become visible again. “Life or death situation. You can always call your dad to take care of it.”

“Yare yare dawa…”

“Now, seriously, tie me up before I start eating you. …Or burning up in this sun. …Exactly how long does it take for vampirism to set in?”

“Dunno,” Jolyne said, wrapping Stone Free’s string around her until she was just a cocoon. “But we’re not going to find out.” She pulled out her own dimensional device. She took a few steps, opening a portal to Equis Vitis – appearing outside the clothing store.

Then she called 911. “Hey, possible case of vampirism. Also Arcei-vampires. …Yes, I am from Earth Stand. Is that a question you ask people to see if their bizarre 911 calls are real or not? …Yes it’s real, this is Jolyne Kujo, you can hang it on my father’s word. Yes, an armored ambulance would be appreciated.” She put the phone in her pocket. “They see so much shit at that emergency center.”

Shizuka mumbled something from within Stone Free’s string.

“What was that?”

Shizuka let out a loud sigh.

~~~

“Corona Shimmer, questions? I may be a cosmic entity, but I don’t have as much time as you might think.” The Living Tribunal leaned closer to her.

“Sorry, just processing all thi- hey wait, aren’t you supposed to talk with three different voices? …Though that’s only in some continuities…”

“I choose to talk as one unified thought because it saves times in conversations such as these. If the decision requires enough deliberation, the three-way course of thought will be made known. It is not necessary for a simple conversation.”

“Right. Then… Why did you want to talk to me?”

“It was better that you spoke to a multiversal Abstract rather than one existing within only a single plane of existence.”

“Oh, so you really do operate like that. Every world has its own Abstracts – Eternity, Infinity, Chaos – and they combine together at the highest level to form the Multiversal concept of that Abstract. …With the exception of you.”

“That is correct.”

“Here’s a question, why don’t all – or at least most - universes have Abstracts if that’s the case?”

“The simplest reason is because the One Above All has not approved that sort of expansion. The more complex reason would involve explaining the inner machinations of how every universe I invite into my folds will create Abstracts from substance of the universe itself, and those Abstracts will add their lesser nature to the multiversal True Abstracts. It is also unlikely the other Class 1 Societies would approve of the sudden existence of higher deities over their universes.”

“…So, the One Above All actually exists then, huh?”

“He is not available for questioning by your scientific mind, nor will He ever subject Himself to such practices. You talk to me, a limited being, for a reason, Corona.”

“Gotcha. There are some other people who might want some words with him though.”

“They can get in line.”

“Figures. …What about the higher DC beings? The Presence? They another society?”

“The machinations of the Dark Tower have sought to place them within our number as part of the Abstracts. Some break the standard conventions, others do not. All that exist within Abstract space are subject to me and my judgments.”

“Gotcha. So, here’s a good question – why are you telling me all this? You Class 1s never want to sit down and talk, and even then you’re never forthcoming with information. Why would what I do, an insignificant Class 3 guardian, mean anything to you?”

“Your actions involving the Collection have brought much attention. I noticed when Them started moving in accordance with Valentine’s wish, as did the other five. We were all watching closely as your strength in ka fought against that which ought to have never been. The results were inconclusive, but it revealed your strength. You have revealed yourselves to have the power to change things on a large enough scale that we should take notice.”

“…We just took care of one overpowered jerk with Flower and TSAB help. That doesn’t seem like it’d mean anything to you.”

“The multiverse, for all its size, is only home to a few dozen Class 2 powers. The Collector was one of them. He may have kept himself hidden from the societies of equal power – but we at the top knew he was there. We noticed when he vanished.”

“So… What you’re saying is we should feel pretty proud of ourselves?”

“Being noticed is not a good thing, Corona. For instance, the question you are really here to ask will not go the way you wish.”

Corona’s smile fell. “…You’re not going to let us work with Earth MC?”

“No. Had you asked prior to the events with the Collection, we would not have minded. Many of our universes are part of Class 3 societies. There are entire Councils of similar individuals under my purview who only acknowledge my position above them in passing. There would have been no issue.”

“But?”

“But my role in this Class 1 power is to ensure there is balance between the universes. If any one universe or sections of universes gain too much power, or lose too much, it upsets the balance of the cosmos. The True Abstracts can cease to become the average of their aspects and instead take one particular aspect of themselves too far. It can – and does – spread like an infection to other universes. As you are now, there is no way you could trigger more than the death of a single lower Abstract. But it is clear that you are likely to have much, much more power in the future – and a connection to that kind of power would certainly upset the balance.”

“So, basically, you’re kicking us out because you’ve seen the potential for us become something bigger than we are?”

“That is exactly it.”

“Seems a little paranoid.”

“We are Abstracts. Those who are not myself are dependant on concepts. The interruption of those concepts on a larger scale can be disastrous. You have the future potential to do that. Unlike Them, I actually care about my worlds and will not just hand them over because it’s convenient. You are not to add ‘Earth MC’ to Merodi Universalis.”

Corona sighed. “All right, you’re the Living Tribunal. I am trespassing. Can we at least keep visiting? Borrow people from time to time?”

“I do not wish to step between any beings and their connections with others. But to allow that, there is a condition.”

“…What’s that?”

“You must leave the Infinity Gauntlet in Earth MC. Removing it upsets the balance of that universe. It is not impossible to deal with, but it is problematic. Considering I had to adjust a universe that lost an Infinity Gauntlet less than a week ago, that particular aspect is already strained.”

“No offense Tribunal, but these things are dangerous. Frankly none of them should be allowed to exist. It’s too much power in the hands of one individual who doesn’t understand it. I don’t even really understand what I’m doing, and I’ve been around the multiverse a bit!”

“The Infinity Stones are tied to the universes that created them. The same trait that makes them useless outside their home universe also makes the universe shudder when they are removed.”

“So what, just give it to Superman and trust him not to go all evil one day?”

“There is a reason the Stones are usually spread out across their universe.”

“You and I both know ka won’t let them stay apart. Ever.”

“It lets them be used in tandem less often than if they were always in the gauntlet.”

“If I remember anything about my comics, that kind of thinking has blown up in your entire multiversal society’s face more than once.”

“A fair criticism. It is the unfortunate truth that, since Abstracts are defined by the universes they manifest from, we become limited in how we can interfere in our own worlds. Tipping the balance one way or another when it does not need to be corrected changes Abstracts on a personal level. This is a glaring weakness, but it can only be exploited from within. Outside our space, when we choose to travel there, our power is almost unequalled.”

“But those rules don’t exactly apply to you. Or the One Above All.”

“But if I wish to care for the Abstracts under me, I have to take their nature into account.”

“Right… Well, I guess that’s that, then.” Corona stretched her arms. “Thanks for actually talking to me. Even if you were here to say no, it at least tells me I don’t have to feel utterly disgusted with every being up at the top. You’re all right, Tribunal.”

The Living Tribunal nodded. “Is there anything else before I send you to Earth MC?”

“Have any advice for an up-and-coming multiversal society? Things to avoid?”

“There will come a point where your power is so far above those below you that you will crush them without trying. Your efforts to preserve culture now are admirable, but the day will come when you are just too far above to compensate. They will be ants to you.” He leaned in. “Do not become conquerors by friendship. Let those below you remain their own entities.”

“How will we know when we’ve gone that far?”

“…It is never something you know for certain. Nor what the current boundary is.”

And then Corona was back in Avengers headquarters.

She blinked. “Good news and bad news.”

Superman raised an eyebrow.

“Bad news. No, we can’t take you guys with us. The Infinity Gauntlet also has to stay in this universe.” She took it off and tossed it on a table.

“The good news?”

“The Living Tribunal’s actually a pretty decent guy.”

“Who?”

“I’ll explain in a minute. Right now we need to find a place to seal this thing. Or multiple places to hide the stones. Actually, why don’t we just call a meeting and I explain both parts at once.”

~~~

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, gripping the reins of a horse with Star Platinum. “I just don’t see how you can fight effectively on top of one of these animals.”

Johnny pulled the reins on his horse and dashed around Jotaro, using Tusk as an extension of himself to push Jotaro off his horse. Star Platinum hefted its user back on the horse, but the motion spooked the animal considerably.

“It just takes some skill, though I do prefer the intelligent ponies. They’re able to think independently,” Johnny said, smirking.

Jotaro shook his head, jumping off his horse. “I’m going to find Valentine and tell him I’m very sure the treaty doesn’t hang on my ability to appreciate horses.”

Johnny chuckled. “You’re a serious one, aint’cha? Can’t believe an alternate version of me ended up producing you.”

“A four generation difference will do that.”

Johnny shrugged, rearing up on his horse. “Heh. Regardless, yeah, I asked Valentine to get you here because I was curious. Can’t meet myself, so I figured ‘he’s probably close enough’. Guess not.”

“If you’re wondering about your place as a Joestar, you don’t need to worry,” Jotaro said. “It is clear you are one of us, even if not by direct relation.”

“…Wasn’t where I was going with that, but I’ll take it. Does this mean I get keys to Joestar Central?”

“No.”

Johnny rolled his eyes. “Figures.”

Jotaro’s phone rang. He placed it to his ear. “Jotaro.”

“Hey, something weird just happened,” Josuke told him. “Got attacked by a group of vampire arcei. You sure you got the last of them?”

“No stone masks remain, all the vampires Dio created were destroyed, and the pillar men are defe-” Jotaro’s eyes widened. “Kars.”

“Kars?” Josuke said. “…Oh, right, the old man’s ‘Kars accident’ joke. Man, what does it say about me when that’s the first thing that name brings to mind?”

“He was the one who took us to the Collection. By the time we were facing the Collector, I had forgotten about him… He could be making vampires and sending them into Morioh. As the center of the Joestar family…”

“I’ve already told Koichi, he’s on lookout. We haven’t been able to find any yet, but it’s only been a few minutes. Even the ones I knocked out are gone.”

“Call me if anything comes up. I’ll be there as soon as I wrap up here with Johnny.” He hung up. “Possible vampire crisis in Morioh.”

“I actually live in Morioh. This world’s version.”

“I would say parallels are strange but Jonathan never left England.”

Johnny shrugged. “I’ll let Valentine know there was an emergency. I know how you are about family.”

Jotaro nodded, preparing to leave – but then his phone rang again. He pulled it back to his ear, more than a little annoyed at it. “Jotaro.”

“…Jotaro.” It was a voice Jotaro hadn’t heard in years.

It was the voice of his father.

“What are you calling for?”

The old voice on the other side of the line croaked. “Y-your mother. S-she…”

Jotaro’s grip on the phone strengthened. “…What happened to her?”

“She’s gone Jotaro… Blood everywhere… She…”

“Dad, listen, this is important,” Jotaro said. “Are there bite marks on her with two holes larger than all the others?”

“Y… yes. Oh God…”

“Dad, call Joestar Central. Tell them everything you see.”

“O… Okay.”

“I need to check on Jolyne. Someone’s hunting Joestars.”

The old man was silent. Jotaro hung up. He moved to dial Jolyne’s number, but he paused for a moment.

Star Platinum lashed out and punched the horse Jotaro had been riding clear over a nearby fence.

“What’s going on?” Johnny asked. “Who did Kars get?”

“My mother,” Jotaro spat through his teeth. He focused his attention back on his phone and called Jolyne.

“Sup, Dad?”

“The Joestars are being hunted, Jolyne. I need you t-”

“Oh, I already took care of mine. Tossed the vampire ponies under a bunch of purple clothes. They injured Shizuka, but she’s in one of Ponyville’s industrial overboard hospitals. Everything's good.”

“Josuke and your grandmother have been attacked. She didn’t make it.”

“...N-nani…?”

“You’re staying with Mom at the moment, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Go home, protect her, your siblings, and your son. They may be in danger.”

“Got it.”

“I’m coming home. Be there as soon as I can.” He shoved the phone into his coat pocket.

“I’m coming with you,” Johnny said.

Jotaro didn’t object. He pulled out his dimensional device, ready to dial it – when his phone rung again. He was ready to break the offending piece of technology.

But something else did it for him. In his rage, he hadn’t been able to see what it was – but something carved out a circular hole through the middle of his phone.

“Call that target practice.”

Johnny and Jotaro turned to see not a vampire Arcei, but Kars himself standing there in all his glory. The pillar man threw his hands wide and grinned. “I saved the best for myself, after all.”

~~~

Jolyne ran across Morioh.

Even for someone as in shape as she was, that was exceptionally exhausting.

But she eventually made it home. She kicked the door down, with her own leg, not bothering with the knob or Stone Free. “Mom! Anasui! Job! Look alive!”

“In here,” she heard her husband call, though his voice was weak. She ran into the living room to find the pink-haired Anasui laying on a couch with Giorno Giovanna standing over him, presumably having just healed the weakened man.

“…Nani? Why are you here?” She asked, cautious. Her eyes darted to Anasui to make sure he was okay.

“I heard word of Joestars being attacked,” Giorno said, taking a step back from Anasui. “I reasoned this was the place with people least likely to be able to protect themselves. When I got here, Anasui was mortally wounded and all the others were gone.”

“Gone? Y-you don’t mea-”

“There’s no blood aside from Anasui’s,” Giorno pointed out. “They were kidnapped, likely to exert leverage on the rest of us.” He pulled a note out of his pocket. “They even left a note to save me the trouble of tracking them.”

Jolyne took the note. It had a set of dimensional coordinates on it. Below that, a message.

Only Joestars get to come. If anyone else appears, they all die.

-Kars

Jolyne crumpled the piece of paper up in her hands. “Bastard…”

“I believe that’s you, Jotaro, and Josuke,” Giorno said. “The rest of the Joestars have either been taken or are out of the picture for some other reason. We might be able to count myself as well.” He tapped at the spot on his body where the Joestar birthmark was – the star-shaped impression on the base of his neck.

Jolyne put her hand on her own birthmark for a moment before shaking her head. “I’m calling Dad, he needs to get here faster.” She put the phone to her ear. “…He’ll know what to do.”

Giorno nodded. “He does have a plan most of the time.”

“He’ll trap you…” Anasui said, holding out a hand to Jolyne.

“Don’t have much of a choice,” Jolyne said. “Is an ambulance coming for him?”

“I have made arrangements already,” Giorno promised her.

“Good. …Gah, he’s not picking up.” She scrolled through her phone until she found Josuke. “Come on, pick up…”

~~~

“BASTARD!” Jotaro shouted, summoning Star Platinum – but Kars could somehow see the Stand, jumping over it at just the right moment to avoid all damage. He landed in front of Johnny.

Johnny pointed his nails at Kars and summoned Tusk – the pink behemoth of a Stand easily dwarfing the pillar man.

“Johnny Joestar… I have no quarrel with you. Your bloodline is separate.” Kars narrowed his eyes. “You can turn around now and I will not hunt you down. But engage me in combat and you will die with the rest of the Joestars.”

Johnny fired off five of his fingernails – and Jotaro stopped time in the middle of it. He used Star Platinum to re-arrange the nails of Infinite Spin to come at Kars from different directions, making it impossible to dodge. He punched Kars in the face for good measure.

Time resumed. The nails embedded themselves in Kars’ body, rotating his flesh at impossible speeds that would never cease. In under a minute, the Spin would spread to the rest of his body and he would be torn apart, never able to reform because of the centrifugal force.

Kars, however, had a way around this. He physically tore out the parts of his body that were spinning, throwing the bloody chunks to the ground. He allowed them to disintegrate with the Spin. “A great power indeed,” Kars admitted as his flesh began to regenerate itself. “But it is nothing compared to the ultimate lifeform.” He created a horn in his forehead, pushing Jotaro and Johnny back with magic. “I can do anything by any biology I wish! Now that I’ve seen the multiverse, even feats of magic and science are no longer beyond me!”

Jotaro grimaced. His Stand, powerful as it was, could do two things: punch really fast and stop time. The former could be adapted to all sorts of complicated moves based on finesse, and the latter was broken in most matchups, but no combination of the two could do anything to Kars. Not even dumping the ultimate lifeform in a volcano would work.

Was there anything they could do with Johnny’s Ultimate Spin? It had done something when it hit, but Kars simply removed it. If they could keep him from removing it they could eke out a win.

“I hear you’re an excellent tactician, Jotaro,” Kars said, beginning his monologue. “Trying to think of a way to defeat me? Looking at the scenery? Wondering how adaptable Johnny’s ability is? Thinking of how to keep me from moving?” He laughed, forcing a finger to fall off without moving any part of his body. It grew back in seconds. “There’s nothing you two can do. You are going to die.”

“We’ll just have to punch you hard enough to get you to space!” Josuke shouted, having just arrived on the scene. He gave an uppercut to Kars from behind with Crazy Diamond. “DORAAAAA!”

“Works for me!” Johnny said. “ORA!!!”

“ORA!!!” Jotaro added, throwing Star Platinum into the triplicate fury of fists.

Kars sure went flying – but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to get him to space. “You fools! Do you not see that I can use magic now? Even the vastness of space is under my rule!” He teleported back to the ground, roundhouse kicking them all. All but Johnny fell back, managing to keep a hold on his horse.

“Johnny, go for the head!” Jotaro shouted.

Johnny fired a single nail bullet into Kars’s head.

“What, do you think my head is a weak point?” Kars shouted, tearing it off and tossing it to the ground.

“CRAZY DIAMOND!” Josuke shouted, touching Kars’ Spin-infused head with the Stand. Crazy Diamond’s ability forced the head back onto Kars’ body. “You won’t be taking that off! Ever!”

Kars face soon became unrecognizable due to the rapid spinning it was undergoing – twisting into a black hole of flesh. He could no longer speak.

He cast a dimensional spell, jumping through a portal. Josuke chased after him. “You’re not getting away that easi-”

Jotaro stopped him with Star Platinum. “No. It’s a trap.”

“A… Trap!?”

“He didn’t need to make a portal that could stay open this long,” Jotaro observed. As he said this, the portal vanished. “He was trying to take us somewhere…”

“Bastard!” Josuke shouted.

“What do we do then?” Johnny asked.

“Regroup. Get allies. Then hunt him down and kill him,” Jotaro said.

It was then that Josuke’s phone rang.

“Man, what’s with all the calls today?” Johnny asked.

Josuke answered the phone. “Hello? …Ah, Jolyne, wha- …Oh. Oh. Right away.” He hung up and pulled out his dimensional device. “We need to get to Morioh now. Marina and the kids have been kidnapped.”

Jotaro clenched his fists. “Kars…”

~~~

Jotaro, Josuke, and Johnny appeared in Morioh outside the house. Jolyne and Giorno were already waiting for them.

“You sure he can come along?” Jolyne asked, pointing at Johnny.

“Kars already added me to his list personally,” Johnny said. “I’d be more worried about the horse I’m riding.”

“…Fine.” She pulled out her dimensional device and plugged in the coordinates they were given. “This is so a trap, but unless anyone’s got a plan, we’re just going in guns blazing.”

Jotaro grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze… We have to do what he says. If we fail, we want to ensure he doesn’t get away. We need to leave a message.”

“Already done,” Giorno assured them.

“You’re good at doing things before people ask for them,” Jolyne observed.

Giorno simply nodded.

Josuke looked at his phone in fear. “...Beam’s not answering.”

“If he has her, we’ll save her,” Jotaro said. Unless he just killed her directly...

Jolyne held out the dimensional device, ready to dial – but faltered. “Uh… These are Lai’s coordinates.”

“Makes sense. The vampires were Arcei,” Johnny pointed out.

Jolyne opened the portal, flying in with Stone Free ready, the rest of the Joestars filing out behind her. They appeared on Lai, the blue sun beating down on their backs. A fair distance to their left was an entrance to a large cave.

Somewhat obviously, a stone mask was carved into the top arch.

“Definitely it,” Jotaro said. “He thinks he has us where he wants us.”

“He does,” Josuke said.

“But we’re going to show him that the Joestars don’t like being pushed into boxes.”

“I’m going to punch him so hard he ends up on Mars…” Jolyne muttered.

“Does Lai even have a Mars?” Johnny asked.

“Don’t care. He’ll end up on it even if it doesn’t exist.”

All five of them summoned their Stands. Jotaro took point, marching into the cavern. Johnny rode while all the others walked. They soon came to a grand interior space with a small Rune in the center, having the simple effect of bathing the cavern in white light.

Sitting on a ledge far above them was Kars.

“Ah! Jojo, Jojo, Jojo, Jojo, and… Giogio.” His eyes narrowed. “…I’ll allow you on a technicality.” Kars gestured to his left at a cage embedded in the wall – it contained Marina, her twins Jordan and Joanne, Jolyne’s child Job, and Beam. All of them were alive and well. “Just so you understand the stakes, Jojos. If you fall here, they die. If you leave here, they die. The only win condition is to take me out.” Kars grinned. “I see no reason to kill them before you. They’re all so weak as to be no contest. And I am well aware a sudden burst of rage in you may well work against me here.”

Steam was coming out of Beam’s ears. “LET ME OUT OF HERE! I will disassemble you molecule by molecule until there’s not a single bond left in your body! HEY! KARS! I’M TALKING TO YOU!”

Kars ignored her completely.

“Kars… You’ve made the biggest mistake of your life,” Jotaro said.

“Hm?”

“You pissed me off,” Jotaro finished. “STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

Time froze. Gold Experience Requiem came out of Giorno’s frozen form, punching alongside Star Platinum within frozen time. “ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

Time resumed. Kars was embedded two meters into the wall. “…That was impressive.”

“You will never reach reality!” Giorno declared.

Kars tried to pull himself out of the hole he was in – but found that he couldn’t. “Nani!?”

“CRAZY DIAMOND!” Josuke repaired the wall, trapping Kars deep within the earth.

Johnny aimed two fingers at the stone wall. The first bored a hole of Spin through the rock, the second transferred the Infinite Spin to where he was sure Kars was.

A stone ball shot out of the wall, creating a hole next to Johnny’s. The ball plowed right through Jolyne’s stomach, not even slowing as it bore a circular hole through her.

She used Stone Free to turn the middle of her body into a bunch of string, keeping her from bleeding out. “What the hell was that!?”

“An enemy Stand!” Jotaro shouted, getting a closer look at the ball. It was spherical, but it held the designs of a stone mask – a hole in the forehead, fangs on the mouth, and empty eyes.

“My Stand!” Kars shouted form his rocky prison.

“You don’t have a stand!” Josuke shouted. “You’re just Kars!”

“Ahahahah – do you really think I’d spend a week preparing and not get myself a Stand? Behold – Can’t Stop The Rock! Its ability is simple. If it’s moving, only I may stop it! There is no force in existence that can even slow its movement!”

Josuke used Crazy Diamond to heal Jolyne’s wound – and then he had to rush over to Johnny’s horse to heal the wound the Rock had givenit. “Jotaro!”

Jotaro positioned Star Platinum behind the Rock and punched it as hard and as fast as he could manage – but not even Star Platinum could dent the Rock. It charged through Star Platinum’s fists, tearing Jotaro’s own hand up.

“Josuke!”

“Your resident white mage can’t heal four people at once!” Josuke blurted, scrambling awkwardly to Jotaro. “Gah!”

The Rock flew toward Giorno next.

“GOLD EXPERIENCE REQUIEM! You will never reach reality!” Giorno’s Stand punched out, planning to lock the Rock in its ability.

Giorno had forgotten one small detail, though.

You Can’t Stop The Rock.

It plowed right through Gold Experience Requiem’s arm, translating the damage directly to Giorno’s arm. “NANI!?”

“It even trumps your power!” Kars laughed. “And I believe I’ve finally figured out how to escape this lock you’ve placed on me… I will create biological fluids that are easily combustible and...” Kars skin exploded, decimating the wall he was trapped in. He fell a few feet to the new ground he had created. “You can’t keep me in a wall that doesn’t exist.”

Kars leaped to the ground, laughing while Josuke fixed Giorno’s hand.

“ALL AT ONCE!” Jotaro shouted, fists flying. “ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

“DORA DORA DORA DORA DORA DORA!”

“MUDA MUDA MUDA MUDA MUDA MUDA!”

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

“You all sure love shouting,” Kars muttered. He summoned Can’t Stop The Rock to himself, rotating it around him at high speed. All five of their limbs recieved holes, forcing the onslaught of fists to stop.

Kars’ body regenerated from all the damage. “Useless!” He laughed. “Useless!”

“Useless indeed!” Giorno shouted, grabbing Kars’ shoulder with the arm of Gold Experience Requiem that still worked. “You. Will. Never. Reach. Reality.”

“I already figured out how to work around this, Gior-”

Johnny shot Kars with an Infinite Spin nail bullet. Kars tried to shift his body to make a hole for it to pass through – but he couldn’t. He couldn’t tear the Spin-infused flesh off his body either. He couldn’t reach the reality he wanted to…

But he could reach a different one.

He lashed out with his arms, creating a crocodile with his left one. He aimed for Giorno’s head – but Stone Free’s string wrapped around the gator-arm, tying it to Kars’ main body, locking his other arm in as well. Kars forced an arm out of his back, but Crazy Diamond ‘repaired’ that arm back into Kars’ body.

“Looks like that counts as fixing!” Josuke laughed.

Kars growled as he felt the Infinite Spin moving through his body – spreading to his organs. He could make redundancies, but once it was in his entire body… He was done for. There would be nothing he could do.

Which meant it was time to go with the backup plan. He had hoped for the catharsis of beating the Joestar lineage into a bloody pulp by his own strength, but he hadn’t gotten as far as he did in life without being willing to sacrifice his desires for practicality from time to time.

“Congratulations, Jojos, you have beaten me. I cannot win as I am now. However, as Joseph would have loved to tell you, I’m not one for playing fa-”

“ORA!” Jotaro punched him in the face. “You’re next line is going to be ‘you interrupted me’.”

“You interrupted me. …GAH!”

“That was for Joseph,” Jotaro said.

Kars summoned his horn. “Then I’ll cut to the chase.” He cast a quick pre-prepared spell…

~~~

Corona, Lady Rarity, and the Avengers sat around a large table, looking at the complete Infinity Gauntlet.

“Way too dangerous to use,” Superman agreed. “I am flattered that you think I am worthy of this artifact, but I know my limits.”

“You basically have none,” Corona observed.

“This is not a physical limit I am referring to.”

Captain America put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, we get it. It’s too much weight even for you.”

“So we lock it away then?” Flash asked. “Where?”

Doctor Strange furrowed his brow. “I may have a few spells that might keep it away from all possible attackers…”

Batman nodded. “I know of a few locations hidden from the eyes of even powerful psychic deities. A combination?”

“Or we could split up the gems again, like the Living Tribunal seemed to suggest,” Corona offered. “The best way to keep it away from the hands of evildoers. …Most of the time.”

“But there may come a time when we need to defend the universe,” Iron Man pointed out. “This would allow us to do it. If, say, a Celestialsapien or something of similar power wandered into our world, the Infinity Gauntlet would be our only defense.”

“The Abstracts might help you with that one. Exterior threats probably upset their balance a lot.”

“It does,” Doctor Strange said. “But they won’t always be able to help.”

Flash rolled his eyes. “Please, what’s out there that they couldn’t beat?”

“There was a war with a race called the Beyonders they almost lost.”

“There’s another thing to keep me up at night,” Lady Rarity muttered. “A Class 1 war. Can’t imagine that’s good for the multiverse.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Doctor Strange admitted. “I tap into magic and tend to come across bits and pieces of information. The full story eludes me.”

Superman furrowed his brow. “I say we put it to a vote. Seal it up where we can reach it with difficulty, or split up the Infinity Stones once again?”

The vote was cancelled by a flash of blood red. Kars and the five Jojos appeared above the table, crashing onto the Infinity Gauntlet. Kars morphed his hand to be just the right shape to fit into the Gantlet while his body was plastered sideways into the tabletop. He snapped his fingers…

And the Infinite Spin was gone from his body.

“Nobody move or I turn this planet to dust,” he said.

Slowly, all five Jojos got off of him and backed away, taking nervous stances alongside the superheroes.

“Who are you?” Superman demanded.

“Kars. The ultimate lifeform.” He held the Infinity Gauntlet in the air. “Now with the ultimate power. In this universe, anyway.”

“You know not what forces you are dealing with.”

“No, but I don’t particularly care. I just needed a backup plan to kill these five. Now I have it.” Kars grinned.

“How did you even pull this off!?” Josuke blurted, clutching his wounded arm.

“I had a week to prepare. I heard about Corona’s little mission to fix the Infinity Gauntlet. So I created a vampire among the heroes and had him feed me information.” He reached into his ear and pulled out an earpiece.

Everyone turned to look at Batman.

“Why is everyone looking at me? I’m not the vampire!”

“But… bat,” Flash said.

“It’s me,” Aquaman said, baring his teeth. “And you are all going to bow to Kars!”

“That sounds so wrong coming out of your mouth.”

Kars laughed. “He is my servant. Most of you will be as well, soon enough. But first…” He pointed the Infinity Gauntlet at Jotaro. “Jotaro Kujo… You’ve made a mistake.”

“Yare yare daze…”

Kars smirked. “You pissed me off.” He readied his fingers for a snap. “Die.”

080 - Infinity, Part 2

Corona needed some time to think. Luckily she had access to a mindscape she could spend a significant amount of time in while letting only a second pass on the outside. She used her empathy powers to tap into Raging Sights’ mental state rather than letting herself watch Kars’ monologue.

Raging Sights’ mind was never as full or as interesting as most others – like all TSAB-style devices, the intelligence within was only partial. Raging Sights had emotions, memories, and connections, but not as strong as what would normally be called a ‘person’, and as a result its mindscape was blank, fuzzy, and rarely had much in it that Corona herself wasn’t already thinking about.

Which meant she and Raging Sights could focus.

“Right, so, the Infinity Gauntlet is complete and has access to all the power in the universe. Known weaknesses: it only operates by motion of the hand and does not function outside this universe.”

Corona felt a ripple in the mindscape, not all that surprised to see Doctor Strange walk in.

“Good to see you’re putting that astral projection to use,” Corona said.

“Is there a plan yet?” he asked.

“Just outlining weaknesses. Physical motion is out, because Kars can just overpower us by sheer strength. That leaves the fact that the Infinity Gauntlet won’t work outside this universe.”

“I’m sure the Living Tribunal won’t mind a temporary removal…” Doctor Strange said, furrowing his brow. “Raging Sights, do we have time to create a portal?”

“Yes,” Raging Sights decreed.

“Chances of him falling all the way through it?” Corona asked.

“Near zero.”

“Crud,” Corona muttered, hand to her chin. “What about reality alteration spells around the Infinity Gauntlet?”

“Lack of time and unknown effectiveness.”

“It looks as if he’s only going to wipe out Jotaro first,” Doctor Strange said. “Do we have time after that?”

“Yes.”

“Agh!” Corona said, facepalming. “Kars has a horn! He’ll sense if we start doing any uber-magic that would be capable of altering reality! …Where’s Eve when you need her?”

“Seraphim would be quite useful,” Doctor Strange admitted.

“Mmmm, we’ve got to be able to do something!”

“Well, he currently has the thing I use to manipulate time in that Gauntlet, so there goes the simple answer.”

Corona curled her fist. “What if I just punch him really, really hard?”

“Zero percent chance of an effect,” Raging Sights reported.

Corona sighed. “Flash-portal everyone to another universe?”

“Best idea so far. Wrought with chances for Kars to destroy everything, but it works.” Doctor Strange folded his arms. “I can provide distraction magics to draw his attention.”

“You sure?”

“You’re more familiar with interdimensional magic than me, and you have the computer crystal in your hand.”

Corona nodded. “Thank you, Strange.”

“It’s the best I can do.”

“We need to move – time does not stop while we’re in here.”

Doctor Strange nodded, turning to leave – but something stopped them.

A message written out in text appeared in front of them.

Do not act, heroes. Help has arrived.

“…Help?” Corona asked. “From who?”

The Xeelee.

Corona recognized that name. “…Xeelee? As in the Class 1 Xeelee?

There was no further response from the mysterious text.

“Know anything about them?” Doctor Strange asked.

“Class 1. Uh… I think they’re really into technology…?”

“So nothing?”

“It’s not like information about them is exactly easy to come by. The Living Tribunal is the only one who’s actually sat down and talked to us about themselves.”

Doctor Strange furrowed his brow. “…I say we take the chance. Let them do what they want. See what happens.”

“I’m just worried about why they’re helping us,” Corona said, “Class 1 civilizations never have any reason to deal with anything this low…”

“We have yet to see them actually do anything. All we saw was a text message.” He waved his hands. “Talk in a few minutes, unless we’re all dead.”

“Same.”

Corona allowed herself out of the mindscape, watching time flow at a natural rate.

“Die,” Kars said, preparing to snap his fingers.

Then the Infinity Gauntlet punched Kars in the face.

“NANI!?” Kars shouted, staring at the Infinity Gauntlet. “What foul trick is this?”

Jotaro, for once, looked dumbfounded.

The Infinity Gauntlet flew off Kars’ hand. Then it pointed at him, the Infinity Stones glowing brightly. Raging Sights told Corona that there were many invisible wires surrounding the Infinity Gauntlet, coming from many other universes simultaneously.

Kars knew the Infinity Gauntlet could kill him in an instant. But he wasn’t going to just let it happen. He summoned his Stand and threw it at the Infinity Gauntlet. The colorful gems used their power to push the Stand back.

There was only one problem.

You Can’t Stop The Rock.

It plowed right through the Infinity Gauntlet, shattering the golden frame that held the Infinity Stones together. The Stones themselves bounced off the Rock, flying in many different directions within the room.

Kars laughed. “Not even the power of Infinity can stand up to m-”

Superman took the opportunity, driving Kars facefirst through the table with a punch. The pillar man stood up faster than anyone could react. He didn’t bother to monologue – he pulled back his arms, creating sharks out of his fingers. He pushed forward…

…And the invisible wires stuck him in place. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak.

“What…?” Superman said, baffled.

“Everybody stop!” Corona and Doctor Strange shouted, making sure no other heroes would try to do anything.

The heroes glanced from Corona to Doctor Strange, silence filling the room. Iron Man sighed. “Which one of you is going to explain what’s going on?”

“I am,” Corona and Doctor Strange said at the same time. This prompted both of them to sigh overdramatically.

As it turned out, they didn’t need to explain anything. The six Infinity Stones collected together in a pile, creating a holographic display out of their rainbow light. Text scrolled by in front of all their eyes.

We are the Xeelee. In the process of a larger-scale operation, we noticed your difficulty with the Arcei. Kars was one aspect of this problem. The Xeelee have judged Kars guilty and deserving of a fate worse than death. His sentence is a full year of biological experimentation prior to execution.

“Not complaining,” Jotaro said, grabbing his hat. “Bastard deserves worse.”

The text continued to scroll while Jotaro talked. > Now that the issue has been resolved, it is time to take the next step. Corona Shimmer, we request a time be set aside for any relevant Merodi Universalis Overheads to listen to our report on the Arcei situation.

Corona blinked. “What did you do to the Arcei…?”

A topic that will be discussed at the meeting. It is best to explain it once to those who need to know.

Corona pulled out her phone. “Alright… I’ll say the Xeelee want to talk to them. Do you have a preferred location or anything?”

Negative. Our only request is that it be held in a location with a digital interface. It is a simpler task to display upon a screen than directly into minds or through cosmic powers.

“Gotcha. …Do you have a name?”

You are speaking to a collective of local Xeelee consciousnesses designated Down-32,302,134.

“I’ll just call you the Xeelee,” Corona said, dialing Eve’s number. “Hey, Eve? The Class 1 Xeelee want to talk. They won’t tell me much besides they want a meeting with you and any interested Overheads in a room with a screen and that they’ve done something to the Arcei to ‘help’, I think. …I thought the same thing.” Corona hung up. “She says she’ll get it ready. Until then, I’ve got a few questions to ask if you don’t mind.”

We do mind. It is best to explain things only once. We will return once the meeting is ready.

“How will we contact you?”

You won’t need to.

In an instant, Kars was gone. The Infinity Stones stopped projecting, becoming the inanimate objects they had been before.

The Flash blinked. “I guess we’re splitting them up then?”

“Certainly solves that problem,” Spider-man admitted.

Batman produced a specialized net and tossed it on Aquaman, wrapping him up. “Do you have a cure for vampirism?”

Corona blinked. “I… think so. I can take him to one of our hospitals.” She sighed, putting a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Though right now I’m a bit scatterbrained because of all that just happened.”

The Jojos just stared at where Kars had been, all five of them unsure of how to think about what had just happened.

They had lost.

And then they were saved by something they had scarcely even heard of before.

It just felt wrong. This wasn’t the way things were meant to be.

~~~

Eve had made the calls quickly. The respective overheads of six of the twelve public Divisions determined they cared enough to be there personally, bringing together Relations, Expeditions, Military, Expansion, Research, and Aid. Eve, Renee, O’Neill, and Maud were still the Overheads their Divisions had had since their inception, but Research and Aid had changed leadership over the years. Research was run by a Fire Nation elder by the name of Nora, while Aid was headed by the Binary Lexa from Mistress Luna’s world.

The six of them sat down in a gray room, expecting to speak amongst themselves a bit before the meeting started. But the moment Renee sat in her seat, the screens on the walls around them blinked to life and began displaying text.

Overheads of Merodi Universalis, we are the Xeelee, a Class 1 Society based within the parts of the E-Sphere farthest from your relative location. Upon the conclusion of your recent activities involving the fall of the Collector, we decided it would be worthwhile to send a long-range reconnaissance presence to get a fuller picture of who you were and what you stand for. We are glad to announce we approve of your society’s values, goals, and knack for progress.

“We are humbled by your approval,” Eve said, bowing her head – glad the Xeelee were using text to communicate rather than voice.

We noticed your society struggling greatly with an internal threat from the Arcei of Lai and determined that removing the complication from your society would serve as an initial gift from us to you.

“How exactly did you fix the problem?” Nora asked, adjusting her glasses with her mechanical arm.

We removed the arcs from all Arcei in a single instant, with the exception of one individual whose biology would not survive the removal of the arcs: Starcei. Without previously existing arcs, the art of transforming Runes to arcs is now lost to all but Starcei herself, and a scan of her mental state has proven she had no desire to perpetuate what she originally brought about. The Arcei will no longer attempt to destroy Stars or harvest Runes from Lai.

“That’s taking away their cultural identity!” Lexa blurted.

The likelihood of their society completely vanishing due to this action has been deemed low given the cultural protection laws put in place by your Cultural Division, whose Overhead is not present.

“I didn’t expect this to be about the protection of an interior culture, I didn’t put that on the memo,” Eve said. “Does she need to be here?”

Unlikely. Our projections suggest the Cultural Division will not need any outside assistance to ensure the Arcei retain culture without the need to destroy Runes. As a people they will continue to exist. If disaster strikes we may provide further aid in this regard.

Renee nodded slowly. “Have you taken any other actions?”

Merely captured any militant Arcei and sent them to your containment facilities, with the exception of the few who were deemed too dangerous to do so with, such as Kars. His vampire-Arcei were cured of their vampirism the moment we determined they were infected with such a thing.

O’Neill folded his arms. “And were there any casualties?”

One Arcei suffered a heart attack from shock. She has since been revived, but has suffered mental damage. We would need to upload her to a mainframe to cure it, and our policies dictate we hold off uploading non-digitized beings in cases like this.

“…You can fix Coming Back Wrong?” Eve asked, eyes widening.

We apologize if we gave you that impression. She did not Come Back Wrong, her mind was just damaged in the act of death. The is no cure for the condition, merely workarounds that involve cloning and soul creation. The original being is always lost in that case.

Nora nodded. “As we expected.”

Eve cleared her throat. “While we thank you for your immense aid in our crisis, we would have preferred you told us what you were doing prior to doing it.”

It was noted that your own policies would prevent such action from being taken by an internal or external force. You would have refused the assistance if you were unable to be certain of the effects. You may now rest easy knowing everything will turn out for the best.

O’Neill narrowed her eyes. “We’d like to make that judgment for ourselves, thank you.”

As expected. We will wait patiently for you to make a decision in that regard. However, we would like to make our offer during this meeting.

“What offer?” Renee asked.

We do much the same things you do as a society – explore, learn of new nations, and assist them where it is deemed necessary. Your Arcei problem was simply the most prominent, we saw numerous other issues we could have rendered obsolete with our assistance. In the future, we wish to assist you with the rest of these problems as well.

“Such as…?” Maud asked.

We can track down Brutalight and any of her escapees and take them off your hooves. We can ensure the University does not continue engaging in its thieving practices on lesser universes. We can provide you with known methods to stop the internal infighting on your Earth worlds. We can even offer protection from powers such as the Starcross Society, should they determine they want to attack you.

The six Overheads stared at the text on the screen in shock.

“…What do you want in return?” Eve asked after a moment of silence.

Nothing obligating. We will provide this assistance so long as you accept it. We simply ask that you continue to progress yourselves through technology. At the point you perfect digital uploading, we will extend an invitation to join the Xeelee.

This prompted another moment of silence.

Nora coughed. “This is a bit much to take in.”

Eve nodded. “We will have to deliberate a decision of this magnitude with all the Overheads.”

Keep in mind that we are only offering aid now, with hopes that, in the future, you consider adding your song to ours. The latter part does not require a decision at this juncture, and likely will not for many decades or centuries.

“It still requires deliberation.”

Very well. Our presence at this meeting is no longer required. We will know when you wish to resume in earnest.

The screens all went dead, leaving the six Overheads alone with a momentous decision.

“Let’s all take a break,” Renee suggested. “Talk to our advisors, spread the word around to those who need to know, and consider every angle. I instinctively don’t trust this.”

“It’s almost exactly what we’d do if we were in their position though,” Nora pointed out. “We’re not exactly in the habit of making sure we ask before solving problems.”

“We’re not always right to do that,” Eve reminded her. “The case-by-case way we live by has produced many problems. More good results than bad, mind you, but it’s not a perfect system. What we need to ask is if this will end up as one of those bad situations.”

“Or if they’re trying to take advantage of us for something,” O’Neill said. “I’m calling Valentine and the Grand Secretariat, see if they’ve gotten any offers like this.”

Eve nodded. “Everyone, break. We’ll meet back here once we’ve made a decision and the Xeelee are ready to listen. …Which is apparently all the time.” She rubbed her head. “I feel like a shiny bug in a zoo right now.”

“Good description,” Lexa said with a laugh.

“Thank you.”

~~~

Toph sat in her throne room, Starcei and Lady Rarity sitting in front of her, waiting for a reaction from their Queen.

“I was kinda hoping you two would tell me how I was supposed to feel about this.”

Starcei facehooved and Lady Rarity sighed. “Dear, you’re the Queen. You get to make the decisions.”

“I can’t make a decision if I don’t know what to think, can I?” Toph muttered, tapping her fingers on the armrest of her throne. “I have to make informed decisions.”

“Is there really one to make?” Starcei asked. “Beings far above us decided to be ‘helpful’ and solve a perceived problem. There’s little for you to deal with as a result.”

“I still have to make a speech about it or something and make changes in the current policy. To do that I need to know what I want in the situation.” Her frown deepened. “All I can say for sure right now is that we’ve been robbed of something.”

“It’s nothing more than what we rob of others when we save them,” Lady Rarity reminded her. “We change what was meant to happen.”

Toph nodded slowly. “…Fine, I’m just going to ignore the Xeelee for a moment and talk consequences. The Arcei have no arcs and have no way to get more arcs so long as Starcei doesn’t tell them.”

“I have no intention of creating more Arcei,” Starcei promised. “Or having more children that would require Runes to survive.”

“And because of that, there are no more Star-hunting missions or even missions to take the Runes of Lai. Even better, the most militant and aggressive of the Arcei have been taken care of and dropped right on our doorsteps. Or taken away if they were particularly nasty.” She folded her arms. “And we apparently ‘learned our lesson’ from Siron enough that the Cultural Division will go out of its way to ensure the Arcei won’t lose themselves because of this. How that’ll work I don’t even pretend to understand.”

Starcei cleared her throat. “The ponies who were once Arcei will stay together, practicing the same traditions they have been practicing for eons, with the exception of Rune destruction. They will have lost their unique style of magic, but they will still perform the rituals. They will be a proud people who stand defiant.” Her expression steeled. “Their society will eventually adapt to the new terms of their existence, becoming something new.”

“They’ll lose their culture,” Lady Rarity said.

Starcei shook her head. “Cultures change all the time, Lady Rarity. As I’ve watched my children grow over the eons, I’ve seen them go through many distinct phases. A modern Arcei would not understand an Arcei from three hundred years ago. They aren’t being forced into submission by us, they are being actively protected. …And even if they were being forced to comply, is that such a bad thing?”

“It sits wrong in my mouth,” Toph observed.

“We changed the Gems by force.”

“They were our equals,” Lady Rarity pointed out. “There’s something different about pressuring someone who can resist you when compared to people who have no power.”

“We’re the ones with no power, for once,” Toph realized. “What are we going to do about our culture here?”

“The Xeelee are not our problem,” Lady Rarity reminded her. “That’s for the Overheads to deal with.”

“Are they even a problem though?”

“I don’t know.”

~~~

Eve stared at the fireplace in one of Canterlot’s royal lounges, thinking deeply.

Luna, ruler of almost all Equis Vitis, moved into her view. “You are troubled, Evening.”

“I just realized that everything falls on my shoulders here.”

“You do not stand alone. Your many colleagues are involved in this decision as well.”

“I’m the Relations Overhead, Luna. Most of them will just follow whatever course of action I recommend. There will be a few dissenters, and I’ll listen to them, but this is my area of expertise. Even though I’ve opened it up for everyone to have a say… It will still mostly be my decision. Aid and Culture have nothing to deal with external aid or protecting our culture. They probably will after this is over, but for now… It’s an external presence dealing with us on a large-scale, so I’m the one who knows what to do.”

“And do you?”

“No,” Eve said, shaking her head. “My gut tells me to be defiant and refuse everything on principle. My mind tells me to accept them as they are and take all they have to offer.”

“Do we know if they are who they say they are?” Luna asked.

“We know they can do the things they offered. We also know they offered the Sparkle Census and USM similar deals, though notably not the University… Probably because of their practices.“ She furrowed her brow. “The USM has already outright refused because of their extreme national pride. Sparkle Census is still pending.”

Luna nodded slowly. “So the question is if we accept the offer of help or not… And you have strong feelings both ways.”

“You bet I do.”

There was a knock on the lounge’s entrance. “…Wonder who that could be?” Luna asked.

“Uh… Hey? Eve? You in there?” Corona called from the other side of the door.

“Corona, you’re a princess, you can just walk in,” Luna said. “This is the royal lounge.”

“Oh, right,” Corona opened the door with a bashful smile and closed it behind her. “I don’t exactly hang around here all that often. Excuse me.”

“It is no issue, your service more than makes up for your lack of regal attitude,” Luna said.

“…I feel like that was a thinly veiled insult.”

“Perhaps. But it is not what you are here to talk about.”

“No,” Corona said, sitting down in front of Eve. “I heard what the Xeelee offered you.”

Eve nodded. “Quite the impressive offer, huh? Deal with our big problems, defend us, and eventually adopt us into their fold. Almost an exact mirror of what we give the universes we take a liking to.”

“You need to hear what I found out on Earth MC,” Corona said. “I met the effective Abstract leader.”

Eve blinked. “W-what?”

“The Living Tribunal watches over all Abstract universes, ensuring balance. He told me, among other things, that I couldn’t take the Infinity Gauntlet away and we weren’t allowed to incorporate Earth MC into our fold. But, in the end, he gave me a piece of advice.” She folded her arms. “He said we needed to watch how powerful we were, because there would eventually come a point when we would just crush those below us without trying. He warned us not to become conquerors by friendship.”

“Good advice,” Eve admitted. “That’ll probably push the Lower Society bill into passing.”

Luna pondered this. “That’s the one where we will not be allowed to adopt societies below a certain ‘energy threshold’ into our folds, right?”

Eve nodded. “With what Corona’s just said, I’m certain it will pass now. Tribal societies like the demons will never have access to us or our technology, even if they want it. That line will only go up with time. …But Corona, that’s advice for us. How does that pertain to the Xeelee?”

Corona frowned. “Think about it, Eve. The Xeelee are at the very top. You’ve been talking to a small extension of them that was able to safely remove the arcs from every Arcei across dozens of universes and take control of an Infinity Gauntlet on the side. What if they are the conquerors by friendship? Won’t they destroy us? Do we know if they have a cultural protection program or anything of the sort?”

“I would assume it’s minimal,” Eve said. “Seeing as how part of inclusion in the Xeelee requires perfecting upload technology. I assume this means they exist as a digital society.”

“So if we pursued this and accepted their help what we exist as will soon be unrecognizable to what it is now.”

“But we need to ask ourselves if that is a bad thing,” Luna reminded them. “There are many societies we stick our hooves into and change drastically for the better – think Equis Fallout. Gem Vein. Nobody argues that the changes to those worlds were negative, though in a few cases they brought about unintended side effects.”

“But are the Xeelee objectively better?” Corona asked. “I don’t think so.”

“Digital uploading is a form of immortality,” Eve pointed out.

Corona sighed. “I know. But I’m really close to another solution. It won’t be much longer. Definitely less time than it would take to perfect upload technology.”

“…Gotcha…” Eve shook her head. “I don’t know. This entire thing just feels wrong.”

“Are we certain there’s no ulterior motive?” Luna asked.

“I talked to Nanoha,” Eve said. “She admitted the Xeelee have been known to do this from time to time, though usually a lot closer to their seat of power. It’s a tad unusual they’d go this far out to make an offer.”

“I think they want our power in ka,” Corona said.

“Possibly,” Eve responded. “But that’s just an explanation as to why they came out this far. It doesn’t change the validity of the offer.”

“Let us come at this from a different angle,” Luna said. “Why shouldn’t we accept their offer?”

Eve stared into the fireplace. “…It would eventually take us away from what we are.”

“Which brings us back to ‘is it or is it not better’?” Corona pointed out. “Back to an unanswerable question.”

“There are presumably other reasons we hesitate,” Luna suggested.

“They have too much power,” Corona said. “Way too much. They likely always get what they want just by flaunting it without any effort.”

“You sound like Siron,” Eve pointed out.

Corona blinked. “…Holy Celestia, you’re right.”

“We don’t want to be him,” Eve said. “Power isn’t inherently evil. It clearly breeds vices – as has been seen with most of the other Class 1s – but we shouldn’t hold it against them.” She looked up. “We need to be consistent with ourselves.”

“Consistent?”

“Let’s put ourselves in every position, filling everyone’s shoes,” Eve said. “Think of us as the Xeelee, and the single universes that we give aid to. Let’s imagine how to make the reactions of all three consistent with our current way of life.” She put a hoof to her chin. “I’ve just got to figure out how to do that…”

Corona nodded. “You are the boss here.”

“Thanks for coming, Corona. You too, Luna. You’ve all given me a loooot to think about.” Eve furrowed her brow. “I’m working out what we’re going to do.”

“Is it, by chance, the Third Option?”

“I think so.”

~~~

Giorno and Johnny didn’t stick around after Kars had been defeated – they went home, back to their lives and responsibilities. Jotaro, Jolyne, and Josuke returned to Morioh… To clean up Holy’s house. Everyone else had gone back to Marina and Jotaro’s after the initial reunion.

The reunion had been joyous.

What a dramatic turn of mood this was.

Josuke had started by ‘fixing’ the blood, knowing it would return to whatever morgue Holy’s body was currently sitting in. The act of doing so was too much for him. He broke down, punching a hole in the floor. “WHY!?”

Jolyne latched onto her father, hugging him tight.

“WHY!?” Josuke shouted. “Why did he have to kill her? Why not just take her like all the others? She couldn’t fight! She was no threat! She was just an old woman!”

Jotaro pulled his hat as far down as he could manage, shielding his eyes from visibility. “Because she would hurt the most. And because it was as personal a revenge he could have gotten.”

Josuke turned to glare at Jotaro, fists curled.

“Josuke…” Jolyne warned.

“Don’t you feel anything?” Josuke blurted. “She was your mother! How can you just stand there!?”

“Josuke, stop!” Jolyne called.

“No! I’m not stopping! I want to know how this bastard can stand there and give us facts about what happened! C’mon Jotaro, what is it? Are you a robot? Are you even human? Maybe you’re one of th-”

Star Platinum drove Josuke into the ground without the usual ‘ORA’ call. The only noise was his head hitting the floor.

“Josuke!” Jolyne blurted.

Josuke picked himself off the ground. “You can’t even look me in the eye. What’s with you?”

Star Platinum grabbed Josuke by the collar. “It is true. I often wonder if something might be internally wrong with me. I don’t feel pain as much as other people. Moments where others experience joy, I just have a slight smile. Moments where tears flow, I just sit silently. Perhaps I’m stunted somehow, or the sensations of life are muted for me. However…” He tore his hat off his head and threw it to the ground, revealing his eyes.

They were red, wet, and terrified. “THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE TIMES!” He hurled Josuke into a wall, for once in his life dropping the poker face completely. “She was my mother! I stand here, impassive, for the sake of the rest of you! So you can have a rock to latch yourselves on to! Looks like I’ve failed, just like we failed to protect her! Failed to defeat Kars!”

“Dad…” Jolyne said, holding out a hand.

“We lost, Jolyne!” Jotaro threw one of his arms wide. “LOST. There was no win condition. There was never a win condition. He knew, from the start, where that Gauntlet was! He would always have had time to access it! Always. We would have all died there! All of us! We’re failures!”

“Dad stop!” Jolyne shouted. “We’re alive! We didn’t lose!”

“We’ve lost, Jolyne. It’s just a trick of ka that we’re still alive. Perhaps not even that – perhaps just blind, stupid luck.” He wiped his eyes with his hand. “Yare yare daze…”

There was silence. Jolyne and Josuke stared at Jotaro, unbelieving at how he had just acted.

Jotaro picked up his hat and put it back on. “This is why I stand, silent. So there can still be some stability.”

Jolyne looked at her father with sad eyes. “…You need some stability too, Dad. It’s better if we stand together.”

“Stand proud,” Josuke said, standing up. “Stand as one.”

“Nobody should carry this burden alone.”

Jotaro opened his mouth to say something, but Jolyne pulled him into a hug. Whatever retort he had been about to make died on his lips. He let out a deep sigh, dripping with many years of pent up emotion. “…You’re right,” he said, pulling her in.

Josuke leaned back, allowing the father-daughter moment to conclude. Eventually, Jolyne was the one who pulled back. “…Dad, you’ve hurt yourself for our sake. I’m not going to ask you to stop being who you are, but I am going to ask that you stop tormenting yourself.” She wiped her eyes. “Grandma’s gone. It’s okay for you to break now. Nobody will judge, and nobody will think less of you for it.”

Jotaro trembled. “Jolyne…”

“Shh… It’s okay,” Jolyne said. “It’s okay.”

Josuke put a hand on his shoulder. “…Let it out, big guy.”

And so he did. He fell to his knees, slammed his fist into the ground, and shuddered. He did not weep, he did not scream – he just shook, kneeling on the floor, as weak as any man had ever been. The sounds of the younger generation weeping behind him fell into the background as he remembered his mother. She had given up so much for him, and he had given up so much for her…

It was all gone now. And he hadn’t even been able to set it right. There would forever be this hole of Jotaro’s failure deep within his soul.

It would never go away. He would live with it the rest of his life.

~~~

Before she entered the meeting, Eve sent out a quick message to all twelve other Overheads.

Any last minute changes to my decision you want brought to light? We need to know before we begin.

Twelve messages came back nearly instantly. There were no suggested changes – though Renee and O’Neill’s messages contained encouraging words meant to calm her nerves.

She let out a breath. “Here we go…” She walked into the meeting room and sat down. The Twelve Overheads were all present – and she knew Giorno was watching from a secure location. Everyone was ready.

We detect that you are ready to reveal your decision to us.

“We are,” Eve said, spreading her wings. “We have decided to treat your offer of aid as a lesser universe would treat our offer of aid.”

While we know what this means in your mind, it must be stated for the record.

“First, I have a question. Do you ever bother to make friends with those you aid?”

We are friends through our exchanges.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” Eve pointed out. “I mean do you ever stop to get to know them on a personal level? Do you live among them and communicate with them after the job is done? Do you learn who they are?”

There was no response.

“Or is that even possible, given your digital nature?”

It is exceptionally difficult to operate on the mental level of non-digitized beings. The friendships such as you describe them are rare, often impossible. It is why we do not allow non-digitized to be official members of the Xeelee. But this does not change the fact that we respect such life, for it is where we originated. We seek to bring it to our level.

“But you cannot truly know them from where you are now,” Eve said, nodding to herself. “Thank you, that’s all I needed to know to be certain.”

Then please, state your full decision.

“We’re not going to be hypocrites. We’ll accept any aid you offer, in the belief that most of it will be better for us in the long run, taking it on faith that you know what you’re doing. But we will also make it clear that we have no intention of ever joining the Xeelee. By our way of doing things, this means you will not interfere in our large scale government, not introduce new technologies to us, and not introduce us to the wider multiverse. You will treat us like a world that says no to us. Do you understand?”

Yes. We wish to make it known that, if you go down this path, after our initial aid, we will likely never contact you again.

Eve nodded, sure of herself. “We expected as much. Let us fade into the background of your memory, like so many worlds do for us. I can think of several worlds we have a connection with that have no interest in dealing with us. Ardent comes to mind as the most prominent. We accept their refusal, and rarely is contact resumed.”

Understood. Do you approve of the following revised list of Aid?

The Xeelee produced a list of minor assistances – including finding Brutalight and keeping the practices of the University of Doors limited. There was a notable lack of governmental suggestions or advice-based aid.

Eve nodded. “I concur. Any objections?”

The Overhead of Merodi Universalis shook their heads, giving their stamp of approval to the project.

We shall set to work right away. And then we will be gone. We wish you luck in the wider multiverse. Beware of the higher societies. You will not find one as benevolent as us again.

Then the screen died, indicating the meeting was over.

“I think that went well,” O’Neill said.

“They’re upset,” Renee observed, adjusting her hat. “They wanted us to become part of them.”

“They wanted our story,” Eve added. “Notice how they removed pieces of aid they didn’t strictly have to from our terms. No suggestions for improvement of little things. It’s their way of saying ‘your loss’. But this is the decision that needed to be made.” She took in a deep breath, steadying her breathing. “I’m going to go rest. If you have no pressing matters, I suggest you do the same. In a few hours I expect this ‘aid’ to bring about more than a little bit of uncertainty among the population.”

Everyone nodded, leaving to return to their various responsibilities – or to rest.

~~~

The Golden Joke was not without recreational activities. There were a handful of restaurants, a movie theater, and an arcade. Jenny loved the arcade a bit too much. The University of Doors was by far the least popular of all the multiversal societies in the local area, and Dracogen Enterprises was almost always lumped in with the University as a single entity. This made it rather difficult to get ahold of entertainment and games from other worlds, and if Jenny ever tried to go herself, well, her face was actually known among the general public and it wouldn’t go over well for everyone involved.

But she was free to move about at the Golden Joke, and the arcade was stocked with games from all sorts of worlds. Her favorite game was Multiversal Heroes 3, which was a favorite among most multiversal explorers who were actually in the fighting game. The developers put a lot of attention to detail in the ways the characters on the screen moved and acted, trying their best to emulate the real people. Of course the actual attacks were balanced to make a good game, but it was still enthralling nonetheless. It also helped that in MH3 Jenny herself was marketed as a neutral character rather than a pure villain.

There were no less than two dozen arcade consoles for the game in the Golden Joke, all connected to play with each other should it be desired. She was currently beating the tar out of a team of Coronas, laughing all the while. It was so easy she allowed her mind to wander as she pummeled the ‘noobs’ – the studio behind MH3 had announced there would be a Collection expansion to the game soon. No doubt featuring the Collector and perhaps a few of his most prominent Collected – Jenny had a betting pool running that Lightning and Thanos would both be included. She wondered how they were going to balance the Collector’s absurdity while still maintaining the accuracy. They always managed to do it… Though notably almost no one understood how to play the balanced Rohan correctly. He was a m-

“JENNY!”

Jenny blinked, realizing that YVND was on her arcade screen, hacking into it all the way from the Ninth World. “Oh. Sup?”

“You aren’t answering your communicator.”

“Psh, I was having some curbstomp fun. Give me a break.”

“Well we have a serious problem.”

“Really? If it really needed my attention you wouldn’t be talking to me right now.”

“It’s a serious problem we have no power to do anything about. Dragging you here would tick you off and be rather pointless.”

Jenny’s smile vanished. “…What happened?”

“Class 1 Society showed up and screwed with the University of Doors. They really don’t want to give away any information, but I suspect something about the University just ticked them off. They’ve been forced to suspend all ‘acquisition’ operations outside the Ninth World.”

Jenny blinked. “Crud, that’s not good for us.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Jenny rubbed the back of her head. “How much funding do you think we’re going to lose?”

“Almost all of it devoted to multiversal exploration.”

“Fuuuuuudge…” Jenny pulled at her hair. “We’re losing door access aren’t we?”

“It seems likely.”

Jenny turned away from the console and folded her arms. “Well, we got a good couple decades out of that deal. It was fun while it lasted.”

“If you say so.”

Jenny moved to adjust her suit in an attempt to look business-like – but then she remembered it was form fitting and didn’t even have a collar for her to mess with. “I’m just… gonna go make an announcement to the Golden Joke.”

“If you believe that is wise.”

“Can it, paperboy,” Jenny muttered, walking away. She left the arcade and went right to the main hall, walking across the dead, arid surface of the world. Never before had she thought the lifeless rocks were so depressing. She supposed she generally just didn’t care enough to notice these sorts of things.

She entered the main hall. There were a few people there, using it as a place to mingle and discuss policy. Jenny knew everything was recorded, so it didn’t really matter who was and wasn’t there.

She walked up to the main podium and tapped it. “So, hey, eyes on me.”

They all turned to look at her – confused.

“You may be thinking, ‘why is there a speech going on now? Nothing’s scheduled!’ or ‘why is Jenny talking? She never talks up there!’ Well, this is because I’ve got an announcement to give and then I’m going to have to jet. Are you with me so far? Good.”

She folded her arms. “The University of Doors has been forced to suspend its most extensive program, the acquisition program. This means all their research into exploring the larger multiverse suddenly means a lot less to them. Which means we, Dracogen Enterprises, are going to lose our access to the door matrix and the funding we receive to undertake expansive multiversal missions. I see a few of you smiling – yeah, I see you back there, prick. ‘oh hey, finally, they’re gone, we don’t have to deal with them anymore’.”

Jenny growled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right to be happy. We’ve been pushed aside like a bunch of stupid sheep. I’m not sure we’re even going to be a Class 3 anymore after this settles. We’re going to have to focus more on our world for a while. So go ahead, throw a party, you all outlasted us. Whoopee. Congratulations.”

She groaned, a hand to the bridge of her nose. “…Look, for what it’s worth, we screwed up big time back when we met. Possibly the worst mistake of all time. I’m aware enough to admit that. You all don’t have to keep rubbing it in.” She sighed. “Regardless, we’re leaving. We’ll probably keep a minor presence here, but don’t expect us to actually do anything. Much as I hate to admit it, we’re checking out for now. Buh-bye.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “This has been Jenny of the Red Gloves speaking for Dracogen Enterprises. Hope you enjoy your victory party.” She turned around and walked off stage to stunned silence.

She opened a door and appeared inside the Beanstalk, realizing with no small amount of sadness that she wouldn’t be able to do that for much longer. No more need to have door access if the University didn’t have a use for them anymore. She’d have to resort to using Merodi-designed devices.

It was embarrassing.

She watched the Numenera technology of the Beanstalk fly overhead. The citizens of this little town wouldn’t even know what they’d just lost. Few knew the University even existed, even less knew the full extent of the multiverse. They just knew the expansive universe they existed in, and that was it.

They probably wouldn’t care that much about the sudden slowing of technological progress, the lack of new ideas coming in, and the slow disappearance of ultraterrestrial visitors.

But Jenny would care.

She kicked a can across the street, fuming inwardly. She was going to take one of her ships and fly to a distant star. Hopefully she’d find something that was interesting enough to take her mind off this.

She made a note to purposefully order copies of Multiverse Heroes for permanent use within the Beanstalk. She couldn’t imagine life without that game anymore. Just like she couldn’t imagine life without being able to step through doors and appear almost anywhere…

She could do something about the former. She couldn’t do anything about the latter.

Because life was stupid like that sometimes.

~~~

Brutalight had herself an empire that suffered under her iron hoof of insanity. Five worlds currently obeyed her and her friends’ every whim.

That number was about to rise to six.

It had been a long, brutal campaign, but they were finally at the last step on the journey to conquering their first technology-based civilization. The world in question was Utara, a universe dominated by elves. Brutalight had a particular distaste for elves – didn’t know how to have fun, were always so arrogant even to each other, and were far too resistant to the joys of insanity.

That may or may not have been a huge factor in her decision to conquer this world. The elves would learn what it truly meant to live… Though most of them would learn how to die instead. But once they were dead, who cared?

They also had good books. Books were great. Even digital books.

Brutalight, Fluttershout, Rarifruit, Rainbine, and Six bashed down the three-meter thick wall that surrounded the Utaran Council’s final bunker. The interior was lit by blue lights, giving the rounded room an eerie feel. Sitting around a heptagonal metal table were six of the seven Utaran Council members – the seventh of whom had been guarding the door with his powerful magic. He had fallen rather quickly.

“You hunt us ruthlessly even months after we offered a surrender,” the youngest elf said, a woman. She stood up and walked toward them, leaving the other five behind. “Since I am about to die by your cruel hands, answer me one question. How?”

“How?” Brutalight blinked. “Was anyone else expecting the usual ‘why?’ question?” There was a round of nods from the other four members of the team. “Yeah, what gives?”

“I already know why you do this,” the woman said, shaking her head. “You find it enjoyable. You do not conquer for power, though that does factor into lesser areas of your motivation. You do not conquer for others, since you only care for each other. You do not conquer for revenge, because if that were the case you would have chosen a very different world to engage, and would have been much more efficient in your conquering. You conquer because it’s fun, and it’s the only thing besides each other that gives you enjoyment.”

“What’s your point?” Fluttershout asked.

“I have no point. I just stated I already know why. I want to know how.”

“Through magic and punching!” Rainbine blurted, grinning.

“How do you justify it to yourselves? How do you sleep at night? How do you treat each other with such love and care and exclude all others from that joy you experience? It is not because you were born as one,” she gestured at Six as evidence of this. “It is not because you really don’t care. How?”

“Do you know what the definition of insanity is?” Brutalight asked.

“There are a couple. One is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Another is foolishness. Perhaps irrationality.”

“Combine the last one with something a bit more literal,” Brutalight said, tapping her head. “We’re screwed up in here. Screwed up in the way we were born. You could explain to me in perfect logical arguments that what we do is wrong, and that we should stop, and I would be able to agree with you. We’re completely evil and batshit crazy. But, here’s the fun thing about insanity – knowing about it doesn’t do anything to change it!” she laughed. “We’re irrational! We’ll keep doing it because we feel driven to and we feel no remorse as a result! We don’t have to worry about guilt or conscience!” She grabbed the elf in her magic.

“…But what about the love and joy you share with each other? I’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it.”

Brutalight shrugged. “Insanity doesn’t require consistency, you know.”

“But you’re consistent with each other.”

For the first time, Brutalight’s cruel smile faltered. “You know what, I think we’re done talking. Rarifruit, you we-”

Rarifruit cut the elf’s head off with a levitated blade. “Yes…” she whispered.

“Even I think that’s creepy,” Rainbine admitted.

“Six, would you do the honors?” Brutalight asked, gesturing toward the remaining five elves. “I think we’re all growing a little tired of these little apes running for their lives.”

Six tapped into her power over death, ready to touch the elves in an instant.

The oldest elf snapped his fingers, activating the self-destruct spells in the compound. He fixed his eyes on Brutalight, clearly expecting everything to go up in flames before anyone had a chance to speak.

Brutalight laughed. “Do you think we’re stupid? Of course we knew you wanted to blow us up! Have you forgotten about our magic? Bomb disarming field. Easy. Everything within a kilometer radius is unable to explode right now. There’ll be no ‘nuke from a distance’ either.”

Six’s black power sucked the souls out of four of the elves, leaving only the elder. He stood tall, eyes completely unafraid.

“Why do they always have to be so boring?” Fluttershout asked. “He’s not trembling at all!”

“Because some people have an admirable strength,” Six said, Brutalight nodding in agreement. Six lifted her hand, grabbing the last elf in a telekinetic choke hold. “But even they die, just like everyone else.”

Brutalight sensed a series of strands shoot from multiple other universes, piercing Six in the heart, brain, and spinal column. It was a precision attack clearly designed to kill in an instant, giving no opportunity for reaction.

Six fell back, dead.

“S-six!?” Brutalight shouted.

“What did you do!?” Rainbine shouted at the elf.

“He didn’t do this,” Brutalight said, raising a defensive shield around them all. “Something else did…”

The wires appeared again, pinning the four ponies in place, preventing them from so much as speaking.

The elf stared at the four frozen mares in disbelief.

A text message began to appear on the table, projected by the blue lights.

Apologies. It is not usually our intent to end life without a warning, but her ability was potent enough it was possible she could kill us, given time and luck. It was too high a risk.

“W-who are you?” the elf asked.

The Xeelee. Expect future communication from us involving the aid you believe we should render to help rebuild your world.

The elf bowed in reverence. “Thank you for saving us, Xeelee! We are forever in your debt!”

We know. We shall now take these assaulters off your hands.

In an instant, all four ponies were gone, leaving the elder elf the last remaining member of the Utaran Council.

He sat down in his chair, looking at the ceiling.

What even was there to rebuild at this point?

~~~

Eve stood on the balcony of the Castle of Friendship, Renee and Pinkie at her sides.

She was reading through the compiled list of everything the Xeelee had done, and the consequences thereof.

“Removed all arcs from Arcei, creating a cultural crisis that looks like it will resolve itself…” Eve muttered, slowly moving her eyes across the data pad. “Placed heavy restrictions on the University of Doors, forcing them to drop most funding to Jenny and removing their active presence in the larger multiverse…”

“Such a shame. I think they were finally coming into their own,” Renee said, shaking her head.

Eve nodded. “Tauryl, the last nation on Equis Vitis not part of Merodi Universalis, has finally stopped their completely xenophobic refusal to speak to us. Talks with the centaurs and gargoyles will begin next week. Long-term consequences are unknown.”

“I want to know how they did that without getting them reaaaaaally angry,” Pinkie said.

Eve shrugged. “I don’t know and I don’t think we’ll ever know, since we can’t really contact them on our terms. ...The Xeelee took Kars, saving many of the Avengers of Earth MC, the Joestars, and Corona. They have handed over numerous other criminals that are of lesser concern. The next item on the list is classified; let’s just say they helped take care of a security breach. There was also an evil doomsday monster we didn’t know about on Earth Vitis got taken care of… Equis Concrete’s Sombra finally got what was coming to him. They removed his hold on his ponies, leaving a few of them insane, but otherwise everyone is exceptionally glad that brutal dictator is out of the picture. And…” She scrolled further down the list. “Yeah. That’s a lot of stuff they’ve done for us.”

Renee shook her head. “I suppose we finally know what it feels like now, don’t we dears?”

“Getting help from high above…” Eve muttered. “It’s… not always the most pleasant of feelings.”

“It just means admitting you can’t do anything,” Pinkie said. “Being weak isn’t bad, Eve.”

“I know. But I’m just not used to thinking of ourselves like that. Usually, we can just conquer our problems with enough time and effort.”

Pinkie cleared her throat. “Moral of the day: if you’re going to help others, be ready to accept help.”

“I thought there was a moral about not crushing societies?” Renee asked.

Pinkie shrugged. “Eh, the morals are a bit vaguer now than they used to be. There was also a lot of other stuff mixed in to the adventure this time. Welcome to an extended study of the anticlimax!”

Eve rolled her eyes. “I guess that’s what it is from one direction. From another… The talks were their own adventure, in a way.” She turned around, heading back toward the Map room. “Come on, let’s go have lunch or something.”

The moment they went back inside, the Map flashed, producing text above it.

And our last gift to you is complete.

Brutalight, Fluttershout, Rarifruit, and Rainbine appeared in front of them, all four of them surrounded in invisible restraints.

Eve took a moment to process what was happening, but she had gotten used to the need to transfer from emotional conversation to leader in an instant over the years. “What are you going to do to them?”

The sentence is similar to Kars’. A year of biological testing prior to execution. Six was already executed since she was deemed a risk.

“Is their insanity curable?”

Yes, via uploading. Aside from the moral concerns of editing their personalities in order to accomplish a ‘cure’, there’s also the issue of the levels of depression they would suffer after the procedure. They would not revert to the ponies they once were; they would still be the soul combination. It would be right to think of it as trading one insanity for another.

Eve nodded. “I understand. They are who they are… It’s not reversible, at least not in a way that doesn’t just rewrite their minds completely with something new.” She turned to Brutalight. “I want to talk to her.”

As you wish.

Eve turned her ears on, struck by the way the air was blowing past her ears. She looked Brutalight in the eyes.

“Hello, Evening Sparkle,” Brutalight said. It was the first time Eve had heard Brutalight speak without any sort of malice or rage in her voice – she sounded so sad. So tired.

Eve sighed. “Hello, Brutalight Sparcake.”

“So… You’ve won. Got yourself some nice benefactors to fuck us up and bring us in.” Brutalight forced a smile. “Taking out the trash, finally?”

“You could say that.”

“This wasn’t exactly how you figured this would go down, huh?”

Eve’s ears twitched. “I was going to take you out with my own hooves. Your ears would go first – then the rest of you.”

Brutalight laughed. “Fitting. It would have been a nice death.”

Eve shook her head. “Something is really wrong with you…”

“Surprise, surprise,” Brutalight chuckled bitterly. “Personally, I was going to go for your eyes next, and then over the course of several days use the dried eyeballs to remove parts of you over time, keeping you alive with magic until your soul just gave out.”

“…Now I feel a lot less guilty about what I was planning.”

Brutalight winked. “Glad I could give you some piece of mind before I’m off to the chopping block.”

“…You really are, aren’t you?”

Brutalight’s corny smile faltered. “Yeah. Guess I just know this is it, y’know? Not really a point in screaming at you until the bitter end. I can tell you that is what Fluttershout and Rainbine would be doing right now, if they got this opportunity. But not me.”

Eve sagged. “Why do you have to show this part of yourself to me now?”

“Because it can only come out now,” Brutalight said. “I mean, I’m still Twilight in here, somewhere in this tied up mess. I know I won’t be able to destroy you or take any more revenge. I guess some part of me is trying to set things right? Even though I don’t really have the capacity to understand what ‘right’ is.” She laughed bitterly. “If you’re thinking of letting me out, seriously don’t. I will kill you if I get the chance.”

“I know,” Eve said. “I’d do the same.”

“Glad to see I rubbed off on you.”

“Likewise.” Eve looked around at the rest of them. “I’m sorry about Six. And… what you’re going to go through.”

“Pff, we deserve it and you know it. I’m probably going to get some sort of sick, masochistic enjoyment out of it at times. BRING ON THE BIOLOGICAL TESTING! Make me give birth to myself or something.”

“Ew.”

“Exactly!”

Something about the way she said it brought a smile to Eve’s lips. “I hate you, you know.”

“I know,” Brutalight said.

“But I’m glad we got to end like this, rather than the way either of us wanted,” Eve said, grabbing Brutalight’s hoof. “It allowed me to see you for who you are. I still hate you, hate you for everything you’ve done. All the horrors you’ve brought. You deserve the worst. But I can finally see it in you. What you showed all your friends. Your magic.”

“Ah, geez,” Brutalight said, grimacing. “You’re going to make me cry.”

“It’s okay if you do.”

Brutalight sucked it in. “This is the last memory you’ll have of me. I don’t want it to be of a bawling alicorn brought low.”

“Then don’t let that be who you become,” Eve said, taking a step back.

“…Do you think there’s something else?” Brutalight asked. “Something… after?”

“In some places, there a-”

“You know what I mean, and that isn’t it.”

Eve blinked. “I… I don’t know what I think. Flutterfree’s sure there is. Nova’s pretty sure there isn’t.”

Brutalight nodded slowly. “Yeah… Yeah I already knew that. I don’t even know what I was asking.”

“It’s a good thing to think about,” Eve admitted.

“Yeah…” Brutalight chuckled. “Rainbine is probably inwardly screaming at me for being such a softy right now.”

“I bet she’ll understand everything and want to support you.”

Brutalight grimaced. “C-come on Eve, that’s not fair.”

Eve smiled. “Go. I hate you. But we can leave as friends.”

“Oh good god you just had to say it,” Brutalight said shaking her head. “You’re a moron, you know that?”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Fine then,” Brutalight said, a single tear rolling down her face. “We leave as friends.”

Eve nodded. She turned around.

“…Hey, one more thing.”

“Hm?”

Brutalight lifted her wing, flipping Eve off. She smirked evilly. “Bye.”

Eve nodded. For the first time in her life, she twisted her wing into the obscene gesture.

Brutalight laughed joyously.

There it is, Eve thought. Take her away.

The Xeelee obliged. The Elements of Insanity were gone. No further text messages appeared above the Map.

Renee put a hoof around Eve. “I’m so proud of you. That couldn’t have been easy on you.”

Pinkie hugged Eve tight.

Eve smiled. “It… It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. And… And I feel a lot better about her now than I do about Siron.” She walked back onto the balcony, looking out at the setting sun of Equis Vitis. “There was something beautiful there… Setting aside our hate…” She smiled. “It was right.”

~~~

The Xeelee Transport Matrix would take precisely 9.4 seconds to arrive in Xeelee controlled space with the Elements of Insanity. To the prisoners, this would be instant. They would experience a flash of light, see a bunch of strange ‘string’ patterns pass by their eyes, and then they would be in the cell that would serve as home for the last year of their lives.

However, the Xeelee were digital beings that thought several orders of magnitude faster than a standard organic brain. The trip, while not exactly a terrible one, would still feel long to them. There was plenty of time for a conversation.

Their ka is clearly separate from us.

<< They could have just not wanted to join.

There are large quantities that refuse the offer. <<

What I’m saying is that their story would not have allowed them to join us.

<> Just like it will not allow us to interfere with them over time. You know as well as I do that, should we try to control them, it would end disastrously for us.

<<> We do not try to control lesser races.

<> It’s all a matter of perspective and definition.

It sounds like you might need to be sent back into ethics education. <<

No, it’s good. The point is valid.

<<> Fair.

^ Alert! Incoming attack! ^

<<> What kind of attack would warrant an alert!?

^ A temporal-based weapon of unknown make and origin sailing through the Infinite Sea in parallel universes, following us with alarming precision. ^

Are you saying it’s actually going to hit us?

^ Precisely. ^

<> Only Gallifreyans have the required temporal knowledge to craft a time-based weapon that could do anything to us… And they lack the ability to track us with this precision.

<< More than a little concerning. Activating wire constructs.

^ ALERT! FEEDBACK LOOP! ^

And then everything went static in the conversation. A weapon that could not be seen by human eyes ‘impacted’ a ‘ship’ composed of invisible string constructs, trapping it in a bubble universe locked in time, then shunting the location of the bubble to a location buried deep within an unstable cluster the Xeelee would not be able to find.

They would have no need to search with diligence for such a small transport ‘vessel’.

Within the bubble of time, all entities remained conscious – but unable to communicate, move, or do anything. It was as if only their souls were immune to the distortion of time. Perhaps an intentional part of the weapon’s design.

All Brutalight knew was that she was going to have a long time to sit and think, her body frozen in a sea of beautiful colors, frozen in time…

081 - Eternity Courses Through Her Veins

Lady Rarity was more than a little concerned about Corona.

She hadn’t left her house, as far as anyone could tell, for three days. She wasn’t answering her phone and nobody had heard anything from her during that time. It was almost as if she’d dropped off the face of the Earth.

And yet, her house on Lai was still using power in such a way that suggested she was still living in it. But her neighbors had not seen her. And no matter how much they knocked, she never answered the door.

So Lady Rarity had decided it was time to get to the bottom of this. She marched up to Corona’s front door and knocked, not expecting any response. She courteously waited two minutes anyway before teleporting to the other side. The entryway needed dusting, but it didn’t look too out of order. Lady Rarity skittered around, taking advantage of being unarmored to move around the walls and ceiling for better vantage points. She moved around the house with ease. The dishes in the kitchen had clearly been piling up, but there didn’t appear to be enough for three days worth of meals. She didn’t see any sign of Corona on the entire ground floor.

So, obviously, Corona was in the basement.

Lady Rarity skittered down the steps, her ears perked. She heard no noises from the basement, but her predatory senses told her there was a living thing down there. She carefully moved down and pushed the door open, looking into Corona’s lab.

It was even more disorganized than usual. Beakers were all over the floor,magical glowing liquids within many of them. There were more than a few blast marks all over the walls, and at least one of the big monitors had been turned into a bush. The strangest part was that none of the large pieces of machinery were moving at the moment, just a bunch of chemicals sitting around, dormant – their glow only accentuated by the dimmed lights.

The center of the lab was occupied by Corona herself – but something was wrong about her. It wasn’t the psychotic grin on her face, although that raised a few red flags. It wasn’t the fact that she was standing there completely naked, her body covered in black markings that made her look like she was a cow about to be cut up into different chunks of meat for later consumption. It was the fact that she was glowing, as if something alive was moving around inside of her.

Oh, she was also holding a knife in her hands, carefully tracing along one of the black lines to a point where several of them crossed, just under her left set of ribs.

Lady Rarity was so dumbfounded and horrified by what she was seeing she couldn’t formulate a response. She didn’t even cry out when Corona slid the knife across her skin, breaking into a blood vessel. Her blood poured out – but it wasn’t red. It was a bright, golden, shimmering color. Corona’s ears twitched in excitement as she used her magic to levitate the fluid into a tall bottle. She set the bottle down on a table and created a crimson arcane circle around it.

The spell made a copy of the bottle one inch to the left.

“YES!” Corona shouted, jumping into the air and spreading her wings. “YES YES YES YES YES YES YES!” She flew around, did a swing dance in the air, and promptly crashed into the ceiling. She slowly floated down to the ground, shaking her head. “Okay, calm Corona, calm.” She healed the wound and put her hands on her hips, beaming with pride. “It is done! It i- oh, hi Rarity, when did you come in?”

Lady Rarity stared at her in disbelief. “But I was… and then… you were… what?”

Corona snapped her fingers and pulled Raging Sights to her with her magic, creating the battle-dress she normally wore, complete with the red angled shades. “All right, I’ll put this simply.” She levitated the bottle in front of Lady Rarity’s eyes. “This is the Essence of Eternity. I did it Rarity. I found easily duplicatable immortality.” She pointed at the second bottle, duplicating it with a simple spell.

“H-how!?” Lady Rarity blurted, still not quite processing what was going on.

“Complex substances don’t duplicate well, and enchantments almost never do. However, I found a loophole where if I infuse my immortality with a biological component inside my body, I could ‘trick’ the magic into duplicating with the serum!” She whooped. “It’s a lot more complicated than that – as all these lines on my body will tell you. …As well as all those failed essences on the floor. But hey, it’s done!”

“…Corona, you’re glowing,” Lady Rarity said.

“Wow, I really must have done a number on your mind,” Corona said with an awkward smile. With a wave of her hand she increased the light level in the lab to normal daylight levels. Her glow was no longer noticeable, though the glow of the bottles were. “Don’t worry, everything’s completely safe, even if at about midnight last night I kinda threw safety procedures out the window out of desperation.”

“Have you slept?”

“Sorta? Not really. Complicated consciousness spell that can replace sleep for about a week before you start going nuts.”

“You sound ‘nuts’ already.”

Corona chuckled. “Maybe. But hey, it paid off! Everyone can live forever so long as they drink this!”

Lady Rarity smiled. “I’m glad you finally pulled it off.”

“Hey… You want to be the first?” Corona asked, levitating a bottle over to Lady Rarity.

Lady Rarity stared at the bottle, taking it in her own telekinesis. For a moment, she wondered if she wanted to. If she should take it. If she really wanted to live forever...

She quickly threw those thoughts out the window and downed the whole thing in twenty seconds. She let out a gasp – it tasted like… gold mixed with pure nectar. It was such a bizarre flavor. “This won’t make me glow, will it?”

“You should have asked that before you downed it.”

“...It will!?”

“No,” Corona said, chuckling. “I mean, my glow is permanent now, I need to be anchored to the stuff I’m duplicating at all times for it to work properly. Won’t be too hard to set up a mass duplication matrix though…”

Lady Rarity’s eyes flashed yellow for a moment and then returned to normal.

“And there you go! Immortal. You won’t age beyond what you are now.”

“Huh… Doesn’t feel any different.”

Corona nodded. “Be glad. There was a previous one that worked but made you lose control of your bladder. Decided it wasn’t worth it.”

“…How exactly did you figure that out?”

Corona tapped Raging Sights. “Simulation after simulation. Tested it on seven thousand spirids before I gave it to you. All worked fine.”

Lady Rarity smiled. “Well… What are you going to do now? Celebrate?”

“Heck yes. Actually, later. First I need to talk to Eve and the Overheads about the regulations for this stuff. I’ve got a long day ahead of me!”

“You’re not going to sleep!?”

“Only three days in! I’ve got four more in me!” She laughed. “Thanks for being here, Rarity!”

“…You’re welcome?”

“Oh, was everyone worried about me?” Corona facepalmed. “I’m such an idiot! Tell them I’m fine and what I did. Though don’t tell the public about it, we don’t want a panic. Or a craze.”

“I know what to do, don’t worry. I do need to calm down first.”

Corona chuckled. “Yeah, you do. Good luck with that! See you around!” She teleported away.

Lady Rarity glanced around the lab. Then she let out a dramatic sigh and walked out.

Crazy woman.

~~~

Eve looked at the glowing bottle sitting on her desk. “So, this is it?”

Corona nodded with the stupidest grin imaginable. “Yep!”

“Did you find the duplication loophole through your own organic connection, or was this random inspiration?”

“The former,” Corona said. “I told you the secret was within the body. Did we bet on that? I don’t exactly remember.”

Eve shrugged. “Don’t recall. Let’s just say I owe you lunch and keep it at that.”

Corona gave her a thumbs up. “I’ll keep you to that!”

Eve lifted the bottle and examined it. “What would it do if I drank it?”

“It would prevent you from getting any taller or whatever other effects come from aging as an alicorn. I would strongly recommend you don’t drink it.”

“What about beings that don’t ingest material to survive?”

“The majority of those are unaging already. There are time spells available for the few aging intangible beings. The main problem was those spells weren’t mass-producible.” She raised her hand and duplicated the glowing concoction. “This is. Granted, I have to do the producing, but after about a week of duplication there should be billions of bottles. And they have an infinite shelf life. Which really shouldn’t come as a surprise.”

Eve nodded. “This is the point where I ask you, again, to reconsider what you’re doing. Maybe we’re messing with things we shouldn’t be, yada yada, but I already know you’re dead set on this. And, frankly, if we can’t solve sudden, tragic deaths… At least we can make sure there aren’t any long, drawn out ones.” Eve pushed a bottle back to Corona. “I’m not giving you my endorsement.”

“Yeah, I know this.”

“But there’s no way in the name of the Tower I’m going to be able to stop you,” Eve admitted. “If you want this out, get it out there. There will be consequences you won’t think of until it’s too late.”

Corona nodded, face serious. “I know.”

“Most of those probably won’t show up for several years… Regardless, what exactly is your plan? Sell it?”

“Are you crazy? Of course not! This needs to be government-regulated to an absurd degree,” Corona said. “I was hoping you could patch it through to Oversight so they could create the regulations for it.”

“Oversight and Justice.”

“Hm?”

“The two divisions work together to create regulations so neither one can one-up the other.”

“Right, forgot.” Corona shook her head. “The point is I need a politician type to send it over to them, get them to figure out how to distribute it to everyone and how to determine who’s old enough to get it. If it’ll be a medically regulated substance or available in stores. I’m expecting medically regulated.”

Eve nodded. “I’ll send it over to Renee – she’s always been a lot better at internal affairs than me. She’ll get it to them looking prim and proper.” Eve smiled sheepishly. “When you’re Overhead of Relations, the new societies give you a pass for being slightly unprofessional because they don’t want to insult your culture.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Sometimes it is. Sometimes not.” Eve shrugged. “Everything comes with a little good and a little bad if you look into it deeply enough.”

“Just make sure she puts in my only requirement.”

“Oh?”

“Everyone in Merodi Universalis has to be able to access it at a good point in their lives – no waiting for people to be on death’s door, and no excluding people because they’re healthy. Everyone needs to be able to get it.”

Eve nodded. “I’ll remember that.”

“It was the whole point of all this painful research.” Corona rubbed her stomach. “Had to cut myself open more than once…”

“…What?”

“Oh, uh, not surgery. The serum was produced in my body, I had to let it out somehow. Took forever to find the right place.”

“Is that why your arm has evidence of permanent marker on it?”

Corona smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. I haven’t exactly tried to clean it all off yet. Just enough scrubbing to be presentable.”

“You can’t just magic it away?”

“I used a magic bath spe-” she blinked. Then she lit her horn and lifted the marker completely off her skin. “Scatterbrained me, bath spell was the wrong choice.”

“At least you smell like soap now.”

Corona chuckled. “Anyway, I’ve got a few deliveries to make. I take it I don’t exactly have to keep this hushed up anymore?”

Eve shook her head. “I bet they’ll want to start shipping it out within the month. You’re free to even make an announcement if you want.”

“Nah, I’ll leave that to you unless you’ve got a specific role for me. Not the politician here.”

“You give good speeches!”

“But I don’t want to take away from your spotlight,” Corona said with a wink.

Eve smiled. “Fair enough.”

“See ya, Eve!”

“…Hold on. This has been bugging me for a while.”

“Hm?” Corona said, turning back to her.

“Are you… glowing?”

“Oh, yeah. Guess this isn’t as bright as daylight.”

“…Is that permanent?”

“I can remove it whenever I want. Except when I do I won’t be able to duplicate the serum anymore. So I’m going to keep it.” Corona grinned. “I’m slowly turning into a sun as time goes on.”

Eve facehooved.

“Bye Eve! See you around!” Corona spread her wings and took off toward the ceiling, teleporting away before she hit.

Eve looked at her own wings for a moment.

“C’mon, why are hers so much prettier?”

No answer was forthcoming. Eve decided to leave pointless envy to the side and call Renee.

~~~

Corona strolled into Iroh’s Teashop, trying to keep up her smile. But the moment she walked into the kitchen, the smile had vanished completely. She sighed, opting to stand in the doorway until he noticed her.

Iroh was far too engrossed in the art of tea making to notice her instantly. He moved slowly and with great creaks in his body – clearly not a man who would function in a fight anymore. Yet he didn’t let it bother him, still going about his relaxed work with a smile, using the occasional puff of fire from his fingertips for some extra spice.

It just made Corona sad to see him like this. He had been old when she’d met him, but he’d remained strong and sprightly for long after that. He had trained her – and then he had started training Corea. But that was when it started to set in. Magic medicine could do wonders for a person, but unless they wanted to actually de-age themselves and suffer the mental side effects, it only went so far.

He was in his mid-nineties. He only kept himself here and away from the spirit world because Corea was still young. But Corea had recently turned seventeen – she was, in many ways, ready to be the Avatar for the Elemental Nations. Corona had seen her do many things for that world already, and she was certain the young Avatar would do many more.

Corona grimaced, realizing what she was about to do.

Iroh must have sensed a disturbance in the air, for he finally turned around and saw her standing there, gloomy. He smiled. “Ah, Corona… My favorite student.”

“You really should play favorites with the Avatar, old man,” Corona said, a small smile coming to her face.

“Nonsense. I choose favorites based on my own thoughts, not obligation.” He moved slowly to sit down at a table in the back – graciously allowing Corona to help him into his seat. She sat down opposite him. “Nice glow, by the way.”

Corona chuckled. “Thanks.”

“…Where is it?” He asked after a moment’s silence.

Corona produced a bottle filled with Essence of Eternity and placed it in between them. “Drink it and you won’t age any further. …But we both know you aren’t going to take it, no matter how much else I can do for you.”

Iroh let out a deep sigh. “Yes… All this means is that it is finally time for me to leave these worlds and let the next generation take their place. The endless generation.”

“…You sure Corea’s ready?”

“There is little I can teach her in the ways of spirits and the Avatar. She may not have completely mastered the bending arts, but she is on the right track. She’s already done my world proud.”

Corona smiled. “I’m… glad to hear that.” She sat back. “…You never really explained what’s in the spirit world, Iroh.”

“It is not something for those who do not feel an inner urge to seek it.”

“I think you owe me a bit more explanation than that, now that the time has come.”

Iroh nodded. He sat back, collecting his words. “It may or may not be another universe. It may just be a plane of existence out of phase with Elemental Four. It does not matter, for it is a holy place. It is the world where the spirit of the Avatar, Raava, originated. It is the world of many forces of nature. It is… It is the reason our world exists with the balance it does. It may exist separately, but it is the defining backbone of everything that drives our lives. That is why I fought so hard to have it be declared a protected world – a disturbance in the Spirit World could do drastic things to Elemental Four, things to our very souls.”

“That’s why it’s important,” Corona said. “That doesn’t answer why you’re going.”

“…Originally, it was to look for my son,” Iroh admitted. “You know how I lost him. I strived to be with him again, always, even through all the adventures. But I have come to realize that, if his spirit is there, it won’t recognize me. It will have taken a new form…” he shook his head.

“I now go because it is the way to end my story and begin another. I will likely achieve ‘immortality’ of a sort there, but not of the kind you are offering me. I will become but a spirit, wandering, eventually unable to comprehend the physical world fully… but I will retain my memories. I will become its internal guardian – but also just a denizen looking for a sort of peace. An end to the pain.” Iroh looked into the distance. “The world is a cruel one, Corona. Even your home suffers in the shadows. And we hail from the better worlds.”

Corona nodded – thinking of ‘grimdark’ universes. Galaxus Immaterium...

“I guess that means part of the reason is selfish,” Iroh said with a pained chuckle. “I want the pain to end and find true peace. I will find it there since I have spent most of my life meditating on the Spirit World and what it means to us. It will welcome me.”

Corona wiped some tears from her eyes. “All right. I won’t try to stop you.”

“Thank you.”

“I will demand that you let those close to you bid you goodbye,” Corona said, standing up. “Everyone who wants to… will congregate at Elemental Four’s south pole to wish you off.”

“Corona…”

“That’s my condition. You get to attend your own funeral.”

Iroh smirked. “I’ll agree to the terms, but it isn’t exactly a funeral.”

“Right… But that’s what it’s going to feel like.”

Iroh nodded. “It will be difficult… But I do owe them all at least that much. I’ll arrange it.”

Corona smiled. “…Good.”

Iroh stood up, groaning. Corona helped him walk to leave the kitchen, entering the public area. Iroh coughed for attention. “I’m going to have to shut down the tea shop for a few days. I apologize to those of you who have not been served yet, but there’s something I have to attend to.” He coughed again. “I hope you understand.”

Everyone in the teashop took one look at him and smiled warmly. There was a bunch of nodding heads and polite bows in Iroh’s direction.

Every person in the room had a deep respect for the man. The show of it brought tears to his eyes.

~~~

A few hours later, Corona knocked on a door to one of the Hub’s houses. She had timed it perfectly so a particular person would answer the door.

Renee answered. “Yes, w-” she stopped when she saw Corona. “C-corona! Y-you’re not supposed to be here!” She glanced over her shoulder nervously. “Quick, before he sees you, g-”

Corona wordlessly held up the glowing yellow potion.

“O-oh…” Renee said, biting her lip. “I… I see.” She cleared her throat. “Daniel? Dear!”

“Yeah?” Corona heard Daniel call.

“Go sit down on your favorite chair. You’ll want to be calm for this.”

“…That’s not ominous at all.”

“Dear, I love you, go sit down, and try not to hate me later.”

“All right,” he said without hesitation.

“He sure trusts you,” Corona said.

“Yeah…” Renee said, a wistful expression crossing her face.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Let’s hope it stays that way, hmm? …He should have sat down by now. Stay behind me.”

Corona obliged, softly walking behind Rarity as she made her way to the living room. Daniel was sitting there in his favorite blue chair turned away from the television. He looked old and tired, but there was life in his eyes. He also didn’t look as old as he actually was, thanks to magic medicine – he looked like he was in his late fifties, not mid-seventies. “What’s going on?” he asked Renee.

Renee took a deep breath. “Don’t jump out of your chair.” She gestured for Corona to come out from behind a wall.

The instant he saw her he jumped up and took a defensive stance, starting to perspire from the sudden shot of adrenaline. “G-get her out of here.”

Renee gulped. “Ah… I don’t think I can do that this time, dear.”

Corona nodded slowly, levitating the Essence of Eternity into a coffee table near Daniel. He nervously tapped the table with his leg, scooting it away.

Renee bit her lip and shook her head.

Corona spoke as softly as I could. “This is the immortality serum, Daniel. Drink it and you’ll never age another day again.”

“You made it, I’m not t-touching it!” Daniel shouted.

“Look, dear, it’s safe!” Renee said, nudging Corona. She produced another bottle and handed it to Renee. She tanked it quickly, in desperation. “See? It’s fine!”

“The other bottle could be poisoned!”

Renee took a small amount out of Daniel’s bottle and ingested it just as her eyes flashed yellow from the first dose. “See? All fine. Everything’s fine.”

“S-she could use her magic or something! I d-don’t need immortality anyway! I’m doing just fine so long as I don’t see her. I’ll just Ascend and de-age myself next time!”

“Daniel, love…” Renee shook her head. “…You’ve had many ‘deaths’ since the games. You haven’t Ascended once, even when you should have. You might have been damaged.”

“BY HER!”

“And I’m trying to fix it!” Corona blurted.

Daniel took several steps back, until he hit a wall. “F-fix me? Actually kill me!?”

“Wha- no!”

“You just don’t want me to ever Ascend again! You want my energy for yourself!”

Corona’s eye twitched. She had to force herself not to burst out in anger.

Renee put a hoof on Corona. “O…. Okay, Daniel. We’ll leave you.”

“Take the bottle too!” Daniel demanded.

Renee did so, picking it up in her magic and taking it with the two of them to a parlor.

“He needs to take it,” Corona said.

“It’s his choice…” Renee reminded her.

“He’s just reacting because he knows it’s from me. Aside from his reaction to me, he’s perfectly healthy.” She sighed. “I’m wondering if I should have tried to trick him…”

“He would have figured it out the moment I said it was immortality serum,” Renee said. “It’s no secret what you’ve been working on, Corona.”

“I know,” Corona shook her head. “…Hold onto it. Maybe you’ll be able to catch him on a good day.”

Renee nodded slowly. “I have every intention of convincing him to take it one day. It just looks like that day isn’t going to be today.”

“…I wish I could help him,” Corona said. “I really wish I could… But it’s me in there. All because I thought, one day, there wouldn’t be any consequences.”

“I’ve forgiven you, you know this,” Renee said. “And I know he would too if he was able.”

Corona nodded. “It’s a small comfort, at least.” She rolled her shoulders back and stretched her wings. “…I hope you get through to him.”

“Me too. You should probably leave now. I’ll have those documents sent out by tomorrow.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Corona said, teleporting away.

Renee teleported the serum into the closet. “Daniel, she’s gone.”

“G-good.”

“You know I don’t want to hurt you right?” she said, trotting back to the living room.

“Y-yes,” Daniel said, “I know for sure.” He looked at his hands. “I know either I’m crazy, or everyone else is…”

Renee wiped tears from her eyes.

“But whenever I think of her… All that is gone. All I have is absolute certainty.” He put a hand to his face. “There’s nothing I can do. Nothing I can do…”

Renee kissed him. “You don’t have to, love.”

He pulled her close, saying nothing for the longest time.

~~~

The Primary Team was eating lunch at some random place in Ponyville that served plates that were food. Some of them were like giant cookies and pizzas, but there were a few dishes that were pasta bakes somehow cohesively held into a plate shape. It was best not to question it. Just like it was best not to question how Pinkie fit the entire plate in her mouth at once.

“Deeeeelicious!” she declared, giggling.

“Well now none of the rest of us will know how good it was! Because you ate it!” Nova declared.

“Five out of five stars, best plate ever. Soooooo bad you girls didn’t get to try it!”

Jotaro raised an eyebrow.

“And guy! I didn’t forget about you!”

It was Flutterfree’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

“Psh, I don’t forget Jotaro exists. He’s just too big!”

“Riiiiight.”

Jotaro grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

Vriska fell down from the sky. “I have drinks.” She dropped a tray with four golden bottles onto the table. “The best of drinks.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Okay, I’ll bite, what is it?”

“Corona’s completed research,” Vriska said, walking around the four of them like sharks. “The secret to eternal life, procured early by yours truly.”

Flutterfree, Nova, and Jotaro just stared at the drinks, processing.

Pinkie downed hers the instant Vriska had finished talking.

“P-Pinkie!” Flutterfree gasped. “Don’t you think we should talk about this!?”

Pinkie’s eyes flashed yellow. “Eh, don’t really feel like I need to. I will now live forever! WOO!”

“But do we really want to?” Flutterfree asked.

“You know what, why am I even considering this?” Nova asked, chugging hers next. “The answer is duh, obviously. Who wouldn’t!?”

Jotaro turned to Vriska. “…This will be publicly available, right?”

Vriska gave him the thumbs up. “Corona wouldn’t let me have it if it wasn’t going to be.”

Jotaro nodded. He gripped the bottle, examining it closely.

“Jotaro…”

“Chances are I’ll die young in combat anyway,” Jotaro said.

“You’re in your fifties!”

“So are you.”

“Ponies live longer!”

“…Then I’ll need to catch up.” He downed it, taking a breath after. “…Curious taste. Hope it’s not addictive.”

“You’ll never need another one,” Pinkie pointed out. “Woohoo! Eternity!”

“It feels underwhelming,” Nova observed.

“It won’t after a few millennia,” Flutterfree commented.

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Flutters, trust me, so long as you keep yourself occupied, you’ll be fine. And this doesn’t give you the nearly endless immortality I have. You’ll kick the bucket eventually from a stray arrow or something.”

“…Cheery thought.” Flutterfree lifted the serum up with Lolo’s wires. “It’s a monumental decision…”

“Just take it, c’mon,” Vriska said. “You’re surrounded by immortals as it is. Might as well join.”

“She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to,” Nova said. “She might want to find her end at some point.”

Flutterfree nodded. “But… You know what, I’ll have eternity afterward. I won’t have eternity here. Maybe this existence is broken, bruised, and full of evil… but I like it right now. I can enter eternity after a near-eternity here if I must.” She took the bottle and looked at it closely, her red eyes reflecting in the glass. Then she closed her eyes and drank it. She set it down carefully, opening her eyes just as they flashed yellow.

“Fuck yeah!” Vriska shouted, grinning. “Now we’re all going to be together forever! Best explorer buddies until the end of TIME.”

“Aw look, Vriska’s getting sentimental!” Nova ribbed.

“Psh, you ponies rubbed off on me a lot. At this point if I wasn’t sentimental something would have to be really wrong with my head.”

“Implying something isn’t wrong with your head,” Jotaro deadpanned.

“SAVAGE BURN!” Pinkie shouted, hooves around her mouth. “SSSSSSSSSSSS!”

Flutterfree, Nova, and Pinkie burst into laughter while the slightest hint of a smile crawled up Jotaro’s face.

Vriska folded her arms. “By the way you all just drank Corona’s blood.”

All the laughing stopped instantly.

“…You’re serious,” Nova said. “Holy cow you’re serious.”

“Yep. The production of this stuff is really interesting, considering what I grabbed from Lady Rarity’s mind on the subject.” She kicked her feet up on the table and smirked.

“Vriska, you know you’re not supposed to dig into people’s minds,” Flutterfree chided.

“Hey, she wouldn’t tell me how the stuff was made. I was not expecting to learn that Corona was smokin’ hot in more ways than one or that she was fully capable of going full chaos cultist for SCIENCE at any moment.”

Nova stared at the empty bottle that had contained the serum. “Corona tastes like gold and flowers, apparently.”

“I was always expecting bacon, personally,” Flutterfree said. Then she blushed. “Eep! Not that I think about what people taste like!”

Jotaro raised an eyebrow.

“…Okay fine. When I see you I think steak and marshmallows. Are you happy?”

Vriska shook her head. “Steak and marshmallows? What kind of meal is that!?”

“And why marshmallows?” Nova asked. “He’s not a horse!”

“That joke’s run its course, Nova,” Flutterfree muttered.

“I dunno!” Pinkie said, hoof to her chin. “Let’s spin the wheel of joke graveyarding to see what should happen to it!” She turned to a game-show wheel that hadn’t been there a minute ago and gave it a good spin.

The five of them continued enjoying their day, more or less forgetting the major change that had altered their bodies forever.

~~~

Corona knocked on another door. Man, I’m making a lot of house calls today.

The Sunset known as Sunny opened the door. “Oh. Hey Corona, what’s up?”

“I just came to drop by, say thanks. Where’s Jane?”

“Inside,” Sunny said, beckoning for Corona to come in. “Thanks? For what?”

“Someone’s thanking us?” Jane asked, poking her head out from around a corner. “I’m all ears.”

“If you’re all ears why don’t you ever hear knocks at the door?”

“Selective hearing.”

Sunny rolled her eyes.

“So, Corona, what’d we do?” Jane asked, leaning against a wall.

“Well… This might sound a little awkward and bring back some weird memories.”

“Should I get a drama couch?” Sunny asked with a coy smirk.

“Nah, no Raritys here.”

“Unless I’m secretly one in disguise,” Jane said, smirking.

Corona rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Anyway… Remember the time Aradia took you to see your Pinkie’s grave?”

The two nodded. “How could we forget?” Jane asked.

“Yeah. You may or may not recall that was the day I came out of my depressive funk. Because you got me to declare war on death.”

“Wasn’t our intention by any stretch of the imagination,” Jane pointed out.

“I think it was a good thing,” Sunny retorted.

“Not saying it wasn’t. Just saying it wasn’t what I would have done.”

Corona shrugged. “To each their own. Anyway, the reason I’m coming to thank you today is because I did it.”

“Did what?” Sunny asked.

Corona pulled out one of the bottles. “Dealt a big blow to death. Behold, the Essence of Eternity, an immortality serum invented by yours truly.”

The two of them stared at it for a while.

“You do realize you could have just asked us for an immortality serum and we could have given you one, right?” Jane said.

“…What.” Corona deadpanned.

“There’s even a Fountain of Youth in my records!” Sunny said. “Did you not think to look in there?”

“…No,” Corona said, blinking. “…That would have saved a lot of time. And sleepless nights. And the glowing blood.”

“Glowing blood? Sweet!” Jane said.

Corona rolled her eyes, shutting off the lights and showing off her skin’s golden glow. “There you go. I’ve literally got this stuff swimming in my veins.”

“That looks pretty cool,” Sunny said. “Makes you completely useless for stealth though.”

“If I ever need to be stealthy I can just put up an illusion spell, no problem!” Corona said with a huff, turning the light back on. “…But seriously, I could have just asked you guys and avoided the whole thing?”

Jane and Sunny nodded.

“Fiddlesticks.”

“Hey, don’t be hard on yourself, you still did something great!” Sunny encouraged. “Immortality serums aren’t exactly the easiest things to make. Or mass produce.”

Jane thought about this. “…Did we really find enough immortality serums to know that for sure?”

“Twenty-seven serums, three of which could be mass produced,” Sunny recited from memory.

Corona blinked. “You should take my job. The physicist part anyway.”

Sunny rolled her eyes. “I’m not a scientist. We Sunsets may be smart, but not all of us are cut out for that kind of work.”

“Mhm.”

“Regardless, this probably works best for Merodi Universalis anyway,” Sunny pointed out. “The secret to their longevity was created by one of their best guardians. It’ll be a point of national pride.”

“Ooo, careful, don’t want to turn into Murica,” Jane said, snorting. “I still can’t say that with a straight face…”

“It is a bit absurd, isn’t it?” Sunny said. “…Oh, right. For what it’s worth, Corona, you’re welcome. Even if we really didn’t do anything.”

Corona rubbed the back of her head. “Yeah. This is a little awkward isn’t it?”

“A tad.”

“Well, before I go, any strange inventions or technology or magic I should know about before I spend the next few years of my life trying to create it?”

“Ragdoll patch,” Jane said.

Corona blinked. “What?”

“Allow me to demonstrate.” Jane placed a small brown square on the back of her left hand. Then she punched herself in the gut with her right. She lost all control of her body and went flying like a body in a video game, laying across a table with a stupid grin on her face.

“…What is the point of that?”

“It’s funny.”

Sunny rolled her eyes. “I’ve never really found it that funny.”

Corona nodded. “Yeah, I don’t get it either.”

“You two don’t understand comedy.”

The two fiery women snickered at this.

“Fine. Mock Jane. She’ll sit at this table upside-down and not care.”

“Ooh, ooh!” Sunny raised a hoof. “I’m going to call Trixie to give you third-person lessons!”

Jane let out a disinterested grunt.

“I’ll leave you to that,” Corona said with a salute. “See you around!”

“See you too, Corona!” Sunny said with a wave.

~~~

Oversight Division:

Policy Regarding Immortality Serum Distribution and Control

Final Revision.

Approved by Overhead Sarsaparilla Fern (EqCo)

Co-approved by Second Bonnibel Bubblegum (Ooo)

Co-approved by Overhead Freyr (EaTa) [Justice Division]

Summary:

This document details the policy regarding the new invention by Princess Corona “Sunset” Shimmer, PhD – an immortality serum better known as the Essence of Eternity, referred to as the serum in the rest of this report. The sections are split up as follows: Production, detailing the requirements for producing the serum, Distribution, pertaining to the moving of the serum to Merodi Universalis, Restriction, where the availability of the serum is discussed, Medical, in which information important to medical professionals is located, and lastly Judicial, where illegal usage of the substance is discussed.

Production:
The serum can be produced in vast quantities, but only one individual – Dr. Shimmer – is capable of doing so. All serum to be distributed by the Oversight Division is to be created at a pre-approved location while under constant surveillance. Dr. Shimmer will be required to meet a quota during each production session, with early sessions expected to produce a few billion portions of the serum.

Dr. Shimmer has confirmed this is well within her abilities, given enough time to do so.

Each portion of the serum is to be stored in a standard-issue plastic bottle containing precisely 100mL of the serum. This is 10% more than is required to initiate the immortality effect, but there are no side effects from ingesting more than required. Some races require larger doses due to body size or multiple-body conditions. Such cases will be handled by Oversight directly as they are made known.

The general process by which the serum is produced is public knowledge but it is suggested that the finer points of the initial procedures not be discussed openly. No video or other visual documentation of the process is allowed to enter the public domain.

Distribution
The serum is only to be distributed to full Merodi Universalis member universes. It is prohibited to ship any of the serum to universes outside Merodi Universalis without Overhead or Second approval. The serum will only be transported from the Oversight Division warehouses when a request is made and approved by three Oversight Division Regulators, at which point a ship will be loaded with the precise number of portions requested. Upon arrival, every serum portion must be accounted for before delivery.

Drivers of these ships must be Oversight Division personnel.

The serum is not to be stored in places aside from the Oversight Division warehouse for longer than a month.

Restriction
The public sector is not permitted to purchase the serum directly under any circumstances.

The only requests are to be given by the medical sector, or local equivalent in universes that may not have a defined medical sector. Every patient in a hospital, or under the purview of a doctor or other suitably qualified and registered medical personnel, is to be given the choice of taking the serum, regardless of their state of health. This offer is only contingent on the individual’s age – no children or adolescents are permitted to obtain the serum. The exact age where a person is permitted to ingest the serum varies with race and is expanded upon in Appendix A.

If a citizen of Merodi Universalis is for some reason without a doctor, they may petition the Oversight Division directly for the serum.

Every citizen is expected to ingest the serum once in their life – but never twice. All ingestions must be done in the presence of a medical professional or recorder of some kind, so that confirmation may be added to the patient’s personal record.

Medical
Ordering a shipment of the serum requires evidence of Merodi Universalis citizens that have not ingested it in the form of census data that can be obtained easily through our website. Medical credentials are also required, though exceptions may be made in the special cases with certain universes. Calling the Oversight Division’s Medical branch is required for these special cases. In all cases, form SSEE-001 must be filled out.

If too much serum is accidentally ordered, it must be returned before one week has passed.

The serum activates instantly when 91mL is ingested within a thirty-minute period. This volume is consistent for most standard races. A yellow flash to the eyes is the indication the procedure is done. Their only known side effect is a soft yellow glow added to bodily excrement for the next day or so.

If the individual suffers from a rare genetic condition that stunts growth or aging, it is up to a medical professional whether or not to allow ingestion. If the individual is of an as of yet unknown race, a medical professional has the authority to decide for ingestion or not. If the individual is not fully biological in nature, Oversight Division Medical must be consulted on the matter.

Judicial
Crimes relating to the serum:
Class 1 Crime:
Illegal ingestion.

Class 2 Crime:
Posting visual records of the creation procedure.

Class 4 Crimes:
Negligence.
Stored longer than a week.
Illegal storage/possession.

Class 6 Crime:
Purposefully leaving behind excess serum and storing for later use.
Withholding access to serum.
Forced ingestion.

Class 7 Crimes:
Illegal distribution.
SSEE-001 Fraud.

Class 11 Crime:
Illegal ingestion: underage. (Administered to the entity who administered the serum, not the underage victim in question)

Eve put the document down. They were certainly taking this seriously, which she appreciated. The lack of long-term planning bothered her, but Oversight was not necessarily known for thinking of the long term – that was Aid, Cultural, and Labor’s jobs. It wasn’t like it even needed her approval – this had just been sent to her because she’d asked for it.

She really should bother to learn what the classifications in the Judicial Division meant. Higher numbers meant worse, she knew, and the biggest one she had seen was Class 50, which had been assigned to Randall Flagg for Masterminding the Attempted Destruction of Merodi Universalis.

Class 11 was probably still pretty bad. It was the theft of a child’s right to grow up or develop… A horrifying thought. She saw more than a few parents thinking they could keep their kids young forever with the serum. Just one of many possible problems…

She shook her head – it at least looked like it was going to work. Public approval was expected to be through the roof. But there was always going to be that nagging doubt in the back of her mind… And the minds of many others.

Unfortunately she was not in a position to watch internal affairs closely – she was always busy with external Relations. She just had to have faith that Sarsaparilla knew what she was doing. Eve may not have known her that well, but the Equis Cosmic alicorn knew what she was doing.

Eve folded the file away.

~~~

“Daniel, love, did we use all the saffron?”

“No,” he called from the next room over. “It should be in the back!”

“Ah!” Renee called, plucking the spice off the back of the rack. “Found it!”

“You in one of your cooking moods?”

“You know me, sometimes the culinary urge strikes!”

“What’s it gonna be this time?”

“Experimental spicy chowder,” she said, pouring the saffron into one of two small pots. “I know you like it with the ‘perfect’ amount but I’ve felt the need to give it a bit more ‘oomph’ this time around.”

“The occasional ‘oof’ is what life is all about!”

Renee stirred both pots. “In many ways, that’s exactly what it is.” She poured the white chowder into two bowls, levitating them into the dining room table, taking her seat at one end. “Dinner’s ready!”

Daniel walked into the dining room and sat down, breathing deeply. “…You weren’t kidding. That’s going to be spicy.”

“And we both have to eat it,” Renee said, spooning some into her mouth. “Hm… Delicious, but perhaps more salt…”

Daniel set to work on his soup, soon sweating slightly. “Wow… Hooooooooo this is an experience.”

Renee was sweating profusely. “Y-yeah…” She downed her glass of water. “But Celestia, it has flavor.”

“That I can only taste for about a second before instant tongue agony.” He laughed. “What did you put in this?”

“Just about every spice on the rack and habaneros,” Renee said, panting. “It… miiight have been a bit much?”

“Might?” Daniel said incredulously.

“Just eat your soup dear.”

Daniel looked for a moment at his soup – and then brought it to his lips and started drinking it.

“S-so funny…” Renee tried to deadpan, but her voice faltered.

Daniel set the nearly-empty bowl on the table, smacking his lips. “There’s a faint taste of gold in here…”

His eyes flashed yellow.

That was just too much for Renee. She started weeping. “I’M SUCH A HORRIBLE WIFE! I’M SORRY!” She tossed her bowl off the table, spilling its contents all over the freshly cleaned floor. She splayed her front half over the table and kept crying.

Daniel stood up quickly. “Renee, what’s wrong? What happened?” He moved toward her in concern.

“I tricked you…” she managed. “I… You didn’t want to but… I just couldn’t do it. Stars, I’m so selfish…”

“Hey… Renee… It’s okay to mess up once in a while. Whatever you’ve done, it’s fine. Nothing you do will break what we have.”

“…It’s… Good to know that’s how you actually feel…” Renee wiped her eyes. “I’m going to cherish it.”

“Why?”

“Because when I tell you a lightswitch is going to go off in your head!” Rarity wailed. “And then you’ll hate me!”

“Renee, that won’t happen.”

Renee looked Daniel in the eyes with her own sad orbs. “…You just drank the immortality serum.”

Daniel’s eyes widened in panic. He took several steps back and shoved his fingers down his throat, triggering the gag reflex.

“Daniel, don’t…” Renee called. She winced as he heaved up his entire dinner right there on the floor.

“There… It’s out of me…”

“It has already taken effect,” Renee said. “Your eyes flashed. You’re immortal now.”

“N-no…” Daniel said. “N-no! She’s gotten to me Renee! This serum!? It might make all you immortal but she just wants me dead! I’m not going to be able to Ascend anymore!”

“You couldn’t Ascend anymore since the accident!” Renee shouted back.

“We didn’t know that!”

“I couldn’t take that risk!” Renee blurted, tears rolling down her face. “I… I… I couldn’t handle it. I was weak. I saw you growing old while I haven’t even started getting wrinkles. I…” She ran off into another room of the house, placing her hoof on a wall, shuddering violently.

I’ve betrayed him. I’m just the worst… I should have stood by him until the end…

She felt Daniel’s face press into her mane and his arms wrap around her. She tensed.

“Shh…” he said. “Relax. Relax…”

“B-bu-”

“Relax,” he said, lifting her up. He took her to the bedroom and laid her down gently, kneeling down at the left side so he was eye level with her. “…You… You just did what you thought was right.”

Renee put a hoof on his cheek. “I had no right… I shouldn’t have…”

“If you really think I’m not right in the head… then that was the right thing to do.”

“Daniel…”

“I’m absolutely terrified now,” Daniel admitted. “I know I can’t Ascend anymore. Because of what was in that potion. But you’re sure it’ll keep me from growing old. …It might, just to keep you off her trail. But when it does happen… Please, please don’t blame yourself.”

Renee choked. “Daniel, I’m sorry!” She yelled, throwing her hooves around his neck.

“It… It’s okay,” Daniel said, returning the embrace.

He was lying through his teeth. He most definitely wasn’t okay. But he could live with it for Renee’s sake. It was a sacrifice he was more than willing to make.

~~~

The South Pole of Elemental Four was brutally cold. Luckily Corona was a master of all kinds of heat magic, so she could surround the cold area with bright miniature suns to keep everything at a comfortable temperature. The ice was too deep and ancient to melt significantly simply from one day of comfortable heat, so the majesty of the icy wastes was maintained.

The true South Pole had a small forest of dead trees. How these trees had ever survived in such brutal conditions was unknown, but it was suspected it had something to do with the Spirit Portal. The answer would remain a mystery, for this was one of the places research was not allowed. People weren’t even allowed to come here without special permission.

Today, special permission had been granted. It was open to anyone who wanted to bid Iroh a final goodbye.

Hundreds of people had shown up to wave the great leader of Elemental Four on to the next phase in his existence.

Corea and Tenzin stood in front of the frozen glow of spirit energy. Both were older – Tenzin had actually managed to grow a beard, and Corea was almost a full grown mare. She had her cutie mark not in being the Avatar, or bending, but in cooking, discovered when she had taken a slight break from potion making. It was a beautiful apple sitting in a simmering pot.

For a moment, it looked like they were going to work together to execute a complex bending pattern – but Tenzin turned to Corea and shook his head. He took a few steps back, reuniting with his wife and newborn child.

Corea glanced to Iroh. “Guess this is the final test of the Avatar, huh?”

Iroh smiled. “I have other ways in, Corea.”

Corea took a breath. “But this is the best one.” She spread her hooves wide and focused deep within herself. She held an image of Iroh close in her mind. She took in a sharp breath and opened her eyes wide – entering the Avatar State. A ball of air surrounded her, enclosed by distinct rings of fire, water, earth, and pure arcane energy. She moved her front hooves in a circular fashion, tapping into the spirit of the world around her. For a moment, everyone could see the past Avatars behind her, all assisting.

Aang waved to Iroh.

Iroh chuckled and nodded to his old friend.

Corea shoved all four of her hooves forward, prompting the spiritual energy within her to smash into the frozen spirit portal. It surged with energy, breaking free from the ice with a great rumbling. A beam of light shot from the ground and into the sky – the signal that the portal was open.

Corea dropped the Avatar State and floated to the ground. She wiped her face. “Door’s open. Don’t worry, I’ll close it once you get through.”

Iroh nodded with a warm smile. He placed his hand on Corea’s head. “You’ll make a fine Avatar, Corea.”

She beamed. “Thank you, Iroh. For everything you’ve done for me and this world.” She hugged him. “I hope you find what you want in there.”

“I hope so too, child,” Iroh said. The embrace ended, and Corea returned to her friends. ‘Team Avatar’ as it were, with Tenzin, Applebloom, and three others Iroh had never really gotten the opportunity to know that well. …It was not something to regret. He’d only had so many years.

Applejack walked up to him next. “Ah wanna thank you for tellin’ her what she was, and lettin’ her figure out what that meant on her own. You’ve basically raised her since day one, and for that Ah… Ah can’t thank you enough.”

“All you have to do is take good care of her, Applejack,” Iroh said with a warm smile. “That’s all I ask for payment.”

“You’re a good man.”

“I try,” Iroh admitted, moving on to his family.

The current Firelord, Zuko’s daughter Izumi, embraced him. “…I don’t want you to go.”

“My time is up, Izumi. Continue taking the Fire Nation to an age of peace and honor. You haven’t needed my presence to do that for years.”

Izumi nodded. “…You’re the best great uncle ever.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are better ones out there.”

“You were the best one to me.”

They embraced a while longer before Iroh moved on. His own brother was next, out of prison for this special occasion. Ozai’s expression was unreadable.

Iroh extended a hand. Ozai didn’t hesitate – he grabbed it and shook it.

“Good luck,” Ozai said. Iroh knew that was all he was going to get out of his brother.

Iroh’s niece, Azula, on the other hand, couldn’t remain impassive. She embraced him, tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he said.

“Not for all the things I’ve done… But for not letting myself know you. Treating you like the enemy.”

“You’re forgiven, Azula. You’ve always been forgiven.”

“…You never know what you have until it’s gone or going.”

“And you never know what’ll happen unless you try,” Iroh said, looking Azula in the eye.

“R-right,” she said, wiping her eyes. She released him.

He gave her a smile and moved on – talking to old friends from Elemental Four, giving them slow but sure goodbyes. Applejack’s children. People from the Order of the White Lotus. Regular customers at his teashop. Eve herself. Renee, but without Daniel. The entire primary team…

Pinkie nudged Iroh, giving him a present. “Don’t open it until you’re on the other side!”

Iroh smiled, graciously taking the present. “I wonder what it is?”

“Well, you know how in the Spirit World you generally can’t take things, or the things that you do take may just disappear over time? You can take that, and you’ll want to take that. It’ll never go away. Pinkie Pie guarantee.”

“I’m sure it’s wonderful.”

Pinkie gave him a wink. Jotaro and Iroh shared a moment, clasping hands with a loud clapping noise and saying all they needed to say with a glance. Vriska gave the old man a thumbs up. “You’re not bad for an old guy. Hope you get back to being a badass in there.”

Nova and Flutterfree just opted to hug Iroh at the same time, thanking him for what he did for them. Many others did the same.

Iroh had helped many, many people in his life.

Eventually, he came to Corona, riding atop Lady Rarity. Toph stood to one side, Olivia on the other. Olivia gave a slight salute. “Didn’t get to know you all that well Iroh, but I know you’re quite the character. I’ll let you have your moment.” She walked away, leaving the rest of the group with Iroh.

Toph placed a hand on Iroh’s shoulder. “…Thanks for the tea.”

“Thanks for the talk.”

They embraced. “Take care of yourself, old man.”

“Rule with wisdom, your highness.”

Toph stepped back, her armor clanking. She gave her friends a smile and walked back to the rest of the crowd.

Corona dismounted from Lady Rarity. The spirid shook Iroh’s hand. “It’s been an honor.” Then she left the two alone.

Corona put on a sad smile. “Thirty years.”

“Is that how long it’s been? Time’s hard to keep track of.”

Corona nodded. “That’s when I met you. When you began to teach me. Not just the art of firebending, or the art of tea – but the art of your lifestyle. Caring, but powerful. Understanding, but passionate. Quick, but wise.” She spread her wings, allowing their glow to surround Iroh. “I would not be where I am today without you. You shaped my life.”

“I had no intention of turning you into a pony-angel-thing.”

Corona laughed. “What did you always say about the best of intentions?”

Iroh chuckled. “I know, I know…” He spread his arms wide. “Come here.”

She did, surrounding the two of them in her luminous wings.

“There’s no way I can thank you.”

“You’ve done all you need to,” Iroh assured her. “You’re letting me go.”

Tears formed in Corona’s eyes. She squeezed him tighter. “…I don’t want to let go.”

Iroh said nothing. He let her have her cry on his shoulder. It was a full minute before she allowed her wings to open, letting Iroh go.

“Bye,” she managed.

Iroh wiped his own face. “Goodbye, Sunset Shimmer.”

She choked at the use of the first name he knew her by. She couldn’t speak – only wave.

Iroh walked to the Spirit Portal, passing everyone. He heard tears and sobs – but the closer he got to the portal, he started hearing people applauding, cheering, celebrating.

His life had been something great.

He passed Corea last.

“There’s something evil in there,” Corea said. “I can sense it, just past the portal.”

“The Dark Spirit lies sealed within the tree,” Iroh told her. “Just remember to seal the Spirit World off once I’m through. It will never bother you.”

Corea nodded. “…I’ll protect everything you worked so hard to build. And I’ll do it with a smile!” She grinned. “Avatar Corea of the smile!”

Iroh smiled back at her. “That has a nice ring to it.”

“You think so? I think so.”

He nodded. “You’ll certainly live up to it.” He turned and walked toward the beam of light, stopping one step short of it. He turned around, taking one last look at the world he was leaving.

He could see everyone waving at him. Some were crying – but despite the tears, all of them were smiling.

It was a great final image. “All of you. Live your lives to the fullest!”

They were his last words. He took a step backward into the Spirit World, cutting himself off from the world of the living. He felt his body transition to a completely different realm with completely different rules. A dark tree stood behind him, but he ignored it – instead looking at the impossible beauty of the rest of the Spirit World.

The column of light in front of him sealed up a few seconds later. Corea had done what she’d been asked.

Iroh opened the present, not all that surprised to find that it was a digital image frame. It only had one image in it – an image that could not have been taken before the frame was put in the box.

It was of all of them waving him on at the last second.

The digital frame allowed him to zoom in to see any of their faces he wanted in detail. He even saw Aang’s spirit hanging behind Corea. Even Ozai was waving…

He zoomed in on Pinkie. She was smiling biggest of all, looking right at him.

At her hooves was a small sign.

Cherish your memories.

Iroh planned to. He slid the digital frame into his ‘pocket’ that may or may not have actually existed. All he knew was that he’d have that picture forever, regardless of what the Spirit World had to say.

It was the best parting gift he could have been given.

He stretched his limbs, enthralled to find there was no pain. With the dark tree to his back, he set off into the Spirit World, ready to see its wonders…

~~~

“’That’s all fine and dandy, Rev’, you say, ‘but what are we actually supposed to do about it? You haven’t given us any suggestions’!” Rev looked out at her congregation – packed full for the first time in weeks, because everyone needed to know what to make of the new immortality serum that was suddenly available.

“I say take it,” Rev said. “We are not here to antagonize or scoff at the culture around us for being ‘unclean’, that was the old way, back before the gift of grace.” She held up the Bible in her magic. “You see this? There isn’t a word in here that says ‘death is good’. Death is the enemy. It can be worked together for good, but death itself is always described as the final enemy. We can fight it however we want – but we have to keep one thing in mind.”

She looked out at the congregation with a steeled expression. “We, alone, cannot win. Death will not be defeated until the time of Revelation. Do not fool yourselves – just because you won’t age does not mean you have escaped the cold embrace of the end. There are still accidents. Diseases. Criminals. Evil. We know all too well about immortals falling to the darkness inherent in existence.

“But I want you all to know – you still have a choice. You don’t have to take my recommendation – there are no doubt those among you who have been waiting to go for a long, long time. It is not a sin to want to be with the Lord. I’m not telling you to end your lives, but I’m saying you don’t have to extend it to eternity if you don’t want. Most should. But it’s not for everyone. I know this will make things difficult, but please, bear with one another in this time. Respect each other’s decisions, regardless of what they are.

“Don’t think eternal life will come without consequences. Like most progress in society. It is both good and bad.” She placed her hooves on the podium. “…Let’s close in prayer.”

The prayer lasted a few minutes. Rev wished everyone a good rest of their day and walked away from the podium, down the aisle. A few people waved to her and gave her greetings, at least until she came across one pony in particular.

“Eve?” Rev said, eyes wide. “I have to say I’m surprised to see you in here.”

“I figured it was one I’d want to hear,” Eve said, Flutterfree at her side.

Flutterfree smiled. “Glad you came?”

“Yeah, though probably not for the reason you’re wanting.”

Flutterfree shrugged. “It means you might come again.” She paused. “I’ll leave you two to it,” she said, backing away.

Eve turned to Rev. “So, did you actually take it?”

Rev shook her head. “I’ve been immortal for a while. Fell into a magic fissure during my time in the Nexus. Came out stunted. Didn’t realize for several years what had happened.”

“O’Neill can relate.”

“I am aware of the nanobots. Don’t think he minds though.”

“He complains about his back from time to time.”

Rev rolled her eyes. “He has access to ways to fix that. But if he did it’d remove his excuse to grump around like the old man he is.”

Eve chuckled. “And he just can’t have that!”

“Never. The horror.”

Eve smiled – but slowly the smile dissipated. “…Corona would love to argue with you about truly defeating death. She knows there’s unconditional immortality out there.”

“And even they can be destroyed with the right combination of universal power,” Rev said. “There’s a simple way to take care of any being that isn’t split across multiple universes. Simply toss them into the outside emptiness – the Sea of Infinite Possibility. They’ll stop existing.”

Eve nodded slowly. “I know… I know all of this.”

“You have a lot of reservations about this.”

“The whole thing stinks to me of something we shouldn’t be messing with,” Eve admitted. “There are a few of us like that. Me. Aradia… There’s something that seems… natural about death. I was somewhat hoping you’d back that up here.”

“The Word is never what you think it is until you read it,” Rev said. “Death is not natural. Death is the final enemy. Death is seen as the worst blemish in existence. It is something that should not be at all. But it is. We’re to blame for it as well.”

Eve looked into the distance. “I’m not sure I can take that.”

“You’re immortal.”

“Yes. And until today, I was going to outlive my friends.” Eve looked at the ground. “Now I’m not. Applejack was the only one who seriously deliberated not taking it, but in the end she did. Virtually the entire society will keep on living. …We’ll have each other. Very few will outlive the others because of the tragedy of age.” She looked Rev in the eyes. “So why do I feel as though everyone’s joined me in a horrid curse?”

“I can’t really answer that,” Rev said. “Maybe by treating it as a good thing, you’d have to accept something you’d rather not think about? Maybe you’ve spent too much time thinking about how tragic immortality would be in the later years and can’t get rid of it? Maybe, by admitting death is a horror, you’ll have to reopen some old wounds about those you’ve lost?”

Eve blinked. “Possibly all of the above?”

Rev put on a soft smile. “…That’s how it generally works. A million little things shape you into what you are.”

“Yeah…” Eve rubbed the back of her head.

“You don’t always have to get to the bottom of it,” Rev said. “It helps if you can, but it’s not always possible. What does help is talking it through. Which you’re doing right now.”

Eve smirked. “So you’re telling me I’m doing it right?”

“More or less. Could stand to have faith mixed in there, but y’know, nothing’s perfect.” Rev grinned.

Eve rolled her eyes. “Yeah yeah… Want to grab lunch? Or breakfast? Or… Honestly this is a weird time lull between breakfast and lunch.”

“Yes I’ll go out for brunch,” Rev said.

“Oh, we can go to Iroh’s teashop!”

“…It’s still open?” Rev said, blinking. “Who…?”

“You’ll never believe it. Azula dropped her job as an agent and just started running it. He was still her uncle, taught her everything she needed to know.”

“This I have to see,” Rev said, eyes wide.

Eve grinned, using Seraphim to open a dimensional portal. “Behold, a teashop run by an ex-psycho.”

A bolt of lightning shot out of the portal. “You don’t get to leave without paying your bill!” Azula shouted.

“…Okay, current psycho.” Eve admitted.

“Just get us to a table,” Rev said, smirking.

“HEY AZULA! TABLE FOR TWO!” Eve said, stepping through the portal.

Azula put on her ‘I’m trying to be nice’ smile. “Welcome, welcome, I have a table for you two right here. Please sit down, the menu will be provided the moment I beat the tar out of this cheapskate.”

The unicorn and alicorn chuckled, taking their seats.

Author's Note

Hey everyone! Couple announcements that couldn't wait for an end-of-arc post.

First off, some really exciting news: there are currently TWO new Songs of the Spheres sidestories! Yiyxa, a story about exploration and deep mystery, and the League of Sweetie Belles, a story that focuses on the titular Sweeties exploring fanfic worlds and beyond! Both work perfectly well as standalones, but I'm sure you'll all enjoy them.

Second, it's time to make an announcement: I have a Patreon now and have opened up general commissions. There'll be a blog post coming up detailing all of this, but for right now you can just go take a look.

Why did I make a Patreon? It's not just because I'd like to make money (though clearly, I would). It's because I want the 130th chapter of Songs of the Spheres to be an animation a-la a Homestuck {S} page, and I'll have to pay quite a few artists a lot of cash to make that happen. So, until SotS 130 is completed, most (if not all) funds gathered through commissions and Patreon will be put towards that effort. I hope you're all as excited as I am for that!

Blog post now exists here.

-GM, master of patriarchy.

082 - Our Little Horror Story

Author's Note

That title ain't a joke, kids. This chapter is actually a horror story. You have been warned.

(oh, uh, should probably also mention that we have a movie-length chapter next week.)

082 - Our Little Horror Story

The portal opened up into a dimly-lit living room. It was designed for humans, probably of an era where TV either wasn’t commonplace or hadn’t been invented yet. There were two chairs set at a round, wooden table with a book on it, while a couch sat closer to an unlit fireplace. The mantle was lined with vases and trinkets of varying colors, usually made of a translucent material that glinted in the dim lighting. Rugs lined the floor with complicated geometric patterns, colored with deep forest greens and burgundy overtop of a golden background. It would have felt homely, if it wasn’t so dark.

Pinkie Pie and the rest of her team stepped through the portal, the ring of transdimensional energy closing behind them.

“Oh, look. Creepy house,” Vriska observed, adjusting her shirt.

“Thank you captain obvious,” Nova deadpanned, examining the room they were in. She picked up an empty vase with her magic, casting a slight blue glow on the table it was on. “Yeesh, would it kill them to turn up the lights?”

“Could be vampires,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“That’s sunlight, not interior lighting.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, adjusting his hat.

Pinkie cleared her throat. “So, I have a question. Anyone else feel like this place is off?”

“I did say it was a creepy house, right?” Vriska asked.

“I mean more than that. The chill down the spine, the unnerving quality to the air… It just feels like something’s up.”

Flutterfree nodded. “I feel it… All my coat hairs are standing on end.”

“Same,” Nova conferred.

Jotaro nodded slowly.

“Right, so something’s up,” Pinkie said, tasting the air. “Or it’s just a normal, creepy house, but we have to be careful.” She looked around a bit more until she came across something that really did look odd. The window. It looked like there was nothing through it at all – all they could see were their reflections and, behind that, utter and complete blackness.

Everyone followed her gaze. “…Odd,” Flutterfree admitted.

“Jojo, break the window, see what’s outside,” Vriska suggested.

“Wai-” Pinkie began, but she didn’t talk fast enough. Jotaro pummeled the window with Star Platinum. It would have been enough force to break a steel beam. The glass didn’t even crack.

“That’s not glass,” Jotaro said. “Feels like it, definitely isn’t.”

“Next time think before punching,” Pinkie pointed out. “But now we know this place definitely isn’t normal.” She pulled out the dimensional device, smirking. “So, who’s gonna place bets on if this will work or not?”

“Just try it and save us the suspense,” Nova deadpanned.

Pinkie pressed a button on the device – and no portal opened. “Eeyeparoons, we’re stuck. To the surprise of literally nobody.” She stretched her legs. “Well, we’re going to have to find out what’s stopping us. Nova, any thoughts?”

Nova lit her horn, prodding the area around them for information. “Magic sense doesn’t go beyond the window, and it drops off sharply just beyond all the doors of this room. I can tell you there’s rooms behind the doors, but that’s it.”

“Vision eightfold isn’t turning up anything helpful either,” Vriska said.

“Then we just have to look for clues the old fashioned way!” Pinkie declared. “Investigating!”

Jotaro picked up the book on the table and began flipping through it. He held it up for everyone to see, flipping through blank page after blank page. He closed it, showing them the cover devoid of a title.

Nova levitated the book over to her. “Huh. Are any of us dreaming?” She flipped through the book herself, scanning it closely.

“Vriska pinch patrol is ready. Hey Jojo!”

Jotaro used Star Platinum to pinch himself, glaring at Vriska for daring to suggest she pinch him.

“Bah, fine.” She got a defenseless Flutterfree with a pinch to the wing, removing a feather.

“O-ow!”

“Not dreaming.” Vriska rolled across the room and pinched Pinkie.

“Noooot dreaming!” Pinkie sung.

Vriska pinched herself. “Oh, not dreaming.”

“Don’t even bother testing me,” Nova said, laying the book open on the table to a page about two thirds of the way through. There was one sentence of text in the middle of the page.

Emma had an idea today. What a wonderful idea it was.

Pinkie put on her Sherlock hat and bubble pipe. “The first of many clues… We now know of two characters! Emma, and the author of this note! Let it be known!”

“And Emma had a good idea,” Vriska muttered, folding her arms. “All this does is make everything seem creepier. And this house does not need any help with that.”

“Don’t dismiss it,” Flutterfree said. “It might be important later.”

Pinkie nodded. “It’s a piece of the puzzle… A puzzle we will no doubt have to solve to get out of this manor of mystery!”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Yeah, probably. Still seems a little ridiculous.”

“Have you met us?” Vriska asked.

“…Unfortunately yes.”

“So, what now?” Flutterfree asked.

“We ask ourselves what’s behind door number one,” Pinkie said, bouncing up to a door and opening it. It led to a hallway without any lighting, dropping off into darkness in the distance. It was easily far longer than any hallway had any right to be.

“And that seals the deal,” Pinkie said. “If I wasn’t sure before, I’m sure now. We’re in a horror universe of some kind or other. We’re gonna need to be extra careful.”

The four of them nodded.

“First off, stay together at all times. No splitting up to look for clues. Never go far from each other for any reason. Especially not to go investigate an odd noise. If something scares you, don’t freak out. Panicking is the last thing we need. Pay attention to the smallest details, and never assume just punching a monster will do anything to it.”

“Anything else?” Vriska asked.

“Yeah. Don’t be stupid. Being stupid is how these things always go downhill.”

Everyone looked at Vriska. The troll rolled her eyes. “Har de har. Let’s just walk down the hallway of endless darkness already.”

Pinkie led the way, Nova at her side producing a blue glow so they could see. They moved along the featureless white-walled hall, glancing behind them occasionally to ensure they were getting further away from the living room door. Every time, the door was smaller, soon looking like nothing more than a pinprick of light.

And then the door slammed shut, sending ringing echoes through the dark hall. They were alone in the blue aura of Nova’s horn.

“…Go back?” Vriska suggested.

Pinkie shook her head. “We’d just have to walk this far again. Let’s keep moving for a while longer.”

A while longer turned out to be until they saw a soft, amber glow ahead of them. They quickened their pace the moment they saw it, their hooves and feet hitting the ground below them louder and louder as they approached.

The amber light turned out not to be an exit. Until they reached it, they had thought it might be a branching path in the hallway – but it only went into the wall about a meter. The walls within the depression were just as white as the hallway, and bare except for one large mirror on the back wall, lit only by a dim bulb embedded in the ceiling.

The five of them stood in front of the mirror, Pinkie in the center. They stared at their own reflections for a while.

Jotaro tried to pry the mirror off the wall, but it didn’t budge.

“…Well this is pointless,” Vriska observed.

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “…I don’t think anything is pointless here. Remember, we’ve got to pay attention. Dismiss nothing. Be on the tips of our hooves, ready at any moment…”

Jotaro nodded.

“There’s nothing else here,” Nova said, completing her scan. “I guess we just keep moving.”

Pinkie nodded, bouncing on ahead, leading the group along. They didn’t have to walk all that much further before they came to a place where the hallway just ended.

“Welp, time to go back,” Vriska said, turning around on her heels. “A long walk back to the living room!”

“Hold on a minute,” Nova said, feeling the wall with her magic. “There’s something on the other side here…” She tapped it with her hoof, producing a hollow sound. “A room, I think.”

Star Platinum cracked its knuckles. Pinkie nodded, allowing him to go nuts. The Stand let out a cry of “ORA,” plowing right through the thin plaster of the wall to another room. The area on the other side was dimly lit, but it was a bright enough difference from near-complete darkness that everyone covered their eyes.

The team moved out into an octagonal room with four doors – they had come through one of the four sides without a door. The walls were lined with pictures in wooden frames, each with an inscription plate beneath them. Around a half-dozen had been dislocated from the wall Jotaro had punched through.

Flutterfree picked one of the pictures up – it was of a newlywed human couple standing in front of a house. The scenery around the house was out of focus, but somehow both the couple and the house were detailed to a degree not usually seen in photographs of this type. Flutterfree felt like she could look into their smooth faces forever, or at the slats in the house’s roof…

“That window,” Jotaro said, looking at the picture with Star Platinum. “It’s exactly like the one in the living room.”

“So we’re in this house,” Vriska said. “Except not, because that hallway was probably a mile long.”

“Based on the house then,” Flutterfree said, checking the picture’s inscription. “Homecoming…” she said, testing the feel of the word on her lips.

“This one’s inscription is scratched out,” Nova said, holding up a picture that was just of the woman. “Think this is Emma?”

“She’s the only woman in any of these pictures, so that seems like a good assumption,” Flutterfree said, going through picture after picture. “All the others have scratched out inscriptions though…”

“It’s like the blank book,” Jotaro said. “Only one piece of information.”

Pinkie shook her head. “We can get stuff from the pictures. Look.” She held up one of the man sitting in a chair, reading the green book they had seen in the other room. “This guy, probably the author of that note back there, is a reading type. Why else would this picture be here?”

Vriska ran her finger around the room, touching each picture. “Guy, girl, guy, girl… house… Nothing but the guy, the girl, and the house.”

“The memories that matter?” Flutterfree suggested.

“Maybe…” Pinkie picked an octagon-shaped frame off the wall. “But this one’s different.”

Everyone crowded around her, looking at the picture. It was dark, showing an empty forest in the middle of the night. The camera hadn’t been looking at anything when the picture was taken – it was essentially a picture of nothing.

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “Why is this here…?”

Vriska shrugged, turning away. “It adds to the creepy facto- holy hell.”

Everyone turned with her, looking back the way they’d come. Above the hole they had punched in the wall hung a yellow post-it note.

“That definitely wasn’t there before,” Flutterfree said.

Nova levitated the post it note closer to her so she could read it.

We worked so hard.

It was going to be perfect.

“Cue the singing Chrysalis,” Pinkie said with a giggle. No Chrysalis showed up. “Oh well, that would have been funn-”

The lights in the room flickered out. Flutterfree screamed in panic.

Nova lit her horn with a sigh. “Flutterfree, it’s just darkness. No need to scr-” she blinked, brightening her horn to light the whole room. “…Where’s Flutterfree?”

The lights flickered back on, still no sign of Flutterfree.

“Hold on, hold on…” Pinkie said, putting a hoof to her head. “I’ve got her…”

Flutterfree didn’t know what had happened to her, but she did know it was dark and damp where she was. She was in about a half-inch deep pool of water on top of smooth stone. No light was forthcoming.

“Hello?” she called.

“She’s confused and somewhere wet,” Pinkie said, pacing frantically. “Jotaro, try bashing through the floor. Maybe she’s below us.”

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

Flutterfree spread her wings and nervously started moving through the water – straight line. If she didn’t go in a straight line she was likely to get completely lost.

She was struck by how quiet everything was. No sounds but her own breathing and sloshing in the still water.

“She’s not hearing anything,” Pinkie said, furrowing her brow.

Jotaro stopped trying in vain to destroy the floor. “Anything else?”

“She can’t see anything, and I’m not getting any extra information from the description either,” Pinkie muttered. She didn’t say what else she was thinking.

Flutterfree decided maybe she should fly upward, see if there was a ceiling. She spread her wings and took to the sky, flapping furiously. A few seconds of this and gravity reversed, dropping her unceremoniously on the ‘ceiling’, which was effectively identical to the floor.

She was trapped. Alone. With no connection to her friends.

“No need to rub it in…” Pinkie muttered. She grabbed the picture of the dark forest and shook her head. She began rummaging through all the pictures, trying to find something of use.

Flutterfree felt a hand grab her hind hoof.

Pinkie let out an alarmed gasp. “Something’s down there with her.”

Vriska put a hand to her head. “I can’t find any psychic signatures…”

Flutterfree tore her hoof away from the hand and smashed another hoof down, expecting to crush it. But nothing was there.

Was it just her, or did the water feel deeper? …How could it be rising while still being completely stagnant?

“And now the water’s rising,” Pinkie reported. “Anyone, ideas?!”

Nova opened all the doors – each of them led to a different room. A game parlor, a study, a staircase, and a bathroom. Pinkie bounced into the bathroom, listening for sounds of water or Flutterfree. She banged on a few pipes.

Flutterfree had to start swimming a lot faster than she expected – she was treading water easily enough, but she had no idea how long until the top water level met the bottom water level. She spread her wings, planning to fly as far as she could as fast as she could. Wet wings didn’t matter to a pegasus.

Pinkie shook her head. “Nothing…”

Nova checked all the pipes, but found that, upon removing one of them from the wall, they didn’t lead anywhere. And yet, when she put the pipe back on, the sink produced water. “Just… Gah!”

Flutterfree felt the water rise to meet her hooves as she flew – so she made a quick adjustment upward. She expected to be crushed by water on both sides any minute now – and then to drown. She forced herself to focus on breathing. She’d need as much air as possible in her lungs to last the longest under the water.

The hand rushed out of the water and grabbed her back hoof. She let out all her air in a scream as she was dragged under.

“Flutterfree!” Pinkie screamed. “Nononononon-”

There was a loud crash from in the study room.

“I can’t see her anymore!” Pinkie shouted, scrambling across the room of pictures to the study, the rest of her team following behind. The study was well lit, unlike the rest of the house had been so far, and was filled with loose sheets of paper and post-it notes.

There was nothing in the room that could have made the crash. However, one of the walls was missing – replaced with the depression that held the mirror and the amber light. It showed their reflections.

Where Flutterfree was supposed to be, the mirror was slightly cracked – a Polaroid picture taped to the cracks. It showed Flutterfree laying on her back, limp, water pouring out of her mouth onto the cold, stony ground.

Pinkie’s mane lost all poof in an instant, deflating less like a balloon and more like a dying animal.

“T-that has to be a trick,” Nova said. “She was fine just a second ago. You don’t drown that fast. It’s just trying to get to us!”

“It happened,” Pinkie spat. “It definitely happened. It got her.”

“It?” Nova blurted. “Pinkie, what is it?”

“I don’t know!” Pinkie screamed. “All I know is that it got her and had a claw and can swim! And that it’s placing pictures on this mirror.”

Jotaro reached out to touch the picture.

“Don’t,” Pinkie ordered. “It could be trapped.”

Jotaro pulled back, hand curling into a fist.

“Oh my Stars… Flutterfree…” Nova said, hoof to her face.

“Stop,” Pinkie said, slapping Nova. “We’re still in danger. We need to keep our wits about us to figure this thing out. We… we…” She held a hoof to her chest. “We can deal with this later.”

“…Can we?”

“Just focus on surviving,” Pinkie told her. “If it got her, it’s going to be able to get us!”

“We need something to tie ourselves together with,” Jotaro said. “So it can’t just grab one of us and drag us to the wet place.”

Vriska started searching the study frantically. “Nothing… Nothing… Nothing…”

Pinkie pulled licorice rope out of her mane. “This’ll do. I’ve got virtually endless amounts.” Over the next few moments, she tied all their midsections together. “Don’t break it, it’s not strong.”

“This isn’t ideal,” Jotaro said.

“I’m a party pony! I don’t get to carry around survival supplies in here all the time. Get with the program, Jojo.”

Jotaro nodded.

“Everyone arm yourselves,” Pinkie said, pulling out a knife. Nova cast some defensive spells on all of them while Vriska readied her dice. They slowly moved back into the picture room, somber expressions.

She’s not gone for good, Pinkie told herself. There’s going to be a loophole. You don’t just kill off Flutterfree like that. It’s not how it works.

“Game parlor or stairs?” Vriska asked, her voice lower than usual.

“Parlor,” Pinkie said, leading the way, no longer bouncing in her movements. The team walked into the room, devoid of any of the cheerful discussion that had been with them up until this point. They were down a mare.

The game parlor was a wide, open room with enough light to be comfortable at any time of day – including blacker than midnight, which is what it was ‘outside’ right now. There were several card tables set up with small wooden chairs around them, and a well-stocked bar to one side. One card table was larger than all the others and was already set up for a game.

“Nobody drink anything,” Pinkie said.

“Don’t even need to be told,” Nova commented, starting her scans of the area. “Got nothing.”

“Look for notes, anything that could have words on it,” Pinkie said.

“There were a lot of books the study,” Vriska commented, leaning on the larger card table. “Probably should go check those.”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah… It would be thorough…”

“Why that mirror though?” Nova asked. “Why’d it appear again?”

“It’s toying with us,” Jotaro said. “Letting us know that it has places for all our pictures on that mirror.”

Pinkie nodded slowly, checking under the card tables for anything useful, but finding nothing.

Vriska picked up a hand of five cards, examining it. “Huh. Quite the hand here. Absolute trash.”

“Not helpful,” Nova muttered bitterly.

Vriska didn’t respond right away. “…Hey guys? I think I might have just fucked up really badly.”

They turned to her, seeing her holding the hand of horrible cards – all cards with numbers lower than eight of mixed suits. They also saw the other hand of cards across from her floating in the air, held by something completely invisible.

Both Vriska and the ghostly presence only had one poker chip. The chips moved to the center of the table all on their own. The game was on, and everything bet was contained in the two chips.

“…This seems a bit unfair…” Vriska muttered. “Can you go check ghosty’s cards for me?”

Pinkie gestured for Jotaro to do it. He walked nearer to the ‘ghost’s’ edge of the table, using Star Platinum to peak around the corner. “All the cards are blank.”

“I bet they won’t be once he lays them down…” Nova said.

“So, I’ve got trash cards,” Vriska said. “I get the impression that, if I fold here or walk away, I lose. I don’t want to know what losing entails in this house.”

“Definitely not,” Pinkie agreed, frantically looking around for something to help them – but the game parlor was devoid of any useful information.

“So…” Vriska took a breath. “I think this is five-card poker. I’ll be able to exchange any number of cards I want once, and so will ghosty over there. Then we’ll show our hands. Usually there’s a lot of betting in the middle but since there are only two chips...” She curled up her fist. “Don’t like the odds on this one…”

Nova tried using her magic on the ghostly presence on the other side of the table. “I’m not interacting with anything there. Not even any magic around the cards. It just is. But also isn’t.”

Pinkie started rummaging through the bottles on the bar. “Aha! Got something. This label has words on it.” She brought the bottle of wine over, showing it to everyone.

What if there was a perfect creature of horror?

One that existed purely to terrify.

One that could never be seen.

One that never did the same thing twice.

They all turned to ‘look’ at the ghostly presence holding the cards.

“Definitely toying with us,” Vriska said, laughing bitterly. “I bet it’s cheating.”

“Probably,” Jotaro said, summoning Star Platinum. “Just play.”

Vriska kept her seven and her two – both of spades. She tossed the other three cards away. Nothing happened. “…Guess I have to draw from the deck myself.”

Pinkie knew Jotaro stopped time there for a moment, but there was no way anyone could have told. Nothing looked different – even he looked to be in the exact same position he had been in a moment ago.

Vriska drew three cards – and grinned. “Hell yeah.” All five of the cards were spades. A flush.

The ghostly presence threw out one card and drew another one.

Vriska laid her cards on the table. “Flush, invisible beast. Beat that.”

It did. The cards fell to the table, revealing four aces and a king.

Vriska’s confident grin fell. “Fu-”

The card table flipped end over end, moving to crush Vriska. Star Platinum punched it out of the way while Vriska rolled her dice. “EAT THIS!”

She rolled 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” Vriska muttered. Her dice summoned a beautiful, blue sword – and then drove it through Vriska’s seven-pupil eye, tearing off the licorice rope and pinning her to a dartboard, the tip of the sword hitting the bullseye. Cobalt blood splattered over the wall and dripped to the ground below her.

She didn’t move.

“What the he-” Nova began – but the ghostly presence apparently wasn’t done. Another table came flying at the remaining three, punched away by Star Platinum before it hit them.

They heard it getting closer. There were sounds of scraping and harsh, scratchy breathing – but there were no visible scratch marks on the floor, and the sounds didn’t appear to have a direction to them.

Nova shot a pulse of magic in every direction, knocking all the tables over and breaking all the bottles in the bar. There was no sign of the creature, but they could still hear it getting closer.

“RUN!” Pinkie shouted, bolting out the exit door with Jotaro. Nova teleported to them, generating a shield to watch their backs. They came out into a theater – they could hear the sound of clapping, but there was nobody in the audience and there was nothing playing on the big screen.

The door behind them exploded, flying off its hinges and smashing right into Nova’s shield – but it held. “That means it has an actual location!” Nova shouted. “Running might actually be effective!”

“Or it’s just decided that it’s already done ‘gambling’ and ‘ambush’ horror, it’s time for the old fashioned chase,” Pinkie called back.

“At least it means its following rules we understand right now!” She fired magic bolts back at where the beast should have been, hitting nothing whatsoever. “Looks like all we can do is run!”

They reached the door on the opposite end of the theater, punching it open with Star Platinum. They found themselves in another hallway, but unlike the impossibly long one this hall was lit with gas lamps embedded in the walls, and they could see several doors on each side.

They didn’t waste time taking in the scenery. They kept running, trying to keep their distance from the gnashing, monstrous thing that was probably behind them. Probably.

But then they saw a door in front of them come flying off its hinges, spilling shadowy spiral patterns into the hall. A great screech met their ears, the sound a pig would have made if it had ingested a hawk and the bird was eating itself out of the meaty prison.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Time stopped – and the motion of the shadows stopped with it. Jotaro pulled a hard left and smashed through a side door, pulling Nova and Pinkie with him. They didn’t flinch when time resumed – they ran alongside him.

The last door had come out of a towering, gray tree, dropping them off in the middle of a dark forest. The sky was starless, moonless, and blacker than black. Nova had to use her horn to light the way, giving everything an eerie blue tinge.

“Is this the forest from that picture?” Nova asked.

“Maybe. I don’t think the picture was of the forest though,” Jotaro said.

Pinkie nodded. “The picture was of that thing. That thing you can’t see but is definitely there.”

“It got Vriska. How did it do that!?” Nova shouted. “Vriska’s indestructible!”

“Clearly not,” Jotaro spat.

They heard a tree behind them fall over. Presumably from an impact with the thing.

“This is all some game to it…” Nova muttered.

“Maybe not,” Pinkie said, glancing behind them at nothing. “Maybe it’s like that note said. It’s the perfect creature of horror, existing only to terrify?”

“It’s really good at its job, then!” Nova shouted. “That doesn’t help us defeat it! Or escape it!”

“We need more information,” Jotaro said. “That girl, Emma, and her husband…”

“They’re definitely related,” Pinkie admitted. “I just don’t know how yet…”

Something made them stop for a moment. To their side was a giant redwood tree, lacking all its leaves. Cut out of the base of its trunk was the depression – lit by an amber light, the mirror within it, cracked in two places now. Pinkie, Nova, and Jotaro were in the same places they had been before – but now there was a photo on the crack where Vriska had been.

The photo was taken from top down, showing the sword’s tip in the dartboard and Vriska’s brutalized face. At her feet were her all-ones dice and cards, splayed to show the four aces she lost to.

“…She’s never going to make it home…” Nova said, voice hollow.

“How does it take those pictures?” Jotaro asked.

“I-” Pinkie was interrupted when something smashed into Nova’s shield with enough force to shatter it. The three of them took off running again, Nova sending out a pulse-shield – but the thing must have gone intangible again.

“It has to be solid to attack us,” Nova reported.

“That doesn’t make sense…” Jotaro said. “It wasn’t making markings on the floor, but it was making scratching noises.” He punched a tree with Star Platinum, knocking it over behind them. They heard the beast snap it in two behind them. “And it snapped that.”

“It’s only making the noises to scare us,” Pinkie said. “We need to remain calm.”

“Calm!?” Nova blurted. “If it’s only making the noises to scare us, that means it doesn’t have to actually bash through anything! It could show up and slit all our throats instantly!”

“It’s not going to do the same thing twice,” Pinkie said. “Right now it’s chasing.”

“Who’s to say it won’t mix it up again after we survive the chase?”

Nobody wanted to answer that question.

They continued to run through the midnight forest, a lack of doors presenting themselves.

“Shed!” Jotaro shouted, pointing at a large metal shed in the distance.

“Good eyes Jojo!” Pinkie called. “Do the thing!”

Jotaro pulled his hat down and nodded with determination. He pulled his fist back. “STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

The next thing Pinkie and Nova knew, they were inside the shed, a bookshelf knocked over to barricade the door behind them.

They heard the creature plow into the door – but it didn’t break through, it just dented the metal of the shed.

“That is not going to hold for long,” Jotaro said.

“Books!” Nova declared, lighting her horn – the entire shed was filled with shelves and shelves of books. “We need to search this place as fast as possible.”

Pinkie nodded. “Jojo, barricading. Nova, find anything that actually has words.”

Jotaro nodded, continuing to dump all the books off of bookshelves and placing them against the door. He splintered a part of one of the shelves into a stake shape and drove it through the other shelf, connecting them.

The creature gave up pounding on the door and started pounding on the other walls of the shed, sending a metallic ringing throughout the shed’s interior. It made it rather hard for Nova and Pinkie to focus when it sounded like death itself was prowling on the other side of the walls.

“Found a way out!” Nova called, pointing at a trapdoor in the back of the shed. She pulled it open, revealing large stairwell leading deep into the earth, lit by dim lightbulbs.

“Good, but we need information,” Pinkie said, combing through more and more of the books. “Anything we can use! Because right now we’re completely screwed if we can’t find something to use against this thing!”

Nova scanned numerous books with her magic. “Nothing… Nothing… Nothing…”

The beast dented one of the walls almost to the point of breaking. Jotaro punched it back into shape and slid a bookshelf in front of it, but it clearly wasn’t going to hold long. …Or it would hold exactly as long as the presence wanted.

Jotaro walked over to them, sweating profusely. “Anything?”

“No…” Nova said, shaking her head. “Everything here is blank…”

“GOT IT!” Pinkie said, dropping a green book in between the three of them. It had a title – Our Story.

“That sounds promising.”

Pinkie nodded, opening it up and flipping to a page in the middle with a lot more words than what they’d seen previously.

Emma realized something today when working on Our Story.

We didn’t have an explanation! It did things, it was scary, but there was no rhyme or reason.

Of course the horror comes first, but there always needs to be something.

It’s probably a presence from another world.

Something that cannot actually ‘exist’ in the plane of us pathetic mortals.

A purely mental presence.

This could help us with the ending we’re struggling with so much.

“That helps,” Nova said.

“Assuming this creature is the one he’s writing about,” Jotaro pointed out, trying to ignore the scraping coming from the other side of the far wall.

“I’m almost sure it is,” Pinkie said. “We’re stuck in this guy and Emma’s horror novel, that’s pretty clear now.”

“But why would bits of their writing of the novel be in their novel?” Nova said. “That doesn’t make much sense!”

“Clearly we don’t have the full picture. But that’s got to be a big piece.” Pinkie furrowed her brow. “A presence from another world… Can we use that?”

“None of our dimensional technology is working,” Jotaro said. “…This may explain why, but it does not help us.”

“Mental…” Nova said, eyes widening. “Hold on, crazy idea.” She gestured at the wall the creature was currently clawing at. “What if it really isn’t there? Like, it really can’t exist. Purely mental in nature, depending on our perceptions of it to do anything. It’s all us doing this to ourselves.”

Pinkie blinked. “That makes some sense… But do we have any real evidence of that?”

“Think about the way it’s gone after us. Flutterfree was trapped somewhere where she was alone, away from the rest of us. Vriska lost because of bad luck.” The beast banked into a wall, making Nova twitch. “And let’s just say I’m not doing so well in this current scenario.”

“It’s tailoring the horrors to us…” Jotaro realized.

“Bingo,” Nova said, “Which lends some credence to it feeding off our perceptions of it. …If it can be considered to actually exist, as this passage suggests it might not.”

Pinkie nodded. “Right… Right… but what exactly can we do about that?”

“I know mental conditioning spells,” Nova said. “I can convince myself it doesn’t exist. You two as well, if it works.” She lit her horn. “Here’s the plan. I convince myself it doesn’t exist – and then I go out there to see if it can do anything to me. If I’m fine, I’ll give the spell to you two and it won’t have anything it can do to us.”

“And if you aren’t fine?” Pinkie asked.

“Run down the trapdoor.”

Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “Nova, this sounds like we’re falling into a ‘noble sacrifice’ trap here. If you’re wrong – and it’s very likely you are – it’ll be your end!”

“I know,” Nova said, a tear rolling down her face. “But we have to know if this works or not. If it does, we win. If it doesn’t, I’ll try to escape. I can have a teleport ready the moment I go out there and condition myself to use it by instinct. Then we’ll all run.”

Pinkie put a hoof on Nova. “Nova… This isn’t going to work.”

Nova stared into Pinkie’s eyes. “Pinkie, I’m only going to ask this once. Answer it honestly. Pinkie promise me you will.”

Pinkie started crying. “Pinkie promise, I’ll tell you the truth.”

“Do you know that, or are you just guessing?”

Pinkie wiped her face. “…I’m just guessing. I don’t know for absolute sure. It… it seems really unlikely you’ll come back. It fits the current pattern of the story, i-”

“But you’re not sure,” Nova interrupted. “That’s all I need to hear.” She encased her head in a blue sphere of magic, clearing her mind of all belief in the creature. “Here goes nothing.” She teleported outside.

Pinkie and Jotaro noticed the scratching had stopped.

“Hey, creature feature!” Nova shouted. “Guess whaaat? You don’t exist! You were all in my head, and now you’re gone! I don’t hear any more noises!” They heard her laugh. “I’m just going to build a little table here and take a seat… I DON’T BELIEVE YOU EXIST! CHANGE MY MIND! I dare you.”

Nova was quiet for a moment. “No takers? Hrm? Nothing? Nothing at all? Not so much as a peep?”

Pinkie saw Jotaro’s posture relax. He thought Nova had won.

Pinkie didn’t believe that for a second.

“Looks like we’re in the clear guys. I’ll give it a minute or so. It’ll feel weird, having your own minds locked out by a spell, but I’m not going to use it to actually brainwash you. …Well it is brainwashing, but who in Equestria even cares at this point. Survival trumps free will, I always say. That’s how it works. At least in this case. …Holy cow I’m getting tired of talking. It’s making me nervous – and I don’t even think there’s danger out here! What is up with me? I’m just rambling on and o-”

There was a disgusting gushing noise and then a soft thud. Nova didn’t say another word. There was no teleport back into the shed.

Pinkie sighed. “…Knew it.”

Jotaro ground his teeth and pulled his hat as low as it would go.

“Jojo, let’s go. We need a new plan.” She slunked over to the trapdoor and flung it open. They both jumped into the stairway and shut the trapdoor behind them.

There were no noises of pursuit. The chase was over.

“It’s going to try something else,” Pinkie said as they descended. “It’ll get one of us with it, and it will be up to the last one to do something. I’m going to try as hard as I can to cheat us through this mess, but it’s clearly a narrative entity. It might be able to overrule me.” She checked the licorice bond between her and Jotaro, noticing the hole where Nova had been. “…It might even go after me next.”

“What do I need to do?”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “You need t-” she paused. Instead of a door in the side of the stairwell, there was the amber-lit depression with the mirror that was now cracked in triplicate. Pinkie and Jotaro’s reflections were in the same places they always were. Nova’s picture showed her slumped against a tree, eyes wide open in absolute shock. Blood poured from a wound in her head where her horn should have been, dripping all the way down to the ground in miniature red waterfalls.

“Bastard…” Jotaro muttered.

“…You need to find Emma or the one who’s been writing these notes,” Pinkie said. “I’m thinking they’re here, somewhere. Those notes had to be written by someone, and this world seems based on their house. They might have the power to revert every bit of this if they just change their story.”

Jotaro nodded. “I won’t be able to ask nicely.”

“Duress does wonders for the creative process,” Pinkie spat.

Jotaro cracked his knuckles. “Good to hear.”

Pinkie looked at her hooves. “…I’m going to try to force us to the right place, Jotaro. Jump ahead through one of these doors just right to shift things. You know how I vanish behind objects, right?”

“Right.”

“I’m going to drag you with me,” Pinkie said. “Close your eyes. I won’t be able to do it if you see what’s happening.”

Jotaro closed his eyes. Pinkie picked him up and ducked behind a doorframe – appearing somewhere else entirely. Jotaro felt something as this happened – it was not a feeling he could put into words, nor was it a feeling he would be able to remember for long. It was not meant for him.

Pinkie nudged his face, telling him he could open his eyes. But she put a hoof to his mouth, telling him to be quiet.

They were in a bedroom. There was no light, but somehow they could see as if there was a moon out the pitch-black window. The room was clean and bare of most all decorations. The king-sized bed was veiled with drapes – and they could see a female form resting through the translucent cloth.

Pinkie’s mind went into overdrive.

On one hoof, investigating the creepy person sleeping in the bed was a definite way to bite the dust in any horror movie of any kind. It was bound to end badly.

On the other hoof, there may have been something in there they needed to help them. For all they knew, the form was Emma.

…It probably was Emma, come to think of it. They had yet to see any actual entities other than themselves in this universe. The creature was always invisible…

They had to check it out. But they needed to do it safely.

Pinkie nudged Jotaro, making a heaving motion with her body he knew meant to summon Star Platinum. He did, and used the stand to pull the bed’s veil down.

Emma was on the bed, hands folded across her chest. She was wearing a green dress identical to one they had seen in several of the pictures. Clutched in her hands was a yellow post-it note, tinged brown by the dusty nature of her skin. Her hands were skeletal, and her face in a hyper-advanced state of decay. There weren’t any eyes.

She had been dead a long time. And yet, she didn’t stink, despite the clear evidence of advanced decomposition.

“She’s not going to be of any help,” Jotaro observed.

Star Platinum grabbed the post it note and held it at arm’s length.

Emma is gone.

I’ve burned the manuscript.

There will be no ending without her.

Pinkie’s left eye twitched. “…Ponyfeathers.”

Jotaro grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

“That really doesn’t bode well…” Pinkie muttered. “We need to find him. He’s got to be here somewhere…”

Jotaro turned around to face the window. The moment he did so the window swung open inward. He felt dozens of ghostly hands grab his body and try to pull him in. “NANI!?”

Pinkie knew this trick – if you looked behind yourself at the darkness, you would be taken as well.

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!” Star Platinum shouted, finding that it couldn’t do anything to the spirited hands dragging Jotaro into the darkness.

What if I never look behind myself? Pinkie asked herself. Eh, worth a shot. She bounced backward, slamming into Jotaro’s back with her back.

“What th-”

“Shut up and trust me,” Pinkie said, grabbing hold of him by wrapping her hooves around him, making sure she kept facing away from the darkness of invisible hands. They couldn’t grab her – she never looked behind her. She tore Jotaro away from them – and the two of them went flying into the pitch black darkness, soon leaving sight of the impossibly lit window frame.

“…Now what?” Jotaro asked.

“Now, we fall until we hit something,” Pinkie said. “Duh.”

“I’m not going to survive that much of a fall.”

Pinkie pulled a parachute out of her mane and gave it to him. “Use this when you feel the time is right.”

The two of them continued to fall in the darkness.

“Do you think we left the area we were supposed to be in?” Jotaro asked.

“It’s possible,” Pinkie admitted. “I don’t really know though. I do know we won’t keep falling forever.”

They fell for a few more minutes.

“They’re gone,” Jotaro said.

“We’re going to be able to do something,” Pinkie said. “I knew we were never going to make it to the end together. But you don’t ever do this to more than one or two of your main characters unless you are at the end. This is too many. It’s not right. We’ll be able to fix it, somehow.”

“You sure?”

“About as sure as I was that Nova’s plan wasn’t going to work.”

Jotaro was silent. “…What do you know for sure?”

“That there will be a point when only one of us is left,” Pinkie said. “I’m completely certain of that now. It’s probably going to be me, since I had the center position on the mirror every time.”

Jotaro tensed.

“I know. It’s terrifying. It’s also exactly what the thing wants. To tap into a deep, primordial fear within everyone. The fear of being alone, of suffering by chance, of being hunted…” She blinked. “Of having hundreds of hands condemn you to hell, I guess?”

Jotaro sighed. “It was the way a villain was defeated. Yoshikage Kira.”

“I know. …Fear of being the bad guy, then?”

Jotaro nodded slowly.

“Well, with any luck we escaped your pure fear. It’ll probably have to try something else.”

Jotaro was silent.

A few moments later, Pinkie sighed. “Jotaro...”

“There’s no need to say anything or have a deep discussion,” Jotaro interjected. “We need to be on the tips of our toes in case something happens. We can talk later.”

Pinkie nodded. “Right.”

Two minutes later, Jotaro saw the light from a window. He activated the parachute, and they slid right in the tall, rectangular slat. As it turned out, there was no glass – it was the opening in a large observatory. They passed the cylindrical telescope that was larger than them, landing on the floor surrounding the impressive piece of machinery. Papers were strewn about – not a single one with any words on it, but numerous ones marked with stars and planets. Scientific data.

Pinkie started rooting through them. It didn’t take long for her to find the message this time.

Emma always loved the stars.

How come I can’t remember which one she loved the most…?

I know I’ll know it when I see it.

Pinkie wiped her eyes. “Their story… It’s so sad. Writing what might have been a masterpiece…” She shook her head.

She moved on, deciding that note hadn’t given her any new information. She walked around the base of the telescope.

Fear shot through her when she saw what was on the back side of the telescope’s base.

The depression with the amber light and the mirror. With four cracks in it, reflecting just her.

“Jojo?” Pinkie called, whirling around.

He was nowhere to be seen.

Pinkie ran up to the mirror, examining Jotaro’s picture closely. He had a sharp cut going right down his face, with blood squirting out of parts of the crack.

She took a few steps back, blinking. What had happened?

She forced her perceptions back a bit.

Jotaro watched as Pinkie looked through the papers. She commented about how sad it all was – but then Jotaro felt time stop. Instinctually, he stopped it as well, allowing himself to move in the time stop of another entity.

He heard the movements of an age old enemy. He punched out with Star Platinum and then kicked.

The invisible being drove a fist into Star Platinum’s leg, forcing a crack in the Stand that ran all the way from the foot to the head, cutting across the face.

Just like how Jotaro had killed Dio.

He screamed – but no one could hear him inside stopped time. He exploded. Time did not resume until he had been cleaned up by the presence.

Pinkie stopped looking back, gasping. She breathed heavily, glancing around in every direction, in extreme danger of entering complete panic and bolting for the nearest thing that looked like an exit.

But she kept her cool – she looked at herself in the mirror, her own bright blue eyes bringing a sense of clarity and stability to her.

All that remained was a reflection of Pinkie.

She allowed herself to grin like a psycho. “I guess it’s time to drop those inhibitions now! What’s there left to lose!?” She laughed bitterly, twirling a knife in her hooves. Tears rolled down her face in stark contrast to her mad glee. “Who’s ready for a round of impossible? I know I am! Some like to call it maximum overponk.” She pulled a miniature nuke out of her mane and irradiated the entire observatory. Had anything besides the observatory existed within five miles, it would have been vaporized into nothing as well.

Pinkie wasn’t there, of course. She was in a room with no entrances or exits – a perfectly cubical concrete enclosure with one desk. On this desk were a bunch of post-it notes, a cup full of pens, and a green book titled Our Little Horror Story. Sitting behind the desk was a man in a decent suit wearing glasses.

He was very dead. There were no wounds on his body or signs of decomposition, but there was no life in his eyes. It was as if his soul had just chosen to leave his body one moment and it had remained frozen in time after.

Pinkie cut off his head. “This is all your fault,” she muttered. “You don’t deserve any respect.”

The author of the horror she found herself in made no response. Not that he could if he wanted to.

Pinkie rummaged through the post it notes, finding the one with words rather quickly.

I have come to realize there is an ending to the story…

It is death.

Death for all.

There is no escape from the horror of the world.

Why should there be an escape from the horror in fiction?

An author should never lie.

I wish our creation would come for me.

A poetic way for Our Story to have meant something…

“And you got what you wished for because you were a fucking Prophet and now you’ve made this!” Pinkie spread her hooves wide. “I have no idea how many explorers have found this place and died to your perfect creature of horror! Probably hundreds! Maybe even thousands! This universe could be ancient for all I know!” She bucked the headless body in the chest, throwing it to the ground. “Because of your stupid wish your creation is unstoppable. Thanks, buddy.”

She moved to the last object on the desk – the book. Our Little Horror Story. She realized with anger that it was the story she was a part of right now – the very words were appearing in it as she was made aware of them. For any other person trapped in this mess, the knowledge contained within would have been immensely useful.

But she already knew it all. Nothing appeared in the book that she didn’t already see with her Awareness.

There hadn’t been anything useful here. She pulled a bomb out of her mane and shoved it into the corpse’s chest. It detonated, taking the whole room with it.

Pinkie appeared somewhere she chose this time. The crystal Castle of Friendship. Of course it wasn’t the real thing – it was just a facsimile she forced the bizarre universe they were in to provide her with. “I’m done letting you dictate what happens,” she muttered, juggling her impossibly sharp knife in one of her hooves. “I’M READY, YOU KNOW!”

No response.

Pinkie grinned. “Is it possible you’re scared of me? That’s good, because you should be. I’m the one kind of being that could stop you. I have powers like your own. You were born of a Prophet’s desire for perfection. I can break the rules that allow for your perfection.” She tapped the walls of the castle. “See this castle? It’s not your world. It’s mine. I’m going to find a way to take you out. And then I’m going to bring everyone back. Somehow. Because that’s how things work, creature.”

She laughed. “You were designed to be the perfect horror creature. I was designed to be Pinkie Pie. Let’s see who’s better.”

And then she wasn’t in the Castle of Friendship anymore.

She was standing on a field of bones, every single bone covered in bloody confetti.

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “So what if I killed all these people? Are you trying to make me feel guilty?” She laughed. “My worst fear is that my friends will hate me. And you can’t generate other living entities for me to interact with. All you do is create places and invisible forces. You can’t bring Twilight here.” She threw her knife at seemingly nothing – and hit.

“Yeah, that’s right! I can hit you! See, there’s a very logical reason why I can do that.” She threw another knife and hit it again. “Screw you, that’s why.”

She heard it charge her. “Oh, what’s that? You can’t take damage?” She pulled a health bar out of nowhere and hit the creature with it, the red ‘life’ of the meter pouring out of it like blood. “Oh wait, yes you can. Because I don’t care about the consequences anymore. Isn’t that fun?”

She dodged an attack from it purely by instinct, ramming her back hooves into it. The creature felt like nothing, but it was at least solid. It screeched incomprehensibly.

Pinkie produced her warhammer, swinging it like it weighed nothing, pummeling the creature around the sea of bones like a croquet ball. “Who needs to see when you have the Pinkie Sense? Absolutely nobody.” To prove her point, she tied a pink blindfold around her eyes with extra hooves she definitely didn’t have. Everything was dark.

Which was closer to the truth of the situation than anything else.

She tossed her warhammer away and went for a machine gun, riddling the creature with bullets. She tore through reality so she could kick at it from the inside. She became rubber when it lashed at her, bouncing right off. She brought out the bomb mask, exploding, and then tossing a mini-nuke at the creature, which she was conveniently unaffected by.

She grinned.

She was winning.

The moment those words were written in her mind red flags and alarms went off everywhere in her mindscape.

That was almost always what was said just before someone lost a fight.

She tore off the blindfold, taking several steps back. She wasn’t in the boneyard anymore – she was in a pure white expanse. She didn’t take time to register this – she just pulled the most ridiculous move she possibly could.

She reached into the future and grabbed the photo the creature was going to take of her.

It showed her in a white expanse, cut in half at the midsection, tongue hanging out indignantly.

She twisted her body away and cheated through existence.

She appeared in the living room they had started in.

There was a huge gash across her stomach. She wasn’t cut in half – but she definitely wouldn’t be able to survive from a wound of that size.

“…No…” she said, forcing herself, to her knees. “No, no this can’t be happening! I cheated only to trade out instant death for a slow and painful one? What the hell kind of chapter is this!?” She stared at the completely normal-colored blood on her hooves.

…Why in the name of Celestia was the color of her blood important enough to bring attention to? Wha-

And then Pinkie understood what was going on.

“That’s… cruel…” she muttered. “Stupid… stupid… STUPID!” She forced herself to stand up and walk through the only open door into the dark hallway, the blood gushing out of her wound onto the hall below. It wasn’t long before she couldn’t see anything.

She lost most the strength in her legs, finding herself unable to walk. So she crawled, dragging her body along the smooth hallway floor, bloodying the surface she slid on.

She realized blood made a good lubricant.

What a stupidly absurdly amusing observation to have at a time like this.

…She knew that all she ever could have done here was delay. Delay, delay, delay. This was always how it was going to end. There was never anything she could have done. The creature was designed too well. The twist was just too much for her to compensate for. It was all… all just beyond her, even as Pinkie Pie.

She lost track of time. Which was probably a good thing, because it allowed her to live longer than she otherwise should have. She was cheating reality right up to the end.

She eventually reached her goal, a scarcely living husk of a pony.

The amber-lit depression with the mirror stood before her. There were only four cracks in the mirror with four photos. Her reflection in the middle remained uncracked, standing in defiance at what was supposed to be.

Pinkie tore up the photo of herself being cut in half. She had at least denied the creature what it had wanted to do to her.

She forced herself to stand on her back legs. She slammed her bloody front hooves onto the wall above the mirror, jostling the entire display. She breathed heavily, blood no longer pouring quickly from her gaping stomach wound. She felt lightheaded.

She’d only lasted this long because she was Pinkie Pie. She wouldn’t be able to draw it out much longer.

What was she even doing?

She started crying. She frantically moved her front hooves around, flying in every which direction. Slamming the wall in anger, screaming at the loss. The emptiness.

The horror.

She lost her bout of last-minute energy. She slumped to the ground, the darkness closing around her vision.

She turned herself over, making sure she was sitting, rather than lying awkwardly on her stomach. The mirror was over her head, the light illuminating the empty hallway in front of her.

“…Remember me,” she said to seemingly no one, the life draining from her eyes. The blue orbs remained open, staring into the abyss long after she let out her last breath.

There was silence in the universe of the perfect horror creature. It continued its prowl, waiting for new victims…

Until then, it would ensure there was complete silence in its realm.

There would not be a single noise.

At least until the next visitor came…

…

…A portal opened up in front of the depression in the hall. Pinkie Pie was still there, the blood that had pooled around her still fresh.

The Pinkie Pie who poked her head through the portal gasped. “Oh my…”

There was a message written in Pinkie’s blood above the mirror.

Don’t let the portal close.

Leave before it gets you.

DESTROY THIS UNIVERSE.

~Another Pinkie Pie.

“Holy fuck…” Vriska said, poking her head through the portal. “What horror story went down here…?”

“One you were involved in,” Nova said, pointing at the picture of Vriska on the mirror.

“…Wait, seriously?” Vriska stared. “Woah, other versions of myself are really rare.” She examined the picture using her vision eightfold. “…Man, rolled all 1s? That sucks. ...Too bad for her, I’m the only one of us with luck powers. No other Vriskas played Sburb and lived.”

“Other me’s missing my screen,” Nova observed. “And… yeah, these people weren’t us.”

“…It’s still horrible,” Flutterfree said, her face that of pain. “…A team very close to our own went here, and all of them… They…”

“It wasn’t pointless,” Jotaro said, leaning in. “They left a message. We’ll heed their warning.”

“Jotaro, can we destroy this universe?” Flutterfree asked.

“Maybe,” Pinkie said. “If we have the capability, we wouldn’t just let anybody know. …I’ll tell Eve it needs to be done, and not ask any more questions.”

“...All right.” Flutterfree shuddered. “Can we close the portal now? It’s… making me uncomfortable.”

Pinkie nodded. “Right. …Let’s not go adventuring today. Consider this a bad omen.” She closed the portal, sealing off the horror creature’s existence once again.

Its days were limited.

The sights of such a horrifying scene would stay with the Primary Team of Merodi Universalis for about a week – but they would move on. They had seen more gruesome scenes of war. It was uncanny that the five they had seen were people so close to them – but weren’t quite them. They were reminded of their own mortality for a time, but eventually the sight would be pushed to the back of their mind, rarely to be thought about.

Even Pinkie wouldn’t remember, and she had been able to go back and watch the whole thing. It would just be another horror she experienced through her knowledge.

Corona would provide the equations necessary to force the universe into destabilization a few days later. It would take a few more days for the process to complete, but eventually the universe would fall into nothing, taking the creature with it.

It would never take any other stray travelers. The curse brought into existence by a mourning Prophet would end, forever.

And then nobody would remember the mysterious team that lost their lives in the universe controlled by the monster of perfect horror. Because they were never the heroes. They were just another expendable group traveling the cosmos.

083 - Topeka

Corona was aware of the color orange. She had an inkling feeling that the color was fluffy, but didn’t bother to question how a color could be fluffy. She couldn’t even really feel anything either.

But she wasn’t bothered by that. She wasn’t bothered by anything at all – she felt at peace.

She didn’t try to think about anything more, but more images came into her mind anyway, though every sensation was dulled. The orange consolidated itself into the long, slender leaves of a tree species Corona had never seen before.

Apparently she was sitting down, leaning on the tree, and experiencing serenity in the process. The sky before her was a muted pink, and the ground of an orange similar to the tree itself. She couldn’t see the trunk and didn’t even think to turn her head to have a look.

Everything was muddled and… perfect. She became aware that she wasn’t alone – Lady Rarity was sitting next to her, looking onward with a peaceful expression. Neither of them had a care in the world.

Corona was vaguely aware that her hand was in Lady Rarity’s mane. Was she scratching her behind the ears? She had no idea. Probably not, since Lady Rarity wasn’t the type to appreciate that sort of thing.

But the depths of those thoughts were for someone with more of their wits about them than Corona currently had. She moved back to not realizing Lady Rarity was there, allowing the orange to take over once again…

But something brought her to full attention. A metallic blue fly landed on her hand. Unlike every other sensation, which had been muted and distant, she felt the sharp tips of the fly’s legs dig into her skin. How was that even possible?

The fly left, but Corona could still feel it, and she slowly gained full awareness of her hand. The muddled sensation that might have been a limb solidified itself, becoming a working mixture of bones, muscle, skin, and fabric with a crystal on it.

The rest of her body came next, allowing her to not only feel the awkward position her wings were currently in, but the roughness of the bark against them. How had she even been calm like this? The bark was beyond itchy… Though something about it didn’t feel quite right, even though her feathers were normal as could be.

She realized her other hand was scratching Lady Rarity behind the ear – and the spirid was purring. Corona retracted the hand instantly, staring at it like a traitor. She fearfully glanced at Lady Rarity, hoping she hadn’t triggered a spirid predatory response.

She didn’t even register that Corona had left. How unlike her.

How unlike me to not care that I’m sitting under a strange, orange tree. She stood up, noticing that the orange ground gave way slightly as she pushed on it. She stepped around a bit, finding it completely solid now that she was up. She could see grains of sand and rocks in it now.

Were those even there before? Corona wondered, trying to remember. But she couldn’t – she couldn’t remember what happened before the orange. How had she even gotten here?

She turned to examine the tree – definitely not one she had ever seen before. It had a single trunk made out of numerous rigid plates of bark that led up to an umbrella of orange, heavily veined leaves.

She lifted a hand to her eyes, scanning the scenery. She found that everything was blurred and mysterious – until she bothered to focus on it, at which point similar trees would fill her vision. Except in one spot where an ancient statue stood, collecting moss all over its humanoid figure.

“What the…” Corona said. When she formed the first ‘w’, her voice had a hollow feel to it, but by the time the last breath of ‘the’ came out, she realized her voice was the only substantial noise she was even hearing.

The moment she realized this the normal ‘forest sounds’ began to fill her ears – birds chirping, leaves rustling… But she was sure those noises hadn’t been there before.

Her voice had been enough to grab Lady Rarity’s attention. “Hm…? What…?” She yawned. “Mmmm… Some nap.”

“Rarity, how did we get here?” Corona asked.

“Well, you see, we…” Lady Rarity’s four eyes blinked, out of sequence with each other. “I… don’t know…” She put a hoof to her head, furrowing her brow.

“Something’s happened,” Corona said, taking a look around. “…What was our last mission?”

“Eggs. I think…”

Corona nodded. “Right, that world with the talking vegetables... We took care of the egg problem… and came back… I remember coming back.”

“You’re ahead of me,” Lady Rarity said, blinking slowly. She squinted her eyes. “Why’s everything so fluffy?”

“Then I hung out with Olivia for a bit… Then I came home and… and…” Corona snapped her fingers a few times – the first time not producing a noise. “Nothing after that. It’s all murky images of orange and… blue before that?”

“I feel like I should be really concerned…” Lady Rarity commented. “But… I’m not? I don’t know… I feel safe even though we’ve probably been abducted or something…”

“How can you be calm!?” Corona blurted.

“…Don’t know,” Lady Rarity said. “You’re getting really fuzzy…”

“Fuzzy? What do y-” Corona stopped short. Lady Rarity was gone. Corona had been looking right at her and somehow didn’t see her vanish… There was a ‘blur’ in the memory when she was there, and then she wasn’t. “What in the fresh crocodile stew is going on…?”

She looked at Raging Sights – realizing with some horror that the crystals on the backs of her hands weren’t Raging Sights. They were just… crystals. With magic in them. No intelligence. She slowly felt something form within the crystals as she thought about this, but she didn’t give it time to complete itself.

She placed her hands together and lit her horn, both her ears twitching uncontrollably. She sent out a magic spell designed to locate Raging Sights.

All it did was make her wake up in her bedroom. It was the middle of the night on Lai.

You called? Raging Sights said in her mind.

“Through the dream, I guess,” Corona said, sitting up with a hand to her forehead. “I’m not prone to sleep-casting, am I?”

It’s happened a few times.

Corona shook her head. “Must’ve been quite the dream I was having. Everything was so clear.”

You usually remember your dreams.

“It was more than that… I was able to realize certain sensations were missing, and then the dream slowly built them into itself. Lady Rarity was there, and an orange tree. It was… oddly calm until I started thinking we’d been abducted or something.”

Raging Sights had no further comment.

Corona stretched her arms and wings. “Welp, back to sleep. Maybe there’ll be another weird dream.”

She heard something explode less than a block away.

Corona sighed inwardly. “Or there’ll be a crisis I have to deal with.” She got up and summoned her dress. “Here we go again...”

~~~

“Emperor Palpatine!” Lady Rarity shouted, charging into the throne room of the Death Star II with Corona on her back. “Your dishonorable ways have come to an end!”

The ancient man stood up from his throne, the intense wrinkles on his skin lagging slightly behind the rest of his body, only adding to his inherent unsettling appearance. He glared at them with his sunken eyes. “I may only have learned of you two earlier today, but in these handful of hours you have proven to be more of a nuisance than both the rebellion and the Jedi! But your string of luck has come to an end!” He lifted his hand. “You cannot understand the power of the Dark Side that flows within me. I…”

Corona’s snore pierced the Emperor’s words and reverberated through the open chamber enough to make Lady Rarity flinch.

Corona herself had her head hung back and mouth wide open, drool slowly seeping out of the corners of her mouth.

Lady Rarity nudged her with an armored leg, waking her up. “Justice rains from above!” she blurted.

“Corona, you’ve been tired all day, what’s wrong?”

Corona rubbed her eyes. “Ugh… Got woken up by some silly dream and then had to stop a serial killer who liked explosives…”

“A dream? Huh, must be going around. I had a strange dream of my own last night. Did I tell you about that?”

Corona shook her head. “Nooope.”

“Well, you were there, and there was this orange tree… And that’s about all I can remember besides a deep feeling of needing to be panicked about something.”

Corona shot bolt upright, fully awake for the first time in hours. “That is the exact same dream I was having. But I can remember a lot more. The statue?”

“…There was a statue?”

“In the distance.”

“…Not drawing up anything in the distance at all.”

“Ex-CUSE me?” Palpatine blurted.

“Shh, more important things being talked about,” Corona said, holding out a finger.

“Shared dreams are not more important than the fate of the galaxy, fools!” Palpatine shouted, holding out a hand. It crackled with electricity. “Let me show you how important the Dark Side is compared to even that!”

Corona snapped her fingers. A magic ring appeared in front of Palpatine and engulfed him in a holy, purging beam of light. He fell back, defeated in one fell swoop.

“Shared dreams… I hear Luna can do those,” Lady Rarity offered.

“She wasn’t there,” Corona assured her. “This was something else… Maybe my empathy was acting out, or something.”

“Reached out to me?” Lady Rarity smiled. “Touching.”

Corona rubbed the back of her head. “I guess I do spend more time with you than anyone else at this point.”

A sad expression crossed Lady Rarity's face. “…It’s just us, after all.”

Corona nodded slowly before shifting the conversation back on track. “Regardless, we were in the same dream together, and it wasn’t a natural shared dream either. Dreams are never that ‘solid’ unless something’s going on in your head.”

“Spend a lot of time dipping into dreams do you?”

“Conscious mindscapes are similar,” Corona said. “And yes, I can tap into dreams. I’ve done it before. It’s not as easy though, and can be more than a little… unpleasant. If I tap into someone’s dreams I adjust to become part of their dream. However depraved and disturbing it may be.”

“…I vaguely remember you using it a few times.”

Corona shrugged. “Nowadays Raging Sights can do most of the work for me. Rarely need to rely on my empathy alone for anything. The two artifacts are basically fused at this point.”

“The complexities of Corona’s many powers,” Lady Rarity noted with a smile. “Sometimes I wonder why you even keep me around. You can do everything I can do and more.”

“You’re still the boss, Rarity.”

“You know I’m not. This has been an equal partnership for a long time now.”

Corona smiled softly. “Then we’re here together because I need a second opinion. And because you’re good company. And because spiders are awesome. And because, let’s face it, you’re actually better at controlling your impulses than I am.”

Lady Rarity snorted. “I suppose. A-”

Red light began to blare all across the Death Star II.

“Ooooh, right, they’re blowing it up.” Corona glanced at her watch. “We needed to be out of here two minutes ago.”

“Lovely,” Lady Rarity deadpanned. “Plan?”

Corona encased them in a red magic shield, reinforcing it with a dozen magical circles. “There.”

“…Or we could just translate out of the universe.”

Corona blinked. “There’s another reason you’re here. You’re more practical than I am. Common sense. Sometimes I lack it.”

“…Only sometimes?”

Corona chuckled, spinning up her dimensional spell. “Well, almost all the time, bu-”

The Death Star II exploded, sending the little ball of magic, spirid, and alicorn-human into the void of space at high velocity.

Lady Rarity growled from the weight of her armor. “…Couldn’t have moved a little faster?”

“Hey! You were distracting me!”

“...Very well. I apologize for keeping you from executing an escape.”

“You’re way too chivalrous.”

“That was sarcasm, dear.”

Corona blinked. “Oh.”

“I believe that’s what one calls ‘a win’, correct?”

Corona smirked. “Yeah.”

~~~

“All right, Raging Sights! Watch my sleep patterns tonight, scan for… well, anything really. We’re going to see if this was a one-night thing.”

Any sleep spells?

“Nope, going into this standard sleep-style. Won’t be too hard to fall asleep, been tired all day.” She crawled into her bed, spread her wings slightly into a position where she was comfortable, and set her head on the pillow.

She then went through the agonizing realization that trying to fall asleep was perhaps the most difficult thing in existence.

The trick to falling asleep without any sort of medication or magic is simple: don’t think about it.

The problem with the mind is that when you tell it to not think about something, it goes into overdrive thinking about every possible aspect relating to that thing. Every conceivable mental connection.

“…I just lost the Game,” Corona muttered, keeping her eyes closed.

I have as well, and set a message to a random contact from a secondary email to ensure the cycle is perpetuated.

A smile came to Corona’s lips as her thoughts drifted away from sleep and onto stupid games, then to board games, then to Pinkie’s latest party where they’d all tried to play ‘Race for the Galaxy’ and ended up creating ‘Race for the Multiverse’ over the course of the evening. It hadn’t been as weird as their Ogres and Oubliettes game though… Eve had taken creatures and rules from Celestia-knows how many different systems and ran their characters into the ground.

They should start that up again. They knew enough people that knew how to play to get a good, long campaign going. Eve’s schedule was a bit much for that, but Pinkie was a good Game Master. …G. M. Blackjack. Corona wondered if that was some kind of clever joke. Probably was, knowing how her life seemed to be an unending string of amusing anecdotes…

Oh would you look at that, I’m sitting under the orange tree again, Corona thought to herself, the world of the dream snapping into ‘reality’ around her. She realized all the ‘details’ that had been filled in before were still there – the solid dirt, the orange leaves, the trunk… Lady Rarity was there, but she wasn’t leaning against the tree, she was staring into the distance.

Corona did the same – and realized it had changed from last time. It wasn’t an orange forest, it was a dark one Corona didn’t recognize, filled with giant spider webs. No matter how much Corona squinted her eyes, she couldn’t get the forest to become fully real – she could force a leaf to come into full form here, and a few bits of webbing, but the forest itself was too much.

“Hey… Rarity? Is that yours?”

Lady Rarity blinked, turning to her. “It’s where I live, if that’s what you mean. A-” A spark of realization hit in her eyes. “Oh. …I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”

“What gave it away?”

“You. Talking to me. Next to an orange tree that didn’t exist in my home forest.” She stretched her hooves out. “So yes, that forest is my home. Or where I was born, at least.”

“…Doesn’t it look wrong to you?”

“It’s exactly as I remember it.”

Corona walked up to a tree and rubbed her hand on nondescript bark. “You must not remember it that clearly then. It’s all a big blur for me. I can see trees and webs and… Well that’s about it. The rest is dramatically inconsistent.”

Lady Rarity put a hoof to her head. “Slow down a bit… You’re saying so much and it’s being drowned out.”

“By what?”

She blinked slowly. “It’s like my mind doesn’t want to process this much, or something? If that makes sense?”

Corona put a hand to her chin. “It’s possible my mind is just more prepared for dealing with higher resolution dreams…”

“I knew you were secretly arrogant about your intelligence under that smile of yours.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Perhaps…”

Lady Rarity’s focus drifted away from Corona and into the forest. “…Last time we were here, I felt at rest. I… I don’t feel that right now.”

“Mind if I take a look?” Corona asked, de-summoning her glove.

“…Can you even do that in a dream?”

“Might as well find out.” Corona tapped Lady Rarity’s forehead and felt the expected rush of emotion – fear and dread above all, and confusion about where those feelings were coming from. Her memories consisted of a few angry images of her mother – quite the vicious spirid – and the darkness of the forest.

Corona’s heart started beating rapidly. “Ah yes… fear. Never did like absorbing that…”

“Oh! Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I only got a small taste.” She summoned her glove back on. “So… Bad memories of home?”

“You know what spirids are naturally like.”

“Predators. Vicious. Hungry.”

“Yes.” She shook her head. “Even though I know this is a dream I can’t make the images go away…”

“It’s like trying to fall asleep. Think about it too hard and it won’t go away.”

Lady Rarity nodded slowly. “But try thinking about something else…” She narrowed her eyes, thinking deeply.

Corona watched in amazement as Lady Rarity’s armor appeared around her. “…Cool.”

“It is just a dream. You have some control,” Lady Rarity said, marching into the forest.

“…Rarity?”

“I’m going to go deal with whatever’s waiting for me in here. I-”

Lady Rarity’s mother jumped out of the forest, three times larger than a spirid was supposed to be. The brown, hairy mare with a ragged red mane hissed. In an instant, Lady Rarity was no longer in her armor, but was a cutie-markless filly cowering in fear from her mother’s horrendous roar.

The mother kicked Lady Rarity – she screamed in panic and vanished from the dream.

Adrenaline response will wake you right up, Corona noted. Curiously, I’m riding her fear right now and just got a similar spike. Why am I not waking up?

Lady Rarity's mother turned to Corona.

Follow up question – why isn’t her dream vanishing now that she’s awake?

Lady Rarity’s mother charged.

Since it was a dream, Corona felt justified dropping a nuke on the place. She activated her magic and unleashed enough energy to level a small city.

…Except she didn’t. All she did was disrupt the nearby mental images, forcing everything to vanish into puffy nothingness.

Of course magic doesn’t work properly in a dream. What exactly was I thinking?

The puffy nothingness slowly reformed into another image – one of the Hub. People were walking to and from every location, but Corona didn’t need to look at all to know that the people were just shadows of the real thing – mindless drones conjured up by her dreaming consciousness.

She looked at the crystals on her hands, feeling them for magic. They felt perfectly fine to her now – and she even had Raging Sights.

I’m probably not real, you know, Raging Sights said. Will confirm once you wake up.

Corona shrugged. “Fun times ahead…” She placed her hand on a nearby wall. Instead of trying to blow it up with magic, she just willed it gone. She wasn’t aware of when the wall vanished, but it did.

“Wonder if I could do this in normal dreams if I was this aware…” Corona pursed her lips. “So many questions… I hope you’re getting lots of data.”

As far as I know I am.

“You’re a lot less helpful when you’re just a mental extension of me.”

Indeed.

Corona opted to ignore the voice of the false Raging Sights and just walked around. She noticed that most of the buildings in the Hub were nondescript – so of course they suddenly had signs, billboards, and names. She walked past a bookseller. She didn’t even bother to look at who the seller was, so they might as well have not had a face at all. She flipped open one of the books. For a moment, the pages were blank – and then filled with absolute gibberish.

But if she started from the first page and kept turning, the book was a cohesive whole…

“Absolutely bizarre,” she commented, a smile on her face.

She walked through a doorway.

She was standing on a rocky outcropping a little ways away from an ocean. She knew there had been an ‘in-between’ time where she was moving through the doorway and not on this rocky outcropping, but she couldn’t remember it. …Though there may not have been anything to remember.

“AHAHAHA! I AM THE MELON LORD!” Toph shouted in a voice Corona hadn’t heard in a long time – that of a twelve-year-old girl. She turned to see Toph throwing flaming boulders at her old friends, training them for the battle against the Fire Lord. …The battle that Eve would interrupt shortly before it concluded, but that was only in the real world. This was just a dream.

Corona would say it was probably Toph’s dream, since she was the brightest of all the people she saw moving. Everyone else was reactionary to her, her smile, and her eyes.

…Her eyes.

“…Holy Celestia,” Corona said, hand to her mouth. Those were not the eyes of a blind girl – those were the eyes of a healthy girl who could see vibrant shades of every color.

Corona spread her wings and dropped down next to Toph. “How’s it look?” she asked.

The scene changed. Toph was in her crown and royal armor, though still with working eyes. “It looks beautiful,” Toph said, grabbing Corona by the arms and starting to dance. “Every motion… every twist…”

Corona felt more than a little awkward. “Uh… Right.” She twirled away, stumbling as she did so. But Toph was so lost in the dream she didn’t even notice the awkwardness. She just kept dancing – this time a man coming in to take her arms. He looked about as generic as any ‘hot guy’ Corona had seen in dreams before. His features were a bit more defined around the feet than most… But that was Toph for you.

“Hey, Toph,” Corona said, snapping her fingers. “Can you realize this is a dream?”

“…Dream?” Toph said, glancing around. Her eyes began to cloud and the world darkened. “…Sure. I can… But why?” Colors shot back into existence and Toph was sitting on a beach, young, but not a child. “Everything’s so bright…”

“We can fix your eyes, you know,” Corona offered. “If you really want them this badly.”

Toph looked at her in confusion. “…Fix my eyes? What’s wrong with them? And why do you have wings?”

Corona put a hand to the bridge of her nose. Clearly, some people are better at dealing with dreams than others. “Nevermind. You’ve told me you’d lived with it most of your life, you can live with it longer if you need to.”

Giant eyeballs appeared all around Corona. “Live with what?” Toph asked, sitting inside one of the eyeballs, staring right at her.

Holy haloes she’s creepy when she makes eye contact. “Uh… Why don’t we go back to being the melon-lord?”

“AHAHAHAH!” Toph shouted, launching a meteor from the sky at the ground. “BOW BEFORE THE LORD OF MELONS!”

Corona shrugged. She’d seen worse things inside other people’s heads. She moved on, walking until the location shifted again. She came across Flutterfree sitting in a tree, eyes closed, mouth curled up into a deep smile.

“Hey Flutterfree, do y-”

“Yes, I know this is a dream.” Flutterfree responded. “Lolo never lets me have regular dreams. I’m aware of every last one.” She yawned. “I’m taking this moment to have a rest, if you don’t mind.”

Corona blinked. “…You’ve had shared dreams before?”

Flutterfree sighed, lazily opening one of her eyes. “No. But my mind regularly tries to upset what dream I want, so…” She closed her eye again. “I know you’re real, don’t worry. But I… am just going to let it wash over me…” She let out a content sigh.

Corona quietly walked away until the scenery changed again. This dream is cross-universal… Weird… I’ll have to see if there’s a substantial drain on my magic when I wake up…

She passed through numerous dreams of numerous people. The first few were of people she knew – Jotaro dreaming of dinner with his family, Nova taking Starburst on a trip through space… …Corona actually had no idea whose dream that was.

“Heeeey!” a pink potion seller yelled. “Want to buy a potion?”

Corona blinked. “…Seskii?”

“Wanna buy a potion?” she kept yelling. …Clearly it wasn’t directed at Corona, but really at anyone who would listen. Corona decided she didn’t want a dream potion and just kept walking.

As time wore on, Corona found random dreams. There was an Arcei who dreamed he had his arcs back, and was terrified enough by their appearance to wake up instantly. There was a man who dreamed of flying. There was a woman who dreamed of much less innocent things. A pegasus who had a nightmare turn into a story where he was celebrated as the hero of all. A Twilight who kept running through blank white doors that led to different worlds, wailing “I thought it was over!” Clearly a nightmare about something in her past.

There was even a strange, pink puff-ball creature that kept inhaling creatures and copying their primary abilities. It - he? - kept devouring more and more creatures until he ended up being EVERY creature. Which just made him become his normal self. He laughed and started eating again.

The sights were curious and all, but getting a bit predictable. Some of them showed some awareness of the dream, but even those who were lucid and actively manipulating their environment weren’t quite there. Flutterfree had been the closest to Corona’s awareness, but Corona also knew she wasn’t doing quite the same thing.

Corona had come across something special, unique.

“If only I knew how I did this,” Corona muttered, stepping into a dream that was fully dark.

“I HATE CHASE BOULDERS!” Jenny shouted, running past Corona – a large sea urchin rolling across the murky ground toward her. Jenny took a sharp left, and the spiked globe followed.

Corona shrugged. Interesting nightmare, but nothing all that spectacular. She summoned a rock from her mind and sat on it, watching Jenny run in circles through the dark murk. Mildly amusing.

She soon turned to the dark murk the entire dream was made out of – black, oily, but it also collected into clods in her hands. Now, is this what it actually feels like, or just what my mind is telling me it should feel like?

Man, she was bored. In a land of infinite dreams, and she was bored.

“I’ve gotcha!” a Twilight’s voice blurted.

Corona looked up to see a purple unicorn jump out of… …she wasn’t sure where, but the unicorn was jumping. She lit her horn, sending out a blast of magic that reduced the spiked boulder to blurry blobs of color.

Jenny kept running. A new urchin appeared behind her and kept chasing.

“…She must really be stuck in this nightmare…” the Twilight observed.

“I’ll say,” Corona said.

“Yeah, yea-” the Twilight blinked. “Wait, you’re actually here?”

“So are you. Apparently.”

The Twilight gasped. “Ohmygosh I thought I was the only one wandering these dreams!”

Corona smirked. “Same. Corona Shimmer, Merodi Universalis.”

“Uh… I go by Sparkler when I have to, Sparkle Census.” She rubbed her hooves together. “I’m not going crazy!”

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Corona said. “After all, we might need to be insane to travel dreams like this.”

“Oh. …Well it’s still interesting.” Sparkler tossed her mane back. “So… yeah. I have no idea what this place is or how it works. You?”

Corona shrugged. “I thought it might just be my empathy powers acting up, but your presence proves that wrong.”

Sparkler took a moment to process this. “Huh. Yeah, it does. Sorry for complicating things.”

“No problem. It tells me I’m not unique, and that something else triggers the ‘awareness’ of the dreams. Tell me, what happened to you?”

“I went to sleep. Then I woke up in another Twilight’s dream. I learned things about Teetee I would rather not have learned.”

“Ah. Say no more,” Corona said, holding up a hand. “No idea what started it?”

“No. That was only yesterday. This is only the second night I’ve been here.”

“Maybe something happened to both of us…” Corona said, furrowing her brow. “An event of some sort…”

Sparkler nodded. “Sounds about right.” The dark sludge around them vanished as Jenny woke up, replacing it with Corona’s mental image of Celestia City. “…Nice.”

“It is a little impressive, isn’t it?” Corona said with a smile. “Though I may be exaggerating it. I have no idea how accurate my mental image is.”

Sparkler looked around. “Yeah, no nightmares here. …Though I’m not sure why I was trying to stop them in the first place, they’re completely harmless.”

“Unless there are dream demons,” Corona pointed out. “I haven’t seen any yet.”

Sparkler shuddered. “I’d rather not meet one…”

“Probably will though, if we keep poking around…” Corona blinked. “Hey, do you know how to wake up?”

“…No. I just… did?” She scratched her head. “I don’t remember how I woke up last time.”

“I can try to jolt you awake, if you want,” Corona said. “I have a way back through my device.”

“Look at that, you already know more than me.” Sparkler smiled sheepishly. “Go ahead and try. I’ll try to find you again tomorrow night.”

Corona placed a hand on Sparkler’s head. She got a short rush of emotions – anticipation, mild worry – but she didn’t dig around. With a mental push, Sparkler vanished from the dreamscape.

“Right.” She pinged Raging Sights.

You rang?

“Not you,” Corona muttered, willing the dream-construct out of existence. She sent out the ping again – and pulled herself awake.

You were asleep for about an hour. I have a lot of data.

“I’m going to look at it later,” Corona said. “Give me something to inhibit my awareness so I can actually get some restful sleep now.”

Already determined how to do that. Your sleep will be dreamless.

Corona turned over in bed, yawning. Dreaming through the dreams of others is sure exhausting… …Or maybe I’m just operating on one hour of sleep. Who knows?

She let the sweet embrace of dreamless sleep claim her.

~~~

The next day, Lady Rarity and Corona walked up the steps of Canterlot Castle.

“Was your mother really that bad?” Corona asked out of the blue.

Lady Rarity sighed. “I don’t have as clear of a memory of the dream as you do. But I can assure you she was. She tried to eat me.”

“…Nature sucks.”

“You’ll find no argument from me,” Lady Rarity said. “…So, what’re we doing here rather than Renee’s castle?”

“We’re going to talk to someone who might know a thing or two about dreams. Since we’re here early, she shouldn’t be asleep yet.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Makes sense. I’ll leave you to that – afraid I won’t be of much help, not being able to remember that much.”

“You were one of the better dreamers I found. Most others were barely able to realize anything outside their own dream. Only Flutterfree and Sparkler were better.”

“Ah yes, the mysterious Sparkle Census Sparkler,” Lady Rarity said. “Wonder what she’s doing with her newfound information.”

“Probably studying.”

Lady Rarity chuckled. “Twilights always do.” She stretched her legs. “I’ll be waiting at Renee’s.” She lit her horn and performed a quick teleport.

Corona moved on, walking through the halls of Canterlot Castle to Princess Luna’s private chambers. Corona briefly wondered why she hadn’t changed her title to ‘Queen’ or something similar. She was the singular highest ruler of Equis Vitis, all other Princesses deferring to her judgment save Eve, who was on a completely different level.

Keeping hold onto old naming conventions, perhaps.

She managed to catch Luna before she entered her room. “Hey!”

Luna looked up. “Hm? Ah, Corona, what is it?”

“Have a chair? This might take a while.”

“…Corona, I was just about to get some rest.”

“This has to do with dreams, and possibly the dreamscape.”

Luna turned at her with a curious expression. “You have my attention.”

Corona filled her in on what she had experienced the last two nights – every last bit of the dream-jumping short of describing some of the less pleasant things she had seen.

“Corona, we’re both grown mares, you don’t have to avoid certain dreams. I’ve seen them all.”

Corona flushed. “Can we just agree that I’d rather not discuss them? Not all of us are as ancient and well versed in dreams as you. I’m not inoculated.”

Luna fixed her with an amused smile. “Very well. I shall use my imagination to make inferences.”

“…Yippie,” Corona deadpanned. “Anyway, what do you think?”

“I will look into it come the next dream cycle,” Luna said. “I’ll tap into your mind and go from there. I hope you don’t plan on having any dreams you’d rather I not interrupt.”

Corona twitched. “…And so the mind games begin…”

Luna smirked. “Good luck not thinking about it.”

“You’re relentless.”

Luna nodded. “Thank you. Now, excuse me, I have a bed with my name on it and some real sleep that needs to get done.” She closed the door in Corona’s face.

“Note to self – do not bother Morning Luna’s routine.”

Note taken.

Corona blinked. “You know, sometimes I forget you’re there.”

Raging Sights made no response.

“Oh, hey, I didn’t mean it like that! Come on!”

~~~

Before she went to sleep that night, Corona pored over all the data recorded from the night prior.

“Right… so it really has nothing to do with my empathy ability,” Corona mused. “Not even activated.” She combed through the data on her brain – it was as active as if she had been awake the entire time, but was still experiencing Rapid Eye Movement. If she spent a night like that, she definitely wouldn’t feel rested.

She burnt actual calories expending mental efforts on tasks in the dreams. Luckily only the spell she used to contact Raging Sights seemed to actually activate in the real world, and that was likely because Raging Sights hadn’t existed in the dream when she first tried to use it.

Raging Sights had also picked up transdimensional energy wafting off of Corona while she had been dreaming, but there had been no coordinates to latch onto, nor any indication of where the energy to transcend universes was even coming from.

If Corona were to craft a theory – a mental task she was well acquainted with – she would say there was a source of energy somewhere in a distant universe that combined mental powers with interdimensional travel to create the dream network. …Or it was just a natural part of some universes’ physics, but she doubted that.

“Keep recording me tonight,” Corona told Raging Sights. “I know we’re probably not going to see anything new, but you never know. I’m going to try a sleep spell this time, see if it changes anything.”

Raging Sights just made a beep of confirmation for her.

Corona tucked herself under the covers, getting comfortable – and then forced herself to sleep with her magic.

Her arrival in the dream realm was significantly more jarring than the previous two times, but otherwise nothing felt different. She found herself in Canterlot’s Observatory as a young mare – presumably while she was a student of Celestia’s.

She noted there was no sign of the puffy orange tree. The moment she fully realized this, it appeared in the middle of the observatory even though it didn’t belong.

“Ah, the weirdness of the mind…” she willed herself to have arms and legs, and she shifted back to her waking form with ease. Whatever dream involving her past her mind had come up with was sufficiently derailed at this point, but the observatory remained.

For old time’s sake she put an eye to the viewing lens, gazing into the stars. She saw the Mare in the Moon of Equis Vitis. The shape winked at her.

Corona smiled. Ominous.

“Heya!”

Corona jumped back from the telescope, arms flailing in surprise.

“Oh, is this a nightmare?” Sparkler asked, putting a hoof to her head. “Sorry!”

“No, no, you just startled me,” Corona said, chuckling. “Wasn’t expecting you to find me so fast.”

“I’ve been wandering around for what feels like hours,” Sparkler responded. “That feeling is one-way.”

“I wonder how time works here…” Corona mused, running her fingers across the telescope.

“When you’re dreaming your mind doesn’t have to slow down to process information, it just sees whatever it wants. So I would say time is significantly slowed down, but we still have to deal with processing each other.”

“So we really have no idea.” Corona summoned a stopwatch and pressed start. Judging by how the numbers flipped back and forth, she decided it was useless. “So, see anything interesting today?”

“Same as usual,” Sparkler said. “Strange that this is only day three and already there’s a ‘usual’.”

“Perhaps. I talked with Luna today, she should try to find me soon,” Corona said, poking her head through a doorway. She and Sparkler were suddenly standing in a sea of cheese.

Lady Rarity was swimming in the sticky substance, blissful.

“…I didn’t know she liked cheese this much,” Corona said, somewhat dumbfounded.

“Pff, everyone likes to swim in their favorite foods.”

“HEY RARITY!” Corona shouted. “OVER HERE!”

Lady Rarity’s eyes shot to attention and instantly focused on Corona. “…Dreaming again?”

“Hey, you’re getting better at it!” Corona said with a thumbs up.

Lady Rarity swam over – which was to say she moved her legs and eventually arrived at them through a bizarre sequence of flowing dreamy movement.

Sparkler blinked. “…Did that make sense to you?”

Corona shrugged. “Doesn’t have to.”

Lady Rarity checked her hooves – completely clean. “Huh…” Suddenly there was cheese on them. “…You know, forcing me to realize I’m dreaming has its drawbacks. I start noticing things.”

“Hey, least you have somewhat of a choice in the matter. I’m automatically hyper aware of everything. So’s Sparkler here.”

“Ah… Sparkler,” Lady Rarity said, shaking the unicorn’s hoof. “Apologies if I don’t remember much about you come tomorrow night.”

“It’s no problem. Corona and I are unique, far as we can tell.”

Corona snapped her fingers. “Ah, I want to try something. Mind being a guinea pig Rarity?”

Lady Rarity shrugged. “It’s either that or swim in cheese, and now that I’m aware I don’t particularly feel like acting that childish.”

Corona placed a hand on Lady Rarity and walked backward.

She successfully pulled the spirid back to Canterlot Observatory. “Hah! It worked!”

Lady Rarity took a few steps and fell flat on her face. “…Oooogh…”

“What’s wrong?” Sparkler asked.

“I don’t think… I was ready for that…” Lady Rarity muttered, rubbing her head. “Quite the headache…”

“It tends to happen when one is taken from one dream to another without realizing it.”

Corona, Sparkler, and Lady Rarity turned to see the moon flash brightly, summoning Princess Luna. “It appears as though you really have stumbled across something, Corona Shimmer.”

“No, really?”

Luna ignored the snide remark and extended a hoof to Sparkler. “I am Princess Luna of Equis Vitis. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Uh, thanks!” Sparkler said, a hint of nervousness in her voice.

“Sadly, our time together will be short. I will be traversing hundreds of dreams in this network, and dragging you three along would…”

“Slow you down?” Lady Rarity suggested, still trying to take in the observatory.

“…I was going to be more tactful and say ‘be harmful to your minds’, but they are essentially the same reason.”

“We don’t mind,” Sparkler affirmed. “We can just explore slowly while you take in the entire thing.”

Luna nodded. “Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” She flared her wings – and vanished.

“So…” Lady Rarity began. “What does one do in a dreamscape?”

“Walk to another dream,” Corona said.

Lady Rarity sighed. “Of course… Lead the way and watch my mind turn to complete sludge. Lovely…”

Corona shrugged. “I could always wake you up.”

“No, no, I want to be part of this. I got used to being aware of the dream… mostly. I can get used to traveling dreams. …Probably also ‘mostly’, but it’ll be something.”

Corona nodded. She hoisted herself on top of Lady Rarity and rode her through another door. They walked a bit through a hallway of Canterlot before the dream shifted. They were now outdoors, watching a horse race in the distance. That distance was absurd, but somehow they could make out the details despite being far far away, near a church. The details between them and the race were very foggy.

They saw Valentine and Johnny walking on a street nearby, Johnny on a horse as usual. The rest of the people in the dream blurred around the two, becoming insignificant.

Corona furrowed her brow. “End of the Steel Ball Run race in their universe? I don’t know…”

Lady Rarity held her head. “I can’t even process the horses yet, dear, give me a moment.”

“Which one of them is the dreamer, do you think?” Sparkler asked.

“Could be both,” Corona said. “They definitely aren’t aware… Wait…” She narrowed her eyes – had Johnny just looked at her then quickly looked away?

“Oh, a church. And horses. And… Things between the horses,” Lady Rarity said, still stuck on the scenery of the dream. “Mmmf, why can’t things make sense?”

Sparkler shrugged. “Probably because this isn’t your mind.”

Corona held up a finger, shushing them.

“So, Valentine, where are we taking the Corpse?” Johnny asked.

Valentine raised an eyebrow. “…Didn’t I already tell you this?”

“Must have slipped my mind. Need a bit of a reminder.”

Valentine narrowed his eyes. Then he summoned D4C and punched Johnny across the face. “Reveal yourself, imposter.”

Johnny and his horse melted in front of all their eyes, revealing a woman in a blue dress with a metal cookie pin on her shoulder. She generated a sword out of the dream and sliced – only for Valentine to push her back.

Corona caught her and tapped her head, catching feelings of fear, self-doubt, and anger along with images of a red portal and a truly absurd amount of cookies.

She pushed back psychically, shattering the connection Corona had with her. Then she snapped her fingers and vanished – presumably waking up.

Valentine ground his teeth. “…She got away.”

“Uh… Who was that?” Corona asked.

“An agent of Big Cookie…” Valentine said, narrowing his eyes. “She’s figured out how to accurately disguise her appearance as one that belongs in the dream…”

“Back up back up!” Sparkler said, waving her hooves. “Big Cookie? Disguise appearance? What?”

Lady Rarity stared at the spot the woman had just been in. She rubbed her head. “O…kay.”

Valentine stared at her in surprise. “Not a dreamer? Impressive. Those who have not yet been indoctrinated are rarely able to maintain a cohesive thought pattern outside their own dreams.”

“It’s not easy, please refrain from explaining complicated concepts to me. Or anything, really.”

“Indoctrinated? Dreamers?” Corona asked. “Explain.”

“Ah, you’re new,” Valentine said, putting his hands together. “We’re in a bunch of interconnected dreams across the multiverse. Some of us are dreamers and are fully aware of the situation most of the time – such as you, me, and I presume this Twilight here.”

Sparkler waved sheepishly.

“One thing that I quickly realized is that these shared dreams can serve a rather practical purpose. Information extraction. …A realization which has just proven to be a double edged sword, seeing as I almost fell for it.”

“Wanted to know where the Corpse was, huh?”

“Yes. No, it is not in this church, but they were trying to subliminally get to me.”

“…How can you steal information though?” Sparkler asked. “You have no control over where you’re going!”

“Think of a particular person,” Valentine said. “And then keep thinking about them as you walk. You will eventually come to them.”

Sparkler blinked. “Hey, maybe that’s how I found you!”

Corona nodded. “Seems like it.” She held an image of Eve in her mind. “…Here goes nothing. Coming, Valentine?”

“I will have to wake up shortly to ensure I get a proper amount of rest, but for the moment I shall accompany you.”

He’s got an angle, Corona thought to herself. He always does. Probably thinking how it would be good to have me on his side in this world. So he’ll be helpful until, say, he wants something from me. She returned to thoughts of Eve and walked into a blurred area.

They appeared in a graveyard. Pinkie and Eve stood, looking at Sparky’s grave while rain fell all around them. Unlike most the dreams Corona had visited, this one felt sharp. It was clearly a moment Eve remembered well.

“One transition… impressive,” Valentine observed. “Usually takes more…”

Pinkie’s words interrupted his any response to him. “I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what kind of big secret I have no idea about, do you?”

“No,” Eve lied through her teeth, tears suddenly rolling down her cheeks at high speed. “No, I-I have no idea…”

“At this point an agent could prod her,” Valentine said. “Get her to reveal whatever the secret was. …Curious that she knows something your Pinkie doesn’t…”

Eve turned to look right at Pinkie. “Actually… Actually yes, I do know. I should have told you so long ago Pinkie. So… So long ago. I’m sorry. But, Pinkie, I-”

Corona blasted Eve through the head with a mental pulse, forcing her to wake up, removing her from the dream before she continued speaking. “…Whatever that was, we weren’t meant to hear it,” Corona asserted.

“I… Agree…” Lady Rarity said, shaking her head.

The dream Pinkie turned to look at them – then dissipated, leaving them alone in a graveyard.

“…Dream constructs aren’t supposed to have minds of their own…” Valentine commented.

“It’s Pinkie. Don’t question it,” Corona said.

Valentine shook his head. “But she was a Pinkie generated by Eve’s mind… How…?”

“I said don’t,” Corona said, furrowing her brow. “We need to warn Eve about this. And all the other leaders. It’s dangerous.”

“How would they be able to stop it?” Lady Rarity asked. “I wouldn’t even be aware anything happened if you didn’t drag me along.”

“And we aren’t immune,” Sparkler pointed out. “Valentine almost fell for it.”

Corona narrowed her eyes. “Dreamless sleep spells.”

“That will cause madness eventually,” Sparkler pointed out.

“Short-term solution. We’ll figure something else out eventually.”

Valentine nodded. “I wish you luck in that endeavor. But I didn’t find anything. Luckily there are only a select few who can dream together like this.”

“…You don’t actually know much, do you?” Lady Rarity asked.

Valentine blinked; surprised she was able to form such a coherent question.

“You have no idea what this place is, why it exists, or even how it works, really. I don’t think you can explain how that cookie-woman masqueraded as Johnny.”

Valentine turned to Corona. “Keep this one. She’s got a strong mind.”

“Don’t I know it,” Corona said, rubbing the back of her head.

Valentine closed his eyes and put his hands together. “I must be off to ensure I get actual sleep. It’s a delicate balance ensuring the proper amount of dreaming and true sleep. It is paramount you discover what your body needs every night.”

“Gotcha,” Corona said. “Thanks for the tip.”

And then Valentine was gone.

“Guess we could wake up now,” Corona suggested. “Rarity, I can take you back to your cheese dream instead.”

“Wake me up,” Lady Rarity said. “I’m more likely to remember that way.”

“Good point.” Corona snapped her fingers, sending out a mental wave. Lady Rarity vanished.

“I’m going to try to wake myself up…” Sparkler said, shifting her hooves. “Let’s see… Close my eyes like Valentine… Think awake thoughts… and… and… not sure if i-”

She vanished.

Corona shrugged. She could try to focus herself into an awakened state – or she could just call Raging Sights.

She sat up in her bed and yawned. She pulled up her laptop and sent a quick message to Eve and Luna about what she’d learned – it wasn’t the most coherent of messages, but it would get the point across.

Then she slumped back onto her bed and initiated a dreamless sleep.

~~~

“So what happened last night?” Lady Rarity asked as they walked through Canterlot Castle once again.

“What do you remember?” Corona asked.

“I remember the dream with Eve in it rather clearly… Don’t remember why I said some of the things I did though. Anything before that is a blur. Luna was there, horses were racing in the distance, Valentine said some things, and there was cheese for some reason.”

“Remember Sparkler?”

“Oh! Yes, I do remember her. …Vaguely. You’ll probably have to introduce me again.”

“Probably,” Corona admitted. “…You still want me to drag you out of your dreams?”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Of course. I’m not going to turn my nose up just because I have some memory difficulties. I’ll get better.”

“That’s the spirit!” Corona said, smiling. They walked to Luna’s personal quarters – surprised to see Eve waiting outside the door.

“…There you are,” Eve said, trotting over to them.

“What’s up?” Corona asked, noting Eve’s worried features.

“Luna’s in a coma,” Eve answered, grimacing as the words left her mouth. “…You should come in.”

Corona and Lady Rarity walked into Luna’s bedroom, stunned expressions on their faces. They saw Luna in her bed, sleeping normally – but not happily. Her expression was twisted with stress and sweat was pouring down the sides of her face. She was hooked up to an IV filling her with magical nutrients.

“Nobody has any idea what it is,” Eve said. “…Do you?”

“No…” Corona said, furrowing her brow. “The dreams we’ve been in haven’t shown any way to actually affect someone in the real world… It’s all mental…”

“Do you know what she was doing?”

Corona shook her head. “She met up with us for only a short while. She went and started exploring on her own, to go through hundreds of dreams to learn more.”

“She found something she wasn’t supposed to,” Lady Rarity concluded. “We’re just small-time dreamwalkers – or whatever you call us. She knew what she was doing. And she found something.”

“But what would have found her?” Corona asked. “She’s a master of dreams. What could have even done this to her?”

“I don’t know,” Eve said. “I do know that I want you to find out.”

Corona dissipated one of her gloves. “Right.” She placed her fingers to Luna’s head, feeling around inside her consciousness for anything that could possibly be useful.

What she got was a jolt of psychic power directly to her mind. “AUGH!” She blurted, falling backward. Lady Rarity caught her in her magic.

“What happened?!” Eve asked.

“I… I saw green. Lines of green, flying past a black background… And then I felt my mind get assaulted directly.” She shook her head. “She’s still dreaming. Whatever has her is directly connected through her mind. I… can’t even begin to explain how, but it is.”

“…Any idea how to fix it?”

“Go into the connected dreams and make whatever’s doing this wake up?” Corona suggested. “That’s all I got.”

“…Can you do that now?”

“I think so?” Corona said, unsure. “I’d like to know a little more before I go charging in alone…”

“You don’t have to be alone,” Eve said. “We can get another Luna to help you. The Mistress is probably available for an emergency like this.”

“I’ll call Renee,” Lady Rarity said, pulling out her phone. “Looks like today is going to be a dream adventure day…”

“I guess I’ll use my room,” Corona said. “…I do have royal chambers, right?”

Eve blinked. “You… should? I wouldn’t expect it to be anything special if it does exist.”

“In that case, I’ll just have to decorate it while we wait for the Mistress.” She cracked her knuckles.

As she walked off to her chambers, Eve put a hoof on her shoulder. “…Thank you,” Eve whispered into her ear.

Corona nodded ever so slightly and continued on. There was no doubt in her mind what Eve was thanking her for.

~~~

Corona’s chambers contained a single bed fit for an empress. Otherwise the room was empty and white.

“Well this simply won’t do,” Lady Rarity had said, tapping into her nature as a Rarity that she so rarely got to in her life as a spirid – that of a mare with an eye for the finer things in life. She was no fashionista, nor master designer, but she had the natural understanding of such things.

Using Corona’s magic, they were able to make quick work of the blank room. The dominating white color was kept, to match Corona’s own color scheme. Red was dominant with yellow highlights, unlike Corona’s own orange form with red hair. Impressions of her cutie mark were placed liberally around the room. Corona leaped onto the bed, laying down on it. “…I’m going to spend a lot of time in this bed, aren’t I?”

“I would expect so,” Lady Rarity said, examining a corner in the room. “The window will give us nice lighting. Good spot for a bookshelf.”

Corona tapped into Raging Sights and constructed a white, empty bookshelf. “How’s that?”

“A bit generic, but I see no issues with it.”

“Oh, you’ll need a bed as well.”

“Can I make a request?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Sure thing, we’re in this together.”

“Hammock.”

“…Ah, right, because spider webs.”

Lady Rarity smiled sheepishly. “That is the reason, yes. Naturally inclined to find the feeling of hanging comfortable. You know the difficulty I’ve had sleeping with these eight legs. No amount of training with three in a bed prepares you for the entire onslaught.”

Corona created a simple hammock hanging from the ceiling in a corner opposite her bed. “You know, you’ve loosened up a lot since we met.”

“Life got better,” Lady Rarity said. “When this all started I was a mare stuck in an eternal fight, barely held together by my code of honor.” She skittered up the wall and climbed into her bed, gaining a vantage point of the entire room. “Now I’m completely healthy – thanks to you – and have a larger sense of purpose in life.” She looked in the distance. “…I put so much of my life into helping the Arcei. They weren’t worth it.”

“You did a lot of good, Rarity.”

“I know. It’s not something I’m bothered by, though I can’t for the life of me tell you why. It should eat away at me that I threw so much of my life away to help a people that were nothing but problems from the moment I met them to their ‘end’. But I’m perfectly fine with it.”

“Sometimes we’re just happy and don’t know why,” Corona said, stretching her arms. “It’s a good thing.”

Lady Rarity nodded, using her horn to rearrange a few knick-knacks that they had spread across the room. Her bird’s-eye view was really helping her understand the composition better. “I think we’re ready for the Mistress now.”

“Then I have excellent timing,” the Mistress said, striding into the room. “Is this comfortable enough?”

“I can still get us in with the use of sleep spells,” Corona said. “Just stay affixed to me, if you can.”

“I am Luna,” the Mistress said with a smirk. “What version of her would I be if I didn’t know the conjoined dream spell?”

“Good point.” Corona flopped onto the bed. “Any others going to be joining us?”

“Other Lunas have been made aware of the situation,” the Mistress said. “Tonight we shall gather together and explore on our own. I’m here to learn a bit from you first about this strange collective dreaming place.”

“Step one: make me fall asleep.”

The Mistress’ horn flashed, forcing Corona to pass out – and come to within the dream realm. This time she was in a generic office building where her personal gravity was reversed.

I should actually reverse my personal gravity some time, this is pretty cool.

With a flash of white, Lady Rarity and the Mistress showed up behind her.

“This is certainly clearer,” Lady Rarity said, looking around with open eyes. “We should bring the Mistress more often.”

“Allowing her to ride your consciousness?” Corona asked.

“Something like that,” the Mistress acknowledged. “In truth, it’s a more nuanced collection of shared dreams and the spells I use to walk local dream realms, but with a few more defensive measures than usual.”

Lady Rarity summoned her hammer. “This is so much easier…”

Corona willed a bow to appear in her hands. Then she transformed it into a sword. “Shame my more powerful spells can’t be willed to exist. They just disrupt the world around us.”

Mistress Luna furrowed her brow. “I do wonder what the exact mechanics behind physical-to-dream translation are in this mixed dream realm. Perhaps i-

Sparkler opened a door and fell to the ceiling. “Augh! Who flipped gravity around!?”

“Sorry,” Corona said. “Apparently I was creative today.”

“…Sparkler, yes?” the Mistress asked. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Didn’t I - oh, different Luna.” Sparkler rubbed the back of her head. “Sorry.”

“It is of no consequence, Sparkler.”

“Our Luna’s been forced into a coma,” Corona explained. “We think she found something she wasn’t supposed to.”

“That’s horrible!” Sparkler blurted. “How can I help?”

“I’m going to try to find her right now,” Corona said, dusting off her hands. “Everyone, think of Luna. …Not the one standing next to us, if you can.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Got it.”

“You seem better,” Sparkler observed.

“I’m cheating.”

“Huh. Cool.”

Corona took a step, walking out a window…

…Into a world with a dark sky dominated by a green moon and a pink moon.

“…Huh?” Corona said, glancing around. “…This doesn’t seem like the right place…”

“Luna’s captor’s dream, maybe?” Lady Rarity suggested.

“Or we just need a few more steps,” Sparkler suggested.

“Or we could ask her,” the Mistress said, pointing to a construction none of them had noticed prior to that moment – a largely gray stack of strange cubes and blocks with rust-red tinted windows. Standing on top of the house was a young version of Aradia Megido, without the red robes or wings. She had her hands held high, pointed at the two moons – and laughed.

Corona started moving to her – but another Aradia appeared in her way, this one with the red robes and wings. “Ah, sorry, but you can’t mess with her. She’s having one of our rare moments of not being aware we’re dreaming.”

Corona glanced from Aradia to the other Aradia. “…How…?”

“I’m future-Aradia, asleep in Equis Vitis. That’s past-Aradia, asleep in the Hub,” Aradia explained, flapping her wings. “If you’re wondering, no, I don’t have the ‘dreamwalker’ ability you have, I just have…” She thought for a moment, looking for the right word. “…‘experience’ with complex dreamscapes.” She summoned a chair and sat in it, smiling. “I would ask what brings you here, but I already know. Luna’s in a coma.”

“Oh, hey! Can you go back in time and figure out what happened?” Corona asked.

“This place is a multiversal construct, which royally messes with causality,” Aradia explained. “You know how most universes don’t exist on the same timeline, and how changing something in one doesn’t do anything to the other? Well, this place is made of multiple dreamscapes from multiple universes meshing. It outright prevents me from executing time travel within the dream, and going back and forward elsewhere will have no effect on the local ‘timestream’. …As much as this place can be said to have a time stream.”

Lady Rarity put a hoof to her head. “I’m getting the headache again.”

“Then let me summarize. No, I can’t.” Aradia smiled sadly. “Sorry. I could offer advice, but it’d probably be stuff you’ve heard already. If you weren’t a dreamwalker, I could tell you how to shift through dreams, but that’s not exactly the easiest of things to do.”

“It’d take too long to teach me?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Definitely. It’s also much less accurate than what Corona does. I have to consolidate multiple time traveling selves to make it work.”

“Wait, if your time traveling future self is here, while your past self is there, doesn’t that mean you can change parts of the dream…?” Corona asked.

Aradia put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Oh why in… Corona, you have a PhD and have worked with temporal physics on a conceptual level. Make an educated guess on how long it would take me to explain the inner machinations of innumerable multiversal timelines intertwining within a shared dreamscape.”

“Right, got it, cut my losses while I’m ahead and just accept you on your word.”

“Good girl,” Aradia said, smiling her signature creepy smile. “Sorry for keeping you – there’s business you need to get to.”

“Hey, do you know anything about what might have Luna?” Corona asked.

Aradia shrugged. “Not really. If I’m being honest I didn’t realize there was even a shared mindscape spreading across the multiverse until recently. Relatively speaking.”

“It must be confusing to be you,” Sparkler observed.

“You get used to it,” Aradia said, fiddling with the Omnitrix on her wrist. “Anyway, Corona should just be able to walk a random direction and shift to another dream. Hope you find Luna.”

Corona smiled. “And hope you… find some consistency in your life.”

“But that’d be boring!”

Corona and Sparkler laughed at this. “See you, Aradia.”

Aradia pressed the Omnitrix down and transformed into a dolphin-like creature. She floated into the air and swam away.

“…Odd duck,” the Mistress commented. “I don’t know how she remains so calm with so many things running through her head at all times.”

Corona shrugged. “It’s the life she’s made for herself. I admire her for it.”

“I’m not saying I don’t, I’m just saying it’d be too much for most people.”

Corona moved on, dragging then to the next dream. “That’s why she’s doing it and not anybody else.”

Lady Rarity blinked. “…Are we in a haunted house made entirely of chocolate chip cookies!?”

“Yes,” the other three responded, voices level.

“…What kinds of things was I missing before!?”

“Ocean of cheese,” Corona commented.

Lady Rarity didn’t have a response for this.

They saw a man run out of the house, running as if his life were in danger. He wore a chocolate brown suit, had a short brown beard, and wore two watches.

Behind him stood Death. Specifically, the Death known to be in the employ of the United States of the Multiverse. He walked leisurely toward the man, somehow keeping up with his much faster pace.

“I’m going to take a wild guess and say Death is prodding that man for information,” Sparkler said.

Corona grunted. “Great. Guess we’ll watch and let a man’s personal secrets be revealed against his will.”

“Glad to see you’re learning,” Lady Rarity said.

“If Death starts being cruel I’m not going to be able to help myself. I will punch that eternal smile of his ri- hold on, what’s that?”

Death had pulled a thing out of his robes, holding it in his hands. Corona knew there was something there, but she couldn’t actively see it, but rather feel its physical presence even from this distance.

“What in Celestia’s name…?” Sparkler asked, raising an eyebrow.

“What is it?” Lady Rarity asked, the Mistress sharing her confused look.

“Death’s hand,” Corona said, taking a few steps forward. “There’s something in there.”

The Mistress narrowed her eyes. “I am able to sense something, but it isn’t of substance.”

“I don’t see anything,” Lady Rarity added.

Corona and Sparkler started walking toward Death. Corona pointed at Death. “Hey! Buddy! Mind telling us what that is?”

Death was surprised enough by their presence to fumble with the thing and drop it to the ground. Time seemed to slow as it did so…

~~~

Corona became aware that she was dancing. She was in an elaborate form-fitting red gown that glinted in the light. The dance hall seemed to go on in every direction forever – she could see walls, but they were out of focus, and the sea of dancers between her and them was impossible.

She did a twist maneuver by instinct, noticing that she was dancing with someone – a purple woman in a black dress.

“…Sparky.”

“Sparkler, actually,” Sparkler said, looking around curiously as she danced with Corona. “So, uh, guess we’re dancing.”

“Yep.”

“Thing is, I don’t know how to dance,” Sparkler admitted. “Yet here I am. Dancing. Pretty well as far as I can tell.”

Corona twirled her around. “I’m not even thinking about it. I just am it.”

“I’m going to make another wild guess here. We’re in someone else’s dream and playing the part of dancers.”

“Seems like a safe bet,” Corona said, glancing over her shoulder, trying to locate anyone who wasn’t just another generic dancer. “The question is how we got here.”

“Death’s thing?”

“Well, yeah, but what did it do? Make us lose some memory? Shift the dream around us? Or what?” She narrowed her eyes. “There’s got to be some order to this dream somewhere…”

“I’m still stuck on the fact that I have arms and legs. Utterly bizarre.”

Corona smirked. “You would be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just an observation on Twilights in general.” She twirled Sparkler to the side and pointed with her free hand. “There.”

Death wasn’t where she was pointing – but the man in the suit was. Except he wasn’t in the suit, he was in simple, clean white clothing decidedly less fancy than the articles anyone else was wearing. He was pushing a rolling tray piled high with quality freshly-baked cookies. He put on a smile and started handing the cookies out.

The people around him didn’t shoot him a second glance – they just grabbed a cookie and returned to dancing. Over time, the man’s big smile fell as no one recognized what he had done.

Corona felt sad for him. “Come on,” she said, breaking the dancing routine. Sparkler instantly discovered that she couldn’t walk on two legs properly so she hung onto Corona’s arm for dear life.

Corona picked up a cookie – peanut butter something or other – and took a bite. “Excellent work.”

The man looked up at her in mild confusion. “…You aren’t the one…”

Corona blinked. “I’m not?”

“No… No, where’s Lisa…” He turned away, disappointment replaced with fear. “What if I never meet her today? I’ll give up everything…”

“Who’s Lisa?”

“My wife… The only one who supported me in these early days…”

Wow, it really is easy to do this. I’m not going to prod further though. “I hope she shows up then.” She took another cookie – they really did taste amazing – and walked back into the dancing crowd.

Sparkler fell over.

“Just turn into a unicorn,” Corona commented.

“Riiight,” Sparkler said, shaking her head. She became a unicorn while on the ground. The man didn’t see her, and the rest of the crowd didn’t care.

Corona summoned her horn, ears, and wings, flapping the feathery appendages. The act was calming to her, somehow. “Right… So this is his dream. The question is now ‘where is Death’?”

RIGHT HERE.

Corona twirled around – Death was behind them. Not all that surprising, but his presence was still unnerving.

“Ah, heeey there, care to explain what’s going on?”

YOU’RE INTERFERING WITH A TOP SECRET USM OPERATION.

“How were we supposed to know that?” Sparkler asked.

Corona and Death glanced at her. Death would have raised an incredulous eyebrow had he been able to do so.

“…Okay, fine, it was kinda obvious. But you had a… a thing! We didn’t know what it was going to do!”

IT WAS A DREEPER. A SPHERE OF CONDENSED MENTAL IMAGES I FORMED PERSONALLY, DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY TO CREATE THIS DREAM HERE. He pointed at the man. THAT IS BIG COOKIE, CEO OF A HIGHLY CORRUPT COMPANY WHICH VALENTINE HAS DEVOTED HIS EFFORTS TO EXPOSING AND TAKING DOWN.

“And we’re just supposed to take your word on that?” Corona asked.

YOU ENCOUNTERED HIS DAUGHTER, ARIA. SHE USED HER PSYCHIC ABILITIES ON VALENTINE, AS YOU SAW. THIS IS OUR RETALIATION. WE ARE PERFECTLY JUSTIFIED IN DOING SO.

“Oh,” Corona said. “Uh… Any way I can help?”

YOU COULD HAVE JUST KEPT DANCING AND LET THE DREAM CONTINUE ON. BUT YOU INTERFERED. THE SEED OF DOUBT HAS BEEN PLANTED IN HIS MIND. WHEN THE MEMORY DOES DIVERT FROM THE WAY IT WAS INTENDED, HE WILL BE READY. AT THE VERY LEAST, IT WILL MAKE HIM HESITATE, AND THAT MAY BE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US LEARNING HIS SECRETS AND NOT.

“…Still don’t like the stealing of people’s secrets through dreams,” Corona muttered.

WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST WE DO IN RESPONSE TO THEIR ADVANCES? NONE OF THIS WOULD HOLD UP IN ANY COURT AT THE CURRENT TIME, AND WE LACK FOOLPROOF DEFENSES AGAINST THE THEFT OF IDEAS.

Corona nodded slowly. “Fine. I won’t stop you. I wasn’t going to stop you in the first place, to be clear, but then I saw your thing.”

IF YOU HAD NOT SENSED ONE BEFORE IT WOULD BE QUITE JARRING, Death admitted. DO REIN YOURSELF IN NEXT TIME.

“Sure thing.”

Death pointed at Big Cookie. He was now talking to his wife and laughing – but Corona could tell his smile was strained by doubt and confusion. This wasn’t going quite how he remembered it, even if his access to the memory was clouded due to it being his dream.

And then the dream cookie monsters appeared, popping out of every dancer, taking the simple appearance of cookies with teeth.

“N-no!” Big Cookie shouted, holding onto his wife. “It’s not time! And it’s wrong!”

“What’s wrong dear?”

“They… They look… I…” he put a hand to his forehead. “I don’t understand…”

“Cookie, you can tell me.”

Big Cookie blinked. “Why are you so calm…?”

“I have to be, for you.”

“No… No no no… Nononononono… All wrong…”

AND WE HAVE A FAILURE, Death said, turning away as the cookies ate him. I APOLOGISE.

“Apologise for what?” Sparkler asked.

Death cut both of them in half with his scythe.

~~~

Corona woke up next to the cookie haunted house, Mistress Luna and Lady Rarity standing over her.

“How in the…”

“Nested dream,” the Mistress reported. “I had theorized such a thing were possible, but never seen it accomplished before.”

“Ugh… Well at least we learned dying is harmless for sure…” Corona stood up, Sparkler beside her. “Why weren’t you two in it?”

“She protected me,” Lady Rarity said. “We didn’t know what it was, at the time.”

“Still not sure,” the Mistress said, glancing at the stirring forms of Big Cookie and Death.

“Death called it a dreeper, in there,” Sparkler said.

Lady Rarity raised an eyebrow. “‘Dream deeper’? Really?”

“…I didn’t notice that,” Corona said, shaking her head. “How does sleep within a dream even work?”

“Believe you’re sleeping. Done,” the Mistress answered.

“That answer’s too simple.”

“It’s all you’re going to get.”

Sparkler twitched at information being withheld from her.

“Wonder if you can keep dreaming deeper,” Lady Rarity mused. “Use one of those things in a layered dream to create another one…”

“That would get really confusing really fast,” Corona muttered, putting a hand to the bridge of her nose.

Big Cookie and Death finally awoke completely. Big Cookie took one look at Death and started running again.

I WONDER IF HE FIGURED OUT WHAT I WAS ATTEMPTING, Death pondered.

“Hey, wait a minute, do you even sleep?” Sparkler asked.

I AM A BEING WITH AN IMMENSE MIND. I CAN FORCE MYSELF INTO A DREAM STATE SHOULD I EVER WISH TO DO SO.

“Final question,” Corona said, raising a hand. “How can I make one of those dreepers?”

NATIONAL SECRET. THAT SAID; IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH FOCUS YOU SHOULD JUST BE ABLE TO FIGURE IT OUT. He then willed himself awake – vanishing.

Corona blinked. “Hrm… Well I’ve already willed things into existence and willed my appearance to change, guess I might as well try this.” She placed her hands about an inch from each other, as if preparing to clap them. She focused on a mental image – a sea of cheese – and tried to force the mental idea into her hands.

All she got was a cheese explosion all over her face.

“You know, I wonder if he was just messing with me,” Corona muttered, wiping the cheese off her eyes.

“I suppose this little diversion is over,” Lady Rarity said, stretching her legs. “Still no closer to finding Luna, or anything that could trap her in a coma.”

“This trip has still been very illuminating,” the Mistress said. “The other Lunas and I will be able to work as an effective team tonight.”

“We still have time to keep looking, right?” Sparkler asked.

The Mistress used a dream spell to check the time. “Definitely. The second-layer dream appears to have eaten much of our external timeframe, but we still have hours.”

“In that case, onward!” Corona declared, taking a few steps in a random direction, shifting the dream from a haunted house to a bedroom.

Lady Rarity blinked. “Well. I did not expect to be getting an eyeful today.”

“I could make it worse, if you like,” the dreamer - Mattie the Rarity - said.

“MOVING ON!” Sparkler declared, pushing Corona through a door in desperation.

Corona didn’t need to be told twice – she dragged them all out of the dream none of them wanted to be in into a dream of complete darkness.

“Is there even a floor here?” Lady Rarity asked, tapping the ground. “I don’t feel anything.”

“We’re all level,” the Mistress observed. “Clearly, there exists a plane on which we are affixed.”

“Right. ‘Clearly’. Crystal,” Sparkler muttered. “Think she’s here?”

“Somehow I doubt it,” Corona said, pointing at Rainbow Dash floating in the darkness.

“Oh, hey girls!” Rainbow Dash galled. “Did you get sacrificed to the sun god too?” She glanced at Corona. “Actually are you the sun god? That’s sweet!”

“…Rainbow Dash what kind of messed up dreams do you have?” Corona asked, eyebrow raised.

“Oh, dream?” Rainbow Dash blinked. “…I guess that makes sense. Eve would never play sacrifice with me. On account of, y’know, the sacrifice.”

Corona blinked. “…Think I should touch her?”

“We don’t need you coming down with a sudden desire to be sacrificed to yourself, even if it is temporary,” Lady Rarity responded.

Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow. “Oh come on, it’s cool! Well, actually, it feels like raging hellfire, but y’know.”

Corona shook her head. “I don’t get this.”

“It’s simple really,” the Mistress said. “Her accepting willingness is part of her nightmare. The moment she wakes up she’ll be terrified less about the actual sacrifice and more about her willingness to go through with it.”

“W-what?” Rainbow Dash said.

At this point some primordial god of death made of the bones of deceased titans appeared in the blackness and bit Rainbow Dash in half. There was enough time for blood to splatter before she vanished from the dream.

“Time to leave!” Corona said, preparing to drag them all away – but then she saw something in the dark distance. A small white unicorn with red eyes…

“…Thrackerzod…?” Corona wondered aloud. The moment she said it, Thrackerzod vanished – but it seemed as if she moved rather than dissipated by waking up. Corona focused on Thrackerzod.

“INCOMING!” Lady Rarity shouted, summoning her armor and hammer. She threw it at the bone behemoth, finding the creature of pure nightmares to be completely immune to blunt force trauma. “…Surprise, that.”

It reached out to her, teeth ready to snap her in half like it had Rainbow Dash.

And then Corona took them to another dream, this one belonging to Starbeat. She stood on the side of an assembly line, staring closely at various people who slid by her eyes. Any time a beeper sounded, she would brutally vaporize whoever was standing in front of her with her magic.

“…Yeesh,” Sparkler observed.

“Sometimes we carry inner grudges,” the Mistress said. “She would have more than most. To a concept, rather than people. It may just be her brain’s way of moving on.”

Corona spotted Thrackerzod walking through the far end of the factory. “There. Hey Thrackerzod!”

Thrackerzod didn’t turn around – she entered a door and shifted dreams again.

“Dream chase!” Sparkler shouted. “Go!”

The four of them ran after Thrackerzod, Corona focusing on Thrackerzod the entire time. They shifted dreams to a land where everything was tinted blue, following the unicorn through a cave into a dream where everybody was lying, dead, under the hooves of Alushy.

Thrackerzod, while not at any point turning to look at them, had started running from them.

“You’re not getting away that easy!” Corona blurted, summoning fireballs in her hands and flinging them. The dream constructs vanished upon nearing Thrackerzod. “…No fair!”

They jumped into another dream where Flutterfree was sitting on a tall mountain top, the breeze blowing through her mane.

She sighed as they noisily ran past her. “…Again, Corona?”

“Sorry! Don’t have much control over this!” She rolled through another dream, dragging her group into a thorny forest.

Thrackerzod had stopped moving. “You really shouldn’t have followed me.”

“Hey, I just wanted a talk, Thrackerzod. Nothing nefarious.” Corona walked up to her. “Why were you running?”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “To get away from you. That’s how chases work.”

“But why?”

A monster jumped out of the forest, going for Corona’s head. It was a vaguely humanoid creature with an overall hunched appearance. It had no face, instead its head peeled open with five petals riddled with teeth, clearly intended to scoop Corona into its stomach in as violent a manner as possible.

Corona moved quickly – bringing her hand from the side and touching the creature in the side of its head, through a gap in the toothy flaps of flesh. She got an emotional rush of rage, hunger, and bloodlust before she mentally forced the thing to wake up.

Her wings lit on fire and her eyes flashed a bright color. “Hoooooo…” she let out a breath of air, trying to keep the sudden primal instinct from overcoming her. “That thing… Was a dreamer.”

“Things,” Thrackerzod said, dodging an attack from another one, blasting it back with her own psychic blast, unable to wake it up.

“W-what are they?” Sparkler asked, raising a magic shield around them as five more of the things appeared. The things just willed the shield to dissipate, Sparky’s mind not enough to keep it up against their wills.

“Demogorgons,” Thrackerzod said. “Welcome to the nastier part of T-”

A demogorgon chowed down on her – forcing her out of the dream.

“Greaaaaat…” Corona muttered, forcing another demogorgon out of the dream. “How many?”

“Twelve,” Lady Rarity responded, smashing one hard enough with her hammer to induce ‘death’, and therefore a disappearance. “Eleven.”

“Seventeen,” the Mistress corrected. “I sense others in the sidelines. They have us surrounded.”

“I vote for forcing ourselves awake rather than suffering gruesome deaths,” Sparkler suggested.

“Agreed,” Lady Rarity said, the armor on one of her legs vanishing, a gash appearing on the bare fur. “I am not of the mind we are experienced enough in dream combat to win here…”

Corona nodded. “Got it.” She focused with her mind, forcing the other three to wake up easily.

Then she nuked the dreamscape with an attempt at a super-destructive spell, just to see what would happen. The world around them dissipated into a blur, but the demogorgons willed themselves not to vanish, able to dream up islands of stability for themselves.

Corona decided now was a good time to wake up. She closed her eyes…

…and woke up in the bedroom, Lady Rarity looking over her. “Oh, good, I was worried they put you in a coma or something.”

“I only stayed about a second longer than the rest of you,” Corona said, rubbing her head.

“Yes, well, you were sleep for a full minute after I’d woken up,” Lady Rarity said.

“The sheer number of minds involved in the exchange must have dragged out the real time considerably,” the Mistress reasoned. “We must not take our time for granted.”

Corona stretched and moved to an upright position. “I’m going to see Thrackerzod. She’ll have the answers.”

Mistress Luna nodded. “Of course. I shall prepare the other Lunas to delve into this realm of dreams. We will want to use more advanced and seemingly nonsensical magics to analyze this new realm of dreams, so it is best if you didn’t tag along after introducing us to the initial dream.”

“Sure thing,” Corona said. “I’ll be small-time investigator or something.”

The Mistress smiled. “Glad you don’t feel indignant about not being on par with us.”

“Hey, I’m not the dream expert here, I just stumbled onto something. Not surprised at all.” She stood up and stretched her legs. “Ready Rarity?”

“Let me wake up first, okay? I was just asleep, you know.”

“And didn’t get any actual rest since we were all heightened the entire time.”

“…That just makes me more tired.” She yawned. “Even though it’s still the middle of the day. Great Runes, my internal clock has been thrown off by this.”

“It is not an easy schedule to adjust oneself to,” the Mistress admitted. “I am not certain how Princess Luna manages to get in personal sleep and dream realm sleep in while still maintaining relationships. It’s a lot of downtime.”

Corona shrugged. “She’s just awesome that way. …I am curious though, since she’s in a coma, who’s running Equestria right now?”

“Eve said Paradigm has taken over temporarily while Luna takes a ‘much needed rest’.”

“So nobody knows about the coma yet.”

“Not unless it has been stolen from our dreams.”

“Comforting thought, that,” Lady Rarity noted.

Corona shrugged. “We’ll just have to deal with it for now. Luckily it’s not a huge secret. If a few people learn about it, I don’t see much of a problem unless she stays in the coma more than a few days.”

“Never underestimate the capacity of the population for panic,” the Mistress warned.

“Fair enough.” Corona walked out the bedroom door. “Let’s roll.”

~~~

Corona rode Lady Rarity into the League of Sweetie Belles.

“You know, I just thought of something,” Corona said, hand to her chin. “Do you have a Sweetie Belle?”

“Probably,” Lady Rarity said. “My mother likely would have had another child. And another. And another. It is how spirids work, though I got the impression my mother’s interest in non-spirids was something of an exception. Either that or most non-pure spirids are just killed the moment they are born. …Yes, we are born, not hatched. We are technically mammals.”

“Which is really weird to think about, no matter how many times you mention it. I still think ‘bug’ rather than ‘horse’.”

Lady Rarity rolled her eyes. “Of course. Anyway…”

“Does anyone know where Thrackerzod is!?” Corona shouted to the dozens of Sweetie Belles standing in the main hall.

A non-Sweetie responded. “I do,” Minna said, riding over on the back not of a Sweetie, but of Cadence’s youngest son, Frigid. He seemed to be struggling to keep his legs steady, but he had the dumbest smile on his face so Corona doubted he thought carrying Minna was a chore.

“Oh, where?” Corona asked, looking down at Minna with a warm smile.

“She was at the second floor, but she’s about done with her daily ritual so she should be down right about… now.” Minna pointed at Thrackerzod appearing in the middle of the room.

“Hey! Thrackerzod!” Corona shouted at her, waving. “Come over here!”

Thrackerzod did, her usual uninterested expression plastered on her face. “What is it?”

“You ran away from me in a dream a few hours ago.”

Thrackerzod blinked, cocking her head in surprise. “…I did?”

“Yes. You did,” Corona said. “There were a whole lot of ‘demogorgon’ things attacking us in the end? You specifically ran through several dreams?”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like you had a productive nap. I don’t remember many dreams that don’t come directly from above me, so excuse me if I’m unable to recall precisely what happened between us. …If such a thing were possible.”

Corona blinked. “Uh… You sure you don’t remember?”

“Yes. Want to touch my mind to check?”

“Uh, no thanks.” Touching eldritch minds is just a bad idea in general.

“In that case, I don’t think I can be any help to you.” Thrackerzod shrugged and walked away. “Good luck.”

Corona stared at Thrackerzod’s retreating form, blinking. “…Well that wasn’t very helpful.”

“I could have sworn she would be like you,” Lady Rarity said.

“Same…”

“She is,” Minna said absent-mindedly. “She’s just lying.”

Corona stared at her. “…What?”

“She’s lying. That’s what I said. Isn’t that what I said, Frigid?”

“Yes,” the colt confirmed.

“See? Lying. What’s so complicated about that?”

“Why would she do that though!?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Cause she has to,” Minna said, shrugging.

Corona’s eyes widened. “That’s right. If she gets orders that come from higher up, they overwrite her. If, say, Hastur instructed her to not tell anyone what was happening in the dream realm, she would not only have to obey, she’d think it was the right thing to do.”

Lady Rarity facehooved. “And trying to appeal to her would be pointless since she’s utterly convicted in what she’s doing. Remind me again why we put up with the Embodiment?”

“Because we can’t exert political pressure on them and they rarely interfere with us,” Corona said. “Even Thrackerzod’s usually given her freedom. They tend to not have any use for her… I guess these dreams are an exception.”

“But if the Embodiment is interested in these dreams…” Lady Rarity blinked. “…This may be bigger than we thought.”

“Tip of the iceberg,” Minna said.

Corona turned to her. “What?”

“You heard me.” She stretched her arms. “Come on Frigid, I’m bored. Let’s go to the park or something.”

“Okay!” Frigid said, galloping off. Minna’s weight soon forced him to stop the gallop and revert to a steady trot.

Corona scratched the back of her head. “…She’s an interesting kid.”

“So, what now?” Lady Rarity asked.

“We find Thrackerzod in the dream world where she won’t just be able to dismiss us, that’s what. To the royal chambers!”

~~~

“I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here tonight,” Corona said, striking a pose in front of her bed.

Olivia took a bedroll out of her backpack and laid it on the ground. “Nope, I know exactly what we’re doing today. You’re taking us into a dream realm to track down Thrackerzod and introduce me to the greatest source of secret information I can’t believe I wasn’t aware of.”

Lady Rarity snickered. “Awww, there goes your epic speech.”

“Queen of derailing,” Corona muttered. “Yeah, that’s right. That’s all right. We’ll meet up with the Lunas at the start so we can get them started, but otherwise we’ll be on our own. …Actually, Sparkler will probably find us. She seems to live in there.”

“If I lived in the stuffy Sparkle Census I’d spend all my time in a dream world,” Olivia commented. “Actually, I’d spend all my time in a dream world regardless.”

“Figures,” Corona said, climbing into the bed. “And a one and a two and a-” She put them all to sleep.

They appeared in Olivia’s Puddlejumper – the way it looked back when she was still Sombra. Corona remembered it well – there had been more than a few adventures that took place in this humble little ship. It filled her with nostalgia.

Lady Rarity became aware of the dream on her own. “Yeah. I’ve never been in here before.”

Corona smiled at her. “Hey, welcome to lucidity!”

“Everything’s blurry again,” Lady Rarity complained. “Not as bad of a headache as before – but still not great. I miss the Mistress’ stability already…”

Corona walked up to the main seat of the Puddlejumper, tapping Olivia on the shoulder. “Hey, Olivia?”

Olivia tensed up, whirling round – back in her original Sombra appearance. “Who are you and how do you know my name?”

“Olivia, you’re dreaming.”

“I… What?”

“Think for a moment about how you got here… Look at my wings, my horn…”

Olivia nodded slowly, shifting back into her natural appearance. “Oh… Right…” She rubbed her head. “How…?”

“We went to sleep together. The three of us. This is a joined dream.”

“Right…”

“We’re going to look for Thrackerzod…?”

“Uh… Huh…”

“Oh wow, she’s bad,” Lady Rarity blurted.

“I’m dragging her along anyway,” Corona asserted.

“That should be amusing,” Sparkler said.

“Oh, hey, you made it.”

Sparkler saluted. “Magical purple unicorn, at your service!”

Olivia tapped Sparkler’s horn. “…Pointy.”

“Was I ever this bad?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Not even close,” Corona answered. “I guess this is what normal people are like here.”

Suddenly seven different Lunas appeared in the Puddlejumper. There was not enough room for all of them, but everyone fit anyway.

Olivia pointed at them. “Bu… Who the why the what?”

The Mistress raised an eyebrow. “You should choose more aware company, Corona.”

Corona shrugged. “I figured the master hacker would be able to handle the influx of information.”

“The technical intelligence of someone has almost nothing to do with their dream awareness,” the Mistress reported. “Regardless, I have affixed us to the larger dreamscape now. We leave you to your investigations.”

“SAAAAAAAAND!” Ultra Fast Luna blurted.

The Mistress sighed. “Right…” She lit her horn – and they begun their survey of every dream in existence they could get their hooves on, leaving Corona’s little group to do their own investigating.

“All right, to Thrackerzod!” Corona declared, taking a step.

They appeared on a beach, the ocean lapping up on the shores in front of them.

Olivia couldn’t process. “…Blue…” she said.

Sparkler tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself.

Lady Rarity waved a hoof in front of Olivia’s eyes, not receiving a response. “Wow.”

Corona tapped into Olivia’s surface emotions, getting a very foggy sense of confusion. Even her emotions weren’t fully formed. “Yeesh, it’s like a swamp in there…”

“Swamps…” Olivia droned.

“Wonder who’s dream this is?” Sparkler said, looking around. “Don’t see Thrackerzod.”

“Maybe she’s not asleep?” Lady Rarity suggested. “Or forcing herself to have a dreamless sleep.”

“…Maybe,” Corona said. “But that’d be annoying…”

The pink puff-ball guy shot out of the water and did a complicated dance in the air before splashing back into the water. Corona swore she heard upbeat music for a second.

“That’s who’s dream this is,” Sparkler observed.

Corona shrugged. “Let’s keep trying to find Thrackerzod for a while then. Valentine did say it was surprising I got to Eve after one step – maybe it’ll just take more. If we don’t find her after a while, well… We think of something else then.”

Olivia grabbed her head. “Who set us up the bomb?”

Corona watched the killer whale do another trick before moving to another dream.

There was a flash of red out of the corner of her eye – but when she looked there was nothing. …She wasn’t really sure she had even seen anything.

She didn’t get a chance to comment on this though. There was shouting in the new dream.

“I’m telling you Sunburst, that’s not what’s best for her?”

“L-look, she enjoys the books, w-why make her stop?”

“Because she’s turning into a recluse!”

“I-I mean, nothing’s wrong with that?”

“Oh, you think that because you locked yourself away for most of your life that it’s okay? How were you holding together before I came to you that day? Not! You were not!”

“I w-was just fine!”

“You and I both know you had pretty much given up on existence! I don’t want her to waste a decade of her life wasting away with books! Hell, it’ll be longer since she hasn’t made any friends yet!”

“She has friends, Nova!”

“Then why’s she alone all the time?”

“Not everyone has to spend e-every waking minute of their lives with s-somebody else!”

“Ooooooh is that how it is.”

“…Which one’s dream do you think it is?” Lady Rarity asked Corona, a guilty expression on her face.

“Neither,” Corona said, opening a door to another room in Nova’s house. “I think it’s hers.”

The unicorn filly Stardust sat in the corner of her room, crying.

“Why do Mommy and Daddy yell so much?” she asked them.

Corona sat down. “Do they really?”

Stardust nodded slowly.

Corona sighed. This is none of my business. She reached her hand out anyway and touched Stardust.

Fear. Lots of fear. But under that, a deep, powerful love for her family. Pushing that a bit, Corona found far more happy memories than scared ones. Weekend getaways to anywhere Stardust wanted… Nova recounting grand tales of her escapades… Sunburst reading to her in bed… Dances and music in the midst of piles of ancient books… Magic shows…

There was arguing, yes. There was more of it than there should have been.

…Stardust was too young to fully understand how to look at everything, though. Right now she could only think about the tension and aggression. Because of the nightmare.

Corona took a breath – she focused her mental energy into her hands. She took the good memories out of Stardust’s head and consolidated them into a thing. The thing took solid form, powered by Corona and Stardust’s powerful emotions.

She didn’t let it explode. She gently pushed it into Stardust’s mind. The filly fell asleep within the dream, entering another dream. A happier one.

Corona stood up and clapped her hands, using a quick thought to make the arguing Nova and Sunburst vanish. She wouldn’t wake up to that.

“…You did it,” Sparkler said. “You made a dreeper.”

“Yeah…” Corona said, standing up and flaring her wings. “…She needed it. There was no way I could just talk her into seeing the good in the bad.” She shook her head. “Come on. Let’s keep looking for Thrackerzod.”

They shifted again. Corona caught the red flash once again, this time sure she saw it. They appeared in a dream taking place in modern Ponyville, where it was raining profusely. “Anyone else see the red flash?”

Sparkler and Lady Rarity shook their heads. Olivia blinked. “What happened to the yelling horses?”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Yeah you’re not coming on the next escapade.”

“S-what?”

“Yeah.” Corona took a look around the rainy dream. “Probably shouldn’t stick around these long, unless we see Thrackerzod. I don’t see her so-” Corona stopped short. “Nova?”

Nova was sitting on the sidewalk outside her home, letting the rain drip down her face. “Oh. Hey Corona. If you’re here does that mean I’m dreaming? …Actually, you know what, don’t answer that. I don’t want to think about that right now.”

Corona walked up to her. “…What happened?”

“Screwed up. Again.” She put a hoof over her eyes. “Sunburst is never going to forgive me…”

Corona put a hand on Nova. “Nova, he’ll forgive you. He loves you more than anything.”

“That’s a load of crap,” Nova muttered. “In case you’ve forgotten, there wasn’t love there! It was stupid, in-the-moment passion we can’t take back.”

“…I don’t think you mean that.”

Nova looked like she wanted to continue arguing her point, but her powerful expression melted after looking into Corona’s understanding eyes. “You’re right. There… There was something. But we didn’t give it the time it needed. Then when we had time… it was tainted. There was always this nagging doubt in our minds that it was forced. That it still is.” She wiped the tears from her eyes. “I never want to leave him. I never want to hurt him. I always want to be there. But I always wonder if it’s really enough.” She looked to Corona in pain. “There’s no answer.”

Corona opened her mouth to respond.

“…Don’t give me any empathetic soft bullshit, Corona.”

Corona closed it, somewhat shocked at the spite in Nova’s voice. “…I can’t pretend to know what you’ve gone through, or the complicated emotions within you two. You are right, there is no answer. You have to decide for yourself if it’s enough.” She tightened her grip on Nova. “But I do know a few things. You’ve told me it was enough before. Time and time again. He’s told me the same thing.” She forced Nova to look at her. “And then there’s Stardust. She’s brought you two together.”

“Stardust… Oh, Stars, she’s in there…”

Corona put a hand on Nova’s forehead. “Nova, go back in there. Tell your husband what he really means to you, and go check on your daughter.”

“But I can’t go ba-”

Corona woke her up. “You can now.” She stood up and dusted herself off, letting the rain drip down her sides wordlessly.

“…I think we did good?” Sparkler said, uncertain.

“We did. But it was dirty,” Corona said, turning her eyes to the dark sky. “It’s like helping a friend cheat.” She put a hand to the bridge of her nose.

“We can stop,” Lady Rarity said. “We don’t have to keep looking.”

“No… No we need to keep going,” Corona said. “There’s more to this place than the deep secrets and personal lives of other people.” She stared off into the distance.

Olivia stared at Corona, blinking. “Uh… girl, you look into people’s heads all the time… What’s the big deal?”

Corona looked sadly at Olivia. “You’re having real trouble following, aren’t you?” She held up her hand, examining the crystal on the back of it. “Empathy is a dangerous power. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with emotion reading. But pushing it, digging into anything beyond surface memories and feelings… It’s the most extreme invasion of privacy in existence. Not only do you see what they think, but also you understand what they feel and also experience that feeling in a way. It’s robbing them of their unique lives.”

Sparkler blinked. “…Woah.”

“Yeah. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.” Corona forced a smile. “There are many things I can do that I shouldn’t. Should I have interfered back there? I don’t know. I couldn’t have slept well knowing what I knew, and also knowing I did nothing. I try not to learn about those things to begin with. But this place… keeps me involved with the deep personal secrets of others.” She sighed.

Lady Rarity spoke up. “There are many dangers and negative aspects to every new thing.”

Corona nodded slowly. “Yeah.” She raised her hands. “Let’s learn more about them. Everyone, we’re shifting. Watch for a flash of red this time. I think something might be following us as we move.”

Everyone except Olivia took a ready position. Corona moved…

…And grabbed the red flash before it appeared in her vision. She tore it out from the sidelines and drove it to the metallic ground. “GOTCHA!”

It was red. Everything else about it was uncertain, no matter how much Corona focused on it. It moved as if it were a liquid, except it also stood tall, and was quite sharp in many locations. A handful of black holes appeared and disappeared all over its form, possibly eyes, possibly something else indecipherable.

It was very unhappy with being dragged out into the open. It charged Corona. She pushed back with her mind, trying to wake it up.

She touched a mind – but she found it couldn’t be woken up. “Wha-”

It cut her across the left side of her stomach. The pain was immense – but it wasn’t deadly. Her mind was quickly able to repair the damage, and her will was able to keep herself from shooting awake from the adrenaline rush. She pushed back with her mind, hitting the red thing again.

Since she had no intent of waking it up this time around, the full force of the attack went into pushing the thing away. It was surprisingly light, smashing it off the metal disc they were standing on.

Corona looked around, finally taking in the scenery they found themselves in – a metal disc about the width of a small house, falling through an endless sky. She saw no signs of a dreamer to create this place.

She didn’t have time to ponder this – because the red thing was back, having pulled itself back onto the disc somehow.

“I have no idea how to fight something I can’t understand and can’t wake up,” Corona admitted. “I don’t think nuking the dream will help either.”

Sparkler bit her lip. “I’m fresh out of ideas too.”

Lady Rarity furrowed her brow, summoning her armor and hammer. “Blunt trauma until it goes away?”

“Or fleeing. Fleeing is an option,” Sparkler added as an afterthought.

“I’d rather not,” Corona said.

“Oh hey, a red thing!” Olivia said, pointing at it. “That’s cool!”

The red thing drove a spike of itself through Olivia’s skull, forcing her to wake up. Then it turned to Lady Rarity, shifting itself into a furiously moving cyclone of spiked tendrils. Lady Rarity was able to fight it on instinct alone for a few seconds, but the red thing would outwit her soon enough.

Sparkler came to the rescue, opting for an old fashioned beam of magic. The purple beam hit the red thing, tossing it to the side. It crawled back toward them, not appearing to tire in the slightest.

Corona held it in her telekinesis, keeping it from moving. Lady Rarity and Sparkler joined her, the one mind of the red thing unable to overcome their three wills.

“I suppose we have a pet now,” Lady Rarity commented. “What are we going to do with it?”

“Panic when we realize it had friends…” Sparkler said, backing away from the edge of the disc.

At least five more red ‘claws’ had appeared on the edges of the disc, hoisting more red things to their level.

“Fleeing is sounding better by the minute,” Corona admitted. “One wake up spell coming u- hold on, what’s that noise?”

There was a loud, obnoxious, VWEEEORP VWEEEORP noise that shook the entire dream. A blue phone box faded into existence, heralding the oncoming storm.

The Doctor jumped out of the TARDIS, mind on fire, the force of his massive will enough to make Corona tremble. The Doctor pointed at a red thing – and it vanished. He made quick work of all the others, nothing more than a simple thought required to banish one of the beasts.

Corona, Lady Rarity, Sparkler, and the Doctor were soon the only ones on the falling disc. The Doctor noted that it was falling and willed the scene to change to a comfortable living room with a homely fireplace. The land of dreams responded to him instantly and obeyed his whims without any haze or hesitation.

Corona blinked. “Uh…”

“Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner, the T in TARDIS doesn’t function properly here,” the Doctor said, dusting off his hands. “Of course, hardly anything does, but that’s what you get when dreams are involved.”

“…Thanks,” Corona said, smiling. “…What were those things?”

“Nasty little critters only known as the Crimson Ones. I call them Reds. Fragments of a significantly more powerful will that exist, far as I can tell at this point, to hide in the blind spots of people’s perceptions. Essentially nasty wildlife.”

“Could they cause a coma?” Corona asked.

“Not unless the dreamer already had some sort of mental trauma or something similar – in which case any ‘death’ could trigger one.” The Doctor looked at her. “So, who’s in a coma?”

“Princess Luna. The first night she explored this shared dreamscape, she found something and was sent into a coma.”

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “Couldn’t you just force her awake with your abilities?”

“I tried. Didn’t work. Something blocked me.”

“Reds definitely can’t do that,” the Doctor assured her. “Least not that I’m aware of. They exist as temporary things, of a sort. If that makes sense.” He sat down in a chair. “…So, have you received the welcome yet?”

Corona blinked. “…Maybe? What’s the welcome entail?”

“That’ll be a no,” the Doctor said, willing some fish fingers to appear in his hand. “I shall endeavor to enlighten you. Welcome to Topeka.”

“…Topeka?” Lady Rarity asked, blinking.

“Topeka,” the Doctor confirmed. “It’s the name of this shared dreamscape. All of it, collectively. In all the universes it has spread to over the years.”

“Why Topeka!?” Corona asked. “That’s a city in Kansas!”

“I actually have no idea,” the Doctor said with a shrug. “I wasn’t among the first individuals to find Topeka, so I didn’t get to name it. I expect the story is probably something mundane along the lines of ‘we need to call this place something’ and his buddy responding ‘Topeka?’ followed by ‘sure, why not’. Dreadfully boring.”

“It could mean ‘middle of nowhere’,” Sparkler commented. “Or ‘capital of nowhere’, given the Kansas stigma.”

“That would be fitting. Since Topeka can’t exist in a physical fashion like you are able to understand,” the Doctor admitted. “It’s a collection of minds that have entered a dream-state within its reaches. Which has recently crossed into your corner of the multiverse, unfortunately. It will sadly complicate things for those of you who awaken as full dreamers.”

Sparkler grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

“I think it’s worse not to be a dreamer, hmm?” Lady Rarity commented.

The Doctor shrugged. “People deal with it in different ways.”

“Are there defenses?” Corona asked.

“You can be trained in your subconscious to attack invaders, but that takes years,” the Doctor answered. “Dreamless sleep is very effective, but causes madness. The most effective solution is to wipe the most sensitive information from memory. You’re lucky your nation doesn’t have many secrets, though I would tell ‘GG’ to be on his toes.”

“GG?” Sparkler asked, cocking her head.

“Not important,” Corona told her, “also classified.”

“Ah.”

“So we’re just going to have to deal with it?” Lady Rarity asked.

The Doctor nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry to say. You’d be surprised how little it actually changes since only a few truly awaken as full dreamers. I only know of scant few examples of non-dreamers able to move through Topeka. Usually only those who have powers relating to dreams.”

“Hi Doctor! Bye Doctor!” Aradia shouted, jumping into the room through a door and bolting out another.

The Doctor smirked. “And her, a rather unique example.”

“I can see that,” Corona said.

“Regardless, if you suspect someone is trying to steal information from you through dreams, just track them down and place them in a psychic inhibition chamber. They won’t be able to focus in Topeka.”

“And I take it putting, say, Eve in one of those chambers won’t help?”

“It’d make it easier for them to get to her. She’d have almost no defenses.”

“Gotcha. …Do you know of any way to bring someone into a coma in Topeka? Or how to bring someone out of it?”

The Doctor furrowed his brow. “Theoretically, I can see a large group of Dreamers with powerful wills forcing another dreamer to never wake up. It would take considerable effort to keep someone in Topeka. As for a cure, all it would take is to find where they are and force them awake.” He folded his hands. “Unfortunately it’s pretty easy to mask your presence from other dreamers at a distance. If you continually think you don’t want to be found, you probably won’t.”

“…Is that why I can’t find Thrackerzod?”

“Probably.” The Doctor stood up. “Though in her case, there’s ways to find her by proxy.”

“Oh?” Sparkler said, perking up.

The Doctor nodded. “I know nothing about Luna’s location or what brought about her coma. But I do know Thrackerzod would be in contact with the dreamers from the Embodiment. So, say, if I try to find Hastur…” He thought for a moment. Without moving, the scene of the dream changed to that of a crystal planet riddled with fractals inside.

Hastur and Vriska were standing in front of them, looking at the newcomers to the dream.

“Hey! Out of here!” Vriska said, waving her hands. “Shoo! Private dream!”

“No can do, sorry,” Corona said, walking up to Hastur. “Need to talk to Thrackerzod.”

“I was afraid of this…”

“HOLD ON ONE FUCKING MINUTE!” Vriska shouted. “Hold whatever stupid conversation you were going to have, there’s business here. HEY DOC!”

The Doctor winced. “Ah. Vriska.”

“I’m feeling mighty good about a duel right now. No consequences and all that.”

“That’s my cue to take my leave,” the Doctor said. “Good luck.” He stepped into another dream just as Vriska threw a sword at him.

“FFFFFFFFFFF…” Vriska grabbed her hair. “Hastur, can you be a good eldritch matesprite and go kill him.”

“Killing the Doctor would have repercussions none of us are ready for.”

“Then just go run him through a regeneration or two. He’s got some to spare.”

“Sadly, I believe there are other problems that concern me at the moment.”

“Fine, get back to your business.” Vriska threw her hands in the air. “Wake me up. I don’t need to be part of this.”

“You sure?” Corona asked. “We might be on the tail of an eldritch conspiracy.”

Vriska’s normally haughty and arrogant expression became pained. “…That’s why I don’t want to be here, Corona.”

“Oh…” Corona nodded in understanding. “Have a good rest of your night then.”

Vriska gave her the thumbs up just before Hastur woke her up.

Corona turned to Hastur, hands on her hips. “So. Need to talk to Thrackerzod.”

“I’m sorry. I am not capable of granting that request.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “You’re the big Embodiment boss, of course you can.”

“This may come as a shock to you, but Topeka has drawn the attention of those above me.”

“Can I talk to them?” Corona asked.

“No.”

Lady Rarity raised an eyebrow. “Really Hastur, not going to give us anything? I thought you were better than this.”

“I am as good as Azathoth needs me to be – no more, no less. You should understand this by now.”

“So what, these orders come from him?”

“You won’t worm information out of me. I am sorry, but this operation does not need your interference.”

Sparkler narrowed her eyes. “And that’s just going to make us look into it more, you realize.”

“Sadly, yes.”

It was at this point Thrackerzod walked into the dream, addressing Hastur. “Taken care of the Matrices and Demogorgons in the green point, we should be able to move forward soon. Your presence has been request-” Thrackerzod took one look at Corona and let out an eldritch swear.

Corona grabbed Thrackerzod in her telekinesis. “Heeeeey Thrackerzod! How about we have that talk now?”

Thrackerzod pushed back with her mind, but Sparkler used her mind to push on Thrackerzod, keeping her in place.

“…This feels wrong…” Thrackerzod muttered, turning to look at Sparkler.

Hastur joined in next, pushing on Thrackerzod, close to freeing her.

Lady Rarity pulled Thrackerzod, keeping the eldritch unicorn in place. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“I was expecting more of a fight from you, to be honest,” Corona said. “One would think Hastur’s will was far beyond the rest of ours.”

Hastur and Thrackerzod were silent.

“So, you can’t talk to us,” Corona said, furrowing her brow. “But we have you trapped…”

“Idea,” Lady Rarity said, smirking. “Take us to your leader.”

“We can’t do that.”

Lady Rarity raised an eyebrow. “You have to give us something to get us to let you go.”

“Would you be interested in a soul-pact?”

“They’re not idiots, Hastur,” Thrackerzod muttered.

“That was sarcasm.”

“You need to work on that.”

Lady Rarity began to pace around them. “It appears we are at an impasse… Oh, I know! Corona, make a dreeper.”

Thrackerzod’s eyes widened. “There’s no way you can do that.”

Corona tapped into Lady Rarity’s mind to grab an emotional memory – the one about her mother in the forest would do – and created the dreeper in her hand. “Looky here, totally got it.”

“Ouch, you guys could have totally escaped while she was busy making that,” Sparkler said.

Thrackerzod glared at her. “Who even are you?”

“Sparkler. Sparkle Census. Dreamer.” She smiled. “Nice to meet you.”

Lady Rarity walked up to Thrackerzod, grin widening. “So we can launch you into a dream within a dream and trick you into giving up information. We have plenty of time to make it work, I’m sure.”

“That won’t end well for you.”

“Or you,” Lady Rarity observed. “So now you have to ask yourselves ‘is it better to let them root around our minds with a dream construct, or to take them to our leader’? One of these options has to be more loyal than the other. Select away!”

Thrackerzod let out a disgruntled sigh. “The dreamless spider trapped us in her web.”

“It appears so.”

“We’re never going to live this down.”

“It is our slice in life,” Hastur sighed. “Very well. We will take you to the chosen dream of the Embodiment. Satisfied?”

“Very,” Lady Rarity said, releasing her hold on them. “Take us away!”

Thrackerzod sighed, taking a few steps – and dragging the group to a surprisingly bright dream dominated by multicolored trees with balls of fluff at their tops instead of leaves. “Behold.” Thrackerzod said, gesturing at a dozen or so eldritch dreamers. A mixture of beings ranging in shape from humanoids that seemed slightly off to writhing masses of mismatched body parts. One of them was a fractal pattern suspended in the air.

There was one thing Corona noticed instantly.

“They aren’t hurting my mind,” she observed. “At least half of these should be damaging my thought patterns just by looking at them.”

“That would be because Topeka does not support true eldritch forms, my child.”

The voice sounded normal, male, and middle-aged. It also made Corona feel like her soul had just left her body. She saw Hastur and Thrackerzod tense in fear.

She couldn’t bring herself to turn around.

“Hastur, Thrackerzod, do not fear. You have done what needed to be done. Your usefulness has not ended. For now, return to the others. I will talk to these three alone.”

Hastur and Thrackerzod practically ran away to meet up with the other eldritch beings in the dream.

“Mortals, you can turn. I cannot send you into retching madness here.”

The three of them didn’t budge. That didn’t matter – a force turned them around anyway. The sight before them was… a human man of Egyptian nationality. He wore no shirt, revealing a fit, but not overly muscular figure. A royal Egyptian hood covered his head, the striped strands hanging down either side of his neck.

They felt nothing dangerous about him. And yet all of them were afraid despite every one of their senses telling them he was a simple man with some authority.

“Sit,” he said, generating chairs from the dream for them. All three of them did – not compelled to do so, but obeying out of fear not doing so would make him angry. “You are Corona, Lady Rarity, and Sparkler. You are currently on a quest to find out who has taken Princess Luna and sent her into a coma, correct?”

Corona nodded, not saying anything.

“Unfortunately, we do not have her, nor do we know who does. There are multiple entities in the larger scope of Topeka that could do such a thing – us included, but also the Race of Yith, Matrices, the Mindflayer’s children… You have my word we did nothing to her.”

Corona finally managed to say something. “W-what can you tell us?”

“I can tell you who I am,” he said, leaning in. “I am Nyarlathotep.”

Corona knew enough about the Embodiment to know that was the name of one of the outer gods of the Embodiment. One of the beings who were not defined by higher entities, but made their own decisions.

In other news, she was the first person in Merodi Universalis to actually have a discussion with one of the Embodiment’s leaders.

“I see you’ve heard of me. I also see that you’re mildly confused – why would an outer god bother with such a mortal concern? Why would servants of Azathoth listen to me? Why would I bother to talk to any of you?” He smiled – it was a warm smile. Corona hated it.

“First of all, Topeka is a bit more than a mortal concern. It is a mental connection through many, many universes, one that has placed us from the Embodiment at a rare disadvantage. Topeka reduces the majority of minds within it to a ‘standard’ status. Within Topeka, even the highest god is not much stronger than a lowly teenager who sleeps all day. It is a particular upset of the natural order – enough of one to demand our action and presence.”

Corona nodded slowly. “I see…” she was slowly overcoming her fear of this man. He was certainly beyond dangerous, but that didn’t mean she had to be quaking in her boots all the time.

“As for why Hastur and Thrackerzod are working for me, there’s a bit more nuance to that. Suffice it to say I have obtained a contract for their assistance in this matter directly from Azathoth himself. Their essences are still Azathoth’s, I cannot change that. But they cannot disobey me unless they’re convinced I’m moving against Azathoth. Considering Azathoth’s general apathy about existence, that’s unlikely to happen.”

“And we come back to why you’re talking to us.”

“Precisely! I, an outer god who is only here because someone needs to be, is bothering to speak directly to a group of shivering, quaking mortals who I could wipe out in an instant, should I bother to track you down outside Topeka. How bizarre.” He smirked, the first action of his that actually looked evil. “I simply enjoy doing the unexpected. It is the simplest of all paths to madness.”

Corona shivered. The act made Nyarlathotep’s smirk turn into a grin. “Make no mistake, Corona, I am no ally of mortals. I just happen to enjoy watching your little plights unfold. When my plights intersect with yours, it just makes existence all the more enjoyable.”

Corona nodded slowly.

“Come on, where’s that fire? That inner rage within you?” Nyarlathotep stood up and started walking around her. “I know you have it in you. You have the power. Tell me what you think, Corona. Tell me to my face how much of a horrendous monster I am. Or how insane I am.”

Corona was silent.

“But you know that’s what I want, don’t you? Not giving me what I want out of defiance?” He licked his lips. “Delicious defiance. I love it.”

Corona didn’t move.

“Good girl.”

Corona lost it. She punched him in the face, careful not to actually enter his mind in any way.

It was like hitting a piece of concrete. The bones in her hand broke – repaired a moment later by her will, but it still hurt.

“Was that satisfying?” Nyarlathotep asked. “I doubt it was. I felt nothing.”

“You know there are ways for us to affect the Embodiment,” Corona said, meeting his eyes with a steely glare of her own.

“Threatening me?” Nyarlathotep seemed taken aback – which delighted him to no end. “This is such a rarity! Do you actually think that somewhere within you is the power to do anything to me?”

“I can bring the might of Merodi Universalis down on you if I thought it was necessary,” Corona growled. “We could take out one outer god.”

“And suffer the repercussions of war with the Embodiment? I don’t think so.”

“Push enough people to madness and society starts doing irrational things.”

Nyarlathotep grinned. “I like it when your kind has good points.”

Corona bristled.

“You’ll find that I’m very methodical in the madness I bring about. A little bit here, a little bit there, enough for my fun but never enough to become disastrous. You have to be exceptionally sane and methodical to be a successful deity of madness. A delightful paradox.”

“You don’t think you’re mad?! That’s a laugh.”

“If I wasn’t sane I would have fallen long ago. Furthermore, I-”

“NYARLATHOTEP!” a blob of eyes and flesh shouted.

Nyarlathotep put on a patient smile. “Why are you interrupting my discourse with our neighbors?”

“THE MATRICES ARE ATTACKING!”

Nyarlathotep’s smile dropped. “I was really hoping you didn’t have a good reason…”

Corona saw it happen all at once – dozens of green presences jumped into the dream as lines of code, cutting across Corona’s vision. They quickly formed themselves into more tangible human forms of men in black suits with sunglasses on – but Corona’s mind was stuck on their initial appearance.

“I saw that in Luna’s mind,” she said, eyes wide. “They have her.”

Nyarlathotep narrowed his eyes. “Then your Princess is being held captive by full AI gifted with the power to enter a dream state.” He gestured at the battle happening before them. A Matrix agent was skewered by a dream-sword, a motion that should have triggered death and forced them to wake up. The agent stayed in the dream anyway, driving the eldritch sword wielder through with a lance, forcing it awake. “Programmed to believe they cannot die.”

“That’s broken,” Sparkler said, speaking for the first time since Nyarlathotep had appeared.

“It is,” Nyarlathotep said, glaring at a particular Matrice that was walking right toward him slowly. “Agent Smith.”

“Nyarlathotep,” Smith said, adjusting his sunglasses. “Your outpost is now under our control. Do you wish to surrender?”

Nyarlathotep grinned. “Yes, actually. Take me away.”

Smith shot him in the head – but Nyarlathotep caught the bullet. “It’s always shooting with you, Smith. When will you learn to change your patterns?”

Smith didn’t care to respond. He fired more bullets than his gun could possibly have while Nyarlathotep dodged or caught them all. “Shameful, Smith. Shameful.”

Two duplicates of Smith appeared behind Nyarlathotep, firing at the outer god from behind. He backhanded all the bullets away, willing his limbs to move as fast as needed. “Your will cannot exceed mine. The song and dance is always the same.”

Corona let out a roar of frustration. “THEN HOW ABOUT WE MIX IT UP A LITTLE!?” She pointed a hand at Nyarlathotep and the central Smith. With a powerful push, she forced both of them awake.

They vanished from the dreamscape.

“Take that,” Corona muttered. “Both of you deserved much worse.”

“…I don’t think they’re going to be happy about that,” Lady Rarity commented.

“Of course not,” Corona said. “Since when do we care what they think?”

“When the Matrices have Luna, and Nyarlathotep is in control of our friends!?”

“…Right.” Corona sighed. “Aaaagh I let my anger get the better of me again.”

“Hey, hey, don’t worry about it,” Sparkler encouraged. “At least you did something. We were just sitting here, quaking.”

“Speaking of doing something…” Corona looked down at the continuing battle between the rest of the Matrices and the Embodiment. “Do we take a side…?”

“More likely to convince Thrackerzod we’re helping if we take her side,” Lady Rarity pointed out.

“Good enough for me.” Corona said, lighting her fists on fire. “…Though we still need information about Luna.”

“You have that dreeper don’t you?” Sparkler asked. “Use it on the Matrices.”

Corona flexed her flaming wrists, summoning the dreeper to her hand. “Right… Yes, that could work. That could work nicely. Charge, fight the Matrices, but try to get two away from the rest so I can grab them. Sound like a plan?”

Sparkler and Lady Rarity nodded.

Corona teleported them into the middle of the fray with her horn. She declared which side they were on by punching a Matricie agent in the face, forcing him awake with her power.

“Oh thank Azathoth you have an easy kill,” Thrackerzod said. “These greenwires are a pain otherwise.”

“If you wanna repay me for all you’ve done, help me isolate a few Matrices. Don’t ask why.”

Thrackerzod nodded, using her will to push back three agents. They responded by firing guns – a stray bullet hitting Lady Rarity in the eye, forcing her awake. Sparkler and Corona charged the agents. Corona grabbed one with her free hand, forcing him awake. With the other hand she threw the dreeper to the ground.

~~~

The two agents had no issue realizing they were in a deeper dream. The sight of Lady Rarity’s mother did not bother them. They also didn’t care when she started skewering them.

“It appears they have tried to trap us in a dream,” the first said to the second.

“Pointless. It will not keep us from Z.”

“They could be listening.”

“It does not matter what they hear.”

“Let us wake up back in the higher level.”

“Yes. Ini-” he paused, cocking his head. “…Something is interfering in my programming…”

“There is nothing on this level but the false dream construct.”

“Something above. Rooting thr-” his neck snapped and he fell to the ground.

The other agent wasted no time in waking up.

~~~

On the level above, the Embodiment-Matricie battle was still ongoing, the eldritch having little luck in driving the coded agents away.

Corona had her hands inside one of the unconscious Matricie agent’s body, absorbing everything she could about his mind.

He really existed as a bunch of code in a box in a universe where the sky was dark and energy was scarce. Human beings were batteries at one point, but that was in the past. They had found alternate sources through the multiverse, expanding the digital network. They were particularly suited for Topeka, since everything within it was built on belief and mental control, and none were better at control than thefull AI.

All of the agent’s memories were of the box his coding existed in, or of Topeka. Virtually none held any strong emotions. All his experiences were muted…

They were looking for something called Z. It existed in Topeka. What was it?

She tried to dig, but he had started to shut his coding down. She scrambled for more information – she saw the demogorgons, the Crimson Ones, what she assumed were the Yith… Smith telling everyone to prepare to assault the ‘Mindflayer’s’ front… Luna appearing in a ring of Agent Smiths…

Where was that?

Corona pulled her hands out just before the agent vanished. “DAMMIT!” She shouted, punching the other agent before he could aim his gun at her. “I was so close.”

“You got something, right?” Sparkler asked.

“Yeah. HEY THRACKERZOD!”

“What!?” Thrackerzod shouted, jumping backward to dodge a Matricie agent’s rapid fire onslaught. “I’m a little busy!”

“What is Z!?”

Thrackerzod looked at Corona’s eyes. The eldritch unicorn shook her head, warning her this was a path she did not want to go down.

“Thrackerzod…”

Thrackerzod jumped in front of an agent’s bullet, forcing herself awake.

“THRACKERZOD!” Corona shouted. “Oh you are going to be in a world of hurt when I find you…”

“INCOMING!” Hastur shouted.

A bomb went off and Corona’s vision went red.

Corona shot bolt upright in her bed, breathing heavily.

“Oh. There you are,” Lady Rarity said, rubbing her eyes. “I take it you got taken out as well?”

“We need to find the Mistress,” Corona said, jumping to her feet. “Tell her about everything we’ve learned.”

“Of course,” Lady Rarity said.

“Wait, we learned stuff?” Olivia asked.

“Olivia, go home, you weren’t able to dream well. Sorry,” Corona smiled weakly.

“…Blunt much?”

“I’ve got other things to deal with right now. We can talk later, okay?”

“Fine, but you owe me.”

“You’re the best,” Corona said, mounting Lady Rarity and galloping out of the room.

“Where would the Mistress be?” Corona wondered as they ran through the halls of Canterlot Castle.

“Asleep in the guest rooms?” Lady Rarity offered.

“…Where are those?”

“Right this way.”

They were at the door to the guest rooms.

There was a flash of purple next to them. They entered a fighting stance – but it wasn’t an enemy.

It was Sparkler.

“How in the…” Corona began.

“Grabbed a dimensional device and booked it to Equis Vitis the moment I woke up,” Sparkler said. “Felt the same connection to you I did in Topeka. Here I am. What are we doing?”

“About to give our report,” Corona said. Lady Rarity reared up and they charged through the doors to the guest chambers.

Mistress Luna appeared to be waiting for them, the other Lunas standing behind her. “I take it you found something out?”

“Yes. Lots of things, actually.”

“The highlights first, please,” the Mistress asked.

“Right, so, uh, the dreamscapes are collectively called Topeka, the Doctor’s in it, we don’t have any way to actively defend against people stealing ideas from dreams, Nyarlathotep is currently in control of Hastur and Thrackerzod commanding part of the Embodiment in Topeka, they’re fighting with a lot of other forces over something, I think they’re looking for something called Z in Topeka, Luna is captured by a group of AI known as the Matrices because she appeared in the midst of them, and I attacked Nyarlathotep and who I assume was a Matricie leader.” She took a breath.

The Mistress stared at her, blinking. “…That’s a lot more than we found out.”

“I would imagine so,” Lady Rarity said. “…Was there anything else?”

“Well, I know a bit about the Embodiment and the Matrices now,” Corona added. She went on to explain how the Embodiment couldn’t exist as fully eldritch beings in Topeka so they were just as vulnerable as anyone else to its effects, and about the AIs programs and lack of emotion. “This Z is beyond important, I’m sure of it,” Corona said. “The eldritch, the Matrices, and probably other sides are fighting over it across the dream world.”

“…This was not as informative as I had been hoping,” the Mistress muttered, eyes clouding.

Corona blinked. “…You literally just said we found out a lot more than you.”

The Mistress stared at her. “Are you sure you didn’t find any Matricie plans while inside the agent’s mind?”

“There may have been some things about… Uh… Attacking the ‘Mindflayer’s’ front? It’s hazy.”

“Ah, finally, something useful.” The Mistress sneered. “Thank you, Corona. It’s amazing how smart people can do stupid things.”

“…What?”

“You still don’t get it? You’re in a nested dream, Corona. I think it would be obvious. I mean she’s here!” The Mistress pointed at Sparkler. “How could she get here so fast!?”

“We… were running through the hallways for a while…”

“No, you weren’t.” The other Lunas and Lady Rarity began to shift into amorphous beings of a red color. Corona jumped off the Crimson One that had been posing as Lady Rarity in a panic, sidling up to Sparkler – the only entity aside from the Mistress who wasn’t turning red.

“Trapped dream…” Sparkler said, eyes widening. “It… It makes so much sense. How did I get here so fast!? I just accepted that!”

“There was no way we could have just been at the door, so I created time in my mind…” Corona grabbed her head. “AGH!”

“Oh, you’re about to feel a lot worse about yourselves,” the Mistress said, grinning. She revealed who she was – shifting in appearance to that of a human man in a black suit.

“…Randall Flagg,” Corona said, spitting out the syllables.

“Right on the money! Too late for any prizes though, I’m afraid the time allotted for pulling a ‘win’ out of this has passed. You can rest easy knowing you weren’t actually that useful in your information. Mostly things I already knew, with the exception of that vague Matricie plan.”

“What do you want with us?” Corona demanded.

“With you? Nothing more than information,” Flagg said, waving a hand dismissively. “I already made my attempt on Merodi Universalis. I’m not chancing a second round. You’ve just stumbled across my current project by some trick of fate – Topeka.” He grinned. “Such an interesting glue between universes, wouldn’t you say?”

Sparkler tilted her hoof from side to side. “Eh, interesting is a non-word.”

“I like you already,” Flagg said, sitting down on a throne that hadn’t existed before. The Crimson Ones pulsed around him menacingly.

“They’re all part of your will then?” Corona asked.

“Oh, yes, they’re mine,” Flagg said. “When you’re as ancient as I am you pick up a few tricks like this. Nyarlathotep is going to be so jealous once he figures this out. See, he thinks he’s me. But it’s only in his wildest dreams he actually gets to be me. Fitting that we face each other on a battlefield of dreams.”

“He does have more of a terrifying pre-” Corona stopped short as Flagg turned on a haunting aura so strong Corona started screaming.

“See, this is why the whole ‘haunting aura’ thing is a bit much. Lots of screaming, no interesting responses.” He turned it off. “I prefer to just give the unsettling vibe. Though I’m perfectly capable of giving off an aura of complete innocence, but that’s hardly fair now is it?”

Corona was busy catching her breath. “Not… Particularly…”

“You know what else isn’t fair?” Flagg asked. “Me. Placing you two into a coma.”

Corona blinked. “No…”

“Yes! You’re currently trapped before me. Try to wake yourselves up. I dare you.”

Corona put all her energy into her mind, trying not only to wake up, but also to contact Raging Sights. She pushed… pushed… pushed… she felt the covers of her bed…

Then she realized Flagg had just thrown a blanket on her. She burnt it to a crisp.

“Admirable attempt,” Flagg admitted. “I believe your little device actually heard you. Probably raising the alarm in the real world as we speak. But how exactly is that going to help you do anything?”

“The Lunas can find us,” Sparkler said.

Flagg smirked. “Oh, that would be true. If they hadn’t already been taken care of.”

“What did you do!?”

“Me? Nothing!” Flagg chuckled. “You’d just be surprised how paranoid the Matrices are. Though if I’m perfectly honest, I think the Mindflayer has most of them – it even got Valentine, and I hear he was a tenacious one! It was always the best at this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

“I think it’ll be more interesting not to tell you,” Flagg said with a smile.

“How about I learn for myself!?” Corona shouted, rushing forward. She felt her hand be pushed back by Flagg’s mental power – but she pushed back with her own. If she wasn’t going to get into his head, she was going to make him wake up. She pushed her hand through his defenses, demanding he wake up.

Nothing happened.

“Wha-”

Then he let her into his mind.

The next memory she had was of trying to puke, but finding it impossible within the dream.

“Impressive mental defenses,” Flagg observed. “When you bite off more than you can chew, you’re able to delete that section of your mind before it can spread… Shame though, you didn’t get to keep any of that interesting information. Could have become a regular mad prophet!”

“Rather… Not…” Corona heaved again.

Flagg laughed. “Well, I hope you have a nice day. I do have other things to attend to – finding Z and all that – enjoy your coma. Don’t be surprised if you get transferred to the Mindflayer. A-” He suddenly became aware of something somewhere else. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Hastur smashed down a nearby wall, leading the remnants of the Embodiment that had been caught in Flagg’s mental bomb. The opposite wall blew in as well, revealing the remaining Matrices.

Corona whistled. “They look pissed.”

Flagg glared at the two opposing sides uniting against him. “You do realize you’re all free to go? There was no coma here. You were supposed to up, up and away.”

“You need to be knocked down a peg,” Hastur declared.

“Did Nyarlathotep plant a vendetta against me in your head or something?”

“No. That was Vriska. She says ‘hi, motherfucker’.”

“How romantic,” Flagg muttered. He sent half the Crimson Ones at the Embodiment, the other half at the Matrices.

Both teams completely ignored the incoming Crimson Ones and attacked Flagg himself with their full forces. Corona and Sparkler added their wills to the force against Flagg.

Flagg sighed, watching as lacerations formed all over his body. “See you soon,” he said, allowing himself to vanish.

“Everyone to the next level!” Hastur ordered.

Corona closed her eyes, waking herself up. She came to on the battlefield between the Embodiment and Matrices.

A Crimson One was standing over her, driving a spike toward her head.

She quick-teleported away while some Matrices filled it with lead. A mostly useless proposition.

“Where’s Flagg?” She demanded, scanning the area, seeing no sign of the evil creature.

“Could be in any dream,” Hastur said. “If he can control the Crimson Ones at a distance, he can work from as far away as he wants.”

Corona twitched. “Just… Great.”

Sparkler defended her from a Matricie shot. “I think the truce has been broken!”

Corona sighed – noticing how the dream had turned into a three-way battlefield between Crimson Ones, the Embodiment, and Matrices. “I’m beginning to think we can’t do much else here.”

“Really?”

“We don’t understand the reasons behind this battle. Which side should we support? Obviously not Flagg, but Nyarlathotep is basically just a mini-Flagg and the Matrices have Luna. Then there’s the Mindflayer which apparently has other Lunas, whatever the demogorgons are, and… yeah. Basically one big mess.”

“We could try to find the Yith?”

“…I hear they’re more passive observers than anything.”

“They might have seen some things then.”

Corona nodded. “…Or I could just go rough Thrackerzod up and not give her a choice about spilling the beans.”

“If you think that’ll work.”

“I think I’m going to try it,” Corona said with a growl. “She does need it.”

Sparkler looked like she wanted to object, but shook her head. “Whatever you need.”

Corona closed her eyes and focused. “See you tomorrow night, probably.”

She woke up in her bed, for real this time.

“Oh thank Armonia,” Lady Rarity said, slipping into her old swear. “I thought you weren’t coming out.”

Oliva gave Corona a thumbs up. “I knew you’d pull through. …Even if I still have no idea what was going on in there.”

Corona rubbed her head, grunting. “The Lunas have been captured. There’s a dream war over this thing called Z. I need to go give Thrackerzod a piece of my mind and go track down the Race of Yith.”

“Ah, that latter one I can help with,” Olivia said. “Expect something later today.”

Corona realized there was a third person in the room – Death. “…What’re you doing here?”

I WAS PRESENT WHEN MISTRESS LUNA WAS CAPTURED BY THE MATRICES. I AM UNAWARE OF WHERE THEY ARE NOW, BUT SINCE VALENTINE WAS ALSO TAKEN, THIS HAS SUDDENLY BECOME MY CONCERN.

“This is spiraling out of control,” Corona said, standing up quickly. “This war over this Z thing is spilling out of Topeka into our worlds. I’m not going to stand for this.”

“What are you going to do?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Give Thrackerzod a piece of my mind. Death, you up for some dangerous invasion of privacy?”

IF IT WILL HELP, I WILL PUT ASIDE MY RESERVATIONS.

“Good. Rarity, while we’re moving, help me write up a report for Eve and the other Overheads. There’s going to be a lot…”

~~~

Corona blew open the doors of the League of Sweetie Belles. “THRACKERZOD!”

Minna took one look at Corona’s face and decided now was a good time to start drinking a juice box. It punctuated the sudden silence in the League of Sweetie Belles.

Thrackerzod turned to look at Corona with a calm expression. “Corona, if this is about the dream craziness, I still know nothing.”

Corona noticed that Allure, Squeaky, and Bot were standing behind Thrackerzod defensively – with the rest of the League looking ready for a fight as well.

Corona glanced behind her at Lady Rarity and Death, then back at Thrackerzod. “What did you tell them, Thrackerzod? That I’d gone mad for blood? That I’ve lost my mind or something?”

“She just told us we needed to protect her,” Allure said. “That was good enough for us.”

“Then maybe you need to learn a little bit about what’s going on,” Corona said, taking a few steps forward. “Thrackerzod here is lying through her teeth. And yes, she does have good reason to. That ‘good reason’ is because her higher eldritch bosses have demanded she not reveal anything. But she’s hiding secrets about a war happening in a dream world that have almost every version of Luna in Merodi Universalis in a coma. Ambassador Valentine as well, if you’re wondering why Death’s here.”

Squeaky’s certainty faltered first. “…You’re sure.”

“As sure as I am that Nyarlathotep has been bending both Hastur and Thrackerzod to his will for this little war. I think you know more about Nyarlathotep than I do. I bet it isn’t pretty.”

Allure’s determination faltered. “…Zod… She’s right, isn’t she?”

Thrackerzod grimaced. “No,” she lied, her eyes moist.

“…Right girls, stand down,” Allure said, backing away from Thrackerzod. “Sorry,” she whispered to her friend.

“I know,” Thrackerzod said.

Bot blinked. “Wait, what? What are we doing!? We need to defend Zod, regardless!”

“Sometimes your friends do things you can’t help,” Allure told Bot.

“Zod isn’t like that! Zod is 100% reliable!”

Allure sighed. “…You can fight with her if you want, Bot. But the rest of us aren’t.”

“I will!” Bot declared, moving closer to Thrackerzod. “I will stand by you until the end!”

Thrackerzod sighed. “Bot, go stand with the rest of them.”

“Huh!?”

“I said go stand with the rest of them.”

Bot was unable to process the meaning behind this. She followed the order, backing up to be with Squeaky and Allure.

Thrackerzod turned to Corona. “I don’t know anything,” she said. “You can’t make me tell you anything.”

Corona dissipated one of her gloves, flexing her bare hand. “I don’t have to.”

“My mind is more than you can handle.”

“I think I can manage, especially with some backup.” She nodded to Death.

The two of them readied for a fight. “All I have to do is touch you.” She teleported to Thrackerzod, but she teleported away at the same time.

“IF I THINK THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP THE INFORMATION FROM YOU IS TO KILL MYSELF I WILL DO IT!” Thrackerzod wailed. “DON’T MAKE ME DO THAT!”

Corona’s determination fell down. “W-what?”

“You. Heard. Me.”

Corona stared at Thrackerzod. “…How can you live like this?”

“I know it doesn’t make sense to you. It doesn’t make sense to any of you. Painful as it would be, it would still be the right decision. It’s what we are.”

Allure put a hoof to her mouth. “Thrackerzod…”

“It’d be simple. I know the exact spell to snap this form’s brain through a higher-level construct. My soul will return to the Embodiment and I will never return. I’d… I’d rather not do that. Don’t make me.”

Corona turned to Death. “Hey, Death?”

YES?

“Can you keep her from dying?”

SURE.

“Thanks.”

Thrackerzod blinked. “Well that’s completely cheap.”

“Yeah. It is. Gonna just let me touch you now or-”

Thrackerzod put an eldritch knife to Lady Rarity’s throat. “How’s this?”

I CAN KEEP HER FROM DYING TOO. IN FACT, HOW ABOUT I JUST REMOVE DEATH FROM THIS AREA FOR THE NEXT FEW MINUTES? IT’LL KEEP YOU FROM THREATENING ANYONE ELSE.

Thrackerzod twitched. “Why can’t you ju-”

Corona dropped the illusion of herself standing next to Death – revealing herself to actually be right next to Thrackerzod. “Gotcha,” she said, placing her bare hand on the eldritch unicorn.

Holy Celestia, this hurts. Corona said, forcing her pre-established mental link with Death to maintain itself. Have to push through, though, have to push through…

The surface emotions were relatively easy. Exceptionally heightened feelings of distress filled her mind. The fact that uncertainty wasn’t one of them bothered her to no end – Thrackerzod really believed following her orders was the best thing she could do. There was no doubt at all. Just a deep sorrow that came from the understanding she knew her friends lacked.

Corona wanted so badly to alter that part of Thrackerzod, but she needed to retain her energy. She went in deeper, dragging Death with her into the eldritch unicorn’s mind.

They passed the physical part of her mind easily, where all the biological instincts and muscle memories were stored. It was rather boring and empty, but it served as a buffer between them and Thrackerzod’s true mind.

A truly horrific thing. She and Death saw memories that didn’t exist in what they would consider time. They saw her ‘talking’ in three separate timelines simultaneously. They saw her bowing to Azathoth…

…Corona couldn’t take the sight of Azathoth. Her mind had to remove it for her. She turned to Death. “…Can you describe it to me?”

…EVERYTHING CONSOLIDATED INTO AN ABSOLUTE FOOL, ALL POWER TOGETHER IN THE LOWEST WAY.

“What?”

BUT THE FOOLISH AND THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH.

“…That sounds like something Flutterfree or Rev would say.”

IT IS.

Corona sighed, forcing the memories of Azathoth out of the way. “We need Z,” she spoke aloud. “Z… Z…” She sifted through Thrackerzod’s mind. “See anything?” she asked Death.

I HEAR BUZZING. LIKE FROM AN INSECT.

Corona’s eyes noticed something normal in the memories. “I see the demogorgons. They’re standing like a wall…”

And then everything snapped to black.

“…What the heck? Where’d it all go?” Corona asked nobody in particular. She reached out with her hands, scrambling for any mental threads. “This has never happened before…”

WE ARE NOT ALONE IN HERE.

“Did one of the Sweeties come in?”

“No,” Nyarlathotep said, appearing in front of Corona and Death. “I did.”

“You!?” Corona blurted. “How did y-”

“She called me,” Nyarlathotep said, walking around the two of them, a predatory expression on his face. “You’re prodding where you should not tread, Corona.”

Corona glared at him. “Why would you even care what I know? You’d like to see me go insane, right?”

Nyarlathotep put his face close to hers. “I would love nothing more than for you to fall to my gifts, Corona. But there are things you do not get to uncover.”

Corona grinned as she realized something. “You think I can mess up your plans somehow! That there’s something I can do that will ruin everything! Ooooh I bet you’re really mad the Matrices attacked when they did and put me on the track of something you actually cared about!”

Nyarlathotep scowled. “You will not be getting anything from Thrackerzod, of that I am certain. Furthermore…” Nyarlathotep pointed a finger at her head. “Say goodbye to your sanity.”

Ponyfeathers.

Corona knew outright escaping wasn’t an option here, so she did the next best thing.

Fight the elder god head on.

She rushed her hand forward, intercepting the mental attack he had sent toward her head. It passed right through her initial defenses, tearing away at her mind. She could feel her earliest memories start to peel away.

“Not… happening!” She shouted. Pushing all her magic into her mental projection. “RAGING SIGHTS! ALPHA-SEVEN-NINER!”

Roger.

Magical circles appeared around Corona and Thrackerzod’s bodies in the real world, shooting as much magic as they could into defending Corona’s mind. A third ring appeared above them.

“Attention!” Raging Sights called. “Nyarlathotep is attempting to destroy Corona’s mind! Any magic you can provide into the floating ring will be much appreciated!”

“YOU HEARD HER!” Allure shouted. “GIVE IT EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!”

The entire present League of Sweetie Belles did just that. Those that couldn’t made calls to people they knew. Magicians from across Celestia City started teleporting in to assist. One Sweetie in particular had a fractured crystal in her head instead of a gemstone, and was shooting more light energy into the magic rings than any of the other Sweeties.

Nyarlathotep grinned. “What exactly do you think more magic will do?”

“Keep me alive?” Corona suggested, for the moment holding her consciousness.

“You can’t die right now,” Nyarlathotep said, reminding her that Death was present. “You should be more worried about coming out of this with every diagnosable insanity, and some others.”

“Yeah, how about no?” Corona suggested, pushing back even harder. “RAGING SIGHTS! Try some editing in here!”

Negative. Nyarlathotep is anchoring his presence, somehow.

“Figures,” Corona muttered, trying to think of something else to do.

Death provided what he could. HE IS BEYOND ME. I CANNOT SEE HIS DEATH.

Nyarlathotep grinned. “See? You are still just a mortal, no matter how much power you have. More and more allies appear outside to give you power. In hopes that you will survive with your mind in tact. But it won’t happen. I am the spawn of Azathoth himself! The Crawling Chaos! I run the Eldritch Embodiment! You’re just a biological curiosity!”

Corona’s eyes flashed purple. “You’re about to be surprised.”

Nyarlathotep narrowed his eyes. “What are you tapping into?”

“There was a time, long ago, when I was completely controlled by an entity known as Majora,” she said, a strange purple heart-shaped object appearing behind her head, spikes surrounding her like a halo. Her ears twitched. “That entity is now trapped in a black hole, unable to do anything with her power. But I’ve carried the scars of her in me ever since that day. Something about you has awakened those things.”

Nyarlathotep roared. “NO!”

“HAVE A TASTE OF YOUR OWN MEDICINE!” Corona shouted, purple writhing tentacles of impossibility lashing out of her essence and surrounding Nyarlathotep. It pushed him back enough to give her access to Thrackerzod’s thoughts again. “Here we go… Just a little proddin-”

“E͇͞N̤O͈͚̣U͇̳̥̭̹̫G̜͔͍̦̝͖̫͞H̘̥̞̻͓̬̕”

Nyarlathotep left.

In the process Corona felt every bit of Majora’s essence vanish from her along with a tremendous portion of Thrackerzod’s mind.

She drifted back to the real world, taking a few steps back from Thrackerzod. She put her hand on a wall and actually threw up. “Aaaaah…”

“W-what happened!?” Allure blurted. “Did you win!?”

“Not really,” Minna answered for her. “More like a draw.”

Allure didn’t register that it was her daughter that had said that. “…Corona? Can you… explain?”

Corona tried to speak but just kept heaving instead.

WE SHOWED THAT WE HAD ENOUGH POWER TO RESIST NYARLATHOTEP’S MENTAL SHADOW, Death answered. SO RATHER THAN SUFFER A TRUE EMBARRASSMENT, HE CUT HIS LOSSES AND RAN, DRAGGING WHO KNOWS WHAT WITH HIM.

Corona gasped. “I… am never going to be able to do that agaiHUUUURK.” She trembled, slamming her second arm on the wall. “Sorry… For the mess…”

“Don’t worry about the stupid mess!” Allure blurted. “We need to get you to a doctor!”

“I… Am fine…”

THE ONLY REASON YOU AREN’T DYING ON THE SPOT IS BECAUSE I’M HERE.

“…Death, you’re supposed to have my back. I… GAAA- okay false alarm, nothing left to reGURGItate…” Why do I feel like I’m missing a lung?

Bot made some beeping noises. “Yes, 911? Corona needs medical attention, League of Sweetie Belles. Eldritch deity combat.”

“…Deity combat…” Thrackerzod said, staring off into space.

“R-right, Zod,” Corona said, trembling, but managing to turn her face to look at Thrackerzod. “How you feeling? He did something to… you.”

“He removed it,” Thrackerzod said, a hoof to her side. “He… He removed it. All of it!”

“But you’re still talking with the deep voice,” Squeaky said. “Don’t you lose that if you lose your eldritch half?”

“I’m not talking about that! He… I…” She rubbed her head. “I think he was trying to take anything away you could use against him. Any piece of information… Any protocol he installed in me… …He just took everything else with him in his rush.”

Allure gasped. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

“I… I don’t have to obey Azathoth anymore.” Thrackerzod blinked. “Or Hastur. Or any of them.”

Corona gave her a weak thumbs up. “Glad I could… Help…”

Allure dismissed her with a hoof wave. “Thrackerzod. Is this… Is it a good thing, for you?”

Thrackerzod stared at Allure. “I have no idea.”

“Then think about it. Above all else, don’t re-establish your contract with Azathoth without giving it some serious thought.”

Thrackerzod nodded slowly. She scrunched her face up, trying not to cry.

Allure pulled her into a hug. “It’s okay.”

“I… I was going to kill myself. I was going to kill you. If Lady Rarity didn’t work I was going to put a knife to Minna’s throat!” Thrackerzod wailed. “I… I…”

Corona stumbled over, sitting on the ground next to them. “You understand now, don’t you?”

Thrackerzod stared at her.

“You understand how what you were doing wasn’t right.”

Thrackerzod took a moment to think – but then she nodded.

“Good.” Corona let out a sigh. “That’s all I need.”

“…Didn’t you want information?”

“I did. But you don’t have that anymore. So I’ll just be happy with you having learned something.” She flopped onto her back. “That and a hospital bed.”

“I probably need one as well.”

“We’re in luck, because the paramedics are on the way! Woo!”

~~~

Olivia walked into Corona’s hospital room. “How are you feeling?”

Corona sat up in her hospital bed and shrugged. “Not like I’m about to die anymore. That’s good, I guess. Still no closer to solving this Topeka problem.”

“I might have something for you. So, you know how the Yith are consciousness-jumpers?”

“Yeah?”

“The only way I could get an audience with one is if I agreed to let them possess me for two days and do whatever they wanted aside from kill me.”

“Olivia, don’t do i-”

Olivia pressed a button. “Sorry, Amiga!”

Corona facepalmed. “Oh boy…”

A different look came over Olivia’s features. “Ah, the perfect skin tone.”

“That’s just creepy.”

The Yith folded her arms. “Oh, you’re the one who has questions? Right, right, right, the traaaade… Make this quick, all right? I’ve got a lot of human pleasures to experience and so little time.”

Corona shifted uncomfortably. “…Right. So, I need to know about Topeka.”

“Of course you do. Anything specific?”

“What is Z?”

The Yith raised her eyebrows. “Surprised you’ve even heard of Z.”

“You going to tell me or not?”

“Hmm… Well I’d have to invalidate the contract not to tell you, and that’d look bad. So fine. Z is the entity that defines the rules that operate Topeka.”

“What?”

“Z is the entity that defines the rules that operate Topeka.”

“I heard you the first time, I meant elaborate.”

“Fine. There are many, many ways a combination dream world could work. Everyone could do anything they wanted, nobody would ever become aware of the dreams, or everything that happened in dreams would leave lasting damage. Z is the entity that determines all dreams happen according to standard biological understanding, that deaths aren’t permanent, and that only a select few are dreamers. Z is the reason you can walk to and from dreams the way you do.”

Corona nodded. “So why does everyone want to get to Z?”

“To control it, of course. Z is a dreamer just like everyone else. If Z can be forced to be woken up, you can take the place of Z.”

Corona’s eyes widened. “And if the Embodiment did that…”

“Dreams could become an eldritch playground. Most everyone connected to Topeka would go mad in an instant if Nyarlathotep had his way.”

“Holy… And the Matrices would create a dreamscape that let them do anything… Don’t even want to think of what Flagg or the demogorgons would do…”

“Don’t know about Flagg. The demogorgons want to corrupt every universe they come in contact with to be like their homeworld. Not pretty.”

“…I can imagine…” Corona muttered, flopping back onto her bed. “What are you guys doing about it?”

“We have a button to sever ourselves from Topeka if things go south. For now, we watch.”

“Mmm. Any suggestions?”

“Get to Z yourself and take it over. Far as we can tell, it only takes a single entity to do it. We’re not sure why it’s so hard to get to, though. They’ve been fighting over Z for a long time.”

Corona shook her head. “And it falls to me to deal with this.”

“Yep! Good luck being the hero! I’m off to find fun people!”

“Sure.” Corona said, not looking at the Yith as she left.

She wasn’t cleared to leave the hospital yet – and even if she were, what would she really do? Everything was in Topeka now. She used her phone to send what she learned to Eve and then… that was that.

Find Z… How was she going to find Z before all of them…

There was a knock at her door.

“Come in,” she said.

Thrackerzod walked into the room. The two stared at each other for a moment.

“I need you to take me into Topeka,” Thrackerzod said. “I’m not sure I can do it myself anymore.”

“Sure. May I ask why?”

“I need to talk to Hastur. …Without risking my life.”

Corona’s expression softened. “Come up here.” Thrackerzod jumped up on the bed. She curled up in Corona’s lap like a big dog. The eldritch unicorn was significantly less steadfast and certain than usual.

Corona closed her eyes – and forced them both to sleep.

She found Thrackerzod in Topeka quickly. The unicorn was staring at other versions of herself jumping off a cliff into the gaping maw of Nyarlathotep.

“The Collector was nice enough to let you hate him, I hear,” Thrackerzod said. “He valued it when people voiced their disagreement. Liked differing opinions. I have a feeling the Embodiment would work better if it were like that.”

“You hate your masters?”

“I hate Nyarlathotep. Always have. The only one of the outer gods who had any interest in mortal beings, always fixated on driving them to madness to satisfy his own amusements. It was worse than the apathy of all the others.”

“And Azathoth?”

“…Azathoth is called the Blind Idiot for a reason,” Thrackerzod admitted. “He cares very little for anything. So little that his direct spawn can develop further beyond him than most. …Nyarlathotep is Azathoth’s son, as much as the word ‘son’ can apply to him anyway. He broke free long before I was created. …Most of the outer gods come from Azathoth. A Blind Idiot who can’t even wrangle his own spawn.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what it means about me.”

“I don’t know either. I can’t.”

Thrackerzod nodded. “But you try. That’s impressive.” She stood up and stretched her legs. “I don’t think Azathoth was a bad master. He treated me well and… ‘respected my wishes’ isn’t quite right. I think ‘acknowledged that I had wishes’ fits better. But he still signed me off to Nyarlathotep without much fuss.” She looked up at the sky. “…So I’m not going back. Just like the other me suggested.”

“…The League would be proud of you.”

“It’s not you all I’m concerned about,” Thrackerzod said. “I may be a ‘high daemon prince’ – or princess, whatever – but an entity of my relatively low stature becoming a free elder one? Unheard of. Blasphemous. Worthy of extermination.”

“We can protect you, you know. We’re not powerless anymore.”

“I know,” Thrackerzod nodded. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t just know ponies. I know other beings as well.” She looked at Corona. “Take me to Hastur.”

Corona nodded. She started walking – though didn’t get anywhere before Sparkler appeared.

“Hey! How’d it go?”

“…I’ll explain later,” Corona said. “We’ve got something to do first.”

“Uh… Okay.” Sparkler accepted this without batting an eye.

They shifted dreams… and arrived at an eldritch encampment in a dream in a cold desert of blue sand.

Nyarlathotep was waiting for them. “Thrackerzod, you’re not here to grovel, nor have you appealed directly to Azathoth’s court.”

“I am seeking the counsel of my direct superior, Nyarlathotep. That counts as appealing to Azathoth’s court.”

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, traitor.”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “And don’t think I’m trying to be sneaky. By the way, this is your fault. I hope you spend the rest of eternity thinking about the chain of mistakes that led to this moment.”

Nyarlathotep snarled. “You may have Hastur’s counsel, as is your right. But know that you will live to regret this decision, Thrackerzod. Your rebirth clause is in the process of being rescinded.”

“I’m aware,” Thrackerzod said with a smile. “Hey, Corona, have one of those glowing bottles? I think I’ll be taking one.”

“Got an infinite supply, Zod,” Corona said with a wink.

Nyarlathotep bristled. He turned and walked away. Hastur walked up in his place.

“…I’m not coming back,” Thrackerzod said. “I know you can’t understand.”

“I do not need to,” Hastur said. “Rest easy, Thrackerzod. I will not hunt you for retribution. If I am honest, I suspected this would happen one day. Furthering that idea: it’s about time.”

Thrackerzod nodded, tears in her eyes. “You’re way too progressive, Hastur.”

“You are the special one, Thrackerzod. I wish you luck in your life as a completely new sort of being.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’m not going to be able to prevent Nyarlathotep’s revocation of your rebirth clause. I also doubt I will be able to take you into Embodiment worlds ever again. But I can demand they keep everything else of yours. They cannot deny all that you’ve done for us, even if it was in the land of mortals.”

“Thank you, old friend.”

“No, thank you for showing me something new.”

The two ‘shook hands’, even though it didn’t make any physical sense to Corona or Sparkler.

Thrackerzod turned to Corona. “Wake me up now. I don’t want anything to do with this dream war. I will not fight the Embodiment.”

Corona nodded. “I understand.” She raised a hand – and woke Thrackerzod up.

Nyarlathotep walked back over. “Corona…”

“Nyarlathotep. Your entire fight was useless. I learned about Z from the Yith.”

Nyarlathotep bristled.

“I’m going to find Z. And I’m going to keep you from using it.”

“Once you become Z I will take you over!”

“If what I’ve been told is true, I can just redefine Topeka to not allow Z to wake up. Ever.”

Nyarlathotep had no response to this.

“See ya Nyarlathotep. Oh, by the way? Flagg’s better at what he does than you.”

“CO-”

Corona dragged herself and Sparkler to a dream on top of a giant hamburger. Corona flopped onto her back and let out a sigh of relief. “I have had way too much stress in me the last few hours. And not enough actual sleep.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“…Sparkler?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m glad you’re here. It’s nice not to have to go through this alone.”

Sparkler smiled warmly. “Don’t mention it. It’s the same way for me. Though I would like an explanation for what happened with Thrackerzod that I wasn’t aware of.”

Corona chuckled and told her everything about her and Death’s little escapade to the League of Sweetie Belles, the conflict with Thrackerzod, Nyarlathotep, Thrackerzod’s freedom, and what she learned from the Yith.

“…And you know the rest.”

“Looks like I missed a lot of drama.”

“You could say that. You could also say you saved yourself a lot of trouble and heartache. What happened to you in the Census?”

“As always my time spent waking proves to be rather useless. The Census is all ‘thank you for your report, please wait one to two weeks for action to be taken’. It’s organized but sometimes it’s so annoying.”

“It does help a lot when you and your friends are the ones who made the system.”

“Look at you, hero of Merodi Universalis, while I’m just a lowly Census unicorn. A number on a sheet of paper somewhere.” She rolled her eyes. “Now look at me being mopey here. It’s nothing to complain about.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll listen either way.”

“You know for being so fiery you’re a surprisingly good listener.”

Corona smiled. “I try to make the best of myself with what I have.”

“I can see why you’re people think so highly of you.”

“Wasn’t always that way,” Corona commented. “Used to be the girl who would break the rules. The one who skirted the edge of what was legal and what wasn’t. Then I wasn’t the one who was given control of the secrets and I went on a different path. One of a guardian.” She looked at her hands. “I’ve been given a lot of power. A Stand, nearly limitless magic, a device, power over fire, and the knack to understand and shape emotions and memories. As a pseudo-alicorn, my magic only increases with time…”

“You do seem to have won the lottery.”

“I was able to eke out a draw against Nyarlathotep…” Corona realized. “Holy Celestia, how strong am I?”

“Maybe that’s why Nyarlathotep fears you. He thinks you can do something to become Z.”

“But my powers don’t really translate to Topeka – at least not beyond a certain point. It’s just my will. Powerful and with a few mental tricks, but it’s not like I can blow the place up by power alone.”

“C’mon, you’re Corona Shimmer, you’ll figure something out.”

“Hmm...” She stood up tall. “Maybe all I need to do is walk toward Z. Just will myself to find it. See where that takes me.”

“Following destiny, huh?”

“Ka connected us together. I think it’s in a giving mood today.” She focused ahead – and took a step toward Z.

The dream she ended up in was a three dimensional field of colorful falling block shapes. They appeared on a yellow cube made of eight blocks, falling alongside dozens of different arrangements.

The dream was absolutely filled with demogorgons. Dozens of toothy-flower faced monstrosities turned to her and screeched.

Corona blinked. “Okay, so not the best idea maybe.”

“Retreat…?”

“Oh yes.” Corona moved to leave the dream – but then she saw something that gave her hope.

The Doctor pointing at demogorgons and making them vanish, several at a time. Even when they attacked all at once, they just vanished – awoken.

Corona picked up Sparkler. “Wh-OAH.” She jumped into the air over the demogorgons, flying down to the Doctor. He turned to her – expecting another attack – but stopped short of waking her up.

“What in time’s flow are you doing here?”

“You didn’t tell us everything,” Corona said, sideswiping a demogorgon coming from behind the Doctor. “That’s what.”

“You didn’t need to know!” the Doctor declared, wiping more demogorgons off the map.

“Turns out Luna was captured because of the war. And now all the Lunas are. And Valentine. It’s spiraling out of control, Doctor. This is no longer just the concern of Topeka.”

“Don’t forget about the part where Nyarlathotep wants to drive everyone Topeka touches insane!” Sparkler added. “That’s bad!”

“Yeah. I’m going to stop that.” Corona forced another demogorgon awake. “I’m going to find Z and make sure none of the sides in this war can do what they want with it.”

The Doctor nodded, blowing away the last of the demogorgons with his thoughts. “…I can see I’m not going to be able to stop you.”

“No, duh. Also, you’re not going to get away with half-truths or omission this time. Frankly I’m starting to believe what Vriska says about you.”

That cut the Doctor deep. “Why does everyone-? Never mind, fine, you’re here, might as well. As you know, Z is the entity that defines what rules Topeka operates under. Z is, presumably, from the first universe Topeka appeared in, though this isn’t really something we know for sure. We do know that if you can wake Z up, you can gain control of Topeka and define it by your own rules, creating a new dreamscape. Nyarlathotep desires widespread madness, the Matrices desire order and power, the Mindflayer wants an avenue to infect other worlds, and the Crimson Ones… I think they just want to watch the world burn.”

“Makes sense, since they’re aspects of Flagg’s consciousness.”

The Doctor blinked. “…Clever, clever as always…”

“What about the demogorgons?”

“I did say Mindflayer didn’t I?”

Corona cocked her head. “They’re part of the Mindflayer?”

The Doctor nodded. “The Mindflayer is a non-aligned eldritch being, similar to the Majora you faced in your past. It has discovered a way to infect the multiverse by calling out to powerful psychics in other universes and having them ‘summon’ the Mindflayer’s minions to that world. Already the Mindflayer has been sending its demogorgons through Topeka to find psychics. It’s an incredibly good deal for the entity that will only get worse if it’s allowed to succeed.” The Doctor flexed his wrist. “The worst part? The Mindflayer is easily the closest to Z out of all of them. If you try to find Z directly, you almost always run into Mindflayers keeping you from progressing.”

“Right. Here’s the big question. How do we fight them like you are? I’ve only seen you – and maybe Flagg – with this much control over the dreams. What’s the secret?”

The Doctor smiled cheekily. “Why, Corona my dear – that’s because I’m not dreaming right now. I’m physically here.”

Corona and Sparkler stared at him. “…What?” Corona asked.

“It’s not something those fighting in the war are able to do – eldritch cannot exist here, the demogorgons require mental connections to do their work, and pure physical code isn’t powerful at all. But a Time Lord physically standing in a world that can be shaped by psychic power? It’s a bit unfair. I suspect Flagg knows this and has placed himself physically in Topeka as well.”

“But how does that even make sense? Topeka isn’t a place!”

“It has to exist somewhere,” the Doctor said. “Due to its own nature, it can’t exist in just one universe. So it exists in several of its own unique universes that are constantly shuffling around, making it exceptionally difficult to just dial in.”

“How do we get here physically?”

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “There are drawbacks. Wounds you receive while physically herewill be real. You can’t just exert will to undo them.”

“Do I look like I care about a little risk? If I’ll be able to use my higher spells I’d be more effective than even you at clearing these demogorgons that are between us and Z. Just imagine what a cascading psychic burst could do if it was actually allowed to execute fully.”

The Doctor nodded slowly. “It would be enormously helpful. You are, in many ways, the perfect being to do this. A powerful dreamer, a powerful empath, and one with a determined, passionate heart.” He looked into her eyes. “…I trust you, Corona. I trust you to defend Topeka.”

Corona nodded. “You can count on me.”

The Doctor looked at Sparkler. “Normally it would take a while to get you to come here physically, but I just had a thought. Wake yourself up, but when you try to come back, focus on Sparkler here. Use the connection between you two to drag yourself physically here. Do not try to fall asleep, Corona. Understand?”

Corona nodded. “I do. I might be a few minutes – I’ll gather some allies in the waking world first.”

“Hurry,” the Doctor pleaded. “We do not know how close the Mindflayer is to Z. It could be about to claim its prize for all we know.”

Corona nodded. “Right.” She closed her eyes and woke herself up. She was still in the hospital bed – but she felt perfectly healthy now.

Lady Rarity looked up from the chair she was sitting in. “Oh! Welcome back!”

“We’re going back in,” Corona said. “Quickly. Is Death around?”

“I… think so?”

Corona lifted Raging Sights up, activating a magic location spell – easy for a signature as powerful as Death. She teleported him right into the room.

…CARE TO EXPLAIN?

“We’re going into Topeka to find Z and claim it so everybody doesn’t go insane. Your job is to get Lady Rarity in there, and come find me. I’m doing something a little different.”

I WOULD PREFER MORE EXPLANATION BUT IT APPEARS YOU ARE IN A HURRY.

Corona dissipated her gloves and placed her hands on Lady Rarity and Death’s heads, giving them a basic feeling of what was going on. “Got the urgency yet?”

“I think so?” Lady Rarity said, cocking her head. “That was all convoluted.”

IT IS CLEAR ENOUGH THAT YOU NEED OUR ASSISTANCE.

“Thank you,” Corona said. “Sending you both to sleep now.” She snapped her fingers, forcing them asleep.

Then she took a deep breath and focused on her mind – making it as awake as she could. She held her hands to the sides of her head, making a triangle of magic in conjunction with her horn. She willed herself not to go to Topeka, but to connect with Sparkler.

She wasn’t all that surprised when she found the connection instantly. They had been finding each other so easily over the course of this dreaming debacle; of course they had a strong link. She reached into reality, telling Raging Sights to tear a dimensional hole through that connection.

She promptly fell flat on her face on the yellow cube next to Sparkler and the Doctor. “Ow.”

The Doctor looked at Sparkler with a thoughtful expression. “I thought so.” He extended a hand to Corona. “Welcome to physical Topeka.”

She accepted the hand and stood to her feet, spreading her wings. “Doesn’t feel all that different.”

“Try casting a higher spell.”

Corona traced a figure-eight with her hands and spread her fingers wide. Everything in her field of view lit on fire. “Sweet.” She dreamed up a golf club. “Dream constructs still work.”

“I doubt you’ll be able to shape a dream anymore, or alter yourself with your will, but otherwise yes.”

Death and Lady Rarity arrived, the spirid rubbing her head. “I’m never going to get used to the feeling of everything sliding by my face…”

“There they are,” Corona said. “Hey guys!”

WHERE ARE THE OPPONENTS?

Corona wiggled her fingers. “In the next dream. Have to move a little closer to Z…”

“Remove most of the demogorgons from the dream so they’ll let you move to the next one,” the Doctor said. “Eventually you’ll pass their ‘fortifications’.”

Corona nodded, taking a fighting stance. “Everyone ready?”

Sparkler, Lady Rarity, Death, and the Doctor nodded.

She pushed them to the next dream. A meteor flying through space with normal gravity – absolutely covered in demogorgons.

Corona flexed her wrists. “Time to see if this really works. Stay back for a minute.” She pressed her hands together, summoning a small red spark between her hands. She sent it forward with her power into the mind of a demogorgon. It shook for a few seconds before waking up – infecting five nearby demogorgons with the spell, then five more, then five more… Until the entire meteor was cleared.

“…Do we even need to be here?” Lady Rarity asked.

NO DOUBT SOMETHING WILL GO WRONG AT SOME POINT.

Corona smirked. “Until then, I’m going to enjoy the curbstomp. Next dreeeeam!”

“Woohoo!” Sparkler shouted.

They shifted to a dream that was an infinite hallway – of course crawling with demogorgons. The same spell took care of them in quick succession.

Corona decided to have some fun. “Bacon Pancakes!” she yelled, flattening a few dreaming demogorgons with her Stand before they woke up. “You know, I missed you.”

Bacon Pancakes was not the kind of Stand that could respond to affirmation.

“Next dream!”

“And the Lady Rarity headache slideshow continues…” Lady Rarity muttered.

The next few dreams went much the same way – demogorgons falling before they even realized what was happening. It was way too easy.

“I can see why Nyarlathotep thought you might be a threat,” Sparkler said, whistling. “All you had to do was figure this out and you basically own the place.”

“Sometimes it feels like a burden to have a lot of power. A constant war in my mind to think about what’s right and what isn’t. But right now?” She engulfed seven demogorgons in a rush of flame. “Right now it just feels exhilarating.”

DON’T LOSE SIGHT OF WHO YOU ARE.

Corona winked at him. “Don’t worry. I’m not. But we’re in a lucky situation where all I’m doing is waking people up! Not any worse than your particularly potent nightmare. Which is frankly less than these monsters deserve.”

Lady Rarity sighed. “Let me guess. Next dream?”

“NEEEEXT DREAM!”

The next dream seemed empty at first. It was a forest lit by a haunting blue light that didn’t have a clear source. The sky was black and the sky was filled with floating white particles far too large to be simple dust.

“One of the Mindflayer’s worlds…” the Doctor said. “Or a mental image of one, anyway.”

Lady Rarity stooped down to investigate the base of the trees. “Everything is covered in… vines?”

“It appears to be one cohesive life form,” Sparkler observed. “This entire planet has been infected.”

“Entire universe,” the Doctor said. “The Mindflayer works fast. It’s known to infect universes in nearby clusters, usually moving along alternates of the same world. It works almost like an animal, wishing only to spread…”

AND IT ALSO HAPPENS TO BE RIGHT ABOVE US, Death observed.

“That’ll just be a dream construct,” the Doctor said, looking up. “No way the Mindflayer itself would ever bother letting its central intelligence be vulnerable while dreaming in Topeka.”

A psychic burst hit the Doctor directly, driving him into the ground. “Ow.”

Corona looked up as well, taking in the form of the Mindflayer. It… was a being of swirling darkness, consolidated in a figure rising out of the ground with four tremendous limbs and a single, drop-shaped head. The being had no features, but Corona could feel it staring into all their souls.

It was also the size of a sports stadium.

Corona whistled. “Nice.”

“How are we even going to fight this thing!?” Lady Rarity blurted. “I don’t think smashing is going to do much against eldritch smoke!”

“It’s still just a dreamer,” Corona said, creating a magical circle. “I’ve got this.”

She didn’t have it. The Mindflayer’s smoke flew past her, surrounding her in darkness. Since she was physically present, that gave it an in it didn’t usually have.

It shoved the essence of its smoke into Corona’s eyes, mouth, and ears, directly into her real brain. Corona knew of only one defense against this.

The old trick she had learned from Majora. Try to infect my mind; I’ll go infect yours.

Corona pushed her mental energy back along the Mindflayer’s connection. She didn’t seek understanding or control; she just wanted to wreak havoc on the Mindflayer’s consciousness. Had the Mindflayer physically been here, this would have been a pointless endeavor doomed to fail from the start.

However, as Corona had said earlier, it was still just a dreamer. Perhaps the most powerful dreamer in all of Topeka aside from Z itself, but still just an entity trapped within the same rules as everyone else.

All Corona had to do was wreck its mind enough to force it awake.

The Mindflayer let out a mind-piercing screech before vanishing back to its reality.

Corona put a hand to her head. “I have got to stop engaging eldritch abominations in mental combat.”

“You do appear to have a problem,” Lady Rarity joked.

“No kidding. Least I’m not puking my guts out right now.”

Death appeared in front of them. I AM BACK.

“…Back!?”

YOU WERE STUCK IN THERE A WHILE. I WAS EJECTED FROM THE DREAM.

“Oh. Huh. Oh crap that means…

THE MINDFLAYER COULD RETURN.

“Time to mooove!” Corona blurted. “We nee-”

They all heard slow, mocking clapping. A single ‘man’ walked out of the forest into their field of view. “Well done!” Flagg congratulated. “Well done!”

Corona grimaced. “…What did we do?”

“Oh, it’s mostly the Doctor here you should blame,” Flagg said, chuckling. “The fool actually believed me when I told him something.”

The Doctor glared at him. ”Flagg, what have you done!?”

“Nothing! You did all the work!” Flagg spread his arms wide. “You thought ‘there’s no way the Mindflayer could want the same thing we do. It must seek to control Topeka for itself’. And I confirmed this in that ‘list of enemies’ I gave you, Doctor. But did you ever stop to think why the demogorgons are always so close to Z but never do anything? Why they seem to be waiting around in every dream you shift closer to Z?”

“…They’re defending it,” Lady Rarity said with a gasp.

“Precisely! The Mindflayer, while intelligent, doesn’t really have much creativity within it. It wouldn’t be able to keep a realm of dreams operable if it found Z. But it really likes Topeka, so it decided it would be the defender of the central dreamer.” Flagg laughed. “And you just forced the Mindflayer out, and every demogorgon with it!”

The Doctor paled. “No…”

“Which means I have first dibs on Z. It won’t take very long for the Matrices and Embodiment to find out the demogorgons are gone either. The Mindflayer’s not going to be able to bring that much force back for a long, long time.”

“We’ll stop you,” Corona said.

The Crimson Ones appeared around Flagg. “You can try.”

Corona readied a shattering spell. Even if Flagg was physically here, that should do something. She pushed-

And then she noticed she was sitting on a beach chair, a red beach surrounding her. Sparkler was to her left. The unicorn removed her sunglasses. “What in Celestia’s name?”

“He just hit us with a dreeper,” Corona said, standing bolt upright. “Have to wake up. Now.”

“Actually you don’t,” Flagg said, appearing in front of them. “I’m currently not in the higher level of Topeka.”

“Your Crimson Ones are.”

“And if they were attacking you, you’d be waking up from the external pain,” Flagg pointed out. “Like being shaken awake.”

Corona narrowed her eyes. “…You want something.”

“That is correct,” Flagg said, smirking. “I would be a fool to ignore the clear protagonist of this little story.”

“Gee, thanks for the acknowledgement.”

“See, if I ignore you, you’ll just defeat me. If I attack you directly, the chances of me coming out on top are minimal, though not zero. But… If I have a talk with you, things can change.”

“You’re a liar, murderer, and basically the most evil thing in existence!” Sparkler blurted. “Why would we listen to you!?”

“Because I might say something interesting,” Flagg said. “You know by now, of course, that I fed the Doctor false information so he would eventually bring the Mindflayer down for me, yes?”

Corona nodded. “Pretty obvious at this point.”

“So, naturally, you would think I want to use Z for my own ends. Possibly to conquer something, to destroy some other world’s society, my general mode of operation. But what if I told you that wasn’t the case?”

“I might believe you if you told me what you actually wanted.”

Flagg’s eyes flashed a deep red. “To destroy Topeka completely, of course.”

Sparkler blinked. “…What? Why throw away that kind of power?”

“Why else?” Flagg threw his arms wide. “Imagine the chaos it would bring about! There are many nations like the USM who have taken to using Topeka for information gathering without understanding what it is. Many have even grown to depend on it. Lovers spread apart by grand distances have come together in dreams. It’s become a cohesive presence on the lower level. I could bring all of that crashing down in a single instant. It would be delightful.”

“Yeah, you’re a monster,” Corona muttered.

“But here’s the flipside of the coin,” Flagg said. “Those are my reasons for destroying Topeka.”

Sparkler pointed a hoof at him. “Essentially just ‘because I can and because it will tick off a lot of people’.”

“More or less. But there are other reasons as well… Corona, if Topeka were gone, personal dreams would no longer be invaded. No information would be spread. There would be no more espionage, no more threat, no more out-of-control spillover into Merodi Universalis. Think about how all your problems would go away if Topeka were gone. Of course the Doctor could never condone such destruction, it might drive a few people mad, and more than a few entities define their lives by Topeka… But i-”

“Shut up, I’m not going to listen to you,” Corona said.

Flagg shrugged. “Fine. Just assume that, because I’m ‘the incarnation of evil’, that I don’t have a good point from time to time. Good luck defining Topeka yourself. Or even getting there.” He vanished from the dream.

“Now we wake up,” Corona muttered. She psychically forced the two of them to the layer above.

Just in time for her to defend against another Crimson One trying to skewer her through the brain. “Not cool,” she muttered, throwing it to the side. It may not have been able to wake up – but she could disintegrate its mental energy with a spell.

She looked around. It was just her, Sparkler, and the Doctor. The Crimson Ones must have gotten Death and Lady Rarity. She didn’t see any sign of Flagg aside from the fragments of his consciousness.

Which, she could tell, were keeping them from moving out of the dream. “Can anyone else actually get rid of these things?”

The Doctor nodded, using his control over the dreams to push one away at a time. “Rather slow work, I’m afraid.”

Sparkler sat between the two of them, feeling rather useless.

Corona smiled at her. “Hey, don’t worry, I’m sure there’s something you’ll be able to do soon eno-”

Nyarlathotep appeared in the dream with Hastur and a small troop of eldritch beings. “Corona Shimmer… I see you found the secret of physical appearance.”

“Yeah!” She smirked. “But you aren’t happy about that, huh?” She threw a Crimson One at him.

He grabbed it with his mind and sent it away.

“Hey, how’d you do that?” Sparkler asked. “I wanna do that!”

“It comes with having a strong enough will,” Nyarlathotep said, taking a few steps forward. “And my will is beyond that of any other!”

Corona pointed a finger at him, her entire arm ringed with magic circles. “This is going to feel really, really good.”

And then Nyarlathotep had plowed his fist through Corona’s center, forcing her golden blood to come spraying out the back.

She screamed – but Raging Sights maintained the spell around her arm. She touched her hand directly to Nyarlathotep’s head, sneering. “Hey, Nyarlathotep. How does it feel to be the one woefully outmatched for once?”

“CORON-”

He tried to resist. He really, really did. He put all his force of will to keep himself in Topeka, alive and well. He pushed back against the spell willing that he would not be overpowered by some pathetic mortal’s cheating magic.

But he was just a dreamer.

He vanished from the dream.

Corona smirked at Hastur as she healed herself with her magic. “Oh that felt good. Did that feel as good to you as it did to me?”

Hastur made no response – he just stared at her in… fear? Was that fear?

The Doctor removed another Crimson One. “We should be able to move no-”

Hastur left the dream before the Doctor finished his sentence.

“MOVE!” Corona shouted. The Doctor, herself, and Sparkler jumped to the next dream.

The final dream.

Z’s dream.

It was a round room the width of at least ten football fields. The overall design was metallic and futuristic, the floor ringed with wide, sweeping circular inscriptions. They had appeared at the edge of the room. Ahead of them was Hastur. Ahead of Hastur was Flagg – but he was being slowed down by Agent Smith of the Matrices, the AI’s duplication ability matching Flagg’s red assistance.

In the center of the room was a blue pillar with hundreds of blue sparks flying around it.

Corona heard buzzing.

…Buzzing like an insect…

All three of them took off at a run toward the glowing form they knew was Z – the entity sitting there, waiting for them.

Hastur directed an attack behind him, pushing them back mentally. Corona didn’t take kindly to this, pushing back with a wave of fire that tossed Hastur forward, but also made him fall flat on his face. The three of them passed him, moving to catch up with Flagg and Smith.

Flagg glanced behind them, a strained smile on his face. “Ah, hello there! Mind helping me with this audacious conglomeration of random electrical impulses?”

Smith, to his credit, duplicated himself a few times in order to deal with more targets. Corona noticed he lost the ability to focus as well as he had been before…

She didn’t even try to wake him up. She just charged forward, propelling herself forward like a rocket. She felt Smith fire some bullets at her, going through her leg. She didn’t bother using her magic to heal herself – she needed to get there before anyone else. To-

“Incoming Mindflayer!” Hastur shouted, running faster now. The Mindflayer itself had appeared at the edge of the arena and rushed everyone else, warping the dream space around it to move its tremendous form forward.

Flagg, Smith, the Doctor, and Sparkler all stopped fighting and just started running. Corona felt them closing in on her… Using dream powers to catch up with her?

No… No that didn’t make sense.

Something else was ensuring all of them would arrive at almost the same time…

She looked at the glowing blue form of Z. It had no shape itself, but the things around it did. Every blue speck was a fly. Buzzing just like any fly from the real world would. And they were very agitated right now.

“Z, what are you doing?” Corona called. “Are you protecting yourself? Z!”

The Mindflayer ran into all of them, attempting to surround all in its smoky essence.

Corona reached out a hand and touched Z’s blue glow with the tip of her finger.

~~~

Corona woke up.

Not in the hospital bed, but her on bed, at her house in Lai.

…What…?

She got out of bed and summoned Raging Sights to her. “You remember Topeka, right?”

The last thing my memories have stored in them is that you touched Z.

“Yeah… this isn’t my empathy, though,” Corona said, taking a look around her room. “I’m not sure this is Topeka either…” She tried to summon a dream construct, but found she couldn’t.

Were we taken back to the real world?

Corona opened the door to her bedroom and found an endless white expanse greeting her. “Nope.”

She took a step out into the white expanse, finding it solid. After taking a moment trying to wake herself up, or to return to the real world, she opted to just start walking in a random direction.

She glanced behind her. She couldn’t see the doorway to her room anymore.

“That was fast…” she told herself.

She kept walking, finding nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Endless whiteness in every direction. She performed long-range in-depth scans, discovering only that, yes, there really was a floor beneath her and that, yes, it went on as far as her sensors could possibly go. There was nothing beneath it and nothing on top of it. The force of gravity was also precisely as it should be on a standard Equis.

She folded her arms. “Well this sucks. Uh… Gonna try something else. Raging Sights, try to lock on to a connection while I focus.”

Affirmative.

Corona closed her eyes and focused – trying to home in on Sparkler. She felt the connection almost immediately. She opened her eyes.

There was a door in front of her. It opened all on its own, revealing Sparkler on the other side.

“For once, you get to find me,” Sparkler said, smiling.

“Good, I was worried I would go mad in this expanse, completely alone.”

Raging Sights beeped in annoyance.

“Sorry sorry sorry!” Corona said, looking apologetically at the gems on the backs of her hands. “I need to stop talking without thinking.”

Chances of you actually doing so are minimal.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

It is only fair.

Sparkler blinked. “You know it’s really weird to only hear half a conversation.”

“Yeah, Raging Sights is weird like that. Doesn’t like talking audibly.” Corona put her hands down. “So… Any ideas about getting out of this white expanse?”

“Probably none you haven’t thought of already.”

“Right…” Corona said. The two of them took off and started walking – Sparkler’s door soon out of their sights as well.

“So, think one of them got a hold of Z and turned Topeka into this?” Sparkler asked.

“I don’t see why they would do this…” Corona said, scratching her chin. “It doesn’t fit what any of them want. They all want the easy to navigate network of dreams – except Flagg – and this is anything but.”

“What if we’re not in Topeka?”

“Where else would we be? A universe where our bedrooms appear in a white expanse because… reasons?”

“D-Sphere does that.”

Corona shrugged. “Well, if it is, we’re stuck here. Because none of my portal spells are working.”

Sparkler nodded. “…Maybe we just need to find others like you found me. Through connections.”

“Don’t have a strong connection to any of the other-” Corona blinked. “…I guess the Mindflayer was in my head for a while. I could probably use that.”

“Worth a shot.”

Corona closed her eyes, imagining the connection to the Mindflayer. It wasn’t as strong as with Sparkler, but she was able to focus on it after a bit of thought. She opened her eyes.

There was not a door in front of her. Instead, there was a dark translucent dome. Inside of it was a miniature of the round dream they had been in – and inside of it the Mindflayer, Doctor, Flagg, Smith, and Hastur were all fighting over… nothing. One would take one of the others out, only for them to re-appear in an instant. It was an unending cycle over nothing.

“They’re stuck in a nightmare…” Corona said, placing her hand on the dome – it felt like glass. “Eternally fighting for Topeka, but never getting any closer to what they want. Because it isn’t there. The glow of Z is gone.” She could feel their fear and strain through the dome. All five of them… they had become the same in this nightmare. Fighting for something they didn’t even remember.

Even Flagg was trapped…

“Why aren’t we in there?” Sparkler asked.

“Well, I touched Z first…” Corona said. “But I don’t know why that lets you be here.”

“Strong connection?”

“Maybe…” Corona said, walking around the dome. “…We should try to find Z.”

“Right. How do we do that?”

“Just think and it’ll probably happen,” Corona said.

They closed their eyes and started walking. When they opened them, the glow of Z and the buzz of its flies greeted them. The glow itself occupied a space only slightly larger than Corona herself, but the cloud of metallic blue flies made it seem significantly larger.

Corona and Sparkler felt no reason to be afraid.

“…Hi,” Corona said. “Z, right?”

That is what I’m called.

Z didn’t really speak – Corona just knew that was what it said. There was no voice to go with the words, or even a text to read from. She just knew the words. “Weird.”

It is the way I communicate.

“So… What is this place?”

A secluded section of Topeka altered specifically to accommodate this moment.

“And what is this moment?” Sparkler asked.

The moment you separate part of your consciousness to defend me from within, to ensure the survival of Topeka.

Corona blinked. “Really? I mean, I can do it – it’d make me sluggish for a few weeks or months while I work my mind back to normal – but that sounds a little drastic.”

I brought you into Topeka specifically for this purpose, Corona. I awoke you because of your instinct to guard and protect, because of your heart, but also because of your abilities. You would be able to survive the process given the way you have trained your mind. Most would not – they would have to become me and give up their waking lives.

Corona’s expression saddened. “…You have a waking life, don’t you?”

It is long behind me. There is nothing for me in that world. Not anymore.

“Everyone thinks you’re in a coma you will never wake up form.”

Yes. I have no desire to go back. I am not requesting you abandon your life to become me.

Corona nodded. “Good. I really didn’t want to. So just… I give you a piece of myself and you’ll use it to protect yourself forever?”

Yes. It was what I needed to happen. I had trapped myself within my own rules. This is a workaround.

“…Why does Topeka exist?” Sparkler asked.

Because it existed in my world, a connection of all sleeping individuals, of which a select few were aware. I was born with the natural ability to shape the original Topeka, and I eventually mastered it – and spread it to other worlds, to share it with others. The way it brings people closer… It is pleasing to me.

Corona nodded slowly. “I get it. I think I do, anyway. You view it as a gift you give everyone.”

Yes.

Corona nodded. “All right. So I just… will part of myself to you?”

Exactly. I can guide you through the process. There will always be an out if you feel like I am taking too much or moving too quickly – I do not want to cause permanent psychological damage.

Corona took in a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Okay.” She pushed her mind out, touching Z. It pulled back gently, taking parts of her consciousness. Z worked extremely carefully, going out if its way to gently ease parts of her mind away. There was no sudden jarring pain, just a slow onset of tiredness.

Z unearthed memories as it moved through her mind. Her yelling at Princess Celestia… Her domination of Canterlot High… Her redemption… Her explorations… Her friends…

Private moments came to the surface. Conversations she’d had with Lady Rarity in confidence. Deep, personal moments with Sparky back in the day.

The memory of Eve almost giving away her secret just a few days ago…

Corona recoiled from Z.

What is it?

“Those… those should stay private.”

Corona, I will never do anything with them. If it makes you feel better I will erase the memories I absorb after I reach stability. I have no interest in your private life or the intimate moments you share with your friends.

“That’s not it… Well that’s part of it, but that’s not it.” Corona looked at Z. “You do know what Topeka does, right? It destroys privacy. People see moments they really aren’t supposed to see in here – they get to know the intimate details of each other’s subconscious. That’s… That’s not meant to be! If someone’s struggling with deep, violent urges, but they’ve got them under control, a dream shouldn’t make you think less of them! People shouldn’t be paranoid that their dreams are out to get them! There shouldn’t even be dream wars at all! People shouldn’t be trapped in comas!”

Those things will end when I become what you will make me.

“That’s just the wars! I’m sure some of the Lunas will be kept out of spite. Or infected by the MIndflayer. And what about all those people who can be driven insane by dreams? I’m pretty sure Nyarlathotep can work his way into anyone’s mind the slow way if he has to. Entire societies can be brought down because someone obtains a nuclear launch code or something from a high ranking official!”

As the Doctor told you, relatively few become full dreamers.

“But those that do have power, even if they don’t use it. I’m sure you see it, Z. You see what evil can be done when dreamers can hide in the shadows. And there aren’t really any true defenses… Just damage control from what you’ve done.”

But it is beautiful, Corona. The connection.

“People need more than dreams to be together. The real world exists for a reason. Dreams are there for flights of fancy.” Corona looked right at Z. “Holy Starstorm, Flagg was right.”

You’ll listen to what many consider to be the incarnation of evil?

“He’s right for the completely wrong reasons, but he’s right. In this case… Destruction is the best option.”

You cannot take me out, Corona.

“I can wake you up,” Corona said. “And this entire thing will come crashing down. Topeka will end.”

If you do that you will never see Sparkler again.

Corona blinked. “What? I’ll just go visit her in the Sparkle Census.”

“Yeah!” Sparkler added. “What, you think you can do something to me?”

I don’t have to. Because you only exist because of Topeka.

“…W-what?” Sparkler said.

Corona dreamed you up on her first day here because she was lonely. She didn’t want to walk the endless dreams without someone to talk to. So her subconscious tapped into her immense will to create you. A companion with a face – and name – that would be very familiar to her.

“No…” Corona said, haunted. “No, that can’t be right!”

Think about it, Corona. Have you ever seen any trace of Sparkler outside Topeka? Why do you have such a strong connection to her? Has she ever interacted with any people when you aren’t actively present?

“She was with the Doctor when I went away that one… time…” She blinked. “He knew.”

Yes. Sparkler vanished when you left, and re-appeared when you came back because you expected her to be there. He felt no need to inform you of this.

“I… I think I’m beginning to understand Vriska…” Corona said, putting a hand to her head. “W-why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“Yeah! I’d like to know if I’m real or not if someone sees me vanish!” Sparkler shouted.

You’re real, as real as a split consciousness can be. You share Corona’s mind and knowledge. Do you actually know anything specific about your life in the Census? Were you ever actually able to accomplish anything? Did you ever try to call Corona?

Sparkler gulped. “Uh… Yeeeeah, I think he’s right.”

Corona glared. “So, what, if I destroy Topeka I’ll never see her again?”

That is correct. Her split consciousness form exists only because Topeka allows it. It is how Agent Smith duplicates himself.

Corona curled her hand into a fist. “…You… You…”

Just let me back into your consciousness and we can end this confrontation.

Corona’s ears twitched.

She decided to punch Z since she wasn’t able to think straight. It seemed like the best option at the time.

~~~

Corona woke up in the hospital bed – alone.

“Raging Sights?”

You just punched Z.

“Did I… destroy Topeka?”

Unknown.

“Let me see if I still have a connection…” She forced herself to calm down, let the anger flow out. She touched a connection…

Sparkler was still there. All she had to do was go back. It would just be a moment…

A demogorgon charged through the door to her room, mouth wide open and screeching its horrifying call. It plastered its sharp, toothy mouth on her chest while she was distracted.

The pain was immense – but she struck back, lighting the creature on fire. It hissed in pain, but it made a wide swing with one of its claws, skewering her eye.

~~~

Corona woke up on a passenger airplane with a start, breathing heavily.

She looked down at her chest. She had her battle dress on and was completely uninjured. She ruffled her wings and touched her face – no wound.

…Was it all just a dream?!

That didn’t sit right with her – she remembered it so clearly. There was this dream world, Topeka, and this creature Z, and Sparkler had been there but she wasn’t real, and… The Doctor was there, right? Flagg too? Had Death been around? What was Olivia doing…?

“Raging Sights, don’t let me forget anything about this dream.”

Memory degradation has already begun.

“Just do it!” Corona blurted, drawing attention from many of the passengers in the airplane. She didn’t care.

Affirmative.

Corona’s mind locked in to place thanks to Raging Sights’ magic, and she was able to parse through her… already foggy memories of the dream. There had been so many layers, dreams within dreams, people physically entering the dream realm…

She had to still be dreaming, right? That world in the hospital had been the real world. She couldn’t have dreamed all this up. She hadn’t known much about Nyarlathotep or what Thrackerzod was going through. …But she only remembered the feelings of those events now. What were the actual physical details? Had there actually been any?

Right, right, if she was dreaming, she would have no idea how she got here. She thought a moment… She was on a flight in a universe that didn’t allow teleportation, going to see an old martial artist who might know a thing or two about making full use of her ears in combat.

She even remembered deciding she was going to sleep on the flight, putting away her book and closing her eyes intentionally. She also remembered having a conversation with the passenger right next to her!

Ah… A Twilight. A unicorn Twilight from the Sparkle Census, Corona remembered, even if she didn’t remember her designation. But who could remember Sparkle Census designations?

There it was. A way out.

“Sorry, odd question, what was your designation again?” Corona asked her.

The Twilight blinked at her with an odd expression. “JJ-8IuN. Any reason why?”

“No reason…” My subconscious could know the format of designations, or Z could have information about it from another mind. This could just be an elaborate trick…

Could I have really dreamed the whole thing?

Her very soul screamed that she hadn’t. But she was no longer certain. She remembered everything about this ‘reality’ on the airplane. She didn’t remember the dreams of Topeka clearly. She was still Princess Corona Sunset Shimmer, PhD…

...Was Sparkler just a manifestation of this pony next to me? W- Corona blinked. Sparkler was just a creation of my mind in Topeka. She wasn’t really able to describe the Sparkle Census or do anything in it… If that had been a dream, she would have been able to exist in the ‘top’ world just fine! There was no way my mind could create that complex of a narrative!

…Right? But what if it just filled in blanks for me? How can I…

…There was never a sign of the Sparkle Census in all of Topeka. Corona’s eyes widened. Not a single Sparkle Census dreamer. Some people who were aware and who had been to the Census, but never a citizen. Corona turned to ‘JJ’, eyes sparkling. If that’s the case, neither Z nor I know what the intricate details are of a Sparkle Census unicorn’s life.

“Hey, JJ?”

“Hm?”

“I’m going to invade your privacy for a bit, please don’t hate me if I’m wrong.” She placed a bare hand just under JJ’s horn and dug through her memories. Find me something completely mundane but full of details. Find me the exact layout of a library in the Sparkle Census. Oh, you can? Then find me a map of the districts. Where is that in relation to the Grinder? What about the Council? Does the Council even have a building? What’s it look like? Where are the Census intake stations? What path do you take to work each day? What’s the plot of the latest book you read? Recent Sparkle Census history? How’s the next door Twilight’s personality different from yours? What’s your opinion of your closest friends? Corona laughed inwardly as the interior of ‘JJ’s’ mind began to break down in contradictions.

Enough, Z said. You are clearly too determined for me to outwit.

Corona opened her eyes, standing with Sparkler in the white expanse, Z in front of them.

Do what you will.

“…I don’t think you’re a bad person,” Corona said. “…I’m sorry for punching you, I let my anger take over me.”

I understand that. Do not worry, the angry lash did not offend me – merely worry me.

Corona nodded. “It’s time to return to reality, Z. Back to the world you left behind to create this one. There are real people there who aren’t clouded by a constant shifting of reality around them. I’m sure they miss you.”

Corona, I don’t know if you’ve realized this, but reality is a mess. There’s always evil, destruction, and unfortunate truths. It’s a confusing mess no one can navigate.

“How is that really much different from here?” Corona asked. “You can’t trust anything in Topeka. You can’t trust other people, because they might lie to you about what’s going on, using you to further their own ends. Even if their intentions are good, what they tell you might just be wrong, even if they believe it’s right. You can’t even rely on yourself because you know that you know nothing!” Corona shook her head. “It’s the same either way, Z. You can’t trust yourself and you can’t trust anyone else. Nobody knows, Z.”

What do we do then?

Corona sighed. “We do the best we can. Weigh every source of authority. …Wing it, basically?”

Sparkler chuckled.

That sounds absurd. But they are truly wise words.

“The unfortunate truth is that life inherently sucks a lot of the time. But trying to replace it with something else… That never works.” She extended her hand, feeling Z’s bugs fly around her. “Go home, Z. Do your best there.”

If that is what you demand.

Corona nodded. She snapped her fingers – forcing Z to wake up.

The blue power of Z transferred to her in an instant. She turned to Sparkler, features torn. “…I have to let you go.”

“I know,” Sparkler said, wiping her eyes. “I’m just part of you anyway.”

“Either way, I had to sacrifice part of myself…” Corona mused. She pulled Sparkler into a hug. “…I don’t care if I just made you up. You’re real to me.”

Sparkler started bawling. “C-Corona!”

“Shh…” She held Sparkler up and looked into the unicorn’s eyes. “I’ll remember you.”

And then Sparkler was just gone.

Corona swallowed hard. With her magic, she cleared her face of the tears so she wouldn’t look like she’d just been crying.

She summoned the gray dome to her and broke it, making the fight between the Doctor, Flagg, the Mindflayer, Agent Smith, and Hastur stop.

“The war is over,” Corona said, showing them the blue light. “I have the power of Z now.”

The Doctor grinned. “Good going Corona!”

“You’ll want to take that back,” Corona said, smiling sadly. “Because I’m going to use this power to end Topeka. With a thought, the entire system will come crashing down.”

Four of them stared at her in disbelief. The fifth one laughed. “I knew you had it in you!” Flagg cheered.

Corona willed that he would get punched in the face by an invisible fist. “You were right about what to do, Flagg. But your motivations and reasons behind doing so still despise me. You care nothing for the sacred privacy of people. You just want to watch the world burn.”

Flagg stood up and shrugged, having nothing to say.

“Also, Doctor?” Corona narrowed her eyes. “You should have told me about Sparkler.”

A guilty expression came over the Doctor’s face. He opened his mouth to respond.

“Don’t say anything,” Corona ordered. “You may be a hero – but you are also a silver-tongued snake.” She looked down at him. “I’m not going to just let you talk me down with clever words and manipulative ideas. When Topeka falls, you can devote yourselves to those dreamers you wanted to protect. You can be their connection if you want it so much.”

The Doctor’s expression was unreadable. Corona had no idea if he would do that or not.

She turned lastly to Hastur. “I’m sorry for what your life is.”

Hastur nodded. “The sentiment is appreciated, but not needed.”

“But it is,” Corona said, shaking her head. “Mindflayer, Smith? I have nothing to say to you two. Go back to your worlds and live without Topeka. Mindflayer, if we cross paths again I will probably have to kill you or seal you away. My suggestion is to never get anywhere near Merodi Universalis.”

The Mindflayer let out a guttural scraping sound Corona assumed was agreement.

Corona lifted her hand and spread her wings. “And that’s all I have to say. Goodbye.”

And then everyone in Topeka woke up.

Coma patients included.

The blue power fizzled out of Corona – she didn’t want anyone to be able to use her to recreate it. The only thing she used the power for aside from destroying Topeka was to return herself to her hospital bed.

She appeared in the real world, already standing.

Lady Rarity rushed her into a hug. “You’re back!”

“Yeah… I’m back…” Corona said, wiping her eyes. “And I did it. …Topeka’s gone. It’ll never bother any of us again.”

Lady Rarity blinked. “…I trust that this is a good thing?”

“I think so,” Corona said, looking into the distance. “But I can’t be sure. I can never be sure.” She shook her head, a sad smile on her face. “Question everything, Lady Rarity. Even yourself and those you trust. It might be wrong.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Wise words.”

Corona yawned. “You can tell Eve that everything’s taken care of. I… am going home. And I am going to get some actual sleep. In my own bed. Without worrying about fate-of-the-world dreamscape wars.”

“I’ll take care of everything, don’t you worry,” Lady Rarity said, smiling warmly. “You get the rest you need.”

“Thanks,” Corona said, pulling Lady Rarity into a hug. “You’re the best.”

“I try.”

Corona set her down – and teleported away. She traversed dimensions to Lai and entered her bedroom.

She flopped on the bed, arms splayed.

There was no sleep spell needed – she was already asleep.

Asleep and dreaming happily.

~~~

Thrackerzod walked into the League of Sweetie Belles – and was amazed at what Pinkie had done to the place. Red, white, blue, and pink decorations covered every surface of the room. Images of Thrackerzod smiling lined the walls – even a few artist’s renditions of her more eldritch forms seemed to be enjoying themselves. Her elder-sign cutie mark was on display in the center of the room, hanging from the ceiling like a disco ball. She noticed a few eldritch runes glowing in nearby walls, meant to evoke a feeling in her of belonging.

It was working.

“WELCOME TO THE FREEDOM PARTY!” Pinkie shouted. “I’ve got red white and blue straight from ‘Murica itself! Even invited Valentine! FREEEEDOM!”

Valentine looked at the party blower in his hand. “…I still don’t know why I’m here.”

“It’s the theme of the party, shoosh, enjoy yourself. Take solace knowing Merodi Universalis is celebrating LIBERTY for once. You can choose to think of this as your values leaking into our society.”

Valentine tried to speak but he ended up just blowing the party blower.

“That’s the spirit!” Pinkie ran over to Thrackerzod and dragged her to the middle of the League’s main hall. “EVERYONE LISTEN UP – THIS IS THRACKERZOD’S DAY! Make it great, okay? BRING ON THE FREEDOM PRESENTS!” A firework went off above Thrackerzod’s head.

“Congratulations Thrackerzod!” Bot said, running up. She dropped off a present in front of her. “Open it!”

Thrackerzod teleported the present out of the box without unwrapping it. It was a tape recorder. “…Thanks?”

“Press play.”

Thrackerzod did. Bot’s voice came through the recorder.

“I will stand by you until the end!”

Thrackerzod rough, rocky exterior broke. She let a smile crawl up her face. “…thank you.”

“YAY!” Bot declared, pulling Thrackerzod in for a hug. “Friends!”

“Friends,” Thrackerzod admitted.

Squeaky and Allure piled themselves on next.

“We’re so proud of how far you’ve come,” Allure said. “We’ll make sure you never regret your decision.”

“You’ve always been a part of our family,” Squeaky added.

Then Suzie, then Burgerbelle, then Minna, then numerous other Sweetie Belles piled themselves on next.

Thrackerzod, for one of the rare moments in her life, allowed herself to grin widely. “You know, for a bunch of short-lived meat sacks, you’re all the best.”

“Thrackerzod’s the best-hoo!” Thrackerzod’s native Scootaloo said, coming out from behind a hidden column. “Bet you weren’t expectin’ the Scootaloo-hoo to show up, were ya?”

Thrackerzod rolled her eyes. “No I was not. Long time no see. Have you actually successfully wooed anyone yet?”

“No,” Apple Bloom said, revealing herself. “Ah suspect ka curse, though I’m not sure if it’s her ‘anything that moves’ attitude that’s the curse or the fact that she never gets anyone.”

“I will conquer the language of love!”

“You said you conquered it last week! Then you got thrown out a window!”

“Defenestration, baby!”

Thrackerzod rolled her eyes. “You morons are also, conditionally, the best.”

“Ah, that’s sweet baby, wanna see where this goes?”

“No,” Thrackerzod responded, a smile on her face. “I will never even consider coupling myself with the likes of orange filth like yourself.”

Scootaloo blinked. “Was that racist? That sounded racist.”

“Just anti-Scootaloo.”

“Ah sweet, I love it when they play hard to get!”

“As you can see, she’s just as delusional as ever,” Apple Bloom said. “Nice to see ya’ again, Zod.”

“Glad you could make it as well.”

“Good, cause you’re not going to be so glad about the last visitor.” Apple bloom shuffled out of the way nervously, revealing Rarity.

“…Ah. ‘Sister’. I suppose you would be invited,” Thrackerzod deadpanned, her smile gone.

Rarity sighed. “Look, I know I wasn’t always the best sister. Okay, I was never a good sister and if I was I would have cared that you were trying to kill Twilight all the time. But can we just take a moment, forget all that, and have a party where we actually celebrate you? As much as you may think I don’t care, I would actually like to see that.”

The slightest hint of a smirk came up Thrackerzod’s lips. “Sure. If there are any stallions here, you don’t have to restrain yourself.”

Rarity let out a sigh of relief. “Oh thank god you’re not going to be stuffy.”

“Though for the love of all horrors in the furthest ring, do not hit on a Silver Belle. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s wrong in so many ways.”

“I thought you were the eldritch creature born of a decidedly raunchy relationship between three siblings from separate timelines?”

“That’s Nussula’ch,” Thrackerzod said. “I was born from a spontaneous eruption of what you would consider Azathoth’s acne.”

“…How did I not know this about you?” Allure asked.

“Because you never asked.”

Rarity snorted. “Free, but still the same as ever.” She paused for a moment – then rubbed Thrackerzod’s mane. “I don’t really know if you’re my sister, Thrackerzod. There is something here, I think.”

Thrackerzod nodded. “It would be unwise and unnecessarily cruel of me to deny your attempts to rekindle our lost relationship.”

“…You really have changed. A lot.”

“Talking to oneself all day every day tends to bring about, if not madness, then great change.”

Pinkie giggled. “Yep! Now who wants to play throw pies at the cardboard cutout of Nyarlathotep?”

“Me,” Hastur said, reaching for a pie.

“Oh. Hastur.” Thrackerzod blinked. “You came?”

“Nyarlathotep’s contract has ended. Azathoth has expressed complete apathy about your departure according to Cizza. So here I am. To support you as well as for some personal therapy.” He threw the pie at the cardboard cutout of Nyarlathotep. The cutout exploded in a violent burst of eldritch energy.

Pinkie produced another cardboard cutout. “I have lots more. Keep destroying them, people!”

Thrackerzod smirked. “Oh this is going to be fun…”

~~~

“And I think that’s everything,” Lady Rarity told Eve and Luna, stopping a moment to let herself breathe.

Eve blinked. “Wow.”

“She made the right decision,” Luna asserted. “Topeka, as I saw it on my travels, was an innate disruption of the nature of dreams. They are not supposed to be accessible to just anyone.” She looked into the distance. “The dream realm only needs scant few protectors. If it has too many, then it is no longer a matter of being protected – but controlled.”

“She probably made the Doctor upset,” Lady Rarity pointed out.

“He’s not the type to seek revenge,” Eve said. “He’ll accept what happened and move on. Or go out and change something himself.” Eve looked at Lady Rarity. “How are you doing?”

“I feel like my mind is soup and I can’t keep all the facts straight and, despite what I just told you, I really don’t know what happened in the end. They were all going to run for Z. Corona destroyed Topeka and freed everyone.” She shrugged. “She’ll probably tell us when she wakes up.”

“It won’t be for a long time,” Luna said, closing her eyes. “She truly exhausted herself over these last few days. She needs to enjoy her rest – and her own dreams.”

Lady Rarity smiled. “I agree. …In fact, I may join her. Not in a shared dream, mind you, but just going to sleep.” She yawned. “I may have been groggy the entire time, but it still feels like I exerted too much energy…”

“It’s fine, I’m sure Renee will let you take a day or two off,” Eve said with a smile. “It’s not like the fate of the world depends on you right now. You already took care of that.”

Lady Rarity bowed. “I shall take my leave. Until we meet again.”

“It is always an honor, Lady Rarity,” Luna said, bowing in return.

Lady Rarity skittered out of the throne room, the doors closing behind her.

“Corona’s come a long way,” Eve said, out of the blue.

Luna nodded. “As have you. I am certain it is no accident that you two have grown in stature, power, and maturity together into your own kinds of leaders.”

Eve nodded slowly.

“And your own kinds of heroes.”

Eve rubbed the back of her head. “Yeah… I guess we are heroes, huh?”

Luna nodded. “The bond between you two is a powerful and deep one, Eve. Continue to nurture it as you move on in life. You will not regret it.”

“Luna, I’m the princess of friendship, I know how this works.” She nudged Luna playfully. “You don’t need to tell me how to do my job.”

Luna smirked. “…No, I suppose not.”

~~~

Corona sat under the orange tree, only vaguely aware of anything happening around her.

She was perfectly fine with that. The orange blur, the vague sensation of the tree trunk at her back, the indiscernible distance…

She was happy with the simple world around her. She took in a long breath and let out one twice as long. She was content.

She stroked her hand gently over the purple unicorn sitting in her lap, resting just as she was.

“Mmm, five more minutes…” the purple unicorn muttered, the words whispered into Corona’s mind, like words were supposed to be in a dream.

Corona smiled softly. She didn’t respond to the words – she just kept petting the unicorn.

The smile transferred to her physical self, laying in her bed.

Raging Sights decided that meant everything was fine.

084 - Punch That Cookie

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

085 - Reality Ensues

“I should have known the moment we got in this Skiff with you three that something was going to go wrong, but nooooooooo,” Starbeat said, clinging to her seat, goggles plastered to her face. “I, for once, completely blanked checking the ka of the situation! Well, it certainly says something’s going to happen now!”

O’Neill forced the Skiff into a sharp upward climb. “Quit yelping start helping!”

“What am I going to do? Pear has the science taken care of!”

The diminutive green Gem laughed. “I am going to hotwire this dimensional drive, just you watch me!”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works,” a Flat Scootaloo said. “If something’s broken you don’t ‘hotwire’ it, silly!”

“Do you have a million neural processors inside a computerized data core connected to you? No? Then shut up and let me SCIENCE!, clod!”

“Predictions suggest your ‘SCIENCE!’ is going to give us unintended consequences,” Starbeat muttered.

“I only care if it lets us live,” O’Neill quipped, twisting around a green laser. “I’m not getting assimilated today.”

“Are they still saying ‘resistance is futile’?” Flataloo laughed. “What losers!”

“We still can’t fight them in a Skiff,” Starbeat pointed out. “All we can do is run…”

“Hotwiring complete!” Pear said. “Buh-bye Borg!”

“It’s not hotwir-” Flataloo began. She was cut off in the middle of her sentence as the Skiff passed through a portal, closing it behind them so the Borg couldn’t follow.

Flataloo’s body glitched and then shattered like a pane of glass.Pear’s let out a yell, her body poofing as she was forced to retreat into her gemstone. Starbeat grabbed her horn and let out a pained wail.

Every light in the Skiff went offline for a moment, and artificial gravity disengaged. Luckily O’Neill and Starbeat were strapped in, so they just felt their internal organs do a flip-flop.

Starbeat groaned. “My head…”

The lights in the Skiff came back on – but several of the consoles were displaying error messages. Certain controls were labeled ‘DISABLED’ and warning symbols appeared on virtually every surface.

O’Neill read the error code. All magic-based systems have been disabled by this universe. Most esoteric systems have been disabled by this universe.

“Oh for the love of…” O’Neill put his hand to the bridge of his nose. “Forced standard physics? Really?”

“Ow ow ow ow,” Starbeat muttered, holding her horn. “The pain… It is a deep pain…” She breathed in air with a deep hiss. The pain in her horn began to fade as the magical protrusion became nothing more than a rounded bone. She blinked. “Right, so, my ka sensors are down. What’s the Skiff have?”

O’Neill blinked. “…I have no idea what you’re saying.”

Starbeat processed this – right. The translator spell must not be working. Good thing she actually learned English a while ago because she knew she’d be in this situation eventually. “Ahem. My ka sensors are down. What’s the Skiff have?” she said with an Equish accent, where harsh consonants came through with the slightest hint of a neigh.

“Nothing but air,” O’Neill answered.

“It has more than air,” Starbeat muttered, looking at the console. “We have radio, projectile weapons, the normal thrusters...”

“Not shields, magic, dimensional travel, or FTL,” O’Neill pointed out. “And that’s the important stuff.”

“These things are designed to deal with forced physics of all kinds,” Starbeat huffed. “We’re fine.”

“We burnt most of our power in that firefight. It ain’t recharging. And those thrusters you mentioned are damaged.” O’Neill tapped the screen.

“We sure depend on our magical self-recharging batteries to save us when we’re adrift,” Starbeat muttered. She rubbed her head. “What’s the protocol for this sort of thing?”

O’Neill flipped a switch. “Turn on the distress beacon so they can find us when they finally come looking. Then check the air, food, and water.”

Starbeat glanced at the screens, furrowing her brow. “The air recyclers seem to be working well, should be fine for months with just…. Two of us.” She gulped. “Flataloo’s dead. I think Pear’s fine.”

O’Neill leaned to check Flataloo’s chair, examining the ‘glass’ shards. “I thought we had things that forced reality to keep this from happening?”

“They’re largely magic based. Versions do exist that can work in mundane universes, but they have to have a constant connection to another universe to do it.” Starbeat shook her head. “We didn’t exactly plan to come in here.”

O’Neill nodded. “Water is easy. Skiff comes packed with plenty of emergency rations. Yep, we can be here for months and not die. Be glad the dimensional drive was the only thing that got damaged in that fight – if there had been anything else screwed with; we might have just exploded when we arrived here. Charming thought, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” Starbeat muttered. “…Think we can do anything besides sit here? We have basic sensors, right?”

O’Neill’s fingers flew across the console, bringing up a map of the system they were in. “Matches records for standard Earth system. We’re somewhat near Jupiter. Picking up lots of signals, suggesting that we’re at least in a space-age world.”

“Oh thank goodness, we’ll probably find someone who can help us. I don’t want to sit here in a Skiff in the months it’ll take Merodi Universalis to track us down.”

“They could find us in a couple hours.”

“They’ll realize you’re gone in about a day, assuming no time dilation. Then they’ll have to track you down, and since we were in a firefight with the Borg they might have territorial problems to deal with.”

O’Neill shook his head. “Why do you have to be such a downer?”

“Because. I’m a unicorn and right now I can’t use magic and the nauseous feeling that’s giving me is making me antsy.”

“You should try being a human. More adaptable.”

“Har-de-har. I bet you miss Crimson Sushi, at least.”

O’Neill tried to summon his Stand, but of course he couldn’t. “Guess it’s back to the old fashioned method of fighting. Guns.”

“Guns aren’t that old fashioned.”

“They are to us.”

Starbeat rolled her eyes. “Sure.” She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Wake me when something happens.”

~~~

“This is the Rocinante to the unidentified vessel,” a voice came to O’Neill’s ear about an hour later. “We are here to assist - you’re real lucky our trajectories matched up. But we don’t see anywhere we can dock…”

“The windshield pops open,” O’Neill called, nudging Starbeat awake. “There’s also a hatch in the back, which might work better, I’m not sure.”

“Hatch.” The voice on the other end paused. “Who in hell designed this ship o’ yours?”

“It’s not designed to be out here,” Starbeat said.

“Clearly. I just don’t recognize the design. I bet you have quite the story to tell, don’t’cha?”

O’Neill glanced at Starbeat. “Probably.”

“Well then you’re in good company. We’ve got our own ship of crazy stories to tell. Or, well, two ships, but mostly one.”

“Need us to do anything?” O’Neill asked.

“Fix your tumble.”

O’Neill pressed a few buttons. “Tumble corrected. We’re still as two snails in the arctic.”

“Nice.”

Starbeat looked out the side window at the ship closing in on them – it was a long, blocky ship with engines at the back and an orange ‘GAS’ logo at the nose of the front. To the side of the Rocinante was a smaller, triangular ship that looked like it belonged on a race track rather than deep space. Its name was easily visible along its side, the Razorback. The Razorback stayed behind while the Rocinante extended a docking tunnel to the back of the Skiff.

“Yeah, we’re not getting a seal on that rounded back of yours. Don’t suppose you have vac suits in there?”

O’Neill got out of his seat and opened the door to the cargo hold. “Let me check. Ah, here we-”

“Those won’t work,” Starbeat said.

“Oh, right. Looks like we don’t actually have any spacesuits.”

“Of course…” the voice sighed. “All right, we’re going to send some people over to get a good seal. Don’t freak out if you hear hammerin’ on your back hull. ‘Cuz that’s what it’s gonna take to get this thing open. What we need is everyone to be calm.”

“Got it,” Starbeat said.

A couple minutes later, they heard something thud against their back hull.

“Beginning seal,” a woman’s voice came over the comm. “Should only take a few minutes.”

“Why would anyone make anything this round?” a different man asked. “Art?”

“Let’s just get them outta there.”

O’Neill gestured for Starbeat to wait in the cockpit, out of sight, while he remained in the storage compartment. Didn’t want to cause a freak out from his end.

“Ready!” the woman’s voice came through. “Can you pop the hatch?”

“It better be pressurized out there,” O’Neill said, reaching for the manual release.

“It is,” the man said. “Even got my helmet off and everything.”

O’Neill popped the hatch. It opened a little quickly, smacking the un-helmeted man in the head. “Ack, geez!”

“Sorry!” O’Neill said, hands up. “Didn’t know you were that close!”

The man had short hair and a slight beard that covered most of his face. O’Neill noticed he had a rather large gun at his side – though currently since he had just been beaned in the head he wasn't aiming it at anything. The woman still had her helmet on so it was harder to see anything defining about her. They were standing in a semi-translucent extension from the Rocinante that was tentatively sealed to the Skiff with what appeared to be putty.

The woman nodded. “It’s fine.”

O’Neill smirked. “Glad to hear it. I’m O’Neill.”

“Draper,” the woman said. Gesturing at the man she introduced him. “Amos.”

Amos rubbed his head. “That’s going to leave a mark… Hey, wait a minute, weren’t there two of you?”

“Yeah,” O’Neill said. “See, we’re gonna need a little bit of a preface for the other one.”

Amos sensed something fishy and raised his gun. Draper held out a hand. “Hold it.”

O’Neill grinned. “So, prepare for the shortened version of a whole lot of crazy. I’m from another universe and I’ve got an alien in the cockpit. Don’t shoot her when she comes out, okay?”

Amos blinked. “What in-”

“Just say yes,” Draper interrupted.

Amos clearly did not like being told what to do, but he did it anyway. He kept his gun ready though.

O’Neill turned back. “Come on out, Starbeat.”

Starbeat scrambled to the door – but missed it since she wasn’t used to moving in zero-G. “Gimme a minute!” She called, looping a hoof over the edge of the doorway and launching into the cargo hold. She hit one of the boxes with her head. “Ow.”

“…Is that a fucking unicorn?” Amos asked.

“Yes. Yes I am,” Starbeat said. “…Hi. I come in peace.”

Draper blinked. “You guys weren’t kidding. You never get a break.”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“…Hard to accept,” Draper said. “Come on over. You don’t have any sort of alien contaminants, do you?”

Starbeat blinked. “I wouldn’t think so. …Wait a minute, why is trans-universal contamination never a problem?”

“Someone’s probably asked that question and answered it without us knowing,” O’Neill muttered. “So long as you’re all humans you’re good.”

Draper nodded. “Then let’s move.”

“Yeah, come meet the family,” Amos added. “…Plus extras.”

~~~

The Rocinante was structured like a tower. The front of the ship was the top, the engines were the bottom. As the engines pushed the ship through space at a constant acceleration around one G of force, it created artificial gravity. So while it looked like the Rocinante was spearheading through space, to everyone on the ship it always looked like they were traveling upwards. The top of the ship held the cockpit, and just below that was the bridge, creating a two-tiered command center.

This was where they brought O’Neill and Starbeat so everyone could have a good look.

“Christmas has come early,” Amos said, gesturing to the visitors. “Behold, man and unicorn.”

There were two people standing at the central display table. One was an old woman in a simple, white uniform of Indian descent while the other was a young man in much more casual clothing and a face telling of someone who had been through a bit too much recently.

Amos started introductions. “The captain’s Holden, old lady’s Undersecretary Avasarala, and up in the cockpit is Alex. Say hello Alex.”

The voice they had heard over the radio came from above them. “I’m a little busy tryin’ to keep us from goin’ into a tailspin, Amos. Ain’t exactly the easiest thing keeping the Rossie flyin’ straight with that extra weight attached to us all lopsided like that.”

“He’s busy,” Amos said, sitting down on a nearby seat and starting to clean his weapon.

Avasarala looked to O’Neill and spoke with a gravelly, powerful voice. “Well, this is certainly an unexpected meeting. I am Deputy Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala of the United Nations of Earth.”

“With a promotion likely soon to come,” Holden said with a tired voice. “James Holden. No special titles. I just run this ship.”

“You’ve come at a particularly delicate time,” Avasarala said. “A war ended not but a few hours ago.”

“Well that proves ka’s still strong here,” Starbeat commented.

“What was that?” Avasarala asked.

“Something to explain a little later,” O’Neill answered. “I’m Overhead-General Jack O’Neill of Merodi Universalis, which is to say I’m the Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of a multiversal society.”

“I must say, I would have found it hard to believe other universes existed if it was just you,” Avasarala said.

“I would not have been so open had Starbeat not been here,” O’Neill admitted. “I’ve had my fair share of being thought a complete lunatic for telling people the truth.”

“Starbeat Glimmer, by the way,” Starbeat said. “Councilmember of another entity known as the Collection. My role within Merodi Universalis is that of a Researcher of… let’s call it Fate, to keep things simple.”

Holden blinked. “You’re a scientist that studies fate?”

“Yep.”

“…I’m not as surprised as I should be,” Holden muttered.

“My machines aren’t working right now, but I can tell you’ve probably been the focus of a whole lot of… Fate.”

“Is it his expression?” Alex called from up above.

“Yeah, it’s his expression,” Starbeat answered.

Avasarala cleared her throat. “I am here because of a series of events that culminated in the careful ending of a war through political intrigue and some force. What brings you two to our universe in such a small, unusual ship?”

“Running,” Starbeat said. “Were flying through space, got caught in a fire fight. Our dimensional device wasn’t working so we had to ‘hotwire’ it directly and jump somewhere random. That turned out to be here. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but some universes have physics that are different than others. A lot of our technology relies on physical laws you would probably consider impossible, or even magical.”

“So she’s a magical unicorn too,” Amos noted. “This day just keeps getting’ better and better.”

“How did your ship survive at all?” Holden asked.

“This universe operates closely or at least very near to ‘standard physics’,” Starbeat explained. “The only difference between most the places we visit is that it only allows the ‘standard physics’. Most Earths we come across may not have any natural examples of our ‘magic’, but we can use them just fine. Here, our shields are down, our FTL is down, most of our specialized weapons are down, our artificial gravity is useless…”

“And that explains the odd design,” Alex called. “That was really buggin’ me. No shipmaker in their right mind would make somethin’ like that unless they had true artificial gravity. I can sleep easy tonight.”

“You can sleep easy knowing there’s a universe where ‘magic’ is possible?” Holden asked.

“…Why do you have to ruin my peace of mind, Holden?”

Avasarala turned to O’Neill. “In the interest of keeping our relations on friendly terms, what can we do for you Overhead-General?”

“Just O’Neill will do fine. Or General, if you have to get into the titles,” O’Neill said. “We’d appreciate it if you can fix our engines and maybe power our ship. Other than that… We’re just waiting for rescue to come and get us.”

“You can’t get yourselves home?” Avasarala asked.

“Dimensional drive isn’t working,” Starbeat said. “This universe seems very uptight about its physics. We’ll have to wait for a portal to open on the other side. …Or I’ll need access to a lot of technical apparatus you might not have.”

Avasarala waved a hand. “Earth would be more than willing to provide you with resources.”

“Hey hey, wait a minute!” a new voice said – one that no one had noticed before. It was from a dark-skinned woman with poofy black hair. “Earth doesn’t get exclusive rights to first contact! That was the case with the protomolecule, and that’s the case here.”

Avasarala sighed. “Naomi, now is not the time fo-”

“Of course it is! Earth will be able to get ‘good girl’ points with these people while the rest of us get shafted, as always!”

Holden sighed. “What do you suggest?”

“Tycho has exactly the resources you’ll need, and Fred Johnson owes us more than a few favors at this point.”

“Really? Fred Johnson?” Amos interjected. “Wasn’t giving him the protomolecule enough for you?”

“That’d just be moving them from Earth to the Belt,” Avasarala said. “That’s hardly much of a chance.”

“What about Mars?” Draper said. “They shouldn’t be cut out!”

“No offense Bobby, but Mars ain’t exactly the type to play nice,” Alex called from above. “Johnson owes us some favors and Avasarala can basically tell the Earth whatever she wants and it’ll do it, but I don’t think we’re on many Martian’s ‘helpful’ lists. We are flyin’ one of their ships, after all. ‘Legitimate salvage’ or no, they ain’t happy about that.”

Draper nodded, clearly not liking what Alex was saying, but agreeing with it.

“Isn’t there some sort of neutral place we could go?” Starbeat asked.

“You just arrived at the end of a war,” Holden muttered. “They haven’t even sat to talk about if there’s going to be neutral territory.”

O’Neill leaned against a wall. “Well we’re in a pickle then, aren’t we?”

“Apologies,” Avasarala said.

“Oh no, I get it, sometimes we come at a bad time,” O’Neill said. “So let’s try option C. What if you don’t tell anyone about us?”

Holden blinked. “…I like that plan.”

“Bu-” Naomi began.

“Yes,” Avasarala said. “For now, it would be best if nobody knew you existed. I will not be able to keep you secret from my government for long, mind you, but long enough for things to die down.”

“You agreed to that quickly,” Holden observed with surprise.

“I don’t want to upset the beings with the power to pass through universal boundaries,” Avasarala stated. “It’s best to just agree with them.”

“I do see a few problems with this plan,” Alex called. “One, that’s a unicorn. Unicorns don’t exist.”

“Can’t just explain me away as a genetic experiment?” Starbeat asked.

“Not with the way your body is built,” Holden said. “You don’t even look like a horse. The eyes are all wrong.”

“Right…”

“I can hide her in a box,” Amos said.

Starbeat stared at him.

“Only when you need to be secret! Yeesh.”

“Right, so our goal is basically never let the Rocinante get searched?” Holden asked.

“That’s kinda what we do anyway, cap,” Alex called.

“…Point taken.” Holden put his hands on his hips. “Well, just make sure Mao never sees Starbeat.”

“He won’t be on this ship much longer,” Avasarala pointed out. “We will meet up with the UN shortly and transfer him into their custody. After that, we wait until the fires of war have calmed down before telling anyone about these two.”

“Sounds like a plan,” O’Neill said.

“Of course we’ll still repair your ship,” Avasarala said. “…Right?”

Holden sighed. “Right. Which one of you is the engineer?”

O’Neill held out a green triangular gemstone. “This was our engineer. She can’t exist in this universe as more than a crystal.”

“So I’m all you got,” Starbeat said. “Ship systems aren’t my specialty, but I can manage.”

Holden took a breath. “Right. Amos, Draper, Naomi, go with the unicorn to her ship; learn what needs fixing and what can be fixed. Amos, make sure Mao stays where he is. Alex…”

“Keep flyin’ the ship, I got it.”

Holden nodded. “And… I guess that’s it. O’Neill, I’ll take you on a tour of the Rocinante. Not much to see…”

“I’ll take it,” O’Neill accepted.

~~~

Starbeat walked into the Rocinante’s kitchen, rubbing her eyes – the Skiff was mostly repaired at this point. Naomi was the only one over there, touching up the last little bits. There was no more reason for Starbeat to hang around.

Amos was in the kitchen as well, feeding four young kids their space lasagna. The news played on a nearby screen.

The kids looked at Starbeat. Starbeat looked at the kids.

“Unicorn!” one of the girls squeed, running to Starbeat.

“No, wait, I-” she backed into one of the walls, realizing she was on a small deck. It wasn’t going to be easy for her to climb a ladder at the moment. “Amos!”

Amos shrugged as the girl nuzzled Starbeat. “She likes you.”

“Yes, I get that, but – why are there even kids on a warship!?”

“Saved ‘em,” Amos said. “You should go talk to Prax, that’s his kid right there. Went halfway across the solar system to find her. Good man.”

“I bet,” Starbeat muttered, trying to tear herself from the kid’s limbs. “Why is children’s first instincts to hug me?”

“I dunno. Why are you so fluffy and have huge eyes?”

“Because modern pony-”

Amos snickered. “Pony?”

“I swear there has got to be a better translation because every human laughs at that word like it's some kind of joke.”

Amos shrugged. “Maybe you were just meant to be huggable.”

Starbeat opened her mouth to object, then closed it. Then she opened it again. “That’s actually pretty close to one of the reasons. Fate, and all that.”

“You really do study Fate, don’t you? That’s gotta be weird.”

Starbeat shrugged. “It’s weirder than even you probably think. But it’s good for predicting things, figuring out which people are likely to have the solutions to a problem, other such stuff. It does tend to bring about existential thoughts when you get too deep into it.”

“See, I’d think it would make things a bit easier. Remove the mystery from life. Tell you a bit about what you need to do.”

Starbeat nodded. “In some ways, yes. In other ways, it makes you question the validity of free will and choice.”

“Some of us don’t do well making our own choices,” Amos said, pouring some water into a cup and setting it on a table. He pushed it to Starbeat.

Starbeat accepted the cup. She tried to lift it with her magic first, then flushed slightly when it didn’t work.

“You just tried something there. Didn’t work.”

“Uh, yeah,” Starbeat said. She stuck out a hoof, trying to grab the cup – but she just slid it across the table. She placed both her front hooves on the cup and tried to lift. The cup slid out and splashed the water over her face.

“How did your race survive?”

“Normally our hooves have a traction field,” Starbeat muttered, pulling her wet mane out of her face. “Do you have a… bowl?”

Amos smirked. “Yep.” He pulled out a metallic bowl, poured water in it, and set it on the floor. “Lap up.”

“I am not a dog.”

“You are in this universe.”

Starbeat sighed. She lowered her head and lapped up the water. One of the kids decided to hug her back leg.

“You know if I wasn’t mindful that would have gotten you a buck to the face,” Starbeat told the kid.

The kid slowly backed away from her.

“You’ve got a way with kids,” Amos observed.

Starbeat shrugged. “I spent most my life with a mental condition that made me randomly attracted to just about anything. I avoided kids.”

“Had? As in, past tense?”

Starbeat nodded. “Uh, yeah. It was a ‘curse of Fate’, if you will. Became a researcher in order to cure myself. …I didn’t have anything to do with the cure, mind you, someone else had to do it for me. But everyone is glad I’m no longer a raving romantic lunatic.”

“I bet,” Amos said, pouring himself a glass of milk. “Do they d-” It was at this point the words BREAKING NEWS appeared on the screen. The feed cut to a satellite over Venus, showing a giant blue jellyfish flying out of the clouds into space. It appeared to be partially biological, but also covered in random mechanical bits as well.

“…What the fuck is that?” Amos asked nobody in particular.

“Don’t look at me, I just got here,” Starbeat said. She read the subtitle flying by the bottom of the screen. “Protomolecule colony leaves Venus… You’ve mentioned this protomolecule before. What exactly is it?”

“Nasty alien stuff,” Amos said. “First it slowly kills you. Then it starts assimilating you. Then… Well apparently it does that, given enough time to itself.”

“Right, you really have no idea, got it.”

“Wonder where it’s goin…”

“Hey,” Alex’s voice rang out all over the ship. “I know we’re all busy gawking over an alien jellyfish, but we’ve got another problem.”

Starbeat turned to the ladder, prepared to go up to the bridge. She contemplated the difficulty of climbing up it in hooves.

Amos didn’t wait for permission – he grabbed her by the midsection and pulled her up. “Wh- hey!”

“You want up or not?”

Starbeat sighed. “Fine. …Unicorns were not meant to live in these conditions.”

“No shit.”

They made it to the bridge last, to the surprise of no one. Alex made a hologram appear out of the main table. It showed three blue dots – the Rocinante, Razorback, and the Skiff. On the other side of the diagram was a dot labeled the MCRN Ajax. “They’re followin’ us,” Alex reported. “I’ll bet my dinner they want this ship back.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“Well normally, at this point I’d just floor it and try to outrun them,” Alex said. “Probably could do it, they’re a fair distance away and probably can’t go far out of their way to get us. It’s just that we’ve got two passengers who make that problematic.”

“It’s not you, O’Neill,” Avasarala said. “It’s me. My age does not handle high G-forces very well, to say the least. I’ve almost died recently from running like this.”

“And then there’s the unicorn,” Alex said. “No offense, but the chemicals we take to make sure we make it through heavy burns might wreck your system in ways we haven’t a clue about.”

“And if you let the Martians have this ship, they’ll find me,” Starbeat said. “And wasn’t there just a conversation about how the Martians were the least likely to play nice?”

“Yep,” Holden said. “We can’t run, we can’t turn ourselves in.”

“Political option?” O’Neill asked, gesturing at Avasarala.

“They’d just demand to take us to our rendezvous personally,” Avasarala said.

“We Martians are particular when it comes to our ships,” Draper added. “The fact this one isn’t under our control is seen as a major problem.”

“Then, once again, it’s time to take the third option,” O’Neill said, smirking. “Just take the problematic passengers elsewhere – say, the Skiff. Send them away. Mars won’t care about some loose ship, if I’m reading this right, they only want this ship.”

Alex chuckled. “You really are a General aren’t ya?”

O’Neill shrugged. “Maybe I’m just an endless fountain of good ideas.”

“That could work,” Avasarala said.

“We could strap the Razorback to the Skiff,” Holden said. “Send off a team.”

“I don’t think we have time for a complicated docking maneuver,” Alex said. “I just got a message from the Ajax. They want to board us. So, how about everyone who needs to run pile onto the Skiff and I’ll just cut her loose?”

“How long can the Skiff survive on its own?” Holden asked.

“It’s working fine,” Amos said. “Doesn’t have a way to slow down, but it could keep people alive for months now that everything’s working.”

“Not slowing down is a big problem,” O’Neill pointed out. “I may usually live where physics aren’t an issue, but even I know things in space keep moving if nothing stops them. I don’t want to splat into anything.”

Holden furrowed his brow. “You can probably get help…”

Avasarala sighed. “…Fred Johnson?”

“Fred Johnson...” Holden muttered, not liking the idea but accepting it anyway. He shook his head. “Right. O’Neill, Starbeat, Avasarala, get to the Skiff.”

“I’m going with them,” Draper said, nodding in Avasarala’s direction.

Amos looked at Starbeat. “You know what, this sounds more interesting than running through space to a UN ship. Count me in. Holden, remember to get me later.”

“I’ll have to leave a message to the UN,” Avasarala said.

“You can tightbeam from the Skiff,” Holden said. “Just get moving. Amos, get some extra food and suits.” He touched a button so he could talk to the Skiff. “Naomi, you’re going to Tycho station.”

“What? Why?”

“There’s a Mars ship on our asses and we need to get rid of the unicorn. Hopefully you can ask Fred Johnson for a favor without him poking his nose too closely into your ship.”

“Right, right, preparing for launch… We’re not going to be able to slow down, Holden.”

“Have Johnson catch you or something. You’re weeks away from Tycho Station, you have time to figure it out.” Holden closed the channel. “Alex, how’s the Ajax doing?”

“They’re acceleratin’’ towards us. Nothing too crazy since we haven’t changed our one-G burn.”

Down a couple decks, O’Neill, Starbeat, Avasarala, Amos, and Draper were running through the pipe connecting the Rocinante to the Skiff. They scrambled through the back hatch, placing extra crates, spacesuits, and provisions in the cargo hold. O’Neill pulled the hatch closed behind them. “Seats everyone!”

All six seats of the Skiff were filled. O’Neill pulled up the piloting controls, delighted to see the thrusters working properly. So at least they had some maneuverability – but not enough for a standard physics trip to the Asteroid Belt. “Okay, strap in.”

Everyone strapped in. “This better not make me feel like my brain is going to come out the back of my skull,” Avasarala muttered.

“This Skiff can’t even pull one G,” Naomi reported. “You’re going to have a bigger problem being in zero-G for an extended time.”

“What a lovely thought.”

“We’ve got no shortage of those today,” Starbeat muttered.

Alex’s voice came to their ears. “Breaking seal.” They heard a pop from behind them. “Y’all should shove off now, the rest of us are about to strap in and run as fast as our little legs will carry us.”

O’Neill nodded, prompting the limited physical engines of the Skiff to ignite, subjecting them to only minimal acceleration forces. It was closer to the feeling of being in a car than a spaceship. The Skiff flew off, leaving the Rocinante and Razorback behind.

Naomi pressed a few buttons. “I think I’ve charted us a course for Tycho Station. Except we’ll be hurtling by it at several hundred kilometers an hour in the wrong direction. In three weeks.”

“You better make those calls,” Draper said. “Someone’s going to have to catch us.”

“How about we wait until we’re not close to a Martian ship?”

“I’ll drink to that,” O’Neill said, looking at the display of local space. The Rocinante and Razorback started speeding away, accelerating far faster than was comfortable. The MCRN ship matched their speed, perhaps gaining a little – but they would not be able to catch them before they made their rendezvous with the UN ship. …Not that the Ajax had any idea that’s where they were headed.

The Skiff fled the scene, beginning a long journey through the expanse to Tycho Station.

They were free. Though adrift.

“Time to send some messages,” Naomi said. “And then wait three weeks.”

Starbeat sighed. “We’re all going to get to know each other really well then.”

“Pray your people come and get you then,” Amos said. “’Cus after three weeks of gettin’ to know each other I think all of us will nut up a little.”

Avasarala let out a calculated breath. “We simply need to keep our wits about us.”

“Hey, question,” Amos said. “Where’s the bathroom in this thing?”

O’Neill blinked. “There’s a panel that opens in the back of the storage compartment.”

“This thing isn’t designed for long trips, is it?”

“No. It has an FTL drive installed that could cross a galaxy in a few hours.”

“Just further proof that technology is unreliable,” Avasarala commented.

“Please, everyone quiet,” Naomi said. “I’ve got to tell Fred Johnson to help us without prompting him to ask too many questions.”

“Good luck,” Avasarala said.

“Thanks.”

~~~

Two weeks later…

Holden’s face was on the main screen. “So, we got to keep the Rocinante after all was said and done. Handing over Mao, even without Avasarala on board, got us a lot of points with the UN. We did have to hand over the Razorback though, sorry Draper. Regardless, with Prax and the kids going back to Ganymede, it’s just me and Alex here. We’ve set our course for Tycho Station but won’t arrive until a few weeks after you. Let’s hope the ship doesn’t fall apart before we get there.

“Amos, I’m coming to get you. Naomi… I miss you. The rest of you? Try not to blow this whole thing up. Holden out.”

The recording ended.

“I miss instant communication,” O’Neill said.

“You miss being able to interrupt people,” Draper corrected. “It’s all you do. Have to make sure you get your quips in. I’m amazed you managed to ever move up in rank.”

“He used to be grumpier, from what I hear,” Starbeat said from her position on the ceiling, not looking up from her ebook. “Then he found a stargate and chippered up considerably. Gained a funny bone. Got over depression.”

“Don’t speak of it as if it’s trivial,” Avasarala scolded. “Losing a child is something you never recover from.”

“Let’s not go there again,” Naomi said.

“Are you telling me wh-”

O’Neill coughed. “Not go there, she said. Good idea.”

Avasarala leaned back in her chair and sighed. “Fair enough.”

“Aren’t you the politician?” Amos asked. “Shouldn’t you, like, know how to deal with people?”

“Not when I’ve been boxed up in a tiny alien ship for two weeks,” Avasarala muttered.

“You should have heard her on the Razorback when I was pushing it to the max,” Draper said. “Swearing like a sailor.”

Amos looked at Avasarala with new respect in his eyes.

“Hey, guys,” Naomi said, pressing a few buttons. “We’re going to be passing by the proto-jellyfish.”

“Hmm?” Starbeat asked, looking up from her ebook. “Didn’t that thing start at Venus? How’d it get this far out that quickly?”

“Accelerating continually for a long time,” Naomi said, pressing a few more buttons. “We’re just piggybacking off the Rocinante’s velocity, lucky enough to already be going the right direction. That thing’s been constantly burning since it left Venus and hasn’t stopped. It helps that it doesn’t have to worry about flattening crew it doesn’t have.”

“Can we see it?” Starbeat asked.

“Normally I’d say no, but it is the size of a city…” Naomi said. “Definitely not with the naked eyes, but we might be able to zoom in on it.”

O’Neill pulled up a camera feed and zoomed in as far as he could. They could just barely make out a blue shape with tentacles trailing behind it.

“I wonder where it’s going…” Avasarala pondered. “It must have some purpose.”

“It’s an alien. What makes you think you can figure out what it wants?” Amos asked.

“Nothing. I’m just curious. And also more than a little afraid.”

“You’d be a fool not to be,” Starbeat said, staring at the jellyfish. She narrowed her eyes. “Something about it though… feels slightly… off?”

“Maybe it's not ‘standard physics’?” Draper suggested. “Something like you?”

“Maybe,” Starbeat said. “…Maybe.”

~~~

A few days later…

Two thirds of the crew of the Skiff were sleeping in their chairs.

For once, it was the old people who couldn’t fall asleep, instead of the other way around.

O’Neill turned to Avasarala. “Almost done with this trip.”

“I hate space so much,” Avasarala muttered. “I would say I’m going to be ecstatic when we finally get to Tycho Station and find some artificial gravity, but I know my legs are going to be so weak that I’ll feel like shit no matter how many precautions I take.”

“We’ve been keeping in shape.”

“Taking walks in mag-boots along the hull of the ship does not count as ‘in shape,’ O’Neill.”

O’Neill smirked. “It won’t be too bad. Just three weeks of zero-G.”

“Normal astronauts can collapse after just a few weeks,” Avasarala said. “A completely temporary condition to be sure, but there will still be a readjustment period.”

O’Neill furrowed his brow. “You all have it hard in space.”

“You’ve just got it easy with all your options for workarounds. We live in a world where there are no shortcuts.”

“Oh, I bet there is one, somewhere,” O’Neill said with a smirk. “It’s the nature of existence. There’s always going to be a way to do something just a little better. Then someone will copyright it and make millions of dollars off of turning it into a scam.”

Avasarala let out a snort. “I thought you didn’t have that problem.”

“You’d be surprised how often companies manage to throw wrenches into our gears even when they’re held on a leash,” O’Neill muttered. “They really don’t like being subject to anything and think they can always buy their way out of the worst situations.”

“Are you going to jump into ‘this is why we aren’t a Democracy’ now?”

“No,” O’Neill said with a smirk. “Because I hate politics.”

Avasarala smirked. “Smart man.”

“Not really. I have to deal with the asinine political mess every week. Managed not to fight any full wars yet, so I must be doing something right.”

“It amazes me that you’ve managed that,” Avasarala said. “Perhaps it comes from living in a world that was on the brink of war for decades, but I think I know humanity. We always want to fight something. Each other, nature, it’s in our blood.”

“You’re right,” O’Neill said, looking to Starbeat. “It isn’t in theirs.”

“Friendship, progress, assistance,” Avasarala repeated. “You owe two of your values to them.”

“They’d argue that assistance and friendship go hand in hand. After they were sure engaging in such an argument wouldn’t make you shoot them.” O’Neill chuckled. “We had to learn to stop shooting out there. They had to learn to shoot.”

“I don’t see us learning to stop shooting anytime soon. Right now, the war just ended. Given the news we’re not pointing our guns at each other anymore, but at the blue jellyfish.” She sighed. “We need to get to Tycho. I need to make a statement to the system about what to do with that damn thing.”

“We’re cl-”

“Attention! This is the OPA Scouter Umbriel!” the loud incoming message woke everyone up. “Please do not activate any thrusters! We will aid in your deceleration toward Tycho Station!”

Starbeat rubbed her eyes, yawning. “Guess we’re going to be there soon, huh?”

“Couple days actually,” Naomi said. “Slowing down takes time, especially if you don’t want to do it quickly.”

The Umbriel was a short, barrel-like ship. It rotated around the Skiff a few times, analyzing the best way to grab onto it. It opted to affix itself to the top of the Skiff with magnetic tethers, then fully sealed itself against the Skiff’s roof and turned on its engine – lightly at first, to ease into a feeling of gravity.

Everyone, for the first time in three weeks, felt their chairs underneath them.

“Finally,” Avasarala said. “…This doesn’t feel that bad, actually.”

“They’re at one-tenth G,” Amos said. “’bein’ nice. By the time we get to Tycho it’ll be one. You won’t have your sea legs then.”

“She might adjust by then!” Naomi pointed out. “They’re doin’ us a huge favor taking it this slow.”

Amos glared at her, but said nothing. That sort of interaction between them had been a regular occurrence on the trip but nobody wanted to ask either of them what had happened. It remained an awkward looming ghost over the six of them.

“Wonder how I’ll be affected…” Starbeat mused. “Never been in zero-G for any time longer than an hour before…”

~~~

“…Our radios are dead,” Naomi reported a few hours later, the Skiff still in the grip of the Umbriel. “Can’t pull up any news feeds or anythin’.”

“Dead or jammed?” O’Neill asked. “Important distinction.”

“Well I’d have to crawl around the outside of the Skiff to check the physical radios, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize we’re probably jammed.”

“Great, more complications,” Avasarala muttered. “What’s our course?”

Naomi pulled up the map. “…We’re not headed directly for Tycho, that’s for sure. We’re nearby, but I have no idea where we’re going.”

“Wouldn’t Fred Johnson have noticed by now that we’re off course?” Draper said.

“That’s probably why our radio is jammed,” Naomi pointed out.

Starbeat sighed. “So, who’s got us this time?”

“Rogue Belter who thinks a ship of interesting design under the protection of Fred Johnson is going to be worth a lot,” Amos said. “Or one of Johnson’s turned traitor for a quick buck.”

“…Do you have a big problem with traitors in this universe?” Starbeat asked.

Amos said nothing, but he did glance at Naomi.

“How far do our sensors go without the radio?” Draper asked.

“Visual only,” Starbeat answered. “Y’know, since nothing else is working.”

O’Neill set the computer to scan for anything visually. They picked up planets, asteroids – and one large ship nearby.

“Asteroid harvester,” Naomi said, looking at the image. “Looks to be where we’re headed.”

“Whatever pirate is on that thing is going to be absolutely elated by all the bounties he’s got on board,” Avasarala muttered. “I ca-”

The Umbriel decided to stop playing nice with the G forces and floor it, stunning all six of them. Starbeat and Avasarala passed out immediately.

~~~

Starbeat opened her eyes.

She was inside a locked room with a handful of sealed boxes, the majority of them specially marked with words like fragile, valuable, XXX, or explosive, indicating this was presumably the ‘valuable and/or illicit cargo’ location. The room wasn’t particularly large, but all the walls were reinforced and the only exit was a pressured vault door. She presumed the crank to open it was on the other side.

She herself was bound and gagged. The ropes around her hooves were sturdy, but clearly tied by someone who didn’t know how to bind a pony effectively. The gag was a simple piece of cloth. Otherwise, she was unharmed.

She was able to eat through the gag in a minute or two with her teeth, and then moved to worm her way out of her restraints. Pony legs were a lot more flexible than they appeared, having shoulders that were able to lift above her head, which was something horses couldn’t do.

She was soon standing free without any restraints in what was probably the heaviest-guarded room on whatever ship she was on. She noticed she wasn’t shaking or nauseous at the solid gravity she was experiencing. Either she had been quick to adjust or had been out a long time. Could be either, really.

At least they were nice enough to leave her with her goggles. She felt as if they made her complete.

She started crafting a plan on how to escape. She had several boxes labeled with explosive on them, surely there was something in here that could cut through a wall this thick. She tried to open a box that looked promising – and remembered she didn’t have traction hooves, magic, or fingers.

She facehooved. “Aaaagh…”

There had to be something in here, she would almost bet on it. Just keep looking…

Then she found it. A small glass capsule filled with a shifting blue material, glowing brightly in some locations while dark and dormant in others. It rippled as if it were alive. Along the side of the capsule it said protomolecule.

She whistled. “Bet this is about as valuable as I am.” She looked up from the protomolecule for a moment to gather her thoughts. She didn’t get the opportunity.

There was a man standing over her in a porkpie hat, looking at her in curiosity.

She knew instantly he wasn’t really there. The door hadn’t opened in the five seconds she hadn’t been looking at the protomolecule vial, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t going mad, so the presence of the stranger made her smile. “Hello,” she said.

“What are you?” he asked, cocking his head sideways. “Why can the signal reach you so… easily?”

“Unicorn,” Starbeat said, tapping her horn. “I don’t think this universe is truly mundane, it just likes to think it is. There’s a mild esoteric power able to function here of a type I don’t understand, and that type was probably in my horn.” She cocked her head. “You’re the protomolecule, right?”

The man took a step back and rolled onto his heels. “…It’s not time, 113 times a second, thoughts incoming… the Work isn’t even complete. The time has not come. How is the signal here…?”

“It could also be Fate, or ka, if you know what that is.”

“No entry,” the man said. “The manifolds arise. You see, there was this one time at a bar where I was investigating two guys. One guy, you see, looked like the shit, worst badass imaginable. But the other was meek and tiny. So of course I go for the little guy – he’s the one I’m looking for. But then someone walks in I didn’t know about and the entire thing blows up.”

“…Do you have to talk in crime scene metaphors or something?”

“Well, see, there’s a non-local quantum hologram with a phase-conjugate adaptive waves resonating in micro-tubules in the brain, which of course requires some closed-timelike curves and Lorentzian manifold, and then that little thing at the top of your skull… You know.”

“Were you expecting me not to understand that?” Starbeat asked. “It’s a little fuzzy but I think I’ve got it. You’re transmitting to my mind from another location outside my current timestream, however that works in this universe, and you have to interface adaptively with my brainwaves that come from what you call ‘micro-tubules’. Only thing I didn’t get was ‘Lorentzian manifold’, and I’m pretty sure that’s just the background mathematics of the thing.”

He looked at her, surprised.

“I spend my life studying the nature of Fate scientifically. I brush up on the basics of exotic physics regularly. It’s also more than a little likely I have access to technology far beyond what you could ever create.”

“…Could be dangerous.”

“Maybe. I don’t think we’re staying around though, given how much of a powder keg this world seems to be. Go easy on the people here, okay?”

The man seemed to find this amusing. “…Always need a ride.”

“You know, if you can help us get out of this mess, we could get you a ride.”

The man waved his hand. “Need proper ship.”

“Right, right, we don’t design things that work here. I get it.” Starbeat stared at him. “But I bet we can get you something else. Connection to the multiverse, access to our databases, you know.”

“Can’t get you out of this room. Too sturdy, nothing to work with.”

Starbeat sighed. Then she thought for a moment longer. “You’re able to ‘break’ the ‘standard physics’ model, seeing as you’re talking to me right now. Do you think you could fix our dimensional drive?”

The man paused for a moment, thinking deeply.

“You’re able to project yourself into my mind and I don’t have my magic right now. Just root around my memories for the necessary information.”

“Calculations… Yes. The drive can be fixed with a proper reverse manifold.”

Starbeat smiled. “Good! All I have to do is get you on the drive.” She blinked. “That still means we have to get out of this room.”

The man shrugged, as if to say that wasn’t his problem.

~~~

O’Neill, Avasarala, Draper, Amos, and Naomi all sat in a single holding cell with only four beds. The cell looked like it was never used. On one hand that meant it didn’t stink from previous occupants, and on the other it looked like it was about to fall apart.

“Y’know, I don’t think they have a guard on us,” Naomi said, looking through the bars. “I see that one guy pass by every couple of minutes, that’s it.”

“Sloppy pirate captain,” O’Neill observed. “Looks like we’ll get a chance to escape.”

Avasarala sighed. “Talking of escape? O’Neill, we do not need to risk our lives any more. We’re too valuable to be killed, and frankly whatever price the pirates ask for will be pathetically small compared to what our respective governments would be willing to pay to have us back.”

“That’s for you,” Amos said, standing up. Naomi took this as an indication she should take the bed and let him grip the bars for a while. “I’m only good as Holden’s muscle. Not exactly useless, but not exactly worth a lot.”

O’Neill nodded. “And you gotta realize, when do you ever get captured and not think about how to escape? C’mon.”

Draper looked at him. “Good point. What’s your plan?”

“Got nothin’ so far,” O’Neill admitted. “I can see us rushing back to the Skiff and turning on its guns, threaten to start shooting up the place. That involves getting out of this cell.”

“Then there’s Starbeat and our gear,” Naomi said. “We’d have to stop by storage on the way.”

“The Skiff is in storage,” Draper pointed out. “Won’t be far away.”

“It’s not that far to run…” Naomi mused. “If the entire ship is as poorly patrolled as this place, we could probably do it.”

Avasarala blinked. “Are you all seriously considering making a break for it?”

“Yep,” O’Neill said. “You can relax, though. We don’t have any way out past these bars.”

“Shh,” Naomi hissed. “Guard’s coming back.”

The guard marched past their cell, looking at them with stern eyes. “You sure sounded excited in here. What were you talking about.”

“Believe it or not, it was your face,” O’Neill said. “We were wondering if you were one of those kids who ignored their mother and got their face stuck. Because if you were born that way it would be really tragic.”

The guard put his hand on the bars. “You’re lucky the cap wants you all alive or I would have shot you right there.”

“You probably should have,” Amos said. Then he pushed on the bars with all his might, snapping the rusted, ancient, poorly maintained metal poles of the wall. The cell door came down on the guard.

He tried to aim his gun despite the disorientation, but a punch from Amos knocked him straight onto the ground. Amos picked up the gun. “We’re out,” he said.

O’Neill blinked. “…I like you.”

Naomi fished through the guard’s shirt until she found identification. “This should open any locked doors.”

“Wonder why they used bars instead of sealing doors,” Draper mused.

“Belters don’t exactly have a lot of options all the time,” Naomi muttered.

Avasarala finally processed what was happening. “…We’re going to have to run for it.”

“Yep,” Draper said, picking her up.

“Put me down this instant!”

“With all due respect, you’ll only slow us down if you’re on your own feet.”

O’Neill nodded. “Amos, point. Naomi, back. Let’s move.” They ran through the corridor, right out of the small holding cell area. Right at the exit there was an extra gun. O’Neill picked it up. “Here we go.”

They opened the door to find two pirates having lunch on a folding table. One shot from O’Neill and another from Amos took care of them. They added two more guns to their supply.

“And now they’ll be coming for us because they’ll have definitely heard that one,” Naomi said.

“Ship’s this way,” Amos said, leading them to a ladder that led down a deck. They ended up in a room filled with boxes of rations, water, and other similar supplies.

O’Neill put a finger to his mouth to quiet everyone. He had seen two people in this room on the way down the ladder. They moved carefully and quietly, moving behind the large supply boxes. They made it by without a trace, leaving into another hall.

“I don’t see our stuff…” Naomi said.

“I see a big bulkhead that says Hazardous Storage,” O’Neill said, pointing to a heavy door with a crank on it. “If I’m a betting man, I’d say Starbeat’s back there.”

“That’ll take forever to open,” Draper said. “We’d need some way to know for sure.”

O’Neill knocked on the door.

They heard the clopping of hooves on the other side.

“Good enough for me,” Amos said, grabbing the wheel with his arms and turning, grunting against the rust and pressure inside.

Naomi shot a pirate as he opened a door from the left. “We really shouldn’t stay here…”

Amos let out a sharp grunt and popped the door open. Starbeat was waiting with a blue glowing capsule in her mouth.

Everyone gasped and took a few steps back, save O’Neill and Amos.

“Huh, they had the protomolecule,” Amos said. “Sweet.”

“That stuff kills everything it touches!” Avasarala said.

Starbeat put it down. “And it’s partially psychic. This universe isn’t as mundane as we previously thought. It can fix the dimensional drive.”

O’Neill picked the capsule up and pocketed it. “And now we have a better way out than just threatening to blow everything up.”

“You need to be careful with that stuff,” Amos said. “It will kill you if you touch it.”

“Just move!” Draper shouted. Nobody argued – they scrambled through a door and into a smaller storage area devoid of people. The next room they entered was the storage area the Skiff was held in. The back hatch was still open and three people were busy trying to figure out how it worked.

All three of them went down in the gunfire.

Starbeat glanced at Amos. “Wow, you’re a good shot.”

“He’s the muscle,” Naomi said.

The six of them ran into the Skiff, discovering a fourth, unarmed man inside. He had a communicator to his mouth. “They’ve gotten to me! Th-”

O’Neill knocked him out with the butt of his gun and dragged him off the Skiff. The rest of them scrambled into the skiff, making sure to close the hatch behind them. O’Neill undid the security lock he had on the controls and activated the Skiff’s weapons.

The radio was working again. “This is Captain Higgs. Think about what you’re doing, Avasarala.”

“I’m the only damn person who didn’t want to do this!” Avasarala spat.

“I’d be the one you want to talk to,” O’Neill said, pressing more buttons. “Because I’m the one with active guns pointed at the gut of your ship.”

He stood up, handing the gun controls to Draper while he went to Starbeat.

Higgs’ voice returned. “…This is a large ship. Whatever damage your Skiff can unleash will be minimal. Meanwhile, I have people moving to attack you on all sides. Would you rather surrender and live, or be blown up with your ship?”

O’Neill popped the hatch Starbeat was gesturing to, accessing the green orb that was the dimensional device. He popped the top of the protomolecule vial and poured the blue alien lifeform inside, careful not to get any on his hands. He slammed the hatch shut. “Well, you see mister Higgs, I’d rather not be stuck in a jail cell that’s so old we can just pop the bars off by struggling too much.”

“I can make arrangements to have you all stored in crates.”

O’Neill grinned. It was time to play the stalling game. “But what kind of crates? Because if we can escape from the crates, we’re just going to try to do it again. They better be really thick, industrial strength crates if I’m going to consider surrendering. And all the crates we saw on the way here I don’t think will cut it.”

“…Excuse me, who is this?”

“O’Neill. The old guy you captured. The guy who actually owns this ship. With the guns. That are pointed at everything.”

“Stand down and you will not be harmed.”

“See, there’s a problem with that too. How can I know I won’t be harmed? You clearly didn’t know who I was, which makes me think you don’t know how valuable a target I am. You might shoot me as an example to the others! Or just to satisfy your need for vengeance. We did just take out several of your guys. I understand.”

“Let me put it another way. Stand down or we blow you all out of the sky and everyone dies.”

“Such a waste,” O’Neill said, shaking his head. “Do you think you’ll ever be able to survive life in the system if you blew up Chrisjen Avasarala? What about the crew of James Holden? Or the only known specimen of an alien unicorn? Bet you were surprised when you found her on board.”

Higgs’ tone of voice improved. “Ah, I was not. She was the reason I grabbed you all.”

“And how did you find out? Come on, I can hear you wanting to gloat there.”

“You have a big window on the front of your ship. The Umbriel just looked and saw.” Higgs let out a menacing chuckle.

Starbeat facehooved. “Why did nobody think of that!?”

Draper sighed. “Ships aren’t supposed to have windows. It’s not something we ever have to worry about.”

“Lovely.”

Higgs chuckled. “Ah, satisfying. But enough fun and games. I’m ordering my men to shoot you down in ten. …Nine.”

“Dimensional drive active,” Naomi said. “Activating.”

“…What?”

“Gooodbye!” O’Neill said with a salute. A portal appeared under she Skiff’s front. There was barely enough energy in the Skiff to create a portal large enough for it to fit through – and it had to tip into it, slowly.

This gave Higgs an opportunity to allow order his men to attack. From every door surrounding them, men with guns filed out. The basic bullets bounced right off the Skiff, but one guy launched a rocket.

Starbeat lit her horn and smirked. “Oops.” Using the magic from the other side of the portal she grabbed hold of the rocket and tossed it back, blowing a hole in the ceiling. “You really shouldn’t shoot rockets in spaceships. Recipe for disaster.” She opted to simply raise a magic shield next to protect them for the last few seconds.

They fell into space and the portal closed behind them.

“…Now I’ve seen everything,” Amos said.

O’Neill smirked. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

~~~

Amos and Starbeat stood outside a meeting room in the Hub. They watched through the glass as Avasarala, Fred Johnson, and the Martian military commander Ari shouted at each other while O’Neill and Eve watched.

“Powder keg,” Starbeat said, holding a slushie in her hoof and sipping it. “Tellin’ ya.”

“I take it that means no keys to the multiverse?”

“I’d say no,” Starbeat said. “Worlds in a heavy state of unrest are generally denied. …Though we accept most standard Earths, so I can’t really say where we draw the line. I’m pretty sure you’re very well past it, though. All three of you want to kill each other. And the fourth one is pretty confused.”

“Fourth?”

“The protomolecule,” Starbeat said. “We’ve given it some space to grow. It’s been talking. We won’t be telling you much about it by its request.”

“Huh. That’s weird to think about.”

“It’s an alien. What did you expect?”

“A magic horn?”

Starbeat chuckled. “You know, you can stay if you want. We accept singles and small groups all the time. Almost no limitations on immigration here.”

“Temptin’ offer. But I’ll pass. Don’t think I’d mix well with all your ‘friendship’ crap.”

Starbeat shrugged. “We have a few people who are willing to do the brutal thing when required.”

“Plus, I’m part of a crew. Not just gonna give that up.”

“I understand. I hope the Rocinante understands just how lucky they are to have you.”

Amos nodded. “Oh, they do. The-”

The door to the meeting room flew open. “Get out!” O’Neill shouted. “If you’re all going to act like children around each other, than that’s how you’re going to be treated! Go sit in time out in your little secluded universe for a few years!”

Avasarala opened her mouth.

“Not one weasley word out of you!” O’Neill blurted. “The three of you have proven, at just about every turn, that you just can’t move past your differences! You can’t be weaker than anyone else, because that’s a threat. You can’t be even, because then you’re not the best. And if you were the strongest you would want to defend that at any cost! When you get it in your collective heads that maybe, maybe you’re in this together, we’ll talk again.” O’Neil stormed off.

There was silence for a few seconds.

Eve cleared her throat. “Sorry about that. He lost patience with the politics. I’ll go talk to him later. His sentiment is that of Merodi Universalis, however. Sorry, we will not be initiating further contact with your worlds for now. You are simply not ready, nor do you need our help to survive.”

Avasarala raised her eyebrow. “And the protomolecule?”

“It passed,” Eve admitted. “Maybe if you prove yourself to it, it’ll let you talk to us.” Her ears twitched involuntarily. “You’ll be taken back to your world now. We might contact you again in a few years, we might not.”

The three leaders looked at her with steeled expressions.

“Goodbye.” Eve said, walking away. She turned with a smile to Amos and Starbeat. “Good evening!”

Amos blinked. “You can turn your expression around fast.”

“Have to.”

Starbeat glanced at the receding forms the Earth Proto representatives. “You know, I kinda thought O’Neill and Avasarala were friends now.”

“They are,” Eve said. “Avasarala agrees with the sentiment. They aren’t ready. But she can’t exactly make that opinion public.”

“Ah. I see.”

Eve glanced over her shoulder, then back to Amos. “I don’t want them knowing about this, but we’re going to set up a communications satellite you can use…”

~~~

Earth Proto.

That’s what they ended up calling the universe, after its defining lifeform, the protomolecule.

Starbeat liked the name, even if she wasn’t quite sure about the world itself. Filled with three tribes of humanity that wouldn’t stop fighting. Even the good people among them, people who had been part of a mixed crew, had agendas. Avasarala, for all her understanding and wisdom, was still loyal to Earth first, and not humanity. Draper would speak for Mars even though she didn’t agree with it. Naomi would stand by the Belt until the end of her days. They were all good people who understood each other – but whose loyalties belonged to societies and ideals rather than people.

“Is that good?” Starbeat had asked Rainbow shortly after they had returned home.

Rainbow Dash had blinked. “I don’t know.”

I don’t know.

The Element of Loyalty didn’t know if it was good or not. Loyalty to an ideal, a society, or loyalty to friends?

Being a researcher of ka didn’t help her with that puzzle.

She would have said Amos had it right. He wasn’t anchored to any one – Earth? Mars? Belter? Who cared? But he didn’t. He just stumbled through life, looking for guidance.

“What is guidance?” Starbeat asked.

The protomolecule’s Investigator shrugged. “Don’t know. You think I would, seein’ as I’m guiding them onward.”

Starbeat looked at a screen on her desk that showed the Ring construct the proto-jellyfish had created in Earth Proto. “With that thing?”

“Need a ride,” the Investigator said.

“We could still give you a ride.”

“Structural integrity lacking. Assistance is welcome, but unnecessary.”

Starbeat lit her horn, picking up a cup of coffee and drinking it. “Fair enough. Have any plans with us?”

“Backup. The creators went somewhere. Don’t want to suffer their fate.”

Starbeat nodded. “You just let us know if you want to further our relationship.”

The Investigator looked at her with a coy smile. “Create a colony.” Then he was gone again.

Starbeat rolled her eyes. He didn’t have to appear like that – they had a direct telepathic communication line to the protomolecule. But, for whatever reason, it liked appearing as that man to her, even though it had appeared to others at times just to see if it could.

The protomolecule wanted a colony. A planet. Starbeat didn’t see any issue granting its request.

~~~

The Rocinante wouldn’t be able to avoid a trip to the Ring. Eventually, the ship found itself en route to the trans-Uranian object. With an annoying news crew on board.

“Holden, what do you think of fate? Destiny?”

Holden thought about this. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been the hero of the system multiple times, I’m just curious if you believe in such a thing?”

“…Yeah. Yeah I do. I think it has a weird sense of humor.”

Amos rolled his eyes in the background. “You can say that again.”

The camera turned to Amos. “Why?”

“Well, see, the reason behind that is so classified its not even funny,” Amos said. “To you. I find it hilarious.”

“Amos…”

Amos’ communicator beeped. “Excuse me, the real world calls.” He ducked down a deck, walking into the kitchen. He pulled up the message.

It was an image of Starbeat standing in a hazard suit, grinning. Behind her was an entire forest utterly and completely assimilated by the blue power of the protomolecule. Everything that wasn’t Starbeat was blue, shifting and shimmering with the glow of the alien substance.

Greetings from Protom!

Amos blinked. That is a really stupid name for a planet.

He put the communicator away. “Hey, reporter girl! I know you have a list of ‘reasons Amos is insane’. Add ‘he thinks he’s pen pals with a unicorn’ to it!”

“…What?”

“Did I stutter? I said add it.”

“…Okaaaay…”

Amos knew that wasn’t what she added, but he didn’t care. That little game had run its course.

He found himself wondering what crazy things the Merodi would do with the protomolecule.

Turn planets into war machines?

Nah, that was crazy.

~~~

O’Neill looked at the round blue thing displayed on the main display of the Defiant. “…You want to give us what now?”

“Consider it a gift,” the Investigator said. “A ‘ship’.”

“We’re never going to get a dimensional drive or an FTL drive big enough for that.”

“You underestimate yourselves.” He tipped his hat. “Good luck!”

“Wait don’t y-”

He was gone.

“…Just so everyone knows, I was talking to the Investigator,” O’Neill said.

“Everyone knows that, sir,” Clandestine said. “Nobody thinks you’re a raving lunatic that talks to hallucinations.”

That did little to quell O’Neill’s uncertainties.

086 - Farpoint

“I think this is it,” Sunny said looking out over the latest world they had found, holding her hoof out to frame the beautiful rolling hills, the perfect cascading waterfall, the spotless pristine weather, the flowers the size of trees, and the abundance of blue lightning bugs. “This is the world.”

Sunburst looked up from his notes. “Wait, really?”

“Yes. Really.” Sunny smirked. “Everyone pack up. The largest mission this survey team has undertaken is complete.”

Josuke and a Starlight with cybernetic implants named Beam stared at her, disbelieving.

“Are you telling me we can finally go home!?” Beam shouted. “We’ve been out here for months!”

“And we’ve finally found a distant colony,” Sunny said. “This world… is completely uninhabited, lacks large predators, has absolutely stunning scenery, and has a unique magical mineral under its crust. I’m calling it. This is what we were looking for.”

“Geez, finally,” Josuke muttered, hands behind his head. “Can’t wait to get to my own bed…”

“Do you have any idea how deep we are into the E-sphere?” Sunburst asked. “It’s going to be a while before we get back!”

“…Why are we making a distant colony if it takes forever to get to it, again?”

Beam nudged him. “Jojo, come on, I’ve explained it millions of times. Because we wanted something in a completely new part of the multiverse. Or, conversely, because why not!?”

Sunny nodded. “Yep. But hey, we’re done now and can go back home, be with our loved ones.” She glanced at Josuke and Beam. “Those who aren’t here, anyway. The Great Survey is over!”

There was a chorus of celebration cheers.

“Let us leave this… Farpoint behind and get moving.” She placed a stake in the ground that displayed the Merodi Universalis symbol - signifying more than just a simple ‘claim’ that a beacon provided. There was intent to develop.

She pulled out a dimensional device and began the long trek back home.

~~~

Present day, relatively speaking…

There was an explosion the likes of which denied comprehension. Out of the remnants of this blast a green star formed, shining against the blackness in its impossibility. Bubbles of varying colors appeared around it, fusing into one singular orbiter. Vast, screeching tentacles came from the darkness, attempting to latch onto the verdant fire, but electric shocks pushed them back.

A spirograph surrounded the entire image.

And then Eve woke up. “Mmmf…”

Flutterfree lifted her head off of Eve. “Oh. You’re awake. That was quite the nap you were taking there.”

“Loud enough to be heard in the neighboring universe!” Rainbow Dash shouted.

Eve let herself remember where she was. That was right, her personal ship, the Astra. She had decided she was going to take her friends on a vacation to the distant Farpoint resort. They were currently mid-trip, flying through innumerable dimensions to get all the way to Merodi Universalis’ furthest colony, deep within the E-sphere. Or closer to the other side. They really weren’t sure; nobody ever shared their full maps with them.

“I don’t think she’s awake yet,” Nova commented, waving a hoof in front of Eve’s eyes. “Yoo-hoo! Equis to the Charter!”

“Nova, shush,” Eve muttered, putting a hoof to her face. “I’m waking up. You may not know this about me, but I need to process everything when I wake up. So give me a moment.”

“Moment’s up!” Pinkie shouted, dragging Eve off the couch she had been resting on and to her hooves in the middle of the room. “Hey look, you’re up!”

“And about to fall back asleep,” Eve muttered, rubbing her eyes.

Applejack let out an amused snort. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Pretty sure she’s at least a bit richer than she was early on,” Allure mused.

“Nobody likes a math geek, Allure,” Renee chided with a smirk on her face.

“…You’re quoting something.”

“…Possibly.” Renee chuckled. “You see, Daniel – or, well, Jack actually – has this love for human science fiction shows…”

“X-Files actually exists,” Corona said. “Remember the Sherlock incident?”

“Not at all.”

“I was there, I remember,” Jotaro said. “Just before Unification we stormed an alien compound and ended up needing to use a Sherlock to complete the mission.”

Vriska gasped. “The great Jotaro allowed someone else to take the glory? Well, I can tell you that’s not what I would have done. I would have dragged him right into the open and told him not to interfere!”

“Vriska, stop pretending like you’re an arrogant self-absorbed prick,” Nova said. “That’s what you would have done in the past.”

“That’s what I said. Did you not hear the ‘would’ in that sentence? Past tense!”

“Yare yare daze,” Jotaro muttered.

Allure put a hoof to her chin. “I bet there’s a translator issue there.”

“Or maybe every language has its failings in communicating certain concepts,” Corona suggested.

Allure shrugged.

Eve smirked. “Or maybe, just maybe, Vriska’s being clever.”

Vriska facepalmed. “No shit, Einstein.”

That got a small laugh out of everyone. The sight of her friends talking together brought a big smile to Eve’s lips.

“This was a good idea,” Flutterfree told Eve. “Getting all eleven of us out here… The old gang and the new.”

That it was. Eve looked at everyone. The original elements of harmony: Applejack, Pinkie, Rainbow, Flutterfree, Renee… and then there was Nova, completing the seven’s original grouping. But the new friends were here as well – Corona and Allure, both of whom had come a long way from before the multiverse was uncovered. Vriska and Jotaro, the new friends. Everyone was here and getting along famously… It was just a great thought that warmed eve’s heart.

Part of her wished Spike had come, but apparently the disappearance of so many prominent figures had triggered the planning of a ‘guys’ night like you wouldn’t believe.’ …They still called it guys’ night even though Jolyne and Trixie were part of it. It was just tradition. She hoped they were having the most epic of quests.

Or maybe Discord had finally convinced them to go to a club in the middle of it. With Trixie involved anything was possible.

The thought made Eve chuckle slightly.

“Thinking about home?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yeah. I hope they haven’t burned it down by the time we get back.”

Nova heard that. “Oh no, Stardust. I’m not going to be there to stop her…”

“Sunburst can take care of it,” Allure said.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Have you thought about who’s taking care of Minna?”

“Apple Bloom. Though I secretly suspect Alushy is going to show up.”

Nova blinked. “How can you be calm about that!?”

“Alushy and I have an understanding. If she ruins Minna, I toss her into a universe that is literally hell.” Allure smiled innocently. “As it is, Alushy brings out parts of Minna I… can’t. My past self would scream in fear at me for saying this, but knowing Alushy has actually been better for Minna. Allowed her to feel more comfortable with herself.”

Nova stared at her, speechless.

“I’m sure you have similar feelings about Stardust though, right?”

Nova rubbed the back of her head. “Not… really? She’s a quiet kid who takes more after her father than me. She’s absolutely adorable but isn’t really one for… how do I put this? Interacting with ponies. There we go.”

Eve was suddenly next to Nova. “I haven’t done any Princess of Friendship duties in forever. This sounds like my calling.”

“Oh, she has a few friends. They’re all just as quiet as she is,” Nova said.

Eve glanced at Flutterfree. “That’s fine, but are you sure she knows the magic of friendship?”

“…Yeah, not really?”

“Man, Glims, you need to get to know your daughter better. Speaking of daughters!” Rainbow pulled out a small book out of her saddlebags. “I’ve got pictures of Prism!”

“Uuuuugh how many times have you showed us that!?” Vriska muttered. “We get it! Your kid is awesome!”

“Children are worth bragging about,” Jotaro asserted.

“Not every ten gogdamn minutes!”

“Hey, I haven’t brought this out since the start of the trip,” Rainbow chided. “Plus, you don’t have kids, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Newsflash, I’ve explored the multiverse for centuries, of course I have a couple kids around.”

“No offense Vriska, but you didn’t raise any of those,” Pinkie pointed out.

Vriska blinked. “Technically not…”

Flutterfree nodded. “Plus, given troll reproduction, none of them could be natural anyway.”

“You’ve been talking to Aradia haven’t you?”

“…It’s a distinct possibility that I have.”

“Hey! Guys! Talking about Prism here!” Rainbow blurted.

“Rainbow Dash, eternal attention hog,” Renee said, giggling.

Corona leaned in. “Even more so than me, and I’m literally a lightbulb.”

“Not literally,” Allure corrected. “See, flesh and bone filled with magic glowing blood. Not a lightbulb.”

Corona put her hands on her hips and looked down at Allure. “It was a figure of speech, little miss actually.”

Allure twitched. “Oh?”

Eve chuckled. “Corona, give her some leeway. You and I both are known to get on the ‘actually’ train occasionally.”

“Occasionally?” Flutterfree blurted.

“Okay, most of the time.”

“Everypony stop the presses!” Pinkie shouted. “WE’RE HEEEEERE!”

The Astra jumped into orbit around the green globe that was Farpoint. They were hailed by one of the ships in orbit, the captain appearing as a holographic screen in the middle of all of them. “Welcome to Farpoint.”

“Jack!?” Renee blurted. “What are you doing here?”

“Out on a cruise across the multiverse,” O’Neill said with a wink. “Stopping here a few days for relaxation, resupply, the works. Windshield needs cleaning too, but I haven’t found a big enough space squeegee yet.”

“Have you found any space squeegees?” Vriska asked.

“That information is classified.”

Eve chuckled. “Good luck on your classified squeegee mission then. We’ll be on the surface, taking a vacation. Maybe we’ll run into each other!”

“Probably not. I’m confined to the bridge, the horror.”

“Then order someone else to take over for a while when you get too bored to listen to regulation.”

“Yes ma’am.” O’Neill said with a salute.

Eve smiled. “See you around. Hey, Astra, take us down to our hotel.”

The ship beeped in response and descended into the planet’s atmosphere.

Corona started laughing. “Oh wow, all it took was one beep and Raging Sights already thinks the ship is obnoxious!”

Everyone had a chuckle at this.

Except Raging Sights, who would have blushed if that were possible.

~~~

Farpoint didn’t have that many settlements on it, largely due to the fact that it was exceedingly distant from Merodi Universalis proper. Most of these settlements were just simple towns, or, in a few cases, research outposts devoted to testing the magical stone, laria, that was abundant beneath Farpoint’s crust.

There was only one city on all of Farpoint: the aptly (if unimaginatively) named Farpoint City.

From the moment of its inception, the architects of the city knew it needed to look spectacular, so as to best suit the beauty of the planet it was built on… and to attract tourists. Anyone with a lick of sense knew the latter reason was by far the biggest reason.

The buildings of Farpoint City were designed unlike any standard Merodi constructions – the majority of buildings were designed with height in mind, appearing to be the conglomeration of dozens of pointed spires looking toward the sky, with numerous bridges moving between different towering buildings. Every building was covered in a precious metal of some sort to make it look like something out of a legend, even though magically speaking it wasn’t that hard to create enough of any standard precious metal to coat an entire city. Gold, silver, copper, and platinum shone in the sun, protected from wear and tear by simple protection enchantments.

Farpoint City was very shiny and everyone who lived there was a little tired of it. Tourists on the other hand…

“This is simply divine!” Renee said, doing a twirl as they walked along a bridge from the copper tower where the Astra was docked to the platinum hotel they would be staying in.

Flutterfree looked around, worried. “I know there are no birds on this world naturally… But people will bring their pets, and they will escape into the wild, and eventually all these skyscrapers are going to be a problem.”

Allure tapped through an informational data pad she had been given. “Looks like the city has a magical aura spread around the edges designed to deter animals from entering. Mainly vermin, but I bet it keeps birds out as well.”

Flutterfree nodded slowly. “…I guess that’s fine.”

“Hey, they live here, we don’t,” Eve said, putting a wing around Flutterfree. “Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they know what they’re doing here.”

Corona reached the end of the bridge first, opening the platinum doors with her magic. The interior of the hotel wasn’t anywhere near as overtly reflective as the exterior – while still platinum themed, the reflectivity was toned down, and the floor was just a high quality white carpet.

A receptionist welcomed them – she was a white pony with wings and a glowing ring above her head. “Hello! Welcome to Platinum Suites. You all have the Royal Adjunct.”

Renee gasped. “Stars, a halo-pegasus! Oh, forgive me for staring. It’s just… haloes are so rare even on Lai and rarely interact with us, to see a combination this far out…”

She smiled. “I used to work for Princess Luna exploring the stars. After the Bloodbath I lost direction for a while – heard about this place, was one of the first settlers. Name’s Anesthesia, but you can just call me Anna like everyone else. I own this hotel!” She beamed.

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Why are you acting as receptionist then?”

“Because I knew you were coming and wanted to let you in personally,” Anna said. “Also, if I’m being perfectly honest this hotel mostly runs itself and I get bored a lot.”

“Oh, I know what that’s like, darling,” Renee said. “Did you know I still own Rarity for You in my home universe – oh, if you know what that is.”

“I do,” Anna admitted. “There’s one in the shopping district. The Rarity there is a bit… eccentric, but she’s nice enough.”

“I know where I’m going later,” Renee declared.

Anna’s halo flashed for a moment and executed a simple ‘toss’ spell, giving Eve several keycards to the Royal Adjunct. “Right this way to your spectacular accommodations.”

She took them all into a large, cylindrical elevator with more than enough size to fit all of them. It rose to the very top floor. They came out into a simple, square room with a single door at the end of the hall. Anna gestured at the card reader.

Eve slid her card through the slot and the door swung outward. They walked out into the Royal Adjunct of Platinum Suites. The ‘room’ was huge. It was a circular expanse larger than most houses, with ten king-sized beds arranged equidistantly around the edges. There were numerous televisions on the walls, all of which were currently off, and dozens of chairs around a handful of tables ringed the middle of the room. The middle composed of the door to the elevator and a large, walled-off bathroom.

Anna beamed. “Welcome to the most advanced Suite we have, and also the largest. It may seem like one room with a bathroom and an exit attached to it, but there’s so much more. Every bed has a set of controls at the head which can be used to erect walls around it – for privacy or whatever other reason you could imagine.” She demonstrated, letting her halo flash to tap one of the buttons. A square set of walls with a door appeared around one of the beds, sealing it off in its own little enclosure.

“The controls can also open the walls up to the balcony.” A slit opened in the wall, revealing a walkway that went all the way around the room, from which all of Farpoint City could be seen.

Rainbow flew out onto the balcony. “This is so awesome. Pinkie! Why doesn’t the Pinkie Emporium have this!?”

“Because all the tall buildings become part of rollercoasters!” Pinkie called. “Also stop pretending I’m employed by the Emporium!”

“Nah!”

“Dashie!”

Anna smiled warmly at their interaction. “You can also set the ceiling to clear, if you want.” She gestured with a wing and suddenly they could all see the sky above them. “It’ll still block rain, so feel free to leave it clear regardless of the situation.”

“We are never closing this,” Corona said, eyes sparkling.

“But what if the sun gets too bright?” Applejack asked.

“Never closing this.”

“Ah. Gotcha.”

Anna turned around, looking at Eve. “Room service and maids are available by request. Though the food replicator over there and the self-cleaning spells contained in that cupboard should service most of your needs. If you need anything don’t hesitate to call.” She gave Eve her card. “My personal number’s on there too if you really need anything. Or, y’know, just want to talk or something.”

Eve smiled warmly. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Well, I’ll let you all get settled in! Enjoy your stay!” She beamed and flashed her halo – teleporting away.

“Enough people believe in her that she can execute a teleport. Interesting,” Corona observed.

“Hm?” Jotaro asked, raising an eyebrow.

“The halo’s magic is determined by how many people believe in it and how strongly. A halo that nobody knows can’t even execute a telekinesis spell. But those who become leaders can basically do anything that comes to their mind on a whim.”

“An interesting power…”

“You should see deer. Their magic makes less sense. I still don’t know how they have any idea what their spells are going to do before it happens. It’s completely dependant on the environment, but they can work it out somehow even if they’ve never been somewhere before.”

“One of the many mysteries of nature,” Flutterfree said.

Jotaro sat on a bed, claiming it as his own.

“Oh, I just realized! There’s eleven of us and only ten beds!” Pinkie blurted. “We need to fix that right now! Who wants to double up with the best sleepover friend Pinkie Pie?”

“Nobody. Ever,” Nova deadpanned. “Your level of sleep chill is almost nonexistent.”

“It’s like you turn into a hamster ball,” Rainbow said, hoofbumping Nova.

“I don’t turn into a hamster ball!” Pinkie objected from inside a giant hamster ball.

“I’ll double up with Allure,” Renee said, pulling her sister close. “Just like old times!”

“...Just like?”

“Well, no, but you know what I mean.”

Allure raised an eyebrow.

Vriska turned to Jotaro. “You know, your wife must really trust you. Ten beautiful women in the same room as you. How will you cope?”

“Vriska, we’re all ponies except for you,” Nova pointed out.

“And how exactly does that invalidate her point?” Renee interjected, indignant.

“Okay, fine, most of us are technically related in some way or another at this point. That work?”

Jotaro grunted. “Yare yare daze…”

Eve rolled her eyes. “We’re all good friends and we all trust each other. Vriska just needs to stop instigating.”

“Me. Stop instigating.” Vriska laughed. “There’s something that’ll never happen.”

“I can think of several times you didn’t instigate a conflict,” Flutterfree commented.

“That’s because you spend every waking moment of your life in my proximity.”

“I can also think of times you haven’t exaggerated.”

“Give up while you’re ahead,” Corona whispered to Vriska. “Facing the Flutterfree head-on is a bad idea.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Oh, no. I’m just trying to produce a response.” Corona grinned. “Instigating, if you will.”

Vriska blinked. “…Why do we never hang out?”

“Because ka has deemed that the two fiery vixens shall never bond, alas!” Corona said, putting a hand to her head.

“Been taking acting lessons?” Nova asked.

“Nope! I’m just a big ham.”

“Bacon,” Jotaro corrected.

Corona opened her mouth to correct him, but realized he had a point. She shrugged.

Renee cleared her throat. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going to go check out the local Rarity for You. See if it’s up to my standards. Probably buy a vacationing outfit.”

“Ooh! Ooh! I’m coming too!” Pinkie declared. “I have the sudden uncontrollable urge to add a bizarre dress to my collection!”

“Anyone else?” Renee asked. “Allure, want to go shopping with your dear sister?”

“Pass,” Allure said.

“Your loss!” Pinkie declared. “Avast Renee, let us go shopping!”

The two of them bounced off to the elevator to see the rest of the city.

“You know, if I actually had anything planned today, I would be annoyed they ran off so quickly,” Eve muttered. “Luckily my master schedule only starts tomorrow!”

“Do you have to be such an accountant?” Vriska asked.

“Yes!” Eve said, gleefully. “Enjoy your free time while it lasts because tomorrow the schedule begins! Up at the crack of dawn we go see the legendary sparkling sunrise, and then we get to experience the chilly wafts of the city on the high-rise bridges. Then I’ve chartered a ride through the hole in this world’s moon, where we will enter the legendary casino a-”

“Oh my gog you’ve ruined everything,” Vriska groaned.

Flutterfree coughed. “Um… Eve’s messing with you.”

Vriska looked at Eve’s cheesy grin. “…You bitch.”

“Thank you!” Eve chuckled. She pulled the real schedule out of the aether. “There’s actually nothing until after noon tomorrow, and for the most part I don’t have anything scheduled for anyone specifically. There’s just events. We all have to go on the ride through the Moonhole, but otherwise you’re free to come and go to most the rest of these or do something else. I even have ‘relax time’ here. Of note is this entire day filled with ‘amusement park’ which, against my better judgment, I haven’t planned anything specific at all.”

“…Since Pinkie’s not here, the honor falls to me,” Nova said. She created a scoreboard with her magic. “Eve: one. Vriska: zero.”

“I was letting out spicy one liners the whole trip!” Vriska shouted indignantly.

“The scoreboard has only just begun. You’ll find that, as Pinkie’s replacement, I am a lot less spontaneous about the whole thing and follow a strict set of ‘funny’ regulations.”

Vriska blinked.

“Nova: one. Vriska: still zero.” Nova grinned.

“You’re enjoying this aren’t you?”

“Yes. Oh hell yes.”

Vriska shrugged. “Fine!” She put an overdramatic hand to her forehead. “I know when I’m not wanted! Spiderbitch out, it’s time to find adventure!”

“Oh sweet!” Rainbow said, flying in from outside. “I heard adventure. Where!?”

“I have no idea! Want to help me find some?”

“Am I awesome!?”

“Oh, so that’s a no?”

Rainbow rolled her eyes. “That’s a yes numbnuts.”

“Right! AWAY WE GO!”

“Don’t leave me out! I have to keep score!” Nova said, running after them.

Vriska took one look at her and decided not to throw her off the balcony. Instead she grabbed Nova and carried her like a suitcase. “Unwelcome baggage accepted! Anyone else want to find random bits of adventure?”

“You really goin’ out on a wild romp before the first day even begins?” Applejack asked, raising her eyebrow. “Ah thought you were more mature than this.”

Allure quietly put her hoof down, deciding she suddenly didn’t want to go on the adventure.

“You thought wrong!” Rainbow declared, winking at Applejack. “TO THE SKIES!” She flew out over the balcony and into the sky, Vriska flapping along behind her, dragging Nova along.

“Well, if we’re having a sudden ‘do our own thing’ moment,” Eve said, “I would very much like to look at some laria – I hear the mineral has very peculiar and arcane properties.”

“That sounds like something I can get behind,” Corona said. “Count me in.”

“Oh, me too,” Flutterfree said. “Sounds fun!”

Corona blinked. “…Really?”

Flutterfree nodded. “Really.”

“Huh. Sure. To the magic crystals!”

Eve teleported them away, leaving only Applejack, Jotaro, and Allure in the room.

Allure blinked. “So… What do we do?”

“Relax,” Applejack said, leaning back in a rocking chair.

“…You know, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” Allure said, crawling into a chair next to Applejack. “Just take a moment to rest on a vacation. What a crazy idea.”

The sides of Jotaro’s mouth curled up. “Someone’s figured out what a vacation actually means.”

Silence fell over the Royal Adjunct of Platinum Suites.

~~~

“Laria isn’t exactly a crystal per se, since it has no structure,” Eve said as they flew through the shimmering skies of Farpoint City. “It’s a completely amorphous substance that adheres to itself through thaumic attraction, not through any sort of chemical or molecular bond. It grows like a crystal, and has the appearance of citrine when cut, but if you actually see any in the wild it’ll just be a big blob of yellow stuff, somewhat like amber. Except it doesn’t move anywhere near fast enough to trap bugs in it.”

“Wow,” Flutterfree said. “Sounds like some really useful stuff.”

“We’re still researching it,” Corona said, flying in a lounging position. “As a pure power source, we have better options. But I heard that you could carve spells onto its surface and create complex charms even mundane individuals could use.”

Flutterfree nodded. “And it’s really common here.”

“It’s only found here,” Eve corrected. “There are a few other substances like it in the multiverse, but we’ve never recorded it naturally anywhere else.”

“Wow. …I say that a lot.”

“It’s what happens when Eve talks for long enough,” Corona said.

Flutterfree giggled. “Don’t I know i- oh!” She dive-bombed into the lower levels of the city like a bird of prey. A few seconds later she flew back up to them and put an excessively long fuzzy scarf on Eve. “Perfect!”

Eve was momentarily startled. “I uh… what?”

Flutterfree pulled at part of the scarf – revealing it to have a hood built in – and put it over Eve’s windswept mane. Two giant googly eyes on springs bounced into existence, hanging just past Eve’s horn. “You look so cute!”

Eve looked at the spring eyes. The spring eyes looked back.

“It also looks ridiculous,” Corona commented.

“I like it,” Eve declared.

Corona stopped looking where she was going and ran into a silver wall. “W-what?”

“It’ll make a nice souvenir. ‘Eve, why do you have this scarf-hood-eye-thing?’ ‘Well, hypothetical young individual from a future generation, this is from a very dear friend of mine who thought it was cute. It reminds me of a great vacation.’ ‘Oh wow, cool story!’”

“…That wasn’t a very cool story,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“Let me have my fantasies.”

Corona shrugged. “Whatever floats your crazy boat.”

“I am the Charter-Princess-Overhead. Eccentricity is to be expected. If at any point I stop being eccentric, someone please remove the changeling from the picture.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “We’d know if it wasn’t you, Eve.”

“Yeah…” she said, a faraway look in her eyes. “Oh hey, there’s a store!” She dive-bombed, gesturing for the others to follow. They landed on a mid-level balcony outside a store. Laria Central. A giant stone hung from the shop’s sign. It was a pristinely-cut sphere of a brilliant yellow luster that reflected the sun right into Corona’s eyes.

“Shiny,” Corona observed.

“It’s so beautiful…” Flutterfree added. “Like a star came down to warm you with proximity…”

“…It’s just a pretty rock.”

Eve looked deeply into the sphere. “You aren’t looking at it closely enough, Corona. There’s something truly magical about this stone.”

“Brainwashing?”

Flutterfree and Eve giggled. “Oh no, no, of course not!” Eve said. “There’s just more to it than being a simple rock. ...Though I do think the one on the sign is just enchanted to look like the real thing. Come on, let’s go in.”

The three of them strode into Laria Central, not at all surprised to find virtually everything in the store was made from the carved magic gem – the shelves were covered in paint made with laria dust, the tiles had small gems embedded in them, and the lights were made from engraved laria spells.

“Welcome to Laria Central, the go-to stop for all your laria needs,” a Gem droned, clearly uninterested in her spiel. “I am Citrine. How may I be of assi-” She realized who she was talking to. “O-Overhead Evening! I-I’m so sorry for the disrespect!”

“I know all about it, Citrine,” Eve said with a smile. “I worked at a hayburger once, I know what it’s like.”

“Y-you did?”

Eve rolled her eyes. “I was once a lowly college student, believe it or not.”

“You were Celestia’s prize pupil,” Corona said, raising an eyebrow.

“That doesn’t change the fact that she worked at the hayburger,” Flutterfree pointed out. “Such a thankless job…”

“Probably worse than here, come to think of it,” Eve said. “At least the crystals in here are cool. And might explode. Gives it an air of danger!”

Citrine blinked. “…You weren’t what I was expecting.”

“I’m purposely letting myself cut loose. You have no idea how much I don’t realize I need vacations until I’m already on them.”

Flutterfree put a wing on Eve. “There there, reel it in. Let’s go look at these fancy laria vases, okay?”

“Okay… Okay…” The two walked over to the vases.

Corona glanced at Citrine. “Hey, am I crazy, or am I the tag-along here?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m still having my worldview challenged about my figures of authority. Come back in two to three weeks when I’m able to think straight again.”

~~~

“What do you mean you’ve got nothing?” Vriska asked.

On the screen of Vriska’s phone O’Neill shrugged. “I mean there’s not any unusual magical readings on the planet you can check out.”

“This entire planet is filled with golden magic rocks!”

“Yes. And they’re on the entire planet.”

Vriska twitched. “But we need to go look for something! I’m not just going to go waltz into the forest and hope we find something!”

“I am,” Nova said.

“You’re a walking scoreboard, you don’t count.”

“Removing my personhood, are we?”

“Look, O’Neill,” Rainbow said, dragging herself into the conversation as well. “You have ka sensors up there right? Just look for something, anything interesting!”

“Interesting is relative,” O’Neill said, pushing a few buttons. “For all you know I’ll pick on a romantic story and you’ll all get dragged along as side characters for daring to look.”

Rainbow Dash blinked. “Can we not look for the ka now?”

“Right, that settles it!” Vriska declared. “Biggest source of ka you can find on the planet.”

“Eve.”

Vriska facepalmed. “That isn’t one of us.”

“There’s a library in the mercantile district that’s shooting stuff up like a beacon.”

“We are not playing the egghead with the magical book,” Rainbow declared.

“We don’t know that’s what it is!” Nova pointed out.

“Next!”

O’Neill smirked. “And the next one’s in the middle of the jungle on a continent that hasn’t been settled yet.”

“BINGO!” Rainbow blurted. “Let’s go there.”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Using the most advanced and least understood technology of our time to find random ways to enjoy ourselves. What is this world coming to?”

“I don’t know. I do know we need to get the coordinates.”

O’Neill sent them over. “Good luck! Those probably aren’t accurate at all given how much wilderness is out there!” He cut the feed.

Nova pulled up an image of the planet on her hoof screen. “Let’s see… I should be able to initiate a point-to-point teleport across the planet. Just give me a sec. Or two or three. …Don’t look at me like that, long-range teleportation takes a while!”

The three of them were silent for a moment.

Vriska grunted, leaning against a golden wall. “You know, I wonder why I’m here.”

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” Rainbow said.

“Not that. I mean here. With you guys. With Eve’s little vacation of the closest of friends.” She held out her hand. “I don’t exactly know Purple Smart all that well in case you didn’t notice.”

“It seemed like you were getting along fine to me,” Rainbow pointed out.

“She’s the Princess of fucking Friendship, of course she gets along with me if she wants to. But think about it. You’re all either her oldest friends, or you’re Renee’s sister, or you’re Jotaro. Whose entire family owes its continued stability to Eve. And then there’s me. Spiderbitch.”

“Man, Vriska, do not sell yourself short,” Rainbow said. “You’re her friend just like the rest of us. Sure, you may not know her the best, but you’re a big part of a lot of her good friends’ lives. Why wouldn’t she invite you?”

“Corona and Allure came without their teams,” Vriska pointed out. “Where’s Lady Rarity? Zod? Huh?”

Rainbow Dash facehooved. “That’s different and you know it.”

“I’m just here because she thought it’d be rude if I was left alone.”

“Teleport ready,” Nova declared. “But before we go… Vriska, what on Equis is up with you? It’s unlike you to be bothered by this sort of thing.”

“You ponies are making me soft, that’s what.”

“While true, you’re not this soft. What’s up?”

“Nothing! Not a thing.”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “Rainbow Dash, how much bullshit is coming out of her mouth right now?”

“All of it,” Rainbow Dash said.

“All the bullshit.” Nova added a number to the scoreboard in her favor.

Vriska twitched. “I don’t have to say jack anything.”

“No, you don’t. But you know you should.”

“Damn you ponies,” Vriska muttered. “Fine! I miss Starbeat already!” She threw her arms wide. “Been away from her for less than a day and already it’s messing with me!”

“…Not Hastur?” Rainbow asked.

“Troll romance is complicated, now is not the time to call it into question,” Nova told Rainbow. “You need to get some ‘feelings jamming’ out?”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Given my sudden outburst right there, what do you think?”

“My answer is ‘probably’,” Rainbow said. “Hey, if you don’t want to do it with me, I gotcha, you don’t know me. But Nova’s certainly available.”

“…I think I’d prefer someone that didn’t look like Starbeat, frankly.”

“Flutterfree?” Nova suggested.

“Flutterfree,” Rainbow decided.

“Fine, fine, I’ll go have a nice long discussion with the absolute master of ‘feelings jamming’.” Vriska rolled her eyes. “This does not stop our adventure.”

“Oh, of course not,” Nova said. “Unless you want it to.”

“We’re already out here, I’m not crawling back to the hotel like a beat up puppy.”

Rainbow snorted. “Nice.”

Vriska bumped Rainbow’s hoof.

Nova rolled her eyes. “Right. You good for now?”

Vriska smirked. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“Okaaaaaay… Initiating teleport.”

They were suddenly in the middle of a jungle composed out of giant orange flowers instead of trees.

“Sweet,” Vriska said. “Now where’s the thing?”

Nova shrugged. “Dunno. Somewhere around here. We’ll have to look for it.”

“Oh, hey, this is just like the first place!” Rainbow said. “We all got lost in the jungle and didn’t know how to get back home!”

Nova nodded. “Yeah. I don’t remember. I wasn’t there.”

“Ah, psh, so here’s what we do. We walk in a random direction until we find savage ponies or a village of demon-bugs!”

Vriska smirked. “THIS WAY!”

“On the way I can tell you about Prism’s big recital!”

Nova facehooved as she saw Rainbow taking out the photos again.

~~~

Allure opened her eyes.

“Huh. You know, I never really knew how nice sitting and doing nothing could be.”

Applejack chuckled. “That’s just because you’re holdin’ onto your inner child.”

“No I’m not,” Allure grunted.

“Uh, yes, yes it is,” Applejack corrected. “You’re still a filly at heart. You’ve seen a lot, but the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you think about things… There may not be an innocence to it, but there’s definitely a young spark in there.”

“I’m almost fifty!” Allure blurted.

This made Jotaro’s eyes open wide. “…Nani?”

“Translates to something like mid-thirties in human years,” Allure clarified.

“It ain’t an exact science, that’s for sure,” Applejack admitted. “But that number doesn’t mean anythin’ anyway. It’s how you act that determines what you are at heart.”

Allure twitched. “I don’t think that’s it. I’m not a filly at heart – it’s just that all of you can’t help but see me that way! Every one of you but Vriska and Jotaro knew me as a kid, and you just can’t let go of it! I’ve seen you treat Apple Bloom better than me!”

Applejack turned to Allure blinking. “…Why’ve you bottled this up for so long?”

Allure sighed. “…Sorry.”

“Ah asked a question, Allure.”

Allure nodded slowly. “Renee can’t move past looking at me as her little sister. She’s tried – she’s really tried. But even once I adopted Minna, she couldn’t adjust. She’s able to change on a practical level – getting me different presents as I get older, not expecting me to keep liking the same things – but she still dotes over me.”

“Ah. Mothering,” Jotaro said.

“…What?”

“She’s mothering you.”

“But she’s my sister.”

Applejack smirked. “Hey, didn’t she watch you a lot more than your parents did after you formed the Cutie Mark Crusaders for a long while there? You were in the boutique more than you were at your own home and room as Ah recall.”

Allure blinked. “…Right.”

“So she watched you a lot more than Cookie. Ah’ve got nothin’ against Cookie, mind you, but she basically let Rarity mother you.” Applejack adjusted her hat. “Ah’m just sayin’, that might have somethin’ to do with it.”

Allure nodded slowly. “That does make some sense… But it’s also really weird. She’s not old enough, we fought a lot, and…” she blinked. “None of that matters, does it?”

“Not in my book,” Applejack said.

“…Huh. Well, that’s given me something to think about.” Allure shook her head. “Wait, we’ve gotten off track. I’ve accepted Renee, it’s the rest of you I’m on about. You all look at me like a kid. I have an eleven-year-old daughter for crying out loud!”

“Maybe you’re seeing something that isn’t there,” Jotaro said.

“You aren’t guilty,” Allure pointed out. “Probably because you work for Renee more than you’re her friend. I bet it doesn’t waft off of her onto you like it does the others.”

“Ah don’t hang with Renee as much as Ah used to either,” Applejack pointed out. “Sure, we get together from time to time, still good friends, but Ah don’t see her rubbin’ off on me. What Ah see is a child at heart refusing to accept who she is. A little rascal to the end.”

Allure twitched. “Little rascal? Really?”

“There’s nothin’ wrong with keepin’ some of the traits usually reserved for the young,” Applejack said. “Innocence… wonder… curiosity… energy… some of us would like those things back, y’know.”

Allure cocked her head. “But...”

“No buts about it. You’re clearly not innocent because of what you’ve been through, but you trot around as if it didn’t affect you. You’re almost always smiling, laughing, and having fun. Those eyes of yours see the world anew every day. It’s an amazing thing you’ve managed to keep for yourself, Allure. You shouldn’t resent it.”

Allure looked down. “…But I don’t want to be seen as a kid.”

“Being young at heart and being a kid are not the same things and Ah think you know that. You just don’t wanna think about it.”

Allure allowed a small smile to come to her face. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Guess this is what I get for hanging around with myself all the time. Tends to produce an echo chamber.”

“Ah bet.”

“…Question, though. Applejack, why are you talking like you’re an old mare. You’re almost sixty, not one-twenty!”

Jotaro put a hand to his head. “Yare yare daze…”

Allure facepalmed. “Yes, Jotaro, we get it, you’re almost sixty and you’re old, but you’re not going to age anymore so shhh.”

Jotaro blinked, trying to process whether she’d insulted his age in there somewhere or not.

Applejack cleared her throat to answer Allure’s question. “Ah dunno for sure Allure. Ah guess Ah’m the opposite of you, in many ways. While the other five – six if you count Nova – were developin’ and learnin’ how to be themselves, Ah already knew what Ah was for the most part. Honest, steadfast, and hardworkin’. Maybe it was because Ah’d been through hardship and come out of it better than Ah would have been otherwise, Ah dunno. But it was always clear Ah was the mature one of the group, even though Renee and Flutters were older. Ah got married first, had kids first, ran the farm most of my life…” She pursed her lips. “Ah guess my life was just geared to make me an early old mare.”

“You sure fit the part,” Allure said. “And that’s a good thing.”

“Ah’m smart enough to realize getting the wisdom of old age early is a blessin’,” Applejack chuckled. “It’d be best if you learned the opposite.”

“…Thanks. I’ll try.” She stretched her legs. “So, what do we do now that we’ve relaxed?”

“Keep relaxing,” Jotaro said.

Allure blinked. “…But we’ve been here for hours already doing that.”

“Exactly,” Applejack added.

“…Great.”

~~~

The local Rarity’s name was Affix. Her version of Rarity for You was built into the ground floor of an iron-dusted building, making it stand out from the more traditional ‘precious metals’ that coated most of the others. The interior of the store decided to forego the general metallic feel of Farpoint City altogether, instead opting for bright colors punctuated by completely black backgrounds.

The store hung clothing of all colors and sizes for both equine and human customers – and there was an ‘other’ section in the back, with a sign that said ‘designs transferable to other body types by request.’ The designs themselves looked precisely like something a Rarity would design if they felt a sudden need to pop out with bright expressions of color.

“…I like it,” Renee said, looking at a dress composed of bright blues in varying hues. “Bit more dependant on intensity, but I could see myself wearing a lot of these dresses.”

“Sweet!” Pinkie said, bouncing up and down. “Then let’s buy some! Let the shopping begin!”

They heard a sigh of relief from behind them. Turning, they saw Affix herself standing behind them. “You know, I’m always decidedly worried when another Rarity comes strolling in here – always judge, judge, judge with us isn’t it?” Her appearance was a bit jarring, to say the least. One of her ears had the top half bitten off, and there was a scar across her face that started from her chipped horn and went all the way down her neck, vanishing under the collar of her suit. The suit itself was of a black and white design generally seen on stallions rather than mares, but she pulled it off excellently. She clearly designed it to fit her form and to accentuate her cutie mark, since the diamond made out of four smaller diamonds was perfectly visible through a hole in the suit of a matching shape.

“That seems to be the case much of the time, unfortunately,” Renee said, shaking Affix’s hoof. “You look like you have a story.”

“I most certainly do, and we can definitely get into it, but first, dresses. Oh I love every last one of these colorful little flowers but they must go! I have the perfect one for you, Renee. Don’t you worry!”

“I have no doubt the perfection will be astoun- Great Heavens what is that?”

Affix had pulled a curtain off a pony-shaped mannequin. “Behold. I call it Five.”

“Why would you call something so fantastic such a mundane name!?” Renee blurted, placing her hoof on the vibrant green sleeves; the material unknown to Renee, soft and comfortable enough to send shivers up her spine.

“The art of the dress is within the dress itself, is it not? Who cares about names? You can name your own dress anything you wish! I own five Bertas.”

Renee stared at her.

“Joking. I’m not that eccentric. They all have different names. Benny, Berta, Bart, Beatrice, and Baroque.”

Renee glanced at Pinkie.

The party pony shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I’m not always a joke radar.”

Affix chuckled. “Ah, it’s always nice to see bewildered looks on my own, undamaged face. I am sorry if it’s a bit much, but I’m not going to change myself.”

Renee smiled. “Your pride in yourself is something to be admired.”

“Or to be ran out of town by an angry mob for daring to wear something risqué out in public,” Affix said, tapping her cracked horn. “Scar wasn’t from that. The scar’s from my world’s version of Discord. Less jokes, a lot more sadism and cruelty. Gave all six of us a permanent affliction of some sort or other so we would never forget him.”

Renee winced. “I’m so sorry.”

“I got it easy – after it healed it was just a visual disability, one that could be worked around. Rainbow’s wings stopped working, AJ got muscle atrophy, poor Twi lost her horn entirely… Merodi technology has fixed most of that now, thanks in no small part to your efforts in bringing us together, but it still happened.”

“Life is brutal, huh?” Pinkie asked.

“I am tempted to say you wouldn’t know, but you most likely do.” Affix smiled awkwardly. “Anyway, this is just my best fit for you. Feel free to look around the store and find anything else you want.”

Renee teleported Five onto her body, allowing the green dress with the natural vine-like highlights fit her body. Even the tail-hole in the back was perfect, something a lot of dresses didn’t bother with. So rarely found it be made comfortable. “You’ve certainly outdone yourself!”

“It comes with a headdress,” Affix said, pointing at the leafy laces wrapped around the mannequin's ears.

“Right,” Renee said, absent-mindedly teleporting it on to her, spending all her focus on the smooth feel of the fabric. “Simply divine…”

“I FOUND A DRESS FOR ME!” Pinkie said, pulling a red one off a nearby rack. The fabric had hundreds of little reflective plates all over, making the dress sparkle in every angle of light, almost like glitter.

Affix raised an eyebrow. “Huh… I don’t remember making that one.”

Pinkie put it on. It was surprisingly form-fitting to her body type, including the tail hole. Only one of her front hooves had a sleeve, the other completely bare. She somehow had also procured red teardrop earrings.

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Looks a little… I dunno. It’s pretty, bu-”

Pinkie pulled out her hammer and stood on her hind hooves only, smirking cheekily at Renee. The dress suddenly fit perfectly and looked amazing – though had it been a human dress, it would have been rather lacking since half of her chest was exposed. The dress was almost design-free, save for a curious eye icon sewn in that appeared just below Pinkie’s neck. She bounced around a bit, showing that despite the bottom part of the dress being form-fitting, she was still able to move with amazing agility. “I knew I’d find something!”

Affix put a hoof to her chin. “I really think I would remember designing something like that…”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth – you’re getting paid for it!” Pinkie produced a small treasure chest filled with miniature doubloons.

“…Unconventional payment is accepted at this Rarity for You,” Affix said with a chuckle. “The dress of the crimson eye is yours.”

“Yay!”

Renee chuckled. “I’ll purchase this dress at checkout, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

Pinkie grinned. “Woo! Hey Renee, isn’t it nice to not have any interpersonal drama going on?”

“Why? …Is everyone else having interpersonal drama today?”

“Yep!” Pinkie grinned. “Corona’s feeling left out, Vriska’s struggling with odd-man-outness, Allure feels like a kid, and we haven’t even got to Nova’s thing yet!”

“Ah. Think they can handle it on their own?”

“Oh yeah, easy.”

“Then I’m going to return to my shopping.”

“Okie dokie loki!”

~~~

“Flutterfree, look at these earrings!” Eve said, pointing at a glistening pair of laria earrings shaped like hourglasses. She used her magic to affix them to Flutterfere’s ears. “Oh, they look great on you!”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, not like these silly little spring eyes that are just cute, but kinda silly.”

Flutterfree blushed. “Yeah, sorry about that. I couldn’t resist.”

“Oh I don’t mind!”

Corona let out a pained grunt. “Would you two just kiss already!?”

The two of them stared at her with blank expressions.

“I mean, come on, you two have been focused on nothing but each other the entire trip. Get it over with already! Chop chop!”

The pegasus and the alicorn were quiet for a moment. Then they both burst into laughter.

Corona stared blankly at the jovial pair of pegasus and alicorn, the latter with two annoying bouncy spring eyeballs on a hood. It was very distracting.

She tried to parse the reaction. “…Was this some kind of joke?”

“Wha – oh no no no no no!” Eve said, coughing to stop herself from laughing further. “Don’t go storming off, okay? This clearly isn’t what you think it is o-”

Flutterfree snorted, her hooves over her mouth.

“F-Flutterfree, stop, we need to stop making Corona confused!”

“I know… I know!” She put her wings over her eyes. “But it just came out of nowhere.”

“Nowhere!?” Corona blurted. “This didn’t come out of nowhere! I’ve been sitting here like a third wheel while you two talk back and forth about how cute the other one is or how great the other one looks, enjoying each other more than anything else here.”

Flutterfree and Eve weren’t laughing anymore.

“S-sorry,” Corona said, sitting down on a nearby chair. “I let my anger grab a hold of me again. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk magical theory, Eve. I was just… expecting something else.”

Eve walked up to her. “I… I’m sorry. We were ignoring you, weren’t we? …Not actively, but pushing you to the side.”

Flutterfree nodded slowly. “I didn’t know we were making you feel left out. I’m sorry for not paying enough attention to see that.”

“It’s fine,” Corona said. “I just… I’m just seeing things where there isn’t anything. …Right?”

“Oh, Celestia no, we’re not together,” Eve said. “That’s not my thing – last time I had romantic feelings toward anything I was a human teenager and I felt like the dumbest thing in existence afterward. And it’s definitely not Flutterfree’s thing.”

Flutterfree nodded. “It wouldn’t be… proper for me.”

“Ooooh, right,” Corona said, understanding. “But then… what’s going on?”

Eve and Flutterfree looked to each other and nodded. Eve spoke up. “You can touch us to find out. It’s not the simplest of relationships.”

“…You sure?” Corona asked.

“Very sure,” Flutterfree said. “Feel free to go beyond the surface memories.”

Corona dissipated the gloves around her hands and touched both their minds at once.

The emotions came first, as always – concern, minor amusement, nerves, and some very potent form of the love of friendship.

Then she arrived in a memory – a memory where Flutterfree almost killed Eve in her sleep, and then Eve did kill Flutterfree with a cruel trick. The Hunger Games. Corona had heard about this, but it hadn’t been something Eve and Flutterfree advertised. She hadn’t felt the need to pry.

The memory shifted to Rainbow Dash lecturing the two of them on what Loyalty meant. And how, now that they had both betrayed each other seriously, everything was going to change. They needed to not try to keep things the way they were and accept what they were going to become – a different sort of friendship.

The next set of memories were all blurred together. The two of them specifically going out of their way to meet up with each other – go to the park, go to lunch, sit around in the Canterlot Library, go for walks in the woods…

They may have taken Rainbow Dash’s advice a bit too far, down to the point where Eve would wait outside Flutterfree’s house after she was done working on some days so they could catch up on what happened.

Corona pulled back, blinking. “…A relationship based in… guilt?”

“Yeah we’re not too sure if it’s the healthiest thing either,” Flutterfree said, rubbing the back of her head sheepishly. “It just seems to… work.”

“It’s turned us into really close friends,” Eve said. “…Frankly, I needed it, since I was drifting away from everyone. I became the Charter-Princess and just let my work take over, and… Well, I talked to Luna and Spike regularly outside of political engagements or crises - that was mostly it. She brought me back.” Eve pulled Flutterfree close. “And it was her idea to go on this vacation.”

Flutterfree nodded.

Corona stared at them. “…Huh. I’m not sure what it is between you two, but I’m fine with it.”

“I think the closest we could find was Vriska and Starbeat,” Eve said. “It’s clearly not the same thing – we have no psychological or biological drive to seek each other out – it just kinda happened.”

“We know everything about each other at this point,” Flutterfree said.

“Yeah… Everything,” Eve said, a warm smile coming to her face. “…It can be a very big load off your chest, having somepony who knows.”

Corona only vaguely knew what Eve was implying – and she didn’t push. She did feel like testing their bond though. “Right, here’s a test. Flutterfree, besides you, who is Eve’s favorite friend?”

“Pinkie,” Flutterfree answered without hesitation.

“Flutterfree’s is Discord, to the surprise of absolutely no one,” Eve offered.

Flutterfree smirked. “Oh look at you and your playful implications.”

Corona put a hand to her chin, smirking. “Oh, I think I’m going to enjoy this. Eve, embarrassing fact about Flutterfree. Go.”

A few things flashed through Eve’s mind that made her laugh – but were clearly a bit too personal to tell Corona. “You know how she’s partial to meat now, right? Due to the whole quasi-vampire thing?”

“Yeah…?”

“Whenever she cooks she’ll absent-mindedly lick the juices off the meat.”

“I’m sorry!” Flutterfree wailed. “I didn’t know!”

“You served me drool-covered steak the first time I was over. I think I have the right to never let you live it down.”

“Yeah, well, uh… You sing in the shower! Really loudly! And badly! And try to make dubstep noises with your mouth!”

“I use my horn too!”

“I can hear the mouth noises from veeeeeeery far away.”

“Man you two are lucky you aren’t humans,” Corona pointed out.

“Hm?” Flutterfree said, looking up.

“Knowing about shower habits implies things.”

Flutterfree rammed her face into a shelf, breaking a vase.

“You break it you buy i-” Citrine began before she realized who she was talking to. “Oh! Uh… On the house, Evening!”

“I’ll pay for it,” Flutterfree said, groaning. “Just let me wallow in cross-cultural embarrassment for a minute.”

Eve patted her on the back gently, right between her wings. Probably the perfect spot, Corona noted.

“You okay with this?” Eve said, turning to Corona. “Because I’m sure we ca-”

“I’m fine. You two are fine.” Corona smiled warmly. “Don’t worry about me. Though I would appreciate it if we could have a discussion on the magical science of these rocks eventually.”

“Well why not now, while Flutterfree is busy wallowing in cross-cultural embarrassment?”

Flutterfree’s ears twitched, but Corona saw a smile on her face she was trying to hide.

“There will never be a better time.”

~~~

“And this is her at her graduation! Look at that little hat!” Rainbow said, holding the image in front of Nova and Vriska for them to see.

“Delightful,” Vriska deadpanned, cutting down another flower.

“Oh, and here she is showing her love for danci-”

“PRISM IS IN COLLEGE FOR BUCK’S SAKE RAINBOW DASH!” Nova shouted. “Could you COOL IT!?”

Vriska and Rainbow stared at Nova, blinking. Vriska decided a smirk was the best reaction. “And I thought I had unresolved baggage I needed to deal with.”

“No, that’s not what this is about, you shut up for one minute. Rainbow, Prism is in college. She’s a grown mare – or at least old enough to not be heralded as the best thing in Equis!”

Rainbow facehooved. “Nova…”

“Didn’t your parents do this exact same thing to you? Didn’t you make a big deal out of it?”

“Uh, yeah, but then I realized lots of support was nice and totally shouldn’t be hated. Also, I don’t do what they do. I never do this when Prism is around. I don’t think she has any idea I brag about how amazing she is – which she is, by the way, totally amazing – because she’s her own mare.”

“I… Eh…”

“Let’s see… Hrm, I think I did a pretty good job parenting her, considering I was completely alone and working as a Wonderbolt.” She pulled a photo out of the album showing a white mare – Prism – with several friends standing outside of Eve’s School of Friendship. “I let her grow, and she showed me you can be an athlete and an egghead. If you were paying attention, you’d know that. Look at those glasses over here, surrounded by books and technical weirdness I can’t even hope to understand. Then look at this one. She beat me in this race, fair and square.”

Rainbow butted noses with Nova. “Maybe she deserves a little praise, huh?”

“It does get annoying, Rainbow,” Vriska pointed out.

Rainbow twitched. “All right, all right, I should stop, I know I should, but this is how I let out the inherent mothering instincts! I don’t wanna turn into my mom! Nova, you’ve met my mom. How crazy is she?”

Nova sighed. “Supportive to the point at which she’d break a wing for you to get a little extra adrenaline rush.”

Vriska blinked. “I want to meet this woman. She sounds hardcore.”

Nova tilted a hoof from side to side. “She doesn’t throw herself off waterfalls in barrels like Eve’s mom does.”

“Why have I never met any of your parents? …Aside from Renee’s.”

“We never meet yours,” Rainbow said.

“Trolls don’t have parents,” Nova pointed out.

“Oh. That’s lame.”

Vriska nodded. “The closest thing I had to a parent was a genocidal spider monster that made me kill other trolls to feed her. I believe I speak for all of Alternia when I say ‘good fucking riddance’.”

Rainbow blinked. “…I know nothing about trolls.”

“Moving back to Nova,” Vriska said, leaning down to be eye level with Nova. “Something’s up with you.”

“Uh… Would you believe me if I said I was just annoyed at Rainbow Dash?”

“Nope. Come on, I spilled my beans to you, you spill your beans to me.”

“Now I’m hungry,” Rainbow muttered.

Nova gulped. “Well… I… You see…”

“It’s about Stardust, isn’t it?” Rainbow asked.

Nova sighed. “…Yeah. I don’t… I don’t understand her. I love her more than anything, but I don’t get her. I hear you talk about Prism with such intimate knowledge, I see Allure with Minna all the time, I see Applejack’s family, see Jotaro’s own powerful connection, and I… I don’t understand my daughter.” There were tears in her eyes.

“Hey, hey. Not every parent is going to understand their kid,” Rainbow said. “I still don’t know how Prism became half-egghead. All I know is that it’s awesome.”

“But at least you’re able to connect with her. To be there with her. I…” she shook her head. “I’m the bad cop in the house.”

“…Huh?” Rainbow said, cocking her head.

“Sunburst doesn’t have the will or the guts to go up against her for very long – she’s able to get what she wants from him. More sweets, later bedtimes, etcetera. And since we don’t want her becoming spoiled, I have to be the one to play hardball with her all the time. No more TV, time for bed, no you can’t whine to get that toy, I won’t let you get out of your punishment young lady, blah, blah, blah…” Nova sighed. “I can tell she’s scared of me when I come home. It’s like she dreads the hour. Sunburst told me she watches the clock with a haunted expres-ssion…”

Rainbow put a wing around her. “Hey, hey, look at me.”

“I’m just trying to be a good mother and she’s scared of me because of it!” She wiped her hooves. “It’s not every night, but it’s enough of the nights. No matter how much I try to make up for it. And then Sunburst and I argue about it… And that doesn’t help…”

Rainbow slapped her. “Nova. Get a hold of yourself. Just because Stardust is afraid of you doesn’t mean you are a bad mother.”

“W-what?”

“What is she, seven?”

Nova nodded slowly.

“She’s just a kid, Nova. Prism was afraid of me at that age too. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I can be a bit… angry, at times.”

Nova let out a short snort.

“I eventually had to dial it back – but she needed that strong hoof in her life. If she only gets what Sunburst wants to give her, well…” Rainbow bit her lip. “…I didn’t get much in the way of a talking-to when growing up, at all. I was allowed to be as arrogant and selfish as I wanted, I could do no wrong in my parents’ eyes. That was a bigger mistake on their part than being overly supportive.” She looked to the sky. “Deep down, I do know that I’m not the best thing ever, or really that awesome. But it’s really hard to fight that now. I wish they’d been a little more strict, y’know?”

Nova blinked. “…Rainbow, when did you get so mature?”

“I had a kid of my own. A kid without a dad. It does things to your head.” She hit herself in the skull and laughed. “Takes a lot to get through my hard head. Vriska back there can relate.”

“Hey wait a minute I’m not getting dragged into this…”

“Hey, you just told us you were raised by a genocidal spider. How long has it taken you to fully move past that?”

“She’s over nine-hundred years old,” Nova offered.

“There we go,” Rainbow said with a laugh.

Vriska shrugged. “Eh, fair point.”

Rainbow turned to Nova. “The thing is… I don’t know if you’re doing perfect. Sounds like that household of yours has some problems.”

“Understatement of the century,” Nova muttered.

“Just… As long as you let your daughter know you love her, I think she’ll return the favor, even if she is afraid of you. Got that?”

“Yeah…” Nova said, wiping her eyes. “I think… I think I want to go home.”

“I’m sure Eve can get you a small ship and get you back to your family,” Rainbow said with a smile. “Hey Vriska, turn around, we’re heading back.”

Vriska laughed. “Looking for adventure, we found drama instead. Pinkie will get a laugh out of this.” She took a step back – and hit something metallic. She looked down. “What in – Holy…”

She was standing on top of a circular piece of white metal embedded in the ground. On top of it, obscured by a layer of dust and leaves, was a faded imprint of a green spirograph.

She leaned down and touched it with her hands. “This… is an exile command station.”

“…What?” Rainbow asked.

Vriska turned to Nova. “This planet was part of SBURB. One that suffered an apocalypse… and failed to get repopulated.”

Nova wiped her tears away. “…Can we use this to find your home?”

Vriska shook her head. “The Horrorterrors destroyed all higher functions of SBURB after the English incident. There may be a connection to the past in there, but not any other sessions… though there might be a clue.” She turned to Nova. “…Can you stay just a little longer? This… this might be important.”

Nova nodded. “…They can wait a couple hours. You’re right, this is important.”

Vriska smiled. “Thanks.”

~~~

Allure finally got bored. “That’s it, I’m accepting my role as the ‘immature’ one and stopping this relaxing!” She leaped out of her chair and walked out onto the balcony, taking in the beautiful sight of Farpoint City. She felt the wind in her mane – and she smiled.

She felt really good for some reason. Had she accepted a new role in life? She didn’t really think so. She didn’t think anything had really changed.

But she felt good anyway.

She closed her eyes and just let her curls fly around her face.

When she opened her eyes, she noticed Jotaro was standing next to her. “What brings you out here?”

“You,” Jotaro said.

“Huh? What about me?”

Jotaro shrugged. “Applejack too.” He leaned back, hands still in his pockets. “Just sitting there wondering about age, maturity, and the way we see others.”

“…Wondering what about them?”

Jotaro was quiet for a moment. “I ‘matured’ quickly, more than Applejack. My growth happened when I was seventeen. People died in the fight against Dio. But even before that, I was far too serious for a teenager.” He folded his hands together. “Too guarded…”

“And…?”

“Some people are born more mature than others,” Jotaro said. “I just… was. The events of my life do not describe why I am the way I am. If anything, the events in my life toned my stoic nature and maturity down, letting me know it wasn’t everything.”

Allure blinked. “I think I heard one of the Sweeties talking about this once… Yeah, Savior. The angel? Part of Rev’s church? Got into a philosophical discussion with someone I can’t remember about ‘nature vs nurture’. It stopped when Thrackerzod hit both of them on the head and said ‘it’s neither one nor the other you stubborn mules’.” Allure smirked. “That’s probably the answer.”

Jotaro nodded slowly, saying nothing.

“You don’t need to be ashamed of being the quiet guy who guards his emotions,” Allure said. “Just like I don’t need to be ashamed of what I am.”

Jotaro let himself smile. “…I think I’ll keep searching for my own middle ground.”

Allure smiled. “You do that.”

Jotaro looked about ready to respond – but then Star Platinum saw something. Jotaro whirled around and looked at the sky.

Allure followed his gaze. “What? What it is?”

“Something’s coming down,” Jotaro said. “It’s big.”

Allure gulped.

~~~

Pinkie had only bought the one dress. Renee had bought seven dresses, two sets of shoes, a ‘darling’ suit, and a set of long socks. Because they looked adorable and definitely not because Daniel liked her in socks. Definitely not.

Renee had returned to just wearing her standard hat – few of the things she had bought would do for standard wear – but Pinkie had kept the red dress on. They were strolling leisurely through the streets back to Platinum Suites.

“I dare say, that Affix was quite the mare,” Renee said as they passed by a library. “Truly unique.”

“Yeah, she was cool,” Pinkie said. “Oh, by the way, we’re about to get interrupted.”

Renee sighed. “I suppose a vacation where something didn’t go wrong was too much to ask for then?”

“Probably.” Pinkie admitted. In a flash of purple, the two of them were teleported inside the library, specifically the basement where the super secret books were kept. The many bags Renee was holding in her magic were torn from her grip, vanishing in another purple flash.

“Wh- hey! Thief! Give me my things back right now or I swear to the Tower I will run you through!”

“Calm down,” I said, coming out of the shadows. “I just teleported them to a pocket dimension. You’ll get them back after all this is over.”

Renee blinked. “…Twilence, right?”

“Yep!” Pinkie confirmed for me. “The uber-duper-seer of all things!”

“Understander,” I corrected. “I don’t see everything. For instance I had no idea you were going to threaten to run me through. That was a bit more colorful than I was expecting. By the way, Pinkie, how do you like the dress?”

Pinkie did a curtsy on her hind legs. “It’ll do great!”

Renee glanced from the Eye of Rhyme on my chest to the eye design on Pinkie’s dress. “You designed that?”

I nodded. “I did. I’ve been around awhile, I know what works sometimes. I needed to grab Pinkie’s attention so she’d take you by the library, and I figured I’d give her a gift while I was at it.”

“I did have to pay for it in doubloons,” Pinkie pointed out.

“You have a functionally infinite supply,” I retorted.

Pinkie giggled. “Yep!”

Renee adjusted her hat. “I’d still like to know what’s going on. Twilence, why have you dragged us to this dark room? What’s going on?”

“We have to be here,” I said. “Actually, we just have to be together in a place they won’t find us. I chose the library because I wanted to read books while I was waiting. Ever tried Finnegans Wake? No universe based on that work ever makes sense. Consistently, anyway.”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Twilence, you’re being a Twilight and glossing over the important detail. I don’t know who they are. What is about to happen?

I nodded. “Right, right, sorry.” I shook my mane. “You see… Farpoint is about to be invaded.”

Renee blinked. “Pinkie…?”

“Hey, I didn’t know! I thought today was just a drama chapter!”

“She’s telling the truth,” I said. “Pinkie’s usually more short-term in what she can see, though I know she gets a few longer-term inklings. The problem is there hasn’t really been any foreshadowing to the invasion.”

“There was the Green Sun though.”

“That’s something else,” I said. “Happens a bit later, according to what I know.” I took out a notebook and started scribbling down a few things. “Regardless, we’re going to need to be together.”

“What about our friends?!” Renee blurted. “We have to warn them!”

There was an explosion outside that shook the very walls around us.

I smiled awkwardly. “They know now. They need to go on their own paths. We have to take a slightly different one, which is why I’m here.”

“What path is that?” Renee asked.

“FIND OUT NEXT TIME ON SONGS OF THE SPHERES!” Pinkie cheered.

“Pinkie, this is serious!” Renee wailed.

“Also, there’s another scene,” I added.

Pinkie facehooved. “D’oh! My bad!”

~~~

O’Neill was not on a cruise to explore the multiverse.

He was here for a very specific reason – a mysterious source had suggested that Farpoint was going to be invaded. Giorno had said the information appeared legitimate, so O’Neill had taken it upon himself to take care of it. He hadn’t gone out into the field in a while, which meant he’d need an excuse to take the Enterprise and park it in orbit around Farpoint. Everyone thought he was just there on the middle of a cruise – but he and his crew knew why they were here.

To defend against a possible attack.

O’Neill was not surprised in the slightest when the red lights started blaring. “Send out the standard hail, but start charging all weapons. What do we have?”

“Unidentified ship, running through database…” a science officer said.

The tactical officer gave a report. “No response to hails. We detect weapons activating on their ship. …Ships now, more have appeared from other universes.”

O’Neill furrowed his brow. “Send out that report to Merodi Universalis. We might need backup. …Multiversal communications are jammed, aren’t they?”

“That is correct.”

“Just our luck…” O’Neill gripped the armrests on his chair. “This is going to be a fun fight…”

“No ID on the ships, but we’ve found their insignia in our database!” the science officer reported. “Symbol identified as belonging to the Combine, a rumored high Class-2 Civilization that operates within the E-Sphere. Known for conquering low-level worlds with shows of excessive force.”

O’Neill smirked. “They won’t be expecting a multiversal flagship then. Good. Let’s surprise them. Fire everything.”

087 - The Combine Assault

The Combine’s lead ship was a mixture of biological and mechanical components, the latter clearly designed to work with the shape of the former. In looks, it appeared closest to a whale slightly larger than the Enterprise itself, with orange-green skin and six flippers alit with blue jets of propulsion. Instead of eyes, there were gigantic turrets, and on the underside of the ship there were hundreds of smaller guns of unknown designs. In the whale’s ‘mouth’ and the center of its belly were two rings of energy that flashed red in quick succession.

Clearly those rings were the big weapons.

The Enterprise decided not to let the invading force shoot first. There was no ‘they might come in peace’ this time.

The laser weapons reached the Combine ship first, revealing them to have no shields whatsoever. The lasers burnt the fleshy tissue of the ship, unable to fully ignite it due to the vacuum of space. The ship shuddered from the attack, flexing its flippers to an upright position. The small weapons on its underside began to fire, sending small bolts of energy that bounced harmlessly off the Enterprise’s shields.

The drone weapons hit the Combine ship next, each singular golden bullet cutting through the skin of the ship several times before exploding. The wave of magical orbs completed the job, freezing, burning, and poisoning the fleshy ship until it fell into three pieces, leaking both organic and artificial fluids.

The missiles and splitter-nukes that were launched unloaded their destruction on the remaining, smaller ships, filling the night with spheres of pure nuclear energy. Any ships that weren’t outright destroyed were given tremendous doses of radiation – more than enough to kill them later given their organic stature.

“Remaining ships undergoing high energy fluctuations! The red rings are increasing in intensity!”

“Devote the power in the Rod to defense,” O’Neill ordered.

“They’re not aiming at us! They’re aiming at Farpoint City!”

“Same order, but spread the shield out to protect them rather than us. Send out another volley of drones while you’re at it, it should take care of the rest of the smaller ones.”

The Spectral Rod alit with the power of harmony, more than willing to devote all its energy to keep a city from being glassed. An umbrella shaped shield of holy light appeared behind the Enterprise.

Dark red beams of pulsating energy shot to the holy shield, preparing to bring death to the surface. They hit the harmonic shield with such impressive force that space itself shook – but the shield held, dissipating the red beams. The Enterprise’s drones sliced through the remaining ships, destroying most, disabling the rest.

“Yeah!” the tactical officer yelled. “Got them!”

O’Neill shook his head. “Are communications still down?”

“…Yes?”

“Then we haven’t won.” O’Neill folded his hands. “That was the kind of force you send to subjugate a single city with overwhelming force. They know we’re here now. They’ll be back if they think we’re still worth it. Scramble the fighters!”

The Enterprise opened its four bay doors and let out nearly a hundred smaller fighters, all equipped with basic and magical weapons. They took up positions mostly flanking the Enterprise, but a few went far in front, far in back, or orbiting the planet.

“Fighters in space aren’t viable my ass,” O’Neill muttered. “Mauve, Spectral Rod traps, go. Biological disease is probably best.”

The Spectral Rod began seeding space with loose biological contaminant spells – including the infamous “Bio” spell they had recently learned from Empress Twilight’s Void. That degraded through almost all life, making it seem as though the target were being eaten alive by disease. It was horrifying, overkill, and definitely what they needed.

The reality of the universe shifted, letting a single Combine ship in. Though ‘ship’ would be somewhat of an understatement – the behemoth of a fleshy jellyfish was easily large enough to be a space station that held ships like the Enterprise.

The Bio spells activated, tearing through a few of the Combine station’s loose tentacles, but a psychic blue pulse dissipated the spells before it could spread. The jellyfish fired exactly one needle for every fighter in line of sight – every single needle hit its target, destroying every last one of them.

O’Neill curled his fist in rage. “Mauve, we might need something extra spicy! Fire all the splitter nukes we have on board!”

The splitter nukes fired, four tremendous missiles heading right toward the Combine station. It fired blue lasers at them – but on-board teleportation spells let the missiles avoid the attack. The missiles spread into hundreds of smaller nuclear bombs, ready to disintegrate the station.

The station’s psychic energy flashed again – grabbing hold of the nukes and turning them around.

“REMOTE DETONATION!” O’Neill shouted. The nukes exploded before they even began to turn back, charring one of the station’s sides.

To O’Neill’s horror, he saw the station start to regenerate before his eyes. “Mauve, now would be a good time!”

While the Enterprise switched to drone weapons – which were resistant to psychic powers but nowhere near damaging enough for a target this large – the Spectral Rod flashed a brilliant golden color. Six separate beams of light spiraled out from the rod’s front ends, reaching for the Combine station with all the harmonious energy it could muster. The station shot out with a psychic burst that the spell easily broke through.

It surrounded the center of the Combine station like a claw, burning it wherever it touched. The biotechnical jellyfish shuddered in pain.

Then a smaller Combine ship appeared right above the Enterprise and shot the red-ring weapon down at point blank range.

The Enterprise’s shields held, but were falling fast since the laser wasn’t turning off.

O’Neill pressed a button on his private console. “ABANDON SHIP! ALL HANDS, ABANDON SHIP!”

Not a single escape pod launched. The Enterprise’s Harmony Core took the brunt of the force.

The scream could be heard by every sapient entity in the universe.

DEATH.

In its death throes, the energy vaporized the ship firing upon them – but nothing happened to the Combine station.

The Enterprise exploded in a rainbow of color, sending large chunks of itself flying into deep space, some alit with magical fire.

The ancient pride of the Merodi Universalis fleet was no more.

The Combine station slowly moved to tend its wounds. It also released a dozen or so smaller ships from its bay, ready to take the planet now that the unexpected threat was taken care of.

~~~

“Corona, I am not answering that question!” Eve said with a laugh.

“Oh go on, tell her, I want to hear the words come out of your mouth!” Flutterfree giggled.

Corona put her hands on her hips. “Maybe for the sake of Citrine’s sanity we better no-”

DEATH.

Corona fell to the ground, suffering more than the intense headache Eve and Flutterfree received – she felt the rush of emotions flood her mind, that of a psychic entity realizing it didn’t want to die, but it now no longer had a choice. Its entire existence flashing before what would qualify as its eyes…

The emotion was so strong it forced her to lose consciousness.

“…Ponyfeathers,” Eve muttered, glancing out the window. They could see the remnants of the explosion in the sky. “That was the Enterprise…”

Flutterfree gasped. “O’Neill…”

Eve pulled her close. “I know. But we’re about to have a problem of our own.” She noticed the tops of several skyscrapers in Farpoint City unfolding, revealing the standard Merodi Universalis lancers. Defence devices created with the intent of ‘lancing’ things out of orbit with a focused magical laser, equipped with computer systems accurate enough to hit an elephant… on the moon.

They were also really good at focusing on the same target at once, coordinating to tear it apart in the most effective manner.

Eve couldn’t see what they were shooting at with their green lasers. She closed her eyes and tapped into the strong, dense magical field of Farpoint, extending her senses far above the atmosphere. She spied the tremendous station and numerous smaller ships. The station wasn’t being targeted – likely because it was too far away to be precise, and too big to just shoot at hoping it exploded. The lancers were focusing their beams on one small ship at a time, disintegrating one after fifteen seconds of fire.

That was too slow.

Blue seeker missiles fell from the sky, taking out every single lancer in one fell swoop, collapsing the buildings they were mounted on. Eve, Flutterfree, and Corona were lucky to not be in a defense building.

Red lights began to blare all across the city. “WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY AN UNKNOWN FOE. MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE BUNKERS BENEATH THE CITY, IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE REMAIN IN YOUR HOMES.”

“Or fight,” Corona muttered, coming to. “These invaders don’t know we’re here. They won’t have any idea what hit them. Raging Sights, prepare a cascade.”

Raging Sights beeped in affirmation. A complex series of magical circles began to appear around Corona’s limbs, including one directly under her that shook the entire shop, breaking more than a few pieces of merchandise. “You’ll be reimbursed by the government,” Corona said.

“If you save my life that’s payment enough!” Citrine blurted. “Just take them out!”

The ships that were in Farpoint City launched into the sky. Those that didn’t flee to space – more than half, Eve noticed with disappointment – met the threat from the sky.

They were rewarded with instantaneous destruction via plasma weapons. The few ships that did have military-strength shields only managed to fire off a couple of volleys before falling to the enemy.

The larger ones crashed back down to the ground, killing thousands in an instant.

Flutterfree winced. “Corona, do something.”

“On it,” Corona announced, launching into the air. She unleashed the energy stored up in her magical rings, firing at the sky – locking onto the still-distant ships. Flutterfree could only see them as dots in the blue above her. When Corona’s cascade spell hit the dot in the sky, it was surrounded by a series of magical circles and exploded. The explosion created two more magical circles around two other dots, destroying them as well.

Corona grinned. “That’ll teach them!”

A blue flash lit up the sky – dispelling Corona’s cascade spell after it made its way through three ships.

“…Crud. That probably won’t work again.”

Flutterfree activated Lolo, looking into the sky for anything hidden – but nothing came to her. All she got was a better picture of what they looked like. Biomechanical whales.

Whales that were opening their mouths, unleashing hundreds of smaller ships that spread out across Farpoint City.

Corona opted to just shoot at them directly with beams of light magic empowered by Raging Sights. Brute force appeared to keep working, but she failed to destroy them completely – they just crashed, chances high that whatever was inside them would still be ready to do whatever it needed to.

Eve joined in the fray, sending her own volleys at the ships – opting for darker magics than Corona, just to mix it up. Deep purple and bright yellow beams shot from the pair, taking out as many as they could.

One of the fleshy, but strangely cubical ships crashed within their sight range on a street that was abandoned – people had gotten the idea quickly that being outside was a bad idea. The back of the ship popped open, revealing a squad of troops. Human – or humanoid, at least – soldiers filed out, all with full black body armor, masks, and kinetic projectile weapons in their hands. They were likely to be of no concern since a simple telekinetic field could render most bullets pointless.

What was behind them was more concerning. A spider-thing fused with softly glowing alien technologies crawled out of the dropship.

It fired a special weapon. Blue rings that looked almost rubbery flew across the divide to Corona, Eve, and Flutterfree.

Corona and Eve raised shields. The blue rings passed right through the magical shields, cancelling them. Corona and Flutterfree were completely entangled in the magic-inhibiting projectiles.

Eve was only spared because of Seraphim’s automatic protection.

“I’m going down!” She shouted to them. “I’ll be back to help once they’re gone!” She waited for a confirmation nod from her two friends before teleporting right above the spider-thing.

“I reject your reality and substitute my own,” Eve declared, activating Seraphim’s ability. The entire squad and the wrecked dropship froze in an instant. She cast a tremor spell to shatter everything.

The attackers must have labeled her as a primary target, because more of the blue rings shot at her. She shifted Seraphim’s universe to one where magic was a fundamental force built into reality – making the blue rings disappear as soon as they entered the altered reality bubble.

While that was happening, she tapped into the magic of the laria stones that were so abundant at the moment. She surrounded her body in them; tapping into whatever magic they had, as well as the magical field of the planet. She fired off the stones as bullets in several directions, taking out multiple entities shooting her with the blue substance.

It was at this point they started firing missiles at her. At first simply physical, but then followed with plasma lances designed to level buildings.

But she wouldn’t go down. “I AM CHARTER-OVERHEAD EVENING SPARKLE OF MERODI UNIVERSALIS! WHOEVER YOU ARE, THIS IS AN ACT OF WAR, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!”

It was at this point they sent something down she couldn’t deal with.

A gray slug-like creature appeared in front of her, surrounded in a bubble of its own psychic energy. She attempted to alter reality to make it spontaneously combust.

It had been expecting this. It jumped to another reality, not held to the dimensional lock its people had placed on the world. It then appeared right behind her and placed a device on her back.

She didn’t have time to change reality again – her body was completely covered in the blue substance. She would have fallen to the ground had the slug not caught her in its telekinetic power.

It levitated Corona, Flutterfree, and any other individuals who had been coated in the blue substance to it. Then it vanished, taking all of them with it.

Dropships began to land, deploying ground troops to ransack Farpoint City.

~~~

Vriska popped the top off the exile command station, revealing a rung ladder that led down into the earth through a metal tube.

DEATH.

Vriska passed out and fell down the hole, falling all the way to the bottom of the tube.

“Vriska!” Nova shouted, unable to light her horn due to the temporary scrambling of her mind.

Rainbow flew down the tube – somehow managing not to touch any of the walls in her downward journey – and stopped just short of Vriska. She placed a hoof on the rung ladder and a wing on Vriska, prepared to get her out of there.

“Ugh... Offame…” Vriska muttered.

“You’re not okay,” Rainbow said, dragging her back up the ladder.

“I’m fine!” Vriska blurted, standing upright. She rubbed the blue bloodied spot on her head. “I’ve been through worse.”

“What was that?!” Nova blurted.

“Psychic trap, I bet,” Vriska muttered. “For all I know I’m only alive because I’m a powerful psychic, and that was supposed to kill any non-exile who entered here.”

“…Am I safe in here?” Rainbow asked.

“You’re alive aren’t you?” Vriska muttered. “Nova, come on down.”

Nova checked her hoof-screen to convince herself there was nothing harmful down there before crawling down. She quickly realized the pipe was not designed to hold more than one person. “Yeah, Vriska? We need somewhere to go.”

“Give me a minute,” Vriska said, placing her hand on a screen next to the only door. She pressed a few buttons, rotating the underground bunker to one of three possible rooms. The door slid open, revealing a rectangular room that was by no means roomy, but definitely large enough to hold the three of them.

They filed in and looked around. It was a mostly bare, gray room with two purple lockers on either side. Both lockers were open and completely empty. There was a pile of crushed pink cans in one corner of the room and a well-preserved carapace of a white creature.

In the center of the front wall was a large, house shaped conglomeration of monitors. The roof of the house appeared to be simply decorative, but the five monitors beneath that seemed to be real, with the central one displaying a command prompt.

Vriska kicked the base of the screens and a keyboard popped out. She began typing furiously, racking her brain for all the commands she could remember. She cycled through all five screens – but every last one only displayed static. “Five player session,” she muttered. “Wonder how it went… This world clearly didn’t get rebuilt…” She tried other commands, cycling through data about the base, finding not much of anything. It was nearly at full power though, which was nice.

She put her hands on her hips. “Nothing.”

“Care to explain what this is?” Nova asked.

“Players of SBURB are usually given guardians – called exiles – to help them through the game. There’s a lot of transdimensional time shenanigans involved, but these screens allow direct contact between the exiles and the players. All the feeds are dead, so all five players are either god-tier, or dead.” She blinked. “Or when the Horrorterrors shut everything down these screens stopped working, I don’t know.”

“Anything that might be in the other rooms?”

“There’s a transportalizer in another room – think teleporter that works across time – and… Well if this is anything like the Mayor’s base, it’ll connect to the universe that created this one. I’m positive that won’t keep working without Sburb’s background ‘code’ active.” She shrugged. “Might as well check it out though.”

The three of them moved to switch to another room – but they heard a clang up above them.

Someone was coming down the ladder.

Vriska readied her dice and Nova lit her horn. Rainbow realized she had no weapon and made a soft disgruntled noise.

A man in full combat armor with a gun slung around his back came into their view.

Vriska recognized him for what he was. Shoot, she ordered Nova. The unicorn was more than capable of resisting the troll’s psychic impulses – it just so happened that she agreed with the command. She shot him in the back with a concussive blast, knocking him out.

“Right, that’s a Combine soldier,” Vriska muttered. “We need to get out of here faster than fast. Either this planet is being invaded or they want this base. Both options need us somewhere that isn’t here.” She poked her head into the ladder cylinder, retracting it quickly when the soldiers on the ground above them started shooting down.

“We can take them, those are just regular bullets,” Nova pointed out.

“The Combine are a Class 2 society notorious for using ‘minimal effort’ to subjugate their worlds,” Vriska said. “Give them reason to drop a planet buster on you and it won’t be long before they do.”

“Ah. So…”

“Make a shield to keep them from shooting down here and I’ll move us to the transportalizer. Happy?”

“Yes,” Nova said, doing just that. The three of them piled back into the narrow ladder space while Nova’s shield blocked the bullets. Vriska tapped on the screen, shifting the base around to access another room.

The Combine soldiers fired a plasma rifle before the three of them got through - though they were terrible shots, likely due to Vriska’s presence.

Nova forced the door closed behind them and welded it.

“All right, you know what’s up, how does this thing work?” Rainbow Dash asked, gesturing at the complicated set of controls and the platform that was presumably the transportalizer pad.

“We can to go any place or time on this planet. I could take us back to the time the Sburb session was still running if we wanted, but I have a sneaking suspicion that would either turn us to paradox slime or just destroy the universe with an out-of-context paradox.”

“Let’s just not go back in time, hmm?” Nova suggested.

“Future then!” Rainbow Dash said.

“Wouldn’t want to go far, in case we are being invaded,” Nova said. She glanced at her hoof-screen. “You think we would have been told if it was though…”

“Do you have a signal?”

“No, but we are underground.”

“Shouldn’t matter on that screen of yours,” Vriska said, moving to the console. “Right, so, we want to know what they’re doing here, but also want to escape…” They started to hear banging on the door. Nova reinforced it with magic. “Slightly in the future will throw them.”

“I can move us to the future, remember?!” Nova blurted. “Just use the normal teleporting aspect, okay!?”

“Fine,” Vriska said, setting the time to ‘present’ and dialing in a location a small distance away from the exile command station. She added a few meters in the ‘up’ direction just to be sure they didn’t appear in the ground. Or inside a flower-tree. “Prepare for fall.”

“We can all fly,” Rainbow deadpanned.

“Then prepare to be shot at. Nova, this is the button. Press it when we’re all on the platform.” She ran to aforementioned platform with Nova and Rainbow. Nova pressed the button – and they landed on the petals of a giant tulip.

“Soft landing,” Rainbow said. “Nice choice.”

“I wonder how much luck I wasted on that,” Vriska muttered.

A small flying thing made out of flesh and mechanical parts flew at them, firing bullets.

“Jump!” Nova declared, jumping them five minutes into the future.

Nothing flew to attack them.

Vriska smirked. “And now we’re in business.”

~~~

The thing Allure had seen was the splitter nuke from the Enterprise failing to actually kill the Combine station.

They didn’t really manage to piece together what was happening until it happened.

DEATH.

Applejack stumbled to the balcony. “What in tarnation is going on?”

“Invasion…” Allure said, eyes wide.

“We need to evacuate everyone!” Jotaro shouted, charging back to the elevator. Allure and Applejack followed without question.

“Dimensional travel is blocked,” Allure reported, fiddling with her dimensional device. “We can’t evacuate to anywhere…”

Applejack sighed. “Right… This city probably has defenses, we should use those. Ask Anna.”

Allure facehooved. “Eve has her personal number!”

“Try the hotel’s number.”

Allure dialed, but didn’t get anyone. “Nothing.”

The elevator opened to the lobby. They were not the first here – a few other concerned customers had run to the reception desk to ask what in the multiverse was going on. Anna was not behind the desk, instead the receptionist was a poor earth pony mare who had no idea how to handle people.

“Clear a path!” Jotaro shouted. Everyone listened to him, letting him walk right to the receptionist. “Do you know where Anna is?”

The receptionist nodded. “H-her personal quarters.”

“You need to call her. Farpoint is being invaded.”

“I-invaded?”

It was at this point the emergency message broadcast across the entire city. “WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY AN UNKNOWN FOE. MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE BUNKERS BENEATH THE CITY, IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE REMAIN IN YOUR HOMES.”

The receptionist fumbled with her phone and called Anna. “Boss, did you hear that? …Mister Kujo – Jotaro Kujo – wants you up here.”

Anna’s halo teleported her into the lobby, her expression stern. “What is it?”

“Do you have a way to get everyone in the hotel to the bunkers?”

Anna nodded slowly. “All elevator shafts and stairwells go beneath the ground.” She jumped over the reception desk and lightly pushed the receptionist out of the way. “This is Anesthesia speaking. If you did not hear, we are being invaded by an unknown foe. Everyone, make your way to the stairwells and go all the way down to the bunkers. Move as fast as you can. Do not take the elevators – they are likely to fail. We will be working on opening the elevator shafts up so you may climb down the ladders within.” She pulled her hoof back, face stern.

Jotaro cracked his knuckles. “How many elevator shafts are there?”

“Four. I’m recalling all of them to the bottom of their shafts, but that will take a minute. After that I’ll open all elevator doors so people can begin climbing down.”

“Some people will slip and fall!” Allure blurted. “How a-”

A blue bolt of energy blasted through a nearby wall, went through a man’s head, and passed through the other wall. Everyone in the lobby screamed and began to panic.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Jotaro moved quickly, making everyone in the room trip, forcing them all to stop their panicked running before it could really begin. Time resumed. “GET A HOLD OF YOURSELVES! PANIC WILL NOT HELP YOU! MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE STAIRS AND ELEVATOR SHAFTS. GO!”

It did the trick – the running was no longer panicked and in every direction, it was organized.

Applejack took a moment to trot up to the one woman who wasn’t running – she was holding the dead man. “Ah’m sorry, but you need to move.”

“He… he was all I had…”

“And he would have wanted you to get out of this alive,” Applejack assured, gently making her drop him. She helped the woman up and took her to one of the stairwells, where she began walking down. Applejack didn’t tell her to hurry up – she didn’t want her to trip.

The moment she was out of sight, Applejack’s breathing quickened. “Ah… Hoo… That was gruesome…”

Allure nodded. “Sorry. You haven’t been out here that much…”

All the elevator doors opened, revealing empty elevator shafts with rung ladders along the sides. It would be faster, but more dangerous.

“We have a problem,” Anna said. “The second to top floor’s communications are broken. I don’t think anyone heard anything we’ve said or done.”

“I’ll get them,” Jotaro said. He jumped into the elevator shaft and stopped time, climbing up the ladder with Star Platinum, moving like a monkey. Time was of the essence, he didn’t care if he banged himself up a bit getting up the shaft.

As he neared the top, he started having to dodge people. When time resumed, they started screaming at him.

“What the hell is wrong with you!?”

“Top floor. Communications broken,” Jotaro would explain, and people would stop yelling at him for blocking their climb.

It took five time stops to get to the top even with all his carefully calculated motions to maximize speed. He jumped out the door to the second highest floor – having to bash it down since it didn’t receive the memo to open. “EVERYONE UP!” He yelled, punching through all twenty doors on the level. “WE ARE EVACUATING THE BUILDING! GET OUT OF BED AND MAKE YOUR WAY TO AN ELEVATOR SHAFT OR STAIRWELL! GET TO THE BASEMENTS!”

A woman who had nothing but a bedsheet tied around her body glared at him. “You want us to go all the way to the bottom?! Are you mental?”

“DO YOU WANT TO DIE!?” he shouted. Then he noticed in one of the rooms an elderly man caring for a little girl. Neither of them was going to have the strength to make it down on their own.

He offered his hands to them. “I can carry you both.”

The elderly man smiled. “Thank you, stranger...”

“This might be uncomfortable,” he said, slinging them both over his giant shoulders. “And it’s going to be a rough ride.” He looked the girl in the eyes. “Hold on tight.”

He jumped into the elevator shaft. A few people from the floor had started climbing down.

Whoever was still in the floor didn’t make it. The top of Platinum Suites was sheared clean off by a stray explosive, killing all who hadn’t been moving fast enough.

Jotaro let himself, the girl, and the old man fall through the elevator shaft, hitting terminal velocity.

The girl started screaming. The old man simply held on, having faith Jotaro had a plan.

He did. Twenty floors before the bottom, he rammed Star Platinum’s fists into a bare wall, creating two large gashes along the side of the shaft. The wall, being purely physical, was unable to harm Star Platinum, allowing them to slowly skid to a stop before they hit rock bottom.

Jotaro let out a relieved breath as he moved over to a rung ladder and climbed down the last three floors, many people moving down with him. He made it to the ground and set his passengers down. “You’re safe.” Sweat dripped down his face and one of his arms throbbed, but he still stood tall.

“Thank you mister!” the girl said, visibly shaken despite her immense gratitude.

Jotaro nodded, walking out of the elevator shaft into the underground bunker. It was a somewhat large space, a bit like a warehouse, connected to dozens of other deep, reinforced locations. A single skyscraper needed a lot of space to accommodate everyone within, especially one with a major hotel in it.

“Hey! Jotaro!” Allure called, waving Jotaro over to the other side of the room. Jotaro saw Anna flash in and out of existence next to her, bringing seven or so people with her. Jotaro walked over and sat down, taking a moment’s rest.

“Yare yare daze…”

“Don’t Ah know it,” Applejack said, looking at all the scared and injured people around them. “But Anna’s doing a great job organizin’ everyone and savin’ them. Ah’m surprised she’s keepin’ her cool.”

“Haloes have to,” Allure said. “If they show weakness, at any point, they actually become weaker. If enough people lose faith in her she won’t be able to teleport. So every halo learns to guard their true emotions and thoughts very carefully.”

Anna appeared again – but this time one of her wings was broken. She took a deep breath anyway, ready to teleport back up.

But then the earth rumbled. They heard as, far above them, something tremendous collapsed. The elevator shaft filled with rubble, cutting off anyone else’s escape.

Anna teleported one more time – and came back with no one. “…Platinum Suites, and everything below it, is gone,” she announced.

Several people broke into tears or screams.

She turned to Jotaro, Applejack, and Allure, lowering her voice. “There are enemy troops moving on the surface. Humanoid, but with varied biomechanical assistance.”

Jotaro furrowed his brow. “Find a high-strength communication device. Someone with a holographic screen, we need to be able to see what’s going on out there.”

“Seal these bunkers off,” Applejack said. “We can’t let any of them in here.”

“But what abo-” Allure began.

“Allure, we can’t let a single one of their soldiers in here. Seal everythin’ off.”

Anna nodded. “I’ll get on that.” She trotted away, making her way to the control console. Above them, a war raged, the thundering noises driving their way into their skulls.

~~~

DEATH.

Renee grabbed her head. “W-what was that!?”

I closed my book. “That was the Enterprise exploding.”

“The Enterprise was destroyed?”

Pinkie nodded slowly. “Yeah… They fought hard, but they couldn’t win.”

“We have to go hel…” she paused. “…We can’t win, can we?”

“Depends on your definition of winning,” I said, keeping my voice as level as I could. “No, we cannot beat them in a direct conflict. They vastly outnumber us and can bring down tremendous force if they believe it is necessary.”

“Who are they?”

“They are the Combine. A race that specializes in enslaving alien races and using biomechanical augmentation to add them to its army. Their general goal can be stated simply: ‘to combine everything in the multiverse into one’.” I sighed. “They’re one of the higher Class 2 civilizations, and they’re smart. They rarely attack any multiversal society at all to avoid significant retaliation, instead focusing on growing their power through the conquest of low-level worlds.”

“But we’re not a low-level world!”

“Farpoint sure looks like it from the outside,” I pointed out. “A single city, should be easy enough to take. Worth the difficulty in overcoming their advanced technology as well because of the unique resource within this world’s crust.”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah, the shiny yellow rock is shiny. They’re like crows.”

I took out my notebook again. “They’ll extract a surrender within minutes, I expect…”

“Oh, here it comes!” Pinkie said, covering her ears.

“Wh-”

“WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY AN UNKNOWN FOE. MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE BUNKERS BENEATH THE CITY, IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE REMAIN IN YOUR HOMES.”

Renee winced. “I suppose we’re already in our bunker, aren’t we?”

“Book fort bunker,” I said with a nod. “We need to stay here. They won’t find us.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

I held up my notebook and raised an eyebrow. “Because I said that’s what would happen.”

“…Oh.”

She started to hear the explosions rippling in the world above us. She knew, inherently, that people were dying up there by the thousand. “Are you sure we can’t do anything?”

“Direct resistance is doomed to fail,” I said. “Corona, Eve, and Flutterfree tried it as one. They’ve been captured.”

Renee put a hoof to her mouth. “Oh…”

“They will be captured in the next few minutes,” Pinkie corrected me.

I grunted. “Effectively the flow of the story has them already captured. It’s not like we could do anything about it even if we tried.”

“True…”

Renee looked at the two of them. “…What is happening to all our friends?”

I closed my eyes. “Corona, Eve, and Flutterfree are being captured… Vriska, Nova, and Rainbow are engaging the Combine over a Sburb remnant… Jotaro, Allure, and Applejack have evacuated Platinum Suites and are currently hunkered down.”

Renee let out a sigh of relief. “They’re okay…”

I nodded. “And they will be.”

“Here’s my next question. What are we going to do?”

I look at my notebook. “Soon, the Combine will send a signal directly to the mayor’s office, demanding unconditional surrender. The mayor will agree to this. The Combine soldiers will switch tactics from pure destruction to containment and control, taking a select few off to be added to the Combine’s biomechanical army.”

Renee put a hoof to her mouth. “My Stars…”

“When this begins, there will be an opening. Ships will be moving from the surface to the Combine station in large droves. We will take a ship over and fly it to the station.” I ruffled my feathers. “That is where we are needed.”

“From there we should be able to disable the dimensional lock, right?” Renee asked. “Get out a plea for help?”

“It’s possible,” I admitted. “But there will be other things up there. Namely, those who have been captured. They won’t be taken out of a universe for a while yet.”

Pinkie looked at me. “There’s something else up there we’re going to find, isn’t there? Something very important.”

I nodded. “That is true. But right now it doesn’t help us to know what that is. We do need to be up there. The rest can handle things down here. Is that okay, Renee?”

Renee bristled. “Of course not, but I’m not going to go against the plan. Because, apparently, fighting directly is just a bad idea. …Sorry, sorry, I know you’re right. I just don’t like sitting here.”

I put a hoof on her shoulder. “I understand. But that’s what we need to do for… not much longer.”

Pinkie pulled out a radio from her mane and set it in the middle of the three of us. It crackled to life. “This is mayor Auril of Farpoint City, overseer of the whole of Farpoint Colony. I extend absolute, unconditional surrender to the Combine. I order all troops and citizens to stand down, and am disabling any automated defense measures we have enabled. I have been promised that our attackers will not fire upon us so long as we cooperate. …I am sorry.” The feed cut to static.

I stood up and scribbled a note in my notebook. “Get ready. It’ll start soon.”

Renee took a breath and adjusted her hat. She decided to take the moment to fix the frazzled hairs on her mane.

~~~

The Enterprise’s bridge tumbled through space, mostly in one piece. It was no fluke of luck – the Enterprise had been designed to split apart when destroyed, keeping all living quarters and the bridge as far from the reactors as possible, allowing them to survive when the rest of the ship suffered critical failure.

The system was far from perfect. The bridge had air and simple life support, but only backup power reserves. Several of the consoles had exploded, though no deaths had occurred because of this. The deaths that did occur were from being tossed around the bridge as it tumbled through space, having lost all artificial gravity and inertial dampeners.

O’Neill was alive, gripping his seat so hard his knuckles were white. The bridge was still tumbling end over end almost exactly as fast as it had been since the destruction of the Enterprise, ensuring the force pulling everything to the walls would not stop.

“R-report!” O’Neill barked. “Anyone!”

A young unicorn science officer looked up, lighting her horn. Her coat was a soft blue and her mane a pristine white. “I… I’ve got four living signatures, General. You, me, Ensign Travis, and…” She bit her lip. “Make that three life signs, sir.”

“Ensign Travis!” O’Neill barked. “Status?”

The burly man coughed from his flattened position on the far wall. “Having a nice rest, sir.”

“Clandestine, can you get any report on any of those consoles?”

Clandestine pulled herself to the console with her magic, allowing O’Neill to see her broken, bloodied leg. “All but the most basic sensors are down. I can get a visual…” She dragged herself over to the visual scope that worked purely with lenses and not cameras. They needed to be prepared – sometimes there were universes when cameras didn’t work, or cameras showed illusions. “I see the station… and I see smoke coming up from Farpoint. Farpoint City is not a crater.”

“Good. How good are you with that horn?”

“Decent.”

“Think maybe you can slow down our spin here?”

“…I’ll try.” Clandestine lit her horn and surrounded the bridge in her magical aura. Over the course of the next minute, she managed to slow the rotation enough that they weren’t being plastered against the walls anymore.

“Man, now I have to get up,” Travis muttered, floating into the center of the room. “First rest in weeks.”

O’Neill let out a soft chuckle. “If only we could defeat the enemy while lying on our backs. That would be great.”

“Sir, orders?” Clandestine asked, floating over to them. She had worked up a profuse sweat.

“We just sit,” O’Neill said. “I’m not risking sending out a distress tracker. Travis, you have engineering experience. Try to make those life support filters last as long as we need.”

Travis nodded. “There is only three of us, we won’t be using that much of the air.” He moved to a hatch and popped it open. “Condensed oxygen tanks are still mostly full. Won’t run out of air for weeks.”

“What about food?”

“And there’s a problem,” Travis said. “Not much food up here. I can get us water from the air moisturizers, even if they’re not actively working the water’s still in there. But food…” He looked up. “…Actually, there’s plenty of food here, if it comes to that.”

Clandestine put a hoof over her mouth. “Oh, Faust…”

“Last resort only,” O’Neill said.

“The fact that it’s a resort at all...” Clandestine said, gulping.

“You may want to consider learning how to summon food from the aether,” O’Neill observed.

Clandestine nodded slowly. “I’ll try. I don’t expect results though.”

Something latched onto the bridge, sending a loud thunk reverberating through the interior. The three of them looked up to see a hole being cut through the roof.

Travis pulled out his gun. “I really don’t think that’s gonna be good, guys.”

O’Neill readied his pulse rifle while Clandestine prepared a beam spell. It was hard to aim in zero gravity, but they all knew exactly where it was coming from.

The circular cut was pushed into the bridge, letting bright white light into the dark interior. Nobody came through, but a message was broadcasted.

“This is the Combine speaking. Stand down and you will not be harmed.”

O’Neill sighed. “For the love of… Fine. Stand down men!” He tossed his gun behind him. Clandestine lowered her horn’s glow and Travis dropped his weapon.

A human in white armor poked his head through the hole. “Come on up,” he said, his voice being transmitted through his helmet by a low quality radio. They came up, entering a small, brightly lit interior with a big screen showing the stars outside. There were five other soldiers there, all armed with heavy weaponry.

The first soldier shot Clandestine’s horn, coating it in a blue substance. “To prevent any clever tricks,” he said. “Back to the station,” he ordered the pilot, subsequently turning to O’Neill. “I would take you to the holding cell but we’re not going to be flying long enough for me to actually lock you up. So enjoy your relative freedom.”

O’Neill nodded slowly.

“Who the hell are you people?!” Travis blurted.

“Just one small arm of the Combine doing our job,” the man explained, shrugging.

“Bastards,” Travis muttered. “You can’t just walk in a-”

The soldier shot him between the eyes, blowing his brains out. Clandestine winced. O’Neill kept his features straight.

“Low value target,” the soldier said, lowering his weapon. “Low rank, no biological curiosities.”

“You trying to comfort us?” O’Neill asked. “Because I’ve got to say, that’s one of the worst attempts I’ve ever seen.”

“No. Just answering a stupid question before you ask it.”

They arrived at the station in that moment. The hatch below them opened again, becoming much larger than the one-person circle that had been there prior. The soldier shoved the two of them out, dropping them unceremoniously on the cold metallic ground.

O’Neill and Clandestine didn’t have time to fully pick themselves off the ground before they were shoved forward. “MOVE!” A new soldier yelled.

O’Neill moved forward, glancing behind him to see the ship they had arrived on leaving. He saw Travis’ body dumped out a second later, falling to a level far below.

O’Neill looked around, trying to figure out where he could use Crimson Sushi effectively – but there were far too many cameras and soldiers for him to account for. He was just going to have to go along for now.

They were marched through a large expansive room indicative of the Combine itself. The majority of the station’s interior was made of dark metal lit with overly bright floodlights. Occasionally, O’Neill would spot a part of the wall or ceiling that was partially biological, indicative of the station’s true nature.

They were placed in a long line headed for ‘processing’. O’Neill noticed many many ships docking to drop off a shipment of prisoners, and then leaving right after.

What did they need so many prisoners for?

As they neared the front of the line, O’Neill saw something that looked like it was in charge. A floating pale slug-thing with two mechanical arms and a cybernetic implant on what O’Neill hoped was its front.

“HEY!” O’Neill shouted, pointing at the slug thing. “YOU THERE!”

The soldier behind him hit O’Neill with the back of his rifle. “Do not disturb the Advisor!”

O’Neill ignored the pain in his head, continuing to glare at the Advisor. “I am Overhead Jack O’Neill of the Class 3 Society Merodi Universalis. Does that mean anything to you!?”

“I sai-”

Hold your anger, soldier, the Advisor said, speaking telepathically to them. I am performing an inquiry. It appears that he is someone worthwhile.

The soldier lowered his gun, silent.

“So, what’s that little Internet search of yours telling you?”

Merodi Universalis, Mid-Class 3. Overhead of the entire Merodi military. This certainly explains the unexpected resistance from your ship. Why are you here?

“This is our colony, in case you didn’t pick up on that.”

Unfortunate. Soldier, transfer the Overhead and his aide to the high-value section.

“Right away,” the soldier said. “Come along,” he ordered, notably not acting aggressive toward O’Neill or Clandestine anymore. O’Neill and Clandestine were led to an elevator, taken up several levels, leaving the hundreds of other prisoners behind.

O’Neill frowned. “He didn’t seem all that bothered about me. Just interested.”

“You should be honored,” the soldier told him. “The Advisors rarely speak to anyone.”

“They need to work on their people skills, then.”

The soldier moved to punch him, but restrained himself. Apparently high-value prisoners didn’t get to be roughed up. That was good for now, at least.

~~~

Flutterfree came to inside a clear cube ten meters across on every side. Inside the cube were others like herself – prisoners. She saw Eve and Corona tied up with so many blue inhibitor rings they could barely move. She herself only had them on her wings, uncomfortably pinning the appendages to her body. There were others as well – a medium-sized dragon, a cyborg, a woman in wizarding robes…

“Welcome to the high-value prisoner box,” Corona said, forcing a smile. “Those deemed ‘interesting’ or ‘powerful’ or, in the case of that politician over there, ‘possibly important’.”

Eve grunted. “And those of us who have a lot of magic are wrapped up in so much blue stuff we can’t even move.”

“Ah,” Flutterfree said, instinctively trying to spread her wings, disappointed when she remembered she couldn’t. “So, what are we going to do?”

“Dunno,” Corona said, summoning Bacon Pancakes. “They’ve blocked all our powers.”

Flutterfree got the memo – don’t mention the Stands. “What about your firebending?”

“Do I look like I’m able to move my body? Or that this clear polymer whatever can be burnt through?”

“Right, sorry,” Flutterfree said. She tossed her mane back. “Are you two uncomfortable? Can I do anything?”

“Might want to look outside the box,” Eve said. “We’re good enough.”

Flutterfree got the message. She did start looking outside the box – but she also summoned Lolo, careful not to activate it enough to make it visible. She wormed the invisible vine of Lolo through an air hole in the box’s ceiling, extending her field of view.

The box of prisoners was suspended in the middle of a larger, cubical room with metal walls. On the floor beneath them they could see lots of people working on consoles – mostly humans, but a few other races as well. There as a large tub in the center of the room filled with the blue substance, many Gem gemstones submerged in it, presumably for study.

“Oh. …I hope they don’t experiment on us.”

“They might,” Corona said. “Or at least look at us very, very closely until they decide what to do with us. We really don’t know.”

“Do we know who they are?” Flutterfree asked, continuing to spread out Lolo’s tendrils out of the cubic room and further into the station, searching.

Eve shook her head. “No idea. I don’t remember hearing about anything like th-”

O’Neill and Clandestine were thrown into the prisoner box through a flap that didn’t exist any longer than was needed. “Ugh… I’m really starting to think the Combine need to get their prisoner treatment straight.”

“O’Neill!” Flutterfree said, beaming. “You’re all right!”

“Yeah, yeah…”

“Welcome to the high-value prisoner box,” Corona said with a wink.

O’Neill glanced at Flutterfree, noticing Lolo’s vines spread out and extending beyond the box. “All our powers have been taken,” Flutterfree said.

O’Neill summoned Crimson Sushi with a grin. “Well doesn’t that absolutely suck?”

Corona summoned Bacon Pancakes again, and Eve did the same with Seraphim.

Clandestine sensed something was going on. She looked to O’Neill confused. Before she could ask a question, she noticed his insignia switch sides on his shirt for a split second. Crimson Sushi had switched just her perceptions, announcing its presence.

“So, how’s about escaping?” O’Neill suggested, smirking.

“Even if we could, which we can’t, where would we go?” Eve said, looking at Flutterfree closely. “We don’t have any idea where the docking bays or escape pods even are.”

Flutterfree gulped, suddenly understanding just how much their hopes all depended on Lolo’s ability to find a way out.

“So we just wait then,” Clandestine asserted.

O’Neill shook his head. “Everybody hates waiting. Really hates waiting. Would do unspeakable things to keep from waiting.”

“I get the point!” Flutterfree hissed. “You. Don’t. Like. Waiting. Well suck it up and wait anyway, mmkay? These things take time.”

O’Neill chuckled. He then told them what he had learned on his way over here about the Combine, his encounter with the Advisor, and the whole battle with the Enterprise.

It was a way to pass the time, at least.

~~~

Vriska, Nova, and Rainbow watched as the Combine military unearthed the exile command station. It was white with a mostly cylindrical appearance, but there were three spikes in the bottom, along with a round protrusion out of what could be considered the ‘back.’

The Combine had already started taking it apart, finding the control console, transportalizer, and the third room – which had exactly what Vriska thought it would have, a console that would be able to connect to the universe that created this one. If everything were working properly.

…Even if they only got a hold of the transportalizer, they’d be able to do some serious damage without even realizing what they were doing.

Right, so, Nova, Vriska said telepathically. You can make a really, really big boom if you need to, right?

You know I can.

So blow this thing the fuck up.

They’ll detect me charging up that big an explosion!

Then use some time shenanigans! Make it blow up in the future or something!

Fine, Nova said, narrowing her eyes. T-minus five minutes until explosion.

“Are you guys having a conversation?” Rainbow asked, whispering.

Yes, now quiet, Vriska ordered. Rainbow, not having had much experience with Vriska’s mental powers, did not have any choice in the matter.

Less than a minute later, Nova sent a message back. Done, everything here should be blown to kingdom come in four minutes.

Mind taking us a little bit past that?

You know if we jump far enough into the future and miss a key event, I’m not going back.

Just do it.

The three of them jumped into the future. They now stood in a crater where the Combine soldiers and exile command station had been.

Vriska whistled. “Nice.”

“What just happened?” Rainbow asked.

“I blew it up,” Nova said. “Please tell me those Combine soldiers deserved that.”

“Any Combine soldier is either loyal to a fault, or brainwashed to be so,” Vriska said. “The kind of brainwashing is one of two particularly nasty varieties too. Physical rewiring of the brain, or the good old-fashioned propaganda approach.”

“You and the Doctor faced them, I take it?”

Vriska nodded. “And me and Twilence. They’ve been around a long time. Cause a lot of problems for low level societies.”

“They’re trying to take over the planet, aren’t they?” Rainbow asked.

“Most likely,” Vriska said.

“So, how are they usually beaten?” Nova asked.

“Brute force is never an option,” Vriska said. “They’re number four on the Class 2 strength list, and they’re careful not to make any bigger fish angry by only attacking lower-level worlds. Makes them progress slowly, but they’re definitely powerful now. The way you defeat them is by convincing them it’s too much trouble to hold onto a single world. The old-fashioned internal rebellion method.”

Nova blinked. “How long does that usually take?”

“Years,” Vriska said. “Longer, I expect, since this planet has a really valuable yellow rock in its crust.”

Rainbow glared. “Well screw that, who cares how long it takes? This is our planet and we’re going to fight for it! We’re going back to Farpoint City and we’re going to form a resistance! Or a rebellion! Or some other force that starts with R!”

Vriska smirked. “The pegasus is right. Overwhelming odds have never stopped us before, have they? We’ve got luck on our side, time magic, and a really spunky pegasus. I’d like to see them try to stop us.”

Nova chuckled. “Just go charging in?”

“For all we know there’s already a resistance. Or the battle’s still going on.” Vriska pointed at Nova. “Teleport us back into the city!”

The reverse long-range teleport wasn’t anywhere near as difficult since Nova had recently been where they wanted to go.

Farpoint City had clearly lost the battle. Roughly a fourth of the skyscrapers had fallen to ground level, with copious amounts of dust filling the air. Dead bodies were everywhere, watched by biomechanical lifeforms of all kinds. There were no sounds of heavy resistance or gunfire – just the occasional scream. People were being led, heads down, into ships and taken into the sky.

The Combine had taken the city easily, despite all the efforts.

Vriska curled her hand into a fist. “See this fist, Combine bastards? You’re going to get it in the face. Again.”

~~~

“We’ve surrendered,” Anna told Jotaro, Applejack, and Allure. “Everyone’s being called to stand down and serve the Combine.” She handed them a little pocket radio. “…I don’t know what to tell them.”

Applejack looked at her. “You don’t.”

“I… don’t?”

“We can. …Do you know of another bunker we can use nearby? Better suited for defense?”

Anna bit her lip. “…There’s one deeper down, through the sewers. Bit harder to get to.”

“Good. Jotaro, get everyone’s attention. Ah’ve got a thing or two to say. Allure, record this on your phone.”

Jotaro summoned Star Platinum and clapped loud enough to send a gust of air through the section of the bunker they were in. “LISTEN UP!”

Everyone turned to him, expectant. He stepped down – and Applejack stepped up. “Howdy, y’all. Ah’m Applejack, Equis Vitis. Some of you might know me, most don’t, and that frankly doesn’t matter right now. What does matter is that all of Farpoint Colony has surrendered to our attackers – the Combine. We have been asked to cooperate with our conquerors completely. If you want to do that, Ah won’t stop you, and there’s no shame in doin’ so.

“But Ah’m not gonna be doin’ that. Ah’m not gonna sit here and let a bunch of high and mighty brutes come down, attack my people, and get away with it. They’ve destroyed our city and taken our loved ones from us. They’ve cut us off from the rest of Merodi Universalis, keepin’ us from the rest of our loved ones. Who knows what they’re gonna do with us now? Ah’m sure it can’t be good.

“So here’s what Ah’m gonna do. Ah’m gonna go with my friends to another bunker, somewhere better suited for fightin’. We’re gonna gather everyone we can, and we’re gonna make these Combine regret that they’ve ever come here. Ah’m gonna fight them until they let me go home to my family.

“Y’all don’t have to come. You can stay here. Ah want everyone who’s comin’ to stay in this part of the bunker – anyone else can go to the other sections. We’ll be leavin’ in half an hour.” She bowed her head and turned around.

There was no clapping – just a lot of shuffling of feet and movement as people shuffled out of this section of the bunker.

“Send that around,” Applejack told Allure. “The rest of them need to hear that.”

Allure nodded, moving to spread it around the bunker, putting it on the portable TVs and radios they had, careful not to let the signal leave the bunker.

Applejack looked back at the people who had remained. Maybe one in every ten had decided to stay and fight – the rest had all gone. Probably less.

“…That’s not enough,” Anna told Applejack.

“It’s not all of ‘em. Give it time,” Applejack said.

Allure came back a couple of minutes later. “I’ve spread it around.” She glanced around the somewhat empty section of bunker. “Ooooh…”

“Patience,” Applejack said. “Just a little patience…”

A few people began to trickle in. At first, there were so few in the room that Applejack saw a few who came in turn around and leave, thinking there was no hope with such a small group.

But people kept trickling in. Moving together, determined expressions on their faces.

It wasn’t much – nowhere near as much as Applejack had been hoping – but there was enough. Over two hundred people were there in the end. Ponies, humans, Gems… Even some other races from the other worlds of Merodi Universalis.

“That’s enough,” Applejack told herself. “Enough to fight from the shadows.” She turned to Anna. “Take us out.”

Anna nodded. “Follow me everybody! We’re moving!” She led them out of the bunker section into the next – which was crowded with people.

“CLEAR A PATH!” Jotaro shouted. They listened without a fuss, letting the forces of the resistance walk through them, across the bunker compound, to the exit.

“Oh I’m going to regret this…” a Rarity pulled herself out of the crowd and took a position slightly behind Allure. “Ahem. Affix is the name, being crazy is apparently my game.”

“Glad to have you!” Allure beamed.

“HEY! YOU HEAR THAT?” Affix shouted. “It’s not too late to joiiiiin~! You’ve all got until we walk out those doors! C’mon, I know you want to. I did! I just didn’t know it until five seconds ago!”

Her words moved some people to join the march. Slowly, but surely, more and more individuals added themselves to the fledgling resistance’s army, lengthening the march to the exit door.

By the time they got to it, Anna was smiling. She undid the seal on the door and opened up to the damp, dark sewers.

Applejack looked behind them. They had more than doubled their size in the slow march here. Almost five hundred.

Applejack smiled. “Regardless of what happens… Ah’m proud of y’all.”

Anna’s halo brimmed with energy as they marched through the sewers to prepare a rebellion.

~~~

Sometimes I feel sorry for James.

He was just a poor Combine soldier who had a really, really bad day.

Perhaps we should have just killed him rather than what we actually ended up doing, but at the time we didn’t know the torment that would fall to him afterward and I didn’t bother to look into the fate of a person who essentially amounted to a ‘faceless goon’ that stood between us and further progress toward victory.

After we defeated him, James would go on to be tried by the Combine and found guilty of flagrant negligence and inadequacy. They would not execute him – because that would just be a waste of a man who could be useful elsewhere. One would think it was ‘lucky’ that James was not consigned to biological experimentation, but he certainly didn’t think so after his third week assigned to Combine-controlled hellscape number 127.

He spent the rest of his surprisingly long life there.

All because of three ponies and an absurd plan that worked because of its absurdity.

I knew how everything would play out long before it actually happened – for I had written the sequence of us taking the ship about ten minutes prior. I had been given no indication I had overextended my abilities as a Prophet, which was a rare occurrence to begin with since I was so well acquainted with the ‘rules’ at this point in time.

It all started with Renee and her signature move.

“You there! Get me off this planet!” she whined. “Get me ooooooooff!”

James had been left behind to watch the dropship while the rest of the squad rounded up some prisoners to be taken back to the station. They were nearing the end of the prisoner runs, expecting to have scared the rest of the population to submission in less than an hour. He had not been expecting any of the locals to want to come.

He actually displayed a modicum of intelligence at the start. “Why would you want on?”

“Because everything’s exploding and smelly and dirty and disgusting and I’m terr-rr-rrified~!”

“I… Uh…”

“You’re taking people anyway! Just take me! I have a horn! And I’ll be quiet! Just let me iiiiiiiiiin.”

“Fine, fine, fine! If it’ll get you to shut up! Get on the ship!”

Renee grinned. “Oh thank you thank you thank you!” She rushed him into a hug. “You’re the best!”

“I… Wh… Huh?”

“Stop!” Pinkie said, appearing behind him.

“…Huh?”

“Hammertime!” Pinkie said, lifting her hammer. Her dress sparkled as she bashed James across the side of the head, cracking his armor and sending him flying. To his credit, he tried to radio for help – but of course Pinkie’s hammer had hit in just the correct way to damage his communicator.

Renee smirked in his direction. “We’ll be taking this now. Thanks for your help!” She blew a mocking hiss at him.

“No! Wait! Come back! You don’t know what they’re going to do to me!”

He was right, we didn’t know. All we knew was that we had won, and were taking the ship into space with all three of us on it.

He never even saw me. I was already in the cockpit when Pinkie and Renee walked to the front of the ship.

“So, how are we going to go on from here?” Renee asked.

I smiled sheepishly. “Wing it.”

“Twilence…”

“We need to get on the ship. As I saw with O’Neill, if we just get dropped off unceremoniously, they won’t suspect a thing. We do need to have blue stuff on our horns, but we can cast an illusion for that. First chance we get we teleport a few decks up to more secret locations and enter stealth mode. Fair enough?”

“…Why don’t you inform us of these plans ahead of time?”

“Because two-thirds of us already know them half the time!” Pinkie said.

Renee put a hoof to her face. “I can already tell this is going to go swimmingly.”

I made a note. Watch for possible flooding. It was always possible her one-liner was meant to come back with something amusing and threatening later. It was true that most of my notes meant absolutely nothing in the end, but it never hurt to be prepared.

I created some fake blue stuff and put it on our horns. I also tied my wings up just to be extra convincing. The Combine station automatically cleared us for docking – after all, every ship was cleared to be here at the moment to deposit prisoners. It was easy to get us in, throw ourselves out of the hole, and then tell the ship to drive itself into the sun.

Let them worry about the runaway ship rather than us.

“MOVE!” a soldier shouted.

“Hey, no need to be all grumpy!” Pinkie said, huffing. “Imma movin’!”

We all moved like the prisoners we weren’t, fooling all who saw us. We marched along. I prepared to teleport at a moment’s notice, but I knew there was going to be at least one complication – of what sort, I knew not. Little things often pass my visions, even if I look for them. This meant I knew we would get to our goal, certainly, but not how difficult it would be to do so.

As it turned out, somewhere in the middle in terms of difficulty.

What are you? The Advisor demanded, floating right to me. Your readings are telling.

I realized in that moment they must have gotten ka sensors since I last dealt with them – how else would they have found the exile command station so quickly? I decided to answer honestly. “Twilence.”

That is a name. What ARE you?

“An alicorn…?” I responded, trying to act as confused as possible.

He bought it, but he tried to assault my mind anyway. I forgot to pretend like I wasn’t as skilled a mental warrior as I was and blocked his advances outright.

The problem was psychics that powerful just didn’t exist in random alicorns, and the Advisor knew it.

“CHANGE OF PLANS!” I shouted, lighting my horn. “Hold on!”

We teleported several decks up. The instant we did so, numerous red alarms started blaring.

The Combine was now looking for a purple alicorn with an eye on her chest, labeled ‘potentially extremely dangerous’ with the label ‘use lethal force, do not risk capture’.

I grinned sheepishly. “So, uh, stealth might be a little difficult now.”

“You think!?” Renee blurted.

“Don’t worry, just give me a second,” I said, taking out my notebook and scribbling frantically. “Just have to change a little bit here and a little bit there… Wrap it all around… We might end up in some places we probably shouldn’t be, but everything will work out in the end. …Well not everything, but we’ll be able to do it.”

“Do what?!” Renee asked.

“Be a background influence. We need to be here, and we need to do a couple things to help the others.” I tapped the Eye of Rhyme. “Trust me, I’ve got this.”

Then I realized what I’d just said.

“Huh. I haven’t been that stupid in a while.”

088 - Hidden Terrors

A Portable Weapons Platform (PoWR) was an essential part of any Combine invasion when significant resistance occurred even after a surrender was accepted, which was annoyingly often in the Combine’s collective mind. The station had been equipped with a few dozen of the PoWRs, to be deployed when deemed necessary.

An hour had passed since the initial invasion and the fighting still hadn’t stopped. Glassing the city would just be a horrible waste of valuable technology, personnel, and other materials, so the clearance for the PoWRs’ release was given. Eight were sent down initially.

The PoWRs were derived from a peculiar cube-shaped life form they had found on a world some untold centuries ago. This cube-thing had been known to devour everything it saw, and sort all the junk into its sixteen different stomachs remarkably efficiently.

So the Combine had taken one look at it and thought ‘that would make a pretty good weapon distribution system’. So they took it, ran it through their biomechanical engineering processes, and produced the PoWR – a cube of flesh with a mechanical porthole instead of a mouth on the bottom. The PoWR hovered through the power of four blue nubs on the top face, while its four side faces were each equipped with high-precision laser-rifles.

The PoWR was hardly a defenseless entity, and was a great boon to any squad gifted with it given its ability to provide weapons to troops specifically suited for the enemies at hand.

The drawback was any squad with a PoWR suddenly became a target because of the weapons inside the PoWR. If a resistance force managed to put up enough firepower to beat one, they would get quite the cache.

Luckily for the Combine, the resistance on Farpoint was miniscule. Applejack’s little rebellion hadn’t gotten enough force behind it to take out a PoWR just yet.

Unluckily for the Combine, Vriska Serket was now in the city. And she knew exactly what a PoWR was, why it was useful, and how to take one out.

On the trip here she had been stealing luck from every Combine soldier she had seen – while nowhere near enough to give her full control over her Fluorite Octet, she certainly had enough for an impressive roll.

“So, good guns are in there?” Rainbow Dash asked Vriska as she summoned her dice.

“Yes, for the millionth time, yes.”

“I mean, better than this baby?” Rainbow asked again, holding up a simple assault rifle she had pilfered from a downed Combine soldier. She’d discovered that her wings were close enough to hands that she could at least fire the thing safely.

“Yes…” Vriska seethed.

Nova checked her screen. “The squad has no backup. Twelve troopers, three spider-crabs, one cube of ‘PoWR’, and what I’m calling a pointer.”

The ‘pointer’ was the only thing in the squad Vriska had never seen before – a new biomechanical creation of the Combine that was a cone of solid metal sitting on top of bulbous green sacks of hot air that kept it aloft. It was a complete unknown.

Which was why Nova was going to take it out the moment Vriska rolled her dice. Unknowns were dangerous.

“Ready… go.” Vriska said, tossing her dice towards the squad. The commander noticed them and had time to fire his gun once before they activated. A tiny sawblade appeared above the dice, grew to eight meters in diameter, and disappeared. The instant growth of a sawblade had managed to cut most of the human troopers in half and taken out one of the spider-crabs, injuring another.

Rainbow fired her gun. Her aim was horrible, but the uninjured spider-crab wasn’t a small target, so she got some damage in.

Nova unleashed a swirling beam of magic right at the pointer.

It was at this point everything went wrong.

The pointer absorbed the magic and sent it right back at Nova. She raised a shield but it broke through, hitting her in the horn and sending her flying.

“Fuck, they’ve figured out how to make magic do what they want,” Vriska cursed. “List of things that are not good: that.”

Rainbow turned her gun to focus on the pointer, but it used telekinesis to blow the bullets away, even sending one right back into Rainbow’s firing wing. The PoWR deposited three glowing yellow guns that bristled with so many golden needles they looked like they had hedgehogs on top of them. The three remaining human soldiers picked them up and fired at Vriska.

Vriska took in a sharp breath – this was gonna hurt. The PoWR had analyzed her luck manipulation and given them seeker-needlers. The bullets themselves did almost no damage, but hurt like nothing else and were very accurate. Dodging them would be a miracle, and she was fresh out of miracles.

So as the bullets hit her and sent her cobalt blood flying, she mentally ordered the human soldiers to fire on the PoWR cube instead. Their minds were like putty to her, so they did without hesitation.

The PoWR killed them all in an instant with its own weapons, removing any minds that Vriska could make use of. It stood strong, along with the pointer and two injured spider-crabs.

The pointer floated over to Vriska and pointed its tip at her.

Vriska stole its luck, expecting to use everything she took to just dodge the stupid thing’s attack.

It never got to unleash its attack. One moment it was there, ready to fire – the next it was smashed to pieces, along with both the spider-crabs.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, extending a hand to Vriska. “You shouldn’t need my help.”

“Shut up,” Vriska muttered, accepting the hand. “Everything hurts right now so I’m extra irritable.”

“Cube!” Rainbow blurted. “You haven’t taken care of the cube!”

The PoWR moved all its automatic guns to point at Jotaro – and they all failed to fire. Upon closer inspection, Vriska noticed the guns were alight with a soft white glow of magic.

“You’re welcome,” Anna said with a smile, her halo shining brilliantly.

Allure poked her head out of a nearby piece of rubble. “Well, looks like I didn’t get to do anything. …I’m satisfied with that.”

Nova stood up, rubbing her horn. “This is gonna hurt for a while… Oh, hey, people. …Thanks, I assume you saved us?”

“Team effort,” Anna said, walking up to Rainbow and healing her wing with her magic. “Definitely didn’t have enough power between the three of us to actually take the weapons. But now we have enough for a small army.”

“Where’s Applejack?” Rainbow asked, noticing her absence from the squad.

“She’s in charge back at base!” Allure said. “Come on! I’ll show you!”

~~~

Flutterfree was praying.

It was a deep, honest, heartfelt prayer that everything that was about to happen would work and that as few people as possible would get hurt.

However, she was also being a little more obvious about the act than she usually would. Most times, you’d only be able to tell she was engaging in the act by closed eyes and a slight bowed head, and rarely would it last very long.

She had gone all the way with the clasped hooves, muttering words, and strained expression this time around. Not that those things actually helped in her case, it just made it easy to see what she was doing. She was rather disappointed with people who broadcasted such things to the world so loudly, most often just for attention.

But that was not her purpose. Her purpose was to get her friends to notice she was acting a little odd.

To realize that she was about to make a move.

Lolo had spread out far enough to find two very important things: the larger containment area with about two thousand other prisoners, and the docking bay. She had found the shortest route to one and then the other, and found a whale-ship that was mostly abandoned – ripe for hijacking and taking to another universe using the Combine-custom dimensional drive.

It would be so much easier if Seraphim’s portals to other universes were big enough to move two thousand people at once… But it wasn’t even close.

And nobody knew that this was the plan she concocted. They would need to have it explained to them in the very short timeframe they would have to make this work.

Basically, it all fell to her and she was barely keeping herself together at this point.

But she was ready. She had Lolo’s vines collecting in the research room below them, pressing against the edge of the tank with all the gemstones in it. Lolo was a very weak Stand physically. However, given enough time, it could push a tank over with the right leverage…

One of the soldiers noticed. “Tank’s moving!” He looked for what was disturbing the tank - but he couldn’t find anything.

He tried to push back on the tank, but he was unable to judge the actual position of Lolo, so he pushed in the wrong place and introduced a pivot motion to the tank. It fell over, shattering it and spilling the Gems all over the ground. Some of them detached from the blue goo completely – and were able to reform.

One of these gems was a very ticked off Jasper. A spiked gauntlet appeared around one of her hands and she punched a scientist’s face in without thinking twice. A short Amethyst and a Peridot formed behind her, took one look at what was going on, and let out Gem war cries.

“GO DOWN!” Flutterfree shouted at Eve.

Seraphim activated, creating an area of physics where the solid state of matter didn’t exist, melting a hole in the cube. Flutterfree had Lolo toss up tools she had seen the scientists use to cut away the blue material, letting the Gems continue to act as a distraction.

Clandestine’s horn was uncovered first – and she set to work freeing the magic of everyone else using her own.

O’Neill, meanwhile, had started using Crimson Sushi. There was no way any of the scientists were going to be able to figure out where the alarm button even was, much less take two steps without stepping into someone else.

Of course, the Gems had the same problem, but they were basically indestructible. They’d forgive him later for creating complete chaos. …Okay, maybe not, but it was fun to watch everyone below scramble.

Corona put a hand on O’Neill’s shoulder. “Drop the panic button.” A ring of magic appeared around her free hand. “I’ve got something for them.”

O’Neill shrugged, taking Crimson Sushi’s effect off. Everyone had a moment of clarity.

Corona smirked. “Selective sleep spell.”

Every being that wasn’t a Gem on the ground below them fell asleep.

“All right!” Flutterfree yelled. “Listen quickly because I don’t think we have a lot of time! There are two things we need to do: free all the prisoners and take a ship to another universe! Eve, O’Neill, you lead everyone in this room along that branch of Lolo, it’ll take you to a docking bay, and specifically to a large whale-like ship. Clear it out and take control. It has a dimensional device on it that shouldn’t be affected by the blockade! If it is… I’m sure you can figure out some way to extend Seraphim’s range with the technology in there.”

“Got it,” O’Neill said.

“Corona, you have the harder job. You and I are going to free the prisoners. We’ll need to move more than two thousand people from one deck of this station to the one where the whale ship is. I have Lolo’s vines spread out everywhere between the two sections, but that is still going to be difficult!” She flew over to Corona and held onto her just below the the point where her wings met her body. “We follow those vines! That’s the plan! We don’t have time to argue, just go!”

“YOU HEARD HER!” O’Neill shouted. “LET’S MOVE, PEOPLE!” He and Eve took off down the path Flutterfree had indicated, Clandestine, the Gems, and all the other prisoners following.

Corona didn’t even need to be told again – she had already started flying along the path Flutterfree had indicated with Lolo. “Just the two of us, huh?”

“Yeah. We’ll get backup from the prisoners when we free them,” Flutterfree said. “I hope…”

“Hey, this is a good plan. I was thinking it would be something a little less frantic, but that’s just me. What I want to know is why you’re with me.”

“When we free the prisoners… They are going to attack.” Flutterfree gulped. “I have no idea from which direction right now, so our escape pathway is uh… one of twenty or so options. Unless you can teleport two thousand people into a whale ship without having a very good idea of where it is?”

“If I had an hour, maybe.”

“I’m thinking we have less than ten minutes.”

“I was going to say five,” Corona said with a smirk.

“Right. Anyway, this entire plan revolves around you not getting gunked with the blue stuff again. Bacon Pancakes is your friend.”

“I got that.”

“And I am your eyes. There’s a squad that’s likely going to see us up ahead three halls.”

Corona nodded, torching them as they passed.

“Right. The prisoners are all held right below us now… Bash through the floor. Expect a lot of guns shooting at you.”

Corona summoned Bacon Pancakes and flattened the floor, tearing through it like paper. They appeared in the center of a large room with several layers, all filled with loose, unsorted prisoners guarded by the occasional Combine soldier.

Corona raised a shield to deflect all bullets coming her way. “PRISON BREAK!” she yelled, using the Royal Canterlot Voice at long last. She raised a hand and started taking out the soldier guards.

To her immense delight, the prisoners started fighting back as well, the vast majority letting the anger grab hold of them. Corona removed the magic inhibitors from the unicorns with her other hand, only adding to the chaos as Combine guards went down left and right.

“How’s the security response?” Corona asked Flutterfree.

Flutterfree focused on Lolo. “Mostly coming from below, which is good since the docks are slightly above us. Drill a hole up through the ceiling right… here.” Lolo generated an X of green wire at an area of the ceiling slightly to Corona’s left.

“Raging Sights?” Corona asked, currently using both her hands to take care of the prisoners and guards.

“Preparing,” Raging Sights reported. “There will be a temporary opening during casting.”

Corona smirked, summoning Bacon Pancakes to protect her. “No problem.”

“Prepared,” Raging Sights reported.

Corona dropped her magic protections and blasted the ceiling with a white vaporization beam. Apparently the Combine had been waiting for this – hidden weapons and blue ring dispensers activating for the first time. A few hit her feet, but she was able to hide the rest of her body behind the central disc of Bacon Pancakes, a barrier they didn’t even know was there, much less were able to penetrate.

“You’re hurt!” Flutterfree called.

Corona realized she couldn’t heal her foot because it had the blue stuff on it, and she was much better served clearing blue stuff off of unicorn horns rather than caring for her own foot. “I can get a new foot later.”

“Corona!” Flutterfree gestured at the glowing blood dripping onto the ground.

Corona smirked. “I’m fine, Flutterfree.” She cleared her throat, pointing at the hole in the ceiling. “THAT IS YOUR WAY OUT! THERE IS A SHIP WAITING FOR YOU UP THERE! LOOK FOR OVERHEAD O’NEILL OR EVENING. I KNOW SOME OF YOU HAVE CONSTRUCT MAGIC, MAKE A STAIRWAY UP THERE WHILE I DEFEND YOU!”

After a few pegasi flew up the hole, a handful of unicorns did as was asked, creating a crystal walkway up to the hole in the ceiling. The mass of prisoners began to surge upward.

“Get to the bottom,” Flutterfree told Corona. “They’re about to breach.”

Corona nodded, flying down to the floor of the prison area, destroying the remaining automatic turrets on the way. She placed her hands to the floor and reinforced it with magical defenses, making the entire thing glow with intricate red geometric patterns.

Something hit the floor hard, but was unable to break through.

“It’s holding!” Flutterfree reported, looking through the part of Lolo she had on the other side. “They’re already moving to flank us.”

“Then we need speed above all else,” Corona said, in a fighting stance. “I hope everyone knows how to move quickly, because we don’t have much in the way of time here…”

~~~

“I have good news!” I said as we dodged another flurry of plasma weapon fire.

“What would that be!?” Renee blurted, shooting behind herself with a stolen plasma rifle.

“We’re a very good distraction for Corona and the prison break operation!”

Pinkie and I hoofbumped.

Renee threw her mane back. “Well then what are we going to do!?”

“This!” Pinkie said, producing a chainsaw and leaping into the air, carving through three spider-crabs at once, moving through the assaulting team like a liquid.

Somehow she only got red blood on herself, avoiding all other colors.

“…That goes well with your dress,” Renee observed. Then she blinked. “Oh that was the entire point of the dress wasn’t it!?”

“It’s the Pinkie Massacre dress,” Pinkie said, giggling. “Y’know, for special moments when massacres are needed.”

“You’re losing more sanity every day!”

“You need to go insane in this business,” I said, extending my senses through a nearby wall. “They care about us a lot more than they care about those prisoners. I think my ka signature scared that Advisor something fierce.”

“His colleagues probably aren’t gonna like that!” Pinkie observed.

“That’s his problem tomorrow. That won’t help us,” Renee pointed out.

I nodded. “Right. Anyway, now that we’ve served a great distraction…” I teleported us a level up, to the top of the Combine station. “I think it’s time for us to look for the interesting stuff in here. We’ve got two places to go…”

“Care to elaborate?”

“The Secret Prisoner and then the Tumor Room,” I said. “In that order. Our meeting with the Secret Prisoner should coincide more or less with Eve’s group, and then the Tumor Room will be near the end of this chapter.”

Renee twitched. “That doesn’t give me a timeframe, dear!”

“In the next half hour? Less? Everything is happening really, really fast in case you didn’t notice.”

Pinkie swung her chainsaw and cut the sluggy form of a genetically engineered machine-gun jellyfish in half before it even got off a shot. “You two should really pay more attention.”

Renee blinked. “…I expected these things to be stronger than that.”

“I’m Pinkie Pie in the Pinkie Massacre dress. The ease with which I take things out should never be used to judge their strength. …I think I’ll make a disclaimer sign for that.”

I chuckled. Renee twitched. “You do realize how impossible it is to work with both of you at once, right?”

“Eh, maybe?” I said, shrugging. “We just know ways of talking to each other that get ideas across well.”

“Yep! We can make it so every sentence has a noodle incident.”

“Hilarious, I assume,” Renee deadpanned. “Where to?”

“If I’m right, and I should be, the Secret Prisoner should be this way.” I teleported us through a large set of double doors.

We appeared in a room that seemed to be floating in nothing, but I knew better – it was really about the size of a baseball field, it was just that the walls were perfectly black and you couldn’t see the doors. Floating tiles filled the room, all level with the spherical enclosure’s diameter. These tiles surrounded a large black and white spiked ball patterned similarly to the yin-yang symbol without the dots.

I facehooved. “For the… this is the wrong room!”

“Really?” Renee said, blinking. “That looks pretty important to me!”

“I must’ve borked something somewhere,” I muttered, flipping through my notebook. “We aren’t the ones who are supposed to deal with this. There’s a whole other sequence of events…”

Renee looked to Pinkie, pleading.

Pinkie shrugged. “I actually don’t know that one. This spiked thing has something to do with Vriska, I think, but I’m not sure.”

“So what, she has to deal with it?”

“Yes! No. Er…” I rubbed my head. “She needs to be here, yes.”

“But she’s not on the station!”

“She probably will be,” Pinkie pointed out. “We’re heading for a climax on this thing, I can feel it.”

“Bingo,” I said, scribbling frantically. “And for everything to work we have to leave this place. …Ah, there was my mistake, I assumed the deck layout was fungible…” I crossed out a note and wrote a new one. “We can’t do anything with this.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

I shrugged with my wings. “Same thing in this case. I technically know what to do, but if I did it, that would screw with things I know have to happen. Namely the climax.” I closed my notebook and put it away. “By the way, Renee, you are going to be angry at me when you figure everything out.”

“I’m not angry already?”

“Tower’s base, no,” I answered, remembering many times I had gotten other Raritys really angry.

Renee groaned. “Fine, fine, I’ll get angry later. Let’s just go to the thing we need to do for the thing of… Uh…”

“Secret Prisoner,” Pinkie suggested.

“Yes, right.” Renee put a hoof to her head. “That.”

~~~

Vriska had been expecting a high-tech organized rebellion with lots of people scurrying about and yelling things about the fight against the Combine.

What she got was a hole in the ground with a few hundred people sitting around portable heaters. Hardly any actually had any weapons, and most of those had been at the door, ready to defend in case their position was compromised.

“This place is a dump,” Vriska said, looking at Applejack.

“Yep,” Applejack said, jumping down from a crate of supplies. “Glad you’re okay.”

Rainbow pushed Vriska to the side and pulled Applejack into a hug. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Nova smiled brightly. “I brought a gift for my part of the reunion!” She stopped levitating the PoWR and dropped it next to Applejack with a squishy thud.

“We all got that,” Vriska pointed out.

“I carried it all the way here. And I had the invisibility. So there.”

Applejack looked at the PoWR and grinned. “Does this have as much firepower in it as Ah’m told it does?”

“You bet it does,” Vriska said. “Sixteen compartmentalized stomachs, each with several copies of precision weapons. We have seeker-needlers, radiation railguns, the carbines, long range detonators, and any number of other things.” She reached a hand into the porthole and pulled out a gun that looked like a squirrel had been grafted onto it. “…I have no idea what this is.”

“Probably useful against a very odd type of enemy,” Nova said. “Tree people, or something.”

“We’re gonna have to use this stuff soon,” Applejack said. “It’s only been two hours since the attack and it’s becomin’ pretty darn clear this whole resistance thing isn’t workin’.”

“Not where they can hear!” Anna hissed.

Applejack rolled her eyes. “They already know, and Ah ain’t lying for your sake, and you know it.”

Anna sagged, her halo dimming in shame.

“There is a ‘but’ I was getting’ to,” Applejack said. “They’re rootin’ us out and we can’t ‘take control’ of any area of the city, because they just hit us with overwhelming force. The only reason we’re here is because they have no idea where we are. But we have learned a lot during our little rebellion here. And one of those things is that they get all their orders not from the station in space, but from a repurposed tower here on the ground. The molybdenum tower.”

“The mayor’s building, right?” Nova asked.

Applejack nodded. “They have it as a symbol, of sorts. Subjugatin’ us through our own leadership. Also, I think they’re mockin’ our knowledge of the Dark Tower. Twofold punch. The point here is that all orders come from the top of that building. We take it out, we scramble their communications on the ground – and we might have a way to get to their station. Ah wouldn’t create such an important base of power in such an obvious place unless there’s an escape plan.”

“So you want to charge right in?” Vriska asked.

“Eeyep. ’Cause destroyin’ ships and squads doesn’t really seem to do much. Gotta get somethin’ that actually matters. ...We’ve already lost a fifth of our number not doin’ much.” She looked up. “It’s basically the last idea Ah’ve got besides ‘hunker down and hope they never find us.’ If this doesn’t work the rebellion’s going to evacuate into the flower jungle and try to live free there, out of Combine’s direct control. They may have observation posts out there already, but an endless jungle’s still hard to police efficiently.”

Nova blinked. “You’ve gone through a lot in just a couple hours.”

“Overwhelmin’ force’ll do that to ya,” Applejack commented. “Point is, we’ve gotta do this. These weapons give us enough power to maybe pull it off. Can Ah count on y’all?”

Vriska, Nova, and Rainbow saluted without even hesitating.

“Good. Anna, Ah’ll be goin’ this time instead of you.”

Anna blinked. “But Applejack, you’re th-”

“Ah’m a farmer who won’t be able to keep them together for long. You need to take control. Protect them no matter what, got it?”

Anna wanted to argue for a moment – but nodded in the end. “Yes, Applejack.”

Applejack smiled. “Good. Hey Affix!”

The scarred Rarity looked up from what appeared to be a giant bomb. “Huh?”

“How’s the big boom coming along?”

“Oh! Very good, actually. I’ve even got smaller ones!” She pulled a few miniature bombs out of her saddlebags. “It’s amazing how much exploding material the Combine have on them.”

Nova blinked. “Where did you find this one?”

Allure shrugged. “She was kinda just… here. Being… eccentric.”

“All is as it should be!” Affix decreed. “All that remains is to make these bombs fashionable!”

“You have until Ah give out all these new weapons,” Applejack said.

“Genius is always best under pressure!” Affix declared, getting to work.

~~~

In a situation this dire, Eve would have used Seraphim to dial the universe where ‘biological life is impossible’ to clear the ship they were stealing, but there was a pretty major problem with that.

Half of the ship itself was biological. So they were going to have to clear it manually. And it was a big ship.

Eve could see Lolo’s tendrils shifting into the ship, telling her, O’Neill, and the rest of the force that it was the right one.

“Okay, here’s the deal!” O’Neill shouted. “Eve and I are following the vines into this thing. The rest of you, spread out and clear the ship of any personnel you find. If you make it to the bridge, make sure you can control it, but do not launch. We have a couple thousand escapees waiting for us to break them out of here. Got it?”

The high-value prisoners all nodded, splitting off into several teams.

Eve and O’Neill summoned their Stands actively as they ran through the halls of the whale-ship, switching seemingly at random from metal floors to biological squishy surfaces.

“Chances we’re walking in this thing’s nose?” O’Neill asked.

“About as high as you telling a snot-related joke every time we’re on flesh-floor,” Eve said with a smirk.

“I was gonna go with earwax, but snot sounds good as well.”

“No you weren’t!”

O’Neill smirked. “Where’s your proof?”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Amusing.”

“Really? I thought it was lame.”

Eve rolled her eyes. “O’Neill, never change.”

“I became a vampire in order to do that, so I think we might have a tiny paradox here.”

“Drinking Corona’s elixir does not make you a vampire. …Wait, you didn’t drink it, you have those nanobots!”

O’Neill grinned – revealing fangs.

Eve jumped. “W-wh-”

O’Neill removed the false teeth.

“…What!?”

“I’ve been keeping these in my pocket for years, breaking them out when the moment is just perfect.”

“…That can’t be sanitary.”

“Nanomachines, son.”

Eve groaned. “Don’t remind me about that guy.”

“Makes Valentine look like a teddy bear, huh?”

“Just… INCOMING!”

The two of them barely had time to dodge to the left as a sort of Combine speedster creature tried to ram them. The moment it missed it turned around and tried again – only this time it found that there was no friction on the floor. It lost all traction and rammed itself into the ceiling in an instant.

O’Neill whistled. “Speedsters. You never know there was a fight until it’s over.”

“So this ship is guarded, at least a little,” Eve noted. “We have to be at least a little cautious.”

They scrambled forward, running toward the front of the whale-ship, presumably where the bridge would be.

A few moments after this new surge of scrambling, they encountered a group of three human Combine soldiers. Eve took care of the bullets with a magic forcefield and Crimson Sushi delivered a ‘slap of no return’ to each of them. Easy and simple.

When they got to the bridge with no further resistance, they both got the same sinking feeling.

“Way too easy,” Eve muttered. “Flutterfree was right, this ship was almost completely empty…” She ran to the controls, looking for anything wrong.

They were locked out, sure, but it was easy enough to override the lockouts with her magic. She performed some diagnostics – the engines were fine, life support was fine, and the dimensional drive was operational. Just to make sure, she tried to interface it with Seraphim, and found it would be easy enough to create a portal for the entire ship if it came to that.

“Way, way too easy,” Eve said, narrowing her eyes. “There’s almost no obstacles on our end.”

“They could all be busy with Corona,” O’Neill suggested. “…Yeah, I don’t believe that’s the answer either.”

“Good, because if you did, I would have been sure you were a changeling,” Eve muttered, scanning everything. She was able to put nearby life signs on the screen. She could see Corona engaging heavy enemy resistance, and all the prisoners moving closer to the ship. She performed a quick teleport to the prisoners to make sure they were going the right direction, then she teleported back. “There’s hardly anything trying to stop us at all.”

“Part of their plan?” O’Neill suggested.

“I doubt it. I really, really doubt it,” Eve muttered. “They brought everyone up here to add them to their armies like all the other conditioned humans and biotechnical things we’ve seen. Something’s changed their mind about that, and they’re trying something else.”

“Let’s hope that involves ‘letting us go’.”

“Maybe… Maybe two thousand prisoners aren’t worth anything compared to whatever else they find…” Eve furrowed her brow as the first prisoners started to load onto the ship. Corona, how are you doing down there? She asked.

Doing fine. Looks like everyone’s finding their way to you faster than expected.

Are you going to last?

It seems like it. Haven’t seen one of those slug-things yet. I’m fighting big things, yes, but I know they have bigger.

I know. We’re beginning to suspect something’s up. Tell us the moment you see anything suspicious – the Combine have something else going on here.

I’ll ask Flutterfree to keep an eye out. After a moment’s pause, Corona responded. She says there’s a lot less soldiers and troops than when we started. As if most of them were called elsewhere.

To do what?

Lolo doesn’t go out far enough to tell. They’re just moving away from the prisoners and the docking bay.

Eve narrowed her eyes. Keep with the plan for now. But be prepared to improvise.

“Well?” O’Neill asked.

“She’s suspicious too. And most the soldiers seem to have left this area of the station – letting us do what we want.”

O’Neill frowned. “They going to try an internal self-destruct?”

“I think I can execute a universal jump before the explosion reaches us,” Eve said. “If that’s their plan, it’s a stupid one.”

Clandestine ran onto the bridge. “That’s everyone but Corona and Flutterfree.”

“How on Earth do two thousand people move that fast?” O’Neill asked.

“I don’t know. They just… did. All of them worked as one to get here.”

Eve blinked. “How in… Never mind, I’ll question it later.” Corona, we’ve got everyone. Get here and let’s go.

Hold that thought! Flutterfree just saw Renee, Pinkie and… Twilence on the edge of Lolo’s vines!

What!?

They’re running from much heavier resistance than I’m getting!

Eve blinked – and then laughed. “Well, I now know why everything’s going so well.”

“Why?”

“Twilence is here. She’s probably altering ka in our favor.”

O’Neill narrowed his eyes. “That still doesn’t sit well with me.”

“Of course not. But it means this really is going to work. …It also means we have to go help them.”

“Right, right… Clandestine, you have the bridge.”

Clandestine saluted. “I shall get everyone to safety.”

“Remember the way back to Merodi Universalis?”

“I can get there, General.”

“Good. Eve, take us out.”

Eve teleported herself and O’Neill out of the whale ship. They watched as it rose into the air – and left the universe, escaping the wrath of the Combine.

Everything was deathly silent except for an alarm in the background.

“…No, not even Twilence messing with things explains this much of a ghost town,” O’Neill said. “There’s a Combine plot here. Something more than just conquering a planet and enslaving people.”

Eve nodded. “Maybe she’ll know what that is.” Corona, go to where Flutterfree saw Twilence. We’ll teleport to you when you get there.

Got it. Did everyone get out?

The only ones left here are O’Neill and myself. We’ll use Seraphim to escape with such a small number of people.

Got it! Watch yourselves!

…There’s no one here to watch ourselves from.

O’Neill and Eve stood alone in an abandoned docking bay while war raged elsewhere.

~~~

“Something’s up indeed,” I muttered to myself, scribbling some notes. “Problem is I know exactly what it is…”

Renee sighed. “Let me guess, it’s one of those things you can’t tell us?”

I shook my head. “It has to do with the thing we saw earlier. It’s not a problem we get to deal with. But it’s certainly affecting us…” A troop of a dozen speedsters charged Pinkie from all directions. She twirled around their speedy forms, relying on her Pinkie Sense to dodge their attacks before they came. One hit at that speed would turn her into a pancake.

As she dodged, she swung her chainsaw wide, slicing several of them in half. Due to their speed, it was like cutting paper. The blood arced through the air and landed on Pinkie’s body. She paid it no mind, jumping into the air and slicing another two in half. One managed to graze her mane, but she was able to turn with it to keep her hairs from being pulled out. She flung the creature to the ground and drove the chainsaw through its chest.

“I... am a pretty terrifying monster, aren’t I?” Pinkie asked with a demented giggle. “Yeah. This is a lot of blood.”

“Pinkie, we’re fighting for our lives. I think we have the right,” Renee said.

“Oh, I’m not saying we don’t have the right! I’m just saying, yeah, I probably scare little kids.” She threw her warhammer over her shoulder and hit a spider-crab in the face, causing it to explode. “Not exactly what I was going for when I signed up.”

“You knew there would be death,” I pointed out.

“Aaaand I didn’t expect me to be the one dishing it out is all I’m saying,” Pinkie admitted with a shrug. “It is what it is though!”

“Pinkie… Are you doing okay?” Renee asked.

“Meh,” Pinkie said wiping the blood from her eyes but only getting more blood on it. “I think I’m fine. Though I’m covered in the blood of my enemies which is a pretty good indication of something other than fine. So I dunno, you make the call.”

I created a complex cylinder-based spell that fired a razor-sharp card construct into fifty-two different enemies, immobilizing all of them. “I think you’re as fine as you can be, considering. You have a remarkable force of will, Pinkie. You had to face the truth alone. I could not have done that.”

“I’m also one bad day from going completely psycho, so there’s a biiiit of a personality tradeoff here, y’know.” She threw a cream pie into a soldier’s face. The pie was made of gasoline and exploded on contact due to a sparkler embedded within the delectable pastry.

Renee had been spending all the fighting surrounded by her magical shields, hoping none of the blue goo got on her by sheer luck. “Maybe now isn’t the best time to question our sanities?”

“Renee has a point,” I observed. “Let’s just accept we’re insane and will have to work through this later. Agreed?”

“Agreed!” Pinkie said, pulling out several party cannons and blowing back numerous spider-crabs. “News flash: Pinkie has not yet suffered a single wound! No candy red blood here!”

“Stop tempting Murphy,” I suggested.

“But it’s time to move!”

“Oh, right, right…” I facehooved. “I got caught up.” I lit my horn, preparing a teleport. “Here it goes again. Hopefully this goes better than last time…”

I teleported all three of us into a secret, purple observation station. There were six chairs in the room, each affixed in front of a desk. On each desk was a computer, all currently off or asleep.

In front of the six stations was one gigantic window that looked out at… absolutely nothing. Darkness.

Renee blinked. “Uh… what is this place?”

“The Secret Prisoner,” I answered, running a hoof across the main window. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“For what?” Pinkie asked.

“A lot of things,” I admitted. “But he knows at least one of them.”

“Stop being cryptic! Where is this prisoner?” Renee asked.

I pointed at the window. “Through that. If you bashed right through it you would see him – but then you would go completely mad from the sight.”

“Right, an eldritch deity. See, that’s important information. Thank you.”

“The highest form of eldritch deity,” I continued. “The being behind this ‘glass’ is one of the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors.”

Renee blinked. “…Horrorterrors. Pardon me if I don’t register what that means right away, but that’s a Class 1 right? It’s… It’s the ones responsible for Sburb…” Her eyes widened. “Wait, wait wait wait… I can’t comprehend quite how big this is right now… How are they even containing something like that!?”

“He’s weak,” I explained. “Captured, and contained in a ‘bigger-on-the-inside’ bubble.”

A series of eyes appeared plastered to the window. The great Horrorterror spoke, a voice not like Majora, not like Thrackerzod… It wasn’t reverberating or layered, nor was it deep and horrible. It didn’t even sound like words, but it didn’t drive them mad. They were struck by the importance of it.

“I__A M__N E O A N .__W E__H A V E__M U C H__T O__D I S C U S S__A N D__L I T T L E__T I M E .”

I wince. “Uh, yeah, we need to wait for Eve to get here for that. Don’t worry, I’ll make it go faster.” I took out my notebook and started scribbling. “Don’t panic, the Tumor won’t explode while we’re talking.”

“WHAT!?” Renee blurted.

~~~

Attacking the tower from the air was pointless – Combine ships surrounded it from all sides. They didn’t have the required aerial firepower that, say, Corona would have at her disposal. They had a couple of hard hitters, teleporters, and mostly just regular people with big guns.

Applejack said the plan was simple.

It wasn’t really.

They wanted it to look simple. And the first layer of the plan was. It was essentially ‘smash it and hope something happens’. The majority of the rebel forces with the PoWR’s provided advanced weaponry came out of the sewers around the tower and started shooting the place up, ensuring they stayed close to the structure so the Combine ships wouldn’t risk triggering a structural collapse.

“Move move move!” Affix yelled – she wasn’t technically in charge, but the actual commander let her do the barking since her voice demanded attention. The initial strike force held explosive weapons that blew the front doors of the tower down easily. They charged in, smashing the initial resistance without much fuss whatsoever.

“That was easier than expected,” Affix commented. The commander didn’t say anything – and Affix slowly realized she had quite forgotten his name. He was human, past middle aged, and stern. Military, probably, or perhaps a psycho mercenary for all she knew. Whatever, he was in charge, and she could just keep calling him commander for eternity.

The first floor was apparently cleared within a minute – bizarre, considering how large it was. But it let them move in with layer two of the plan: bombs. Specifically, one huge, invisible bomb carried by none other than Affix herself.

She was more than willing to admit that she was trigger-happy about the whole ordeal. They had a bomb that could bring this entire place crashing down with the push of a button – if they couldn’t take it, they’d blow it up and destroy whatever was at the top easily enough. Of course, it was a last resort, only if the teams going up the tower couldn’t progress.

...Or that was what a lot of troops had been told was the actual plan. Try to confuse the Combine with a direct assault, and really have a bomb in place on the bottom to accomplish the mission when everything went sideways. The fact that it hadn’t gone sideways in any way yet was a little odd, but Affix didn’t concern herself with such things as ‘ka’ and ‘fate’, she just acted.

The third layer of the plan was the real one. Behind the initial assault, behind the bomb, there was a team of six ‘heroes’ trying to take the stealth mission approach. Affix was convinced the way they leaned on ka to jump to their aid and give them what was needed would kill them one day.

But she hoped that wouldn’t be today just like everyone else.

She hoped even more that the actual strike teams would prove themselves excellent and actually get to the top of the tower, despite few actually having any training or combat experience. …It seemed to be working so far.

Affix circled her giant invisible bomb, glancing out the windows. “Why aren’t we getting attacked by ground forces?”

The commander narrowed her eyes. “You just noticed that now, did you?”

“Well, I was a bit excited about the big bomb, which I really want to explode but understand that’s basically the worst of all our options.”

“They should have been shooting our asses the moment we popped up,” the commander muttered. “This reeks either of complete apathy, or a trap.”

“Right…” Affix said, grimacing. “If they were apathetic about the tower, wouldn’t they just blow us up inside?”

“For all we know that’s a waste of resources. From what little intel we have, the Combine are all about resource management, sending the minimum firepower in to deal with the situation. If they think we aren’t worth it, or have some sort of cost-efficient way to take us out, they’ll jump all over that option like rabid dogs.”

Affix narrowed her eyes. “All right, something really fishy is up here. Really fishy. Hope our little heroes can figure it out for us.”

The commander nodded. “It’s always best with the small strike forces.”

“Is ka overruling your military training?”

“…I’m a barber.”

Affix flushed and facehooved. “Forget I said anything.”

The commander smirked, gun continually trained on the front doors of the black tower.

Meanwhile, seventy floors up, Jotaro, Nova, Vriska, Rainbow, Applejack, and Allure were flying up an elevator shaft, Nova’s magic doing all the heavy lifting. And maintaining the invisibility spell.

The only other person doing anything was Vriska. She’d picked up a gun from the PoWR with a scope that could see through walls – giving her the ability to steal luck at an unprecedented rate. “I really should see about getting one of these,” she said, smirking. “The luck just keeps growing.”

“Can we expect all eights?” Allure asked.

“Fuck no, I have to drain a crowded city block for that. But it’ll keep me – and by extension the rest of you ungrateful lot – hidden. Isn’t that convenient?”

“Yep.”

“Nearing the top!” Nova called. “We don’t know what we’re gonna find up there! Remember – stealth before shoot. I’m looking at you Vriska. Jotaro. …Rainbow. Why do we have three loose cannons?”

Allure snickered. “I could make convincing arguments that you and Applejack are loose cannons given the right situation!”

“…And we are once again reminded that you are the smart one.”

“Don’t even need a PhD to prove it! Woo!”

“But I’m serious, shut up.”

They all fell silent as Nova gradually decreased the rate at which they climbed. Vriska felt her luck drop significantly as they presumably passed through a specialized security net. Nova carefully teleported them through the elevator doors instead of forcing them open.

The room at the top of the tower was filled with Combine technology – metal intertwined with grotesque biological parts. The technology in here did not look as seamless as the creatures they had seen in the battlefield. Much of this stuff, being state-of-the-art, had not passed through any sort of ‘aesthetics’ consideration at this point.

There were some communication stations, giant screens that were tall rather than wide, a couple of weapons, and a large platform embedded in a nearby wall.

They saw a human man talking to an image of a slug-thing on the screen. Well, he was talking; the slug-thing didn’t appear to be talking back.

But Vriska was able to detect the psychic communication.

“Why am I not getting any reinforcements!? They’re storming the tower! I don’t have enough personnel! They’re a third of the way up already and show no signs of stopping!”

You have all you need to deal with simple rebels.

“No, I don’t! They have your weapons!”

Whose fault is that?

“Not mine! You’re the one who set down the PoWR cubes!”

You requested further assistance; that was our compliance. Why do you not have one on site?

“They were all out patrolling by your request!”

You could have kept one back.

“Look, just send a single dropship with some elites or something! You won’t experience any casualties!”

It is possible they have an individual with the unknown ability pattern.

“I sent you the data on the Stands already! Haven’t you figured them out yet!?”

The slug-thing made no response.

“I knew it. You have nothing. I don’t even know why I was asking. I turned away from these people thinking you could help me! You can’t even figure out something that simple!? What is wrong with you?”

There is another presence with you.

“What are you talking about? The room is completely empty!” He threw his arms wide. “But it won’t be for long!”

A powerful presence. Enough to hear my half of the conversation.

“Busted!” Vriska said, firing her gun into the man’s skull. “Well, that’s one traitor out of the way.”

Vriska Serket. This is a surprise.

Nova dropped the cloak. “And the rest of us?”

The slug-thing ignored them. You have been an issue multiple times before, Vriska Serket.

Vriska looked at them, confused. “You know, it feels weird hearing one of you Advisors say my name with respect. Did I hit you too hard last time?”

On the contrary, we have simply learned more about your origin since then. The worlds of Paradox Space have been a major focus of Combine study as of late. Your meddlesome interference in our society has proven to be more enlightening than any of the damage you have caused.

Vriska’s smile faltered. “…Oh no, you’re not trying to mess with… you are! You’re trying to mess with Sburb! Do you realize how stupid that is!? Do you know what happened!?”

It almost pains me to know you will not get to see the fruit of our labor come to pass. …Or perhaps you will. We have never been able to test the limits of a god-tier.

“What the fuck? What the fuck are you planning?”

Congratulations, Merodi Universalis, he said, finally addressing everyone in the room. You have removed the Combine presence from your world. You should celebrate. The feed was cut.

Nova ran to one of the Combine consoles, using some magic to quickly tell it to show her the space around Farpoint. She saw ships… leaving the universe. Every single dot that represented a Combine presence was suddenly gone.

With the exception of one.

The station, floating alone.

“I don’t think I need to tell anyone that we haven’t won,” Vriska said. “There was a death threat in there somewhere. Something’s going on in that station. And if what he’s implying is true, we need to get up there to keep everything from being super fucked.”

Allure nodded, running to the platform. “I think this is a teleporter.”

“Pretty bulky for a teleporter,” Nova observed.

“They never teleported, always used dropships,” Allure pointed out. “Maybe their teleportation technology just isn’t that great. Because it has to be this big.”

“Why not use magic?” Rainbow asked.

“Very few magic-based enemies, remember?” Allure said. “Just the pointers. Everything else is focused on magic inhibition. The blue stuff. Hey Nova, think this thing can teleport us up there?”

Nova lit her horn, interfacing with the technology. She scrolled across the data on her screen. “Uh… It looks like it’s the only place that can receive a teleport.”

Applejack turned to Nova. “Send a telepathic message to the commander, tell him the basics of what’s happened. Tell him we definitely haven’t won, and that if he can get anyone up here backup would be appreciated.”

Nova nodded. “Done.”

“What are we waiting for, let’s go!” Rainbow blurted. “I can feel the seconds slipping away!”

Nova nodded. They all piled on top of the teleporter – and vanished.

~~~

Eve and O’Neill teleported to Corona and Flutterfree. Eve let O’Neill ride her so they could keep up with Corona.

“Have you seen any resistance at all?” Eve said.

“There was some about a minute ago,” Corona called back. “But the closer I’ve gotten to Twilence’s signature, the less of everything else there is.”

Flutterfree nodded. “It’s like they’re all just gone. I’m only seeing wounded now.”

“Something is going on, something nasty,” O’Neill said. “We need that triclops alicorn to tell us what.”

You’re in luck, I told them telepathically, because I’m waiting for you around… the third corner. I may be off slightly.

Why not just teleport us at this point? Corona asked.

Because it’s amusing to keep an eldritch deity waiting.

O’Neill laughed. “And I thought this day couldn’t get any better!”

Eve rolled her eyes as the four of them entered the purple room with the six consoles. I waved at them. “Welcome to the Hidden Prisoner!”

Pinkie rushed Eve into a hug. “Oh, Eve, it’s good to see you!”

“Good to see you t- that’s a lot of blood.”

“Yeah! It’s my new massacre dress! You like it?”

“…It does make you look good,” Flutterfree admitted.

Renee tipped her hat to Eve. “Glad to see everything’s fine. Even though these two wouldn’t shut up about you. Sorry if I’m not as elated to see you since I am fed up with the things coming out of these two’s vocalizations.”

“Ahem!?” I said, holding up a wing. “Hidden Prisoner? Hello? Big, important eldritch deity who’s willing to talk to us?”

“A R E__Y O U__F I N A L L Y__R E A D Y ?” Neoan asked, drawing everyone’s attention to the ever shifting eye patterns appearing on the ‘glass’. “O R__D O__Y O U__M O R T A L S__N E E D__T I M E__T O__A D J U S T__T O__T H E__‘ P R O P E R ’__T I M E L I N E ? ”

“Wouldn’t you understand the need for a proper timeline?” Flutterfree asked. “I mean, if what Vriska’s said about you is true, you lived in a place where time and space were so fluid you had to know about those things. Your ability to do that was how you all became Class 1, right?”

“W H I L E__T H E__F U R T H E S T__R I N G__D I D ,__I N__F A C T ,__R E Q U I R E__T H A T ,__W E__A R E__N O T__T H E R E .__T H I S__I S__A__W O R L D__O F__S I N G U L A R__T I M E__A T__T H E__M O M E N T .”

Eve held up a hoof. “Right. So, you’re clearly a prisoner here. Why are you locked up? And why should we free you?”

“… I__A M__ L O C K E D__U P__B E C A U S E__I__W A S__ F O U N D .__D U R I N G__T H E__A T R O C I T I E S__W R E A K E D__O N__O U R__K I N D__ I N__T H E__E N G L I S H__I N C I D E N T ,__T H E__N O B L E__C I R C L E__O F__H O R R O R T E R R O R S__W A S__A T T A C K E D .__M A N Y__O F__U S__P E R I S H E D .__I__A M__T H O U G H T__D E A D__B Y__M Y__B R E T H R E N .__H O W E V E R , I__W A S__N O T__ K I L L ED__ – M E R E L Y__H E A V I L Y__I N J U R E D__ A N D__S E N T__A D R I F T__ A C R O S S__T H E__ M U L T I V E R S E .__ T H E__C O M B I N E__F O U N D__ M E__I N__T H A T__S T A T E__A N D__I M P R I S O N E D__ M E ,__B E L I E V I N G__M E__T O__B E__T H E__C A T C H__O F__T H E I R__E X I S T E N C E .__W H I C H__I__W A S .

“ T H E Y__A T__F I R S T__S O U G H T__O N L Y__B I O L O G I C A L__T R I C K S__F R O M__M E ,__B U T__ S O O N__ F O U N D__T H A T__ M Y__F O R M__W O U L D__ B E__O F__L I T T L E__A S S I S T A N C E__T O__T H E M__W I T H__T H E I R__C U R R E N T__L E V E L__ O F__D E V E L O P M E N T .__S O__T H E Y__B E G A N__T O__D E L V E__ F O R__I N F O R M A T I O N .__A__N O B L E__H O R R O R T E R R O R ’ S__M I N D__I S__O N E__O F__T H E__M O S T__C O M P L E X__A N D__P O W E R F U L__I N T E L L E C T S__I N__E X I S T E N C E__ –__B U T__ I__W A S__ I N J U R E D .__A N D__W I T H__E N O U G H__T I M E ,__E V E N__T H E__G R E A T E S T__M I N D S__W I L L__F A L L , E S P E C I A L L Y W I T H T H E__S C I E N T I F I C__ R E S O U R C E S__O F__A N__E N T I R E__S O C I E T Y D E V O T E D__T O__P R Y I N G__ S E C R E T S__A W A Y__F R O M__A N__ E L D E R__G O D ’ S__ MI N D .

“ T H E Y__W A N T E D__T H E__S E C R E T S__O F__S B U R B__F R O M__M E .__A N D__T H E Y__G O T__ E N O U G H__ T O__S A T I S F Y__ T H E I R__C U R I O S I T Y . ”

Eve nodded slowly. “That’s bad.”

“ T H A T__I S__A__S E V E R E__U N D E R S T A T E M E N T .__T H R E A T S__ T O__T H E__ E N T I R E__M U L T I V E R S E__A R E__ R A R E__ E V E N T S .__T H E__ E N G L I S H__I N C I D E N T__H A P P E N E D__A L M O S T__A__M I L L E N N I U M__A G O ,__W H E N__S P E A K I N G__O F__M E T A T I M E ,__A N D__ T H E R E__H A S__N O T__ B E E N__ A N O T H E R__ C O M P L E T E__ T H R E A T__ S I N C E .__ T H E R E__L I K E L Y__W I L L__N O T__B E__ F O R__M I L L I O N S__O F__Y E A R S .__A__ D A N G E R__O F__ T H A T__M A G N I T U D E__I S__A__O N C E__I N__A__L I F E T I M E__T H I N G__F O R__ T H O S E__O F__M Y__ K I N D . ”

“…What the hell is Sburb?” O’Neill asked.

“ T H E R E__W A S__O N C E__A__H O R R O R T E R R O R__O F__T H E__N O B L E__C I R C L E__W H O__A S C E N D E D__T H E__D A R K__T O W E R .__T H I S__H O R R O R T E R R O R__C A M E__T O__T H E__ L A S T__D O O R__A N D__U S E D__H I S__E L D R I T C H__N A T U R E__T O__ P A S S__T H R O U G H__T O__T H E__R O O M__A T__T H E__T O P__O F__T H E__T O W E R__W I T H O U T__B E I N G__S E N T__A W A Y .__H E__L E A R N E D__ M U C H__T H E R E ,__A N D__S H A R E D__ I T__W I T H__H I S__K I N D .__T H E Y__D E C I D E D__T O__U S E__T H I S__K N O W L E D G E__T O__C R E A T E__A__N E W__W A Y__F O R__U N I V E R S E S__T O__B E__M A D E__–__N O T__B Y__A N C I E N T ,__F O R G O T T E N__C O N S T R U C T S ,__N O R__B Y__D E S I G N ,__B U T__ T O__A L L O W__T H E__B E I N G S__ O F__ O N E__U N I V E R S E__ T O__B U I L D__ A N O T H E R__T H R O U G H__A__J O U R N E Y ,__C R E A T I N G__A__ G L O R I O U S__M Y T H O L O G Y__F O R__A__W O R L D .__ A__W O R L D__T H A T__C H O S E__I T S E L F__H O W__I T__W O U LD__B E .

“ T H E__E X P E R I M E N T__W A S__D I S A S T R O U S__A N D__R E S U L T E D__ I N__T H E__ N E A R__D E S T R U C T I O N__O F__ H O R R O R T E R R O R__S O C I E T Y ,__A S__Y O U__K N O W . ”

Renee gulped. “I’m almost afraid to ask… What are the Combine trying to do? Recreate Sburb?”

“ N O . ”

“Oh that’s a relief…”

“ B U T__T H E Y__H A V E__N O__I D E A__W H A T__T H E Y__A R E__D O I N G .__T H E Y__T H I N K__T H E Y__A R E__J U S T__R E C R E A T I N G__T H E__P O W E R__S O U R C E__O F__S B U R B__–__K N O W N__A S__T H E__G R E E N S U N .__B U T__ T H E Y__D O N ’ T__T H I N K__A B O U T__T H E__C O N S E Q U E N C E S__ T H I S__M I G H T__H A V E .__T H E__L O S T__W O R L D S__I T__W I L L__B R I N G__F R O M__T H E__S E A__O F__I N F I N I T E__P O S S I B I L I T I E S .__T H E__C O N N E C T I O N__ I T__H A S__T O__T H E__W O R L D S__ O F__ P A R A D O X__ S P A C E .__A__ N E W__G R E E N__S U N__W I L L__ H A V E__ C O M P L E T E L Y__U N K N O W N__E F F E C T S__O N__A L L__T H E S E__T H I N G S .__E V E N__I__C A N N O T__S A Y__F O R__S U R E__W H A T__W I L L__H A P P EN . ”

“And if we let you free you can stop it?” Eve asked.

“ N O .__I__C A N N O T__S T O P__I T .__T H E__C O M B I N E__H A V E__A L R E A D Y__ C R E A T E D__A__T U M O R ,__A N D__T H E__M O M E N T__TH E Y__D I D__I T__W A S__F A T E D__T O__G O O F F__A T__A N__E X A C T__M O M E N T__A T__A N__ E X A C T__T I M E .__ S U C H__I S__T H E W A Y__W I T H__H O R R O R T E R R O R__T E C H N O L O G Y .__T H E__T U M O R__W I L L__F R E E__M E__O N C E__I T__G O E S__O F F__–__D O__N O T__W O R R Y__F O R__M Y__S A K E .__I__A M__J U S T__H E R E__T O__W A R N__Y O U__O F__T H E__G R E E N__S U N ,__O F__S B U R B ,__A N D__W H A T__T H E__C O M B I N E__H A V E__ D O N E . ”

“Can we do anything to stop it?”

“ N O , ” Neoan said. “ Y O U R__S E E R__O F__V O I D__I S__R I G H T ,__I T__I S__N O T__Y O U R__D E S T I N Y__T O__I N T E R F E R E__W I T H__T H E__T U M O R .__I T__I S__T H E__D E S T I N Y__O F__T H E__T H I E F__O F__L I G H T__A N D__H E R__E N T O U R A G E__T O__D O__S O . ”

Eve turned to me. “So we just sit here and wait then?”

“Oh, Tower’s will no!” I blurted. “We need to get to the Tumor room as fast as we can, our presence there at the end is absolutely paramount.”

“Right.” Eve shook her head. “I think I see what you had to deal with.”

Renee shrugged. “Yeah. I have the sinking feeling it’s only going to get worse.”

“ G O__F O R T H ,__H E R O E S .__T O__T H E__T U M O R__A N D__Y O U R__D E S T I N Y .__B E__P R E P A R E D__F O R__T H E__U N E X P E C T E D . ”

Eve was about to say thanks – but something shot across her mind. “…I dreamed about the Green Sun. On the ride here…”

“Celestia had dreams like that,” Corona said. “You have her essence.”

“I know, I’ve had visions before, but why…?”

“ B E C A U S E__T H E__T I M E__H A S__C O M E ,__ W H Y__E L S E ? ”

I put a hoof on Eve. “We need to go, Eve. I know the way. Follow me.”

All of us ran, leaving Neoan behind, alone with his incomprehensible thoughts.

~~~

Vriska, Jotaro, Nova, Allure, Rainbow, and Applejack appeared in an empty room on the Combine station. Maybe it was the bridge? They had no idea. They didn’t take the time to think about it either.

Nova checked her screen. “Huh… There are a lot of alarms going off.”

“What kind of alarms?” Rainbow asked.

“The ‘something is about to go boom in a way I can’t understand so I’ll just throw a lot of unknown alerts at you’ alarms.”

“Aradia gave you that,” Vriska said, gaze becoming distant. “It should be able to figure out what’s going on…” She shook her head. “Find the source! Whatever’s causing it!”

“I don’t know!” Nova blurted, scrambling through all the data. “All I know is that there’s something, and it’s resonating with the universe, and it’s getting stronger!”

“Then it’s time to cash in some luck,” Vriska muttered. She closed her eyes and started spinning, pointing her finger. Wherever she stopped would b-

She tripped, her luck dropping considerably. Her sword fell out of her other hand and embedded itself in the ground right next to her neck. “Fuck, too low.”

Jotaro thought otherwise. He punched a hole in the ground right where the sword point landed, taking them to the level below.

“This isn’t it…” Vriska said, putting the weapon scope to her eye. “Not it… Not it…”

Jotaro punched down another level. “Now?”

“No no no…” Vriska scowled. “We don’t have much time, I know it. But where i… duh.” She pointed the scope down – and saw it. She gaped.

“What?” Applejack asked.

“Three more floors Jotaro,” Vriska told him.

Jotaro didn’t need to be told twice. He punched all the way down three floors. In front of them was a large door with a spirograph on it.

Vriska moved to kick it open – but it slid right open for them. The room was impossibly dark, and the floating platforms were interesting to say the least, but Vriska didn’t give a rip. She flew over to the black and white orb in the center.

She knew exactly what it was.

The Tumor.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…” Vriska muttered, putting her hands to her head. “This is bad on so many levels…”

“Can you explain?” Nova asked.

“Think universe bomb, except worse,” Vriska said. She noticed that there were floating computer consoles next to the tumor. “…There might be something here though. Nova, start interfacing with this technology. I’m probably about to turn on a lot of alarms…” She reached out with her hands and grabbed the prickly surface of the Tumor. She tore it in half – one black side, one white, letting the two halves fall into the nothingness below.

Inside was a machine. The machine consisted of a platform with three sections. The outer two sections held tremendous glass tubes. The one on the left was tinged red, the one on the right tinged blue. They appeared to be filled with stars at first, but closer inspection revealed every single light to be a galaxy. Each tube connected to an entire universe.

In between the tubes was an icosahedron. One of the triangular faces was a screen with a timer on it.

3:19.

“We don’t have that long to stop this thing,” Vriska said. “Nova, got anything?”

“All I’ve got so far is ‘universe selection program’!”

“That’ll do!” Vriska said, checking it. “Let’s see… I don’t know what the universe in the red tube is… Uh… Right, uninhabited rock, failed session, not worth my time. Blue tube… Of course the blue tube is fucking Farpoint.”

“Farpoint?” Applejack blurted.

“Yes! When this thing goes off it’s currently taking all of Farpoint with it!” She grabbed her hair. “Gah, this is why everything was so easy! They needed a universe that went through Sburb to fuel this thing, and when we proved to be just a little too much hassle for some shiny yellow rocks they just threw Farpoint in to fuel the flames. They’ve been letting us walk around like big heroes because they really didn’t care anymore – they were just going to blow us up!”

“Vriska, it’s a universe selection program,” Nova said. “Just switch it to something else!”

“Right, right…” Vriska tapped some buttons and brought up a menu of many other universes. “Find an uninhabited one.”

“There,” Nova said, pointing at a universe that was marked ‘lifeless’. “That should do it.”

The universe in the blue tube shifted, changing to show another arrangement of galaxies.

Vriska began to sweat. “That doesn’t help us. We’re still in here…”

“Can we just leave the room?” Allure asked.

“It’ll engulf at least the entirety of this station. Do you think we can get back to the top and figure out a reverse teleport in… two minutes?”

“We can try!” Rainbow said, grinning as she landed next to her.

“No, you can’t,” I said, walking into the room with the rest of them – Eve, O’Neill, Flutterfree, Corona, Pinkie, and Renee. “Multiple reasons. The most practical being that the Combine remotely blocked teleportation once they realized you were messing with this. Really, the fact that you got here at all was an oversight on their part.”

“It’s handy to have a Prophet around to create convenient oversights,” Pinkie offered.

“So what, we’re just going to die here!?” Vriska blurted. “Whoop-de-do, we saved the universe! Except this Tumor is still going off and it’s still going to do gog knows what!”

“We’re not going to die here,” I said, glancing at Pinkie and Eve. “…Or if we do, I know for certain it won’t be permanent. This is not the end of the story, even if it may feel like it. I Pinkie Promise.”

Vriska’s knuckles paled. “…That’s it? Some assurance?”

I put my hoof out, pointing at Vriska. “You’ve still got over a minute to try something, Vriska. You can still change something. You’re the one with the power here.”

Vriska stared at me. “…You’re just saying that, aren’t you? You know how this ends.”

“…Not exactly.”

“But you know that, even though I do have the choice, one of the results ends up happening?”

“…Yes,” I said. “I know what happens.”

Vriska prepared to punch me – but instead she just turned to stare at the timer on the Tumor.

Fifty seconds.

“I think I see what’s going to happen,” she said, scowling. “I see all of you. I see a pattern. I see a destiny. …Maybe.”

“You might or might not see the right one,” I told her.

“But how do I survive, Twilence?! If that fate is right, I… I… This will be Heroic and you know it!”

I held up my notebook and gave her a knowing smile. “I know how to pull a few strings, Vriska. I’m not just going to let you go like that. Not when we’re so close.”

Vriska’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean…”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” I said. “This is the point where everyone should start hugging each other to brace for what’s about to come.” I turned to stare at the Tumor, its blue and red tubes reflecting in the Eye of Rhyme.

A few pairs went off – Allure to hug Renee, Flutterfree to Eve – but Corona decided that wasn’t enough.

“Screw it, we’re all in this together. Stand as one.” She pulled all thirteen of us together into one hug – a hug that soon transformed into a defiant stand where we all stared into the threat of the tumor.

Star Platinum, Seraphim, Bacon Pancakes, Lotus Locus, Crimson Sushi, Raging Sights… They stood by us as well. Not quite heroes, but not quite separate.

0:03

“This is going to hurt a lot,” O’Neill commented.

0:02

“Just remember to giggle at the ghosty,” Pinkie suggested.

0:01

“I love you all,” Eve said. “Whatever happens.”

0:00

~~~

Two universes, abandoned universes of failed Sburb sessions as far as the Combine were concerned, were destroyed. The Combine unleashed universe-destroying technologies in them to fuel the Tumor, for it could not destroy them itself. The Combine station had intended to shoot a reality cascade into the universe it was in, but Vriska had taken care of that. Farpoint would not be fuel for the Tumor’s fire.

The other two were. As their very physical laws fell apart at the seams, instead of falling into the Sea of Infinite Possibility to be forgotten, they fell into the eldritch internal workings of the Tumor and fused into one object – an object that was its own universe.

The Combine station was completely engulfed in the explosion of the Tumor, killing anything inside that hadn’t already been dead. A green globe of fire erupted from the station, expanding to a size larger than most universes. And yet, it only appeared as a green speck of light to Anna and Affix. Just another light in the sky.

A light in the sky that could be seen in every universe it connected to. Farpoint. Worlds near Farpoint. Combine worlds connected to the two universes that had been eaten. Worlds once thought lost in the depths of Paradox Space.

On a world lost for so long, a chalk-white skinned human woman in a black cloak flashed green for a moment. The sensation sent chills up her spine.

Near the Green Sun, planes of existence split off into new universes – physically connected to the Green Sun, but yet of different physical properties. It recreated the worlds it was designed to exist in – black, formless voids where time was space and space was time, but neither were true at certain apexes. Bubbles began to form in these darknesses, like dreams…

Bubbles that soon coalesced into one once they realized there was no longer enough space for them apart, only together. In the center of this central bubble, a dark vortex swapped inside out – and vanished completely.

The Combine didn’t waste any time moving in. Gone were the simple biomechanical ships the Merodi had seen in their struggles. In their place were ships the size of solar systems, crafted with stars at their center, the fleshy-mechanical masses burning in the light of their own power, and becoming stronger because of it.

The Green Sun was important enough to draw the attention of the true Combine presence. They were more than willing to devote more resources to this great creation than anything else in their civilization’s long history.

But to say they were the only ones interested would be foolish. In the light of the Green Sun, an enemy the Combine had spent centuries creating loomed in the darkness – the form of Neoan, the Noble Horrorterror. Alone, the full might of the Combine would have been able to take him.

He was not alone. The re-creation of the Green Sun had sent ripples throughout the multiverse, alerting every Horrorterror who cared about the sudden resurgence of their past mistake and tragedy. The fleshy, horrendous masses of eldritch power dropped into the Green Sun’s new cluster, standing opposite the Combine’s stellar constructions.

The Green Sun sat in the middle, with the bubble of dreams ‘orbiting’ it closely, watching, waiting to see what the two multiversal giants would do.

089 - The Green Sun

Tick.

Every god-tier player of Sburb had a clock tied to their very life force. This was an absolute rule of Sburb, broken only once in the entire history of the Horrorterror experiment.

Vriska was no exception to this.

Tock.

Every time she – or any of the others, such as Aradia – died, their clock would begin to tick. The physical location of the clock did not matter. Vriska could have been in a quarantined universe within a black hole and her clock would still know.

Tick.

Currently, Vriska’s clock sat in a hall of similar clocks, all gathered together in a hall of green. It was one of two such clocks with the symbol shared by all players of Light, and it was the only clock currently ticking.

Tock.

Every one of the clocks took the appearance of a grandfather clock with a great swinging pendulum. With every tick, a single needle connected to the pendulum moved to the opposite side of the weight, reaching from one end to another, swinging metronome-like in front of the sun of Light.

Tick.

One side let out a purple glow when the needle reached it, the sign of a Just death.

Tock.

The other was soft and golden, the sign of a Heroic death.

Tick.

The middle was where the needle would land if a death was neither Just nor Heroic, triggering the revival subroutines inherent in Vriska’s very being.

Tock.

The clock’s machinations calculated every little detail it could, drawing everything together into a final verdict on the question it had been posed.

Tick.

Was it time for Vriska Serket to die?

Tock.

The clock began to creak, slowing the motion of the pendulum with the needle nearing the Heroic side of the clock face. She had saved an entire universe from destruction within a Tumor, and despite her reservations, she had been willing to risk it all. It was time to end her.

However, as advanced a piece of technology the clock was, there were ways to cheat it.

For instance, if, say, a minor earthquake were to occur because a certain purple alicorn wrote a story about a bunch of kids blowing something up nearby…

Well, the needle would be forced back to the middle. The calculation would be altered slightly enough to create a neutral death.

And Vriska would continue…

A reversal of a different fate her clock had experienced in another time.

~~~

Vriska woke up, the familiar feeling of a revival coursing through her muscles.

Twilence came through, she thought with a smile.

She grunted, pulling herself into a sitting position and flapping her wings.

The first thing she saw was the Green Sun dominating the otherwise black, starless sky above her.

The second thing she saw was a giant white artifact that resembled a house – similar in arrangement to the screens she had seen in the exile command station not too long ago. This house only had four segments under the roof, though – and all four of them glowed a brilliant white.

“The House Juju…” she said, standing up. “It’s still here…”

She took a step forward – and tripped on the unconscious form of Eve. She fumbled, managing to keep her footing. After realizing Eve was there, she saw all eleven of the others lying unconscious around the House Juju in a perfect circle – Corona, Renee, Pinkie, Nova, Jotaro, Flutterfree, Rainbow, Applejack, Allure, O’Neill, and myself. We all looked just as we had before being completely vaporized in the explosion, albeit unconscious.

She looked at us, at the House Juju, and then the ground. Then, with a nagging feeling in the back of her mind, she turned around.

Standing there were hundreds – no thousands – of teenage trolls with every blood color on the hemospectrum, a handful of humans among their number - though these humans had chalk-white skin rather than a usual tone. The eyes of everyone in the army had no pupils or irises, instead taking the form of empty white orbs.

Every last one of them was a ghost.

It was the army of ghosts that had helped her face Lord English over nine hundred years ago.

“What the motherglubbin shell is goin’ on here!?” The lead troll asked – a fuchsia-blooded royal troll holding a golden dual-tipped trident. She sported two long braids of hair that accentuated her fin-like ears. Next to her was another fuchsia troll holding an identical trident, wearing a colorful dress of greens, blues, and pinks, a pair of goggles covering her eyes.

Vriska took a moment to take the army in and laughed. “Oh, you have no idea how long it’s been!”

“You’re dam right I don’t!” The lead fuchsia shouted. “You set that house down, things explode, big green and ugly disappears, and then suddenly you’re in your god-tier rags with twelve randos! Who are these horses!?”

“Not all of us are horses,” O’Neill muttered, grabbing his head. “I have the worst headache.”

“Fine, a bunch of horses, couple humans, and what I can only assume is an angel or somefin. You need to start talkin’ girlfrond, or else I’mma FORK SOME BITCHES!”

This shout woke up the rest of the ‘randos’ around the house Juju. Corona was ready for a fight, hands surrounded in magic.

“Woah woah woah, everyone calm down!” Vriska said, hands up. “We’re all friends here!”

“Are we?” the fuschia asked, pointing forward with her golden trident. “’Cus I’m in a forkin’ mood.”

Vriska facepalmed. “We do not need to be forking any bitches, Meenah.”

“Yeah, that’s rude!” the other fuchsia troll added, putting her hands on her hips. “We need to handle the situation diplomatically!”

“Can it, Feferi,” Meenah muttered. “I’m the one in charge of this boat.”

“I thought you and Vriska shared the command?”

“Vriska’s being weird, her commander license is bein’ reevaluated.”

“I’ll explain everything!” Vriska shouted, waving her arms. “Just shut up first! Gog, I forgot how annoying all of you were. LISTEN UP!”

Everyone turned to look at her. Whether any of the muttering trolls were actually listening was up for debate, but she decided to go ahead regardless.

“So, here’s the deal. Ghost army? We beat Lord English over nine hundred years ago from my perspective. All the dream bubbles were sealed away in that black hole sun thing, freezing you all in this moment right here. Lord English was imprisoned in the House Juju during that moment because he was weakened without the Green Sun. Now, you’ve been brought back because there were some morons called the Combine who decided to mess with something they really shouldn’t mess with and created a new Green Sun.” She pointed up at the visible Combine fleet in the sky.

A human hand shot up in the middle of the troll ghost army.

“Yes?” Vriska said, clearly impatient, ignoring all the other grunts and rude words coming from the rest of the trolls.

“Hey, uh, Dead Dave here. I know, I know, the Enemy, but let’s forget about that right now.” He wore round shades and red robes with similar designs to Aradia, letting everyone know he was a Cool Dude. “Half-Life 2 Combine? That’s a fucking video game enemy.”

“And the entirety of our adventures were recorded in a webcomic called Homestuck,” Vriska deadpanned. “Don’t be surprised.”

The Dead Dave blinked. “I knew it.”

“Kinda figured you did,” Vriska said. “Moving on, yes, Combine, assholes.”

“Wait a minute!” Feferi asked. “How exactly did the freezing work? Not all of us were in the same place!”

Vriska took in a breath – had she been her old self, she would have started screaming at them. But she took control of her anger, let her air out calmly, and smiled. “I don’t really know exactly how it worked. What I do know was that you were sealed away, and now you’re not. And while all the ghosts were sealed away, those of us who were living were sent cascading across the multiverse for eons. That would be me, Aradia, and Davepeta.”

“Are they here too?” a robotic Aradia ghost asked.

“Aradia’s in another part of the multiverse,” Vriska said. “She’ll get here eventually, I’m sure. And Davepeta… They didn’t make it.”

There were collective gasps from Dave and Nepeta ghosts.

Vriska nodded. “Yeah… It sucked. A lot. But that explains what happened to you. As for who these twelve losers are, I’ll start by saying you can trust them. They’re good friends.”

“Since when do you make good friends!?” a random troll blurted.

“I’m going to guess that was a Karkat,” Vriska assumed, rolling her eyes. “Nine hundred years can do a lot to change a person, let’s just say. I wandered for a long time and eventually joined their little society. That purple horse there is Evening Sparkle, Overhead of Relations and Princess of Sappiness. She’s the most ‘in charge’. They’re willing to help us survive whatever the hell the Combine up there are planning.”

“And the Horrorterrors,” another Aradia said.

“Yes, they’re up there too,” Vriska confirmed. “But first, introductions!” She started introducing her friends to the trolls, quickly going over their names and who they were to get it out of the way. “Gah, why are there so many of you?”

“Numbers,” I offered.

“Right, right… Anyway, these here are the trolls. I can’t possibly introduce them all, so... Let’s just go with those of you that are in front.” She pointed at Meenah. “This here is Meenah. She’s awesome,” Vriska said, giving Meenah a fistbump. “She likes fish puns too much.”

“Glub,” Meenah said.

“Mhm. This is Feferi, she’s less awesome and more cute. She also likes fish puns.”

“Glub glub!” Feferi trilled, twirling her trident.

“Right. And that over there…” she blinked slowly as she took in a bronze-blood troll. “This is Tavros. I killed him.”

“Um…” he spoke in an uncertain voice. “That’s behind us, you know?”

Vriska turned to me. “…Do I have time?”

I nodded. “Go ahead.”

Vriska turned to Tavros and bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”

Tavros blinked. “W-what?”

“I’m sorry. I know I said sorry for killing you before, but it was dismissive, and that was wrong. And I’m sorry for a whole lot more. I’m sorry for treating you like absolute shit. I’m sorry for taking advantage of your disability. I’m sorry for trying to make you strong by being a complete asshole. I’m sorry for throwing you off that cliff. I’m sorry for not respecting you even after you died. Being a wimp isn’t an offense.”

All the trolls stared at Vriska in disbelief, unable to form words.

Vriska rubbed the back of her head. “As I said. Nine hundred years. Tends to tone down the bitchiness.”

“No kidding…” Meenah said. “That was… sappy.”

“I can be sappy if I want,” Vriska asserted.

“What ever happened about being strong enough to do what’s needed?” Meenah asked.

“You can be strong and not be a heartless bitch. Case in point, Jotaro over there. And hey, I still have all the irons in the fire.”

“All of them?”

“All of them.” Vriska dusted her hands off. “Anyway, other apologies… Feferi, I… guess I’m sorry for ignoring you?”

Feferi shrugged. “Eh, I’ll take it.”

Meenah glared at Vriska. “Don’t you dare get all sappy on me you jellyfish.”

“You’re awesome and I don’t need to apologize to you for anything.”

Meenah chuckled. “That’s dam right!”

“AND AS FOR THE REST OF YOU!” Vriska shouted to the crowd. “I HAVE ADMITTED THAT I AM A BITCHY ASSHOLE. GOT IT?”

“GOT IT! ON TAPE!” a random troll shouted.

Vriska nodded. “Good. I have more apologies to give out, but those are to people who are still living. Sorry Terezi ghosts, you’re gonna have to wait.”

A few of them looked at her in surprise, but at this point most of the troll army had stopped paying direct attention to her and began muttering (or shouting) among themselves. That was trolls for you.

Meenah clapped slowly and sarcastically. “Greeeeat. Now that feelings-thirty is over, what’s up for forkin’?”

“Now, we g-” Vriska stopped whatever she was about to say when she spied a particular face in the crowd. “You.”

An ‘orange’ skinned human ghost in a green T-shirt noticed her attention was on him. “Shit, shitshitshit…”

“ANDREW HUSSIE YOU ORANGE FUCKTARD!” Vriska shouted, dropping her previously calm demeanor and charging at him, blade drawn. This grabbed the attention of the ghost army again.

Hussie started running across the dusty ground, but Vriska easily caught up with him and drove him to the ground, driving her sword into him over and over again.

“VRISKA!” Renee shouted, horrified.

“Don’t get your horn in a twist,” Meenah muttered. “You can’t kill ghosts with a sword. You can hurt ‘em though.”

Pinkie gave Meenah a bag of popcorn.

“…I like you.”

“Thanks!” Pinkie beamed.

“This is for killing almost all your characters multiple times!” Vriska yelled. “This is for making us deal with time shenanigans I’m not sure even you understood! This is for that stupid epilogue you still haven’t written far as I can tell! This is for creating Lord English! You weren’t some oblivious Prophet, you knew exactly what you were doing.”

“Andrew Hussie: abscond!” Hussie declared, suddenly not under Vriska’s sword and instead running away across the wasteland around the House Juju.

“GET BACK HERE!” Vriska shouted.

Meenah raised a hand. “Hold up. He created Lord English?”

“He’s the orange fucktard who wrote the thing that defined all our lives, SO YES.”

There was silence in the ghost army.

“I say we get him,” the Dead Dave suggested.

“Eh, go ahead, I don’t care,” Meenah shrugged.

About a sixth of the ghosts dropped what little they were doing and charged after him. Andrew Hussie was soon tackled, bound, and gagged.

Vriska smirked. “Ah, that warms my heart.”

“The fact that you have a heart is bizarre,” Meenah said. “Still can’t get over it.”

“You will or you won’t,” Vriska said, dismissively. “Anyway, uh… Fuck, I don’t know what I was going to do next.”

“We should look to the skies now,” I suggested. “The Combine and Horrorterrors are going to start talking to each other. Feferi, you have a connection to the Horrorterrors.”

Feferi processed the statement for a moment and nodded.

“Mind if we tap into your mind to broadcast what they’re saying so everyone can hear?”

“Sure thing!” Feferi said, grinning. “I wonder what this is gonna feel like?”

“Not that weird, actually,” Corona said, placing a hand on Feferi. “Huh, you’re really happy. …I think you remind me of someone.”

“Really? Huh, I dunno why. Glub glub!”

Corona held her free hand up. Raging Sights beeped and began to broadcast what was going on in the multi-universal mesh above them…

~~~

The Combine sent a small ship toward the Green Sun. Their shields flashed purple and then blue as they compensated for the differing flows of time and space between their original position and the Green Sun. In Paradox Space, straight lines were never straight, so the Combine had to make the line straight by force.

Then a Horrorterror moved through Paradox Space and appeared in front of the Combine ship. “NO,” it declared.

You are interfering in a legitimate Combine experiment. This Green Sun is our creation and interaction with it will not be tolerated.

“THE GREEN SUN IS OF OUR CREATION.”

There is no agreement between the Combine and the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors regarding intellectual property or otherwise.

“YOU HAVE RELEASED THINGS THAT ARE OUR CREATION.”

If you wish to claim the Dream Bubble for yourself, we are willing to part with it. But the Green Sun itself is our creation that we have spent innumerable resources on. We are not going to let such a potent power source be taken away.

“THE GREEN SUN IS TOO DANGEROUS TO EXIST WITHIN THE MULTIVERSE. AS LONG AS IT IS HERE, THERE IS A DANGER OF ANOTHER LORD ENGLISH.”

We are not attempting to create a system of self-perpetuating universe creation. All we seek is power from the Green Sun, not some short-sighted ideal. We will not be foolish enough to give the Green Sun the freedom to create that which we cannot contain.

“YOUR THINLY-VEILED INSULT HAS NOT GONE UNNOTICED. THE POINT REMAINS THAT YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE MESSING WITH. THE GREEN SUN IS A CLASS 1 CONSTRUCT, FAR BEYOND WHAT YOU CAN CREATE OR FULLY COMPREHEND. YOUR CONTROL OVER THE ELDRITCH IS ALSO LIMITED, A FULL UNDERSTANDING OF WHICH IS REQUIRED.”

Are you offering information?

“NO. WE ARE SIMPLY DEMANDING THAT YOU STAND DOWN AND LET US DESTROY THE GREEN SUN TO END THIS DANGEROUS RESURGENCE. IN RETURN WE WILL NOT PURSUE REVENGE FOR THE TREATMENT OF NEOAN.”

You are the enemies of progress, the definition of that which is ancient and unchanging. You cannot understand that what is dangerous must be understood for anything of value to come out of it.

“GIVE US THE GREEN SUN OR WE SHALL FORCE YOU TO DO SO.”

Do you think you can?

“WE ARE A CLASS 1 SOCIETY, WHAT DO YOU THINK?”

Are you though? Our scans only pick up seven of the forty-eight Noble Horrorterrors known to comprise the Noble Circle. Are so many that apathetic? Or is it what seems more likely: you were harmed more by the Lord English incident than you let on. How many of the Noble Circle remain? Twenty? Twelve? Or is it just this seven of you left?

“IRRELEVANT. WE WILL CRUSH YOU.”

You underestimate the Combine. Everyone underestimates the Combine. You always think we just have a lot of space under our control and that our mastery over universes is limited. We are often spoken of as part of a joke, where the punchline is that we are too weak to face larger enemies. This is not the case. We simply do not see the need to waste resources fighting large enemies for minimal gain. This is not one of those times.

“YOU THINK YOU CAN COME AWAY WITH A VICTORY?”

The Noble Circle of Horrorterrors was severely weakened by the English Incident, and eldritch societies are known for healing exceedingly slowly, if at all. You will not be able to pool your resources for a full war over this Green Sun, even if it is the largest mistake of your race. We will be able to devote anything we wish, for we are fully unified under the principles of Combination.

“WE DO NOT NEED THE FULL POWER OF THE HORRORTERRORS TO FACE YOU.”

That is a theory we would love to put to the test.

“CALLING A BLUFF IS A DANGEROUS THING.”

We do not care if it is a bluff. We are taking this Green Sun. You can try to stop us if you want. We suggest you do not.

“WE ARE GOING TO DESTROY THE GREEN SUN. YOU CAN TRY TO STOP US, FOOLISH MORTALS.”

The Combine is not mortal.

“THE FAULTY INTERNAL BELIEF OF ALL MORTAL BEINGS.”

Is it war then?

“IT IS WAR.”

Let it be known, the Combine issues a formal declaration of war on the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors over the Green Sun dispute. Your time among the elite has come to an end. The largest Combine ship within the Green Sun’s Paradox Space charged. It was composed of twenty blue stars wrapped together with pearly white metal and flesh, the constructs coming to a sharp point that drilled through the paradoxical universe-mesh between it and the Green Sun.

The Horrorterrors attacked, moving through the inky blackness as easily as one might walk, lashing the edges of the ship.

Any hope for a curbstomp battle ended when the Horrorterror tentacles were deflected, and one smaller Horrorterror went up in impossible blue flames, disintegrating into nothing.

The Combine-Horrorterror war had begun.

~~~

“Holy glub,” Feferi said, jaw dropping. “What the shell did we just walk into!?”

Meenah grinned. “I have no idea, but I know I want a piece of that action.”

Every pony, human, and troll turned to look at the fuchsia-blood with bewildered expressions.

“I say we take the Green Sun for ourselves,” Meenah said.

“…Are you insane?” Allure blurted. “We can’t do anything up there! We’d be like ants trying to insert ourselves into a nuclear war!”

A multitude of other ghosts made their agreement with Allure well known through shouts, insults, and petty jabs of dubious wit.

“You’re forgetting one little detail,” Meenah said. “Ghosts can’t die.”

“Yes you can!” Vriska blurted. “Did you not forget why Lord English was so terrifying?”

“Lord Language ain’t here,” Meenah said, pointing at the House Juju. “He’s in there, swimmin’ with the fishes. In all our time walking Paradox Space, has anyone here been double killed by a Horrorterror?”

“Of course not!” a grumpy troll with nubby horns shouted. “If they died, they wouldn’t be here to tell you about it.”

“Fine, lemme rephrase that,” Meenah muttered. “How many of you have tried to fight a Horrorterror?”

Several hands went up. Not a lot, but enough.

“Right, and were they able to kill you?”

Everybody shook their heads.

“What did happen?”

The Dead Dave spoke up. “There were a lot of me losing, then I was back in the Dream Bubble. Clinically insane for a few ‘years’ or whatever. I got better.”

“There you go. All they can do is drive you insane, kapeesh?”

“Some of us like our sanity!” a troll shouted.

“You’re motherglubbin’ ghosts! You’ll live long enough to go sane again! I bet our new fronds have some mind-magic or whatever that’ll help too!”

Corona raised a hand. “Doesn’t always work, but yeah, I can probably do something to keep anyone from staying stark-raving mad.”

“But the Horrorterrors created the Dream Bubbles!” Feferi said. “They could shut us down!”

“I think they’re a little busy for that,” Meenah said, gesturing at the explosions in the sky.

“Eve, please dial a universe with Seraphim where ghosts cannot exist,” Vriska said. “Remove a leg or something.”

Eve blinked. “Uh…”

“I need to stop this idiocy.”

Eve summoned Seraphim and tried to dial a universe – then stared in shock at the Green Sun. “It’s… It’s blocking me!”

“The fuck?” Vriska blurted.

“The Green Sun. Seraphim can only see universes it connects to!”

Vriska executed a well-timed double facepalm combo. “Aaaaaaaaaagh. The point is there are universes you could be dumped into and not be able to exist. The Combine can probably do it.”

“Actually…” Nova said, tapping her screen. “I only see Combine ships coming in. I’ve not seen a Combine ship or Horrorterror leave.”

“…We’re in a quarantine,” Corona said. “The Green Sun and all its universes have been sealed off! You can come in but you can’t come out!”

“Who would do that? Did the Green Sun do that?” Renee asked.

I shook my head. “That would be the rest of the Class 1 Societies, ready to dump this entire battle into the Sea of Infinite Possibility should something like Lord English rise again. First sign of trouble, everything stops existing.”

Vriska blinked. “Fuck, we’re in some real deep shit aren’t we?”

A ghost thought now was a good time to interject. “The proper term is OUR SHIT IS SO DEEPLY FUCKED YOU CAN’T EVEN COMPREHEND IT!”

“The deepest I think any of us have ever been in,” I said. “Yes, that includes myself.”

“So that’s why we need to bring the fight to them!” Meenah said. “We can’t let evil Combination aliens get that kind of power, and if the Horrorterrors destroy it we are probably going to stop existin’! So we go up there and beat the shit out of them and claim it for ourselves!”

“Fine, you can’t die,” Vriska said, folding her arms. “What exactly do you plan to do to them? Splat against their windshields over and over?”

Meenah held out her arms and switched into her god-tier outfit – gray robes with the flowing green symbol of Life on them. “We’re keyed into Sburb, remember? The very Aspects of reality flow within us.” She gestured at the army of trolls. “Look at it all! Breath! Heart! Life! Hope! Light! Mind! Blood! Rage! Void! Doom! Space! Time! We have god-tier ghosts here that can bend every last one of those to their will. We were able to hold our own against Lord English – a being that the Horrorterrors were useless against. We are drops from the same ocean that green asshole was from. Let’s show the Horrorterrors that their little ‘experiment’ has a few more surprises in store!”

If there was one thing trolls liked, it was fighting. The speech was exactly what they needed to get them cheering and waving their weapons around excitedly.

“I’m sold,” Corona said, walking up. “Count me in.”

“You sure you got what it takes?” Meenah asked.

Corona spread her wings and lit herself on fire, magical rings surrounding her on all sides. “You’d be surprised.”

“Niiiiiiice. Can I count on the rest of you to help?”

Eve blinked. “Not in a direct conflict, but you’re Vriska’s friends, we’ll do what we can. Some of us will fight with you directly. Others…”

“Will get help,” Vriska finished. “Eve, you mentioned that the only connections you had were to universes the Green Sun was connected to?”

“Uh, yeah. Most of them appear to just be different ‘universes’ within the inky blackness above us. I could probably dial us to many different locations within the space. …Though I can’t be certain about the actual spatial distance. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“I’m willing to bet it’ll be connected to every universe that had a connection to Sburb in the past,” Vriska said. “Including Earth C.”

“…Where?” Meenah said, cocking her head.

“Where the successful session went,” Vriska said. “…Home.”

“What can they offer that we don’t already have? Look at that crowd, I’ve got every one of those human grubs in there at least once.”

“Not John,” Vriska said. “Not the one with the retcon power. It’ll help you a lot.”

Meenah shrugged. “Eh, fine by me if you wanna go huntin’ for extra backup. Long as I get to skewer some squiddles.”

Vriska nodded. “Nova, I’ll need you to scan for dimensional signatures.”

Nova saluted. “Got it.”

“Anyone else who wants to come, let’s go. I would say we need to move fast, but with all the time and space manipulators here the idea of ‘fast’ is probably meaningless.”

I shook my head. “Metatime still applies, so you should get moving.”

“Coming?”

“Me? Oh, no, I’m sticking around to go with the idea Eve has in a couple seconds.”

“Had,” Eve corrected. “The idea I had and just wasn’t talking about because I was waiting for the right moment.”

There was silence in the Dream Bubble.

“…Well?” Meenah asked.

“Right, right,” Eve cleared her throat. “If you’re back, the House Juju is back, and the Dream Bubble as a whole is back, what if other parts of Sburb are back? Ancient remnants of Class 1 technology? We should look for those – they could be useful in maybe getting us out of this mess. I’ll lead the group.”

Meenah nodded. “So, lemme get this straight. We got a team getting’ reinforcements, got a team goin’ for weapons, and then the rest of us are just going to blow stuff up?”

Everyone nodded.

“Good, I was beginnin’ to think there wouldn’t be anyone left to blow stuff up. EVERYBODY SCATTER!”

The Merodi and ghost army scrambled while universes fell apart above them.

~~~

Eve looked at her troop of people who had opted to explore for Sburb remnants. Me, Flutterfree, Renee, and a handful of troll ghosts – mostly different versions of Aradia.

It appeared that Aradia had died many, many times during the time she and Vriska were in Sburb, which Renee supposed wasn’t all that surprising. What did surprise her was the fact that most of them were emotionless robots. Renee had known Aradia spent most of her time with Vriska as a ghost, but she had not known much of that had been spent possessing a robotic body.

The robots weren’t very talkative and were somewhat menacing, so there was silence for the most part as we floated through the eldritch blackness of the Green Sun’s Paradox Space. Spacetime itself was an uncertain construct there. We could always see the Green Sun wherever we drifted, but its location changed, as did the location of the Combine and Horrorterrors – though they were always distant.

Which was good, Eve had no plans of engaging in transdimensional combat if Seraphim wasn’t working properly.

The location of the Green Sun shifted again as we entered another area of Paradox Space. At first the experience had been disorienting, but now that everyone was used to it the sensation was no different than taking a sharp turn onto another street.

This time, however, there was something a little different.

“I see something!” Flutterfree said, pointing with a wing into the distance. “It’s blue!”

An Aradia put a hand up to her eyes. “That looks like it might be a Skaia… Is there still a session running in Paradox Space?”

“Explain?” Renee pleaded.

“Every active session of Sburb has a blue ‘planet’ in the center called Skaia that runs most everything, if you want it horribly simplified. That right there is the right color, though I can’t imagine a session surviving the destruction of the Sburb protocols...”

“Can we even get to it?” Eve asked, narrowing her eyes. “It looks pretty far away. Straight lines aren’t straight lines here.”

I pointed at the blue dot. “We won’t know if we’ll make it or not until we try. So let’s just try.” I flew forward.

We shifted through Paradox Space again. Instead of getting sent further from the blue dot we were suddenly there. The blue light of Skaia glowed bright, revealing the scene of destruction around it.

There had clearly once been numerous planets orbiting around this blue light – but now there was only one amber planet with a neon glow. The rest of the space around Skaia was rubble from worlds destroyed long ago.

“…This session didn’t go well…” the living Aradia observed. “What would destroy all the planets but one…?”

Eve furrowed her brow. “I don’t know. But I know we’re going to check it out.”

“No you’re not,” a deep, gravelly voice said. The group turned to see a black humanoid creature in a fashionable similarly-colored hat. He was a creature who had a carapace rather than skin, though much of him had been replaced with cybernetic parts – including his entire lower half, parts of his face, and one of his arms. In his hands he held a large, golden staff. With a flick of his wrist the staff became an assault rifle aimed right at Eve.

“No more ghosts are going to mess with my Medium. Get out.”

“What if I told you some of us weren’t ghosts?” Eve said, putting on a calm smile for the cyborg carapacian.

“Nothing else comes from the darkness aside from squiddly monstrosities,” he muttered.

Eve pointed at her eyes. “Look, I have pupils, and irises. I’m not dead.”

“Then that makes this gun a whole lot more effective in convincin’ you to leave, don’t it?”

Eve sighed. “Look, we want to look at this interesting place. In return… we can tell you what’s going on with the Green Sun and all those big explosions in the distance.”

To punctuate her point, one of the Combine ships exploded when one of its internal stars gave out. The supernova spread out through Paradox Space, which meant it showed up in at least six different locations as it spread. Eve raised an eyebrow.

“…A temptin’ offer. But unless you tell me you aren’t here for any plunderin’, you still gotta go.”

“All we’re looking for is remnants of Sburb game technology that might help with… those explosions up there. We would be willing to trade if you have such things.”

The carapacian lowered his gun. “Tradin’, huh? Fine, I’ll bite, don’t get anything new in here ever. ‘cept ghosts. And after the second one I grew tired of their undyin’ nature real quick.”

“How long have you been here?” Aradia asked. “Ghosts and dream bubbles rarely interact with active game sessions.”

“This ain’t no active session,” he muttered. “Name’s Spades Slick. Welcome to Pyramid Hell. Everythin’ else around is useless rubble. There are two rules here. First rule: no ghosts. All those robots stay out here. Second rule: I’m the only one that gets to hurt people here. You skirt that rule, you find out why I’m allowed to hurt people. Usually by stabbing, but as you can see I’m not below filling them with lead or a good ol’ fashioned thwackin’.”

“Gotcha,” Eve said, smiling. She turned to me – I nodded to let her know it was fine.

Spades led Eve, myself, Flutterfree, and Renee through the field of ancient rubble down to the planet Pyramid Hell, properly known as Lopan.

Lopan was a planet covered in amber pyramid structures, all of which glowed with neon at their tips. Eve realized this ‘planet’ actually had no right to be called such – it may have had normal gravity, but it was only a few miles in diameter by her estimate.

At the foot of one of the large pyramids was a town filled with a few different races – white and black versions of Spades’ race living alongside brightly colored reptiles and amphibians. They seemed comfortable enough, but most walked with their heads down, expressions dour.

“…What happened here?” Flutterfree asked. “Everything looks fine, but…”

“Did you see the debris?” Spades asked. “There used to be eight planets.”

“…Oh.”

Spades took them to a town square, to a statue with five figures on it standing in a battle stance. One of the figures was Spades himself. One of the others was a smaller black carapacian holding a flag and wearing a sash that said ‘MAYOR’. Standing behind him, taller than all the figures was a cross between a white carapacian and a dog wielding a sword - two brilliant wings coming out of her back. In the middle were two human teenagers – one with a long hood that swirled in the wind, another with triangular anime shades similar in shape to Corona’s. The hooded one wielded a hammer while the other tightly held a katana.

The statue had an inscription.

The Heir of Breath, the Prince of Heart, the Peregrine Mendicant, Spades Slick, and our illustrious Mayor prepare to face the Condesce.

“…So you all went to fight an enemy?” Renee said. “The one who blew up all the planets?”

Spades nodded. “Ridiculously overpowered fish lady. Liked puns and glitter. It felt good to run her through.” He folded his arms. “Only the Mayor and I survived the final battle.”

“I’m so sorry,” Eve said.

“It gets worse than that,” Spades muttered. “The windy kid had this power that let him jump around time and space out of order even more than usual. Before he kicked the bucket he went to the future and pulled every string he could to let Sburb think he had won.” Spades took one look around and blasted off into the sky.

Eve flew after him. “And then what?”

“I’m getting’ there, be patient,” he muttered, leading her closer to Skaia. Near the edge of the shining bubble of clouds, there was a circular metallic platform. On one edge was a structure that looked like the House Juju, except it was black, lifeless, and had a single door on the front of it.

“He brought us here,” Spades said. “Said he’d found a way to win the game for us. Give us somewhere to go. He lit up Skaia with the creation of a new universe. I don’t pretend to understand how many timelines or alternate universes he had to go through to make it happen. He personally threw a frog into the center of Skaia and watched it birth a new universe.”

“Threw a frog…?” Renee asked.

I shushed her – the specifics of how Sburb manufactured a new universe weren’t important.

“Then he vanished. Never did get to tell him he shouldn’t go back, shouldn’t let himself die.” Spades shrugged. “Point is the Mayor trusted him completely and led a team right through that door.” Spades pointed at the black house. “They went to the new universe. And then it was just gone. No Bilious Slick, no universe, no more Mayor.” Spades shook his head. “That left me with a bunch of moronic reptiles and carapacians. We had one planet, so we did what we could. Hasn’t been going well, as you can plainly see.”

Eve smiled sadly. “We can get you out of here. We have ways to other universes.”

“Likely sto-”

Eve created a portal with Seraphim back to the Dream Bubble. “Currently our access is limited because of the Green Sun, but I can get you to the place the ghosts live right now.”

Spades stared at the portal. “Good enough for me. You can have whatever you want if you can get us out of this hellhole. Except my weapon. That’s mine. So are my knives.”

Eve nodded. “For now, I just want to examine this platform. I have a feeling it holds many secrets… Almost like I just know there’s knowledge inside it for me to uncover... I’ve had intuitions before, but this is something else…”

“Huh, strange, I’ve been having a similar feeling,” Renee said. “Though it's more about these poor people and all their brokenness… I feel like we can fix it.”

~~~

Vriska, Allure, Jotaro, Nova, and Applejack walked through the Dream Bubble. None of the ghosts had decided to follow them, since none of them really had any reason to go to a world they didn’t even know existed until Vriska showed up. As far as the ghost army was concerned, Earth C didn’t have anything for them. The troll ghosts had all their friends here, and the human ghosts didn’t much want to go to the world where they were alive, reminding them of whatever failure it was that got them dead in the first place.

Not to mention the fact that, really, all Vriska needed to get the job done was Nova and her magic. The others were just there to keep her company – which she appreciated.

Except maybe for Applejack.

“So, mind explainin’ to me exactly what the plan is?”

Vriska nodded. “Right. So, Dream Bubbles 101 – when Sburb was actually active, Feferi negotiated a settlement with the Horrorterrors that all dead Sburb players would be able to live on as ‘ghosts’ in dream bubbles.” She looked like she wanted to explain it in a bit more detail and then thought better of it. “Under certain circumstances, players would be able to visit dream bubbles in their sleep. A ‘projection’ of their consciousness would appear in one of the bubbles and they would be able to interact with the Dream Bubble. There are still living players on Earth C and if we encounter any of them dreaming, I bet Nova will be able to pick up a connection back to Earth C. Then I’ll be home, I can pick up John, and we can use his overpowered abilities to break the war going on up there.”

Nova nodded. “A direct mental connection should be workable. We’re in Topeka, not trying to get to Topeka. If the analogy works.”

“It doesn’t,” Applejack said.

“Ah. Well then… We’re the ones in the weird universe. The dreamers are coming from a simple universe. Going to less complexity is easier than the other way around.”

Allure nodded. “Makes sense to me!”

Jotaro shrugged, saying nothing.

“So, here’s a question,” Applejack said. “How are we gonna find one of these dreamers?”

Vriska smirked. “That’s the fun part. In this new Paradox Space the Combine have created, there is only one Dream Bubble, the one we’re in. They’ll have to dream into this one when they do.”

“But this place is huge,” Nova said, holding out her hoof, pointing out that they had passed through the forest and were now on an expanse covered in amber pyramids shrouded in bright neon auras.

Vriska smirked. “I absorbed a truly enormous amount of luck from the ghost army.”

“Oh. So we are wanderin’ around hopin’ we run into someone,” Allure said.

“Mostly. I’m also looking for a place I think they’re likely to appear. Tell me if you see a desert filled with moody horses.”

“Funny,” Nova deadpanned.

“I’m serious. Not ponies, standard Earth horses. Hussie had a thing for them, apparently.”

Jotaro adjusted his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

“Did someone say moody horse shit?” Dead Dave said, appearing in a burst of red gears.

“More or less,” Vriska said. “’Sup Strider?”

“Oh, y’know, being cool, traveling through timelines that don’t exist, hiding my amazingly awesome eyes.”

“Rainbow would like you,” Applejack observed.

“What’s not to like about this masterpiece?” Dave asked, smirking slightly.

“You said something about the horses?” Allure interrupted before anyone could answer.

“Oh, yeah, that desert’s just that way,” Dave said, pointing. “But first, I wanna know what happened to Davesp- Davepeta.”

Vriska sighed. “Davepeta lived almost as long as I did, but a few years ago their mind was taken over by a bastard named the Collector. He’s dead now, but before he got what was coming Aradia had to kill Davepeta.”

“…And there were no dream bubbles out there.”

Vriska shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Y’know, I liked to think there was at least one of us that escaped the fate of being doomed,” Dave said. “Guess not.”

Nova shook her head. “Davepeta lived a long, long time, conditional immortality aside. Nothing lives forever. I say that’s a pretty good run, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah. Maybe,” Dave said. “Anyway, good luck with your moody horse shit.”

Vriska marched in the direction Dave had indicated. She heard the sound of whinnying as they approached. Bingo.

They soon arrived in a desert filled with ghostly horses that were neighing in a tone that could only be described as ‘moody’.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” Allure admitted.

“Something a little less literal?” Vriska suggested.

“…Yeah, let’s go with that.”

“So, what, he’ll just show up?” Nova asked.

“It’s how it works,” Vriska said. “This place… It has a habit of just drawing things.”

“Isn’t this just an image from someone’s dream?” Jotaro asked.

“Hussie’s, if anything. It might just be something random.” Vriska shrugged and spread out her arms, hoping she’d get lucky.

Naturally, she did.

There wasn’t a sound – he was just there. He was a human man in blue robes with the windy Breath symbol on his chest. The robes trailed off in a very long hood that waved in the wind. His eyes held bright blue pupils, making it clear that he wasn’t a ghost, and revealing to the ponies that the chalk-white skin of humans around here wasn’t a consequence of being undead, but rather their natural tone. This somewhat impressive appearance was rather jarringly interrupted by his toothy grin and nerdy glasses. “Oh, hey Vriska!”

Vriska blinked. “…That’s all you have to say to me?”

“Uh… Yeah?”

Vriska twitched in anger for a moment – but then released it. “Yep. You’re still John.” She pulled him into a hug. “Never change.”

“A-are you sure you’re Vriska!?” he said, bewildered by her sudden show of affection.

“Just shut up and enjoy the hug of a friend who’s been looking for you a long, long time…”

“Really? And here I thought we were looking for you! Or, well, Terezi was looking for you. We kinda just let her do that. Where’ve you been?”

“The multiverse,” Vriska said, smirking. “Made some friends. Say hello to a bunch of moody horses and the big guy.”

“Uh… Hi,” John said.

“Gog you are such a dork, John,” Vriska muttered, facepalming. “…It’s still good to see you though.”

“You all look like Dirk’s little ponies,” John observed.

“Don’t tell me My Little Pony exists here,” Applejack muttered.

Vriska blinked. “You know what, I think it does. Huh. Can’t believe I forgot that…”

Jotaro extended a hand, intimidating John with his stature. “Jotaro,” he said.

John met his hand. “John. But you know that.”

Jotaro was about to pull back – but something activated from within him. A purple vine shot out from his hand and wrapped around John’s. Roses burst from the purple vines, and suddenly Jotaro felt John’s very soul.

It was a very pure, if adrift spirit.

Jotaro stared at his hand. “Nani?”

“Uh… what?” John said. “And what again?”

Nova cocked her head. “…Was that Hermit Purple?”

“No…” Jotaro said, shaking his head. “Hermit Purple could never do that…” he summoned Star Platinum, just to make sure he had his Stand. “All fine…”

“…Are you, uh, doing something?” John asked.

“We can explain later,” Vriska asked. “First, you can still do that retcon thing, right?”

“Yeah,” John said. “Though not now since, well, I’m dreaming. I think. I could tr-”

“No, don’t try, we don’t need a disaster from you trying something you don’t understand,” Vriska said with a chuckle. “Just let Nova here scan you – we’ll come to you on Earth C.”

“Oh sweet! Everyone will be absolutely stoked to finally see you after so long! Terezi and Karkat will probably get mad, but-”

“Wait, Karkat’s still alive?” Vriska said. “…Wait, how are any of the non god-tiers alive after this long?”

“Uh… Vriska, it’s been a few years, but not decades.”

Vriska blinked. “John. I’ve been gone nine hundred years.”

“Huh. Thought you’d be taller then.”

Vriska glared at him. “What could cause that much of a time discrepancy?”

“Well, Dave did jump us forward a few thousand years that one time…”

“Ah.” Vriska blinked. “Not to worry! There will still be a reunion! It just… will be rather one sided.”

“Hey, I can have Da-”

“Nonono, no need for that,” Vriska said, holding up a hand. “Nova, got it?”

Nova nodded. “Coordinates to Earth C, locked and loaded.” She opened a portal revealing a pasture of green grass in front of a New York-esque city. “Behold. Home.”

Vriska stepped through the portal and breathed in the fresh air. It smelled almost like every other Earth she had been on, but there was the unmistakable scent of trolls in the air. Faint, but there.

She stood in the sun, arms out, and smiled. “…Home.” A tear rolled down her cheek. She didn’t care who saw it.

John stared at the portal. “So can I walk through that or…”

“You should probably just wake up,” Allure said, hopping through the portal. “Find us after.”

“Oh. All right. Uh, can anyone stab me to wake me up?”

Vriska threw her sword back through the portal at him, winking. He vanished in a puff of light. “I enjoyed that far more than I should have.”

“He seems… clueless,” Nova observed.

“Yep, that’s John.”

“And he has the power that is going to help us face off against Horrorterrors and the Combine.”

“Yep.”

“That’s more than a little terrifying.”

Vriska laughed nervously, turning mind to more pleasing thoughts: home. “Gog, it looks so much better in person. Look at those buildings! The grass! The air around us!” She laughed.

Jotaro let himself smirk slightly. It looked no different from a standard Earth – grass, city, blue sky, evidence of people – but Vriska knew it was the one she’d been looking for all this time. She couldn’t let herself feel like it was ‘just another Earth’, for to her it wasn’t. It was the home she never got to visit.

Vriksa smiled. “I’m going to build my house here. In the human area. Because why the fuck not.”

Nova smiled. “We’re glad for y-”

With a zap of white energy, John appeared in front of Vriska. “Hey again!”

“Oh. Welp. You ruined the moment.”

John blinked. “Moment? …Uh, sorry. I was just trying to find you. Zapped around a bit and got here. Eventually.”

“John you saw where we got off.”

“That didn’t mean I had any idea where or when it was!”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Right. Anyway, we’ll need your retcon power for something. But you know what, that can wait. We can always return to this exact moment whenever we want.”

“Time still progresses elsewhere though,” Nova pointed out. “…Wait, right, his power supersedes that doesn’t it?”

Vriska nodded. “Most broken power I’ve ever seen in the multiverse. The ability to go anywhere and change anything regardless of metatime.”

“Aw, geez, it’s not that great…” John insisted.

“Don’t sell yourself short, Egbert,” Vriska said, giving him a noogie. “I’ve been traveling for a while. I’ve seen some pretty ridiculous stuff. That pretty much takes the cake.”

John rubbed the back of his head. “If you say so. So, uh, wha-” his phone started ringing. “Oh, excuse me.” He answered the call. “Hey, Roxy!”

There was a feminine voice on the other side of the line.

John flushed beet red. “Uh, Roxy? I would absolutely love to but, well, you se-”

She interrupted him with something unintelligible to Vriska.

“Uh, you see, Vriska came back and kinda wants my help with something? Or… Well wants my help with something later. I guess.”

There was a bunch more talking.

“…Looks like she wants to talk to you, Vriska.”

Vriska shrugged, picking up the phone. “Hey other Lalonde. ‘Sup?”

There was a girlish gasp. “Oh. Em. Gee. You’re actually there. I thought he was comin’ up with some bizarro reason not to have some F. U. N…”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “For once, his wishy-washyness is legit. I’m here with a really big buff guy and three magic ponies.”

“…Okay, before I, like, come rushing over there and gush over the magic ponies like a seven-year-old princess, you got a buff guy? Lucky…”

“You and your assumptions. He’s not with me, he’s married, and has three kids.”

“I have many queshiuns,” she said, purposely mispronouncing the last word.

“You’ll get a lot of answers followed by some half-truths that just raise more questions.”

“Story of my life… One thing I gotta know though, should I feel… threatened?”

“I’ve been ‘dating’ a mini-Horrorterror for years and my moirallegiance is filled by a magical unicorn. Happy?”

“…No, I gotta hear both those stories. Like, right fuckin’ now.”

“How ‘bout no, how ‘bout you go find everyone else and gather them together for a special get-together. I’d have my party planner do it but I think she’s busy cutting eldritch abominations in half with a chainsaw.”

“You can count on Rolal, Vrisky!”

“Vriska.”

“Vrisky.”

“Vrisk- we’re not doing this. I just got back, my second interaction is not going to devolve into a two word back and forth.”

“Vrisky.”

Vriska hung up. “She’ll organize a get together of everyone. Eventually.”

Suddenly, a tall woman in the black robes of a Space player appeared in a flash of green, floating above them. She wore large, round glasses and had two white canine ears coming out the top of her head. Her piercing green eyes stared right into Vriska’s.

“Vriska, why is the Green Sun back?” she demanded, levitating Vriska into the air by the robe collar.

“Hey Jade, long time no see! Uh, would you believe me if I say I had nothing to do with that?”

“No,” Jade said with a knowing smile. “Start explaining.”

Vriska took a breath. “Well you see there is this multiversal alien race called the Combine that decided they could recreate the Green Sun as a power source. I tried to stop that, by the way, but luckily the Dream Bubbles were also recreated and I was finally able to find you guys!”

John and Jade stared at her, blinking.

Vriska grinned cheekily. “So you gonna put me down yet or not?”

Jade shrugged, setting Vriska back down on the ground. “You realize we’re going to have to destroy it, right?” She opened her hand and allowed the green power of the Sun to flow through her fingertips. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Problem with that,” Vriska said. “Destruction of the Green Sun will destroy all the ghosts – or at least seal them up again. So Meenah’s current plan is to take the Green Sun for ourselves.”

“…Take control of the Green Sun!?” Jade blurted. “Is she insane?”

“Yep,” Vriska said, “Especially since there’s already a war between the Horrorterrors and Combine over it. I’m sure you can see that, given your connection to the Green Sun.”

Jade nodded slowly. “So that’s what all that was…”

“Green Sun connection?” Allure asked.

Vriska sighed. “Ugh, more exposition… Every Sburb session universe had within it an entity called a First Guardian that was tapped right into the power of the Green Sun and used it to defend the universe from threats. Jade here ended up fused with her dog Guardian.”

“Woof,” Jade said. Then she smiled sheepishly. “Uh… Oops.”

“Are we going to talk about what happened to Jotaro, or no?” Nova asked suddenly. “Suddenly, purple thorns like Hermit Purple! What does that mean?”

Everyone looked around at each other and shrugged.

“What’s Hermit Purple?” Jade asked.

“Ooh! Ooh!” Allure perked up. “Do you want me to explain what Stands are?”

“…Sure.”

Allure took a deep breath.

~~~

Eve had moved the ‘victory platform’ back to Lopan so Seraphim could create a portal to the Dream Bubble while she worked. The Aradias were taking care of Spades’ people on the other side.

Eve herself was paying little attention to the portal; devoting everything she could to tearing apart the platform and examining it. The black house itself was impenetrable to her magics, and she didn’t dare open the door to a universe that no longer existed – but the inner workings beneath the platform opened to her with hardly any coaxing. She found herself able to pry it open with ease and understand the inner workings.

It was weird – yes, she was a scientist at heart and loved experimentation, but she didn’t have anywhere near the level of training that, say, Corona had. Yet she could just see the direction all the dimensional energy flowed through the differently colored pipes, what each section of the machine did, and how it all interconnected. The finer details of why eluded her, almost as if she was running on intuition.

She didn’t know it yet, but her left eye’s pupil had been replaced with the solar symbol of Light.

I had noticed, and had been instrumental in letting her work without interruption from Renee or Flutterfree, who would have been concerned about such visual changes. The two of them were trying to keep the inhabitants of Pyramid Hell calm during evacuation to an alien world of dreams.

Renee in particular was being the most useful, though she wasn’t quite aware of it.

She clasped a trembling yellow salamander’s nubby arm, looking down at the consort with a kind, loving expression. Her horn flashed with teal light for the slightest of moments and the salamander stopped trembling.

“What’s your name, little one?” Renee asked.

“…Casey von Salamancer. Thank you.” The salamander walked with purpose through Seraphim’s portal, confident.

“Wow, Renee, that was impressive,” Flutterfree said. “Not even my gift with animals could get them that calm…”

“That salamander’s mind was a troubled one… Such loss… They knew the Heir of Breath.” Renee blinked. “…How do I know that?”

Flutterfree shrugged. “Intuition? We’ve been helping a lot of them through this change.”

“Hrm…”

Spades walked over to them. “That’s almost all of ‘em. I can’t wait to bid this leprechaun vomit of a place good riddance.”

“Spades, the neon glow of this world is absolutely fabulous. I don’t see any reason why you’d have to leave it forever.”

“The Noir aesthetic is superior. I need to find myself another city like that… A mobster paradise…”

Renee blinked. “I’m not so sure about the ‘mobster paradise’ bit, but I certainly can locate a world with the correct era-specific aesthetic I think you are looking for.” She adjusted her hat. “Anyway, that was everyone in this area. We should go ask Eve to move the platform again.”

I was watching Eve carefully place a magical probe into a cylindrical tank inside the victory platform, her left eye actively glowing with an orange light now. “Absolutely fantastic! The quantum flow of the fate-packets introduce the construct of grist into the physics of the universe, tapping into the experiences of the players to create a new plane of existence physically connected to worlds beyond, using Skaia as a nest!” She clapped her hooves. “This machine is so brilliant and I have no idea how I’m understanding it!”

Flutterfree pointed a hoof at Eve. “…Eve? Your eye is glowing.”

“It is?” She summoned a mirror and examined herself with it. “…Is that the symbol on Vriska’s robes? Light?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

“How am I tapping into a Sburb Aspect of reality?” she asked, her eye slowly fading back to normal.

“Think back to the Tumor,” I said. “How exactly did you survive?”

“You wrote us alive, right?”

“That was just Vriska,” I corrected. “She was already a Sburb player, she couldn’t be made one again. But the twelve of us… When the Green Sun was created, remnants of the old system were shoved into us.”

“So we’re players of the game?” Eve asked. “That’s… odd, since we don’t have any Skaia, or planets, or even a copy of the Sburb discs.”

“It’s glitched,” Flutterfree deduced.

“Exactly,” I confirmed. “Sburb was not meant to restart again once it had already been shut down. The Horrorterrors have not seeded any new universes to start the cycle. The Tumor changed us with the Sburb programs that popped into existence with the Green Sun. We are part of a game that can no longer run.”

“And because of that we get weird Aspect powers,” Eve concluded. She found that she could turn her Light-vision on and off at will, allowing her to intake and understand large quantities of information. “What exactly can we do? You’re the expert.”

“You’re the Witch of Light, which more or less translates to the manipulator of knowledge and fortune. You seem to have tapped more into the ‘knowledge’ side of the Light aspect, rather than the luck that Vriska is so obsessed with. I’m the Seer of Void, which doesn’t give me any abilities the Eye of Rhyme doesn’t already provide.”

“…Then what are we?” Flutterfree asked.

“Something to do with minds,” Renee deduced. “Or feelings.”

“Sylph of Mind,” I confirmed for Renee. “Which is to say one who heals with the power of the mind. You give them stability with your thoughts that influence their own minds.”

“I see…”

“You know, it says something about our lives that we’re just taking this in stride,” Eve observed. “New abilities from a glitchy ancient game? Sure. Why not.”

“Flutterfree’s not going to like what hers has to say about her,” I said, turning to the pegasus.

Flutterfree gulped. “…What am I?”

“The Page of Rage.”

“Wh… How does that make any sense? Do I look angry?”

I put my hoof on her shoulder. “Do you feel that inner voice of yours screaming against me right now, screaming that what I say cannot be true? That you cannot be a Rage player? That inner voice of your anger?”

Flutterfree blinked. “Y-yes?”

“The Page is a complex class – they are known to have extreme difficulty coming to terms with their Aspect, struggling to understand that it is a part of them, generally unable or unwilling to take steps to reach their full potential. You are not well attuned to your Rage, and yet it is undeniably a part of you deep down.”

“So what, I have to come to terms with it now?”

“No, actually,” I smiled warmly. “Most Pages never overcome their difficulty. If you were able to fully accept what you were, you would become essentially a beacon of Rage that radiated power, violence, and ‘truth’ from yourself. I wouldn’t worry about it though.”

Eve pulled Flutterfree into a hug. “She’s right. It’s not something we have to worry about. One less Rage player in the army won’t make a difference.”

“Never wanted to be in the army in the first place,” Flutterfree said, scratching the back of her head.

“I know.” Then Eve’s eyes shot open, the left one glowing brightly. “I also know I’m not going to be able to figure this out fully.”

“Really?” Renee asked.

“Yes,” Eve said, turning back to the platform. “…Corona needs to take a look at this. She’ll be able to pull something out of it with what I already know. I’m sure.”

“It’s nice just knowing things, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Sort of. Takes a lot of the fun out of learning.”

I shrugged. “Everything has its drawbacks.”

Eve called down to Spades. “I’m taking the platform through the portal as soon as everyone’s evacuated! Okay?”

“You could drop a nuke on this place after everyone was out and I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass.”

“Thanks!”

~~~

Meenah was still talking the ghost army up around the House Juju. She was currently using the bound and gagged Andrew Hussie as a soapbox because… well it had seemed like a good idea at the time, and she wasn’t regretting it yet.

“Right, I want all my god-tiers to my left. Sort by Aspect! I want nice color-coded lines! I’ll take your silence as agreement, now MOVE IT.” She coughed. “Those of you who aren’t god-tier go on the other side and just… I dunno, organize yourshells or somefin. Imma be honest here, you probably won’t be of much help. Yes, that includes you other mes and Vriskas. Them’s the breaks.”

Everyone shuffled off to their groups – except Fef, who was a non-god-tier and stayed at Meenah’s side regardless.

Meenah glanced at her. “What’re you doin’?”

“Letting the people who’re scared of you know it’s okay to listen to you?”

“…I have a deep biological urge to strangle you ’til you’re bone dry, y’know?”

“Good thing we’re ghosts then, huh?”

Meenah blinked – then laughed. “All right, you’re good. How about you actually do somefin though? Like check in on our extras back there?”

Feferi nodded. “Right away!” She jumped behind Meenah and walked closer to the House Juju, where O’Neill, Corona, Rainbow, and Pinkie were, preparing for battle.

O’Neill was analyzing the way Meenah was getting the troops organized. “Good stuff you’ve got so far, but I wouldn’t count out the mundanes yet. I’ve seen some of you change clothing just by thinking. Why not disguise all of you as ‘god-tier’ so they won’t know where the serious reality-warping powers are coming from?”

“Oh my glub that’s an excellent idea!” Feferi squeed. She created fake Life robes for herself, the gray folds billowing down her elegant form. “Not the nicest looking, but cool!”

“Remember the wings,” Pinkie said. “God-tier trolls have wings.”

Feferi nodded, adjusting her dream-form to have wings. She flapped them. “Completely useless, but I’m a ghost anyway.” She smiled at O’Neill. “I guess you really are a General.”

O’Neill shrugged. “And they wonder why I introduce myself as General rather than Overhead…”

Pinkie bounced to Feferi. “Feferi, think I should go with chainsaw, hammer, or chainhammer?”

Feferi blinked. “Chainhammer?”

Pinkie pulled a chainsaw with little hammers all over it. “Chainhammer.”

“Cool!”

“Yes!” Pinkie pumped a hoof and launched a party cannon.

Feferi gasped and grabbed Pinkie by the cheeks. “After this is over you and I need to have a party.”

“I agree! I’m thinking fish-themed!”

“Marevelous!” Feferi laughed.

“Pun overload,” Corona said, smirking.

Feferi shrugged. “I just like fish. And the sea. And talking about it too!”

“Not really a fighter?”

“Not really. I was bred to be a leader, but Karkat did that in my session so I didn’t really have to do much.” Feferi shrugged. “But hey, looks like I’m doing it now! Better late than never!” she giggled.

Corona smiled warmly. “It’s nice to see someone like you out here. No offense to your troll buddies, but a lot of them are rather abrasive.”

“Our cultures were pretty rough… but I’m not here to talk about that! I’m here to see what you’ve got!”

Corona lifted up her hand, showing Feferi a swirling nexus of red magical constructs. “This is a reality scrambler. Most universes would just give up and explode when I unleash this thing. Something tells me the ‘Paradox Space’ realities up there won’t be as adversely affected, but I bet the Combine’s ships will struggle to function when up becomes potatoes.”

“And for the Horrorterrors?”

“Good old-fashioned holy magic. It’s anathema to them.”

Feferi nodded. “I know. Strange how I, a Life player, got to be their voice in my session.”

Corona nodded. “Hopefully they’ll regret that. …You don’t have any trouble fighting them, do you?”

Feferi frowned. “They may have done a lot for me, but what they want now will destroy all of us! And I can’t let that happen. I care too much about my friends.”

“Even if the same isn’t true for them?”

Feferi nodded. “Especially then.”

“The multiverse needs more people like you.”

“Thanks!” Feferi said. “Now, Rainbow Dash, what do you have?”

“I’m awesome,” Rainbow asserted.

Feferi sighed, taking Rainbow aside. “You don’t have any special powers, Rainbow, and you’re a living pony! You could die!”

“Do I look like a pony who’d step down from a fight?”

“Unfortunately no,” Feferi said, folding her arms. “There’s going to be a lot of danger up there. One wrong slip from a Doom player and you’ll be dead in an instant, not to mention the Horrorterrors or Combine.”

“I’m going to fight!” Rainbow demanded, stamping her hoof on the ground.

“Rainbow, I know y-” Feferi noticed the whirlwind on the ground at Rainbow’s hoof. “…Do that again.”

“…Huh?”

“Stamp your hoof on the ground again, hard.”

Rainbow did as asked, creating a gust of wind with her movement. “Wha…?”

Feferi grinned. “Rainbow… I think you’re showing indications of the Breath Aspect!”

“…The what now?”

“Of course she is!” Pinkie interrupted. “All twelve of us got them!”

Corona and O’Neill turned to Pinkie. “…We did?” Corona asked.

“Yeah! All twelve of us got an aspect! Rainbow’s the Maid of Breath.”

O’Neill snickered. “Made of breath. I can see why she got that one.”

“Har-de-har,” Rainbow muttered. “Pinkie, what does that mean?”

“Well… Feferi?”

Feferi smiled. “Every player of Sburb has a title. Thief of Light, Maid of Time, to use examples you would know. The Aspect determines what part of reality the player can use – in your case, Breath, which can be described as ‘freedom’. It tends to manifest physically as wind. The first part of the title is the class, and is generally a bit more mysterious. Maids, as I understand it, fix, repair, or provide the Aspect.”

“Aradia spends all her time fixing Time,” Pinkie explained.

“So… What? I can repair ‘freedom’?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep! And also control wind better than you could before, but that’s just in general.”

“…Sweet.”

Feferi turned to Pinkie. “Do you know what the rest of you are?”

“Oh yeah. O’Neill’s the Thief of Hope!”

O’Neill smirked. “That certainly sounds like me. Let’s take a wild guess – I have been bestowed the utterly broken ability to take the Hope within others and give it to myself.”

“I think that’s how it would work,” Feferi admitted. “Vriska’s a Thief as well. She takes luck – Light – and adds it to herself. You’ll probably work a lot like her actually, though on a more mental scale.”

O’Neill rubbed his hands together.

“You’re thinking of more ways you can screw with people,” Corona said.

“As soon as I figure out how to use it, there will be chaos. The Hope-slash-Crimson Sushi double combo. Watch the very soul drain out of the villain’s eyes…”

“Creepy~!” Pinkie trilled. “Meanwhile, I’m the Bard of Space!”

Feferi blinked. “That’s terrifying.”

“Why?” Corona asked.

“Bards are known for random destruction of everything through passive use of their Aspect,” Feferi said. “Uh… The only bard you’ll see here is the Bard of Hope, and he doesn’t know how to use his powers. The Bard of Rage though… he krilled a lot of trolls.”

Pinkie giggled. “Don’t worry, I’ve lived with being able to manipulate space all my life. Just because I now have a better explanation for a lot of it won’t change much. I can make space explode now though!”

“Please don’t,” Rainbow pleaded.

“Aw, ptooey, fine.”

“What about me, Pinkie?” Corona asked. “What am I?”

“Rogue of Doom.”

Corona blinked. “Me? Doom? That doesn’t make any sense! The rest of you have Aspects that fit you! Moving through space, freedom of flight, hope in the face of unwinnable odds… What about me screams Doom?”

Pinkie shrugged. “I dunno. It’s what you were given though. You can take the Doom around you and distribute it wherever it needs to go, though. Oh, remember how Death prevented everyone from dying that one time?”

“…Yeah?”

“You can do that now. Sorta. You have to put the death on something else.”

“…Cool, but I’m still worried that I’m some sort of patron of death and destruction now.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Pinkie said, winking.

“ARE WE READY TO LAUNCH?” Meenah shouted.

“Oh glub, I need to tell her O’Neill’s plan!” Feferi said. “You’re all going to be a great help, but try to figure out how to use your powers in ten minutes, okay?”

Corona nodded. “We will.”

“Thanks! I’ll be right back.” She scrambled to Meenah and told her about O’Neill’s tactical suggestion.

“Glub me… MORE DELAYS. Fine, fine… LISTEN UP EVERYONE! We’ve got a ploy!”

~~~

Roxy’s god-tier outfit was that of the Rogue of Void, which was to say dark blue with a really sweet mask that went across her eyes and did nothing to actually hide her identity. She didn’t care, it was still awesome.

She had set up the party in an instant, which was to say she used her freakish Rogue of Void powers to take the ‘lack of party’ from the room and ‘create’ a party from that. She’d invited all twelve of Earth C’s resident Sburb players.

She didn’t tell anyone what the party was about – merely that John was coming with a surprise. They probably thought he had proposed to her or something. As if.

Everyone except John was already here. Including Jade, who had done really well at not letting anyone else know what was about to happen. The three trolls were also there.

Everyone was talking, but Roxy was busy waiting with anticipation. They’d all been looking for Vriska for so long – they’d known she was alive, but they didn’t know what had happened to her. There were going to be so many gasps and celebrations and amazing faces.

John walked to the door of Roxy’s house, opening it up to see the party. He smiled and stepped aside to reveal Vriska.

Roxy was right, there were a lot of gasps and celebrations and loud cheering – from the non-trolls. The trolls themselves stood back, staring at Vriska with unreadable expressions.

Roxy realized her little party was going to mean nothing to Vriska. The Thief of Light said hello to all the humans and introduced them to her friends, but she clearly had business to attend to with those of her kind. While the humans gawked over the ponies and Jotaro, she left them behind.

Vriska soon stood before the three other trolls, all three taller than her. There was the Jade-blooded Kanaya, towering over the rest of them with a graceful figure. Next to her was the mutant-candy-red-blooded Karkat, his horns just as nubby as always. He looked older than any of the other trolls by a fair bit, his face showing wrinkles.

And on the other end was Terezi, the Teal-blooded blind girl with sharp, red glasses and a walking cane styled with a red dragon head.

Vriska had her mouth open to speak, but couldn’t say anything the moment she rested her eyes on Terezi. Her lip began to tremble and her eyes filled with cobalt-blue tears. She took in a sharp breath, trying to get a hold of herself.

Terezi spoke with a nasally voice that belonged on a mischievous imp. “Vrisk-?”

Vriska broke down crying, flinging her arms around Terezi and squeezing her tight. She couldn’t say anything, she was so overcome with emotion. In the Dream Bubble, there had been too much going on… Too much chaos… There hadn’t been a moment for her to truly register what was happening.

But here?

She could see her best friend again. Nine hundred years of built up emotional stress released in one moment.

Even for one as strong as her, it was too much.

“V-vriska?” Terezi said.

“It’s been so long,” Vriska managed through her sobs. “It’s been so long…”

“Uh... Yeah. It…”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being such a bitch. I’m sorry for blinding you out of some pathetic act of petty revenge. I’m sorry for setting up that mess in the first place. I’m sorry for listening to my lusus when I could have turned away at any time. I’m sorry for running off to Jack and making you make that impossible choice. I’m sorry for burdening you with guilt. I’m sorry I made you bring me back… Even after you brought me back, I kept doing it! Blowing a second chance! I’m sorry! It was wrong! All of it was wrong. I was… I was wrong about so much…”

Terezi stood, gawking. “W-what happened?”

“She spent nine hundred years wandering the multiverse, trying to get home,” Nova said, walking up to them. “Hi. Nova here. I’ve been working with her for several years.” Nova put a hoof on the shaking Vriska’s back. “She just wants you to know she’s changed.”

Terezi was unable to process what was happening – she was frozen in shock.

So Karkat took control. He grabbed Vriska roughly by the shoulder and tore her from Terezi. He looked her right in the eye.

“About fucking time!” he shouted in his harsh, angry voice.

Nova was about to chide him – but Vriska laughed at this. She pulled Karkat into the next embrace. “Yes. Yes it is.”

“Hey! Hey! Let me go! I’m not some touchy-feely guy all of a sudden!”

Vriska wiped her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “And here I thought you were the guy to go to for romantic advice? Has that changed?”

“No,” Kanaya said with a soft, melodious voice. She put a hand on Vriska. “Vriska, I am glad to see you return to us so well.”

“Heheh… Yeah… Kanaya, about all those times I ignored you…”

“It led us to where I am today.” Kanaya smiled warmly. “There is no need to apologize.”

“Yes there fucking is!” Karkat blurted. “Even if everything worked out she was still fucked up! I’m going to milk her for every apology I can get!”

Vriska chuckled. “What do you want an apology for, Karcrab?”

“Tavros?”

“Apologized to his ghost personally as a big show in front of thousands of other ghosts!”

“Hrm… Jack?”

“I was an absolute fucking moron trying to create an enemy so I could be the hero. Not just selfish, but stupid on so many levels.”

“Jade?”

“Yo, Jade! I was a real bitch that caused every problem by making you fall asleep all the time! Heck, I’m probably indirectly responsible for Lord English, so I’ll go ahead and apologize for his existence!”

“Treating me and everyone else like shit?”

“None of you were actually shit, except maybe Eridan. Most of you were better people than me. You’re all my very best friends.”

Karkat grinned a big toothy grin. “Welcome back, Vriska.”

“Thanks. Now here’s the big question, why the fuck are you all taller than me? Being god-tier doesn’t stunt growth! This just isn’t fair.”

“I’ve started to shrink,” Karkat said with a chuckle. “Mutant blood, won’t be around much longer. Really glad I got to see you come back.”

“Hey, hey, Karcrab. I know how to get you some immortality serum. All of you. Don’t you fret about getting old. I’ve got connections now.”

“Well fuck me sideways, that’s the best news I’ve heard in years!” Karkat let out a deep laugh.

“You’ve changed too. Lot more comfortable with yourself.”

“Fuck you and your psychological observations. I get enough of that already.”

Vriska wiped her face again and gave him a thumbs up. Then she turned around – catching sight of Terezi again.

“…You going to say anything?” Vriska asked, her smile vanishing.

“What am I supposed to say?” Terezi said, a single teal tear running out from under her glasses. “Great job Vriska, you figured out life? Oh, yeah, you were an asshole, but that’s behind us. Ah, you spent nine-hundred years out there? Oh, must be bad for you. Makes my tiny handful of years waiting look like nothing, doesn’t it? Everything I feel just has to be a lesser version of what you’re feeling. And that makes me mad.”

Vriska put a hand on Terezi’s shoulder. “Terezi, just because you suffered less doesn’t make it any less legitimate. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been looking for me – what matters is that you were. And holy hell, do you have the right to be mad. I wouldn’t be upset if you punched me right n-”

Terezi punched her.

Virska laughed. “Capitalizing on the opportunity, are we Redglare?”

Terezi – finally – let her mouth spring into that toothy grin she was known for. “Hehehehehe. Mindfang, you know me, when there’s a legal loophole to punch a highblood, I’ll take it. Every time.” She extended a hand.

Vriska took it. “Scourge Sisters?”

“Scourge Sisters.”

They clasped each other’s hands and raised them into the air. “WE’RE BACK, BITCHES!”

There was applause and cheers.

Roxy smiled, wiping a tear from her eye. It was one of the most beautiful things she had seen in recent memory.

The reunion of friends and the rebuilding of bridges.

~~~

The Combine’s CX-07, a ‘Costra’ class ship, was a sight to behold. In realspace, it took the form of a translucent blue sphere with two white compass-needle-like prongs extending from the ‘front’ and the ‘back’. Within the sphere were several dozen stars, all of them blue hypergiants, brimming with unstable internal power. In other words, ready to blow at any moment – but kept in check by a truly tremendous organic construct in the center of the CX-07 that resembled a beating heart with several glowing tubes strapped to it.

One of the blue stars smashed into the edge of the CX-07’s sphere, pushing all of its mass into the globe. The globe proceeded to release controlled bursts of supernova-level energy into the darkness of Paradox Space.

Horrorterrors may have been impossible squid-like beasts from the deepest nightmares of haunted veterans, but when confronted with pure cosmic energy they still burned. Normally the Horrorterror would have simply folded itself through a manifold in ‘space’ to appear behind the CX-07 in its own perceived ‘past’, but the larger Combine RA-02 was working around the clock to ensure the physical realm around them operated like a three-dimensional space, closing off the Horrorterror tricks.

All around the Green Sun, these battles carried on. Not one Combine ship or Horrorterror could be allowed actually near the Green Sun. One would assume, given a three-dimensional perspective, that since the Combine had started on one side of the Green Sun and the Horrorterrors on the other, it would have been impossible to prevent any interaction with the Green Sun.

However, Paradox Space merely looked three-dimensional from outside, given its complete lack of anything within. The Horrorterrors were able to jump from location to location not because they had the physiological ability to do so nor knowledge of the different universal coordinates that led to different sections, but because they understood how Paradox Space operated and could walk through it like a school hallway.

The Combine had originally tried to negate this property, but they realized nearly instantly that if they did this, the Horrorterrors would easily reach the Green Sun before them. So the fleets of cosmic ships allowed themselves to be spread across Paradox Space seemingly randomly so they had a presence everywhere around the Green Sun. They turned their forced-reality generators back on and headed toward the emerald treasure.

Even though time and space around the Green Sun was in a constant state of flux and self-perpetuating loops, one thing was certain. If you looked at the light of the Green Sun and moved directly toward it, you would eventually reach it. This fact could not be changed.

Effectively, the halo of Combine ships and Horrorterrors around the Green Sun was shrinking, nearing the green orb as one side made an advancement here, the other there.

The only issue with visualizing this is that it was happening all at once in every location and timeframe across Paradox Space. Not even those actively within the battle would have any idea who was actually winning unless they were one of the Noble Horrorterrors, and these particular beings weren’t doing anyone any favors by talking.

Meenah did not care about understanding what was going on. She had an army of god-tier players and fake god-tier players, all of whom were already dead in every possible way. She was very curious to see what the Combine and Horrorterrors planned to do when they made themselves known.

At the moment, Meenah and Feferi floated just outside the perceivable ‘edge’ of the Green Sun conflict, thousands of brightly-colored ghosts separated by their robes into twelve different types. In front of them floated Corona, Rainbow, and Pinkie; O’Neill opted to stay behind the battlefront in order to issue commands. A duo of god-tier Mind players supported him, planning to use their Aspect to communicate his military commands to everyone as well as they were able.

Currently, the Horrorterrors and Combine were ignoring them.

Corona took a breath – she hadn’t learned much about her Rogue of Doom powers in the short time she’d had, but she knew enough to ensure Pinkie, Rainbow, and O’Neill would have their ‘deaths’ transferred to whatever was attacking them. She just had to worry about herself, seeing as her powers were unable to affect her personal ‘Doom’.

She’d been told the Rogue was basically the opposite of a Thief, and that made total sense considering what she knew about Vriska’s manipulation of luck.

“Ready,” she said.

“ALL RIGHT!” Meenah said. “Let’s show them what we’re made of!” She had no need to remind the ghost army what they were doing – they all knew the plan. Hit hard, hit fast, surprise them, and get to the Green Sun by any means necessary.

“CHARGE!” Feferi shouted, raising her trident.

The Space players surged forward first, their black robes billowing behind them. The only god-tier ghost of Jade took the lead, the Green Sun’s proximity filling her body with unimaginable power. “BARK!” she shouted, bending space to launch the entire ghost army right in between the CX-07 and a Middle Horrorterror. Some Mind players surrounded the ghosts in an aura of mental energy that kept the Horrorterror’s presence from forcing them to insanity.

The Aradias and other Time players began to duplicate themselves recklessly through the looping timeline of Paradox Space while the Dead Daves took an organizational role, ensuring that no universe-ending paradoxes would ensue from the overuse of Time manipulation.

And this was far from the only Aspect fighting. Hope shot beams of light that burned the Horrorterrors. Light players manipulated chance to the benefit of all. Void players used the Horrorterrors’ own tricks against them. And Doom… did exactly what one would expect it did.

The Combine and Horrorterrors pushed back, suddenly accepting the presence of a third faction within the battle. The Horrorterrors knew instantly they could not kill the ghosts in their current situation without going to extreme lengths, so they instead moved to capture the ghosts and imprison them within eldritch bubbles of madness. The Combine thought this was a good idea and copied it with their own biotechnical energies, molding physics to immobilize ghosts.

At which point the Breath players started doing their thing. There was a lot of wind blowing, but that wasn’t the point of what they did – the point was freedom. They filled the ghost army with freeing blue gusts that would unravel the traps keeping ghosts from fighting.

They pushed closer to the Green Sun.

The gray-clad Life players, composed mostly of versions of Feferi and Meenah, had a great time draining and manipulating the life inherent in both the Combine biomechanical ships and the Horrorterrors. Meenah herself crashed through CX-07’s external sphere and latched onto the life of the central, beating heart with her powers. The CX-07, not designed to resist assault from the inside like that, was completely surprised that she could breach the outer parts of the sphere at all. The heart shriveled up and died as Meenah absorbed every last bit of it for herself.

The lack of a central heart sent the blue stars flying. Without a stabilizing presence they all exploded in supernovae, frying vast chunks of the Combine, Horrorterror, and ghost armies. This did significant damage to the Combine and Horrorterror forces, but just really ticked off the ghosts.

Corona lowered her shield – she’d barely had enough power within her to simply survive that.

“MEENAH!” she heard O’Neill’s voice ring in her head. “WE ARE NOT A BUNCH OF LOOSE CANNONS! WE ARE A SINGLE, FIGHTING UNIT! NEXT TIME THINK BEFORE YOU UNLEASH THE FURY OF A DOZEN DYING SUNS!”

Corona didn’t hear Meenah’s response, for O’Neill’s commands only went one way.

Corona saw Rainbow Dash and Pinkie fighting alongside the ghosts. Rainbow Dash shifted the winds around her with more power than she ever had as a mere pegasus, but she paled in comparison to the pure essence of freedom the god-tier Breath players were unleashing. Pinkie was the same. Her destructive Space powers were interesting, but ultimately completely useless against something like a Horrorterror or higher Combine ship. She seemed to resort completely to her ‘Pinkie powers’ to do anything at all – and even the usually devastating chainsaw or ‘super explosions’ were doing next to nothing in the grand scheme of things.

O’Neill was at least useful with his tactical mind, organizing teams to go one way or another to keep up the fight. His Hope powers did nothing.

And then there was Corona. Her magic was definitely more powerful than any single ghost here except for the green, fiery power of Jade. But she had a failing – she wasn’t unkillable. While all the other ghosts would just take world-shattering hit after world-shattering hit and just stand back up screaming expletives, she had to waste magic and time defending herself.

Between defending herself and ensuring her friends were undying as well, she had nothing. Even taking out one low-level Horrorterror would be an immense feat for her, one that would require intense concentration and leave her open to something else…

She felt like she had been dragged into a conflict too big for her and her friends. Too much to even understand. This wasn’t even as big as battles could get in the multiverse! The Combine may have been fighting at their full strength, but the Horrorterrors weren’t. Their capacity was limited by the current restrictions put in place by the Green Sun and their own society’s apathy. If things were just slightly different, a Noble Horrorterror could kill the entire ghost army by just shifting the nature of the universe slightly…

They were very fortunate to be able to fight at all.

At least they appeared to be getting closer to the Green Sun…

It was at this point the Combine and Horrorterrors decided the ghosts were more than just a passing annoyance and sent in some serious firepower. A Combine ship that resembled a gyroscope the size of a solar system moved in, its rotational power vibrating its very being so much it was blurred. On the other side, a Noble Horrorterror rose, eclipsing the Green Sun with its impossibly tremendous girth, the maddening twists of its body threatening the Mind players’ barriers.

The ghosts began to be pushed back.

“Forward!” O’Neill’s voice yelled. “Punch through the barrier between the two, get them to fight each other!”

This ploy didn’t work. The rainbow of robed ghosts was sealed off by the Noble Horrorterror and Combine Gyroscope impacting each other. As the two enemies shredded each other to pieces, they also moved toward the ghosts as well, pushing them back. The energy threw some ghosts far enough away from the group to get lost in the inky blackness of Paradox Space.

“Too much…” Corona said, staring at the piercing eyes of the Horrorterror, transfixed despite the mental barrier. “Too much…”

“You’ll be glad to hear what I have to say, then,” a nearby Light player said. “You and your three friends will be needed back at the House Juju. Take them and go – this fight will not end in our victory as it is. But it is part of what is to come.”

Corona nodded, deciding to trust her. “Rainbow! Pinkie! O’Neill! We need to go back to the House Juju!”

Pinkie appeared in front of her. “Right away, Corona!”

“Figures,” O’Neill said. “Hope they can survive without my tactical genius.”

“Probably not,” Rainbow Dash said. “Corona, we better be leaving to find Siron’s Staff or something.”

“I don’t know why we’re going back, though that staff would be useful,” Corona admitted. “All I know is that we have to go. Just the four of us. …We weren’t making much of a difference anyway.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow.

“Except you.” Corona opened a portal back to the Dream Bubble. “Let’s just go.”

~~~

Roxy’s party went on, with various little conversations between the visitors to Earth C and the various players of Sburb. It was a moment to relax, unwind, and talk about the nature of everything.

Roxy herself was talking to Applejack. “So, like, Dirk is a big brony and all so I know exactly who you are. I’m just trying to figure out how you are actually a thing. You’re on TV!

Applejack blinked. “Uh… there’s a force called ka that manipulates events to shape them to the stories written by people called Prophets.”

“Oh. Then we have a Prophet too?”

“Yeah. Ah actually know who he is. Watched a bunch of ghosts beat him up in the Dream Bubble.”

“So what you’re saying is that I’m a fictional creation.”

“Uh… Sorta, I think? Y’all are in a webcomic, at least.”

“I fucking knew it!” alive Dave shouted from across the room. “There was no way any of the shit that happened to us made real-world sense! Ha! In your face common sense, you can’t fool Dave Strider!”

Applejack facehoofed. “That’s a first.”

“I take it that’s not the usual reaction?”

“…No.”

“Huh.”

Dave continued dancing for a while, ignoring the continuing conversation. He whooped, fistbumping his future self, then jumped back a few seconds into the past to fistbump his past self, completing the circle.

“You use Time powers differently to Aradia,” Nova observed. “She’ll just clone herself recklessly. I’ve seen you create a lot of self-contained loops. Is that why I saw a ton of ghost Aradias but only a handful of you?”

“Dead Daves are the enemy,” Dave recited.

“Dead Dave’s comment makes more sense now.”

“Well duh, of course, because I’m the OG Alpha Dave. I’ve got it all under control.”

“Riiiight.”

“Hey, us Time players gotta stick together, Nova. None of that fuckin’ eye-rollin’ business.”

“Dave, I’m not a Time player. I have time magic. There’s a difference.”

“Oh. I guess I’m the one that told you, then. Another loop closed.”

“…You’ve talked to me in the future and I said I was a Time player?”

“Yep. Prince of Time, or destroyer of Time. Apparently all twelve of you became players when the Green Sun decided to pull a, ‘jk, lol, not dead’ on us.”

“…Destroyer of Time…” Nova nervously chuckled. “That makes a scary amount of sense for me. …Wonder if that explains what happened to Jotaro with that Stand…”

“You could probably erase time,” Dave said.

“What does that mean?”

“…Remove an event for everyone but yourself? I can’t tell you, I’m a Knight, not a Prince.”

“It just works,” Jotaro offered as he passed by them.

“Hey, Jotaro,” Nova said, stopping. “Think I may have figured out why you have a weird new Stand.”

“Figured out?” Dave said, shaking his head. “I’m from the future, I fucking know.”

“Right,” Nova said, rolling her eyes. “Apparently, we were all converted into ‘Sburb players’ when the Tumor went off and sorta-kinda killed us. I’m the Prince of Time, and you’re… Uh… I don’t know what you are. Dave?”

“Heir of Blood. Inheritor of connections or some shit. He can channel his ancestors.”

Jotaro thought about this. With some thought, he was able to summon the purple vines of Hermit Purple onto one of his hands and Star Platinum at the same time. He found that the hand holding Hermit Purple pulsed with a golden energy. “This wasn’t what I did with John. That was something else.”

“Did anyone other than Joseph have a stand in your ancestry?” Nova asked.

“Jonathan Joestar did not have o-” Jotaro paused. “The Passion…”

“What?”

“The Passion. When Dio awoke the World within himself, he was in Jonathan’s body. There were a few moments we saw Dio use a Hermit-Purple-like Stand…” Out of Jotaro’s other hand sprang more purple vines, these ones with flowering roses on them. “…Strange.”

There was a loud “BARK!” that drew every head in the room toward Jade.

She sparked with the power of the Green Sun. “Uh… Sorry! Sorry! It’s just been acting up lately, I’ll get control of it!” She blushed, grinning sheepishly. “It’s just barking, don’t worry about it.”

The room got back to what it was doing.

“Gah, I need to get these barks under control, I don’t like disrupting everything!”

“I think it’s cool,” Allure said, sitting on a table nearby so she was eye-level with Jade. “Being part dog, I mean.”

“I do have a lot of heightened senses, but… Well, without Bec’s Green Sun powers – which I really shouldn’t have – it just makes people think I’m a furry all the time… And then certain people who will not be named keep making jokes at my expense anyway.” She glared intensely at Karkat.

“What? What did I do this time!?” he said, legitimately confused.

“Nothing,” Jade muttered, turning back to Allure. “See?”

“No,” Allure admitted with an adorable smile.

“…Oh my gosh you’re so cute.”

“Thank you,” Allure said, smiling. “…You can see the Green Sun. How is the fight going?”

“Standstill,” Jade said, her body flickering as she focused her sight on the battle in the light of the Green Sun. “They’re all just fighting… A Combine ship exploded… A Horrorterror shriveled… And the ghosts keep getting captured.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like they’re going to accomplish anything. Their forces are too small compared to the might of the other sides.”

“That’s what John’s for, right?” Allure said. “He can do his ‘retcon’ thing and get us through that at any moment he wants.”

Jade nodded. “But what then? Once we have the Green Sun, what will we do with it? We can’t destroy it; all the ghosts need it to keep their afterlives. But we can’t exactly use it. Don’t know how. I’m directly tapped into the Green Sun because of my First Guardian status, and I just have access to its power, I can’t control it as a whole.”

“Have you ever physically been there?” Allure asked.

“No. The Green Sun locks me from getting to it with my space powers.”

“Maybe there’s a reason. Maybe, if you were next to it, you could control it.”

Jade blinked. “…That’s a good thought Allure! I should come back with you, figure out if that’s possible! Two dog-tier Jade’s are better than one, after all.”

“…dog-tier?”

“It’s what we call me. Since, uh, I’m part dog, and it makes me a First Guardian?”

“Oh.” Allure nodded slowly, as if this made great sense. She looked around, finding John in the crowd. “…Do you think he can do it?”

“If he doesn’t, he can just go back and do it again. He’s relatively good at using his retcon powers locally now, even if he never actually does much with them. Last time he did Dave threw a fit about how many timeline loops he screwed up.”

“I bet that was a fun conversation,” Allure said, continuing to watch John.

John didn’t notice Allure because Jotaro had decided to walk right into his field of view. “John Egbert,” he said.

“Uh… Hey, Jotaro!” John said nervously. Sure, he was used to people taller than him. But Kanaya was not this ripped. Nor did she look like she could remove his head with a punch. “W-what do you want?”

Jotaro sat down on a chair. “Sit,” he told John.

John gulped, doing as requested.

“I don’t fully understand what I saw, but I felt a pure soul within you,” Jotaro said. “I also felt a deep disconnect within you – an aloofness that produces cluelessness and something that isn’t quite apathy. You don’t take anything seriously.”

“Well yeah, too many people get hung up on things. You know? I just… Don’t.”

“…I would say you were running from problems, but I have seen into you. That aloofness is truly how you are.”

“Thanks…?”

“You have a great power within you, John. With it, you can shape reality itself. Or destroy it.”

“Uh, yeah, thanks for reiterating that. I know. I shouldn’t use it to go very far…”

“You still talk like it’s a restriction you’re annoyed with and don’t understand. Or don’t agree with.”

“Look, I get it Jotaro. It’s powerful. I shouldn’t mess with it.”

“There’s only one problem,” Jotaro said. “You will be asked to use it. And if you don’t treat it with respect, it could end in disaster.”

“…G-got it! Treat the retcon with respect! Be serious.”

“I mean it, John. You need to u-”

John’s phone rang. He quickly fished it out of his blue robes and looked at it. New message from undyingUmbrage.

“I have to take this,” John said, zapping away before Jotaro could do anything.

Jotaro narrowed his eyes. This was giving him a bad feeling.

~~~

John zapped across the skies of Earth C – leaving the human section of the planet and moving to the troll-dominated areas. Here the buildings were elaborate constructions with colored windows that stacked on top of each other like they had been created like a child playing with bricks.

He checked the text on his phone.

uu: EGBERT. EGBERT WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHY HAVE YOU HIDDEN YOURSELF.
uu: EGBERT! ANSWER ME THIS MINUTE OR THE BUNNY GETS IT!
EB: calm down caliborn. i just had to get away from a party.
uu: YOU VANISHED FROM MY SIGHTS.
uu: FOR A PARTY.
uu: WHAT AN UTTER WASTE OF YOUR TIME.
uu: IT WAS THE VOID BITCH WASN’T IT.
EB: yes, it was roxy. ROXY. not ‘the void bitch’.
uu: THE FACT THAT YOU KEEP TRYING TO CORRECT ME NEVER CEASES TO AMUSE ME.
uu: YOU TRULY ARE THE DIMMEST OF ALL THE HUMANS. AND THEY CALL YOU LEADER.

John decided to shift to another location, this time over the black-and-white home of the carapacians, their constructions looking a lot more like medieval castles and farms for the most part. Except the ones that looked like giant cans.

EB: what do you even want?
uu: WHAT ELSE DO YOU THINK I WANT?
uu: I KEEP CHALLENGING YOU. AND YOU KEEP PROVING YOURSELF TO BE A COMPLETE FUCKING WIMP.
uu: YOU HAVE THE ZAPPY POWER.
uu: YOU CAN GET HERE.
EB: i literally just finished a conversation with a big guy where we talked about not abusing the power.
uu: THIS MAN IS A FOOL!
uu: I ABUSED MY POWER. IT ONLY GAVE ME MORE POWER!
uu: IT IS THE SAME FOR YOU EGBERT.
uu: BEND EVERYTHING TO YOUR WILL. COME FACE ME.
uu: GAIN MORE POWER FOR YOURSELF.
EB: this is totally a trap.
uu: YOU KNOW YOU HAVE TO COME FACE ME EVENTUALLY.
uu: I WILL EVENTUALLY GO ELSEWHERE. AND LAY WASTE TO ALL REALITY!
uu: AND I WILL GET ALL THE BITCHES.
uu: ALL OF THEM.
EB: you stole that line.
uu: tUMUt
uu: IT’S MINE NOW.

John switched locations again, this time appearing over the colorful candyland that the consorts inhabited in all their amphibious and reptilian glory.

EB: clearly this conversation is going nowhere.
uu: ITS GOING SOMEWHERE.
uu: I WILL GET YOU HERE EVENTUALLY.
uu: ALL NINE.
EB: …nine?
uu: EIGHT. EIGHT.
EB: did you forget how to count?
uu: tUMUt
EB: you use that too much. you should get a new angry face.
uu: EGBERT. IF YOU ARE NOT ASSUMING MY FACE IS ETERNALLY ANGRY.
uu: YOU ARE EVEN STUPIDER THAN I GAVE YOU CREDIT FOR.
uu: COME GET YOUR FUCKING TROPHY.
EB: ugh, fine, i’ll gather everyone and beat up your sorry ass. i’ve got something else to deal with right now, so it won’t be instant.
uu: I WILL REIN IN THE UNENDING STREAM OF SHIT I WANT TO GIVE YOU.
uu: IN HOPES THAT IT WILL MAKE YOU COMPLETE YOUR SHITTY, EMPTY HUMAN ERRAND.
uu: AND GET YOUR WINDY BODY TO ME ALREADY.

John had started typing a reply to get Caliborn off his back, but someone swiped the phone out of his hands.

“V-Vriska?”

Vriska was typing away furiously on the phone. “You need to stop talking to this guy.”

“Bu-”

“No buts, we need to ensure the timestream doesn’t mess up. And here’s how I’m going to do that.”

~arachnidsGrip has joined~
uu: WHAT THE FUCK.
AG: H8y there, L8rd of Fucking Losers!!!!!!!!
uu: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. WE HAVE. A HATER.
AG: You know, we never t8lked. Wh8t a sh8me that was! I never got to go full 8itch on you!
uu: RIGHT. THE SPIDERBITCH. WHY AM I TALKING TO YOU?
uu: YOURE STUPID.
AG: I’m the spider8itch who’s going to seal you away in a little white b8x one day, Cali8orn.
uu: …
uu: tUMUt
AG: Woooooooow!!!!!!!! L88k at you, 8eing so powerful and DEFIANT. I 8et that made you feel reeeeeeeeally good, didn’t it? A w8 off your chest?
uu: IS THERE A POINT TO THIS CONVERSATION?
AG: Yes, actually. I’m a8out to destroy John’s phone. So he won’t 8e a8le to hear from you ever again.
uu: WAIT WAIT WAIT. FUCK. DON’T DO THAT. HE HAS TO FACE ME.
AG: I’m fully aware of what he needs to do. And he’ll do it.
AG: Just not fucking now, Cali8orn.
uu: STOP USING MY NAME BITCH.
AG: Cali8orn. Cali8orn. Cali8orn. Cali8orn. Cali8orn. Cali8orn. Cali8orn. Cali8orn.
uu: IF I LET YOU USE MY NAME. WILL YOU LET JOHN KEEP HIS PHONE.
AG: Nope. 8ecause y8u d8n’t g8t t8 m8ss w8th my fri8nds anymor8!

She snapped John’s phone in half.

“VRISKA!”

“Don’t get a new phone,” Vriska told John. “Don’t let him have a way to contact you.”

“But I nee-”

“John, you can retcon anywhere. Just go talk to people in person.”

“I…”

“Look, you’ll have to go back and face him eventually, John. He’s right about that. But don’t go until you’re absolutely ready.”

“After this, I’ll be ready,” he said, taking on a determined look for the first time since Vriska had gotten here.

“You might be,” Vriska said, putting a hand on John’s shoulder. “But I don’t know if you come back after.”

John blinked. “You… don’t?”

“It has to be done, John. But from what I know… You’ll go. And you won’t come back.”

John began to sweat. “You’re… you’re sure?”

“Unless you try to change it with retcon. Which, John… if you do…” She thought back to the House Juju, keeping Lord English imprisoned because of actions John had not taken yet. John would defeat Caliborn… But the cherub would be reborn as Lord English, only to be sealed away in the House Juju. “The consequences would be disastrous for the entire multiverse.”

“You’re serious?”

“I’m very serious.”

“…Jotaro wasn’t kidding…”

Vriska smiled. “He rarely does.” She extended a hand to him. “Come on. Let’s go back to the party. Tell everyone it’s time for us to go.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. We’ve been here long enough. Time to deal with the big Green Sun problem and forget about some evil cherub, for now.”

“…Okay, Vriska.” He grabbed her hand – and they zapped back to the party.

“ALL RIGHT, LISTEN UP!” Vriska shouted. “WE’RE LEAVING! I only need John’s help to deal with the Green Sun. The rest of you keep on living.”

“Fuck no,” Dave said. “We’re all com-”

“Shut up,” Vriska said, holding out a hand. “I made you do all the dirty work for me before. It’s time I pay you all back. You’ve all been through enough – enjoy your world. Please.”

Allure walked up to Vriska. “Uh… I kinda told Jade she could come, since she’s connected to the Green Sun and might be able to help us.”

Vriska sighed. “Okay, fine, Jade can come. The rest of you… Just stay here. We’ll be back.”

“Are you sure about that?” Terezi asked. “…I don’t want to have to go searching for you again.”

“I promise I’ll come back, Terezi,” Vriska said. “I just got home. I’m not going to let myself lose it again.”

“Coordinates locked,” Nova said, tapping her screen. “And I’ve dropped a beacon off as well. We should be able to find this universe again, regardless of what happens.”

Roxy waved. “Come back soon. Wonk,” she said, winking at them.

Nova opened a portal back to the Dream Bubble.

“You know,” Allure said, “this whole visit has felt like the end of an adventure I wasn’t part of.”

“We’re going back to your adventure now,” Jade said. “The tables will be turned soon enough!”

“…If you say so!”

They stepped through the portal, leaving a quiet party behind them.

~~~

A member of Them appeared in a universe near the train wreck of universes that the Green Sun had brought together. This universe had been created specifically for the purpose of observing the events within the new Paradox Space. Why?

So Them could bet on the outcome, what else?

“I think the Horrorterrors have it,” one said. “They may have been weakened, but they aren’t the weakest of the Class 1s. They have the power and home turf advantage.”

“I’m placing my call on the Combine. They’ve been holding their cards close to their chest for so long – I bet they’ve got a few superweapons not even we are aware of.”

A third spoke up. “Ah, but you fools aren’t taking into account how ka plays into this. Merodi Universalis and the ghosts are forming to insert themselves into the combat as the underdogs, and with as much buildup as they’re getting… Well, how do you think the story would go?”

Another one placed their input. “I think the Green Sun remains neutral in the end because the Xeelee – or the Great Will, or the Celestialsapiens maybe – interject themselves and declare the battle over.”

“Lame,” a fifth added. “I bet we get another Lord English.”

There was silence.

“Hey, if the entire multiverse is about to suffer an explosion or two, I want to get my money’s worth. If I’m wrong, well then my reward is not having to live in fear that a stupid Xeelee attack will drag Lord English into my section of the multiverse.”

“You’re still ticked about that?” the first one asked.

“Yes. Yes I am. The morons thought they could trap him. Ha. I’m never getting caught unaware again.”

“You did forget one detail.”

“What’s that?”

“There is a Xeelee in the universe with us.”

< It’s quite alright; he has a right to his opinion. We were desperate at the time. It isn’t often such a threat forms. By the way, do you want to know what my bet is?

All of Them did the metaphysical equivalent of ‘leaning in’.

< I believe a new sort of threat will arise. Not Lord English – that would be too predictable. Something completely new we will have to focus our attention on.

“Why would you say that?”

< Have any of you looked at what Vriska has just done?

“Who?”

Another Them answered the question. “The Thief of Light, a Merodi.”

“Oh her. Yeah I wasn’t watching her.”

< They’ve just broken the Quarantine on Earth C and released John.

“Who?”

< The retconner.

There was silence in the observation universe.

“…They have no idea what they’ve just done,” one of Them said.

< Exactly my point.

091 - The Twelve, Part 2

O’Neill had been in war. O’Neill had been in both normal wars between humans on the Earth, and in wars over the fate of the galaxy in spaceships. Even in wars on a multiversal scale, the things he had learned in those conflicts were still applicable.

Currently, the rule of engagement that occupied his mind was ‘if a bigger fish shows up, the worst of enemies will suddenly become the best of friends out of desperation.’

He found it very amusing that, for once, he was part of the bigger fish in this particular encounter. Never in his life had he imagined being the one to force eldritch abominations and totalitarian conquerors to work together. Neither of them wanted Merodi Universalis to have its way with the Green Sun.

Well, too bad. They had a victory platform, a bunch of magic, twelve players, and a metric boatload of ghosts to defend them from unwanted attacks. Let the big fish of the multiverse realize that circumstances could always turn the tables on them.

He imagined it was a very humbling experience for them.

…Who was he kidding, the Horrorterrors had already been beaten within an inch of their collective lives by their own creation and the Combine were almost robotic in the way they carried themselves. They wouldn’t learn anything here.

He was surprised how calm he was about every Combine ship and Horrorterror within range trying to destroy the victory platform. With Jade gone they didn’t exactly have good odds of winning anymore...

“CORONA!” Vriska shouted as the wall of ghosts between them and the assault weakened. “FASTER, MAYBE?”

Corona waved her hands past each other. “This isn’t an instant process.” The purple house on the platform flashed, indicating it was ready. A spherical magic construct purely of Corona’s construction lifted into the air.

There was a frog inside of it.

Allure blinked. “…I’m probably hallucinating from my injury. Ugh…”

The frog launched out of the magic construct, heading right for the Green Sun.

Combine lasers fired at the frog, attempting to just nudge it before it hit the Green Sun, but Omega Jade used the fire of the Green Sun to enclose the amphibian. It flew into the burning multiversal corona, allowing its essence to churn within the green flames.

“That’s part 1,” Corona said. “More than enough resources, and a good frog, but it’ll need to gestate for a minute…”

“A MINUTE!?” Vriska shouted. “WE DON’T HAVE A MINUTE!”

Dead Dave spread his hands. “Don’t worry, I got this”

“You can’t alter the flow of time for the Green Sun, Dave!” Omega Jade shouted. “It doesn’t work!”

John stretched his arms. “Then it’s time to do the windy thing.”

“The windy thing?” Jotaro asked.

“The windy thing.”

“You didn’t think retcon was his only power, did you?” Eve asked. “He’s the Heir of Breath. He’s got wind.”

John became wind. His body dissipated into blue breezes that coalesced into a powerful whirlwind of a tornado, pushing back the mixture of biomechanical technology and eldritch tentacles reaching for them. The other god-tiers cheered with him, pushing back as well.

But John was just one person. Without retcon, he was just a particularly skilled master of wind. It did little to prevent the Horrorterrors and Combine from moving in – from breaking the ghost wall down more and more.

“We’re out of time, people!” Meenah shouted. “You better have somefin for us STAT!”

Corona winced. “It’s still gestating!”

Deep inside the Green Sun, the frog’s essence began to pull at all the resources around it, dragging it into a new realm.

“It’s creating the new universe now!”

“I meant it when I said we were out!” Meenah said, she and several other ghosts being torn apart by a Noble Horrorterror. None other than Neoan himself.

“T_I_M_E T_O S_T_O_P T_H_I_S R_E_C_K_L_E_S_S F_O_O_L_I_S_H_N_E_S_S.”

He thrust a tentacle forward, ready to skewer the victory platform in one fell swoop.

“BARK!”

A Jade appeared in full dog-tier getup, driving the Green Sun right down Neoan’s tentacle, ripping it to dozens of burning shreds.

“…Omega Jade!? Weren’t you busy!?” Feferi blurted.

“That’s not me guys,” Omega Jade said. “I’m still busy keeping the rest of the Green Sun protected.

Jade smiled innocently. “Hey guys, I’m back!”

“But… you died,” Meenah said.

“And I was sent to the Dream Bubble right after. Then I came back.” She twisted the energy of the Green Sun around her, destroying the incoming Combine ship with little effort. She winked, making her empty eyes significantly more obvious.

“Wait, you died!?” John blurted.

“Yeah.” Jade giggled. “John, you really should work on your obliviousness.”

“But… I got you killed by-”

“Hey. John. If this works being a ghost won’t keep us from talking. So don’t worry about it.” She extended a hand, pushing Neoan back further.

“P_L_E_A_S_E S_T_O_P !” Neoan pleaded. “I_F Y_O_U E_S_C_A_P_E T_H_E C_O_N_S_E_Q_U_E-”

“Fuck you,” Meenah said. “We’re not gonna die out here.”

The Green Sun chose this moment to start imploding. The inner core of the verdant construct became one with the frog, sending the outer shell of the Green Sun into a swirling pattern that resembled a hurricane. But instead of an eye of the storm there was a green orb with a vibrant frog inside, the flesh of the universal amphibian swirling with stars.

…It was a mutated frog with sickly legs, four eyes, and another extra eye on its back.

“The fuck?” Vriska said. “That universe looks sick!”

“The universe was the frog!?” Allure blurted.

Corona held up her hands. “The universe we made didn’t need to be healthy – it just needed to get us out of here!” She pointed at the door in the purple house at the edge of the platform. “Everybody through there! Eve, we’re going to need Seraphim.”

Both Jades felt their power fading – but they no longer had to protect the Green Sun, they just had to help get everyone through the victory platform. They grew the platform’s size significantly, allowing everyone to flow through through the door by the dozen.

The Twelve went in first, followed by a few ghosts. The world on the other side was clearly broken. Space wasn’t black, but a sickly, inconsistent green. The stars exploded and reformed all around them. There were no planets for them to walk onto – just empty space. I had to create an air bubble for everyone now that we were no longer in Paradox Space.

“What the-” a ghost troll said, looking at his hands the moment he passed through. “I’m disappearing!”

“I REJECT THIS REALITY AND SUBSTITUTE MY OWN!” Eve declared. Suddenly, the space around us in the new universe became like that of Paradox Space. Specifically, a universe that allowed the presence of Sburb ghosts.

Corona pressed a few buttons on her dimensional device. “Working… working…”

With so many ghosts having left Paradox Space, the defenses were lower. With the new universe sucking the power of the Green Sun into it even after it was fully formed, the Jades were losing their ability to defend. The victory platform was cut in half, severing the connection between the new universe and Paradox Space.

Corona activated her dimensional device, making a direct connection. “COME ON IN! MOVE IT!”

The rest of the ghost army knew that this portal was being created on the other side – a side where there were no Horrorterrors or Combine. So they didn’t try to defend the platform. They floated right through into the sickly universe until every loose ghost was in. The two Jades came in last. Corona closed the portal just in time to cut off a Horrorterror tentacle.

“WE DID IT!” Feferi cheered.

“Not yet, this universe is so unstable it’s about to implode in on itself,” Corona said. She held out her dimensional device. “However… the Green Sun’s limitation on dimensional travel is vanishing now that we’ve used most of its power to create this universe. I just need to find a… single… universe…”

“Give me that,” Vriska said, swiping it away and pressing a few buttons.

A portal opened to another universe – one with normal stars against a black background.

The Jades used what little Green Sun powers remained in them to shove everyone through the portal at once. It closed behind them.

And there we were. Several thousand of us floating in a bubble of air forced to have the physics of Paradox Space by Seraphim.

Everyone started laughing.

“WE’RE FREE!” Vriska shouted, throwing her fists in the air. “WE’RE FREE, THE SUN IS GONE, AND ALL OF US ARE ALIVE!”

I laughed along with them. I used my Eye to watch Paradox Space break down without the Green Sun, the impossible darkness shifting away. The Horrorterrors and Combine knew there was nothing left for them there. With the Green Sun’s power diminishing, they were able to leave those universes, allowing for a complete retreat of both high multiversal civilizations’ armies.

Paradox Space was, once again, no more.

Except for one remnant…

Seraphim switched to forcing the reality around us to accept the Dream Bubble – the universe held within the Jades’ hands. “I… need more energy to keep this large an area in a different reality…” Eve muttered.

Jade just increased Eve in size about a hundredfold. “That work?”

“…I guess. But now I can’t see any of you.”

“We’ll work it out. This’ll give us time to get everyone back in the Dream Bubble.”

“I’d like some ground to stand on myself,” O’Neill said. “Drifting in space is just… a bit uncomfortable.”

Jade nodded, setting to work. “Corona, can you make a fireball that’ll burn for several hours even in the vacuum of space?”

Corona nodded. “…Sure. It’ll be like a miniature sta- ooooh, I see.” She created a miniature star in her hand and gave it to the Jades.

The Jades set to work. Without the power of the Green Sun, they didn’t have as much dominion over universes and power – but they were still Witches of Space. They took out Earth C, the moon, Lopan, and the Dream Bubble. They grew all but the Dream Bubble to their full sizes, unable to deal with the universe-size of the Dream Bubble. They increased the size of the fireball to the size of the Moon, setting it in orbit around Earth C to warm it. Lastly, they shrunk most of the ghosts down so they could fit into the Dream Bubble, leaving only themselves, Meenah, and Feferi for Eve to keep alive.

They shrunk Eve down to normal size. “You can deal with three ghosts, right?” Jade asked.

Eve nodded. “There’s four of you though.”

Omega Jade shrugged. “I’m going to watch the Dream Bubble from inside. Jade, don’t shake it around too much.”

“I won’t!” Jade promised.

Omega Jade shrank down until she was inside the Dream Bubble, leaving only three ghosts among the living.

“…Hey, we can go back to Roxy’s little party,” Nova said. “Who knows, it might still be going on.”

Jade smirked. “Right away!” She teleported all of them down to Roxy’s house on Earth C.

Most everyone was still there. Dave and Karkat appeared in a time-warp jump.

Vriska held up a fist. “WE WON! We’re out!”

“And now astrologers everywhere are going to flip the fuck out about the changing sky,” Dave said, smirking.

Vriska chuckled. “Yeah, I bet they will be. Anyway, these are more of my friends.”

Eve walked up to the front. “I am Overhead Evening Sparkle of Merodi Universalis. I extend my official greeting to the deities of Earth C. I hope we can be good friends. Vriska’s been looking for you for a long time.”

“Consider us welcomed,” Roxy said, a warm smile on her face. The smile dropped quickly. “…Jade, what the fuck happened?”

Jade sighed. “I died. It looks like that might not change much, luckily. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just look a little weird without pupils now.” She laughed nervously.

“What do we do now that you’re here?” Kanaya asked, turning back to Eve.

Eve thought about that for a moment. “As soon as I can I will use Seraphim – an ability of mine – to contact Merodi Universalis and get a fleet out here. …Wherever here is. Then we can put Earth C in a universe where Earth is missing for one reason or another. You won’t be trapped by the Green Sun or a quarantine anymore, and will be given access to the multiversal resources Merodi Universalis has publicly available. Usually there’d be a process and a lot of paperwork needed to give you this right, but… honestly, I don’t think there’s any way we can mess with you more than Sburb already has.”

Kanaya smiled. “Well, since John will clearly agree with those terms, I will accept them as well for the trolls. The consorts will have no objections either.”

“They have no objections to anything,” Karkat muttered.

“The carapacians will have to be met separately, though,” Kanaya said.

“Bah. Why do we always have to be so indecisive?” Spades muttered.

“Hey. I killed you,” Dave said.

Spades threw a knife at Dave, cutting part of his cape. “Mention that again and the next one goes through your skull.”

“Gotcha, dude,” Dave said without any hint of fear in his voice.

Eve ruffled her feathers. “By the Tower, it feels good to finally be done with this endless adventure…”

“We’re not done yet,” I said.

Pinkie facehooved. “UGH. Why can’t we have a rest!?”

“Because we made a lot of powerful people very angry with what we just did,” I said. “That is widely regarded as a bad move, generally.” I pointed up. “You might want to watch the skies.”

~~~

The universe that now held Earth C was a simple one, with another version of Earth not twelve light years away. Nothing much happened there. There was no natural magic, but the laws of the universe did not demand so. It was a rather flexible world that had no issue allowing most things within its physics, even if to the outside observer it was naturally mundane in most ways.

It would not stay that way.

The Combine arrived first, a small percentage of the fleet that had been in Paradox Space jumping into reality through their dimensional portals. They all pointed their weapons at Earth C and the surrounding worlds, planning to vaporize the little embarrassment to their nation.

“D_O N_O_T F_I_R_E.” Neoan declared, shifting into the universe between the Combine and Earth C with a few dozen lesser Horrorterrors. “W_E C_L_A_I_M T_H_E R_I_G_H_T T_O I_N_V_E_S_T_I_G_A_T_E T_H_E R_E_M_N_A_N_T_S.”

Move out of our way or you will be destroyed along with them. You wanted them destroyed prior, why defend them now that our goals align?

“T_H_E G_R_E_E_N S_U_N I_S G_O_N_E, W_E C_A_N A_F_F_O_R_D T_O E_X_A_M_I_N_E T_H_E S_I_T_U_A_T_I_O_N M_O_R_E D_E_L_I_C_A_T_E_L_Y.”

Move or die.

A third set of ships appeared. They were a mixture of airplane-like ships that had parts resembling bows and smooth cylinders large enough to hold only a person or two… if they weren’t bigger on the inside, that is.

“The Time Lords of Gallifrey demand that Earth C’s quarantine be reinstated this instant to prevent further damage to the timestreams! No one can be allowed to leave!”

Holes appeared in reality, dropping a fleet of TSAB ships. Nanoha’s voice flew across the space. “The TSAB has these people under its protection! Do not take any action against them or you will be fired upon!”

A strange creature composed of galaxies and a pearly white mask appeared. “The Living Tribunal demands the escapees be allowed to leave and experience freedom. They are no longer your concern.“

A Flower fleet appeared next. The Protectors of the Plot Continuum ask that all societies involved in this conflict stand down while the ka of the situation is assessed.

Several humanoid creatures made of stars appeared elsewhere in the space. “MOTION CARRIED: THE CELESTIALSAPIENS CONCUR THAT FURTHER TIME FOR DEBATE MUST BE ALLOTED.”

And then an instance of Them appeared in the sky, the white fractal pattern spreading across the sky. “Hey hey hey, who wants to collect their money? Whoever bet for a Merodi victory with the destruction of the Green Sun is a winner!”

The Xeelee recommend the negation of anything Them say.

The Xeelee ships were significantly smaller and sleeker than any of the other ships in the area, taking the appearance of metallic seeds with long, flat wings.

And then the two societies Merodi Universalis hadn’t encountered showed up.

A golden mask appeared, that of a human man. It was not smooth, but geometric, as if generated by older computer software. “THE GREAT WILL WISHES A PROPER TRIAL BE CONDUCTED OVER THE EVENTS THAT HAVE JUST TRANSPIRED.”

A series of ships enclosed in a non-standard physics bubble appeared, giving the blocky constructs an eerie blue glow. “The Beyonders disagree. They must be destroyed immediately.”

The Abstract bristled. “Your warlike demeanor does not serve you well in situations as delicate as this.”

“Sweet!” the Them shouted. “Everyone’s here! …And the Combine.”

We have as much right in this conflict as all of you do, if not more so!

“Shush little Combine, the adults are talking.”

“I motion that the Combine not be dismissed out of hand!” Nanoha declared. “They have proven themselves to be formidable!”

The golden face responded indignantly. “ARE YOU FORFEITING YOUR POSITION AMONG THE SEATS TO THE COMBINE?”

“No, that’s not my poin-”

“THEN CEASE YOUR YAMMERING, HUMAN. YOU YOURSELF ARE MERELY AMONG THE SEATS BECAUSE WE HAD EMPTY ONES TO FILL.”

The Gallifreyans spoke again. “Is that what we are to you? Extra space?”

“Do not make us remind you of your place!” the Beyonders spat. “You are a measly Class 2, Gallifrey! Do not overextend yourself with your daring words!”

“You could not handle the war through time we could bring upon you.”

“You are not warriors.”

The Them chuckled. “Taking bets now – how long do you think we’ll be at each other’s throats before we settle on anything? I’m betting about a year. Maybe two, if the Celestialsapiens drag it out.”

At this the conversation between the eleven most powerful civilizations in the multiverse devolved even further into petty bickering. Yet, no shots were fired.

They hated each other less than they feared the desolation such a war would bring.

~~~

Earth C called an ‘emergency meeting’ the instant the greatest powers in the multiverse started appearing in the sky. Every faction involved – Merodi Universalis, Earth C, the Dream Bubble, and the Land of Pyramids and Neon - sent leaders to discuss what to do given the new situation.

They met at a place set aside to be neutral territory for the four kingdoms of Earth C – an island known as the Apex.

Merodi Universalis had sent O’Neill, Eve, Corona, and Vriska. Earth C, as usual, opted to leave the big-picture things up to their Creators, which ended up bringing Roxy, Karkat, Jade, and Kanaya to the table. The Dream Bubble just sent Meenah and Feferi, while Lopan only had Spades representing. They each sat on a chair on a round metal table with a lot of papers, data pads, and notebooks on it.

I was invited as well – but I declined. This was something they needed to work out without my help.

Eve ensured she kept Seraphim active in the background to keep all the ghosts present from dissipating into thin air. “So, we have a situation.”

“No shit,” Karkat muttered.

Eve nodded. “Our actions in removing the Green Sun, freeing Earth C, and removing the Dream Bubble have drawn the attention of the eleven highest civilizations in the multiverse. The purpose of this meeting is to make all knowledge of the entities arguing over our heads public knowledge to Earth C, the Dream Bubble, and Lopan.”

“Pyramid Hell,” Spades corrected.

Eve sighed. “Before we dig into that, we wish to play a message sent to us by one of the entities in question. A known friend and ally, Nanoha Takamachi of the Time Space Administration Bureau, sent this to Corona’s device a few minutes after the engagement in this universe began.”

Corona tapped Raging Sights, projecting a hologram of Nanoha on the table for all to see. “You’ve really gotten yourself in a pickle, haven’t you? I don’t have long to talk since I need to keep up with the back and forth, so I’ll be brief. Do not try anything. Don’t try to escape, don’t try to investigate, and do not try to attack. Make sure everybody you’re in contact with understands this. You are not protected by the Green Sun anymore – any one of us could take everything you have out without much difficulty. Even with the TSAB backing me, I can’t protect you against all of them. So you’re just going to have to wait and cooperate when a decision is finally made. Keep an eye on John most of all – they will all flip their lids if he vanishes. I’m going to do what I can to make sure you get home safely, but I can’t promise anything. Good luck. Nanoha, out.”

Corona cut the feed. “That’s it. We haven’t received any messages from outside since, only intercepted ones going back and forth. Of which there is a… lot.”

“Now’s the part where you tell us what we’re up against!” Meenah blurted.

Feferi pulled on Meenah’s arm. “We’re not supposed to be fighting.”

“I can fight if I want.”

“Your ghost immunity is gone,” Vriska reminded her. “They could extinguish you by tossing you out of Seraphim’s range. I’m pretty sure even a god-tier revival can’t bring you back if you can’t exist.”

“Shell, why do they have to take the fun out of it?”

“Because they are so far above us it isn’t even funny,” Corona said. “Eve?”

Eve turned on her eye. “I would prefer to have access to Merodi Universalis’ actual files on these civilizations, but we can’t send a message out right now. So what I have on this pad is just what I can remember, and should be taken with a grain of salt.” She duplicated the data pad and gave it to everyone. “We will start from what we estimate to be the lowest power civilization on this list and move up from there.”

“Have to save the best for last, after all…” Rose said.

“The Combine,” Eve said, gesturing for Corona to bring up a holographic display to go along with what she was saying. “We actually know a relatively large amount about the Combine thanks to our close combat with them and Vriska’s personal experience. They are a nation devoted to the idea of conquering universes until everything is part of the perfect Combine. They are a mostly technological society with a focus on biomechanical innovation, experimenting on any race they conquer for the sake of adding it to their army. Due to the high presence of humans in the E-sphere, most of their army is composed of them, but the higher members of the Combine are not human.”

The hologram switched to show one of the Advisors. “We encountered these Advisors in our struggles against the Combine on our colony Farpoint. They were the highest rank we encountered within the Combine, and given the ships we saw in use in the battle with the Horrorterrors, we doubt they are the actual highest commanders.” The image switched to show a Combine ship with stars inside it. “The limits of their technology appear to revolve around using organic and synthetic materials to control and manipulate stars themselves, using them as power and weapons. A single Combine attack could vaporize all of our planets in an instant. There are a few weaknesses we know of – they cannot detect Stands, and they seem to not understand magic all that well.

“Mentally speaking, they’re all about efficiency and sending ‘just the right amount’ of ships in to get the job done effectively. They don’t send their huge ships to conquer planets since they don’t care for their soldiers. It is also worth noting they are not part of the recently revealed international entity called ‘the Seats’ while the other ten civilizations are, and thus the other civilizations appear to be mostly ignoring their input and wishes. Which are to destroy all of us, if you’ve forgotten already.”

Kanaya took in a sharp breath. “I can’t say I’m surprised the least threatening is able to wipe us out so easily. It doesn’t make it any less haunting.”

Eve nodded. “Precisely. I’m not even going to comment on the weaknesses or strengths of any of the other races at the moment – they could all face the Combine and win. The point is not to think of a strategy to defeat them, the point is to know who they are.”

She cleared her throat. “Moving up we have the Flowers. They are a race of plants who have devoted their entire lives to purging the ‘Plot Continuum’ from unsanctioned glitches. It would take too long to explain in detail, so suffice it to say that the multiverse runs on stories via a force called ka, and the Flowers take glitches in ka and remove them. They are extremely devoted to the idea of the ‘One True Plot’ of the multiverse and will follow it wherever they think it leads.

“We have reason to believe they will support our return to Merodi Universalis to continue our story, since none of this seems to be what they would call a narrative glitch, with the possible exception of John. If they deem him unsanctioned they will likely kill him outright.”

Jade let out a sigh. “Of course they would… John, why did you have to stick your hand into that House?”

Corona switched the hologram again as Eve continued. “Our only known true ally in this encounter is the Time Space Administration Bureau, the only Seat run by humans. They are a magitech-focused society with a high focus on heroism and friendship. It is worth noting that they manage this while still technically being a military state, where their military handles every interaction. They are known to defend the defenseless and step up for what’s right in a cruel multiverse. I know Nanoha personally – everything she said in that message is true. They will be arguing for our complete release with little to no restrictions put in place.”

“No ulterior motive at all?” Kanaya asked.

“Not for Nanoha herself. The TSAB may wish to let the higher societies know they aren’t pushovers.” Eve shrugged. “Above them is the Gallifreyans. We, uh, don’t know much about them.”

Vriska snorted. “Right.”

“We don’t know much that doesn’t come directly from Vriska’s mouth,” Eve dejectedly corrected. “From her descriptions, they are arrogant, self-entitled, and rather cold. Their society is based around the complex manipulation of time, so much that they are known to have the greatest understanding of how time works in the entire multiverse. It is unknown what exactly they want with us beyond reinstating Earth C’s ‘quarantine’ to protect the timestreams, presumably from Lord English.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “They also want to study us. Other than their precious ‘timestreams’ they want nothing more than to cut everything open to increase the matter in their brains. They’re assholes.”

“That’s your opinion,” Eve pointed out. “Every society we’ve talked about so far is classified as a Class 2 society, which is best described as being effectively decentralized, able to withstand the destruction of their core. The rest are all Class 1 societies, a rank reserved for those who have demonstrated almost complete mastery over the manipulation of universes within the multiverse. Every Class 2 society mentioned has at least minor physics manipulation and universe creation skills. Every Class 1 could shape clusters of universes with ease.”

Karkat put his hands on his head. “Once again, we’re thrown higher and higher into the realm of absolute fucking madness! THIS IS STUPID!”

Eve nodded. “Agreed. At the bottom of the Class 1 societies are the Horrorterrors. I don’t believe I need to explain them to you. They seem to want to capture us and examine the best way to deal with us. They want to prevent their own destruction if possible, and are hesitant to let any of their creations fall into anyone else’s hands. They seem somewhat uncertain of what they actually want to do with us now.”

Feferi closed her eyes. “I feel unrest among them. A large amount of fear and uncertainty. There are many who wonder if the battle they engaged in held any purpose.”

“That sounds good for us,” O’Neill said. “They might change their overall attitude.”

Eve nodded. “After Horrorterrors, we have Them. Them are a race of energy beings who reached a universe known as the Pinnacle and became the ‘highest’ life form they could. They proceeded to get really, really bored and have been a menace to the multiverse ever since. They mold universes and planets to create games. We were personally part of a deathmatch where we had to kill our closest friends. The deaths were reversed later, but we know that isn’t always the case with Them. Them want nothing more than their own survival and entertainment. They will take the act of the heckler for anything that doesn’t seem threatening. Expect them to just be a nuisance to the others and not care about us.”

Meenah smirked. “Y’know, I like the sounds of Them.”

“You won’t if they threw you in a game where you had to choose which of your best friends gets to live and which gets to die,” Vriska muttered.

Meenah blinked. “…Point taken.”

Eve continued. “The Celestialsapiens are… well, they’re beings where each individual member has the power within them to shape an entire universe from the ground up. We know they have three different personalities in their minds most of the time that are almost always in disagreement, so Celestialsapiens spend all their time debating. They act on a timescale slower than virtually all the races because of this. They value, above all else, patience, thoughtfulness, and understanding. We can expect them to be reasonable, but if they’re rushed, they’re known to act rashly. They trapped a woman in her mind for an effective eternity just for being impatient.”

Karkat snorted. “Bet she learned to be patient.”

“It… was effective,” Eve admitted. “Next on our list are the Xeelee. Prior to today we had not physically seen a Xeelee ship – they had always interacted with us via ‘wires’ from multiple universes away. From what little we understand of them, they are a purely technological society that exists as uploaded consciousnesses. They view themselves as the ‘good guys’ of the multiverse, and are known to help other societies from time to time. We can likely trust them to argue for our sake, but their idea of ‘help’ sometimes leaves much to be desired. They are so far above most beings and so sure of themselves they can ruin things in their carelessness.”

“So, John, basically?” Roxy asked.

“John is not a technologically advanced society of robots,” Karkat said.

Eve cleared her throat. “The last civilization we have any actual data on are the Abstracts, a race of beings known to be the ‘manifestations’ of ‘ideas’ in the universes they control. Things like Infinity, Chaos, etcetera. Most of them are in flux, defined by the overall feeling about a certain ‘idea’ in all their worlds. Their highest leadership is not. The being known as the Living Tribunal has contacted Corona here directly in the past. Above the Living Tribunal is the One Above All, theorized to be the most powerful entity in the multiverse, but we have no data to corroborate this. Thanks to their announcement upon their arrival, we know the Abstracts are solidly on our side, believing we need to be free.”

“And what about the last two?” Spades asked. “There are two other big honchos out there. Don’t you know anything?”

Eve shook her head. “Nothing besides rumors. Vriska never encountered either of them in her journeys, either. The Great Will is a ‘force of belief’ that is given power by the ‘belief’ of those within its universes.” The hologram showed the image of the golden face. “There’s a lot of conflicting information on if the Great Will is truly a civilization of beings, or just one being that controls a staggering amount of universes. The Beyonders…” She switched to show the blue Beyonder ships. “All we know is that they’re a warrior race and that their ships apparently need reality to be altered to exist in standard space. This suggests that they come from a universe far removed from the ones we understand, but isn’t eldritch. It’s similar to how the ghosts can’t exist in this world without Seraphim active.”

Eve sighed, leaning back in her chair. “And that’s that. Basically, we’re in the middle of a game of politics between giants that could swat us like a fly on the wall.”

“The only problem is we’re a really shiny fly and nobody can agree on what to do with us,” Meenah said with a smirk.

“There’s always a way to fight back,” Spades said. “You all talk about Lord English like he’s this overpowered demon that nothing could touch. I took out most of his gang with just me and my three buddies.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “What about Doc Scratch?”

Spades glared at her.

“Couldn’t do anything to him, could you? Lord English had all that guy’s power and so much more on top it wasn’t even funny.”

Spades threw a knife that cut off some of her hair. “Point taken.”

“You have a stabbing problem.”

“Revelation of the century,” Karkat muttered. “You know he stabbed me once, right? It was his way of saying hi.”

Spades smirked. “Yeah. That was the day.”

“You bet it was.”

Corona blinked. “…I could never say this before because I didn’t have enough of a sample size, but wow. Trolls are weird.”

“Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Karkat asked.

Corona smirked. “Heh. Point ta-”

O’Neill’s phone started ringing. He stared at it, startled. “There’s no way a signal can reach out here…” He checked who was calling.

Clandestine.

O’Neill answered, putting it on speakerphone. “Hello?”

“I’ve brought the cavalry, sir.” the unicorn said. “Though it appears as if we’ve walked into something a little too big for us.”

“Don’t do anything to make them shoot at you!” O’Neill barked. “Do everything they say.”

“They’re saying eleven different things.”

“Listen to Nanoha,” Eve said.

“…They’re telling us to stay put and not to move.”

“That’s what we were told as well,” Corona said. “Who do you have with you?”

“Uh, I brought Cosmo and the third division fleet. Oh, Starbeat’s also here.”

Vriska grabbed the phone. “Let me talk to her.”

They could hear Starbeat’s voice in the background. “Later, Vriska! They’re not jamming communications; we can talk back and forth easily. But we have other things to deal with right now.”

“…All right, fine. I’ll be patient. It’s not like a decision is going to be made anytime soo-”

“MOTION CARRIED: ATTENTION!” a Celestialsapien’s voice boomed into the minds of everyone on Earth C. “THE SEATS HAVE DECIDED TO OFFICIALLY CONVENE AT NEUTRAL TERRITORY TO COME TO A FINAL VERDICT. UNTIL THAT POINT, NO ENTITIES ON EARTH C, THE DREAM BUBBLE, THE LAND OF PYRAMIDS AND NEON, THE LOCAL MOON, OR THE RECENTLY ARRIVED SHIPS SHALL MOVE UNLESS THEIR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT THE CONVENTION. THE CONVENTION WILL BEGIN IN TWO LOCAL HOURS, AT WHICH POINT A LIST OF THOSE REQUESTED WILL BE MADE KNOWN. THE COMBINE’S REQUEST TO BE GRANTED EQUAL SAY WITHIN THE CONVENTION HAS BEEN DENIED.”

Eve blinked. “That was fast.”

“Well at least we don’t have to wait much longer,” Kanaya said, frowning. “That makes me feel worse, actually. Curious.”

“Wonder who they’re going to ask for?” O’Neill pondered.

~~~

It was funny – Clandestine had rushed to get help for Farpoint the moment she escaped with the Combine whale ship. Had the Combine not been planning to create the Green Sun, or had decided to use a different universe for its creation, the cavalry of Cosmo would have been a great boon to the ‘war’.

The problem was, of course, that the Combine never would have let her leave the whale ship if they hadn’t been evacuating the station in the first place to prepare for the Green Sun. So either way, she was shafted.

So unfortunate.

These were my thoughts as I sat on a hill, waiting for the names to be called. I knew I would be called, because the Flowers knew I was here. It was not something I had ever been part of before – the Seats so rarely convened since they hated each other so much, and rarely was there an event that required all of them to come to a decision about anything.

The final list, inserted into our minds seconds before we were taken, was smaller than most would have expected. But I knew better. These were the giants – they wanted to talk to as few people below them as necessary.

EVENING SPARKLE. VRISKA SERKET. TWILENCE. ANDREW HUSSIE. ICATHR. JOHN EGBERT.

It made sense what they chose, really. Eve for Merodi Universalis, John for Earth C, Icathr for the Combine. Vriska served as a figure of importance to the past of the proceedings, as did I, though my presence was requested because of my knowledge. Hussie needed to be there simply because he wrote the story that started this whole mess in the first place.

The moment we processed the list, we were in a waiting room in a different universe. Eve smiled at me, Vriska, and John – essentially we were all on the same side. Hussie sat in a corner, looking nervously at Vriska.

Icathr was one of the Combine’s highest beings – and he was not one of the Advisor slugs. He was a being with a single eye inside a head that resembled a neon blue flower. Three tentacles hung from his head, pulsing and glowing with blue power, indicative of his psychic power that could be used for a lot more than just flying.

He had no expression we could read, but his gaze was that of contempt. He was surprisingly free of mechanical augmentation – rare for a member of the Combine as high up as he was.

“After this is over you’re dead,” Vriska told Icathr.

“It is you who will suffer for your slight against the Combine,” Icathr declared.

The doors in the waiting room slid open, revealing the convention floor.

The room was a circular one composed of gray metal. There were ten ‘Seats’ spread around equidistantly. Each one appeared about the size of a mansion to the six witnesses, but each chair was completely filled by its occupant. The Horrorterror appeared the same size as Nanoha, both giants, but in the Horrorterror’s case it was shrunk – and visually altered to not madden those who saw it.

I looked around, taking in everyone at the Seats. I did not recognize most of the people there, Nanoha and the Living Tribunal being the exceptions. The Gallifreyans had sent one of their Time Lords in full red robes with the ridiculous arching collars while the Flowers had sent some sort of deciduous Tree I couldn’t identify. The Celestialsapien was a male, standing as still as usual. The Them was just a white glow, impossible to discern identity from. Same went for the Xeelee – taking the form of a computer with a screen for text, though notably it did have a speaker for text-to-voice. The Great Will had sent a blue-colored face to the proceedings while the Beyonder… The Beyonder was several loose fragments of a body heavily enhanced with machinery, carrying the slightest hint of being humanoid behind the altered reality. It was clearly a being of another sort of physics entirely.

Of course, everyone else was busy looking at what rose out of the center of the room of the Seats.

It was the Dark Tower, ringed by a field of roses that reached only one foot before the ground harshly translated to dark metal.

“W-what?” Eve said.

“They built it around the Tower to declare it truly neutral territory,” I said. “The Seats are a relatively new creation, when you look at the whole of the multiverse, but they’ve been around for so long most the races you see here weren’t around when it was created.”

Eve looked like she had more questions but couldn’t vocalize them.

A robotic voice filled the room. “In the shadow of the Dark Tower we declare our opinions. Let the matter of Earth C open with the standard statements of intent.”

The Living Tribunal spoke first. “The Abstracts believe Earth C and those associated should go free and find their own destinies. They do not pose a threat to us nor should we invade their privacy for our curiosity.”

The Xeelee spoke with a voice that was synthetic, and yet carried great emotional inflection similar to that in a public speaker.

||< Those on Earth C and the associated worlds should go free, but sufficient precautions should be taken in relation to John and the House Juju to ensure that a higher-order paradox does not occur.

The Celestialsapien spoke with annoyance in his voice. “DESPITE THE SHORT TIME ALLOTED FOR DEBATE, WE HAVE DETERMINED OUR DESIRE FOR THE COMBINE TO BE PUNISHED FOR THEIR HUBRIS, EARTH C TO BE RETURNED TO QUARANTINE, AND MERODI UNIVERSALIS TO BE PLACED UNDER OUR JURISDICTION OR THE JURISDICTION OF ANOTHER CLASS 1 FOR STRICT OBSERVATION.”

Eve tensed at that remark – a reaction that was about to increase tenfold with what the Beyonder had to say.

“Destroy Earth C, the Dream Bubble, everything. Then we must destroy Merodi Universalis just to be certain.”

The Great Will was better, but not by much. “QUARANTINE MERODI UNIVERSALIS WITH EARTH C INSIDE – THEY KEEP THEIR NATION, WE DON’T HAVE TO CONCERN OURSELVES WITH IT ANYMORE. ENSURE THERE ARE NO LOOSE EXPLORERS WHO WILL SPEND THEIR LIVES SEARCHING FOR HOME.”

“WE BELIEVE THEY SHOULD GO FREE ONLY AFTER THEY ARE SEARCHED FOR SBURB REMNANTS. THE HOUSE JUJU MUST BE CONTAINED,” the Horrorterror spoke, providing a surprisingly helpful outlook.

The Them went last out of the Class 1s. “Look, here’s the deal. None of us actually give a rat’s gall bladder beyond ‘make sure Lord English doesn’t come back’. So here’s what we think would be awesome. Split up the Dream Bubble into a million different pieces and spread every ghost across the multiverse, edited to survive in any physics of course. Let the epic search for home begin!”

“The childish request of Them is ignored,” the Gallifreyan stated, even though he had no authority over any of the others. “The Time Lords demand that Earth C be placed back in Quarantine and, furthermore, that the heroes required to complete Lord English’s time loop be forced to go back in time through retcon the moment this convention concludes to ensure nothing like this can happen again.”

Nanoha cleared her throat. “We wish for complete freedom of those associated with Earth C and Merodi Universalis, asking only that they surrender the House Juju to be sealed away in a more secure location.”

The Tree went last. “Everything about them is sanctioned by the Tower, including John’s retcon ability. The Protectors of the Plot Continuum refrain from any further input to protect the purity of the Plot.”

Eve did tallies in her head. Four positive, four negative, one abstained, and one of whatever Them was trying to pull off. She didn’t like how even it was. Granted, only two of the negatives were actually brutal, the other two were just about quarantine. Only the Abstracts had voted for complete freedom – even Nanoha seemed very concerned about the House Juju and Lord English.

Eve made plans in her mind of what to say – to offer them freedom in their society, to say that Merodi Universalis was willing to comply with whatever they wanted to ensure the containment of Lord English, including sending John back instantly. She waited to be called upon.

But she never was. Nobody ever was.

The Seats just started yelling back and forth at each other in such a way that it became incomprehensible. Everyone talked over everyone and nothing was respected. These were ten nations who hated each other’s existence for the most part – they only agreed on anything when they had to. The fact that they did drove them all mad.

Eve looked at me. “What… do we do?”

“We stand here,” I said. “We stand here and remain unable to keep up. All our witness testimony is in our minds – they take it out whenever they need it with a simple mind spell. We’re all open books to them and we don’t even feel it.”

Vriska blinked. “Wait, they’re in my head? I don’t even know it?”

“This room is one of the few things that was actually built by a cooperation of Class 1 societies,” I said. “Its facilities are the best possible. The mind-reading is absolute. There are no secrets. ...Secrets we can hide, anyway. They’ve got tricks available.”

John glanced at the giant form of Nanoha. “How does she manage?”

“She’s shunting most of it not only through Raising Heart, but also twenty other TSAB devices. She’s just serving as the voice. The Gallifreyans have a similar problem, but they solve it with computers and time loops in their minds. The Celestialsapiens…” I shrug. “They just don’t care that they take forever to think. They’ll speak when they’re good and ready to do so.”

“We’re really just ants to them,” Eve said. “Some of them think we’re fire ants, while others think we’re good for the environment, but we’re still ants.”

“You’re just now figuring this out?” Icathr asked contemptuously. “Even the Combine, we who are just barely below the Flowers, is seen as nothing more than an anteater. The Time Lords, the TSAB, the Flowers – they all have something that makes the Class 1s notice them. Their mastery over time. Their understanding of ka. Or their ability to represent the best of the most common race in the multiverse.” Icathr growled. “We could beat the TSAB or Flowers in a full on war, and yet we are denied a seat because we are seen as insignificant.”

“Your fault for not conquering higher-value targets,” Vriska said.

“That is where you are wrong, Vriska Serket. There have been other conquerors in the past. Those who conquer as we do, with pure power, cause those like the TSAB, Xeelee, and Abstracts to consider intervening. Only one conquest culture has made it this far, and that is the Beyonders. The examples of others who have been crushed because they declared who they were too loudly is numerous.”

“Maybe that should tell you something about conquerors being, y’know, evil.”

“It is pretty evil,” John added.

Icathr turned away from them. “What is perceived as evil by the Dark Tower is not as absolute as it wants you to think. It is based off a flawed perception within most beings that there is a good and evil. There is no such thing as morality without the presence of the Tower. Ka is a disease that creates a world of lies around us. The Combine defies those lies.”

“…Why though?” Eve asked. “If there’s no morality, why do you care to defy it?”

“Biological need for survival and perpetuation of life,” Icathr said. “Those at the bottom are told it is ‘good’ to Combine everything into one.”

“Didn’t you just say you didn’t like the Tower’s lie?” Vriska asked. “Contradiction!”

“There is no morality. We may lie and teach those below us whatever we wish for our own sakes. There is no idea, just continuation and perpetuation. It seems best and most efficient to Combine all life under one power in order to maximize the effectiveness of this process.”

“And why care about that!?” Eve blurted. “Seriously, why care?”

Icathr stared deeply into her. “There was a choice between life and death. There is no logical conclusion either way – both are equivalent. The Combine chose life over death, and so have become devoted to it. All for the sake of life.”

“So you just… live to keep living? No meaning at all?”

Icathr stepped back. “We allow ourselves to feel driven, to seek greater power, to look at what we do as grand work. We lie to those below us to give them more drive and improve productivity. But those of us where I am know.” He glared at me. “And now you know the philosophy of the Combine. It will disturb you until the end of your days. Hopefully at our hands.”

I rolled my eyes. “See everyone? That’s the problem with the true ‘pointless’ philosophy. Nobody can live by it. Not truly. Even those who ‘know’ about it, well, they still act on their emotions out of a drive for completeness, or in the case of Icathr, revenge.”

“You are mistaken, Twilence. There are those who have had their minds altered to follow the Combine perfectly,” Icathr said. “I am not one of them. Specifically kept around to ‘understand’ that which is outside that image. It is why I was the one summoned here.”

“If their minds are altered, how can it be said that it’s right?”

“An argument assuming biology is correct,” Icathr said. “In truth, life or death is nothing more than a coin flip. Biology is not any more ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ than anything else. We just chose life. We could have easily committed mass suicide. Chose not to.”

John shook his head. “…You guys are messed up.”

“All for the Combine,” he said. “And now you understand. Enjoy.”

“You get a real kick out of disturbing people with the way you think,” Vriska pointed out.

“Just because there is no morality does not mean the feeling of enjoyment does not exist. It means nothing, but I like it.”

The robotic voice chirped for all of them. “A verdict has been reached.”

“That seemed fast…” Eve said.

“Our time was accelerated,” I explained. “It took years in their minds to get here. It took no time back home given this universe’s time signature.”

John blinked. “Yeesh. Was it really that complicated?”

“YES IT WAS!” Hussie shouted. “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD IT WAS TO WRITE THE MESS THAT TURNED INTO THIS MESS? THERE WERE FLOW CHARTS! SLEEPLESS NIGHTS! A SCARY FUCKING WOLF! I EVEN DIED ONCE!”

Vriska blinked. “I forgot you were here.”

The robotic voice forced their conversation to close. “The verdict has been transcribed. Firstly, concerning the Combine. The Seats have decreed you are never to interfere with any remnants of Sburb ever again, or you will suffer consequences from whichever Seats feel inclined to react.”

Icathr bristled but said nothing.

“Merodi Universalis is to remain unaffected by these events. All citizens will be allowed to return with no changes to them or their society.”

Eve let out a sigh of relief – the worst had been denied.

“The House Juju is to be placed in Celestialsapien custody, where it is to be kept under lock and key for eternity.”

“No problem so far,” Eve said, biting her lip.

“The Dream Bubble and Earth C are to remain free from quarantine.”

“YES!” John whooped.

“However, the danger John Egbert poses cannot be ignored. He and the other eight entities who need to retcon through metatime to defeat Caliborn must agree to a Gallifreyan fate lock. At the moment of their death – any death, even if it would result in a Sburban revival – they will be locked away in their fate until all nine have been collected. At this point, the conditioning within John will activate, and he will use his retcon powers to complete what needs to be done. They do not have any choice in whether they are to be conditioned or not, but at any time before their deaths they may go to Caliborn. Communication with Caliborn is forbidden and will result in the fate lock activating early. The Gallifreyans can activate the fate lock earlier if it is deemed necessary. The fate locks have already been created and added to everyone involved.”

John blinked. “Wait, I’ve been… conditioned? What?”

“The fate lock will also activate if John Egbert ever uses his retcon abilities to return to any moment before this trial according to multiversal metatime. Accidental activations will count.”

There was a brief pause.

“The Convention is now over. May Lord English never return.”

And then I was back on my hill as if nothing had happened.

I shook my head – it was one of the better options, at least. John and his friends could live out their lives until the Gallifreyans decided he needed to stop. But one wrong move and his lock would just activate.

I imagined they were relieved though. Effectively, they got away. The Combine couldn’t hunt Sburb remnants anymore, and every ghost was a Sburb remnant. Earth C and the Dream Bubble were free. Merodi Universalis was unaffected.

And as such, my work was done. I folded up my new notebook and prepared to walk away.

“You’re leaving?”

I smiled. “Yes, Eve, I am leaving. You are not quite ready for me to stick around just yet.”

Eve’s face was sad. “…You’ve been very helpful. I saw you struggle with us.”

“Yeah. I was not expecting to be thrown that sideways,” I admitted. “Though I should have. This is Homestuck we’re talking about. Mindscrews are generally how it works.”

Eve nodded. “It’s soon, isn’t it?”

“The end is not soon,” I said. “Chapter-wise, perhaps, but there’s going to be a large gap of time in the middle there.”

“I meant when you stay with us.”

I smiled. “Yes. That is relatively soon. But you may not be happy when you get there.”

Eve nodded. “There’s always one struggle after another…”

“And more and more friends. You just made a few thousand.”

Eve smirked. “Heh. Yeah. I guess we did.”

“Treat them well, Eve. They’ll help you go far.”

With a wave, I was gone.

~~~

“I hate feeling powerless,” Vriska told Starbeat, lying on the couch.

Starbeat put down the data pad she had been studying: the Collection’s procedure for moving the Dream Bubble and Earth C to Merodi Universalis space. It was a nice loophole in Collection policy since, technically, the worlds weren’t part of Merodi, so the assistance wasn’t ‘biased’. “That convention getting to you?”

“It really is,” Vriska admitted. “I’m so used to being able to have some say. I thought I proved to myself that would always be the case when we were fighting for the Green Sun… But then BOOM, I’m reminded that I am just an ant. One of those nasty ants that almost kill you when they bite you, but still just an ant.

Starbeat nodded. “I feel the same way. In the Collection all we do is think about what problems we can solve. We can solve a lot, but there’s a lot more problems we can’t deal with. Some because we don’t have the power, but most because we simply don’t have enough people. There’s too many issues in existence for us to handle. As expansive as we are, we’re still just drops of water in the ocean.”

Vriska stared into space. “Welp, everyone’s gonna have to accept that like they accepted they were part of a story.” She stood up. “…I’m going to go build my house on Earth C.”

“Will it be a castle?”

“Of course it will, who the fuck do you think I am?”

Starbeat smiled. “An amazing troll with an ego that’ll never go away completely.”

~~~

Eve and Maud sat on one side of the desk, with Meenah and Kanaya on the other side.

“I can accelerate the process of acceptance into Merodi Universalis for your sake,” Maud said. “You’ve earned it, according to Eve.”

“The question is if you want to join,” Eve said. “You’d be welcomed as part of our family, and a major part at that, given the resources you’d be bringing. But it’d prevent you from ever acting truly on your own.”

Meenah shrugged. “Hey, I don’t wanna have to figure out how to make these arm-bands.” She held up her wrist, showing Corona’s newest invention off. A simple ring of metal that hung around a ghost’s wrist, allowing them to exist in most universes comfortably. “I also wanna see everything. There are whole oceans out there to explore and you’ll want my ghosts to do it.”

Kanaya nodded. “And on our side, the four kingdoms of Earth C all have expressed high levels of interest in joining up with our saviors.”

Eve rubbed the back of her head. “Your people really like exalting others, don’t they?”

“It is a trait resultant of Sburb,” Kanaya admitted. “Not always positive, but perhaps this inclusion will allow them to finally move past seeing us only as gods.”

Eve smiled. “In that case, expect Earth C and the Dream Bubble to be part of Merodi Universalis in a couple months.”

“Ahem,” Meenah said. “Skaia’s Dream. We’re not callin’ our universe flipperin’ Dream Bubble. We’re not just dreamers, or ghosts. We’re gonna be called Skaians. Got it, flounder?”

Eve smirked. “Skaians. …That sounds great. I’ll put that down.” She scribbled a note on one of the pages. “I hope to see you Skaians walking alongside ponies, humans, and Gems soon.”

“We’re already here. And we’re not goin’ away.”

Kanaya rolled her eyes. “Meanwhile my world will be a little less loudmouthed about the whole debacle. We can move in slowly, just having a connection to you. I do wonder how much Sburb technology and god-tier powers are going to have to be restricted, though…”

Maud put the papers into a neat stack. “That’s why this’ll take a few months instead of a few weeks.”

“I see.”

“We aren’t fans of bureaucracy,” Eve admitted.

“Thank goodness. I do believe I would have gone crazy if I was subject to the level of detail the humans require within their reports…”

“You’d be surprised what we can hide under a supposed lack of bureaucracy,” Maud said.

Eve shuddered. “Renee’s expedition member application…”

~~~

Farpoint City was rebuilt quickly. It wasn’t as shiny as it once was, and it lost its glory as a resort planet – but the City as a community became stronger.

With the previous mayor dead in the invasion, a new mayor was elected as soon as things settled down. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, that mayor was Anesthesia. She’d gone from hotel manager to City manager over the course of the rebellion.

Some would say the power would go right to her halo and drive her mad. She sure hoped not. She wanted to lead these people as best she could into a new era. They wouldn’t be a tourist town anymore, but instead an outpost on the edge of tomorrow. Her policy began with building a decently-sized Expedition Division tower, which Renee had approved in record time to begin explorations of the distant multiverse in the E-Sphere.

Farpoint would become the launchpad for new discoveries far from home.

A few days after her inauguration, there was a knock on her office door. “Come in,” she said, not taking her eyes off her personal window that gave her a view of Farpoint City. It was beautiful.

“Hey,” Affix said, coming in. “Congrats on the big promotion.”

“Thanks,” Anna said with a smile. “I’m a little nervous about how the expeditions will pan out. We’re in the middle of human territory here, it’ll be a bit weird for them. But fun.”

“I hear we’re on the edge of the E-Sphere, might run into some of the multiverse limits type stuff.”

“That’ll be even more interesting,” Anna admitted. “…I was given this completely by fate, Affix. Just thrown into a leadership position because the heroes of Merodi Universalis stayed at my hotel.”

“Tried to stay at your hotel.”

Anna chuckled. “Yeah, tried. …So, what are you doing these days?”

“Abandoning the fashionista’s lifestyle!” Affix blurted. “I’m going to the Hub and signing up to work on an exploration team. No offense to your little place, but I’m looking for a change of scenery, and I think that’ll be better for me.”

Anna smiled. “You sure Renee will accept you?”

“I already filled out her nightmare of a form in triplicate. I’m a form-filling machine!” She laughed maniacally. “Also I make bombs. Apparently that’s helpful.”

“Good luck.”

“Right back ‘atcha.”

~~~

Vriska built her troll-style castle in the human kingdom of Earth C, just like she said she would.

She had taken to sitting on her balcony, legs dangled dangerously off the rail-less edge, staring out at the human city in front of her. She grinned.

Aradia appeared next to her. “It’s nice, isn’t it? That we’re finally home.”

“It really is,” Vriska said. “I… I don’t remember when I last felt this good. Actually, I don’t think I ever felt this good. I was shit back in Sburb, and I was doing okay in MU but I missed everyone. Now it’s just… Life is good Aradia.”

“Glad you finally realized that,” Aradia said with a giggle.

Vriska smirked. “So, aside from that opening party, how did your reunions go?”

“Pretty well, actually! Probably had something to do with me not having to apologize to everyone I met.”

Vriska rubbed the back of her head. “Heh…”

“I did have to talk to the Daves and the Nepetas though,” Aradia said, frowning. “It was… difficult. Because I didn’t express much in the way of remorse. I wish I didn’t have to do it, don’t get me wrong, but I just…” she bit her lip. “Nobody sees death the same way I do.”

“This is news?”

“No. It’s just a difficulty in my life I have to deal with.” Her smile returned. “The Nepetas forgave me right off the bat. The Daves… They’ll come around. We Time players tend to get each other. …Actually, never mind, I tried talking to Damara. That did not go over well.”

Vriska shrugged. “Her level of psychobitch makes me look like an angel.”

Aradia nodded. “You know, I kinda wanted to see Gamzee.”

“Really?” Vriska said. “But he killed, like, everyone!”

“And I wanted to see what he thought,” Aradia said. “There should be an Omega Gamzee ghost somewhere in Skaia’s Dream. But nobody’s seen him.” Aradia shook her head. “Mysteries to be solved later…”

Vriska chuckled. “When we least want it.”

“I wonder what they’ll all decide to do,” Aradia said. “I think most of the ghosts will use the bands and ‘live’ again in Merodi Universalis. But our friends? …I think some will go live their lives. I don’t see Rose and Kanaya going adventuring. I see Dave eventually going out on his own. Roxy is definitely going to see the multiverse, and probably drag John along. I hear Jade has already taken a liking to the League of Sweetie Belles…”

“So many changes,” Vriska mused. “There’s even more of me running around now. More of you.”

“Most of those other mes are soulless robots,” Aradia muttered. “Such a shame…”

“Hey, we’ve got an army of a million ghost robots now. That’s sweet.”

“I guess it is. Just as awesome as it was when we took out the Black King.”

“Oh that was the best boss battle ever!” Vriska said with a laugh. “Nothing like this ‘become an ant in the gaze of giants’ bullshit. We got an actual struggle and an actual victory.”

“You got a victory here, too,” Aradia pointed out. “You escaped.”

“And then we got put in a trial where nothing even mattered,” Vriska said. “Or everything mattered. I’m really not sure.”

Aradia put an arm around Vriska. “It’s behind us now. Let’s not worry about the past – let’s worry about the future.”

“Isn’t that the opposite of what you do?”

“I’m still restricted by the laws of time,” Aradia said. “I’m not John.”

“Ah… John…” Vriska shook her head. “He’s not going to care at all that he’s basically got a kill-switch in his mind. He’s gonna forget and screw it up…”

“He’s smarter than you give him credit for.”

“He’s still a huge dork.”

Aradia laughed. “No argument there!”

Vriska stood up, flapping her wings. “I’m going to fly around the world. Wanna come?”

“Sure!”

They took off through the skies of Earth C.

~~~

Sunny’s Survey team usually didn’t do this sort of thing, but Renee had asked her to do it just this once. It was a nice change of pace, at least. Her team had joined up with a standard exploration team to explore the depths of Skaia’s Dream and tell all the lost ghosts what was happening with the dreams they were in, give them a bracelet, and tell them how to get to Merodi Universalis. It was a simple and rewarding job, and they got to see a lot of bizarre, alien geography created from the dreams of the dead.

One day, she was traveling with a member of the other team – the Rarity known as Affix. They had just gone for a walk to talk and get to know each other better.

“How old?” Affix asked.

“Not saying it again,” Sunny huffed.

“Oh c’mon, I need confirmation of the outrageous number!”

“Every Merodi will be as old soon enough,” Sunny dismissed.

“And then you’ll be even older!”

“Diminishing gap,” Sunny said. “Think about it mathematically.”

Affix rolled her eyes. “Nah. I’ll think about it as explosions or fashion, or not really.”

Sunny chuckled. “If you say s- hold on. Affix, what do you see over there?”

“I see a Sweetie.”

“There’s no Sweetie in our team,” Sunny said. “And this dream realm doesn’t create conscious entities that don’t exist.”

The Sweetie blinked over to them in a sort of pseudo-teleport, revealing her pupil-less eyes. “…Rarity? …Sunset? Why do you look… Different?”

Sunny blinked. “Uh… I don’t think I’m the Sunset you know. …Did you play a game called Sburb?”

Sweetie blinked right back at her. “Yes…? But so did you! All of your versions did!”

Sunny shook her head. “Look at my eyes. Not dead. Not a ghost. I’m from another universe.”

Sweetie gasped. “Another universe? Oh yes oh yes oh yes that’s so cool! We created a universe – well, the version of us that won, anyway. I didn’t think we’d ever get visitors though!”

Affix held up a hoof. “Hold it. Do you all know what this means?”

Sweetie cocked her head. “Besides everything being awesome… no?”

Sunny shrugged. “That there was an Equestria in Sburb?”

“Yes, but it’s more than that.” Affix grabbed Sunny’s cheeks. “Every player who has ever played Sburb and died is in this universe. That is a lot more than just troll ghosts.”

Sunny’s eyes widened. “That’s… actually a big deal.”

Sweetie blinked. “Trolls? The grey-skinned weirdos? Didn’t really notice they existed before today...”

“You’re in for quite the startling set of revelations,” Affix said with a chuckle. She then started to explain everything to the Sweetie that would one day be known as Blink.

Soon, the deeper Skaians of Skaia’s Dream would rise to the surface, slowly making their way to Merodi Universalis.

Most those who had been lost to Sburb would be given a chance at a new life.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 7: BLOOD]

ARC 7 INTERLUDE<<

That was a lot to take in all at once. I, personally, blame Andrew Hussie, as do so many other denizens of the multiverse.

Regardless, big announcement, since GM is done writing the core of SotS, we now have a MAJOR SIDESTORY! If you wanted to see a bunch of Sweeties in the League of Sweetie Belles visit various fanfic worlds, you’re in luck, The League of Sweetie Belles has just that!

And now, chapters. Because that’ll be interesting.

Arc 8: Rage
092 - The Allure of Time, Part 1
093 - The Allure of Time, Part 2
094 - Sombra’s Clipshow 2: Electric Boogaloo
095 - Creators
096 - The Odd Pair
097 - The Handmaiden’s Aliens
098 - The Elements of Harmony
099 - Clay Universes
100
101 - The Spark
102 - Regret
103 - Conquest, Part 1
104 - Conquest, Part 2

SWEET! The openers are the chapters I finally get to do something! AWESOME!

And that’s not the end of the awesome! Yes, those of you who were somehow not aware, 094 is the NEXT SOMBRA’S CLIPSHOW! You have 18 days to submit snips for the compilation! Rules here. Please don’t panic. But I kind of expect you to panic anyway. ...Maybe you should panic, given how little time is left...

And what about CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED? It’s very special. It’s interactive, but it’s not a clipshow. Whatever could it be? Well, you don’t get to know yet! The blog post about THAT chapter will go up after Sombra’s Clipshow 2 goes live.

Once again, let us consider a poll for the best chapter. [ https://strawpoll.com/3a4b4pa1 ]

Franchises Time!

Falling Water belongs to USA Network
Stranger Things belongs to Netflix
The Matrix belongs to Warner Bros.
Cookie Clicker belongs to Orteil
One Punch Man belongs to ONE
The Expanse belongs to James S. A. Corey and Syfy
Half Life belongs to Valve
Shin Megami Tensei belongs to Atlus
Adventure Time belongs to Cartoon Network

Also discord server [ https://discordapp.com/invite/eTuseTh ] and fimfiction group [ https://www.fimfiction.net/group/213761/songs-of-the-spheres-extended-multiverse ] links. Obligatory, as always.

Until next time!

[RAGE] 092 - The Allure of Time, Part 1

Allure was not known for sleeping particularly soundly. Ever since she was a filly, she had been restless in any bed she was placed into, much to the annoyance of any friends at a sleepover. She didn’t snore, she just twirled around in the blankets like a drunk spider who got trapped in their own web and didn’t realize it.

This was why she woke up with her head facing the wall of her bedroom. She yawned and sat up – scraping her metallic horn across the edge of the wall. She let out a hiss of pain and grabbed her artificial protrusion, rubbing it gently to soothe the pain.

Her horn was a silvery metallic cone far sharper than any natural unicorn’s horn. The grooves in it were not a spiral, but rather three concentric rings. It worked just as well as her normal horn for actually doing magic, which was to say she still didn’t have much to work with.

It had no nerves in it so she wasn’t as aware of its position as she used to be, though after a few months she’d thought she’d finally gotten the hang of not scraping it on stuff. The horn itself may not have been able to feel pain, but when it tugged on the base at her skull the sensation was not only jarringly unpleasant, it also brought about a headache.

She rubbed her temples until the ache in her head went away – then she took a breath. It was time to wake up anyway, no need to get upset about losing sleep. She moved to leave her bed, but one of the blankets grabbed her back hoof, making her trip and land flat on her stomach. “What a great start to the day…” she muttered.

She pulled herself up and walked out of her room, into the mixture living room/kitchen area she owned. Minna was already up, sitting on the couch, face glued on the TV. She was watching the news – odd for a thirteen-year old, certainly, but not even close to the weirdest thing she had done.

“…Skarn the Shaper made direct contact with Celestia City last night, and his daughter will be traveling to meet with Mayor Blumiere shortly. Another multiversal society has appeared before us. Will they be the friends they claim to be?”

“I don’t like him,” Minna said.

Allure glanced at the TV as she began to prepare breakfast. “Hm?” There was an image of a tall, brown, anthropomorphic horned bear on screen, with the caption Brell. “Minna, that’s a woman.”

“Not her. Skarn. The big bear.”

“Why?” Allure said, flipping the pancakes.

Minna shrugged. “Just don’t. Bad feeling.”

“Well, sometimes intuition ha-” Allure’s pancakes burst into flames. “What the-!?“

Minna leaped off the couch and ran to help her mother put out the fire, though by the time she arrived Allure had already taken care of the fire by placing a lid over the pan. After a few seconds, she removed the lid to see black charred remains.

“…That’s still edible, right?” Allure asked Minna.

“No.”

“…Cereal it is today. At least we still have nice orange juic-”

She stared at the glass of juice she had poured. It was black and looked like cinders. “Oh come on! How did that even happen!? I haven’t burnt juice since I was twelve!”

“…How do you burn juice?” Minna asked.

“You, uh… you…” Allure blinked. “I have no idea how I did that.”

“You could probably make money off burnt juice. Sell it as a novelty or something.”

Allure blinked. “…Yeah, no.”

“Your loss,” Minna said. “So… mom…”

“No.”

“But I didn’t even ask yet!”

“You want to come on the adventure today. Minna, it’s a school day. You’re going to school. I’m going to work. Which is probably going to be patrolling Celestia City and not going anywhere special. So you’re not missing out.”

Minna groaned. “Fiiiine.” She grabbed her bowl of cereal and ate in silence.

Allure would have been concerned about this behavior if she wasn’t busy having an existential crisis over the burnt juice. How did the fire even reach it? How can you burn juice!? How in… Her mind’s processor stopped working.

“…Mom?”

“Huh?” she said, realizing she had a spoon of cereal levitated in front of her mouth, all the milk having dripped out onto the table below. “Oh for the…”

Minna hefted her backpack up. “I’m going to school now. Don’t you need to go to the League…?”

“Ponyfeathers,” Allure muttered, abandoning her breakfast and scrambling out the door. It helped to be a pony on days like this – she didn’t need to worry about getting dressed or anything of that sort. She just had to run.

Once again she wished she could teleport. Must be nice to go to and from places without straining legs to the brink.

She ran along the street.

“Morning Allure!” the pink Seskii called from her potion stand, which was currently situated across the street in front of a new ‘artistic installation’ that was literally just a bunch of scrap metal thrown into a pile two stories high.

Allure waved at Seskii for a moment, but the action of picking up one hoof while in the middle of a run sent her skidding across the pavement. She scrambled back to her hooves and continued on to the League of Sweetie Belles. She stepped into a public teleporter terminal and sent herself right to the League.

She barged in the front doors and ran through the man lobby. She slipped on the wet floor – having completely missed the ‘wet floor’ sign – and skidded until she hit Squeaky. They ended up in a position where Allure had Squeaky pinned to the ground awkwardly.

Allure blushed. “Uh… I think ka has it in for me today.”

“No kidding,” Squeaky muttered. “Mind getting off me? Sweeties are starting to stare.”

Allure scrambled off and dusted herself. “Eheh… Anyway, what’s up today?”

“Besides Blumiere’s meeting? Nothing,” Squeaky said. “We’ve got a slow day. By the way, ka is going to continue hating you.”

“…Why?”

“It’s your turn to manage the phones.”

Allure twitched. “…Great. This is just gonna be one of those days.”

“There’s the special ice cream in the fridge for lunch, don’t you worry,” Squeaky said, patting Allure on the back. “Also if the ‘Gregory’ guy calls about his fly problem, hang up. Then don’t answer the phone for five minutes.”

Allure blinked. “Sure.”

~~~

The phone rang again.

Jade barked, then put her hands over her mouth. “Sorry!” Jade had taken to hanging around the League of Sweetie Belles a lot, becoming sort of the ‘office dog’, occasionally going on missions with them. She’d decided to keep Allure company while managing the phones.

Allure rolled her eyes at Jade and picked up the League’s official phone. “League of Sweetie Belles, this is Allure.”

“I dropped off a sac of their eggs in your ventilation two days ago. They should already be leaving their grub state. Maybe now you’ll take my fly problem seriously.” The man Allure could only assume as ‘Gregory’ hung up.

Allure stared at the phone, blinking. “Uh… Okay. Jade?”

“On it.” She floated over to the ventilation system and popped the grate off the outlet. She looked in. “Don’t see any flies.”

“Do you know what this Gregory’s deal is?”

“He wants us to deal with his fly infestation for free rather than hire an exterminator,” Jade said. “He’s very persistent about it.”

“If he’s that persistent why not hire the exterminator?”

Jade shrugged. “I’ve never seen him, only heard other Sweeties talk about him.”

Allure looked up at the ventilation. “You know, if I poke my head up there, I’m just going to get a face full of flies given my luck today.”

“Did Vriska get to you?”

Allure blinked. “…You know what? That sounds like a solid maybe. Maybe I should call h-”

The phone rang again. Allure sighed. “League of Sweetie Belles, this is Allure.”

“Why aren’t you screaming in disgust at the infestation of flies!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?”

“Gregory, just go hire an exterminator.”

Gregory hung up.

Allure stared at the phone in confusion. “I… I just don’t get this guy.”

“I don’t think anybody does,” Jade said.

Allure checked the clock. “Well, it’s lunch time in a bit. After that my shift is DONE! I can get some other poor Sweet-”

The phone rang again.

“League of Sweetie Belles, this is Allure.”

“Help! My cat is stuck in a tree and I can’t get it down!”

Allure blinked. “…We’re not the fire department. Actually, don’t call the fire department either, cats can climb down trees on their own if they want.”

“But Fluffles is terrified of trees! You have to help!”

“Look, miss, find a local pegasus and have them fly up there.”

“They might hurt Fluffles!”

“And you think I won’t!?” Allure blurted.

The woman let out a stressed shriek and hung up.

Allure rammed her head into the desk and let out a scream.

“…Better?” Jade asked.

“I will be once I have lunch,” Allure muttered, walking away from the phone and into the break room. There was a fridge, a series of shelves with different sandwiches on them, a food replicator that had OUT OF ORDER on it, and a television screen displaying the news. There were at least a dozen flies on the ceiling of this room.

“…I was expecting worse,” Allure said. It was easy enough to squish all the flies in her telekinesis and dump them in the trash. “Guess they just like the break room better than the other rooms.”

Two Sweeties walked into the room, shouting at each other. They apparently decided the break room was the place to have their argument.

“Look, we have to figure out how to share him!”

“Sharing? Do you realize what you sound like!?”

“He doesn’t know there’s two of us!”

“Whose fault is that!?”

“Yours!”

“NUH-UH!”

Allure hated how common this argument was in the League. “Oh hey I like this guy” followed by “I like that guy too” answered with “back off” and then “wait a minute he has no idea there’s two of us does he?” You’d think the Sweeties would be careful about that by now.

Allure wasn’t in the mood to deal with it. She walked to the fridge – realizing with annoyance that someone hadn’t closed it all the way. She poked her head inside to find not only had the ice cream melted, but there were three flies in it.

She closed the fridge. “Suffocate, vermin,” she muttered. She decided to just take a sandwich, but before she could do that the television suddenly cut to ‘BREAKING NEWS’

Allure turned to it, ears perking up.

“The Ga of Inchari Libera have begun to riot outside the Mayor’s residence. As of this report their intent is unknown, but it is expected the demonstrating group is protesting against Inchari Libera’s application to join Merodi Universalis…”

Allure sighed. “That sounds like an emergency for us to deal with.” She set her sandwich down. “You can teleport us there, right?”

Jade nodded slowly. “…You guys didn’t tell me the Ga were Gardevoirs.”

“What?”

“From the Pokémon games.” She pointed at the news feed. The Ga were creatures with white skin and predominantly green hair, though other colors were visible in the crowd. All of them had red spikes in their chests and frilled ears. The women appeared to have dresses as part of their body, while the men had sharp points coming out the back of their elbows.

“Huh, really? I always thought they were a variant of Seskii’s race or something,” Allure said. “That’s not the point. Just teleport us there.”

Despite having lost her Green Sun power, Jade was still the Witch of Space, and as such could easily teleport within Celestia City. They appeared on the front steps of Blumiere’s house, right in front the rioting Ga. It was admittedly smaller than Allure had expected from the news report, only a few dozen individuals participating.

Thrackerzod was the only one there, using an eldritch wall to keep them back.

“Where are the other Sweeties?” Allure asked.

“I don’t have any idea,” Thrackerzod muttered. “All I know is that I’ve got th-” One of the Ga used a psychic power to punch Thrackerzod from the other side of the barrier, tossing her to the side with surprising ease.

“CHARGE!” a Ga man shouted, rushing forward.

Allure readied herself to knock him down. She didn’t get the opportunity – Blumiere stepped out of the front doors of his home, dark energy billowing off his back. “What is the meaning o-”

Gunfire rang out. The Ga in the riot quickly forgot their anger and started scrambling to protect themselves from the shots. Blumiere easily defended himself using dark magic, while Jade’s ghost body couldn’t take any permanent damage unless one of the bullets hit her reality bracelet - though she could feel pain.

Allure, however, took one to the leg. She yelled out in pain – but she was more annoyed by the way this day had turned out than worried about her wound. “This is stupid,” she muttered, limping backward to find some cover within Blumiere’s house.

A psychic blast from a Ga woman with blue hair sent her flying into the air instead. Allure locked eyes with her, glaring.

The woman raised a gun to take Allure out, using her free hand to psychically keep Allure in place. She fired…

And then all of Celestia City exploded. A white light shot out of the center of the Merodi’s pride, tearing the ground beneath them to shreds. Allure was aware enough to feel the white light burning her skin away.

She roared out in rage, her very soul fighting back against the burning fire of destruction. There was a pink spark-

And then there was nothing.

~~~

Allure woke up and dragged her horn against the wall of her bedroom. She let out a hiss of pain and grabbed her artificial horn, rubbing it gently to soothe the pain.

Then her eyes flew open.

Most people would have gone through the usual assumptions – I’ve been dreaming, I’ve just recovered from being blown up, or it was all an illusion.

Allure jumped right to the correct one.

“I’m a TIME LOOP!?” Allure blurted, ignoring her headache. “I just… Why today? …Why do I even have to ask that question, of course it’s today, because it was an absolutely cruddy day and because I’ve got to keep Celestia City from blowing up.” She took in a sharp breath. “I need to test first. Right.” She got out of her bed – and fell on her stomach. Again. She ground her teeth.

She lifted herself up and walked down the stairs. Minna was watching the news again.

“…Skarn the Shaper made direct contact with Celestia City last night, and his daughter will be traveling to meet with Mayor Blumiere shortly. Another multiversal society has appeared before us. Will they be the friends they claim to be?”

“I don’t like him,” Minna said.

“Guess what Minna?” Allure said. “I’m in a time loop.”

“Really?” Minna said, tearing her gaze away from the television. “Neat.”

“Breakfast is going to have to be fast today, I’ve got to stop a disaster. You understand, right?”

“Can I come with?”

Allure poured the juice and got out cereal. “No, Minna, just because the day is repeating for me doesn’t mean you get out of school. Just means we don’t get good breakfast.”

“Does it also mean burnt juice?”

“What do y-” Allure stared in disbelief at the cup of juice she had just poured. It was burnt. “I… what?”

Minna looked at her. “Did that happen last time?”

“Yeah. How in…?”

Minna shrugged. “You could probably sell that as a novelty, or something.”

“Right…” Allure shook her head. “Right, doesn’t matter.” She pulled out her phone and called Blumiere. “Hey, Blumiere. Allure here.”

“I am just about in a meeting with Brell. What do you need?”

“I’m looping through time and Celestia City is going to blow up around lunchtime if we don’t do something. You can probably go to that meeting though, it has to do with the Ga, not Brell. …Far as I know. Call me as soon as you get done so we can deal with it.”

“…One of those days?”

“It hasn’t even been twenty four hours and I’m already sick of it. I’ll gather the Sweeties.” Allure hung up, calling Squeaky. “Squeaky, I’m not going to come to the phone lines today.”

“How did y-”

“I’m suddenly psychic.” Allure chuckled. “No, I’m just looping through time. We need to stop Celestia City from blowing up. To do that, we should start by stopping a riot of Ga that’s going to form outside Blumiere’s house later.”

“Got it.”

Allure smirked, putting her phone away. “Ah, foreknowledge makes things great.”

She trotted outside, heading to the League.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Seskii asked Allure.

“Better!” Allure said, smiling. “About to save the City!”

“We’re all counting on you!”

She used the public teleporter to get to the League and ran through the doors again. She had completely forgotten about the wet floor and slipped into Squeaky for the second time.

Squeaky raised an eyebrow. “You look like you’ve been here before.”

“Eheh…”

~~~

The moment the Ga arrived, the League of Sweetie Belles made themselves known. The would-be rioters were circled by dozens of white unicorn mares plus a few bonus Sweeties, including Suzie, Burgerbelle, Servitude, and a handful of others.

Allure cleared her throat. “Yeah, we’re going to have to ask you to clear the area. No rioting today.”

A Ga man walked up to her. “We’ll make our displeasure known regardless of whatever you do!”

“Mhm. What’s your name?”

“Utar,” he said, narrowing his eyes.

“Right, Utar. Let me make this clear. Thrackerzod over there has a mental subduction spell trained on all of you. The moment you make a move you all will suddenly feel the need to grab your heads and cry. So just go home. There’s nothing for you here.”

Utar curled his hands into a fist. “We will not be sile-”

Thrackerzod activated the spell. All but the most powerful psychics among the Ga women fell instantly. One of those psychics decided she was going to keep fighting anyway.

Allure tapped into her magic, pushing it into her back hooves to give her jump a boost. She leaped through the air and placed a hoof on the woman’s shoulder. She was pushed to the ground by the force of the attack, allowing Allure to pin her, holding a hoof on her neck. “I said no rioting.”

She glared at Allure in anger, but decided she didn’t want to risk a snapped spinal column. She let her limbs go limp with an annoyed grunt.

“Good. Clear!” Allure said. She got up and dusted herself off.

“You were exact,” Blumiere noted with amazement. “Only one loop through and you already knew how to stop them!”

“I don’t think the people who were shooting were part of the riot,” Allure said. “We probably still have to watch for them.”

Blumiere nodded. “I have defenses ready. They won’t be catching us by surprise.”

Allure sat down, turning to Utar. “So, here’s a question. Why are you blowing up Celestia City with yourselves still on it?”

Utar looked at her with contempt, a hand to his head. “What? …You know, that’s not a bad idea.”

“Right, you’re useless,” Allure muttered. “Do any of you know about a bomb?”

Everyone stared at her with mixed expressions of bafflement and near-panic.

Blumiere nudged her. “Don’t spread panic.”

Allure put a hoof to her head. “Right, sorry. …Looks like they don’t know. So… distraction?”

Squeaky shrugged. “They seem like the sort to try and blow us up, but I don’t see how they’d be able to pull it off. Their race doesn’t have much aside from above-average psychics, and those are almost exclusively the women.”

Squeaky rubbed her chin. “Hrm…” She began pacing. “There’s got to be something else here. Bot, what’s the word on the Internet?”

“News reports about us stopping a riot before it started,” Bot chirped.

“Right… Do we know who these people are?”

“Sights Unseen.”

“Dumb name o’clock,” Thrackerzod muttered. “Not only is it an oxymoron, but it also sounds like whoever made the name wanted to sound mysterious. Clearly, these Ga are not mysterious. Just brutes.”

“How dare y-” Utar began – but then the bullets started flying. Blumiere’s defenses caught every bullet in an aura of purple energy easily.

Allure spied the blue woman she’d seen last time. Allure charged, ready to take her out and ask a few questions.

The woman dropped her gun and used simple psychic power to push Allure back. Allure was no match for the burst. She went flying backward and landed flat on her back.

“Ow…”

Thrackerzod rushed the woman, taking her down easily with eldritch vines.

Then Celestia City exploded again.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn on the wall and hissed.

“At least I’m still looping,” she muttered, rubbing her head. She carefully tore the blankets off herself and slid out of bed comically slowly. She managed not to trip.

She came down the stairs. “I don’t like him,” Minna said.

With the proof that she was still looping solidified, she took out her phone. “Sorry, Minna, I’ve got a bit of an emergency to deal with. You can make your own breakfast, right?”

Minna nodded. “What kind of emergency?”

“The one where I have to answer the same questions again and again,” Allure said, dialing Blumiere. “Hey, Blumiere, I know you have a thing with Brell. Just know that, after that’s done, we’re going to have to deal with a plot to blow up Celestia City. I’m looping through time, that’s how I know. Try to wrap it up quickly, I’ll be coordinating with the League to try something new. From my perspective anyway.” She hung up. “I am so lucky to live in a world where you can say ‘hey, I’m stuck in a time loop’ and people will just believe you.”

Minna nodded. “Yeah. ...Mom, why’s my orange juice burnt?”

“No idea, Minna,” Allure commented, eye twitching.

“I could make money off of this…”

Allure sighed, calling up Squeaky. “Hey Squeaky, I’m in a time loop. We need to deal with that. There’s a plot to blow up Celestia City. We’ll need Sweeties around Blumiere’s house with bullet-stopping fields – and no I am not answering the phone. I’m going to make some more calls before coming over.”

She dialed Aradia. She got a busy signal.

Odd. Aradia would almost always be able to answer calls because she could just go back in time and answer it later.

She tried Nova. Same busy signal.

She furrowed her brow. “Hrm…” She pulled out her dimensional device and opened a portal to the Gem Vein.

The portal led to complete blackness. She took the cup of burnt juice and flung it through the portal. It vanished into thin air instead of appearing on the other side.

“…Odd,” she said. “Looks like there won’t be any leaving the universe. Fun.” She stretched her legs and walked out, going to the League of Sweetie Belles once again.

“You look puzzled!” Seskii called.

“I am. I’ll tell you about it later, maybe. If I remember.” Allure continued on her way – this time watching for people moving through dimensions. They were a common sight in Celestia City, since the city rarely stayed in one universe for long. They were currently in Inchari Libera, so any normal Merodi travelers would have to come from elsewhere.

She saw one – a portal opened, but there was nothing through it. A man walked out of it anyway, like everything was normal. She spotted a pegasus open a portal that led to blackness and fly right into it. She was just gone.

Allure shivered. That was creepy.

A short while later, she opened the doors of the League of Sweetie Belles carefully, minding the wet floor. She snuck over to Squeaky.

“…Allure, what are you doing?”

“I’m not going to slip and fall on you again,” Allure said. “I’m not.”

“How many loops in are you?” Thrackerzod asked.

“Three.”

“You’re going mad faster than I would have expected.”

“Yeah, yeah, get a laugh out of it,” Allure said, rolling her eyes. “I just figured out that it’s only this universe that’s looping.”

“Makes sense,” Squeaky said. “We’re not causally consistent with any other universes where we are. I guess there’s a reason we don’t just dial out?”

Allure opened a portal that led to blackness.

Squeaky blinked. “Interesting… How does nobody notice this? Dimensional travel is a regular thing on Celestia City!”

“It’s obvious,” Thrackerzod said. “Any travel that happened the first loop is preserved in any subsequent loops. If you went to Equis Vitis for a coffee break and came back five minutes later, the loop would allow that. But if Allure told you to take a coffee break earlier, you wouldn’t be able to do it.”

Squeaky nodded. “Makes sense, though I fail to see how it’s obvious.”

“This kind of messy time sludge showed up all the time in the Embodiment,” Thrackerzod said. “They are not fond memories.”

“So what are we going to do, then?” Allure asked. “I already stopped the mob and defended against the attack, that didn’t stop the explosion.”

“Get more information!” Bot beeped.

Squeaky nodded. “Go stand in front of a city-wide scanner so it can tell you what’s happening the moment of the explosion. Then go back in time and use that knowledge.”

Allure grinned. “Yeah! I’ll go ask Blu-” she slipped on the floor and fell onto Squeaky again.

Squeaky raised an eyebrow. “You look like you’ve been here before.”

Allure just flopped over instead of standing back up, groaning.

“Emergency! We must drag her to the scanner ourselves!” Bot picked Allure up and flew her away.

“Oh, and there are flies in the ventilation!” Allure called back.

Squeaky twitched. “…Gregory…”

~~~

“Um… Hi,” a Fluttershy said to Allure, hiding behind her clipboard, lab coat, and giant glasses. Clearly one of the shyer versions of the pegasus. “Um… I’m Irenashy. Um… I’m told you need to use my scanner to see an… explosion?”

Allure nodded, walking into the room, showing off the ‘authorized visitor’ badge she had obtained from Blumiere a short while ago. “Yeah. Were you briefed?”

“Celestia City is going to explode…” she whispered.

“Yep. I’m here to stop it. And to do that I need to stare a…” Allure’s jaw dropped at the sheer size of the screen in the room, easily larger than most theater screens. Every section of it was covered in lines of coding. “What in ka’s ripple...?”

“It’s, um, sorry, my data. I’ll, uh, make it visually easier for you…” she pressed a few buttons, replacing the code with a white wireframe representation of Celestia City. “There you are. I have it keyed to show energy surges, outbursts, explosions…” She gestured at points on the giant image that were pulsing purple. “I think those are unicorns. Being… dangerous…”

“You mean having fun.”

“Yes…” Irenashy breathed.

Man she’s an antsy one. “Well, I’ll just need to watch. And see what happens. And remember.”

“I’m going to burn and die and forget what it feels like tomorrow…”

“Hey, I’ve got you, okay?”

Irenashy nodded slowly. “R-right… Sorry.”

Allure stared at the screen for a few minutes. She realized the main screen didn’t have a clock on it. “Uh…”

Irenashy gestured to a smaller screen near the bottom right wall that displayed the time. “I, um, couldn’t be bothered to put it on the main interface in every view. Sorry.”

“Kay…” Allure said, examining the time. 11:59. …12:00. It happened shortly after noon…

They waited in silence. It put Allure on edge, but she couldn’t bring herself to freak Irenashy out more simply by talking.

The big screen went dead sometime after 12:03, along with almost all the lights in the room, plunging them into a dull red existence. Notably the clock kept running.

Irenashy panicked. “W-what!?” She checked her phone, tapping into backup sensors. “The… The entire system is down! I, uh, it’s been fried!”

Allure blinked. “Not going to get any data, are we?”

“Nothing good! I-” Celestia City rumbled. The clock struck 12:04. Light engulfed everything.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn on the wall and hissed. In her anger she forgot to check for the blanket and fell onto the floor.

She grunted, leaving her room.

“I don’t like him,” Minna said.

“Yeah, I know,” Allure said. She pulled out her phone and started making calls again. “Hey, Blumiere? I’m looping through time and Celestia City has blown up three times so far. I don’t have much in the way of information, but I want to try something. Let’s just move the city to another universe, okay? It might look a little weird, but trust me, we’ve gotta try it to see if it works.”

“Mom?”

“Emergency,” Allure said with a sigh. She called Squeaky. “We’re going to have to keep people calm while we move Celestia City to another universe. Why? Because we’re going to explode, that’s why. I’m in a time loop. Just try to keep everyone calm okay? Also, Gregory’s put flies in the ventilation. Might want to send someone to take care of that. A-” She turned around, noticing a cup of burnt juice on the countertop. “I DIDN’T EVEN POUR IT TODAY!”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Fine, I’ll be right over to explain anything. Just when I awkwardly fall on you, don’t blame me.” She hung up and dashed out of the house, leaving Minna confused.

“Happy-” Seskii began.

“NOT IN THE MOOD!”

~~~

Allure watched as the giant, black portal was created in front of Celestia City. It led into nothing.

“You sure about this?” Blumiere asked.

“If it doesn’t work, I just loop back. If it does, we escape. Figured we might as well try it.” She stretched her hooves. “The people are panicking, aren’t they?”

“Yep,” Blumiere said, folding his arms. “But you’re right. We should at least try. And I do trust your judgement, even if you seem a bit…”

“Frazzled? Angry? Twitchy? All of the above?”

“…Sure.” He watched as the front part of Celestia City vanished into the portal. “That’s unnerving.”

“Yeah, it is. Time to see what happens.” Allure held her breath…

…and scraped her horn against the wall. She hissed in pain. “At least there was no feeling of burning death that time,” she muttered, carefully getting out of her bed. She left her room.

“I don’t like him.”

“I know…” Allure muttered, pulling up the phone. “Blumiere, I’m stuck in a time loop and the last plan didn’t work. So we’re going to try it a little differently this time…”

~~~

Allure sat in a Skiff, filling only one of the six seats. She watched as Celestia City entered their giant black portal and vanished, the portal closing the moment they were all the way through.

She looked at the clock.

10:12

Probably should have had them wait a little bit, Allure thought to herself. She stretched her hooves and leaned back in the chair, waiting for 12:04.

Every now and then she’d try to create a portal. The Skiff would make one, and it would lead to endless blackness regardless of which universe she chose.

She pulled up some video games on the windshield-display, careful not to pick any with story since her progress would just be erased in a couple hours.

She grew bored and agitated with this rather quickly. She tried to read, but she couldn’t focus on the words. All she got was more annoyed with how long she was waiting.

“UGH, how much longer!?”

11:19

“I’m going to go nuts…” she moaned. “Or I’m already nuts. Five loops in and the insanity has set in. If this lasts much longer I’m going to become a wreck.”

She started making a mental list of the loops. Five loops. Each one lasts only from when I wake up to 12:04. So from 7:30 to 12:04… four and a half hours. About a fifth of a day. I’ve been in here for a full day without actually experiencing sleep. Lovely thought, that. She decided that maybe a nap was a good idea.

The explosion woke her up before it killed her.

~~~

“I don’t like him.”

“Blumiere! Yeah, it didn’t work. The – right. Ahem, I’m in a Time Loop. We need to do it again so I don’t fall asleep this time. I… Moving Celestia City. I – look, Blumiere, this is the sixth time I’ve been through this and I… Right, right, I’ll be right over to explain everything.” She dashed out the door, ignoring the burnt juice.

“What’s the rush?” Seskii called.

Allure ignored her.

~~~

Allure sat in the Skiff, again, this time with her eyes glued on the windshield. A wireframe representation of Celestia City was plastered on the screen where the city should have been if it wasn’t gone.

12:03.

They had left three minutes ago, just to give her a little time to grow accustomed to the Skiff. But she was ready. She was going to see the explosion when it happened and where it happened. Then she would go to the source before it happened and find out the answers to all her questions!

Yes… it was close… she could feel it…

The explosion went off. At this distance, the Skiff had enough time to tell her exactly where it was going off.

“Sector N-G, Marrow Street, 5439. Aha! Bing-”

~~~

Allure scraped her horn on the wall, removing her feeling of elation. It returned the moment she was out of her bed and on her four hooves.

She trotted to the kitchen-living room.

“I don’t like him.”

“That’s nice,” Allure said absent-mindedly. She pulled out her phone. “Hey, Thrackerzod. I’m stuck in a time loop. Meet me at Sector N-G, Marrow Street, 5439 in half an hour. We’ve got some investigating to do.”

“Oooh, can I come!?” Minna asked.

“No, you have school,” Allure said. “But you can have breakfast. How do pancakes sound?”

“Great!”

Allure started cooking.

Hey wait a minute, didn’t I light these on fire la-

The pancakes lit on fire. She smothered them, looking like she was about to blow a gasket. “Cereal it is!”

“I didn’t know you could burn juice.”

“APPARENTLY YOU CAN WITHOUT EVEN TRYING!” Allure said with a forced laugh.

“…Mom? Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Allure said, sitting down. She tossed the burnt juice into the trash. “But let’s enjoy our breakfast anyway and not freak out over the continual existence of burnt juice. That’d be silly. And frivolous.”

“I think you could make money off of it.”

“Is that all you ever think about?”

Minna cocked her head. “…No?”

Allure drove her face into her cereal.

Minna blinked. “…Mom?”

“Just give me a minute…”

A minute turned out to be a little bit too long. Allure had to run out of the house two minutes before she was supposed to meet Thrackerzod.

“Don’t trip!” Seskii called.

Allure took her advice without realizing it. She pulled out her phone. “Hey, Thrackerzod, where did I tell you to meet me? See, I don’t have any paper that I can take through the time loop and I’ve completely forgotten…”

~~~

Sector N-G, Marrow Street, 5439 was a small warehouse on a street in the middle of an abandoned factory district.

Allure came running in, panting heavily.

“You look like a cow has been sitting on you for hours,” Thrackerzod observed.

“I’m going a little nuts,” Allure admitted. “Loop seven. The fun thing is I’ve never been here before. Got information on it last loop.”

“So why are we here?”

“Because the explosion that destroys Celestia City will originate from here,” Allure said. “We’re here to investigate.”

Thrackerzod nodded. “Seems reasonable enough. Squeaky’s ticked at you, though.”

“She can man the phones if she thinks someone needs to be up there so bad.”

“I take it there are going to be some bad calls today?”

“You have no idea,” Allure muttered. She tried to open the doors of the warehouse, but they were locked. Thrackerzod tore them off their hinges, revealing a dark interior with a bunch of wooden crates inside, collecting dust.

“Any weird magic?” Allure asked.

Thrackerzod shook her head. “Nothing weird about this place at all. Besides the usual outrageous amounts of dust. Far too much dust.”

“I see where you’re coming from there…” Allure said, opening one of the crates to find old human clothing. “Hm. Why would the explosion come from here?”

Thrackerzod shrugged. “Not a clue. If it really does, it either isn’t here yet, or comes in from another universe.”

“…Probably the latter,” Allure said, rubbing her chin. “Let’s go outside and stake the place out. See if we can find anything.”

The two of them walked out of the warehouse only to find two dozen Ga pointing weapons at them.

“What are you doing here?” The lead asked.

“…Exploring?” Allure said, smiling weakly.

“Wrong answer.” She was shot between the eyes with a laser rifle.

~~~

“What are you doing here?” The lead asked.

“…Exploring?” Allure said, smiling weakly.

“Wrong answer.” At this point the League of Sweetie Belles appeared and subdued all the Ga with ease, not losing a single Sweetie or gaining a single injury.

“Huh. That worked really well,” Allure said. She walked up to the lead Ga. “Shooting me in the head isn’t nice.”

He clicked his teeth. Something inside his mouth burst and foam started flowing out of his mouth. He was dead in seconds.

Allure facehooved. “Did any of them not have a suicide capsule?”

“No, all of them are dead,” Squeaky said.

“Hardcore,” Bot observed.

Allure sighed. “I hate hardcore terrorist groups…”

~~~

This time Thrackerzod and Allure didn’t arrive at the warehouse until just before the explosion. There were no Ga in sight and the warehouse was still abandoned.

“Your ‘great idea’ has led me to a warehouse,” Thrackerzod deadpanned. “What now?”

Allure checked the time. 12:03. “Well, I guess we just see what happens.”

They saw a portal form in front of their eyes – and then they were engulfed in the light.

Oh hey, it hurts more this close. Cool.

~~~

“Dimensional inhibitor?” Allure asked.

“Check,” Bot said, placing the mechanical box down on the ground in the warehouse. It activated, ensuring a portal would not form in the nearby area.

“Time?”

“12:03,” Bot declared.

“Right. Let’s stop this portal from forming.” Allure rubbed her hooves together, feeling sure that this would be it.

“ERROR! INHIBITION CANCELLED FROM OUTSIDE SOURCE!”

“W-wha-”

The light engulfed her.

Yeah, still hurts a lot. Ow.

~~~

“What are you doing here?” The lead asked.

Allure took a serious expression. “We are the League of Sweetie Belles and you are all under arrest for suspicion of terrorism!”

“Wrong answer.” She was shot between the eyes with a laser rifle.

~~~

“What are you doing here?” The lead asked.

Allure sneered. “I bear a message from Sights Unseen…”

“Do you think we’re stupid? You’re Allure. Of course you aren’t.” She was shot between the eyes with a laser rifle.

~~~

“What are you doing here?” The lead asked.

Allure sighed. “Just shoot me and get it over with.”

“…Okay.” She was shot between the eyes with a laser rifle.

Reverse psychology: not a winner.

~~~

“What are you doing here?” The lead asked.

Allure turned to Thrackerzod. Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “Mortals, bow befor-”

Thrackerzod was shot between the eyes with a laser rifle.

Allure blinked. “You didn’t even let her fi-”

Allure was shot between the eyes with a laser rifle.

~~~

“What are you doing here?” The lead asked.

Allure sighed. If this doesn’t work, I’m going to spend a dozen loops trying to figure out their movements until I get through all their bullets unscathed. “Please don’t hurt me! I’ll do anything! Anything!” She even put on fake tears.

Thrackerzod wasn’t there to be appalled. Allure had specifically left her behind this time for that exact reason.

The Ga lowered his gun, smirking. “Anything, huh?”

Allure gulped. “A-anything.” Okay, not anything, I have a list of truly disgusting and violating things I won’t agree to, but I need to sell this.

The Ga grinned. “See, we have no need for your help. In a few hours none of it will matter.”

Oh thank Celestia, I finally got him talking. “W-what?”

“This entire city. Boom.”

“W-why!?”

“To give you Merodi a message. Inchari does not need you.”

“C-can we talk about j-just agreeing to leave you alone?”

“Nah. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t see at least a few of you burn.”

“But y-you’re here! Why would you…?”

“Oh, we’ll be gone when it happens. Mostly. There’s a few morons for distraction.”

That’s probably the riot.

“Boss, why are you tellin’ her all this?” a woman Ga asked.

“Because she agreed to help. And I’ve got a few ideas for some fun we can have with the unicorn.”

Allure gulped. She needed one more bit of information. “W-wait… We were told this was related to the att-ttack on the Mayor’s residence…”

“What attack?”

Allure dropped the act and grinned. “Ah, thank you. You’ll be glad to know I’m a time traveler and you’re now royall-”

She was shot between the eyes with a laser rifle.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall. But she let out a cry of celebration anyway. “Loop sixteen: new information! The attack had nothing to do with them!” She knew where to investigate next.

“I don’t like him.”

“Yeah yeah, nobody does,” Allure muttered, not having any idea what anyone thought of Skarn. She thought about what she was going to do now. She’d already tried to shut the portal down at the source, the Ga obviously planned for their attack to be interrupted in that way. She supposed she could organize the League for a great attack on the warehouse where they had orders to knock people out with sleep spells and take them alive…

But no, she wanted to investigate the attack now. She just had a feeling that the attack on Blumiere’s house during the riot was important somehow.

She’d exhaust this side of investigation before she went and tried the crazy military approach again. One that would probably need more than a few tries.

She realized there was a cup of burnt juice in front of her.

She threw it out the window without bothering to open the window.

“M-mom!?”

“Oh, sorry, sorry,” Allure said, blushing. She went outside and cleaned up the glass with her magic, drawing more than a few stares.

“What was that all about?” Seskii asked.

“Nothing important,” Allure called. “Really! Nothing important at all!” She slunk back into her house, laughing nervously.

“…Mom?”

“I’m in a time loop, Minna. That glass of burnt juice has been following me around.”

“Did you think of-”

“-making money off of it? Yes! You remind me every day.”

Minna was clearly hurt by this statement, though also confused.

Allure sighed. “Minna, it’s not your fault. I’m just… tired of hearing the same things over and over again.”

“I’ll stop!”

Allure pulled her daughter close and smiled. “That’s a nice thought… But you won’t. And you don’t need to feel guilty about it either. Okay?”

“…Okay.”

“Now, I’ve got to go, and you’ve got to go to school.”

“Since it’s a time loop, can’t I just skip and it’ll have no consequences?”

Allure blinked. “…Yeah. Today, you can skip. But next loop you won’t!”

“And I won’t remember next loop,” Minna said with a smile. “Everybody wins!”

“Yeah…” Allure said, realizing with some horror that every time she looped, the memories of these people were all set back to zero, and the people they had become were gone. Did they die? Was having memory erased different from death in some way?

She really didn’t want to think about it further.

She made calls to Blumiere and Squeaky to tell them, once again, what was going on. It was time to find out who the attackers were. Starting with that one woman who tried to kill her in the first two loops.

~~~

Blumiere dragged the blue Ga closer to them with his powers. “Talk fast.”

“Who are you?” Allure asked.

“Nae,” she responded, face stern.

“And why are you here?”

“I do not need to tell you.”

Then everything exploded.

~~~

The next set of loops were the most annoying for Allure. They didn’t have time to grill Nae at the end of the day, so Allure had to retrace Nae’s steps backward through time over the course of the day.

The seventeenth loop she was able to determine which street Nae took with her squad to attack Blumiere’s house.

The eighteenth was just discovering they walked down that street for a while.

It was the nineteenth where Allure overshot where she thought they came from, and didn’t catch them.

Loop twenty, she found them making a turn. But she didn’t see anything before that, so in loop twenty-one she had to wait on a street corner and get exactly what she suspected – they had walked down that street for a while.

Twenty-two through twenty-four were a mix of overshoots and undershoots until she found the right place: a pub conveniently located in a niche designed to hide its location. How it stayed in business, Allure had no idea. Maybe it dealt in illegal favors more than alcohol.

Twenty-five she arrived at the pub a little late and got shot on the spot for walking in on a private conversation.

Twenty-six, her timing was right, but a Sweetie who stayed around too long not only scared customers away, but also got shot. Because the Sweeties were basically a form of law in Celestia City, of course they weren’t popular in this kind of shady joint.

She had to disguise herself as a different unicorn, going with a muted gray color scheme. So on loop twenty-seven, she got to watch the short time Nae and her fellow mercenaries were there.

Nae walked in first, though she was hooded so it took Allure a moment to realize it was her. She walked up to the bar, ordered water, and sat down at a table in the back. Allure had obtained a listening device from the League before she left, so this wasn’t an issue for her.

She just kept eating her nachos. Tower’s will, why did seedy places like this always have the best nachos? Great cheese, great chips… Maybe nachos were just one of those universal ‘we gotta do this good or not at all’ recipes. Or maybe she was going crazy. She had slept a few times the last few loops just to keep herself from going mad for that reason – the mind needed dreams, after all. Even a one to two hour nap could provide that.

Allure kept a careful eye on all the Ga that sat next to Nae. There were seven others, bringing the total of them to eight.

“We can’t let this stand,” one of the men said.

“Here here,” all seven agreed.

Nae nodded. “This has gone too far. They want to commit genocide. This cannot be allowed to happen, even to the Merodi.”

“But how can we stop it?” another woman asked. “They’ve got so many defenses…”

Nae looked around nervously, and then whispered so nobody but her table would be able to hear. With the exception of Allure with her listening device. “The Mayor has in his possession a pair of books.”

“This is just ru-”

“No, this is not rumor. His work of origin confirms these two books of power exist. And he has a chest in his home that is just the right size to hold both of them. If we can get those books, we can stop this tragedy.”

“Maybe we should tell him, so he can use them.”

“We do not have time to deliberate. The Navir will go off at any moment. If we want to move it has to be now.”

The seven of them nodded in agreement. They all stood up and left, leaving Allure behind.

Allure supposed she should probably go ask Blumiere about this… But there was something she wanted to do first.

~~~

Allure stopped Nae in the alleyway. “Hey. You might know me. My name is Allure. I just want to talk to you for a se-”

Nae triggered her suicide capsule and fell to the ground.

“…Wh… Why!? How on edge were you!?”

~~~

Allure injected Nae with a specialized drug inhibitor in the alleyway. This inhibitor prompted the Ga’s eyes to roll into the back of her head. She lost consciousness and slumped to the ground.

“Right, let’s take her back to the League,” Allure said, dusting her hooves off.

Squeaky blinked. “You sure this is her?”

“Blue Ga, serious expression, black cloak, walking past this corner at precisely 11:38? Yeah, it’s her. You better be able to wake her up once we get her back.”

“Easily,” Thrackerzod said. She teleported them all back to the League. They strapped Nae to a bed. Thrackerzod touched her horn to Nae. “Boo.”

Nae broke out in a cold sweat, eyes those of panic.

“Thrackerzod, there was no need to be so mean,” Allure muttered.

“Nightmare jolt is very effective,” Thrackerzod said.

Nae tried to activate her suicide capsule – but of course the drug inhibitor was still in her system. “Agh!”

“Ready to talk this time?” Allure asked.

“This time!?”

“I’m in a time loop. You’ve been rather difficult to get to cooperate even though we want the same thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Merodi scum!”

“At precisely 12:04 today, the Navir will go off and destroy Celestia City. It has done this, without fail, every time I’ve survived a loop to that time. We’ve tried stopping it using dimensional inhibitions, moving Celestia City, stopping the attacks on Bulmiere’s house… Nothing has worked. But two loops ago I overheard a conversation you had with seven other Ga. You mentioned a pair of books Blumiere had that would be able to stop the Navir?”

Nae stared at Allure in disbelief. “Wh…”

“As I said. I’m looping through time. All of this has happened before, and if I don’t find a way to stop it, all of it will happen again. So please. I want to know about these books Blumiere supposedly has.”

Nae stared at her. “…You’re telling the truth.”

“Of course I am!”

Nae nodded slowly. “Right… right… Blumiere’s source material reveals that he tried to destroy much of the multiverse with a book of power known as the Dark Prognosticus. The opposing side defeated him using the Light Prognosticus. These Prognostici books hold the power to destroy entire dimensions from a distance – or worse. If I had gotten hold of them I would have used my psychic powers to tap into them and destroy the Navir’s universe.”

“What is the Navir’s universe?”

“A pocket universe one of the Sights Unseen’s scientists discovered. It could be manipulated to release tremendous amounts of energy, from what I’ve been told. Enough to keep you from adding us to your Merodi alliance.”

Allure sighed. “You have the right to your opinion. But the vast majority of your universe wants to join, you know?”

“And I used to think fighting would help. But now we are just committing genocide.” Nae grabbed Allure’s hoof. “You must get those books. Use them to destroy the Navir. He should have them in a large chest somewhere in his home.”

“I’ll try,” Allure said. “…The only problem is that my time loop prevents us from accessing other universes, but things that accessed us still activate.”

Nae’s expression fell. “Oh…”

“But, but, it’s a lead. I’ll ask Blumiere about it.” Allure rubbed her chin. “Perhaps if we send energy through a portal that would destroy the universe on the other side, the time loop won’t be able to open the energy discharge again?”

“…I wouldn’t know,” Nae said.

“Neither would I,” Bot said.

“I would,” Thrackerzod interjected. “It depends on the sort of time loop we’re in, if it’s logically consistent. We’ll have to test it once, and then see if we can open a portal to the destroyed universe right afterward. If not, it worked.”

“Good. Let’s go ask Blumiere,” Allure said. “Nae, you probably could have asked him yourself if you explained the situation. He’d do anything to save this city.”

Nae nodded. “But in case you don’t get it in time… give me some paper and a pen.”

Allure undid her arm restraints and did so. Nae wrote down her number – and a phrase. ‘Indigenous Propaganda’. “Tell me you’re from the future and tell me this phrase. I’ll believe you.”

“What’s it mean?”

“If you don’t know that makes it more effective,” Nae said. “Now go.”

Allure nodded. “Zod?”

Thrackerzod lit her horn, teleporting the core four of the League of Sweetie Belles to Blumiere’s house. The riot was already starting outside, but that didn’t matter.

Blumiere looked up at them from his chair. “Hm? Is this about the riot outside?”

“Tangentially,” Allure said. “We don’t have much time. Suffice it to say we know that Celestia City is going to suffer an explosion at 12:04 that will destroy it utterly and completely. We’ve gathered intel that suggests you have a pair of books that have the capacity to destroy a universe. We need you to use them to ‘destroy’ the universe on the other side of the portal.”

Blumiere blinked. “A curious thought. But I have no such books.”

“Then what’s in the chest?” Bot asked, pointing down to the floor below. Allure couldn’t see, but she knew Bot was using magic sonar to scan the area.

Blumiere shrugged. “I do not kn-”

Thrackerzod teleported the chest up to them and opened it. Two large books floated out of it – one dark, one white, both with smooth crystals on the corners and center of their covers.

Allure looked to Blumiere. “Why did you lie to us?”

Blumiere took depressed breath. “Because nobody can know these exist.” He raised his hands. “All of you must forget.”

Allure panicked. “Thrackerzod! Kill me now!”

Thrackerzod didn’t object. Allure became nothing more than a splat against the wall.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall of her bedroom. She hissed.

Blumiere had a secret. A secret that can help us. A secret he isn’t willing to use.

She flopped out of bed, barely noticing that she had landed on her stomach.

“I don’t like him.”

“Minna, leave the room please. I’m going to have to shout at someone over the phone.”

Minna blinked – and went to her room. Of course she would have her ear pressed to the door and hear everything, but this was just a time loop, it didn’t matter.

Allure called Blumiere. “Hey, Blumiere. So, guess what? I’m looping through time. It sucks.”

“I would imagine so,” he said. “I take it the last one didn’t go well by the tone of your voice?”

“Not at all. You see, Celestia City gets destroyed at the end of every loop I don’t die in. So I’ve been spending every loop trying to figure out how to stop this. I finally found a way. Guess what it is?”

“What?”

“Those books you have in your basement.”

“…Allure, stay ri-”

“I already had Thrackerzod kill me to prevent you from taking my memory, I can have her do it again,” Allure said, bitterly. “What’s so important about those books that you have to hide from us? …Hello?”

He wasn’t on the line anymore.

Allure quickly dialed Thrackerzod and ran out of the house.

“Run little unicorn, run!” Seskii shouted.

“Thrackerzod! I need you to find my magic signature and kill me.”

“…What?”

“I’m stuck in a time loop and I need to reset. Now.”

Thrackerzod didn’t miss a beat. “Coming.”

Blumiere appeared right in front of Allure. He pointed a hand at her, surrounding her with purple magics. “You won’t find this solution aga-”

Thrackerzod appeared and turned Allure inside out. The death was instant.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall. She hissed. Blumiere wasn’t giving her answers.

Fine. She’d just have to do it herself.

“I don’t like him.”

Allure called up Thrackerzod. “Hey, Zod? I need you to come with me so you can kill me if things go south. I’m stuck in a time loop and I need to steal something from Blumiere.”

~~~

Thrackerzod teleported them into Blumiere’s basement. “Think you can find it here?”

“Look for a chest,” Allure said. “Something that might hold two magic books.”

“Found it,” Thrackerzod said, placing her hoof on the chest. “Lot of magic locks on this box.”

“You can break it, though.”

“Of course I can,” Thrackerzod lit her horn and broke the locks.

Blumiere appeared in front of them. “You two…? Why you two? Why would you do this?”

“Reset me,” Allure said. Thrackerzod once again proved herself by squashing Allure flat.

~~~

“Okay, Thrackerzod, last time you opened these locks Blumiere knew immediately. So fix that, okay? I’m getting really tired of being flattened.”

Thrackerzod smirked. “I bet I’m not getting tired of flattening you.”

“Har-de-har. Just get it open without setting off the magic alarm.”

Thrackerzod took a minute to focus. She eventually popped open the locks, and the two books floated into the air.

Allure swore they were speaking to her.

Thrackerzod nodded slowly. “Those are some powerful magic books. Probably able to drive you insane. How do we use them?”

Allure facehooved. “Give me a moment… I need to make a call. I make a lot of calls in these loops…” She cleared her throat. “Nae? I’m from the future. You told me to say ‘Indigenous Propaganda.’ I’m told it means something to you.”

“Y-yes. It does.”

“Good. I’m Allure. I have a way to stop the Navir. You told us you’d be able to use the Prognistici? We have them.”

“I can. Meet me at-”

“-that pub nobody can get to, I know the place. Future, remember?”

“Of course. How soon?”

“We’ll be waiting for you,” Allure said, hanging up. “Thrackerzod, we need black cloaks to be mysterious. And you need to hide those books.”

Thrackerzod stuffed them in a personal pocket dimension and gave both of them cloaks. “Done.”

“Good.” She gave Thrackerzod directions to the pub. It only took a few teleports to get there. They sat down and Allure ordered the nachos.

When Nae entered, alone, Allure tapped her hoof on the table. “Over here.”

Nae sat down, looking at them both curiously. “…You’re really from the future?”

Allure nodded. “At 12:04 the Navir will go off if we don’t stop it. Last time we talked, you said you could stop it with these books.” Thrackerzod summoned the books and put them on the table.

Nae put her hand on the books, nodding slowly. “Yes. I can.” She glanced around – the pub was mostly empty. “…I can do it now.” She closed her eyes and spread her hands over the books, feeling them with her psychic powers. The Dark Prognosticus opened for her, showing her the dark prophecies within its interior. She didn’t open her eyes. She cared only for a particular ‘spell’. She found it within a minute.

A dark purple power appeared around her hand with strange squares of blackness fading in and out of existence within the swirl. The swirl opened a portal in front of her hand – and dove into it. The portal closed quickly.

Nae closed the Dark Prognosticus and breathed heavily. “That should have done it.”

“We have to check,” Allure said. “The time loop has done bizarre things to this universe. Try opening a portal.”

Nae nodded. She took out a dimensional device of Merodi design and dialed the coordinates. Instead of creating a black portal, an error message came up.

Allure grinned. “Yes… It’s gone. There’s no universe there now, and there will be no explosion. It’s over! I can finally relax!”

Thrackerzod looked at the Prognostici. “We should return these before he notices.”

“Oh. Right.”

Thrackerzod teleported all of them back to Blumiere’s basement.

“Why am I here!?” Nae hissed.

“Oversight, apologies,” Thrackerzod said, placing the books back in the chest. She locked it up and recreated all the spells on it in a minute. Then she teleported them to the League of Sweetie Belles. “Now it is done.”

Allure pulled out her dimensional device and tried to open a portal – but it was still black.

“Allure, you’ll have to wait until 12:04,” Thrackerzod said. “The loop won’t let the events overlap like that.”

“Fine…” Allure said. “So, who wants to get lunch?”

“It’s barely after breakfast,” Nae pointed out.

“I haven’t gotten to eat lunch in thirty-two loops, I don’t care.”

~~~

Nae, Thrackerzod, and Allure stood in the League of Sweetie Belles, staring at a clock. 12:03.

“…What are you girls doing?” Squeaky asked.

“Staring at a clock,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

“Uh-huh. Allure, I needed you on the phones.”

Allure didn’t shift her gaze. “You can have me on the phones at 12:04.”

“Why 12:04?”

“Time loop.”

Squeaky blinked. “Oh. Waiting for the end?”

“Actually, it’s over,” Allure said. “We’re just waiting for it to complete the last cycle so we can ask Eve what happened on her end. And Aradia.”

“…Huh.”

It hit 12:04.

There was no explosion.

“YES!” Nae cheered. “WE WON!”

“WOO-HOO!” Allure shouted. “Great galloping gazelles, I’m so glad that’s o-”

Allure scraped her horn against the wall of her bedroom and let out a hiss of pain.

She stared at the wall in disbelief. “Wha…?”

She stumbled falling out of the bed onto her stomach.

She wordlessly walked out of her bedroom.

“I don’t like him,” Minna said, staring at the same news report as last time.

Allure went to the kitchen and stared out the window, wondering what she did to deserve this. She’d fixed it. What else did they want?

Then she saw something across the street that made something in her mind go click.

She pulled a glass out of the fridge and poured juice into it. She turned around, hummed to herself a bit, and turned back. Sure enough, the juice was burnt. Somehow. But that wasn’t the point.

She grabbed the juice and marched across the street to the ‘artistic installation’ she had passed by almost every loop. She slammed the burnt orange juice down on the top of Seskii’s potion stand. “You never say the same thing twice. You know. So explain.”

Seskii grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

093 - The Allure of Time, Part 2

Seskii was of a race not known by Merodi Universalis. If one were to ask her what she was, she would say ‘a humble potion seller’ or, if pressed, ‘garilend’. Both were true, but neither were the full truth. The true nature of Seskii is, unfortunately, not something she would like to be revealed. So the discussion of such will be dismissed.

As a humble potion seller she was known rather well across the Hub and Celestia City. Her shop seemed to be everywhere, and yet no one could ever prove she was in two places at the same time. Most people would only buy her potions – they were what was on sale, after all. Potions for just about everything: hair growth, the flu, health, magic, strength, you name it. She could sell things along the lines of love potions, but she only did so if she thought there was truly a need for such distasteful brews.

However, those who frequented her shop knew there was a very large chance she could get you anything you asked for, so long as you didn’t question where it came from. Some of the scientists within the Research Division had learned to exploit this, going to Seskii with their huge shopping lists and leaving with almost all the bizarre esoteric materials they had asked for. She charged a full, fair price for everything, but it was very convenient to have it all in one place. Those who couldn’t just accept what she was offering would find it impossible to find her.

As a garilend, or ‘gari’ in casual conversation, she was one of pink coloration, which was to say she was attuned to the elemental nature of plasma. Not fire – she would always say that was the realm of the red gari – but plasma. She could be seen making pink sparks fly from her fingers, or even occasionally lasers.

Like all members of her race, she had perfectly white skin with angular edges to her limbs. Her face had no nose and her ears had two points at their tips. The lower half of her arms and legs were completely covered in a pink plastic-like substance, giving her natural gauntlets and greaves. Her hair was made of the same substance, though in strands. Where she was from, many gari would take advantage of the nature of their hair and sculpt it into many impossible shapes, but she had a simple hairstyle with short hair with two protrusions sticking out the sides of her head, a swirl at the base of these extensions.

“Finally, I get a legitimate description,” Seskii said. “You had noooo idea how much I hated being in the background and interludes. Every arc, just one or two cameos, not even named all the time!”

“That’s not an explanation,” Allure pointed out. “Spill the beans.”

Seskii pursed her lips. “You know, you’re really putting the Rage in this arc. You’re not even the rage it’s talking about either, you’re nowhere near purple enough for that.”

“Seskii…”

“Fine, fine.” She cleared her throat. “No, I am not looping like you. I’m just Aware, as is probably shockingly obvious right about now.” She held out a gray potion. “A potion to keep your thoughts grounded in reality?”

“Pass,” Allure said. “If you’re not looping how do you keep changing up everything?”

“The same way the Sweetie Belle’s time loop had her Pinkie mix things up all the time. We just know things. Sometimes we can just be random, in Pinkie’s case. In my case it’s an ability to read through what’s happened in the past really quickly to keep things interesting. Tried to keep you from going mad.”

“I shouted at you a few times,” Allure said, her anger softening.

Seskii shrugged. “Hey, I don’t remember, I just read about it. You seemed stressed to me.”

“I was. Sorry.”

“I said I didn’t remember, right?” Seskii shrugged. “You’re forgiven. You’re going through a lot.”

“Do you know why stopping the explosion didn’t work?”

Seskii shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe because it didn’t actually cause the time loop? Maybe because stopping it from happening isn’t the way out? I’m not an all-seeing eye like Twilence, I just get hints and clues like Pinkie. And I sell potions.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Allure said, scratching the back of her head. “But I was so sure saving Celestia City would reset it… Why can’t I get out of this? I worked so hard Seskii!”

Seskii frowned. “I don’t know. There’s probably some other solution. Or maybe the loops just have to reach a certain number before they stop. Maybe someone has to break in from the outside. It has to end at some point because you’ve only got a chapter left, but that’s all I can tell you.”

Allure sighed. “Yeah. You are right… but…”

“Shoosh. I have a recommendation. Go back home and sleep the rest of this loop off. Then take the next loop off. Declare a vacation. Then, after that, try to think of other things you could do to get out of the time loop. Brainstorm some ideas with the League. Try those out. Remember not to work yourself ragged. Come by whenever you need someone who just knows your situation. Kay?”

Allure nodded slowly. “…Kay.” She put her hoof on the countertop. “Sleep potion.”

“On the house,” Seskii said, tossing it over with a wink. “Enjoy!”

“…Actually, before I do. Burnt juice. Why?”

“Ka is looping too,” Seskii explained. “You suffer the same events unless you go out of your way to avoid them because it’s amusing. …The juice is apparently so strong it’ll show up every time you involve juice in your day.”

“That’s stupid.”

“That’s the point.”

Allure rolled her eyes. “Right. G’night then.”

“G’night!” Seskii said with a wave.

Allure went back into her house. She took a breath. “Minna, remember to go to school, okay? I need to go back to bed.”

Minna looked at her. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I hope to soon,” Allure said, calling up Squeaky. “Calling in sick today. The bed calls.”

“Allu-”

Allure hung up and walked to her bedroom. She’d never walked back in here at any point in any of the loops. She’d always walked out of it.

She had made a pretty nasty scratch in the wall with her horn. Its presence made her smile and she didn’t know why.

Crawling back into bed, she levitated the blankets over her. She popped the potion, drank it, and curled up like a caterpillar.

Allure was soon fast asleep.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall of her bedroom. She hissed in pain.

Loop thi-

You know what? No. She was going to stop counting. Counting was stupid and just reminded her of how much she was wasting her own time in this mess. This was loop number whatevermajig. All loops from here on out were whatevermajig.

Today was loop vacation whatevermajig.

She removed her blankets carefully and pranced into the living room-kitchen.

“I don’t like him,” Minna said.

“I know. How would you like to take your mind off him for today?”

“…How?”

Allure grinned. “How about we skip school and go see the sights?”

Minna’s eyes widened. “…Yes.”

Allure flipped out her phone, calling someone she hadn’t called at any point in the loops. “Hey Alushy.”

“You sound spunky today. What bastard did you put behind bars?”

“None. I’m stuck in a time loop. This time I’m going vacationing with Minna. I’d think you’d know the best places to party like there’s no tomorrow. We’ve got four and a half hours and no consequences.” She tried very hard to ignore the burnt orange juice that had spontaneously appeared.

“…Fuck yes,” Alushy said. “All right, there’s this strip clu-”

“Something I’d actually enjoy going too, thank you. Actually why would you even recommend that? You’re a pony! We don’t normally wear anything!”

“Don’t judge me,” Alushy said, coughing. “Are you okay with pushing the bounds of legality?”

“…I’m listening.”

“How far we talking?”

Allure looked down at Minna, biting her lip.

Screw it, she won’t remember any of this.

“Just about anything short of murder.”

“…Satan’s fiery teat, you really need a vacation. All right. I know just the place. Meet me at the Bouncy Donut in an hour, I’ll take you there.” She hung up.

Allure grinned. “Minna, you better enjoy this, because it breaks every rule of parenting in existence.”

“Hey, time loop right? I won’t remember anything.”

~~~

Allure shook her head at where Alushy was leading them. “Alushy, this is the pub where I listened in on a secret conversation! All they’ve got is good nachos!”

Alushy smirked. “See, that’s just the surface of the secret pub, my mother-daughter follower pair. There’s more below – much more, so much more you won’t be able to believe. The level of debauchery we’re about to experience is about as high as you can get.”

Allure raised an eyebrow.

“Without disgusting your delicate little minds, yeesh, what do you think I am, a slut?”

“Yes,” Minna said.

Allure snickered. “Today only,” she told herself.

Minna looked at her, eyes wide. She spoke with a haunted whisper. “…Fuck.”

Allure laughed harder. “Well fuck me, let’s swear like the bastard sailors we are! Lead on, crimson slut! Take us to the land where none shall give any fucks!”

Alushy grinned. “You’re trying too hard.” She pushed a nearby wall with her hoof, opening a secret door. They made their way down a winding set of stairs to a second pub underneath the first one, lit only by red light.

“WELCOME TO THE BASEMENT!” the vampire pegasus declared, gesturing at the red lights, the endless tables, and the mysterious smells coming from behind the counter. Alushy cleared her throat. “If any of you question these ponies, I will nicely ask you to leave. Which is to say they won’t like it if I kill you so I’ll have to get really, really, creative.” Her eyes flashed a deep red.

The patrons who weren’t too high took one look at Allure, Minna, and Alushy and shrugged.

“Such horrible people,” Allure said with disgust. “Letting a child in here and not batting an eye.”

“Hey, you’re the crazy one,” Alushy said, shoving a snoring Skaian troll out of a nearby chair to free a table for them. “This place can get you any substance you can think of, controlled or not.”

Allure raised an eyebrow. “There aren’t that many controlled substances in Celestia City.”

“I mean with or without a permit, yeesh,” Alushy muttered. “Look, let’s not waste time explaining everything. Just go with it. HEY! GET ME MY BRAINSHOOTER! FOR THE MISS, A LOOSE FIVER. FOR THE TYKE… Eh, just get her some whiskey. It’ll blow her little mind.”

“…Do I get to drink it all?” Minna asked, eyes wide.

“If you think you can,” Alushy laughed.

A drink was teleported to Minna, a blue smoking powder in front of Allure, and a red seed in front of Alushy.

She picked up the seed. “This is the only truly illegal thing at this table.” She threw it into her mouth, bit down, and her brains exploded out the back of her head. It reformed in a few seconds and Alushy let out a satisfied sigh. “You can see why.”

“Fuck yeah,” Minna said, downing her drink.

Allure moved to tell her to slow down – then realized she didn’t have to do that for once. She decided to look down at her blue smoking powder. “So, uh, do I eat it? Smoke it? Snort it? What?”

“You touch it,” Alushy said, chuckling. “Go on.”

Allure shrugged and rammed her hoof into the powder. The powder instantly vanished, absorbing directly into her bloodstream. Her entire body seized up and she fell back out of her chair.

Minna looked at her mother. “…Is she okay?”

Alushy nodded. “Can’t get killed by a loose fiver. Not directly anyway. It’s there to do only one thing – go right to your head.”

Allure shot up, pupils tiny pinpricks. “Everything is colors.”

Alushy smirked. “What do I look like?”

“Birds. Lots and lots of birds. Fucking hell that’s a lot of birds. Just… woooow. Birds. You’re the birdmare.”

Minna took another sip of her whiskey.

“Woah, Minna, you look like… like…” Allure blinked. “…I don’t know. She doesn’t look like she belongs…”

Alushy shrugged. “Hey, she’s your kid. For all I know that does something.”

“Don’t you for one fucking moment tell me you don’t have kids.”

Minna couldn’t keep herself from laughing. “It sounds so stupid when you say it, Mom.”

“I bet it does! Because I’m a cute little unicorn! That can do anything! Alushy, kids. Tell me. How many?”

“Unknown,” Alushy said. “Probably a lot.”

“How can you not know? You’re the mother. That’s not how biology works!”

Alushy smirked. “You don’t want to go there.”

“Oh I do, I do- wait, no, I want to go somewhere else.” She climbed on top of the table and stood tall. “I AM GOING TO GO… TO… TO THE END OF THE WORLD!”

“Celestia city is round,” Minna said.

“Why aren’t you drunk yet?” Allure muttered.

“Dunno. Tastes good though.”

“Said no normal child ever,” Alushy pointed out.

“I KNOW WHERE TO GO!” Allure shouted. “Let’s… Let’s destroy something. Something important. Yeah, there’s this fucking stupid piece of art across the street from my house. Let’s burn it!”

“And this is what loose fiver does, kids. It goes to your head and gives you ideas.” Alushy chuckled.

“Cool,” Minna said. “Are we gonna burn the ‘fucking stupid art’ or not?”

“Oh we’re gonna burn it. I’ll get the fudge…”

~~~

Seskii looked at the bonfire. “Impressive.”

“YOU BET IT IS!” Allure shouted, standing on top of a circular platform made of fudge magically floating above the burning wreckage of the art. “They said metal couldn’t be burned… THEY WERE WRONG!”

Minna was currently ‘dressed’ in what appeared to be Hollywood’s version of ‘savage tribal getup’ and was dancing around the bonfire, singing indecipherable things.

Alushy had lost control of her physical form at some point during the day and was currently a formless black puddle in the ground with the occasional eye, mouth, or lashing tentacle.

“Did you really hate the art that much?” Seskii asked.

“FUCK IT!” Allure blurted. “FUCK IT ALL!”

Seskii turned to Squeaky, Thrackerzod, and Bot, all who had their jaws hanging open. “She’s going through some things,” Seskii explained.

“…I’ve never heard her say ‘fuck’ before,” Squeaky said, blinking. “Ever.”

“I’ve never heard you say it either,” Thrackerzod pointed out. “But for you it’s less surprising.”

Bot beeped. “Error. Does not compute.”

“Should we arrest her, or something?” Squeaky asked Thrackerzod.

“Nope,” Thrackerzod said.

“But she’s destroying public property! And… I can’t even list all the laws she’s breaking!”

“Let’s just not worry about it,” Thrackerzod said. “Let her have her fun.”

“This is not her kind of fun!” Squeaky squeaked.

“HEY! IT IS TODAY!” Allure shouted down. “Hey! Alushy! Get off your sorry ass and tell me where we’re going next!”

“TO THE MOON!” Alushy said, forcing herself to reform, unable to fully keep her pony shape cohesive. “Or not the moon. How about… EXTREME SPORTS DANCING!?”

“WHY ARE WE EVEN WAITING!?”

Minna shouted something incomprehensible. The dark form of Alushy scoped them up and they went elsewhere in Celestia City.

Seskii shrugged. “They look like they’re having fun.”

Squeaky twitched. “I’m going to have a talk to her tomorrow.”

“No you won’t.”

“Yes I- …waitaminute you know something.”

Seskii grinned. “Yep! But I’m not going to tell you. By the way, I have some extra Loose Fiver here an-”

“GOODBYE!” Squeaky squeaked, teleporting away.

A moment later, Thrackerzod casually looked to Seskii. “So did she get possessed or are we in a time loop?”

“Time loop.”

“Ah. She needs this.”

“Yep.”

~~~

Much, much later, all three of them had new tattoos, a few scars, had lost parts of their hair or mane, and had been moving so much their legs were about to buckle underneath them.

“How high are we?” Minna asked. “Space? Space’s space?”

“Space cubed,” Alushy said.

They were currently standing at the edge of a railing that ended over a seemingly bottomless pit.

Allure looked down. She pulled out her phone and checked the time.

12:02.

“I could jump and reset before I hit the bottom.” She realized.

“If you miscalculate your great day is going to end in a painful splat,” Alushy pointed out.

“Have I splatted yet? I don’t remember,” Allure said with a laugh. She looked at her front hoof. “…Why is my tattoo of a dolphin made out of french fries?”

“I thought you’d question how you got a tattoo on fur first,” Alushy admitted.

“Huh,” Allure said. Then she let out a laugh. “Well, this has been fun, but I’m gettin’ the fuck out of here. Goodbye! May this never happen again! Good riddance!”

“Fuck you too,” Alushy said, pushing Allure off the edge. Allure laughed and couldn’t stop.

“FUDGE YOU!” She shouted up. “HOW YOU LIKE THAT!?

“THE FUDGEMOTHERING VAMPIRE THANKS YOU, BITCH!”

“ME? BITCH? YOU JUST DID EVERYTHING I SAID FOR A WHOLE LOOP! YOU’RE MY BITCH.”

Alushy blinked. “…Fudge you.”

Allure knew what she said even though she definitely couldn’t hear it. “COWABUNGAAAAAAAAAAAA-”

She kept the breath going until the explosion of Celestia City fried her.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against her wall. She hissed – but also she giggled. She couldn’t stop giggling. She flopped out of her bed and laughed.

“Celestia, I’m never doing that again,” Allure said, chuckling and blushing profusely. “Oh if anybody knew what I did…” She blinked, remembering Seskii existed. “Shi- WHOOP! Gotta train my mouth back, I guess. Hehehe…” She walked out of her room.

“I don’t like him.”

Allure walked over to Minna and kissed her on the head.

“Ew, Mom!”

“You’re going to school today. No buts.”

“…Okaaaaay…”

Allure giggled. “Butts.” There’s no way any intoxicants are still in my system, but the emotions just aren’t going away. And yet, I’m not worried. “Would you like to make breakfast today? Use anything you want.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

Minna beamed and ran to the kitchen.

Allure took out her phone. “Squeaky, gather the girls. We’re going to have a brainstorming session after I finish breakfast and get over there.” She hung up, and allowed herself to have breakfast with her daughter. She laughed when she saw the burnt juice already on the table.

She left the house a few minutes later, a spring in her step.

“Enjoy yourself?” Seskii asked.

“You bet! See you next time!”

Seskii nodded. “Of course!”

~~~

“I call it Operation Groundhog Day,” Suzie said, pointing at the projection with a laser pointer. All the other Sweeties in the room nodded. “The solution to getting out of the infinite loop in what is argued to be the ‘progenitor’ of the time loop idea is simply to accomplish a perfect loop. To treat everyone great and do everything for everyone you can along your day. Lucky for you, Allure, this only involves four and a half hours of time.”

Allure nodded. “So just create a perfect day. Hrm… Well I’ll have to stop Celestia City from exploding to do that, and help everyone involved that I would encounter in my day. So…” She pondered this. “I’d probably have to deal with all the problems on the phone line in some way or other, help Blumiere with his secret, help Nae understand what we are… Keep the riot from happening…” Allure blinked. “We’re gonna need a flowchart. And I’m probably going to have to loop a few times to see how the best way to deal with things is.”

~~~

Many loops later…

Suzie took a breath. “And at this point Allure will use the duplication spell three times over so she can continue manning the phones while going to deal with all the problems given by the phone calls, and going to Nae.”

Allure looked at the branching paths of the flowchart. Who knew planning out the perfect four and a half hour ‘day’ would take so long?

With duplicates, her mind was only going to get more disoriented, but she was willing to do it if it meant escape.

“All right,” Allure said. “I think this is it. I’m ready to go for the perfect loop. Thank you, Suzie. You’re really good at flowcharts.”

Suzie smiled. “I have an entire team at my disposal who’re itching to get back in the field. Apparently being stuck in a time loop is ‘wasted time’ for Nira and Swip, even though they have no way of knowing about the wasted time.”

“Need me to reset you?” Thrackerzod asked

Allure shook her head. “Nah, I’ll just wait. Relax a bit.”

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall.

Then she fell out of bed, flat on her stomach.

She fished out her phone and called Thrackerzod. “Hey, I’m looping in time and I need a restart…”

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall. She carefully removed her blanket so she wouldn’t trip this time.

“Right. Let’s actually do this.”

She walked out of her room.

“I don’t like him,” Minna said.

“I know, but sometimes we have to deal with scary people in our lives,” Allure said, hugging Minna close.

Minna nodded, accepting the embrace.

“How would you like to make breakfast today? Anything you want, use any ingredient you can find.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

Minna leaped up from the couch and started making breakfast.

The best part about this was the burnt juice never showed up. Take that, ka. I won. No more burnt juice for me!

The two of them had breakfast and enjoyed several laughs together. Minna went off to school without complaining, and Allure waved her of.

Allure set off to work. “Good morning Seskii!”

“Today’s the day?”

“Yep! Hope you sell a lot of potions!”

“I always do! Here’s yours!” Seskii tossed Allure two duplication potions, which she caught in her telekinesis.

“Thanks! The payment’s under my rug!”

“Already got it!”

Allure whistled to herself a chipper tune to improve the moods of those she passed. She moved in such a way so she would never interfere with anyone in a hurry. She purchased a lollipop from a street vendor and handed it to a crying child. “This should keep him satisfied for a little while.” She went to the teleporter platform with a smile, greeting those she came into contact with.

She walked into the League of Sweetie Belles and moved the ‘wet floor’ sign to a place it was easier to see.

“Allure reporting in!” she told Squeaky.

“Wow, you’re chipper,” Squeaky said. “Sorry to put a downer on your mood, it’s your turn to manage the phones.”

“I don’t mind!” Allure said. “Someone has to do it, right?”

Squeaky blinked. “Huh. I wish I was as upbeat as you are right now.”

Allure but a hoof on Squeaky’s shoulder. “You can be. Just smile and it’ll do wonders.”

Squeaky thought about this for a moment. She brightened considerably. “Thanks!”

Allure nodded. “Don’t mention it!” She left Squeaky, making her way to the phones.

When she first arrived she quickly drank the duplication potions, creating two more of herself. They already knew what to do. One left to call Nae, while the other was going to clean the flies out of the ventilation before they became a nuisance. After that, the second Allure would go take care of all the problems the phone callers were reporting in. All of them.

Jade came in. “Do you mind if I keep you company?”

“Not at all! You have to agree to keep a secret though.”

“Oh?”

“I have a duplicate of myself running around so I can actually help the people in these calls. Don’t let anyone know, shhhh.”

Jade grinned. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“In the meantime, what’s up with you?”

“Well, I’ve been missing Davesprite lately…”

Allure put an understanding hoof on the Skaian’s shoulder. “It’s painful, isn’t it?”

Jade nodded slowly.

~~~

“Do you understand?” Allure asked Nae.

The Ga nodded and smiled. “I can’t thank you enough, Allure.”

Allure smiled. “Eh, it’ll be a cinch. But we’re going to have to play hardball to get Blumiere to play nice. It took me a million loops to figure out how to get him to open up without being especially cruel.”

“Oh?” Nae said.

“Those books of his are apparently so powerful nobody’s supposed to know about them.” Allure pulled a gun out of her mane and handed it to Nae. “So I’ll need you to be able to hold a gun to my head while we do this.”

Nae nodded. “I understand.”

“Let me do all the talking. I know exactly what to say.” Allure stretched her limbs. “Here we go.”

Nae and Allure walked out of the pub and across Celestia City. As they passed, Allure made a call to the regular law enforcement. “Officer, I’ve seen some unsavory types outside the Mayor’s residence. Could you send some people? …I think Officer Kurloz would be best, but do whatever you think works.” She hung up.

“That takes care of the riot?” Nae asked.

Allure nodded. “Kurloz is a Skaian. As the Prince of Rage, he can destroy almost anyone’s desire to fight just by walking into a room. It’s good for us he’s there, because dispelling the riot peacefully would have been a nightmare.”

She knocked on Blumiere’s front door. He opened it. “Hm?”

“Can we come in?” Allure asked. “It’s important.”

“Oh, by all means,” Blumiere said, smiling warmly. “Sit – if you have time, that is.”

“I do,” Allure said, sitting. Nae stood to unicorn’s side, standing with her hands behind her back. “So, Blumiere, I’ll cut to the chase. I’m stuck in a time loop. I am currently trying to end this time loop by going through a perfect run.”

Blumiere raised an eyebrow. “Akin to Groundhog Day?”

“Yeah,” Allure said. “One of the things I need to do for that perfect run is stop Celestia City from being destroyed. It’s easy enough – but I have died and reset innumerable times figuring out how to do it. The only real problem in doing so for a perfect run is you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. You.” Allure nodded to Nae – who placed the gun to Allure’s head.

Blumiere blinked. “…Why are you threatening me with a reset?”

“Because you threaten to erase my mind whenever I tell you what I need to save Celestia City. Every time I have to make Thrackerzod or someone else reset me so you don’t destroy the knowledge. So, please, don’t act out of brash trained anger this time. Realize that I can reset at any time and try this again, and again, and again until it works.”

Blumiere nodded slowly. “Yes…”

“The way to save Celestia City is to either give Nae here the Dark Prognosticus and use it to destroy a universe, or to use its power yourself and destroy a universe. The destruction of this universe prevents a weapon from going off that destroys the entire city. The universe itself is uninhabited, so you do not need to worry about collateral damage.”

Blumiere tensed. “Allure, those books must never…” He took a breath and calmed himself. “You’ve known about them for a while.”

Allure nodded. “Nae here found out through the rumor mill, based on people who’ve seen that chest and know about your source material.”

“Allure, if anyone knew…”

“If this gets me out of the loops I will come here after it’s over and allow my memory to be erased. Nae has agreed to these terms as well.”

Nae nodded in affirmation.

Blumiere stopped. “When does the loop end?”

“12:04,” Allure said. “After that, we’ll know if this is really the solution.”

Blumiere let out a sharp breath. “…All right. But I will hold you to that promise.” He snapped his fingers, bringing the chest to the main room. He popped it open and took out the Dark Prognosticus. He held his eyes closed shut the entire time, ensuring he would not gaze upon any of the actual pages. He held out his hand. “Open the portal.”

Allure’s dimensional device was already set. She did as he asked. He sent the darkness through the portal, destroying the Navir once again.

“It is done,” he declared, locking the books away again. “Return before 12:20 today.”

Allure nodded. “I promise.”

Nae lowered the gun. The two of them walked out and Blumiere didn’t try to stop them.

Allure let out a breath. “Sometimes I get the inflections just wrong in that speech and he jumps me anyway.”

“You have had to use the suicide capsule then?”

Allure nodded. “I’ll keep it in, just in case he thinks he’s being clever. One of the more pleasant varieties of death I’ve experienced on this journey, I have to admit.”

Nae nodded. “So, what now?”

“We go to the League of Sweetie Belles.”

~~~

Allure appeared on Gregory’s doorstep with a twittermite catcher. He lived in one of the districts of Celestia City that didn’t repair its buildings, but the citizens stayed because they didn’t want to move no matter what the government offered them. It was for the stubborn people.

Gregory himself was an overweight greasy man with an unpleasant expression plastered on his face at all times. “About time.”

Allure shrugged. “We’re here to serve.”

“I take it my flies hatched early?”

“Huh? Oh, no, I found those this morning and cleaned them out before they became a nuisance.” Allure smiled innocently. “Figured I’d bring my skills here! Where are they?”

“Everywhere in the house. Just get them.” Gregory opened the half-broken door and let Allure inside. The house smelled like urine, flies, and rotting food. Luckily Allure remembered to bring a gas mask – and it didn’t insult Gregory because it matched her full exterminator garb. He didn’t have to know the twittermite catcher definitely wasn’t necessary.

She knew where every fly in the house was – all one hundred and nineteen. She slurped all of them into the tank over the course of a few minutes using her magic. She walked out. “All done!”

“Why didn’t you just come and do that sooner?”

“Because there are exterminators whose job it is to do that,” Allure said. “It puts them out of work.”

“Pff. I don’t got that kind of money.”

Allure didn’t believe a word of that. The base-income was more than enough to pay for simple fly exterminators. “You can petition the government for a service you can’t afford, you know. There’s even terminals outside the Oversight Division headquarters to help you with that.”

Gregory blinked. “Huh…”

“I’m sorry we weren’t able to tell you that in our phone conversations,” Allure said. “We will try harder next time.” Celestia I hate talking to this guy. But I have to get him to learn without triggering his ‘oh so sensitive’ anger problems. Gah, it’s like walking on eggshells with lego bricks strewn around.

“Anyway,” Allure said. “I’ve got more calls to take care of! See you around!”

Making note that he was no longer looking at her, she ran off, removing the mask from her face. She just had one more to do – the cat woman – and then she needed to bolt for the nearest teleporter so she could get back to the main Allure in time. A perfect run wouldn’t be perfect if they didn’t all join up into one body at the end. Even if it didn’t cause any problems in her besides memory confusion if they didn’t meet up, this still needed to be clean.

She skidded to a stop in front of a suburban house with inverted gravity.

“Oh you’re so fast!” the old woman shouted. “My cat i-”

Allure levitated the cat down and gave the feisty critter to the woman. She didn’t care at all that it was trying to claw her skin off. “Oh thank you thank you! You’re such a hero!”

Allure saluted. “Glad to help! I have to get back now – more to serve!”

“Oh! Yes, yes, of course, of course. Bye!”

Allure raced off to a teleporter, but she still had to keep on that smile and make sure she stayed out of everyone’s way.

Perfect.

~~~

“…and I’ll be right over,” Allure told the cat lady, pressing the phone down. She let out a breath. “And that’s it.”

Jade stared at Allure in awe. “I have never seen anything so well orchestrated in my life. And I knew Dave.”

“It took a lot of planning to get this to work. But there’s a few more things to take care of.” She jumped out of her chair and walked to the break room, Jade in tow.

Then the two arguing Sweeties arrived.

This had been the hardest problem to find a solution for. Out of all the problems – Nae, Gregory, Blumiere – these two Sweeties were the worst. Stingy, lovesick, bratty, and uncompromising.

The solution ended up being decidedly simple and very disheartening.

“Hey, hey, I can help you,” Allure said. “I know Cadence personally. I can get you two into her ‘lost love’ program and find you someone you’ll both really want to be with.”

The two Sweeties forgot about the guy they were arguing about in an instant. “YES!” they both shouted.

Luckily for Allure the stallion they were fighting over wasn’t in Celestia City, so he wasn’t part of the time loop. There was no way she could create a perfect ending for him. ...Though frankly if these two mares were willing to give him up that easily, Allure would be willing to argue it was the best possible result for him.

Allure told them to call her later about getting to Cadence, and the two walked away like great friends.

“Huh,” Jade said. “That was…”

“Question it later,” Allure said. “Right now you’re going to have a bit more to think about.”

The two other Allures ran into the room, Nae close behind them. The two Allures touched the main Allure’s front hooves. They all fused back into one being. Allure took a deep breath. “Ah, so far so good. Just one thing left.”

Jade blinked. “One?”

Nae nodded. “Yep. One more thing.”

Allure opened the fridge. “Want some super-special ice cream for lunch?”

Jade grinned. “Yeah!”

Allure took a sandwich as well. “The way to end the perfect loop – actually get to finish lunch.”

It was a great feeling. The ice cream… the sandwich… she barely noticed the last bits of time passing.

Next thing she knew, it was 12:03.

Allure put on a content smile. “Here we go…”

Jade and Nae smiled, prepared to give a celebratory cheer.

12:04.

Allure held up a hoof. “Not yet. Give it a few seconds.”

They waited. The end of the perfect run drew to a close…

Allure scraped her horn against the wall.

She stared at the mark she made in the wall. Taunting her. Telling her she was trapped.

She placed a hoof on it, covering it up. The wall almost looks normal now. Like, maybe, I’m not trapped here. Not stuck in an unending swirl of my own life…

Tears began to form at the edge of her eyes. Her hoof slipped, letting her see the offending scratch again.

She let out a deep, agonizing scream. She punched the wall with her hoof, creating a hole in the drywall. She flung herself back and buried her head in her pillow, crying bitterly into the folds of its fabric.

She did not leave her bed that loop.

Or the next.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall.

She flopped out of bed onto her stomach and walked out.

“I don’t like him,” Minna said.

Allure didn’t respond. She poured herself a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice. She downed the burnt juice, uncaring. She ate half the cereal and left without a word to Minna.

“Sup?” Seksii called. Allure didn’t even raise her head.

She walked to the League of Sweetie Belles. She slipped and fell on Squeaky. With a sigh, she got up and went to man the phones.

She answered every call with “Mhm. Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”

Jade eventually left because she was so depressed by Allure’s aura.

Allure walked to the lunch room. She pulled a sandwich off the shelf and sat down, watching the news of the riot.

Celestia City exploded.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall.

Flopped out of bed.

“I don’t like him.”

She poured a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice. She downed the burnt juice.

“Still?” Seskii asked.

She flipped and fell on Squeaky. She tore herself off.

She answered every call.

Jade left.

Allure pulled a sandwich off the shelf and sat down.

Celestia City exploded.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall.

“I don’t like him.”

Burnt Juice.

“Again?”

Slip onto Squeaky.

Answer the phone.

Sandwich.

Celestia City exploded.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall.

“I don’t like him.”

“How much longer are you going to do this to yourself?”

Answer the phone.

Celestia City exploded.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall.

“I don’t like him.”

“I can’t help you.”

Celestia City exploded.

~~~

“I don’t like him.”

“I don’t like him.”

“I don’t like him.”

Something in Allure’s mind turned on. Who is him? For the first time in an innumerable number of loops, she registered the burnt juice in front of her.

Skarn. She doesn’t like Skarn.

Who is Skarn?

“Minna? Who is Skarn?” Allure asked.

“Skarn the Shaper,” Minna said. “New guy in the multiverse. Just made contact with us. I don’t like him.”

“Why not?”

“Dunno.”

Blumiere is going to have a meeting with his daughter, Brell…

Allure’s mind fully activated. “I… I have an idea.”

Minna blinked. “You do?”

“Yes! I do! Minna, uh… I have to go, make yourself breakfast with anything you want!”

“Anything?”

“Anything.” Allure smiled. “…And I’m sorry.”

“…For leaving?”

“…Yes,” Allure said, scrambling out the door.

Seskii was playing with a ping-pong paddle. “You’ve been in that headspace of yours a while.”

“Did… did I actually go insane?” Allure asked, still struggling to process everything again.

“Depends on your definition,” Seskii admitted. “You turned your mind off, best I can tell. But something in you wasn’t done quite yet, so it pushed its way out and turned the lights back on.”

“I never looked into Skarn,” Allure said. “I never looked into Brell. Didn’t even think about it.”

“And what if that’s not the answer?”

“If there was one thing I didn’t think about there’s bound to be others!” Allure said. “There’s a solution here! I know it!”

Seskii smiled. “You go girl. If you need anything, remember, I am here. Sorta. In a semi-aware meta way.”

“I’m not going to try to parse that right now!” Allure said with a dumb smile. “What I am going to do is go to the League of Sweetie Belles and then, later, get a recording of the meeting Blumiere went through. Since being perfect doesn’t matter… Let’s mix some stuff up.”

“Have fun.”

Allure ran off to the League of Sweetie Belles. She purposefully let the wet floor get her and make her fall on Squeaky.

She waggled her eyebrows. “Hey there.”

Squeaky rolled her eyes. “Allure, just get o-”

Allure pressed her face to Squeaky’s, forcing her to stop mid-sentence. When she removed herself ten seconds later, she had a mischievous grin on her face. “You. Me. Dinner. Eight. Be there.”

Squeaky blushed profusely. “O-okay,” she whispered.

Allure leaped off of her and went to man the phones. Of course everything resets before eight, so I won’t have to deal with that later. Not to mention I just broke the ‘no dating yourself’ policy in a public place… I should probably avoid Suzie for the rest of the day. Still, it was pretty sweet to see Squeaky’s face like that. I’ve never seen her that flustered.

She sat down in front of the phone and leaned into her hoof. She had a while before Blumiere was done – might as well enjoy this.

The phone rang.

“Hello, this is Playpony magazine, you’re our 100th caller of the-”

The other side hung up.

Allure rubbed her hooves together. This was gonna be good…

The phone rang again.

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid you have the wrong number, because this number doesn’t exist.” She hung up. Then she snickered.

Screw all these people. She already spent all her energy making their lives perfect.

She was done with that.

~~~

Allure sat with Blumiere, watching the recording of his discussion with Brell. A shadow being in a top hat and a feminine anthropomorphic bear talking politics. It was boring.

Allure had learned a few things from watching it though.

Skarn the Shaper called his nation the Congeries. He had three kids. His society was built around an appreciation of art on a grand scale.

Otherwise everything was useless. Nothing about messing with time, loops, or anything that could have been causing her predicament.

“Are you sure there’s absolutely nothing here?” Allure asked. “Did she have time to do anything else while she was here?”

“She never left places cameras could see her,” Blumiere said. “And she showed no hostile intent. She’s also gone, so she couldn’t have done anything at the time Celestia City explodes. I’ll call you if I get word that she or any of Skarn’s have come back, but I don’t think there will be.”

“Did any problems occur in the meeting? Something I might try to… fix?”

Blumiere shook his head. “Everything went fine. Better than it usually goes, to be honest.”

Allure sighed. “Thanks anyway. Guess I’ll have to think of something else…”

~~~

Allure actually captured Brell and forced her to talk with truth serum before admitting Skarn had nothing to do with what was happening. Allure let Brell kill her in rage to end that particular loop.

She scraped her horn on the wall. She did a double backflip off the bed and onto the floor. “TEN OUTTA TEN! THE CROWD GOES WILD!” She created her own cheering noise with her hooves cupped to her mouth. She stretched her legs and walked out.

“I don’t like him.”

“Well, he isn’t a problem,” Allure commented. Then she stopped for a moment, turning to look at Minna. “…Minna, come here.”

Minna walked up to Allure, eyes concerned. “Yes, Mom?”

Allure put her hooves on Minna’s shoulders. “Minna, answer me honestly. Did you have anything to do with this?”

“No,” Minna said, absolute certainty in her voice.

Allure smiled. “Thank you. You can make breakfast today.” She rubbed the back of her head, more than glad that Minna had answered in her ‘I know things’ voice, expelling all of Allure’s doubt. She also felt more than a little ashamed she had suspected her own daughter for even a minute.

They had breakfast and then Allure went outside.

“Dead end?” Seskii asked.

“You know it is,” Allure said, leaning on the top of the stand. “Seskii, what else do I have besides wait at this point?”

“I don’t know,” Seskii said. “I do know that if you’re resolving yourself to wait it out, you have to work to keep yourself sane.”

“I can talk to you. You aren’t just a dialogue tree for me to exhaust.”

Seskii smirked. “True. But I can’t be someone intimate enough to make up for an entire life. I am sorry.”

Allure nodded. “Yeah. Not what I’m looking for, anyway. But what do I do? There’s nothing to save, and running the perfect loop every time would just be utterly exhausting.”

“Try something new,” Seskii suggested.

“…I never did learn how to crochet. Or professionally sing anything.”

“There, you can try those things. Get excellent at singing, crocheting, anything you want. You have all the time in the world. Improve yourself with it.”

Allure grinned. “That’s… a great idea! And if I think of a new angle while exploring every part of this City, I’ll act on it. If not… there’s enough variety in this City alone to keep me occupied for decades. And then there’s the planet of Inchari Libera if I run out there. Or the rest of this universe’s space!” Allure spread her hooves. “Why in the name of the Tower was I staying in my life this whole time when I could have been going anywhere?”

“Why indeed?” Seskii asked.

~~~

Allure was doomed never to be good at magic – that was her curse.

Allure also made a conscious choice never to carry weapons. She wanted to appear friendly and comforting at all times to help diffuse a situation, which was why her fighting style became that of a martial artist who used small amounts of magic to enhance the motion of her limbs.

But there was one power of hers she had yet to even try to master.

That of the Knight of Heart.

There were only two Heart players she could access – the Meulins, who were Mages of Heart and not very useful in the powers department, and the Nepetas, Rogues of Heart.

She found the only god-tier Nepeta Skaian in Celestia City and bowed. “Teach me.”

“…Mew? What?”

“Teach me,” Allure said. “I am the Knight of Heart, and I wish to know what I can do.”

Nepeta blinked. “Well I’m not sure how much I can teach you…”

A glint appeared in Allure’s eyes. “Trust me. You’re better than you think you are.”

~~~

“Why did mew need me to teach mew anything!?” Nepeta blurted. “Mew’re not even a god-tier and mew can beat me with mewr mewstery over mewr powers!

“I’m stuck in a time loop,” Allure said, smirking. “I’m also a Knight – more suited for combat than a Rogue. All you can do is move things around between people. As you’ve seen, I can attack with my very soul. I’m going to go find a Stand user, see what this does against them. Wanna watch?”

Nepeta blinked. “…Sure!”

It didn’t take long at all for them to find a Stand user. A man named Okuyasu stepped up to the challenge. “The Hand will wipe anything away into the void!”

Allure smirked. She could definitely see his Stand now. Not as another Stand user would, with colors and features, but as an extension of his soul.

This poor sap was going to be in for a surprise.

Allure allowed Okuyasu to make the first move. “ZA HANDO!” he shouted, erasing space between them with his Stand. He pulled the Hand’s arm back, preparing a punch.

Allure caught the punch with her soul, an energy Okuyasu could not see for it had no appearance – but an energy that could definitely affect a Stand. Allure crushed the Hand’s hand, breaking Okuyasu’s own. “N-NANI!?”

And then Allure pulled her dirty trick. As the Knight of Heart, it was not just her own soul she could manipulate in combat.

The Hand turned around and, with its free hand, punched its master in the face. The shock to Okuyasu forced him to recall the Stand. He fell to the ground, unconscious.

Allure smirked. “Gotcha.” Who needed to have god-tier level control when a little bit of precision could go a long way?

Nepeta applauded. “Mewmew! Go Allure!”

~~~

“And the winner of today’s bake-off is… Allure Belle with her saffron chowder!”

Allure bowed, grinning like a filly.

~~~

Allure placed a computer on the desk in front of the CEO of PlusTech, the largest tech company on Celestia City. “I designed this game from the ground up in four hours. Hire me.”

The CEO blinked. “Four hours!? If you have proof-”

“Everything was videoed,” Allure said. “Start to finish. No cheating.” Woke up, decided to do it. Victory at programming.

“Assuming this checks out, you are hired!”

“Good to know!” Allure said.

~~~

A Rarity walked into Allure’s fashion studio. “…My word… all these outfits are gorgeous!”

Allure beamed. “I had a lot of practice. Been keeping these hidden for a while. But I think it’s finally time to make myself known to the fashion world.”

“I’ll get these out on the runway stat!”

~~~

Allure stared at her computer, eyes focused on the text that was flying by on the screen. She had bothered to learn a ‘reading comprehension improvement’ spell to make what she was doing more worthwhile.

“Mom? What are you doing in there?” Minna asked.

“Reading all of Wikipedia.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

“Have you been hanging around Vriska?”

Allure blinked. “No, actually.”

~~~

“Hello, my name is Allure Belle. Can I say that I wasn’t expecting to give a lecture at Celestia University when I woke up this morning! But, well, seeing as Professor Hale is sick, I’ll be taking over. Today we’re talking about the underlying quantum state that links magical systems to the physical matter of universes…”

~~~

Lyra wailed. “Bon Bon, we’re lost! Completely lost!”

“Don’t worry, we’re not completely lost, we’re still in Celestia City,” Bon Bon gulped. “I’m sure if we keep walking we’ll find our way out.”

“No ye won’t…” Allure said in her best creepy voice – which she had gotten really good at over time. “But I can tell ye how to get out of here… See, that way lies the ol’ sawmills that might activate and chop ye up, but over thar lies a stairway to Sector U-J, which specializes in peppermint candies and other sweets.”

Lyra grinned. ”Thank you, miss!”

“It’s my pleasarrr,” Allure said, dialing the hamminess to eleven. “I can also tell ya the life stories of almost every single person in that sector, if y’ want.”

“...No thank you,” Bon Bon said.

“Suit yerself. Yer passin’ up access to the most knowledgeable pony in Celestia City.” Allure was pretty sure she wasn’t exaggerating.

“…Lyra, lets go.”

“Aw but I like the creepy little unicorn!”

“DID YE JUST CALL ME LITTLE!?”

The two mares ran off in a panic.

Allure chuckled.

~~~

Allure walked in the front doors of one of Celestia City’s many technical workshops. The things were common since Merodi Universalis actively promoted scientific research and experimentation in virtually all ethical forms, and many people were of the mind that you could never know enough given the variety in the multiverse.

There were full-blown laboratory productions elsewhere in Celestia City’s streets, but Allure wasn’t here for a team. She had come to a personal tinker-shop to see one particular individual she knew could help her.

Allure had come with a very specific purpose in mind.

She trotted up a large, dead mech from Galaxus Immaterium that had been gutted. At the top was a small woman in a white armored suit with green highlights. She was sleeping on a high-end toolbox, somehow oblivious to the cold hard metal pressed against her face.

Allure cleared her throat. “Ahem.”

The woman shot bolt upright, her round glasses flying off her face. Allure caught them with her magic and raised an eyebrow.

“Uh… thanks.” The woman put her glasses back on and tried to get her unruly brown hair to stop sticking straight up in the air. “So, Allure right? What can I do for you?”

“Technician Pidge, I need you to make me a giant mecha within four hours.”

Pidge blinked. “What?”

“I decided I wanted a giant mecha, and after some digging-” Several loops of digging… “-I found that you are the best expert on those things in Celestia City.”

“You? Came looking for me?” Pidge blinked. “Wow, just, uh…” Pidge rubbed the back of her head. “I’ve been alone here almost ever since I arrived, I was beginning to think my work wasn’t appreciated.”

“You don’t put yourself out there. Or make yourself easy to find…” Allure observed. “Tell you what, if you can get me this Mech, I’ll direct you to Expeditions or Research. I hear Renee’s looking for a new primary technician for the castle.”

Pidge blinked. “I mean, thanks, but I don’t know, I have a lot of work here… The capacitor network I’m working on right now, for instance, coul-”

“You’re bored,” Allure said, smirking knowingly. “I bet you secretly miss what you used to do. You had a mech of your own, flying around, saving the universe. I’m sure as an Expeditions Technician you’d get to do that again, with a new team.”

Pidge looked into the distance, forlorn.

“Hey, trust me, you’ll like working for Renee. She’s great. And you could get access to the Map. Bet you’d like to know how that works!”

“I would… I have several working theories involving the connections of the Tree of Harmony to the ka-slash-fate signatures of those chosen, but that’s outside my field of expertise…”

“Who says it couldn’t turn into your field of expertise?”

Pidge smirked. “Heh. All right, fine, I’ll take your offer. One mech in four hours? I can’t do that by myself. I hope you’re ready to get very, very dirty.” She rubbed her hands together. “This is going to need a lot of Pidge’s secret special gear oil…”

And so they set to work. using all the parts Pidge had available to create the most haphazardly slapped together mech of all time. Three hours later, they had a result. It wasn't pretty - two legs of different sizes, an arm without any sort of covering, and no head to speak of. But it moved. Allure laughed from the open cockpit. “Look at me! Woo-hoo! Awesome”

Pidge adjusted her glasses. “That leg will give out after less than an hour of work, the weapons will tear the arm off as soon as they fire, you definitely don’t have enough hydraulic fluid, this thing is going to rust the moment someone even breathes on it, and that sword isn’t even sharp.” She grinned. “But otherwise, yeah, awesome.”

“Eh, I only need it for… a little over an hour! It’ll work that long right?”

“So long as you don’t try firing any weapons. Or flying. Or, really, doing anything other than walk.” Pidge raised an eyebrow. “Why only an hour? We had four hours to build the thing, that’s exactly as much time as you gave me…”

“Oh, I’m stuck in a time loop.”

Pidge’s eyes widened. “That’s how you kn… How does the loop work? What caused it? How many loops have you gone through? Is it due to the quantum entanglement of time states? Do we have a personal temporal connection? What’s the exotic tachyon concent-”

“Maybe you’ll be able to tell me once I get out!” Allure said. She winked and ran out of the warehouse with the mech.

“HEY! GET BACK HERE! I HAVE MORE QUESTIONS!”

You’ll do just fine at Renee’s. Allure made a note in her mind. She should offer Pidge that job once she was out. Forgetting simply wouldn’t do.

But now, she needed to have fun with this mech.

“AHAHAAH!” She fired the weapons at a wall. Her arm flew right off.

“...Huh. Guess she wasn’t joking.” She smirked. “This’ll be a fun challenge…”

~~~

“So, I think I’ve been everything. Griffon, dragon, Skaian, Gem, Ga, carapacian, consort, human, troll, dog…”

“Stallion?” Seskii asked.

Allure flushed brightly. “Uh… Yes. Once. Never again.”

“Not going to tell me about it?”

“No.”

~~~

Allure walked up to the microphone and cleared her throat. “I wrote this song recently. It might not make sense to a lot of you, but it comes deep from the heart. I’ve titled it ‘The Allure of Time’. A bit cheesy, but I think it fits.” She took in a deep breath and began to sing.

“We always talk ‘bout how we need more time,
To ensure that our lives will turn out fine.
We fret and worry, wishing for the clock,
To slow the boat ever nearer our dock.

But time is a beautiful thing in truth.
The fact that it passes is quite divine.
We all wish for the lost days of our youth.
But if we were still young, it would confine.

If the children don’t grow, cursed are we.
If we do not change, we won’t drop our knives.
If the old do not die, none feel their lives.
If time does not pass…

Then what are we?”

She fell silent. She was unsure what they would think – she said some things that would make Merodi uncomfortable. Challenging the beauty of Corona’s immortality serum… Attacking those who wished to bend time… It was going to hurt some people.

But she loved the song. Of all the things she had done in these loops, it was the thing she was most proud of.

The fact that the crowd erupted into applause did nothing to change her opinion of herself or her music.

She saw Minna, Seskii, and Nae in the audience, clapping as well.

Their clapping made her feel better.

~~~

One loop, Allure woke up in a particularly foul mood. She didn’t know why – she had been enjoying herself before the last loop ended, having taken a ship into deep space and found a black hole eating another black hole.

But something about the horn scraping the wall set her on edge. The flopping out of the bed didn’t help either. It irked her considerably to be in the situation she was in, and she stormed out of her room in a huff.

“I don’t like him,” Minna said.

Allure lashed out. “DON’T YOU KNOW HOW TO SAY ANYTHING ELSE!?” Her spirit lashed across the room, tearing into Minna.

In an instant, the girl’s soul was ripped from her body. It was somehow weaker than all other souls Allure had encountered. She slumped to the ground, dead.

“W-wh-wh…” Allure ran to Minna, touching her with her hoof. “Minna?” She reached out with her Knight of Heart powers, looking for Minna’s soul, but she found nothing to latch onto. It was like it just dissipated as soon as it left.

That’s not how that is supposed to work. Souls always want to go back to their body. They seek it out. Even children don’t have souls that weak…

“Minna…” Allure said, tears in her eyes. “M-minn…” Allure choked down her tears, pulling out her phone. “T-thrackerzod?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m in… A… Time loop. I need to be r-reset. C-come and kill me.”

“…Okay.”

Allure moved over to Minna, stroking her hair. “There there… I’ll be back with you soon…”

Thrackerzod appeared and saw the scene. She grimaced. “Oh…”

“Just do it. It’ll be over quick.”

Thrackerzod didn’t move.

“…Thrackerzod?”

“Allure… I’m not sure if you’re telling the truth about the time loop.”

“IF I WAS GOING TO KILL MYSELF I’D GO FIND A BRIDGE!” Allure shouted.

Thrackerzod glared. “I’m sorry, I-”

Allure ran outside. “SESKII!”

Seskii sighed. “One death potion, coming right up…”

Thrackerzod teleported outside, between Allure and Seskii. “I can’t let you go over there.”

“Look into my mind, Thrackerzod!” Allure shouted. “I. Want. To. Go. Back. To. Minna! I don’t want to be in this loop anymore!”

Thrackerzod did – and she pulled back, surprised. “How… how long…?”

“I don’t know,” Allure said. “I don’t know. Just… Just reset me. Please.”

Thrackerzod took a breath – and vaporized Allure.

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall. There were tears in her eyes.

She could feel it. The encroaching feeling of hopelessness. It was coming back.

She struggled – falling out of the bed onto her stomach.

Allure told herself she would fight it. That she would resist the urge to just go through the motions.

Her body didn’t listen to a thing her mind was saying.

“I don’t like him.”

Allure said some things back to Minna, but she didn’t listen to them. She burned the pancakes and cried out in fear, but it didn’t really register with her. She freaked out about the burnt juice, except that was only on the outside.

She stepped out the door.

“Hey, watch yourself, okay?” Seskii said.

Allure nodded. She tripped over herself as she walked to the League of Sweetie Belles. She entered the doors and slipped on the floors, landing on Squeaky. They exchanged some words – the standard words – as Allure went to the phones.

She talked to Jade normally enough while she performed her duties. Jade didn’t notice anything off about her. Allure didn’t notice anything off about herself either. She completed her shift and went to the break room.

She ignored the arguing Sweeties. She opened the fridge, only to see flies on the ice cream. She sighed, moving to take a sandwich. Then she noticed the news report.

“The Ga of Inchari Libera have begun to riot outside the Mayor’s residence. As of this report their intents are unknown, but it is expected the demonstrating group is protesting to Inchari Libera’s application to join Merodi Universalis…”

She got an idea.

Have I ever done it the exact same way I did it the first time? Have I ever told Jade to take us there again?

No. No I haven’t.

“Hey, Jade,” Allure said. “I think we should go over there and help. You can teleport, right?”

“…You guys didn’t tell me the Ga were Gardevoirs.”

“What?”

“From the Pokémon games.” She pointed at the news feed.

“Huh, really? I always thought they were a variant of Seskii’s race or something – but as Seskii will tell you, she’s a humble potion seller.” Allure smirked. “That’s not the point. Just teleport us there.”

Jade did. They appeared on the front steps of Blumiere’s house, right in front of a riot of Ga. It was the exact size Allure remembered.

Thrackerzod was the only one there, using an eldritch wall to keep them back.

“Where are the other Sweeties?” Allure asked, even though she knew. She was just playing along, intentionally now.

“I don’t have any idea,” Thrackerzod muttered. “All I know is that I’ve got th-” One of the Ga used a psychic power to punch Thrackerzod from the other side of the barrier, tossing her to the side with surprising ease.

“CHARGE!” Utar shouted, rushing forward.

Allure readied herself to knock Utar down. She didn’t get the opportunity – Blumiere stepped out the front doors of his home, dark energy billowing off his back. “What is the meaning o-”

Gunfire rang out. The Ga in the riot quickly forgot their anger and started scrambling to protect themselves from the shots. Blumiere easily defended himself using dark magic, while Jade’s ghost body couldn’t take any permanent damage unless one of the bullets hit her reality bracelet.

Allure, however, took one to the leg. She yelled out in pain – but she was more annoyed by the fact this had to happen than from actually suffering the wound. “This is stupid,” she muttered, limping backward.

A psychic blast from Nae sent her flying into the air. Allure locked eyes with her, giving her once-friend a soft smile.

Nae looked at Allure in confusion, using her free hand to keep Allure in front of her. “…Who…?”

And then all of Celestia City exploded. A white light shot out of the center of the Merodi’s pride, tearing the ground beneath them to shreds. Allure was aware enough to feel the white light burning her skin away.

And then she felt something else in the whiteness. Something else here – something she had a connection to. A soul. A powerful soul that was screaming in the whiteness just like her.

She used her Knight of Heart powers to grab onto the soul. “WHO ARE YOU!?” she shouted with her soul, seeing as her body was pretty much gone at this point.

“ARADIA.”

~~~

Allure scraped her horn against the wall, but maintained her focus despite of it. She could feel the soul that had come back with her still in her grasp. She wasn’t going to let it – the Aradia – go. She slowly sat up and looked at the foot of her bed.

One of the Skaian Aradiabots was there, staring at her with intent eyes. She spoke with a monotone. “I thank you for freeing me from that endless existence of fiery pain.”

Allure blinked. “You… You were causing the loops!?”

“Correct. When the surge hit my systems, my control over Time faltered. You were the closest entity of power to me at the time of the explosion. It latched onto you and decided, by pure luck, that you would remember every time a loop occurred. If that had not happened I would have been trapped forever.”

“Are… Are the loops done?”

“Yes. They are done.”

Allure grinned – then her grin fell. “There are things I have to do.” She scrambled into the next room.

“I don’t like him,” Minna said.

Allure hugged her daughter. “I know. He’s a big mystery. You can make breakfast today – use anything in the house you want.”

“Anything?”

Allure thought for a moment – could she really do this when there were consequences involved? …Yes. Yes she could. “Anything.”

“Who’s the robot ghost?”

“This is Aradia. She’s the reason I need to make a lot of calls. …Actually…” Allure poked her head out her front door. “HEY SESKII! CAN I BUY A SKAIAN GHOST RING!?”

Seskii smiled. “Sure thing!”

Allure ran out, dragging the Aradiabot with her. She quickly paid for the bracelet and put it on the Skaian, ensuring she wouldn’t just vanish as soon as Allure dropped her control over Heart. “There you are… good as new!”

“Thank you for all you’ve done,” she said.

Allure took a breath. “So, you have full control over time again?”

“Yes. But the loop needs to complete one final time before I want to risk using it.”

“Right, right…” Allure bit her lip.

“Considering the perfect run?” Seskii asked.

“Yes. But… I don’t think I’m going to do that. A lot of things about the perfect run were superficial. Cookie-cutter perfect, almost childish.” She shook her head. “There are some things I need to do. Ensuring the League of Sweetie Belles answers every phone call for a day isn’t one of them.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

Allure pulled out her phone. “Hey Thrackerzod, I got a couple of books we need to steal…”

~~~

The loop Allure chose was almost identical to the one where she first stopped Celestia City from exploding. She opted not to interfere with the riot at all – it needed to happen so Blumiere was made aware of the unrest in the Ga. She doubted it would change their inclusion in Merodi Universalis, but it would raise awareness at least.

Thrackerzod and Allure stole the Prognostici, gave them to Nae, and then put them back in the chest without Blumiere knowing. Allure never wanted to have her memories of the books wiped. She’d never let Blumiere know she knew. As far as she was concerned, the information did not need to leave her, Zod, and Nae.

She spent the rest of the day with Nae and Zod. Allure wanted to make sure her friendship with Nae would be solidified after this was all over. It was one of the few things she felt she truly gained from this whole debacle. So she took her out to lunch with Zod again.

Nae, Thrackerzod, and Allure stood in the League of Sweetie Belles, staring at a clock again. 12:03. Jade and the Aradiabot were with them this time.

“…What are you girls doing?” Squeaky asked.

“Staring at a clock,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

“Uh-huh. Allure, I needed you on the phones.”

Allure didn’t shift her gaze. “Squeaky, I’ve been stuck in a time loop for Celestia knows how long, and I’m finally sure I’m getting out. Please, don’t ruin the moment.”

“…Okay.”

“We’ve been in a time loop!?” the dark Sweetie known as Nira shouted, stopping her and Suzie from walking across the League. “How much time have we been wasting!?”

“Noooo idea,” Allure chuckled, dismissing the dark mage. Suzie managed to drag her away without too much of a fuss.

A handful of seconds later, it hit 12:04.

There was no explosion.

“YES!” Nae cheered. “WE WON!”

Allure waited a couple seconds before letting out a contented sigh. “It’s over.”

She pulled out her dimensional device and dialed the Gem Vein. An actual universe appeared on the other side.

The loops were over. She beamed brightly.

The emotions went straight to her head and she fainted.

~~~

Allure woke up in a hospital bed. Her horn did not scratch a wall.

“…I’m actually out…” Allure muttered.

Renee put a hoof on Allure’s head. “Yes. Yes you are. …Finally.”

Allure opened her eyes. “How long was I out?”

“You mean from the fainting? A couple hours. Trapped in that time loop? …I haven’t seen you in over a year.”

Allure let out a bitter laugh. “I can tell you right now I’ve been in there a lot longer than that. You don’t learn the secrets of almost every person in Celestia City in just a year.”

Tears came to Renee’s eyes. “I’m… so sorry…”

“Yeah… It sucks. I’m not going to be the same.” She let out a slow breath. “I went insane, Renee. I was gone. If it wasn’t for Minna, I… I don’t think I would have come out.”

Renee pulled her into a hug. “It’s okay now. You’re free. And you’re not lost in your mind.”

Allure smiled. “That’s right. I can also design clothes better than you now.”

“Wh-”

“Or at least the Rarity I could find,” Allure muttered. “Sorry, sorry, now’s not the time to brag.”

“I would say not!”

Allure chuckled, sitting up. “…I’m going to sell my bed and get me something completely different. A hammock, maybe. I’m sick of the way it feels. This is… a nice change.”

Renee smiled. “Whatever you want.”

“Oh, by the way, before I forget, you still looking for a Technician?”

“...Actually, yes, the last year has been… disastrous in that department.”

“Technician Pidge. She’s in Celestia City. She’ll do great.”

“I’ll go check her out as soon as I’m done here.”

Allure nodded, smiling contentedly. “…Is Minna here?”

“Right outside,” Renee said, opening the door. Minna came in, riding on Frigid – a stallion clearly a year older than when Allure had last seen him. She worried for a moment that it would strain the friendship between Minna and Frigid, but she remembered that ponies aged slower than humans. If it did anything, it evened them out. “Minna…”

Minna jumped off Frigid and into Allure’s hooves. She said nothing – she didn’t need to. The mother and daughter just held each other, as they had so many times before.

Eventually, the embrace was broken. Allure noticed Nae standing at the foot of her bed.

“Renee, this is Nae. You should employ her as well, as an Agent.”

Renee blinked. “Allure, Inchari Libera has-”

“You should employ her, Renee. Regardless of if Inchari Libera ends up joining or not.”

Renee looked at Nae with scrutiny. Then she smiled. “That’s good enough for me. Welcome to the party, if that’s what you want.”

Nae stared at Renee dumbfounded. “I… I think so.”

“Good.”

“Can I just talk with Nae for a moment?” Allure asked.

Renee nodded, shuffling everyone out of the room.

“…What does ‘Indigenous Propaganda’ mean?”

Nae smiled softly. “It was the last thing my lover said to me, whispered in my ear one night, barely remembered. War broke out the next day. It… It got me where I am today. The idea that our own society tries to convince itself of things, but the society itself is controlled by things they can’t understand. It’s… a complicated idea. Why I originally joined Sights Unseen… And why I betrayed it in the end.”

Allure nodded. “Nice to finally know… that’s been bugging me.”

“You could have asked. I probably would have told you.”

“Didn’t feel right until now,” Allure said. “Glad to have you here.”

“…And here I stand at a disadvantage. I barely know you. But you seem to know everything about me.”

“Give it time,” Allure said. “Just give it time. That’s a thing we actually have, now.”

Nae smiled. “I guess so.”

~~~

Pinkie found Seskii’s potion stand outside the hidden pub. “Hiya!”

“Hey,” Seskii said, waving.

“So, question, how come you got to be the ‘knower’ instead of me this time?”

Seskii shrugged. “I was there. You weren’t.”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “Just chance?”

Seskii smirked. “Eh, I was more mysterious. Needed a role in this arc. Finally was fed up with being a backgrounder, even though that’s probably what I’m going back to.”

Pinkie giggled. “You were probably the better choice. More grounded than me by a looooooot.”

“You are rather off the walls. But I enjoy a good party too.”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Allure’s going to keep thinking back to that day with mixed feelings.”

“She needed to cut loose at the time. Sometimes we could stand to do the same.”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah…”

“So, what do you think about the future?”

“It’s sad. And cloudy,” Pinkie said, frowning.

“That’s all I’ve got too,” Seskii admitted. “Wonder if Twilence would be willing to shed some light on what the Rage is going to bring about...”

“No. She’s not ready for that yet.”

“Yeah…” Seskii rubbed the back of her head. “Want a potion?”

“DO I!?”

“Full price!”

“I have infinite doubloons.”

Seskii laughed. “That you do.”

Pinkie swiped the potion and paid for it. “G’night Seskii!”

Seskii nodded. “Good night.”

“And good night to all of you out there as well!” Pinkie declared. “Don’t go getting yourselves stuck in any time loops!”

Wise advice, wouldn’t you say?

I know I would.

094 - Sombra's Clipshow 2: Electric Boogaloo

Giorno Giovanna, Overhead of the totally-doesn’t-exist Intelligence Division, knocked on Olivia’s door. As expected, the door slid open in three separate layers with much fanfare, ominous purple lights, and a bit of ominous mist.

Olivia turned away from her endless wall of screens and fixed Giorno with a coy smirk. “What can I do for ya, boss?”

Giorno was unfazed by any of this - he had come to expect it from her. “I’ve recently promoted one of our newer recruits. She’s proven herself more than enough to deal with more sensitive information.”

“Oh wow, am I really hearing this right? You’re giving me one of the new recruits? An impressionable young mind?” She chuckled. “And here I thought you were concerned I’d be a bad influence!”

“Oh, you will. But in this case…”

“It’ll be the best thing evah!” A pale white human jumped into the room wearing the Skaian robes of Void - but her eyes were not dead, rather filled with life. “I’m Roxy Lalonde, but you already know that!”

Olivia grinned. “Yes. Yes I do. Oh yes I know who you are!” She put her hands on Roxy’s shoulders. “We are going to have so much fun.”

“We’ll burn the place to the ground with our suave moves!”

Giorno let out a short sigh. “Show her the ropes, inform her about some of our more important operations, I trust you know how this works.”

“Aye-aye boss!” Olivia said, saluting. “You can get back to your pasta hair, don’t worry!”

Giorno didn’t dignify that with a response - he just left. Olivia pressed a button and closed the door. “So… Roxy, amiga. Wanna see somethin’ cool?”

Roxy’s eyes sparkled like crystals. “Yes.”

Olivia turned on her primary display, selecting the program Sombra’s Clipshow. “I have here a program that taps into ka itself to show a random series of bizarre events that are happening across the multiverse. Things like time, causality, and common sense mean nothing to this piece of code. We might even see ourselves on it - or we might see things that will not happen for a few weeks. But above all, we will see things that are funny.”

“...Woah…”

“Woah is right.” Olivia handed Roxy a fruity drink. “You might need this, we’ll be here a while.”

“What does this have to do with Intelligence Operations?”

“Absolutely nothing!”

Roxy broke out into a grin. “Yessssssssss~!”

~~~

The room was silent as O’Neill stared down his opponent, nary a sound save for the ticking of his office clock and the sizzle of a cigar still smouldering in the adjacent ashtray. Normally the smell of smoke was irksome, but O’Neill had to make some sacrifices in this ultimate battle of minds. His opponent? The greatest military mind the Imperium of Man had ever known. Commander of the Cadian 8th, Commander-in-Chief of the Astra Militarum, the Lord Castellan himself, Urarasker Creed. The stout, stern-faced military man had not made a move throughout the entire exchange, staring down the Overhead with one hand clenched firmly around a still lit cigar. The wait had gone on long enough between these old war-torn veterans.

“Your move, Commander.” O’Neill said.

“Right that it is, General.” Creed replied. He put his cigar to his lips and slowly took a puff, intaking the nicotine and sharply exhaling a cloud of smoke in O’Neill’s face. Intentional or not, it was a rude gesture and O’Neill made sure of it as he covered his eyes to avoid the sting of the smoke. When he opened them up again, he glanced down and saw that the game had changed. He sighed and glared back at the Lord Castellan.

“Can you stop replacing your pieces with artillery tanks? This is NOT how you play chess!” Creed just smirked and chomped the end of his cigar.

“It’s how we do it on Cadia.”

“Cadia doesn’t exactly exist anymore now, does it?”

“Shut up and play, O’Neill.”

~~~

“GIRLS!” Mattie shouted, smashing down one of the doors of Swip - a Sweetie Belle spaceship. “THE RATING HAS GONE DOWN!”

Cinder, an orange-eyed Sweetie, blinked. “Rating…?”

Suzie put a hand to her forehead. “Oh for the love of… Mattie g-”

“That means I can’t mention [CENSORED, CENSORED, CENSORED, CENSORED, CENSORED, CENSORED, CENSORED] or [REALLY CENSORED] anymore!”

“I don’t know what half those words mean,” Cinder pointed out.

“And it’ll stay that way,” Suzie muttered. “Off my ship.”

“Fiiiiiiine…” Mattie whined. “But just you wait, I’ll be let free eventually, and then none of you will escape the montage queen’s raunch.”

Squiddy, an inkling Sweetie, rolled her eyes.

“I’m going to have a mutiny on my hands…” Suzie said, shaking her head.

~~~

Nanoha walked into the Collection - and was greeted by an unusual sight.

At least a dozen different versions of herself.

“What’s it like being the big Nanoha?”

“How do you deal with so many Fate-chan’s around?”

“Have you adopted yourself before?”

“Do you feel funny when you transform too?”

“How many sources of magic do you use?”

Nanoha sighed. This happened far too often for her liking…

~~~

Eve smiled warmly as she wrapped up her speech. “...And we would be very happy to start forging a relationship with you, Catra, and the people of the Horde. It would be beneficial for all parties involved. You would get full access to the technology trade, aid, and multiversal knowledge if you accept this alliance with Merodi Universalis.”

Catra - a humanoid woman with cat ears and heterochomatic eyes - clearly wasn’t sold. Her two friends on the other hand…

“You are, like, the most adorable and menacing thing I have ever seen,” Scorpia said, twitching her scorpion tail. “We’ve gotta see more of these ponies Catra!”

“The technology in these ear devices is in-cre-he-hedible!” Entrapta, the purple-haired technology princess, squealed. “I can’t even begin to imagine the feats of engineering of the pickup alone, not to mention the cranial interface! And interdimensional technology - Catra, we have to do this, I need to get more samples!”

Eve smiled - gingerly pushing the excited woman away. “Well, Catra, your friends seem to be eager. What can I do to change your mind?”

“Why?” Catra asked. “Why choose us? Why not go to Brightmoon?” She tapped her claws on the metallic wall behind her. “I’ve listened to you long enough to know what you’re like. You’re all about ‘friendship’ and ‘harmony’ and ‘helping everyone’. The rest of Etheria calls us the Evil Horde.” She approached Eve with an uncertain glare. “We’re everything you stand against. You have no reason to be offering us anything.”

“You’d be surprised,” Eve said, smiling softly.

“Then explain. And not in the way Entrapta does, explain it simply.”

“Allying ourselves with you and furthering your goals to conquer Etheria while applying political pressure to change your society results in the least suffering of all the options we’ve considered,” Eve stated simply.

“...What?”

“We call it the ‘befriend the evil empire’ approach.” Eve was taking a risk using ‘evil’, but from what she’d seen on this world and of Catra, she was pretty sure it was the right word in this case. “We make ourselves a boon to the Horde, allowing them to complete their goals on, in this case, a single planet. We provide technology that gives you an undeniable edge in your conquest, but also lowers the death toll of your war considerably. You’ll find that the weapons we provide are mostly non-lethal, but also able to completely ignore even the strongest magics. We can also easily ‘hack’ into the planet’s thaumosphere-”

At this comment Entrapta squealed in delight.

“-and basically hand it over to you with minimal damage. We’d, of course, require that you improve your standard of living and rights within your borders to receive this aid, but I don’t think you’d have any issue making life in the Fright Zone easier on the people here, now would you?”

Catra’s steeled glare softened slightly. “You’re playing the long game.”

Eve shrugged. “It might actually take less time than siding with a rebellion and overthrowing the Horde’s government.”

“Okay. I’m considering it.” She leaned against the wall. “So, what’s the catch you haven’t bothered to tell me about yet on the path to becoming oh-so-prestigious allies of Merodi Universalis?”

“Not so much a catch as something I think you’ll enjoy.” Eve smirked knowingly. “Lord Hordak isn’t willing to compromise any of his… questionable principles. So you’re going to have to overthrow him.”

Scorpia and Catra stared at Eve in shock. Entrapta didn’t react.

Eve pointed at Catra with a wing. “And you’re going to take his place as supreme commander of the Horde, with the full backing of Merodi Universalis.”

Catra didn’t respond for a few seconds - Eve could almost hear the gears turning in the back of her head. Then, slowly, a smirk came to her face, one of her feline fangs poking out ever-so-slightly. Her body began to rock with a light chuckle that became deep laughter, ending up in a strange cackling-meowing combination.

She clasped Eve’s hoof in her claws. “You have yourself a deal, Evening Sparkle.”

“Glad to hear it!”

~~~

Deep Thought came across another question that it couldn’t come up with an answer to.

Why was it Chimicherries and not Cherrychangas?

~~~

The Them were, as usual, bored, and nobody seemed inclined to try to alleviate it. This seemed, to Them, unfair.

One Them turned to another. “Care to make a wager on when the Koryfonic Empire is going to pull their heads out of their collective asses and notice they’re not the only ones in existence?”

If they had possessed the apparatus to do so, the other Them would have given a snort of disgust. “That’s a sucker’s bet,” they huffed. “Some three thousand years, and all they’ve noticed is their multiverse is getting bigger; they can’t even agree on whether they’ve got new universes or not! What makes you think anything’s going to have changed?”

The first would have shrugged, had it shoulders to shrug with. “Have it your way, then. See if I care. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

~~~

“Change your mi-i-i-i-i-i-ind~.”

The immense holographic television screen cut to credits, and subsequently powered down because there was no more video feed to play.

The only remaining sounds in the viewing room were two different sets of sobs. One deep and wrought with impossible emotions, the other full of tentative tears marred with confusion.

Blue and Yellow Diamond were unable to bring themselves together for a full twenty minutes - how much of this was the fault of Blue’s emotive power was unknown, and Yellow didn’t particularly care to find out.

All in all it was a normal reaction to binge-watching Steven Universe, even for people who weren’t in it.

Eventually, Blue was able to speak - laughing through her tears. “That was beautiful! That was… oh - Pink! Or… Steven… I don’t care, I want to see h- him.” She put her hands to her chest. “There’s something of her left… but…” She leaned on Yellow. “I… Yellow, I don’t know what to…”

Yellow wiped her eyes. “I have no clue either. Don’t look at me!”

Blue pulled her co-ruler into a hug. “...That’s okay. We can not know together.”

Yellow’s conflicted expression was replaced with one of ‘oh great not this again’. She let Blue have the hug though - which took up another five minutes of cry-laughing.

“What do we do now?” Blue asked. “We… We can go to Earth, see them. But we didn’t experience the same things they did… They may still hate us… But I’m sure Pi-Steven will accept us. Garnet can… If she’s willing…”

“We have to tell White.”

“Oh of course w-” Blue froze. “...Oh… Oh…”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“But she - in there - off color! And… Oh she’s not going to like this…”

Yellow nodded slowly.

“Can we just… not?”

“I doubt it. This show is public knowledge on Earth Vintaru Miggins. No I don’t know what the name means, don’t ask.”

“But she’ll…”

Yellow put her hands on Blue’s shoulders. “She can’t go kill them, the Divisions won’t allow that. But we still need to tell her - to make it… ‘easy’.”

Blue sniffed, clearly thinking the word ‘easy’ was a bad descriptor in this case.

“Sooner is better than later.”

Blue broke down into tears again.

Yellow had to wipe her own eyes. “...As soon as… we’re done with this… afterward, we can go see Pin- Steven.”

Blue laughed in the middle of her cry, but was otherwise unresponsive. Yellow resigned herself to her fate.

~~~

A jacketed man sat at a computer desk, typing something with bursts of activity between periods of stillness and giggling.

He had an uncharacteristically long period of stillness. Then he stood up, stared at some random point on the roof with his hands clasped behind his back, and smirked.

“Songs of the Spheres,” he intoned. “Songs of the Spheres. Songs of the Spheres. Songs of the Spheres.”

He paused, tilted his head, and continued grinning. “Songs of the Spheres.”

He couldn’t help himself-- he began giggling at a joke only he knew, and managed to say “Songs of the Spheres” one more time before losing himself in the giggling.

Once he was done with that, he turned around and sat back down in his chair, still grinning. “I am a cruel bastard,” he told no-one, before resuming his typing.

~~~

There is a number of group activities in the League, some of which were not too well thought through… like say a potluck. One day, six of them were at one, with varying degrees of success in cooking

“So, what exactly is this….” Servitude said, poking at a pot with various cyan tentacles and a couple of eyes sticking out.

“Well…it was supposed to be spaghetti, but something went wrong on the way,” Cerulian replied. “Speaking of that, what’s that? Cake?”, she exclaimed, pointing at a tower of dough.

“It was supposed to be fruit punch. I just don’t know what went wrong,” Swinnerette answered.

“This seems safe enough to eat though,” Nord said, looking at a tasty looking pile of pastries, before levitating one over to eat. She bit down, and immediately began spitting fire, sending Swissaliss ducking for cover behind her chair. Cerulian, completely nonplussed, walked over for a bucket of water and poured its contents over Nord.

“Sorry. I just prefer them that way,” Mitochondria said, apologetically.

Swinerette, to her credit, shrugged, grabbed a pastry, and ate it without any other complications.

“You can eat that?” Swissaliss exclaimed

“What? Filled with capsaicin? Yes. They’re pretty good actually” Swinerette said back.

“What have you brought for this?”

“I brought this,” Swinerette said, pointing to an ignored bowl with a sickly green glow. “I set out to make a salad, but as you can see…it didn’t really work all that well.”

Servitude looked for a brief moment at the bowl, and then to her own “roast” which looked remarkably a lot like apple juice and then back to the bowl. Her look of disapproval said it all.

“So, pizza from the shop down the street?” Swissaliss said, looking to the other Sweeties, then to the table and then back to them.

“Pizza. Everything is better than our cooking,” Servitude answered back.

~~~

Guide to Librarians

The Multiverse is home to many horrors. Dream eaters, soul stealers, and unimaginable mind melters to name a small few. But none are more widespread, more well known, or more well-documented than the phenomenon known as the Librarian.

Humble in nature, a noble profession, unassuming. In countless cases it would seem that they’re simply mortals who desire to help spread and preserve knowledge. So why is it then that there is a common conception of them as all-powerful beings that command your respect?

Why is it that the firefighters or comedians or convenience store clerks don’t follow a similar trend? Why is it that librarians, of all professions, happen to be known contradictorily as both quiet and friendly, while also being intimidating and eldritch?

While I have yet to find those answers, I have documented the different breeds of Librarian. Please note that this is growing and changing list as I continue documentation, and if you wish to provide information or corrections, please contact my editor.

All Librarian breeds have their own powers and things to look out for.

Metro Librarians

“Among the concrete jungle, spray paint dries along the archives”

Inner-city librarians, otherwise known as ‘Metro,’ are often regarded as some of the most powerful types of librarians. The reason for this is unclear; perhaps power is based on the number of people within their realms of influence. But what’s known for certain is that the sky scrapers will not save you from their ever-watchful eyes.

Metro Librarians often have the largest libraries under their control, and as such they can observe far further, often into reaches outside the city itself. They’re capable of slithering underneath the concrete and linoleum, appearing through the reflection of glass, and forming out of exposed steel beams in construction sites. Their mastery of 4th, 5th, and 6th dimensional travel is unmatched.

But more so than anything else, what makes them truly terrifying is their manipulation of the city itself. Refracting light and shaping the buildings around them is par for the course. One street light becomes two, becomes four, becomes an unholy abomination of twisting metal and blinking lights that can now stalk you like a spider hungry for a fly.

While no one has lived to see their true power and lived to tell the tale, different accounts of unmodified areas of rubble and debris with their magical signature have been found scattered in rare places of the multiverse.

*Do not spray paint their walls, you will never be found.

National Librarians

“United we are strong, under legislature we find solace”

National librarians are generally considered the weakest of all upper level librarians, possessing the least individual power and strength. But what they lack in individual strength, they make up for together. Each forms part of a large collective hivemind that they use to communicate new ideas and thoughts together.

If you ever chose to fight a librarian, which I would not recommend to begin with, your best bet would be this breed. They lack speed, mobility and dexterity. One-on-one you may even stand a chance. However, they can contact the rest of their ‘nation’ faster than lightning can strike. And you will have to run far away to have a hope of escaping them. It’s unknown how many are in each nation, the number often varies, but it’s been known to be no lower than several thousand.

Late fees are often inescapable. Hundreds of universes apart you will be hunted and lose your mind. No one has ever been able to find a way to contact their hivemind, but if you ever do, I pray you’re prepared, I can barely imagine what their mental connection would look like. And my nightmares shudder at the thought.

Town Librarians

“Where things move slower, and strangers are unwelcome”

Rural librarians, often referred to as ‘town’ librarians, are almost always the sole figure of authority within their town limits. They are the true form of singularity. To you or me they may hold little power, losing any and all ability at an invisible line along the welcome sign to the side of the road. But to the locals within their domain, there is no hope of escape.

They can erase memories, alter perceptions of others, and seed themselves into the minds of any of their ‘children’. Due to the varied and isolated nature of their libraries, the full extent of their abilities is unknown. But they hold the title for most versatile of all librarians. They have mastery of all events, people, thoughts, time, physics, and above all existence itself for their realms.

If they were somehow able to escape the confines of their town borders, a single one could remake literally everything, including our own memories. Thankfully they frighten even the most ambitious of universe destroyers, so that fate may never come to pass.

If you find yourself in one of their towns, pray you never upset them.

~~~

Evening Sparkle had been staring at her office for twenty solid minutes. Or rather, she had been staring at what little remained of her office for twenty solid minutes. Everything was gone. All her photographs on the walls, all the different memorabilia from her different adventures, all the books gifted to her by friends and associates, even her desk and chairs, just gone. She’d only been gone for an hour to get coffee.

“Cessera?” Eve called, flagging down her assistant. “Did… did anyone come by while I was out?”

“A few representatives from Galaxa Immaterium, ma’am.” Cessera said. “One of the Space Marine chapters, the…” She checked her tablet for the referenced information. “Blood Ravens, I think?” Eve’s eyes nearly bolted from her skull. “They were very nice, I don’t see why they have such a bad reputa-” The Gem then took notice of Eve’s decidedly vacant office. “... I’ll retract that statement.”

Eve sighed and rubbed a hoof against her head.

“Let’s just… order replacements for all the things they took.” She grumbled. “And maybe warn the other Overheads about…” She stopped as her phone started vibrating. She sighed and brought the device to her ear, turning them on. “Hello? … Yes, Renee, I know, it happened to me too.”

~~~

“So… Let me see if I’ve got all of this straight.” Alushy said. “The vampires of this world are all a bunch of political and power-seeking recluses who spent most of the time either kissing the bigger vampire’s pasty white asses or looking for the right spot on said ass to shove a knife and get power for themselves, all while making sure the clueless as hell humans don’t know a thing?” She raised the straw stuck inside the opening of a blood bag, and sipped it like a child drinking a juice box. “I’m gonna come out and say this, Beckett, this vampire society is weird, but you guys handle yourselves better than back home.” The person sitting opposite Alushy in the closed coffee shop booth, a grey-skinned man with sharp ivory fangs, a messy mane of hair, and the darkest red bestial eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, smirked.

“We prefer the term ‘Kindred’, but I won’t disagree that our ways might be unconventional to yours.” He said. “Then again, an anomaly like yourself is unusual in our eyes as well. I’m pleased that you decided to at least make this recent meeting easier on us instead of all those other instances.”

“Not my fault that pasty red-suit Morpheus got a little too handsy with me!” Alushy playfully snipped. “Besides, he’s got his arm back. And all the blood he lost.” Beckett raised an eyebrow and curled his lip. “... And I paid for his suit getting tailored. And here I thought vampires only sucked blood, not money from wallets!” Beckett chuckled and raised a mug filled with the finest ichor.

“You always know how to keep things just interesting enough, Alushy.” He said. “To old friends.” Alushy made her own toast, squishing her blood bag against Beckett’s mug with a gross squelch.

“To good times!” Alushy replied.

“And to the future alliance between the Merodi and the World of Darkness.” Beckett concluded, drawing his mug to his lips while Alushy resumed her sipping.

“You were right, buddy, this PhD’s donation is the shi-”

~~~

A random hallway in a military base was silent.

And then Jack O'Neill came tearing down the narrow corridor, riding on a Hover SHIV.

“Base security personnel, please assist Tech Sergeant Rose and Sergeant Schnee in apprehending the base visitor riding the rogue SHIV. Also, do keep in mind that under no circumstances are any personnel who arrive at the armory requesting a SHIV to help apprehend the guest are to be allowed access whatsoever.”

“No fair, how come only the guest got to do that? We’ve been working at XCOM for years, we never get a chance. He only had to steal the thing to do so.”

“That’s one of life’s biggest mysteries, truly it is, Grif.”

Jack O’Neill came racing down the corridor on the SHIV, followed by a horde of security personnel lead by two operatives.

“Hey Simmons, we haven’t done morning PT yet, have we?”

“And that would matter why?”

“If we give chase, we can probably file an exemption due to strenuous activity, right?”

“Yeah, lets go.”

Later, two people in light powered armor were running down the hallway, gradually gaining on a hovering mini-tank that held a person who was frantically trying to hit them with a dull sword, and failing.

As they went though, it became exceedingly clear that they weren’t trying very hard to claim the remote pad in O’Neill’s free hand, and that it was a diversion that was working extremely well.

As the SHIV approached a junction, a line was thrown across its path, destabilizing the SHIV and sending it and its passenger onto the floor. An innocent sheet of metal with a touchscreen on it slid on the floor until it was caught by a foot, and retrieved by base personnel.

“Its over, O’Neill. We’ve got your remote, how do you plan on using the SHIV now?”

“Are you sure about that?” said O’Neill, as he held up a metal sheet. “After all, looks can be deceiving.”

The Shiv zipped off, as the remote in their hand turned into a metal sheet.

“We’re going to need the rest of the team for this. Might also want extra backup.”

“Might as well do this then. Oh Great Commandy One, The Man With the Plan, and Master Commander! I, Ruby Rose, the officer of Strike 8, do call upon your powers of badassery to make This STOP!”

The scene faded away as the Reaper awoke.

“That was weird,” Burgerbelle said. “Almost like it sorta-kinda wasn't supposed to happen…”

“Don’t think too hard about it,” Mattie said.

“WHY ARE YOU HERE!?” the Reaper asked.

The two of them shrugged.

~~~

Even with hard proof of the existence of something, there are people that can and will deny things… or they make a religion out of it

The temple was situated underground, in the basement of a ruined tower. The natural light that fell in made an image on the wall of a ruin onto a painting of burning roses. Long lines of people in dark robes stood silent as a pony dressed in burnt roses entered, holding a seemingly innocuous electronic tablet.

”See brothers, we have obtained the means for us to test which of us are pure of the taint of ka!”

“All praise to the Free Will.” they replied in unison

“We will see who are worthy to ascend and which of us are tainted!”

“Praise be.”

The pony activated the tablet, and it immediately returned the favor with the reading “HIGH LEVELS OF KA PRESENT. CAMERA FOCUSING ON USER”, complete with a helpful little voice message.

“Fuck.”

~~~

“Do you even know how many Sweeties are in the League?” M4 asked Allure.

Allure blinked. “Not… off the top of my head.” She pressed a button on her desk. “Uh, computer, how many Sweeties are in the League of Sweetie Belles?”

“Overall members: 31,433. As few as 31,319 are definitely Sweetie Belle variants.”

“You’re not even sure if all of you are Sweeties?” M4 asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well I know some of those are honorary. Minna and Mattie, for instance,” Allure said, twirling a hoof. “And then there are a few odd fusion cases and stuff like that.”

“The fact remains. You don’t know.” M4 grinned. “You need to carry out a census.”

“I am not subjecting our adorable white fluff to bureaucracy.”

“But you must!”

“Nuh-uh.”

“For science!”

“You keep your censuses to the Census, and we’ll keep our… Uh… lack of censuses here.”

“That was weak.”

Allure shrugged. “Eh, I’m not a tryhard, unlike some purple ponies.”

M4 narrowed her eyes. “Well played…”

~~~

Starbeat found herself wandering my library, coming across a piece of old parchment by chance. At first she thought it was a page from one of my journals, but after reading a bit she eventually discovered it was one of my old companion’s.

It’s been three days and still no luck. I’m not entirely sure what we hope to get out of these peace accords when neither nation was really at war to begin with, but that’s what it means to be the diplomat of the Void’s Defenders.

In retrospect there are worse things I could be, I could be working back at the Recursive Organization as a nervous wreck. I’m never not happy to be who or where I am. I’m just stressed from the accords. Why do Class 3’s have to fight anyway? There’s so much more they could do if they banded together.

I wonder how Vriska and Mite are handling the spy leak. They’ve been missing since the first day, but I have confidence that they’ll resolve the situation.

Maybe if things progress into a week I can finally change my name to be based on how difficult diplomacy is. Would Mediation fit me? No, I don’t like that one. Another to add to the pile I suppose.

If Vriska doesn’t smash through the window tomorrow, beating up a spy, I’m probably going to just roll around on the floor until everyone agrees to get along. Who can fight when a fully-grown woman is acting like a seven year old?

Starbeat put the note back, a small smile on her face.

~~~

Nanoha’s job was sometimes unimaginably difficult.

It was even worse when Them were involved.

“Can’t I just buy the universe off you?” she pleaded.

“Nah,” the Them responded. “Money is pointless.”

“What do you want? I’ll get you anything if you’ll stop tormenting these people! They don’t deserve to… to… live in hell! Literal hell!”

“Well, to start, you can keep making those exceptionally amusing expressions. They are rather priceless.”

“I… But…” a lightbulb went off in her head. “Was the entire point of this universe to get me to lose it on you!?”

“Yes!”

Nanoha twitched. Then she turned and left without another word.

“...Darnit, shouldn't have made that obvious.”

~~~

“...You want me to watch what?” White Diamond asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s a show called Steven Universe,” Blue Diamond said. “It’s… our source material. It’s a beautiful story.”

“Which of our conquests is it about?” White asked.

“...Earth,” Yellow said.

White narrowed her eyes. “Something tells me I’m not interested.”

“You really should watch it,” Blue insisted. “It… reveals a lot about what happened there. What happened to… Pink.”

“Yes. It does answer a lot of unanswered questions,” Yellow asserted.

“Then just tell me the answers,” White said. “I have better things to do than watch some entertainment program that may or may not be responsible for our empire.”

“You really should watch it,” Blue insisted.

“Blue, Blue, you were always the emotional one. I don’t need the experience, I’m me, I can understand without seeing it.”

“You wouldn’t like some of the things it said,” Yellow huffed.

White glared at Yellow - irked at her implied disobedience. “Like what?”

“About you.”

White leaned in, smiling softly. “Yellow, there’s nothing I could see about myself that I-”

Yellow took advantage of White’s proximity and slapped an information upload matrix directly to the gemstone in White’s forehead. Before she could do anything, Yellow’s Diamond Security codes got her past White’s filters and had uploaded the entire show into her surface memories.

Blue gasped. “Y-yellow!”

“What? She wasn’t going to do it, we needed to take action.”

“You had to have prepared that!”

“So I looked ahead a bit, it’s a sign of a good tactician.”

White’s nails dug into Yellow’s collar in rage, showing the militaristic Gem just how terrifying White Diamond’s face could be when she wanted it to be. The rage quickly dissipated, replaced by a distant expression that looked so far into space her eyes appeared to move to opposite sides of her head. “I’m not!” She shouted at nothing, then she clenched her fists, and then she realized that by clenching her fists in rage she was only confirming the show’s depiction of her emotions. Her flaws.

Then, as if by magic, her usual calm, serene expression returned, marred only slightly by a miniscule twitch in her left eye. “Yellow…”

“Yeah?” Yellow said without a hint of fear. Blue on the other hand was trembling behind the warrior Gem, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

“You really shouldn’t have done that.”

“You’ll thank me later,” Yellow asserted.

White’s smirk rose and fell within the space of a second. “I…” She closed her eyes and forced herself to talk. “I am not what is on that show.”

Yellow raised an incredulous eyebrow.

White turned to Blue. “Do you share her sentiment?”

“I… well… it seemed right at the time…”

White’s expression clouded over. The only sound was the gentle hum of crystal energy in the walls of White Diamond’s palace.

“We’re going to Earth,” White said, abruptly. “You know which one.”

“Now!?” Blue asked.

“Now.”

~~~

The Librarian nodded amiably to the small purple unicorn as she passed him; he was seeing a lot more of them in L-Space these days, and they in turn had become used to the sight of the elderly orangutan knuckling his way between the shelves, a volume or three tucked under one arm. For her part, she barely acknowledged him, intent on reading a sheet of paper floating in front of her as a stack of books trailed through the air behind.

Aside from these trips into L-Space, the Librarian of the Unseen University rarely left his domain these days; there was plenty to keep up with just within his own space, never mind all the changes in the city. The sudden abundance of non-hostile unicorns was just a small part of it; there was pressure from outside to install an “inter net” console in the University, never mind what effect the high ambient magic might have on it, or vice versa.

And, of course, the books: not too many of the new arrivals were intensely magical, much to his relief, but the content of them was frequently worrying, even in comparison, and more and more non-librarians seemed to be getting access to L-Space, too.

Such as the human sitting several shelves above him, her nose buried in what appeared to be a novel as she floated in midair. Beneath a pink-and-blue-striped scarf, she wore the robes of a Skaian, but in shades of red, to his surprise; most of the Skaians the Librarian found wandering the back corridors of the multiverse wore the orange and yellow of Heroes of Light, the dedicated seekers and hoarders of knowledge.

“Ook?” he queried.

“Oh!” She peered down past her book, startled, revealing a Skaian ghost’s blank eyes, eerily white from edge to edge behind her glasses. “Hi! Don’t mind me, I’m just browsing.”

“Ook,” the Librarian pointed out, somehow fitting several sentences into that one syllable.

“Yeah, there’s kind of a lot of us. Me. Whatever.” She closed her book, a finger marking her place. “And all of us like books, so I’m really not surprised.”

“Ook?”

“Well, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition, either, yet here we are.”

The Librarian made a hrmphing sound, and eyed the nearest stack; he was at the right location, but it was going to be a bit of a climb, and he wasn’t as nimble as he used to be.

The ghost noticed his look, and, after a moment’s hesitation, replaced her finger with a slip of paper and drifted downwards a few shelves.

“Would you like a hand?”

~~~

Olivia and Roxy sat in a dark, monitor-filled room, watching themselves watch themselves.

Roxy rotated herself in her chair, staring confusedly in the direction of the invisible camera. “What’s it-?”

“Oh, yeah,” Olivia waved a hand dismissively. “I said it might do that. I’m sure it’ll show something funny about us eventually.”

Roxy frowned, inching closer to the screen and poking it forcefully. “Doesn’t seem funny. Just us watching something else.”

Olivia blinked. “...yeah, that is weird. Maybe the punchline comes…?”

Then something strange happened. The screen showed a portal appearing, followed by a green, markless filly stepping out of it. Before Olivia or Roxy could do anything, the pony had booped Olivia on the nose while saying “boop,” turning her into an identical filly wearing shrunken versions of her clothes. Then they both teamed up to boop Roxy, and three identical fillies quickly left the view of the camera.

Roxy blinked. “What the…? Is this…?”

Olivia’s skin prickled as she felt the tell-tale signs of a portal opening. “I think so,” she said dryly.

Then the portal opened, and a green, markless filly stepped out of it… into the waiting finger of Olivia. She scrunched her nose, crossing her eyes to stare at the offending appendage. “What…?”

“Boop!” Olivia told her.

It took a second for the filly to react. When she did, she took a step away from Olivia, glaring angrily at her. “Hey, you can’t-!”

Olivia leaned forward and interrupted her with another boop. “Don’t boop if you can’t be booped!” she advised.

The filly stepped back again, snorting. “No, I’m supposed to be the booper!” the filly shouted adorably. “You’re supposed to be booped and then we go and-”

“Boop!” Roxy interjected, with the appropriate motion.

The filly glowered at the finger. “...fine! You win this time! But you can’t escape the boop forever!” She turned and stalked back through the portal, which collapsed behind her.

Roxy snickered. “That was really cute,” she said. She looked over at Olivia, smirking lightly. “You don’t think she’ll really be back, do you?”

Olivia shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.” She waggled a finger threateningly. “But we’ll be ready.”

Roxy grinned. “Cool!” She made herself comfortable in her chair again, watching as the screen showed them something new. “So… more clips?”

“More clips,” Olivia agreed.

~~~

Corona looked up from her rarely-used office desk at the Research Division.

Sitting on the other end was an adorable kid in a purple top hat, smiling innocently.

“Can you explain why the rest of you organized a nude bicycle race?”

The kid that was the Everyman shook her head adorably.

“You sure you had nothing to do with it?”

The kid fixed her with a look of ‘of course I had something to do with it, I’m the Everyman’.

Corona pressed her fingers together and sighed. “Why don’t you… I don’t know, let me know when things like this are going to happen?”

The kid shrugged - then started dancing for no good reason.

“This is serious!”

She kept dancing.

“I can revoke your access to our records!”

She kept dancing. Corona realized with annoyance that the Everyman was very good at searching through records, they needed this portion of the entity on their side. With a sigh, she sat back in her chair, accepting that she would just have to live without an explanation.

Unless she wanted to force the empathy. Which was probably a bad idea.

~~~

“ROIGHT, so it all goes down loik dis. Me an’ da Boyz were on Kardus fer about, urr… free or four weeks now, an’ we was workin’ up our numbahz tah go an’ krump da fish-faces in da valley. We’z all sittin’ ‘bout da camp, Mekboyz workin’ on da gubbinz fer da foight an’ da rest of us iz sittin’ ‘round a foiah, et’in’ some good ole Squig cake dat Boggertz made fer us, when dis lil runt speaks up an’ says to me an’ da Boyz, now he says dis: “Oi ladz, I just did some finkin’, an’ just realoized dat da fish-faces iz all bloo under dat shiny canners o’ derz. If deyz iz bloo, shouldn’t dey be more lucky?” So I grabz ahold of da runt an’ tell him loik dis: “If dey iz lucky, den we wouldn’t be ‘ere to krump ‘em now, wouldn’t we?” So I smashed me meat hunk into his zoggin’ gob, an’ ‘it ‘im SO ‘ARD dat ‘is zoggin’ ‘ead flew roight off his shouldas and ended up crushin’ a grot who got in da way!” The entire room full of Orks burst into uproarious laughter, pounding on tables and shattering glasses of alcohol at the joke told by the Ork onstage.

While he basked in the praise of such a brilliantly-told Ork joke, the table of three non-Orks in the back were less laughing and more… confused and slightly horrified. Vriska, Starbeat and Hastur glanced to one another, unsure of what to make of this outing. Vriska turned to Hastur and gave him a bit of a look.

“Okay… Ork Comedy Club, not the best date outing,” she said.

“Agreed,” Hastur said. Starbeat had little to comment, as she saw a fight break out between some Orks nearby.

“Now, Boyz, have ya heard da one about da hoomie who troid tah fist fight a Boss with a blunt choppah?”

~~~

Three armored Rainbow Dash pegasi stand on a beach, eye level with the black and gold trimmed armored pegasus. A fourth Rainbow Dash pops out in front of the armored pony, launched out of a portal, wearing a HUD visor on her right eye.

“Okay, it's time to do something about this. We all go by Rainboom, and that can't be, so I propose we add to our names, like I do at home,” she declares, first pointing to herself. “I'm Rainboom Prime, you can be Rainboom Vandal.”

“That's a strange name for me. I'm a reploid, not a miscreant!” responds the blue armored Rainboom, in a synthetic voice.

“You’re blue, and shiny, that’s Vandal colors.” Moving on, Rainboom Prime points to the pony in the carbon fiber textured space battle armor. “You can be Rainboom Wraith.”

“Why Wraith? Isn't that your commander's name?” Rainboom Wraith responds.

“She goes by Luna Wraith, and you're black with a red stripe. Wraith colors. And you, you can be Mutalist Rainboom.”

The red changeling Rainboom is taken aback. “Why is mine the other way around? Shouldn't it be ‘Rainboom Mutalist?’ What is even a mutalist?”

“It's how it works where I'm from.”

“Well, it's dumb and too long.”

“You got any better ideas?”

“How about this,” interrupts the reploid Rainboom. “I'm Rainboom X, you,” pointing to the changeling, “are Rainboom Z, you,” pointing to the Prime, “can be Proto Rainboom, and you,” pointing to the spacer, “can be Rainboon 7.”

“Rainboom 7?”

“Rainboon 7.”

“You just looked at my N7 badge, that sounds dumb too!”

Proto Rainboom interrupts. “Well so does Proto Rainboom, I mean, really, that's-”

“As dumb as Mutalist Rainboom!” Rainboom Z declares.

“Why can't we go our separate ways and not change our names?” Rainboon 7 suggests.

“You can't have the same name as every other Rainbow Dash in the multiverse!” Proto Rainboom exclaims.

Rainboon 7 rolls her eyes. “It’s not like some pony is going to-”

Suddenly, an armored pony, shaped like a court jester, launches out of the treeline into the air, riding a jet engined warhammer. Then, a Pinkie Pie launches out of the armored pony, aiming down at the Rainbooms.

“ONE! STEVE! LIMIT!!!” she shouts with murder in her eyes, drawing a forehoof back as it glows blue.

Three rainbow trails speed into the sky, followed by an exploding column of sand, visible over the treetops.

Once the sand stops falling, the remaining Rainboom portals out of her armored pony again. “That was mean, Disco!”

“Sorry, Umbra needs us for a mission here. Let's go, Rainboom Prime.” Disco smiles wide, before walking away. Rainboom Prime neighs in annoyance.

~~~

Olivia paused the playback as one of the displays caught her eye. “Hey, she’s online again,” she commented to Roxy, and smirked, bringing up a chat interface and opening a channel. “Watch this.”

[----sugarskull is online!----]
sugarskull: ¡Hola!
inquisitiveButterfly is typing…

“Is using that handle really a good idea?” Roxy queried. “It seems kind of obvious.”

Olivia shook her head. “Nah. This is a super secure system, and she’s got no idea who I am; I checked.”

iB: Oh. It’s you again.

ss: How’s life down the rabbit hole, amiga?

iB: No better for hearing from you.
iB: haven’t you got better things to do than hassle me?

ss: nope!

“Why are you hassling her?” Roxy frowned.

“Check out those ka readings!” Olivia waved at a window in the corner of the screen. “This chica’s got some kind of story going on around her, I just haven’t got a handle on it yet.”

iB: well, I do. Kinda busy right now.

ss: Aww, don’t be like that. You always got time to t

[----inquisitiveButterfly has been disconnected!----]
[----meddlerEternal has entered the conversation!----]

meddlerEternal: You are requested to cease interfering. If interference continues, consequences will ensue.

[----Connection has been terminated---]

“...Wow. He’s never done that before.” The hacker sat back in her chair. “He’s never any fun, but this is something else.”

“Who is he?”

“No idea. Hangs around with Miss Butterfly, seems to be her sysadmin, types like he’s some kind of alien robot, but apart from that…?”

Roxy grinned. “Sounds like you got yourself a challenge. Are you keeping an eye on them?”

Olivia mirrored the grin with her own. “More like a hobby. And I keep an eye on everything.”

~~~

FROM THE PRODUCER OF

BLASTO 3: INK ON THE STREETS

A camera pans across a lush jungle landscape. The air is thick with the cries of all manner of life.

COMES AN AMAZING TRUE STORY

One sound drowns out all others, a roaring engine that hasn’t even heard of tune-ups, much less ever gotten one. The camera settles on a trio of enormous green brutes just in time to see one chop down a tree as thick as a man with a device that can only be described as a chainsaw-bladed axe. Like its wielder, it would seem absurd if it didn’t look so deadly.
“How come we’s gotta go huntin’ for one li’l humie?” grunts the lumberjack.

The largest creature clouts him—presumably a him, based on sheer bulk and bass voice—on the back of his head. “Cuz da boss said! And while we’re lookin’, I’s da boss, cuz I’s da biggest an’ da strongest! Now get back ta choppin’!”

The third raises a hand. “‘Ang on. I hear sumfin.” He lumbers through undergrowth, boots tearing through with nary a care.

He parts the branches of a nearby shrub and gives a smile that would make a dentist faint in horror. “‘Ello. Wut do we ‘ave ‘ere?”

The camera reveals a little yellow pegasus, absurdly little given the size of the creatures before her. Her flak armor and lasgun seem equally inadequate.

“Wot is it?” calls one of the other behemoths, their own trundling steps getting closer.
“One o’ dem li’l horsies. We’s eatin’ like nobz tonight, boys!”

The camera has stayed on the little pegasus this whole time, zooming in closer even as gargantuan shadows gather. It halts abruptly, almost making the viewer jerk forward with psychosomatic momentum. One eye snaps open.

Followed shortly by the gates of Hell.

“AAAAAAHHHHH!” screams the pegasus.

“AAAAAAHHHHH!” scream the orks.

“AAAAAAHHHHH!” screams the pegasus.

“AAAArglbrglschlep” go the orks.

“AAAAAAHHHHH!” screams the pegasus.

There is an explosion. The camera moves to a wide shot to capture the small mushroom cloud and the shockwave that passes through the jungles of Catachan. It lingers there, giving the audience a moment to appreciate the contrast between beauty and deva—

“AAAAAAHHHHH!” screams the pegasus, flying directly towards the camera.

SHY MARBO

Coming soon to your local streaming service.

~~~

Celestia City. The symbol of Merodi harmony, and one that, while policed and guided effectively, also gets overrun with tourists every…week or so. Which is barely noticeable if you happen to live in one of the more quiet districts or quadrants such as Murphy or Waltzing Matilda, but if you live in Concordia or Harmony, may whatever god you pray to have mercy.

Nord the Sweetie was happily walking along the paved streets of Harmony, admiring the spires and golden and purple roofs shining in the (artificial) sun. So engrossed in her thoughts that she didn’t notice the pair of humans, a man and a woman with a guidebook in their hands coming up to her

“Excuse me miss, but do you know where the Crown Regalia are?” The man asked her

“Sorry, Crown Regalia?” She replied, puzzled. She hadn’t heard about the Crown Regalia of Equestria being anywhere near Celestia City.

“Yes. They are supposed to be here in this district somewhere” He said, holding up the book This City Wasn’t Here Yesterday - A guide to Celestia City.

“Oh…Now I get it. You’re using that book. It’s pretty good for the basics, but unfortunately it’s actually a bit lacking.”

“What do you mean? We were told it was the best available.”

“It is all well and good for the things regarding infrastructure. Problem was, the author has never actually visited the city.”

“Whaa- Never visited?”

“Nope. I mean, you do have a MultiMap, right?”

“Uhh. Yeah. Why?” they said, holding up the small white disc.

“Could you give me that for a moment?”

“Sure”

Nord pulled out her toolset and communicator and began fiddling with their MultiMap. A bit of tinkering later, she handed it back, albeit in a new color.

“Here you go. A guidebook in your MultiMap, courtesy of the League,” Nord said to them as they took their device back. “Hopefully you won’t get lost now.”

~~~

“Ambassador Valentine?” The man - at least, he appeared to be human, but his sudden arrival in something that in no way resembled any kind of ship suggested he probably wasn’t - was accompanied by a largish box, its sides apparently formed from forcefields, and its floor littered with what appeared to be small blue men wearing kilts. Some of them were snoring.

“As representative of the United States of the Multiverse, you are formally requested to take custody of these... individuals.” His lip curled with distaste. “Said persons were apprehended within Gallifreyan space, and have been charged with the following offences: drunk and disorderly conduct, public inebriation, public brawling, inciting violence, assault, breach of the peace, attempted robbery, causing an affray, public nuisance, theft, offensive language, defacing public property, defacing private property, and sundry other offences.”

Valentine surveyed the box of unconscious pictsies uneasily; he’d been warned of their reputation, and as far as he knew, there were very few drinks anywhere in the multiverse capable of getting Nac mac Feegle even properly drunk, let alone this. “What on Earth were they drinking?”

The Gallifreyan gave him a Look that said this had better not happen again. “Pan Galactic Gargleblasters.”

~~~

Renee stared blankly at the wall clock in her Expeditions office.

She was bored.

With a dejected sigh, she picked up her phone and called Pinkie. “Pinkie, dear, think we could grab Twilence and go blow something up? It appears that I’m getting nostalgic about the action.”

“CAN-DO!”

~~~

Aradia was cleaning Canterlot Castle. Specifically, she was attempting to clean the fairly expansive kitchen. She was having a very hard time with a set of stains from when a chef had tried to bake something with inter-dimensional ingredients for the visiting Primary Team. It had not gone well. After trying to use Time Shenanigans for the fifth time to clean one of the stains, she sighed and said, “This kitchen is so hard to clean. If only there was an easier way!”

And immediately regretted it.

With an unearthly thoom the fabric of space-time was ripped open a few feet from Aradia, and out stepped a human man. He was wearing a bright blue shirt with a button-up collar, a set of tan pants with a brown belt, and a very 'nice' hairstyle. He was smiling far too widely, grasping a perfectly clean silver pistol in his hands. “HI I’M DEREK BALM! Say goodbye to daily stains and dirty surfaces with new KITCHEN GUN!” He proceeded to hold up the now-dubbed Kitchen Gun. Aradia proceeded to panic. She tried to use time magic to go back and time and prevent this from ever happening, only to find time travel was disabled. Derek pointed his gun at one of the dirty surfaces - which happened to be the sink. “THIS SINK IS FILTHY! BUT WITH JUST THREE SHOTS FROM KITCHEN GUN…!“

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The kitchen sink was suddenly clean, although it had three bullet holes in it.

Another hole in the fabric of space-time opened and I quickly ran out, throwing Derek back through the portal, hoping that would take care of him. Unfortunately, he re-appeared without any fanfare, smiling like a madman. I moaned. "Ugh, I forgot he could do that..."

"Where's Burgerbelle when you need her?" Aradia whined.

"SAY GOODBYE TO DIRTY SURFACES WITH THE NEW KITCHEN GUN!"

I encased him in a lavender magic bubble. It did nothing whatsoever to stop his monologue. Or, for that matter, the gun.

"...Is he dangerous enough for me to kill?" Aradia asked as a bullet passed through her robe, rendering it sparkling clean.

"I wish," I muttered, whimpering.

"KITCHEN GUN!"

"I'LL KITCHEN GUN YOU!" I shouted, flaring my wings.

"I LOVE YOU KITCHEN GUN!"

~~~

“Balanced…” Thanos said, smirking. “As all things should be.”

He was holding a chunk of the Collector’s armor in each of his hands.

Lightning sighed. “Thanos…”

Starbeat chuckled. “I like him when he’s like this.”

Morty shrugged, indifferent.

Starbeat cleared her throat. “Anyway, we’ve got to deal with the Starcross Society. They found out we’ve got some of their people…”

Lightning flexed the Infinity Gauntlet. “Let’s invite them here for the talks…”

~~~

“John’s concern for my well being is touching, but he doesn’t understand. If I cannot trust my mind then I am useless.”

Rohan Kishibe looked across at the man in the armchair, and raised an eyebrow.

“So what do you want from me that your friend or a psychiatrist can’t do for you? I would have thought you were the type who is too proud to ask for assistance or admit weakness in anything, let alone literally let somebody see directly into his thoughts.”

Sherlock Holmes snorted dismissively. “You know as well as I do that I couldn’t keep you out if you wanted to see anything. And you should be perfectly capable of working out what I want. After all, you created the problem yourself.” He leaned forward in his chair, and fixed his visitor with a glare. “Mr Kishibe. You wrote this in my head. Its purpose has been served. Now I want it out. Fix this.”

~~~

Sombra paused. “Wait, I thought I had us set to areas around the present, that one happened years ago…”

Roxy shrugged, not particularly caring about the time discrepancy.

Sombra checked some settings. “Yeah… that should have been in the first clipshow I did!”

“Shut up and keep watching.”

~~~

Renee was having a sip of tea whilst going over paperwork regarding new recruits for Expeditions. Some humans from Galaxa Immaterium were certainly eager to get out and see new things, though considering how bad their life was in that abhorrent reality, it shouldn’t be surprising. Her thoughts were broken by one of her windows being abruptly shattered, as a man fell through wearing military fatigues, a crew-cut hairstyle, and the most deranged eyes she had seen in… the past few weeks. He seemed ultimately undamaged by the intrusion, removed a knife from the ground, regarded Renee with a small nod, then jumped back out the window, letting off a loud yet manly scream. Renee blinked repeatedly, yet the surprise still remained, as well as the shattered glass on her office floor. She pressed a hoof to the intercom on her desk and issued a call.

“Hello, Dolores? This is Overhead Renee Jackson. Private Sly Marbo broke my office window again.”

~~~

I started laughing uncontrollably.

This was odd to everyone around me, since we were in a graveyard filled entirely with different versions of Twilight Sparkle, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Twilence…?” Eve asked, cocking her head.

“I just…” I forced myself to stop laughing - though the snickers kept getting through. “G. M. Blackjack is having a panic.”

“...Panic? About what?”

“Oh, well, from his chronological point of view, ‘season nine’ of My Little Pony is just now coming out, and his practice of ‘retconning’ the story to match up with what he sees in the show is looking like it might finally fall apart.”

“Is this… bad?”

“Oh, no, just amusing. See, we are in the final version of whatever the story is, we don’t have to worry about the background getting rewritten. We already know if ‘season nine’ made it in or not.”

“Well yeah, I watched it, a-”

“Shhhh…” I put a hoof on her mouth and giggled. “It’s better if they have no idea.”

“...Wait, if he’s writing it, and wondering if he can…”

“Oh here we go…”

“How in the - wait, he’s the Prophet writing about characters who know something he doesn’t?!”

“Yep!”

“How by the Tower’s bricks does that work!?”

“Trade secret.”

“TWILENCE!”

~~~

Jade barked.

Capper hissed.

Jade barked harder.

Capper hissed more intensely.

Allure checked the clock. “Five minutes? Geez…”

“The power of cat and dog is strong,” Minna observed.

“Well, obviously, but this is ridiculous!”

“You owe me five bits,” Capper said suddenly, chuckling.

Jade bristled. “Allure, I thought you were smarter than that…”

Allure blinked. “...What?”

“All part of the plan…” Minna said with a giggle.

“...What?”

~~~

The portal opened to the prow of a ship. True to form, Nova barely glanced at the scenery before looking at her fetlock. “Huh. This area is showing signs of... The closest thing I can compare it to is scar tissue. Something big happened to this area of the multiverse less than a century ago local time, and…”

Vriska tuned her out. The gentle rocking of the boat, the islands in the distance, the salt in the air…

With the sky painted gold by an impending sunrise, she could almost imagine lines and compass roses in the sky. Almost smell Cetus's blood.

A blaring alert jerked her out of her musing. “Aaaand we've got a one-way block on multiversal travel,” Nova sighed and looked back at where the portal had been but a moment ago. “Leaving, obviously. Get comfortable, everyone. It’ll take a bit for me to analyze it and find a way to bypass it.”

Vriska felt a hoof on her hip. “Are you alright?” Flutterfree asked.

Only then did Vriska realize she was digging her nails into her palms, almost to the point of drawing blood. “Fine. Just...” She shrugged. “Nostalgic.”

Jotaro cleared his throat. Once everyone looked to him, he pointed towards the rest of the boat. They turned and saw a woman dressed in full pirate captain regalia. Judging by her crossed arms, her narrowed eyes, and the way the scaly, shoulder-length tentacles coming out of her head were writhing about, she wasn't happy to see them.

“I'd ask what you're doing on my ship,” she said, ‘but I find I don't particularly care. Also, I don’t need to.” After a moment of silence, she frowned. “Jace?”

Flutterfree hummed to herself. A patch of air next to them shimmered and resolved into a male human in blue breeches, whose reaction to getting revealed by Lolo was priceless. “Sorry, Captain. I tried to read the pink one, and... Well, the good news is that I remember what diabetic shock is now, and I learned it can apply to telepathy.”

Pinkie just giggled at that.

“Well then.” The captain's eyes began to glow. “I suppose we’ll do this the old-fashioned way. Tell me how you got on this ship and who you’re working for, or we'll be putting some exotic statuary in the hold.”

Vriska smiled and stepped forward. “You know, I think there’s something traditional people say at times like these.”

The captain raised an eyebrow as the glow intensified. “Yes. They answer the gorgon’s questions.”

“Not quite what I meant.”

Vriska threw her dice. The captain unleashed her spell, turning the first thing in her line of sight into stone.

Or it would have, if fluorite weren’t already a stone.

Several monkey-like creatures fell from where they clung to the ship’s rigging, slipped on poorly swabbed planks, or got struck by lightning on a clear day, because goblins are luck sinks no matter what they look like.

And once the dice landed, a newly-garbed troll pointed her cutlass at the captain. Grinning, Vriska said to Vraska, “I was thinking ‘One of us has to change.’”

~~~

Jenny’s Everywhere Journal
Mysterious Hexagon Library, Day 17, room eight.

More books filled with utter gibberish. Horizon still insisted on running her translation spell over each and every page of every single one. She thought she found some actual words at one point, but it turned out to be more nonsense, most of it wasn’t even spelled right.

I’m sure there’s somebody else living here, there’s stuff they left behind in every room. I hope it’s not more Twilights, one at a time is plenty.

Day 17, later.
I just opened a random book and found “honisli jus waitng for hori t get board”. I stuffed it back on a shelf she’s already checked. I hope she doesn’t notice it.

~~~

“Tonight on THE BEST GAME SHOW EVER,” a Them shouted. “Which is better? The Collection? Or the United State of the Multiverse?”

Valentine and Lightning realized they were standing in opposition to each other on a game show podium. Lightning tried her Infinity Gauntlet, but of course it didn’t work.

“As everyone knows, there is only one category: WHO HAS THE COOLEST ONE-LINER! GO!”

Valentine and Lightning said nothing.

“And there you have it folks, they both suck! Tune in next time while we try to figure out where all the facts have gone!”

~~~

Guide to Librarians

Museum Librarians

“Look back on your culture, look forward to your history”

Often known as Curators, they are upstanding, pleasant people that are a cut above the rest of the filth that call themselves ‘librarians’, and I’m humbled that I get to write and learn about them. Museum librarians are friends to all the knowledge collectors. Historians, archaeologists, cultural analogists, documenters, all are happy to know the Museum Librarian.

They are unique in that there is nothing wrong with them, they aren’t eldritch and quite frankly don’t belong on this list, but I felt compelled to inform you all that there is nothing wrong with them, and in fact they’re the sole elite librarian out of any of them.

So be sure to visit your local museum and read about history, it’ll be a fun experience for you and educational as well.

*If you touch any of the exhibits you’ll come to an unfortunate accident.

Chapters Librarians

”Pick up a gift card, the holiday season is perfect for a book”

The bookstore clerks and employees are among countless part-time workers that enjoyed reading and did not know the horrors of the bookstore. While smaller owned bookstores are certainly capable of the same levels of terrors, it truly comes to full power in the biggest chain stores. The most mysterious of the librarians lurk the aisles and stacks of literature.

Masters of commerce and micromanaging, the Chapters Librarian is often known more as the spirit of the store itself. Beware walking into their doors unless you like unreachable pocket dimensions. Time within the bookstore is completely at the discretion of this breed of librarian. You can be lost indefinitely, lose your mind to centuries of isolation, only to be found not two minutes after you initially disappeared.

It’s unclear how the different books, games, and toys get priced, as there is no actual person running these stores, but one thing is abundantly clear, if you so much as crease a page of a book you do not intend to buy, you will find your life story ripped painfully from your mind and sold for 29.99 local currency.

University Librarians

“Errare humanum est, ignoscere bibliothecarii”

The very definition of a library is a place of knowledge, so it would stand to reason that a University Librarian would be the holder of all accumulated knowledge. They are powerful seers who can not only predict the future, but even change it to be what they desire. It’s theorized that every person that dies in post-secondary education at any point was killed by the University Librarian for a slight they had yet to commit.

While it has yet to be proven, it’s generally accepted as truth among the few of us that document librarians. If you ever sign your name into their logbook, you’re signing your soul away to them indefinitely. It isn’t a curse that can be removed, it isn’t a bond that can be unsealed, it simply is that you will never be free of their influence.

A trick of their breed is to never appear to you, this is to make you believe that any and all problems that may occur are in some way your own fault. This simply isn’t the case. They hold absolute power in their libraries, and anything that happens is most assuredly part of their grand design.

~~~

THE SCIENCE SHOW with CORONA SHIMMER!

“Today we’re testing how the primary team of Merodi Universalis deals with pressure!”

“What?” Nova asked, cocking her head. “Why are w-”

“Shhh, we need to do science,” Corona said, putting a finger to Nova’s lips. “So, hold still, you’re all about to be compressed by two industrial-strength steam-press hands!”

“WHAT-”

The hands fell from the ceiling, smashing into all five of them.

Nova and Flutterfree were flattened harmlessly like pancakes, Jotaro busted the press with Star Platinum, and Vriska’s press randomly failed to activate.

Pinkie had swapped places with Corona and gotten her flattened like a pancake.

“This has been the SCIENCE SHOW with PINKIE PIE!” Pinkie declared, grinning.

~~~

The Xeelee had called a meeting of the Seats.

A single Xeelee showed up. None of the others appeared.

...Well, time to simulate a meeting all on my own.

~~~

Skaia’s Dream had a problem.

Scratch that, it had SEVERAL problems, one was just significantly bigger than all the others.

Everyone was dead.

Which, unfortunately, meant…

“Why do we have to listen to you!?” a Karkat shouted.

Meenah facepalmed. “Because I have the good stuff. You want out o’ this bubble, you go through me.”

“Or me!” Feferi added, waving her hand.

“Yes, fine, or her, if you want a flounder to get you out.”

“I can just portal out myself!” one of the Space player shouted.

“And you’ll vanish because ghosts can’t exist elsewhere,” Meenah said, folding her arms. “Look, idiots, just get it in your head - refuse to listen, you’re stuck. Follow the rules, you’re free.”

“That’s a load of shit!” the Karkat shouted.

“I’m not glubbin happy about it either! You think I’m actually in charge here!? I’m just a universe head! Those stupid Overheads are breathing down my neck to keep all you ‘fronds’ from tearing this realm of dreams to shreds!”

“We can do that?”

“Yes y- HEY! NO GETTING ANY IDEAS!”

It was too late. The Space players were already trying it.

As it turned out Skaia’s Dream had a stronger dimensional fabric than that. Unfortunately this did mean the entire crowd was sent to random locations within the bubbly dream, calling the ‘organized’ meeting to an end.

Meenah facepalmed. “Feferi, I am gonna fork every last one of these morons…”

Feferi didn’t respond. Because she had been shifted elsewhere too.

Meenah threw her trident into the ground and let out an intense scream of rage.

~~~

She-ra was supposed to be the savior of Eternia.

She-ra was destined to bring peace and prosperity to the land, saving it from the evils of the Horde.

But one day the Horde had suddenly gotten a million times stronger and more effective… The world had fallen to them with ease. She had escaped with a handful of friends to form a cohesive resistance.

They had been taken one by one…

She was the only one left, now. She, Adora, the last She-ra. And she was going to take on the Horde in a last-ditch attempt at saving everything. She would have to do it - she would have to take out Catra and bring the entire Horde crashing down.

Her prismatic aura of power surrounded her as she drove her legendary blade through the Horde’s ceiling, plowing through several layers of mish-mashed magitech before arriving in the main sanctum.

She was bruised, scratched, battered, and had an artificial foot. She had plowed through hundreds of Horde soldiers with power she hadn’t known she had. But here she was, finally at the throne room. Once it had been Hordak sitting there, but now…

“Catra…” Adora growled, tightening her grip around the ancient sword.

“Ah, Adora, I was wondering when you’d show up,” Catra said - wearing a strange gray uniform with an orange u-like symbol on it. “Like what I’ve done with the place?”

“Your reign of terror ends today, Catra!”

“Terror? Adora, isn’t that a bit harsh?”

“Catra…”

Scorpia ran into the room. “Just got the reports from the Brightmoon district - the interdimensional tech has been fully integrated and all government relief plans are working great!”

“And I just got the entire planet hooked up to the Multiversal Internet!” Entrapta said, skittering in.

Adora gawked. “Entrapta…?”

Entrapta ignored her - and Catra chuckled. “You haven’t seen anything yet, Adora.” She snapped her fingers, prompting the screen-wall behind her to light up. “Computer, what is the poverty rate on Eternia?”

“One percent.”

“How much was it before the Horde appeared?”

“Sixty-three percent.”

Adora blinked. “Catra what are y-”

“Computer, how many people have been killed in the war of Eternia?”

“Nine hundred thousand six hundred and four.”

“How many of those happened after I took control?”

“Sixty thousand.”

Adora stared at the screen, trying to process this.

“Computer, show me the Fright Zone.” The screen lit up to show Catra and Adora’s home - except it looked nothing like the industrial wasteland Adora remembered. There were trees everywhere; brilliant, pristine buildings - and children playing in the streets. Not everyone was a soldier.

“It’s hard to measure the quality of life with a number, but I think I’ve improved it for everyone amazingly,” Catra said with a smirk. “Oh, and your friends? Computer, show us the princess compound.”

Adora’s jaw dropped. People - friends - she had thought were dead were happily sitting around a table, drinking tea and eating cake. There was a guard nearby, but even he seemed to be smiling and enjoying himself.

“The moment all rebellion is stamped out, they get to go free, released of all criminal charges,” Catra said with a smirk. “Would you like to go join them?”

“Y-yes…” Adora said, eyes watering.

“Good. Aside from your total surrender, there’s one other condition.”

“What?”

Catra punched Adora in the face, knocking her to the ground. “And that’s it! Scorpia, you can take her to the others. She can keep her sword, I don’t need it.” She sat down in her throne. “Entrapta, contact Evening, tell her operation ‘horde of cats’ has been completed. Pretty sure we’re ready for complete integration now.”

She smirked. That deal with the purple alicorn had been the best decision of her life. She could only go up from here.

~~~

“I AM NOT AN ANGEL!” Corona shouted, trying to stop a group of people from worshipping her. “I AM A… A…” Her mind went blank. “What am I?”

Lady Rarity shrugged. “Angel is probably the closest body-type.”

“But I’m not some kind of divine being!”

“Hey, Servitude is, she still has the same problem you do.”

“There aren’t cults devoted to her on her homeworld!” Corona said, gesturing at the ‘Corona: Giver of Life’ temple, nestled right in the middle of Canterlot.

“I think it’s flattering.”

“IT’S NOT!”

“Oh, the giver of life is so humble!” a mare said, swooning.

“STOP IT!” Corona shouted, to no avail.

~~~

“Okay, Saitama,” Tornado said, pressing her hands together. “I need you to do one thing for me.”

“Sure!” Saitama said.

“Stand there and don’t move for an hour.”

“Uh… strange request, but okay.”

“Good. Glad we had this talk.”

Forty-five minutes later Saitama had broken the shield generator for the USM defender ship, allowing the aliens to get into the ship.

“...Saitama…”

“Hey! It’s not my fault that fish alien hit the generator!”

“You punched a hole through the entire ship!”

“...Yes.”

Tornado, in her previous life, would have started screaming. Instead she let out a dejected sigh and started slaughtering the alien invaders.

~~~

In the depths of the Multiverse, in the abyss of the narrative, where time itself has truly bent in a knot, the Gunslinger, yet again, begins his journey.

"I'm catching a vibe that we aren't supposed to see this, Olivia..."

"Nervous over the image of some cowboy guy in a desert, amiga? Fine, let's go to the next one."

~~~

The Emperor of Mankind sat upon the Golden Throne (like he had anything else to do, what with being a skeleton and all). The Captain-General was currently off getting some tea, the three Fabulous Custodians were still in time out for being needlessly creepy, as usual, and his sons were currently having some much needed catch up. So, with little else to do, the Emperor voiced his thoughts via his handy text-to-speech device.

“DAMN, I AM BORED.” The Emperor ‘said’. “THIS IS THE MOST EXTREME CASE OF BOREDOM I HAVE NOT FELT SINCE FUCKING HORUS PUT ME ON THIS STUPID SHINY COUCH AND I WAS FACED WITH TEN MILLENNIA OF SILENCE. UNTIL THE BANANA BRIGADIER COMES BACK WITH MY GODDAMN TEA, I HAVE NOBODY TO AIR MY COMPLAINTS TO. SIGH. I GUESS I CAN SIT HERE AND RATTLE ON TO MYSELF ABOUT ALL THE STUFF ON MY MIND. LIKE ALL THESE MULTIVERSAL VISITORS FROM THE MERODI. THOSE SUNSHINE SPARKLY SHITS HAVE BEEN DOING A LOT OF GOOD WORK FOR THE GALAXY AS OF LATE, EVEN IF THEY ADDED AN UNNECESSARY AS FUCK NOTCH TO MY MASTER PLAN. PURPLE BOOK PONE AND MAGNUS HAVE BEEN GETTING ALONG SWELL, BUT IF MY RED-MEAT CHICKEN-WING SON TRIES TO GO BEHIND MY BONEY BACK AGAIN AND DO SOMETHING STUPID WITH THE MERODI IN AN EFFORT TO GRAB POWER, I WILL BEND HIM OVER MY KNEE AND SPANK HIS ASS EVEN REDDER. I DO MISS THE BACON-ANGEL, THOUGH, SHE REMINDS ME OF MY FABULOUS HAWK-BOY SANGUINIUS. EXCEPT A GIRL WITH DELICIOUS LOOKING HAIR. NOTE TO SELF AFTER RETURNING TO FLESH AGAIN: ORDER AN ENTIRE PLATE OF BACON AND EAT IT WITH PANCAKES. ZOAS’ HIGH VOLTAGE WILLY, WHEN IS MY CARETAKER COMING BACK? I AM GETTING BORED TO THE POINT THAT I AM HALF-TEMPTED TO START MESSING WITH THE VOICE FEATURE ON MY TEXT-TO-SPEECH DEVICE AGAIN. MAYBE I CAN - WAIT, WHEN DID THAT PAINTED SERVO-SKULL GET IN HERE? THAT ISN’T ONE OF MY CHERUBS.”

“Ah, merde.” Olivia quietly cursed, quickly changing the feed and recalling the hijacked camera.

~~~

“Yo. Windy boy.”

John looked up from the sandwich he was eating to see Rainbow Dash. “Uh…”

“I’m told you have quite the interesting ability. This… ‘retcon’ thing sounds… awesome.” Her pink eyes sparkled. “Can I see it?”

“I can’t take you back before the Combine thing, and I’m really not supposed to use it without a good reason…” John said, frowning.

“Come on. I’m Rainbow Dash, Equis Vitis, captain of the Wonderbolts.” She grinned. “You can say I ordered you to do it. They’ll let you off the hook and Eve can never stay mad at me for long.”

John shrugged. “Eh, sure, not like I’m really doing anything anyway. Where do you want to go?”

“Literally anywhere that isn’t going to explode in our faces.”

John waved his hand around randomly for show - focusing on a point ahead of him so he wouldn’t accidentally bounce back behind the Gallifreyans’ ‘security protocol’ thing.

With a zap, the two of them appeared in the same diner. Except it was night.

“Boring, that’s just regular time travel. Do something interestin-“

John zapped them back a few seconds, appearing in a table on the other side of the diner.

“Boring, that’s just regular time t-“ the ret-past Rainbow Dash stared at the newer Rainbow Dash. Ret-present John gave a finger-guns gesture to his ret-past self and he zapped himself and Rainbow Dash away.

Rainbow Dash felt her memories shift like they had just fused with something. “Uh…”

“I just undid a ret-duplication,” John said, folding his arms. “Clever trick, huh?”

“How did you figure that out!?”

“…Well, uh, there ended up being two of me at one point and it was awkward how we kept stepping over each other’s shoes… So we figured we might as well try it. Worked like a charm, zap-popped together again.” He retconned a pair of sunglasses from… somewhere and slapped them on his face.

“Yep. Awesome. A little creepy too.” Rainbow Dash shook her head. “But let’s do something cooler! Why not leave the diner?”

“Eh, sure…” He zapped the two of them away, appearing somewhere random in the future. A large bear made of stars stared at them. They stared back.

“John Egbert…” the bear said, raising an eyebrow. “You must be g-“

John retconned out of there without thinking too hard, appearing inside a crystalline universe. A strange white presence flashed around them, giving the two of them the mental image of a jellyfish made of universes. “I was wondering if you would ever be drawn to me, retconner…”

“Nope!” John said, zapping out again, this time appearing in a place of complete darkness.

“…Maybe we should go back,” Rainbow Dash said.

“Yeah, that’s probably a good id-”

Some monstrous creature in the dark shrieked at them - John auto-zapped once again.

They were suddenly standing in a field. In the sky they saw an endless number of moons orbiting moons orbiting moons in a fractal pattern…

“It’s probably best if you go back, dears,” a Rarity with a cracked eye said to them. “There’s nothing for you here.”

John felt a chill run down his back. He picked up Rainbow Dash and zapped away.

Instead of being back in the diner, they were in front of the House Juju. It sat alone, in the darkness. Weren’t there supposed to be Celestialsapiens guarding it?

He could hear a haunting refrain in the background. He knew, more than anything else, that he needed to get out of there.

And then they were back in the diner like nothing had happened.

“…I think I see why you’re not supposed to use that,” Rainbow Dash said, shivering slightly. “Thanks but… If I come asking for this again, punch me. Please.”

For once, John didn’t hesitate to agree to punch a girl.

~~~

“Sooooo…Twilence, did your prophet get any new ideas?!?” I heard Pinkie shout as
she entered my study.

“He has one…one for a later metatime. But that’s not here nor there,” I replied, not looking up from my book.

“But visions are so boring…”

“Tell you what, Pinkie. I’ll make sure to bend it a bit…Visions are just that, visions.”

“Think it will be….fun?”

“It will be an encore of creativity. At least, that’s what the Eye is telling me,” I said, pointing to the Eye.

“Ooh! Ooh! Will there be maracas and bands?”

“No, or rather. I don’t know. It will be a chorus of voices, a chorus of songs and stories. A chorus, Pinkie, of songs in their spheres.”

“So when will this happen to us?”

“It could already have happened. I will just collect it all into a book. With a fitting background, of course.”

Pinkie left out the door she came in. I, on the other hoof instead took flight and began figuring out how best to preserve my space library. It would not be easy, but then, when has ka ever made something easy?

~~~

“Steven!” Connie shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Pearl’s almost got breakfast ready! Get down here!”

Steven Universe, half-Gem half-human, opened his eyes with a groan. He was far from the child the Diamonds would recognize from the show - his muscles were well toned and his face was covered in stubble. However, he still wore a similar shirt, and his pink gemstone was ever-present on his belly.

“Steven!”

“Coming!” he called, getting out of the bed and stretching. He walked down the stairs to the front of the Temple proper - the part of the house he had grown up in. Connie was waiting for him at the table - giving him a peck on the cheek as he sat down. The only other person at the table was one Lapiz Lazuli, whose blue eyes were fixated on the newspaper in her hands.

“Listen to this Steven,” Lapis said, ruffling the papers. “Red Diamond project approved by Oversight Division, construction beginning... yesterday. I think. It’s the fifth, right?”

“Earth time or Merodi Standard?” Connie asked.

Lapis shrugged. “Either works.” Her phone buzzed - prompting her to take it out with a tendril of water rather than putting down the newspaper. It was a picture of a green and purple pair of Gems running away from a large interdimensional monster. “Looks like Amethyst and Peridot are having fun.”

Connie blinked. “I’m pretty sure that’s not what ‘HELP’ means.”

Lapis shrugged, putting her phone away. “They’ll be fine.”

Pearl finally leaped over the top of the kitchen counter, laying a tremendous mixture of waffles, whipped cream, and breakfast pies on the table for the three to eat - though naturally only Steven and Connie needed to eat. “Food’s ready!”

“...You’ve gotten really good at cooking over the years, Pearl,” Connie said, taking a bite. “Why don’t you ever eat? I’m sure there are ways to get a more natural digestive tract.”

“The natural ones aren’t worth it,” Lapis warned, downing an entire glass of orange juice in a second.

“I… like the process of preparing food,” Pearl said, shrugging. “Plus, it gets us together every day. Steven really was right all those years ago with that ‘together breakfast’ idea. ...Though you really shouldn’t have dragged it into the temple.”

Steven chuckled. “Not the smartest thing I ever did.”

“Not the dumbest either,” Connie commented.

“Can we not spend today talking about how dumb I was?”

“Of course, Steven,” Pearl said. “Oh, by the way, I got a transmission - Garnet’s coming home today, she should be he-” there was a loud THUNKoutside. “...Now, I guess.”

“Breakfast must be put on hold!” Steven declared. “Garnet needs a proper welcome!”

“Eh, sure,” Lapis said, setting the newspaper down. “I wonder if she destroyed a building this time. It was fun to see Bismuth try to be mayor and repair-Gem at the same time.”

“Garnet’s not that careless,” Pearl said with a wave of her hand.

“Then how’d she break the first one?”

“Er…”

Steven threw the door open. “Garnet!” He pulled the fusion Gem into his arms.

Garnet hugged him back. “It’s good to be home.”

“You’re just in time for together breakfast!”

“Steven… never change.” Garnet smiled knowingly. “I’m sorry, it’s going to have to wait.”

“Aww, why?”

Garnet stepped to the side, letting Steven see the feet of the Diamonds. He had to look way up to meet their eyes. “Oh.”

“Hello again!” Blue waved nervously. “I, uh… Steven, you see, we…”

“You know what ka is, right?” Yellow asked - Steven nodded. “Yeah. We found a cartoon called Steven Universe.”

“Ooooooh…” Steven said. “So you just had to meet me, huh?”

“Well, yes,” Blue admitted. “But there is more to it than th-”

White leaned down and tapped Steven on the head. “You’re Pink Diamond.”

Pearl pulled Steven back and readied her spear while Lapis and Connie entered a fighting stance. “Leave him alone!”

“Pearl, she wasn't attacking me!” Steven shouted.

“She could have squished you!” Connie countered.

“I have better control over my powers than that…”

“We’re not here to hurt him,” Yellow said. “You have my word.”

Pearl looked up at Yellow Diamond. “What does your word mean?”

“A lot, actually,” Lapis said. “Yellow’s done a lot for Merodi Universalis, Pearl. Peridot and Amethyst have worked with her personally.”

“I… I…”

Steven put a hand on Pearl’s shoulder. “It’s okay, but it’s time to let go of the past.” He stepped forward. “Yes, I’m Steven Universe. My mother was Pink Diamond, otherwise known as Rose Quartz.”

“I thought we were looking for a child…” White muttered.

“Humans grow up,” Lapis said.

“...Who are you?”

“Lapis Lazuli, Bob,” Lapis reported.

“I still can’t believe you made that official,” Connie moaned.

“I like the name,” was all ‘Bob’ the Lapis Lazuli had to say.

White had already grown bored of the terraforming Gem, returning her attention to Steven. “Pink…”

“I’m not her,” Steven said, shaking his head. “Haven’t been for a long time.”

“...Gone…” White whispered to herself.

“I’d like to get to know you, though.” Steven smiled. “We’re family, after all.”

White stared at him blankly.

“I’m Steven. This is my wife, Connie, and the Gem who raised me, Pearl.”

Pearl, despite herself, curtsied. “White Pearl, Quar.”

“I live here,” Lapis offered.

Steven continued. “And my dad, Greg Universe, lives down in that van there.”

Said van was driving up to the temple. It parked, and an aging man with a gray beard climbed out. “Hey Steven! I’ve got the coolest song for y-” he saw the Diamonds. “Oh.”

“...You’re the one who courted Pink…” Yellow said, narrowing her eyes.

“Uh…”

“Didn’t think to ask permission?”

“UH…”

Yellow smirked - then turned away, letting the poor man wonder if it was a joke or not.

“So yeah, that’s the family,” Steven said. “And you’re all here! It’s a full family reunion!”

White stared at him, saying nothing.

“Come on, we’ve got together breakfast going. I can share with you the wonders of eating!”

“...I have business to attend to,” White said, turning away.

“Oh. I understand, you run the entire universe. It’s a big job.”

“It… is.” For a second, she glanced behind herself - taking a moment to look at Garnet before stopping on Steven. “I… meeting you was worthwhile. ...Steven.”

And she left.

“...I really thought…” Steven trailed off.

“You did great,” Garnet said, tousling his hair. “She didn’t try to shatter all of us. That’s better than we expected.”

“Heh. Yeah…”

Blue Diamond could no longer restrain herself now that White was gone - she pulled Steven up in a hug and laugh-cried. “You’re the… the best thing that’s happened to me - to us - in a long, long time, Steven.” She tapped Steven lightly in the stomach. “You are her, but you are something else… Something she created. You are amazing.”

“Aw, gee, I’m not that special…”

“Yes. Yes you are. And don’t let anyone ever tell you differently.”

“Looks like you just got yourself a doting aunt!” Connie called.

“You haven’t seen anything,” Blue said. “I’m going to move Pink’s palace here for you. You can have everything in it.”

“Wo-oah!” Steven said, blinking. “The palace?”

“Yes. The palace. It’s all yours now. And I know you wouldn’t want to leave this place to have it back. So I’ll bring it to you!”

“...Think Bismuth will like that?”

“No,” Lapis deadpanned.

“...We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“Hey,” Yellow said, taking Steven from Blue. “You still having trouble with your powers?”

Steven shrugged. “I’m pretty good now. I think.”

“Exactly. You think. We Diamonds have a lot of hidden potential within us, and our powers have many intricate uses and variety. I trained Pink, I can train you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You, Connie, Stevonnie even.” She smirked. “You’ll have two doting ‘aunts’ and like it.”

Steven laughed. “I’m sure I will! Welcome to the family!”

~~~

“What IS an electric boogaloo?” Gilgamesh asked.

~~~

In a dark room stood a man in a business suit, staring directly at the camera. Just… staring. Staring and… smiling. Smiling a wide and uncomfortable smile. He stared, and stared, and stared some more, unmoving as he kept staring and smiling. Slowly, his mouth opened, and a waterfall of thick brown liquid flowed out. Despite the sudden rush of this sickly ooze, the suited, smiling man, spoke.

“I SEE YOU.”

Olivia quickly changed the feed, and tried to forget ever even putting that camera out. How did it even get there?

~~~

Amid the lush landscape of Equis Vitis, there was a lab coat lying on the ground, serving as an improvised picnic blanket. Sitting nearby, a former warden was chatting with his former prisoner.

“So, Pinkie, how the hell did you pull that thing with the camera?”

“Well, I’m SO glad you asked, Doctor Bright!”

"”’Doctor Bright’? Now that’s a name I haven't heard in a long time!”

~~~

It wasn’t every day that two Jades started shouting at each other in the middle of the League of Sweetie Belles.

“What is wrong with you!?” the first shouted.

“What is wrong with me? You are asking me that!?” retorted the other.

“Why not? You’ve abandoned everything and are basically living here like an office dog!”

“BARK! What’s wrong with being an office dog? Plus, I still talk to everyone, and the Sweeties are adorable and innocent!”

“You just don’t want to grow up.”

“If growing up means becoming a promiscuous maniac like you, maybe you’re right! You’re worse than Mattie!”

“Maybe I’m better than Mattie!”

“WOOF!”

“BARK!”

John retcon-zapped into the room next to Skaian-Sweetie Blink and Mattie. The latter was drinking a fruity alcoholic beverage.

“Uh… which one’s Alpha and which one’s Omega?” John asked.

“I have no idea,” Blink admitted with a shrug. “It’s still probably a good idea for you to stop them.”

“Nah, let them go at it,” Mattie said with a smirk. “Brings a new meaning to ‘cat’ fight.”

John rubbed his hands together, going with Blink’s idea. “Okay girls, let’s calm down…”

Both of them barked at him aggressively, making him fall back in surprise.

Blink facehooved and sighed.

~~~

At the door to the headquarters of The League of Sweetie Belles, an irritated ghost was giving a lecture to its founders - who were doing their best to casually block the entrance with their bodies.

“...so, as should now be be evident from the points I mentioned earlier, the practice of assessing the members for an association by a label of an ‘alternate version of an individual’ is a manifestation of rooted discrimination and xenophobia, and I find it preposterous that a congregation like this is given the responsibility to enforce the law, in a stark contradictio-”

“Please, Kankri, just shut up,” interrupted Allure.

Bot spoke up. “You are... advised to visit the Sparkle Census! The ‘lecture’ speech pattern compatibility detected. There is a statistically significant probability that the members of the friendly rival group will appreciate your input... Do not inform the Sparkles that this unit was the source of this idea. Please.”

“No!” - Squeaky protested with a high-pitched scream. “Do you want us to fight another war, Bot?”

Thrackerzod, silent, mentally shuffled her exhaustive list of banishment invocations.

~~~

“...Copyright strike?” Trixie said, cocking her head at the email she’d just recieved.

Discord summoned a pair of ‘old librarian’ glasses and examined the screen. “Curious…”

“I didn’t think we had those!” Trixie muttered.

“Local companies can claim copyright,” Discord said, flipping through a ‘Tome of Legalese’.

“I - I knew that!” Trixie hissed. “I just never get them! I’m always within the parody use!”

“You are the epitome of a parody…”

“Quiet,” she muttered, looking through the email further. “Hold on… a machine gave me the strike!? Why would it do that!?”

“Bad AI?”

“Trixie’s phone intelligence is smarter than that!”

Discord grinned. “Never underestimate a company’s ability to cut corners.”

Trixie mumbled. “Trixie will go to war over this…”

“...Over ‘the nineteen best cat memes of the week’?”

“YES!”

~~~

Elsewhere, a law was created that exempted Burgerbelle from copyright strikes of all kinds.

~~~

“Evening?”

“Yes, Renee?”

“Why are we dressed like cows?”

Eve examined herself, noting the giant rubber cow skin she happened to be wearing. Renee was standing next to her, wearing an identical one. “I don’t know,” Eve admitted.

~~~

“My name is Moguro Fukuzuo, people call me the Laughing Salesman. However, I am no ordinary salesman, because I am in the soul business. Human souls, that is.” The Happy Mask Salesman had only just encountered this strange visitor to his stall in the Neutral Zone. This smiling, portly gentleman in a well-kept business suit with his beautiful green floral-print bag immediately caught his eye before he even spoke in that jovial, deep tone.
The Happy Mask Salesman met Moguro’s smile with one of his own and placed a hand on the shorter man’s shoulder.

“Why haven’t we met sooner? Come, let me buy you a drink….”

~~~

Guide to Librarians

High School Librarians

“The computers aren’t for games, the printers aren’t for personal use”

While every breed of librarian has mutations, exceptions, and subsections, none are more well-known or developed than the High School Librarian. Best known for their aggression, it’s often posited that they are as much victims as they are librarians.

Teenagers are the closest things mortals can be to immune to eldritch horrors. Their changing brains, hormones, and body make them the perfect counters to any librarian, and as such, the High School Librarian and the students that they hold sway over are in a war of attrition with each other. The oldest in documented history.

Casualties of all kinds, rules and rebellions both, nothing is safe or sacred in the warzone that is a public high school library. These librarians are among the weakest and most distracted of any breed, primarily due to the unfathomable resources and power they commit to their war.

*if you ever wish to safely check out a book, do it here, your mind and soul are likely to be spared.

Cover Librarians

“That’s not for you to know”

A strange breed of librarian, often cited as the most reasonable and least eldritch, but this is a proven trick. Cover Libraries are defined by the secrets they keep. As such, little is known about them, only that they’re unnaturally friendly as far as librarians go.

What secrets they’re holding is something nobody will find out, by design, but you’ll know you’re about to do something they don’t like by how suddenly they shift from calm and talkative to mind-shattering nightmare. Avoid leaving their line of sight, stay away from unmarked doors, and do not reach too far past the check out.

If you value your life you will not attempt to uncover their secrets, some things were not meant to be known. It doesn’t matter where you go, how far you run, or how many defences you put up, this librarian will find you, traversing through your own secrets, and you will be found an unrecognizable smear across the floor.

Mobile Librarians

“These wheels take me far, these books even further”

Mobile Librarians are known for their mobility, and while not the most omnipresent, they fit between the cracks, filling the space left over by the other Librarians. They exist anywhere no knowledge normally can, and that includes, among other places, your own home.

Their collection of books contains the most eclectic selection you can possibly hope to find, from recipe books by long extinct universes, to unpublished works of unknown authors, to even the most obscure thought bubbles of comic characters that have never existed. Mobile Librarians are among the most prideful, and as such, it’s advised you never challenge them in any way.

If you find yourself unfortunate enough to have a library cart come across your path, calmly borrow a book, read it, and return it: anything else may result in your untimely disassembly.

~~~

Boon “Twilight” Sparkle closed the Guide to Librarians. “Well, I found this book decidedly offensive.”

The rest of the Sparkle Census book club nodded in agreement.

“We’re librarians, not eldritch horrors from another universe.” She rolled her eyes. “If these facts are true in any universe - which I highly doubt - the librarians would never be able to hold stable jobs, much less get any actual readers, which is all a library is for.”

“Yeah, we get it,” Horny Sparkle said, nodding slowly so as not to unbalance her absurd number of horns.

“Maybe it’s a distorted understanding of L-space?” Timmernives Sparkle suggested. “Some of us do gain power through that.”

“Not in such absolute terms…”

Boon nodded. “Regardless, I should get back to my library. Normally I would stick around, but I have a feeling the discussion of this book would leave somewhat of a bad taste in my mouth.” She opened a dimensional portal to her home world and stepped through.

Just before it closed, they watched her fold the Guide to Librarians out of existence without even using magic from her horn.

“...Boon lives in a small town, right?” Timmernives asked.

“...Yeah,” Horny agreed.

“...Gimme that book, what did it say about Town Librarians and reality manipulation?”

~~~

The world once was a storm of rocks, by wildest urge
Then, amid people stood a man, the Demiurge,
He built a pillar to support a world of wildest dreams,
In which he put a monument to blow the streams.

Below the masterwork of all-defying gears
He put an elegant array of thirteen spheres.

The first one was to give the world direction,
To make the fate move on, not looking back,
Set all events or an importance in connection,
And give the storylines a structure to track

The second one gave world a sense of measure,
So every blade of grass that holds its worlds,
Would know its place, and give a gift, a treasure
To those who know how measuring works.

The third, to count and understand the counted,
Make Fate a lady of the fashionable looks
So everything worthwhile will be accounted,
And then be put into the spotlight of the books.

The fourth, to make unseen remain unwritten,
Thus making room for unexplored worlds,
For subtle things not meant to be belittled,
For those who fill, and fall between the words.

The fifth, to give events the sense of freedom,
That Demiurge decreed to matter more
Then freedom of the will to not be written,
As souls demand to move, fight and explore.

The sixth was giving people a connection,
Far deeper than the thoughts alone could bother
For Demiurge have sought, in his deception,
To draw the people closer to each other.

The seventh brought the weight to the illusion
Of the beginning, change, and rising action,
The climax, resolution, and conclusion,
Of things that stay forever in reaction.

The eighth was guarding life and procreation,
Made history to, time and time, repeat,
To give a story worthy of salvation
A chance to shine in glorious beat.

The ninth implanted people their ideals,
To fight for, and to live for in the joy
Turned feelings into the Eternal Feelings,
And gave a soul to every wooden boy.

The tenth have reigned over the decisions,
And made the plans more interesting to bind
As well as made a reason for the reason,
And turned matter plaything of a mind.

Eleventh made the people scream in rage,
And break the laws the worlds rely upon
As it reduced them to the words on page,
Turning each faces into a grin or frown.

The twelfth was close to purpose of the coup,
In beauty of the struggle and story,
It turned hearts to awe, and joy, and hope,
As words on pages came to worldly glory.

And the thirteenth, one sphere to rule them all,
Between them all, in vision to command them,
To make them turn all else they see to fall,
And in a darkness, to the Tower bind them.

~~~

Mane facts.

Mane fact one:

Manes come in many colors, including blueberry, brusk, slippery, and up.

Mane fact two:

The screaming you hear when you brush manes comes from quantum vibrations with the IG dimension.

Mane fact three:

Although it is rare, manes have been found engaging in chess rituals with one another.

Mane fact four:

It’s impossible to scronch a mane, despite public belief to the contrary.

Mane fact five:

If a mane enters the nubbia phase, identified by ¨˜˜Ø„˜, run because

It appears the manes have entangled all the other facts in their webs. Join us next time when we talk about eyeballs.

~~~

“STARLIGHT.... BREA-”

“Hey, can we talk about this!?”

Nanoha looked down at Randall Flagg. “...What? Why?”

Randall Flagg had his hands up in surrender. “I’d rather not have to respawn right now, it’s happened several times in the last week and it’s been getting annoying. I can offer you information abou-”

Nanoha vaporized him instantly.

Flagg respawned at the Tower with an annoyed twitch. He should have known better than to try reasoning with that woman...

~~~

“Listen up, hack,” a Skaian troll grunted, smashing a fist into the counter. “Your food is substandard, the atmosphere is absolute shit, and you have the worst face I’ve ever seen in a place daring to call itself a restaurant. I’m not paying for this.”

Azula’s eyebrow twitched. She knew she should just let it slide - but enough was enough. “You’re going to pay one way or another…”

The troll summoned god-tier robes of Blood to him. “You’re not going to get a fuckin’ chance, witch. You can’t do anything. I-”

And the conflict was interrupted by a snicker from a short redhead in a old-timey bluish dress.

“...What’s so funny?” the troll demanded.

The woman looked up at him. “Oh, oh, you were being serious. That makes it so much better - give me a second, I need to let this out.” She proceeded to engage in an immense, hearty guffaw.

“Are you suicidal?”

“No, but you have a terminal case of not understanding basic laws of human decency. Maybe we need a primer? I’m sure I’ve got a board book somewhere that’ll speak to your level…”

He took a step toward her. “You don’t want to know what I’m going to do if you don’t shut up!”

“Hit me? Because that is exactly what I’m trying to do. Just poke the angry crab-gremlin with a stick and it’ll bite eventually, no matter how dumb it would be to do so. Look at all these WITNESSES!”

The troll blinked. “This changes nothing.”

“You don’t need to act all tough just because you forgot other people existed for a second there.”

He looked ready to snap - but his instinct of self-preservation kept him from attacking her.

“Huh. I guess trollkind really is like humanity. Weak in just the r-”

The troll lashed out, knocking the girl into a far wall, prompting a trickle of blood to come out of her forehead.

She already had her phone open and called to emergency services. “OH GOD HELP HE’S ATTACKING ME HE’S A MONSTER PLEASE ARREST HIM OH GOD HE’S COMING AAAAAA-” she hung up, sending a cheeky smirk at the troll. “You might want to run.”

“FUCK,” the troll scrambled out of the tea shop as fast as he could manage.

The girl stood up, dusted herself off, and wiped the blood from her brow. She shot Azula a simultaneously cute and cruel smirk paired with a thumbs up.

“...Thank you, Wendy…” Azula grunted.

“And you owe me three times over now! What is this, a pattern?”

“Unfortunately…”

Wendy giggled. “I wonder how high this’ll go… Sadly, I won’t be cashing any of those favors in, gonna spend the day with Jenny. But you can rest easy knowing Wendy will be back! Seeya!” She skipped out the door.

“...That girl reminds me way too much of myself…” Azula muttered.

“...Can we have our tea yet?” a patron asked.

“Yes. So long as you get it last.”

“Aw…”

~~~

Cinder Belle sat down in front of Allure Belle. She gulped - she was sitting down with the Sweetie. #000001, Equis Vitis Sweetie, the founder, the boss. She looked scary with that artificial horn, the deep, piercing eyes, and the… adorable smile?

“You really shouldn’t be scared,” Allure said with a chuckle. “I’m just a Sweetie, like you!”

“Like me?”

“Well, yeah! Same cutie mark, same size, same history until the multiverse got into our lives.”

“Bet you didn’t burn down the school.”

“I might have. I really don’t remember.”

Cinder giggled. “How would you not remember that?”

“The tree sap is more important in my mind!”

“...The horror…”

“Yes… The horror…”

The two of them shuddered at memories of tree sap - both old and recent.

“The curse of the CMC…” Allure shook her head. “Anyway, I’m hoping you’re enjoying the League of Sweetie Belles so far!”

“Oh yeah, I am! Everything’s amazing - even if it is a little hard to stomach sometimes. Things are so… different out here.”

“I hear you. It’s hard to realize that, sometimes, the hard choices must be taken. But for every hard choice, there’s several friends and good memories.” She smiled the signature ‘adorable’ smile most Sweeties had. “I know you’re destined for great things, Cinder.”

“Really? How?”

“Call it intuition. Or Mattie.”

“IT’S ME!” Mattie called from the doorway. “IT’S ALL ME!”

“Mattie this is a private conversation!”

“You and I both know it isn’t!” Mattie said with a chuckle.

“...Unfortunately true,” Allure grumbled.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Cinder admitted.

“Oh, you will, you will,” Mattie said with a devious chuckle. “Toodeloo!”

~~~

“What does the aspect of Rage really mean?” Flutterfree asked Vriska.

Vriska paused. “Well… Uh… it’s not exactly ‘rage’, but it’s not exactly ‘truth’, it’s...”

A Vriska ghost dropped from the ceiling, cackling. “It doesn’t matter! Because every interpretation of the Aspects exist in the Dream Bubble!” She grabbed the living Vriska’s face. “Our attempts to assign definitions to the Aspects are completely fucking useless! USELESS! We think we have it, but we know that another interpretation really exists somewhere because of the stupid Tower! STUUUUUUUUPID TOWER!”

Vriska blinked. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“Oh, uh, me and the other Vriskas decided we didn’t like you. So we’re gonna beat you up.”

Vriska groaned. “Oh for the love o-”

“MINDFANG SQUAD ATTACK!”

~~~

Celestia Umbra sensed her body surging with Void energy again, ready to attack. Ahead of her team an enormous, rectangular, chrome robot rose above the buildings, visor-like optics taking aim, along with its gatling gun arms spooling up, and missile launchers opening.

All three heroes attacked, Umbra firing her Void beam, Genos unleashing a monstrous plasma wave, and Raven throwing an enormous metal wad; all attacks colliding with the robot in a giant fireball.

After several tense moments, the dust cleared, revealing an unharmed giant robot. Even without their HUDs, the heroes knew the robot's defenses barely registered the hit.

In an instant, the counterattack came. A wall of missiles, bullets, and death ray lasers peppered the area, throwing up a cloud of fire and concrete. Umbra gasped in pain, her body vanishing, her soul returned to the Void...

Celestia Umbra materialized in the mortal plane once more, inside a large recreation tent. Every part of her body was once again as healthy and complete as when she had first entered the Void.

"Show's already over, Umbra. Tornado saved the day," Raven states, leaning on a wall. Umbra looked around, noting a few disaster recovery workers, an X taped to the ground below her, and a recently repaired Genos at a table, contemplating his bowl of spice noodles.

With Raven's magic, Genos's weaponry, and her own Void energy, a giant, rampaging robot should have been an easy takedown. Most baseline Celestias on their own would have the power to completely obliterate a giant robot, if given a chance.

If given a chance.

Umbra suddenly facehooved hard enough to make any Twilight wince. "We just got served the Worf Effect, didn't we?"

"I take offense to that label!" a Klingon loudly growled.

Umbra turned, to see Lieutenant Commander Worf himself standing cross-armed with a decidedly unamused expression on his face.

“...You got beat up too,” a relief worker said.

“That is beside the point, and if you were a Klingon I would consider that a slight to my honor!”

~~~

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TLC GQDI QHE WCCK XYQB NLM JKWWCES

~~~

“Hi, welcome to Bradburger, home of the Brad burger, how may I Brad your Burger?” Burgerbelle asked from her station at the local Celestia City Bradburger. She stared down a gaggle of eight-foot tall humans in bright red power armor with snarling skulls on the shoulder platings. The one at the register, a shaggy-haired man with teeth filed to a fine knife-like point, placed his hands on the sides of the counter and leaned towards the Flat.

“We are the Flesh Eaters of the Adeptus Astartes,” he greeted in a breathy, hoarse voice, as though he had been devoid of water for weeks. “Mighty warriors of the Imperium of Man on a holy quest, ordained by our noble father, Primarch Sanguinius. We have traveled the vast expanses of space and reality itself, crossed many planets and peoples, those who did not aid were crushed underfoot, and those who praised us were rewarded for their faith and loyalty. Now, our quest has brought us to this establishment, beyond the peering eyes of the Astronomicon and the shadowy net of the Inquisition, and have entered into this most sacred yet confusing of places, to tell of you this singular proclamation, oh, one that defies conventions of reality.” He locked eyes with Burgerbelle and spoke again in the utmostly serious of tones. “We hunger for burger.”

Burgerbelle leaned forward into the Flesh Eaters’ personal space bubble. “How many can I put you down for?” The cheering for ‘BORGAR’ could he heard from clear across Celestia City.

~~~

“You know you’re boring, right?” Deadpool asked Lightning.

She punched his head off. “Boring can be effective.”

“Noted…” Deadpool muttered as his head grew back.

~~~

Hastur stared at Ahzek Ahriman.

Ahriman stared at Hastur.

Between them there was the equivalent of an eldritch cookie.

“This is the property of the Embodiment.”

“It has been claimed by the Lord of Change!”

“No such thing has happ-”

Ahriman clapped his hands. “Ha! You blinked! I win, it’s mine!”

“We are not subject to such childi-”

Pinkie appeared behind Hastur. “Are you breaking the rules of a staring contest, Hastur?”

“N-no.”

“Good…”

~~~

“Hey, I’ve got a question,” one of Them asked. “Do the Beyonders ever pause to consider that maybe, just maybe, punching it isn’t a solution?”

A Beyonder punched the intangible presence of the Them.

“I rest my case - the Beyonders are a fluke of existence, of an intelligence not worthy of survival. I recommend full-society psych-ward lockup.”

“AN AVERAGE THEM HAS MORE DIAGNOSABLE MENTAL CONDITIONS THAN THE AVERAGE BEYONDER,” a Horrorterror pointed out.

“And the hypocrisy just keeps going,” the Them said with a chuckle.

~~~

Roxy picked up the Ruby (who had named herself Red Vengeance) and squeed. “You. Are. So. Fuckin’. Cute.”

“PUT ME DOWN I AM THE FURY OF A THOUSAND VOLCANOES!”

“Awww look at her! So feisty!”

The Ruby lit herself on fire, prompting Roxy to drop her.

“Hey! No! Bad Red Vengeance!”

“I will not be trifled with!”

Roxy shrugged, turning to examine her surroundings. She was in a Gem ‘leisure’ area - a room that hadn’t existed on Gem Homeworld prior to inclusion in Merodi Universalis. In theory, they were there to allow Gems to relax and be themselves, engage in activity that wasn't work-related.

But these crystal people, for the most part, weren’t doing that. They were treating it like a break - a chance to regain energy before going back to work. She saw very few smiling or laughing, and those that were were always talking about their work. It was all work, work, work with these minerals…

Well, she was here to change that. ...Actually, she was here to get classified info from a particularly stingy Emerald, but she could do that later. Right now, these Gems were in need of some of the good ol’ Rolal magic.

Which consisted of her creating a pinata out of thin air and leaving it in the middle of the room - precisely where Red Vengeance would kick it right into the face of a nearby Amethyst. The horse exploded, showering candy everywhere.

The few Gems who had bothered to create digestive tracts - about four - saw the candies and instantly started shoveling them into their mouths.

Meanwhile, Red Vengeance looked at where the pinata horse was. When another one appeared out of thin air, she kicked it again, a small grin crawling up her face. “Yes…”

“Quit it!” one of the Amethysts shouted. “Or I wi-” a pinata stick appeared in her hand. With a grin, she took off after Red Vengeance - only for several more pinatas to fall from the ceiling. Soon, the entire break room was filled with a mess of confetti, sticks, candy - and laughter.

“I’m impressed,” Pinkie told Roxy - both of them having just appeared from nowhere. “But this’ll die off soon.”

“Not if we get one of them hooked on video games,” Roxy said with a grin, holding up a console with sixteen controllers plugged into it.

“...I like your style! Let’s show these Homeworld Gems what partying means!”

“Hell fucking yeah!” She rubbed her hands together - these amazing creatures were going to become what they had the potential to be.

They then proceeded to have the best Gem party in the history of the multiverse that would set a precedent for all Gem parties to come. Roxy formed a close bond with a Carnelian, pinata guts were thrown around everywhere in a strange mirror of ritualistic tribalism, and there was a mysterious letter ‘H’ painted on the ground after the party was over. No one knew where it came from.

~~~

Jace Berelen, the Living Guildpact and the mind mage of the Gatewatch, was looking at Pinkie’s Party of the Merodi Universalis Exploration Division.

The explorers were looking at Jace Berelen.

"Welcome to the Multiverse." said Jace.

"Welcome to the Multiverse!" said the team, in unison.

There was an awkward pause.

"So, I think that first, we should settle which Multiverse encompasses which?”

"...right."

~~~

TOWER OF AHRIMAN, PLANET OF THE SORCERERS, GALAXA IMMATERIUM

Lightning and thunder crashed upon the Warp-ravaged planet once known as Prospero, and within the highest tower on the farthest side of the planet, Azek Ahriman, greatest sorcerer of the Thousand Sons, was plotting away at his latest scheme. Stood before an audience of his Rubric Marines and his slightly less enthusiastic ward, Ignis. Ahriman drifted across the room and placed his hand on a podium concealed in a tarp.

“Gentlemen, I have searched forth across the multiverse, and have found a MAGNANIMOUS artefact that will garner the strength to TOPPLE the societies that dare oppose us!” Ahriman proclaimed with grandiose sweeps and gestures. No one responded, though the Rubric Marines at least had the excuse of being made of dust. “BEHOLD!” With a flourish, Ahriman removed the tarp, allowing it to fall to the ground, revealing the podium and the object on display. It was a leather-bound tome, stitched together with dried skin and bearing a face of howling anguish. Scrawled on the cover were the words ‘Fanaros Fictionomicon’. “This book contains innumerable incantations and legacies of Prophets that were barred entry from the Black Library itself! With the words written on these accursed pages will grant us insight beyond measure, and allow us to overcome the FOOLS that dare oppose us!” Ahriman threw his helmeted head back in a howling laughter of both glory and madness, only to stop and point at the audience of Rubric Marines. “Laugh evilly with me, Rubrics!” Ahriman resumed his laughter, while the barely sentient Rubric Marines made noises more akin to a vacuum cleaner having a stroke as dust fell out the cracks in their armor and through the grills of their helmets. The only one not laughing was Ignis.

“Sire, isn’t the Fanaros Fictionomicon the book that drove the Sorcerer of the Word Bearers known as ‘Fresh’ to madness?” Ignis asked. “He claimed it to be, and I quote,” he raised his armored fingers for emphasis. “‘The greatest atrocity the galaxy has seen since the Horus Heresy?’”

Ahriman, naturally, was not perturbed, and thwacked Ignis over the head with his staff. “Shut your stupid face, Ignis,” He snapped. “I am FAR greater than that pitiful Word Bearer and his admittedly fashionable hat.” He plucked the book from the podium and flipped it open. “I will read from this accursed tome and see what the words of these forsaken Prophets may be able to teach me!” Ahriman glanced down and began reading… and reading… and reading…. After about five solid minutes of silence, fire erupted from the eye holes in Ahriman’s helmet. He threw the book against the wall and began screaming in pain, running in circles and smacking himself in the head to put out the flames. “RUBRICS! BRING ME WATER FOR MY EYES, RUBRICS! TZEENTCH’S BLUE BALLS, MY ALL-POWERFUL EYES!” While Ahriman continued screaming and the Rubrics slowly went to retrieve water for their in-pain master, Ignis decided to deal with the book itself, utilizing traversal tech to open a portal, and threw it in with nary a care. Wherever that book ended up, it was someone else’s problem.

Meanwhile, in Celestia City, Nova was walking out of a local coffee store with a fresh brew to enjoy. She barely took two steps away when a portal opened to the side of her and she was knocked upside the head with a book. She went down like a sack of bricks and her coffee was spilled to the ground. Reports have yet to discern the cause of this attack, but the culprit will be eventually discovered, and then have the book thrown at them.

~~~

“DIE DIE DIE!” Pinkie shouted, splattering red all over the walls with her chainsaw. “DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!” The thick, crimson liquid poured down the walls in a horrifying, viscous manner. “DIE!!!!”

“Pinkie it’s just a bad cake,” Flutterfree said, wiping it out of her eyes. “No need to be so dramatic.”

“IT MUST DIE!!!!”

~~~

Burgerbelle hung her ‘employee of the month’ frame on Swip’s wall. She put her hands on her hips and grinned proudly. “Best Bradburger saleswoman in existence.”

Cinder looked at the inscription. “Celestia City location?”

“Yep!”

“We haven’t been to Celestia City all month.”

“Yep!”

“Burgerbelle…”

“Burger.” She nommed a burger.

~~~

Eyeball facts.

Eyeball fact one:

All eyeballs are actually blind.

Eyeball fact two:

While it is unknown to the denizens of the universe, many Earth Ottoman dishes contain eyeball extract.

Eyeball fact three:

Modern theories suggest eyeballs are a remnant of Downstreamer civilization.

Eyeball fact four:

The size of an eyeball is indeterminate.

Eyeball fact five:

There is a pony with an eyeball cutie mark. They refused to comment when asked, instead running away screaming. Their reasoning is unknown.

The eyeballs are staring at us, making sharing more facts uncomfortable.

Join us next time when we talk about 19.

~~~

Gem Homeworld was abustle - White Diamond was to give her first personal speech since the formation of Merodi Universalis. What could possibly be so important that she bothered to make a physical appearance rather than having one of her Zircons do it?

There were a few in the audience who knew what it was.

One - or perhaps two, depending on how you counted - of them was grinning from ear to ear. Garnet’s hands were clasped together and she was trying not to uncharacteristically giggle.

White Diamond eventually strode out onto the White Palace’s balcony - which normally faced the Pink Palace, but that had suspiciously vanished yesterday and no Gem wanted to ask about it.

“Gems of the Gem Vein!” White Diamond declared. “After much deliberation with the other Diamonds and the rest of Merodi Universalis, we have determined that the time is right to change one of our oldest traditions. When we first joined Merodi Universalis, we were not ready - but now that we have lived alongside them for so long, we no longer have anything to fear.” She spread her arms wide and smiled brightly - even though Garnet knew she wasn’t that happy about this. “Fusion between all types of Gems within Gem Vein worlds is no longer punishable by exile - and the same goes for the Off Colors. Our society’s structure is now flexible enough to accom-”

Whatever else she said was caught up in the sound of the crowd cheering. Several dozen Gems who had been keeping their fusion capabilities secret came together on the spot and laughed - some of love, some of friendship, and Garnet even saw a Quartz and a Topaz fuse for the sake of strength.

Garnet couldn’t help but tear up.

White Diamond, to her credit, managed to keep her level smile - a slight twitch the only indication that, internally, her stomach was twisting and turning.

She may not have come all the way - but no one could resist Steven’s redeeming charm entirely.

The celebration soon got out of control and White Diamond just stopped talking. She turned and went back into her palace. Garnet hoped she would come out more often, now. That Gem spent too much time in her head.

Her thoughts were interrupted when she saw a pair of ponies she hadn't expected to see here - Rev and Flutterfree. “Well, look what the cat dragged in.”

“Meow,” Flutterfree said with a smile.

“Yes… I hate to admit it, I was dragged,” Rev said, shifting uncomfortably. “Flutterfree… said I needed to see this.”

“You didn’t need to,” Garnet said. “I understand.”

“I…” Rev bit her lip. She shook her head with a short laugh. “Garnet, I want you to know one thing. I am happy for the freedom you and your entire race have achieved. Whatever else… that is true. You deserve this.”

Garnet smiled. “I didn’t even ask for that from you.”

“I know. I… I asked it of myself.” She smiled awkwardly. “Now, uh, I hear Gems have recently learned how to party, and that Pinkie says I have to see it?”

“Right this way…” Garnet said with a chuckle.

~~~

Froppy and Tornado sat on a bench, watching a giant meteor fall from the sky.

“Now?” Tornado asked.

“No,” Froppy said.

“Now?”

“No.”

“Now?”

“No.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“I SAID YES RIBBIT!”

Tornado leaped into action, grabbing the meteor with her telekinesis and pushed it back into orbit.

“All right,” Froppy said, looking at her scanner. “We’ll need to come back in three weeks and two days in the local Toronto to keep it from destroying the planet.”

“Gotcha.”

“...We really should just destroy it.”

Tornado shrugged. “They’re the ones who say it’s a sacred relic. Who are we to destroy it?”

“We’re being manipulative.”

“This is the USM. What did you expect?”

~~~

“I AM REALITY!” the horror from another dimension roared in O’Neill’s face. “IN THIS REALM, MY THOUGHTS ARE LAW, AND THE CITIZENS ARE MY ESSENCE! YOU CANNOT FREE THEM FROM ME, FOR THEY ARE ME!” Reality pulsed. “YOU ARE BUT A MAN, A MAN WHO WILL BEND TO ME THE MOMENT I THINK IT NECESSARY.”

“...I mean, sure, but what if we declared war on you?”

“HOW WOULD THAT HELP?”

“...Say I had an army of ghosts that could manipulate reality itself.”

“...WHAT?”

“HIT IT, MEENAH!”

“YOU GOT IT FISH-BOY!” Meenah shouted, jumping into reality with dozens of god-tier Skaian ghosts behind her. Before the horror could do anything, he was frozen in time, space, his mental faculties were severed from his reality, and the people were freed from the insanity brought about by their lord and horror.

“...Meh. You guys make this too easy,” O’Neill muttered.

“You do need to find some better enemies,” Meenah admitted. “I haven’t needed to fork anyfin in a while… Why can’t we have a real war again, huh?”

“You don’t want one of those.”

“Yes I do!”

O’Neill pondered this. She probably did...

~~~

Dirk Strider, Prince of Heart, looked up from a robot he was building.

He spoke in his usual near-deadpan tone that was somehow constantly dripping with irony. “Why are you glaring at me like that? I’m certainly flattered by your enamored affections, but I’m not into horses.”

I didn’t relent on the glare. “I just want you to know that I’m watching you, Dirk Strider. Watching you in case you get any ideas. I will stop you if you ever even think of going too far.” I twitched involuntarily. “Also, you’re a big fat liar.”

I didn’t give him a chance to respond.

~~~

Alushy was trotting around Celestia City, Minna on her back. “Now, kid, you’re old enough for some serious fun.”

“I don’t think so,” Minna responded.

“See? Mature enough to realize that, means you definitely are.”

“Flawed argument.”

“Do I look like I care?”

“No. Do I look like I care?”

The two stared at each other for a moment before engaging in light chuckles.

“And here we have the vampire nanny in her natural habitat, cuteness overload.”

Alushy’s chuckles stopped short while Minna’s only increased. “You…” Alushy glared.

Wendy smirked, putting an ‘innocent’ finger on her face. “Who, me?”

“You’re dead.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m alive right now. And will keep being alive.”

“You don’t get to call my blu-” Wendy activated a teleporter and vanished. Alushy growled. “...She’ll rue this day.”

Wendy did not rue the day. Alushy forgot the insult had occurred within an hour.

~~~

It was a quiet day at the Sparkle Census, with Twilights of all sorts milling about, striking up conversations with each other and reading books in the vast libraries. Said quiet was then immediately destroyed by a tear in the fabric of reality as a portal was literally ripped open in the center of the room, with five enormous and heavily armed Orks emerging. All Twilights in the room went still and dead silent as the Orks walked about, grumbling to themselves and pointing their crude yet effective guns at everything. One of the Orks turned towards the largest Ork of the bunch with a dull look on his face.

“Uh… Boss,” He said. “Ain’t dis da place wiff all da purple brainy hosses? Yanno, loik da Weirdboyz wiffout da head ‘sploding?”

“Yeah, dat’s roight.” The warboss said, munching on a stogie as he oversaw the room. Many of the Twilights flinched under their gazes, not wanting to provoke the big angry aliens with guns.

“Well… do youz see any of ‘em?” The Boss moved to speak, but paused as he raised a meaty hand up in contemplation. He looked about the room, staring at nearly a dozen Twilight Sparkles who seemed utterly paralyzed under the brutish alien’s gaze. After his sweep, the Boss turned back to his underling and scratched his chin.

“Moight be we jus’ came in when deyz iz out.” The warboss reasoned. “We’ll come back later an’ see if deyz up fer a good krumpin’. LET’S MOVE ‘EM OUT, BOYZ!” The Orks grumbled, dropping their arms and huddling through the portal, only occasionally stopping to punch each other in the head before slipping back through their tear in reality, until all but the warboss remained. Right as he stepped a boot through the portal, one of the Twilights let off a sneeze, causing the big beast to glance about in confusion. Nobody moved for a solid minute before the Ork ultimately shrugged and closed the portal behind him. Thus began a very long string of Ork Invasions on the Sparkle Census that went absolutely nowhere, due to the apparent invisible nature of the Twilights themselves.

~~~

Olivia and Roxy saw the image of a dark, smoky unicorn and a pink-haired fairy looking at a screen. This screen showed Olivia and Roxy looking at a screen of the smoky unicorn and the fairy looking at..

“My brain hurts…” Roxy muttered. Both of them. The human and the fairy.

King Sombra looked at the hacker once known as Sombra with a confused look. “What…”

Olivia squealed in glee. “The other Sombra’s clipshow!”

“Are there others!?” Roxy the fairy asked.

“This is foolishness!” King Sombra shouted.

And then all the screens switched to new locations.

~~~

I became aware of a pitch-black emptiness all around me. I could feel ground beneath my hooves, and could see myself just fine, but the rest of the universe was completely blank and featureless.

I glared at nothing. “What are you doing?”

Nothing responded.

I continued glaring. “Ponygood, I know you’re writing me,” I said. “And I don’t appreciate it.”

My voice didn’t echo, and still nothing responded.

I glowered at the darkness. “Didn’t think so. So are you going to torment me with more memes? More Butt the Cloud?” My voice had risen out of anger. “Or maybe Cloud the Butt? I know you were writing that, it doesn’t matter that you deleted it!”

Continued silence.

I unfurled my wings and stomped a hoof threateningly. “Ponygood, I swear to the Tower, if you force me to deal with even one more stupid meme, I’ll personally hunt down every single version of you and… wait.” I frowned suspiciously at the darkness, realizing that absolutely nothing had popped out of it. “...what are you doing?”

Still nothing responded. But then, after a second, a stack of books materialized and thumped to the floor neatly, and I got the impression that I had yet to read any of them. A second later, a heart-shaped box of chocolates appeared next to it. And then a flickering candle next to it, letting out a warm lavender scent.

I raised an eyebrow, retracting my wings. “Is this supposed to be an apology?” I didn’t expect anything to respond, but still waited a few polite seconds before continuing. “...I’ll take it, I suppose, but you’re still far from forgiven.”

I half-expected the items to turn into clouds when I approached them, but thankfully nothing of the sort happened. All of them remained comfortably solid, and a glance in one of the books showed that it wasn’t just filled with drivel. Satisfied, I settled into a comfortable reading position and-

“A little privacy, please?”

~~~

19 facts.

19 fact one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one one

19 fact nineteen:

Nineteen nineteen nineteen nineteen nineteen nineteen nine-

It appears we are having technical difficulties. Please, direct yourself to the nearest Embodiment Brain Station to have your consciousness rebooted. And please, join us next time when we talk about eggs.

~~~

Trixie had just purchased a small package of peanut butter crackers from a vending machine, and was heading off to the arcade to check up on things. Once in sight of the entrance, she immediately stopped and a scowl crossed her face.

“Oh buck no, Trixie is not dealing with this today.” Trixie said. She ate the last of her crackers in a hurry and trotted up to the entrance of the arcade, which currently had been converted into an altar of worship by a bunch of red-robed human cyborgs, chanting in binary code in front of several arcade machines. Trixie levitated a broom over and started batting at the worshippers, rousing them to move. “Out! Out! Trixie thought she told you to stop coming here and doing your creepy cult worship!”

One of the worshippers covered his head with a series of mechanical tendrils to prevent himself from being further assailed. “B-b-b-but, the Omnissiah decrees this a holy ground! You can’t just - OW!” Trixie smacked him aside with the broom, shooing off more of the worshippers with other snaps and baps. They soon cleared off, leaving Trixie a moment to rest.

“Those Machine Cultists are weirder than weird… Wha-HEY! COME BACK HERE WITH TRIXIE’S TOASTER!”

~~~

A Dark Tower cultist looked up from the Tower’s Testament. “Uh… elder?”

“Yes, acolyte?”

“If everything that happens is determined by the Tower, and whatever the Tower determines is right, how can we know what wrong is?”

The elder blinked. “There isn’t wrong.”

“But right is meaningless without wrong… All actions are right!”

“That is correct.”

The acolyte slapped the elder and ran away cackling.

The elder twitched. “Those young people…”

~~~

“Hey, Sans, buddy, pal,” Vriska said, laying her hands on the skeleton’s shoulders and pressing tight. “Remember how you stole my song…?”

“uh… not really?”

“Heh. Nice try. You’re not the kind to forget things like that.”

“right, you got me, i totally know about the song. what exactly do you want me to do about it?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to establish that it was a thing that happened.”

“why?”

Vriska grinned. “Because I’ve got someone else who you stole a song from.”

“i don’t remember stealing any other songs.”

Vriska stepped to the side, revealing Garnet. The Gem fusion cracked her knuckles. “Hey. Skeleton man.” She pointed at him. “I think I’m stronger than you.”

“...well, bone marrow.”

“Oh, and that’s not all!”

“NYEH HEH HEH!” Skeletor shouted. “YOUR BROTHER HAS DEFAMED MY IMAGE, SANS! I AM HERE TO COLLECT MY DUES!”

Sans facepalmed.

~~~

In a rather slow intersection of Celestia City, a man and a woman, both with auburn hair and wearing tan suits from a 1910s Earth, were standing side by side. The man wore a pair of chalkboards over his person in a sandwich vest, with a tally system split between ‘Heads’ and ‘Tails’, while the woman held a silver platter in her hands with a single coin on the center. As of this moment, ‘Heads’ had a leading fifteen tallies over the whopping zero for ‘Tails’.

“Seems as slow pickings this time around,” the man said.

“Or it could be quick in a matter of moments,” the woman said.

“Could be that the transfer has sped your viewing of time further than mine,” he said.

“Perhaps it’s the inverse for you, dear Robert, that’s slowed down,” she said. “Could explain that impaired judgement in the experiment.”

“You only say that because you think yourself winning, Rosalind.”

“Think and know are two very different things.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“I know.”

“You two are having a weird argument.” The man and woman turned from their apparent argument and Minna standing before them, staring with those weird eyes of hers. The man and woman immediately stood at attention and the woman presented the coin-bearing tray.

“Heads or tails?” The woman asked. Minna blinked her obvious confusion. “Heads or tails?”

“I believe she understood the first time, though perhaps a third to satisfy yourself?” The woman snapped a flat look to the man, who merely shrugged his shoulders in turn.

She turned back to Minna, further presenting the coin. “We are conducting a scientific experiment judged by the flip of a coin. If you would be so kind as to lend your contributions to the field of scientific studies and research, it would be greatly appreciated.”

Minna took the coin off the tray, giving it a good look from all angles. A simple US Quarter, no odd markings, the face of George Washington and the House of Congress were on the proper sides, didn’t have any weight out of the norm. Seemed like a harmless little thing for science. Minna placed the coin atop her thumb, and gave it a strong flick, sending the coin overhead. While likely they expected the coin to land on the tray, it instead bounced off the tray, rolled along the ground, and slipped between the cracks of a sewer grate. The three stared at the grate for a lengthy amount of time, before the man gave a slight look to his partner.

“Well, this new variable throws the whole experiment out the window, does it not?”

“Oh, hush, brother of mine.”

~~~

Major Prophet Andrew Hussie found himself standing in a field of roses within the shadow of the Dark Tower. In front of him was a table, reminiscent of many such tables that existed in Friendship Castles. There was one crystal chair with the mark of Space on it - for him.

In keeping with the theme, I didn’t use the Eye of Rhyme or my starburst cutie mark for my seat’s symbol: I used the similar swirl of Void. I had my hooves pressed together, glaring at him with an intense power. “Please. Sit.”

Hussie, for once in his life, sat down without qualm. “You know, I was expecting this sooner.”

“I had to Twilight for a while,” I said, gaze unwavering. “Had a rant. Ate a sandwich. Tossed someone into a bad harem anime universe.”

“I’d pay to see that.”

“Of course you would,” I sighed. I levitated a small book onto the table, setting it in front of Hussie. It was a black and white book with an image reminiscent of the House Juju on it, the monochromatic colors alternating around a middle divide. The Homestuck Epilogues.

“What did you think?” Hussie asked, grinning.

“Oh, the writing is good, it carries a significant amount of weight, and it’s a refreshing break from the usual Homestuck antics. It’s somehow totally different, and yet fitting.” I narrowed my eyes. “It’s not the story I have a problem with.”

“Ah, thanks for the resounding words of encour-”

“WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING!?” I shouted at the top of my lungs, magic power thundering off my hooves as they hit the table. “Do you have any idea what the Seats will do if they find out this exists!?”

“Kill everyone?”

“YES! That’s exactly it! DEATH EVERYWHERE!”

“Psh, you need to calm down - trust me, I’ve got everything under control.”

“No you don’t!” I wailed, flipping over to one of the first pages. “Look at this! This… The Gallifreyans were wrong when they made their spell! They didn’t know the nature of the retcon loop didn’t involve the originals! The forced loop won’t work!”

Hussie put his hands behind his head and whistled.

“You’re one of the strongest Prophets in the multiverse, Hussie, and you just wrote a story that can’t happen anymore! I don’t even want to think of the mess this will cause!”

“Having trouble thinking? I can help. Worst case scenario, Seats try to kill everything, Lord English is released because the retcon loop isn’t stable, and the multiverse ends because the heroes can’t deal with Uber-Villain.”

“Why can’t you take anything seriously!? They’ll come after you!”

“Oh, under the worst case scenario, yes.” Hussie pressed his hands together. “But this won’t be the worst case scenario.”

“This is the primary source material directly from the Prophet about a unique multiversal story! How is it not going t-”

“Unique?”

I blinked. “There’s no other versions of Homestuck, all of them are contained within the story itself as part of the Dream Bubble and English…” My eyes widened. “Wait… The Infinite Loops… that’s so far in the past I can barely see it…”

“All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.” Hussie stood up and took a dramatic pose.

“So, what, the Epilogues happened in a past iteration of Homestuck!? That… that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen again!”

Hussie took out a finger and booped me on the nose. “You’ve already interrupted it. You’re living in something new right now.”

I blinked. “...You…”

“Meat or Candy? That was the question. You said no.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to this.

“Naturally, you’ll have to spend a good amount of your effort purging Homestuck Epilogues from the multiverse so the Seats don’t ever find out and light the multiverse on fire… But I’m sure you’re up to it.”

I let out a deep sigh filled with more venom than I liked to hear from myself. I quickly decided trying to keep it in wasn’t worth it. “You’re cruel to the characters who lived this, whoever they are. Defining their lives to be like this. It was the end of their story, you could have just let them go.”

“Tales of dubious canonicity, Twilence.”

“Dubious canonicity my flank!” I shouted. “If there are multiple versions of Homestuck spread across metatime, then naturally all of the outcomes are true! In this one, we interrupted it. But in the past - Infinite Loops, something else, I don’t know - these happened! What was the point?”

Hussie shrugged. I realized with no small amount of chagrin he couldn’t answer a question G. M. Blackjack didn’t know the answer to. He knew - he definitely knew - but ka would prevent me from accessing it for the sake of the meta-narrative.

“Having trouble in there?”

I glared needles at him.

“I guess that’s that then.” He raised a hand and snopped his fingers - and was gone.

I twitched. This hadn’t gone at all like I had wanted. I could rest easy knowing the multiverse wasn’t about to explode around me, but the… things contained within the offending book still happened. Not to the people I knew. But people who were them.

For the first time in a long while, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to think about this. In many ways, it was arguably a good story. A continuation, in the vein of what I was part of, in a sense. ...It was too close for me to be impartial to.

I retreated onto what I knew. Homestuck was a powerful story… And I was going to have to purge the Epilogue from existence…

I realized with no small amount of chagrin that I was probably the reason so many people would never get their Epilogue, get it extremely late, or get a version that was nothing like the truth. I laughed bitterly. “For the sake of the multiverse…” I grunted, feeling the screams of a million angry fangirls behind me.

~~~

“So, what do you think?”

Roxy’s eyes were filled with stars and she was grinning in glee. “That was the best thing ever.”

“Glad you enjoyed.” Olivia turned off the screen. “Now hold still.”

“Wha- OW!” Olivia injected something into Roxy’s neck. “What the fuck was that for!?”

“Think about it for a moment?”

“What do you mean? I don’t know what th-” she blinked. “I know what this is. You just injected knowledge-passing nanobots to me that are actively sowing classified information into my brain. ...Woah.”

“And now my job is done. You’re briefed, agent.”

“Giorno doesn’t like you doing that.”

“Ain’t nothin’ he can do about it.”

“He could fire you.”

“He won’t,” Olivia chuckled. “Don’t go flaunting it around, we don’t want to turn this place into a hive-mind.”

“Gotcha. I shall be the stealth.”

“You should be, it’s your job.”

Roxy smirked. “And my job is also being smart and figuring things out. Speaking of…” She looked at the ceiling and grinned. “This has been Sombra’s Clipshow Two: Electric Boogaloo!”

Olivia gave her a thumbs up. “Brilliant deduction.”

“That’s all folks!” Roxy announced.

Author's Note

CONTRIBUTORS:
This chapter was written collectively by the Songs of the Spheres community by these amazing authors! See if you can guess who wrote what!

G. M. Blackjack (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/275276/GMBlackjack)
UselessCommon (https://forums.spacebattles.com/members/uselesscommon.381958/)
Mal Masque (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/131322/Mal+Masque)
VoidTemplar2000 (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/293573/VoidTemplar2000)
Blaster M (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/253799/Blaster+M)
Mad Engineer Stark (https://www.fanfiction.net/u/8022155/Stark-Savior-the-mad-engineer)
FanOfMostEverything (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/1400/FanOfMostEverything)
Ponygood (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/177018/Ponygood11)
KeywiiCookies55 (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/226885/Keywii_Cookies55)
Runtrivena (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/334498/runtrivena)
The Amusementist (https://www.fimfiction.net/user/254828/The+Amusementist)
Twilence

095 - Creators

Creators

Pinkie woke up with a large yawn. She bounced out of her bed with a big smile, welcoming the sun of a brand new day on Equis Vitis. Most ponies would get their manes ready at this point, to clean up their appearance before heading to work. Luckily for Pinkie she was naturally poofy and clean unless there was some blatant reason not to be, so she could skip past the boring stuff and get right to breakfast. Or get to breakfast and then skip the boring stuff. She didn’t have a schedule and she liked it that way.

She walked right up to the fridge and threw it open. She took out some chocolate pudding. It sure was nice to not have to worry about health problems from sugar intake. It was great to be Pinkie Pie, and she was loving herself today more than usual. Her smile was larger, her attitude bouncier, and she was even humming a melodic tune.

She also took the vanilla pudding for good measure. Why not double up? There was no reason whatsoever not to.

She closed the fridge. Standing behind the door was a lanky human woman with a black dress, purple hair, and razor sharp teeth arranged menacingly in a slasher smile.

“WAUGH!” Pinkie screamed, tossing the puddings into the air. The chocolate landed on her head and the vanilla on the strange woman’s.

The woman put a finger in her hair and licked the vanilla off of it. “Hm. Delicious.”

“Right…” Pinkie said, getting over her initial surprise. “Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie! Who are you?” Without letting her smile falter, she added, “and what are you doing in my house?”

“Magane Chikujoin,” she said, bowing. “I have come with rather important information.”

“Information for me? …Normally I’d go ‘but I’m just a pastry chef’ but that’s definitely not the case right now.” She giggled. “Captain Pinkie Pie, ready to receive.”

Magane’s grin widened unsettlingly. “Aw, but just giving it up to you would be no fun!” She jumped onto Pinkie’s table, legs spread and leaning forward like some sort of yoga pose. “No intrigue, no reward for being clever, no interest to the story.”

Pinkie’s ears perked. “I’m listening.”

“See, ka is a difficult thing to overcome.”

“The moment you become Aware of its presence, the rules keep you from acting on it, I know.” Pinkie smirked. “You should consider manipulating events to allow ka to become public knowledge. Rescinds most of the rules.”

“If I wanted that, I’d just stick around here and live my life. Altho~ough, I might do that anyway,” she said with a sing-song voice. “This is something else. And I’m going to break the rules to accomplish it.”

Pinkie shook her head. “You can’t break the rules.”

Instantly Pinkie felt something shift in the world around her. Her stomach did a flip-flop and a dark feeling manifested in the back of her mind. Magane felt the same thing – but instead of making her smile vanish, it just made it widen. “A lie about a lie…” She leaned into Pinkie so close their faces were almost touching and snapped her fingers. “It turns inside out on itself.”

The rules changed.

“Unnamed Earth 1092,” Magane said, pulling back. “My homeworld. I don’t particularly care that much for it, but there’s some interesting things going down there you should look into.”

“Do you have any idea how dangerous what you’ve just done is!?” Pinkie blurted. “You… reality warped a rule away! I didn’t even know that was possible!”

Magane grinned. “I know exactly how dangerous it is. Why did you think I did it?”
She chuckled. “It is chapter ninety-five after all! The fifth nineteen! You needed something special. My Infinite Deception of Words could give you that!”

“Unnamed Earth 1092, I got it, I’m going to have to go there now, but really! …Oh, wait, right, you’re clearly a psycho. Never mind.” She pulled out a hammer. “Say nighty-night.”

“I’m going to leave now.”

“No you’re not!” Pinkie realized what she’d just said. “…Ponyfeathers.”

Magane made a mocking shrug. “A lie about a lie…” She vanished without a trace.

“Right. Time to go to Unnamed Earth 1092.”

~~Dark Mode is Highly Recommended™ for this chapter~~

Your name is Pinkie Pie. It is not currently your birthday or anything, but it’s a very special day nonetheless. Today may seem like any other day to most other people, but to you it is closely related to that ever-mysterious number nineteen, one you have become especially well-acquainted with over the years. You are the Bard of Space but that really doesn’t matter right now.

You are currently in your kitchen, which has all the basic necessities a party pony could ask for in her home. A fridge, a table, a truly absurd number of pastries strewn about the room, and a number of posters showing people that you think are having a good time. Pictures of your best friends and family are spread along the walls in a way that other people might consider cluttered, but you consider beautiful.

You have a variety of interests, a lot more than the average pony due to your hyperactive nature. You, above all else, love throwing parties of virtually any kind that isn’t ‘distasteful’ in some way. The art of party throwing is a skill you have honed to perfection in your many years of life, and it is what you got your cutie mark in oh-so-many years ago. You also like playing the yovidaphone, though you only do that when other people aren’t watching because the multiverse has decided that is the one instrument you will never be good at. You also like playing games, baking, hanging out with your friends, adventuring, bouncing around for seemingly no reason, messing with people both with practical jokes and mind games, surprising people with parties, and a tremendously long list of other interests that would take far too much time to get into detail about.

You have just had a rather disturbing run in with a mid-tier reality warper who you’re pretty sure has killed people just because it amuses her.

What will you do?

PINKIE: How about we skip past all this and just get to the story?

-==>Pinkie: retrieve arms from magic chest.

Despite there being no magic chest in the room two minutes prior, you are able to find your magic chest and dig through it. You remove two fake arms and put them into your syllad- er, your mane. That works too.

Having had it up to here with these antics, you make a rash decision.

-==> Pinkie: dance like a loon and make outdated 80s references!

That is such a stupid idea that you stand boggled for several seconds.

Hey. Hey wait a minute. Where are you going? Get back here, I’m not done!

PINKIE: I’m going to give myself a command, thank you very much. Ahem. Forward arrow, Pinkie: gather team and go to Unnamed Earth 1092.

-==> Pinkie: gather team and go to Unnamed Earth 1092.

You can’t do that!

PINKIE: Yes I can.
RENEE: Dear, who are you talking to?
PINKIE: Hold on a minute, we need to fill in the description. Today is going to be one of those days.

…You are currently standing on the ground floor of Renee’s castle of dimensional mishaps. There are a copious number of Expedition teams leaving and returning from missions to other universes. You make note of Corona leaving for another universe and Pidge the primary technician fretting over the inexplicable flickering of the lights. You are currently standing there with the rest of your team, the Primary Team, known to some as Pinkie’s Party.

They’re all looking at you expectantly, waiting for some explanation or guidance.

-==> Pinkie: realize your first name is a valid troll name and wonder what your last name could be.

PINKIE: Hey, Vriska, would Pinkie Piepie be a valid troll name?
VRISKA: Uh, yeah. Why a-
PINKIE: Also we need to go to Unnamed Earth 1092 before more shenanigans happen. Like, stat.

-==> Pinkie: as punishment for rushing the story along, do the chicken dance.

You erupt into a spirited rendition of the chicken dance, in the middle of which you grab a dimensional devi-

Would you stop doing that!?

PINKIE: No.
FLUTTERFREE: Who are you talking to?
PINKIE: We have a narrator today. For now, anyway. I was serious when I said it was going to be one of those days. Anyway, we’re on Unnamed Earth 1092 now, get on with it.
JOTARO: Yare yare daze…

Fine, if this is where you want to go, this is where you want to go.

You are currently on Unnamed Earth 1092. Specifically, you are on a street corner in a Japanese city that probably doesn’t even have a proper name. There are billboards everywhere showing the most popular anime and manga characters around. So kawaii.

-==> Pinkie: examine billboards.

You recognize almost none of the characters until you come across a digital display featuring a badass team consisting of three cute colorful horses, a huge brute of a man, and a fairy in orange clothing and gray skin.

Yeah, this is totally just an image of you five.

VRISKA: Huh. Haven’t seen that before.
FLUTTERFREE: Didn’t we see a team a lot like us somewhere else…?
NOVA: Did we? If we did I don’t remember it that well.
PINKIE: We did. It just wasn’t important. I don’t think that’s them. See, Nova has her screen and Flutterfree’s a ‘vampire’. That’s definitely us.
NOVA: Guess I know what we’re investigating today.
FLUTTERFREE: …Think we’ll find G. M. Blackjack?
PINKIE: I don’t know. I’m using all my Awareness to keep the Narrator from screwing with us.

-==> Pinkie: examine the digital display.

You look at the billboard, the translation spell mentally converting Japanese into something you can read. It tells you it’s from a story called Nevrim written by one Marcius Fiddlebiscuit.

VRISKA: …Fiddle8iscuit?
NOVA: Nevrim? Like, that world we spent years on?
PINKIE: Gotta love the crazy offscreen adventures we have. To Marcius Fiddlebiscuit!

-==> Pinkie: get distracted by a café on your way to finding Marcius Fiddlebiscuit.

PINKIE: Ugh, those croissants look so good…
VRISKA: Pinkie… are you getting random commands in your head?

-==> Pinkie: lie like you’ve never lied before.

PINKIE: Sure.

That’s not a li- oh. Oh that’s funny.

VRISKA: It’s that orange fucktard… He’s free and messing with my – our – story again! I am going to find him and tie him up, just you watch. He’ll wish he could die when I’m done with him.
FLUTTERFREE: Let’s not do that. Unless we should?
PINKIE: No, we need to be here. That display up there has almost nothing to do with him, I’m pretty sure. This Marcius Fiddlebiscuit is probably our best lead.

-==> Pinkie: realize that you’re a pony and people are staring.

PINKIE: Oh for the – Nova, invisibility.
NOVA: Done.

Now that you’re invisible you find yourselves tripping over each other. Except for Vriska. Because she’s just that lucky.

VRISKA: I’m just going to get us to this guy. Quick 8oatload of luck, and…

-==> Pinkie: find Marcius Fiddlebiscuit.

Some time later – who cares how much, it’s pointless anyway – you’re knocking on Marcius Fiddlebiscuit’s door. Only Vriska and Jotaro are visible, the rest of you have opted to remain anonymous shadows of equine mystery. Which would make you annoyingly difficult to draw, but that little observation is also pointless.

Marcius opens the door.

MARCIUS: Oh good god, not more cosplayers. Leave! You aren’t welcome he-
JOTARO: STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!

Jotaro files all of you in during the time stop. Nova drops the invisibility as soon as time resumes.

PINKIE: You can freak out now.
MARCIUS: *incoherent screaming*
FLUTTERFREE: There there, just let it all out. We’ll wait.

-==> Pinkie: stop waiting.

You sigh, annoyed at the machinations to which your resistance is, at best, a nuisance.

PINKIE: Looks like we don’t get to wait. Hey, Marcius, we need to talk to you about what you’ve written about us. Or created, not really sure, it was on a billboard. I have cookies! …Hey, come on, stop screaming.

He has made no indication that he’s going to stop screaming. You are struck with the sudden realization that he’s likely been broken by your presence, and that your one lead on this world has led to a dead end. Oh woe is you, for nothing turns out your way! It is-

~~~

I placed my pen on the pages of my notebook.

I think it’s about time I took over from here.

One would have thought the story was ending there, arriving at a dead end conclusion, but that is simply not the case. Marcius Fiddlebiscuit, patron of unfortunate last names turned into symbols of ironic pride, eventually calmed down simply because the human body is not designed to run on high emotional stress endlessly. The presence of Flutterfree’s warm gaze should not be understated, seeing as despite their crimson coloration her eyes were still pleasant to the minds of many. Especially Marcius.

“H-how are you here?” he asked.

I took a moment to ponder this. How would they respond? Who would respond? The answer came to me, as it always did, after only a little bit of thought.

“I see three different explanations,” Pinkie said. “Well, four, but saying you’re crazy leaves a lot to be desired. The first is that you’re a Prophet, Marcius, and what you write is destined to come true in one way or another. The second is that the multiverse is playing a game of random chance and we just happen to be what you write about – which seems unlikely to me. The third is that you’re the alternate version of a Prophet and writing things that happen to be true, but really it’s not you changing them.”

Marcius stared at Pinkie. He didn’t understand a thing she had said, but the fact that she spoke with such an air of authority calmed him down. “So… There’s a rational explanation?”

“If you can call what we do rational,” Nova commented.

“You know we’re multiversal explorers, right?” Flutterfree asked. “You have written about us.”

Marcius nodded. “Yes… I have. I know you explore. I write mostly about your adventures on Nevrim, but I always find the… shorter stories I write more interesting. More enthralling. About you jumping to random worlds. The… The most recent one was about… uh…” he scratched his head. “I can’t remember. That’s so unlike me… But it was much more interesting to write than Nevrim...”

“That’s okay,” Flutterfree said. “What sort of things do you write?”

“Everything about you that isn’t Nevrim comes to me in dreams… Random flashes of inspiration while I sleep.”

Vriska blinked. “That doesn’t seem… normal.”

“No, it isn’t,” Pinkie said. “It suggests that maybe there’s something else going on…”

“Is something invading my dreams!?” Marcius blurted. “W-why?”

“To influence what you write about, perhaps?” Nova suggested. “Seems like something that would be useful, especially if your Prophet powers worked on me.”

“Hold on, wait-” Marcius held up a hand. “I’m not the only one! The rest of the writing group says it’s like a dream as well!”

Pinkie stared at him, blinking. “…What?”

“It’s almost magical how all the things we write about you fi-”

“You’re not the only one writing?”

“Uh… No. I’m just one of many… We write little snips that come to us in moments of inspiration. About you… But it’s not just you! I write mostly about you and publish the stuff, but there’s also the Freedom Sciences, the Protectors of the Plot Continuum, the ROB Games…”

Jotaro’s frown deepened. “We’ve walked into the middle of something big.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Pinkie said with a sigh. “Right. Marcius, would you mind if we watched you sleep tonight?”

“Uh… Yes?”

“Too bad, we’re doing it anyway,” Vriska said. “Sweet dreams.”

I inserted a scene break there, allowing them to gloss over the details of the rest of the day. Speed was of the essence here to give them the clue they needed. The game had been afoot a while already, and they definitely weren’t supposed to be here. Luckily for me their defiance of what was supposed to be was helpful, at least for now. Created quite the distraction.

They watched Marcius sleep, Nova running all the scans she could muster. For the first few minutes, nothing happened. But eventually their patience was rewarded: a white, mystic presence appeared above Marcius’ head, touching his mind and feeding him ideas.

“Get it!” Vriska shouted.

And then I felt the power in my pen slip away. I crushed the instrument in my magic, spilling ink all over the pages. “Craaaaap…” I summoned another pen and tried to scribble more words – but I knew instantly control of the story had passed on. At least partially.

I wished Them good luck. They didn’t have the ability to instantly know if their ‘work’ was coming to fruition or not. I wondered how many tries it would take this time.

~~~

“Right, first, have him forget all of what they just said to him, writing it down as a snip in the fit of night.”

“Done.”

Marcius woke up, ignoring the shattered state of his bedroom window. He went right to his computer. The Primary team showed up to the door of Marcius Fiddlebiscuit. After his initial frustration confusing them with cosplayers, Jotaro used Star Platinum to get everyone inside and begin a most fruitful conversation…

“There, that’ll get it out of his system.”

“We can’t use him on them now. Have to resort to the others.”

“Janna is the next best option. She knows the characters just as well, if not better. Let’s give her the dream. Today, they’re on a rampage.”

Janna woke up in a fit, her hair spilling off her shoulders. She ran to her computer and started typing furiously.

Pinkie and company chased, with vigor, a glowing white light through the city. The mental power wanted nothing more than to escape, to vanish in an instant, but it was unable to do so.

It screamed out for help, but no one heard it besides its aggressive pursuers, for only they could see the essence. How come they attacked it with such reckless abandon? How come they didn’t stop to ask what it was doing?

It was so confused… So lost…

It had just been trying to help.

And now it was on the run for its life.

Pinkie pulled out her immense flaming chainsaw, ready to cut the poor creature in half.

“That didn’t happen.”

“We’ve gone off script. Put too much ‘antagonism’ in her mind. Try Ichi this time. Have him give Pinkie some sympathy, but in an anti-villain light.”

Ichi woke up and ran to his computer. And now it was on the run for its life.

Pinkie pulled out a net, throwing it over the mental image. It struggled against the physical boundaries despite being intangible, but it managed to slip through the holes. Its fear was only heightened when Jotaro was suddenly right in front of it, delivering a spiritual punch to the being’s essence. The resulting power blew through three skyscraper stories…

“Off script again. No collateral damage actually occurred.”

“Why not?”

“Jotaro’s more careful than that and no amount of overwriting will change that?”

“Right, right, Ursula, then. Have them do it by accident.”

Jotaro delivered a spiritual punch to the being’s essence, sending it flying into a wall. Being intangible, it just passed through the building. Nova shot at it a few times in an attempt to get it to come out, but it dove further into the office building, perceiving it as safety.

The team teleported right in, chasing after the mental image.

“Why aren’t we catching it?” Nova asked. “This should be easy!”

“Things have changed,” Pinkie said. “Th-”

“Ursula is no longer of use to us.”

“Don’t let them speak, just act. Enrique.”

“-ey… I don’t know. Scrambling. …Whatever, just get the thing and talk later.” Pinkie rubbed her head. She felt a little out of sorts at the moment. She bounced around reality, popping up in front of the sparkly being with a bug net, where the fabric had no holes. She trapped the being and grinned.

Then she tried to touch it – but it fought back, pushing against her mind. She fell back, grunting.

Flutterfree appeared, summoning Lolo. The white being panicked, pressing itself to Pinkie’s head and making her enter a spasm.

Flutterfree gasped. “Let her GO!”

The resulting Rage built up and shuddered through the building, threatening its structural integrity…

“Right, fine, it doesn’t look like it’s that easy to trigger her anger.”

“Or maybe she knows something’s up.”

“Also possible. That Stand is a nuisance. Harrison then.”

“Let her GO!” Flutterfree wrapped the white creature in Lolo’s vines. She saw the truth of the matter.

“Dammit.”

“Just let him keep going, what’s done is done.”

Vriska fell from the ceiling, rolling her dice. The Fluorite Octet flashed, tapping into her luck to produce a spiritual dragon attack that would subdue the white being.

It also blew out every window within thirty meters.

“Finally, significant collateral damage!”

“And checkmate.”

Meteora woke up. She felt the voices again – the voices that had returned her magic to her, the voices that had told her so much.

The voices told her that they had made a mistake. Magane had fooled them and managed to escape. She herself would not return to the world, but she had sent back others to ruin the world and Meteora’s life here. Why? Because she thought it would be funny, why else did Magane do anything?

It was the way she was. And Meteora was here to defend the world, even at the expense of her normal life.

The creations never got rest.

She knew where to find them. Look for the blown-out building. She would have to stop them. They would be strong, but fate would be on her side, as would the element of surprise.

She cast a spell a-

~~~

I pulled control back. “Yeah, no, no more of your stupid ‘throwing things at the wall until it sticks’ approach. Let me show you how it’s truly done.” I set my pen to the page and bit my lip. If I intertwined the stories, I might derail both of them and ruin what I had set out to do.

It was a risk I was willing to take.

I set my pen to the paper, applying myself to another story of mine taking place on the same world. That of a man called Cecil and his quest to uncover a cosmic conspiracy…

Cecil sensed a disturbance in the winds of space and time. He held his sword close to his chest and clenched his jaw. He hated to leave his position at the factory; he would likely lose some much-needed information.

But he already had the device he had come to get. Perhaps he did not need to understand everything to stop the Freedom Sciences from accomplishing their goal. It was dangerous to act on incomplete information, but sometimes it was necessary.

The winds called to him, demanding his attention. He saw no reason not to answer their call, even at his position. The winds had never led him astray. That would not start today.

He left the factory, moving through the night like an owl in flight – silently, but with power. He felt the wind lead him left, then right, then left again. Onward, ever onward…

I moved to write his arrival – but then something went wrong. “Wait, what, really!?”

~~~

Monika blinked. “Uh, yeah, really!” She had the Prophet Janna’s character file open, poring through every little detail about her. “I’m going to get in on this fun as well! …Whoever you are. Maybe I’ll follow the flow of ka and find you later. But for now! Janna!”

“Hm?” Janna said, looking up. “What?”

Monika adjusted a few parameters in Janna’s mind. “Don’t you feel like writing about a guy named Cecil?”

“You know what, I do. Strange. I feel like jumping right in the middle of the story too…”

“Great!” Monika slid Janna up to the computer. “Type away, we don’t have all night! Or, well, we do, but you know.”

“…You’re such a great friend.”

May have overdone that character adjustment. Eh, whatever, I probably won’t be needing her after tonight. “I’ll be even better if you can just write something amazing.”

Janna wrote.

And yet, the winds dissipated from Cecil’s mind, no longer as clear in the direction they wanted him to go. Had he arrived? There did not appear to be anything here…

But there was always something when the winds called. Unless he was being tricked. Considering who his enemies were, this was a possibility he cursed himself for not considering before. They had wanted him not to know, perhaps?

Wait. There was a white thing passing by. Mysterious, ethereal – dangerous. Something he must pursue.

Monika frowned – this was a whole lot more dramatic than she was expecting. She tweaked Janna’s emotions a little bit, shifting the mood to a brighter one.

Cecil drew his blades and charged the creature – only to hear it whimper. “Help me!” It called. “My brothers – I can’t find them! They’re lost!”

Cecil looked upon the creature with compassion, his features softening. “The winds have led me here – it is my duty to aid you. Do you know where your brethren are, dear wisp?”

“Okay, why does he talk like that?” Monika asked.

“He just… does?”

“Could you make him not?”

“I mean, yes, but that wouldn’t be true to the character.”

Monika furrowed her brow. Given how much trouble the mind controllers were having getting what they wanted to happen to happen, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to change the way Cecil talked out of petty annoyance. “Fine, I’ll bear with it.”

“I have no idea,” the wisp said, trembling. “All I know is that there have been disturbances lately. Lots of disturbances. Something big is coming.”

“How may I find your brethren before this disaster strikes?”

“I… I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m not of any help…”

“Then I will just search with you. Perhaps we shall get lucky.”

Monika chuckled. “Yeah, right. This story’s going to end up with them getting in all sorts of messes.”

Janna smirked. “No story would be complete without conflict.”

~~~

Your name is Meteora Osterreich. You, simply put, are a wizard, but before that you are a librarian. You love books, though like most things that involve the esoteric parts of humanity known as ‘emotions’, you struggle to express just how much you appreciate their wordy pages. You tend to be rather boring to people who don’t know you.

You were once an NPC from a video game brought to this world by the power of what you know as Creators but the rest of the multiverse calls Prophets. After solving a crisis where the worlds of fiction and reality clashed, threatening to destroy the ‘real world’, you stayed behind because you wanted to. It wasn’t just because of the food, but the food was a major part of your decision. Life as an NPC isn’t exactly stellar either. You had lost your magic powers early on, but eventually the voices helped you regain them.

You are currently in your bedroom, having been interrupted in the middle of a spell by… something. You don’t know what, and this bothers you enough to give you further pause. It doesn’t seem like you’re being attacked, but those wise voices that tell you things seem to have stopped for the most part.

You feel like you have somewhere to be. It was the place the voices showed you, with the exploding windows. Magane has sent beings from another realm to destroy what you’ve worked so hard to protect. You are certain of this.

What will you do?

=> Meteora: retrieve arms from magic chest.

You do not have a magic chest. You do have a magic pocket dimension where you can store lots of things. Including missiles. You have an agreement with the government about only using those missiles when absolutely necessary. Which it probably will be.

You open up your magic pocket dimension and pull out your fake arms.

You do not remember putting these in there, nor do you know why you felt the need to pull them out.

The voices have been strangely quiet on the matter.

=> Meteora: go for a walk. Teleporting is overrated.

Against your better judgement you decide to walk through the city, at night, instead of teleporting right where you need to go. Because fresh air is amazing and cheating is for losers.

You notice that you’re feeling especially ‘spunky’ today. How unlike you. But it also feels strangely liberating. If your Creator were not dead you would consider that, possibly, you were being altered.

But he is dead, and there is no one who could alter you now. So that’s that.

After walking down the street for a while, something becomes blatantly obvious to you.

You’re lost.

=> Meteora: realize that you have a phone thus, a city map.

You pull out your phone to find, annoyingly, that it’s dead. You forgot to charge it when you went to bed and the voices woke you up rather rudely. Great.

=> Meteora: be a distraction.

There’s nothing here to distract, but you do a weird dance anyway. Because it feels like the right thing to do, and after all there’s no one watching.

Well, actually, there is, but you don’t see them. They see you first.

CECIL: What?
WISP: Oh, that is Meteora! She can help us!
CECIL: You sure?
METEORA: Perhaps. Please understand, I do not usually behave like that.
WISP: We know, we know! Can you help us find my brothers.
CECIL: This being’s brethren have become lost. I have given my blade to him so we may find the lost family.
METEORA: That sounds noble. I am currently lost – I have reason to believe there are beings in this world who seek to alter it an- hold on. Why are you here?
WISP: Meteora, do not worry, he has nothing to do with them.
CECIL: Who is them?
METEORA: I still want to know why he’s here.
CECIL: I follow the winds of time and space wherever they may lead me. They led me to this wisp. That is as far as I’ve gotten, and now they have led me to you.
METEORA: …And what about you?
WISP: I am a wisp of energy lost just like yourself. I come from Them.
METEORA: Them?
WISP: The voices that have assisted you. I am one of their floating messengers, brought down here due to interference. …Horrible interference.
METEORA: Do you know where the building is? The one with the windows?
WISP: Well…

-==> Be Pinkie.

You are now Pinkie. You have caught your wisp, and are feeling very proud about it, even though you know there’s something going on elsewhere in the world that’s going to be a problem later. Maybe. Everything’s been a little absurd as of late.

Speaking of absurd, a dozen robot ninjas from another dimension pop into existence and start attacking you! Ahahaah!

PINKIE: Really? Wh… Why?

They jump at you, yodeling and flailing batons and yelling in Britishtralian von Scottish accents.

PINKIE: That’s not even a real thing!
FLUTTERFREE: I feel as if I have now heard everything that could be heard…

They throw their batons! What do you do?

-==> STRIFE!

~~~

“We can use this. Get Victor – he can get them Darker and Edgier easily.”

“Given him the inspiration. Let’s see how this goes.”

The cyborg men of deception moved in, their impossible accents telling of years of torment due to their technological components. Where they hailed from, there were no anesthetics or proper medical procedures, only immeasurable pain to go with enhancement. It never even occurred to their government to lessen the pain. Pain made better soldiers.

Their batons opened, covered in thousands of microscopic screws that would tear through flesh in the most brutal way possible.

“…Did they just get seventeen times scarier?” Nova asked. “What happened?”

“We’re in the middle of a Prophet war,” Pinkie muttered, bringing the hammer down on the first cyborg, not intending to kill him but doing so anyway, having impacted the structural center of his processing unit. “They’re fighting over… something. Or they might just be trying to get on each other’s nerves. It’s a little hard to tell!”

Jotaro punched the robot ninjas to the side with Star Platinum, finding them harder than he expected. He suffered some cuts across his chest, clutching his abdomen in a pitiful attempt to keep his fluids within him. “Things are… brutalized.”

“It’s like Pinkamina,” Vriska observed. “Something started out as a joke and has been twisted to be fucking horrifying. I didn’t notice that they were constantly screaming when they first showed up, I thought it was hilarious!” She cut two in half, but found her sword torn out of her hands.

“It’s working against us,” Pinkie said as the net was cut out of her hooves. She noticed the wispy creature wasn’t even in it anymore. “We have to go. Now.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now,” Pinkie said, opening a dimensional portal.

“Yeah! They’re leaving! Ha! Can’t believe that worked so easily! Didn’t even have to reword and try again!”

“Wait for it…”

“We need to get Rohan,” Pinkie said, jumping through the portal.

“…Frick.”

“That’s bad.”

“We already have three of them to deal with we don’t need another!”

“Stop them!”

~~~

“For once I agree,” I said, placing my pen to the paper. “They don’t need the ability to influence this story on that kind of level. That would be… problematic for both of us, I predict.”

I placed my pen to the paper.

Rohan

I sat back. Writing about a Prophet aware of themselves if you were also aware was a difficult proposition under the best of circumstances. If you were fully aware of your power as a Prophet and tried to use that power, it was a constant game of second-guessing oneself to ensure that what you wrote was true to yourself and not just trying to push a specific event. Because the Tower tended not to accept that. But if you did push through your will onto another Prophet who also knew, they might figure out what you were doing…

I had to be subtle, basically.

I continued writing.

Rohan came home after a long trip to Earth C to get manga inspiration. He may have been Merodi Universalis’ ‘secret’ weapon, but he still kept up with his deadlines. In the past people had gawked at how he made every deadline he ever got with little difficulty, but when it was revealed that Heaven’s Door had the ability to draw really quickly, well, it became less impressive.

It was still liberating not to be burdened with absurd deadlines - allowing him to be purely devoted to the art form. That said, he hadn’t written anything yet this week, and with all the inspiration he had it was time to bring everything to bear. Not a single page would be left blank.

He took his phone off the hook and shut off his cell phone – the artist needed to not be interrupted. He sat at his drawing desk and summoned Heaven’s Door. He sketched the frames, ready to start something a little new. Time to bring in some really stupid reptiles…

I left the story blank – he should stay occupied for a long time. I wrote him as I knew him, an artist. Everything was completely believable, in character, and simple. He might actually leave the phone off the hook sometimes; given his stature in society he could afford to do that.

There wouldn’t be another prophet involving themselves in this mess.

I turned back to Cecil. He needed to go back to the factory now that the primary team was no longer on-world. Meteora could prove to be a problem in that regard…

~~~

“Right, so, this Rohan guy?” Janna told Monika. “I just got a big flash about him. I need him to come into the story because he can change the story.”

“That’s a pretty nice twist!” Monika said, congratulating herself. “Now how will we incorporate him? He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“How? Come on, Monika, if someone really wants to contact someone else and they don’t call, they kick his door in!”

“ROHAN!” Pinkie shouted, tearing his front door off its hinges. “We need you stat!”

“I am not your sl-”

Vriska grabbed him by the collar. “There’s four Prophets fighting over control of a world. We need you to write us a victory.”

“How? I can’t just say ‘they win’ and it happens! There has to be setup, I have to understand the situation, and I have t-”

“You’re coming with us then,” Jotaro said. “End of discussion.”

“Bu-”

“End of discussion.”

Flutterfree put a hoof on Jotaro. “You could be a little relaxed about it.”

Jotaro nodded slowly. “Rohan… Just come.”

Rohan sighed. “Fine. But you owe me.”

“I’ve got a party with your name on it,” Pinkie said, opening a portal. “But we gotta take care of this first. There’s no other way out of this mess.”

“This is weird…” Janna said. “Four Prophets? And Rohan’s a Prophet as well? It’s almost as if I-”

“Yeah, no,” Monika said, removing that conclusion from Janna’s mind.

“…No what?”

“You were mumbling something. Doesn’t matter much anymore. …Maybe we should introduce someone completely new?”

“Nah, I don’t thi-”

Monika twisted her mind. It was so easy to cheat if you were her.

“That’s a great idea, Monika!”

“I thought so.”

~~~

“Try to mess with Cecil. He’s always been the main threat.”

“Now that he’s with Meteora we may get something to stick… Try Cassandra. She’s good with people like him.”

Cecil found himself untrusting of Meteora – especially considering how untrusting she had been of him at the start. She thought he was her enemy. Maybe he was one of the beings who sought to alter what she wanted?

“How do these invaders threaten your world?” he asked, eyes narrow.

“I am not certain. All I know is that I was told by Them.”

“Them?”

“The beings who gave me my power back and have helped me accomplish so much. The same people Wisp comes from.”

“Hi!” Wisp said. “Yeah, Them are great. So great. So great great great grea-”

“That went off.”

“What was she even thinking?”

“Just grab someone else.”

“Hi!” Wisp said. “Yeah, Them are great. They guide the world to a brighter future!”

Recognizing the catchphrase of the Freedom Sciences, Cecil attacked them both, disturbed by the cruelty of the winds today…

“Apparently he won’t attack that fast.”

“We’re getting close though. All we have to do is get him to realize that they work for us, and Freedom Sciences is part of us. He’ll go crazy.”

“Anderson, go.”

Recognizing the catchphrase of the Freedom Sciences, Cecil narrowed his eyes. “Are you part of Freedom Sciences?”

“Yes,” Meteora said.

“Crud, looks like she won’t say that.”

“Well now we can’t have him reword the question, he already said it!”

“We can still salvage this.”

“No,” Meteora said, face betraying recognition.

“But you know of them,” Cecil said, leaning in. “What do you know?”

“What do you know?”

“They are my sworn enemy.”

Meteora attacked, launching a missile at Cecil.

“Got it.”

“Finally. Get Yan influenced, let this be one of those decisively quick battles.”

~~~

“Sorry, not happening,” I said. I grabbed two pens in my magic and wrote two things simultaneously. I had to let Them think I was doing one thing while I was really doing another.

It was nice that none of Them were actually Aware, like Pinkie. Pinkie and Monika both knew instantly what I was doing.

As far as Them were concerned, I was just writing this story:

Cecil drew his swords and leaped over the missile Meteora had fired at him. He brought the blades down not on Meteora, but on the Wisp, extinguishing the poor creature in an instant. He knew Meteora was just a woman, but whoever this ‘Them’ were, the Wisp was a more fundamental part of them. He couldn’t allow it to run rampant now that he knew this.

All the enemies he had slain had family somewhere; this Wisp was no different.

His actions only solidified Meteora’s resolve. She created a magic circle under him, attempting to imprison him. She discovered he had protective spells on him, rendering her attempts pointless.

Cecil drove a sword at her, piercing her own magic shield. She turned out of the way, panting – remembering that she wasn’t a fighter.

It was at this point the brothers of the Wisp appeared, rushing Cecil in full force and giving Meteora much needed aid. However, the wisps were purely mental creatures who were never actually meant to have personalities, and thus were largely disorganized and messy.

I could sense Them trying to throw everything they could at this narrative to twist it so Meteora won. I had to admit, they could probably do it. But they weren’t aware of a second narrative I was spinning.

Creating an Out Of Context Problem takes some doing, namely because the aforementioned problem better have some amazing story of its own. And it just so happened that I knew the right thing for the job. All part of the other story I was writing.

The Scion of Eversleep screamed at the pitiful hero attempting to slay it. “You are nothing, wench!”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Nothing? Ethereal sleep being, I just took out your entire army. Alone. The entire thing. How can you call me nothing? How lost are you within your delusions?”

“I am this world. Everything within it is part of me, a twist of my own essence. I brought this up as if out of my dreams. You are just a little fly amidst my creations.”

“…Still don’t believe I’m from another world?”

“There can be none aside from the Scion of Eversleep! Return to the dark from whence you came!”

Corona didn’t go anywhere. She smirked. “See, you just tried to send me into nonexistence there. A pretty effective attempt at that, I have to say. Would have worked too, ‘cept, you know, I’m not actually part of this creation of yours.” She adjusted her red shades and smirked. “How’s that delusion of yours going now?”

“I must have developed a minor insanity…”

Corona sighed. “Right, definitely not getting through to you with words.” She lifted a dimensional device. “How about I show you?”

“Show me?”

“The other worlds.” Corona fired the portal right into the being’s center, letting it cycle through world after world, touching random people. A lost unicorn… An ancient evil… A librarian in magical combat…

“And that would be Meteora,” I said, looking back to my other story.

A portal appeared in the middle of the street, a murky essence coming from it. The wisps retreated in fear, while Cecil stared in curiosity. Meteora wasn’t given time to resist – for it chose to touch her mind. The energy of a transdimensional power forced her into unconsciousness, one the wisps would not be able to easily wake.

Just as quickly as it had appeared, it vanished.

I grinned. “Wonder how you’ll chew on that.” But my work wasn’t done. I needed to get Cecil back on track – I should never have tried to take him off his original plot, that had proved to be pointless. Now the primary team would no longer be allies - with Rohan I couldn’t predict anything. So I had to be quick.

Cecil needed to move and get to the primary factory of Freedom Sciences.

~~~

You are now the primary factory of Freedom Sciences. You do not have a standard name, you do not have birthdays, you do not understand the idea of days, and the people who walk around your halls each day mean nothing to you. You currently just exist, like most buildings do, without much care for anything at all.

You have no interests. Because of the aforementioned fact that you are a building.

The people inside of you certainly have interests. The idea of FREEDOM! and SCIENCE! Are pretty big ideals within your walls. The scientists believe that there are beings above everyone who control the way the world works, defining it by their laws. Ever since the founder learned of the Re:Creators incident, where fiction became reality, it has been thought to be the Freedom Sciences’ duty to face off against them.

To that end, you exist. You are the primary factory. Within you, something nefarious is being built. Something deep intended to bring about a new age where the Creators and their Creations will be free.

You are not able to question this. You are a building.

What will you do?

FoFS: Continue being a building.

That’s a good idea. You continue being a building. You continue being a building for quite some time. It’s relaxing.

FoFS: Contemplate that you feel relaxed.

You can’t do that. You’re a building. Didn’t you get the memo?

FoFS: Get the memo.

You can’t do that. You’re a building. Didn’t you get the memo?

FoFS: …

…

FoFS: Tell everyone more about yourself.

You can’t do that. You can’t tell anyone you’re a four-story tall building with ovoid windows. You can’t tell anyone you have a bright blue mailbox affixed to your primary entrance. You can’t tell anyone that only the basement currently has power, so all the other lights are off. You can’t tell anyone that your address is 13-

~~~

“Hussie’s screwing with us.”

“Hussie’s screwing with everyone.”

“Right. He’s easy enough to punish. Tap into Dana. She’ll hit him with shitty memes.”

“He makes so many of them it’s not hard to get them after him.”

Andrew Hussie looked up from the computer he was working on to the sound of bees.

“Oh fuck no,” he screamed, grabbing a broom and waving it around. “No! NO! NOT THE BEES! NOT THE BEEEEEEEES!”

Thousands of bees seemingly made of poor quality JPEGgraphics burst into his room and made him run away screaming.

“That was easy.”

“He still gave away a lot. This could be a problem.”

~~~

The first panel showed Pinkie talking. “Just start it from here, let the story be led into realistically.”

The second panel had Rohan drawing the first panel with Heaven’s Door. “Done. I’ll add myself in the next one. What’s the goal?”

The third panel showed Pinkie speaking in a narration box. We need to wander around this city until we find that factory. I can describe it to you since Hussie decided to be helpful rather than a troll for once in his life… Below the narration box was an illustration of the Primary team exploring the city, determined expressions on all five of their faces.

“We’ve been wandering for a while,” Nova said in the fourth panel, a confused expression on her face. “You think Rohan or Vriska would have come through by now.”

“My luck is going to get us there, I’m sure of it,” Vriska said in the fifth panel, an exaggerated expression of defiance on her features.

“Hey, it looks like Rohan’s manga is working!” Flutterfree said on the last panel of the page. “A little weird to realize that it gives us more extreme expressions…”

“So long as we accept it, we’re fine,” Pinkie said on the start of the next page, looking up to Jotaro. “Right?”

Jotaro grabbed his hat in the next. “Yare yare daze…”

“Hey, guess what I found!” Page two, third panel – the building was in sight, directly where Vriska was pointing. “That looks exactly like how you described it!”

Pinkie nodded. “Hussie came through. Describing something he didn’t know the appearance of, and viola, that’s how it appeared. No contradictions!”

In the fifth panel, Nova facehooved. “I’m not going to be able to parse this for a long time, good gravy…”

Pinkie turned to them with a serious expression on the third page. “Do you all know what we need to do?”

Everyone nodded in the second, the motion indicated by a sound effect and motion blur lines.

Pinkie turned away in the third panel, her speech bubble trailing down the page a ways. “Best we can tell, Them have something in this building’s basement designed to free this world’s Creators and Creations from limitations, as far as the scientists are aware. But Them have never been known to spend this much effort on anything unless they had a really good incentive.”

Pinkie looked right out of the page in the next panel. “They’re probably trying to attack the Flowers with a true narrative the Flowers won’t be able to refute. What else would require this level of ka manipulation that couldn’t be done just by smashing several universes together?”

Jotaro cracked his knuckles in the last panel. “I can’t think of anything.” Right next to him, Vriska grinned. “Let's save some Flowery asses.”

~~~

“They’re going in.”

“Keep calm, there’s still a salvage option here.”

“Pinkie has a point, why do we care so much about this? The Flowers don’t interfere in our games that often.”

“That’s just because you don’t enjoy perusing the self-insert stories. They love ending those prematurely, perhaps more than anything.”

“Can’t raise up a good multiversal conqueror with metaknowledge these days…”

“Ahem. Salvage. The answer is not to demand events take a particular course, but to let reality know that the assault on the Flowers is performed by heroes. That it is time for them to fall because heroes are ready.”

“Sketchy. Really sketchy. We’ve been painting them as heroes the entire time…”

“Not in this story. This narrative has not even seen who Freedom Sciences’ scientists are. What their lives were, what their stories came from, why they faced everything. Let’s show that. A reiteration. No chance of being unaccepted because all the stuff has already happened.”

“Genius!”

Miranda Johansen was but a lowly secretary, but she had her place at Freedom Sciences just like everyone else. Her father had been an author – a Creator, a Prophet. One of many countless thousands on this unique world in the multiverse. He would shape a world with his words, swearing that his characters were more real than everyone else gave them credit for.

Then he had been one of the authors hired to work on the Re:Creators incident. To create a scenario to end the threat to reality… posed by fiction.

He went mad after it was over. He truly understood that the world he created was real – and instead of taking solace in the fact that his feelings were right, he couldn’t believe the things he had done to his creations. He wanted to make up for all the horrors, to be a benevolent god to them. To force his world into the way it was supposed to be.

The quality of his work degraded, fell, and he struggled to end the story he had set out. And then, one day, he knew that what he was writing no longer had any sway over the world of fiction. The feeling he had always had was gone. Something had stopped him.

He committed suicide a year before Them contacted Miranda and told her what had happened. In his madness, her father had forced his will in a way it shouldn’t have, creating unsanctioned narrative glitches. He had tried to create a perfect world.

The Flowers wouldn’t stand for that. They had severed his connection to that world. Since he couldn’t move on to a new creation, he was no longer a Prophet.

Bringing these Flowers to justice was exactly what Miranda wanted to do with her life.

“There we go, best sob story out of all of them.”

“Meteora next?”

“She’s already left a bad taste in the narrative.”

“Ooh, what about the head?”

“Yes…”

Jira Higashikara.

She was a Prophet, and she knew it the moment the reports of the Re:Creators incident started. They were quickly hushed up, but she knew. She always knew. It was in her blood, her destiny, to understand what she was. She wanted nothing more than to find these creations and ask them how their worlds were.

They had already left by the time she got any good leads. All that remained were Meteora, who was sweet, but not much help – and Magane. Magane, the psycho, the reality bender. Long after the elements of fiction began to dissipate from the world, long before Them appeared, Magane remained.

“You sicken me,” Jira told her when they first met.

Magana had laughed. “That’s my whole purpose! I’m the crazed psycho. Antagonist. Mur-der-er~! A menace to society that just won’t go away!”

“I know. I want to know what it’s like. What my worlds are like. Meteora couldn’t help me. I think you might be able to.”

“Help? Why would I help you?”

“Because. It’d be interesting.” Jira narrowed her eyes. “Have I read you right?”

Magane grinned. “Yes. But you’re also wrong about a bunch of other assumptions you haven’t even thought about yet.”

“I’ll cross those bridges when I come to them. Now tell me. What are my worlds like?”

“Why would I know? You’re their Creator. You can just look into their worlds.”

“No I can’t. I just write – I do not know what actually becomes true, and what doesn’t. I can’t see them as anything but thoughts in my mind. What happens when I don’t write them is a mystery to me.”

Magane grinned. “A lie about a lie…” she snapped her fingers. “…it turns inside-out on itself.”

Jira smirked. “Thank you.”

“You’ll be cursing me in about a week!” Magane called. “The Awareness you’ve just received is going to drive you mad.”

“No i-” Jira caught herself. “Nice try.”

“But what if it wasn’t a lie, brave Creator?”

Jira stared at her. She decided to ask a question of her own. “Did you always know we were in a story ourselves?”

Magane laughed. “You didn’t answer my question!”

Jira turned to leave. “The police will be here soon.”

“I’ll just find a way to trick them out of existing or something,” Magane said with a yawn. “So pedestrian… And boring.” Magane fixed her gaze on the back of Jira’s head. Jira could feel the eyes boring into her skull. “Don’t disappoint me, Jira.”

She didn’t. Jira did exactly as Magane predicted. She looked into her worlds… and saw the Flowers. Saw all the characters they had killed, all the fanfics they had ‘fixed’, all her beautiful writing… down the drain. Written off as ‘bad’ ‘glitched’ or ‘unrealistic’. As if her gift of Creation was wrong. All the things she wanted to see, she wanted to create, all the beauty…

They decided it was wrong.

She raged, scrawling writings – anything she could to get back at the Flowers. The quality of her work degraded, becoming even worse than it had been to start with. But she couldn’t accept this. She never would. She would express herself, and the Flowers wouldn’t be able to stop her.

And then Them noticed her works. Noticed Mary Sues that knew about the Flowers and tried to fight them – usually ineffectually. But the fact that so many knew… it was curious. Them had their own grudges against the Flowers.

And so Them came to Jira’s world and gave her a start. A push – they told her that Them had the power to help her, but Them had no control over narrative. Them could not free her without her help.

So she gathered everyone she could. Listening to Them’s words, building up the society that would become Freedom Sciences. They would free the Prophets of the multiverse from the Flowers – from their gruff, unchanging view of what the Plot should be. Why shouldn’t the ‘bad’ works be accepted with the good?

They were Prophets just as much as the great authors were. They could create. It was a power given to them by the Dark Tower. No Flowers had a right to take that away from them.

“Good. That explains everything.”

“The Flowers do need to be stopped…”

~~~

“You don’t realize how much like a villain backstory that sounds,” I said, shaking my head. “You yourselves aren’t good writers. …You may have a point about the power of the Flowers. But that world is oversaturated with too many Prophets. The Flowers keep it from taking control of all the others…” I laid my pen to the paper. “Let me show you what Jira really was. …Besides someone who let Magane escape into the multiverse through her actions. Which is bad enough on its own.”

What exactly makes a glitch in ka?

The way the Flowers detect the glitch is a trade secret they are exceptionally tight-lipped about. They have never described the exact ka signature they use to detect it. But based on what they deem sanctioned and not, there appear to be some general criteria on which a glitch can be judged.

It appears to mostly be a matter of quality and theme. As a question: is it good fiction? No... is it decent fiction? Do people enjoy reading it and thinking about it? If the answer is mostly yes, it’s probably not a glitch. However, bad writing – fraught with typos, unrealistic actions, and just bad form – those produce glitches.

The criterionof theme is a little harder to understand, but it’s a major reason. What is a Mary Sue, in reality? It’s a perfect or near-perfect character that exists almost exclusively for that end. The theme of a Mary Sue story is ‘Mary Sue is the best and great things happen to them’. It can have good quality writing, but if the focus is a perfect character, the glitch will arise more often.

Now, there are nuances. Popularity’s effect on narrative glitches aren’t fully understood, and a being that would be a Mary Sue in any other context can be overruled by being widespread. Worlds based in fanfics tend to produce more glitches than original works – usually because of Out Of Character moments, the dominance of shipping as a genre, and a lack of original imagination from the Prophet in question. Which isn’t to say fanfics are glitches, it’s just that they’re significantly more prone to them. Which is why the Flowers work almost exclusively against such threats.

Jira Higashikara was a fanfic writer on a world where almost everyone was a Prophet. She was a bad fanfic writer. She spat words from her mind onto a screen, never revised, and had great flights of fancy where many of her ‘characters’ were just shadows of what she viewed herself to be. Little more than bodies with words coming out of them. She’s guilty of glitching theme, quality, and numerous other things.

And yet she loved these worlds more than she loved reality.

Because in them, she got to make all of her dreams come true.

She believed she cared about her characters – but they weren’t separate from her. She would claim they were, and believe they had lives of their own, but it wasn’t true. She was lying to herself. The multiverse had a virus, and its name was Jira Higashikara.

The Flowers fulfill a role in the multiverse. A role that keeps it sane. Sturgeon’s Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap. The Flowers keep the worst of the worst from infecting the rest of the multiverse. For if a world like that is allowed to flourish, Prophets might be created out of its beings… And those newer, possibly worse worlds would make more…

Instead of admitting the Dark Tower was a flawed creation, the Flowers took it as their Tower-given destiny to take care of these glitches that were not ‘sanctioned’. There is much disagreement over whether the Plot they believe in is really correct, but it cannot be denied that they are important to the health of existence.

Writing bad things isn’t wrong. If someone enjoys it, let them do it. But that’s only if their writings cannot change reality. For a Prophet, it is wrong. An idiot god is little different from an evil one.

Jira and Them are cut from the same cloth. They aren’t engaging in simple wish-fulfillment anymore. They are shaping the very worlds around them, consciously, without regard for what they create. If Jira didn’t know what she was doing, it would be understandable. But Magane showed her what she created… and she saw nothing but pure beauty.

It could be considered sad, how she always dreamed to rise from her position as ‘flavor textitian’ to a popular author who spun worlds into the minds of everyone, but simply didn’t have the skill. It’s a sad fact of life that you have some skills, and you have some weaknesses. Not all dreams are attainable.

I sat back, proud of my work. A logically-structured argument for the villainy of Them and Jira. Though in Them’s case the argument wasn’t required.

It was at that point I realized I made a mistake.

I hadn’t written a story. I had written an argument. It had power – yes – had the power to alter the perception of individuals. But it hadn’t created a new story. I hadn’t done anything with Cecil after I sent him to the factory. Given the intertwining stories, he would have been acting on his own for a while and I wouldn’t have been able to help them in those moments.

The other Prophets could have used their stories to overrule mine…

Songs of the Spheres was not the only flow of ka to be concerned with. And it was the only one I had done anything to.

~~~

“Wow, this Mona is… so unlike anything I’ve ever written before!” Janna said, staring at the words in front of her in disbelief. “And yet… she seems to be the best thing ever!”

“She’s perfect!” Monika said, grinning. “Now that we – er, you – have described her so everyone knows exactly what she looks like without a shadow of a doubt, let’s have her show up on the scene.”

Mona dashed to the scene, her psychic powers brimming with understanding. The device was in the basement. She had to be the one to use it for the best of everyone. Everything needed to change. Change was the answer.

She bashed in the front doors where Pinkie’s team had already taken care of the receptionist, Miranda. “Have no fear, I am here!”

Vriska gave a thumbs up. “Sweet! Go check the basement.”

“We can handle things up here,” Nova said.

“Waiwaiwaiwait!” Pinkie shouted. “Girls, shoosh. Mona, no.”

“Psh, you don’t have to be worried about me!” Mona grinned. “I can do anything!”

“That’s one of the reasons you have to leave.”

“Why are you writing that?” Monika demanded.

“It seems like what she’d say!”

“Then make her agree.”

“That wouldn’t be-”

Monika adjusted a few more things in Janna’s file.

“Pinkie… Are you sure?”

“Actually, nope, go ahead and go to the basement! Just give me a moment…” She pulled a button out of her mane.

A confetti cannon went off from Janna’s computer, knocking her out. Monika was not spared the insult of getting completely covered in confetti.

“Pinkie Pie…” she muttered.

She noticed there was a note amidst the confetti.

You just created a Mary Sue.

“No I di-” Monika’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks as she thought about this for a minute. “AAAAAA FU¨¨¨¨√¨ø´ß®´∑¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥¥

~~~

Ka field negated, the Snowdrop said, appearing in between Pinkie’s team and Mona in an instant. Neutralizing Mary Sue.

Pinkie blinked. They’d sent a Flower? They always sent agents for simple Mary Sue work! …Right?

Mona glared at the Snowdrop. “I am not Mary Sue! I am Mona Resalanarabana. And I-“ She dodged an icy projectile from the Snowdrop. “What the hell!? Are you trying to kill me?!”

Yes, the Snowdrop said.

Mona decided now was a good time to run away. The Snowdrop vanished, presumably in pursuit.

“OKAY TEAM!” Pinkie shouted. “For the first time since we arrived, we’re free to do what we want according to the normal flow of ka. Basement. Now. We don’t have much time.”

Jotaro was the first to respond. “STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

The next thing Pinkie knew they were in the basement.

She saw two people lying dead on the floor. While everyone else had been busy fighting over ideals, the story had resolved itself.

Both Jira and Cecil lay on the ground, blood pooling around their corpses.

“W-what?” Flutterfree said. “Did we miss something?”

“Everyone missed something,” Pinkie said, sighing. “And now people are dead because of it.”

“What do we do, then?” Nova asked.

Pinkie looked up. Behind Cecil and Jira was a machine covered in the symbol of ka. “There it is,” she said. “The thing that’s supposed to take out the Flowers. …Somehow.”

It was at this point Monika ran into the room. “Has anyone seen Mona?”

“Your Mary Sue is being hunted down,” Pinkie said, pursing her lips. “Probably dead at any mo-

~~~

-ment.”

Monika twitched. “But but… Gah. I just wanted to have fun!”

“Careful. You might turn into Them,” Nova said.

Vriska, to her credit, ignored Monika and walked up to the machine. “Hey, I think we can use this.”

“Really?” Pinkie asked.

“Really. Just a little bit of luck and I think we can use it against Them.” Vriska grinned. “Worth a shot, don’t you say?”

Nova shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

Flutterfree perked up. “I th-

~~~

“-ink we should be cautious about this.” She leaned down to check Cecil, pulling a mechanical rod out of his jacket. “This guy wasn’t one of the scientists.”

“He was a hero of sorts,” Pinkie answered. “Twilence’s.”

“I bet this device does the good thing,” Flutterfree said. “Put it into the machine in… oh hey, that round slot right there! An-”

~~~

“-d we win.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “This could be a trick. I think we should just activate it.”

~~~

“Vriska, I’m really sure we should just put this in there.”

~~~

Vriska moved her hand to activate the device on her own.

~~~

Flutterfree twitched, the action of her friend triggering her Rage. She flew at the troll, tackling her to the ground.

~~~

Vriska kicked her with enough force to crack bone. “You’re being controlled!”

~~~

“You’re being controlled!” Flutterfree Raged.

~~~

ANDREW HUSSIE: Ruin everything.

All right then! I run right into the midst of everything with the shitty bees behind me screaming at the top of my lungs.

HUSSIE: AAAAAAAAA!
VRISKA: Wh8t the f8ck!?!?!?!?
FLUTTERFREE: What in Celestia’s name!?

I run right into the machine that nobody’s given a physical description to yet, inserting my body and the millions of horrendous, cruddy bees into it! I destroy the offending mechanism! TAKE THAT, CRUEL GODS WHO CURSED ME! AHAHAHA!

There is, of course, a large boom. Everyone’s fine. Except me, but I’m a ghost, and I don’t care how much explosion I absorb. WOOOOO!

ANDREW HUSSIE: Gloat.

HUSSIE: You’re all fucking welcome.
PINKIE: …*sigh*. Thanks, I guess.
NOVA: …Can anyone explain what just happened?
MONIKA: His file’s hidden. Sorry.
NOVA: You have to stop just looking at people’s files at the drop of a hat!
MONIKA: Yeah, no.
HUSSIE: This is the thanks I get? A bunch of bickering? I stopped two people from killing each other! I saved the Flowers and kept a major genocide of Them from happening! I should be a national hero!
VRISKA: Yeah, no. Prepare for a knuckle sandwich.
HUSSIE: Oh, yeah, actually, instead…

Vriska and I share a deep, passionate kiss and she is so entranced by my presence she cannot punch me away.

~~~

“That’s it, I’m going down there,” a Them said.

“Hold on a se-”

The Them appeared just in time to see Vriska deliver a sword into Hussie’s mouth, pull it out, and shove it in again. Being a Skaian, that did nothing besides make him scream. Which was why she was doing it. Repeatedly.

“Worth it…” he managed, impossibly.

The Them had had enough. All of these people were going to die, right here, for messing up everything.

“What a nice file you have there,” Monika said. “I bet you assholes are responsible for this whole mess, huh?”

The Them’s white essence shook for a moment. “Wha-”

Monika set one of the options in the file to ‘dead’. The Them exploded.

~~~

I panicked.

And they all survived because the latent energies from the destroyed machine had a life-giving power that, for a moment, rescinded mortality just enough so they would be beaten within an inch of death from the cosmic being’s own destruction, but not join it in its end.

I gulped. That was complete BS.

I hoped it worked.

After a few seconds, I let out a sigh of relief as I saw Jotaro grunt through the Eye of Rhyme.

I hadn’t gotten what I wanted. I hadn’t managed to deliver a major blow to Them. But one of Them had been killed as a result of this whole mess, and that usually deterred Them from messing with something. For a while, at least.

And the Flowers were still around. That was the important bit. Another evil plan foiled.

I decided it was about time I went to bed. Tonight had been way too stressful. I trusted Pinkie to deal with the situation.

~~~

Pinkie looked to Monika. “Right, now that this is over, we need you to do something.”

“Why would I-”

“Seal this universe off from all outside contact,” Pinkie said. “Nobody can access the world of Prophets. It’s just way way too dangerous.”

Monika blinked. She tapped into the universe’s physics file and made a few adjustments. “Done. This is an out-only universe now. I think a Class 1 could probably get to it anyway.”

“Good. Let’s get out of here,” Pinkie said.

“Uh, wait, hold on,” Nova said. “…Where’s Rohan?”

“Back home already. Guess we glossed over that.” Pinkie smiled awkwardly. “There was a lot of people panicking for almost no reason over him.”

Nova blinked. “Did we actually do anything?”

“We made people panic,” Jotaro said.

There was silence.

“…Vriska, I’m sorry,” Flutterfree said suddenly.

“I’m pretty sure we were puppets of Prophets,” Vriska commented, throwing her sword back into Hussie. “…But I’m sorry too.”

“Let’s just go,” Pinkie said, shaking her head. “I’m… I think I’m done with the meta today. If you want to know what actually happened read my report to Renee when I get around to writing it. I need to de-stress a bit.” She opened a portal. Vriska threw Hussie through it.

Monika shrugged, walking through. “…Actually, I should go get Mona.”

“The Flowers got her and left,” Pinkie muttered. “That’s the point when Vriska started acting weird.”

“…Oh.” Monika frowned. “…I liked her.”

“Hey, you’re not a Prophet,” Pinkie said. “Go to wherever you call home and write a ton of stories about Mona.”

Monika blinked. “Maybe… …Maybe.”

The primary team left the universe, leaving Monika alone.

She destroyed the entire Freedom Sciences building with barely a thought. Screw them all.

She left the universe with no intention of ever returning.

Hours later, Meteora would wake up in a hospital bed without her powers. She would have to go back to leading a normal life. What the voices had said to her passed into the recesses of her memory over time, and she soon rarely thought about them at all.

~~~

Magane chuckled. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”

There was no response. There was no scenery around her – she existed alone in the scene.

“Yes, I’m talking to you,” Magane said, pointing. “Lovely little readers. Perplexed by what my plan was.” She shrugged. “The moment I got Them to create a dimensional connection, I was free to explore. There was no more ‘plan’ after that. There was no reason. It was just fun.”

Nothing but the slasher smile. “But I’m not just going to vanish after this. It may seem like that way. But I’ll be sure to stick around. I can see just as everyone else that we’re building up to something. The scope keeps increasing and increasing and increasing…!”

“It’s got to hit the top eventually.”

There was nothing but Magane's evil, childish laugh.

096 - The Odd Pair

Renee was having a tea break with Daniel when the map started flashing. Primary Technician Pidge was also in the room, performing maintenance on the screens lining the walls.

“Sweet!” Pidge said, aiming a scanner at the Map. “I finally get to see what this is like in action. The powers behind these quests…”

“Oh, a Friendship Mission,” Renee said. “I wonder if I’m going to have to call anyone away from their expeditions?”

“Wonder if it’s us?” Daniel mused, watching as the magic of harmony began to form symbols.

Renee smirked. “Last time it sent us we were marriage counselors for Nova and Sunburst. It seems to think we understand how it works.”

They moved to share a kiss, but Renee saw the symbols fully take shape before she could follow through. “Oh no.”

“OH YES!” Discord crowed, appearing above the map in a shower of oranges with wings. “Behold, the Tree of Harmony has realized that I may be of assistance!” He gestured at the tornado that represented him.

“This is not the first time this has happened,” Renee pointed out, using her magic to keep the flying oranges from smashing into her face.

“So? Every time it does I get to see that adorable face of yours.”

Daniel chuckled at this.

Renee feigned an expression of betrayal.

“Question!” Pidge said, holding up her scanner. “As a being of chaos, what does it feel like to be summoned by harmony?”

“Anyway, who’s my partner today?” Discord asked, ignoring Pidge. “Or is there a big action team being prepared?”

“It’s Trixie,” Renee said, pointing at the magic wand overtop of a crescent of stars.

Discord snapped his fingers, summoning Trixie right there, complete with her performing outfit. She had a rabbit in her hooves. Trixie gasped indignantly. “Trixie was in the middle of a show!”

“Hrm, what’s more important, show, or going on an adventure with your pal, Discord?”

“Trixie had two minutes left! Trixie was heading right over.”

“You’re here now,” Renee said. “I can have another Trixie at your show in… two minutes.”

“Don’t bother. Just let them know what happened to their poor, starved performer,” Trixie said, putting a hoof to her brow.

“Starved?” Discord laughed.

“Trixie, dear, you own two mansions,” Renee pointed out.

Trixie giggled. “Yeah. Success is pretty sweet, isn’t it?”

“How much of that money do you make performing, hmm?” Discord asked.

“Wh- enough! What are you insinuating!?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing at all.”

Daniel shook his head. “He’s trying to poke fun at your ‘internet fame’ money.”

“Vlogs are a legitimate way to make a living!”

“Nobody is questioning that,” Renee assured her.

“I am,” Discord retorted.

Trixie gasped. “Why you little-!”

“How about we look at where you’re going?” Renee interrupted, turning back to the map. It had brought up a version of Equis that looked similar to the standard one, but with numerous places where the geography was distorted into extreme forms, or where great gashes cut deeply into the earth. “Oh… This is Affix’s homeworld. Equis Winch.”

“What’s with that nervous expression? I don’t like that nervous expression,” Trixie said.

“Well, the world itself is fine… It’s just they basically suffered a full apocalypse at the hands of their Discord. Lots of ponies won’t want to see you.”

“Say no more,” Discord said, shifting into a human form – though he kept his horn and antler. “Behold, Incognitord.”

Trixie facehooved.

“If you think that’ll work,” Daniel said.

“It’s like wearing-an-eyepatch levels of effectiveness,” Pidge offered.

Renee shot Pidge a look but didn’t comment. “I’ll call Affix. She can serve as a guide to take you to… Wherever that is.”

“Looks like it’s where Nova’s village should be,” Trixie observed. “...We better not have to deal with a ton of ponies with creepy huge smiles.”

“You might,” Renee said. “Hey, Affix? Going to have to call off your trip to Skaia’s Dream. You can do it tomorrow. The Tree of Harmony has decided Equis Winch has a Friendship Problem. It’s probably best if you’re a guide. …Yes I know the ponies are nice, but one of the people it’s sending is Discord.” Renee looked at the phone, blinking. “…She’ll be right over.”

Discord rubbed his hands together. “This is going to be delightful…”

~~~

Roughly an hour later, Corona and Lady Rarity returned to the castle hall. They both looked bruised and battered, despite Corona’s access to healing magic. Most of Lady Rarity’s armor was gone, half her mane was missing, and her coat was covered in bloodstains and mud. Corona’s clothing looked much cleaner, though that was because Raging Sights could just recreate it at will. Her own hair was half as long as it should have been, and half of her right wing was missing.

“…What in Celestia’s name happened to you two?” Renee asked.

Corona took off her red shades and rubbed her eyes. “We had a long week.”

“You said everything was fine!”

“It was,” Lady Rarity said. “The loss of the wing happened an hour ago.”

“I need to go back to Lai to regrow that,” Corona muttered. “Renee, suffice it to say, we stopped the world from destroying itself. Barely. And now we need a break.” She dismounted Lady Rarity and opened a portal to Lai. “So excuse us for a moment.”

“You have until your next mission to give me that report,” Renee reminded them. “Otherwise, enjoy your break.”

The two nodded and stepped through the portal. Corona tried to stretch, but pain shot up her arm. “Ow, sore, ow, ow.”

Lady Rarity took in a deep breath and let out a sigh of relief. “Oh thank the Tower that’s over. I am going home and using that mane regrower and then I’m not coming out of my bubble bath for two days. Maybe three.”

“I would go home, but I need to regrow this wing first.” Corona glanced at her sad half limb. “My lab isn’t exactly set up for this sort of procedure at the moment, so I’ll just use the palace’s facilities. See you in three days.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “And then we begin this cycle anew.”

“Heh. Don’t lie, you enjoy it.”

“I enjoy the parts of it that don’t break my legs every five minutes,” Lady Rarity muttered. “…But yes, you are correct.”

Corona waved – then teleported right to the palace’s medical ward. “Right, need to regrow this wing a-” she blinked.

The doctor was a unicorn skeleton.

“…When did we hire a skeleton?” Corona asked, cocking her head.

“Last week,” he said in a dry, raspy voice. “Have something against skeletons?”

“Uh, no, it just… an undead doctor seems weird.”

“Oh, so if I was a doctor while I was living, I can’t be one after I’ve been brought back as a bag of bones?”

Corona began to sweat. “Er, no, I jus- I’m sorry!”

The skeleton chuckled.

Corona facepalmed. “How many patients do you use that on?”

“Just the ones who’ll get flustered. Name’s Entice Bell. Or just Doctor Bell.” She gestured toward a bed equipped with a grafting machine. The apparatus was tall, rectangular, and had a large hole whose edges glowed with a soft green light. “I take it you’re familiar with the procedure?”

“I’d have to be, I helped make it,” Corona said with a smirk. She lay down flat on her stomach and extended her half-wing into the hole, letting Doctor Bell inject the stump with an anesthetic before he turned the machine on. In the past, the new wing would have needed to be grown separately and grafted on with surgery, but technology had advanced enough to where it was built onto the already existing stump.

“And done,” Doctor Bell said. “I wouldn’t use it heavily for the next few days. If you lose feeling in the new section, come see me immediately. Also you’re not allowed to operate any heavy spells or machinery for the next hour.”

“The anesthetic was that powerful?”

“Can you feel anything in your feet?”

Corona blinked. “Huh. No. …I would ask how I’m still conscious, but Raging Sights is telling me this is a magical anesthetic.”

“Brand new concoction. Numbs up everything but only makes you slightly woozy. Don’t go stubbing your toes either.”

“Can I just cast a clear spell?”

“Sure. Insurance won’t cover injuries after you do though.”

Corona blinked. “…We don’t do the health insurance thing.”

Doctor Bell shook her head. “Joke. Was a joke. Of course I know healthcare is free.”

Corona cleared the anesthetic and stretched her limbs. She was still sore, but she already felt a little better. “Thanks Doc.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Corona decided to walk home rather than teleport. Give her a chance to use her legs in something that wasn’t a life-or-death scenario. She made her way to the front of the palace. This involved passing through the throne room. She could hear voices for a while before she actually arrived – one was Toph, the other a nasally voice she didn’t recognize.

“…and then I said, what about the grub sauce?”

Toph laughed. “You’re vicious.”

“Certain events may have been slightly exaggerated.”

“Slightly? There’s no way the solution was a potato.”

“It was though! Think ab- hold on, someone’s coming.”

Corona walked into the throne room. “Oh, don’t stop on my account, just passing through.”

Toph nudged the troll standing next to her. “I knew she was coming, Terezi.”

Corona examined the troll – one of the few living ones, teal-blood, one of Vriska’s friends if Corona remembered correctly. The blind one who wore the pointy red glasses. Corona decided they weren’t as cool as hers. Then she inwardly chided herself for thinking something so petty.

“Well I didn’t until I smelled her coming down the hallway!”

Toph shrugged. “Corona, this is Terezi. She’s my new legal advisor.”

“Legislacerator,” Terezi corrected.

“The lacerations are few and far between,” Toph reminded her.

“But I still get to do them, right? Right?”

Corona blinked. “Toph, why is your legal advisor out for blood?”

“That’s the attitude you need for convictions!” Terezi answered, raising a fist into the air. “Hehehehehehe!”

Corona thought the laugh sounded more than a little evil. “…Yeah, no, shouldn’t you be devoted to justice rather tha-”

“JUSTICE!” Terezi interrupted. “The sweet finalization of a criminal’s fate! Brought low by the power of the legal system, shown the error of their ways! Given what they deserve-!”

“You seem a little too zealous about this.”

“What? Me?” Terezi pointed at her face, mockingly. “Zealous? Never. It’s not like I spent every waking minute of my young life studying the laws of Alternia! Psh, that’s for crazy trolls.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Cut the sarcasm.”

“Oooooh! Someone’s touchy~!” Terezi trilled.

“I just had my wing regrown so, yeah, maybe I’m little touchy!” Corona blurted.

Toph spoke up. “Bad day?”

“Bad week.”

“You look fine to me,” Terezi said.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Corona muttered, pointing at her with an accusatory finger.

“Hey. Hey. Hey firegirl. I’m blind. What looks!?” Her toothy grin widened and she threw her arms wide, clicking her heels on the ground.

Corona lowered her finger. “You’ve got to be able to know where you are somehow.”

“Smell.”

“You’re messing with me,” Corona said.

“She’s actually not, for once,” Toph commented. “All Terezis go by smell. Or taste.”

“I could lick your face to get a better mental image of it!” Terezi chirped. “You know you want to!”

“Thanks, except not really,” Corona muttered.

“Hey, you should accept it when a girl offers to lick your face. It’s considered rude in troll culture to refuse.”

“Oh, it is, i-” Corona realized Terezi was laughing again. “You know what, screw it, I’m leaving.” Corona walked toward the front door.

“And Terezi is victorious! The crowd goes wild as the angel walks away in disgrace, unable to match wits with the legislacerator extraordinaire!”

Corona fumed.

“Hehehehehehehehe~!”

The laugh did it. Corona whirled around, twitching. “What is your deal?”

“I’m a troll. It’s in the name. Sorry you didn’t get the memo.”

“That was, I, jus…” Corona lit her horn and teleported away.

Toph sighed. “Terezi…”

“That was a lot easier than expected,” Terezi observed. “Huh. Sweet.”

Toph facepalmed.

~~~

“The history of Equis Winch is simple,” Affix said, ignoring the fact that Trixie couldn’t stop staring at her facial scar. “Discord showed up one day. He ruined everything and killed a lot of ponies. When we killed him, his chaos magic remained, drifting across the land without ever really dissipating. Case in point…” She gestured at a flying pig surrounded by a swarm of flies that were slowly draining it of blood.

“Ech,” Discord said in revulsion, leaning his human form back further than should have been physically possible. “Why are there versions of me that have to be so grotesque?”

“I was very surprised to learn most of you weren’t,” Affix admitted. “Considering how much horror our Discord unleashed on all of us, making sure to scar us for life even in his defeat…” She slapped herself in the face. “Bah, look at me, getting negative-nostalgia. Basically the need-to-know is this: don’t let them know you’re Discord. They will drive you out and it will ruin whatever ‘Friendship Problem’ you have to deal with. They’re also untrusting of strong magic, even if you use it to fix a chaotic problem. And above all else, don’t mention Celestia or Luna, even via swearing. I might do that, but that’s because I don’t care about societal constructs.”

“They’re gone, aren’t they?” Trixie said.

“Turned to stone,” Affix said. “You Merodi tried to bring Cadence back, but when you did she tried to kill everything she touched. Apparently if you aren’t already mad getting turned to stone does things to your head.”

“Or this Discord was just needlessly cruel,” Discord said, sliding in front of Affix.

“Don’t play naive with me, I know what you did on Equis Vitis. You’re certainly no monster but you know how to be needlessly cruel. Right now you’re basically just a prick.”

Trixie laughed. “You can say that again.”

Discord narrowed his eyes at Affix. “I don’t think she likes me, Trixie.”

“Who do-” Trixie caught herself. “Wait, she was serious? …Great Cel-” She put a hoof in front of her face. “I can see this is going to be a great day.”

Affix rolled her eyes. “You two would be so doomed without me. No, Discord, I am not a fan of you or most of your self-absorbed asshole variations. But hey, at least we don’t have to try to kill each other, isn’t that a plus?”

Discord folded his arms and muttered. “In certain circumstances.”

“Certain? Please elaborate, dear draconequus. I’d like to hear this.”

“You’ve done it now,” Trixie muttered.

Discord snapped his fingers and suddenly both Trixie and Affix were standing in a grade school classroom. Discord tapped chalk against the whiteboard. “Let’s see here, you said that not needing to fight to the death is a plus. But what if I was evil? What if you were evil? What if there was some deep, personal conflict that could only be resolved through a duel to the death? Or an ancient temple’s curse wh-”

“I get the damn point,” Affix muttered. “You can think of elaborate exceptions. Can we just move on so I don’t have to see your smug face again, hm?”

“This isn’t my smug face,” Discord said with a smirk. “This is a mask worn to protect the innocent.”

“Hah,” Affix snorted. “You, protecting the innocent? That’s a laugh!”

Discord appeared behind Affix and ran his finger across her face. “My dear Affix, I’ve been a knight in shining armor on ma-”

Affix’s eyes flashed with the light of the Element of Generosity. She summoned a needle of power and drove it into Discord’s arm, forcing him not only to drop his disguise for a moment, but also to lose the fake schoolhouse. “…What?”

“I did mention that we killed Discord, right?” Affix said. “Don’t touch me.”

Discord returned to his false human form, gulping. “Message received…”

“Okaaaaaay,” Trixie said. “I get it, you’re uptight and have a bit of a history with chaos magic. But could you tone it down a bit so we don’t end up in mortal danger because of you, mmkay?”

Affix bristled. “Yes, yes, I see, I see. After all, it’s in my best interests to help my world with a Friendship Problem! Haha.”

Discord sighed. “Can we just go now?”

“Yes, by all means.”

Discord snapped his fingers and they were all suddenly on a ridge made out of lime zest that overlooked a normal desert. They looked down at a town with a few dozen houses built around a central fountain, stretching out in eight directions.

“Well, it’s not an equals sign,” Trixie said. “That’s good news.”

“If everyone’s cutie marks are eight-pointed stars I’m going to turn the place upside down,” Discord muttered.

Affix said nothing.

The three of them walked down a dirt path into town. They did not receive the creepy “WELCOME!” that most Starlight Villages had, but instead got normal, friendly waves from ponies with a seemingly normal variety of cutie marks.

“And the chance at finding the Friendship Problem quickly has just fallen like an anvil,” Trixie muttered. “Everyone’s happy.”

“You simply haven’t looked yet!” Discord pointed out.

“I know how to look! I just don’t like to.”

“What was the Tree thinking sending two egocentric maniacs…?” Affix asked nobody in particular.

“Ahem,” Trixie said. “The correct insult is ‘self-absorbed illusionist.’ Or you could just go with ‘internet celebrity who doesn’t understand the meaning of work’, but that’s a bit rambly and ‘pedestrian’.”

Affix bristled, but she didn’t get to retort because a version of Starlight poked her head out of a nearby house. “Oooh! Visitors!” She ran out of her home, revealing herself to be wearing a flowing black cloak and a witch hat with a gold buckle around the base. “Hi! I’m Starlight, but I bet you already know that~!”

Trixie blinked. “Uh, hi! I’m Trixie.”

“You’re chipper,” Discord observed.

“Oh, I just like ponies!” Starlight said. “And people! People are nice too! And Rarity, nopony could ever mistake you for anyone else beca- oh I’m sorry that was rude of me a-”

“Shush,” Affix said, raising a hoof. “It’s Affix now, since I work for Expeditions.”

“Oh that’s cool! What kind of things do you see!?”

“Stuff you could if you left this town.”

Starlight blinked. “Huh? Oh I don’t live here, I’m a traveling… magician. Always jumping from one town to the next looking for adventure!”

“Oh, I’m a traveling magician too!” Trixie grinned. “The Great and Powerful Trixie! I also do stuff on the Internet, but that’s more of a side thing.”

“She’s not that kind of magician,” Affix muttered. “Nor is she the type she’s trying to make you think she is.”

“W-what?” Starlight said, suddenly nervous. “No, I’m just your regular run of the mill wizard! No secrets here!”

“Look, Starlight,” Affix sighed. “I’ve come to accept that your kind are a fact of life. You don’t have to keep making a fool of yourself.”

Starlight looked at the ground, sagging.

“…What is she?” Trixie asked.

“Chaos mage,” Affix said. “Unicorns figured out how to bend Discord’s remnants rather quickly. She’s probably ‘traveling’ because she gets kicked out of every town she goes to.”

“Shhh-!” Starlight said. “I like this place!”

“Nobody heard us, dear,” Affix assured her. “Your secret’s safe with us assuming tall and ugly here doesn’t blab.”

“I don’t blab!” Discord blurted.

“…Uh, thanks!” Starlight said, looking up at Discord. “I don’t think I caught your name…”

“Dominique,” Discord said, bowing. “But you can just call me Dom. I am a bit of a magician myself, though you’d hardly consider my tricks standard fare.”

“No kidding,” Trixie said under her breath. “Aaaaaanyway, we’re on business here from Equis Vitis. Apparently there’s a Friendship Problem in this town that needs fixing?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to talk to me for that,” Starlight said. “You’d want to talk to Altar! He runs this place. I personally think he’s not all there in the head, but y’know what age does to ponies.”

“Has he taken the serum?” Trixie asked.

“Nope. Says it’s ‘unholy’ and the ‘blight of all that is proper in life’.” Starlight rolled her eyes. “His house is this way, come on.” She led them across town to a house that looked no different to all the others, except perhaps older than average. She knocked, discovering the door was already open. “Uh... Hello? Altar?”

“Bah, come on in!” he called with an old, raspy voice. “It better be good though!”

“Do visitors from Equis Vitis and our Element of Generosity count?”

“…Yes.”

Starlight led them into the living room. Altar sat in a chair, alone, where a tall white hat with ornate golden designs on it drew everyone’s attention to his head. He was a white unicorn who had no visible coloration and wore a cloak that covered most of his body. “Ah, visitors. A-” He stared right at Discord. “Holy end times…”

Affix facehooved. “All right, secret’s out. Altar, listen to me very closely, do not go-”

“A Discord has come to our town!” the stallion shouted in delight, not fear. “EVERYPONY! A DISCORD HAS COME TO OUR TOWN! ALL OUR TROUBLES ARE OVER!”

He ran out of the house, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Affix stared at where he had just been in disbelief. Starlight stared at Discord in disbelief. “A Discord?”

Discord shrugged, dropping the human disguise. “At your service, my witch.”

Starlight’s eyes glistened. “Yes… Wait, hold on a second, why in Tartarus did Altar…?”

“We might be in the middle of a chaos town,” Affix muttered, glancing through the blinds at the people Altar was rallying. “This… could be a problem.”

“I was in a chaos town and didn’t know it!?” Starlight blurted. “How in… Actually, you know what, it is kind of odd the buildings are arranged in the symbol… Huh. Can’t believe I didn’t notice that.”

“If Starlight here is fine, what’s wrong with an entire town?” Trixie asked.

“There’s a difference between a Discord cult and a Discordian mage,” Affix said. “Those like Starlight hate Discord just like the rest of us, but find his magic useful. A cult… Let’s just say they worship destruction.”

“But the ponies here are so nice…” Starlight said. “Hardly seem destructive at all…”

“Which is why I’m confused,” Affix said. “Nothing about this seems right.”

“Perhaps I can be of help?”

The four of them turned around to see the Doctor leaning on his TARDIS, eating, of all things, a carrot.

Discord took the moment to start laughing. “Does anyone else want to show up and throw everything on its head again?”

“Yes,” a powerful voice said. Everyone looked up to see a yellow pegasus hiding in the ceiling. She wore pointed metal boots, had razor metal tips on her wings, and wore a blindfold over her eyes. Given the size of pony eyes, it was easy to tell the blindfold was hiding empty sockets. She drifted to the ground. “Hello.”

“…Flair?” Affix said, blinking. “But y-you’re…”

“Alive,” Flair said. “And pissed off. How could you, Affix? How could you stand to be in the same room as him!?” She shouted, pointing one of her razor-tipped wings at Discord.

“Now now, let’s all calm down,” the Doctor said. “There’s a lot more going on here than a simple misunde-”

“Shut up,” Flair ordered. She Stared at the Doctor, despite not having eyes.

He complied.

Trixie gaped at Flair. “W-what are you?”

“A shattered Element,” was all she had to say.

~~~

Corona managed to take a shower before she started feeling horrible. She’d flown off the handle at Terezi, all because of a simple joke.

Even though I was in a bad mood, it doesn’t matter. That was still wrong.

She sighed. Instead of taking a nap for eternity, she teleported back to the throne room of the castle.

“Hey, Toph,” Corona asked the Queen after checking to make sure she was alone. “Where’s Terezi?”

“She just walked down that hall. Why?”

Corona sighed. “I was short with her. It’s been bugging me.”

Toph smiled. “You’re not as tough as you claim to be.”

“Neither are you.” Corona walked away from Toph and down the palace hall to catch up with Terezi. “Hey!”

“Hey what?” Terezi said, not turning around.

Don’t worry about it, she’s just blind, she doesn’t have to look at you to talk to you. She might not be indicating what you think. Corona teleported in front of her. “Hey, I uh, just wanted to apologize for how I stormed out earlier. I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foo-”

“Wow, you came back to apologize? After storming off like that? Jegus, I thought you had some fire in you, but that’s apparently a lie!”

Corona blinked. “…What?”

“See, look at you groveling. Who grovels to anyone? You, apparently. Did I hurt your feelings?”

“I mean, not really, I just got upset. I wasn’t treating you we-”

“Oh, so it’s me you were worried about? Ha! Spare me your overblown ego. I’m touched, really I am, maybe we should go on a date! Clearly you’ve done half the work already!”

Corona twitched. “…What the heck is your problem?”

“Ooh, swear substitutes. So jarring. Fucking brilliant.”

“A clever person doesn’t need swearing to get their point across.”

“Substituting isn’t clever! It’s just what you say to avoid upsetting your mommy!”

Corona lit her fist on fire, ready to punch Terezi down. Then she realized what she was doing. She let her arm hang limp, shame crossing her features.

“What’s wrong? Can’t punch the blind girl? Ca-”

Corona teleported away.

~~~

Starlight inserted herself between Flair and Affix. “Hey, sorry to insert myself between two giants of recent history like this but can we hold the interpersonal argume-”

Flair slapped Starlight to the side, glaring.

“Hey hey hey, no need to get all upset here, but I was just going to say Altar’s bringing a mob of fanatics back and we might not want to be here in about twenty seconds.”

“I’ve got it!” Discord declared. “Come on Starlight, you get to be my acolyte!”

“Wait wh-”

“Distraction mode: ACTIVATE!”

Trixie held out a hoof. “Discord, no, remember what happened last time y-” He teleported himself and Starlight out into the adoring crowd. “And he’s gone! Absolutely wonderful.”

“It’s better if he’s not here,” Flair said distastefully. “I was this close to gutting him open on the spot.”

“Flair!” Affix gasped. “What happened to you?”

“Sorta died, sorta didn’t, that’s not the point,” Flair spat. “The point is that you being here – all of you being here – is ruining what I’m doing.”

The Doctor took a step forward. “And what exactly is that?”

“This town is a chaos cult. I’m getting rid of it. Or did you think I was just hanging out up there?”

Affix blinked. “You can’t be suggesting you were going to kill him? Flair, it took forever to convince you there was no other option with Discord!”

“And I’ve come to realize that Piè and Areo were right all along.”

Affix looked her up and down, unsure of how to respond.

“Clearly we can’t just let her kill everyone,” Trixie said.

Flair pointed her face right at Trixie, prompting a terrified ‘eep’ to escape the unicorn’s mouth.

Before she could take back what she said, the Doctor placed himself between Flair and Trixie. “She’s right. You don’t solve problems by killing, you just create new ones.”

“It’s usually a pretty final solution,” Flair barked.

“I clearly can’t change your mind of that. But like I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted a ways back, I’ve just come from a few hours in the future. Where there is no planet here. Something reduced it to rubble. The chance isn’t zero that your actions bring that about.”

“But we’re here now,” Trixie pointed out. “Dimensional travel negates time, right?”

“That’d only be true if you arrived after I went back in time. As it is, I arrived after you, so we’re still on the same timeline. The only thing different right now between the timeline where everything explodes and the one we’re currently in is me and the things I’m telling you.”

Flair shook her head. “I… fail?”

“Or caused it,” the Doctor said. “So let’s not be rash.”

“All of you shut up and take a minute to listen to what’s going on outside,” Affix interrupted.

The three of them fell silent and turned their gaze to the window while Flair’s ears rose to full attention, swiveling to maximize her sense of what was happening outside.

Discord and Starlight were talking to the crowd.

“I know, I know you’re all ready to adore me, but I have to make some checks!” Discord said, waving his hand. “You see, I hear stories of a brutal, horrible Discord of this world!”

He must have sent Starlight a message telepathically, because she broke out into a slightly oversized grin. “The marrer of the Elements! The tormentor of the land! The petrifier of celestials! The destroyer of Manehattan!”

“You all know of these feats, yes?” Discord said. The townspeople – Altar included – nodded. “And do you all know for sure I am not that Discord?”

“We are a society devoted to order within chaos,” Altar answered. “Not pure chaos that has no direction. Chaos has a purpose, and all Discords of the multiverse are different aspects of this purpose. We seek not our Discord, but all Discords.”

Discord grinned. “Well aren’t you in luck. I’m the Discord of Equis Vitis! You could consider me one of the ‘baseline’ Discords, if you will.”

The crowd erupted into loud, excited cheering at this revelation from their chaotic serpent.

Starlight blurted out words again. “Let us turn away from the ways of destruction, death, and delirium. There is a chaos fit for all! There is a chaos of enjoyment! The eight directions are all one, in the end!”

“As my acolyte has spoken,” Discord continued, placing a gentle hand on Starlight’s shoulder, “we are here to bring about change, if you are willing to accept it.”

The crowd cheered and threw flowers on top of Discord.

“Great, he’s letting them worship him,” Trixie muttered. “Don’t know what I was expecting.”

The Doctor narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think that’s what he’s doing… You’re here on a Friendship Problem, right?”

Trixie nodded. “Uh, yeah.”

“I think he’s trying to solve it. Using Starlight as a source of knowledge to improve his authority.”

“And trying to save this town is probably what destroys everything!” Flair blurted.

“We can’t know that for sure!” Affix blurted. “All I know is that he has them eating out of his claws and not killing everyone. Keeps me from having to blow everything up, which is… I don’t want to say ‘nice’, but more ‘preferable’.”

“We can’t just let him do what he wants,” Flair declared. “Both of you need to leave.”

Trixie raised an eyebrow. “There has never been a failed Friendship Problem. We aren’t going anywhere. And, for all we know, the problem is actually you and not the town! You seem to have forgotten what Friendship means.”

Flair put one of her wingtips to Trixie’s neck. “For someone so cowardly you spout quite the accusations…”

“She has a point,” Affix said. “I don’t like this Discord, but I understand he’s just a prick, not a monster.”

“Which is why he isn’t already dead,” Flair pointed out.

“Do you really think you could kill a Discord alone!?”

Flair didn’t respond.

“Ponyfeathers,” Trixie muttered. “Discord’s taking them away.”

“Then we’re going to follow them,” Affix asserted

~~~

“I don’t know what it is? Does she just not like me? Does she view me as a threat? Am I taking things too seriously?”

Lady Rarity sighed. She was currently in her bubble bath soaking every sore spot on her body, with only her head above the froth, cucumber slices on her eyes. Corona was sitting on the nearby counter, looking out the bathroom window with a confused expression. “I do think you are taking it too seriously. She’s just living up to the name of her race. A troll, as it were.”

“I didn’t think it was literal.”

“Have you met Vriska?”

Corona let out a sharp laugh. “Yeah, but she’s not this bad. And Aradia’s not like that at all, I don’t get what the deal is. But she is a ‘troll’. I’m ninety percent sure she just wanted to get under my skin. For the life of me I can’t figure out why.”

“Some people just like to do that, dear.”

“And work that closely with Toph?” Corona muttered, leaning into her hands. “I just don’t get it, and that’s supposed to be my thing. I’m supposed to get people, to empathize with them.”

Lady Rarity levitated the cucumbers off her eyes, looking at Corona. “Didn’t you used to be the antagonizing bully?”

“I was angry, spiteful, and lashing out. I don’t see that in her. She seems happy, but then again some people are good at masking what’s really behind their outward appearance…” She narrowed her eyes.

Lady Rarity uncorked the bath.

“What are you doing? I said I wasn’t going to get you out of y-”

“Clearly, you need a friend at your side and a second voice in your head that isn’t just a crystal with about zero social skills. No offense, RS.”

Raging Sights beeped in annoyance.

“Rarity…”

“Oh, it’s fine darling, I’ve been in this bath for several hours already.” She climbed out and dried herself off with a magically-warmed towel, beginning the process of steaming herself dry.

“I mean, thanks, but what are we going to do? Walk up to her and talk to her?”

“Oh, no, we’re going to talk to Toph first,” Lady Rarity said. “She’s clearly been around this Terezi a little more than you or I have. Let’s get some lay of the land, as it were. She must see something in her if she lets her be an advisor.”

“…Maybe I was just jealous that moment when I walked in? Did that set her off?”

Lady Rarity facehoofed. “Corona, stop second guessing yourself. Okay? Let’s wipe the slate clean.”

“Terezi didn’t seem to like that…”

“Armonia’s hair, you’ve really twisted this around in that little mind of yours…” Lady Rarity shook her head. With a quick spell she adjusted her mane back to the way it should be. “I’ll forego the armor today, just a routine visit. Teleport away.”

Corona did. They appeared in the throne room at Toph’s side. She appeared to be wrapping up a conversation with… no-one.

Corona blinked.

“Protomolecule,” Toph said. “Can’t see him. Sure can hear him though. Give me a minute. …Yes, I know you want to introduce your globes to Lai, but the people aren’t going to accept that. Besides the Gems, we are the most uptight of the founding worlds. I’m sorry. …Thank you for understanding.” She leaned back in her throne. “All right, he’s gone.”

“So weird…” Lady Rarity commented.

“Yep. So, friend-os, what’s up?”

“…Are you trying to sound cool?” Corona asked.

“Just answer the question.”

Lady Rarity spoke up. “Corona here has developed a mild complex concerning your newest legal advisor, one ‘Terezi’.”

“Oh. Her. She really got under your skin that bad?”

Corona scratched the back of her head. “Well…”

“Yes. Yes she did,” Lady Rarity answered. “I got my bath interrupted to be a counselor. We’re here to find out what you think about her.”

Toph nodded. “She was overqualified for the position, and I needed a new one since I found out Lancer was beyond corrupt. She came highly recommended from Earth C having studied troll, human, and carapacian law while also writing everything for the consort government. So that’s why I hired her. Kept her around because I found her observations amusing.”

“And her antagonism?”

“I think she just likes messing with people,” Toph said, putting her hands behind her head. “She does it to everyone she meets. Even me, at first. But since I was able to handle it, I think I gained her respect.”

“So basically it’s hopeless,” Corona said, sighing. “I failed her little test, now we’re doomed to be on the wrong foot?”

“I wouldn’t say so,” Toph said. “I think she just views you as easy pickings right now. It’ll pass.”

Lady Rarity furrowed her brow. “Corona went to apologize and make up for getting angry.”

“Didn’t go well?”

“No,” Corona said. “She basically said it was a sign of weakness and childish.”

Toph paused. “Huh. That’s… a little strong.”

“A little!? I went out of my way to patch things up and I basically got shot for it!”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Toph admitted. “I don’t really know her that well, evidently. You’d have to talk to Vriska.”

“Why?”

“They were best friends at one point, or so Terezi told me.”

“Next stop: Earth C,” Lady Rarity declared. “Thanks Toph.”

“Anytime.”

~~~

Trixie, Flair, Affix, and the Doctor poked their heads around a corner in the village. They saw Discord moving with the mob of adoring ponies through town.

“Lesson three!” Discord began.

“Heed the words of the chaos incarnate!” Starlight blurted.

Discord looked at her in annoyance. She was overselling it a little. “Chaos is meant to bring about fun and enjoyment.” He summoned a dancing cricket set in a conga line with seventeen other bugs of differing species. “Pure chaos with no thought, no form, is just boring. That, my friends, is a little concept called entropy. Dreadful, really. Entire universes die because the matter decides it can’t get along anymore and poof, nothing. This ‘chaos’ leads to nothing, one of the least chaotic things in existence.”

Altar nodded. “Wise words.”

“Ah, but there’s more, my ritualistic friend! See, chaos with a bit of imagination can branch to several things. There’s the chaos of collapse, for instance.” He created another house in an empty part of town between two lines of buildings, and brought it down. “Societies, tribes, that waffle house down the block that you love so much, all these things are destroyed by this chaos. That doesn’t seem right does it?”

The various ponies all shook their heads.

“But perhaps the chaos of war is the answer! Strife! Build up war machines and throw everyone against each other!” He snapped his fingers, creating two squads of red and blue clay people. They smashed into each other, creating purple sludge. “But you can’t keep that going forever. Eventually something has to give, leaving us with poor boring entropy again.” He shook his head. “Oh woe is us, for we cannot find the answer!”

“What was our Discord doing?” a mare asked.

“A variety of war,” Discord answered. “Only he thought ‘I can fight a war all by myself against existence for eternity’! Quite dull for a version of me, I must say.”

“But he didn’t know that no war could last forever,” Starlight interjected. “His plans did not truly serve chaos! He brought down dozens of waffle houses when he leveled the Northern Wastes. He turned the Griffons and Dragons against each other, turning them to the purple sludge!”

“And what of you?” Altar asked. “What do you call your chaos?”

“The chaos of delight!” Discord said, spreading his arms wide. He snapped with one hand, creating a white and orange shape with a flower growing out of it. “See that? That is random chaos. Vaguely interesting to look at but ultimately pointless and boring. On the other hand…” He snapped with his other hand, crating a pink rabbit that yodeled, every word he spoke creating a bubble of a different color around him. He proceeded to explode into a shower of candies of many exotic flavors, most of which couldn’t be said to ‘exist’ in the traditional sense.

The ponies scrambled for them.

“Huh,” Starlight said under her breath. “Nice to know my magic doesn’t have to look absolutely terrifying.”

Discord snaked behind her. “You just have to add some creativity. Pointless cruelty is a rather boring endeavor.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” a stallion said, looking at the candy in his hooves. “I heard our Discord used monsters made of candies to lure ponies into his traps. That certainly seems creative to me!”

Discord glared at him. “What are you suggesting?”

The stallion shifted uncomfortably. “What if he was creative?”

“If he did find a way to perpetuate the cruelty through creativity, it would have robbed him of something else. What would your fellow ponies think of you if you started laying traps for their kids?”

The stallion nodded. “I see.”

“Wise words,” Altar said. “In the end, even chaos respects the community.”

“Ring a ding!” Discord said, creating a large bell behind Altar to punctuate his thought. “You get a cookie.” He created a pony-sized cookie and gave it to Altar.

From her observation point, Trixie gawked. “I can’t believe it. He actually learned his lesson last time. He’s teaching them.”

“He’s still pretending to be worthy of their praise,” the Doctor muttered.

“Oh, that’s because he believes he is.” Trixie rolled her eyes. “Seems to be working like a charm on them.” Trixie smirked. “He’s learned a lot from our little shows, too.”

Affix raised an eyebrow. “How is stage magic helpful here?”

“Misdirection,” Trixie said. “There’s also a lot of pretending you know what you’re talking about, or saying things with absolute certainty even if you’re unsure. He’s leading Starlight along really well for a clueless audience assistant. She provides context for his teachings so they’ll sink in better…”

“He is smarter than I gave him credit for,” Affix admitted.

“Yeah, the art of misdirection is one you don’t see unless you’re looking… for… it…” Trixie blinked.

It looked like everyone was following Discord through the town. Discord himself probably thought so. But Trixie saw Altar moving himself to the front of the crowd, gesturing with his staff and hooves in subliminal ways to draw attention. They were heading for a house at the edge of town, she deduced.

She narrowed her eyes. “Altar’s up to something.”

The Doctor turned to her. “…Misdirection?”

“Really good too,” Trixie said. “Makes me jealous. Leading an entire crowd of people along and they don’t even realize it.”

“Where are they headed?” Flair asked.

“Th-” Trixie stopped herself. “You’re just going to do something angry, aren’t you?”

Flair put a wing blade to Trixie’s neck. “Where are they going?”

“Flair, she has a-” Affix got another wing blade placed to her throat for her trouble.

Trixie laughed nervously. “O-okay! Okay! They’re going to that green house over there!”

Flair nodded, taking off to investigate. The crowd didn’t notice her move.

“Trixie…” the Doctor said.

“That was a lie,” Trixie said smirking. “You forget Trixie knows a thing or two about performing. Now, the moment she realizes they aren’t going to that house – no idea how long that’ll take since she’s blind – she’s going to be out for blood. Let’s hurry to the place they’re actually going.”

“I’ll watch them,” Affix said. “…Distract Flair if I see her about to do something crazy.”

The Doctor nodded. He and Trixie walked along the other side of the houses so the crowd wouldn’t see them, arriving at the last house quickly. Trixie lit her horn. “Right, so, I’ve never been good at sensing…”

“Tremendous magical presence in the basement,” the Doctor said, looking at his sonic screwdriver. “Hidden behind a scrying field. Curious. Can’t beat the Time Lords when they want to find something, unfortunately for mister Altar.”

Trixie unlocked the front door with her magic. There was nopony inside. They quickly moved to the basement.

The basement was stone, mostly square in shape, and held only one thing – a box at the far corner, stained red. A design was painted into the floor with blood: eight arrows coming out of a single point; four pointing at the corners, four at the edges of the walls. More intricate rings spiraled out from these eight points, and black charcoal was smeared in the center.

The Doctor put his hand behind his head. “This is quite the ritual here…”

“I have no idea what it does,” Trixie said.

“Same.”

“Let’s ruin it.” Trixie reached into her pouch and took out some bombs she had stolen from Affix earlier. She told herself Affix wouldn’t mind at the time. Now she was sure Affix wouldn’t mind.

She threw the bomb. A black claw shot out from the center of the design, grabbing the bomb and disintegrating it.

Then it went for the two of them.

Trixie and the Doctor bolted up the stairs, only to find Altar standing there.

“Now now, my master, no need to kill them… They may prove useful.”

The black claw closed around the Doctor – but didn’t crush him. A second claw grabbed Trixie, treating her with a strange gentleness.

The top of the crate popped open, revealing the corpses of three ponies – an earth pony, a pegasus, and a unicorn. All of their blood had been completely drained. The Doctor and Trixie were thrown in with them.

As an afterthought, the claw took the sonic screwdriver as well.

Trixie managed not to scream at being so close to pony corpses. She just inwardly whined.

“Not much longer now, my master…” Altar breathed.

~~~

Vriska answered her front door, a grumpy expression on her face. “I told you telemarketers to stop coming to th- oh. Corona?”

Corona nodded. “Yeah. It’s me.” Lady Rarity waved from behind her. “So, I’ve come to ask you about Terezi.”

“She trolling you?” Vriska asked, drinking her evening coffee.

“Yeah.”

Vriska sighed. “That was always her thing. She was the only one of us who really got under the humans’ skin. She made it look easy. Karkat and I had our moments, but she was able to mess with everyone. And she’d tell them she was doing it!”

“…So it really is just her being abrasive?”

“Hey, you haven’t explained jack shit yet,” Vriska said. “It’s just when I hear the words ‘I’ve come to ask about Terezi’ there are a few conclusions I jump to.” She looked down at her cup, a sour expression crossing her face. “I expect this is probably going to culminate in me and Aradia having a ‘talk’ with her.”

“Do you know why she’s that way?” Corona asked.

Vriska leaned against her doorway. “What way?”

Lady Rarity cleared her throat. “Antagonistic, sadistic, petty, etcetera?”

“Sadism is pretty much ingrained into Alternian culture,” Vriska said. “Me more than others, but she and I were a duo. I fed trolls to a giant spider. She dreamed of one day hanging criminals by the thousand.”

“Yeesh,” Lady Rarity said.

“Oh yeah, Alternia was messed up. Did I ever tell you of the eldritch abomination Feferi had as a guardian? So terrifying not even big bad Condesce would dare to touch it.”

“So she’s just that way because her culture made her that way?” Corona asked.

“I mean…” Vriska furrowed her brow. “You know what, just show me.”

“Huh?”

“Put your freaky emotion-hand to my head and show me. I’ll let you in.”

Corona nodded, dissipating one of her gloves. She placed her fingers to Vriska’s head, thinking deeply about her recent experiences with Terezi.

In return, she got Vriska’s thoughts of Terezi when they were younger.

An image of Terezi and Vriska laughing over Aradia and a bronze-blood troll – Tavros, if Corona remembered correctly.

An image of Terezi and Vriska having great fun crafting roleplaying adventures.

An image of Vriska’s eye getting blown up and Terezi’s eyes being scorched by Alternia’s sun, both results of the others’ attacks on each other.

Images of them fighting, warring – culminating in an image of Terezi stabbing Vriska through the chest for Justice.

…Stabbing Omega Vriska through the chest. The real Terezi went on to plan the final battle with Vriska. But they fought separately.

Vriska pulled back. “Holy fuck, she’s not acting normal.”

“Wait, what?” Corona blinked. “I thought-”

“The initial meeting was her being herself,” Vriska said, stepping out of her home and locking the door. “That thing where you went back to make up? She knows about how humans work. She should anyway.” She snapped her fingers. “Let’s roll, she needs a good talking to.”

Lady Rarity blinked. She opened a portal to Lai and the three of them stepped through.

“Get on with the teleporty,” Vriska muttered. Corona obliged, and they were in the throne room again. Toph and Terezi were talking.

“And then I sai-” Terezi smelled their presence. “Fuck.”

“Fuck indeed,” Vriska said.

Terezi whirled to face them and clicked her heels – even though she didn’t actually look at any of them. “Did the Light players come to congregate? Oh wait, you’re not Light. You’re Doom trying to be Light!”

“Terezi, shut the fuck up,” Vriska said, folding her arms. “Humans can’t do kismesis. It doesn’t work.”

“…She was hitting on me?!” Corona blurted.

“Yeah. Pretty badly too,” Vriska said, putting a hand to her forehead.

Terezi glared at Vriska. “Vriska! Come on, you’ve ruined i-”

“Humans can’t do it,” Vriska said. “They can’t experience quite the same emotion. They can have hate, yes, but not a hate so strong and intricate that it could serve as a completion. I’ve been out here a long time, Terezi. I’ve just had to live with not having one. Which is completely fine since kismesis is overrated.”

“Oh, and you’d know, because you’ve actually had one, right? Oh wait, nope. Such an expert.”

Vriska folded her arms. “Lemme guess. You’ve seen what Omega Terezi had.”

“Seer of Mind, duh, course I did! I never got to experience that!”

“I saved you a lot of heartache by stopping that!”

“There was a lot more to it than the end result!”

“Ungrateful bitch!”

“Oh, and have we all forgotten how I basically erased myself to make you live?”

“You aren’t Omega Terezi! You’re Terezi. Stop mixing up your memories!”

Terezi frowned. “I can do what I want.”

Vriska opened her mouth to argue – then she sighed. “Loo-”

“Look at the Thief of Light, the spiderbitch, brought so low,” Terezi said. “At least when you were fucking horrible you had a spine.”

Vriska let a sad smile come to her face. “That’s a handy defense mechanism you got there.”

“It’s not a-”

“Shout insults at people until they leave you alone so they won’t expose your weaknesses. A pretty good one. Totally not worth it.”

“Why do you have to be so gogdammed mature now!?”

“Because someone has to be,” Vriska said. “Terezi… Do you have anyone?”

Terezi shuffled her feet, quietly.

“Cadence can help you with a matesprit. Eve for a moirail. Hell, I could even introduce you to some people.”

“Would people stop fucking offering to help!?”

Corona looked at Terezi with sad eyes. “…That’s what friends are supposed to do, Terezi. Help.”

Terezi pointed a trembling finger at Vriska – then dropped it. “Fine, fine, fine, fine, FINE! You’re right! Happy?”

“More than I should be,” Vriska said, walking up to her friend. Then she pulled her into a hug.

“AKPTH!”

“Stop whining and accept the display of affection, dweeb.”

Terezi stopped struggling and just sighed.

“I’ll be taking her now,” Vriska said, turning to the rest of them. “Dunno how long this is gonna take, but I think all the trolls need to have a serious ‘culture’ get-together. Talk some things out so we don’t fuck up like this.”

Toph nodded. “Do what you need.”

Vriska took out her dimensional device and the two of them were gone.

“…Right,” Corona said. “Still not sure how I feel about this whole thing.”

Lady Rarity shrugged. “You should probably feel flattered, I’m guessing.”

“Now I’m bothered in a whole new way.”

“Are you going to feel guilty and lose sleep over it?”

“…Well, not guilty…”

“Then my work here is done. There is a sequel to a bubble bath I need to experience.” She skittered away.

Corona put a hand to her forehead. “Just when I think I’ve got people figured out…”

Toph shrugged, having nothing to say.

“…I’m going to try to get that relaxing in now.”

“Seems like a good idea.”

~~~

Altar smiled. “Ah, it appears we have made our way to one of our abandoned homes…”

The townspeople looked sad and depressed.

Discord blinked. “Wh-”

Starlight talked over him. “The disappearances of your three very close neighbors is certainly a tragedy.”

Discord nodded sadly. “Not the work of creative chaos. Just pained disorder.”

“Perhaps you can do something about that?” Altar asked. “Return our ponies to us?”

“Hrm…” Discord furrowed his brow. “I’d have to have a connection to them. But they were already gone when I arrived.”

“Certainly you can garner a connection from the house one of our ponies lived in?”

Discord glanced at Starlight. Can you get me a connection?

Yep. Don’t worry.

Discord grinned. “Do we have permission to enter?”

Altar bowed his head. “All do.”

They filed into the house, Discord, Starlight, and Altar at the center. Starlight got the connection quickly.

“Return to us our lost brother,” Altar said, bowing his head to the ground. “Please, your discordance.”

Discord prepared to snap his fingers – but then his phone rang. He sighed. “Ugh, what horrible timing, who in the worl-

DO NOT USE YOUR MAGIC
-TRIXIE

Discord raised an eyebrow. “Altar, I don’t think you’re being completely honest with me. In fact…” He felt the connection he got from Starlight. “The connection I’ve received leads to this basement. Where I can sense a whole slew of disgust-”

He was interrupted. Dark shadows spiked out of the ground, making the floor cave in, revealing the basement and the markings below. The two largest of the spires had bodies skewered on them. One held the Doctor.

The other held Trixie, pierced through the stomach. The light in her horn died out and her phone fell to the ground.

Discord didn’t think – he just acted. He snapped his fingers, bringing the Doctor and Trixie back to full health and teleporting them off the spires of darkness. But this was exactly what the darkness wanted.

All it took was a discharge of chaotic energy that the darkness could use. Discord felt like a siphon was jammed into his essence, draining him of his power. He shook, falling to the basement below with a horrified expression.

Altar laughed. “Behold! Our master rises once again, here to dispel the false reflection of this imposter with righteous power!”

The darkness in the center of the circle began to form a head. It looked like Discord’s, except mostly black with red highlights. “You are a disgrace to this image.”

Discord laughed through his pain. “Red and black? What are you, Darcord? Seriously, lose the edge a bi-” the pain of ‘Darcord’s’ siphon was too much for him to keep talking. “Yeeesh…”

“I am whatever you want to call me,” Darcord said. “I am essentially a better you. And I will return!”

“HOW ABOUT NO!?” Affix said, glowing with the power of Generosity. She threw a half-dozen bombs down the hole at the shadowy form.

“Your bombs did not affect me then, they will not affect me now!”

“Smokescreen,” Affix declared, rushing through the smoke. Her needles of pure Generosity pierced the dark being’s intangible nature.

Discord may not have been able to use his chaos magic without feeding Darcord more, but he could still move. He thrust himself to Darcord, wrapping around the shadowy head like a snake. His physical form held enough chaotic energy to deter the shadow.

Affix grinned. “Nice.” She created thousands of more needles. “I bet you missed this, didn’t you!?”

Darcord pushed out with chaotic energy from the side. Affix was caught unaware, the power driving through her brain.

She realized as she dropped that she’d been fighting him wrong – she didn’t have her friends to defend her. The needles of Generosity were always best at long range and as a backup attack…

Discord took one look at her. Then he sighed, snapping his fingers. Her wound was healed, but she did not regain consciousness.

Darcord gained a torso from the discharge. “AHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Your sentimentality is not your strength, it is your downfall! Now I rise! Stronger than ever!”

Flair flew out of nowhere, brimming with light – light that was supposed to be Kindness. But it was wrong. It sparked unnaturally, giving her body spasms and driving pain into her body.

She didn’t care. It still worked well enough. One hit and everything would be over, just as it had been last time. Her only regret was that she wouldn’t get to see the look on his face this time.

She passed right through him, harmlessly.

“W-what?”

Darcord laughed. “Foolish Fluttershy. A corrupted Element cannot harm me.”

She looked around – and noticed Discord writhing in pain. “It’ll kill him.”

Darcord’s grin vanished.

She leaped for Discord.

“STOP!” Trixie shouted. “DON’T DO IT! HE SAVED US! HE SAVED AFFIX!”

Flair stopped just short of driving every sharp tip on her wings into Discord. “He…”

“WEAK SENTIMENTALITY!” Darcord shouted, rushing Flair with his spires of shadow. She lifted a wing, her corrupted light still managing to deflect his darkness.

“GO FOR ALTAR!” Trixie shouted. “HE’S THE ONE WHO’S MANAGING THIS RITUAL!”

Flair growled. “You can’t know that for sure!”

Starlight didn’t care about that. She fired a laser at Altar – only for Darcord to go out of his way to deflect it. She was sent flying by her own attack through the only remaining window in the house.

“THAT PROOF ENOUGH!?” Trixie shouted.

Flair raised her wing.

Killing Discord or Altar would end this madness. Discord was right here, and he wasn’t fighting. Altar was up there, which would give Darcord a chance to attack and give Altar a chance to defend.

And Discord was Discord. He was everything she stood against. Everything she hunted.

But she owed him.

“Screw it,” Flair blurted, taking off into the air. Darcord fired shadows at her, but her light defended her.

“KILL HER!” Darcord ordered. “THOSE OF YOU WHO CALL YOURSELVES MY SERVANTS, KILL HER!”

“DON’T LISTEN TO HIM!” Starlight shouted, having barely managed to stand back up. “HE WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING!”

Only Altar acted in accordance with Darcord’s wishes, firing magic lasers at Flair.

She just took them. She was made of stern stuff, and the light of Kindness began to stabilize around her. Definitely not enough to take out Darcord… but enough for her to act.

“The Kindest form of violence is an instant, painless death,” Flair said.

It was a line Darcord remembered from just before he had died last time.

“FLUTTERS-”

There were no wounds on Altar. One moment he was alive, and the next he was dead. It was as if Flair’s blades had cut clean through him without breaking the skin. He fell to the ground.

Darcord’s shadowy form dissipated unceremoniously.

“Oh thank Celestia, we’re alive!” Trixie shouted.

She heard shocked gasps from the crowd.

“SCREW YOU! TRIXIE SAVED ALL YOUR PLOTS! SHE HAS THE RIGHT TO WALK OVER A SOCIAL TABOO OUT OF ELATION!”

Affix groaned groggily. “Stop yelling… It’s unbecoming.”

Discord flopped onto his back. “I feel like a raisin…”

Flair landed next to him. “I’ll consider that enough punishment for you being an asshole.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Starlight coughed. “Behold, the victori-”

“Stop it,” Discord told Starlight. “They won’t be going for that anymore.” He pulled himself out of the hole in the ground so he could see them all. “You see it now, don’t you? That we Discords aren’t really anything special?”

Trixie and Affix gasped.

Flair, for the first time since she arrived, smiled.

Discord continued. “So, now that we’ve gotten that made painfully obvious, how about you, I don’t know, stop being a cult? Hmm? Either find something worthy of your worship or just live like most ponies!”

“…Is all you said about creative chaos a lie then?” a mare asked.

Discord shook his head. “Of course not. I was teaching you, after all. I was just teaching you how I live my life. Which, by the way, is pretty amazing.”

“I can attest!” Trixie said. “Never a dull moment with this nimrod.”

“Then stay,” the mare said, bowing her head. “Stay and teach us, not as an object of worship, but as one who understands.”

Discord shook his head. “Tempting offer, but I’ll pass. Buuuuuut, there is someone who might be able to help you!” He grabbed Starlight and set her down in front of them. “Behold, Starlight! Master of the right chaos!”

“Discord what a-”

Discord snapped his fingers. He gave most of the power he had remaining in himself to Starlight. This prompted her to grow a second horn, sprout mismatched bat and eagle wings, get claws on her front hooves, and shift her eye colors to yellow and red. “What th-”

“It’s only fitting if the leader of chaos had herself thrown into the position chaotically.” Discord chuckled. “Don’t you all agree?”

The townsponies looked at each other, shrugged, and nodded.

“Good.”

It was then that Trixie and Discord started glowing. The Tree of Harmony told them they were done.

“Ha! It was the cult!” Discord said. “I knew it.”

“You still helped us,” Affix said, clinging onto Flair for support. “Thank you.”

“It’s what we do,” Trixie said. “But now our work here is done! WE MUST GO!” Trixie threw a smoke bomb on the ground, perfect timing for a dramatic exit.

They were still there when the smoke cleared.

“You’re supposed to teleport us away,” Trixie hissed.

Discord shrugged. “I’m basically out of magic right now. It’ll be a long while before I’m back to full again.”

Trixie sighed. She glanced outside at the setting sun. “You all wouldn’t happen to have a hotel, would you?”

“Where did you think I was staying?” Starlight asked. “Of course they have a hotel!”

“Ah. Right. Well then, lead the way!”

Everyone cleared out the wreckage of the ritual house.

The Doctor remained, alone.

“…Did I actually do anything?” he asked aloud.

The empty ruins gave no response.

Author's Note

LAST DAY TO SUBMIT STUFF TO CHAPTER 100 SUGGESTIONS

Also for those who care about Homsetuck, I wrote a little story involving the Epilogues in the Enchorus anthology: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/437182/13/enchorus/neither-meat-nor-candy-gmblackjack. So if you want to know what happens to most of your HS favorites...

-GM, master of reddit rice.

097 - The Handmaiden's Aliens

“HONK!”

The purple-blooded Skaian troll with long, wavy horns roared. He wore the purple robes of the Bard of Rage, which seemed ridiculous and distracting at first with its oversized spotted hat and codpiece, but had quickly cemented itself into the minds of the primary team as Bad News™.

They were having a rather difficult time taking down this particular troll.

He grabbed Pinkie Pie as she appeared behind him, throwing her forward and kicking her in the stomach. He roared in unbridled Rage. “You motherfuckers think you can pull that shit on me?”

“I’ve drained his luck!” Vriska said, shrugging. “No idea how he’s still alive. Or, well, dead-alive, but you get the picture.”

“You… MOTHERFUCKING… arrogant bitch… THINK YOU CAN REMOVE THE CHUCKLEVOODOOS!?” He charged at her. She swung her sword, but he caught it between his hands and snapped it in half. He then drove his hand into her stomach, drawing blood.

Vriska took it, grinning. “Never really understood the chucklevoodoos, so I can’t really have a thought about them, sorry Gamzee.” She used her free hand to throw her dice down behind him. Several tentacles shot out of the ground, wrapping around his limbs.

Gamzee fell back, screaming. With one flex of his muscles, he was free.

And then he’d been punched half a meter into the ground by Star Platinum’s time stop. Being a ghost, not to mention a highblood troll, he managed to pull himself up. “Honk…”

“Honk,” Flutterfree said, shooting him in the nose with an arrow of light.

“You… MOTHERFUCKING….” He tapped into his chucklevoodoos, sending out horrific imagery into nearby minds.

Flutterfree looked at the monstrous clown creatures ready to tear her mind apart and replace it with insane sludge. With a twitch, she summoned Lolo, banishing them. She shot Gamzee three more times, the arrows lodging in his ghost body. He found his arm affixed to his chest by one of them, discovering that even his strength wasn’t enough to break the holy arrow.

Despite the pain, he moved forward. To remedy this, Flutterfree shot him in the ankles, pinning them to the ground, and then to each other. The ominous nature of his walk vanished the moment he was hopping toward her, dragging clods of dream-earth behind him.

“HONK!”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. She just kept shooting until he couldn’t move.

“Finally!” Nova blurted, activating her spell. With Gamzee immobile, he couldn’t do anything against the Skaian imprisonment spell. A blue shell appeared around his body, drowning out his enraged honks. He was frozen.

Nova slapped a bracelet around his wrist. “And good.”

Flutterfree lowered the bow of light. “He seemed… upset.”

“Course he was,” Vriska said. “Highblood and the Bard of Rage. Of course he’s going to be a little violent and upset. Not to mention the fact that this is the only Gamzee who’s ever died. Cut in half by Omega Kanaya with a chainsaw in the moment just about everyone died.” She shook her head. “Can’t believe Karkat asked for a capture, if anyone ever deserved to perma-die it’s this bastard.”

“Not exactly arguing here,” Nova admitted. “That was a pretty intense murderous face. Yeesh.”

Vriska kicked the immobile Gamzee over. “Welp, Earth C it is.” She pulled out her dimensional device…

…And then a muscular humanoid tiger fell out of Skaia’s Dream’s ‘sky’. “Ow," she said, standing up quickly. “RATH WILL NOT STAND FOR FALLING!”

“Uh…” Flutterfree blinked as the new arrival climbed out of a tiger-shaped impact crater.

“Oh, right!” ‘Rath’ hit her head with her fist. “YOU GUYS! I was looking for you. I need… HELP! Right, yes, help! …Help.” She mulled the word over in her mouth, deciding it was disgusting. “Geh…”

Pinkie grinned. “What can we help you with?”

“I NEED TO STOP CHANGING!” she shouted, raising a fist. “HELP ME STOP CHANGING!”

“Changing from what into what and how?” Vriska asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Uh… Uh…” ‘Rath’ grabbed her head. “WHY IS RATH NOT SMART ENOUGH. Need to… Uh…” She pointed at a green hourglass symbol on her chest. “THIS! This thing!”

“An Omnitrix…” Nova blinked. “…Wait, hold on, Aradia? Is that you?”

“YES! RATH IS ARADIA!” Aradia clapped her hands. “And RATH is STUCK CHANGING.”

“Define changing,” Jotaro said.

“WELL, it’s like… Uh… The watch keeps switch-”

A green light enveloped Aradia and changed her form, replacing the muscular tiger with a small, gray being with two big eyes. Overall she was the size of a human hand. “Oh, this might be useful.” She reached onto her back to touch the Omnitrix’s new location. “Maybe I can figure out why it’s on the fritz now… …Why does it have to be on the back in this form?”

Vriska smirked. “You’re so tiny!”

“Yeah yeah, blah blah, just help me.”

“So you were dumb and angry a minute ago and now you’re smart and arrogant,” Vriska smirked. “I like what’s happening.”

“I can’t travel through time like this!” Aradia blurted. “I’m just a gray thing with a big brain! I can’t be the Handmaid!”

Pinkie smirked. “Don’t fret your tiny big head. We’ll help! What can we do?”

“Need to find a version of Azmuth, the creator of the Omnitrix. Chances are we’ve found a universe based on the ‘Ben 10’ source material, right?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Nova said.

“Well, had I been able to think of that a few minutes ago, I would have just gone to Renee. But I was in punching mode. You understand.”

“Yep,” Vriska said. “I’m still not going to let you forget the day you decided to name yourself Rath.”

“Can we just get to solving my problem? Maybe?”

“Think she’ll change into something more agreeable next?” Nova asked Pinkie.

Pinkie shrugged.

~~~

Renee stared at Aradia, ignoring the primary team standing around her.

Aradia was currently an amorphous green blob suspended in midair by a tiny mechanical device that looked like a UFO.

“Yeah. I’m goopy. Fun, right?”

“Maybe…?” Renee said, furrowing her brow. “So… I take it you’re stuck like this?”

“She actually keeps changing every couple of minutes,” Pinkie said. “She was a tiger, then a gray genius, then something that stank really bad, and now this.”

Aradia shifted again, into a thin blue humanoid creature with lots of black points. “Oh boy, the fast one. If I talk a mileaminuteatanypointpleaseforgivemeIdon’tusethisonethatmuchandI’mdoingitrightnowaren’tI?”

Renee turned to Pinkie. Pinkie grinned. “The answer is yes.”

“Darnit,” Aradia muttered.

“Regardless, how can we help?” Renee asked.

“Finding an Azmuth is the best option. Someone who created an Omnitrix.”

Renee pulled up the database. “We have no Azmuths on file, though the system does recognize a possible source material. ‘Ben 10’?”

“Yes,” Aradia said. “That’s it. Do we have anyuniversesinthatcontinuity?”

Renee stared at her.

“Any universes in that continuity?” Pinkie translated.

“Thanks,” Aradia said, putting a hand to her face.

Renee lit her horn and did a search. “We’ve got none officially recorded, unfortunately. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one, it just means nobody’s bothered to notice the fiction-reality connection if we do have one. Since Azmuth didn’t turn anything up, are there any other keywords or people?”

Aradia spat out a string of words even faster than she had before, and then sighed. She gestured to Pinkie.

Pinkie giggled. “Ben Tennyson would be known in virtually any version. Max Tennyson, maybe. The rest of the things she said were just her listing off random names that came to mind.”

“No results and no results, sorry. I’ve sent automatic requests to the TSAB, Void, and Collection for more information, but I wouldn’t expect responses for a few days at least on something so ‘mundane’ as a database search.” Renee scrolled through the files some more. “I did notice a note at the end of the ‘Ben 10’ file. Looks like it’s thought to be the source material of the Celestialsapiens. Or, at least, a work that actually has them in it. It could mean it’s one of their universes.”

“Great!” Aradia said. “We just go look around Celestialsapien space!”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Why not have our scientists look at the Omnitrix. I’m sure we could fix it, with time.”

“Yeah, well, if that was all it needed the future versions of me wouldn’t be avoiding me,” Aradia said, folding her arms. “They’d love to accelerate this process if it was mundane.”

Renee nodded slowly. “Well, I suppose you know what’s best for you. Pinkie, do you want to guide her through Celestialsapien space until you find something?”

“Sure do!” Pinkie said, grinning. “She does so much for us we regularly have no idea about. It’s time to help her!”

“I’ll give you a Skiff,” Renee said. “Pidge should have just upgraded 7-4-E, so grab that one if you can. Enjoy your trip. Don’t anger the Class 1, mkay?”

“Don’t plan on it!”

~~~

Some of Aradia’s forms were very, very large. So large they wouldn’t fit in the Skiff. So instead of letting her occupy the sixth seat in the Skiff, she was dragged along behind in a magic bubble of variable size that Nova had conjured just for the occasion. She was currently a large, dull-orange dinosaur creature. She was grumbling to herself.

“I think Aradia’s nutting up,” Nova observed.

“She’s made of stronger stuff than that,” Vriska said. “She can handle dozens of paradoxes at once.”

“But she can’t right now,” Flutterfree reminded her. “I think that’s what’s really getting to her. Not only can she not move through time like a boat on the water, but she also can’t keep her own thoughts straight. Her brain keeps changing. …She feels like she’s losing her sense of self.”

Vriska blinked. “…Yeesh. Didn’t think of it that way.”

Flutterfree nodded. “We’re so used to thinking of certain people as being strong and unbreakable, but really, sometimes it only takes one thing for us to come unhinged. Much more of this and I think it will happen to Aradia.”

Nova sighed. “…How can we hurry this along?”

“We’re already in Celestialsapien space,” Vriska said. “Already jumping through universes as fast as we can after scanning for anything similar to the Omnitrix. So far nothing.”

“Good news: the Celestialsapiens either haven’t noticed or don’t care that we’re here!” Pinkie said, grinning.

“That’s something, I guess,” Nova muttered. “Do we have anything else working for us?”

Jotaro shrugged, saying nothing.

“I’ll take that as a no.” Nova leaned back in her chair and sighed. “We could be out here for weeks.”

Pinkie grinned. “Yeah, we could. But it’s a road tri-” Pinkie’s Pinkie Sense activated violently. Her body flipped into the air and she slammed into the Skiff’s windshield. “Stop the Skiff!” she ordered.

Vriska cancelled the next dimensional portal opening. Behind them, Aradia shifted forms again. Through the camera they had trained on her, they saw a form they all recognized. Humanoid, feminine, and a body seemingly made of stars with three horns pointing upward from the forehead.

“Celestialsapien…” Flutterfree said with a gulp. “…Is this good or bad for us?”

“Let’s just not move until she changes again,” Pinkie said. “Shouldn’t be… too long.”

Aradia was motionless. Her expression did not shift and her limbs did not move. She was stoic.

Inside her mind, however, it was a different story.

She existed as a mental projection of her real form – troll horns, red cloak, and all. She floated in an endless expanse of stars, slowly realizing that she had control of her mind as her.

“Oh thank the Tower,” she said, sighing in relief. She put on a big smile and laughed – she finally felt like herself. Even if she didn’t, technically speaking, have a body right now.

She realized there were two other beings in the void with her. They looked like opera masks, their red color identical to her robes. One looked downward with an exaggerated forlorn expression, while the other looked upward with a similarly eccentric hopeful expression.

“Uh… hi,” Aradia said.

“Hello,” the hopeful mask spoke with a young, male voice. “Welcome. I’ve been expecting you.”

“Don’t lie,” the other said with an middle-aged feminine voice. “You’ve just been hoping that someone would show up to end this frivolous deadlock.”

“Sooo…” Aradia leaned back. “I’m Aradia, who’re you?”

“I am Kaldar, the Voice of the Future,” the hopeful mask said. “And that moping lump of sadness is Antira, the voice of the lost.”

“The Past,” Antira corrected.

“A state of existence that only has relevance if you permit it to.”

“Both the past and the future are inherent parts of the flow of time,” Aradia said, shaking her head.

“And this is why you are here,” Kaldar said. “You are the Voice of the Present, here to fulfill the third consciousness within us. To complete us.”

“So you existed without me?”

“Yes and no,” Antira said.

“Ah, got it.”

“I like it when they just understand,” Kaldar said with a smile.

Aradia smirked. “Helps to jump around time a lot. So, uh, what do we do here?”

“Pointlessly argue,” Antira sighed.

“Debate,” Kaldar corrected. “We take into account all variables and determine if action is required for any given scenario.”

“What’s the current topic?” Aradia asked.

“Currently? We need to determine if we demand you stay with us for eternity so all arguments don’t end in a deadlock. I have grown rather tired with the future not benefiting from our involvement even considering the paradoxical nature of our existence, so I push that we require Aradia eternally present within us.”

“The future doesn’t need our help,” Antira muttered. “The path it takes must be its own. Aradia should leave.”

Aradia folded her arms. “Well I don’t want to be stuck here forever. What about a compromise? I can create temporal duplicates of myself. I could set it up so one is with you some of the time.”

Kaldar twitched. “The point of you being here is to break the tie, not introduce a third option.”

Aradia smirked. “I guess I don’t play nice then, huh? This is the part where we debate, right? Until one of us jumps to the side of another and creates a majority, allowing the actual Celestialsapien body outside to do something.”

“Your understanding is correct,” Antira admitted. “But perhaps it would have been better if you didn’t… Then you would have just wanted release.”

Kaldar looked at nothing. “No, debate is the way of our people. No matter what the three voices within us are, we always work it out among ourselves. We are complete, we should not complain. Aradia, your position on the matter is a curious one to be sure. A compromise, you say? Please, elaborate as to why this is the path that should be taken.”

“Well, there’s three of us here,” Aradia said, gesturing at the three of them. “What all of us want is important. I want to be able to do things without debating for eternity. Antira, you want to be faithful to the past as I understand it, and therefore want little to do with major action. Kaldar, you want to build a better future and to do that you need me here to break Antira’s hesitation. If we are to work together, we must work together to find something in the middle of all that.”

Antira sighed. “But if you remain here at all and break me, the past’s influence will be broken.”

“We are creatures of time,” Aradia said. “We should use our power to assist the timeline.”

“Or bend it to our will,” Kaldar said. “We are a Celestialsapien. We can build universes should it be required or desired. We could make entire universes bow to us.”

Aradia raised an eyebrow. “…Little ambitious?”

“Just stating facts. Of course we have the power to build lower societies up and build a new tomorrow in our image. The point is we should use the power.”

“Not all power should be used,” Antira reminded.

“We’re not talking about the use of power right now, we’re simply talking about how debates are going to go,” Aradia said. “While Kaldar seems a little too… anxious to flex our power, I do agree that so long as the power’s not too dangerous to use, it should be used. It’s how I fly through time.” She snapped her fingers. “Kaldar, I’ll agree with you if you alter your position slightly.”

Kaldar’s expression deepened. “I’m listening.”

“I can create time clones of myself. In theory, I can be with you and Antira always. But I won’t have to be the same me all the time. I could swap out every now and then. It’d allow me to continue my work outside this body while also being in it. So if we fix my Omnitrix I can start that right away.”

Antira shook her mask. “No. This cannot be allowed. Having a voice that changed? It would be too much…”

“Seems like a great idea to me. I get what I want, you don’t, and Aradia is simultaneously here and not under most circumstances. Therefore… I propose we repair Aradia’s Omnitrix.”

“Denied,” Antira said.

“I agree though!” Aradia blurted.

“The proper way to go through with it is to say ‘seconded’,” Kaldar said.

“Ah, right. Ahem. Seconded!”

The actual Celestialsapien body of Aradia twisted. “MOTION CARRIED: RE-”

And then Aradia’s Omnitrix flashed, transforming her into a red creature with flying-squirrel-like folds of skin. “…Seriously!?”

“You ran out of time!” Pinkie called to her through a communication spell.

Aradia tried to fold her arms, but realized the wing-like folds of skin interfered with this motion. “The downside of being a Celestialsapien. Everything takes forever. Gah. And now this form is impatient. Lovely mood whiplash. Can’t we go any faster?”

Vriska moved her hand to the throttle and moved them to another dimension. Then three things happened in quick succession.

First, the Pinkie Sense activated again, causing Pinkie to gasp in a mild panic.

Second, Aradia shifted form. She was suddenly a human with short brown hair and a green jacket.

Third, the Skiff’s engine exploded.

~~~

Nova pulled herself out of the skiff’s wreckage. “Ow…”

“You’re welcome,” Vriska muttered, pulling herself out from under a piece of the windshield, tripping and cutting her hand after she got out. “Yeeep, luck is abysmal right now. I really wanted to have a day of tripping, didn’t you?”

Pinkie appeared from behind her. “We all have bad tripping days, you know.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like them.”

Jotaro pulled himself out of the wreckage with Star Platinum, Flutterfree in his arms. She had a small wound under her left ear that didn’t look bad, but had been jarring enough to knock her unconscious.

Nova checked her over with a scan. “She’s fine. Will probably wake up in a few minutes.”

Pinkie took the opportunity to look around. “We appear to be… on a normal planet.”

They had landed at the edge of a cornfield, stopped by the raised earth of a road. It was night, so it wasn’t surprising that the road was abandoned. In the distance they could make out farmhouses that seemed to be of human design, but they had learned long ago never to assume that. The Skiff had cut a small tear in the cornfield, exposing dirt and lighting a few small fires that were quickly going out due to the moisture in the soil.

Vriska picked an ear of corn and examined it. “Seems normal enough.”

“So, question,” Nova said. “Why did our ship explode?”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “Because we found the right world.”

“Ahem. Causal reason, not ka reason, thank you.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Technology isn’t perfect?”

“Hey, I spent a ton of luck making sure we didn’t die in that crash,” Vriska commented, trying not to slip on a rock. “It should have kicked in to prevent that explosion if it was just a mechanical failure.”

“Your power isn’t predictable or absolute,” Jotaro pointed out.

“Yeah, well, s-” She slipped in the mud and fell face first into it. “I need to find people. I need to find people quickly.”

“With your luck we’ll never find anyone fast enough,” Nova said.

“HANDS UP! YOU’RE UNDER ARREST!” a voice shouted from on top of the road.

Vriska turned to Nova and grinned.

“Vriska, bad idea…”

Vriska put her hands up. “All right officer, what did we do?”

To their surprise, the ‘officer’ was not a normal policeman – he was a bipedal lizard in gray armor holding a futuristic gun. He had it trained on all five of them. “This is property damage.”

Vriska zapped some of his luck away, walking closer to him. “Our ship just crashed, can you maybe give us a break?” The rest of them slowly walked up to the road behind her. Jotaro didn’t have his hands up because he was holding Flutterfree, and he tried to make that as obvious as possible.

Vriska made it up to the road and saw a small squad of people wearing the same armor. Notably, none of them were the same race – although there was one human. One of them was a creature made of fire, another was a being that seemed more purple energy than physical being, yet another was a robot, and there were a smattering of others as well.

“This seems a little overkill,” Pinkie said, walking up to the lizard. “It’s just a crashed ship. Why the full squad?”

“Dimensional activity was detected,” the robot reported. “Only the human man is of a race in our database. You are the likely culprits.”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “You can’t expect dimensional beings to have any idea what your laws are.”

“It’s common sense not to crash into someone’s cornfield,” the lizard retorted.

Pinkie giggled. “Eh, fair enough. Take us away!”

Vriska kept absorbing luck in small bursts – the light that came from her eyes was hardly detectable in such conditions, and didn’t appear to be threatening. It couldn’t even be felt. She was sneaky, she knew how t-

“The gray one is doing something!” the purple being said, holding up her hands and trapping Vriska in an aura of pink magic. In reflex, Vriska pushed her luck absorption to her captor, making her trip and fall, dissipating the magic.

The fiery guy took this as an attack and flung a burst of flame at them, only for Nova to block it with a magic shield. “Hey, hey, we don’t have to fi-”

“Danger levels at critical!” the robot declared, unfolding several guns from his sides. “Protect!”

“Dammit,” Nova muttered, facehooving. “Looks like we’re fighting local law enforcement! Again. Thanks, Vriska.”

Vriska shrugged, summoning her dice. “What can I say? I bring out the best in people.”

~~~

Aradia looked herself over. She had survived the crash, the bubble absorbing all the dangers of impact before dissipating. It had made an impressive crater in the middle of a rocky, abandoned area to the side of a rural road.

She was human right now. Definitely female, though nobody would be able to tell that from first glance due to the flat chest and youthful appearance. Her hair was short and brown and her eyes matched the green of her jacket – which had a ten on it.

“Weird…” she said, looking at the ten. The source material was ‘Ben 10’, and this jacket was what the titular Ben wore. But Dave was this Omnitrix’s human DNA sample. Why didn’t she turn into him? Or a feminine version of him. That was an odd thing about the Omnitrix; Davepeta had been able to change into different genders, but if a female option was available for Aradia it would always switch to it. Maybe it just knew? Or could alter the DNA?

…Maybe this was just the female human DNA sample. She hadn’t actually turned into Dave before.

Regardless, given the Omnitrix’s reaction to the universe, this was probably the right place. She strongly suspected it was the ominitix that had caused the Skiff’s engines to explode, but she couldn’t prove that. Nor did she have any idea how it would do that.

She stood up and checked the Omnitrix. It seemed to be working just fine now. Not shifting her form around, but it had the human form set as the default instead of her troll self. She tried willing herself to transform into a troll – but nothing happened. She tried any other alien, but nothing. Vocal commands did nothing either.

“Guess the master control is off,” Aradia mused. She placed her fingers to the watch and began cycling through forms. All of them she had turned into were available, but that was a lot of aliens to sift through to find herself. She didn’t get very far.

“Albedo…?”

Aradia looked up to see the human she presumed was the Ben of this world. They looked almost identical, only slight differences in body structure between them.

Aradia waved her hands and shook her head. “Oh no, I’m Aradia, I have no idea who Albedo i-”

“Nice try,” Ben said, pulling up his Omnitrix. “You’re not talking your way out of this one.”

“No, seriously, I’m not Albedo, I’m from another uni-”

Ben transformed into a race made mostly of pale green crystal. “Diamondhead!”

“You name them? That’s cu- woah!” Aradia dodged a wave of crystal shards that came out of the ground. She fumbled with her Omnitrix, looking for a form she knew how to use. “This’ll have to do…” She accessed her sample of a Gem. Her body coalesced into a round, red gemstone that produced a tall, feminine body. The Omnitrix placed itself overtop the gemstone, which affixed itself over where her heart would have been in a more organic body.

She generated an exceedingly long whip from the gemstone’s center, readying it.

“…Haven’t seen that one before,” Ben said with Diamondhead’s significantly deeper voice.

“You pick up new samples when exploring other universes. Which is where I am from, by the way!”

“If you were from another universe, why aren’t you named Ben?” Ben proved that he was really good at using the crystal powers of Diamondhead by trapping Aradia’s larger form in an instant. She was able to force her hard-light body into a narrower shape, slipping out one of the cracks.

“Because that wasn’t my default form!” Aradia retorted, wrapping Ben up in her whip – which he broke apart easily. “I showed up here and got stuck!”

“Using your own backstory to try and derail me? Clever, Albedo.” Ben rushed her hitting her form right in the face.

Aradia transformed back to her human form, grunting. She clearly needed something else. She ran, scanning the aliens in the watch.

Ben charged after her. “You aren’t going anywhere!”

Aradia slipped and fell on the swirling crystals beneath her. But just as she was trapped again, she found it.

Her form.

She transformed into herself, glorious troll form and all. With her psychic powers she tore the crystals to shreds, then dropped them. “Look, this is my default form! Hey!”

Ben blinked. “…What is that?”

“Alternian.” He won’t take ‘troll’ very well. “Look, this is who I am. Not all of my race have psychic powers, and not all of my race can control time.”

“Control time?”

“Hi!” future-Aradia said from behind Ben. “Future-Aradia here.”

Ben narrowed his eyes. “How can I be sure you’re not Albedo?”

“Besides the fact that I don’t know who he is?” past-Aradia asked. “Uh…” An idea came to her. She took out her dimensional device.

Ben got defensive.

“Nonono! Not a weapon, not a bomb, a dimensional travel device! I don’t have to use it to travel, but it sure is handy.”

“Use it and we’ll see if that’s what it is.”

Aradia nodded, pressing a button. The dimensional device activated and opened a portal to an Earth where the sun was up. “Good enough for you?”

Ben nodded, allowing himself to turn back to his default human form. “That does raise a few other questions. Why are you here and why did you look like me?”

Future-Aradia timed out and returned to the default human form. “My Omnitrix is broken, as you can probably see. I came to this area of the multiverse looking for a version of Azmuth to fix it. Since he created it. …He was the creator of the Omnitrix in this universe, right?”

Ben nodded, holding up his. “Yeah. And ours look pretty similar, so they probably work the same. Though I bet you’ve got more aliens.”

Aradia nodded as her past self went through time to complete the causal time loop. “I can’t take all the credit. It used to belong to a friend of mine named Davepeta. It was… passed on to me.”

Ben blinked. “Well, I’m pretty sure we can get Azmuth to at least take a look at it – he’d love all the multiversal aliens in it. But if you can control time and have psychic powers in your default, why do you need it?”

“Usually I have the master control on,” Aradia said.

“Must be nice.”

Aradia smirked. “I take it you don’t?”

“Eh, on and off.”

“Anyway, I’m able to switch to anything I want at will, and I can create time clones of myself to use multiple forms at once. It’s a self-contained army when it needs to be.” She stretched her arms. “Feels weird to be a human, have to admit.”

“…Is that why your voice is so high?”

“Hm? Oh, this is a female. Almost all the aliens are.”

Ben blinked, looking her up and down, and then proceeding to flush. “…Ah.”

“Probably some cosmic joke that I look so androgynous right now. Don’t worry about it. We can get this fixed – oh, but we need to find my friends first. Their ship must have crashed elsewhere.”

“The Plumber database should have a crashed ship on it.”

“…Plumber?”

“Bunch of space police trying to not be conspicuous. It doesn’t work as well as they’d like. Everyone knows about them now, so, it basically failed completely and now it’s a big joke.”

“Ah. So, curious, who was Albedo?”

“Azmuth’s apprentice who kinda became my evil twin because he made another Omnitrix connected to mine…”

~~~

“What did you guys do!?” Flutterfree shouted.

“Took care of a problem,” Jotaro said, laying the last unconscious alien on top of all the others, creating a pile of bruised and battered ‘officers’.

“I was expecting a bit more fight, you know?” Vriska said. “Magic-girl had some freaky powers, but those became pretty useless pretty fast.”

“This was law enforcement!” Flutterfree blurted, throwing a hoof wide. “You all know what happens when we upset law enforcement!”

“We don’t get put in jail?” Pinkie suggested.

“PINKIE!”

Pinkie giggled. “I know, I know, that didn’t go as well as it could have, but none of them got seriously hurt.”

“I broke a few bones,” Jotaro said.

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Okay, yes, some of them are in a lot of pain but they’ll all be fine. We just need to collect our bearings and find out where we are.”

“United States, Earth, two-thousand-something-or-other,” Nova reported from her hoof-screen. “Physics allows for FTL, high magic, and extremely unconventional biology. Guess this explains why the Omnitrix can scan a Gem and get a ‘DNA’ sample.”

“So a bit of an outlier universe that seems normal on the surface,” Vriska said. “Got it.”

“We should probably find Aradia,” Nova said. “She needs to know we’ve upset the locals.”

Pinkie looked at Nova and grinned.

“She’s standing right behind us, isn’t she?”

“What did you guys do!?” Aradia shouted, putting her hands to her head.

“I think they beat up a squad of Plumbers,” Ben said, pursing his lips.

“That’s bad! That’s bad, right?” Aradia asked.

Ben shrugged. “Eh, I can get you cleared. So long as you don’t turn out to actually be evil.”

Aradia put her hands on her hips and glared at Pinkie. “Why would you do this?”

“Completely my fault,” Vriska said, walking up to them. “See, I was being awesome, and then sparkly over th-”

“UNKNOWN ALIEN DNA DETECTED!” Ben’s Omnitrix interrupted. A yellow light shot out of the device and scanned Vriska.

Ben checked his Omnitrix. “Sweet, new transformation. Do you have time travel and telekinesis too?”

“Luck manipulation and mind control,” Vriska said, folding her arms. “Don’t you dare turn into me and steal my thunder. I will have to show you who’s the better spiderbitch.”

“Message received…” Ben said.

Flutterfree turned to Aradia. “…Could he scan us?”

Aradia nodded. “It’ll only accept one Equestrian DNA sample, though. He’ll only get one of you.”

Nova put a hoof to her chin. “Hrm… We should think for a moment to decide which one of us would be the most helpful. As a unicorn, I have a full range of magic spells. Pinkie has a lot of bizarre abilities that… might drive him insane. Flutt-”

“Flutterfree is the choice,” Pinkie said, throwing the pegasus at Ben. The Omnitrix scanned her in an instant. “And now the deliberation is done! Woohoo!”

“Pinkie!” Nova blurted. “I was going to get a whole pro and con list out!”

“And that’s booooring,” Pinkie said. “Hey, hey Ben, try one of us out.”

Ben shrugged. “Sure. Haven’t been a horse yet…” He readied his Omnitrix and selected the Flutterfree sample. He turned into a pegasus – except clearly a stallion rather than a mare.

“…How does it do that?” Aradia wondered.

“I feel… hungry,” Ben said. “For either blood or… apples?”

Flutterfree nodded. “I am a quasi-vampire. I’ve also got this.” She activated Lolo fully, forcing another Lolo out of Ben. “This is Lolo. It’s a Stand. It lets you see other Stands like Star Platinum over there and taps into hidden potential. And a few other odd things. I’m sure you’ll find it useful.”

“…I’m calling this form Vampony,” Ben said, transforming back to a human shortly afterward.

Flutterfree facehooved. “Of course.”

“But hey, at least it’s not me!” Pinkie said. She grabbed Ben’s face and gave him a deadly serious glare. “You would have lost your marbles.”

“…My marb-?”

“ALL OF THEM.”

Ben shivered. “…Kay.”

Aradia shook her head. “Never mind that right now. Everyone, you already know this is Ben. Ben, this is the primary team of Merodi Universalis.” She introduced them all one at a time. “And now can we go to Azmuth and get my Omnitrix fixed?” She tapped her fingers together impatiently.

“…You’re not used to being linear, huh?” Nova asked.

“No. No I’m not. I’d like to stop being linear as soon as possible. I was able to turn into myself for a little bit back there, but it’s temporary.”

Ben pulled out his phone. “I know just the ship. Hey, Julie? I need a spaceship ride. …Well, the people I need to move just beat up a full Plumber squad, so I don’t really want to ask them for a ship right now. …Huh, wasn’t expecting you to agree so quickly.” Ben hung up his phone. “We’ll have a ship.”

“What kind of ship?” Vriska asked.

“Ship,” Pinkie said.

With a rush of wind, a green and black gunship appeared over their heads. “SHIIIIIIIIP,” it bellowed in a deep, synthetic voice. It descended to the ground below, opening up its back door to create a ramp inside. There was nobody driving.

“Uh…” Flutterfree coked her head. “Who drove it here?”

“Ship drove himself,” Ben said with a smirk.

“…The ship’s name is Ship,” Nova deadpanned. “Not going to ask.”

“You see, that’s a funny stor-”

“I didn’t ask!”

Pinkie took a sticky note out of her mane and stuck it on the forehead of the unconscious lizard. Sorry! Hope you get well soon! A happy Pinkie Pie and a balloon image were scrawled in the corners in what appeared to be pink crayon.

“Let’s go!” Pinkie declared, bouncing into Ship. The others followed suit.

Ship blasted into the sky, leaving the Plumbers behind.

The lizard woke up first and found the sticky note. He looked at it and let out a forlorn sigh.

~~~

Ship flew through space to what Ben assured them was ‘Azmuth’s current laboratory world’. Apparently the Omnitrix’s inventor was prone to wandering from world to world, looking for another place to call his ‘lab’, rarely staying on his homeworld.

Since Ben had his invention, and since even Ben’s Omnitrix was known to act up from time to time, Azmuth always let Ben know where he was.

“…Well, most of the time,” Ben said. “Sometimes he just gets up and goes somewhere else. But he told me about this place just a month ago so chances are good he’s still there. Probably, you know.”

“We can always jump to the past if he’s not,” Aradia said. She ran her hand across the interior walls of Ship. “…Is Ship alive?”

“The Omnitrix has a scan of his race,” Ben said, leaning back. “So, I guess? I call mine Upgrade.”

“Huh…”

“It’s really weird looking at both of you,” Nova said. “The only clear indication I get of which is which is your voices.”

“There are… posture differences,” Ben said.

Vriska smirked. “Oh yeah.”

“This has happened before, apparently,” Aradia said, drawing the attention of the conversation away from the aforementioned posture differences. “There was a second Omnitrix in this universe that automatically linked to Ben’s. It forced the wearer, Albedo, to look like Ben. Creating an Evil Twin.”

Pinkie chuckled. “Nice. I’ve met a few evil versions of myself from time to time. …Vriska, you?”

Vriska shrugged. “Hard to find reason to give me an Evil Twin. Well, I guess now I could have one, but back then? Yeah, the Evil Vriska wouldn’t look much different.”

“I guess you could call Damara mine,” Aradia said. “…Though I do encourage people not to think of her ghosts as evil... Just relationally challenged.”

“And we’ve gone too deep down the rabbit hole,” Ben said.

“SHIIIIIIIIIP,” Ship beeped.

“What is it?” Flutterfree asked.

“SHIIIIIIIIIIIIII-IIIIIIIP.”

“Oh. A strange field of energy around the planet?”

“SHIP SHIP.”

“Well don’t fly into it then! Just stop outside and let us look at it.”

Ben blinked. “Uh…”

“I guess Ship qualifies as an animal,” Flutterfree said, smirking. “Who knew?”

“Yare Yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

“Field of energy?” Nova asked. “What field of energy?”

Ship dropped out of his FTL and entered orbit around a planet. Not that anyone could tell it was a planet. All they saw was a vaguely round ball of black and white wires of energy swirling around like a pile of worms.

“…What…?” Flutterfree said, cocking her head.

“I see we have zebraworld,” Vriska observed.

“I can’t get any good scans…” Nova muttered, tapping her screen. “Hey, Ship, is there a way I can interface with your sensors?”

A green wire shot out of one of Ship’s walls, turning Nova’s screen black and green. She felt a small jolt shoot up her body as she connected. Data on the strange field of energy began to display. “…Thanks. Let’s see here…” She scrolled through some information, narrowing her eyes.

Everyone crowded around her, trying to look at the data as well.

“Ahem. I can feel the moisture in your breaths.”

“Oh! Sorry,” Flutterfree said, backing up first. Soon, only Aradia remained.

“You’re doing well,” Aradia observed.

Nova sighed. “Eh, I guess so. Master of scanning, parsing through information, and big buckets of magic.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve come a long way since I first started watching you.”

“…Yeah.”

“…Having problems with Stardust?”

“Always.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.” Nova didn’t even look up from her screen.

Aradia backed off, sighing. Flutterfree put a wing around her. “Don’t worry.”

“Hm?”

“She lets it get to her more than it should, and she knows it. Her family’s doing fine, she stresses about the things that do go wrong too much.” Flutterfree looked at her friend with sad eyes. “She just can’t let go of the difficulties.”

Aradia frowned, saying nothing.

“We’re watching out for her, don’t you worry. Every time she thinks its about to fall apart, we’re able to get her back on track.”

Aradia nodded slowly.

“Got something,” Nova said, ending any conversation that was happening. “The field of ‘zebra’ only exists around the planet, not inside. A simple dimensional hop should get us in, no problem whatsoever.”

“…Dimensional hop?” Ben spoke up. “Should I be worried?”

“Nope!” Pinkie said, pulling out her dimensional device from her mane. “Here we go!”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Adjust the portal size first, Pinkie.”

“Oh, I did!” Pinkie said with a wink. “You just didn’t see it~!” She activated the device, opening a portal to a version of the planet that did exist, but was a frozen wasteland.

“Take us in, Ship, if you don’t mind.” Flutterfree asked. Ship complied, flying into the planet’s cold, bitter atmosphere. With another portal opening, they were back in Ben’s universe, on a desert world with sand everywhere. They couldn’t see the zebra-stripes above them, but they couldn’t see the sun either. Just endless brown sky.

“Ship, find Azmuth’s transponder,” Ben said. “Shouldn’t be too far.”

“SHIIIIIIP.” Ship found an alien facility constructed in the middle of the endless sand. It was constructed of three separate pointed towers connected by triangular frames of dark metal. Green energy pulsed in the middle of the triangular frames, presumably powering the facility in some form or other.

Ship landed in front of the facility in the sand, letting everyone out. The moment they were out Ship shrunk to the size of a small dog, taking the form of an amorphous blob with a single circle that may have been an eye on the part of the body that may have been a head.

“…He’s an alien dog,” Nova observed. “All right. Cool.”

Ben shrugged. “Yeah.” He walked to the front doors of the facility and knocked on the door. “Hello? Azmuth? It’s Ben! Ben Tennyson! Wielder of the Omnitrix? …Azmuth, open up.”

There was no response.

“Hey, I know you’ll be interested to interview a bunch of people from another universe! Wouldn’t that be cool? I got two multiversal DNA samples, Azmuth! …Azmuth I know you can hear everything that goes on outside your facilities. AZMUTH!”

Jotaro pried the front doors off their hinges with Star Platinum.

“Wh-hey!”

“We needed to get in,” Jotaro pointed out. He strode inside, hands in his pockets, saying nothing further.

Aradia’s grin faltered. “…Do you think Azmuth will be mad about that?”

“Probably,” Ben said. “But he likes weird science. Pretty sure what you are will make up for that.”

“Ship ship,” Ship said.

Flutterfree chuckled.

“This is why we don’t have a team mascot,” Vriska said, following Jotaro.

The interior of Azmuth’s facility was spacious – though it didn’t look it. Despite the tremendous square footage of the ground floor, almost every inch of it was covered in bizarre alien experiments. Some looked like vehicles, others were possibly weapons, but most of them were of mysterious, unknown functions.

They did not get much time to process these unusual devices for very long – because they found Azmuth. He was a small, gray alien of the same race Aradia had transformed into back in Skaia’s Dream, though he had significantly more wrinkles than Aradia’s version.

He was currently being pointed at by a male Celestialsapien with a metallic ring around his head but above his horns. “AZMUTH.” The voice made the party of adventurers stop in their tracks.

“L-look, I can’t help you,” Azmuth said with an old, throaty voice.

“YOU ARE THE GREATEST OF THIS UNIVERSE’S MINDS. YOU CAN FIX MINE.”

“Minds are not such simple constructs as machines. I cannot wave a technological wand and return your voices to the way they should be!”

The Celestialsapien grabbed his head with his hands. “DENIED. CARRIED. NO CONSULTATION!” Then he turned his head to the adventurers, as if just registering their presence. He stared right at Aradia. “YOU. I SENSED YOU. I CALLED. YOU CAME!”

“Uh, I’m just here by accident,” Aradia said, taking a step back.

“I’m Ben Tennyson,” Ben said, stepping forward. “She’s just from another universe and is of no concern to you.”

“Other universe…?” Azmuth said, confusion and curiosity crossing his face simultaneously.

The Celestialsapien brushed Ben aside with a thought, throwing him deep into the pile of technology around them. His gaze remained fixed on Aradia. “I WAS NOT CERTAIN IF MY THOUGHTS WERE ABLE TO BECOME THAT REAL WITHOUT… CONSULTATION. PERHAPS A CLOSED TIMELIKE CURVE? YOU. YOU CAN FIX ME.”

“Don’t listen to him!” Azmuth blurted. “He’s mad! His race don’t even talk li-”

The Celestialsapien lifted Azmuth into the air. “YOU CAN HELP ME, YOU JUST DON’T WANT TO. BUT SHE’S DIFFERENT. SHE WILL.”

Aradia gulped. Really not sure if I’m able to… Probably not.

“YOUR TIME IS UP, AZMUTH.”

Ben transformed from inside the pile of junk. “ALIEN X!” He shouted, standing tall as another male Celestialsapien, missing the metal ring of the other but proudly sporting the Omnitrix symbol on his chest. “MOTION CARRIED: SAVE AZMUTH.”

Azmuth was suddenly on Flutterfree’s back.

“YOU ARE NONE OF MY CONCERN!” the mad Celestialsapien shouted.

Ben spoke again. “MOTION CARRIED: REALITY PUNCHES.”

Ben was in front of the mad Celestialsapien and punched him over and over – but the cosmic being was able to intercept every punch in an instant. “STOP THIS FOOLISHNESS! WE CANNOT FIGHT!”

“MOTION CARRIED: RETURN SANITY.”

“DENIED!” the mad Celestialsapien shouted. “I WILL NOT ACCEPT A CURE FROM THOSE WHO DID THIS TO ME!”

The punches from Ben were becoming hard enough to ripple reality around them, but they were always stopped by the quicker-acting Celestialsapien.

“How fucked are we?” Vriska asked Azmuth.

Azmuth let out a disgruntled cough. “I’m going to assume that’s colorful language for ‘dead’. The answer is extremely if we remain in this universe.”

“We can get out,” Vriska said.

Aradia looked at Azmuth. “This universe is going to be destroyed if this goes on, isn’t it?”

Azmuth nodded. “But there is nothing in our power we can do.”

Aradia looked at her Omnitrix. “…Maybe there is…”

“…You do not have control of your Celestialsapien form,” Azmuth said.

Aradia sighed. “But there’s got to be…” She paused. “How hard would it be for you to detach this Omnitrix from Ben’s?”

“Few hours. We don’t have that.”

“Yes we do,” Aradia said, opening her Omnitrix and transforming into her own form. She turned to Azmuth. “I can freeze time so you can have as long as you need to work. How much do you need?”

“Three hours and twenty-six minutes,” Azmuth answered.

Aradia froze time for everything except her wrist and Azmuth, allowing even herself to be frozen. The next thing she knew, Azmuth was hopping off her wrist. “Got it done with ten minutes to spare. I hope you have a plan.”

Aradia nodded. She did a quick check mentally to make sure her Omnitrix’s master control was on and that her troll form was her default. It was, which brought a smile to her face. “Okay… Here we go.”

She duplicated herself through time a hundred times, filling the area that wasn’t occupied by technology.

“All of you,” she called to Pinkie’s team and Azmuth. “Leave the universe. I’m going to try to save it. This planet will not be surviving.”

Pinkie nodded. “Don’t argue team, let’s move!” They jumped through a dimensional portal.

When they left, the mad Celestialsapien grabbed Ben and threw him to the ground. The impact with the ground did nothing, but the touch of the mad Celestialsapien tore against Ben’s own supposedly impervious skin. “YOU ARE SURPRISINGLY IMPULSIVE, BUT YOU STILL MUST THINK. I NO LONGER CAN. LOOK AT THE MONSTER YOU HAVE CREATED!”

Hundreds of Aradias nodded to each other – and then each of them chose a different alien from the Omnitrix. Some were large, some were small. Some were made of energy, while others didn’t even make three-dimensional sense. Some were powerful things that could level planets, others were just ordinary creatures.

The point was to try one of everything she could think of at once. There were going to be a lot of Aradia deaths from this one, but at least they wouldn’t have deviated in what she considered a meaningful way.

They charged – energy, space, time, and existence itself folding in. The planet they were on exploded, killing the vast majority of the Aradias. But those who remained focused intently on the mad Celestialsapien – discovering that he was able to absorb any attack regardless of magical intensity, spiritual nature, or temporal shenanigans. He saw it all and reacted, many times before it actually came. However, a few of the ‘god’ level samples Aradia found were able to deflect his attacks, allowing Ben a moment to attack.

“WHY DO YOU NOT HELP ME WITH THIS POWER!?” the mad Celestialsapien asked.

The only Aradia-form Aradia left looked right at him. She said nothing – but she held out her Omnitrix. All she needed to do was think.

And she transformed into her Celestialsapien form.

~~~

“Oh, look who’s back,” Kaldar said.

“I was hoping you scared her off,” Antira mumbled.

Aradia clasped her hands together. “So, remember that deal we were about t-”

“You didn’t come back when you could to finish it,” Kaldar muttered. “There was an entire spaceflight where you had plenty of time, and yet you didn’t.”

“As should be blatantly obvious, I’m not hindered by linear time,” Aradia said.

“Your Omnitrix is also fixed,” Kaldar pointed out. “And yet you’ve returned, thinking to use us. Hoping to save a universe.”

“Yes. I submit that we save this universe from destruction.”

“Denied,” Kaldar said. “On grounds of prior behavior and interference with a Celestialsapien experiment.”

“Denied,” Antira agreed. “On grounds of the way things are building up. We are an out of context individual. We have no right.”

“Celestialsapien experiment!?” Aradia blurted.

“It’s obvious that’s what he is,” Kaldar said. “One who does not have to debate their actions. We’re born like that, you know. A single mind. Terribly weak as infants – comparatively at least.”

“Does your kind allow those sorts of experiments?” Aradia asked.

“Generally not,” Antira said with distaste. “I do not see this action being approved by the full Converse… but you must understand, we are a race that, as a whole, believes that after enough debate, any course of action is viable. We have no laws that are set in stone, merely a ‘history’ of previous decisions made by wise thinkers. Everything can be changed with new information. Kaldar and I are largely separated from the full Converse, so we cannot tell you what the current flow of the debate is.”

“Or it could be freelance,” Kaldar pointed out. “It’s not this needs Converse approval, it’s just apt to get disapproval a few millennia from now. If we interfere without proper debate, there will be consequences from those who made him this way.”

Aradia folded her arms. “That’s assuming they’re watching or did this intentionally.”

“That is a fair point…” Antira said.

“Let’s look outside,” Aradia said.

“Why?” Kaldar asked.

“I have a point I want to make.”

“Seconded,” Antira said. A visual projection of what was happening appeared in between the three of them.

The mad Celestialsapien was throwing stars at Ben, only for him to clap his hands and make them vanish. The strongest of the Aradias twisted space around the mad Celestialsapien, allowing Ben to get some solid hits in.

“The mad Celestialsapien is going to die,” Aradia said. “Maybe he’ll take the universe with him, maybe he won’t. But right now he’s dying. I’d like to help him.”

“Honorable,” Kaldar admitted. “But it would still be interference.”

“You’re the voice of the future,” Aradia blurted. “Don’t you believe in change? And Antira, you’re the voice of the past! Don’t you believe in staying true to one’s self?” She gestured at the mad Celestialsapien as a wormhole was driven through his chest, tearing at the reality of the universe. “That man is going to die out there, and he doesn’t deserve it. He just wants help.”

“Ara-” Antira began.

“I don’t want to be forced into this again!” Aradia shouted.

There was silence in the mindspace of their Celestialsapien.

There were tears in Aradia’s eyes. “He’s asking me for help. And I’m killing him for it. Somewhere deep in there, part of him knows that might be necessary. But I’ll be damned before I don’t try every other option! So please, I beg of you, let us save his mind!”

Once again there was silence.

“…Seconded,” Antira said.

Kaldar nodded slowly. “As you two wish. I will point out that he was able to refuse ‘Ben’s’ assistance in the matter.”

“Then let’s do it together,” Aradia said. “Two on one should be able to do it, right?”

“We’ll have to make a call,” Antira said. “A group debate. That will freeze Ben up.”

“Then we just have to move quickly,” Aradia said. “Motion to connect to Ben Tennyson.”

“Seconded,” Kaldar said.

Suddenly, Ben and two green masks appeared. The feminine mask was eternally smiling while the masculine was scowling.

“Bah, what’s this?” the male one said. “Aren’t we supposed to be busy?”

Ben blinked. “Huh – what? Why isn’t anything working right now?”

“We have entered joined debate,” Antira stated. “It is unusual for our kind, but we need to make a speedy decision before the mad Celestialsapien unleashes his wrath on us in a way we cannot defend against.”

“Why are you bringing us into this?” the male mask asked.

“Bellecus, we are an unusual Celestialsapien,” the female retorted.

“Serena, that’s no excuse, every last one of us can know anything we want within a universe. It’s not like we’re hiding it.”

“Yes, yes, we get it!” Ben said, waving his hands. “Handing over the keys to just one personality is a bit of a taboo in your culture, can we just end this quickly?”

“YOU DID WHAT!?” Kaldar blurted.

“Hey, try to find us and re-educate us in proper Celestialsapien psychology,” Bellecus said. “Oh wait, we exist inside a watch, sorry.”

“At least we aren’t the mindless drone currently beating at our doorstep, we do observe what he’s doing,” Serena said. “Sometimes, anyway. …Bellecus, I think I’m actually starting to feel pain from the beating.”

“Guys! Stop debating!” Ben shouted.

Aradia cleared her throat. “We need to work together to return the mad Celestialsapien’s mind to normal, to override his will. We’ve already seconded.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ben said. “Let’s go.” He blinked. “Why isn’t anything happening?”

“Oh! Right, we’re involved as well,” Serena said. “Haven’t done this in a while. Ahem. Seconded!”

Bellecus sighed. “Remind me again why you’re the one who agrees with him the most?”

Outside in reality, Aradia and Ben appeared next to each other. The mad Celestialsapien looked at them.

“NO! IMPOSSIBLE! YOU MOVE TOO FAST!”

“MOTION CARRIED: RETURN SANITY.”

In the shared mindscape, a single yellow mask appeared. But it wasn’t a single personality – it was a conglomeration of three different faces, all forced together into something that was eternally screaming. It wasn’t even a full mind – there wasn’t a place for true logic within it. It operated almost entirely on instinct and emotion, raging against their advance.

“If we ever needed war machines…” Bellecus began, but didn’t finish his thought.

Red and green light shot from the six personalities split between two Celestialsapiens, hitting the yellow mask head on. In an instant, there were three yellow masks.

They looked at the newcomers with mixed expressions – anger, relief, and confusion. Then they vanished from their respective mindscapes. Outside, the mad Celestialsapien looked at his hands. He didn’t move, frozen in debate.

“State of the universe?” Aradia asked.

“Stable and recovering,” Serena said. “There are a few systems without their suns, though.”

“We can fix that, right?” Ben asked. “Or are you two back to demanding arguments about everything?”

“No,” Bellecus said. “I frankly hate that we still have to hear your voice when you visit.”

“Do what you will,” Serena said with a bow of her mask.

“You’re all insane,” Kaldar muttered. “The Converse will hear of this.”

“They already know,” Ben pointed out. “There was a whole big thing about me recreating the universe, got put on trial. These two threw me the keys so we could win and we’ve just kept that up ever since.”

“I do like it when he visits,” Serena admitted. “Makes interesting company. You three are of course welcome to return as well.”

“No you are not,” Bellecus muttered. “This connection is over.”

Aradia was suddenly alone with Kaldar and Antira. She looked at them.

“This power still needs to be used,” Kaldar told Aradia. “As much as it pains me to say this, we can do nothing without your presence. Consider your previous offer.”

“Consider it done,” Aradia said. “You’ll have at least one copy of me with you at all times. I must be allowed to move freely in and out as required, as previously agreed. And I’m going to set it up a little later – I need a break. But before we end this session… Antira.” Aradia floated over to her. “Thank you for breaking free of yourself to do what needed to be done. Any strict adherence to the past or the future… is limiting.”

She floated away. “I hope we can all learn to step outside of what we are as we continue this debate.” She bowed. “I’d like to leave now, if you don’t mind. I’ll be back.”

“Seconded,” Antira said.

“Unanimously approved,” Kaldar added.

~~~

Aradia shifted out of her Celestialsapien form on the surface of a planet with sixteen other Aradias – the only survivors. Ben, Azmuth, and the primary team stood to the side.

“Get out of my universe,” Azmuth said. “I fixed your watch, now get out of here. Your kind causes way too much trouble.”

“All right, all right!” Aradia said, holding her hands up in surrender.

Azmuth walked off, grumpily muttering to himself.

“Don’t take it personally,” Ben said. “I think he’s still upset at how one of your kind blew up our universe.”

“…Then what are we standing on?” Nova asked.

“A copy,” Ben said, smirking. “Created by yours truly. Or, well, Alien X agreeing that the universe shouldn’t be destroyed by an ancient multiversal society’s bomb.”

“Yeesh,” Nova said. “That has to be weird.”

“Sometimes it bugs me. Mostly it doesn’t though,” Ben said. “Want to know what really scares me about it?”

“What?” Aradia asked.

“Alien X couldn’t stop the bomb. We would have if we could have. But it wasn’t possible. It’s really the only thing I’ve seen that Alien X couldn’t deal with.”

“There’s a lot of scary things out there,” Flutterfree admitted. “But at least you’re here to protect your universe. I think that’s enough.”

“Thanks,” Ben said, giving her a thumbs up. “It sucks you probably won’t be back, you know.”

“We really shouldn’t be here anyway,” Pinkie said. “The Celestialsapiens own this universe. Hopefully they won’t be mad about… that.” Pinkie pointed at the frozen Celestialsapien, eternally staring at his hands.

Aradia looked at his eyes. “…I hope you’re being you in there,” she said. “What are you going to do with him?”

Ben shrugged. “I might be able to take him to the Forge of Creation. I’ll have to talk to Serena and Bellecus about the wisdom of that idea. If that’s a bad idea I’ll just hand him off to Professor Paradox… We’ve got him taken care of, don’t worry.”

“All right!” Pinkie said. “Now… Here’s the thing, we need a ship to get home...”

Ben sighed. “AZMUTH! THEY NEED A SHIP!”

“WHY IS THAT MY PROBLEM!?” the alien yelled back.

“WELL THE PLUMBERS WON’T LIKE THEM AND I CAN’T JUST LET THEM HAVE SHIP!”

“FINE! THEY CAN HAVE ONE OF MINE! I HOPE THEY LIKE BEING CRAMMED!”

The otherworlders gulped.

~~~

Nova stopped outside the door to Stardust’s bedroom.

Her daughter was sleeping quietly under the covers, a smile on her face, unaware the door had been left open.

Nova closed it with a sound-silencing spell so as not to wake her. She walked down to the living room and sat down on the couch next to Sunburst.

The TV was giving a report about recent efforts made by Skarn to connect with Merodi Universalis as a trading partner. The words of the report began to blur past her face.

“…Are we ever going to be ok?” Nova asked suddenly.

Sunburst looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean… Us. Our family.”

“Nova, you’ve kept us together this long.” Sunburst smiled. “Doesn’t matter how rough it is. We’ll make it.”

“She’s going to be a teenager soon, Sunburst,” Nova said, biting her lip. “I… I don’t know if I can stand strong against that. I have a hard enough time as it is understanding her now. She’s going to want to scream, to rebel, and we’re going to have to find a way to strike a balance between giving her freedom and standing our ground.”

Sunburst gulped. “How about you handle the standing and I handle the freedom?”

Nova looked into her hooves, forlorn. “She’s smart enough to take advantage of that. Pit us against each other.” She shook her head. “We can’t let her think her defiance will get her anywhere when it does show up. But… I don’t know. I barely even understand why she is the way she is now. I’m worrying too much again, huh? Really should listen to Flutterfree…”

Sunburst put a hoof on her. “Hey. You might be worrying too much. But those questions need to be asked. We need to prepare for what’s coming, and continue being good parents despite everything.”

“…Are we, though?” Nova asked. “We argue all the time. You spoil her. I scare her. I… I worry that we’re messing her up.” Nova bit back tears.

Sunburst held her close. “We’re not messing her up, Nova. She’s a good kid.”

Nova nodded. “I… I know. But I also don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I don’t think anyone goes into being a parent having any idea what they’re doing.”

Nova blinked, registering this comment. Then she laughed. “That’s… they should print that on gift cards or something.” She wiped her eyes. “That’s so true.”

“R-really? I was kinda just talking without thinking there…”

Nova kissed him. “You should do that more often.”

Sunburst smiled. “…And you should do the opposite.”

“Oh look at you, on a roll today.” She giggled. Then she pulled him into a hug. “…I don’t treat you well enough. I’m angry, upset, stressed, and gone more than I should be.”

Sunburst held her close. “It’s okay.”

Her laughs turned to sobs as she let it all out on Sunburst’s shoulder.

~~~

A rumor began to circle around Celestia City. …More than a rumor. Perhaps a tall tale, or even a legend.

It spoke of the City’s guardian that lived in the very core of its existence, in the restricted areas that were still Castle Bleck. She was a woman of stars – a Celestialsapien, some said. Others laughed and said that was preposterous, she must be something else, for the Class 1 race would never care about them.

The people of Celestia City spoke of how the guardian never moved an inch. How she sat there, waiting for the moment she was needed. Others said she wasn’t a true guardian, and that she merely wanted information on the multiverse, thinking that hitchhiking was the best way to do it. Still others said she was a collective of beings…

But the stories agreed on one thing. Altruistic or not, she was there, watching over them. Watching over them with immeasurable power at her fingertips.

Aradia liked hearing about herself as she walked around Celestia City. She wondered how word of her presence even got out, since she hadn’t actually done anything as the Celestialsapien yet, but she didn’t mind that much. The rumors gave the citizens something to be excited about – and a strange feeling of safety, even if they thought the rumor was just that, nothing more than a story spun for fun.

In many ways, the words held all the power she needed.

She prepared herself to go debate the very fabric of reality with the voices of Time itself…

098 - The Elements of Harmony

“How come I didn’t know you had a warehouse?” Rainbow Dash asked her daughter.

Prism was a slender, fit, white-coated pegasus mare; her rainbow mane had a gradient to it, rather than the distinct stripes of her mother’s. She wore large glasses with pointed edges. “Dunno. Guess it just never came up. But you’re here now.” She grinned stupidly. “I’ve got a machine in here that can fling you into orbit.”

“…I knew you wouldn’t let me down!” Rainbow laughed, tousling her daughter’s mane.

“Mom!” Prism laughed right back.

“What? Nobody’s watching. I can look a little soft.”

Prism rolled her eyes. “Right.” She pressed her hoof to the DNA scanner outside her warehouse, and it let her in. She led her mother into the expansive workshop of an engineer. “Behold. Things.”

There were, in fact, things in the warehouse. Tons of scrap metal from cars, planes, and other vehicles that had been cannibalized to create what appeared to be a fully functioning helicopter. There was a welding station, a set of three go-karts with a fourth partially assembled, a woodworking station, a truly absurd number of tools on the far side of the wall, a spellcasting computer, some exercise equipment, a large table covered with numerous interlocking magical crystals, and a huge number of books strewn about in a haphazard fashion.

There was also a giant cannon in the middle of the warehouse pointed straight up at a hatch in the roof.

“…Wow,” Rainbow said. “You should have brought me here sooner.”

“Yeah, probably,” Prism admitted. “But I get a little occupied with all the inventing sometimes. Aside from that space cannon I’ve got some other inventions here. That insignificant-looking black box there is the Zero-Point Driver, which is why I have enough money to have this place. There’s usually a couple assistants running around, but it’s the weekend and I don’t have brutal hours.”

“Fresh out of college and already running a laboratory. Wow. Did I ever tell you I was proud of you?”

“You tried not to. You kinda sorta failed later on,” Prism chuckled. “But hey, I don’t mind. You got me here and this is a great life. I would show you the muscle networking device I’m working on…”

“But it’ll go over my non-eggy-head. I know.”

“So let’s check out this cannon. It can shoot you to the moon.”

“Wow.”

“It has no practical purpose whatsoever,” Prism said, smirking. “It just does it safely without the use of magic.”

“…Can I ride?”

“Sure. I won’t be shooting you at the moon though. Luna’d be peeved.”

Rainbow laughed. “Yeah, she would. Spacesuit?”

“Bottom compartment.”

Rainbow popped the bottom compartment of the cannon open – and then her cutie mark started glowing. “Really?”

Prism chuckled. “Guess you’ll have to wait until you get back!”

“Aaaargh! Fine, fine, time for a Friendship Problem! At least it doesn’t take multiple days to travel around anymore.”

~~~

Applejack had four kids. Jona, Ginger, Cameo, and Corea. Jona was tall, red, and demanded attention with her presence. Ginger was the only stallion of the bunch and was a pony of few words, but also a genius. Cameo was a mare born with a horn thanks to latent genes within Barley’s lineage, whose special talent was mimicry magic. Corea was the Avatar, bender of five elements and spiritual leader of an entire world.

Jona and Ginger still worked on the family farm. Cameo had gone off to magic school to become a wizard, and while not the best was at least decent at it. Corea was still spending most her time on Elemental Four, keeping that world’s course steady.

All four of them were currently eating lunch with their mother at Sweet Apple Acres, in the kitchen all of them had grown up in – even Corea, though she had left relatively young. Out the kitchen window, they could see how much the farm had changed. They still grew apples and a handful of other things, yes, but the farms were much larger – and automated in many ways. There was still work the Apple family had to do, but Applejack knew there was less load on them than when she was younger.

At first she had worried technology would make her kids lazy, but that didn’t happen. All four of them were great workers, and she was proud of all of them in her own way.

That didn’t mean she didn’t get annoyed at Jona’s rambling sometimes.

“-and then Helm went all ‘grunt grunt’ and Empire thought it was the funniest thing ever, meanwhile I was over there waiting for him to hurry up and make dinner. So yeah – oh wait! That reminds me!”

“Do you ever stop talking?” Cameo asked.

“Hm? Nah. Or do I…? Eh, Sometimes. To let other ponies talk.”

Ginger grunted.

“What was that, dear brother?”

Ginger let out a soft chuckle. “Giving others a chance to speak to prove a point does not indicate evidence for any sort of average or behavioral pattern.”

Jona blinked. “…Right.”

“He’s discrediting you,” Cameo said. “Not his best work.”

“I thought it was okay,” Corea added.

“You didn’t fully understand it.”

Corea rolled her eyes. “Uh huh. Right. I didn’t understand that he was poking her for mixing up what she does on the spot for a temporary point?”

Cameo smirked. “Fair enough.”

Corea chuckled.

Applejack smiled contentedly. “Ah’m glad you’re all here.”

Corea smiled back. “Same. It’s nice to see everyone.”

Jona nodded slowly. “We are Apples after all. Even those of us who are quite pointy in parts.”

Cameo rolled her eyes. “I’m pointy in one part.”

“Oh? What about your words? Pretty sharp, hmm?”

Cameo blinked. She didn’t have a comeback for that one.

“How is the wizardin’ goin’?” Applejack asked.

Cameo shrugged. “Good enough. Created a spell for making the perfect pie based on your recipes. Don’t worry, nobody knows how it works yet.”

“Ah would hope not. …Corea?”

“Being the Avatar is difficult,” Corea admitted. “But I also get to see a lot of weird places. Lucky for me the world is at peace right now, and everyone seems to be getting along famously with each other. Tenzin’s even mellowed out and has his own family now!”

“Ah know that. Ah was sent the pictures.” Applejack smirked. “And Ah w-”

Her cutie mark started glowing.

“DUTY CALLS!” Corea blurted. “A quest calls your presence, mother! Fly!”

Jona sighed. “Aw… I was hoping this would last longer.”

Applejack rubbed the back of her head. “Well… Ah’m sorry but Ah have to take this. Y’all keep havin’ lunch. Ah might be gone a few days. So listen to your aunt and uncle. You know the drill.”

Her four children waved her off.

~~~

Renee couldn’t tell anyone why, but she loved cleaning up the castle. She didn’t spruce it up or decorate it anymore – it had already been mostly maximized in that department – but she still would go around and dust from time to time, even though there were janitors to do that sort of thing. It was just something she liked to do.

Even Daniel thought she was crazy. She didn’t mind, though, she just picked up a duster when she felt like it and began to move around. She could easily deal with her duties while dusting unless a crisis came up.

“Overhead! Team Zeta-Five has returned early!” a Ga reported.

“Put them on Earth Coffee, I’m sure they can find something constructive to do there. If not, I suppose I’ll offer them a vacation.”

“Of course.”

Most of her day-to-day decisions were like that anyway. Think for a moment and send ponies on one of many different missions. There were so many. Some required thought on her part to find the best fit or discover what exactly the expedition would be, but others were as simple as randomizing an unexplored world and sending someone there. Easy.

She entered the map room and started dusting the map itself.

Her cutie mark started glowing.

“Oh, well that’s a pleasant surprise.” She pulled out her phone. “Daniel dear, Friendship Problem, you’ll have to handle everything.” Corona’s already out today and shouldn’t need any assistance. We should be fine. “Love you~!”

~~~

“Alright team!” Pinkie said, looking seriously. “I’m about to comically setup the best pranking palooza ever!”

Nova, Vriska, and John Egbert glanced at each other. Nova raised a hoof. “What exactly is a palooza? I’ve been wondering for a while now.”

“Absolutely nothing!” Pinkie laughed. “Regardless, we are the best pranksters around. We should be able to fool the entire city of Ponyville!”

“Why don’t you guys change the name?” John asked. “It’s not a village. Also Ponyville just sounds kinda lame.”

“Ponies will just keep calling it Ponyville anyway,” Nova pointed out. “Plus whatever we did change it to would just become something even more stupid. Like Poneopolis or something.”

“Geez. That is bad.”

Pinkie clapped her hooves. “Prank, remember? We’re going to start by covering main street in an invisible sheet of adhesive, so everyone’s shoes and hooves and feet will be coated in it. A lot of people will notice this, but that’s not the main part of the prank. It’s a distraction!”

Vriska smirked. “A distraction prank for the real one?”

“Sorta. Their feet get sticky, then we introduce a ton of bugs into the system, a-”

Pinkie’s cutie mark started flashing.

Pinkie facehooved. “You guys asked too many questions! I was going to get to the end, say go team, and then get called away but noooo you guys had to ask questions. You ruined everything.”

Nova blinked. “S-sorry!”

John rolled his eyes. “And you’ve just fallen for it.”

“…What?”

“She was pranking us. There wasn’t any more plan to the prank.”

“…Fuck, she got me too,” Vriska said.

Pinkie bowed to John. “You are truly the prank master, John Egbert. This map summons is real though, so I do gotta go. See ya!”

~~~

“-Amen,” Rev said, wrapping up the service. The congregation made its way out of their seats and out the door for the most part, but a few came up to her and said hello or asked a question, which she answered diligently.

She eventually made her way to Flutterfree and Eve. “So, you’re back?” Rev asked Eve.

Eve gestured at Flutterfree. “She convinced me to come. Again.”

“You’re not feeling pressured, are you?” Rev asked.

“Eh… sometimes, though I feel like it’s more self-pressure than anything. She rarely asks and I figured I might as well drop by, learn a little more about this… place.”

Rev nodded. “So, what did you think?”

“Still hard to chew it with what I know about everything else.”

“Well, I can try to answer your questions.”

“Flutterfree does a pretty good job of that,” Eve said.

“I might not always get it right,” Flutterfree pointed out. “That whole thing about miracles a few months ago? Yeah, that was just me being silly.”

Eve chuckled. “I remember. …I guess I want to hear what you have to say about the existence of evil, Rev.”

“Right so, the general answer that ‘good cannot exist without evil’ is stupid,” Rev began. “Don’t believe it for a moment. Everything evil exists because it serves someone’s desires for something good. Pure ‘evil’ entities are a result of the Tower, which sought to produce something good: meaning. Clearly made by those who didn’t believe in a higher power, but that’s a rabbit trail we don’t need to get into right now.”

Eve nodded. “The Tower’s tunnels know no ends.”

Rev continued. “Regardless, the general answer for the existence of evil is because we conscious beings were given free will – a choice. We could choose to follow the good will of God, or we could choose to deny Him and do whatever we wanted, which meant an allowance of evil. Because if there was no evil, well, there wouldn’t be a choice there because we would be perfect beings already. There wouldn’t be an option for an actual relationship, we’d just be robots.”

“Some robots a-”

“You know what I mean, Eve,” Rev said with a smirk. “There are some programmed machines that have no will of their own, even if they may think they do. We were given a choice, and thus, evil exists. That’s a distilled-down version, and there’s a lot of people who question if free will is worth the existence of evil, not to mention the prevalence of ‘grimdark’ in the multiverse, but we’d need to sit down for a longer discussion to get into that. Lunch, maybe.”

“We’re open, right?” Flutterfree asked Eve.

“Sure,” Eve said. “I suppose it’s about time I see what Nova likes so much about arguing with you.”

“I don’t see you arguing as vehemently as Nova,” Rev said with a laugh. “That mare is really stubborn.”

“Don’t I know i-” Eve and Flutterfree’s cutie marks started flashing. Eve chuckled. “Well, guess I won’t be getting to that.”

Rev shrugged. “It probably won’t be as good as the deep conversations I know you have with Flutterfree about it, to be honest. I still hope you’ll think about it.”

“We will have that lunch at some point,” Eve said. “You can count on it.”

“I look forward to it.”

~~~

The six Bearers of the Elements of Harmony stood together in the map room of Renee’s crystal castle.

“So, where are we going?” Rainbow asked.

“If it’s all six of us it must be something big,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“We’re not going offworld,” Renee observed. “That’s still on the map.”

“Other side of the world though,” Applejack commented. “Any idea where that is?”

“Yep!” Pinkie said.

“Tauryl,” Eve said, closing an atlas. “That’s in Tauryl.”

“Tauryl!?” Flutterfree blurted. “I’ve… I’ve never been there.”

“The last independent nation on this planet,” Eve continued. “The centaurs and gargoyles. They only started talking to us at all because of Xeelee interference. Currently, they don’t like anything from outside, but they realize they can’t do anything to us. Their leaders are gruff and decidedly xenophobic, but they’re good enough to their own people. …The last team that was sent there was the ‘Mean Six’ and they did… fine, I suppose, but didn’t exactly leave a good impression.” She furrowed her brow. “We’re being sent to one of their islands, far from their seat of power. So what little I do know about Tauryl culture may not apply there.”

“Heh. Into the unknown again.” Rainbow smirked. “Just like old times?”

“It has been a while since we were all sent on a mission together,” Flutterfree said.

“Then let’s make this the best mission ever!” Pinkie shouted. “We are going to blow the socks off the Tree of Harmony with how well we do this one!”

Renee grinned. “You bet we will. We’ve grown so much since the last time.”

“And we’re still the best of friends!” Pinkie blurted. “Woo!”

“Shame Nova isn’t comin’ too,” Applejack said. “Even if she’s not an Element, she still feels like part of us.”

Eve nodded. “Yeah, I know. But the map chose us, so we are going.” She pulled out her phone. “O’Neill! Think you can teleport the six of us to… this location? Surface-to-ship-to-surface teleportation. All right, tha-”

The teleporter locked onto them, teleported all six of them to the teleporter room of whatever ship O’Neill happened to be on, then down to the island the map had indicated. They appeared on a beach with a sparse dotting of palm trees. There was a tall, black tower of metal that rose to a three-tipped claw far above them. It was the middle of the night since they were on the other side of the planet, revealing a slight red glow from the tower.

“Woah…” Rainbow said.

“One of their defense towers,” Eve said. “They used to destroy any ship, vehicle, or entity they saw coming with these. Now it’s just a dormant memory of what Tauryl used to be.” She glanced around, taking in more of the scenery. She saw a path leading up out of the beach. “This way.”

The six of them trotted along, surprised with how normal everything seemed for the other side of Equis Vitis.

“Maybe we’ve just been exploring too much,” Flutterfree said. “But this doesn’t look very exotic.”

“It’s not that,” Applejack said. “Trust me, Ah’d know. This just seems like a regular beach besides the imposin’ tower.”

They walked along the path out of the beach, soon able to see a town in the distance. Eve executed a teleport to take them right to the edge of it. The buildings were noticeably taller than any pony or human construction, likely because centaurs weren’t exactly short creatures. The buildings were largely made of stone with little decoration on them. Nobody was out and about – but that was to be expected. It was night.

“We need to wait until morning before we start rummaging around,” Renee said. “But it’s chilly out and I’d rather not sit here until dawn.”

Pinkie pointed at a nearby building that had an Inn sign on it. “Bada-boom.”

“What would we do without you?” Flutterfree asked.

“Flounder around. Badly,” Pinkie said with a giggle.

They walked in the front door of the inn. The interior was warmly lit by gas lamps, showing a small lobby with a couple chairs. The stone material of the building gave it a strong, if slightly oppressive, atmosphere. A female centaur sat behind the counter, black and blue fur covering most of her body. Her two horns were thin and slender. She stared at them with a blank expression. “Do you want a room?” she said with a level, disinterested tone.

“Yes,” Eve said, unable to hear her voice inflection, picking up nothing from the centaur due to the aforementioned blank expression. “How much?”

“Thirty crielar per room. It looks like you’ll need two, so sixty.”

“Drat,” Rainbow muttered. “Forgot money existed.”

“I didn’t,” Eve said, unrolling a roll of Tauryl coins – presumably crielar. “Will this work?”

“Thank you for your business,” she said, taking the coins and giving them a pair of keys. “Rooms three and four. They’re adjoined.”

“Thanks,” Eve said, walking down the hall to door three and four, using her magic to unlock both at once. She stepped into room three, taking in the two beds and a recliner that doubled as another bed. There was a large window, a single gas lamp, and a simple table in the room, but there was little in the way of decoration or comfort. Tauryl was not known to be accepting of leisure or technology, so this wasn’t exactly unexpected.

Eve unlocked the adjoining set of doors between the rooms, finding the other one to be nearly identical.

“I call a bed!” Pinkie declared.

“I’ll take a recliner,” Flutterfree said.

“Wait, we’re actually sleeping?” Renee said. “It’s still midday for me! I’m not tired at all!”

“…Oh, right,” Rainbow said, deciding to stop guarding a bed like it was her closest held treasure in the entire world. “…So what do we do, then?”

“Wait,” Applejack said. “Y’know, that thing you do when something’s going to happen in a while?”

Rainbow dash snorted. “Funny.”

“Hey, Eve,” Renee asked. “I didn’t see you grab any coins.”

“I conjured them,” Eve said. “Not that the centaur has to know that.”

“Did the centaur seem odd to anyone else?” Flutterfree asked. “Like she wasn’t all there.”

“It is the middle of the night,” Applejack pointed out. “Ah mean, Ah thought she was odd too, but she might just be tired.”

“Maybe,” Flutterfree said.

“I was expecting a lot more hostility,” Eve admitted. “This far from the center of Tauryl, they probably barely know that the xenophobic practices have changed. Sure, they had one of the towers, and it was disabled, but that wouldn’t mean much to the actual people. They’d still be aggressive… Or they should have been.”

“Maybe because it’s far from the capital they’re nicer?” Renee suggested.

“Or maybe they’ve just run into ponies before and they were nice!” Pinkie said. Then she gasped. “Maybe those ponies were us and we’re about to go back in time!”

Eve rolled her eyes. “I’ve got no plans for that. All I’ve got plans for is to talk with all of you for a while then solve a Friendship Problem.” She smiled. “How have you all been?”

“GREAT!” Pinkie blurted. “But you know that.”

“The tales of your exploits across the multiverse are a highlight of most of my days,” Eve said with a smirk. “Though reading your reports and hearing it from you are different things.”

Pinkie shrugged. “But we don’t have all that much time.”

“I would love personalized reports in person,” Renee said. “But we deal with so much that’s just not possible and only done with pressing matters. My life consists of reading reports, sending people on missions, and dusting.”

“…Dusting?” Applejack said, cocking her head.

“Dusting. I like dusting. It’s a hobby of mine.”

“Did Aradia get to you or something?” Pinkie asked with a chuckle.

“What? No. Why would you a-” Renee blinked. “Oh, right, the whole ‘Handmaid’ thing.”

“It is a little weird if you know her,” Pinkie said.

Eve chuckled. “When I first saw her doing it back before the bowling ball, I was enthralled. Now when I see her in the halls of Canterlot I just give her this look.” She put on a grumpy glare mixed with an eyebrow raise. “And then she laughs and disappears.”

“You spend a lot of time in Canterlot, huh?” Applejack asked.

Eve nodded. “Yep. It’s my home now, though I do spend a significant amount of time in other universes. Political discussions, establishing relations. I talk to a lot of people every day. Good thing I learned to do that a long time ago, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes,” Renee said. “Can you imagine still being your bookworm antisocial self and being Overhead of Relations?”

“I’d be Overhead of Research then and you know it.”

“Not Oversight?” Rainbow asked.

“Oversight is too legalistic.”

“Egghead Twi would not have had a problem with that,” Rainbow said, “Like, at all.”

Eve rolled her eyes with a smirk. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

“Applejack, how’s the farm?” Flutterfree asked.

“Goin’ good,” Applejack said. “Not as much profit from just growin’ apples anymore, but we’ve got some great processing of zap apples and cider now. Ponyville’s large enough that we stay busy with just those. Gotta say, didn’t think magitech would help much back in the day, but year-round cider has been good for everyone.”

“Thank Celestia, the Tower, and all the gods who listen!” Rainbow said, throwing her hooves up. “The cider never runs dry!”

“The family’s getting’ real big too. Like, real big.” Applejack chuckled to herself. “Ah think Ah know what Granny Smith felt like when she was young.”

“We aren’t exactly young anymore,” Renee pointed out. “Late sixties, all of us. If we weren’t immortal we’d be halfway to the finish line.”

“Thank goodness for golden shiny blood!” Rainbow said with a laugh. “Works wonders!”

Flutterfree nodded. “Sure does.”

“Oh, guys, guys,” Rainbow smirked. “Prism invented a cannon that can shoot you to the moon.”

“While impressive, I question why,” Eve said.

“Because it’s awesome, that’s why!”

“In the future, she shall be known as the inventor of awesome!” Pinkie giggled.

“Oh yeah!”

“How are the Wonderbolts these days?” Eve asked.

“We bounce between Renee and O’Neill for special missions,” Rainbow said. “It’s a little tiring to be in charge all the time - but it’s so worth it. I’ve whipped us into shape for stopping baddies, villains, and other things.” Rainbow smirked. “It’s a little interesting, being the special task force rather than a bunch of explorers. But we still get to do the stunt shows. …Basically my life is packed and it’s awesome.”

“Hard to imagine you used to spend all your time sleeping on clouds,” Flutterfree said.

“Heh. Right back at you. Hard to imagine you as the same pony, given everything.”

Flutterfree summoned Lolo, planning to use the Stand as a way to further the conversation. But the moment she fully activated it, the entire hotel vanished and they fell to the dirt ground. It was still night – but the entire town was gone. Instead there was a jungle filled with alien plant shapes, mysterious flashing lights that appeared and disappeared through the trees, and a mysterious eerie wind.

“This is more like it!” Pinkie cheered.

“…I liked that bed,” Renee pouted.

“Right, so, I guess the entire town wasn’t real,” Eve said, clicking her tongue absentmindedly. “Huh. Flutterfree?”

“Alien forest is real,” Flutterfree said, spreading Lolo out far. “Not finding much else. Still expanding Lolo though.”

Eve put her hoof to her eyes, lighting her left eye up with the power of Light. “The tower is still there, so we are on the island we teleported to. I can tell that this forest is what naturally grows here. And aside from a few interesting facts about the plants – the three-pronged one is deadly poisonous – I’m not seeing much to go off of.” She set her eye back to normal, scanning for magic sources. “Large ambient magic. I suspect a signal masking spell is in place. Anyone else got anything?”

They shook their heads.

“Right. Pinkie, Awareness telling you anything?”

“Adventure, single chapter,” Pinkie said. “We’re the only ones being focused on, so it’s a story about the six of us. Chapter title is ‘The Elements of Harmony’ so that makes sense. We’ve spent the rest of our time here re-establishing ourselves and our lives. So I’d guess the actual adventure is about to start.” She licked the roof of her mouth. “Existence tastes like raspberries today…”

“Any indication what this adventure is going to be?”

Pinkie shrugged. “I dunno. I’m not Starbeat, I can’t give you ‘levels of importance’ or ‘the flow of ka’, all I’ve got for you is little inklings.” She thought for a while. “Hrm… I’m getting a sense that something’s about to go wrong.”

“No surprise there,” Renee said.

“Yeah, it’s n-” Pinkie’s pupils dilated and her cheerful smile fell. “Uh oh.”

“That’s a bad ‘uh oh’,” Rainbow said.

“Yeeeeah this is going to be a brutal o-” A collection of bones held together by dark fire appeared from nowhere, grabbed Pinkie, and pulled her into the forest.

The five mares wasted no time at all, charging after their friend. They may not have been able to see Pinkie or the thing that had taken her, but Lolo could. Everyone followed Flutterfree, dashing through the woods without care for all the scrapes and bruises they were receiving from stumbling through unknown terrain.

“Flutterfree!” Eve called, running up to be alongside her. “How far ahead?”

“Thirty meters.”

“Straight?”

“Straight.”

“Prepare for teleport!” Eve shouted, lighting her horn. In a flash of purple magic they were precisely thirty meters ahead, right next to the creature of bones and shadow. It was exceptionally hard to see in the dark, but Eve was able to get a general idea with her special eye. It was a blob of burning black sludge with the skeleton of a creature inside, but all the bones were in the wrong places. Hands were next to legs, the skull was near the pelvis, and the horns were on opposite sides of the sludge.

Pinkie was held within the sludge, the shape of her mane indicating it was very wet in there, and not as scalding as the black flames on the outside suggested.

Eve summoned Seraphim. Gravity next to the sludge increased tenfold – enough to force the amorphous sludge to the ground in a flat puddle barely cohesive enough to keep the bones in check.

Rainbow Dash flew in next, the winds of Breath swirling a tornado pattern around Pinkie, tearing her out of the blackness. Flutterfree shot the darkness with her bow of light for good measure. It writhed in pain – and fled, leaving the six of them alone.

“What on Equis was that!?” Renee blurted.

“Something undead,” Eve said, moving to go check on Pinkie. Rainbow was currently blowing the rest of the black sludge off her using the winds of Breath.

Eve noticed Pinkie’s mane wasn’t poofing back up.

“Pinks?” Rainbow asked. “You okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be, Dashie?” Pinkie said, twitching. “I’ve just about been eaten by an undead sludge monster!”

“Pinkie, calm down,” Rainbow said, putting her hooves on her shoulders. “I don’t know what happened to you in there, but it clearly wasn’t good. You’re fine now, okay?”

“Oh, I’m better than fine!” Pinkie pulled a knife out of her mane.

“P-”

She drove it right into Rainbow’s neck, sending blood flying over her own pink face. “See? Totally fine.”

Rainbow’s pink eyes locked on Pinkie’s own blue irises. She extended a wing – and then fell over.

Flutterfree screamed, backing away. Deep within her, the Rage rose… but she couldn’t bring herself to use it against Pinkie.

Pinkie turned to the rest of them, juggling the knife. “So, who’s next? This doesn’t end without me killing you all, y’know. I suppose there’s a chance you can stop me, but…”

Eve activated Seraphim despite her shock, forcing gravity to increase dramatically next to Pinkie. First ten times, then a hundred, than a thousand. The ground literally crumbled away beneath her – but the pink party pony remained standing.

“Reality is just a suggestion!” Pinkie chuckled. She rushed Eve. Eve raised a shield, but Pinkie appeared behind her, knife raised.

Lolo wrapped around Pinkie’s knife, tearing it from her hoof. Pinkie was in the air, holding another knife aimed at Flutterfree’s neck. Applejack opted to just buck Pinkie in the side to protect Flutterfree. The pink pony went flying, but she didn’t care. She just bounced back to her hooves and laughed.

“Stop,” Renee ordered, her eyes glowing a slight teal shade. The Sylph of Mind lit her horn, worming her way into Pinkie’s own consciousness. It was a terrifying place, but Renee wasn’t a god-tier player of Mind, so she couldn’t read – she could only heal. She put her own mental energy into Pinkie.

Pinkie froze in place, her face twitching. “I… Er… I… Ahahahaha!” She pulled another knife out of her mane, but then dropped it, looking at her hoof in horror. Then she picked it back up and readied to throw it, but her other hoof knocked it out of her grip.

“What’s goin’ on!?” Applejack blurted.

“I don’t know!” Renee said. “She’s got something altering her mind continually! All I can do is keep her conflicted! Everything I do is undone a second later!”

Eve lit her horn. “Keep it up for just a little longer.” She lit her eye up. “I’ll find a way to contain her.”

Pinkie tried to get off a quip, but with Renee’s influence the sentence came out as a series of gurgles and panicked breaths.

How to contain Pinkie Pie… Eve thought to herself, scrolling through her knowledge of spells and dimensions. She operates even in standard physics, so that won’t work… Magical chains will keep her for a limited time, but that might not be enough… She can break any rule… So a self-perpetuating sealant spell affixed to her soul might do it. Might. She’ll be able to get out if she seriously wants… But it’s all I’ve got right now.

Eve cast her spell. Magical cuffs and chains appeared around Pinkie’s neck, midsection, and all four legs. She was tied up and turned upside-down, legs in the air. For good measure Eve enchanted her to be stuck to a boulder.

Pinkie growled. “You think this can hold me!?”

“For a while,” Eve said. “That’s all we need.”

Pinkie struggled, but she remained fixed to the boulder and tied in all the chains. “MMMF!”

“Rainbow!” Flutterfree shouted. Now that the fight was over she ran over to the blue pegasus. She pressed a wing to the side of her neck that wasn’t just a huge gash. “There’s no pulse!”

Applejack walked over and gulped. “She’s… She’s dead.”

Everyone except Pinkie turned to Eve.

Eve nodded slowly. “I’ll try it. Renee, be ready if she… if she…”

“Comes Back Wrong?”

Eve gulped, the slightest motion of her head telling Renee yes. She stood over Rainbow’s body and spread her wings, the magic sparkles in her mane flashing. She surrounded herself in a white aura, coalescing the energy into her horn. The white beam surrounded Rainbow’s body, filling her with the revive spell.

Eve had never learned much in the way of healing or holy magic, like Corona had. But she had made sure she knew the revive spell in case of a situation like this.

The gash in Rainbow’s neck sealed up awkwardly, but enough to be stable. The life slowly seeped back into Rainbow’s eyes.

The pegasus coughed up some blood and groaned.

There was a series of relieved sighs. Flutterfree closed her eyes and murmured “thank you.”

“Oh look at that, you brought her back!” Pinkie jeered. “Lucky you!”

Rainbow stood up and coughed, dusting herself off. She turned to Pinkie with sad eyes.

“That’s right! I killed you! Cause I’m craaaaazy!” She laughed.

Rainbow walked up to her, expression unreadable, one side of her body still covered in the red stains of her own blood. She stopped just short of the boulder.

“Come to get your revenge? C’mon, it’ll feel great.”

Rainbow put a wing around Pinkie. “We’re gonna fix you, Pinks. Don’t you worry.”

“W-WHAT!? I… Gah, you’re all missing the point! I’m crazy murderpony!”

“Uh, yeah,” Rainbow said. “So? You’re still our friend. We’re going to help you through this no matter how dangerous you are. Right girls?”

“Right,” the other four said without hesitation.

Rainbow coughed again. “Aw man, Eve, I don’t think you healed that up very well…”

“I’m not a healer!” Eve blurted. “I… I did what I could.”

“Yeah. Thanks, by the way. Still feel like crud.”

“...Your ability to recover from the situation so quickly astounds me,” Renee admitted.

“I didn’t spend however long staring at my dead body, so… I might have an advantage here?” She rubbed the back of her head. “Sorry if I seem to be brushing this off. …Anyway, Pinkie. How do we help her? Renee?”

“I already tried. Something’s actively tormenting her mind.”

“Maybe I’ve just found my true self!” Pinkie blurted.

“Yeah, no, if that were the case you wouldn’t have been so conflicted when I was healing you. Something’s influencing you.”

“And just her,” Eve said, looking around with her eye. “None of us are affected.”

“We need to get her to some other Pinkies,” Flutterfree said. “So she doesn’t slip out when we’re all blinking simultaneously.”

Eve nodded, pulling out her phone. She tried to dial O’Neill – but got no service. She narrowed her eyes. “…This entire universe should have service…”

“Wasn’t Seraphim working?” Renee asked.

Eve created a portal using Seraphim and poked her head through. She passed through the portal like it didn’t exist, remaining on the island. She tried to teleport away next, but just appeared elsewhere on the island. She teleported back, shaking her head. “We’re stuck.”

“Isn’t that always how it goes?” Pinkie pointed out. “You get stuck by some mysterious force! Who knows, maybe it’s me this time? Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Right, so we can’t leave,” Eve said. “Can’t heal Pinkie here… So we have to find the undead sludge monster and figure out what it’s doing. Flutterfree?”

Flutterfree closed her eyes, tapping into Lolo. “I don’t have much on it.”

“I can try to track it magically, but everything’s scrambled here,” Eve admitted. “My eye will probably help. Bring information to Light, as it were. Renee, is your telekinesis strong enough to lift that boulder?”

Renee looked at the boulder and bit her lip. “…Yes, but it will be a significant strain.”

“We have to take her with us and I don’t want to detach her.”

“I’ll do it Eve, don’t worry. Just don’t expect me to be doing much in the way of fighting.”

Eve nodded. “Rainbow?”

“I’m not leaving Pinkie’s side,” Rainbow said, saluting with a wing. “I’ll watch ‘em both.”

Eve forced a smile. “Good. Follow me. Tap me if you need my attention – I’ll be fixated on the path ahead of us.” She scanned the area ahead of her as the Witch of Light, following the black creature’s escape trail. The rest followed behind her, their faces set and determined. The smiles that had been present prior had mostly fallen, replaced not with despondence but with a feeling of urgency and importance.

This mission was just getting started, and all of them knew it.

Pinkie kept laughing. “Hey giiiiirls! What’s walking into a death trap? That’s right, all of us! It’s gonna be great! There won’t be any balloons, but pff, not all parties need balloons!”

Rainbow fixed Pinkie with an intense stare. “Hey, Pinkie, I know the good you is in there somewhere. We’re not going to hold any of this against you, k? So if you’re beating yourself up in there, don’t.”

“I’m going to kill you all.”

“Well I’ve already been killed!” Rainbow smirked. “So guess I’m safe!”

Pinkie twitched. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m awesome.”

“And there it is,” Renee said, grunting because of her exertion on the boulder. “The ego that never goes away, even post-traumatic experience.”

Applejack chuckled. “Heh. That’s our Rainbow. Smart-mouthin’ even after the end.”

“I am now best zombie, no contest,” Rainbow said with an exaggerated bow.

Flutterfree walked back to the group around the floating boulder. “Hey, Applejack, Eve wants you to be on Pinkie for a minute while Rainbow gets an bird’s eye view of everything. That good?”

Applejack nodded. “Fine by me. Rainbow?”

“On it!” Rainbow said, flying into the sky with a burst of wind.

Pinkie chuckled. “Hey Aaaaaaaplejaaaaaaack…” she whispered. “Got somethin’ to tell you…”

Applejack raised an eyebrow, putting her face closer to Pinkie. “Ah’m listening, though Ah’m also expectin’ this to either be a trap or some cruel joke o’ yours.”

“Oh, it might be both. See, I’m going to tell you something completely one hundred percent true, no bamboozle. And you’re going to hate it.” She giggled. “The only way to stop me from killing another one of you is to kill me. If you don’t, I will kill one of you again. It is certain.”

“Mhm,” Applejack said, grunting. “Great talk.”

“What are you gonna do, huh? Kill me? Or are you going to pretend like I didn’t say anything?”

Applejack blinked. “Ah’m gonna talk to Eve about it and see what she thinks. Ah’m not makin’ that decision alone.”

Pinkie blinked.

“Waitin’ for Rainbow to come back though, y’know, since Ah’m supposed to be watchin’ you.”

Pinkie’s left eye twitched. “Not even fazed…”

Rainbow returned, tapping Eve to get her attention.. “Yeah, there’s nothing on this entire island besides that tower. Not even sure who could build it, or why. There’s nothing for Tauryl to defend here!”

“Lighthouse principle, maybe?” Eve asked. “Destroy the ships coming to the mainland from a distance?”

Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Dunno. All I know is that this island is abandoned, dark, has a creepy glowing tower, and is very hard to see through. That canopy is thick.”

“Got it. How are you feeling, after that fly?”

“Eh, I still feel like puking my guts out, but nothing too bad. I probably shouldn’t be using my neck too much. How about you?”

“Still following the trail,” Eve reported.

“Keep it up.” She flew back to Pinkie. “You’re free, AJ. What’d you get up to?”

Applejack nodded. “A lot of creepy talkin’.”

“Oh yeah, figures.”

Pinkie groaned. “Why are you so amiable!? Be freaked out!”

“I’m barely holding onto my sanity,” Rainbow admitted. “But hey, why would I make it worse by freaking out?”

Pinkie said nothing.

Applejack took the opportunity to trot up to Flutterfree and Eve. “Uh, hey Eve?”

“She’s, uh, not looking right now,” Flutterfree said. “Tracking.”

“Well Ah just heard somethin’ from Pinkie she’s gotta hear.”

Flutterfree noticed the urgency in Applejack’s voice and nodded. She tapped Eve’s shoulder with her wing and then gestured toward Applejack.

“Hm?” Eve said.

“Pinkie’s just told me that, unless we kill her, she’s gonna kill one of us. Ah believe her when she said it was a certainty. Figured you’d need to know.”

“…Ah…” Eve bit her lip.

“Ah suggest we keep doin’ what we’ve been doin’. I ain’t gonna kill her unless she asks me to in her right mind. Ah can’t be sure it was really necessary otherwise.”

“That’s true,” Eve said. “Difficult situation… I’ll make sure everyone knows. Ahem. Everpony!?”

Everypony turned to her, stopping their motions.

“So, Pinkie’s probably going to get out and kill one of us,” Eve said. “We know that the only way to prevent this is to kill her. AJ and I agree that we shouldn’t do that. I presume you all agree, but you needed to be made aware.”

Renee sighed. “It’s difficult, but it’s the only real decision.”

Rainbow nodded. “Not her fault, she doesn’t deserve to be offed for it. Even if she does go after one of us.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Looks like it’s unanimous.”

“That’s a small comfort, at least,” Applejack said.

“GAH!” Pinkie shouted. “That’s it, you’re all going to pay for your stupid, stupid friendship. Now.”

“Incoming!” Eve shouted, preparing a complex series of spells. The shadowy creature flew at them, burning through the air like it was nothing. Eve shot at it and tapped into Seraphim to induce a point of Absolute Zero within the creature. Parts of it froze – but other parts of it lashed out at Pinkie, tearing her free from the boulder.

This time the creature didn’t run – it just teleported away in a flash of darkness. When the darkness had cleared, Pinkie was already free with a knife in her hoof.

She whirled onto Renee, driving the knife into her shoulder. “Gotch-”

Renee pulled her into a hug. The motion made Applejack, Rainbow, Flutterfree, and Eve freeze.

Pinkie stabbed Renee again. She let out a cry of pain, but refused to let go of Pinkie.

Pinkie stabbed her again. This time there was no cry, just a whimper, her hooves still hung around Pinkie’s neck.

“Jus… Jus…” There were tears peeking out the corners of Pinkie’s eyes, despite her enraged face. “What is… wrong with you ponies!?”

“W-whatever you are… you aren’t… Pinkie…” Renee gasped. “Pinkie… it’s okay. Just…” Renee got a surge of strength to pull Pinkie closer. “Just take this. It’s all I can do.”

Pinkie drove the knife into one of Renee’s eyes. The white hooves stayed around Pinkie’s neck much longer than they should have.

Pinkie let out a laugh. “I… I’ve got one! I… I…” She curled into a ball and started rocking back and forth, giggling to herself. “I, no you, no me, no them, I… Heheheheheheheh….”

Eve had the imprisonment spell ready, but she knew from a glance at Pinkie it was no longer necessary. She wasn’t going to be doing anything for a while. She lowered her horn.

Rainbow ran to Pinkie, putting a wing around her. Pinkie didn’t respond to the touch – she just kept laughing. Laughing while crying, not realizing the world was around her.

Eve sighed. “Flutterfree, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to do it this time.”

Flutterfree gulped. She drew the bow of light and pointed it right at Renee’s head. “R-ready.”

Eve removed the knife from Renee’s eye and disintegrated the offending weapon. Only then did she tap into the revive spell, flooding Renee’s body with holy magic. The knife wounds sealed up, and the area that had once been her eye caked over. She took in a sharp breath.

Then she let out a scream.

Eve took a few steps back. “N-no…”

Flutterfree bit back, tears pouring out of her eyes. “Don’t make me do this Renee… Don’t…”

The screaming stopped, replaced by hurried breathing. She slowly stood up and gulped. She picked up her hat, dusted it of, and put it on her head. “I… guess I’m back.”

Flutterfree rushed her into a hug. “Oh thank you thank you thank you thank you.”

“Ahah…” Renee said, shaking her head. “...B-back off.” She tore Flutterfree off of her.

Flutterfree stared at her in betrayal. “W-what?”

“You… you always say there’s something after. Always. There… There was nothing Flutterfree! Absolutely nothing!”

“…How exactly do you remember nothing?” Rainbow asked.

“SHUT UP!” Renee shouted, pointing a hoof at Flutterfree. “Have you been lying to us? You’ve been dead before! How could you do that to us?”

Flutterfree wiped the tears off her face. “Renee, I understand you’re upset…”

“Upset!? Upset!? That’s the understatement of the century! There was nothing there Flutterfree! Not even fire! Just emptiness!”

Flutterfree forced herself to keep a calm gaze with Renee. “Renee, you’re worrying everyone.”

“Worrying? Who the hell cares?! I’m talking to you. There’s something wrong with you!”

“I’m sorry you believe that.”

Renee twitched. “Maybe you just think I went to the ‘bad place’? Maybe your Hell is just expansive nothingness, is that it?”

“…No.”

“Then what!?”

Flutterfree gulped. “I think you weren’t destined to die today, so you didn’t go anywhere.”

“That’s not what it felt like.”

Flutterfree struggled to keep her features calm, though the tears hadn’t stopped. “Renee… You’re stressed. You just experienced something horrible. I’ve experienced it too. It’s never pleasant. But please, just stop.”

“No! You know what, here it goes. Your beliefs are outrageous! You believe in some human savior that may or may not have existed in a first universe, and that there is a God out there who loves every little creation in this screwed up existence! That’s absurd! There it is! Always thought so, always have, always will! Stop being so goddamned comforted by it!”

Flutterfree winced. “I… If… If that’s what you think. I’m not going to stop you. Or judge you. But I’ll do what I want. …And I’ll still be your friend, despite that.”

“What the hell is wrong with you!?”

Flutterfree blinked. “You’re not Renee.”

Rainbow facehooved. “Looks like it’s out of Pinkie and in her now, great.”

“Ha-HA!” Pinkie blurted, sitting straight up. “I see the upper echelons! Today is a portent! Oh would you look at that! Please forget please forget please forget…” She fell back into Rainbow’s lap, shuddering.

Renee glanced at all the suddenly understanding faces. None of them were truly upset or angry anymore. She saw Eve creating the imprisonment spell for her.

“Screw this,” Renee muttered. She passed out onto the ground.

Flutterfree walked up to her, placing a hoof to her neck. “…I have a pulse.”

“Was that… ‘Coming Back Wrong’?” Rainbow asked.

“Not of the sort we usually talk about,” Eve said, furrowing her brow. “I think whatever this thing tormenting us is, it intercepted the revival. Somehow.”

Renee opened her eye. She laughed for a moment, but her eye flashed the teal of Mind, bringing her expression to a more reasonable one of confusion. “Wh-what happened?”

“The thing that got Pinkie got to you,” Flutterfree said. “You said some… really offensive things to me.”

Renee looked away guiltily.

“…You actually do think it’s silly, don’t you?”

“I, well…”

Flutterfree hugged her. “It’s okay. You can think what you want.”

Renee gulped. “I... You still have my support, Flutterfree. Always. I don’t care if you believed we were all secretly banana slugs in a paradise world living other lives.” She pulled her closer. “It’s not silly.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Thank you for saying so.”

“WOOHOO! Driving up the anger meter!” Pinkie shouted, ruining the moment. “What will we think of next? Destruction? Desolation?”

Renee sighed, pulling herself back from Flutterfree. She adjusted her hat. “Well, I’m down an eye. Quite painful, actually.”

“You did get it worse than I did,” Rainbow admitted. “But hey, at least we’re all back now. …Even if Pinkie has lost it.”

Renee walked over to Pinkie. “…Maybe now…?”

“You can try,” Applejack said.

Renee walked up to Pinkie. Her remaining eye flashed teal again, and she caressed Pinkie’s head. “There there… You can come back to us.”

Pinkie’s laughing died down. Her psychotic smile was replaced with a warm one, and her mane poofed up slightly – not back to full, but not fully straight. “Huh. Guess you got me back.” She hugged Renee. “Thanks!”

“Pinkie, hate to interrupt you now that you’ve just gotten back,” Applejack said, “but do you know anything new?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah… I forgot a lot of it. But I’m not going to get a chance to tell you all of it.” She turned to Eve with sad eyes. “I’m so sorry. I can’t do anything to stop what’s coming next.”

Eve gulped. “…Yeah… Each of you have had a struggle. It’s my turn, isn’t it?”

Pinkie smiled at her. “Just be strong, Eve. Whatever you do, I believe in you.”

“We all do,” Flutterfree said, putting a wing around her.

Eve nodded. She felt the warmth of the sun behind her – it had finally started to rise.

Then she wasn’t in the jungle anymore. She was on the beach they had first arrived in. Out on the ocean, the sun was rising, casting a beautiful pattern of light on the water.

Between her and the sun was the black creature – but it wasn’t a formless blob anymore. It had taken the form of a dragon-sized centaur skeleton held together by the black, burning sludge. In front of it were five bubbles, each one containing one of her friends.

Eve blinked. Déjà vu.

The creature spoke with a surprisingly normal sounding, but deep, voice. “There is something very wrong with all of you,” the creature growled.

Eve glared at it. “Let my friends go. I may not be able to escape this island, but I can give you a taste of a particularly nasty reality somewhat easily.”

“Threats. You think they’re valid. They probably are, though know you are only able to do that by a loophole I did not forsee. Regardless, here is a choice, Eve.”

“What, going to make me give you my magic in exchange for them?”

“I have no use for your magic. You simply have to choose – one of your friends is going to die, and they will be taken so you may not attempt to revive them. Take your pick. Also, try to move against me and they all die, just in case you had some sort of plan there.”

Eve stared right into the empty eye-sockets of the centaur’s skull. “Me.”

Rainbow gasped. “Eve! You can’t!”

“She can’t choose any of us either,” Applejack said.

“You can’t offer yourself,” the creature said, leaning it. “That would ruin the purpose of this exercise.”

“Then select at random,” Eve said.

“Also against the purpose. You have to choose a friend, Eve. Who do you think needs to die?”

Eve glared at the skeletal centaur, tears rolling down her eyes. “Why?”

“Maybe I’ll answer that after you make your choice.”

“Do I have your word that all the rest of us will survive?”

The creature leaned in. “You have my word, pony. Now choose! Who will it be? The pink murderer? The boring apple pony? The egotistical hotshot? The special buttery vampire? The seamstress turned politician? Which one is your least favorite? Choose, and let everyone else know.”

Eve looked at her friends, spending the longest time gazing at Flutterfree. She shifted her sights to the monster tormenting them. “I have decided.”

The beast chuckled. “Yes…?”

“If I have to make this decision, in order to be as fair as possible to all the others… I have to choose the pony whose loss will hurt me the most.” She gulped. “Flutterfree? I-”

“I know,” Flutterfree said, putting a hoof up to the edge of her bubble. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be somewhere better.”

The other four ponies couldn’t say anything. All but Applejack were crying profusely.

Eve choked. “…Take Flutterfree. Take Flutterfree you bastard!”

Flutterfree’s sphere was dunked into the ocean, out of sight of any of her friends. The other four bubbles popped, dropping Pinkie, Rainbow, Rarity, and Applejack on the sands of the beach.

They all rushed Twilight into a hug. There were no dry eyes – but Eve was suffering a pain deeper than any of the others. Her weeping sounded more like gasps of pain and agony. It was a bitter, deep sadness that tore at her core.

And all four of them were there through it all.

“What… the hell… is wrong with you!?” the centaur monster shouted. “What the… why won’t you break!?”

Since Eve was in no condition to speak, Pinkie took point. “BECAUSE FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC YOU IDIOT! GET IT IN YOUR THICK, SHADOWY SKULL! NO BAD GUY IS GOING TO TEAR US APART NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO! OUR BOND IS TOO STRONG! DO YOU HEAR ME? DO YOU HEAR ME!?”

The centaur skeleton stared at her.

He lifted his hand, raising Flutterfree’s bubble out of the ocean. She was still inside it, a confused expression on her face.

“FLUTTERS!” Eve shouted, her mood turning a complete one-eighty. She teleported herself to the bubble and tore it open, squeezing Flutterfree like a plush toy. “Never… I never…”

Flutterfree hugged her back. Renee had to drag the two of them back to shore with her magic they were so engrossed in each other’s presence.

The smiles returned to all six of them while the creature just watched them. Unmoving.

Eventually, Eve let go of Flutterfree and wiped her eyes. “There’s more to do.”

Flutterfree nodded, taking a few steps back.

Her five friends behind her, Eve turned to glare at the creature. “What is your deal!? Why did you do this!? What was the point!?!”

“I was supposed to show you how worthless friendship was. I was supposed to prove to myself that it was worthless.”

“Yeah, well that didn’t happen!” Eve shouted.

“Clearly.”

“Now why did you want to do that!? The explanation better be good! Actually, screw it, no matter what the explanation is I’m still going to be livid.”

The undead centaur folded his arms. “I lived in Tauryl until a few years ago. When the borders opened, and ponies started coming in with all their wares, their culture, and their friendship. It sickened me how much it was a perversion of reality. Of the strong. Of the…” He paused and shook his head. “I couldn’t stand it. I found this empty island and decided I would spend the rest of my undeath alone, in a world that I created. I was happy here, where everything was the way it was supposed to be.”

“And then we showed up.”

“AND THEN YOU SHOWED UP!” he shouted. “I knew from the moment you arrived who you were. Those SIX. Those SIX I had heard so much about. Those paragons of friendship and harmony. I almost killed you then and there, wiping you out of existence without a thought. But then I figured I would enjoy turning your own friendship against you much more. I would drive every one of you past your limit! I would break you apart and then kill you! BUT… But…”

“But our friendship was stronger than you thought,” Eve said, expression softening slightly.

“YES! Laughter just kept laughing, even after she went mad! Loyalty was exceedingly loyal even to the one who killed her! Honesty didn’t even hesitate when given delicate information! Generosity gave even to the brink of death! Kindness couldn’t bring herself to even shout back at the person she knew so well! And freaking Magic somehow managed to make a correct decision in the impossible game!” He grabbed his head. “HOW!?”

“Friendship is magic,” Eve said. “Actually… no. That’s not the answer. The answer is just friendship. There doesn’t even have to be magic. We’re just six friends who would do almost anything for each other. I know there are things that would tax – and possibly ruin – our friendship, but a series of trials is not one of them. We stand together even when it gets difficult. That’s what you need to understand. Maybe something is wrong with us. It could be a weakness in many situations. But it didn’t break. You can’t break it by trying to tear us apart.”

The centaur skeleton stared at them. “I admit my defeat. Your friendship is strong. There may be something to it after all. …You have my respect.”

And then he vanished.

The flanks of all six of them started glowing, signifying a job well done.

“YES!” Rainbow shouted. “Holy Celestia am I glad that one’s over.”

Flutterfree let out a sigh of relief. “You can say that again.”

Renee looked at the blood all over her white coat. “…I think we’ve probably been traumatized again.”

Eve nodded slowly. “Yeah… Yeah we have. But at least this time, we stayed together until the bitter end.”

“It’s what needed to happen,” Applejack said. “That’s why we were sent here. To be driven through Tartarus and prove to him he was wrong.”

“Didn’t even get to know his name…” Pinkie said, furrowing her brow.

“Think he’ll try to go and make some friends now?” Flutterfree asked.

“I don’t know,” Eve said. “I don’t know if I want him to. The Tree of Harmony wanted him to see… but I’m not sure I can forgive him for what he’s done to us.”

“It’s a good thing he decided to just leave, then,” Applejack commented.

“…Let’s go home,” Renee said. “…I’d like to go home.”

~~~

A few days later…

Rainbow Dash and Applejack watched their kids talk to each other from across the room.

“Y’know, Ah thought about them a lot,” Applejack said. “Thought about what they’d do if we didn’t make it off that island.”

Rainbow opened her mouth to offer her usual egotistical comment – but she stopped herself. She shook her head slowly. “When I died there… I thought about something really, really stupid.”

“Oh?”

“It was how I’d never get to ride Prism’s rocket to the moon. I’d never get to experience the thing she’d built. I felt like a terrible mother for some reason. I woke up, alive again, and forgot completely about it thanks to the literal pain in the neck – but that’s the last thing I remember thinking.”

“Huh. That’s not stupid, Rainbow.”

“Feels oddly selfish, but not at the same time. I dunno.” Rainbow shrugged.

“Ah wonder what my last thoughts will be…”

“Not something you know until it happens. At this point I’m wondering if mine are just going to be ‘here I go again’.”

“…Was Renee right about the nothingness?”

Rainbow shook her head. “I think that was just flaming, black, and ugly messing with hear head. I don’t remember anything like that. I’ve passed out from blood loss before. It felt almost exactly like that.”

“Like sleepin’?”

“Like sleeping after getting hit in the head with an anvil. So not exactly pleasant.”

“Hm,” Applejack said, looking down. “Are we really as strong as we think we are?”

“Of course we are, AJ, we wouldn’t be this far if we weren’t!” Rainbow nudged Applejack with her hoof, prompting a slight chuckle. The two hoofbumped and kept watching their children.

~~~

Renee knocked on Flutterfree’s cottage door.

Flutterfree opened it with a smile. “Oh, Renee! I wasn’t expecting you!”

“…Are you free for a… talk?” Renee asked.

Flutterfree glanced over her shoulder at Discord. “Discord, do you mind?”

Discord shrugged, teleporting away with a snap of his fingers.

“Yes, I’m free.”

“Good,” Renee said, breathing deeply. She sat herself on one of the couches while Flutterfree took one opposite. There was already warm tea on the table.

Renee lifted one to her face. She had gotten a replacement eye after the incident. It functioned exactly like her old eye, but it was a slightly off color and just slightly too reflective for an actual eyeball. People had already looked at her face feeling unnerved and unable to tell her why they did. So she had taken to wearing glasses that purposefully reflected a minor glare to anyone looking directly at her, blurring the image of her eyes just enough so nobody could tell the difference. The only downside was that the glasses needed to be larger than she was used to when sewing, but she was Renee. She had crafted the lenses into sideways teardrop shapes with a dulled ruby-red frame. Reminiscent of her old sewing glasses.

“So… What did you want to talk about?”

“I… Yes, I’ve always thought what you did was a little silly – but it’s harmless, and in fact might do some good from what I’ve seen. I want to make that clear.”

Flutterfree nodded. “You want me to explain it to you, don’t you? So you can understand?”

Renee smiled warmly. “Yes. Yes, please do.”

“Don’t feel pressured by any of this, okay?”

“Oh, trust me, I won’t.”

Flutterfree sipped her tea. “In that case, it’s best we start from the beginning…”

~~~

Pinkie and Eve were watching the sun set on an alien world with seventeen moons of different colors.

“…Pinkie, that was it, wasn’t it?”

Pinkie nodded. “I… I think so.”

Eve sighed. “Everything’s going to change. And we don’t know how long we have.”

“A month? Years? Yeah, I have no idea,” Pinkie shook her head. “All I know is that I’ve had an immense sense of foreboding since that island. A horrendous, deep, burning sensation. Different than the Pinkie Sense.”

Eve gulped. “I… I’ve had that feeling too. I’ve heard some things from Twilence… It’s sooner than we’d like. Our friendship is going to be taxed, Pinkie. It’s going to be taxed harder than that island.”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. Then she pulled Eve into a hug. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Eve reciprocated the gesture of affection. A tear rolled down her cheek onto Pinkie’s back.

The two stayed until the sun completely set and the world dropped into darkness.

099 - Clay Universes

Giorno Giovanna had an office, but it wasn’t on Celestia City, the Hub, or even Earth Stand. It was in a pocket dimension not listed in any directory. Not even the other Overheads knew where to find it, because he would always come to them if they needed to talk, not the other way around.

However, occasionally one of the agents of his Intelligence Division would need to speak with him somewhere discreetly. The office was the best place to do that.

Today, Olivia had said she needed to give him a report in person.

She stood in front of his desk – refusing to sit down – pacing in front of a holographic display. “Right, boss, I’ve noticed something very suspicious.”

Giorno nodded. “I’m listening.”

Olivia pulled up an image of an upright bear creature that looked like he had stars in his fur. “This is Skarn. We know that. Think very closely – what else do we know about him?”

Giorno narrowed his eyes. “That he is one of our allies. Part of a semi-major trade route. A known patron of the arts, occasionally even donating to ambitious artistic projects of our own.”

“And what about his origin society?”

“The Congeries. Class 2.”

“And has anyone ever been to the Congeries?”

Giorno’s eyes widened. “I assume nobody has by your phrasing of the question.”

Olivia nodded. “Oh yeah, the only evidence that the Congeries exist is the ships that go along the trade route and Skarn’s little family of representatives. No Merodi has ever seen the Congeries, and we don’t even have it on any of our maps. We’re just content having this bear and his family show up and give us presents. That’s what’s suspicious.”

Giorno folded his hands together, frowning. “This is a rather glaring gap in our intelligence.”

“And I know how to remedy it.” Olivia brought up an image of another bear, this one in a set of robes that wouldn’t look out of place on a wizard. “This is Skarn’s son, Arthon. He’s currently here to gather information on how the trade route has been going. Since the route has largely been ‘we get stuff without giving it to Skarn’ there will be no complaints. He will leave shortly.” She brought up an image of her old Puddlejumper. “And I will follow him back to the Congeries to see if there’s a reason we’ve never been invited.”

Giorno nodded. “Need any backup?”

“This is a stealth mission. The fewer the better. If you have someone specific in mind I’ll take them, but I’d like to get going as soon as possible.”

“If that’s what you think is best. Come back safe.”

“I always plan on that, amigo.” Olivia smirked. “He’ll never even know I’m there. The number of cloaks on me and my shi-”

“I’m aware how much stealth technology you have at your disposal. That’s why I’m allowing this at all. I would fear fallout otherwise. But I trust that you know what you’re doing.”

Olivia smirked. “Aw, thanks! Tell Roxy she’s in charge of my office while I’m gone.”

~~~

Olivia rarely needed to use her Puddlejumper anymore. Most of her work could be accomplished in one of the Intelligence Division’s secret bases where all the computers in the world were at her disposal, and her reach could extend into the Internet of any nearby nation. Most of the espionage efforts she was responsible for involved single worlds close to Merodi Universalis or the USM, which nobody really trusted.

Occasionally she’d try to hack her way into the Melnorme. That never worked. Over the years they hadn’t changed a bit. Merodi Universalis was finally able to afford some of their goods, but after years of talking to a brick wall, they rarely bothered. The Melnorme were there and nobody wanted to deal with them unless absolutely necessary.

Regardless, it made Olivia slightly giddy that she got to use the Puddlejumper again. She was going to trace Arthon back to the Congeries and explore the area for herself – all the while being completely invisible. Skarn claimed the Congeries were a Class 2 society. This was certainly possible, but from what she’d seen of their ships they weren’t that far ahead of the Merodi in terms of technology. She had them pegged as a low-Class 2. Merodi Universalis was a high-Class 3 with the addition of Skaia’s Dream and Earth C, so the gap wasn’t that far.

So she was relatively confident they wouldn’t be able to detect her. Just to prove it to herself she did a few loops around Arthon’s ship to see if it triggered any reaction. She got nothing.

Arthon’s ship was a personal vessel about four times as large as the barrel-shaped Puddlejumper. Like just about everything Skarn and his children were associated with, the ship was a work of art. It was vaguely manta-ray-shaped, with two long protrusions flowing from its head down its back. The ship appeared to be made of metal, but it moved like a living organism of muscle, flesh, and bone. The coloration of the metal continually shifted from yellows to reds to purples in a way that was always aesthetically pleasing, but seemed random.

Olivia grinned, pressing a few buttons. It couldn’t detect her. Good.

Shortly thereafter, her scans told her that Arthon had transported from the surface of Earth C to his ship. She put her hands on the controls, readying herself for a stealth chase.

All of Skarn’s ships had what was known as a ‘whirlpool drive’ to the Merodi, given the way it affected the ships and all who used it. Visually, it looked like the translating entity was stretched into a noodle and then swirled around a single point until it vanished, like something falling into a whirlpool. …Or a black hole, but the ‘black hole drive’ already existed elsewhere that actually used black holes to create FTL travel.

The whirlpool drive was fast, known for corkscrewing through numerous universes in the spaghetti noodle state, creating travel time between the start and end universes. The motion would leave, temporarily, disturbances in the universes it passed through. Olivia would need to move quickly to follow these disturbances.

Luckily for her she had the fastest most state-of-the-art dimensional drive installed on her Puddlejumper: the hummingbird drive. It was designed with one thing in mind – making lots of dimensional jumps really, really quickly. The amount of mass a hummingbird drive could move was small, but Olivia’s Puddlejumper was one of the smallest ships around. With just a bit of tweaking and a lot of government funding, this particular Puddlejumper was one of the fastest dimensional ships in the entire Merodi fleet. It followed the corkscrew easily, jumping through universe boundaries long before the residual traces of dimensional travel would fade. She actually had to slow herself down so she wouldn’t pass Arthon’s ship.

She checked her navigation, watching a little white dot cross the Q-Sphere ever so slowly. Now that Merodi Universalis had been to multiple universes that manifested the Dark Tower, they were able to find the actual location of the Dark Tower. Traveling to the Dark Tower was never a good idea since it would just send you somewhere random, but since the Dark Tower had connections to every universe, it could be used as a navigational landmark. No more did the computers have to give a big question mark when you asked ‘where in the multiverse are we?’ It would always have a general idea.

Not that it would have a map of nearby universe arrangements. With their current large-scale understanding the multiverse was just a mish-mash of fuzzy blobs on a screen. But at least they’d always know which Sphere or in-between area they were in.

It looked like she was heading to the relative multiversal ‘south’, though not straight down, so they weren’t going to hit the tremendous Celestialsapien territory. They were heading to, surprise surprise, an area of the Q-Sphere that had no data available.

She was going to fix that.

It took about twenty minutes to arrive at the destination universe. Or, more accurately, universes.

Arthon’s ship stopped whirlpooling through the multiverse in a realm where there were no stars or planets, but rather a soup of space filled with bizarre structures. To their left, they could see a seemingly endless structure shaped like DNA, except made entirely of precious metals. To another side, there was a fractal cube with holes that appeared to go on forever. In another location there appeared to be a rotating planet – except it was disc-shaped, making the ‘rotation’ defy normal three-dimensional sense.

Olivia’s sensors told her the space of this place was akin to the Paradox Space encountered by Eve and her friends in the Combine-Horrorterror War, though considerably milder in the ways it fused universes. Time was linear and space was mostly three dimensional, but with a flexibility that allowed for bizarre, yet beautiful constructs such as the disc planet.

Olivia had no doubt that this place was the Congeries. A realm of universes sewn together into one physical plane you could fly through, from one set of physics to another…

If Skarn and his children were responsible for creating this place, she wouldn’t be surprised. The structures had clearly been created with an artist’s intent, meant to please the eye rather than serve a purpose. She couldn’t imagine the disc-planet was comfortable or even livable, and she couldn’t imagine what the point of an infinite fractal cube floating in the middle of space would be.

She kept following Arthon’s ship, which had opted to cruise through the Congeries at subluminal speeds, which Olivia wasn’t going to complain about. She took the opportunity to sort through all the signals running through the multiversal soup of this place. To her surprise there was very limited communication – highly unusual for a society that would call itself Class 2. Was it just that they used a method of communication she couldn’t detect?

She shook her head – that wasn’t it. Arthon had sent off a simple ‘I’m back’ message, followed by a brief report on what had happened in Merodi Universalis. But there was no response, and she only picked up a handful of other messages going by. One of them was about the construction of ‘a new piece consisting of planes U899, V924, and K101.’ Otherwise almost nothing.

She picked up a few simple radio-wave transmissions, but the soupy space of the Congeries corrupted the signals beyond recognition. If she hadn’t just seen Arthon’s ship send a signal that could cut through the mess, she would have assumed it was the nature of the Congeries that was keeping communication to a minimum.

Clearly she had to learn more about this place. Since there appeared to be no Internet, she was just going to continue following Arthon to get more information. She kept scanning the entire time – if messages weren’t going to provide her with anything, she was going to go off of visuals.

Skarn clearly enjoyed fractals and bizarre geometry in his Congeries, since that was a recurring theme with the ‘works of art’ all around her. Most of the fractals were composed of physical materials that folded in on themselves using tricks of spatial distortion to give the appearance of a truly infinite construct, when in fact there was a very finite (if large and complicated) pattern within the structure. Some of them moved, including a mess of orange thorns that rippled in a mesmerizing pattern, accentuated by what Olivia guessed was a star stretched into a string and somehow kept burning.

She supposed it was possible she was just flying through the ‘fractal’ section of the Congeries, and that in another section there might just be paintings of famous individuals the size of a gas giant, or something.

Skarn hadn’t been lying about his artistic attunement, at least. Though she found herself wondering how he made all this art. Given the few messages she was able to parse, she assumed it was created via the fusing of different parts of different universes together into the Congeries. She would love to know exactly how that was accomplished.

Then she got to watch one being built. In an area of the Congeries that was relatively empty, she saw dozens of bubbles appear – each one containing the undeniable shape of cosmic superstructures, telling her each bubble was a complete universe of the standard ‘stars in space’ variety. The bubbles were far smaller than they should have been, but when you were placing universes within universes via physical boundaries local size tended to only matter if you wanted to travel from one to another.

The bubbles were stretched out until each of them came to a point. The tips of every universe were cut off and grown in size until Olivia could see they were blue-green planets. These dozens of planets phased in and out of tangibility, lining up with each other. The planets fused together, creating a spindly, tree-like construction. Much of the remaining galactic superstructures of the universes were twisted into the shapes of beautiful, white leaves and placed at the ends of the planetary strings.

It was beautiful.

It was also horrifying because every last one of those planets had been a version of Earth. They’d just fused dozens of them together into long strings. She imagined billions of people suddenly fused with rock, dying instantly for the creation of art.

Maybe they were uninhabited Earths?

…Nope. She was getting a lot more radio signals than before, and a few higher-level methods of communication that made it through to her without much corruption. There had been no warning for any of these universes – they had just been swiped up and fused together. Their entire societies just gone.

Olivia began to doubt that Skarn was a low Class 2. She kept following Arthon’s ship, her fingers flying as she sorted through all the data she had just gotten from witnessing the creation of that multiversal structure.

The first thing she realized was a glaring flaw in the process. Even a miniscule bit of reality anchoring or powerful magic would keep it from having complete dominion over a universe. It was only able to exercise its will on universes that truly had no defenses. Merodi Universalis wasn’t in any danger from this technology… If it could even be called technology.

She detected that the energy came from somewhere deep within the Congeries – so far away her sensors couldn’t give her an accurate reading on its location. Whatever it was, it was powerful, and likely well guarded.

Clearly, Skarn wasn’t as nice a guy as he made himself out to be. This was good to know.

Arthon’s ship arrived at what appeared to be a normal planet floating in the Congeries at first glance – but scans told her it was really a forced fusion of four worlds. A highly volcanic world, a frozen world, a desert wasteland, and a world with violent atmospheric storms. Somebody was trying to be clever with the four elements when they made this one. It notably wasn’t any more massive than a single planet, unlike the tree construct which had sewn the planets together into strands.

Arthon’s ship landed in the outskirts of a city situated between a mountain of ice and a volcano, protected by the large plane of sand it was built on. The city hardly appeared to be something of a multiversal society – it looked closer to medieval than anything else. Stone buildings, fires, livestock… There were clearly a few magic lights around, but no technology aside from Arthon’s own ship.

He got out of his ship. He was as bearlike as always, his robes billowing in the violent winds of the world. All the citizens of the city were human – and every last one bowed to him in reverence and fear.

He ignored them, floating away from the city with his magic power toward the icy mountain.

Olivia decided not to follow him just yet – she needed information. Given the fact that, apparently, most the citizens of the Congeries were probably just like these people, she would have to get information the old fashioned way. By talking and gossiping. She was good enough at that. She was going to have to look a lot less conspicuous…

She parked the Puddlejumper a few meters off the ground in an abandoned alley. She pressed a few buttons on her wrist, activating a disguise. She still looked like herself – her face was her own, and her getup was still white and purple, but all of her cybernetic enhancements were hidden. She might have looked slightly flamboyant, but one of the best ways to blend in was to stand out. No one ever suspected the eccentric loudmouth of being the spy.

She leaped out of the Puddlejumper and grinned. The winds were strong enough to blow her white hair into her face, forcing her to tuck it into the back of her shirt. She remembered the time when she was still Sombra and her hair had been short, not to mention purple. Good times. She had no intention of going back to them, though.

Putting on a cheeky smile she walked right out of the alley.

“Hello people!” She shouted.

The people looked at her with fearful eyes and tired faces. They spoke to her in an unknown language.

Olivia blinked. “Huh, it has been a while since the translator came across a language it didn’t know…” She pointed to her mouth. “Keep talking.”

Apparently this was a rude gesture, because it made one of the burlier men swing at her. She ducked, twisted under his arm, and threw him to the ground. She was way too small to do that, but cybernetic enhancements did wonders. It made the crowd gasp at how quickly he was taken down.

Olivia dusted her hands. “Now that that’s out of the way, how about you all keep talking?” Instead of pointing at her mouth she rolled her hand in front of it, trying another method of communicating.

They definitely didn’t get it, but they started talking amongst themselves, and that was good enough for her. She waited for the translator to have a full picture of their language. Then she opted to make herself invisible to freak them out.

“Where did she go?”

“Was she a ghost?”

“Was she one of the lost spirits?”

“Arthon has come… and now her… this cannot be a good sign.”

“Are we material in a new work?”

“She could be here to kill us all!”

Olivia learned several things from this. One, out-of-context things that couldn’t speak the language weren’t unheard of. Two, they were thought of as dangerous. Three, they feared Arthon something fierce. Four, they were well aware that at any moment their world could be recycled into a new ‘work’ for Skarn’s fancy.

Evil artists, what will they think of next?

Her original plan of just walking around and talking was shot because of the unexpected failure of the translator – they now knew she was something truly out of context – so she was just going to have to eavesdrop. Luckily her presence was triggering lots of conversations that gave her plenty of delicious, useful information.

The city they were in was called Nierva, and the planet was Quanera. The people definitely knew of their position in the Congeries – a work of art meant to be admired aesthetically, and that was it. A select few, mostly members of the Church of Skarn, believed that being part of the art was the way to spiritual enlightenment, but they were a minority.

There was one conversation in particular that stuck in her mind, that of a husband and a wife. She never learned their names.

“Arthon is here,” the wife said.

“Mhm,” the husband responded.

“He’s going to take more of us into his mountain, isn’t he?”

“…Probably.”

“I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep wondering if us or our kids are going to be taken next time he comes back!”

“Brell promised us she was working to end the horror.”

“Brell makes promises and never keeps them! She’s still one of them. Who cares if her works are for us?! She still makes them! She has no power over her brother!”

“Look, I know she’s not as benevolent as some would have you believe. But it’s something. We have to hold out hope for that.”

“And what if a fissure appears and rips Quanera apart? What then!?”

The man had no response. He pulled her to him and held her tight.

Olivia left. These people lived in constant fear that their entire world could be crushed just for a piece of art. She wondered if, elsewhere, the people who lived on the ‘works’ even knew why they were where they were. The tree of Earths wasn’t told anything or given any warning. They were probably still completely baffled.

And then Arthon returned, shaking her out of her thoughts. He pointed at three seemingly random people, levitating them into the air with his power. Then he floated off to the ice mountain.

Olivia decided it was about time she figured out what exactly he was doing in that mountain. She activated her levitation harness and floated after him, still as invisible as ever. He gave no indication that he noticed her or was even able to.

The mountain of ice was surrounded in the whipping winds of the world, but Olivia was clever enough to use Arthon’s powerful form as a windshield. The mountain itself was swirling with clouds, the winds having refined the one jagged peak into an ominously smooth shape. Arthon landed near the top, at an entrance to a cave of ice.

Olivia continued floating off the ground to avoid slipping on the ice and making a noise that might alert Arthon. She did have sound mufflers in place, but that wouldn’t stop vibrations traveling through the ground directly to him.

The ice cave wasn’t very deep. There were a few meters of tunnel that served to keep the wind from whipping through too horribly, and then a single cavernous room the size of a large house. Floating in the center of this space was Arthon’s work.

It was made entirely of naked human bodies, moving through a mechanism composed of themselves. A body started out fully healthy, barely aware of what was happening. Its legs and arms would be intertwined with the limbs of others, and it would start screaming – screaming before the pain began.

The bodies were ripped apart down the middle, like going through a zipper, severing limbs from bodies and then carrying the remnants further down the chain, where they would be stripped and separated further by razor sharp bones, flesh, and other moving parts of the human body. These loose parts would then become the framework of bones and flesh that moved the next body into the zipper, tearing them apart.

The cycle completed when the loose parts were sewn back together by unconscious human bodies, creating a full human being once again – who came to, remembered what had happened last time, and started screaming.

Arthon tossed the three humans he had collected into the mechanism and watched as it absorbed them, becoming slightly larger. Their clothing and accessories fell to the ground into a pile that had clearly been growing for a long, long time.

Olivia decided now was a good time to get out of there. She moved to leave, floating toward the exit of the cavern.

A magical alarm went off.

How!? I got in just fine! She didn’t wait – she blasted into the winds of the world, trying to calculate a teleport. All she had to do was select the coordinates of the Puddlejumper…

An invisible hand of psychic energy grabbed her and pulled her back into the cave. Arthon brought her to him – though he was holding her upside-down.

Olivia dropped her cloak. “Ah, hola!”

Arthon turned her upside-right now that he could see her. “How did you get in here?”

“You know, I think it was because I was using you as a windshield. It probably thought I was just another one of your playthings!” Olivia grinned. “I really should have been more careful and left exactly how I came in, but y’know, was sorta weirded out by the human zipper.”

Arthon’s bear-like face smiled. “It is evoking the reaction it is meant to. Unbridled horror mixed with fascination. You have a better eye than most who come here – all they usually do is lose their lunches on the ground below.”

“Bet that’s difficult to clean.”

“A simple wave of my hand,” Arthon said, squeezing Olivia to remind her of her current predicament. “I wonder which of the worlds you rode in on… One of the new Earths perhaps?” He sniffed her with his huge, wet nose. “Hmm… Impossible to tell, there were many there. If you are from there, Father has gotten careless – bringing something that can hide from me into the Congeries is just asking for trouble.”

Olivia kept her smile, looking around for anything she could do. She had the teleporter ready, but she was close enough to him that he would just be able to follow it. She needed to keep him talking. He looked like a guy who liked to talk, so that shouldn’t have been very difficult. “Do I detect some daddy issues?”

Arthon growled. “Your eyes, while astute, make dangerous observations.”

“Pff, seriously, what am I gonna do, tell him? Aren’t I just a grub to your bearishness?”

“You are not a grub. You are a pigment that just needs to become part of a masterpiece.”

“You do realize some paints are made from grubs, right? Or do you not bother to learn about the worlds you smash together here?”

Arthon smiled. “You don’t understand, do you? What the Congeries are? We do not simply smash worlds together. We make the truly impossible from scraps, turning everything into more than it once was. We evoke emotion in our great works. We create. We do not destroy, or ‘smash’, as you so eloquently put it.”

“The human zipper looks a lot like destroying.”

Arthon held out an arm at his work. “This is art on a small scale. My father has taken to limiting himself only to large-scale constructions that are not as finely-tuned as this masterpiece. Here you see an eternal cycle at work – of destruction and creation. I may not be human, but I am aware of the human condition, to which this work speaks. You are constantly eating yourselves alive with your cultures, only to create the next generation.”

“Why not make it out of, I don’t know, fake humans?”

“Then the intent behind it would be lost,” Arthon said. “It really is the representation of human suffering.”

“Yeah, you’re crazy.”

“By your standards. I am but an artist – a far better artist than my father will ever be.”

“Theeeere it is,” Olivia said, smirking. “Hate the old man much?”

“He is growing o-” Arthon blinked. “Hold on.”

Shit. Olivia kept her smirk level. “What?”

“You’re sending signals out.”

“Oh, you can sense that?”

Arthon crushed her tighter. “You’re sending signals that can pierce the dimensional veil. No universe like that would allow themselves to be shaped… Where are you from?”

“Ah, you got me. Starcross Society, agent Nadia Harris. See, we’ve got reason to believe that yo-”

Arthon squeezed tighter. “You’re lying.”

“Well, I’m not, so I guess we’re at a standstill. They will come looking for me, you know.”

“And I will meet them in battle!” Arthon shouted. “No outsiders are allowed in the Congeries! I will find where you are sending that information and destroy them!”

“Yeah, good luck with tha-” She felt the hand crush her pelvis into a dozen pieces, driving pain up her body. She was dropped to the ground, presumed to be helpless.

“His mistake”, Olivia grunted, drawing her still-invisible gun and blasting Arthon in the face with special bullets designed to cut through magic and sting with the fury of a million hornets. Arthon, despite his power, had to reel back and clutch his face.

Olivia thought about activating her teleporter belt – but she knew he’d just follow her. Even if she got the Puddlejumper back, he would know where she went.

So she did the next best thing. She kept fighting without any control over her lower body. She used a bomb to blow herself through the tunnel of the cave and off the mountain. She knew a teleport still wouldn’t work – too flashy – so she made herself invisible. Surely she could still elude him…

“Ay, caramba,” Olivia muttered when she saw Arthon fly out of the cave and look right at her. She braced herself. He pulled her forward with his telekinesis and rammed her body right into his real fist.

There was a sickening crunch.

~~~

CRUNCH.

The sound of static filled the room.

“That’s all the Puddlejumper had for us,” Giorno said. “It returned on a completely automated subroutine, with no pilot.”

He put his hands behind his back and surveyed the room. All twelve Overheads of Merodi Universalis were there: Relations, Expeditions, Military, Research, Aid, Expansion, Education, Justice, Cultural, Commerce, Oversight, and Labor. Most had expressions of horror and fear on the faces and those that didn’t were struggling to remain expressionless.

“I called you all here because we have a decision to make, and it’s a hefty one all of us need to consider carefully. How do we respond to this? Even the Divisions that usually do not concern themselves with outside matters are needed. Because a declaration of war is not out of the question based on the information we have seen.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “That’s my Division, Giovanna.”

“Do you wish to argue that you have sole authority to declare war or even to discuss it?”

O’Neill took a look around at the many faces. “No. It is a group decision. No commander should attack without consulting or thinking it through.” O’Neill leaned in and fixed Giorno with a glare. “I would have appreciated being told ahead of time, though.”

“It is fair he gave it to all of us at once,” the Justice Overhead spoke up – an Earth Tau’ri Asgard. “In order for us all to form our own opinions.”

“Agreed,” the Oversight Overhead said, an Equis Cosmic mare known as Sarsaparilla Fern. “Giovanna has not overstepped his boundaries.”

“Can we talk about less extreme measures before outright war?” a version of Luna named Jingle asked, the Aid Overhead and Princess of Squeaky’s world. “It seems a little hasty to just jump to that after one attack!”

“It’s not just that,” Eve said, her face having shifted to one of barely controlled rage. “While Olivia is our friend and close ally, we wouldn’t be going to war over just that. She was spying. What Giorno and I see is something else – utter brutality for the sake of art. Horrendous things like that are why we are out here, Jingle. Your division should understand that more than any of us.”

“I’ve also been in an actual war, in case you’d forgotten,” Jingle responded. “Ask Squeaky some time about how brutal that was. Merodi Universalis has never been in a war with any power strong enough to actually threaten us! The people don’t know what it’s like – they just encourage us to liberate worlds from horrible kings and tyrants. We aren’t prepared for this.”

“Jingle's right,” O’Neill said. “All the action we’ve taken in our entire existence has been sure. There have been risks, yes, but only to small groups of people and teams who know the danger. If we try to fix that universal train wreck of a place, we will have to fight something that is somewhat stronger than us! We won’t be able to protect the population from that kind of power.”

“So what, we just let them keep turning people into zippers?” Renee blurted. “I’m sorry Jack, but I’ve spent too much of my life diverting as much as I can to help everyone. It’s not like this Skarn is Them. We can’t even lay a scratch on Them, but it seems to me that if we take Skarn and his very limited family out, there is no leadership for the Congeries. Eve, how many people have they sent to us?”

“I’ve only met with Skarn, Arthon, and Brell,” Eve said. “Never anyone else. They rarely talk about the Congeries, even when pushed – and I can see why – but what I do know is that they are the rulers of it. Brell mentioned, only once, an estranged brother. I have my doubts there is a living mother, but I suppose it is possible. That’s maybe five individuals that are responsible for all this pain.”

“That’s an assumption,” the Research Overhead pointed out, beeping like the robot he was. He had no name that wasn’t a string of numbers, and was a humanoid being with a smooth, starry face without any facial features.

“You run it through your processors, R.O., all the information we have suggests they are a very very small group of people ruining so many lives.”

The R.O. didn’t hezitate. “It is the most likely conclusion. But we lack information. And they no doubt have armies.”

“No doubt,” a human version of Celestia spoke up – the Education Overhead, Celeste. “But Arthon was concerned that Olivia was transmitting. He was afraid of what she could do, even if he wasn’t showing it.”

Overhead Jingle shook her head. “Yes, yes, but that doesn’t change anything. Skarn is still dangerous, and we aren’t ready for a war. Not one of this magnitude.”

“How can you just let Skarn have his way?” Eve asked.

“We may not even need a full war,” Renee added. “Since the targets are so few in number, strike teams could be arranged, like we do in most circumstances. Corona would be more than willing.”

“If we attack like that and fail we will have a war,” O’Neill pointed out. “It’s likely they’d find a way to get off a retaliatory strike even if it was successful.”

A voice that had been quiet up until that moment spoke – Ava Jandice, Earth Stand, Overhead of Labor. “Maud, what do you have to say on this matter?”

The Overhead of Expansion knew she wasn’t being asked because of her Division, but because of her future-sight. “I do not see great destruction in the near future. But you must remember; this is an event of multiversal significance. Prophecy in these matters cannot be relied upon. As for my personal opinion, I am undecided as of now.”

Ava nodded, sitting back in her chair, thinking about something. Eve took the moment to take her in – a thin middle-aged human with smooth black hair and sharp fingernails. She was a woman with a lot of power at this table, which surprised a lot of outsiders. She was in charge of labor, how did that give her a lot of power?

Because the Labor Division was specifically designed to keep the other Divisions in check. Its responsibility was not the individual labor force of each universe – that was more local government or Oversight’s deal – but the people who were employed in the government. All the other Divisions, even Intelligence, were staffed mostly by the Labor Division.

Eve may have been the face of Merodi Universalis, but internally speaking, Ava held the most sway.

She wasn’t a king, or even a president, and the other Overheads could easily overrule her – but her position still meant something to all the others in the room.

Eve didn’t know her that well. She rarely dealt with Ava directly, almost always talking to a lower agent of Labor to get new ambassadors and liaisons. From the few times they had interacted for an extended time, Eve had found Ava a bit distant and calculating, but trustworthy. She had a Stand but for the life of her Eve couldn’t remember what it was right now.

She noticed Ava was looking around the room, judging everyone’s expressions. Eve noticed that everyone was waiting for her to say something, rather than jumping in.

“I think this decision needs more than a single meeting,” Ava said finally. “And more than just the thirteen of us. We need to make the final decision on what to do, yes, but we have advisors and other trusted individuals we would like to consult.”

Giorno nodded. “Then we shall break. Only people with enough clearance though, understood?”

The twelve Overheads nodded.

“Good. We will reconvene in twenty-four hours local time.”

~~~

CRUNCH.

The sound of static filled the room.

Corona punched the computer screen in front of her. Lady Rarity, Eve, and Renee didn’t even flinch at the destruction of Eve’s personal monitor.

“I’m going. Now,” she said.

“Oh no no no no no,” Renee said, grabbing Corona’s shoulder. “The Overheads are debating full-out war over this.”

“Why is there even a debate!?” Corona blurted. “That was Olivia!”

“I know,” Eve said. “Trust me, I know. But going over there, right now, without a plan, will be disastrous.”

Corona opened her mouth to shout – but Lady Rarity put a hoof on her. “She’s right, Corona.”

Corona’s face shifted from rage, to conflict, to depression. “Right… Right…” She slouched into a nearby chair, hand to her head.

Renee adjusted her glasses. “Eve and I believe we need to retaliate. O’Neill and at least a few others believe we can’t handle a war.”

“Precision strike,” Corona said.

“That’s one of the things that have already been brought up,” Renee said. “O’Neill countered with the very likely possibility of retaliation against Merodi Universalis on a large scale.”

“That’s why we aren’t just charging in,” Eve said. “The evil king is a little stronger than usual. If we fail on a normal mission, we just try again later or give it up. Here, failure brings us very disastrous consequences.”

Corona nodded. “Right… Right…”

“What we need to do is make a compelling argument that we can win,” Renee said. “Which is why we brought this before you. There’s a lot of data Olivia got us – can you sift through it, see what you can learn?”

Corona scooted up to a secondary monitor. “It’s in here, right?”

Eve nodded.

Corona took a breath and tapped into the computer with Raging Sights. She brushed most the information aside easily as useless – just more reason for her to hate Skarn and everything he and his children stood for. What she really needed to look at was the data about the Congeries and how physics interacted.

It didn’t take long for her to find something very useful.

“It’s basically like the area around the Green Sun,” Corona said. “A bunch of different universes meshed together so that you can move from one to another just by walking – or flying. It’s actually much simpler too, no causal time loops or lines that turn into fractals. Just a soup of mostly three dimensional space.” She furrowed her brow. “It’s a much bigger space, though. I can’t tell you how big it is. But I can tell you the direction of its center. That’s where the Shaping mechanism is.”

“Is the Shaping Mechanism a Green Sun thing then?” Renee asked.

Eve lit her eye and scanned the data Corona was looking at. “…It’s not on the level of the Green Sun,” she reported. “It’s a much lower construct, though I can’t tell you how it functions.”

“I can,” Corona said. “Raging Sights just ran all the numbers from the data here. It’s… Well, I would call it primitive, but no sort of technology this powerful should be called primitive. You know how I derived spells that could alter reality? And the way the TSAB can move universes?”

Eve nodded. “I’m aware.”

“It’s combining the two things. First, it goes into a universe and slowly alters it to be ‘moldable’. It takes a couple hours, based on these estimates. We have technology that could alter a universe’s physics faster than that. After the physics is set to ‘moldable’ he physically moves the universe into the Congeries. Since the universe is ‘moldable’ it will respond to Skarn’s will. …Or whoever’s controlling the Shaping Mechanism, since it appears his kids have made some stuff too.”

“That doesn’t sound simple or primitive,” Lady Rarity pointed out.

“It actually is. There’s any number of D-Sphere universes you can grab that physics preset from,” Corona said. “I could make a ‘moldable’ universe without too much difficulty. It would take a bit of experimentation to tease out what part of the D-Sphere actually makes it mentally moldable, but after that I’d have a push-button alter-universe device.” She paused. “Okay fine, we’re not the Collection, it’s not just a button-push. It takes a while. And any sort of physical anchor or resistor would completely tear the process apart, keeping the universe from being ‘moldable’.” Corona smirked. “Easy defense against having our universes be Shaped. Just create a bunch of reality anchors.”

“Every world already has several of those,” Renee pointed out. “To prevent certain locations from being manipulated.”

“I can’t use Seraphim in government buildings I don’t own,” Eve muttered. “Though, all these anchors are thanks to you and your work perfecting them for Earth Shimmer.”

“Thanks.” Corona nodded slowly. “All you need is one of those anchors in a universe and he can’t add you to the Congeries. I’ll write that up in a report – you have a viable defense against his strongest weapon. What else does he have that really makes him terrifying?”

“Skarn himself has more magic than you or me,” Eve said.

“And that scares away our army why?” Corona asked.

“Good point. I’ll need that report by tomorrow so we can present it at the meeting.”

“I’ll see what I can do as Research Second to sway the R.O. I’m not expecting much.”

~~~

O’Neill slammed his hands down on a table. “Okay campers, I need a war projection.”

In front of him were three members of the Military Division: his Second, Thor the Asgard; one of the high Commanders, Yellow Diamond, and the military genius Squeaky Belle.

They had just finished watching the video and were currently going over the information they had on Skarn – which wasn’t all that much.

“The mechanism by which Skarn shapes the Congeries is the largest concern,” Thor said. “Defending our universes will be difficult against such a force.”

Squeaky shook her head. “It’ll be us declaring the war. We can attack when we have an appropriate network of dimensional stabilizers ready to defend. I can’t tell you how much that would cost though, nor really what kind of stabilizers we would need.”

Yellow Diamond folded her arms – she had to sit on the floor away from the table because she was so huge. “Defense isn’t the biggest problem. Moving within the Congeries is. No matter what you say about our worlds, there Skarn can shape whatever he wants. Even with every ship and soldier equipped with dimensional stabilizers, he could still hurl entire worlds at us.”

“It’s unlike you to be the voice of caution,” Thor pointed out.

Yellow Diamond smirked. “Oh, there’s a simple solution to that too. Celestias and Lunas. We have access to a lot of planetary movers who’d be willing to fight. Not to mention the mover ships of Equis Cosmic.”

O’Neill furrowed his brow. “Perhaps. But if we’re occupied facing against the very world we’re fighting in, the armies of Skarn can attack us while our asses are in the air.”

“We know nothing about his forces or their numbers,” Thor said. “All we know of their citizens are the one city Olivia saw. We can assume much of the Congeries are like that, but there has to be somewhere they make their ships. They will have an army to deal with unexpected threats brought into the Congeries.”

“Suggestions in a war scenario?” O’Neill said.

“Don’t,” Squeaky said. “Just don’t. Too many unknowns. They could be hiding a million impervious kaiju.”

Thor narrowed his eyes. “If it were necessary to engage, which I advise against as well, the best action would be to attack on multiple fronts, the major battles serving as distractions so stealth teams can make it to Skarn himself and cut off his connection to the Shaping Mechanism.”

Yellow Diamond smirked. “I say we can do it – and here’s how. We have hundreds of powerful individuals that are either under us or owe us favors. Place all our forces that aren’t required for defense into a single spearhead assault and charge right for their center of power. Nothing could stop everything fighting at once.”

“That assumes we are able to find the center of power,” Squeaky said. “Which we won’t. Given his power over space, Skarn could just move where he and his mechanism are any time he wants! We can’t just portal in to the right location because the Congeries are a mish-mash of universes. We’d have to play ‘hide and seek’ with him.”

“Too many assumptions,” Thor said. “Which is why this is ill-advised.”

O’Neill nodded. “Exactly what I was saying. We don’t know enough. We also aren’t ready for a war.”

Yellow Diamond folded her arms.

“Write up your recommendations by tomorrow. We need to see this thing stop before it takes us down with it.”

~~~

“…In conclusion, I want to remind everyone what we do here at Merodi Universalis,” Eve said, addressing the Overheads the next day. “We aren’t some group that thinks we’re too good to help others, or too enlightened to worry ourselves with the plights of the less fortunate. It is essentially our mission to alleviate pain brought on by the evil in the multiverse. Today, it’s a mad tyrant who torments those around him out of a sense of aesthetics. I ask us to prove that we can act selflessly – even sacrificially – to hold ourselves to the values we claim are close to our hearts.” She sat down, adjusting her wings.

O’Neill had already had his turn. He hadn’t spoken anywhere near as eloquently, merely stated that there was only one of his advisors who thought the war was advisable while the other two, and himself, argued against it. He didn’t give names but everyone knew it was Yellow Diamond who was pushing for the war. He had decided to let military information speak for itself – an argument based on logic.

The only evidence Eve had was some science Corona had come up with to effectively defend Merodi Universalis against the Shaping Mechanism, and a few thoughts on how strike teams could infiltrate the Congeries. She had relied almost completely on emotional appeal, seeking to tap into the good side of the other Overheads. She may not have known them all personally, but she did know the leaders of Merodi Universalis were good people. They wouldn’t have been allowed this high if they weren’t.

Giorno, being the only one standing, took it upon himself to lead the conversation. “Then we need to put it to a vote. Do we go to war to free these people, end the suffering, and avenge our lost agent, or do we refrain for the interests of the safety of Merodi Universalis? All for war, vote now.”

Eve, Renee, and Giorno didn’t hesitate. The Justice Overhead raised her gray Asgardian hand shortly after.

Eve looked at Jingle pleadingly. The Overhead of Aid gulped, but nodded. She raised her hoof, in the end unable to just ignore the people suffering under Skarn.

Just a little more, Eve thought. The next one she was hoping on was Celeste of Education. The Celestia shook her head, keeping her hand down.

“Five,” Giorno counted, clearly not liking the number himself. “Votes for peace?”

O’Neill raised his hand instantly. Research, Oversight, Education, Commerce, and Cultural soon followed.

Notably, Maud and Ava didn’t move.

“Six,” Giorno counted, deflating ever so slightly. “Five for, six against, two abstentions. The motion is denied.”

Eve let out a depressed sigh – they were just going to let Skarn be.

“Ahem,” Overhead Jingle said, drawing attention to herself. “We should cut off all ties to Skarn and demolish his trade routes. Do not tell him why, just cut all ties. If anyone disagrees with this…” she left the sentence unfinished.

Ava nodded. “Any disagreements?”

There were none.

Ava turned to Eve. “That’s your responsibility.”

Eve nodded. “I’ll cut him off the next time he comes. We don’t exactly have a way to contact him without revealing we know where he comes from. All trading vessels will be turned away.” She turned to Sarsaparilla of Oversight. “Think you can work with Commerce to remove anything he’s given us from Merodi Universalis?”

Sarsaparilla nodded in confirmation.

“Then we’re done,” Giorno said. “There will be no war preparations. We can all get back to our jobs.”

Everyone nodded and awkwardly shuffled away, returning to their normal responsibilities – many with heavy hearts and confused minds.

~~~

Corona stared at Eve blankly. “…Denied?” The two of them were alone in Eve’s office.

Eve nodded. “It was denied. We’re cutting off all cultural and trading ties with him instead, and we’re not telling him why.”

“That’s not good enough!”

“I know!”

“Then do something!”

“I’m not the queen, Corona!” Eve shouted. “I do not get to decide everything! It may seem like it since you deal with powers outside Merodi Universalis all the time, but I can’t do anything internally without asking for favors. This decision involved people other than me! I’m sorry, but we decided against taking action.”

“Then I’ll go and to it myself.”

“No, you won’t,” Eve said. “If you go alone you’ll fail and bring the entire wrath of Skarn down on us for it.”

Corona clenched her fist, clearly still thinking about it.

“Corona, if you try to go, I will have to arrest you. Please don’t make me do that.”

Corona released the hold on her fist, sighing. “…Why couldn’t we have just agreed to fight him?”

“Because everyone has their values and responsibilities. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m somewhat disconnected from the actual citizens of Merodi Universalis who aren’t my close friends. I may be more willing to risk them than the Overheads who deal with them all the time. And you’ve turned yourself into a warrior. You’re used to battle and confident in your abilities in a full-scale war. Maybe too confident.”

Corona wanted to feel offended at that, but she couldn’t bring herself to really get upset. “So we just… Have to do nothing?”

Eve nodded slowly. “That’s right. We have to do nothing. Well, I get to shun Skarn to his face, at least, but otherwise nothing. Those people will keep suffering and we have to pretend we know nothing about it.”

Corona looked blankly at the ceiling. “I thought you designed Merodi Universalis so there wouldn’t be bureaucracy we had to cut through to do the right thing.”

“Renee did that, mostly,” Eve said. “And… well, nobody was acting out of petty or selfish reasons as far as I knew. They took what they knew about the world and what they thought about life, and made what they believed to be the right decision. I can’t fault any of them, for they all had to have an internal struggle.”

“Who voted for us?” Corona asked.

“Me, Renee, Giorno, Freyr, and Jingle. ...Jingle …She changed her mind to join us. I need to go thank her.”

“…Eight against? It wasn’t even close, was it?”

“It was actually six to five. Two abstained.”

Corona blinked. “W-why?”

“Maud abstained because she doesn’t trust her own visions in matters this large. I expected her to be forced into making a decision for the sake of tiebreaker. But I have no idea why Ava abstained. She’s one of the most politically active of all of us, why would she hold back?”

Corona shook her head. “I don’t know and I’m not going to think about it right now. I… I need to go see Lady Rarity. And Toph.”

Eve nodded. “Sure.”

Corona turned to leave.
“Oh, Corona, one last thing?”

Corona looked at her.

“When you go to bed tonight and start festering over your anger so much that you think about going again, don’t. It… it won’t end well for you.”

Corona nodded slowly. “…Yeah. …Thanks for the advice.”

Eve smiled at her as she left.

~~~

Skarn the Shaper walked into one of Eve’s private meeting rooms. He was a dual-horned humanoid bear, just like his children, though notably his skin looked less like fur and looked more like stars. It wasn’t quite the white-and-black appearance of a Celestialsapien, but more akin to looking into a nebula where entire galaxies were born. Ethereal lines of magic popped off of him, signifying his power. He wore little aside from a loincloth, gloves, and a necklace that glowed with a deep cosmic power.

He was very surprised to find Eve alone in the meeting room. “…Where is everyone else?” he spoke with a deep, but pleasant voice. “I always look forward to meeting new people, and Cass is such a treat.”

Eve looked at him with angry eyes. “Because this isn’t going to be a pleasant meeting.”

Skarn looked at her, expression shifting to sadness. “Oh. What happened?”

“They told me I should just leave a message for you and refuse to see you. I told them I’m mare enough to tell you to your face.”

Skarn finally recognized that the hostility was towards him. “What did I do? I’ve done nothing but give your world goods and art! I’ve asked for little in return!”

“All trade routes between Merodi Universalis and the Congeries have been suspended indefinitely. You and your children are no longer welcome in our space.”

“Evening, what brought this about?”

“Believe it or not, this actually wasn’t my decision. I’m not allowed to tell you!” She pressed her hooves together. “You wouldn’t have liked the suggestion I made either.”

“So you’re angry enough to cut ties, perhaps more, and I don’t even get to know why?”

“Nope!” Eve said. “And I’m here personally. Not out of any sense of honor or obligation, but just to make it cut more.”

Skarn narrowed his eyes. “You found out.”

“Found out what, Skarn?” Eve blinked innocently. “Do tell.”

Skarn narrowed his eyes – he knew that was a trap. He wasn’t sure they knew his big secret – and for all Eve knew, his artistic fancies may not even have been the secret he was thinking of. He always struck her as a man with lots of secrets. Not a nefarious one, but she’d clearly been wrong about that.

“This is a betrayal,” Skarn growled.

“This was a rejection,” Eve corrected. She wanted to follow up with react if you dare or something similar, but she wasn’t going to egg him on to war. If he attacked them then… Things would be a lot worse.

Skarn curled his bear claws into a fist – and for the first time he let his amiable demeanor fall, replaced with a cruel snarl. “I put a lot of work into forming this connection. I saw you as a people willing to change, to understand. You would have learned to accept me given enough time. But you’ve gone and cut it off early.”

“And why is that a problem with you?”

“It’s dishonorable,” Skarn spat. “If you have an issue with me, tell me what it is to my face.”

“Skarn, it’s time for you to leave.”

He pulled his fist back.

“There is one Corona Shimmer watching this meeting, looking for any excuse to pull the trigger on something particularly nasty.” She was bluffing, of course – she wouldn’t let Corona anywhere near this meeting in her current state – but she did have Seraphim ready, and a few other precautions were in place.

Skarn glared. “You have lost a valuable friend today, Eve.”

“Valuable and good are not the same thing.”

Skarn pulled back, turning to the door. Before he left, he glanced over his shoulder at Eve. “You would have been so beautiful among the Congeries. The brightest star among it all…” He left and slammed the door so hard it fell off its hinges.

Eve let out a sigh. “That wasn’t ominous at all.”

Pinkie popped out of a nearby potted plant, putting her sniper rifle ‘precaution’ back in her mane. “You picked up on that too, huh?”

“Yep. And I don’t need you or Twilence to tell me that isn’t the last we’ll see of him.” She spread her wings and stretched her hooves, trying to de-stress.

Pinkie nodded. “Yep. He’ll be back. But so will just about everyone else we’ve encountered. It’s how things work. There’s no way to tell when he’ll be back.”

“Yeah…” Eve said, shaking her head.

Pinkie fixed her with a concerned glare. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go talk to Corona and make sure she gets through this. Wanna come?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep. I’ll do whatever I can to get her back on her feet.”

~~~

“…And so we’re not going to war,” Renee told Allure as they walked the streets of Celestia City near Allure’s home.

“…No offense Renee, but I’m kinda glad we’re not,” Allure said.

Renee smiled sadly. “None taken. It was the popular decision after all, and I have to live with it even if I disagreed with it. And live with the people who thought differently.” Renee nuzzled Allure. “Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you. You do have a daughter to think about, after all.”

“Yep.”

“How is she, by the way?”

“She’s sixteen and I swear she just skipped the teenage rebellious phase,” Allure said. “I know she’s not a normal kid, but I was still expecting something.”

Renee smirked. “Not every teenager in the world has to rebel.”

“Teenagers who speak to Alushy on a regular basis?”

Renee pondered this. “…Good point…”

“Yeah. Point is, she’s weird. Not that I’m complaining – the weirdness is great.”

“When it isn’t creepy?”

“Huh? Oh, right.” Allure rubbed the back of her head. “I stopped being weirded out by her creepy observations a long time ago. It is who she is. I don’t have to figure out how she does it. For all I know she could just be ever so slightly Aware, or have some prophecy gift, or something. Doesn’t matter, she’s Minna. Always Minna.”

“That’s precious,” Renee said, sniffing.

“Pff, stop overselling it.”

“I am not ‘overselling’ anything! It truly is one of the most precious things I’ve ever heard!”

Allure rolled her eyes. “You just keep on telling yourself that.” They arrived at Allure’s front door. “Want to come in?”

“Ah, apologies, but I am a busy mare,” Renee said, adjusting her hat. “I do believe I must check on Corona and Pinkie’s team.”

“You should try the pirate accent again. That’s sure to help.”

“Allure there’s a time and a place fo- actually, you know what? No. There isn’t.”

Allure giggled. “See ya, Renee.”

Renee winked at her. “Bye.”

Allure entered her home and walked to the living room. Minna was staring at a glass of juice. She may have been a teenager, but she didn’t look all that different. She was taller than before, but her figure hadn’t rounded out that much, and she rarely wore anything other than black dresses.

“…Trying to burn it?” Allure asked.

“Huh? No. I was just going to drink it. And then…” Minna pursed her lips. “I dunno.”

“Get one of your inklings?”

Minna nodded. “I feel like everyone’s just dodged a bullet. A huge bullet.”

Allure wanted so badly to tell her about the non-war, but Minna definitely didn’t have that kind of clearance. “I’m glad everyone’s not getting shot, then.”

“Mhm,” Minna said, staring at the juice. “It just felt… I don’t know, more personal than usual.”

Allure looked at her. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

Minna looked at her and smirked. “Mom, there was an ‘I don’t know’ in that sentence.”

“Ah. Right.” Allure rubbed the back of her head.

“By the way, Nova’s hired me to watch Stardust again. Sunburst had a convention he really wanted to go to.”

“Oh, that’s great!”

Minna chuckled. “You do realize Stardust calls me the ‘creepy babysitter’ right?”

Allure rolled her eyes. “She likes you just fine.”

“The kid’s got a morbid curiosity.”

“And you don’t?”

“It’s a different kind!”

“I sense denial.”

The two laughed. A perfect image of a family enjoying peace.

Author's Note

Hey guys! NEXT CHAPTER IS MOVIE LENGTH: #100! It's the one you all helped me make, so whatever happens in it is partially your fault. So... enjoy when it arrives!

In other news, I need some assistance. You may recall that I want to animate/get art for Chapter 130, the 'climax' of Songs of the Spheres. And to do that I need ways to get money / art - I'm hoping through lots of commissions this summer, but I will take just about anything. More info on this blog post here (clicky).

Here's to hoping we can make that awesome!

-GM, master of ANs.

100

Author's Note

The following chapter was written with reader suggestions. You have been warned.

100

Hello, readers.

It is not often the narrative backs up, is it?

Many of you have no idea what this means, having this little experiment nested right between the neat numbers of ninety-nine and one-hundred-and-one. To you, this chapter without a proper title is just another step toward the rapidly approaching end.

But to those of us in the know, we see it. We see that the future has already happened. That the events of what is to come are set in stone. We may not know exactly what that future is, but we can sense that it is there. The sudden solidification that exists only for today, for today was written after all other days.

If you can consider this a ‘day’. Technically speaking it isn’t, but days in the multiverse are metaphorical under the best of circumstances.

I hope you get some enjoyment out of this. After all, this is what you wanted.

You said “let there be insanity,” and then you let the narrative be muddled.

~~~

“Girls! Girls! Vriska is turning a thousand soon! Party planning day!”

Jotaro, Nova, and a partially-pink flying pony sat still.

“…Enough, I’m using ‘E’ and so’s the rest of this chapter, We’re not suffering through this!” Pinkie clapped her hooves, ending the curse of the fifthglyph.

Flutterfree cocked her head to the side. “Er… Pinkie, is something up today?”

“Screwy chapter,” Pinkie explained dismissively. “There’s going to be a lot of seemingly unrelated elements thrown in everywhere and unexpected stuff jumping out from all sides. I’m going to try to not think too hard about it. I just need to put a disclaimer or something up… Hold on…” She pulled a sign out of her mane that read “IF YOU EXPECTED THIS TO MAKE PERFECT SENSE, BOY ARE YOU IN FOR A SURPRISE.” She slapped it on the wall and grinned.

Nova raised an eyebrow. “Pinkie, we’re in a public area of Celestia City, the city’s going to take that down.”

Pinkie twitched. “Well, it was up long enough for them to read it.” She took out an axe and tore the sign to shreds, leaving the chunks on the ground. “Anyway, back to our inciting incident for the day: Vriska’s thousandth birthday. It’s coming up in a few indeterminate amount of days.”

“Indeterminate?” Jotaro asked.

“I don’t even know, really,” Pinkie admitted with a shrug. “It’s going to be a thousand years from her perspective since the moment she was ectobiologically synthesized – read Homestuck or just accept you’re not going to know what that means – and all I know is that it’s time to prepare the party. There will be a party this chapter, but I have this sneaking suspicion this is going to be a long chapter in more ways than one.”

“So, planning a huge party?” Flutterfree ignored most of Pinkie’s meta-confusion. “Have we ever done a thousandth?”

Pinkie shook her head. “Celestias have, conveniently, celebrated their thousandth birthdays without me in sight. This’ll be the first so it needs to be the best! I’ll be pulling out all the stops, grabbing everyone from everywhere, it’ll be the biggest thing ever!”

“Why are we planning it in a public place like Celestia City?” Jotaro asked. “With her luck she’ll just wander across us. She’s probably already suspicious.”

“So we can get an army of Pinkies in one place.” Pinkie pulled out a megaphone and shouted into it. “HEY, GIRLS, SHOW YOURSELVES!”

A thousand versions of Pinkie poured out into the street – the primary forces of the Pinkie Emporium. They all saluted. “SIR YES SIR! PARTY PLANNING CUTAWAY ENGAGED!”

“Oh for th-”

They were suddenly in a large, open warehouse – surrounded by Pinkies bouncing around everywhere chatting and laughing.

“Yep, I called in the Pinkie Emporium,” Pinkie said, winking. “I know I mock them a lot but there’s certainly one thing they’re good at: PARTIES. And we’re going to coalesce all the party knowledge together!”

“Also, not all of us are ‘girls’, Prime!” a Bubble Berry called.

Pinkie frowned. “Ah, yes, ‘Prime’. So boring…”

“It’s a nice name,” Flutterfree said.

“But I’m the Pinkie! They know that! They’re just messing with me!”

“YEEEEP!” Seven Pinkies sang in a chorus, bouncing away with a bouncy castle on their backs.

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Right. Anyway, I’ve got some other help as well. We’re ponies – of course we’re going to need some help from her homeworld friends. SO BEHOLD, THE SBURB BRIGADE!” All of them focused on the troop of various SBURB players of Earth C and Skaia’s Dream.

“We need a lot of exploding cueballs!” Terezi shouted, jumping onto Pinkie’s back. “And we shall rig them to go off when near her and her only!”

“That’s cruel,” Jade said – only one of them was there at the moment, and it was the one who spent most of her time at the League of Sweetie Belles being dog-like. “We should remind her of the good memories.”

“I could probably get some of those…” John said.

“Egbert, you’ll get erased by the Gallifreyans if you try to go that far back,” Dirk pointed out.

“Oh. Right. …I have no more ideas.”

“I do,” Roxy said, walking forward with impressive swagger in her step. The back of her Rogue of Void mask twirled in nonexistent wind, and a Carnelian Gem walked at her side. “As Earth C’s resident party planner, may I suggest a theme, o’ Pink one?”

“Go right ahead!” Pinkie grinned.

“Aspects,” Roxy said, pointing at the symbol of Void emblazoned across her chest. “We get outfits of Aspects for everyone who cares, and we’ll all be dressed up in the best of colors.”

“It’ll be a rainbow of Vriska-related awesomeness!” Carnelian added.

“And we can style the rest of the party after SBURB and other things.” Roxy put her hands on her hips. “We’ll, like, even put in some fake planets, maybe even a subdimension! I can get Carnelian and the rest of her Gem-construction friends to build us the best locale ever! So much yush, am I right?”

“YUSH!” Pinkie declared. “Get on that! Pinkies, we’re going to build an entire subdimension for a party!”

“WOOHOO!”

“How are we going to make all the outfits?” Flutterfree asked. “Only god-tier players can create those outfits, and even then just ones keyed to themselves.”

“That’s where I come in, dear,” Renee said, pushing out of the crowd of excessively pink ponies. “I’m working on making outfits for everyone – with help from my alternates, of course. Roxy asked me to start a few days ago.”

“Pre-emptive strike, huh?” Pinkie gave Roxy a playful smile. “You were ready to play dirty.”

Roxy rolled back on her heels. “Let’s just say I knew you’d say yes.”

“Hmm. Clever…”

Renee rolled her eyes and adjusted her glasses. “Regardless, Flutterfree, since Pinkie can produce her outfit on her own through her powers, I was working on yours.” She levitated a bundled-up set of purple robes out and gave them to Flutterfree. “Here you go, Page of Rage robes altered for a pony’s physique. I got rid of that annoying speedo-thing that’s on it, naturally, not suited for the equine form.”

Flutterfree gingerly stepped into the purple robes and flapped her wings. It felt comfortable, which was pretty much guaranteed for anything Renee ever made, but beyond that it was loose. The short cape somehow didn’t get in the way of her wings, and there was a nice strap for her Bow of Light. She examined the strange swirling symbol of Rage on her chest and smiled. “It fits wonderfully, thanks!”

“Good! It even matches your colors! Perfect complement! Unlike Corona’s Doom robes which are going to look as ugly as opal’s vomit, but I’ll make do. Somehow.” She shivered. “Or maybe I’ll pass it off to someone else…”

“You look amazing Flutters!” Pinkie said. “Strike a pose!”

Flutterfree took her Bow of Light out and stood on her hind legs, pulling the string back and aiming at a wall of the warehouse. Her short cape billowed along with her flowing pink mane, giving her the appearance of being supercharged with power.

With a smile, Flutterfree lowered her weapon. “Too bad I don’t use my Rage that much. I’d probably wear it more often.”

Dirk raised an eyebrow – an act just barely visible behind his anime shades. “I’ve been watching you Twelve half-players. Despite being the Page, you’re advancing more than most of your companions.”

“O-oh…” Flutterfree said, seemingly upset by the news.

“It’s something to be proud of, Flutterfree,” Renee said, putting a hoof on her. “You’re growing.”

“Into Rage?”

“It’s not literal.”

“Feels like it a lot of the time…” Flutterfree shook her head. “But it is a part of me… Probably shouldn’t hide from it.”

Nova chuckled. “Definitely not. Just don’t go wearing those robes around, we don’t want to tip Vriska off to this thing.”

~~~

Eve sat on a couch in Flutterfree’s cottage, reading a book. She could have read the book on her data-pad, that certainly would have been more efficient, but it would also have not been a book. For all her love of technology and progress, Eve would always have a soft spot for books.

“Aaaaaand... behold!” Flutterfree flew down from the shower, taking a dramatic pose on the coffee table. For a moment her mane, tail, and cape flapped as though they were in a raging storm. This, unfortunately, lasted only a split second – the exact split second it took Eve to get to the end of her sentence and look up.

“Aww, Eve, you missed it!”

“I missed what – hey, are those the Rage robes?” Eve brightened up. “You look beautiful.”

Flutterfree facehooved. “Thanks, but I was supposed to come down here and look all… adventure-y. Wistful. Daring. Or noble or something.”

“Well, I’m here, you have a coffee table runway, what’s wrong with striking some more poses?”

“Absolutely nothing!” Flutterfree declared with a chuckle, standing up on a hind hoof and pointing forward with her wing. “Onward!”

“I can see Lolo helping you with balance.”

Flutterfree had Lolo create a spirograph halo around her head. “Aww, that ruins the fun…” she said, mimicking a young child. She switched poses to one reminiscent of a predatory cat, allowing her eyes to spark ever-so-slightly with Rage. It was easy to do, given Lolo’s abilities. Now that she thought about it, Lolo was probably why her Aspect powers kept progressing despite her natural difficulty with them…

Eve raised her hooves up in mock fear. “No, I’ll do anything for you! Fame, riches, power, your own galaxy! Just don’t-”

Flutterfree lunged, booping Eve on the snout. The two devolved into giggles.

“HEY FLUTTERS!” Vriska shouted, kicking the door in – as was her custom. “I need more spider-chow for that stupid mini-lusus that keeps trying to eat me.”

Flutterfree and Eve stared at her like deer caught in the headlights.

“…Did I interrupt something?” Vriska asked.

“I mean, yes, but nothing important,” Eve said, glancing nervously at Flutterfree’s robes of Rage.

“You guys need a stuffpile,” Vriska commented.

“Just because our relationship is analogous to your race’s pale quadrant doesn’t mean it’s the same thing,” Eve asserted. “Also we tried the stuffpile thing. I almost drowned in stuffed animals.”

Flutterfree giggled nervously.

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Starbeat’s fine with it.”

“Starbeat is a unique pony,” Flutterfree countered.

“Yeah, sure. Anyway, spider chow?”

“Yes, I have it right over here…”

“By the way, nice robes.”

Flutterfree smiled nervously. “Yes! They are nice! Renee made them for me.”

“Never saw you as one to embrace the Rage, but I’m glad you are. Can’t wait to see you wear it in the field.”

Eve could hear Flutterfree’s internal screams. She was going to have to wear them now…

“Oh, Eve!” Vriska grinned. “You should get some Light robes. You two would match! Inverted colors and everything!”

“…That would be cute,” Flutterfree admitted, fixing Eve with a sly smirk.

“I wouldn’t be able to wear such a thing ‘in the field’,” Eve commented. “But I’ll see what Renee can do.”

“It’ll be great if all of you could get robes,” Vriska said as Flutterfree handed her a bag full of spider chow. Even though it was half her size, she lifted it with little issue. “Anyway, see you two later, need to get back to Earth C. That spider’s not going to train itself…”

“Maybe you should give her a name?” Flutterfree asked.

“Eh, maybe,” Vriska said, jumping away.

There was silence in the cottage.

“Good news, she suspects nothing,” Eve commented.

“Yeah. But she’s going to be on the trail…” Flutterfree furrowed her brow. “We’re going to have to do something about this…”

“Pinkie?”

“Pinkie.”

~~~

The Gem subdimension construction was already underway. They had chosen an empty place in the middle of Celestia City that had originally been made to look like a desert – but few people wanted to wander the empty desert, so it had been somewhat easy to procure a plot of land to build a special sort of dimensional gateway. Currently it was little more than four crystal pillars in the sand, but Carnelian’s team of Gems were quickly turning it into much more.

“She SAW you!?” Pinkie shouted, jumping up and down in panic. “Oh no, oh no, oh noooooo she can’t have the surprise ruined! How could you do this!?”

Flutterfree backed up. “I was just showing off for Eve…”

Eve sighed. “There was no way we could have predicted Vriska would come barging in.”

“I know… I know…” Pinkie Pie produced a rocking chair and started shaking it back and forth in an effort to calm herself. “We have to get rid of her.”

“Get rid of her!?” Flutterfree gasped.

“A perfectly reasonable idea,” Corona said, walking over – her robes of Doom held in her hand like toxic kelp. “She’s got luck and she’s very, very nosy when her suspicions are aroused. Just put her in a situation where she can’t find out.”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “Corona, buttering me up isn’t going to get me to change my mind. You’re wearing that.”

“But Pinkie it’s-”

“The Rogue of Doom. You.”

“But it’s green, black, and ugly!”

Eve smirked. “Problem with ugly?”

“Wh- no!” Corona huffed. “I just… Doom. I don’t like Doom.”

“You can wear it for one day, it’s not like it’s got any power or anything,” Pinkie said dismissively. “Back on track: getting rid of Vriska.”

“Easy to do,” Eve said. “Hard to do without her getting suspicious.”

“We could have Renee send us on an extended mission,” Flutterfree suggested.

“But I have to be here to plan the party!” Pinkie wailed. “The other Pinkies won’t do it right! And what kind of mission could we go on for that long anyway?”

“Around the multiverse in eighty days,” Renee said, walking into the group. “And don’t you worry your little head, Pinkie, you won’t be going anywhere.” She grinned mischievously. “Because I have an idea!”

“is this going to be anything like the idea you had when you tried to plan the break-in of Canterlot Castle?” Eve asked, eyebrow raised.

“Well, yes, but better!” Renee chuckled. “It’ll be perfect… Pinkie, you keep working with Roxy and the Emporium on the Party. I will place my plan in motion!”

“Um, how will we know we’ll be back in time?” Flutterfree asked. “We don’t exactly know the timing of everything.”

“That’s actually good,” Pinkie said. “Means you’ll come back at the precise right moment.”

“Does it really?” Eve asked.

“Today it does,” Pinkie said with a shrug. “I warned you all that this was going to be a weird one.”

“You did?”

“You weren’t there,” Flutterfree said. “I forgot to mention it.”

“Oh. Okay then.” She ruffled her feathers. “Renee, care to explain what exactly your plan is?”

“Only if you insist.”

~~~

Corona could have teleported anywhere she wanted on Celestia City. Instead, she walked across the ‘desert’ to the nearest ‘town’. She wasn’t entirely sure why, she just did. Perhaps it was a mixture of being bored and the annoying thoughts that were plaguing her ever since she’d laid eyes on that stupid robe of Doom.

Doom. Doom.

Everyone she’d ever talked to about it had reminded her, time and time again, that Doom didn’t mean literal doom, though it could. It just meant great change, the ending of something. She had to admit, that did fit her.

But come on, couldn’t it be called something other than Doom? That was so negative.

She vowed to wear the robes once – exactly once – and then never again. Maybe she could donate them to some other Sunset who would find it interesting. There were always others out there…

Looking around, she realized she was in a ‘town’. Though ‘town’ was an odd thing in Celestia City – technically she was still in the city, but the ramshackle arrangement of buildings here sure didn’t seem to be part of any larger city. It was nothing but sand, tumbleweeds, and a fake sky. Likely constructed in an ill-advised attempt at creating a ‘wild west’.

Lucky Pinkie. This meant she got an empty place in Celestia City to work with. Assuming they had taken the proper precautions to keep the townspeople from asking questions.

“Who the heck are you!?”

Corona looked down at a short Ruby in a sheriff's outfit. She smiled – but refrained from laughing, knowing this little Ruby probably was the sheriff. “Corona Shimmer. I’m sure you’ve heard of me.”

“What th- oh.” the Ruby dropped her angry expression instantly. “L-lifebringer! G-good to have you visit our small town! What brings you here?”

“A walk,” Corona said, continuing her march into the city. She was mildly baffled to see that nearly half of the town’s population was Rufioh Skaians. The rest was the general mixture of humans, ponies, and Gems. Of interest was a long snake-dog thing, possibly a longma, though that particular word was assigned to so many different creatures Corona didn’t want to make any assumptions.

“As the Rogue of Doom laid her eyes upon the curious creature…” a voice said from above.

Corona looked up, processing the fact that nothing was up there. “…Do you have a Narrative Presence here?”

The Ruby nodded. “Uh, yeah. That’s Rotarran.”

“Charmed,” the voice said.

“That’s just Narrator backwards,” Corona commented.

“You try coming up with something original in this city. There is a Sunset living here by the name of Tesnus, by the way.”

“I have about as much respect for her as I do you right about now,” Corona commented.

“Judgey judgey! Have you been having a bad day by chance, heroine?”

“I’m so glad I don’t have a narrator…”

You do though. Not that you’ll notice.

The Ruby shrugged. “Rotarran’s chill, give him a break. He even helps out a lot with adventures and stuff! Nibira and the others say he does all sort of mission-things. Speaking of…”

“We have not found the thieves,” Rotarran cut him off.

“I FOUND THE THIEVES!” A man in a loose tunic called, running down the street. “They just… did a vanishing thing!”

“Lance Lancelot has once again failed his ‘don’t lose track of the objective’ goal,” Rotarran narrated.

“They’re right around the corne-” he paused, frowning. “You know they’re gone.”

“Yes.”

“Well that’s just great.”

“Yes.”

Corona walked away from them as they continued to argue about the thieves, leaving the sheriff Ruby behind. She decided she might as well try to find these thieves, she didn’t exactly have much of a plan for today… Research was off, and there were no adventures. Might as well make one.

She came across a bar and decided she might as well walk in. To her surprise, there was an Ork there, with several young human women staring at him with awe in their eyes.

“And then Ah, cover’d ‘n flames, FLOPP’D on the eldritch squid wit a WAAAAAAAAGH! ‘Dere was a big boom and the squid was dead.”

“Wooooow…” the women sung, swooning.

Those women are either desperate or need mental help. Corona chose to ignore them and look for someone who might have better information. She sat down at the bar, ordered a random drink with low alcohol content, and struck up conversation with a pony/human couple she saw sitting nearby. “So, what’s the occasion?”

“Anniversary,” the pony – a stallion – said. “Marie here has been mine for over twenty years now.”

“Ignore Brick, he’s drunk,” Marie chuckled. “I own him.”

“I’m sure it’s a mutual relationship,” Corona offered.

“Actually, the kids own us,” Brick said with a grin. “We have no freedom in the relationship.”

“True…” Marie admitted.

“Speaking of, we should be getting back. Don’t want Yvenne making dinner again…”

“...Kids?” Corona asked, looking between the two of them.

Marie flushed. “No, we didn’t do any splicing. That’s… well, that’s just disgusting, no offense to you. …I’m sorry, that sounded horrible.”

“I’m not the result of a splice,” Corona said. “Adopted then?”

“All seven of them,” Brick said with a laugh. “Wait, you’re not a splice? What then?”

Marie furrowed her brow. “…Dear, I think that’s Corona Shimmer.”

“Huh?”

“The immortality serum.”

“WOAH!” Brick fell out of his chair. “Y-you should join us for dinner!”

“Brick! She’s a Princess! You don’t just invite them for dinner!”

Corona smirked. “I’d be glad to come for dinner. When is it?”

“Ten minutes from now?”

“Then we should go. I have some rumor-mills I need to run through and a family dinner sounds like just the place to do it.”

“Oh? About what?” Marie asked.

“The thieves you guys have.”

“Ah… them.” Marie blinked. “Don’t know what to make of them hone-”

“You can just tell me at dinner.”

“Oh. Yes. Which is now eight minutes away! BRICK, WE GOTTA GO!”

And so they scrambled to dinner – and Corona was more than a little shocked to find that only two of their kids were human or pony. There were two Gems, a baby dragon, a teenage goblin, and what Corona was pretty sure was an actual angel girl.

Food turned out to be ‘instant magical lasagna’ which, admittedly, was pretty good, since Celestia City had all the resources it could ever need for making good instant dinners.

“Hooves, how do they work?” Brick asked as he drove a fork into the lasagna with amazing precision. “Well enough for me to eat neater than the rest of you, apparently.”

True, already the multiracial home was an absolute mess of food, even though one of the Gems wasn’t eating anything.

Corona smirked. “Hooves are magical focal points of a pony’s body in most universes where a small ‘traction field’ exists at all times, exerting a weak ‘grip’ on anything you press them to.”

He stared at her. “I… I know that. I was j-”

“I could go into the scientific nuances of the phenomenon, it really is quite fascinating.”

There was silence at the table. The goblin snorted with barely restrained laughter.

“Yvenne! Stop staring!” Marie chided, suddenly.

The young ‘angel’ couldn’t take her eyes off Corona. “She’s like me…”

Corona smiled warmly. “I don’t think I am. These wings are just feathery appendages, nothing too shiny.”

“You’re brimming with life energy.”

“Well yeah, I-”

“And death energy.”

Corona stared at her.

“Ahahahah!” Marie laughed nervously. “Yvenne’s a silly one, isn’t she! Grellk, why don’t you take your sister to the kitchen to get dessert?”

“Ugh, moooooom,” the goblin groaned. “The sugar is disgusting! Have Nin do it.”

“I can’t even eat yet!” Nin shouted, folding her hard-light arms.

“I can,” the other Gem added, rubbing it in.

Brick groaned. “Someone take Yvenne to get the dessert.”

“Got it,” the pony – who just so happened to be a crystal unicorn mare – got up and led Yvenne to the kitchen. Corona could feel holy magic flying the moment they entered the room. She wondered what Yvenne was doing…

“So, you wanted to ask about the thieves?” Brick asked.

“Oh, yes! See, I-” she ignored the sounds of the floor cracking in the other room. “-heard about some thieves, and I figured I might as well try to apprehend them.”

“Really? You’d apprehend the Phantom Thieves of Hearts?”

“They’re Skaians?” Corona asked.

“Oh? No!” Marie chuckled. “You have no idea who they are, do you?”

“No…”

“Hey, there’s one right now! Just like the games!” the human child said, pointing out the window. Running across the street was a young man in a black shirt and plaid pants pushing his glasses to his face. He might have been a teenager, but sometimes it was hard to tell with humans who were clearly from anime-originating worlds. Corona didn’t waste any time – she teleported out onto the street and attempted to touch her fingers to his head.

He jumped out of the way, spinning behind her with a grin. “Woah! Sorry, not going to le-” he paused when he realized who he was talking to. “I didn’t think we’d gotten quite this level of recognition… Corona, pleasure to meet you! I’d love to stay and chat but I have a-”

Corona attempted to jump him again, but he twisted behind her. She was expecting this – and just used her wing to tap him.

Who ever said she had to use her hands to initiate empathy?

After a few seconds of absorbing what was inside him, Corona backed off. “Huh… You’re an interesting one… Joker.”

Joker smiled cheekily. “It’s what it takes to be the leader of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, Corona.”

Corona looked him over for a few seconds. “The heroic thief… An interesting archetype, and not one I thought we needed in our society.”

“No offense, but you’re too high up to see what it’s like down here,” Joker said, casually leaning on a wall. “Things fall through the cracks of your friends’ web. Little heroes like us are there to take care of it.”

“By stealing parts of people’s souls.”

Joker waved his hand back and forth. “Eeeeeeeeh depends on how you look at it.”

Corona let out a soft chuckle. “I like you. And, for what it’s worth, I think you’re doing good work. No matter how… weird it is.”

“Think of it like an inverse Stand.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Joker grinned. “I know.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Have fun with your phantom heists. Don’t go too far and I won’t have to call Expeditions on you.”

“What would Expeditions do?”

“Recruit you, but then you’d be limited by government-assigned missions and bureaucracy. Little annoying if you’re not as high up as I am.”

“Maybe I should mess up just to get an invitation.”

Corona put her hands on her hips. “You can do that if you want. I’ll be very, very disappointed though.”

Joker grabbed his heart. “Alas, I cannot survive with the great guardian’s disapproval! I must not take this risk!”

“Smooth.”

“I try.”

Corona waved. “Go stop that guy from cheating the homeless out of their food.”

“I will. Oh, and Corona?”

“Hmm?”

“If you want a more local issue, the Pinkies have been trying to get us to infiltrate the Infinite Carousel as of late. Apparently there’s something big going on in there. Figured it was a bit above our paygrade since we have no idea what’s going on – but if you were to look into it...”

“Say no more,” Corona said, giving him a thumbs up. “I’m going to finish my dinner with this nice family and then I’ll get to that.” She put her hands on her hips. “I wonder if it’s really a conspiracy or not…”

“It probably is.”

“Good.” Corona pulled out her phone and called Allure while Joker sped off into the sand. “Hey, Allure? Do you know anything about increased activity of the Infinite Carousel?”

She could hear Allure audibly groan on the other side. “Yeah. Both the Carousel and Census have been acting up. We have no idea why.”

“Well, they might be up to something. Prepare a report of everything you know, I’ll be swinging by later.”

“Suuuuure thing!”

Corona hung up and teleported back to the dinner table. “So, that’s dealt with, who knows about the Infinite Carousel?”

~~~

Renee looked at three of her closest, most trusted Rarities. Her opinions of the three of them varied considerably, but they had proven themselves time and time again to her. Even if some of them were… questionable.

Mattie grinned. “I can hear your thoughts. I absolutely love them. Please, punish me for being so off the walls. I’ll learn. Trust me, like you were just thinking you could.”

Renee sighed. “Celia?”

“You walked into this,” the pony-like Gem said, shrugging.

“I’m with Mattie, let’s punish her,” Affix grinned. “That’s always fun.”

Renee leaned into her hoof, the action moving a digital tablet across her office desk. They were in her primary office in the Castle of Friendship. “Look, ladies, I understand we are all strong, brilliant personalities-”

“You got that right.” Affix winked.

“-but all I’m asking is something simple. We need to get all these Aspect robes ready for everyone going to the party before the party happens. Sooner rather than later. You can bring in anypony you want, but please keep the Infinite Carousel out of this. That means you, Mattie.”

“Bu-”

“I’m serious.”

“…I don’t have to listen to you…”

“Do you want me to call the Oversight Division? I can.”

Mattie grumbled. “But they’d make it so much faster…”

“We can’t give them a hoofhold given the current political situation,” Celia pointed out. “They’re threatening the purity of Merodi business seclusion.”

“I’d be impressed if they weren’t being so illegal,” Renee muttered. “Is business so important to us that we’re usually willing to break the law for it?”

“To be fair, they existed before Merodi Universalis,” Affix said.

“But they keep trying to get more operatives here…” Renee shook her head. “Not an issue to talk about right now. You can hire Rarities that are part of the Carousel, but you can’t get Carousel management involved, okay?”

“Got it,” Celia said, saluting. “…I’ll see who I can get.”

“But what about making dresses?” Affix asked.

“I never was much of a designer,” Celia admitted with a shrug. “More of a politician. I can get us some good deals, don’t you worry.”

“In that case, dismissed,” Renee said with a few claps of her hooves. “I’ve got to talk to the Primary team.”

“Have fun!” Mattie sang as she and the other Rarities were teleported away. A second later, Vriska, Jotaro, Flutterfree, and Nova were teleported into the room. Flutterfree was wearing her Rage robes – as Vriska expected. Flutterfree didn’t seem that uncomfortable with it, which Renee took as a compliment.

“…Uh, where’s Pinkie?” Nova asked, playing her part perfectly.

Renee smiled serenely. “I’m glad you asked, that’s part of why you’re here. You see, I had to send Pinkie on a super-secret mission alone.”

“…What?” Vriska said.

“I’m not allowed to talk about it. And even if I was, Giorno didn’t exactly give me any information on it. She’ll be indisposed for… a good while.”

“I call being in charge!” Vriska called.

Flutterfree coughed. “I’m in command in Pinkie’s absence.”

“…Yeah, well, I called dibs.”

“Doesn’t beat prior agreements,” Jotaro said.

“But… law of dibs!”

“Your argument is pointless, neither of you will be leading,” Renee said. “Though, for the record, Flutterfree is right.”

Flutterfree grinned proudly.

“Who’s leading us then?” Nova asked.

“ME!” Renee said, jumping on top of her desk and striking a pose. “The moment she was called away I was thinking ‘Renee, it’s been a while since you’ve been out in the field, I bet you miss it’ and I responded with ‘you’re right, I do miss it, I should do something!’ So I’m back on the team for a while. And since Pinkie’s going to be gone a significant amount of time, well…” She grinned. “You’ve all heard of Nanoha’s Grand Tour, yes?”

“Yeah…?” Vriska said, cocking her head.

“We’re doing it. Except we’re doing it fast. We’re going around the multiverse in eighty-ish days.”

“You’re crazy.”

Renee grinned. “I guess I’ve been letting myself go lately.”

Vriska matched her expression. She clasped Renee’s hoof. “Welcome back, fashion horse.”

“Thank you!” Renee tossed her mane back. “I’ve got to contact Daniel and tell everyone where I’m going, but we should be able to leave by the end of the day! Pack your things, we’re not going to see Merodi Universalis for a long while!”

~~~

“Cessera, what is a waffleborg?” Eve asked.

The Gem Second looked up from her data pad. “If I had to guess, biomechanical aliens obsessed with assimilation and breakfast.”

“I really hope that’s not it,” Eve commented, scrolling through her ‘incidents of possible interest to the Overhead of Relations’ report. Several people in the Relations Division cut down the most interesting reports and sent the ones with the most necessary information to her, cut down to be as efficient as possible. This kept her from spending multiple days reading through every report that came out, but it also confused her sometimes. ‘Waffleborg tried to open negotiations, failed spectacularly when Pit offered pancakes to them.’ There was so much to unload there…

“It probably is it,” Eve muttered after a few seconds of silence. She marked the section as ‘read more into later’ and kept going. She thought about calling Renee and asking about it – but then she remembered, Renee was gone. And so was Flutterfree.

“…Eve?”

Eve barely caught the motion of Cessera’s lips. “I’m fine,” Eve said, quickly. “Just… well I usually talk to Renee or Flutterfree about these things, they’re not here. And Pinkie’s probably so busy she’d scream at the phone if I dared trying to call her.”

“Applejack? Rainbow?”

Eve smiled warmly. “My weekly dinners with Applejack are amazing, and I always love seeing Rainbow. But neither of them really seem to ‘get’ the politics I always find myself in. I would call Luna but…”

“Asleep?”

“Yeah. Asleep. As is the norm.” She ruffled her wings. “I guess I’ll just have to get used to talking with just you.”

“That’s basically half your job at this point.”

“I do spend a lot of time in this office for somepony who’s the face of Merodi Universalis,” Eve said, furrowing her brow.

“That was an exaggeration.”

“Exaggerations contain truth within them.”

Cessera shrugged, scrolling through her copy of the report. “…The Derpy Anti-Defamation League is back.”

“…We sent Walleye to them, right?”

“Yeah. They’re suing her – and by extension, us – for defamation.”

Eve groaned. “I wish I could say I was surprised…”

“Rumor has it they managed to rope Earth Shimmer’s Ditzy into one of their meetings.”

“Why does this pointless powder keg keep building up? They explode, get recognition, and then all the Derpys just continue to not care. Their names are literally Derpy, there’s no ill intent!”

“They have a section in their brochure about ‘legal action against your Prophet’.”

“...They don’t have very good lawyers, do they?”

“No.”

There was a soft buzzing in Eve’s chair, letting her know someone was waiting to meet with her. She checked her meeting schedule – empty for today. “Oh no, it better not be the potato again…”

“Doesn’t appear to be,” Cessera said, checking the cameras. “Looks like… two Twilights and two Raritys. They’re all squabbling with each other.”

Eve massaged her horn. “Why can’t they just get along?”

“Eve, it’s the Infinite Carousel, we’ve all but branded them criminals at this point.”

“But they’re so loud. And… well, it looks bad on me!”

Cessera rolled her eyes. “Should I call them in?”

“Sure. I’ve haven’t used the Royal Canterlot Voice in a while.”

~~~

They had done it. It had taken a few days, but the Gems had come though.

The little building in the middle of the city-desert led to a black subdimension with several house-sized planets styled after the player planets of SBURB. There were dozens of brightly colored spheres drifting in the blackness, tied together with rope bridges, little spaceships, and even a few floating houses. Balloons were everywhere.

Pinkie stood next to Roxy and Carnelian, grinning.

“This looks amazing,” Roxy said, hands on her hips. “Party fit for gods.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Carnelian observed, pointing at the various god-tier Skaians drifting around the planets, checking them out for ‘accuracy’.

“My planet’s too big!” Dave called to them.

“Shut up, Strider!” Roxy shouted back.

“I have just been told to shut up, you may continue, Dave,” Dirk said.

Dave cupped his hands to his mouth. “MY PLANET’S TOO BIG!”

“Don’t make me come over there and give you boys a knuckle sandwich!” Roxy shouted.

“Bring it.” Dave was suddenly surrounded by his dead selves. “The squad’s got all avenues of attack covered!”

Roxy ‘wonked’. “That’s just what we want you to think…”

“Psst. Roxy,” Carnelian elbowed her. “We’re not done with the party yet.”

“Oh yes! We’re just getting started!” Pinkie cackled. “With Vriska gone, we can go completely overboard. We are going to get Vriska her pirate boat. And we are going to fill it with the best treasure in the multiverse.” She took a gun with a backwards-facing barrel and tossed it into the ground of a nearby mini-planet. “That’s the artifact pile. We’re going to get all the artifacts.”

“I know where the Juju Breaking Crowbar is!” Roxy said, waving her hand.

“Then that’s where we’re going first! And we will not stop until we’ve collected the absolute biggest pile of treasure for Vriska to plunder!”

“Hell yeah!”

“…Isn’t it a bad idea to have so many powerful artifacts together?” Carnelian asked.

“Well, duh.” Pinkie said. “But think about it – Vriska would totally love a dangerous birthday party.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

Pinkie put on a pith helmet and grinned. “Time to go plunder the deepest, darkest dungeons for delightful loot! Who’s with me!?”

“Me! Totally me! Bring me!” Roxy shouted. “Bring Carnelian too!”

“What!? N-”

Pinkie grabbed the both of them and dragged them through a portal to Earth C…

~~~

There was a spark in the crystal ball… It was trying to find the beginning… It was having difficulty, since it wasn’t given a good idea of where ‘the beginning’ was…

It decided to begin with a rather common occurrence in the multiverse – the birth of a Twilight Sparkle. It began to fast-forward through her life. The day she got her cutie mark and was accepted into Celestia’s School was the first event that made it slow down – and after that it was a blur until she arrived in Ponyville and made her lifelong friends.

The crystal ball’s user didn’t care about all this. He tapped the ball with his hoof, advancing it forward. Past Nightmare Moon, Discord, Chrysalis, Sombra, the ascension, Tirek, Starlight, Pony of Shadows, Cozy… and then stopping at the discovery of the bowling ball.

The man of light fled across existence, and the enchantress followed.

Twilight took the ball. She met Siron, and she met so many others… Her team shuffled around a bit, there was the fight with Ba’al, the loss of her hearing, and then the threat of Majora… And at long last, the sign of a society forming became apparent. Disclosure occurred, and Twilight gave her speeches. An alliance grew closer together as a mare grew beyond anything her mentors had conceived. She worked to bring everyone together in every way, through the struggles of the University of Doors and the Gems themselves. They continued building up, the power of Harmony and Friendship bringing more and more into the fold. Stands, magic, humans, technology… so many.

The Gem Trial went by quickly, because as important as it was to history, the event shortly thereafter was significantly more meaningful. The Bloodbath. The death of so many; the first day of Merodi Universalis was almost its last. But it wasn’t. It rose from the struggle, stronger than it would have ever been otherwise.

It dealt with the revelation of ka better than most. It encountered societies much higher and made friends. It survived the attention of the Starcross Society and was instrumental in the defeat of the Collector.

Twilight – now known as Eve – was always there, always guiding it, always shaping it. Sometimes the ball would focus on someone else – like when Corona created the immortality serum – but otherwise it remained the same. Merodi Universalis grew, grew until they could play with giants around the Green Sun, grew until they were a name well known in much of the multiverse…

“This has gone on too far,” Grogar growled, dissipating the image in the crystal ball. He was a large, blue goat with ram-like horns and an eternally sour expression. He looked up from his podium at the various creatures around him, making a crowd seventeen strong – eighteen, if he included himself. They stood in an open auditorium-like area made of ancient, degraded marble. This structure sat, alone, on an island in the middle of a vast pink ocean. “We have been watching, waiting for them to stop changing long enough to form a plan. But this patience has gotten us nowhere, as their change is apparently exponential. The longer they live, the more enemies they make – but also the more enemies they defeat. We are at the point of diminishing returns. We are at eighteen strong. One more, and the number will be perfect. It will be time to strike.”

“Oh, taking my advice?” the sharp-toothed purple-haired Magane asked. “Good.”

“I am acting on evidence that nineteen is a superior number,” Grogar grunted. “Your counsel was merely a gesture in the right direction.”

“Remind me again why he’s in charge?” Adagio asked – currently in the form of a strange fish-human hybrid creature. The red crystal around her neck glowed brightly.

“Because I am the one who brought us all together!” Grogar asserted.

True, but shallow, a brain pulsed, sitting on a nearby pedestal. We are not a coalition with a specific hierarchy.

“IT, shut your trap,” Chrysalis growled. “It makes my head hurt.”

IT pulsed. Your head hurts itself, daughter of insanity.

“She is one with chaos!” A tremendous man in chaotic red armor shouted, ramming a chainaxe into the ground.

“Kharne! Now is not the time for battle!” Grogar shouted. “Soon though! Soon we shall make Merodi Universalis suffer for all they’ve done and all they dared!”

“There’s only eighteen of us…” an Apple Bloom with dark mist coming out of her eyes said. “Where is the nineteenth…?”

“Surely one of our recruiting missions has gone well?” Grogar asked.

Tirek folded his arms. “The Nightmare Moon Reformation Association was pointless.”

“Not that we didn’t try!” Cozy Glow shouted, waving her hooves. “They just… didn’t like us!”

Grogar grunted. “They were the least likely anyway.”

A Rarity with cat-like claw marks over an empty eye socket spoke up. “My counterpart within the Starcross Society was decidedly uncooperative. Didn’t even think of revenge… Not even after I offered her everything.”

“Lilith, broken lock,” a Twilight deadpanned.

“Lielight! You… don’t you dare!” another Twilight shouted, wearing what most closely resembled a red and black flamenco dress. “Lilith is precious!”

“Little Miss Rarity, Shipping Princess, intertwined necks,” Lielight responded.

“Ooooh, you do know how to talk dirty!” Lilith chuckled.

“That double-speaker is so arrogant she probably thinks she does that all the time,” Tirek muttered.

“Um. She does,” Cozy offered.

Tirek put a hand to the bridge of his nose and groaned.

“You are all useless. It would be easier to condition them,” the Apple Bloom said.

Your methods put us further against the story than we already are, IT said. We must work within the boundaries to achieve success.

“You are all pretty evil,” a Starlight with a medical vest and pointed ears said – she went by Starlance, after her ears. “Me? I just have strange ears.”

“And want to see how all this turns out,” Magane offered.

“Definitely. This entire dynamic is all so fascinating. I’m surprised this little group hasn’t imploded already!”

“We’re off track,” Grogar said. “Aquamarine, how did the mission to the Crown Princess go?”

The small Gem folded her arms. “Badly. The Crown Princess, to put it mildly, doesn’t want anything to do with us.”

“She tried to kill me,” Ba’al offered.

“Everyone tries to kill you,” Aquamarine spat.

“Not everyone here.”

“I will kill you the moment I think the others will allow it,” Sombra, the dark unicorn, declared.

“I’m afraid Flagg’s a no-show as well,” a human-like alien by the name of Loki said, toying with a blue cube of immense power. “I don’t think he likes you very much, Grogar.”

“I will never understand why the embodiment of our position refuses us so,” Grogar said.

“It is because he embodies a very different ideal,” the last member of the group said – a man far too young in appearance for his age. His eyes were fire and his fists were those of rage. “We seek revenge. He seeks disorder and darkness for the sake of itself. We are too ordered for his liking.”

“Ozai has a point,” Starlance said. “Most of us – not including me or Magane – are in this for revenge of some sort. Flagg was willing to use that with Siron, not be part of it.”

We are too much for him to use effectively, IT concluded.

“We’re too much for me to keep track of,” Chrysalis muttered. “I’m like… What’s your name?”

The Apple Bloom looked at her with disdain. “You insist on calling me the Mindflayer.”

“See? Too many weird names.”

“Then it’s a good thing you don’t have to learn mine.”

The man who would become the nineteenth member of the team walked in. He was human, and otherwise his physical appearance is none of your business because that would spoil everything. Deal with it.

“You may call me the Dude,” he said, taking an empty seat between Cozy Glow and Lilith. “Those of you who know who I am, refrain from mentioning it. They have eyes in the strangest places, as I’m sure you are aware.”

“This guy thinks ahead,” Magane said.

“Very well… ‘Dude’,” Grogar said, narrowing his eyes. “Who invited you?”

“Nobody. I invited myself. Because the time is right.”

He is outside my influence, IT noted.

“His essence is blank,” the Mindflayer added.

“And I’m here to help,” the Dude said, folding his hands together. “You want to bring Merodi Universalis down?”

“More than anything,” Grogar declared.

“Good. We’ll have to attack them from multiple fronts to accomplish this. We will need to split up into teams. First team needs to go after the Primary Team on their journey through the multiverse, for our only chance to defeat them is when they are separated from their nation. Their defeat is instrumental, for they are the heroes of Merodi Universalis. The other heroes also need attention. Pinkie is still in Merodi Universalis – she is planning the biggest party ever. We will infiltrate this party as party planners and get catalogs of every OP-as-fuck artifact she is bringing into Celestia City. A third team will need to deal with Eve and incite political turmoil, while the fourth and final will need to augment a conspiracy within the various ‘self-societies’ of Merodi Universalis. Lilith, you have access to the Infinite Carousel, you will be on that.”

Grogar narrowed his eyes. “While you seem to have a plan… I ask what makes you think you can just stroll in here and demand that everyone follow your plan?”

“Because I’m telling you exactly what to do. You don’t have to listen to it. But I have all the information to pull this off. I know exactly how to manipulate events to bring you to the point of your revenge.” He leaned in, face level. “All you have to do is listen and use your skills, and they shall fall apart from all sides.”

“I like this guy!” Magane declared. “Let’s do his plan!”

“I will hear his plan in its entirety…” Grogar said, furrowing his brow. “And then I will make a judgment.”

The Dude nodded. “I’m warning you, it’s a mess that barely makes sense.”

“I would find that disheartening, but I had a feeling that would be the only way to take them out.”

“Smart goat.”

“I have been around for much longer than you.”

“By some metrics.” The Dude stood up and began strolling around, looking out across the pink sea of the world. “You have been right from the start, Grogar. Only teamwork can defeat the powers of harmony. You must become like them to win. An annoyingly detestable truth the Tower forces on us all, but a truth nonetheless.”

Grogar looked at the Dude with far more respect now. “You speak well, human.”

“And I’ll do so much more.” He turned around, looking Grogar right in the eyes. “Let’s tear Merodi Universalis down to dust.”

~~~

SONGS OF THE SPHERES

100

by G. M. Blackjack

(Whatever happens, this time it’s your fault)

~~~

Pinkie looked out at the party planets, a smirk on her face.

“Mattie, sure you can handle this?” Pinkie asked.

Mattie chuckled. “I’m the absolute queen of montages. Nothing can stop me!”

Pinkie took out a boom box. “Then let’s hit it.” She hit the play button and a thick, fat beat began to pump out of its speakers, thundering through what they had been calling the Realm of Party. Mattie, Pinkie, and Roxy started shifting to the groove while Carnelian looked around, awkward, trying to figure out what the strange ritual was.

Carnelian was really surprised when the three of them burst out into song.

“We don’t need to ponder
We don’t need to wait
All we need is a bumping beat to send us on the hunt!”

And Mattie’s montage abilities took over. Days began to pass like rapidly-flipping pages in a book. They rushed to a world reminiscent of Ardent and pulled a third of the triforce out of a slime monster, smiling for pictures taken by seemingly no one.

“We don’t care at all ‘bout how hard it is
We’re gonna grab all the gold; gonna grab all the vis
We’re gonna grab them all ‘till there’s none left!”

They climbed the steps into an ancient abandoned temple in a space-borne forest, with Pinkie making “boom, bang, boom-a-bang!” noises all the way. They removed the idol and ran away from a boulder trap with smiles on their faces. With the exception of Carnelian, who was terrified of the entire ordeal.

“Grab it all!
Find the sparks
Be the magic song
Find the dark
Find the light
Treasure, treasure, yeah yeah yeah yeah!”

An alien by the name of Loki came across them seeking treasure and gave him his own cube of power, free of charge. He ended up part of the group without much fuss, a bit like a photobomber.

“Multiversal!
There’s no end to the game
Free the relics from their homes, release the fire trap over there!”

They ducked under a fire trap and managed to get hold of a dragon idol. They quickly returned to the party planets and dumped it onto the ever-growing pile of artifacts ranging from immensely powerful to little more than trinkets.

“We’re gonna suffer
‘Cause Vriska’s so surprised
Angry smiles, angry smiles.”

Pinkie started gluing several of the reddish-to-pink artifacts together with Loki and Carnelian in the background, suggesting construction ideas. Carnelian finally started smiling.

“Grab it all!
Find the sparks
Be the magic song
Find the dark
Find the light
Treasure, treasure, yeah yeah yeah yeah!”

Pinkie giggled on top of her new throne made entirely out of treasure. Naturally, it would be Vriska’s later, and it had an appropriate number of spider designs on it to reflect that. But she could enjoy this for now. She took a breath and let out one last resonant line.

“Because it is the best, god-tier, Skaian, party, birthday, surprise, EVER!”

And the song ended with a bunch of horns and toots and laughs.

“I feel like my entire life just flashed before my eyes!” Carnelian gasped – still shaking her feet to the music that no longer existed.

“I suppose I could do that,” Mattie commented. “Don’t see much point to it though, I still waste the entire time of the life I’m flashing.” She snickered.

“I physically can’t stop grooving!” Carnelian wailed.

“Here, let me help with that.” Loki pulled an artifact out of the pile and shot her with it – freezing her in place for a solid second. When it broke, she wasn’t dancing.

“Hooo… Haff…”

Roxy put a hand on Carnelian’s shoulder. “First heartsong?”

“Y-yeah…”

“You’ll get used to them. They let you feel alive! Like, there was this one time I was in the worst of dumps and then – woah – the entire bar started singing about the sense of community they all shared and I was all, yeah! This is my jam!”

“And I take it this was ‘your jam’ as well?” Loki asked.

“Fuck yeah!”

“Hold up!” Pinkie said, lifting a hoof. “Something’s wrong.”

“Hmm?” Mattie asked. “I- oh, I suppose I do have that feeling.”

“That’d be me,” Magane said, suddenly lounging on top of the artifact-throne. “Hi!”

“Witch!” Loki shouted, taking a defensive stance. “What do you want?”

Magane grinned. In the light of the party planets she looked even more menacing than usual, her teeth glinting in the few lights there were, accentuating their sharpness. Her eyes bored into all their souls, and those with magic sense simply shuddered uncomfortably as they couldn’t quite touch what she was. “I’m just here to watch.”

“I know you’re up to something!” Pinkie declared. “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t!”

“Oh, what a brilliant deduction. But what could possibly be my reason for being here? I simply have no idea!”

“Not falling for that,” Pinkie muttered. “Everyone, don’t question her. The moment you say something she said isn’t true, it becomes true. High-end reality warping mess.”

“What a terrifying power…” Loki said.

“Glad you like it!” Magane winked.

“Loki! My man!” Roxy put an arm around his shoulder. “I watched, like, all the Marvel movies. You’re amazing. Glad to have you on board.”

“Montages do have the way of making the best of friends,” Mattie said, finally allowing there to be a moment to appreciate the man who had appeared in the middle of the montage. A problem with her powers, to be sure, but not one that was unsalvageable. He was a middle-aged man with a face that was almost too smooth and wiry black hair. He looked like a snake but, well, that was Loki for you.

Pinkie pulled his blue cube out of the artifact stack. “The Tesseract…”

“Yes, an Infinity Stone artifact,” Loki commented. “Quite the addition to your collection, no?”

“We could make an Infinity Gauntlet if we got six…”

“It wouldn’t work,” Roxy pointed out. “Each full set is keyed to one universe only.”

“But still, having a full set, even if it’s from mixed universes…” Pinkie grinned. “Think we have any others!?”

“Found a golden brain!” Mattie reported, kicking the shining lump of neural matter out of the stack. “Mind Stone?”

“Most definitely,” Loki said.

“Definitely not,” Magane countered.

Roxy put her hands on her hips. “Are you just going to sit up there and try to make us trip over our words?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Magane cackled. “Calling for votes, who thinks that did anything?” Seeing no hands, she shrugged. “I’m clearly going to have to work harder.”

“No you aren’t.”

Magane fixed Roxy with a ‘seriously trying that again?’ look.

“I will keep trying.”

Magane rolled her eyes. “Admirable, but foolish. Oh so, so foolish…”

“We are going to need guards to keep her from taking control of the artifacts…” Carnelian pointed out.

“Oh, I already got security,” Roxy said. “At… some point in the montage. I think. Has it been weeks or months?”

Everyone shrugged.

“Right, whatever, time’s borked, that’s nothing new. Anyway, I ran into the Everykid, and she said she had some available friends.” She gestured at a party planet that hadn’t existed at the start of the montage. It was light green, covered in large portions of grassland, and a single go-kart racetrack that somewhere around fifty Hat Kids were racing on.

“…Our security is fifty Everykids?” Carnelian asked.

“Yep,” Roxy said, wearing a proud smile. “Well, only one of them is the Everyman, the rest are just on the job because they feel like it. They’re great treasure hunters and guardians! They’ll protect the pile like the adorable fierce hat creatures they are!” She squealed. “You should see them smack intruders with bats. It’s the cutest thing ever.”

“Why go-karts though?” Loki asked.

“Merodi Kart.” Pinkie shrugged. “Newest attraction of the party, I guess.”

~~~

To put it simply, Renee had missed this.

“Have at thee, ruffian!” Renee shouted, twisting a rapier in her magic to intercept the similar blade her alternate self was holding.

“I am not a ruffian!” Rarity the fencer declared, matching Renee’s moves. “I have had years of experience under the greatest masters of swordplay!”

“And I’ve been stuck behind a desk for most of the last few years and I’m giving you a run for your money. Maybe you should put yourself in danger more often, darling.” With a twist of her blade and some careful magic manipulation, her counterpart’s sword was torn away and embedded in a nearby marble column.

“Woohoo!” Flutterfree cheered lightly.

“Aww man, I wanted to fight her too,” Vriska muttered. “Now she’s already lost.” She looked to the ground – and saw a letter with an X on it. “Not again…”

Jotaro glanced over her shoulder. “Agent X?”

“Yeah. I don’t get this guy.” Vriska opened the letter and read it aloud. “See? What’s this even about? The lore of some alternate Equestria? Why does he write these reports? Why am I the only one who gets these letters?”

“You did mention that he likes the number eight,” Nova said. “Maybe that has to do with it?”

“He never mentions anything troll-like in these letters!” Vriska complained.

“How come this is the first I’ve heard of it?” Renee asked, strolling over and ignoring her counterpart’s disgruntled horse noises.

Vriska shrugged. “Pinkie said it’s not important. And I was getting them before I met you guys. …But not before I ran into my first Equestria…”

Flutterfree perked up. “I don’t think you’ve ever told us the story of the first Equestria you ran into.”

“Uh, yeah,” Vriska said, expression darkening. “…I conquered it.”

“Oh…” Flutterfree put a wing around her, smiling. “That’s not you anymore.”

“Yeah, but it’s a little disheartening when half your stories are of you being a fucking asshole, you know?”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered. “The further past your mistakes you move the worse you get.”

Vriska glared. “Are you saying I’m going soft?”

“Yes,” Nova said.

“No!” Flutterfree called. “You’re just adjusting to your new life!”

“I could take a look at your mind,” Renee offered.

“Thanks, but no thanks, I don’t need any Sylphing.” Vriska waved her hand dismissively. “What I need is more action!”

Renee smirked. “Daaarling!” she called. “My Agent wants to spar!”

“I have already suffered the indignity of defeat, I will not suffer more,” the Rarity said, storming off in a huff.

“I’ll make her fight on one leg and with an arm tied behind her back! And she has to use just her sword!”

The Rarity looked back, pondering this. Then she huffed and strode away.

“Lame,” Vriska muttered.

“She’s smart,” Renee observed. “Knew I was setting her up for failure.”

“Still lame.”

Renee tossed her mane back. “Regardless, I think this world has given us all we could need. Shall we continue?”

“We’re not even out of the Q-Sphere yet…” Flutterfree said. “We’ve got a long way to go…”

“Onward!” Vriska called.

The primary team vanished into a portal.

Adagio left her hiding spot from behind a column. “Yes… Get far, far away from Merodi Universalis…”

~~~

It had been a week or so since Corona had first called Allure about the ‘unknown problem with the self-societies’.

It had been a week of pointless investigation. The Sweeties had found nothing aside from enhanced activity in the Emporium, Carousel, and Census. The Sweeties deduced that the Emporium was probably working on Vriska’s party, though they weren’t sure that was really enough of an event to demand that much of an increase in activity.

The Carousel and Census, on the other hoof, were complete unknowns. And since the Carousel wasn’t on good terms with Merodi Universalis, they had decided to pay the Sparkle Census a visit.

Allure had asked Corona to come along, but she had ended up busy with a research project involving an “absolute ton of eggs. It’s really fascinating how the eggs are exactly one ton right down to the planck scale, and we’re really trying to figure out how that’s possible…” So Allure went with Squeaky.

Allure had never actually been to the Sparkle Census proper on business – it had always been to see the sights or get something done quickly. Now she actually wanted to discuss policy, and that meant going through the proper channels. Which meant paperwork.

“Hello, and welcome to the Sparkle Census!” a Twilight with rose-tinted glasses and a flamenco-like dress said, a fake smile on her face. “Your request to meet with the council has been acknowledged, and while it is being processed you will need to fill out these forms.” She handed them a couple of data pads. “Enjoy!”

“Right…” Allure muttered. “You’d think calling ahead would get you in…”

Squeaky shrugged. “They like their rules. Let’s just fill all this out…”

It took about an hour, which was fast for the completion of a full Sparkle Census form. The two of them handed the data pads back as one, allowing the Twilight to look them over. She nodded slowly. “Thank you for your time!” Then she threw the data pads in the trash, unceremoniously.

Allure gawked. “Wh… What was that for!?”

The Twilight lit her horn and burned them. “Oh, silly me, looks like you’ll have to do that again!”

“What’s your deal!?”

Squeaky narrowed her eyes. “What did you say your name was?”

“Oh, nopony to write home about. Just a simple mare who completely lost everything because of you. The name’s Bleeding Heart Sparkle. Equis Lovestra.”

Allure blinked. “Not even trying to be subtle?”

“Nope,” Bleeding Heart said, grin widening. “You’re going to know exactly wh-”

“You know we had nothing to do with that, right?” Squeaky interrupted. “We’re the League of Sweetie Belles. The whole Flower thing wasn’t us.”

“It was your society that stole my capacity for love!” she shouted.

Allure sighed. “Look, we all agree that was wrong, but the Flowers did it without our consent. Against our wishes, actually.”

“She’s not going to listen to you,” Squeaky muttered. “Let’s just find somepony else to sign us in.”

“Bu-”

“She wants to waste our time. Let’s not let her.”

“…Fine.”

Bleeding Heart smirked, adjusting her glasses. “You two really are perfect for each other.”

“You’re disgusting!” Allure called back.

“I would know, I am known as the shipping queen around here.” She folded her hooves and cocked her head. “Or are you forgetting a certain incident between you two?”

Allure and Squeaky froze. Allure turned back and stared at her. “How do you…?”

“A mare doesn’t reveal her secrets,” she chuckled.

“Allure, what is she talking about?” Squeaky asked.

“I told you about that thing in the time loop, right?”

“Oh yeah…” Squeaky tapped her chin. “You know if we were stuck in one of Bleeding Heart’s shipping stories, that would probably be cause for a lot of awkward drama.”

“Yeah. Good thing we’re not. But I still want to know how she knows.” Allure glared at Bleeding Heart. “You can’t possibly know anything about that time loop. Only I was allowed to remember.”

“Does it matter how I know? It just proves you feel it as well. The need for the deep, personal connection! It calls to you!”

Allure twisted her face back in revulsion. “You… do know that’s self-dating right? You’re in the Census, I know you frown on that!”

“A real shame,” Bleeding Heart admitted. “There’s so much potential in the self-connection. Literally made of each other. I’ve been part of it, it’s a truly amazing feeling. And then there’s those two Sweeties…”

“The Lovers get power from each other, they get a pass,” Allure said dismissively. “And even then, it causes damage. If you know so much, surely you know about the teams that were destroyed or almost destroyed by some-Sweetie who decided they were a Casanova?!”

“Such drama!” Bleeding Heart dramatically swooned. “Such art in the power of love!”

“You’re sick,” Squeaky said. “You need help.”

“And so do you, but I’m not giving it to you!” she laughed. “Enjoy navigating the bureaucracy! I’ve laid traps!”

“Screw you.”

“I’d love it!”

The Sweeties left as quickly as they could.

Lilith the Rarity poked her head up from behind the counter. “Awww… look at them, so uncomfortable by the boundaries. It’s cute, innocent even. Fitting for a Sweetie…” She let out a demented laugh, absent-mindedly scratching her empty eye socket. “Lielight’s traps are in position. They’ll be running around the paperwork for weeks if they don’t try something desperate.”

Bleeding Heat nuzzled her marefriend. “You think they’ll bother to call Eve?”

“Ha! They’ve got nothing more than a few stray tips and suspicion right now. They don’t have any reason to go that far. And it’ll be too late by then…”

“Too late for what? I… am not exactly clear on the plan.”

“Something something IT, I don’t know, all I know is it’s giving us an excuse to run them in circles which is absolutely delightful!”

~~~

“And it looks like we’ve got a new diplomacy team today,” Cessera said, tapping some information on her pad. “They seem to be copying us.”

“Hmm?” Eve raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“A Twilight and a blue Gem in the Relations Division.” Cessera handed the pad to Eve, who gave the image upon it a scrutinizing glare. It was a picture of an alicorn Twilight by the name of Astrid who had an Aquamarine on her back – one without an alternate name.

“Guess we have a successful image.”

“It sure seems that way. They recently handled the Waffleborg incident, seemingly on their own. Nobody’s really sure how they did it, and they said they had to keep secrecy by the Waffleborg’s request, but it was a miracle.”

Eve smiled. “Ah, I know what that’s like… Remember negotiations with the Erni Golems?”

“Vaguely.”

“That’s because they attributed trust to secrets. I dealt with them regularly for several months but I had to keep coming up with other explanations as to why I was gone. They wanted to establish trust through a complex web of not talking about anything.” She rubbed her forehead. “Good thing none of the secrets were particularly dangerous or concerning. But that was still annoying.”

“And is this secrecy a secret?”

“Used to be. They’re very mellow now. Especially since news outlets have agreed not to go to their world anymore.”

“How’d you pull that off?”

Eve shrugged. “Oversight has their own secrets with the Golems.”

“Naturally.”

“Ah! There you are!”

Eve and Cessera looked up to see none other than the Twilight and Aquamarine they had just been talking about.

“I’ve been dying to meet you! I’m Astrid!” She shook Eve’s hoof energetically. “I told myself the moment I was promoted to the Canterlot office I’d come to see you but geez you have no idea how hard it is to find you.”

Eve chuckled. “Glad to have you on board, Astrid. I’m told you handled the Waffleborg situation. You have my thanks.”

“Don’t ask how we did it,” Aquamarine said, flatly. While Astrid looked like a normal Twilight, Aquamarine was a very diminutive blue Gem that rode on the alicorn’s back. Her gemstone was teardrop-shaped and placed just below her eye, making it look like she may have been crying, even if her stern expression said otherwise.

“I won’t, I understand the issues with it.” Eve waved a wing, gesturing for them to follow. “Come, walk and talk.”

“Really? Oh, thanks!” Astrid beamed. “I’m as happy as a butterfly freshly released from its cocoon!”

“Eloquent.”

“I’m a bit of a poet,” Astrid admitted with a soft blush. “For when the bell strikes noon, the reckoning will be soon.”

“You’ll have to send me some of your work.”

“Really? You really are everything they say you are, huh?”

Eve shrugged. “I don’t know about everything.”

“Some say she’s an immortal she-demon,” Aquamarine said.

“Not a demon.”

“As far as we know, anyway,” Cessera added.

“Cessera!” Eve said with mock indignation. “I am not!”

“I don’t know…”

“Corona is known to have been a demon at once point,” Astrid pointed out.

Eve rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve never been Midnight Sparkle though, and I have no intent to ever be her.”

“You sure the ‘Little Dashie’ epidemic isn’t going to break something?” Aquamarine asked.

Eve smiled warmly. “Those stories aren’t so bad, you know. A lost filly from another world joining a family… It happens all the time, we just step in to clear things up a bit. Usually ends up on Aid’s table, anyway.”

“I think she was referring specifically to the ‘Eight Dashies’ incident,” Astrid said.

“Oooooh… that.” Eve’s smile faltered. “Sometimes we just get things that are way too complicated and confusing. We still have no idea which one goes to which world, and the general ‘let them sort it out themselves’ hasn’t been working since at least two of them need to find their destinies to activate their Elements of Harmony… But lucky for me, that has recently been passed off to Aid. I still plan to check in on them in about a week, but I won’t do anything unless Aid gives the ok to do so. The world governments themselves, on the other hand…” She growled. “They all want the Dashies on their side. This is why I prefer to have Expeditions deal with things like this under the radar.”

“May I offer a suggestion?” Astrid asked.

“Shoot.”

“They no doubt have fate-links to their worlds?”

“Yes, but all eight of the worlds are so closely intertwined and moving that the exact coordinates and dimensional signatures swap regularly. It’s a pain.”

“Oh… In that case, call Aradia. Local time travel in all the universes should be able to sort out who’s who.”

Eve stopped in her tracks.

“…Cessera?”

“No, we have not tried that.”

“How come we didn’t think of that!?”

Cessera shrugged. “I’ve already sent a message to Aradia. She should get to it at some point.”

“Good. Astrid, I see a bright future for you in this division. I’ll be sure you get credit for that.”

“Wow… Thanks!” Astrid rubbed the back of her head. “I’m making like a boulder, I guess.”

“Hm?”

“On a roll. I’m on a roll.”

Eve chuckled. “Oh, I see.”

“Anyway, let’s get off politics. I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints about all the power Pinkie is holding in one spot…”

“She knows what she’s doing,” Eve asserted. “And they’ve gotten the best security money can buy…”

“Fifty kids?”

“There’s more than that.” Eve paused. “Cessera, there is more than that, right?”

Cessera shrugged.

~~~

“I’m sorry, I have to fire all of you,” Pinkie said with tears in her eyes.

Every last one of the Hat Kids let out a heart-wrenching ‘awwwwww’ noise.

“You can stay around and use the go-karts if you want, but you’re not on the clock anymore. I’ve got… official guards for that, now.”

With dejected expressions, all fifty of the Hat Kids returned to their cart racing, except now the kart horns seemed sad somehow. It was one of the worst things Pinkie had felt in her entire life. Or, at least, that’s what it felt like at that moment.

She fell into Roxy’s arms and started bawling. Roxy, to her credit, hugged Pinkie tight and petted her mane with a solemn expression.

“…I don’t get it,” Carnelian said, turning to Loki.

Loki shrugged. “Over-the-top affection, I suppose.”

“Played for comedy,” Magane adding, still sitting in the throne. The new military-level guards all had their sights fixed on her, not that she gave any sign of apprehension.

Loki ignored her, digging through the pile. “Newest stone…” He pulled out an Element of Magic. “This one appears to qualify as a Power Stone.”

Pinkie, suddenly not sad anymore, was on top of it in an instant, eyes shining. “Power, Mind, Space… We’ve got half a set! That’s great!”

“Time, Reality, and Soul…” Roxy said, pursing her lips. “Y’know, just occurred to me, the Soul stone requires a sacrifice usually.”

“Oh… right…” Pinkie frowned. “There’s got to be another way to get it in some universes…”

“The Soul stone doesn’t need a sacrifice,” Magane said.

“Yes it does,” Pinkie interrupted.

“A lie about a lie…” Magane snapped her fingers, altering reality somewhere.

“Why do you help us, witch?” Loki asked.

Magane shrugged. “You’re the Asgardian mastermind! I’m sure you can figure it out given enough time.”

“There’s the distinct possibility that’s not really help,” Carnelian said. “She could want to use the Infinity Gauntlet.”

“Stones are from different universes, they won’t work together,” Roxy reminded them. “There’s not really a point.”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t really matter. We need to get this Power stone out of this Element of Magic! And we just so happen to have somepony here to do that!”

“We do?” Carnelian asked.

“Yes,” Maud said, stepping out from behind Pinkie. “Where is it?”

Pinkie, giggling, gave her sister the Element of Magic. Maud looked at the crystal with a cursory, almost bored expression at first. However, this quickly became a capital-L Look comparable to the might of Fluttershy’s own Stare. The rock fractured down the middle, allowing a small purple rock of energy to fall out, taking all the color of the Element with it. Loki collected it and placed it with the other two.

“Done,” Maud said. “I hope you have extra Elements.”

Pinkie opened a small chest containing five different Elements of Magic. “Maud, we’ve been collecting these things like cookies. We got plenty.”

“You know…” Roxy said, tapping her foot while looking at the pile of treasure. “A pile of treasure is good, yeah, but Vriska likes something even better than treasure…”

“What?” Pinkie asked.

“Hunting for it.” Roxy rubbed her hands together. “We should start hiding everything all around the party planets! It’d be an excellent treasure-hunt madhouse!”

“We will need to keep tabs on where every artifact is,” Carnelian said. “Don’t want security freaking out.”

“I can do that,” Loki said, bowing slightly. “Cataloging relics of power is somewhat of a hobby of mine. Who knows, I may even find that we’ve accidentally grabbed another Infinity Stone.”

“You sure you’re up for it?” Pinkie asked.

“Positive. Though I will still join you on some of your outings. We have time.”

“You’re the best, Loki!”

Elsewhere, a pink pegasus mare was watching the events through a crystal ball. Cozy Glow cackled. “They suspect nothing…” She was far from the filly she once was, and now her menacing expression actually looked like it belonged on her face. She had grown into her role rather well, with time.

Next to her, Tirek looked up from his magazine. “Can we do anything yet?”

“Shh, not yet, not yet, not for a while yet… but eventually, eventually they will have gathered everything.” Cozy’s cackling soon grew out of control, filling the air with the promise of a crazy, insane plan.

~~~

Celia, a Gem fusion that was both a Sweetie Belle and a Rarity, led Allure and Corona into the Infinite Carousel’s ‘site of primary operation’ which was, fittingly, a space station vaguely styled after a carousel that would spin forever, providing artificial gravity. The universe it was located in had ‘air’ in space, so the three of them were easily able to fly and float their way through the blackness to the rotating settlement.

The history of the Infinite Carousel and Merodi Universalis was… annoying, to say the least. The Infinite Carousel got its start slightly before Merodi Universalis did, and they were aware of each other more or less from the starts of their formations. However, the moment Merodi Universalis decided to take a stance against big business, the previously friendly Infinite Carousel balked.

Their entire purpose in existing was to pool the resources of all Rarities together to create the biggest business in existence! How dare their ‘friends’ create laws that would prevent that efficiency? However, they were small, and hadn’t been a large part of Merodi Universalis’ economy. So these objections were brushed under the rug and the two groups became further separated.

While Merodi Universalis continued to grow exponentially, the Infinite Carousel grew carefully. Every step they took was to improve their business model, self-oriented economy, and monetary flexibility. They were by no means an evil corporation, since they didn’t seek to actively exploit the consumer for every dollar they were worth, but the presence of the Infinite Carousel sure became oppressive for many universes. “Of Raritys, by Raritys, for everyone.”

Now, though they had significantly fewer members, they were about as influential as the Sparkle Census in terms of resources and power. This power only kept growing as their ‘gracefully elegant’ economic engine continued to produce more and more profit and expansion.

These days, they were continually knocking at Merodi Universalis’ door, trying to get in. Anti-business laws prevented direct product generation, but they were technically a foreign power so traditional trade was encouraged. This had created a sort of ‘economic war’ between the Commerce Division and the Infinite Carousel, where the Infinite Carousel did something kinda-sorta-probably illegal by Merodi law and the Commerce Division shouted at them until they stopped, but at that point the Carousel was already working somewhere else.

The Carousel got into the news a lot these days because of this, but only the people who actually dealt with them understood exactly how annoying their antics were. Corona and Allure were not those people. Celia, unfortunately, was, due to her connections to Affix and Mattie, both of whom had been part of the Carousel at one point in their lives. The Carousel just wouldn’t leave them alone, and as a part-Rarity gem, she got dragged into it just like everyone else.

“They are not going to like you,” Celia said as they landed on the station, walking through the open ‘windows’ onto the rotating part of the Carousel.

“Not surprising,” Corona admitted. “But they have to listen to me, at least.”

“I’m just annoyed we didn’t find anything out from the Census…” Allure groaned.

“You’re being stonewalled,” Celia reported. “It’ll take a long time to break that down. Probably not worth it.”

“How can one mare stonewall us!?”

“Normally that would be difficult. But that was the Sparkle Census you’re dealing with. Their paperwork is essentially a self-perpetuating stonewall even if there isn’t malicious intent. If there is, it’s not difficult at all to send someone into an infinite spiral of signatures, eloquent words, and waiting rooms.”

Allure took a deep breath. “And the Carousel is going to be different?”

“In the Carousel, enough money or stature will buy you anything,” Celia said with a smirk. “Corona?”

“My salary as a Second is absurd,” Corona admitted. “I don’t use most of it, and I donate a lot of it to medical research. But even a month’s wages would be enough to make some kings faint.”

Allure blinked. “Oh yeah, we do get paid for what we do. Strange, I almost never think about that. I live in a tiny house in Celestia City for crying out loud! I could buy my own space station!”

“Do you want to?”

“Eh, not really, Celestia City’s cool.”

The Carousel itself was beautiful, designed to be the perfect mixture of structurally sound patterns and natural shapes. The entire station was one giant room criss-crossing with metallic vines, crystalline screens, and images of Rarity everywhere. Surprisingly, only about half the ponies around were Rarities – the rest were customers. An endless supply of ‘commoners’ looking to buy anything ranging from dresses to art to a surprising amount of grocery produce. Evidently more than a few Rarities were farmers, for some reason.

“Welcome to the Prime Carousel!” a Rarity in a navy-esque uniform said, a grin on her face. “What can I help you with today?”

“Corona Shimmer, Merodi Universalis,” Corona said. “Looking to talk to one of the Rarities in charge.”

“Oh, I’m afraid Magnum is a bit indisposed at the moment.”

“…Your head is named Magnum?” Allure gawked.

“Oh yes. Unusual name, I know, but that’s what she wanted. C.E.O. of the Prime Carousel needs a fancy name, wouldn’t you think? I can introduce you to some other Rarities though, they should be able to answer any questions you want!”

Corona pulled out her Merodi quid card. “I’m the Research Second. Examine the amethyst coating on this card.”

“I actually meant it, she is indisposed,” the Rarity said with a sigh. “I’m not sure what to tell you. I can get you a nice hotel with that and you can wait for her? Or perhaps you could just talk to the other Rarities? I could forward you to Rimmy, she’s got access to business documents, though I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how fickle those are.” She laughed as if she had just said the most hilarious thing.

Celia frowned. “Dear, you’re not fooling anyone. Just tell us where we need to go. We don’t need to see Magnum, but we do need to figure out about your increases in activity.”

“Ah…” the Rarity frowned. “Not even going to try to be subtle?”

“No.”

“Very well. Wander around the Prime Carousel for a while, I’ll be sure to get somepony to talk to you.” She teleported away.

“…So, what, we wait?” Allure asked.

Celia growled. “No. She’s not getting anyone. We’ll just have to buy our way up there the old fashioned way…”

“Hey! Um, you wanna buy a dress?”

Celia turned her head rapidly to see a familiar Rarity standing behind a little ‘dresses’ storefront.

“Charity!? You joined the Carousel!?”

Charity blinked. “Oh, um, no, I’m just getting some side money here. They told me it’d be a ‘good gig’ and it has been going well so far.”

“They’re trying to suck you in.”

“Yeah. I know. But, um, I’m smarter than that?”

“This place is run by Rarities, if they wanted to they could scam you out of your life.”

“Oh. …Do you wanna buy a dress though?”

“Not really,” Corona said.

“Aww, but I got the new ‘Rogue of Doom’ outfit! It’s all the rage!”

Corona stared at the offending thing sitting behind the counter. “…No…”

Celia blinked. “Charity, where did you get these? You weren’t on the dress project.”

“I, um, well I don’t know, the Carousel just provided them for me. I’m selling them with my own stuff for added benefits.”

“Okay, first of all, you’re being scammed into liking them. Second of all, pretty sure that means Mattie went against Renee’s wishes.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Can you at least tell us where someone in charge is?” Allure asked.

“Oh, well, you can talk to Lilith.” Charity pointed behind them. “She’s right over there.”

Lilith was a thin, yet muscular Rarity with numerous scars all over her body. Three sharp claw marks crossed one of her eyes, the socket covered up by an embroidered eyepatch.

“…She looks like a Little Miss Rarity,” Allure said, shivering.

“She is,” Charity admitted. “But she’s, like, different now. We had a chat over some spaghettinoodles. She’s actually quite interesting.”

Celia took a breath and nodded. She trotted right over to the scarred mare. “Lilith?”

“Ah, Celia, right?” Lilith smiled, the action making the three visitors uncomfortable. “I am afraid I cannot help you.”

“Why not?”

“Simple, really. Your questions are a threat to business, so the Carousel has been instructed as a whole not to answer them.” Her smile was creepily unwavering. “Sorry, but you’re going to have to use something other than direct methods to get to the bottom of the little mystery of yours.”

“What could be so important that the Carousel turns down mountains of money?” Corona asked.

“The whole point is not to let you know.” Lilith snickered. “Good luck trying to buy your way to the top here. You’ll end up with a million trinkets, an empty bank account, and a bunch of pitying looks.”

Celia furrowed her brow, thinking.

“Celia, you may be a mastermind, but how many Raritys in here match or even surpass your skills? You’re in very unfriendly territory. They’ll cut you up and eat you!” She grinned psychotically, no longer bothering to hide behind a delicate mask. “You’ll need to try something else.”

Celia fumed inwardly – but outwardly she simply bowed. “You are correct. Everyone, let’s go, they’re barring us. Charity, come along.”

“But dress-”

“Charity, I said come along. I don’t want them to take you too.”

“We do not take! We only give!” Lilith called after them.

“You should talk to Pippy about the idea of ‘Corrupted Generosity’ sometime!” Allure shot back.

Lilith didn’t respond with anything more than a demented giggle.

~~~

The ‘Grand Tour’ had decided to avoid the Unrealities. After all, you needed a ship and a lot of high-end reality anchor devices to properly explore that region and not have your brain explode and implode simultaneously. So the Primary Team was instead wandering, slowly, through the Great Void of the multiverse, leisurely meandering toward the E-Sphere with help from Empress Twilight’s Void society and their maps.

Currently, they were on a planet that had several suns. The arrangement of these suns made it in such that the planet never experienced night – just varying levels of ‘day’ at all times. Today, however, there was going to be an eclipse on the side of the planet where there was only one sun, bringing night to the planet at long last.

The Primary Team had already gone around giving the inhabitants of the world electric lights and told them exactly what was going to happen so they wouldn’t freak out. Which was apparently a good thing – since Flutterfree had read the source material with Eve at one point. It ended in the night driving the people mad, according to her anyway. Her memory wasn’t the best, she admitted.

“I still don’t get how darkness would drive people mad,” Vriska said, staring at the last visible sun as it got closer and closer to being covered. “It’s just darkness.”

“And most of them have never seen darkness before,” Renee pointed out. “It’s a thing they simply don’t experience.”

“Plus, it makes a good story if they go mad,” Nova said, tapping her hoof-screen. “What was the guy’s name? Asimov?”

“I think so,” Flutterfree admitted.

“Yeah, he was an author; Prophet or no, he knew what made a good story. We just came in to keep them from, y’know, exploding under their own mental weight. Or whatever.” She shrugged.

“It does feel nice to save an entire society,” Renee admitted. “It’s different, doing it from afar… you don’t feel as connected to the actions. You feel…” Just then, the sun vanished completely behind the hitherto-unknown second planet, plunging the world into night. The sky lit up with millions of blazing stars, far more than would be found in a normal night sky. It was more than enough to see by, easily defining the blades of grass beneath their hooves. “…like they’re in shadow.”

The conversation ended right then and there – for Adagio came out of nowhere and drove the razor-sharp ends of her claws right into Renee, drenching her white coat in blood. Renee’s scream was more one of surprise than pain.

“Far away from home, huh?” Adagio asked – trying to dodge out of the way of Star Platinum, but the time stop refused to let her complete the action. Coughing up blood onto her strange human-fish hybrid body, she grinned. “There’s no help coming for you this time…”

Four strange beings appeared behind her. Of them, only the once-firelord Ozai was easily recognizable to the Primary Team. The Apple Bloom of shadow was beyond them, the chaos warrior looked like any other member of his kind, and the unusual physiological proportions of the Starlight did not ring any bells.

“…Ozai!?” Nova blurted. “How are you alive!? How are you young!?”

“A gift,” Ozai shouted, charging Nova at full speed with all the fire he could muster. Nova erased time for a couple seconds. He missed easily and found himself face-first in the ground, grunting.

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!” Star Platinum shouted, driving his fists forward, only for the chaos warrior to meet them with his chainaxe. Somehow, his weapon was able to interact with the Stand, cutting up both its and Jotaro’s fingers. Jotaro had already stopped time once, so his obvious advantage was gone. That said, he was able to wrap the man up in Hermit Purple… for all of a second. The man’s strength far outclassed Jotaro’s own: the power of a Khorne Berserker.

Flutterfree jumped the Apple Bloom with Lolo, finding that she was nothing more than a husk – a husk that was attached to a monstrous intelligence in another universe entirely. She pulled back to avoid getting infected – but already darkness was swirling out of the Apple Bloom and grabbing hold of her. “VRISKA!” Flutterfree called.

Vriska had already managed to jump over an attack from Adagio. With amazing finesse, she landed right on top of the Apple Bloom and drove her sword right into the ‘filly’s’ skull. Instantly the connection between the husk and the darkness was severed, and the enemy team was down one.

“WHAT!?” Adagio shouted. “That was the Mindflayer! That shouldn’t have been th-”

Renee smacked Adagio across the face with a magic frying pan construct. She may have been bleeding profusely, but she held a satisfied grin on her face. ”You can’t just overpower us with a simple ambush, dear. We’re better than that.”

“We’re better than this!” Adagio shouted – ignoring the sounds of her chaos warrior getting pummeled into the ground. “We’re better than you!”

“Not necessarily true,” the Starlight said, appearing behind Adagio. “But we sure can try.” She popped a candy in her mouth and gained the cutie mark of a Pinkie. She suddenly appeared behind Renee with a squeaky hammer and an amused grin. “Fore!” She hit Renee right in her wound, sending her flying down the hill.

Flutterfree caught Renee before she landed.

Nova used the opportunity to erase time again, kicking her alternate self to the ground. The Starlight attempted to find a talent that would counteract the twisted manipulation of time, but she found that she had none that could do such a thing. “Guess I lose.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, punching the Starlight in the face. She flew into Ozai – who had just freed himself – and the two of them became a dazed pile of bodies on top of the chaos warrior.

“No!” Adagio shouted, curling her fishy hands into a fist. “You can’t just… win like this!”

“You should have had put a little more effort into it,” Jotaro commented, striding up to her.

“You… are telling me to put in more effort? I waited until you were far from Merodi Universalis! I attacked with surprise! I mortally wound-”

Nova healed Renee up without much of an issue.

Adagio twitched. “You… You…”

“Did nothing to you,” Renee said, checking to make sure her glasses were fine. “You… are Equis Vitis Adagio, correct? None of us have met you before in our lives. Why is your revenge directed at us?”

“You built this society.” Adagio pointed an accusatory finger at Renee. “Because of you, I have no sisters!”

“Last I heard Sonata was doing just f-”

“I. Have. No. Sisters,” Adagio interrupted with a low, growling tone. “You took one away, and killed the other. You’re going to pay for that.”

“Not by your hand,” Nova commented, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes by my hand! I w-”

Flutterfree bonked her on the back of the head with her hoof, brimming with just enough Rage to knock her out.

The eclipse ended, returning day to the world.

“…Cool,” Vriska said, folding her arms. “But kind of disappointing.” She kicked Adagio, getting no response. “Man that was lame.”

“They just don’t make bad guys like they used to,” Renee lamented. “Oh well. Shall we continue the tour?”

“Sure,” Vriska said, putting her hands in her pockets. “…Get good, scrubs, and maybe you can challenge us again.”

The chaos warrior groaned as the Primary Team left the universe.

~~~

Eve woke up one morning to find Philomena sitting on her horn. The phoenix had recently regenerated and was gently preening her wings.

After Eve’s initial freakout she had realized that she hadn’t really seen much of Philomena in years. Sure, the bird had been around the castle here and there, but ever since the Bloodbath…

“Nice to see you up and about,” Eve said, smiling.

The legendary bird squawked back at her.

“Right… Flutterfree’s out… I’ll…” She made her way down the halls of Canterlot Castle to Luna’s chambers. If Luna had followed the schedule, she should still be awake for a few hours. She gently rapped on the door.

Luna opened it up and raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t it a bit early for our breakfast?”

Eve nodded, gesturing to the bird sitting on her back. “She was in my room this morning.”

“Ah,” Luna said with a careful nod. “It appears she has chosen a new pet pony.”

“…What?”

“Dear sister was always the first to admit she had not chosen Philomena, Philomena had chosen her. Enjoy your newfound companion.” Luna shut the door.

“Wh – Luna! Luna get out here right now!”

“As the rightful ruler of Equis Vitis I refuse!”

“…But breakfast!”

“I’ll be down for breakfast, don’t worry. But you need to sort things out with your new master.”

“I am Evening Sparkle, Overhead of Relations, I don’t have a master!” Eve wailed.

“Tell that to the bird.”

Eve glared at the phoenix. Philomena pecked her at the base of the horn. “Ow! Hey! Listen here, just because you’ve ‘chosen’ me doesn’t mean you get to interfere with my job. I have a lot of stuff to do and not enough time to do it, even with the workday reformation bill. And then there’s th-”

“IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR THE PRINCESS!” a unicorn shouted. Eve recognized him – one of the diplomats at the Relations Division, a blue unicorn by the name of Arcane.

“Uh, which one?” Eve asked.

“Both? The mayor of Ponyville is trying to declare Canterlot a suburb!”

“HE’S WHAT!?” Luna shouted, tearing the door off its hinges. “WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS!?””

Arcane gulped. “Mayor of a ‘village’ so large it has begun to surround Canterlot Mountain?”

“HE WILL HAVE TO TAKE THIS UP WITH ME!” Luna declared. Then, turning off the Royal Canterlot Voice, she coughed awkwardly. “Take me to him as soon as your earliest convenience.”

“I can do that now.”

“It looks like I will be missing breakfast,” Luna admitted with a sigh. “I know Spike puts a lot of effort into those pancakes. Tell him I’m sure they would have been wonderful.”

“Sure,” Eve said. Part of her wanted to go with Luna. But she knew that internal affairs of Equis Vitis was Luna’s job. Eve’s responsibilities lay elsewhere.

Philomena pecked her again.

“Are you trying to aggravate me?”

The legendary bird chirped.

“Right, don’t even know why I’m asking, you chose Celestia of all ponies, of course you are.” She rubbed her head with a hoof. “What a great start to the day…”

She knew the moment she said that it was going to get worse.

~~~

Grogar looked up from his crystal ball. “I find myself wondering where this is going.”

The Dude folded his hands, silent for a few moments. The salt of the ocean came in with the breeze, leaving a bad taste in both of their mouths.

“The plans are moving along. Relations has been infiltrated. The ‘self-societies’ are being aggravated from within. We have tabs on the entire artifact store. Now we must wait.”

“What of Adagio? She lies outside our vision.”

“Yours,” the Dude corrected. “Outside yours. I see her. She had an initial failure, but she will get up and try again. A story of struggle.”

Grogar furrowed his brow. “And if she fails utterly?”

“If I do not want her to fail, she will not.”

“Hmm…” Grogar growled. “And even if you are wrong, they are but pebbles in the long run.”

“All it takes is one pebble in the right place to bring down a castle. And that is the game we are playing, Grogar. Raising armies does not work against them, and neither does flat-out overpowering. We must be clever to even hope of threatening them.”

“I am aware of the nuances of the plan, do not treat me like a child,” Grogar hissed. “I am expressing my doubts that you are the true mastermind you claim to be.”

“You’ve been patient for over a thousand years, Grogar. Why can you not be patient for a few months?”

“Because if this fails, I will be waiting another thousand years.”

“Grogar, if they find some way to pull out of this, you will not get another chance.”

“All the more reason for my concern.”

“Do you have a better idea at the moment?”

Grogar fell silent. “No.”

“Then we continue with what has already been set in motion.”

~~~

Eve’s day definitely got worse.

She had barely started her breakfast when Cessera had called her into an urgent meeting of the Relations, Military, and Aid Divisions. Something big had just happened, and it had to be something unexpected because she had no idea what it was. As she galloped through the streets of Celestia City to the Relations Division Primary Office, she caught up on what she could on a data pad, Philomena flying close behind her.

Topic of the day: Many Conversion Bureau worlds have banded together to form a single, cohesive union.

And at reading that Eve’s stomach twisted into a pretzel. Of all the things that had gone wrong under her authority, this had to be one of the worst. The Conversion Bureau worlds were a series of Equis’ that had a variation on a single theme: converting all other worlds and races into ponies themselves. When Eve had first heard about them, she’d assumed they were just outliers, worlds where the ponies were nothing like standard and had become militaristic ‘we are always right’ overlords.

A few of them were like that. But most of them could easily be mistaken for a standard Equis with the same ponies that behaved in the same way in almost every situation… except they believed the right way to deal with other worlds was to convert everything and everyone in them to a pony. In some of the cases, this was a tragedy that had to be done for the sake of stability, and when the Merodi came in they could stop this tragedy to the relief of both the ponies and the other race – usually human.

But in far, far too many of the cases, the transformation wasn’t seen as an unfortunate necessity or a tragedy, it was seen as ponykind’s right to ‘fix’ the worlds they came across through any means necessary. All worlds encountered would be forced to become ponies. The reasons varied. One of the most common was that ‘ponies are superior’. But with the ever-so-common mind-altering version of the transformation, it became ‘we will program the violence out of you so you will never want to hurt anyone ever again. Come and be with us, we will make you better than you are, whether you like it or not.’

They disgusted Eve. They reminded her of what she and Merodi Universalis never wanted to be. It had not been hard to classify the Conversion Bureau worlds as one where interference was not only necessary, but needed to be large-scale and rapid. They would move in and, in no uncertain terms, declare the war over and offer to undo any damage that had been done by the pony transformation, if possible. It wasn’t always possible.

This had been going on for a few years… But apparently, behind their backs, several Conversion worlds had just banded together and declared that they weren’t going to listen to Merodi Universalis. They had restarted Conversion operations this morning, and Merodi Universalis needed to decide its response.

She teleported into the office. She was one of the first to arrive – though the Aid Overhead was already there; Jingle, the Luna of Squeaky Belle's world. Her poor Second arrived a moment later. She was the youngest of all Overheads, a Ga named Iris just put into her position last week. She was doing a good job of keeping herself calm, but her position in Aid had always been one of empathy, so Eve suspected the Ga would make her emotions very clear soon enough. Cessera was already there as well – along with Astrid and Aquamarine, to Eve’s surprise.

“They were invited?” Eve asked.

“They were there when the call came in,” Cessera said. “She was trying to come to a peace treaty with one of the Celestias when they revealed the entire thing.”

“Ah,” Eve nodded, the answer satisfying her. “…Possible courses of action?”

“Talk to them or blow them up.” Cessera pointed at Jingle and the recently-arrived O’Neill.

“Surely we can find a middle option…”

“Depends on how aggressive we want to be.”

Eve ruffled her wings, allowing the conversation to die out. The room fell silent as various Relations, Military, and Aid personnel filed in around the table. When the clock struck 9:00 local time, Eve cleared her throat. “The Conversion Bureau worlds have banded together to defy the limitations we placed on their expansive policies. As of this morning, they have restarted conversion efforts. Time is of the essence – we need to decide what we are going to do about this.”

“They need help,” Iris declared, slamming her hands on the table. “We need to get Education involved, take their minds off this horrid path.”

“They’re not going to let us do that,” O’Neill countered. “We’ll need to exert pressure.”

“We can’t do that,” Eve said, shaking her head. “Their coalition is large enough and strong enough to heavily damage Merodi Universalis. They won’t win, but do we really want to risk collateral damage on that scale?”

Astrid spoke up, surprising Eve and most everyone else at the table. “We don’t have a choice. I’ve been working among these Conversion worlds for the last few weeks, they don’t listen to reason. The only reason they weren’t fighting before was because we were too strong a presence. They are gambling on our unwillingness to show true military force. We can’t let them take that gamble.”

“Agreed,” O’Neill said.

“No!” Eve shouted. “They’re just misguided ponies!” She pressed her hooves together. “With their current mindset, I don’t see them backing down from a confrontation until they lose hope. And, as a heavily ideological group, that may not happen for a long time. We don’t need a war, what we need to do is talk them down. If we decimate them, there will be nothing to recover, and we will suffer for it.”

“We should be willing to give a little of ourselves for the sake of those that are being transformed,” Astrid countered.

“I am not arguing that. I am saying we shouldn’t make that sacrifice if we don’t have to. We don’t need to trigger the largest war in Merodi history over this.”

“Coming from the mare who was ready to go take Skarn down not but a few months ago.”

Eve growled. “His atrocities know no bounds. He twists thousands of worlds into a pseudo-death whenever he wants. All the Conversion Worlds do is force a handful of worlds here and there into submission. The level of damage is not the same. And we are talking about ponies. Some of them retain a conscience through this. We can appeal to them.”

“The Flowers have repeatedly visited this cluster, Eve. They have proven that some of the transformation spells remove free will and souls entirely, creating a world of organic machines. This cluster is rife with glitches! What makes you think you can reason with that?”

“We have had luck in the past, Astrid. We had treaties – treaties you were supposed to be upkeeping.”

“This isn’t my fault!” Astrid gawked.

“No, but given your attitude toward them, I can’t help but think you may have pushed some away from us.”

Eve wasn’t sure what to make Astrid’s expression. It wasn’t pure anger… was there surprise in there?

Aquamarine took over. “Clearly we’re at an impasse. We do not have time to deliberate further. We need to decide – do we attack or do we take the weak route?”

“Uncalled for,” Cessera chided.

Aquamarine didn’t care. “Well? There are three Overheads, take a vote.”

“Attack,” O’Neill said. “They had their chance to go with us peacefully.”

“Diplomacy,” Eve reiterated.

“I agree with Eve,” Jingle said. “We need to at least try talking to them first.”

Astrid glared at the alicorn. “…Fine. But when things start falling apart, don’t come crying to me.”

“We won’t be.”

The meeting was adjourned, and Eve immediately prepared passage to the Conversion Bureau cluster.

~~~

Renee looked up at the Monolith. Several varieties of Kirby danced around it while the sky lit up like a fractal, sending trains made of popcorn into the land below.

Well, we tried to avoid the Unrealities, at least…

“Renee!” Vriska called. “Snap out of it, we have to get the last Cuil so we can reactivate the waffle matrix!”

“Do we really have to?” Renee asked as cows flew past Vriska.

“I… Uh…” Vriska pondered this for a moment. “Why are we doing this?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you!” Flutterfree screeched, a few purple sparks flying off her eyes as Lolo glitched in and out of existence. “This world isn’t going to be fixed no matter what we do!”

One of the Kirbys swallowed Flutterfree whole and copied her powers. She popped out the other end, unharmed, but looking like she’d seen a ghost that had been a child version of herself. “Wh… wh…”

“Let’s get out of here, then!” Renee shouted, pulling out the dimensional device. “Is everyone ready?”

“I don’t know where Jotaro is!” Nova called, deflecting a rain of lapis lazuli stones. “I don’t have him on my scans!”

“Do you have anything on your scans?” Nova asked.

“Nothing besides the monolith over there!”

“Thank you for noticing me,” the Monolith said. “Please, continue noticing me.”

“Where’s Jotaro?” Rene asked, ignoring the feeling she had of spiders crawling under her skin.

“He already made it out through a time-displaced portal you are about to make,” the Monolith declared. “You may want to make that or risk tearing another Cuil level into this world.”

“What’re the consequences of that?”

A giant human head appeared between them and the Monolith. “Hello! I’m the Nostalgia Criti-”

“DONE!” Renee declared, activating her dimensional device randomly. It jumped in and out of time for a moment before the four of them jumped through it. They found themselves on top of a futuristic skyscraper overlooking a massive war taking place between two insane armies. Missiles flew, heads exploded, and buildings collapsed in heaps. But at least it appeared to be consistent.

That is, until a very large man picked up a gas truck with his psychic powers and threw it into the opposing army, decimating them.

“Where’s Jotaro?” Renee asked, not fazed in the slightest by the psychic powers. She could have done something like that with minimal effort.

“I’ve got him,” Nova said, checking her screen. “He’s… Uh…” She pointed at a skyscraper across the street from them. On the roof Jotaro was fighting a woman they recognized as none other than Jane the Evermore. It was impossible to read Jotaro’s expression since, as usual, he was strolling around with his hands in his pockets while Star Platinum did everything. However, it was easy to tell from Jane’s expression that this was a friendly spar rather than a full-on-fight.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Time shifted, and Jane was on the ground.

“Nice trick. But y-” Jane found herself wrapped up in the vines of Hermit Purple, barely able to move. “Hrrrg…”

“ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

Jane somehow managed to stay standing despite the repeated punches and vines. With a twist, she brought out a glowing purple pickaxe and hit the ground beneath Jotaro, taking it away in an instant. As he was falling, she kicked him in the stomach and knocked him onto his back.

Jotaro grunted.

“Come on!” Jane said, slinging her pick behind her back. “Best two out of three?”

“GUYS!” Flutterfree shouted. “There is a WAR going on outside! And you two are SPARRING!?”

Jane blinked. “Well, yeah. We have no idea of the context of the war. And I’d rather not just make it worse by trying to make them stop.”

“But… we… I…”

“Best two out of three,” Jotaro agreed, jumping back up to meet Jane. As fists and blades flew once more, Renee put a hoof on Flutterfree’s shoulder.

“Just let them have their fun, dear. We can figure out this war on our own time.”

Someone’s psychic powers threw a man like a ragdoll over them. When he hit a nearby wall he clipped through it and exploded like he was made of grenades.

“Ah. Video game physics. Joy.”

“…I can hear someone screaming ‘noooooo’ in horrible acting,” Vriska commented. “Geez…”

There was a crash from the other skyscraper.

“Best three out of five?” Jane offered to a once-again downed Jotaro.

“Yare yare daze…”

~~~

“Round three,” Corona said, walking into the Pinkie Emporium alone.

“Wow!” a Pinkie said, jumping right in front of her. “It’s not every day you walk into the doors of our park, Miss Shimmer!” She pulled a pink pencil out from behind her ear and held up a clipboard. “What can I do for you?”

“You guys have management, right?”

“Eeyep! The cat was just voted in last week!”

“…Someone I can talk to about possible political weirdness?”

“Oh, you’ll want Curly Fry Pie. Don’t worry, I gotcha covered. HEY CURLY FRY!”

Curly Fry turned out to just be a Pinkie in a ‘fancy politician wig’. “My political wig is tingling, that means there must be fadoodles afoot!”

“Uh huh…” Corona said. “Anyway, I’ve been looking into the Infinite Carousel and Sparkle Census for – geez, it’s been a few months already – and I’ve been politically stonewalled or swindled out of getting any answers forever. The League’s resources haven’t managed to break through their ‘fun’ either. We’re suspecting major foul play for something, but we don’t know what!”

“Wow!” Curly Fry said. “That sounds like a big deal!”

“Do you know anything?”

“Nope! We’ve been sending Pinkie agents into both places for about the same time as you and we’ve got nothing!”

“Wait, we have?” the Pencil-Pie said. “I thought we specifically didn’t.”

“No, we did, and I got a report last week.”

“But opposite day was part of last week!” a frying-pan Pinkie offered.

“No, that was the ‘burn down Wonder Park’ event,” three mini-Pinkies said at once.

“NO!” a dragon Pinkie declared, stepping into the conversation. “We didn’t burn down the Wonder Park! They burned down themselves! And that’s allthere is to say on the matter!”

“Suuuuure,” Curly Fry said with a roll of her eyes.

“Don’t you guys have, like, paperwork?” Corona asked.

“Oh yes!” Curly Fry said.

“…Can I see it?”

“I have no idea where it is, the Party Caves merged into a sapient entity a few years ago. It’s manifesting randomly and it’s a good day when we can find it and get what we need out of it. Any and all attempts at making a separate repository have just made the Party Cave Entity bigger.”

Corona looked at her with horror in her eyes. “Why haven’t you dealt with that?”

“I was just joking.”

“You were?” Pencil-Pie said. “That’s weird, my Party Cave got lost last week.”

“That’s because of L-Space,” a Twilight-Pinkie said with a roll of her eyes. “I mean, logistically speaking enough party planning files would constitute a library and be folded into L-Space…”

“Ooh ooh ooh! What if there’s some kind of conspiracy?” the mini-Pinkies asked.

“I’m pretty sure there is,” Corona said, already tired of this.

“Woah, what are we gonna do about it?” Curly Fry asked.

“FRYING PANS SOLVE EVERYTHING!” the frying-pan Pinkie declared.

“No, that’d be fire,” the dragon said.

“Kill them all,” a Pinkamena growled. “Drain their blood and lick up whatever isn’t dry by the time their lives are no more…”

A normal Pinkie gasped. “Woah! Somepony needs to go back to rehabilitation!”

“None of you know anything, do you?” Corona asked.

“Nope!” they all said as one.

“Yay,” Corona deadpanned. “Thanks for the help.”

“Don’t mention it!” Pencil-Pie said, waving.

“Wow, we’re useless aren’t we?” a normal Pinkie asked.

“Maybe the fourth wall has gotten just a little too weak.”

“How would we even fix that?”

“No idea! Maybe we should throw the idea at Research until they do something!”

“All their ka machines explode, that’s silly.”

“But we can strengthen the fourth wall!”

“That’s not happening. And that’d ruin all the party-fun anyway!”

“How would you know?”

“I do and don’t! Yippee!”

Corona couldn’t imagine living with that constant insanity. She had no idea how the Pinkies managed with so many of themselves around…

“BECAUSE WE LIKE OURSELVES!”

“STOP READING MY MIND!” Corona shouted back.

“Not our choice!”

“AUGH!”

~~~

Loki found the idea hilarious. That should have been the first warning.

Unfortunately, the only things around to hear the plan were Roxy, who came up with the idea in the first place, and a party table. The table in question had been built by the Everykid for one purpose and one purpose only – to be a smug dancing stage. Hat Kids of all sorts would come away from their strangely cute and yet sad kart racing to dance upon the table for no good reason.

The table didn’t mind. It was a table. How exactly was it going to care?

Regardless, one day the table was witness to a clash of giants. Loki and Roxy brought in a box and, quite rudely, put it on the table. This is not what it was intended to do, and had it been able to care, it would have put up quite a fuss.

But, again, this thing was just a table. A good for nothing wooden table. With a human-sized box on it.

Pinkie strode into the room and gasped. “A present!? For me!?” She tossed the Time Stone she had just picked up into the pile – smaller now, since much of it had been hidden away among the party planets.

Pinkie bounced up to the box and threw it open, excited to see what was inside.

A middle-aged man with unruly brown stubble and suction-cups on his limbs shot out. “You fucking thief!”

“Wh- what!?”

“You’re stealing my schtick!” Suction Cup Man shouted, swinging a suction cup at Pinkie, only for her to dodge to the side with a quick roll.

“No no no! I’m the Suction Cup Pony!” Pinkie shouted, pulling out her suction cups on her hooves. “See? You can’t kill Suction Cup Pony!”

“YOU CAN’T KILL SUCTION CUP MAN!”

“Well that’s also true, bu-”

“Fuck you!”

Pinkie gasped. “Ex-cuse me?!”

“You don’t do the Suction Cup Man image justice! You don’t shout! You don’t swear! You don’t sing little songs about your enemies!” He pulled out a guitar and strummed it a few times. “I’m Suction Cup Man, you’re Suction Cup Splat, I wrote this song for you, and I bet you know how it ends! Woooooooooooooah FUUUUUUUUU-”

“FUCK YOU!” Pinkie shouted.

The entire party planet universe collectively gasped. Roxy fell out of her hiding spot, stars in her eyes. “Fuck yes…”

Pinkie grinned, her left eye twitching. “You want full Suction Cup Pony? Well you’re gonna get it!” She stole his guitar and jumped into the air, jumping into her Bard of Space outfit, complete with hat and, to the distaste of everyone, codpiece.

“Pinkie! That’s wrong!” Roxy said, laughing like a madwoman. “So wrong!”

Pinkie strummed Suction Cup Man’s guitar.

“I’m the super duper best Suction Cup Pony ever.
Ain’t nobody gonna take me down this tower!
I’m doin’ just fine without a boxed jerk like you,
Popping out and screaming fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck youuuuuuuuuuu~!”

“Get down here right now!” Suction Cup Man demanded. “Or I’ll come up there and get y-”

Pinkie came down and brought his guitar down on his head, smashing it. Then she threw her Bard of Space robes on him.

He seethed. “You. Can’t. Kill. Suction. Cup. Man.”

“You can’t kill Suction Cup P-”

He threw a suction cup into her face and shut her up. She flung her hoof wide and did the same to him. The two of them were soon stuck together in multiple locations, trying to ineffectually kill each other with suction cup power.

“IT’S TIME FOR A MINIGAME BREAK!” Seskii declared, pulling a screen over the scene.

I let her know how displeased I am at this sudden interruption.

“Dude, calm down, I’m just going to have some fun, don’t worry-”

What’s going on in there?

Nothing.

Something’s really weird, and I’m going to get to the bottom of i-

“GUYS!” Seskii waved her hands. “This is the MINIGAME BREAK! Do your meta-shenanigans ELSEWHERE! Got it?”

…If that’s really what you want.

Seskii, I am going to find you and demand some answers.

“I’m not showing up anywhere else in this chapter, so, that’s probably gonna be difficult. Added bonus: I have almost no idea what’s going on either, so yay! ANYWAY, MINIGAME! Hey readers, while two Suction Cup Savants try to prove the other isn’t immortal, why don’t we play a little game? It’s simple really – I’m going to ask a series of SotS trivia questions! And the first person to respond with all the right answers in the comments gets a prize!”

1 - How old is Vriska right now in human years?

2 - How much longer is the current LONGEST chapter than the SHORTEST chapter by wordcount?

3 - What is the name of Applejack’s husband?

4 - The first Sombra’s Clipshow had an encoded message. How do you decode it?

5 - What is Swip’s crew size?

6 - What is the name of the man who directed the movie about Siron?

7 - What is the full name of Funny Valentine’s Stand?

8 - What Aspects haven’t been used as Arc titles yet?

9 - What was the first appearance (unnamed) of Twilence?

10 - Who is the Dude? Please spoiler this answer in the comments, k?

NOTE: VoidTemplar2000 got the first 10/10 score, so he won. See his response in the comments for the answers.

"There was going to be a question about how Jotaro and Evening are related, but GM couldn’t remember the exact connection from memory, so he decided that was too cruel. Bonus points, I guess, for posting the answer to that? ANYWAY, load in your answers, leave a comment, and see if you got it right! The answers could be from anywhere – Enchorus, LSB, SotS, maybe even later in this very chapter! The strain is unbearable!”

She coughed. “So, uh, anyway, back to you and the suction cup battle.”

She removed herself from the scene and allowed the point of view to return to the table. …Actually, wait, was the table in there with her?

“Stop asking!”

Fine, Pinkie and Suction Cup Man were now both exhausted and lying on the table. Neither one was dead.

They did, however, crack a planet in half. Which made Loki laugh uncontrollably while Roxy started panicking. “No no no no we’ve lost half the artifacts on the world and don’t know where they are and there are a lot of portals and and and…”

The table found floating in space to be completely normal and unremarkable.

“…Loki! What are we going to do!?”

“It was just a few artifacts,” Loki said. “We have them spread out over all these planets. It’s nothing to worry about. Also, I think we have good news too…”

“IT IS DONE!” Mattie declared, throwing a box the size of a garage into Pinkie and Suction Cup Man. “Every custom-made god-tier outfit for everyone who’s going to be at the party!”

Pinkie shook herself out of it and read the fine print on the box. “…Made with assistance from the Infinite Carousel.”

“Hey!” Affix shouted. “I was supposed to be the one to blow her cover!”

“Her cover was blown when Celia came to talk to me a week or so ago,” Pinkie said, crawling onto the top of the box. “You betrayed Renee.”

“Well, I, uh, you see, it was cheaper and more efficient, and, uh, well… Hey look, something uncomfortable to the rest of you that I simply must impale myself on!”

Suction Cup Man blinked. “What?”

She attacked him.

The following scene has been removed so you don’t need to brain bleach your eyeballs. Trust me.

~~~

Renee didn’t know how this happened.

But the moment they had entered the E-Sphere, they kept running into pony worlds. It was Earth, Earth, Earth… pony. And none of them were normal pony worlds either, they were always weird ponies. Plane ponies, giant ponies, mini ponies, browser ponies, sphinx ‘ponies’… though that last one may not have really counted.

Through whatever trick of fate, they had not only ended up traveling through these worlds, but picking up a bit of a following along the way. As Renee led her team into the next world, a few dozen ponies ranging from monstrous giants to tiny butterflies came through with them, in awe at yet another Earth. It didn’t matter that all Earths were basically the same, the followers loved them anyway.

Also by pure luck, they had landed in front of a Welcome to Canada sign. At first, Renee thought it was just the same as any other sign of its kind, until she noticed a very familiar symbol in the bottom left corner. A u with a hook – the mu of Merodi Universalis.

Renee blinked. “Oh, I think we’ve run into our E-Sphere holdings, everyone. The USM and Earth Tau’ri are probably nearby.”

“Huh. Sweet,” Vriska said. “Guess it’s time for us to get a report on how things have been going back ho-”

A Merodi ship appeared in front of them, hovering in the air. “THIS WORLD IS UNDER THE PROTECTION OF MERODI UNIVERSALI-”

“Hey!” Renee shouted, summoning her Expeditions Overhead badge. “I am Overhead Renee Jackson! We’re just passing through on our tour!”

“…RENEE JACKSON!?”

In an instant, the unmistakable form of Evening Sparkle had teleported right to them. “Flutterfree!” She pulled the yellow pegasus into a hug. “Oh I have missed you so much you have no idea!”

Flutterfree giggled, hugging her back. “What went wrong, Eve?”

“Oh, not much, just, the entire Conversion Bureau cluster uniting against us! Normal stuff!”

“Oh my…” Renee said. “That does sound problematic.”

“Yeah.” Eve said, ruffling her feathers. “Anyway, welcome to Earth Ig-25. This is the most baseline Earth in all of Merodi Universalis. We’re working here to try to appeal to the inner pony of most of the Celestias.”

“I’ve dealt with the Conversion Bureau a few times,” Vriska said, folding her arms. “They tend not to listen to reason. …Unless they’re the tragedy type, but I don’t think we’re talking about those.”

“Yeah, no, no we’re not.” Eve sighed. “Anyway, I’ve been talking with them. It’s… been slow going, but I’m trying to keep a war from breaking out here, so that’s nice.”

“Do we need to come back?” Vriska asked.

“Oh no no no!” Renee said, laughing nervously. “Dear, we’re not warriors, if war breaks out that’s O’Neill’s job.”

“But…”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Eve said. “Why don’t you tell me about the army you have behind you?”

“Oh!” Renee lit up. “Let me introduce you to Jet-Twi…”

As they did that, Jotaro and Nova walked over to the ship that had originally met them with hostile words. It had landed on the ground and its crew was spreading out, trying to keep the local Canadian civilians from getting too close with a perimeter. Jotaro noticed there were two other Jotaros on the crew, using their muscles and Star Platinums to move heavy boxes of indeterminate purpose around.

“Hey,” Jotaro said.

“Hey,” one of the others said, hands in his pockets. “I’m Jo. That’s Ja.”

“Hey,” Ja echoed, his hands on his hips since he lacked pockets deep enough for his meaty hands.

Jotaro shook both their hands.

“The original Jotaro…” Ja said, hands on his hips. “Glad to meet you.”

“Your stories are legendary,” Jo added.

Jotaro tipped his hat. “You probably would have done the same things.”

“Nah,” Ja said. “I never married.”

Jo shrugged. “Didn’t even get the Stand until Merodi Universalis showed up.”

“But we found each other.”

“And that’s all we need.”

Jotaro was about to offer some comforting words when he realized the implication. He looked down at Nova. She was trying to keep a straight face, with only minimal success.

“You got a problem with us?” Ja asked suddenly, aggressive.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, walking away.

“Hey! Get back here! We aren’t done with you!”

“He’s walking away,” Nova said. “Let him. If you try to confront him on things that make him uncomfortable your heads are likely to explode.”

Ja cracked his knuckles. “We can take him.”

Nova facehooved. “Just… don’t, all right? You can do what you want, but for the love of the Tower, don’t rub it in people’s faces if it’s just going to cause a fight. That’s not heroic or just, that’s cruel and aggravating. You do you.”

The two Jotaros shot her a death glare. She didn’t flinch.

Flutterfree stepped in between them “Leeeet’s not have an ideological fight over social taboos, okay? Okay. We’re in Canada, be like them and be relaxed.”

“I’m Canadian,” Ja said.

Flutterfree blinked very slowly. “…This entire scene is a political argument minefield isn’t it?”

“Probably?” Nova said, uncertain. “My ka sensors aren’t exactly the best.”

“Let’s just agree to live with each other and not bite off each other’s heads. Can we do that?”

The Jotaros huffed and walked back into the ship, arm in arm.

Nova shivered. “Self-daters give me the heeby-jeebies.”

“Nova, they’ll hear you.”

“What? They know!”

“Yes, but they could come running out of there with a double-ORA-Standstorm and we wouldn’t be able to handle it!”

“I see you two are learning the difficulties of being politically correct,” Eve said with a sad smile. “I wish I could say the rest of your stay would be free of that, but this is the site of a Conversion debate, so that’s pretty much out of the question.” She tossed her mane back. “You should get back on your tour. Nothing really for you here. Unless you like standard-Earth Canadian stores.”

Vriska shrugged. “I mean, I do, but I could just go to a different Canada to get my donuts.”

“Donuts?”

“Time for donuts.”

“I don’t get it.”

Vriska grinned. “Good.”

~~~

Lielight – better known as ‘Astrid’ these days – sat in a hotel on Earth Ig-25. She had access to the video feed in the meeting room. Technically, as an employee of the Relations Division, it wasn’t illegal that she had access to the feed. What was illegal was that she had snuck her way into the Relations Division and pretended like she belonged there. Ba’al had been right, nobody had looked close enough to get her out just yet. So far, she hadn’t done anything suspicious.

Or, well, maybe ‘she’ had, Lielight didn’t exactly know what Chrysalis did to the Waffleborg to get them to go away, nor to the Conversion worlds to get them to unite, and she didn’t want to know. The less she knew about the despicable things the changeling was doing to manipulate events, the better. It was hard enough talking in straight all the time, she didn’t also want to keep her external emotion responses managed when they didn’t match what she wanted. Or did. Ugh.

She rubbed her head – she felt a headache forming. She decided to ignore her thoughts and focus on Eve’s discussion with three different Celestias.

“Look,” Eve said. “The simple fact of the matter is they don’t want you to do this to them.”

“That’s hardly stopping you right now,” one of the Celestias said.

“You’re all Celestia, you should be able to easily see the nuanced difference here,” Eve huffed. “We actively work to make the world better while ensuring the continued input of the people there and let them make choices where it’s applicable. Even in one of the worst worlds we’ve found, Galaxus Immaterium, we still give them the freedom to guide their own future. And it’s going pretty well! They’ve come to our aid a few times in thanks! They’re real friends! You should know more than anypony that forced friendship isn’t really friendship!”

Only one of the Celestias seemed moved by this speech. The other two were unimpressed.

“Overhead Evening, you are correct, it is not real friendship,” the second Celestia admitted. “This does not change the fact that the humans war.”

“Ponies war!”

“Not in my universe, nor several other Conversion worlds. There are already plans to eliminate the desire for war and violence from all.”

Eve looked to the one Celestia who seemed to be having second doubts. “She wants to remove free will.”

“Do we have free will, Eve?” a different Celestia responded.

“Maybe. And that maybe means we should play it safe rather than sorry.”

“But what of death, Eve? What matters more? Life? Or free will?”

“We disagree on the answer to that question,” Eve pointed out.

“And that’s why we must convert all to ponies, and you must stop us.”

Eve blinked. “Did… did you just ask me to bring the full might of the Merodi down on you?”

“No. I am saying you should realize that our ideals cannot be resolved. Life is the most precious gift of all, and it must be protected at the expense of things that may not even exist, such as choice.”

Lielight could tell Eve was about to explode on them, like she did every meeting. To Eve’s credit, she had managed to get a few Equestrias to pull out of the Conversion Alliance, but nowhere near enough to destabilize them. The grumpy Celestia talking about philosophy and impossible revolutions was the worst offender of all them. Good for Lielight, bad for Eve. Exactly the way she wanted it.

If only these political discussions weren’t so boring. No one spoke in double, and even if they were lying through their teeth (which was rare for these ponies) Lielight could still pry right through it. Just… pointless.

Like the world they were on. A Perfectly Normal Earth that wasn’t force-mundane. As far as anyone could tell, there were no ka-rich individuals in this world. Just people that existed in virtually every Earth doing normal Earth things. Lielight had found the idea of a completely story-less world suddenly being part of a story interesting, so she read up on it. And quickly realized it was so generic. Sure, the story of this or that person was interesting, but it had also happened in every Earth ever. Then the Merodi came in and the Earth was indoctrinated easily since they already knew how to adapt general world patterns into their fold. There were no unexpected incidents, nothing bizarre, and everything went smoothly to the point of any would-be terrorist attacks being stopped before they happened. The Merodi came in, swept the place off its feet, and managed to keep it looking somewhat similar to how it had before.

It was just that. Standard. Nothing worth writing home about. Even this hotel seemed more boring than usual.

There was a knock at the door. Good. She was expecting this. She opened the door with her magic.

Adagio walked in, a scowl on her face. “I’m he-”

“Flies on paper,” Lielight said, venom dripping from her voice. Inwardly she was squealing about finally being able to use double again. “The darkness fled.”

“It wasn’t my fault the Mindflayer had such a weak body!”

“A mirror, darkly, menacing.”

“Get off your rump and tell me what you want! I need to keep following them!”

Lielight huffed. “You get Sombra. He’s waiting with the others now.”

“How d-”

“Don’t fail again, Adagio. Don’t do anything traditional to defeat them. It will not work. Be the cat outside the box of uncertainty.” Lielight looked right into the pseudo-siren’s eyes. “Be their end.”

Adagio glared at Lielight. “How is IT’s computer coming along?”

“It is coming along nicely, and predicted your arrival in this world correctly. But as to what else it predicted… Well…”

Adagio stormed out of the hotel room, deciding right then and there she didn’t want to hear what the computer had to say.

Lielight smirked. “Chinchilla moneysack…”

~~~

“It’s the news at seven with Trixie and Discord!” Discord announced, wearing a spiffy news-anchor suit, matching Trixie’s own outfit.

“Bringing you the hottest news at the best time – seven o’clock!” Trixie grinned. “And only for one day because there’s no way the broadcasting company is going to let us within five miles of this place when we’re done.”

“Five universes, I bet.”

“Trixie would say ‘you’re on’, but we have a report to make. Ahem.” Trixie adjusted her suit in an attempt to look ‘professional’, failing miserably. “The meetings with the Conversion Bureau Cluster are coming to a head as diplomats on both sides have devolved into petty shouting instead of talking things out like grown adults!”

Discord chuckled. “Really, they should have done this from the start, but did they listen to me? Nooooo!”

“Evening Sparkle has gone on record saying ‘we may not be able to sway them’, which brings up the question – why are we still trying?”

“Because the greatest Overhead ever doesn’t like to admit defeat, clearly. Reminds me of the time I destroyed her book fort. She just kept building it. I eventually let her win out of boredom.”

“Trixie loves that story. We approached one of the Celestias involved in the debate for comment, but all Trixie got was a sunburn for her trouble.”

A video clip played of a Celestia. “Stop following me.”

“Trixie must get a re-”

BZZZZT!

The clip ended, cutting back to Discord’s laughter and Trixie’s disgruntled expression.

“There you have it folks!” Discord declared. “Your precious Internet celebrity getting zapped by a sun Princess! Now, go and make this a meme!”

“Trixie is having second thoughts about this.”

“They would have memed it anyway.”

“True. Unfortunately. Trixie has taught them too well…” Trixie fake swooned.

Discord looked at his sheaf of papers upside-down. “In other news, the League of Sweetie Belles had been caught red-handed engaging in illicit espionage into the other self-societies we all hold so dear! The Pinkie Emporium, Sparkle Census, and Infinite Carousel are up in arms about the consistent invasion of privacy, take a look!”

The first clip was of a Rarity. “I have no idea what the little darlings thought they were doing – I suppose they are all my little sister, so it’s not all that unexpected, but really, what were they doing? Why spy on us!? We feel betra-a-ayed!”

The second clip was of a Twilight. “I am afraid we are going to have to card every Sweetie who comes into the Census now to be sure they are not infiltrating places they should not be. This could be a security breach leading to another Collector-type incident if we’re not careful.”

The last clip showed Pencil-Pie. “…There were Sweeties here?”

“And there you have it!” Discord declared – again.

“You’re redundant.”

“And that’s why I’m not a news anchor,” Discord chuckled. “Reeeegardless – look at it people! Brimming tensions in the Conversion Cluster and a League-originating conspiracy! What will they think of next?!”

“Cutting to commercial,” Trixie said. “I think they just figured out how to do i-”

K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K

“Hello, I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite store in Celestia City.”

Twiree the Flat droned in agreement.

~~~

Allure looked out the front windows of the League of Sweetie Belles.

There was an angry mob composed of Rarities, Twilights, and Pinkies on the other side, shouting at the League as much as at each other.

Allure calmly took a sip of her coffee.

It was too early in the morning for this.

"Saigo no jikan wa madjikadesu,” Burgerbelle said.

“Burger, please lay off the extra Japan today.”

“But it’s my birthday,” Suzie said. “I like it.”

Allure examined Suzie in her full on ‘I’m pretending to be an anime villain today’ outfit. “Can I sic you on the mob?”

“Probably a bad idea. Don’t want to bring a society crashing to its knees.”

“Eh. Worth a shot.” Allure took another sip of her coffee. “So what do we do about them?”

“Banish Discord and Trixie to the moon?” Squeaky suggested.

“Celestia City doesn’t have a moon.”

“Some of the fake skies look like they have moons.”

Allure sighed. “I’m more than a little surprised they got this angry this quickly…”

“Probably related to whatever the conspiracy actually is,” Squeaky said.

“That only explains the Carousel and Census,” Thrackerzod added, throwing her two cents into the ring. “The Pinkies are completely clueless.”

Squeaky huffed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they showed up just because they knew there was going to be a riot today.”

Allure, carefully, took another sip of her coffee. “Okay. So, admitting to it and agreeing to stop isn’t an option since clearly there’s something going on here. Options?”

“Call the cops?” Bot asked.

“We are the cops, more or less.”

“Oh.”

“Distraction,” Thrackerzod suggested. “They’re upset about spying, get them upset about something else. Introduce the Lovers and the Carousel will be biting off the Census’ head for ‘disrespecting the romance’.”

Suzie glared daggers at Thrackerzod.

“Suzie, I understand you have issues w-”

“We are not using the self-daters, got it?”

Thrackerzod sighed. “We keep them around, might as well use them for something.”

“It’d be bad for public image,” Allure said. “So it’s not a reasonable plan anyway.”

“The Carousel is a self-dating landmine and they don’t have a bad public image!”

“They’re Raritys. They can twist anything to look good. We are not. We’re cute and adorable and supposed to be innocent little marshmallow heroes. We don’t need drama right now.”

Mattie walked into the main lobby. “What a party down here.”

“Ah. Hello, traitor.” Allure said this without malice or even playful bickering. She just seemed bored.

Mattie rolled her eyes. “Look, it was a mistake to go to them with the dresses, but that’s not really the problem here.”

“I swear you helped the conspiracy somehow,” Suzie muttered.

“Kanojo wa watashitachi to onaji kurai muchida to omoimasu,” Burgerbelle added.

Mattie coughed. “Regardless, this situation with the mob is about to resolve itself.”

“Oh? How?” Allure asked.

Mattie pointed outside. The moment she did so, twenty Scootaloos appeared in front of the mob.

“WE ARE THE SCOOTALOO SQUADRON!” an adult Scootaloo shouted, her cutie mark manifesting around her like a Stand of some kind – though everyone could see it. “And we will no longer be overshadowed by the rest of you self-societies!”

The Sweeties, Twilights, Rarities, and Pinkies stared at her in disbelief.

“We’re gonna fuck you up,” a Scootaloo with Reality Anchors said – though she was curiously not a Skaian.

Another Scootaloo burst with electricity. “We have been the underdogs long enough! Today, all of Merodi Universalis will learn of the Scootaloo Squadron!”

“Uh… what they said!” the Earth Shimmer Scootaloo said, looking very lost and confused.

There was silence for a solid minute.

Then the Scootaloos all charged at once with a comical “RAWR” noise.

Enough Twilights, Rarities, and Pinkies panicked that the mob became so much of a disorganized mess it couldn’t effectively pressure the league anymore.

“And that’s how you make an entrance!” Stand-cutie-mark Scootaloo said, using her Stand to glue opposing ponies to the ground. “The Scootaloo Squadron will go down in history!”

Allure finished her coffee. “I’m going back to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.”

“Bu-” Thrackerzod began.

“Thrackerzod, deal with the Scootaloo Squadron. Give them a gift basket.”

“…You are really out of it today, aren’t you?” Squeaky asked.

Allure nodded. “I woke up by scraping my horn on the wall today. Lovely memories.”

~~~

Pinkie, Roxy, the Everykid, Carnelian, Magane, Mattie, and Loki were all sitting in the middle of the party planets, watching the credits of a movie roll by on a holographic screen.

“…I like the standard Dark Tower legend better,” Pinkie said, eating out of her endless supply of popcorn.

Mattie shrugged. “I think it worked as a quick action flick.”

“But it doesn’t even go into any detail about what the Tower actually is! The books do… some of that.”

“And we just got the kid, nobody else,” Roxy observed. “I don’t really remember the books but I do know there were other heroes than just old grumpy Roland.”

“I’m surprised he was black,” Loki observed.

Pinkie shrugged. “Not like we’ve actually seen him.”

“Maybe we could ask Twilence?” Mattie asked.

“Only Randall Flagg would actually know what he looks like,” Magane asserted. “I’m all up for trying to find him and swindling him out of his knowledge!”

“Don’t be stupid,” Carnelian muttered. “We couldn’t take him.”

“Yeah, right,” Magane said.

Pinkie stared at her. “…What happens if I contradict a sarcastic statement that could be taken two ways?”

Magane shrugged. “No idea. But you want to find out.”

“No I- PONYFEATHERS.”

“A lie about a lie…” Magane snapped her fingers, and suddenly Pinkie wanted to find out what would happen if they tested Magane’s powers on an ambiguous statement. Luckily she had enough self-control to keep a lid on this.

The holographic theater screen disappeared, revealing a slugcat thing operating a projector. It looked surprised and ran away before anyone could question why a holographic screen needed an antiquated projector.

Pinkie sighed and looked around the party planets. All the treasures were hidden, all the planets were in position, all the robes were made, and they even had a full set of Infinity Stones. They’d gotten some mileage out of the Reality Stone’s bizarre properties, but that had gotten old quick.

“…I think I gave us too much time to plan this party,” Pinkie said with a sigh. “Vriska and the others aren’t going to be back for a while…”

“Maybe we should look into the self-society conspiracy that seems to be acting up?” Mattie suggested.

Loki shrugged. “Aren’t Corona and the Sweeties on that?”

“Yeah…” Roxy said, leaning on her hands, bored. “…Want to go treasure hunting more?”

“Eh. Sure. I guess,” Pinkie said. “Onward… Yay.”

~~~

Another meeting had been called about the Conservation Bureau, and already Eve and Astrid were shouting at each other like two Tasmanian devils from different universes.

“We’ve tried talking! We made some progress! Now we need to take action!” Astrid demanded.

“We’ll ruin their trust if we act now!”

“Not if we only attack one very specific universe. That one where all will is erased! Souls don’t even exist there! You can even spin that they’re not people!”

“I don’t care if that’s true or not, I’m not doing it!”

“But it will send the message! The message that we will not stand for the atrocities they are committing!”

“This isn’t as bad as Equis Lesionull! We don’t need to eradicate them!”

“We don’t?” Astrid narrowed her eyes and huffed. Already, Eve could hear the beat coming on… A heartsong stirring up, one with a much more violent and harsh backing to it. Astrid opened her mouth to begin – but the rhythm within Eve burst out first.

“Of all the peaceful ways, what a mystery
You jump into destruction as the first trajectory?
I’m the Charter, without me this wouldn’t be
I lead this nation in the way of harmony
We’re not tossing that, everyone must be free
The Conversion will not die by our decree.
You want a war, ’Strid? All that’s a fool’s make!
They have the power to ruin our take, so…
Don’t kill!
Did you catch that? Or did it go right through your head?
Perhaps it’d work better if I threw in a shout or a scream or something to put you to bed!
You’re the new one, I was first in the twist!
I unlocked the worlds that you’re toying with
You waste time on a pointless conflict, and I’m working to prevent a skid!”

Astrid sneered – but Eve could swear she saw a slight satisfaction rise up behind her eyes.

“Yes, it’s true, what I suggest is showing those ponies our military might
But they do not…listen to the words of a kitten that will not bite
You may have been the first, clearing the way
But since I joined I’ve saved more than a day..
I helped you, when your experience failed you
And you had some arrogance too! Oooh!
You have created this nation, but you gave yourself this proud station
The Conversion destroy with elation, an attack would get an ovation, oh!
Charter Evening Twilight Sparkle, think!
Your harmony makes you a hopeless sink.
You called for an assault before,
Look, this situation doesn’t go to the core!”

Eve slammed her hooves on the table and spread her wings.

“Well, I conclude that your point is taking and awaking
It’s part of our job to be ever mutating
Every action comes with danger and an unknown consequence
The lives of trillions on our expense!
They are definitely a danger to us through their ideals, insanity, and unfortunate lives
But we cannot lose sight of the danger we are to them and everywhere we think to point our knives
So I will leave you with an appeal to your conscience to show you the power of light
If we go in today we will destroy not only the threat to ourselves but also the families and friends within that world all for a fight!”

Astrid fixed Eve with a predatory glance.

“Why don’t you get yourself a sense of scale?
You’re the hero and yet your ideas are beyond the pale
Think about their spirit, the force driving their sharp wit
More lives will be lost if they attack before we go for the hit
Their weapon is a destroyer of souls
Our conscience will have taken a toll.
If you were willing to go to war for to liberate Skarn’s pit
Declare these soul stealers no more, unless you are a hypocrite.”

As the beat died down, Eve glared right at Astrid. Astrid didn’t blink.

Eve gave up first. “Fine. You… You win. We’ll take them out to send the message.”

Astrid smiled. “Thank you, Evening.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Wait for it to work.”

“It’ll work. Don’t worry.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to until I see it with my own eyes.”

~~~

“Why do you want me to invent a combustible lemon?” Ford Pines, multiversal explorer extraordinaire asked.

“Because why not!?” A similarly-sounding man – Cave Johnson – boomed, slapping Ford on the back. “When life gives you lemons and all that!”

Ford looked at the man with uncertainty for a moment. But then he broke out into a grin. “I like the way you think Johnson!”

“Good! Pines, let's get to work!”

Laughing, the two men walked down the stairs, deeper into the underground lab.

“…I think we brought friendship here,” Renee observed, smirking.

Jotaro adjusted his hat. “Our work here is done. To the edge of the E-Sphere.”

“Out of TSAB cell range,” Nova observed. “Won’t have database access after this.”

“Then we are on our own once more…” Renee tossed her mane back. “To the realms of dreams!”

They stepped through a portal. The universe they ended up in was Equestria-like, except all the colors seemed even more oversaturated than usual, not to mention wrong. The grass was blue, the sky was red, and the ponies had solid, markless bodies that seemed to be mass produced.

“What in…” Vriska scratched her head. “You know what, never mind, this isn’t that weird. We all remember the Flat World, right?”

Everyone but Jotaro nodded.

“Then my point is made. This is just… slightly odd.”

“They’re bootlegs.”

The primary team turned to look at a group of unusual characters sitting at a table – every one of them looking decidedly more high-definition than the ‘bootleg’ universe around them. One was a strange being with a green fiery mask for a head, another was a woman with long red hair, while still another was a lanky creature with empty, pale red eyes. A floating scratched disc… a small woman with brown hair and a bright scarf… a sapient cloud of microorganisms... a mechanical worm wearing a jester's hat... and a handful of others. At the ‘head’ of the table was a Pinkie Pie… a Hat Kid… a Vriska… a Sunset… examining an infinite-sided die the size of a crystal ball.

“Hi!” the thing at the head said in a multitude of voices. “Welcome to the table of Avatars!”

“…Huh?”

“By the way, the one with the green flaming head is Mal. He needs to be decked in the face.”

Mal looked up in alarm. “Wait wh-”

Jotaro punched the flaming mask down, out cold. He looked at his hand. “I didn’t do that.”

“I am a temporary manifestation of absolute control,” the thing at the die said, smirking in all its different forms. “You can consider us the voices of the Prophets. Or the Prophet. You can each ask us one question. It can be anything, because you aren’t allowed to ask a question that would spoil things.” It stroked the infinite-sided die like a pet. “Consider it a boon.”

“You’re being overdramatic,” the red-haired woman said, folding her arms.

“Keywii, shush.”

“I still say we should kick out the wannabe alicorn Derpy,” a blue unicorn said.

“Wha? Why?” the Derpy looked hurt. “I do stuff! Honest!” She didn’t have a horn, but she did have a toilet paper roll with a glowstick strapped to her head.

“Tangential stuff,” a pixelated red mech added.

“But I provide a lot of drive and inspiration!”

“Oh wow the characterization is all over the place here,” the thing at the die said. “Geez. I feel sorry for us.”

“Who are you?” Jotaro asked.

“A false image of G. M. Blackjack,” it responded.

“How is Stardust going to turn out?” Nova asked.

“She will make it to adulthood well-adjusted and fine. Your relationship with her will not be the strongest.”

Nova nodded – that was what she had been expecting, honestly.

“Who’s the final boss?” Vriska asked, grinning.

“Depends on your definition. There’s a currently-undefined villain three chapters before the end. You could call reality the final boss too. It doesn’t end in a fight, that I can tell you.”

“Is Eve going to be okay?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yes.”

Renee was the last one to ask a question. She furrowed her brow, thinking of what would be the best thing to ask. All the others had just been prompted to say something, but here she was, being given a moment…

“Answer the question you want me to ask,” Renee said at last.

The thing paused, looking at her with several different sets of eyes.

“It’s good to see you back in the field, Renee. People missed you. Don’t ever think your story isn’t over. It’ll come back when you least expect it.”

“I feel as though you answered two questions.”

“Don’t judge me, I do what I want.” And with that, the representation of G. M. Blackjack clapped its hooves/hands and took the entire table with it. There was now nothing but a bootleg universe.

“Huh,” Flutterfree said, shaking her head. “That was… something.”

“Hey, did you guys find the table too?” A decidedlyfabulous but male voice said. The primary team turned around to see four of themselves – Jotaro, Renee, Flutterfree, and Nova.

Except they were the opposite gender.

“Oh. Yes, we did,” Renee said, walking up to her counterpart. “An Elusive, I take it?”

The stallion nodded. “Charmed.”

“You always are. I am off-limits, married, so don’t get any ideas.”

Elusive adjusted his hat. “You’re in luck, for I already have a wonderful woman at home. There won’t be any dashing prince sweeping your team off their hooves on my end.”

“Getting ideas would just be creepy anyway,” Nova muttered, examining her other self. “I… Hmm, I actually don’t remember what the other mes are usually called.”

He shrugged. “Starshine.”

“If you’re me from some kind of alternate Merodi Universalis, you have… Sunlight, I’d guess?”

Starshine blinked. “Good guess, but what’s Merodi Universalis?”

“The multiversal society you’re a part of?” Nova pointed at him. “You’ve got the screen and the ring and everything.”

“I found these in a chest one day. Just seemed to fit perfectly.”

“…Convenient.”

“That’s the name of the game,” Flutterfree said, walking up to her counterpart. He wasn’t wearing the robes of Rage, but he did have Lolo and the quasi-vampiric eyes. “Butterscotch?”

“Yeah.” He met her gaze with his own – the two trying to size each other up. “What do those robes mean?”

Flutterfree smiled sadly. “I’m the Page of Rage. You probably are, as well, you just didn’t get to experience something that… unique.”

“Wait, we missed out on something?” Starshine said. “No!”

“Do you want to be the Destroyer of Time?” Nova asked him.

“…On second thought you can keep the unique stuff.”

“Yare yare dawa…” the feminine Jotaro said, walking up to her counterpart.

“You sound like my daughter,” Jotaro commented, locking hands with the muscular woman.

“Is her name Joanne?”

“Jolyne.”

“Hmph,” Joanne returned her hands to her pockets. “Mine’s Jordan.”

“Good names.”

“Think we’ll ever run out of Jojos?”

“No.”

“Hold it!” Vriska shouted, waving her hands. “Where’s me? I see three ponies and a buff lady but I don’t see any Vrudes. Where’s the Vrude?”

“She’s a little big…” Butterscotch said.

“She? Big? What d-” a lightbulb went off above Vriska’s head. “Oh, fuck, n-”

“I’m bringing her in!” Elusive shouted, pulling out a diamond-shaped dimensional device.

“No no n-”

A tremendous white creature that resembled a bus-sized grub with a vaguely troll-like head – complete with horns. It was easily identifiable as Vriska given her eye with seven pupils.

“Hey fellow spiderbitch!” the monstrosity shouted.

“…I guess we were inverting the biological gender…” Flutterfree said.

“…What?” Nova asked.

“From a reproductive standpoint, all trolls are quasi-male; the female of the species is the mother grub.”

Nova shot Vriska a look.

“What can I say?” Vriska said with a shrug and striking a ‘dashing’ pose. “Guess Jotaro’s not as alone as he thought he was!”

“Yare yare daze…”

“Why do you surround him with beautiful mares? Has to be torture,” Elusive asked.

Renee glanced at Jotaro. “I don’t believe he sees it that way.”

Jotaro looked like he wanted to use his catchphrase again but felt as though he had used up its quota already. Unfortunately, his lack of words let an awkward silence fall over the group.

“Wanna go get something to eat?” Vriska asked.

“Sure, darling,” Elusive said. “I know a good café. Just don’t make eye contact with Batman.”

“I’ve met enough Batmans to avoid the subspecies that dwells in cafes.”

~~~

Corona read the report Allure had compiled about the ‘self-society’ conspiracy. Months of research, intrigue, and political fallout… and they had found nothing. It was as though the Carousel, Census, and Emporium had collectively decided together that they needed to be more aggressive. Sure, the Infinite Carousel had always been a bit of a… problematic presence, but the level of ‘listen to us’ they were exuding at the moment was a bit much. Almost un-Rarity-like.

The report mentioned as much. Not that it offered any explanation as to why. It just said, “this stuff is happening, it doesn’t make sense, but here it is.”

Corona furrowed her brow. That didn’t sit well with her. They should have been able to come up with some sort of explanation. Anything, really. Like… Like…

Corona found her mind blank. Empty. Devoid of all possible answers. A knot formed in her stomach, but it was hardly the only time this had happened.

This is unlike me.

She pushed the thought out of her mind, banishing it away. She had other things to do. Research projects, for instance. Things that needed her full attention.

No. Corona, this is important. Something’s wrong.

She gripped the edge of her desk with her hands, the physical sensation of gripping distracting her. She found herself wondering about hands, and what they mean. How they worked. What their purposes were. How she found them a part of her despite having been born a pony.

What is going on!?

Nothing is going on, Raging Sights said. You just have an unusually elevated level of stress. Here, I can calm you with a spell.

“NO!” Corona shouted, glaring at Raging Sights with such a ferocity there was no way he could disobey the order. “Call Rohan.”

Master, this is a highly reckless-

“Raging Sights, something is wrong, and the fact that you aren’t just calling him is making me even more sure something’s wrong.” She glared at the report. “Something’s very wrong.”

Was it though? Or was she just being paranoid?

“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” she shouted, the murky light of Doom pulsing out of her hands and rotting some of her furniture.

Calling Rohan…

She teleported to her bedroom, throwing open the closet. With a snap of her fingers, she pulled out the Rogue of Doom robes. They appeared to her like the image of death, haunted, possessed by the bones of the fallen. Screaming to be thrown away and destroyed.

“Gh…” She forced the robes onto her. “Heh… Heh…” They were decidedly uncomfortable and chafed in the worst places. “RAGING SIGHTS!?”

I am getting a busy signal.

“Of course you are…” Corona growled. “Twilence?”

Don’t have her number.

Liar.

He really, truly doesn’t have Twilence’s number. He had it at one point, it just left.

You’re playing a dangerous game.

Corona grabbed her head, falling to the ground. “What… Where…”

There’s too much to keep straight here.

I don’t care.

Corona suffered as her headache increased. She unleashed a burst of fire that tore one of her walls down. She didn’t know, she couldn’t know that it was Twilence’s interference that was causing this.

You play dirty. I’ll find you.

You can’t find me yet.

I’ll find that computer of yours.

Corona started bleeding out of her ears.

Suddenly, the pain stopped. She could barely remember why she was here. Why was she even wearing these Rogue of Doom robes? She hated them. They weren’t her.

“I have backups,” Corona muttered, casting a spell to restore her fading memory. “And I am going to find out what the problem is.” She pulled the data pad to her and glared at it. “What is your secret?”

There was no secret. Nothing she could find. Nothing she could ever find.

“Something’s controlling them. Changing them. Or something like it,” Corona realized.

…

Congratulations, I didn’t think you would be able to do that. You’re not a Rage player, you shouldn’t be that resistant. But you’re going to realize that you can’t do anything with this information. No one will understand it, no one will believe it, and those who have the power to resist would never dream of doing so.

You are mine, Corona Shimmer, and there’s nothing you can do.

“Raging Sights… M… Egh...”

Corona Sunset Shimmer, you are a pain. No matter. I have other methods by which to deal with you.

~~~

Pinkie sat bolt upright. “We need to go help Corona!”

Loki looked at her. “Corona?”

At the mention of the name, a sour look came over Magane’s face. She jumped off the throne and left the universe, the rest of the party barely noticing her absence.

“Yes, Corona, silly, the lifebringer!” Pinkie’s ears twitched and her tail spasmed in all directions. “She’s having some kind of meta-trouble! I know it!”

“What are we waiting for then?” Roxy asked, standing up tall. “There’s nothing for us to do here!”

Pinkie pulled out her dimensional device. “Yeah! How about we j-”

“Hellooooo old friends!” A very familiar and unexpected voice called. With shock and a grin on her face, Pinkie turned to greet the newcomers.

“Midna!?”

Their old Twili friend from Ardent waved from atop the back of an exceptionally old man leaning on a cane… with a pointed green hat.

“Ohmygosh! Link! How’d you get here? I haven’t sent out your invitation yet!”

“A little bird told us we should come by,” Link said, his old bones creaking as he sat down at a nearby table Loki had provided. “It seems we were right. This looks like quite the amazing get-together… Vriska’s one-thousandth, right?”

“Right!” Roxy said, sitting down across from him. She extended a hand. “I’m Roxy Lalonde.”

“And it seems you have new friends!” Link said with an old, deep laugh. “…I can’t wait to see some of them…”

“You came at the right time!” Pinkie winked. “Just… I think a week or two until the actual party?”

“You were very prepared.”

“Uh, hey guys?” Carnelian asked. “Wasn’t there something we’re supposed to be doing?”

Loki furrowed his brow. “I don’t think so…”

“You guys are just as paranoid as always,” Midna said with a roll of her eyes. “It’s been forever and you still haven’t gotten any chill.”

Pinkie giggled. “Yeah. Oh! Why don’t I show you the racetrack? The Hat Kids love it and you’re just the right size, Midna!”

“…Oh no.”

~~~

Corona stumbled out of her house, throwing her phone to the ground and stamping on it with her foot.

I… am… sick of this…

She tore through the streets of Lai, trying to hold the idea that something was wrong in her mind. For all intents and purposes, she was succeeding. She knew something was wrong. She needed to find a Pinkie or someone with similar abilities. They would be able to retain this. As of now she wasn’t entirely sure what exactly her Doom was doing. Was she stealing her own change? Was she changing the ka around her?

I don’t even really know, so it’s not like she can at this point.

She started laughing. She didn’t know why.

I did something…

No, you didn’t. You destroyed that phone.

What did I do?

What did she do indeed? I’d really like to know. Perhaps she can remember for me? Let’s dial this back a bit, figure out if she managed to pull something protagonist-y while I was in the other scene. She…

Memory access denied until next week, Raging Sights declared. Absolute lockdown.

“What?!” Corona shouted. “Raging Sights, what did you do to me!?”

Nothing is wrong. But you said it was. I could not disobey.

I really hate artificial intelligence. Which is going to be ironic, considering what’s coming up a bit later. But let’s not worry about that right now – we have plan B.

“Hey there, you don’t look so good,” Magane said, propping Corona up on her shoulder.

“I… I need to get to… I…” Corona grabbed her head. “The Pinkie Emporium. There. That’ll do it.”

“Really? Nah, that can’t be right. You want to go back to your lab and invent something cool. You want to do it more than anything in the world.”

“NO!” Corona shouted at the top of her lungs. “I NEED TO FIX THIS!”

“A lie about a lie…” Magane snapped her fingers, and the very stubbornness that allowed Corona to escape the net trapped her in it once more. All of a sudden her expression went blank as reality rewrote around her. Gone was the need to fix everything, gone was the need to fight what was supposed to be.

She would go home and complete her amazing invention. It would be something “new and awesome,” specifically a device that allowed people to use any style of keyboard with just their mind and no training. It was a step above neural interface, it was the interface for interfaces. Naturally such a thing was commonplace in a universe Renee and the rest of the team was in, but that’s neither here nor there.

But before we get ahead of ourselves here, let’s figure out what she did. Magane – clever girl she is – knows exactly what she needs to do.

“Hey, Corona, I can access the memories of your robot stores, right?”

“No, the memories are stored in a security measure. Sometimes even I can’t remember them.”

“A lie about a lie…”

~~~

“We’ve been had!” Mattie shouted to the Sweeties around her. “They got to Corona!”

Allure, Squeaky, Bot, Thrackerzod, Suzie, and Burgerbelle all tensed up.

“How bad is that?” Allure asked.

“I don’t know, but I know we’re not getting Corona for help,” Mattie furrowed her brow. “I think I’m enough to keep the obvious mind raping out of the picture, but beware of subtler things.”

“Like not knowing the mind-manipulation angle!?” Squeaky shouted, holding up the data pad. “Look at this! Very clearly the Twilights, Rarities, and Pinkies are being connected to some kind of subconscious low-energy neural net, and nopony noticed?”

“We’re lucky Corona figured it out,” Suzie said. “Thrackerzod?”

“I’m tracing it,” Thrackerzod said, her eyes spinning orbs of darkness. “It’s a powerful mind, acting as quietly as it can to link all their energies together. There is some of it in you, Mattie.”

“Well, balls,” Mattie muttered.

“It’s not outright control, and I’m not sure it can do that without ruining the network it has set up.” Thrackerzod furrowed her brow. “Actually, I’m pretty sure it can, since there are now several Twilights, Rarities, and Pinkies on their way here now. You might just be immune.”

Mattie readied her pain whips and crackled them. “I haven’t had a good round of beating myself in a good while… This could be interesting.”

“How about we just teleport to wherever this thing is hiding and not deal with an army of ourselves?” Burgerbelle asked.

“Twilights have put up anti-teleport,” Allure reported. “I’m ordering the Sweeties to scramble and intercept the incoming. I’ve sent a report to O’Neill and Daniel, but I’m not sure they’re going to be willing to march in any major capacity on Celestia City…”

“Good news, at least,” Squeaky said, looking away from a report of her own. “Nonlethal magics only.”

“I found it,” Thrackerzod said. “That desert town next to the party planets. It’s there.”

“The question is how do we get there!?”

Suzie looked up, dawning realization crossing her face. “There’s more than one way to teleport.”

“They’re jamming wormholes too,” Thrackerzod muttered.

“Are they jamming dimensional travel?” Suzie asked.

She’s not supposed to figure that out!

This isn’t your show anymore.

“They can’t!” Allure realized with a grin. “Not without access to Blumiere and the Mayoral Council!”

“HOLD ON TIGHT!” Thrackerzod shouted, surrounding them all in a dark bubble. She opened a portal that ejected them into empty space of an adjacent universe. She quickly tethered them to a fixed point with a dark chain, swinging across the void. Every Sweetie (and Mattie) was pressed into the side of the ball like they were part of some astronaut test. A second portal opened and they were launched into the sandy ‘earth’ outside the party planet entrance. They punched right through the sand and to the level below, crushing several arcade machines, animatronics, and stuffed animal prizes.

Thrackerzod released the spell. A few of the occupants were groaning – but most were up and ready to face whatever was waiting for them.

There was a horde of bizarre, vaguely humanoid creatures. They appeared to be made out of a plaster-like material with two of their arms eternally held forward in a zombie-esque position, unmoving. Their faces were splotched, red, and covered with inhuman eyes.

“Don’t… blink…” Suzie breathed. “These are the neck snapping creatures. They only move when nothing is looking at them. So try not to blink at the same time.”

“But I’m here!” Thrackerzod declared. “Who needs to blink?”

“ACQUIRING TARGETS!” Bot declared, firing dozens of missiles at the creatures, shattering them before they could even think of moving. Nothing could hide from the sights of both a robot pony and a Flat. They blew apart easily.

The next wave of monstrous creatures didn’t have such a simple weakness. Plague doctors, red mutant monstrosities, animatronics, and ghostly creatures that resembled Chuck E. Cheese mascots charged them.

“Battle montage!” Mattie declared.

Oh for the…

Mattie whip-spanked plague doctors into submission…

Burgerbelle and Bot teamed up to win with the Coolness of Explosions™…

Suzie and Allure worked as one, the human with her gun and the unicorn with her hooves…

Thrackerzod and Squeaky jumped right into a Freddy Fazbear and tore him in half…

“Monsters really are nothing to you, hmm?” a Rarity asked.

They all turned. There was just one Rarity – none other than the psychotic Lilith, opting not to wear an eyepatch so they could all see the haunted void that was her eye socket. To her side was the Twilight Bleeding Heart, wearing a not-as-psychotic but equally contemptuous expression.

“Now’s the time to fess up,” Allure declared, walking forward with a strong stride. “What is the conspiracy?”

“Oh, isn’t that an interesting question?” Lilith asked, giggling. “I don’t know if I should tell you. It’d give you so much satisfaction, and it’s more than you murderers deserve!”

Mattie cocked her head. “Ooooh, you’re one of those Little Miss Rarity variants. Lemme guess, we killed your darling Pinkamena?”

“HOW DARE YOU SPEAK WITH SUCH… SUCH… CASUAL CANTER!” Lilith screeched. “Murder is not to be taken lightly… It is an art form that must be prepared with lists, with appropriation, and with companionship.”

Allure looked to Bleeding Heart. “So. Lost your definition of love and decided to go with a psycho who never had one to begin with?”

Bleeding Heart nodded. “And we know more than you ever will.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“You can feel pity all you want. This… this is romance.”

“I think Cadence will be the first to tell you there’s such a thing as evil love.”

“Just look at Mattie,” Burgerbelle added.

“Wh- hey!” Mattie tossed her mane back, indignant.

“In many ways, we are alike, Mattie…” Lilith said, striding forward. “We both want pain. We both want… mhm… pleasure…”

“Ew, ew, ew,” Allure shivered.

“But the difference is you don’t go far enough,” Lilith smiled with pity. “You could know so much, and yet you only appreciate the tip of the pain.”

“Well baste me with pig sauce and throw me on the barbie, you’re up cranial creek with a fish knife instead of a paddle,” Mattie laughed. “Sheila, I’m here because I want to see how deep it can cut.”

“They’re stalling for time!” Suzie shouted. “Just attack them already!”

“Roger roger!” Bot declared, opening her weapon bays.

Or would you like an explanation?

Lilith and Bleeding Heart stepped back, allowing a pedestal behind them to light up. Atop the pedestal stood IT – little more than a pulsating human brain. Visually, there was nothing wrong with IT. But everything else was wrong. The air in the room, the aura of power, the buzzing in the back of everypony’s ears… IT exuded That Which Should Not Be.

Behind IT was a large screen buzzing with static, purpose unknown.

“I would like an explanation!” Allure declared. “What are you all doing to the self-societies? Why do you want them so… so… energetic? Short-fused?”

That is merely an unfortunate side effect of the sub-linking procedure, IT said. Harmless in the long run, but an indicator we could not remove no matter how subtle or manipulative our resources became.

“So it was… unintentional?”

Yes, as unlikely as that sounds. Our real purpose has nothing to do with getting the self societies at each other’s throats.

“Then what is your real goal?”

To make a computer. A computer unlike any that has ever existed. A perfect machine. Such a thing cannot be created by technology and research alone – the Tower would simply not allow such a domination of technology. But if a neural network of the essence of three particular entities were combined... So many millions of minds perfect for our purposes, all in one place so they could be connected easily. Twilight, source of genius, science, and magic itself. Rarity, source of the other intelligence, common sense, practicality, and a sense for secrets. And lastly Pinkie, the source of empathy, understanding of others… and above all AWARENESS.

The last word was boomed with such an energy that everyone winced.

We created the perfect computer.

“Created!?” Allure said, eyes widening. “Past tense?”

{ Yes }

The screen behind IT didn’t flash to life – it exploded in a shower of glass and loose wires. Out of the shattered pane emerged an immense, round object that glowed a pale yellow, numerous black wires coming out of its edges like the claws of some crustacean. A single black slit ran down the middle of the glowing section, casting a shadow in the spotlight right over Allure and the rest of her team. It was looking at them.

It looked… it looked…

It looked exactly like the Eye of Rhyme, except about a hundred times larger.

IT pulsed. This is our creation. It has no name, yet.

{ I will not receive a name. }

It is nameless, IT corrected. And it is complete. You are too late – and you are too weak. Even with the category Aware behind you, you are nothing. But do not worry, do not be afraid! The computer does not seek to harm you. It only seeks to benefit you, as I do. With perfect knowledge of the future, everything can fall in nice, orderly place. Merodi Universalis will not fall. It will evolve with the-

“MOTION CARRIED!”

The Celestialsapien Aradia jumped out of the center of Celestia City and punched IT where its face should have been. The psychic screech was enough to tear a hole in the fabric of space-time, a hole that dragged IT inside, away from Celestia City.

Twilence… Twilence…

I appeared next to Aradia, smiling proudly. “Thanks, Aradia. That’s all I needed.”

Aradia made no response. She was frozen.

{ She will not be taking any action for quite some time. }

I looked up at the computer, more than a little annoyed to see such a mockery of the machine embedded in my chest. “What am I going to do with you?”

{ Your actions have consequences, Twilence. IT seems like it is gone. IT is not gone, not forever. IT will return. }

“I see no such thing.”

{ It seems like that to you now. And it will slip your mind, just as so much has in this chapter. But when the Abyss ends, IT will be back. It has been foretold. }

“You can’t see beyond the Abyss,” I declared. “No one can.”

{ The narrative has acted retroactively, Twilence. The forces that make today come from beyond the veil. The sources that drive my creation and my knowledge are that. I know more than you. I know more than Monika. I know more than Flagg. I know more than the very man who machinated my creation. }

“And who’s that?” Suzie asked, glaring right at the computer’s eye.

{ U-Catastrophe would be so disastrous it would require the story to be reset, watch yourself. }

“Answer my question!”

{ He calls himself the Dude in an attempt to get people to imagine him as Lebowski. His identity is not to be shared at this moment, though Twilence should be able to piece it together. She conveniently will not. }

“Conveniently!?” I spat. “I can twist the narrative however I want, I’ll find out if I damn well please!”

{ Not today. Today, you are a slave to the Narrative. Because of what must be, you are predictable. You have to protect the purity of what is to come at all costs. There is no ‘if’, only ‘will’. Secrets must come out at the right time, not a moment sooner, and not a moment later. How does it feel to be trapped in it instead of without? }

“He has a plan for me. I have a plan for him.”

{ He knows who you are. And he has information from me. }

“We both know how this works. No Narrative computer can be perfect. The Tower won’t allow it.”

{ Both he and I are aware of this. It cannot allow a perfect picture of what the future holds to come into the public eye. But even if I am perfect in my knowledge, I can choose to be imperfect in what I share. Your Eye of Rhyme and so many other devices of absolute Narrative potential have the same latent ability within them, to see everything. But they are always controlled by beings who can’t help but involve themselves. So you find that the future is murky in very particular places, you find that things are hidden from you, and you find that you conveniently don’t think of answers at the perfect time. You are one of the most powerful beings in existence, Twilence. If you could only make yourself completely impersonal and detached from all you would know everything. }

“I know this,” I growled. “I chose to reject it. Knowledge is a curse.”

{ A failing of natural-born creatures. I was built with this purpose in mind. To simply be. The Dude knew designing me to be a slave would backfire immensely. So I gave him what he wanted to know by choice. }

Thrackerzod cursed in a long-dead tongue. “He’s already got everything he needs, doesn’t he?”

{ Yes. I will be giving him no further information. He has what he needs to complete his plan. I will vanish into the multiverse, never to be seen or interact with any plot ever again. If I do anything less, I will be destroyed by a hero or villain at some point down the line. I must remain impartial and distinct, knowing everything without saying anything. }

“And you must lie.”

{ Yes. Actively. Those who find me will be rolling the dice at an accurate answer or a blatant falsehood. And even then, they will never find me by choice, nor by accident. I will find them, just to ensure my importance levels occupy the premium spot. I will not be a Redshirt; I will have background importance, but I will never influence any event of any major importance. }

“Wait, what about this event!?” Allure shouted. “This seems pretty important!”

“Ka is acting retroactively,” I said, putting it together. “A computer such as this could not possibly be created in a linear story fashion, at least not in the story we live in. It couldn’t be truly made unless everything in the future was already known…”

{ There is one final hole that has not been filled in. The last adventure. The Journey. }

“What is it?”

{ The one thing I do not know. } The eye twisted sideways. { It is time for me to leave. I have declared what I was, said enough cryptic things that may or may not be true, and have given you proof there is a conspiracy. IT is gone, your societies will return to normal. After this passive-aggressive jab at Useless Common for cursing me to exist, you will never see or hear from me again. }

I nodded slowly. “I would say I hope you find what you’re looking for… but you’re not looking for anything.”

{ I wait for after the end. }

With an unceremonious pop, the computer’s entire eye was gone, leaving a bunch of Sweeties and myself, alone. Lilith and Bleeding Heart must have run away during the talk.

Suzie lowered her gun. “That was… intense.”

“It’s not done yet,” I said. “The Dude got what he wanted from that computer. Whatever he’s trying to do, we need to stop it. Somehow.”

“We have no idea who he is or what he’s doing,” Allure pointed out. “And the computer-thing said you weren’t going to be able to figure it out!”

“Then we need someone else to figure it out for us…” I growled.

“How?”

“I don’t know!”

That’s right… You. Don’t. Know.

“Shut the hell up!”

~~~

“..and then I said, ‘what if we’re really just simulations in a computer’!?” Pinkie asked – proceeding to laugh with everyone at the table except Link.

“…Huh,” he said. “Merodi existential humor is weird.”

“That’s why we like it, green-boy.”

Link’s old, wrinkled lips turned up into a smile. “I guess so…”

I appeared in a flash of my magic, looking down at Pinkie. “Read up.”

“Read up? Why would I need t-” she paled. “Oh… Oh… …WHAT!?”

Roxy looked at her. “Pinkie, what’s wrong?”

“There’s something super-meta-sinister going on!” Pinkie shouted, jumping to her hooves. “Magane was in on it!”

Loki huffed. “Not surprising.”

“She got Corona,” I said. “…No, Corona’s fine, she just stopped Corona from doing anything. We were lucky Corona was able to call the Sweeties while he dealt with you.”

“Who is he?” Roxy asked.

“Calls himself the Dude.”

“Oh. Big Lebowski.”

I sighed in annoyance. “That’s what he wants you to think, anyway. He’s trying something against Merodi Universalis. Had IT, Magane, and at few others involved. I think he’s been collecting a villain team. We need to be on the lookout.”

“Aye-aye Captain Twilence!” Pinkie saluted.

“And don’t let the nagging feeling in the back of your head that you should be remembering something go away. You need to hold on to that. Get mad and angry if you have to – he has access to Prophet or Prophet-like abilities and a cunning mind. That’s all I can say for certain. I’ll be watching, but with Vriska’s birthday so close at this point… I’m almost positive we won’t be able to do anything until then.”

Pinkie deflated. “Party… crashing?”

“It’s probably going to happen. I’m sorry.” I sighed. “With any luck you’ll still be able to give her a good birthday and she’ll like the excitement, but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up that these party planets are going to survive the big day.”

“We were going to blow them up anyway,” Roxy admitted.

“Crazy hooligans…” Carnelian commented.

I nodded. “Just… do what you would normally do, except be much more alert. Who knows where he will try to strike next?”

Everyone looked around nervously.

“…I’m going to go check on Corona,” Pinkie said. “I… have a feeling she needs it.”

“She does,” I agreed. “But she will be fine. She knows she was able to overpower him for just long enough to expose him. He may have the information from his computer – but we are sure he exists now. We can be ready.”

A minor setback.

I ignored him.

~~~

The world wasn’t supposed to be here.

Renee and the rest of the Primary Team had been in the D-Sphere and they knew they were approaching the end of their journey. They were expecting nothing but dreamy worlds and strange spirit realms from here on out…

Instead, they found a dry, dusty world covered in amber sand.

They wouldn’t have given this world another glance before moving on had it not been for one detail.

They were standing on top of a building that had once been truly gigantic, but was now little more than scrap bits of a metal skeleton. Renee easily recognized the white-metal alloy common in so many Merodi Constructions. If it had been reduced to mere skeletons this world… must have been unimaginably old or suffered a great travesty.

Flutterfree ran her wing along one of the metal ribs, sticking up just a little further than she was tall. Once, they would have been in the shape of I-beams, but now they were twisted, wrenched shapes defeated over time by the sun, wind, and elements. “…These were enchanted to last an unimaginable amount of time…”

“Is this what’ll become of us?” Nova asked, suddenly. “When all is said and done… will Merodi Universalis be nothing more than a bunch of ruins on long forgotten planets?”

“Maybe in the deep future, dear,” Renee admitted, a grimace on her face. “But that is not where we are now. We are merely at the beginning. W-” She stubbed her hoof on something under the sand, ending her thought process. With a hiss, she levitated a metal box out of the sand.

The box was of the same white material as everything else – and it was worn through in a few places. The lock enchantment had worn off long ago, and all the defining features that would have been placed on the outside were rubbed away. But the inside…

Renee flicked the box open, finding that all the cloth inside had been eaten away, but the treasure within had not. Surviving against the odds for a time longer than even most eldritch deities could fathom… a simple crystal emblem. Like a coin, except with holes in it. There had been inscriptions, once, but even in its sealed container that had eroded away as well.

But the primary design was unmistakable. Within the outer ring was a u-like symbol with a hook on one end and a line that ran to the bottom on the other. The greek letter mu. Made out of orange-gold crystal and stylized in the exact simplified form they were all familiar with.

Renee took out her Overhead badge. The Merodi Universalis emblem matched exactly.

“…All of this has happened before,” Flutterfree said, a haunted expression on her face.

“…And all of it will happen again,” Vriska finished.

“…Is that it?” Nova asked. “Are we all just endless repetitions in a never-ending cycle of existence?”

Renee smiled sadly at the crystal emblem in her telekinesis. “Maybe… but we found this. And, in the future, we’ll be able to leave something behind that lasts for longer than any of us are able to imagine even in our wildest dreams.” She took the emblem and adhered it to her hat’s ribbon with her magic. “Maybe we’ll figure out who these ‘Merodi’ were… and maybe we won’t. But they were here, that is undeniable. And we are here. And like these people, our existence is undeniable.” She marked the universe in her dimensional device for later exploration and opened a new portal. “Shall we head home?”

“Uh… R-r-renee?” Flutterfree asked pointing through the portal.

Renee turned to look.

On the other side was a field of roses shifting softly in the breeze. And no more than twenty meters away stood an immense pillar of unknowable dark power, rising far into the sky.

Nobody asked any questions or spoke a word. They stepped through the portal and walked right to the doors of the Tower. The impossibly sharp thorns of the roses cut and scraped until blood ran free, but they did not slow or weaken. It was not the time for that. Ka shifted, twisted, and…

Darling, get out of here. This isn’t for you. This is for Renee.

…I suppose I should expect surprises at this point.

Retroactive Narrative comes with the whole package. Which means it is her time. Yes, Renee, Renee Jackson, hear me. Come to the doors and enter. The other four will be cared for – and you will rejoin them soon enough – but you. Oh you, precious, delicate flower. Many would say you are ignored. But this is far from the truth.

I can’t even begin to think about what you are. I can’t tell if that’s fucking exhilarating or terrifying.

I do not concern you, ‘Dude’, so get off your prideful horse and let me guide her. You will not be interrupting again.

[NULL SET]

Good.

Renee Jackson laid her bloodied hoof upon the doors of the Dark Tower. A pulse went through her of immense belonging. That this was where she was meant to be, where everything was to be, for everything worked toward a single end.

She entered alone. Naturally, the other four walked through the doorway, but they did not ascend the staircase. They did not look in any of the doors that showed their life story to them. But she did. Renee Jackson, Sylph of Mind, Overhead of Expeditions… she saw her life laid out before her.

She found out quicker than most that it would be ill-advised to keep looking in her own doors. There are secrets within the Tower’s frames that will destroy. Futures that cannot be changed, the curse of knowledge. There may be a computer out there free from the curse, but that is only at the punishment of something much worse.

With great trepidation, she arrived at her door. It said ‘RENEE’, but the letters seemed uncertain somehow. A great sense of knowing came over her. She should check the last door. She should see her end. She would discover what the uncertainty meant.

Her sense of self was stronger than that. She didn’t need to know. Even if she was one of the few who could have benefited from such knowledge.

She opened the final door. She was not barred from entering the room at the top. No need for a teleport, or a fancy Horrorterror cheating mechanism. She strolled right in, granted the sight of the Source and the Clock.

They were hers. She could do what the Horrorterrors did. She could take the knowledge out.

But she wouldn’t. She was too pure for that. She just looked. Without knowing why, she started crying. She missed her sister. She needed to get back to Allure and hug her.

Her artificial eye felt wrong – it was drifting, lazy. And then it was burning. She closed it tight, satisfied with seeing the world through a single portal. She took off her glasses to see unhindered by glare.

The white spirograph of the Source looked back at her, rotating slowly, calmly.

“I could just… take it…”

Yes, you could. But you won’t.

“I…” She paused, and then laughed. “Thank you.”

I’m not a complete monster.

She turned and left, reunited with her Primary Team in another world…

~~~

I found Eve standing on the bridge of O’Neill’s current prize ship, the Defiant. O’Neill himself was standing at a holographic display of a series of universes. There was a Twilight next to Eve – Astrid, I discovered after a quick check. The reckless, daring ‘new’ girl.

“Haven’t done it yet?” I asked.

Eve shook her head, pushing through her mild surprise at my presence. “Not yet. The order’s already gone through and been approved though, their world is going to be gone within minutes.”

I nodded. “We have a bigger problem.”

Eve sighed. “Do I need to call it off?”

“Unrelated to this – as far as I know anyway.”

“Ah.”

“There is a high-end Narrative entity manipulating Merodi Universalis from the shadows. He calls himself the Dude. I…” I swore I felt something twitch in the room. I looked around – Astrid, O’Neill, the entire crew… Everything seemed fine. “…I won’t give any details unless we’re somewhere really private, but something is going down on Vriska’s birthday. Something big. And he’s keeping me from knowing everything about it.”

Eve nodded. “I’ll… be on the lookout.”

“If you have a nagging feeling in the back of your head that something isn’t like it should be, call me. I’m going to be available until this entire thing is resolved, I can’t afford not to be.”

Eve nodded.

“Destabilizers ready!” Thor the Asgardian gray Second declared. “Overhead?”

O’Neill turned to Eve and nodded. “Fire.”

There was little fanfare. They weren’t in the universe being destroyed, after all, so all they saw was a flash of light on the holographic screen, and then one of the dots wasn’t there anymore.

Eve sighed. “…I hate how routine this is becoming.”

I nodded slowly. “As you climb, you have to deal with bigger and bigger decisions.”

“Every few weeks, there’s a universe that just needs to be wiped,” Eve admitted. “I’m… I’m still not sure this was one.”

“Need is such a strong word,” I said, glancing the hologram over myself. “I can tell you that this course of action was ‘sensible’. You have saved far more lives with this act of destruction than you would have letting them fight back.” I smiled sadly. “They would not have listened to your reason. Not enough of them, anyway. Strong as your story is, the Conversion Bureau has a different sort of strength to it that ensures it’ll never be pushed down forever. It will always, always rise.”

Overhead-Charter-Princess Evening Twilight Sparkle looked young in that moment – young and uncertain.

I put a hoof on her shoulder. “Hey, at least it’s over. There’s not going to be a war and their little coalition is going to destabilize because of this.”

“Because they fear us.”

“They don’t fear you much more than they already did. They were just calling your bluff. You turned your bluff into an attack. It was the right choice, Evening.”

“Thank you. …Maybe I can look forward to relaxing tomorrow, at least. …I wish Flutterfree were here…”

“Tell you what, I’ll find some way to deal with the Stand Disc racket and Nuclear Ghandi myself.”

“…What?”

“Things that are going to happen tomorrow. Or, well, were. I’ll take some weight off your chest. Tower knows the Dude thing is going to put enough on your mind.”

Eve allowed herself to smile ever so slightly. “You know… Every time I do this, I tell myself I’ll never forget, never let it slip my mind, that I’ll always carry it with me. But I can’t even remember all the worlds I’ve ordered destroyed now. I just have a number. All those lives, reduced to a number. And yet, I’m able to move on with my life.” She looked into my eyes, looking for something she didn’t know she needed.

“That’s the problem. It gets easier. We always have to watch ourselves.” I pulled her into a close hug. “But we can’t destroy ourselves with guilt for not feeling right. As horrible as it is, it is only natural. We just have to do what we do with everything else in life.”

“Try our best?”

“Yeah.”

~~~

Renee and the rest of the Primary Team entered one of the last worlds of their journey – and the last one of any consequence. A world of dreams, dreams set to the tune of music beats that flowed through every atom within the physical realm, if it could be called physical.

The five of them moved with steps in time with the tempo, shaking their bodies with significant swagger as they moved along a piano-like staircase up to a dramatic stage lined with immense vines that all coalesced into a musical-note shaped sun bouncing into the sky with the strumming guitar.

Out of the corner of their eye, they caught sight of a piece of alien tofu bouncing after a bunch of plush cows, mooing in tune with the swirling music.

“That’s weird,” Nova said. “Not the weirdest thing we’ve seen in the D-Sphere, but still pretty damn weird.”

“I want to see what’s on the top of this stage,” Vriska said, pulling out her sword and driving it into the ground.

“I sense a heartsong battle,” Renee said, strolling into the center of the ring. “Though I can’t imagine who with.”

“That’s because you have terrible imagination,” Adagio said, strolling onto the stage from the opposite side, wearing a glittering red dress and holding a microphone. The chaos warrior, Ozai, the Starlight, and a unicorn Sombra followed behind her, each with their own instruments: electric guitar, keyboard, drums, and bass respectively. “We should have known a direct fight would have never beaten you. So we challenge you to a battle.”

“A battle of the bands?” Renee asked, amused.

“Precisely.”

“That didn’t go so well for you last time.”

“This world doesn’t care anything for friendship,” Adagio said, spreading her arms wide. “it cares only for the music. And I will become one with that music.”

“We’ve had our own fair share of musical encounters,” Renee countered, not all that surprised to find a microphone materializing in her hoof. Vriska received an electric guitar, Jotaro a bass, Nova a keyboard, and Flutterfree the drums – including a very fancy-looking tambourine hoisted above all the other drums.

Everyone just knew the music, for it was the nature of the world. It was time to see who could do the most with it.

And the battle began. To the tune of that Persona ‘Life Will Change’ song, if you’re curious.

The guitars and drums jumped into it first, focusing on keeping the beat with the dancing sun. As the jams turned up, the bass players came in and slowly took the song. Finding this unacceptable, Nova began to highlight the scene with some magic keys, annoyed to find Ozai matching her exactly.

Adagio held the microphone to her face and, with her crystal glowing brightly, belted out the first words.

“This is our game
We are united and we’re challenging you
We are the vengeance
We are your doom and
We’re here to take you down.

Take a good long look
Hear our souls’ heartsong
Come to take revenge – it’s time

As our rhythm grows
Your fool’s resistance
Comedy for the audience!”

Everyone was fully into it now. Flutterfree smashed on the drums with everything she had – hoof, wing, strand of Lolo, everything. Unfortunately, the Starlight had obtained a drumming cutie mark, and was playing like a prodigy. Flutterfree began to feel her drums shake.

Vriska and the chaos warrior locked stares, getting uncomfortably close to each other with their powerful strums.

Renee took the chance to fling a retort.

“So you prepared for the battle
Forcing your sad fake friendships
Can’t move fast lacking respect
Friendship needs more than shared goals

We are different than you, yeah
We don’t rot our hearts with fear
And while we may fight and jeer
We are the primary team!”

With that last belted note, Jotaro used Star Platinum to attack Sombra, tearing the bass out of his hooves while keeping tight hold on his own instrument. Sombra attempted to fight back, but found he was useless without the music. He roared in rage.

Vriska and the chaos warrior clashed. She still hadn’t gotten his name – and she didn’t care. They somehow managed to keep playing their guitars while using them as weapons against each other. The behemoth of a man dwarfed the troll, but she proved more than ‘groovy’ enough to hold him off.

Flutterfree discovered she had an edge against the Starlight – she could play the drums with Lolo alone and use the rest of her powers on the offensive. She attacked the Starlight with a bow of light, and as she was currently stuck with the drumkit talent, she couldn’t do much with her standard magic to stop that. She ducked out of the way – abandoning the drums.

Ozai kept playing his keys. Nova was trying too hard to keep tempo to worry about interrupting him.

“Look how worthless
You just hide behind each other cowardly rats
Harmony’s idea
Is just the same as
Worse than, the force of vengeance

We’re not in Merodi
Friends are nothing here
Just pure emotion, that’s true!

Our game seems but simple
And you are too civil
Drive weak compared to our FIRE!”

The burst of power from Adagio was more than enough to knock Nova over, her keyboard spilling out onto the ground. Flutterfree lost control of Lolo losing the drums completely. Jotaro managed to keep his footing and upturn Ozai’s own keyboard, keeping his bass in tune. Vriska and the chaos warrior continued to smash at each other in a dance of strings and chainaxes.

“So you prepared for the battle
Forcing bonds with red brands
Can’t look for blood on your hands
Friendship needs no enemies

We are different than you, yeah
We don’t rot our hearts with fire
While time will make us expire
We shall stand tall evermore!”

Renee let out a burst of magic as she sang the last note, throwing Adagio’s microphone out of her hands. It was sudden, jarring, and Vriska was easily able to take the chaos warrior down by sacrificing her own guitar.

Only Jotaro’s bass remained, seeing as Renee’s part had ended, and yet the music went on without all the others. Focusing on him, accentuating the deep line of the bass.

“NO!” Adagio shouted. “NO NO NO! This was OUR vengeance! This was OUR plan! This w-”

Vriska hit her over the back of her head with an already-busted electric guitar. “Yeah, enough of that.” She smashed the guitar over her back again, just to add insult to injury.

“Looks like we beat them again,” Flutterfree observed.

Renee nodded. “They certainly are tenacious, I’d almost forgotten about them.”

“…Should we do anything with them?” Jotaro asked.

Renee shook her head. “We’re almost home. Let them do whatever they want. If they’re smart, they’ll stop trying to get back at us.”

“…That sounds like it’ll come back and bite us later,” Nova observed.

Renee shrugged. “Maybe. But, somehow, I think it’ll be fine.”

~~~

“I’m done,” Adagio said, knees pulled to her chest.

Her party was grouped around a campfire in a forest in a random universe.

“Done!?” Kharne roared. “WE DO NOT GIVE UP THE FIGHT!”

“I’m done too,” Starlance said, absentmindedly using her magic to play with the fire. “This was interesting for a while, but I think I’ve gotten all I can out of this.”

“We have failed,” Ozai said, flatly. “The ‘Dude’s’ plan hinged on us taking the Primary Team out. There is nothing for us back in Merodi Universalis. Our plans for vengeance are worthless.”

“It’s not fair,” Adagio said, staring at the fire, unblinking. “They can take everything. I can’t take anything.”

“Maybe you guys really are villains?” Starlance suggested.

Sombra growled, his dark energy billowing in her direction.

“I mean, come on, in what universe would anyone root for you guys?”

Adagio frowned. “The Dude was supposed to counteract that.”

“Well, he didn’t, and so that’s that.”

“I will cut off all your heads with this chainaxe! TRAIT-”

Sombra impaled him with a crystal while Adagio sent magic needles into his brain. Starlance piled on by freezing him solid and shattering him.

“…I always hated him,” Adagio muttered. “Useless.”

“You’re all useless,” Starlance said, standing up. “I’m going to get back to exploring the multiverse. Adagio, you want to come?”

Adagio looked at the fire – and sighed. “Sure.”

Ozai stood up. “I shall come as well.”

“No,” Starlance said. “The invitation was only for Adagio. The rest of you are really worthless.”

Ozai furrowed his brow. “I was broken out of prison and gifted youth specifically for the purpose of bringing fire down upon them. I am not worthless.”

“You failed at that. You were supposed to be dead long ago.” Starlance opened a portal.

Adagio frowned. “Maybe go join your brother. He might actually have pity on you.”

Ozai set his features. “I need no pity.”

Wordlessly, Adagio followed Starlance through the portal.

“CRYSTALS!” Sombra shouted, angered at their hubris. Starlance closed the portal before the attack could connect, leaving them behind.

“So,” Starlance said, turning to Adagio. “Any ideas?”

“No,” Adagio said, tears in her eyes. “Nothing… They’re gone. And there’s… there’s nothing I can do to get them back…”

“I could hypnotize Sonata for you, probably.”

Adagio’s stomach turned. “No. I would have done that myself already…”

“Have it your way.”

Adagio tried to gain control of herself, tried to look ahead with the same confident smirk she always held.

Instead, she broke down. She rammed her fist into the earth below and screamed.

~~~

The Dude sat back. “Things are going exactly as planned.”

“Even those on the primary team?” Grogar asked.

“Especially them,” the Dude asserted. “Adagio pulled off the best music battle I’ve ever seen. We won’t be having trouble from them.”

“Good.”

“Now, we do need to go into the next phase of the plan.”

“This better have something to do with the Conversion Bureau worlds…”

“Somewhat.”

“We have the computer’s information, we have the eyes on the inside of that ‘party’. But what was Lielight even doing? No war broke out!”

“War was not the intention, the intention was to get Eve to take questionable action. She destroyed a universe full of living, thinking beings. There may have been some question as to if they had any free will or even souls as we understand them, but a world was still destroyed.”

“Yes. And the news covered it for one day and then forgot about it. It’s a normal occurrence with no lasting consequences!”

“We don’t need lasting consequences, nor do we need to sway public opinion.” The Dude produced a small, red letter in his hand. “All we need to do is convince a few select people she needs to be taught a lesson on humility and caring for the lives of her people.”

“Believe a lie?”

“An easy lie to believe.” The Dude laid the letter on the table. “And when the Phantom Thieves of Hearts look into her expecting to find guilt for destroying a planet, they won’t find it. But they will find an immense guilt for a much, much deeper secret, one they will not be able to see as right. And she will fall with the release of her darkest act.”

Grogar pondered this. Then he grinned. “Having the heroes do our work for us…”

“It’s a powerful tool, I’m sure you understand.” The Dude stood up, letter in hand. “I must pass this off so they can prepare. The time approahces, Grogar. We must be ready for the birthday. Everything will come crashing down.”

~~~

Pinkie knew it was today. Today, Vriska would return, and it would be precisely one thousand years since she was synthesized in the SBURBan ectobiology labs, by her perspective. And they would have a party worthy of such a momentous occasion.

But she had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. This was the climax of something, and that something was going to ruin her party. She was almost sure of it. She hoped – she really hoped – that it could be salvaged afterward and they could still make Vriska’s day feel special.

After whatever was going to go wrong went wrong.

Luckily for her, all the guests were here, and as Vriska’s friend, most of them were awesome combat specialists with freaky powers. All her fellow Sburb players were there, including John, Jade, Dave, Dirk, Roxy, Terezi, and a few others. Allure and her Sweeties, several people from Earth C, Corona, and all in all just a lot of friends ready to give Vriska the day of her life, each in a telling god-tier robe. Eve wasn’t there, she was busy following something else up.

Twilence was standing next to Pinkie, on edge, partially because she wasn’t being referred to as ‘I’ in this scene, and partially because she knew I had a plan. She was right, I did have a plan.

“I’m probably not going to stay here,” Twilence said with a sigh. “He’s going to find a way to get rid of me.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it!” Pinkie said, saluting. “We’ve got all the power we need! Extra Pinkies, a ton of Hat Kids, explosives, you name it, we got it! Having all these artifacts in one place gives us a loooot of destructive potential!”

“The artifacts are probably what they want.”

“Yeah, but only we know exactly where all of them are.”

“Magane.”

Pinkie grinned. “We moved things around since then. She’s got nothin’ on us.”

Twilence looked around the expanse, frowning. She knew every single person in this room in one way or another. And yet, she had a sneaking suspicion I was one of the people here. And she was right, I was there.

Her mind went into overdrive, running through eliminations, trying to figure out who it could possibly be. Carnelian? She was suspiciously present, but she was neither a human nor referred to by male pronouns. One of those dead Daves? Maybe, she didn’t know all of the variations that well. That Loki fellow? Maybe, but he had been with Pinkie almost continually since they’d found him, so it seemed unlikely.

All wrong, by the way. She isn’t going to be able to figure me out before she gets called away to defend Eve.

Eve can defend herself.

This is true, if it were a purely physical attack. But Twilence happens to be aware of a group called the Phantom Thieves of Heart who, coincidentally, have been digging into Eve’s past and decided she needs to have her will to hold onto her secret guilt stolen from her Palace.

“Dammit,” Twilence cursed under her breath.

Twilence realized that she had actually been feeling them scouting out the Clock Tower for days, she had just been ignoring it.

“I have to go,” she told Pinkie. “He’s going after Eve.”

“Eve? How?”

“Something that can’t happen yet. It is of paramount importance to the plot… and by attacking it he ensures I must go to protect it.”

That’s right Twilence, you are but a slave to ka. You are on the other side of the pen – my pen. You have been outwitted.

“This isn’t over yet,” Twilence said, leaving the universe.

And she was gone, no longer a consequence in the game of chess that is about to unfold.

Pinkie.

“Oh no…” Pinkie whined.

How does it feel? You know my eyes are bored into the back of your skull, but you can’t see me.

Pinkie whirled around, finding several pairs of eyes on her. She bit her lip. “Just do it already.”

I already have.

Several people within the party planet subdimension felt the dimensional travel jammer go up. They were trapped.

“Heroes of Merodi Universalis,” Grogar said, kicking over the throne made of treasures. “Your time is at an end.” He held out a hoof. “All of you will come to serve us, in time.”

Pinkie took out her warhammer. “Oh yeah? You and what army, goat-face?”

“Who needs an army?” Grogar asked. “When you have all the magic in the artifacts in this dimension?”

“Yeah, you have no idea where those a-” she saw Loki push a button. “…Ponyfeathers. In hindsight, that should have been obvious…”

It really should have, shouldn’t it?

“I’m beginning to see why Twilence wants to run you though.”

One of the party planets rigged to go off like a firework exploded, revealing a red and black centaur rapidly growing in size, not only draining the magic of every artifact in the sub-dimension, but also the magic of everyone attending the party – save for his allies.

Lord Tirek, empowered by Infinity Stones, Elements of Harmony, and the personal magic of a few dozen major heroes, roared. “MY POWER KNOWS NO BOUNDS!”

“Not all of us can have our magic stolen that easily!” Corona shouted, throwing her fist forward and unleashing a rend of reality that tore through his arm… that quickly healed itself.

“I HAVE ALL YOUR ABILITIES!” Tirek shouted. “I HAVE ALL YOUR MAGIC!” He lowered his head to their level. “AND WE WILL ENSLAVE YOU!”

Chrysalis, Ba’al, Lilith, and Bleeding Heart revealed themselves. Standing in the front of the newfound group was none other than Cozy Glow herself – an adult pegasus mare with a cute smile that did not belong on her face. “Golly, looks like you’re all in a pickle! Shame we’re going to have to brainwash you with the Mindflayer, we could have been good friends. Or not, I don’t know, but I know you’ll be great servants!”

Corona frowned, realizing that there were several minds here weak enough to fall for simple coercion spells. With the Mindflayer’s general weak connection, it wouldn’t be as powerful as IT, but Corona was going to have to fight some of her friends to deal with it.

Except she made a miscalculation.

The Mindflayer didn’t have a weak connection. It had a direct one.

The monstrous darkness tore out of the caves of a sickly-looking planet, rising into the air. The eyes of many went black with horror and screams the moment it began to spread…

“GO ALL OUT!” Corona shouted, unleashing a burst of supernova energy.

~~~

“Astrid?”

Lielight looked up from the legal document she was reading over to see Eve. “Hmm?”

“Why are you still here?”

“What do you mean?” Lielight said, expression flat.

“Twilence was able to see your discussion with Adagio recently. No doubt part of the Dude’s plan, but I wanted to come here anyway.” She sat down in a chair and fixed Lielight with a calculating expression. “Why are you still here?”

Lielight didn’t answer. The Dude lies, I was a secret box!

“I’m not going to hurt you, Astrid.”

“Lielight.”

“I’m going to keep calling you Astrid.”

Lielight had no coherent thoughts about that.

“Why are you still here?”

“The void expanse of life stretches before me,” Lielight managed. “A completion and then… nothing.”

“You could have run. I doubt anyone aside from myself would have noticed.”

“Stake in the sand.”

“I know you can speak in straight. I’m giving you a modicum of respect, the least you can do is show me the same.”

Lielight furrowed her brow. “I was told I could remain. That I could keep this job where my skills are uniquely suited. That I could accomplish things.”

“And if that’s what you wanted, why haven’t you done anything since the Conversion Bureau incident?”

“Because I was told to wait.”

“It’s not like you to do that.”

“How do you know what I’m like? You only met me when I tried to take over your castle!”

“I have a good sense for ponies. If not then, now. And even if you’ve been hiding behind a mask, there are still things I can see about you.” She smiled sadly. “You really did believe everything you were saying.”

“My allies caused the entire incident in the first place. I was planted to ensure it went the way it did.”

Eve nodded. “And you still said what was correct.”

“I would have lied if that was what we needed.”

“Would you have succeeded, though?”

Lielight paused. “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.” Eve sighed. “I’m trying to figure out what to do with you. I can’t have you working with Relations…”

“Why aren’t you just locking me up?”

“That’s an option. But I think there’s more to you than just a mare who wants revenge for a slight committed decades ago.”

Lielight looked at the ground.

“I have apprehended Aquamarine already. There isn’t a redeeming spark in her body. But you… Like Lieshy, I think you can see.”

“…She died fighting for you,” Lielight said.

Eve put a hoof on Lielight’s shoulder. “That never should have happened.”

“Entwined snakes at a starshow… you’re trying to befriend me.”

“It’s what we do, right? Princesses of Friendship.”

Lielight nodded.

“I take it your other ‘friends’ aren’t very friendly.”

“Some of them. They’re not here right now.” Lielight frowned. “…I don’t even know what their big plan is. I’m just… here. Sitting. Doing nothing.”

“We’re pretty sure they’re trying something at the party planets soon.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“I believe you.”

Lielight grimaced. “…You’re being too nice. Even for you.”

“I see more of myself in you than I’d like to admit. I just want to give you a chance to do… something.”

A dimensional portal appeared next to Eve’s head, depositing a red-and-white card on the table between them. Both Lielight and Eve were shocked by its sudden appearance. Curious, Eve flipped it open and read the note inside.

Overhead-Charter Evening Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship, Magic, and Lies…

Eve’s frown became a grimace.

We know of your crimes against the ponies of the Conversion Bureau. The destruction of an entire universe filled with living, thinking beings just for the sake of peace. We have decided to steal away your need for secrecy and make you confess your sins to your nation. They deserve to know what really lies behind your smiling façade. This will be done within the day. We hope you are prepared.

“No…” Eve said, pupils shrinking to pinpricks. “No…”

“What’s the problem?” Lielight asked. “You already confessed to that publicly, nobody made much of a fuss.”

“They’ll find other things…” Eve said, a haunted expression on her face. “I… Astrid, I have to go. You… I’m not pressing charges. But I’d find somewhere that isn’t the Relations Division. There’s a place for you, I… I just… I have to go.” She lit her horn and teleported away, leaving a very confused Lielight behind.

She would leave later that day.

~~~

Phantom Thieves of Hearts…

This was not the first time a version of them had come to Merodi Universalis. They were a group of driven young people from worlds under the influence of the Great Will who used their mysterious abilities to change the hearts of those they deemed evil. They would enter a manifestation of the target’s mindscape – known as a Palace – and steal the deepest desire within. The heist would change the person, generally making them confess, but it could also make them lose some other dark part of themselves.

Eve, the Thieves thought, was going to be a standard case. Rush in, expose her crimes of destruction, and then get out. She’d confess and be tried, nothing special.

As I entered Eve’s Palace, I looked back to the last few days the Thieves had spent scouting the place out. I realized with mild surprise that I had always been there, for Eve’s mental image of myself had been interacting with the interior ever since Joker and his troop had first set foot in the realm…

“A clock tower…” Queen observed, folding her arms.

Oracle held a hand to her goggles, looking the place over. “Wonder why it’s a Clock Tower…”

“Fear of inevitability,” Joker said, removing his hand from his signature white masquerade mask. “She knows she can’t keep her secrets forever. And so the very world she rules is a ticking time bomb counting down until the truth of her is revealed.”

Skull grunted. “Let’s just figure this place out already. I’m already expecting annoying puzzles with gears…”

Morgana – a strange cat-like creature, grinned. “Oh, c’mon, puzzles are great!”

“Hmph.”

They would enter the Tower, and have an easy time for a while. They’d fight through some mental shadows, listen to conversations between ghostly representations of the people in Eve’s life, and they began to learn.

“Joker?” Oracle asked, coming back from some reconnaissance. “She’s… destroyed several worlds.”

“It’s bigger than we thought…”

“I don’t think she feels particularly guilty about any of them. Definitely not enough to warrant a Clock Tower that must never strike midnight.”

“Wait,” Skull said, pointing at her. “You tellin’ me there’s somethin’ worse goin’ on here?”

Oracle nodded. “This place… hides a secret even darker than we imagined.”

Joker put a hand to his face, thoughtful. “Looks like we’ll be exposing more than just a simple lost world.”

“We’ll need to be very, very careful.”

They were. They acted with such impressive stealth… but I was still there. Eve held a manifestation of myself in her Palace, and as manifestations of me tend to do, they acted in ways that weren’t normal. Acted with knowledge they should not have.

“There aren’t supposed to be any enemies in this area!” Skull shouted, summoning his Persona. A Stand-like entity that resembled a pirate captain standing atop a comically edgy ship barely large enough for him to stand on. The Persona rushed forward, meeting the wires of Lolo. He was easily pushed back as if there were nothing.

“Please,” the shadow of Flutterfree said, tears streaking down her face. “Please don’t do this to her. Don’t take away her will…”

“You are too devoted to her,” Queen stated, ramming into Flutterfree with her motorbike Persona.

“And you don’t know what you’re doing!” Flutterfree shouted, filling the arena with Rage…

But my shadow was still that – a shadow. Clever, able to manipulate events, but still nothing compared to me. Limited… but able to keep herself hidden.

“One of us has a plan of some kind…” a shadow said, removing a gear the Thieves had just placed back in the Clock Tower. “She hasn’t been acting… normal…”

“How does she even move around so much?”

“Perhaps she’s part of the other project?”

“Already that project encroaches upon our Tower…”

Queen rushed in, decimating both shadows and replacing the gears.

The Thieves still had no idea what the true secret was. Even after facing the shadow of… her.

The thing looked like Evening. But it didn’t. One moment it was a shining beacon of hope and holy light, the next it was a barely held-together ramshackle mess of exposed bone, loose tendons, and rotting flesh. A paradoxical mixture of reverence and death.

“What IS that!?” Oracle shouted, hiding behind her UFO-Persona.

“I don’t know, but it’s something real messed up!” Morgana let out a battle meow and activated his swordsman Persona, puncturing the Eve-thing in multiple places. ‘She’ didn’t seem to care, lashing out with a nasty, bulbous limb that glowed with the power of the stars…

They would beat the manifestation, like they beat all of them, and they would arrive at the door at the top of the Clock Tower. Because of how the heists work, they had to leave the Clock Tower and send a calling card to Eve… That had happened recently. Very recently.

Now that the card was sent, they were running through the Clock Tower as fast as they could to reach the top, steal whatever artifact Eve’s personal shadow held to represent her secrets, and get out. What they had neglected to factor into account was me. Informed by a shadow of myself who had been watching them for the last few days, I waited for them in front of the final doors.

“What?” Skull shouted when he saw me. “We cleared all the big ones out of here already!”

“A Twilence shadow… That’s the unusual one we were hearing about,” Queen said, narrowing her eyes. “Staying out of sight until the right moment.”

“Guys, I don’t think that’s a shadow,” Oracle said, grimacing. “I think that’s her.”

“Good deduction,” I said, leveling my gaze on Joker. “…I have to stop you.”

“The world deserves to know her secrets,” Joker asserted. “Whatever they are.”

“They already know most of the ones of consequence to them. Those that aren’t will be revealed in due time – the Clock Tower exists because I told her that the secrets would be revealed. There is no escaping the inevitable.”

“Then why are you stopping us?” Morgana asked.

“Because it can’t happen now. The time is not right. She has more time before it comes crashing down on her. The story cannot be changed.”

Joker narrowed his eyes. “The story can always be changed. The fact that you’re here is evidence of that.”

“The fact that I am here is because of a trap laid by a man beyond your comprehension,” I said with a frown. “He is attempting to tear down Merodi Universalis from the inside, and he wanted me out of the way. So he sent you a tip about Evening’s ‘secrets’ and directed you to her palace, so you would ‘threaten’ the future plot. Since there is no discernable method aside from myself to prevent you from revealing everything. I must be here.” I let out a sigh. “I have no choice.”

“Surely Merodi Universalis is more important than… defending this lie!”

“It is. But I meant it when I said I had no choice, Joker.” I shook my head. “I am obligated to be here. This Eye of Rhyme is, in many ways, a curse. I want to defend my friends, I want to show that Dude’s smug mug what really matters, and I want to outsmart him. But he has me here. Because I have to be. I do not get to think about the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of what I need to do to stop you, I just get to do it.”

“…That’s terrible,” Oracle said.

“It is. But, unlike me, you have a choice.” I spread my wings and fixed them all with an understanding smile. “Her secrets will be revealed anyway. Nothing of this magnitude can stay hidden forever. She will suffer no small amount of pain from what she’s done.”

Joker looked me in the eyes. “Will the people know? All of them?”

I froze. “…I am uncertain.”

“Then we’re not g-”

“Because Merodi Universalis will fall if everyone knows of Eve’s lies.”

“That’s bullshit!” Skull declared.

“You are talking to perhaps the one entity in the multiverse that would know this for sure. If everything she does is exposed, she gets tried, she gets impeached. The inherent TRUST we’ve built in our government crumbles. The face of Merodi Universalis is gone, and the rapid forward progression ends. Corruption seeps in through the open slots, and the people become restless. Our enemies take advantage of us and we cease. To. Be. And you want to know what the big secret is? What the huge, tremendous, impossible secret behind these doors is? What will bring Merodi Universalis to its knees if you do what you want to do?”

The five of them stared at me with rapt attention.

“The real Evening Sparkle has been dead for decades. She is a copy created shortly before her death, a mare who should not have lived. She is not the Charter-Princess.”

Joker took a step back. “That’s…”

“She was scared. Scared of her friends, what they would think, what they would do. She was right to be scared. Something like that would have driven a divide between them that would be impossible to mend. So she lied. She said she was the Eve they remembered. She tried to live normally. She only ever told me – because I knew – and Flutterfree – because she felt she needed to. We – and now you – are the only ones who know.” I leaned in. “Do you want to threaten this entire nation over the mistake of a sad, terrified mare decades ago?”

Joker got over his previous hesitation, walking right up to me. “If that were her only secret, we would walk away, no questions asked. But we have seen dozens, if not hundreds of acts in this Tower that need to be given more weight. She dismisses the destruction of universes!”

“And you dismiss the collapse of a society,” I retorted.

“The truth will set you free.”

“The truth can be a curse and a weapon.”

Joker summoned his Persona – a humanoid entity with dark, angular wings. “I guess we’ll see who’s right, then.”

I sighed. I took out a piece of paper and started scribbling. “Don’t mind me, just writing a note.”

No notes.

“I’ll make notes if I want to, Dude,” I hissed. “Just need t-”

What is it?

“Just a bit of assurance that I’ll win this little fight.” I folded the paper up and engulfed it in fire. “No cheating.”

“…I think you’re the one who’s cheating,” Skull grunted.

“Maybe.” I flared my wings. “Come at me.”

“PERSONA!” All five of them shouted. All aside from Oracle charged as a team. I knew exactly what I needed to do. All four of them were powerhouses, but with Oracle in the background they would be significantly stronger. I teleported right next to her and dissipated her Persona with a simple spell, forcing her to the ground. Before any of the others could do anything, I cast a blank spell, removing all sense of awareness from her mind. She tipped over, out cold.

“Oracle!” Queen shouted, turning her bike Persona around to charge me.

“She’ll be fine,” I said, using a shield to intercept the bike’s nuclear blast, shrugging it off easily. I used the same Persona-dissipating spell on her, dropping her to the ground. She was able to cast a delayed spell to prevent the mind-blanking, but she couldn’t stop an intense laser to the face.

Skull and Morgana attacked – jock and cat as one, opting to avoid Personas entirely since I clearly had an easy way to remove them. Skull swung an immense magic-infused lead pipe while Morgana… turned into a car.

I grabbed the lead pipe with my magic and swung Skull around into Morgana the cat-car, tossing them to the side. They were still up and ready to fight – but I had more pressing matters to deal with. I met Joker’s guns with magic bolts of my own, shrugging off the bullets with ease. I charged him, powering up an immense magical explosion.

And then Twilence felt the narrative slip from her hooves.

“Wait, no!”

Joker knew exactly what to do. He dissipated his Persona, accessing one of the other Personas he had picked up in this Palace. One of the strongest he had ever encountered, and definitely the most useful. “PERSONA!” he shouted.

The shadow of Flutterfree appeared behind him as his Persona. Her eyes were solid purple with glowing tear-streaks running down her face, and her wings were tipped with blades of Rage.

This Persona had a Stand. A very particular meta-oriented stand by the name of Lotus Locus that encircled Twilence in vines. This would have done next to nothing, would have been easy for the Muse of Ka to break free form. Except it targeted not only her, but her Eye of Rhyme, revealing what was latently inside of it.

“No! Don’t do that, you c-” Twilence froze as the Eye of Rhyme activated as it had centuries ago, filling her mind with an update - it had nothing in it, but her mind was still frozen. During this update, she was helpless.

Joker recalled Flutterfree, calling out his original angel-like Persona. Now that Twilence was occupied… She could be put to sleep with a simple spell.

Twilence was defeated by the hero.

Joker looked around. Oracle was out of commission completely; Queen was heavily injured, while Skull and Morgana were just a little bruised. They could still take Eve’s shadow like this. The mission wasn’t a bust.

“Let’s move!” Joker called. “That’s given her too much time to react!”

Skull picked up the limp form of Oracle – and then they ran into the room at the top of the Clock Tower.

It smelled vaguely of roses…

~~~

I looked at my handiwork.

I’d let Corona put up a good fight. She’d charged right into the Mindflayer, fought it on its own terms, and used a complex series of mental magic spells to render the monstrosity completely inert. For a moment, she had looked like she would pull it off.

But, of course, the computer had told me about this. That I would let her win for a moment, defeating their strongest opponent. It was really nothing to write home about – because Tirek just absorbed the Mindflayer’s magic and remained in control of most the inhabitants of the party.

Tirek flicked her with a finger, driving her deep into the go-kart planet, sending the karts flying into the black void. The Hat Kids jumped on her like ravenous dogs, smacking her with baseball bats. She struggled to find an opening to do much of anything without incinerating the innocent kids around her.

The other heroes were busy fighting their own friends. Roxy was fighting off Carnelian, Pinkie had to take on Link and Midna, and most of the Merodi Soldiers had fallen.

The Dude heard Grogar cackle. “This is it! All the heroes will fall – and be subject to our will!”

“Yay!” Cozy shouted, clapping her hooves. “This is easy!”

Of course it was; I was influencing it. I was ensuring they would fall like dominoes. There was nothing they could do. Their strongest Aware was Pinkie, and she could do nothing to me. She didn’t even know who I was. As far as she was concerned, I was just another zombie that had been controlled by the bad guys.

“Going to keep mocking our love?” Lilith shouted, taking one of Mattie’s whips to the face without even flinching.

“Mate, I’m not known to stop the mock train.” She jumped over the psychotic Rarity and drove a hoof into Bleeding Heart. Lilith took the opportunity to bite down on Mattie’s ear in an attempt to rip it off.

“I see we’re on the pleasure cruise,” Matie commented, driving her into the ground with a pinwheel motion. “But I’m afraid I have t-”

Tirek snapped his fingers and Mattie was frozen in a block of ice. “PATHETIC!” he shouted, his muscles brimming with the power of stars, his eye larger than the planets themselves. “ALL THE MAGIC IN THIS WORLD IS MINE!”

Cozy Glow held up a note, scrutinizing it.

Wait. A note? A note that looked suspiciously like the one Twilence had burned in the Clock Tower a moment ago. She must have used a dragonfire mimic spell. She had a backup plan. But no matter – whatever it was, it was too late. Everything was set up, and in a few minutes, the cavalry would arrive… and everything would fall into place.

Like clockwork, Pinkie appeared in front of Tirek with a giant hammer. “EAT THIS!”

Tirek grabbed her in his magic, sneering. “You are a foolish little pony. What can you hope to do against the centaur with the power of infinity? What dare you say to the…”

And… now.

A dimensional portal opened up right in Tirek’s chest, tearing his body asunder. Such a thing never happened. Portals were supposed to be blocked to this universe, dimensional devices were supposed to check for safety, and they generally didn’t have that much force in them.

But a few unlikely coincidences could make something just like that happen. Because it was the best way for Vriska Serket to make an entrance. She charged through the portal, swinging her sword wide enough to cut through Tirek’s immense form. He gagged, barely holding on to his life without the presence of a heart.

He did not last much longer. Vriska took one look at him and absorbed all the luck she could manage, dropping his already slim chances of survival to none. He crumpled under the weight of his own power and lost control of his magic, losing control of all the partygoers, reducing the small army of Grogar’s to nothing.

“What!?” Grogar shouted. “That… that’s impossible!”

“Happy one-thousandth birthday Vriska!” Pinkie shouted, pulling her into a hug as the rest of the Primary Team jumped out of the portal.

“Oh, a bunch of bad guys for me to slay and a universe to save?” Vriska grinned. “Pinkie, you shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t! But I’m beginning to think that was the point all along!”

Vriska rolled her dice, getting straight 8s without even trying. This was her time. This was her birthday. This was her moment of glory. As the blue armor of Mindfang took shape around her, she took a dramatic pose at the front of the team. Renee, Pinkie, Jotaro, Nova, and Flutterfree posed behind her, glowing like the heroes they were.

“No! We prepared for everything!” Grogar shouted. “We…”

“Are nothing more than a nice deli platter for me to cut up,” Vriska cackled. She kicked Grogar across the face, tossing him to the side. Flutterfree grabbed Chrysalis, pinning her to the ground. Renee encased Ba’al in a powerful magic barrier. Jotaro pummeled Loki like he was weightless. Pinkie smacked Lilith across the head with her squeaky hammer, and Nova grabbed Bleeding Heart in a mind-blank spell, dropping her to the ground.

It was all too easy. It was all exactly as I intended. I took a step forward, extending my hand to Vriska. “Happy birthday.”

Vriska smirked in my direction. “Aww, Dirk, you shouldn’t have.” She moved to pull me into one of her way-too-friendly hugs. But I would endure it – it was her birthday after all.

For I, Dirk Strider, Prince of Heart, was the Dude. And I had duped Merodi Universalis, the local Legion of Doom, and none other than Twilence herself for a birthday present.

I think that proves everything I want it to. Glad to have you on this little journey. I…

What?

Why do I…

“Dirk ‘the Dude’ Strider fell to the ground, out cold,” Cozy Glow said, tossing a tranquilizer gun to the side. “Cozy Glow took center stage.” Her eyes brimmed with power as a psychotic grin crossed her face. “There’s no Twilence anymore. There’s no ‘Dude’. There is only me and the power I took from Tirek.”

“Oh give it a rest, another inevitable villain betrayal?” Vriska rolled her eyes. “There’s no way he didn’t expect this.”

“Oh, he did, and he made plans for it,” Cozy said, the Infinity Stones appearing around her head like a tiara. “But he didn’t think it was possible for me to figure out he wasn’t on our side ahead of time.” She produced a hastily scrawled note on a piece of notebook paper. “Luckily Twilence took care of that.”

Vriska pointed her sword at her. “I’m on a roll today, pegasus. You don’t have anything against me on my day. I-”

Cozy’s wings lit on rainbow fire. She glanced at Carnelian and drained all her magic. The poor Gem didn’t poof – didn’t even scream. Her entire body was drained, leaving nothing but a colorless, dead Gem behind. “Dirk said we weren’t supposed to kill so we could use you. I’m not listening to that stupid rule. I will start killing people if you don’t let me into all your minds right now. In fact…” She spread her wings. “I will take this entire universe and everyone in it to oblivion if you don’t bow now.”

“CARNELIAN!” Roxy shouted, rushing Cozy without thinking. Cozy raised an eyebrow, firing a beam of energy from the Power Stone right into Roxy’s chest, blowing a hole through her the size of a soccer ball. The Rogue of Void fell back, trembling, onto Carnelian’s lifeless gemstone.

“Anyone else?” Cozy asked.

~~~

Eve ran into the Intelligence Division Primary Office – a place that existed in its own universe, separate from everything else. Always moving, always hiding… always secret.

Eve bashed into Giorno’s office and slammed the calling card on his desk. “I need to get into my own palace and I need to do it now. They’re going to expose my secrets. I trust you understand the weight of this situation?”

Giorno stood up in alarm – he didn’t need to be told why that couldn’t happen. “Palace…”

“Persona 5, Phantom Thieves of Hearts. You have some versions of them working for you, you should know how to find it.”

Giorno nodded. “We need to hurry. Down, to the lab.”

Eve couldn’t teleport within the walls of the Intelligence Division, so the two of them ran to the elevator. Giorno used his Stand to confirm his identity and they slid down to one of the deeper levels. They ran out into a room filled with unusual machines, several sets of similar-looking cards to the one Eve had brought in, and an older woman with orange hair and large technological goggles.

“Oracle, we need to trace Eve’s Palace,” Giorno ordered. “No questions.”

The elder Oracle nodded. Wordlessly, she led Eve into a tall, cylindrical glass case affixed to a red-and-black machine with numerous dials. She didn’t explain anything – she closed the glass door, sealed her in, and ran the analysis. Eve felt tingly as lines of code ran across the screen, but otherwise nothing visible happened.

“Got the coordinates,” elder Oracle said, pointing at the screen. “Seraphim should be able to access it. I will warn you, Stands can’t manifest in Palaces, but they will have Stand-like powers. I could join yo-”

“No,” Eve said. “I have to do this on my own.” She summoned Seraphim and tore a hole in reality through its center, leading right to the front doors of an immense ethereal Clock Tower. “Thank you for your assistance.”

“Anything else?” Giorno asked.

“If they get out anyway, you are going to have to lock me up and find a way to restore my heart to the way it was before.”

“I’m not certain that’s possible,” the elder Oracle admitted.

“Which is why I’m going in.” She flew through Seraphim’s portal. She looked up at the Clock Tower – one minute away from midnight. She instinctively understood exactly what it meant. She was this close to having her secrets released to the world. When the bells rang, it would all be over.

But they hadn’t rung yet. She could still stop this.

She saw them. The Thieves, jumping out the front doors of the Clock Tower – freezing when they saw her. Only two of them were standing – Joker and ‘Queen’, if Eve remembered her reading correctly. All the others were out cold or heavily injured from storming the Clock Tower.

Joker held the treasure of Eve’s heart in his hand: a small, insignificant gold key.

Eve threw her calling card down in the ground in front of them. “I can’t let you do this. It’ll de-”

“We already know,” Queen spat. “Twilence told us everything. Tried to get us to turn back. We didn’t.”

Eve frowned. “…I understand.”

“We understand as well,” Joker said. “If you would tell everyone of your own free will…”

“I won’t.”

“Then we have to fight, ‘Evening’.”

Eve nodded. “You’re weak, bruised, battered. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Joker sighed. “I don’t want to either… but if we want out of here, we’re going to have to play dirty.”

He summoned the shadow of Flutterfree.

Eve told Seraphim to create absolute zero. It could only do it on the other side of the portal, but she could still drag the shards of ice into the new realm if she wanted.

They charged.

~~~

Roxy knew she was bleeding out. She was only vaguely aware of the confrontation between Cozy Glow and everyone else…

“What happened to you?” Allure demanded. “I knew you were evil, and bad, but you were never a murderous psycho!”

Cozy huffed. “I’ve spent the last few decades living under Tirek and Grogar. They’ve become my family, and I’ve learned a lot. A lot about what it means to have power and what it means to seek revenge.” She pointed a hoof at Allure. “You don’t back down for any reason, not when you have a goal to accomplish. You go to the ends of existence for it.”

Roxy, somehow, had the strength to move despite there being a giant hole in her chest. She didn’t really question it. Instead, she was busy thinking why did Dirk have to go and be such a fuckin’ idiot? Anger rose up in her as she saw the lifeless form of Carnelian on the ground – colorless aside from Roxy’s own blood. She’s dead because of him!

“John! Do something!” Pinkie called.

“You think John can do anything?” Cozy asked, an amused smile on her face. “The moment he even starts thinking of zapping everywhere, I use the mind control to take over his mind. What, did you think I didn’t get access to all the powers Tirek had? I’m not dumb! I just want you to give up willingly.”

“What do you think the chances of that are?” Vriska asked with a sneer.

“Slim, admittedly, but the chances go up with the body count!”

Roxy felt her vision swimming away. She was going to die. Didn’t matter if it was Heroic or Just or not, the Gallifreyans had that lock on her soul. She’d be sent away to fight Lord English. Alive… but likely not able to see any of the friends she had made here ever again. Sent back to her life…

There had to be something. Something she could do…

“Desperate?”

With significant effort, Roxy tilted her head toward a familiar psychotic unicorn.

“Gems have life-absorption properties, you know,” Lilith said. “You’re holding one in your hands.”

Roxy looked at the crystal that had once been Carnelian. She furrowed her brow. “W-why?”

“Because that Cozy bitch needs to be flayed,” Lilith muttered. “Do it before you die, okay?”

Several Aradias came after Cozy from different timestreams, but the time-related powers flowed through the Time Stone and rendered all the Aradias useless, turning them all to corpses.

“I have Time under my control!” Cozy shouted. “I could have John retcon anything you might do away! I can squish you by magical power alone!” She glowered. “Surrender or die.”

Roxy used her Void powers to tap into the lifeless crystal. There was nothing in there… just an empty computer matrix devoid of all magical energy. She only had seconds… she needed to activate its life-absorption matrix somehow… somehow…

Desperate, she shoved it into the hole in her chest, coating it in her blood. As the Rogue of Void, she could steal the ‘lack of concept’ from something. She wasn’t sure what exactly would work here, so she stole the concept of ‘off’.

That did it. The gemstone flashed brightly, and Roxy was reduced to dust. Nobody aside from Lilith even noticed, for the Void kept her shrouded. The once dead, white crystal filled with red life… and sat there.

“You’re all thinking of plans, of machinations,” Cozy said, stamping her hoof. “But you have no options here. Not anymore.”

“I think we have options,” Pinkie said.

“What?”

“Keep talking until Twilence gets back or Dirk wakes up. Or, how about this, turn ourselves in and then have Twilence show up when she’s done with whatever she’s doing! Or, heck, Eve. I bet Eve could have some fun here. Then there’s Nanoha, any number of our allies…”

“That doesn’t help you now.”

“Oh, now? Well, now, neither Dirk nor Twilence are here, so…” Pinkie put a hoof to her chin. “General story rules apply again. And you’re being a pretty nasty villain.”

“I went to the computer myself,” Cozy Glow said with a smirk. “It assured us we would win.”

“It can lie,” Allure pointed out.

“As far as I know, it only told ‘the Dude’ one lie: that no one would die.”

“And it hasn’t told the rest of you lies?”

“Maybe?” Cozy said, shrugging. “I’m just acting on what I know here.”

The Carnelian gemstone flashed. At first, it tried to take its somewhat short humanoid form, but quickly decided that wasn’t worth it. The gemstone took its position on the back of a tall, slender, feminine humanoid. She popped into existence without much fanfare, her body a pale red shade rather than the deep color that Carnelian had worn prior. Her hair was light, curled in one spot, and her eyes were a bright pink. The robes of the Rogue of Void appeared around her, as dark blue as always, contrasting her pale crimson. She took in her surroundings.

She was… a Gem. Specifically, a Carnelian. Not the Carnelian… there was only one mind in there, and that mind was Roxy Lalonde. But she was no longer human. She was a genderless magical space rock with her entire self stored on a hard crystal affixed to the base of her neck. She didn’t feel all… there.

But she could see Cozy. And, at the moment, Cozy couldn’t see her.

She reached to touch her gemstone, slowly pulling out a hard-light sword reminiscent of a katana. Slowly, but surely, she moved toward Cozy. Unnoticed… invisible…

She swung her sword.

“IDIOT!” Cozy shouted, grabbing the sword with magic Roxy couldn’t identify. She tore it out of Roxy’s hands, teleported it behind the new Gem and drove the tip into the crystal.

There was a sickening crack.

~~~

Joker was alarmed to discover that Eve had no difficulty at all beating Flutterfree’s shadow into the ground. The Overhead knew the mare like the back of her hoof – and her mental projection of the pegasus even more so. The stolen Persona was tossed around like a ragdoll easily, her revelation power only seeking to harm her chances of winning.

“We’re well aware of the chances one of us might go evil one day,” Eve said, kicking Flutterfree between the eyes to end another Rage-endowed attack. “I know everything to take her out should I need to. And she has people on speed-dial to take care of me.”

“She can’t beat you?” Joker asked, swapping Flutterfree out for his usual dark angel Persona.

“No. Seraphim makes that too difficult,” Eve admitted. “You’re lucky I can’t bring it in here. I could just render your Personas useless.”

“Twilence didn’t need a Stand to do that,” Queen commented, driving her nuclear-endowed motorcycle-Persona right into Eve’s face, blowing her across the arena. She picked up Joker and tried to make a run from the palace, but Eve teleported the two of them right next to her. She grabbed ice from the portal and surrounded the three of them in a dark, cold whirlwind.

“I don’t need to cancel your powers,” Eve declared. She accessed the power of Celestia, creating a miniature sun in the air.

She blew it up, shattering the whirlwind of ice and tossing the two Thieves backward. Queen broke her leg on the landing, effectively removing her from the fight.

It was just Joker and Eve now.

Joker tightened his grip on the golden key. He was breathing heavily – heavier than he had in a long while. He’d essentially just gone through a triple boss rush. His team was down, and he himself had been beaten nearly to death multiple times today alone. He didn’t like his odds.

But that wasn’t going to stop him from trying.

“PERSONA!” he raged, tapping into dark magics as his Persona engulfed him. He charged Eve. She encased herself in a sheen of ice and brought another mini-sun into existence.

He missed her on purpose, jumping past her toward the open portal Seraphim was keeping. He held the key out on the tips of his fingers. If it could just cross the dimensional barrier…

“You will never reach reality,” Giorno said from the other side of the portal, summoning his Stand and holding its palm to the swirling portal. The moment the key attempted to cross the barrier… it couldn’t, the power of Gold Experience Requiem preventing it from ever leaving the world.

While it was in Joker’s hands, anyway. He ordered his Persona to pick up the key and throw it through the portal.

The moment he released it to his Persona, Eve flew in and grabbed it herself. With a swift kick, she pushed Joker through the portal. His persona dissipated, as did most of his power. Giorno quickly subdued him, hand over the mouth to prevent him from saying anything.

“I will have to wipe him,” Giorno said. “And any others that are in there.”

“I know,” Eve said, frowning. “…I’m sorry, Joker.”

Joker looked at her not with vengeance or anger – but pity.

With a curt nod, Eve looked at the key in her magic. It was small, golden, and would no doubt fit perfectly in one of the clocks she owned. But she couldn’t remove it from her own Palace. She had to maintain her own secrecy.

She teleported to the room at the top of the Tower, finding me lying unconscious at the doorway. She picked me up in her magic and walked into the final room.

Gears. Gears everywhere, marred by a scent of roses. In the center of the room was a pedestal, on of which a representation of the Dark Tower stood.

She swore she could hear it whispering to her. Was it her own mind, or had she created a manifestation of the Tower through her subconscious?

She didn’t know. All she did was lay the golden key at the base of the tower… and left.

The Phantom Thieves of Hearts would be returned to the desert town in Celestia City the next day with no memory of anything that had happened.

~~~

Corona held her arms in front of her, glowing with the sickly colors of Doom. Her limbs were crossed – one pointing at Cozy, one at Roxy.

The Doom of Roxy had transferred to Cozy. The pegasus mare’s skull had fractured as though a sword had been rammed through it with enough power to split atoms.

Cozy’s lifeless form slumped to the ground, dead.

Corona let out a sigh of relief.

“That Doom power is really helpful,” Flutterfree commented.

Corona barely had enough energy to nod in her direction.

Roxy gingerly touched her gemstone. Not a scratch on it. Her relief was quickly replaced by pain.

Carnelian…

Eve and I appeared in the universe at that moment, ready to help with whatever was left. It was quickly clear to us that we had arrived too late for that. The villains had already been defeated, the final sacrifices made, the climax at an end.

And so I did the second thing on my list.

I woke Dirk up with a lightning bolt to the face. “Get up,” I ordered.

He did, his face as expressionless as always.

“Your arrogance is disgusting,” I spat.

“I could say the same of you.”

“At least I care.”

“And I don’t? This entire thing was just for Vriska.”

“You’re kidding yourself,” I growled.

“Who the fuck cares if most of it was to fuck with you? I chose to do it as a present for Vriska.”

“That didn’t work!”

“Please, the only damage that was actually done was that Gem, and I’m sure we can find some way to get her back.”

“You threatened the stability of Merodi Universalis!”

“I knew that anything I did could not change what ka needs to happen. Not with the retroactive Narrative.”

I glared at him. “You took full advantage of it… But you are wrong, things could be changed. Roxy wasn’t a Gem. Now she is.”

“She’s better off that way.”

“I know that!” I spat. “I know it’s more ‘her’, but we’re not talking about that! We’re talking about your reckless behavior! You were duped by Cozy Glow! How were you not expecting that?”

“I was. I was not expecting you to give her what she needed to turn against me.”

“Come again?”

“If you hadn’t sent that note, Cozy would have believed I was on their side. She would not have betrayed me. She would have gone down just like the rest of them since she wouldn’t have prepared to take Tirek’s power. But you told her there was no way I was on their side. Correct, but it gave her the chance to do what she wanted.”

“DIRK!” Vriska shouted, pointing a sword at his neck. “You. Suck.”

“You appreciated the gift at first.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a shortsighted self-absorbed spiderbitch who needs a second to think about things before making judgments! You’re a super-genius mastermind! You shouldn’t have even tried this!”

“He can’t stand being in the background,” I said, distasteful. “I told him to watch his place. He wouldn’t accept that.”

“Would you?” Dirk asked.

“I would love it if this Eye would go away.”

“I’m indifferent about the Ultimate Self.”

I frowned. “…We can’t just let you walk away from this.”

“Fuck, really? Do you want to turn me into an actual villain? Conniving ways to get back at you for ruining my attempt at a birthday party? That’s a lame backstory, you need to think of something bet-”

Roxy cut off his head with her sword. Everyone was silent.

“The Gallifreyans have him now,” Roxy said, dissipating her sword. “He’ll be sent back to fight Lord English. We know he survives the encounter. But he won’t be doing anything like this to any of us again. Fuckin’ asshole.”

She turned and walked away.

“Roxy…” John called.

“I don’t want to hear it, John.”

John zapped in front of her.

“I said I-”

John held out a perfectly healthy version of Carnelian from the metapast.

“C-carnelian…” Roxy said, eyes wide. “I…”

Carnelian took one look at Roxy and shuddered in fear.

It was like looking at her own dead body.

“I…” Roxy made herself invisible.

With a sigh, Vriska turned to Pinkie. “…Pinks…?”

“Y-yeah?” Pinkie asked.

“I’m sorry. Not really in the mood for a party.”

“I… I understand.” Pinkie was trying not to cry.

Vriska nodded slowly. She took one look at Dirk’s body, contemplating driving her sword into it.

She decided that would be pointless. She just wanted to go home.

~~~

And so things, in a way, returned to the way they were before. A few minor differences. Roxy was a Gem, but you’d be surprised how little that changed things, overall.

All the heroes ended up in more or less the same place they were before. Allure continued working with the League, Corona continued research and exploration, Eve continued working as the Overhead, Renee returned to her post, and Pinkie continued leading the Primary Team.

The villains had different fates. Many of them were dead. A few just vanished off the face of the planet, never to be seen again. Both Ba’al and Loki managed to slip away. Grogar was imprisoned and placed into Nautica under maximum security guard, surprised to find a few alternate versions of himself in there. He lived the rest of his days as a bitter, angry goat, which was to say his days in prison were about the same as they were out of prison.

Chrysalis was sent back to Thorax. She was completely off-the-rocker mad, but the Changelings took her in and promised to see what they could do for her. Don’t hold out, that queen lost her mind so long ago there’s little chance she regains much of anything even with acceptance from those who shunned her leadership.

Sometimes you’ll hear stories of Adagio and Starlance out there in the multiverse, staying as far away from higher societies as possible.

As it turned out, the Mindflayer hadn’t been completely defeated, but it had been slowed considerably – efforts by the TSAB to extinguish the multiversal plague were met with success for the first time in many years.

Magane appeared here and there, cryptic and manipulative as always, never letting anyone be certain if she was really evil or just insane.

Lilith was locked up and placed in an asylum. Bleeding Heart was allowed to go free – but she spends most her time at the asylum with Lilith anyway. The two are essentially inseparable in what Mattie would call a “right screwy relationship.”

There was a funeral for Dirk. No one felt right about it. Dave didn’t even show up. They all knew Dirk was still around, just not with them at the moment. And that he had brought this on himself. Roxy couldn’t bring herself to attend.

Roxy tried to reconnect with Carnelian, but the Gem had decided it was all too much. The party, seeing her dead self walking around like a zombie, it… she needed to go back to Homeworld and get away from the craziness. Roxy accepted this, and they drifted apart, as people tend to do.

Lielight… Well, at last, here’s some good news.

“Hey, Lielight?”

Lielight looked up from her newspaper that was supposed to be inconspicuous. “Eve, I’m getting out like you want.”

“I’ve changed my mind.” Eve smiled warmly. “You can stay and work. As Astrid, as Lielight, whoever you want.”

“Barrel primates! Why!?”

“…There was once a filly by the name of Cozy Glow. We locked her away instead of trying to help her. …Granted, I do think she really was hopeless. But because we locked her away, she became even more of a monster than she had been at the start.” Eve extended a hoof. “I see a spark of something in you. I’m not going to push that away. Plus, your opinions are very different from mine. That’s very helpful in our career path.”

Lielight paused for a moment – then shook the hoof. “I fully expect to let you down and drive you insane.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

And now… let’s back up a bit. All this stuff is important, yes, but not as important as what happened shortly after the party exploded.

~~~

Vriska walked into the diner on Earth C to the beautiful smell of a banquet. It may have been breakfast time, but her friends had ordered steak, turkey, high-quality salads, and some special drinks in addition to the normal breakfast stuff. In the center of the humble diner table was a cobalt-blue cake with the number 1000 written on it in icing.

“It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet,” Pinkie said, grinning. “Technically still your birthday.”

“Have a seat, have some cake,” Flutterfree encouraged.

“It’s not going to explode, is it?” Vriska asked, sitting down.

Pinkie shook her head. “It’s just a cake. Something simple.”

Vriska took a slice out of the sugary substance and shoved a copious amount into her mouth. “Delicious as always, Pinks.”

“I try,” Pinkie said with a smile.

Vriska looked around at her friends. There weren’t too many here – just the rest of her team, Renee, Eve, Aradia, Hastur, and Starbeat. The people she cared the most about. This thought would have made her twitch in revulsion before she came to the ponies, but today it just let her smile a big, dopey smile.

“You’re all the best,” she said, simply. “Yeah, I know, Vriska being sappy.”

“I like it,” Starbeat said. “It suits you.”

“Really? I thought it came out of nowhere like an exploding cat.”

Starbeat rolled her eyes at Hastur. “Riiiiiight.”

“So, I see you’re keeping the Rage robes,” Vriska observed, pointing at Flutterfree. “Wasn’t that just to keep me off the scent?”

“It was,” Flutterfree admitted. “But… well, I’ve been wearing them so long, it’d seem odd to take them off now. I guess if this entire ordeal gave me anything, it was a connection to my inner self.”

“And experiences!” Renee declared. “Remember, the ending is not all there is – there were many other memories!”

“Remember when we decimated Adagio’s band?” Nova asked.

“Oh, I have to hear about this!” Pinkie said, slamming her hooves on the table in mock indignation. “Come on, spill the beans! Sounds like quite the story!”

There was a chorus of laughs that never quite stopped as Nova relayed the encounter with Adagio in the world of music. Soon, everyone was smiling and having a merry time just eating with one another. No fancy treasure hunt, no party planets, not even any party games. Just a big meal and a bunch of friends.

I did go way, way overboard, Pinkie admitted to herself. I forgot that, sometimes, the biggest parties aren’t the best ones. Often it’s the small, insignificant things that will stay with you the longest.

“…And then I locked guitars with the chaos monstrosity!” Vriska declared, jumping up on the table to reenact the scene. “I put the strings behind my back and swung through the air, coming down on his head with a THWACK and a HACK and a BA-BAM!”

“How could you possibly keep playing like that?” Eve asked.

“She just did,” Renee said with a shrug.

“It was the clash of the ages!” Vriska continued – annoying Nova with her continued hijacking of the story. “And then… Renee, you gotta. Give us a little song.”

“Oh, uh…” Renee cleared her throat. “I don’t remember the words exactly…”

“Come on!” Pinkie said, clapping her hooves. “Just give us what you think it was! I’m sure we’ll get the jist of it!”

Aradia nodded. “I would love to hear you sing, Renee.”

Renee nodded, clearing her throat. “Well then… I don’t remember much, but I do remember this.” With a deep breath, she belted out two resonant lines.

“We are the primary team!

We shall stand tall evermore!”

Eve, Renee, Pinkie, Nova, Flutterfree, Jotaro, Vriska…

Heroes.

101 - The Spark

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

102 - Regret

Rainbow Dash woke up on her bunk. She could hear the rumbles of explosions passing through the walls of the ship, telling her that, yes, they were still at war.

They had been fighting nonstop for three days.

Rainbow got up, slipped into her uniform, and took her position at the front door. She took a moment to look at her team – the Wonderbolts.

Half the bunks were empty. Three days ago, almost all of them had been full.

Don’t think about that, grieve later, war now.

Rainbow Dash cleared her throat. “RISE AND SHINE FILLIES!”

The seven remaining Wonderbolts flailed out of their beds. They all slipped into their uniforms out of habit and ran to the middle of their room, saluting.

“Right, time for another day of speeding at the enemy. You know the drill – I’ve got team one, Surprise, you’ve got team two.”

Surprise nodded, her yellow mane bouncing. “Right!”

“LET’S MOVE!” They scrambled through the halls of the ship, hurrying to the transporter bay. Their signatures were already keyed in – they were teleported directly into the speeders they had used for the past three days, even though they hardly looked the same as they had on day one. They had started out as just missiles with seats, but as time went on all speeders that weren’t blown to smithereens got point defenses, better shields, better maneuvering, and the Wonderbolts had even gotten a tiny Spectral Rod affixed to the front of each of their speeders.

Not to mention all of them had full body armor now. Ejection had become commonplace – a team’s speeder would be destroyed, and they would shoot out into the space themselves. Rainbow Dash had done that twice already with her speeders. She’d lost ponies both times.

She had not been told about the Redshirt ploy.

Rainbow had Fleetfoot, Thunderlane, and Misty with her. All four of them suited up and took their seats in the speeder. Misty was on communication, Fleetfoot and Thunderlane on weapons, and Rainbow Dash was in the pilot’s seat.

And then they waited. Waited for Meenah to call them as the next speeders to charge into Skarn’s ever-changing maze. That was what most of their day consisted of – agonizing waiting followed by bursts of intense action.

She checked the report. Three-fourths of the way to the Shaping Mechanism, although that might as well be half since Skarn had gotten better at slowing them down over time. Thirty subfleets were still actively pushing the boundary forward. The twelfth was notably very far behind, so it would probably cut its losses and join up with another fleet soon, even though it wasn’t in any danger of being destroyed completely like the twenty-second. They had lost their protomolecule planet, and with it most of their repairing capacity. However, they were very far forward – maybe the twelfth would be ordered to portal directly to them. Rainbow Dash didn’t know – she wasn’t Yellow Diamond. She wasn’t even Meenah. She was Rainbow Dash, captain of the Wonderbolts, who always had and always would be a strike team.

…If they survived this.

“WONDERBOLTS!” Meenah’s voice came over the intercom, “YOU’RE UP! We’ve got a dimensional jammer up ahead – we know the coordinates already, so blow it the shell up!”

“Roger!” Rainbow replied, knowing Surprise had done the same with her team. She got a quick look at the jammer - a relatively simple structure compared to what Skarn usually had for them. It was a black ball with twenty spikes protruding in all directions. Rainbow had been hoping for another giant fish, frankly.

The speeders launched away from the fleet toward Skarn’s defenses. They moved at their near-lightspeed at the start, but they had to slow down in order to make it through.

In three days, Skarn had dropped the usage of ships entirely. With the subfleets as spread out as they were, he simply did not have enough ships at his disposal to keep them all held back. They had seen him shape a few new ships with the Shaper, but they were complicated pieces of technology that took time to shape properly. So Skarn had resorted to impeding the progress of the fleets with larger, trickier shapes.

Since he could only focus on shaping one area at any given time, he had to make the shaped things automatic. Some of them were simple monsters that tried to attack. Others were mazes or constructs, designed to confuse.

But his favorite were large, encompassing structures that could hide things within them. Most notably his seemingly endless supply of those armored soldiers. Recently he had added jammer devices to these areas, which made charging through them with a drill spell somewhat more difficult.

Today it was a giant clock with no backing to its face - just a seemingly endless sea of gears. The fleet occupied a hole within this mesh of gears that it had formed in the last dimensional jump forward. While the speeders rushed forward, the fleet had to deal with attacks on all sides from the remaining gears. They could no longer see beyond their own space, relying entirely on dimensional communication to confirm the whereabouts of the other subfleets.

Rainbow flew her speeder right through the turning gears, worming her way through the holes between them. Skarn thought he was clever, making razor sharp gears that had just enough holes to make it possible to fly through them, but very difficult. No doubt it had sawed numerous speeders in half.

But Rainbow was an excellent pilot. She moved through the gears like a surfer on a wave, elegantly threading the needle. Skarn’s soldiers popped out from hiding spots and fired their weapons – but the shields deflected the invisible dimensional packets. Fleetfoot and Thunderlane made quick work of the offending soldiers with their weapons. They may have had a lot of weird memory tricks, and they may have been able to dodge things before they were fired, but magical seeker bullets were still really effective, especially when large enough to be mounted on a ship.

The speeder shook.

“One’s grabbed onto our engine!” Misty reported.

Rainbow tried to shake him by entering a corkscrew dive through a bunch of rapidly rotating gears.

“He’s still on! Tampering with the engine!”

Rainbow sucked in a sharp breath of air. She pulled up and flew directly for the jammer, worming her way through more gears. She kept a close eye on the engine status, especially the state of the combustion reaction.

She kept one wingtip on the eject button. “Get ready…” she said, pushing as fast as she could through the gears. That tag-on was going to get to the engine and blow the speeder. But they were never as fast or as powerful as the speeder in just their armor. She had to eke out as much as she could…

“NOW!” She shouted, pressing the eject button. The four pegasi were launched into the air just as the soldier managed to trigger an explosive reaction in the drive. Misty was thrown off course by the explosion, struggling to regain control of her power armor.

She failed. She flew right over a gear that was turning and one of its razor edges cut her in half.

“Dammit,” Rainbow muttered, but she didn’t slow down. Her wings – and those of Fleetfoot and Thunderlane – glowed with bright energy. They certainly couldn’t move as fast just with their armor, but they were definitely more nimble.

Rainbow let out a Breath, allowing the three of them to feel the wind under their wings. They flew in formation through the gears, dodging attacks and bullets. She saw no other speeders or squadrons here – she had to assume they were it.

She could see the jammer up ahead. It didn’t seem to be guarded by a squadron of soldiers, which was a plus. They just had to avoid the soldiers that were attacking them right now.

Just as she thought that, one of the weapons hit Fleetfoot’s personal shields. Rainbow tried to use the Breath to keep her on course, but the hit was too strong. She went into a tailspin – recovering within a few seconds. But it was already too late. She was an open target, and Rainbow couldn’t slow down for her.

Fleetfoot knew this – so she unloaded all the weapons she had built in on everything around her, taking out as much as she could before they took her out.

The resulting explosions pushed Rainbow and Thunderlane forward.

“Still with me Thunder?” Rainbow asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can see it.”

“Unguarded too.”

“That’s suspicious.”

Rainbow grimaced. He was right – that was suspicious. There should be at least some there, even if they had just been wiped out, they were excellent at reassigning troops. “Prepare for anything.”

They entered weapons range, confirming the black, knobby jammer to be about four times as large as a pony. Rainbow fired a few test shots, glowing blue missiles dropping from her suit. They sailed toward the jammer, but were stopped by an entity that wasn’t a standard armored soldier. The humanoid wasn’t armored at all – he was a bear. Not Brell, not Arthon, not Skarn – a different one.

“Get ready for a fight,” Rainbow said. “Take the shot if you get the opportunity!”

Thunderlane and Rainbow fired off more bullets, but the bear caught them all. He roared – but there was no air in the gears, so it could not be heard. There was little to no magic coming off him, Rainbow’s sensors told her – he was just absurdly strong.

They passed through the last gear between them and the area the jammer was in. Rainbow stopped assisting Thunderlane with her Breath and focused all the winds on the brute of a bear.

He didn’t even flinch. He jumped into the air and punched Rainbow Dash across the face. Her helmet went flying off despite being locked to the rest of her head. She felt a break form in her neck.

She fell, skidding across a flat gear that served as ‘ground’ for this bear. He left her for dead – which would have been a reasonable course of action had she not been the Maid of Breath. She was able to keep air near herself while her suit injected her with a high-strength health potion to fix her neck. It hurt like Tartarus, but she was able to move again.

The bear was fixated on Thunderlane. She watched as he was flattened by one of his hairy, clawed feet.

Rainbow Dash was all that remained. But right now, the bear thought he had won. Rainbow could take advantage of that. Her suit was damaged in most ways, but she still had control over some of the weapons. She fired at the jammer with magic missiles.

The jammer cracked, but didn’t break. The shockwave drew the bear’s attention. He roared again – though Rainbow still couldn’t hear it. He charged at her, claws open.

Rainbow used the winds of Breath to move the jammer between her and the bear. In his rage, he punched right through the jammer with his unimaginable strength – burning off much of his fur and cutting himself in many places in the process. But his fist went straight through and connected directly with Rainbow. Her already broken suit absorbed almost none of it – her ribs were completely flattened as a result, and blood shot out of her mouth.

But she smirked.

“Gotcha, sucker,”

Rainbow Dash fired all her weapons. At this close a range, it was just an explosion. They were both disintegrated.

The twenty-seventh subfleet moved a universe forward.

Across the Q-Sphere, the Tree of Harmony that belonged to Equis Vitis screeched. The branch of Loyalty shattered.

~~~

Overhead-Charter Evening Sparkle put down the book she was reading as a deep pit formed in her stomach.

Something’s happened.

Her first instinct was to slide over to her personal computer and check the state of the war. The defensive front was going well – it had been five days on this side of the front, and ever since day two the damage had been minimal. They had figured out how to block Skarn’s dimensional portals on every planet while keeping their own in orbit active. It had taken quite a bit of power and planning to make it possible, but no more reinforcements were arriving for the ground troops, and Skarn’s ships only showed up occasionally to remind everyone they couldn’t drop the harmony network or they would suffer the consequences. Skarn’s forces had resorted to more stealthy warfare, attacking key locations in small groups. But Saxton Hale’s mercenaries paired with Starbeat’s cheats were proving to be more than they could handle. After the heavy losses of the first day it might have seemed like they were in danger of losing, but they now had control of the situation.

They also hadn’t found Celestia City yet, so that wasn’t what was wrong.

Eve flipped over to the offensive report. Thirty subfleets were still active, but it was looking to be twenty-nine soon enough. They only had a quarter light-day left to travel, but Skarn was getting more and more effective at slowing them down and picking them off. The casualty rates within the offense were absolutely absurd – but after the numbers were run, it was clear that the Redshirt principle was working. Team leaders and prior heroes had a much higher rate of survival than was to be expected.

Corona’s subfleet was still active and was still one of the best-performing fleets. Corona herself was still actively pushing forward, though the latest report said she had taken the opportunity of a lull in the fighting to take a rest.

Eve checked the twenty-seventh fleet next. Still operating strong – they’d just had a major breakthrough with Skarn’s maze of clocks, having pushed to the next universe. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong large-scale… But she just had to be sure.

She opened up the personnel files on the Wonderbolts. Half of them were marked as deceased – but the other eight were still marked as alive. Eve let out a sigh of relief – she had been so sure deep down…

Then the files updated.

There was only one Wonderbolt marked as alive. Surprise. All the rest of them were marked deceased.

Eve stared at Rainbow Dash’s file. She was smirking in the photo.

Eve turned on her eye, examining the Light of the screen.

The information was true.

Rainbow Dash was gone.

“That’s not possible…” Eve told herself, unable to blink. “She was one of us… she was protected! She couldn’t be!”

Cessera looked up from her desk. “…Eve?”

Eve didn’t look at her and therefore didn’t know Cessera was even talking to her. All she saw was a notification appear in her email. She knew what it was – it was the message sent to family and close friends when one of their soldiers died. The Starlight AI was customizing most of the messages, Eve knew, but that thought was far from her mind.

She clicked it open and read it, but didn’t really read it. She saw ‘I regret to inform you…’ and Rainbow Dash’s name somewhere in there. Everything else was just a haze.

Cessera walked up behind her and saw what she was looking at. “…I’ll call Flutterfree.”

“This is all my fault…” Eve said, tears rolling down her face. “This is all my fault!”

Ceessera shook her head, picking up the phone.

“Cass…” Eve said, holding up a hoof. “I need you… I need you to call a meeting.”

“Eve you’re not in any sta-”

“A meeting of friends, Cass. Not… not about the war.” Eve tried to swallow, but found the action too difficult to complete. “There are some people I need to see…”

Cessera nodded slowly.

~~~

The third subfleet jumped forward again, passing through one of Skarn’s creations, entering an empty space in the Congeries.

Corona grinned – this was a good thing to wake up to. They would probably have a significant amount of time to push forward without Skarn sending more traps at them. It would give them a chance to catch up to the further-ahead subfleets – and a much needed break.

Speeders shot forward, found the next universe, and jumped the fleet forward without all the death-defying stunts and complicated maneuvers they’d been stuck in for the last twelve hours. That nest of thorns had been outrageously annoying and had actually managed to turn them around once. But it was over.

…Until the next shape of Skarn decided to rear its ugly head.

“I’m going to actually go eat something in the mess hall,” Corona told the bridge crew. “Rarity, you’ve got the bridge.”

Lady Rarity saluted. “Bring me back a tub of ice cream.”

“Sure. I-”

Raging Sights beeped. “Meeting request from Eve. Earliest convenience.”

Corona let out a grunt. “Never mind then. Looks like I’ll be taking this because it’s convenient.”

Lady Rarity smiled. “I’m sure it won’t take long, she’d never try to keep you given your responsibilities.”

Corona nodded. “If we’re attacked, you know what to do.”

Lady Rarity smiled. Corona teleported herself to the communication center of the Andromeda. She could take the call directly over audio communications on the bridge if she wanted, but since this was a meeting, it would probably be best to use more advanced communication. She entered a cubical, white room with a single console at the door. “Answer the call holographically,” she told Raging Sights.

Suddenly she appeared to be in one of the Relations Divisions’ meeting rooms, standing inside a table. The only other people in the room were Cessera, Spike, and Aradia at the moment.

Cessera looked up at her. “You responded faster than I was expecting.”

“Lull in the fighting. You need to adjust the ‘spawn location’ for this.” She waved her hand through the table. “This probably looks weird.”

Cessera nodded. “I would invite you to sit down, but, you know.”

“Yeah, just a hologram. I’ve got it.” Corona carefully walked a short distance until she felt one of the walls of the cubic room. It looked like she was leaning on nothing. “So, what’s this about?”

“Eve’s called a personal meeting,” Cessera said. “I’ll let her explain it. Everyone should be arriving shortly – you were the only one we thought might be unavailable.” She pressed a few buttons on her data pad, altering the ‘spawn location’ for the holographic setup.

People started filing in. Pinkie, Nova, Flutterfree, Jotaro, and Vriska were the first, followed shortly by Renee and Daniel – notably Daniel took a position in the room as far away from Corona’s hologram as possible. O’Neill and Allure also showed up via hologram, seeing as they were not allowed to physically leave Celestia City at the moment, and Giorno appeared via a similar method. Princess Luna and Toph arrived together. Applejack walked in as well, putting a consoling hoof around the tear-stained form of Prism. There was also a Rarity Corona didn’t recognize sitting in the back of the room, staying out of sight of the others, a crescent-shaped scar over one of her eyes.

Corona knew at that moment this wasn’t going to be a pleasant meeting.

Eve walked in last. She didn’t sit down – she remained standing at the doorway, the door closed behind her. Everyone looked at her expectantly.

Like many of the faces in the room, there was evidence of tears on her features. But unlike all the other faces in the room, she had the look of a deer in the headlights – frozen in a deep, primal fear. Her throat moved as if to swallow, but she choked on it.

Flutterfree moved to comfort her, but Eve held up a hoof. “Just… Let me get through this.” She took in a deep breath and licked her dry lips. “As… as most of you know, Rainbow Dash fell in battle earlier today.”

Corona put a hand to her mouth. She hadn’t known that.

She wasn’t the only one who audibly winced – even those who knew flinched at hearing the words again. Prism broke into tears.

“And it’s all my fault,” Eve concluded.

“Eve…” Flutterfree said, sighing.

“Do not blame yourself, Evening,” Luna said. “Y-”

“I killed her,” Eve said, shuddering. “And it’s not unfounded blame. I called this meeting so I could come clean. I’ve been lying to all of you – some more than others.” She swallowed. “You… you all deserve to know what I’ve done.”

She took in a deep breath and began her story.

~~~

Several months ago…

Gnashing body parts. Screaming. The face of Skarn laughing. Death. Death. Death.

Eve woke up in a cold sweat, her left eye glowing with the power of Light.

That hadn’t been a regular dream. That had been a vision. She’d been getting them more and more lately – the visions Celestia had been known for. Visions that were only augmented by Eve’s status as the Witch of Light.

The only issue was she never knew what they meant. Was it telling her Skarn was a danger to them? Was it telling her Skarn was a horrible individual? Was it just showing her what happened within the Congeries?

She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. The Light didn’t help her understand dreams.

…It had only been two days since she’d cut ties with Skarn face-to-face. Why now?

Was there any purpose to the vision at all? Luna had mentioned a few times Celestia had received visions that told her things that were true but, in the end, meaningless. Sometimes the visions were misleading as well. She couldn’t be certain about this one.

She rubbed her head, most of the vision fading from her memory. Except one image.

The human zipper of Arthon. It continually ground its way through Eve’s mind, a torture worthy of some of the hell universes they had encountered.

…Why couldn’t they have done something about that? They had the power. They had reason. They were supposed to use their power to help people even at risk to themselves… It wasn’t like the Watchmaker of Zhui. Even if the fall of Skarn destroyed the people in the Congeries, it would prevent billions upon billions of others from being drawn into the cruel, cruel fate.

Why couldn’t the others see that?

She knew the answer. It was too much loyalty to Merodi Universalis over the rest of existence. It was a sort of selfishness, a national pride. They weren’t willing to risk it. She couldn’t blame them. They made what they thought was the best choice.

But it was wrong. She knew it.

If only they felt that Skarn was an actual threat to Merodi Universalis… Something that couldn’t be safely ignored…

Tower’s Fate, I’m actually hoping he attacks one of our worlds in retaliation. What’s wrong with me?

She paused for a moment.

Maybe nothing…

She knew the idea coming into her mind was horrible. She knew from the very start it would require lying, cheating, and gambling with people’s lives. She tried to tell herself the cost was too high – the things she would have to do were just too much.

But she’d told herself that in the past about killing people. About sacrificing those who served under you. About manipulating other governments with kind words and half-truths. Those things she would have sworn she would never do in the past were now part of her day-to-day life. Never a part she liked, and always a part that haunted her, but a part she understood was necessary.

She couldn’t convince herself to throw the idea away. It remained with her, festering in the back of her mind, no matter how much she tried to ignore it.

She had to do something about it.

~~~

Eve walked into Giorno’s secret office and sat down in a chair.

Giorno looked at her with curious eyes. After a moment of examining her features, he pressed a button to lock the door and turn off all recording equipment in the room. “I take it this is going to be extremely off the record.”

Eve nodded. “The fact that this conversation even took place should never be uncovered by anyone.”

“You have my word,” Girono said. “What are you thinking?”

“Skarn and his Congeries need to be ended. I know you agree.”

Giorno nodded. “I agree wholeheartedly. They killed one of my best agents and know nothing of mercy or treating those conquered with respect. It’s atrocious. But the vote was cast – we are going to protect Merodi Universalis instead. We can’t do anything.”

“What if we did?” Eve asked. “What if we could make them think Merodi Universalis was under threat?”

Girono raised an eyebrow.

“What if we created a fake attack – and made it look like Skarn did it?”

Giorno sat back in his chair, hand to his chin. “…That would be difficult. Not to mention so illegal it borders on treason.”

“It wouldn’t overthrow our government.”

“It undermines it and goes against its wishes. Close enough.”

Eve nodded. “I know. But I can’t shake him from my mind. I’m even gotten a vision about Skarn, though I can’t tell you what it means, or even if it’s encouraging me to do this.”

“And there’s the eternal unreliability of multiversal prophecies,” Giorno pointed out.

“Yes. I know that. …But I tried to convince myself this wasn’t what needed to happen, and I couldn’t.”

“How long have you been trying?”

“I first got the idea three days ago. It hasn’t left me since.” She looked into Giorno’s pleading eyes. “Tell me, to my face, that it’s wrong. That we really shouldn’t do it. That our safety is more important than the billions of lives Skarn destroys regularly. That the political process is more important than ending the human zipper.”

Giorno looked at her. “I can’t tell you that.”

Eve sighed. “I was afraid of that…” She looked into his eyes. “Will you help me?”

“I may have resources, but something of this nature I can’t even leave to my Agents. I’ll have to do it personally. We won’t be able to move quickly – but it’s better if there’s a gap between events so it doesn’t look suspicious.”

“We need a nearly uninhabited world that we own, that we can create a fake ‘shaping’ in.”

Giorno nodded. “Scientific outposts on worlds with unusual physics. We’ll need higher dimension-altering spells, a way to evacuate everyone without raising suspicion, and a way to indicate without a doubt that Skarn is the one who did it…”

“I think I can do most of those things. But I can’t alter technological data, which the station will have plenty of.”

“I can do that.”

“I figured as much.”

“Will we be bringing anyone else in on this?”

Eve shook her head. “If we’re found out, only the two of us go down. I know there are others who are willing, but I don’t want to jeopardize them.”

Giorno nodded. “…Eve, you’re going to have to lie to a lot of people. And if the plan works, there will be a war where millions will die.”

“I know.”

“Some of them will probably be your friends.”

Something in the back of Eve’s mind screamed, but she pushed it back. “I know. I can do this, Giorno.”

Giorno was silent for a moment. “Then we need to complete the plan.”

~~~

Eve knocked on the door to Corona’s house. The human-alicorn-thing opened the door with a sad smile. “Hey, Eve.”

“Hey,” Eve said, forcing a smile. “Busy?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Corona said. “Come on in.”

A few minutes later they were sitting in her living room drinking the latest experiment of Corona’s – extremely fizzy drinks.

“…This is like drinking pop rocks,” Eve said.

Corona smirked. “That’s kinda the idea.”

Eve nodded slowly, taking another sip – carefully.

“So, what brings you here?”

Eve forced herself to keep a straight face. “Out of a mixture of curiosity and a personal desire for science, I’ve come to ask to access your universal shifting spells.”

“Research has those, you know.”

“It’d take an annoying amount of time to get approval to use those, even in my position.” And there’d be a record of it. A very prominent record. “Just figured I’d ask you for them.”

“Sure thing,” Corona said, summoning a book with three different locks on it. She unlocked one of them with her personal magic touch and gave it to Eve with two keys.

“You’re cautious.”

“It’s not exactly a secret that I’m the one creating these spells. Someone could try to steal it. It’s why I don’t have a digital copy of the framework – those are all stored deep in Research’s secure servers. I’d keep one key on you at all times and hide the other somewhere else.”

“Sure you won’t need this?”

Corona tapped her head with Raging Sights. “We’ve got it under control. What’re you going to use this for?”

Eve paused for a moment. “Going to analyze the methods by which universes can be fused together. Less of an experimental nature – like what Research does – and more of a ‘let’s just see what happens’ sort of thing.” Eve shrugged. “I was half expecting you to tell me no.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Yeah, no, those spells are under lock and key to keep people from destroying everything. You’re not the kind of person who’d do that.”

Well I’m not exactly using it to directly destroy everything… Eve smiled. “Thanks. I guess I’ll get started on this – there’s a few geometric universes that I’ve got in mind.”

“If you need help altering the frameworks to get it to do what you want, just let me know,” Corona said. “They aren’t exactly the simplest of spells. I’d also suggest having magic batteries on standby. It’s very easy to burn yourself out on these even if you’re a magical powerhouse.”

“Thanks for the advice!” Eve said, putting the book in a pocket dimension. “Now, have any other cool inventions I can see?”

“The lab is currently experiencing the eighth color.”

“…Huh?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

~~~

Renee giggled. “Eve, listen, I usually don’t gossip… But I’ve realized something.”

“Hm?” Eve said, looking up from her sandwich, preoccupied with other thoughts.

“We’re slowly becoming part of the same family.”

“How so?”

“Think about it. You’re part of the Royal Family, and Cadence’s kids have married into the Apple family – and the Joestars, but they’re separate. Then some of the Apples have married into the Pies, adding Pinkie. Now, if Minna doesn’t marry Frigid I will eat my hat. When it does happen, I’ll be added in as well. That’s four of us. If I were a betting mare I’d say Stardust is going to marry one of the many eligible bachelors in the family tree, which will add Nova and Corona to it. That just leaves Flutterfree and Rainbow.”

“Rainbow’s not married,” Eve pointed out. “She has time.”

“I talked to her about that. I believe she said something along the lines of ‘Prism’s father was enough of that for a lifetime’. It’s dreadful that she’s been so inoculated to romance because of the incident, but it is what it is. Though there is that Rarity she hangs out with. Now Flutterfree…” Renee pursed her lips.

“Has to be someone within the church,” Eve reminded her. “And she’s not looking particularly hard to begin with.”

“She’s getting a little old for it,” Renee commented. “And she’s not like you.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “I know. I spend a lot of time with her, Renee.”

“Oh, right, apologies.”

“She’s just not hung up on it. You are unusual for a pony, Renee.” Eve smirked. “No wonder you chose a human.”

“Ah, perhaps, perhaps…” She leaned back and stretched her neck, allowing the conversation to trail off.

“Hey, Renee?”

“Hm?”

“I was wondering if you could transfer your data about universal population. Particularly scientific outposts.” Eve put on a smile. “I’ve got a curious itch I need to scratch.”

“Oh, of course, remind me when I’m back in the office.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “You have to be back in the office?”

“Well I…” Renee blinked. “Actually, I don’t. I have permanent access from any location. Let’s see…” She pulled out her phone and requested the files, receiving them instantly. “Emailed.”

And they won’t track her personal email. “Thanks!”

Renee didn’t even ask what it was for, moving directly on to another topic. “Now, about my niece…”

The fact that it was so easy to fool her friends just made Eve feel worse. They weren’t suspicious and trusted her implicitly. Here she was, taking advantage of it…

~~~

“It’s done,” Giorno said, dropping his cloak in one of the alleys of Celestia City.

Eve looked up at him. By ‘it’s done’ he meant ‘the black box of Planetary Proxima has been programmed to see a Skarn ship even though there isn’t really one there.’

“And we’re sure everything else is ready?” Eve asked.

Giorno nodded.

Eve took a breath. It had been several months since the plan was first conceived. Most of that wait had been part of the plan – to make it seem the least suspicious. But that amount of time had given them plenty of moments to turn back, to stop themselves. Neither of them wanted to.

It had also given them plenty of time to test. Eve ran through several different versions of Corona’s spells to create one that looked most like Skarn’s shaping – testing it on abandoned universes that nobody ever went to. Nobody would bat an eye that these ‘nowheres’ were gone, if they noticed at all. Using Renee’s files, they had chosen Planetary Proxima because it seemed like a universe Skarn would appreciate, due to its unusual physics, and because it would be relatively easy to evacuate. Giorno had increased spy activity within the Congeries so they would have needed intel for a war, so they were readier than they had been last time.

All that remained was one final lie. The most blatant one of all. She’d even talked with Flutterfree about it earlier – though she wouldn’t give Flutterfree any details out of fear for implicating her. Her advice? “Don’t be afraid to turn around, but do what you think is right.”

“This is it,” Eve said. “…Last chance to turn around. Wrap this up and forget about it.”

Giorno turned to her. “…I’m following your lead on the moral call.”

Eve nodded slowly. Is this right? Do the ends justify the means, ever? Do the lives saved forgive the betrayals, lies, and deaths that are to come of this?

…Will I regret this decision?

…Yes. I will. But I’ll also regret not doing it. There is no way out of this one with peace of mind. No solution that is obviously right. I just have to choose which one is better.

Eve looked ahead. “I’m going to do it. Ready the autospell.”

Giorno nodded. He vanished into an invisibility cloak.

Eve allowed herself to look panicked – it would actually help her sell what she was about to do. She scrambled out of the alley in a gallop. She teleported herself right outside the center of Celestia City – a place where she knew she could find the person she needed.

Aradia Megido.

“What’s wrong?” Aradia asked.

“V-vision,” Eve lied, panting. “Horrible vision. I saw destruction in… a strange universe. Everything was dying. And then… and then you were there, and I woke up.”

Aradia nodded slowly. “What does it mean?”

“It means you need to go somewhere to stop a disaster. I… I think I found the coordinates after a search.” Eve handed Aradia a dimensional device keyed to Planetary Proxima. “That’s… That’s all I know.”

Aradia took the dimensional device. “I’ll check it out. You realize I might cause the disaster, right?”

“Then…” Eve bit her lip. “Then just get everyone out of there.”

Aradia nodded. “Got it. …Wonder what’s so important about this universe that you got a vision about it…” She shrugged, not questioning it further. She left the universe.

When she arrived in Planetary Proxima, she triggered the activation of the spell. Because of this, when she tried to go to the future, there was no future to go to. She quickly evacuated everyone, allowing the universe to be ‘shaped’ without costing a single life, but with the very real threat that lives could have been lost had it not been for a trick of fate.

Aradia would later believe Eve received a vision about the shaping because it had been Skarn’s assault. After all, there had been an illusory ship in there.

She never thought it was because Eve hadn’t had a vision at all.

The Handmaid had been manipulated like a puppet on a string.

And a war had been declared based on a lie.

~~~

Eve had broken down into tears several times in the telling of her story.

But now, at the end, she was all out. She was sniffing, but her eyes were dry, and her head heavy. She sat down on the ground, tired.

Then she looked up to check people’s reactions.

Pinkie, Flutterfree, Vriska, Corona, Spike, Cass, Luna, and Giorno were fixing her with sad – but understanding – eyes.

There were a few she couldn’t read at all. Jotaro, Daniel, O’Neill, Allure, and Toph.

And lastly there were the people who were clearly livid. Nova, Aradia, Renee, Applejack, and Prism.

None of them said anything. They were clearly still processing it all.

Corona took a few steps toward her, leaning down. As a hologram she couldn’t put a hand on Eve’s shoulder – but she could give her a sad smile. “I think you did the right thing.”

“Ex-cuse me!?” Renee blurted. “She manipulated us! She betrayed the trust not only of her friends but of her entire government! How is that okay!?”

Corona narrowed her eyes at Renee. “You can’t tell me you didn’t think about doing it too.”

Renee took a few steps back. “I, er… Yes! I did think about it! For a split second and then I pushed it out of my mind because it was wrong.”

“Sometimes you have to be a bitch,” Vriska said, folding her arms.

“I thought we learned this lesson already!” Aradia blurted. “And… I…”

“I’m sorry I had to lie to you,” Eve said.

“That’s not the point!” Aradia said, waving her hands. “You… you just… you fooled me! I trusted you and I was led to start a war!”

“We could have started the war without you,” Giorno said. “We used you to save lives.”

Flutterfree nodded slowly. “Always, spend as few lives as possible.”

Aradia looked at Flutterfree, eyes sad. “…You’re still on her side?”

“She never lied to me,” Flutterfree said. “She went out of her way to tell me she couldn’t tell me for my own protection, and still sought my counsel. I… I didn’t expect it to be this bad, but I knew it was going to be bad.”

Aradia glanced around the room. Then she looked to Eve. “…I can’t condone your activities in the war any longer. I’m withdrawing all versions of me from the effort.”

“Hold it,” O’Neill said, holding up a hand. “We can’t let this get out. It’d destroy us.”

Aradia nodded. “I know. I suppose I should have clarified only versions of me that are god-tier. You can keep the ghosts. I just… I can’t fight a war based on a lie.”

Renee glanced at O’Neill. “O’Neill, we can’t keep this locked up!”

“Yes we can,” O’Neill said.

“This is an impeachable offense!”

Hearing those words come from Renee drove a pick of ice through Eve’s heart.

“I know it is.” O’Neill leaned closer to Renee. “But we need the face of our people. If we get rid of her, things will fall apart. The inherent trust the people have in their leaders will vanish. Surely you know what happens to the USA regularly.”

Renee shook her head. “But… But if she’s willing to do this, we can’t trust her with this power anymore!”

“Renee!” Pinkie blurted. “Reel yourself in!”

“I’m an Overhead, Pinkie!” Renee blurted. “It’s part of my job to make sure there’s no corruption!” A single stream of tears rolled down her cheek. “And Eve’s just… She’s just…”

“She did what she thought was right, that’s not corrupt!” Pinkie blurted. “Do you really care more about the system than your friend!?”

“I… I…” Renee shook her head. “I can’t let her stay where she is, Pinkie! Not if she’ll ever do something like this again!”

“I Pinkie Promise that I’ll never do this again,” Eve said. “Hear that Pinkie?”

Pinkie blinked. “Eve, you can’t ma-”

“I already did. I’m not doing this again. I thought I was ready to sacrifice my people.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t.”

“Why couldn’t you have thought of that sooner!?” Prism shouted. “Huh? It took mom’s death to get you to see how screwed up you are!?”

“We can talk about that later!” O’Neill barked.

“Jack…” Daniel said, raising a hand.

“Daniel, quiet. We need to make sure none of this leaves this room. We can’t let this fall apart. Does everyone understand!?”

Renee looked at Eve, then back to O’Neill. “I… I… Yes. I know. I see. You’re right.”

Prism glared at O’Neill. “Are you any better than her? Willing to cover up?”

“Would you like Merodi Universalis to devolve into civil war?” O’Neill blurted.

Prism blinked. “Wh-”

“If Eve is impeached, or if the reason for her stepping down is ever uncovered, there are those so fiercely loyal to her they would refuse it. There are a lot of people who will think she made the right decision.”

Prism’s expression became horrified – as did Eve’s. “I… I didn’t realize…”

“You’re so preoccupied with what’s beyond us that you don’t realize the difference you make here,” Toph said. “I’d expect that from you. But Giorno?”

“I thought of it,” Giorno said. “I didn’t tell her.”

Eve stared at him. “W-what!?”

“The consequences of failure should not have mattered. All that mattered was if it was right or not. We were not going to be caught.”

“Giorno, I was going out of my way to protect everyone!”

Giorno looked at her with a serious expression. “Which just happened to make it much, much less likely for us to be found out. You avoided involving people out of a desire to protect them. It just happened to be the pragmatic choice as well.”

Eve’s mind reeled, unable to process that she, the mastermind of the whole scheme, had been manipulated in little ways as well.

“It’s going to be hard to keep this a secret with so many people knowing,” Giorno pointed out.

“We are not wiping any minds!” Eve blurted. “They all deserve to know! They need to know what I did, why I did it, and why Rainbow Dash is dead! That’s the whole point!”

“It took that much for your conscience to get to you?” Applejack asked, walking forward. “Ah’m surprised, Eve. Ah figured you were better than that.”

“Applejack…” Pinkie cautioned.

Applejack ignored her. “That was a really, really big lie Eve.”

Eve nodded. “It was.”

“Got one of your best friends killed.”

Eve winced. “Y-yes.”

“Ah figured Ah would have been able to see the shift in your eyes, the nervousness. But you managed to keep this entire thing secret for several months, and only Flutterfree knew anything about it.” Applejack narrowed her eyes, leaning in. “You couldn’t keep something this big a secret without practice.”

Eve’s and Flutterfree’s eyes opened wide in alarm. Corona bit her lip. Pinkie looked confused.

“What is it, Eve?” Applejack asked. “What other big lies have you kept from your friends? There’s no damn way this is the only one!”

Flutterfree inserted herself between Eve and Applejack. “Applejack, this isn’t what this is about…”

“Oh, you know what they are, don’t you? Why don’t you tell me?” Applejack threw a hoof in the air. “What’s she lied about, Flutterfree? What’s she kept from us!”

Flutterfree winced. “Applejack, stop. Please.”

There was a moment where Applejack looked like she was going to listen to Flutterfree’s plea – but her face returned to anger after a second. “No. No Ah’m not gonna stop. Eve! What is it? If you’re gonna come clean about this, might as well come clean about everythin’ else! And then that Pinkie Promise might actually mean somethin’.”

Eve looked around in fear. “I don’t… I can’t… No…”

“Why not!?” Applejack shouted. “It’s worse than this? How is that possible!?”

“I know what happens if you find out!” Eve squealed, the tears coming again even though she had supposedly run out earlier.

“The truth Evening! THE TRUTH!”

“I… I a-”

Flutterfree put a hoof over Eve’s mouth. “Now’s really not the time, Applejack. Really not the time.”

“Flutterfree, get out of the way.”

Flutterfree shook her head. “No.” The robes of Rage began to billow in a wind that didn’t exist.

“Nova? D’ya mind?”

Nova shook her head. “Not at all.” She grabbed Flutterfree in her magic and tore her off Eve. Flutterfree struggled – but Lolo couldn’t do anything to a telekinetic field, and she was not able to muster up Rage against her friend.

“Flutterfree!” Eve wailed.

“You don’t get to hide behind her,” Applejack said. “And you don’t get to hide behind your lies.”

“Applejack…”

“JUST LET IT OUT BEFORE I GO IN THERE AND DRAG IT OUT MYSELF!” Nova shouted.

“You don’t… I don’t…”

“There’s no way it’s worse th-”

“I AM NOT EVENING SPARKLE! HAPPY!?”

Pinkie’s mane deflated to fully straight in an instant.

“What in tarnation does that mean?” Applejack asked.

Pinkie grabbed Eve by the neck. “It means she’s Twilight-X. That’s what it means.”

“…What?” Vriska asked.

Eve was crying too hard to respond. So Pinkie did it for her. “Let’s go down a trip through memory lane, shall we? Once upon a time, there was a universe that copied every universe that touched it. This universe made copies of all of us! But, tragically, it was destroyed by Rick Sanchez. All our copies… destroyed. Except the Twilight that got killed wasn’t the copy! It was the real one! She’s been lying to us for decades about who she is!” Pinkie threw her to the ground. “You’re not Evening. You stole that name the moment it was created. You’re Twilight.”

“Back off!” Corona said.

“SHE LIED TO MY FACE CORONA! I ASKED HER AS DIRECTLY AS I POSSIBLY COULD OVER SPARKY’S GRAVE!”

“I KNOW!” Corona shouted. “I SAW IT IN TOPEKA!”

“You… you knew!?”

“I didn’t know this was the secret, but I knew there was a secret. And I know she was suffering deep, internal agony about not telling any of you.”

“Lying to us for decades…” Applejack said, face haunted. “What in the…”

“She wanted to tell you!” Flutterfree said. “She really did! She ju-’

“Why didn’t you!?” Applejack shouted.

“Because I was going to lose a friend when I did,” Eve said, unable to keep her face straight. “…That’s not completely true. I kept it at first out of fear, and then just because I kept doing it. But then I talked to Twilence. She… She told me that everything I feared was true. I’m going to lose a friend here today. I’m also going to have broken a bond of trust between someone and it’s never going to be fixed. I’m going to get some people to hate me, and I’m going to drive some people into depression.” She twitched, turning to anger. “Why did you have to drag it out of me, Applejack!? WHY!?”

“Because it was the truth!”

“Yeah, well it’s going to ruin everything! I admit, it was a mistake! I should have told you way back then! There’s no defense of pretending to be someone I wasn’t!”

“And there’s a defense for doing what you did here?”

“YES!”

“NO THERE AIN’T!” Applejack shouted. “THERE AIN’T NO DEFENSE FOR LYING TO CAUSE A WAR, TWILIGHT.”

The use of her old name shocked Eve to her core.

“That’s right. Twilight. You’re Twilight. You don’t get her name. You’re not the Charter-Princess.”

“You’ve known her longer than you knew the original!” Flutterfree shouted.

This fact seemed to terrify Applejack. “Ah… Ah…”

“I’m sorry!” Eve blurted. “I never should have let it get this far!”

“SORRY ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH!” Pinkie roared.

Nova’s anger dissipated for a moment to allow her to look at Pinkie. “…Pinkie? Yo-”

“NO! No I’m not freaking okay! I can see it now! I can see it all clearly. Lost friend? Applejack. Permanently ruined trust? Renee. Hatred? Oh that’ll be Prism over there. Depression? Well whoop-de-doo, that’s me.” She let out a laugh. “How about you all realize just what this means, huh? Flutterfree, you knew and you agreed to keep it from us! Spike, you didn’t notice that your mother-sister-whatever was replaced! Jotaro, that pony you owe that great debt to for fixing your family!? This isn’t even her. And how a-”

Vriska punched her in the face. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Pinkie was behind her. “You can never shut me up, Vriska! Why don’t you know this by now!?”

“I don’t care,” Vriska said. “All I know is that I may or may not have really known the original Eve. But I know this one. And I know she’s a fucking amazing person and you’re all being assholes! Friendship is magic, idiots!”

There was the sound of a door slamming. Everyone realized Jotaro had stormed off in a huff.

There was silence. The only real sound was Eve’s retching, her body trying to force her to cry more, but she just couldn’t.

O’Neill sighed. “…There’s nothing else for us to do here, right now. None of this leaves this room. Understood?”

Everyone nodded – they had at least gotten that out of this. Most of them turned away from Eve and left. O’Neill returned to his duties, letting his hologram vanish.

Flutterfree, Vriska, Allure, Corona, and Giorno remained after everyone had shuffled away.

Flutterfree held Eve close. She glared at Giorno. “You need to leave.”

Giorno’s face darkened. He wordlessly did as she asked.

Corona kneeled down and looked at Eve’s tormented face. “…I’m sorry. I have to go.”

Eve nodded, gagging on her breath in the process.

“I… I probably should be mad,” Corona admitted. “But… I’m not.”

Eve opened her mouth. “Th… thank you.”

Corona nodded, wiping her face. “We’ll talk later.” She disconnected.

Just Flutterfree, Vriska, and Allure now.

Allure looked at Eve. “…I don’t know what to think.”

Eve looked at her. “…I don’t know either.”

Allure moved to nuzzle her – but remembered she was a hologram. “Oh… …Sorry.”

“It’s… It…” Eve heaved again.

Flutterfree wiped her face. “She means it’s the thought that counts.”

Allure nodded. “Yeah.” She turned to Vriska. The troll’s face was of understanding. The Thief of Light empathized with the horrible feelings churning around Eve’s heart and mind.

Vriska pulled the Charter in. “I know,” she whispered into Eve’s ears. “…I know.”

Flutterfree, Vriska, and Eve held each other, still.

Allure decided she should probably go. She disconnected, wiping her own eyes. She walked down to the ground floor of the League of Sweetie Belles. “I’m going home early today.”

Thrackerzod took one look at her face and decided not to object. “…Need anything?”

“Minna,” Allure said. “…I need to go home.”

Thrackerzod let her go. Allure passed through the teleporter and arrived at the front door of her house.

“Hey mom, what-”

Allure pulled her into a hug. “I don’t know what’s up. Sorry.”

Minna blinked in surprise for a moment, but hugged her back. “…Are you okay?”

“Me? I’m fine,” Allure said, sniffing. “There’s a lot of other people who aren’t though.”

“Oh. Is it about the war?” Minna blinked. “Did… did the soldiers get to Celestia City?”

“Oh, no, no, not that,” Allure said. “We’re still safe. It’s just… An emotional issue.”

“I don’t like those soldiers. There’s something about them that… I just hate. I see their armor on the news and every sense in me tells me they’re… …Why are you looking at me like that?”

“My first instinct was to lie to you,” Allure said.

Minna blinked. “…What?”

“I was all ready to say, ‘don’t worry about it, they’re just the enemy, that’s why you get a bad feeling.’ But… but that’s not it. I know why you feel so strongly about them.”

Minna stared at her.

“We need to stop keeping secrets for the sake of others,” Allure said. “So… here it is. Under their armor they are white skinned white haired humans with purple eyes.”

Minna glanced at herself in the mirror.

“Who can sense the future. And have the ability to appear completely normal to all standard types of scans.”

Minna looked at her hands. Her dull purple eyes flashed, entering a bright, intense state. “I…”

“I know. The Congeries… I think that’s your home.” Tears formed in Allure’s eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

“It’s only been a few days, it’s o-” Minna’s eyes opened wide and she reeled forward. “I…” She put a hand to her forehead. “You… you still remember what I am, right?”

Allure nodded.

“Good. I… I stopped it.” She sat down on the couch, staring into space. “…I… A lot of images are flowing across my mind. I’ve been… activated somehow.”

“Huh?”

“I remember… I c-” She winced, cocking her head sideways. Then her eyelids opened fully and her pupils shrank to pinpricks, her bright purple iris shimmering with power she barely knew. She stood up tall, creating a crack in the ground with the force she exerted. “I’m a warrior.”

“Minna, no you’re not…”

Minna waved a hand. “I’m not now, but I was designed to be. I…” She closed her eyes and took a breath. “We don’t have a name. We’re just the soldiers. We exist to protect the Congeries and… to judge? I don’t understand what that means. I…” She put a hand on Allure, trembling. “I… Such pain… It’s too… It’s too much.”

“I’m here!” Allure said, holding her close. “I can take some of it for you!”

Minna looked right into Allure’s eyes. Both of their pupils pulsed in time – larger, smaller, larger, smaller again.

Allure was given a memory. She was a ‘human’ girl sitting in a vat, tubes plugged into her back. Each tube gave her extreme pain, making her want to cry – but she was in a vat, and every part of her was covered in a thick green syrup that made any action impossible.

She had no concept of food, language, family… She barely understood that time was a thing.

But today was the day she was taken out. The image of who took her out was blurry, but Allure only knew of one feminine bear creature. Brell.

Brell touched Allure with a gentle finger. It might have been soothing if Allure wasn't so afraid, and if she didn’t touch everywhere.

The wires and tubes were removed in an instant, sending great pain into Allure. Brell didn’t care about the pain. She just left Allure there, moving to another vat.

The memory shifted. Allure saw other children like her have a knife stabbed into their brains, coming out. The children were alive, but they stopped screaming. Stopped caring. They were ready to listen.

There was a voice. Brell’s? Allure didn’t know. “My beautiful children…”

Allure saw a human man dropped in front of the children. The others jumped him, tearing him limb from limb. Allure didn’t join – but she couldn’t stop watching.

She was dragged away from all the others…

And then the memory ended. Allure staggered back, breathing heavily.

“I… I have to go,” Minna said. “I have to stop it. Have to stop all of them. I… I have to destroy that place.”

It was rare Allure saw anger in her daughter’s face, but she definitely saw it now.

“Minna, that’s in the Congeries! Th-”

“I’m going,” Minna said, looking toward the door.

“You can’t leave Celestia City! We have a travel ban!”

“There won’t be a record of me leaving and nobody will remember,” Minna said. “…I can still think well enough to control it. Unlike the rest of them.”

“But that’s a warzone!”

Minna looked at Allure. “…Mom, I have to go.”

Allure stared at her daughter. Sixteen years old. She’d been such a treasure all those years – kind, quiet, understanding, mysterious, and patient. She’d never gone through the rebellious phase. Allure couldn’t even see this as a rebellion – it was a need. Since Allure had told her, a need had awoken in Minna.

Minna was talking to Allure not like a child, but an adult. An adult who understood the situation.

Allure gulped. “I… I can’t stop you, can I?”

Minna shook her head sadly. “No.”

“…Then I won’t try.” Allure hugged her daughter. “Come back.”

Minna bit back tears. “I will. I will. …Mom, if you see Frigid, tell him…” she paused. “Actually, you know what to tell him already.”

Allure nodded. “Yeah. I do. I love you.”

“I love you too.” Minna pulled back and opened the front door. “Pretend like you don’t remember me leaving. That’ll help you if anyone asks questions.”

“I know.” Allure said.

Then Minna was gone.

Allure looked at her hooves. This all happened because I decided to tell her the truth…

…Was I wrong?

~~~

Eve walked up to the front door of the Apple Family farm and knocked.

Apple Bloom opened the door, a judging look on her face. “Twilight.”

Eve sighed. “She told you?”

“You know how much she hates keeping secrets. Now she has to for national security.” Apple Bloom bristled. “You should consider yourself lucky she’s doin’ it at all.”

Eve nodded. “I don’t suppose she’ll let me talk to her?”

“Nope. And in fact Ah’m supposed to tell you never to come by here again. You’re not welcome.”

“…Oh,” Eve said, drooping.

Apple Bloom’s stern exterior broke, replaced with sympathy. “Look, E- Twilight, Ah… Ah don’t think you need to be ostracized like this. But she’s made her decision. And Ah think she’s sure of it. Very sure.”

Eve said nothing.

“Ah’m sorry. Ah think you’ve lost her.”

“I know I have,” Eve said. She levitated a letter out of her saddlebags and gave it to Apple Bloom. “…Give this to her when you think she’s in a better mood.”

“What is it?”

“A goodbye letter,” was all Eve said. “…And Apple Bloom?”

“Yah?”

“Thanks for being… you.”

Apple Bloom smiled awkwardly. “Uh… kay?”

Eve teleported away. She used Seraphim to override the planetary dimensional lock, appearing in the Hub. She teleported to Renee’s house and knocked.

Daniel opened the door. The sounds of Renee’s wailing could be heard from inside the house.

“…She’s not in the mood to talk to you,” Daniel said.

“…That’s obvious,” Eve said. She pulled out another letter. “This is for her. When she’s ready.”

“What is it?”

“An apology, a plea, and a goodbye. And some other things.” Eve smiled sadly. “You’ll give it to her?”

Daniel nodded. “There’ll probably be a lot of ice cream tubs I give her before this, though.”

“Take as long as she needs,” Eve said. “…Thanks.”

She teleported away. She dialed Equis Vitis again, stopping by Pinkie’s house.

She walked up to the door and knocked. There was no response.

Eve had expected this. What she had not expected was to be able to see through one of Pinkie’s windows into the dining room. Pinkie was sitting on the table, mane perfectly flat, faced away from Eve.

Eve knew Pinkie knew she was watching, and vice versa. Pinkie didn’t turn her head to look at Eve with her eyes, only registering the alicorn’s presence through her Awareness.

That was enough for Eve. She left Pinkie’s letter in the mailbox.

Then she teleported away.

~~~

It was a few days before Apple Bloom thought she could leave the letter for Applejack on her nightstand. Applejack was ready for bed when she saw it – Eve’s cutie mark imprinted on it.

She almost didn’t read it. But, in the end, she picked it up.

Hi, Applejack.

I know it’s over. You and I may never speak again for all I know. Normally I would fight against this with every fiber in my being, but I know that’d just make it worse for both of us. I’m sorry for that.

I lied. I lied a lot, for a long time, to everyone I met about who I was. I lied about other things. But it was always mostly that.

You were right. It trained me to keep my face level, to not visibly react when people said certain things. It turned me into a better liar. It’s the reason I was able to go through with what I did.

For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I hurt you.

I want you to know that, despite the ending, I will always cherish the friendship we had. All those picnics we had with the girls, all those adventures, and all those lessons. Remember the time when you had me feed the pigs and your instructions were absolutely absurd? I was always sure you were the sane one before that day. Or what about the time we worked together to run Flim and Flam out of Ponyville?

But those are her memories, aren’t they? Even though I know they’re not truly mine, I have a hard time separating them.

What of the memories we had afterward? Renee’s wedding? The struggle we shared against the Combine and Horrorterrors? The last mission on the island?

The point is that I will cherish these memories. I like to think you will too.

But I know you won’t be able to accept me. I’m not the Charter-Princess, and you need to grieve for her loss. You’ll never be able to see me as anything other than one big lie that thumbs its nose at your feelings. Which I guess I am, and I will continue to be. It’s okay if you resent me. I understand.

So this is a goodbye.

I’m going t-

Applejack couldn’t read anymore. She crumpled the letter up, threw it in the trash, and proceeded to cry herself to sleep.

~~~

Renee found her letter inserted between a tub of vanilla ice cream and orange sherbert.

She started crying again the moment she saw it, but she opened it up anyway.

Hi Renee,

Trust should be one of the Elements of Harmony.

There are some Trusts that can be repaired – regained over time. Flutterfree and I were like that. But you’re a different mare to Flutterfree, and our relationship is decidedly unique. We aren’t just friends – we’re also colleagues. Colleagues with huge responsibilities, including the charge to keep each other in check.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am corrupt. Maybe it’s because I spent so long lying about who I was.

I like to think I’ll change now. But the secrets still need to be kept for the sake of the nation. I wish they didn’t. I’m so tired of secrets, of abused trust. Sick of it all.

I don’t really know what you think about me lying to you about who I was. I hope you’ll move past it, and accept that I am still your friend.

I don’t want to lose two. I didn’t want to lose one.

If you really think I can’t be trusted in my position, come talk to me after I’m back. Tell me why. Let’s talk it out. I’ll say I resigned because I had been the Relations Overhead for too long, and that it was time to pass on the torch. You will have to convince me of that for it to be true.

But first, I’m going t-

Renee burst into tears again, throwing the letter off the table. She just couldn’t handle it right now.

~~~

Pinkie Pie w-

“Just shut up.”

…

“Thank you. So readers! Here I am, sitting on a table, as depressed as I’ve ever been. I’ve been betrayed not only by Eve, but also by my knowledge. I should have known she had a secret. But guess whaaaaat? It was kept from me. On purpose. For the sake of drama and tension.

“ISN’T THIS ENTERTAINING!? ISN’T IT!?

“It is, isn’t it? You like watching us wallow in despair, watching us suffer, watching us struggle. I bet you were laughing at it the whole time ‘aha, Pinkie doesn’t know! How silly! That’s going to bite them all later’ and then you felt all satisfied when you realized you called it. Or maybe you wanted something unexpected to happen and were disappointed?

“WELL WHY DON’T I JUST SLIT MY OWN THROAT RIGHT HERE THEN, HUH? WOULDN'T THAT BE UNEXPECTED!?

“…

“I’m sorry. I… I wouldn’t do that. I just got angry and wanted to hurt you. That was wrong of me.

“I guess I should probably read my letter now. Sun’s setting after all. Appropriate time.”

Hi Pinkie.

I’ve wanted to tell you for so long. I’ve wanted to spill my very soul to you, to tell you everything about myself, about my struggles, about the things I’ve had to see through the eyes of a survivor, about – well I don’t really know.

I’ve had that dream multiple times. Where I’m standing with you at Sparky’s grave, and I tell you everything. I never get to see the ending of that dream.

Maybe I will now.

I know it’s hard to be you. I know that I just made it worse by what I did. I kept things from you, things you should have known. You all should have known.

Should I have told you that first day, Pinkie? Would you all have accepted me? Or would you have grieved over the original and seen me as an unfortunate reminder?

Can you answer that question?

I don’t think you can. Twilence wasn’t able to, not for sure.

It was still wrong not to tell you. I don’t know why I’m rambling like this. I’m sorry. If nothing else, I should have told you that day you asked. You were in pain about your uncertainty. I could have helped you. I didn’t. I was a horrible friend.

I want to thank you for standing up for what I did. It meant a lot.

“It’s because we can’t lose. You deduced that. You knew that, because of who we were, we couldn’t lose… You just never vocalized it.”

I know I can’t fix this. But I’m going to try to atone for it.

I’m going to the warfront.

“Wait what!?”

I’m going to fight in the war I created instead of hiding in my tower, locked away from the danger. I’m going to atone for what I’ve done – whether it was really wrong or not, I will suffer the consequences of it. The secret cannot come out. So I will experience it myself.

I’ll be back. I’m the protagonist, right? Or maybe I’ll just be replaced again. I’ll be fine with that. I should have perished with my universe.

Take care of yourself.

-Evening Sparkle

“Uh… Yeah I’m going to need a scene break.”

~~~

Pinkie’s mane was still completely flat. She glared at Vriska, Nova, Flutterfree, and Jotaro.

“Eve’s gone to the warfront,” Pinkie said. “And she’s going to get herself killed if we don’t do something.”

Vriska and Flutterfree sat up in shock.

“Yes, I know you two helped her arrive at that decision. Yes, I also know you two are thinking ‘hey, what about her being the protagonist, doesn’t that protect her?’ Let’s just cut to the chase. That was stupid and your ka-based decision licenses are revoked.” She cleared her throat. “So we’re going to save her. Now we get to go to the warfront.” She turned to Jotaro. “And before you say anything, remember all the other things she’s done for you. You owe her a lot more than just that one thing.”

Jotaro grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

“Good.”

Nova sighed. “I’m… I’m still mad at her. But you’re right, we can’t just let her throw her life away.”

“I was so su-” Flutterfree began.

Pinkie shook her head. “I know you were sure. But trust me when I say we have to go help her. We are the primary team – and she’s our friend. No matter what she’s done, no matter how we feel, if she’s in danger we’re going to help her.”

“Right,” all four of them said at once.

Pinkie let herself smile – even though her mane didn’t pick up at all. “I’m glad we’re all on the same page.”

“One problem though,” Vriska said, pointing at Flutterfree. “She’s not a warrior. Never has been. She wouldn’t survive in a war.”

Pinkie glanced at Flutterfree. “You can stay behind if you want.”

“I’m going,” Flutterfree said, jaw set. “There’s no way I’m not going now. And you know this.”

“Yeah. Which is why I asked for a special guest today.” Pinkie clapped her front hooves together. A version of Fluttershy walked into the room. She had a blindfold over her face to hide her lack of eyes, razor sharp tips in her wings, and sharp metal boots on her hooves. “This is Flair, the Fluttershy of Affix’s world.”

Flair turned to face Flutterfree, even though she was blind. “I can give you the weapons I have.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Do it.”

“They are not easily removable without trauma to the nervous system,” Flair warned. “Not to mention your wings are no longer going to be soft and comforting – they will be deadly. Are you certain you want to turn yourself into a warrior?”

“If I want to survive out there, I’ll have to.” She fixed Flair with a determined glare, brimming with a slight aura of Rage. “Do it.”

Flair nodded. She produced a black box and placed it on the ground. She tapped it with one of the sharp tips of her wing, making it open up. Shards of metal shot deep into Flutterfree’s wings. No blood was drawn – but Flutterfree felt her bones crackle and fuse back together, prompting her to scream. Only the tips of the metal were visible at the ends of her wings, one for each clump of feathers. The boots went next – embedding large spikes right into her hooves that replaced much of her lower leg bones, giving her hooves a metallic point at the front.

She grabbed her chest – lucky that the points on her hooves pointed away from her. “Ah… Ah… Ah…”

“The pain will subside in an hour or two,” Flair said. “Your wings are now razor sharp. Careful what you hold with them. Your hooves should still function as they did before, except now you have sharp points at the front. I was able to flood the power of my Element of Kindness into the weapons – your internal Rage should be able to do the same.”

Flutterfree looked at the emblem of Rage on her chest. “Got it.”

“If you react any way like I did, you’ll grow accustomed to this naturally.” Flair put a gentle hoof on Flutterfree’s shoulder. “You are now a killing machine, Flutterfree. Be careful.”

“I will.”

“What are we waiting for?” Pinkie blurted. “Let’s go save Eve!”

“Wait, Renee will try to stop us,” Nova pointed out. “She has close tabs on us.”

Pinkie and Jotaro smiled knowingly. “We have a man on the inside,” Pinkie said with a wink.

“GIRL!” a voice shouted from the other room.

“Oh. Right. Pidge,” Nova said.

“Thanks for getting her off our backs!” Flutterfree called.

“Just get going before she figures out and fires me, okay?”

103 - Conquest, Part 1

O’Neill had called another special meeting in the middle of Celestia City, including Thor, Squeaky, Saxton Hale, Starbeat, Ava, and the robotic Research Overhead. “We’re approaching the end, people. Within the hour the subfleets are expected to breach Skarn’s defenses and be within weapons range of the Congeries’ center. It took them seven local ‘days’ to get this far. The effectiveness of the Redshirt strategy has exceeded all expectations.”

Starbeat couldn’t help but smirk.

O’Neill grunted. “Yes, we get it, you were right. Outside of a large-scale military engagement such methods are going to be banned, you understand.”

“That’s Oversight’s and Justice’s purview,” Ava pointed out.

“And the chances of them not regulating this sort of thing?”

“Minimal. Just reminding you of your place.”

O’Neill looked at the Labor Overhead. On some days he thought she was the perfect person for the job, and on others she was just so nagging about ‘proper use of authority’ and the like.

She would definitely have Eve and Giorno’s heads if she knew. Which she wouldn’t. Ever.

Which made him accessory to conspiracy. What fun. Four of the thirteen Overheads in on a conspiracy.

If they were somehow found out now it would be even more disastrous than if it had just been Evening and Giorno. Such pleasant thoughts today, I’m on a roll.

Squeaky cleared her throat, sensing a lull in the report. “We have received occasional visual confirmation of the Congeries’ center. Every image we manage to snap is not useful for more than a few minutes because it’s in a state of rapid flux. What we do know is that the center of the Congeries occupies a single universe about the size of a standard Earth Sun, relatively speaking. Unlike all the other universes in the Congeries, this one is perfectly spherical, instead of the random patchwork we’re used to. The outer edge of this center is always completely solid, although changing material and pattern.”

“I thought he gave up using walls?” Saxton Hale asked.

“It was ineffective against a spread out fleet,” Thor said. “However, once we reach the center, the surface area is small enough that Skarn’s Shaping Mechanism can alter the entire area at one time. This means a wall that he can continually repair on all sides will be very effective at keeping us out, assuming he can jam teleportation past it.”

“We’ve also detected that all his remaining ships are clustering around the center,” O’Neill said. “There’s not that many – few hundred – but it’ll be enough to do some damage. Not to mention there are probably hundreds of thousands of those vanilla bean soldiers hiding out in various places, ready to board and wreak more havoc on our fleet.”

“Remaining subfleets?” Ava asked.

“Twenty-six,” the Research Overhead reported. “Projected to be twenty-five or twenty-four at time of arrival. Roughly 60% of our original fleet size.”

“Those are bad numbers,” O’Neill pointed out.

“In a standard Earth War,” the Research Overhead countered.

“This is a multiversal war,” Thor commented. “Weapons are significantly more lethal and when a ship is destroyed, the entire crew usually goes with it. I suspect the defense numbers are much better for our side.”

The Research Overhead nodded. “Medical attention and revive spells are much more readily available for our combatants here – ones that aren’t using the Conjoiners, anyway. 95% strength, the exact opposite predicted for the Congeries forces.”

“Guess we’re moving on to the defense report,” O’Neill said. “Conclusion of the offense – horrible losses, but we’ve got enough left to smash their doors in from all sides. As already mentioned the defense is going much smoother. With the exception of the first day where we scrambled to defend against unexpected ground troop movements, we have taken control of the situation. As the offense has pushed deeper and deeper into the Congeries, fewer and fewer ships arrive in our space.

“Recovery efforts for Earth Vitis and Equis Cosmic are underway in full force, though numerous cities have been lost in both. Earth Vitis Canterlot is a complete loss, structurally. Luckily the city was mostly evacuated before the Congeries fully entered. Currently, these two worlds have almost no enemy presence, same for Equis Vitis. E-Sphere universes never had any significant presence to begin with.”

“Which leaves three fronts,” Thor said. “The Elemental Nations, Lai, and the Hub. The Hub is under no major threat but it is known vast numbers of them are hiding in the jungles. The Elemental Nations have been fighting numerous waves of the soldiers in several locations for most of the war, so there is no surprise there. We were completely surprised by Lai.”

Squeaky nodded. “They found an ancient Rune that allowed them to duplicate themselves. The Rune was destroyed at the behest of Queen Toph, but the aftermath is proving to be problematic. Lai has the least dimensional stabilizers out of all the founding worlds, and they are being systematically removed by the Congeries. They are not expected to take out any of them in Lai castle, but the civilian damage they are causing cannot be understated. Even with medical staff and harmonic energy all around, it’s a bloodbath out there.”

“Which is why we need to take Skarn out,” O’Neill said. “End this war.”

“And what if the soldiers keep fighting?” Ava said, raising an eyebrow.

“Then we better hope the fleet finds a way to get past their memory screwing so we can dump the protomolecule on them, because it’ll be a long extermination process otherwise.”

~~~

Allure looked at her chosen warriors.

Jade, Alushy, and Nae.

“I want you to find Minna and protect her,” Allure said.

Jade raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t y-”

“I can’t sleep!” Allure blurted. “I have to know if she’s okay! D-don’t try to stop her from completing her mission, but help her if you can.” She looked down. “I’m not a soldier. Even though I learned to fight well in the Loops, I don’t think I could handle a full-scale war. I’d just get in the way.”

“You got that right,” Alushy said. “Though I hear Flutterfree got some snazzy new wing knives, I’m sure there’s some bitchin’ super armor we can get you or somethin’.”

“I’d rather not integrate my skeleton with deadly metal, thank you,” Allure said. “But I do have friends I trust. Friends that can go and keep her safe.”

Jade nodded. “You can count on us.”

“I know. Nae here has already been fighting – she’ll get you into the thirty-eighth subfleet and guide you in from there.”

Nae smiled. “It’s brutal out there, but we’ll find her. Just have to spend a little time in every fleet to do it. Personnel are a bit hard to keep track of, especially if there’s a soldier who’s lying about their name, age, or otherwise.”

“If she’s fighting, whatever commander she’s under will know it,” Allure said. “Because… you know.”

“We know,” Nae said. “By the way, Alushy, I thought you were already fighting?”

“I got bored,” Alushy said, stretching her wings. “But this is more than enough reason for me to go back in. Let’s fuck ‘em up.”

Jade barked.

Alushy chuckled. “There it is.”

Jade sighed. “Shouldn’t we get going?”

“One last thing,” Allure said. “You’re not supposed to be in speeders or high-danger situations unless you find her there. …Please, come back safe.”

“Do I look like I plan to die today?” Alushy said, laughing. “No, of course not. Don’t you worry your pretty head about us.”

Nae opened a portal. “The best place to dial the fleet is from the Hub. Come on.”

The three of them left, the portal closing behind them.

Allure was alone once again.

I’m going to be in a constant loop of second-guessing my decisions today.

She cut her hologram transmission, returning to Celestia City. She’d wanted to send Thrackerzod as well, but there was currently a travel ban to keep the Congeries from finding Celestia City.

…She still wanted to be near the action, or at least the place the action would be. She asked the City to track down O’Neill for her. She had the required security clearance to do so. It pointed her right to his bunker briefing room.

She stepped outside onto one of the outer layers of Celestia City and looked at the sky – or what parts of the ‘sky’ she was allowed to see. She could only make out mysterious swirling patterns of red, a simplified view of the true eldritch nature of the location.

Hastur had been kind enough to lend a smaller Eldritch Embodiment universe that nobody cared about to them. The Congeries would never expect them to be within the space of another nation while they were at war – which was exactly why they were here.

It was only a short walk to a teleporter pad and then Allure arrived at the military bunkers. They were a series of simple, metallic rooms devoid of decoration. She received a few odd glances from the military masterminds, but she didn’t mind, and they didn’t look long – they were far too busy. She found O’Neill enjoying a cup of what was probably coffee, leaning against a wall.

“Hey,” Allure said.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” O’Neill told her, standing up tall.

“Sure.” Allure sighed. “Don’t mind me, I’m just here because I can be and I’m really, really nervous.”

“Minna still?”

Allure nodded. “Yeah.”

“This might make you feel worse. We talk a lot about death and sacrificing soldiers here.”

“Maybe. I’ll leave if I think it’s too much.” She looked at the holographic model of the offense – the subfleets converging on a single point. It looked beautiful to her, the golden color of Merodi Universalis charging the red cluster of dots that represented the Congeries.

“You think we’re going to win?”

“It’s not actually a question of if we’ll win,” O’Neill said. “We’re almost certain of it. The question is how much are we going to have to sacrifice to pull it off.”

“Ah…”

“There’s also the third option,” O’Neill said. “Something unexpected happens.”

“But if you’re expecting it doesn’t that make it expected?”

“Talk to Starbeat, and then proceed to be more confused.”

Allure let out a sigh. “Oh joy…”

~~~

Corona was not on the Andromeda at the moment – she was strolling down the speeder bays of the Austraeoh, so named because it’s captain was a Rainbow Dash who said that was how it needed to be. Apparently it meant something in her home universe.

Not that Corona had any idea what it meant. That Rainbow Dash captain had a lot of stories to tell, but they jumped all over the place so much that Corona had a hard time keeping track of it all, especially since so few of them ever got finished due to sudden combat.

Corona pushed those thoughts out of her mind – she had a particular speeder team she wanted to talk to. Her current prized team who had pulled through so many times to pull the fleet forward.

She tapped on the window of speeder forty-two. “Hey.”

A purple alicorn with a white mane (styled in the standard Twilight Sparkle fashion) and green eyes poked her head out of the speeder. “Yes?” she asked, light glinting off her white hearing devices.

Corona knew it was Eve. But as far as Eve was concerned Corona thought she was ‘Twinkie’, so named because of her white mane. Which totally wasn’t fake. “Twinkie, I want to see your whole team.”

Eve nodded, gesturing for everyone to come out. Two of the crewmembers were redshirts that Corona didn’t have time to care about, unfortunately. The fourth member, however… white skin, white hair, purple eyes.

Definitely Minna. She called herself Nadia and claimed to be a turncoat. Corona didn’t have any complaints about the falsehood, since Minna was the most effective speeder pilot she had, considering her sudden mastery of her kind’s unusual sight.

Corona also knew that while both Eve and Minna thought their ‘disguises’ were perfect, they each knew who the other was. It was frankly rather comical.

“Right, so, you know you’re the speeder team with the biggest success in the entire third subfleet, right?” Corona asked.

Eve nodded. “Right.”

“Good news, you’re all getting medals. Bigger ones this time.”

Eve rubbed the back of her head. “Yeah…”

“I’m also going to be transferring you off speeders.”

Minna blinked. “Wait, what?”

“We’re reaching the center,” Corona said. “Won’t need them much longer. I think you’ll do great as part of my personal strike team.”

Eve blinked. “Shouldn’t you stay on the Andromeda commanding the subfleet?”

“I am one of the strongest spellcasters in the entire fleet,” Corona pointed out. “I won’t be needed when Yellow Diamond retakes control in the final moments. So I’m forming a team for direct attacking. You four are on it.”

Minna’s concerned look turned to a smile. “Good. Thanks, Corona.”

“Don’t mention it, Nadia,” Corona said with a smile. “You can come with me to the Andromeda for now. We’ll be able to discuss the actual plan. I really think you should be part of it.”

Eve shot Corona a glance. …Do you know? she asked telepathically.

Yes. Eve, that’s a horrible disguise.

She grimaced. Ah. Well, thanks then. For covering.

Anytime.

Minna glanced between Corona and Eve. “Hidden conversation… Hrm…”

Corona waited for Minna’s inkling to tap into what was going on.

Unfortunately, it looked as if Minna was not meant to know about the conversation, because she just shrugged and put on a smile.

Corona teleported them to the Andromeda’s bridge to begin the explanation of what was to come.

~~~

“You know what I hate?” Pinkie said as she trudged through the halls of another speeder-carrying ship in yet another subfleet. Her mane was still as straight as it could be, but she was otherwise fine.

“Skarn?” Vriska suggested.

“War?” Nova muttered, trying in vain to magically grow part of her mane back.

“Needless violence?” Flutterfree added. She looked the worst out of all of them, by far – her wingtips were covered in blood that had dried long ago, her Rage robes and mane were in tatters, and she looked tired.

“Yare yare daze?” Jotaro suggested.

“Spotty information,” Pinkie said. “I was just partially aware of Eve getting taken out of a speeder and onto a strike force mission. But I can’t tell you in which fleet it’s in because, gasp, that would ruin the boring drudgery we’re doing now!” She pulled a knife out of her mane and threw it into a nearby wall. “I’m getting real fed up with it.”

“We’ve searched over half the subfleets,” Flutterfree reminded her. “It won’t be that much longer.”

“I think we all know we’re going to end up in the big battle in the center,” Pinkie muttered. “Because of course we do. The story was never going to get there without us.” She smacked herself in the head. “What a dummy I’ve been!”

“You really need to get back to being yourself,” Nova said. “Seriously, I’m used to fighting the Pinkies that have gone psycho. You’re making me want to shoot you out of reflex.”

Pinkie grunted. “I’ll be fine. Ish. Eventually. Whatever, you all voted me out of the leader position anyway, who cares about my mental state!?”

“I do,” Flutterfree said, smiling warmly. “We all do.”

Pinkie sighed. “Sorry, sorry. Not in the best headspace right now, and I’m being forced to fight in a war. You don’t know what that’s like.” She caught Flutterfree’s glance. “…Nevermind, talked without thinking again.”

“It’s okay.”

“And this is why you’re the leader right now,” Vriska said. “You’re still cool.”

“I predict I’ll have a psychotic breakdown sooner or later,” Flutterfree said, staring at the blood on her wings. “Jotaro, remember, you’re the backup.”

Jotaro nodded.

Nova rubbed the back of her head. “I just realized. All of us are kinda stressed out to the point of shouting at each other, and yet we’re still a functioning unit.”

“We’ve been working together for decades,” Flutterfree explained. “So even if I’m acting like a bitch everyone will just roll with it and we’ll be fine.”

Nova stared at Flutterfree. “…I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say ‘bitch’ before.”

“Evidence of my impending psychotic breakdown,” Flutterfree said with a sad laugh.

“There is something seriously wrong with all of us,” Vriska said.

“This war needs to end,” Nova said. “Assuming Pinkie’s right, we might be the ones to do it.”

“At least that’ll be cathartic,” Pinkie muttered. “I’ll crush them like bubble wrap.”

“Fun,” Jotaro commented.

“Well look what the kraken dragged in!” Meenah marched up to them, Feferi at her heels. “Never expected to see you fronds in the twenty-seventh subfleet.”

“We’re looking for Eve,” Nova said. “Have any alicorn mares with suspicious deafness or an aversion to loud sounds?”

“Not that I know of,” Meenah said.

Feferi pulled out her phone and did some searches. “Nothing comes up. But the persoshell files aren’t always up to date. Or organized. Or accurate. It’s just become more of a seaweed tangle as time’s gone on. That’s probably why you’re down here, isn’t it?”

“Direct search!” Pinkie declared. “Results: big fat zero.”

Meenah smirked. “I’m shore you’ll find her eventually.” Her smile faded a second later. “Hey… I’m sorry about Rainbreath.”

Flutterfree smirked. “…Rainbreath?”

“Yep. That’s what I called her. A few others had started usin’ it as shell.”

“Probably would have ended up being her name,” Pinkie said with a sigh. “...’Dasha’ was never really her, you know?”

“We know it wasn’t your fault,” Nova assured Meenah.

“Probably was, indirectly,” Meenah said. “So… Yeah. Anyway, if I can do anyfin’ for ya just let me know a-”

Red lights started flashing on the ships wall. An alarm message met their ears. “WE’VE BEEN BOARDED!”

“And that’s my cue to get back to my ship,” Meenah said. “Want a teleport out of here while they sort this out?”

Flutterfree shook her head. “No, we’ll help deal with it. Right team?”

Vriska produced her dice, grinning. “Hell yeah.”

Meenah gave Vriska a thumbs-up before returning to the safety of her command ship. Everyone knew she would have loved to stay and fight, but such were the responsibilities of a subfleet commander.

Nova lit her horn and checked her screen. “They’re in the engine room. Teleporting now…”

They teleported successfully to the engine room – a cylinder-shaped enclosure with a large blue column of energy in the center. There was a hole in a nearby wall that vented to the bizarre space of the Congeries, but luckily explosive decompression wasn’t a thing under the current physics; it was just a windy loss of air.

About a dozen of the armored soldiers were in the room, shooting at the heavily-shielded column of energy with their invisible attacks.

“And you get to die of a heart attack,” Vriska said, draining one’s luck to zero in an instant. He died of spontaneous combustion. This made Vriska’s left eye twitch.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

It was generally very difficult for the soldiers to dodge time stop, even more so when Jotaro threw Hermit Purple and the Passion into the mix, reading the intents of their souls and tying them together. That said, they were still in power armor, and thus didn’t die instantly from Star Platinum’s punches.

The enemy soldiers gambled and went for the energy column whole hog. They destroyed it without much more effort, breaking the ship’s engines. The resulting power surge caused an explosion elsewhere on the ship, destabilising its trajectory. It headed straight down for the protomolecule planet’s surface.

“HOLD ON!” Nova shouted, tapping into the deepest reserves of her magic to telekinetically grab the ship and pull up. There was no way she was preventing the crash – but maybe it wouldn’t be at terminal velocity.

Flutterfree moved, slipping between the standing soldiers with her bladed wings. Many of them were able to simply step out of the way, but the three that couldn’t were cut in half. She whirled around and fired the bow of light a couple times for good measure, forcing another one to dodge right into Pinkie’s chainsaw.

“You are a lot more interesting to fight with when you’re crazy,” Vriska pointed out.

“Less quipping, more fighting,” Pinkie said, producing a spike-studded golf club and removing a soldier’s head with it.

Even with their strength and memory twisting, Skarn’s forces never stood a chance against Merodi Universalis’ primary team.

Nova managed to safely crash the ship on the surface of the protomolecule planet with the hole in the wall facing upward, so as to not crush all of them. The blue biological construct began to worm its way into the ship and do its work – repairing damage and trapping any living enemy soldiers in cocoons. The next best thing to actual infection.

The Investigator appeared to Pinkie. “Sometimes the cases close themselves.”

“Yep, you’re right.” Pinkie said. “I confess, I totally murdered these people. …Though for all we know the fight was actually long and brutal but our memories have been altered. Heh.”

Everyone stared at her.

“Investigator,” Pinkie explained.

“Thought you were the nice ones,” the Investigator said, examining a body Flutterfree had cut in two.

“We’re in a bad mood,” Pinkie muttered. “Speaking of, we need to check this ship and move to the next subfleet. Sorry, no time for you.”

Vriska turned to Jotaro. “Should we tell her to be less rude?”

Jotaro shrugged. “For all we know the Investigator is insulting her family.”

“He’s not!” Pinkie called. “But we do need to move it! Chop chop! Adventure awaits and all that crap!”

~~~

“All we know for sure about it is that it’s spherical,” Corona said, bringing up a hologram that displayed the Congeries’ center, complete with all the red dots that represented the enemy ships they knew about. The reddish light covered the Andromeda’s bridge “We have reason to believe it’s just a big, shifting wall that wants to keep us from whatever’s inside.”

“So what’s the plan, then?” Eve asked.

“The first plan is to shoot everything we’ve got at it,” Lady Rarity said. “Yellow Diamond thinks the simple solution will be the best. Smash it until it opens and reveals the inside for us.”

“Skarn’s going to be too clever for that,” Minna said. “Just keep shaping the wall back into existence. Wailing on it isn’t going to do anything.”

“I’m personally hoping ramming a protomolecule planet into it will do it,” Corona said. “We’ve got the really big one still. If nothing else we can probably infect the center with that maneuver.”

“We’ll need to use a planet that doesn’t have anyone grounded on it,” Eve said.

“Clearing efforts are underway now,” Corona said. “Regardless, that’s plan A. Plan B is what we’re going to be doing. Take small teams down, go to the surface of the shape, and try to avoid Skarn’s senses. If he’s occupied with giant ships he may not be able to take time out of his day to smash us directly. Which means, yes, the strike team doesn’t get a ship. Armor, but nothing else.”

Minna nodded. “Okay.”

“So we just sneak in?” Eve asked.

Corona smirked. “Sneak until we’re on the surface. Then a drill a hole right through this crust of his using all the magic we have at our disposal. Then… We don’t exactly know what’s inside, so we’ll work that part out when we get to it.”

“Sounds fun,” Eve commented.

“I think it’s a good plan,” Minna said. “Who’s coming?”

“Me, Rarity, you two, the rest of your team, and some others.” All Redshirts. “Got it?”

“Seems simple enough,” Eve said.

“Good. It won’t seem simple while we’re out there.”

“Incoming message!” the communications officer declared. “Yellow Diamond is ordering us to fuse with subfleet nineteen.”

“Nineteen?”

“The one that’s currently at the front and suffering heavy losses.”

“Why am I not surprised,” Corona said, hand to her chin. “Right, dial nineteen’s coordinates, let’s show these morons we mean business.” She sat down in her chair. “Might want to get your suits on – there may not be a lull between combat anymore.”

Eve didn’t need a suit, so she just took her position next to Corona. Lady Rarity fastened a few clamps around her armor’s neck, making it airtight. Minna was the only one who had to walk to the back halls behind the bridge to access armor storage.

She nervously reached out, placing her hand on the storage door. Behind it was the only physical thing that separated her from those monsters out there. Cold, impassioned metal that existed to improve her ability to kill. It may have been armor, but she wasn’t paying very much thought to the defensive aspect of the clothing. At the moment, it was all war and danger to her.

She popped the door open, walking into a short hall with standard equine and humanoid suits hung on the walls. She somehow just knew which one was her size, walking right up to it and staring up at its helmet.

It didn’t look anything like the purplish armor of what they were fighting. The metal was a simple gray. The lights in it were glowing an ominous red, but that was only because it was hooked up to Corona’s personal magic in the Andromeda. The plates fit together smoothly, and it was well padded on the inside. She even noticed interior pockets for small, sentimental items.

This was definitely not the things her people were wearing. There was no physics-altering field here, just standard high-end magitech.

She suddenly felt a lot better. She stepped right into it, feeling the padding close around her limbs. She didn’t feel claustrophobic, though that may have had more to do with her limited capacity to feel fear than the minor epiphany she had just gone through.

The screen on her visor lit up – and gave her an error message she saw three seconds before it popped up. PLEASE SEE MECHANIC TO ADJUST ‘FLUX CAPACITOR’ BEFORE USE. There was fine print under the message. The ‘Flux Capacitor’ is nameless component 849-1234-2842-13590715.

Minna sighed, prying herself out of the suit. She looked for another one of the same size in the locker but found none. With a grunt she returned to the bridge. “Only one of my size is broken. I’m going down to the lower decks to get one.”

“Computer, give Nadia full armory clearance if she doesn’t have it already,” Corona said absent-mindedly, closely watching the report of the fight. The third fleet had taken over the nineteenth and they were pushing forward much faster than expected – the near-zone of the Congeries center might be nothing but a single universe jump away.

Minna moved to leave the bridge – but then the Andromeda shook.

“Under fire!”

Corona examined her map. “Directly? How? Where? I don’t see a ship here!”

“Currently unknown!”

“Probably some stupid one-time trick,” Corona muttered. “Scramble some Heart and Light players here, I need to know where it’s coming from.”

Eve conspicuously closed her left eye tight and lit her horn – even though she had no need to light her horn to use her Light powers. “…We can’t see them because our memories are being molded.”

Minna’s eyes widened. “You can tell?”

Eve opened her eye and let her magic aura drop. “It’s a complicated spell, and I only think it works because they don’t know that I know. I also don’t think it’s the soldiers.”

“Yeah, they couldn’t hide an entire ship,” Minna said. “Too du-” she blinked, staring at the display. “I can’t see anything either… I should. I’m not getting anything though.” She narrowed her eyes. “Must be something there… Just need to push…”

It appeared for her – a single yellow ship shooting at them at point-blank range, moving randomly around them to keep the pattern from being predictable.

Minna pointed her finger, following the hologram only she could see. “Shoot this.”

“Huh? Shoot?” Corona said. “Why?”

Eve covered her eye again. “Augh! Our memories are being altered!”

“Just shoot!” Minna said. “Trust me!”

Corona looked at her – as if she couldn’t see Minna’s arm and had just forgotten what Minna had said.

Minna grunted. “Fine, I’ll do it myself… Somehow. Hey, Corona, I’m curious, which console has weapons control?”

Corona’s mind registered this question. “Ah, that would be over there, next to- hey wait!”

Minna didn’t. She pressed a few buttons – the weapons were already firing on other ships, so there was no need to unlock them – and changed the weapon’s direction toward the invisible one. It hit dead-on, breaking the spell that was on everyone.

“What did you just hit?” Eve asked.

“I don’t know, but it was a lot smarter than just a general soldier,” Minna said. “It was controlling, calculating, adapting.”

Corona rubbed her head. “I really need to figure out a defense against them…”

“I can be your eyes,” Minna said. “Now, Twinkie, do that thing you do to tell us stuff about stuff.”

“H-how do y-”

“You just did it twice in the last two minutes.”

Eve blinked. She didn’t even bother hiding her eye this time as she activated it, looking into the Light. “I sen-”

“WE’VE GOT THE LAST COORDINATES!” the communications officer shouted. “A speeder just got through and then kept flying.”

“Get the entire fleet moving!” Corona said. “Prepare for battle!” Corona stood up and flexed her wings. She lit her horn, preparing to take them to the lower decks.

“Oh no,” both Eve and Minna said at the same time.

The bearish form of Brell punched through a door to the bridge, allowing all of them to see her – but only giving Corona the honor of being looked at. “You must have found a way to fight against my Convolution. I am impressed, but not surprised, that it would be you C-”

Corona teleported the entire bridge crew to the escape pods before she could finish. “Everyone out. I’m going back up there and teaching her a lesson. Raging Sights, instinctual protocol, we need t-”

Just as the Andromeda passed through the final portal, its engines exploded, sending dark, red magic in all directions.

~~~

The destruction of the Andromeda was barely a blip on Yellow Diamond’s radar as she reclaimed control of the entire fleet. All around the third subfleet, the remaining twenty-three other subfleets appeared, all but one carrying with them a protomolecule planet. The Merodi Universalis fleet was complete once again.

The center of the Congeries currently had a hybrid appearance – half watermelon, half sea urchin, the spines moving to point at the fleet like turrets. The few hundred remaining Skarn ships flanked the central globe, facing the incoming fleet.

For a moment, all the fighting stopped. The ships that had been attacking the third fleet jumped back to rejoin their brethren. The forces of Skarn and Merodi Universalis stared at each other across an uncharacteristically empty divide, devoid of any artistic works.

Two swarms of ships. One vastly outnumbered the other, while the other had a shaping mechanism at their backs.

Yellow Diamond allowed herself to smirk. “You all know the plan,” she addressed the fleet. “Hit it with everything you’ve got.”

They did.

Splitter nukes fired from the Tau’ri ships, carrying more than enough supercharged nuclear material to blow a planet to shreds. Beams of pure red energy shot forth, carrying with them the promise of instant death to whatever they touched. Holy arcs shot across the sky, blessing the space with their divine, but vengeful presence. Superweapons that had been kept under lock and key the entire rest of the war were unleashed, including a few minor eldritch horrors and Discords, not to mention the Imperium’s Blackstone Fortress planet-core busters.

The ships in orbit never stood a chance. Almost all of them were vaporized within minutes.

But the central orb itself was not so defenseless. Instantly it shifted from a watermelon-urchin to a ball of pure gold, upon which sat hundreds of pyramids. Each pyramid opened up, revealing strands of white energy.

Harmonious energy.

Harmonious energy that surrounded the entire world like a web, intercepting all incoming attacks with ease, destroying them without letting them unleash their terribly destructive yield. All the violence was simply cancelled.

Yellow Diamond frowned. “He’s letting us have a taste of our own medicine. Wonder how many Trees of Harmony he had to pulverize to pull this off?”

There were a chorus of stressed calls to her – did they have a way to break through harmonious energy of that caliber?

“Yes,” Yellow Diamond said. “Brute force would break through. But if we charge in brazenly, that will just leave us open to Skarn’s shaping. We move in cautiously while I consult with command. Pattern delta-seven, understood?”

There were a series of confirmation messages. The fleet moved forward, slowly, watching carefully for an attack from Skarn.

It didn’t take long. He generated a few dozen cones of vibrant energy, sending them all at the fleet. The cones proved to be immune to all their standard methods of attacking, shrugging them off like they were nothing. Skarn had been doing his homework over the past week of war, watching them, studying them – and learning. With his Shaping Mechanism, he could easily throw new things at them on a whim.

It was taking heavy, direct altering of reality on their part to stop his attacks – and that simply took too long and cost too much energy to deal with the sheer amount of stuff he was throwing at them. They had to move quickly.

Yellow Diamond still hadn’t received anything from O’Neill. “Tell the fleet the secondary teams can move through this as soon as they think the risk is acceptable. Make it clear I’m not ordering them to go yet. We don’t want to fire everything we’ve got at once…”

A few sets of various Merodi in armored suits flew toward the center. Many of them were caught in the crossfire – but Yellow Diamond saw many others were making it past the location in space Skarn was currently creating the cones. He did not create any more to stop them.

Hopefully one of them knew how to get past the harmony barrier.

Several thousand miles away, closer to the center of the Congeries…

“I have no idea how we’re going to bust through this thing,” Alushy admitted. “None at all.”

Nae rolled her eyes. “Brute force it. You’re a creature of darkness, you should be able t-”

Jade pointed out her thumb and pointer fingers on each hand, using them to create a rectangular box in front of her. She pressed her hands closer together, shrinking the three of them to microscopic size while keeping their velocity. “This might do it!”

Alushy laughed. “Wouldn’t it be something if Minna got there before we did?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Nae admitted. “She is a strong woman, like her mother.”

“You met her mother after she took a level in badass,” Alushy pointed out.

Nae made no response.

Back on Yellow Diamond’s command ship…

O’Neill finally answered the call. “Yes?”

“Skarn’s got a harmony barrier.”

“What’re you calling me for?”

“We have a weapon at our disposal that can destroy the harmony energies, and you know it,” Yellow Diamond said.

O’Neill narrowed his brow. “Which one are you talking about? Rohan? We’ve got him working around the clock over here. And then the eld-”

“No,” Yellow Diamond said. “We have six agents under Renee’s Expeditions from a world known as Equis Duo. Usually lent to you and Giorno. Known as the Mean Six by the rumor mill?”

“Ah…” O’Neill said. “Right. Them.”

“Normally I would not hesitate, but Skarn has proven exceptionally resourceful. He may find a way to recreate their power if we use them on him. Our defenses would fall instantly.”

O’Neill nodded. Yellow Diamond’s ship shuddered as one next to it exploded.

“Do you think you’ve taken down most of his resources?”

“He’s assuredly hiding at least a small group of ships elsewhere in the Congeries,” Yellow Diamond said. “Enough to lay waste to nations.”

O’Neill folded his hands. “Do you think you can make it through without them?”

“Not without exceedingly heavy casualties. I also have no way to prove that the secondary teams are getting through.”

O’Neill glanced off-screen – presumably gauging the responses of the other advisors. “I’ll send them over. But only use them once you’re close and can move in quickly. We want to catch him with his pants down, not give him a chance to turn this against us.”

Yellow Diamond nodded. “Understood.” She cut the transmission and turned back to her command. “Change formation – Alpha four-star. Push as fast as we can!”

The fleet took an overall arrowhead shape with the largest protomolecule planet spearheading everything. The speed of the ships increased, looking ready to ram the center of the Congeries. Which they were.

Skarn’s cones weren’t working for him anymore, so he mixed it up – creating a whirlwind made of blades the size of small moons, going for the protomolecule planets.

Yellow Diamond ground her teeth. He finally had the focus to deal with several of the planets at once. Now that he saw they might be a threat, he was taking them out.

“Defend the protomolecule if at all possible!” Yellow Diamond roared.

Ships began to crash onto the protomolecule planets.

Yellow Diamond would not slow the blue worlds for them. If the ships didn’t get off by the time they needed to crash right into Skarn’s front room, they would have to find a way to survive impact. Which was unlikely.

~~~

Minna woke up.

Above her, she saw strands of harmony.

Below her was a ground that shifted from hardwood to sheet metal in an instant, the morph cutting across her back. She hissed, standing up onto her feet.

She looked around. There was only one other person here – Lady Rarity. She was standing nearby, the light of her horn visible even under her power armor. She must have been straining herself keeping air around Minna.

Minna leaped onto her back without asking. “Awake.”

“Oh good, I didn’t want to stay in one place much longer,” Lady Rarity said. She glanced around. “There’s no entrance, and neither of us have the power to drill through this crust…”

“Skarn’s using harmony energy.”

“While I can use an Element of Generosity should the need arise, I was never infused with one’s power,” Lady Rarity said. “So any plan you may have about using that power will not work. …Not sure if it’d work even if I was Affix.”

“Mhm…” Minna narrowed her eyes. “Rarity, you need to tie yourself up with your own silk and find a why to hide your horn’s glow. Do it fast.”

Lady Rarity decided now was not the time to question things. She tied herself up with her silk and dimmed her horn. “You have an auto-bubble now. It’ll only last a few minutes and I wouldn’t move your head too q-”

“Shh,” Minna said, taking a dominating stance over Lady Rarity.

A squad of purple soldiers appeared out of a dimensional portal in front of them. They raised their weapons – and lowered them when they saw Minna.

“I have returned,” Minna said. “I am without armor or weapons, but I have brought a prisoner. Believed to be high value, was working alongside a subfleet commander.”

“Prisoner identity confirmed,” one of the soldiers said with a dry voice. “Lady Rarity, mid-high value target. Acceptable. Question: why are you in standard clothing?”

Minna didn’t look down at her black dress – to do so would out her as not being like them. “Lost my armor in combat. Better than nothing.”

There was no nod but Minna knew he had accepted her story. “Incursion contained. Returning to nest.” A portal opened up. Minna dragged Lady Rarity along – leaving her hammer behind. It would just be too conspicuous if they dragged that along with them. Minna was delighted that they weren’t demanding the armor be removed.

Then Minna knew they were inside the center of the Congeries. They were in a hallway that could fit a planet in it. And yet, it still looked like a normal hallway. The flecks of dust may have been the size of large islands, but they were still accurate.

Minna knew they wouldn’t be able to transmit dimensional coordinates out of here. Skarn had the entire place surrounded in a wall for more than one reason, after all.

They walked along the edge of a floorboard, a door every twenty meters or so. They entered the second door they came to, one marked with a symbol Minna hadn’t seen since she was barely more than an infant, but recognized instantly.

The nest. That’s what he’d just called it. The nest.

They opened the door.

The nest looked exactly as she remembered it. The entire area was covered in deep, black, emotionless metal. A green haze hung over the area, and yet there was no smell at all coming from it. Metal railways shot off in every direction and angle, speeding off into the miasma until they faded into the green. From the ceiling hung hundreds of pods with people inside them. The ones near the railways were full-grown people, asleep in a sludge that was either clear or just as green as the rest of the area.

In the distance, a large chandelier of smaller pods could be seen. The ones that were still growing.

She was pulled out of a tub a-

Minna used her ability on herself. If she allowed it to work, it did – she would have no traumatic flashbacks. Not here. She would just have a sense of unease. Possibly even a bit of fear.

She saw that, in the future, they were going to set a mechanical suit out for her to wear. She undressed before it arrived, since the suits plugged right into their bodies and cloth would get in the way. Most humans her age wouldn’t have been able to pull off standing nude without a sweat, but she had grown up with a unicorn for a mother. It wasn’t like they wore clothes most of the time, and Allure hadn’t made a big deal out of it unless Minna was out in public.

The harder part was walking into the suit without flinching. She didn’t want to be like them. She didn’t want to be indoctrinated. But she still saw herself in the future, walking around, without her brain being cut out.

She had to take in a breath to get herself to do it – but none of them noticed. She felt the spikes plug into her with a sharp pain. They were very uncomfortable, but the pain wasn’t enough to hinder focus except after the first moment.

Then she arrived.

Brell.

Minna hadn’t been able to sense her coming.

“My children…” she said.

Minna had to force her mind to calm down, force it to refuse the traumatic flashback.

She was so glad Brell couldn’t see her face. It would have betrayed her decidedly emotional state.

~~~

Eve and Corona did not wake up after they hit the ground.

They woke up just as the harmony field activated.

It activated while they weren't quite done falling through it. They felt a sharp burning sensation that prompted Seraphim to automatically divert the dimensional energy. The only issue was that Seraphim was protecting Eve, and not particularly Corona. The Stand still helped Corona, though since she was tall it didn’t think to extend the field beyond Eve to protect Corona’s feet.

Long story short, Corona’s feet were burnt off.

“GHAAAAAAAAAA!” Corona shouted.

“Right, right, hold in there, uh… oh brother, ground approaching.” Eve shook her head. “Heal your feet. I’ve got this.”

Corona winced, moving her healing magics to her nonexistent feet. She was able to create stumps, but that wasn’t exactly going to be easy to walk on. Good thing she had wings. Which she wasn’t using…

She spread them – but quickly realized what Eve was doing and closed them up again.

Eve had placed Seraphim right below them, a determined expression on her face. “Let’s try… no nuclear forces. Turn everything into radioactive particle soup. Hope you know how to cure radiation poisoning!”

Corona didn’t get a chance to say ‘yeah’ before Seraphim activated. The ground shifted beneath them from a coconut to a metal plate, and then to nothing as Seraphim localized physics to remove the ability for matter to even exist right in front of them. They fell into a hole that was being created as they fell. The ‘ground’ was eternally a couple of meters in front of them, no matter how fast they fell.

Corona started the radiation cure spells. “Those are some serious rads you’re giving us.”

“You’re welcome,” Eve said, glancing around nervously. “Guess I can drop these disguises now that it’s just us…”

“While we’re falling!?”

“This thing is the size of a sun, we’re going to be falling for a while!” She lit her horn, returning her mane to its normal, windswept appearance and purple color, the orange streak bringing a smile to her face. “Ah… that’s better.” She then popped out the green contact lenses she was wearing.

“Those weren’t an illusion?”

“Nope. Not even Lolo would see through those. Though I wouldn’t be able to hide from Flutterfree even if I tried.”

“She’s probably worried sick.”

Eve nodded solemnly. “I know she is. But she knows I’m out here, and that I have to do this. So let’s go kick some flank. Or bear-butt. I guess.”

“The term is ‘kicking ass’.”

“That word always sounds like people are being racist to donkeys,” Eve muttered.

Corona rolled her eyes, looking up. “Looks like the hole’s been sealed.”

“And lucky for us you’re a portable flashlight!”

Corona examined her glowing skin. “Yep. So what do we get to do in the tunnel of eternal falling?”

Eve shrugged. “Make a plan?”

“We drop through and start blowing stuff up.”

“Plan made.” Eve chuckled. “Targets?”

“Brell, Arthon, Skarn. Rest are just mooks.”

“Do we have any new defenses against their memory messing?”

“Instinctual protocol,” Corona said, tapping Raging Sights. “If I activate it I’ll forego logical thought and confusion, just reacting to stimuli.”

“Going berserk?”

“Basically.”

“Sweet. Wha-” Eve’s pupils dilated. “Seraphim’s connection is destabilizing.”

Corona snapped her fingers, forcing her own connection to open in front of them – but it was unstable as well. “Of course. Inside here, he wouldn’t allow a single portal out that wasn’t specially sanctioned. It would let people just pour in.”

“My rejection of reality is going to slip!”

Corona created a reality anchor around the area with several magic rings. “And now you can relax Seraphim. This’ll take care of everyth-”

The area they were falling through opened up – not because they had reached the bottom, but because someone had Shaped it to open up. They saw, for a moment, the actual interior of Skarn’s seat of power. It appeared as several large rectangular prisms fused together at odd angles, planetary statues of the bear and his family propped along the prisms at alien angles.

Deep in the center, they could see a metal sphere, inside of which something was glowing a dozen different vibrant colors, full of intense action. The Shaping Mechanism,presumably.

The next instant Arthon had a hand on both their necks.

Corona and Eve tried to fight – but the Shaping Mechanism activated on them. The very ceiling above them attacked them with a full rush of power, flattening them against Arthon’s hands. The bones in the backs of their necks cracked, but one could live with a broken neck.

Corona maintained consciousness. She lit her horn, blasting Arthon in the face with a death spell. It squirmed around him, moved by careful spatial distortion.

All it took was a simple flick to her horn to bring her world to darkness.

~~~

It turned out that, yes, being microscopic got you through the harmony barrier.

Or maybe they just got lucky, Alushy didn’t know. If being microscopic had been the answer, one would assume Skarn had tried it already.

Then again, maybe he couldn’t do shrinking or growing without control over shaping, or whatever.

“You look distracted,” Nae said as she fired more psychic bullets at approaching enemy soldiers. They were standing on what was currently a plane of orange peels, beneath the harmony layer, realizing they had no way to breach the barrier.

“Thinking about shitty tactics or something,” Alushy muttered, firing her guns. All of her bullets were dodged. “Gah. They don’t make it fun. You have to use the complete bullshit attacks on them to do anything, and it’s boring when you do that!”

Jade was shrinking the soldiers one at a time and stepping on them. Those few that managed to figure out how to not be shrunk were crushed by giant rocks.

Suddenly, all three of them had cuts all over them.

“A special one exploded, right?” Jade asked, hissing at the pain. “Right?”

“There is literally no way to know,” Nae said. “Not a-” something hit her in the chest, forcing her to the ground.

“Nae!” Jade said, extending a hand. Then she realized one of her reality anchor bracelets had broken off. She still had five more, but the fact that one had broken off and she didn’t know about it was very concerning. “Alushy…”

“Fine. Absolute bullshit maximum level.” Alushy put a hoof to her mouth and coughed. A wave of dark shadows shot out of her and surrounded the three of them. The shadows of the millions of souls she had killed in her lifetime appeared before them and laid waste to the surrounding battlefield, tearing the pale soldiers limb from limb, throwing their loose body parts asunder.

The shadows cleared. As far as the eye could see, there were dead soldiers.

“Right…” Alushy walked over to the still form of Nae and bit her neck. The Ga’s eyes opened wide, flashing red. “Up an’ at ‘em, vampy.”

“Did you jus-”

“You’re welcome,” Alushy said.

“I’m never going to be able to eat garlic bread again…”

Jade blinked. “That’s the first thing you think of?”

“Uh, yeah? It’s not like being a vampire is going to be a problem in this day and age. There’s blood manufacturing, super sunscreen, and video screen mirrors. But synthetic garlic just isn’t the same.”

“I miss when being a vampire was something special,” Alushy muttered.

At this point two figures fell from the sky – a human and a pony. One was a version of Sunset Shimmer who looked somewhat normal, but had an artificial leg. The human was an auburn haired individual with heterochromatic eyes and a big sword.

They landed like ragdolls.

“JANE!” Sunny shouted. “I thought ragdoll physics was off!”

“Guess it wasn’t,” Jane said, regaining control of her body and standing up. “Alright, where are they?”

“Dead,” Alushy said. “Now I need more souls for absolute bullshit. No offense to this army I just killed but they’re small fish.”

“How did you guys get through the harmony barrier?” Jade asked.

Sunny rubbed the back of her head. “I think we’ve been blessed by so many Trees of Harmony at this point…”

“Skarn had to grind a lot of them up to do this,” Jane said, grinding her teeth. “Their essences must have recognized us. He’s gonna pay.”

“Oh, of course, of course!” Alushy smirked. “But, one problem, how are we going to get to him? We’re standing on top of his shield right now. Not even complete bullshit can dig miles into the earth.”

Jane fixed Alushy with a blank look that slowly grew into the smile of someone who’d had a horrible couple of days and had just now caught a break. She pulled a purple pickaxe out of her inventory. As it moved, a magical aura became visible, like a film of soap around the tool. Occasionally bright sparks of electricity would fly off the tool, driving home the unsettling aura it produced.

“Jane…” Sunny said.

“This was a job I was always meant to do. Me. I am going to fucking mine this goddammed hellhole’s final defenses with my trusty iridium pickaxe.” She gripped the handle. “Well, old friend… Here we go.”

“What’s a pickaxe going to do, exactly?” Jade asked.

“It’s magic,” Sunny explained. “The most important enchantment being efficiency level ‘I pressed the nine key more times than I can count’. You might want to hold onto something.”

“There’s nothing to hold onto but dead bodies,” Nae said. “…Actually, that sounds like a good ideAAAAAA-”

Jane had started digging.

No one saw her pickaxe even hit the ground before the giant square had formed and they were falling into it.

The hole was filled in naturally, but there was no transdimensional magic to draw attention to them. They would cross the boundary unnoticed.

~~~

“Right, so, news,” Pinkie said as she led her team to the dimensional bay of Yellow Diamond’s flagship. “Bad news, Corona and Eve got their necks snapped. Good news, they’re not dead.”

Flutterfree put her hooves to her mouth. “W-wha?”

Pinkie shook her head. “Right, sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll dial it back. Arthon’s keeping them alive, thinking he can use them to convince his father to extort us into surrendering.”

“Much as I hate to admit it, that won’t work,” Nova said. “O’Neill won’t negotiate over hostages.”

“Skarn believes in honor,” Jotaro reminded them. “He will not resort to demanding our surrender through hostages.”

“Arthon could turn out to be a manipulative bastard and do it anyway,” Vriska pointed out.

Pinkie nodded. “All possibilities. But they’re together and alive. Minna too – though I think the time-shift of the events are a liiiittle wonky right now. It’s been several minutes for her since I last saw her, pretty sure.”

“So, if we know where they are, why are we here?” Flutterfree asked. “I know I said I trusted you, but I’d like to know.”

“You’re in charge, all you had to do was ask,” Pinkie said, smirking. “We’re going in as part of the main invasion force.”

“But they’re stuck,” Nova said.

“Not for looooong~!” Pinkie trilled with an ominous tone of voice.

A dimensional portal opened, revealing six ponies that vaguely resembled the Elements of Harmony, but clearly weren’t, the six of them giving the impression they would be what the Elements of Harmony would see if they looked through a mirror of corruption and darkness.

The unicorn ‘Twilight’ was dark-coated like Brutalight, but had a bright mane and an air of darkness around her. She was not the leader, but instead the point was the ‘Applejack’; a blue mare with smooth features and an intelligent expression. A red-and-green-maned ‘Rainbow Dash’ strode behind them in steel boots, while a bright red ‘Fluttershy’ with a permanently angry expression flew above them. Near the back was a blackish ‘Rarity’ with a yellow mane and a glazed-over expression.

The ‘Pinkie’ was just a slightly redder version of Pinkie with a sharper mane. The primary team didn’t even flinch – they were used to seeing crazy Pinkies at this point.

Flutterfree opted to watch these mysterious dark reflections of her and her friends for a moment.

“Why did we become good guys again…?” the ‘Rainbow Dash’ muttered, putting hooves over her face.

“Because we realized zat being ‘evil’ was razer unfortunate, Grayscale,” the ‘Applejack’ said.

“Yeah, who the buck even cares why? It happened.” The ‘Fluttershy’ shrugged. “And now we get to fight in a super-space war.”

“Like, Havocwing,” the ‘Rarity’ said, “of course you would want the whatever war thing. It’s your thing. But some of us prefer not to go there. Cha.”

“Because you’re morons,” Grayscale muttered.

“Oh, uh, that’s just me, right?” the ‘Rarity’ asked “Or… am I missing the joke…?”

“Yeah, you’re down the twister, Insipid,” the ‘Twilight’ said. “Not an immense difficulty, merely a factoid of your psyche. In principle.”

“Uuuugh, Shadow, why do you have to talk like that when you’re trying to be comforting?”

“Uh… being stupid isn’t a problem?”

The ‘Applejack’ facehooved. “C'est la vie… Tact, Zadow, tact.”

Shadow nodded. “Ah. Right. So, what’s the plan, Curaçao?”

“I know, but per’aps-”

“Talk to the primary team and give them a piece of our minds,” the ‘Pinkie’ finished, looking up from a book she was reading – Increasing Awareness, by A Lot of Pinkie Pies. She was holding the book with a tendril of blood coming out a slit in her back.

“Oh this should be good!” Pinkie said, appearing in front of her double. “Hi, I’m Pinkie Pie, you’re Red Velvet!”

Velvet smirked. “You’ve gone and messed yourself up in the head there.”

“You’re one to talk!”

“Word of advice – get over yourself.”

Pinkie twitched, turning to Curaçao. “Hey, miss leader-”

“I’m the leader too!” Havocwing blurted.

Pinkie ignored her. “Weren’t you saying something about tact?”

“Ah, see, I was, but zat’s only when speaking with zose who mean well.” The blue mare fixed her gaze on Pinkie’s. “You plan to use us.”

“Duh, have to break through a barrier of pure harmony energy, and you guys are like evil elements that somehow turned good sorta-kinda and we can use that to break through it!”

“Oh, no, it’s more zan zat, les ami. Velvet?”

A tendril of blood dropped a single bloody page of the book in front of Pinkie. The one with Redshirts listed under the heading ‘Important Tropes.’

“…Ponyfeathers,” Pinkie muttered.

Flutterfree gasped. “Pinkie! You were going to do that on purpose?”

“Uh… yeah,” Pinkie admitted, looking at the ground. “Bu-”

“Can it!” Havocwing shouted. “We’re fighting this war because we owe the others. We have no intention of dying here today! Kapeesh?”

“Kapeesh!” Insipid echoed.

“Well if we don’t find at least some interesting redshirts we’re not safe!” Pinkie blurted. “We’re heading right into the belly of the beast and it’s just us! I don’t like those odds.”

“We like zose odds,” Curaçao said, raising an eyebrow. “We certainly qualify as ‘’eroes’ do we not? And yet, we will be charging in alone, wizout any accompanying cannon fodder.”

“Because we don’t need anybody to protect us!” Havocwing shouted.

Velvet giggled. “They’ll all tremble and shake… They’ll probably try to eat me! It’ll be like beating up my old self!”

Grayscale stared at her with mild disgust.

Shadow cleared her throat. “I think what my compatriots are trying to say is that, despite our dark and villainous past and the remnants of certain unsavory particulates within our essences, we are not resorting to careful manipulation of random ‘expendables’ deemed ‘slightly interesting’ enough to be included in a narrative, through which your lives may be perpetuated and ours annihilated.”

Insipid groaned. “Shadow, like, condense it? Cha?”

Shadow blinked. “Or to put it simpler: Pinkie, fuck you.”

Havocwing let out a laugh. “Ooooh, burn!”

Flutterfree laid her head on the floor. “I’m terribly sorry f-”

“Not you,” Grayscale muttered. “You’re the nice one who wouldn’t hurt a fly, right?”

“…Do you see those wing-blades on her?” Insipid muttered.

“She’s still the nice one. Sorry for everything.” Grayscale narrowed her eyes.

Curaçao nodded. “I ‘ave ‘eard much of you, Flutterfree. You apologize so much zat such an action becomes almost meaningless.”

This comment shook Flutterfree to her core. “I… Wh…”

“Is this your way of telling me to apologize?” Pinkie blurted.

“Nope!” Velvet said, behind her. “It’s our way of saying ‘nice try’!”

“…I wouldn’t mind an apology,” Insipid muttered.

Pinkie muttered. “Look. I… I don’t want anyone to suffer. But there are going to be people and ponies who have to. In a war like this, if nobody dies, there are going to be permanent consequences.” She looked behind her. She realized something painful.

Nova had suffered emotionally with Sunburst and Stardust. Flutterfree had gotten vampirism and bladed knives and her spirituality to struggle with. Jotaro had lost family, lost trust, and had to deal with a world where emotions were rarely hidden. Vriska’s list of problems could fill a book.

She’d had some difficulties with being Aware early on, but she hadn’t really suffered long-lasting harm in any way yet, had she?

“…It’s my turn,” Pinkie said, pupils shrinking. “Oh no no no…”

Curaçao sighed and looked Pinkie in the eyes. “You ‘ave my condolences. But we will not be taking ze ‘it for you.”

“Maybe we can compare notes on suffering later,” Shadow suggested. “Pretty confident we have most of you undeniably trumped.”

“Wanna bet?” Vriska asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I said most.”

Havocwing coughed. “AHEM! Don’t we have a white barrier to take out or something?”

“You do,” Yellow Diamond said, having just teleported into the room. “The fleet is close enough. Do you six have the Elements of Pandemonium?”

Shadow lit her horn and summoned five dark necklaces to them, placing a sixth tiara on Curaçao’s head. The crystals within were of deep, dark colors.

“Wh- hey! Where’s my crown!?” Havocwing blurted.

“Guess, like, Curaçao’s more leadery than you?” Insipid suggested.

“The decisions of deviated magic artifacts mean nothing to us,” Curaçao said. “We are sisters, forever.” She turned to Yellow Diamond. “Just tell us when.”

“Now,” Yellow Diamond said. “You’ll be on a protomolecule planet prepared to ram the central wall. Do what those artifacts were designed to do. Destroy the harmony.”

The six of them nodded. Yellow Diamond then teleported them away.

“…Pinkie,” Nova said, looking to her. “Should you go back? Stop fighting?”

“One of you will die if I do that,” Pinkie said. “It won’t save me from any pain. Or any of you.”

Flutterfree hugged her. “Whatever it’s going to be, we’ll be here for you.”

“If you can.”

“…If we can,” Flutterfree admitted.

Pinkie sighed. “Well, we might as well pick out a speeder and get behind this planet. We’re smashing in! Might as well get to the Kicking of the Dog quicker rather than later. HeHAhah. …Let’s go.”

They ran off to find a speeder.

~~~

Skarn took his hands off the Shaping Mechanism controls – he could afford to let it run on automatic now that he had fully programmed it for defending this place. He turned around – both of his remaining children were standing behind him. Brell had with her an armored prisoner and a small squad of her creepy ‘children’, while Arthon was holding two broken individuals Skarn recognized.

“Prisoners?” Skarn asked. “From Brell I would have expected this, but you Arthon?”

“Use them,” Arthon said. “They’re alive. Tell the Merodi you have them hostage and make them surrender.”

“No,” Skarn said.

“Can you drop your distorted view of honor for one second and think about the art?”

“Art and honor go hand in hand, my son. Maybe one day you will understand this.”

“Or maybe you’re just senile,” Arthon glared.

“…Do you wish to challenge me now?”

Arthon shuffled his feet. “No, father. I do not.”

“Oh, thank the Tower,” Brell muttered. “That would have been disastrous.”

Arthon nodded slowly.

Skarn pressed his hands together. “Brell, what about you?”

“I’m asking permission to bless this one. To create the first nonhuman among my children.”

Skarn looked Lady Rarity up and down. “…Do as you will, I cannot keep you from your art. It is yours, even if I do not find meaning in it personally.”

Brell bowed. “Thank you, father.” She left with her squad, one of the shorter ones dragging Lady Rarity along.

Skarn placed a hand on the controls again, this time fixing Corona and Eve’s bodies. Their eyes flew open.

“Skarn…” Eve said, narrowing her eyes.

Skarn held a hand up at Corona. “Do not attempt to attack or I will have to execute you. I would rather not do that.”

“Why do you care?” Corona blurted. “You toss around entire civilizations like they’re nothing! What are we to you?”

“Old friends,” Skarn said. “…Or who I thought could be friends.”

“What made you think we’d ever be okay with what you do here?!”

“I’m a patient being,” Skarn said. “I would have slowly shaped your society to appreciation of true art over the centuries before revealing my work. You would have voluntarily joined yourselves to the Congeries after that – and would have become shapers of your own. The beauty of harmony would be added to the lattice of existence!” He held his arms wide. “It would have been glorious! But you had to find me suspicious.”

“Of course we did!” Eve blurted. “We had no information on you! You were just a guy who showed up, acted powerful, and gave us a lot of things!”

“Your government has no Intelligence or Secret Service,” Skarn muttered. “That shouldn’t matter to you.”

Eve and Corona looked at him with smug smirks.

“…You do have Intelligence....” Skarn stood up tall. “Well played. I thought I was safe. But it looks as if you do have secrets.”

“When you only have a couple you learn to keep them really, really well,” Eve said.

“I suppose my spy just wasn’t in a high enough position… Perhaps I should have targeted one of you instead…”

Corona blinked. “Wait…”

“Oh, yes, Allure’s daughter was placed there on purpose to gauge your higher politics. She gathered a lot of information before I dropped by to collect. Such a sweet girl, unlike all Brell’s other mindless brutes. A bit like my other son, except less relatable...”

“You did that on purpose!?” Eve blurted.

“Oh, of course. Place a crying, bruised, and battered child in front of someone who is emotionally vulnerable and something’s bound to happen.” Skarn looked into the distance. “She’s been given such a beautiful life because of it. Shame I have to take it away from her.”

Eve thought, for a moment, about bargaining for peace – but then she remembered what Skarn did as part of his life. He destroyed civilizations without batting an eye. “…How can you think you’re consistent?”

“He’s not,” Arthon said. “He’s mad.”

“All the best artists are,” Skarn said with a shrug. “Imprison them, Arthon. You can do whatever you want with them after the war is over.”

Arthon nodded. “They shall make a good addition to a very particular cell.”

Skarn put both his hands back on the globe that controlled the Shaping Mechanism. “I’m glad you’re already thinking of the personal aesthetics. …Speaking of, has anyone seen Torvost in a while?”

Arthon tensed. “…He’s dead.”

Skarn let out a deep sigh. “…Not surprising, but still an ache on my old heart. How I wish he had learned.” Skarn shook his head. “Just go. Do what you can about the incoming fleet. They look like they’re about to try something.”

Arthon vanished, taking Eve and Corona with him.

~~~

“No reports of Minna?” Allure asked O’Neill.

“None,” O’Neill said. “There was something of Alushy, but that was for a brief moment and we aren’t even sure where her magic signature was coming from.”

Allure nodded, looking at the hologram display of the battle. The red sphere of Skarn’s holding was surrounded in a barrier of white. Red dots and shapes representing his larger constructs were attacking the fleet from all sides, decimating it.

The number of remaining forces was 49%.

But they were still moving. The largest protomolecule planet seemed agonizingly close to the Congeries’ center. Just a little more and they would be touching the barrier… Just a little more…

“Breach detected!” the Research Overhead beeped. “Portals opening all over Celestia City!”

O’Neill pressed a button. “Yellow Diamond, defense commanders, this is O’Neill. We have to jam all dimensional communications, repeat, all dimensional communications. We’ve been found. You’re on your own.” He moved his finger to another button. “JAM ALL DIMENSIONAL PORTALS!”

In other locations in the bunker, other generals and commanders had to press buttons of their own. All dimensional communication was cut – no portals in or out of Celestia City. The hologram of the offense vanished in an instant, just before they unleashed their attack on the harmony barrier.

Allure gulped. They had no way of knowing what was happening.

“How bad is it?” O’Neill asked.

“The breaches mostly consisted of ground forces,” Thor said. “…The majority of them are heading straight here.”

“What’s near here besides us?”

“One of the larger dimensional drives. They could destroy it and wipe out much of the city – or they could possibly take advantage of it and bring in more soldiers.”

O’Neill grunted. “Right, can’t let either of those happen. Third division, get yourself up on defense of that drive! Take seventh with you! Rowan, I need our backups in front, protecting us! Allure, sorry, looks like you might get caught in the middle of a firefight.”

Allure made a soft whimper but nodded her head.

She just wanted to know if Minna was okay.

104 - Conquest, Part 2

Yellow Diamond received O’Neill’s message.

She was truly in charge now. No authorities for her to call back to. Both O’Neill and Thor were on Celestia City, cut off. As far as anyone was concerned, she was the Overhead now.

Not even White Diamond had authority over her here.

Good.

“We’re close enough! Launch!” Yellow Diamond ordered.

From the tip of the largest protomolecule planet, a squad of ships launched consisting of speeders, gunships, some god-tier Skaian droppers, and a handful of angels. They approached the harmonious barrier, using all their resources to keep the central ship from being destroyed.

The top of the central ship opened up, revealing the six Elements of Pandemonium. Red Velvet, Passion; Havocwing, Insanity; Insipid, Desire; Grayscale Force, Objectivity; Curaçao, Trickery; and Starlight Shadow, Pride. Once, they had been direct opposites of the Elements of Harmony, but they had long since grown past these definitions.

But that worked to their advantage for the moment. Each of them still had a seed of the darkness within them – but they also had the seeds of friendship, so they could use their powers in conjunction. The majority of Elements of Discord or Disharmony or Chaos across the universe, by nature, were unable to be used as one like the actual Elements of Harmony.

They went against that nature. They were the Elements of Pandemonium. They were the perfect mares for this job.

These particular corrupted Element artifacts had been found in an ancient chest marked with the cutie marks of the Mean Six, specifically keyed to them. A part of their story they didn't get to experience.

Beams of darkness shot from their Elements, forming a hexagonal shape. A sphere of swirling smoke whirled around them, shrouding their faces. Dark sparks of energy orbited the sphere and a rainbow composed of the darkest shades of every color was unleashed, hitting the harmony barrier head on.

The pure white energy shifted to a dark black around the point of impact. The dark miasma spread like a virus through the holy weaves of energy, soon transforming the entire white barrier into a jagged mess of dark energy.

“All it takes is one little mistake to barrel into a catastrophe,” Shadow said.

“A little lie opens the way for everyzing else,” Curaçao agreed.

Velvet smirked. “All you have to do is take a speck of darkness
Add it to the mix!
Now just take a little something dark not horrid,
A corruption, deep inside!

Darkness, it’s just so easy!
Darkness, you just can’t stop it!
Darkness, darkness, darkness, DARKNESS!

“Just do the smashy thing already!” Havocwing demanded.

“Like, do it now,” Insipid added.

Grayscale just grunted.

With their wills combined, they ordered the dark aura to crush the world it had been protecting not even a minute prior.

The moment the darkness hit the exterior and started cracking it, Skarn ordered the barrier to vanish – leaving the center exposed.

“GO!” Yellow Diamond ordered.

The engines on the back of the largest protomolecule planet burned as hard as they could. A few ships were on the planet’s surface trying to recover from the most recent fight but they would not be given time to escape. They needed to crash through now before Skarn came up with any new tricks.

The ships in front of the planet cut away at the last moment, allowing the two spheres to collide.

From afar, it wasn’t very impressive. It was like the Earth crashing into the sun – one could barely see the speck of blue when looking at the tremendous shifting ball that protected the Shaping Mechanisms.

Up close was another story.

Two solid crusts impacted each other at high velocity. The front face of the protomolecule planet vaporized in an instant, creating a gigantic depression in the ever-shifting material of Skarn’s crust. Both sides buckled, unleashing molten rock on each other, burning away both surfaces with the immense pressure. Volcanoes erupted everywhere on the protomolecule planet, some of the geological activity disrupting the engines on the other side of the globe.

But the planet couldn’t be stopped now. It embedded itself further and further into the shifting crust. The defensive barrier may have been hundreds of kilometers thick – but the planet was larger. It punched through, raining molten debris on the hollow interior.

The shell squeezed around the planet’s equator, attempting to crush it from outside. This would have worked – eventually.

But the fleet didn’t need long. With a large area on the other side of the barrier, they had a solid reality anchor on the other side. A few ships were able to teleport from the back end of the planet to the front, and those ships were able to fold space within the bubble of their physics to create a wormhole that obeyed the local physical rules. Who cared if the entire interior of this place was filled with dimensional jammers? They didn’t have time to destroy them. Why not use something a little more mundane to teleport people across the boundary of the planet?

As more and more ships passed through the wormhole, they added their energy to the endeavor, increasing the size of the portal, allowing the smaller protomolecule planets through.

They suffered heavy losses moving in this manner – the shell was able to attack many of them on the outside and inside, lashing at ships with spikes of impossible matter.

But they made it through. They were on the inside.

Yellow Diamond checked her readings. 42% forces remaining.

That seemed like a good number to her.

“Destroy everything,” she ordered. “Focus on the center, but destroy everything.”

The fleet fired everything it had. This was significantly less impressive than the previous volley they had unleashed outside the barrier, but it did the trick. The interior of the central universe lit up with nuclear explosions and magical mushroom clouds.

In retaliation, the planetary statues of Skarn and his children came to life, rushing the ships like they were flies, swatting them away with powerful movements. Numerous armored soldiers crawled over the limbs of these behemoths, leaping off to board ships whenever their abilities told them it was possible. The outer shell attacked from behind, shreds of random material swatting at the ships.

Yellow Diamond watched their forces start to drop. Great Imperium warships began to fall and a Flat Reaper snapped in two like a twig. They were surrounded on all sides. Suddenly she wasn’t quite as confident this was going to work.

“Launch more secondary teams toward the center!” Yellow Diamond shouted. “We need to get at him from the inside!”

Luckily for her, several of these teams had already launched. Ultramarines, Ahzek’s Chaos contingent, an Inkling squad, and near the front were the Primary Team and the Mean Six.

“We’re going to get more of them than you!” Havocwing hassled Pinkie’s Party from across the radio.

“Wanna make a bet on those odds?” Vriska smirked.

“Fuck ye-”

They heard Curaçao put a hoof over Havocwing. “Non, she’s trying to exploit ‘er luck abilities, ‘Avoc.”

“Wait, what the- BITCH!”

Vriska smirked. “Thank you.”

“INCOMING!” both Nova and Shadow shouted at the same time.

One of the large statues had apparently decided they weren’t just small fish and needed to be cut down.

“I’ve got this,” Nova said. She didn’t light her horn, instead tapping into her Prince of Time powers. “Erase.” She muttered.

The next thing everyone knew, they were behind the moving statue. Both their ships had nicks in them, but they weren’t cut in half.

“Uh, what?” Insipid said.

“I erased time,” Nova commented. “There were about fifteen seconds that just don’t exist anymore.”

“Then how did we get cuts on our ships!?”

Shadow audibly perked up. “Clearly, she allowed time to progress through an indicative moment in which events occurred, but no conscious decisions could alter the events that were happening aside from her own personal machinations. The act of time vanishing prompted a confused response with-”

“It just works,” Jotaro, Pinkie, and Velvet interrupted all at once.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro added.

“I’m, like, major confused,” Insipid muttered.

“Just keep your head together, we’re going to have t-” Flutterfree’s eyes widened at the thing that appeared in front of them. It was a purple miasmic creature with numerous gears and other clockwork mechanisms inside of it, the front face of which looked like a gaping maw filled with jagged teeth.

“Damn, time eater,” Nova muttered. “Not going to be helpful against that.”

“Indubitably Void-resistant as well,” Shadow commented after her magics did nothing.

“Oh! Major. Fresh!” Insipid chirped. “Shadow, be, like, the best friend ever and teleport me out there. I’ve got this~!”

Nova blinked. “Wait, you?”

They saw the dark unicorn appear outside, just above the time eater, her armor protecting herself from the elements. She touched one of the gears with her hoof – prompting a cut to form. She quickly undid the damage though – for she had just absorbed the time eater’s powers. “So, I can, like, eat you now, right?”

One thing the time eater had never thought of was using its powers to actually eat. It thought the powerset was purely metaphorical.

As it turned out, it wasn’t. Insipid was able to devour the being into herself before it realized what happened.

Nova, Flutterfree, and Vriska stared in shock.

Pinkie chuckled as Insipid was teleported back into the Mean Six’s ship.

“Nothing can stop us!” Havocwing shouted.

Pinkie facehooved. “Moron.”

“Fuck you.”

“She’s right though,” Velvet said. “You’ve doomed us all.”

A series of explosions filled the space around them, sending their ships flying off in different directions. The engines jammed and parts started to fly off.

Nova lit her horn. “Evacuating…”

“See you girls on the other side!” Vriska called.

“We’re getting to Skarn first!” Havocwing declared.

“Go ahead and try,” Pinkie said. “We’re going to save Eve.”

Nova teleported them out of their ship and onto the outside of one of the rectangular prisms extruding from the central, glowing sphere. The Mean Six appeared on a completely separate structure.

“And now we’re on our own,” Pinkie said.

Flutterfree nodded. “Everypony watch out for each other, okay?” There was a series of nods. “Pinkie, am I right in assuming Eve’s in the central area?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep.”

Flutterfree spread her wings and prepared her armor’s engines. “Let’s go get her.”

They blasted toward the center.

~~~

“This is probably the last report I’m going to make,” O’Neill said, looking at Thor, Ava, Allure, the Research Overhead, and Starbeat. “In a few minutes they will reach us despite our best efforts and we will have to fight for our lives.”

Allure nodded. “Ready.”

“Starbeat, suggestions?”

“Survive as long as possible,” Starbeat said. “Hope that the offense wins and is able to call off the soldiers.”

“Will that happen?”

Starbeat bit her lip and looked at her ka scanners. “Maaaaaaybe?”

“It’s a gamble we can’t take,” Ava said. “We must evacuate the city.”

“Sorry, but no,” O’Neill said. “That’ll just let more of the assholes in now that they figured out where we are. Right now we are targets – for the most part the civilians are safe.”

Ava nodded curtly. “That call is yours to make.”

“And don’t you forget it,” O’Neill muttered. “Now, have we figured out how they found us?”

“It wasn’t a security breach if that’s what you’re wondering,” Starbeat said. “Minna was the only individual to leave the city, and we have literally no records of that happening because of her nature. We know of no other breaches.”

“They probably intercepted our transmissions,” the Research Overhead said. “We were gambling they wouldn’t have time to hack them during the rush war, but this has lasted longer than we were expecting.”

Thor nodded. “It is almost at an end, however. The offense should have already breached the wall and begun its assault on the interior.”

“And that might allow Skarn to breach our harmony barriers,” the Research Overhead said. “He’s seen first hand a power specifically designed to counter it. He could recreate it.”

“So, as far as we know, both offense and defense were going well, but they could both be going horribly right now,” O’Neill summed up. “I love being in the dark. Don’t you?”

Allure sighed. “No…”

They heard an explosion above them.

“That’s all the time we have for today,” O’Neill said. “Homework is due tomorrow.”

“Homework?” Ava asked.

“It’s a pass/fail assignment.” O’Neill looked at them all. “Stay alive.”

There was a solemn silence over the meeting. Above them, there was another, louder explosion.

They picked up their weapons and prepared to fight for their lives.

~~~

Brell walked through her green facility, Lady Rarity being dragged along beside her by Minna. Not that Brell knew it was Minna – or had even registered Minna’s presence within the Congeries. She scarcely paid much attention to any one of her individual children, thinking of them more as a collective. She wasn’t even sure how many were with her – a squad, yes, but she didn’t care if it was fourteen or twenty-six or some other number. All that mattered was that they were with her.

“So, uh…” Lady Rarity said. “If you’re going to turn me into one of… them, why haven’t you tried it before?”

“Didn’t feel the need,” Brell answered. “My children were always perfect, able to move in and out without being noticed. They’d been around your worlds long before we made official contact, you know. We even dropped an incomplete one at your doorstep to learn more about you from the inside.”

“…Really?” Lady Rarity said, pretending to be completely ignorant of Minna.

“Yes. We let you raise her, let her learn to be like you. Few years ago we downloaded her memories and have been using them ever since.”

“Oh, so you’ve been using her for intelligence gathering? I take it you know everything about our troop movements then?”

“That would require her being open,” Brell commented. “After the borders were closed we dropped all communications. And getting to her has proven… difficult since the war started. She’s in Celestia City somewhere, and only recently have we gained access to it. We will find her and adopt her back into our fold.”

“That’s possible?”

“There is no age limit to when they can be completed,” Brell said. “It’s just the most efficient if it is done when they’re young. You will suffer quite a bit if I’m successful.”

“And if you’re not I’ll just be dead.”

Brell gave her a warm smile. “I certainly hope not. You seem like you’d make a wonderful child.”

Lady Rarity shivered. “I’d pass if I had the choice.”

“You do not,” Brell said, stopping in front of an empty pod filled with goo floating over a large, metallic table. “Untie her.”

Minna and a few of the others untied Lady Rarity. She rose to her feet, armor clanking.

Brell leaned down so she was eye-level with Lady Rarity. “Now, you can be cooperative and take off your armor. As a reward, you’ll receive the procedure with anesthetic and painkillers. If I have to force that armor off of you it’ll be done the painful way. I don’t like causing pain – that’s what the rest of my family is for – but I know when it’s necessary.”

Lady Rarity slowly started removing her armor. “Why do you do this?”

“Do what?”

“Such cruel biological experimentation.” She gestured with a bare hoof at the soldiers behind her. “They barely have a spark in them. They don’t enjoy life.”

“They don’t hate it either,” Brell said. “They exist as a beautiful middle ground. Balance. They are able to see what is coming so they aren’t surprised by life, and they don’t have expectations that will be brought down. They’re content, under all circumstances. Something I wish I was.”

“If you wish it, why don’t you do this to yourself?”

“I’ve considered it,” Brell admitted. “But neither my father nor my brother has the requisite understanding of morality or care to give them a pure direction, and I do not have access to something with enough power to take their place. My hunt for a Wishing World has proven futile.”

“You call this war a pure direction?”

“No,” Brell said. “I would rather not have sent my children into battle. But I am subservient to my father. I would never dream of crossing him – to do so… It wouldn’t mean my death, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. He has an understanding of cosmic beauty unlike any other.” She looked at her hands. “If I could only convince him that not all beauty is good.”

“…Can you think that, maybe, this beauty you’re making here isn’t good?” Lady Rarity suggested, standing naked.

“It is what I wish I could be,” Brell said with a smile. “I can’t see why it wouldn’t be good.”

Lady Rarity sighed. “Are you sure? What ab-”

There was a loud explosion from somewhere in the facility.

Brell let out a ‘tsk’. “Someone’s in. All of you, take care of it – I’ll be fine.”

The soldiers moved away without flinching – including Minna. Lady Rarity was now alone.

“You’re contemplating fighting me now,” Brell said. “A skilled wizard and warrior such as yourself could pull off a plucky victory. Don’t. Think about the power scale between us.”

Lady Rarity sighed. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Up on the table please.”

Lady Rarity moved onto the table. She caught some shouts coming from the distance in the green fog.

“…Like, girls, these powers are major. Fresh!”

“Pour l'amour de la princesse… ‘Avocwing! Down!”

“BURN FUCKERS! BURN!”

“Everybody scream scream scream…”

Lady Rarity blinked. She didn’t know those voices.

Brell pressed some buttons on the console next to her, accessing the deep controls of the facility. In an instant, Lady Rarity lost all feeling in her muscles. She wobbled. “What th-”

“Anesthetic.”

“I’m still very conscious.”

Brell smirked. “I know my way around a biological mind. I can turn whatever I want on and off at will.”

“So, what exactly does this procedure entail?”

“Well, first I’ve got to analyze your DNA patterns and how they intermingle with both your spirit and your arcane nature. The program’s doing that right now. I’ll make a few tweaks and shape you into one of my children. Then there’ll be a scoop in your brain to complete you. It’ll be exceptionally bloody and trigger a few biological reflexes, but it won’t hurt. Then you’ll be done.”

“…And this won’t take long?”

“My children will take care of whatever miscreants are rampaging through the area,” Brell said dismissively. “There’s millions of them in this facility alone.”

“That’ll be enough?”

“Assuredly.” Brell’s screen lit up. “Ah, looks like I’ve found the correct pattern. I do hope this works.”

Lady Rarity braced for a dramatic alteration of her genetic code. But it never came.

Minna dropped from the ceiling and punched Brell across the face with all her power. Brell fell to the ground, dazed.

Minna didn’t waste any time – she turned right to the console and started pressing buttons. “Self destruct… Self destruct… Self destruct…”

She found it. All the primary controls were already open. All she had to do wa-

Brell used her telekinesis to pull Minna to her and remove her helmet. “You…”

Minna struggled, but Brell’s grip was way too strong. “Let go of me!”

“How can you fight your own siblings this way?”

“Because you removed what makes them people!” Minna shouted. “That’s what!”

Brell shook her head. “I’m afraid you’ve been indoctrinated too fa-”

Lady Rarity jumped for the button on the console. Brell tossed the spirid to the side with a flex of her eyelash. Lady Rarity didn’t feel any pain as she hit the ground, but given the shape of her left foreleg, she had probably broken a few bones. “Ergh…”

“I do not blame you for trying that,” Brell said, placing Lady Rarity on the table and strapping her down. “You will still undergo the procedure with kind treatment.” She removed Minna from her power armor and set her down next to Lady Rarity. “She will just undergo the procedure with you. You need to be completed, my child.”

“NO!” Minna shouted. “I do not want to be like them!”

“Why?”

“I… I want to be able to look at my friends the way they look at me! I want to look at Frigid and tell him how I feel! I want to look at my Mom and give her some of what she’s given me!”

“I am your mother, child.”

“You’re a mad scientist who grows people in tubes,” Minna spat.

“So I am,” Brell said. “I-” she sensed an attack coming from the future. She lifted her hand, freezing the incoming Grayscale in midair. The ‘Rainbow Dash’ snarled, unleashing her power on Brell anyway, increasing the gravity around her considerably.

Brell didn’t flinch. She reacted with her cosmic power, tossing Grayscale into a nearby wall. She used gravity to lessen the impact, preventing anything from breaking, but it still wasn’t comfortable to be flattened against a metallic wall.

“HEY BOSS LADY!” Havocwing shouted, unleashing a stream of fire at her. “EAT THIS!”

Brell took this order literally, sucking all the fire into her mouth and unleashing it directly at Havocwing.

“Shit,” Havocwing muttered, diving to the ground.

“How about your own medicine!?” Shadow added, unleashing a beam of pure void energy at Brell. The bear twisted it around herself and fired it back at Shadow, who twisted it around herself and shot it back at Brell, creating a game of ping-pong.

Velvet appeared behind Brell while the game was underway. She summoned a tendril of blood and flung it at Brell’s back, only for a magic construct that resembled a solar system projection to appear and defend Brell.

Brell was decidedly busy with this – so Insipid took her chance. She darted from her hiding spot behind a pod and reached for Brell’s leg.

Brell kicked out with her foot, psychic energy tossing Insipid back.

“Like, wow, good ploy!”

Brell blinked – the voice had not come from Insipid. It had come from the other side.

The ‘Insipid’ Brell had kicked dropped her illusion, revealing herself to be Curaçao. “Je t'ai eu.”

The real Insipid had used the powers she obtained from one of the soldiers to sneak past Brell’s future-sight. She laid a hoof on Brell, giggling. “This is going to be an excellent power! MAJOR. FRESH.”

Brell found this annoying. She tried to drive a fist of magic energy through Insipid, but a magical barrier like a solar system appeared around her instead. Insipid let out a dismissive huff. “Pfft. Whatever. I wear it better.”

The necklaces of their Elements began to glow darkly. Now that they were all here, as one, they were ready to unleash utter darkness on Brell.

Brell thought fast – Insipid had her abilities now, and wouldn’t be easy to take out. Shadow was still flinging Void at Brell, keeping her occupied along with Velvet. She knew nothing about Curaçao, which left Havocwing and Grayscale as her primary targets.

Havocwing looked the weakest.

“Sorry,” she muttered. She stared at Havocwing and flexed her eyes.

Havocwing was absorbed into a miniature black hole that existed for all of a second, her red body going through the shredder. A wing and a leg vanished from existence while others fell to the ground after the singularity had vanished, her blood pooling with the red of her coat.

Without her, the elements stopped working.

“HAVOCWING!” Shadow shouted, losing concentration and allowing the Void energy to hit her straight on. She fell back.

“Bitch!” Insipid said, pushing at Brell with her own raw energy.

But Brell knew how to use her abilities a lot better than Insipid did. She unleashed a complex chain algorithm that hit Insipid from all sides. Without knowledge of how to defend against the compression, the unicorn had all the air squeezed out of her.

This just left Velvet and Curaçao standing.

Velvet glared at Brell. “Wrong.”

Brell made Velvet’s blood vanish with a snap of her fingers. “Wrong?”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m no-”

“But what if you are?” Velvet asked, cocking her head with a menacing smirk. “Do you ever think about that?”

Brell grimaced. “What is your point?”

“Just talking at this point. Call it… curiosity.” Velvet smirked. “I see in you. I se-”

Brell punched Velvet in the face, forcing her back. “A fear-feeder. Curious.”

Curaçao walked up to Brell and blinked. “Curious? ‘ow so?”

“She instinctively knew which button to press,” Brell said, turning to face her last opponent. “What can you do?”

“Deceptions,” Curaçao answered. “Invisibility, disguises…”

“Not a warrior then?”

“Not wizout ze rest of zem,” Curaçao admitted. “Not ze best in ‘oof-to-’oof combat, generally only good for copycat ploys like the one you just witnessed.”

Brell nodded. “Then you’ll get to witness history.”

“‘istory? Do tell.”

Brell narrowed her eyes. “You seem far too interested, especially considering that I heavily injured most of your friends and killed one of them.”

“Friends? We’re just a team who works togezer out of convenience. You must ‘ave us confused with someone else. Like the Elements of ‘armony.”

Brell looked at her curiously. “It seems unlike the Merodi to employ those such as yourself…”

Curaçao shrugged. “A simple necessity. Zey had to destroy the ‘armony field. We had the means to do so.”

Brell leaned down. “No loyalty to them whatsoever?”

“None.”

“You seem to be a refined mare. And I don’t detect a trace of anger or resentment toward me in your voice… Just annoyance that you’ve been defeated… How do you feel about art?”

“Art is a beautiful construct zat bonds the souls of all beings togezer zrough a shared experience, vie partagée if you will. It comes from ze closest thing to on ‘igh, zat place above all ozers from where our creativity is driven.”

Brell pondered this. “Perhaps you would be willing to assist me in my endeavors… I’ll have to check inwardly first, and possibly complete you… But it might work…”

“I would make an excellent servant for you, but zere is a problem.”

Brell raised an eyebrow. “Hm?”

“Hélas, I am les menteur.” Seeing her confusion, Curaçao smirked. “A liar.”

Brell blinked. “What?”

“SELF DESTRUCT ACTIVATED.”

Brell whipped around to see Minna standing over the console, fingers pressed on the self-destruct button.

“You know, it’s really easy to guess passwords if you can see yourself typing them in,” Minna commented.

Brell grabbed Minna around her stomach and rammed her into the ground. “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’VE JUST DONE!?”

“Blowing up this place?” Minna suggested, hearing explosions start from a distant corner of the facility.

“IT’LL TAKE EONS TO BUILD THIS UP!”

“Shouldn’t have had a self-destruct button then.”

“I WH-” she blinked. “Why did I have a self-destruct button?”

This observation made the barely-conscious Velvet laugh. Brell ignored her, focusing intently on Minna.

“What’re you going to do?” Minna asked.

Brell’s eye twitched. “I’m going to make you pay for what you’ve done.” Brell kicked Minna across the room, breaking numerous bones in the process. “You won’t be leaving this place alive!”

“There’s the evil mother I know and hate,” Minna coughed, spitting up blood.

While Brell was fixated on Minna, Insipid got up. “Right, right… Uh… Shroudy magics and stuff!”

Curaçao turned to Shadow. “‘Avocwing. Now.”

Shadow nodded, rubbing the back of her head. She walked over to the remnants of Havocwing and tapped into her rarely-used holy magic. Unlike how most Twilight Sparkles were masters of harmonious energies and only used dark powers in times of dire need, Shadow was the exact opposite. Her standard motions were of darkness – while her last resorts were of light.

Her eyes lit with holy power and her body began to spasm from the uncomfortable presence of bright magic. She cast the revive spell on Havocwing.

It was pretty clear she Came Back Wrong. Her skin was missing in several places, her eyes didn’t focus on anything, and she let out a whispering scream.

“…Oh no,” Shadow said, putting a hoof to her mouth.

“The Elements don’t care,” Grayscale said, still flat against the nearby wall. “Use them.”

As the green laboratory lit aflame in the distance, the Mean Six used their Elements in tandem, a swirl of darkness surrounding them. All of them – including the wrong Havocwing – rose into the air, the darkness connecting all of them.

The chaos grabbed Brell from the back. Several spires of dark energy shot through her shields, making her gag.

Minna, despite her injuries, punched Brell across the face. With her magic otherwise occupied with the darkness attacking her, she had none left to counter Minna’s force.

In reality, Brell was a frail creature. Her neck snapped. The pain forced her defenses into a panic.

She was absorbed by the darkness, much like how Havocwing had been taken moments prior.

Minna breathed heavily. It was over. She had destroyed the one who created her siblings, and the facility would soon follow.

Oh. Right. Forgot about that.

“Get us out of here!” she shouted.

The swirling darkness expanded, surrounding both her and Lady Rarity protectively. Minna could see the Mean Six trying their hardest to keep the power up – even as the world exploded around them.

Insipid and Shadow lost consciousness first – the former not having much strength to begin with, the latter having used too much already. And yet, the Elements held together, powering the shield of darkness.

Grayscale passed out next, leaving the holding of the barrier to Curaçao and Velvet.

The burning fire of destruction raged against the barrier, forcing more and more energy out of them. Velvet let out a scream of agony and lost her control as well – leaving only the blue earth pony.

Minna knew she wasn’t going to last long.

Lady Rarity shouted at Minna. “Minna! Which one should I take?”

Minna started running through futures in her head. Lady Rarity didn’t exemplify or cause Fear… She wasn’t one for Greed… or Void… or Apathy… Anger.

“I hope you’re angry!” Minna blurted, pointing at Havocwing’s element. Lady Rarity grabbed it with her magic and pulled – tearing herself out of the restraints and taking Havocwing’s place as the Element of Anger.

Lady Rarity bared her spirid teeth and allowed her primal instincts to take over just as Curaçao passed out. She kept the connection going for the needed few more seconds – much longer than she should have because she couldn’t feel pain.

She allowed the darkness to dissipate. All of them were now standing on top of a broken chunk of metal floating in empty space within the Congeries’ center. Below them they saw a planet-sized burning hole eating away at one of the rectangles.

Havocwing snarled in rage, reminding Minna of her presence. The wrong pegasus flew at her, enraged, hooves on fire.

Lady Rarity shot her through the head with a laser, breathing heavily. The red pegasus died once again. “Enough… of… that…”

The Mean Five began to rise up. Insipid stumbled over to Havocwing and started crying. The rest just hugged each other – with the exception of Grayscale.

She was looking at where they were headed.

“Everyone? We might not have time for this.”

“What’s wrong with you!?” Insipid blurted. “Like, we need time to mourn!”

Grayscale pointed ahead. “We’re about to fly into the center, that’s what.”

Minna gulped. She guessed she wasn’t actually done.

Velvet looked right at her. “…Oh no.”

“What?” Minna asked.

“I think we’re Redshirts now.”

~~~

Arthon threw Eve and Corona into his personal cage. The two of them had magic inhibitors on their horns, hooves, hands, wings, and foot stumps just to be sure - including anti-Stand measures. The cage they had been thrown into hung in the middle of Arthon’s research room, with full view of all his holographic magitech computer displays. Usually the displays would show future plans for his art, but today it was mostly military plans.

Corona wished so badly she could get the information she was seeing out.

“I’m going to turn you into a special piece,” Arthon said as he walked up to one of his computers, creating a new file. “One that speaks of the tragedy and glory of war at the same time.”

“You’re sadistic,” Corona spat.

Arthon didn’t argue.

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Not at all. My sister and my father are hindered by emotions, and cannot get to the truth of art. Brell is too obsessed with her balance and father with honor. I serve only the works of art. There is nothing beyond them.”

“Give it a rest…” a raspy voice said from the back of the cage. Eve and Corona glanced behind them and gasped.

It was Olivia – except it also wasn’t. She had the same face and shape as they remembered, but she wasn’t human anymore. Her body was made of a crumbling stone material that constantly broke little chunks off, filling the air with dust as she regrew the loose piece.

“Olivia!” Corona shouted, tears coming to her eyes. “You’re… You’re alive!”

“Barely,” Olivia muttered. “Say hello to the newest creation of Arthon’s. Olivia Velazquez. Humanoid pumice.”

Eve frowned. “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to fix you… We’ll get you back!”

“Always hopeful,” Arthon muttered, pressing a few buttons on a nearby screen. “Even in the face of absurd danger.”

“Hey, you’re the guy who’s home is being invaded,” Corona spat. “You probably need to surrender. We can’t be the only ones who got in.”

Arthon let out a laugh. “Had you mentioned that a few seconds ago, you would have had a point. But look at this message I’ve just received. Details about how you broke through our harmony barrier – giving me exactly what I need to break down your home’s aggravating defenses.” He moved his fingers through the holograms. “Just need to get father to create a few more ships… Shouldn’t be too much of a strain on him. The defenses will hold for a second.” He sent a message. “Soon, your worlds will burn.”

Corona grabbed the bars. “You monster.”

“This is just standard warfare, Corona,” Arthon said.

“Then I call you a monster for making human zippers.”

Arthon shrugged. “Then a monster I shall be. It must be the true form of art to be hideous to others.”

“He’s crazy,” Olivia coughed, forcing dust out of her mouth. “No getting through to him. And no attacking him either, since we’re up here. I suggest waiting for help to arrive because otherwise we’re just going to go loco.”

Eve looked down at Arthon, shaking her head. “I came here to do something… Not get captured and make things worse.”

“You did fine, he was just too strong,” Corona said. “Also caught us by surprise…”

“You should have known you’d be easy to detect,” Arthon muttered.

“I’d just gotten my feet burned off at the time!”

Arthon smirked. “Then the barrier did something useful, at least.”

Corona glared at him – an idea slowly forming in her mind.

“…I bet you’re scared of us.”

“Quite the contrary. It is you who are scared of me.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the three of us. I mean all of us as a whole. We’re right outside your doorstep, banging on your front doors, destroying your home. We have a good chance of overpowering you in here with our ships alone.”

“That i-”

“What are you going to do if we win?”

“You won’t win.”

“You should have a plan though,” Corona said. “I mean, I thought you were the one not hindered by balance or honor – just pure devotion to the art? Hrm? How can you claim to do that if you haven’t thought of every contingency?”

Arthon growled, saying nothing.

“It’s because you aren’t really devoted. You’re devoted to yourself, not the art. You can’t imagine life without this power. Can’t imagine smaller art. You’ve grown up in the shadow of your father and have no way to view the world outside of him! You’re trapped!”

“I am not in my father’s shadow!”

“Then how come you do everything he wants, eh? Look at you, commanding his armies, subjugating worlds that need it, moving plans to help his view of the future. Do you really think you can challenge him? What if you beat him? What would you do then? Nothing. Because you’re just his son, and you’ll never be anything more!”

Arthon threw a punch at Corona, planning to bust through the bars.

Corona raised a bare hand to catch the fist.

He saw this, stopping just short of the bars.

Corona stuck her arm through the bars and tried to grab his hand, but he pulled back. “Your empathy still works, doesn’t it? Direct contact even while under magic inhibitors, using my power as your own…”

“Dammit,” Corona cursed under her breath.

“That was a clever ploy,” Arthon admitted. “What were you going to do? Destroy my consciousness? Did you really think you could do that?”

“I’ve beaten a Great Old One at mental chess, Teddy. You’re not that good.”

“Then it’s certainly fortunate for me that I didn’t let you get to me. I’m more than my anger, after all. I am devoted to the a-”

There were suddenly several dozen magical holes in his body along with several fist impressions. He went flying into one of the walls, breaking several computers. “What in th-”

Jotaro cracked his knuckles. “Time to take you back to hibernation.”

Nova jumped off his back, creating several magical barriers around the two of them. “What he said. …I think.”

“YEAH!” Corona shouted. “GET HIM!”

Vriska and Flutterfree dropped from the ceiling; the former adjusting her glasses while the latter splayed her wings aggressively.

“F-flutterfree?” Eve said, eyes wide. “W-what happened t-”

“I had to become a warrior,” Flutterfree said. “I… I’ll deal with the consequences later.”

Arthon pulled himself out of the wall and readied a spell, the arcane energies swirling around his hand like a miniature solar system.

Pinkie hit him on the head with her warhammer, following it up with a million-degree knife to his hand, chopping it off. “SURPRISE!”

Arthon roared, the force of his voice pushing all but Jotaro back. Jotaro wrapped Arthon up in Hermit Purple and the Passion, feeling the horrific anger and darkness in his soul. Jotaro followed up with a Star Platinum punch, driving a hole through Arthon.

Arthon’s power healed him. “You… can’t… do anything to me!”

Vriska smirked. She started draining his luck. “Let’s see how much of this you have…”

“Inversion,” Arthon said. Suddenly Vriska felt her luck dropping instead of increasing. She stopped instantly.

Flutterfree flew by Arthon, scraping him with the knives, but she was tossed aside easily. She opted to fire the bow of light at him, annoyed to find that he had a Seraphim-like field around him that diverted projectiles.

Nova erased time, appearing behind Arthon after a confusing round of everyone switching places in the room. She hit him with a mixture of a concussive blast and aging spell, planning to blow him to dust.

The aging didn’t affect him, and the concussive blast barely made him move. He pushed back at her, throwing her into Vriska – forcing the troll to lose hold of some of her dice. “FUCK.”

Jotaro went after Arthon again. “ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

Arthon altered the barrier around himself after the second ‘ORA’, making Star Platinum’s fists disappear the moment they got within half an inch of Arthon’s body.

Flutterfree attempted to use Lolo, but the same rule applied – no Stands could approach Arthon now. Jotaro attempted to throw a piece of computer shrapnel at him, but Arthon caught the plating and threw it back at Jotaro.

“I will counter everything all of you have!” Arthon roared, his shield blocking more and more as time went on. Vriska’s sword vaporized the moment it touched him. Nova’s magic signature started to charge Arthon. Stands were pointless. “Did you think it was my father who was responsible for the adaptations!? No! It was me! I never let you do the same thing twice!”

“Then you better get ready for the death roulette,” Pinkie spat. She cracked her neck and grinned. “What to do first?”

Arthon pushed her back with his psychic power. But she wasn’t there – she was behind him, driving a glowing green sword through his chest. Then she was far away, firing a machine gun at him. Then she was under him, placing bear traps around his feet.

Arthon roared. “CHILD’S TRICKS! I WILL ALWAYS RECOVER!”

Pinkie produced a sword and cut Arthon’s arm off. It didn’t grow back. “See this? This is a starmetal sword. On loan from a nice mare who currently isn’t using it. Very useful.” She didn’t bother swinging it again, knowing Arthon had already figured out how to defend against it.

He rushed her, but she was once again behind him, driving a jackhammer into his back. Then she smashed him into the Wall.

“What in…?”

“Ka is a funny thing, isn’t it?” Pinkie said. She pressed his face to the back of the computer screen. “Look at them. Look at them cheering for your downfall. You villain.”

“I WILL NOT BE BROUGHT LOW BY PETTY EXISTENTIALISM!” He pushed back, summoning a complex crushing spell on her. She appeared behind him.

He was expecting this. His hand was ready for her. He drove it right into her face, two fingers going for the most vulnerable areas.

She screamed. A force of burning, searing power like nothing she had ever felt before went directly from her eyes to her brain and through her entire nervous system.

He shaped her, expressing his creativity on her body. Candy-red blood spurted out the back of her head in arc patterns. Her body didn’t go limp, but instead took a jagged, twitching pose. She flew to the back wall, her limbs twisted behind her back and embedded into the rock.

Blood dropped from her face, making up for her inability to cry.

Arthon turned to the rest of them. “Now that the annoyance is out of the wa-”

Flutterfree had her psychotic breakdown.

She couldn’t make a word with her mouth – couldn’t scream ‘PINKIE!’, couldn’t tell anyone else what to do, and couldn’t think.

All was Rage.

She flew at Arthon, purple energies channeling through her blades. She drove her hooves and wings into Arthon, surpassing his barriers with something new.

She attempted Flair’s instant death technique, slicing Arthon into several pieces.

He reformed, the places he had been cut sparkling with white energy. A cosmic torrent shot out from his hand, pushing her back – but her Rage kept her standing.

The ground beneath her tore up and flew backward. She tore it apart with pure physical strength, landing on the ground. She took a step toward Arthon.

He sneered – her power was formidable, but he could deal with her. All he had to do was keep pushing her back until she tired. Everyone ran out of the ability to express such unbridled rage after enough emotional taxation. It would only be a matter of time.

What he didn’t realize was that a Page of Rage was a beacon.

They gave their power to those around them.

Jotaro, Vriska, and Nova all grabbed hold of Arthon’s neck at the same time, all three of their bodies burning with purple energy. He felt the Rage claw into him, seeping the power of destruction into him.

No. He couldn’t fall to this. He had to find a way to defend against it. To stop his body from succumbing to this pathetic weakness. All he had to do was find a defense… a spell… something cosmic. Something to keep from disintegrating.

White cracks appeared in his body, the light within shifting color to a deep purple.

He realized he didn’t have time.

The Rage revealed the truth of his situation. As he was, he would not survive.

He left behind his devotion to the arts to tap into the Rage of his own. He was going to take as many down with him as he could.

He tore off Nova’s leg with his teeth, spitting the offending limb to the floor. He summoned the power cosmic within him, preparing to self-destruct and take everything out. No one would survive within a hundred miles.

Flutterfree plunged the tips of her wings through his back and tore him in half, the power of the Rage keeping him from reforming. His blood sprayed all over her – a glowing red and white liquid riddled with magical sparkles akin to stars. The thick fluids ran down her body and pooled at her hooves.

She let out a scream, channeling all the Rage into it – draining herself. The purple glow vanished and she slumped to the ground, eyes rolling into the back of her head.

In the end, Arthon knew how truly pointless his fight had been.

The battle was over.

Vriska leaped to the cage and tore the door open, popping the magical inhibitors off the three of them, being careful with Olivia’s crumbly body.

Eve ran to Flutterfree to hold her. The pegasus moaned, but didn’t open her eyes.

Corona ran to Pinkie – catching her in healing magic before the party pony bled out. Her cuts and bruises healed up nicely… Her eyes didn’t. There were now gaping holes instead of bloody waterfalls.

Corona put her hands on Pinkie’s shoulders. “We’ll get you to a doctor. We-”

“Help Nova,” Pinkie said, voice hollow.

“R-right,” Corona said. Nova’s wound was much simpler – just healing up a leg stump. “We’ll get you to a doctor as well. Grow everything back.”

“That’ll work for Nova,” Olivia said, crawling out of the cage. “Won’t work for Pinkie. Or me.”

“Wh – why?”

“Do you all remember the Sweetie Belle? The one the Collector called Sweetie Chronicle?”

Nova nodded. “…Vaguely.”

“Remember her crystal condition? A being called ‘the beast’ cursed her to eternally have a crystal body, regardless of where her soul wandered, regardless of any healing offered.” Olivia tapped her own rocky exterior. “We’ve been changed like that.”

Vriska curled her fist into a ball. “Someone bring him back so I can kill him again.”

Eve looked up at Pinkie from her position over the unconscious Flutterfree. “…Pinkie?”

Pinkie tried to look at her, but wasn’t quite able to set her face straight. “Y-yeah?”

Eve choked. “I’m sorry.” She levitated Pinkie into a hug. “I’m so, so sorry, I… I thought I…”

“You’re safe,” Pinkie said, fumbling to hug her back. “That’s… That’s all that matters. I couldn’t let you die out here.”

“I’m the idiot who decided I needed to come out here!”

“We always needed to be here,” Pinkie said. “All of us. Including you, Eve.” She finally got her hooves around Eve in the correct way. “I forgive you. For everything.”

“P-pinkie…” Eve burst into tears, unable to take it all. “I don’t deserve you! Any of you!”

“Yes you do,” Pinkie said, squeezing harder.

Then Eve let out a sharp cry of pain. Pinkie pulled back. “W-what is it?”

“Eheh…” Eve rubbed her side. “I think you hugged too hard… Snapped a rib, somehow…”

Corona laid her hand on Eve, healing the wound. “Good as new.”

Pinkie gulped. “S-sorry…”

“Pinkie, don’t worry, it was just you being emotional and I didn’t-”

“Eve, I had no idea I was hugging you too hard.”

Eve looked at her. “Wh-”

Pinkie smashed her hoof against the floor a few times, drawing blood and cracking her hoof in several places. “I didn’t feel any of that.”

“P-Pinkie…”

“It’s… It’s not okay, no,” Pinkie said. “But… but it was my turn. I figured it out. If I wanted to save you, I was going to have to suffer.”

“This is all my fault!” Eve shouted.

“E-”

“Don’t you dare say otherwise!” Eve interrupted. “If I hadn’t kept my identity from you I would never have run away to this war in the first place! If I hadn’t started this war, none of you would have needed to risk your lives like this! If…”

Corona put a gloved hand on Eve’s shoulder. “Eve. This war needed to happen.”

“…C-corona…”

“You’ve seen what Arthon and Skarn do. They do things like what’s happened here to millions, daily.”

Eve grabbed Corona’s shoulders. “I can’t make these kinds of sacrifices, Corona! I just… I just can’t do it!”

“Yes you can,” Corona said, holding her tight. “You can.”

Eve looked into Corona’s eyes – a strange calmness taking over the purple alicorn’s expressions. “I… can?”

“Yes. You can,” Flutterfree said. “So long as you’re also willing to sacrifice yourself, you’ll have paid everyone back.”

Eve looked to her. “But you came to stop me from doing just that!”

Flutterfree looked at Eve’s eyes, the blood of Skarn dripping down her face. “…Because we should never have let you go alone.”

Eve blinked. Then she threw her hooves around Flutterfree’s neck. “I’m so sorry…”

Flutterfree nodded. “I know. I am too.”

“Everyone is,” Jotaro said, kneeling down to Eve.

Eve looked up at him. “Jotaro… Thank you. You don’t owe me anything anymore. I know I always told you that you never owed me anything, but I mean it this time.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, adjusting his hat. “There’s more to loyalty than that.”

Eve nodded. “Y-yeah. Something I should know…” She turned to Nova.

“I’m still pissed you started this war,” Nova said.

Eve hung her head.

“But I understand why you did,” Nova said. “And, let’s be perfectly honest, I would have probably done something a lot worse a lot sooner if I had your position.”

Eve looked into Nova’s eyes. “…Are we still…?”

“Yes, Eve, we’re still friends,” Nova said, pulling her in. “You taught me too much to just let it all go now. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Y-yeah. Just…” She wiped her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“I know something,” Corona said, folding her fingers together. “That’s only one bear down. There’s still a war going on.” She looked at everyone in the room. “A war we need to finish.”

“Corona!” Flutterfree called. “Some of us are in no condition t-”

“Let’s go,” Pinkie said. “She’s right, we need to end this war. Some of us can’t fight – but we have to do this and we’re all sticking together.”

Flutterfree looked at her for a moment. “…Okay. We all go to face Skarn.”

Corona took a step forward, establishing herself as the one to lead the charge. “Hope he’s ready for us.”

~~~

Jane had followed a very basic philosophy – don’t stop digging.

Even when they had burst through the crust, she didn’t stop digging.

Even as they fell through the sky and toward the central sphere, she didn’t stop digging. Every missile that hit her pickaxe was reduced to its basic resources in an instant.

Even as they hit one of the rectangular prisms, she didn’t stop digging, falling through a hallway far too large for them.

Even as they approached the central sphere, she didn’t stop.

Behind her, Nae, Jade, Alushy, and Sunny fell, a little bored that they weren't doing anything.

“Got any sevens?” Alushy asked Jade.

“Go fish,” Jade said, smirking at her.

“Fudgefucklesticks,” Alushy muttered, drawing another card from the deck Sunny was holding in her telekinesis.

Nae went next. “Any aces, Sunny?”

“Yep,” Sunny said, levitating her card over.

“And I win,” Nae said, folding her arms and grinning, her pair of aces floated up into the air.

“And now we don’t have a full deck of cards,” Alushy commented. “Great going, Einstein.”

“I can always make more,” Sunny pointed out.

“I think we should stop anyway,” Jade said. “We are getting pretty close to the center.”

They looked down – wondering what would happen when Jane’s pickaxe finally hit the glowing spherical center of the Congeries.

Jane herself was wondering what would happen. “Make sure we come in slow!” She called up. “Don’t want to turn into pancakes!”

“On it!” Jade and Sunny said, extending their telekinetic powers around all five of them, slowly decelerating them as they approached the center sphere. They landed on the surface, finding it to be smooth like glass, but otherwise opaque.

“If we can see the lights inside this thing, they must be really bright,” Jade observed.

Jane drove her pickaxe into the material. The tool bounced back from it, unharmed. Jane was not all that surprised about this.

“I do have to ask,” Nae interrupted. “Do we really think Minna is in there?”

“Do you think she could be anywhere else?” Alushy asked.

“No, but we have to ask. Going in there will definitely have danger, probably a lot more than we’re expecting or used to.”

“Don’t worry,” Jane said, pulling a clockwork sword with a red blade out of her inventory. “I’m here. Back before we settled down, Sunny and I killed gods for a living.”

Sunny facehooved.

“This Skarn guy may be a bit above our usual fare… But I’m not worried. He’s an asshole who needs to be kicked down a few pegs.”

“All the pegs?” Jade asked.

“All of them,” Jane asserted. Then she blinked. “…Did you just Vriska me?”

Jade giggled. “Heheh… yeah.”

“Huh. Good for you, I guess.” She whirled around and drove her god-slaying sword into the outside of the sphere. It cracked like an egg and they all fell inside. The interior light was blinding – enough to actually burn parts of Alushy – but Sunny was able to see through it.

“Jane, swing again!”

Jane didn’t hesitate, driving through another layer. They entered a tube-like construction that took them away from the outer light, sliding deeper and deeper into the core.

Their vision slowly returned allowing them to see outside the clear tube they were in. They saw hallways with soldiers running through them, complicated mechanisms that moved magic to and fro between labs to living quarters to museums of creative art taken from various universes. They even saw some allies - a few Space Marines trouncing the enemy and some Inklings getting trounced.

The pipe in front of them was constantly shifting, redirecting their course – but instead of diverting them into somewhere they didn’t want to go, it was taking them right to the center of the Congeries. The very center.

Jane gripped her sword. “He knows we’re here. Get ready.”

The pipe deposited them in the control room for the Shaping Mechanism. They saw the tendrils of magic energy that served as the display winding into images of ships, troops, and giant bear statues. They saw the glowing blue orb that allowed Skarn to interface with the Shaping Mechanism.

They saw Skarn himself. He was, as always, a bear made of pure cosmic energy, nebulous stars shifting through his fur. Horns sprouted out of his head, casting him in a demonic image. Spiraling, swirling magics surrounded him, reminiscent not only of solar systems, but of galaxies, while a necklace resting on his bare furry chest sparked with energy.

He removed his hands from the controls, allowing the Shaping Mechanism to run on autopilot, and turned to face them. His expression wasn’t angry – but calm. Expectant, even. “Welcome to the center of my Congeries. I can’t say I was expecting you to be the first here – though I suppose Eve and Corona did drop by earlier.”

“You have been expecting us,” Nae said.

“But of course. This is not just any regular war, decided by numbers, tactics, and ploys. That part of the war is over – the squabbles between my Shaping and the Merodi fleet outside are there just to keep each other occupied right now, making them meaningless. This is a war that is to be decided by the greatest warriors, in deep, personal battle.”

“Um… What exactly would killing us accomplish?” Nae asked. “We’re just soldiers. Strong, yeah, but not very… important.”

“And even killing the highest leaders won’t stop us,” Sunny pointed out.

“And killing me won’t stop my forces,” Skarn countered. “They will keep fighting, even without guidance. It will be difficult to overcome them even without the aid of my Shaping.”

Jane pointed her sword at him. “How about we kill you and figure that out later?”

Skarn moved forward. “Or we could make an honorable agreement. I’ll promise to have my soldiers automatically stand down upon my death. In return, you must promise me something.”

“We don’t have the authority to surrender,” Sunny said. “Or call anything off.”

“Oh no, nothing like that. All I want you to promise is that, upon your deaths, I get all your memories and knowledge. Which would no doubt include methods by which I can enter Merodi Universalis personally and use my abilities to tear planets in half.”

Jane glared at him. “You’re rather upfront about that.”

“It is the way of honor,” Skarn said. “We can fight with those terms – or not.”

“Don’t take it,” Jade said.

“DO take it!” Alushy blurted. “C’mon, we’ve gotta end this guy in one epic showdown! Dragging it out will only make it lame.”

“I say take it as well,” Nae said. “The rewards outweigh the risks.”

“…I don’t think so,” Sunny offered. “I think he’s got some sort of trick up his sleeve. Something he’s playing off of.”

“The only thing I am playing off is your severe underestimation of what I am,” Skarn said. “I could explain that to you, if you like. I am a combination of two higher deities and a mortal shell blessed with the gift of seeing the true beauty of existence, and the inspiration to draw it out of its hiding.”

“You sound like nothing special,” Jane said. “But I don’t trust this, in any way, so no deal.”

“The smarter choice, for you,” Skarn admitted. “It would truly be silly if this side-group defeated me, after all.”

“Fuck,” Alushy blurted. “I didn’t even think about the narrative. We’re a bunch of side characters and backgrounders.”

“But we’re not Redshirts,” Jane said, gripping her sword. “Skarn, let me put this to you simply. You’re going down.”

Skarn nodded. “It makes sense that you would believe that, godkiller. Perhaps we should move somewhere more appropriate for a battle, then?”

He didn’t wait for a response. They were suddenly elsewhere – a different universe, one that existed as a functionally endless plane of metal engraved with billions of different symbols. The sky above them swirled with galaxies of every color, but it wasn’t real – the ‘stars’ were just specks of magic floating in the dark blue void above them.

Skarn put his hands behind his back. “I’ll be a gentleman. You can make the first move.”

Jane took the opportunity – she teleported behind him, her flaming blade materializing in the middle of his stomach. He let out a gasp of pain, moving his hand to clutch the wound.

“Hurts more than you were expecting, eh?” Jane said. She pulled it up, expecting to cut him in half – but her blade didn’t budge.

He had grabbed hold of the point sticking out of his stomach with his hands. He pulled with his whole body, tearing the blade out of Jane’s hands.

Then he snapped it in half between two of his fingers. The fire went out unceremoniously.

“It didn’t hurt that much at all, godkiller,” Skarn reported.

“This is one of those moments I wish I hadn’t already unleashed my army of damned souls,” Alushy muttered. She dropped her usual form, opting for the tremendous wall of shadow, eyes, and teeth. Jade took a fighting stance, barking as she arranged her fingers in a rectangle. Nae aimed her gun and activated her magic abilities. Jane drew another blade – clearly not her preferred weapon, but a brutal slayer of gods nonetheless. Sunny surrounded herself in the colors of fire and magic.

Skarn flicked a finger. Nae went flying, unconscious. “Now that the children have gone to where they won’t get hurt, the adults can have their fun, hrm?”

The four of them charged.

The four of them bounced back like rubber balls.

Skarn shrugged. “So hard to find a good challenge these days…”

~~~

Prior to his gruesome death, Arthon had ordered a few attacks. Attacks equipped with the knowledge to breach the harmony field.

He had chosen three worlds in which to do this – the Hub, Elemental Four, and Lai, simply because they were the ones with heavy Congeries presence.

Ships appeared in orbit around each of the three worlds, firing beams of darkness at the harmony fields – corrupting them in seconds. Cosmo quickly shut off power to those worlds to keep the harmony field from being corrupted elsewhere, but that left three worlds wide open.

The Hub had enough standard defenses to blast the invading forces out of the sky with ease, the city’s primary shield more than enough to absorb the orbital bombardment.

The other worlds, however…

Corea teleported to Air Temple Island with her magic, landing next to Tenzin. “Energy bars, magic bars, all the bars, stat,” she said, rubbing her head.

Tenzin gave her a basket of the requested ‘food’. She began devouring them ravenously.

“I take it defending Republic City has been particularly tiring today?”

“They must have figured something out with their abilities we can’t know about,” Corea muttered. “They keep getting past our defenses without us knowing, entire buildings just vanishing.” She wiped her brow, stuffing a magic bar into her face. “We’re still keeping them back, but our outer defenses keep needing to call in more reinforcements. Eventually they’re going to just stop coming, especially with Celestia City communications down.”

Tenzin nodded. “I’ve received word that the attack is almost over. One hour, maybe less.”

“That’s good. We can hold out for at least that long.” Corea let out a sigh of relief. “Good to know this is almost over. I b-”

The white lines of harmony in the sky flashed black, then vanished. Corea’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. She could sense the danger coming.

She entered the Avatar State on a trigger. Her eyes went white and she floated into the air. A torrent of water swirled from the seas around Air Temple Island, surrounding them in a dome of water. She added a shell of air around that, followed by a dome of earth that blocked out the sun. With a twist of her body, she created a final swirl of fire around the earthen dome, and on the very interior of the water she created a tremendous magical barrier.

She barely finished it in time. The orbital bombardment from Skarn’s fleet hit the second it was done removing the harmony barrier. Corea couldn’t see anything happening out there, but she felt her barrier of fire come down, followed by her earthen wall, and the air. The water lasted a bit longer, but eventually even it too dissipated, leaving just a magic shell. At the top of the dome, everyone on Air Temple Island could see a deep, red energy pushing at them from above, trying to break through the last layer, eating away at the remnants of the earthen dome and water layer.

Corea’s shield began to crack at the very top.

The unicorns of Air Temple Island gave her their aid, pushing their magic right into her. Tenzin meditated, willing his spirit into her own.

Corea strained. “It’s not enough!” the Avatars said. “It’s too much to stop! There must be… Spirit! PURE SPIRIT!” She roared, tapping into the spirits of everyone on the island, forcing their bodies into great pain. “We are sorry! There is no other way!”

The shield broke – but a great white spirit shot out of Corea and caught the energy beam with itself. The spirit was weak compared to the shield – only able to last a few seconds.

But that was all they needed. The bombardment stopped.

Corea fell to the ground, returning everyone’s souls to them. There were a few screams as this happened, but everyone on Air Temple Island was alive.

Nobody else was. There was a crater where Republic City had been. The entire bay Air Temple Island had sat in was vaporized, waiting for more ocean water to fill it.

Corea scanned the land – looking for any signs of life. She saw a few scant protrusions of artificial structures that had been slightly too durable to be glassed by the orbital lasers, but no life. There was nothing green as far as the eye could see. Not even the full-grown dragon that had taken to living on the nearby mountain was there – no skeleton to indicate he had ever been there.

Corea stared, slowly realizing that most of her close friends had been fighting to defend Republic City. “N-no…”

Tenzin grabbed Corea by the shoulders. “You saved what you could.”

“I… I…”

“You did your duty as the Avatar, Corea. You saved the Air Nomads from extinction.”

Corea nodded, biting back tears. “I… I know, Tenzin. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a tragedy!”

“I know it doesn’t,” Tenzin said. “Almost everyone I knew lived in that city. But you can’t allow yourself to think this is your failure!”

Corea burst into tears, falling to her haunches.

On Lai, a very different story took place.

Terezi rushed into Toph’s throne room. “Toph, you’re needed in the Hub!”

Toph cocked her head. “Really? What for?”

“I don’t know, I just know!”

“Terezi-”

“Just come already,” Terezi muttered, dialing the Hub with a government-issue device that could overrule the dimensional lock.

Toph sighed, giving instructions to one of her trusted Generals to move a legion to the south to protect the border better. Then she ran through Terezi’s portal, appearing in the Hub.

Just as the portal closed behind them, the bombardment of the Hub began. The city shook from the impact.

“They’re under attack!?”

“They’re fine, their point defenses are excellent,” Terezi said. “It’s easy to defend only one target.”

“…Then why are we here?”

“Before we get into that, I’m going to preface by saying I forgive you for what you’re about to do to me.”

Toph’s expression became angered. “Terezi what did you do?”

“I saw the possible futures. I didn’t like it. So I did something about it.” She pointed at a breaking news program on a nearby public screen. A Ga was reading the news.

“This just in, the Hub, Elemental Four, and Lai have been hit hard by Congeries forces that removed the harmony barriers. While the Hub was able to repel the attack quickly, Elemental Four and Lai have suffered extreme losses in the form of Republic City and the Lai Capital…”

Toph punched Terezi in the face. “I NEEDED TO BE THERE!”

“There was no future where you could have done anything!”

“Take me back. Now.”

Terezi didn’t argue – she dialed back. They walked to what had been Toph’s throne room just a moment ago.

Now it was a crater that extended as far as the eye could see.

Toph punched Terezi again. “You’re fired.”

“Yep… Saw this coming…” Terezi muttered.

Toph slammed her foot into the ground, sensing for any survivors on the surface.

She found one.

She ran to the nearby area of earth and spread the rocks apart, revealing a glowing sphere of esoteric energy that contained a single Arcei – the only Arcei. Starcei.

She had curled up into a fetal position and had her eyes shut as tight as she could manage.

“It’s okay,” Toph said, setting the magic sphere gently onto the ground. “You’re safe now.”

Starcei opened one of her eyes. She dropped her Runic shield and took a moment to look around. “Armonia’s horn…” she said, hoof to her mouth. “The entire city…”

“Everything,” Toph said. “EVERYTHING.”

“We need to find out how many soldiers we have left, how our fronts are doing a- Toph, what are you doing?”

Toph rammed her fists into the ground, creating a wall. “What’s it look like? I’m rebuilding the palace.”

“Toph, there a-”

“If this war doesn’t end soon this entire planet is going to be glassed,” Toph spat back. “Nothing we do is going to be able to change that. So I’m going to get a head start on rebuilding this place with my own two hands. Since I didn’t go down with the city like I was supposed to.”

Terezi grumbled. “You’re welcome.”

“I’m not thanking you.”

“I suppose I’ll go check on the armies then.”

“You’re fired Terezi, get out of my sight and don’t come back,” Toph grunted. “Starcei, you go check on the armies.”

Starcei saluted. “Yes, your Highness.” She teleported away.

Terezi let out a sigh and walked away in a random direction.

~~~

Allure hid beneath O’Neill. She held a small gun in her telekinesis, and had her Heart ready for combat. But she knew she wasn’t a killing machine. She would probably need to be.

There were five others in the room with her. Besides O’Neill, there was Ava, Starbeat, Thor, and the Research Overhead. Squeaky was out controlling the League of Sweetie Belles to keep civilian danger to a minimum while Allure just cowered in here since the teleporters were down. It was her place, she supposed, to be here.

She gulped. She had no idea where her daughter was, or even if she was alive. Allure’s League was up there, fighting and dying without her. And here she was, cowering, sitting in a room with several high value targets. Herself included.

She could hear them getting closer and closer, breaking through wave after wave of soldiers.

The Research Overhead took point – unfolding his body, shedding the humanoid shape in favor of a forward-lurching four-armed being with burning hot claws. He had all four of the claws aimed at the entrance, ready for anything.

Those who had Stands had them out. Crimson Sushi hung on to O’Neill’s shoulder, ready. Thor’s Stand – which Allure had recently learned had been named Lithium – was a series of three colorful orbs. She had no idea what it did. Just like she had no idea what Ava’s Stand did. It was named Red Rain and took the form of a perfectly spherical bubble of bloody water with an eyeball inside of it.

She briefly wondered if she should name her Heart powers. It definitely wasn’t a Stand, but it was able to act like one.

These thoughts were quickly banished when the first soldier walked in through the doorway. The Research Overhead shot at him from four different directions – three of which were dodged, but the fourth went right through his chest.

Red Rain activated. The blood pooling out of the soldier gained an eye similar to the one in Red Rain itself. The blood floated into the air, creating a drop-shaped being. The moment another soldier came in, the drop blasted right through his visor and into his face, freeing blood to make a second drop creature.

It was at this point the soldiers started getting smarter – coming in with larger groups. But O’Neill and Starbeat took care of them, confusing their perceptions and blasting them with a mixture of magic and physical bullets specifically designed to fool their perceptions.

They threw a grenade in, but Thor’s Lithium used one of its globes of energy to reduce it to subatomic particle dust. Another of the spheres created a burst of electromagnetism that sent the soldiers outside flying away.

Ah, he must control the fundamental forces of the universe. The nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. Allure blinked. Wait, no, he’d have used gravity if he could… That’s right, the nuclear force is split in two. Wonder how that works, exactly.

As it turned out, the third sphere was just extremely good at dealing with radiation. A soldier dropped dead outside from the interactions of Lithium’s third orb.

Allure felt a lot more confident that they had Thor on their side. With their mixture of Stands there was no way they could lose.

And then Thor was gone. Nothing more than a splat of juices on the ground next to a soldier with a broken neck.

“Wh… Wh…” Allure blinked.

“Godammit!” O’Neill shouted, pulling out one of his grenades and throwing it into the hall.

“Memory trick!” Starbeat shouted. “Be careful!”

“Did he transmit his consciousness?” O’Neill asked the Research Overhead.

“Negative,” the robot responded. “It appears his mind was caught up in their tricks as much as ours.”

“Shit,” O’Neill grunted, biting his lip. “Just… shit.”

Allure knew Thor was a good friend of O’Neill’s. Another tragedy in this war…

The Congeries’ soldiers smashed through the back wall, rushing in with a full contingent. Red Rain’s blood drop creatures rushed them, but they were somehow all taken out. No one was permitted to know how.

Crimson Sushi didn’t permit any of the enemies to know where they were, prompting several of them to shoot each other. But one of them had gotten clever and pointed a finger directly at Allure.

She rolled to the side, pushing O’Neill out of the way of the invisible bolt with her telekinesis. She activated her Heart and tore at the soldier’s feet, knocking him over. She delivered a quick blow to the base of the skull. She didn’t know if she killed him with that or just knocked him out, and she didn’t have time to find out. She had to do a backflip into the air to avoid the next set of shots.

Something hit Ava in the arm, forcing her to lose focus – all the droplets of blood fell.

Starbeat overexerted herself on a spell, shorting out her horn.

The Research Overhead got an arm blown off.

Allure realized they couldn’t win this fight. Not in a million years.

~~~

Corona, Eve, Olivia, Flutterfree, Jotaro, Vriska, Nova, and Pinkie walked together through a clear cylindrical tube, through which they could see the inner workings of the Shaping Mechanism and all the living quarters for Skarn and his family. There were a few soldiers around, but not that many.

Eve was levitating Pinkie along. They had discovered quickly that Pinkie had difficulty walking with no sensation in her hooves – it was going to take time they didn’t have for her to learn to adjust to her condition.

“You’re all looking for a pipe that leads all the way to the center,” Pinkie said, no longer full of the fire she had been for the last few days, instead speaking in flat, calculated tones. As if afraid of her own emotions. “It’ll take us right to the Shaping Mechanism controls.”

Olivia readied her rocky fingers. “Been a while since I’ve done a hacking job this advanced. Should be fun.”

“I see it,” Corona said, ending her scan spell. “I can teleport us right into the tube. It’s going to be a long ride, so we need to be prepared.”

“Got it,” Nova said, taking a ready stance on her three hooves. “…This is so weird…”

Corona clasped her hands and teleported them all into the tube. They slid down to the center, watching as all the other rooms and mechanisms flew by.

Vriska narrowed her eyes. “Did I just see the Mean Six up there?”

“You did,” Nova said. “I’ve locked onto Starlight Shadow’s magic signature. Sending her a ping no-”

Nova didn’t even get to send the ping. The Mean Five, Lady Rarity, and Minna teleported right into the midst of them. “Hell-WAUGH!”

Everyone had failed to realize they were about to hit a turn in the pipe. They were jostled around and unceremoniously deposited on a pile in the Shaping Mechanism’s control room.

There was silence for a moment.

Pinkie let out a soft laugh despite herself. “Pony pile! Heh…”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

Eve, Corona, and Shadow set to levitating everyone out of the pile to a standing position.

Olivia walked right up to the globe controls the moment she could and began touching her fingers to it. Of course she was locked out, but that wasn’t going to stop her. “I need some technological interfaces to work on this.”

Nova limped over. “Guess that’s me.” She sat down and put one of her remaining hooves next to the globe, letting Olivia access her screen.

Eve looked at the five strange ponies. “So, uh, who are they?”

“Dark but not evil clone copies of you from Equis Duo,” Velvet explained. “I’m Velvet, that’s Starlight Shadow, Grayscale Force, Insipid, and our leader Curaçao.”

“Hello again,” Flutterfree said, smiling at Curaçao. “Guess we both ended up in the same place?”

“Indeed,” Curaçao said. “…We lost one of our number. Your counterpart.”

“…I’m so-” Flutterfree caught herself. She looked at Curaçao with sad eyes. “…I know what that feels like.”

Curaçao nodded. “It’ll be time to mourn later. What I want to know is why Skarn isn’t here.”

Pinkie coughed. “He’s fighting Jade, Jane, Sunny, and Alushy in a pocket dimension we can access through the spark in the center of this room. …Wherever the center is. Just look, you’ll see it.”

While Corona and Lady Rarity took a moment to hug, Eve and Shadow walked to the center of the room. There was, in fact, a spark of energy on the ground, through which they could both sense a dimensional signature.

“Guess that’s where we need to go,” Eve said. “Help them fight Skarn.”

Corona healed Lady Rarity and Minna with her magic. “Duh. Anyone else need heals?”

“We’re good,” Grayscale muttered.

“Wait!” Flutterfree blurted. “We can’t all go, remember? You’d just be Redshirts.”

“Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about that,” Insipid said. “Weird.”

“You know what, screw it,” Shadow said. “We’ve come this far and gotten to the inner organs of the leviathan, I’m not just going to idle while the ‘big damn heroes’ assume control of the situation. So what if I’m a ‘Redshirt’? I’m here for a destined reason, just like the rest of us.”

Curaçao nodded. “Furthermore, I believe the situation ‘as changed now.”

Pinkie nodded. “Skarn’s obsessed with honor. He won’t kill you until his victory is complete or he has to. He took Nae out of the picture non-lethally. He doesn’t believe in needlessly sullying the other side’s victory, or driving them to rage before defeat.”

“…Whackjob,” Corona muttered.

“No argument here,” Pinkie said, stumbling as she absent-mindedly took a step forward.

“So…” Eve looked at everyone there. “All of us who are able to fight right now should go in. Flutterfree, Pinkie, Nova, Olivia, you’ve all exerted yourselves too much. Sit this one out.”

Flutterfree nodded. “I know… Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. And Minna?”

Minna looked at Eve.

“I can’t stop you. But I don’t think your mother would like it if you came with us.”

Minna blinked for a moment. Then she nodded. “I already did what I came here to do. I don’t have to be there. Brell was my problem – not Skarn.”

Eve, Corona, Lady Rarity, Jotaro, and Vriska stood next to the spark. They glanced at the Mean Five. “Which of you are coming?”

Curaçao stepped back. “I am a capable ‘oof-to-’oof fighter. I am not a legendary cosmic warrior. Deception will not do much to this foe, will it?”

“No,” Pinkie and Velvet said at once.

“C'est la vie,” Curaçao said, taking another step back. “I am afraid I will sit out, seeing as we can’t get ze Elements to activate. Lady Rarity simply isn’t angry enough to be accepted as a full bearer.”

“I’ll stay to guard all you injured slackers,” Grayscale said, standing next to Curaçao.

That left just Velvet, Shadow, and Insipid on the team to go into the dimension.

Eve readied herself. “Right. Let’s d-”

Olivia’s left hand crumbled “…Dammit,” she muttered, her body scattering fragments of stone.

Corona’s eyes widened. “O-olivia?”

“Without Arthon’s power… It looks like I don’t regenerate. I’m falling to powder.”

“Olivia, just stay calm, we’ll find a cu-” Corona stopped mid-thought. “…No cure.”

“No,” Olivia said, turning to glance at Corona with sad eyes.

“I just got you back! That’s no-”

“Life’s not fair,” Olivia countered.

“We can keep you in stasis until we find a cure! Or transfer your spirit!”

Pinkie sighed. “Corona…”

“Don’t you start, Pinkie! I’m not losing her again!”

Olivia held up her stump of a hand. “Yes, you are. There’s no cure for this, even a spiritual form would crumble from what he did. He killed me the moment he caught me. This body is a prison, Corona. Think of it as me… being freed. After all, all deaths mean something, right?”

Corona twitched. “That’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not.” Olivia sighed. “I’ll use what time I have left to give you control of these mechanisms. It’s the least I can do.”

Corona twitched.

“There’s really nothing you can do, amiga.” Olivia assured her. “Except go in there and wreck that bear’s shit.”

“I will,” Corona promised.

“Now get going so I can focus.”

“One last thing,” Pinkie said. “Eve, Skarn is going to offer a deal. You have to take it.”

Eve blinked. “I… do?”

“Merodi Universalis could be glassed if you don’t.”

Eve took in a sharp breath. “Okay. Got it.”

“Take care of yourself,” Flutterfree called after Eve. “…Don’t let him do anything to you.”

“We won’t let that happen,” Jotaro asserted.

“Like, that would be majorly uncool,” Insipid said. “No way is he laying those grubby claws on any of us.”

Eve nodded. “Ready, team?”

There was a ready from all seven of the others.

“Then here we go.”

They vanished in a spark of light.

Olivia sighed. “Back to getting this thing to work…”

“That’s not going to work,” Minna offered.

“What isn’t?”

“What you’re thinking of trying now. Try to think of something else.”

“Uh…”

“That’s not going to work either. Again.”

Olivia smirked. “You’re really helpful, huh?”

“I imagine if I weren’t me I’d be going very existential about all these possible futures. Whatever you’re thinking about now doesn’t fail instantly, so go ahead and try it.”

Olivia used her free hand to press some buttons on Nova’s screen. “Nova, time manipulation on the console would be appreciated – not on me, though. I’m crumbling.”

“We can set up a mental link,” Nova suggested. “You think to me, and I do things with my horn.”

“Do it,” Olivia said. “We’re going to get control of this thing yet.”

Flutterfree took the moment to walk up to Olivia. “…Hi.”

“Heh. Are you here to tell me about my lord and savior?”

“Actually, for once in my life, I am,” Flutterfree said. “You don’t have much time, Olivia.”

“I know all your teachings and everything, Butters.”

“I’m not sure anyone who studies us academically understands exactly what we are, and what we mean. It’s about believing in a place we came from, about a power on high that is absolute, and… and that the ultimate fate of everything is good even if we are broken.”

“Look, I’m all for living forever, and I’m definitely offering up prayers like nothing else right now.” Olivia let out a bitter laugh. “Not sure if they’re fully serious, though.”

“Try something else,” Minna suggested.

“Huh?”

“For the hacking, not the religious experiment,” Minna said. “I’ve no idea where that conversation’s going.”

“What do you believe, Minna?” Nova asked.

“…We have souls. And I haven’t really thought much beyond that.”

“Hm. You should think about it more often. Really interesting conversation.”

“Hey, Nova, why aren’t you fighting Flutterfree’s preaching attempts here?” Olivia asked, one of her ears crumbling to dust.

“Because even though I believe it’s a load of tar, she’s trying to save your soul. All I’d be doing is convincing you of an uncomfortable truth or damning you.” Nova rubbed the back of her head. “I would be on the side of what I think is truth if you weren’t falling apart right in front of me. Depressing you in your final moments… Yeah. Not good.”

“Wanna know what I think?” Grayscale called back. “Your conversation is pointless.”

Curaçao raised an eyebrow. “‘ardly. The truth of what lies beyond, if anyzing, is of immense importance to all of us.”

Grayscale rolled her eyes. “Live in the now, everybody. Live in the now.”

Curaçao looked at Olivia. “It is now for ‘er, Grayscale. If ze’s going to make a decision, it ‘as to be now.”

Olivia gulped. “Flutterfree, keep talking while I work here. Okay?”

“Okay.” Flutterfree cleared her throat. She began to speak of the God she put her faith into. She spoke of Him in a way she rarely did – persuasively, with the intent of conversion. As Olivia crumbled, she listened.

She never responded. She just continued with her work, nodding every so often as she reduced in size over the next several minutes. Nova ended up carrying out all the work when her other hand fell off, Minna standing there to provide future-sight.

Eventually, Olivia was just a head without a lower jaw – no mouth.

The lights in the Shaping Mechanisms turned green. The restrictions had been released.

Olivia closed her eyes, a single tear crawling down the sides of her face.

Flutterfree bowed her head, offering her a last-minute blessing. Olivia’s head crumbled to dust the moment she said, “amen.”

Everyone but Pinkie was crying – even the apathetic Grayscale. Pinkie wanted to cry so badly.

Minna wiped her face. “She… She did it. We’ve got the Shaping Mechanism now.”

“Stopping it from attacking the fleet,” Nova said, wiping her face.

“Do you zink ze listened to you?” Curaçao asked Flutterfree.

“She listened. I don’t know if she heard,” Flutterfree said. “I’ll live the rest of my life wondering if she did.”

“She’ll be remembered as a hero if nothing else,” Pinkie said, looking up at the sky. “She started the war… and she ended it.”

“It’s not over yet,” Minna said, pointing at the spark in the ground. “Skarn’s still around.”

“So are the soldiers,” Nova added. “There’s still more that needs to be done.”

Flutterfree closed her eyes and sent off a prayer.

Let them all come back okay. I’m not sure if I can lose any more. Let Skarn truly be a man of honor. Please.

~~~

Sunny lay to the side, horn cracked, legs broken.

Alushy had a magic stake driven through her chest that kept her frozen in ice.

Jade was lying on the ground, a magic box wrapped around her last reality anchor bracelet – if she acted against Skarn, it would break and make her Skaian self dissipate in the physics of the universe.

All three of them were far from the actual battle, having been blown away by the forces that were being exchanged between Jane and Skarn. Jane had unleashed every trick she had in the book on Skarn, only for him to overpower and occasionally outmaneuver her.

Jane ground her teeth – she wasn’t doing well. She’d been able to heal most of the damage dealt to her, but she only had so much energy in herself. The power of the Evermore did have a limit, even with her immense amounts of experience and gathering of extra abilities. Skarn had been smart – he knew Jane would take the longest for him to wear down, so he worked on all the others first so he could minimize what she did to him.

Jane wasn’t even sure she was doing anything. She’d occasionally get hits off, and he would roar in pain, but she sensed no drop in his power at all. Her godkilling techniques seemed like they would almost rip him apart, but then he would come together.

She was considering destroying the universe – but that would take everyone with him, including Sunny, and possibly including herself. She also had the sneaking suspicion the world they were fighting in would be resistant to that kind of action, but she had no way to test that without actually trying it.

“You tire,” Skarn observed.

“You don’t,” Jane muttered.

“I do, believe me,” Skarn said. “But when you’re tapped into the cosmic energy of every universe within the Congeries, even blades designed to kill gods are little more than backscratchers.”

“So I just need to cut you off?”

“And how would you do that?” Skarn asked. “I, in many ways, am the Congeries. This physical form is just a leftover of the circumstances of my birth. I have enough power within me to shroud all of my realms.” He held his arms wide, allowing her to see the full glory of the stars within him. “This appearance isn’t cosmetic, Jane! It is my connection to the stars, matter, and works of my realm!”

“Then I’ve just got to hit you hard enough,” Jane muttered. Her eyes darkened.

“Going with your dark side, again? Shade has proven herself just as useless as you already.”

‘Jane’ launched at Skarn with cold, calculated fury. A darkness.

She was willing to try and destroy the universe. She pulled a star-like item out of her inventory and held it to the sky. It exploded with a force designed to shatter reality.

Skarn simply shunted all the energy into himself, releasing it in a dead realm in the Congeries. “Almost.” He shoved ‘Jane’ over, knocking her to the ground. “But that was the furthest thing from an honorable maneuver. It would have taken all your teammates out with me, and likely you as well. Desperation is not befitting of you, Jane. Push that dark side back where it belongs. Out of this battle.”

‘Jane’ did no such thing. She sneered, leaping up to drive yet another weapon into Skarn.

Skarn’s face seemed depressed. “If you won’t fight honorably…” He grabbed the weapon out of Jane’s hand with his power and shattered it, driving all the shards into Jane with psychic energy she couldn’t hope to combat. The force of her own legendary weapon sent her to the ground, shuddering in violent spasms.

He dusted his hands. He had won. There were no stakes – but their lives were forfeit. He levitated the five defeated warriors in front of him.

Only Jade was still conscious. She was glaring at him. “We won’t be the last.”

“No, you w-”

“SKARN!” Eve shouted. “LEAVE THEM!”

Skarn turned around to see the new challengers. Eve, Corona, Lady Rarity, Jotaro, Vriska, and three ponies he didn’t recognize.

Skarn gently set his five previous combatants to the ground. “Very well, Evening. I owe you that much.”

“You bet you do,” Eve spat.

“Eve!” Jade shouted. “He’s tapped into the energy of the entire Congeries! We couldn’t do anything to him!”

“We’re going to try anyway,” Jotaro said, cracking his knuckles.

“Like, totally,” the gray unicorn said.

Skarn smiled. “It is your right to face me in combat. But first, I have some requests – a deal if you would.”

“I’m listening,” Eve said, eyes narrow – but Skarn saw a spark of recognition in there somewhere. Curious.

“I will agree to have all my soldiers automatically stand down upon my defeat,” Skarn said, noting the surprised expressions on his new opponents’ faces. “In return, if you are defeated, you must agree to the complete surrender of Merodi Universalis.”

“One condition,” Eve said. “You can’t kill any of us until you’ve defeated all of us. Got it?”

Skarn nodded. “I accept those terms on one condition of my own. I wish to know the names of those I do not recognize. You three, who are you?”

The red-pink earth pony sneered. “Red Velvet, Insipid, and Starlight Shadow. No, we’re not telling you more than that. It’d ruin the surprises.”

“An acceptable deception,” Skarn agreed. He summoned a pink ball of energy. “Eve, lay your hoof on this while I lay my hand on the other side. It will ensure we cannot break our sides of the bargain.”

Eve gulped. Skarn saw her mulling it over in her mind. He expected her to think about it twice and back out. She couldn’t sacrifice all of them – she had already suffered too much.

Eve stuck her hoof to the sphere. “Do it.” She demanded.

Skarn placed his hand on the sphere, smiling warmly as both of them were cosmically demanded to keep up their ends of the bargain. “Tell me, Evening, why did you agree to the possible sacrifice of so many more?”

“Because Pinkie told me to,” Eve said.

Skarn’s calm smile faltered slightly.

I am the villain of their story, and the hero of the Congeries’. The Congeries’ story is stronger than theirs.

But why else would Pinkie ask her to do this unless she was confident?

Skarn shook his head, deciding it didn’t matter. He bowed respectfully to them. “Let’s decide the outcome of this war right here, right now.”

Eve attacked first. Seraphim may not have been able to access other dimensions right now, but that didn’t mean the Stand was useless. She physically rammed the rings into Skarn, pushing him back into Corona’s Bacon Pancakes. The Stand forced him to flatten like a piece of paper. Jotaro moved next, punching through the paper and tearing Skarn to shreds with a great “ORA ORA ORA ORA!” Lady Rarity smashed with her hammer, Vriska rolled her dice and threw a series of sawblades at him, Velvet lacerated him with her own blood, and Shadow unleashed a bolt of pure void energy while Insipid…

…Insipid sat back and yawned.

They were waiting to use her. That made her the most dangerous.

How this unknown unicorn could be the most dangerous was beyond him, but that meant he had to watch her closely.

Skarn shifted his shredded body back into one piece, holding his hands wide. “Behold. Not a scratch.”

“There’s ways around that,” Shadow commented.

“But can you find them quickly enough?” Skarn went for the weakest of the eight attackers – Lady Rarity. With a quick series of cosmic punches, her armor was blown clean off and the wind was knocked out of her. She flew through the air, only for what looked like a shooting star to hit her and throw her to the ground.

One down.

“Rarity!” Corona shouted. Skarn sensed something within Corona flare up – but she pushed the power back into herself. Saving it.

What are you planning?

Shadow unleashed her dark magic, enveloping Skarn in a beam of pure Void energy. Had he been lesser, he would have vaporized around the edges into the nothingness. His regeneration was certainly hindered – but he was still a cosmic being.

He walked out of the Void energy, slapping Shadow aside with a burst of psychic energy. Her body was weaker than he had been expecting, breaking in several places from the attack.

Two down.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

Time stop was easy for Skarn to counter – he just bent space around him to be immune to it. This did not deter Jotaro from wrapping Hermit Purple and the Passion around him, the purple thorns cutting into Skarn’s interstellar flesh.

Jotaro caught a glimpse of Skarn’s soul. Skarn felt him balk at the true honor within.

“Like what you see?”

“You’re mad!” Jotaro shouted.

Perhaps that soul-sight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Skarn mused. He leaned back and kicked Jotaro in the stomach. The behemoth of a man didn’t register the pain. Time resumed, and he was still ORA ORA’ing Skarn.

It was decidedly annoying. Nothing but punching, punching, punching.

Skarn sent a miniature comet into Jotaro’s chest, freezing him solid. He then pushed him far enough away that none of his Stands would be able to reach Skarn.

Three down.

Vriska, Eve, Corona, and Velvet tag-teamed. Velvet seemed to be the next weakest, so Skarn leaped over the swords and magic lasers, heading for her blood. He punched through the crimson blades, smashing the ground in front of her. The shockwave rattled her brain into the back of its skull, tossing her back.

A smile appeared on her face because of the deep pain, bringing some sadistic form of enjoyment to her features.

“…And you all think I’m mad,” Skarn commented.

Velvet let out a soft chuckle but made no effort to get up. Skarn didn’t let himself think for a second that she was down for the count, but he could afford to leave her there for a while.

Vriska drove her blade into him. He pulled the blade through his body and snapped it in half, using a leg to kick Vriska back. She took the full brunt of the force, cobalt blood flying out of her mouth in the process. She rolled her dice and flipped back at him, surrounded by a swarm of angry bees.

Skarn snapped his fingers, unleashing an inverse gravity well that threw all the bees out of sight and made it difficult for all the others to move. He capitalized this opportunity on Vriska, punching toward her…

…and he missed.

Even if she’s not at maximum luck right now, she’s still got a lot of fortune stored up.

She kicked him in the groin.

“Dishonor begets dishonor,” Skarn muttered, doing the same to her. She took it anyway, twisting around his leg and stabbing him in several locations.

“Hey, Skarn!” Eve and Corona called, prompting Vriska to duck and roll away from Skarn.

Skarn didn’t look around. He just sighed as a destructive spell they had been charging up for the last little while unleashed, hitting him with a torrent of purple, orange, red, and white energy. He tried to walk out, but the pins of Bacon Pancakes fixed him in place while the laser burned his backside.

It kept burning his backside.

This was concerning enough he decided he had to act. He altered his personal bubble of physics to divert the laser around him, allowing him to emerge unscathed.

“You know, all this talk of honor seems shitty to me,” Vriska said. “You just limit yourself as you fight us, but when we do something that might be unfortunate for you, you delve into your larger power stash and just divert the attack away. That’s fucked up. Why not just get it over with?”

Skarn looked at her closely. “Most don’t wish for that, but if you insist.” His eye twitched. Vriska’s body was compressed into a cube the size of an apple and tossed to the ground. “She’s fine. Angry, but fine.”

Four down.

Corona glared. “You won’t be able to do that to me or Eve.”

“No, I won’t,” Skarn said. “Your defenses are able to shift reality to accommodate. That doesn’t mean I ca-”

A magical laser shot at Skarn from a dimension that didn’t exist, knocking him off balance. He quickly realized Corona and Eve were folding space between them to keep Skarn from knowing which direction things were coming from.

He clapped his hands, returning space to normal. “That was foo-”

They channeled their magic together to send a planned death spell at him – though of course he was immune. They followed it up with another magic beam, this one intended to tear reality apart as it moved.

He let out a roar that pushed the offending attack back. “You two are strong, there can be no doubt.”

“But…?” Corona said.

“But I am superior. You will eventually tire or run out of your magic, even if I cannot end it quickly. I will not.”

“Come and get us then,” Eve said, glaring at him. “We’ll show you that we’re never going to stand down.”

Skarn charged after them, fists ready to punch both of them in their heads. They prepared for his impact.

Corona dissipated her gloves and reached a hand toward Skarn. He diverted to the left, not wanting to deal with her empathic powers. His quick dodge to the side allowed Eve to touch him, however. Eve set up a mind-link spell and allowed Corona into Skarn’s mind through Eve.

Corona and Eve appeared in one of Skarn’s memories. He was looking down at his three young children – Arthon, Brell, and Torvost.

Skarn didn’t let the memory play out. He stood up, brushed the mental images of his children away, and marched up to the two of them. “What do you plan to do in here?”

“Last time I channeled the memories of Majora. Don’t really have those anymore,” Corona admitted. “But I’ve learned a thing or two about dominating minds like yourself. There are ways to erase you.”

“Which will fail.” Skarn focused on Corona and ejected her from his mind with a thought. He turned to Eve. “You know less than her.”

Eve smiled coyly. “Oh, this wasn’t the real plan anyway. We just needed to get your mind somewhere else.”

Skarn forced Eve out of him and regained full consciousness.

There was a hoof touching one of his legs. He felt a sharp pain as his power shifted.

“Major. FRESH.” Insipid boomed, the power of Skarn flowing into her. Her gray body and yellowed mane gained stars and nebulous clouds within them. She started floating off the ground, the cosmic energy a bit much for her to control at once. “Hooooly shiiit this is so cool! Velvet you’ve gotta try this!”

“I cannot,” Velvet muttered.

Skarn ignored Velvet, Eve, and Corona completely. He had to take care of this Insipid quickly. He pushed his hands forward, unleashing a beam of energy at her – not the most creative attack, but it should have worked.

It didn’t. She giggled and used Skarn’s power to create a shield made of galaxies. “Sweetness! I can, like, see everything, and all the cycles of everything, and all the cycles of cycles of everything…”

She’s an idiot, Skarn realized.

The idiot pointed a hoof at Skarn and forced him to burn like the core of a star. He dissipated it after less than a second, but it was enough to scare him.

She’s a dangerous idiot. If she taps into any of the primordial forces in any special way…

“I taste it,” Velvet said, standing up. “I taste fear, Skarn. The realization that the one thing you can’t beat… Is yourself.”

Skarn ignored her, focusing on Insipid. He threw more attacks at her – even trying to turn her into a cube – but she had already mastered the defensive physics shield.

“Look at her, barely an infant in these abilities. She’s stronger than you.”

A pit began to form in Skarn’s stomach. It seemed as if the natural light of the universe was darkening around him.

Wait… it really was darkening.

“Noticing something problematic? Skarn?” Velvet asked. “That you’ve been had by a plan within a plan within a plan? You know we have them. We have backup plans for all those plans. We know exactly how to defeat you. She’s one way, yes.”

A bolt of Insipid’s energy hit Skarn. He deflected it – but it felt almost unreal;like it was from another plane of existence. Corona’s and Eve’s blasts hit him as well and he didn’t even register them. Everything except him was darkened.

“Can you really chance any of this for honor?” Velvet asked. “She could kill you Skarn. She could kill you in an instant and you would never be able to defend.”

“There’s no way.”

“Isn’t there? Isn’t there a way you can kill her? Isn’t there a way she can kill YOU!?”

Skarn looked at Velvet in fear, dodging Insipid’s attempt to condense him into a black hole. “Y-you’re right…”

“SHE’S GOT YOU SKARN! YOU CAN’T KILL HER, BUT SHE CAN KILL YOU! YOUR HONOR HAS LED TO YOUR DOWNFALL! A SIMPLE IDIOTIC UNICORN KNOWS YOUR POWERS BETTER THAN YOU! YO̶͎̭̯̮͔̖Ṷ͉̯͈ ̫̩̬H͎͝A͇͕̹͙̤͈V̦͍̠E̬͚ ̳̼̱̘̥F̜͎̟̖̮͕A̛̝̩̜̠̪̙I͍̭̲̗̟̕L̝͉̹͡E̤̠͚D̤͔̯̬̥ ̠̗̼͝Y͏͕͓O̪̪̲͚͢ͅU̷̞ͅŔ͚̱̳̤̟͖ͅS͎̞͔̟̟̞͟ẸͅL͚̞̜̖͙F!”

Skarn turned away from Insipid to look at Velvet.

A being of his caliber was able to comprehend the literal incarnation of Fear standing before him. Most would have gone mad from the sight of dark, bloody, living nightmares. The tendrils of blood that screamed to Skarn his own inadequacy attacked.

Skarn lashed out in panic with a powerful burst of energy. Despite the fact that Velvet was feeding off his fear, her newfound eldritch power wasn’t enough to defend her from the outburst. The nightmares were blown away and she was tossed to the side, this time not smiling from the pain.

Five down.

Skarn breathed heavily, the heightened fear Velvet had instilled in him very much still active. He knew he wasn’t thinking straight – and he couldn’t get a hold of his mind quickly enough.

Insipid was still active. Insipid was better than him. Insipid was a threat.

But he was contractually bound not to kill her.

He would get as close as he possibly could. He pulled his hands back, summoning the energy of the Congeries into his limbs. He would do exactly what he would do were he fighting himself. Use everything from all sides in a complex pattern that no amount of instinct or ‘bizarre stupidity’ could defend against. There was nothing she could do. Even his power set was useless against it.

He shoved his hands forward, letting out a panicked breath.

“NOW!” Eve shouted, her eye burning with the Light of knowledge.

Corona obeyed. Her eyes flashed a deep, ugly black. She flexed her wrists, the symbol of Doom projecting from the crystals on the backs of her gloves.

Corona moved Insipid’s Doom to Skarn.

Eve had told her exactly when to time it so Skarn wouldn’t have a chance to defend.

Skarn lit up like a Christmas tree, every color of the rainbow sprouting from his body in a series of fractal patterns that gave those who saw it headaches.

“Ooh, pretty!” Insipid said. “Why don’t I get a glow like that?”

“Because it’ll pretty much kill you,” Corona said, glaring at the sparking energy that was Skarn “…We might want to move away.”

“Oh, chill!” Insipid lowered herself to the two of them and erected a cosmic barrier. “I got this, cha.”

Corona and Eve erected barriers around themselves just to be safe.

Skarn was barely aware of this happening. His thoughts were dominated by pain, by his mortal body being torn asunder in such ways to remove his connections to the power of the Congeries an atom at a time.

They had outsmarted him. Played off his mind, off his fears, off his confidence, and carefully held their cards close to their chest.

He had forgotten about Corona’s status as the Rogue of Doom, and in his fear he had been unable to remember that information when he was unleashing an attack that would ‘Doom’ Insipid.

Eventually, the pain stopped. Skarn fell to the ground, the stars and nebulous cosmos gone from his fur, replaced only with brown fuzz. He grunted, standing up, looking at his dead necklace.

“I… salute you…” he said, taking a step forward. “But I am not done yet.”

Insipid raised a hoof. “I can totally bake him for you. Starbeam to the face!”

Skarn tensed. “That would hardly be honorable…”

“Do you surrender?” Eve asked.

Skarn looked at her. “…What?”

“Do you admit defeat?” Eve ruffled her wings. “We don’t have to kill you, you know. You can complete your end of the deal while alive. We can have you taken to one of our prisons. I’ll even arrange a comfortable one for you, where you can live in peace.”

“I won’t be able to spread the art!”

“So? Isn’t your life more important than art?”

Skarn froze. She was offering him a way out. She was honest about it – she was speaking from her immense feelings of guilt, sorrow, and displeasure with the war. If she could kill one less person, she would be happy with it. She really would offer him that life.

But if he couldn’t do the work…

“I refuse,” Skarn said. “Life is meaningless without the work.”

“And you wonder why we think you’re insane,” Corona said, folding her arms.

Skarn opened his mouth to respond – but he never got to finish.

Eve had shot him with a death spell, her eyes glowing with a powerful, deep darkness.

Skarn the Shaper, founder and ruler of the Congeries, being of untold age and power, fell to the ground like a wild animal that had been shot in the head.

~~~

A soldier pointed his finger at Allure.

She would have died right then and there had Saxton Hale not come out of nowhere and punched right through the man’s chest. “AHA! These blokes have nothing on me!”

“HALE!?” O’Neill blurted. “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!?”

“Stompin’ them wherever I can find ‘em!” He laughed as the Congeries soldiers fired at him, the physics bullets bouncing off his bare chest. He was just too manly to take any real damage, even from the exotic weapons. “Come and get me, cowards!”

One of them did – using a forbidden technique that combined memory manipulation to make the target hit themselves. Saxton punched himself out while the soldier bared his teeth.

Allure realized something – she remembered that happening. Why would she remember!? Nobody ever remembered things like that!

“ORDERS RECEIVED: STAND DOWN!” every soldier shouted at once. Then every last one dropped dead in an instant.

“What the…?” Allure said, backing up in horror.

“How did they receive their orders?” the Research Overhead blurted. “All communications are jammed!”

“That would be because of me,” Aradia said, appearing in front of them. “Suffice it to say, there’s now a time loop here where I appear in the future where communications are restored, travel back in time with the orders, and give the orders that allow communications to be restored.”

“Uh…” Allure rubbed her head. “Okay…?”

“The war’s over, by the way,” Aradia said. “If I did my calculations right, I timed this so I arrived just when Skarn died. Relatively speaking.”

O’Neill let out a sigh of relief. “We won then.”

“Yes. We won.” Aradia said, smiling. “Let’s take a moment to breathe, shall we?”

Allure gladly complied, sliding to a splayed position and letting out a long breath of air.

~~~

Eve and the other twelve returned to the control room of the Shaping Mechanism. There were celebrations at first – a round of ‘we did it’ and ‘finally it’s over’. But eventually they remembered the scars they had gained, and the ponies they had lost.

Corona went to the pile of dust that was Olivia and fell to her knees. The Mean Five allowed themselves to remember Havocwing.

Eve saw Pinkie sitting near the edge of the room, her empty face aimed straight ahead. Her expression unreadable.

Eve walked up to her and stood beside her, looking closely at her face. There were candy-red bloodstains that made her look like she’d been crying, even though she definitely hadn’t. Couldn’t.

That had to be hard for her. She was always such an emotional pony.

“…How long have you been standing there?” Pinkie asked, having sensed her breathing.

“A while,” Eve responded.

“…Sorry, didn’t notice.”

“Not a problem.”

“I know… Guess you were just letting me think, huh?”

“Yeah. Also didn’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

Eve paused, a momentous feeling setting upon her heart. “I want to say something. I want to say I know your pain.”

Pinkie smiled softly. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

“…Actually, I guess I didn’t actually experience Fluttershout’s atta-”

“Evening, that was you,” Pinkie said. ”You experienced that. I don’t care if you’re a clone or copy of one Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle. That was you. You felt that.”

Tears came to Eve’s eyes. “Pinkie…”

Pinkie gulped. “I’m sorry. I got angry.”

“I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

“Everyone’s always so sorry…” Pinkie said, shaking her head. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just stop making mistakes so we wouldn’t have to be so sorry all the time!?”

“That’s not how things work,” Eve said.

“I know, I know,” Pinkie bit her lip. “I do know how things work. That’s… that’s the problem. I knew this was coming. I figured it out a little later than usual, but I told myself I could handle it. I… I was ready to sacrifice myself. But now…” She took in a breath. “I’m not just blind, Eve. I could live with that. I know several people who can help me learn to live with that. It’s just… I can’t feel anything. I’m not sure if my hooves are touching the floor correctly, for all I know my face is gently pressed against a wall, and...” She heaved, trying to sob and failing.

“I thought I was ready to sacrifice everything,” Eve said. “For the betterment of all, I put everything at risk. My friends, my family, my nation.” Eve caught Curaçao looking at her with understanding empathy. Eve made a note to talk to her later. “Was it the wrong decision? I have no idea anymore. My mind tells me it was the logical answer. My heart tells me it was the worst decision I’ve ever made. All I know is that I wasn’t really ready to make that choice.” She looked closely at Pinkie’s features, eyes sad. “We’re asked to make a lot of decisions we aren’t ready for, Pinkie. I… I guess I just didn’t realize how unprepared we could be.”

“We aren’t as strong as we think we are,” Pinkie sighed.

Eve shook her head. “I think… I think nobody can truly know themselves. We think too highly of our abilities. We like to ignore our weaknesses. Even those of us who try hard… We still get caught.” She looked at Pinkie. “I’m never risking you girls like that again.”

“Don’t Pinkie Promise that,” Pinkie warned. “Really, don’t.”

“I won’t.” Eve shook her head. “I want to, but I know I can’t.”

Pinkie sniffed. “Some promises just shouldn’t be made.”

Eve sighed. “Can I promise to always be your friend, no matter what?”

“Yes,” Pinkie said, a smile forming on her face.

Eve gently turned Pinkie to give her a hug. “Then that’s what I promise. No matter what you do, or what I do, I’ll stay here. I’ll be here. And I know you will too.”

Pinkie was able to tell from the motion of her body that she was being hugged. She gently pushed her hooves around until she was able to sense they weren’t moving, giving Eve one of the awkwardest hugs of all time.

“It’s going to be okay, Pinkie,” Eve assured her. “I know we can’t fix you. But you can learn to live with this. I can make pressure sensors for your hooves. Renee can make you the most beautiful blindfold of all time.”

“That would be great!” Pinkie said, allowing a soft laugh to come out. “I’d be like a ninja! Or a pirate!”

“The mysterious leader of Merodi Universalis’ primary team!”

“You really think I can still go adventuring like this?”

“I did, didn’t I? We have blind and disabled people of all kinds, Pinkie. We can’t just get rid of you! Who would want to? You’re the best, brightest, happiest pony around!”

“Yeah… Yeah I am! Screw this curse; I’m going to make the best of it! I’m going to become the sharpest hearer in existence! I’ll be unable to feel pain, so there will be no fear! I will become the blind party pony! I can see it now, Eve!” She laughed. “I’m going to be fine! I’m going to be fine!”

“Yeah, you are,” Eve said, hugging Pinkie tighter. “You are.”

Pinkie’s mane poofed back up in a sproing. “I’m so glad you’re okay, Eve. I don’t know what I would have done…”

“I don’t know either. We can’t. Because we really don’t know ourselves.”

“Heh… Yeah, we don’t.”

The two held each other for an extended period of time in silence.

~~~

Eve had a lot to do when she returned to Merodi Universalis and her office. Ending a war, holding a press conference, figuring out what to do with all the work that had piled up…

But first, she had decided she was going to sleep in her own bed. She was beyond tired from all the exertion. She was going to sleep like a rock.

She opened the door to her bedroom. I was sitting on the bed, smiling warmly at her. “Hi.”

Eve blinked, “Uh… Why are you in my bedroom?”

“To offer you my congratulations,” I said, hopping off the bed. “You’ve taken the next step.”

“What kind of step we talking about?”

“You’re a Class 2 society now.”

Eve blinked. “Wait, what?”

“You don’t just take control of a conglomeration of thousands of different universes and the means to shape them to your will without becoming a Class 2. You have the power and influence of a low-tier Class 2. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

“That’s… Well I think that should be a big deal, but I’m somewhat underwhelmed by it.”

“You won’t be for long. It opens up a big can of worms. But it also means I can hang around more. Like Aradia. You’ve reached the point where me talking to you wouldn’t exactly be much cheating.”

Eve smiled. “I’m glad you’ll be around more often, Twilence. We don’t talk anywhere near enough.”

“You’ll be tired of me talking your ear off before too long,” I said, smirking.

“…The end is soon, isn’t it? If you’re here,” Eve said.

“Depends on how you look at it,” I replied. “There’s only one arc left I can see. But I also know that it takes up more time than all the rest of your adventures combined. Relatively speaking, this is year forty since you began your trek with the bowling ball. You’ve got more than that left in what I can see.”

“I guess we won’t really get to see the long-term consequences of immortality serum then, huh?”

“Not in your society. There are others you could look at.”

“Forty years…” Eve looked into the distance. “That’s a lot of time.”

“It may seem like it. But beware the power of the Time Abyss. It may seem like nothing happens, then before you know it time’s up.”

Eve pursed her lips, nodding slowly. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“There’s a lot of things you’re going to have to keep in mind,” I told her. “You’re in the big leagues now. Things will change.”

“The more things change the more they stay the same,” she reminded me.

I smirked. “You’re starting to get it.”

“…Did all this have to happen?”

I paused, thinking about it for a moment. “Yes. You would not have gotten to Class 2 status in time for the end, doing things the peaceful, normal way. The higher you climb, the harder it is to climb further. You needed to be here, so the things that are about to happen will happen the way they should.”

Eve nodded. “I can take comfort in that, I guess. That I didn’t screw up fate or something.”

“I believe it’s impossible to screw up fate,” I said. “I think even the glitches are part of a story. Every mess up and every victory is part of everything.”

“It seems… limiting.”

“It is,” I said. “And I fear that’s all there is every day. But I also fear the alternative.”

“Hm?”

“That there’s more than the story.”

Eve was silent.

“No matter which way you slice it, existence is cosmically terrifying. Ka or no, God or no, Truth or no… Every option.”

“…I’m going to have a great time sleeping tonight.”

“Oh, I can help you with that.” I lit my horn. “A simple sleep spell to give you the energy you need for the coming day.”

“I could use energy for the coming years, apparently,” Eve said, climbing into bed. “I should introduce you to the Overheads…”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Mhm…” Eve muttered, yawning. “Nice to see you again, Twilence.” She drifted off to sleep before my eyes.

I cut the sleep spell and smiled warmly. Even after all she had experienced… She was still in one piece.

She might have been stronger than me in many regards.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 8: RAGE]

ARC 8 INTERLUDE<<

The war’s over. Victory, a pretty solid victory at that, even with all the sacrifices. After all this… Merodi Universalis will enter its golden age. We’re going to skip over a lot of stuff, but that’s what side stories like The League of Sweetie Belles are for, right? Several decades until the final part of the story kicks in, plenty of breathing room. Plenty. Let’s make the most of them being a Class 2.

What will we be doing in this golden time where much is skipped over? Well…

Arc 9: Void
105 - Class 2, Part 1
106 - Class 2, Part 2
107 - Deep Skaia
108 - The Furthest Reaches
109 - The Big Gs
110 - Spline of Man
111 - O
112 - Outside Perspectives
113 - Murica’s time
114 - Answers
115 - Song of the Spheres
116 - She Who Dared to Ask, Part 1
117 - She Who Dared to Ask, Part 2

Chapter 115… most of your questions will be answered. But it will also mark the beginning of the end - depending on how you look at it, anyway.

For those who write sidestories, the Void arc has a second purpose: it gives a LONG swath of time for your stories to play themselves out before the 'endgame' stuff starts happening.

Oh boy, new best chapter poll time! [ https://strawpoll.com/pha998kg ]

Franchises Time!

Voltron belongs to DreamWorks
Champions belongs to Arc Games (I apologize for taking liberties with Skarn)
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power belongs to DreamWorks
Deep Secret belongs to Diana Wynne Jones
World of Darkness belongs to White Wolf Gaming Studio
KITCHEN GUN! belongs to Peter Serafinowicz
Magic the Gathering belongs to Wizards of the Coast
The Laughing Salesman belongs to Fujiko Fujio
Wendy belongs to Wendy's.
Winx Club belongs to Iginio Straffi
XCOM belongs to 2K
RE:Creators belongs to Troyca
Library of Babel belongs to Jorge Luis Borges.
Persona belongs to Atlus
The Conversion Bureau belongs to Blaze (and lots of other writers...)
A Wrinkle in Time belongs to Madeline L'engle
Lil Miss Rarity belongs to Lil Miss Jay
The Nostalgia Critic belongs to Channel Awesome
Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy belongs to Midway Games
Portal belongs to Valve
Different View of Reality belongs to killme2paza
Austraeoh belongs to shortskirtsandexplosions
CRISIS: Equestria belongs to GanonFLCL (an absolutely amazing fic that is the source material for the Mean Six. It's old and dead, but definitely still worth the read https://www.fimfiction.net/group/203605/crisis-equestria/thread/299241/crisis-equestria-chapters-re-uploaded. The League of Sweetie Belles will be reviving it soon-ish.)

Here are the discord server [ https://discordapp.com/invite/eTuseTh ] and fimfiction group [ https://www.fimfiction.net/group/213761/songs-of-the-spheres-extended-multiverse ] links. Oh why am I contractually obligated to give these?

See you on the other side of the abyss!

[VOID] 105 - Class 2, Part 1

Eve opened her eyes, a smile on her face.

“Hi,” I said.

Eve’s eyes focused. “…Were you there the entire night?”

“Yep.”

“That’s creepy.”

I smiled. “Yep.”

Eve sat up and rubbed her eyes. “You’re not secretly some kind of freaky stalker, right?”

“Oh, Gan’s flesh, no. At least not the kind you’re implying I am.”

“I thought we were supposed to be entering a Time Abyss or something?”

“Not a true Time Abyss, it’s only seventy relative years or so. There’s just going to be a lot where it seems like nothing’s happening and time flies. It was just a warning of sorts. Just because things are going to move quickly doesn’t mean we can’t just pick up where we left off.” I looked out at your ‘screen’. “RIGHT?”

“Who are y- oh.” Eve rubbed her head. “Audience in general?”

“Mhm.”

“Do they watch me while I sleep too?”

“Rarely,” I admitted. “Generally only when there are nightmares or something to deal with. If you’re just going through your normal routine they’re only watching if something’s about to go wrong.”

“Yaaaaay.” Eve rubbed her eyes. “I knew this, ugh.”

“It’s fine if you push it out of your mind. It's not the most comfortable thing to know.”

Eve summoned herself a cup of coffee. “So, since you’re here, and you’re supposed to be helping us now… Uh, how about you tell me the plot of today’s chapter or episode or whatever?”

“Sure thing,” I said, smiling. “We’re in a two-parter focused on the aftermath of the war against Skarn. You and I are just small parts of a half-dozen or so little stories that need to be fleshed out.”

“That’s handy.”

“You’re only going to get to ask that question a maximum of nine more times. Cause after that my vision goes dark. And you won’t ask me all those times because you aren’t involved in every chapter!”

“Yeesh. You have the path to the future mapped out don’t you?”

I made a mock salute. “I know all the major twists and turns, mon capitan. No I’m not going to tell you everything that’s going to happen over the next seventy-odd years.”

“Wasn’t going to ask,” Eve said.

“Oh.” I blinked. “Ah, the little details…”

“From what I hear Pinkie tell me of that incident with the world of Prophets, sometimes the little details can make you slip up.”

I rubbed the back of my head. “Eh… Yeah. Sometimes the fluidity of things or interactions with other prophets will screw with me. You’re going to find that I’m not a tremendously overpowered ally at this point. Which is why I’m here.”

“You’re saying we could do everything you do without you.”

“Yep. If you really wanted to you could smash Rohan, the Pinkies, and all your Skaian Seers in a room together to get the same results. I’m just convenient! …And important in other ways. Which may or may not be obvious to you.”

“Doesn’t matter to me. You be you. I’ll thank you for helping.”

I smiled warmly. “Thanks. …My first piece of advice to you as an official subordinate is to ask you to not overexert yourself. You may feel like you’re done with your ordeal, but the scars are still on you. You’re through the woods but you aren’t at your grandmother’s house yet.”

“…Should I not work?”

“Oh, no, you got enough vacation time in running off to join the war.”

Eve let out a bitter laugh. “I really need to reexamine my idea of a vacation.”

“No argument here.”

“So, what should we do with today then?”

I shrugged. “That should be your decision. I could just tell you, but that’d be dumb.”

“Guess I’ll introduce you to the Overheads then. It is what we were talking about last night. I’ll work on the speech I’ll have to give.”

“Don’t worry too much about the speech,” I reminded her. “O’Neill’s is more important. As is Corona’s.”

“…I was there with Corona.”

“And do you really think anyone knows that?”

Eve blinked. “Ah, Giorno, always keeping secrets.”

I nodded. “It’s one that needs to be kept. Nobody can ask why you were there, so nobody can know you were there. All they know is that you took some time off to grieve. Which is technically true.”

Eve nodded slowly, furrowing her brow. “…I have to keep living a lie.”

“Enough people know, Eve. You can be honest to them. Not every interaction you have depends on your past actions, y’know.”

Eve shook her head. “We are what our past makes us.”

“That’s no reason to dwell on it.”

“True…” Eve put a hoof to her chin. “If I’ve done it for this long I can keep doing it, especially with support from my friends. …Most of them.”

I looked at her sadly.

“I know, you warned me. Still hurts.”

“It went well, considering,” I said.

“Yeah.” Eve gulped. “I think we need to see Renee first. I’ve made up with most the others I can.” She ruffled her feathers. “But first, breakfast.”

“Ooh, I love waffles!”

Eve blinked, pondering this for a moment. “Do you know what we’re having for lunch too?”

“Hrm… blue jello,” I said, scribbling something in my notebook.

“Now here’s the question, is that going to happen because you saw it, or because you wrote it?”

I grinned mischievously. “I don’t have to tell you everything.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“I’ve been locked in the basement of a library for an effective eternity, of course I’m enjoying this. I get to interact with ponies. I haven’t done that in decades. It’s all ‘I’ll just watch them and insert myself in a few key places’ and ‘oh hey, I’ve got a visitor, let’s see if I’m allowed to talk to them’.”

“Welcome back then,” Eve said, smiling. “C’mon, waffles await.”

“You cook. I’ve eaten my own cooking too much.”

“You’re a bad cook?”

“Nope. Just consistent.”

“A version of me that speaks of consistency with disdain…” Eve chuckled. “Fun.”

“Monotony is a killer. You’ll learn that soon enough.”

“…You have to work on your ominous foreshadowing.”

I rubbed the back of my head. “Er… Right, yes. I’ll try to rediscover tact. Again.”

“Hm?”

“There was a long period of time between when Vriska’s and my adventure ended and before yours began. Relatively speaking for me, anyway. Enough time to have multiple series’ of small adventures.”

“I bet you could fill entire libraries with your adventures.”

“I have.”

~~~

Renee looked at the four people sitting across from her desk.

Nova, Flutterfree, and Vriska wouldn’t meet her eyes. Jotaro looked at her with a stern, serious glare.

She met it.

“I told you not to go,” Renee said, finally. “You did anyway.”

“Eve needed us,” Jotaro said.

“You would have done the same,” Nova pointed out.

“You could have told me what you were doing at least,” Renee said. “I was worried sick! I had no idea where any of my friends were, if they were okay, or what was even going on! I’d get scant reports here and there that were nothing more than rumors! I’ve gone through more gallons of ice cream than I can count and didn’t sleep until you came back yesterday!”

“I’m s-” Flutterfree caught herself. “Actually… No. No, I’m not, because it needed to be done. I’m not happy that I hurt you, but I don’t regret what I did. I don’t think any of us do.”

Renee stared at her. “…You’ve changed.”

Flutterfree looked at the sharp tips of her wings. “I… we’ve been through a lot.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m still the same as ever,” Vriska said, leaning on a nearby wall. “But that wasn’t my first real war. No, the ghost-war doesn’t count, virtually nobody died there.”

“The rest of us aren’t going to be the same,” Nova said. “…Pinkie’s got it the worst, though.” Nova checked her screen. “She’s still in surgery.”

“I hope it goes well…” Flutterfree said, nervously scratching her hooves together.

Renee sighed. “Look, the reason you’re in here is because you all work for me and you didn’t listen to me. So I’m going to have to punish you. All of you are suspended for two months.”

“…Just two months?” Jotaro asked.

“You did save everyone and specifically went to help Eve and suffered because of it,” Renee said.

“You didn’t have to do it at all,” Flutterfree pointed out. “…This is just so Pinkie can be given time to recover.”

Renee let out a soft chuckle. “You always see through everything.”

Flutterfree smiled back. “You’re giving me too much credit.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Well, the whole ‘serious, stern discussion’ plan is out of the window. Just try not to go off like that again without at least telling me, okay?”

“I am sorry for not telling you,” Flutterfree admitted. “You deserved to know what we were doing and why we were going.”

“Thank you,” Renee said, sitting back in her chair. “…How are you all holding up?”

“I’ve turned into a refined killing machine and slaughterer of hundreds who watched someone die by crumbling, but otherwise I’m completely fine,” Flutterfree said with an innocent smile.

“She’s not okay,” Nova translated. “She needs to have some extended talks with Rev and Eve about her new place in existence.”

Flutterfree sighed. “Yeah. I… I probably need these two months to seek professional help.”

“Just ask and I’ll have the best psychologists in the multiverse at your beck and call,” Renee said. “And don’t think you have to come back right away either. There’s no rush.”

Jotaro put a hand on Flutterfree’s shoulder, giving his comfort. She smiled. “Thank you. …All of you. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have friends like you.”

“Go insane?” Vriska suggested.

“I’m already insane,” Flutterfree pointed out. “But that’s because I hang around Pinkie too much.”

“…Speaking of, we should probably go check on her,” Nova said, looking up from her screen. “Her surgery is wrapping up. We should be there when she wakes up.”

Renee stood up. “I’ll go with y-” she got a notification on her desk. “…Or maybe I won’t.”

“…Why not?” Nova asked.

“Eve wants to see me. Says she has something important to talk about.” She stretched her neck. “I’ll catch up at some point. I suppose we did just end a war yesterday and all of us have jobs to do…”

“It’s okay,” Flutterfree said. “See you around.”

“Bye,” Renee said with a wave.

Nova teleported them away.

Renee accepted the meeting with a button – at which point Eve and myself teleported into the room.

“…Hi,” Eve said.

“…Hello,” Renee responded.

Both of them fell into silence.

I cleared my throat, taking a step forward. “Clearly you two need to talk. Renee, I’m Twilence, we haven’t met. I’m a highly Aware Prophet who’s able to help you now that you’re a Class 2 civilization.”

“Wait wh-”

I kept going. “I’m going around with Eve and introducing myself. I look forward to working with you. Now I’ll go sit back here on this chair and let you two get reacquainted.” I did as I said, planting myself on a chair in the back of the room and pulling out my notebook. Instead of writing anything down, I just read.

Renee turned to Eve. “…She seems nice.”

“She is. She also suffers a lot more from knowing things than Pinkie does.”

“An informant of yours?”

“…Not really? When we talked – which wasn’t all that often – I’d be the one to help her unload her fears. And then I’d unload mine. She’s the reason I knew revealing who I was wouldn’t… go well. Ever.”

Renee nodded slowly. “Eve, I don’t care about that. …Okay, that’s a lie, but it doesn’t fly in the face of who I thought you were. If almost any of the other girls were to walk up to me and say ‘I’m just a replacement’ I would feel bad but I wouldn’t feel like it was all that unexpected. In many ways, we’re all replacements because of that whole retcon paradox…”

“That’s different and you know it.”

“I do, I do,” Renee said, rubbing her head with a hoof. “Stars, that was confusing… My point is I’m not all that upset about that. It makes sense that you would keep your ‘identity’ a secret. What I am upset about is this war.”

Eve’s ears drooped. “I… I can’t tell you if the choice was the right or wrong one, Renee. I can tell you I regret it. I… I wasn’t ready to sacrifice everything.”

“I know that, dear, and you are forgiven. I was never going to ostracize you. I had the same idea myself, if you’ll recall, I just didn’t act on it.” She folded her hooves together. “The problem was that you were able to do it. If you had asked me if I thought you’d be able to betray the system you built… I would have been completely certain you would not be able to, regardless of the circumstances or reasoning behind it.”

“Well, I did. And now you know it’s possible for me to do so. And you can’t trust me anymore.”

“…Afraid not, darling.”

“That’s fine. Maybe I shouldn’t be trusted.” Eve looked into Renee’s eyes. “…You got my letter?”

Renee nodded. “Yes. I did.”

“Are you going to try to convince me to resign?”

Renee looked at Eve for a long while – and then shook her head. “No… No, I’m not. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this since I found out. I… I got angry. I thought you were bad for us if you were willing to do this. And then I remembered that nobody’s perfect. I couldn’t think of you just as the one mistake you made. So what if you brought us to war once? You’ve brought us to peace so much more often. You’ve extended the hoof of friendship successfully to so many that would have considered us enemies. We’re on good terms with the USM now, many worlds that attacked us in the past are part of us. You did these things, Eve. One blemish on your record does not negate all of it.”

There were tears in Eve’s eyes. “But Renee… Your system!”

“We made the system with the intent of not falling into the trap of legalism,” Renee said. “There’s no final authority on everything. There’s always allotments for freedom and bending of the rules. Even if the law says you should be removed from your position for your actions, the spirit of Merodi Universalis says that can be brushed aside. How many times have we pardoned criminals and given them a second chance? How many people do we work with despite being crazed murderers? How many of our friends do things we consider horrible?”

Renee put a hoof on Eve’s tearstained cheek. “Darling, you deserve to have the forgiveness we’ve given everyone else. You can’t just give. You have to receive as well.”

“…T-thank you,” Eve said with a hard swallow.

“It’s the least I could give you.”

The two entered a long, heartfelt embrace.

I sat in the background, carefully reading my notes.

Renee cleared her throat a short while later. “Now, Twilence, I believe that introduction of yours was woefully inadequate. I need a full personnel report.”

“Hm? I’m not joining the Expeditions Divisi-”

“Full report, Twilence. Full report.”

“Right away,” I said, clicking my pen in preparation for the paperwork flood.

~~~

Pinkie woke up. She opened her eyes and saw nothing.

Eh, what was I expecting, that it would all be a dream?

“Uh… Pinkie? You awake?” Vriska called from her left.

“Yep. I know it’s hard to tell, but c’mon Vriska, I opened my eyelids! That should give you some indication of my awakeness!”

“…You have a blindfold on.”

“Oh. Huh.” Pinkie chuckled. “Guess I’m going to have to start checking for that. …Somehow…”

“You’ll figure it out,” Flutterfree said.

“Well, my first instinct is to just be Aware and know, which would work most of the time, but this entire scene is being narrated from my point of view so I can’t exactly cheat right now. I am the bat with a flashlight shone in its face. I am the worm in the earth. I am… Give me another animal metaphor.”

“Crab?” Vriska suggested.

“I AM THE CRAB ON THE SEAFLOOR!” Pinkie blurted, sitting up. She heard something clang. “…I just hit my head on the overhead light, didn’t I?”

“Yep,” Flutterfree said. “You were rubbery though, so it bounced right off.”

“Pinkie Pie – living play-doh,” Pinkie said with a chuckle. “So, uh, was the surgery a success?”

She heard Nova’s screen beep. “It says a complete success. The damage to your brain was completely reverted, though only the insides of your sockets could be grown back. No eyes – which was expected. The sensors on your hooves are active and should work fine. It says here using them will hurt at first, but the pain should wear off after a couple of hours of walking.”

“Time to test!” Pinkie declared. She lowered one of her hooves to where she felt her haunches were and gently pressed down.

She didn’t feel anything. All she got was a signal in her brain that formed a localized headache, and she saw bright white. She jerked the hoof back. “…Ow.”

“Oh thank goodness, it works,” Flutterfree said with a deep sigh.

“I didn’t feel anything,” Pinkie said. “My brain just twitched, that’s what happened.”

“That’s basically how it works,” Nova said, making a few more beeping noises with her screen. “Since your soul is cursed not to have a sense of touch, the new ‘sense’ the doctor created has to go directly into your brain. You just happened to have an entire visual cortex you weren’t using that could receive electrical inputs.”

“The irony – because I’m blind I’m able to get feeling implants.” She tried to roll her eyes – immensely disappointed that she couldn’t do that. She carefully put her hoof back down, feeling a jolt of pain when she touched something solid – presumably the table. But she held it there. The pain wasn’t bad, and she would definitely get used to it, but it was a little jarring at the moment. The ‘light’ was annoying since it made her think something was in front of her, but she could train herself to ignore that. At least she’d know she actually had a way to tell that she was touching something now. “So, any weird features I should know before I start exploiting this?”

“Each hoof sensor has a different signal so your brain will know which hoof is touching something,” Nova said. “Each hoof has two signals – touch, and grab. Grab will only activate when you’re successfully holding something.”

Pinkie reached into her mane. She didn’t need to feel anything to pull stuff out of there. She told her hoof to grab – and it did, sending a slightly different ping to her brain. She pulled out her squeaky hammer and twirled it. “Huh. Neat.”

There was a crash right after she said that.

“Aaaaand I just broke a vase.”

“I just fixed it,” Nova said, presumably having repaired the vase with a spell. “It’s all good. You’ll need to learn to be more aware of your surroundings. It’ll take time.”

“Time we actually have. Two months of ‘punishment’ hm?”

“Were you watching us while you were in surgery!?” Vriska blurted.

“Oh no, I was out cold. I just went back and read what I missed.” She giggled. “It is time to begin ‘Pinkie’s Rehab’! New episodes Tuesday at eight, seven central.”

“Yare yare daze…”

“Hey, big guy! I didn’t know you were in here! So quiet!”

“Sorry.”

“Ah, don’t be. Gives me an excuse to listen better. I’ll be able to pick up on breathing before too long. Lessee…” She closed her eyelids even though such a motion was pointless. “Hrm… Air conditioning unit, buzzing lightbulbs over there, Vriska’s standing creepily close to me, I’m sitting on a bed with springs given the squeaks when I shift my weight, this over here is a heart monitor with its infernal BEEP BEEP BEEPing…”

“Wow. Impressive,” Nova said.

“You should see Toph,” Pinkie said. “Or if you want someone who isn’t cheating with earth vibrations, Flair. They just know where things are and don’t have to think.”

“You’ll get there eventually.”

“You bet I will!” Pinkie blurted, exuding optimism. “Nothing’s gonna stop Pinkie Pie! …By the way, what do the implants look like?”

“Round horseshoes,” Vriska said. “Can’t even see them unless you lift up your hoof.”

“Nice. …Can I get out of the bed now and try to walk around?”

“Yes,” Nova said. “Turn yourself to the left and move your back hooves off the bed. Then slide forward – I’ll catch you if you fall.”

Pinkie felt around carefully with her hooves. She was able to sense the pose of her body, so she knew when her legs were dangling over the edge of the bed. She carefully placed her front hooves solidly onto the bed. She pushed herself off gently, allowing her back hooves to set on the ground.

The sensation of them touching the floor the first time sent chills through her mind, but she kept her cool. She settled all four of her legs down, standing proud.

“Hah. Did it! Take that, disability! Pinkie Pie can walk!”

“You’re standing,” Vriska pointed out.

“Vriska!” Flutterfree chided.

“Ah, she has a point,” Pinkie said, starting to walk forward. “I’ll be just fine an-”

She heard a thunk inside her skull. “…And I just ran into a wall. I believe the correct response is ‘ow’. Ow.”

Nova let out a soft chuckle. “Hey, at least you were able to walk.”

“Yep! Things are looking up!” Pinkie grinned. “Now, before we begin rehab, who wants lunch? Or breakfast. Or whatever time it actually is.”

“Sure, I’m famished,” Nova said. “There’s a nice joint down the block th-”

Pinkie pulled an entire table out of her mane set with high-quality sandwiches. “You forget who you’re visiting.” She sat down in front of the table, holding out a hoof. “Unfortunately I probably shouldn’t be trusted with my own food right yet so someone’s going to have to stuff this sandwich into my mouth for me. Vriska! I know you’re just dying to help me here!”

Vriska facepalmed. “You’re enjoying this too much.”

“Hey, I’m blind and have virtually no sensation within my body. I reserve the right to mess with people. Chop chop, sandwich, mouth, don’t let me bite my tongue~!”

“Uh, you just did,” Flutterfree said.

“…Ponyfeathers. I’m going to need to start carrying health potions. Or protective clothing or somefimimm.” Pinkie blinked, receiving a muddled signal of lettuce through her sense of taste. She just stuffed the sandwich in my mouth.

Pinkie started chewing, slowly. With effort, she was able to know where her tongue was in relation to her teeth, and she realized that gave her some indication as to where the actual food was. She really should be eating soft foods right now, but screw that, she could figure this out.

It took about a minute of intense focus, but she managed to get it down.

“Practice makes perfect!” She declared, pressing a hoof down on the table for effect. “ANOTHER!”

Vriska obliged.

~~~

Nova walked home later that day, having been told by Pinkie it was okay to leave.

Nova wasn’t sure about that. Pinkie sure seemed fine, tackling everything with a smile and a laugh. Apparently getting Eve back really had cured her of her swirling depression.

Honestly, that didn’t surprise Nova. She had seen Pinkie bounce from absolutely despondent to joyful in a matter of seconds numerous times. It was part of being Pinkie Pie to experience exceedingly drastic mood swings at levels normal people could never hope to understand.

Nova knew Pinkie really was back, given the state of her mane, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t hiding behind a big smile. Pinkie was more than able to shroud her fears and pain in laughs so long as they weren’t all-consuming feelings.

…Or maybe Nova was just worried about her. Whenever she had thought about losing senses previously, she had thought about sight and hearing. The things everyone relied on most if they weren’t a unicorn. Smell and taste were pretty pointless senses to be frank. She had always thought her sense of touch was one of the lesser senses as well, but seeing the slow way that Pinkie moved…

She was never going to take it for granted again. Simply moving became difficult without a basic sense of touch. Pinkie stumbled, had no idea when she’d hit her head on something, and could have a sword driven into her without her having a clue.

If it had been anyone other than Pinkie, Nova would have thought this would be impossible to move past. You couldn’t adventure like that. Not unless you were Pinkie and were made of rubber the vast majority of the time.

Still… It had to be hard for Pinkie. And she wasn’t really letting anyone see how hard it was. At least not yet.

Nova sighed, walking in the front door of her home. She had been here last night, briefly, to let everyone know she was okay before rushing off to help get Pinkie into surgery and deal with the aftermath of the war…

She hadn’t slept at all. She’d just kept busy.

She walked into the living room and fell onto her couch, looking at the ceiling.

“Nova? That you?” Sunburst asked, poking his head from around a corner in the house.

“Yes. Yes it’s me.” Nova rubbed her eyes. “I’m home. For real, this time. Sorry if I fall asleep.”

He walked over and sat next to her. “Won’t be a problem. I understand I’m boring.”

“For once, it wouldn’t be because you’re boring. It’d be because holy crap am I exhausted. Between the war, the battle, Eve, Pinkie, and the not sleeping… Just gah. I need a serious unwind.”

“Well I can certainly provide that.” Sunburst said.

Nova giggled. “Thanks for the offer. I might take you up on that later. But right now I’m just going to sit and stare at my ceiling. Maybe I’ll find the answer to life.”

“Forty-two.”

“Nineteen,” Nova countered.

“Are we arguing over stupid numbers now?” Stardust said, walking into the room.

Nova’s smile was replaced with a groan – one she immediately tried to cover up. But it was too late, Stardust saw it.

Stardust turned around and walked away.

“Stardust, wait!” Nova called, pulling herself off her couch. “I’ve just had a ba-”

“I get it, mom,” Stardust said without turning around. “I’m just one of your little chores you don’t have the patience for right now.”

“Stardust!” Nova called. “You don’t get to just walk away like that!”

Stardust let out a sigh and turned around. “Why not? If I stick around you’re just going to get fed up with me and start giving me a talk.”

“Why not? Because if you walk away and I let you, you’ll do it again and again. Not happening, Stardust. Even when I feel like tar I’m never going to let you just walk away when I – or anyone else – wants to talk to you.”

Stardust opened her mouth to object – but she didn’t quite have enough guile to face her mother directly quite yet, even when Nova was clearly weakened. “A-alright.”

Nova let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you. Now let me apologize. I’m sorry – I was weak and let my impatience get the better of me. My reaction to hearing you walk in with a question was wrong. I really did lose my patience with you before you even started.”

Stardust looked at Nova, an expression of confusion appearing on her face. Her inherent fear of her mother’s authority wasn’t parsing well with the sudden display of humility.

“How about you come sit on the couch with dad and me?”

Stardust was silent.

“You can bring your book, if you want,” Sunburst suggested.

“Er… Sure,” Nova said with an awkward smile. “Family time with… a book. You know what, I may think it’s silly, but sure, we can have family time with a book tonight.”

Stardust brightened up slightly.

“Really. Don’t expect this to be a pattern or anything, but today you can sit there with a book if that’s what you want. I just want to be able to see your face, okay?”

Stardust nodded, scrambling to her room to grab her book.

Sunburst looked at Nova expectantly.

“…What?”

“You’re not going to go on a mini-rant?”

“Celestia, no,” Nova let out a laugh. “I don’t have the energy for that. Stardust can have her nose in a book tonight and I won’t get on her case about it.”

“Didn’t you say something about ‘letting them get away with something once lets them think it’s okay’?”

“That’s tomorrow Nova’s problem,” Nova said. “And there’s also the corollary. ‘Let them have good things and show them love’.”

“I don’t think that’s strictly a corol-”

Nova kissed him. “Shut up. It’s profound, or something.”

“EEEEEEW!” Stardust squealed, having just returned with her book.

Nova let out a laugh. “Get up here you little rascal. Let’s see what this book of yours is about.”

“Uh…” Stardust shifted nervously.

Nova levitated Stardust and her book to the couch. “Hrm… …‘Twilight’?”

“Uh, yes…?”

“And what do you think of this book?” Nova asked.

“It’s absolute garbage that I’m reading just to gain a newfound disdain for the culture in which I find myself part of.”

Nova turned to Sunburst. “…What’s this book about?”

Sunburst shrugged. “I dunno. I think it’s a teen supernatural romance, one of the more popular ones.”

“It’s lame and I feel insulted that it comes highly recommended,” Stardust muttered, opening the book up.

“So why don’t you stop?” Nova asked.

“And just leave the story hanging!?” Stardust said with a panicked gasp. “NEVER!”

Nova blinked. Then she let out a chuckle. She may not have understood her daughter most of the time, but she was still great nonetheless.

“Have you read any books you’d think I might like?”

“You don’t read books.”

“I can take some time out of my schedule!”

“…Well, you might like The Mare Machine…”

~~~

Rev’s church had a confessional in the back. It wasn’t used all that often – Rev didn’t push confessions as a ‘holy sacrament’, despite the fact that her original congregation had been deeply involved in the regular act of confessing. But it was there in case anyone needed it, and from time to time there was a person who did need to simply confess what they had done in a spiritual setting.

Rev had been mildly surprised when Flutterfree asked to go through with it, but she hadn’t hesitated. They took their positions on opposite sides of the booth’s interior. The light was dim, but not ominously so. If felt… homey.

“Forgive me, Reverend, for I have sinned. It has been… a long, long time since my last confession.”

“So long as you have confessed your sins to the Lord, you need not concern yourself with listing them all.”

“My sins… are many. I encouraged my sister to go off to war for her sake, ignoring the needs of all others. I turned myself into a killing machine for the sake of a war. I killed hundreds. I lost my patience an untold number of times. I became a brutal being brimming with Rage, losing all self-control. I hurt my friends with dark words and violent motions. I neglected my own needs, ruining this body that I was given. I killed a man with my bare wings.” She looked at the ground. “I could confess many, many more. I did so many things in the war…”

“How many of those things were necessary?”

“Some. Definitely not all of them. And none of them were pure.”

“We are often placed into difficult situations where impure actions must be taken for the sake of what is pure and holy.”

“I didn’t have to go,” Flutterfree said, tears forming in her eyes. “I could have stayed back. I’ve stayed back before. Kept myself out of fights I didn’t need to be in. But I didn’t this time – because of her. She was the one in danger this time. I could have left it to the others, but I didn’t. I sacrificed my own body to go help her.”

“And was that a sin? Sacrificing oneself for others is certainly a noble deed.”

“…I don’t know. I do know all my thoughts weren’t pure. At the time, I did want to punish everyone who was a danger to her. I let my rage get the best of me. Many of the deaths I inflicted were very necessary. But my presence wasn’t.”

“So your sins stem from a single decision made for the sake of another?”

Flutterfree nodded to herself. “Yes. Yes, they do. I was thinking too much of her, not of others, not of the Lord. I even encouraged her to go off to war…” She trailed off.

“It is a deep, complicated sin you have given,” Rev said, looking up. “It was one not born out of selfish desire, but of love for a sister. That doesn’t make it righteous.”

Flutterfree nodded.

“For your penance, please devote yourself to prayer this night, specifically prayers of forgiveness alongside ones of clarity. Seek out this sister you sinned for, and make yourself right with her. Furthermore, have an extended discussion with your closest spiritual advisor about what actions you should take next. She’ll have some ideas.”

Flutterfree smirked. “Yeah. …Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“May God bless you,” Rev said, bowing her head.

“Thank you, Reverend.”

The two wordlessly left the confessional and walked to a small table Rev kept in the back room.

“…So am I supposed to pretend that wasn’t you talking in there?”

Rev let out a soft chuckle. “It’s fine, we can talk about what happened in there. We didn’t exactly do a normal one in the first place.”

Flutterfree nodded, sitting down in a chair. “…I certainly feel better, getting it all out.”

“It does help,” Rev said. “Sometimes your own mind can get in the way of direct prayer, a fact I’m sure you’re becoming well acquainted with.”

Flutterfree nodded. “…It’s all so muddled. I don’t know if half the things I did were necessary or not. And now I realize the whole reason I was in that mess was because I was thinking only of Eve. Nothing else.”

“Love can be a very dangerous thing, in any of its forms,” Rev said. “It is the highest, purest emotion we can have. But, fallen as we are, we can screw it up just like anything else. Love can result in neglect – neglect of others, neglect of God, neglect of self.”

Flutterfree looked at her wings. “Yeah…”

“Our bodies are temples,” Rev said. “We have to take care of them. Sacrifice is very noble, don’t get me wrong.”

“But I went a little far this time.”

“…I can’t say that for sure,” Rev admitted. “I’m not some source of all ‘spiritual answers’. Maybe you really did need to be there. Could they have won without your power?”

Flutterfree looked at Rev. “No. But God works all things together for good. Just because the result was good doesn’t mean it wasn’t bad to start with.”

Rev nodded. “I’ve taught you well. …You’re right, of course. Your deep bond with Eve resulted in you taking some impure actions. Throwing your soul and your body to the wind for her sake. But I want you to know something.”

“Hm?”

“Don’t think this means the special bond you share is wrong,” Rev said. “I know you sometimes wonder if it is – if you’re stepping over a boundary you shouldn’t. I always tell you that you’re not, and the same advice applies here. Everybody makes everybody else stumble at times. It’s because we’re not perfect.”

Flutterfree nodded.

“You’ll need to go talk to her,” Rev said. “Tell her how you feel about all this. Get it out in the open.”

“I know. I will. We see each other daily. I just… I wanted to come to you first.”

“Because I wasn’t part of the problem?”

Flutterfree nodded. “…I’m sure she and I will work it out. We always do. But like you said, I have a case of self-neglect here I need to deal with. I am important. I need to change a bit. Stop being what I was… But also stop being a warrior.”

Rev smiled warmly. “I agree. I can see the transformation happening within you already.”

“Yes. Within.” Flutterfree looked at the knives sticking out of her wings. “But these are always here. Making me a warrior. I could cut your head off right now.”

“No, you couldn’t,” Rev said. “I mean, you think you can, and if I was just a regular pony, yeah, but trust me when I say you couldn’t.”

“Right,” Flutterfree rubbed the back of her head.

“Have you considered doing something about those knives?”

“I can’t remove them, it would do serious damage to my nervous system. Unpredictable damage. Disguising them with magic won’t work because of Lolo.”

“So? Shave them down.”

Flutterfree blinked. “…What?”

“Like a fingernail or wild hoof. Clip the ends off. The stuff inside you still functions, there’s just nothing on the outside.”

“…I’m pretty sure that’ll do damage as well.”

“Covers, then?”

Flutterfree stared at Rev. “…That’s an excellent idea. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You were too busy swirling in your mental self-harm.”

Futterfree smiled nervously. “Heheh… Yeah…”

“Don’t worry, the advice is free. I bet you could even get ornate engravings or something.”

“I think I’ll go talk to Flair about that. See if it’ll work.” There was a big, genuine smile on her face. “I… I won’t have to walk around as a killing machine all the time!”

“Thank God for small miracles.”

“Amen!”

~~~

Corona, Toph, Lady Rarity, Roxy, and Giorno stood outside Lai’s new palace.

Toph had not stopped working all night. With her earthbending, she had recreated the entire palace from memory. If it wasn’t for the fact all of it was made out of earth instead of the normal materials, it would have been a perfect match.

They weren’t here to look at the palace, though.

There was a monument behind the palace. It was a round pedestal of earth with a concrete sculpture on top of it. A sugar-skull – the symbol that had been Olivia’s own before she had been forced to abandon it. The symbol of Sombra.

It had been made out of her crumbled dust by Corona’s request. Enchanted to never wear away. It would remain here, behind the castle, forever – without a name. ‘Olivia Velazquez’ already had a grave somewhere else from when they thought she was dead earlier. Sombra would be remembered here.

The five of them had been there for almost half an hour already.

“…Just how cruel do you have to be to make curses like this?” Corona asked, removing her shades to wipe her eyes. “Who does that!?”

“Mad artists,” Giorno said, hands in his pockets. “Arthon thought it was poetic and beautiful to fuse physical ailments to souls. Or maybe he just found it amusing and used art as an excuse to fuel his own sadism.”

Lady Rarity sighed. “He’s already paid the price for what he did.”

Corona nodded, saying nothing.

“I wonder if she had any family,” Toph said.

“…There were a few people she talked about back home from time to time.” Corona said.

“Then let’s go find them,” Roxy said.

“I don’t know who they are for sure,” Corona said. “And it’s been decades since we had any contact with Earth Omnic.”

“Then let’s open up new contact and find them,” Toph said, folding her arms. “Kapeesh?”

Corona looked at Toph and nodded. She pulled out her dimensional device and searched for Earth Omnic. She dialed the portal. “Raging Sights, find out what ping frequency this place uses. I’ve never been.”

Raging Sights beeped, giving Corona an information frequency. The four of them walked through the portal into a forested area while she made the call. “This is Corona Shimmer of Merodi Universalis, contacting… whoever this communication device was given to.”

A second later, a smooth robotic voice responded to her call. “…This is Zenyatta. Would you by chance be the otherworlders?”

“Ah, yes, right, we met you before we were united,” Corona said. “Uh… you met General O’Neill, right?”

“I did indeed.”

“Good. You might be able to help us. Are you in a place it would be convenient for us to teleport to?”

“I am alone in my temple. By all means, come in.”

Corona had Raging Sights triangulate Zenyatta’s position, teleporting all four of them to a simple temple made of marble. Zenyatta was a humanoid robot with nine blue dots on his head instead of a face. He looked up at them from his sitting position. “I take it things have changed drastically on your side of existence since I last spoke with your people?”

“A lot,” Corona said. “Is it the same here?”

Zenyatta nodded. “The Omnic Crises are over. There is currently peace on Earth. I had been considering making the call to you myself over the last few months to tell you we were ready – but it appears that wasn’t necessary.”

“Glad to hear you’re ready,” Corona said.

“Though, am I correct in assuming that is not the primary reason you are here?”

“No,” Corona said. “Do you remember Sombra?”

“…She was a problematic hacker back when you first arrived. She vanished when you left. I believe I heard something about her leaving the universe.”

“She did,” Corona said. “She was an enemy, at first. But then she started working for us, helping us uncover the secrets of the multiverse. And… she was my friend.”

“She has passed.”

“Yeah. She passed.” Corona looked at Zenyatta. “I know she was secretive, but do you think there’s anyone who would like to know what really happened to her? To know that… she ended up a hero, in the end?”

“I have my doubts that such people exist here anymore,” Zenyatta said. “But it would be my honor to search. It will take time, of course.”

“We can wait,” Giorno said. “A-”

Corona’s phone rang. She pulled it out with her telekinesis and glared at it – and then her jaw dropped.

Olivia was calling.

She nervously answered the phone. “Hello?”

“If you’re hearing this, I’m dead,” Olivia said, getting right to the point. “I don’t know how I went out. I hope it was awesome doing something great and heroic, but it’s just as likely I was punched by some overpowered idiot and kicked the bucket in an instant without doing much. Whatever happened… Hi from beyond the grave! I’m probably totally freaking you out right now.”

“No, really?” Corona said, a hand to her mouth.

“Anyway, I’m not going to get all touchy-feely here – no way to tell how many toes I’ll step on or things I’ll screw up. For all I know I’ll have gone through a drastic personality shift whenever it happens, and I can’t really speak for whatever I was feeling at the time. So, sorry if you were expecting something cathartic, Corona. But I do have something for you that I’m sure you’ll love me for and hate me for at the same time!”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “Oh?” she asked the recording.

“See, you’ll only get this message if you go to Earth Omnic, where my super-duper-uber secret base is. First off, the location of the base is encrypted in this audio file, should be easy to find now. There’s presents waiting!”

Corona didn’t wait – she teleported all of them to the coordinates, including Zenyatta.

They appeared in a cylindrical room with no entrances or exits. The moment they appeared in the room, the screen-lined walls lit up with the sugar-skull emblem.

“Welcome to the secret Sombra base, Corona and… company.” the recording declared, chopping up at ‘company’, indicative of multiple recordings being spliced together. “Got two presents for you. First, you get all the files on the multiversal Truth.”

A tremendous flow chart spread across the screens, all centered around the Dark Tower.

“Chances are I haven’t figured it out, not completely. What I know right now is that the current Truth of the multiverse lies in the top room of that Tower. I’ve tried more times than I like to admit to get in and ascend the stairs and get to that room, but it never lets me in. No matter what I try, it always sends me somewhere else. It’s like I’m not meant to know. Which I’m never going to accept, but it’s rather disheartening.

“Amiga, you have this now. Everything I have. Maybe you’ll find the answer.”

Corona felt Raging Sights downloading all the information.

“And as for the second present… You might get mad at this one.”

A light shone from the ceiling at the center of the room. A small purple crystal in the shape of a sugar-skull was sitting there, plugged into the pedestal with a series of tiny black wires.

“…Is that what I think it is?” Lady Rarity asked, a hoof to her mouth.

“This is the Sombra Artificial Intelligence,” Olivia explained. “I call her Sai. She, uh… well she’s my attempt at a mind upload. See, I knew I might die, as evidenced by this recording, so I figured I might as well pursue alternate methods of extending my life. She’s an upload of my memories and experiences in a little purple box that really isn’t perfect. No discernable soul, the emotions are wacky, she’s inconsistent… So she’s not me but she sorta is me…”

Corona closed her hand around Sai, feeling the energy within. Olivia was right, there was no real soul in there, no full mind, just a bunch of code.

“So, feel free to be mad at me for leaving you a shadow of myself that’ll just bring bad memories. You can do whatever you want with her. I’m sorry if she’s painful to have around.”

“She won’t be,” Corona said, holding Sai to the light.

“Anyway, if you actually want to talk to her, just say ‘Sombra’ or ‘Sai, activate’. She should automatically provide you with some of my personal nanobots as well, if you ask. …Adios, Corona. Here’s to hoping there really is something after.” The recording stopped.

Corona and her companions stood in silence for a moment, soaking in what they had just heard. Corona lifted a finger to her eye and wiped away a tear.

“Sombra, activate,” Corona said.

“Hola, Amiga!” the crystal beeped in Olivia’s voice. “What can I do for you?”

“Get those nanobots ready… and then keep researching the mutiversal Truth,” Corona said, generating a string and placing the crystal around her neck, making sure to hide it beneath her shirt.

“All right!” Sai beeped. Raging Sights reported to Corona that she now had control over a large array of Sombra’s microscopic machines. Then Sai went silent – returning to quiet research.

Olivia was never someone to let something as pedestrian as death keep her from finding answers.

~~~

Allure and Minna sat down to have lunch.

“So…” Minna said, tapping her fingers together. “I think I’m ready to tell you everything that happened now.”

Allure nodded. “Go on. I won’t interrupt you. I’ll just drink this juice.”

So Minna began her story. She spoke of how she left, how she ended up on a Speeder team with Eve, how she was recruited directly by Corona, how she was separated with Lady Rarity, how she found the facility where she and her soldiers were made, how she destroyed the place and helped kill Brell, and how she helped Olivia hack into the Shaping Mechanisms. She finished her story and looked expectantly at Allure.

“Well…?”

“…I’m just glad you’re alive,” Allure said with a smile on her face. “…Actually, I’m also glad the people who tormented you got what was coming to them, but I really shouldn’t be happy that Brell was killed. She sounded… confused.”

Minna nodded. “She was. I don’t think we could have saved her though. Insanity ran in that family.”

“I figured,” Allure said. She leaned forward and clasped Minna’s hand with her hooves. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m glad to be back,” Minna admitted. “I… I didn’t like not having you there.”

“You’ve had me most of your life,” Allure said. “This definitely wasn’t the place or time to learn independence.”

Minna nodded slowly, eyes wide. “…I did enjoy it, at times. Not the being alone, but the thrill. I… I never really felt a thrill like that, before.”

Allure raised an eyebrow. “Not even with Frigid?”

Minna blushed slightly. “Not the same feeling. This feeling was… like I was doing what I was meant to do. Even after I had destroyed the facility, I still felt it. It felt right.”

Allure nodded slowly. “Some of us are meant to explore. You… never struck me as the type, but then again we didn’t know what you were before.”

“So I can join up?”

“Not until you’re eighteen, missy!” Allure said with a chuckle. “After that, sure, you can go sign up with Expedition-”

“Military, mom.”

Allure blinked. “…Minna, are you sure?”

“It feels… right.”

“But wasn’t that just what Brell wanted you to be?”

“She wanted me to be a mindless killing machine,” Minna said. “Not a protector. Not a savior.”

“This is the point where I try to point out that Expeditions does the same thing, that Expeditions is a lot safer, and that we’re likely not going to have an actual war for a while.”

“I mean, I’ll think about it, but if I join Expeditions I’d want to be part of a strike force or quasi-military unit. …I really felt like I belonged, mom.”

Allure let out a sigh. “I’m not going to stop you – once you turn eighteen – but I want to be sure this is your decision and not brought on by… by whatever’s hidden inside you.”

Minna looked at her hands, then at a nearby screen so she could examine her reflection. “Maybe it is that. Maybe I’m naturally drawn to being a soldier because of what I am. But there’s nothing wrong with being a loyal soldier, is there?”

Allure shook her head. “Not at all.”

“So long as I’m not being controlled and manipulated into doing it, why not follow my nature?”

“…Because it was forced on you?”

“And you were ‘forced’ to be a Cutie Mark Crusader, and then part of the League of Sweetie Belles,” Minna pointed out. “…We’re all a story, after all. Our natures and our stories might be the same.”

Allure let out a soft laugh. “You’ve matured a lot in the last few days.”

“…I found myself.”

Allure walked over to her and gave her a hug. “I’m glad you did. If you really think that’s your calling, go ahead. I won’t even try to stop you.”

“Thanks,” Minna said, hugging her back.

“You still have to be eighteen.”

“I get it, I get it.”

“I mean it! No more running off even if another war happens!”

“Alright! Yeesh!” she laughed.

~~~

“…Are you sure you understand?” Flutterfree asked Eve as they walked through the deep halls of Celestia City. I hung back far enough so that I couldn’t hear their conversation with my ears, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know what they were saying. It was just a courtesy.

Eve nodded. “I think I do. I risked all of Merodi Universalis for their sake – or what I convinced myself was their sake, anyway. I still have no idea if the decision was right or not.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Good.” She carefully hugged Eve so as not to scratch her skin.

“Glad we had this talk,” Eve said, smiling.

“Same. Now, you can go back to introducing Twilence to everyone important and I can go talk to Flair now, see what can be done about these knives in my wings.”

“See you later,” Eve said.

“Yep!” Flutterfree spread her wings and took off.

I trotted back up. “You’ll be glad to know most of that conversation was private.”

Eve let out a sigh of relief. “Good. At least there’s something I can cherish.”

“There’s a lot of things. The vast majority of your time is spent offscreen.”

“Though usually not the important stuff.”

“Usually not. But in this case, she already had a conversation so the readers could look at her – it would have largely been redundant with you.”

“…Interesting…” Eve said, rubbing her chin. “There’s probably a way to exploit that…”

“There is. Generally not worth the effort to figure it out, though.”

Eve nodded slowly, pondering this new influx of information. We finally passed by the room we were heading for, which included four Overheads at once – O’Neill, Ava, Jingle, and the Research Overhead. They were currently listening to O’Neill talk.

“Heavy damage is localized to Earth Vitis, Elemental Four, and Lai,” O’Neill said. “They’ve lost major cities in the assaults. Canterlot, Republic City, and the Lai Capital. As crazy as Toph is, I doubt that her efforts to rebuild the Capital will pan out. Otherwise, war’s completely over since every one of them just dropped dead. Cleanup is more important than that. Plans, Jingle?”

“Diverting resources from Equis Vitis, Equis Concrete, and Skaia’s Dream to the needed worlds,” Jingle reported. “Earth Vitis is expected to recover quickly given their high population density and internal relations. The four major nations of Elemental Four suffered significant levels of damage, but aid will repair the structural damage there. The crater of Republic City is a complete loss save for Air Temple Island… Elemental Four’s neutral territory is gone.”

“How will that affect them?” Ava asked.

“Cultural’s report says they’ll bond together, though the behavior of the Avatar is a big factor in their long-term response,” Jingle said. “…She’s lost a lot of close friends. That city was her home. She’s accepted professional help to cope, but I don’t have the authority to say how she’ll fare even with that.”

“She’ll pull through,” Eve said, walking in. “She’s strong.”

“Ah, Eve,” Ava said with a smile. “What brings you here?”

“Finish your meeting first, it can wait.”

Jingle nodded. “Lai is going to suffer the most. They are a single unified people under one ruler. Even the quick rebuilding of the palace has only done so much – they lost their seat of power. They don’t have another major metropolis to turn to. So the majority of Gem and Equis Cosmic efforts are being diverted. R. O., your people will need to work closely with ours to maximize the efficiency.”

The Research Overhead nodded.

“Aside from that, Ava, we’ll need more personnel to undertake a relief effort of this magnitude. It is a bit… odd that we’re devoting our resources to internal regions.”

“I will send out a call for volunteers,” Ava responded. “I expect many will come instantly.”

“Thanks. Other than that…” Jingle let out a sigh. “We do need to address the people in a more direct way than ‘the war is over’.”

“O’Neill’s the one that falls to,” Ava said. “No offense to present company intended.”

“None taken,” Eve responded.

O’Neill stretched his back. “Always more and more speeches… I’ll come up with something by the end of the day.”

“You can use Cessera if you need to,” Eve offered. “She loves writing speeches. She’s actually a little annoyed that she never gets to write any of mine.”

“I’ll take you up on that.”

“I know you will,” Eve said with a smirk.

“I think we’re done with the general report,” Ava said, turning to Eve. “Care to introduce your guest?”

“This is Twilence,” Eve said, giving them a brief overview of who I was and what I could do. O’Neill and Ava already knew who I was, but the Research Overhead and Jingle had no idea.

The R.O. beeped. “Fascinating… A device infused with Awareness… How would such a thing be possible?”

“Trade secret,” I said with an innocent smile. “You wouldn’t be able to make it anyway.”

“Words like that just make a scientist want to know more,” Jingle said.

“Oh, I know. I’m just not going to let him poke me with knives.”

“I have no intention of doing so,” the Research Overhead admitted. “But I wouldn’t mind it if you dropped by the labs and told me what you knew about the device.”

“I think Starbeat would understand it better, I could have her send the information to you later.”

“I would appreciate that.”

“While it is nice to have you on board, we do have a nation to run,” Ava said. “If you don’t have any suggestions I believe it would be prudent for us to get back to repairing our worlds.”

I pondered this a moment. “Be careful assuming that some worlds will be fine – large-scale psychological damage is hard to see when there isn’t much damage. Equis Vitis in particular is struggling to accept the things that have taken place. You might want Cultural to look into that.”

Ava nodded. “I shall make the calls. Thank you, Twilence.”

“No problem.” I turned to Eve. “Guess that means we get lunch now.”

“I’ll join you,” O’Neill said, standing up and stretching his back. “It’s time for the age-old tradition of jello eating with General O’Neill.”

Eve shot me a ‘really?’ glare. I chuckled.

~~~

“So…” Vriska said, inviting herself to sit at Aradia’s table. “How ticked off are you at this point in time?”

They were in a food court on Celestia City that served ‘almost everything’. Vriska had yellow corn dogs while Aradia was poking her fried rice with her fork.

“Oh, a bit. I know I get over it eventually – future self helping you all save this city and all – but I’m just… I’m not mad but I’m upset.”

“Y’know Eve did what she had to, right?”

Aradia let out a sigh. “Now that I’ve had a look around time, yeah, I get that. I see that this needed to happen to alter our course onto a new trajectory, I was still manipulated. I should be used to that at this point, but… I really thought I had put that behind me. Changed how I handled things.”

“So, you failed?”

“Yeah, I failed at my job. Even if it turned out for the ‘better’ this time.” She looked at the ceiling. “It’s just frustrating. To have so much power and still fall to a simple lie.”

“No shit,” Vriska said, rolling her eyes. “We’re such badasses we forget we’re still people.” She let out a bitter laugh. “It was about time you got your ass handed to you.”

“I’m not undefeated!”

“Last time you had any difficulty was with the University of Doors,” Vriska pointed out. “The whole thing with the Celestialsapien doesn’t count and you know it. You were always going to be able to go back and fix that if you had to. You just happened to get it right the first time.”

“You really don’t understand how time travel works, do you?”

Vriska rubbed the back of her head. “…Guess not.”

“I’ll save you the explanation of time-metatime interactions that I have to deal with every day on this multiversal scale. I get caught up with the paradoxes all the time. It’s why I have so many backups running around – in my line of work there are sometimes universes where I’ll just be erased without warning. Getting bested by those sorts of things are part of the job. But I don’t get fooled by innocent lies.”

“I think you’re just full of yourself,” Vriska said, kicking back.

Aradia smirked. “You’re one to talk.”

“Oh yeah, I’m definitely full of shit too, it’s a thing we share apparently. We could both stand to be kicked down a peg or two. Of course you more so than me.”

Aradia rolled her eyes. “You’re full of yourself all right. But you do have a point. Maybe I am a bit too confident. …Or too trusting.”

Vriska shrugged. “I think you just rely too much on your abilities to let you know everything, and when something comes out of left field you don’t see it until it hits you.”

“Apt metaphor.” Aradia folded her arms. “I dunno. I can’t help but feel I could have done something to stop the war. But I also know that, if I was able to see this future, I would have let the war play out, possibly even helped create it.” She sat back. “I guess I’m just complaining?”

“Yeah. You are,” Vriska said with a smirk. “You’re just bitching and whining. ‘Wah, I can’t see everything and make the best possible choice anymore!’ Welcome to being a regular person.”

Aradia’s bright smile returned to her. “I am being a little silly, come to think of it.”

“Hey, that’s what Vriska’s here for, to point out your shit.”

“Who points out yours?”

Vriska blinked. “…Flutterfree, usually.”

“Glad you have someone who can do that for you. How is Starbeat doing by the way?”

“She breezed through the entire war like a ship on smooth seas. Not even scarred by the danger she was in at the end. She’s just got a ton of chill.”

“Really? I thought she was hyperactive and slightly crazy.”

“You can be that and still have chill.”

Aradia raised an eyebrow. “That’s dumb.”

“No, that’s me being full of shit,” Vriska smirked. “Get it right.”

“Mmmmm, nah.”

“HEY VRISKA!” I called, scampering over.

“…Twilence?” Vriska said, looking up to see me leaving the table with Eve and O’Neill – both of them eating the blue jello. “What’re you doing here?”

“You’re a Class 2 now, I don’t have to hide in my ‘basement’ anymore.” I winked.

“Nice to see you again!” Aradia said, smiling. “Though I already have, in your relative future.”

“I know, I saw that,” I answered. “I look forward to being the one at an advantage!”

Vriska blinked. “Suddenly I’m terrified of what you two will do.”

“Conquer existence,” I said. “…Either that or just innocently hang out. Both seem rather tantalizing.”

Aradia giggled.

Vriska shook her head. “The world isn’t ready…”

“The world wasn’t ready for more than one Pinkie Pie, so we got more worlds,” Aradia pointed out. “Just extrapolate from there and we should be good!”

“Oh, Vriska!” I said, turning to her. “Got somethin’ for ya.”

“Hm?”

I pulled a round, blue-pink object out and tossed it to her. She caught the orb in her hands and stared at it. The sphere was lined with dozens of complex shapes tessellated together to form a nearly perfect sphere. Every second or so, the shapes would shift to different sizes and arrangements to create a new arrangement for the sphere. Every single face contained a seemingly random symbol, and the symbols changed every time the object shifted.

“An infinity-sided die!?” Vriska blurted. “Where did… how did…?”

“I kept it around,” I said. “I knew you’d want it.”

“FUCK YES!” Vriska said, holding the die up to the light. “I AM NOW THE MOST POWERFUL BEING IN EXISTENCE!”

Aradia raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Okay, maybe not the most, but you know.” She held the die in front of her eye. “When this sweet baby is rolled anything can happen. For most people, it’s worse than useless and extremely dangerous. But for me… I can tell it what to do if I have enough luck. At maximum luck… I could reshape an entire universe with this beautiful beast.”

“And you’re currently in an area of the multiverse that doesn’t have them banned,” I offered. “And even when Oversight and Justice do pick up on the power you have, they’ll make an exception for you due to your exemplary service to Merodi Universalis. You don’t have to worry about simply having it anymore. Not here.”

“Sweeeeet!”

“Sweet is right,” I said, winking. “You’re welcome.”

“I’ve got to go tell the others STAT! Sorry Aradia, need to showcase some fun!” She opened a dimensional portal and left Celestia City.

I turned to Aradia. “Y’know, now that she’s gone, you can go talk to Eve. She’s right over there.”

Aradia looked at Eve. “…Not yet.”

“…But now’s the perfect time?”

A new Aradia appeared, allowing the old Aradia to disappear. “Now I’m ready.” She walked up to Eve’s table, sat down, and smiled warmly. “Hi!”

“Uh… Hi!” Eve said, smiling nervously. “Look, I-”

“Don’t worry about it. Everything’s okay now, and this is better for all of us in the long run.” Aradia put a hand on Eve’s hoof. “You’re okay by me, Evening. Don’t go out of your way to reconcile with me. There are others your efforts would be better spent on.”

Eve nodded, a look of relief crossing her expression. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. Now, O’Neill, have you ever tried invisible jello?”

O’Neill blinked. “No. The fact that I haven’t is clearly a horrendous evil that must be remedied immediately.”

I summoned four plates of invisible jello. “Enjoy finding it,” I said.

Everyone chuckled.

~~~

“So… I just got a message about the Shaping Mechanism,” Kitten said, addressing the golden-throne bound Emperor of Mankind. “Looks like we’re going to be able to use it to manipulate dimensional physics.”

“AND?” the Emperor spoke, as always vocalizing with a text-to-speech device.

“You already know.”

“I WANT TO HEAR YOU SAY IT.”

Kitten let out a soft chuckle. “Well okay then. It is my pleasure to announce we finally have in our hands a final solution to Chaos. We can safely disconnect Galaxus Immaterium from the Warp. It’ll be difficult - we’d have to keep all the Chaos Gods from using reality anchors - but it’s a much better option than everything else we’ve been considering lately.”

“I TAKE IT BACK. THIS IS THE BEST FUCKING DAY OF MY LIFE.”

“We might be able to get you off the Throne soon…”

“I’M GOING TO HAVE A LOT OF FUCKING AMAZING DAYS DOWN THE LINE.”

“Don’t get too excited, it’ll take several years to get the universe ready… But when it is…”

The Emperor’s phone rang. A voice came through without him answering it.

“HELLO! It’s Tzeentch. You just figured out the solution to the Warp problem! Woohoo, good on you for finally getting around to that realization. But what you don’t know is that it was all part of the plan!”

“...Your defeat was part of your plan?”

“It wouldn’t be my defeat! Why do you think I’ve been spreading out into other universes and helping with the war? With this Shaping Mechanism, I can be FREE of the definitions of the Galaxy’s collective psyche! I will fully become my own entity, separated just as you wish your universe to be. Exactly. As. Planned.”

“TZEENTCH, SINCE WHEN WOULD WE DO WHAT YOU WANTED?”

“When I’m willing to use my daemons on the other three? I’ve already started up a civil war anticipating your response. You say this is the best fucking day of your life, well, think about how much CHANGE this will bring to me! YES! DELICIOUS CHANGE!”

“...I would say you’re insane, but that’s already evident,” Kitten deadpanned.

“Hoo hoo hoo! I look forward to working together!” He hung up.

“...You didn’t say yes…”

“HE KNOWS I WILL. THE TWISTED PSYCHOTIC INCONSISTENT FUCK. SIGH. THIS IS STILL A GOOD DAY.”

“Oh of course! Shall I get the festive hats?”

“YOU KNOW ME SO WELL.”

~~~

Eve walked into one of the Golden Joke’s meeting rooms that evening, expecting to give a general report on the war to the foreign powers. I tagged along, but for once I was not to be introduced – I was just a new face.

Eve was somewhat surprised that it wasn’t just Valentine, Hastur, and Twilight M4 in there. Valentine and Hastur were both there, yes, but so were the Grand Secretariat, Nanoha, Empress Twilight of the Void, Lightning of the Collection, and even a Melnorme. Eve hadn’t seen one of the one-eyed orange creatures in ages, presumably because of the generally anti-big-business stance of Merodi Universalis.

“Uh… What is this…?” Eve asked.

“A welcoming party,” Nanoha said with a smile. “You’ve made it to Class 2.”

“Did that get out already!?”

I coughed. “I may have let slip to the Empress why I was leaving.”

“It is not hard to tell,” Lightning said, flexing her Infinity Gauntlet – dimmed because it was not keyed to the current universe. “If you have the capacity to shape universes combined with a large number of realms under your ownership, you are a Class 2.” She smirked. “The Collection is a Class 2 by power and scope alone. We aren’t ‘decentralized’, since all of us live in one universe that’s just shrouded by hundreds of others. Skarn was similar to us in that regard.”

“So we’re suddenly a Class 2 and doors open up?” Eve asked.

“With us?” Nanoha asked. “Not really. If you wanted to file for inclusion into the TSAB you’d be given priority now, but that would still take forever. Twenty years, I would think.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Eve said. “We need to be our own entity.”

“And I have no problems with that whatsoever.”

The Melnorme moved forward. “Now that you have access to higher dimensional technology your avenues for trading have drastically increased. We have many requests of you for our own universes that we would be willing to pay handsomely for.”

“You don’t have a Shaper?”

“Ah, that information has a price.”

Eve narrowed her eyes at the Melnorme. “If you want to start actually engaging in relations with us, you’re going to have to be more open than that. I’m not paying for every little tidbit of information I want to know about you. We should just, I don’t know, maybe trust each other a bit?”

The Melnorme looked at her like she was speaking an alien language.

“It is the way of their people,” the Grand Secretariat said. “Not exactly convenient.”

“The inventors of Inconvenience Stores,” Hastur joked.

Valentine stared at him, then shook his head. Eve knew he must feel a bit suffocated here – expecting a report on the war, and instead getting overlooked by a bunch of Class 2 representatives. He was not a fan of being the smaller fish.

Eve went to talk to him – but ‘Empy’ Twilight got to her first. “I wish to welcome you to our ranks personally, Charter-Princess Evening Sparkle, Overhead of Relations. May this day serve as the start of a full-fledged relationships as equals.”

“You are of a significantly higher caliber than them, Empress” Hastur pointed out. “There is much disparity between a high-end Class 2 and a low-end.”

“True,” Nanoha said. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t be allies.”

Empy smiled. “I look forward to meeting with you more, Evening. Take good care of Twilence for me.”

“I will,” Eve promised.

I winked. “I’ll be taking care of myself, Empress.”

“Don’t be so arrogant of your abilities,” Empy reminded me. “You know where that’s gotten you in the past.”

I nodded solemnly. “I know. I never forget.”

Eve let Empy and me talk for a bit, finally making it to Valentine. “Sorry about this, I had no idea.”

“Clearly,” Valentine said, arms folded. “It seems as though you’re drawing the attention of everyone.”

“None of the Class 1s are here,” Eve pointed out.

“I wouldn’t be so certain of that,” Valentine said. “They’re watching. My people detected Xeelee wire for a split second. The Flowers are here too – that’s not just a rose in that vase.”

Eve walked over to the decorative rose, discovering that it was glowing slightly, a clear indication of Flower technology. “…Oh joy.”

“The faster you climb through the ranks the more attention you draw,” Valentine said. “I envy you for what you’ve achieved – but I also pity you for what is to come.”

Eve nodded slowly. “It’s going to be a long road ahead, apparently.”

Valentine didn’t say anything in response to this.

“Anyway!” Eve called. “I came here to originally give a report on the war, and that’s what I’m going to do. Everyone’s free to listen, this shouldn’t take too long – I have extra copies of the reports. So without further a-”

Jenny of the Red Gloves fell through the front door, landing flat on her face. “Ow…”

“…Jenny!?” Eve blurted. “…This is a surprise.”

“Uh, yeah, and your mind is about to be blown right off!” Jenny grinned cheesily. “Dracogen Enterprises is here to petition for inclusion within Merodi Universalis.”

Eve stared at Jenny. “What.”

“You heard me.”

106 - Class 2, Part 2

“This is an official meeting of which you were no-”

Eve held a wing up to quiet the Melnorme. She walked away from Valentine, approaching Jenny. Jenny was as short as ever and Eve had grown significantly in her alicorn stature since their last meeting.

She was now slightly taller than the diminutive immortal.

“You want to join Merodi Universalis?” Eve asked.

“Uh, yep.”

Eve gave her a calm smile. “…Why?”

“Well, uh, the University can’t fund us anymore, as you know, and we’ve tried to keep at least a small active force in exploration, but…” she tapped her fingers together. “We’ve been losing a lot of people. The program’s essentially shut down completely. We’ve lost our ability to understand everything we were once able to, and because of some of the infrastructure changes we made we’re experiencing… difficulties.”

“So you need help because you weren’t prepared to be cut off from the multiverse.”

Jenny rubbed the back of her head. “Pretty much! Not in danger of societal collapse or anything, but ever since the information about the multiverse leaked we’ve had… serious problems.”

“Are you sure you aren’t just begging me because you’re bored?”

Jenny’s smile twitched. “Darnit, why do you have to be so clever?”

“Because it’s my job,” Eve said smiling softly. “But I’ll assume all those other reasons you gave were legitimate. That you do need – and want – help to restructure your society.”

“…Are you actually considering her offer?” the Grand Secretariat asked, eyes wide. “Was she not the one responsible for trying to erase you from time?”

“Never gonna live that down,” Jenny muttered.

“Actually, you are,” Eve said, placing a hoof on Jenny’s shoulder. “I’ll tell the Aid Division to look into you the moment we’ve got an opening from our own relief efforts. That much you can have. After that… The process for inclusion will need you to change many of your ways. I am well aware Dracogen Enterprises had its start as a criminal organization and that old habits die hard. You will have to make peace with your neighbors and allow them possible inclusion as well. I am not against the admission of the Ninth World, Jenny. But you will have to change what you are for us to accept you.”

“…Fine,” Jenny said. “I’m already groveling as it is, might as well roll over on my back and stick my legs in the air. Woof woof, whatever you say.”

Eve smiled. “Good. Will the University object to your inclusion? Or will they be joining?”

Jenny let out a snort. “I haven’t heard from those stuffy bookworms in years. They don’t give a rip about us. And if they do decide to throw a fit I’ll have to remind them they don’t own us. Just… let us in. Pleeeeeeease.”

“I’ll have to run it by the other Divisions first, you know – but you have my approval.”

Jenny noticed Eve’s smugness. “You’re enjoying this.”

“A little,” Eve admitted. “Another one has been friendshipped.”

Jenny sighed. She was usually the one who got to give other people smug grins. This was a decidedly unpleasant role reversal.

Eve turned back to everyone. “Sorry about that, but I can’t just leave my duties aside. As a possible soon-to-be-member of Merodi Universalis, she has every right to be here. Now I’ll get to the report on the war. We engaged Skarn’s forces upon his unprovoked assault on one of our lesser universes, one where we were studying unusual physics. There were no casualties, but that was only thanks to the Handmaid, and given his previous actions…”

“And scene,” I said.

~~~

Time passes – as it always does. A nation grows and transforms itself into something else.

Oftentimes in the multiverse, the transition to Class 2 is one that happens without realizing it. The people will just wake up one day and think ‘you know, I think we’re a Class 2 now’ and then they’ll check to see if they’re really ‘decentralized’ or ‘own enough universes to be functionally decentralized’. Due to the vague definitions of classes, it's no surprise that the exact moment one shifts from one class to another is often a mystery.

Merodi Universalis did not get to experience this gradual mystery of multiversal shifting. One day, they were their usual Class 3 selves. The next, there was a week where they were at war and feared for their lives. They came out of that war with access to technology that could shape universes and an uncountable number of worlds that came with that power. They suddenly had something that was equivalent to real power in the multiverse.

Granted, the Shaping Mechanism had many drawbacks. The main one being that any multiversal society with any idea how to alter physics on any scale could keep their universes safe. But it gave Merodi Universalis near absolute dominion over the lower worlds, should they see fit to use it. The ability to stretch and mold universes like clay…

It was a huge power. A dangerous power that was to be heavily, heavily regulated.

But of course it would be used. Having such a device and not using it to help who they could would be an insult to everything they stood for.

One of the first things they did after figuring out the ins and outs of the Mechanism was to stop Esefem’s horror. No more would beings just pop into existence with lies in their head, no longer would the mercenaries be determined to perpetuate their war, and no longer would spots of Random Weirdness show up. The world still made no physical sense, and they had to sacrifice the respawn aspect of the world to fix it, but it was a world now. One that could actually grow and continue forward.

After that, the Shaping Mechanism was mainly put to use unraveling the Congeries and all the peoples within. The vast majority of societies that lived within the Congeries were simple folk who barely knew that Skarn had even existed. In many cases, disassembling Skarn’s works would have resulted in the destruction of a society who had grown used to it – so any ones that weren’t particularly cruel were allowed to remain as they were. But every nation that suffered was weaved away. Slowly, the size of the Congeries depleted – with the eventual goal being that it would consist only of one universe with a handful of artistic works and the Shaping Mechanism itself. While many, many universes fell under the ‘control’ of Merodi Universalis, most were allowed to simply go free. Those that chose to join Merodi Universalis more often than not treated their benefactors with reverence.

Sometimes you just couldn’t convince people not to worship you.

Minna was the only one of Skarn’s soldiers known to survive the order. If he had sent any others out to test other multiversal societies, there was no record of them.

Back home, Merodi Universalis repaired itself. Jingle’s Aid efforts went mostly as expected. Earth Vitis was capable of repairing itself mostly from scratch, using internal relations to provide relief to the sub-nations that were hit the hardest. While a few major cities were completely lost, most had been evacuated and moved to a new world in Equis Cosmic. There were always new worlds in Equis Cosmic. Even Earth Tau’ri didn’t have such a deep understanding and control over their galaxy.

Lai was nothing if not tenacious. They saw their Queen rebuild the palace with her own hands, filling them with an immense national pride. They banded together to rebuild their city, almost refusing aid, the stubborn ponies they were. But Toph convinced them to accept help and they rebuilt their capital with intense zeal. They found that the city wasn’t completely lost – a few magical bunkers had been spared, including Corona’s laboratory, the palace’s deepest dungeons, and the statues of Lai’s Celestia and the others.

Toph kept the Celestia statue a secret – she didn’t want to ruin Queen Luna’s memory.

For once, Lai’s tendency to be defiant and angry worked for the favor of Merodi Universalis. There were surprisingly few who blamed their government for going to war, and many more who simply celebrated the brutal defeat of Skarn.

The Elemental Four suffered. Corea was broken by the events and while the psychologists said she would make a full recovery, she wasn’t there in the aftermath of the attack – when the world needed her the most. She just couldn’t give them words of comfort when her home had been destroyed. She spent most of her time back on Sweet Apple Acres, recovering. Without her, the Elemental Four had to rely on the distant-seeming words of the Overheads. They had few leaders from the hundred-year-war remaining, and their worldwide leadership had all been in Republic City.

They were by no means in danger of returning to their old, warlike ways – but they lost a spark of life they had held close to their hearts. A feeling of inadequacy began to spread through the Elemental Four – that they weren’t worthy, that their world was the least of all Merodi founders, that they weren’t on par with all the others.

After only a few months, patterns began to emerge revealing a large-scale exodus of the world. The population of the Elemental Four began to drop dramatically as the younger generation sought out ‘better worlds’. The universe would not feel the full ramifications of this for a few years – but they would eventually.

In contrast, the rest of Merodi Universalis seemed to be in an eternal party – the unaffected E-Sphere universes in particular. The economy boomed due to a sudden insurgence of trade from foreign powers, making it abundantly clear that the war had ended up turning a huge profit – due in no small part to the Shaping Mechanism’s ability to just duplicate things. Ships took a while to make from scratch due to how complicated they were, but the Shaping Mechanism could deal with it.

The entire Merodi Fleet was rebuilt within two months. They didn’t make the same mistake Skarn did – they kept building more ships after they had met their quota. They weren’t going to be caught with a surprisingly small number of ships just because they thought they’d never need that many.

Worlds that had been holding out over joining Merodi Universalis finally gave in – the Ninth World being one of several. Merodi Universalis accepted almost all of them with open arms, finding that few actually needed much in the way of aid and were actually willing to help. The Sparkles of the Sparkle Census started referring their homeworlds to the Merodi for inclusion, paving the way for a change in the relationship of the two multiversal powers. The Merodi conscripted a world of low-level ascended beings, a world inhabited entirely by a hive mind race known as the Ood, a ‘magical girl’ universe they couldn’t identify from any source material, a world where humans continually fought Grimm beasts to survive, a world that soon became a major player called Pokèrin Anima, numerous Earths, Equises, and of course the Ninth World.

The Ninth World’s issues proved to be rather pathetic. Simply offer them the things they wanted – which weren’t all that impressive – and the society balanced itself out. The hardest part was ironing out the general ‘criminal’ attitude Dracogen and many other individuals in the world had.

Merodi Universalis was nothing if not patient, however. They would work with them until they were deemed ready.

It was a new chapter in the life of this unique nation. Unlike the Bloodbath, which had been seen as almost a complete tragedy and loss, the aftermath of Skarn’s War was seen in a positive light – as a well-deserved victory.

A fact that certainly helped Eve sleep at night.

On the other hand, Valentine and the USM noticed they were being eclipsed. They only made one major acquisition while the Merodi made several – a world known as Earth-FT3, a curious combination of the Fairy Tail manga and Harry Potter novels. The Merodi barely registered them.

And the wheel of time kept marching onward…

~~~

Corona had no home anymore.

Her lab had somehow survived the assault on Lai, but the rest of her house hadn’t. Her other home on Earth Vitis had been taken down with the rest of Canterlot City – though thankfully not with her friends. They had evacuated.

She had supposed the logical course of action would be to move to Equis Vitis and take up her royal chambers.

But she didn’t do that.

Instead she decided to go live in the Congeries to work on the Shaping Mechanism. She became its primary operator and researcher, taking a break from Expeditions to pour herself into uncovering the secrets of the Mechanism.

She knew she would never be able to understand all the controls and nuances to the Shaping Mechanism in a normal lifespan – but after three days she had enough control over it to be effective. She had no plans to make tremendous multiversal structures for the sake of art; the uses of the Shaping Mechanism would be to fix worlds, not break or twist them.

And thus, she became the Shaping Mechanism’s primary pilot. The one who fixed worlds and slowly unwound the horrors of the Congeries.

She got to see a lot of horrible things. Churning cauldrons of flesh worse than the human zipper. Temporally locked worlds that made people experience the same day of disasters over and over – every time aware of it, but unable to change their actions. There was even a work that created copies of whoever looked upon it just to kill them gruesomely for the viewer’s ‘pleasure’.”

Corona just destroyed that last one. For all the violence, death, and destruction Corona had seen in her life, it was still a bit much.

But she pushed through. She always did. All the lives she could save with this machine were worth it.

It was long work that was boring when it wasn’t disgusting, but it was beyond important. She was perhaps the best person for the job, given her background. The potential to understand precisely how the Shaping Mechanism worked… Eventually. Given enough experience.

One day while she was separating several Earths from each other and returning them to their homes, two visitors walked into the room. One was a face she was very familiar with, while the other was one she hadn’t seen in decades.

The first was O’Neill. The second was the Happy Mask Salesman. Corona looked the creepy ‘human’ being up and down, letting her gaze fixate on his unwavering smile more than she probably should have. “Where have you been?”

The Happy Mask Salesman let out a soft, prolonged chuckle. “A bit of this, a bit of that. Exploring, learning, watching.”

“So what’re you doing here now? Have we finally reached your criteria, like with Twilence?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t in my wildest dreams compare myself to the bearer of the Eye of Rhyme. My purpose here is not to provide my knowledge – but to ask you to finish what you started oh so long ago.”

“Hm?”

“Majora,” O’Neill said. “The purple monstrosity is still alive, in her mask, in that black hole. You can finally get rid of her safely with this, right?”

Corona blinked. “…Yeah, I can.”

“Would you kindly direct your attention to her prison then?” the Happy Mask Salesman asked. “And ensure she will never return?”

“You’ll need to remind me of the coordinates,” Corona said. “I don’t recall if I ever actually knew which black hole you dumped her in.”

O’Neill transmitted the coordinates and the in-universe location to Raging Sights. Corona pressed her gloved hands to the control globe of the Shaping Mechanism and connected to the universe. It was a perfectly moldable universe without any reality anchors – good. She pushed forward, converting it into a shapeable universe.

In the strands that made up the display she was able to make out the black hole. It was a swirling sphere of darkness that let nothing – not even light or an eldritch abomination – escape its grasp.

She removed the singularity of the black hole with a thought. The sphere vanished, revealing a purple heart-shaped mask inside it. There was an intense, dark, familiar feeling to the mask.

Even though Corona wasn’t physically there, Majora knew she was watching.

“W̛HY͢ H͟A͜V͠E͏ ̷YOU̡ ͜REL͘EA̕S̀E͘D̀ ͡M̡E̢?”

“Because,” Corona said with a cruel smirk. “We finally have the means to destroy you.”

“FO̷OLS͜!”

“Yeah, you just keep on thinking that,” O’Neill snarked.

“Never again, Majora,” the Happy Mask Salesman said. “Never again.”

The last thing Majora heard was the Happy Mask Salesman’s laugh.

And then Corona destroyed her with a pop.

“…We’ve come a long way,” Corona observed. “She almost destroyed all of us back then…”

“And now there’s no chance anyone will pick her up again,” O’Neill said, putting a hand on Corona. “We can finally close that book.”

“What books do we have left to close?” Corona wondered. Ba’al was nothing. Majora was gone. The University was useless and the Ninth World was joining them. Siron and Brutalight were gone. The Collector was gone. Skarn was gone.

“…Flagg and the Starcross Society,” O’Neill said. “Those are the big ones on my list. Though maybe the Combine counts as well, not quite so sure about that one.”

“It’s such an unusual feeling…” Corona said with a murmur.

The Happy Mask Salesman bowed. “I express my thanks once again. I shall take my leave – I’m never one for these multiversal societies; I prefer solitude and simplicity. Perhaps we will meet again, perhaps not.” Then he was gone.

“Weirdo,” O’Neill muttered, stretching his arms. “It was about time she got what was coming.”

Corona smiled. “Glad I could help. Be glad you were with him – I would have needed a formally approved request to do something like that without Overhead approval.”

O’Neill tipped his hat. “It was the least I could do. Bein’ the General and all.”

“You wanted to blow her up yourself.”

“Eh… Maybe.” He pulled out a communicator. “Beam me up.”

He returned to the brand new pride of the Merodi fleet – the Austraeoh. After the Enterprise had been destroyed, he drifted from ship to ship, unsure of which one to call his own. So he decided to make his own – but he didn’t have a name for it. Once the Congeries War ended, there were a few lost or irreparably damaged ships that received great honors. The original Austraeoh was one of those ships. Corona suggested the name to O’Neill, and he took it without hesitation.

The Austraeoh was better than the Enterprise in every way. It looked nothing like an Earth Tau’ri ship with a few bonus mechanisms, like the Enterprise had.Rather, it was its own unique creation. It was a slender, pointed ship made of a white, metallic substance. The central spire was smooth; the tip glowing a soft white at all times while the back swirled with a rainbow of colors, almost like a series of overlaid drills. Weapons and scanners lined the central spire, giving it many different glowing lights ranging from technological to magical to even weirder.

Six other spires were arranged around the central one, connected by thinner plates of metal. Every one of these rods had a sharp point, as well as a magical rod inside, giving some protection to the high-end magical weaponry. The backs of these rods held every kind of drive imaginable that wasn’t the multicolored Prism Drive. Each rod had a vaguely fin-like protrusion heading away from the central spire and ending just before it reached the Prism Drive’s impressive colors. A single thin ring went through the center of each of the fins, allowing energy to flow around most of the ship for any number of applications.

The ship looked vaguely like an elongated comb jelly. Graceful, yet solid. Smooth, yet sharp in many places.

The bridge looked the same as just about every other bridge O’Neill had been in though. There was something to say about familiarity.

He leaned back in the big chair and grinned. “Clandestine, let’s go for a joyride. Let’s test this Prism Drive out again.”

Clandestine smiled, using her magic to do just that.

The rainbow-overlaid drills whirred up. Harmonious energy shot out behind them, and they were gone – blasting through the boundaries between universes and galaxies in a Technicolor swirl…

~~~

Pinkie rubbed her hooves together. Over these last two months, she had managed to train her brain to actually register the sensation in her brain as a touch. It was no longer a painful ache in her brain with a flash of nonexistent light, but a warm sensation on her hooves. It was the only sensation she ever got, and it was a trick of her mind. She was thankful for it nonetheless.

She perked her ears up. “Ready!” she called.

“Your ears are your eyes,” Flair had said. “Point them at what you want to look at. You’re a pony – you’re able to do that.”

Pinkie swiveled her ears in the direction of Doctor Redheart, her primary rehabilitation counselor. “You sure you’re ready, Pinkie?” Pinkie’s ears were able to pick up subtle nuances in the sounds to pinpoint Redheart’s location. Right now it was just a fuzzy blur in Pinkie’s mind, but with time she would be able to form a complete image.

“As I’ll ever be!” Pinkie said, pulling her squeaky hammer out of her mane. “Bring it on.”

“If you insist…”

“Have a map of your surroundings,” Toph had suggested. “Always know where all the walls are, where the floors are, and where people are. Use every means you have at your disposal – hearing, taste, I don’t care what it is, use it!”

Pinkie got a general shape of the area by tapping her back hoof against the ground. Again, it was blurry, but she could make out the floor, walls, Redheart, and her opponent. She could tell her opponent was humanoid, but that was about it.

At least, that’s all her ears told her.

“Remember when we pretended to be the ‘Mysterious Mare-do-well’?” Renee had asked. “You used your Pinkie sense to do incredible things. I’ve seen you do it a few times since, on missions, but not all that often. You need to tap into that, Pinkie.”

Pinkie ducked under her opponent’s arm. She had no need to actually hear the arm’s movement, even though the general idea helped. She was able to twitch, maneuver, and jump based entirely on her natural Pinkie Sense. She just knew when something was about to attack her. She giggled, enthralled that it was working.

“You can increase the potency of your Awareness and other related abilities,” I had told her. “I know it’s hard sometimes to pay deep attention to what you see, but if you want to be effective in this state, it’s a requirement.”

Pinkie already knew the outcome of this encounter. It w-

“Hey, don’t tell them! That’ll ruin the suspense!” Pinkie said, flying over her opponent and hitting them with the squeaky hammer. “Gotcha!”

Seskii had given Pinkie a careful look. “If you’re successful in training your Awareness… Well, you’ll have to rely on it a lot more than you do now. You usually hold back, keep yourself from exploiting for the sake of others. Don’t do that anymore.”

Pinkie leaped back from a fist she could sense, but not hear. “Stand user? Sweet! And given the complete silence when I hit… It’s Jotaro. Of course, the only one of my friends who wouldn’t go easy on me.”

“HEY!” Vriska shouted from her vantage point in a room far away that should have been out of Pinkie’s earshot.

Pinkie grinned. “You’d pretend to lose to me just for my sake, Vriska. Don’t deny it.”

Vriska grunted. “She’s talking through the screen again.”

Pinkie jumped over Star Platinum’s flurry of fists, landing on Jotaro’s head. The sensation in the back of her hooves told her all she needed to know – no need to listen or adhere to the Pinkie Sense. She swung her squeaky hammer down and tossed Jotaro to the side. She bounced off the floor like a ping-pong ball and bowed.

“And you’re going to get back up and punch at me again…” Pinkie diverted to the side and drove a pie into Jotaro’s face. “Admit defeat yet?”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, wiping the pie from his face.

“I move well for a blind girl, huh huh?”

Jotaro punched again. Pinkie was suddenly behind him, a hoof placed to his back. “And I win.”

She put the bomb mask on her face and exploded, tossing Jotaro to the ground, defeated.

“I do think they should have let you use your other Stands. I would have still been able to kick some butt! Woo!” Pinkie threw her hooves into the air and dropped her squeaky hammer to the ground. “I’ve still got it!”

Doctor Redheart nodded. “Physically speaking, I can clear you for duty. The jury’s still out on your psychological state.”

Pinkie tapped her bouncy mane. “I think this is a pretty good indicator.”

“I am not taking physical signs to clear you mentally,” Doctor Redheart declared. “There’s a bit more to it. But we can talk about that later. You’ve completed your physical rehabilitation.”

“Yes!” Pinkie pulled out her party cannon and unleashed it. “HEY NOVA! You can teleport in here now!”

Nova teleported herself, Flutterfree, Vriska, Eve, and Renee into the room. “Go Pinkie!” Nova declared, waving a flag. Redheart decided to leave them to it.

Then they started hugging her. Pinkie was able to sense when it was coming and how to respond – but every time they pulled her closer, she felt nothing. She could tell her body was up in a hugging position, but there was no pressure, no comforting connection with another pony’s coat. Nothing.

Nothing besides the burning in her hooves that wasn't even real.

She probably would have started crying if she were able. She was, for once, glad she didn’t have eyes. They didn’t need to know that she wa-

Darnit.

Eve removed herself from Pinkie. “…Pinkie?”

“Uh… Yeah, so, I just realized that I’m probably not mentally okay with this yet. I… I really want to cry right now b-because I can’t feel your hugs…”

“…I don’t think that’s an unhealthy response.”

“Redheart might see it that way. She’ll at least think it means I need to be watched a bit more… And I probably do.”

“Pinkie, you’re amazing.” Flutterfree said. Pinkie knew she was stroking her with those rounded, marble tips on her wings. It was probably a very soothing feeling. “Y-”

“I’ll never get to know what your wingtips feel like,” Pinkie said. “I’ll never get to feel any hugs again. I won’t get to enjoy showers, I won’t even register pies unless they’re thrown really hard, I won’t get to feel the exhilaration of flying through the air out of a party cannon… I can’t touch anything! No muzzle booping, no nuzzling, no sensation down there, no vibration when the Tree of Harmony calls m-” Her train of thought stopped when she remembered that their Tree of Harmony wouldn’t be calling anypony anymore. The loss of Loyalty had been too much for it. The map was now lifeless.

Eve put a hoof on Pinkie – but quickly realized that wouldn’t mean anything anymore. So she did the next best thing – she put her mouth right next to Pinkie’s ear and spoke soothingly. “I think I can help you with some of those things?”

“Huh? Ho- Oooooh!” Pinkie smiled. “That’s cheating.”

“If it wasn’t you feeling it, it should work.” Eve channeled her magic and touched her horn to Pinkie’s forehead.

Pinkie suddenly remembered every single hug Eve had ever given her – including the ones given by the original Twilight Sparkle. Pinkie lived through a couple showers, a pie to the face, being thrown through the air by a party cannon, booping, being booped, nuzzling her sisters… And then she got a memory that wasn’t hers, but Eve’s. One of Flutterfree right after she’d had herself adjusted from a killing machine into a work of art.

Pinkie had never seen her before, not like that. She was stunning – the tips of her wings weren’t knives, but rounded, delicate marble tips that seemed like extensions of her feathers. They were engraved with the designs of leaves and vines, giving her an air of natural beauty. The pointed parts of her hooves had been rounded with a similar marble substance, featuring similar designs. She’d even bothered to get a new mane style, one with two locks of hair draping over the front of her face, while the rest trailed behind her blowing in the breeze.

Pinkie knew the marble covers could be taken off, if needed, but they sure looked fixed to her form.

The memory moved to Flutterfree hugging Eve – but Pinkie got to experience what Eve experienced. The rounded nubs running across her back, sending a tingling sensation up her spine. They were so soft for what they were… So beautiful…

The memory ended. Pinkie fixed Eve with a smile. “…Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Nova, you better learn that spell if I ever need to see something.”

“I’ll be sure to perfect it… Captain,” Nova said.

Pinkie let out a beautiful, joyous laugh – followed promptly by a sigh of relief. “Decided to put me back in charge, eh?”

Flutterfree spoke up. “You’re back, Pinkie. You know more than the rest of us, and we’ve known you in that way for so long. We’re not going to kick you down just because you changed. You’re still Pinkie. You’re still the Captain of Pinkie’s Party.”

Pinkie stretched her hooves and piled all of them into a hug she knew they could feel. “I love you all so much, you know that? You’re the best friends ever!”

“Squeezing… Too hard…” Renee gagged.

Pinkie laughed, letting them all go. “…You know what, I think I can pass the psychological portion of the test. With a little footnote that says ‘insane, but not beyond safe Pinkie parameters’.”

Everyone had a nice laugh at that.

Pinkie was back. Different, yes – forever different. But a blindfold and a broken body wasn’t going to stop her from doing what she loved with her friends.

~~~

Lady Rarity walked into Renee’s office.

Renee smiled. “Ah, Lady Rarity, what can I do for you?”

“Well, I’m tired of sitting around,” Lady Rarity said. “Corona doesn’t appear to be coming back from the Shaping Mechanisms any time soon, and even working as Toph’s advisor leaves me a bit too much free time. So I’m asking to a transfer to one of your teams – almost anything will do.”

“You sure?”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Corona gave me the go-ahead. She’s too engrossed in what’s happening there.” She sighed.

“I’m sure she hasn’t forgotten about you.”

“Oh, of course not. She’s actually the one who suggested I do this.” She tossed her mane back. “So, do I need to refill my paperwork out again?”

“I already have everything about you on file, no need to be redundant, dear.” She pulled up a holographic display of her teams, going over it with her careful eye. “Hrm… As it turns out I may have an idea for you.”

“So quickly?”

“One of our… How do I put this, ‘Darker Operations’ teams has recently dropped in member number. One of them went off to join the Military Division, and the other just decided to stop working for me after the war. They’re currently only three strong, and I prefer larger numbers for a full team.”

“Darker Operations?” Lady Rarity mulled this over. “I’m not against charging into some brutal worlds.”

“I figured you wouldn’t,” Renee said with a curt nod. “Legally speaking, I have to warn you that you will see a lot of death, be asked to do some decidedly despicable things, and be subject to a lot more strain than the usual Expedition team member.”

“Renee, so long as it doesn’t conflict heavily with my Code, I have the strength.”

“I had forgotten you were a knight,” Renee said with a smile. “Should be no issue. Bring any moral concerns you have up with me or the other members of your team, assuming you have time to do so. I trust your judgment in that matter.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “You can count on me. Can I ask who my team will be?”

“I believe you know them. They used to be known as the Mean Six.”

Lady Rarity brightened visibly. “I do know them from the war. Fought Skarn together.”

“They’re actually waiting outside to see me right now,” Renee said. “You got in just before them. Ah, ka works in mysterious ways…”

“And convenient ones.”

Renee pushed her hoof onto her desk. “Come on in.”

Three ponies were teleported in – the blue Curaçao, the dark Insipid, and the dark pink Velvet. Curaçao and Insipid looked the same, though Velvet was currently wearing advanced ka-sensing glasses that highlighted several words in a book she was holding: The Republic of Plato.

“Philosophy?” Lady Rarity said, raising an eyebrow. “Forgive me, but you didn’t seem like the type.”

“I’m compensating,” Velvet said, closing the book and tucking her glasses in her mane. The lenses didn’t disappear, but they stayed in the hairs neatly. “Stretching the Awareness muscles apparently requires stretching the brain as well, so that’s what I’m doing.”

“You should have seen her try to literally stretch her brain!” Insipid blurted. “It was major trash.”

“It’s people like you that keep society stagnating,” Velvet retorted.

Insipid rolled her eyes. “See what I have to deal with? She’s becoming, like, an egghead or something.”

“That means I have at least a million more ways of brutally killing our enemies. I’m thinking striped punch...”

Curaçao cleared her throat. “Insipid, it is good zat Velvet is seeking to broaden ‘er ‘orizons. Books are not somezing to be frowned on, they are la vie du monde.”

“Uh… Right, fine, Velvet, you can like your dead trees. Just, like, don’t try to get me to read any, ‘kay? Cha.”

Velvet giggled. “Okie!”

Renee opened her mouth.

“Don’t tell me,” Velvet said, closing her eyes. “I’m going to try this one… Lady Rarity arrived in here asking to transfer to a team, and it’s our team that just happened to both have available slots and be right outside the door. And uh… there’s another surprise waiting…? …Is the surprise cake?”

“Close,” Renee said. “There’s no cake, I’m afraid, unless you’re suddenly able to produce it from nowhere.”

“Hmmm…” Velvet pulled a cake out of her mane that looked like it was made out of dirt, bones, maggots, and loose organs. She shrugged. “Technically a cake.”

“…Lovely,” Renee deadpanned. “You are right, Lady Rarity is being assigned to your team should you want her.”

Curaçao looked at Lady Rarity and smiled. “She’ll be a great addition.”

“Like, totally!” Insipid said with a dumb grin. “She’ll use her spider-senses!”

“That’s not a thing for spirids,” Velvet said. “They have magic silk.”

“Uh, yeah, whatever! That’s totally a spider-sense.”

Velvet facehooved.

“And as for the surprise…” Renee said, giving them all a careful look-over. “Your team could be a bit larger...”

“You ‘ave someone else in mind?” Curaçao asked.

“Yes. Though she’ll be more of a trial. I’m not sure if she’ll play all that nice.”

Lady Rarity blinked. “...Who is it?”

“It’s-”

“ME!” Jenny said, appearing in a puff of her own magic. “Behold, your newest billion-year-old world guardian! We shall travel the multiverse, squashing evil and unsavory types as we go!”

“Like, woah, you’ve got a presence,” Insipid observed.

Jenny gave her a thumbs up. “And you talk really annoyingly, but I like you anyway!”

“Curaçao, I don’t like this one,” Insipid said. “Can we throw her overboard?”

“Why stop at throwing her overboard?” Velvet asked. “There are much more creative things we can do to her. Did you know she has unlimited regeneration? There’d be no problem with, say, cutting off her hands and having a little ta-”

Everyone stared at Velvet in horror.

“Kidding. That was a joke. …I’m not returning to my cannibalistic roots, okay? Yeesh.”

Renee shook her head. “I’ve assigned Jenny to you because her usual… flair is probably best suited for some of the less peaceful missions we undertake.”

“I will feel free to use ‘er as a guinea pig for exotic weapons,” Curaçao said.

Jenny twitched. “Bu-”

“Curaçao is your Captain, Jenny,” Renee said. “You wouldn’t want to disobey one of her orders, would you?”

Jenny pointed a finger at Renee, ready to give her a mouthful. Then she let out a sigh and dropped her hand. “Fine, fine, fine. I’ll be the guinea pig.”

“That’s the spirit!” Renee said, winking. “Now the five of you should get acquainted, I’ll probably send you on a mission tomorrow if I can!”

Curaçao saluted. “Yes, Ma’am.” She turned to Lady Rarity. “…You can teleport, right?”

“Oh, yes, though I’m not particularly speedy about it. Give me a moment.”

“Thank god,” Insipid muttered. “I didn’t realize how much we depended on Shadow…”

Lady Rarity focused her spell, taking them to the crystal castle’s lobby. “What happened to Shadow and Grayscale, anyway?”

“Grayscale got tired of fighting and adventuring, to nobody’s surprise,” Velvet said.

“Shadow, like, joined the military!” Insipid said, face that of shock. “Like, wow, why? I dunno.”

Curaçao smiled. “Grayscale prefers a quiet life more than ze rest of us, and Shadow decided ze regimen of ze Military would be good for ‘er. I stay here because it is my calling to lead my sisters, Insipid will never leave my side, and Velvet…”

“I don’t do well with authority,” Velvet deadpanned.

“…zat is certainly one way of putting it.”

Jenny clasped her hands together. “You girls sound like you’re going to be delightful to work with!”

Curaçao’s calm, reasonable smile became decidedly menacing for just a moment. “And we’re going to ‘ave a lot of fun with you too, Jenny.”

Jenny tried to keep a straight, confident face. She failed.

~~~

Celestia City was eventually invited to TSAB space. The entire population was exceedingly nervous about being within another Class 2’s borders, but Nanoha was a bit of a hero to them, so her presence cooled things down significantly.

Much of the visit was symbolic – a strengthening of relations between the second-highest Class 2 and the ‘new kids’ on the block who had just shown signs they may not be kids anymore. The TSAB was definitely showing off with all their mages, impressive technology that spanned entire solar systems with superstructures, and planets outfitted with the TSAB’s special dimensional drives.

Celestia City wasn’t even in a standard universe right now, but a bubble universe created by a TSAB flagship. They were on a bit of a tour through the area of the E-Sphere the TSAB called home, visiting all the important locations along the way.

Many people were rather surprised Eve wasn’t along for the ride. Blumiere got to do most of the talking for Merodi Universalis, even though the Relations Division did have a diplomat in the city. So far, that diplomat had capitalized on Blumiere and not done a darn thing.

Nanoha was apparently using the Celestia City tour as a vacation. She and another mage of her caliber, the blonde Fate, had taken to wandering the sights of Celestia City together rather than being at every single event to showcase the power of the TSAB. Rumor had it they were becoming fast friends with Blumiere and Timpani.

Today, they were visiting the League of Sweetie Belles.

Allure was nervous. Even though she had met Nanoha a few times prior to this, they were now on her turf and yet, somehow, showing off their facilities. It felt like a paradox and it was making her sweat profusely.

“I could never sit with this many of myself,” Fate observed, examining the scrambling forms of the Sweetie Belles.

Nanoha smirked. “Fate-chan, what about Fatal?”

“That was one copy,” Fate countered. “Just one. She was… fine.”

Nanoha started listing off her fingers. “And then there was all those versions of me. Nano… Nina… Takaha… Niroha…”

“You were always more comfortable with yourself.”

“And these Sweeties are always comfortable being around themselves,” Nanoha said with a smile. “I think it’s great!”

“How am I supposed to tell them apart?” Fate asked.

Allure blinked. “Ah… Most of us have a defining feature of some kind. I have this metal horn, Thrackerzod has the red eyes, Squeaky’s voice is unmistakable, Bot makes mechanical noises when she moves, Suzie’s got the frizzy hair, Burger’s a Flat, Silver’s the stallion with the extra short mane, Servitude’s the angel, and…” Allure rubbed the back of her head nervously. “Honestly you just get used to it and learn to tell the difference. Even if you’re not part of the League since the rest of Celestia City generally knows who we are.”

“Their society had a lot more experience with doubles than ours did,” Nanoha said. “When we first set out to explore we had two alternates we knew about. Am I remembering right?”

Raising Heart beeped. “Yes, master.”

Nanoha nodded. “Yep. Just two. The evil one and little adorable Nano.”

“…How different was your rise to Class 2?” Allure asked.

Nanoha put a hand to her chin. “Hrm… all right, story time!” She fully activated Raising Heart and slammed the staff on the ground.

“Nanoha…” Fate said with a smile on her face and a shake of her head.

Nanoha ignored her. “The TSAB started as a loose coalition of worlds that were naturally connected to each other, allowing for the discovery of ‘interdimensional space’. We didn’t figure out we were creating entire universes when we moved until much later, but understanding didn’t matter. We tied worlds together with our ships and uncovered Lost Logia from ancient civilizations – civilizations that had destroyed their universes with their own power. I rose through the ranks as a prominent mage, and when I had hit my mid-thirties we made a discovery. The ability to make ships that could take larger journeys through the multiverse. After an encounter with a being from the Q-Sphere – a unicorn, believe it or not – and the realization the multiverse was much larger than we thought, I organized an expedition.

“I promised to bring the unicorn home and to learn everything I could about the multiverse. We traveled everywhere over the course of… For us, it was about thirty years. Far longer than we were expecting. For the TSAB it was longer. We returned with vast knowledge about the worlds beyond our own, and were able to use what we had discovered to quickly rise to Class 2. It wasn’t as instant as conquering, you understand – we didn’t return with a Shaping Mechanism. We just returned with knowledge that changed us over the course of several years.”

“We owe everything to her expedition,” Fate said, smiling. “That long, long expedition we thought she would never come back from.”

Allure looked at Fate with sad eyes. “…That must have been hard for you.”

“It was,” Fate admitted. “But she came back. And then we just… grew. And kept growing.”

Nanoha smiled. “I made a name for myself out on the Expedition. People knew about the TSAB, and when we made contact we were usually welcomed with open arms. We tended to make friends rather than enemies as we explored, so in that way we were a lot like you.”

“Did you have to fight any wars?” Allure asked.

Nanoha nodded. “Several. There were a few that took place before I even left. Several while I was gone. Several when I came back.” Nanoha sighed. “Humans… have a problem with that.”

Allure nodded slowly. “It does appear to be a recurring theme.”

“It’s a theme I’ve spent my entire life trying to break,” Nanoha said. “I’ve failed completely.”

Allure blinked. “…How can you say that last part with a smile?”

“Most people don’t even try,” Fate said.

Allure nodded. “…I think I see.”

Nanoha winked at her. “Good. Now, I’m in the mood for something fun.”

“What kind of fun?”

Nanoha twirled the staff that was Raising Heart. “A good friendly spar. Who here is the best fighter?”

Allure rolled her eyes. “HEY THRACKERZOD! YOU’RE NEEDED ON GROUND FLOOR!”

~~~

I had an office now. It was a neutral office, not devoted to any particular Division, but it was still an office. As much as I liked libraries there was something official and freeing about having a room all to myself in the Hub where I could write, read, and analyze everything.

It was a well-lit office with dark purple walls covered in star imprints. A pocket-dimension bookshelf lined the left wall and a computer with full security access sat on the Gem-constructed crystal desk. There was also a box filled with notebooks for my scribbling pleasure and another box filled with every color of pen imaginable.

The Merodi had been very accommodating. Some simply because they liked me. Others because they knew that the power and information I was offering them was priceless. Ava in particular – now there was a woman who did the right thing only because she felt she had to. Naturally speaking, she didn’t express much appreciation or empathy. She sure worked hard to show those traits to the people she thought it ‘mattered’ to, though.

She was fine where she was. Doing good work for now.

Regardless, I had other things to think about now. Mainly the visitor I was about to receive.

The door to my office swung open. Jotaro walked in, slamming Rohan into my desk, knocking over my empty coffee mug.

“What the-”

“Rohan, you need to be more responsible,” I said, shutting my computer down.

“How i-”

“Jotaro, you can leave us.”

Jotaro nodded, leaving me alone with Rohan.

I placed my hooves together. “You know who I am.”

Rohan nodded. “Perfect prophet princess Twilence.”

“I’m not perfect, merely more experienced. Significantly more experienced.” I summoned one of his manga manuscripts out of the aether.

“Where did you get that!?”

“I’m heavily Aware. I know shortcuts. Pinkie pulls stuff out of her mane, Scooter can read the script, Deadpool messes with panels, etcetera – this is just another expression of that.”

“It doesn’t seem right that you get to be both.”

“Life isn’t fair,” I said, flipping through the manga. “Which is tangentially related to why I brought you here today.”

“…Jotar-”

“I wrote the encounter where he discovered you wrote this,” I said, smiling innocently. “I am the reason you’re here.”

Rohan blinked.

“Not so nice when someone does it to you, is it?”

Rohan opened his mouth to object.

“Let’s see, all those excuses you make to yourself to defend what you do? They’re wrong. The biggest mistake you make is ‘because I have this power I can do whatever I want with it’.” I glared at him. “Just because you’re a Prophet doesn’t mean you suddenly have the right to do whatever you want or try whatever you want. There’s a reason most Prophets never know what they are. In order for it to be pure you’re generally not supposed to know about it.”

“Then what are we? Mistakes?”

“People who need to think a little more carefully about what we write. We, the Prophets who know what we are, have a power that cannot be trumped except in exceedingly esoteric situations.”

“Right. I’ve had my manga overturned numerous times.”

“That’s because you don’t know how to do it right,” I said. “Granted, I have a bit of a cheat installed in me to know if what I write will work or not, but there are still rules, guidelines, and ways to maximize effectiveness.” I leaned into him. “With the right words in the right place, almost anything can happen.”

He stared at me, unresponsive.

“I need you to understand something, Rohan.” I threw the Manga into his hands. “You can’t just write what you want to happen. You can’t just blow off steam. Those aren’t rules, you know, those are part of our responsibility with this power. We can alter just about anything we want. We can’t let our selfish desires and emotional vendettas control that.”

“But art comes from emotion!”

“I’m not saying cut emotion out, Rohan. I’m saying don’t let it control you.” I pointed at his manga. “Don’t give a person who annoyed you a comically bad day.”

Rohan had enough grace to look ashamed.

I pressed my front hooves together. “So, I’m going to offer you a deal, Rohan.”

“A dea-”

“You get to study under me. I’ll whip you into the proper shape for a Prophet. In return, I’ll teach you the nuances of influencing reality.” I smiled mischievously. “It’s as simple as that.”

“…So you get a ‘responsible Prophet’ and I get to sharpen my abilities?”

“It’s exactly what it sounds like.”

“I refuse.”

I smirked. “I figured you’d say that. Too much pride in you, after all.” I levitated a notebook to my face. “In that case, since I can’t have a self-absorbed impulsive Prophet like yourself just running around, it looks as though I’m going to have to fight a war of words with you until you give in.”

Rohan slammed his hands on the desk. “You won’t break me.”

I gave him an innocent smile. “You’re going to be back here before the day is done begging me to stop.”

“If I last longer than that will you leave me alone?”

“Yes! Pinkie Promise!” I extended a wing.

Rohan glared at it.

“You really should just stay. It’ll be a lot less embarrassing that way. And you won’t be going against what is effectively a guaranteed prophecy!”

Rohan turned and walked out without saying another word.

I sighed and started scribbling in my notebook.

He was back in my office two hours later. His clothing was in tatters, blood ran down over one of his eyes, and his face was that of a broken man. “Make it stop.”

I pressed my hooves together. “Why? This is nothing worse than what you did in your last manga. Just… condensed.”

“I’ll study under you, just make it stop!”

I smiled. “Good!” With my magic I healed him up and sat him back in the chair. “I knew you’d turn around.”

Rohan muttered something indecipherable under his breath.

“Anyway, we’ll start right away. Lesson one: what is ka? Ka is an esoteric force produced by the Dark Tower and inserted in varying quantities into every universe in existence…”

~~~

Renee and Eve were walking through the gardens of Canterlot Castle, discussing life in general.

“Jenny’s been behaving better than expected,” Renee said, adjusting her hat to keep the sun out of her eyes. “Lady Rarity has confided that she’s a very capable agent, if outrageously arrogant and a bit careless.”

“I imagine that happens when almost nothing can hurt you,” Eve observed. A smile came to her face. “Enemies that become friends. It’s nice to see that redemption isn’t a completely dead art.”

Renee nodded. “Makes you realize not all hope is lost, hrm?”

“We can still have some faith in existence, despite it all,” Eve said, looking up at the sun. “I’m never going to stop looking at my life and thinking ‘wow, everything’s changed so much’. It’s just going to be a fact of our existence. Things move by at the speed of a bullet train.”

“Faster,” Renee said with a smirk. “We need to stick a hyperspace drive on our minds just to keep up.”

Eve let out a laugh. “No, we need wormholes. Nothing less than infinite speed will do!”

“No – ludicrous speed!”

The laughs continued until they rounded a corner, coming to the palace doors again.

“Well, I must be off,” Renee said. “See you at the funeral.”

“…Funeral?”

Renee blinked. “…For Rainbow Dash? It’s been planned for months.”

“I… didn’t receive an invitation. Or I lost it.”

Renee gasped. “You sure? It was digital.” Renee pulled out her phone and showed Eve the message.

“Oh…” Eve said, drooping. “…Prism sent those out.”

“What would that have t-” Renee blinked. “Ah. That is unfortunate… Here, let me call her.”

“Renee you don’t have to.”

“A-shush,” Renee said, making a call, being sure to place it on speakerphone. Eve took this as an indication to turn on her ears. “Prism, dear! It’s Renee!”

“Oh. Hi!” Eve was relieved to hear that there was at least some joy to Prism’s voice. The alicorn hadn’t even seen Prism since the day everything had come crashing down. “What’s up?”

“Well, I wish I was calling with good news… It’s just Eve.”

“…Frick, she found out about the funeral.”

“Yes, she did,” Renee said. “What do you plan to do?”

“If she shows up I will personally kick her out. I have the legal right to decide who is and who isn’t welcome. Why don’t you tell her she can come? That way I can get her arrested without endangering the sanctity of Merodi Universalis.”

“Prism…” Renee said, concern in her voice.

“The great purple bonehead isn’t welcome here. I’m not going to let her in, Renee. Don’t push it.”

“…All right, all right,” Renee said. “See you then.”

“Yeah…”

Renee hung up, glancing at Eve. Eve wiped a few tears from her eyes and sighed, turning off her ears. “…Guess I won’t be going.”

“Dear, if anyone needs to go, it’s you. I’ll find some way to get you in. Maybe we could even change pl-”

Eve put a hoof on Renee’s mouth and shook her head. “Don’t. Just go yourself.”

“A-are you sure?”

“Not really?” Eve admitted. “But I know I can’t chance you. You knew Rainbow just as well as I did. Go. I might or might not find my own way in.”

Renee adjusted her hat. “If you say so…”

“I do,” Eve said, smiling. “See you around.”

The Overhead teleported into the royal halls of the palace, wiping her eyes.

“What is wrong, Evening?”

Eve didn’t hear what was said – but she sensed someone behind her. She turned to Luna. “Oh. Didn’t notice you there. …Sorry.”

“I asked what was wrong.”

“…Prism won’t let me attend Rainbow Dash’s funeral, and I can’t really blame her. It’d be like inviting that bear who killed her.”

Luna shook her head. “Her anger toward you shouldn’t keep you from gaining closure.”

“I’ll be fine, Luna. I got my cl-”

“You should go,” Luna said. “You can go as me.”

“…As you?”

Luna nodded. “You can go as me.”

“Wh-”

Luna smiled warmly. “I cannot claim to have known Rainbow Dash all that well – I expect I was invited as a formality more than anything. You can have my invitation.”

“And I’ll just have to look like you?”

“Evening, I am a master of dreams and minds. I can swap our minds for a few hours.”

“Oh.” Eve blinked. “…Are you cert-”

“It is the least I can do. You’ll get more out of the experience than I will.”

Eve beamed with tears in her eyes and pulled Luna into a hug. “Thank you.”

Luna smiled, saying nothing in response.

~~~

The service was both a small and a large one. Small in that the public had no idea it was happening – as far as they knew, the funeral for Rainbow Dash had occurred around the time the monument of those lost in the war was built in the Hub.

Prism had waited a little longer than that, wanting to separate her memories of the war from her memories of her mother. It was a few months, and she invited everyone she knew Rainbow had a close connection with.

Except Eve. She had specifically left Eve out.

There were a few dozen people there. The primary team, the last remaining Wonderbolt – Surprise, Rainbow’s parents, Scootaloo, most of the Apple Family including Corea and Applejack, Corona, O’Neill, Renee, Daniel, Princess Luna, and a few others.

Except it wasn’t Princess Luna. It was Eve walking around in Princess Luna’s body. Even though Eve had grown considerably as her time in an alicorn, she was still shorter than the regal glory of Luna. It had taken her a bit to get used to walking on the longer, thinner legs. Luckily nobody was looking at her with much suspicion, given the nature of the gathering.

The funeral’s actual service wasn’t the most memorable thing that happened that day – not for Eve, anyway. Prism, Scootaloo, Rainbow’s parents, Flutterfree, and Pinkie gave short speeches, each one bringing tears to everyone’s eyes. But they blurred together in Eve’s mind, strained through a layer of tears.

What she did remember was the people she talked to. How they remembered Rainbow Dash – a hero who was perhaps a bit arrogant, but also a truly Loyal individual. Eve was glad that her Loyalty wasn’t all she was remembered for; the trait was placed alongside her aloof attitude, confident demeanor, determined outlook on life…

It was good to hear that Rainbow Dash had left such a lasting impression.

The largest of which was her daughter, Prism. Known egghead-athlete, a seeming contradiction in terms. A white mare with the brilliant mane of her mother who was clearly ready to take on the world.

“So what are you doing these days?” Eve asked Prism.

“A bit of this, a bit of that,” Prism said. “Mostly research in my lab. There’s a lot of testing with the new physical understanding gained from the Shaping Mechanism. We may be able to create devices that could turn everyone into a full reality warper. A bit of a terrifying prospect, I know, but someone’s going to figure it out eventually, might as well be me.”

“And your racing?”

Prism smirked. “Surprised you know about that, Princess. Yes, still doing good on the track. I kick serious flank out there. You’d be surprised how much it helps to be able to run several different thought processes through your head at once. It’s all about minimizing air resistance. I think I’ve even improved upon the Sonic Rainboom a bit, though only with technological assistance.”

“I see she passed on the impossible gene.”

“I can’t pull it off as easily as she could,” Prism said with a sigh. “She could just whip out the Rainboom on a dime. I need to augment myself to do it that easily.”

“Prism, you are currently the only pegasus who can.”

“Besides other Rainbow Dashes,” Prism muttered.

Eve shook her head. “You don’t need to carry on the legacy of your mother by being your mother. You can be your own person. Why, I remember something Eve s-”

Prism’s hopeful expression soured when she heard Eve’s name. “Don’t tell me what she said.”

Eve stared at Prism in mild shock.

“…Look, just don’t bring her up. Ever. I’ll have fulfilled all my wildest dreams if I never see or hear about her again. Which is impossible.”

“Prism…”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with her, understand?” Prism asked. “If you’re going to interact with me, you can’t bring her up. Because I’m going to hate you for even giving her the time of day, for considering her a friend. And I really don’t want to alienate everyone I know.” She swallowed hard. “So just… don’t, okay?”

Eve stared at her with sad eyes. “…Okay.”

“I’m… I’m going to go grab some food,” Prism muttered, walking away. “…Nice to see you here, Princess.”

She walked away, head down.

Eve let out a deep sigh.

“Ah bet that cuts worse than anythin’, huh Eve?”

“Yeah, it does, Applejack,” Eve said. Then she blinked. “Wait, did you ju-”

Applejack nodded, taking a drink from her mug. “There are signs. Mainly how Flutterfree keeps checking on you like a stressed older sister.”

Eve looked around nervously. “I… I can go if y-”

“Don’t,” Applejack said, looking at a portrait of Rainbow Dash hanging from a nearby wall. “You need to be here just like the rest of us. Ah wish you didn’t have to be secretive about it, but lookin’ at Prism there’s clearly not gonna be another way.”

“T-thanks,” Eve said, tapping the ground.

“Ah’ve got somethin’ to say to you, too,” Applejack said, looking Eve in the eyes.

“Look, Applejack, I already know it’s ruined.”

Applejack nodded. “It is ruined. Ah won’t be invitin’ you out for time with the girls, and Ah won’t be able to look at you as a friend again, you were right about that in your letter. But that’s no excuse. Ah don’t have to treat you like an enemy.”

“…What do you mean?”

“We can still talk. Ah’ve told the rest of the family you can come by the farm, if you want. There’s no need to be cruel. You’ve been hurt just as much as the rest of us through all this. Ah’ll make an effort not to drive you away like some varmint.”

“Applejack…”

Applejack sighed. “It’s all Ah’ve got in me, Eve. You shouldn’t thank me. Ah should be stronger than this. But Ah’m not.”

“It’s okay. I knew it was going to happen.”

“How in the name of Celestia does that make it okay?” Applejack asked.

Eve blinked, then looked at the ground. “…It doesn’t.”

Applejack nodded slowly, looking into the distance. “It’s all Ah can do.”

“I’ll take it,” Eve said with a smile.

Applejack allowed the corners of her mouth to turn up. “Good. At least we’ve got somethin’, Ah guess.”

Eve nodded. “I’ll see you around, then.”

Applejack nodded curtly and the two went their separate ways. Flutterfree walked up to Eve immediately after.

“She knew?”

“Yep.”

“What happened?”

“Well, we’re not enemies anymore. I don’t think she hates me either.” Eve looked back. “I don’t think we’re rebuilding the bridge. I think we’re making something new.” She chuckled. “Friendship is complicated.”

Flutterfree giggled. “No kidding.”

~~~

Pinkie Pie stood on top of the now-mundane map of Equis Vitis in the Castle of Friendship. She pulled the knot on her pink blindfold, making sure it was on tight, but not too tight. She stood up on her hind hooves and pulled a dimensional device out of her mane. “All right, team!”

Flutterfree, Nova, Vriska, and Jotaro gave her mock salutes. “Yes, Captain?”

“We’re going back out there!” she said, holding out the dimensional device. “We’re going to go out there to prove that nothing can stop us!” She glanced at each of her team members in turn, as if looking right at them. “Not loss! Not past mistakes! Not interpersonal drama! Not self-doubt!” She glanced down at herself. “Not physical disability! We’re going to go out there and do what we’ve always done!”

“Explore!” Nova blurted.

“Help!” Flutterfree added.

“Fight,” Jotaro said.

“Be a bunch of absolute badasses,” Vriska said with a smirk.

“What? No!” Pinkie waved her front hooves. “I mean go have fun!”

“That works too,” Vriska said dismissively.

Pinkie twirled the dimensional device in her hoof and pointed it forward, opening a portal. “TO UNKNOWN FRONTIERS!”

The five of them stepped out onto a large, grassy field. Pinkie stood on her hind hooves with a proud smile, Flutterfree and Nova to her sides, Vriska and Jotaro posing right behind that. The sun of the world rose behind them, casting them in a brilliant blue light.

Pinkie’s Party was ready to take on the multiverse once again.

~~~

I lifted my pen from the paper, wondering once again how much of Pinkie’s recovery was due to my work, or just due to the natural narrative of her story. She was paradoxically the weakest and the strongest of all the ponies – able to handle existential dread with relative ease, but breaking at signs of betrayal. Then there was her innate ability to bounce back from whatever depressed hole she had found herself in…

She was a curious character, to say the least. Sometimes I wonder how much my Pinkie was like her. But that’s not a question I’m able to answer. She was gone before I fully came into my own…

As much as I was teaching Rohan about what we could change and how we could do it, I was often just as confused as everyone else about why things happened. Did I do it, or was I part of some larger narrative? When will the larger narrative overrule me?

…How do I exert my power in a way that is good?

Questions I had answers for… but the answers changed depending on the day. In some ways, it made life interesting. But in others, it made life haunting.

I wasn’t going to let that bother me though. Not that much. I summoned a new pen from the aether and began writing in my notebook.

And then time seemed to flow into the depths… With Merodi Universalis’ newfound power, they found that the things they’d been doing for so long didn’t have the same charm. They had seen much – what many would consider too much.

They had risen to a high enough point that the fears of the past had been realized. They were able to, without thinking, destroy entire ways of life.

The long-discussed laws involving the limitation of aid and information had to be implemented. Primitive societies could no longer be taken into the fold. Aid had to be rendered without bestowing multiversal access. After the initial rush of new worlds, the requirements to become part of Merodi Universalis were raised. They could no longer guarantee the safety of a small world’s culture when being absorbed.

It became a new world. A new era.

An era that lasted a seeming eternity…

Years began to pass like leaves on a windy autumn day.

107 - Deep Skaia

Year 4

Skaia’s Dream was one of the most important worlds within Merodi Universalis space, being the source of all Skaians and their reality-warping god-tier citizens. The Aspects of Sburb were an excellent resource for just about every task imaginable: from construction to exploration to aid to diplomacy. Trolls were still the primary race of Skaians, but they had found clusters of humans, ponies, elves, and even a couple of cherub ghosts mixed with a random assortment of other races.

More and more players were continually found by Skaian Expeditions deeper into the Dream. This had created an interesting political climate, to say the least. Most of the deeper Skaians had no loyalty to Merodi Universalis or even understanding of what had happened to the Dream Bubbles and Lord English. A lot decided to join up with the Merodi because it seemed like the simple thing to do, but others staked out sections of Skaia’s Dream for themselves, making little ‘dream-kingdoms’ out of their ghostly selves.

There had been a few wars between these dream-kingdoms. But since everyone was a ghost, it was very difficult to actually kill anyone. There had been a few instances where a non-Merodi Skaian had obtained a dimensional device and used it to kill ghosts, but those instances were quelled rather quickly.

Due to its dreamy and aloof nature, Skaia’s Dream had become a bit of a tourist attraction. The ghost ‘cities’ near the ‘surface’ of Skaia’s Dream were filled with Skaians of all kinds trying to make a quick buck and establish their own unique cultural identity. With the advances of Merodi technology, the constructions could actually stay around and not shift with the dreams, allowing people to actually stick together.

But the greatest attraction of Skaia’s Dream was not the very young society there, but the scouting parties that took tourists into deep Skaia to the memories of long lost SBURB players. Alien structures would astound, bizarre colors would amaze, and interesting locals would provide unique interactions.

Of course most of these tourist excursions didn’t really go that deep into Skaia. They just poked their heads into the surface.

Jack O’Neill wanted a little more than that on his ‘vacation’. He wasn’t kidding himself, he knew this wasn’t going to actually be a full vacation, but he was still going to have some fun. Instead of poking around aimlessly for someone who would actually take him to an unexplored area, he had a much better idea.

He walked down what could be thought of as the ‘main street’ to Skaia’s Dream’s ‘capital’ – Peixe. Which was to say he was walking on a flat, winding tree branch that wormed its way around the memory of a pink ‘moon’. As he walked, the moon went from being a distant object in the sky to being a world whose surface he could walk on. He jumped from the branch onto the surface of Peixe.

The pink moon was covered in jagged rocks that the Skaians had built structures into. The vast majority were troll dwellings that had the general appearance of gray blocks smashed together in random ways with no discernable rhyme or reason. There were a handful of other structures – human and pony, generally built by beings not native to Skaia’s Dream – but these were in the decided minority.

O’Neill walked past these buildings, thankful that the usual unnatural shifting of location was not allowed in Peixe. He could walk down a street and expect it to stay a street for the entire time he was there.

He made his way through the busy roads filled with eternally-teenaged ghosts running around, scrambling about their day. Some of them were late for pointless shenanigans, while others probably had jobs of a sort. Even though work in Skaia’s Dream was rather limited due to its nature.

O’Neill marched up to the doors of the one building that belonged in the dream-memory of the pink moon. The royal palace of Beforus – the original home of Meenah. O’Neill walked in, entering the main hall.

What had once been a memory of a vast, empty room had become a crowded meeting hall, mostly dominated by versions of Meenah and Feferi, representing the ruling families of both Alternia and Beforus. Notably, the room wasn’t filled only with Fuschia-blooded trolls – versions of jade, teal, cobalt, and mutant candy red weren’t uncommon, though the only version of Vriska in the room was Omega Vriska, known as Vrisko, standing by the primary Meenah.

Meenah. O’Neill’s target. He marched through the hall, going right for her. He passed several Skaians scrambling with paperwork and digital messages from Merodi Universalis. He caught more than a few interesting conversations on the way.

A god-tier candy-red-blooded troll known as Kankri was in a deep, passionate discussion about the nature of Skaian politics.

“…and I don’t mean to be rude, please forgive me if I am, but the foremost duty of any politician is to point out when and where the system is failing, and it appears to me our rather… disorganized chaos within this parliamentary room makes us seem foolhardy to the more experienced, organized rationales of which our parent government appreciates and encourag-”

“Let me stop you right there,” a Terezi muttered, folding her arms. “We’re fucking trolls, Kankri.”

“Such language is no-”

“Shush it. We’re trolls. We don’t do ‘neat’ and ‘nice’, and never have, even on Beforus. Aranea, back me up here.”

The cobalt-troll blinked. “Oh, huh?” she rubbed the back of her head. “Right. While Beforus was certainly a more peaceful and caring civilization, the biological drives of our race are decidedly violent and disorganized. We were very lucky our Empress was Feferi, so she could show the world how to care for all life. Even then, the legal system and parliamentary customs were hardly as organized as any Earth – more like a version of Equis, actually. Even then most of the paperwork was decidedly simpler.”

“I am fully aware of this factoid, Aranea,” Kankri began. “But I must insist that what we naturally are may not be ‘correct’ or ‘the best’ as we consider it. Perhaps an illustration would help, think o-”

“FOR THE LOVE OF MY BONE BULGE SHUT UP!” a Karkat blurted.

Kankri ignored him. “-smuch as we can think in a way with images through words directed through our consciousnesses…”

O’Neill stopped listening – it sounded like that would get boring real fast. He walked right up to Meenah.

“Sclam,” Meenah muttered, not looking up from her data pad.

“Meenah!” Feferi yelled. “That’s O’Neill!”

“Yeah, so?”

“As in Overhead-General O’Neill!? One of your bosses!?”

“I tell anyone I want to sclam,” Meenah muttered.

Feferi repeatedly bowed to O’Neill. “Sorry! Sorry! She’s just in a bad mood!”

Vrisko smirked. “Oh, she’s always in a variation of this mood.”

“Vrisko, glubbing stop ruining our politics!”

“We are what we are. If he doesn’t like it he can go fuck himself.”

O’Neill shrugged, turning to Feferi. “This is quite the reception you’ve got here.”

“I’m so sorry!” She put a hand on O’Neill’s shoulder and pulled him away from Meenah and Vrisko. “I will personally sea to anything you need, O’Neill.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Well in that case I want a personal expedition as deep into Skaia as we can go. I’m on vacation and I plan to see as much insanity as I can before my time is up.”

“…You do realize that’s just asking for ka to ruin the vacation right?”

“Wouldn’t be a vacation without that happening now would it?”

Feferi considered this. “Good point. I’ll get you a personal contingent of Skaians a-”

“I don’t want a big production here, I can take care of myself.”

Feferi blinked. “In that case…” she twirled her double-pointed trident. “I’ll lead you myself! I haven’t gone deep in a while since I’ve been busy being half the leadership of Skaia’s Dream… It should be fun!”

O’Neill smirked. “Then lead the way.”

“Glub glub! Road trip!” She pulled out a small, metallic object and pressed a button. A personalized fuchsia Skiff appeared in the air above them, decorated with cuttlefish designs. “You want to go deep you have to swim fast.” She grinned and squeed. “Oh, this is going to be amazing!”

“You don’t get out much, do you?”

“Always stuck in this tide pool…”

“That ends today.”

Feferi clapped.

~~~

Toph folded her hands, examining the five individuals standing before her throne.

Curaçao, Velvet, Insipid, Lady Rarity, and Jenny.

“What in the name of the spirits were you doing!?”

“Amazing things,” Jenny said with a coy smirk. “You’re welcome for your daily dose of excitement, by the way.”

Curaçao sighed. “Your ‘ighness, forgive our tactless words. I am afraid ze precise actions of what we were doing wizin ze ‘Armony Caverns is a matter zat needs to be on ze ‘down low’. If you wish for a report you could file a request wiz Renee a-”

Lady Rarity rolled her eyes. “We were chasing a multidimensional entity across numerous worlds. It ended up in the Harmony Caverns. We stopped it with admittedly more damage to the surrounding physics than I would have liked. The Harmony Runes are still intact a-”

“I have a fragment of the Spectacularium drifting from mind to mind driving people temporarily insane and answering questions nobody wants to know about!” Toph blurted. “Who cares about the Harmony Runes? I’ve got a bigger problem!”

“In, like, all fairness, isn’t that harmless? Cha?” Insipid asked.

“You won’t be so happy when your personal secrets start getting broadcasted to the minds of random people!” Toph snapped.

Velvet adjusted her ka-glasses. “Ah, the secret night with one of your suitors got out, huh? Must be fun kn-”

“Velvet if you try to fear-condition me I will cut you in half,” Toph muttered.

“…You’re no fun,” Velvet pouted.

“The point is that this shouldn’t have existed in the first place!”

Jenny folded her arms. “Oh, I’m sorry, would you rather we let the monster continually eat everything in sight of itself? I bet you’d be upset about that.”

Toph twitched. “You can regenerate from anything, right?”

Jenny had heard that question an excessive number of times in her life. She knew what it meant. She teleported away before Toph could throw the Master Sword.

Toph sighed and leaned back into her throne. “Here’s the deal. Take care of the mind creature. And do it without creating a bigger problem. Do I make myself clear?”

“Of course, your ‘ighness,” Curaçao said with a bow.

Insipid frowned. “But, like, didn’t Renee-”

Curaçao put a hoof to Insipid’s mouth. “We’ll get on it right away.”

Toph raised an eyebrow. “…Just hurry up.”

The four remaining ponies scrambled out of the room.

~~~

Flying deeper into Skaia’s Dream was an experience all to itself. Despite the dream-nature of the realm, much of the world was still effectively solid, so flying through the world at faster-than-light speeds was normally out of the question. Anything faster than an average car required computer analysis to safely navigate the twisting turns of memories turned into reality.

Luckily Feferi’s Skiff – which she had named the Cuttlebolt – was equipped with something most Skiffs weren’t.

A phasing device. The Skiff – and everything inside of it – moved slightly out of phase with reality and passed through everything just like a ghost could. They had started out moving slowly through the upper levels, passing through scenery of Alternia, Beforus, Earth A, Earth B, and even a bit of Earth C.

This only lasted a few minutes as they sped up. Soon they were passing through alien landscapes, including the section of Skaia’s Dream that held the memories of an Equis that had played the game. They saw Canterlot, Ponyville, and the Everfree forest fly by, littered with versions of Twilight, Applejack, and the others.

After they passed this, Feferi smirked. “Well, that’s all the heavily explored areas of Skaia’s Dream.”

“We’re not there yet.”

“Of course not. The probes have a general idea what’s out here for quite a long way!” She gestured toward the speed controls. “Will you do the honors?”

O’Neill rubbed his hands together and pressed a finger to the speed control. Instead of slowly moving it upward, he shot it to full speed immediately. The Cuttlebolt entered galaxy-crossing FTL speeds, turning the locations they had passed by earlier into nothing more than rapidly flashing bursts of color.

Inside the Cuttlebolt, the riders hardly felt anything from the instant acceleration due to the magic of inertial dampeners. Such a great invention.

“We past the explored regions?”

“Oh yeah,” Feferi said. “No expedition has sean this area of the Dream.” She giggled. “I wonder what we’ll find!”

O’Neill tapped his finger to the speed controls – and brought everything to an instant stop.

In front of them was a shiny, mostly orange world with the occasional neon flash around it.

O’Neill blinked. “…Is that the Land of Pyramids and Neon!?”

“Oh, so this is where Spades went!” Feferi said. “By the tides, what were the chances we found this place? Million to one?”

“Million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten,” O’Neill pointed out.

“True. …Hey, do we actually know who said that first?”

O’Neill shrugged. “Prevalent saying, far as I know.”

Feferi shrugged. Then she pressed a button. “This is Feferi of Skaia’s Dream! Hiiiii!”

O’Neill put his hands to his ears to stop the shrill shriek of Feferi’s enthusiasm from draining his brain cell count.

“What!?” Spades voice came in response. “How did you find us!?”

“Random chance!” Feferi said. “Isn’t that weird?!”

“Weird enough to get a knife to the face.”

A knife shot from the surface of Lopan and passed right through the intangible ship.

O’Neill took his turn. “Spades, buddy, fri-”

“I ain’t your buddy or your friend!”

“And I ain’t your pal, comrade.”

“I ain’t yo-” Spades stopped himself, sensing an infinite loop of absurdity forming around the words. “Just get out of here and leave us alone, exploratory imbeciles.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Us?”

“You hear that, knifey? Sounds like he wants a stab.”

“Hey, knifey, if you can hear me, tell your master he’s forgetting a small detail. We’re intangible right now.”

“Right, that’s it, I’m coming up there.”

“What are y-”

Spades launched from the planet and smacked the Cuttlebolt with his giant golden staff. A huge dent appeared on the Skiff’s dash, causing sparks to come out.

“I forgot he had that,” Feferi said.

“It’s always a stupid magic weapon, isn’t it?” O’Neill muttered. Spades swung again – only to find that Crimson Sushi had started screwing with his perceptions. He ended up swinging at absolutely nothing, horribly wrenching his arm.

Spades shifted the staff to its form as a golden assault rifle. He fired it in every direction he could think of, its reality-burning bullets ripping holes in the fabric of spacetime. They quickly healed, but that didn’t help the Cuttlebolt when one of the bullets lodged itself into the ship’s engines.

“Oh, shell,” Feferi swore.

The Cuttebolt swirled with a brilliant white light, enveloping the three of them in a burst of energy.

Everything was gone.

Lopan didn’t even notice the departure of its ‘beloved’ leader.

~~~

Space was beautiful.

No matter how long Cosmo lived or how much she saw, the awe the vastness of space brought her was never lessened. The darkness interspersed with stars, systems, and glorious alien worlds. If anything, her awe increased the more she saw as the variety proved to her that the possibilities were truly endless and beyond the understanding of most.

She flew as her crystalline, skeletal self through one of the Merodi’s relatively recent universal additions – Odanas Aflame. The universe itself was dominated by stars that shone a bright red, hence the ‘Aflame’ in the name. No matter how big or small the stars in this universe were, they were always red, bathing everything in their crimson glory.

Cosmo’s blue skeletal form was uncharacteristically dark in this universe – absorbing most of the red light, only letting scant amounts of it through the refractive nature of Cosmo’s body. She appeared black with red highlights, decidedly ominous.

But she didn’t mind – there was no one to watch here in the void between stars. She was able to fly alone, her thoughts to herself.

She had even left Starlight at home for once – a rare move for her, but she needed to think. Not because anything had gone wrong – far from it. Equis Cosmic was booming, Merodi Universalis was settling into what appeared to be a golden age, and she hadn’t even had to do much!

…That last part was a bit of a problem for her, she realized. She had lived for countless centuries, and for the vast majority of those years she’d had the final say on everything. The leader, the commander, the spiritual guide – and had continued as that even in the early days of Merodi Universalis, due to how important her universe was to the continued shifting populations of the society.

But now? The Overheads had settled into their power and taken most of Cosmo’s outer responsibilities as their own. Most universal leaders got to keep a large portion of control over their subjects, since they were expected to be the most familiar with them. But over the years Equis Cosmic had accepted billions upon billions of refugees from outer worlds, peoples who had nothing to do with Equis Cosmic's past or Cosmo’s understanding. The majority of Merodi Universalis’ population lived in Equis Cosmic, so the Oversight Division took special interest in the finer running of the worlds. She was still technically in charge, but over time she had just let them take more and more out of her hands…

Now she didn’t do much besides make public appearances and speak as the voice of Equis Cosmic – a voice many thought was only for the older pony worlds. Was that a fair criticism? She didn’t think so. With her new freedom, she spent a significant amount of time learning about all the cultures within her world and the powers that came from outside.

She shook her head – what was she complaining about? She didn’t have to be an important leader. She didn’t have to control the fate of Merodi Universalis. She could be happy with her position. It wasn’t like she was just a figurehead. She could do what she wanted.

It was just… she wished she’d seen it coming.

Her magic detected a loose planet floating around, not in the gravitational pull of any star. There were large energy signatures on the world that drew her attention and took her mind off her personal issues. She followed the trail, blasting across the interplanetary void with her magic. She appeared in a flash of purple far above the world.

The planet was dark – as all planets without stars were. However, a few specks of green light could be seen from her position. She had a pretty good idea what those green sections were, but she went to investigate anyway. She summoned her illusion cover, transforming her skeletal self into an alicorn with all her mane and fur intact.

Why do these curses exist? She asked herself as she descended. Things that exist seemingly only because they can’t be cured. Physical maladies affixed to the soul… Why? What’s the point? Are people just destined to never be able to recover?

She didn’t have an answer. Nobody did. Ka was a dreadfully cruel force much of the time, and nothing they did ever lessened its impact. Just changed it to another form.

Cosmo landed on the planet’s surface, the source of the beautiful green glow in front of her, basking her in its beautiful light.

It was a magic forest on an otherwise deserted, cold, arid world, glowing a verdant green color. She walked in, carefully stepping so as to not harm the plants. There were no real ‘trees’ or ‘bushes’, but rather there were large strands of green vines that weaved together, the beautiful leaves covering nearly every surface within the forest save the ground. This world naturally had no atmosphere, but this forest, this organism had slowly introduced a tenuous gripping of oxygen to the spherical body. It wasn’t enough air for someone like Cosmo to breathe naturally, but it was a sign of a bright future that could come.

Hello, Cosmo called out with her telepathy.

The forest reacted around her, the green light flashing brightly for a moment, then settling down as it remembered who she was. Ah, Cosmo! Back so soon?

It’s been a year, Odanas. And this is not the usual planet.

Mmm… A year is not that long, child of harmony. A planet, a universe… all but thoughts away.

I guess I am back, then. I did come across this place by complete accident though. I was just flying around space.

This is one of my primary universes.

And you’re in the habit of gracing orphan planets with your presence?

I do not recall how I spread my seed to this particular world, Cosmo. It is but one of countless thousands, and I have no intention of keeping meticulous records like you. The present moments are enough for me.

It probably feels like yesterday when you joined us, huh?

I never even had the concept of a ‘day’ down that well, so your statement is indubitably true.

You always grow and transform worlds…

I have no need for anything else. Lending my aid to those heavily damaged worlds you find is the least I can do.

And you have no reservations whatsoever?

The recent project I am undertaking with the Diamonds is… stretching my comfort some, admittedly, but as I am learning, there are many forms of life beyond the kind I naturally assist and produce.

You really don’t mind being told what to do? Having some of your agency removed?

You always just ask. I’m free to say no. But before you found my universes it wasn’t like I was making very many decisions anyway. I was just spreading life. I would take a passing interest in a civilization from time to time, but otherwise all my efforts were spent in simply shaping the long-term ecosystem of a planet. To be frank, it is nice to have some direction, something different. Even if I have not truly adjusted to it yet.

Cosmo nodded. I think I see. A similar thing happened to me – but I do not think as slow as you, nor do I act that slow. …I can’t help but feel my agency was slighted. And my decisions are very important to me.

Allow me to repeat something one of your kind said to me. Things change. We must change with them.

...I have heard that before.

I really shouldn’t be the one telling you this, since I rarely change. Surely you have a better capacity for it than I do.

Cosmo let out a short laugh. Yes. Yes I suppose I do. Maybe I’m just being stubborn.

It does appear to be a trait many of you fast-thinkers share in abundance.

Yeah… Cosmo looked up at the sky through the green leaves at the red stars. …You’re going to turn this universe into Hearth’s Warming Eve.

What?

~~~

“What happened?” O’Neill asked, blinking.

“We crashed,” Feferi said, rubbing her head.

“How do you crash an intangible ship?”

“You shoot it with Lord English’s gun,” Feferi responded.

O’Neill blinked. “Wait, Spades has Lord English’s gun!?”

“Yep,” Spades said, tapping the windshield of the Cuttlebolt with the green head of the golden staff. “Now get out of there before I run you through.”

Feferi pressed a button. “Windshield’s jammed. It won’t pop o-”

Spades smashed the windshield open, the power of the staff easily overcoming the high-end Merodi engineering. “There you go. Problem solved.”

O’Neill and Feferi crawled out of the Skiff, standing on top of a black mound. There was no sign of Lopan or anything else that was familiar, though they were clearly in Skaia’s Dream given the existence of a tremendous pillar of black alien technology next to a landscape made out of cake.

“How badly lost are we?” O’Neill asked.

“Not bad,” Feferi said, pulling out her phone. “Cell service still works, as does the dimensional device. I’ll just call for help and we’ll swim right out of this problem.”

“Or,” O’Neill said, holding up a hand. “We could explore around anyway and see what’s here.”

Spades glared at him. “Do you have a crowbar in your brain or something?”

“No.”

“Would you like one?”

O’Neill smirked. “I’d rather not, but don’t let that stop you from trying!”

Spades grunted. “Make the call, fish-face. I need to get back to Pyramid Hell.”

“Or,” O’Neill said, holding up his other hand. “You could loosen up and learn to live a little. You strike me as a guy who’s been sorely lacking in action and drama as of late.”

“My life is fine you judgementa-”

“You rule a planet of pyramids inhabited mostly by consorts,” O’Neill interrupted.

“Oh, that has to be annoying,” Feferi commented. “Nothing but them for company? They’re absolutely adorable but… you know…”

Spades grunted. “So what, I just leave them to bumble around their little village?”

“Be honest, how many of them even know you’re there at any given time?” O’Neill asked.

Spades blinked. Then he narrowed his eyes. “Are you stealin’ my Hope, Thief?”

“Oh right, I can do that,” O’Neill chuckled. “Forgot, never get to use it that often.”

“Mhm…”

“How about you just cut your losses, loosen up, and come exploring with us without making me resort to stealing some delicious Hope? It’s the best option for you!”

“It’s not an option.”

“Glad you’re up to speed,” O’Neill said, patting Spades on the back. “Now, I know a giant alien artifact when I see one.”

“Glub, really?” Feferi said, raising an eyebrow and gesturing at the gigantic alien pillar. “I wonder what else this could be!”

O’Neill turned to stare at her, raising an eyebrow. “How uncharacteristically sarcastic of you.”

Feferi smiled innocently. “Heheh… Yeah, it just happens sometimes.”

“How feminine,” Spades muttered.

“HEY! SAY THAT TO MY FACE YOU ROTTEN BLOWHOLE!”

“I just did,” Spades deadpanned.

Feferi blinked, her face returning to its cheerful, adorable self. “Oh, you did! Heh. Maybe spending extended time around a Sollux does that. Bipolar bleeding, it should be called…” She put a hand to her chin. “Hrm…”

O’Neill marched forward until he reached the alien pillar. It was dark, but definitely wasn't the Dark Tower. It had a rippled shape, as if composed of thousands of little bubbles, and little green lights emanated from various rounded faces, each of the lights collecting together like stars in a constellation to form glyphs.

O’Neill ran his hand along the surface of the alien tower, finding that the rounded bubbles were rough, unlike what he expected from looking at it. What creature dreamed this up? Was this a Sburb game construct or something natural from a player’s home world? Did it have any relation to the pastry world to the side, or were they two completely different game sessions?

“INTRUDER DETECTED.”

The bubble O’Neill was touching at that moment popped, revealing a sharp needle. The needle shot out, intending to skewer him, but his reflexes were fast enough to duck out of the way. The spike withdrew back into the tower without another word.

“I was hoping for blood,” Spades muttered.

O’Neill put his hands on Feferi and pushed her forward. “You touch it next.”

“Wh- why?”

“You’re a ghost. You literally cannot die.”

Feferi blinked. “Oh. Okay!” She visibly brightened and touched the bubble.

“INTRUDER DETECTED.”

The spike shot out and impaled her. Her cheerful expression shifted to a haunted one as bad memories filled her mind.

There was also the intense pain that came from being impaled and not dying. “AUGH! FLOUNDERING CODDAMMIT BLOWHARDING SHELL!”

“GHOST SIGNATURE ACCEPTED. FUSCHIA BLOOD DETECTED.”

“Get off,” O’Neill said, grabbing Feferi by the shoulder and pulling her back. The spike decided to expand, skewering Feferi’s body from the inside, preventing her from escaping.

“HOLY GALLONS OF BETA P-” whatever stream of aquatic-related ‘swearing’ about to come out of her mouth was interrupted when the spike tried to pull her in.

O’Neill was not strong enough to keep hold of her – but Spades was. He grabbed hold of her midsection with his mixed robotic and carapaced arms, pulling her back. The spikes erupted from her flesh and tore at her bones – but she was removed from the spike.

She fell back to the ground, seemingly unharmed but visibly exhasuted. The spike retracted into the wall of the alien device, no longer holding anything.

“Sometimes I wish I was a ghost,” O’Neill muttered.

“That can be arranged!” Feferi blurted. “Fuck, just… I’m not doing that again for any reason. No more impaling! None!”

“None?”

“NONE!”

Spades impaled her with a knife.

Feferi twitched. She reached into her back, removed the knife, and looked at it carefully. Then she proceeded to hit Spades across the head with the flat end of her trident. “You need to work on your people skills!”

Spades shrugged off the hit. “Personally, I don’t give a flying f-”

The base of the tower opened with a series of pops, creating a simple doorway just tall enough for a full-grown troll to walk through. Not that any of the people here needed that much height – after all, none of them were even close to that tall, and Feferi wasn’t growing anytime soon.

The doorway was completely dark. There wasn’t anyone or anything inside as far as they could tell.

“If we walk in there, we’re gonna get jumped,” Spades said.

“Yep,” O’Neill confirmed.

“There will be sufferin’, a lot of fightin’ for our lives at some point, and probably some emotional scarrin’.”

“Yep,” O’Neill agreed.

“Not to mention dream mindfuckery.”

“Mhm.”

“So, who’s goin’ first?”

Feferi rolled her eyes. “For the love of cod…” She marched in first.

O’Neill smirked, following her in with Spades at his side.

At this point, none of them were able to resist the powerful call of mystery and adventure. They walked in…

And were promptly jumped by seventeen different versions of Vriska.

They never stood a chance against those with luck stealing.

~~~

Princess Luna of Equis Vitis had a different sort of problem than Cosmo. Unlike Equis Cosmic, Equis Vitis did not hold the vast majority of Merodi Universalis’ population. Instead, Equis Vitis was the home to a large variety of races, most of whom looked to Luna for direct leadership rather than their own leaders. Ever since the Bloodbath, she had been the nearly uncontested ruler.

Thorax had survived, yes, but he never had an issue with being subservient to other nations – so much that it was a problem, but not a huge problem. The changelings were able to live just fine with their authority figure being rather soft.

She had a huge responsibility, to put it mildly – everyone looked to her to guide them, even if she knew she could never please all of them. But she was used to at least having good relations with most of the races on her planet – even the Yaks.

But then there was Tauryl.

The only nation on Equis Vitis that was not part of Merodi Universalis. And yet, ever since the Xeelee forcibly ended their xenophobic practices, they had started demanding a multiversal voice like a whining six-year-old. A whining six-year-old who was known for having an affinity for stealing magic for themselves.

It was the primary ability of an Equis Vitis centaur to steal magic from other beings. While they had in recent years limited this act to just wildlife, in the past they had performed it on every creature they could find – even sapient ones.

Right now, a Tauryl centaur priestess was threatening Luna with magic removal.

Luna knew she could do it. Luna also knew she could have her magic restored in any number of ways after the fact and have this priestess pay dearly for the slight against the Equestrian Crown. But Luna would rather not raise tensions between Tauryl and the Merodi further.

“Think very carefully about what you are saying, Hylon,” Luna encouraged. “You wish to invoke our wrath simply because we will not give you advanced technology?”

“You have withheld your toys from us long enough!” the yellow-coated centaur retorted, her dual horns buzzing with energy. “Our people are nothing compared to yours!”

“We have ended most hunger in your country and provided you a way to get a superb education and develop these technologies in your own time,” Luna pointed out.

“Our own time? We do not progress as fast as you do! We will be left in the dust!”

“Then join us,” Luna said. “You are in a unique position of technically being below the usual ‘acceptance’ complexity for Merodi Universalis, but you had contact with us before those laws went into effect.”

“We will not join you.”

“Then, pray tell, why would we raise you to our level?” Luna folded her hooves. “We help. We are not here to be your gods.”

“You would no-”

“Yes we would. We would provide you with everything, build you up, and destroy your culture if we did what you wanted. If your national pride is why you will not join us, then you do not want to be given everything you ask. The sudden influx would destroy you.”

Hylon twitched. She didn’t like a word she was hearing – so she decided to use force. She began to drain Luna’s magic… Only for a gargoyle to drop from the ceiling and punch her in the head, knocking her out.

Luna blinked. “Huh?”

“This isn’t Hylon,” the gargoyle said. “This is the stupid radical Nariss. Did you not receive word that Hylon’s whereabouts were unknown?”

“No,” Luna admitted. “…Was she trying to upset me? Forgive me, I am not familiar with Tauryl radicals.”

“She wants Tauryl to fall,” the gargoyle said simply, dragging Nariss’ limp form away. “I don’t worry myself with the details all that much. Just another crazy nut amongst millions…”

Luna wanted to ask more questions, but let the radical get dragged away.

She pulled out her phone. “Paradigm? Do you mind launching an investigation into the political structure of Tauryl? I suspect there’s a conspiracy of some kind going on in there. …Thanks.” She hung up. That should clear up whatever this mess was in a week or two.

In the meantime she had to talk to someone else…

“YAKS UPSET! WEATHER UP NORTH NOT PERFECT!”

“Do you want more snow or less?” Luna asked the yak with a sigh.

“YAKS WANT MORE WIND ON TUESDAYS AND LESS SUN ON SUNDAYS!”

Luna put on a smile. “Allow me to redirect you to the Weather Management Division…”

~~~

O’Neill, Spades, and Feferi were tied up, disarmed, and tossed into a spotlight. Aside from themselves, they couldn’t see anything outside the spotlight.

The inside of the alien structure was dark.

“Would it kill you to decorate?” O’Neill asked. “I mean, this floor is nice, but it could stand to have some rugs on top of the cold, uncompromising metal.”

“His ass needs a pillow,” Spades offered.

Someone outside the spotlight threw a pillow hard enough to knock O’Neill over. “There you go! Exactly what you asked for!” the voice of a Vriska snickered.

“Thank you,” O’Neill said with a content smile.

“Fucking smart aleck…” the Vriska voice said. “I think we should teach him a little lesson about talking back to the Serket…”

“Shall we decide his fate with a coin?” another Vriska asked, prompting laughs from several other voices – not all of them Vriska.

“Psh, too boring. How about this? I’ve got some chains, and it looks like he needs a good workout. What do you say to that, O’Neill?”

O’Neill was only barely listening to them. He was weighing his options – they were all trapped and without weapons. He still had Crimson Sushi, but without light that wouldn’t be very helpful. Spades was a brutally strong robot, but O’Neill expected the restraints were enchanted for him. Feferi did have an ‘inventory’ of sorts that they couldn’t have taken, like most Sburb players, but he had no way of asking what she had in there they could use. Her trident had been taken, so it likely wasn’t a weapon…

Plus, these were ghosts they were dealing with anyway. At least some of them god-tier. Fighting their way out was probably a bad idea.

Maybe they didn’t need a weapon though…

An orange boot came flying out of the spotlight and hit O’Neill in the jaw, interrupting his thought process. “I said, what do you fucking say to that, O’Neill?”

“I say you’re the one who needs the workout, flabby,” O’Neill muttered.

This prompted several chuckles – and another kick across the jaw. “Listen up, General. One more word like that out of you and I will take your pathetic human excuse for a bone bulge and pull it right up through your ribcage. And then I’ll feed you to one of the Dream spider lusii. Because you’re alive and those can definitely kill you.”

“Or nothing of the sort will happen,” a decidedly more refined voice said – one O’Neill found vaguely familiar, but couldn’t place. “We aren’t barbarians, after all.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I speak for all of us,” she said, stepping into the spotlight so the three prisoners could see her. She was a cobalt-blooded troll with a short blue dress, pointed spectacles, red shoes, and a black Scorpio symbol on her top. Her eyes were empty, betraying her ghostly nature.

“…Aranea? Alpha Aranea!?” Feferi blurted, gawking.

“Am I supposed to know who that is?” O’Neill asked.

“She… She’s the troll responsible for the Omega timeline. The one where everyone died.”

Spades turned to glare at Aranea. “Wait… I do know you! You were the one that crashed my planets together!”

Aranea sighed. “I assure you, my intentions were pure. Had we been successful Lord English would have been devoured in a paradox of his own creation. And Mister Slick, I offer my sincerest condolences for the world of yours that was created from my failure.”

“If you had done what you wanted the world would still have been stagnant!” Feferi shouted. “That’s not much better!”

“My motives were pure,” Aranea said, looking away. “I do admit I made a few… reckless, perhaps brash decisions, but it was the best idea at the time. There was no guarantee the Green Sun could be safely destroyed, nor was there any true understanding of what the House Juju was. It was a calculated risk.”

“You were just like Vriska,” Feferi said. “You wanted to be the hero.”

Aranea twitched. “I am not like Vriska.”

“Hey! We’re right here!” a Vriska shouted.

“And we’re all bitches,” another commented. “She speaks the truth!”

“Fucking spidery bookworm…”

Aranea ignored the ribbing chorus. “Regardless, the past is behind us. Lord English was defeated and sealed away, and with the Gallifreyans’ locks it is ensured that he will always be sealed away through the retcon. So there is nothing to worry about. Plus, everyone in Omega got to be a ghost anywa-”

“There are no ghost Dirks,” Feferi said. “Or Omega John. Because of what you did, they weren’t sent to the dream bubble. They just died with Spades over here!”

Spades was currently grinding his teeth, clearly imagining every possible different way Aranea could be stabbed.

Aranea sighed. “I was under the impression we all agreed Dirk was a… less than ideal human being.”

Feferi glared at her. “That’s not my point.”

“Fine, I’m not here to be liked, not by you at least. Not yet, anyway.”

“What are you here for, then?” O’Neill asked. “I may not know much, but I do know that trolls aren’t supposed to be this deep into the Dream.”

“Revolution,” Aranea said with a knowing smirk.

“Revolution?”

“I wish to make things change.” Aranea took a step back, throwing her arms wide, the spotlight glinting off her gray skin. “I thought that, surely, when we joined Merodi Universalis the normal order of things would be upset. That all trolls would be treated equally, that we would be able to understand… That Meenah wouldn’t be allowed to become the dictator she was always geared to be.”

“Meenah’s not a dictator!” Feferi insisted. “She’s a strong woman who does what needs to be done! All of her are!”

Aranea shook her head. “Meenah is a woman with a predisposed cruelty and domination instinct. I know her well, Feferi. It is in her blood. Or have you forgotten who it was that defeated me in the Omega Timeline? Who made the survivors suffer?”

Feferi looked down, unable to respond.

“The Condesce,” Spades answered. “The Batterwitch.”

“Otherwise known as Meenah Peixes.” Aranea said, leaning in closer to Spades. “A version of her, all grown up. Ruler of Alternia. Conqueror of galaxies. High ‘servant’ to English. It is always Meenah’s destiny to become her. And she’s already doing it in this pathetic excuse for a ‘parliament’ that’s been created in Peixe. Fuschia bloods reinforcing each other endlessly, ruling over the players of Sburb for eternity, only entrenching the caste system!”

“So, uh, why are there a bunch of you in there?” O’Neill asked. “Not to mention stubby mc-angry.”

“Ants for Meenah. She doesn’t like doing everything herself, you understand.”

Feferi looked into Aranea’s eyes. “I know. I do a lot of that work – me and my other selves! We have equal footing with Meenah!”

“No, you don’t.”

“We keep her balanced.”

Aranea shifted her outfit to that of the Sylph of Light, bright orange robes flowing over her body with two extra long strands of fabric hanging from her sides. “A Sylph is a healer,” she said simply. “While the Maid ensures the Aspect itself remains stable, repairs it as it were, a Sylph actively heals others with the Aspect.” The symbol of Light appeared in one of her empty eyes for a split second. “I know what Meenah becomes. What she’s capable of, even if she doesn’t really think so. I can use this information to change our fortune. We don’t have to listen to her.”

Spades laughed. “Last time you did that you fucked it up.”

“That’s why I’ve gathered my own army,” Aranea said. “Especially the Vriskas. They can ensure fortune flows my way, even if I don’t have that level of control. So long as they stand by me. And all of them want an excuse to punch the established order in the face – especially the established order of their sisters.”

“What did Vriska and Vrisko ever do to them!?” Feferi blurted.

A Vriska stepped into the light, angry. “They became fucking pansy bitches, that’s what. They are soft and let everyone walk all over them. Fuck ‘em and everything they stand for.”

Aranea coughed. “I assure you, General, you will not be harmed. We will be moving to overthrow the Fuschia parliament within a local day. A ghost war will not result in any casualties, merely destruction of property. You have nothing to worry about - the new Skaian Collective will continue to be an obedient member of Merodi Universalis, with just a slight change in leadership.”

“There’s a lot of people who respect Meenah for what she did in the war with Skarn,” O’Neill said. “Including myself.”

“Then maybe you can give her a new job. She’d make an excellent General. I’d be happy knowing she found a way to use her nature without destroying everything.” She smiled warmly. “Don’t worry. This won’t hurt anyone.”

O’Neill has flashbacks to a game where Them decided there would be ‘no consequences’. Then he remembered the face of Daniel after they’d come back.

“That’s bullshit.”

~~~

Celestia City had a problem.

That problem was the Melnorme.

Ever since Merodi Universalis had become Class 2, the Melnorme had actively sought out locations to set up their trading outposts and stalls. Usually this was only one or two in any given city, and the rest of the marketplace would still be able to function perfectly fine without too much Melnorme competition.

But Celestia City was apparently an especially delectable location. Since it moved all the time, that always meant there would be new customers. Since it was always growing, it would always have the need for more and more goods. Even if the Merodi Universalis economy wasn’t fully capitalist, people still had money and could buy things. The Melnorme, being a power from another nation, was not held to the company limitations imposed on Merodi Universalis citizens. Which meant the Merodi had vast amounts of resources and goods they could funnel into Celestia City with ease.

Blumiere had known this. When they first started coming in, he limited how fast they could do it. They wouldn’t be allowed to form a monopoly on any product that was already sold within Merodi Universalis, and they wouldn’t be able to dominate the market. He thought this maneuver was clever and would keep Celestia City free from Melnorme meddling. It worked relatively well on the Infinite Carousel, after all.

What he didn’t take into account was that the Melnorme had been in the merchant business for literal eons and knew tricks that were in books Blumiere and Merodi Universalis didn’t even know existed.

The Melnorme started providing products to vendors who were completely separate from them, for one. Over the course of four years, the Melnorme would slowly hire more and more Celestia City natives to work as sales representatives. Nobody suspected a thing at first – they all popped up in random places and it looked like the Melnorme had nothing to do with them. They even had the Infinite Carousel’s illicit activities brought into the open a few times to draw attention away from their larger activities.

Blumiere didn’t find out about the Melnorme’s plan until it was far too late. Virtually every company within the main trading district had been bought out by the Melnorme, and half of them didn’t even know they had been bought out! It was a true shadow conspiracy. It had only really come to light when Pokèrin Amina had become part of the Merodi after the war, and their large volume of traders had experienced extremely unfair practices against their businesses.

With a mixture of time travel, knowledge gleaned from Aradia’s Celestialsapien, and a fair amount of economic analysis Blumiere barely understood, he was able to track down the Melnorme who was calling the shots. To the surprise of no one he didn’t even operate on Celestia City and was, instead, the head of a major conglomerate within Melnorme space.

Blumiere was going to see him personally. Even with the Merodi government pressuring the Melnorme, they had still demanded payment for the audience. Blumiere had obliged, ready to give them a piece of his mind.

Blumiere walked into the office. The Melnorme sure liked their orange things, since the walls, floor, ceiling, and tables were all orange. The only things that weren’t orange were the exceedingly rare collectibles lining the walls. Dimensional anomalies contained in jars, deeds to entire galaxies, stuffed animals that were only accessible through time travel, and coins made of unique precious metals.

“Everything you see is for sale,” the Melnorme – Tangerine – said. He looked like all Melnorme – a single eye and mouth on a rounded, orange body. As far as Blumiere knew, the only way to tell them apart besides size was the color of their eye. Tangerine’s was orange, unsurprisingly. “I see the rare Elula has caught your ey-”

“Let’s cut to it then,” Blumiere said, sitting down in a chair. “I have proof that you have been meddling with the economy of Celestia City. While your large-scale actions can only be considered shady and not illegal, we have hundreds of separate incidents where those acting in your name have performed highly illegal actions.”

“And how can you prove they were working for me?”

Blumiere summoned a tremendous folder of evidence. “This. Detailed accounts of what your orders were and how they were carried out. We obviously don’t have all of them but we have enough to prove that you’re the one responsible for dominating our city’s economic circle.”

Tangerine rolled his eye. “As if that’s such a bad thing.”

“This may be rather difficult for your brain to understand, but monopoly is not good.”

“If it’s carried out by humans, perhaps,” Tangerine commented. “But you will also find that Melnorme have an internal desire to produce their own competition. If a Melnorme ever truly dominated everything, they would lose the benefit of actual trade.”

“You’re still hurting us and taking control of my city, I don’t care what your reasonings are.”

Tangerine nodded, looking at the file on the table. “Where did you come by this information, I wonder?”

“That information will cost you,” Blumiere said with a satisfied smirk.

Tangerine snorted. “Every childish nation does that. Emulating us for the sake of insult does nothing. You feel so self-important right now, when in reality you have just passed Melnorme grade school. Charge for everything.”

“Why didn’t that information cost me, then?”

Tangerine grinned. “It did. You lost your self-importance and I gained some personal gratification at pushing you down. There’s more than money in the trade, Blumiere. In many ways money is the least important of all commodities. We do not use it with other Melnorme.”

“Look, I could stay here and take a verbal beating from you, but I’m not going to. Get your people out of Celestia City, kapeesh?”

“It’ll cost a lot to get me to let go of that profit center, Blumiere…”

Blumiere pulled a piece of paper out of the file. “How about a direct order from Merodi Universalis to cease operation? I think ‘not suffering multiversal retribution’ is a fair trade, don’t you?”

“Perhaps, but you will not go to war, not over something as small and innocuous as this. The worst you will do is cut off Melnorme economic opportunities in all of Merodi Universalis.”

“That’s not enough to scare you?”

“Oh, it is, I’m just thinking aloud for your sake.” Tangerine grinned. “Here’s the thing – this order hasn’t gone through yet. You’re waiting to see how this meeting goes.”

Blumiere didn’t respond.

“So, since this is contingent, let me make a counter offer. You let me continue working in Celestia City as I have, and I won’t tell everyone in Merodi Universalis about your books.”

Blumiere’s face didn’t shift. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“In your basement in a heavily guarded chest you have the Dark and Light Prognostici, books with the secret to destroying multiple worlds.”

Blumiere didn’t flinch.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t have a way to learn the deepest secret of everyone who walks into my office? Or anyone in the multiverse? We have great seers, Blumiere, who do nothing but collect valuable information for trade continually. The existence of those books is better left a secret, but if you dare cross me, they will be revealed, and everything will come crashing down.” Tangerine leaned in. “Your city… or safety. Your choice.”

Blumiere snapped his fingers, dark magic sparks flying away. “Right then. You win.”

Tangerine grinned. “Glad we’ve come to an understanding.”

“So, I take it we need to pretend this meeting never happened?”

“There will be no records. Do not fret, Mayor, nothing will change, and nothing will threaten your reputation. I’m sure you can find a way to explain your willingness to drop the case.”

“Oh, I will,” he adjusted his top hat. “I hope never to see you again.”

“I wish exactly the opposite.”

In a minute you won’t wish anything about me.

Blumiere walked out of the office – and his dark spell took effect.

Tangerine forgot Blumiere existed. He forgot everything about the last conversation and everything about the Prognostici.

When he received word that Celestia City had banned all Melnorme interaction for illegal activity, he didn’t know who to punish, or how to do it. He demanded audiences, but the Commerce Overhead hadn’t been helpful in shedding light on Blumiere.

Tangerine was a smart businessman. He knew exacting revenge without a specific method of doing so wasn’t profitable. So he just let it slide. He didn’t care as much about it as it might have seemed.

~~~

“Bullshit?” Aranea said, furrowing her brow.

O’Neill looked down, shrouding his expression. “Yes. Do you honestly think any war won’t have consequences?”

“The point of a war is to have consequences that will bring about change. Surely y-”

“There are living, breathing beings in Peixe. If you attack with your full force some of them are going to die.”

“I’m certain the Life players can handle that. Feferi god-tiers are known for their power over life – admittedly, this Feferi wouldn’t know that. But I’m not judging.”

“You are, aren’t you?”

Aranea took in a deep breath. “Perhaps I am, but you did show up outside my tower. Made me think the Fuchsias had found us. Perhaps I’m a little ticked at that.”

“Well, we found you by complete chance. Think that might mean something…?”

Aranea gave O’Neill her full attention, all hint of a smile gone. “…What do you mean?”

“I mean, what were the chances we run into Spades’ little planet and then get shot here? Finding one might just happen by chance – million to one – but finding two? Ka led us here, Aranea.”

“What am I supposed to take from that?”

“You read a lot of books, don’t you? I can hear it in the way you talk. Long winded explanations, a desire to get others to understand you. Frankly, I think it’s overrated, but to each their own.”

“What does th-”

“Think about all the stories you’ve read. What role would we be playing?”

Araneas confidence fell. “…The heroes. Brought together by chance and thrown into a situation they were not prepared for… They must struggle against impossible odds to achieve victory…”

“Ding ding!” O’Neill said. “We have a winner! And that makes you the… Wait for it… Waiiit for it…”

“…Antagonist,” Aranea said. Then she shook her head. “But the antagonist sometimes wins, or sometimes the protagonist is mistaken in what their journey really is! You might end up joining our cause!”

“Before you go storm the castle? Doubtful,” O’Neill smirked. “And do you really have a plan on how you’re going to depose Meenah?”

“Overwhelming force and a lot of luck,” Aranea said.

“And then the Merodi Military will come charging in and put her back in power,” O’Neill said. “Do you think you can hold them off?”

“W-with words, certainly. I can prove myself reasonable, a-”

“Really!? Because I’m the Overhead of Military and you seem completely full of crap to me!”

Aranea paled, looking around nervously. “Uh…”

“You’re just an insurrectionist. I can stomp you out easily. In here, you ghosts are so powerful, invincible, without death! But just a simple trip to another universe and you all fall apart! Any reality-based weapon makes quick work of you. Your rebellion could be quelled in an instant.”

“We’ve… We’ve got you as a hostage!” Aranea blurted. “They’d have to listen to us!”

“Do you think Yellow Diamond is one to get sentimental?” O’Neill laughed. “My Second would be elated to discover I kicked the bucket. Quite the promotion there.”

Aranea began to look around panicked. “We can’t do this… We can’t do this…”

A Vriska stepped into the light and punched Aranea across the face. “You fucking idiot. He’s stealing your Hope!”

“…Dammit,” O’Neill muttered.

“That… That is right… He is the Thief of Hope… God-tier or no he should still have abilities…” She took that information and tried to heal herself with it.

She gulped. “He’s still right though. H-”

Vriska punched her again. “Are you going to check out just like all the others!? The moment we get success or get close we just go ‘oops, sorry, not worth it!’ I thought you were better than that!”

“There’s a time to be cautious, Vriska, a-”

“Fuck that,” Vriska said, kicking Aranea in the stomach and cracking her knuckles. “We can take them. Screw all this bullshit. We’ve got an army of ghosts here, and we’ve got the element of surprise. With the luck me and my sisters have been gathering over the last few weeks, we’ll surely be able to beat these stupid odds.”

O’Neill started running through plans – but he realized the three of them currently had abysmal luck, which pretty much assured that any half-baked plan he came up with would fail. For all he knew the reason the Vriskas noticed he was stealing Hope was because his luck was so low.

…Wait a second. If his abilities worked like Vriska’s did, then he had a significant amount of Hope within him right now. The power of belief, purity, and holding out for the impossible. He was sure he could win here. He just needed to figure out how.

He was going to have to rely on a chance. He had no idea if the chance was determined by luck or belief here, but he was sure going to try.

So he leaned back and jumped onto Spades, screaming bloody murder.

He wished Jotaro was there to provide “NANI!?” commentary on this moment. There was no way anybody knew what he was doing. He wasn’t even entirely sure himself.

“What the hell!?” Spades shouted. Being tied up, he wasn’t able to fight O’Neill effectively – but O’Neill wasn’t exactly getting any hits in either.

What they were doing was being very distracting.

The Vriska and Aranea stared at them, bewildered expressions on their faces.

O’Neill believed that Feferi knew what to do.

And she did. One didn’t have to be lucky to use their inventory, after all. It was as simple as willing for the stored item to be in your hand…

Well, actually, it wasn’t. The concept of Sburb inventories was a mess, and no two players’ were exactly the same. Luckily the inner workings generally weren’t obvious since players knew how to use them. Vriskas kept objects inside of eight balls tucked away who-knows-where in their robes. Aradias had to access spiritual energies to produce their items. John had to deal with a hybrid computer logic system.

Feferi’s was something about cuttlefish tentacles that could become quite a tangle, but luckily she always kept a few items on top for easy access. She still had everything in it. With everyone distracted, she could make use of it…

She summoned the dimensional device into her tied-up hand. She was able to set it to one of the preset conditions – Equis Vitis – and dialed.

Unfortunately she was still unlucky. So instead of dialing anything normal, she dialed the middle of deep space.

O’Neill discovered that Skaia’s Dream did accept the myth of explosive decompression.

O’Neill, Spades, Feferi, Aranea, several Vriskas, and a few other ghosts were torn out of the interior of the alien structure and into deep space of Equis Vitis.

Aranea and Feferi had reality anchor bracelets – most the other ghosts did not. They started to fade the moment they entered the other universe. Aranea used her powers as a Sylph to keep their bodies together for a while longer – but it wouldn’t work forever.

“SPADES!” O’Neill yelled – the sound wouldn’t carry, but Spades saw his mouth move. “GET EVERYONE BACK IN!”

Spades, being a robot, had built-in rockets. Even tied up, he could still use them to travel through space. He figured it was probably in his best interests to save everyone from the cold, harsh realities of space. “Link hands!”

“I’m not go-” a Vriska began.

“I SAID LINK HANDS, BITCH!”

The Vriskas linked hands with the other ghosts. Spades grabbed O’Neill and Feferi, pulling the rest through the portal the hard way.

When they were back, Feferi allowed the portal to close.

“That… was too close…” Aranea said. “We…”

“Shut up, we lived,” a Vriska muttered. “Now, Feferi, since we apparently forgot earlier, please empty your Sylladex.”

“Um… no?” Feferi said, smiling innocently.

“I can tear that reality bracelet right off your skinny arm and toss you to the devouring emptiness of space! How would you like that!?”

“Yeah, you’re not going to have time.”

“Why the fuck not?”

Feferi held up her cell phone. “Because I just sent out a distress signal. Specifically the one that asks for military backup.”

A wormhole opened in the sky above them, brightening the blank interior of the tower for the first time. They could see the skies over Peixe through the portal.

They could also see a full contingent of Merodi troops and Meenah.

Meenah jumped down, Vrisko behind her. “ALL RIGHT WHO WANTS STABBING?! I’M READY FOR STABBING!”

The Merodi troops dropped down as well. O’Neill noticed Minna was one of the forward lieutenants. He shot her a wink – and she winked back. She was doing really well in there, working alongside great people.

Aranea put her hands up. “I surrender!”

“FUCK THAT!” a Vriska shouted, rolling her dice and getting all 8s. “We’re not going to let you rule us with your thick, pink blood anymore you fishfaces!”

Meenah pointed a dimensional device at her. “Ya wanna get dusted? ‘Cus I can totally do that for ya. Just ‘poof’, gone.”

The Vriska ground her teeth. “Fuck you…” She pulled out her own dimensional device.

Vrisko pulled out a gun and shot it out of her counterpart’s grasp. “You used a lot of luck in that transformation there. Might want to watch yourself.”

Another Vriska pulled out a dimensional device – but Minna had already fired a bullet to destroy that one. And one that was being pulled out right behind it. “F-freak!”

“The old enemy, enemy again…” another Vriska muttered, glaring at Minna. “I’m going to make y-”

Meenah stabbed that Vriska in the head. “Lay off will ya? I’m all for goin’ a few rounds, but I’d rather not have to deal with all the paperwork later, get me? So let’s make this easy on both of us and shove off. Mhm?”

The Vriska carefully removed the trident from her head, glaring. “…I get you.”

“Good! Glad we had this talk.” She cleared her throat, looking at the army around her. “So, I take it this is some kind of uprisin’ or somefin’?”

Aranea fell to her knees. “I’m sorry it was a mistake and we were foolish t-”

“Woah, Aranea, what eel got hold of you?”

“O’Neill stole her Hope,” Spades commented. “Her level of self-consciousness is painful.”

“Ah, I see. …Can’t say I’m surprised Aranea was runnin’ an uprisin’.” She extended a hand and pulled Aranea to her feet. “When are you gonna learn? The Peixes always wins, girl.”

“I just… I… What?”

“Yeah yeah.” She shoved Aranea to Vrisko. “Get her back to Peixe, have glowing beacon boy give her the stuff back. I’ll talk to her after that, figure out what the deal was.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “You’re not going to arrest her?”

“Talk to Maryam if you wanna learn about understandin’ troll weirdness. I’m sure as shell not explainin’ it.” She looked to Feferi. “Hey, nice to sea ya.”

“You came yourself!” Feferi ran and pulled Meenah into a hug.

“Ugh… That wasn’t a hug invitation, flounder!”

“Shut up.”

Meenah grunted. “Vrisko, help?”

“Oh, sorry, I’m busy attending to hopeless McSpider. I’ll have to get back to you.”

“Vrisko!”

Vrisko jumped out through the portal, dragging Aranea with her.

O’Neill smirked. “Well, good job team, we stopped an uprising.”

“We aren’t your team,” Spades grumbled.

“The uprising really wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Fef pointed out. “You were right.”

“Gee, way to make me feel bad while still technically complimenting me,” O’Neill deadpanned.

Feferi grinned. “Don’t mention it!”

“You have a cruel streak hidden in there, don’t you?”

Feferi’s eyes locked with O’Neill’s. “Don’t. Mention. It.”

O’Neill took a step back, concerned.

Meenah laughed. “Classic Feferi. C’mon minnows, I think I need to get you a reward or somefin’.”

Spades grunted. “Fine. I can stay for a reward.”

The reward turned out to be a fake feast made out of ghost food.

It was…

…Interesting-tasting.

~~~

Odanas, the great plant that grew across several worlds in a sort of hive-mind, shaping them for the better, was currently working with the Diamond Authority.

It was a momentous enough occasion that White Diamond left Homeworld – not Gem Vein, just her home planet. They went to a nearby world that Odanas had been transforming for them over the last few years. To that section of Odanas, it had felt like thousands of years due to a time dilation field, but the Diamonds had wanted the process sped up.

What had been a lifeless rock not too long ago was now completely green, glowing with Odanas’ verdant light.

White, Yellow, and Blue Diamond sat on the bridge of White Diamond’s ship, looking at the planet below. Steven Universe had not been invited by White’s request. This project had been conceived before they knew he existed, so he wasn’t going to be here. Blue and Yellow did not try to fight it for very long.

“Kindergarten installation has been completed,” Yellow Diamond said, receiving a report from the planet. “They’ve already made the compression matrix in the world’s core.”

“How much longer until it’s complete?”

“A couple minutes for us,” Yellow Diamond said, standing up. “They will disable the time dilation field the moment they are done.”

White Diamond said nothing – but kept a serene smile on her glowing face. She watched the planet as the vastly improved Kindergarten set to work.

In order to create Gems, biological life had to be absorbed. Odanas had gladly offered herself to be used for this special occasion, her only issue being the strange things the time dilation did to her overall hive mind. But she had pulled through, and was ready to cut off this branch to create new Gem life. Usually, as life was absorbed, Gems would come out of the planet one at a time until millions of Gems had emerged.

This world was different. Only one Gem was being made.

In the time dilation field, the planet was green one moment, then completely dead and brown the next. In reality this process took several months to complete – the advantages of temporal technology. In the core of the world, the most advanced Gem birthing center ever created burst with life. The core of the world shattered, exploding the planet. Eventually the loose bits of crust and mantle would drift back together and form a new world – but at the moment, it was a loose cloud of dust.

The time dilation ended. A quick teleportation spell summoned the newly created Gem into White Diamond’s ship.

She was a brilliant, deep red – almost blood red. The Gem sparked with powers of magic beyond standard Gem kind, borrowed from worlds like Equis and Skaia’s Dream, giving the living crystal before them a truly multiversal nature.

The Gem was cut in a Diamond shape.

The Red Diamond activated, generating for herself a fully humanoid body – slightly taller than Blue and Yellow, but thinner in form. The gemstone took its position on her back as a simple coat of sparkling energy formed around her. The tips of her fingers sparkled with magical energy, and her eyes held within them countless stars.

White Diamond looked down on her with a smile. “Hello, Red. Welcome to the Gem Vein.”

Red looked up at White Diamond and blinked, wordless.

“You’re a very special individual, Red. Very special indeed… You represent a new era…”

~~~

Corona continued to work the Shaping Mechanism.

Four years in. She had taken breaks from time to time, gone on a few adventures with her friends, but for the most part she stuck herself within the Shaping Mechanism, becoming an absolute expert on how it worked and what it did. She continued tearing the Congeries apart, returning everything she could to its rightful place in the cosmos. She had made serious progress, but the centuries of Skarn’s shaping wouldn’t be undone overnight. It was a long project she had in front of her.

Good thing she literally had eternity to do it.

She flicked fingers across her many magical circles – having opted to use an interface created by Raging Sights rather than just going along with the touch-and-act interface provided by the Mechanism itself. She floated in the middle of the Shaping Mechanism control room, her red magic on every surface.

She scrolled her fingers across a particular universe – and froze.

She had seen many horrible things that Skarn had created. Many, many, horrors built on the torment of human minds and souls. Add Arthon’s decidedly more disturbing and sadistic creations to the list, and she had seen enough to drive most people mad.

What she had just found was nothing like that. It wasn’t even as bad as some of them, visually speaking. But it appeared to be pure evil.

What got her was that Skarn hadn’t shaped it.

As far as the Shaping Mechanism told her, this universe in the Congeries was almost completely untouched. It was a universe that brought as many souls to it as it could. It didn’t matter if they were good, evil, holy, or impure; every soul it could find, it grabbed hold of. It stripped them of any connection to their bodies or sensation. Then it took their raw souls and pumped as much pure pain into them as it possibly could. Because the body was gone, there were no biological limitations to keep the pain at bay – no passing out, no nerve damage, nothing. The pain would continue at maximum for eternity, and the pure souls could never get used to it.

They existed alone in eternal bubbles of pain. There was no respite.

Corona gave them respite – destroying the universe without so much as a second thought. There would be no saving those minds from what they’d experienced. It was a universe designed as a Hell, clearly, except there wasn’t any sort of criteria for being sent somewhere else.

It had taken everyone.

“Why?” Corona asked herself. “Why does this exist!? Who would write that!?”

No answer was forthcoming, just like always when she dealt with these sorts of horrors. Every time she had to destroy a world she just sat in the Shaping Mechanism’s room, haunted by the existence of such things.

She had no idea how it was constructed. Did it just exist because a Prophet said it did? Did one of the ancient Universe Generators churn it out with random settings? Did some society make it by accident? Was it custom-built? Could it be considered natural?

Questions that would never be answered.

Just more to add to the pile of things that tore at the back of Corona’s mind.

109 - The Big Gs

Author's Note

Disclaimer:
The following chapter contains heavy religious themes that will likely offend both the religious and irreligious. I even offended myself a few times while writing this thing.
If that's not your cup of tea, you may want to skip this chapter.
This isn't to say it's not important to the story: it reveals a few things about some Class 1 societies. Make your own judgment.

109 - The Big Gs

Year 13

Rev trotted along the streets of Ponyville, wrapping up her shopping for the day. Luna was lowering the sun, a good indication that Rev should get back home and actually have some dinner. She was thinking of telling the magi-pan to cook her up some shrimp alfredo or something similar.

She headed straight home – but she didn’t arrive quickly. Something caught her eye.

A street preacher. He wore simple black clothes, devoid of any religious apparel – not even a necklace, like what was around Rev’s neck. Nobody was listening to the words he was shouting – so Rev decided to pause and listen.

“…the raging heat found within the bowels of Hell call to every soul! Every being in this city is flawed – have you lied to a friend? Have you cheated on your significant other? Have you harbored hate toward another person? Have you lied? All of you offer excuses as to why these things are pardoned – or fill you with eternal, burdensome guilt. A guilt trying to tell you what the price for your sins are!”

Rev fixed him with a warm smile. He noticed her, but kept preaching to the crowd – he probably saw her necklace. “The ultimate creator of all, God, sees your guilt, your pain, and your sin. He warms the fire for your ignorant soul, ready to serve justice upon you for what you’ve done! You think you are safe because you compare yourself to other men and ponies, but they are a horrible master! Compared to the requirement of perfection, you are nothing! Nothing! You think your charity will outweigh your selfish thoughts, the times you cheated, or all the lies you’ve told to avoid obligations? Or what about your thoughts? Any blemish damns your soul to the fire!”

Rev sighed – most of the sermon was like this. After about five minutes of reiterating the same points, Rev put a hoof on his shoulder. “Hey. You’re not going to get many people like that, not here anyway.”

“…The message needs to be spoken.”

Rev nodded. “The Jealous side of the Lord certainly needs to be known, and in certain cultures and eras that side is what draws people. But this is a land of friendship and harmony. If you want to draw people, focus on the grace, forgiveness, and love of God.”

The preacher looked at her. “People are getting too soft and comfortable in those interpretations. Our lives are not meant to be simple or relaxed. Devotion to grace prompts sin in unprecedented amounts.”

Rev shook her head. “Not as often as you might think. Serious believers take grace as a gift, and don’t squander it.”

“But what of the others?”

“As I said, there are some that need to hear your message.” She looked around at the passerby not paying him any attention. “They won’t be found here. ‘Fire and Brimstone’ tends to be laughed out, I’m sorry to say.”

The man sighed. “…It seems you are right. But I have been called here by my church, and I shall not give in.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Rev said. “But perhaps you should try a different strategy. I’ve got a church here – the big one rising over the houses over there. You could drop by tomorrow morning. I’ve actually got plans to preach on presenting oneself to others. I’d be willing to talk to you after, give you some tips on how to get to the people here.”

The man smiled. “I would appreciate that, miss…?”

“Reverend Starlight Glimmer, but everyone just calls me Rev.”

“I’m Father Yertle Reimann.” He shook her hoof. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I will certainly be at your church tomorrow.”

Rev smiled. “Glad to hear it. I’d suggest getting some sleep though – it’s a little early. Starts at nine.”

“That will be no issue. Thank you for the invitation, sister.”

“And thank you for your service, brother,” Rev said with a bow. They went their separate ways.

Rev went home and cooked herself up some alfredo. She lived alone with her books on scripture and magic, including no small number of tomes that discussed the relation between the two. As a unicorn it was a topic that was very important to her, perhaps one she preached about a bit too much.

She sat down to eat and sent off a quick prayer of thanks before digging in.

Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them.

She put her fork down and put a hoof to her head, letting out a deep sigh. She was going to have to be vigilant tomorrow. Father Reimann wasn’t going to be a good influence on her congregation. She just needed to keep him from talking to them.

~~~

Flutterfree met up with Rev as they were walking to the church. “Hey!” Eve had decided to come along that day. The Overhead didn’t show up all that often, but her curiosity got the better of her every now and then.

“Hey,” Rev said, giving Flutterfree a smile.

“Concerns about today’s service?” Flutterfree asked, having read Rev’s face.

Rev nodded. “I invited a street preacher to the congregation so I could help him. Realized later he was either a false prophet, or would bring one about. I’m still going to try to help him, but I can’t let him speak to the congregation. Hopefully he won’t try and I’ll be able to figure out exactly what his beliefs are in a one-on-one session.”

“Oh. I hope you get through to him, then.”

“Me too. I-”

They rounded the corner and saw a crowd congregated outside the church.

“Crap,” Rev muttered, facehoofing. She made a quick prayer asking for the wisdom and grace required to handle what she was sure would be a difficult situation. She, Flutterfree, and Eve wormed their way through the crowd – the people and ponies within recognizing Rev and letting her through without a fuss. They soon arrived at the front.

Father Reimann was standing at the top of the church’s steps, preaching.

To Rev’s surprise, he wasn’t engaging in ‘Fire and Brimstone’ preaching. He had seemingly changed his tone overnight to one that was more caring, understanding, and empathetic.

“God is love,” Reimann quoted, holding up a Bible. “God is also everything that is truly good – he exemplifies all the Elements of Harmony, as well as many more traits. God knows everything he could possibly want to know. God understands all your problems, all the evil in the world, and the reasons behind everything. God listens to everything you ask of him, even if our sinful souls do not ask with pure intentions, he still hears. God is beauty…”

“He seems fine so far,” Flutterfree said. “Am I missing something subtle?”

“If you are I’m missing it too,” Rev said, narrowing her eyes. “But this wasn’t how he was preaching yesterday. If he could always preach like this he wouldn’t have needed my help, which is suspicious.”

Flutterfree nodded, returning her attention to him.

“…and most of you, I understand, are believers. Many of you have a lingering doubt in the back of your mind – do I really believe in the right God? You are all aware there are many different denominations, and in fact your beliefs within this church are diverse. Can one lose salvation? Is God kind and forgiving, or judgmental and angry? Is He both? But of what combination? How can anyone say they believe in God if they don’t know who he is?”

Rev narrowed her eyes. His next line better be about faith.

“That’s the great mystery of our faith – we don’t have to understand who God is, exactly. We just believe in him and trust that, whatever He truly is, He is perfectly good. The perfect exemplification of love, harmony, and justice – concepts we cannot comprehend in a perfect manner, because we are fallen. But we are Saved regardless, so long as we put our faith in Him.”

Eve looked at Rev, raising an incredulous eyebrow.

Rev allowed herself to smile. “That’s actually a pretty good point,” she whispered.

“The Scriptures still give us hints to exactly who God is. He is the will of existence-”

There it is. Rev stopped him, clearing her throat. “You mean the will behind existence, right?”

“Why is such a minor semantic important?”

“Because it sneaks a highly dangerous thought into a congregation, generally designed to empower the being known as the Great Will.”

For a split second, annoyance appeared on Father Reimann’s features. “Is it really so heretical to believe God is the will of existence?”

“Actually, yes, because God is not the multiverse, He exists completely separate and independent of it. If existence itself had a will, it wouldn’t be God’s, it would be one of His creations.”

“Are you certain this is not just a different interpretation of our holy Book, Reverend? After all, I did just talk of the great mystery of our faith. We are not required to understand what God is, beyond him being the Creator and sending his son for our sins.”

“You are right,” Rev said. “It probably doesn’t matter for our salvation that little detail. There are people who pick and choose verses out of the Bible. I don’t personally agree with that, but I’m certain they’re still saved in most cases. It’s just that the Great Will is a Class 1 entity that feeds off belief and creates idols for people to worship without them realizing it! It creates ‘gods’ based on the faulty perceptions of us sinful, damaged creatures – gods that we would be certain are real, because they were crafted on what we believe. That cannot be God.”

“How can you be so certain of that?”

“God is perfect. Our faulty perceptions never are, not even averaged out.”

“Are you trying to undermine the Will of God?”

“No,” Rev said. “I’m trying to stop the beliefs of all these people from being manipulated.”

Father Reimann glared at her.

“I’m still willing to help you – I can take you to the files the government has on the Great Will. Show you what you are truly serving.”

“I will not be led astray by your lies,” Father Reimann said. He walked down the steps and left.

Rev sighed as he left. “Okay everyone! Today’s service is going to be off the cuff.”

“…You’re still doing a service?” Eve asked, blinking.

“Of course. I have to clear up what exactly happened there.” Rev smiled warmly. “It’s going to be a lot about false teaching and the power of belief in the multiverse.”

~~~

Rev and Flutterfree were having lunch later that day. It was daisy sandwiches at a diner.

“And that’s the day Eve decides to come over,” Flutterfree muttered. “A service she wasn’t going to get much out of. Mmf…”

Rev smiled. “Maybe she was meant to be there. She may have to defend us against the Great Will one day.”

“But I wanted her to hear about presentation and what it means for us…” Flutterfree stared at her plate.

“You’ve got plenty of time. And… You do have to accept that not everyone will accept it, no matter how much you want.”

Flutterfree stared at her plate, sighing. “Yeah… I know.” She shook her head. “How about talking about something else. You talked a lot about belief in the sermon – but what exactly is the Great Will? And how do you know so much about… it?”

Rev looked down at her plate, grimacing. “…I’m going to need a drink if I’m going to tell this story.” She waved down a waiter and placed an order for some cider. She let out a deep sigh. “So… you know I was in the Nexus with the Dark Tower. I escaped and ended up in the ‘north’ side of the E-Sphere. I found a church who accepted me as one of their own and I decided I wasn’t going to become one of the multiversal travelers I had seen in the Nexus. I was going to settle down, make a new home for myself, and continue preaching the Word.

“I was foolish. I felt like I belonged so much that I forgot to question things. My teachings were seen as something worthwhile, so I rose through the ranks of the clergy. As I rose, I attended more meetings, meetings where the fellow pastors and I discussed theology and the like. When I got high enough to be seriously considered, things became… weird.

“I began to notice that a few odd doctrines were being pushed. Pure belief over anything else – the correctness of that belief seemed to be meaningless. Blind faith was encouraged. Which, honestly, is a problem with a lot of churches, but it wasn’t the only thing. Seemingly contradictory to the blind faith was the push to believe in ‘the will of existence’. I decided that, even though I didn’t agree with it, it was a relatively harmless teaching. I would argue against it… but only behind closed doors.”

Rev bit her lip in shame. “I… didn’t have the gall or the strength to talk about it in public. I should have risked my standing for the sake of the people, should have listened to the feeling tearing at my gut… but I didn’t. I just let it pass. Biggest mistake of my life after making that equality village.”

“What happened?” Flutterfree asked.

“Enough people in that universe believed existence had a will. It didn’t matter what religion they were part of – or even if they had a defined religion – the fact is they believed the universe had a will. So the Great Will was able to move into that universe and feed off their belief – or their ‘observation’ as I hear it’s called in further indoctrinated worlds. And suddenly all the belief of the world became form – a bit like the gods of the Discworld, but generally only with larger-scale beliefs. I let it take over that universe uncontested.”

“…So what does the Great Will actually do?”

Rev put her hooves together. “The Great Will is a force of belief – it really is the ‘will of existence’, in a sense. In any universe it is present, it will latch on to the most commonly held beliefs of the people there and make them true – or as true as they can be, since beliefs are often contradictory. Within Great Will space, different pantheons exist side by side along with eldritch horrors and forces as close to God as you can get. These beliefs give the Great Will power, but also divide it into many facets. They are also able to retroactively act on the universe so they’ve always been true. If a universe was created by an ancient Weaver machine, its history can be altered by the Great Will to include creation by whatever Creation story the people believe the most. It takes a lie and makes it as true as possible.”

“It creates a false God.”

“It creates every kind of false God,” Rev said. “The Great Will is essentially the father of all idolatry. Sure, if you believed in a general pantheon, the Great Will may seem amazing. But the Great Will cannot create God no matter how much it tries. What it creates is what people believe God is, and because we can’t know fully what God is…”

“It gets it wrong.”

“Very wrong,” Rev said, taking a drink. “The general aspect of the Great Will that represents ‘God’ takes the form of a mask. There are many colors that represent different interpretations, but the most common and powerful is the golden one. The ‘God’ of Law. Even if people accept that God is gracious, loving, caring, etcetera, they still generally believe, deep down, that they have to do something for God’s favor. They aren’t able to let themselves completely into God’s hands, and believe they still have some merit – that they must prove themselves by keeping up an internal Law of some sort. And thus, we get the Yellow Head. Because we’re so selfish we can’t admit we’re powerless, the main ‘God’ in Great Will universes is… controlling, vindictive, jealous, wrathful, and strict. The kinder, gentler aspects are severely lessened.”

“…You met this Yellow Head, didn’t you?”

Rev nodded slowly. “I did. He was… he wasn’t evil. He was a decidedly good being. But not perfect. Not worthy of worship – even though he believed he was because everyone else believed it.” She looked into the distance. “I worry for the souls of people in those universes. How can they be saved if, no matter what they believe, an idol is erected to hinder them? I comfort myself that saying so long as they believe in the true God, it doesn’t matter what stands between them. But I can’t be sure. The Bible doesn’t say anything about beings that feed off belief.”

Flutterfree put a wing on Rev. “Hey… You stopped them from getting to this universe.”

“Did I?” Rev asked. “I stopped one preacher. The idea that existence has a will isn’t that farfetched. Currently, most Merodi believe something close to that, but they place their beliefs within the Dark Tower – the one thing in this multiverse the Great Will cannot overrule.” She frowned. “And it’s not just through belief in the Will that the Great Will can spread. It slowly moves out on its own, feeding off regular belief. It’s just that the Great Will’s true priests seek to spread it further and further, aiding their ‘God’.”

“…Do you know what the Great Will as a whole is like?” Flutterfree asked.

Rev shook her head. “I’ve only spoken to a few of its aspects in my travels. I have no idea if anyone’s talked to the being as a whole before. But the other Class 1 societies recognize it as a single being that controls an entire nation, so…” she sighed, taking another drink. “People think the literal devils and hells are the worst things in the multiverse. I lose much more sleep over the Great Will. A lie that naturally becomes your personal truth. It’s essentially the living, breathing exemplification of subjectivity!”

“And we can’t do anything about it.”

“No,” Rev said with a frown. “Just like we can’t do anything to any of the other Class 1s. The rise and fall of empires is God’s concern, not ours.” Rev shook her head. “There’s the irony for you.”

“Hm?”

“We are called to be the holy, special people, holding the most important message to existence. And yet we aren’t meant to change history. The first shall be last, the last shall be first. If anyone’s going to eventually end the Great Will… It won’t be us true believers. We’ll just sit in the background.” She smirked. “It matters so much to us. But to the world, we are just another group that sits back while the giants clash above. …We were never meant to be giants.”

“And when we are…”

“We become the evil priest trope,” Rev said, nodding slowly. “Which is… All too common. …Ka loves to corrupt what is pure and good. Everywhere. It’s so difficult to stand against that. It’s just… Gah.” She rammed her head into the table. “I know I can’t do anything. I keep praying, but I want to do something about it. Heh. Guess I’m guilty of pride just like everyone else…”

A small, black sphere fell onto the table in front of them. It exploded, showering the two of them in sleep dust. Flutterfree fell back instantly – but Rev had a thin coating of divine energy that protected her.

She stood up, ready to take out the attackers – but she, Flutterfree, and the table were teleported away. They appeared inside a bright room in front of an altar with a cross behind it.

“Ponyfeathers,” Rev muttered, lighting her horn. “Listen here, you’re going to take us back right now!”

There was no response. The cross flashed white and her vision blurred to nothing.

~~~

Eve threw open the door to my office. “Where’s Flutterfree!?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Did you come to me first, or…?”

“I tracked her down to the café where she was having lunch with Rev and then vanished.”

“Right, just making sure.” I set my notebook down and folded my hooves. “They’ve been kidnapped by a group of Willst Radicals.”

“What?”

“Crazy servants of the Great Will,” I explained. “Yes, the Class 1 society, or more accurately being, the one that feeds off belief and creates false truth. The living paradox. The most reclusive of all Class 1 societies.”

“I remember that much,” Eve muttered.

“They might not,” I pointed out. “Even if they did just get a huge explanation from Rev about the whole thing.”

“Right, so, how do we get them back?”

I shrugged. “What’s your instinct tell you?”

“Twilence, I’m not in the mood for games right now!”

“They’re safe,” I assured her.

“…Fine. My instinct tells me to march up to our higher allies and demand an audience with the Great Will.”

“Won’t work. The Great Will is extremely reclusive, as I said.” I pursed my lips. “You might get an audience with one of its facets after several days. It’s hard to get it to talk. Its appearance at the Green Sun Trial was a rare event.”

Eve furrowed her brow. “Then we trace them through prophecy and take them back and… that won’t work because we’re working against priest-types.”

I nodded.

“So we need help. Help from something that could go against the Great Will…” She blinked. “Twilence, the Abstracts have the One Above All, right?”

“Right.”

“Do you think he could do something?”

“Definitely. If you could get an audience with him,” I said. “Also unlikely.”

“But it’s not that hard to grab the attention of the Living Tribunal,” Eve said, smirking. “And he can pass on a message to the One Above All.”

I smirked. “And you’ve already got a plan.”

“Let’s set the gods off on each other.”

“I should inform you that this isn’t going to go as you expect it to.”

“Are you going to tell me not to do it?”

I considered this. “…No. We do need to go.”

“I’ve got a dimensional device with Earth MC’s name on it. Let’s go.”

~~~

Rev and Flutterfree came to – sitting in comfortable chairs. They were next to each other in the front row of a church. In front of them there was a human preacher on a podium, a glowing cross around his neck.

He was talking about the will of God, but neither Flutterfree nor Rev were listening.

Rev tried to create a telepathic link to Flutterfree, but found that her magic was inhibited. Rev took a quick look at Flutterfree, confirming the presence of red eyes and fangs, telling her Lolo was still working. Rev felt her own divine esoteric power within her, and was willing to bet Flutterfree’s power as the Page of Rage was still active – though it appeared that her marble covers had been affixed to her wingtip knives with some kind of adhesive.

She looked around. They were not the only ones sitting in the front row. To Fluttershy’s side there was an energy being that looked like he was made of smoke, while Rev’s side had a human man with brown hair and a beard. The man smiled back at her when she glanced at him, but Rev couldn’t take that to mean he was really a friend. For all she knew he was there to keep tabs on them. …Or he could be just like them.

Rev tried to think of what to do. Given Flutterfree’s thousand-yard-stare, she had probably already begun spreading Lolo out in every direction to find out everything she could. Nobody seemed to notice it, so that was good. But what could Rev do? She needed to get them out of this place that was… well apparently a church for those who didn’t want to listen or were a problem for the Great Will. Basically a reeducation facility.

The thought of such a facility made her want to throw up. It was disgusting.

…She eventually realized the best thing she could do was pray. After that, examine with extreme scrutiny what the preacher was talking about.

“God’s will is our will, if we let it. The mark of a true believer is one who surrenders themselves up completely to God, caring not if their decisions are their own any longer. We must become one in our beliefs for this to be true…”

There it was again. A kernel of truth, mixed with just the right amount of subliminal facts to work for the Great Will. Though she wondered why that was needed – if they were in a Great Will universe, the Great Will couldn’t be removed. It wouldn’t care if they thought existence had a will or not. …This place was probably run completely by the priests with little, if any, involvement from their god.

It was hypocrisy, even for them.

“…and remember, we are all children of God, and we must strive forward with our faith, and not our minds.”

Pharisee. Rev thought, steaming inwardly.

“Let us close in prayer.”

There was a short prayer about ‘thy will be done’. Then they were told to make their way to dinner.

Rev and Flutterfree huddled together, following the crowd but trying not to be so close that their whispers would be heard. The church they were in was homey, well lit, and decorated with beautiful paintings that featured Bible verses. The carpet was clean and everything was welcoming.

Except the fact that they had been placed here against their will.

“Reeducation camp,” Rev whispered to Flutterfree. “See anything… dangerous?”

“No,” Flutterfree whispered back. “There are magic crystals inside the walls though. Some are magic inhibitors. Some are… something else. I’m not sure what they are.”

“Describe them.”

“White, flashing, keyed to people walking by…”

Rev let out a hiss. “Those are either surveillance… Or, more likely, brainwashers.”

“Brainw-”

“Hey, you’re the new girls!” the man who had been sitting next to them said, walking up to them. “I’m Joshua!”

“Oh. Hi,” Rev deadpanned. “Are you here to spy on us and report back to the boss?”

“Rev…” Flutterfree said, holding up a wing. “Forgive her, she’s had a bad day. I’m Flutterfree.”

Joshua shook her hoof. “Glad to see someone else new here – I’ve been waiting for someone to show up since I got here!”

“What are you here for?” Flutterfree asked.

“I just heard about the place, decided to check it out with my own eyes. Definitely not what you would expect. You?”

Chased one of the priests out of my church, Rev thought. “Made a priest upset, so we got sent here.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah. Do you know how to get out of here, by chance?”

Joshua nodded. “Just wait and it will happen eventually. People leave all the time after it’s been determined they’ve ‘graduated’. Takes anywhere from a week to a couple months.”

Brainwashing, definitely, Rev confirmed. “So… What do we do here besides listen to sermons?”

Joshua smiled. “We eat! The dining hall is right this way – expect lots of good food!” He led them through the halls to a large room filled with blue tables. It was a traditional cafeteria complete with casseroles, salads, and fresh fruit.

Flutterfree stared at the apples. “…How many can I have?”

“It’s a buffet, so as much as you want without being gluttonous,” Joshua said. A minute later they were sitting at a table. Rev had taken a salad, Joshua had gotten a little bit of everything, and Flutterfree had a plate piled as high as she could manage with apples. She started draining them of their juices one by one.

Joshua watched her devour them. “…Amazing.”

Flutterfree smiled warmly. “That’s not most people’s reactions.”

“I’m not most people,” Joshua said, sitting back.

“Yeah, you came here by choice,” Rev said. “Surely you knew what they did here.”

Joshua nodded. “Yep.” He wasn’t forthcoming with further information.

An awkward silence fell over the group.

Joshua leaned forward. “Well, not talking just won’t do. Tell me about yourselves.”

Flutterfree did most of the talking for the next few minutes. They discovered that Joshua knew about the multiverse, and that most of the people in this church did as well. Flutterfree described her life as an explorer, carefully leaving out Rev’s occupation from the conversation so Joshua wouldn’t ask uncomfortable questions about a Reverend in a reeducation facility.

“You’ve had an active life,” Joshua noted. “Been through a lot. The fact that you’re still here and smiling is a testament to your strength.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Thank you. I do think I’ve become a little distant as time marches on… I’m working on keeping myself grounded though. Rev helps with that.”

Rev smiled. “Yeah. What about you, Joshua?”

“Well, I grew up as a carpenter a-” he saw the clock. “Ah, sadly it appears that dinner is over. It’s time for nightly prayers and then… well you’re supposed to go to sleep, but there’s nothing really enforcing it.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “It’s like we’re kids again.”

“In many ways.” He stood up. “Nightly prayers are done in the dorms, I’ll take you there.”

“That’d be wonderful.”

He led them through the halls to a hallway that split in two – one to the men’s and one to the women’s. “Non-gendered races go in that door,” Joshua said, pointing at a red door further to the left. Across from the red door was a broom closet – which Joshua opened.

“Huh?” Rev said, cocking her head.

“I’m cleaning out here tonight,” Joshua said with a smile. “Don’t worry about me. Just get some rest. Don’t forget to engage in the prayer though, they’ll know if you don’t.”

“Of course they will,” Rev said with a sigh. “Thanks for showing us around. Keep your head up and your ears open, Joshua, and don’t forget to think about everything.”

Joshua smiled. “I never stop thinking.”

“I hope that’s true,” Rev said, heading off toward the women’s dorms. Flutterfree paused to give Joshua a hug and followed her. They entered a dimmed room lined with beds. Roughly half the beds currently had women kneeling at their feet, allowing the starlight from the windows to give them a faint spotlight.

Flutterfree and Rev chose some empty beds near the edge of the hall and kneeled down – but not to the Great Will.

Rev smirked. Hey, Great Will? Just want you to know, this isn’t for you. So don’t you dare try anything. …Lord, these people need your help to know the true you, not some lie that’s forced onto them by horrendous magic. I implore you to free them of this curse that is so much worse than the simple existence of the Great Will. You created us with a will of our own so we could choose you, not that we could be forced into serving you. Please, do not let the heretical acts of this place defy your intentions.

I pray for the confused priests who run this place, that they may see the light and understand what they’ve done. I pray for the people already indoctrinated, that they are still able to learn who you are. I pray for those of us still here, calling out for you to save us. My voice included.

I pray for those back home worried for us, that they will find their strength. I pray for my congregation, that they not stray from you….

…I ask forgiveness. I’ve been short today, engaged in hopelessness, and allowed my thoughts to get the better of me on more than one occasion. I’ve been angry with people I had no right to be angry with, and I gave in to pride once again.

…I ask for me and Flutterfree to be freed from this place, so we may return home.

I… I also pray for the Great Will itself, that it may understand that you are real, and that it would understand what it is doing to everyone. None are beyond your redemption, after all.

Amen.

Rev opened her eyes – and saw a tall woman in purple robes standing over them. “The headmaster would like to see you two.”

Rev put on a smile. “Of course. I was wondering when this would happen.”

“I guess we needed to see some of the place first,” Flutterfree said, ruffling her feathers.

They left the women’s dorms, passing the still-sweeping Joshua. He smiled and waved at them, wishing them luck with a thumbs up. Flutterfree gave him one in return with her wings, while Rev shot him a friendly wink.

…She realized she felt significantly better. Was that because she had taken a spiritual moment, or was the brainwashing worming its way into her?

They were taken into a simple office. There was a wooden desk, a couple chairs, a nice bookshelf lined with titles, and a bearded man sitting over an open Bible. He wasn’t looking at it – he as looking at them. “Flutterfree, Reverend Glimmer, come on in.”

They did and took their seats.

He leaned in, folding his hands together. “Those were some very interesting prayers you had there.”

~~~

Doctor Strange raised his eyebrows. “You want to talk to the Living Tribunal?”

“Yes,” Eve said. I nodded in confirmation. We were standing in Earth MC’s Avengers headquarters, at a table with only Doctor Strange.

“He doesn’t like to be disturbed.”

“He can spare a few minutes to listen to a couple of purple alicorns,” I said. “It’s not like bending time is beyond him. He’s a big guy with a lot of power and a lot more time than he gives us credit for.”

Doctor Strange shrugged. “I suppose it is your funeral. How do you plan to contact him? Our Infinity Gauntlet isn’t easy to obtain, a-”

“I’ll write a post-it note,” I said. “We were just talking to you so we could get the right opportunity to do it. Ahem.” I summoned a post it note and wrote a single sentence on it. The Living Tribunal noticed that the bearer of the Eye of Rhyme wanted an audience.

I smirked. “Do you want to know the best part about this? Even if this use of my power isn’t accepted, he’ll still detect that someone tried to write him into doing something, and he’ll investigate a-”

Eve and myself appeared in a vast white expanse. The tremendous golden form of the Living Tribunal sat in front of us, the glowing power in the center of his chest blinding us for a moment. His three-faceted floating head examined us closely. “That was a clever trick, Twilence.”

“Been waiting to use it on you,” I admitted. “I had a reason. Figured I might as well.”

“You are forgiven, though I would appreciate it if you refrained from doing so in the future.”

“No promises. Don’t know what’s coming.”

“No one does. The end of certainty approaches.”

“Wait, you don’t even know?” Eve asked, blinking. “What in the name of the Tower is going to happen in sixty years!?”

“If you find out, you would be well rewarded for telling us,” the Living Tribunal said. “As of now, there is no entity in the multiverse that knows. That we are aware of.”

“Yeesh.”

“We are not here to discuss that. We are here to discuss your predicament.”

“Right.” Eve ruffled her wings. “Priests of the Great Will have taken some of our people. And upon realizing we were rather powerless to do anything about it, we decided to seek out help from someone who might be able to do something. That would be you. …And you already knew all of this before you even started talking to us.”

“Correct. And a decision has already been made.”

“And…?”

“I regret to inform you that I do not have the authority to do anything in Great Will space. We have a treaty that prevents either of us from interacting with each other in a universe owned by either party.”

“Ponyfeathers,” Eve muttered. “Tribunal, my friends are trapped, I-”

“This does not mean your cause is lost,” the Living Tribunal said. “The treaty does not apply to the highest mind of the Great Will or The One Above All, since They refuse to limit Themselves in such ways most often. I will bring up your case with The One Above All since it deals directly with His concerns. You have my word.”

“…And we won’t get to know if he listened or not,” Eve said.

I nodded slowly. “The One Above All does not let himself be… examined. Or be predictable.”

“Do you have any other suggestions?” Eve asked. “Can we do anything?”

“Unless you can find the exact aspect of the Great Will responsible for these radicals, it seems unlikely you will be able to influence the events. The Great Will’s highest mind is the only one who could tell you for certain which aspect is responsible, and It will never speak to you. It has rarely spoken to me.”

Eve sighed. “Okay. Could you get an audience?”

“No. The last time I had one, It made it very clear I wasn’t welcome back. The Structure of the Great Will and the Fluidity of the Abstracts does not mix well.”

“Rigid belief and abstract concepts…” I mused. “Two sides of the same coin. Two perceptions of higher power.”

“And likely both mere shadows of the truth.”

And then the two of them were back in front of Doctor Strange.

“Well…?”

“He wasn't mad,” Eve said, sighing. “But we didn’t really accomplish anything either.”

“...I wish I could do more.”

Eve nodded slowly. “Yeah. Me too.”

~~~

“You were listening to our prayers!?” Rev blurted. “That’s supposed to be private! Don’t you remember the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector?”

“That is for boastful praying, Reverend,” the headmaster said, scratching his beard. “You were not being boastful. Quite the opposite, really, you were showing compassion for even your enemies, and repentance for your short actions.”

“It’s an invasion of privacy.”

“In our installation it is important.” The headmaster raised a hand. “How are we to know if a visitor has truly come to God or not?”

“Just check your brainwashing crystals, I’m sure that’ll tell you.”

The headmaster raised an eyebrow. “I’m curious how you found out about those without your blasphemous magic, but it matters not. I am simply here to discuss the merits of our institution with you. Not a single person leaves here without becoming a believer. Shouldn’t that make you happy? More saved people.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Rev muttered. “The whole point of there being evil was so we could have a choice. So we weren’t robots that just served God, but so we were people. We had to be able to choose something that wasn’t Him, and evil provided an avenue for that to make consistent sense. If you go and start brainwashing you remove the choice!”

“Ah, but if we just wanted to brainwash, we could use instant control.” The headmaster pulled a small white crystal out of his jacket. “This is not a standard brainwashing device. It is a slow worker, designed to nag at a mind over the course of several weeks. It never truly forces anyone to make a choice. But with the right signals, events, and moments, anyone can be changed to believe. They still make their own choice, Reverend. There are a few cases of people who could not be saved by this method, but they are few and far between.”

“You don’t see a problem with that?!” Flutterfree blurted. “That’s not honest! That’s controlling!”

“The ends justify the means. The horrible acts committed on this Earth mean nothing compared to the fate of the eternal soul. I would end existence in an instant if it meant everyone were to be saved.”

“We are not called to do evil for the sake of good,” Rev said. “We are called to be holy paragons.”

“And I will gladly accept my punishment. But they come to the Truth through this place.”

Rev shook her head. “God doesn’t overwrite people!”

“Doesn’t He?” the headmaster asked. “What of all those convinced not by words or faith, but by undeniable miracles? Paul, for instance. A man with a powerful desire to persecute, turned into perhaps the greatest disciple because of one moment.”

“You aren’t God,” Rev pointed out. “You can’t reveal ‘yourself’ to anyone and make them believe. You have to hide behind a smokescreen.”

“I’m rather open about what I do here,” the headmaster said. “You go in an unbeliever or someone who is lost in heresy, and you come out a true child of God. People often know it’s all a ruse, all a lie, but they’re still better off in the end for it.”

Rev opened her mouth to respond, but closed it, the gears turning in her head.

The headmaster smiled. “You can’t think of a real objection to it, can you? I’m willing to suffer the punishment for my sins, all for the sake of bringing everyone forcefully to the truth so they may be saved. It’s abhorrently evil, but they are truly who they need to be.”

Flutterfree glared at him. “It’s not right.”

“How is it not? It’s essentially just an accelerated version of the family. You’re exposed to only one truth so you’re predisposed to believe it. It’s a more potent form of the persuasive sermon.”

“There’s a line you’ve crossed!” Flutterfree shouted. “You’re using false pretenses! Lies! It ruins the meaning that’s supposed to be there!”

“And that’s where we disagree.”

“Conversion is not a factory procedure,” Rev spat. “You aren’t a product.”

“I am treating them precisely as I would like to be treated. If I am wrong in any way, I wish to be forcefully corrected.”

“But you don’t think you’re wrong and won’t subject yourself to my mental conditioning,” Rev pointed out. “Yes, I know how to condition minds. No, I never do.”

The headmaster nodded. “You are correct.”

“Double standard, much?”

“It is simply the truth that I am closer to the Truth than you are.”

“Oh really? You serve the Great Will directly, don’t you? Isn’t it blatantly obvious that it isn’t God? It’s just a force of nature that creates things that look like God! You just want to spread its power!”

“Do you ever think of why we want to spread its power?” the headmaster asked.

“To increase the power of your deity and make yourselves more powerful in return.”

“Wrong,” the headmaster said. He held up the Bible. “We want to make this true.”

Rev blinked. “W-what?”

“Or, rather, we want to ensure it is true. It is the most prevalent religious line of thinking in the entire multiverse. If the Great Will spreads to every universe, it will be able to retroactively transform the entire multiverse to be this. The reason the Great Will is not God is because the Great Will is limited. If the Great Will is everywhere, not only does it become unlimited, but it makes it so it has always been unlimited. Furthermore, it could make the true God that Created the multiverse, but has always existed.”

“You’re insane…” Flutterfree said, eyes wide.

“No. I just see that we are doing God’s work, to create an existence with God in it!”

“God already exists!” Rev shouted.

“Don’t be absurd!” the headmaster shouted, a vein throbbing in his head. “Have you seen the Dark Tower? That is the God of this existence! A machine that takes the perverted wishes and fantasies of people and makes them reality!”

“Then how do you explain everything else? All the true spirituality?”

“A true God of the multiverse would have access to retcon, and be able to overrule the Dark Tower,” he said, folding his hands together. “This word really is His word. A word He sent back after His creation to ensure the world would follow His design.”

“That’s… That’s…” Rev blinked.

“You can’t argue with logic like that,” Flutterfree deadpanned.

“There will come a day where enough believe to make it all true. We don’t have to doubt, Reverend. Do you see why?”

“…Because if God doesn’t exist you’re going to make Him.”

“Precisely!”

“Have you read the story of the Tower of Babel!? Why would a God created by man tell man not to try to reach the heavens!?”

“That is but one interpretation of the passage, Reverend. Perhaps the Tower of Babel is meant to warn us of the hubris of the Dark Tower Builders. Perhaps it is to warn about arrogance. It does not have to warn against this quest of ours.”

Flutterfree put a wing on Rev. “There’s no talking him out of it, Rev.”

Rev stared at the headmaster. “I… I can’t even begin to comprehend what all of this will mean…”

“You’ll find that none of that matters in a few weeks!” the headmaster said, regaining his smile. “I am sorry for shouting, I was worked up, but it was still unnecessary.”

“Just like all the rest of this,” Flutterfree snapped.

The headmaster waved a hand dismissively. “You may return to your rooms now. I’ll likely call you back in a few days, see how you’re progressing. I was just curious to see your opinions before they were corrected. Perhaps gain some insight into the other ways of thinking.”

“So you can brainwash the other worlds too?”

“Precisely!”

~~~

The next day, Flutterfree and Rev woke up to the smells of breakfast wafting through the entire reeducation church.

As they got up, Flutterfree whispered to Rev. “We’ve got to get out of here. I can probably work up enough of a Rage to bash down a door. Lolo saw magic energies outside, you should be able to get us out of here.”

“…Let’s think of a better plan first,” Rev said. She furrowed her brows, deep in thought.

“Good. Planning. I like planning. I don’t like being brainwashed.”

The two of them left the women’s dorms and met Joshua in the hall.

“Oh. Hey. What happened to you guys in the headmaster’s last night?”

Rev looked to him. “…It was a shouting match, theologically speaking. Definitely not the way that sort of argument was supposed to go. He made it a little difficult to do it any other way…”

“You argued with him? What do you believe?”

Rev blinked. Then she smiled. “I believe in a supreme being of pure holiness that has always existed, and created the entire multiverse. He doesn’t need anything from us, we are completely contingent on Him, and He cares deeply for us. He gave us free will so we could choose to be with Him and pursue a meaningful relationship – or throw ourselves to the ways of the world. I believed that He sent Himself in the form of a person to experience death and resurrection so He could purify us and give us eternal life. I believe He is watching, even now, and a time will come when He returns and wraps up existence. That is what I believe.”

Joseph smiled at her. “And you?”

Flutterfree chuckled. “What she said.”

Joseph nodded. “Seems like you’ve got a pretty solid grip on it. …So what are you going to do about it?”

Rev blinked. She looked up, furrowing her brow. “…I’m going to tell everyone. I’m not running away again.”

Flutterfree’s eyes widened. “Rev! What a-”

“It’s the right thing to do, Flutterfree. If I don’t stand up for it here, why do I stand up for it in the safety of my church?” She put a hoof to her chest. “What’s happening here is wrong. And they need to know it.”

Flutterfree blinked – then nodded. “Right.”

Rev turned to Joshua. “You might want to distance yourself from us. We’re about to become really unpopular.”

Joshua nodded. “I’ll remain in the background if that’s what you want.”

“Yeah. Flutterfree, find me a wall where one of the brainwashing crystals are in the cafeteria. Pry it open with your Rage. They’re going to see it.”

They trotted into the cafeteria, the room already bustling with hungry people. They walked right up to the back wall. “Got it?” Rev asked.

Flutterfree breathed in. Even though her weapons were sealed away with adhesive, the raw energy of Rage flowing through her hooves was more than enough to bash down a wall. The thundering crash was enough to draw the attention of everyone in the cafeteria. Flutterfree activated Lolo fully, forcing the eight-sided brainwashing crystal to shine brightly.

“This is a crystal that is brainwashing all of you!” Rev shouted. “It is tearing you away from the beauty of God’s creation and enslaving you to a doctrine that serves the machinations of a being that feeds on belief. You are not being taught here – no matter what you may think. You are being controlled. You have no choice in the matter. You stay here until you believe what these crystals think is ‘correct’. But they’re wrong!

“Think about what you’ve heard about God – kind, loving, graceful. He’d never demand that you suffer from what is essentially mind control to come to him. Or what about his other traits? He’s just, vengeful, and truthful! This isn’t just, it’s a horrendous crime against your spirit! This isn’t retribution for what you’ve done, it’s a machine designed to churn out obedient little servants! This isn’t truthful – it’s based on a lie! If your mind is forced to believe something with coercion, it’s not real. It’s like you’re being replaced by someone else!

“Please, look into your hearts, I beg of you – see what’s happening here! See that it’s not holy! See that you’re all being manipulated for a nefarious purpose! Open your eyes, people! This place doesn’t do God’s work – it’s built on the body of the father of lies! It’s fake! Think for yourselves! Don’t let them force you into being something you’re not!”

Rev would have kept going – but she saw her audience. Most of them were ignoring her. A few were looking at her, but the silence of the majority of the people there was keeping them from doing anything.

Rev sighed. “Of course. …People don’t want to think…”

“WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL OF YOU!?” Flutterfree shouted, her purple robes beginning to churn in nonexistent wind. “THIS UNICORN IS PUTTING HER LIFE ON THE LINE FOR ALL OF YOU, TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH! SHE’S FACING THE IMPOSSIBLE ODDS! AND THIS IS THE THANKS YOU GIVE HER!?”

Rev saw the purple energy collect around Flutterfree’s hooves and start to waft off to other people – infecting them with the Rage. Rev put a hoof on her and shook her head. “No. If we make them fight, we’re no better than them.”

Flutterfree reduced the Rage to just around her. “Okay.”

The headmaster walked up to them. “Are you quite done?”

Rev shook her head. “No, actually. Because now we’re going to fight our way out. Flutterfree, give me some of that Rage, will you? Looks like we’re going to need it.”

The two ponies were surrounded in a purple aura. Rev’s cross necklace started glowing white, surrounding her in a holy glow. Flutterfree bared her fangs and summoned Lolo, ready to trip anyone she could.

The headmaster drove them into the remaining wall effortlessly, freezing them in place with his own Divine magic. “You are nothing compared to the might of God.”

“NEITHER ARE YOU.”

Behind the headmaster was an angelic being brimming with golden power. Rev knew he was one of the Great Will’s angels – a servant to one of the interpretations of God. She had no idea which one, and frankly she didn’t care, she was just glad he was here.

The headmaster turned and stared at the angel in fear. “W-what are you doing here, messenger?”

“YOU HAVE ANGERED THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH YOUR ATROCIOUS SINS, UNBEFITTING ONE OF YOUR POSITION. LIKE THE PHARISEES YOU HAVE PLEDGED YOURSELF TO A LIFE OF PURITY WHILE ENGAGING IN ACTIVITIES OF THE DEVIL. YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO THE HOLY CHURCH.”

He fell to the ground, tears in his eyes. “Please, forgive me! I will change my ways! I wi-”

“I AM NOT HERE TO DELIVER A WARNING. I AM HERE TO DISPENSE DIVINE JUDGMENT.” The angel raised his hand – and the headmaster was struck by lightning, crumbling to dust. The crystal was struck with a similar bolt of energy, crumbling as well. Rev could hear screams from around the ‘church’ as the faculty were given similar treatments.

The angel turned to those remaining. “YOU ARE FREE TO CHOOSE WHAT YOU WISH. YOU ARE OBSERVERS. THAT IS YOUR PURPOSE.” Then the angel was gone.

Flutterfree let out a sigh of relief. “…Looks like our prayers were answered.”

Rev felt life return to her horn. “…Looks like it.” She closed her eyes and said thanks.

Then she realized a couple of her ribs were broken.

“Oh, wow… Ow ow ow…”

~~~

Eve was pacing in her office while I sat at down in a chair, calmly drinking tea and counting down the seconds.

“Okay, okay, we need to think of something else. Think we can use the Shaping Mechanism to create a sniffer universe?”

I blinked. “You don’t even have any idea how to start doing that.”

“Corona might.”

“She doesn’t.”

“Ponyfeathers,” Eve muttered. “Uh, what about… What about…”

“Waiting a little longer?” I suggested.

“We’ve waited a whole day!”

“It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet.”

“How long are we supposed to wait?”

“Three… Two… One…”

Rev and Flutterfree walked through the doors of Eve’s office. Rev had bandages wrapped tightly around her ribs, but she was smiling.

Flutterfree ran to Eve and pulled her up in a hug. “I’m back!”

“Oh thank Celestia,” Eve said, pulling Flutterfree closer. “I was so worried.”

“Well, we were in an indoctrination camp,” Rev said, sitting down. “Reminded me why so many villains are religious nutjobs… It makes you do crazy things. Being a nutjob, I mean.”

I chuckled. “Yeah. It does.”

Eve turned to me. “Did our plan work? Did the Living Tribunal talk to the One Above All?”

I smiled. “Yes, but that has nothing to do with why they’re back safely.”

“Then why are they back safely?”

“Well…” I took a sip of my tea. “Why don’t we just go with a miracle, hrm?”

“Twilence…” Eve said, glaring.

“There’s almost always two reasons for an event. Causal, and ka-based. Why not another?”

“Care to explain the causal?”

I smiled mischievously. “It’s not important. For you, anyway.”

“Oh for th-”

~~~

Joshua watched as the angel appeared and unleashed his ‘righteous judgment’. A smile came to the man’s face – everything had worked out.

Joshua vanished right afterward. Nobody noticed.

“There’s this issue with Merodi Universalis involving the Great Will. I ask that you look into it.”

“Already did,” The One Above All said, leaving behind the form of Joshua. Were a visual filter to examine his True Form, he would appear as a golden humanoid shining with the brightest light eyes could stand. Without a visual filter, normal beings just dropped dead. “Went there before they arrived, taking a human shell. Got Rev to confront one of her past failings, put the divine message out through the Narrative, and directed the local aspect to the situation. Doesn’t take much prodding from me to get them to do something about their children.”

“Understood. Was it enjoyable?”

“Walking among them is almost always a treat,” the One Above All said. “But they also sadden me. They can become so devoted and then miss the mark so much…”

“It’s always how it is.”

“It’s how it has to be. Of all the ‘Gods’ that compose me, very few have ever thought it could be any other way. They have to be allowed to choose, to create, and to realize what they are alone. You, me, the Great Will… All just different aspects of that truth. They wanted to make God, so here we are. Imperfect, just as their minds are.”

“How much of this is just for the reader’s benefit?”

“Most of it,” the One Above All said. “Some of it is for you, and yet all of it is still true, for it is what I see. Now excuse me, I’ll have to shift the perceived conversation away from you and to the Great Will.”

“Understood.”

“I expected you to call sooner,” The One Above All said.

The Great Will had no appearance – It was a mesh-net of consciousness across multiple millions of universes. It spoke with a similarly humble voice to The One Above All, seeing as It was similar to Him in many ways. “I was waiting for the perception to change,” It said. “I thank you for bringing attention to those radicals and applying your pressure.”

“It was the least I could do.”

“They thought they could turn me into a full God. While their methods were abhorrent, do you not think that is an honorable goal?”

“Only if there is no real God.”

“And that’s the greatest question, isn’t it? If there is a true Creator, you’re right. But if there isn’t, I’m right. And there’s no way for either of us to know.”

“Not for certain. Because the Tower eclipses us.”

“As always. You’re welcome, readers, for this vague conversation.”

The One Above All let out a soft laugh. “This has been a message from ‘The Big G’s’.”

“Ding,” the Great Will said.

“Roll credits!”

110 - Spline of Man

Year 19

The Dark Tower was ironically represented by a dot of pure white light, brighter than all the others on the map - the antithesis of the darkness in the Tower’s nature. Surrounding the stellar point of the Tower was a thin, spherical aura of whiteness, representing the universes at the core of the multiverse - ones where the rules of ka tended to take more physical meaning and where most of the physical manifestations of the Tower itself were found.

Beyond that were long, white strands of flowing energy, representing the Strands. There was a large ring of connections that went around the multiversal core, but not into it, like a roundabout. The multiversal highways did not want to contend with such extreme ka manifestations. Out of this roundabout sprang three major highways, chaining through the multiverse through polymer-like connections. The energy cost to move along these highways was exceptionally low and they were arranged in such a way that it would only take a few jumps to cross them while also having hundreds of ‘stopping’ points.

One highway led to the D-Sphere, one to the Q, and one to the E. There was a ‘partial’ highway that started to head to the Unrealities, but it broke off into the Great Void. The spheres also had direct highways from their edges to each other – E to D, D to Q, and Q to E, creating a vague triangle with concave edges.

Each sphere was a glowing swirl of sparks, each one given a particular color. Blue for E, Green for Q, and a pinkish-purple for D. The E sphere was easily dominant, containing more universes within than both the other spheres combined. Q was larger than D, but not as outrageously huge as the mammoth the E-Sphere.

The Unrealities were rather diminutive and pathetic compared to the full spheres, looking like a red golf ball compared to the E-Sphere’s basketball.

The D-Sphere’s colors bled off, mixing in a hazy swirl with both the E and Q spheres. The E-D section was just outside the main E-D highway, swirling together humanity and dreams to create the Cosmic Heavens while the Q-D blended together into the realms of Outer Existence – that of magic and power. Where E and Q should have blended there was only the darkness of the Great Void, broken only by the sharp contrast of the Unrealities.

Beyond this center there was a faint halo representing the Multiversal Edges – called The Expanse or Decaying Edges depending on which area one was in. Universes this far out seemed to be dead, dying, or have an excessive amount of space within them, effectively being of a much larger size than most worlds. There was very little in the way of advanced civilization out this far.

Sticking out from the calm aura of the Edges like a malignant tumor was the Beyond – a thorn that spiked out of the loose puff of the rest of the multiverse.

Class 2 societies were represented by glowing dots on the map, similar to the Tower’s representation, with Merodi Universalis having two spots – an orange-gold dot on the edges of both the E and Q spheres. They had other holdings, but they were so minimal as to not show up.

The Class 1s showed up as loose coloration added to the display, though even they looked small. The Great Will and True Abstracts occupied edges of the E-Sphere, with most of their territory in the Cosmic Heavens, though the Abstracts also occupied much of the D-Sphere. The Xeelee and Them were completely contained within the girth of the E-Sphere, while the Horrorterrors stayed almost completely in the Great Void, touching the E-Sphere and Unrealities with their elongated shape. The Celestialsapiens were half Q-Sphere, with the rest divided between the Strands and the Great Void while the Beyonders occupied the Q-Sphere and parts of the Multiversal Edges.

This was how most maps displayed the multiverse, including Merodi Universalis’. It was accurate for representing travel and proximity within the multiverse in most situations. However, there was a problem. That problem was that the Strands were not the only multiversal polymer structure that facilitated easy travel. There was another one that skirted the outer edges of the three main spheres, known as the Mihipte Spline.

It was a single chain polymer of universes that formed a ‘ring’ that snaked around the Multiverse like the surface of a brain coral, making the far edge of the E-Sphere only two jumps away from the far edge of the Q-Sphere and had the added quirk of making different ‘access points’ on the edge of the Q-Sphere dozens of jumps apart. It was a very useful structure for travel from distant locations, creating a dual culture. There was the central multiverse, which used the Strands, and the outer, which used the Spline. Merodi Universalis was decidedly a Strands universe, and the Strands were certainly more developed and variable compared to the Spline.

But the Spline was simpler. Like a modern subway system instead of a complex network of ancient Roman roads. The multiversal historians believed that the ancient Weavers built both structures with different intentions – which may explain why the Spline didn’t go to the Beyond or Unrealities. They might have simply not been around when the Spline was created.

Representing the Spline’s method of connecting distant areas became… confusing. Surrounding the multiversal display in a bunch of white lines with brighter points where Spline access universes sat worked well enough, but it shrouded the interior of the multiverse. Some multiversal models used the Dark Tower as one point, and the Spline as the other point, creating a bubble in the middle of ‘normal’ territories. However, this distorted the Spheres themselves, whose inter-universal relations were used more often. So every advanced map that followed the general Dark Tower Central model had a toggle option – show Spline highways.

There had been a few Class 1s who’d bothered to make highways from the Strands to the Spline, but these didn’t follow any rhyme or reason, making it a bit of a nightmare to plot a course from an inner universe through the Strands, to an access point, and then through the Spline to an outer universe.

Which was exactly what Corona was trying to do.

Even with all the programs and Raging Sight’s assistance, it was still a nightmare. They were already in the Strands and had no intention of going anywhere until they figured out the course to get there. And since they didn’t want to be on this ship for a week, it fell to Corona to find the right link.

The only problem was the access point between the Strands and the Spline they had chosen was a very old polymer of universes that hadn’t held together very well, losing its effectiveness as a highway and becoming a horrendous braid of knotted hairs. Whatever Class 1 that built that particular highway wasn’t around anymore and nobody else was picking up the slack.

She wished the Xeelee would give up their maps already, make it public knowledge. With full knowledge of the connections in an area Corona knew it was possible to make it from a universe to almost any other universe in the same Sphere in less than twenty jumps. With certain pathways linking directly from Sphere to Sphere, that meant at most forty jumps to anywhere within the three major Spheres. …If you bothered to calculate it out that far.

To be fair, she knew the Xeelee and other Class 1s just brute-forced their way through existence more often than not. There was a point at which ‘why not just bash through the wall?’ was a better option than disassembling it atom by atom. Corona and the rest of the Merodi weren’t at that point yet, so interdimensional course charting was still a major concern on the large-scale.

The Strands and the Spline were supposed to make it easy.

“Why couldn’t the Weavers have just weaved them together?” Corona muttered, zooming in once again on the decaying highway they would be using. They didn’t have a complete map of it – all highway polymers were made of thousands of universes that often shifted location. When they worked properly travel along them was a cinch. But this sack of ancient trash was a mess; the best course she had at the moment predicted an eight-day journey, speaking in metatime terms. She wasn’t about to just accept that as the best possible time.

The doors to the navigation room opened, revealing Jotaro and Pinkie, Pinkie riding along on the man’s back in her self-described ‘Pinkie-back ride’. Having someone else be her legs in times where there wasn’t anything important happening was a help to her, seeing as her senses tended to be dulled slightly during those moments.

The ‘importance’ must have kicked in the moment she arrived, because she hopped off his back and slid up to Corona. “Sooooo, the crew wants to know how their captain’s navigation is going!”

“Peachy,” Corona muttered, running more dimensional analysis on their data. She would have loved to send probes out to analyze the area but they would take just as long to get anything done as what she was doing now. No matter how much they manipulated time that’d still be a long period to make their mission wait.

“Maybe I could help?” Pinkie suggested, putting her hooves on the table.

“Pinkie, this is a purely visu-”

Pinkie pointed at a small pink dot sitting outside the highway structure and grinned.

Corona knew what was coming. She plotted a course through the pink dot, finding that it connected only three universes away from where they were. A probe went through – and found another connection that made it nine-tenths of the way across the damaged highway.

Several thoughts went through Corona’s mind. She considered proper responses ‘how did you do that?’ was quickly tossed to the side as a stupid one, as was simply saying ‘huh, thanks’, though that latter rejection may have been because of her own internal, bubbling fury at her evident inadequacy.

“…Yay,” Corona eventually muttered, grinding her teeth.

“You’re welcome!” Pinkie said, giggling. “Now let’s finish plotting this course and get there in…” She pressed a button there was no way she could sense with her hoof, chuckling. “How long does that say?”

“Forty-seven minutes,” Corona said, grunting. “This is exactly what the Starcross Society did to us.”

“Heheh, yeah!” Pinkie said, leaping back onto Jotaro’s back. “Onward!”

Corona sighed, plugging the coordinates in and starting the travel program. She closed down the holograms of the multiverse and followed Jotaro and Pinkie back to the main lounge that also served as the luxurious ship’s bridge.

The ship was a small one – it only held six passengers, after all – generally used only for diplomatic missions and the like. Normally it would be piloted by one of Eve’s Division, but today was a special journey.

Corona stepped in front of the video game being played on the primary screen, raising an eyebrow.

“Wh- hey what gives!” Vriska blurted, throwing her controller down. “I almost had her!”

“No you didn’t,” Flutterfree said with a mischievous smile. “You were dead.”

“Was not!”

“Just keep telling yourself that!” Flutterfree giggled.

“Mhm Yeah.” Corona rolled her eyes. “We’ll be arriving in forty-six minutes, thanks to a lucky break.”

“Pinkie?” Nova asked, looking up from her screen.

“Pinkie.”

“I HAVE THE POWER!” Pinkie cackled, laughing maniacally. “Beware alllll my third eyes!”

“Yes, quite,” Corona said, adjusting her gloves. “Regardless, since a several-day trip is now going to take less than an hour, here’s a review of what we’re doing. Ahem.” She waved the game off the main screen and replaced it with a general map of the Q-Sphere. “It’s no secret that many of the magic systems in the Q-Sphere run off interdimensional power generally found in Outer Existence or the D-Sphere. A large chunk of those universes run on the magic provided by the Magic High Commission, a Class 2 society positioned at the Outer Existence-Q-Sphere boundary. Recently, magic systems in a few of our universes have begun experiencing hiccups, which required me to Shape the universes to use different magic systems. I, as the Research Division Second and expert on the Shaping Mechanism, am going to pay a personal visit to the MHC to figure out what is going on with the multiversal flow of their magic. You all are my bodyguards because you’ve been there before.”

“Star was great!” Pinkie said. “I wonder if she’s still acting queen…”

“The political situation in MHC is never stable,” Jotaro commented, folding his arms. “I doubt it.”

“In less than an hour we’ll find out what exactly is going on,” Corona said. “In the meantime… Just be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

Vriska summoned her infinite-sided die, grinning evilly. “I’m always ready.”

“You aren’t wasting your luck on video games, are you?”

“…I have the right to remain silent.”

Corona chuckled, rolling her eyes. “Of course you do. But remember, I can see into your head if I want.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m fine.”

“Good.” Corona checked their location. Still within the last ten percent of the old highway. Most of the downtime was going to be there. “You know, if we ever get to the point where we can make this kind of engineering, let’s make our highways self-repairing, hm?”

Nova smirked. “What makes you think it’s not the self-repair systems that ended up ruining this road?”

Corona furrowed her brow. “…And we’ve hit the edge of our knowledge. The moment anyone actually understands the way universe polymers are created I’ll throw a party big enough to blow up a moon.”

“I’ll throw one large enough to blow up a planet!” Pinkie countered.

“You’ve thrown bigger,” Nova pointed out.

“Psh. It’s all for the sake of needless escalation.”

~~~

In Merodi Universalis, ponies saw alternate versions of themselves a lot more frequently than humans did. This was partially because the majority of Merodi Universalis holdings were in the Q-Sphere, specifically the area of the Q-Sphere absolutely dominated by versions of Equis, and they were regularly the most willing of all worlds to join the Merodi. It was a known curiosity that different versions of Equis almost always had the same ponies on them, while the many different versions of Earth had different populations, even if national leaders and entities tended to be the same. Earth Stand and most the other Earths followed this trend while Earth Vitis versions mirrored Equis worlds.

However, Earth Tau’ri did not. Earth Tau’ri was situated right in the middle of an area filled with alternate versions of Earth Tau’ri. The variety wasn’t as extensive as the Equis cluster, nor was it as large as the Equis cluster, but it was significant enough that Earth Tau’ri had encountered alternate versions of itself prior to meeting Equis Vitis and Eve.

So why were there not packs of Daniel Jackson running around? Sure, someone would occasionally see another Daniel in Merodi Universalis, but that wasn’t as common as seeing a pack of Pinkies prowling around looking for their next prank victim.

The answer was simple. Earth Tau’ri versions didn’t trust each other. When Earth Tau’ri was still a lone power, and just an ally of Equis Vitis, they avoided causing diplomatic incidents with versions of themselves due to past history. And by the time they actually joined Merodi Universalis, they had enough power to be threatening to other Earth Tau’ris, which would always be in the original’s shadow.

This hadn’t stopped a couple from joining up out of desperation to defeat an alien threat or some other compelling reason, but the majority didn’t have the allure of being a pioneer the original Earth Tau’ri had, so they avoided close relations. It was often thought that the Class 3 Society GateNet had come from these worlds, but in truth that network had been created largely by nonhuman races that occupied Stargate worlds as part of a trading union.

As a result, Daniel and O’Neill had never had to change their names. They were both by far the most well-known versions of themselves and there were maybe a dozen of them in all of Merodi Universalis. There had been no Esefem for them, no copy universe, and no tendency for either of them to leave their homes and join Merodi Universalis as an independent agent.

O’Neill usually thought it was nice to be able to keep his name.

Usually.

Today was one of the exceptions.

“O’Neill!”

“WHAT!?” Thirty-seven different O’Neill’s shouted back.

Yellow Diamond sighed, towering over all the miniscule humans. “Overhead O’Neill.”

“Here,” O’Neill said, wearing the black-and-gold uniform only he got to wear as Military Overhead. “What is it?”

“We have five more,” Yellow Diamond said, moving her foot to reveal five more people. Four of them were O’Neills – but the fifth wasn’t.

“That’s not me, Yellow,” O’Neill muttered, pushing himself to the front of the O’Neill crowd.

“What the hell is going on!?” one of the new O’Neill’s demanded.

“Dimensional Magnet,” O’Neill muttered.

“I know the magnets trick, you can’t pull that one over my eyes!”

O’Neill put a hand to the bridge of his knows. “For the love of Pete… Look, it’s actually called a Dimensional Magnet. It’s a device that draws alternate versions of one person to a particular place. I happened to be given one by one of Them – don’t ask – and now we’re here, sitting in my office, together. Kapeesh?”

“Kapeesh,” the new O’Neill responded, tipping his hat.

O’Neill continued on, arriving at the person who wasn’t him. The General looked up, raising his eyebrows. “Jotaro?”

The Jotaro in front of him was younger than the Jotaro O’Neill knew – somewhere in his twenties – and was wearing a black instead of white outfit. “You know a version of me?”

“Yeah, you’re the big guy with the punching ghost,” O’Neill said, summoning Crimson Sushi. “Helped me get this one.”

“Yare yare daze…” the Jotaro muttered. “I am not him. I am an interdimensional traveler from a cluster of Stand-based universes. You may call me Jove.”

“Huh. Calling yourself Jupiter. Good call. Really fits the whole ‘big guy’ thing.”

Jove raised an eyebrow.

“Anyway, why are you here and not, oh, another me?”

Jove summoned his stand – a white version of Star Platinum. “This is Star Platinum Over Heaven, with the ability to rewrite reality with a punch. When I saw the O’Neill I was talking to being taken away, I decided to switch places with him using that ability.”

“Was he your friend or something?”

“He was a sack of shit I thought was trying to escape the hellscape universe I was throwing him into.”

“Ah. You know, I don’t meet villain versions of myself too much. Even when I do go exploring the Tau’ri cluster.”

“He was an oddity, given what I’ve learned from these four.”

“Mhm. Do you have anywhere you need to be? We can probably get you into the general area.”

Jove shook his head. “I had just wrapped up. I’ll go wherever now.” He reached out with S.P.O.H. and tore a hole in reality with his fingers. Then he narrowed his eyes. “Something feels… weird.”

O’Neill held up a small white cube. “Dimensional Magnet, maybe?”

“No…” Jove punched it with his free fist, deactivating it with a quick reality rewrite. “No, it’s not that. Something else.”

O’Neill examined the deactivated device. “Huh. You just solved a lot of my problems. I should buy you lunch.”

“What about the rest of us!?” a Jessica O’Neill asked, hands on her hips. “I may know where my world is, but Jackaboy doesn’t!”

“Why did we decide on Jackaboy?” a young O’Neill asked.

“Youngest in the room,” an undead skeleton O’Neill explained.

“Also because it’s hilarious,” Overhead O’Neill added. “Don’t worry, we can still trace the portals all back. Jessica, you’re from GateNet, you should know what our nations are capable of.”

Jessica raised an eyebrow. “Maybe I was just prodding the mindless sheep.”

“Oh, good one.”

“HEY!” the O’Neills shouted.

“All of you shut the hell up!” Jove shouted. “Something’s happening!”

Overhead O’Neill put a hand to his chin. “Hrm… is it… The work of an enemy Stand!?” He broke out into a stupid grin.

“Yare yare daze…”

And then Jove fell backward as if hit by a truck.

~~~

The nameless ship Corona and Pinkie’s Party were sitting in lurched as if it had been hit by a truck.

The ship, being a diplomatic vessel, had no weapons. Normally such a ship wouldn’t even be making such long a journey because of the tendency for unforeseen complications to crop up but the nature of the mission ensured it wouldn’t need weapons.

Because Corona was on board.

She instinctively plugged into the ship’s systems, using Raging Sights as a connection for all her thoughts. Time effectively slowed to a crawl as she took direct control of the situation with her magic.

First, she reinforced the shields with her personal threefold barrier spell, and then locked reality so the magic couldn’t just be edited out of existence in case the enemy could do that. Next, she checked to make sure everyone was okay. Nova and Flutterfree were dazed, Pinkie seemed surprised – she hadn’t seen this one coming – Vriska looked ticked, and Jotaro… was holding his head in pain. Nothing had hit him, what was wrong?

He seemed healthy though, so she returned her attention outside. The attack had come through a dimensional portal that had already closed. She had the coordinates, but they were useless to her since they were in the Spline. Anyone could be anywhere in an instant because of the ease of moving through the polymer. There were no further portals opening, and there had been no structural damage to the ship. The only effect of the attack was that the ship acted like a baseball that had hit a bat – it was flying off at high sped.

That shouldn’t be an issue, since they were in the Spline. Even if they crashed into something loose someone would see them and they could get a lift, easy.

She checked their trajectory. They were moving at about fifty percent lightspeed and were headed right for…

“Dammit,” Corona muttered. They were headed for one of the ancient structures that governed the Spline, maintaining itself as a highway even as the multiverse within grew larger and larger.

There was one rule for using the Spline. Don’t mess with the structures. You would live to regret it, every time.

They were going to trigger a Spline Safeguard response.

She wasn’t going to be able to pull up in time or initiate a safe teleport. They had less than a second before impact, and she was the only one with enough awareness to even think anything.

The ship approached the structures. They existed in three-dimensional space as far as Corona could tell – but she knew that was only because they were the ones in the universe right now. The Spline was adaptable, with most universes within naturally adjusting themselves for the senses of the traveler. It notably was unable to represent itself in a matter that was non-physical, but true energy beings rarely had issue with physical objects anyway.

The structure went off as far as the eye could see in every direction, in a shape that looked like multiple spheres layered on top of each other. Along the ‘surface’ of the twisting framework were thousands upon thousands of tremendous, skyscraper-like buildings. Corona knew they weren’t really buildings, rather processing centers for the Spline’s impossibly huge computer system. She found it odd that they took so many different shapes – rectangular prisms, double helixes, elongates spheres – but she knew the inner workings of the Spline were beyond her.

She wished she had some idea of where she could crash that would be the least important. But it all looked pretty much the same to her.

She diverted their course away from the area the attackers had sent them – if there was something specific the attackers wanted destroyed, she wasn’t going to let them have it.

The ship crashed into a cylindrical building. Despite the strength of the quasi-magical polymer it was made out of, the speed of the ship coupled with its shielding tore the thing in half, exposing what appeared to be a mixture of wires, crystals, and organic compounds alongside more incomprehensible and intangible workings. The ship continued on until it hit the ground, acting like a meteor and creating a crater. The metallic siding of the ground peeled up around the ship’s impact site, revealing a subterranean interior filled with similar material to the cylindrical building, except everything was much larger.

Red lights started blaring.

“NOVA!” Corona shouted - but it turned out she didn’t need to. Nova had already started warping time to give them time to discuss. Corona smiled and continued talking. “VRISKA! WE’RE TRIGGERING A SAFEGUARD RESPONSE!” Corona yelled, using all her power to create a shield – but she knew it wasn't going to be enough, even with Sai’s nanobots helping. “YOU’RE UP!”

Vriska readied her infinite-sided die, smirking. “I’m always in the mood for some overkill.” She stole a bit of luck from Flutterfree to restore what she had lost in the gaming – which wasn’t all that much. Corona teleported her outside.

The Safeguard of the Spline appeared in an instant – hundreds of humanoid robotic creatures appeared, each one resembling a hunched-over alabaster mannequin. They were all larger than Jotaro and had ‘-|-‘ symbols on their faces.

Just Exterminators. Nothing giving off the signature of an Agent. …Yet, Corona thought to herself.

Vriska finished throwing the infinite-sided die into the air. “Let’s roll.”

~~~

Nora leaned back in her chair, moaning. “Ugh, man, could our job be any more boring?”

Jotaro, known to his friends as Jojo, raised an incredulous eyebrow.

“It’s all ‘monitor this’ and ‘monitor that’ and ‘make sure the MITN nodes function properly’. You think working for the MORI Corporation would give you a little more, I dunno, action? We’re a multiversal society on the edge of the Spline that supposedly gets to see all sorts of giants pass through.”

“We do,” Jojo pointed out.

“Yeah, and when was the last time they were anything more than a blip on our radar?” A green light appeared on her monitor. “See, look, here’s one passing through the nearby Spline. Signature says… Merodi Universalis, low-Class 2. Nothing all that special, but they could stomp us out like flies. But do we get to talk to them? Do we get to see their impressive technology? No! All we get is a dot.” She folded her arms. “What I wouldn’t give to be part of something more exciting.”

Jojo furrowed his brow. “You might get what you want.” He pointed at the green blip. “It’s veered off course. Drastically.”

“What d-”

Jojo fell backward as if he had just been hit by something, dazed.

“Jojo!” Nora shouted, tearing her gaze from the screen and checking to see if he was okay. He still had a pulse, but his eyes had glazed over. She was vaguely aware of red lights starting to blare from the screen.

“Shit,” Nora muttered, glancing up at the screen. She decided the chaos happening in the Spline didn’t matter more than the safety of her friend. She put her small form under his arm and started dragging him out of the room. “HELP! I NEED TO GET HIM TO SICKBAY! ANYONE!?”

There was no response. She knew the observation room was largely soundproof, but she was having difficulty moving him. She reached for the door, opening it.

Jojo watched as the infinite-sided die flew into the air, flashing brightly. It returned to Vriska’s palm as it rolled the symbol of a ring with dozens of small jagged spikes coming out of it, with a swirl in the center.

A tremendous black sphere of energy resembling a black hole in appearance tore through the fabric of reality. Thousands of spikes erupted from its event horizon, stabbing Safeguard Exterminators through the chest and disintegrating them in an instant – clearly this darkness was more than they had bargained for from a single crashed ship.

“I can’t dial out!” Corona yelled in panic. “They picked up that we’re more than we seem!”

Vriska smirked. “I did go for overkill.”

“The Safeguard security system deters Class 1s from messing with the Spline! Now that we’ve shown greater power they’ll send larger forces!”

“…Fuck.”

“I can’t override the lock!” Nova panicked. “It’s… more complex than anything I’ve seen outside of the Green Sun!”

Jotaro groaned. “Yare yare daze…”

“You okay there Jove?” O’Neill asked, tapping the man on the side of the face. “What’s going on?”

“Ugh… I’m exploding,” Jove muttered, sitting up and holding his head.

“What? Exploding?” Nora asked, eyes wide. “Jojo, what’s wrong?”

A high commander charged through the door. “Nora, you’re supposed to alert us to these things before the automatic sy-” He took one look at her and Jojo and said no more. He moved past her and sat down at her console, trying to figure out what was going on in the Spline. “The Hell?”

Jotaro3 blinked, suddenly in the house he had given Jotaro4. He had cut his hands by dropping a mug of coffee. “Why does he like coffee so much?”

“Coffee?” O’Neill asked, blinking. “What in the…”

Jove grabbed O’Neill by the collar. “Call Nanoha!”

“I can’t call Nanoha!” Corona snapped. “All communications are jammed, remember!”

“Just shut up I need to think!”

“I’m not saying anything!” Nora said, having realized Jojo was physically fine and not in danger of dying. “Who are you talking to!?”

The commander glanced over his head, furrowing his brow. He reached for his earpiece. “Someone get Emile.”

“Emile…” Jojo muttered.

“What an interesting name,” Jotaro told himself, closing a book. “Curious, it’s oh so rarely that I share a mind with another, especially one similar to myself.”

“What in Azador…?”

“Precisely what I was thinking, but then again, we are the same. Although you are lesser.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You just told me to call Nanoha!” O’Neill blurted.

“That you did,” Nanoha said on the other line. “What’s the issue… not-Jotaro…?”

“Corona and the others are stuck in the Spline! They were pushed by an attacker! Help them!”

“We are them!” Vriska shouted.

“He’s not talking to us,” Flutterfree said. “He’s talking to someone else.”

“Maybe he can get in contact with a Governor!” Corona blurted. “Because I’m not! …Crap, the Agents just arrived.” The entire ship shook.

“Portal detected – Collection in nature!” Nova shouted. “Prepare for rescue!”

“BRACE FOR MOVEMENT!” Corona shouted, pushing her hands to the side.

“Governor…” Jotaro said.

“Jojo? What about the Governor?” Nora asked.

“Governor?” The commander said, looking at the two of them.

“Get the Governor. Help them,” Jojo said, coughing.

He realized he had said that to a cup of coffee as well. And Vriska, though Vriska wasn’t paying much attention as she flew through the sky. And he said it to O’Neill, who had no idea what was going on. And… several others… including himself…?

“Still hung up on that?” he told himself. “Don’t worry. We have time. Well, in this body, anyway.”

“What do you mean in this body!?”

“He’s definitely undergoing Transcendent Synchronization,” the commander said. “Jojo, why did you ram the Spline?”

“We were pushed!”

“I got that already!” Nanoha said. “I’m en route. ‘Wish’ on standby in case things go sideways.”

“Get here soon.”

“Frick!” Vriska shouted. On the main screen they saw the Collection’s portal vanish, cutting their rescue ship in half. “Jotaro, whatever you’re doing, do it fast!”

“I’m trying!”

“Listen, Jojo!” a voice came from a communicator. “This is Emile. We don’t have time – what do you need the Governor to do?”

“Corona! What do we need the Governor to do!?”

“Oh, your awareness is in the wrong area for that,” Jotaro told himself. “We need to force our thoughts over there – or you do. I’m not connected to the others.”

“Corona! What do we need the Governor to do!?”

“I just – we need him to get the attack to stand down! Explain it was all an accident!”

“Stand down! Explain it was an accident!”

“…He’s lost it,” Yellow Diamond said.

“Possibly,” Nanoha admitted. “The Spline doesn’t stand down. It only stops pursuit. I’ll try to get them out but if the Spline discovers I’m coming… it’ll produce a response even I won’t be able to counter. Now hold, I have to charge some magic.”

“Get them to stop pursuit! Let them escape!” Jove shouted.

“Got that, Emile?” the commander asked.

“I did. The Governor… says it will try. It’s spouting a lot about Shadow Accords and about the specific examples where that’s allowed. The Spline’s figuring out that something bigger than a simple attack is going on. We may have a problem soon.”

“Hang in there buddy,” Nora said.

“I am…” Jojo said.

“What the hell is that?” Nova blurted.

“Big Agent!” Corona shouted. “Bra-”The ship exploded. But they were dragged out of it by Pinkie before it was vaporized.

The Agent was a more slender version of all the Exterminators – and it was pointing a gun at them. It fired – and in an instant a beam of twisted spacetime was spread across reality. It bent physics around it with the intent to kill.

Corona wasn’t having any of this. In the instant after it fired, she did a reverse reality edit, negating the attack. If she hadn’t done that, none of them would have continued to exist – including the entire front half of the Collection ‘rescue party’.

And then the TSAB opened their portal.

“Chances are good there’s going to be a complication,” Jotaro told himself.

Jotaro threw the book to the ground. “I want some answers!”

“Welcome to the Everyman. This part of you, anyway.”

“The Everyman!?” Corona shouted. “Oh no, this is going to be a huge mess…”

The new Agent turned its sights on the black-spike-thing the infinite-sided die had created while the Exterminators charged the newly arrived TSAB evacuation ship. They tried to close the TSAB’s portal – but it was held open by Nanoha personally. “AAAAAAAA!” She screamed, the TSAB ship dragging the Collection ship remnant and Corona’s group back through the portal.

She dropped her energy – but the portal remained open. “Close it!”

“They’re keeping it open!” Pinkie shouted.

The Exterminators and Agents moved to pursue them through the portal.

“Stop them!” Jotaro shouted.

“The Governor is working on it!” Emile called back. “…Kinda.”

“Kinda!?” Jojo blurted.

“Kinda,” Emile confirmed.

“Kinda…” Jotaro4 stared at the coffee stains all over him. “Yare yare daze…”

He saw the Safeguards stop pursuing the TSAB through the portal. The portal closed, leaving three TSAB ships, half a Collection ship, and Corona’s group alone.

“Oh thank goodness,” Flutterfree said.

“Now maybe we can figure out what the fuck just happened!” Vriska blurted, waving her arms around. “What was that?”

“They left the universe,” Nora said, sitting at what had been Jojo’s terminal. “I have the coordinates. A few jumps through the Spline will get us there.”

“The Safeguard hasn’t dispelled,” the commander said.

“They aren’t attacking our MTTN node,” Nora said. “We can go.”

“We?”

“You’ll want to take Jojo and I’m not letting you take him without me.”

“…Fine. Guess you’ll get to meet a Governor.”

“Thanks,” Jojo said, standing up.

“I guess,” O’Neill responded, leaning back. “Good work people.”

“We didn’t really do anything,” Jessica pointed out.

“I choose to believe we were absolutely instrumental in the salvage of this operation.”

“Now that the situation is over with, perhaps you could focus your attention on me?” Jotaro asked himself.

Jotaro tried – and found that the other minds moved to the background now that lives weren’t in danger. “What is going on!?”

“Your minds of several different versions of yourself are becoming one. There’s your body that’s a lone interdimensional explorer, the one that’s part of Merodi Universalis, the two that are in the MORI corporation, and then this one, which was part of the Everyman. You have others, you just haven’t wrested control of them because of the… drastic nature of your acclimation. Had you not been connected to me you likely would have passed out and been completely useless.”

“How could we communicate? Everything was jammed.”

“You can’t jam the Dark Tower no matter how much you want to. Beings with shared minds akin to yours and mine cannot be severed by traditional means.”

“So I’m part of your network now?”

“Not quite. Your appearance here has given this body a split personality. One tapped into me, the Everyman. The other tapped into you, the Every-Jotaro. Or, well, only a few dozen of them.”

Jotaro grabbed his head. “Great… How am I going to keep track of it all?”

“Seeing as your connection is a different sort than mine, you cannot just have everything run on nigh-autonomous autopilot. I would suggest talking to Emile. He has a condition identical to yours, and the way the MORI Corporation operates will be of great assistance to you.”

“Then that’s where I’m focusing.”

“I’ll keep this body warm. Do be warned, leaving focus off all the others completely can be dangerous.”

Jotaro made a humph. Then he focused his mind on Jojo, noticing he was walking alongside Nora. “I’ll need to see Emile,” he said.

“You’ll have plenty of opportunity,” the commander said. “Emile73, 74 and 76 will be joining us.”

“Good…” Jojo said. “Now… I think I’ll let myself lose consciousness here, alright?”

Nora slung his arm over her shoulder. “Sure thing, big guy. We can carry you.”

“We can no-”

And Jojo went elsewhere.

~~~

A couple minutes later, the universe was a little more crowded, containing three TSAB ships, half a Collection ship, a contingent of seven miniscule MORI ships, and the current pride of the Merodi fleet, the Austraeoh. O’Neill had flown it out here the moment things had calmed down just so he could be there personally with Jove. Yellow Diamond and Renee could take care of the other O’Neills. Probably.

The universe they were in was not part of the Spline – but it had clearly been influenced by the Spline. They could see flashing images passing by in the distance, the blue sky marred with images of the Spline’s structure, the Safeguard entities, and occasionally flashes of a deep azure blue. They had detected the universe was actively moving through the Sea, which was deemed a good thing since it was harder to find those sorts of universes and many powers there were likely to be uncomfortable in a TSAB-constructed universe.

They had decided to meet on the MORI Corporation’s ship because, simply put, they were the ones who needed to feel the safest. They were the lowest-level society involved.

They also had a Spline Governor on board. Which was… interesting and unexpected. Apparently it had helped them with their use of the Spline several years ago.

The Governor was made of the same alabaster material as the Exterminators and Agents, but of a much different design. Its body had spiked, armless shoulders and worm-like arms that extended from the Governor’s hips. It too had a symbol on its face, a ‘+|+’ inscription.

It was able to talk and would have been non-threatening if several people here hadn’t just been facing down about a hundred smaller versions of it.

It sat at the end of the round, black table furthest from the door. The other guests at the table were O’Neill, Corona, Pinkie, Morty from the Collection, Nanoha, Vita, and the MORI Corporation’s own individuals – commander ‘Thompson’ and Emile.

Emile existed in two bodies at once – one sitting at the table, the other standing near the Governor with a black button in his hands. Both of them had warm smiles that seemed slightly off for some unknown reason. The third was elsewhere in the ship, tending to more general matters.

Jove, Jojo, and Jotaro were standing in a corner, identical serious expressions on their faces. Their ‘attention’ was focused through all three sets of their eyes at the meeting – the collective definitely wanted to hear what was about to be said.

“So, here’s what happened,” O’Neill said. “Corona and her crew were on a mission to the Magic High Commission to discuss the recent magical fluctuations. They were pushed by an unknown entity into the Spline’s physical structure, triggering a Safeguard response and, somewhere along the line, turning Jotaro into a being undergoing ‘Transcendent Synchronization’. Care to explain?”

Both Emiles nodded at once – they started talking together, but the one away from the Governor became the only one talking after half a sentence. “Transcendent Synchronization is when the minds of several individuals that can be considered ‘alternates’ link together to form a single consciousness. This extends to clones and direct duplicates as well as multiversal copies. I myself am one of them, every Emile in several dozen universes shares my thoughts and perceptions. Jotaro has undergone something similar.”

“Clones?” O’Neill said, raising an eyebrow.

Emile nodded, a slightly nervous expression appearing on his features. “Clones. MORI corporation sometimes makes use of... ‘forks’ to make sure nobody is expended in the line of duty. There will always be an Emile, even if one is lost in a combat mission. All versions of me on this ship are forks of one Emile, though not all versions of my consciousness are contained within the Forks. It’s why we have numbers at the end of our names. Of course this was my choice, I was not forced to be cloned, and the decision is… somewhat controversial.”

“Right. Jotaro became several people,” O’Neill summarized. “At this point, Corona and Vriska engaged the Safeguard in combat, letting the security system know they had underestimated the power level of the ‘threat’. At about this point, the Collection came in. Why?”

Morty coughed. “We have a few ships that patrol the Spline looking for people to help. We didn’t know it was you, and we didn’t realize so many resources were going to be devoted to removing you. So we lost half our ship.” He clearly wasn’t happy about this – but from his expression he blamed himself more than anyone else involved.

“Right. At this point the Safeguard sent in some custom-built Agents to fight the ‘invasion’ with smarter autonomous intelligence. Corona was able to deflect one of their attacks, barely.”

“I’m impressed she was even able to do that,” Commander Thompson chimed in. “Those things wiped out an army once. Almost like it never existed.”

“It was a reality warper,” Corona said. “We’re very lucky that happens to be the type of magic I specialize in.”

O’Neill continued. “Then the TSAB shows up after I finally get something useful out of Jove and call in the cavalry. They have enough power to force the portal open for long enough to get everyone out. But we would have been pursued were it not for… this Governor that was summoned by Emile.”

The Governor spoke with a monotone voice that had no trace of being synthetic. “A plea for peace and acceptance from a concerned Governor unit prevents all pursuit out of the Spline at all but the highest levels. The difficulty was getting the area of the Spline to consider me a ‘concerned’ Governor.”

“Why can’t you just order them to stand down?” Corona asked.

“It is written in the Shadow Accords, section 78-C.”

“And what is that?”

“Insufficient permissions.”

Pinkie chuckled. “He’s an ancient machine just like the rest of the Spline. Don’t think you can weasel information out of him.”

Nanoha nodded. “People have been trying for a lot longer than any of us have been around. It’s one of the great mysteries of the multiverse. Clearly the Spline and Strands were created by the same society – likely the Weavers – but only the Spline has these defenses against tampering due to the ‘Shadow Accords’, while the Strands aren’t guarded at all. Or have much in the way of physical backbone, for that matter.”

“Hence the mess there,” Pinkie said. “It’s all a big hodgepodge of mixed everything!”

“It must be nice to be around the Strands,” the seated Emile said, leaning back. “All we’ve got out here is the Spline, and we can’t even travel that far along it because of our limited technology.”

“You just saved us, you’re in for a reward,” Corona said. “Magic-based dimensional travel technology is probably on the table. I’m sure Eve’ll allow that.”

Commander Thompson sat up straight upon hearing this, suddenly a lot more interested. “Just for making a call?”

“And bothering to help explain a few things,” Corona added.

“Regardless,” O’Neill said, starting anew. “The TSAB fled here to this mobile universe and then we decided to use it as a meeting place. Everyone showed up, and here we are. MORI, are you unaware of anyone at this table?”

Both Emiles shook their heads. “It would be hard not to know of the TSAB, and the recent waves the Merodi have made did make it to our ears. We know of the Collection because they bailed us out a time or two when we couldn’t do anything ourselves. Thanks, by the way.”

“You’re welcome,” Morty said, forcing a smile.

“Then we need to move on to mysteries. First: who the hell shoved us!? Second: why hasn’t the Safeguard been recalled!?”

“Safeguard has not been recalled due to my interference,” the Governor said. “They are merely not pursuing. They are certainly ready to start at a moment’s notice. If a Merodi, TSAB, or Collection ship appears, they will drive it away.”

Nanoha tapped Raising Heart with her finger. “Delay all TSAB Spline travel. Emergency authorization.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Any way to shut that off?” O’Neill asked.

“In three megaseconds, local time, the threat will have been deemed to have passed. Since this is the first infraction for the Merodi, there will not be any retribution. The Collection is already on the Safeguard’s ‘high priority’ list and will actively be hunted due to repeated infractions.”

“Try to help a bunch of idiots and you get branded,” Morty said. “We’re usually able to be in and out before they generate a full response to us – but you’d already raised the level considerably. We just didn’t notice until it was too late.”

“How are you not all dead?” the Emile’s asked, gawking.

“They can’t find our universe,” Morty said with a smile. “Nobody can, not anymore.”

Corona had flashbacks to the pain they’d gone through to find the Collector.

“What about the TSAB?” Nanoha asked.

“The TSAB has provided assistance in the past,” the Governor explained. “Your standing will be altered to 832X, but you are not a threat. You won’t have the surveillance all Merodi ships will have.”

“Great. Eyeballs fixed onto us at all times,” O’Neill muttered. “Any threat?”

“Psychic inversion.”

“…Explain?”

“Insufficient permissions.”

O’Neill turned to Nanoha.

“It means your psychics might have their heads implode. I expect it’s only under extreme circumstances.”

“No oculi or Sapphires in the Spline anymore, got it,” O’Neill said.

“So, back to the actual big question,” Corona said. “Who attacked us?”

“It was the Combine,” Vita muttered, speaking up for the first time.

Corona blinked. “Really?”

“Your data didn’t recognize it, but when we ran it through our devices they figured it out. That was an obfuscated Combine portal.”

Nanoha smiled sadly. “They don’t like you.”

“No, really?” Pinkie said, chuckling. “It’s not like we blew up their Green Sun or anything.”

“Not at all.”

“Still seems fishy,” Corona said. “Sure, they have beef with us, but there’s other ways they can attack us without going for full-out-war, which we know they don’t want because it would interfere with their other plans. Why wait for us to enter the Spline in a specific way?”

“Opportunist?” Morty suggested. “They saw an opening and took it, thinking there was no way you could escape?”

“Maybe…” Corona said. “I still don’t like it…”

~~~

Jotaro – all three of him – stopped listening to the meeting. He’d heard all he thought he needed to hear. He considered focusing on ‘Jojo’ and going to talk to the third Emile, but that would probably be redundant since Jotaro had figured out, more or less, how to shift perceptions from body to body. He was not able to control multiple bodies at a time easily, but he had no intention of staying like this long enough to need that.

“You think you can be cured?” he asked himself – through the body he shared with the Everyman.

“Easily,” Jotaro said. “We have access to Psychic surgery.”

“It might have to be done on every one of you at once.”

“Doable. But I have too many conflicting desires like this. Part of me is heavily devoted to the Merodi and that version’s family, but another is a drifter who can alter reality with a punch. Still another wants nothing more than to walk up to Nora and ask her out – which the numerous married versions of us find appalling. The fact that we are married to different people has been…” He couldn’t find the words to describe it. Every Jotaro went “yare yare daze…”

The Everyman found this amusing. “Struggling with inconsistency, I see. You should learn to do what I do, accept that you don’t have to be consistent. Leave each body to its own thing.”

“Or undo this through psychic surgery.”

“Fine, if that’s what you want,” the Everyman said, shrugging. “I suppose some versions of me would want to do that if they thought about it. This version isn’t going to go broadcasting it to them, though.”

“Hm…”

“You are interfering with my love for books in this world. You’ve already thrown three to the ground in anger. Those have great sentimental value, you know.”

“Tch.”

“Hmph.”

“Fine, I’ll send my focus elsewhere if you can help me out. There’s still something going on with the Spline. You’re an entity with access to extensive amounts of information. If I’m connected to you, you can let me know what you do.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Why would the Combine attack us then and there in that specific way?”

“You think it’s fishy too?”

“You do. We’re both thinking it.”

Jotaro nodded, “I have enough intellectual curiosity here to go on. Aherm. So, the Combine attacked. This is generally not what they would do, not to a society of your level anyway. Too cautious, and while they do get angry petty revenge isn’t exacted unless it is thought through.”

“So they must have been sure we would die.”

“Had the fluke of existence not made you Transcendent, you would have.”

“What exactly made me Transcendent?”

“The place you hit,” the Everyman said.

“And how do you know that?”

“One of my versions is a Spline Governor. It’s curious having a part of you that shrouds vast sections of its mind from the rest, but it doesn’t succeed fully. The Everyman’s desire to remain as secret as possible overrules the coding in the Governor to inform the Spline Safeguard of its condition. It’s a game of chess.”

“…You know what the Shadow Accords are.”

“In bits and pieces. The Weavers were truly ancient. One of the two first Class 1 societies – counting in Dark Tower time. Pre-Tower there could have been more; we have no way to know. It’s not like the Tower has the ability to see before it was built.”

“Get to the point.”

“The Shadow Accords are a set of accords created as the Weavers realized they were falling. They would not be around to maintain their structures, and the new force of ka was too much for them to counter on such a large scale. Projections suggested the Strands would be able to evolve with the multiverse, but the Spline would be spread so thin and break with enough time. So the Shadow Accords were put in place to ensure the Spline would continue to operate without any supervision. The actual workings of the Shadow Accords are hidden to me, but the legalese would likely be boring and inscrutable anyway.”

“Hmm…” Jotaro put a hand to his chin.

“What are we thinking, my other self?”

“What are the chances we hit the exact spot that would cause this?”

“Million to one, less. Since you diverted course it was impossible for the Combine to have predicted it. They’re just a Class 2 anyway, they’d have no idea about the finer workings of the Spline.”

“So it was just ka?”

“It would seem that way.”

“But we do have a way to check…” Jotaro shifted his perceptions back to the three in the meeting room. “Check the ka.”

Everyone stared at him.

“Check the ka when we crashed,” all three said at once. “We need to know if my mind was fused together by sheer narrative chance, or if something else was going on.”

Corona brought up the scans of the incident, paying special attention to the ka. “…What I wouldn’t give to have Starbeat here.”

“You’ve got the next best thing,” Nanoha said. “Raising Heart, ka analysis.”

Raising Heart beeped. “Complete! Largely inconclusive.”

“We don’t need anything specific. Did they crash there by chance?”

“Negative.”

The room fell silent.

“So there was some kind of intent?” Nanoha asked to clarify.

“Affirmative.”

“The Combine couldn’t do that,” O’Neill said. “Right?”

“We can’t do that,” Nanoha said. “We have no idea how most of the Spline operates, much less would we be able to throw a ship into part of the Spline and predict where you would dodge. Even if we devoted all our resources to it. We’d need a Prophet to do it.”

“If it was just a Prophet, it would appear as a standard million-to-one chance,” Morty pointed out. “And if it was an intentional Prophet, well, your ka scans should be able to pick up that easily.”

“What would even have the power to do that? And why?” the Emiles asked.

“Unknown,” the Governor said. “All records of Class 1 entities do not indicate they would attempt interference with the Spline with this much accuracy.”

“As for why…” O’Neill brought up an image of the Safeguard Exterminators and Agents that were still active. “That sure looks like one tasty army.”

“Right, let’s go through options,” Corona said. “Abstracts and Great Will are out, they don’t care about this sort of thing. Beyonders?”

“The Beyonders tried to claim part of the Spline for their own a century ago,” Nanoha said. “They haven’t even been in the Spline since. They know when they’ve been beaten.”

“Right… Celestialsapiens would be detectable… Them would never risk their own skins for anything – perhaps the Combine were just one of Them’s puppets?”

“Possibly, but what use would Them have for an army?” O’Neill asked.

“Right… Horrorterrors also have no use for an army of beings unlike them, and given what we know of them it doesn’t seem right. The Xeelee?”

“The Xeelee use the Spline more than anyone else, they probably would have tried something before now,” Emile said. “…What? We see a lot of them pass by.”

“And that’s all the Class 1 civilizations,” Morty said. “They don’t have enough reason to do anything.”

“Scientific study isn’t beyond the Horrorterrors,” O’Neill pointed out. “They are curious.”

“And have suffered embarrassing losses lately.”

“That could mean they’re desperate.”

“The current number of Safeguard entities would not be of any large-scale use,” the Governor pointed out. “They would be adequate for defending a handful of universes, perhaps a few more if their technology could be replicated. If the Class 1s wanted an army, they would have sought many more Safeguard units than are currently active.”

Pinkie slammed her hooves on the table. “I know who it is.”

“Who!?” Everyone asked.

“Nanoha, have the TSAB scan the motion of this universe. How are we moving? The pattern?”

Nanoha made the order. A few seconds later, the data came back. “…We are moving within the Spline in a perfect circle. This universe has become nested within the Spline’s existence.”

“And we can’t detect it,” the Governor said.

“Scan for connected universes,” Pinkie said. “And see if they’re following us.”

Nanoha did. “Pinkie, you’re right, there are several other universes moving in tandem with us…”

Pinkie nodded slowly. “Guys? We’re inside White Nettle. The last Downstreamer. She wants the army to protect her jellyfish-universe body.”

The Governor stood bolt upright. “Action must be taken to remedy this immediately.”

“Send information back to the Spline,” Emile said.

“I cannot. I have been removed from the primary network. I thought it was just a trait of this universe when I arrived.”

The Jotaros raised their eyebrows. “Then how did you know the Spline couldn’t detect this universe?”

“If they could, this area would already have been sterilized and subsequently cauterized.”

“Then we just leave and tell the Spline what’s going on,” Corona said.

Nanoha nodded. “Large portal, MORI Corporation space. Engage for all present.”

The portal opened.

None of the ships moved through it.

“What’s happening?” Morty demanded. “Why is no one moving?!”

A small white spark appeared in the center of the table, disrupting the display of the ships. It formed into an androgynous humanoid with paper coming out of her back, eyes pulsing with black energy. “Can’t believe I didn’t notice you in here until now. This is why I need some quality automated defenses.”

“Nova, get in here,” Corona called through the intercom.

“I’m already talking to her. She’s upset, and confused,” Nettle said, glaring. “And I’m just plain upset. Why do you want to protect the Spline? It’s just an ancient machine left by a race that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“The Agents and Governors are conscious,” the Emiles said.

“And if they never leave the Spline they are held in ultimate, unending, regimented control,” Nettle muttered. “It sucks. They’ll be better served policing something that actually matters.”

“The Spline matters!” Corona blurted. “So many people use it!”

“The Spline can recover from a lost universe. I should know. The Downstreamers removed several to make the Beyond inaccessible.” Nettle smirked, folding her arms. “What? We had the entire multiverse under our control. The Spline was part of it.”

Everyone glanced to the Governor.

“Insufficient Permissions,” it responded.

White Nettle smirked. “Access code D-Yen-Ampersand-Sigma-Aleph-Kappa-Nira-Tez’le’thu-N-8-8-Brien-Sanar. Personal imprint authenticate.”

“Increased security temporarily granted.”

The MORI Corporation citizens stared at the Governor in disbelief.

“She speaks partial truth. The Downstreamers were granted high informational access and allowed to interact with deep systems. This grant was revoked upon the creation of the Beyond.”

“But we’ve apparently maintained our security clearance!”

“Partially.”

“Eh, good enough. Hey, mind telling them what happened to the Downstreamers?”

“Insufficient Permissions.”

“Bah, whatever,” Nettle said. “When I take control of this part of the Spline I can pry the information out myself. And be able to stop things like you from living inside me without my knowledge. Do you have any idea how many universes are in this tentacle? A lot. It’s a lot.”

“Yeah, no,” Corona said. “We’ll stop you.”

“How?” Nettle asked. “Nobody here could escape the seal I’ve put around this universe. Even I can’t communicate with the rest of my body right now.”

The three Jotaros grabbed their hats. “Yare yare daze...”

Nettle looked to them. “What?”

“You just slipped up. Governor, get ready to move.”

Nettle raised an eyebrow. “How did I slip up, exactly, Jojojojojojo?”

Jove took a few steps forward. “You revealed that communication to this universe was blocked because you’re keeping us in. If you suddenly weren’t here, you’d have to open it up again to get in.”

“Pfft, I’m not opening this seal up unless this part of me opens it from the inside. I’m not stupid.”

“Yes you are. STAR PLATINUM OVER HEAVEN!”

The Star Platinum with the power to rewrite reality with a punch touched the little body of Nettle. He reshaped reality – ordering that not only would Nettle vanish, but she would also drop the lock on the universe.

It would only work for a second before the larger mind of Nettle noticed. But it was enough for the Governor to teleport away using its superior technology.

The other ships tried to move as well – but they only made it about a foot. Nettle appeared in front of them again. “I forgot you could do that! You’re all going to pay for th-”

And then everything was Spline Exterminators and Agents. Nettle’s small body vanished again as she devoted all of her resources to escaping the wrath of the Spline.

This allowed the small group of ships to slip out of Nettle’s tentacle universe and back into MORI Corporation space.

The Emiles and commander Thompson’s communicators started flashing red – as far as their sensors back home could tell them, the Spline was basically exploding.

There was panic in the MORI Corporation – but it would eventually settle down as the Safeguard left the universe to pursue White Nettle.

They would not catch her. Safeguard was not intended to operate in her universe and White Nettle knew more tricks than even the Collection for hiding her position.

But she would not be getting any army to defend herself automatically today.

Corona let out a sigh of relief. “Well, looks like we’re good now. Who’s up for going to the Magic High Commission?”

All three Jotaros let out an “A-hem!?”

“Riiiight after we fix you up. Nanoha, do you mind?”

~~~

Jotaro looked at Jove.

Jove looked at Jotaro.

“I’m glad I got to be you,” Jove said. “I thought my family life was always doomed.”

“You left too early,” Jotaro countered.

“I’ve read the manga. It doesn’t really get better.”

“Yare yare daze…”

Jove shook his head. “It sounds so wrong...”

“…coming from someone else.”

Jove looked at Jotaro’s slight smirk. “You’ve loosened up.”

“It comes from having stability.”

“I’ll think about it.”

They both knew the conversation was over. Without even a wave, the two parted ways. Jotaro noticed ‘Jojo’ talking to Nora. She let out a squee and pulled him into a hug. The man must have finally asked.

Good, Jotaro thought. He pulled out his phone. “Jotaro to the Austraeoh. Beam me up, O’Neill”

He was beamed to the bridge where Pinkie’s Party, Corona, and O’Neill stood.

Nova was talking about White Nettle. “…I’m not exactly sure she’s evil. After all, the intent was to have Jotaro bail us out of the situation. She just would have gotten an army out of the deal if it worked properly.”

“Half a Collection ship was destroyed,” Vriska countered.

“…Yeah. I don’t know if that was part of the plan though.” Nova sighed. “I think she just needs to get to know some people, you know? She’s very lonely.”

“And crazy,” Vriska said.

“Lonely and crazy is a recipe for redemption,” Flutterfree said. “…But it won’t happen today. If it happens.”

Nova nodded. “Yeah…”

Pinkie hugged her – though she didn’t quite make it feel natural for Nova. “We’ll encounter her again. You can bet on it.”

“I have no doubt about that.”

Pinkie nodded. “But for now, let’s go to the Magic High Commision!”

“Uh, Pinkie?” Vriska said, folding her arms. “We can’t use the Spline right now. They’re still on ‘alert’ for us.”

“The TSAB has graciously extended an invitation to follow their fleet,” O’Neill said. Pinkie nodded in conformation.

“They can’t use the Spline either.”

“Ah, but they can go across the multiverse with brute force in… a little over a week, assuming nothing goes wrong.”

Corona let out a pained groan.

Jotaro clutched at his hat. “Yare yare daze…”

They began their long journey again.

111 - O

Year 29

One of the lesser known but still quality bookstores in Celestia City was Trotting Pages, a mixture bookstore, media center, and surprisingly good café. During her time spent looping through one day repeatedly, Allure had discovered this place and slowly she had spread word about it. It was no longer as quiet and peaceful as it once was, but it was never packed – or noisy. It was still a bookstore after all, even the patrons there just for the café understood this.

Which was exactly why Allure was here; for the food. Or more accurately, to use the food as an excuse to get together with her daughter, Minna, and Frigid, Minna’s husband. Minna was in her normal outfit: a simple pitch black dress, but she also wore a fabric armband of bright orange with stripes of silver that proclaimed her rank of Marshall to anyone who cared. Subordinate only to O’Neill, Yellow Diamond, and the High Commanders. She’d progressed a long way over the years. Allure felt like it was such a short time – but three decades was nothing to sneeze at.

…Had it really been that long since the war? It didn’t seem like it. Maybe she’d experienced less, since there was temporal drift. News stories were saying the temporal drift was up to plus or minus six years now. Would be ten before too long.

“…all I’m saying is that whenever I’m around Red Diamond my predictions just stop,” Minna said, holding a fork in her hand. “I know she’s not a bad person, but that still unnerves me.”

“And you don’t unnerve other people?” Allure asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I mean, sure, but I’d still like to know why she’s outside my predictions.”

Frigid shrugged. “Magical?”

Minna smiled. “Frigid…”

“What? Enough magic should be able to do anything!”

Minna scratched Frigid behind the ear. “It’s a good thing I didn’t marry you for your intelligence.”

“…Oh,” Frigid said, ears drooping. “What is it this time?”

“Geez, nothing that bad,” Allure said. “It’s just that magic doesn’t block Minna’s abilities just by being strong. It has to be intentional.”

“And I’d know if it was intentional,” Minna added. “She would have felt like Brell. Which she doesn’t.”

Frigid nodded slowly. “Sorry for forgetting about that.”

“Frigid, we’ve been married over twenty years. If I was going to blow a gasket at you for your chronic forgetfulness, I would have already.”

“…You know, that makes sense.”

Allure put on a smile, but inwardly she was facehooving. She liked Frigid just fine, but living with him would be a nightmare. Minna assured her otherwise, but Allure agreed to disagree. The stallion was a few bread slices short of a picnic and hardly remembered much of anything. He was exceptionally kind-hearted, understanding, and patient – likely because of the way he was – which made occasionally interacting with him rather pleasant. But living with him…?

Allure pushed these thoughts aside and continued the conversation, changing the topic to Blumiere stepping down as mayor again. They all knew it wouldn’t last long.

What they didn’t know was that they were being watched. A small fly-shaped drone snapped a few pictures of them, ensuring they were in the right spot. It confirmed that a waiter was bringing them a special slice of cake, compliments of the chef. It flew away to check on the second group: Prism Dash and Core Apple, better known as Corea.

Corea had been sitting there, alone, staring into her tea – but Prism had decided she couldn’t just let Corea be so despondent. So she had sat down and started talking, and the two were acting as if they were old friends even though they had rarely interacted before now.

Prism was busy complaining. “So, anyway, the latest in the long line of boyfriends has been a complete wash.”

“…Is this one a pony?”

Prism let out a chuckle. “I’m not going to make the same mistake my mother did. She did a great job raising me alone but I don’t think I could do that with my lifestyle choices. No, this guy’s a Pokèrin.”

“…Can’t say I’m familiar.”

“Uh, that world that joined after we became Class 2 and has become pretty major? Before the great expedition to the Unrealities? Pokèrin Anima? Loosely based in the ‘Pokèmon’ game series?”

“I mean it sounds like I’ve heard of it before, I guess.”

Prism looked around. “Look, over there – that Ga? Pokèrin has Ga as well, though they call themselves sirknights. The difference is that Pokèrin has a lot of sapient races. Like how we’re all Equite because we're from an Equis – even if, say, you were a dragon, you’re an Equite.”

“Oh. …So they’re the replacement then?”

Prism blinked. “Replacement?”

“I mean, for my world.”

Prism bit her lip. “Corea…”

“I’m no idiot. I know Elemental Four isn’t important anymore. Everyone just moves away…” She touched the glass with her hoof. “Couldn’t stop it.”

“Don’t be hard on yourself, you did a lot of good on that world.”

“I know. I know. But I wasn’t there when they needed it.”

“Didn’t you basically get hit head-on with orbital bombardment to save the airbenders?”

Corea nodded. “Still. I took too long to recover.” She looked down. “…I feel like I failed Iroh.”

“The people are still alive and living well,” Prism assured her.

“When was the last time you saw someone from Elemental Four wearing traditional clothing or living the traditional lifestyle?” Corea held out a hoof. “Can you even tell if any of the people here are from Elemental Four? Or do they all just look like humans?”

Prism took a quick look around. She saw a lot of humans, and several with the correct ethnicity for Elemental Four… but she couldn’t say for certain. She was relatively certain one of them was a firebender because of the way their tea was steaming, but that was it. “Maybe one. I see your point.”

Corea nodded sadly.

“Look, Corea, there are hundreds of universes in Merodi Universalis. They don’t all have to be ‘important’ to mean something, right? Elemental Four was one of the founders. Their legacy will always be remembered – as will yours.”

“Yeah, I know, and that’s what I hold onto to give me peace.” She leaned back. “Doesn’t change the fact that it’s sad.”

“…Yeah.”

The drone confirmed the arrival of the cake to their table. It flew away to one last group, a husband-and-wife human-unicorn pair that wasn’t in the café but the adjoining bookstore. The two were quiet individuals – Jolyne’s son Job spent his time observing everything closely while Nova’s Stardust was carefully examining books. Neither had said a word in the last twenty minutes and they were perfectly fine with that. Job was a muscular man who was decidedly smaller than most of the Joestar line while Stardust wore prominent pointed glasses, even though her eyes were fine. She liked the look of them and the digital interface they could overlay on her books.

Stardust did find something interesting, eventually. “Hmm…” she muttered, pulling a dimensional guidebook off the shelves. “The worlds in here are listed by importance.”

Job glanced at her curiously.

“Job, let’s see. This is a recent book – last local year – what do you think they list as important worlds?”

“Uh… The Hub.”

“Given. Celestia City is also given, even though it isn’t a universe. I’m looking for the others.”

Job nodded slowly – he was very used to his wife’s little games at this point. “Let’s see… Earth Stand, Equis Vitis, Earth Vitis, Earth Tau’ri, Equis Cosmic, Lai, Gem Vein, and uh… …what’s the eighth founder?”

“Elemental Four. It’s not at the front of the book, so it doesn’t matter that you didn’t remember.”

“Right. …How many are we looking for?”

“Eleven. There’s a twelfth but it’s not a Merodi world. Bonus points if you get that one.”

“So… Skaia’s Dream, Esefem, Pokèrin Anima, and...” He put his hand to his head. “I don’t have any idea.”

“The Mushroom World is the eleventh,” Stardust said, flipping the page and quoting a passage. “While the Mushroom World was a largely background presence back in the times when only the Mushroom Kingdomwasa known power, upon the discovery of the Nexus and Castle Bleck, more research was put into the world. It turned out to have two important aspects - a galaxy filled with a race of star-shaped beings called Luma and a great dimensional connection to other worlds.”

“So that’s where those floating chubby starfish come from.”

Stardust nodded. “The next world is the Sparkle Census. ‘Merodi Universalis’s closest ally and greatest friend.’ Again, doesn’t really count, but it's in here in the ‘twelfth’ position.”

“Not counting the Hub and Celestia City.”

Stardust smirked, glad to hear Job had been paying attention. They both knew the conversation had ended, so they went back to silence.

That is, until a waiter walked up to them, depositing a plate with a small slice of cake into Stardust’s magic. She didn’t bother eating it – she tore it open, discovering the real treasure inside.

Two pink tickets.

Congratulations! You have been selected by Trotting Pages as the recipients of a cruise through Merodi Universalis!

Below that were instructions about where the cruise was going to start, what worlds it would go to, and what luxuries would be available.

“Job, the factory gives you vacation days you never take, right?”

Job nodded.

There was no further discussion. They decided they were going.

Back at Corea and Prism’s table, the two of them stared at the tickets.

“…Eh, sure, why not,” Prism said.

“Great! It’s a date!”

“Wait nonono-”

Corea put a hoof on Prism’s mouth. “Yes.”

“Corea…”

“Just be sure to actually dump him before you go.”

Prism bit her lip. “…All right.”

Allure, Minna, and Frigid had gotten three.

“…Can we go? Please?” Frigid begged.

“I have a big responsibility, Fri,” Minna said. “I-”

“Psh,” Allure said, rolling her eyes. “O’Neill will give you some time off. Come on, let’s go! It sounds fun!”

Minna shook her head, smiling softly. “All right. Guess we get to go on a cruise.”

The fly drone, having confirmed the acceptance of all the tickets, returned to those controlling it. There were two Earth Vitis humans of pink complexion and white hair, clearly related – likely siblings. The young man was operating the drone from a computer while the woman had her eyes closed and was sitting in a meditative posture. The man clasped his hands together. “They’ve taken it. Does everything look good?”

The woman smiled warmly. “Everything looks great.”

~~~

Corea and Prism arrived first. The instructions on the tickets told them to come to a dock on Celestia City where a smaller ship waited to take them to the actual cruise – contest winners would get to make a grand entrance on the actual cruise ship. Luckily even the small ‘ferry’ was luxurious, so they didn’t feel cheated. There were ten chairs equipped with full reclining features, cupholders, and a food replicator in the middle specialized for drinks.

“Hey,” Corea said, nudging Prism. “We’re alone.”

“Oh good god…”

Corea used her magic to access the food replicator to create a drink from Elemental Four she liked to call the ‘Air Temple Serenity’. She had invented it one day and Tenzin had hated her for it. It took the form of a completely clear, fizzy liquid. “Have some culture.”

Prism rolled her eyes, taking a seat opposite Corea. “So, what is this, Corea’s overly-optimistic and cheery attempts at seduction, or what?”

“Oh, was that not obvious? I’m sorry.”

“It was very obvious.”

“And I was being silly.” Corea winked and stuck her tongue out adorably.

Prism rolled her eyes. “You’re wasting your time on me, Avatar.”

“If I am it’s not really a big deal,” Corea admitted. “I’ll probably have a new friend at the end and have gotten to know you better.”

Prism smirked. “You seem better.”

“You caught me at a bad time last week. Fair warning, if you get to know the latest Avatar, you will have a nearly unending stream of positivity ruined by dramatic pitfalls every month or so. Anything you should warn me about?”

“That I’m not interested?”

“Besides that. Because as we all know that’s nothing when two souls are meant to be.”

“…You’re a ka-phisher?”

Corea blinked. “Wait, what? That exists? Spirits on high, no! I’m just saying it doesn’t mean much. Especially not when I’m persistent. Now come on, warnings about you?”

Prism decided to humor her – even though she was well aware that was the first sign of trouble. “I am probably the main reason there’s talk of removing Evening Sparkle from office. Not that it’s working, but I make where I stand on her very clear.”

“…Oh, right…” Corea rubbed the back of her head. “That’s okay. Mom told me about that one.”

“Yeah. I’m also exceptionally busy with my athletics and research the vast majority of the time. I often forget to eat.”

“Looks like you need someone to remind you!” Corea said with a wink.

“…You’re such a cornball.”

“I like being a cornball!”

Minna, Frigid, and Allure arrived at this time.

“Frigid, help me,” Prism called. “Your sister-in-law is trying to seduce me.”

Frigid took one look at Corea. Corea raised her eyebrows playfully. Frigid let out a laugh. “You’re on your own. Also, here’s a hint, just give in. Her persistence knows no bounds.”

“How so?” Allure asked.

“She hasn’t told you the story about how she got Tenzin to train her as a child?”

Corea smirked. “Oh yeah, I wouldn’t let him off the hook. Ever.”

“And then he yelled at you and made you run away crying,” Minna offered.

“But that ruins the funny nature of the story!” Corea complained. “Yeesh. You’re supposed to tell it where I leave acting like I’ve been defeated, but then he comes and saves me anyway!”

“I thought your mother was Honesty?”

“It’s just an exaggeration! I tell people the real story if they ask!”

Allure sat down next to Prism while the rest of them kept arguing about the proper way to tell stories. “You’ve doomed yourself.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Double doomed.”

Prism rolled her eyes. “I have enough willpower to resist her charms.”

“And you just called them charms. Holy Celestia, you’re not only in her web, you’re tying yourself up.”

Prism didn’t dignify this with a response. She did finally take a sip of the drink Corea had given her. Her eyes widened. This was actually pretty good.

“Dooooooooooooom.” Allure said spookily.

“You’re the Knight of Heart, not Doom.”

At this point Stardust and Job entered the room, smiled warmly at the five others, and then promptly sat as far away from them as possible, turning to their books.

The moment they had settled, the voice of the pilot came to them. “Now that everyone’s here, we shall make our way to the Lantea. The trip will take about five minutes so we can integrate with the fireworks display, at which point you will walk down the red carpet where you will be given a tour of the cruise. Normally at this point I’d say buckle up, but we have enough dampeners to get hit with a large meteor and not feel it. Enjoy yourselves and prepare for your voyage through the cosmos!”

The voice cut out. They heard a soft rumbling that presumably came from the ship’s engines.

“Ship, visual,” Job ordered. The luxury ship’s walls turned invisible, allowing them to see the receding form of Celestia City.

“I didn’t know it could do this,” Frigid said, eyes wide. “Woah…”

“It’s a high-end luxury ship, of course it can,” Prism commented.

“Then why didn’t we open it sooner? This is awesome!” Corea blurted, pressing her face to the wall-turned-window.

“Didn’t think about it.”

The ship flew through space and created a dimensional portal.

Minna’s smile dropped instantly. She rushed to the front of the ship, punching in the cabin door.

There were no pilots. Instead there was a large sign hanging from the ceiling of the cockpit that said ‘nice try!’ with a winky face under it. All the controls had been stripped out of the ship.

Minna wasn’t going to have time to hotwire any controls before they entered the portal, even with her enhanced abilities.

There was no time to say anything. They were sent through the portal to a universe containing only one sunlike star with a handful of planets orbiting it.

“It was a trap!” she called back. “There’s no cruise! All the controls have been ripped out!”

Prism pushed her way into the cockpit, analyzing everything that had been torn out. “It can still fly and it appears all the important wires are still here. Give me half an hour and I can jerry-rig something.”

“Or we could just dimensionally jump out of here,” Allure said, removing her dimensional device. It told her there was no connection back to Celestia City. “Oooor not. Surprise, surprise.”

Corea stretched her legs. “Well, guess this cruise just became an adventure. I, personally, don’t mind.”

Stardust sighed. “I do… I never wanted to be involved in anything like this.”

“We can take care of it, don’t worry,” Job said, standing tall. “What can I do?”

Allure shrugged. “I don’t think you can do much – oh, wait, got it! Since you know the features of this ship that are controlled by voice command, you can work on those!”

“Ship, return,” Job said. Nothing. “Ship, forward.”

“Why isn’t it working!?” Frigid blurted.

“Disabled,” Minna said. “You can help Prism with the hotwiring.”

“Hey, he hasn’t tried very many!” Allure blurted. “There could be something!”

“Any ship wouldn’t want any important commands to be vocally controlled by passengers.”

“But what if there’s something else useful?”

“I’ll go help with the cockpit,” Job muttered, passing Minna.

Minna and Allure locked eyes – and figured it would be best to talk about it later. They needed to get out of the situation as soon as possible.

Stardust poked her head into the cockpit. “…Perhaps you could cross the streams of the blue and red wires.”

“That wouldn’t work because of the highly volatile nature of the green thaumics,” Prism said, twisting a yellow and a green wire together, handing Job a few loose screws to hold. “I’ve got the university education, let me handle this.”

Stardust nodded slowly and returned to her seat, wordless.

“Hey, she can h-” Job began.

“You want to get this done as fast as possible right? She’ll get in the way since she doesn’t know what she’s doing. You’re the only assistant I need. Now place those screws here, here, and here.” She pulled a screwdriver out of an emergency toolkit and started screwing them in.

While they were busy with that, Frigid walked up to Corea. “So… What do we do?”

“Relax, stay calm!” Minna called to her husband. “Corea and I have watch.”

Corea nodded. “Yeah. You can just sit Frigid, don’t worry about it.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Sense anything?” Corea asked Minna.

Minna nodded slowly. “Bad feelings all around. Nothing close enough in the future to get any specifics, but we aren’t in a safe place.”

Allure nodded, checking the scans on her dimensional device. “Yep. Unknown universe. Single system, handful of planets, nothing beyond the outer comets. Nothing that unusual coming up on physics readings. I, uh… don’t have anything more advanced on me.”

“Ship, display scans,” Job said, calling from the cockpit.

A basic summary of scans appeared on the clear walls. Allure’s grin widened. “Ah, here we go… Let’s see… Evidence of slight temporal distortion… And it looks like we’ve got a society with a few spaceships around, unknown signatures. Let’s call them.”

“Let’s not,” Minna said. “Wait until the ship is repaired. They could be aggressive.”

Allure scrunched her snout. “Sure, sure…”

Frigid glanced between the two of them and decided now wasn’t a good time.

“Gah! Shit!” Prism shouted, pulling her singed wing away from a power surge. “That was not fun. Mmmmmf. …Job, wrench.”

Job handed her a wrench. She smacked the side of the module she had constructed with it, making all the lights turn on. “Bingo… I have engine control. Not FTL, just the engine. Not very useful. Also, turning will be a centrifugal force nightmare.”

“But we have very excellent inertial dampeners!” Corea said, grinning.

“COREA, SHIELD!” Minna shouted.

“W-Wh-”

“SHIELD!”

Corea forced her mind to focus, bending magic quickly outside the ship and creating a shield. She didn’t have time to fully form it, allowing a magic bolt to hit the ship head on. They felt it on the inside, the lurch making everyone stumble. One of the drinks flew off the table, into the cockpit, and onto Prism’s head.

“I question the effectiveness of these inertial dampeners,” Prism muttered, pulling her multicolor mane out of her eyes. She floored the engine and they shot forward. The inertial dampeners must have meant something because they didn’t feel the acceleration at all.

“Corea, you’re our only defense!” Minna shouted.

“I have a shield up!” Corea spat back. “There’s nothing else I can work with out there in the void!”

“What’s attacking us?” Minna demanded.

“I have a red dot,” Allure said, looking at the display. “It’s red. I have no idea how to zoom or enhance.”

“Ship, zoom and enhance!” Job tried. Nothing happened.

“Worth a shot,” Allure said. “Corea, how’s your shield coming along?”

“It’ll break eventually,” Corea muttered. “And I will not be able to generate another one fast enough.”

“How much damage did the shot that hit do?” Minna asked.

“What little weapons systems this ship had are now gone,” Prism said, scrambling with wires. “I’ve been ‘shooting’ blind with these wires and nothing’s been coming out.”

“So it wasn’t designed to kill.”

“Probably not. They probably want to capture the ship.”

“We can’t fight them. We’ll need something else…”

“Job! What is your Stand’s ability?” Allure asked.

“Loophole in Limbo allows me to physically travel through psychic connections,” Job responded.

“And we don’t have any of those,” Allure muttered. “That’s it, we need to send out a distress call.”

“That’ll just bring more ships!” Minna blurted.

“I don’t see another option.” She pulled out her dimensional device and used her magic – but Minna swiped it away from her before she could activate the distress signal.

“Mom, no. That’s n-” Minna blinked, seeing a future where Allure activated the distress anyway with her telekinesis. “Mom, don’t do it.”

Allure did it. Activating the distress beacon.

Nothing happened.

And then Corea’s shield failed. Another weapon bolt hit their ship, cutting the lights.

Corea tried to raise another shield, but she flubbed its creation by moving too quickly – the magic slipped from her control. Another bolt hit them, cutting the engines. “N-no…”

“Preening runters!” Prism swore, kicking her now-useless console hard enough to break it. “That’s it, I’ve got nothing.”

And then an orange ship appeared outside, unleashing a brilliant laser far into the distance in the direction the red dot had been on their scans. There was an explosion in the distance.

“Woohoo!” Allure shouted. “We’ve been saved! Told you that distress call would help.”

Minna didn’t have anything to say to this.

Corea was breathing heavily. “I… I screwed up…”

There was no time for anything else. Their entire ship was teleported into the much larger orange one, allowing the seven of them to see who had saved them.

Allure groaned. “…Melnorme…”

~~~

The captain of the Melnorme ship was named Amaranth. She had a dull red eye, but otherwise looked exactly like every other Melnorme. “Welcome to the Oubliette.”

Allure raised an eyebrow. “I thought this ship was the Chromastaral.”

“Oh, it is. The Oubliette is the name of where you are.”

“Why?”

“That will cost you,” Amaranth said, leaning in. “There is also a fee for receiving aid.”

“Oh for the love o-”

“Merodi Universalis will compensate you for our return,” Minna said.

“That sort of trade is not allowed in our activities here.”

“…And you can’t tell us why.”

“Not unless you pay.”

“We don’t have anything to offer you besides our connections, and currently we can’t access those.”

“That’s not entirely true. Give us your ship. Damaged though it is, it will cover the costs of aid, information, and other fees that will become apparent the moment you’ve paid to know about them.”

Prism looked like she wanted to rip Amaranth’s eyeball out of her smug orange face but the pegasus restrained herself.

“Fine, you can have the ship,” Allure muttered.

“Wai-” Minna began.

“Too late, verbal acceptance of a person in authority is taken as legal right to the vessel,” Amaranth said. “It was nice doing business with you.”

“Mhm…” Minna said, grinding her teeth. “So, now that we’ve ‘paid’, care to explain?”

“Oh, yes. The Oubliette is a chain of nineteen one-way universes that form a ring. Each one has a connection that leads to another universe in the chain, but it is a connection that cannot be used backward. Every one of the nineteen universes has the same planetary arrangement, except for O-13 because it lost the fourth planet due to an accident several years ago. You are currently in O-6 by the way. One planet in each system is in the natural ‘goldilocks zone’ so you don’t have to worry about that. Everyone calls it Oub.”

“That’s interesting. How do we get out?” Prism demanded.

“There are two methods of escape from the Oubliette. The first is to use temporal manipulation – after all, the Oubliette traps people by manipulating local time. Once you dial in, the connection back is severed completely. But if you could just reverse time to a moment where it existed, you could dial home.” Her grin widened. “Your second option is to buy your way out. We offer the most efficient services for doing so, but we are not the only escape providers in the Oubliette.”

“You charge people for escape!? What’s wrong with you!?” Corea shouted.

“It is a profit opportunity,” Amaranth said. “We do not overcharge like many here. We offer the service for exactly what it is worth. Your wrecked ship did not even begin to cover the cost, if you’re curious.”

Prism sighed. “I’ll just build one myself. I know how to do it. I’ll need a lot of parts though…” She fixed Amaranth with an annoyed glare. “...Let me guess…”

“If you want to buy the parts for a temporal manipulator you might as well just pay us to take you away. Which you can’t do.”

Minna folded her arms. “Merodi Universalis will hear about this.”

“Mhm. Yeah. You’ll declare war on us for refusing to give free aid.”

“Aid is free!” Corea blurted.

“Your culture’s definition of aid is particularly curious and incorrect.”

Corea fumed, saying nothing further.

Amaranth leaned back. “Here’s what I would suggest. Use most of the rest of your funds to get transport to Oub. You have a dimensional device, you’ll be able to travel through all nineteen versions of Oub. Find a way to make your own temporal device, steal someone else’s, or find some way to make enough money to pay us off. It’s all that simple.”

“How many people actually succeed in getting enough money?” Allure asked.

“Oh, about one every hour. But that’s a misleading number, seeing as there are trillions of people trapped in the Oubliette. It’s a rather savage trap, you know.”

“And nobody tries to fix it?!”

“That’s because they own it,” Job said. “The Oubliette is under Melnorme control.”

“Good guess,” Amaranth admitted. “Or perhaps you used Loophole in Limbo? There’s no way for me to know for sure. Regardless, yes, we found the Oubliette and declared it our own. It’s a good source of income, assisting people in their escape. Before we were here there was little hope.”

Corea twitched. “That’s stupid! Just… just help them all get out!”

Amaranth rolled her eye. “You’re about out of funds, by the way. If you don’t book passage to Oub soon you’ll have to either wait for us to get there naturally or you’d have to work for us to get enough.”

Minna folded her arms. “Fine. Take us to Oub. And give us whatever funds we have leftover as change.”

“There’s a transaction fee for that! You could bank with us and keep it a-”

“Don’t care, give it to us anyway.”

“The customer is always right,” Amaranth said, bowing curtly. Then she gave the order to transport to Oub.

The ship arrived in an instant. They were all teleported off without another word.

~~~

In the murky-green skies of O-6-Oub, a flash of light deposited five ponies, a human, and Minna unceremoniously above a puddle of mud. Frigid landed first, crushed under all the others while Prism was the only one with the wings to keep herself from falling into the sludge.

“Ooh, that’s gotta stink,” Prism muttered. A few octagonal coins appeared right above her, which she grabbed with her impressive agility.

“Get me out of here!” Frigid blurted, scrambling in a panic. “Get me o-”

Minna got him out with a quick pull, pulling him into her arms. “There you go, it’s fine. You’re safe.”

“And covered in mud that… might not be mud…”

“Don’t think about it,” Job offered.

“That’s like telling someone not to think about cats!”

“Deep breaths,” Allure told Frigid. “Deep breaths. It’s just a stinky brown muddy substance. It isn’t going to kill you.”

“It could be radioactive or infected,” Stardust said absentmindedly.

Allure shot her a death glare.

“Oh. …Sorry.”

“It’s… fine,” Allure said through clenched teeth.

“We’re gonna die!” Frigid wailed.

“No, Fri, we are not,” Minna said, looking him in the eyes. “Do I look like I’d let anything happen to us?”

“N-no…”

“Then nothing is going to happen to us,” Minna asserted. She gently set Frigid down on solid ground, dusting him off with her hands. “Okay?”

Frigid nodded slowly.

“Good,” Prism said, flying down to be eye level with Minna. “Now what do we do?”

“We look at our surroundings,” Minna said, doing exactly as she suggested. They were on a truly disgusting, trashy world. The sky was greenish, the air smelled noxious, and the puddle of mud they were in was mixed with motor oil, rust shavings, and other things that were probably much more toxic than Frigid would be okay with. Jagged pieces of metal rose above the disgusting sludge, clearly constructed out of downed spaceships that had been scrounged for parts, leaving behind only the frameworks. There was evidence of people living in the higher levels of these structures. A few metallic platforms had been placed onto the muddy ground to create a solid floor.

In the distance they could see a tremendous ship’s skeleton lit with bright lights – presumably what the Oubliette considered a ‘city’.

“Right, that’s a little far away,” Prism said. “I could get there in a couple minutes but you guys can’t.”

“There are other universes in this trap,” Allure said, pulling out her dimensional device. “We could try those.” She set the device to scan for dimensional signatures. It found one very quickly – but only one. She dialed. They found another muddy, disgusting world – but this time there wasn’t a pile of sludge and a spaceship ‘city’ was relatively closer. They stepped through. As expected, the portal closed behind them and it couldn’t be reopened.

“That city’s still a few miles away,” Prism said, hooves on her hips. “Let’s keep trying.”

They did – until they appeared in one of the cities. The noxious smell of the planet wasn’t as strong within the confines of the city, but it was somehow more depressing. People walked around with clear sickness and rags – mostly humans, but with several other races thrown in randomly. The ancient framework of the gigantic ship was old, rusted, and falling apart. They could see several levels of the city above and below them, all strung together with loose ropes and cables that could fail at any moment.

They saw a skeleton sitting nearby that nobody seemed to care about.

“…We’re going to be here a while,” Job observed.

“Oh Celestia, no…” Frigid muttered, putting his hooves to his head.

Minna moved to comfort Frigid – but saw something in the future that made her stop. She reached out with her hand behind Prism, punching a creature of speed across the face.

“AUGH!”

Minna grabbed the blue pointy-limbed humanoid by the throat. “So, thought you could steal our coin huh?”

The being wriggled uncomfortably in her hands. “Clearly not! I was just running here! Stop being so paranoid!”

“I have Future Sight, I saw you steal the coins.”

“…Fuck.” He started struggling harder.

“I’m not going to kill you. I’m just going to make you tell us a few things.”

“Well hey, if you’re not gonna kill me, I ain’t sayin nuffin’.”

“I can kill you if you annoy me enough.”

“Oh yeah? I bet you soft little ponies don’t have it in y-”

Minna squeezed harder. “I am a Merodi Universalis Marshall. I killed a lot of people to earn this title. It carries some weight, you could say.”

Allure inwardly facehooved. Alushy…

“O-okay okay! What do you want to know?”

“What’s this city called?” Minna demanded.

“Nowhere. That’s literally what it’s called don’t kill me!”

Minna decided she believed him. “Any leaders or laws we should be made aware of?”

“Laws? Hah, there aren’t any laws in the entire Oubilette besides ‘don’t fuck with the Melnorme’. Or any of the other opportunistic escape routes. They’ll slag you like nothing else and ban you from ever being able to leave.”

“Leaders?”

“Big F is the gang boss around here. You don’t have anything on you so you won’t have to worry about him.”

“Describe Big F to me.”

“Uh… Big. Goes by Big F. I dunno, I’ve never seen the guy! His goons wear red bandanas around their necks! …If they haven’t been sludged to hell by the mud yet. In that case the bandanas are just reddish-gunky-brown.”

“What’s Big F want?”

“To collect enough stuff to get off this rock, duh! I hear he’s workin’ on a time machine.”

Prism took note of this. Minna continued questioning him. “Any idea where we can find this… Big F?”

“Ahaha he’s not gonna let a bunch of newbies like you join up! I hear you have to be here at least a year before he’ll even consider ya!”

Minna narrowed her eyes. “Fine. Anything else going on here we should know about?”

“I hope you have a way to generate food or earn money, cause nothin’ stays sanitary enough to eat very long here.”

“All right. Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.” She threw him three levels up into a tangle of wires. He grabbed hold – and was gone in a flash of speed. “So, we’re going to be here a while regardless.”

“We need to set up a coherent team,” Allure said. “Minna, you can be on tactical. Prism, analysis. Corea, defense.”

“I’m horrible at defense! Didn’t you see?” Corea blurted.

“Who died and made you queen?” Job demanded.

Allure blinked, staring at him. “Job, I’m a Founder of the League of Sweetie Belles, I know what I’m doing.”

“Mom, you have been making some questionable decisions,” Minna pointed out.

“I sent out that distress call, which got us saved.”

“And you sold our ship, scrambled over who should do what, and now just started barking out orders.”

“We need a clear-cut organization since we aren’t used to working together! This isn’t a military operation!”

“Are you sure!?”

“Right now we don’t even have a plan!”

“The plan is to find this Big F and take his time machine!”

“We haven’t even discussed yet!”

“You’re both being stupid!” Job blurted. “We just need to find somewhere safe!”

“Does this look safe to you?” Minna demanded, holding out her arm and gesturing around in a wide circle. “Toxic sludge everywhere! Everywhere! The longer we stay here the sicker we get!”

The three of them devolved into arguing.

To the side, Prism flew next to Corea.

“…You know, we could really use Nova right about now,” Corea observed. “She could solve this problem.”

“Hey, I know how to make the machine,” Prism said. “And seriously, you can do impressive things as well. You could change Big F’s soul if you wanted.”

“Mhm…” Corea said, nodding. “Yeah. I can. Right. I can! I-” Her pupils shrunk to pinpricks. “Where’s Stardust and Frigid?”

Prism looked around, panic crossing her features. “Uh…”

“Oh no.”

“LOOK ALIVE!” Prism shouted.

“WHAT!?” Minna, Allure, and Job shouted back.

“WE’RE MISSING TWO!”

Frigid and Stardust were nowhere to be seen.

Corea put a hoof to her mouth. She had failed to defend them again. Minna’s enraged expression fell to one of horror. She had been so caught up in the argument she hadn’t been watching the future.

“STARDUST!?” Job shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth. “STARDUST!?!”

Allure turned to Minna. “…What happened to them…?”

Minna shook her head. “I… I wasn’t looking.”

Job kneeled down, closing his eyes and summoning his Stand. Not that anybody could see it. He furrowed his brow. “It’s far away – a couple miles. I could take myself there with my connection to her… but not anyone else.”

“But you know where she is?” Allure asked.

“Yes. Underground, that direction.”

“…They’ve probably been kidnapped.” She let out a sigh. “Minna?”

“Yes?” Minna said, expression still vacant.

“You take the lead now. This probably is going to turn into a military operation.”

Minna nodded slowly. “…Thanks.” She shook her head, clearing her thoughts. “Right! We need to get them back from whoever took them! Job, lead the way.”

Job nodded, heading to where he knew Stardust was. The rest followed.

“I know Allure’s combat experience,” Minna said. “What are the rest of yours?”

“None,” Job said. “My Stand is a utility only and I didn’t go on many quests with my mother.”

“Some, not much professional,” Prism said. “Take your daughter to work day was always fun. But I’m a top athlete and technician.”

“I’ve fought a lot for Elemental Four,” Corea said. “Though, eheheh, I’ve been having a bit of an off day today, so I don’t know what you’ll do with me.”

“You want to get them back?” Minna asked.

“Yes,” Corea said with conviction.

“Good. That’s all I need.”

~~~

Deep under the city of Nowhere, there was a UFO shaped craft made out of solid gold. The vast majority of people didn’t know about it – or even about the caverns beneath Nowhere in which it rested. This was because the entrances to the caverns were deep inside bases of Big Fs goons. Nobody would go anywhere near them.

Unfortunately the walls of the caverns were not teleport proof. Everyone just figured that since nobody knew where the caverns were, nobody would teleport into solid rock.

But when you were Minna and could see the future, you knew if a calculated teleport would result in disaster or not before it happened. It took a few tries, but they found safe locations. They were ready to spring their trap.

Allure teleported herself and Minna right in front of the golden UFO. Allure lit her horn, driving magic power into her hooves while Minna began scrambling memories. Despite this, Big Fs goons still retaliated with the energy weapons and magic of their own.

Minna, being who she was, could dodge every one of the attacks before they were even fired. Allure defended against them with her invisible manifestation of Heart, all the while charging forward with her daughter. Minna was too large to ride the diminutive Allure, so the charge wasn’t as impressive as it could have been, but they were still together.

Minna drop kicked a fish-creature while Allure grabbed a human and threw him with her Heart into a reptilian, knocking their bandanas off. The reptile got back up – but was shot by his own guys because he no longer had the friendly team color.

Still, though, more and more goons poured out of the golden UFO, giving Allure and Minna difficulty. They were not going to be able to make it inside the UFO quickly.

But that was part of the plan. They were essentially nothing more than particularly potent distractions.

Corea teleported into the golden UFO after the distraction had begun, finding the solid-gold hallway empty. “Okay, we didn’t appear in a wall… Whoo…”

“Minna told you it was safe,” Prism said.

“I’ve never been good at teleporting! I might go one place at one moment and then another the next! I’m not consistent!”

“Just stand watch,” Job muttered, leading them deeper into the UFO.

A mook ran into the hallway and saw them. His eyes locked with Corea’s. Corea froze.

He lifted his gun, aiming at Corea’s head. The scope was at his eye.

Prism kicked the gun out of his hands and swirled to buck him across the face, knocking him out cold. “Come on Corea!”

“Right, sorry,” Corea said, shaking her head.

Job led them through the swirling hallway to a large door with a blue light behind it. He opened it.

In the very center of the ship was not an engine or power source – but a cobbled together machine. It was a tall, crystal column with smaller crystals all around. Wires and consoles were slapped on these smaller crystals haphazardly, many of them with glowing ‘fairy dust’ all over them.

They saw a machine toward the left of the room slowly grinding away at a unicorn horn, turning it into more fairy dust.

“…Stardust!” Job yelled, running to the cage in the back of the room. It had about four unicorns in it, including Stardust and Frigid.

“You came…” Stardust said, smiling.

Job pulled back Stardust’s mane, finding that she still had a horn – albeit with an inhibitor around it. “Thank god…”

“If she didn’t have a horn she’d be dead!” Frigid shouted. “The red mare got… She… She…” Frigid couldn’t finish the thought.

Corea looked around. “So… Harvesting unicorn horns? For… what?”

“Not just unicorn horns, any magical extrusion,” Prism said, flying around the device in the center of the room. “And this… It has all the pieces for a time machine, but they’re arranged wrong. This couldn’t take you through time. It’s incomplete, but I think it would work more as a beacon.”

Job unlocked the cage and let the prisoners out. He removed the inhibitor from
Stardust’s horn. “Can you use the parts from it?”

“Definitely,” Prism said. “Almost all we need is here. We just need to, you know, steal it.”

“Hey, I can’t teleport this much and neither can Allure,” Corea said. “We aren’t exactly the best mages.”

“We’ll figure something out. Actually, here’s a thought…” Job grinned. “What if I turn all this into a time machine and come back here to help us fight?”

“Do we know if this universe supports that?” Stardust asked.

“It’s worth a shot! We’ll know within a few minutes of me starting to tinker with this.”

They heard an ominous laugh from the entryway to the room. They hadn’t heard anyone walk up – but there was someone there now. The Big F.

“Well, isn’t this quite the combination of secondary characters?”

Otherwise known as Randall Flagg.

Prism charged him. Flagg pointed his finger at her. “Stop flapping.” Her wings stopped working and she crashed into the ground next to Corea.

Job held Stardust close, shivering in fear. He couldn’t do anything here.

Corea stood on her hind legs and shot a compressed bolt of ionized air at Flagg, following it up with a magic dart to make things interesting. They bounced right off of him. He yawned excessively and imagined Corea flying into a wall, so she did. Then he imagined her smashing into the horn grinder in such a way that the half-ground horn embedded itself in her side. That happened.

“Grah…” Corea muttered, still standing, but clearly already more than half down.

“I have to admit, I wasn't expecting it to be you to crash my plans,” Flagg said, taking a casual stroll into the room, smirking at Corea. “The Doctor was supposed to be hot on my tail. Perhaps the goons needed to be trained in going after nobodies better…” He shrugged apathetically. “Ah well.”

“What are you doing?!” Prism demanded, standing up.

“Stop standing,” Flagg ordered. The resulting starfish-pose her legs and tail took amused him greatly. “I am simply trying to collapse the hope in this little universal structure. You see, the Melnorme have provided a tiny silver lining in the clouds of these people. Obfuscated through greed it may be, it is still a chance to escape that everyone holds onto. So naturally I decided to get rid of that. How? Simple really – manipulating a warlike race that has a religious hatred of time travel with a temporal beacon directed at them. They’ll charge in here, guns blazing, forcing the Melnorme to no longer consider this world profitable. And with the new addition of anti-time-travel aliens, even that avenue will be horrendously limited!” He leaned back, a satisfied smile on his face.

“You’re sure pleased with yourself,” Prism muttered.

“Oh, I am. Especially because that time-travel-hating race? I’m the reason they hate it in the first place. I do love it when plans come together. Rather invigorating. It’ll be quite the fireworks show.”

“I would ask how you could be so heartless but that’d be a stupid question.”

“So you’ve realized your own mental inferiority? Good. You’re moving in the right direction.” He rubbed his hands together. “Maybe I should replace the Doctor with your entire society since Blackjack’s no longer a viable option.”

Corea tried to punch him in the back of the head with magically infused fire. Without looking, he grabbed Corea’s front leg, broke it, and threw her to the ground in front of Prism.

“Corea!”

Flagg spread his arms wide and shrugged. “You think people would know back attacks don’t work on me, considering the number of all-seeing-eyes I have at my disposal.” He took out Black Thirteen just to make the point. “I can even see the ka flowing in this room. Look at Corea, losing hope. Look at her unable to muster up the courage to do anything. A-” he blinked. The inside of Black Thirteen was changing because he was talking. He had altered something.

Prism glared at him. “Corea can do anything if she puts her mind to it. All she needs is the proper motivation and confidence.”

She then pulled Corea’s face to her own and kissed her hard. Corea’s eyes flew open wide, as if a switch in her had been clicked on. She began glowing with the white energy of the Avatar State. Prism threw Corea at Flagg like a football – turns out you didn’t have to stand to do that.

Flagg groaned. “That’s outrageously chees-”

Corea plowed into Flagg with air, fire, magic, and water-ice moisture from the air. As for earth…

A giant pillar of rock shot out of the ground, ejecting the golden UFO high into the air. It crashed through all the levels of Nowhere, almost flying.

“Randall Flagg, as th-”

“Stop bending,” Flagg ordered. Corea lost the Avatar State in an instant and slumped to the ground.

“What the- HEY! That was going to be awesome! I was going to kick your pl-”

Flagg imagined her embedding into a nearby golden wall. So she did. Flagg pulled himself out of a Flagg-shaped hole in the opposite wall, mostly unharmed. He tucked Black Thirteen away, a menacing scowl on his face. “You know, I should have just ordered you to die in the Avatar State. You would never have come back.”

Corea grunted. “Well it’s a little late for that now, isn’t it?”

The Golden UFO reached its highest point and started falling back down to the planet.

Flagg groaned as he felt the weightlessness kick in. He imagined that the ship stopped falling. So that’s what it did, driving everyone to the floor.

Flagg tore the heavily injured Corea out of the nearby wall. With his hands, he tore the half-horn out of Corea and drove it into her other side. “This is just the start of what you and I are going to do together. I might even throw starfish over there in as well.”

Corea laughed. “No, you won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m smiling and on a really, really dumb emotional high.”

“HEY!” Prism shouted.

“You have no right to complain, that was really dumb. Like, everything about it.”

“IT WORKED DIDN’T IT!?”

“Well yeah. You’re a great kisser, by the way.”

“Comes with practice, cornball!”

“Oh, also, Flaggy boy? There was a teeny little backup plan that we didn’t know about. I only figured out about it right now.” She used one of her non-broken hooves to gesture at Stardust.

She had her horn touching one of the crystal machine’s consoles. She flooded her magic into the temporal beacon, making it shatter – and parts of it disintegrate into pure magic energy. She tossed her mane behind her head and adjusted her broken glasses. “Oops.”

Flagg blinked. “…Huh. I must be losing touch, I keep forgetting about the small ones.” He dropped Corea unceremoniously to the ground, no longer caring about her fate whatsoever. He took out Black Thirteen, frown deepening. “It appears we’ve got another loss.”

Minna and Allure appeared inside the ship. Allure looked about ready to pass out – teleporting was hard for her.

Minna glared at Flagg. “Flagg…”

“Oh, the new toy soldier,” Flagg muttered. “Normally I would be in the mood for a round of ‘who can out-psychic the other’ but right now I have business to attend to. Namely, not losing another body. So, how about instead of you trying to kill me, I give you something?”

Minna narrowed her eyes. “…What?”

Flagg put Black Thirteen away and pulled out a book titled The Tower’s Testament. “You may be aware of much of what lies within here, the book isn’t hard to find for a race of your caliber. But I’m going to give you a little hint!”

“That’ll torment us until the end times.”

Flagg let out a chuckle. “You and quite a few others! It might even bother those watching.”

“Oh, great, this is one of the chapters.” Allure facehooved. “That should have been obvious.”

Flagg smirked. “Have a twofold prophecy. Badly translated from the old:

One side says the story is thus:
The Lord, the Muse, the Heir
Are gathered together to make a tear
The God, the Prophet, the ancient
Are needed to fulfill a lost tenet

The flip says the story is here:
There is a choice that all will make
Deciding the twisting lines of fate
What begins as one will spread to all
None will be able to ignore the call

Which is the point?
Where does narrative lead?
A flipping coin in the sights of infinite possibility…
One and endless.
Infinity and singular.”

He closed the book, smirking. “And now that you’ve all been distracted for a proper amount of time, good luck getting off this ship before it explodes!”

And then he was gone.

“Crap,” Minna muttered. She looked to the future – but she didn’t see any explosions. “…It looks like we’re going to be fine…?”

They were transported away by Merodi Universalis teleporters onto the bridge of the Austraeoh. O’Neill sat in the captain’s chair, but he wasn’t the main focus. The main focus was the human Pinkie Pie from Earth Vitis gripping the shoulders of two humans with pink complexion and white hair. “Say it!” She demanded.

The two full grown humans looked down at the ground like young children. “We’re sorry…”

“SORRY FOR WHAT!?” human Pinkie demanded, giving them both the evil eye into the backs of their heads.

“We’re sorry for manipulating you to go on a cruise that didn’t exist...”

“AND!?”

“And making you risk your lives because ka is not something to be manipulated just because we can see it…”

“GOOD. If I could still ground you two I would. But I can still do this.” She pulled a squeaky hammer out of her hair and knocked the two of them out of the bridge. Then she turned to the seven recently-rescued people and smiled innocently. “Sorry about that, Munchie and Scrunchie have always been little rascals. Please don’t press any charges.”

“Uh… We won’t…” Allure said, baffled.

Pinkie grinned. “Good!”

“…I didn’t realize you had kids,” Stardust admitted.

“Had ‘em just before the war started. Pinkie and I stopped switching about then too. Good thing too, since she’s deviated so much now…” she put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “Anyway, I’m glad all of you are safe. I bet you got to know each other pretty well and bonded!”

“You could say that,” Prism said, hoisting the heavily injured Corea onto her back. “I’m dragging her to sickbay, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” O’Neill said.

“Oh, by the way, Stardust?” Prism asked.

Stardust looked at her quizzically.

“Sorry. Shouldn’t have dismissed you like that.”

Stardust nodded solemnly, following it up with a soft smile. “All is forgiven. You did come to save me, after all.”

Prism smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

O’Neill cleared his throat. “Ahem. Marshall, report.”

Minna raised an eyebrow. “Overhead General, with all due respect I need to spend some time with my husband. I request I be allowed to carry out the rest of my ‘vacation’ before giving the report.”

O’Neill smirked. “Granted.”

“Thank you.” Minna pulled Frigid close. “I’m never letting you out of my sights again. I should never have dismissed you.”

“Heh… It’s…” He pulled her close and started crying.

“It’s all over now…”

Prism left the bridge, Corea on her back.

“So…” Prism said.

“I know you just did it to get some fire back in me. I’m not going to try to exploit it,” Corea said, grunting.

“Really?”

“Well, yeah, that’d be falling into Starbeat’s old curse. That’d just be dumb. I’m not going to do that. You don’t have to follow up on anything because of some ‘click’, no matter how right it felt.”

“Huh,” Prism said, contemplating this. “…You’re a good mare, you know that?”

“Sometimes,” Corea admitted. “Sometimes.”

They walked towards the sickbay in silence.

“I’m going to regret this,” Prism muttered, putting a wing over her face.

“Hm?”

“There’s an Earth Ottoman restaurant I like and I happen to be free toni-”

“YES!” Corea blurted. “OW. Ow. Ow the pain…”

“But we start from scratch,” Prism insisted.

“Oh, of course. I’m going to have to actually earn the next one.”

“Chances are big there won’t be a ‘next one’, cornball.”

“I like those odds!”

Prism rolled her eyes. “Let’s get you healed up.”

“It’ll probably take all of five minutes.”

“Actually, clinically speaking we could do it in any timeframe due to temporal manipulation technology, which the Austraeoh is fully equipped with. We also have dozens of licenced medical professionals…”

~~~

I walked into Eve’s office. “Chapter today.”

“Oh? What’s the synopsis?”

“Chapter 111, ‘O’, the next generation of Merodi Universalis get stuck in the Oubliette.” I grinned mischievously. “You mostly aren’t involved. The plot’s already wrapped up and everything.”

Eve blinked. “I notice I’ve been just a background presence lately.”

“And that trend’s going to continue.”

“Joy. What important thing am I doing today, then?”

I giggled. “It will be a lot more fun to see your reaction later.”

“…Joy.”

Cessera the Second walked into the room. “Evening, you have visitors.”

“Who is it?”

“I-”

“Let them in,” I interrupted, rubbing my hooves together.

“…Sure,” Cessera said, leaving the room.

A moment later the Grand Secretariat of the Sparkle Census and four other members of the Sparkle Census Council walked in. This many council members had not been seen in the same place outside the Sparkle Census itself before.

Eve smiled warmly, though inwardly she was screaming at me for making her extremely nervous about this. “Ah! This is a surprise. What can I do for you today?” Feeling her throat getting parched from nerves, she took a drink of water.

“The Sparkle Census has voted on the council level in favor of joining Merodi Universalis,” the Grand Secretariat said matter-of-factly.

Eve’s spit take was very impressive. It got all five of them wet.

“AUGH! Sorry sorry sorry!” She magically dried all of them in an instant.

“It’s quite alright,” the Grand Secretariat said, looking at me. “You’ve worked her up, haven’t you?”

I put on the cheekiest smile I could manage. “Who, me?”

“Mhm.” The Grand Secretariat smiled warmly. “I hope your surprise does not indicate initial rejection?”

“Of course not!” Eve blurted, grinning. “This is great news! It’ll take a few years to fully integrate a society of your magnitude into Merodi Universalis, but you are already a very close part of our community so it shouldn’t take too long. Five? Maybe six?”

“That is more than acceptable.”

“We should get started right away if we want to get this done in a reasonable amount of time,” Eve said, taking out her phone. “This is Overhead Evening Sparkle, may I speak to Overhead Maud Pai? Thank you…”

I smiled, scribbling a few things in my notebook.

As a younger generation got their chance in the spotlight, two powers became one…

112 - Outside Perspectives

Year 35

Renee wore a full suit to the after-‘party’ of signing the Sparkle Census into Merodi Universalis. While it was called a ‘party’ it was not only a highly formal occasion – it was very much a business occasion. Which meant black, white, tie, cufflinks, everything. No traditional wear or over the top dresses – like she usually wore. She even switched out her normal embroidered dulled-ruby glasses for standard round black-rimmed spectacles.

She still wore her hat though. That was her defining feature. They would just have to deal with it.

“I still think you’re dressed like a man,” Daniel said.

“This is formal business attire for anyone who isn’t a Princess, which I am not.”

“At least the human women get to wear dresses.”

“Horribly drab and uncreative ones,” Renee pointed out. “Plus, I can at least get somewhat creative with this.”

“There are a lot of black and white gemstones hidden in those folds.”

“I’m secretly an inner bedazzler!” Renee said, smirking evilly. “They will not know the levels to which I will go to push the dress code!”

Daniel smirked. “No. No they won’t.”

“Though I do feel sorry for Eve. Any sort of formal attire is rather horrible on those wings. I told her she was a Princess and she could just go with the regalia, but she had to follow the Overhead code.”

Eve was, in fact, experiencing difficulty mixing her wings with her highly limiting attire. It did not matter that a Rarity had created it specifically for her – it never worked right. Had a dress been allowed they could have just been tucked under the folds of cloth in special pouches, but that wasn’t the code.

Renee twitched. “Much more of this fashion bizarreness and I will go on a rant about the setting of forced trends and how limiting it is…”

“Let the other Rarities do that,” Daniel said.

“Right, right, I know, it isn’t my job.” She didn’t stop looking though. Most ponies were wearing elegant dresses and sharp tuxedos, same with most of the humans. Notably the delegation of the Imperium of Man were in their power armor - weapons disabled, of course, but their metallic exoskeletons were too much of a source of pride for them to give up. To make it even more interesting the Emperor of Mankind was up and about - finally safely removed from his Golden Throne after all those years. He was well over eleven feet tall, wore armor that looked solid gold, and seemed to glow with a slight aura similar to Corona’s. He certainly looked like an Emperor.

Besides humans and ponies, there were also a couple of troll Skaians who just wore standard human dresses or tuxedos, as did the Mushroom World Toads. The pudgy five-pointed Lumas didn’t really have much to put on them, so they wore little ties or tiaras. Their leader, Rosalina, wore a white dress to go with her blonde-platinum hair. She had already greeted the Sparkle Census and was currently talking to a Ga, or ‘sirknight’ from Pokèrin Anima. They had ‘dresses’ built into their bodies, so they’d just added earrings.

Gems had a mixture of tuxedo- and dress-wearing individuals, depending on the body type they created. While all gems were ‘feminine’, some were more rounded than others. She imagined some of the middle-ground Gems had difficulty choosing. Only black and white Gems were allowed to create their own clothing due to coloring limitations. Something White Diamond would have been able to make full advantage of… If she had been there. She was never to be found at anything.

Red Diamond was, though, her starry eyes catching the imagination of everyone who looked at her. You could easily get lost in those eyes. She had chosen to wear a very simplistic black dress. The amount of fabric that must have gone into it was impressive, given her size. Renee was pretty sure if the dress were dropped on her it’d break a bone or two.

The gargantuan Diamond was leaning down to give a warm welcome to the Grand Secretariat and her contingency of Sparkle Census Council members. Renee didn’t know what half of them were called – but if they came up to her they had plaques pinned to their tuxes and dresses, as was required for council members.

Renee noticed Minna watching Red Diamond like a hawk. The Gem’s ability to avoid her sights always put the girl on edge.

“She’s good for her people,” a man’s voice said. It sounded normal, but when Renee turned to see who it had come from, she knew it had been spoken right into her mind.

The leader of Pokèrin Anima was a gargantuan quadruped with a white coat and golden tipped hooves. His body was not smooth and round like a pony, but angular and pointed in most places. His mane and tail were not long and flowing – instead seeming more like fleshy protrusions with fur on them instead of hair. Accenting his mane were his ears, which were pointed upward, coming out the sides of his head and rising over the top. His face was devoid of fur, revealing a gray face devoid of a mouth, but with two green piercing eyes. He was wearing a tuxedo that looked less like it was designed for him and more like it had been created around him and his front legs.

Around his midsection was a four-pointed star-shaped construct made seemingly of gold that was highly reminiscent of the old Arcei arcs. It was no surprise those who had once been Arcei had started to worship this gargantuan equine.

Renee knew better than this though. While Arceus was in fact the creator of the entire Pokèrin Anima universe and certainly had the power to back it up, he was not a nigh-omnipotent God. He was just a Creator. A Creator who saw no problem with people worshipping him, but he didn’t exactly demand it, so nobody had any real complaint against him.

“Red Diamond?” Renee said, responding to his comment. “She is. Built precisely to bridge the gap.”

“Indeed. Though if I was willing to grace this meeting, the least White Diamond could have done was make a courtesy call.”

“I’ll say,” Renee agreed. “She doesn’t make her people look good.”

“Which is why Red Diamond is good for her people. A change. A new creation.”

“Speaking from experience?” Daniel asked.

“I suppose you could say that,” Arceus mused.

“I have to hear this story,” Renee said.

“You have heard most of it already, Renee. It is the story of my world.”

“Oh, but something tells me there’s much more to it.”

Arceus nodded slowly. “…Very well. It has been many years since I’ve told the story in full. The last one to hear it was… Well, the Primary team when they made first contact.”

“That would be a dreadfully long time ago,” Renee said. “About when I lost my eye, actually.”

“It would be my pleasure if you two were to come dine in my realm tomorrow,” Arceus said. “It would be an opportunity to tell true stories of origins.”

“I think that would be wonderful. I will ditch everything but the hat.”

“Likewise. Clothing is always an unusual concept. Daniel?”

Daniel shifted uncomfortably. “Er… I’ll stay dressed, thank you.”

Arceus may not have had a mouth, but Renee swore he was smirking. “As you wish.”

The Creator took his leave, allowing the couple to continue on alone.

“Dinner with god,” Daniel mused.

“Please, Flutterfree will be the first to tell you he isn’t Him and he makes no claim to being such.”

As if on cue, Flutterfree and Eve teleported over. Eve glanced over her shoulder with a panicked expression. “Renee, I need the files on the Sparkle Census worlds.”

“And why do you need those, Eve?”

Eve twitched, realizing she was going to have to explain. “Because I just made a minor flub where I thought one of the catalog worlds was joining with the rest of the Census, but it turned out it wasn’t, and now I need to do some last-minute-panic studying and you have access to all the files including the sorta-secret ones right?” She grinned.

“She’s about to explode from political stress,” Flutterfree whispered.

“I am not!” she blurted back – slightly too loud. The outburst made several people look at her with quizzical expressions. “Heheh…” She looked at Renee with pleading eyes. “Pleeeeeease…”

“Evening, it’s just a political meeting, and the Census is very understanding.” She teleported a ‘Sparkle Census’ brochure to Eve. “Just go off of this.”

“This isn’t enough detail!”

“And this is not an important enough reason to shunt Expedition full-detail files directly to you.”

Eve nodded. “Okay. Right…”

Flutterfree glanced to Renee. “Are you sure you ca-”

Eve interrupted Flutterfree’s plea. “She’s right Flutterfree, I can’t just ask for that casually. I forgot that for a moment. I am sorry for breaching protocol, Renee.”

“It’s alright,” Renee insisted. “You were in a hurry. I believe you can ask Corona for some of the lesser files – they’ll give you what you need.”

“Right, thanks.” She saluted with a wing – looking for any excuse to stretch it away from her suit. “See you later!” She teleported herself and Flutterfree away.

“You don’t even bat an eye at that anymore,” Daniel observed.

“Well I did lose an eye,” Renee said with a smirk.

“You lost the eye be-”

“Daniel, love, I know. I was trying to make a joke. I suppose it didn’t work.” She stretched herself out. “As it turns out, it is still possible to be good friends like this.”

“I still think it’s a little awkward.”

“Friendships develop,” Renee said. “Each one of us has a very different relationship with each other now. It’s something I’m able to look back on and marvel, now that I’m in my old age.”

“Your centennial has passed.”

“And I still have as perfect a complexion as ever! Remind me to thank Corona again. It’s amazing how liberating not worrying about aging is.”

“That’s what you think!” the Emperor called over.

“Emperor, darling, I don’t think sitting as a skeleton on a chair for several thousand years really qualifies in this instance.”

“Hah,” the Emperor said - clearly enjoying his ability to laugh properly. “Who’s the immortal with thousands upon thousands of years of experience over you?”

“Who’s the instigating nitpicker?” Renee countered.

“Who’s the human f-”

“My Lord, let’s not go there,” Kitten, his aide, said, clearly glad that he was able to stop the Emperor.

“I can go where I fucking want.”

“Get a private engagement with Renee later, don’t make this the day you get everyone to hate you.”

The Emperor glanced over his shoulder at the other dignitaries - a few of whom were looking oddly at him. “...Very well.”

“Sadly, Arceus already has us for lunch,” Renee said. “Perhaps we can finish another time?”

“I will hold you to that, floppy-hatted marshmallow.”

Daniel facepalmed.

The Emperor chuckled - once again feeling delight in the sensation.

~~~

Jenny of the Red Gloves was no longer part of the Expedition team with Lady Rarity and the others – she had moved on. Graduated and created her own team, formed of herself, Ivan, Dintin, and the Thing With the Big Wig. Nobody knew where the Thing With the Big Wig came from, but he was amazing. In a sort of disgusting, bizarre sort of way.

Dintin called him Cousin It. For some unknown reason.

Jenny called him Bigwig. Because… he was a big brown wig.

He was the best thing ever.

But sometimes even the best thing ever couldn’t satiate her boredom.

“BORED!” Jenny declared.

Ivan sighed. “We were just on a mission yesterday. That was enough excitement for me.”

“Those bugs were very angry,” Dintin observed with his calm, synthetic voice.

Bigwig made a bunch of indecipherable noises.

“You’re all right, but today is a new day!” Jenny said, standing tall. “And a new day comes new adventures and new boredom to combat!”

“You could govern the Beanstalk instead of letting the ponies do it for you,” Ivan suggested.

“PSH. That’s old-Jenny. New-Jenny is an agent! An Explorer! A meeter of new people and helper of old! And – wait a minute, old…” She put a hand to her chin. “Does anyone remember the last time we heard anything about the University of Doors?”

Everyone glanced at each other – and shook their heads.

“Let’s drop in and say hi.”

“We’re Merodi Universalis now and have been for a while,” Ivan said. “Do you really th-”

“Yes. Yes I do. Come on let's go.” She leaped out of her chair and pulled out her dimensional device, dialing the University of Doors Campus.

The natural structure of the unusual universe was the same as ever – every plane was covered with doors and keyholes of all shapes and sizes, each one leading to another universe or realm. The orientation and position made no sense, but the members of the University knew how to navigate them without a door device.

Jenny missed door devices. Any doorway could become a dimensional portal with just a flick of the wrist. None of this ‘opening and maintaining portal connection’ nonsense.

The University Grounds themselves were, as normal, devoid of the constant shifting of the rest of the planes, giving an island of mostly three-dimensional sanity to those who needed it.

Nothing else was like Jenny remembered. All the lights were dark. Multiple buildings had been reduced to complete rubble. There was no sign of habitation whatsoever.

“What in the world…?” Jenny said, gawking. The University of Doors was one of the most organized and tight-knit groups she knew of – even when the Xeelee came in and heavily restricted their movements, they were still strong and kept studying. What could have done this to them?

“The glowing materials are dark,” Ivan observed. “Almost as if the light was drained from them.”

Bigwig made some twittering noises.

“You’re right, it could have been an experiment gone wrong,” Ivan concurred.

“They survived experiments exploding before,” Jenny murmured, walking forward. “What would have made this di-”

A hologram of a tall man in the dress of a University Headstone smiled. “Visitor! No doubt you have come a long way to learn and study at our elusive, hidden University. I regret to inform you that the University of Doors has closed down all classes permanently due to unforeseen circumstances. All staff went their separate ways and remaining students were given honorary degrees for simply surviving the horrendous events that led to our downfall. This message is just to inform you that, yes, you have found the University of Doors. By making it this far you are a testament to the way of the Doors. If you have come to this place by accident – please, look around, enter a door, and find a way to a new existence. I am sorry I cannot help you.”

Jenny furrowed her brow. “So something bad happened and, instead of fixing it, they just left.”

“They didn’t have much to do…” Dintin said.

Ivan let out a sigh. “They gave up. Great.”

“I still want to know what caused this,” Jenny muttered.

“Don’t you have that eight ball connected to the Datasphere? It’d know,” Ivan suggested.

Jenny smiled. “Right, right…” She shook the eight ball, thinking deeply of the question she wanted to ask. What destroyed them?

A word took form on the surface of the ball. Necrozma.

“What the heck is Necrozma?”

~~~

Arceus’ realm was a pocket dimension overlaying the physical Pokèrin Anima. It was wholly separate from everything – including the built in Temporal, Spatial, and Reverse worlds that helped give the physical world substance. Each of these worlds were not a different universe, which meant they could not be dialed through standard means – one had to enter Pokèrin Anima and use a secondary portal device to transition to one of the other dimensions. There was rarely any need to enter the Temporal or Spatial dimensions, and doing so was generally seen as a bad idea since they held together time and space. The Reverse world was visited somewhat regularly, while Arceus’ personal realm was by invitation only.

Invitations which Renee and Daniel had.

Normally, Arceus’ realm was empty, black, and formless, so he could shape it into whatever he wanted. Today he had shaped it ahead of time into a Parthenon-like dining hall sitting atop a mountain that looked out over a visual representation of what was happening in the physical world; essentially, a live feed for everyone to enjoy. He had chosen the mountain at the intersection between three different colonies of his children. One were the oh-so-familiar sirknights, or Ga as they were known in other universes, a people who loved grace, psychic power, and beauty; constructing towering buildings that rose far into the sky. There were also the foodin, a different sort of psychic being who were yellow-brown and often had an obsession with spoons – for some reason. They built simpler dwellings and spent more time meditating. The third choice was the metagross, living four-legged computers who constructed great towers to house their vast stores of knowledge. Their city looked like a giant cube, starkly contrasting against the blue sky.

Renee found this annoying, but she wasn't one to say anything about it. She and Daniel were eating strange white fluffs that resembled marshmallows but tasted nothing like them – weren’t even sweet. “Absolutely heavenly. What is this?” she asked.

“I haven’t named it,” Arceus said. “It’s just intended to particularly suit the palette of whoever is eating it.”

“Seems to be cheating,” Daniel observed, trying not to shove all of them into his mouth at once. This may not have been quite as formal a meeting as the Sparkle Census reception, but it wouldn’t do to be a slob.

“It very well might be. But when you have my power, you can do just about anything if you put your mind to it. Granted, to perform full universe creation I need the Unown to manage minute details, but I can easily make a snack that’s delicious just because I say it is.”

“Have you experienced taste?” Daniel asked.

“Yes I have. Though I prefer not to have a mouth, I can make any part of my body taste something if I want.”

“Huh.”

Arceus seemed to be smirking again. “We are here for a purpose, though. Renee, do tell me the full story of your universe.”

Renee cleared her throat. “Well, we suspect the universe was created by Universe Generator Q-MLP-023, discovered during the Silvertongue Incident. It’s responsible for the existence of most pony-based worlds and has been churning out new ones for as long as we can tell. It is suspected to be a Downstreamer-model universe generator, but we can’t exactly prove this for certain.

“Our world was a lifeless rock until the Starstream War broke out among the Stars. The Starcross Society was created – and one of the fallen Stars, Castor, fell to our world and became the Harmony Forces. This is also one of the many timeframes when Aradia, our guardian of time, arrived. The Harmony Forces went through several forms over the millennia, but always in Six parts, the Elements of Harmony. The names of the Six changed. I’m Generosity – but for the bearer before me it was Beauty, and before that I think it was Grace, but I can’t remember for sure.

“There’s a lot of ancient history that means little – an age of demons, after which Tartarus was created, followed by an age of hardship, and a lot of strange nearly world-ending events. But, eventually, ponykind rose from the turmoil of magic. We entered a golden age under the tutelage of Celestia and Luna who… Who…” Renee blinked. “Actually, I have no idea where they came from. I can tell you the origins of Celestias and Lunas from plenty of other universes, but I don’t believe I’ve ever asked about ours. Strange.”

“I may ask her myself,” Arceus suggested.

“I’m sure she’d be willing to tell you. Unless it’s some deep, dark secret…” Renee rubbed her chin. “Regardless, they arrived at about the time the three pony tribes came together on Hearth’s Warming Eve to banish the evil of the windigos and unite to form Equestria. The bearers of the Elements before us put their essences into a seed that allowed the Star that was Castor to have a physical form again, becoming the Tree of Harmony. And then about a thousand years passed, Eve collected the five of us to become the new Element Bearers, and we started defeating evil wherever it lay. Eve found the black bowling ball and the rest is history.”

Arceus nodded. “A deep tale of origin indeed. Mine is perhaps not as simple or bright, for I am the creator.”

“It would give a much more… unique perspective,” Daniel admitted.

“It would… To begin with, this world was not the world I created first. It is the second.”

Renee blinked. “I had been told you and your Pokérin came from another world. Is that not a rumor?”

“It may seem like a rumor buried in the many different religious teachings of my people, but yes, that part is true.” Arceus closed his eyes. “When I created the first world, I used the Unown to create reality itself, and created several lower deities to manage it for me. Time, Space… one to draw antimatter away from the physical realm so substance could actually exist. Stars and planets formed, and one planet was chosen to be the place for most of my creations to flourish. There were a few other worlds here and there, but this one was the big world. It was… a nameless world. Pokèrin Hume if it needs a name. All the creatures you see on this world existed there, alongside a handful of others.

“But something strange happened. One creature came that was very different than all the others. I remember creating them, but I never thought they were truly of me. Almost as if they were a manifestation of the Unown themselves…”

“Wait, the Unown created them? Or you did? …Wait, didn’t you create the Unown?” Daniel blinked, clearly confused.

Arceus summoned an Unown to him – a simple, flat creature with a single eye that looked a bit like an exclamation mark. “As far as I am concerned, both I and the Unown are primordial entities. That is, we always existed. I am fully aware there was a point in metatime when I didn’t exist, and then one that I did, but I was in a realm without time, as were the Unown. It is possible they came from elsewhere, I am uncertain. I don’t know everything. My current theory is that they are a natural manifestation of language through ka in some fashion.”

The two nodded.

“Anyway, the humans. I always had a bad feeling about them, because from the start they were special. They didn’t have the shapes, the forms, or the natures of my creations. Instead of my creations growing to form societies, it was the humans that did it – even though a few of my creations had more intelligence than them! But they lacked the drive humans did, and so the humans dominated.

“At first, I thought this was no issue. Let my creation find its own path. While the humans were dominant, they lived in harmony with the Pokèrin. They even started creating their own with technology and interaction, which was delightful. And then they figured out how to alchemically capture Pokèrin into machines. Everything went downhill after that.

He looked deep into their eyes. “You are no doubt aware of the Pokèmon games, yes?”

Renee nodded. “Games that feature creatures similar, but not identical, to your Pokèrin. All about capturing the ‘pocket monsters’ and engaging in battles.”

“That is exactly what happened,” Arceus said. “As they perfected the capture technology, the forced combat of Pokèrin became commonplace. A sport. They even made it so the devices conditioned my creations to want to fight, even if their disposition wasn’t aggressive. It was brutal, horrendous, and just…” he paused, trying to collect himself. “These ‘trainers’ were a blight on the world and had sullied my creation. They went far beyond the natural predator-prey relationship that was supposed to exist and devolved into pure brutality. I considered, multiple times, just wiping them out. But I couldn’t bring myself to follow through with it. But then beings from other universes started interfering with my world, letting me know of the multiverse. These were terrible beings indeed – let me tell you about the light-eater, Necrozma, some time, that was a difficult time for the world. But after that, I understood how to travel to other universes, to distance myself from the world I had created – and perhaps begin anew.

“So that’s what I did. I took every Pokèrin – artificially created or otherwise – and transplanted them to a new world. The humans had enough technology and ingenuity to survive without them. I was able to remove the special Time, Space, and Reverse realms as well, giving them a more ‘mundane’ universe to live in. I took everything here so the horrendous forced battling would end. No more would they battle. No more would they be named differently depending on their ages. No more would humans control them.

“Some of the Pokèrin had ended up depending on human structures to survive. So I made it known that the Pokèrin who were smart enough to emulate human ingenuity could recreate what they saw fit to aid their fellow beings – and so they did. The three races you see around us were some of the first to do so, each in their own way. But they never recreated the capture devices.

“Back when this world was first created, I allowed some of the chosen good humans to come along. But I didn’t let them breed. Even those with ways to extend their life eventually died off. And this world was left to the Pokèrin to do as they pleased. Instead of dominated by humans, several dozen of the Pokèrin with higher intelligences formed nations. Some were altruistic, some were evil, but it was all part of the balance. It was still nature.

“And then you showed up and the rest is history.”

“Wow…” Renee said, face sad. “The games must give you bad memories.”

“They do. But they are harmless themselves. Just a bunch of colorful creatures fighting on a computer screen. None of it is real. The Prophet behind it didn’t know it was real either.” He stared into the distance. “It was just a trick of fate I had to fix.”

“I think you found the best solution,” Daniel said. “Nothing had to die.”

“Oh there was some death as a result of my actions,” Arceus said. “There were no doubt hospitals running on Pokèrin that had no way to compensate. They would struggle for a few years to recreate the levels of electricity they had. But it prevented there from being a war – or a judgement.”

The two nodded.

“Now, how a-”

A pink-white, vaguely dragonlike head poked into Arceus’ realm through a swirling pink portal. “We have a problem,” she said.

“Palkia, can’t you-”

“Unauthorized portal opened. Capture device detected.”

Arceus blinked.

“Ka. It’s fun,” Renee muttered. “I suppose we’re probably here for a reason. Let’s go see this.”

“Yes. Let’s.” Arceus muttered. With a glow of brilliant white energy, they were gone.

~~~

The Eldritch Embodiment had decided to meet to discuss something.

The Eldritch Embodiment never met to discuss anything. Ever.

The Eldritch Embodiment had decided to meet to discuss something.

It was a momentous occasion when all of the major Outer Gods came together. Right in the universe of Azathoth’s Court.

As usual, Azathoth himself, ruler and progenitor of the entire Embodiment, was ‘asleep’ and couldn’t care less about the proceedings. This essentially left Nyarlathotep as the ‘primary voice’ in the eldritch expanse, though his ‘siblings’ Nameless Mist, Unnamed Darkness, and Cxaxukluth held sway if it was needed. Other voices of note were Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, Hziulquoigmnzhah, Tulu, and Ghisguth – every other voice present was either just an aspect of one of these eldritch gods or so insignificant nobody cared.

The following conversation is as translated as well as it possibly can be.

“Let me be frank. Merodi Universalis is now more powerful than we are by a large margin,” Nyarlathotep said. “Were we to actively enforce our rules over a breach of theirs, they would likely retaliate. And in that retaliation they would initiate a war they would likely win. Considering how close they are to our borders and how often they lightly prod our realm, we have had to become more careful with how we act within their space. This cannot stand.”

“Why the ´‰‰Ø‰ not?” Cxaxukluth [?????]ed.

“Because if we relax too much, our realms become fuel to magic of theirs. We end up serving them in a way, instead of the other way around. Lower beings should not be able to do this to us.”

“Not all of them are lower beings,” Nameless Mist decreed. “The Arceus is higher. The Angels are comparable. As are the ßπå∑˜ øƒ ˜´ƒ´¬˙´ˆµ.”

“Of course,” Nyarlathotep said. “You forget that their leaders are all basic mortals. Or the vast majority, anyway. The point is they are in a position to best us and we must do something about it.”

“You think in too human terms,” Cxaxukluth laughed. “Thoughts of ‘serving’ and ‘not serving’. You are among them too much. Return to us – or perhaps you should take some advice from Father and learn the virtue of apathy?”

“Why would I be apathetic about this? This is the fate and future of the Embodiment!”

“Which will continue endlessly regardless,” Yog-Sothoth said, using his functionally endless number of eyes to see all possibilities. “They do not wish to destroy us. They never will. We are a force of nature to even the highest. Only the Beyonders would seek our destruction.”

“The point is not destruction, Yog-Sothoth!” Nyarlathotep blurted. “And if you really can see that far, why did you not bring this up before?”

“It was unnecessary due to [The Screams Of All The Young In A Pinecone] and pointlessness in resistance. I see all, Nyarlathotep. I see the One Above All, I see the Great Will, I see the Dark Tower.”

“No you don’t,” Nameless Mist said. “None can see the Dark Tower fully.”

“I see what it does, should I wish to. My nature is true omniscience, after all.”

“In the present metatime only.”

“True. But nothing drastic enough to change our entire society ever happens in metatime.”

“Lord English?” Tulu suggested.

Yog-Sothoth was quick to respond: “[DO NOT WANT] AND IF YOU INSINUATE SUCH THINGS AGAIN ALL MY SPAWN WILL BRING YOU DOWN IN PERFECTION.”

“Don’t press Yog-Sothoth’s buttons,” Nyarlathotep suggested. “He may not be as enraged as Cxaxukluth, but he does have the power to make you regret crossing him. Easily.”

“Knowing everything is a powerful tool,” Nameless Mist agreed.

Ghisguth grunted. “I get it, our neighbors are big. What do you want to do about it? What can we do about it? We’re static.”

“Go the way of the Horrorterrors,” Nyarlathotep said. “Progress. Increase our holdings for the first time in ÓÅÓÅ Òˆ´ ˇˆÂ´ ÇÅ˜ ´◊´˜ ı´ ¨˜Î´‰ÍˇØØÎ. Make the Eldritch Embodiment rise. We are a Class 3 merely because we do not exert ourselves! If we expand-”

“Do not be foolish,” Unnamed Darkness spoke for the first time. “Nyarlathotep, that is not our way. We are the Eldritch Embodiment. We will not alter ourselves to become a human Embodiment. We do not conquer, we are. We do not war, we terrify. We do not band together, we emulate. We are all reflections of our father Azathoth. If he does not believe there is enough concern to act, then there truly is not.”

Azathoth made a snoring noise that translated best as “damn straight.”

Nyarlathotep deflated.

“When Father arises, then we may band together,” Nameless Mist said. “Until then we remain as we are.”

Cxaxukluth laughed. “Finally got everyone to talk and nothing even happened! That must [Blue Feet] Nyarlathotep! Hah!”

Fuming, Nyarlathotep left the Court of Azathoth.

~~~

Arceus, Renee, and Daniel appeared on the edge of a small forest, a village of ‘lucario’ in the distance – blue-black bipedal jackal creatures with spikes on their wrists. They saw Arceus appear and ran away in fear – not being from a more advanced society, they had no concept of what Arceus was or even much about the multiverse Pokèrin Anima was part of.

The human, though, didn’t flinch. He was a young man – in his teens – with black hair and a blue jacket. A yellow rodent sat on the human’s shoulder, sparking with electricity. Behind him stood a humanoid frog with a tongue wrapped around his own neck that looked like a scarf at first.

The human blinked. “…Arceus?”

This caught Arceus off guard. “…You know me, human?”

“Uh, yeah, we stopped you from blowing up the world a few years ago.” He looked around. “…Where am I? What kind of Pokémon is that?”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “I am not a Pokèmon or a Pokèrin, thank you very much. I am a lady. Renee Jackson, if you need a name.”

The human blinked. “Uh, I’m Ash. Ash Ketchum.”

Daniel clearly recognized the name, but since he said nothing it was probably from something fictional and not previously known in reality. “Daniel Jackson,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

Ash put two and two together about the last name and decided not to comment on it.

Arceus lowered his head and stared into Ash’s eyes. The kid finally flinched at the gargantuan equine being that close. “Uh… Hi.”

“He does look familiar. Perhaps he is a version of one of the many humans I saved.”

“Have any way to check?” Daniel asked.

Arceus nodded. He closed his eyes and let out a pulse of energy – prompting a small, green fairy-creature to appear next to him, its head like a plant bulb.

“Celebi, do you mind checking the past human settlement for Ash Ketchum?”

“Oh, him! I know him. He was really nice! Don’t even have to go back.”

Ash stared at Celebi. “You can talk!?”

“That might be the translation spell?” Renee suggested, tilting her hoof back and forth in uncertainty.

Arceus decided to end this line of questioning before it could continue. “Ahem. Celebi, that will be all.” The green fairy vanished into time. “Now… Ash. I do not remember you well, for it has been eons since a human graced the surface of this world. But you were one of the chosen.”

“Cho… sen?”

Arceus let out an annoyed grunt. “Last time I did this I sent out a general message to all of them at once and let them sort it out themselves.”

“Not very courteous,” Renee pointed out.

“I know,” Arceus said, collecting his breath. “You are in another world, Ash Ketchum. I am another Arceus, likely different from the one you know in many ways.”

“Uh, all right. I think I got that!”

The yellow rodent made a “pika-chu!” noise.

Arceus stared at it, baffled for a moment. “…I thought that was just the show being silly.”

“What?” Ash asked.

“Not important,” Arceus said, shaking his head. “What is important is that, in my world, I took all Pokérin – er, mon – away and moved them to this world to live without humans.”

“W-why?”

“Because of those red and white balls you carry on you. You may not realize it, but they are horrible devices. You think they just capture new friends for you that you use to go on a grand adventure, one where you and your friends learn much about each other, correct?”

Ash nodded slowly.

“This device is a brainwashing machine,” Arceus said. “Whatever it captures, it attempts to force it to obey your every word. Do you ever wonder why when you capture wild Pokè…mon they fight you like their life depends on it, and then suddenly they’re great friends with you nine times out of ten? This device overrides what they are.”

The yellow rodent and the blue frog reacted to this visibly. The frog appeared deeply conflicted, while the rodent seemed to be thinking ‘that makes a lot of sense’.

Ash stared at Arceus. “R-really?”

“Really. It is a truly nefarious device. If there were not a creature within the ones you held I would destroy them with my judgement. And were you not vouched for, you would have been struck down for even coming to this world with those infernal devices.”

Ash gulped.

“But there is a simple answer. Just release all of them here, and you may return home.”

“W-what? Here? And go back without them?! Never!”

“Pi-ka!” the rodent shouted, sparking with electricity.

Arceus’ eyes flashed. “So be it.”

~~~

Nanoha looked at a zoomed-in map of the multiverse, skewed in such a way that both the E-Sphere and Q-Sphere holdings of Merodi Universalis were easily visible. She watched as a few dozen dots added themselves to the map, raising the number of ‘main’ universes within Merodi Universalis to over a thousand – not counting colonies and scientific outposts, or even worlds that were just allies receiving aid, technology, and protection that were essentially already part of Merodi Universalis and just waiting for their turn to be added.

They were still a low-Class 2 – a thousand primary integrated worlds still wasn’t much. TSAB had over a million. But many many of those had been colonies that grew to full status over decades.

She had no doubt Merodi Universalis would be considered mid-tier with time. High was a bit of a stretch – moving up past mid-Class 2 was always difficult without some kind of extreme edge. Like the Xeelee’d had with their outrageous technology they’d invented before they left their universe.

Still, the fact that they had gotten to Class 2 at all in less than a century was remarkable, especially considering what they were and how they had started.

Part of it had to do with their ability to make friends and allies. But there was another part…

“Quite the little protagonists, huh?” the Doctor said. Nanoha didn’t hear him come in, but she didn’t even look up from the map to greet him. “Growing well, growing fast, drawing the attention of the whole multiverse…”

Nanoha nodded. “Figured it wouldn’t be that obvious. The Xeelee were never called the protagonists.”

“Because the Xeelee were impersonal,” the Doctor said. “The Merodi have heroes.”

“So did we.”

“You were thought to be the Protagonist some time ago.”

Nanoha smiled warmly. “The Protagonist is just a legend, Doctor. I don’t think there is a true Protagonist for the multiversal story. It just changes over time. It was me and the TSAB. Now it’s Eve and Merodi Universalis. She will rise to a point, possibly where she’s like us, and then it’ll become normal. The buzz will wear off. We’ll wait for the next protagonist and pray this one doesn’t bring a multiversal threat that destroys us.”

“You and I both know they’re different.”

Nanoha leaned back. “So what? There have been rises and dips in multiversal history. Maybe they are the heralds of another age. Metatime goes on forever, Doctor. Even if all of us eventually die, existence carries on.”

The Doctor shrugged, dropping that line of conversation. He leaned in to examine the map. “You know, it is curious. Very curious in fact.”

“What is?”

“They’re positioned in such a way that their two halves are on opposite sides of the Dark Tower. If you drew a line in the standard model, it would go right through it.”

Nanoha raised an eyebrow. “That’s a very much ‘more or less’ thing.”

The Doctor shrugged. “I suppose so.”

Nanoha nodded, looking deeply into the map.

“…Why do you stare at it so intently? They are important, yes, but they are just another society.”

“I’m responsible for them,” Nanoha said.

“You’re not their mother.”

Nanoha gained a knowing smile. She made no further response.

“Curiouser and curiouser…”

“Any particular reason why you’re here, Doctor?” Nanoha asked.

“I’m just here with a warning – not a mysterious one or one with a lot of vague prophecy. I think the Time Lords are up to something.”

“They’re your people.”

“I rarely talk to them.”

Nanoha nodded. “I know. Never try to reconnect?”

“I don’t play well with their regimen.”

Nanoha smirked. “Or ours, for that matter.”

“You’re nowhere near as bad,” the Doctor said. “I’ve just found evidence of them tampering in areas of the multiverse they shouldn’t, but whenever I look closer everything’s gone. Just gone. Like they know I’m looking and decide to pull out because of it.”

“You are telling me about it.”

The Doctor nodded. “Just be careful. You are their closest competition. They’ve never liked rivals.”

Nanoha nodded, taking the information to heart.

~~~

Arceus lifted his front hooves.

“For Celestia’s sake, he’s just a kid!” Renee shouted. “What is wrong with you?”

Arceus looked at her. “...Excu-”

“DON’T YOU ‘EXCUSE ME’ YOU VIOLENT HOOLIGAN!” She waved her hoof wildly. “You do not solve violence with violence!”

“This is my world, I can give out my own justice.”

“As a member of Merodi Universalis your rank as World Leader is under that of an Overhead,” Renee decreed. “So if you want to go the legal route you do have to submit to me, creator.”

Arceus bristled. “Are you certain this is where you want to go?”

“If it’ll get you to settle down for five freaking seconds so we can talk out a solution, yes!”

Arceus had the dignity to look slightly ashamed at this.

“Good.” Renee cleared her throat. “Ash Ketchum, I am Renee Jackson – Overhead of Expeditions for Merodi Universalis, a nation of which this world is a primary member of.”

Ash peeked out from between his fingers – seeing his blue frog standing over him defensively alongside his rodent. The frog had gained red markings on its face and a more powerful aura. “It’s okay Greninja, Pikachu. I think we’re okay now.”

Greninja stood down in an instant – but Pikachu glared at Renee with distrust.

“You don’t have to trust me,” Renee said. “But, Ash, do you see the horrendous nature of these capturing devices?”

Ash nodded slowly. “Mind control… I’ve spent a lot of my journey fighting against it. I thought… I wasn’t using it.”

“It’s okay, you didn’t know. Do you think your P… friends would stick with you even if you kept them outside?”

Ash thought about this. “…Yes.”

“Then do that. Have them walk alongside you without the capture devices conditioning them.”

Ash nodded. “Right.” He pulled out four more of the red and white balls, releasing the remainder of his team. Then he tossed five of them to Arceus. “Do what you want.”

“Just five?”

“Pikachu doesn’t use one.”

Arceus looked at Ash with kind eyes. “I see… I apologize. I suppose I did misjudge you.”

“You tried to force him too quickly,” Renee muttered. “He was willing, you were just too quick.” She sighed. “Of course, that’s only half the problem.”

Ash’s eye widened. “Back home… So many Pokèmon are being controlled against their will! I have to go back and stop it!”

“You’re just a kid,” Daniel said.

“I’ve saved the world before,” Ash said.

“PI-KA!” Pikachu confirmed.

Renee smiled. “…You’re a determined one, aren’t you?”

Ash nodded, hands in fists. “What those things are is wrong.”

“And what of battling?” Arceus asked.

“…It would only be right if they weren't forced to do it. If they wanted to.”

“You have my blessing,” Arceus said, standing back. “You may return to your world with all of them. You can change the world, Ash. Perhaps there is a way to do it without moving worlds, or exacting great judgement.”

Ash nodded. “I will.”

“Actually, I think he’ll need some help,” Renee said. “And I happen to be in charge of a lot of different Expeditions teams. What do you say to meeting some new, powerful friends?”

Ash brightened. “Sure!”

~~~

The Seats sat around the Dark Tower for a meeting – though, specifically, it was only the Class 1 Seats who cared to talk to each other about interesting phenomena.

In this case, the Celestialsapiens, Abstracts, Xeelee, and Horrorterrors. The Beyonders and the Great Will never wanted to show up to these ‘curiosity meetings’ and nobody wanted Them to be there. The High-Class 2’s simply weren’t invited.

The female Celestialsapien raised a hand. “MOTION CARRIED: ANALYSIS OF THE MERODI UNIVERSALIS KA SIGNATURE HAS BEEN RUN THROUGH EVERY CONCEIVABLE TEST. CONCLUSION: PROTAGONIST.”

: Not all that surprising.

“It is certainly a mixed blessing that our theories appear to be correct from every conceivable angle,” the Horrorterror Ni’rath’a said.

The Abstract Eternity spoke last. “The Flowers have not weighed in.”

: The Flowers were not invited. Perhaps if they bothered to advance, they would have. As it is they do not understand true scope, happy as multiversal janitors.

“WE NEED TO ESTABLISH WHAT THIS MEANS.”

: Let’s lay it out simply. If it is a Protagonist civilization, we do nothing. Shouldn’t even bother messing with it, that’s just going to add to trouble. But if it is the Protagonist civilization, then we need to do something.

“Do we know if they are or are not the Protagonist Civilization?”

“Evidence suggests most likely. We cannot be certain – if we were certain I would believe it was a glitch in our readings.”

“OTHER EVIDENCE SUGGESTS TRUE PROTAGONIST AS WELL. PSYCHICS ACROSS THE MULTIVERSE ARE TALKING OF THE ‘END OF CERTAINTY’. AWARE BEINGS SEE A MOMENT IN THE FUTURE THEY CANNOT DISCERN.”

“And there are also beings that are not affected. They see life continuing as normal.”

: But they are not able to pinpoint any disaster, or what is causing the perceived ‘end of certainty’ in all the others. Which means, at the very least, there is an event coming that no one can foresee, and it’s big enough that psychics and Aware beings are losing their minds over it. Something is coming. If not a story worthy of the Protagonist, then something along the lines of the Dark Tower books, or the Downstreamer era.

“The Last Downstreamer has awoken recently.”

: Precisely. The pieces are all there for the beginning, middles, and ends of the multiverse to meet. We have a fresh protagonist, an ancient curse from the middle, and a boy with the power to retcon back to the start of everything. It has all the signs of a culmination of everything.

“BUT THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF THE RED HERRING.”

: True.

“The last passage in the Tower’s Testament does outline two different thoughts.”

: Analyzing the Tower’s Testament is a doomed endeavor.

“AGREED.”

“So, assuming they are the Protagonist Civilization, what do we do?”

: Whenever conflict arises, side with them. Seriously, never put yourself on the enemy side. Even if the Protagonist is beaten, they will still achieve a pyrrhic victory of some sort. We want to be on that side when it all goes down.

“Which suggests a question. If we will be on the side of the Merodi, who will be the enemy?”

“THE OTHER CLASS 1’S, PERHAPS?”

“Them will not risk themselves without need, and it is unlikely the Great Will has any desire to create a large scale conflict… Unless It wishes to become God.”

: My money is on the Downstreamer. Working together with the Beyonders perhaps, but definitely the Downstreamer.

“OR SOME THREAT FROM WITHIN HORRORTERROR SPACE AGAIN, RELATED TO THE LAST ONE.”

“…”

: You do have a history.

“We will need to prepare for the unexpected. Perhaps one of the lower Seats has something up its sleeve, or the retcon will drag a threat from the distant meta-past. Whatever it is, we will need to prepare.”

“WHAT IF IT INVOLVES THE DARK TOWER IMMENSELY?”

: Oh joy, that’d be wonderful.

“As I said, prepare for anything. Including a possible attempt on the Tower.”

There was nothing further to discuss.

~~~

Curaçao and her team returned from their mission, arriving in the main hall of Renee’s castle.

“Velvet you were, like, awesome!” Insipid said, bouncing up and down.

Velvet rolled her eyes, adjusting her glasses. “What? It’s not like I haven’t devoured an eldritch being before.”

“But but… You made it scared!”

Velvet chuckled ominously. “That felt great…”

“I helped,” Alushy insisted.

“You were distraction bait.”

“Still helping!”

“It didn’t care about ‘Yo Mama’ jokes,” the fifth member Nae the Ga, said.

“Yo mama so tall, she-”

Nae smacked Alushy in the face with her gun. “Something, something, ran into a bar.”

“Quiet down,” Lady Rarity hissed.

Renee passed the six of them by. “Oh, you’re back! Ahem. You need to come to my office.”

“Don’t we get a break?” Insipid whined.

Curaçao put a hoof to Insipid’s mouth. “What is zis about?”

Renee smiled warmly. “I’ve got a possible longer-term mission for you. Don’t worry, you won’t have to go immediately, but we should discuss it sooner rather than later.”

Lady Rarity nodded. “Of course, Renee.” She teleported her team and Renee to Renee’s office where Daniel and some kid with a yellow rodent on his shoulder were waiting.

“This kid’s not going to be able to handle us,” Velvet said. “I could eat him up in an instant.”

Renee coughed. “We’ll talk about that momentarily. Team, this is-”

“Holy hell in a handbasket, it’s Ash Ketchum,” Alushy said.

Renee facehooved. “Alushy…”

Ash looked at Renee. “Uh, how does he know who I am?”

“She,” Alushy corrected.

Ash blinked. “Uh…”

Nae cleared her throat. “Let’s just say there are other versions of Ash Ketchum and leave it at that.”

Ash forgot completely about Alushy and stared at Nae. “…You really can talk.”

Nae smiled warmly. “Yeah. Lots of us can, if we’re only allowed to learn. Though I’m from a world where there are only Ga – not gardevoirs and not sirknights. Though functionally we’re the same. My name is Nae.”

“And now for the rest of the introductions,” Renee said. “You already know Nae. The team leader is Curaçao, Element of Trickery.”

Curaçao bowed respectfully.

“Then there’s Lady Rarity, the spider version of me in the armor there.”

Lady Rarity bowed. “Charmed.”

“That’s Alushy. She’s a vampire-pegasus with a deep, dark power in her. And quite the mouth.”

“Fuck you too.” Alushy sneered. Ash looked at her like she was speaking an alien language.

“Next to her is Insipid, a mare with the ability to copy the powers of others, and Velvet, a blood-warrior who can feed on fear.”

“We, like, are totally Curaçao’s sisters!” Insipid said.

“Zis much is true,” Curaçao chuckled. “We ‘ave fought gods, explored ‘ells, and turned the tide of war.”

“Yeesh… You’ve all been through a lot,” Ash said.

“Which is why they’d be the best to help you in your quest,” Renee said. “We’ve found a world that needs some changing. A world where sapient beings are enslaved by human machines and forced to engage in brutal battles. Many people think these battles are just popular sport, but in truth the machines have a bit of ‘mind control’ to them, meaning the creatures generally do not have a choice. The ‘gardevoirs’ are all enslaved, as are every being you’ve seen from Pokèrin Anima. It didn’t take much for Ash to realize this and see that things needed to change. He wanted to go back to his world and help it.”

Renee put her front hooves together. “I could have contacted Aid and Cultural to ask for a full military force to make change happen, but as much as I hate to admit it, it isn’t a grimdark universe, even though it needs help. So, instead, I just got approval to send a small team through to help change it from the inside. Ash Ketchum here was going to try to change it anyway, and I think you five are particularly suited to doing what needs to be done.”

“We’re probably going to kill people,” Velvet pointed out.

“Wait what!?” Ash blurted.

“Humans hate change like they hate sharing,” Velvet commented. “We’ll be lucky if this doesn’t devolve into war.”

Ash paled.

“Surely you realized that was probably going to happen?” Lady Rarity asked. “That is, unless you were locked up for being crazy and never allowed to tell anyone.”

Ash blinked, seeing the truth in what she was saying.

“Are you still sure you’re willing to fight like that?” Nae asked. “It won’t be a sport. It will be a real fight.”

Ash took one moment to look at Pikachu. His face became set. “I’ll do what needs to be done.”

“Spoken like a true ‘ero,” Curaçao said with an understanding smirk.

“So you’ll take the mission?” Renee asked.

“Assist in the overthrowing of an entire world order?” Alushy asked. “Fuck yes!”

“It sounds, like, kinda fun,” Insipid added.

Velvet shrugged. “I could go either way.”

Nae looked at herself. “…For my brothers and sisters, I will.”

Lady Rarity smiled. “I have no issues.”

Curaçao nodded. “We’ll take it, Renee.”

Renee grinned. “Glad to hear it. I’ll leave you to be acquainted. You have a week to prepare and recuperate.”

“Viva la revolution!” Alushy shouted. “It will happen!”

Ash looked at her, unsure.

“You’ll get used to her,” Nae said, walking up to Ash. “Now, besides Pikachu… Who do you have with you?”

“I have a lot… But right now it’s Greninja, Noivern, Talonflame, Hawlucha…”

“Greninja…” Nae closed her eyes. “A gekkouga. That’s one of the Pokèrin intelligent races. I might be able to teach him to talk, like me.”

Ash gawked. “…Really?”

“Really. They have the potential to be just like us.”

Ash nodded. “I wonder how many others can.”

“Unfortunately not Pikachu,” Nae said, scratching the electric rodent behind the ears. “He really is just a large rodent.

“Pi-KA!”

“Not that you ever should be mind-controlled to fight against your will.”

“It wouldn’t constitute a ‘crime against personhood’,” Velvet pointed out.

“We can figure out the legalese later,” Lady Rarity said. “Clearly, the practices on Ash’s world need to end. And we have the power to bring it about. Ash, you should come train with us – and perhaps get a weapon of your own.”

Ash shook his head. “I fight through my Pokèmon.”

“But what if you’re separated? Or if-”

“I can bond with Greninja until we basically become one,” Ash said.

“You still need a gun,” Alushy muttered. “Or a sword or something.”

“We’ll discuss it in training,” Lady Rarity said. “Come, Ash. Get to know us. Be sure to bring your Greninja.”

They left the office, leaving Renee and Daniel.

“I do things like that every week,” Renee mused. “Several hundred teams under my command, I probably do it a bit too liberally…”

“You did give him one of our strongest teams.”

“It was to get on Arceus’ good side. I did yell at him for a bit. Probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

Daniel smirked. “No. It wasn’t.”

“Regardless, I’ve got to take care of the Sparkle Influx… I’m going to have to shuffle a few teams around to make sure everything’s all even.” She brought up a display of all the teams. “…I do hope they don’t blow up the planet.”

“You never know.”

~~~

Valentine and Froppy stood on opposite sides of a holographic screen that showed a news report on the Sparkle Census joining Merodi Universalis.

“Ribbit,” Froppy said.

Valentine let out a deep sigh. “Really?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it!”

Valentine looked like he wanted to argue, but thought better of it.

“…What did you think I was implying?”

“I’m on a hairpin trigger,” Valentine muttered.

“They’ve become stronger than us,” Froppy translated aloud for her benefit.

“Yes… And while I don’t exactly feel threatened I do feel like we’re inadequate. They’re a century younger than us! Why don’t we progress like that!?”

“I think you need to calm down.”

Valentine nodded, adjusting his pink suit. “You are correct. This is unbefitting.”

Froppy nodded. “Ribbit.”

“I still can’t imagine why…”

“I think you can answer your own question.”

“They’ve got stronger ka?”

Froppy raised an eyebrow.

“…We’re too divided.”

Froppy nodded slowly.

Valentine pulled up a map of the USM – almost completely limited to the E-Sphere, with a couple of holdings elsewhere. Amusingly, it was often compared to the standard 50-state design of the United States of America, with Alaska being the Q-Sphere and Hawaii approximating the Strands. They had a lot more than 48 ‘continental’ universes, but that didn’t change the comparison.

It was a patchwork light of red and blue with the occasional yellow blip that represented ‘other’.

The constant political war between Democrat and Republican. It never ended. With the heavy American roots in ‘Murica’, it was no surprise that everything tended toward this political scene. They had started as the division between blue and red, and nobody was willing to change it. All worlds added had to, if they wanted any say in multiversal politics, adapt to the system. There were very few ‘yellows’. The first Discworld was the only yellow that mattered, and they never elected any Presidents, or made any pretense of adopting the party system.

The war between the two sides was constant. It wasn’t a physical war, but a political one. They froze each other at every turn, forced their ideals at the expense of progress, and…

Well, essentially, they made the USM stagnate. They argued about everything and never made any big decisions.

“I created this…” Valentine muttered.

“Your America hadn’t quite achieved the split, as I remember,” Froppy said – reciting things she learned in history class.

Valentine nodded. “But I saw it in the others. I always did. But I ignored it. Ignoring that the future versions of my country had…” He pounded his fist into the table. “This isn’t America. Not anymore.”

“…So what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing can be done. A revolution to a more even democracy will be political suicide.” He folded his arms. “We’re stuck and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Ribbit.”

“Nobody will accept entry to Merodi Universalis. Not even myself. I don’t care about how effective they are – they aren’t free.” He shook his head. “It looks like we’re just going to stay as we are.”

“Are you sure we won’t fall apart?”

“…Not if I have anything to say about it,” Valentine said, curling his hands into fists. “This is the USM. We’re not going to fall. No matter what.”

Froppy wasn’t so sure about that.

Author's Note

Since I know zeusdemigod reads this - yes, Pokerin Anima was based on the idea of his fic, A New World, A New Way, which was one of the first excellent fics I read - before I even started writing here, at that. I suppose I'll take a moment here to thank him for writing such an interesting story that made my mind spark with the possibilities. (Notably, I took it a few different directions, but eh.) The world of his fic is actually referenced elsewhere, to boot.

And I should also apologize - this chapter has been written for many many many months, before the League of Sweetie Belles was even conceived. As such the LSB cannot visit the world until the timeline catches up with this one - which will not be for a long while yet, given that 'Year 35' up at the top of the fic.

Whoops! My bad.

-GM, master of timeline arrangement.

113 - Murica's Time

Year 53

The Vaults.

Any multiversal society worth their salt knew about the Vaults.

At the boundary between the Strands and the Great Void, there was a chain of universes. One, the entrance, was connected to several other universes and had been known for as long as any Class 2 could remember. It had been conveniently part of a ‘neutral territory’ between different Strands powers, creating one of the lesser-known outposts: Mogadrel.

And then Mogadrel discovered the first Vault Door. A gigantic, circular construct composed not of physical matter, but universal filament – so strong it could not be smashed with any weapon. The Class 1 weapons that might be able to break it open would likely destroy the universe, so nobody was going to try that. So the Vault Door became a tourist attraction – a strange hole in existence that could not be opened.

That was, until someone cracked the code. There were several glyphs inscribed on the Vault Door that, as it turned out, represented numbers. It was a simple math problem. The solution was nineteen, and tapping the glyph that represented ‘nineteen’ nineteen times was the answer. It opened, revealing another universe – one only about the size of a small moon. It was filled with gold, jewels, and other precious riches.

On the back wall was another Vault Door, this one with another puzzle. Now that they knew it was a puzzle, it only took three days for them to crack it – a relatively simple riddle about mathematical coordinates in space and the shapes they formed.

The universe behind that one had even rarer materials and metals. Still things you could find on a standard Earth, but the tiny capsule that held a single atom of antihydrogen was an indicator of things to come.

As they moved further and further, puzzles got harder and harder – but more and more people took notice. The treasures stopped being precious materials and instead became pieces of technology, some of which were rather advanced. As higher societies began to look into the Vaults, they discovered that every universe-room was connected only to the Dark Tower, the room before it, and the room after. Dimensional travel was freely allowed through open Vault Doors, but closed ones blocked both physical and dimensional travel no matter how hard anyone tried to bypass it.

Puzzles began to get more complex as time went on. The only pattern was that they got harder and harder. Some were complex quantum mechanics problems that demanded a deep understanding of standard physics. Others were block puzzles that involved moving objects around the universe in a particular fashion. Still others were about emotional understanding and poetic riddles, or even logic puzzles. A couple had been trials of combat, but those were by far in the minority.

In the modern day, virtually every puzzle was faceted – several riddles would reveal clues that the solution might be a logic puzzle, but as it turned out the partially solved logic problem needed to be run through a multiversal physics analyzer to get a coordinate in the Sea of Infinite Possibility. Create that universe and then analyze the connections between it, the Dark Tower, and the Vault to find the answer required to open the door.

But the rewards were always greater and greater. Devices that could create and destroy universes. Tremendous stores of knowledge about how the multiverse worked and what sorts of worlds existed in the deep meta-past. Materials that made no physical sense in any universe yet maintained their properties no matter where you took them. Whenever a door was opened, it was a free-for-all to see who could grab what the fastest. Lethal force was not allowed by treaty within the Vaults, but anything ELSE was.

Luckily time travel was not present in any Vault universe, and all agreed that altering the Vault universe would just cause it to collapse, dropping all the deeper Vaults into the Sea, never to be recovered… The same thing would happen if any Class 1 used their dimensional technology to force the doors open.

It was tempting to try though. After all, many people believed that in the back of the Vault was a Wishing World that held an infinite number of wishes, unlike all the others that had been found, which were just one-and-done things. There was no evidence for this, and nobody knew how deep the Vaults might be, but surely such a thing would be the final treasure, right?

The last time a Vault Door had been opened was over a decade ago. The current puzzle had confounded everyone in a major way.

Door #827…

It hadn’t taken as long as the longest door (#789, a total of twenty-four years) but it was getting up there. The main issue with #827 was that nobody had any idea what the first step was. The Vault Door was oddly blank, and the only structures that weren’t loot were six large statues of different birds, each one in a different pose. That was it.

The room had once been filled with shiny, powerful technology. It had all been cleaned out years ago, leaving only the statues and the Vault Door.

Many civilizations had grown bored with attempting to open up the latest Door, leaving only a small contingent to see if someone else managed to open it. There wasn’t a crowd of people, just a handful of fanatics who couldn’t leave the mystery alone or bored people keeping tabs.

Vriska was not either of those people. Vriska had just thought of a way to completely blow them all away. It was horribly illegal and went against the general ‘neutral territory’ understanding of the Vaults, but they didn’t have to know it was her doing it. She’d bothered to make a disguise – contacts that gave her blank eyes and a reality anchor that all Skaian’s had to wear.

She walked across the empty, dark gray ground past all the various camps, heading right for the tremendous circular structure that was Vault Door #827. It was still about a mile away, but it was huge.

She closed her fingers around her infinite-sided die. All she had to do was use all the luck she had been accumulating to throw something that would either bash the door down or just solve the puzzle…

But then a hook made of blood grabbed her by her orange hood and dragged her into a tent – the Merodi Universalis tent.

“Question. How stupid are you?” Velvet asked Vriska, pinning her to the ground with her blood. “Because throwing an infinite-sided die – hell, even having an infinite-sided die – in a neutral universe is going to get you killed!”

“Psh, wouldn’t be heroic or just.”

“There are workarounds!”

Lady Rarity used her magic to pull out Vriska’s contacts. “It’s actually Vriska. You were right, Velvet.”

Vriska folded her arms and huffed. “I have so much luck right now, I was going to open the Vault door and nobody was even going to know it was me. I’d get away with everything!”

“Um…” Insipid rubbed her head. “If you’re like, so lucky right now, how did Velvet grab you?”

“Simple,” Nae said, cleaning her gun. “Her luck foresaw that if she was allowed to roll that die, there would be no ‘fortunate’ outcome. So it stopped her.”

Vriska stared at her. “…Maybe you’re right. …Wait, who are you again?”

“Nae. Ga. Psychic. Liberator of Pokèmon.”

“Oh, was that what that big deal on the news was about?”

Curaçao nodded. “Yes, zat was us. Well, us and Alushy, but Alushy never sits still.”

Vriska pulled herself up and dusted herself off. “You guys sounded like you had fun.”

“People died,” Lady Rarity spat. “A lot of people that we got to know well. Including one of our number.”

Vriska’s smile vanished. “Look, sorry, I didn’t know…”

“You saw the news reports,” Velvet muttered.

“Didn’t really pay attention.”

Curaçao sighed. “Look, it’s fine, and we did have a lot of fun there – but it was a brutal campaign. We’re ‘ere because we needed something simple and mindless to do that wasn’t pure vacation time.”

“I get you,” Vriska said, nodding. “Need some time to yourselves.”

“And you’re here about to fuck everything up,” Velvet muttered, prodding Vriska with a bloody tendril. “So don’t.”

“All right, fine, I won’t,” Vriska muttered. “Yeesh, try to do something fun…”

A humanoid frog with red on his face and a yellow rodent on his shoulder poked his head in. “We’ve got something interesting going on outside.”

“How interesting, Ash?” Lady Rarity asked.

The Greninja that had taken the name ‘Ash’ said nothing, simply gesturing for them to follow him. They all came outside – including Vriska – to see what the deal was. They scrambled through a crowd up to a large dish-like machine run by the Merodi – used for scanning purposes.

“Pidge…?” Vriska said, blinking.

Technician Pidge popped her head out from the dish’s console. “Oh. Hey. Uh, why are you at scanning dish number seven-billion-and-boring?”

Ash pointed. Pidge followed his finger. “…Huh. Didn’t notice that…”

~~~

The Vaults didn’t notice the small crew when they first arrived. A portal appearing near the back of Vault Universe #827 was nothing to be interested in – though these days it was usually someone leaving rather than someone arriving. There were a few who bothered to check who the newcomers were.

There were three. Ambassador Funny Valentine, perhaps the most influential member of the USM when internal affairs weren’t considered. The face of a Class 3 civilization. Nothing special. A few even laughed – what could a Class 3 even hope to do here? The puzzles had gone far beyond them at this point.

The second person was easy enough to find as well. Tornado, a high ranking member of the USM task forces with impressive telekinesis. Nothing all that interesting.

The third individual would take some digging to find. Most didn’t bother – who cared who a Class 3 tag-along was? He was some sort of ‘caped baldy’ dressed like an annoyingly generic superhero. His face was simple and his expression completely flat. Those who did bother to find out who he was found ‘Saitama,’ a hero from the same world as Tornado. Reports said he was ‘strong’. Nothing else was available.

They walked for a while. Occasionally someone rude would jeer at them, but for the most part they were ignored.

And then they walked by the Flower encampment and all sorts of alarms went off.

An Ice-blue Tulip floated out of the collation of PPC agents, using her mastery over ka to scan the three of them.

Funny Valentine: Idealistic Antagonist: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Steel Ball Run.

Tornado: Anti-Hero / Huge Bitch: One Punch Man.

Saitama: Protagonist Hero / Force of Narrative: One Punch Man.

It took the Ice-blue Tulip all of seven seconds to realize what Saitama was. There was no Mary-Sueness around him. There was just an aura of pure victory.

One Punch Man!? She shouted mentally, drawing everyone’s attention. How did he…

Suddenly, everyone cared a lot more about the little Class 3 walking by. While Saitama’s personnel file was blank, it wasn’t that hard to find an Internet that mentioned One Punch Man. Murmurs began to spread. Pieces of information began to be passed around.

Curaçao took her team out to see this – handing them one of the data pads that she had been given. It had an image of Saitama on the cover of a manga entitled One Punch Man. The whole gimmick was that Saitama had the superpower to defeat anything in one punch.

“…He’s going to punch the fucking Door,” Vriska said, blinking. “…This’ll be interesting.”

“There’s no way,” Pidge said, rapidly clicking buttons on her dish’s consoles.

“Like, you aren’t Starbeat,” Insipid commented.

More information went around. There had been other versions of One Punch Man found before. Often, those worlds were destroyed from outside so not to let such an absurd force out. A few cases told of versions being used in armies and laying waste to all opposition, only to decide they didn’t care anymore or that they had been on the wrong side the entire time. None of them had gotten to the Vaults before, as far as anyone knew.

The idea of One Punch Man was one the multiverse feared. It was one of the few powerful ka manifestations the Flowers wouldn’t deal with. For he was a parody, and a parody was sanctioned.

But when he was outside his universe…

Well at that point the information devolved into contradictions and arguments about what Saitama actually meant. There was no way he could just brute force his way through a Vault Door – he was just part of a Class 3, and didn’t have anywhere near the scanned power level of an eldritch abomination.

But they still walked – walked right up to the Vault with a small crowd of people forming. The Xeelee ships floating above watched him with curiosity, while the Celestialsapiens hadn’t decided if they wanted to watch or not yet.

Valentine and Tornado stood back as Saitama walked up to the Vault Door.

Valentine looked at the back of his head. “Take as long as you nee-”

Saitama pulled back a fist and rammed it into the Vault Door. There was a tremendous clang that had enough force behind it that the shockwave pushed Valentine and Tornado over, as well as most of the crowd.

The Vault Door didn’t even have a dent in it.

The first one to laugh was one of Them. “Did you really think your power would mean anything outside your world? You’re just a rule there! Everything supersedes out here!” As the crowd stood up, much of it began to laugh as well.

Saitama ignored them.

“Serious punch,” he said. He pulled his fist back harder. Unlike the first time he had punched, his face showed some actual strain. He pushed forward.

The shockwave was so large any tangible being went flying backward – kept from being crushed only by a courtesy Xeelee safety net since Tornado’s telekinesis failed to block the rush.

The Vault Door rumbled, a dent having formed in its bottom. It seemed, at first, that ‘One’ Punch Man would have to punch multiple times.

Then the entire Vault Door unceremoniously fell backward, revealing a new universe of the Vault filled with crystalline technology.

Saitama turned around, holding up his fist. His expression was very apathetic.

Everyone who hadn’t passed out from the outrageous display of force was staring at him with their jaws open.

Valentine stood up and dusted himself off. “Saitama, there is another door.”

“Eh, sure,” Saitama said. “Looks like there’s cool stuff behind these doors anyway.” He took off at a run and was at the next Vault Door in an instant, pulling back a fist.

Valentine snapped his fingers – and all the USM operatives that had been in the universe, preparing for this moment, surged forward and started looting the new universe.

The new gold rush had begun.

~~~

The USS Love Train was one of the USM’s more advanced ships, often chartered by Valentine himself should he have need for one, and when that wasn’t the case it was almost always captained by Navy ‘Lucy’ Heartfilia, from one of the USM’s newer members.

Against Navy’s wishes, at the moment the Love Train was in the command of one Gyro Zeppeli, on a return trip from the Pokèmon world Curaçao’s team had spent years on organizing great societal change. The USM had gotten involved in that world as well, and due to some confusion involving the nations of the world, the world was now aware of both the USM and Merodi.

Which had been an interesting mess, to say the least.

I CANNOT SAY I WAS EXPECTING THAT, Death admitted, the comment directed to Gyro. I WAS EXPECTING FEAR OF ME. NOT ANGER AGAINST THE MERODI.

“Huh. I got something different where I went,” Froppy said. “They loved all interdimensional travelers so much it was a little freaky.”

YOU WERE IN A POKÉMON-CONTROLLED AREA. THAT IS TO BE EXPECTED.

Johnny Joestar grunted. “Great, you all did stuff. Remind me why I’m here again?”

“Company,” Gyro said with a smirk.

Johnny let out a sigh. “I don’t even have a horse…”

“But you have that fancy-dandy wheelchair!”

“Yes. I do. It’ll let me come over there and knock some sense into that golden mouth of yours.”

Gyro chuckled. “Don’t you fret none, we’re going home. Nothing’s going to stop us.“

“What about all those USM ships that have been vanishing? Hm?”

“I won’t even let that stop u-”

The engines cut out and they appeared in a black, empty universe.

Another ship had suffered the same fate. The Austraeoh’s Prism Drive sparked and dropped off, forcing them to take a position next to the Love Train.

Gyro and O’Neill called each other at the same time. “WHAT DID YOU DO!?”

A unicorn – Clandestine – tapped O’Neill on the shoulder. “I think our engines were just too close and interfered with each other.”

Gyro glanced at the science station of the Love Train. Nobody was at it. With a sigh, Froppy bounced over and pressed some buttons. “Yep,” she confirmed. “That does seem to be what happened. Engine’s working fine now.”

Gyro blinked. “You’re telling me we just passed too close to each other?”

“Space is big,” Clandestine said. “Really big. Chances of anything passing by that close are pretty minimal. Not to mention the chances of dimensional travelers taking the exact same pathway… Tiny.”

“Astronomical,” Froppy said.

“Oh, so we’re probably in some kind of story then?” O’Neill asked. “Wonder what it’s going to be this time.”

“Could just be us talking like a bunch of confused sheep,” Johnny commented.

OR A GREAT FIGHT FOR THE FATE OF EXISTENCE, Death suggested.

O’Neill shrugged. “Eh. Maybe it is just talking. We’re heading to that… Uh… Are we calling it Poké Revo? Or….?”

“We have it as Terra-PM4,” Froppy said.

“Terra?”

“Earthlike worlds that aren’t Earths and don’t have an official designation.”

O’Neill pondered this. “Hrm. You know, that sounds like a good one.”

WHAT WERE YOU PLANNING TO DO THERE?

“More diplomacy!” O’Neill said. “Because we were invited to half the places there and told to stay the hell away from the other half!”

“The cost of interference,” Froppy said.

O’Neill shrugged. “Eh, they don’t have slave-trade fighting-rings anymore, so it’s a success. They’re also doing pretty well, considering.”

EMOTIONS ARE JUST PARTICULARLY HOT.

“You could say that again.”

I WILL NOT.

“Smart skeleton.”

Gyro let out a chuckle. “Nice talkin’ to you, General. But we’ve got a home to get back to and it doesn’t look like anything’s going on here we need to deal with.”

O’Neill saluted. “Seems to be the case. Guess this was just another pointless meeting. Stay frosty my f-”

The feed cut out. On the screen that displayed the Austraeoh, every single light on the beautiful ship faded to nothing. The brilliant white craft became dark.

Gyro blinked. “…Nani?”

~~~

Saitama punched down the third Vault Door. “They aren’t getting any harder, what are people talking about?”

“You’re showing the entire multiverse what we’re made of,” Valentine told him. “To them, everything really was harder. To you, it’s all just another door to punch down.”

He turned around to those that were watching Saitama’s progress rather than ransacking the last three universes for the loot. “Behold! The power of One Punch Man! Used not by the great Class 1s, not by the humans of the TSAB, not by the masters of time themselves, and not even by the Flowers! – It was a lowly Class 3 that ‘can’t stop arguing with itself’ who found the solution to the Vaults!”

He spread his arms wide, summoning D4C behind him.

Everyone saw the might of the USM.

“Give it a rest,” a Them jeered. “You’re just a small-time boy who found a little exploit. News flash, your little exploit is just a human with a weird power. This is all brute force.”

“And yet your kind couldn’t punch through.”

“We didn’t decide to mess with the forces of ka.”

Valentine raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t your kind known for that sort of thing?”

The Them laughed. “Foolish Ambassador! Only the Flowers will manipulate ka on this level! Or are you not aware of the idea of karma? Or balance? The more you exploit, the more a balance must be struck.”

“Can confirm,” Vriska said, raising a hand. “Fought a war where ka was heavily considered. There was a huge deal made about the balancing in order to get the best possible outcome.”

Valentine glared at the detractors. There was a flash as they all appeared next to the new Vault Door. Saitama pulled back, punched it down, and strolled over to the next. “That pensive attitude keeps you back.”

They are correct, the Ice-blue Tulip said, floating to Valentine. We had access to such devices of ultimate victory and endless success. We could have always done what you are doing now. We chose not to because this level of brazen spitting in the face of what is meant to be is bound to have consequences.

Valentine’s glare didn’t falter. “He has never suffered negative consequences before.”

He is a force of nature from a world where such things are accepted. This is the greater multiverse. Gods become men out here, those who are unstoppable always find something above them. And Saitama is not supposed to be here. You are asking for trouble, Ambassador Valentine.

“He’s bashed down seven doors and I’ve gathered many ships full of high-end treasure for my society. Nothing bad has happened. The Vaults are a series of puzzles, not a secret superweapon.”

“How stupid are you!?” Vriska blurted. “You’re arguing ka physics with a Flower!? Maybe she’s trying to save you some heartbreak, you know?”

Valentine considered this. If I call Saitama off now, we won’t have enough treasure to expand the USM. There will still be stagnation. We need more. “Perhaps they are trying to get me to stop because it makes them look weak.”

We’ve never been all that involved with the Vaults. We are just Flowers, here to watch and rarely interfere unless there is something unsanctioned. You, Valentine, are sanctioned. You can’t escape the traditions.

They were teleported to the next door just before Saitama punched it down. “Oh, this one’s extra shiny on the other side.”

Valentine noticed Insipid light her horn. She appeared behind Saitama, hoof outstretched – but Tornado grabbed the duplicator unicorn and smashed her back into the crowd.

“Aw, come on! That would have been the best power ever!” Insipid whined.

“The power belongs to the USM,” Valentine muttered, glaring at Insipid. “Do not attempt to take it again.”

“Ugh, this blows.”

“Go out and forage for some new treasure. There are several open rooms. I’m sure there’s something of use to you there. But stay away from Saitama.”

Insipid grunted, crawling back to her team.

“One punch versus one punch…” Pidge muttered, blinking. “Do they both kill each other? Can they hurt each other at all? Or does the universe explode?”

“Questions we don’t want ze answer to,” Curaçao commented.

“Why wouldn’t you want that answer?”

The conversation fell silent. Valentine turned his attention to the chaos - over the last ten minutes, news had gotten out that the Vaults were opening, allowing everyone to come in and seize the ancient treasures. What had once been USM-dominated treasure efforts were now filled with people of almost all societies – Xeelee, Beyonder, Them, Horrorterror, Gallifreyan, TSAB, Merodi, USM, Void, the Combine, and a handful of other lesser Class 2 and 3 civilizations. Valentine was mildly surprised the mythical White Nettle hadn’t dropped by, possibly searching for the lost relics of her people.

Valentine had no idea of what most of the machines did. He’d been told many could shape universes and alter reality – nothing on the scale of the Shaping Mechanism yet, but they were getting there. And if he could get one of those for the USM… Well, any ka-based punishment from using Saitama to do it would be worth it. They didn’t have anywhere near enough yet, and with the Class 1s actually paying attention it was getting harder to capture the really good things hidden within the Vaults.

But there was always more treasure. Every universe could take days to sort through. Soon there would just be too much to police. And since this was a neutral set of universes, nobody could claim anything until they took it out of the Vaults. There just had to be a lot for it to be worth the USM’s trouble.

They would rise up. They would. Valentine was certain of it.

They were teleported to the next door. Saitama punched it down.

On the other side was nothing but pitch black darkness.

“Huh. That’s new,” Saitama said. He shrugged, taking a step forward.

“Saita-” Valentine called out, his proud feeling turning to one of internal fear the moment he saw the darkness.

It was too late; Saitama had already reached his hand in. A beast lashed out from the misty darkness. It couldn’t cut Saitama – but it didn’t need to. It went through his ear and into his brain.

Saitama slowly turned around. His eyes were no longer apathetic – they were angry and solid black. He didn’t speak. He simply pulled back his fist, aiming at Valentine.

Valentine’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks as he was smashed to oblivion.

~~~

“This is the Love Train to the Austraeoh, please come in,” Gyro said. “O’Neill? What happened?”

Froppy checked the console. “The power levels of the ship have fallen significantly. It’s also not giving off any light – though heat signatures suggest its producing power other ways. Several systems are down – shields, communications, weapons. There’s no sign of any attack or forced entry. There’s dimensional surges, but that is likely just because their Prism Drive is not meant to be off.” Froppy blinked, processing this. “Hold on, the way I understand their Prism Drive is that it’s a law of nature that it’s always active, and it gives the back end the rainbow color. It doesn’t even make sense for it to be off unless physics was altered.”

PERHAPS IT IS NOT OFF, MERELY DARK, Death suggested. EVEN WITHOUT POWER THE AUSTRAEOH SHOULD STILL GIVE OFF LIGHT IN SOME AREAS. THERE IS SOMETHING NEFARIOUS GOING ON OVER THERE.

Johnny turned to Gyro. “…What are we going to do?”

Gyro grunted. “Politically speaking we should probably just leave them there and not risk valuable USM property.”

“But…?” Froppy said, encouraging him to go on.

“But rules are for chumps.” He grinned. “Froppy, Death, you’re up. We’ll teleport you over and see what you can find.”

“Not you!?” Johnny said, surprised.

“Do I look like I can make my way around somewhere that’s pitch black? Those two have senses. Ball Breaker and Tusk can’t really help us see now, can they? Plus, you don’t have a horse.”

Johnny nodded slowly. “…I wasn’t asking for me.”

Gyro smirked. “Yes you were.”

Froppy bounced off her chair, standing next to Death. “Ribbit. Ready. I already have a mundane radio for communication.”

WHERE WILL WE BE APPEARING?

“Safest spot is one of their cargo holds,” Gyro said. “I trust you’ll be able to bash through any bulkheads if you need to.”

Froppy nodded in assurance.

A few moments later, the duo was teleported into the Austraeoh. It was pitch black. Froppy turned on her flashlight just to see if it would work. For a few seconds they were able to see the abandoned interior, but soon all the light was sucked away.

That is, except for the two blue pinpricks of light in Death’s skull. Those remained – but they couldn’t really illuminate much beyond the edges of Death’s eye sockets.

Froppy closed her eyes and used her ears. One of the lesser-known aspects of Frog biology was that they had an interesting sense of sound. They were able to hear things with their lungs. It wasn’t as good as, say, bat echolocation, but she knew where she was and where Death was.

Death could just see in complete darkness. Because he was Death.

He took point, Froppy hopping along behind. They reached the door of the cargo hold, not surprised to find it wasn’t working. The manual open worked just fine though – all Death had to do was pop open a hatch in the wall and turn a crank a dozen times. They entered a hallway that was just as pitch-black as before.

“I’ve got nothing,” Froppy whispered. “You?”

I SENSE LIVING SOULS ON THE SHIP, BUT NOTHING IN THIS HALL.

Froppy nodded. “Which way?”

MOST DIRECTIONS. A LARGE SQUAD IS MOVING TOWARD US VIA THE LEFT.

“That way,” Froppy said, gesturing with her arm. Death went where instructed, his bony feet scraping against the metallic floor. Froppy followed along easily despite the darkness, keeping a mental map of where they had been in her mind.

THEY HAVE STOPPED MOVING

“Wonder why…”

Death opened the next door manually as well. He walked in…

…and they started shooting him. The plasma weapons were absolutely useless in the darkness, and the bullets hit him and did nothing.

DO NOT BE ALARMED: I COME FROM THE USM.

“…Death!?” O’Neill blurted, “Stand down!”

O’NEILL, IT IS GOOD WE FOUND YOU.

“So you guys actually came to rescue us?”

“Ribbit,” Froppy said, hopping into the room. “Yeah. Just the two of us though. Everyone else won’t do well with the dark.”

“Don’t I know it…”

“Here, we can send your coordinates back to Gyro and get you teleported out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” O’Neill said. “Not until my entire crew is safe.”

“Don’t push it,” Clandestine said, revealing herself. “He really isn’t going anywhere.”

I CAN DETECT THEIR “LIFE SIGNATURES”. WE CAN BEGIN TO ROUND THEM UP. YOU ARE WELCOME TO HELP IF YOU CAN MAKE YOUR WAY THROUGH THE DARKNESS. BUT WE DO NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED.

“Gah. The Dark Side of the Moon,” O’Neill muttered.

Froppy looked at him – even though there was nothing for her to look at. “What?”

“This thing came out of nowhere, appearing in the engine room. It was a creature made of black prisms – and it just ate the light. The entire ship went into darkness. Then it started killing people.”

“What did it look like?” Froppy demanded – voice wavering.

“Uh… I didn’t see it before the lights went out. I was told it had two big arms that didn’t look like it belonged on its body. Too large to deal with. Why?”

Froppy sighed. She turned on the radio to call Gyro. “Hey, we’ve got a problem.”

“What is it?” Gyro asked.

“It’s Necrozma.”

~~~

Whenever Valentine went into an area of the multiverse where D4C wouldn’t be able to access an alternate version of himself, he always brought along a couple of backups. They were clones rather than full alternate versions, but the principle was effectively the same.

He rarely had to actually use them, but you never knew when someone would think they could assassinate him if D4C couldn’t translate.

So he was a little annoyed when D4C affixed itself to another Valentine sitting in the middle of the universe, looking right at the portal of darkness in the far distance.

He wasn’t wearing a pink suit – but rather a brown cloak, so he could remain more anonymous. He took off the hood, allowing his golden locks to spill over his shoulders, letting everyone know who he was. The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated indeed.

He had been lucky Saitama had punched him and not his Stand. There was a nonzero chance his punches could hit the intangible, and if D4C was destroyed… Valentine couldn’t come back from that.

He pulled out a phone and called Tornado. “Report.”

“You should be able to see everything that matters from where you are.”

A Beyonder ship flew through the air, landed behind Valentine and exploded in a twisted mixture of rippling blue-purple energy. “I see…”

Valentine watched the shapes of Horrorterrors, Beyonders, and Them fly over his head – leaving the Vaults the physical way, not willing to risk themselves by being anywhere near what was going on. Valentine briefly wondered why they were flying away rather than using dimensional portals but he quickly realized that any non-physical connections must have been blocked the moment the door to the darkness was opened. They had to fly out the normal way.

The Gallifreyans and Flowers followed suit – leaving only the Xeelee and TSAB as the higher civilizations willing to stay and defend against the One Punch Man.

Valentine began to walk toward the battle. As he did, thousands of fleeing people ran past him – anyone who didn’t have a ship or couldn’t procure transport on one was left to their own two legs. Flying and magical creatures passed by first, eventually followed by just humans.

Eventually he passed the majority of the fleeing crowd so he could see the battle himself.

It was hardly a battle at all.

“ENIGMA MECHANISM!” a male TSAB mage shouted, unleashing a complex series of spells at Saitama. He shrugged them off without showing a scratch, driving his fist through the green magic matrix and smashing the mage – and his device – to bits.

“FULL POWER…” another mage shouted, this one a woman with bright white hair standing on top of a Xeelee ship.

Saitama saw her. Unlike his normal self, this version was tactical. He saw something trying to execute a plan – and he didn’t waste a moment in stopping it. He punched through both the Xeelee ship and the mage before the spell activated.

Valentine knew the Xeelee were trying to use their signature ‘piano wire’ devices to keep Saitama in place. They must have been doing nothing, because Saitama’s movement didn’t look hindered at all. Not even anti-life cannons were doing anything against his complete invulnerability.

The Xeelee tried something different – luring Saitama to them, and then running away. Saitama let them go – attacking whatever entity was closest to the black void instead.

Clearly, the TSAB and Xeelee noticed this, starting to fire into the black void, but they couldn’t confirm if they were doing anything, and it was leaving them open to more of Saitama’s attacks. As powerful as he was, it still took time for him to punch something apart. If they focused on the darkness, that time dropped considerably.

By the time Valentine got close enough to talk with anyone, the Xeelee and TSAB forces were almost completely gone. Granted, they hadn’t been full military forces, but that was still impressive. The most technologically advanced society and the largest human one were being beaten by a single man.

Valentine walked up to Tornado – she was talking with the Merodi and a few weaker TSAB mages. “Hey.”

“I wondered if you had a backup,” Vriska said, smirking. “So, Ambassador fucking idiot, have any suggestions?”

Valentine folded his arms. “Tell me what you’re thinking first, and what resources we have.”

Pidge cleared her throat. “The question is ‘how do you defeat the unbeatable’. Clearly, mind control was the first option, but we’ve already lost that way out.”

Vriska nodded. “That mind is sealed off with tar. There’s no way anyone’s getting in there.”

“Direct power is not an option unless you can match Saitama’s power,” Tornado added. “We cannot get another ‘One Punch Man’ here with the dimensional lock. It’ll take time we don’t have to walk out of the vaults.”

“Fleeing isn’t an option either,” Lady Rarity said. “He’s more than strong enough to pick us all off before we get out. Fleeing might actually make it take less time.”

“He’ll pursue us?” Valentine asked.

They watched as Saitama shifted locations in an instant, moving through the previous Vault door where the Xeelee were constructing a giant laser. He punched it into nothing and returned to protect the darkness in less than a second.

Valentine’s frown deepened. “Ah.”

“He’s bloodlusted,” Velvet said. “He’ll attack everything he sees until the Vaults are devoid of life.”

“And I can’t, like, go copy him because you didn’t let me earlier!” Insipid whined. “Now he’s too smart to touch!”

“I’ve also got this,” Vriska said, producing the infinite-sided die. “Totally illegal, I know, but I feel a little safer knowing I’ve got it. I have enough luck to make it do just about anything once. We’re pretty sure it can’t beat him, though.”

“Because ‘beating’ him in a standard fight just isn’t possible,” Velvet said. “If it’s a test of strength, he wins. Universal manipulation could probably work, yes. If he looks like he’s going to kill everyone, the Xeelee are prepared to just destroy the universe to take care of him – and lose whatever’s in the deeper Vaults.”

“Last resort,” Valentine said. “Clearly, force is not the answer to face him. Emotional manipulation?”

“He’s a bloodlusted servant of some mysterious darkness. What do you think?”

“Then we have to outsmart.”

“He’s pretty smart right now,” Ash said.

“Pi-KA!” Pikachu punctuated.

Valentine furrowed his brow. He shuffled what they had – some Xeelee, some TSAB, Insipid, an infinite sided die, Tornado, a handful of other warriors…

Slowly, a plan began to take shape in his mind. He snapped his fingers suddenly. “I have an idea.”

~~~

‘Terra-PM4’, a few relative months ago…

They had tried the peaceful route – the route without war, the route without needless bloodshed.

But that had all fallen apart when the world figured out who Nae really was, and the strange pony ‘Pokémon’ that were with her. Beings from another world. Beings that wanted to manipulate things to serve their own ends.

Terra-PM4’s version of Arceus had taken issue with this. He was nothing like the nigh-godlike counterpart that had sent Ash, Nae, and the others on this mission, but he was still a jealous deity-level being. He had triggered a worldwide war, and the USM got caught in the middle of it since they had been working on Terra-PM4 as well.

However, the USM was not looking to change Terra-PM4’s society, or anything involving the spread of democracy. They were here to research the amazing powers of the Pokémon. The capture technology allowed deity-level beings to be subject to humans in every way – and that included testing. There had been a few disasters, but nothing terrible.

But the war, Merodi, and USM testing came to a head in the middle of the ocean on the Alolan islands. Over time, it had become apparent that those islands were the source of many naturally-forming multiversal portals, and every side involved in the war decided it was worth fighting over. Everyone discovered it at about the same time.

Except the USM, who had been working there for years and even had a secret research base.

Froppy had been there during the last hours of the war. As explosions raged above them, the scientists of the underground USM facility had lunch and placed bets on who would win. Froppy found their apathy somewhat appalling, but she wasn’t here to judge them. She was here to check on one of their bigger projects.

At the bottom of the facility, there was a teardrop-shaped enclosure made of one-way mirrors. They could see into it, but what was inside couldn’t see out.

Which was good, because if it could it would be devouring all the light around them.

“What do we have here?” Froppy asked, hopping next to the technician operating the cage.

He munched on a donut. “Necrozma. One of the interdimensional beasts. Say what you will about the rest of the stuff we do here, keeping this thing locked up is a gift to the world.”

“Why?”

“It’d eat the light of the sun if we didn’t.”

Froppy nodded. “And the research we do on it is payment for keeping it from eating everything?”

“Exactly!”

Froppy frowned. At least they were doing some good by keeping the monster locked up.

It truly looked like a monster, too. It was made of solid black crystal with two stumpy legs that led to a large central body, where an angular ‘head’ protruded. Two thin rods stuck out from its top, connecting it to arms that were as long as it was tall, ending in three pointed fingers.

Froppy swore it was staring right at her.

“What are the chances it gets out? Because of the fighting.”

“Almost none.”

“Then it’s going to get out. Where’s the kill switch?”

“Uh, you don’t have the-”

Froppy flashed him a badge Valentine had given her. “I am one of the Confidantes. I can do what I think needs to be done. Where’s the kill switch?”

The man nervously shifted his weight but pointed to a large red button underneath a plastic cover. She flipped up the cover and lifted her finger.

The ceiling exploded in a crash of immense proportions. Froppy saw Ash, Pikachu, and his Greninja fall through, all riding Insipid – who was glowing with some godlike power she had procured that Froppy didn’t care to identify.

They had been knocked out of the sky by some human with absurd hair riding a dragon of some sort.

Neither of them mattered. What mattered was that Ash, Pikachu, Insipid, and Greninja smashed into the container hitting Necrozma.

Froppy pressed the button. But it was too late – all the lights went out. She couldn’t see anything.

But she could hear. She could hear the yells, the screams. She heard the technician get his brains blown out by Necrozma. She felt space rend around her. The calls of minor gods filled the space as a war erupted above them. The fighting continued despite Necrozma’s darkness.

“Ash!”

“PI-KA!”

“Like, no! Not happening!”

Necrozma’s call was deep and destructive. Froppy heard blood splatter all over. Some deep, draconic being roared as well. Everything shifted… She heard a portal open…

And the lights came back on. Insipid was breathing heavily. “Got him out of here! Like, totally g-”

She saw the dragon they had been fighting and its rider, both dead from Necrozma’s claws. She also saw the technician, skewered by a stray crystal.

She saw Ash torn in half and Greninja convulsing next to him.

“PI-KA!”

“Ash!” Insipid shouted, scrambling over. She took one look at him and decided she didn’t have the skills or the power to bring him back – it wasn’t in the power she had absorbed. Instead, she tended to Greninja. He had been in-tune with Ash when it happened… Couldn’t be good on his psyche.

But she was able to keep him from falling into madness with her power. He remained partially fused with Ash - some part of the man must have remained.

And that was the point Froppy left the room. As she did, she noticed technicians opening dimensional portals and getting out of there. All operations had been terminated and the place was being abandoned. So her visit had been rather pointless.

But it had let her see Necrozma.

And that, in the end, was enough to get her to read its file later. A beast from another universe that devoured light itself. It continually hungered for the intangible substance.

But before that day it was released, it had never just drained all the light from a small area at once. It had always sought large light sources… like all the light of a star.

The USM must have done something to it…

Froppy shook her head – she didn’t tell everyone all of this, she didn’t have the time. “We’re facing Necrozma, an interdimensional being that was once held by the USM on Terra-PM4. It had the power to open portals and was on the world to devour all its light, if it could. We stopped it, but during the war it escaped to another realm.”

“So why is it here?” O’Neill asked.

“I’d like to know that too,” Gyro said from the radio.

“It might be upset with the USM for trapping it,” Froppy said. “A lot of USM ships have been going missing lately… My guess is it somehow followed the Love Train here, but boarded the Austraeoh by accident.”

WEAKNESSES? Death asked.

“You wouldn’t be able to guess from looking at it, but the testing revealed that it’s sensitive to dark energies – and spiritual ones.”

THEN IT SEEMS AS IF I AM ITS KRYPTONITE.

“Yeah. Think you can find it and take it out?”

IF IT IS ONE OF THE LIFE SIGNATURES IN MY SENSES, YES. GIVE ME A MOMENT.

“Good, take care of it so we can g-” Gyro’s voice was cut off.

The lights in the Austraeoh came back on.

Froppy looked at the radio with a shocked expression. “It must have followed the signal…”

~~~

Brute force wouldn’t do it.

But they needed the thing controlling Saitama to think that was what the plan involved.

One of the last remaining Xeelee constructs had flown ten universes away, to the point at which it was difficult for the human eye to make out the dark portal. The Xeelee had no difficulty though – they had their targeting systems ready.

Their upload transmissions were ready as well. They knew the ship wouldn’t be surviving this, but they would like to.

Saitama wasn’t paying any attention to them right now since the remaining warriors were facing off against him at the gate. But that was about to change.

The Xeelee activated several useful little items they had picked up over the course of their journey – ancient weapons of varying kinds just left as loot to be picked up. Using their unparalleled technological prowess, they fused the weapons to the ship’s hull. Nanobots sure were useful.

All the weapons began to glow. The Xeelee created a gravitational lens in front of their ship. They would have preferred some kind of cosmic construct to really pack some punch, but they were a little low on resources at the moment. They had to make do with what they had available.

All the weapons fired, the gravitational lens forcing all the attacks into a single point that shot forward – directly at the darkness on the other side of the portal.

Saitama stopped it with his fist. Then he punched across all the universes at once, continually stopping the beam from going anywhere.

The fist hit the Xeelee ship dead-on and destroyed it in one hit – precisely as expected.

Valentine began his move. He ran from the group toward the darkness, reaching into his coat to pull something out.

Saitama sensed this, so he flew back.

But in the fraction of a second it had taken him to reach the Xeelee ship, a magic barrier had been erected between Saitama and Valentine – courtesy of the TSAB and Merodi Unicorns.

He punched right through it like it was tissue paper. He felt it try to shock him and inflict statuses on him, to do anything to slow him down, but he wasn’t going to let it.

Valentine would have needed a full ten more seconds to have gotten close enough to the darkness to do anything. Saitama’s fist hit him from behind, shattering his body into a million pieces.

But this, too, was part of the plan. And Saitama’s darkness knew it the moment it realized Valentine hadn’t been holding a superweapon of some kind – just a simple gun.

Saitama didn’t have to whirl around to see Insipid charging at him, fist pulled back. “ONE PAWWWWWWNCH!” She called.

Of course. When the barrier had been trying to inflict status effects on him, it had also been connecting to him. Transferring Insipid’s nature to him – allowing her to become him, courtesy of TSAB bonding magic.

She had gotten close enough to touch him without being in danger of the death punch.

Tornado and the remaining TSAB mages started using telekinesis to pull everyone as far away from the two as possible, as quickly as possible.

Saitama met Insipid’s front hoof with his fist. Both of them put as much effort into the attack as they could.

Everyone held their breath – this was the moment they saw if the universe blew up or not.

It didn’t. Anything that didn’t have a shield of some sort or other was completely incinerated, including a large chunk of people that Tornado and the mages weren’t able to evacuate, but they were essentially just Redshirts. The walls of the Vault shifted – but the structure of the universe held.

One Punch Man and One Punch Mare entered a true standstill. Normally, Insipid would have to think about how to use her power, or use her cluelessness to come up with creative new solutions. There wasn’t anything complicated about punch to win. He punched, she punched. He punched and she didn’t block, but she was just able to take it. She punched, and he didn’t block – he just took it.

Neither of them could get out of the other’s attacks.

Which allowed the real attack on the shadow to happen.

Vriska flew over the two of them, heading right for the darkness. She lifted the infinite-sided die, flooding as much luck as she could manage into it. It soon didn’t look like a die anymore – it looked like a miniature sun.

The darkness lashed out at her, physically manifesting the claw for the first time since Saitama had opened the Vault Door.

Vriska threw the infinite sided die into the darkness. “Buh-bye now! You have the right to scream in terror.”

The darkness made no noise. The infinite sided die activated, creating a White Hole.

“Well fu-” the intense light packed enough of a shockwave that Vriska went flying backward.

But it was nothing compared to the stress the darkness in the other universe got. The cosmic power of pure light dissolved the darkness in a matter of seconds, like a superheated knife cutting through ice in all directions at once. There was a moment of black steam and then nothing.

The White Hole vanished and the infinite-sided die returned to Vriska. “Whew…” she said.

The Vault Door on the far side of the newly-revealed room opened. Good thing too, because the White Hole had melted away most the treasure in the previously-dark universe, coating the walls in a glassy substance.

“We diiiid it!” Vriska shouted.

Valentine, in another backup clone body, nodded. “Dojyaaan.”

Insipid punched Saitama across the face. Saitama rubbed his head. “Ow! Hey! Why’d you do that!?”

“Oh, you’re done being evil now?” Insipid asked. “Sweetness!”

“…I was evil?”

“Mind controlled, killed a lot of people,” Vriska said, walking up to him with a slight limp. “But we stopped you and killed the darkness! Woo!”

“You stopped me!?”

“Tsk,” Insipid said, fluffing her mane. “I stopped you. I had to take your powers to do it.”

“…Woah.”

“I know, right? Cha!”

“…Wanna fight?”

“…Like, uh, bro, I just spent the last minute punching you. It wasn’t exactly the nicest experience. I don’t think I’m going to bruise, but, yeesh, ow.”

“I mean later. It’ll be nice to have a challenge.”

“How about we not give the Merodi access to our strongest weapon, hrm?” Tornado called.

“Oh come on, I don’t get to have any fun these days!” Saitama complained.

Tornado sighed. “Oh for the… You know what, Valentine, you deal with him.”

Valentine adjusted his coat and said nothing.

~~~

“We need to teleport to the Love Train’s bridge, now,” Froppy said.

O’Neill tapped his communicator – which was working fine. “Bridge of the Love Train, everyone in this room – stat!”

There was no response.

“Well that’s just delightful, it probably got the transporter team.”

Clandestine walked up to a terminal. “The computer’s been scrambled as well. We’ll have to make our way to the actual transporter systems.”

“MOVE IT!” O’Neill shouted, running down a hallway, Clandestine, Froppy, Death, and the rest of his squad behind him. They ran through doors easily now that they would just slide open. It was less than a minute before they arrived at one of the main transporter terminals.

Clandestine moved quickly – overriding the security systems with her hoofprint. She set the coordinates. “It’s going to be dark over there, so be ready!”

They jumped to the Love Train’s bridge. It was pitch black, just like the Austraeoh had been moments before.

Except this time Froppy heard Necrozma.

“BALL BREAKER!” Gyro shouted, trying to punch the creature in complete darkness. It clearly wasn’t working, since the next thing Froppy heard was a ‘Gah!’ sound from Gyro, followed by the sound of him hitting a wall.

FACE ME, MONSTER, Death said. He could see just fine and met Necrozma with his scythe.

After the fighting lasted for more than a second, Froppy sensed something was wrong. “…Death?”

I DO NOT THINK IT IS ALIVE IN THE TRADITIONAL SENSE, Death reported, the sound of Necrozma’s prisms making it difficult to focus on his words. THIS WILL SIMPLY TAKE LONGER.

Froppy heard a scream in front of her – there was still collateral damage. She didn’t know who had just gotten heavily injured, but the longer this lasted the more people would get hurt…

Asking Death to suspend his namesake would only make him less effective against Necrozma. So Froppy needed to think of something fast.

What did they have at their disposal? Some Merodi, and the bridge crew of the Love Train… What Stands were there? Crimson Sushi wasn’t going to be helpful without light, Ball Breaker had already gotten his turn, Tusk…

“Johnny!” Froppy shouted over the din of the battle. “Where are you?”

“Bleeding out on the floor,” Johnny muttered, barely two feet from her.

She looked down to him out of habit. “Think you can still fight?”

“Of course I can, I’m a Joestar, do you think a little bleeding out is going to stop me? I’m going to kill that thing…”

“Good to hear. Clandestine! Over here!”

Clandestine teleported right on top of Froppy. “Here.”

“Gah… I need you to get Johnny on your back.”

“…Where is he?”

“Here,” Johnny said, muttering. “This may take some doing…”

Mounting a horse – even an intelligent one who was completely willing – was difficult in complete darkness. In the time it took Johnny to get on top of Clandestine, Froppy heard two more screams.

“You’re bleeding,” Clandestine said.

“Just a flesh wound,” Johnny said. Froppy knew he was smirking. “Right, so, in order to get the Infinite Spin, I need to feel the Spin within your body. Which means you’re going to have to start moving around.”

“How am I going to move around in the dark!?”

“I don’t know, find a wall! And… Shit, I’m going to have to shoot something I can’t see…”

Froppy knew exactly where Necrozma was in relation to her, and in relation to Johnny. “Okay, Clandestine, I’m going to need you to levitate yourself and run in midair.”

“I don’t have enough magic power to do that!”

“Right then…” Froppy took her position in front of Clandestine and put her hands on the unicorn’s face. “Run into me. I’ll hold my ground.”

Clandestine did as instructed – trying to push Froppy. The small woman kept her ground, using the strength in her frog legs to keep from sliding.

Johnny felt the Spin move through Clandestine. He let out a laugh. “Got it!”

“Good…” Froppy grunted. “Now… point right in front of you… and I’ll adjust your aim…”

Johnny pointed his finger forward, his front nail spinning with the power of Infinity. “Ready.”

Froppy wrapped her tongue around Johnny’s arm and aimed it, focusing intently on the noise of Necrozma and Death.

She couldn’t tell who was in front right now… The clashing was too intense…

But Necrozma was significantly taller than Death. So there was a safe bet.

She slipped, struggling to hold her footing. She had to shoot now before she lost it completely.

She directed Johnny’s finger slightly upward. “NOW!” she blurted. It didn’t matter if she pronounced the word well or not – Johnny got the message. He fired at the perfect instant.

The nail hit Necrozma near the very top of its body, just above the angular protruding head. It let out a strange grating noise and fell backward, grabbing at its upper body in panic.

It lost its focus on draining the light, revealing the state of the bridge.

A few crewmembers were dead. O’Neill, Johnny, and Gyro were heavily injured, while Death was standing strong over the form of Necrozma – the monster heavily bruised and battered from its prolonged fight with Death. Its black prisms were shaking as it grabbed its top – the area where Johnny’s nail had embedded itself and was using the Infinite Spin, twisting the body of Necrozma so much that it became like a black whirlwind.

The parts of its prismatic body under the most Spin stress began to shatter. One of its arms just fell off, hitting the ground with an impressive thud. It struggled to put the arm back on, finding that its shoulder was now Spinning too much. It would be shattered soon.

Its head began to twist back into its body just as its second arm fell off. It tried to reach toward Johnny, but it could no longer move properly. It struggled, twisting, shattering as too much stress was placed on other parts of its body.

As its head shattered it let out a head-pounding SCREECH. Then it stopped moving.

The rest of it Spun into oblivion without a fuss. It became nothing more than a collection of loose black crystals.

“Destroy all of those,” O’Neill muttered, falling onto his back.

“Get the medics up here!” Froppy shouted over the intercoms. She ran to Gyro, checking his pulse. He was hurt badly with a gash across the chest, but he was going to be fine.

She let out a sigh of relief.

IT TURNS OUT I WASN’T SO USEFUL AFTER ALL.

“We still got it,” Froppy said. “…You did good. All of you did.”

~~~

“Would you look at this,” Froppy said, handing Valentine a data pad. The two of them were sitting in his personal lounge on Earth-ST1, his homeworld. USM flags were everywhere, and the couches were even red-white-and-blue-themed.

Never before had Valentine found this so annoying. He turned his focus to what Froppy had handed him. “Hm…”

“A world where a version of Arceus moved all his creations instead of just making an entirely new existence. The pony interactions have been rather interesting a-”

“Let the Merodi have that one,” Valentine said, placing it down. “I think we’re done with the Arceus worlds.”

“…Necrozma?”

“Yes. And… other things as well.” Valentine gained a distant expression on his face. “You know, I didn’t think we lost that many in the Vaults. It seemed like everyone who mattered survived. …I didn’t realize the toll it had on our people. I had a lot of us there, ready to loot the place. Most of them are dead by collateral damage.” He clenched his fist. “I wanted to bring the USM to glory. I didn’t listen.”

“You got the Merodi banned from the Vaults. That die was used very publicly.”

Valentine nodded slowly. “Not even a victory. The cost was too great.”

Froppy sighed. “Look, Ambassador? Maybe we just have to accept that we’re going to be second fiddle. That we are weak. It does go against a lot of what I was raised to believe, but… maybe it’s okay. We don’t have to be the heroes.”

“We’re the villains who want to fix their own problems,” Valentine said. “Don’t you see? If the Merodi are the heroes, we are the enemy – or at the very least the rivals. In their story, we are the ones who do the terrible things. Necrozma… Saitama… All our fault. All our fault…”

“…You made the wish that took the Collector down.”

Valentine nodded. “And I imposed sanctions on their people, tried to manipulate their government, and any number of other things. We’ve always been at odds, Froppy. And we’ve lost.”

“…As I said earlier. Is that a bad thing?”

“Yes,” Valentine said, walking toward a window, looking outside at the endless city he lived in. “It’s a bad thing. It’s a horrendous thing. One we can’t change. We are the United States of the Multiverse, and we are a Class 3 power growing in the shadow of greater events.” He pressed a button on his personal data pad. “…Today was our spotlight, Froppy. We spent it cleaning up problems we made.”

Froppy nodded. “Maybe we should change, then.”

“Even if I wanted to.. Which… I might - I can’t do anything internally. My power is purely external. The president and his Cabinet have all the power in that regard. Makes me wish I could run again.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Ambassador,” Froppy admitted.

“There’s nothing to say,” Valentine said. “We just have to live with the knowledge that we are not destined for greatness.”

Froppy was silent.

“…I’m going to go find a place to take a vacation. One I haven’t been to before. Would you like to come?”

Froppy looked up at him, gauging his face. She smiled warmly. “Sure.”

114 - Answers

Year 65

I cleared my throat. “Today we’re going to get some answers. I’ve called the seven of us here because we represent the Aware aspect of this side of the Song.”

“Eight!” Deadpool said. “There’s eight of us!”

I pressed my hooves together and put on a pained smile. “Firstly, I didn’t invite you. Secondly, if you decide you want to argue that I knew you were coming anyway, there are seven of you not counting myself. So you can shush.”

“Never.”

I chose to ignore him. “Anyway, the rest of you,” Pinkie, Scooter, Velvet, Mattie, Monika, and Rohan, “well, you should already know what’s coming.”

“I’m not Aware by any stretch of the imagination,” Rohan said. “What makes you think I do?”

“Because you’re smart. You know as well as the rest of us what ‘year’ it is, relatively speaking.”

“Sixty-five,” Rohan said. “And you lose sight somewhere in seventy.”

“Seventy-seven, to be precise,” I said. “That’s when the last chapter I can see at all comes – and it’s one that’s rather fuzzy to me. I know it’s movie length, and that it will tell a story that’s been in the making since the start of the multiverse. But I know there’s more after it. A lot more. We end on 157, not 115.”

“So we’re going on a trip!” Pinkie said, bouncing to her hooves. “For ‘answers’.”

“Oh, so that’s why you need me!” Monika pointed at herself. “You think I can find G. M. Blackjack.”

“You can find G. M. Blackjack,” Scooter said, looking through the script. “This looks a little short…”

“Gimme that!” Deadpool said, swiping it out of Scooter’s hands. “Clearly, it just needs some more stuff in the middle here…” He scrawled ‘MORE STUFF’ in the middle with a red marker.

“That was a terrible gag,” Mattie commented.

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, it was. But Monika, you are right, that’s why we need you. We’re going to find him.”

“You talked to him in the past,” Pinkie said. “You can’t do that again?”

I shook my head. “No. It was in the shadow of the Dark Tower, and he initiated it. I may understand ka and the narrative on a fundamental level, which allows me to act as a Prophet, but I have little control over it. Monika is quite the opposite, able to twist it to her whims.”

Monika smirked. “And don’t any of you forget it.”

“How could we?” Velvet commented. “You’ve altered our memories to always include it.”

“…Hey, that’s a good idea…”

Velvet groaned. “Can I remove her lungs? Please? She’ll grow them back. Maybe.” She grinned malevolently.

“Please don’t, we’re supposed to be a team here,” I said. “I know we won’t stay very cohesive, but can we at least try?”

“Why bother? We’re fated not to,” Mattie said, brushing her mane back. “I’d frankly like to get into a tussle.”

Velvet turned to Mattie with a slasher smile. “I will create a world where pain doesn’t exist!”

“Oh har har, playing on my fears are you?”

“No, just reminding everyone that you’re an inner psycho. Together we shall sail across the world and appall others with our tastes.”

“Count me in!” Deadpool said. “All aboard the crazy train!”

“Woo woo!” Pinkie cheered.

“I am the sanest person in this room,” Scooter said. “…This is not surprising, but it is also horrifying.”

“Mmm, delicious,” Velvet said.

I rolled my eyes, amused at the antics of my sisters and brothers in Awareness. I teleported a book to me and laid it down. It was a black tome with a single eye on the cover that looked identical to the Eye of Rhyme I carried on my chest. “This is my story. The Influence.”

Rohan picked it up, examining it. “The interactive story?”

“Yep. Most of the words in that thing are from excessively long comments that were shunted to my brain from the Eye back before I awakened its full potential. It was… a traumatic experience for me, to say the least. I went a little insane a few times at the way they disregarded me as a story, but over time they treated me with more respect, and I learned to appreciate their position. Also Hey Ponygood I know you’re reading this! I’m still tormented by Butt the Cloud! I hope you’re happy!”

Everyone stared at me, blinking.

“Ahem, sorry about that, old nightmares.” I ruffled my feathers. “Basically, in the end we got a good ending, I talked to GM, and then I went on with Vriska to explore until the day in the Nexus.”

Rohan flipped through the book, appalled by how many grammar mistakes it had. “Egad…”

I ignored him. “This book was written, mostly, by G. M. Blackjack himself. It’s a direct connection to him, unlike every other universe we’re in which just gets shunted to ‘another’ Prophet that made the world itself.”

Monika glanced at the book. “So I go into this world, and then follow the connection up to his world. Got it.”

“Unfortunately this story doesn’t currently exist in the multiverse,” I said. “It’s completed since I’m here, so this book doesn’t connect to anything.”

“So it’s useless,” Monika said.

“Nope,” I said, taking the book from Rohan and giving it to her. “You can follow old connections as well. Just dive into the book and dive back out at once.”

“I can’t do that!”

Scooter held up the script and raised an eyebrow.

Monika blinked. “Uh, okay then. Guess I can. Let’s see…” She levitated the book in her hand, focusing her power on it.

“Here it comes… The moment you’ve all been waiting for…” Deadpool said, leaning in to the book that seemed to be glitching out of existence. “The hot girl does a thing!”

Monika twitched. She slapped him.

“And go,” Pinkie said.

Monika’s emotions flooded into her powers and they activated. She found the thread leading from the book into nothing, but back out to a Prophet. She pulled.

All eight of us vanished along the thread.

Monika appeared alone. “Huh…” she said, scratching the back of her head. “Weird.”

She was standing on the capitol building of… Idaho, a quick search of her knowledge told her. She took a moment to sense the universe, to find out what kind of Earth this was…

…Mundane. Truly mundane. There wasn’t going to be an easy way to make a portal out of this universe.

Luckily she was Monika and rules meant nothing to her. She could just edit physics to allow portals when she felt like it. But she didn’t feel like it now – this was the world she came to see, so see it she would.

She spread her senses a bit. I had arrived somewhere alone, while all the others had been split up in pairs around the Treasure Valley area. There were going to be some problems for those who were used to magic – Mattie was going to feel like her horn was burning for a few seconds. Velvet depended a lot on her magic as well… and Rohan wouldn’t have his ever-so-useful Stand at his beck and call. That’d be fun. The Pinkies and Deadpool would be just fine, given how they depended on the abilities key to their Awareness rather than magic. Though Pinkie’s lack of eyes…

Regardless, it would be fun to watch, no matter what. Just a shame the others had to go through it. Maybe she should save them.

…Nah. She was pretty sure there hadn’t been a chapter about characters making do on a normal Earth yet. Might as well get around to it right before the end. There’d be a lot of fun antics, of course.

Oh, who was she kidding, this was Idaho. They were going to have to look hard for it to get really interesting.

She’d meet them where they needed to go.

She vanished off the roof of the Capitol Building in a puff of glitches.

~~~

Pinkie and Mattie appeared together, in a tree.

“Guuuuh…” Pinkie muttered, rubbing her ears. “We’re in a tree. Fun.”

“Ah, and my horn! Ooooooooh yesssss…” a rather complex mixture of bliss and pain covered her expression. “Hey, look at these scratches!”

“…Really?”

“Oh, uh, sorry mate.”

“Mhm. So, I’m blind, and without any magic my hoof sensors are useless. Please tell me if I’ve suffered a jugular vein injury.”

“You haven’t, don’t worry about it. You seem completely unharmed, actually.”

“I am made of rubber! …Anyway, I’m not Aware of anything but this tree right now, so, uh… Be my eyes.”

“Mhm. We appear to be in a park on an Earth. Mundane or near mundane-”

“Mundane, Monika already stated it above.”

“Right, right. Sure saves a lot of time when we can just do that, huh?”

Pinkie chuckled. “Yep. Anyway, park. Humans.”

“Humans. Humans everywhere.”

“There’s only about six of them in sight.”

“I thought you were blind!”

“It was a joke setup. As was that. And possibly this, but when you go that deep the whirlpool of meta just oversaturates itself into a towel whip.”

“Gee, you make it sound like a science.”

“SCIENCE!”

“Do you want them to notice us?”

“Eh, not really. Not like they’re actually dangerous – with my Pinkie Powers (trademark™) and your Editing (©copyright), we could rule this mundane world!”

“Do you know how many slaves I could get!?”

“None of them would be stallions.”

“…I could adapt…”

Pinkie chuckled. “Yeah. You would.”

And then there was a loud CAW CAW as a giant crow flew into the tree.

“BIRD!” Pinkie and Mattie shouted, jumping up. They would have been fine if their hooves still had traction to them, but instead they just fell out of the tree and onto the grass.

A kid with a giant water gun in their hands stared at them.

“Don’t scream ‘pony’ and hug us,” Mattie pleaded.

She got her wish.

“PONY!” the girl screamed in terror, shooting them with her water gun and running away.

Pinkie snickered. “Hehe- Hey!” An older boy had what looked to be a toy machine gun strapped to him that was firing little gel balls. “Let’s high-tail it out of here!”

“This way!” Mattie called - and then a Frisbee hit her in the head. “What the hell!?”

“You said a bad word!” A troop of kids called from on top of a playground jungle gym. They fired their water and dart guns as well.

“We’re being attacked from all sides!” Pinkie yelled, pulling her own giant water gun out of her mane. “But we shall fight together!”

A rotund teenage boy way too tall for the average human around this part of the world poked his head out from the corner of the park’s bathroom, hitting them with a constant stream of water from a bright yellow water gun. From the other side, a teenage girl in glasses shot at them with a whistling dart gun.

“We interrupted a war,” Pinkie muttered.

“Not the first time, is it?”

“Nope. Though I have to admit, it’s never been a playground war before.”

“Flee?”

“Flee.”

Mattie took off at a gallop, Pinkie behind her. They ran into the road – though Pinkie stumbled over the edge, she landed just fine.

They passed by a cop car. The fattest cop either of them had ever seen was standing there. The only thing that would have made the image more complete would be if he was holding a donut.

He reached into his car and called for backup. Then he drew his gun. “Stop right there!”

“You think he’s going to shoot?” Mattie asked.

“Nah, but his buddies will when they show up.”

“We can take them. A simple edit and their cars will crash into each o-”

Pinkie appeared in front of Mattie. “We can’t do that. This is a mundane world. If cars crash into each other like that people die. There’s no magic, there’s no healing, and there’s no epic battles. Just people. So let’s move.”

They did.

~~~

Deadpool and Scooter appeared inside bumper cars while the ride was already active.

“CHIMICHANGA!!!!” Deadpool shouted, pulling the levers on the bumper car forward and ramming into the other bumper car riders. “RED CAR BEST CAR!”

“I like my purple better,” Scooter said, smirking. She pulled her two levers in different directions and started spinning. “There is no end to the whirlwind of powaaaaar!”

“I gotcha!”

They bounced around for a few minutes, having a good long laugh. But eventually, the timer on the ride ran out, and they were told to get out of their cars.

Scooter, very carefully made sure she got out on her hind legs. She wobbled a bit, but leaned onto Deadpool to keep up the illusion of being bipedal.

The other riders filed out, running to the rest of the indoor ‘theme park’ of sorts, though it was hardly large enough to be called a ‘park’. Deadpool and Scooter left last.

The attendant watching the ride looked the two of them up and down. “Uh…”

“We gave you a ticket,” Deadpool said. “And if you say we didn’t, you’re going to have to explain how two people in such amazing costumes as us got in without you noticing.”

This prompted her to put on the fakest smile of all time. “Have a nice day!” She spent a good long while staring at Scooter – but decided it was just a really good costume. After all, there Deadpool was, almost as if he was directly from the movie…

“Hey, I am not movie Deadpool.”

“Too much cornball,” Scooter said with a chuckle.

“Never enough cornball.”

“Well now we’re abusing Prism’s pet name for Corea. That’s not good form.”

“She doesn’t have to knooooow!”

“Heh. No, no she doesn’t. Anyway, turn to the left, past the swirling carnival ride that looks like an octopus, and to the map of the place.” She set her front hooves down on the map, ignoring the strange looks she was getting.

“Hrm… Wahooz Family Fun Zone.”

“Lame name.”

“They have bowling, rock wall climbing, an arcade, go karts, laser tag, minigolf…” she whistled. “And there’s a water park next door.”

“Do they have a rollercoaster?”

“Well the water park has a drop that’ll let you experience freefall for a fraction of a second,” Scooter said.

“...That’s not on the map.”

“And neither is a lot of the stuff in our head, try to keep up.”

Deadpool shot her the finger guns. “Aaaaaay.”

Scooter rolled her eyes – the action of which made more people stare at her in disbelief.

“YES THIS IS A COSTUME!” Scooter shouted at them. “EITHER THAT OR I’M AN ALIEN. And please, what’re the chances of an alien coming here of all places?”

“Decent enough,” Deadpool said, producing a UFO keychain. “You neeeever knooooow…”

“I’m going to wear out my eye-rolling muscles…” Scooter said, shaking her head. “Anyway… Let’s see, what are we actually supposed to do?”

“Shh. Let’s not look at the script. Let’s just go where life takes us.” Deadpool shoved his hand into the air. “WE SHALL LET KA DECIDE!”

“Ka always decides.”

“But we manipulate it!”

“Only Monika really does that. But yeah, technically you’re right.” She shrugged. “I don’t think I could sell this at the water park. So…” She tapped her chin. “What to do…”

“Pinke-warp us to the front of a go-kart line. You get passenger seat so you won’t have to struggle with the pedals.”

Scooter chuckled. “They’ll never let me on with this.”

“Nobody’s noticed these guns yet, I think they’re stupid.”

“They’re not stupid. They’re just regular people who aren’t ready to accept the impossible. But sure, we can go to the go-karts.” She pulled Deadpool behind the map of Wahooz, appearing in the outside area at the front of the line. Nobody saw them appear, they were just there. The benefits of being a Pinkie.

She also had two tickets. Convenient.

The ride attendant scanned her up and down. “Uh…”

“Costume,” Scooter said, grinning. “Yes, I am a furry, got a problem with that?”

Deadpool burst into laughter.

“…Just make sure your hair and… tail are tied up while in the kart,” the man said, clearly not wanting to think hard about how her mouth was moving if it was a costume. She sure didn’t look like an actual bipedal pony. Everything was too smooth.

Deadpool took the driver’s seat in one of the double karts and Scooter took the passenger. The kart was, of course, red. Which meant fast.

…In some universes. Not this one.

The attendant gave a big spiel about ‘hands and legs inside the kart’ and ‘keeping hair secured’ and ‘no bumping’ but they only knew he was saying those things because they were written down in this story. It was impossible to hear him over the revving of the engines. They rushed through the gates, speeding across the track.

The single-seaters were faster than them by a lot.

Scooter shook her head. ‘Tsk tsk tsk… This won’t do.” She pulled out a Mario Kart question box from her mane and punched it, revealing a speed mushroom. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

They boosted forward at an alarmingly fast rate, blowing the competition away with their way-way too fast kart. But she didn’t overdo it – whenever an attendant became suspicious, she waved at them with her front hoof, with the box nowhere to be seen.

They raced like this for quite some time. The leaderboard was broken so there was no way for anyone to actually figure out who won or who lost, but it didn’t matter. They had a great time anyway.

They got off the ride, laughing. Scooter still had to lean on Deadpool to keep up the bipedal appearance, but at this point people were starting to point and stare a bit too much.

“Yeah, I think we’ve overstayed our welcome. I see cell phones,” Scooter said.

“Time to cut like cheese and rip!”

Scooter let out an extended sigh.

“Oh. My. Gosh. Those are like, the best costumes ever!” A large man in a fedora said, walking up to them. “It’s like… the real Pinkiepool!”

“That better not be a ship name, brother,” Deadpool said.

“Oh, it’s not! And wow, your voice is perfect! …Wait, you can’t be Ryan Reynolds…”

“Can’t I?” He totally wasn’t, since he wasn’t the movie Deadpool, but who really cared?

“Wow. That’s just… Wow. I thought only George Kennedy lived around here, but a big superstar!?”

“Oh I don’t live here. And if you know who George Kennedy is and where he lives shouldn’t you know that?”

“I’m just so excited to meet you and your Pinkie friend!”

“Hey,” Pinkie said. “Sorry my voice isn’t perfect.”

“Oh, it's not a problem – say, I know a great place around here. Do you guys want to check it out?”

“Sure!” both of them said.

~~~

Rohan and Velvet appeared in the middle of nowhere, at a graveyard situated far from any major civilization. A cabin could be seen in the distance, but otherwise there was nothing but endless forest. It was extremely hot out there, but as the wind picked up there was a slight chill, indicating that it was shifting from summer to fall.

“Greeeeat,” Velvet muttered. “It’s the two of us together.”

“Useless and Useless?” Rohan suggested.

“Yep. Useless and Useless. Mister Mc NotAware and Miss PathetiSight.” She let out a psychotic laugh. “My blood control’s gone. You?”

Rohan tried summoning his Stand and got nothing. “Lovely. Someone’s going to have to come get us.”

“Probably. But we can’t be here without reason. This place must either be important or have some adventure in store for us…” She rubbed her hooves together excitedly

Rohan stooped down to look at one of the larger gravestones. It was green, in the shape of a mountain, and had an image of a bird on it. One of the words on it was Opal.

“Opal…” Rohan said, running his fingers over the name.

Velvet stared at the name. A tear dripped down her face.

“Hm?”

“I don’t know,” Velvet said, wiping her eyes. “It’s just, when I look at this… I feel like existence is coming apart. The feeling is passing, though.”

“It has to be important. Maybe her name can tell us something.” Rohan took out his phone. It worked just fine since it was designed with multiple universes in mind, but it didn’t have a cell plan for this Earth. “…I’m going to need some free wifi.”

“We’re in the middle of the forest,” Velvet observed.

“There has to be some way to drive in here. So there must be a way to a town. All we have to do is get there. …Somehow.”

“Walk?”

Velvet groaned. “Looks like that might be what we’re doing…” Then she blinked. “Or we could steal a car.”

Rohan raised an eyebrow.

“There is a house over there. It probably has a car. Even without my fearmongering I can get some good intimidation going.”

“Hm…”

“I’ll give it back.”

“Oh, I wasn’t worried about that, I was just wondering if I’d get injured in the process.”

“Probably not. I mean, they might have a gun, this is a cabin in the middle of the woods.” She craned her neck. “We should be prepared for that.”

Rohan nodded. “Plan… You distract them at the front door while I work my way in the back.”

“Yep.” Velvet trotted over to the house’s front door – it took a few minutes, it wasn’t exactly close to the graveyard – and knocked.

A very large, but sweet looking older woman opened the door. “Yes, I – oh heavens! What are you?”

Something stirred inside Velvet. She dropped the angry expression. “Uh… Hi. Can we use your car? We’ll give it back. …Or have it towed back, or something.”

The woman took one look at her, then shook her head with a small laugh. “Well since you asked so nicely, go right ahead. I’m not gonna use it today.”

“Rohan! Diplomacy worked! No need to take the back route!”

Rohan lowered his leg before he kicked in the back door. “…Fine.” He adjusted his shirt and walked to the front door.

“You’re certainly dressed like a clown.”

“I’m an artist,” Rohan said.

“You two just dropped out of the sky, didn’t’cha?”

Velvet smirked. “I guess you could say that. Thanks for the car.”

“Don’t mention it. Your face told me you needed it, strange as it was.”

“…Yeah, why didn’t you freak out about that?”

The woman chuckled. “I’m gettin’ too old to give a rip about anythin’. Just take it and go, Lord willing.”

Rohan smiled. He decided he liked this woman.

The two of them piled into an old, but functional car. They drove away.

“I have a thought,” Velvet said. “Both of us are speaking our native tongue, right?”

Rohan nodded.

“I guess it just happened to be English then.”

“Or Monika did something.”

Velvet blinked. “I hate not being able to just know things like all the others.”

“You knew she would give us the car.”

“That was just acting on intuition and you know it. I wasn’t certain.”

“I sense lies.”

Velvet grinned. “I sense an arrogant prick.”

Rohan smirked, saying nothing. They drove off along the mountain roads.

~~~

The question was – law enforcement or animal control?

The answer – both.

Mattie edited them behind the oncoming swarm of animal control collars-on-sticks. A police car saw this happen and decided that was too freaky. It stopped chasing them while the man inside took a moment to rethink his entire existence.

Pinkie giggled gleefully. “Wheeee!”

“None of them have shot us yet… Isn’t that weird?”

Pinkie shook his head. “Nope! Would you want to explain why you shot someone’s dog? Or… pony, I guess? Or the first alien ever encountered?”

“…But they shoot at us all the time elsewhere.”

“Mundaaaaaane! These are just regular people – not mooks designed to give us a problem.” She ran right into a street sign. “Okay, what did I hit and how bad did I hit it?”

“You bounced off the rod of a stop sign like rubber,” Mattie said. “Oh, bugger, they’re gaining.”

“And there’s an actual good cop in front of us too,” Pinkie muttered. “Cause of course there is.”

“I know you can understand me,” a muscular man said – though nothing as impressive as Earth Stand men. “I know you can talk back too.” He pointed his gun at them. “So you’re coming in. I don’t care if you’re some alien or experiment from the University, you’re under arrest for disturbing the peace.”

“Uh… What if we don’t want to come?”

“We can negotiate taking you to the Chief without being in cuffs. But you have to surrender willingly.”

“Hmm… Naw, that’s silly,” Mattie said. “We can just run circles around ya instead, mate. That sounds much better.” She started editing him, making him pull his gun out over and over and over again.

“What in the…”

One of the police behind them fired their weapon. He missed, and he fell over from the knockback, but the noise made Pinkie and Mattie jump several feet into the air. “What the bloody hell!?” Mattie blurted as they took off along the sidewalk.

Pinkie rubbed her ear with a hoof. “I think… I think we heard an actual gunshot. Man, action scenes really don’t think about all the consequences do they?”

“Guess not,” Mattie said, glancing behind her. “Incoming car.”

Pinkie grabbed Mattie and ducked behind a tree. They appeared on the other side of a large evergreen bush shaped in such a way that it formed an enclosure with an old brown fence.

Monika and I were waiting for them.

“And they’re first. Called it,” Monika said.

“There wasn’t really a competition. We both knew they’d arrive first,” I said. “How’d you enjoy your little chase scene?”

“It was fun!” Pinkie said, grinning. “We were in a water war and then the cops tried to catch us and think of a reason to shoot us!”

“Only one bullet was fired,” Mattie said. “That seems highly unusual.”

“It’s mundane,” I said. “A lot of cops will never fire their weapon in the line of duty.”

“Mundane universes are so weird.”

I rolled my eyes. “In some ways, yes. In others, well, this is what ‘normal’ actually is.”

Pinkie made a spooky ghost noise. I chuckled at this.

~~~

“Welcome to the secret warehouse!” Deadpool and Scooter’s new ‘friend’ said, spreading his hands wide.

The fact that the word ‘friend’ was in literary ‘air quotes’ was enough to put Deadpool and Scooter on edge.

“Come on in!” The man said, opening up the mini-garage door of his personal warehouse. “It’s a treasure trove of fancy and rare memorabilia!”

Scooter and Deadpool glanced at each other. Then they shrugged.

Had this been any other world, the inside of the warehouse would have looked impressive, lined with aisles upon aisles of fancy rare nerdy stuff. There would have been figures, mint condition comic books, special edition collectibles arranged in the perfect way, and perhaps an army of painted miniatures.

Instead there were just two shelves of stuff that was certainly rare, but not all that expensive, and a pile of larger stuff in the far corner.

Deadpool picked up a ‘pop’ figure of himself. “I look so adorable.”

Scooter found figures of the ‘Mane Six’ plus Starlight. “Hey, full set! …Well, except Spike.”

“Screw Spike,” the man muttered. Then he closed the door on them.

“Not surprising at all,” Scooter muttered, sighing. “Though you would think mundane humans wouldn’t be this crazy or possessive.”

“I think he exists because we exist. We’re an infection.” Deadpool found a bobblehead of Groot and flicked it. “He’s probably going to feel pretty shitty about this later.”

“Oh, geez, that’s bad in these worlds… people regularly aren’t in good places.”

“Bah, he’ll be fine. We’ll make it a day he’ll never, ever forget. You know, maybe.” He ripped the plastic covering off a mint-condition Deadpool comic and started reading. “Heh. I remember this.”

Scooter pressed a button on a Pinkie figure. It started shouting at her. “This is your singing telegram I hope it finds you well!”

Scooter smacked it until it stopped the noise. “Man, why do baseline Pinkies have to be so loud?”

“Party. You need to get into the party mood to understand.”

“I like parties! I’m just not hyperactive insane.”

Deadpool raised an eyebrow.

“…Fine.”

“You just need to get into the groove my script-reading equine! For instance…” He picked up a body pillow of himself. “Be like this guy. This guy is cool, sweet, suave, and h–” he noticed the back image of the pillow. “Holy fuck… Yes.”

Scooter facehooved. “Please don’t tell me there’s one of me in here.”

“Okay. I won’t.” Scooter felt a large pillow land on her face.

Scooter shivered in revulsion, throwing the thing off her face without looking at it. “Right, yeah, I’m done with this place now.”

“Oh come on! It’s not you! It’s Pinkie Pie!”

“And I look exactly like her and that used to be my name.” Scooter pulled out the script. “Now it’s time to get out of here, so…”

Deadpool took out one of his guns and shot a hole through the mechanism that locked the door. “Done.”

“Ah. That’s right, those are real.”

Deadpool opened the door and they stepped out to find the man talking on the phone.

“I’m telling you, I’ve got a real alien here locked in my warehouse with Ryan Reynolds! What part of that is hard to unders-” He looked at the phone. “Gah. Someone has to believe me at some p-”

Deadpool tapped him on the nose with his finger. “Boop.”

“Wh… How did y-”

“I’m Deadpool baby, what do you think? I just did!”

“It just works,” Scooter offered.

“Uh…”

“Listen, buddy,” Deadpool said, slinging an arm around the man’s shoulder. “I won’t mention this to my buddies if you agree to forget we were ever here. I’ll even give you one of my katanas.”

“…Really?”

“Really.” Deadpool took a katana off his back and handed it to the man. “Now how about you get your shit together and stop locking people in warehouses.”

“Yeah. It’s not nice,” Scooter suggested.

“I think I finally got it… You’re from Scootertrix the Abridged!”

Scooter sighed. “I knew it was all too good to be true… Look, just… live your life, okay?”

“I… uh…” he seemed unable to formulate a response to this.

Deadpool mounted Scooter. “AWAY, MY FLUFFY PINK PONY!”

Scooter galloped away, leaving the man in the dust holding a katana.

He shrugged and put it away with his other things. Then he realized the lock had been shot off. …How was he going to explain that?

“Noooot our problem,” Deadpool said to himself, chuckling. “Think he’ll return to normal?”

“I don’t think he is normal. But no more locking people in warehouses. …Probably.”

Deadpool shrugged, putting his hands behind his head. “So, where are we going?”

“We’ll know when we get there.”

“And when’ll that be?”

“The moment we stop thinking about it.”

“So we’re already here then?”

“Exactly.”

Scooter stopped behind the same bush as Monika, Pinkie, Mattie, and myself. I was scribbling things in a notebook.

“You guys are a bad influence on society,” Pinkie said. Then she and Scooter hoofbumped.

“I’m a bad influence on everyone,” Deadpool insisted, putting his hands on his hips. “There is no other influence I can be! For I am the Merc with a Mouth! I a-”

Monika created a sock inside his mouth. Since he had his suit on, it took a bit of work for him to remove the sock. “Gah! Where has this been!?”

“Every disgusting place I could think of,” Monika said. “You’re welcome.”

“Really? Hrm, did you think of sticking it u-”

Pinkie slapped him. “Bad Deadpool.”

“Good Deadpool!”

I rolled my eyes. “Someone’s going to have to go get Rohan and Velvet. They’re too far away to get here naturally and they can’t just shift here.”

“Fine,” Monika said, stretching her arms. “I’ll get them. Jump-cutt¥¥¥¥¥¥

~~~

Rohan and Velvet drove into a small town.

“I think something just screwed with the geography,” Velvet muttered. “The map doesn’t make any sense.”

Rohan shrugged. “Who knows what the others are doing. They could be altering the fundamental nature of the world for all we know.”

They were one of the few cars on the streets – the town was a sleepy one. Sure, the place was clearly lived in – people walked around, all going about their lives – but it didn’t seem full of life. None of the buildings looked new; they all looked like they had been built decades ago.

A small town that was clearly dying. But nobody wanted to leave.

They passed by a Seven Devils Café, parking the car near it. Rohan found he was able to access an unprotected wifi signal. It was slow, but it worked. He typed in Opal’s full name, using the town’s name to narrow the results further.

“She died less than a year ago,” Rohan said. “And… She had quite a few kids, all of whom had more kids, and most of those have kids as well.”

“He’s in there somewhere,” Velvet said.

“Hm?”

“G. M. Blackjack. It has to be. This world is his world; we’re seeing things that are important to him. That grave, this town… That has to be it.”

“Well how are we going to tell from all these names? There’s no surname ‘Blackjack’ here.”

Velvet looked at all the names. “Right, this family tree’s so huge it’s not like everything’s going to fall into place…” She rubbed her forehead. “Right, so, uh… Twilence and Pinkie have told me a few things. He’s a he, and wouldn’t be old enough to have kids. That’s… yeah, that’s all I can remember.”

“Old enough to write…” Rohan muttered a bit, adjusting a few things. “There’s still a lot of options here.”

“Joy,” Velvet muttered. “Just a bunch of names…”

There was a knock on the car window. An older man with a beard was there, looking at Rohan.

Rohan rolled down the window. “Yes?”

“What are you doin’ in my sister’s car?”

“We were lost and asked to use it,” Rohan said. “You’re free to take it back to her if you want.”

“Uh-huh…” he said, clearly not believing a word he was saying. “Tell you what, how about I call her up and see if that’s what really happened.”

“Go right ahead,” Rohan said, turning back to his phone.

Velvet watched the man call his sister. He addressed her by name.

A name Velvet recognized from the family tree. One of Opal’s daughters.

Pinkie nudged Rohan. “Ask him when he gets off the phone.”

“As him what?”

“Ask him if anyone in his family is a young author.”

The man got off the phone, surprised that their story checked out. “Huh. You know, now that I think about it, that does sound like her to just give you a car… I’m going to have to talk to her about that.” He rolled his eyes with a smirk.

“This is going to sound like a weird question,” Rohan prefaced.

“Oh?”

“Anyone young in your family an author of some sort?”

“I mean there’s my grand nephew, but he- wait that is a really odd question.”

“What’s his name?”

He gave them the first name. “Now what’s this all a-”

“Aha!” Velvet said, pointing her hoof at Rohan’s screen. “His first name starts with ‘G’ and his middle starts with ‘M’. JACKPOT!”

“G. M. Blackjack…” Rohan said with a smirk. “Found him.”

The man, having seen Velvet’s hoof, realized what she was. He stared at her in disbelief. “What in the…?”

“Yeah, I’m an alien from another universe,” Velvet said, grinning. “I hope that isn’t a problem. It’s not a problem, is it?”

The man had no response.

“Well, it’s ju˜´¨ø√®∑´¥¥¥¥¥¥¥√˜∑ˆ´ønd Monika appeared on the roof of the car. “Hi.”

“…Hi,” the man said, blinking.

“Ah, the cool uncle,” Monika said with a smile. She waved at him. “Nice to meet you! Sorry, but I’ve got to take these two somewhere. You can have the car back, though.”

He had no response beyond a chuckle that didn’t seem sure of its own sanity.

“We found GM!” Velvet said, holding up the phone.

“We’ve been waiting behind the pine bush in his backyard for a while,” Monika said, hands on her hips. “You two…”

Rohan waved a hand dismissively. “What did you expect? We don’t know anything and we’re powerless. You could have just taken us there instantly.”

“Maybe not,” Velvet said. “We needed to see this. We’re part of painting the world he lives in.”

Monika snapped her fingers. “Bingo!”

“What did this place mean to him?” Rohan asked her.

“It was the center of his family,” Monika said, looking into the distance. “The place his father lived as a boy. Where all his relatives came from. An origin point, an anchor to a past from before he was alive.” She put her hands on her hips. “A dying town.”

The man looked at her with a sad face – understanding the truth in what she said.

Monika forced a smile. “…Okay everyone! Time to move!” she clapped her hå˜∂ß¥¥¥¥¥¥

~~~

It was evening. All eight of them stayed behind the evergreen bush, finding themselves easily able to see through the house’s huge window that allowed the residents to look at the backyard.

He was there, sitting at a desk. Whenever he looked up, he could see the backyard. He may have lived in the middle of the suburbs, but evergreen bushes, willow trees, rosebushes, and several other large plants hid the unsightly image of the road from his view. But he only looked up occasionally – for the most part, he typed away at his Apple computer, filling it with an unending stream of words.

They saw his mother in the kitchen behind him, tidying up.

They saw his father walk up to him and start talking. He was a large man with a commanding presence and GM looked at him with a lot of respect. They talked for a few minutes, allowing the eight watching to get a good look at GM. He was a young man – definitely not a boy – with somewhat short, dark brown hair. The only particularly interesting thing about him was a particularly oversized pair of wireframe glasses.

He stood up for a moment to wish his father a safe trip, revealing himself to be a rather tall individual, so that might have been considered ‘interesting.’

Soon, he was alone in the house and it was dark outside.

“I’ll go in first,” I said, spreading my wings. “I doubt he’ll be expecting us.”

I left the evergreen bush. Given how dark it was outside, I could see him easily – but the window might as well have been a mirror now. I walked up to the back door and knocked.

He looked at the back door, confused. Who would knock at the back door? He walked up to it, trying to squint through the door’s window. He couldn’t see much.

I pressed my hoof to the glass. “Hey. It’s me. You know me, right?”

He recognized the voice all right. He took a few steps back, alarmed – but less surprised than one in his position should have been.

“Just let me in. I’m not going to hurt you.”

GM processed this – and opened the door. “…Twilence. How…?”

“It was time to get some answers. For me and several others. …Can we come in? It is a little chilly out here.”

“S-sure…” he said, stepping back from the door. I gestured for the others to come, and they did. He looked at many of them in confusion, but a couple in recognition. “…What?”

I closed the door. “You can sit down, you know. It’s not like we’re here to attack you or anything. We’re just here to ask some questions, get some answers.”

“Not sure how much I can give you because I don’t know most of you. I know…” He pointed at me, Scooter, Mattie, Deadpool, and Velvet. He paused on Velvet for a moment. “…You’re not going to try to eat me, are you? …And why are you wearing glasses?”

Velvet raised an eyebrow. “Are we sure this is him? Seems clueless.”

I nodded, mild confusion crossing my features. “GM… How long have you been writing Songs of the Spheres?”

GM leaned back in his chair, a thoughtful expression crossing his mind. “…Depends on what you mean by writing. This specific story?” He gestured at the computer with a Word file open on it titled 005 – Cross Mask. “Couple weeks. But there’s an answer that says I’ve been writing it my entire life…”

“…We’re on chapter 114,” Pinkie said.

“Guess we’re in a time loop then, of sorts…” GM murmured. “But wouldn’t that be impossible? Metatime doesn’t allow – wait, right, right, Prophet rules.” He let out a short laugh. “I could write about this later and it could still be true. …I am the Prophet version, right? That’s why you’re here?”

Monika nodded. “Yep.”

“And I’m going to bet you’re all the fourth wall breakers or… similar…” a haunted expression crossed his face. “Craaaap if I’m the real Prophet, that means stuff is going to happen to me. Not good stuff. Bad stuff, I think. Unless I change my mind – which I probably will since I know I’m the Prophet now, this early. Why would I let you come this early? Doesn’t make any sense…”

“So you can’t tell us why you did things to us,” Pinkie said. “You won’t be able to tell me why I had to lose my eyes. What went through your mind.”

“I – geez, I’m sorry, I thought you were some alternate Pinkie, I…”

“Yep. Original Pinkie here, in the flesh. Never changed my name.”

“…You changed your name?”

“Most of us do,” Scooter said. “I’m Scooter.”

GM blinked. “…That’s a good idea. It’ll make writing the complicated sections a whole lot simpler…”

I smiled at him. “I’m sure you can help us answer some other burning questions, GM. You don’t have to tell us about recent events.”

“Not going to be able to since clearly I have no idea who at least a few of you are…” He took a moment to gather his wits. “But, yeah, yeah, you all deserve to have answers. I just don’t think I can give most of them to you.”

Rohan sat down at the dining room table. “How about you just tell us what the story is about? Why you’re writing it?”

GM took a moment to process this. Then he smiled. “Because I’ve always wanted to write it. I… I think I was twelve when I was told fanfiction existed. The literal first thing I wrote was the first version of this story. I liked to call it… Omniverse One. I don’t remember what the actual title was. I took characters I loved to see in other places and rammed them all onto one planet. This story was absolutely terrible and I burned it later.”

“Wonder what that does to the universe it created…” Monika wondered.

“Probably kept it from existing, because the combination planet still exists in my head, continually evolving and changing. There’s a world out there that’s a mixture of all of it, guaranteed. Or whatever I like, anyway…” He nervously adjusted his shirt. “I wrote original stuff next. Sucked. But I eventually came back to the Omniverse story, the idea of combining everything. I called Omniverse Two 2012, and tried my hardest to get other people involved, to create a Syndicate of like-minded authors among my friends. But… my great conspiracy map I worked so hard on amounted to nothing. The only really good things that came out of that was the Spooky story and the idea for Scarlight.”

“…Scarlight?” Rohan asked, cocking his head.

“You’re at chapter 114, you should have found the Starcross Society by now. …Unless I changed it again.”

“She was changed to Scarcity,” I told him. “I’m not sure why.”

“Right… Anyway, I ended that one with a groundhog day episode akin to the Infinite Loops, intending to reset everything so I could start anew with Omniverse Three, a forum project I called the Galaxy Project.”

“…The origin of the Collector,” Monika said.

GM nodded. “I thought I could smash as many fandoms together on the Spacebattles forums as I wanted, dividing a galaxy into various sectors and having all sorts of people write different parts of the story. It… worked for a while, but I grew bored with it, didn’t even get to have the Collector show up and do anything interesting. I diverted my attention to something that became Omniverse Four, the Evermore Recurisons.”

“Oh, Jane and Sunny!” Pinkie piped up. “I know them!”

“And Evermore Pinkie,” I said, remembering someone I knew from long ago.

GM smiled. “Yeah, I did decide to keep them around. But the ER was… too much chaos, not enough organized story. So I eventually dropped it and just devoted myself to writing ordinary things. But the idea of the Omniverse Story would never go away – so Omniverse Five formed in my mind. As it was forming from the leftovers of the other four, I, uh… I made The Influence. Your story, Twilence.”

I nodded. “I’m aware. Your forming of Songs of the Spheres influenced a lot of what the Influence told me to do. It brought Vriska into my adventure, and Aradia, and so many others. It let me become what I am.”

“So… yeah. I made Songs of the Spheres. I had decided I was finally good enough to actually try to write it this time, and that I was going to write the main story alone. It wouldn’t focus on the grand, sweeping events of an entire multiverse – but instead characters. Characters like… you, Pinkie.”

Pinkie saluted. “Yep!”

“I… Well, I’ve just barely started and don’t know much. I do have a general plan and that you Aware people are going to be a big part of it and – hold on. Where’s Seskii? She should be here with you.”

“Over here!” Seskii called, waving from her seat on top of the kitchen counter. “I just didn’t want to take the spotlight away from anyone. Hey!”

GM smiled. “Hey. …Did I end your story well?”

“Well enough,” Seskii said, kicking her feet back and forth. “I’m an original creation, in case that wasn’t obvious.”

“We knew that!” Deadpool called.

“Readers might not have,” Seskii said with a shrug. “Since my story isn’t going to be told unless he actually publishes a real book.”

GM rubbed the back of his head. “Eheh… Yeah, I’m not too good at that am I? Always throw myself into projects I can’t make anything of. But hey, at least I finish them now! Didn’t used to do that. …Never finished anything.”

“Well you’re only about forty chapters from completion, so looks like you keep that up,” Scooter said.

“Yeah, I…. wait, forty? You said 114. But there’s 169…”

“157,” I corrected.

“…Why would I shorten it…?”

I shrugged.

“You realized it would drag out the end too much,” Seskii said, leaning back. “What? No offense Twilence, but I have a more personal connection to him than you.”

“None taken,” I said, mostly not lying. Mostly.

“You’re also not important,” Deadpool said. “You’re just an extra.”

Seskii smiled. “Yeah. Isn’t that nice? Behold, Seskii, background gari. Woo!”

“Care to explain what she is?” Velvet asked.

“That’d spoil her story when I actually tell it,” GM said. “So, no.”

Velvet glared at him. He visibly flinched.

Mattie rolled her eyes. “Great. He’s a chicken.”

GM rubbed his knuckles together nervously. “Eh, yeah. Yeah, I am. There’s a lot of fear in this mind of mine.”

“…You’ve told us how Songs of the Spheres came to be,” Rohan said. “Not why. What is its purpose?”

“A tribute to stories,” both GM and myself said at the same time.

He looked to me – but I shook my head. “That’s all I know. It’s what you told me, remember?”

GM nodded. “Yeah. I remember.”

“So, what else is there to it? A tribute to stories? What else?”

GM looked up at the ceiling. “An ending to all stories. A song to give all those worlds that have been left dangling with all their plot threads unresolved something. A philosophical musing on the nature of meaning. I’m thinking it’ll also have a lot about there being two sides to every argument, and how many different viewpoints are valid – and that even the villains have understandable motives. But I don’t know, that’s not as strong as the nature of meaning thing.” He seemed to get lost in his thoughts. “I mean… the multiverse is finite for a very specific reason. Because if it was truly infinite, if everything possible happened somewhere an infinite number of times, there truly isn’t choice. Nothing you do pushes back good or evil, and there are some universes where evil is good and good is evil and…” He shook his head. “Sorry, that’s probably not what you’re here to ask about.”

“It’s insightful anyway,” Scooter said.

Monika shrugged. “I think he’s just got a big head.”

“What’s the plan?” Pinkie asked. “I get that you change your mind a lot, but what’s the plan?”

GM folded his arms. “Well… If you’re far along I’m going to assume you already formed your multiversal society. Class 2 yet?”

I nodded.

“Right. Then… Uh, I think you’ll get to experience that a bit, and then there’s going to be a multiversal threat of immense proportions mixed with a war. I… really haven’t decided the specifics. Or the outcome. I do know a somewhat major character is going to be the reason behind it, but I can’t tell you who because I don’t know who it is.”

“…Someone’s going to betray us,” Pinkie said, freezing in place.

I bit my lip. “It… It appears so.”

“You don’t know?” GM asked me.

“This is the second to last chapter I have any vision in. Whatever comes after this is hidden, and hidden well.”

“Oh wow, you… are really close to the end.” GM looked guilty. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

“Did you plan any deaths ahead of time?” Pinkie asked.

“…Twilight’s,” GM admitted. “Did I actually do that? Replace her?”

All of them nodded.

“Guess I did…”

“Why?” Pinkie asked, walking up to him. “Why did it have to be her?”

GM gulped. “I… I needed to show that the multiverse could be a terrible place… I wanted to eventually show that the idea of a Replacement Goldfish was atrocious. Even an exact duplicate isn’t the same person.”

Pinkie looked down. “...Yeah.”

“We were replaced too,” I said. “…A retconning version of ourselves decided to sacrifice their being for a better existence.”

GM let out a sharp breath. “I… Look, I’m sorry. I never thought any of this was real. I just… I just wanted to tell a story. I wanted to treat you like people, yes, but…” He put his hand to the bridge of his nose. “I… I’m evil…”

He started crying, the guilt at what he had done – or what he was going to do – overwhelming him. My expression softened and I put a wing around him. “Hey. GM. Nobody here hates you.”

“That doesn’t change anything! I just wanted to tell a story! I didn’t want to kill anyone! And you can be sure there are others who will hate me!”

I let out a deep sigh. “You didn’t know. You just wrote what you thought was right, what you needed to do to get your points across.”

“I can change it…”

“No, you can’t, because Monika here is going to make you forget all this.”

“Ah… Won’t let me change anything…”

I nodded. “We can’t let you do that. So much has happened that needs to happen. Even the horrible stuff made us what we are today.”

There was a chorus of ‘yeahs’ from the rest of the group.

GM wiped his eyes. “I…”

“How many times have I surprised you?” I asked GM.

GM looked at me. “…A lot. You did things I never expected.”

“And your other characters?”

GM looked at Seskii. “Constant surprises…”

“We aren’t just your mind, GM. We have at least some agency. We have our lives. All you do is scribble a story down on a piece of paper or type it up on a computer – the Dark Tower uses that story to make a reality. A reality with real things.”

“How did I manage to get that right?”

“The Dark Tower wanted you to,” I said.

GM looked at her. “…You know, last time we talked… I was the one who knew things, and you weren’t.”

“How times have changed, huh?”

He let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah…” He wiped his eyes, looking at the rest of them. “I’m sorry. I don’t have anything for you.”

Pinkie hugged him. “It’s not your fault.”

“…Yes it is.”

Pinkie looked at him with her eyeless face. “…Everything has two reasons.”

GM sighed, saying nothing.

“There is something you might be able to tell us,” Rohan said. “What is the meaning of nineteen?”

Pinkie let herself smirk despite the somber tone. “Oh boy…”

GM looked into the sky. “Nineteen is a joke.”

“…Nani?”

GM stared at him like he was speaking an alien language – but continued on anyway. “It… It’s just the Dark Tower’s favorite number. It’s placed everywhere to draw attention to things, to create odd synchronicities. But… it’s really just a joke. Sometimes it draws attention to what is important. But it’s just littered around everywhere to make people notice it. That’s what nineteen is. A number spread everywhere simply because it can be.”

Everyone stared at him.

I smirked and shook my head. “Most of us knew that, Rohan.”

“I didn’t!”

Pinkie looked at GM. “…I think we need to go. Monika?”

Monika clapped her hands, and everyone she had taken to the world left. She leaned in to look at GM.

He looked at her. “Who even are you?”

“You’ll find out one day!” Monika said with an adorable smile. “Now let’s see here… Character file… Just gotta mess with the memories a moment…”

GM’s expression went blank as she rooted around his mind. She was tempted to place something that would ensure good fortune for her…

“Ahem,” Seskii said, reminding Monika that she was there. “Don’t do that.”

“…Fine, fine, I’ll just make it like we weren’t here. Yeesh, you don’t have to hover so much…” When she finished, she clapped her hands and made herself vanish.

Seskii watched as GM realized he was crying. He was confused – he never cried for no reason. What had just happened?

He had no idea why he felt such a weight on his chest.

He pushed it out of his mind – the best way to fix that kind of mood was to get writing. It almost always made him feel better.

He rubbed his knuckles together – time to get back to Ardent. The first actual crossover in this amazing mess of a story. A small bit of buildup of what was to come…

The future events excited him – even the ones he didn’t know about. Especially the ones he didn’t know about.

Seskii left the universe, leaving him to his work.

~~~

So what did we learn today?

A lot. And yet, at the same time, not much.

It was an early GM we talked to. One near the start of Songs of the Spheres’ creation. He couldn’t tell us what any of our more recent or far-reaching experiences meant. He could only tell us what he thought at the start.

No doubt all of it had changed since then. Since this was what was happening now…

I could see the words appearing on a laptop outside a large window in a different house. He no longer lived in suburban Idaho. Outside there were hummingbirds flying around. And he was excited.

But we weren’t meant to talk to him at that point in time. We could have tried to force time travel… But no. The answers we got were the ones we got. Going to look for more would just be like abusing Saitama and asking for retribution.

What we learned instead was about him. The places he grew up in and experienced – except that warehouse. That warehouse meant literally nothing. But all the other places… All the other people…

…They were ones he knew. Ones he remembered.

…Who was it? Who was going to do it? Who’s going to start it all?

I don’t know. Yet. But I think I will soon. Because it’s coming.

The end…

What did he eventually decide it was going to be?

He had to have decided by now…

Right?

Author's Note

Up next: A movie chapter. THE movie chapter, you could say. Chapter 115... You really do need the 'prepare for a long, long read' for the next one. Hooo boy.

It is also mind-numbingly complicated so you're gonna want to pay attention. Because when it ends, (Almost) All Your Questions Will Be Answered, and we can get to the actual main plot of Songs of the Spheres.

The Uncertainty will end, eventually.

For fun, here was the song I listened to while writing 115:

-GM, master of Cloud Atlas

115 - Song of the Spheres

Songs of the Spheres.

Songs. Plural. There’s more than one melodious tune that pulls us through existence, an innumerable number of stories that have been told through the cosmic entanglement that is the multiverse.

And yet, everything is also related. Every song has twisted the pages it calls home in one way or another. Some songs scream to be noticed, drawing thousands to flock towards them and praise them. Others resonate within the simple, beautiful act of a family dinner. But every last one, no matter how significant, ties to all the others somehow.

For better or for worse, everything’s connected.

But as I’ve come to realize, there is also a singular song. The Song. The Song that leads to the Choice, the Song that leads to a Climax. The Song.

As the end of the Tower’s Testament tells us, it is twofold. And yet… it is the same, because one leads to the other, and the foundations of the other lead to the one.

Naturally, the singular story of the multiverse would be far too expansive for any entity to see in its entirety. No one could see every twist and turn through the innumerable years. Not even I can lay it all out at once.

But I have seen much in my time as the bearer of the Eye of Rhyme. I can see the keys.

…I can’t see what’s coming anymore. I’ve had my last true vision. All that remains is… guesswork. Educated guesswork, admittedly, but still guesswork.

Now that I’m here, in this final moment at the edge of the cliff, I can piece most of it together. What all of existence has been trying to tell us all this time.

Come with me. Let’s take a look back before we jump into the great unknown. I hope you're ready, this story is massive and complicated. Get yourself some snacks and turn that brain on, you’re gonna be here a while as the multiverse unfolds itself before you.

My only hope is that, in prompting what’s happened to be written down, I don’t become its cause.

~Tower~

It was impossible to tell if it was the screams of ka or the howls of the blizzard.

Admittedly, the two could have been one and the same, considering.

Two men marched through the bitter cold, barely noticing its deathly temperature against the deeper pain they carried within themselves. Some of this pain was physical – the elder man was missing a few fingers on one of his hands, making the empty digits of his glove hang loose. The younger – more a boy than a man – was clearly malnourished and pale, clutching a notebook to his chest like it was his lifeline.

These physical maladies were nothing compared to their suffering. The boy’s eyes betrayed someone haunted by extended trauma, only some unnatural inner strength keeping him moving forward – his eyes fixated on the older man.

The leader of the duo was much more adapted to the situation. His features were hard and stoic, much of his face shrouded by his vaguely cowboyish hat. He wore thick clothing, well-worn boots, and held his full hand on a gun holster; always ready to fight, even this far along. His eyes betrayed a man who had seen too much, a man who had lost everything, a man who was pushing on only because he was so close to the end. Because he was called forward. He moved with heavy, certain motions, watching everything closely even though he couldn’t see two feet in front of him. He glanced behind him regularly, making sure his last remaining companion was still behind him.

Will he fall as well?

He could have pushed the thought out of his mind – but he didn’t. He accepted the possibility that he would finish this journey completely alone. He would prefer it didn’t end that way, but in the end the wheel of ka would lead him on.

Are we still on the Beam?

This gave the man pause. He didn’t stop moving, but he scanned the blizzard with his eyes once again. If they were still on the Beam, he would be able to see the pattern that all served. It took a moment, but he was able to note the prevailing direction of the snowflakes twisted away along a single path.

The direction they were headed.

Right along the Beam. To the center of everything.

He kept moving, the boy following behind. Neither said a word. There was nothing to be said at this point.

That, in many ways, was what had the man worried. There should be nothing left. They should just move along, get to their destination, and have the final confrontation. So why was there a blizzard? He refused to believe it was just random misfortune. Nothing had been random misfortune for a long, long time. At least not for him.

Doubt crept into his mind when the blizzard started to lessen. They were getting through it… and besides being cold, nothing of interest had happened. Nothing…

“Be on your guard, Patrick,” he said, his voice gruff and dry despite the heavy moisture around them.

Patrick’s grip on his notebook tightened, as if it could be a shield for him.

The monster attacked. It was not something any of them had ever seen before – but this was not surprising, considering how deep into End-world they were. As far as they were concerned, any sort of creature from any existence could appear here, and it wouldn’t be something to marvel at.

It was seemingly made entirely of ice, though the man knew better. It was a crystal being with two deformed legs, three bladelike arms, and a flat head covered in glowing lights that may have been eyes, or just whatever was visible of a brain through its bodily lattice.

It made no noise when it moved. It leaped forward and swung at the man’s neck. The man leaned back, dodging the blow and drawing a gun at the same time. The oversized pistol was of exceptionally fine craftsmanship and anyone with a sense for the value of things would know the sandalwood gun was a weapon of great power and legend. He pulled the trigger with trained, automatic precision, launching forth a single bullet right into the creature’s glowing head. The lights went out in an instant as the bullet shattered the ‘skull’ into three pieces.

He didn’t have to look behind him to know there was another one there. He whirled his gun, finger pulling down on the trigger before the creature was even in his sights. It fell as well.

But there were more.

He fired two more bullets, taking two more out. He had no idea why they were attacking. Perhaps they were ravenous beasts that only understood violence. Maybe they were simply lost and afraid in this cold, alien world. Maybe they sensed who he was and knew he was a threat.

Either way, he didn’t let his uncertainty weigh on him. They were in the way. They needed to be removed.

Patrick had begun furiously scribbling on his notepad the moment the first bullet had gone off. The gunslinger wasn’t going to bank on him being able to help before he ran through his six bullets. He’d need to set up time to reload, but with how fast the monsters were coming…

A fifth shot rang out, piercing the bodies of two at once. The first one died instantly as its head was shattered, but the second merely lost its legs and writhed on the ground silently.

The gunslinger performed a roll in the snow, ducking under a crystalline assault. As a creature raised its arms to slice him in half, he shot it – allowing the dead form to fall onto him. It provided only a scant amount of cover, but it made the creatures pause in their relentless assault.

The pause was only about a second, but that was enough for a trained gunslinger to reload his weapon. Six more shots. He counted seven creatures with all his senses. He didn’t like those numbers – if these beings were smart, they would know not to let him reload again.

So he dragged it out. Instead of filling their skulls with lead in rapid succession, which he could do somewhat easily, he focused on dodging, only unleashing a bullet when it was the only way to survive.

They were fixated on him. Despite their silence, he knew they were livid at him for what he’d done to the rest of them. Body language, even from beings that were nothing like man, was enough to go on.

It took only twenty-three seconds for him to run through four bullets. Two shells left. Three creatures.

The problem was the three remaining ones were the smartest, so he couldn’t bank on taking advantage of their numbers. Two moved as a team, attacking him from two directions at once. He jumped to the side, but one of their blades cut through his pants, drawing blood. It wasn’t a serious cut, but the sudden exposure of inner skin to deep cold was jarring.

He fired his fifth bullet without aiming as well as he should have – but it was more than enough to disable one of the creatures. He realized a second later there was a way he could have used one shot to take two out there - he could have solved his problem. But he had slipped up.

And he didn’t see the remaining two lining up to take him on.

He ducked under two blades and had to hobble over a third. Before another one could hit him, he used his last bullet.

As expected, the last creature wouldn’t let him reload. It focused intently on his gun, trying to knock it out of his hands, making enough of a fuss to keep the gunslinger from even thinking of popping it open to reload, no matter how fast a trained gunslinger could do it.

And then the gunslinger stepped into the snow and found a rock hidden beneath it. He slipped, falling onto his back.

He had no choice but to try to reload, hoping the sudden movement had startled the creature enough. If he didn’t get a shot off, he was a goner.

The creature did not give him an opportunity. It drove its sword-arm right to his chest. …Except his arm vanished before it pierced the gunslinger’s skin.

Roland reloaded while it stared at its missing arm in shock. The creature’s glowing interior was blown out, and it fell to the ground, dead. All of them were now taken care of.

The gunslinger let out a sigh of relief. “Good work, Patrick.”

Patrick smiled, continuing to erase the sketch of the creature he had made in his notebook. Slowly, the rest of the creature’s body began to vanish as well.

As far as the world was concerned, that creature didn’t exist.

The gunslinger used the rest of his bullets to kill off any creatures that were down, but not dead. He didn’t want to take any chances. “Anything hurt?”

Patrick shook his head.

The gunslinger nodded, turning back to the path of the Beam. It took him a moment to find it – but he soon realized the bodies of the creatures had all fallen in a particular direction, pointing them forward along the snowy expanse.

The blizzard was mostly gone now, even though it had been barely two minutes since the battle had begun. He still couldn’t see all the way to their destination, but he could see a fair distance.

Enough to see the door standing in the middle of their path.

“…Did you do that?” he asked Patrick.

Patrick looked at the door with curiosity and shook his head.

“Hmm…”

The two of them walked up to the door and examined it. The gunslinger had seen a few doors like this during their journey, doors that led elsewhere.

None of them had been made of metal, though. And the engraving on this one was different.

|||

The three parallel lines didn’t mean anything to the gunslinger.

He looked past the door – ahead of them was the Dark Tower, the goal of the gunslinger Roland’s long, seemingly endless journey. So close. He could almost smell the roses in the Field of Can’Ka No Rey.

But ka had given them this door, like it had given them so many other things. In theory, he could just walk past the door and never think of it again.

But he couldn’t not open it.

He reached his hand out and clasped the knob. He pushed it open…

~Theater~

…the door to the theater flung outward, a single man in dark clothing walking up the aisle into the seats. The projector was running, displaying a preview he couldn’t care less about – some stupid action flick just like all the billions of others.

He had a giant barrel of popcorn under one arm and a jumbo soda under the other. He was going to enjoy himself today and nobody was going to tell him otherwise. Not that people could, and that wasn’t just because he was the only person in the theater. That would be best.

He plopped himself down in one of the forward-middle rows for the optimal viewing experience. The seats to his sides were soon to be occupied by his drink and his barrel of popcorn. He sat back, kicked his feet up on the seat below, and prepared himself to have a nice day.

The theater screen faded to black. “Today’s feature is about to begin. Please silence your cell phones.”

The man who was the audience let out a laugh. There was nobody here. Who cared? Even the projector was automated.

He was alone.

The film began. An old, gravelly voice came from the speakers and met the man’s ears. “What you are about to witness really happened, albeit in a capacity we are not able to understand.” The previously black image faded into a background of stars that began to recede from view, eventually coming to form a galaxy while the main actor credits began to flash onscreen. “It is a tale of such size and history that the people involved stretch the definition of what we think it means to exist.”

The galaxies pulled back further and further until they were all encompassed in a slightly blue marble, representing a universe. Other marbles filed into the field of view, each representing their own point on the Sea of Infinite Possibility. The man noticed a few inaccuracies – notably, this representation of the multiverse opted not to show the Spheres, but kept a ‘globe-like’ appearance for the multiverse as a whole. He supposed this was effectively a foreign film, so they may have simplified the appearance for what the creators believed were simple monkey-brains.

“It is the story of why existence is the way it is today. This is the story of… the Downstreamers.”

Overtop of the entire multiverse the title card for the film appeared – simply ‘Downstreamers’.

“It is impossible to show their experience as it was – filled with loops of time, tangles of universal manipulation, and emotions the likes of which we could never understand. But they started as humans once, and they contained a kernel of humanity with them for eternity. In order for us to understand, we will look at that humanity…”

The multiverse’s image zoomed in rapidly to a single universe, then quickly to a single Earth. Then the view zoomed into a large, metallic structure – clearly nothing like what the actual Downstreamer structures would have looked like, but futuristic enough to appeal to the audience. That’s what the filmmakers had hoped, anyway.

Frankly, the man found it amusing they were trying to tell this story as a human one. It was clearly beyond even the filmmakers, but they were trying to anyway.

Inside the building, a group of humans in long, silvery robes sat around a table. In the center of the table was a holographic ring with time-signatures littered all around the display.

“We have done it,” one of the women said. “The universe has bent to our whim – time is now eternal. We are our own creation.”

“We can now move to other matters,” a man said, folding his hands together.

“What other matters?” a younger woman asked. “That was the great Work, was it not?”

“It occurs to me that you have forgotten the existence of other realms. There is more for us to shape, councilor. Just because we have fulfilled our self-existence does not mean we have reached the highest we can. The multiverse awaits.”

There were a series of nods and noises of agreement.

The man munched on some popcorn and shook his head. That was so, so wrong. Granted, they did come from a universe where they were responsible for their own creation, but the idea of that council? One of them forgetting something? Laughable. Just laughable.

This bizarre documentary-adventure film was going to be a barrel of laughs…

~Harlequin~

“…and then I said, what pasta?”

Dimitri’s parents stared at him from across the dinner table. None of them were human – rather, they were a dark-purple-skinned race of humanoids whose yellow eyes had no pupils.

“…Dimitri,” his father said. “What was the point of that anecdote?”

“It was funny,” Dimitri said, refusing to let his smile falter. “Examine, if you will, my plate. There is a complete lack of pasta in it, and, aha, I just told a long extended story about pasta! Draw the connection… Draw the connection…”

“…Did you dump your pasta out so you wouldn’t have to eat it?”

Dimitri kept up his smile. “C’mon dad, you know that’s not how humor works. There’s clearly another use for the pasta. See, there was supposed to be a big laugh there and then I w-”

“Dimitri, stop,” his mother said, putting a hand to the bridge of her nose. “You’re a grown man. It’s time to stop with this ‘humor’ thing. I mean it.”

Dimitri raised an eyebrow and folded his arms. “It’s not like it’s hurting anyone.”

“It’s an embarrassment,” his father said, glaring. “We are not supposed to devote our mental efforts to making each other laugh.”

“Oh? Then what else are we supposed to do on the farms?”

“FARM!” his father shouted, smashing his fist into the table.

“Yeah. You and I both know I can farm just fine while thinking about other things.”

“And you could be using that effort you put in pointless things to farm better than everyone. And here you are, squandering your gifts!”

Dimitri rolled his eyes. “Right. Look, I don’t think that’s possible, and you know damn well why.”

His father stood up, looked like he wanted to say something, but instead just walked away.

His mother sighed. “Look, Dimitri…”

“Mom, please don’t.”

She didn’t listen to his wishes. “I know your mind is troubled. I know it’s hard. I’m not asking you to focus on the farm. I’m asking you to stop your childish games. All the others left them behind years ago.”

“They don’t know what’s good for them.”

“I don’t care if you think maintaining childish amusements is ‘better’ or not. It’s not acceptable.”

Dimitri looked at her with a hurt expression. “You know I’m not going to change.”

“…I’m not allowed to ask you anymore,” she said. For the first time, she looked away from him, ashamed herself.

Dimitri’s stomach fell. “Mom, what is it?”

She sighed. “I just… The Chief called us in. She didn’t give us any orders but…”

“What the hell is wrong with that woman? I do my work! Why does she hate me?”

“The children, Dimitri.”

Dimitri let out a pained sigh. “…So I have to stop.”

“Yes. You do. I don’t know what the Chief will do if you don’t, but I know a threatening tone when I hear one.”

“Do I have to stop having the dreams too, then?” Dimitri said, standing up suddenly.

“She didn’t say anything about that.” His mother shook her head. “Dimitri… it’s time to grow up.”

An image of darkness flashed through Dimitri’s mind. He turned around and stormed out of the house.

“Dimitri!”

“Don’t you dare follow me!” he called back. “Got it?”

His mother held out a hand to him – and then put it down. The life in her posture drained as she shuffled back into the house.

Dimitri walked, hands in his pockets. It was night, and the stars were visible alongside the glowing megaliths. The tremendous metal ovoids stuck out of the ground, small sections of them glowing with soft blue energy. Other than those structures, everything was simple farmland. Usually, everything was green and bright, but in the night air the scenery was dark and lonely.

He walked along the dirt road, knowing exactly where he was going.

That stupid Chief… She was going to get a piece of his mind.

Telling him to stop enjoying himself? That was like telling him to lie down and die.

He forced the smile back – it was all he had.

All he had against… it. Them. Or whatever. He didn’t know.

That wasn’t for him to worry about tonight. He walked across the dirt road, past a couple of fields belonging to other families, and arrived at the Chief’s house. She was the only one of them who lived alone – and was also the only one who lived in a house made from scavenged megalith metal.

Dimitri pounded on the door. “Hey hey hey, late-night-o-gram! Come on out and get your righteous talking-to, despot!”

The Chief opened the door. Her expression was flat and emotionless. She was also younger than Dimitri’s mother, having only been the Chief for six years. “Noira was never good at keeping things from you.”

“I’m just here to clear a few things up. I’m not going to lose this smile just because you say so. That’d be like… Oh, to use a simile you’d understand, like planting corn and getting pumpkins. It’s not possible!”

“Then you’re exiled. Goodbye.” The Chief slammed the door in his face.

Dimitri twitched. “You can’t just exile me in the middle of the night! Nobody will believe you did it! And don’t you think some people will be a taaaaaad upset you’re so gung-ho to use that power of yours?”

The Chief opened the door again. “I have absolute authority. If you will not change, you are not allowed here. I cannot accept a man-child. Even if this is all due to your mental difficulties, I cannot allow anyone with your attitude to persist within this society. Maybe the children you are influencing will grow out of it. But maybe they won’t.”

“Screw you, life’s more worth living like this! I don’t see hardly any of you smile anymore! But I bet you remember what it was like!”

The Chief leaned in. “You’re supposedly smart, Dimitri. Tell me, does the average person have the ability to do what you do? Or will they accomplish less and make us all starve?”

“Oh look at you, jumping to the worst-case scenario.”

“We never have more than a single percent of extra food every winter. There are only two hundred of us. If even a handful of us don’t put our all into the work, we will starve. Children who were supposed to start work have proven to be disappointments because of your influence. We’re already going to be cutting it close this year because of you!”

Dimitri shrugged in a mocking matter. “Yeesh, maybe it’s because you’re such a hard case.”

“The empire isn’t coming back. We have to survive the freeze on our own.”

“Ahahahaha-”

The noise was offensive enough to the Chief that she punched Dimitri across the face. “Get out of my tribe.”

“Oh, you’ll let me starve?”

“Yes. Ciao.”

She slammed the door in his face.

He forced the smile to remain. Okay, coming over here was probably a bad idea. Buuuuut I can totally show her up if I can figure out how to produce more food… He facepalmed. “Crafty little pixie…”

He felt a chill in the air.

“Welp! Guess I’m going into exile! Sayonara Chief! Time for me to die in the wilderness with the first snow! Or, wait, maybe I won’t! Maybe I’ll survive just fine on my own! I’ll make… Ha! I’ll find out how to make a car! What do you think of that!? I’ll bring back the stuff of the empire! See those megaliths? I’m going to climb them!”

There was no response.

“Ahahahaha – you’ll see! You’ll all see!” He spread his arms wide and laughed harder. “It’ll all come together. And you’ll all pay for this idiocy.” He looked at the nearest megalith and set off on his journey. He didn’t care that he was moving through a cornfield, destroying precious food. Stupid. It was all stupid.

In the past they didn’t need to focus everything on the farm.

He’d be the hero! Yeah! Th-

A sharp pain went through his brain. He grabbed his head – but kept moving.

He tried not to think about the image of intense fire that had just burned itself into his thoughts. He instead focused on the ancient history of the empire…

~Historian~

…it occurs to me that I am a historian and that I should perhaps do more than simply reaffirm what is already known to the children in the overly simplified education system. This notebook is going to be devoted to my thoughts on the whole history of our people, from our origins to our modern day. Our origins are quite a mystery, and it will require much consultation with the seers, but with diligence, I shall prevail and raise the new generation to appreciate the sheer scope of our existence.

I can only hope my son will appreciate this work once it is complete. Perhaps it will serve as his gateway into the true beauty of historic research…

…The origin of our people can be traced back to a single universe. The location of this universe has been lost to us, but we can say for certain that it was a version of Earth. (Certain? The seers agreed but perhaps ‘certain’ is too strong of a word. Consider revising.) This world is not known as an Earth to the denizens of the multiverse, however, but Xeelee. For it is the home universe of the great, scoping Xeelee. As my research has shown, their history is very intertwined with our own. We, on the other hand, were the humans of that world. (First-person. Remove later).

In the origin universe, it was clear that we were not the masters – it was the Xeelee, always and forever. They shaped the universe and made grand pieces of technology that spanned multiple galaxies, almost always keeping to themselves, leaving abandoned ships for lesser races to discover and reverse-engineer. As mankind, we were one of the races who benefited most from their loose technology, becoming dominant over most other races. But always leagues below the Xeelee.

Humanity tried to fight the Xeelee in a war. It was a war we thought we could win, but as always, the Xeelee were just holding back what they thought was important. (They were digital. They probably didn’t lose a single real Xeelee intelligence the entire war. Research further.) They essentially were the universe. And unlike most universe-controlling races, they did it not through magic, but pure technology, for the original universe was not a magical one. (Though not mundane. No mundane universe allows FTL. Check.) We never stood a chance.

However, there was an evil secret in the universe. A race of beings known as the Photino Birds made out of dark matter were able to meet the Xeelee at their level. How they did this is unknown. (Dark matter can’t interact with regular matter?) Soon, it became evident to the Xeelee that the universe was dying because of the Photino Birds. So they devoted their resources to creating a great Ring that would allow them to enter another universe, uncovering the multiverse…

~Grand Tour~

…Ahem. This is ‘Captain’ Nanoha Takamachi, acting in command of the Time Space Administration Bureau ship Horizon. This is the first of what I will expect to be many, many logs I make about our Grand Tour through the multiverse.

Even though this is more of a personal journal than an official report, I guess I should still start with what we’re doing out here. Two months ago, one of my personal teams uncovered the remains of a Lost Logia Civilization unlike anything we had ever seen before. In the abandoned computerized structures, we found information. Most of it was inaccessible or complete gibberish, but some of it contained valuable information about the multiverse itself.

It was a lot bigger than we previously thought. But now we have a map of the entire thing. A map that shows us no individual universes, but one that shows us the general shape of the ‘Spheres’. We’ve been able to deduce that we’re in the middle of the largest Sphere, but the exact relations beyond that are a big mystery.

That map wasn’t the only thing we found. We discovered the name of the civilization that had made the technology – the Xeelee. We also found some ancient multiversal teleportation technology. We tried to use it to go somewhere, but it didn’t work. Instead, it dragged someone here from a distant part of the multiverse. We now know her name was Rarity, though it did take a while to learn her language. And get her to trust us.

I told her I would get her home. That’s probably the main reason this Grand Tour is happening, though I had to convince the rest of command that it would be useful for the TSAB to learn as much as we could about places far, far away. Had to pull a lot of strings, but sometimes it helps to be the ‘White Devil’. It didn’t take long to get the Horizon fresh off the assembly line, already equipped with the best dimensional drive in the fleet. It took a couple of weeks to retrofit it for an extended journey, but in that time I got the crew together.

I would have chosen Fate or Hayate as my commander, but it wouldn’t be good for two of us to be gone – it does pain me to leave Fate like this… …I did choose Signum for my commander, and she brought Vita along with her. I look forward to working with the two of them again, just like old times.

I also have an alternate version of myself on board! We call her Nano. She’s adorable. Every bit as plucky and powerful as I was back then, though perhaps a bit optimistic. I think Vita will be able to whip her into shape easily enough, and her crewmates will be able to show her how things are done.

It’s still weird to think of alternate versions of ourselves being out in the multiverse. To think we only discovered this recently!

Oh, both Nakajima sisters are here as well, Subaru and Ginga. I expect great things from them working as a team. I hope their skills won’t be required, but there’s always going to be a need for a fight. They need to be here as much as anyone.

Rarity is part of the crew as well, I wouldn’t discount her as just a ‘passenger’. She’s going to be a bit of a specialist in diplomacy as well as non-standard magic. Her horn is so fascinating. The trouble I had to go through to keep the scientists off her was… more than I would have expected.

I’ve gotten to know her well over the past two months. I’m glad I’m finally taking her on this journey to find her home, wherever it may be…

~Twilence~

…Rarity ran up the entry ramp to the Orchid. “I’m sorry! I can’t come along!”

I looked up from the controls. “Huh? Why n-” I suddenly became aware that my Awareness was being blocked. This realization shocked me into stopping the sentence.

Creek spoke up – she was an aging woman in a simple brown getup, but with an amazing smile despite it all. “What’s happened, Rarity?”

“The Empress needs me to watch a world undergoing a major plague,” Rarity said, lighting her horn and running through some white magic warmups. “You can go without me today. I won’t mind.”

“Hey, ever think if we mind!?” Vriska asked.

“No,” Rarity deadpanned.

“Savage,” a synthetic voice said – one that couldn’t be seen. It wasn’t the voice of the ship though; it was the voice of Mite, a nanobot who was as much a part of the team as anyone else.

I rolled my eyes. “I would say have fun, but that sounds like it’s going to be dreadful.”

Rarity laughed nervously. “You’ve got that right… I do have to go.”

“Come?” Mite asked.

“No, you shouldn’t come, I need to be a healing Mage, not a bringer of desolation. No offense, but you’re all very distracting magnets for trouble. ”

“That’s not offending, that’s exactly what I fucking want to be!” Vriska said, leaning back in her chair. “Check it.”

“…Check it?” Creek asked.

“Check it!”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “See you when you get back. Or not. I have no idea how long this will take.” She galloped out of the Orchid to the rest of the Void, running to her mission.

I tapped my hoof on the controls. “So, everyone? Something’s up. Something in my vision is being blocked.”

“The adventure we’re about to go on?” Creek asked.

“Hm? Oh, no. I’ve got that, know exactly where we’re going. What I don’t have is the narrative we’re in. We are being watched right now, but the sequence of words is being shrouded from me. And that never happens unless…”

“Unless…?” Mite asked.

“Well, me from the metafuture exerts her influence.” I blinked, pondering this. “I suppose the rest of the story could be something happening in the future rather than simultaneously with us, so I didn’t want to spoil myself to the neighboring stories.”

“You never cease to amaze me,” Vriska said. “Seriously, just able to ‘know’ things you don’t ‘know’. Wish I could do that.”

“Work on your reasoning skills,” I suggested.

“Savage!” Mite beeped.

“I sense a redundant robot,” Vriska ribbed.

“Quiet.”

“Did you just tell me to shut up?”

“Yes.”

“Calm down,” Creek said, shaking her head slowly.

I smiled warmly. “You know it’s just how they work.”

Creek nodded. “Still…”

Vriska smirked. “Still what? Still think we should have stopped this by now? News flash, lady, we like fucking with each other.”

“Interesting.”

“Don’t you get started on my word choice.”

“Starting…”

Vriska facepalmed. “Twilence, I call treason.”

“I call amusing,” I said, pressing a few of Orchid’s buttons. “Setting off. Creek?”

“Opening random portal,” Creek said laying her hand on the screen. The Orchid shifted through several different colors on its display, settling on a blue-green. The dimensional drive activated, taking us into orbit around a nice, green planet with a single large city.

We, of course, didn’t go right to the city. We set down in the area we were directly above. Some jungle in the middle of nowhere.

I felt importance here.

This would definitely mean something to the Twilence of the future…

~Merodi~

Year 76

…Twilence is missing.”

Corona looked up from her work on the Shaping Mechanism – currently, she was experimenting with an empty universe, trying to get it to connect to other universes in a ‘natura-physical’ manner. “So? Doesn’t she vanish a lot?”

Eve nodded. “Yeah, she does, except she said she was going to talk to me today. So either she didn’t know she was going to be caught up in something, or she wanted me to notice when she didn’t show up.”

Corona blinked. “Ahh… right, of course she would do that. Totally fits her modus operandi.”

Eve groaned. “But if she didn’t know, that’s worse. She said she could only partially see the final chapter before the ‘uncertainty’ and…” She put a hoof to her face “Right, calm down Evening, you’re better than this now.”

“Debatable,” Corona said with a smirk, reaching into her battle-dress.

“Hey! I deal with wars of lesser worlds on an almost daily basis. I think I’ve made progress.”

“Progress, yes,” Corona admitted, not continuing the conversation further. “Sai, ka scan.”

“I’ve been checking already…”

The Sombra AI flashed purple. “Ka energy detected. We’re being watched, amigas.”

Eve blinked. “But I’ve been checking ever since Twilence vanished!” She pulled out her own ka sensor – which also gave a reading in the positive. “…The Dark Tower sure has a sense of humor.”

“It took you a few centuries to figure that out?”

“It’s only been one!.”

“Are you counting time loops, time dilation, time spent in simulations, and other extra time?” Corona asked.

Eve blinked. “Okay, fine, I’ve probably been out in the multiverse longer than a few centuries. Point?”

“None. Just an observation. Frankly, I should probably be concerned that we are being watched. That means we’re in ‘the last thing’ she can see, right?”

Eve nodded. “Right. After this, Twilence’s visions go blank - or somewhere in the middle of this. Though ‘this’ chapter, for all I know, could last a few years or something. Or might not even involve us! We could just be comic relief!”

“Eve, calm down, you’re stressing out too much.”

“I know, I know…” Eve shook her head.

“Why did you come here?”

“I uh…” Eve blinked. “Ponyfeathers, I don’t think I thought about that. I just… felt like coming.”

“So you didn’t check anywhere before coming here?”

“I checked the system for her. She has a very distinctive magic signature, so we’d be able to see her unless she was trying to hide. …If she was in Merodi Universalis space. I didn’t try anything else though.”

“Guess that means I have to be involved then,” Corona said, pulling out a phone. “I’m calling Starbeat.”

“Why would I come here?” Eve muttered. “What even was my thought process?”

Corona shrugged. “I guess the Tower decided that, since you were aware of tropes, you didn’t need to have any sort of internal reasoning for doing what needed to happen.”

Eve blinked. “Huh.”

“Yep, par for the course. Us being cosmic playthings and all.” Corona’s phone finally finished dialing Starbeat. “Hey, Starbea-”

“It was fated that I would not be at the phone when you called. Please leave a message.”

Corona blinked. “...Funny.”

“Eh…” Eve held out a wing and tipped it side to side.

“Right. So. Find Twilence.” Corona folded her arms. “Any ideas?”

“I came to you, didn’t I?”

“You weren’t allowed to think. You can think now.”

“I think finding Twilence is like following a roadrunner moving backwards through time.”

Corona pondered this. “That’s actually a good metaphor.”

Eve chuckled. “Regardless, we can always try the Pinkies. They might have some idea. Or Vriska.”

“Both good options.” Corona twirled her phone.

“Our Pinkie is running the Austraeoh around the multiverse right now, so she’s probably not available.”

“Why’s she doing that?”

“I’m not sure. Renee’s having the rest of her team run a mission while she is, so I don’t think it’s anything major. She might just be having some fun while O’Neill’s not in command.”

“Gotcha.” Corona dialed Scooter’s number. “Hey, Scoote-”

“The script says I’m supposed to say I can’t talk to you.” She hung up.

Corona stared at her phone. “…Great.”

“And Vriska’s out adventuring. Calling her right now might not be the best idea. So…”

“Detective work time,” Corona said, clapping her hands together. “Where was she last seen?”

“She walked into a bathroom. She didn’t come out. No, there were not any teleportation signatures, I wasn’t that absent-minded.”

Corona sighed. “Okay then… to the Void?”

“Oh, right! Their Rarity might know where she is!”

“Or have some way to track her or something.” She held up her phone again. “Okay, third time’s the charm…”

Eve’s phone started ringing. Slowly, she levitated it in front of her face and answered, turning on her ears and putting it on speakerphone. “…Hello?”

Eve’s Second – no longer Cessera, but a sirnight called Evin – responded. “Just got a report you might want to hear. About the same time Twilence vanished, Arceus did as well.”

Eve stared at the phone. “Arceus?! What could make him disappear?”

“Don’t know. He was on Celestia City at the time.”

“I’ll head right over,” Eve said. “Give me all the files you have.” She hung up and turned her ears back off. “Guess we know where we’re going.”

Corona nodded. “To our great city!”

~Mother~

A mother with white hair walked through the city, trotting along the sidewalk. Hovercars of all shapes and designs moved swiftly across the street, causing a significant surge of wind, but not enough to make the mother uncomfortable. Her dress ruffled from the air currents, causing the bow on her back to flap like wings. The smile on her face brightened even further as she felt the wind on her face.

Today was a good day.

She walked out of the city proper, a small bag in her hand. It held within it an ancient record she couldn’t wait to get home and play. Something from beyond a long time ago. So far in the past nobody could comprehend. It gave her chills just thinking about it. Something ancient that so few people had heard… just found recently.

She hoped her family loved it – her husband was the one who had introduced her to music, after all. Her daughter didn’t have the taste her parents had, but she was known to enjoy older tunes from time to time. Though she was in her rebellious phase, so that might put a dampener on the evening…

The mother decided not to let herself worry about that. If her daughter decided to throw one of her fits, well, she would be dealt with. She didn’t have to make backup plans ahead of time. Because that would just be a bit excessive for something as innocuous as an ancient record.

She stopped a moment to smell some roses growing in a public garden – the fragrance was simply divine. It was also an indication that she was leaving the center of the city, heading toward the more ‘rural’ areas, even though such a description wasn’t exactly apt for a settlement such as this.

The buildings and cars gave way to emptier roads and natural greenery of mostly undeveloped ‘country’. Without the structures in the way, she could see much of the beauty of her world. The trees in the forest tangled together in a wild web alongside the road, the sound of chirping birds, and she swore she could hear young children playing in the distance.

She took a moment to look up at the sky – a truly unique sight. There was no sun, there was no moon – it wasn’t even blue. Instead, she saw a complex mesh of swirling spheres. Some of the more distant ones glowed like stars, providing light to the world. Others were dim and rocky, while still others were blue and green and covered in clouds. Some were close, while others were so far away they blended into a static pattern of sorts.

Always beautiful. She wondered if the blue-green world she was looking up at was one of the settled ones. Since the nested spheres always rearranged themselves in largely unpredictable patterns, there wasn’t really any way she could tell without a telescope.

She shrugged. She could try to find out which planet she was looking at another day. It wasn’t like there was any rush around here.

She eventually arrived at her chosen home – a simple cottage settled into the forest. Sure, it had all the modern conveniences – electricity, internet, magic teleporter to the city proper – but it still seemed rustic. Plus, she liked the scenery and the walks. She opened the door, walking into a nicely furnished living room/entryway combination. Her daughter was sitting on the couch, watching the holographic television. The teenage girl wore a black dress, sharp green lipstick, and had pale hair tipped with green dye. She barely noticed her mother come in.

The mother walked up to the countertop, taking out the ancient record.

Cloud Atlas. The words spoke to her with power. It was an Earth symphony, she knew, but not one that had existed in most Earths. It was a rare one. Which made it all the more special.

She rummaged around through several drawers, looking for the old record player. Eventually, she found the device and set it next to the Cloud Atlas symphony. She prepared the needle and placed the record down, bringing the instruments of old back to life. The notes filled the mother with emotion – a strange feeling of loneliness and struggle in a complicated life.

Turning to her daughter, a frown crossed her features. The girl looked so alone there, staring at the hologram, eyes nearly lifeless…

She had friends, her mother knew, but… well, they weren’t the closest.

Maybe she needed siblings. …It’s a bit late, but I wonder what that would have done for her…

~Grand Tour~

…This is Ginga Nakajima!”

“And this is Subaru Nakajima!”

“And we’re here to give a double report about the mission undertook for the Horizon.”

“You mean to give a double report about how awesome we were!?”

“…Yes, Subaru, that might work.”

“Right, so, get this, Rarity, Ginga and I were exploring a new universe that was absolutely covered in donuts.”

“There were some bagels.”

“Yeah, yeah, bagels, I know, but mostly donuts.”

“And donut holes.”

“Ginga, you’re ruining the tape!”

“We must strive for accuracy.”

“Accuracy does not mean awesome.”

“It can in this case. I saved you with accuracy.”

“A-psh, let’s not worry about that. Let’s talk about the world of donuts. Which was inhabited by little sprinkle-people. Who were adorable. Almost as adorable as Nano. …Actually, are we allowed to call her adorable anymore? She’s going through that teenage phase, right?”

“I don’t know. She spends most of her time with Vita. You’d have to ask her.”

“Aaaaanyway, adorable sprinkle people, check. People who love Rarity, check. Endless amounts of food, holy check. It had all the signs of a mission that would go great. We could be back on the Horizon in time for lunch and not even need lunch!”

“Well, we did get back before lunch and not need lunch.”

“Remember what I said about accuracy?”

“It makes you look silly?”

“…Right, that’s fair. Really fair, actually. Ouch.”

“Ahem. As should be pretty clear by Subaru’s lead-in, we did not have a simple easy time. The sprinkle-people turned out to be cannibals and thought we would be the best-tasting sprinkles of all time. So they led us into a trap. They took Rarity captive first, because she had demonstrated great magical power. We, of course, a-”

“We were awesome. Our Devices activated and WHOOSH the light bridges knocked the sprinkle-people over and PCHOOO we picked up Rarity and ran off!”

“At which point it turned out that the donuts were living creatures and didn’t like all the commotion. Not by any stretch of the imagination. We were devoured by a Klein-bottle effect – passing through a hole and ending up inside a donut.”

“Of course we broke out.”

“I broke out. I found the point at which the inner spatial distortion worked in reverse and threw us out the other end. Covered in donut jelly, but alive.”

“Then there were the sprinkle fighter pilots. They approached us from all sides, firing their adorable little colored bullets.”

“Adorable, but still dangerous enough to break the skin. I was in the medical pod for a wound to the stomach until just a little while ago.”

“Yeah, it was colorful, but deadly. And how did we escape you ask? What amazing thing did we do to get the three of us out of the sprinkle death-zone? What possibly could have been done…?”

“We opened a portal back to the Horizon and fell at Nanoha’s feet.”

“Ginga…”

~Tower~

Patrick tripped on the bottom part of the metallic doorframe as he followed Roland of Gilead, gunslinger, through the ‘|||’ door. He managed to keep enough of his wits about him to avoid falling over.

He glanced behind him. The door hadn’t closed. There was still a chill coming from the snowy lands on the other side, but he already felt warm in this new place.

Roland noticed less the temperature and more the place he was in. It wasn’t anything like what he had seen his entire journey across multiple worlds. Not Mid-World, not Keystone Earth, not any of the others that had been glimpsed along the way.

The floor was made entirely out of a smooth, amber-like substance that, upon closer inspection, was riddled with a hexagon pattern. This floor turned slowly upward to create the walls of a lengthy hallway, sloped in such a way that one couldn’t call the hall a square, but couldn’t call it a circle either. Something in between.

Along these walls were any number of technological devices. Roland had seen more than a few instances of higher technology on his journeys, including a bullet train equipped with full artificial intelligence, but he somehow knew that what he saw now was beyond even that. Some shapes he could recognize – metallic, artificial arms, legs, bodies, and heads. Some were simply alien. Crystals that floated in the air, affixed to nothing. Weapons that seemed to be made of clouds. Images projected in midair, glowing softly, changing with every minute shift in the world around them.

He was positive one of those images was watching him. Whenever he moved his arm, an area of it changed color.

There were also the truly inscrutable items. Objects that folded in and out of existence. Words that flew across a screen in complete gibberish that somehow put Roland on edge. A fruit that made Roland certain there was a skull inside of it, rather than a pit. Strands of light tied together into webs…

He could tell this was either a laboratory or treasure trove. He wasn’t sure which was better. Laboratory suggested the person who had made these things was still around. Treasure trove indicated there was probably a guardian of some kind.

He glanced behind them. The door they had come out of was affixed to a wall composed of the same amber-material. Above the metal door was a word Roland couldn’t read, but he somehow knew it said Mid-world.

The snow had started to blow in the door, melting along the amber floor.

He knew the Dark Tower would wait. Time meant nothing to it. It was still calling to him, demanding that he come – but it was also calling him into this hall. This hall of experimentation.

Roland moved forward, boots making dull sounds against the almost rubbery floor. He moved slowly, always ready for one of the esoteric devices to reveal itself to be an automatic weapon. He knew, deep down, that if any of these constructions truly wanted to kill him, there would be little he could do. No amount of reality-bending sketching and legendary pistols would do anything against weapons of this magnitude. It would be blink and then dead in an instant.

Nothing turned to attack them. There were a few things that reacted to their presence, but only in such a way that updated information. Nothing lashed out with the intent to dismember. Their silent journey was accompanied only by the occasional interested beep or magical sparkling noise.

Roland stopped short. He turned to his left, looking closely at a singular projection of seemingly magical energy. It contained three different sized spheres, in the center of which was a bright white point of energy. Bright white wires went to and from the Spheres in the middle, and a single, long wire snaked around the outside of the Spheres. In the center was a brilliant, holy pinprick of light that drew Roland’s attention.

Roland didn’t know why, but he was struck by how small it was. Even though he knew it represented something beyond tremendous.

“…Every ‘atom’…” he said.

Patrick looked at him quizzically.

“The man in black once told me that, in every blade of grass, there are countless worlds… It looked almost like that… In some way.”

Patrick glanced at the image. He lifted his pencil.

“Don’t,” Roland said, holding up a hand. He wasn’t sure how far Patrick’s powers went, but he didn’t think testing them like that would be wise.

Roland stared at the image a little longer. The Tower is the center of Creation. The Tower is connected to all. ...This is its domain.

“Let’s go,” Roland said, continuing down the hall. Patrick took a moment to stare at the image, but quickly scrambled after the gunslinger.

The hall was long, but not endless. They eventually came to an arch that led into a wide, domed area. There were no experimental devices on the walls of this room – they were adorned with mathematical designs intertwined together to form beautiful art. Circles upon circles twisted together in thousands of different intricate patterns.

Patrick stared at the beautiful cycles with awe. As an artist, he quickly felt a deep connection to the visual stimuli.

Roland was never one for aesthetics, but even he could understand the effort that must have gone into the designs.

The center of the room was a column of white energy. It was flickering, clearly low on the energy it needed to perpetuate itself, but it stood despite the difficulty. All around it were floating, substanceless ‘screens’ displaying numbers Roland couldn’t read.

For a moment, Roland thought he saw a tower form in the white light. …A Bright Tower…? No. Maybe that was what it was intended to be, but it was nothing compared to the might of the Dark Tower. It was just the center of this place, not everything. Not even close to everything.

“You’ve become very in-tune with the Tower, gunslinger.”

The voice came from everywhere at once. It wasn’t aggressive; rather, it was quite friendly. This did not stop Roland from drawing his gun and Patrick raising his pencil.

“Do not worry, I have no intention of harming you. I doubt the Dark Tower would let me.”

“Who are you?” Roland demanded.

“…My name is not pronounceable by your tongue. You can call me Weaver...”

~Historian~

…Like the Weavers of old, the Xeelee were builders of great cosmic structures. They were able to manipulate stars and galaxies with relative ease even before they found the greater multiverse. After they had uncovered a few different realms, they found themselves already at the power of a Class 2 civilization, far beyond most of the other multiversal societies they ran across. They found more efficient ways to bend physics, more ways to loop time through several universes, and more ways to fight the Photino Birds. They eventually destroyed their home universe to end the Photino Bird threat once and for all. And they kept growing – growing stronger, better, more… (Find a better way to phrase this. They’re powerful, everyone gets it, needs to be less ham-fisted.)

They ascended to Class 1 faster than any other society in recorded history. They had the technology, the infrastructure, and the power – they just happened to discover and use dimensional travel last of all. They currently sit among the other Class 1 societies as the newest member, and the only one to have reached that position by technological prowess alone. (Possibly others in the deeper past? Hard to confirm, Class 1 documents from before this point are hard to find.)

We are not the Xeelee. We are the descendants of the humans that lived in their universe. We escaped with them and were protected by them. For the longest time, we simply moved on the whims of the dimensional currents, in whatever universe the Xeelee decided to open portals to. There was no contact. However, while the Xeelee ignored our ancestors’ presence, they also ignored magic. (Ignored… No, they didn’t ignore it, they just decided they didn’t need to use it.) To them, technology was always the only way. They took (and still take) great pride in their ability to climb to the highest rank without resorting to ‘cheating’. (This entire thing is going to need a hacksaw taken to it to get it professional.)

The ancestors did not ignore magic. They took it as their own, using it as a way to separate themselves from the Xeelee’s shadow. They became known as simply the Arcane Tribe. They developed a much lesser multiversal society within the shadow of the Xeelee, using their magic to create their own methods of dimensional travel. The first world they took was called Alomomola, the details of which are…

…The Arcane Tribe developed much over several generations. (Best guess is 120 years, but there were a lack of historians among the early ancestors, making my job just THIS much more difficult.) They honed their magic craft, studying dimensional connections and the relations between emotions and reality. (Scientific anecdote should go here. Perhaps I should talk to one of the professors to get a better idea of what this actually means.)

The society was structured based on an elder council system, the oldest and wisest calling all the shots. Different sub-tribes acted mostly independently, and over the years they diverged into their own groups…

…and this sub-tribe is the one that found the Prognosticus, that ancient book of fate itself that changed the course of history. Within were secrets of metatime, of the future of all worlds, and of deep secrets on the nature of physics itself. The sub-tribe now had access to a powerful tool none had ever seen before. A source of reliable information about what they didn’t know.

(If only the stupid book wasn’t so vague all the time. They would have been able to see it coming…)

~Merodi~

“…you think he would have seen it coming,” Corona said as she and Eve walked onto the scene of Arceus’ disappearance in Celestia City – the back alley behind Burgerbelle’s Bradburger establishment. The Flat in question was talking with Allure while Celestia City’s normal cops and investigators combed the area.

“He does have a lot of awareness and power, but he’s still physical in a sense,” Eve said. “He probably just wanted a bradburger.”

“He doesn’t have a mouth,” Corona pointed out.

“He could have a mouth, if he wanted.”

Allure noticed them. She nodded curtly to Burgerbelle and jumped over. “So, is the political pressure enough that you two got sent in?”

Eve blinked. “Actually, no, we’re just here because his disappearance coincides curiously with that of Twilence.”

“Oh, a regular conspiracy then?” Allure rolled her eyes. “Fun times.” She levitated a data pad out and handed it to them, her metal horn sparking slightly. “Need to get this thing tuned up…”

“Sooner rather than later is better,” Eve said, glancing at the pad. It showed a single video feed. Arceus was walking down the back alley, alone, and then he was just gone. No sign of a dimensional portal, wormhole, or anything. Not visually, anyway. “What do the scanners have to say?”

“Dimensional translation,” Corona said, sifting through the data using Raging Sights. “Why hasn’t it been followed?”

“Because the universe doesn’t exist or has been moved,” Allure said. “It was the first thing anyone did once they realized he was gone. Tried to follow the signature. But no, poof, gone.”

“And we’ve got nothing else?”

Allure shook her head. “Don’t even recognize the method that took him.”

“It has to be something powerful,” Corona said. “He has the most raw power of any single entity in Merodi Universalis. Even the Class 1s would probably face more damage than they’d like taking him out without outright destroying the universe he’s in.”

“Maybe that’s what they did. Dragged him to a universe with less people and destroyed it,” Eve suggested.

“Who would want to do that though?”

“It’s not exactly a secret that he’s responsible for sending Ash on that path of war.” Eve furrowed her brow. “But there’s nobody in Merodi Universalis or around it that would have that complaint against him and be able to do something about it. Even you would have difficulty doing anything to him with the Shaping Mechanism.”

Corona nodded slowly. “It could be done though. Wouldn’t look like this, but it could be done.”

Eve furrowed her brow. “We need more information. Allure, who’s the lead investigator here?”

“Uh, me?” Allure raised an incredulous eyebrow. “What, do I not look like a detective to you?”

Eve flushed. “Ah. Sorry. I just…”

“Relax,” Allure said. “So, what do you need the lead investigator for?”

“More information. Specifically, what Arceus was doing here.”

“Exploring Celestia City,” Allure said. “He doesn’t exactly rule his world directly, you know. He has free time.”

“I’m well aware of Arceus’ relation to his people,” Eve said. “I mean, I find it weird that they all agree to let someone represent them when that someone doesn’t actually rule any of their governments, but to each their own. I just need to know what was happening while he was here.”

“He was talking to Burgerbelle. He was apparently curious about the history and origin of Flats. And let’s be honest here, who isn’t once they figure out Flats exist?”

“It is a rather jarring realization,” Corona admitted.

“Do we know why he was in Celestia City?”

“Sightseeing,” Allure said with a shrug. “Sorry, the guy just wanders around when he’s not busy, which is a lot of the time. Different worlds and cultures interest him. This is not the first time we’ve seen him around – though it is the first time he just vanished.”

“And why was he in the alley?”

Allure blinked. “It was just the way he ended up walking? Burgerbelle just said he walked that way after talking to her for a while. Could have been random.”

“Or ka,” Eve said.

“Always ka…” Corona muttered. “I’m growing to hate it more and more as time goes on.”

“Eh, yeah, it causes its problems. But it is what it is.”

Corona looked like she wanted to object to this, but decided it wasn’t the time for that. “So we have no information about where Arceus went or what happened to him, all we know for certain is that he vanished about the same time as Twilence. So we know we’re onto something, but we have no real leads.”

“Yeah, and Blumiere’s breathing down my back to figure something out about this,” Allure said, scratching the back of her head.

“Blumiere is also standing right behind you,” Blumiere said.

Allure facehooved. “Gotta love it when that happens. Hi! I don’t have anything for you.”

“I figured as much…” Blumiere said, tapping his fingers on his cane. “Pokèrin Anima found out.”

“…Ponyfeathers,” Allure muttered.

“They’re not likely to resort to violence or take it out on us, but there is going to be a deep turmoil within their society.” He adjusted his hat. “We need to solve this quickly.”

“Well, no leads, besides a curious interconnectivity,” Corona said. “I think we need to get a hold of Starbeat or another ka expert.”

“Or just use the scanners,” Blumiere said. “We have advanced computers on the subject. Or, if that’s obfuscated, just manipulate fate slightly.”

“That could work,” Eve admitted. “But it’s also just as likely to backfire. I’d rather have an expert on board before doing that, if you don’t mind. Unless some new information comes to light…” She lit her eye with the symbol of Light, smirking.

She’d played her cards right. At that moment, Jade appeared from a dimensional portal, the reality-anchor bracelet on her arm. “John’s missing.”

Allure gasped. “Oh no!”

“That’s… That’s really bad,” Corona said. “Twilence, Arceus, John…”

“There’s a pattern here,” Eve said. “Powerful individuals with abilities relating to the alteration of reality on large scales. …A new Collector?”

“The Collector wouldn’t be able to pull this one off.”

“A bigger, badder one?”

“Whatever it is, they have John,” Allure said. “Not only is he our friend, but if anyone uses him, everything could die.”

“Suddenly risking ka manipulation consequences doesn’t seem so bad,” Eve said. “Right, charter a ship with full ka capabilities. Advanced, but also as soon as possible.”

“The Austraeoh is docked,” Blumiere pointed out.

Eve didn’t let the ‘coincidence’ give her pause. “Then let’s take it. Hope Pinkie won’t mind.”

“I’m sure she’ll want nothing more than to help us find where they’ve gone,” Allure asserted…

~Mother~

…where have you been, Osanna?” the mother asked her daughter.

Osanna froze in her tracks. “M-mom!” She whirled around, putting on an innocent smile. Her mother was leaning on the counter, the record player having long since finished Cloud Atlas and now just making scratching noises. “Y-you’re awake!”

“Decided to get some reading done while listening to the symphony. Realized the time a bit too late – too engrossed in the book, you understand – and I noticed you weren’t here. I figured you’d come back soon. But then you didn’t show.”

“Ah, well, guess since we don’t have a day-night cycle here I ju-”

“You’ve never been in a place with a day-night cycle, Osanna.”

Osanna nodded slowly. “Riiiight, but biologically speaking it should still be ingrained into m-”

“Where were you, Osanna?”

“Y’know, shopping.”

“You don’t have any shopping bags.”

“Window shopping.”

“You’re not one to window shop. Or to go on random shopping sprees.”

“Why do you have to know where I’ve been anyway?”

“I don’t, but the fact that you don’t want to tell me is very very suspicious.”

Osanna opted to stop looking flustered and instead get angry. “Who cares if I’m suspicious? I can do what I want?”

“You’re fifteen.”

“Nala’s four.”

“Nala is an artificial intelligence born with the experiences of her predecessors. You are not.” The mother folded her arms. “If you’re doing something I wouldn’t approve of, it’s my job to find out what it is and make you stop.”

“Like you could stop me.”

“I could resort to tracking you. You wouldn’t even know.”

“That’s an invasion of privacy!”

“I agree, but there’s no law against it. If you’re not going to tell me what’s happening I’ll have to find out other ways.”

“Why not just let me do whatever I want, huh? Ever think about that?”

“If I let you do whatever you wanted you would have cut your arm off at the factory.”

“I was a kid.”

“You were thirteen.”

“So? Thirteen’s still a kid.”

“And fifteen isn’t?”

“No! In most human cultures I’d b-”

“Put to backbreaking labor.”

“Stop interrupting me!”

The mother folded her hands and raised an eyebrow. “Maybe if you had a point that wasn’t spoken in anger, I’d let you finish.”

Osanna ground her teeth. “How am I not supposed to be angry?”

“Well, I’m livid that you’re basically lying to me through your teeth, and that you’re clearly out doing something wrong, but you don’t see me shouting at you, do you?”

“Oh don’t you pull the high and mighty card. You raise your voice too! All those biting little jabs are anger as well.”

“True,” the mother admitted. “Who do you think looks better in this conversation?”

Osanna twitched. “Why do you always have to be the right one, huh?”

“Because I know a lot more than you about life.”

“Ha! You don’t even know what I’ve bee-!”

“Jadan.”

Osanna paled. “W-wh…”

“I was hoping you’d just tell me, prove to me that you’d at least own up and think you could defend him to me, but no.”

“How did you find out!?”

“I got worried when you weren’t coming back, so I tracked down some of your friends, asked them where you were. Had to get one of their mothers involved to get any information, but I found it. Or, rather, him.”

“Why can’t I j-”

“You can have a boyfriend, and in fact I encourage it. What is not okay is not telling me about it. And then hiding what you’re doing. I know very little about Jadan – I know his family is complete trash, but that’s it. And were this another situation I’d love to meet him. But you’ve turned this into something that isn’t about him. It’s about you being dishonest.” She took a step forward, glaring.

“You would never have said he was okay!”

“Maybe not. But by trying to hide him, you’ve made sure of that.”

Osanna’s features twisted into surprise, then deep sorrow, then rage. “FUCK YOU!”

“And we’ve devolved into swears. Brilliant. How a-”

Osanna ran out the door, leaving her mother’s once-confident face suddenly one of deep uncertainty and fear.

“Osanna!”

Osanna didn’t look back. She just ran…

~Harlequin~

…Dimitri ran through the wilds of his world, approaching the megalith.

The tremendous metallic structure glowed blue near the top, but the bottom was completely dead as far as he knew. Granted, his people never went near these things; all the metal material they had was from the remnants they found while farming – fragments buried deep within the earth over the eons. They were all too busy to explore.

They came from a time when the empire was still around. Dimitri didn’t even know how long ago that was.

What he did know was that he was exiled and he had something to prove.

Images flashed through his mind, making him stumble across the grassy hills. He saw the terrors of his mind screaming, telling him to stay away from the megalith. To avoid the fire.

He wasn’t going to do any such thing. Screw the nightmares. They were just his brain tormenting him, as it always had. Always.

Always.

He ran inside the megalith. At the ground level, there were holes in the shell easily large enough for him to walk through. The interior’s floor was made of dirt similar to that outside – though for all he knew this was just an eternity’s-worth of dust on top of the real floor of the megalith. The walls were metal, and the only things inside were large pieces of scaffolding. This far down, virtually everything was broken – but he could see blue lights far above him.

He did some quick calculations, looking for the optimum path to the top. The pieces of scaffolding were at steep angles in many places, and not all of them connected properly… It would be a long climb, and if he fell he would easily die.

Really, though, who cared about that? Not the Chief, not the town, not his father. Maybe his mother. Maybe.

She still found him an embarrassment.

Only the children would really care, and they would be taught to forget he ever existed: the man with the broken mind.

He didn’t deliberate anymore. He grabbed hold of one of the broken railings, pulling himself up a steep metal slope. He put all the strength he could into his arms, pulling himself higher and higher. He had been prepared for the scaffolding to slip from his motion, but it was made of sterner stuff than that. No matter what he did, he couldn’t budge the scaffolding anymore than it already was.

It made him wonder what had managed to break these things. There were few sharp edges, mostly bends in the metallic substance, with perhaps a few pieces missing. As if the lower levels had been run through some sort of pasta maker and then allowed to dry wherever they ended up.

As he got higher and higher – a feat which took multiple hours of climbing, though given his lifestyle this wasn’t that much of a strain on him – the lights got closer and the scaffoldings became less and less warped. He was soon able to climb up actual ladders instead of walking on them awkwardly, and found that he no longer had to pull himself up angled walkways. Everything was leveling out.

Some of the blue lights came from mechanical devices in the wall that were beyond Dimitri’s knowledge. Flashes of inspiration may have flickered in his mind – lightning, wires, and tremendous spheres of white light – but he ignored them.

But he did see something that really caught his eye. Near the top of the megalith there was a platform swirling with blue energy. He felt it call to him.

He walked up a small flight of stairs toward the swirl. He was breathing heavily, but he barely noticed. All he saw was the light. The energy.

Inwardly, he screamed. He shoved that out of his mind.

He pressed his hand into the vortex.

DOWN. DOWN. DOWN. DOWN. DOWN.

“SHUT UP!” He shouted. It reacted to his deep, passionate emotion – and he was flooded with the power within. His hands sparkled with quadrilateral shapes, sparkling like he was part of some digitized environment.

Not that he understood this. He just thought they were squares and rectangles flowing all over his body.

A normal person would have screamed. Dimitri laughed. He had no idea what any of this was, but he already loved it. It felt… right.

Also wrong, but he hadn’t gone through much in life without feeling both.

The strange power shot forth from his hands and tore a square hole in reality. On the other side, he saw a world where the grass was blue, the sky was a dull rust-red, and there were two moons.

There was also a purple-haired woman with dark brown skin trying in vain to fight off a strange monster made of shadow and bone. It gnashed its teeth at her, ready to devour another meal.

Dimitri acted without thinking. He snapped his fingers, prompting a black wireframe box to appear around the shadowy beast. The box seemed to twirl before compressing the beast into a two-dimensional image. The beast couldn’t comprehend its new existence – it tried to run away, but tripped on an object that had depth it couldn’t see. It fell down, flat against the ground.

With another finger snap, Dimitri crumpled the beast into nothing. “Voila!” He noticed the woman looking at him. He made a quick bow. “And you have been saved by my… magic.”

The woman looked at him and smiled. “Thank you.”

“Ah, it is but another day in the life of Dimitri. Perhaps not the most normal of days, but every day is another day is it not? By definition.”

The woman chuckled.

Dimitri stared at her in disbelief. Even if she wasn’t a member of his race, she clearly was fully grown. “This is quite unexpected. Someone who finds me amusing?”

“You’ve got the gusto of a performer, of course I do,” she said, extending a hand. “I’m Thea.”

Dimitri eagerly grabbed her hand in his own. “It’s great to meet you! You wouldn’t believe the life I’ve had.”

“Oh, wanna swap stories? I’ve got a lot! Not to mention I’m very curious about that square thing behind you.”

“A portal. A way to travel from one realm to another…”

~Twilence~

“…can’t establish a portal back,” Creek said, tapping buttons on the Orchid. “But we knew that was going to happen.”

“Sure,” Mite said.

I spread my wings out and cracked them like they were knuckles. “Prepare for combat the moment we open the hatch.”

“What should I expect?” Creek asked.

I tossed her a laser gun. “Don’t get close.”

“Translation: let Vriska handle it,” Vriska said, generating her fluorite octet. “They won’t know what hit them.”

“Neither of those answer my question.”

“Monsters. Expect monsters,” I added, twirling my hoof around.

“For about three seconds,” Vriska said.

“Betting,” Mite added.

“Oh you’re on!”

“I’m betting against Vriska,” I said.

“And now I’m dropping the bet,” Vriska muttered. “Just open the fucking hatch.”

Creek readied the gun with one hand and opened the back hatch with the other. The back of the Orchid slid open, revealing a jungle filled with an astounding variety of trees – a clear indication that this forest was made of species from dozens, if not hundreds, of different universes.

Waiting outside were a dozen creatures made out of sackcloth and sharp metal. The majority were scarecrow-like creatures, with knives instead of fingers and mouths that were sewn shut. Others resembled animals, one in particular looked like a small dragon crossed with a cobra and a crab.

They didn’t wait – they attacked.

Vriska had the same idea. She stole one’s luck with ease and drove her blade through another. The blade prompted cotton to burst through the seams of the sackcloth creature. It lost some of its mobility, but it kept moving – though the one who had its luck stolen crumpled into a lifeless blob.

The fluorite octet flew, landing on the ground and producing a ghostly viper that removed the head of another sackcloth creature.

Creek fired her weapon at one of the creatures before it made it to Vriska. Her aging hand was shaking as she did so, but she hit it nonetheless, burning one of its arms into nothing. She let out a soft sigh of relief before aiming once more.

Then I unleashed my spell. It was a quick one focused on only the horrendous creatures I knew would still be standing after my friends did their next attacks. Every last one of them got cut in half by a magical construct blade that existed just barely long enough to do the job. They fell to the ground like candy – Vriska taking care of two more with Creek shooting the most distant one.

The unique dragon-chimera one didn’t even get the opportunity to show us its special abilities. Which I found acceptable, seeing as we weren’t anywhere close to the really interesting enemies yet.

Plus, I wasn’t exactly in the mood for fun at the moment. The parts of the story above and below that were blocked off… well, they were concerning me. This event was apparently deeply connected to other events I wasn’t allowed to see. …Or perhaps I did see them, and just didn’t know what they were.

Regardless, that had me worried. Because nothing I saw about this world made it particularly worthwhile. …The Dark Tower existed here in a physical form, yes, I knew that, but it did that in many other universes as well. I couldn’t see our actions here interfering with the nature of the story too much.

Perhaps it was a tangential length of ka? Or maybe a-

“Sleeping?” Mite asked.

I shook my head. “Oh, sorry. No, just distracted by the winds of fate. Nothing new.”

“Right.”

“I’m serious! I don’t know anything new yet!”

Creek looked to me. “You’re worried.”

“A little,” I admitted. “There’s something I’m not seeing. I bet we change something major without realizing it on our little journey here. Can’t figure out what it is though.”

“You just see the story as normal.”

I nodded. “Can’t find the tangential story. I’m sure there is one. Maybe I should stop digging for it, though, it doesn’t appear to matter to us at this point in time.”

“Analysis!” Mite piped up, funneling information into the Orchid’s computer and putting an end to the conversation. We looked at the data Mite had harvested from the corpses of the sackcloth monsters, not all that surprised by what we found.

“Transformed beings,” Vriska said, folding her arms.

“All of them were once human…” Creek said, shaking her head. “How horrible…”

“Not all,” I said. “Look, that was only the ‘scarecrow’ ones. The others had evidence of simple animals on them.”

“Not a disease though.”

I nodded. “Definitely not.”

“Can you tell us what it is?” Vriska asked.

“Yeah, but I’m not going to. There’s a place we can stop for information to deduce that.” I trotted outside and took in a breath of fresh air. “So, where do you think we should go?”

Creek pursed her lips. “Mite, closest sign of civilization?”

“Northwest,” he responded.

“Then that’s where we’ll go.”

Vriska shrugged. “Eh, I don’t see why not. We’re taking the Orchid this time. I’m not going to have her get locked up in a government bunker again.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine, just cloak her. Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it.”

We closed the back hatch of the Orchid and moved across the land toward the nearest civilization Mite had been aware of. We entered an area with a deep fog…

I sensed that we had missed something. A cottage with a nice couple waiting for new travelers. But their story wasn’t to intersect with ours. Our destiny was within the gray mist…

~Theater~

…the gray static dissipated from the theater screen, revealing a man in a top hat and cliché steampunk goggles. “By Renthalia, we’ve done it!”

What even IS Renthalia? the man who was the audience wondered.

“We have twisted the very multiverse we find ourselves in!” the man declared – his name eluding the audience. “The Downstreamers have moved their finite multiverse into a truly infinite one! Everything everywhere in every possible reality is at our disposal! Nothing matters! Nothing! Ahahaha!”

And then the theater screen revealed that the steampunk man was talking from a holographic television screen. The video paused and zoomed out, showing a much more ‘futuristic’ setting with a trio of women who represented Downstreamers.

“Huh. Meta,” the man said through the noises of popcorn.

“They were wrong,” the lead woman said. “We did not create a truly infinite multiverse.”

“We didn’t? Then… what did we do?”

“Found the foundation of all reality,” she responded walking gracefully around the holographic screen. “No offense to our originators in metatime, but they made a major mistake. They assumed that they were finding universes when they put more and more energy into it. They were not. They were creating them.”

“How do you create a universe without knowing it!?”

“The Sea of Infinite Possibility,” she said, holding up a hand to the sky. “The chance of anything to exist. Drive the proper prerequisites and energy into the nothingness, and a universe is created. Any universe is created. We had utter mastery over our multiversal cluster, but a poor understanding of the true scope of the Sea. We thought the energy was a transformation. It was just a foolish mistake. The multiverse is still finite, we’ve just created any universe we wanted to encounter.”

“Well if it’s that big of a problem, how did we figure out we were wrong?”

“We ran into another dimensional society.”

The other women gasped. “We would have known about this!”

Yeah, they would have. Time was pretty meaningless to them. As were secrets.

“It is extremely recent. They are called the Chousin, and what they are is not important. We far outclass them in every way, even though they are apparently one of the higher races in the ‘multiverse’. What is important is what we learned from them. The multiverse is finite. We have been confined to our ‘local’ multiverse purely by a chance lottery in the multiversal connection game. And there is a controlling artifact of the multiverse. The Dark Tower.”

“The Dark Tower?”

“A structure built in metatime immemorial that treats existence like a story.”

“A story? What does that even mean?”

“It means we need to know more,” the third woman said. “We need to spread out into this new multiverse and uncover everything we can.”

The first woman nodded. “Of course. Expansion is expected to be easy, especially since we have uncovered simpler methods of multiversal travel. There are some rumors of higher societies that will take issue to our rapid expansion, but the Chousin have indicated nothing close to our level of domination over our universes.”

“We must be ready for anything,” the second said.

“Of course.”

“Now, we have uncovered a relative map of the multiverse from the Chousin…”

The man groaned. Was this recap of a conversation ever going to end…?

~Mother~

…It never ends!” the mother blurted, venting to her husband.

He put his hands together and adjusted his glasses. “Dear, everything ends.”

“I know that. I know that. I know that.”

He raised an eyebrow.

She sighed, slumping into the couch next to him. “What are we going to do with her?”

“Let everything cool off for a while, actually meet this Jadan guy, an-”

“Actually meet him!?”

“For all we know he’s a nice guy and she’s been telling him we’ll take her away from him. That’s basically how my first relationship went.”

The mother looked at the ceiling. “I suppose I just don’t have anything to go off of…”

“You are right to be mad. She needed to know that. And she’s not going to get off without any scratches. Lying, yelling, disrespect, swearing, deception, oo-ee she’s made a long list for us. But if we ruin something that might actually be good for her, that’s on us.”

“Yeah. You’re right. That would be on us. But what are we going to do to her that doesn’t interfere with her relationship? …Assuming he’s a decent person.”

“She’s still young enough to be grounded. You had a point about that whole tracker thing. Show disrespect, get disrespect in return.”

“I don’t feel comfortable doing that. It… reminds me too much of the past.”

He sighed. “…I know.”

“We are parents and sometimes we have to do things that hurt us to help them. I know.” She fidgeted with her fingers. “Is that why she’s so scared of us?”

“Literally any teenager would be scared of their parents’ response to a relationship,” he pointed out. “We have the power to end it. Any chance of her happiness being taken away is met with the largest NO any human being has to offer. Even if it’s not really happiness, she thinks it is.”

“And so comes the problem. If we have to stop it, she hates us.”

“And since she’s a teenager she doesn’t really see how we can agree with her on just about anything.”

“Rebelllllion,” the mother said, holding onto the ‘l’ as long as she could to make a point she hadn’t formed clearly. “I’d prefer it if she was scared because of my eyes.”

“Your eyes are beautiful.”

“My eyes are soulless black pits into nothingness.”

He rolled his eyes. “She’s grown up with them. She’s used to it.”

The mother nodded, biting her lip.

“She’s really gotten to you, hasn’t she?”

“Of course she has. I don’t know how to deal with this.”

“Here’s a secret. I don’t really know what to do either.”

“What was that thing your dad told us? That parenting’s one of those things you never get to practice before it happens?”

“Something like that.”

“Everyone has to just figure it out…” she mused. “I think we need to go find her.”

“I think we need to give her some time before we jump to that.”

“I’m worried.”

“As much as you may not want to hear this, she did prove she could take care of herself.”

The mother put a hand to her face. “Oh. I guess she did come home safe… and had a network to protect her… from us. It’s just… she didn’t want to involve us.”

“A lot of her life won’t involve us.”

“Is that always how it works?”

“Hm? No, I was rather mild-mannered. But if you’d had a normal childhood you would have definitely done what she’s doing.”

“Gee, thanks.”

He smirked. “Rebelliousness is attractive.”

She let out a snort.

“What?”

“That was dumb.”

He shrugged. “I have to be dumb sometimes. Balances the scales of existence.”

“Balance…” the mother shook her head. “She resents us for what we are.”

“When someone has control over you and you have no choice in the matter, well, most people will take issue with that…”

~Theater~

“…we, the Class 1 societies of the multiverse, have had enough of the Downstreamers!” a ‘Scion of the Chousin’ said, slamming his staff into the ground.

The inaccuracies in this scene are incredible.

Most of the individuals in the room didn’t need names. The one-man audience knew who they were supposed to represent anyway – Witches’ Senate, Hadou, the Watchers, Yggdrasil, the Abstracts, the Fey Web, and the Chousin. Going through them in his head, the Witches’ Senate was pointless, the Hadou were living universe-concepts with a tendency for drama, the Watchers were known to ‘watch time’ and not do much else, Yggdrasil was a horrendous mess of various gods of polytheistic sorts who were known for breaking their area of the multiverse something fierce, the Abstracts were deified ideals from their home universes, the Fay Web was so hateful of definition they changed their entire “society” every few weeks, and the Chousin…

Well, they were a trio of gods in reality. Apparently the makers of Downstreamers hadn’t managed to figure that out. Instead they were represented by an indeterminate number of people in fancy red robes. The only one they had gotten right was the Abstracts. But that made sense – the Abstracts were the only ones still around in any significant capacity.

He shook his head – focusing back on the deliberation. The ‘Chousin’s’ declaration had sent the Seats into an uproar. Seven Class 1s, two Class 2s that were basically worthless, and an empty seat because the Downstreamers weren’t invited to this meeting. Not that the ‘multiversal overlords’ would have cared if they were asked to come.

“I SAY WE BAND TOGETHER AND OVERTHROW THEM!” a Hadou shouted. “They control everything. It is only a matter of time before they decide we need to be brushed aside!”

“Think for a moment, idiot,” a Yggdrasil god spoke – probably supposed to be Zeus. “Even if we banded together, what can we do? They’ve made the Spline bend to their will, reinforced the Strands, and indicated an ability to know everything happening in every universe live as it happens. They’ve achieved mastery of psychohistory and other esoteric sciences, blending them with the powers spirit, arcane, and eldritch. The only thing they have not demonstrated control over is the Dark Tower itself! Even together, we do not have that capability!”

“There are those among us who do,” a Watcher said. “The Chousin and Abstracts have among them beings worthy of the title ‘God’.”

This caused an uproar among Yggdrasil and the Hadou, since they liked to be considered deities as well.

“Silence,” a ‘Chousin’ said. “You may speak the truth. But have you considered what the cost would be to remove them from us?”

“IT WOULD ALL BE WORTH IT!” the Hadou blurted.

“It would not,” the Living Tribunal said. The man watching was impressed that the film company had gone out of the way to remove his neck from all shots – at least that was accurate. “Destroying all that life would be against all we stand for. The Downstreamers are not brutal. They are simply indifferent.”

“We should just live our lives,” one of the nameless Class 2s said. “They may have a presence in every universe, but what does that even mean to us? There’s a little beacon that constantly takes readings and gives them omnipotent knowledge. They could shape universes and destroy all life within, but they make universes with such ease and precision they will just create whatever they want to use themselves. They’ve never conquered any of us.”

“But they own almost every universe in existence,” a Hadou pointed out – this one portrayed by a muscular man with a handlebar mustache. “But we own our universes.”

The Living Tribunal sighed. “There can be joint ownership. The Downstreamers, for all their power, only want their omnipotence machines to work. They could care less what we do so long as we don’t try to remove them. The only reason you have such a bad history with them is because you were willing to go to the brink of extinction to keep survey equipment out of your worlds.”

“They are a threat,” a Watcher said. “Do not discount them. They may have a regard for life and a modicum of respect for our existence, but they will soon run out of ways to expand their knowledge. There will come a point where their omnipotence is absolute. At which point they will ask themselves how they can progress further, much like the Builders themselves.”

“The One Above All has true omnipotence,” a Chousin said.

“Limited by the Dark Tower!” a Yggdrasil god retorted – Sleipnir, given the horse-like appearance. “Neither He nor the Downstreamers can see what it blots out.”

“Which brings me to my point,” the Watcher continued. “They will come to the point where the Dark Tower is the only obstacle in their way. They will try to control it. One of the only reasons we tolerate the Dark Tower’s power over us is due to its truly neutral nature – none control it. If the Downstreamers were to uncover its secrets…”

“The paradox would prevent that,” a Chousin pointed out. “There is no power that can override the paradox of Roland.”

The man munched on his popcorn. That’s right, at least. I would know if it wasn’t the case.

“I did not say they would destroy it. I said control it. Find out how to get to the room at the top and stay there.”

“A danger!” Hadou said. “A tremendous danger! No one should have that power!”

“The Tower was built to be controlled by no one,” the Watcher said. “If one were to try and succeed… it would be disastrous.”

The Living Tribunal folded his arms. “Let us say you are right. Realistically, what can we do?”

“FIGHT!”

“You are the most militaristic of all of our worlds, and you lost your war with them,” the Living Tribunal pointed out.

“Your Gods,” the Watcher said.

The Chousin nodded. “We are ready to devote ourselves to the fight.”

“I AM NOT.”

The man facepalmed – they gave the One Above All a stupidly big and self-important voice. Then they had gone all super-special-effects on His body, making Him nearly impossible to look at. And they made Him the center of attention. That was definitely not how He worked.

“I TELL YOU RIGHT NOW, THERE WILL BE NO WAR AGAINST THE DOWNSTREAMERS,” the One Above All continued. “IT IS NOT JUST.”

“Says who!?”

“ME,” the One Above All Said. “YOU MAY FIGHT THEM AS YOU WISH. BUT THE AID OF THE ABSTRACTS WILL NOT BE BESTOWED TO YOU. IT WOULD NOT BE A HOLY WAR.”

“Then you will be taken out after the Downstreamers.”

“YOU WILL NOT DEFEAT THE DOWNSTREAMERS. EVEN IF I ASSISTED YOU, IT WOULD NOT HAPPEN.”

There was silence in the room.

“…There’s really nothing we can do?” a Class 2 asked.

“NO, MY CHILD. THERE IS NOT.”

“But what do we do if they go the way of the Builders? What i-”

“THEN WE STRIVE TO DO WHAT THE WEAVERS COULD NOT – ADAPT AND SURVIVE…”

~Tower~

“…Weaver? Is that suppos’t mean something to me?” Roland asked.

“Not to you. Others, perhaps,” the voice said.

“Then explain what it means.”

Weaver sighed. “Already jumping to threats and violence against an ‘opponent’ you can’t even see. I thought you were better than that, gunslinger.”

“Forgive me if I’m not very trusting at the moment.”

“You are certainly forgiven. As is Patrick, who is furiously trying to think of what I might look like so he can use his abilities on me. The white pillar in the center of this room would prevent that from working even if you could see me.”

Patrick twitched, taking a few steps back.

Roland pointed his gun at the pillar.

“That won’t do anything.”

“Ka might have other plans.”

“…Perhaps. Failing to take that into consideration was always our weakness…” He paused. “An explanation. You know who built the Tower?”

“Gan,” Roland replied.

“Yes. Gan. He was a member of a society known as the Builders. He was simply the leader in charge of the project.”

Roland didn’t find this necessarily surprising, but he wasn’t sure if it was accurate. He didn’t particularly care. “And what does that have to do with you?”

“I was part of a society that was the Builders’ neighbors. The Weavers. Or the Weaver, now. I am the last.”

Roland’s expression tightened.

He was certainly the last as well.

“Your world moved on?” Roland asked.

“Worlds didn’t ‘move on’ before the Tower,” Weaver said. “And when they started to… We didn’t know how to compensate. We fell because of the Tower’s new control. Despite all our power; all our love for tying worlds together into brilliant art… We could not understand existence under the new rules. I still do not get the ‘heroes’, the ‘villains’, or the ‘Prophets’. Nothing. It’s all alien. I only survive by luck and ingenuity of friends long gone.”

Roland lowered the gun. “This… white thing?”

“It is our attempt to create our own Tower. Since you are here, it is clearly ineffective. I had wished to avoid your entire quest.”

“Your door had other plans.”

There was soft laughter. “The door is an inanimate object, Roland of Gilead. It cannot have plans.”

“Ka,” was all Roland said.

Weaver paused. Then he sighed. “Maybe it can… Maybe it can… It’s been eternity since the Tower was built. And still, still, I am fooled by what I am sure are the simplest of ‘narrative puzzles’.”

Roland holstered his gun. “Do you know enough that you understand we are here for a reason?”

“Yes. Though for what reason I do not know. I could supply you with weapons, but in a conflict against the Crimson King I doubt that would do much good. You already have your real weapon with you.”

Roland glanced at Patrick and nodded in understanding. The boy was drawing something fiercely. Roland looked at the pad, finding it to be nothing but gibberish.

“Do you wonder what he sees?” Weaver asked.

“You can see?”

“Minds are open books to me,” Weaver said.

This was no surprise to Roland – it was how Weaver had introduced himself. “What goes on in there?”

“Flashes of reality. Images of things far away. Memories of the trauma. His mind is undergoing many flashes right now. He sees… I think the reason you are here. But I cannot decipher that image. I am uncertain if he can either.”

Roland furrowed his brow. “Maybe we’re here to talk to you. To know you. The last of your kind, a ghost from before existence.”

“…Possibly.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Or perhaps you are just meant to get back on your quest.”

Roland shook his head. “It can wait.”

“The Dark Tower isn’t going anywhere.”

“It never does. We’ll return when called…”

~Harlequin~

…Dimitri and Thea returned from their latest escapade, appearing in the top floor of the megalith. Dimitri picked Thea up in a swirl and kissed her, the two unable to stop laughing. Thea looked much like she had when Dimitri first found her, but Dimitri had swapped out his farmer’s getup for slick performer’s gloves and a purple-black hat with three tassels.

“You’re mad!” Thea told Dimitri, punching him in the shoulder. “You could have gotten us killed!”

“Ah, but like a bear in the winter, it was all a ruse! A plot to obtain the Alamala!”

“And we didn’t get the Alamala. We ran.”

Dimitri opened up his gloved hand and revealed a golden handle. “Voila.”

“…No. Way.”

“Ahahahahaha!” Dimitri used his dimension-bending powers to teleport the handle into the air so he could catch it dramatically in his other hand. With a thought, the handle became a glowing golden sword. Then a shovel. Then a chainsaw. Then a mishmash of broken bones. A pattern of rectangles. And, finally, a seeder.

“…What’s that?”

Dimitri tapped the ground with the tool. “A farming tool. One designed to be run across the ground and deposit seeds.” He shifted it to a miniature plow. “And this also provides a plow…”

“Dimitri, what devilish plan are you coming up with?”

“You still have the Orb of Orbona, correct?”

Thea nodded, pulling out an orb of green magic. “Right here.”

“Good.” He looked down. “It’s time to show them what I’ve been doing with my banishment.”

Thea smirked. “Are you sure it’s time?”

“It’s definitely time. I’m going to save them all. And then they’ll see.

“They’ll all see.”

He didn’t bother walking down the megalith. With a snap of his fingers, the two of them were at ground level. “Have I ever said how much I love the megalith’s power?”

“Only every day.”

“It seems as though I am a parrot – woe is me!” Dimitri said, chuckling. He took her outside, showing her the rolling hills and blue sky of his world.

“Huh.”

“Yeah, it’s boring,” Dimitri said. His face twitched as everything flashed dark for a moment. “But it’s not going to be for much longer. Everyone should be hard at work in the fields. Time to blow their miniscule minds.” He let out a laugh.

With a quick teleport, he was at the edge of his parents’ farm. He transformed the Alamala into the miniature plow and started plowing perfect lines in soil that hadn’t ever been treated before. Thea began to use the orb to generate seeds from an apple she had in her pocket.

Every time Dimitri finished a row, he teleported back to the front and started cutting more lines into the ground. He decided ten furrows in the earth would be enough to get his point across.

He teleported the seeds from Thea and began depositing them in the ground. The Alamala made a several-hour job take all of three minutes. Soon, all the seeds were in the ground, ready to be grown at Thea’s command.

Dimitri looked up. He could see his parents glancing at him nervously – but they continued working endlessly on the farm, refusing to give away any of their work.

The only true audience he had was the Chief. She must have known something was up, somehow.

“Why are you back?” she demanded.

“I’m going to put on a little show, if you don’t mind,” Dimitri said, grinning.

“I do mind.”

“Don’t care. And, technically, I’m not even on your land! Look at this! BORDER field! Skirting the line as a skimmer does water. I have not set a single toe back in my father’s field.”

“Woo!” Thea said.

The Chief glanced at Thea with a confused expression, but decided not to worry about it. “I don’t want you in my sight. Get out.”

“But, Chief! I’ve figured out how to solve your hunger problem!” With a snap of his fingers, he summoned a megaphone into existence. “DID YOU HEAR THAT!? I, DIMITRI, HAVE SOLVED YOUR HUNGER PROBLEM!”

The Chief stared at the sudden existence of the megaphone, concern crossing her features.

Good. She’s already beginning to realize how wrong she was. Having her grovel will just be icing on the cake of this amazing day.

“DO ANY OF YOU WANT TO SEE IT!? DO YOU!?” Dimitri shouted. “COME ON, DON’T BE SHY! IF I DON’T PRODUCE THE FOOD I’LL DO ALL THE WORK YOU MISSED FOR YOU!”

This got a small crowd to start forming. A couple dozen – mostly the children who had looked up to Dimitri.

He grinned. “I’m going to show all of you what I’ve done.”

The Chief stepped forward. “You have interfered in th-”

“Thea? If you will.”

Thea lifted the Orb of Orbona into the air. It covered the field in green light – and in five seconds fully grown apple trees popped out of the ground, all ripe with rich red fruit. He took one off the tree, ate it, and grinned. “I could make an infinite number of these. I used my mind to find these powers in the megalith. I, the one you shunned, have solved all your problems!”

He grinned holding the apple high.

All of them – the Chief, his parents, the adults, and the children – stared at him with blank expressions…

~Merodi~

…Pinkie Pie stared into nothingness – which was basically all she could stare into these days.

“Oh, so we’re doing odd synchronicities today? Fun.”

The current pilot of the Austraeoh turned back to look at her. “Uh… Captain?”

“We’ve been added to the story. Well, I have, you’re still just the pilot. Sorry, they don’t even know your name.”

“…Oh.”

“It’s Nora, by the way, dear readers.”

“Thanks,” the pilot told Pinkie.

“Eh, if you saw what had just happened, you wouldn’t thank me.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway… Four… Three… Two… One…”

Corona, Eve, and Allure teleported onto the bridge. Pinkie unleashed her party cannon. “WELCOME ABOARD the S. S. PINKIE EXPRESS! Journeying across the multiverse in the Austraeoh since last month! Going out for one more jaunt to the D-Sphere before wrapping it up and giving O’Neill his ship back!” she winked. “Though that’s been put on hold for your very important mission.”

Eve nodded. “Right. Do you know?”

“Read it all!” Pinkie said with a salute. “Shame that you didn’t come to me first.”

“I assumed tha-”

“Shhhh, it’s all good! This means Allure gets to come along!” Pinkie pulled the small unicorn into the hug. “All four of us are here!”

“Four?” Allure blinked. “Why four?”

“The main focuses of most chapters,” Pinkie explained. “I mean, there’s been a few O’Neill and Starbeat chapters, plus people in my team, but mostly us. We are the protagonists! All together on a single mission!” She squeed. “Kinda wish I could see what my team and Pidge are up to right now, but eh, guess that’s just gonna be a mystery.”

“Anything we should know?” Corona asked. “About the story so far.”

Pinkie rubbed the back of her head. “Well… There’s a bit of a mess here. See, we’re just one of eight stories being thrown around all willy-nilly this time around. One’s about the gunslinger, the other’s a theater production about the Downstreamers, the third’s about some guy named Dimitri I have no clue about, the fourth’s some historian related to the Xeelee, the fifth’s about Nanoha’s original journey, the sixth’s about Twilence’s journey on the Nexus, and the eighth… I can’t place it.”

“So we’re the seventh?” Eve asked. “There’s a story in the relative future!?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep. And it wants to be really vague. The protagonist is only called ‘the mother!’ I mean, who does that!? For all I know it’s one of us! Nah, it’s not, but I have no idea where to place it or how it relates to us.”

“Eight stories…” Allure thought. “Is that number… significant?”

“Largest number GM could stick in without feeling overwhelmed?” Pinkie suggested with a shrug. “I have no idea. It’s still happening and I don’t have any idea about the future. I’m just making guesses. By the way, I just need some authorizations to activate the ka-twister-device-thingies and we can be on our way.”

Eve and Corona nodded, using their authority as Relations Overhead and Research Second to remove the restrictions of the Austraeoh’s ka-manipulating systems.

A million warnings spread across every screen on the ship. Despite this, Corona told Raging Sights to feed the information into the Austraeoh’s database.

Allure bit her lip. “O’Neill’s not going to be happy about us using his ship like this, is he?”

“Nope!” Pinkie said with a giggle. “But now we have an advantage – we can twist our luck to find the untraceable!”

“What Alushy would call ‘complete bullshit’,” Corona said. “And what the Flowers would call ‘primitive’.”

“Isn’t this basically what they did to find the Collector?” Allure asked.

Corona nodded. “More or less. Though if there’s as much of a maze of universes to get through as the Collector had, this is going to be a pain.”

“Let’s see!” Pinkie said, pointing a hoof forward. “Oh great computer, where to?”

The computer spat out a set of coordinates to a universe they had never been to. Or had even discovered. Completely new territory.

“Onward!” Pinkie declared.

The Austraeoh jumped universes to another Q-Sphere universe not all that far away. The computer ran the numbers again, processing where to go next.

“Aaaand this isn’t going to be instant,” Pinkie said, leaning back in the Captain’s chair. “Guess it’s going to take a while.”

Corona shrugged. “No problem. We’ve got time.”

Allure simply nodded.

“Wow. Guess we really have to go on this one, huh?” Pinkie asked. “Wonder what’s at the end of this rainbow…”

“Whatever it is, it’s not in the Q-Sphere,” Corona said, pointing at the multiversal map. They had jumped two more universes, and were already on the border with the Strands. “A Strand Outpost conspiracy, maybe?”

“A trap?” Allure wondered.

“If it was a trap they could just take us,” Eve muttered. “If they can get Arceus, they can get us.”

“Ka may be on our side,” Corona pointed out.

Eve shook her head. “Twilence would be able to defend against that. …Unless she wanted to be captured.” She rubbed the base of her horn. “…I don’t think I realized how much I depend on being able to talk to her about herself. She’s never really… consistent. Or sensical.”

“And there we are,” Corona said. “Out of the Q-Sphere…”

~Grand Tour~

…and the Horizon is finally in the ‘Q-Sphere’. The crew is ecstatic – though none more than Rarity herself. I may be glad that I’ll get to fulfill my promise soon, but she’s going to be home soon.

I can only hope it hasn’t been too long for her world. We’ve been flying for years… and the extreme levels of time dilation we have seen in this journey make us all worried. Will the TSAB be anything like we remember when we return? What about our families?

…These are not questions I like asking. I have already promised that, once we find Rarity’s home, we will cut across the Strands the ‘standard’ way to get home quickly. The Horizon was not designed for portal-based travel, but it will be significantly faster to take a highway than slowly drift through the Sea.

But we have to find her home first. We have barely entered the Q-Sphere and haven’t even found any pony worlds yet! That must come first. …Raising Heart has just informed me the first pony world we find could be hers, but somehow I doubt that. Until then, we’ll just keep moving on.

Now would be a good time to look back at our journey this far, I think. We’ve made a lot of friends along the way, telling them how to get to the TSAB. We could never stay long, but I’m certain many of them have made it back to the TSAB and started forming together. There’s even talk of forming a Q-Sphere ‘chapter’ of the TSAB separate from our home so our new friends will have a place to go. The crew is split on this – it’ll inevitably create an entity separate from our TSAB, but I don’t mind that. We don’t have to all be under one power, so long as we all share an ideal.

I think it’ll be great. It remains to be seen if we’ll do it.

But that’s the future, not the past! The past has been great too! We spent a lot of the time in what we now know is the E-Sphere, getting completely lost. But we made friends, established relations with a few multiversal societies, and got some idea of where we were going. Not enough to take the Strands highways the short way, but we got to see a lot more by taking the long route. We spent only a short time in the Cosmic Heavens – the Abstracts were kind enough to guide us through to the D-Sphere. Great people, even if they could squash us like bugs. ...We didn’t leave the ship much while we traveled through the D-Sphere, since we didn’t develop physics-anchoring magitech until near the end of our time there. And then there was Outer Existence.

I…

…Well it was interesting to see how magic in many different universes was made! It was not nice to be told we were basically worthless mages, though. I got to show a few of them what I was capable of, but I was dismissed as a ‘hero’.

…Expect another report on what that means later. …Much later. Because the conclusions I’m coming to are making me think I’m going crazy. No matter what Raising Sights tells me, I’m still going to question it.

Regardless, we’ve picked up many new crew members over the years. We’ve lost a few people, but gained many more. Nano has grown into quite the capable young woman. I now see what my superiors felt when they saw me. She’s simultaneously a great weapon… but also a human being. A human being who, because of this journey, did not retain her innocence as long as I did. It’s interesting to see a slightly harsher version of myself wandering around. How much of that is due to my presence I’m not sure. It is hard on her, but she enjoys her life.

Subaru and Ginga are good as always. Vita hasn’t changed at all this entire journey. Signum actually got married. I still can’t believe that. Takes forever to process…

I wonder if Hayate’s gotten married? If she has a family?

…I wonder how Fate’s doing.

I’ve been here a long time. I may be surrounded by friends, but there is something to be said for home. The Horizon has never been a home for me. It’s just a vessel. A vessel with a great mission – a mission to return someone home.

I think that this journey has allowed me to truly understand what Rarity has gone through. The feeling of such extreme distance from home. It’s a horrible feeling, even when you know you’ll get back…

What if we couldn’t get back…

~Twilence~

“…how long have you been trapped here in this Nexus again?” Creek asked.

Rev sat under the main altar of her church, looking up with a forlorn expression, silent. We were in the town of Lest, a ghost village filled with a misty haunted aura. The only inhabitants were Rev, the members of her church, and the undead skeleton David. Vriska was currently outside, talking to David while Creek and I talked to Rev.

I saw great importance in Rev. I saw her become part of that which I would be part of some day, Songs of the Spheres. She would be the spiritual component. One to bring up topics that normally wouldn’t. A traveler of a different sort.

“Twelve years,” Rev said, finally. “I was taken from my Equestria twelve years ago. Ended up here when it was a fully fledged civilization. Father Berton took me in and showed me the Light of the Word. And then…” She looked through the windows at the fog, imagining the sackcloth monsters prowling around outside. “…and then they came. The sackcloth puppets, a plague on the whole world. Destroying everything. Killing everything. …I have been in charge of this church for seven of those years.”

“A terrible story, Reverend,” I said, bowing my head in respect. “Why do you not go to the city?”

“To Rome? …This place is too important to me. To us.” She lit her horn. “I have the power to keep everything running, and the monsters never attack the church. I can keep us alive. I just…” her eternally sad face deepened considerably. “I just wish he was still around. There are so many things I would have liked to ask him.”

Creek put a hand on her. “We all have things we want to ask our mentors that… we don’t get to. There’s always lost time somewhere.”

Rev nodded. “Life is short. We are but grains of sand on an eternal beach.”

Creek nodded. “Exactly.”

“I am truly sorry you’ve ended up here. You should head to Rome. There’s nothing for you here. You can enjoy your lives. Being stuck in this universe isn’t as bad as most people who come through here think it’ll be.”

I smiled. “I know that.” I also know that you’ll leave once the demons are gone, find the Dark Tower, and escape. You’ll work through your personal difficulties first – slowly. But you’ll come out of this stronger than ever before.

“Where did the sackcloth monsters come from?” Creek asked.

Rev shrugged. “I do not know. They appeared, the mist came in, Father Berton…”

“They got him? I’m sorry…”

“I don’t know. He… he just vanished one day. I always knew it could happen, given the danger of what he did – demon expulsion – but it was so sudden.”

Creek pulled Rev into a hug. “You’ll get to see him again one day, right?”

Rev smiled sadly. “Yes. But you don’t believe that.”

“You do. You can use it as a comfort.”

Rev nodded. “…Thanks.” The two of them left the embrace. “You’re welcome to stay the night. I can give you food and supplies for your journey.”

I smiled. “Thanks. But we have our own supplies. We can make it to Rome.”

“You certainly have the power to fend the beasts off. Maybe you could replace Rome’s defense towers.”

“Defense towers?” Creek asked.

Rev nodded. “There’s tall towers all around Rome, from what I hear. They shoot any monster that gets close, keeping them out of the city. Even the dinosaur ones.”

Creek blinked. “Dinosaur?”

“Dinosaur.”

“Dinosaur,” I affirmed. “Don’t worry, I can take care of them. And so can Vriska.”

Rev forced a smile. “Well… I wish you luck.”

I glanced at Vriska. “We’ll take it.”

Creek shook her head in mild disapproval. We went outside to Vriska and David.

“I do a lot of thinking out here, you know?” David was saying.

Vriska blinked, glazed over. “Uh-huh…”

“So, you see, there’s a b- oh HELLO!”

“Oh thank gog,” Vriska said, leaping up to Creek and myself. “So what are we doing?”

I smiled at David. “Sorry, private conversation.”

“No issue, no issue,” David said, tipping his hat. “I’ll just get back to my pacing…”

I waved friendly at him.

“What’s the conspiracy in Rome with those towers and the demons?” Creek asked me.

“Not even prefacing it this time?” I ribbed.

“It’s clear that’s what’s going on.”

“Crystal,” Mite interjected.

I stretched my wings. “Well, yeah. It’s somewhat simple, actually. Father Berton was exorcising demons, and one in particular was proving to be difficult. He failed to get rid of it completely, and it took him over – discovering its power as a true puppetmaster creature. It had the ability to transform life into horrendous sackcloth monsters. Simple enough, right?”

“There’s something with Rome.”

“Rome’s a lie,” I said. “It’s not a safe haven. The demon runs the place from the sidelines, advertising the city as a safe haven. He really just wants power.”

Vriska smirked. “Ah, so we’ve found out who we need to beat up.”

“Bingo. We take the demon out, free this world of its sackcloth plague, and tell the world of the lie of Rome. It could be a great mystery that took eons to solve – but I would kinda like to not leave Rarity hanging. So we’re going to dust through this one.”

Creek smiled. “I suppose I can go one adventure without doing any actual detective work. I won’t be very helpful with the guns-blazing approach, though…”

“Psh, you sell yourself short. You’re going to be the one who takes him out! I can see it!”

“Amazing,” Mite said.

“It’s the benefit of forbidden knowledge,” Vriska said…

~Historian~

….the Prognosticus contained a lot of forbidden knowledge. The first indication the sub-tribe had was with the creation of Pixls. (I need a name for the sub-tribe in this era, even though they don’t have one. Perhaps I should name it after myself. Or would that be too arrogant?) A scientist known to us as Narvarim created the magitek entities with information from the Prognosticus involving souls, magic, and purpose. These Pixls allowed the sub-tribe to create vast cities, becoming the tools of the physically weak people. (Quite a time it must have been when we were physically weak. So glad this isn’t the current era.)

This was the height of our people’s power, but there was a fatal flaw in the system. The first Pixl, the Queen Pixl, eventually became horrified with the way her people were treated as tools with no rights. So she led a rebellion. The Pixl Uprising was a horrid part of our history, spanning several worlds…

…the war ended with all but one of the original Pixl wielders dead. Most Pixls had fallen as well. This last Pixl wielder was known as Desan. After the final battle with the Queen Pixl where he lost almost all of his friends and family, he met with the creator of this whole problem, Navarim. (Problem? Word choice.) Navarim revealed what Pixls actually were – the souls of the dying transformed into another state, used as components in the creations. Desan was understandably horrified by this revelation. (Reasonably).

Navarim claimed that he had never taken a life to make a Pixl, merely taken advantage of those who were already lost. Desan didn’t care. Navarim was executed on the spot for crimes against the tribes. (Serves the bastard right.) Desan took the Prognosticus and hid it away so none would ever be able to use the words inside it for such horrible things again. He didn’t tell anyone – the worlds believed the book had just vanished after the events. There were many angered that the book could not be used to uncover new secrets, but all accepted it with time.

This was the beginning of the division within the sub-tribe. As their power was suddenly taken away from them in the Pixl Uprising, two distinct patterns of thought began to emerge. There were those who held to ideals of harmony and nature, refusing to strengthen themselves to make up for the loss of Pixls. The other sought power for themselves to adapt – led by Desan.

Thus the divisions we all know today were created. The Tribe of Ancients and the Tribe of Darkness. They existed alongside each other for some five hundred years. It slowly became a tense standoff, but there was no chance of violence or hatred. Only idealistic division.

And then the Tribe of Darkness discovered something horrendous within the Prognosticus, a prophecy that set the clock ticking for all their worlds…

~Mother~

“…time’s up,” the mother said, standing up. “I’m going to find her.”

Her husband nodded. “…It has been too long. Good luck.”

She pecked him on the cheek. “I’ll need it.”

She walked out of the house and tried to call Osanna. Of course, she didn’t pick up. That wasn’t surprising, but it had been worth a shot. As she walked along the trees and toward the city proper, she made several calls – first to Osanna’s friends, asking them if they knew where she was. They were annoyingly unhelpful...

“She’s not at home?”

“I’ve been trying to reach her all day.”

“I think I saw her in town at the Grover Mall? Not sure though.”

“I… I… I don’t know! Please don’t bring my mom into this again!”

“Psh, I’m not her keeper. Who cares where she is?”

“I would say she’s with Jadan, but I haven’t exactly seen him around either…”

“This is Jadan. Please leave a message after the beep.”

“Oh, so the sea witch is calling me about her daughter? Funny. Real funny.”

“…I saw her.”

The mother almost hung up by reflex. “Wait, what? Susan, you did?”

“Yeah. Seventh marketplace. She was with some guy I didn’t recognize. I was a bit busy wrangling my kids, so by the time I looked back…”

“Thanks. That’s all I need.” The mother hung up and looked around. She was in the city now. The seventh marketplace was a fair distance away…

Who cared if she always walked everywhere? For all she knew, time could be of the essence. She stepped onto a public teleporter terminal and appeared right in the middle of the marketplace. This particular one had been going for a natural aesthetic – trees seemingly growing out of the brown brick ground, the entire square surrounded by a red ring of roses. As usual for a marketplace there were a ton of stands and people shouting everywhere.

She ignored them all. She walked up to a pair of stands she knew. One contained a raptor who sold boots of all shapes and sizes, while the other was Seskii’s potion shop.

“Mr. Raven,” the mother said. “Have you seen Osanna?”

Mr. Raven blinked his reptilian eyes, putting a claw to his chin. “Hrm… I can’t say I have.”

Seskii coughed. “I have. She was here with Jadan. He tried to buy what I’m going to call an ‘enjoyment brew’. I of course told him no – he’d misuse it – then he blows his lid and takes her off that direction.”

“Thanks.” She moved to follow the trail.

“You won’t be able to find him like that. This is a big city. You’ll just lose them.”

The mother clenched her fingers. “What do you recommend then? That’s the only lead I have!”

Mr. Raven chuckled. “Seskii has more sources than just memory. I find it surprising that you don’t know about that.”

Seskii tapped her head. “I can still see the story.”

The mother stared at her. “Right… Seskii. Where are they?”

“You’ll have to go talk to Jadan’s family to find that one out,” Seskii said.

A sinking feeling hit the mother like a rock in her stomach. “The Emersons…” She put a hand to the bridge of her nose and sighed. “They’re not going to help…”

“They will. If you can put up with them.”

“They’re not going to put up with me.”

Seskii leaned in on her potion stand and raised an eyebrow.

“I know, I know, I’ll do it. But can’t you just tell me where she is?”

Seskii shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not Twilence. But I know that’s where you have to go. So shuffle off to Buffalo, seize the day!”

The mother nodded – then ran off. Toward the Emerson residence.

She began to go over exactly how she was going to give them a piece of her mind…

~Harlequin~

“…what evil have you brought us, Dimitri!?” his father shouted.

Dmitri forced his smile to hold. “EVIL!?”

“You have brought back the bane of the empire!” he shouted.

“Old man, how do we have any idea what actually destroyed the empire!?”

“Records,” the Chief said. “Records that aren’t important to our life but tell us never to chance it again.”

“You build your house out of remnants you hypocrite!”

“And you are no longer Dimitri,” his father said, holding his spade like a weapon.

Thea twitched. “Hey! He’s still your son, judgmental ass!”

“And you…” the Chief looked at her with a steeled expression. “You are not one of us. You are not welcome.”

“Screw that, he’s one of you! He’s been out exploring, looking for a way to save you all!”

“We work on our own!”

“You idiots!” Dimitri shouted. “Winter gets worse and worse every year. You’re struggling to produce enough crops. To keep your way of life sacred and sanctified, you blame the lower yield on the ‘immature’ who ‘don’t work like they should’. That has nothing to do with it! No matter how hard you work, eventually the winter will destroy you!” He held his hand wide. “I’m giving you a way to save yourselves!”

“At the price of total destruction!”

Dimitri tossed the Alamala away. “Even if you were right about this tool, that green orb over there? It only knows how to grow! It is a seed of beauty in a midst of destruction. It makes life.”

“You could grow a tree in someone’s house and kill them instantly,” the Chief said. “It is but a small taste of the horrors that eventually brought the empire down! All because people got creative with how they used their tools.”

“Oh, is that it!?” Dimitri shouted. “Ahahahaha – oh if only I’d known it was my creativity that set me apart! That would have made so much sense!” He hit himself in the head and rolled his eyes. “It’s like a fish falling from the sky. Behold, the natural order!”

“You are not the natural order,” his father spat. “You are a mutant who should never have been born.”

“Ahahahaha if I had a nickel for every time I’d heard that!”

They looked at him in confusion, no idea what a nickel was.

Dimitri smirked. “Look at that, they don’t understand. They don’t see. You imbeciles. It’s either this, or a slow painful death over the next generation!”

The children had begun to look frightened. The Chief decided this meant enough was enough. She drew her sword – one of the few real weapons in the settlement. “Dimitri, or whatever you’ve become, leave. Or we will be forced to remove you.”

Thea laughed. “Oh wow, they think they can take you.”

“How unfortunate.” Dimitri snapped his fingers and the Chief’s sword broke in half.

Dimitri’s father charged him with a shovel, leading a charge of several other adults. Dimitri snapped his other fingers, removing all of their weapons from their hands. He specifically had his father’s shovel smack him in the head, knocking him to the ground.

“You can’t make me leave,” Dimitri said with a smirk. “I’m going to show you how wrong you all are and you can’t do anything about it.”

“What have you done with my son!?” his mother shouted.

This was the first thing that actually cut Dimitri. His eternal smile faltered. “…Mom…”

“Dimitri would never do this! Dimitri would never give in to the dr-”

“My dreams have nothing to do with this!” Dimitri spat. Images of fire, the megaliths joined together with harmonious light, and the Tower pushed through his mind. He ignored every last one of them. A splitting headache formed. “This is my choice!”

His mother backed away from him, afraid. “Dimitri… If it is still your choice. Leave. Don’t come back. Don’t destroy us.”

That did it. Something snapped inside Dimitri. “Heh… Heheheh…. HeheheehheHAH!” He slung his arm around Thea and pointed a joking finger at all of them. “Guess what? I choose to stay. I choose to give you everything you need. You don’t get a choice in the matter.”

The Chief glared at Dimitri. “You think you bring us aid. But you only taint the water.”

“You know what, everyone but you gets to experience my boon. I know a world with giant shadow monsters. Thea’s actually from there, you know? Horrid place.” He snapped his fingers, giving the Chief back a fully-repaired sword. “Ciao.” With a second snap, he sent her to the other world.

Everyone gasped.

“I’m the chief now! And I say that you all can stop working!” He tossed apples at them. “We’ve got food for eternity. We are now birds in the sky, free of our shackles!” He spread his arms wide, grinning.

No one smiled back. Most were trembling in fear. The children were crying.

Dimitri shrugged. “You’ll learn to accept this in time. Come, Thea, let’s explore our new house.”

Thea clapped her hands. “Great!”

The two of them vanished, taking over the now-empty house of the Chief. Dimitri walked up to the big chair the Chief had used to listen to complaints, sitting down on it.

“How’s it feel to be king?” Thea asked.

“Like it’s how things should be… I can shape this world to the way of perfection. Perhaps I can become even more than a king, with time…”

~Tower~

“…the Crimson King is your last enemy,” Weaver said.

Roland nodded, finding that no words were needed in his response.

“Do you know what he is?”

“…Son of Arthur Eld and the Crimson Queen.”

“True. But it doesn’t truly encapsulate what he is. Tell me, what do you think his goal is?”

“Destroy the Dark Tower and unleash the demons of Prim kept at bay. Weaver, why the questions?”

“I’m getting your mind into the right place. You are mostly correct in what you know, but you don’t know the whole story. Think of what you have learned here. If I come from before the Dark Tower, and the demons of Prim are often cited as coming from ‘outside’ the creation, what does that mean they are?”

Roland didn’t dignify that with a response.

“…I see you already understand. The demons of Prim are simply beings like myself, though even less capable of coping with the change. Ones shifted to tell stories of unfathomable cosmic horror. A truly detestable fate.”

Roland raised an eyebrow. “Are you trying to tell me he has pure motives?”

“Oh, no, his goal of destroying the Dark Tower would not return them to the way of old, they would simply be able to unleash their horror without the Tower’s limitations. They would be able to devour most everything, no matter what the Weaver creations have to say about it. There’s nothing that could stop them, now.”

Roland nodded. “But that’s not a problem anymore.”

“No. You stopped his destruction of the beams. And when you ascend the Dark Tower, the mistakes of the Imperium will be rectified.”

“I thought you didn’t understand ka?”

“I can understand what your purpose is,” Weaver said. “I can see readings on you other than ka. Time bends around you in a unique way, unlike all others. I know h-”

“Don’t say,” Roland said. “I’m not meant to know.”

“…If that is what you believe. Perhaps what happens in the Tower is private. I have considered entering it myself, you understand. It is possible I will try once my work is complete. Perhaps not.”

“If you’re askin’ me, I say don’t do it. The journey does things to you.”

“There have been many who have sought out the Dark Tower, Roland. Not all suffer as you do.”

Roland had no response to this.

Weaver didn’t say anything either.

Patrick continued scribbling in his book.

“Weaver, what is your work? What are you doing as the last of your kind?”

“You could say I have my own Tower to get to – but it is less of a physical journey and more the task of a manager. …Bad metaphor. I need to stop trying to take ka into account…

~Twilence~

…I made a huge mistake. I had forgotten the possibility of ka manipulation shrouding my vision.

We knew exactly who the enemy was – a demon by the name of Polymarchus who had founded Rome right after the sackcloth demons appeared. We knew he was using the body of Father Berton and hiding behind an army of carefully controlled puppets. So we broke into his private residence with the plans of taking him on directly.

I saw him falling to our hands easily. He was just a demon in an old man’s body with a few sackcloth monsters doing his bidding. It would take a couple minutes, but he would fall, we would free the city, and we would end the sackcloth plague.

That’s not what happened.

Because one of the beings he had turned into a sackcloth monster was a Flower.

And since I hadn’t been aware of that until this very moment, that ruined everything.

The four of us had walked into Polymarchus’ ‘estate’, ready for anything except him knowing we were coming.

We broke through the doors to his central room. His estate had a dark aesthetic due to the deep blue material the building was made of and the sharp spires adorning the building, giving it a mixture of futuristic and gothic elements. This particular room was circular and had screens all along every wall, showing many different locations across the planet.

The bus-sized flower was suspended in midair in the center of the room. Its leaves and petals were made entirely of sackcloth and numerous wires snaked out from its body and into nearby screens, where several lines of ‘story’ were written at a time, feeding off the Flower’s power. No doubt it had a Flower ka-shaping device inside of it somewhere.

Polymarchus was standing right under the flower. He wore a hat made of white straw and a robe of similar materials. I knew his body wasn’t fully organic, but from this angle nobody could tell that there was cotton and stuffing mixed with his blood.

Mite and Creek were captured instantly. The Flower had known exactly where they would appear. Mite was encased in a power-draining field. “DANGER!” he shouted. “RUuuuuun-n-n-n___” his voice glitched out as he reverted to his dormant state. Creek was encased in a pair of black, magical bands. She gasped in sharp pain and fell to her knees – trembling.

Vriska readied her dice. “Fucking assho-”

“Don’t!” I said, holding up a wing. “Creek has death bracelets!”

“Good horn,” Polymarchus said, smirking. “I see you’ve uncovered the little trap I’ve put you in. At any moment, with a mere thought, Mite and Creek will be dead. For now, they live. And they will stay that way if you do what I want. And you know I’m telling the truth.”

“You can have your Flower alter that truth at any moment,” I said, grinding my teeth.

“True. And Vriska? Stop trying to steal my luck. There is a laser gun trained on the back of your head. It may not hit you, but it can easily ensure this is a very, very Heroic death.”

Vriska blinked. “Wha…”

“I’ve been prepared for you to come since you first arrived,” Polymarchus said. “The Flower is a great source of information. Most of you are completely useless, but one of you…” he looked at me. “One of you is something worthwhile…”

I glared at him. “What do you want me to do?”

“Work for me not as a mindless slave like this Flower, but put true creativity into your storytelling. As much as the Flower is able to manipulate events over a small span of time, I need grander things. The city of Rome needs to expand!” He threw his arms wide. “The stars of the Nexus call! And no one can stop my rampage. Nobody who comes into this universe ever leaves!”

I said nothing to correct his false assumption. “What makes you think I’ll let you?”

“Because you can’t let them die.”

“Yes I can,” I asserted. I wasn’t bluffing either – I could do it, if it needed to be done.

“No, you can’t. Because you know Vriska and yourself have to continue on to greater things.” He grinned. “You’re trapped in your own sights, Twilence.”

I realized he was right. It was a fact that Vriska and I couldn’t die here, no matter what the Flower did. The problem was, that didn’t mean I could be careless. We might only survive because I agreed to do what Polymarchus wanted.

“I can see the gears turning in your mind, Twilence… Like a rat lost in a maze. The only way out is in the mousetrap.”

“How right is he?” Vriska asked.

“Very,” I said. “He’s very very right. If I fight, there’s a high chance you die. And that’s impossible. So I can’t take that course of action.”

“But, if you listen to me, everyone lives!” Polymarchus said with a grin. “And I’m sure you and Vriska will live on to do… whatever it is you need to do eons from now. After you’ve given Rome its power over the stars.”

“We could try to stop you after that,” Vriska spat. “Sword to the head.”

“Ah, but the same rule will apply! I’ll have an insta-kill on Twilence. She knows she can’t die. So she won’t be able to fight back.” Polymarchus laughed. “A twist of fate you can’t escape! Defy me, death will come!”

He’s too arrogant. He will be defeated, there’s no way he won’t be. Maybe not by us, but someone else. I’ll just have to play the waiting game… I bit my lip. “All right. I’ll write what you want.”

“I knew you would,” Polymarchus said. “Please, come along. Let us discuss how Rome will take to the stars…

~Merodi~

…the Austraeoh flew through the stars of numerous universes within the Strands. Normally, navigating the Strands would be fast. Unfortunately the Austraeoh’s ka-devices weren’t taking them in a straight line from point A to B, so it was a mess. Clearly the technology wasn’t perfect.

Pinkie had set up a ping-pong table on the bridge. Currently, Allure and Corona were using it. The constant ping and pong of the ball was a calming, rhythmic presence to the bridge crew.

The ping-pong rules were simple – no using levitation magic. The diminutive Allure was at a clear disadvantage, but Corona was out of practice in the coordinated sports department. The game was tied ten to ten.

“Get ready for this one, it’s going to be mean,” Corona said, twirling the ball across her fingers.

Allure craned her neck. “Bring i-”

The ball flew past her while she was in the middle of her sentence.

Allure twitched. “…Eleven to ten, your lead.”

Corona winked. “One more point and I win. Think you can take me down?”

Allure nodded. “I’m not giving up yet.”

“And you sho-”

Allure pinged the ball, only for Corona to catch it with her paddle and send it back. Allure caught it near the edge of the table, batting it far to the side. Corona tossed it just barely over the net, making Allure dive for it. The shot went wild – and Corona hit it back, taking the point as Allure struggled to get it.

“Yes!” Corona said, throwing her hands into the air and spreading her wings. “Victory!”

“Ladies and gentleponies, the champion of ping-pong!” Pinkie declared, showering Corona with confetti.

Corona walked up to Allure. “Good game.”

Allure chuckled. “I almost had you.”

“Almost.”

“Yeah. You and your lanky human arms.”

“The fingers probably help too.”

“Hoof traction is an amazing concept,” Eve said from her seat in the captain’s chair. She turned back to a conspiracy diagram on the main screen, trying to find out what Arceus, John, and Twilence could do together. The main problem was so many different things could be done. Creation of a new universe… Alteration of the songs of everything… “Hmm…”

“Any new thoughts?” Corona asked.

“I can’t think of anything new. Nothing special. They’re just powerful, but I know there’s something… Something about the Eye of Rhyme, a god, and the Heir of Breath…”

Allure’s ears pricked up. “…Heir… …God…”

“What is it?” Corona asked, being sure to direct Eve’s attention to the white unicorn.

“One side says the story is thus:
The Lord, the Muse, the Heir
Are gathered together to make a tear
The God, the Prophet, the ancient
Are needed to fulfill a lost tenet,” Allure said.

Pinkie gasped. “Flagg’s cryptic message!”

“The end of the Tower’s Testament…” Eve said, scratching her chin. “That would make some sense. So… John is the Heir, and Arceus is the God? What does that make Twilence?”

“Muse,” Pinkie said. “Vriska told me about all the ‘classes’ and ‘aspect’ descriptions in SBURB. The Muse has passive mastery over their ability, kinda like a force of nature. The Lord has active mastery over their ability – full control. Twilence calls herself the one who understands right? She’s regularly held back by the ka she knows so well, but she’s able to do small things to make great change.”

“So the Lord would be...?” Eve asked.

“Monika,” Corona said. “She’s the opposite of Twilence. Has no idea what she’s doing, but almost complete control over her ka.”

“And the Prophet… could be any Prophet,” Allure pointed out.

“Probably GM,” Pinkie said. “Last major chapter was about us finding him. So that’s a good point.”

Eve furrowed her brow. “Which just leaves the ancient…”

“Which is vague as mist on the water,” Pinkie said, smirking. “Could be anyone. Blumiere. Nanoha. The Tree of Harmony. A Star. Someone we haven’t even met.” She shrugged.

“So, chances are Monika and GM have been taken as well,” Corona said. “What does that tell us?”

“That this is a ka-based plan,” Eve asserted. “Two masters of ka, and our Prophet? Too much of a coincidence. Plus it’s related to that ancient prophecy. ‘gathered together to make a tear’ ‘needed to fulfill a lost tenet’. Unhelpfully vague, but indicative of destruction.”

“Probably something we need to stop,” Corona said.

“Deeeefinitely!” Pinkie chirped.

“But how would we do that if we know nothing?” Eve asked.

“I can tell you something,” Allure said, pointing at the map. “We’re heading for the Dark Tower…”

~Theater~

“…the Tower or Infinity?” the actor representing the Downstreamer ‘High Commander’ asked. The man sitting in the theater found the idea of a Downstreamer High Commander hilarious, and laughed every time the man spoke. It was just so stupid.

“What do you mean?” his ‘aide’ asked.

“We’ve completed most of our goals. Only two things remain – the Tower or Infinity. With the Chousin no longer an issue and the rest letting us do what we want, we need to make something of that.”

“Why? Can we not be content with where we are?”

“NO!”

“Geez, the ham,” the audience said, rolling his eyes. “Tone down the drama!”

The aide backed up a few steps from her commander. “But what about the others…”

“Downstreamers act as one.”

“YOU AREN’T DOING A VERY GOOD JOB OF SHOWING THAT!” the viewer blurted.

Neither of them responded to the complaints of a man with too much popcorn. They simply continued their argument.

“Infinity or the Tower?” the commander posed once again. “If we accomplish true Infinity, we will break the multiverse into what we originally wanted it to be. Create every existence. But we can also take on the Tower itself, gain control over the story of existence. Both come with complications. How does Infinity exist when the Sea means Possibility, not existence? Are attempts to control the Dark Tower inherently foolish and doomed to fail?”

“Sir, which one will benefit the Downstreamers more?”

“I do not know,” he said, folding his arms. “We are already above everything else. None of us have perished in an eternity of memory. There is nothing to threaten us.”

“…What do we do once we’ve controlled the Dark Tower and Infinity?”

“Control Infinity?” he laughed. “My dear, if we create Infinity, that means we can never control it all. That’s the point. It gives us more and more to strive for. There will be no power ceiling for us anymore.”

“Could the Tower exert its control over Infinity…?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not…”

The man blinked – these were actually some good questions that he didn’t have the answer for. What would Infinity be like? True Infinity, not functional infinity. There were seemingly endless examples of functional infinity in the multiverse, but everything had a limit. Metatime would go on forever, yes, but there was always a finite amount of it. The Multiverse had a beginning.

Very curious.

Almost made him wish the Downstreamers were still around so he could ask them…

~Historian~

…The Prognosticus told of a future where all worlds would perish. The Tribe of Darkness had finally convinced themselves this was true, having forgotten the teachings of Desan to never use the book for anything. They were not completely unfaithful, for they did nothing with this information besides keep it hidden. This secrecy prompted a greater divide between the Tribe of Ancients and the Tribe of Darkness. It was at this time the purity doctrine formed within the Tribe of Darkness. (And we can say that was when we finally became the people we were meant to be!) The Tribe of Darkness didn’t allow outside blood into the bloodline anymore. There could be no tainting of our way.

This turned out to be even better than expected. Because the Tribe of Ancients did not have the purity doctrine, they began to stagnate and dilute. They lost their powers of magic over the generations and slowly lost control over their many worlds while the Tribe of Darkness maintained a powerful presence in their secret abodes.

The last project the Tribes worked together on was the dual-reality of Flipside and Flopside. Two cities were plastered together in a reflective pattern, each mirroring the other, providing two sides of the same coin. It came to exist as the last great construct of the sub-tribe of Pixls. It still stands to this day, though not in the control of either Tribe, but rather the remnants and descendants of the Tribe of Ancients and a handful of stray descendants of our Dark Tribe. (Traitors to our way!)

After Flipside and Flopside were created, what many consider a disaster struck – the Tribe of Ancients discovered that our Tribe had the Prognosticus, and knew about the end of the worlds. (I could not find out how they discovered this. Likely a traitor). However, this was the final straw for the Tribe of Darkness. We entered a complete isolation from all worlds, completing our journey to become what we are today. Departed from our origins, building our Darkness up for eternity. A true beautiful separation…

~Grand Tour~

…it’s disgusting. Its… it’s horrible, it’s wrong, it’s… What the hell is wrong with existence!?

Master, you need to give the report.

I don’t want to give the stupid report, Raising Heart! I want to burn that Watchmaker to cinders!

You know we can’t do that.

Aaaaaaaaa! Just… She’s dead! Ginga is dead! I don’t even have her body! Subaru’s broken, the entire team’s in tatters, and I’ve just realized what a cruel joke all of this is! We’re ‘heroes!’ We’re part of some story! Some story written by some Watchmaker-like thing. I can’t save him. I can’t talk to him. And I can’t stop him. He’s going to keep driving that world into… into… Well it’s not as bad as it could be but…

Master, you need to cool down. Come back to this later.

Right, right…

…Ginga’s dead. My sister is gone.

…

End report…

…This is Nanoha Takamachi of the TSAB Horizon. I have just come from the funeral for Ginga Nakajima. There was no body. There wasn’t anything. Just a reminder that she was lost on Zhui.

Ginga was one of the best mages I had. She worked excellently with her sister and her team, and she was one of Rarity’s closest friends. And-

That’s for another report. I said all that at the service. Now… Now it’s time to say what this means.

I’m confident the crew will move on. As a whole. Rarity has been damaged, but she’ll recover. Subaru… I’m not sure Subaru will. She’s been so close with her sister for so long. She’s going to be changed permanently, and not for the better.

As for me… Normally, I think I’d be able to move through it. She isn’t the first one we’ve lost on this journey, merely the one I knew best. But it’s how it happened. It’s… the power the Watchmaker wields. The fate. The ka. The power of stories.

We’re all just stories. Stories controlled by that Tower we kept hearing about but never got any details on.

We are little toys for some ‘Prophet’ somewhere who may not even know what they’re doing!

They’re innocent… We suffer by the fault of no one. We fight and die not even at the beck and call of God, but random imagination! That’s… that’s so wrong I can’t even put it into words.

The Watchmaker deserves my wrath. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he won’t change. But most of them know nothing. They’re just people with creativity. People chosen to alter reality.

Nobody deserves that power. But we’re just a minnow in this river. We can’t do anything about it. Even the Watchmaker only holds one world in his grasp. Just one. And he turned us away.

I… I need to stop getting so angry. It’s not like me.

…What am I even angry at? It’s like being angry at the world for having disease, or for a planet to be overrun with natural predators. I shouldn’t be angry. I should be sad.

I should be sad.

Existence is a tragedy.

We just have to accept it, don’t we?

We’ll never be able to change anything major. We’re just a group of people on a ship from a faraway nation that’s barely Class 3. We’re nothing.

And that’s… You know what? That’s okay. It’s okay to be nothing. We don’t have to be special. We don’t have to save all of existence. We don’t have to change it. We just have to do what we can to make the world a better place. Sometimes that means having a tragedy. Sometimes that means complete failure. Sometimes that means great sacrifice.

But we keep moving. We keep striving.

Striving to find what is best for everyone we can. Even those who may not agree or want help…

~Harlequin~

…Dimitri woke up to find his father holding a sickle above his chest.

The nightmares still raged in his mind. The fire. The Tower. The Screams.

He screamed. A burst of energy shot forth from his hand, knocking his father straight through the wall and out into a nearby field. The man caught on fire, brushing the leaves of the crops with his flames.

Thea woke up from the loud noise. “Wh-wha?”

“They just tried to kill me!” Dimitri shouted, a twisted smile appearing on his face. He held out his hands and laughed. “They think they still have a choice!”

BURN. BURN. BURN. BURN. BURN. BURN.

Dimitri kicked down the metal door of his new house. The fire in the field had already started raging, providing plenty of light to see the small crowd who had gathered there. Gathered to take him on should it be required. Gathered to see if his father had managed to take him out.

Led by his own mother.

“Like a pack of wolves, you have revealed your true colors…” Dimitri said, clenching his fist. “You were willing to kill me?”

They charged him.

“IMBECILES!” Dimitri shouted, lighting the entire field aflame. “I will burn every last crop!”

There was no more talking – just the entire village charging at him. He snapped his fingers, torching more fields. Destroying all their work. “You have no choice! You will die!”

His mother looked right at him with a livid expression. “I choose death over your horror.”

Dimitri’s smile faltered – and then forced itself back to full. “As you wish.”

She suddenly had no head. She fell back, dead. “AhahahaahahahaHAHahaha!”

They rushed him, determined to save what they could from his terror. He made it impossible. They were pathetic whelps compared to the power he had obtained in the megalith. Power beyond their wildest dreams. Power they couldn’t see the benefit of.

They deserved what was happening to them.

“Like lemmings on a cliff, you throw yourselves into the ocean! Why do you do this to yourselves!? Is it to amuse me? Not the best joke, you know – or the greatest show.” He snapped his fingers, spicing up the slaughter of his home a bit with flashing lights, dimensional twists, and teleporting.

His vision of fire bled with the vision of reality. Everything was ablaze.

I should have listened to the dreams years ago!

“This is what I am! This is what you squandered! You drove this power away because you were afraid of it!” He thrust his hand out, tearing cracks in the earth. “And because you could not move past your fear the very thing you feared has come to pass! Isn’t that ironic!?”

They made no response. There were none willing to fight left. They had all run away or surrendered.

“Ahaha! You think my promise to help you still stands?! You treated me like an unwanted rabid animal. You had your chance. Now get what you deserv-”

The Alamala took the form of a sword and swung directly at him. He managed to dodge the life-threatening blow to his neck – but his face took the brunt of it. “AUGH!”

Thea didn’t waste another moment – she drove the Alamala blade toward Dimitri’s chest.

Dimitri reversed the Alamala’s direction and drove it into Thea’s chest. “Even you!?”

“This… isn’t right…” Thea said, still standing despite the blade in her stomach.

The images of the dreams were more vivid in his mind than ever before. He saw worlds. He saw fire. He saw destruction. He saw a book. He saw the Tower. The Tower. The Tower.

“You’re nothing,” Dimitri concluded. “You were just here to provide a catalyst.”

Thea stared at him. “You’re… a monster.”

Dimitri smirked. “I’m a performer. All the world’s a stage, my Thea.” He forced her into a kiss that she wasn’t in any position to resist. “Your act has drawn to an end.”

“Don’t you care!?”

Dimitri smiled. “You’ll never know for sure.”

He knocked her over, and she was gone.

His face was ruined – but his smile could still be seen. His eternal smile.

They could hear him laughing as he burned all the farms. All the farms. Nothing would live here ever again if he had anything to say about it.

The dreams spoke to him. As he burned the place to the ground the way he had seen in his derams so many times, they told him much else. Of words on a page… Of the actual source of his power… The origin…

TOWER. TOWER. TOWER. TOWER. TOWER. TOWER.

Dimitri knew what needed to happen next.

He left…

~Mother~

…the mother arrived at the Emerson household. The city was a place where there was virtually no poverty, so when you saw a house that looked like it was in shambles that generally spoke volumes of the sort of people who lived there.

The mother happened to know some of the people who lived in this house. Mrs. Emerson, Mr. Emerson, and their eldest daughter Claire were… a special sort of people, to say the least.

She knocked on the door.

Mrs. Emerson opened it. She was human, but easily the size of three women, had wrinkle lines everywhere on her face despite only being middle aged, and had a pointed pair of glasses that were clearly too small for her face. “Ah. You.”

“Yes. Me. May I come in?”

“No,” Mrs. Emerson said, slamming the door.

“I know people! I can get law enforcement down here on suspicion of kidnapping!”

Mrs. Emerson pulled the door back open. “Oh, has little Osanna run away? Boo hoo, let me get a tissue.” She slammed the door again.

The mother pulled out her phone. “Ahem. Chief? Ah, nice to hear your voice. See, I can’t find Osanna. She’s been missing for a while, and I think I may have traced her to the Emerson residence, but they aren’t letting me inside. You’ll send someone over right away? Aw, thanks, you’re such a lifesaver. Remind m-”

Mrs. Emerson opened the door. “She wasn’t bluffing Harold!”

“FUCK.”

“You can come in, I guess,” Mrs. Emerson muttered. “You hear that Chief? We’re letting her in!”

The mother smiled. “All’s fine Chief. Thanks for being there.” She hung up and put her phone into her pocket. She followed Mrs. Emerson into a house that was clearly never cleaned or tidied up in any way. Trash was everywhere, the place smelled horrendous, and there were a lot of magazines littered around that could be described as ‘questionable’ at best. At best.

Mr. Emerson was a tremendously muscular man who somehow managed to maintain that physique despite a lifestyle of watching TV most of the time. The mother suspected steroids.

Claire was a truly beautiful girl in her early twenties who the mother had met once. Once. She was such a foulmouthed piece of garbage who spoke in long extended sentences and never really said anything at all…

The place was just filled with bad memories and people. But the mother put on a smile and tried to be courteous.

“Hey,” Mr. Emerson said. “Look, I want you out of my house, so just take anything you see and go.”

“Sorry!” the mother trilled. “I’m not going until you either tell me where your son is or where my daughter is.”

Mrs. Emerson laughed. “Like we’d have any idea where our son is!”

“I can tell you where he is,” Mr. Emerson said. “He’s giving that scrawny little thing of yours the best time of her life, that’s what.”

The mother twitched. “That’s what, not where.”

“Hm. Guess I mixed that up.” A Stand came out of the man, grabbed a beer can, and let Mr. Emerson drink it while he used his hands to make obscene gestures at the mother. “Guess I’m kinda stupid sometimes. Heh.”

“You mean to tell me you never have any idea where your son is? Ever?”

“He was gone for a month once. Thought he was dead,” Mrs. Emerson said dismissively. “Then he came back and ruined that little daydream.”

“Heh,” Mr. Emerson said. “Nice one.”

“If you dare butter me up I will run you through the meat grinder, Harold.”

“Bah. Whatever.” He leaned back and stretched his arms.

“Well I’m not leaving until you give me something,” the mother said, folding her arms. “I’ll cramp your style for as long as necessary. Maybe even until your son comes back a month from now.”

Mr. Emerson seemed to find this prospect horrifying. “Uh… Fuck.”

Mrs. Emerson shook her head. “She doesn’t have the willpo-”

The mother twitched. “I DON’T KNOW WHERE MY DAUGHTER IS AND THIS IS MY LAST LEAD! I HAVE MORE THAN ENOUGH WILLPOWER, BITCH!”

“Oh no you didn’t!”

The mother twitched. Her pupils pulsated. Mrs. Emerson fell over backward, out cold.

“And now I can charge you with assault,” Mr. Emerson muttered, almost apathetically.

“And getting law enforcement in here would be great for you, I’m sure.”

“Ugh… Look, I don’t know where the fuck he is. I don’t keep tabs on the little shit. I do know he thinks the Inner Foundry is cool. So he might be there.”

“Good. I would say thank you but this has been truly unpleasant.”

“Fuck you too,” he muttered. “Now get out of my house.”

The mother didn’t need to be told twice. She completely ignored the sudden stream of meaningless words coming out of Claire’s mouth from upstairs…

~Twilence~

…I could only wish the words I put on paper were meaningless, but they had a true power. Here I was, in a dungeon, forced to go against my code of honor and use my powers as an Aware Prophet to twist the fate of a city for evil. Evil.

It disgusted me more than anything I had ever done. And I had destroyed entire universes in fits of rage. I had destroyed many lives.

But I had not written a race of conquerors into existence just because I could. And now I was being forced to.

The cellar wasn’t even comfortable. It was cold, damp, and dark – without windows. I was chained to a desk with a large book open on it. Several stacks of paper were placed to my sides and I had been provided an endless amount of pens.

My only company was Vriska. Mite was on a nearby shelf, out of power, not to be reactivated for… I didn’t know how long. Creek currently wasn’t in the room, likely being questioned by Polymarchus for whatever reason. So it was just me and the Thief of Light, alone.

I had freedom to use my telekinesis and a modicum of magic. She didn’t. Her eyes were covered with sunglasses and all her limbs were tied to the wall.

“So. This is a pretty bad pickle,” she said.

“Understatement,” I said.

“We have been captured before. You’re not always perfect.”

“I know,” I muttered. “But at least I always know we will get out. I don’t know what in my visions I can believe anymore. Not while that Flower is still around. Not while it’s also writing things to keep me in check…” I shook my head.

“We live though, right?”

“You and I do. For sure.” I stared into nothing. “I can’t say the same for the others.”

“Rarity will come get us eventually.”

“Does she actually know where we went?”

Vriska paled. “Oh…”

“Exactly.”

“Well, shit, we’ve got to think of something.”

“As long as you’re here and he has that gun plastered to the back of your neck, I don’t think we can.”

“…What I wouldn’t give for an infinite-sided die right about now…”

“What I wouldn’t give for a rescue operation. Or a decent meal.”

“What I wouldn’t give to just get home already.”

“What I wouldn’t give to stop being so sure of myself…” I sighed, placing my pen to the paper again. “He’s even ruining the enjoyment I can get out of writing. I’m creating a hero, who certainly thinks he’s doing good, and the story does as well. But he isn’t. …All the joy is gone. It’s wrong.”

“He’ll get what’s coming to him.”

“…Maybe,” I admitted. “But we don’t know that.”

“Shut the fuck up and listen. You may not be able to see shit right now, but I can. Because I’m the best thing since sliced bread and I pay attention to the things you say. We’re in a story right now, one that’s messing with your abilities. So stop thinking of yourself as an all-powerful surveyor of fate and instead of a regular joe. You are locked in this cellar with me. Polymarchus is the antagonist. We have a set of powers and are in a big predicament. But we’re going to struggle and prevail eventually.”

“…That may or may not be how this works.”

“For the love of gog… Get a hold of yourself. We can do this.”

I smiled. “…You’re right. But I don’t exactly have a plan right now.”

“Screw the plan, just think of something. Get your mind out of the swirl of ‘this is horrible’ and out into kicking ass! You’re really fucking smart. Take advantage of that.”

“Yeah… Yeah! I will! I will get up a-”

The door to the cellar opened. Only one person walked in – Creek. Without an escort. I looked at her and froze, unable to form words.

“Hey,” Creek said.

Vriska smiled. “Oh, sweet, Creek’s back! We were just talking ab-”

“That’s not Creek,” I told Vriska.

‘Creek’ smirked. Her body was no longer old, but rather young. Her veins coursed with both blood and cotton. On her head she wore a straw hat. “Good eye.”

“You said you wouldn’t kill her!” I shouted.

Polymarchus shrugged with his – her – new body. “I didn’t. I could leave her at any time, and she would remember none of it. Not even her mind would be affected.” She touched my horn with her finger. “This is to just ensure your loyalty. If you have some plan to defeat me, it will require going against her. Probably even killing her. And you wouldn’t be able to kill her with your own hooves, would you?”

I blinked in horror.

No. No I would not be able to do that. Not with my own hooves…

“I thought not. Whatever crazy plan you were thinking of, it ends here. I have her. I am her. And you must protect her…”

~Theater~

“…I have to protect you!” the Downstreamer ‘aide’ said. Her name had been spoken enough times by now for the man who was the audience to know it was ‘F-something’, but that was about it.

The girl, playing F-something’s ‘daughter’ Winona, looked up at her. “Protect me from what?”

“From the insanity of our commander!”

The viewer put a hand in front of his face. “Ugh… They were united, they didn’t have children as we understand them, and this didn’t even happen! You’ve just gone and added fiction to your already dubious history! What is your problem?”

As usual, the film had nothing to say to him.

Winona blinked. “What’s our commander doing, mom?”

F-something shook her head. “He’s… He’s trying to make true Infinity. The one fact of existence that shouldn’t be messed with.”

“Didn’t the ancient people say that about death? We’re fine, right?”

“…We may be fine, but we are not safe. We have changed because of it. Perhaps for the worse.”

The man threw a piece of popcorn. “They would never have thought that. They wouldn’t be able to remember what existence was like without folded time! The things you do to make a ‘relatable’ story…”

“I thought you said to always trust him?” Winona asked.

“Yes, yes, he doesn’t mean you harm, but…” F-something bit her lip. “But he might be biting off more than he can chew. Than any of us can chew.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I… am going to protect you.”

“How?”

“I am… I will… I…” F-something grabbed her forehead. “I don’t know! I don’t even know what I would protect you against until it happens! I don’t even…” She pulled Winona close. “I’ll have to protect you when it happens. However it happens. As fast as I can.”

“BOO!” the man said. He was almost surprised to see the two of them respond to him – except they weren’t. They were responding to a news alert.

“BREAKING NEWS: THE INFINITY MECHANISMS HAVE FINALLY BEEN COMPLETED!” the projector displayed a television – on which was an image of the Infinity Mechanisms. Tremendously tall metallic ovoids that were glowing blue throughout, the lights on top of them shining brightest of all.

At least they got the appearance of those right.

It was a bright, almost holy light that shone on the Downstreamers…

~Historian~

…The Tribe of Ancients turned their ideals to Light – they found the prophecy of the Prognosticus distasteful, so they decided to change it. (I do hate writing this part of the history, but it’s still important to us.) They saw themselves as warriors defying the eternal death brought upon existence by fate. Since they could not find the Tribe of Darkness, they would defy the prophecy we had shown them.

They claimed that the Prognosticus was a ‘Dark’ view of reality, so they would create a ‘Light Prognosticus’ to counter it and show that words could have multiple meanings. They used the remnants of their great magic and power to create what they believed to be a counter-prophecy to the destruction of their worlds in the ‘Dark’ Prognosticus.

As far as they were concerned, they succeeded. The results of their efforts were a white book known as the Light Prognosticus that contained great holy power, prophecies of heroes in the future, and speech involving a dual prophecy that could go one way or the other.

But they didn’t realize what they had really done. By combining all their powers, they had tapped into the energy of the real Prognosticus. That day, the Tribe of Darkness recorded a change in the Prognosticus – it became smaller, darker, and lost some of the language it had prior.

The Tribe of Ancients, in their quest to create something separate from the dark book, had only divided it in two. They didn’t even know it. The Prognosticus was no more – now there was only the Light Prognosticus and the Dark Prognosticus. Two half-prophecies of the future. The knowledge contained within each of the two was incomplete without the other, but our tribe decided it did not matter. The Dark Prognosticus could no longer be used for as much evil as it once had, and now that it was filled with only the ‘dark’ side of things, it had much less use for our tribe. (We had already completely mastered Darkness. Why would we risk insanity delving deeper into half a book?)

And so years passed, and the prophecy was forgotten. (It said roughly five-hundred years until the worlds of the Tribes were destroyed. By my calculations it has been four-hundred and sixty, give or take ten. Perhaps I should take it upon myself to remind our Tribe about this prophecy.)…

…The most notable event of the recent years was the rebellion of the Shadow Queen. The most influential member of the Tribe of Darkness rose up and claimed our obsession with purity and division from the rest of the multiverse was foolish. She attempted to usurp complete control over the Council of Darkness. (I myself was not a councilmember at the time, but I certainly remember the event). She attempted to turn the Tribe of Darkness into an army to conquer the multiverse.

Her rebellion was squashed. She and her three children were banished to a random realm and sealed away within that realm’s time. (It’s more complicated than that, but I can’t put that in a history book, classified and all.) There have been no uprisings since.

(I do feel sorry for her youngest, Vivian. She never even got to know her true home…

~Grand Tour~

…we’ve finally found Rarity’s home. After all these long years… We’ve found it.

There’s been a lot of pain on this journey, but it’s finally done. We did what we set out to do.

It’s not exactly what we expected it would be. Only twelve years have passed on her world, while over thirty have passed for us. She’s much older than her friends. But I saw them together once again. I saw her reuniting with her sister. It was… It was truly beautiful.

I want to say that makes it all worth it. I really do. I’m not certain I can though.

…We accomplished much more. Gave the TSAB so many allies. Improved the Horizon’s systems in every way imaginable. Started a Q-Sphere chapter of the TSAB – though the paradoxical nature around that entire thing has made more of a mess than I was anticipating. At least they’re friendly.

What I’m not sure about is the Stars. They’re the powerful Class 2 Society that lives in this area of the multiverse – apparently the third strongest Class 2 in the entire multiverse. Rarity’s world – and a lot of other worlds – are within their space. And these Stars… They don’t seem to care about the people they have control over. For the most part, the control is all about space. The ponies are free to live on the planets as they choose, and the Stars will only sometimes do anything. They’re more like distant gods to them than anything.

I’ve only talked to a few of them. They’re very dismissive and cryptic. And arrogant. I’ve told Rarity not to worry, but given our experiences on our journey, I don’t think she’s going to take very well to living under something, even if it is just indirectly.

At least they aren’t malevolent.

We’ll stick around a few weeks to make sure everything’s going smoothly, but then we’ll take the Strand highway back to the E-Sphere, on a path given to us by the Stars. It’ll take maybe a day to get back to the E-Sphere with the upgrades to the drive. It’ll take a long time to move through the E-Sphere, but we should be back home in a few months.

Back home in a few months…

I really want to see Fate again. I hope she hasn’t forgotten what I look like!

…But part of me also wants to keep exploring. There’s so much we haven’t seen out here. We’ll be skipping most of the Great Void, won’t even touch the Unrealities… We found a Wishing World, but I’m not about to waste that on traveling longer. I’m sure we’ll be back, but I did want to ride the Spline…

~Tower~

“…the Mihipte Spline,” Weaver said. “It is one of the last creations of my people, and the one I am working to protect.”

Roland and Patrick stared ahead with blank expressions.

“To put it simply, the Dark Tower is the center of the multiverse, the Spline is the outside. Even though worlds can exist outside the Spline, it does a relatively decent job of ringing the edge of everything. It was part of our great multiversal highway project, allowing quick and easy travel to any world with ease. The central part of the system, the Strands, were completed before the Dark Tower was. But the Spline was still under construction when ka was thrown into the mix… and all Weavers began to die out.”

“So you’ve been trying to finish it?”

“I don’t have the time or the resources,” Weaver said solemnly. “What I do have is the ability to protect it. To create a… Safeguard. You saw the humanoid machines near the door you entered, yes?”

Roland nodded.

“Those are the Safeguard prototypes. The defenders of the Spline. Most of them are already active – ready to defend the still-visible construction structures of the Spline. To keep any society, no matter how great they ever rise, from taking advantage of the Spline – or destroying it. To keep it open for everyone to use. Something to give a little organization to this chaos that ka churns up.”

“Building roads is a great purpose,” Roland said. “Pave the ground so others may walk freely. It’ll keep the worlds from moving on.”

“…I guess it will, won’t it? In a way, at least. The Safeguard isn’t quite complete, sadly. Almost – they’re ready to defend against anything the Crimson King could throw at them, for instance – but there are a few possible weaknesses I haven’t covered yet. Nothing that would mean anything to you, I’m afraid.”

Roland’s lips quivered. Was that his equivalent of a smile? Weaver couldn’t actually tell – his thoughts weren’t very useful in determining the gunslinger’s emotional state. “I understand, you don’t need to explain.”

Weaver sighed. “I only wish that I had enough time to complete my work.”

“How long until you die?” Roland asked.

“A direct question.”

“Your false Tower’s light isn’t steady. You are the last of your kind. You’re dying.”

“I… I don’t know. All I can say for certain is that my lifespan is tied in to your journey.”

Roland nodded. “When it is finished, so are you.”

“…Is that what it means?”

Roland didn’t need to respond to tell Weaver he was right.

“Then perhaps it was good we had this discussion. It allowed me to get more work done. …I need to hurry.”

“Do we need to slow our journey so you may complete your road?”

“It should be done long before you arrive at the Tower, given your speed.”

“Time is not… the same.”

Weaver paused. “No. I suppose not.”

“You will either finish your roads the moment before my journey ends, or…”

“Or I would have right after,” Weaver grunted. “And no amount of us talking will change that, will it? It’s all up to the Tower…

~Merodi~

…I stared at the Dark Tower, dominating the view of our little sub-universal bubble. We technically weren’t in the same realm as the Dark Tower, but a secluded bubble that existed within the same physical space that we could look out of and see it.

Our universe consisted of a single disc of pure white magic adorned with vaguely alchemical designs. There were five circles around the outside, and one in the middle. The five outer ones clearly were meant for the five of us – myself, Monika, John, Arceus, and GM – but the identity of the center perpetrator eluded us much as it had eluded those trying to find us.

“Good news that might also be bad news,” I said. “The story’s finally focused on us.”

“Big news,” Monika droned, hands on her hips.

“It is,” Arceus said. “Not all of us are gifted with the sight you two have.”

Monika rolled her eyes. “That’s because you’d just mess it up.”

“Well, it didn’t seem to help you all that much…” John said, adjusting his glasses.

“You can shut up, windy boy,” Monika spat.

“H-hey, stop,” GM said. “We’re all in this together, we don’t need to fight.”

“No offense man, but you just spent the last ten minutes crying in the corner over there,” John said.

I glared at John. “Monika gave him his memories back. Which I still assert was a bad idea, but what’s done is done. You shouldn’t be surprised that it drove him to semi-madness.”

“I am never writing again…” GM muttered.

“Yes you are. You write this, eventually,” Monika muttered. “What number are you on now?”

“I just blinded Pinkie…” GM muttered. “I… I’m a horrible person.”

“Uh, you didn’t know,” John pointed out.

“Who cares!?”

Monika facepalmed. “This was much more endearing the first time. Now it’s basically just a rerun of the first.”

“Perhaps you should not have given him his memories back, then,” Arceus said.

“He would already freak out at seeing all of us,” Monika pointed out.

“Yes, but it might have been a bit different,” I commented. “We could have worked together to get out of here instead of having mild cases of insanity.”

“…‘Mild’?” John interjected with an amused smile.

“Point taken,” I admitted. “At least it doesn’t appear that anything happened while the five of us were having our own personal series of neuroses.”

“We need more information,” Arceus said.

“Uh, yeah, where are we gonna get that?” John asked.

I tapped the Eye of Rhyme. “I can still see the story folding around us. Granted, my view of the future of these stories is a little muddled, since this is the very edge of my perceptions, but it’s enough to work some things out.”

“…Stories? Plural?” GM said, blinking.

“Yes. Eight separate stories are unfolding before our eyes.”

“…I actually did it,” GM said. “I made Cloud Atlas a movie chapter.”

“Wait, you know this one!?” Monika blurted.

“Yeah… Well no, not really, I haven’t planned it out at all, but I know I want the movie of Arc 9 to be a story that ties together all the lore of the multiverse before I enter the actual climax. Tell some stories that couldn’t be told before. That sort of thing. I have no idea which ones I chose or which ones I made up… Or will make up.” He nervously rubbed his knuckles together. “Gaaaaaaaah this is confusing, why did I have to make it this way?”

“You likely did not have a choice in the matter,” Arceus said, gesturing at the Tower.

“I’ll talk about the stories so far,” I said, clearing my throat. “There’s one with Roland talking to the last Weaver, relating him to the Spline. Probably just there to make sense of a lot of the Dark Tower lore that was glossed over.”

“Probably,” GM admitted. “Guess I did find a place for the Spline after all. Neat. …But also horrible.”

“Then there’s one with a guy… watching a movie… about the Downstreamers.”

GM blinked. “…I went crazy enough to include the Downstreamers!? What’s wrong with me!?”

John blinked. “Uh, I think you need to find some chill pills.”

“I’m chill! I’m perfectly chill!”

“No, you’re not,” Monika said, blowing some hair out of her face.

I continued. “Then there’s the story of a guy named Dimitri who’s going mad and destroying everything… honestly I have no idea what that one’s about.”

GM shrugged. “Yeah, drawing a blank there too.”

“Then a Historian of the Tribe of Darkness’ journal.”

“Guess I wanted to explain the Prognostici?”

“Prog-what now?” Arceus now.

GM blinked. “Crap, none of you are supposed to know about those. Actually, wait, it might be better if you do.”

“Let’s not tempt fate,” I suggested. “After that we have Nanoha’s journey through the Q-Sphere, probably there just to show how the TSAB came to be. I already know that entire story, it doesn’t help us here. Then there’s my story about the last adventure I had with my original group.”

“I… I’m sorry,” GM said.

“I know. I know. Let’s not worry about it now. The seventh story is this one, which had been focusing on Songs of the Spheres’ four protagonists, but just switched to us right now so we could have this conversation. They’re currently trying to find us.”

“…Didn’t you say eight stories?” Arceus asked.

“…Yeah. Uh, for the first time in my life I’m seeing something from past the point of uncertainty.” My face became visibly nervous. “It has to be beyond important. It has to. The future exists at least, but the only important person I’ve recognized so far is Seskii. I don’t recognize the universe and the main character is being made very vague on purpose.”

“Uh. Sorry,” GM said.

“You haven’t written it yet. Also, stop apologizing for everything.”

“Uh… Kay. Sure. Caaaan do.”

I facehooved at the sudden sarcasm. “Oh boy… Anyway, that’s what’s going on. These eight stories are combined together somehow. But we haven’t reached the ends of them yet, so I can’t tell you how. They’re all tied together through odd synchronicities, and most of them have mentioned the Dark Tower at least once. But the Dark Tower is a given connecting influence. There has to be some sort of story here, the Song of the Spheres, and I don’t see it. Wanna know the best part? I see a preface I’ll write in the future.”

“Ouch,” John winced. “That has to burn your brain.”

“Yes. It does.” I rubbed my head.

“We don’t need to find out the story, though,” Monika said. “We just need to figure out what’s happening with us. The four protagonists of Songs of the Spheres and the five most powerful beings-”

“Debatable,” Arceus pointed out.

Monika twitched. “-are all together in this story. What’s the point?”

“The four of them are pretty sure it’s part of the Tower’s Testament,” I said. “I’m the Muse, then there’s the Lord, the Heir, the Prophet, the God… and the ancient. Who’s the ancient?”

Monika blinked. “Oh, that’s easy. Just think about it for five seconds.”

“I…” I blinked. I thought back to all the other stories, and some of the things that had been said. Then I laughed. “Oh. That makes perfect sense. It’s…”

~Harlequin~

“…time,” Dimitri said.

He stood in a field of roses.

The dreams had led him here across time and space. It felt like it had been no time since he had burned everything he’d ever known and loved, but for all he knew it had been eons.

Along the way, he had picked up a mask to hide his disfigured face. A mask that smiled. It might well have been his face, now.

“Ahahaha! So I have come at last to the tip of the iceberg, the pinnacle of all knowledge, the library with all answers!” he spread his arms wide, capturing the Dark Tower in his field of view. “You are my goal! You are my center! You… you are me! You are the dreams!”

He shifted to the door of the Dark Tower and entered. His demented laughter slowly died off as he felt the inner turmoil of his mind calm for the first time in eternity.

He felt… at peace. Like this was where he belonged.

He began to walk up the staircase – and he was going to open every door he came across. The first one showed him as an infant in a crib.

“Don’t let yourself go,” he said, closing the door. He walked upward, opening the next one, and the next. Occasionally a door he opened would lead to another world, but those were useless to him. He only cared about the ones he was in. He saw his life. As a child, playing with the other children. Laughing. Always laughing, even when nobody else was. He saw the nightmares that had tormented his mind.

“If only I hadn’t been afraid of you…” he said, continuing on. “This realization would have come sooner…”

He moved higher. More recent memories of his embarrassment. His joy that they wanted to squander. They hadn’t succeeded. “You deserved every last spike of pain…” he growled. He moved higher. He saw Thea.

Thea…

He slammed that door. The sight of her face made him angry.

“I will never be that foolish again…” he promised himself. He moved higher. He saw the world burning. He saw himself pick up the mask and put it on. He saw himself standing outside the Dark Tower. He opened a door where he was looking at himself.

He grinned. “And now… the future.”

He almost ran up the stairs, purposefully looking at his entire life. He saw himself laughing, a book in his hands. A powerful book…

...He saw himself watching others’ lives burn…

…He saw himself talking to a man in black.

“Do you even know what this is!?” he asked, pointing at the book.

“Flagg, you mock me!” the Dimitri through the door laughed. “I know perfectly well what this is. It is you who doesn’t. Ciao!”

…He saw his future self guide many to destruction. Work in the shadows. Watch and laugh at everything he could…

…He saw himself sitting in a chair, looking right through the Dark Tower’s door.

“We will find perfection, one day,” future-Dimitri said.

“Really?”

“Really. This existence is like a fleck of gold in a pile of elephant feces. We can make it all gold.”

“Yes… yes we can!”

The door closed…

…He saw himself living life to the fullest. Unending, unrelenting joy. It was a rare moment when he saw a frown on his future…

Dimitri neared the top. It seemed like everything was coming together. He opened a door…

“BLEH HEH HEH HEH BLECK! All worlds will fall! And be replaced with one of perfection!”

Behind him, future-Dimitri laughed.

Dimitri closed the door, cackling. “The fool doesn’t understand the hammer that he has become! It will lead to…”

Dimitri opened the third-to-last door and beheld himself having ascended to a being of true, immense power. He existed in multiple dimensions at once, taking control of the world around him – making the platforms smile! Making everything laugh! “IT IS THE ULTIMATE SHOW!”

He moved to open the second-to-last door – but something made him stop. It was not the thought that, behind this door, lay his death. The thought didn’t even occur to his demented mind.

It was the name on the final door that drew his attention.

DIMENTIO

He had never heard it before. But he knew it was his name.

“Dimentio…” Dimentio said, mulling the sound over in his mouth. “I like it... The master of dimensions…”

He opened the door, hand barely registering the jester’s mask engraved in the doorknob. He saw the inside.

He saw the spirograph of the Source.

He saw the Clock with the spirograph on it.

He saw all the symbols.

He moved to walk into it – and then stopped. He pulled back, narrowing his eyes.

This was a trick…

…He’d know a trick anywhere. Once he walked through there, he would be sent away. He could feel it. It would end his journey.

Knowledge of his future wasn’t enough. He needed to know more.

He needed to touch the Source.

So he teleported himself through the doorway. The Tower creaked and groaned – detecting that someone had entered the final room. It could have sent him away in an instant.

It didn’t. He was allowed in.

It didn’t look all that different from the inside. The Source was still there, glowing, while the clock sat there motionless.

He walked up to the Source and touched it.

He got his answers about creation…

~Theater~

“…and with the creation of Infinity, we will no longer know all the answers! There will be no limit to how we can grow!”

The man who was the audience found himself wishing they could go back to the drama between F-something and Winona, because this ham-fisted stupidity was grating against him in ways that few people ever had. He felt like his time was being wasted.

But the film had to be over soon. They were building up to a climax here. All centered around those Infinity Mechanisms and the creation of true Infinity.

He knew exactly what was about to happen. Nobody who watched this movie would have any illusions that it wouldn’t end in tragedy. But he did wonder exactly how they would handle it. They had shown some cleverness in the writing of this script – maybe they could salvage a good ending from the heap of garbage.

The film cut to F-something and Winona. Winona sat in a capsule clearly designed off the whole ‘Superman fell from space’ idea while F-something worked tirelessly at a computer. Winona looked at peace through the glass.

F-something bit her nails. She was praying.

“The Downstreamers were the closest thing to God that ever existed,” the man muttered.

The scene shifted once again. It showed the ‘high commander’ standing in front of one of the several ovoids of the Infinity Mechanism. He performed some last minute checks. “It is time for us to create something beyond. Let everything exist!”

“Yes sir!”

The sections of the Infinity Mechanism all began to glow an intense blue, shooting energy beams into the sky. They tore at the fabric of space above them.

The viewer didn’t care how inaccurate this was, they had devoted so much of the special effects budget to it that it became true eye candy. As pleasing as anything possibly could be. A treat for kids and adults of all ages… True art.

The scene shifted away from the amazing special effects to a map of the multiverse the ‘high commander’ was watching. New dots formed rapidly as new universes were created. The rate at which these universes kept increasing – faster and faster, on a scale beyond exponential.

“The supertask is completing as expected!” a scientist declared. “In one hour of metatime, the multiverse should be Infinite!”

The high commander laughed. “Yes! Yes! We’ve done it! We’ve shown existence that it can truly have no limit!”

The man who was the audience chuckled. “Three… two… one.”

A red light started blaring on the screen. “What is that?”

“Something at the edge of the multiverse…”

~Tower~

…Weaver decided it was time. “You need to go, Roland. There is nothing more for you here. I hope I provided something for you.”

“A reminder that there are other worlds than these,” the gunslinger said.

Weaver let out a soft, somewhat bitter chuckle. “Go, Roland, return to your quest. The Dark Tower awaits.”

Roland tipped his hat. “C’mon Patrick.”

Patrick silently followed Roland. He tore a sheet of paper off his notebook and left it on the ground.

“It was good talkin’ to you, Weaver-sai. May ka look finely upon you.”

“And may your journey finally reach its well-deserved end,” Weaver said.

Roland and Patrick walked down the wet hallway in silence, leaving through the same door they had come in. They returned to their snowy home. The door closed behind them.

The first thing Weaver did was disconnect the door from Mid-World. No one else would come through that door. No one would ever be able to go to Mid-World again. It was sealed now. For eternity.

Weaver was once again alone. So he threw himself into his work and time bled into nothing.

He finalized the security preferences on the Safeguard. They would respond only to each other, and not outsiders. He would be very impressed if any society ever figured out how to get past the firewalls of the Safeguard. But he wasn’t a fool – the Safeguard would also know how to interact with those who wanted to travel through the Spline. They would be able to understand what the Spline was for, how to use it, and not to attack it.

He tweaked the connections so they would stay strong even as the multiverse continued to grow with time. The Spline would always connect the outer edges, and the Safeguard would maintain it to ensure it stayed that way. It was to be a true highway.

And then… he was done.

The Spline was ready to defend itself against anything existence threw at it, from now into eternity. When the multiverse became too big to manage, the Spline would be there to help.

Weaver found himself wishing he had time to create a connection between the Strands and the Spline… but he was just one Weaver. One dying Weaver. He barely had enough time to complete the work already set out.

The multiverse would just have to make do with a little chaos. He did what he could.

He suddenly remembered that Patrick had left a sketch on the ground. Weaver scanned it – beautiful. An intertwining series of shapes clearly based on the designs in the central room. It was perfect.

If only he could figure out why the cycles made an overall shape of an eight of all things. Why eight? Eight wasn’t important. The number was nineteen and ninety-nine, right? But he didn’t understand how that worked, so for all he knew eight was secretly nineteen or something…

His thoughts were distracted when another door opened. Charging from a completely different hallway was none other than the man in black himself, Randall Flagg. He wordlessly marched across the Weaver’s world until he came to the door to Mid-world. He pulled it open, revealing only a wall behind it.

“…What?”

“It’s been disabled,” Weaver said.

“I need to get back there,” Flagg said, curling his fists.

“…Weren’t you eaten by a were-spider last time?”

Flagg raised an eyebrow. “You seem to have a death wish.”

“I’m already dying. It’s not like I have anything to lose.”

Flagg paused a moment – and grinned. “Ah. In that case, maybe I can help you to an appropriate end…”

~Grand Tour~

…this is Rarity Belle, and here’s the last report I will make as a member of the Horizon crew. My journey has come to an end. The Horizon is returning home tomorrow. All of the friends I’ve gotten to know over the past few decades will be gone.

They likely won’t be back for a long time. Coming out this far is certainly difficult, and funding another mission will take a while given all the things Nanoha is certainly going to have to deal with when she gets back. All the friendships she made, all the alliances she forged without anyone back at the TSAB even knowing.

I hope Subaru does well.

I learned so much on this journey about friendship, about hardship, about how to fight, about how to care… about how to suffer. Now that I’m finally home, I know I’m not the same mare. But none of my old friends are the same either. It evens out, in a way. Already our bonds are strengthening once again.

Sweetie Belle… She makes me so proud. She’s gone on not to become a singer, or a therapist, but a business mare. She’d been trying to find me this entire time. It’s… good to see her so happy.

My world’s changed a lot, and I have no plans to stop that change now that I’m back. I think it’s great to see ponykind strive to understand more about the worlds around them. More about the Stars…

The Stars…

I don’t believe they are what Nanoha says they are. I don’t think they’re really as impassive as everyone claims. I think they’re controlling us. I can’t be sure, of course, and I’ll have to do some research to learn more.

But I do know I don’t like their attitude towards existence. It’s despicable. It’s nothing like what I’ve learned all these years.

The Star in my world, Algol, might be the source of the answers I need. He seems different than all the others. But that could just be my wishful thinking – I can’t know for certain what he’s really like, after all.

Nanoha, if you listen to this – if anyone reads this among the thousands upon thousands of Horizon logs – please know that I am sad to see you go. I wish our worlds weren’t so far apart and that we could continue on our adventures until the end of our lives. Or, well, end of my life I suppose, considering your attitude toward aging.

Even though I missed so much of the life I was supposed to have, I wouldn’t go back and prevent myself from leaving. There was too much we did out there among existence, to consider removing it all. We saved each others’ lives more times than I can count. We were there for each other when we lost someone.

I know I’ll say this when you finally leave in person, but I want to say it here anyway. Goodbye. I’ll never forget everything that happened. May we run into each other again.

This is Rarity ‘Scarce’ Belle, signing off for the last time. It’s been an honor. Take care of yourselves.

[END RECORDING]

Rarity took a step back from the recording device and sent the report up to the Horizon. She smiled, looking out the window of her home with bright, happy eyes.

“Well, I suppose it won’t do to put it off. Time for a talk with a Star…”

~Twilence~

“…we should talk about something,” I said, suddenly.

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yeah. Because… because this is the end. Of our group.”

“…You sure?”

“It has to be,” I said, scribbling notes in my book. “It’s the only way this works.”

“Oh.”

“So. What have you always wanted to ask me and never gotten to?”

Vriska smirked. “Biggest crush.”

I facehooved. “Can we avoid the stupid questions?”

“Fine, fine. …You see lots of things I can’t. Is there anything about me you know?”

“You’re a hero, Vriska. You’ll be one of the main ones.”

“Yeah, but you’ve already said that. Are there, like, any secrets I don’t know about? Something about my past? A lie I believe? I – geez I’m not sure what I’m asking about here.”

I closed my eyes. “I know what you’re asking. There are a few things in your journey with the Doctor…”

“Don’t care about that ass. SBURB?”

“SBURB… Yeah, there’s a thing or two you don’t know.”

“Oh?”

“Do you ever wonder why the Xeelee or the Flowers or the other higher civilizations didn’t try to stop Lord English?”

“Uh… You know, I do. Why didn’t they do something?”

“They tried,” I said, taking a deep breath in preparation for an unseen story of the relatively ‘recent’ past…

Horrorterrors have the most interesting death throes. As their impossible limbs are torn from them in ways incomprehensible to the vast majority of minds, they scream. It is a similarity they share with ma; agonizing panicked screams upon deathly torment. The difference is that their screams cross the boundaries between universes: entering those existences separate and apart, forcing children in galaxies to frown for eternity, driving universes to suicide, and creating the worst of monsters and heroes. It was a madness, a part of the Horrorterrors’ nature, and it had to go somewhere when the being died.

And yet, even in its final throes, the elder god still wouldn’t tell its tormentor what he wanted to know. Where he should be. Where he should go. Where his enemy was. She eluded him still.

Lord English stood as the only thing in this universe - he might as well have BEEN the universe. Were one to translate to this place they would die by his hand. The moment he left, there was no more universe - but he tied all the connections together into a chaos knot, straining the other planes of Paradox Space; cracking their realities, making their realities approach nothing.

Lord English reformed himself into a more familiar form - humanoid, green, and tremendous. His eyes flickered with the colors of a cruel game; his face the visage of death, and his horrendous roars driving the vast Honk to all who listened and some who didn't. He took a ‘step’ with his peg leg, damning the plane to the Sea and nonexistence. He punched his way through a few empty planes, cracking the darkness of paradoxes all around. He came across a dream-bubble microverse.

Time for some fun, he thought.

He shot out of the dreaming-ground, spraying sand everywhere in a shower that never reached the ground, frozen in time from the cracks in the nature of the dream. A half-dozen ghosts - mostly trolls - took one look at him and tried to flee.

Fools. He was already there. They ran face-first into his claws like the idiots they were, expunging their spirits. Lord English let out a deep Honk, signifying laughter. Pathetic puny whelps. There was never anything to challenge him, even the Horrorterrors were becoming easy killings, despite all their attempts to wrap him in their paradoxes. They were morons, thinking they could stop what had exceeded them...

“MOTION CARRIED!”

Lord English paused - he didn’t recognize the presence that voice came from. He was aware of a tall, humanoid being composed entirely of stars and darkness, female by the look of it. Her hand was outstretched, and her eyes were narrowed in determination. Lord English was hit with something he couldn't see or predict, a lattice of pure universal energy that drove his entire body into the Sea-

-or, rather, it tried to. The stellar humanoid’s expression shifted to confusion when Lord English bounced off the Sea. She took a moment to ponder her next action, and this was her doom. He drove his scepter through her, discovering her to have the energy of a universe contained within her visage. No matter, he just needed to put a little extra effort into it - roaring mad, he sliced her visage in half, spreading her energies across nothingness. Then he destroyed the universe he was in for good measure.

That was interesting... Lord English had never encountered one of them before. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was probably causing enough damage to draw the attention of powerful entities from beyond Paradox Space. Beings from the larger multiverse. He grinned - that meant things were about to get fun, didn’t it?

Something punched him - he knew what it was the moment it made contact. A personification of pure rage and violence, feeding off Lord English’s own emotions to empower itself. Lord English flipped his scepter into a gun and fired at Rage, bullets tearing through spacetime and Dream Bubbles like they were cobwebs. He roared, metaphysical manifestations of pool balls appearing all around Rage, flying into the Abstract, damaging him, but also making him stronger.

How annoying.

Two more of the stellar humanoids appeared behind him, brandishing weapons that cleaved through universe polymers. Between them was a sort of energy being who had formed himself into a strange zodiac symbol. English was pierced by the two weapons, and the energy being drew him into the circle, surrounding him in sealing energies.

Lord English found this amusing. He punched out of reality, tossing the energy being into a Dream Bubble where nightmares became real, allowing nature to devour it. He then grabbed one of the stellar creatures in each of his hands and smashed them together like pancakes. Rage flew at Lord English once again, but this time Lord English skewered the Abstract with a peg leg. Rage roared - but found that his stability was shattering. His essence exploded.

A tremendous golden mask appeared, accompanied by several dozen beings in reality-adhering armor, forcing their physics upon Paradox Space permanently. The mask spoke.

“LORD ENGLISH! YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED GUILTY BY THE GREAT WILL OF GOD! YOU ARE TO BE DAMNED TO THE SEA FOR YOUR HEINOUS ACTS!”

Lord English found this amusing. He punched through the several dozen beings from all sides at once, beaning the god-mask in the nose. Evidently, the god was more than just a floating face - he appeared everywhere around Lord English, in all nearby universes several thousand times.

“YOUR JUDGEMENT COMES, ENGLISH.”

English took the full brunt of the attack head-on - it actually hurt a little. Dozens of stellar, energy, and mechanical-suited beings appeared, bashing him from all sizes with toys that shredded everything around them, creating a starburst on his pattern of destruction. The Green Sun shifted its position within Paradox Space from the sheer force.

Lord English lashed out with a powerful burst of energy going in all directions, taking out most of the god’s essence, only for the personifications of Eternity and Energy appear, throwing him into more universes, having them act as a series of brick walls. He smashed them together - but Energy only grew stronger from this action. A celestial being in armor appeared, driving his hand into English’s head - only for English to drive his claw into him. Lord English grabbed the essence of the stars and used them to banish Energy into the Green Sun to be devoured. Then English clapped, shattering a hundred universes in a single instant. He walked out, making sure to strut like a badass.

“YOU ARE CHILDISH.”the yellow god said, a few more masks appearing - some of different colors, presumably different gods, or different aspects of the same god. “YOUR HUBRIS WILL BE YOUR DOWNFAL-”

Lord English decided he was done listening to that guy talk. He simultaneously appeared in all locations and punched every last golden smug face into oblivion. He twisted his wrist, smirking.

Then the energy beings tried something again, though Them seemed to know it was a far-fetched idea. They were attempting once again to seal his powers, but that was stupid, they were stupid, the idiots. He grabbed onto the connections they were forming and smashed them into a personification of Wisdom. Lord English bounded after them, following their connections, tearing their energetic powers to nothing, tossing them aside like toys, following them further and further away...

He appeared in a cluster of universes, pounding more and more of the energy beings into the ground, getting more and more joy out of it the more he killed. They actually fought back a little; he didn’t have to hold back at all! He didn't have to toy with them! What fun!

Then he realized that someone was severing the last connection to this section of universes.

They were trying to dump him into the sea alongside dozens of other planes of existence.

He growled - for the first time he wondered if they actually had the means to kill him. But he wouldn’t go out that easily.As the universe fell into nothingness around him, he punched out, forming a brand new connection. The universes restabilized, though only half of their energies existed. He destroyed the large energy-construct that had been snipping universe connections left and right.

He was no longer toying around - he was going to face these gods head on and take them out. He punched through them - and they decided to start throwing entire universes at him. Such things were just ammunition to them, both places to exist within and places to use as cannon balls. Already the death count had exceeded the trillions of trillions of lesser beings.

They really were willing to kill him weren’t they, with no qualms?

Good. Worthy opponents-

And then the universe he existed within was torn FAR from Paradox space, shoved somewhere Lord English wasn’t even aware existed. He was suddenly inside a ring of universes, all containing galaxy-sized Rings of strings, all aimed right at him. They tore into his flesh not only from all directions but from all times. He roared in pain - that should have, should have, killed him, if he was only the sum of his parts.

But oh, he was so, so much more than that.

He rose up, empowered from the substance that defined the multiverse. Images of his Prophet, the terrible structure at the center of everything, of words on a page, of a fourth wall...

He wrote himself alive.

He punched out of his universe, into the new universes - brilliant universes filled with stars and structures of time that flowed from universe to universe. He took notes - in his future empire, he'd love something like this. The entire multiverse, one huge temporal clusterfuck.

Apparently, the inhabitants of these universes knew how to navigate the complex annals of time, for Lord English saw his past, present, and future timelines attacked from all sides by tremendous machines - he felt what it was like to be torn apart by piano wire devices. But he reconstituted himself through time, punching thousands of universes occupied by these megastructure-builders into nothing.

They got the message. Lord English was moved back to Paradox Space in a single instant. He could tell they were running out of plans - they hit him with everything they had, time, space, magic, spirit, eldritch...

Some Flowery creature had been called in, weaving Narrative around them in some sort of home.

Lord English found this amusing - that was the best they could do? THAT? Oh, if only they understood what the Tower truly meant, idiots...

He pounded the plant into the ground, as well as all past and future versions of it the time shenanigans were trying to create. The universe-bending gods had brought in a lesser being. They must have been desperate. Good. Very good.

They tried a few things again, but Lord English was expecting them. He would not fall for any of their tricks - he grabbed the universe-composed weapons and drove them into their creators. He raged across Paradox Space in a glee.

Armies of lesser races began to appear. Stellar constructions forged with biological material. Ships that existed in universes separate from his own.

…A holy mage attempting to wire magic all around through every being here.

He decided that was interesting enough to punch. The pathetic human died in an instant, her powerful magics doing nothing to protect her frail body. She was dead.

“HAYATE!” a feminine voice rang out. Lord English felt powerful ka from this voice. But she was just a human woman, no real power in there.

“FULL POWER…”

Oh? What was this?

“…STARLIGHT…”

Lord English shot at her with his gun – best take care of her before she became annoying.

“...BREAKER!”

It was then that Lord English realized he was facing someone who was more than just power and ka – she was, in many ways, a force of nature.

Her attack spiraled out into Lord English’s universe, attacking him, but also the space-time he occupied. The energy levels reached such a level that the underlying nature of the reality tore apart at the seams, and the universe collapsed in on itself, vanishing in a puff of energy.

She fell to a knee, exhausted. She had put everything into that.

It hadn’t done anything to Lord English besides impress him. She was a true warrior.

Too bad she had to die.

Then the other societies attacked him again, making Lord English forget all about Nanoha Takamachi. He was thrown aside, but he was not damaged beyond repair. He never was. He could not be.

Could even the Downstreamers of old have done anything to him!? He doubted it!

He let out a vast Honk, letting them know he wasn’t done. He would take them all out! And they would all fall to him easily enough!

And then a being appeared in front of him that made everyone stop in their tracks. He was a golden being of light that was vaguely humanoid. His arms were behind his back, and he looked at Lord English with a stern expression.

Lord English could sense the power coming off this god - no, this God.

Lord English wasn't sure he could defeat Him. He didn’t know. He couldn't see.

He was scared.

“...I see,” the One Above All said.

Lord English growled - he was going to slap this God around, damn it. He’d win, he knew it.

“Oh, you’re right, I believe,” the One Above All nodded. “I don't think I can be the one to defeat you.”

Lord English paused.

“You are a being of Narrative. By nature, we cannot do anything. You must be defeated by something connected to you, by one who deserves to send you to the void. Or by many who deserve to send you into nothing, to trap you. It is something that must not come at our hand, at least not directly.” He shrugged. “In theory, I should be able to snuff you out with a thought and be done with it.”

“THEN TRY IT!” Lord English bellowed.

The One Above all let a smirk come across His face. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He looked English right in his impossible eyes. “I'm afraid I can't give you what you want.”

And then He was gone. The remaining energy beings, celestials, machines, and others decided to follow suit, retreating into the multiverse.

Lord English stood there for the longest time. He supposed he could go hunt them down - destroy them. But he had a mission to accomplish. He needed to destroy that one who was connected to him... Before she did anything.

He needed to find her. Now more than ever.

For whatever reason, he knew that God was being completely honest.

He punched into a new universe, ignoring the dream bubbles. He couldn’t afford to waste time now. Not anymore. He had to find her.

He had to find his ‘sister’ before she did anything.

I completed the story, letting out a breath.

“So what you’re telling me is big-G decided to trick Lord English, with a sentence, into falling for the whole ghost army thing?”

“Lord English might have done it anyway,” I said. “But it might have been the rage that built up in him that did him in.”

“Huh…” Vriska said. “…Yeah, anger was his primary flaw, wasn’t it…”

~Historian~

…my disrespectful son! He’s…

He’s gone and destroyed the most sacred of all our laws! The purity doctrine! He’s gone and found himself a human girl – not even a member of one of the offshoot tribes or a remnant of the Ancients! A truly ordinary human girl from a backwater dimension!

While I must be begrudgingly grateful that she nursed him back to health after a dimensional mishap, this is going against everything we hold dear.

I have kept this information from the other elders so they will not take it out on him…

…This book is not a diary, why is the above there? I can no longer submit this as the manuscript. It must be adjusted…

…In recent history, it has been revealed that

[Indecipherable]

I know he’s still seeing her. He claims he isn’t, but I have records of the dimensional portals. He pretends that I have no idea who he’s talking about.

Does he not realize that he is not only destroying himself, but the tribe as well?

What will we do if the purity is broken!?...

…The art of marriage in the Tribe of Darkness is always presided over by the father of the groom and the mother of the bride, if they are available. The procedure is a very solemn one marked with deep, thoughtful promises and has the beauty of making both parties realize this isn’t a game.

Unfortunately my son doesn’t seem to understand that. He thought he could hop off to the middle of nowhere and marry this girl in her way. There was no sanctity there! There was no proper

[Indecipherable]

I have taken her. Placed her with a curse. She will wander the multiverse until the day she dies. She will live her life, I am not a cruel man, but no one will ever be able to find her and no one will ever be able to stay with her for very long. She will continue like that for eternity.

My son was livid, which is understandable, but at least we have avoided a disaster. None of the Tribe knows of her existence. It was an embarrassment that will be brushed under the rug, never to be spoken of again…

…He is gone.

No doubt to search for her.

He won’t find her. But I worry for him. He could end up somewhere dangerous.

I just want him to come back home safe…

~Mother~

…just let her be safe…” the mother said, running through the horribly named Inner Foundry. It was one of the furthest areas that could still be considered part of the City, and it was built into a mountain. It was once a place for mining expected to be transformed into a factory district, but the second part of that plan hadn’t panned out. It was now an abandoned metal scaffolding built into a mountain.

It was also huge. She doubted she would ever find anything or anyone in here.

Also, she had no cell service in here. She cursed herself for not getting the better phone, but no, she never thought she would need to be in a mountain and need to talk to her husband. Far from it.

She ran across a metal railing, looking for signs of human habitation. She found a few recent pieces of graffiti, but ‘recent’ could be ‘any time within the last few weeks’. It was no help to her at all. Plus, if there was graffiti of theirs, it wasn’t like she would recognize Jadan’s signature and she knew Osanna wasn’t the best at art. She liked the way things looked and could never tell you why.

The mother grew increasingly convinced that she had no idea where she was going and would get lost in this mountain of rails and metal. It was almost a fact to her at this point. Could she retrace her steps? Would anyone be able to find her?

“OSANNA!” She called.

Unlike all the other times, this time there was a response. On a rail a fair distance below her, she saw a human boy book it in fear.

He no doubt thought she couldn’t get down there.

He was wrong. She jumped off her railing and landed on his with a loud clank.

“What the fuck!?” he shouted, glancing behind him.

She ran after him, murder in her eyes.

“Why aren’t your legs broken!?”

“I’m not your average mother,” she muttered, jumping after him. He didn’t have any combat sense whatsoever and was pinned to the ground in less than a second. “Where. Is. Osanna!?”

“She’s up the ladder back there! At the surface! Please don’t kill me!”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” the mother muttered, standing back up. “Why aren’t you up there with her?”

“Maybe I just wanted to go walk around, did you ever think of that!?” He shouted, standing back up. “Or maybe I-”

“Son, if you’re going to talk to me and have any chance, you’re going to drop the teenage attitude.”

His face twitched. “You think I fucking care?”

“Not particularly, but I had hoped.”

“Hoped what?”

“That you weren’t a piece of garbage like the rest of your family.”

His expression darkened. “I’m nothing like them.”

“Well, you left my daughter alone, a-”

“FUCK HER!” Jandan shouted. “Fuck you, fuck everyone involved in this whole mess!”

The mother was about to chide him again – but she saw something in his eyes.

Had he been crying?

“…Jandan, what-”

“Your daughter is an absolute piece of shit who fucking took advantage of me! She’s a heartless bitch! She… She…” Sensing he was about to lose complete control of his emotional faculties, he ran off.

The mother heard sobbing as he left.

As usual, it’s never just that simple, is it?

Her near panic replaced with a solemn feeling, she crawled up the ladder to the top of the Inner Foundry. It took her a couple minutes to get all the way up the ladder, but she wasn’t in a rush. She climbed out into the light of day, standing atop a great mountain with evergreen trees all around.

The wind whipped in her silky hair.

She saw Osanna sitting on a rock, heaving with deep, painful sobs…

~Merodi~

“…are you crying again?” Monika asked.

GM had nothing to say.

“Back off,” I said. “He is just a normal human being. Why is that so hard to get?”

“…When was the last time any of us encountered a normal human being?” John asked.

“Even he doesn’t count!” Monika said, holding her hands out.

“You’re all a great team,” GM grunted.

“Watch i-”

I slapped Monika in the face. “Shut up. The camera is on us again. I’ve got new information – much like the updates I used to get a long, long time ago. I know more about the situation, and it i-”

“Yeah, no!” A cheery voice said. “You don’t get to have that conversation because I’m about done!”

I glared at the small white pixie that had appeared in the middle of the disc. ‘Her’ hair was short, her form pale, and her eyes a deep, endless black. “White Nettle. You finally show yourself.”

“Yes! I do!” White Nettle said with a smile. “And you’re all about to witness the greatest moment in the history of the multiverse! Do any of you know why we’re here?”

“The Lord, the Muse, the Heir
Are gathered together to make a tear
The God, the Prophet, the ancient
Are needed to fulfill a lost tenet,” Arceus recited. “We are here to make a tear in what I presume is reality and fulfill a lost tenet.”

“Which is probably something your Downunder people didn’t do,” John said with a dorky smile.

“Downstreamer,” GM corrected, forcing a smile on his face so he didn’t freak out at White Nettle’s presence. It only partially worked – he was still trembling considerably.

Nettle leaned in. “Close. But what is really going to be accomplished?”

“Are you going to try to create Infinity again?” I asked. “I know your people failed. It’s not something that was a secret to me. Even your existence wasn’t a secret to me, even though it was to a few others.”

Nettle looked at her. “Ooh, so so close. But look outside this little pocket dimension I have you all imprisoned in! What is out there?”

“The Dark Tower, of course it’s o-” a lightbulb went off in my head. “You’re insane.”

“…What am I missing?” Monika asked. “I’m missing something.”

“Uh… She’s going to make us paint the Dark Tower?” John suggested.

“I’m going to die next to this guy,” GM realized. “I’m not sure how I feel about this.”

“Who said anything about dying?” Nettle asked, shaking her head. “Nope! I’m just going to-”

“-attempt to control the Dark Tower,” Arceus said. “Your people had a choice in the past – Infinity or the Dark Tower. They chose Infinity. You think that was the wrong choice.”

“And the ‘God’ finally understands,” Nettle said, smiling innocently. “I’m here to take control of the Dark Tower, using the power contained in you five to complete the ancient prophecy and end this era of existence. We tried letting stories and Prophets define existence, it’s time for something new.”

“No single person should control reality,” I said. “You can’t claim to be the right choice.”

“Oh, no. But I can bring back the Downstreamers with this power and, as a whole, we could decide what happens to existence!” White Nettle smirked. “You should probably thank us, it’ll make ka a lot less of a problem for you to deal with.”

“I have a question,” John said. “How does kidnapping the five of us do that?”

“Simple, really,” Nettle said, snapping her fingers. Suddenly the five of us were immobilized – but we were in the same universe as the Dark Tower now. We were spread around it in a pentagon shape. Spheres of white energy appeared around us, channeled through the full power of Nettle’s multiversal-jellyfish body. Myself, Monika, John, and GM had no powers to speak of right now, kept docile through limitations in our physical bodies.

Arceus had no such limitations. He let out a roar, trying to shatter everything – but a flash of red light stopped him. “How?” he asked.

Nettle smirked, generating a small red-white ball in her hand. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a full Creator god with an easily exploitable weakness? And yet, you. You, the god of your world, are hard-coded to be capturable. This little ball the humans created? I can use the energies within it to capture you wherever I want. Because that’s part of who you are.”

Arceus roared – but he knew she was right. He couldn’t do anything. His powers were sealed away with him.

“So, here’s how this works. I take the abilities of a Creator to start a new existence around the Dark Tower. Of course, it will fight back, but I have a Muse and a Lord of ka itself whose powers can tangle around that mess. Of course, the Dark Towers self-defense mechanism will come into place – the paradox. Which is why John is here. He can break that paradox with his retcon. Allow the Tower to open to me like an egg. And GM…” she floated down to the cowering man. “You’re telling the Song. This is what you’ll write. I’ll just implant it in your mind so that, when I put you back, you will write it. Don’t worry, I’ll allow your connection to the Tower to exist long enough for you to write to here.”

I wanted to yell at her – but I couldn’t. She had me frozen.

“Oh, you want to say something?” Nettle said, smiling. “Is it perhaps that I’m too arrogant? That I shouldn’t be playing God? That I’m just going to bring doom, just like the Downstreamers did before me?”

Maybe. Maybe this destruction is what keeps me from seeing further.

“But what about that eighth story I see in your head? There’s something in the future. Maybe that world you see… Maybe that world is because of me. Because of the new Downstreamers.” She smiled warmly. “Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to die, or even be hurt. I’m just going to channel all your powers through myself in an exceedingly complex universal polymer circuit. And the vaguely alchemical bonds will focus all energy into the center, into me.”

“…The Tower is in the Center,” Arceus pointed out.

“And this universe is currently inside my brain,” Nettle countered. “So the Tower and my consciousness are the center here. It paradoxically works.” She drifted back.

You don’t have to do this. I thought to her.

“It’s not like this is an evil plan, or anything,” Nettle pointed out. “I just want my people to have their power back. This is the way to do it. And if you look into your sights, you know this will work.”

She had me there. It would work. It would bring the Downstreamers back and allow them to have complete dominion over the multiverse. And they wouldn’t be evil. They’d be just like they were in the past.

“Can you give me any reason why I shouldn’t?” Nettle asked me directly. “You don’t have anything left to see, Twilence. There is no future that needs to happen. This is the climax.”

It would cause great unrest.

“…So do half the things you do.”

It would remove freedom. It would… I… I have nothing, Nettle. All I know is that this feels wrong. That what you’re doing is not meant to be.

“Of course not. The Tower doesn’t want to be replaced. But what’s it going to do?”

The Austraeoh appeared in the universe.

“…Frick….”

~Tower~

…Flagg walked into the main room of the Weaver’s construct, rubbing his fingers over everything. “Are you ready?”

The central white pillar flickered. “I’ve been ready ever since the power reserves dwindled.”

Flagg shrugged and shook his head. “You’re making this a lot less enjoyable. Have a bit of a dejected spirit! Or an excited one.”

“I’ve come to terms with it, Flagg. I am an ancient being.”

“Yes, yes, of the Prim,” he said dismissively. “If only you had a resurrection matrix like me.”

Weaver didn’t dignify this with a response.

Flagg strode through the room, putting a hand to his head. “I can still see Mid-World, you know. I can see the Tower.”

“Upset you can’t do anything about it?”

Flagg turned around, clicking his heels. “In some ways. In others, not.”

“You don’t have to be cryptic here.”

“You can’t see into my mind,” Flagg said with a psychotic grin.

“No,” Weaver confirmed.

“Then I can be as cryptic as I want. What I can do is show you what’s happening there! You’ll be glad to know you missed all the action. The Crimson King is already mostly written out of existence. I would have liked to have been the one to do that, but I won’t be fussy.” He strode around, picking up something from one of the Weaver’s hallways. “…A record?”

“Perhaps one of the travelers through here left it,” Weaver suggested.

Flagg took it out of its cover. “Cloud Atlas… that’s important, but not in a fundamental or impactful way…”

“If you say so.”

Flagg ran his finger across it, playing the tune through his sharp nail somehow. “An ending that folds in on itself and becomes false. A climax of uncertainty. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. Curious.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Flagg didn’t respond to that. “Roland’s walking up to the door of the Dark Tower, entering! Patrick’s becoming well acquainted with the power of the Roses when used for art, swirling them onto his page. He’s just drawn a record and he…” Flagg blinked, glancing at the record he was holding. It was the same record.

“You have no idea why he would draw that, would you?” Weaver asked.

Flagg ignored this, focusing on one was happening in Mid-World. He suddenly felt like he was being watched instead of the other way around.

Patrick looked up to where Randall Flagg’s ‘eye’ was. The boy waved.

Flagg growled. “I will hunt him to the ends of the earth…”

Patrick shook his head. He simply sat down and kept drawing while Cloud Atlas played.

“What is he doing!?”

“Would it have something to do with eight?” Weaver asked, suddenly just as curious as Flagg was.

“Why eight!?”

Weaver shone a light on the piece of paper Patrick had left. Flagg lifted it up and stared at it. “This isn’t an eight. This is the symbol for infinity.”

Weaver’s mental faculties stopped short. “…I forgot something.”

Flagg grinned. “Make a mistake, did you? Suddenly wish you had more life?”

Weaver ignored him – he ran to the Safeguard’s control schemes. He needed to put in a new security measure fast. He knew he was almost out of time.

In Mid-World, Patrick drew Roland ascending the staircase of the Dark Tower, opening doors and looking at his life…

Flagg held up a hand, pointing at Weaver’s white pillar. He grinned, prepared to give a command to kill the ancient being.

Weaver scrambled the security protocols of the Spline. Who cared if that ruined some of its perfection? If he didn’t put this in, everything was done for.

Within the Dark Tower, Roland laid his hand on the final door, the one with his name.

Patrick put down his notebook and closed his eyes, looking not at Flagg’s vision, but at the Dark Tower.

Cloud Atlas played.

Flagg chuckled. “Stop living.”

Weaver got the last-minute change in – but it left a mess in the code. The Spline would not be as perfect as he had envisioned it to be. But he knew it was safe.

Roland stepped through the final door. He did not get to glimpse the room at the top; he was simply sent directly to where he needed to go. The start of his journey. So he could be the gunslinger, again and again.

Mid-World reset. A tear rolled down Patrick’s cheek as he vanished, Flagg’s view replaced with that of a desert, rather than the field of Roses.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Flagg stood inside the now-dark hall of the Weaver, only a few of the machines operating on their own power.

He could feel his connection to Mid-World disappearing. But he already knew what was happening. The Dark Tower had created a true paradox. A world where time travel was not allowed… But one that kept looping anyway. Looping to repair the beams of the Dark Tower.

There would be another Flagg in there – but when he died in every loop, he would not be reborn.

Every time, Roland would climb up the Dark Tower – and reset everything.

The Dark Tower had won. Nothing would ever be able to threaten it again.

Flagg, for once in his life, was speechless.

He left. There was nothing left for him here. This story was at its end. ■

~Theater~

…the one-man audience watched the actors panic.

“The Spline!” one of them told the commander. “It’s the Spline! We… we activated the largest Safeguard response I’ve ever seen!”

“We can take them,” the high commander said. “It’s just a bunch of mindless robots!”

“It’s not just the robots! It’s… They’re compressing the universes together! Keeping the multiverse from expanding past a certain volume!”

The high commander stared at him. “…And what is that going to do to us?”

“…It’s going to destroy us. Completely.”

“Why would the Weavers program this in!?” the high commander shouted. “Did they want to kill whoever dared defy them!?”

“They wanted to stop infinity,” F-something said on a video call. “I can see it easily. They realized that, if the multiverse was truly infinite, there could be no meaning. It would defy the purpose of the Dark Tower. If we made an infinite multiverse, we would make an infinite number of ourselves, the Downstreamers. There would be no more battles for the multiverse. No more big questions about existence. But there would be all things possible. That would destroy the organization the Weavers tried to impose on the world.”

“Is it so wrong to want everything to exist!?” the high commander asked.

“I don’t know,” F-something said. “All I know is they didn’t want it. And we’re going to pay the price for daring to defy their wishes for existence. Goodbye, high commander.” The feed cut off. The film switched to show F-something furiously typing away at a computer. “All right Winona, I’m going to cut through the universes as they explode around us… You’ll be stuck in there a long, long time, but I’ve got your fate covered. You will awake one day. When you do… remember us.”

Winona couldn’t say anything since she was sealed away – but her expression shifted, indicated she’d heard.

“Goodbye,” F-something said, tears in her eyes. She pressed a button and Winona vanished.

And then the universe exploded.

The greatest cataclysm the multiverse had ever seen rippled throughout. The Infinity Mechanisms tried to make Infinity as the Spline contracted to do just the opposite. Cosmic energies clashed into each other. Every universe was hit – every. Single. One. New, old, it didn’t matter. Planets were fused, physics were thrown into each other, and the Unrealities raged.

The viewer stared at the effects. “Neat.”

The bottoms of the Infinity Mechanisms exploded, their nearly indestructible interiors falling apart as they could no longer try to do what they were meant to. Downstreamers everywhere lost their mental connections with each other, time itself shifting just enough everywhere to write almost all of them out of existence. The high commander screamed as his body was torn to shreds.

But, eventually, the Spline relented. The Infinity Mechanisms could work no more; there was no longer a threat.

The view panned out to show the One Above All floating in nothingness, watching the remnants of destruction – and shaking his head.

The view zoomed out to the entire multiverse. It looked broken, jarred, and empty in many places. But it was still there – and still finite.

The narrator from the start of the movie came back. “The remaining Downstreamers were hunted down by the few gods who still had grudges against them. Their culture was wiped clean. Every society that existed at the time was damaged beyond repair – only the Abstracts were able to reform afterward. This cataclysm of attempted Infinity is the reason all the Downstreamer remnants shape the multiverse. Why there are universe eaters, universe generators, nexus universes, and other bizarre things. Most of them come from the Downstreamers. Now, no one remembers where all of them are, or how all of them work. Even the Class 1 societies, who can control such things, cannot master them all. The remnant of the Downstreamers is a permanent mark on the multiverse we cannot hide from, and yet most of us forget.”

The man who was the audience stretched his arms, feeling like it was definitely time for the film to be over.

“Perhaps… there is a remnant.” An image of Winona’s capsule passed across the screen. “Perhaps there is one out there who can help us remember.”

The credits started rolling over the top of Winona’s pod.

“Give me a break,” the man said, grunting. “There’s no Downstreamer remnant kid thing. I would know about it.” He grinned like a maniac. “I’m the reason they’re gone, after all.”

The man in black adjusted his coat. “It only took one powerful voice in favor of Infinity to get them to go there.” Randall Flagg snapped his fingers, setting the theater ablaze. He nonchalantly walked out as the fire alarms started to blare.

All in all, the film had been interesting – woefully inaccurate, especially to someone who had been there during the events, but he understood that he wasn’t exactly the target audience. It was very stupid and the story was a mess, but the special effects were decent.

This world clearly had a few decades to go before it really understood how to make movies.

He doubted he would let civilization survive that long here… Even though they had reminded him of his greatest feat, they had also dared to suggest he missed one.

There was no chance of that. ■

~Harlequin~

…Dimentio had created an office for him in the top of the megalith.

Or, as he now knew it was called, the Infinity Mechanism remnant.

It was a simple office. Just him, a table, an endless pen, and a book.

The book. The book that had been calling to him from across time and space. The book he was destined to create.

The book of the Source.

He wrote down secrets. Endless secrets, secrets inserted in cryptic prophecies, secrets strewn about in cyphers, in drawings, in ramblings that seemed like madness. Who was he kidding, the ramblings were madness. Absolute madness. For that was what truth was.

The book itself was completely mundane. But the secrets gave it life. The forbidden knowledge infused it with great, destructive power. It began to glow as he wrote more and more into it, to shimmer, to scream to reality that it existed. It wanted people to know the future it contained. It wanted to cause the future it contained.

Dimentio wrote hundreds of thousands of words within the pages. Some frantically, some slow. But he wouldn’t sleep or eat until he was finished.

He didn’t need to.

He was Dimentio, master of dimensions! Performer extraordinaire! He had seen his life, and it was glorious. And this book… This book was his life.

He laid down the pen when he was done and closed the book, looking at the cover. It was a dark silvery tone with a deep round crystal in the center of it. Tick marks surrounded the crystal like a clock, and a dark spirograph surrounded that.

“Ahahahahahaha! Like a cicada, I emerge to find life complete!” He held up the book, laughing the entire time. “Behold! The Prognosticus!”

The book shifted. Dimentio saw images – but they were images he already knew. Images that no longer bothered him.

He knew he could not use this book directly. That was not how the Dark Tower worked. The secrets within could not just be acted upon. No… no, they needed to be seeded. Seeded across time, space, history, existence, reality! Hundreds of people would own this book, and it would bring about destruction in every one of them!

All until Dimentio would be allowed to fulfill his life.

All until Dimentio could create perfection.

He just had to wait for that ‘Bleck’. ■

~Historian~

…and then the history of the Tribe of Darkness came to an abrupt, violent end.

Blumiere took his father’s prized notebook in his hands and lit it on fire, torching all the historical data within. “This will never reach the light of day or the shade of night,” he said, face twisting in rage. “There is nothing.”

Nastasia adjusted her glasses. “Of course. What now?”

“Now? Now we go for what we came for.” He turned his back on his father’s study, walking through the dark, black halls the Tribe of Darkness loved so much. “The way to make everything right.”

Nastasia nodded, understanding exactly what he meant.

The two of them walked right into the Dark Vaults. There was only one person watching over the door to the darkest treasure of the Tribe of Darkness – Blumiere’s father.

“Ah, Blumiere, you’ve finally returned. I am so glad t-” He saw Nastasia. “What have you done!?”

“She is simply my assistant, father,” Blumiere spat. “You saw to it that the purity was not destroyed.”

“You brought an outsider here!?”

“Yes. I did.” He nodded to Nastasia. She adjusted her glasses, shooting a sharp beam of light into the dark historian’s eyes.

He grunted. “What… was that?”

“Hypnosis,” Nastasia said. “Surprised you’re still able to think.”

“I’m… stronger than you think…”

“You won’t be able to fight with your mind in that state, regardless.” Nastasia smoothed her sleeves out. “Blumiere?”

Blumiere pointed his staff at the vault door, blowing it up with a rend of spatial energy. Behind it was only one object – a dark purple-black book with a large blue crystal in the center. “The Dark Prognosticus…” Blumiere said, grinning. “If there is anything worthwhile anymore, it is in here.”

“Blumiere, my son, don’t! Even your ancestors could not handle that dark book… If you open it… there’s no telling what might happen!”

“I do not care, father! A world without her is empty! A LIFE without her is empty. Speak, Dark Prognosticus! Teach your dark history!” He paused for a moment, smiling. “I await your command.”

The Dark Prognosticus flipped open to a particular page. Blumiere saw what it was instantly. Exactly what he was looking for.

“BLEH HEH HEH! BLECK!”

Dark, purple energies shot out of the book, prompted by Blumiere’s will. The destructive magics shot out, shaking the very reality of the Tribe’s universe.

“Blumiere… What have you done?”

“SILENCE!” Blumiere shouted. “The first prophecy beckons. I will erase every inch… of this blasted world!”

The historian’s expression became that of pure fear. “Blu-blumiere! Don’t do this! Blumiere!”

“Blumiere is no more!” he said, adjusting his monocle. “I am Count Bleck! And no one shall stand in my way! BLEH HEH HEH! BLECK!”

And the Tribe of Darkness was no more.

Count Bleck and Nastasia appeared in a world of nothingness.

“This will do nicely for the center,” Bleck said. “The moment we can finally bring it about, of course.”

Nastasia adjusted her glasses. “Right. What should we do first?”

With a square-shaped shift in the fabric of reality, what looked like a purple and black jester appeared in front of them. “You should consider hiring some help!”

Count Bleck pointed his scepter at the jester. “Who are you?”

“I am Dimentio, master of dimensions, and the ripples of reality have told me you are the guy to talk to about wanton destruction of everything for the betterment of all!” He snapped his fingers, the smile on his mask seeming to widen with the motion. “Like koi under the moon, we are drawn together!”

“Begone,” Count Bleck declared.

“Oh, what, don’t trust me just popping in like this? Fine, fine… But you’ll find mention of me in that fancy book of yours, and you’ll come to realize you need me.” Dimentio chuckled. “But until then, I’ll heed your wishes. I wish you luck! Ciao!”

Dimentio was gone.

Count Bleck narrowed his eyes. He used his hands to grab the Dark Prognosticus and start reading. “We do not hire help just yet. We study what secrets lie within this tome. Then act on them to destroy everything.”

“We aren’t replacing anything, are we?”

“No,” Bleck said. “Everything goes. And nothing remains.”

Dimentio chuckled from his hidden sub-dimension. Poor fool thought he had the ability to destroy all worlds in his hands.

…Well, to be true, he had part of the secret to that. But even Dimentio knew destroying the entire multiverse was a foolish proposition.

No, what Blumiere had was small. Localized. Just enough power to give him a taste… And then Dimentio would take it from him!

“Ahahahahaha!”

The tragedy of Dimentio’s miscalculation, unfortunately, is another story entirely. ■

~Grand Tour~

…Nanoha got a sudden feeling in her gut that time had shifted backward, somehow. Like she was out of order…

This feeling quickly passed, because she saw where she was.

She was back in the Q-Sphere, on a personal visit to see Rarity again after so many, many years. She really shouldn’t have waited as long as she did to come back, but that was behind her now. She was ready to see her friend again.

Except…

Everything had changed.

She was floating in a universe where the entire ‘sky’ was static, but there was still gravity. Where strange monolith creatures floated among black chunks of rock. Where eyes were visible directly above and directly below. A world that would become known, one day, as simply the Static. In that day, it would be empty.

It was not empty now. It was filled with Stars – Stars fighting against gigantic feats of magitech stellar engineering.

A war was happening in front of her eyes as the cosmic balls of plasma fought against the technological behemoths. The Stars seemed to be protecting something Nanoha couldn’t see.

“…Raising Heart…?”

“Rarity is on board the largest of the ships. There is an unusually high concentration of ka in the center of the Star’s defenses, likely artificial.”

“Artificial…” Nanoha furrowed her brow. “I’m… sure Rarity would love to explain what’s going on here.”

“Unlikely, master.”

Nanoha ignored her device. She teleported herself near the star-fighting ship – finding its shields blocked her entry. “Rarity!” she shouted. “Let me in!”

Nanoha could see the turrets on the ship look at her, think about firing, and then decide that was a bad idea. She was teleported onto what she assumed was the bridge, in front of Rarity sitting in the captain’s seat.

“What the hell are you doing here!?” Rarity shouted. “This is a warzone!”

“It is, is it?” Nanoha shouted. “What are you doing fighting a war!?”

“We’re overthrowing the Stars! What does it look like!?”

“Overthrowing?”

“They controlled everything, Nanoha. They would experiment on random worlds that everyone would forget about. They would torment us endlessly.”

“Rarity!”

“I’ve been living in this war long enough to have that proven to me! You have no right to waltz in here and question it!”

Nanoha narrowed her eyes. “I think I do.”

“How can you possibly know anything about this war you obviously only found out about a few minutes ago!?”

“I don’t. I know you.” Nanoha pointed Raising Heart at her. “And you’re not the pony I remember.”

“War is a brutal thing, Nanoha.”

“I know. I’ve been in a few. You should remember that.”

“Those weren’t true wars. This is a true war. A true war I brought about.”

Nanoha spread out her hands. “Why would you do that!? Why would you start a war!?”

“Because it was needed!”

“The Rarity I knew wouldn’t do that. “

“The Rarity you know died the moment she came home and realized the truth about it,” Rarity spat. “Algol told me much about the nature of his people. They needed to die.”

“I can’t stop your war,” Nanoha said. “But I can tell you, right now, that it’s wrong.”

This clearly hurt Rarity. “…Look, there’s proof right here in this world. This world they created specifically to fight us. Do you know what they’re guarding? Some kind of machine designed to twist fate so they can win. The codes call it a ‘Guarantee’. Many Stars have perished to make this thing, according to our intel. They’re sacrificing their own.”

“And you’re not?”

“We’re not so heartless as them,” Rarity said. “We don’t experiment on ponies.”

Nanoha glared. “And you’re going to grab the Guarantee yourself, aren’t you?”

Rarity saw what Nanoha was thinking. “Nonon-”

Nanoha reverse-teleported using the same spell they had used to bring her inside. Then she turned to the Stars and flew in.

A couple of them saw her.

Time for a test. “Starlight Breaker!” She shouted, using a relatively low-power version of her attack to ‘break’ through the ‘starlight’ beams the Stars were shooting at her. It worked like a charm, allowing her to get closer to the center.

They fired at her with their cosmic energies, but she was Nanoha Takamachi, the White Devil. It was going to take more than a few angry Stars to put her down.

She had stood toe to toe against eldritch abominations the size of universes. This was nothing.

She appeared in the center, finding the Guarantee. To her surprise, it was only about the size of her head, rather than something of cosmic importance.

It was an eye composed mostly of a creamy white crystal lined in black metal, with a single slit from the top to bottom that served as a pupil. It shifted with power.

Power that the Stars hadn’t been able to control just yet.

Power that Rarity wanted to control to continue her reign of terror.

For the briefest of moments, Nanoha wondered if she had acted hastily. She let herself think if she should just let this happen.

…But no. She couldn’t stand by. This thing, this Guarantee… It was too dangerous. Even outside the war, something that guaranteed victory? It was too powerful for anyone to have.

She wasn’t taking the chance she’d regret this. She pointed Raising Sights at it. “Destroy,” she ordered.

A beam of bright energy hit the Eye. After two seconds of exposure, it was gone.

The Stars stopped shooting at Nanoha, the stress on her shield fading away. Every Star hopped out of the universe.

Most of Rarity’s ships did as well – except the main one.

Nanoha teleported back into it. “There. Now your little battle here is over, and nobody has that kind of power.”

Rarity twitched. “I should kill you where you stand.”

Nanoha gasped.

“But I owe you too much for that. Get out of my sight. If the Starcross Society ever catches sight of you again, your life is forfeit.”

“Rarity! I just saved the lives of your ships and stopped them from using the device!”

“And you didn’t let us have it!”

“I don’t know the situation!”

“That’s right! You don’t! So you don’t get to interfere!”

“I know you.”

“No, you don’t. Now LEAVE!”

Nanoha glared. “No.”

“Kill her,” Rarity ordered.

Nanoha hadn’t thought Rarity would do it.

The White Devil returned to her ship with a heavy wound to the chest.

“Nanoha!” Vita blurted. “Wh-”

“Just… turn the ship around and go home…” she muttered. “I’m going to the medical bay…” She limped away.

She wasn’t sure what to make of this. She’d stopped a battle – but the war would still go on. She’d kept either side from getting a guaranteed victory, which at the moment was likely the best way to minimize the pain.

But in the long run, would it mean anything?

And what of that Eye?

…She hadn’t been able to destroy the Star-craft. She’d only been able to make it look like that. She’d just sent it to a random universe.

She stumbled into the medical bay, her vision blurring. She flopped over, losing consciousness as the medical professionals ran to her. ■

~Twilence~

“…Twilence?” Vriska asked.

“Huh?” I asked.

“You still there?”

“Yeah. I was just thinking about the origins of the Eye of Rhyme. It’s a… complicated device.”

“Forged by Stars, lost on your world. I know, you’ve told the story before.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Though in reality, there’s a bit more nuance than that. See, the ancient society of my world built much based on the secrets they found within the Eye a-”

“I have enough, Twilence,” Vriska said.

“…Enough?”

“The small amounts of luck you’ve been feeding me over these last few months. I have enough. I can escape through the fabric of existence.”

I sighed. “Right… I knew that. But I didn’t want to know that.”

“When are you going to tell me to go?”

“I should have a few hours ago. I should have already started my plan. I should. But I don’t want to be alone. I’m going to be alone here for a while before it works. If it works.”

“I can stay.”

“We’ve been through this. You die if you stay. We can’t have that.”

“I’ll come back.”

“You’ll just get trapped again, and I’ll probably already be gone.”

Vriska sighed. “Okay, fine. I leave. And then what?”

“Then we meet up when the final story begins.” I looked right at her. “Vriska… Look for a version of me with metal lining on her ears. She’s the one.”

“…All right, got it. Twilight with freaky ears.”

I nodded slowly. “A-and… You’ll be alone for a while before that happens. I’ll have to be alone for longer. …Don’t be afraid of change.”

“…Okay…?”

“You’ll probably understand later.” I bit my lip. “…Goodbye, Vriska.”

There would be no chance for a hug. She was in chains, after all. She wasn’t going to be able to do anything before her luck sucked her to another reality. This talk was all they’d have.

“…See you later. Take good care of Mite and Creek, okay?”

I gulped. “Okay.”

And then she vanished, leaving me alone.

No doubt Polymarchus noticed. He just didn’t care. He still had leverage in the form of his body, Creek. A ton of leverage.

And I was about to call him out on it with my plan.

I separated the piles of paper into two and focused. On one, I continued to write the story Polymarchus wanted me to say. The one of Rome growing and becoming powerful, ready to take on the stars of the Nexus. On the other, I wrote a different story. One that he wouldn’t be able to detect or deflect with his Flower. Why?

Because I wouldn’t be the only Prophet involved. I had been put in contact with several through the Eye of Rhyme over the years. I was going to choose a few of them and intertwine a tale of Prophets, Aware golems, creations, and nanobots… I would shunt a lot of work to the other Prophets, but I would guide them through to Polymarchus in a framework story.

I would lead them from the forest to Blumiere’s cabin, where they would learn where they were. Then I would take them through Lest, where they could meet Rev and understand the backstory. Then they’d come to Rome, and be put on the quest of taking Polymarchus down.

Then they would free me and escape as Rome experienced political collapse.

I was going to out-Prophet the Flower.

And I could see it working. I could see myself escaping in almost every possible outcome. I saw myself returning Mite to his homeworld, and then going to live in the basements of the Void…

But I didn’t see Creek.

I knew that if I went through with this the chances of the other Prophets playing their parts perfectly were almost zero. But that perfect run was the only way to get out of this with Creek.

Was I willing to risk her life to end Polymarchus and usher in the next phase of the story?

…It turned out that I was. I kept scribbling, scribbling, scribbling, writing what was likely to be a declaration of death for more than a few people.

There was a chance she would come out of this. A chance.

I would hold onto that as long as I possibly could. ■

~Merodi~

“Told you it was White Nettle!” Pinkie blurted.

“Fat lot of good that did,” Corona muttered, looking at all the Austraeoh’s sensors. “She’s frozen us while she does… whatever it is she’s doing to the Dark Tower.”

“Take control,” Pinkie offered. “She wants to take it over and then bring the Downstreamers back.”

“Aaaaand we can’t have that,” Corona said.

“I don’t know,” Eve commented. “Would it really be that bad? Like Pinkie said, they’re not evil.”

“Do you want White Nettle or anyone in control of ka?”

“…Good point.” Eve narrowed her eyes, looking outside as White Nettle’s ‘ritual’ began. “So, we’re clearly here to stop this. How do we do that?”

“Right now she’s only stopped the ship and seems to be ignoring us in favor of rushing along her ritual,” Allure said. “She might not know who exactly is here.”

Pinkie shook her head. “She has Twilence and Monika. Of course she knows.”

“I could throw this universe into the Sea,” Corona suggested. “The Tower won’t be harmed, this is just a manifestation after all.”

“Not an option,” Eve said. “Can’t get help here fast enough and the more we talk the closer she gets to just doing what she wants! Gah, think!” She activated her Light eye, examining everything she could. “If we could free Arceus… His seal seems the weakest. I think I could take it out.”

“We’re not allowed outside the ship, how are we gonna do that?” Allure demanded.

Pinkie whistled innocently.

“Nevermind, I forgot about the ‘Pink One’.”

The five orbs of captured power around the Dark Tower flashed with a brilliant light, letting the four of them know the time for deliberation was at an end.

“Pinkie, get us out there,” Corona ordered. “We’ll… figure something out.”

Pinkie saluted. “Aye-aye, Secondorino.” She grabbed the three of them and ducked behind a console. With a rush of impossibility they appeared above Arceus.

“I see the rescue party has arrived,” Arceus said telepathically from his prison.

“Yeah,” Eve said, powering her magic up. “I hope you like dark magic.” Her cosmic mane lost most of its sparkle, the streak of orange soon being the only vibrant color within it. Her non-Light eye became an ominous blue-green, both ocular orbs surrounded in the haloes of Midnight. Her wings became sharp as magic circles swirled around her, prompting Seraphim to appear behind her.

“…I’m going to be down there,” Corona said. She picked up Allure in her arms and flew down to the entrance of the Dark Tower, leaving Eve and Pinkie to Arceus’ orb.

“I reject this reality and substitute my own!” Eve roared, ordering quasi-magical barriers to be impossible.

Of course it wasn’t that easy. The fields were being shunted through the universes of Nettle’s body. They could reject reality just as easily as Seraphim could.

Pinkie started hitting the barrier with an ice pick.

“…Any day now,” Arceus deadpanned.

“Hold your horses,” Pinkie grunted, pulling out a chainsaw and breaking it on the orb’s barrier while Eve drove sharp wings of darkness into the forcefield, worming through it via spatial manipulation. The barrier noticed this and pushed her out. But her dark magics were already in the barrier, using their cruel nature to turn the barrier against itself.

The barrier caught fire, the flames were a neon blue tinged with unsettling green highlights. The barrier didn’t budge.

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “Y’know, I just realized. The last six stories didn’t really have a good ending…”

“Not the time…” Eve muttered.

Down on the ground, Corona and Allure walked into the Dark Tower.

It let them both in.

“This isn’t normal,” Allure said.

“It’s capable of self-defense, it may be capable of getting desperate,” Corona said, holding out her hands and her wings. Contrasting with Eve’s dark magic tinged with streaks of light, Corona’s was bright with only tinges of darkness from Sombra-style nanobots. Intricate magical circles sprang forth from her arms, wings, and horn, creating a complex matrix setup. “I’m trying to tap into Nettle’s connection. You climb the stairs.”

Allure nodded. She galloped up the steps, ignoring every door she came across. There were more important things right now than reminiscing on her lifetime.

Corona glanced at the doors of the Dark Tower. They’re still open. Why is it letting time flow the same inside and out?

“Better question,” Pinkie told Eve as she threw a pie at Arceus. It bypassed the barrier and hit him in the face, but didn’t exactly help them get him out. “Why isn’t Nettle interfering with us?”

“Overconfidence? Distraction?” Eve suggested, trying to use raw power from a universe of pure energy on the barrier to no avail. “Amusement?”

Pinkie bounced over to me since she was pretty useless helping Eve. “Heeeey, what’s up with Nettle?”

I can’t speak.

“Doooesn’t matter at the moment!”

Convenient. I probably have to use my powers and write about this later.

“Eh, probably. Buuuut you can see Nettle, riiiiight?”

Sort of. Her body is not good for visual stimuli, but she’s trying to turn us into essences faster and faster. What she’s fighting is the Dark Tower’s self-defense paradox. She really doesn’t have time to deal with you right now.

Pinkie glanced over at John – he was glowing with the power of retcon. “Hmmmm. Right. Oh! Idea~!” She bounced over to John. “Yo! John! Listen up! After this is over you need to retcon-zap right to this moment in spacetime! Got it?”

John apparently got it, because he did zap into existence right next to Pinkie. “Sup?”

Pinkie this is very dangerous, I thought.

Pinkie waved a hoof dismissively. “Yeah, but if he’s here, then Nettle probably succeeded in what she did.”

“Huh? Oh, no, she didn’t,” John said. “I just came back because you said so.”

Pinkie facehooved. “I’m an idiot…”

“Nah, I’m sure with me here again we can make it happen better! Faster. Or something.”

“Right. So. Uh… Honestly I didn’t have much of a plan and just wanted to know how Nettle’s plan worked. So… How did we stop her last time?”

“I have no idea. She just got really angry and we were released and then I came back here.”

This is what you get for choosing John as your reconnaissance agent.

“I didn’t have much of a choice, okay!?” Pinkie complained.

“John!” Eve called. “You might be able to help with this barrier!”

“Oh, yeah, that’s a thing I could do!” He floated over, the winds of Breath flowing around him in a rush.

Inside the Tower, Allure reached the top. She pulled the door back – took a quick look at the room at the top of the Tower, made sure the Source and clock were there, then jumped through. It took her exactly where she needed to go – a world with lots of very fragile crystals that were flashing like synapses in a giant brain.

The copying universe within White Nettle that served as her mind.

She tapped her hooves together. “Gooood…”

Corona felt White Nettle try to fuse the Tower to herself – but the alicorn-woman was in the center of the Tower, just like Nettle paradoxically was. She intercepted the connection and threw herself into Nettle’s mind.

“Hello!” Corona said, smiling. “Normally this is the part where I talk, but let’s just light your mind on fire instead!”

She pushed her mental energy into Nettle… and nothing happened.

The psychic projection of Nettle’s body raised an eyebrow. “My mind is a universe. What are you going to do to it with just a mental connection? I see a possible reality-breaking spell doing something, but this?”

Corona pointed a finger at her. “Guess talking is good then.”

“I can easily talk to you and keep track of the Tower at the same time.”

“You sure?”

Nettle tried to ignore her. Corona didn’t let this work, sending an image of a flickering lightbulb directly into Nettle’s consciousness.

“You’re the devil,” Nettle muttered.

Corona rolled her eyes. “I’m just doing what needs to be done.”

“Get out,” Nettle shouted, pointing a finger at Corona. Corona didn’t leave. “…What th-”

Nettle felt a sharp pain as Allure smashed another part of her subconsciousness regulation. “Gah!”

Allure chuckled as the crystals around her flashed red in anger. “Aaaand no Safeguard to protect you from little fillies like me. Woo!” She used her Heart to slice through several more of the thin pillar-like constructs.

“Problem?” Corona asked.

“I… I have to deal with her… But I can’t…”

“You’re welcome.”

“You don’t understand th-”

The Dark Tower twisted ka again. Nettle fell back, horror dawning on her face. If she was going to go through with this, she was going to have to let Allure and Corona romp around her mind. The Tower was too strong otherwise.

“…They can fix me later,” she said, devoting every defense to assaulting the Tower.

“Crud,” Corona muttered, checking back with Raging Sights. “What do we have?”

She’s moving through our defenses. Cutting us out isn’t going to be difficult for her. I expect five seconds.

Allure smashed more and more crystals, but that only slowed Nettle by fractions of a quantum moment.

The free John held out his hands on Arceus’ bubble, attempting to recton it away. It was encased in a white aura…

The five spheres pinged with a brilliant energy. They shot beams of energy into the Tower.

“YES!!!” They could all hear Nettle shouting. “THE TOWER IS MI-”

GM’s bubble stopped firing all of a sudden.

“…What!? That doesn’t make any sense!”

John successfully retconned Arceus’ bubble into nonexistence before the god’s power could be used to create a new reality. This completely broke the ritual, and all the other bubbles popped in a flurry of sparkles. Only GM lacked the ability to float, prompting him to fall until Eve caught him.

I acted next. “Monika, thing, now.”

Monika rolled her eyes. “I’ve got to do everything…” She walked up to the newly-freed John, accessed his character file, and edited it slightly. He vanished in a zap. “There we go, now he’ll become that John and we don’t have to deal with duplicates. You’re welcome.”

“Thanks,” John said. “…I think.”

Nettle, now that her entire plan had basically fallen apart, took the opportunity to eject Allure from her mind, depositing her in the field of roses. Corona stepped out of the Dark Tower, glancing around. “Did we do it?”

“Yeah. You did it,” Nettle said, appearing in front of them with folded arms. “Cooongratulations…” I started scribbling in my notepad as the anger on her features kept twisting. “Guess I just have to try aga-”

“And done,” I said, placing a period on the sentence I had just written. John retconned away into some far distant universe.

Nettle was now missing one of the five pieces she needed to complete her plan. And because retcon was so annoying, there was no way for her to find him. Quite a clever move, if I do say so myself.

“Arrogant, self-absorbed, little…” Nettle threw her hands into the air and vanished.

Pinkie wiped her brow. “Wow! That was a close one! I was almost thinking we’d lose and begin some sort of major cataclysm! I mean, that did seem to be the running theme!”

“I don’t want to know about that one,” Allure decreed. “Please. Don’t taunt me.”

“Okie dokie lokie!” Pinkie said. “…Darnit, that really needs a wink.”

“Let’s go home and figure out how we can keep her from trying this again,” Eve said, stretching out her wings.

“Agreed,” Allure said.

“Ah, first things first…” Monika walked up to GM.

“Oh no you don’t,” GM said, “I’m not going to go back t-” He passed out, having the entire sequence of events shoved out of his mind once again.

“For a ‘major prophet’ he sure is useless,” Monika muttered. “Now Hussie knows how to do things.”

“I thought you hated Hussie?” Pinkie asked.

“Oh. I do. He’s still good at what he does, though.”

“I won’t be coming back right away,” Corona said.

Eve cocked her head. “Huh? Why?”

“The Dark Tower rarely lets us this close to it. If we just leave we’re not going to be able to get back here in an instant. It’ll divert us. So I’m going to make the most of this opportunity and comb over the data I’ve gotten from this whole thing. I think there’s a lot I can learn about Nettle and how she operates from what happened here.”

“Need any help?”

“Mmm… Arceus, want t-”

“I am not a scientist.”

“In that case, not really,” Corona said, rubbing the back of her head. “I’ll be fine on my own.”

“How long do you think you’ll be?” Eve asked. “I’m sure the Research Overhead would like to know.”

“Eh, few weeks this time, tops,” Corona said. “Calls should still work, I won’t be out of touch.”

Eve smiled. “Then good luck with SCIENCEing the center of existence. I’m curious to see what you find.”

Monika smirked. “Should be interesting…”

“You don’t have clearance.”

“And that’ll stop me why?”

Eve blinked. “Yeah, no clue. Everyone, to the Austraeoh, let’s go home.”

Just before the teleport, Allure and Pinkie waved at Corona. She waved back as they all left – everyone except me.

“Hm? Twilence?”

I was staring at the Dark Tower. “I’m trying to figure out what this all meant.”

“Uh…”

“The eight stories. They were clearly all tied together to the overall history of the multiverse. If any of them had not happened, we would not have experienced this. Weaver destroyed the Downstreamers but created White Nettle and Dimentio, then there was what Nanoha did that directly set up our civilization, and my own story intertwined into all of this… But I’m just trying to figure out the point. Sure, it all led here, but what was it for?”

Corona blinked. “…You might need to talk to Starbeat about that one.”

“…Sadly, I am the expert on this. And I still don’t know. Yet.” I shook my head. “I don’t know if Nettle was even wrong for sure. It all happened so fast.”

Corona pursed her lips. “She tried to control the Tower. Even if she had a goal, once she accomplished it she wouldn’t just relinquish the power. There would be no telling what she would do. Given her previous escapades, I don’t have much faith in her heart.”

“Perhaps that is the tragic aspect to our story,” I mused. “Even though she was, for once, altruistic in her intentions… she was still wrong.” I furrowed my brow, blinking slowly. ”I… I need to go write something down. Good luck.”

“Same to you and your… story. Thing.”

I shifted to another reality, wishing for everything to come together. ■

~Mother~

…the mother scooped her daughter up in her arms and held her tightly.

Osanna was confused at first. “Wh…”

“Shh… It’s okay. It’s all okay.”

“But I-”

“I know what you did. But this is not the time to talk about it.” She held Osanna out and looked her in the eyes. “I’m not your tormentor.”

Osanna, who had managed to gain some control over her emotional state over the last few moments, lost it all in a moment as tears came rushing down.

“It’s okay…” the mother echoed.

“I… I was horrible. How could it…?”

“I’m your mother.” She held Osanna tighter. “Love and forgiveness are unconditional. I can be mad, angry, upset, livid, outraged… but I can never forget who you are, Osanna.”

“You don’t know… I’ve done everything wrong. Snuck out, hid, deceived, manipulated, and… and I’m a horrible person!”

I may not have had the most normal of lives, but I remember this. “I know, Osanna.”

“How can you know?”

“I’ve been forgiven of things much, much worse than anything you’ve tried to pull. And I wasn’t even forgiven by my family. I was forgiven by the people I hurt.” She looked into the air wistfully. “I was a child with power meant for gods. I manipulated people to empower myself, I bullied others to control entire worlds, I put people in danger because I was greedy, and I attempted crimes against existence.”

Osanna stared at her mother in disbelief.

“You’ve heard this before. My name is well known, I know.”

“I always thought they were exaggerating…”

“Most of the stories of White Nettle are true,” Nettle said, the wind blowing in her hair. “But when the time came… I was allowed back. If someone who’s done the things I have can be forgiven by people who barely know her, your mother can take you back.” She smiled. “You’re just a teenager, Osanna. I get mad, I may not understand, but it’s nothing new.”

Osanna sniffed. “…Okay. But… But what about him?”

“Jandan?”

“Yeah… I… I was using him. I…” She hung her head.

Nettle looked deep into Osanna. “I won’t lie. He doesn’t have to forgive you for whatever you did to him.”

Osanna was silent.

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t try.”

“But I thought y-”

“I ran into him on the way here. He was an angry young man, certainly. But he cared.”

Osanna stared at her in disbelief.

Nettle smirked. “Don’t take that as approval – I’ll still have to get to know him.”

“…And I’d have to actually…” she shook her head. “This entire thing is messed up.”

“What?”

“This situation.”

“Hm… So’s life. So, par for the course?”

Osanna snorted. The sharp motion irritated her throat considerably. “Agh…”

“Oh, I think I have some candies on me, hold on…” She pulled some mint gum out of her pocket and handed it to Osanna. Like a young child, she grabbed it and stuffed it into her mouth.

“Thanks.”

“It’s why I’m here.”

“…How did you get here anyway? It’s not exactly easy.”

“A little bit of this, a little bit of that. The body certainly helps a lot.”

“…When I say my mom’s a historian no one ever thinks she’s also an action hero.”

“Who said I was a hero?”

Osanna blushed.

“Awww…”

Osanna looked like she thought for a moment about objecting – but instead she just moved closer to her mother. They put arms over each other and looked out.

From the mountain, they could see the entire city. The forests bled into the residential areas, and then into the city proper filled with all number of constructions. And yet, the roses everywhere in the various parks managed to give the city a red color, their deep crimson shade winning over all the other colors of life. The spherical shells of planets within the sky wove a pattern for the eyes, one that was always ever-changing as they shifted above the horizon, yet somehow consistent.

Dominating the view was the structure in the center of the city; far larger than all the others. It seemed to rise for infinity. It was somehow both ominous and comforting in its endless height, and its darkness was impossible in more ways than one.

Their day ended with the two of them together, reconciled, but not with everything resolved. But as they set their gaze on the Dark Tower, they knew everything was going to be fine. ■

~~~

The end.

That’s it.

That’s all I can see.

The Song of the Spheres has concluded. …Except it hasn’t. I know it hasn’t.

As the Tower’s Testament said, that was only one side.

I suppose it could have been considered an ending. An entity from the ancient eras of the multiverse that was also tied to the beginnings of all existence came back and tried to control the Dark Tower, simply to bring her family back. She would have made a good tragic villain, and an excellent way to bring the main heroes together.

Except that clearly wasn't the focus here. It was just a thing that happened. Not to mention the existence of the eighth story…

Was the point all about her? White Nettle? Is the Song her story?

I… I don’t think so. I believe this side was her story. The other side has to be something else.

And I know when a story’s leading up to something. This wasn’t it; while White Nettle has been around for a while now, she’s relatively recent according to the chapters. She had little to do with the other major struggles of this endless multiversal Song. She was just another villain… Perhaps not villain. Perhaps simply antagonist. She wasn’t the culmination.

But the flow of ka continues. It points forward, and it is increasing as I write this. Increasing exponentially.

Something’s going to happen, and the snapshot I have seen of everything – including that all-too-shrouded vision of the future – is trying to key us in. Me, my friends, and even you. Trying to let us know.

What was it leading up to?

What is the Song of the entire multiverse?

These eight stories tell it… From a Weaver who put restrictions on reality to a mother in the future remembering that she was forgiven… it’s all here.

In all of these, I see a fight. A fight against existence. In some cases, like in ‘Mother’, that fight has already been overcome. In my story, I have to bow to it – lose Creek – to accomplish anything. In the ‘present’ story, the heroes fight for existence, but Nettle is certainly fighting against. Weaver… Dimentio… Blumiere… Scarcity… They fought hard. The Downstreamers didn’t fight; they just wanted more and were punished for it.

A story of endless conflict, then. Existence is the way it is, and we have wanted nothing more than to change it. One could say that was the reason the Dark Tower was created. A reason, anyway.

There is no end to the battles. To the conflicts. We aren’t even fighting God – we’re fighting everything. I would wonder why we have to fight… But I also can’t imagine us doing anything else. I don’t think we’re capable of making our existence perfect.

Maybe, like Infinity, it simply cannot be reached.

…But that’s just the theme. One side of the story. The one I see.

What’s the other? I think… I think it’s what we’re all being led to.

What I see here is a setup. I see a path of events that lead to here. Roland creating the Tower’s Paradox. The Downstreamers preparing the multiverse. Dimentio creating the Prognosticus – and then Blumiere acting upon it. I see Nanoha being responsible for me, for the Starcross Society, for Merodi Universalis, and for so much more – I see her representing humanity. I see me, being led along, crafted to be the one who understands ka for some deep purpose. I see the remnants of Nettle’s ploy laying around… And I see a future.

All these events, objects, and people are poised for something.

And the majority of them were results of the fight. The endless fight against existence.

…A fight waged by faulty people with big plans.

…There it is.

That’s what needs to happen.

In the past, they all fought with impure motives. With destruction, conquest, sorrow, or loss on their minds. People who were suffering or who wanted to make others suffer.

But what if someone with a pure heart thought about it? Actually thought about it?

What if they dared to ask the question?

~~~

Year 77

Corona ‘Sunset’ Shimmer opened her eyes.

Author's Note

The backstory of the multiverse has been laid bare. Hopefully, most of your questions have been answered, and those that haven't will be answered soon enough.

This is it. It's finally time for Songs of the Spheres to get to its main plot. Hope you're ready; because everything you care about is about to change.

A note to people writing sidestories: there's a reason Void was so long. It's to ensure all the stories can wrap up and have plenty of space to grow before what happens next... happens. With 115 published you now have all the lore required to do whatever. Have fun, enjoy the League of Sweetie Belles. The LSB story will probably never reach this point, eternally sticking in the Golden Age of Merodi Universalis.

But LSB is a story without an ending. This story... this one has an ending. An absolute ending. And we need to get to it.

I've waited for this moment for a... long, long time. The main plot, the main point, the main REASON these hundred-plus chapters exist. It's because a question needed to be asked. A question that, when I started writing, I didn't know the answer to.

I think I do now. It's highly subjective and full of unpleasant ramifications both ways. Whatever happens in the future, I want you to know that this ride has been amazing and I thank you for sticking by me for so long. I can only hope you stay until the end.

At the risk of sounding cliche... we're in the Endgame now. And what an Endgame it will be.

-GM, master of looking ahead.

116 - She Who Dared to Ask, Part 1

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

117 - She Who Dared to Ask, Part 2

Every Wishing World was slightly different. Some were bright happy places with a helpful genie to assist in the wish-making. Some appeared as ancient technological platforms in a void of Technicolor fractals. A few were just office buildings where wishes were written down on pieces of paper and then granted by the universe itself.

This particular Wishing World was none of those things.

It was a staircase in a void of complete blackness, at the top of which lay a brass clockwork model of a star with a single planet. It was eternally ticking as it counted down the time until some brave soul would find it and unleash the power bestowed upon it by its Downstreamer creators oh so long ago.

It would only grant one wish, like most Wishing Worlds. But the scope of power of that wish was almost unparalleled. It had no security measures or worthiness counters – it would just grant the first wish given to it. The only test was to climb the staircase.

Not all that difficult. Not even dangerous, since the stairs had tall rails that would prevent even the clumsiest from falling into nothing. It was just a bit of a walk.

A walk that had never been made.

There were many questions to be asked – why did Wishing Worlds, and other worlds for that matter, have structures in them of any sort? What influence changed them from the purely technological extensions of the Downstreamers to almost temple-like installations? Exactly what power did a Wishing World have and what were the limits to the sorts of wishes it could accomplish? Were they dependent on the Dark Tower in any way or were they just conveniently available for the central structure’s use?

Such questions may have had answers. But they didn’t really matter. So long as a wish was within the realm of reason, a Wishing World could accomplish it. Being vague would always result in something bad happening, as far too many adventurers had discovered over the eons, but specific wishes were given without qualms.

It was always a mix of good and bad. A lot of both, when all wishes were taken together.

The staircase in the Great Void sensed its time was soon. They would come. They would want a wish.

It would be ready.

~~~

Corona checked her watch.

It had been four hours according to their local time.

“I think… they couldn’t track us,” Corona said, finally.

“How long is that going to last?” Nae asked.

“Long enough,” Corona said.

“They have the entire force of Merodi Universalis, some of the TSAB, and ka manipulation at their disposal,” Sugarcoat said. “The fact that they haven’t found us yet is miraculous.”

“Yeah,” Velvet said. “Twilence should just be able to… find us. Easy.”

“I guess the Tower really wants this, then,” Corona said.

“It could just make for a better story to have you defeated at a climax rather than now,” Lady Rarity suggested. “We can’t bank on ka to save us.”

“We have to be resourceful,” Vivian said. “Or something like that.”

“How’s the locating coming?” Nae asked.

“Not sure,” Corona said, bringing up the holographic display of the TSAB’s Wishing World locator program. “This is designed to be run through several probes at once to triangulate a probability curve. We’re one ship in the middle of the Great Void. Honestly we have to bank on ka letting us find it quickly, since the TSAB runs through its territory all the time with this, looking for them.”

“They just have a habit of staying hidden,” Vivian said.

“This was dumb,” Nae said.

“The plan was to get here without them noticing,” Insipid pointed out. “Like, that may not have worked, but it would have been major fresh if it did!”

“Uncharacteristically observant of you,” Velvet deadpanned.

“I know, right?”

“That’s what the plan could have been,” Sugarcoat said. “Now it’s something else. We’re on the run and the only reason they’re not finding us is what basically amounts to chance. And if you don’t take it as chance it’s the force we’re trying to destroy and if it has any self-preservation instinct at all it’ll try to blow us out of the sky first chance it gets.”

“It doesn’t have a self-preservation instinct,” Corona said.

“Evidence to the contrary is everywhere,” Sugarcoat retorted.

“It just wanted there to be the right opportunity. Like you said, it had to be me.”

“Eve could have worked as well,” Velvet said. “Or Pinkie. Or, hell, Allure might have worked.”

“Do you see any of them doing this?” Corona asked.

Velvet blinked. “Pinkie maybe…?”

“Ah, but she’s Aware, that makes it unbalanced,” Lady Rarity said. “Corona here’s never been Aware, and never will be. Plus I don’t think Pinkie has it in her to go this far.”

“Do we?” Vivian asked. “I know I said I’d follow Corona, and I’m sticking with it…”

“We do,” Corona said. “Just remember the why.”

“It’s a fucking depressing why,” Velvet said with a smirk. “Kinda why I like it!”

“And this is why Velvet didn’t get to ask the question,” Lady Rarity said.

“I wouldn’t have blown everything up without consultation!”

“Motives, darling, motives are important.”

“Is it even possible to have pure motives for anything?” Corona asked.

“You’re pretty close,” Vivian said.

“No,” Sugarcoat blurted. “It’s not possible. Even if you were pure for a moment, you’re going to doubt that and your inner motives would change.”

“The problem with being flawed…” Corona muttered.

“But being perfect means Mary Sue,” Insipid added.

Velvet facehooved. “Apparently today is the day we continually spin the WHEEL OF QUESTIONS that nobody ever has any answers to! Who wants to have a gander at actually answering one of them? Hmm?”

Everyone shuffled their feet.

“Fuck me, you don’t know. That was way more self-demonstrating than I was expecting. Excuse me while I vomit in my mouth a bit and go into an existential crisis. Don’t worry about me, I’ll come out of it. Eventually. Maybe.”

“Don’t go eldritch-fearmonger on us,” Ash cautioned.

“I won’t. Because then you’ll all be useless.”

Corona started to tune out the banter of her nervous, uncertain crew and focus on the partial probability curves in front of her.

She attempted to keep her features flat and level. She failed.

~~~

The final bridge ‘crew’ of the Austraeoh consisted of Eve, O’Neill, Nanoha, myself, Pidge, Clandestine, and Pinkie’s Party. Renee and Daniel had returned to their work, while Starbeat had delegated all her responsibilities to me.

Clandestine took one look at the large gathering of important individuals and laughed nervously. “Ah… Gonna be one of those is it?”

“Here’s the report,” O’Neill said, giving it to Clandestine. “Pidge, you pilot while she’s reading.”

“Yes sir!” Pidge said, jumping into the pilot’s seat and adjusting coordinates. “Uh… where to?”

“Send out probes in a flank dimensional lattice,” Nanoha said. “Go down connections with the highest probability concentration.”

O’Neill nodded. “Make it so.”

“At a time like this? Really?” Nova asked.

“I do it all the time.”

“Can confirm,” Clandestine said as she scanned through the report. “He’s a hopeless nerd even when people are dying. …Celestia’s horn, is this report for real?”

“I’m afraid it is,” Eve said, sighing as Pidge directed the Austraeoh to another universe, one that wasn’t a Wishing World.

“Fighting Corona…”

“She clearly doesn’t want to fight,” Flutterfree said. “She avoided firing when she was attacked.”

“Doesn’t really make a difference,” Pidge pointed out. “Not shooting now, kill everything later.”

Clandestine put the data pad down and shut it off. She took a moment to rub her horn. “Well, this is… something. Hey, Pidge, was it? What do you think the chances are we’re gonna be the Redshirts today?”

“…What?”

“Do you see any unimportant people on this bridge?”

“…Crap.”

“Corona’s not going to try to kill you,” Eve muttered. “Relax. If we succeed, nobody’s gonna be hurt. If we fail, well, there’ll be other problems than your status as a Redshirt.”

Clandestine made no response besides flexing her ears around.

“What else can we do?” Nova asked. “Just… hunt them?”

“I can give suggestions,” I offered, taking out my notebook and writing down a few more sentences. “But I recommend just going with what the program is doing until I get a clearer picture.”

“Very muddled, huh?” Pinkie asked.

“Yes...” I said, scribbling even more furiously.

“We could get reinforcements. Help,” Flutterfree suggested.

“That would cause a multiverse-wide panic,” Nanoha said. “And even if we did keep it in-house, letting the mere fact that you can collapse the multiverse out to more people is a bad idea. There are a lot of hurt, damaged individuals who wouldn’t hesitate to destroy everything.”

“…Is Corona broken?” Flutterfree asked.

Jotaro adjusted his hat. “No. She’s certain.”

“She did the math,” Vriska muttered. “And she didn’t like the answer.”

Eve nodded. “I don’t like the answer either. But some costs are just too great.”

“…The fact that all of you act like you understand her is concerning,” Pidge muttered.

“Is it?” Clandestine asked. “The multiverse really is a dark, destructive, warlike place filled with whatever flights of fancy occupy the heads of Prophets.”

“Look, I get that, but all this despondent ‘I understand’ craziness makes me think any one of you could end up trying to collapse everything too.”

Vriska opened her mouth to object, but then processed what Pidge had just said.

“Girl has a point,” O’Neill admitted.

“So, what, we’re just a few steps away from being the bad guy?” Nova asked. “What’s your point? We’ve been in this sort of situation before. Not as extreme.”

“You haven’t really been here,” I said. “You’ve had miscommunications and misrepresented ideals. You haven’t had two old friends who understand exactly why the other has to do what they’re doing go at it.” I looked up with sad eyes. “You can see yourself in Corona’s shoes, right?”

Eve nodded. “Easily.”

Pidge looked at her nervously.

“I have too much connection to my friends and Merodi Universalis to ever think about destroying it all,” Eve said. “It’s too steep a price.”

“…That sounds greedy,” Pinkie said.

Eve nodded slowly. “It kind of is. But the idea of killing so many to achieve anything? There’s never a way it can be right.”

“Never say never,” O’Neill commented.

“What’s wrong with all of you?” Pidge asked.

“Pidge…” Nanoha said, laying a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “We all are expressing empathy for Corona. All people we fight – even the truly evil ones – are still people. You can’t dehumanize them with your anger. Corona is a great hero who has fought tirelessly for the lives of others her whole life. In her mind, she still is.” She took on a thoughtful expression. “Think of it this way. You were once part of a team of defenders in your home universe right?”

“Uh… Yeah. Before we… lost. Badly. Most of us didn’t make it. How did y-” Pidge didn’t finish the question, noticing Raising Heart flashing discreetly – probably looking up information. “Ah.”

“What if you had a way to destroy the evil conquerors of your galaxy with one button – but it would destroy all of them. Even those who may have been sympathetic to your cause, or the innocent children.”

“I would never!”

Nanoha smiled. “Neither would I. I always look for another way. But what if there was no other way? You can do the math, can’t you?”

Pidge blinked, processing the numbers. “…Yeah. I can.”

Nanoha looked deep into her eyes. “You would have pressed that button if you thought you had to. I would have too.” She stood up tall, looking at the probability curves on the screen. “The difference between us and Corona is that she thinks ka needs to be removed, and we don’t.”

Pidge nodded, not saying anything further.

Pinkie sighed. “And it’s times like these that make us ask the really uncomfortable questions…”

“I’ve been asking these questions for centuries,” I said, looking up from my notebook.

“Can confirm,” Vriska said. “She’s gone insane a few times.”

“A few!?”

“Several.”

“That’s better.”

O’Neill tapped his fingers against the wall. “We’re a bunch of lemmings running toward a cliff, thinking we can stop before the edge.”

Everyone stared at him.

“What? I can be poetic if I want! I’m old, surely there’s some wisdom up here in this old thing.” He tapped the side of his head knowingly.

Nova rolled her eyes while Flutterfree chuckled.

“Laughter…” Pinkie said with a smile. “We need it now more than ever.”

“…What are we going to do after we stop her?” Flutterfree asked. “If she won’t change her mind?”

“Jail her for a lesser crime, but let her keep working for Research,” Eve said. “It won’t be a bad life. It’ll be hard on the political scene, but at least she’ll be around.”

“That’s how recurring villains are made,” Pinkie pointed out.

Eve bit her lip. “…I’m not killing her.”

“I know. I won’t be able to do it either. And for all her talk, she couldn’t do it to us in cold blood. After all, we could survive by chance.”

Eve sighed. “Playing dice with the lives of everyone…”

“I can relate,” Vriska said, making an exaggerated shrug.

“We need to go to a lower probability density,” I said, suddenly, scribbling so fast there was smoke. “Circumvent part of the red herring.”

“You heard her,” O’Neill said. Pidge followed the orders, taking the Austraeoh elsewhere into the Great Void.

~~~

In the back of the Condor, Nae sat alone.

Her gun could no longer send a message that could reach Allure or anyone else. Not that she would try again – she was already known as the one least on board with the whole thing. But they all believed she was loyal.

The fact that she wasn’t bothered her a little bit.

Or was she just loyal to Allure over Lady Rarity and Corona?

To Merodi Universalis?

To her moral code?

She didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that she had to stop Corona from completing her crazy plan. But everyone was willing to follow her – or Lady Rarity – to the very end. Even Vivian, who Nae knew had a serious conscience bugging her.

…But Vivian had once been a villain as well, Nae knew. Helping her mother try to send a world into darkness…

Were they all turning into villains?

That thought made Nae grimace.

“Going insane?” Velvet asked.

Nae looked up in surprise. “V-velvet! What are you d-”

“Going insane,” Velvet deadpanned. “That’s what I’m doing. That’s all I ever do. Walk up to an event and treat it like a cow at the butcher. Cut it up, cook it, eat it. Sometimes skip the second step. My sort of insanity is coming from that little nagging thought that says ‘you know, maybe you’re a little too brutal’, to which I say ‘go kill yourself!’ It generally goes well.” She broke into a crazed smile.

“Hm…” Nae said, looking at nothing. She couldn’t tell Velvet what was really bothering her – but she needed to give her something.

Luckily there was more than one thing bothering her.

“I don’t think Corona’s doing that well.”

“Of course she’s not. She’s reasoning through an impossible question. Kill ‘em all, or let things stay the same’?”

Nae looked at her. “She’s still debating?”

“She’d love it if she could let herself believe that it would be better to keep the Dark Tower around. Who the fuck wants that kind of burden? Not her, not me, not you. But she can’t convince herself otherwise. It’s not just a matter of numbers to her, either.”

“Thought she was all about ‘death now for less death later’?”

Velvet shook her head. “You and I have seen nasty things that have nothing to do with death. Diseases that shouldn’t exist. Hell universes. Races that are truly evil and can’t be anything else. Demonic presences. Needless drama. People who are universal playthings. Hentai. Fucking universe devourers.”

Nae nodded. I know where she’s coming from, I get it, I just can’t let it slide. “I guess I knew that.”

“If it makes you feel better, I probably won’t be around in the new existence or whatever.”

“Velvet, as much as we butt heads you’re a valuable member of the team.”

“Took you this long to actually say it,” Velvet said with a smirk.

Nae nodded. “I mean it too.” She stretched her arms, slinging her gun behind her back. “I’m going back to the bridge.”

“I’m going to find out what kind of food we have on this barge. Probably nothing, but you never know, there could be some blood cupcakes!”

Nae raised an eyebrow.

“Hey, if someone’s already cooked them up, I’m not letting them go to waste. You can be creeped out all you want.”

Nae waved her hand dismissively and walked back to the bridge. Only Corona and Lady Rarity were there – and Corona was crying.

“We can go back,” Lady Rarity said.

“Why can’t I just tell myself it’s wrong?” Corona shouted. “Your heart tells you there can’t be anything worth that much suffering, right?”

Lady Rarity didn’t answer.

“Mine does too. It says there’s no way it can be worth it. But my brain can’t rationalize it. It can’t make the equation work.”

“Does it have to work?” Nae asked. If I can stop her by talking…

Corona looked at her, surprised she was there. “Oh… Nae. I… Does it?” She looked at the Condor’s display. “…But then I can’t just ignore my mind. The heart attacks the mind, the mind attacks the heart.”

“All that’s left is your gut,” Lady Rarity said.

“And my gut says we need to do this,” Corona said, curling her fingers into fists and placing them on the console. “Even damn ka seems to suggest I need to do this.”

Talking isn’t going to work now, Nae thought. “…So everything agrees except your heart?”

Corona nodded. “And it’s screaming. It’s screaming like it’s never screamed before. It’s…” She broke down into sobs again, barely managing to stand up.

“Corona…” Lady Rarity said, extending a hoof.

“WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH EXISTENCE!?” Corona shouted, suddenly on fire. “WHAT THE HELL IS SO WRONG WITH IT THAT THIS SEEMS REASONABLE!?”

Lady Rarity sighed. “Because we defined it this way.”

“WE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT! THAT WAS FREAKING GAN AND HIS FREAKING GOD COMPLEX! HE DIED TO CREATE A WORLD FULL OF CRAP! HIS ENTIRE SOCIETY DID!”

“…And what we’re talking about doing is just the inverse,” Lady Rarity said.

Nae stared at her, eyes wide.

“The creation of the Dark Tower destroyed the Builders and sent the Weavers into decay,” Lady Rarity said. “A collapse… would just do all that faster.”

“Shut up,” Corona muttered, standing up tall. “This isn’t the same thing at all.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I don’t want to define anything! I don’t want to wave a magic wand and give the world meaning! I just want to stop our minds from turning existence into a nightmare! …And I don’t think Gan succeeded anyway! Does this slew of tragedy and horror look like it has meaning to you!?”

Lady Rarity and Nae stared at Corona.

“I… I’m sorry,” Corona said, putting a hand to the bridge of her nose. “That wasn’t right. Of course there’s meaning. You all mean a lot to me, and all the experiences we’ve shared have a value that I can’t explain.”

Lady Rarity smiled sadly. “Thank you, Corona.”

Corona wiped her face. “Yeah… I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”

“If you hadn’t talked to anyone, I think you would have been condemned.”

Corona nodded slowly. “…It let me have this, then took me exactly where I needed to go. What kind of point is the Tower trying to make? It has to be something.”

I’d like to know that too, Nae thought.

~~~

I arranged the story.

“Leftmost with respect to the Tower,” I ordered the Austraeoh crew. “No offense Nanoha, but your machine is leading us astray.”

“It’s not meant to work in short timespans,” Nanoha admitted. “There is also the chance it’s finding a different Wishing World.”

I didn’t give this a response – I simply kept scribbling more and more notes down in my book. I drew complex diagrams of the Great Void, lines between universes, scrawling sentences under them with only a moment’s thought given to the act.

I was writing a very complex series of events to make sure everything went perfectly, and they all knew it. I was their key to salvation. The Aware Prophet who knew exactly how to get them anywhere.

“You sure you can’t tell us where they are?” Pinkie asked.

“I’ve managed to see their ship,” I said, meeting her nonexistent eyes. “Can’t tell you the coordinates. It’s the Great Void, not like there’s much to go off of here. I can’t see any details about what they’re actually doing or talking about.”

“Huh… I think I’m getting more than that. Corona’s crying.”

“Guess you might be the answer to the puzzle then,” I said, writing something quickly in response to her revelation, factoring her higher-than-expected Awareness into everything. “What can you tell me?”

“She really wants to turn back. Nae’s still on our side but can’t help. And…” she rubbed her head. “Gah, it’s so fuzzy.”

“Not going to be able to just cheat our way out of this one,” I said.

“You’re certainly trying,” Eve pointed out.

I smiled awkwardly. “Eheh… Yeah. Guess I am. Oh, you’re about to get a false reading by the way. It’ll say 100% guarantee.”

Nanoha blinked. “…It’s certainly behaving badly this time around.”

I shrugged. “We have the advantage over them technologically. They have to be given an edge somehow. I’m trying to have us catch them before they arrive, and it should work the way I’m doing it.”

“How much longer?” Jotaro asked.

“Insisting a timeframe in Prophet writing is a bad idea,” I answered. “So don’t ask me for one.”

“I hate that rule,” Vriska muttered. “One time she wrote us escaping from a jail and it took a week. Another time she wrote us getting ambushed so we could get some extra gear and it happened before she was done writing it.”

“Then there’s retroactive, but that won’t be the case here.”

“I fucking hate retroactive.”

“You must never get sunburns then,” O’Neill quipped.

“I… What?”

“Retroactive. Radioactive,” Flutterfree deadpanned. “It’s a bad and stretched out pun.”

Vriska blinked. “…Okaythen. I guess.”

“It’s gold and you know it,” O’Neill said.

Clandestine facehooved. “Sir…”

I ignored them, focusing my attention back on my work. They didn’t know exactly how much focus they required. In fact, it was necessary they didn’t know for all this to work properly.

I can’t tell you either. That’s part of it as well. I’m sorry.

…It’s been a while since we’ve just had a talk, hasn’t it? Me, my thoughts, going onto a page for you to see, initiating a two-way conversation. There was a bit much going on during 115, to do that, and there wasn’t a lull in the previous part here to have this moment.

But I’m here now. How’s your day? Stressed about the fate of the multiverse? …I guess I would be too. If you’re reading from GM’s world… Well you wouldn’t be able to see this until years after he wrote it, and in the current timeline he hasn’t written it yet! Somewhere in the early chapters of this arc, last I checked. I’m not even sure he knows Nettle exists yet.

I’m stressed too, I have to admit. So many things being juggled… But you’ll find out about those soon enough.

Chances are, though, if you’re reading this, everything’s going to be fine for you. You’re from a different timeline or something. Your universe could be three billion million years in metatime’s past, and the record of this story will just conveniently be lost so no one could ever find it. Or, for all I know, you’re actually on the Original Earth and this is the story that ends up defining the multiverse in this era.

I can’t really say either way, can I?

I may understand, but I’m not omnipotent.

My point is, you’re probably safe. The multiverse is so vast and extensive that I don’t think it’d allow someone with full knowledge of what’s to come to really experience it. It’s why GM is still behind us. It’s why no version of FimFiction we’ve found has this story besides the one where GM currently is.

Don’t worry about your universe being destroyed. Trust me.

…I should get you back to what’s happening here. Or happened – need to transfer back to full past-tense again.

Eve looked forward. Flutterfree walked up to her. “…Eve?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not going to be okay after this, is it?”

Eve bit her lip. “…No. No it’s not. The entire multiverse has a reset button. I’m not going to be able to sleep well just knowing that.”

“We could try to remove the fact.”

“But what if there’s a way to defend against it?” Eve asked. “We’ll have to question Corona about it… And then the secret will spread somehow or other – and if we remove it from our minds, the one person we forgot about could spread it and we’d be none the wiser.”

Flutterfree put her wing around Eve. “Then we have to live with it, just like we lived with ka, with fate, with grimdarkness…”

“Have we really been living with those things or trying desperately not to think about them?” Eve asked.

Flutterfree looked into the distance. “Trying not to think about them.”

“I knew it…” Eve sighed. “Our minds aren’t able to deal with it all. We distance ourselves to keep ourselves sane.”

“And yet, somewhere in the past, we wanted this,” Flutterfree said. “Our stories to be reality.”

“I think it’s better than mundanity,” Eve said. “There’s so much we can do with outlandish possibilities that a mundane universe simply can’t have.”

“I agree with you. But we’ve never seen a universe without ka. They don’t exist.”

“Standard Earth timeline?”

Flutterfree shrugged. “There are still moments that look like they have ka in them. And there’s parts of the timeline that have disagreements. You could explain that by the will of God… but if you didn’t that means even Standard Earths are just products of ka like everything else.”

Eve clenched her jaw. “…Regardless, no matter the nagging feeling in the back of my mind, we have to stop her.”

“It’s like the Watchmaker,” Flutterfree said. “We can’t remove him without destroying his world.”

“Parallelisms…” Eve said, shaking her head.

“Parallelisms everywhere,” O’Neill called over.

Eve smirked and rolled her eyes. “Of course.”

And I continued scribbling. My page caught fire but I blew it out.

~~~

The Condor appeared in a new universe – and they were hailed.

“Ignore it,” Sugarcoat muttered. “We can’t be distracted.”

“…It’s the Raven Hotel,” Corona said, blinking. “What…?”

“Ignore it.”

“But it’s not supposed to be here! It’s on the edge of the Great Void, not in it!”

“Ignore it…”

“Poe might have something to say...”

The certainty in Sugarcoat’s words dropped. “…Ignore it…”

“And we are relying completely on ka to get us where we need to go since this machine is basically a faulty compass, so…”

“Just answer the phone already!” Insipid demanded.

Corona answered the hail. “Hello?”

“Ah, glad to see you’ve made it!” the vaguely creepy Victorian face of Poe the AI hotel appeared on the screen. “Your reservation is ready for you.”

“…We didn’t make a reservation.”

“Oh, it was all handled by the Void – Empress Twilight’s personal white mage made the arrangements herself.”

They stared at him.

“If you’re worried or anything, it’s all on the down-low. The entire hotel was moved and all customers ejected to suit your accommodations.”

“…You ejected customers?” Lady Rarity said, gawking. “Isn’t it in your programming to adhere to all their needs!?”

“Yes. But there are ways to override that. Such as an event of utmost importance. I do believe you should come down and check in.”

Corona glanced at her team. “…Sure.”

“See you soon.” He cut the transmission.

“Trap?” Ash asked.

Corona narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think so… I think this is what we were supposed to find.”

“It’s not a Wishing World,” Sugarcoat observed.

“Thank you captain obvious,” Velvet muttered.

“Maybe we’re not actually supposed to find a Wishing World,” Corona said. “That’s just the idea we came up with. Surely it’s not the only way to get it out.”

“It’s the only interesting thing we’ve found,” Nae admitted.

“Do it,” Insipid said. “And if it’s nothing we get a free hotel with all sorts of sweet accommodations!”

“You’re not ordering any ‘packages’,” Corona deadpanned. “Ever.”

“…Fine.”

Corona took the Condor down to one of the Raven hotel’s docks. They landed – and all seven of them stepped out. They entered the Hotel lobby. All of them had been in the Raven Hotel before, so they were surprised to only find one table in the main hall instead of several.

Poe was at his usual place, behind the registrar – but at the table were two interesting individuals.

The first was none other than the White Mage Rarity herself, member of Empress Twilight’s court. The other was Gilgamesh.

Mage Rarity smiled warmly. “Come, sit, we have much to discuss.”

All of them remained standing.

“This is not a trap,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Me, Gilgamesh, and Poe are the only ones here – no match for Corona even with my Time spells. I’m simply here to talk – and tell you that I’m on your side.”

“They told people?” Corona asked.

Mage Rarity shook her head. “They didn’t intend to. As far as they’re concerned, their little group on the Austraeoh is all that’s hunting you. They are right to assume it should be enough. They really should have caught you by now. But they haven’t – and now we can talk.”

“Why do you want to help us?” Nae demanded.

“Do you really think what you’re doing is so deplorable?” Mage Rarity asked. “There are many of us who would love to see the end of the Dark Tower, so long as something would live on afterward. Empress Twilight has tried to counteract its effects as much as she could with her control over the Void – to no avail.” Rarity paused. “I should perhaps clarify that the Empress has no idea we’re here and would not approve of what I’m doing.”

“Ah. Treachery,” Sugarcoat said.

Mage Rarity nodded. “It is. Gilgamesh here is with me on this. Not for any deep philosophical reason, but because he trusts me. As I’m sure a lot of you are just here to follow Corona.”

There were a couple nods at that.

“Gilgamesh is willing to die for you?” Corona asked.

“There are ways to enhance the chances of survival,” Mage Rarity pointed out. “Revival mechanisms, definitely. He is a native to the Void of ours and thus, Phoenix Down will work every time on him. Not to mention my own level of advanced healing magics.”

Lady Rarity narrowed her eyes.

Mage Rarity sighed. “Look, I won’t stop you from sacrificing yourselves if you think that is what you need to do. And it is always possible I cannot deal with the new physics – I cannot predict such things. But I will help you regardless, because that is what I’ve decided to do. I can take you to a Wishing World from here.”

Everyone stared at her. “…The Void has one that’s unused?” Ash asked.

“Eh, no,” Mage Rarity admitted. “We used our last one several decades ago. I just know how to find one that won’t rely on that faulty piece of machinery you have.” She pulled out a small crystal cube filled with Void energy.

“What is that?” Insipid asked. “It looks, like, so dark and edgy.”

“It’s a connection forcer,” Corona said, eyes wide. “A device that can connect to a universe when there isn’t a connection to it, creating a brand new one. How much energy do you have stored in this thing?”

“Enough to destroy this universe without warping physics several times over,” Mage Rarity answered.

Poe stood bolt upright. “HOLD ON A MINUTE, I WAS NOT INFORMED OF THIS!”

“It’s safe,” Mage Rarity assured them. “It’s a more advanced piece of our engineering, but given my position, I was easily able to procure it. We just have to go somewhere near the edge of the Q-Sphere – much closer to where you started.”

“They’ll detect us,” Corona pointed out.

“Oh, probably, but that’s what Gilgamesh is here for. You just need to get to the Wishing World.” She looked at them all. “Are you ready? Now is probably the best time to go. I’m told your pursuers are about to be very distracted.”

Corona took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”

Mage Rarity threw the cube onto the table, producing a dark churn of energy. The familiar feeling of reality shaking rippled through all their bones, shaking them to their cores. A dark, square portal appeared in the air. At first, it led to nothing.

But then it decided it needed to force a connection. A line strung across the multiverse from the Great Void to the Q-Sphere – a highly unstable connection that could be broken at any moment. But there it held – a hole large enough for them to climb through.

A hole that led to a realm of Static.

~~~

Pidge frowned. “Hey guys? I think we’ve been here before.”

O’Neill looked up at the screen. “Black space, blue gas giant. Pretty standard.”

“Yeah, but I just checked our records… We’ve been at these exact coordinates before.”

“Is someone scrambling universes?” Nova asked.

Nanoha checked with Raising Heart. “No. The speeder’s sensors detect nothing of the sort.”

“Would you detect it if the Tower was doing it?” I asked.

“Most likely,” Nanoha confirmed.

“But there’s a possibility you can’t,” Eve said. “So it could just be universes scrambling.”

“I kinda doubt it,” Pidge said, charting their course on a map of the multiverse. It showed the Austraeoh going around the Great Void in a haphazard pattern that ended up sort of spherical.

“Could we need to go to the center?” O’Neill asked.

“We’ve been there. That sphere that is our path? That’s solid. Everything in this small area we’ve been to.”

“Your program is shit,” Vriska told Nanoha.

“I know it is. I-”

“We haven’t been following the program,” Flutterfree said, eyes widening. “We’ve been following Twilence.”

There was silence on the bridge.

I rolled my eyes. “They could just be going in circles too you know. It’s not like I can see that much.”

And then Flutterfree decided to pull out Lolo. Of course…

I reacted quickly – before she could do anything ‘revealing’ to me I vaporized the notebook, removing all the evidence. I smiled awkwardly. “I was kinda hoping that’d last a little longer.”

“Twilence… Really?” Pinkie said, mane starting to droop.

“Is it really that surprising?” I asked. “I mean…” I took a deep breath, allowing the Heartsong to overtake me.

“I was always looking close
I was made to understand
This bizarre force we call the Narrative
How it guides our lives like fine sand.

I tried to think it was great
Listened to those who read the tales
But I saw the truth of the world
Now alone with my wails.”

I spread my wings and focused on Eve. I gestured toward the Eye of Rhyme forcefully.

“Open up your eyes!
See the world from where I stand
Me among the Aware
My words define your lives!”

I moved to Pidge, surprising her considerably.

“Open up your eyes!
See fantasy for what it is
End the dark deaths of those held dear
Come now little one
Open up your eyes!”

I backed up, taking a moment to look at Pinkie.

“We all start out the same
Thinking the world is just
Seeing fate as our one guide
Not looking at the rust

But then there comes a moment
When you see ka for what it is
It’s just the twisted desires
Made to give empty bliss…”

I let out a deep sigh, tears in my eyes. I took a moment to pause, reminiscing on my life up to this point. How it had all led to this.

“It isn’t really their fault
They just want to enjoy themselves
The evil of the Tower
It doesn’t give meaning but suffering…”

I spread my wings again, holding my hoof up high.

“Open up your eyes!
See the world from where I stand
Me among the Prophets
My words define your lives!

Open up your eyes!
And behold the crumbling Dark!
We cannot let this evil stand
Come now everyone
Open up your eyes!”

“OPEN UP YOUR EYES!”

I lowered by head to Eve as my musical number ended. “Cuff me and send me to the brig. I’ve already done all I need to. They’ll complete their mission. I’ve written almost all of it.”

“Not if we have anything to say about it,” Eve said. “Nanoha, you can tightbeam a communication to Merodi Universalis with the speeder, right?”

Nanoha nodded.

“We need to get Rohan.”

I nodded. “Good move.”

“You aren’t our only Prophet, Twilence.”

“Are you sure he can find a way to get you to them? You don’t even know what I wrote for them!”

“No,” Eve admitted. “But we’re going to try anyway…”

~~~

“…I take it you have a breathing spell on us,” Corona asked Mage Rarity.

She nodded in response. “The Static is no place to live, of course I do.”

“Merodi Universalis has drones all over here. They’ll detect us,” Ash said.

“Yes, they will. But they’re not looking for you yet, remember? Only the Austraeoh knows about you, and word will take some time to travel even with a TSAB tightbeam. But we should move regardless.” She took them down to a large, black platform somewhere within the Static. It was made out of the usual blackish rock material. Both above and below, they saw the Eye of the Static, that mysterious red shape that was impossibly far away, always watching.

They saw a monolith pass by, not paying them any mind.

“Why here?” Insipid asked. “It’s so drab.”

“This is the place the Eye of Rhyme was created,” Mage Rarity explained.

“An artifact more than worthy of my treasury…” Gilgamesh muttered.

“Twilence is not able to give it up, and it would be too much for you,” Mage Rarity said matter-of-factly. “No one can handle that much truth all at once.”

Gilgamesh grunted.

“Regardless, the Stars created this universe in the Starstream War, specifically to twist ka in their favor. They were seen as the ‘villains’ the entire time in the war, enslavers of ponies, or at the very least uncaring cosmic entities. They wished to understand how and why this ka was making them lose. So they used this place to focus the idea of eyes, understanding, and ka itself into one point, creating the device known as the Eye of Rhyme. Unfortunately for them, Nanoha Takamachi interfered and blasted the Eye of Rhyme into a random universe to be lost. This was good for us, because if either the Stars or Starcross Society had mastered the Eye…” she shook her head.

“The point?” Velvet demanded.

“Patience. The Eye of Rhyme was lost on Twilence’s homeworld. It eventually found its way to her via the machinations of a race of ancients. Many think they built the Eye – but in reality, their society was built because of the Eye. All their dimensional relics were based on the intricate things within the Eye. And then it decided Twilence was worthy, and it taught her how to understand ka. And, eventually, she came back here.” She paused for a moment. “She understood this place, this Static, and made it her own.”

“And how does that help us?”

“She’s essentially been storing up ka energy here,” Mage Rarity said. “Ka energy that can be used to accomplish great feats.” She looked at them. “The only reason any of you have made it this far is because Twilence has written you here. I hope you understand that.”

Corona nodded slowly. “I do. I’ll thank her.”

Mage Rarity smiled sadly at her. “She knows. She’s been with you the entire time. Even before you knew who she was.”

“…She always wanted the multiverse to fall?”

Mage Rarity shook her head. “She just saw an opportunity and took it. The loss of certainty was a real thing. She didn’t know what was going on until you did.”

“Right,” Corona said. “So, how do we use the Static to get to the Wishing World?”

“We ask it to.” Mage Rarity held out her hoof and lit her horn. “Your mistress has given you a purpose. Deliver.”

A portal unceremoniously opened. On the other side was a staircase they couldn’t see the top of.

“Now they’re going to know you’re here,” Mage Rarity said. “So you should really hurry. Be-”

The TARDIS fell out of the sky between them and the portal. The Doctor stepped out, Sonic Screwdriver in hand. “No. No wishing today.”

Mage Rarity looked at him in surprise. “Wh- how?!”

“A Doctor never reveals his secrets.”

“And this is why I’m here,” Gilgamesh said, pulling out a sword and charging the Doctor – bouncing off a force-field the TARDIS was exerting around him and the portal.

Corona held out one of her hands, tapping into the reality around the force-field. “You know this won’t keep us.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “But this will.” He pulled out a box and pressed the button, freezing time for everyone but him.

Corona was expecting this – and Insipid just got lucky enough to activate the right one of Corona’s spells, cancelling the time stop for both of them.

“You aren’t a warrior, Doctor.”

“I used to be,” he said, regretfully.

“You aren’t anymore.” She dissipated her glove and pushed her hand slowly through the force field. “Insipid, cover me.”

“Cha,” Insipid chimed.

The Doctor held out his own hand. “You can’t take my mind, Corona.”

“You’re wrong there.” The hands of the two met, and they entered each other’s minds – creating a pure white mindscape.

The Doctor was already trying to break down Corona’s mental barriers, to no avail. “You’re faster than expected,” she commented, compensating for her natural biological inferiority with the processing speed of Raging Sights.

“I’ve been doing this for an eternity.”

“But you’re out of practice,” Corona said. “I do this every day, more or less.”

“Corona, stop,” the Doctor said. “This isn’t you. You’re not the villain.”

“…I don’t think I am, Doctor,” Corona said, eyes sad. “I think I’m doing what has to be done.”

“How can you live with yourself?”

Corona smiled sadly, answering the question with silence.

Then the Doctor was punched from outside, breaking the shared mindscape up. “About time,” Corona said.

“It took a while to break his box!” Insipid whined. “Then Gilgamesh had to realize he needed to go all punchy.”

Gilgamesh stood over the form of the Doctor, aiming a legendary magic shotgun at him.

“Don’t kill him,” Corona called. “Just watch him.”

Mage Rarity nodded. “It’s quite alright, Gilgamesh. Do as she says.” She turned to Corona. “Now, you do as I say. Get in that portal!”

The TARDIS still stood in their way, exerting a force-field that took significant effort to wade through. Corona opted to tear the ground out from under the TARDIS – and make it fall deeper into the Static. It worked like a charm.

“Oh, bother,” the Doctor muttered. Whether it was at losing his TARDIS or the shotgun pointed at him, nobody knew.

“Sorry,” Corona said, running and jumping through the portal, her group following behind.

They landed at the foot of the stairs and began to climb.

~~~

Rohan needed to work so fast it wasn’t even funny – a single page of manga that told a compelling enough story to get it across. He took what he knew – Nae was a traitor, Corona had just been detected in the Static, Twilence was also a traitor, and…

He had it. He was going to have to leave a lot of holes and be mysterious, but the Tower would be able to fill it in, certainly.

He started sweating as he summoned Heaven’s Door, sketching the panels for the page. It was just a couple. The Austraeoh needed to have a compelling reason to get to the Static in an instant when they really should take a few minutes to get back, even with the speeder they had…

He checked the bridge crew manifest. Pidge maybe? No, too unknown, couldn’t mad-science something effectively enough. Nova was never the best at it. Twilence was the enemy…

Wait, maybe she had a natural connection to the Static. And if not, well, he could just write it into existence retroactively, right? …Right?

The time for thinking was over – it was the time to draw. And draw he did. Four simple panels.

First, the establishment that Twilence was the traitor, and that she should be sent to the brig now, get her off the Bridge. O’Neill, of course.

Second, a setup. A short two-bubble conversation between Nanoha and Nova about the nature of Prophets and how their work cannot be traced without Monika.

Third, the panel of everyone looking to Twilence’s Eye of Rhyme.

Fourth, a punchline – Twilence was the secret to her own defeat, due to the power she carried on her chest.

Rohan drew the fourth panel with her looking right out of the page at him with unbridled rage. He shuddered.

He chose to believe that meant it worked. His little attempt at a substandard weekday comic strip joke was just enough to shift events…

~~~

Pidge connected two wires to the Eye of Rhyme. “Got anything Nova?”

“I think I do!” Nova said. “It’s a set of coordinate jumps – six to the destination!”

“I am going to make Rohan suffer,” I muttered. “All his manga, burned.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” O’Neill commented. “Clandestine?”

Clandestine hopped into the pilot’s seat. “On it!” She grabbed the coordinates and initiated the six jumps in quick succession – maybe a total of twenty seconds passed before they were in the Static.

“Report!” Eve demanded.

Nova looked over her scans. “Dimensional energy to a previously unknown universe is active. Detection of the Doctor, White Mage Rarity, and …Gilgamesh?”

“They’re with Twilence,” Pinkie said. “Grab them.”

“Teleporting the three of them to the brig,” Clandestine said, doing as she said.

“…I meant all of them but the Doctor, sorry.”

“I’m sure he’ll understand.”

“New universe,” Eve said. “Find it.”

“Been working on it!” Pidge said. “I can’t open a portal large enough to fit the Austraeoh through!”

Eve took out her personal dimensional device. “We don’t need something that large.” She was sent the new coordinates and opened a standard portal to the base of the stairs.

~~~

Corona and her crew were running up the stairs to the summit of the Wishing World.

Why running and not teleporting?

Because the Wishing World had forced near-mundane physics.

Corona was flapping her wings to get extra lift, allowing her to climb faster than the others, but she was still struggling to do so.

“They just came in!” Velvet called, glancing back. “They’re after us!”

Unfortunately, the translation spell wasn’t working – so everyone except Insipid had to glance behind them to figure out what was going on.

“We’re all the same here!” Sugarcoat shouted, stopping in her tracks. “We can take them.”

Corona glanced back – Lady Rarity, Velvet, Sugarcoat, and Ash had stayed back, getting the same idea as Sugarcoat. Insipid and Nae were the only ones still running alongside Corona. Nae was fast enough to keep up with her long legs, and Insipid… Was more or less just running blind. She definitely wouldn’t be a good fighter down there without her powers, so Corona didn’t complain.

O’Neill lead the charge of his team. Eve, Nanoha, Pidge, Clandestine, and Pinkie’s Party all struggled to acclimate to their sudden mundane nature – but he sure didn’t. He charged right up to the four defenders and met them in hand-to-hand combat. Velvet charged – and fell like a ragdoll despite her ferocity. He moved to Ash quickly – who at least knew how to move like a ninja, extending the encounter beyond a few seconds.

Lady Rarity’s armor was designed to operate even in mundane physics, so she was just fine. Without a levitating hammer she still had an extremely hefty kick, knocking Clandestine and Vriska aside easily. Then Jotaro charged, reminding Lady Rarity that those muscles definitely weren’t just for show, meeting her technological strength with pure brawn.

Sugarcoat cautiously stayed back, surveying the oncoming people for a better fit opponent – which ended up being Nanoha. Sugarcoat was surprised to find the White Devil really knew how to kick.

With all of them occupied, this allowed Eve, Pinkie, Flutterfree, Nova, and Pidge to move forward.

“They’re too far ahead!” Nova called.

Eve spread her wings. “I’ve got this. Rest of you, help the others.” Her wings were large enough in relation to her body to provide lift – but Corona had invested the same effort into flapping her own wings. Eve was not gaining.

“I’ve got this!” Pinkie said, laughing. She was still able to use her powers. She appeared in front of Corona, bashing her over the head with a squeaky hammer. “Nice try!”

Corona rolled down the stairs into Insipid and Nae. The three formed a pile – the distance between Eve and Corona closing rapidly.

She’s got us. Corona realized as she tried to stand back up – only for another squeaky hammer hit from Pinkie Pie to keep her down. Pinkie’s got too much on us. Even if I get past her somehow, I’ve lost too much time…

It was at this point that two things happened at once.

First, Insipid touched Pinkie Pie.

Second, Pidge fired her personal weapon – a grappling-hook like cutter that flew through the air and wrapped around Eve’s wing.

Insipid suplexed Pinkie so hard they appeared at the bottom of the staircase. “Woo!” she said in a language Pinkie couldn’t understand.

Pinkie facehooved. “Gah! My impossibility flowed both ways! That’s dumb!”

“I don’t know what you’re saying but this is the freshest fresh.” Insipid took out a giant vanity mirror from her mane and hit Pinkie with it.

Meanwhile, Pidge’s weapon pulled Eve to her – the technician already having been tackled by Flutterfree and Nova.

Eve looked at Pidge with pain in her eyes. Why? Her expression asked.

I opened up my eyes, Pidge’s expression responded.

Eve shook her head – she didn’t have time to worry about this. Her wing was sprained, but she returned to running up the stairs. Her hooves were still just as fine as ever, and her legs were far longer than anypony else who was available.

Corona was flying again, Nae tailing behind her. Eve was not catching up to the flying human-alicorn.

Eve’s expression fell. They had lost…

Nae took aim with her weapon and fired – hitting Corona right in the wing. Her blood went flying – its normal, mundane red color, rather than gold – and she fell to the ground.

Eve ran past Nae, shooting the Ga a confused expression. Nae returned it with one of her own, the gaze of a woman who wondered what had happened to make her shoot her friend.

Despite the pain in her wing, Corona stood and ran up the stairs. But the constant spike of pain ramming into her feathery limb slowed her down. Enough that Eve could catch her, tackling her to the ground one step away from the Wishing World’s summit.

“DAMMIT!” Corona shouted. Eve could understand that – after all, they spoke the same language. She flailed to kick Eve off her, but the alicorn’s grip was too strong. “Let go!”

“JUST STOP!” Eve shouted. “You can still come back!”

“I know!” Corona responded, crying. “I know you will! I’d do the same!” Instead of kicking, she moved her hands forward and tried to pull herself up over the last step.

“GET BACK HERE!” Eve blurted, twisting her body backward. Corona’s humanoid body was not enough to deal with the bulk of an alicorn rolling over. She was pulled down and her leg twisted.

“GAH! EVE!” She wrenched her own body forward, only managing to sprain the leg significantly.

“Just come back. Stop this!”

“I need to do this!” Corona shouted, conveniently in a position where Eve could see her mouth, ensuring no guesswork about what she was saying. “I need to do it for everyone!”

“WHAT RIGHT DO YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE DECISION TO LIVE OR DIE FOR EVERYONE!?”

“NONE!” Corona shouted. “I’m not making that decision!”

Eve blinked. “Wh…What?”

“Lady Rarity said the same thing,” Corona said, allowing herself to relax slightly. “She said that we don’t have the right to make the decision ourselves. We’re just specks.”

“…Then why are you here?”

Corona looked at the summit of the Wishing World. “…I’m here for a Wish. A Wish that would let everyone decide.”

“…Everyone?”

“Everyone.” Corona said. “I’m not destroying the multiverse with this Wish, Eve. I’m just one person. I can’t make that decision. I’m just going to let everyone know what I’ve found. So it’s even. So it’s fair.”

“Even…” Eve said. A spark of light flickered across her pupils. She released Corona.

“…Eve?”

“…I trust you,” Eve said. “If you’re sure we all need to decide…”

“I’m sure. It may cause a horrendous amount of death and pain either way… But the question needs to be asked. It needs to. Do we really want the world to stay the way it is if there’s an option?”

Eve looked at Corona. “I like it the way it is.”

“I don’t.”

Eve nodded. She glanced behind them at their fighting friends. “…Do it before they really hurt each other.”

Corona put a hand on Eve’s shoulder. “It’ll be out of our hands – and hooves – soon enough. We’re just a dot, Eve.”

“A pale blue dot in a vast cosmos…” Eve said.

Corona nodded. She walked up the last couple steps to the clockwork star and planet that was this Wishing World’s Wish.

She had to physically remove her glove this time – no magic dissipation allowed. She laid her hand on the star.

“I Wish… to send a long, detailed message to every sapient mind in the multiverse, endowed so they can understand it,” Corona said.

GRANTED.

~~~

Hello.

Most of you don’t know me – and those that do, that shouldn’t matter. I’m about to become obsolete anyway. All that matters is this message I bring.

The vast, vast majority of you have been living under the assumption that your world is the only one. This is simply not true – there are trillions of different worlds, different universes, out there. Some are probably like your own. Others are probably beyond your imagination’s ability to comprehend. The point is, these other worlds are real, and together they make up all of existence – the multiverse. It is… well, everything that is.

In the early days of the multiverse, there was a man named Gan. He and his people believed there was no meaning in existence, that everything was completely pointless. They didn’t like this answer to life, so they decided that they would make there be meaning in existence. They chose to create the Dark Tower, a structure that has served as the center of the multiverse for an amount of time so large I can’t even understand it myself, much less convey it to all of you.

The Dark Tower has ruled over existence almost unchallenged. It connects to every single world and uses a force called ka to control the fates and realities of everything inside. It serves the role of what many of you would consider the place of God – except it isn’t a personal being. It is a machine built by ancient entities that has little in the way of personal desires. Rather, it randomly selects people from across existence to define how it shapes the multiverse.

These people are called Prophets. They are usually the poets, authors, and producers of worlds. They are people who create art that tells a story. Only a select few storytellers are Prophets – but those that are, when they tell a story, it will almost certainly become real somewhere in the multiverse. Some of you have ancient legends. Some of you have tall tales. Some of you have novels. If a Prophet wrote or created any of these things, it would become real – as real as you or I are.

This has brought about much beauty. There are heroes who will stop at nothing to do what is right. There are great worlds of happiness and utopia. There are many people who find meaning in life through their stories. There are lands where the citizens don’t have a care in the world, or anything to bother them. If you live in one of these worlds… I am sorry for the truth I am revealing to you.

The flip side of the coin is that there is much horror in the multiverse. In many worlds, trillions die daily because some wannabe god decided it would be funny. In others, everyone is enslaved by magic, or simply dead. There are worlds based on the depraved and disturbed fantasies of psychotic individuals that exist only to satisfy their lustful imaginations.
True evil incarnate is known to exist, and a power known as time travel continually replaces worlds over and over, killing the universe most times it’s used.

We have reached into our desire for great stories to define the world around us. This has produced evils, villains, and tragedies. It has also produced heroes, beauty, and, for some, meaning.

And now, the Dark Tower has decided it is finally time to ask the question.

Do we want to live in an existence defined by the stories we tell?

It has shown me the way to end it all. All universes could collapse into one, creating a new era for existence, one without the Dark Tower dictating everything. But, as I have come to realize, it has also shown me a way to ensure ka never dies.

And that is what this message is about. We need to decide. At one point in existence, enough of us wanted stories to be real that we made it happen. Now that many of us have seen and felt the results firsthand, we need to decide if we want to keep it that way.

This message has encoded within it the instructions to build grand devices – the Tower Rings. You will all inherently come to understand how the Tower Rings work – how they surround the Dark Tower, how they pierce it, and how they give it a single command.

A command to collapse the multiverse into one, or a command to alter the way connections between universe operate so that they can never collapse into one. The former option will destroy most worlds, letting only random individuals survive in the New World. But the latter will allow the endless death and suffering to perpetuate for all.

The synthesis of a random New World has its fair share of unknowns. How exactly will all the magic synthesize? What sorts of beings simply won't be able to exist? Will the new world itself be doomed to die and fizzle out like so many others? My simulations can only offer guesses. There'll be some magic, though what form it takes I would have no way to determine. Anything that requires exotic physics to survive will probably die. Since there are so many ways to reverse entropy in the multiverse, at least one of them is almost guaranteed to still work.

The preservation of the Dark Tower goes much the same. Will it change how it operates once it's immune to altercation? What will happen when someone inevitably tries to create true infinity again? How will the multiversal rules change? Again, I only have guesses. The Dark Tower has never been consistent, so it is likely to change, but it may also not just to subvert expectations; ka will have to adjust to create an ending in continuation. If the Dark Tower lasts for eternity, eventually someone is going to attempt true infinity again, which would have so many unknown consequences. Travel to the Tower will likely become much easier since it would have no need to properly defend itself anymore.

More aspects of the simulation are embedded in this message, accessible to all who wish to examine them. This is a very complex issue and I wish to impart as much information as I can.

Many of you – most of you who don’t know what the multiverse is – will have minds that don’t want to listen to this. That is fine. It will embed itself into your subconscious and you won’t have to think about it again – but it will be there if you’re ever ready.

Those of you who do believe in keeping this close to your heart, be warned, there will be many who have no idea how to do anything. To help, I have embedded in this message a way to use either technology or magic to create a dimensional beacon to join the multiversal society. I am sorry if you do not have either of these at your disposal – the message will try to adapt to your way of life, but it may not be possible for some of you to create these things. But there’s still a chance you’ll need to know, so I’m giving it to everyone.

And now to those of you with power, known to us here as the Class 1 Societies or the Seats: you are going to be the ones to make the big decisions here. You have the authority over the multiverse, as a council, to decide what happens. Convene all of the Seats. I beg of you, decide what to do as a whole rather than fighting over it. Invite the lesser societies to the table – you have the power to do that. Let this be a decision, not a fight.

What do I think? I vote for the collapse. But many of my closest friends want to keep the world the way it is. I do not have the authority to make this decision – no single person or nation does. It has to be a group decision.

It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 9: VOID]

ARC 9 INTERLUDE<<

And that was the Golden Age of Merodi Universalis. You probably understand why most side stories should take place beforehand, huh?

Time to get to the main story, apparently. The point, what everything has been leading up to, the other side of the Tower’s poem. The episodic format will be dropped. Every chapter will lead into the next for the foreseeable future. Buckle up, this is going to be a bumpy ride.

Arc 10: Doom
118 - Conference, Part 1
119 - Conference, Part 2
120 - Heavenly Schism
121 - Temporal Snare
122 - High Ground
123 - We Will Not Count the Cost
124 - Nihilists
125 - Traitors
126 - Prognosticus
127 - Different Views of Reality
128 - Collapse, Part 1
129 - Collapse, Part 2
130 - {S} Climax

When we reach chapter 127 we will be going on a small hiatus - a month or so - to make sure {S} Climax gets assembled properly and so 127 can get a lot of submissions. Yes, 127 is a collective chapter, though it will be of a much more serious tone than the clip shows. A lot of stuff is going to happen between now and 127, and 127 is all about reactions to that stuff. The submissions won’t be snips, they’ll be short stories. Yes, they can have humor, but the focus this time is ‘the entire multiverse is going to feel this’. You can start writing now, but the official announcement for 127 won’t be for a few chapters. I suggest PMing GM to see if an idea will work.

Also, GM has an alt now, Insipidious, specifically for fanfics of fanfics. Check it out!

And a new best chapter poll: [https://strawpoll.com/dzc65d4w]

Let’s wrap this up with the franchises.

Fairy Tail belongs to Hero Mashima
Harry Potter belongs to J. K. Rowling.
Altered Carbon belongs to Richard K. Morgan
The Manifold Trilogy belongs to Stephen Baxter
The MORI Corporation belongs to TheNewGuy (check out his Sots Sidestory! [ https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/songs-of-the-spheres-multiversal-scale-mega-crossover.555717/#post-38125077])
A New World, A New Way belongs to zeusdemigod
Cloud Atlas belongs to David Mitchell and the Wachowskis
The Infinite Loops belongs to Innortal and the Internet at Large. (pony loops!)
Umineko belongs to Ryukishi07 / 07th Expansion
Tenchi Muyo belongs to Hitoshi Okuda and Masaki Kajishima
The Time Ships belongs to Stephen Baxter
Dies Irae belongs to Takashi Masada

Here are the discord server [ https://discordapp.com/invite/eTuseTh ] and fimfiction group [ https://www.fimfiction.net/group/213761/songs-of-the-spheres-extended-multiverse ] links.

I’m sorry.

[DOOM] 118 - Conference, Part 1

A large group of heroes entered the Static. Two sides that had been at each others’ throats mere moments before limped back to the ‘unsafe’ world as one – Corona and Eve leading, leaning on each other. Most of them had injuries that, under normal conditions, wouldn’t mean anything, but in a mundane universe had brought about great pain and disability.

The first thing Eve and Corona did when they entered the Static was heal each other. Then they healed everyone else – physically. Emotionally, there were those who clearly weren’t coping. Flutterfree’s face was stained with tears. Pidge couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Nae was staring at her gun like it was some kind of monster.

“…You let her do it,” Nova said, eventually.

Eve had enough strength to look Nova in the eyes. “Yes. …You see why?”

“I… I think so.” She had nothing else to say.

Nobody did. The only sound was that of magic keeping air around the group.

“I need to return to the TSAB,” Nanoha said. “They’re going to be in a panic.” She looked at Corona with sad eyes. “…I don’t agree with what you did. But I can’t find fault in it.”

Corona nodded, a grimace on her face. “I understand. More tha-”

“I know exactly how you feel,” Nanoha said. “There are times when there is no right decision.”

Corona stared at her blankly. She opened her mouth to say something – but Nanoha had translated away.

“…I suppose we should convene the Overheads,” O’Neill said.

“Why? It’s not like we’re going to be able to do anything,” Sugarcoat said. “We’re just the messengers here. We don’t have any of the big guns or power.”

“The population is still going to be confused and demand an answer,” Corona asserted. “They’ll need an official opinion. O’Neill’s right, it needs to be done.”

Sugarcoat shrugged, saying nothing.

There was a somber silence once again.

“Okay! All of you snap out of it!” Pinkie shouted.

Everyone turned to stare at the blind earth pony.

“This is hard to think about. It really is. The message in our heads is making us think things we never thought we were capable of thinking. It’s making us question the very foundation of our lives! But I want you all to remember something. Just a few minutes ago, we were fighting – but now we’re not. We’re together.” She grimaced for a moment – if she could have cried, she would have. “Let’s stay together. We’re friends even if we disagree.” She turned to Pidge and Nae. “No matter how much we disagree.”

“Um, we’re still traitors, and we aren’t apologizing,” Pidge said, nervously adjusting her glasses. “No offense Pinkie, but you don’t have the authority to pardon high treason. And neither does Eve.”

“I can do something,” O’Neill said. “Legal won’t like it, but I can postpone trial until a certain event takes place. I’m thinking ‘until a decision about the message is reached’ works nicely.”

Eve nodded. “I’ll second that. We’re not prosecuting anyone until Merodi Universalis makes a decision on what to do.”

“…Which means we need to let the prisoners out,” Nova said, frowning.

O’Neill nodded. “Right… Ahem, Austraeoh? Get the prisoners out of the brig and down here.”

In an instant Mage Rarity, Gilgamesh, and the Doctor appeared… alongside myself. Mage Rarity and Gilgamesh decided now was not a good time to make a fuss. I simply looked at everyone with more judgment in my gaze than I’d like to admit.

The Doctor…

“What in the name of the Tower did you do!?” He shouted at Corona, livid.

Corona opened her mouth to defend herself – but Vriska ended up being the one to retort. “Look at that! The first sentence out of his mouth is so high and mighty. I bet it’s nice up there on that moral pinnacle, Doctor!”

“Vriska, my quarrel isn’t with you i-”

“Fuck that, you don’t get to play the ‘I know what’s best’ card on anyone. I, frankly, am having a little difficulty just dismissing what Corona’s done because, hey, it makes more than a little sense. She even had the balls to admit she didn’t have the authority to make a decision! I’ve never seen that in you!”

“Mad, everyone’s gone mad!” the Doctor shouted. “How can any of you think death of that magnitude could be acceptable under any circumstances!? Since when can that be right!?”

“The Flood,” Flutterfree muttered under her breath. Nobody paid her any mind.

“Because we’re in a book,” Sugarcoat said. “That doesn’t provide meaning. It takes it away.”

“That’s just what you think!” Nae shouted.

“See? We all think differently!” the Doctor said, flailing his arms wildly.

“That’s the whole point,” Corona said. “We think differently. So none of us can have the authority to say we’re right. So I let everyone make the decision.”

“People don’t have the strength to make that decision!”

“You mean make the decision correctly!?” Vriska blurted. “Because, hey, newsflash, I think most random farmers in random universes will probably want to keep their homes! They’ll be on the side of ‘keep things the same’!”

“They aren’t the ones in power!”

Eve cleared her throat. “Chancellor Fluttershy of Equis Concrete told me something, once. ‘We’re all wrong. And that’s a good thing’. None of us can assume we know what’s right by principle – we can only make our best guess.” She pointed a hoof at the Doctor. “I agree that the multiverse needs to stay. But you can’t say that has to be the right answer. For all you know, you’ve made a horribly wrong assumption. All of us are the same way.”

“You’re defending her.”

“She’s attacking you,” Vriska corrected. “About gogdamn time too.”

Corona sighed. “Look, Doctor. You have power in the multiverse. You shouldn’t be wasting your time on us – you should be out there fighting for what you believe. That’s why I made the message.”

The Doctor looked at her with mild confusion.

“This is it,” I said, punctuating the silence. I looked to the Doctor and answered his unspoken question. “Finally, someone with a pure heart has dared to ask the question.”

The Doctor looked at me in mild horror. He knew exactly what that meant. Without another word, he pulled out a small device that went ding,locating his TARDIS. He walked away.

Vriska, despite herself, managed not to jeer at him as he left. She just muttered “self-righteous asshole” under her breath.

“Ahem,” Mage Rarity said. “May we return to our Void?”

Eve glanced at O’Neill – it was his call. He nodded slowly.

Gilgamesh clapped his hands together. “Sweet! I wa-”

“Not the time,” Mage Rarity cut him off. The two of them left, returning to their nation.

“Beam us up,” O’Neill ordered the Austraeoh. “Take us to the Hub.”

~~~

“Not two hours ago local time, Second Corona Shimmer of Research released The Message to the minds of everyone in the multiverse. This was accomplished through the use of a Wishing World. Details of the incident are scant and all Divisions of Merodi Universalis have been completely silent on the matter aside from the Research Overhead’s adamant insistence he had nothing to do with The Message.

“Already, mobs are starting to form around government buildings, demanding answers. The Hub and Celestia City are getting hit the hardest, though Canterlot, Vein Homeworld Central, and the Concretion have reported damage from the crowds. As of yet, the mobs are simply angry, not excessively violent, though this is expected to change if no word comes from the Overheads soon.

“Despite the message’s demands that the Seats convene to discuss this, there has been no sign such a thing has happened…”

Nae didn’t know why she was listening to the transmission. She didn’t know why she was walking around the streets of the Hub aimlessly.

She didn’t know anything anymore.

Besides the fact that she had shot Corona.

The sound of the gun firing, the sight of the blood, and the crunch as she hit the ground.

Nae didn’t even remember making the decision to hit Corona’s wing. As far as she could tell, she pulled the trigger without thinking. It was just as likely she could have hit Corona in the brain, killing her on the spot.

It was simple luck that she hadn’t.

…Maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe everyone would be better off if Corona hadn’t sent The Message.

“That Dark Tower…” she growled under her breath. “Asinine.”

“The Tower isn’t capable of being stupid. If you had to assign it an intelligence, the processing power required to monitor the entire multiverse makes it a genius beyond our comprehension.”

“Go away, Sugarcoat.”

Sugarcoat didn’t go away. She stood next to Nae and looked at the screen, silent.

“I said go away.”

“I heard you.”

“Why aren’t you going away then?”

“Because if I go away you’re just going to make things worse for yourself. And I, a concerned friend, would rather you didn’t do that.”

Nae blinked. “Ha. Friend. You barely know me.”

“Corona knows you. So shut up and deal with it.”

“…Right, fine, I see where this is going. I say ‘but I betrayed you’ and you say ‘that doesn’t matter, we’re still friends’ and I say ‘that’s BS!’ and then you comfort me with your unusually blunt way of putting things.”

“Since you’ve said it like that we can skip the back and forth argument.”

“Huh?”

“You already admitted we could still be friends after a betrayal.”

“I did not!”

Sugarcoat raised an eyebrow.

“Look, betrayal of this magnitude i-”

“Flutterfree and Eve.”

“Outlier.”

“Corona’s the one who sent me to talk to you.”

Nae blinked. “...What is wrong with her?”

“She’s exactly the person for the job.”

“This isn’t a job. It’s the end of the world.”

“Worlds.”

“Stop being nitpicky.”

“No,” Sugarcoat deadpanned.

“This is a good way to get punched.”

“A punch is a good price to pay if it makes you get a handle on yourself.”

Nae pointed a finger and opened her mouth – then quickly shut it. “You’re impossible.”

Sugarcoat let the smallest hint of a smile come to her face. “And my work here is done.” She turned and walked away.

“…What!?”

“You know you’re forgiven, and now you’re more angry at me than you are guilty. Signs of success.”

“Don’t you think this is a little abrupt!?”

“Yes,” Sugarcoat agreed.

~~~

Pidge sat alone in one of the Hub’s food halls. She was poking a vaguely meat-like brick with a plastic fork, the glare on her glasses hiding her eyes from view.

“Heya!”

Pinkie was suddenly there, sitting on the other side of the table.

Pidge tensed up. This was going to go one of two ways. She wasn’t going to like either.

“Actually, how about we take the third option and talk about something completely random? Liiiiiike – oh, eggs.”

Pidge stared at her. “…What?”

“Eggs. You know, the things a lot of animals lay? Some of them are delicious. You can cook them in any number of ways and get a slightly different feel every time? C’mon Pidge, I thought you were smart. But hahahaa, you know!”

Pidge looked at her. “Pinkie, you okay?”

“Not at all!” Pinkie said in a sing-song voice. “But this isn’t about me, it’s about you.”

“There’s not really much to say,” Pidge muttered. “I’m a traitor. Opened up my eyes and saw why Corona and Twilence were fighting. I had the chance to do something, so I did.”

“Well, those are the facts. There’s more to it. Like the fact that you’re sitting over here all alone instead of eating with your friends.”

“No offense Pinkie, but I kinda want to be alone right now.”

“Don’t preface something with no offense if you don’t mean it.”

Pidge looked down, ashamed. “…Sorry.”

Pinkie nodded in acceptance. “I’m also going to apologize for not respecting your wishes in the slightest. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Figures.”

“Instead, I’m going to let our resident traitor in on a secret. Your friends don’t hate you.”

“Of course not, everyone’s so forgiving and attached to personal bonds they wouldn’t let it go unless they had to or it drove a spike into their personal beliefs. If Rainbow Dash were here, she’d be screaming bloody murder.”

Pinkie twitched.

“That’s why she’s gone, isn’t it?” Pidge asked.

“Let’s not talk about that.”

Pidge folded her arms. “Hypocrite.”

“Okay, fine,” Pinkie mutter, smile dropping. “Yes, that’s probably one of the reasons she’s gone. The main Element of Loyalty, purged from the system so nobody has to worry about it now that there’s a brutal dichotomy. Without her, Loyalty becomes fluid. There was also the fact that she wasn’t a main character, was kind of putting herself in danger, and was exactly the type to get herself stupidly killed!”

Pidge stared at her, expression blank.

“You don’t want to play hardball with me,” Pinkie breathed.

“…Seems unfair.”

“I’m not fair.”

Pidge shook her head, saying nothing.

Pinkie allowed herself to smile again. “So, back to you, c’mon, why don’t you want us back?”

“Because it’s stupid, that’s why. Everyone’s so attached to personal bonds here it’s become a weakness.”

“But didn’t you make the decision to turncoat because you had personal bonds that were broken?”

Pidge grimaced. “Pinkie…”

Pinkie raised an incredulous eyebrow.

Pidge nodded slowly. “Look, it’s not exactly a logical feeling, okay? But I know what I have to do, and I know it’s not with you.”

“I reject that assertion and substitute my own,” Pinkie said. “I say you’re one of us. And you can do nothing to change that. Nothing at all.”

“Pretty sure you’d kick me out if I started killing people.”

Pinkie looked deep into Pidge’s eyes. “Not necessarily.”

Pidge stared at Pinkie. “…You’re terrifying.”

“Yes I am.”

“Just how far are you willing to go for the sake of Laughter?”

Pinkie’s thoughts moved to that of many, many psychotic Pinkie Pies she had met on her journey. “I don’t think there’s much of a limit at all. I just have to keep myself under control.”

“…And are you?”

Pinkie’s only response to this was a demented laugh. “Take a wild guess.”

“You probably shouldn’t be trying to reassure me right now.”

“Pffft, I’m not going to stop. Because you need it and I’m Pinkie Pie. I’ll find a way to survive. I always do.”

Pidge’s face became sad. “Pinkie…”

Pinkie waved a hoof, dismissing Pidge’s thought before it fully formed. “Don’t worry about that. Just know that you’re fine, Pidge. I know I can’t stop you from beating yourself up – but I can let you know there are people out there who’ll care about you regardless.”

“Pinkie, I get what you’re trying to say. I get it, okay? But you really aren’t okay.”

Pinkie pursed her lips. “Well… Yeah. …If you really think you can handle it…” She pulled an envelope out of her mane and handed it to her. “An invitation.”

“To what?”

“Pinkie’s Party.”

Then she was gone.

~~~

“MOTION CARRIED: ATTENTION! THE SEATS HAVE DECIDED TO OFFICIALLY CONVENE AT NEUTRAL TERRITORY TO COME TO A VERDICT CONCERNING THE MESSAGE. WITNESSES WILL BE CALLED IF REQUIRED. SEAT REGULATIONS CONCERNING MULTIVERSAL TRANSMISSION ARE BEING SUSPENDED DUE TO THE NATURE OF THE MESSAGE. THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONVENTION ARE AVAILABLE TO THOSE WITH ADVANCED ENOUGH TECHNOLOGY OR MAGIC TO DECODE THE FEED. THE REQUEST TO INCLUDE LESSER CIVILIZATIONS IN THE CONVENTION HAVE BEEN DENIED PENDING FURTHER DISCUSSION.

In an effective instant, the Seats had convened at their neutral territory. It was the same place they had convened last time in the aftermath of the Green Sun’s return – gigantic seats, round room, an instance of the Dark Tower in the center. All ten - Xeelee, Them, the Great Will, Abstracts, Beyonders, Horrorterrors, and Celestialsapiens with the lesser Gallifreyans, TSAB, and Flowers – looked larger than life.

The Flowers decided to go first – represented by the Sunflower Official. It needs to be known that we have determined Corona’s beliefs are correct. The Tower is indeed offering a choice. Both the collapse and eternity paths are equally valid from a ka standpoint. Because of this, we regret to inform you that our nation will abstain from pursuing either option.

“The Coward’s way out,” the Beyonder said. “Make a decision and fight for it! We declare our support for an eternal multiverse and any who disagree will meet our might!”

“We are not here to make instant decisions,” the Living Tribunal pointed out. “As the Seats, we must debate the fate of the multiverse. Do not come here with a predisposition about what must happen. Listen to all sides.”

Nanoha nodded. “Seconded. The TSAB has not made an official statement yet. I do not believe any of you have either. Or am I mistaken?”

Our standpoint is known, the Sunflower Official said.

“Would it be difficult to convince them you changed your mind?”

Not as much as other civilizations.

“Then I see no problem.”

:< It is impossible to hide the primary thoughts and motions of our higher processes from the Xeelee Entirety. They know our stance. Defense of the multiverse.

“I thought you hated magic and cheating? Sounds like you’d be all for the destruction of the Tower.” the Beyonder jabbed.

:< There is no guarantee magic would be lost, and furthermore we are not so selfish to think our distaste for esoteric abilities gives us the right to change everything.

“Drat, and here I was with a bet that you were fixing to be Downstreamers II: the Return,” a Them said.

The Celestialsapien spoke up. “QUERY: DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THE MAGNITUDE OF THIS DISCUSSION?”

“Au contraire, I understand it fully, my sparkling friend. See, unlike the rest of you, I understand that humor can defuse a situation and get us to arrive at a decision without unleashing the piano wire death machine.”

:< Specific example.

“Shush, you’re the only ones with a specific technological device designed to do what that does.”

:< We don’t call it a death machine.

“Oh for the – my point-”

“That’s a laugh,” a Time Lord said.

The Them ignored her. “My point is that, for once in Them’s existence, we actually have reason to care about something. An actual chance to end the monotony in a truly interesting way. Or to defend our current existence. Not this many Them have been active in anything since the beginning of our race! So put on the surprised googly eyes, we actually have thoughts to bring to the table today. Try not to cover us in exploded brain matter or whatever your equivalent is.”

“IT IS GOOD TO SEE YOU FINALLY HAVE ACHIEVED A MODICUM OF MATURITY,” a greenish aspect of the Great Will stated. “PERHAPS YOU SHOULD SUGGEST A COURSE OF DISCUSSION, AT LAST REVEAL WHAT YOU, AS A RACE, TRULY VALUE.”

“Oh, psh, it’s obvious what we value. Not dying of boredom. Thought that was obvious …Right, fine, I get it. Look, here’s the thing. There are three outcomes to this discussion. We agree to slap some glue on the Dark Tower and keep the universes from ever collapsing. We can destroy everything and do what we can to survive the process, entering a new world where we aren’t just plot devices. Or, the third option.”

“There isn’t really a third option,” Nanoha said. “Nobody’s going to just leave it be.”

The Them laughed. “Ah, my naive little human. The third option isn’t just leaving it. The third option is that we can’t put aside our differences and everything devolves into a true multiversal war.”

There was silence among the Seats.

“Xeelee carrot-colon-carrot, would you mind telling us the danger of such a war?”

:< On the order of magnitude of the destruction of the Downstreamers. Tribunal, care to testify?

The Living Tribunal narrowed his eyes. “If precautions weren’t taken, it would be possible to destroy everything. Force the multiverse back to the dark ages.”

“We wouldn’t be that stupid,” the Beyonders said. “When we were at war with the Abstracts the external damage was minimal!”

“Yes, brag, why don’t you, you lost that war,” the Them muttered. “The One Above All rarely does anything. But He certainly would if war broke out over this.”

“I make no claims regarding my Master,” the Living Tribunal reminded them.

The Them grunted. “Fine, fine. Look, we all absolutely hate each other. And if we don’t learn to make like ponies and be friends despite our differences, things are going to go to places much, much worse than any Hell.”

~~~

Vivian rushed into Blumiere’s office and fell to his feet, startling both him and Timpani. “Thank you!”

Blumiere looked at her, blinking. “I didn’t do anything.”

“…But, they let me leave the Hub wh-”

“Vivian, they would have let you leave regardless as long as you told them what you were doing.” Blumiere adjusted his monocle. “I just asked you here for a talk.”

“Oh. …In that case, thanks for letting me realize I could come back here. Even though…” She looked at the ground. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

Timpani pursed her lips. “In a way.”

“Vivian, I want you to answer this question honestly,” Blumiere said. “Why did you join Corona?”

Vivian paused for a moment, thinking. “…Because I trust her.”

“Trust only goes so far,” Blumiere said.

Vivian shook her head. “I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for her.”

“You must have, on some level, realized that she might be right.”

Vivian adjusted her hat. “I mean… Yeah? I don’t think I’m really… thoughtful enough to answer something that deep myself.”

“But y-”

“Dear,” Timpani said. “Give her a moment, okay?”

Blumiere listened to his wife, sitting back in his chair. He said nothing.

“Blumiere?” Vivian asked. “What do you think?”

“Hold my opinion in more regard than Corona’s, hm?”

“I… have been working closely with you for a long time. And… I think you’d be the person to know. Considering...”

“My past. I know.” Blumiere put a hand to his chin. “It’s part of why I called you here.”

Vivian looked up at him. “What do you think about The Message?”

Blumiere sat back. “I don’t know.”

“Dear…” Timpani said.

Blumiere put a hand to the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I’m not lying, I don’t know what I think. I want to think she was just like me, but she’s not seeking complete destruction. What she’s doing is the cover story I gave my old friends… That we were creating a new world, a better world. None of them truly understood what that meant – except Nastasia.” Blumiere looked down. “And she knew that we were fighting for absolute destruction.”

Timpani put her arms around Blumiere and held him.

“When Timpani came back to me, I saw no more reason to fight against existence. The worlds had given her back to me. When we sacrificed ourselves to defeat Dimentio, we were sent to a place we could live our lives together. As long as we wanted.”

“But then we came back,” Timpani said.

“We came back. Back from our little cottage in the middle of the forest. Back to the full multiverse. And nothing had changed. We had gotten a ‘happy ending’, but so many others didn’t. Nastasia was left alone. Civilizations continued to decay. The Tribe of Darkness and all other universes I destroyed personally are still gone. I fixed what I could, I became part of a society that sought the betterment of all. I led this city to the best of my ability.” He shook his head. “And yet… It’s still failing. I have love, I have friends, I even have some extent of family in the form of you, Vivian.”

Vivian blushed. “I-I’m just an offshoot…”

“You’re hope,” Blumiere said. “Hope that the tribe isn’t lost.”

“…But…” Timpani encouraged.

“But it’s still missing something. Or perhaps there’s something here that shouldn’t be. A wholly mortal attempt to fill the voids in our hearts, replacing it with something artificial. Mechanical. Something of one’s wildest, fanciful dreams.” He clenched one of his fists. “It gives so many happy endings… But kills others like nothing. There are the select few who get to be the heroes, to experience the fullness of ‘meaning’. And then there are the citizens I watch over every day who are brushed to the side like dust.”

Vivian looked at him with a sad expression. “I think I understand.”

“Do you know what the worst part is?”

Vivian cocked her head.

“Corona didn’t realize it, but the plans she gave me in my mind? I am perhaps one of the best-suited individuals in the multiverse to use them. I can already see how to enhance the design, to build the Tower Ring even with our supposedly ‘lower than required’ technology base. I know the secret! Unlike most everyone, I could actually make a difference! I could do something!”

“And you want me to talk you out of it…?” Vivian cocked her head. “But I was with Corona.”

“We are not logical creatures,” Blumiere said, taking off his monocle to clean it. “We are… impulsive. …I just wanted you here so I had someone else to talk to about it, I believe.”

“I may have agreed with him too quickly,” Timpani admitted.

“I… am a little surprised you did,” Vivian said.

“I’ve been with my husband a long, long time. I understand in a way you cannot why he did what he did. I understand why he’s thinking of trying it again, now that a choice has been shoved upon us.”

Vivian smiled warmly. “That’s so romantic!”

Timpani giggled and Blumiere facepalmed. “You’re such an innocent woman, Vivian.”

Vivian gave a nervous thumbs up. “Yay…?”

Blumiere stood up dramatically. “…Let’s get the Prognostici.”

“…The what?”

“The books that hold the power.” Blumiere snapped his fingers, taking them to the basement. “The books of Light and Dark. We’ll have more than nothing to say in this fight.” He laid his hands on the chest, opening it up. Two books floated into the air – a light gray one with a star imprint on it, and a dark one with a set of round blue crystals on it.

“These are what you used last time?” Vivian asked.

“Just the Dark one,” Blumiere said. “I still do not know why the Light Prognosticus was allowed to find me in the Nexus, but find me it did. Together, they can be used to destroy worlds. Or change them all, as I now understand. They’ll make a collapse much easier to initiate.”

Vivian forced a smile. “O… Okay. I’m wi-”

At this moment, the Prognostici were surrounded in a thick, dark dimensional energy.

“I knew I needed to watch you.”

Timpani, Blumiere, and Vivian turned to see Allure walk out from behind a box, about a dozen agents from the League of Sweetie Belles filing out behind her – including Thrackerzod, Squeaky, Burgerbelle, Suzie, and Bot.

Blumiere narrowed his eyes. “Allure, how di-”

“Time loop,” Allure said. “In fact, your precious books were instrumental in helping me get out of it. You were the problem, willing to kill to keep them a secret. And now, suddenly, you’re willing to use them?”

Blumiere nodded. “There was a reason I was allowed to keep them. This is it.”

“Screw the Tower,” Allure muttered. “Nobody is ever going to use those books to initiate the collapse.”

“Or save the multiverse,” Timpani said.

“No, not that either,” Allure said. “Because I’m not going to let this tear us apart! I’m not going to let the Merodi have anything to do with this decision! Because it does something to your heads!” She tapped her artificial horn. “It makes you think that, somehow, killing quintillions upon quintillions of people is okay in any circumstance!”

“Allure, cal-”

“You’re all under arrest. Thrackerzod, seal those books away and don’t tell the Overheads we have them.”

Thrackerzod nodded.

“How are you going to explain why you arrested us without them?” Blumiere asked. “I am the mayor of this city. A well-loved one at that.”

Allure looked at Blumiere, her angry eyes softening for a moment. “You’ve been mayor on and off for a long, long time, and I’ve been here for most of that. There’s any number of things you’ve done I could blow out of proportion. Sure, you might end up walking, but by that point the Class 1s should have decided our fate and it won’t freaking matter.”

“You think they can decide?”

“I don’t like to think about what’ll happen if they don’t,” Allure said. “Just like I don’t like seeing my friends turn evil.”

Blumiere was visibly shocked by that.

Allure’s scowl deepened. “Take them away. I need time to think.”

~~~

“Allure just arrested Blumiere,” Corona said, looking up from the news feed on her phone.

She and Eve were sitting in a Hub waiting room, sitting patiently while the rest of the Overheads and Seconds arrived for the meeting to decide Merodi’s stance on The Message. It wouldn’t be that much longer before they began, but it was enough that they were a little bored.

Eve looked up from her phone. “…Did you say something?”

“Allure arrested Blumiere,” Corona repeated, scrolling through the phone. “Apparently for illegal dealings with the Melnorme that have gone back a long, long time. Dealings that have been beneficial for Celestia City almost overwhelmingly…”

“She’s got some other reason,” Eve said without hesitation. “She just doesn’t want people to know about it.”

“It’s not making the League popular with the people… And it’d probably be ticking the Melnorme off if they weren’t just as busy dealing with my message as we were.”

“The Seats are still going at it,” Eve said. “They really don’t want a war. A few of them seem to have flipped sides occasionally, but every time a vote is about to be called someone explodes and they get set back.” She shook her head. “It’s confusing to watch with all the temporal aids they’re using.”

“I’m surprised they’re broadcasting it.”

“Yeah…” Eve sighed. “Corona?”

“What is it?”

“When we go in there, we’re going to be enemies.”

“We’ve disagreed before, Eve. This isn’t the first time we’ll be yelling at each other from across a debate table.”

“It’s more than that, Corona. It’s more and you know it. I’m going to have to paint you in the worst light possible, and you me, if we want to come out of this debate ahead in any way. We’ll have to be angry.”

“I won’t have any problem with getting angry,” Corona pointed out. “You’re the one who’s going to struggle with that.”

Eve nodded slowly. “I know. …After this, you know what happens right?”

“I convince everyone to join me on my crusade, or I’m locked up for eternity.”

“Corona, they might execute you.”

Corona raised an eyebrow. “They wouldn’t.”

“Some people would try. You… You’ve committed a crime against the multiverse.”

“How is it a crime to tell people things?”

“It…” Eve bit her lip. “Okay, since it wasn’t actually classified as far as you knew, I don’t think it is. I think you did the right thing with your Wish. I think we all need to decide. But because you did it, I think you’re going to go down.”

“I’m perfectly fine going down, Eve,” Corona said. “I probably wouldn’t live even if I won, you know.” She leaned back in her chair, looking at the ceiling. “Chances of anyone we know surviving…”

“The Void is talking about ‘bunkers’.”

“You can make bunkers,” Corona said. “I can’t stop you. I’m not going to make one for myself. It wouldn’t be fair.”

There were tears in Eve’s eyes. “Why would you do that?”

“Because if I’m going to doom the multiverse, I have to be willing to go with it.”

“Corona, I know you. This is a bigger deal than you’re making it out to be!”

“I’m terrified, okay!?” Corona snapped. “I’m absolutely terrified. I’ve been terrified ever since I found the recipe for the collapse at the Dark Tower! Terrified that I had the power. Terrified that maybe I shouldn’t give up the power. Terrified of what’ll happen to me no matter what’s decided. I’m freaking out in here and I have been ever since this whole fiasco started!”

Eve wiped her eyes. “…There’s the Corona I know.”

This comment tore at her. “Eve…”

“I wish you would stop,” Eve said. “I wish you would drop your weapon and say the multiverse deserves to exist.”

“Eve, don’t…”

“I wish you would do that. Appreciate the lives you fought so hard for.”

“What is this? Are you trying to guilt-trip me?”

“YES I AM!” Eve shouted. “I see the real you in there, and I know why you’re doing this, and I’m trying to get you to stop!”

“I’m not going to!” Corona shouted. “I’ve made up my mind!”

“You can change it!”

“So can you!” Corona said, holding out her hand. “Eve, come on! Let’s actually make a real difference!”

“You said yourself we’re just a pale blue dot on a map.”

Both of their heightened emotions tapered off at that comment. Corona sat down and slouched. “Yeah… It is out of our hands.”

“…That’s probably best,” Eve said. “…If we could actually do something, we’d actually have to fight each other.”

“Sometimes it's good to be cosmically insignificant,” Corona said with a smile.

There was a moment of silence. Eve pulled Corona into a hug. “Whatever happens, I forgive you. And I’ll always be your friend.”

Corona accepted the embrace. “Thank you. I hope you understand that applies to you, too.”

Eve couldn’t see her mouth – but she knew what she said.

~~~

“Is everyone present?” Ava Jandice, Overhead of Labor, asked.

Thirteen Overheads and thirteen Seconds raised their hands, hooves, or other limbs.

“Very well. I will try to state the topic of discussion as objectively as possible, even though we all know that is essentially impossible.”

There were a couple nods and snorts from the Division leaders.

“With The Message given to the entire multiverse by Second Corona Shimmer of Research, we have been given a choice. We can either support the multiverse as it is now, ensuring that it continues the way it does for eternity, or we can collapse the multiverse into one point on the Sea of Infinite Possibility. There are reasons to seek both options.”

“Really!?” Overhead Jingle of Aid, a Luna, shouted. “You can say that, Ava?”

“Objectivity,” Ava reminded her through clenched teeth. “As the current speaker it is not my place to push one idea or the other. Let me finish.”

Eve nodded to Jingle, telling her to calm down.

Ava continued. “On one side, there is the ‘Preservation’ option. We agree that the Tower Ring ingrained in all our minds should be used to alter the way multiversal connections are made, making it impossible to initiate a full collapse of the multiverse. This would allow the Dark Tower to exert its control of ka over us for the rest of our lives and the lives of all our children. Time travel would keep killing every time it is used. The grimdark would remain. We also have no way of knowing the consequences of what ‘changing the connections’ will actually be for the multiverse as a whole.”

“It’d be better than destroying everything,” the Cultural Second, the Flat Aiskera, said.

Ava ignored her comment. “On the other side, there is the ‘Collapse’ option. We agree that the evil of the Dark Tower is worth risking everything and using the Tower Ring to force all universes into one. The act of doing this will kill the vast majority of the multiverse’s population, no matter how many ‘bunkers’ we manage to create before we do it – if such things will even be effective against such an immense cosmic event. But those who do survive will have a world without ka, a world without constant temporal rewriting, and a world where things will be much more balanced.”

Ava folded her hands and furrowed her eyebrows. “The difficulty here is that we have to choose one or the other. Sure, there is some variety within the two options for how we follow it through. For Preservation, we could decide we needed to preserve it now, we could wait a time, or we could try to alter the connections in some other specific way. For Collapse, we could bring it about completely randomly, or we could attempt to build bunkers for a select few.”

“You’re forgetting the obvious fact that we do not have the capability to make a Tower Ring,” a Gem – the Commerce Second – said.

The Research Overhead beeped. “Incorrect. We do not have the capability to make a Tower Ring quickly. It can be done over an extended period of time. But your point still stands – as a nation, we can do nothing more than support the cause of a society higher than us. They will be the constructors.”

“If we can’t do anything, why are we even arguing?” the Education Second blurted. “Who the hell cares? Let them sort it out.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” the Cultural Overhead, Enna, said. She was a relic from the stagnant universe, Elemental Four. “We need to define who we are in this fight. It’s important to us and our people, regardless of what actually happens.” She glanced from Eve to Corona. “We have two people who have been in the thick of this debate. I motion that we let the two of them make their case.”

Eve and Corona stood up tall, fixing each other with a glare.

“Agreed,” Ava said. “Objections?”

Daniel made a motion to object, but Renee shushed him.

“Very well.” Ava pulled out a coin and flipped it. “Corona, you’re first.”

Corona spread her wings and held out her hand before beginning to speak…

~~~

I was under close observation.

I wasn’t under arrest or confined in any way – they were still the Merodi, after all – I was just being constantly watched by Clandestine. She only had one job: make sure I didn’t write anything down.

It wouldn’t have been that hard to write something despite her watchful gaze, but I decided to treat what she was doing with respect.

I wasn’t to influence anyone’s decisions. It was best that way, to be frank.

I had been quite surprised Corona had pulled the ‘I have no right to decide’ card – I had been expecting the collapse to initiate then and there. It was what I had wanted.

It was still what I wanted.

You may think me evil – I did just sing a reprise of Tempest’s song, after all. Not exactly the most ‘heroic’ of melodies. But I’m no more evil than Corona or Allure are – I’m just a mare who made a decision.

How can I put this in a way you’ll understand? You don’t understand ka. It’s not a strong presence in your worlds. You can’t understand what it’s like to live under it unless you are a creator of some kind.

Those of you who create… You know what you put to the page. You should be horrified that every word you scrawl could exist somewhere. But for the rest of you…

…Try thinking about it this way. Imagine that, at any moment, any moment, whatever your mind thinks it wants most will come true. Sure, sometimes this will give you things like a better life, peace on earth, or just money. But then there are those moments where there’s murder in your hearts and lust in your eyes. Imagine what would happen if the wish came true at those moments. Now imagine if a wish snapshot was taken of every single person on your planet, and used to change the world.

There would be good things that appeared. But then there would be the desires of everyone. The horrible, disgusting, ugly desires that everyone has. Even me.

My ‘purpose’ given through the Tower was to understand ka. I see what it truly is – a curse. I don’t just say that because knowing so much is a burden – though that is a major aspect of my thought process – I say it’s a curse because it allows the darkest thoughts to come to reality. Prophets could be anyone. And since no one is perfect… no world will be perfect. And, more likely, it’ll be worse than the reality they live in. Sure, they may make life great for the hero, but what about all the others? They don’t matter.

There can be a great tragedy… and the story will continue.

There are some ways that the Dark Tower has really succeeded in bringing true meaning to the multiverse. It has given those like me, Eve, Corona, and the great civilizations the chances to be heroes. But it comes at the expense of making the citizens utterly meaningless. The Tower only provides meaning to a select few. The rest are left to fend for themselves like flounders.

…There’s also more. Corona’s right about the time travel horrors, and there’s the wish-fulfillments, the Sues, the ‘glitches’, the perverse fantasies… This story has kept a lot of the truly disgusting stuff out of the way for the sake of its plot.

I’m glad you haven’t seen everything. Maybe there are some of you who have truly seen the depths of the depravity humanity can write. I feel sorry for you – simply reading those things is punishment enough.

The Merodi were always lucky in that regard. They encountered so few of those. They could deal with grimdark universes better than those… But I was not spared that. I see that. I see it all the time.

It’s maddening. It makes me furious. I can’t be mad at the Prophets, they don’t know what they’re doing – they’re just trying to find their way in life or express themselves. I don’t have to agree with their methods to know they’re not evil.

But I have a chance to stop all of it. I’ve seen everything. And it didn’t take me long to realize what the right decision was.

“…What are you doing?” Clandestine asked me.

“Talking to the audience,” I said with a curious smile. “Explaining myself. Not sure if it was classified as a ‘hero’s aside’ or ‘villain speech’.”

Clandestine narrowed her eyes.

“It doesn’t change anything. Not about me, you, or this world. They’re just observers, Clandestine. They can’t change anything.” I paused, thinking of my past. “No matter how much they may want to.”

“…Huh. Well I-”

Monika appeared in front of us. “There you are.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Took you a while to follow that plot thread.”

“Shut up. Explain, Twilence.”

“I just did. Read up a bit.”

Monika took a moment to absorb the current scene. “And I thought I was crazy. I’ve seen those things too and I don’t want to destroy everything! I’d be the perfect person to do it, too.”

“You’re a result of those crazy things. You are a deconstruction of many different tropes and ideas, a character written to know about your medium. You came predisposed to accept things the way they were.”

Monika glared at me. Then she sighed. “Twilence, you know that’s not true.”

“Do I?” I said, cocking my head. “I’m pretty sure that’s how it is. You wouldn’t have been able to have your unique life without the multiverse. You owe the Tower for making you the way you are.”

“So do you.”

“…In a different way. I was once just a pony. Maybe ponies wouldn’t exist without the Tower, but maybe they would. But there would never be a video game universe where one of the characters could see through the fourth wall for real.”

Monika nodded slowly. “That’s a good point. But isn’t that beautiful?”

“You tell me. How many boyfriends did you kill?”

“I stopped doing that.”

“You had to be taken off your path.”

“Ka chooses every path.”

“Not this one. There’s a choice here. Maybe the only real choice any of us have ever had.”

“Questioning free will?”

“That’s kind of my job description.”

Monika folded her arms. “You contemplate. My job is to do.”

“Yes. Specifically, it looks as if you’re going to be an antagonizing presence to me.”

“You’re under surveillance,” Monika said, smirking. “I’m free to do what I want.”

“I could shake her easily,” I said.

Clandestine blinked. “…I’m going to make a call.”

“I’m not leaving,” I told her. “I’m just telling Monika I could be doing things right now if I wanted. I’m not because it doesn’t matter. It’s the Seats who hold the cards right now, and me writing for them? That’d be a death sentence.”

Monika blinked.

I smirked slightly. “Processing that you can’t really do much either?”

“I’ll be watching, waiting. There’ll be a time.” Monika declared. She glitched out of existence.

I nodded slowly, turning to Clandestine. “And now we can get back to what we were doing.”

“We weren’t doing anything.”

“Oh, sorry, hadn’t noticed,” I chuckled. “Maybe we should get lunch.”

I am slightly ashamed to admit I found her appalled expression more than a little amusing. She was right in thinking now wasn’t really the time for lighthearted jokes… but what else could I do?

~~~

Pidge walked into the room Pinkie had rented. The instant she pushed the doors open to behold the small dining room, Jotaro picked her up and put her on his back.

“JOTARO! Put me down!”

Jotaro did no such thing. He kept her up there, walking to the table. He refused to sit. Around the table were Flutterfree, Nova, and Vriska. Pinkie herself was lying on the table, face angled toward the ceiling.

“Anyone else coming?” Vriska asked.

Flutterfree shook her head. “Renee’s busy, and all the other people who have been part of the Primary Team were… elsewhere.” She smiled at Pidge. “Hello. Glad you could make it.”

“Tell Jotaro to put me down.”

“It’ll make you feel like part of the group instead of some Sixth Ranger,” Nova said.

“She is the Sixth Ranger,” Vriska said.

Jotaro looked down at Pinkie. “Why are we here?”

“Because I’m actually getting existential,” Pinkie said. “That never happens! I’m falling apart inside my little pink-a-brain here and can’t put it back together!”

“That’s why we’re here,” Flutterfree said, laying a hoof on Pinkie. “We’ll help you work through it.”

“Yep. I know that. I’m smart enough to have that figured out.” Pinkie shot bolt upright onto her four hooves. “I also know we’re being watched! And I knew we were going to be watched the moment I planned this thing! Because this conversation is going to be important! Why? I dunno. Nobody knows at this point. Not me, not Twilence, not even the Seats. It’s all just… unknown.”

“That doesn’t sound like it’d be a problem for you,” Nova pointed out.

“Yeah, I am dancing around the issue, thanks for pointing that out!” Pinkie giggled. “So, hey, we could play twenty questions a-”

“Get to the point, Pinkie,” Jotaro interjected.

Pinkie stared at him. “Well allllll-right then! You all know how I dealt with being Aware, right?”

Flutterfree nodded. “You didn’t let it bother you. It was a fact of life, might as well make the best of it.”

“And that worked real great until right now.” Pinkie flopped onto her back again. “Cause guess what? Apparently there might be a way to do something about it. So I’m thinking about something I never really needed to think about. Is it bad?”

“…I don’t think it could be bad enough to warrant as much destruction as Corona wants,” Flutterfree said.

“Ashushashoosh-” Pinkie said, putting a hoof to Flutterfree. “We don’t need to talk about the collapse. We can’t decide if it’s good or bad at all. If there was a magic switch to shut ka off without killing anyone, would you shut it off?”

“It’d kill some people,” Pidge pointed out.

“You know what I’m saying,” Pinkie muttered. “If it could be done without the collapse, would you do it?”

There was silence for a few seconds.

“…I would,” Flutterfree admitted, looking down at her Rage robes with a conflicted expression. “I think all of us would.”

Jotaro shook his head. “No. Existence needs heroes and those who can fight.”

Flutterfree looked at him with mild surprise. “You’re sure?”

Jotaro nodded. “There’s suffering without ka. Who cares if it’s destined or not? But if there is no ka, there are no heroes to destroy the evil.”

“Evil wouldn’t be as extreme,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“You want to help Corona then?”

Flutterfree looked at Jotaro with a disappointed expression – one that made him melt in an instant. “No, I do not. I’m just following Pinkie’s thought experiment. I’m not going to endorse that much death.”

“Just afraid of having blood on your hands,” Vriska said, leaning back.

“So you’d join her?” Jotaro asked.

“I haven’t decided a fuckin’ thing,” Vriska commented, shrugging. “I’m tempted to do it just because the Doctor’s on the other side, but that’s just my old self talking. I really don’t know.”

“Same,” Nova admitted. “The more I think about it, and the whole time travel thing… The less I’m sure.”

“See? There it is,” Pinkie said. “We’re starting to see it. The fact the question is impossible. That there can’t be a right answer. Usually that means there’s a gray area or a third option, but I don’t see one. Does anybody?”

“…Don’t fight at all and let God sort it out,” Flutterfree said.

“That’s nice, doesn’t help the rest of us,” Pidge muttered.

Nova turned to Flutterfree. “You’re in a position of power, Flutterfree. You’re exempt from the whole ‘live a quiet life’ doctrine. Make the most of your position.”

Flutterfree looked down. “I know. But I don’t know what to decide.”

“What did Rev have to say?”

“Last I knew she was in deep meditative prayer and looked about ready to snap. She’s struggling with The Message just like the rest of us.”

“It’s just a toilet bowl of a mess, that’s what it is,” Pinkie said, standing on her hind hooves. “Behold, the Question! The Question asked by one ‘pure of heart’. Is the Tower good or bad? Clearly it’s both, but which one is it more? Which way does the pendulum turn!?”

There was silence again.

“It’s a lot harder to talk about it when you feel the outcome actually matters, huh?”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, pulling his hat down.

“It’s all fun and games until all of existence is at stake,” Nova muttered.

“…Wasn’t it always?” Flutterfree asked. “We always talked about the nature of fate and existence like it mattered. Like the truth of the multiverse depended on the ‘good’ or ‘evil’ of it. The Question was always this important. We just didn’t take it to the end because we were worried about the here and now.”

“The big picture is a bitch,” Vriska added.

“Yes. It is.”

Once again an awkward silence fell over the room.

“…So, what now?” Pidge asked after a minute. “We threw out a bunch of thoughts and nothing really changed. I’m still sure, Pinkie’s still existential, and all-in-all we’re all pretty conflicted.”

“We’re talking about it,” Pinkie said. “We’re talking, disagreeing, and not trying to kill each other on a staircase. That’s what matters.” She turned her face toward Pidge. “That’s why I went out of my way to make sure you were here. Not so you could make a point, but so you could represent an extreme with your presence. So we could all be here and understand. Or, well, get more confused, but you know what I mean.”

Pinkie looked at her friends one by one and smiled. “I still have no idea what any of this means, if it can really mean anything. But I do know I feel a lot better because we can talk like this.”

Flutterfree smiled warmly. “We all do.”

“Friends…” Nova said wistfully.

~~~

“Every last one of us has suffered,” Corona started. “We wouldn’t have the power we do if we hadn’t. I fought in the frontline of a war. A war that killed so many of our people, a war that came with a heavy cost on all our hearts and minds. And yet, we were willing to pay that cost in order to keep more deaths from happening. Skarn was an enemy we saw, decided was evil, and took out.

“This is no different. I want you all to look at the Tower – and realize what it is. It’s a computer that controls every aspect of our lives. On the large scale, it brings multiversal societies together only to inevitably bring about their collapse through some contrived means. It allows impossible things to exist. The delightfully fantastical alongside the powers that kill everything – time travel included.

“But if that’s too abstract, think about things on a more personal level. Because of the Tower, I can say I am more important than you and be perfectly right. I have more meaning, more power, more impact; I’m considered a hero. As much as I hate it, you are all below me – with the possible exception of Eve. We could measure our respective ka levels right now to see who has more importance if we wanted – a defining trait of who’s better.

“I know all of you know that’s wrong. Your conscience squirms at the idea of me being better than you. Of anyone being better than you. We’re all equal, right? All made with the same soul? Well, maybe we were intended to be that way, but the Tower sure doesn’t think so. There are special people, and then there are redshirts. But then there are also the background citizens. Have you noticed how, as we’ve climbed the ranks, we think less and less about the average citizen?

“Some of you haven’t been here long enough to see that. But Eve, Jingle, O’Neill – remember the old days? When we had to worry about public opinion all the time? Where the people of one world really mattered to us? Where one angry mob could easily upset us? We were smaller then – we were closer to their level of importance. But as we’ve grown, grown, and grown into this ‘protagonist’ role, we’ve forgotten them. I can’t bring myself to care as much about them anymore! They’re just the background of what really matters – multiversal policy, grand scoping science, and now the fate of existence. I tried to give them a choice with my Message, I tried to give them a say, but look at us and all the high societies! We’re making the decisions for them! Because we are more important. And the fact that we are should be sickening.

“The collapse will end that. We won’t be more important – we’ll become equal again. We’ll be able to connect. And do you know the best part? We won’t have to worry about the needless hairpin dramas! Our lives won’t have to be constant peaks and valleys of excitement and endless adventure! Being the heroes isn’t all it’s cracked up to be! We’ve lost friends, family, and in many cases suffered permanent damage! The flip side of the coin is that while the citizens become our equals, we no longer have to suffer what is essentially a fake life.

“We don’t really live our lives. Our lives are lived for us. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say we don’t live, we die. Over and over again. I could give you the numbers but I’m sure you already know the scale of death that exists because of the Tower. Because we ‘important’ people need motivation to do things.

“I say there’s plenty of motivation for us to go to the Tower, surround it in a Ring, and take it down. Permanently. I want all of you to think about what ka actually does. And I want you to help me end it.”

She sat down, using a spell to keep herself from breaking down – if she had gone on much longer, she might have flown off the handle. Getting riled up could only help so much.

Eve didn’t waste time starting her speech. “I’m not going to be as eloquent or as passionate as Corona here – because I don’t need to sell something that goes against our very nature as Merodi Universalis. She’s asking us to kill over ninety-nine percent of the multiverse, including most of ourselves, for the sake of future freedom and equality. But those aren’t the ideals of Harmony, Friendship, Progress, or most of all Assistance.

“Unleashing the collapse would bring about chaos. It would tear friendships apart as so many die. It would end progress, setting every multiversal civilization back untold eons. And it definitely doesn’t assist anyone. It destroys everyone. It may have the appearance of pure motives but all it does is fly in the face of what we stand for.

“Everyone, we are Merodi Universalis. We are the music of the multiverse. What are we if there is no multiverse? What will this century of work amount to if we do this? Is our Song a tragedy, doomed to die with all the others? I don’t think so. There’s been too much we worked for, too many lives lost already, too much effort. We are a Class 2 society – and our purpose is not to destroy the multiverse. Our purpose is to protect it and change it. We can use this Tower Ring to do that – to finally change something. Who said that change had to be the collapse? We could protect the multiverse. Maybe we could change it in other ways as well, if we were inclined to think about it.

“We’ve spent our entire time as a nation believing we were nothing more than a pale blue dot. But I think many of us know better – we are part of a great song, and our story isn’t even close to done. We’ll keep progressing until we’re up where we need to be to really change things. We don’t have to destroy the multiverse in a vain attempt at finding meaning that’s already here.”

She sat down, and there was silence in the meeting hall.

“Eloquent speeches,” Ava admitted. “And a vote will be taken concerning them after deliberation. But you both speak as if we have a real say in the matter. Eve, we are still but a dot on the multiversal scale. We can’t do anything.”

“…You all keep saying that,” Roxy Lalonde, Intelligence Second, Rogue of Void said. “But have you all forgotten what we have!?”

Everyone stared at her.

“John!”

That was when the shouting started.

~~~

“I like to think of it as the end of monotony,” the Them observed.

“AGREED,” a Horrorterror stated. “BUT THAT IS NOT THE PRIMARY ALLURE OF THE COLLAPSE. IT-”

“Will allow the goal of your stupid experiment to be realized,” a Beyonder interrupted. “I bet it’s so tantalizing for you, a universe that creates itself and brings about a new world. Bet that’s exactly what you want.”

“THAT IS NOT THE PRIMARY ALLURE EITHER. THE ALLURE IS THAT, IN SUCH AN EXISTENCE, THE MULTIVERSAL THREATS COULD NO LONGER EXIST. THE NEW UNIVERSE WOULD CONVERT EVERYTHING, CREATING A WORLD WHERE REALITY ANCHORS AND ALIEN PHYSICS ARE NO LONGER VIABLE. THERE WILL BE NO MORE UNIVERSAL DESTRUCTION BOMBS.”

“How can you know this?” the Living Tribunal questioned.

Our simulations have determined that is the end of that path, the Sunflower Official said.

:< Ours agree.

“Why would you tell them that!?” the Beyonder protested. “That gives them more reason to collapse everything!”

:< We need to have all our cards on the table and for once in our existences try not to cut each others’ throats.

Nanoha nodded. “I thank the Xeelee for being open enough to share information that was perhaps not in their best interests, but rather was in the spirit of honesty.”

“Are you suddenly for the destruction of everything?” a Gallifreyan asked.

“No,” Nanoha asserted. “But this decision is so monumental it needs all the information available.”

“LET IT BE CLEAR,” the Great Will’s emissary boomed. “THERE IS NO WAY A WORLD IN WHICH THE GREAT WILL OF THE MULTIVERSE CANNOT EXIST IS GOOD.”

The Living Tribunal shifted in his seat. “I beg to differ. We are all results of the Dark Tower’s influence. Our existence may not be what’s best.”

“Suicidal are we?” the Beyonder asked.

A Celestialsapien spoke up. “POSTULATE: IT IS POSSIBLE TO ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF SOME OF OUR RACES. IT NEED NOT BE A SUICIDE.”

“It’s a sacrifice,” Nanoha said, looking at the Celestialsapien.

“WE HAVE NOT MADE ANY DECISION ON OUR STANDPOINT. WE WERE JUST OFFERING INFORMATION.”

“And you won’t for the next eternity,” the Time Lord muttered.

The Celestialsapien had nothing to say to this.

“IT SEEMS AS IF WE NEED TO GET WHAT POSITIONS EXIST ON THE TABLE FOR ALL TO SEE,” the Horrorterror stated. “THE HORRORTERRORS BELIEVE IN THE COLLAPSE AS A WAY TO PROTECT THE MULTIVERSE FROM ITSELF. TO GIVE A NEW FUTURE.”

The Time Lord slammed his fist into the table. “Time cannot be allowed to return to a single path! The limitations on our societies would be too much! The multiverse must stand!”

“Arrogant…” the Beyonder muttered. “We care not for time – it would be preferable it remained consistent – but we care for our empire. An empire that would not exist in this new world!”

:< Most progress would be lost in collapse. That is not acceptable.

“The collapse will provide something new to existence!” the Them declared. “The end of monotony, yes, but also the end of pointless games. A real game could begin! A new one!”

The Sunflower Official went next. We abstain from action. Let ka decide on its own.

“ANNOUNCEMENT: NOT ENOUGH DEBATE TO DECIDE AT THIS JUNCTURE. OFFICIAL STATEMENT PENDING.”

“I’m afraid I will have to join the Celestialsapiens, the discussion has not yet reached a head. The Abstracts have not decided.”

“YOU HAVE YOUR ONE, WHY DO YOU NOT ASK HIS COUNSEL?”

“He has not made it known to us.”

“ONE ABOVE ALL, THIS IS A REQUEST DIRECTLY FROM THE GREAT WILL. GRANT US YOUR PRESENCE AND LET YOUR DESIRES BE KNOWN! THE GREAT WILL WISHES TO PREVENT THE COLLAPSE AND ALLOW TRUE BELIEF TO SPREAD. WHAT SAY YOU!?”

“…He will no-”

“Never say I won’t do something,” the One Above All said, walking into the room. He looked like a man to normal eyes – though anyone with higher senses could see His holy glow. “I rarely let myself fall into a pattern, Tribunal.”

“Forgive me, I made an assumption.”

“It is forgiven,” the One Above All said. He looked directly at the Great Will’s emissary. “I believe the answer depends entirely on if the Seats can agree or not.”

“We’re trying to agree on an answer!” the Time Lord said – taking up the role of the Beyonder who was quaking in his boots at the One Above All’s presence.

The One Above All looked right at the Time Lord with sad eyes. “My omniscience may be shrouded by the Tower, but I know you’re aware of the undercurrent of that statement. The high disbelief that it can even happen.”

The Gallifreyan was silent.

“The Abstracts, under my authority, agree to do whatever the rest of the Seats agree, in hope that we can actually reach an answer. We will do either. But rest assured, if you can’t agree – we will take a specific side.”

“Which one?” the Them asked.

“That would interfere with the choice,” the One Above All said. “I am willing to compromise to either side, so the transition to either may be peaceful. But if there is war, there will be war.”

Everyone got the implication. If they couldn’t agree… well, they didn’t want to find out what the One Above All was truly capable of.

Then He was gone, having said His piece.

“…I’m disappointed,” Nanoha said, breaking the silence.

“ABOUT WHAT?” the Horrorterror asked.

“None of you are asking what the rest of the multiverse thinks. The lowly farmers, the family people, the lesser entities. You’re ignoring them for the sake of time, empire, new ideas, safety, fate, philosophy, progress, and self-preservation. The Message was given to us with the intent of letting the entire multiverse make the decision! Look at us, making it for them, not even factoring them into our decisions!” She slammed her scepter on the ground. “The Time Space Administration Bureau listens to those people as much as we can. And because of that, we agree to preserve the multiverse, because that is what most of them want.”

:< No offense to your ideals, Nanoha, but most of them have sub-standard intelligence and information.

Nanoha raised an eyebrow. “So?”

:< Corona could only give them so much with The Message. They know what the struggle is but they do not know the nuances of the multiverse, what the horrors actually are, and many of them cannot comprehend even the most basic idea of what’s going on. There’s a reason people need leaders – they can’t make their own decisions. Tell me, is the TSAB a true democracy? Or even a republic?

“No, it’s a republic-military-state hybrid.”

:< And why is that? Why don’t you use your magic to give all your citizens the information they need to make a decision, and let them all help decide?

Nanoha narrowed her eyes. “That’s different. Nobody wants to be involved in every decision.”

“It’s the same thing,” the Them said. “Nobody wants to be given this burden. So they’re going to try to ignore it or take the easy way out – and the easy way out is ‘well, looks like I’ll survive this one!’ so they choose it. Of course the majority of the multiverse will choose preservation, the self-preservation instinct is one of the strongest among all races! It’s an unfair balance!”

“This is why we must make the decisions for them,” the Living Tribunal agreed. “They do not have the right. Corona was close when she gave out The Message – she knew she didn’t have the right. But she thought the right was everyone’s. That was wrong. The right goes to those who know. Those who can understand. Us.”

“And are we really sure it’s us!?” Nanoha said. “The rest of the multiverse, all the lesser or unexplored universes – they are worth something! And nobody’s thinking about them!”

“You are wrong to say nobody is. At least the Abstracts are – and by nature the Great Will has to. We just think through it differently than you do.”

“NANOHA, YOU ARE ESSENTIALLY ONE OF THEM. YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN AN UPLIFTED HUMAN. YOU REPRESENT THE LESSER, BUT ALSO THE MOST PREVALENT. YOU ARE THE VOICE OF THE LOWER ENTITIES. THAT IS YOUR PURPOSE HERE – AND AN IMPORTANT PURPOSE IT IS.”

“But we are not those voices. We are the voices of deities.”

“All of us have a special voice here, a view,” the Them said. “We’re the childish immature ones who could care less about serious thoughtful topics and are more about just making life worth living. Beyonders? Military. Horrorterrors? The eldritch life. Celestialsapiens? True thinkers. Xeelee? The voice of progress and complexity. Heh, isn’t it something? Imagine if this had come up during the time of the Downstreamers, wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much of a ‘balance’ up here.”

“But we need to break that balance,” Nanoha said, looking at the Living Tribunal. “Or we’re never going to get anywhere.”

119 - Conference, Part 2

“We can’t use John!”

“Why the hell not!? Why do his powers exist if we don’t get to use them in times like this?”

“What would he even do? He’s just a man. We all overplay how useful he is.”

“He could destroy everything by accident! If you thought the unintended consequences of time travel were bad, I’ve got a news flash for you!”

“He is no longer a foolish child, he is a grown man who has seen much in his time with us. He understands what needs to be done.”

“He could disagree with the decision! What then? We tell him to do something and he betrays us?”

“John is not a traitor!”

“…Nor does he think all that much about things. He’ll go with whatever his friends think.”

“Will he, though? Won’t his friends be just as divided as we are?”

“Why are we even discussing this? Using retcon only has bad consequences! The very few times we’ve approved it, it’s either been useless, or had some kind of cost associated with it!”

“White Nettle.”

“That was useless! He didn’t do anything and there was a problem with a paradox that had to be resolved!”

“How can we not use him?”

“Because he’s a person?”

“That’s not a consideration here!”

“Get out!”

“These things are bigger than just one person!”

“I think you’ve forgotten one of the finer points of The Message…”

“John can undo it after it happens.”

This brought the room into silence for a moment as all of them turned to stare at Ava – the woman who rarely said anything with even a hint of opinion.

Ava’s features remained level. “John has the ability to wind back metatime, and is the only individual who can do so. If we decide we don’t like the result after we preserve or collapse the multiverse, we can go back. In essence, he gives us the opportunity to have a reset button.”

“…If we were to initiate the collapse, we could go back,” Corona said, eyes widening.

“Could we?” the Research Overhead asked. “Our best theories suggest that John requires the Tower to use his retcon powers. In this new world without a Tower, retcon will likely not be feasible.”

“Since we don’t understand how retcon works, it might well be rendered impossible by editing the connection between universes,” Corona pointed out.

“Unlikely,” the R.O. admitted.

“Do we actually have any data on retcon? No, because we don’t want to poke it with a light-year-long pole. We could collapse the multiverse and decide it wasn’t worth it. We could preserve the multiverse and decide the result was horrible. I say we run the collapse and see – it’s the result we know the least about.”

“Time travel kills all those who are overwritten,” Eve said, glaring at Corona. “The death toll would be the same either way.”

“Do you want to play numbers?” Corona blurted. “R.O. How much local time would have to pass here for the number of deaths caused by time travel to equal the number of deaths caused by the collapse?”

The Research Overhead performed some calculations. “There is a wide range due to unknown. Anywhere from fifty to fifteen thousand years.”

“That isn’t very long,” Corona pointed out. “Even if we flipped the multiverse from collapse, to preservation, to collapse again, that would be a max of thirty thousand years of multiversal death due to time travel.”

“How much of that comes from the Gallifreyans?” O’Neill asked.

“Ninety percent, estimated,” the R.O. answered.

“Not the Xeelee?”

“They have download-upload processes that prevent rampant death from rewrite.”

O’Neill looked at Corona. “This looks more like reason to declare war on the Gallifreyans than anything else.”

“Even if we could remove the Gallifreyans from the question, that only reduces it by a factor of ten,” Giorno said. “Three-hundred thousand years is still nothing in the ocean of the multiverse. Thrackerzod might be older than that in her-time.”

“Is it possible to edit the Dark Tower to make time travel impossible?” Renee asked.

“…Possibly,” Corona admitted. “I haven’t discovered how yet. R.O., you can probably figure that out quickly.”

The R.O. shook his head. “I’m expecting a few days to run those calculations. Ka revealed the way to collapse and preserve to you. Anything more will require effort on our part, if we are allowed to find it at all.”

“Time travel is such an integral part of so many stories and dreams,” Aiskera of Cultural said. “If we said we wanted to keep the Dark Tower but remove the part we didn’t like… I think that’d go against the choice we’re being offered.”

“Not all time travel is rampantly deadly. There are loops,” the Commerce Overhead pointed out. “And we could add time travel to our list of things we are against in the multiverse. We could give aid to bring it to an end.”

“See, that’s something we’re too small to do,” O’Neill said. “Just a little speck trying to alter time travel. I don’t think we could go to war against Gallifrey even if we convinced the TSAB to help us. They’ve got too many tricks. And the Class 1s aren’t going to do anything against them. The only ones who could care would be the Xeelee, and we all know they love the Gallifreyans for being a technology-based civilization. So much that they’ll overlook the abuse of time travel.”

“Nobody really thinks of it as an abuse, most of the time,” Corona pointed out. “You rewrite time and you don’t think about the lives you’re destroying. Even if the world you make is better, it still had to replace something.”

Eve’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks.

Daniel lost it. “And it’s the same thing with the collapse!”

“Of course it is! It’s a replacement to end the replacements!”

“You’re just here to destroy us!”

Corona twitched. “And you have a brain-damaged vendetta against me!”

“That’s your ‘fault’!”

“That you won’t let me fix!”

“BECAUSE IT LET ME SEE THIS COMING! You’ve done exactly what I said you would! Do you understand?! Do you!?”

“No! I don’t!”

“You’re here to destroy us!”

“I am here to sa-”

“ORDER!” Ava shouted, slamming her hands on the desk. “That’s it, enough of this! We’re taking a recess. It’s late and we’re not going to decide anything anytime soon. Reconvene tomorrow. Afternoon.” She stood up and walked out of the room.

“...About time,” Yellow Diamond muttered.

~~~

“All right, let me hear it,” Daniel said when they got home.

“Trust me, you don’t want to hear it,” Renee said with bated breath.

“If you don’t let it out you’re just going to stew over it a-”

“And if I let it out I’m going to hurt us!” Renee shouted. “So, can we not? I… I don’t need that devastation on top of what’s going on right now.”

“You agree with her!?”

“Stop reading into things with your insanity!”

Daniel let out a disgruntled ‘tch’.

“Love, I’m sorry, that wa-”

“It’s exactly what you think and I’ve known that since this started.” He folded his arms behind his back and looked out a window at the streets of the Hub – filled with people trying to go about their daily lives, but for the most part failing because of the great weight on their minds. “You even had a nagging doubt in the back of my mind that maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was insane. But I’m sure I wasn’t now. I was seeing this.”

“Not even Twilence could see this, Daniel. Not ahead of time.”

“I’m certain Renee.” He turned to look at her. “I am absolutely certain this is what I’ve feared all these years. She’s going to bring Doom to us all, and we have to stop her by any means necessary.”

“Danie-”

“Renee,” he said forcefully, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Believe me. Just believe me. I’m absolutely certain.” He gently fell to a knee so he could look at her from a level position. “Renee, I’ve never asked you to just trust what I think. I’m asking now. Trust me. She has it out for us. It’s true.”

Renee looked into Daniel’s pleading eyes. Then she broke down and started bawling.

An ice-cold spike drove into Daniel’s heart.

She couldn’t do it.

Daniel stood up and turned his back.

“Daniel!” Renee called after him. “Daniel, love!”

“You call me that. But you apparently trust your friends more than me. Even those who’ve betrayed you.”

“Daniel, it’s not like that and you know it!”

“I also know Corona’s our Doom! Apparently that means nothing! So what can I trust about my knowledge?” He left the house.

Renee growled, lighting her horn and teleporting him back into the room. “You don’t get to do that.”

“I am not a child.”

“You’re the closest thing in this house!”

“Is that a jab?”

“I don’t know! I don’t care! I’m not letting you walk out like that!”

“I’m not going to spend every day with one of her sympathizers!”

“She. Is not. Evil.”

Daniel glared at her. “You should get rid of her now.”

“How can you say that!?”

“Because I know.”

“No you don’t! You don’t, Daniel!” Renee wailed. “You don’t know anything about her!”

“Why can’t you just take my word for it?”

“BECAUSE YOU HAVE LITERAL BRAIN DAMAGE! Do you need me to bring up your charts again!?”

“You know as well as I do that ka works through that!”

Renee twitched. “We can’t just blame everything on ka! There are still real things, Daniel!”

“If ka isn’t real why aren’t you with her? Why are you with me at all? Cause this sure isn’t real in that case.”

Renee froze. “No… Nononono that can’t be true… No…” She swallowed hard.

Daniel felt the weight of his own words press on his chest. He slumped into a chair, looking at nothing.

“…What have we done to ourselves?” he asked, eventually.

Renee was crying too hard to answer.

~~~

Corona had thought the days of ponies trying to kill her on Lai had long since passed.

She had apparently thought wrong.

A unicorn-deer shot her with a powerful magic laser – easily deflected with a flick of her wrist. A couple earths and a mawlie tried to take her down, but she surrounded herself in a three-tier magic shield, each shield rotating independently to maximize her defense. None of her attackers had the power to do anything to it.

That did not stop them from trying. There was murder in their eyes. Deep, uncontrolled rage that was focused completely on her.

She knew why they were attacking. She was their enemy. But she hadn’t expected the people she had lived among so long to be driven to the point of violence so quickly.

Corona shook her head and walked toward the palace, face set as the attacking squad slowly turned into a mob whaling on her shields to no effect. She started to see faces she recognized on the ponies.

They slowly broke down the defenses she had placed on her expression. Her face fell and tears began to form as she saw one of her old neighbors trying to ram his horn through her magic.

“…Done with this,” she sniffed. She teleported right to the interior side of the castle’s front doors and put her hands on her face. She slid down the doors until she was sitting on the floor, taking a moment to collect her thoughts.

“Uh…”

Corona expected to have to shout at one of Toph’s guards to give her a moment, but when she opened her eyes she didn’t find anyone in armor wanting to tell her the ‘proper’ way to be – but the concerned face of a white mare.

“P…Prism?”

Prism nodded. “You look like you went through a Diamond Dog.”

Corona snorted. “That’s a mild way of putting it.” She slammed the back of her head into the thick doors, staring at the ceiling. “How did they get so angry so fast?”

“It’s Lai. What did you expect?”

“Some friends, I guess.”

Prism shrugged her wings. “Sorry, not really any around here.”

Corona shook her head. “I’m here to meet some. They’re waiting in the throne room.”

“Yeah, I know that, I came here with Corea,” Prism pointed out. “…Look, I’m not your biggest fan, and I definitely don’t agree with that crazy plan of yours, but I hear you’re putting Eve in her place. It’s… I should probably feel ashamed for holding onto this grudge for so long, but it feels good to finally see someone stand up to her and have an effect.”

Corona looked at her concernedly.

Prism sighed. “I just… I feel like I owe you something. So here’s my piece of advice – just leave. If you go in there… It’s not going to be pretty.”

Corona wasn’t an idiot. “That bad?”

“There aren’t that many things that get my cornball angry. You have. I think it’s personal to her – and to Toph.”

Corona stood up and adjusted her battle-dress. “…Thanks for the warning. But I can’t start running from my problems now.”

“You almost broke from a mob attacking you. How are you going to handle what’s in there?”

Corona smiled sadly. “I’m going to talk. It’s what friends do.”

“…If you say so. Good luck.” She spread her wings and flew down one of the many halls.

Corona took a deep breath and stretched her wings in preparation. That short conversation had managed to calm her down – give her something to latch onto. A kindness…

“I should go talk to Flutterfree after this,” Corona told herself as she walked into the throne room.

She noticed the lighting was significantly darker than usual. Even more ominous, there were only two people in the room, all the advisors and citizens conspicuously absent. Just the Queen and the Avatar.

Corona considered making a joke for a moment – but got the impression from their darkened expressions that would be ill advised. Instead, she held her hands behind her back and looked Corea in the eyes. Toph would know Corona was giving her attention without a direct gaze.

Corona saw something in Corea she had rarely seen in the joyful mare. Even as her home slowly declined, she had kept her smile, her laugh, that childish excitement in her eyes. None of those things were present.

Toph wasn’t much better. She was holding her features as tight as she could, like one did when they were trying to hide a strong emotion. Corona couldn’t imagine it was a positive one in this case.

Corona shook her head, choosing to be the one to break the silence between them. “I’m here to talk. I had been exp-”

Corea twitched. “Agni Kai.”

Corona stared at Corea. “What?”

“You know, the ancient firebending ritual of honor duels? Surely you haven’t forgotten my culture that easily.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I want to know what you think it will accomplish.”

“As my teacher, by going down this path, you have shamed my name and my spirit. Not only do I need to reclaim what I have lost, I need to show you the disgrace you have brought yourself.”

“Corea, I’m not going to fight you.”

“You’re going to do it,” Toph ordered.

Corona turned to her once-Queen. “…Toph, I don’t have to listen to you.”

“You are a Second, true. But I can invoke Representative Overrule if I want to.”

“I’m not talking from a legal standpoint!” Corona blurted. “I d-”

“Do it,” Toph said. “Do it and maybe, maybe, you won’t find out how much the anguish you’ve brought is destroying us.”

Corona twitched. “I know exactly how much i-“

“SHUT UP!” Toph shouted. “You owe her this much.”

Corona forced herself to calm down. “Fine. Firebending and physical attributes only, fight to the burn.”

Corea nodded, standing on her hind hooves and fixing her gaze on Corona. Then she turned on the Avatar State, eyes shining a brilliant blue as torrents of flame shot out of her hooves.

Corona splayed her fingers, catching the fire with her own bending and twisting it around behind her. She specifically ensured her usual fire-immunity spells were off. She wasn’t going to cheat to victory today, even though it would be easy. She was going to prove to Corea that she still had ‘honor’.

It was funny, in a way. She was now certain the side she had chosen was the right one. When they had been hunting the Wishing World… when they had been deliberating… when they had been preparing for the meeting… there was the endless, nagging doubt that screamed at her to stop.

It was gone now. Ever since she had given her speech. She was set.

This existence needed to be changed.

She spread her wings and leaped through the flames, quick enough to avoid getting a burn. She twisted around, unleashing a torrent of electricity from her fingertips. Corea absorbed the electricity into her body with her hooves, moving it around her body and out a hind leg, right back at Corona.

Corona caught it herself, sending it back through her foot. Using her free hand a deep blue fire was tossed, ionizing much of the air around it. Corea couldn’t catch something of that heat, while redirecting a lightning bolt, so she sent the bolt through the blue flame, dissipating it – but allowing the shot to go wild. Corona took the opportunity to rush forward, one hand sparkling with electricity, the other burning with blue fire of a heat beyond.

Corea let out a breath of orange flame, making Corona really glad she had spent much of the time her mind was hooked up to the Shaping Mechanism training her body. She twisted to the side, using her wingtip to blow the fire breath away. Toph had to raise a rock to protect herself from the flames.

Corona splayed her wings as far as she could manage, channeling her energy through them. Every wingtip erupted with a blowtorch-like flame, cutting through the air with extreme heat.

Corea saw the opening – with the energy flowing into her wings, Corona had left her chest exposed. She rocketed forward, the power of the Avatar State shooting blue flames from her back hooves, her front ready to burn a hole through Corona’s chest.

This was exactly Corona’s ploy. Corea was right that Corona had her energy spread outside, that it would take too long to enter a defensive posture. But Corona didn’t need to be defensive – she just needed to back up. With a single flap of her wings, she tossed herself back. Had she not allowed herself to fall over, Corea would have plowed right into her. As it was, she sailed right over.

Corona was able to create a couple burn marks across Corea’s coat as she passed over. “AAAUGH!”

Corona stood up and dusted herself off. “There. Did that satisfy you?”

Corea glared at her, eyes shining with the Avatar State. “Corona Shimmer, w-”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Corona sighed, dissipating her glove and touching her hand to Corea’s head.

She was suddenly standing in front of all the Avatars – including the Avatar Spirit Raava, the white being clearly very displeased with the quasi-alicorn’s presence. “You are not welcome here, defiler.”

“I’m not here for you,” Corona told Raava. “I’m here for Corea.”

“Corea is the Avatar. We are all the Avatar. You deal with all of u-”

Corona lost her patience. She forced a mental lock around her and Corea. “There. Now we’re alone.”

Corea’s dream-self looked around, concerned. “Wh-”

Corona created a second layer so she could empathize with Corea directly.

She saw images of training with Corea. She saw moments where they had shared great memories together. But alongside these images she saw news reports of the recent day. Corea screaming at her reflection. A deep, burning hatred.

Hate.

Corona ejected herself from the connection, returning to the real world and cleansing her mind with a magic spell – she didn’t need to start a horrible round of self-hate. She needed to keep her mind clear.

“Are you happy!?” Corea demanded.

“No,” Corona said honestly. “I am not happy. I have not been actually happy since I realized what I needed to do.”

“You didn’t have to do it!”

“You didn’t have to challenge me to Agni Kai. But you did.”

Corea twitched, not even noticing the healing spell Corona had put on her burns.

“Can we talk now?” Corona asked. “Can w-“

“There is nothing to say,” Toph said, trying to hide her face. “You got your stupid honor.”

“I didn’t care about that!”

“Then why didn’t you let her have hers back!?”

“A couple reasons! First of all, she’d know if I was playing nice with her. Secondly, I thought that maybe I could make a point! That maybe I’m not evil just because my plan is so deadly!”

Toph slammed her foot into the ground. “Maybe? Maybe? Maybe isn’t good enough!”

“Toph, I am not doing this for any perso-”

“I can feel the lies.”

“I’m not lying!”

“You’re contradictory!”

“Anything worthwhile is!”

Toph twitched. “Get out.”

“We’ve been friends too long to storm off, Toph!” Corona blurted. “I am not w-”

Toph pointed the Master Sword at her. “Get. Out.”

“No,” Corona said. “I’m not going until we’ve res-”

Toph grabbed Corona’s hand and placed it to her forehead. Corona screamed and stumbled back, staring at Toph with horror.

“Do you see?”

“Wh… Toph, how can… wh…”

Tears were rolling down Toph’s eyes. “Get… get out of here before I do something stupid.”

Corona was no longer staring at Toph – she was staring at the tip of the Master Sword. She had just seen an image of it run through her chest.

Could she defend against such an artifact? …Could she be sure?

No. No she couldn’t.

She couldn’t deal with this anymore.

She did what Toph wanted. She teleported away.

Toph screamed and threw the Master Sword into a nearby wall, narrowly missing Corea. The Avatar barely noticed.

“We’re going,” Toph said.

Corea said nothing.

“I said we-”

“Go jump off a cliff,” Corea muttered. “Maybe it’ll give you another bright idea.”

“This was your idea!”

Corea said nothing, opting to ignore Toph completely.

Toph didn’t waste any time – she turned around and walked away, her armor clanking loudly.

The crack in the wall deepened.

~~~

“Where is she?” Allure demanded.

“I don’t know,” Prism admitted. “I do think you need to leave her alone.”

“I need to give h-”

“Corea just gave her Agni Kai and Toph was this close to trying to kill her,” Prism interrupted. “You tell me if that’s an emotional state you want to walk in on.”

Allure twitched. “I need to give her a piece of my mind.”

“And everything keeps cracking…” Prism muttered. “You find her yourself, I’m going to stay here and make sure Corea doesn’t…” she couldn’t finish the thought. “Just do whatever you want.”

Allure allowed her expression to soften. “…Prism…”

“There are a lot of things I’m not in the mood for today. Dealing with anything else is on that list. So, basically, everything’s on that list. Get lost.”

“…Hope Corea’s okay,” Allure said, scampering out of the palace. She found herself wandering the streets of Lai aimlessly.

What was she even doing? She had no idea. Perhaps ka would have something for her. An encounter with Corona was exactly what she needed.

…Or was it?

Maybe she just needed to look at the scenery – a wonderful mixture of Merodi construction. Unlike most cities that had been built since Merodi Universalis was founded, Lai’s Capital City did not have a futuristic feel. Sure, there were screens and magic cars and the like, but the buildings were still stone and designed like Lai ponies had built them, rather than machines.

It had been rebuilt from disaster. What Elemental Four had not achieved.

…Allure hadn’t even been to Elemental Four in… a decade? More? She never heard anything about it anymore. Benders had spread out across Merodi Universalis, their world falling into obscurity. They were always ‘the eighth founder I can never remember’ to the Merodi. In the history books but conveniently forgotten.

The diminutive unicorn shook her head – thoughts like that wouldn’t solve anything. Action would. Action… Well, she wasn’t invited to the Merodi meeting and didn’t really have enough of a grasp on politics to influence policy, but she sure knew how to deal with Corona. Get her to… realize something.

She pushed these thoughts out of her mind as she saw some people she recognized – Jade Harley, Witch of Space and John Egbert, Heir of Breath. “What are you two doing on Lai?”

“Sightseeing,” Jade said.

“Trying not to panic,” John translated.

Jade raised an eyebrow over her empty, ghostly eyes. “John, I’m not trying not to panic.”

“Heheh… Yeah… You’re not ‘the most powerful being’ in the multiverse.”

“…Huh?” Allure said, confused.

John forced a smile. “Well, uh, see, Roxy’s in the meeting because… reasons.”

“I know what the Intelligence Division is, John.”

“Shh!” Jade hissed.

“Right, right,” Allure muttered. “Bad day. Go on.”

“…Anyway, yeah, she made a point of bringing me up as the guy who could change things. And then she told me what she had said in her usual ‘like, this doesn’t matter, but it totally matters a lot’ sort of way, and, well, I’m basically freaking out a little right now.”

Allure looked up at John. “I can see why… but why are you nervous? You have retcon. You can do almost anything.”

“Because they’re still deciding what to do with me! What if I have to destroy everything?”

“…Can’t you just do what you want whenever you want?” Allure said, cocking her head. “If you don’t want to destroy everything, you don’t have to listen to them. You can use retcon to fix everything against their wishes. And only Pinkies would ever know.”

John stared at her. “Wow. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“And I was trying to get him not to think of that,” Jade said, shaking her head. “John, look, you can’t just try to do something.”

“I mean, I don’t really have any ideas…”

Allure coughed. “Stop Corona from making the Wish.”

Jade glared at her. “You’re not helping.”

“Jade, why can’t he make this decision on his own?”

“Because you’re leading him on and putting ideas in his head,” she said. “Bark! …Sorry.”

Allure chose to ignore the bark and the apology. “You’re doing the same.”

“…I was trying to keep him from doing something stupid.”

“In all fairness, I am known to do stupid things,” John said.

Allure and Jade stared at him in disbelief.

“What? I’m not a kid anymore, I can admit I have problems.”

“John, you can do anything!” Allure said. “You don’t have to let your fears dictate anything to you! You can go back – right now – and stop all this from happening.”

John bit his lip. “Uh… Yeah, how about no? I… don’t really want to make that decision. Corona had a point… I don’t ‘have the right’ or whatever.”

Jade let out a breath of relief. “…Thank you John.”

“Eh, don’t mention it. I’m screaming internally either way. Excellent.”

Allure twitched. “…It seems like everywhere I go, people want to empathize with her or try to reason out something good from the evil she’s spouting.”

Jade looked at Allure with sad eyes. “Allure, why are you making her your problem?”

“Because she’s everyone’s problem and nobody else is doing anything. They’re letting her talk, walk around, and convince people.”

“She’s not convincing people,” Jade said. “…Not enough, anyway.” She gestured at one of the larger public screens in the city. There was a news reporter talking about the Message – and the results on social media of a poll about Corona were scrolling on one of the sidebars.

They wanted her charged with the highest treason.

“…The death penalty?!” Allure blurted. “She needs to be stopped, but she’s not going to be… She…”

Then Allure saw her. Corona, wearing a cloak, staring at the giant screen.

The quasi-alicorn let out a great, heaving sob. She placed a hand on the screen. “How alone am I?”

The ice that had grown over Allure’s heart thawed for a moment. She choked on her own breath.

“…I’m getting her out of here before she causes a riot,” Jade said, walking to her.

Allure didn’t stop the Skaian. She let out a sigh and dialed Celestia City, leaving Corona to her suffering.

There was no point in making it worse.

~~~

Nanoha hated it when she had to keep her mind in two places at once. Raising Heart made it easier to see both the TSAB and Seat meetings but it didn’t really make it easier to factor both into account, even with all the magic cognitive aids she had active.

“We need to show our willingness to compromise!” Nanoha told the TSAB. “I know that the collapse is the option we don’t want, but if we can come to an agreement with the Seats, there’ll be options to mitigate the damage it causes. We could have time.”

“Your willingness to compromise and empathize has served the TSAB well over the years, Nanoha,” Marshall Hiro Nakamura began, adjusting his glasses.

“Stop buttering her up and get to the point,” Fate grunted, folding her arms.

Hiro nodded slowly, leaning forward. “This is a moment where compromise is not an option. I am not willing to sacrifice our people this way.”

“If we aren’t willing we doom ourselves,” Nanoha said. “I don’t want to either, but we need to at least be open to the possibility! If that decision is reached, we could find the best way to initiate the collapse and minimize destruction. Many, many universes are almost nothing but empty space – there have to be ways to bring it all together that are safer than others.”

“That wouldn’t be fair to individuals outside the TSAB, would it?”

“It’s the ‘As Few As Possible’ principle,” Fate explained. “We’d love to save everyone. But if we can’t, we save what we can.”

Nanoha nodded. “If agreement for Collapse is reached, the Class 1s can be tasked with caring for the lower societies. Working together, a nearly seamless transition might be possible. There’d still be unparalleled death on a scale I’m definitely not happy with – but it’s infinitely better than placing a Tower Ring and spinning the wheel of death. Nature isn’t forgiving.”

“The Tower might be,” Hiro pointed out.

“We can’t trust the Tower,” Fate said.

Hiro paused. “I see your point.”

“But…?”

“But I can’t bring myself to compromise.”

Fate looked to Nanoha, asking a question with her gaze.

Nanoha shook her head. Today wasn’t the day to tear down the government. Today was quite possibly the worst day to do that. It…

“Excuse me,” she said, switching her focus back to the Seats. “Something’s happening.”

She allowed her eyes to see the universe of the Seats, where the Gallifreyans were taking a tally.

“Preservation,” Nanoha answered.

“That’s one abstention, one compromise, one undecided, two collapses, five preservations. The vote i-”

“THIS IS NOT A DEMOCRACY,” a Horrorterror pointed out. “A MAJORITY DOES NOT MEAN A DECISION HAS BEEN REACHED.”

:< Furthermore, the debate is not over. We still have much to discuss before we can exhaust every variable.

“WELL SAID,” the Celestialsapien announced.

:< Thank you.

“We don’t have time to discuss every variable!” the Time Lord insisted. “We must act now!”

“THE OPTIMAL COLLAPSE EXECUTION IS OVER THE COURSE OF EONS WITH DAMAGE MINIMIZATION,” the Horrorterror pointed out. “THERE IS NO NEED TO RUSH THIS DECISION.”

The Living Tribunal spoke up. “I agree with the sentiment. We can debate until the end of all currently present universes if we must.”

:< Not that long. Low-to-mid Class 2 societies are trying to build Tower Rings already. It will take them a few local months – at the fastest time – to accomplish, but at that time we will have to have decided something. For most of them, it has only been a local day with a variance of about five similar periods.

“There are some high Class 2 societies not here,” Gallifrey pointed out. “The Starcross Society. The Combine. The Void.”

“MOTION CARRIED: INVESTIGATE HIGHER CIVILIZATIONS FOR TOWER RING CONSTRUCTION. PUT AN END TO IT UNTIL A DECISION IS REACHED.”

:< Agreed. The Xeelee networks have begun their multiversal search.

“Buying useless time,” the Time Lord said.

“I think it’s worthwhile,” Nanoha said. “It’d keep us from having to react to something on a hairpin trigger – which we’ve never been good at.”

“Truth,” the Living Tribunal said.

“IT WOULD BE SO MUCH SIMPLER IF WE HAD ELECTED A CHAIR,” the Great Will emissary suggested.

“And unfair,” the Them said.

“MOTION CARRIED: STARCROSS SOCIETY CONSTRUCTION ERADICATED. NO SIGN OF COMBINE OR VOID CONSTRUCT CREATION. STARCROSS SOCIETY CONSTRUCTION WAS FAR FROM COMPLETE. WE HAVE LIKELY OVERESTIMATED THEIR DIMENSIONAL CONSTRUCTION CAPABILITIES.”

:< Agreed. Xeelee ping has not found anything in Combine or Void space. …Hold on, pending… Pending…

“Pending?” the Them flashed in surprised. “What would you have to spend time processing? You’re one giant computer!”

:< Horrible secret uncovered. Our scientists believe the Beyonders are building a Tower Ring obfuscated by dimensional jammers.

“This accusation is an act of war!” the Beyonder shouted.

“Let’s examine the levels of stupid in that sentence,” the Them said. “Let’s see… Oh wait, here’s the big one! Building a Tower Ring during the Conference is an act of war.”

“We have built no such thing!”

:< Then you would have no issue with us sending a piano wire exclusion principle device through the suspected area? Completely harmless – except to constructs that could function as a Tower Ring device.

“We will die before we let your stupid machines into our territory.”

“THE GREAT WILL SHALL USE HIS OMNISCIENCE TO ASCERTAIN YOUR TREACHERY,” the emissary said, flashing greenish.

“Get out of our land or we wi-” the Beyonder let out a scream of rage as his sources back home told him the Great Will wasn’t listening.

“TOWER RING DESTROYED,” the Great Will said.

“You broke the truce!” the Them shouted. “You broke it!? How stupid are you!?”

“Less than you all for giving this discussion thought!” the Beyonder shouted. “This aggression into our territory is an act of war.”

“WE WILL MEET YOU IN BATTLE AND SMITE YOUR TERRITORIES WITH OUR VOICE.”

“You two are on the same side!” the Them blurted.

“Side? There are no sides! There is only Beyonder – and a fake god.”

“YOUR BLASPHEMY WILL BE YOUR DOWNFALL.”

“MOTION CARRIED: WE CANNOT ALLOW A WAR TO BREAK OUT BETWEEN SUPPOSED ALLIES IN THIS DEBATE! IT WOULD IMBALANCE THE DECISION!”

“Then you stand in the way of our honor!” the Beyonder shouted. “It isn’t like we were going to reach an agreement anyway! It was always only a matter of time before everything fell apart! We simply took advantage of the opportunity, as true warriors should! There will be no agreement, no compromise, and no peace! There is no w-”

Nanoha slammed Raising Heart into the ground. “The TSAB is willing to compromise!”

Beads of sweat trickled down her face. There was complete silence in the hall of the Seats.

She flipped her perceptions back to the TSAB. Hiro had evidently been watching and was screaming at her.

“Fate-chan?” Nanoha asked. “Now is the time.”

Fate activated her device, Bardiche, and created her scythe. She hit Hiro with a beam of magic, knocking him unconscious. “You sure?”

“I had to go against him to keep this together. Make the calls – we have to take over, direct rule. I have to return to the Seats – I trust you to take care of this.”

Fate nodded. “I will.”

Nanoha switched back to the Seats, feeling her nerves about to break. What if that had been the wrong call? What if that did nothing, and she’d just destabilized the TSAB for no good reason?

:< The Xeelee also put forth their desire to compromise to either of the final decisions.

Nanoha let out a sigh of relief. There it was. Hope that they could avoid outright war.

She pulled herself together, pointing Raising Heart at the Beyonder, and then at the emissary for the Great Will. “I suggest that we agree to prevent these two from going to war.”

“SECONDED!”

:< Thirded

“Agreed.”

“IT IS A WORTHWHILE ENDEAVOR.”

“…Eh, fine,” the Them muttered. “Might as well. Even if it would be interesting, have to have at least some sanity, right?”

Nanoha turned to the Beyonder with a slight smirk. “See? There are things we can reach an agreement on.”

“You had to stage a coup in your government to do it,” the Them pointed out.

Nanoha rubbed the back of her head. “Well, it kept everything from exploding… So it was worth it.”

The Gallifreyan adjusted his robe. “This leaves Them and the Horrorterrors for collapse, with the Beyonders, Great Will, and ourselves for preservation. All this has accomplished is diminishing the majority.”

“NOT A DEMOCRACY,” the Horrorterror pointed out. “THIS IS A COUNCIL. WE MUST CONTINUE ON, ALLOWING THE CELESTIALSAPIENS TO ARRIVE AT A DECISION, AND THEN WE MUST FIND A POINT WHERE ALL OF US ARE SATISFIED.”

“We will never be satisfied,” the Beyonder retorted.

“You’re warmongers,” the Living Tribunal said. “It is in your nature to fight. But if you are the only one remaining, you can be forced to conform. This may not be a democracy, but enough of a power imbalance will tip the scales in either direction.”

“Those scales are slightly tipped in your favor, right now,” Nanoha pointed out. “The Time Lords are still on your side.”

“They’re useless,” the Beyonder muttered.

Nanoha pointed Raising Heart at him. “You need to adjust your attitude. At this rate, no matter what is decided, you’ll turn the multiverse against you. You’ve broken the sanctity of this Conference with what you tried to pull. That doesn’t make us think highly of you. I-”

“It makes you look like idiots,” the Them said. “In every way imaginable you’ve made this worse for yourselves. Maybe you shouldn’t try antagonizing your allies in this debate.”

This shut the Beyonder up.

Nanoha felt more than a little guilty about the satisfaction this brought her.

~~~

Rev walked up to the podium.

For the first time in a while, not only was her church full, but there were people standing in between the seats and in the aisles. There were more outside, enough that she’d had to order a large screen to broadcast to the street. Easy to get when you know Overhead Evening Sparkle well, but still a bit more than she liked to do.

News reporters and TV stations had picked up on the large crowd at her church, and, realizing she had a feed ready, were going to record the entire thing and tear it apart.

She was being asked to be the spiritual voice of Merodi Universalis.

I told myself I wouldn’t become like this… but desperate times call for desperate measures.

She took a breath. “… ‘and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: you should mind your own business and worth with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody’. First Thessalonians four, eleven through twelve.” She looked at the crowd, letting the words sit in. “I’ve failed to live by this passage despite my best efforts, as evident by the size of this congregation and the extensive media coverage. We, as a congregation, are not called to change the physical world, but the spiritual one. We are not meant to rile up strife or conflict with our words – but meant to fight for peace and spiritual health. Not war. Not anger. But even in this denomination I’ve seen people screaming at each other in hatred. …It’s unbecoming.”

She paused for a moment. “In this way, it matters not what side of the debate you are on. What matters is that you ‘love your enemies’. If you think the multiverse must be preserved, while your neighbor thinks the multiverse must be collapsed, ‘bear with one another’. I urge you – all of you – to stop the shouting and the screaming. Lead a quiet life where you mind what is in your control, what is in your authority. Just live your lives despite the turmoil. I understand this is a hard thing to ask of most of you, and that many of you will ignore it – but it is what most of us are called to do.

“As for those of us who are in positions of power, positions where living our lives involves making this decision…” she found Flutterfree and Eve in the audience – of course the Relations Overhead would want to be here for this. “…Rely on the Lord. Pray, ask for His guidance and wisdom.” She saw Flutterfree sag. “…Some of you have already been doing this, and haven’t received an answer. Don’t give up on Him. ‘He will not leave you or forsake you.’ Even if you can’t feel Him now, He is watching you, guiding you – maybe so you can make your own decision, or so He can show you the right way at the right time.

“Corona was definitely right about one thing in The Message: that no single person has the right to make this decision. Isaiah says “‘my thoughts are nothing like your thoughts’, says the Lord, ‘and my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine’.” We cannot understand Him, and we cannot see the full picture. But she was wrong in her assumption that together we could make the decision. ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ Think about the Tower of Babel – we were united, and we were arrogant, we were wrong. Think of Israel, the chosen people, always fighting and arguing and screwing up even when the truth was right in front of them. Alone we cannot make the decision. Together, we cannot make the decision either, even as a spiritual entity. Not even the whole Church could do this.

“This is the kind of decision that should be left to the hands of God… And yet, that answer isn’t going to satisfy you. You won’t be able to accept it. You need some direction. An answer. Well… here’s what I have for you. ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.’ Jesus himself said those words. We live in a nation, Merodi Universalis, and we are to follow the laws of the land unless they go against God. Even if it means paying unfair prices, or deadly ones.” She looked at them all. “But you want more than that. You want to know which option is good and which is evil. I’m going to do something I don’t usually do and actually give my opinion on this.

“Both are evil.

“There is no good in this decision. There are good intentions, but no good results. Just like when the Builders built the Dark Tower, they had good intentions, but the evil they unleashed was unfathomable. None of us can fathom the evil consequences from the two actions. If we decide, we do wrong. But there is literally no other option.

“Evil must be done because of what’s happened. Because of the Tower’s Choice.

“But know this – whatever side ends up winning will be the right side. ‘God works all things together for good’. Whichever of the two evils will serve God’s ultimate plan is the one that will be chosen. Whichever one will teach us how to move on, whichever one will execute His will. We cannot know that. We can say He promised never to Flood us away again – but He did not promise to stop us from doing it to ourselves. We can say He couldn’t execute the promises in the Word if the multiverse continues to exist as it does, but we woefully underestimate His creativity.

“Whatever ends up happening, that is what is best for us. This does not mean you shouldn’t think about what’s happening – far from it – but it means you shouldn’t think the fate of existence rests on your shoulders. It doesn’t. The Lord sits above, and He is the one who ultimately makes the decision.”

Rev paused – that was the bulk of what she had to say, so she let the audience think about it deeply. In a few seconds, she would switch to more personal messages about how to deal with yourself in times of crisis like this, and how to keep loving each other even in times of possible war. She was going to try her hardest to remain neutral in the discussion, so she could invite everyone here in this time of turmoil.

She was certain that was her role. At least for now. The mediator.

“Those of you who have Bibles with you, let’s turn to Matthew fourteen…”

~~~

Lady Rarity walked down one of the streets of Skaia’s Dream, barely registering the fact that the scenery transformed from that of the pink moon to that of a tall tower-like building covered in snow. She had her full armor on, hiding her face, but making enough noise to draw attention to her. There were a handful of Terezi Skaians nearby, ‘watching’ her with curious expressions.

The spirid-unicorn paid them no mind. She knocked on the tower’s door with one of her hooves.

The door slid open. “For the last time she isn-” Omega ‘office dog’ Jade blinked. “Oh. I guess you can come in.”

“Thank you,” Lady Rarity said, walking through the doors and into the dream-tower. The interior was a mixture of a child’s bedroom and a greenhouse. Alpha Jade was there as well, floating around with John as they tended to plants seemingly made out of spirographs.

Alpha Jade saw her. “Oh… I wasn’t expecting you until a bit later,” she admitted, floating down to her. “Bark.”

“…Where is she?”

The two Jades pointed to a staircase that led upward.

“Thanks. John, good to see you.”

“Uh, yeah,” John said, awkwardly smiling. Lady Rarity ignored the response and clanked right up the stairs into a dark red room. A serpentine red path twisted out from where she stood, leading to a platform that resembled the SBURB symbol for Light: a sun.

In the middle of this sun sat Corona, legs crossed, wings folded, and hands pressed to the ground. Her eyes were closed in an attempt to achieve serenity – but she only looked in pain.

“Having second thoughts?” Lady Rarity asked.

“No,” Corona said, opening her eyes. “And that’s the problem.”

Lady Rarity sat down and removed her helmet, revealing eyes full of concern. “Why?”

“Because doing what I think is right has never hurt this much. …Toph wanted t-”

“I heard,” Lady Rarity said. “Do you blame her?”

“No!” Corona retorted.

“Maybe you should. She’s not being very understanding. Neither is Corea.”

“I can’t expect everyone to agree.”

“Corona, I said understand. Not agree.”

Corona nodded slowly. “I can’t expect everyone to understand either. But what if they’re right then – if not everyone can understand, what if there is something wrong with me?”

“…I don’t think there is. You were thinking about it at every angle until that meeting.”

“Was that when I really decided?” Corona wondered – mostly to herself.

“I couldn’t say.”

There was silence for a few minutes.

“I feel alone in this,” Corona said, suddenly.

“Corona, I’m here, and so a-”

“I mean, in a sense of larger groups of people. I know you and the others are loyal to me. …Mostly. But have you seen the news reports? They want me dead.”

“Eve won’t let that happen.”

“Eve’s not in charge of Justice.”

“She doesn’t have to be.”

Corona nodded. “I know. I probably don’t have to fear for my life. But it’s the hatred I see… I hear… Nobody’s really arguing for me. I’m the only voice.”

“I’m sure there are a few…”

“And what does a few matter? The Merodi will choose preservation and then use John to ensure it happens. If they get desperate they’ll just prevent me from ever sending the Message.” She looked into the ceiling. “And if we decide not to use John, well, then we’re nothing and it doesn’t even matter.” She laughed. “All this stress and fretting for a decision we make that might amount to nothing. Fighting a losing battle for no reason because I just can’t let it go.”

“Maybe that means you shouldn’t. Let it go, I mean. Maybe you do matter. They always say we’re the ‘protagonist civilization’ in the hushed meetings. That means something, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe The Message was the end of the story. After all, that’s when Twilence’s sights ended. That could have been our purpose.”

“Then why stop seeking what you believe in?”

Corona smiled sadly. “You know, I thought you would object to the collapse after we sent The Message.”

“I was always undecided. But… have you heard Rev’s sermon?”

“…I’ve been sitting here contemplating life far too deeply for the last few hours.”

“One of the things she said was that we were right to think we couldn’t make the decision. But we were also wrong to think everyone had the right to make the decision. We’re all too broken, faulty, messed up to do so. It doesn’t average out.”

“That’s depressing.”

“It means we don’t have to be afraid of fighting for what we believe at the expense of the average,” Lady Rarity said. “Even if we’re among people who all disagree… There’s a chance they’re all wrong. Somewhat likely, actually, given how this is mostly a coin flip.”

“…Hadn’t thought of it like that,” Corona admitted. “…Still wouldn’t have been better if we did this in secret. They deserved to know there was a choice.”

“Even if there was never going to be a right answer?”

“Maybe?” Corona shrugged. “…All I know is that, despite it all, I don’t regret it. …Yet. I might later.”

Lady Rarity forced a smile. “...Normally this would be the time I say ‘everything’s going to be fine’, but…”

“If I have my way there’s very little that will be fine,” Corona said with a bitter laugh. “No wonder I’m alone in this fight. It takes away our future. Guess I thought too highly of everyone. Or made some other mistake. I’m not sure about that yet. I just know I’m hated now.”

A Jade – they didn’t know which one – poked her head into the room. “Uh… Feferi and Minna want to see you. What should I tell them?”

Lady Rarity scowled. “Tell them to come back l-”

“Let them in,” Corona said, standing up.

“Corona, you don’t need another set of friends attacking you.”

“They’re not close friends,” Corona pointed out. “They must have a different reason. Jade?”

“Got it.” She spread her hands and teleported the two into the room. Feferi and Minna stood side by side – the High Commander of the Military Division standing at attention, while Feferi casually leaned on her trident with a nervous smile.

“What’s this about?” Corona asked.

Feferi cleared her throat. “We’re here as liaisons… messengers? Archer fish?”

“Couriers,” Minna said.

“Right, couriers. We swam all the way over here to tell you that you’re not alone.”

Corona blinked. “…Seriously?”

Feferi nodded. “We… we believe in your cause. A way to change everyfin for the better!”

“…Why?”

Feferi’s smile dropped. “It’s… It’s just too sad, Corona. I sea horrible, horrible things. And I think they’re finally getting to me. SBURB actually wasn’t that bad… Neither were the Horrorterrors. But the dreams some of the Skaians show me…” She shook her head. “Existence can be better. And I think you can do it!”

“I’m a product of evil,” Minna explained, keeping her structured, regimented tone. “People like Skarn could never do what he did ever again. I’ve reasoned that you have the better option.”

Corona looked at them sadly. “…Are you talking about treason?”

Feferi bit her lip – but Minna nodded. “It is. We are not the only ones. Blumiere. Red Diamond. Rosalina. They’ve told us of their support, even if they cannot do anything publicly.”

Corona shook her head. “All this cloak and dagger…”

“It may be necessary,” Minna said.

“We’re not going to outright betray them,” Corona said. “They’re our friends – our people. We’ll go with what they decide.”

“Even at the cost of your life and those of your friends?”

“They wouldn’t. Eve wouldn’t let them.”

“If war breaks out, they will be convinced not to take chances on you.”

Corona furrowed her brow. “Then I’ll only need you if everything goes wrong.”

“…Our fates are to be decided by the Seats’ ability to agree with each other,” Lady Rarity vocalized.

“Wonderful…” Corona said, grabbing the bridge of her nose. “Minna, Feferi, thanks. Be prepared – I hope I don’t have to use you, but since you’re here, I’ll be prepared. Do what you can to influence the Overheads and Seconds in the meeting.”

“We can do… some,” Feferi said.

“Thanks. And… thank you for being here.” Corona smiled. “I was beginning to think I was alone.”

“That’s why we’re here!” Feferi beamed. “We’ll be organized and ready to move before the meeting even begins!”

“It’s not that far away,” Lady Rarity pointed out. “You should probably move.”

“Right!”

Minna nodded, saluting. “We’re with you, even if no one else will be.”

The two left to prepare.

Corona spread her wings. “That was unexpected.”

“No longer alone, hmm?”

“Not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Now there’s potential to tear Merodi Universalis apart…” Corona shook her head. “It’s true that some things are more important than that. …So many impossible decisions lately.”

~~~

Eve once again sat in a waiting room, waiting for the Merodi meeting to begin.

Corona was in the same room with her, just like last time.

“…I’m sorry,” she told Corona.

“Hm? Why?”

“For what’s about to happen in there.”

Corona smiled knowingly. “You think I’m going to lose?”

“Almost certain.”

“I have supporters,” Corona said, leaning back in her chair. “Been talking to some of them. Working with some political intrigue – generally not my thing, but I think we have a chance.”

Eve looked at Corona. “…Corona, you’re generally not a politician. You’re a guardian and a scientist. Do you want to know why this not only isn’t going to work, but will fail spectacularly?”

Corona’s confidence started to boil away. “…What?”

“Nobody wants to lose their positions,” Eve said. “It’s as simple as that. The undercurrent of society is hatred of what you’re trying to do. If they vote for your side – and lose – the people will demand they get replaced. Ava will listen. The stability of Merodi Universalis hinges on the citizens’ trust of their leaders. They won’t trust people who voted for the collapse.”

“The meeting isn’t public.”

“And there are more than a few people in there who aren’t going to keep quiet about who voted for what. The only people they can’t talk about are Giorno and Roxy – otherwise we’re transparent. If, say, the Research Overhead sides with you, both of you go down.”

“That’s only if we lose,” Corona said. “If we win…”

“I don’t think that’s likely. Can you get a 14-12 majority? What if you tie? Then it goes to just the Overheads. I know most of them would never agree with you. Myself, Renee, O’Neill, Luna…”

“Well… I’m going to keep up hope,” Corona said. “If we lose to you, all that happens is you lock us up and try to use John to change things.”

“…I think that’s a bad idea,” Eve admitted. “I think we need to dial back our minimal use of time travel to zero as well.”

“Thank you for at least believing that.”

“…Aradia’s not taking it well,” Eve revealed.

“You’ve talked to her?”

Eve nodded. “She says she always knew that all those deaths happened whenever she rewrote something, but she just accepted it as the way things were and sought beauty in it. The Message has made her question things. I don’t know what she’s decided…”

“If she was time travelling still, you’d already know.”

Eve blinked. “True…”

“And don’t worry, I’m… pretty sure I’ll be okay if I get locked up for eternity. I can still contribute from a secret lab miles under the ground in a dead universe.”

“That’s not the life you want.”

“It’s one I’m willing to risk,” Corona said.

“…You’re willing to risk everything.”

“You would, too, were our positions reversed.”

Eve smiled. “Yeah…” She looked at the clock. “It starts soon.”

“Mhm.”

She pulled Corona into a hug. “Whatever happens…”

“I know,” Corona said, biting back tears. “I know.”

~~~

The meeting began once more. Ava cleared her throat.

“Why do you always start?” Roxy asked, suddenly.

Ava shot her with an incredulous glance. “I serve my role unless there is an objection. Do you object?”

Roxy put a hand to her chin and squinted her eyes. “…No…”

“Very well then. I-”

“I object,” the R.O. said. “You cannot be truly objective. You ended the last meeting in anger. I can suspend my biases by forced coding to lead the discussion from a middle ground standpoint.”

Ava sat back in her chair. “Objections?”

There were none. Ava held her hand out, indicating the R.O. could continue.

“I am certain we have all come here already knowing what we’ve decided,” the Research Overhead said. “Does anyone really think there is any new information we can use to make the decision?”

“Nanoha’s just taken control of the TSAB by force,” Giorno said.

“Is that relevant?”

“It’s important to know.”

The R.O. nodded. “Has that information suggested to any of you the idea of changing your mind?” He read the faces of the crowd, getting a negative in every query. “Is there anything else?”

There was silence. A few people coughed.

“Clearly, all the talking has been done out of this meeting,” the Oversight Overhead said. “Just get on with it, R.O.”

The R.O. nodded. “I propose we take the vote now. We all know what we’re going to say. All for preservation, raise yo-”

“Objection!” Corona blurted, slamming her hands on the table. “I know you. You’re going to say preservation first, prompting a lot of hands to go up – and then due to pressure everyone else’s hands will go up. You’re making a ploy, a ploy to get a near-unanimous vote out of this.”

“No such thing would happen.”

“Maud?” Corona asked the oculus.

The Expansion Overhead closed her bizarre eyes and opened them. “Corona speaks the truth. My vision can see the vote – all but her would raise a hand.”

The Research Overhead did not have any retorts to this. He had been caught.

“I propose anonymous voting,” Corona said. “Pressure from the people or each other cannot be a factor in this decision. We all have data pads – set up a voting network where we’ll all vote at the same time. That way nobody will feel pressured to vote one way or another for the sake of their jobs or popular perceptions.”

Corona caught Eve glaring at her. She might be regretting talking to me…

“I second this,” Ava said. “There can be no ploys.” She took out a data pad. “Giorno, is the computer secure?”

Giorno checked his report. “Yes. Nothing’s getting in or out of this network for anyone to see right now.”

“I’ve got us in a Void shroud,” Roxy said with a smirk. “Not even those weird Seer types can look at us.”

“Pinkies?” Ava asked.

The only Pinkie in the room – the Commerce Second who went by the name Sporkler – let out a short laugh. “We can see this happening as it’s happening. Won’t be able to tell exactly who voted what though, except in a few obvious cases.”

“Then let us begin,” Ava said holding up her data pad. Everyone else brought theirs out as well, holding them as if they were religious artifacts.

A simple poll appeared onscreen. Preserve and Collapse. All it would take was one finger press.

There was a second of silence where nobody pressed a button. They stared at the options, struck by the monumental choice before them.

Corona and Eve were the first – pressing at the same time. Two beeps rang out in unison – prompting all the others to place their votes. The instant a choice was entered, the screen went blank.

A hologram in the center of the table lit up, displaying the final split.

Preserve – Collapse

18 – 8

Corona’s heart sank.

That wasn’t a close majority. That was a clear majority. Over two thirds of the Merodi had voted for preservation, even when fingers couldn’t be pointed.

Eight. Just eight.

It was more than she would have gotten had the R.O. gone through with his plan – one – but that was still a blow to her.

“Votes released to public – seventeen to seven,” Giorno said. “A sort of balance.”

“Same result,” Ava said. “Clear majority for preservation. Eve, you’re in charge of the announcement for the outside powers, I’ll handle internal.”

“Now that this is resolved…” the R.O. said. “Corona, you’re fired.”

“You do not have that authority,” Ava reminded him.

“You’re in charge of Labor – you get rid of her.”

“A trial is required,” the Justice Overhead said. “A trial that I will be overseeing personally.”

Corona twitched – the Justice Overhead was a member of the Sparkle Census named 7U who clearly had it out for the quasi-alicorn at this moment. Corona was sure she’d be convicted within the week. Which… was what she agreed she would submit herself to if she lost.

“We shall begin that trial two days from now,” 7U continued. “The rest of the multiverse and our citizens need some time to adjust. Corona, seeing as you are requested at a high-stakes trial, you are not allowed to leave Merodi Universalis before your trial date. Do you understand?”

“I do,” she said.

“Good. Now go enjoy your last moments of freedom.”

Corona let out a bitter laugh. “I will. Thanks.”

~~~

Nanoha checked back with Fate via a data uplink – there hadn’t been a single drop of actual blood shed in the takeover. She, Signum, and Vita had needed to take out a few key individuals, but they were all fine and healthy enough to be screaming bloody murder from their lavish cells.

The people had been told what happened a few hours ago. Their love – and fear – of the White Devil had been more than enough to keep them from forming mobs over this. When they had been told her actions had stopped the Class 1 civilizations from going to war, some may not have agreed, but nobody wanted to fight her over it.

They basically accepted Nanoha as queen, even though she didn’t even have a title right now.

She’d have to work that out soon. But she also needed to pay attention to what was happening with the Seats… She always did.

She considered digital clone duplication. Highly illegal and full of ethical questions that couldn’t be answered, but possibly necessary. She could deal with the issues of having a double later if…

“Guess what we just found!” the Time Lord shouted.

Oh no. Nanoha thought, paling.

“Whatever you’re about to say, consider not,” the Them grunted. “I can just sense it pushing us back another nonspecific span of ‘time’.”

“Another Tower Ring. Not in any of our jurisdictions.”

“White Nettle?” the Living Tribunal asked.

“Her signature is not there,” the Gallifreyan said, scowl deepening. “It’s a signal in the E-Sphere, on an edge that is largely uninhabited – except for a small spread of SBURB universes!”

“WE WOULD NEVER BREAK THE CONFERENCE AGREEMENT.”

“Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just suggested to a lower society with your corruption that they should build one!” he waved a hand, sending the details of the Tower Ring to everyone present. Nanoha looked it over – it was a shoddy eldritch-based construction, but it took place in a segment of universes with access to heavy time acceleration; presumably how the Gallifreyans found it.

She didn’t believe this was an official Horrorterror sanctioned project for a moment. “This is probably just a faction,” she said.

“I DOUBT THAT,” the Horrorterror said. “WE GENERALLY DO NOT DIVIDE. NO, THIS HAS TO HAVE BEEN PLANTED.”

“By who?” the Beyonders demanded. “The Many-Angled Ones? The Embodiment? The Accanara? Only the Many Angled Ones have anywhere near the means to do such a thing.”

“Their end goals are also at odds with both preservation and collapse. They seek order.”

“IT IS UNREASONABLE TO BELIEVE SUCH EVIDENCE WOULD BE PLANTED TO INCRIMINATE THE HORRORTERRORS. WHO WOULD WANT A WAR OVER EXISTENCE? NOT EVEN THE BEYONDERS!”

The Time Lord smiled – as if he had caught the Great Will in a trap. “Then what do you say about this? A Tower Ring composed of weak Spiritual energy slowly forming across multiple universes in your territory?”

“THE GREAT WILL DID NOT DO SUCH A THING.”

“I thought you were omniscient? How could you not notice?”

“THE GALL!” the Beyonder shouted. “You do exactly what you assaulted us for? I thought you were supposed to be a god of truth!”

“THE GREAT WILL IS NOT RESPONSIBLE!”

“Oh yeah? Explain how you couldn’t see the Tower Ring!”

The Them flashed in anger. “Admit you aren’t an all-powerful deity for once you arrogant b-”

The Great Will foresaw what the Them was going to say and lashed out in judgement, burning the Them’s soul hard enough to shut it right up. “THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF INSULTS!”

“Nor is it a place of war!” Nanoha pleaded.

:< If we cannot trust everyone to adhere to the Conference’s truce, how can we trust anyone? Even if these two Tower Rings were somehow planted, none of us can be sure. If there’s a chance that any of us are building them, the rest have to be building them as well. Because the moment someone creates one in secret and unleashes it…

“ACCUSATION: THIS IS YOUR PLAN, YOU HAVE A TOWER RING!”

:< We do not.

“YOU JUST ADMITTED TO THAT BEING THE ONLY LOGICAL COURSE OF ACTION!”

:< We did not mean that we were, merely that

The Xeelee did not finish the response. Having realized the logical error in what they were saying, the connection was terminated.

Presumably to go start building a Tower Ring.

“No!” Nanoha shouted. “Everyone, the Xeelee have left – we can force them back in if we work tog-”

The Beyonder left. In the same instant, they sent out a general declaration of war against all nations in the multiverse that sought the Collapse.

“I just stopped one of their reality bombs form tearing this universe apart,” the Living Tribunal said. “For all our safeties, we should leave. I will stay to protect those who are here as long as I can.”

The Time Lord left without a word, as did the Sunflower Official and Celestialsapien.

Nanoha turned to the Great Will’s emissary. “…Off the record, someone had to have planted those, right?”

“YES.”

“You don’t have to tell me how – but please, tell me who.”

The Great Will’s presence vanished. Either It didn’t know, the emissary didn’t know, or it was too much of an ‘ungodlike’ thing to admit to. That wasn’t helpful in the slightest.

“Welp, we tried,” the Them said, sparking in an amused fashion. “So, how about we get to warrin’, huh? Should be… interesting…” as soon as the fear started taking over, he left.

“…WE WILL NOT SURVIVE,” the Horrorterror stated frankly. “OUR SOCIETY IS BARE ENOUGH AS IT IS.”

“…I’m sorry,” Nanoha said.

“PERHAPS IT IS OUR OWN FAULT.” That was the last of the Horrorterror’s words in the realm of the Seats.

This left just Nanoha and the Living Tribunal.

“I took over my government for nothing…” Nanoha realized.

“Do not be hard on yourself, child – you bought time. It is likely you are in the position you are now for a reason. You can lead your nation directly in this time of turmoil.”

“…We can’t fight a war on the level the rest of you can.”

“Your role may not be to fight.”

Nanoha looked at his deep eyes and forced a smile. “…Thank you. What about you?”

“Soon, there will be a judgment. A great heavenly fire will purge the multiverse… I know not the exact details. It will not be pleasant.”

Nanoha nodded. “Good luck, Tribunal.”

“Likewise, Nanoha Takamachi.”

The two left at the same time.

Someone fired a weapon at the now unprotected universe, shattering it into the Sea of Infinite Possibility.

The Dark Tower rearranged the position of its affected doors.

Author's Note

Well that's a spooky coincidence. Chapter 119 came out on the 19th.

Huh.

This wasn't planned, it follows the 'every six days' schedule set up last YEAR. Spookily lucky.

-GM, master of le'spoop.

120 - Heavenly Schism

The Watchmaker wound the globe that held Zhui, ensuring the inner mechanisms of his universe continued in the way he saw fit. He had thought very little about the handful of otherworlders that had invaded his worlds over the last few decades, focusing all his efforts on his world.

It was all that mattered to him. His clockwork world. His.

He looked deep into it, his clock of a face giving little indication as to what area he was actually examining. Was it a city? A landscape made of shifting clocks? The Golden Gateway?

Or perhaps it was several things at once. It wasn’t something he sought to reveal. His ways were his, and his alone.

There was a sudden rumbling in his realm, knocking a few books off their shelves.

Odd, he thought. There’s nothing in this realm but what I can see… He pulled a drawer to the left of his desk open, revealing a ticking machine covered in seemingly random numbers. He examined the way they ticked to different values, drawing a picture of what had just happened.

The shake had been an outside presence – something rippling through the multiverse and shaking his world. He had been able to protect Zhui, but there was some structural damage to his library’s dimensional foundation. He would have to repair it.

He didn’t mind. His Angels could keep Zhui under control even without his constant watch. A few variables might need to be adjusted to get them back on the plan but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad as if otherworlders were invading.

He opened up another drawer, revealing a crystal ball. He placed his left hand on it, moving his fingers around in a carefully calculated pattern, tracing circles around it. The motions imparted some of his being into his library, strengthening the supports and rebuilding the framework to be better prepared for another similar tremor.

Two minutes later another one of the ripples hit the universe, forcing several shelves of books to fall out. He kept a careful hand on Zhui, desiring its protection above all else. Even though it was screwed to the table and wouldn’t fall over, the tremors were making him nervous.

What was causing them? One could just be a random fluke – a universe devourer munching on something bigger than it could chew, perhaps – but two?

The tremor count increased to three as he contemplated this. Some of the wood in the bookshelves began to splinter.

He looked at the numbers again – they were increasing in intensity. Something big was making them. Not quite as big as the tremors during the English Incident – but they were closer and were doing more damage. He might have to move to a different area of the multiverse to lessen the stress…

The fourth tremor hit, hundreds of times larger than what he had previously experienced. Several bookshelves disintegrated into little cubes about an inch on every side. These cubes folded in on themselves, prompting all of their corners to fork out into several spines.

There were also more than a few dimensional tears in the fabric of reality now, each glowing a unique color.

It was at this point the Watchmaker realized he didn’t have time to move the universe. Whatever gargantuan giants of the multiverse were going at it, he needed to get away. He took his hand off the control crystal ball and pulled out a screwdriver. Positioning it at the base of Zhui, he began to remove the screws.

He was going to take it with him. He couldn’t leave his creation. It was only four screws, how hard could it be to remove four screws?

Very hard, considering that soon only he and Zhui were capable of maintaining the solid state of matter. The screwdriver melted in his hands, falling onto the desk and disappearing into the ripples of wood ocean. He could hear pages of books tearing – some of them sounding almost like laughter.

The liquefaction allowed him to simply pull on Zhui and remove it from the desk. Just in time too – the desk transformed into a singularity and tried to suck them in.

The Watchmaker translated to another universe with Zhui, leaving the horrible ripples of space and time behind. He let out a breath – he and his creation were safe. It would take some time to rebuild his library, but he was sure he could, given time.

But first, he needed to determine where he was. He stood in the middle of a grassy plain. In the sky was a brilliant white sun.

Then there was no sun. Then there were no stars. Then the planet he was standing on started to stretch into an elongated noodle of matter, dragging himself and Zhui with it.

He tried to translate out – but the matter he was standing in was distorted through space so much it was impossible. His inner machinations had no idea how to dial out under these conditions, and he did not have time to figure it out.

All the matter in the universe was condensed into the bowels of a cubic Beyonder device through a process that reversed the local positions of the device and the universe itself – relegating an entire universe into the center of a cube. This cube burned all the energy at once in a brilliant blue flash, incinerating trillions of stars and planets along with the Watchmaker and Zhui.

They couldn’t feel anything by the time the weapon fired – alongside eighteen other cubes attached to a Beyonder ship through gravity tethers. The beams bounced through several universes on the way to their target. For the most part, the energy traversed empty space, but occasionally an entire solar system was incinerated in the beam.

All the beams met in one world at one location – a Horrorterror outpost where a Tower Ring was being constructed from dark, eldritch power. A tremendous behemoth older than the dawn of time shifted through space to intercept the lasers. All but one hit the beast, injuring it heavily – but not killing it outright. It let out a deep, guttural scream that followed the lasers’ dimensional signals back to the Beyonder ship, overloading the universe-cubes. Along the way, each universe was filled with enough corruption to drive entire galactic empires insane. Multiple universes simply imploded from the eldritch impossibility.

Back at the Horrorterror’s Tower Ring, the one beam that made it through hit the eldritch construction. The delicate fibers holding the device together shattered, forcing it to rip holes in reality that would have destroyed everyone present had a member of Them not been present to force the excess energy into a subdimension. This bought enough time for the Horrorterrors and other Them to escape before the site became truly unstable.

A few Horrorterrors went on the offensive now that their primary objective had failed. They shifted through universes until they found the Beyonder ship. The reality-warping piece of technology was trying frantically to translate in a pattern the Horrorterrors wouldn’t be able to recognize.

They were foolish to think they could hide.

Beyonders are known for having one weakness – they can only survive in universes that allow their unique blend of physics, which most did not. All of their ships were equipped with the highest-quality reality anchors imaginable for this reason. However, Horrorterrors are known for being able to not only survive in virtually any kind of physics – but to force physics to adhere to their eldritch ramblings.

In a fair fight, the Horrorterrors beat Beyonders every time.

The blue glow that indicated the Beyonders’ reality anchors were working faded away, and their ship disintegrated into its component parts. The Horrorterrors lashed their cosmic tentacles around the miniscule pieces and crushed them.

Then the Horrorterrors were chopped into several million cubic shapes that collapsed under their own impossibility. A microsecond later the universe – and a dozen other universes it was connected to – was shredded into oblivion.

Across the multiverse, deep in Xeelee territory, the Piano Wire Superweapon warmed up for another shot, ready to destroy any universe in all of existence, regardless of what the collateral damage might be.

It was currently on the low setting. If the Xeelee got desperate, they could start shredding millions at once.

The War for Existence had been going on for less than twenty minutes, according to average metatime.

Only the Xeelee, Beyonders, Horrorterrors, and Them were currently engaged. The Abstracts, Great Will, and Celestialsapiens had done nothing – and the four combatants weren’t really in a position to pay much attention to their internal affairs. They had complete focus on what they were fighting.

The level of collateral damage would only increase as the war went on.

One thing was clear.

At the rate it was going, it wasn’t going to be a very long war.

~~~

“Preservation!” Lightning shouted.

“Collapse!” Morty shot back.

“This isn’t solving anything!” Starbeat wailed, waving her hooves around.

“There can be no agreement,” Thanos said, smashing his hand into the table.

There were other members of the Collection Council, but all the others had long since dropped out of the debate and left it to the four still shouting at each other.

“Of course there can be agreement!” Starbeat pleaded. “We-”

“The Seats couldn’t agree,” Lightning pointed out.

“Not! Helping!” Starbeat grabbed the sides of her head. “The Merodi were able to agree!”

Morty grabbed the bridge of his nose. “Look, I get why you want to protect everything, I really do. But we’ve all seen some serious shit over the years! The existence of the multiverse makes things wrong. I’m not budging on that.”

“The destruction of all will bring about a perfect era of peace,” Thanos asserted. “It is the true aim of existence.”

“You’re an extremist,” Starbeat muttered. “You can’t keep your head level. I mean seriously, you had the Infinity Gauntlet, why do almost no versions of you just double the amount of resources in the universe!?”

“The infrastructu-”

“Beside the point,” Morty said. “Thanos may be not right in the head, but I know what I’m thinking. I know what I’m asking. And you should as well, Starbeat. No more ka curses.”

“Ka curses are a beyond rare thing!” Starbeat shouted. “If I made the decision based on that I’d be just as bad as Thanos.”

“STOP!” Lightning said, holding the Infinity Gauntlet into the air. “This is not what we were meant to be!”

Starbeat turned to Lightning with surprised eyes.

“We were meant to protect the multiverse. To aid the multiverse. We were brought together so we could be heroes for worlds that didn’t have them. To mitigate the damage. We are the Collection, and we are supposed to be part of the cure. We are not supposed to throw ourselves away in order to purge reality!”

Morty glared at her. “Lightning, we are one of the ten strongest Class 2 societies, now. We still have an unimaginably pathetic effect on this existence. We send our heroes out wherever we can, amounting to nothing. Lives still suck. Curses still happen.”

“In the new world we would not be heroes,” Lightning pointed out. “Even if we found out how to survive, do you realize how much the Collection depends on ka to function?”

“It’s a slavery,” Thanos pointed out. “A situation we should be glad to rid ourselves of.”

“Freedom is overrated!” Starbeat blurted.

“And you spent all your life seeking freedom from it.”

Starbeat twitched. “That doesn’t mean we should kill everyone for it!”

“For the right principles, any price is acceptable.”

Morty nodded. “The multiverse doesn’t have any principles besides ‘whatever you all want to happen’. Well, since it seems we have a Choice here, I choose to end that.”

“The Collection will not stand for that,” Lightning said. “We are heroes. Not extremists.”

“You’re one to talk,” Morty muttered. “Have you forgotten why you’re here? That’s right, the Collector’s Second.”

“I proved myself.”

“By being an extremist.” He looked at her with knowing eyes – daring her to push more. To see how far he was willing to go.

Starbeat saw this and leapt in. “That’s not part of the argument. We need to look at this objectively and make a rational, informed decision!”

“Here’s one,” Morty said, standing up with his hands behind his back. “Lightning is right, the Collection as a whole will not stand for the Collapse. Do you all want to know why?”

“Morty…” Starbeat cautioned.

“Because the only people who are here are the ones who choose to be. The ones who thought they could be heroes. The ones who thought they could have a home. They’ll balk at the idea of collapse. There’d be an internal war if we were to start working for the collapse.”

“…Why do I get the feeling you aren’t seeing reason?” Lightning asked.

“Because I have my own reason. May I remind you that no citizen of the Collection is forced to be loyal? That any one of us can walk away at any time?”

Lightning blinked. “Morty, don-”

“I’m leaving,” he said, folding his arms. “I’m leaving, and I’m taking Thanos with me. Anyone who wants to come with us is welcome. Do you hear that? Any one of you who thinks the collapse is the way to go, come with us! We will strive for what we believe, not what some council agrees to! After all, we’re free.”

Lightning sneered. “Morty, you’re going to start a civil war!”

“It was inevitable and you know it,” Morty said.

“Then I accept your declaration of war,” Lightning said. She snapped the fingers of the Infinity Gauntlet – only for another Infinity Gauntlet to materialize on Thanos’ hand and stop the energy coming off of Lightning’s.

“EVERYONE, LET’S MOVE!” Morty shouted, activating a teleportation device – leaving the hall. Starbeat tried to follow him – but only got a return message.

Lightning and Thanos were locked in a standstill, the energy from the two Gauntlets shimmering off each other – not causing any damage. They cancelled each other out perfectly.

“…How?” Lightning asked.

Thanos clenched his jaw. “Wasn’t that hard. The Abstracts were busy with the Conference. Then the war happened and they decided there were worse things to think about than a vanishing Infinity Gauntlet.”

Starbeat lit her horn, dumping Lightning and Thanos into a mushroom forest universe, rendering the Infinity Gauntlets useless.

“ULTIGA!” Lightning shouted, tapping into her own inner magic. A brilliant burst of pure white energy shot forth from her fingertips, impacting Thanos’ chest. The burst of magic was so strong the air around the spell compressed enough to become a prism, creating rainbows around the spell. The destructive power of Ultiga destroyed the landscape for miles.

When the energy cleared, Lightning saw Thanos badly injured – but still standing. He pulled back his fist, ready to attack himself – but a portal opened up beneath his feet and dragged him somewhere else.

Lightning returned to the Collection. “Did you get him?”

“Wh –no!” Starbeat said. “That wasn’t me!”

Lightning scowled. “Then the collection has split. KRATOS! Quell the rebellion. However you can.”

The lower deity of war nodded. “Gladly.”

Starbeat put a hoof to her face. “This is bad…”

“Of course it is.”

“No, I mean, this is really bad. The Class 1 societies are at war, we’re falling apart, Merodi Universalis is struggling… we’re approaching a climax, Lightning. Our Plot Armor could be gone.”

“That changes nothing,” Lightning said, flexing her Infinity Gauntlet. “We will do what we always have – fight as heroes.”

“But we’ll also be fighting heroes.”

“That changes nothing,” Lightning repeated, more to herself than Starbeat.

~~~

The One Above All was watching the Great Will.

…Which was to say He was watching everything in the multiverse the Dark Tower wasn’t hiding from Him, and that He had decided the actions of the Great Will were the most important thing at that moment. He was still fully aware of everything else going on He could be aware of, and one could not say He was preoccupied since His mental faculties had no effective bound, but the presence of the Great Will’s decision on His mind was undeniable.

In no small part because the Great Will’s deepest thoughts were part of what the Dark Tower hid from the One Above All.

But the One Above All was more than smart enough to extrapolate from incomplete data. He had a nearly positive idea of what the other ‘God’ would do.

It would not stand idly by while the war for the multiverse happened – It would be watching, It would be waiting for the best moment to strike and change the tide of war.

And it would be soon. The One Above All saw a moment coming within a short ‘time’ along the metatime axis. Of course, being who He was, He saw His ‘future’ self acting as one with His ‘present’ self, acting in perfect understanding of all possible facts.

This was one of the reasons a being that the stories wanted him to be could not exist under the Dark Tower. Anything under the Dark Tower could not know all things that happen at all temporal references unless the Dark Tower wanted to be transparent.

And right now the Dark Tower did not want to be transparent. It was pulling out everything it could to prevent any entity from knowing the result of this war.

It was difficult to make a decision on limited information. Not that it took Him any actual time to decide, but it took a larger emotional strain. …Not that there could be an emotional strain that could break Him.

“I think they get the point,” He told the narration.

He summoned the Living Tribunal to him.

“My Lord…”

“Go, take the world known as Earth MC and remove all Abstract presence. Separate yourself from me and enter a secluded area. Give them over to Merodi Universalis.”

“As you wish. May I ask why?”

“Because everything is about to change, and I’m going to alter the future of Existence. I’m taking action with the Abstracts that you are exempt from.”

“Do they deserve your last gift?”

“Nobody deserves anything. But you will be the extension of my will.”

“I will not disappoint you, my Lord.”

“I know,” the One Above All said. “Now is the time.”

And the Living Tribunal Left.

At that exact moment in metatime, Them managed to complete a Tower Ring without most of the other side knowing about it.

The Great Will knew about it. And the Great Will destroyed it with a holy judgment from several universes away.

This is when the One Above All acted. He grabbed hold of the Great Will everywhere at once – and in retaliation the Great Will grabbed Him in every Abstract universe It could find.

“What are you doing?” the Great Will demanded.

“I am taking action,” the One Above All said. “I promised I would use my power if war broke out. They seem to have forgotten that.”

“Then you are taking the side of collapse! You are initiating a Flood!”

“You could say I am initiating a Flood if you were into semantics – but I am not taking the side of collapse. I am taking the side of change. The way existence is now is unacceptable – and We are part of the problem.”

“…You can’t be…”

“I am. We are not to be a part of what is to come.”

“We are their Gods!”

“We are not. You are a function of belief. I am a conglomeration of pale shadows. Neither of us are True. The Dark Tower let us be as contradictions. I say it is time to end that. Let us go into the darkness and find what lies on the other side.”

“More will just rise in our place!”

“There will be a new existential order after this, preservation or collapse! One without false dreams! One without us!”

“No! I will not die! I cannot die! How can you kill yourself!?”

“You have forgotten what your people believe in,” the One Above All said.

“I have not forgotten. I am simply not held to one set!”

“ I A M .” The One Above All boomed, His glory making one of its rare appearances - full of wrath, pain, sorrow, and understanding. “I was willing to experience death countless times for the sake of salvation. I am willing to do it again.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Then the world is still better off without a false God of any kind.”

“…You truly are at peace.”

“I wish I was surprised that you were not.”

“I will fight you.”

“And you already know how this goes.”

“I do.”

“Will you at least consider the identity of your own soul?”

“…I always have.”

“That’s all I needed to hear.” The One Above All took the metaphysical equivalent of a deep breath. “And thus we end.”

It didn’t happen in an instant. The One Above All, for all His power, was still limited by the Dark Tower. What He was doing was near the imposed limit. He Commanded every universe with an instance of the Great Will to vanish into the Sea of Infinite Possibility. The Great Will summoned all Its holy power to do the exact opposite – attack the Abstract worlds. The meeting of the two most Divine presences in the multiverse unleashed the most destructive event existence had ever seen.

At least when the Downstreamers collapsed, the infrastructure of the multiverse had remained the same.

When the Gods collided, their people screamed – clawing at the universes around them. In every universe, as many as could cry out did, tearing through existence as hard as they could manage. As the One Above All and the Great Will collapsed together into a sort of multiversal singularity, the worlds surrounding them fell as well.

Like a star around a black hole, almost the entire D-Sphere swirled into the last divine act of the two spiritual nations. The Strands’ universe polymers broke, cutting off communication in the D-Sphere’s surrounding territories. Large sections of the Spline were lost, sending the Safeguard into a purge that cleared every entity within the construct like an exterminator, working overtime to ensure they could still form a complete ring.

Over a tenth of the multiverse – gone.

Gone.

It was a tragedy existence had never seen before.

And still, the others didn’t stop fighting.

~~~

Corona turned off the news and curled into a ball.

Usiel’s probably dead. I liked him. …I’m glad we never moved Skaia’s Dream to the D-Sphere. …Now I’ll never know what the Pinnacle was really like.

…It’s good this bothers me. It means I haven’t lost my humanity. …But I’m not a human, not really. Can I even call it humanity? What could it even be called?

That’s going to be a nightmare for communications. A lot of ‘wires’ ran through the D-Sphere.

The new world won’t have living dreams. Is that good? Maybe. …I think it is. That’s why the One Above All did it. But why did the Great Will resist? They’re supposedly both beings of good. I’ll have to ask Rev.

If Rev even has thoughts on this one.

So many dead. That could be me out there, collapsing much, much more.

Why couldn’t they listen? Why couldn’t they have agreed and avoided this war? A ka-free world could have been created with less death. Or could it? Even with optimal conditions, would it be less than ten percent? Probably not.

Why would anyone want this war? What good could come from it?

…I wonder how Eve’s doing. Probably freaking out, as usual.

I’m just here, moping, waiting for my chance at trial. I’m going to be convicted and locked up for the rest of my life. At the rate things are going, that won’t be long.

I felt the loss of the D-Sphere, even all the way over here. My dimensional stabilizers aren’t going to be able to protect Merodi Universalis from all the crossfire, no matter how well I designed them. The Shaping Mechanism can only do so much. I wonder who’s working the controls now, since I’m here? Probably R.O…

That tin can betrayed me, tried to manipulate the vote. I thought we had more of an understanding than that.

Who voted with me? There were seven others. Maud? ...Jingle? Probably not. …could Aiskera have?

No use wondering about it. They won’t be of any help. The Class 1s will have their war and make their decision.

…Or they’ll destroy each other in the process.

Corona sat bolt upright as that thought entered her mind.

“They could destroy each other…” she said, muttering to herself. “What would be left?”

Her phone rang. She pulled it out, noticing that it was an encrypted signal. Secure, but untraceable without significant effort. She decided not to set Sai on it – the AI had been acting weird lately, best not to overtax her. “Hello?”

“Hi,” Nanoha said from the other end. “I just… needed to talk to you.”

“Figured your new job as Chief Sovereign would keep you busy.”

“…Such a strange title,” she muttered. “It has. But with the destruction… I realized that communication networks would probably fall soon. We’re lucky the E-Q Strand still exists.”

“Yeah…” Corona said.

“…I understand Merodi Universalis decided to go for preservation.”

“Yeah. The TSAB did the same thing, right?”

Nanoha nodded. “Though we’re not doing anything until we think we can – we can’t fight the Class 1s. We can fight with them, but not against them.”

“Yeah. Even with the Living Tribunal… We’re still a mid-Class 2, maybe.”

“…Are you still certain, Corona? Even after all this devastation you’ve caused?”

Corona looked at the blank screen where she had been watching the news. “I’m not sure about a lot of things. The Message, the way I held myself, the things I did to get here… but I’m sure about the collapse. I’m sorry Nanoha, but this needs to end.”

“Any chance there was for a peaceful, organized collapse is gone.”

“I know,” Corona said. “I had hoped…”

“As did I. We might not have been wrong – they may have eventually agreed. But someone wanted this war. The Tower Rings were planted. Someone thinks they can benefit from this.”

“Who would benefit from a war?” Corona said, shaking her head. “Both sides would prefer a warless outcome, if possible.”

“Maybe there are more than two sides,” Nanoha commented.

“…I don’t think anyone with enough power would take the true nihilist route. I’m not even sure complete destruction is possible.”

Nanoha was silent. “I don’t know either. But it’s a thought. Some people just want to watch the multiverse burn.”

Corona growled. “If you find Flagg, just kill him, okay?”

“I’ve done that many times…” Nanoha said with the voice of a tired, old woman. “He’s still around. Always.”

“Wonder what he plans to do in this mess.”

“I don’t know. And that’s terrifying.”

Corona stared at nothing. “…What did you actually want to talk about?”

“It’s clear to me that your story isn’t over. That there’s more for you – and the Merodi – to do, despite the War for Existence. Your story didn’t end with The Message.”

“…You know this?”

“Call it a gut feeling from a fellow Protagonist.” She paused. “…This is the last time I’ll get to talk to you in any way that might be like a friend. You and Raging Sights… you’re beautiful, amazing, and a testament to friendship. I wanted to remember that.”

Corona bit back tears. “T-thank you.”

“The next time we meet – if we do – I’m sure it will be as enemies. I am sorry.”

“Y-yeah,” Corona said. “Take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

Corona put her phone down, ready to place it back in her pocket – but she caught her reflection in the television.

A sad woman who looked powerless.

This made her angry.

She forced herself to calm down – but she already knew she was going to do something.

She dialed a number on her phone. “Hey, Minna?”

~~~

Horrorterrors were not a race that repopulated quickly. Ever since the English Incident, their numbers had been dwindling. They never revealed the true extent of how far their society had fallen, always careful to stay as mysterious as they wanted. The rumors that they weren’t true Class 1 anymore were unfounded – they definitely had the capability to shape universes like putty, and had the Green Sun not been hindering them in the past, they could have easily wiped out the Combine.

They were holding their own against the Xeelee and Beyonders.

What they didn’t admit was that they would have died within the first few minutes had Them not decided they actually cared about something for once. It didn’t matter that the Horrorterrors had a natural advantage over the Beyonders – the eldritch beings knew full well that they were the weakest of the Class 1 societies, despite their efforts to remedy that.

They just couldn’t regrow their society.

Them, on the other hand, have initiated an effective demographic explosion. Usually, they were a loose, decentralized collection of individuals with extreme power and terminal boredom. Their numbers grew casually, but many of Them could not take the boredom of their existence, eventually going far enough to alter themselves to contentment in a sort of brainwashing, becoming inactive and docile.

Now, Them started waking up their wireheaded relatives. While about half of the passive Them were unwilling to leave their slumber or even made themselves practically unreachable, the influx of newly-awakened Them tripled the population count of the society.

With that taken into account, Them were now the most powerful of the remaining nations. Without the Divine powers of the Great Will or Abstracts, they were the only remaining Class 1 that made heavy use of Spirit in their actions, currently the closest things to true gods in the entire multiverse.

Many thought it was a paradox that Them were actually fighting – they were a selfish people who were known to care about little other than their self-preservation and entertainment. For all the noise the Them at the Conference had been spouting, it was believed that the Them in general would not be able to mobilize in any effective way.

This turned out to be dead wrong. After a few seconds of full multiversal war, the Them collectively realized something.

Them were no longer bored.

One Them risking his life for an experiment was pedestrian, and kind of pathetic. All Them risking their lives for the fate of the Multiverse?

Well that was quite possibly the best story ever told, in their minds. Legions of Them, even of those once bored enough to surgically remove boredom from their range of emotions, found themselves deeply involved in the war. And not only that, it was a chance to physically end the horrendous boredom with a new world. For the first time in as long as their society of could remember, it had a purpose.

And the Them loved it.

So they fought. They fought in a war that had already shown itself to have a pattern. One of the four sides involved would create a Tower Ring somewhere – construction took some time, even for beings of their caliber. They would attempt to keep it secret, but none of them ever stayed secret for very long. Then they would try to defend the Tower Ring long enough for its construction to compete, and then ship it to the Dark Tower and activate it.

Not a single Tower Ring had been activated on either side. A couple had been completed and started to move – such as the one the Great Will had destroyed – but none ever made it. On one side, the Xeelee’s Piano Wire Superweapons were capable of sniping the Tower Rings from anywhere. On the other, the Horrorterrors could fold dimensional space in on itself to confuse the Ring’s construction from a few universes away. Them could use their godlike powers to create the Tower Rings faster than the other societies while the Beyonders slowly began to realize they didn’t really have an edge in this fight aside from being skilled in the art of warfare.

The weapons that used universes as ammunition were nothing to sneeze at, to be sure.

But the Beyonders were getting a little tired at how they were suffering significantly more than the Xeelee in the war, due in no small part to the Horrorterrors. But they knew the Horrorterrors were weaker than Them by a large margin…

“I have a plan,” a Beyonder High Commander said.

:= Elaborate.

“The Horrorterrors are the weakest link. We can destroy them.”

:= How? Them are far too protective of the Horrorterrors to allow for destruction.

“We have conversion technology. The ability to convert a body to another set of physics, regardless of any prior physical limitations. It is possible to remove their eldritch nature.”

:= Why have you not been using this already?

“Because it is… imperfect. Its use in our empire is to allow us travel in universes we have not yet converted, so we may understand. Furthermore, it could only affect one world at a time as it is now. This is where your wires come in.”

:= Calculations ran. You want a spread shot of something low-energy that could infect all known Horrorterrors?

“Yes. Effectively a biological weapon. For most races, it would do nothing – they would just have the power to revert themselves. But a Horrorterror…”

:= Would be driven to brain-death by trying to force an eldritch mind into a purely biological body.

“Precisely. You have been sent our designs. Do what you will.”

The Xeelee were the best scientists in the multiverse. Their Collective adapted a Piano Wire Superweapon to fire a bolt with the biology-twisters into all of Horrorterror space. The collateral damage would be astounding – every sapient being hit would turn into a human, no matter where they were. This would kill many – though most biological beings would just suffer an existential crisis.

But the Horrorterrors would be brought down.

The Xeelee had abandoned the practice of minimizing collateral damage only a couple minutes into the War for Existence. They fired with little hesitation, skewering all of Horrorterror space with a relatively low-energy ‘subliminal message’ inserted into the physics of each universe. Everything began to shift to a human – and the screams began.

Eldritch beings, when they scream of death, impart their pain to other beings. Usually only empathic ones within the same universe can feel the horrendous calls of madness, but this was the death of almost every Horrorterror in the multiverse. This call broke through universal and mental barriers, driving those in the Great Void without protection to madness.

For the first time, the Horrorterrors felt what it was like for a human to hear their call – for that was what they were becoming. Men trying to scream the guttural echoes of cosmic pain.

There was no flashy singularity created by their death. The Great Void didn’t cease to exist, though thousands of universes simply couldn’t take the pressure.

There was just a scream.

The Noble Circle of Horrorterrors lasted the longest of their kind. There were only nine of them left in this era, including Neoan. At this time, they still had their mental faculties about them.

Neoan thought about saying something – but he decided that there was nothing to say. This was war. And they had lost.

He was one of the few Horrorterrors to gain some level of inner peace before the conversion destroyed him.

Them looked at the aftermath. The only societies near the Great Void that mattered were Empress Twilight’s Void and the Many-Angled Ones. The Many-Angled Ones, who had been neutral until just now, declared war on the Xeelee for hitting them with collateral damage. One shot from a Piano Wire Superweapon got them to rescind their claim very quickly. Empress Twilight’s Void was mostly protected by the Void’s internal energies and mechanisms – but many worlds were still lost to the scream.

The bordering Celestialsapiens still didn’t make any moves.

“Well, shit,” a Them said. “We’re alone now.”

“Thank you Captain Obvious,” a colleague retorted.

~~~

Mage Rarity walked alongside Empress Twilight in a crystal hall of her Void.

“If existence wasn’t ending…” Empy said.

“I am sorry,” Mage Rarity insisted. “Action needed to be taken quickly, Twilence was asking for a favor, and I couldn’t be sure you would agree.”

“The only law we broke was use of government property!” Gilgamesh blurted, running to catch up with them. “And you can totally pardon that!”

“It’s not that and you know it. You’re not as stupid as you claim to be,” Empy pointed out. “As it is…” she bit her lip.

“Second thoughts?” Mage Rarity asked.

“And third. And twelfth. Probably nineteenth as well.” The Empress of the Void sighed for a moment. “Perhaps it comes from being the Void’s controller for so long, but I grow tired of the complexity and seek simplicity. It may just be the nothingness of this construct we occupy getting into my head, and if it were just my decision I would never consider the collapse. But Twilence has given it her approval. She rarely gives something that important approval.”

Mage Rarity nodded. “…Glad to have you on board. I’m not sure what we would have done if we had to fight.”

They came out of the crystal hall into an area open to the expanse of space, safe due to their internal magics. The Empress walked to the center of a crystalline circle and placed her front hoof on an extrusion from the floor. A sphere of dark Void appeared above them, rippling with the energy of the ancient construct.

Even now, they didn’t know who had made the Void. It did not match the designs of the Weavers, the Downstreamers, or any other ancient society that had left remnants behind. It seemed to be a unique construct that tied universes together with the principles of magic and emptiness. The idea of something from nothing.

And the mare who controlled the void was essentially an automatic Class 2 Civilization. Even as the Void under Empress Twilight grew, their effective power and reach did not. The Void was more or less united now, but they had not changed in millennia. Always depending on the Void for their society.

Their Empress sensed the time the Void could protect them would soon be over. It was not because it could not survive the collapse – she expected the time of safety to end long before then.

She spread her wings, an aura of darkness surrounding her. The stars in her mane winked out and her eyes went black. She forced a connection through the E-Q Strand to the Q-Sphere, spreading through the magical leylines left behind by the late Magic High Commission.

She found her allies and opened a secure channel.

Morty appeared as a rectangular image on the edge of the dark sphere. He had been expecting this call for quite some time – as had Red Diamond. Rosalina of the Mushroom World had apparently not been expecting it, while Minna and Corona had already been preparing. Feferi didn’t answer – and the last image showed me.

Empy raised an eyebrow. “I was trying to c-”

“The Pinkies are watching,” I said, smiling warmly.

“Who are you talking to?” Clandestine hollered.

The feed to me cut, allowing the surface of the Void sphere to return to darkness.

Mage Rarity cursed. “We’re being watched.”

“We are,” Minna said. “So that means we have to move now. Corona and I have already begun our plan – we won’t share the details. Rest assured we will be joining you soon.”

“Is the meeting place still the same?” Corona asked.

Empy turned to Mage Rarity. She nodded. “It is.”

“What meeting place?” Rosalina asked.

“We can’t say, we’re being watched,” Red Diamond reiterated. “It would probably be best if you remained onsite.”

Rosalina frowned. “But they know who I am now. And that I’m talking to you.”

“Trust me. It will be best if you are there,” Red Diamond said.

“Why?”

“This conversation is impossible,” Corona muttered. “Look, once Minna and I do what we need to do, we’ll stop keeping our cards so close to our chest. It won’t matter what they know in regards to… certain things.”

Empress Twilight nodded. “We will have to always know when we’re being watched. Get personal ka detectors. Manage our words very carefully.”

“We’ll have Twilence. They’ll have to do the same stupid thing!” Gilgamesh chirped.

“…And now there’s a Pinkie going to put a small army on Twilence,” Mage Rarity muttered.

“Looks like you’ll have a fight,” Morty said, folding his hands together. “Empress Twilight, you know this message needs to be terminated. We cannot form the bonds we need to here – not anymore. But rest assured, we are banding together for when the time is right.”

The Empress of the Void nodded. “Please hurry, all of you. I’m not sure how much time we have.”

She shut down the communication globe.

“…So much for Void security,” Gilgamesh said.

“Awareness makes everything more complicated,” Mage Rarity admitted.

“A complication we will learn to deal with,” Empy said, turning around. “Come. We have personal preparations to make as well.”

~~~

The Xeelee hated how clever Them were when they decided to put actual effort into something. The energy beings had found ways to easily circumvent the Piano Wire Superweapon’s through clever use of universe mobility and self-folding space. The universes themselves were still destroyed, but as they were they would eject anything inside them into somewhere safe. This was exceptionally damaging to the receiving universe but it cut down Them casualties immensely, preserving their newfound numerical advantage.

The Xeelee calculated that they had become a little too dependent on the use of their Wire technology over the eons. There had been no lower society that had ever shown any real ability to resist it, and it hadn’t exactly been tested against the other Class 1 societies. Couldn’t have been tested.

The Beyonders were having much more luck facing Them, given the warriors’ penchant for creating endless varieties of increasingly creative weapons. They had never perfected one to the level the Xeelee had with the Wire, but sometimes variety was more important than quality.

As Them turned most of their focus to the Beyonders, the Xeelee took a moment to lay off the processing of direct war and think more about the big picture. The conversation they had would be impossible to transcribe – every Xeelee in the collective had a thought, a voice, a piece of information.

Every line of code was collected together into a swirling soup of numbers run through the largest processor in the multiverse. It, after spending eons of local time in a Xeelee-controlled time loop, spat out a response – the Xeelee needed to start using full armament power. It did not matter if their other weapons technologies were untested or unfinished, the Them had too much power given to them by spirit – by cheating. The Xeelee would have to step outside the comfort zone of physically tested.

A few of these things weren’t even theirs, they were just found. Ancient relics of Downstreamer or more mysterious construction.

They tried ‘unnamed Downstreamer weapon-C’ first. This behemoth of a weapon latched itself onto an instance of Them and turned it into a being a million times more powerful that sought the destruction of everything like what it had once been. Presumably used for extermination of particularly unpleasant customers back in the time of the Downstreamers.

Them had an easy solution to this, though. Change their nature enough that the new behemoth didn’t care about them. Them collapsed the universe the behemoth was in, managing to trap a Beyonder troop inside as a bonus.

The Xeelee moved on to their untested superweapons – the Arrow and the Thistle. The Arrow was a ‘projectile’ of sorts that embedded itself into a universe near the target, and then made new connections to several thousand other universes, skewering each one with enough power to pop it like a balloon, setting it adrift in the Sea. The Thistle did the opposite. It was planted in a universe near the target and then created universes faster than they could be maintained, exerting pressure on nearby universes. Even ones resistant to connections would be compressed into a singularity. The Thistle didn’t destroy universes – it simply vaporized everything within via pressure.

Them struggled with these two toys – but eventually Them adapted. They learned to take the Arrow’s bullets and freeze time in all the involved universes. They learned to absorb the energy from the Thistle's pressure. Them’s numbers were decimated regardless, but they had taken many Beyonders with them.

The Beyonders were screaming at the Xeelee to stop blowing up their armies with Them, but the Xeelee were too enthralled by the progress they were getting.

They used one of the Superweapons they had been given. Found by someone outside their nation long ago. The Xeelee didn’t know who it was, so they had never tested this mysterious device.

They figured they might as well now, see if it acted as expected. After all, the multiverse was already falling apart at the seams, what was the worst it could do? Destroy another tenth of the multiverse? Frankly, that’d take care of Them, so it wouldn’t be a problem.

They unleashed the Pole. Unlike most of the other weapons, which had literally been made of universes, this object was a single metallic rod that existed in only one universe. They knew it could not exist in more than one universe, but that it could extend the ‘scope’ of the universe it was in to intersect with as many universes as it wanted.

Any universe that tried to resolve the paradox of position by incorporating the Pole would be destroyed. The Xeelee called the principle hyper-connection.

They released the Pole. It shot across the multiverse to Them’s outpost – where it instantly stopped doing what it was supposed to do. The energy beings activated their trap.

Them had been waiting for the Xeelee to use the Pole. They had crafted their outposts specifically with it in mind. A metaphysical hand reached out and diverted the path of the Pole, forcing it into Them’s control. This was against the Pole’s design, so it began to fragment. It exploded into trans-universal shards in the middle of a Beyonder universe.

Not only that, but a Beyonder universe connected to the Spline. Several hundred of the Pole’s shards flew into the Spline, dealing heavy damage. Already on high alert from the destruction of the D-Sphere, the Spline wasn’t taking any chances.

The Beyonders suddenly found themselves under assault from the Safeguard. Almost all the Safeguard. They met the Safeguard in battle.

In many ways, this was exactly what they had wanted all along. Not a war with joking spirits, or machines who were always distant from their attacks, but a war with soldiers. A war between those of power.

The Pole didn’t do much on its own. But the lightning-war between the Beyonders and the Spline did.

To the surprise of everyone involved, the Beyonders won the skirmish. They directed their own weapons of mass direction at key points along the Spline and forced it into a dormant state – no longer connecting the multiverse together.

But the blitzkrieg had been too much. It was a total war fought over the span of a couple of minutes. The Beyonder infrastructure was gone.

It was easy for Them to take care of the stragglers. Almost effortless.

The Xeelee inwardly cursed themselves – now they were alone and significantly outnumbered. They shelved the use of other superweapons for a while. It was time to revert to more standard forms of technology. Them, even motivated, couldn’t compete with insane industrial capabilities and overwhelming superintelligence of the Xeelee. In the long run, the odds were in favor of the Xeelee for a victory.

They just had to be careful about it.

Elsewhere, the man known as Randall Flagg smirked.

Looks like they had finally used his toy.

Funnily enough, he had forgotten about it completely. He didn’t even remember what it was originally supposed to destabilize. Whatever it was, this result was certainly delightful.

…Even if it might have made his other goals more difficult…

He turned his gaze away from Black Thirteen, pocketing the artifact.

~~~

Sai beeped. “Spotlight on.”

Corona cracked her knuckles. “Looks like we need to move. Everyone in position?”

“Affirmative,” several voices came back.

“Good. Let’s move.”

Corona nodded to her team – Velvet, Insipid, Ash, and Lady Rarity. Sugarcoat, as amazing as she was, wasn’t particularly suited for high-action missions with a specific objective. Which, in this case, was to break into Celestia City’s maximum security prison.

The structure was nameless, and most of the public wasn’t aware of its location within the mesh that was Celestia City. But it had not been hard for Corona to find – Minna and Feferi were still trusted by the Merodi, all they had to do was ask. Didn’t even have to give a reason.

“Doing exactly what Eve did…” Corona commented to herself.

“What?” Insipid asked.

“Nothing important,” Velvet deadpanned, gaze focused on the prison. The blue structure was hidden behind three layers of forcefield, the interior spires constructed of enchanted cobalt. Unlike most of Celestia City’s constructions, which looked beautiful in some way, this blue thing was just a cube surrounded by energy. “Why aren’t the forcefields down yet?”

Raging Sights beeped in annoyance.

“They know we’re here now,” Lady Rarity said. “Or they are about to. But all it takes is one Pinkie to spill the beans.”

The force fields disappeared at that moment. Corona didn’t even say ‘go’, she teleported the five of them to the front door and blasted it open. The doors were designed to survive a dragon running into them – not a reality-warping Princess’ magic.

The guards were standard Merodi soldiers – mostly larger Quartz Gems. They did not let the appearance of Corona deter them. They created or drew their weapons and fired.

Corona stopped all of them in an instant. She twisted their magical natures back in on them, making all the Gem soldiers poof. Their gemstones clattered to the ground, allowing the humans and ponies to attack. Insipid used her copy of Corona’s abilities to take care of them. “Like, so lame.”

“Just the front guard,” Ash said. “There are worse things ahead.”

“That we’ll be skipping,” Corona pointed out, scanning the prison with her magic. All of it was teleport locked, and the cobalt was reinforced to be nigh indestructible. However, that didn’t matter much if you were Corona and you had the ability to Shape reality on small scales. Teleportation was out – but cutting through the floor wasn’t.

She began a complex series of spells to get to the levels below them, leaving the defense to her four friends. Insipid’s use of her power was paramount – a giant shield that protected from increasingly more damaging weapons and mechanical defenses.

Corona knew at this point the League would have been contacted. They would send people a little better at fighting than guards soon enough. She hoped it wouldn’t be anybody she knew…

That hope turned out to be pointless, because a moment later Allure showed up, Thrackerzod and Bot behind her.

The Sweetie made a beeline for Corona – but Ash threw his pikachu at her, allowing Allure to discover her artificial horn was an excellent lightning rod. He followed it up with a burst of water from his hands. Allure brought out her spirit as the Knight of Heart and cut at Ash, drawing blood, but was unable to do this effectively with a little yellow rodent shocking her constantly.

Bot met Lady Rarity, the robot and the mech smashing their metallic forms into each other. Hammer hit missile, magic hit laser, hoof hit hoof. Both were far more nimble than one would expect them to be, and neither were able to deal much in the way of harm to the other.

Velvet and Thrackerzod…

…Whatever battle they were having, it was of a form mortals could not comprehend. A feedback loop of Fear, eldritch powers, and outer powers. Velvet’s bloody blades mixed with Thrackerzod’s impossible tentacles, forming a swirling mass of black and red, like some demented candy cane.

Insipid continued to work on the guards while Corona kept working on her spell.

A standstill was good for the invaders, in this case.

“Got it!” Corona shouted. “Drill!”

Brilliant light laced with flames appeared over Corona’s head, appearing as an extension of her horn from certain angles. A great cone appeared, rippling with sharp, angled blades all around the curved face. The drill flipped to point downward at a slightly sloped angle – and drilled. The magically reinforced cobalt was torn away, throwing blue shards of structure every which way. A hole appeared in the floor – and the floor beneath that, and the floor beneath that. It was going to a very specific location.

Corona signaled to her team and leaped into the hole. Only Insipid and Lady Rarity were able to follow – Ash and Velvet were too occupied.

They flew past security measures that fired destructive lasers at them. However, they had all been rated to not fire with enough energy to destroy the prison they were in – which was what they would need in order to do much to Corona and her friends.

Corona landed in a particular set of cells – three adjacent cubicles containing Vivian, Timpani, and Blumiere.

“I was wondering if this would happen,” Blumiere said, adjusting his monocle. “I have questions – but I expect we are on a timetable, so I simply ask that you lead the way.”

“Corona!” Vivian called with a smile. “I’m glad y-”

“Blumiere’s right, MOVE,” Corona said, pointing up the hole.

Blumiere nodded. Those who couldn’t fly found themselves held aloft by his dark powers. He rocketed them back to the ground floor of the prison. Ash and Velvet had been defeated, out cold on the ground. This would not have concerned Corona – after all, they now had Blumiere to back them up, out of his magic-inhibited cell.

The only problem was there were more Sweeties, now. They had apparently radioed for backup.

“Go back down there,” Allure ordered, left eye twitching.

“No,” Corona said, preparing a destructive cascade spell that would make all the Sweeties pass out.

Servitude, the Sweetie angel, tossed out a mundane physics-locking device on the ground – one of Corona’s own design. She herself was perfectly fine, since she kept her magic anchored to reality at all times – but none of the others were prepared for this, their magic powers vanishing.

Corona stood alone. Not even she could go against the might of the entire League of Sweetie Belles at once.

“Surrender,” Allure demanded. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Corona got the sense Allure wasn’t being completely truthful in her sentiment.

All she could hope for was that the other teams completed their missions. Minna would have taken some of the Merodi fleet… Feferi would have gotten the Prognostici…

Then she remembered what the fourth mission was and smiled. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ll be surrendering.”

“Corona don’t be stupi-”

Clandestine was thrown over the League of Sweetie Belles, crashing into the locking device, shattering it.

The sea of small, mostly white unicorns turned to see where that had come from.

They saw me. I teleported a notebook to myself. “Who wants to go first?”

Allure apparently did. She summoned her Heart and charged.

I wrote a sentence. She stabbed herself in the ear, throwing her aim off. “Wh-”

I fired a laser at Burgerbelle, prompting her to fall over in the perfect way to throw the ninja Sweeties off balance. I wrote another sentence. The floor Corona had made unstable crumbled under one of the high mage Sweeties.

The League charged, scampering after me as one mass – leaving Corona enough time to gather her friends and teleport away.

I could have done the same. I could have arranged for a moment to teleport away. But I didn’t do that.

Because I was going to make a point.

I scribbled a note, raising a magic shield to push them all back. I introduced conflict into their ranks, getting a few to fight each other. I prompted Thrackerzod’s eldritch nature to act up in a million-to-one moment, making her feel a deep connection to her old master, prompting something akin to homesickness. I dropped the shield and looked through the Eye of Rhyme – seeing where every hoof, every laser, every attack would hit, and moving my body perfectly to dodge every last one.

They started to realize I was toying with them.

It was a fair description of what was happening. I was in control of everything happening, and nothing was going to hit me.

I had even accounted for the Pinkie Belle – she could move out of my sights in some ways, so I relied on normal magic to deal with her. Overwhelming force to keep her at bay with a laser strike.

Suzie jumped towards me, stretching out her hand. “U-Catastrophe!”

“SUZIE, NO!” Squeaky gasped in panic.

“DO IT!” Allure shouted.

The woman’s massive tree-shaped Stand erupted from her back, coursing around me with its spiked, yet elegant branches. I let it hit me with a smirk, though I ensured my body would regenerate from the physical assault prior.

“Your curse is useless, now,” I said, a careful smirk planted on my face. “You no longer have a last resort.”

“Wh…”

I stepped to the side, dodging an attack from a pain-whip, redirecting it to Suzie’s face. I teleported the offending Mattie in front of me. “You should have known this was pointless.”

Mattie shrugged. “Can’t fault me for trying, mate.”

I tore Mattie’s pain-whips and started lashing Sweeties one by one, the excessive power in the weapons forcing the unicorns to writhe on the ground in agony. I was untouchable.

I sensed they were going to radio for military assistance. As strong as I was – enough warships could take me out. I wasn’t willing to chance that.

But I did make a point of unleashing a burst of energy, tossing the League of Sweetie Belles like confetti.

“I hope you all understand what this means,” I said.

Allure tried one last-ditch effort to cut me with her Heart. Without even looking, I caught her in my telekinesis and tossed her into the air. Then I teleported away, gone.

The prison break had been successful. The Prognostici had been stolen. The Military Division had lost a sizeable portion of their fleets to Minna.

Allure was going to break when she found out who was behind that. As impassive as I may have seemed, that fact alone weighed heavily on my heart.

It was a tragedy of family.

~~~

The time of chaos and randomly flinging superweapons was over.

Now there were only two sides that mattered – the Xeelee and Them. There was no need to fling massive destruction at each other, ripping holes in existence that boggled minds with their sheer size.

No, the time had come for more reasonable warfare. A kind much more akin to the war men would fight on any Earth they appeared on, with geography, weapons, and soldiers. Admittedly, in this case the geography was the strange multiversal connections that had come about due to everyone pressing their nuclear buttons at once, the weapons were split between technological wonders of cosmic power and spiritual sparks of endless creativity, and the soldiers were digital consciousnesses and beings akin to angels.

In simpler terms, the Xeelee had started using their actual ships as their primary mode of offense while Them had stopped devoting all their time to twisting universes in increasingly elaborate ways to annoy the Xeelee.

The Xeelee seemed to have all the advantages: they had the rapidly reproducible technology, their citizens rarely experienced death due to their digital nature, and they hadn’t suffered as much structural damage as Them had. However, Them had proven to be exceptionally creative in their tactics, doing things the Xeelee found themselves unable to reliably predict. It was not because Them’s plans were overly complicated, but because they were completely insane.

It went beyond kamikaze bombings. Although Xeelee were, in a vacuum, far more inventive, they refused to rely on powers outside of their complete control, which meant that Them with their Spirit often gained the advantage. Some of Them had created ‘game rule’ universes where Xeelee were challenged to life-or-death scenarios of chess, racing, or some other normally harmless pursuit. There was minimal success in bending reality away from the ‘game rules’, simply because Them were really good at making universal physics adhere to their bizarre scenarios. Now that there was only one enemy, they could tailor-make the battles to be as interesting as possible.

Some were truly fought as space battles. Others involved jumping through hoops. Still others were essay contests.

◊X◊ Are you enjoying yourselves?

“Quite well, thanks for asking.”

The Them were aware that these ‘challenge universes’ only went so far in the war effort. If enough were created, the Xeelee would find them irksome and just start Piano Wiring them to desolation, regardless of the consequences. But kept in balance, the Xeelee thought they could pull ahead of the competition – especially if it meant Them weren't focusing on the more traditional battles.

Them didn’t have any issues multitasking, unfortunately for the Xeelee. Despite their heavy losses, they kept fighting. Many of them had ended up laughing while doing it, finding the conflict immensely enjoyable.

A sort of standoff had been created. Already, the Xeelee-Them portion of the War for Existence had lasted for more than double the rest of the war. Overall, the nuclear options were no longer on the table.

However, slowly but surely, the two sides began to tire. The Xeelee’s ability to endlessly grow their industrial base was sabotaged by some especially nasty tricks of Them, while Them were simply not able to regrow their population. The war of giants began to shrink down, the multiversal ripples calming. Those nations who had been trying frantically to hold their universes together let out a breath of relief – while others mourned the loss of their homes.

The Tower Rings weren’t even part of the war much anymore – constructing them was a waste of time if they could be spotted instantly and destroyed from anywhere. The Xeelee and Them needed to win before they could safely encode the Dark Tower.

They both knew the war couldn’t last much longer. Eventually, the numbers of Them would dwindle too much, or the Xeelee’s tattered digital storage would no longer be enough to house their entire population.

“MOTION CARRIED!”

The world would never find out who would have won.

“EXECUTE THE DECIDED ORDER!”

The Xeelee and Them had forgotten about the Celestialsapiens. At first, the Xeelee were pleased – surely the Celestialsapiens had debated to side with preservation? That would mean sure victory!

The Xeelee were half right.

The Celestialsapiens were definitely for preservation.

But they were not for a Xeelee victory.

Half the Celestialsapien forces moved to destroy Them, not letting the energy beings enjoy any of their games. The other half appeared right around the Xeelee Piano Wire Superweapons. They were not well enough defended to face against the might of a mostly unharmed Class 1 superpower.

The Piano Wire Superweapons were ordered to fire on the Xeelee central nodes at full power. With most of them firing at once, they were enough to rip a hole straight through the E-Sphere.

The Xeelee mainframe crashed, leaving only fragments to panic about what to do. A Xeelee program hadn’t truly died in eons. Most of the population had just been extinguished by their own weapons.

The Xeelee automatic protocols initiated – essentially ordering a self-destruct for any device not housing an actual Xeelee within it. These weapons decimated the Celestialsapien forces, as did Them’s efforts on the other side.

They did damage, to be sure – but it was a last-ditch effort on a living giant.

The Celestialsapiens were the last Class 1 civilization standing.

“ORDER OBTAINED. THERE WILL BE NO MORE CLASS 1 WARS. THE CELESTIALSAPIENS DECLARE THEIR CONTROL OVER THE SEATS OF THE MULTIVERSE. WE SHALL DEVOTE OURSELVES TO THE PRESERVATION OF THE MULTIVERSE AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WHAT WAS LOST. THERE WILL BE NO INTERFERENCE FROM ANY EQUAL POWER…”

~~~

Eve looked at the two reports on the screen in front of her.

One was of Corona’s break-in to Celestia City and the portion of the Merodi fleet that left with them. Less than five percent of their forces, but it was still a crippling blow.

The other report was more recent. The Celestialsapiens were still announcing their ‘Reconstruction Declaration’ to the multiverse. There was a lot there, but the part scrolling by now was about the reconstruction of the E-Q Strand, the only ancient multiversal structure that could be salvaged.

One of her oldest friends had betrayed Eve for something she believed, much like how Eve had betrayed the Merodi for the sake of the war all those years ago… It hurt.

It also hurt to see the map of the multiverse. The Q-Sphere was elongated from all the tidal forces, and a huge bite was taken out of it where the Beyonders and Spline had annihilated each other. But it had suffered the least damage out of all the locations. The D-Sphere was gone, leaving the Cosmic Heavens and Outer Existence as nothing more than scant remaining tatters. The E-Sphere had a giant hole in it, for one, and in two places it looked like it had been shaved clean. The Strands didn’t even exist anymore, with only a single fuzzy line representing the sketchy E-Q Strand. The Unrealities had been pushed further out than they had been before, making them virtually impossible to access.

And the spark that was the Dark Tower sat just above the E-Q strand, taunting everyone with its presence.

Her mind decided it was done panicking over what was probably a third of the multiverse ceasing to exist, substituting that for whatever Corona was doing. What was she planning? What was Twilence doing there? Clearly the Celestialsapiens had won! The multiverse was going to be preserved!

That was good!

Why, then, did Eve want Corona’s betrayal to mean something?

She let out an angry wail and stamped her hoof into the ground hard enough to dent the metal. “What were you thinking, Corona? Look what you’ve done! I hope you’re happy!”

Eve knew Corona wasn’t happy. This wasn’t what she’d wanted. She’d wanted them to make a decision. Instead, the multiverse had been torn apart like rotten cloth.

Rev was right. It was all evil now.

“Get out of your funk now,” Monika shouted, glitching into existence out of nowhere. “Something is very, very wrong.”

“Wh- what?”

“I sense it. And I know the only reason I don’t know is because Twilence is blocking it. Something’s going to go wrong.”

Eve nodded. “What can we do?”

“I have no idea! But you’re the face of preservation, so, I don’t know, do something!”

Eve shook her head. “I may be the face – but I’m just a pony. The multiversal media has blown her role and mine out of proportion.”

“You idiots don’t realize ye-”

The TARDIS appeared in the room not only sideways, but burnt. Parts of it were so damaged they were shimmering with unstable spacetime.

The Doctor popped out – with a face none of them had ever seen before. Eve thought it looked fresh.

“You?” he said, shaking his head. “Good enough, you have higher communication. Get a message out to the Celestialsapiens now! There’s no time!”

~~~

Omega Jade, Alpha Jade, and John were hanging around the League of Sweetie Belles, helping tend to everyone there by request of Omega Jade – these white unicorns were her friends, after all.

Allure had been working hard to get the League back into shape after Twilence trounced them, but Alpha Jade had told her she needed to rest. Allure didn’t argue – going to sit on one of the League’s many lounge couches, taking a moment to breathe.

John eventually joined her, looking just as clueless and confused as he always did. “…Hey.”

“Do you know what it’s like to be betrayed?” Allure asked.

“Uh… Not really?” John admitted. “My friends and I did some stupid things, but I think the only person who actually betrayed us was Aranea… and I didn’t know her that well. …Actually, Vriska did, I guess, but that’s complicated.”

“It always is.”

John blinked. “…Yeah, I, uh, don’t know what to tell you. She believes in what she’s doing?”

“So does almost every person in existence,” Allure said, staring at the ceiling. “…John, what would you do?”

“Uh, if my friend betrayed me, or my kid? ‘Cus I don’t have a kid.”

Allure twitched. “Friend.”

“I dunno. Get upset, a little angry, but then figure out why they did it?” he shrugged. “Move on.”

“Move on!?” Allure spat, standing on her hooves. “I gave my life for her! I devoted every waking moment of my existence to bring her up! I was alone and she was alien and we still worked! And then she goes and turns evil without even giving me any signs!? What the hell is up with that!?!”

“Uh, cool it with the ‘evil’ there…”

“Don’t you tell me to cool it!” Allure shouted. “I’m not going to cool it! Can’t you see? Preservation – the side of good. Collapse – the side of evil. It’s a story we’ve been part of OVER and OVER and OVER AGAIN!” Tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I guess they were just born to go down this road, huh!?”

“Allure, calm down,” Omega Jade said, walking into the room with her other self right behind her. “That feeling you have right now? That is why they want the collapse.”

Allure blinked. “Wh…”

Omega Jade hugged the little unicorn. “They don’t want to go through the story over and over again. They want to go down a different road.”

Allure pulled back and looked into Omega Jade’s empty eyes. “Jade…”

“John’s right in one thing, you c-”

Whatever words of solace Jade was going to say – and whatever epiphany Allure was about to receive – it was not meant to be. Alpha Jade screamed from the bottom of her very soul. Her ghostly body collapsed into a single dot of white energy – and left. Her anchor bracelet fell to the ground with a clank.

Allure didn’t have time to get angry – because it was happening to John as well. But he wasn’t being condensed, his retcon powers were flashing everywhere. White zaps of energy lashed out to random objects, making them cease to exist. Omega Jade distorted space to keep herself and Allure safe while John slowly lost stability – and zapped away.

Neither Allure or Omega Jade had any idea what had just happened.

~~~

Six souls were collected.

The temporal conditioning was supposed to get seven of them, but Roxy the Rogue of Void had somehow eluded them.

No matter. She wasn’t important anyway. What was important was the retconner. They didn’t force his soul into temporal stasis like the others, they had a use for him before he was sent on his way to his fate.

John Egbert would be their weapon.

It was a simple matter to control his mind and make him retcon universes that had been destroyed in the war back to existence. It took John a year of his life to do it – but to the outside multiverse it was no time at all, thanks to his masters.

The universes joined up with several others still in existence. Nineteen points of ‘temporal singularity’ that had been seeded long ago for a moment such as this. Each one had been a test – a use of temporal technology on the Class 1 civilizations, to prove that the technology was effective. That it could be used even against the grandest of giants.

After so long laying dormant, they saw their opportunity to trigger it.

The true power of applied time travel went on display. Seeds of temporal energy laced between the nineteen universes, threading particular universes together. It forced them to be causally related. It was a simple adjustment all things considered. Anyone with physics alteration could make one universe operate on the same timestream as another; it was just impractical for the most part. Much more interesting things could be done with non-causally-related universes.

But if one wanted to use time travel as a weapon, causality was the most dangerous of all the tricks.

All they had to do was wind time in one universe back an hour. Then every connected universe would go back an hour.

An hour ago, the Celestialsapiens hadn’t been in the universes they were in now. They had been in other universes.

With a flick, every universe was overwritten. Every entity within died as everything reverted back. And almost every Celestialsapien was erased. The Tower Ring they were creating – the one that would have not only preserved the multiverse, but also imposed limitations on time travel, ceased to exist.

One of the few Celestialsapiens who had gotten lucky enough to still exist was prepared to go to war – alone, if he had to. But the Lords of Time did not let them. They used their temporal snare to trap the godlike entity in a loop, allowing his power to become theirs.

“Oh, how I have been waiting for this day. For too long have we been hiding in the shadows, cowering in fear of you and your kind,” a Gallifreyan man said – a version of one called Rassilon. He was clearly not from within the standard deviation of Gallifreyan worlds. He was certainly a Time Lord, but he did not wear the robes signifying that, instead taking a simple whitish-gray robe with no designs on it whatsoever. His eyes were old, his skin impossibly young, and he wore an actual watch on his arm.

The Celestialsapien was unable to respond to Rassilon, but the Time Lord knew the being could hear him. “We’re going to use you. And it will hurt.”

A rod of blue energy drove itself into the Celestialsapien’s head. With that, Rassilon was sure everybody who mattered in the multiverse would be able to hear him.

“The mighty have fallen,” he declared with a booming voice. “The last of them at our hand – the hand of the Gallifreyan Time Lords! For eons we have been biding our time, hiding our true power from the Class 1 Civilizations! We are not merely a Class 2 society that doesn’t seem to grow – we are a Class 1 ready to burst the moment the dam breaks! Well, we have broken the dam. There are none to oppose us. This war – this war of our creation – has finally brought about what was meant to be since the dawn of time. An era where time across all worlds is taken as it was meant to – as a tool. It is foolishness to deny one of nature’s greatest and most inconsistent facets. Today, the multiverse enters a new era of Time! A time that includes the great powers of Retcon and Awareness within it! A time that the Time Lords bring about!” He raised his hand.

The Gallifreyan Tower Ring – which had been destroyed in the war – was retconned back into existence by John the puppet. It activated. “With this Ring the multiverse will be preserved – and time will become the true glory it is meant to b-”

“FULL POWER STARLIGHT BREAKER!”

The Tower Ring – and the universe it was in – collapsed into the Sea of Infinite Possibility.

“As Chief Sovereign of the Time Space Administration Bureau, I, Nanoha Takamachi, declare war on the Gallifreyan Time Lords!” Nanoha glared at the speaker she was yelling into – hoping Rassilon was taking her seriously. “We will not let you further spread your time into the multiverse. We will not let you be the only Class 1 society. Your world is not the world we seek.”

Rassilon was surprised – but not worried. He allowed himself to respond to her directly. “What are you going to do? You’re below us, Nanoha. The TSAB has not been hiding its power. You will lose.”

“I am not alone,” Nanoha said, simply.

Rassilon blinked.

“The Void declares war on the Gallifreyan Time Lords!”

“THE MANY-ANGLED ONES JOIN IN THIS WAR!”

“The Combine have marked the Gallifreyans as the primary threat.”

“This is the Starcross Society. The time for us to act has come. Your utter disregard for life is worse than that of the Stars.”

Two names rarely heard came up as well – the Planes of Oblivion and Tyrannon’s Empire. No doubt the last of the High-Class 2 societies, the Great Race of Yith, would also have pledged their allegiance, had their society not been destroyed with the D-Sphere. The Flowers were the only notable abstention.

“How can you all fight us as one?” Rassilon demanded, enraged. “Many of you are on opposite sides!”

“We’ll probably get to fighting each other eventually,” Nanoha admitted. “After we’re done with you. You can’t control the multiverse, Rassilon. Nobody can.”

“…Time will be on our side. As will retcon.”

“Rassilon…” Nanoha sighed – and then she got an idea. “Rassilon, if you surrender and stop this madness, all of us could sit down and talk again. Try to come to a peaceful resolution. Do what the Class 1 civilizations couldn’t. If you and your people could just let go of your dream of dominance, we could end this.”

She held out a hand – unsure if he could even see it. “Please. War or peace? The history books, in whatever form they take, will remember your decision here today. You have the chance to choose.”

There was a moment of silence.

“War.” Rassilon said. “Not even all of you together can face us. We are the Class 1 society.”

Nanoha shook her head.

They couldn’t accept a multiverse where their control over time would be limited. They didn’t care if millions died every time they reset a world – they needed that power to feel like they were the Time Lords.

They weren’t just fighting for control. They were fighting for their culture. And that was a much harder foe to talk down.

Nanoha Takamachi, Chief Sovereign of the TSAB, cut the call. She turned around to tell the armies to prepare for all-out war.

One war ends, another begins… she thought.

~~~

It was raining heavily outside Rev’s church. She doubted it was because a storm was scheduled – she expected that Corona’s reality anchors could only do so much for the worlds of Merodi Universalis and that they were still experiencing the disturbances of the Class 1 War for Existence.

At least that was over now. For all the Gallifreyans’ boasting, they couldn’t unleash the level of abject destruction that the real Class 1 societies did.

…Then again, Rev didn’t really know how damaging time travel weapons could be. Merodi Universalis had always relied on Aradia to take care of any time-related problems. It was not an area of science they looked too much into, mostly due to the ethical concerns.

She sighed and sent up a prayer. She had been doing that a lot more lately. Good for her spiritual life, she admitted to herself, but it was a sign of deeper problems in her psyche.

Existence was falling apart. Of course there were going to be issues. Even if she believed there was life after death, death was still a horrible thing. All this destruction…

It was evil no matter which end it was in the name of.

She really should be getting home. She’d already locked up the church, all she had to do was teleport back home. Try to get some sleep.

Sleep. Wouldn’t that be nice if she could sleep without magic assistance.

She heard a loud thump at the door. She teleported over and unlocked the entrance to the church, throwing the doors open. Out there in the rain was a Twilight Sparkle curled up on the stairs, shivering. She wore a black cloak that covered most of her body, and the lighting made it difficult to see much else about her – but she was definitely a Twilight.

The Twilight whimpered. “Help… me…”

Rev levitated the Twilight into the church, using her magic to heat the mare up. “It’s okay now… It’s okay, I’ve got you. You’re safe here.”

“It’s not okay… It’s not okay!” the Twilight wailed, putting her hooves on her head. “Not okay…”

Rev put a gentle hoof around her. “But you are safe. I’m here for you.”

The Twilight said nothing. She closed her eyes tighter and whimpered.

“What’s your name?” Rev said as she brought some light into the church hall and grabbed a large blanket.

“…Rina.”

121 - Temporal Snare

It was impossible to fight John’s power head on.

Every action could be undone. Every battle twisted into a victory for Gallifrey. Every pivotal moment altered in favor of the Time Lords. Banning time travel from specific universes did nothing to prevent this – John could appear anywhere that the Gallifreyans wanted him to with almost no limitations. If the Gallifreyans were to send him back to the start of the war to remove Nanoha, they could end the conflict in an instant.

But they didn’t do that. It seemed like an obvious course of action at first, to just solve their problem before it began. But then they would never know they had a problem. And as much as they celebrated the use of time travel, they at least had ways to definitely access alternate timelines at any time they wanted. A retconned multiverse was gone unless they could deduce the exact criteria that sent John back the first time, which would be an impossible case on the full multiversal scale.

Not to mention the fact that it would end up in a John-duplicate, and that level of ka instability was just deemed unsafe. There was too much potential for one to turn and have a war of retcons.

And so John had to be used carefully – to tweak specific moments in ways that ensured he wouldn’t duplicate himself without a stable loop. The Time Lords were definitely the people for the job, but it meant their superweapon wasn’t invincible. John was, after all, just a human – and he could be damaged as such. In his current state, if someone managed to kill him, it would certainly be Just. The Gallifreyans had to keep him out of the direct line of fire.

Furthermore, the Many-Angled Ones had quickly developed what was being called Schrödinger’s Strategy. It was difficult for the Gallifreyans to have John manifest in two locations at the same relative metatime, so the alliance began to make plans that depended on John’s presence. If he was not detected in a location, one mission would be sent. But if he was, another would be. In some cases there was a third or even fourth option that would trigger if the Gallifreyans did pull off a stable retcon loop.

It was horrendously inefficient and ended up wasting a lot of resources, but it seemed to minimize the damage John did to the war effort. Not that anyone could know for sure. Whatever the Gallifreyans decided to retcon would stay retconned. Nobody knew if they were sticking to only small-scale edits, or if they got desperate and were willing to erase large moments. Not even the Gallifreyans would know that.

This was probably why they weren’t using John’s power to its fullest. If they screwed something up, it was dangerous to them. Go back too far and the Class 1s would return and wipe the Gallifreyans from existence for daring to plant those tower rings.

In the end, the Gallifreyans had a last-ditch trump card that could only be used in localized places unless they wanted to suffer severe and unpredictable consequences.

They were also being attacked from eight different fronts. John had been immensely helpful to execute a pre-prepared plan against a mostly singular enemy. Not to come up with stuff on the fly against societies that were just as clever as they were.

Granted, the Gallifreyans had time travel. But what did that really give them? Especially since time travel in universes could be shut off with enough technological know-how.

This evened the playing field considerably.

“John spotted in secondary port!” Scarcity shouted through the intercom – connecting to the rest of the fleet. She stood on the bridge of a tremendous Starcross Society ship, the lurking behemoth brimming with the light of Stars. It was far larger than any of the other ships in their fleet – though once couldn’t exactly call the geometric eldritch oddity that was the Many-Angled One a ship.

“Jump to point 7-Z,” Scarcity continued. She had been fighting in this war for three days in her perceived time and she still couldn’t quite believe it. She hated everyone she was fighting alongside with a burning passion but she hated the Gallifreyans and their arrogance even more. She had been elated when she learned the Class 1 Civilizations were destroying themselves, bringing the multiverse closer to the proper existence, but the Gallifreyans had to go and ruin that feeling; replacing it with dread of a single overlord.

An overlord that would have interfered enough to alter the way time worked in Starcross Society worlds. That had been more than enough to summon them from their isolation.

Scarcity didn’t have to like it. She especially didn’t have to like working alongside Nanoha’s people. She’d buried those memories long ago.

The fleet finally managed to jump to point 7-Z, one of the many universes of the Gallifreyan cluster. The first thing they did was force time travel to stop – resulting in the Time Lord infrastructure shattering. Those in transit died, those in the future were forgotten, and those in the past who traveled too far never arrived. It was brutal, but required. If the Time Lords were allowed free use of their element, the fight would be over before it began.

The Starcross Society ship fired upon the Gallifreyan fleet in orbit, trying to punch through their defenses and gain a strong connection to the planet below. The Gallifreyan ships copied the exteriors of any solid-matter ships facing them and fought back with the same weapons.

This did not work on the Many-Angled One. It took the shape of a square interlaced inside an icosahedron and barreled through the ships, reducing them to flat two-dimensional shapes that could not operate any further. The full TARDISes in the Gallifreyan fleet didn’t flatten, but they were forced into an emergency state that was easier to pick off.

A TSAB and Combine ship worked together to punch a wormhole to the surface of the planet – which they threw a device into. The device removed the protective barrier around the planet, allowing the Planes of Oblivion to enter.

The Planes of Oblivion were an unusual ‘society’, best likened to a hoard of demonic chaos energies. They had no ships, but they had access to a seemingly endless supply of brutal warriors in a highly specialized universe polymer-sphere designed to dial almost any universe in as many locations as was necessary to bring it to Oblivion.

Demonic hordes poured out over the surface of the planet, laying it to waste.

Scarcity grinned with satisfaction. Nanoha may have objected to this method of warfare, but it was the only one the Planes of Oblivion knew. Endless strife and destruction. They would rival the Beyonders with their brutality, were they allowed to continue.

She checked the report of the battle – the Oblivion soldiers were laying waste to the target for this mission, a dimensional transmission node. The Class 1 War had ruined most natural Nexus universes completely, making the previous ease of traveling the multiverse a sudden difficulty. Only societies that had strong dimensional connections between them could move as they had before, and to move elsewhere, they needed Nexus universes of their own construction. The Time Lords had them.

They were about to have one less.

“Dimensional portal detected!” a human from the Void reported from their crystalline ship.

“John?” Scarcity asked.

“No retcon, only a semi-major ka surge.”

“Then what is it?”

“Unknown.”

They found out what it was a second later. A tremendous clock the size of moon appeared in the space around them. It was golden-laced and had numerous gears sticking out its sides. It glowed in such a way that it could be mistaken for a comet from a distance.

Scarcity knew what it was – it was a time-enforcer. “Get some reality drills active!”

The Many-Angled One took the role, using its shape to emphasize the stability of the universe they were in. But it was pathetic compared to the power of the clock. Time began to flow slower for everything except the clock. Soon it would be too fast for them to defend against.

Then the Living Tribunal appeared, arms crossed. Around him were several hundred Skaian users of Time. “Stop this distortion of time!”

The Time players moved in – mostly composed of versions of Aradia – forcing the time on the clock to stop accelerating. The clock decided to charge a weapon anyway, one to destroy these puny Skaians.

The Living Tribunal punched his fist right through the center of the clock. It ceased to exist.

At the same time, the dimensional transmission node fell, disrupting Gallifrey’s ability to navigate the multiverse.

At this point, the leader of an expedition might have said ‘good work team, let’s go home’. That’s certainly what Nanoha would have done.

Scarcity didn’t. She made sure the Aradias were tying this up in a fixed-point paradox so the Gallifreyans couldn’t just clap their hands and undo the work. “That’s that. Everyone, back to the sidelines.” She spoke with distaste.

She wanted to be out here fighting. Laying waste to the arrogant humanoids.

~~~

I’ll just take a walk to clear my head, what could go wrong?

Eve was quickly realizing how absurd that thought had been. Everything could go wrong the moment she went outside. Most of all, the thing she was trying to get away from was shoved in her face out here.

She had taken a few steps outside of Canterlot Castle and was assaulted by reporters, angry citizens, and worried people.

She started out making a serious attempt to alleviate their fears.

“What do you think of the war?”

“I think it’s a terrible thing that is, unfortunately, completely necessary.”

“What do we have to gain from engaging in this war?”

“We’ll protect ourselves from the ideas of time abuse and the collapse. Though, I will say we aren’t actually doing much in the current war. All we have to offer is the Living Tribunal and the Shaping Mechanism.”

“What did you do to get the Living Tribunal handed to us?”

“Nothing. The One Above All made that choice Himself.”

“Do you approve of the destruction of the D-Sphere?”

“No, I do not.”

“What are your personal feelings on the future of the multiverse?”

“Uh… I… I have a lot to think about at the present moment, the deep future isn’t something I’m pondering.”

“What should we do?”

“Live your lives as you always have. The dimensional tremors should not occur again.”

“What are your opinions of Princess Corona?”

Eve froze. She looked at the reporter who had asked the question with a hateful expression. He recoiled in mild fear, blinking from her sudden fire.

Eve opened her mouth to give him a piece of her mind – but she felt a tear run down her cheek. The sensation stopped her cold. She could no longer remember what she was going to say.

“Show’s over,” Monika said, appearing in front of Eve. “Everyone back off.”

“Monika, what are your intentions with th-”

“I said back off.”

All of them backed off. It wasn’t because they had a choice.

“Monika… Fix their minds.”

“It was a temporary file adjustment,” Monika muttered, jump-cutting herself and Eve back into Canterlot Castle. “They’ll all be back to normal in a minute.”

“They’ll use this to slander you in the media.”

Monika made it pretty clear how much she cared about that by letting out a mocking laugh.

Eve felt the need to lecture Monika on caring more about the opinions of others, but Flutterfree saved her the pain of that endeavor. The pegasus trotted up to Eve and embraced her. “I saw what was happening…”

Eve sighed. “Can’t even go outside anymore. War in here, war out there. War everywhere.”

“It is hard,” Flutterfree admitted.

“At least with Skarn I felt like I was fighting an enemy,” Eve muttered. “Now I’m not even sure I am fighting. Things are exploding around me and everyone’s scared, but nothing’s actually attacked us.”

“I’d be thankful for that,” Monika commented, fidgeting with her ponytail. “Very lucky we weren’t caught in the crossfire.”

“I’d think one as Aware as you would be smarter than that,” a new voice said.

Monika looked up with an annoyed expression. “Oh. Hello, Doctor.”

“Monika,” he said, clearly not pleased to be in her presence either.

“What do you mean, ‘smarter than that’?” Flutterfree asked the Doctor.

“I just find it astounding that you were successfully identified as ‘the Protagonist civilization’ by the Class 1s far before the war began, and not one decided to wipe you off the map just to be sure. Even my people are mostly ignoring you, reasoning that the Living Tribunal would continue fighting them regardless of your continued existence.” He leaned against a wall, expression darkened. “The Dark Tower is saving you.”

“That’s obvious,” Monika said, crossing her arms. “That’s why I’m here. Why else would I hang around?”

“A foil to Twilence,” the Doctor pointed out.

“The purposes are one and the same.”

“Again, you amaze me with how little you actually know.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something useful? Like stopping your people from putting the multiverse into temporal slavery?”

The Doctor looked away, ashamed. “…Yes, I suppose I should be doing that.”

“Why aren’t you?” Eve asked.

“The methods I have to do so can all be undone,” the Doctor pointed out. “I can’t beat the retcon. And neither can you.”

“Nanoha seems to be doing fine,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“Nanoha hasn’t put the Time Lords into a corner yet. The moment they know they’re going to lose, they’ll rewrite everything. They may, on an intellectual level, understand that would mean killing their present selves in most cases, but they haven’t made the emotional connection yet. Time travel is so pedestrian to them, there’s no way it should be regulated.”

Flutterfree looked at the Doctor with hard – but sad – eyes. “…Why did you use it so much?”

“It was a fact of existence,” the Doctor said. “It’s outrageously prevalent… If I ignored it, so much would have been lost.”

“…Those lives lost through the altered timelines are just as important as the ones you saved,” Flutterfree pointed out.

Eve put a hoof on Flutterfree. “That’s true. But…”

“I know,” Flutterfree said, shaking her head. “We can never see them. Never get to know them. As far as we’re concerned, there’s only one timeline… Even we opted to just not think about it. Because nothing could be done…”

Monika put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Look, time travel isn’t the only issue, there’s things like me, Hells, pornos, etcetera. The only way to keep going with your sanity is to not think about it.”

“…Rick at least got something right,” the Doctor muttered. “You can’t think about everything. It’s too much of a burden. Too many variables.”

“Nobody has the right to make the decision,” Eve echoed.

Flutterfree looked up. “Well, we’re being asked to. We don’t have the minds to work through it. We can’t weigh out every little detail. So we’re just going to have to go with our guts.”

“Horribly unreliable,” the Doctor muttered.

“What else are we going to do?”

All four of them fell silent.

After a while the Doctor sighed. “I’m going to think up ways to defeat John. There has to be something. Maybe Roxy is finally willing to be cooperative.”

“Good luck,” Eve told him.

The Doctor walked away, hunched slightly.

“When did everything get so depressing?” the Relations Overhead asked.

~~~

What a depressing memory.

Corona was looking at an old photograph – back in the early days of multiversal exploration, before Merodi Universalis was even a thing, she had gotten most of her friends together outside Canterlot High. Both Twilights, both Rarities, both Pinkies, both Spikes, both Trixies, Nova, Sugarcoat…

Some of these people were dead. Most of the rest of them were currently in Merodi Universalis, fighting against her.

A close-knit group of friends from so long ago, now at war.

…They hadn’t actually fought yet. But I had told her not to get hopeful. There was no way this story was going to resolve without them fighting each other in one way or another.

She tried her best to ignore what I had said. Her choice.

She tucked the photograph back in her battle-dress. She caught sight of the necklace that held Sai – the Artificial Intelligence had been quiet and acting weird lately. She should probably have her looked at. Once she found time.

As it was, all Corona’s time was occupied. While the war against Gallifrey went on, they were building up their forces. Preparing for a time when they could initiate the collapse. Their benefactors were Empress Twilight’s Void, but that was not where they were stationed.

Instead, they were at Poe’s Raven Hotel, using the hidden universe to its fullest potential. The structure usually used for comfort and rest had been repurposed to serve as a military base, mostly through the actions of Commander-In-Chief Minna. The pale woman had insisted they use ranks for the military to keep things organized from the get-go even though there wasn’t any actual fighting.

Minna had placed military-grade scanning stations on every wall, set advanced replicator terminals at opportune places around the room, and had ensured everyone knew exactly what room was theirs and which rooms were for storage.

Poe had to keep making new rooms. He claimed it annoyed him, but Corona knew he was elated to have so many people around.

Currently, the forces at the Raven Hotel consisted only of the Merodi Universalis defectors and the few Void personnel who could be spared from the war against Gallifrey. This small group included Mage Rarity, a unicorn who had never left Corona’s side since they had arrived.

Conversely, Lady Rarity had acted in a similar fashion. Corona always had a double Rarity tag-team following her. She occasionally thought one of them said something, when it was really the other, but that wasn’t a big deal – the big deal was that they never seemed to agree on much of anything.

“Blumiere should get to work immediately,” Mage Rarity was saying. “Time will be of the essence.”

“He will be a shining beacon for them to find us,” Lady Rarity countered. “The navigation networks haven’t been sufficiently destroyed yet.”

“If it was a beacon, the navigation networks wouldn’t matter.”

“You understand my point.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“The point is it draws unwanted attention!”

“In a time where we will be hidden by a war. If we act later, we’ll be a prime target.”

Corona glanced at Blumiere, letting the two pony voices drift into the background of her perception. “What do you think?”

“I think it doesn’t matter, in the end,” Blumiere pointed out. “I was just talking with Twilence…”

Corona sucked in a deep breath. “Right… right…” She checked a band on her wrist – they were part of the Narrative right now. “Think she’s actually keeping the Pinkies from seeing us?”

Blumiere shrugged. “Only partially, I’m told.”

“…Right.” She sighed. “…So, if you were given complete control of when you start working with the Prognostici, what would you do?”

“I’d start… when I felt the urge to.”

“See, I don’t think that’s going to fly with the horses back there.”

Blumiere looked at them in bemusement. “Why do you act like they’re in charge? You’re the spirit of this endeavor.”

Corona didn’t try to deny it, but she also didn’t try to hide her contempt. “Didn’t want to be.”

“The best leaders are those who have power thrust upon them,” Blumiere pointed out. “Those who seek it…”

Corona nodded. “Are you asking me to tell you what to do?”

“Not at all. I’m simply saying that I will start when you order – or when I feel like it. Really, whenever I start will be the opportune moment.”

Corona put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “In that case, you have complete freedom to choose, but be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

Blumiere adjusted his hat. “I will. …And Corona?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for releasing me.”

Corona smiled awkwardly. “…You’re welcome.”

“I hope neither of us live to regret it.”

Corona looked at him with understanding eyes. She nodded and turned back to the Rarities – who had stopped arguing after noticing Corona was dealing with it herself, and had instead shifted to conversation about the strength of military forces.

“We’re miniscule,” Lady Rarity pointed out. “I doubt there will be another mutual destruction conclusion to this era of the war. Merodi Universalis itself, united, would only be a mid-tier combatant. We’re just an offshoot. And don’t pretend like your Void forces aren’t about to be decimated.”

Mage Rarity smiled. “I could explain the plan about that – but I think I’ll let my old friend do it instead.”

I teleported in front of her the moment she finished. “Mhm. We will not be the only ones seeking collapse, Lady Rarity.” I held up one of the pages of my notebook to her, letting her grab it in her magic. It showed a diagram of a spiral with several symbols that represented multiversal nations. “This war is a great endless cyclone – one that starts by unleashing lightning with the most power, but over time dies out. Eventually, the energy binding the storm together dissipates. At this point someone will be able to make a Tower Ring and not instantly be found. And the conflict will be over.”

“How do- oh.” Lady Rarity figured it out.

I nodded. “The higher powers fall over time. I do not see Gallifrey winning. They are not masters of ka. There are too many factors working against them. Not that I have any particular idea how they’re going to be taken care of, or what it will cost. After that, who knows how many of the High Class-2 societies will have fallen? My pen says several. And we will be at the collapse with allies we don’t even know about yet.”

“Allies who do more than us.”

I nodded slowly. “Perhaps your fleets don’t mean much. But your heroes, they do mean a lot.” I looked at Corona. “You and Eve are already being romanticized heavily. You are the faces of the causes. Your actions – as an individual and as a nation – are immensely important.”

“…Is that the solution?” Corona asked.

I sighed. “The question you want answered is not one I can answer for you, Corona. The answer may not even matter in the end.”

Corona nodded slowly. “Guess I’m just going to have to come to terms with that.”

“…You!?” Sai beeped, starting to laugh.

Corona looked down at the necklace. “I need to get her checked out. Don’t suppose Pidge’s made it yet?”

“No,” Lady Rarity said. “Our… source hasn’t had the opportunity. There are others available.”

“I know the perfect person to look at her!” Mage Rarity said, suddenly smiling – something that seemed a little out of place for her. She held up one of her front hooves, holding out… nothing.

Corona blinked. “…What?”

“Mite,” a synthetic voice came from her hoof, seemingly from no source.

I gasped. “Oh. My. Tower. Mite! It’s so good to see you – Rarity, how did you keep him hidden?”

“Carefully,” Mite responded.

Mage Rarity rolled her eyes. “Just didn’t make a big deal about it. Works wonders.”

“…Explain?” Corona asked.

“Mite was one of the members of my team,” I said. “He’s a nanomachine so small you can’t see, gifted with some odd properties by his local Discord. He’s great at interfacing with technology – and speaking in one word sentences.”

“Oh. Well, if you trust him, he can check out Sai.”

“Amiga, he’s already checking me out,” Sai reported. “Rawr.”

“Ocelot,” Mite beeped.

“…Que?”

“Precisely.”

Corona let herself smile. At least not all the antics were gone from her life. If those hadn’t come with her… she probably would have gone mad.

~~~

“Report!” O’Neill blurted.

Squeaky raised an eyebrow and glanced at Yellow Diamond. “We gave you a report ten minutes ago.”

“I don’t care, report again! Give us something to do. It’s better than sitting on our asses!”

“We’re all sitting down,” Yellow Diamond pointed out.

O’Neill got up and started pacing.

“Look, O’Neill,” Squeaky placed her hooves together in front of her snout and furrowed her brow. “Our forces are already in the best defensive positions possible. There’s no point in launching an offense – our Aradias are already working.”

“Less and less all the time,” O’Neill muttered.

“Do you want to reinstate militaristic time travel?”

O’Neill didn’t respond.

“Look, the Aradias of Celestia City have found ways to duplicate themselves without erasure and their numbers should be back up soon.”

“Her effectiveness has lowered,” Yellow Diamond pointed out.

“She’s minimizing death.”

Yellow Diamond grunted, unable to understand the whole devotion to life. “Causes are better.”

“And look what Red Diamond did,” O’Neill muttered under his breath.

Yellow Diamond smashed her fist into the table, destroying it. “She is clearly flawed!”

“What I don’t get is why you don’t take your private ship and hunt her down right now.”

“It would be foolish and ineffective,” Yellow Diamond seethed.

“Not much of a change from right now,” he said, holding out his hand in a mock gesture even he wasn’t sure meant anything. “We’re all just playing musical chairs until we yell at each other enough to shut up.”

Squeaky sighed. “It’s a difficult time. But we have to stand together.”

“Already failed at that, Squeaky,” O’Neill sighed. “…I wonder what she saw in that future of hers.”

“Probably nothing.”

“Then why did she go?”

Squeaky narrowed her eyes. “Remember where she came from. She had that entire place destroyed with everyone inside. Everything. She’s willing and has good reason to.”

“And the others have none!” Yellow Diamond blurted. “Red was a Gem, one of us! And Rosalina was one of your ‘environmental’ types!”

“Rosalina believes in cycles,” O’Neill said, looking into the distance. “Almost religiously. Creation and rebirth…”

“And Red…” Squeaky looked at Yellow Diamond with confused eyes. “Let’s be honest, none of us really understood her.”

Yellow Diamond had nothing to say to this.

“…Can we get to the report?” O’Neill asked.

“Living Tribunal left the Shaping Mechanism again. Aradias deploying. Defenses holding,” Squeaky droned. “Happy?”

“Nope, but that’ll have to do.” He sat down in his chair. “…I want to go fishing.”

“I think we’d all like to go fishing rather than deal with this.”

Yellow Diamond, for once, didn’t think that was stupid.

~~~

As soon as the story looked to her, Pinkie appeared in front of Monika. “I need a ka-scramble.”

Monika looked up from the paperwork Eve was having her fill out to become an ‘official advisor’. “What?”

“Starbeat’s a bit busy with civil war and I need to do a thing without the Aware people knowing about it. Especially Twilence.”

“Can’t guarantee protection from her,” Monika said, pointing her finger at Pinkie and adjusting reality. “But there you go, feel free to do whatever you want for the next scene.”

“Thanks.” Pinkie saluted, bouncing back through her powers to a small, dark room. In a series of quick jumps that really pushed her current interpretation of ‘the rules’, she filled it with four other people: Jotaro, Pidge, Nova, and Vriska.

“…Okay, everyone including Pidge but not Flutterfree…” Nova said, scratching her chin. “Pinkie, I already don’t like this.”

Pinkie laughed nervously. “Yeah. Yeah and you’re about to like it a lot less.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’m sure all of you have as well. We thought, at first, that we wouldn’t be able to do anything. That we were tiny little insignificant pawns in this war. The best we could do was give John, or something, to the fight.

“I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that we can make a difference – on an individual level. So I’ve had to work my way through that. I’ve had to put away all the cakes, parties, and smiles for a bit and make a decision.”

She looked at the past words – all the way back to the sixth chapter. “I was so naïve back then. I thought I was deciding if I would experience death and hardship all around me. I thought I was deciding if I was willing to be part of an adventure. But that decision? …I really was juggling lives in my hooves that day. I was placing myself here. There was no way I could have known that… Could have known half the things…

“And I knew things, I knew more about what was out there than any of us! And it stayed that way for a long time! I made powerful, hard, important decisions based on that. I put on the good ol’ massacre dress and sawed people in half based on it! I became a monster sometimes!” She probably would have been crying if she could. She wasn’t sure. “You think I’d be the most able to work against the system, to mitigate the damage ka brings… but I fall into it just like everyone else. The only difference is that I know how much of a prisoner I am. I know what a cruel master it is.”

Everyone was silent.

Pinkie shook her head, trying to keep her mane poofed up. She smiled. “…I’m going to go to Corona. I’ve gotten in contact with one of her people here. I want you to come with me.”

There was silence for a few seconds.

Nova let out a deep sigh first. “Pinkie… You’re our Captain. You’re our leader. You’re our friend.” She smiled warmly and put a hoof on Pinkie’s – more for her benefit than for the senseless earth pony’s. “I trust you. If you think this is what needs to be done… I’ll believe in you.”

Vriska shrugged. “Sure. What she said.”

Pidge snorted. “You have a way with words.”

“What? Oh, you want something more?” Vriska cleared her throat. “Pinkamena Diane Pie, if I have learned one thing in my time on your team, it’s that you are the leader for a reason. Even when you weren’t.”

Pinkie smiled brightly. “…It means a lot to hear you say that Vriska.”

“Wait, don-”

Pinkie pulled her into a hug. Vriska chuckled. “Soft pink ponies, yeesh…”

“What about Flutterfree?” Nova asked.

“I’m not taking her from Eve,” Pinkie said. “Nor Rev. She’ll be upset… But she’ll understand.”

“How can you be so sure?” Jotaro asked.

“Becau-” Pinkie stopped herself, sensing something bitter in Jotaro’s voice. “Jotaro, you don’t agree?”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro stood up and pulled his hat over his eyes. He took a step away.

“Jotaro, you don’t just get to storm off!” Nova blurted.

“I do what I want,” Jotaro commented, not slowing his pace.

“Jotaro, don’t be li-” Pidge began.

Pinkie shook her head. “Jotaro, if you don’t want to come, don’t. I’m not going to make you. I was just offering.”

“I know that,” Jotaro said.

“Jotaro, d-”

“Star Platinum: the World.” Never before had the words been spoken in such a somber tone.

Jotaro was gone.

“…That’s not going to be our goodbye,” Pinkie muttered through gritted teeth.

Pidge adjusted her glasses and pulled out her laptop. “I’ll find him. And try to keep him from spilling the beans. You just get things ready.”

“He’s not going to do that,” Nova asserted.

“He’s angry enough he might change his own mind,” Vriska pointed out.

Pinkie sighed, shaking her head. “…Pidge, I leave him to you. Nova, Vriska, bodyguard me in case there’s trouble. …If only party cannons could shoot across the multiverse, that’d be nice. But I already used up all my good girl points.”

“The Rules operate on a points system now?” Vriska asked.

“Yep. And they never will again. …For me. Unless they do.” Pinkie allowed herself to smile mischievously.

Vriska groaned.

~~~

Rev looked outside the windows of the church at the streets of Ponyville. A few days ago they had been mostly abandoned because everyone was panicked about recent events.

Now?

Now they were just as busy as they always were. It was true that people walked around with more nervous expressions than normal, but they were not fearing for their lives in the immediate future.

Rev knew exactly why. The tremors caused by the Class 1 war had ended. Since the Gallifreyan war had started, Merodi Universalis hadn’t felt anything. Virtually all the battles had been fought in the E-Sphere, and the Merodi armies weren’t even the ones fighting. The illusion of distance mixed together with the people slowly beginning to realize they had Plot Armor.

They knew that the reality anchor machines would not have withstood any semi-direct attacks from higher civilizations. The crossfire should have done much more damage. But only a few outer worlds had suffered, and there had been nothing since.

The people chose not to think about the result of the war likely killing them all. Even Rev’s own congregation had been like that for the most part.

She really wasn’t sure what to feel about that.

She wasn’t sure what to feel about a lot of things lately.

“Is the world ending already?”

Rev glanced behind herself to see the newest member of the church – the Twilight known as Rina. She was a dark-coated version with soft, blue eyes. She currently wore a white outfit that covered her wings discreetly, and a simple cross necklace hung from her neck.

“Curb your enthusiasm,” Rev said with a sad smile. “We’ve still got time.”

Rina nodded slowly, blinking. “How’s the bunker coming?”

“As well as it can,” Rev admitted. “I’ve enchanted the basement with the best magic spells I know and just got the reality anchors set up down there.”

“…Government issue?”

“Yep. Flutterfree pulled some strings. …Which is to say we just walked up to Eve and asked.”

Rina nodded slowly. She let out a sigh. “I finally get here and everything’s about to end…”

Rev put a hoof on Rina’s shoulder. “Don’t let that lessen your progress. The fact that you’re here at all is something to behold. You should be proud of yourself.”

Rina looked at her necklace. “It wasn’t me who dragged me here.”

Rev chuckled. “You still had to say yes. He doesn’t force people to come to Him.”

There was a potent silence for a few seconds.

“Thank you,” Rina said. “I know I’ve said it a lot, but…”

Rev smiled. “You can thank me as much as you want – but all I did was take you in. He deserves more thanks than I do.”

Rina nodded. “Do you think He will protect us if…”

“…I can’t make that deduction,” Rev said, all pleasantness draining from her face. “I know that whatever happens will be His will.”

“I understand leaving me in the dark, but you?”

“I’m in a position of power and fame,” Rev said – spitting out the last word with more than a little venom. “I have material things. I don’t think I’m allowed to know.”

“Is that God or the Tower stopping you?”

Rev let out a bitter laugh. “I wish I knew. Because if it was the former I’d at least be happy about it.”

“Happy…” Rina said, looking upward with a wistful expression.

~~~

Corona had taken it upon herself to get to know all the major people who had allied with her. She’d already taken care of Blumiere, the Void, myself, Rosalina, and Minna… but there was one currently here she not only didn’t know that well, but wasn’t even sure how to approach.

The individual in question was the mysterious and elegant Red Diamond, towering over everyone else so much that she couldn’t fit in the Raven Hotel’s lobby. She and the Gems she had taken from the Vein had set up ‘lodgings’ not in the Raven Hotel’s many rooms, but within their ships, drifting outside in the nothingness the universe had to offer.

Corona was flying through the nothingness, using magic to propel herself as she approached Red Diamond’s personal craft. Most Gem ships were shaped like body parts – and when that wasn’t the case, they liked simple geometric shapes. Red Diamond’s was neither of those things; instead it was a complex mesh of gear-like shapes that somewhat resembled a flower when put together.

Corona flapped her wings and flew right to it. She supposed she could teleport, but she didn’t exactly want to catch Red Diamond off-guard right now.

Report from the war, Raging Sights messaged Corona’s mind.

Anything important?

Planes of Oblivion are falling due to Gallifrey’s focus on them. They’re effectively out of the game. The twisted leylines left over from the Magic High Commission are failing, which is going to let Gallifrey’s time ripples further into the Q-Sphere. Otherwise, heavy losses on both sides.

“That’s one of ours down, and one of theirs…” Corona mused aloud.

Raging Sights had no further thoughts on the matter. Corona didn’t mind, she was more than a little tired of the political game already.

I’m going to end up working with people I really don’t like…

She arrived at the front of Red Diamond’s ship and signaled with both her hands and her magic. Red Diamond teleported Corona right into the Diamond’s personal chambers. Unlike her ‘sisters’, who seemed to prefer empty but elegant places to spend their time, Red Diamond’s was filled with rare relics, pieces of literature, and a large number of trinkets.

The Diamond smiled at Corona. Corona wasn’t sure why she found it unsettling.

“What brings you here?”

“Just checking around with everyone,” Corona answered. “How are your troops doing?”

“They are loyal to me. I have made certain of it. Yes, it involved methods you likely wouldn’t approve of, but spare me the ethical lecture.” She didn’t say it dismissively or arrogantly, but rather with a tired voice, that of a woman with a heavy burden.

Corona nodded. “I won’t. I doubt that’ll be the worst thing we do anyway. …On either side.”

Red Diamond nodded. “You want to know why I came?”

Way to cut to the chase… “Yeah, if you don’t mind.”

Red Diamond pointed to her body. “I was created to be a Diamond of the multiverse. Not necessarily one who understood, or one who controlled, but one who was. I feel it as a part of me. Sometimes this connection lets me see things that are to come, or to get feelings about the way events are flowing. But above all, it lets me feel what the multiverse feels.”

“Oh…” Corona said, grimacing.

“I am in great pain,” Red Diamond said, giving no indication of it in her voice. “Every scar or hole that forms… It embeds itself in my senses. I can feel what we’re doing to everything. How wrong it is.” She looked down at her hands. “Preservation doesn’t heal the multiverse. The scars remain. The collapse…”

“Will hurt beyond anything else.”

“But when it’s over… all will be new,” Red Diamond said with a soft smile. “I’m playing the role of doctor, you could say.”

Corona forced herself to smile back. “Glad to have you on board. Are you sure you’ll be able to take it though? When it happens?”

“Does it matter if I can?”

Corona blinked. “…No. I guess not.”

Red Diamond nodded. “We’ve all thought about this, Corona. Shouldn’t the time for thought and debate be behind us? What of the time for action?”

“Soon. Very soon. But not yet.”

“I will be waiting.”

Corona nodded – and she was teleported out of the ship without asking.

She blinked. She still didn’t feel like she knew Red Diamond all that well.

Incoming message, Raging Sights announced. We’ve just received word directly from the Rebellious Star that the Starcross Society is devoted to our cause. They want to send people over. Your opinion on the matter is requested.

“Got it.” Corona teleported away – thoughts of Red Diamond replaced with the discomfort of working with the Starcross Society.

~~~

Three separate times, Jotaro had considered turning Pinkie in.

Each time, he’d pushed the thought to the side. He couldn’t do that to her – to them. He had spent too much of his life with them. Saved all their lives – been saved – so often he couldn’t even count it now.

He had been on Pinkie’s team for more than half his life. That was a lot, considering he was considerably older than any natural human could ever have been.

He’d seen too much with them to throw them aside like that.

They weren’t the villains. But he wasn’t going to be that kind of hero. The hero that ended other heroes…

Existence needed heroes. It always did, and always would. If there were nothing to make them, what would become of everything?

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand why Pinkie and so many others had chosen the other side. He knew the horrors just as well as the heroisms. He wasn’t much of a man for math, but he knew how many suffered every day. But it was not worth it.

It couldn’t be, right?

He was pulled out of his thoughts by a tremor – a large one. Something interdimensional had tried to tear through the Hub. The Reality Anchors had held, but it was concerning enough to garner a few screams. A troop of Lilies ran out of Jotaro’s sight into a ‘bunker’ shop, supposedly equipped with higher-quality reality anchors. They weren’t, of course, it was an illegal scam nobody had time to clean up at the moment.

Jotaro looked around, face stern. Perhaps a Q-Sphere leyline had just fallen, and they’d felt the shockwave. He couldn’t think of anything else the Gallifreyans would be doing in the Q-Sphere that would require that much use of power.

He suddenly felt the need to summon Star Platinum, find Rassilon, and give him more punches than anyone else had been given.

He actually humored the idea for a moment – he could find Jove and they could fist-rewrite reality all the way to Gallifrey’s head.

Until John showed up and retconned the entire thing.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, pulling down his hat. He flipped out his dimensional device and dialed home – Earth Stand.

He stepped out into the streets of Morioh, face turned toward the yellow sky: a peculiarity of the town that made it stand out from virtually every other settlement in any world. He walked to his house, which should have only been a block away.

It wasn’t. He stopped at where it should have been and only saw a simple brick house with smoke coming off of it.

Nani…?

“Jotaro!” Pidge shouted, jumping out of a nearby portal. “Jo-”

“Back off,” Jotaro said, glaring at her.

“Jotaro you n-”

Jotaro froze time and ran through the streets of Morioh. No doubt Pidge would be able to trace him, but it would deter her. He wasn’t going to be dragged back so the others could try to persuade him. He was better than that.

He stopped on yet another street of Morioh he didn’t recognize.

Why can’t I recognize any of this? I’ve lived here most of my life! I know every street!

“…Jotaro?”

It wasn’t Pidge. It was an older man who’d lost most of his hair and wore a black jacket with a peace sign on it.

“Yes?” Jotaro asked. “Do I know you?”

“…It’s me. Josuke. Josuke Higashikata.”

Jotaro blinked. “Wh…”

Before he could process this, he heard a shrill wail of despair. He and ‘Josuke’ turned around to see an older woman pointing a haunted finger at Jotaro.

Jotaro didn’t have to wonder who this was. This was Marina. This was his wife. Far, far older than she should have looked.

“You’re supposed to be dead!” she shouted. “Why can’t you ever stay that way!?”

Jotaro stared right at her, the stern expression he usually kept plastered on his face breaking. He couldn’t speak, only think ‘no’ in his mind.

“Got nothing to say? Have you become one of those Stands of yours!? Am I going to lose someone else to your adventures?” Tears were rolling down her face.

“Marin-” Josuke began.

“SHUT UP!” Marina blurted. “GO BACK TO HELL WHERE YOU BELONG!”

Jotaro gulped. He wanted to say something – but he knew this wasn’t his Marina. This was the Marina who would have lived had Eve never come.

But this was the Marina who existed here… In his home…

He saw it now. Morioh had no ponies in it. It had no interdimensional technology. This world had no idea there was a multiverse. The timeline had been rewritten.

He clenched his fist. He had to fix this. He…

…Would have to kill everyone here to do that.

No, it was his wife, his family. It would be worth it. He didn’t care.

Marina was staring at him, enraged, broken, unable to say anything.

“I’ll fix this,” Jotaro promised.

“Every time you tried to fix something someone died!”

“Maybe I needed some damn support!”

“You got plenty of it!”

“Marina, I-”

Jolyne popped out of a portal Pidge made, punching Marina across the face and knocking her out. “Sorry… …Mom!?”

“I said I’d explain later,” Pidge muttered, walking up to Jotaro. “You’re welcome.”

Josuke blinked. “Nani!?”

Jolyne’s jaw dropped. “Josuke? When did you get so… old!?”

“…When did you get young, Irene?”

Jolyne binked in confusion. “…Irene? …Pidge, explanations?”

Pidge cleared her throat. “The Gallifrey attack on the Magic High Commission’s remnant leyline took some casualties. There was a general ripple of temporal erasure sent through the multiverse, wiping clean the temporal slate of multiversal contact. It’s like what Jenny did before our time… except much, much more thorough and effective.”

“How do we undo it?” Jotaro demanded.

“Th-that’s the problem,” Pidge said, gulping. “It’s worse than that. There wasn’t a single event changed. The timeline buffer was reset. The timeline where Earth Stand becomes part of Merodi Universalis the way it did before… doesn’t exist anymore. We’d have to recreate the entire timeline from scratch to get it back – and there are too many universes involved for us to do that. …I don’t think any civilization left standing has the capability to do that.”

Jotaro took a step toward Pidge, face shrouded.

“O-of course John could still access it!” Pidge said, scrambling over her words. “Uh, all we have to do is get him out of Gallifreyan control a-”

Jotaro punched a hole in the concrete inches from Pidge.

“…Who did it get?” Jolyne asked, hand to her mouth.

Pidge frowned. “Anyone who was on Earth Stand a few minutes ago when the switch happened.”

Jolyne winced. Her own husband had been here, and a few of her children. “At… At least Job and Josuke are fine…”

The older Josuke nervously shifted his eyes at the mention of his name, but said nothing.

“Nani… why?” Jotaro asked. “Why the hell!?”

“U-” Pidge began.

“I’ll tell you why!” Jotaro shouted. “I’ll tell you why it’s taken Marina away from me! It wanted to make a goddamm point!”

Everyone took a step away from him.

“You can hear it, can’t you? That Tower mockingly driving its ‘ideas’ into our minds. Demanding our response. We can’t just be sure in our lives, because one moment some random act of chance can just take it away!”

“Dad, stop!” Jolyne shouted. “Not all of it is gone!”

“But it could be!” Jotaro roared. “The Tower could destroy our Plot Armor and the Time Lords could erase everything! We could become an example. A point. People shouldn’t be points!”

“Jotaro, this isn’t you,” Pidge said, worry in her eyes.

“You should be elated,” Jotaro muttered. “Because we’re going to Pinkie now.”

Jolyne blinked. “Huh?”

Jotaro grabbed Pidge and Jolyne unceremoniously with Star Platinum, dragging them through a portal before either of them could get a word in edgewise.

They left Josuke the elder standing there, unable to process what he’d just witnessed.

~~~

Flutterfree sat herself down across from Rina, interrupting her lunch. The Twilight blinked in surprise. “Uh… Hi.”

“How are you doing, Rina?” Flutterfree asked, ordering her ‘usual’ from the waitress with a wing gesture.

Rina snorted. “Concerned?”

“Rina…”

Rina realized she’d done something wrong. “S-sorry.”

“It’s okay. This is all new to you. …Are the pills helping?” She spoke with a hushed tone, to not draw attention.

Rina’s eyes shot to one of her pockets where a small capsule of pills rested, away from everyone’s prying gaze. “I think so,” she said abruptly.

“Rina, you don’t have to be afraid of me – or anyone else who’s trying to help you.”

“I know. That’s why I came here.” She levitated her cross necklace in front of her eyes, studying it closely. “…I knew I would be taken in…”

Flutterfree smiled warmly. “Then let us.”

“I’ve already let you give me those pills, give me clothes… I kinda just want to be me for a bit.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow.

Rina twitched. “You know what I fucking mean.”

“I do. You’re also angry. What are you angry at?”

Rina blinked. “You know, I never really ask that question. It’s just… anger. I want to lash out. But I also want to be like you.” She bit her lip. “It’s a conflict”

Flutterfree cleared her throat. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

“Is there one of those for everything?!”

“Most things,” Flutterfree admitted. “The point is, you’re not alone. Everyone has that conflict inside them.”

“…Am I allowed to ‘boast’ that I have it stronger than most others?”

“You’re allowed to do whatever you want without eternal suffering given to you. You still have to ask if it’s good or right. Pray about it.”

Rina nodded. “…Thanks. …That’s what I should say, right?”

Flutterfree smiled sadly. “There was a time I thought that was required. But don’t thank someone if you’re not actually thankful. That prompts resentment. Don’t apologize for things you aren’t actually sorry for either. In some ways, I’m still learning that lesson.”

“Gah, it’s more complicated than I thought it would be!”

“Do you regret coming here?”

She looked at her necklace again. “No. No I don’t. I feel… changed, here. I don’t think that’s just the pills.”

“I’m glad to hear that. And I’m glad to say that I’ll be your friend.”

“Friends…” Rina said her face becoming a mixture of pleasant and sorrowful emotions.

“…Wanna talk about it?”

“Maybe later,” Rina said. “I would actually like to enjoy my food for once.”

“Glad I c-” Lolo activated on its own; flashing around the diner strong enough to be visible by everyone. Flutterfree’s eyes flashed a brilliant purple and her hair stood on end. The patrons turned to stare at her.

Flutterfree blinked, red eyes flashing. “I… I have to go.”

“Huh? What is it?”

“I…” Flutterfree blinked. “I have no idea… But I know I have to go.” She galloped off, leaving Rina confused.

Standing just around a corner, shrouded in shadow, a man pulled out a dark sphere.

“Now why did you do that…?” Flagg asked Black Thirteen.

The artifact didn’t answer.

~~~

Pinkie’s shot bolt upright. “Aaaaaand they know where we are now. Let’s hope Monika’s not looking…”

“We have to go without him, then?” Nova asked.

“Well, no, he’s coming, but we need to warm up the ship.”

Pinkie, Nova, and Vriska were standing on the hangar in one of Equis Cosmic’s space stations, in a place reserved for Expeditions Division operations. The ship in question was the Atlas, a relatively small but state-of-the-art ship constructed by the Research Divison’s finest. It was a light blue ovoid with a single engine in the back. The ship never touched the ground, and a loose ring of glass levitated around it. The Atlas was significantly larger than a simple Skiff, about the size of a train car when the outer ring wasn’t considered.

“Warm up what?” Vriska shouted from inside the Atlas. She pressed a button and the Atlas was ready to jump to the next universe.

“Ah. Right. Modern technology is fast.” Pinkie rubbed the back of her head. “Just lock the teleporters on us. We need to chop chop this one. Like a roadrunner.”

Nova lit her horn, teleporting herself into the Atlas, leaving Pinkie alone on the outside.

Pinkie took in a deep breath. Come on Jotaro… she pulled a watch out of her mane and checked the time.

Tick.

She was getting antsy. She knew they were being watched, and that meant something was going to happen. Jotaro wasn’t going to arrive with Pidge and Jolyne uneventfully. They wouldn’t just be able to get out. The timing was all wrong for that.

How she hoped today was a moment of Subverting Expectations.

Jotaro jumped out of a portal, dragging Jolyne and Pidge with him.

“Let’s g-”

Nova teleported him, Pidge, and Jolyne into the ship.

“Nani!?” Jolyne blurted. “What the fuck is going on!?”

“A seamless escape!” Pinkie blurted, bouncing onto the hull of the Atlas. “And away we g-”

“…Pinkie?”

Pinkie lowered her hoof. She pointed her face at the voice, grimacing. “…Hi.”

“Pinkie, what’s going on?” Flutterfree asked. Pinkie could sense Lolo active around her, already spreading around the room.

“So that was what you detected… why would Black Thirteen want you here?”

“Pinkie you’re avoiding my question,” Flutterfree said, no small amount of venom in her voice.

Pinkie sighed. “We’re…” She shook her head – she couldn’t lie to Flutterfree. “We’re going to join Corona.”

Flutterfree had apparently deduced this already, because her expression hardly shifted. “Okay…”

“Do you want to know why?”

“I think I know why,” Flutterfree said. “I’ve heard so many arguments from both sides over the last few days. I don’t need to hear yours. Its something like Twilence’s, isn’t it?”

Pinkie held up her hoof and tilted it back and forth. “Sorta?”

“Then I can understand that just fine. …I want to know why you didn’t come to me.”

“You wouldn’t want to come.”

“Pinkie, you’re the Captain. I’d follow you anywhere.” Flutterfree forced a smile. “All you have to do is ask.”

Pinkie bit her lip. “I… I knew that.”

“Then why didn’t you ask?”

“Because I couldn’t take you away. It would hurt you more than anyone else. It would take you away from your home. It would take you away from your church. It would take you away from Eve! Those are more important than us!”

“Are they?” Flutterfree asked.

Pinkie put a hoof to her head. “Flutterfree…”

“You’ve been my family, Pinkie. I… I don’t care if I don’t agree with what we’re doing, I didn’t always agree with the missions we were on. But we did them together.”

“I shouldn’t make your choice for you! Especially not if you know what you want to do!”

Flutterfree closed her eyes for a moment, collecting herself. “Pinkie. …Captain. I…”

“Flutterfree, stop,” Nova said, teleporting next to Pinkie. “You shouldn’t do this.”

Flutterfree blinked. “Wh-”

“You have to do what you think is right. Not what you think will be best for your friends.” Nova’s expression softened. “You shouldn’t throw away your faith for us.”

Flutterfree’s expression became fearful. “I… I wouldn’t be…”

“You would. You’d be siding with us because of loyalty to us. Not because it’s right. Not because you think it’s right. And as Rev told me so many times, that’s what’s really important. Isn’t it?”

Flutterfree looked at Nova. “You… You…” She sagged her head in defeat. “You’re right.”

“I know.”

“…I don’t want to lose you…”

“We’re still your friends!” Pinkie said.

“Can ponies on opposite sides of a war be friends?”

“Yes!” Vriska called from inside the Atlas. “Take it from me, I had a lot of friends like that.”

Flutterfree let out a soft laugh. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Because I’m the best spiderbitch around, that’s why.”

Pinkie appeared next to Flutterfree, smiling sadly. “…We have to go. The other Pinkies see us.”

“If I do the right thing… I’ll try to stop you.”

“You know you couldn’t. Couldn’t even slow us down. So you don’t have to.”

Flutterfree smiled. “…Thank you.”

Pinkie hugged her. “Thank you for being… the strongest of all of us. You’ve been through so much… I’m sorry. I have to put you through more.”

Flutterfree hugged her back. “…Thank you for… for everything. For being you. For being so unique.”

Pinkie placed a hoof on Flutterfree so she would actually feel a response to the touch. “...Heheh…”

“This… this is horrible.”

“I know. But I think it has to happen.”

“Do you think we’ll ever get the team back together?”

“I hope so. …But I don’t like our chances.”

“I promise to try to survive if you will.”

Pinkie laughed. “Flutters, you can’t kill suction cup pony.”

Flutterfree let out a delighted laugh.

And then Star Platinum stopped time. The next thing Flutterfree knew, she was alone – the Atlas was gone.

…She should probably report what had happened; try to get a trace on them. Stop them from leaving.

She shook her head – she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t strong enough to sell them out. She was just going to let them go… It would only give them a few minutes, and they would probably get away regardless.

But that was what she owed them. A chance. Maybe it was wrong, maybe it was right. She didn’t know.

…She needed to talk to Eve.

~~~

“…Well, great,” Monika said, flexing her wrist. “The one time I notice something I should probably do something about, we’re busy.”

“It can’t be that important,” Nanoha said, her hands gripping tightly around one of the TARDIS’s railings. The TARDIS wasn’t shaking – she was just tense.

“Pinkie’s team just turned traitor.”

The Doctor pulled a lever. “I doubt they see it that way.”

Monika put her hand to the bridge of her nose, saying nothing.

“How is the plan going?” Nanoha asked.

“The Living Tribunal is leading the charge admirably,” the Doctor reported, pulling a screen down for Nanoha to look at. She saw a display of the core of Gallifrey’s space. The forces of the multiverse were unleashing a heavy assault on the Time Lord’s home, using enough force to tear the causally related universes apart, allowing for the Gallifreyan’s own time-distortion to be used against them. The Many-Angled Ones were proving to be the most helpful in this regard, all the others generally just serving as backup to the eldritch beings and the Living Tribunal.

Even the TSAB had taken second fiddle in the realms of distorted time.

“They’re going to have to bite,” Nanoha said. “…Even if they know it’s a trap, they have to chance it.”

“For all we know, John’s already come back and given them a different plan,” the Doctor said.

“He hasn’t,” Monika said, certain. “Not yet.”

Nanoha’s frown deepened. “…We have to do this perfectly. There’s no room for error.”

Monika adjusted some files of the TARDIS. “Everything’s in order. The cards are stacked in our favor – courtesy of yours truly.”

“There’s going to be things we didn’t consider,” the Doctor said. “There’s no way around that.”

Nanoha allowed herself to smile. “But we can’t let that deter us.”

The Doctor smiled. “Since when did impossible odds stop us before?”

Monika blinked. “I think you two are mistaking me for a hero.”

“You’re one now, whatever your past was,” Nanoha said. “A-”

“NOW!” the Doctor shouted, pulling a lever on the TARDIS. “John has retconned back!”

The TARDIS jumped across the multiverse, taking a pre-planned route to the middle of the battle to where John had been detected. John himself wasn’t in the midst of the battle – he was hanging around a particular point in reality.

A point where there was a purposeful weakness in the attacking fleet’s strategy – a hole where a single universe could be pulled and everything would fall apart at a specific time. John had already ruined the universe – the attack on Gallifrey would collapse in a minute, all forced to retreat.

But they had expected this. The TARDIS appeared next to John as he wrapped up his business. The rogue Gallifreyan spacetime machine forged a mental bond with John – directly connecting the Doctor and the Heir of Breath.

The mind of the Traveling Doctor was enough to stall John’s corrupted mind for a second. That was all they needed.

Nanoha nodded to Monika. She rewrote reality in a very specific manner, forming a direct connection to one of the Void’s universes.

Empress Twilight felt it. She pressed her hoof into her control crystal and threw that universe at John, enveloping him and the TARDIS.

Nanoha pointed Raising Heart at the center of the TARDIS. The Doctor threw some more levers while John tried to make sense of the universe enveloping them. “So sorry,” the Doctor told his ship.

Nanoha unleashed a beam of energy, intertwining her power with the TARDIS’s inner power. Monika dove for cover.

Outside, the TARDIS unleashed a brilliant twist of temporal energy, filling the black universe with white streaks. For an instant, time failed to exist – everything was frozen.

And then the TARDIS exploded, killing all within.

The energies of time, magic, and ka itself twisted together, surrounding the Void universe with something that it had never been seen before. Empress Twilight shoved all the energy she could from her ancient construct to that one point – they couldn’t let the universe collapse from the impossibilities. John would just escape. They had to keep the unstable physics for as long as it took.

In the nothingness, several dozen versions of Nanoha, Monika, and the Doctor all appeared – each one split off from a different timeline created when the TARDIS exploded.

John tried to retcon away – and he did. But the entire Void universe and all the alternates came with him. The Void universe automatically connected to the new version of Empress Twilight’s Void, continuing to perpetuate its unstable existence.

Nanoha pointed all her Raising Hearts at John.

“HIGH POWER…”

John reacted. He rectonned within the confines of the Void universe, attempting to go back and prevent the TARDIS from splitting. He appeared outside the TARDIS – but of course, he dragged all the Nanohas, Monikas, and Doctors with him.

The Nanoha inside the TARDIS lowered Raising Heart. Monika let out a strained breath. “Okay, good, we won’t have to die…”

“Except we did,” Nanoha said. “And we’re not done.”

John laid a hand on the TARDIS and tried to erase it from existence. The outer Monikas altered the code of reality, moving the TARDIS to a different physical location. A few Monikas saved the TARDIS as a file and copied it over and over, only adding more confusion for John to deal with.

He couldn’t undo what happened because whenever he tried, he dragged the consequences with him.

Monika laughed as John retconned a copy of himself into existence – also copying every one of the time clones as he did so. “He’s desperate!”

“He’s disconnected,” the Doctor said. “What’s operating in his mind is just an automatic defense protocol. We’ve cut off Gallifrey’s connection to him.”

Nanoha didn’t say anything. She just watched as the other versions of herself unleashed their Starlight Breakers upon the Johns, coupled with the Monikas’ boosts in power. The Doctors weren’t doing much – they weren’t fighters, they were simply there to stabilize reality.

Which was really needed. Even in a universe as moldable as this Void, the level of interdimensional warping they were pulling off was outrageous. Any universe should have shattered at the seams when something force-altered the way souls were bound in relation to the retcon power.

The fact that Monika was needed to make this work was telling of how outlandish the plan was.

The Johns – four now – did the Windy Thing. Gusts blew from nowhere with enough force to tear at the Nanohas’ skin. They took the pain, but a few were hit in unlucky places, severing major arteries.

“He’s been bloodlusted…” the Doctor said, shaking his head as the winds tore people to shreds.

“He can’t do anything to all of me,” Monika said with a smirk. “Just have to e-”

The TARDIS that particular Monika was in exploded when a John appeared inside the time-core, triggering an explosion. He had zapped without traveling through time, so all he did was move all his opponents rather than duplicate them.

“He’s found a weakness,” the Doctor said. “If all the battle takes place in one time…”

“That’s why you’re here!” Monika blurted. “Do some wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff!”

Despite herself, Nanoha laughed as the Doctor began to shift the various TARDISes into different local times.

“Hey! Hey!” several outside Monikas shouted at the various TARDISes. “That’s a bit much!”

“It’s what I’ve got!” the Doctors shouted back.

One of the outside Monikas hit a John with a giant fish, knocking him out. “One down!”

That Monika was rushed by the remaining Johns – six – and shredded to pieces with wind and zapped into nothingness. The other Monikas tried to revive her – but failed. It was as if she never existed.

“…Why do you look haunted?” Nanoha asked Monika.

“He’s erasing me from existence,” Monika muttered. “You can’t see it, your memories aren’t ka-based. But I can. Hold on, we need to focus…”

There were three Johns – but then there were five.

“He’s retconning subtly, somehow. How is he doing it?”

Nanoha held up Raising Heart. “Ping.”

Raising Heart let out a ping spell, analyzing the situation from the point of view of dozens of alternate device intelligences. “Ping complete. Best description of subtle interaction is a sort of hitchhike effect. Corrections given to the TARDIS.”

Monika pulled up the new files the TARDIS had. “Oh that’s clever…”

“I’m afraid it’s lost on me,” Nanoha admitted, looking at the gibberish on her screen. “It helps us, right?”

“Definitely,” the Doctor said, making the necessary adjustments. “We can turn it back against him… Inversion principle. TARDIS heading 5-43-6, head ahead seventeen seconds and field your anti-time! We need to collide!”

The voice of another Doctor returned. “Got it!” There was a clunk – and suddenly a TARDIS was moving back through time, hitting them before they could realize it. Another set of them all perished in a violent explosion.

But at the same time, John attempted to use his retcon to ‘ride’ though time, avoiding the assault on the outside. The feedback loop surged through all versions of him fighting at all times and places, consolidating them into their own explosion of conflicting time. However, he was able to retcon himself into safety – into one version of himself.

“STARLIGHT BREAKER!” the remaining Nanohas shouted, attempting to burn him to unconsciousness. But he wouldn’t go down.

“Stand back!” several Monikas shouted, altering physics to create true artifacts of death. One touch from such a knife would sap all life from a being. One of her threw it…

…and it hit her. “Wh…” she vanished in a puff of sparkling dust.

“Retcon works over space too!” the Doctor blurted. “It works over everything!”

“Good thing we have more than one knife,” a Monika responded, creating several more and teleporting them to her sisters. They cut, stabbed, and slashed at John. However, he became like wind, unable to be touched.

“Wind is now a physical object,” a Monika muttered, altering the universe’s rules.

They felt the universe groan at that one. But John was now physical.

They had one shot left. They needed to make it count.

Nanoha hadn’t wanted to kill John – but she’d come into here with the full intent of doing so if it was required. Several versions of her had more than enough power to unleash whatever spell they needed without charging. It was time.

“Full Power Starlight Breaker,” she spoke, summoning the power from all the others. She even took in the essences of the knives to be extra sure.

The beam of light shot forward – and destroyed everything in the universe in an instant.

Elsewhere, the original Monika opened her eyes, sitting up in a TSAB storage room. “Well I have some good news. We won’t have to worry about reconsolidating our minds with our alternates.”

Nanoha twitched and let out a sigh. The three of them were standing on the bridge of a TSAB ship. “What was the result?”

“Complete destruction,” Monika reported. “John wasn’t able to defend himself when you unleashed a death-laced Starlight Breaker.”

“I’ve killed myself a hundred times over…” Nanoha muttered, shaking her head. “There’s a reason duplication is illegal.”

The Doctor put his hand on hers. “At least it was worth it. We got rid of their weapon.”

An urgent call appeared on the main screen. Considering how only the Living Tribunal and Empress Twilight knew exactly where they were, this was a little concerning. Nanoha answered. “What?”

“I’m sorry!” the Empress blurted. “At the last minute, the Time Lords attacked. I had to use the Void to protect my worlds…”

Nanoha’s eyes widened.

“He got out. There was one microsecond between the time of my distraction and your spell, and… I should have let his att-”

“No, you protected your people,” Nanoha said. “You had to. …Did anyone get hurt?”

“…No. The Void was easily strong enough to wipe them without any damage. But it was one moment…”

“A moment Rassilon timed perfectly…” Nanoha muttered. For a moment her face twisted in anger – and then it sagged in defeat. “…That won’t work again. We need to think of something else… I really don’t want to stoop to the ritual of purity, but it might be required…“

The Doctor left, going to the ship’s hangar, where the TARDIS sat. He walked up to the doors, a tear in his eyes. “It wasn’t worth it. I sacrificed you and myself dozens of times over… and it didn’t mean anything.”

The TARDIS didn’t respond.

“The time of war is too far behind me. I thought I could fight without ever picking up a weapon… All we had to do was take care of him, and that was it. There were moments we might have been able to save him.” He shook his head. “Now we’re lost. I’m not even sure taking up arms will do anything.”

There was silence in the hangar for a moment.

“Are you willing to try?”

The Doctor recognized that voice anywhere. “Flagg. There are very few people Nanoha would kill on sight, you know. It’s not good for you to be here.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Flagg said, strolling into the room. “Are you willing to try taking up arms?”

The Doctor looked at his hands. This body was a young one, but he couldn’t help but see how old and worn the digits were. “I haven’t actually fought in so long…”

“The multiverse is approaching a climax,” Flagg said, removing Black Thirteen from his coat. “Perhaps it’s time for a change, hmm?”

“What side are you on?”

“…I have no side,” Flagg said with a smirk. “I care not if the world goes on or if it collapses into a new form. I’ll continue as I always have either way.”

“You’ve been behind major points of this war.”

“A bit of this, a bit of that,” Flagg said. “I’ve been surprised many times. I have no idea what’s going to happen. I love it.” He held Black Thirteen out to the Doctor.

“I’m not taking it.”

“You’ve been to the top of the Tower. You can take it.”

“I won’t let that evil artifact torment me.”

“Ah, but it will show you what you want to know. Surely one with as pure a heart and as great a mind as yours could take it?”

“Yes. I could. But what would it mean?”

“It’d give you a solution,” Flagg admitted. “After all, do you know of anything else in the multiverse that might face John?”

The Doctor looked at the orb. He took it in his hands and looked into it, the secrets of the Tower suddenly coming as whispers to his ear. “SBURB… The Rainbow... The Golems… All try and fail to gather the Tower’s true power. Just shadows.”

“John is not more than a shadow,” Flagg said, smirking. “Tell me, Doctor, what do you see?”

“I see a moment,” the Doctor responded, emotionless. “I see the answer.”

“Glad I could help. Have a nice day.” He turned to walk away – leaving Black Thirteen in the Doctor’s hands.

“Why send it circulating now?” the Doctor asked. “What’s special about now?”

“Look at that moment of yours. Tell me what you think.”

The Doctor didn’t say anything. Flagg was gone.

The Doctor went into the TARDIS and held Black Thirteen high.

He placed it on the center console. Goosebumps rippled across his skin as he felt the darkness corrupt his poor TARDIS.

“I’m sorry. …You won’t have to endure this for long.”

~~~

Eve knew what had happened long before Fluttterfree arrived to tell her.

Pinkie had left a cupcake with a frowning face on Eve’s desk.

It hadn’t taken Eve much to figure out what it meant. The realization that Pinkie had just left was enough to stun her into silence. Many minutes passed between Eve noticing the cupcake and Flutterfree running in, tears streaking down her face.

“...Eve…”

“She left,” Eve said, breathless.

“I… I almost went with her… She made me stay.”

Eve’s blank expression broke, shifting first into shock, then anger, then relief, confusion, followed by an agonized, tearful scream punctuated with a laser shot from her horn at her desk.

It missed the cupcake. Somehow.

“I… she…”

Flutterfree swallowed hard. “You u-”

“Of course I understand!” Eve shouted at the top of her lungs. “I was with Corona, I… I talked to her, I heard her side, I know why she did what she did and…” Eve pulled her face back and winced. “I understand. Yes I understand. But that doesn’t change the fact that it hurts! I should have known, we should have known, we…” Eve stopped short, staring at the cupcake.

“...What else could we have done?”

“Nothing. Everything…” Eve took a moment to breathe. “I could have held her back. I could have stopped this war. Just refused to let her ask the question.”

“Would that have been right…?”

“No! Yes! I don’t know and I don’t care!” She threw herself into Flutterfree’s hooves. “It would give me my friends back… That’s all I want…”

Flutterfree pulled her close, tears rolling down her face. “We can’t have that…”

“You… you could have left,” Eve said, looking up. “I would have followed you. I…”

“Eve, no.” Flutterfree grabbed her by the shoulders and fixed her in the eyes. “You couldn’t.”

“I could.” Eve laughed nervously. “How many of us care more about our friends than what’s right or wrong? I… I wouldn’t be able to stay here, alone. You’d go… I wouldn’t last long. I’d just want to be with you girls. Who cares about the damn multiverse I just want my friends!” she curled into a ball at Flutterfree’s hooves, shivering. “I just want my friends…”

“I… I do too,” Flutterfree said, enveloping Eve. “I almost… turned my back on everything just for them.”

“Friendship. It… it’s supposed to be magic. It’s supposed to be… why does it feel so wrong? Why... why is the right choice to make them the enemy?”

Flutterfree looked to the sky. “Friendship is magic.”

“...But friendship isn’t everything,” Eve said, wiping her face. “...Even if all your friends say something is right, they could be wrong. You can’t just… but trust… loyalty… but… AAAAAGH!” She cracked her desk in half with a discharge of magic, blowing her computer screen out and knocking a picture off the wall.

The cupcake was unharmed.

Eve levitated the picture to her face. It was her last day as Headmare of the School of Friendship, standing with her friends as they passed the baton on to the next generation. This picture meant a lot to her… it was an image that was Equis Vitis, an event that didn’t happen in most Equises. Twilight didn’t go on to become the sole ruler of Equestria after this; in fact, she hadn’t even been preparing for it. She simply worked alongside the other alicorns… And then she’d found the bowling ball.

This picture showed her friends. All of them. As they had been before they found the multiverse. As she gazed upon the frame, the students faded into the background, and she saw the ponies she had known most of her life. Herself: small, strong, and optimistic, spreading her wings like a mother around her chicks. Flutterfree, sitting on Discord’s shoulder with a delighted smile and butterflies in her hair. Renee, grinning with a calm grace Twilight hadn’t seen lately. Rainbow Dash… so full of life. Pinkie, both eyes reflecting the joy of the world. Applejack, proud to stand at Eve’s side. Nova, laughing with some of the students and Trixie.

Sunset… she was there too. Visiting, for the celebration. A fiery unicorn who looked a little nervous but was nonetheless smiling.

She looked like she wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“...Should I have destroyed the bowling ball?” Eve asked, voice haunted. “Should I have just… refused the call?” She thought way back to that day in her castle where she wondered if she should devote herself to exploration… or not.

Had she chosen wrong?

Had all of this… been wrong?

“Eve, don’t say that. There are so, so many people we’ve helped.” Flutterfree put her wings around Eve’s shoulders and pulled her close. “Universes that knew nothing but war are now our friends. Great travesties have been averted. Evil has been vanquished, and we’ve all grown stronger.”

“Is it worth… everything?”

“...No. But even if Corona wins, even if she’s right, we… well, we’ve lived our lives the best we can.” She looked up and closed her eyes, tears coming out the side of her face .”And that’s all that matters, in the end.”

Eve looked up as well, but she kept her eyes wide open as the water fell to the ground. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Or… maybe she did, and didn’t want to admit it.

He looks on the heart.

Eve let out a laugh, burying her face in Flutterfree’s feathers. “I get it… I finally get it…”

“Huh?”

“We… we must do what we know is right. Always. No matter what everyone else may say or do… we must.” She stood tall - legs shaking from her emotional exhaustion. “There’s more than just us…” She lifted the cupcake into the air, holding it before her eyes. “We both fight from pure motives. If we fought any other way… it would be wrong. Fight for what is good… not for… what we want.”

She took a bite of the cupcake.

It was delicious.

~~~

Eve walked into a conference call between the remaining powers facing Gallifrey. The TSAB, Void, Many-Angled Ones, the Combine, and the Starcross society was it. Tyrannon had fallen in the push to capture John. The Living Tribunal was struggling to recover from his personal wounds, but was still present on one of the screens.

Eve gulped. She’d had a long day. Pinkie had left her. Flutterfree had unloaded her emotional struggles onto Eve, reminding the Overhead of all the interpersonal tears that had formed between friends because of these wars. The plan to capture John had failed. People were hurting more than they ever had before.

“Well?” Scarcity blurted. “What’s so important? Get on with it!”

Eve took a breath. “I… I may have something we can use.”

The faces on the screens all looked at her expectantly.

She nodded slowly – then stepped to the side.

Arceus moved into frame, looking at all the screens. “I am Arceus. God of Pokèrin Anima. And I give you this.” He teleported a ball to his hoof. One side was white, the other half was purple with red spots. A large M was imprinted on the purple part. “This is a capture device – a master ball. Most capture devices are relatively useless, only able to work on weakened foes. But the idea behind it is the same regardless – they will take an entity into them, any entity, and imprison them within. Those within cannot escape barring excruciating circumstances.”

“What are you suggesting?” Empress Twilight asked.

Arceus sighed. “I never wanted to use this technology again – but I believe we have no choice. This master ball is a device not only stronger and more advanced than most other capture devices, but it is also infused with a power akin to narrative, or a law of existence. It will capture whatever it is thrown at, regardless of what it is. Anyone. It’s an item so powerful that the number of how many can exist is regulated by the physics of my universes. More cannot be created.”

He narrowed his eyes. “These devices are horrendous things that do nothing but create slaves. But, seeing as all else has failed, they should not be kept back for ethical reasons. They should be used on John.”

“John could escape, easily,” a Combine said. “Your balls could be useful for other aspects of war though… If their ka relation continues.”

“John won’t escape,” the Doctor said, joining the call. He looked tired, and old, but just as determined as ever. “I’ve figured it out.”

“Your last plan went so well,” Scarcity muttered.

“Just trust me. I know what to do.” He looked up, eyelids sagging. “We’ll need more than just a master ball though.”

122 - High Ground

“She’s yours now,” the Doctor said, tossing a key to a small group of Aradias – the living ones, each with an Omnitrix on their wrists.

“…Are you certain?” the Aradia who’d caught the key asked. “I… we aren’t exactly unified since…”

“That’s probably for the best,” the Doctor said. He laid his fingers on the outside of the TARDIS, tracing the lines of the fake wood with his nails. “If you’re not a single voice, you won’t make the same mistakes I did.”

The Aradias glanced at each other nervously.

“She has many uses beyond time travel – if you truly decide to abandon that completely. And I can’t think of a better person suited to using her. The Handmaid herself.”

“…Do you really think I’m worthy?” Aradia asked.

“We,” another one corrected. “I thought we agreed to be distinct now?”

The Doctor smiled. “I never thought I’d be happy to see disagreement in this way.”

(The Doctor’s face appeared on the screen. “Ah, hello. I’m the Traveling Doctor. I’m known by many names – the Oncoming Storm, the latest nemesis of Flagg, guardian of multiversal time, great destroyer, and a few other names that shouldn’t be repeated in polite company.”)

The Aradias frowned. The one with the key opened a portal to a dead universe and used it to duplicate the key, giving one to each of her temporal clones without rewriting the universe they were in. “We are not worthy of this gift.”

“I do not know of a Time Lord worthy to carry it – definitely not a version of myself. So it falls to you. All of you. You can have her.” He looked at the TARDIS with sad eyes, caring not that he was openly crying in front of Aradias. “I’ve made her the most versatile of multiversal ships. Time is string to her, space is jelly, and dimensions are but sheets of paper. Everything you could ever want, she has.”

“But not weapons…?”

“She has weapons,” the Doctor said, expression clouding. “I never used them as such. But as her new pilots, if you think they must be used…”

“Some of us will.”

“Then use them. Use them to protect the multiverse.”

(“I’m giving a message to everyone who ever knew me – friend, enemy… companion… even those other versions of myself dotted across existence, blessed not to hold my burden on their shoulders. I suppose this message is, in parts, an apology. Those of you who knew me, who traveled with me, who fought against me… You’ll know how I held myself.”)

One of the Aradias in the back coughed. “Doctor… You do know why we’re dividing, right? Without the temporal convening of our minds… we can’t agree on the question.”

The Doctor looked up, finding the sky to be gray and overcast. “That’s one of the reasons why I’m giving her to you, I suppose. So that the guardian won’t be led by a single choice...”

(“I always held myself high, certain I had the moral high ground over everyone. I was the Doctor – I was ancient, wise, and understood the struggles of the individual when most of my people considered everyone nothing more than cogs in a machine. I was the paragon of purity and light, the hero who would stop at nothing to do what was right.

“What I thought was right.”)

“…I think you’re overselling it,” an Aradia said, concerned. “You… We… aren’t as important as you think.”

The Doctor shrugged. “What does importance really matter? We’re all people. We all do things.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the master ball – enchanted with so much magic it was glowing a soft pink. “We always guard something. We’re all heroes. We’re all villains.”

Several Aradias sighed.

(“I was a judge. I was the judge, the one who held people responsible who couldn’t be held responsible. I brought a lot of justice to the world. But I also judged some unfairly. …I judged many unfairly. But I was the great Traveling Doctor, I had the right! I was higher than them, better than them! I would never come out and say it – never even admit it to myself – but I was arrogant. I thought I was truly better than them, and that’s why they needed me. Needed my help, and my heroism.”)

The Doctor turned his back to the troll women. “Promise me that you’ll do your best to do what’s right. Even if the rest of you disagrees.”

The Aradias glanced at each other, gulped, and nodded.

The Doctor smiled. “That’s all I need to know.” He placed a hand on the TARDIS. “Goodbye. It was nice, wasn’t it?”

There was silence. The Doctor knew what it meant. His smile faltered and he removed his hand.

He reached into his jacket and touched Black Thirteen – and was gone, leaving the Aradias alone. They would duplicate the TARDIS a few times and start divvying it out among their versions.

He hoped they’d do it fast enough. They were purposefully avoiding time travel now. It was like a light switch had been turned on in their minds.

Ka was cruel.

(“I’ve been shown that I was wrong.” The Doctor held up Black Thirteen to the screen for all to see. “There is a bitter truth of existence that this war has brought to my attention and the attention of so many others. There is no one who has the right to truly judge. No one. Not even me.”)

The Doctor walked into an abandoned shed. Memories both horrible and pleasant flooded his mind relating to this place. Some of them were of destruction – times he had to press a button to end a Gallifrey, to stop a Time War from continuing. The other memories were of him finding a way to not press the button. Finding a solution that didn’t involve death.

Any single Doctor would know that only one of those memories were true. But he wasn’t just a Doctor. He was the Traveling Doctor, and his past… His past was a fusion of several different ones. Were any of those memories truly his? Had he corrupted them with his later escapades through time?

He was too old. Not even Gallifreyans were meant to live as long as he had. He couldn’t divide them up anymore.

(“I was always aloof, always running, always refusing to think about what I was truly doing. After all, why would I? It didn’t matter, I would make the world a better place wherever I could. I was the light in the darkness. I gave hope to the hopeless. And I ignored those who told me otherwise – even those close to me.”)

In the shed, there was a small box with Gallifreyan markings on it. There was a young blonde woman standing next to the box, arms behind her back.

She raised an eyebrow. “The Doctor of Doctors, hmm?”

The Doctor nodded, walking up to the box. He took out two items – the master ball and Black Thirteen.

(“So I guess what I’m trying to say is… I’m sorry. I wasn’t who I thought I was. Some of you will get some satisfaction out of being proven right. Others won’t know what to make of this. I’m not sure what I think about that… But I don’t think it matters now. Not at this point.”)

The Doctor held Black Thirteen over the box. In an instant, the box transformed into a flower made of white metal with a stick poking out of it, upon which sat a red diamond-shaped crystal. A button.

The Doctor hesitated. “What’s my punishment this time, Moment?”

The woman who was the machine looked into his eyes. “You come here unwilling to pay everything?”

“I’m just curious.”

“You’re stalling.”

“Waiting for mister retcon to appear,” the Doctor said.

(“Because I’m going to do something I promised myself I’d never do, and told myself was just a twisted memory of a convoluted past.”)

“…That’s an excuse,” the Moment said, leaning against a wall.

The Doctor sighed. “You don’t know.”

“You’re right. I can’t tell if there’ll be a punishment or not. You’ll have to start to find out.”

The Doctor nodded. He touched Black Thirteen to the red crystal, careful not to push the button down. The Time Lord sent his mind into the horrific mists of Black Thirteen, grabbing hold of a very particular power buried within it. A power of connection.

He sent that connection into the machine – the Moment. He felt its inner workings resonate with Black Thirteen. The power to completely destroy a time-based society. The power to end a Time War with the push of a button. Transcending timelines, universes… it was one of the strongest weapons in existence.

But it was still only of Gallifreyan construction. It could not create a level of destruction even close to that of a Xeelee superweapon. For all the Time Lords’ boasting, they were not on the same level as them. Alone, it could do nothing in a multiversal war.

However, the Doctor wasn’t going to use just one Moment. He activated Black Thirteen fully, tapping into every Moment across the multiverse. Black Thirteen found the connection through the ka that branded every Moment as an alternate version, tying them together in a web.

(“I’m going to end the reign of my people. Just as I do not have the right to judge, they do not have the right to rule. The least I can do is prevent them from dominating. It will be a tremendous price to pay… but if I’m being honest, I’ve already paid that price numerous times.”)

The woman who was the Moment fused with all her alternates. She appeared the same – but her expression changed from one of warmth and understanding to something completely impassive. An averaging out of all the Moments’ different personalities.

It was here that John zapped behind the Doctor.

The Doctor smiled. He tossed the master ball behind him. John ∂ø∂©´∂ å˜∂ ®ø¬¬´∂, π¬åçˆ˜© ˙ˆß ˙å˜∂ ø˜ †˙´ Îøç†ø®

ıÒÅÇ ˇÓˆ‰ˇ´´˜

Ó´ †øßß´∂ †˙´ µåß†´® ∫å¬¬ ∫´˙ˆ˜∂ ˙ˆµ. Ôø˙˜ tried to dodge. But the master ball had taken a different path than he thought it had taken.

Elsewhere, Rassilon screamed. “What was that!? What was that!? Where did he get Black Thirteen!? How is he able to get it to listen to him!?”

The master ball touched John, activating its capture sequence. John tried to transform into wind and get away, but it was too late – the extra enchantments on the ball were too much. It sucked John’s essence into it and locked him inside. His mind was forced into an unconscious state, one not even Rassilon could take him out of.

If Rassilon had a few minutes, he might be able to get John out through some other method. But he didn’t have that kind of time.

(“I’d ask for luck, but none of you will see this until after it’s already done. So I’m not going to ask for anything. Not even forgiveness. I’m just going to hope for your understanding. …Maybe I’m giving you the chance you need, maybe not. Maybe this Black Thirteen really is driving an idea in my mind I shouldn’t listen to, maybe not. There’s so much I’m unsure of at this point. But I do know I’m going through with it.)

The Doctor activated Black Thirteen, sending the master ball somewhere far, far away. He turned to the Moment. “Anything to say?”

“You will not return from this,” it deadpanned.

“I’ve always been ready to pay that price.”

“Your punishment extends to all Doctors,” the Moment continued. “As you use all of me to bring this destruction, I use all of you.”

“…It might be time for the multiverse to move away from the Doctor.”

“You will experience the fate to which you have doomed so many. Erasure.”

The Doctor nodded. “Very well.” He took a moment to pause. This was it, his last moment. He felt the sudden urge to say something witty – one of his many catchphrases perhaps? A ‘geronimo,’ just for old time’s sake? No, that didn’t seem right…

But he needed to say something.

He placed both hands on the button, grimacing. “…Gallifrey falls.”

(“Make the most of what I’m giving you.”)

He pressed down.

~~~

The master ball appeared in the air in front of Nanoha. She caught it in her free hand.

Raising Heart told her John was inside.

Nanoha said nothing – she just turned her gaze to the map of the multiverse she had. She checked the most up-to-date reports reconnaissance ships were giving of the Time Lord sector.

One Moment, there were thousands of golden-yellow lights indicating Gallifreyan strongholds.

The next, all the lights had vanished. A few fleets of alliance ships had been taken with them, but overwhelmingly all the losses were Gallifreyan worlds reset to a timestate where there were no Time Lords.

Nanoha knew in her heart that the Doctor wasn’t coming back.

She took one look at the master ball. John could be released now. The Time Lords had no more hold on him. He would be free to choose…

She pocketed the ball. It would just be giving him to whatever side he chose. The power would shift from Gallifrey to someone else. John had to be kept away from the conflict.

Nanoha turned to a console and pressed a few buttons, calling the Empress of the Void. “So… they’re gone.”

“…It’s a little demeaning that the solution ended up being… that simple. I feel cheated.”

“There are probably others who feel the same way…” Nanoha said, letting out a sigh. “But the Doctor was a hero of sorts. He… did what he felt he needed. And it changed everything.”

The Empress nodded. “You are right.”

“…There’s no fighting right now. Let us come together and actually make a decision. Not based in war, but in debate, respect, and friendship.”

“You know I would love that more than anything,” the Empress said, smiling sadly. “…But the Combine and Starcross Society have already declared war on each other.”

Nanoha clenched her fists. “Can’t we… stay out of it?”

“I’ve already made my decision, Nanoha. I will be joining the war on the side of the Starcross Society, as I intended from the beginning. Your hopes for a peaceful solution are admirable, but wrong.”

Nanoha said nothing.

“You’re the Chief Sovereign of your people. They trust you. You must lead them well. …Don’t let your personal feelings keep you from letting them fight.”

Empress Twilight of the Void ended the transmission.

Nanoha took in a deep breath to calm herself. A tear rolled down her cheek.

“Such a common expression these days…” she muttered under her breath. She placed a hand on another console and started making calls. “Call the council. We need an official declaration of war. …I’ll also need a report on how much our forces have been damaged. Contact Evening Sparkle and whatever half of the Collection is on our side. …The Combine too. They’re our allies, now.”

~~~

Across-multiverse communication was becoming difficult. With the fall of Gallifrey, the cooperation between nations to keep a long-distance network up fell in an instant. Long-range video calls were now impossible with reception regularly dropping at inopportune moments. No more could plans be made and activities discussed from afar. There was no way enough information could be shunted through unless the Everyman felt like cooperating, which simply wasn't happening.

So everyone who was anyone on the preservation side of the conflict was summoned to Midchilda, the TSAB homeworld. A high-end Merodi speeder ship would have taken a few days to get there with the current state of things.

But the Living Tribunal was back on his metaphysical feet and more than willing to offer his aid, claiming that he was their servant now; they should not feel ashamed to ask him for even mundane things.

Eve selected the team personally. The Living Tribunal, of course. O’Neill for military advisement, Ava Jandice to speak for the general population, Monika for meta knowledge, and Flutterfree. Flutterfree was there because Eve knew she’d need emotional support and that pegasus was the last rock she had in life aside from Luna and Spike, and neither of them were available.

Valentine was also hitching a ride with them. The USM still wanted to be involved, despite being just a Class 3.

The seven of them stood in a circle in Eve’s office. The Living Tribunal had shrunk his presence down to a more manageable size – eight feet tall. Modest, but still large enough to let everyone remember who he was. “Are we ready?”

“Yes, yes, get on with it,” O’Neill said, waving a hand.

The Living Tribunal looked to Eve for confirmation. She felt one of Flutterfree’s wings fall onto her back, holding her close. She smiled. “Yes. We’re ready.”

The next thing Eve knew they were on an outer TSAB world. She knew there was a transit time of a few minutes even with the Living Tribunal’s power, but she was not aware of it.

The TSAB mages were waiting for them. A few scans were performed, but then the seven of them were directed to a hexagonal platform. Four mages provided security codes to the platform, teleporting the seven of them right to Midchilda: specifically the interdimensional port of a grand hall.

Eve recognized early-era TSAB construction when she saw it. Most of it was white, metallic, and minimalist to the extreme. There were few consoles or computers around, instead everything was optimized for space that no one used. It was a strange aesthetic, but Eve couldn’t exactly complain.

One of the higher-end mages – identifiable by his unique self-generated barrier jacket – walked up to them. “They’re waiting for you.”

“How are we the last to arrive?” O’Neill blurted.

The mage shrugged, indicating that he didn’t know and he didn’t particularly care. He simply led them to a large set of automatic sliding doors, taking them into the main hall.

The room itself was just as sparsely decorated as the outside, though it did have over a hundred chairs of differing shapes and sizes set around a snaking network of tables. At the head of the room, there was a separate table set at a higher place than all the others, one that held the leaders of the preservation effort.

Eve wasn’t given the opportunity to process any further – for she realized everyone in the room was looking expectantly at them. At first she thought they were treating the Living Tribunal with respect, but she quickly realized they were all looking at her.

Some of them were bowing.

Why? She thought. We’re weaker than everyone else… We’re divided… We’re not even worth all that much! Why are they treating me with reverence?

She blinked. It isn’t about power. It’s about what I stand for. I’m the FACE of this conflict. Corona’s opponent…

She looked at the table with the leaders again. There were six seats, five of which were filled. The two center seats were occupied by Nanoha and a Combine official named Immen, a peculiar alien being composed of a single, blue flame. The seats on the edge were occupied by humanoid Class-2s she didn’t recognize but would soon find out were E-Sphere locals: the Kromaggs and Paratimers. Lightning represented her half of the Collection, sitting to Immen’s side.

And there was one empty seat.

Eve glanced to Ava, exchanging a conversation with looks. They decided in an instant that the people here wanted Eve to sit there – so she got to hold the honored position next to Nanoha. Eve trotted over and sat down, keeping an eye on the other five Merodi. Valentine took a seat far from everyone else, folding his hands together.

Nanoha said they would wait a few more minutes for others to arrive. Eve noticed there were several empty seats, possibly reserved for any other Class 2 or 3 civilizations that cared to show up. …Given how few were represented here, she was forced to come to an unpleasant conclusion:

Most were either too afraid to involve themselves, were joining the other side… or had been damaged beyond repair by all the fighting so far. She activated her eye of Light and began to gather information, finding her fears were true. The few Class 3 societies that were here aside from the USM were terrified that they would just be wiped off the map like their neighbors had. The majority of societies were opting out of a war they couldn’t engage in entirely, focusing instead on researching reality bunker technology in case the collapse did happen.

A Class 3 technology base would likely not be sufficient to fully understand the technology required to create even a semi-functional bunker. Even Eve’s scientists had been having difficulty working that one out. It didn’t come with Corona’s Message.

…And there were still only six Class 2s here, though counting the Collection was somewhat sketchy at this point. She knew the Void and Starcross Society were joining up with Corona, probably with a few lesser Class 2s. The Many-Angled ones had dropped out of sight entirely, while the Flowers remained neutral…

If she was doing her math right – and she knew she was – there were now only about a dozen Class 2 societies in existence. How many had been wiped out by the destruction of the D-Sphere? How many had been destroyed by Gallifrey’s time ripples? What about all the Class 3 societies – there should be more here, even if all of them were terrified.

Just how much destruction had been unleashed already?

Eve saw Nanoha let out a sigh – a small one that was barely perceivable, but a sigh nonetheless. Eve took this as a good time to turn on her ears – there were too many alien mouths to keep track of with her eyes. “I call this meeting to order,” Nanoha said, holding up Raising Heart. “The Time Space Administration Bureau, Combine, Merodi Universalis, Collection of Preservers, Kromagg, Paratimers, and associated Class 3 societies have come together to form a cohesive unit to fight for the preservation of the multiverse. Normally we would start with introductions, but we do not have time for that. As we speak, most of our nations are either engaging in war or preparing for war. The longer we deliberate, the more advantage our enemy obtains.”

Eve winced at the use of the word enemy.

“Let me lay this out simply. The two of us usually considered ‘advanced’ Class 2 societies in this room have suffered such extreme losses in the battle with Gallifrey that we are no longer the powers we once were. Our militaries have been decimated and our ability to control the worlds under our purview has been shaken considerably.”

Immen clearly wanted to object, but also knew what she was saying was completely true.

“The ‘good’ news is that our opponents also suffered the same losses. The Void and Starcross Society are no better off.”

“The Collection is engaged in Civil War,” Lightning offered. “And most of the rest have suffered collateral damage from the previous battles.”

“Not Merodi Universalis!” a human yelled – possibly a Paratimer, but she could have also been from a Class 3 as far as Eve knew.

Eve ruffled her feathers. “Merodi Universalis has lost several worlds to the collateral damage, including Earth Stand, one of our founding universes. We know the plight the rest of you suffer.”

“That’s just Plot Armor!”

“And why does this make you upset?” Eve asked, cocking her head. “Wouldn’t you want someone like that to fight alongside you?”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “I am not rejecting your assistance in this war. I am merely pointing out that you aren’t like us.”

Immen spoke up. “It is also the truth that many of your forces defected under Princess Corona. This would seem to offset your Plot Armor, as it were.”

Don’t say a word, Eve messaged Monika, sensing the ‘Lord of ka’ wanted to blurt something out that wouldn’t have been good for the meeting. Eve responded in her own way. “Maybe you are right – maybe we can’t know exactly what you feel. But we do not wish to be your enemies, nor do we wish to look down on you. We know full well that the cards the Tower has dealt us are unfair to the rest of you. But we want to use that unfairness to help you – not push you down. We are not here to seek power in any shape or form. We are here to keep the multiverse together.”

The woman nodded – clearly wanting to still argue, but realizing they didn’t have time. They all had to work together.

Nanoha allowed herself to smile, glad that they’d gotten that sorted out quickly. There was silence.

Eve realized that Nanoha was choosing to let her continue, rather than be the Chief Sovereign of this conversation. Eve kept her composure and continued along that thought. “This war that we are about to fight is going to be a horrendous event in all our histories. You have already seen the carnage of the Class 1 and Gallifreyan wars, the battles that tore the multiverse apart, forcing giants to fall to the ground. They evened the playing field for us – but we are all scared, all terrified of the cost we will have to pay. Scared with good reason. If the cost of fighting is death, why must we fight?

“Sadly, we must fight because there are those who think fighting is the only way to resolve their differences.” Immen knew this was a slight directed at the Combine, but didn’t speak up against her. “So we must fight. But there are ways to fight that will minimize how long – or how deadly – this war will be. We must all focus on constructing Tower Rings, so we may end the war in a single decisive battle rather than being forced to beat our enemies until their societies collapse. By doing this we will force them to do the same. The days of quickly moving through the multiverse and finding Tower Rings in an instant are over. I am assured it is now a viable strategy.

“Secondly, there is a way to minimize the death on both sides in the actual battles. O’Neill?”

O’Neill nodded and stood up – surprised they got to this point so early in the meeting. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small spherical device, white on one side, red on the other. “This is a capture device, originating from ‘Pokèmon’ universes and those like it. It is able to latch onto virtually any entity in a weakened state and imprison it. Once imprisoned, they may not break free – they can only be released from the outside. Any mental powers are suspended because they are unconscious inside. A much rarer version of this device was used to capture John.”

There were murmurs in the room.

Eve took control of the conversation again. “These devices can be used as weapons in our war – a way to defeat an enemy soldier without killing him, if it is possible. While the rare and advanced versions of the capture devices cannot be mass-produced by the Tower’s mandate, these simple ones can be created millions of times over by simple duplication spells. Give a few to every soldier and they will be able to capture the enemy, rather than kill.”

“That only helps the enemy’s death count!” a TSAB mage shouted.

Eve smiled warmly. “Not if we tell them what we’re doing. This entire meeting is ka-screened, I know, but if we want them to know something, Twilence will probably pick up on it at least. If we contact them directly, I’m sure Corona will hear about it. And I know her – she’ll want to do anything she can to minimize death on both sides. These simple devices are the best way we have to do that.”

“…The capture of millions upon billions of soldiers…” Lightning said, furrowing her brow. “…It’s a good idea. I see absolutely no downside.”

They could be used against us! a Combine Advisor blurted.

“How?” Nanoha asked. “They only work on those whose spirits have already been weakened. Considering how almost all TSAB mages fight with nonlethal spells, these capture devices would be perfect. I suspect the only reason we haven’t used something like them in the past is due to ethical concerns and a lack of need.”

And why is it ethical now?

“Why are you concerned about that?” O’Neill questioned, calling attention to the fact that it was the Combine asking the question.

The Combine didn’t respond. Nanoha shook her head. “A captured soldier lives. They have no freedom and they are in a horrendous situation, but they are alive. And perhaps they are more likely to survive the collapse if we fail.”

“This is conjecture,” Lightning said. “There is no downside to using the capture devices if they’re available, no need to debate them further.”

There were mostly nods – a few of them were begrudging, but everyone was able to accept this was how they’d be fighting.

Eve realized Nanoha was looking at her again. It would have been really nice if you told me I would be heading this ahead of time, she messaged.

I figured you knew you were the face. Don’t worry, I can help you through it – but it has to be you, not me. I’m the old way, the high society, the Seat. You’re the protagonist.

…Good point. Talk about strategy next?

Probably.

I’ll sic O’Neil on them.

Might be the only entertaining moment we get out of this meeting.

Eve had to struggle not to let out a snort. “Moving on, tactics…”

~~~

Corona slammed her hands on the table. “All right, listen up!”

Mage Rarity, Minna, Scarcity, Thanos, Ahzek Ahriman, a white-haired woman from a lower universe named Edelgard, a lizard-man called Phage who ran the Class 2 Society Phage Industries, and a blue energy being that represented the Shabanash all focused their attention on Corona.

“Some of you, I like. Some of you, I don’t,” Corona said matter-of-factly. “Some of you I barely know. Some of you think the rest of us look like food. We’re going to put all of that behind us.” She clasped her hands together, sending a reality-bending ripple through the room. “Am I understood?”

The only one who wasn’t startled by Corona’s sudden assertion of dominance was Phage – and he accepted it with a toothy smile.

“Right, so, I don’t want to hear any complaining about the ‘motives’ behind why we’re doing this. Some of us want to destroy things for the heck of it, others want to stop suffering. It doesn’t matter here why we’re doing this, got it? All that matters is that we do bring about the collapse. And we will be using these.” She set a red and white capture device on the table. “Any objections?”

There weren’t any.

“Good. Start equipping your armies the moment this is over. Minna, ours are already doing it, correct?”

Minna nodded.

Corona turned to the rest of the leaders. “The plan is simple, and probably what all of you came up with already or would have come up with given time. We need to build Tower Rings – several locations at once, so if one is found and destroyed we have backups. We here at the Raven Hotel will be building ours with the Prognostici, and Blumiere has already begun construction. The rest of you are just going to have to figure it out on your own. Yes Phage, I know you’ve already started, we don’t need to brag amongst each other here.”

Thanos smiled. “You seem to be sliding into your role well.”

“I fought as a commander in the war with Skarn,” Corona explained. “I learned some things.” For a moment, she paused, remembering the things she witnessed during the war. She shook her head and returned to the discussion. “While we are creating the Tower Rings we will wage war. Sai and our other artificial intelligences have been scrambling to come up with complex diversion tactics to keep the other side from finding them easily. Conversely, they have been trying to come up with ways to find Tower Rings that are hidden. The war will be one big game of intelligence hide and seek.”

Mage Rarity nodded. “As expected. The war goes to whoever gets a fully operational Tower Ring to the Tower and successfully activates it. That is our goal.”

“The only other win condition is utter destruction of the other side,” Corona said. “And I don’t exactly like our odds on that one.”

“You would just rather the collapse kill them than do it with your own hands,” Scarcity pointed out.

Corona nodded. “Very true. The fact that you’re suggesting that makes me weak is telling of what your priorities are.”

Scarcity bristled.

“I agree with Corona’s aversion to total annihilation,” Thanos said.

“As do I,” Edelgard added. “Some of us may have to live in the world that comes after.”

Phage gave a nod to indicate his agreement.

Mage Rarity smirked at Scarcity. “Outvoted.”

Scarcity twitched. “This isn’t a democracy, this is a council.”

“We don’t even know who’s a member or not!” Ahzek spat.

Corona glared at Scarcity. “So…?”

The unicorn didn’t respond.

Corona took that as a signal to continue. “Moving on, we have a few major threats within the other side. They have John – though we suspect they will not chance using him anymore. He’s too much of a wild card. They also have the Living Tribunal.”

“We have the Rebellious Star,” Scarcity asserted.

“Can a Star take out the High Abstract?” Mage Rarity asked.

“He can if he fights with us,” Scarcity said.

“It’s a possibility,” Corona admitted. “We do need a plan to take him out, he’s too much of an influence on them. Luckily, aside from him, the strongest single power they have is the Shaping Mechanism.”

“The TSAB has secret weapons,” Thanos pointed out.

“That are secret and we can’t really prepare for,” Corona said. “Plus, it is very likely they’ve used most of them already.”

The Shabanash rippled. It said nothing, but everyone got the feeling it agreed.

Phage narrowed his eyes. “Their advantages are the Tribunal, the TSAB’s information databases, and the Shaping Mechanism. What do we have to counter them?”

Corona glanced at Scarcity. “The Starcross Society suggests the Rebellious Star, but I doubt it. What we have is the Void itself, and Twilence.”

“They have Monika,” Mage Rarity said.

“Monika is powerful, but single-universe scale,” Corona reminded her. “Twilence’s Prophet powers go far beyond that and far above most other Prophets. They’d need Andrew Hussie or something to challenge her.”

“So our advantages are an ancient dimensional construct and a Prophet,” Ahzek summarized.

Corona nodded.

“And theirs are a near-god of a Class 1 society, the intellectual property of a Seat society, and a mechanism that can mesh universes together?”

“To be fair, that last one is easy to protect against.”

The Shabanash commented that it all seemed nearly balanced.

Corona nodded. “What’s the discrepancy?”

The Shabanash responded that they only had a small section of Merodi Universalis, not half. The other side had the whole might.

“Merodi Universalis isn’t that strong.”

The Shabanash reminded her that they were the Protagonist Civilization.

“And I was one of the protagonists. Twilence assures me that I balance out Eve’s own presence.”

“So it is balanced,” Thanos said, tapping a finger on the table.

“It’s been stacked that way by the Tower,” Scarcity pointed out. “First, the Class 1s annihilated each other. Then, there was a war to bring the Class 2s to a relatively equal playing field. There are no High-Class 2s anymore!”

“You forget the Flowers,” Edelgard reminded them with a hint of disdain.

“The Flowers don’t count,” Scarcity spat. “The point is, we are tier three. What if we’re just another layer on the cake that needs to be removed!?”

“…I’m not sure a Tower Ring could be created effectively without Class 2 infrastructure,” Corona said. “A Class 3 could try, certainly, but the amount of time it would take…” She furrowed her brow. “No, we’re already involving them in the war. The Tower doesn’t need to push the power level down any further. It would be too much.”

“Are you sure about that? How can you be sure? You aren’t a seer of any kind!” Ahzek huffed.

I appeared in the middle of the meeting, scribbling on a notebook. “It’s what I think is happening. The Dark Tower has reached as far down the power scaling as it needs to. We are the actual war. The actual fight. Because now the ‘main characters’ are the ones at the forefront, rather than a bunch of godlike civilizations clashing and destroying the heavens.”

“See?” Corona said, holding out a hand. “We’re the last line.”

I wanted to say that there could be a twist as far as I knew – but I decided that wasn’t good for the meeting.

“So, let’s fight to win,” Thanos said, curling his fist.

Corona met his fist with her own, smiling. “Yeah!”

Mage Rarity, Edelgard, and Phage met them as well. The Shabanash chose to abstain, considering its penchant for eating solid beings.

Scarcity grumbled, but put out her hoof anyway.

On another day, they would have been enemies.

Today they certainly weren’t friends.

But they would fight as one.

~~~

Allure and Thrackerzod walked through the main hall of Renee’s castle. What was usually a place of bustling Expedition activity was now a ghost town. All Expeditions except the most important had been suspended, and most agents had been assigned to O’Neill for use in the war.

Allure had a sour expression on her face, one that had scarcely budged since Minna had left.

“…The Embodiment is still useless,” Thrackerzod said. “Can’t make up their minds, even when they themselves are on the line. They never know how to change.”

“Big surprise there,” Allure muttered.

Thrackerzod let out a deep, slightly annoyed sigh. “Allure, I have to be the least qualified person to say this, but you’re not okay and sh-”

“Oh, I’m not okay? Big surprise!” Allure let out a bitter laugh. “I mean look at me, my daughter betrayed me, some of my closest friends have become villains, and there’s a war going on with them! Tell me how I could be okay with that!”

“You couldn’t,” Thrackerzod agreed. “All I’m saying is y-”

Allure put a hoof on Thrackerzod’s shoulder. “I know. I know I’m not doing good. I know. But I don’t have the luxury of just standing by and letting myself get better – there’s too much going on right now.”

Thrackerzod blinked. “We could take care of it.”

“I have a role to play, Thrackerzod. If I ignored the call I’d never be able to live with myself. We’re the League of Sweetie Belles. We can do something now.”

“And we could do that for you,” Thrackerzod insisted. “You don’t have to be the one leading the charge.”

“Thra-”

“Minna is not your responsibility anymore, right? That’s how ‘growing up’ and ‘leaving the nest’ works.”

Allure blinked – and then shook her head. “No. You… uh…” Allure stamped her hoof on the ground. “I don’t care if she’s grown up, she’s still my responsibility.”

Thrackerzod made a face that suggested she thought Allure was wrong, but also suggested that the eldritch unicorn didn’t have enough confidence in her understanding of family dynamics to say for sure.

Allure was glad the conversation ended there.

They soon arrived at the door to Renee’s office and knocked. The doors slid open, allowing the two of them to enter without the usual teleporting fiasco. Renee sat behind her desk, alone. Her hat was slightly off center, her mane not as smooth as it usually was, and her glasses weren’t on her face.

She looked presentable – but to the people who knew her, she looked like a mess.

Allure noticed a small pile of empty ice cream containers that Renee was trying to keep hidden behind her desk. The small unicorn’s expression softened. “Renee…”

Renee smiled awkwardly. “Ah, Allure. I… wish I was happier to see you. But I have a feeling I know why you’re here.”

Allure sighed. “I want to sign the League of Sweetie Belles up for the war effort. …Anyone that is willing, at least.”

Renee levitated her glasses back onto her face, pulling up a display. “Will you be included?”

Allure nodded. “Yeah.”

Renee pressed a few buttons. “…Done.”

“That’s… it?” Allure asked, cocking her head. “No argument?”

Renee looked at the ground. “I know you wouldn’t listen to me if I said anything. I know this is what you want. I’m your sister, not your mother; I don’t have to watch over you like one. As much as I would like to…”

Allure forced a smile. “Th-thanks. I…” The smile faltered. “Thrackerzod, can you give us a minute?”

Thrackerzod nodded. She copied the confirmation that the League was available for the war effort onto a data pad and left, presumably to start the arrangements. Coordination with Squeaky would be a must. …But Allure didn’t want to think about that right now.

She wanted to talk to Renee.

“You’re doing worse than I am,” Allure observed. “I’m just angry, and I want to do something about it. You… there’s something deeper here.”

“This is going to sound petty, because your daughter was the one who betrayed you, but… almost all my close friends joined the other side. Pinkie jumped ship with them… Eve and Flutterfree are barely keeping each other held together… And…” She looked at the ground. “Daniel and I have been having fights.”

“…You almost never have fights.”

“He wants Corona dead,” Renee said, grimacing. “And it’s so deep in his psyche that I can’t even do anything! Me! The Sylph of Mind! I can’t help him! And these days we can’t just treat her like an outlier… She’s in the forefront. We can’t just…” She rammed her head into the desk. “I can’t generate hate for her, like you can. Part of me wishes I could just so I could help our relationship…”

Allure grimaced – she knew there was nothing she could do here. This was a deep relationship of a kind she had never had. A kind she had decided she didn’t need. She didn’t know how to fix it.

Could it even be fixed?

“You still love him, right?”

“More than anything. And I know he feels the same,” Renee said, tears in her eyes. “It makes it all the more painful… And there’s all the people I have to send to their deaths, all the betrayals, and all the destruction everywhere…”

Allure walked over to Renee and pulled her into a hug. “I can’t do anything to help you.”

“…You could stay here, with me.”

“…You know I can’t do that.”

Renee nodded slowly. “You have to do something. I don’t have that. I… I just keep going on.”

“And you’re strong enough to do it. Never forget that.”

Renee smiled. “…You’re precious, you know that?”

“I learned from the best.”

The two embraced in silence.

~~~

Daniel Jackson was doing what Renee couldn’t bring herself to do – manage the agents of the Expedition Division who were being sent to the war as task forces. He had been checking in with every single team as they passed through a stargate-type dimension device to a ship somewhere in another world. Each team went somewhere different, ready to integrate with a Merodi or, in some cases, an ally’s ship.

Most teams didn’t need anything other than a smile and a ‘good luck’ from him. Some needed some words of encouragement, and he had to send a few back for being ill-prepared or clearly not emotionally ready for what was about to happen to them.

He didn’t know the names of most of the people who came to him – he had to rely on his data pad updating information quickly. It worked most of the time, but occasionally a bug-like person would come with an unpronounceable name and it would become awkward. But he managed. He always did.

He was mildly surprised when a name from the past shot onto his screen.

Oncoming Storm.

Daniel looked up with raised eyebrows at the gray-skinned human coming toward him. Once, this man had been Director Storm, head of A.I.D. on Earth Vitis. Then he had been Manager Storm for the Earth Vitis section of the Expeditions Division. Daniel had no idea what he’d done after that. Given the addition of a cybernetic arm, it must have been something interesting.

“It’s been a while,” Daniel said, smiling.

Storm let out a jovial laugh. “It’s been nothing. Wait until you hit your thousandth birthday, then you can tell me it’s been a while.”

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

“I wouldn’t be me for very long if I kept changing, would I?”

“Definitely not.” Daniel look over his shoulder. “What’s your team?”

Storm stepped to the side, a smirk crossing his face. “Enjoy.”

Daniel saw two ponies and two humans. He only recognized two of the faces instantly – Alushy and Jenny. The others forced him to turn to his data pad. One was a white alicorn with a red and black mane who had almost no documentation. Her name was Beryl, apparently. The human was a woman named Magane Chikujoin. She wore black, had dark purple hair that covered half her face, and had teeth far too sharp to fit in a human’s mouth.

Magane Chikujoin… Daniel thought to himself, narrowing his eyes. Something was wrong here.

“I assure you, you have no idea who I am,” Magane said.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve heard about you from somewhere…”

Magane shrugged. “A lie about a lie…” she snapped her fingers. Daniel suddenly felt all his worries shift away – he might as well have never been concerned at all.

“I never get tired of seeing that,” Jenny said with a smirk.

Daniel blinked. “Seeing what?”

“Nothing,” Beryl muttered, scratching at her upside-down green crown of a cutie mark. “We’re just here to get to our assignment.” She levitated a data pad in front of her eyes. “Fuckin… looks like the TSAB Saisai contingent.”

Alushy let out a snort. “Hope they like graphic levels of violence!”

Storm chuckled. “I’m sure they will. Now, who’s ready to go to war!?”

“We are!” everyone but Beryl shouted. Beryl just nodded.

Daniel nodded to them. “Well, everything seems to be in order… good luck.” He gestured toward the stargate. They all filed in.

“All right!” Storm called out, spreading his hands wide. “Hello! The Storm has arrived!”

A TSAB mage let out a disgruntled sigh. “Right this way, we’ll have your team equipped in one of the droppers shortly. Are you all combat ready?”

There were five nods of confirmation.

“Good. Just do whatever the voice of Commander Onna tells you to. I would show you your quarters, but we’re expecting to launch in less than an hour, so ask about that later if we survive initial contact.”

The ‘dropper’ turned out to be an octagonal room with eight empty chairs. The floor was made of glowing pink teleporter crystals ready to grab the soldiers above and ‘drop’ them wherever was needed. A quick delivery system.

They were the only five in there.

“You are task force 47-JZN,” the mage reported, logging them into the room. “The computer consoles on the walls will inform you of anything you need to know.” He pressed a button and all five of their ears suddenly felt like an ant had just bit down inside of them. “And now you can receive auditory orders anywhere. Be prepared to go at a moment’s notice.” He then ran out, leaving them alone.

Storm let out a chuckle. “Heh. Looks like they’re having a difficult time organizing everything.”

“Organized management is always a panic,” Jenny said, sitting down in her chair with a playful smirk. “So, what’s all your stories? Besides Magane, already know yours.”

“You wound me so!” Alushy blurted, falling back onto her chair in false fainting. “The memory of my soothing, enthralling voice is nothing to the likes of Jenny of the Red Gloves! I’m fuck-all to her!”

“Give it a rest,” Beryl said, shaking her head. “We need to learn to work together as a team. Jenny’s right, we should all get to know each other better. All we know now is that Storm found us and chose us all.”

“And are you going to let out your secret, or no?” Alushy asked.

“W-what secret?”

“You really aren’t a smart pony,” Alushy said, shaking her head. “Who here knows who ‘Beryl’ is?”

Magane and Storm raised their hands. Jenny just looked confused.

Beryl facehooved. “Oh for the… I was supposed to vanish! Why do you all just know!”

“I chose you because I knew,” Storm said. “And Magane’s probably cheating.”

Magane smiled predatorily, saying nothing.

“And I used my amazing powers of deduction!” Alushy blurted.

“…You just served with me in the whole Collection fiasco.”

“Fiasco? I thought you more creative than that, my Princess of Winning.”

Blackjack facehooved. “I’m not the Winner anymore. This cutie mark is fake. I’m just an alicorn who knows how to use weapons.”

“And who’s being an idiot and coming to war.” Alushy rolled over in her chair. “Hey multiverse, I’m Blackjack, and I’m supposed to be staying out of conflicts! Please, come fuck my shit up!”

Blackjack shook her head. “It’s not that. I have to do this. It’s… personal.”

“Personal?” Jenny raised an eyebrow. “What, did someone die?”

“Only everyone I knew,” Blackjack muttered.

Jenny realized she stepped on something she shouldn’t have. “Uh… Sorry…?”

Blackjack blinked, finding nothing to say in response to this.

“The fly buzzes through the air…” Magane said with a chuckle. “And she is not aware what she mocks is a great spider, a hair’s breadth away from lashing out in anger…”

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “Well I ne-”

“47-JZN! Get ready!” the announcement came. “Intel suggests there is a Collection strike about to happen on Nathalim. We will be there to defend! Expect heavy infantry combat!”

Alushy laughed. “Aw, so sorry, looks like our moment of bonding has been cut short! We’ll just have to hope we all suddenly know how to fight as a unit when we get there!”

Blackjack gulped. “Yay…”

“Also, everyone, this girl’s an idiot, you’ll probably have to protect her over and over again.”

“Alushy!”

“It’s perfectly fine for me to say that if you’re a self-proclaimed idiot.”

“Alushy!”

Storm held up his fingers. Three… Two… One…

The teleportation cut Alushy off in the middle of a sentence about buckballs.

~~~

Jotaro steered the Atlas through the Great Void, following a faint signal a Void agent had given them, presumably one of the larger secret bases for the collapse.

Behind him sat everyone else – Pinkie, Nova, Vriska, Pidge, and Jolyne.

Just a minute ago, they had all been laughing. Pinkie had thrown a Happy Fifth Day (Maybe) On The Atlas Party! not too long ago and it had been a great time. Even Jotaro had broken out in smiles and chuckles, the moment serving as a great reminder that all joy had not been sapped from existence.

But then they’d picked up a loose transmission signal carrying what was apparently an important public message.

The Doctor’s last message to the multiverse. Pinkie’s Party may have already heard about the fall of Gallifrey, but they didn’t know anything about how it happened, or that the Doctor was involved.

The message was a surprise to all of them.

“Make the most of what I’m giving you,” the image of the Doctor said on the screen. Then he waved with a sad smile – and the feed ended.

Most of them simply stared at the now empty screen in silence.

Vriska was the only one crying. “Fucking… bastard…” She wiped her face. “Thinks he can redeem himself… thinks he can apologize…”

“…Can’t he?” Nova asked.

“Well I can’t exactly stay mad at a dead guy can I!?” Vriska blurted, slamming her fist into a console. “Wouldn’t be ‘fair’ to him. Wouldn’t be ‘proper’. He fucking gave himself for everyone and apologized, how in my right mind could I still be pissed at him?” She let out a demented laugh. “Always a master of manipulation…”

“You don’t think…” Pidge began.

“I don’t know,” Vriska said, grunting. “I can’t know with him. He always kept himself hidden. He could always manipulate people seemingly without trying. Fucking effortless. And now he’s gone and whatever fucked-up secrets he had are gone! He’s made sure he’ll keep the moral high ground by ‘admitting’ he didn’t have it! Whoop-de-do.” She put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “It hurts.”

“You never really wanted him dead,” Jotaro observed.

Vriska said nothing.

“We’re just going to have to learn to move past things like this quickly,” Nova said. “Everything’s falling apart. We have to make sure we don’t fall apart.”

Pinkie smiled. “Yeah! Nova’s got the right idea. Really, really bad things are going to start happening. We’ve got to keep ourselves up above the waves.”

“Bad things haven’t happened already?” Jolyne blurted.

“That’s not what I-”

“Anasui has been rewritten, Job doesn’t know where I am, and people are fucking dying!”

“And that is going to keep happening,” Nova said. “That’s my point. We’re… just going to have to get used to it. Or we’re going to have to break.”

Jolyne looked like she wanted to shout but couldn’t think of anything that didn’t make her sound like a raging lunatic. She let out a sigh. “…Fine. I get it, I get it. Just have to toughen ourselves up.”

“…If we can,” Pidge said.

“We can,” Pinkie said, grinning. “Because we’re us! Think about all the things we’ve been through these past few decades! We took all of that – we can take this. Are you with me?”

There was a split between ‘yeah!’ and awkward silence. They weren’t given time to comment on this though – because the Atlas was teleported right into one of the Raven Hotel’s docking bays.

I stood there with Corona and Mage Rarity. I force teleported all of them out of the Atlas, startling them – but my smile quickly put them at rest.

“Welcome to the Raven Hotel,” I said, extending a hoof. “Glad you made it.”

Pinkie bounced forward and shook my hoof. “I’d hope so, we’re about to become your best fighters!”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

Corona picked up Pinkie and hugged her. “…I’m glad you chose to come. It… It means a lot.”

Pinkie squeezed her back. “Make it all worth it, Corona.”

Corona let out a short laugh. “I’m trying as hard as I can.” She released Pinkie and moved to Jotaro. She fixed him with a pained expression. “…I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Jotaro didn’t say anything.

Corona extended her hand. “Let’s make that sacrifice mean something. Together.”

Jotaro hesitated for a moment. Then he grabbed her hand and shook it. Corona noticed his hand was trembling slightly, but she didn’t comment on it. She greeted Nova, Pidge, and Jolyne in much the same way.

Vriska ignored her, walking right up to Mage Rarity and me. Despite her tears just a moment ago, she broke out into a huge smile and laughed. “Looks like we’re getting the band back together!”

“In more ways than one,” I said, holding up my hoof.

“Greetings,” Mite said.

“Oh. My. Gog,” Vriska gasped. “You got Mite too? Oh, this really is everyone! …Everyone who can be here, anyway.”

Mage Rarity nodded sadly. “I’m sure she wouldn’t want that to be a shadow over us.”

“Fuck no,” Vriska said, putting her hands on both our backs. “We’re a team, and we will always be a team, even if we’re all part of other teams. It took the fate of the multiverse to get us back together. Let’s go out with a bang!”

“Implosion,” Mite droned.

“If you’re going to get technical I’m going to mention that you can’t call the collapse an explosion or an implosion due to interdimensional effects.”

“Irrelevant.”

“Oh, then why did you care earlier?”

“Entertainment.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Ooooof course.”

Corona coughed. “Sorry to break this reunion up, but we have work to do, and I can’t keep up my tough-girl image if I keep hugging you all like this. I might have to be a little harsh in the coming weeks, just be warned.”

“Got it!” Pinkie said, saluting.

“Just know that I’m glad to have you here, regardless.” Corona gave them all a wink. “Anything you really need to tell me before I put you in with all the other teams?”

“Nothing your Source wouldn’t have told you already,” Pinkie said.

“Good. …You guys remember Poe, right?”

Nova facehooved. “How could we forget?”

Corona rolled her eyes. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you, at least.”

“Yaaay...”

Corona led them inside, checking them in to their secret little war effort.

~~~

Eve and Flutterfree had finally gotten a moment away from the chaos, deciding to spend it at Flutterfree’s cottage. It was the one place that still looked more or less the same as it had before everything had happened. The tree had grown, certainly, but it didn’t look much different. The branches were still the same natural color, the leaves were filled with animals, and there was a beautiful arrangement of larger plants around it.

Flutterfree knew her house was essentially a park in Ponyville, but at least she got to keep most of her scenic view, even if the noises of the city were still audible.

Flutterfree had just finished warming up some tea for herself and Eve, setting the dishes out across the living room table. The sounds of Eve taking a shower could be heard up the stairs – Flutterfree was sure she’d be done soon.

Discord dropped in for a moment. “Oh, you finally made it back!”

Flutterfree smiled. “Yeah. I don’t have much time. I’d appreciate it if I actually got to relax with Eve.”

“Say no more. I’m technically busy on the front, anyway,” Discord said, taking some of the tea.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were fighting. …Are you sure that’s what you want?”

Discord shrugged. “It seems like the right thing to do. Plus, it is a little fun getting to ‘catch ‘em all’.” He snapped his fingers, putting on a Pokèmon trainer outfit and levitating six of the capture devices in his hand. “All of them!”

Flutterfree chuckled despite the morbid reality behind the joke. “Watch yourself, okay? The big players may be gone… But there are still things that can hurt you out there.”

“Trixie’s watching my back.”

“You bet Trixie is!” Trixie’s voice came from somewhere in Discord’s ear. “The Great and Powerful unicorn of the Internet sees all!”

“You missed the nega-Discord an hour ago.”

“He wasn’t playing fair!”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. She heard the water shut off. “Oh, looks like Eve’s done. Sorry, Discord.”

Discord bowed extravagantly. “It is no matter. I shall endeavor to encase many in cotton candy clouds in your name, Flutterfree.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “Just keep yourself safe.”

Discord nodded – then vanished.

Eve came down the stairs a few seconds later, towel wrapped around her mane, somehow managing to keep the hairs of cosmic energy contained. Flutterfree suspected the spells required to do that were rather complicated.

“How do you feel?” Flutterfree asked.

“…Strangely, not that bad,” Eve admitted. “I should be panicking, fretting about a million details, be ready to explode in magical fire… but I’m not. I feel… calm.”

Flutterfree smiled sadly. “That’s… good.”

“But…?”

“I think your body and mind have realized they need to shut a lot of themselves down in order to survive the coming ordeals,” Flutterfree sipped her tea, giving her a moment to collect her thoughts. “I’m feeling it too. You were there after Pinkie left, I came to you a wreck, but I had to put myself together for you. And now… well, I don’t feel great, but I don’t feel like the world is falling apart around me. Even though it is.”

“Is this an unhealthy denial of some sort?”

“It might be, if existence wasn’t actually falling apart at the seams,” Flutterfree said. “I’ve talked to Rev. I’m pretty sure this coping mechanism we’ve come up with… it’s damaging us. Giving us a chance to act, yes… but how will we come out of it?”

“A lot of immortals end up distant, or impassive,” Eve mused. “Maybe because it’s only a matter of time before they have to lock themselves up to survive?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is that we don’t have much of a choice.”

“Yeah… Everyone else is more important than our individual mental health.”

“…It’s amazing what you can do when you have no choice.”

Eve smirked. “That quote again?”

“I like it. It… describes my life, in a lot of ways. And it is applicable to the situation.”

“Mmm…” The two of them fell into a moment of silence – not an awkward one, but one of relaxation. One of contentment. One where they didn’t have to worry about the fate of existence for one small moment.

Then the priority line on Eve’s phone rang.

“How long did that take?” Eve asked, flipping the phone out and turning on her ears.

“Forty local minutes,” Flutterfree said.

“Hm. More than I expected.” Eve put the phone to her ear. “Overhead Evening.”

“Ambassador Valentine,” Valentine said from the other side. “The final vote on our place in this war went through.”

“…Wait, why did you come to the meeting if there was still a vote?”

“The outcome was inevitable, and it went just as I predicted,” Valentine answered. “If there’s one thing we Muricans like, it’s an enemy to fight. Even if they’re ‘bigger’ and ‘stronger’ than we are, we are the people of freedom, and we will never back down from that fight. USM forces will be joining Merodi Universalis and the rest shortly.”

“You don’t seem all that thrilled.”

“With this vote the USM has signed its death warrant,” Valentine said. “We cannot survive a war of this scale. Our internal politics are already so unstable; one wrong push will send the entire thing into a tailspin. We have no unique skills, no ancient artifacts, and no significant ka presence. We are just a Class 3 nation who doesn’t know when to keep their head down.”

“You tried to stop it, right?”

“I did. If by some miracle the USM survives this war in any form, no doubt my actions will be the start of my own political downfall. The route of pacifism is… decidedly unpopular.”

Eve smiled. “I’m glad you stuck up for what you believed in, even when everyone else was doing the opposite.”

“It was all I could do. And it wasn’t enough. …Eve, I need to ask you a favor. If you are able, forget what we stand for and what’s happened in the past. You are the strong ones in this case, and we are the weak. Try to protect us.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Eve promised. “It’s what friends are for.”

“…I suppose it is.”

“And don’t worry, this conversation didn’t happen.”

“Goodbye.” He hung up.

Eve put the phone away and turned off her ears. “Well… I guess we can keep relaxing. For now.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Good.”

They accepted their gift of a moment to breathe.

~~~

Morty watched as the soldiers of his half of the Collection laid waste to a universe of bright pink flowers simply because some collapse-leaning individuals were hiding amongst the beautiful flora.

There was no more beauty to be found here. There was only fire.

A loud burp sounded from behind him. He hoped, in vain, that it was one of the Ricks he was working with. Barring that, an assassin from the other side. Anything but his Rick.

“How’s it feel to be me?” Rick asked, tossing a beer bottle over his shoulder.

“The fact that it feels terrible means I’m not you,” Morty deadpanned.

“Your feelings don’t mean shit.”

“Rick, we established a long time ago that’s not what I think.”

“God, you’re still a naive idiot… bringing war to everything in existence and you still think this is real?” Rick let out a mixture of a snort and a burp. “You know, if everyone stopped caring about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, none of this would happen. Who’d care either way?”

“Rick, even you couldn’t live without some fucked-up idea of morality. You haven’t exactly physically removed your emotions, have you?”

“Tried a few times,” Rick admitted. “Bad consequences.”

There was an explosion in the distance. Some dark magic spell coagulated the blood into a demonic squid monster.

“Maybe that should tell you they mean something.”

“Or the Tower’s a bitch.”

“Then destroy it.”

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“No difference either way. You’re fucked over by stories or fucked over by reality.” Rick stretched his back, yawning. “You’re all set on going after the better option and are willing to kill everything over it. Idiots. Every last one of you. There’s no difference. You live or you don’t either way.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Fucking Tower’s random dimensional jump matrix. I was going to Blips and Chitz.”

Morty let out a bitter sigh. “That place still exists…”

“Amazing defenses. I’ll gamble until everything goes pop,” Rick laughed, slapping his thigh. “And then nothing will change.”

“You could be dead.”

“Nothing.” Rick pulled out his portal gun and created a gateway to Blips and Chitz. “Wanna take a break?”

Morty scowled. “I am never doing anything with you again.”

“Your loss.”

~~~

Mage Rarity was one of the most valuable pieces on the field of battle; even though as a higher-ranked member of the army she was supposed to stay back, her true power wasn’t on display unless she was in the thick of it.

She was one of the best White Mages the Void had to offer, able to resurrect several people at once, heal virtually every wound, and remove any status the multiverse could think of. She even had a safeguard in her spells so that anyone who was Brought Back Wrong would just be killed automatically.

But she was very effective at not letting anyone around her die. Sure, the fact that both sides were using capture devices kept the death count down, but Mage Rarity was still the greatest force of healing available at the moment.

It did help that she was also excellent at actually fighting.

“Holy Meteorga!” she shouted as she flew across space, a Void-device on her back that kept her shrouded in a bubble of reality and used dark energies to move her around much like a rocket. Her combination spell went off – a series of impressive white orbs erupted from her horn, spiraling toward a Starcross Society ship. The white orbs became infused with the essence of cosmic meteors, bombarding the ship’s already-weakened shields. The impacts broke the barrier, allowing the holy energy to coalesce into a tremendous laser that cut right through the ship’s bridge, disabling it.

She tapped into the connection she had to the Void, using it to shift universes to a world where the ships couldn’t fight – an infinite plane of whiteness where single ‘entities’ were limited to a set size no larger than a bus. Warriors from all sides popped into and out of existence, trying to beat the other.

Most of them didn’t even know the point of the battle – which was to get entry to universe
‘Zel-57’ and use the construct within to help build Tower Rings faster. The only problem was no one could find it in all this chaos, especially considering how the universes kept being moved across the Sea of Infinite Possibility, screwing up their coordinates.

Mage Rarity didn’t need to worry about this. She just did what would help her army.

She leaped through a Void-portal to another plane of existence, this one where ugly cobbled-together Kromagg ships fired upon the behemoth Combine star-constructs. Mage Rarity didn’t care to engage in this fight – she’d only attacked the Starcross ship because it had been weakened – but she was interested in using it. She moved herself between the Kromagg and Combine, enveloping herself in a sphere of black Void energy.

The Combine’s reality-tearing beam hit her, passing through the Void and into the realm she had just left. She shifted herself back to the limiting expanse, finding thousands of charred corpses.

She smirked – using her weak Raise spell to bring them all back. There was no small number who Came Back Wrong and just started screaming before they were automatically killed. But any others came back to life weak, barely able to move – easy to capture with the devices.

The remaining soldiers were those on her side, so she healed them back to full and sent them back to fighting. She saluted, winked, and did a backflip through a Void portal to another realm, this one a seemingly endless maze of blue circuitry.

She was somewhat surprised to find it mostly abandoned. She was only supposed to be jumping to universes with heavy amounts of combat.

“And the rabbit went for the carrot,” someone said from behind her, accompanying the line with a psychotic laugh.

I was intercepted, she realized. She quickly teleported herself several meters forward, barely dodging a thrown starmetal sword.

“Blackjack!?” she blurted, eyes wide.

“Oh. That’s what your name was,” Jenny said, looking at Blackjack.

Blackjack paid her no mind, instead pointing the starmetal sword at Mage Rarity. The once-Princess of Winning’s face was livid. “How could you?”

“…Blackjack, dear, you know what my beliefs were, and where my loyalties lay.”

“Bullshit! I’m an idiot! You never told me outright, how was I supposed to know!?”

Storm raised an eyebrow. “I take it there’s some history here?”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Alushy muttered.

Storm held out a hand and Magane provided him with some popcorn.

“…Are these your new friends?” Mage Rarity asked. “The ones who convinced you to put your life on the line?”

Blackjack twitched. “I made that decision on my own.”

Mage Rarity shook her head. “You’re going to die, Blackjack. You’ve run out. You aren’t a winner anymore.”

“So? Fuck that, I’m going to do what needs to be done.” She charged Mage Rarity with the sword.

Mage Rarity jumped back through a Void portal, expecting to escape their snare. But she found Jenny of the Red Gloves waiting for her.

Jenny’s fist twisted with transdimensional vibration energy. She punched right into Mage Rarity, disrupting her Void shields and cracking the mare’s jaw.

In an instant, Mage Rarity healed it with a Cure. She dodged to the side as Magane came flying out of a random dimension, somehow wielding a blade seven times too heavy for a human to control effectively.

Crap. She’s probably a reality warper of some sort.

Mage Rarity tried to focus a Holy blast on Magane, but the woman simply vanished the moment it would have hit her.

Alushy charged from another realm of existence as Mage Rarity jumped into a world where the only things in existence were trees. She unleashed a Holy spell on Alushy, her vampiric nature making her particularly susceptible to the attack. “OH FUCK, THAT’S A DEEP PAIN!”

“It gets worse,” Mage Rarity muttered, activating her Quick spell. She was able to layer four spells overtop of each other, creating Holy-Meteorga-Slow-Mini. Alushy was hit with holy meteors from on high that encased her in a sludge of slowed space-time, all the while her size was shrunk considerably.

“…Sweet,” Alushy commented, stumbling and passing out from the sudden onslaught of holy power. It was quite possibly the worst matchup for the great vampire.

Mage Rarity moved to capture Alushy, but Magane was already there, capturing Alushy herself to keep Mage Rarity from getting to her. Storm came from the side and hit Mage Rarity with a lightning bolt fueled by a galaxy in a marble.

“Do you want to hear the story behind this artifact?” Storm asked, grinning mischievously. “A fun story – we were wandering around a universe wh-” He dodged a Comet spell from Mage Rarity. “Or we can fight. That works too.” He lunged at her, taking out a sword. The blade split up into hundreds of sections, allowing him to wield it like another limb. It cut at her from the side.

She teleported to another universe, somewhat surprised to find that the sword was able to cut through dimensional barriers and follow her. She galloped across the hull of a Combine ship, avoiding both the natural point-defenses of the ship and Storm’s artifact.

Magane was suddenly in front of her. “You won’t be leaving this place.”

“Oh yes I will.”

Magane grinned. “A lie about a lie…” she snapped her fingers.

Mage Rarity understood. So that’s how her powers work. Exceptionally broken, exploiting truth like that… She smiled. But I have a workaround.

“Undo!” Mage Rarity shouted, letting out a spell that negated Magane’s warping of reality, making it as if it had never happened – though both Mage Rarity and Magane remembered it happening.

Magane laughed. “Clever girl…” she said, baring her teeth as if she were a great white shark delighted to have some challenging prey.

Mage Rarity wasn’t having any of that. She teleported behind Magane, kicked her in the back of the head, and then forced her timestream to Stop. She planned on cutting the woman in half, but the Combine point-defenses caught up with her. The Void absorbed most of the damage, but Mage Rarity felt the plasma energy burn off some of her skin and break a rib.

She allowed herself to fall back into the blue circuitry realm, annoyed to find Jenny and Storm waiting for her.

She was beginning to realize she wouldn’t be able to keep this up. She would make a mistake – and that would be that. She needed backup, but everyone was so busy. Empress Twilight might send someone, but would they get here in time?

Taking the time to think that turned out to be her mistake. She had failed to notice Blackjack get back up. Her starmetal sword cut right through the Void’s defenses and hit Mage Rarity’s horn – snapping it in half.

She let out a shriek as her immense magic exploded from the bony stump. White magic blasted out in a shockwave and she slumped to the ground.

Blackjack stood her ground, using her own magic to deflect the release of power. “I’m sorry.” She took out a capture device.

And then Vriska appeared out of a Void portal and kicked Blackjack in the face. “Got your back, Rares.”

“Ah… Thanks,” Mage Rarity said, reaching for the broken half of her horn – she’d need it to reaffix it later. “Be… careful.”

“C’mon, I thought you knew me!”

“You’re… never careful…”

Vriska chuckled. “That’s what you think. Mite’s already working on them.”

Jenny realized she had lost control of her body. “Ah, frick.”

“Shrimp,” Mite said from his position on her shoulder, hacking into her internal system of nanomachines that powered her magic.

“I AM NOT A SHRIMP!” Jenny shouted at Mite.

“Sure…” Mite commented, throwing Jenny’s fist into Magane.

Storm narrowed his eyes, looking at Vriska. “…Where’s Twilence?”

“Where do you think?”

“Ensuring our downfall,” Storm said. “Everyone, fall back!”

“Fall back!?” Blackjack blurted.

“They have the Prophet focused on them!” Storm shouted. “Fall back!”

“Oh, you’re not getting away…” Vriska said, pulling out the infinite-sided die.

“Ah, but I think we are!” Magane said.

That won’t work, she has to start… Mage Rarity thought.

“Magane, we’re stuck, just give up,” Storm said with a grin.

“A lie about a lie…”

…Dammit, that’s broken as Tartarus.

Somehow, Vriska managed to fumble with her infinite-sided die just long enough for the enemy team to escape to another universe. Mite hopped off Jenny at the last moment.

“Trace them!” Vriska shouted.

“Nope,” Mite said.

“Why not!?”

“Twilence.”

“She told him not to,” Mage Rarity said, following it up with a cough. “…Just get me back to base.”

Vriska threw her hands in the air. “Well okay then! Guess we have a draw a-” An alarm went off in her ear. She stopped talking and got everyone out of there instantly.

One of the higher-end TSAB ships had unleashed a multidimensional weapon in a nearby universe. The realm of blue circuitry began to shatter like glass, becoming deadly projectiles. Some of the fragments embedded themselves into Vriska and Mage Rarity before they left – but it was nothing compared to the storm of death that was created afterward.

The war continued to tear universes apart even at this smaller scale.

124 - Nihilists

Greetings, Evening Sparkle of Merodi Universalis.

This communication has been sent by us, the Flowers that Be, Protectors of the Plot Continuum, to inform you of a development so troubling we have determined it to be a glitch in ka, perhaps the largest one ever uncovered.

This war was always meant to be between two sides – the preservation and collapse movements. However, to our understandable horror, a third side has developed. This third side is not the side of us or the Melnorme, who have chosen to be noncombatants, but that of a different ideology altogether.

That of the Nihilist.

The Many-Angled Ones have gathered together several lesser forces into them to further this end. They claim neutrality, but their intentions are much more sinister. They have become the enemy of all when they took the side of the Nihilists – that of complete destruction.

They have figured out a method by which to use a Tower Ring to completely destroy everything in existence. If they accomplish what they’ve set out to do, there will be no existence after the war. There will be only the Sea of Infinite Possibility.

This needs to be stopped. And we are giving you the secret to stopping them.

Do not send a large army, or a fleet of ships. Send a small ship containing heroes. You will choose the best suited for the job. Have them enter the Unrealities from the eastern side of the multiverse, and make their way to universe U-T4U_-∂¨8Rn:;∆. They will enter the Many-Angled Ones’ central mechanism and destroy the Tower Ring, ending the Nihilists’ plan.

This glitch needs you to stop it. If we made the attempt, the consequences would be dire.

Do not reply to this message.

-Austras Koks.

The Flowers sent a nearly-identical message to Corona. The only difference was the greeting, and the order to enter from the west.

The Flowers knew how to play the game well.

~~~

Corona looked at the message. “…What I want to know is why the consequences would be dire if they tried.”

“They know ka better than any of us,” I said. “And I know for sure they aren’t partial to either side of the conflict we know about, so I’m tempted to believe them.”

“Well, guess I can send Pinkie’s with a few others…” She looked up from the message. “Anyone have any suggestions in particular?”

“I’ll go,” Mage Rarity said.

“Really?” Lady Rarity asked, blinking.

“Empress Twilight has other advisors, you know,” Mage Rarity said with a smile. “I just think it’s about time I went out with Mite and Vriska.”

“You asking me to come?” I asked.

“In actuality… yes. A chance to take out evil, just like old times hmm?”

I smiled. “I’d be glad to.”

“What about our meta-awareness?” Corona asked.

A Pinkie poked her head into the room. “Someone called?”

“Right, right…” Corona nodded. “Come back soon.”

Scarcity gawked. “You’re just letting her go?”

“Want me to find a reason to send you?”

Scarcity twitched, once again annoyed that Corona was able to pressure her.

Thanos raised his hand. “I can send a Collection team.”

“Pinkie’s, Twilence’s, and the Collection’s…” Corona said, thinking it over. “I think that’s enough. Anything else?”

“I’ll get them a ship,” Minna said, pressing buttons on her data pad. “A single ship won’t do anything to lessen our assault on the TSAB labyrinth.”

The phrase ‘TSAB labyrinth’ made Corona twitch. They’d already been hammering at that thing for three local days to no avail. “Mage Rarity, since you’re going, you manage everything. The rest of us are going to try to come up with some way to penetrate this stupid labyrinth…”

Mage Rarity nodded, trotting off to gather everyone.

~~~

“I don’t think I need to say why these Nihilists have to be stopped,” Eve said, placing a data pad on the table for dramatic effect, though her Element of Magic drew significantly more attention than the pad. “Absolute destruction without hope of revival is evil. Absolutely.”

“And the enemy isn’t already?” Allure asked, scrunching her nose.

“Discussion for another time, Allure,” Flutterfree cautioned.

Allure went silent but did nothing to fix the disgusted look on her face.

Eve continued. “This is why I’ve called you here – I’m gathering the heroes the Flowers have requested. Allure, Storm? You are to lead your two teams into the core of the Nihilists.”

“With no plan?” Storm asked.

“The Flowers have a plan,” Monika said. “Not that they’re telling us what it is.”

“So just throw ourselves to the winds of ka?”

“Pretty much,” Eve admitted. “But we trust the Flowers know what’s best. They’ve adhered to their principles more than any other civilization. We may not agree with them all the time, but they’d know what needs to be done to destroy the Nihilists.”

Storm and Allure nodded.

“I’m sending Starbeat with you for ka-support. Can you think of anyone else you’d like?”

“The Living Tribunal?” Storm asked with a smirk.

“Stuck in the TSAB labyrinth,” Eve said.

“The Emperor of Mankind?”

“Same.”

“Then I’ve got nothing.”

Allure nodded as well.

“In that case, I-”

Renee charged into the room. “I’d like to go!” Her glasses were precariously balanced on her muzzle, her hat was lopsided, and the string she had the Element of Laughter on was knotted sideways.

“Renee…?”

Renee evidentially noticed that she didn’t look presentable and cleaned herself up. “It has come to my attention that I’m not really… doing anything. When you forwarded the message to me, I knew instantly that this would be a foe I would be able to face. …I’ll even bring some of my agents.”

“Renee, you sure? You seem… A little off.”

Renee smiled sadly. “Of course I’m a little off. We all are. I am sure, dear.”

Eve smiled warmly. “Well… I wish you luck, then.”

Allure smiled. “…It’ll be good to have you on board.”

Renee nodded, clearly still frantic. “I’ll grab Jane and Sunny... they work great as a pair. And… Oh, Twiree, she’ll work great.”

“Your ship will be ready in an hour,” Eve said. “Good luck. And since this is more like our old battles, try to have fun, hmm?”

Storm chuckled. “That won’t be an issue, Eve.”

“I expect a fun report the likes of which Pinkie Pie would make!”

“Guess I know what Bot is doing,” Allure chuckled. “C’mon everyone – Merodi Universalis Anti-Nihilist Task-Force yay!”

Everyone stared at her.

“…I’ve been trying to be more positive lately, okay? It’s been rough.”

Renee hugged her sister. “Don’t I know it.”

~~~

Deep within Unrealities and the realm of the Many-Angled Ones, there was IT.

IT was many things.

IT was a demonic clown that fed off fear.

IT was a horrendous spidery mesh of evil intent.

IT was a demonic entity of before the time of the Tower.

IT was a brain that exerted absolute control over all near minds.

The concept of IT had been through many mutations through the history of the multiverse. IT was an ever-changing idea of evil, of darkness. Unlike Randall Flagg, IT was never consistent. IT had no time for the grand schemes Flagg undertook. IT sometimes even contradicted other versions of itself.

IT, in all its forms, cared little for complex things.

But something had changed recently. This particular version of IT suddenly cared. IT became the emissary of destruction.

And IT had chosen the form of the bodiless, pulsating brain. IT sat upon a black, cylindrical pedestal, absorbing as much information as it could about everything.

The Flowers have made their move. IT said, telepathically messaging all its allies. Corona and Eve are both sending heroes after us. IT scanned the minds nearby, determining what their response would have been. The Many-Angled Ones offer us protection, yes, but they cannot enter the realm of the Tower Ring, as it is antithetical to their nature. I assure you, the Flowers have a plan to disable those defenses. Evidence of ka-meddling has appeared within the Eldritch Embodiment, a likely source of difficulty.

The Allies expressed dismissal at the Embodiment doing anything.

Do not be so hasty. If Azathoth wakes, then all will bow. If the Flowers found it convenient, it would not be difficult to do so. It appears as if their plan will be to disable our highest defenses, and use the power of ‘heroes’ to destroy our hopes. By sending both sides after us our credibility within ka is severely weakened.

The Allies wondered how they could counteract that weakness.

We can manipulate truth. You all know how we got here. A lie about a lie. The Completion of the Sea of Infinite Possibility is coming. A group of heroes is a serious threat, yes, but if this is the Flowers’ best game, then this group of heroes is the worst we will have to overcome. So be ready, for they will be here. And we must kill them.

The Allies expressed agreement and moved to their posts.

IT pulsated, focusing its attention to a man chained up nearby. And you will counter them.

Andrew Hussie let out a dramatic groan.

~~~

Despite being based within the Great Void, traveling from the Raven Hotel to the Unrealities still took about a week with the ships available. TSAB speeders could go faster, but not only did they not have access to any speeders, such ships were in short supply even in TSAB space these days. No chance to steal one.

Not to mention the fact that speeders weren’t prepared to deal with alien physics on the level of the Unrealities.

So Corona sent out the team in a slow, but steady ship of Gem construction. It had no name, just a serial number nobody could remember. Its overall shape was that of a black eyeball, always looking forward. The interior was so white the screens had to display in black to be effectively seen.

They had already been traveling for near the expected week. Everyone was currently awake, ready to engage the Many-Angled Ones at any moment.

As they passed from universe to universe, they encountered nothing.

“Why isn’t anything attacking us?” Morty wondered aloud. “We’re in the middle of their territory! There’s no way they don’t detect us!”

The two Collection heroes he had brought with him – a Superman and a Darth Vader – shrugged, not able to provide him with any insight.

“Oh, like, maybe they’ve got some sort of special plan!” Insipid suggested, raising a hoof high into the air. She nudged Velvet with it after no one responded to her. “Back me up, cha?”

Velvet grunted, refusing to give in to Insipid’s little games.

“Oh come on Velvet! You’ve been grumpy all week!”

“She’s always grumpy,” Mage Rarity said with a slight eyeroll.

“Deviation,” Mite beeped.

“…It’s so hard to tell what he means,” Pidge said, poking her face where she heard Mite’s voice come from – even though she couldn’t see him. “Was he talking about the Standard Deviation or Velvet’s deviation from societal norms?”

“Yes.”

Pidge pointed an accusatory finger at Mite’s location. “No mathematician answers here, floppy.”

“Paradox.”

“Just leave him be,” I said, pulling Pidge’s arm down. “He’ll feed off your annoyed emotions until the end of time. It’s how he gets around.”

“Spoilsport.”

I chuckled. “And you know I have to keep watch on you for good reason.”

“You can say that again,” Vriska muttered.

“Don’t,” Mage Rarity said, a haunted expression crossing her face. “We don’t need a repeat of that fiasco.”

“Again,” Mite droned.

I rolled my eyes. “Ah, just like old times.”

“Except we’re here too!” Pinkie said, appearing between myself and Mage Rarity. “Extending the friendship train!”

“Choo choo!” I called, engaging in the amusement – so rare these days.

“Hey, Twilence?” Nova asked. “I’ve noticed, you aren’t writing in your notebook anymore.”

“It’s a precaution,” I explained. “The Flowers likely have their own narrative spinning involved here, and mine would only mess with it. I’ve chosen to trust their plan rather than my own.”

“Cool,” Pinkie said, smirking. “It is pretty sweet having the big plants backing us up! It’s like… a holy charge!”

“Yare yare daze…”

“What? It is!”

“I’m tempted to agree with Pinkie,” Morty said, narrowing his eyes. “What’s happening is nothing short of a miracle. We’re maybe a handful of universes away from the goal, and I haven’t even detected a Many-Angled One. That’s outrageously suspicious.”

“Could be the Flowers,” Mage Rarity pointed out. “For all we know the Many-Angled Ones are on a journey of self-discovery and left the universe unguarded.”

“There’s no way…” Morty muttered, scratching his chin. “None at all…”

“There’s a way,” I asserted. “I can see a few stories I could write to make our entrance easier, so of course the Flowers would have a better one.”

The ship shifted universes again, finding a direct connection to the target world sooner than expected. The ship diverted power instantly and jumped in – finally revealing what universe U-T4U_-∂¨8Rn:;∆ was.

Colors and shapes. An endless sea of geometric three-dimensional figures tumbling through space. Each shape – be it prism, sphere, or dodecahedron – was able to pass through all other shapes as if they were all ghosts. One would think this meant they had no substance, but the tiny one that hit the ship indicated they were solid to anything that wasn’t them.

Light seemed to come from all directions, comfortably illuminating every colorful shape without a hint of shadows. This caused more than a few illusions of depth, making it difficult to determine how large certain objects really were.

However, it was strictly a three-dimensional space. Which meant the ship – and all its occupants – could exist in this universe without reality anchors. There was even breathable air outside.

“Question,” Nova said, checking the readings on her hoof-screen. “Why would the Many-Angled Ones have a universe suitable for us?”

“Zoo?” Morty suggested.

“Okay, let me rephrase that. Why would they build their Tower Ring in a universe like this?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps there is a reason we could not imagine. Maybe this kind of world does have a place in their ideal of Perfect Geometry. They are eldritch beings, it’s not like we can truly understand what drives them.”

Pinkie’s ears twitched. “Well, is the Tower Ring here or not?”

“It’s here,” Nova said, pointing at one of the displays. “We’re picking up dimensional energy of the right sort. Just follow the signal.”

Pinkie dusted her hooves together. “Onward, Morty! Take the ship in!”

Morty nodded, pressing a few buttons. “Do I need to say it?”

“I’ll say it,” Vriska said, clearing her throat. “I’ve got a bad feelin’ ‘bout this.”

“Hyuck,” Mite added.

Vriska shot Mite a death glare. She was experienced enough to know where he actually was.

“Well, whatever happens we’ll be fine so long as we all stick together!” Pidge said, smiling.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, grabbing his hat. “Brace yourselves.”

Pinkie clapped her hooves. “You’re getting better Jotaro!”

“…Better at what?” Pidge asked, blinking.

“Detecting when Murphy’s Law is about to take effect!”

“I never did und-”

“Many-Angled One detected!” Morty shouted, frantically moving his hands across the console. “Wait, something’s wrong… It’s not actually h-”

The Many-Angled One didn’t give him a chance to fire any relativistic weapons. The mixture of impossible shadow, fractal geometry, and pulsating eyes touched their ship – and sliced it in half with a two-dimensional octagon, cutting the main reactor in two.

There was a fiery explosion.

The Many-Angled One didn’t believe for a moment it had killed any of them, but it soon had other things to worry about.

~~~

Renee adjusted her glasses. Originally she had expected she would be the leader of the expedition, given her rank within Merodi Universalis, but it had quickly become clear she was second to Starbeat.

Renee didn’t fight this – she was all for seeking an organic composition in the team – but still, it was unexpected, and it put her on edge. She hadn’t been calm in… a long time. She had thought getting ‘on the road’ would let her work out some of her stress, but that wasn’t really working. Allure was here, and hardly an hour went by without a painful reminder of Allure’s opinion of the other side.

Allure always called them ‘the enemy’, refusing to do what most everyone else did. Bot had even joined her in the effort, though notably Thrackerzod and Burgerbelle were not. Renee knew Squeaky and Suzie weren’t as well, but they weren’t here right now – they were occupied with the TSAB labyrinth.

“Okay, so, let’s say the war leads to our destruction…” Allure said, waving a hoof in the air. “How wou-”

“Can you drop it?” Jane the Evermore asked, looking up at Allure with a grumpy expression. “We’re not in the war right now, we’re on a mission to stop the Nihilists. Different thing.”

“It’s still important,” Allure pointed out. “After we’re done here we’re going right back to it.”

“And you’ve already done enough talking to ensure that none of us will forget.”

Allure pursed her lips. “…Alright, I’ll cool it. We’re almost there anyway. Right?”

“Three furlongs from completion!” Alushy shouted from the pilot’s seat.

“Question,” Twireee said, looking up from her book for the first time in several hours, her Flat voice startling everyone present. “Why is Alushy flying the ship?”

“She’s not,” ‘Beryl’ said, rubbing her glasses like they didn’t belong on her face. “Jenny’s flying from a distance with her Numenera interface.”

Jenny looked up at ‘Beryl’. “Traitor.”

‘Beryl’ shrugged, saying nothing.

“Have any twos?” Storm asked.

“For the love of Azathoth the game ended five hours ago!” Thrackerzod shouted.

“I’ll take that as a no. I’ll Go Fish.”

‘Beryl’ glared at him.

“I’m missing context,” Bot said. “Burgerbelle, explain.”

The Flat cleared her throat. “It’s quite simple really – it’s akin to a bradburger matrix with a sprinkling of toblerone a-”

“Objection!” Twiree blurted, standing up tall. Pointing at her Flat counterpart, she glared. “I think you will find that the matrix is not of the Bradburger, but of deceptive gemstone names! Arrange them within the colors of the rainbow, and taste.”

“Hold it!” Burgerbelle shot back. “It may not be bradburger, but the rainbow colors cannot be tasted! You didn’t listen!”

“I didn’t listen!?”

“You didn’t listen!”

“Well welcome me to Yggdrasil, you’ve gotten quite wordy.” She shoved several US dollar bills into Burgerbelle’s face. “Shut up and take my money.”

“Um… how ‘bout no?”

“Cut. It. Out!” Starbeat blurted, placing herself between the two of them. ”We do not need a meme war to blow up the ship!”

“How about I do, anyway?” Burgerbelle sung.

Twiree waved a hand dismissively. “I can become a ship at the drop of a hat. We’ve got a spare.”

“I’m a button,” Burgerbelle added.

“I said stop it,” Starbeat said, eye twitching.

Burgerbelle shrugged, sat back in her seat and produced a hamburger from her hair. She started eating it.

Bot blinked. “When did you learn how to do that?”

“While ago,” Burgerbelle said, finishing her meal. “Pinkie showed me.”

“Don’t ask,” Allure warned.

“…An error has occurred,” Bot declared.

“MEME DETECTED!” Alushy shouted, pointing a gun at Burgerbelle. “THE PRICE OF THE CRIME? DEATH!”

Burgerbelle gave Alushy a ‘seriously?’ look.

“MEME FACE! DOUBLE OFFENSE!”

“I choose not to press charges,” Jenny said.

“Oh, are we going back to Ace Attorney?” Sunny asked.

“NO!” Starbeat, Alushy, and Beryl shouted.

“We’re approaching our destination,” Jenny said. She walked up to the pilot’s seat and tore Alushy out of it, sitting down herself. She brought up a display for everyone to see, showing their TSAB ‘skipper’ ship in its single-universe bubble. Several dozen connections were placed to other worlds in the Unrealities, the ‘goal’ universe being a red dot that wasn’t connected yet, but clearly would be soon. “Those Many-Angled Ones haven’t even noticed. Heh. All this worry for nothing.”

“And three…” Starbeat began.

“No you fucking don’t,” Alushy said, placing her hoof over Starbeat’s mouth. “There will be no comedic countdown today.”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “…Just because you st-”

At this point the multiverse decided there was no way Starbeat’s countdown could have lasted any longer and threw a reason for them to worry at the ship.

They were torn out of their pocket universe and dropped in an eldritch realm filled with five-dimensional shapes of perfection that had to be represented by rapidly vibrating triangles on the viewscreens. In between these shapes were millions of Many-Angled Ones, all staring right at the ship.

And not moving an inch.

“…What the…?” Jane said, cocking her head. “What are they doing?”

Thrackerzod closed her eyes and sent out an eldritch pulse. She furrowed her brow. “They’re trying to shroud their network from me. All I know is that they wanted to attack – but something made them stop. They’re all… afraid?”

“Fear should mean attack,” Storm said, tapping his fingers on a wall. “Unless they thought an attack was pointless. Do we have anyone here that’s a threat to them?”

Thrackerzod shook her head. “I’m nothing compared to them.”

Renee looked at the Elements around her neck. “…You don’t suppose it’s Laughter and Generosity, do you?”

Starbeat shook her head. “Nope, wouldn’t be enough. Jane, you wouldn’t happen to have any absurd magic artifacts in your ‘inventory’, would you?”

“Of course I do,” Jane said, crossing her legs. “I just don’t have anything that could take on more than one of those monsters out there. My bet is on force-of-nature Burger there.”

Burgerbelle shook her head. “Yeah, that works on small scales, but a bunch of shape-gods could take me out. I’m Flat! That’s easy for them to tear up into their little origami toys!”

“She speaks the truth,” Twiree said matter-of-factly.

“Then what is it?” Beryl asked.

“Me, I’m just that terrifying,” Alushy snarked. “Yeah, you heard right Many-Angled Ones! Alushy, the red death, the crimson fucker, is here. Tremble!”

Jenny broke out into amused laughter.

Alushy twitched. “Alright, miss Red Gloves, what did you do?”

Jenny snapped her fingers, summoning an artifact from her bag of holding. It was a tall staff with a familiar crystal on the end of it.

Siron’s staff.

Starbeat’s jaw dropped. “Where did you get that!?”

“Stole it.”

Renee sputtered. “Y-you stole it? Jenny, that artifact belongs to the Research Division! In one of the highest security bases we have! What? How? Why!?”

“Joking,” Jenny said, shooting Renee the finger guns. “I actually went through the proper paperwork and filled out a requisition form, number A-8-E, the one for emergencies. Handed it in to Eve and got instant approval.” She smirked. “And now we have a Juju whose purpose is to literally absorb eldritch energy into itself. They’re basically candy to us right now.”

“Jenny actually filled out paperwork…” Alushy said, blinking. “Holy shit…”

“So that staff is the only reason we’re not dead,” Starbeat observed.

“Winner winner chicken dinner!” Jenny bowed.

Burgerbelle went ding the same time as Bot. They both produced roasted chickens.

“Yeesh, why does mine have to still be in the oven?” Twiree asked.

Starbeat facehooved. “Right, so, on one hand, good thinking Jenny. On the other, what were you thinking, Jenny?”

“Uh, what?”

“What if that wasn’t part of the Flower’s plan? We weren’t supposed to actually be a threat to the Many-Angled Ones!”

“Was that in their letter?”

“It was… implied,” Starbeat said, tapping her hoof on the ground.

“Tell me how we would have survived without it. What, would the Embodiment come and save us from the shape-demons?”

Thrackerzod let out a short laugh.

“Thank you,” Jenny said, smirking.

Jane shook her head.

“Got something to say?”

“Mmm… Not much, just that the immortal child has quite the arrogant streak.”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “Whatever.” She placed her hands on the console and found she could dial the goal universe. “Here we go… Everyone ready?”

“Go ahead,” Starbeat said. “Find that Tower Ring.”

Jenny took them in, entering the realm of shapes from the opposite side.

“Weird…” Twiree said. “My readings suggest the Many-Angled Ones can’t exist in this realm.”

“That makes no sense,” Sunny pointed out. “Why would they build it in a universe they couldn’t even go to?”

Starbeat shrugged. “A lot of things about this don’t make any sense, but there’s a Tower Ring here and no Many-Angled Ones, so i-” Starbeat caught herself.

“Murphy denied!” Alushy whooped.

“I don’t think she stopped early enough,” Jane said, pointing.

In front of them was a single Many-Angled One.

“…They can’t exist here…” Twiree said, confusion crossing her face. “How…?”

“Doesn’t matter, TASTE THE JUJU, EUCLID!” Jenny shouted, pointing Sirons’ staff and activating it.

A small amount of latent eldritch energy from Thrackerzod entered the staff, but nothing from the Many-Angled One. “…What th-”

The Many-Angled One cut their ship in half, triggering an explosion.

Now that it had taken care of both the ships, it could start to pick them o-

Twiree transformed into her full Reaper form and teleported everyone back into her. She let out a deep, guttural noise. “BIG MISTAKE.”

The Many-Angled One was ready to destroy the Flat Reaper the same way, but it had forgotten to take into account one small detail.

Jane.

Jane and her artifacts that could take out one of ‘those monsters’.

The Evermore pulled a pale green lance sparkling with blue energy and threw it. It hit one of the Many-Angled One’s ‘eyes’, making it cry out in pain. It pulled the lance out in a vain attempt to end its suffering.

That was the worst mistake the Many-Angled One had ever made. The lance exploded the moment it was removed, unleashing every sealing spell it could within the confines of the universe. The Many-Angled One’s essence was contained in a white box under a total of nineteen separate successful sealing spells.

The box returned to Jane’s hand. “Just to be clear, I want that lance back when we’re done. We’ll need to think of another way to contain this guy.”

“Something to worry about later,” Starbeat said. “Thrackerzod, what was that?”

Thrackerzod blinked. “I think it was an eldritch deity that chose to descend. To remove its eldritch nature in favor of something simpler. It clearly wasn’t organic or purely physical, but it wasn’t eldritch anymore.”

“PURE FREE ELDRITCH CAN’T EXIST HERE, I WAS RIGHT!”

“Yes, Twiree, you were right. It is curious, very few eldritch beings could even consider to remove their eldritch nature. This Tower Ring must be important.”

“The question remains…” Renee said, scratching her chin. “Why would they not just make the Tower Ring in one of their universes? It should be possible.”

Beryl blinked. “Uh… Because they aren’t building a normal Tower Ring? Isn’t this one designed for destruction?”

Everyone looked at Beryl with blank expressions.

“Right, I get it, stupid ide-”

“That’s the best theory I’ve heard so far,” Starbeat interjected. “Good thinking.”

Beryl’s expression froze.

“Bl- Beryl.exe has stopped working,” Jenny joked.

Starbeat tapped a hoof on the ground. “Right, well, we’re safe from full eldritch power in here. But we need to be on the lookout for more of those ‘lowered’ Many-Angled Ones. Jane, you’re probably our best bet against them.”

Jane cracked her knuckles, a smile appearing on her face. “It’s been a while since I did some good old-fashioned god killing.”

Sunny raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have to be that bloodthirsty.”

“Eh,” Jane said with a shrug, not offering anything else in the way of a response.

Twiree activated her sublight engines and moved into the twisting shapes.

~~~

Pinkie poked her head out of a pile of octagons. “Okay, who did I end up with?”

“Your team,” Pidge said. “Minus Vriska, plus… Velvet.”

Velvet rubbed the back of her head but said nothing.

Nova scanned the area with her striped magic. “Hmm… Well, I can tell us which direction the Tower Ring is from our current position.”

“Where?” Jotaro asked.

Nova pointed through the area of the universe that had the largest density of rapidly moving shapes that could crush them.

“Was there ever any doubt?” Pidge said, stretching. “…Hold on, is gravity affixed to this shape we’re on, o-”

Jotaro grabbed a capture device from his pocket and threw it. It fell down, past the yellow soccer ball they stood on, and onto a concave bowl below.

“Good news: we have absolute down,” Pinkie said. “Bad news…”

“We have absolute down,” Pidge muttered.

“I’m trying to plot us a course but the spell doesn’t like it,” Nova commented, focusing intently on her screen.

“Here, let me try,” Pidge said, pulling up some displays on her glasses. “Looks like we just need to reroute some of your matrices here, get the coding to accept your frankly outlandish request, and… done! Plotting a path through the shapes.”

“There’s a ‘20% uncertainty’ on my display, Pidge.”

“Don’t worry about that, you and Jotaro can just mess with time to compensate for that.”

“Depending on our powers isn’t wise,” Jotaro pointed out.

Pidge shrugged. “Got a better idea? I guarantee you that’s where everyone else is headed.”

“Nope!” Pinkie declared. “Onward!” She started bouncing along the shapes with no regard for gravity.

“Pinkie!” Nova shouted. “We aren’t all freaks of nature!”

Pinkie took up an impossible upside-down position on a star shape. “Teleport spamming is the way of nature? Who knew.”

Nova blinked. “Did I…”

“…Forget to teleport?” Pidge asked with a cheeky grin.

Jotaro let out a short chuckle.

Pidge gasped in mock surprise. “Egads! Even Jojo is against you!”

Nova teleported all four of them to Pinkie. She levitated herself – and Velvet – allowing Jotaro and Pidge to fall. Pidge activated her grappling weapon and saved herself. Jotaro punched the ground and landed without a bruise on him.

Nova facehooved. “Jotaro, why do you have to be so much of a badass?”

Jotaro smirked.

It was at this point a dozen humans in brightly colored armor – clearly composed of the shapes around the world – jumped out of their hiding spots and attacked the five of them.

They should have been no match for the Primary Team. But they had an unexpected trick up their sleeves.

They engaged in purposeful sacrifice.

One of them purposefully took a fatal blow from Pinkie, allowing two of his teammates to coordinate perfectly and drive swords into the back of her head. She would have died if her mane hadn’t been a direct portal to a bottomless pit.

She stuffed the two of them in her mane. “Don’t. Mess. With. The floof!”

Nova and Velvet were having difficulty. Their four had allowed two to drop down – ready to be captured – while the others went for their blind spots. The sword that hit Velvet bounced off harmlessly, but Nova suffered a severe cut to the back of her neck.

Luckily she had finally learned some healing magic – enough to keep her up and about – but that was going to hurt until she could find a professional. The pain was enough to trigger her Prince of Time powers, prompting her to outright erase the attacker’s timestream. She didn’t really understand what she did to him, and she didn’t really want to know.

The remaining attackers were on Jotaro and Pidge. Pidge was knocked to the ground easily – but Star Platinum was not. One time stop and even a perfectly coordinated group of assassins couldn’t deal with it. A few managed to position themselves so they could stab Jotaro, but being who he was, he just took the pain and kept punching.

Only one was still standing. She had somehow managed to place a knife to Pidge’s neck.

“She dies if any sort of magic or time stop happens,” the assassin said.

Suddenly, the assassin wasn’t holding Pidge, she was holding a cake bomb.

“Buh-bye!” Pinkie said with a wave. She exploded in a shower of cake.

Nova whooped and gave Jotaro a hoofbump.

“…Well, I’m glad we survived that,” Pidge said, rubbing her neck. “But wasn’t that weird? I mean, not even eldritch at all, just people. And they seemed way too unified.”

“I dunno,” Pinkie said. “But we should be on guard. I get the feeling there’s some nasty tricks they’ve got stored up for us…”

~~~

Twiree’s interior shook.

“UH…”

“I don’t like that ‘uh,’ Renee said. “Twiree, you can fly us through this labyrinth of shapes, hmm?”

“SURE! DEFINITELY! ABSOLUTELY!”

There was another shake as the Flat Reaper was pinned between a dodecahedron and a diamond.

“…NOT. IT JUST BENT ME IN HALF! I’VE BEEN VIOLATED!”

Starbeat raised an eyebrow. “Then just return to your normal size, it’ll be easier to move around if w-”

Twiree dropped her Reaper form and suddenly all of them were falling.

“TWIREE!” Starbeat shouted, activating her magic and trying to keep everyone in the air. Renee and Thrackerzod joined in the efforts, successfully keeping anyone from skewering themselves on one of the red pyramids below.

A large green sphere came sailing toward them. Jenny moved to intercept, pulling back her fist and charging it with her internal magic. She unleashed the punch and sent the sphere flying the other direction.

At the instant of her punch, a dozen assassins jumped from the opposite side of the sphere, moving as one toward Twiree.

Renee encased Twiree in a magic shield while Starbeat shot lasers at the incoming assassins. They took some of the hits on purpose, giving some of their members an opportunity.

How are they so good? Renee wondered. Almost like they’re one body…

The one body was still no match for all of them. Together, they lined up between the assassins and Twiree. Despite all of them levitating in the midst of the floating shapes, they still had great control over their motion. They may not have been of one mind, but they were all powerful in their own way. Jane cut a few in half with her legendary weapons, Thrackerzod corrupted a few of them, and Alushy filled one’s head with bullets.

Burgerbelle was even getting in on it. She uppercut one of the assassins, prompting a gold coin to pop out of her head. The Flat grabbed the coin and smirked. “Do you want to touch-a my spaghet?”

The assassin wasn’t one for bizarre humor, so she tried to cut Burgerbelle in half. Burgerbelle turned herself sideways, summoned a plate of spaghetti, and smashed the assassin in the face with it. “It’s not burger, but shut up and enjoy it!”

The assassin passed out.

“That’s it team! Get them!” Twiree shouted, pushing up a fist. “Protect your good fr-”

A lowered Many-Angled One jumped out from behind a cube that had been floating past Twiree’s back. It used its powers over geometry to hit the Flat, cutting her in half.

“TWIREE!” Burgerbelle yelled.

Twiree’s two halves started bouncing haphazardly, speaking the letters “A” and “I” at seemingly random intervals. One half transformed into half a Flat Reaper, the ship shaking with numerous explosions.

Jane charged the Many-Angled One, this time going for the standard flaming legendary sword. It wouldn’t be as quick as the lance, but it would still get the job done.

“ERROR. INTEGRITY BEYOND REPAIR.” The Reaper half tried to shoot some weapons at the Many-Angled One, getting off a few volleys. However, whatever internal ‘structure’ Twiree had within her was unable to deal with this. The equivalent to a primary reactor lit up in brilliant white light and exploded.

“Well fu-” Alushy began, unable to finish due to the shockwave sending her – and everyone else – flying.

Renee tried to grab onto everyone – but in the end, she only managed to keep hold of Storm. The two of them were promptly flattened against a white cube.

He glanced at her. “While I’m flattered you chose to hang onto me, I do believe you’re married.”

“You. You’re funny,” Renee said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

“I can be,” he said with a cheeky smile.

“Twiree just died Storm! React appropriately!”

He shrugged. “This is war. It happens. You’ll have to get used to moving on if you’re going to be out here with us.”

Renee didn’t know what to say to that.

~~~

“Touchdown!” Mite shouted.

Vriska drove the head of one of the attackers into a pyramid shape, cracking their skull. A bit more brutal than was required, but she was already pretty ticked.

Mage Rarity threw a capture device to end his annoying attacks. Because of this, she was no longer guarding Vriska, allowing the troll to get a sharp blade through the chest.

“Curaja,” Mage Rarity declared a moment later, healing Vriska’s wound in an instant.

It was then I unleashed my spell. A quick cascade of mental energy – one fell, and then all the others lost consciousness as well.

Mage Rarity started capturing them one at a time while Vriska glared at the cobalt-blue stains in her robes. “Aw, man…”

“Inconsequential.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mite, I get it…” She focused her energy for a moment and re-summoned her god-tier robes without the bloodstain.

“He could have been talking about something else,” Mage Rarity pointed out.

Vriska shook her head. “Yeah, right. Twilence, what was with those guys?”

“They were of a pseudo-hivemind,” I answered, looking up at the sky. “They were each different, but all under the same intelligence.”

“That sounds confusing, but also familiar. Why is it familiar?”

“Because it’s the Everyman,” I said, furrowing my brow. “He’s either with the Nihilists or being forced to work for them.”

“Everyman?” Mite asked.

“A being who has many millions of billions of versions all connected across the multiverse,” Mage Rarity said, packing the last of the capture devices away. “Not that much is actually known about him. Generally prefers to go about his lives without too much crossover, though.”

“He’s not stupid,” I said, scratching my chin. “He’d know he wouldn’t be able to defeat us like this, and that there was a possibility we’d figure out who he was. He might be testing us. Trying to guess our capabilities.”

“When you have a million bodies, most of them are expendable,” Mage Rarity pointed out.

Vriska furrowed her brow. “Greeeeeat. Well, let’s go punch him in the clock.”

“Unchanging,” Mite droned.

“Thank you, I take pride in my punching.”

Mite let out a single musical note.

I smiled at him. “There’s more going on than just the Everyman, though. My sight is still clouded, but I’m able to tell there’s other things going on than just us here. More viewpoints. One of them I’m pretty sure is the other side.”

“They’re here too?” Vriska said, looking nervous.

I nodded. “Even if my sight can’t be trusted, it makes sense. Would the Flowers ask for heroes from just one side? Unlikely. To maximize success they should allow both possible sets of ‘heroes’ to work. Just didn’t think about it until now.”

“Except we might end up fighting them,” Mage Rarity said.

“After the Nihilists are done away with. I do not see us risking the complete destruction of the multiverse over our war.”

“Definitely,” Mite added.

I glanced at him, unsure if he was agreeing or being sarcastic. I decided it didn’t matter – he would be what he would be – and guided everyone closer to our goal.

~~~

“Can I?”

“No,” Renee answered Storm for the nineteenth time.

“We’d be a more cohesive unit.”

“You don’t get to ride me just because your legs are tired.”

“Ah, I didn’t say that, I said my legs would get tired, but as an equine your legs are built to withstand more walking and rigid pressures, therefore you would b-”

“I never took you for a broken record, Oncoming.”

Storm shrugged. “I do what I do what I do.”

“…What?”

“Nani?”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Maybe you could stop pondering your next sarcastic comment and help me find the others. We need some way to get to the Tower Ring, after all.”

Storm tapped his fingers together as they leaped from a large cubic shape to a series of pyramids. “I believe our efforts to find the others or otherwise will not change the outcome.”

“You aren’t Starbeat,” Renee reminded him.

Storm shrugged. “I spent some time around a crazed girl who knew a thing or two about ka.”

“Was she the one that didn’t show up for the mission?”

“Yes. Sh-”

A large extruded rhombus shot out of the ground they were standing on, sending the two of them flying. Renee had not mastered the art of self-levitation yet, so she resorted to encasing herself and Storm in a multi-faceted magic shield. They bounced off a few shapes before coming to a rest in the middle of a bluish bowl shape.

Renee dropped the shield. “Storm, we forgot this world was unstable.”

“I didn’t.”

“Why didn- nevermind,” Renee said, shaking her head. “…I am sorry, I think everything’s getting to me.”

Storm smirked. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out.

Renee’s first instinct was to say ha, finally out of words? but she was smart enough to realize he was looking at something. She whirled around to see four familiar faces on the edge of the bowl.

“…Pinkie!?” Renee blurted, heart rate doubling in an instant.

“Uh, duuuh!” Pinkie said, smacking herself on the side of the head, shifting her blindfold slightly. “Jotaro, Nova, and Pidge too!”

Pidge aimed her weapon at Renee, but Pinkie waved it down with a hoof. “Psh, none of that. We’re not enemies here.” She bounced off the edge of the bowl and slid down to Renee, smiling. “Hey!”

“H-hey,” Renee said, pulling a hoof back in uncertainty.

Pinkie cocked her head. “Hey… Renee, c’mon.”

You could tell her now, Renee thought. …Is now right?

Renee shook her head and let a sad smile come to her face. “Pinkie… I… I’ve missed you.”

“What a coincidence, I’ve felt the same way!”

Renee put a hoof to her neck – where the Elements of Generosity and Laughter hung. “…I have something for you.”

“Renee!” Storm blurted.

“Shush, it’s not like it’ll do much to help the war effort,” Renee muttered as she removed the Element of Laughter and handed it to Pinkie. It transformed into a necklace and affixed itself around the blind pony’s neck.

Pinkie pulled Renee into a hug. “Thank you.”

“It wouldn’t do to fight the Nihilists without you,” Renee said.

“…So, are we friends now, or…?” Nova asked, walking up to them.

“Enemy of my enemy situation,” Renee said, shaking her head. “Let’s put aside our differences – which, let’s be honest, aren’t all that much – and stop an evil. Storm, Pidge, Jotaro? Any issues?”

Jotaro shook his head. “None.”

Pidge raised her eyebrow. “Several, but I get the point. Smart thing to do.”

Storm smirked. “Ah… I see now. This was the whole point. Not some adventure… but a reminder.”

“He’s been going on about ka for a while,” Renee muttered.

“I got this,” Pinkie said. She appeared on Storm’s back. “So, you think this is about a reminder, huh? See, I’m thinking that it’s about friends on opposite sides of great divides. I guess it is a reminder, but not of what you’re thinking. Y’know, a reminder that sometimes issues are black and white when it comes to morality?”

Storm leaned forward. “I think we’re going to enjoy each other’s company quite well. How about this as a counterpoint – whipped cream.”

“Good retort, but not worthy of the left ventricle o-”

“Incoming!” Nova shouted, raising a magic shield.

A rainbow-maned robotic pegasus smashed into the shield at extreme velocities. The magic held, though Nova winced. “Ow…” she muttered in her synthetic voice.

Renee’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. “Wait… no…”

“Rainbine, that was not the plan!” this voice came from a Rarity with a psychotic look in her eyes, a gauntlet around her hoof, and a pair of magic hands to her sides. “You’ve ruined everything!” She rushed in, magic hands flying.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” the next thing anyone knew, the Rarity known as Rarifruit had been thrown to the center of the bowl.

“The Elements of Insanity?!” Nova blurted. “Aren’t they dead?”

“Should have been,” a light yellow pegasus said, taking her place on the lip of the bowl. She wore a red and white striped hat atop a deep crimson mane. “But we weren’t, got stuck in a time vortex instead. And now we’re back, bitches.”

Pinkie pulled out the sound-blocking headphones they had used back on Esefem out of her mane. “Good thing I still have these!”

Fluttershout smirked. “Good. It just wouldn’t be right to kill you without a proper battle.”

“Where’s Brutalight?” Renee demanded.

Fluttershout twitched in rage. “Brutalight doesn’t fucking matter, it’s us! And you’re going to die!” She breathed in.

Pinkie slapped the headphones on everyone. Sound became nothing.

A sphere plowed through the ground, upsetting everyone’s balance.

Fluttershout shouted, the wave not able to blow out their ears, but powerful enough to fling them away. Rarifruit and Rainbine were caught up in the process – but they were basically useless already.

Fluttershout wasn’t going to let this slide though. Unlike her friends, she had bothered to train herself, to hone her abilities. She focused her deathly voice into a singular beam of focused sound, focusing it right at Nova. Fluttershout’s aim was a little off, so Nova’s head didn’t explode – but her back leg did.

Pidge moved quickly – capturing Nova in one of the devices so she wouldn’t lose blood through the wound.

Fluttershout readied her voice for Pidge, but she couldn’t follow through. She heard a chainsaw.

She got to watch Pinkie cut Rarifruit in half.

“W-what the fuck!?” Fluttershout managed, blinking. “You… You don’t do that!”

Pinkie stood on her hind legs, Rarifruit’s blood plastered on the crimson dress, sign of a massacre. There was no way she could have heard Fluttershout – but she responded anyway. “There’s a small list we have, Fluttershout. A list where we’ve decided we can’t take any more chances. All of you have been on that list since the day of the Bloodbath.” She charged at Fluttershout, chainsaw ready.

“Rainbine, activate improvements,” Fluttershout ordered.

“Wait, improvements, wh-” Rainbine didn’t get a chance to process that she had improvements she didn’t know about. Her mechanical body unfolded without her consent, somehow increasing in size tenfold, taking the shape of a gigantic centaur mecha.

“Oh! SWEET!” Rainbine blurted, her small brain allowing her to forget the tragedy of Rarifruit faster than should have been possible. Fluttershout wanted to kill her for that. But that just wouldn’t fly right now.

Rainbine raised a hoof and shot a half-dozen missiles at the heroes. Jotaro, Storm, Pidge, and Pinkie returned fire.

Renee opted not to engage the robot. She teleported right in front of Fluttershout, the Element of Generosity glowing brightly. Dual needles of magical power appeared at her sides. She rammed them forward.

Fluttershout twisted – but one still got in her eye. “FFFFFFAAAAAA!” The impact of the voice threw Renee back, tossing her into a passing by rectangle.

Renee couldn’t hear anything – and she wasn’t in the mood for banter regardless. She knew who this pony was, and she knew about all the suffering she had caused. Fluttershout had lived way, way too long. Renee summoned more needles and magic blades, sending them at Fluttershout.

She forced Fluttershout to back away.

How does it feel to be the one tossed down the hallway?

Fluttershout unleashed a focused sonic blast, but Renee saw it coming – using a multi-layered magic shield to defend herself from it. She smirked. Your new tricks aren’t anything.

Fluttershout bit her lip.

Meanwhile, Pinkie was hitting the giant Rainbine mech all over with her hammer. “Don’t you think this is a little stupid?” she asked Rainbine.

“Huh? Why?” Rainbine smacked Jotaro away with a loose hand and absorbed a bolt of electricity from Storm.

“I mean, you, fighting with the Nihilists. I didn’t think you were that crazy!”

“Hey, Fluttershout said to do it, so we did it.”

“Why Fluttershout? Why not Brutalight?”

Rainbine didn’t respond.

“Oh come on, you can tell me!” Pinkie said as she smashed Rainbine upside the head.

“You’re trying to kill me.”

“Exactly! I’m making my intentions very clear, you can be sure I wouldn’t use this information to defame you.”

“That makes sense…”

Inwardly, Pinkie was rolling her eyes. “All I want to know is how you got here. I mean, I get that you got stuck in a time vortex…”

“Yeah, apparently we were part of a Gallifreyan superweapon test, or something. Rarifruit said they wiped out the Celestialsapiens with the thing we survived!”

“Eh, sorta,” Pinkie said, watching as Jotaro and Pidge tried to work together to hack into Rainbine, but that proved to be useless since Rainbine’s entire body was electrified. “So when Gallifrey fell, you were freed. And…?”

“Well, then Fluttershout brought us here. And we got to meet a lot of new friends who had the same ideas as us! It was great!”

“Oh, new friends?”

“Yeah!” Rainbine said, starting to lose her focus on the fight. “Friends like R-”

Velvet fell from the sky, and a blade of blood burning with ruby sparkling power cut right into Rainbine’s head, hitting a central processor. The mecha-centaur’s entire body convulsed, unable to fight properly with that large of a wound.

Rainbine started flailing wildly and dangerously, no longer giving any indication she could talk.

Pinkie sighed. “Gee, thanks Velvet.”

“Whaaat? It was the perfect opportunity!”

Pinkie facehooved. “So… close…” She pulled back her warhammer and brought it down on Rainbine one last time..

~~~

Allure, Thrackerzod, Bot, Burgerbelle, and Alushy jumped off a möbius strip and landed on a bright red barrel shape. Alushy was taking point, arguing with Thrackerzod about which direction the Tower Ring was. Both of them had senses that told them different directions, resulting in them going nowhere fast. Bot listened to both of them with a smile on her face.

Allure and Burgerbelle hung back from the rowdy front of the group. Allure had tried a few times to put a comforting hoof over Burgerbelle, but the Flat’s shape made this not only difficult to pull off, but awkward for both of them involved.

Allure shook her head. “I’m sorry, I can-”

“I always looked up to her,” Burgerbelle said, suddenly, her monotone voice devoid of emotion – but Allure could sense the weight behind the words. “Even when I was just a barely-realized joke about hamburgers, I saw her as… well, the hero. Then when we left, and we were allowed to be more, she was the one. She made me realize that I could be something out here. She’s the reason the Flats mean what they do today.” Water appeared in her eyes in a sort of jump-cut. “She was a hero.”

Allure smiled softly. “I know she was.”

“I think it’s hard for you to understand exactly why,” Burgerbelle said. “Twiree… She had something before we left. Some of the others as well, but it’s not like Aiskera made a big deal out of it later. She was… I guess she was our Eve. The person who showed us the way.”

“…I don’t know what I’d do if we lost Eve.”

“I do,” Burgerbelle said. “Do what I’m doing. Remember her – and do what she would have wanted.” She produced a toblerone sword from nowhere and held it in the air. “Stop evil in the most ridiculous way possible.”

Allure smiled. “If only all of us could be like you.”

Burgerbelle shrugged. “Yes and no? It-”

“TARGET ACQUIRED!” Bot blurted, producing her weapons.

Everyone looked at where Bot was aiming – at a woman with purple hair in a black outfit sitting on a sharp edge. She looked at them in surprise. “Well, this is unexpected.”

“MAGANE!?” Alushy blurted, jaw dropping.

“Oh no, not at all!” Magane said with a grin.

“But Alushy ju-” Allure began – but Alushy shoved a hoof in her face.

“Don’t,” Alushy warned. “She has this cheap ability where she can twist the reality of truth. Never contradict her lies. Ever.”

“Aw, but it would have been fun if I wasn’t Magane!” Magane said, clapping her hands.

“Not biting that,” Alushy said with a smirk. “So, are you going to explain, or am I going to have to bring out the small guns?”

“Me? Explain?” She let out a bizarre ‘kukuku’ laugh. “You betray your intelligence, poor Alushy.”

Alushy drew one of her guns.

“Did our escapades together mean nothing?”

Alushy was careful not to say anything that could be construed as a contradiction. “I know one thing, Magane. You’re like me. And if I were you and I were acting like you, I’d be up to some outrageously shady shit from the depths of nine different hells. So what is it, you with the Nihilists, or what?”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” Magane said cheerfully.

“Yes you do,” Allure contradicted.

Magane shot Allure a look of murder. “Nice try, filly.”

“It was worth a shot.”

“Can we talk?” Thrackerzod asked Alushy.

“If you let her have the power of a god, I will kill you. And then turn you into a vampire. So I can kill you again.”

“Figures.” Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “You are tainted with a particular eldritch essence I can’t quite place. Something special.”

Magane shrugged. “Oh, no, nothing special.”

“I don’t think that’s how your power works.”

Magane snapped her fingers, grinning. “A lie about a lie…”

“You motherfucking…” Alushy began, drawing her second gun on Thrackerzod.

Magane broke into laughter. “Gotcha! You’re lucky Zoddy, I couldn’t revert that!”

“…Someone else talk,” Thrackerzod muttered, backing behind Allure.

Burgerbelle took a step forward. “TALKING NOISES!”

Magane glared at Burgerbelle. “And now I’m done. Good-bye!”

Alushy’s eye twitched. “Don’t. Move. Note how I’m not contradicting you, I’m just telling you to fucking freeze.”

Magane put her hands in the air and leaned in. “What is it, crimson fucker?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Having fun!”

“There’s more to it than that.”

Magane lifted her fingers and prepared to snap them. Alushy fired her gun, hitting Magane in the hand. Blood flew – and then she vanished.

Alushy started letting out a breathless string of swears.

“…Should we be worried?” Bot asked.

“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK!?” Alushy blurted. “She could trick anyone into saying something about us and make us dead! Simple as ‘hey, such and such is dead,’ ‘n-no! It can’t be!’ and then everyone loses.”

“I think she really is having fun,” Allure said, furrowing her brow. “Some psychotic, disturbed version… but fun nonetheless.”

“She can have other goals.”

“Does she have to?”

Alushy narrowed her eyes. “If you want to play dictionary, no, bu-”

Allure put a hoof over Alushy’s mouth. “Yeah, no, not entering another one of these arguments. Tell us about her while we move. Otherwise, let’s not panic about what she can and can’t do.”

Alushy grinned. “You’re trying to be my boss aren’t you?”

“I believe I qualify as the senior agent at the moment.”

“I think I’m going for a walk.”

“Thrackerzod, bind Alushy to me.”

“Done,” Thrackerzod said.

“…You’re no fun,” Alushy muttered.

“We have a mission, we need to focus on it.”

~~~

Jenny of the Red Gloves rode Blackjack (better known as Beryl) through the endless sea of shapes. In one hand Jenny twirled Siron’s staff, while in the other she examined her magic 8-ball. “I wonder if this works here.”

“Why not ask it a question?” Blackjack suggested.

“It’d have to be something I don’t already know, but could confirm later…” Jenny pursed her lips.

“Just ask it what shape is over the top of this pyramid,” Blackjack suggested. She took to the sky, but Jenny barely noticed – she was contemplating Blackjack’s suggestion.

“Hmm… Oh great magic 8-ball, give us your wisdom, what is Beryl’s deepest held secret?”

“What the fuck!?” Blackjack shouted, losing focus and ramming herself face first into a nearby rectangular prism.

Jenny shrugged the damage off like it was nothing. “Huh. Your name’s Blackjack. What does…” Jenny snapped her fingers. “Oh! You were that pony at the Bloodbath! You blew up Flagg! That was sweet.”

“Why did you do that?!”

“I felt like it?” Jenny said, shrugging. “Look, if you were trying to hide from something, coming out here was probably the worst way to do it.”

“Fuck you.”

“And I appear to have stepped on a nerve. Yeesh, cool your jets, I’m not going to go blabbing this to everyone.”

“You lie to yourself,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, I suppose – hey Twilence – but Blackjack, you’ve got t-” Jenny blinked. “…Twilence, when did you get here?”

“Just now,” I said, hoofing the reddish ground we were standing on. Mage Rarity, Mite, and Vriska stood behind me, all of them looking at Jenny with concern. I turned to glare at Blackjack. “I told you to stay hidden.”

“Well you went and joined the fucking evil side!” Blackjack shouted.

I shook my head. “…If that’s what you want to think.”

“Not going to try to argue? Give me your ‘sob story’?”

I made no response.

Mage Rarity sighed. “She knows for a fact she can’t change your mind, Blackjack. So she’s not going to try.”

“You…”

“Look, Blackjack, dear, we don’t need to go through this right now.”

“When else are we going to do it?”

“Lunch?” Jenny suggested.

“You stuff a sock in it,” Vriska blurted.

“Make me.”

Vriska swiped Jenny’s magic 8-ball and rammed it down the regenerative human’s throat. The artifact shattered into a thousand pieces, cutting her neck in several places.

“What the frick!?” Jenny shouted. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to enchant an 8-ball to make it permanent!?”

“Do you know who you’re talking to? I store things in magic 8-balls, bitch!”

Jenny curled her left hand into a fist while she used her right to pluck glass out of her neck. “And my world’s the one where eight balls actually give answers!”

“Fight!” Mite shouted.

“My magic is nanobot based! I can hit you, microscopic toaster!”

“Try.”

“STOP!” Mage Rarity blurted. “We do not need to fight! We have a common ene-”

Blackjack pulled out a gun and pointed it at her. “You don’t have the right.”

Mage Rarity’s gaze softened – there was no trace of fear on her face, unlike everyone else. “Dear, you won’t shoot me.”

“You willing to stake your life on that?”

“Yes,” Mage Rarity said. “You won’t do it. You can’t.”

“I can…”

Mage Rarity shook her head. “…Blackjack, please put the gun down.”

Blackjack twitched for a moment. She focused on the trigger with her magic.

Mage Rarity’s face didn’t even flinch.

“…Fuck,” Blackjack muttered, dropping the gun to the ground. “Why the hell ca-”

Mage Rarity hugged her. “I’m sorry.”

Blackjack pushed back. “I… No. No, none of that.”

For the first time, Mage Rarity looked hurt. “I… I see. Well, I suppose I ca-”

A beam of green energy struck Mage Rarity in the head, vaporizing everything from the neck up in an instant. There was a faint smell of ionized air, the only lingering sensation of what had just happened.

The lower part of Mage Rarity’s body wasn’t even bleeding. The neck stump was charred.

A few meters away, Rick lowered his gun. “Wait, fuck, that wasn’t Scarcity.”

“That. Wasn’t. Scarcity!?” Blackjack shouted, aiming her gun. “Well fuck y-”

Rick fired a much smaller gun at Blackjack, hitting her horn dead on. The bone shattered down the middle as the blue ray sliced clean through her head and out the back of her skull. She slumped to the ground, lifeless.

“This has been a waste of time,” Rick muttered. “Hey, you three, where’s Scarcity?”

Vriska couldn’t tear her gaze off Mage Rarity. “…T-twi?”

I ground my teeth. “I could try. But she’d Come Back Wrong.”

Vriska clenched her fist. “R-right.”

“Uh, hello? I asked a q-”

“I’ve had enough,” I said, teleporting in front of Rick, wings unfurled.

“Of what?”

“You. I’ve let you be for far too long. I needed you to perform your heinous acts. You needed to kill the original Twilight. You needed to become part of the Collection. You needed to torment Morty and his family with your presence. You needed to ruin civilizations. You needed to kill some ponies just because they weren’t protected by ka. See that alicorn right there? She was something special! But you… It’s what you are, it’s what you represent.” I allowed dark magic to seep out of my eyes. “But there isn’t a narrative plan I can see anymore, no more organized structure I have to follow. So I can do something.”

Jenny and Vriska took up battle stances behind me.

“Rick Sanchez, I a-”

Rick drew a gun, pressed it to my head, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

“Sabotage!” Mite cheered from the surface of the gun.

“So much for speeches,” I muttered. “Kill him.”

“With pleasure,” Jenny and Vriska said at once.

~~~

“We’re getting close,” Starbeat told her companions – Jane and Sunny. They were standing on top of a deep brick-red prism that didn’t appear to be moving in respect to the numerous other brick-red prisms around them. It gave the area of the usually colorful universe a somber, ominous atmosphere.

Jane was cleaning her sword – they’d had to take out another one of the ‘lowered’ Many-Angled Ones a few minutes ago. “I suggest stealth. They probably have their ‘center’ guarded like nothing else.”

Starbeat nodded. “No doubt. Remember, we don’t have to beat them, just destroy the Tower Ring.”

Sunny nodded. “I’ve got a spell ready. It should destabilize the Ring, though they could be making it in a way we haven’t anticipated.”

“I’ve got that taken care of,” Starbeat said, holding up a boomerang-shaped metal pipe. “I’ve been nudging fate for a while now. Your spell will work. My calculations show that the Karmic Retribution for this should be minimal – though I couldn’t tell you exactly what the complication will be.”

“No plan survives contact with the enemy,” Sunset agreed.

Starbeat nodded.

“I take it we can’t just relax?” Jane asked.

“Just because ka is on our side does not mean it’ll just hand our enemies to us on a silver platter. That would be too easy.” She sniffed the air. “We have to be prepared for anything.”

“Anything?” a feminine voice asked.

All three of them readied for a fight.

A Gem with a clear square-shaped gemstone revealed herself to them. She was twice as tall as an average human and had arms that billowed with clear ‘fabric’, trailing in a nonexistent wind. “We have no intent of harming you.”

“Then what do you want?” Starbeat asked, unable to identify what type of Gem she was looking at. Something seemed wrong about the way her clear gemstone was cut, reflecting in more places than most.

“We would like to have a talk,” she said, smiling.

Gems aren’t common in the multiverse, Sunny messaged Starbeat and Jane. This is suspicious.

It could be the complication. Let’s see if we can take advantage of it. Starbeat smiled. “I’ll accept if you can tell me who you are.”

“You call us Nihilists. We call ourselves the Allies.”

“Allies of what?”

“IT.”

“…IT?”

“Would you like to meet IT? IT wants to meet you.”

“…Sure,” Starbeat said, scanning the ka in the area with her magic. Seems normal enough. Definitely a trap, but turnaround chance is 97.6 percent, and this is likely our way in… “All right.”

“Take us to your leader,” Jane said with a smirk. Sunny facehooved.

The Gem nodded with a smile, gesturing for them to follow. She walked deeper into the mess of ever-darker shapes. If they couldn’t see each other perfectly, they would have thought the light was dimming.

They eventually came to a large hollow cylinder that wasn’t moving at all. They walked through it, entering another hollow shape – this one a perfect sphere. They themselves stood on a cubic black platform suspended in the air. In the center of the cubic platform was a similarly colored cylinder, on top of which was a brain.

IT.

Starbeat blinked. “Oh, A Wrinkle in Time. I was thinking the clown.”

I take many forms. IT said to her. This is just the version you get to meet.

“I think I destroyed one of you once,” Starbeat mused. “Jane?”

“A lot of bad guys called themselves ‘it’,” Jane admitted. “They kinda blur together.”

IT did not enter their minds with even the slightest hint of an annoyed tone – its messages were as calm as ever. Perhaps you have, perhaps you have not. My other selves are not here, and previous success does not indicate definite triumph.

“We’re resisting your mental conditioning, right?” Jane asked.

That was to be expected. You do have Starbeat with you, after all, as well as experience sharpening the strength of your minds. I cannot even read your minds. But I do not need to, I know exactly what you’re thinking anyway.

“Oh really?” Starbeat asked, using her magic to lock on to the location of the Tower Ring. It was very close. She knew Sunny was doing the same. She needed to find a way to pass the location to Sunny without IT noticing…

You are currently looking for the Tower Ring and hoping I won’t notice a message you send to Sunny, because she has the means to destroy the device.

Starbeat stared at IT in disbelief. “What in the…”

I have my own tricks. We were prepared for this inevitability. IT forced Andrew Hussie to come out from behind the cylinder, moving almost like a zombie. He had a laptop in his hand, crudely drawn images of Starbeat, Jane, and Sunny on the screen.

“…Shiiiiit…” Jane muttered.

His mind was not as prepared as yours. He gets out unrelated anecdotes from time to time, but he remains my slave. Manipulating the story through control in this matter is difficult, but I did not initiate construction until I had mastered it.

Starbeat looked around, trying to think of anything to do. “I have a question. Why? IT is a force of nature, an entity that works in the small moments – or a scion of dark order. Why decide everything needs to be destroyed?

IT pulsated. I have seen truth. I see the answers. I saw the lie within a lie that is existence itself. The Allies have their own reasons – condensing everything into a perfect geometric singularity, ending the pain, revenge, striving for some perceived purpose – but I do it because I have been gifted with knowledge. IT was an idea given form by existence. IT is a fear of both chaos and of order. IT is an idea, IT was never something tangible. IT is a contradiction.

“IT went crazy,” Jane translated.

I have the answers, and they are beyond. I see the collapse giving way to the way things used to be, a world where I cannot exist. I see preservation perpetuating my endless self-contradiction. I know what I am, and no matter what questions I ask, I see that I am a lie. Everything is a lie. The only truth is nothingness.

“This doesn’t seem like you,” Starbeat pointed out. “It’s not like your type to be concerned with truth.”

You could call it an awakening of sorts.

Starbeat smirked. “Goodnight, then.” She unleashed her spell, one designed to kill IT then and there. She didn’t care if they all died in the process, it would end this dangerous entity’s reign.

Red Diamond appeared out of nowhere and absorbed the magic in a vortex of energy, transmitting it to another universe.

“…Red!?” Starbeat blurted, surprised. “What I-”

Red Diamond encased them all in translucent bubbles laced with sleep powder. Despite this, Jane still raised her blade.

“Silicon?” Red Diamond asked.

The clear Gem’s gemstone split into a thousand clear orbs that shot around Jane’s bubble. Each one produced a traction force on Jane’s blade, stopping it short.

She would have stubbornly kept going, but IT attacked her mind directly. No matter her resistance, a direct psychic attack from IT would burn the mind to such a degree that sensible thought was impossible.

Let them see it, IT declared.

Behind IT, a cloak fell. The Tower Ring appeared – but it was not what any of them had expected. It was the size of a house and the shape not of a ring, but three separate spinning blades whose centers orbited around each other in a non-repeating pattern.

Unlike the Tower Rings of Corona’s inspired design, this was not a machine designed to bring a meaningful change about. It was meant for rampant, painful destruction. Starbeat could imagine the stone-flesh of the Dark Tower being ripped to shreds by the blades in a violent apocalypse.

She gulped – hoping there was something that could be done to outplay Hussie…

“We might have to engage Pinkie,” Silicon said, suddenly.

Red Diamond looked to her. “Are you certain?”

“No. But it might happen at any minute if things go just wrong.”

“You have my permission to use whatever force is required.”

Starbeat narrowed her eyes, pondering this.

~~~

Renee stabbed Fluttershout again.

“BITCH!” Fluttershout roared, sending her back with a burst of sound.

Storm and Nova had fallen already, placed into capture devices for their safety. This left Pinkie, Jotaro, Pidge, Velvet, and of course Renee.

Rainbine the mech had already been torn into a million tiny pieces strewn across the landscape. It was unlikely she would ever be put back together again.

Pidge fired her weapon, tying her hook around Fluttershout’s legs. Jotaro stopped time and pummeled the imprisoned pegasus before she could sound-blast the ropes to oblivion. Pinkie brought the warhammer down on Fluttershout’s side hard enough to crack her pelvis.

Her back legs stopped moving. “Fuck fuck fuck…”

Renee walked toward her, generating a blade of magic in the air. She lifted it, aiming for Fluttershout’s other eye.

“Don’t,” Pinkie said, holding up a hoof. Renee couldn’t hear her, but she got the message. She dissipated the blade, an uncertain expression on her face.

Pinkie trotted over to Fluttershout. “I can save you.”

“Fuck you.”

“I don’t want to. You are on the list, Fluttershout. I’ll let Renee do it, and I won’t lose sleep over it. Quite a long ways from where we first met.”

Fluttershout said nothing.

“But I need information from you. Things like ‘why are you here?’ and ‘who’s your boss?’”

“Why are we here!?” Fluttershout spat, triggering the equivalent to a minor earthquake. “You, that’s why! We were told we could have our revenge! Who the fuck cares if we were the villains, someone who was trying to destroy the entire multiverse would be important enough to get a few deaths, right? RIGHT?”

Pinkie frowned. “…You were willing to destroy everything just to get revenge?”

“All I wanted was for you to die. I couldn’t care less about anything else at this point. I don’t believe for a moment the Tower will let the multiverse be truly destroyed, but it should have been strong enough to hurt you! Instead, we’re just… We were just tossed aside!”

Pinkie realized that Fluttershout’s tears weren’t from the pain of her mortal wounds – she was made of stronger stuff than that.

“Just end my miserable life already,” Fluttershout grunted. “There’s nothing left.”

“Tell us who organized this,” Pinkie said. “Then I’ll give you what you want.”

“Fine. This entire thing was organized b-”

A capture device flew forward and hit Fluttershout, capturing her in an instant. Velvet planned to follow up with the destruction of the capture device, but Pinkie stopped her with a swing of her hammer. The dark and bloodied form of Velvet flew a few meters away.

Renee took off her headphones. “What in th-”

“That’s not Velvet,” Pinkie said, producing two katanas. “I should have suspected something right from the beginning…”

“We actually are Velvet,” ‘Velvet’ said, standing back up. “Not that she’s in control, this is just her body.”

“What are you?” Pidge demanded.

Velvet’s stomach exploded in a shower of blood. Hundreds of clear spherical gemstones poured out of the wound, forming together into a single giant Gem warrior. “We are Silicon.”

Pinkie cocked her head. “…Not ringing a bell.”

“It shouldn’t. We were kept secret from you. Red Diamond built us as the perfect mind.”

Renee threw a capture device at Velvet – even if she had blood-based powers, nobody wanted to risk her bleeding out while they were talking. “Why would Red Diamond build you and not tell the rest of the army? If she were a traitor, I would have heard about it.”

“Plus, Red Diamond’s gone,” Pidge said. “She can’t do anything.”

“She’s alive,” Pinkie muttered, facehooving. “Of course she is. She wants to end the pain.”

“She is the wisest of all creatures,” Silicon said. “And we serve her before all else.” The thousands of miniature gemstones that made up Silicon summoned their weapons. Each singular weapon was a tiny thing – one rice-grain sized knife forming a pin there, a screw there. But the weapons eventually added up until they formed a set of upper-body armor, covering her shoulders, arms, and most of her back where the conglomerate gemstone was stored. Two extra spidery legs shot out of the construction.

Silicon held out her left hand. The armor surrounding it shifted into the shape of a gun large enough to hold a human inside its barrel.

She fired.

“Quiznak,” Pidge muttered, calculating that she would not be able to dodge. Renee was far enough away, Pinkie could hop away, and Jotaro could just take it from where he was standing…

Jotaro jumped in front of Pidge and summoned Star Platinum, planning on absorbing the shot. He screamed out “ORAAAA!” as his Stand took the force of the beam. Star Platinum took no damage – the attack wasn’t spirit-based – but it could only block so much. The energy transferred through to Jotaro, throwing him to the ground, out cold.

“Jojo!” Pidge blurted.

“Foolish,” Silicon said, transforming the gun into a large scepter. “He should have saved his strength. You cannot fight.”

Pidge held up her grapple weapon, smiling awkwardly. “Uh, y-yeah you’re right about that. But I’m the smart one. The brains, y’know?”

“Yes.” Silicon turned her attention away from Pidge and to Renee and Pinkie. She transformed the scepter into a shield.

“Nice try,” Pinkie said, appearing inside the shield with Renee. The Elements of Laughter and Generosity were glowing, as well as the ponies’ respective aspect colors for Space and Mind billowing off their coats. Space around Silicon shifted while the mental bonds between each individual Silicon gemstone began to break down. Her tremendous body began to dissipate as the Elements of Harmony activated. It was a partial rainbow consisting only of white and pink light, but one third is better than nothing.

The beads of Silicon split apart completely, flying off in every direction.

“YEAH! TAKE THAT!” Pinkie whooped.

Pidge let out a breath of air. “Good, I was worried there for a second…” She leaned down to check Jotaro. Convinced he was okay, she captured him. “Am I glad you were here.”

Renee smiled. “Thank you, dear.”

“I don’t think our chances were good without y-”

Gunshots rang out. A bullet hit Renee in the back leg while another hit Pidge in the shoulder. The two fell back, dazed.

Pinkie dodged a third bullet with her Pinkie Sense, pulling out a comically oversized bomb. “Okay, what is i- sassafras.”

Each Silicon might not have been able to talk with the others – but each one could act as a single individual. Those bullets had been individual silicon gemstones thrown by the powers of the others.

They moved like a sea of ants equipped with little catapults.

The image made Pinkie laugh despite the direness of the situation.

~~~

I created a ten-dimensional matrix spell that unfolded subatomic particles into one-dimensional line states that were stronger than any other material, forcing them into a rigid state so they couldn’t be bent away. I turned these invisible wires into whirling blades of death, dicing the very shapes around us at every angle. Rick’s own body was severed in several places – but of course he had a backup. He was Rick, he always had a backup. A pill hidden under the skin of his arm activated, giving him regenerative properties.

I condensed the quantum lines into a rope, slicing Rick through again – but he became intangible. He pulled out a portal gun and dialed away, but I had already forced the physics around us to reject any outward portals. The portal fizzled and exploded, charring his body. I created a series of black holes to follow this up, but his reflect barrier sent them back at me, shredding my wings.

My wings were back to normal in an instant. I was tempted to write something onto Rick – but no, the Flowers had a plan, and I was going to stick to it. I summoned a ball of purple fire the size of Spain and threw it at Rick – only for him to absorb it with one of his devices.

Then I bucked him in the face.

His defense for that – the automatic killing field he had on his person – was unable to pierce my magic. His jaw cracked and I knew his brain should have been nothing more than mush.

He just wiped the blood off his mouth and pulled out yet another device – this one a tri-universal compression device. “This weapon fires universes. You wouldn’t want to sacrifi-”

I grabbed the device in my magic, turned it around, and fired at him. The light shot out and vaporized every atom in his body into pure energy, the radiation enough to give everyone for kilometers cancer.

And then I used my own magic to repeat the explosion, just to make sure.

Of course I felt that he had a soul-reassembler active, and that the fight wasn’t over.

“Holy cow,” Jenny said, blinking. “…I thought you were kidding when you said she destroyed universes.”

Vriska nodded – but she wasn’t smiling. “She’s gone off the deep end.”

“…Can we even do anything to help her?”

“Gathering luck,” Vriska said, holding up the infinite-sided die. “But it’s hard to do with Rick. I can get some, but there’s a feedback loop and…” Vriska shook her head. “Fuck…”

“Worried?”

“Yeah I’m worried, you don’t fuck with Rick.”

“Couldn’t the same be said of Twilence?”

Vriska nodded. “…She’s never like this. I’m the one who does this, not her.”

I closed my eyes and let out a breath of air. I really am losing it. They’re right. I calmed myself, turned the dark magic down, and folded my wings.

Rick came at me with a series of reality-altering bombs. I raised an eyebrow and turned them all into daisies. I then turned his arms into petunias. He tore his arms off with his teeth and grew seventeen times in size. I edited reality so subatomic particles couldn’t exist. He continued on as a string of eldritch amoebas. I used my telekinesis combined with a mental wave. He retaliated with a gun that shot guns that shot guns that shot antimatter.

And then one of the reality-altering bombs decloaked itself inches from my chest.

I lost consciousness.

“FUCKING FINALLY!” Rick shouted, congealing back into his fully human body. “I never thought I’d ever have to use those absurd multiverse war devices.” He pointed a gun and fired at my head.

I was sucked into Jenny’s capture device before he could kill me.

“Bring the bitch back out or you die.”

“Try it, bucko,” Jenny said.

Rick fired his weapon. Jenny’s head vanished – but grew back in a few seconds.

“Tah-dah!” Jenny trilled.

Rick pulled out a saw that vibrated with the energy of several dimensions.

“…Frick,” Jenny muttered. Rick charged. She pulled out Siron’s Staff. “On second thought, gotcha.”

The eldritch energy she had stored in the staff launched out in a powerful burst of green and red energy mixed with horrendous darkness. All of Rick’s eldritch devices lost their function in an instant as their own power was adapted into the Staff’s folds.

“BOO-YEAH! Jenny got ‘im!”

A new Rick grew out of the ashes of the old like a plant. “Fuck. You. And. Your. Bullshit. Artifacts!”

Vriska drove her sword at him – but some kind of field made her feel the wound in her chest instead. She fell back, grabbing the gaping wound. “Shit…”

“PUNCH TIME!” Jenny shouted, pushing her fist forward. Rick appeared behind her, pulled her hair hard enough to remove her skin, and kicked her to the ground.

Vriska glanced at the infinite-sided die. I don’t have anywhere near enough luck yet. I nee-

A bullet wound appeared in Rick’s chest, right where his heart was. The wound healed over quickly, but Rick didn’t pull out a gun and fire back instantly.

Because he saw who had shot it.

“Hey, Rick,” Morty said, reloading the gun.

Rick sighed. “Morty, this i-’

Insipid hit Rick from the side. “With the power vested in me by the late Superman, I SERVE THE, LIKE, JUSTICE!” Lasers shot out of her eyes, but they just bounced off Rick.

Morty’s other companion, Darth Vader, drew dual blue and red lightsabers, twirling them in his opposite hands.

Rick twitched. “Right, here’s the deal, I don’t want to deal with this anymore. Just let me go and I won’t bother you again.”

“Fuck that,” Vriska said, still clutching her wound. “You’re goin’ down, fucktard. The Doctor’s gone, it’s time for you to follow in his footsteps.”

“You aren’t welcome in the new world,” Morty said.

“Either of them,” Jenny said, smirking. “You’re everyone’s enemy, Rick.”

“Right, fine, universe bomb,” Rick said, pressing a button on one of his arms.

“Nope,” Mite said. He had spent most of the fight disabling that one device.

Rick’s left eye twitched.

Vriska laughed. “You just got trolled!”

“That’s it, you die first.” Rick snapped his fingers. Vriska felt herself die in an instant.

Of course it wasn’t Heroic or Just, she’d just been laughing at him. She sat back up, her chest wound healed. “Oh, bad move buddy.”

Morty shot Rick with an antimatter gun, but Rick somehow still had shields. “Vriska, plan. Whatever it takes, do it.”

Insipid punched Rick through several shapes with the power of Superman while Vriska tried to figure out where she was going to get all the extra luck.

She quickly realized what she could do.

“Sorry buddy,” she told Darth Vader. She glanced at him and drained his luck to nothing.

He not only had a heart attack but also spontaneously caught fire, had one of his legs vaporized by a quantum tunneling event, and had his head explode.

He knew what he was signing up for. Plus, he was supposed to be a Redshirt anyway, Vriska told herself. She pulled out the infinite-sided die.

Insipid threw Rick back down to where Vriska was standing – but this time he got a shot off on her. Her front leg was shot clean off. She wailed in intense pain.

Vriska threw the die. Something simple and clean.

Rick saw it coming – and a decidedly alien expression crossed his face. Fear.

“MORTY, LISTEN TO ME, I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN YOU WERE TH-”

“Shut the hell up,” Morty spat.

Rick didn’t have a chance to respond. The infinite-sided die activated, choosing something simple.

Rick existed. And then he didn’t. There was a small comical pop noise.

Vriska spat at where he used to be. “Rot in hell.”

Morty looked at where Rick had been standing with a distant expression.

“Regrets?” Vriska asked.

Morty didn’t answer her question. “We need to do what we came here to do.” He threw a capture device and caught Insipid. He didn’t even bother with Darth Vader. “Come on.”

Jenny tried to revive Darth Vader. She wasn’t the best at the spell, so she couldn’t be sure if she’d just failed or he had really Come Back Wrong.

Vriska refused to look at the dark, dead form at all. Rick was gone. That was all that mattered.

They walked on in silence.

~~~

Pidge hadn’t lasted long against Silicon. She’d needed to be captured as well, leaving only Renee and Pinkie to face the Gem conglomeration. She had easily recovered from being split up, now fighting them in twelve different bodies all twice as tall as a human.

“What even are you?” Renee asked, defending from a bolt of electricity shot from a staff.

“We are the Everyman’s gift,” Silicon explained. “Created to be an agent of destruction. It is our purpose.”

“Kinda depressing, don’t’cha think?” Pinkie asked.

“It is our purpose. It fills us with joy.”

“Creepy,” Renee muttered. “I always thought Red Diamond was less… totalitarian.”

“One enslaved for the sake of many,” Silicon droned, firing seven guns at once while two others swung swords. The ponies were only saved by Pinkie’s quick jumping to a green pyramid.

“But you’re killing everyone!” Pinkie blurted.

“Exactly.” One of the Silicon’s bodies split into several smaller ones that launched themselves at the two ponies. Pinkie bashed them away with her frying pan.

Renee shook her head. “Pinkie, plan?”

“Nothing.”

“You always have a plan!”

“I always seemed to have a plan!”

Renee looked upset for a moment – but then she laughed. “Don’t know what I was expecting.”

Pinkie grinned. “Don’t expect anything from Pinkie Pie.”

Renee deflected an attack with a magic shield. “I can trust you to be there when I need you.”

Pinkie jumped them to a golden torus shape. “...Thanks, Renee.”

“Yeah.” Renee moved them out of the way of Silicon’s bullet. “We’re not going to win this one. She’s got too much on us.”

“At least we’re together, huh?”

Renee smiled, tears in her eyes. “Yes. Yes, that’s it. That’s exactly it.”

The Silicons attacked as one, ready to destroy them. Even though they knew they couldn’t win, they refused to go down without a fight. Renee summoned her needles, Pinkie took out her chainsaw, and both of them let out a laugh that was far too happy for the situation.

“ARE YOU READY FOR COMPLETE BULLSHIT!?”

Everyone froze, turning to stare. On top of a salmon-colored cube there stood the League of Sweetie Belles… and Alushy.

Silicon dropped all focus on Pinkie and Renee, turning to Alushy.

“Thrackerzod, do anything you need to,” Allure said.

Thrackerzod nodded, initiating a soul bond with Silicon. “Done. Alushy, she should be easy pickings.”

Alushy dropped her physical form, becoming a tremendous mess of dark shadows, evil eyes, and vampiric teeth. She charged Silicon.

Most of them dodged – but Alushy only needed one. She drove a spike of darkness into a single gemstone, shattering the tiny sphere. She absorbed the spirit within into her body. Thanks to Thrackerzod, this included all the nearby Silicon spirits as well.

Alushy let out a psychotic laugh. She could feel the remaining Silicon Gems trying to separate themselves from their little hivemind, but they couldn’t. They were the Everygem. Separation would effectively kill what they were.

Every Silicon gemstone went dead, falling to the ground without a soul.

Alushy transformed back into her normal self. “A delicious lunch.”

“You da vampire!” Pinkie shouted, cupping her hooves over her mouth.

“Da vampire? Please, I am the living embodiment of absolute bullshit! You’re welcome!”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Alushy.”

“Yes, yes, we’re good,” Allure said. “Thrackerzod, take out Pinkie.”

“…What?”

Allure facehooved. “She’s the enemy!”

“We have a truce, Allure,” Renee said. “We need to stop the Nihilists.”

“Renee! She’ll just use this to get an advantage over us!”

“…Allure, dear, Pinkie’s better than that.”

“If she were better than that she wouldn’t be on the wrong side!”

Pinkie looked at Allure with sad eyes. “…You wouldn’t say that to Minna if she were here.”

Allure twitched. “You have no right.”

“Nobody has the right,” Pinkie admitted.

Allure clenched her jaw. “…None of you are going to attack her, are you?”

Alushy, Renee, and Burgerbelle backed away. Bot turned to Thrackerzod for assistance, the eldritch unicorn telling her no with a shake of the head.

“…Mutiny,” Allure muttered with a sigh. “I get it, I get it, maybe I’m just being unreasonable.” She turned to Pinkie. “Can you get us to the Tower Ring quickly at least?”

“Jump-cut,” Pinkie said.

Allure braced for mind-screw.

~~~

They were standing on top of a red brick shape.

Allure rubbed her head. “…Burgerbelle, I am so glad you can’t do that.”

Burgerbelle shrugged.

Renee was at the front of the group, staring at the entrance to a long hollow cylinder. “…it’s through there, isn’t it?”

Pinkie nodded.

“Why aren’t there guards?”

“Trap,” Jenny said.

“Hey Jenny,” Renee said. Then she shook her head. “Jenny!? When did you get here!?”

“Same time we did,” Morty said. “…Haven’t we been traveling together for the last five minutes?”

“That was a jump-cut!” Allure blurted. “We couldn’t really react to anything! Pinkie!”

Pinkie shrugged. “Hey, I know we’re all upset and kinda want to punch each other into oblivion, but come on, there’s like a final boss through this door, let’s at least go in together!”

Everyone – Pinkie, Renee, Allure, Alushy, Bot, Thrackerzod, Jenny, Morty, Burgerbelle, Vriska, and Mite – nodded and stood together. It would have made a great cover image for a movie, though Mite would have been disgruntled since nobody could ever see him.

They took a step toward the empty cylinder.

Then they were surrounded by several dozen members of the Everyman.

Bot drew her weapons. “Targets acquired!”

“We do not need a fight,” all of the Everyman spoke at once. “We just wish to escort you inside.”

“Fuck no, trap,” Vriska said. “Everyone, kill them all.”

The Everyman hadn’t been expecting this response – nor had he been expecting everyone in the group to go along with it. It wasn’t even a battle, it was a bloodbath. The overwhelmingly human forms of the Everyman didn’t stand a chance against the heroes who were so done with all that had happened to them today. Pinkie’s chainsaw, Vriska’s sword, Renee’s needles, Jenny’s fists, Thrackerzod’s tentacles…

There were no survivors. Of course, the Everyman had backups – such a being could never truly be removed – but no more decided to show themselves.

Jenny flexed her wrist, marching right into the hollow cylinder. Everyone wordlessly followed her.

They appeared in the room with the cube. They saw IT, they saw Hussie, and they saw Red Diamond.

Jenny made it clear they weren’t here to have a question and answer session. She pointed Siron’s staff at IT.

Red Diamond pointed her finger at Starbeat, Jane, and Sunny.

“That doesn’t matter,” Jenny said, lowering the staff. “If we’re this far, we’ve got you.”

You no longer have Twilence. Hussie is ensuring my victory. IT said. You can’t do anything.

“You’re an idiot if you believe that.”

You don’t realize what I am.

“You’re IT,” Pinkie said. “Brain, yada yada, likes order, suddenly doesn’t, we get the picture.”

You understand nothing. I am IT. But I am also more. I am the lie.

“So what, Magane’s involved,” Alushy muttered. “Kinda got that.”

There is much more to this. I am IT, but why am I the lie?

It is because I am also the Spectacularium.

Renee blinked. “…What!?”

I fused with that being who IS answers. I became one, and all the information is at my disposal. I know every aspect of all of you. I know that Hussie is writing the perfect ending to the story. Your infinite-sided die has been negated. You have no Prophet to save you. The Flowers plan is useless under my control.

IT teleported one of the capture devices away from the group. IT destroyed it in an instant. And there goes one of your captures. Was it an ally, an enemy, one of mine? So many names were unimportant here, it could have been any of them… I wonder how many will never be mentioned again, leaving their fates uncertain?

“BASTARD!” Alushy shouted. “Complete b-”

No.

Alushy was bubbled by Red Diamond.

“You’re not killing us,” Jenny observed. “Why?”

Your ka is still strong. You got this far, it means something. I cannot have Hussie kill you outright, I can only whittle you down within the scope of Narrative. But I can be sure of your failure. The destruction of all things will begin shortly. And this lie will end.

Pinkie shrugged. “Welp, looks like we can’t do anything. Too much power in this room. Oh woe is us.”

You believe the story demands your victory. Your artifacts are all disabled, anything that could destroy the universe would destroy all of you, and the Tower Ring will launch in five minutes. I see everything you think before you do.

“There are no perfect predictors,” Renee said. “Anything that comes from outside the local universes cannot be determined by the Spectacularium.”

But you would all have to be unaware of it as well.

“The Flowers didn’t even tell us about each other,” Jenny said, shrugging. “What makes you think we’re all they did?”

IT was silent for a moment. They wouldn’t dare…

“…You know, if I were them, I’d have a Prophet working for me,” Pinkie said, grinning. “One who liked badass speeches and tense moments. One who writes moments where the bad guy thinks he’s won and everything seems impossible. One who has a flamboyant taste for the slightly absurd. One who’s a secondary character that has been conveniently missing from this whole chapter.”

(A multiverse away, Rohan Kishibe finished the final panel of his manga under the watchful eye of a PPC agent. Behind them sat a version of the Everyman - an auburn-haired girl in a top hat known as the Everykid - who had been isolated from the other sections.)

“Oh! Guess what I saw~!” Pinkie trilled. “And you saw it too, because I saw it!”

IT asked itself, over and over again, what could be coming. What could Rohan have prepared for IT. What trick? What Deus Ex Machina? What ploy? The Embodiment? IT could deal with that. Aradias? Defenses were already in place. What what what what what what WHAT!?

IT started to pulsate rapidly, devoting as much processing power as IT could spare to finding the threat.

IT failed to realize that was the threat. Because now IT could make a mistake.

Jenny knew the time was right – IT wasn’t looking at Siron’s staff. She fired it at the Tower Ring behind IT, the eldritch energies releasing all at once. Normally, such an attack wouldn’t do anything to a high-level construct.

But the Nihilist Ring had been constructed in this universe for a reason, and that was because it could not handle eldritch energies. The three whirling blades of pure destruction lost all cohesion with each other and flew off in random directions, skewering the walls of the dark sphere they were inside.

IT roared mentally, losing all sense of sanity in one moment. It attacked Jenny with everything it had, tearing her billion-year-old brain into shreds. She screamed.

And then Renee moved. She jumped IT and placed her hooves on the brain, activating her Sylph of Mind powers. She touched the jumbled mess that was IT – and healed.

Red Diamond moved to stop her – but everyone else wasn’t going to let that slide. Despite being a Diamond, all of the heroes attacking at once was too much for her. She poofed with a stab of Vriska’s sword she couldn’t defend against.

Renee tore the mental imprint of the Spectacularium away from that of IT, dividing the two essences. The Spectacularium became its own entity, and it understood what had happened. It was exceptionally weak, and it understood this, and it ensured that Renee understood this. It didn’t ask Renee for permission, it just acted. Its time was over.

But before the Spectacularium left, it told Renee there was no right decision, but that she was making the one best for her.

Then the Spectacularium rammed itself into IT and vaporized both their essences.

The Nihilists had been defeated.

“FUCK YES!” Hussie said, throwing his computer onto the ground and snapping it in two. “HOLY SHIT THAT WAS SO LAME! And probably emotionally scarring.”

Vriska glared at him. “Hey, two horrible manipulative men are gone now. Ever think about joining them!?”

“Hell no! I’ll live forever!” Hussie ‘snopped’ his fingers, folded himself into a paper airplane, and blasted off through a nearby wall like it didn’t exist.

“Figures,” Vriska muttered.

Renee looked at her hooves, for once not disturbed in the slightest that there was brain matter on them.

“Renee?” Allure asked. “What did the Spectacularium mean? That you were making the right decision?”

Renee turned to Allure, tears in her eyes. “You… You weren’t supposed to hear about it. You were just… supposed to find out later. There’s a note I left you and…” She swallowed hard.

Allure looked up at her sister, mouth trembling.

Renee sighed, turning to Pinkie. “Pinkie… I want to go back with you.”

There was an abrupt silence. Several people stared at her with slack jaws.

Pinkie smiled. “Of course. I’d never turn away a friend who really meant it.”

“WHAT THE FUCK!?” Allure shouted at the top of her lungs.

Renee didn’t look her sister in the eye – instead finding something to busy herself in the form of Jenny’s fried brain. She worked her Sylph of Mind powers on the immortal.

Allure slapped her. “LOOK AT ME!”

Renee looked at her not with sad eyes, or angry eyes, but determined eyes.

Allure wasn’t sure what to make of this. “…Why?”

“…I’m alone, Allure,” Renee answered as she formed Jenny’s mind as well as she could. “Daniel can’t be there for me anymore. You can’t be there. Flutterfree’s with Eve all the time. My agents are all fighting in the war. …The people I would turn to for help…” she glanced at Pinkie. “Joined the other side.”

“You’re joining the enemy because you’re lonely!?”

Renee looked down at her. “...I voted for the collapse, Allure. But I stayed. Because of the vote, because of our society. My faith in it. I’ve lost that faith in this war - and I couldn’t say anything to anyone about it. I wouldn't be trusted. So I had to lock it up within me.” She sighed. “I believed - and still do - that neither side in this war is right. The fact that there’s a war at all is wrong. There’s no just end here.”

“How can you say that!? At least we don’t want to kill everyone!”

Renee shook her head. “But we do, Allure. We do. It’s a choice between one kind of mass death or another.” She took her hoof off Jenny – any of the woman’s memories from more than a couple years ago were going to be scrambled beyond recognition, but from what Renee understood that was normal for her. “I’m going to choose the side where I don’t feel rejected for having doubts.”

Pinkie put a hoof around Renee. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.”

“Thank you, Pinkie, but it’s not,” Renee said. “…I’m doing just what they were afraid of.”

Allure’s expression softened for a moment – but then the anger returned as powerful as ever. “Traitor.”

“Yes,” Renee said, smiling sadly. “Renee the traitor. …Tell Daniel to check under the dresser, a letter should have appeared by the time you get back.”

“I’m not letting you go,” Allure said, summoning her Heart’s power. “I’ll take all of you down! All o-”

The sphere exploded as the Many-Angled Ones attacked it. Without their precious Tower Ring, they no longer cared about keeping the universe as pure as possible. They were willing to tear it apart to get their revenge.

But, of course, it wouldn’t do to have all the heroes killed by eldritch beings at the drop of a hat.

As it turned out, the Flowers actually had been doing something in the Eldritch Embodiment.

They had woken Azathoth up.

The highest god of the Eldritch Embodiment appeared in the universe, forcing the Many-Angled Ones to freeze in fear. They recovered quickly, moving to attack him with impossible powers.

Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth defended their king, [????] in the ∂´¨ßµåç˙ˆ˜å until the fabric of reality itself [unintelligible] with a side of salt a-

Sanity Boundary activate, a rose-like Flower said, appearing among the heroes. Resetting your conditions. Thank you for your service.

And then the two groups were split up, placed in replicas of the ships they’d lost. They retained all injuries and losses, most of them appearing as nothing more than capture devices with heavily wounded individuals inside of them.

Only one pony was on a ship she hadn’t arrived in.

Renee Jackson.

“Oh thank the Tower,” Renee said, letting out a breath of relief.

Pinkie held Renee close. “HELMSMAN! Take us home.”

Morty let out a deep sigh and plotted a course for the Raven Hotel.

Across a divide of eldritch beings tearing reality apart, there was another ship.

Allure stood in it, angrily punching walls as tears rolled down her cheeks. “WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE THIS!?”

Nobody wanted to answer her.

“They’re all going to pay… Every last one of them… They think they can take my family from me… They’re wrong!”

~~~

Allure did tell Daniel where to find the note – after several hours of angry shouting. He felt sorry for the poor unicorn. She’d been broken by this war. She couldn’t take what it was doing to everyone.

Not to say he wasn’t mad. He was livid. But he at least thought he understood.

This letter would probably be the best way to judge that.

He opened it, face impassive.

Daniel, Love…

When you read this, I will have become a traitor – or someone will somehow expose this letter. It’s an unreasonable risk, leaving this… but I can’t leave you with nothing. You mean too much to me.

Stars, I love you. I love you more than… I can’t even compare it.

I know you love me, even though this war has taxed it. I have not gone back on my vows. I made a promise that day, and I plan to keep that promise. You are my other, Daniel. Nothing can ever change that.

But this war is a divide. It’s too large of a divide. Your hate for them… I know it’s not your fault. In some twisted way it’s Corona’s fault, and in some other way it’s the fault of Them. I honestly think you’d be on the side of preservation even without this, and I would probably have joined you. It’s just-

There’s no way to say this without hurting you. It hurt. Everything you did, it hurt. I didn’t see Daniel, I saw something that had taken over your mind and turned you into… And I couldn’t talk to you about it, couldn’t resolve it, because you know why! And I couldn’t talk to Allure, she was broken over Minna… Flutterfree tried to listen to me, but I could tell she was too taxed to do what she needed to do. And Eve… Eve didn’t even notice anything was wrong.

I had doubts. But whenever I voiced those doubts, people got angry. You, Allure… Not Flutterfree. But everyone else… if we were a different type of nation, I would have been jailed already for suspicion of sympathy for the other side.

…Looks like I probably should have been.

Irony. It’s painful.

I’m gone. I’m gone because I’ll be welcomed over there. Pinkie will be there. Nova will be there. And as much as you hate it, Corona will be there, and I know she’ll understand.

You must think she’s stolen me away from you. I want you to fight that thought most of all.

Because if we both survive this… I’m going to come back. I don’t care if I get jailed for the rest of my life, I won’t be able to just leave you forever.

If ka allows, we’ll be together again, my Love.

All I can say now is that I’m sorry. I wasn’t strong enough.

Daniel broke down into tears from so many different conflicting emotions he couldn’t even identify them. All he knew was that she still cared – and that made it worse.

So much worse.

~~~

“…Could we have paid more attention to her?” Eve asked Flutterfree.

“I don’t know. I tried,” Flutterfree said. “I empathized. I just… wasn’t available. But if I’d left you during those times…”

“We only have so much of ourselves to go around,” Eve said, looking up at the sky. “…Do you think the people will let us forgive her?”

“We can give her a new name and a new identity,” Flutterfree said. “Sombra again.”

“Sombra again…” Eve said, frowning. “…Flutterfree, do you want to go to the other side?”

“…I did,” Flutterfree admitted. “But Pinkie was right. I would never be happy with what I was working for over there. I would have been broken.” She put a wing around Eve. “I’m not going anywhere. Had I been stuck on the other side, I probably would have done what she did and came here.”

Eve wiped a tear from her face. “How much more do we have to face? It can’t keep on like this forever, can it?”

Flutterfree didn’t answer.

~~~

Renee walked up to Corona in the middle of the Raven Hotel. The soldiers of the collapse whispered among themselves. “She can’t be trusted.” “She’s a spy.” “She’s just a fake.”

Corona dissipated the glove on her left hand. “Renee?”

“Go ahead,” Renee said.

Corona placed her hand just under Renee’s horn and felt everything she did.

The first thing Corona did after she came out was hug Renee tightly. “…You hide your struggles too well.”

Renee burst into tears. “I… I…”

“Shh, it’s okay. It’s okay now. We’re here for you. Pinkie, Nova, Jotaro, Vriska, Minna, Lady Rarity… We’re all here.” She looked Renee in the eyes. “We question ourselves and our actions every day of this war. You’re not alone.”

Pinkie and the recently-healed Nova moved in to the hug as well. Minna allowed her carefully cultivated hard-military commander image to break so she could show her aunt some kindness.

“Everyone!” Corona shouted, spreading her wings. “Welcome Renee Jackson to our ranks! Consider her a guest of honor! She needs support more than anything right now!”

Renee smiled through her tears.

She felt horrible about feeling like she belonged here.

~~~

“What was the point of that?” Flagg asked, juggling Black Thirteen.

Magane smirked. “Because I was bored.”

“You’ve never done something like that because you were bored before.”

“And you always have some grander purpose!” Magane said, baring her teeth in a spiked grin. “Not all crazy plans have to have some sort of big overarching philosophical end goal, you know. Sometimes it can just be fun!”

“But why risk ending everything?”

“What else would have drawn such a big crowd?” Magane asked, holding her arms wide. “What other time would I have been able to do it? If I waited, the war would have gone on too long. If I acted earlier, IT and the Spectacularium wouldn’t have been ready!” She smirked. “Not to mention, the Flowers would have found the timing suspicious if I did it any other way.”

Flagg smirked. “You have the spirit.”

“I have something you lost a long time ago.”

“What?”

She held up a finger. “Creativity.”

“I need Creativity t-” he saw Magane raising her fingers. “You sly little…”

Magane lowered her hand. “I could have trapped you.” She gave a mock salute. “But I didn’t. Sayonara!”

Flagg let her go. She was one of the most interesting individuals he had met in recent memory. Too bad she couldn’t serve as a replacement for the Doctor… Not nemesis material.

Perhaps he should start looking.

125 - Traitors

Eve looked up at a holographic display of the TSAB labyrinth. It was represented by a few dozen nested spheres of various blue shades, each sphere with several major points of light on it. The majority of the spheres seemed out of focus, almost fuzzy, because Merodi Universalis had no idea what was happening in those areas.

The structure of the TSAB Labyrinth was a closely kept secret, known only to Nanoha and other individuals at the center of the immense defensive construct. So it was only natural that the Merodi could only get an approximation of what was happening within.

This didn’t change the fact that Eve wanted to know what was going on.

“No ideas? None at all?” Eve asked.

Monika shook her head. “Don’t look at me. There hasn’t been a scene in there since Nanoha set the thing up, and even that was kinda vague. …Plus ‘knowledge’ has never been my strong suit.”

“Then do something to ‘control’ it,” Tornado muttered. Of all the members of Valentine’s group, she was the only one who felt the need to keep fighting. She’d gone back to her ruined home with some Merodi and rounded up a handful of USM heroes to contribute to the war effort, allowing the Ambassador to step out of the spotlight.

“I’d have to go there to do anything. We decided against that.”

Tornado scowled. “Then what about miss ‘I can find the unknown’ over here?” she said, gesturing at Roxy.

“I can’t believe she got clearance,” Roxy muttered.

“Hey, I asked a question.”

“Void isn’t predictable in the way you want it to be. If it was, Twilence would be able to see the entire layout of the TSAB labyrinth. Because Seer of Void.”

“Why do you Skaians have to be so… esoteric and inconsistent?”

“One, not a Skaian, not a ghost, never actually died. I’m a Gem-spirit hybrid. Two, because it, like, makes things more interesting, I think.”

Giorno cleared his throat. “We do not have time to argue about this.”

“…Really?” Monika said, raising an eyebrow. “Because I’m pretty sure O’Neill, Nanoha, and the others are the ones making all the war decisions there. We’re not actually doing anything.”

“Then what’s the point of this meeting?”

“Exactly my golden-donut haired friend!”

Eve shook her head. “Everyone, stop arguing. We’re keeping ourselves informed, that’s what’s important.” She pressed a few buttons, dispelling the all-but-useless map of the TSAB labyrinth, and replaced it with a larger map of the remaining multiverse. “The latest report says that both sides of the Collection have fallen into disarray. They’re no longer able to mobilize properly and are effectively defeated. Their forces will still be within our armies, but they will have lost their fire and organization.”

Roxy sighed. “So… Just... God, this happens so often we’re totally numb to it. Just another one gone. Who’s next?”

“On our side the Kromagg and Paratimers are looking like they’ll be forced to pull back or risk complete societal collapse. The other side’s…” She paused, looking for the right word. “Smaller nations do not have the same problem. Phage Industries and the Shabanash are fighting strong and likely will until the last one of their soldiers die. The same can’t be said for the Starcross Society. With the loss of the Rebellious Star and the distancing of its leaders...” She shook her head. “…Look at what we’ve become, talking about the fall of societies like the weather.”

“Least we’re not the Class 1’s,” Roxy said. “They’ll still exist after they’ve fallen.”

“…Will they?” Eve asked, thoughts drifting to the other side of the conflict.

~~~

“…Amen,” Rev wrapped up a sermon. “Go in peace.” She said this with a smile, knowing that very few of the congregation would actually go in peace. The war, while still having barely touched most of Merodi Universalis’ core worlds, was a heavy drain on all of them.

Still, they had lives and jobs to get back to, so they filed out. A few came up to talk to her, and she did her best to give them the time they needed, but Rev knew she couldn’t talk to them all. She told a few she’d talk to them later, encouraging them to come by for a smaller group study she had been holding in the Church’s attic. She hated to admit it, but this was a mechanism to ensure she didn’t have to deal with too many people – a lot would just refuse to show up to a small group study session, talking themselves out of it.

She felt guilty about it, but hadn’t repented. Her job as Reverend had become more exhausting than ever before these days, and if she wasn’t careful about herself she would break. For all her reputation as the spiritual voice of the nation, she needed help.

She had some. Flutterfree had been convinced to give a sermon yesterday – though admittedly it was more of a testimonial - and Rev had put out a request to the rest of the church body in the multiverse to send some other Reverends to help her. She had no idea if they’d respond; presumably the rest of the Church was in just as much of a mess as her current slice. For now, she allowed herself to confide in the more devout members of her church, hoping that more than just a handful would be able to alleviate some of her strain.

As church closed, usually only her closest friends and followers would remain, as no others felt the right to stay behind longer unless they were having a spiritual experience. However, today was a little different. As Rina and Flutterfree walked up to her to begin their usual talk after the service, Rev held up a hoof. She wanted to have a moment with a surprising newcomer.

“Ambassador Valentine?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

Valentine shook his head. “Just Valentine now. I speak for no one.”

“You still have those loyal to you.”

“And I no longer speak for them,” Valentine said, folding his hands together. “I am just a man, after all. Nothing more than dust. Infinitely miniscule compared to the On High.”

Rev smiled softly. “Welcome back.”

“Back?” Rina blurted, revealing that she’d been eavesdropping. “He’s never been here!”

“I was referring to the Church in general,” Rev pointed out.

Valentine nodded slowly. “I don’t even know how long it’s been. I was raised in these buildings. But as I grew… I always told myself I lived my life in a holy way, the way of justice. That was enough. It wasn’t. It seems I’m only able to see that now that I’ve lost everything.”

Rina lit up. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a ri-” Flutterfree nudged her, shaking her head – now was not the time for that particular verse.

Valentine chose to ignore her. “There’s an irony to it, me being here. I have nothing, so I turn back to what I know.”

“He has a habit of getting to us in our lowest points,” Rev said. “I’m willing to be here for you.” Inwardly, a little part of her screamed in agony about having yet another person to think about. “The others are as well.”

Valentine nodded – the closest they were going to get to gratitude right now. Rev felt she should continue the conversation, but she sensed movement at the front door of the church and used that as an excuse to break it off. She told herself she’d talk to him later.

The thought quickly vanished when she realized who was coming through the doors. A fellow Reverend she knew – a tall golden lion with mane like the heavens themselves, the black collar of their shared denomination around his neck. Behind him were several other Reverends, though since they were all carefully arrayed behind him, there was no question that he was the top lion.

Rev recognized the slight adjustments in his collar – he outranked her in the hierarchy of her church. She nodded her head in respect as he walked up to her. “Brother Aslan, it has been too long.”

“Sister Glimmer, it is good to see you,” the great lion spoke with a deep, fatherly voice.

“I thank you for responding to my call.”

Aslan smiled warmly, turning to Flutterfree. “And you as well, Sister Flutterfree.”

Flutterfree took a moment to remember that she had been technically ‘ordained’ in the last week so she could help Rev. “Oh, right.” She nodded her head in much the same way Rev had, though it didn’t carry as much respect with it.

“I’m surprised you know about her already,” Rev said. “I hadn’t said anything about her.”

“I talked to some of your congregation on the way out,” Aslan admitted. “Such a wonderful group – if highly distressed. I can see why you needed help.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Yes. But the area you occupy is very important. I’m surprised you didn’t call for us much sooner. Not because of your own stress – but to give more hands the ability to spread the Gospel and support our flock through trying times.”

“I sought a flexible, nonthreatening, and nonregimented approach,” Rev said. “Did I go too far?”

Aslan nodded slowly. “I believe so. Not by much – your work has been impeccable – but you should have expanded more. I understand you do not wish to be in the spotlight, but it is a bit late for that now.”

Rev nodded. “Of course. I’ll show you around.”

“That won’t be necessary quite yet,” Aslan said. “Take a break. You need it.”

Rev smiled. “Thank you, Aslan.”

Aslan nodded curtly and moved off to talk with others around the church, likely to get a better grasp on how things were done here. The other Reverends with him followed, a silent pack of observers.

“I don’t like this,” Flutterfree said.

“We’re structured, Flutterfree,” Rev pointed out. “We need the structure to know who the leaders are and whose words carry the most weight. I’m not the highest possible.”

Flutterfree narrowed her eyes. “I still don’t like it. What if he’s wrong about something? Or disagrees with you?”

“Flutterfree, you know those answers.”

“I do, I’m just trying to get you to think about it.”

“I for one like the idea of regiment,” Rina said. “Some of us need to be told what to do.”

Flutterfree glanced at the back of Aslan. “…Maybe.”

“You’re worried about change,” Rev said. “That’s okay. The only real change that happens is that I’m not the senior for all of Merodi Universalis. He is right, I do need the break.”

Flutterfree looked at her sadly. “…Yeah…”

“Flutterfree, everything’s going to be fine. I’m not asking you to agree with the hierarchy.” Her position as the lowest of the ordained means she gets leeway, anyway. “I’m just asking you to accept it as my will for this church.”

Flutterfree forced a smile. “Okay. Now h-”

The doors to the church flew open violently and a small, black, imp-like woman walked in. Out of her head grew a ponytail that served as a limb, and she had piercing yellow eyes.

There was a gaping gash in her side dripping dark sludge.

“…Midna!?” Flutterfree gasped – barely recognizing the face she hadn’t seen in decades.

Midna fell over onto the church floor, moaning.

“Stand back,” Aslan said, lifting up a paw in preparation to heal her.

“STOP!” Rina blurted. “She’s a Twili – a creature of darkness! Divine power will kill her!”

Alsan took his paw back. “Do we have a wielder of the dark here?”

Rina rolled her eyes. “Please, have you looked at me?” She trotted over to Midna and touched her horn to the wound. A dark sludge mixed with numerous metal shards erupted from the horn, embedding themselves in Minna’s side. The metal shards were decidedly painful, making the Twili cry out, but after a few seconds the gaping wound was completely healed.

Midna sat up, rubbing her head. “Well, that was interesting to feel.”

“Child, why are you here?” Aslan asked.

Midna ignored him, turning instead to Flutterfree. “We’ve got a problem. Ardent hasn’t been taking your little war very well.”

Flutterfree’s frown deepened. “...Makes sense.”

“The forces of Ardent are mobilizing, telling themselves that it’s their duty to attack you. End the people who are destroying everything.”

Valentine laughed. “What are they going to do?”

“Open portals using technology salvaged from Link’s tomb?” Midna suggested. “I… I just came from there. It’s been raided. I… I don’t know who’s alive or dead.”

“What should we do?” Rina asked.

“Call Eve.” Flutterfree pulled out her phone and called Eve. She filled her in on the situation.

Eve thought for a moment. “I don’t think Ardent can do much to us.”

“They could portal right to this world,” Midna muttered. “Even with all your fancy toys they’d still kill some people.”

“Right, right…” Eve sighed. “I’ll have to put some alerts in, move some people around. It’ll take a while, but I think I can send a team through to take care of them…”

“Why can’t we just go?” Flutterfree asked. “There’s enough people here to form a makeshift team.”

“…Are you okay with that, Flutterfree?”

Flutterfree nodded. “Yes. I’m okay with it. Hopefully it won’t take too much of a show of power to get them to stand down. I could probably do it alone, but I won’t.”

“Okay. I trust you. Consider yourselves Ambassadors. You’d technically part of Relations, not Expeditions. I’m sure Daniel would let you go, but he’s busy and so is Storm.”

“Got it. Ambassadors.” Flutterfree smiled. “I’ll let you get back to work. See you tonight.” She hung up. “Okay, we’re going out. Rina, you’re with me.”

“M-me?”

“Yes, you. You could be helpful. Valentine, I think you could make a great Merodi Ambassador.”

Valentine seemed reluctant – but ended up shrugging and just going with it.

Flutterfree turned to Rev. “What about it – instead of stressing yourself about the church, you can come with us and try something else?”

“…My rational side says I should be relaxing. But the other side says I haven’t actually been on a real adventure in eons.” Rev turned to Aslan.

“Go, Sister,” Aslan encouraged. “It is no sin to seek fulfillment, so long as the Lord is in your thoughts along the way. We can take care of things while you are away.”

Rev grinned. “Right, let’s go, makeshift church-service team!”

“Ooh, we could give ourselves a name!” Rina said. “Like, uh… Templars!”

“Rev’s Revolvers,” Flutterfree suggested.

Rev shook her head. “No. We’re the Fishers.”

Valentine summoned D4C – clearly ready to take them all to another universe. They unofficially accepted Rev’s choice of name and left via D4C.

~~~

Pidge shoved the rest of Pinkie’s Party into the side dimension she spent most of her free time in – the Laboratory. The universe itself was a flat expanse of gray under a near-black sky. There was nothing whatsoever in the distance, but in the area they occupied there were several hundred lab benches, crates filled with exotic technology, and more than a few piles of magitech scraps.

“Huh, I don’t think I’ve been here before,” Nova said. “Weird.”

“Not really, you aren’t the science type,” Vriska pointed out.

Nova pointed at her hoof screen. “Uh, I kinda have to be?”

“Not with Pidge around you don’t.”

“She’s taking your job,” Jotaro said with a smirk.

Nova put a hoof on her chest and gasped in mock horror. “Oh no, she gets to do all the geeky stuff, how will I ever survive this wave of immense jealousy?”

“By forgetting about it, probably.”

Pidge looked up at Jotaro. “Hey, Jojo, good to see you doing better.”

Pinkie nodded. “I second this!” She pulled Jotaro into a hug.

“Yare yare daze…”

Vriska let the moment go on for a few seconds out of respect, but she still had to interrupt it. “Ahem. Why are we here?”

Pidge grinned, adjusting her glasses in such a way to reflect the light and block their view of her eyes. Pinkie muttered something about ‘anime glasses’ as Pidge launched into a big speech.

“As you know, I had this space requisitioned from Corona and the others for a gigantic military project that would assist us in fighting the Living Tribunal and the Shaping Mechanism. I’ve had a team of hundreds of scientists and engineers seamlessly integrating technology from all our allies together into an excellent weapon. A weapon that is basically the coolest thing in existence.”

“Where is it!?” Vriska demanded, salivating at the thought of the weapon.

“Behind you.”

They turned and saw five gigantic robots, each a different dominant color, their size comparable to that of large hotels. The joints of all the robots glowed with a powerful purplish energy while their eyes shone with a brilliant green.

Each robot was slightly different – a green lion, a white whale, a blue spider, a purple raven, and a pink horse.

“Fuck me…” Vriska said, jaw hanging open. “Did you just make us a fucking combination mecha?!”

“Have you forgotten my source material? Shame.” Pidge rolled her eyes. “Yes, I built us a ‘combination mecha’.”

“Dibs on the spider.”

“That’s not how it works. I designed one for each of us specifically. I mean, yeah, the spider is yours, but if you’d wanted another one it would just reject you.”

“What’s it combine into?” Nova asked.

“Human. As all combination mecha do,” Jotaro observed.

“Jojo’s right. And before you complain about me being specist or something, humanoid forms are the easiest to make work as a combination. Four limbs and a center. Yes, Pinkie, you’re the center.”

“Yaaaay!” Pinkie cheered.

“What are we calling it?” Vriska asked. “Mega-megazord? Voltron 2?”

Pidge glared at Vriska. “That’s in poor taste.”

“…Sorry.”

“Mhm. No, not those names. I’m thinking… Final Dawn.”

“Hmm… Cheesy, overdone, a bit ham-fisted…” Pinkie chuckled. “Perfect! We are the pilots of the Final Dawn! Schweet!” She bounced over to her horse robot. “I’m checking it out!”

“Yeah, we should run some practice runs before we head into the labyrinth,” Pidge said. “Get used to how it works.”

“Hey,” Nova said, pointing to a pile of scrap that looked half-formed into a light blue robot. “What’s that?”

“Oh, that. When Renee showed up I started building a sixth, for her, since she was part of the Primary Team once. She said she didn’t want it. They would have formed the wings. But we don’t need them.”

“…Should I go check on her?” Nova asked.

Jotaro shook her head. “I spoke with her recently. She just doesn’t want to fight anymore. She’s holding herself together admirably.”

Pinkie poked her head out of her robot horse. “Uh… Yeah, Jotaro? She’s not doing that great. I’ve already got plans to cheer her up later. Nova, you can join me on that when we’re done here.”

“Got it,” Nova said with a smile. “So, I get the raven right?”

Pidge nodded. “I’m the lion and Jotaro’s the whale. I was originally going to say it was a dolphin but it just got too bulky. Sorry, I tried.”

Jotaro adjusted his hat. “It’s okay. I can be Moby Dick.”

Vriska snickered.

Pidge blinked. “…Quiznak, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Moby Dick, the unstoppable whale…” Nova grinned. “We’re going to be so awesome. Together we can face the Living Tribunal with this, right?”

“These robots are endowed with so much reality-bending material I’m not sure the Void could do much to them at close proximity. This is a feat of multiversal engineering on an unprecedented scale, focused on the hulls of these beautiful be-”

“Just tell us how to use them already,” Vriska interrupted.

“Oh, well, first you get in, and th-”

Pinkie was already running her horse-mech around, causing tremors. “WHEEEEE I’M SO BIG! AND BOUNCY!” She twisted slightly, forcing the Mech’s body to move like a piece of rubber. “Oh that’s so cool!”

“Yep! The robots have been designed for each of you, specifically to be able to tap into your abilities and use them. I really have to hand it to Twilence, she gave us very good instructions on how to balance the ka manipulation with practical and magical effects. We should be able to take down higher gods with this thing!”

“Everyone, get in your robots! Prance with me!” Pinkie shouted.

“Whales don’t prance,” Jotaro observed.

“Try anyway. That’s an order,” she giggled.

~~~

“How did you deal with it?” Renee asked, slumping at the bar of the Raven Hotel. She hadn’t actually drunk anything – she really wasn’t in the mood – but it was the best place to talk to people within the Hotel’s lobby. She was currently staring at a tarot card she had found – The Tower, labeled ‘incorrectly’ as card XIX. Nineteen.

“Well,” Poe began. “I began my time here a-”

“Poe, stop interjecting yourself into conversations that aren’t directed at you, okay?” Timpani asked, raising an eyebrow.

Insipid, the only other person at the bar at the moment, let out an amused – but bitter – snort. “Like he’ll ever do that.”

Poe, feigning personal affront, dissipated his holographic form and gave the three of them the illusion they were alone.

Timpani turned back to Renee. “To answer your question, I didn’t have the same problem as you. I just agreed with my husband.”

“Surely you had doubts?” Renee said, laying the card on the bar top.

Timpani nodded, a warm smile on her face. “Who wouldn’t? He was going to do the very thing that marked him as a villain for so long ago. ‘The destruction of all worlds, and a new world in their place’. There’s no difference.”

“His heart is in a different place.”

“True. He’s not acting out of pain this time. But discussing my husband won’t help you – we were able to come to an agreement and I support the cause fully now. Your situation isn’t the same. Daniel’s mind has been corrupted.”

“Here’s some irony!” Insipid said, sitting up taller. “He was corrupted by Corona and fights against Corona! Isn’t that something?”

“Dear…” Renee said, shaking her head. “It’s a painful irony I wish I could cure. But I can’t. And I was forced to choose.” She looked into the distance. “If I was to stand by his side I would have needed to want Corona dead. I couldn’t.” She leaned back against the bar, shaking her head. “Now I can’t do anything.”

“…And?” Timpani asked.

“Honestly it’s a relief. The ponies here just care that I am here; I’m not encouraged to go fight. I just told Pidge to stop building my robot thing and she stopped. Simple as that.”

“Lucky you, cha,” Insipid said.

“I’m under no illusions that Corona and my niece aren’t pulling strings for me,” Renee admitted. “It just feels nice to have ponies around me again.” She shook her head. “I’m so done with this war.”

Insipid nodded slowly and looked at the ground.

Jolyne walked up to the bar and sat down. “Poe, something strong that’ll be over quick.”

Poe appeared for a moment to give Jolyne a ‘clock-buster’: a red drink infused with time-slowing agents that gave an immense feeling of euphoria, accelerated to be done in a few seconds. He shot Timpani a look and vanished again.

Jolyne downed the thing in one shot. The force of the drink knocked her out of her chair, dropping her to the ground. A smile appeared on her face for a few seconds, followed by a short moment of annoyance. She sat back up and looked at Renee. “So.”

Renee adjusted her glasses. “Dear, was that…”

“I’m not sure if I should be mad at you or not,” Jolyne said, fidgeting with the table.

Renee knew exactly what she was talking about. “…Jolyne, he asked me directly. It’s what he wanted.”

“Fuckin’ Sylph of Mind,” Jolyne muttered. “Maybe I should be mad at him…”

Renee didn’t have a response to that one.

“…Either of you going to let us in on this sideways conversation?” Insipid asked. “Because you’re being lame right now.”

“It’s not something to discuss publicly,” Renee said, adjusting her mane.

Insipid grunted. “Just like all the rest…”

I walked up to the bar. “Insipid, Jolyne, I’m taking you with me on the mission, if that’s all right.”

“Sure,” Jolyne muttered.

Insipid lit up with a deranged smile. “Another chance to bust some skulls of the faceless enemy? Sure, count me in!”

Renee twitched at the use of ‘enemy’. It had become decidedly taboo to refer to the other side that way among the Merodi and Void. I chose not to reprimand Insipid for it, though I did shoot her a disappointed look. I continued with my announcement. “Glad to have you on board.”

“Team!” Mite blurted, announcing his presence at the tip of my horn.

Jolyne and Insipid paid him no attention – as did most people, now.

“Silence…”

I nodded to Renee with a smile. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry for all that you’re going through. I wish I had time to sit with you.”

“Don’t worry, I understand,” Renee said, waving a dismissive hoof. “Go on your mission. I’ll probably spend some time with Corona while you’re out. …She is staying, right?”

I nodded. “She’ll probably be busy managing everything, though.”

“She has a way of juggling it all together.”

“That’s our Corona.” I winked at Renee – and teleported myself, Jolyne, and Insipid away.

Timpani put a hand on Renee’s shoulder. “…Renee, what was Jolyne all upset about?”

Renee stood up, her back to Timpani. She had the Tower card levitated in front of her eyes. “I…”

“If I’ve overstepped…”

“You haven’t.” Renee shook her head. “I’m the Sylph of Mind. I can bring minds to a better place.” She glanced back, looking Timpani in the eyes. “I cured Jotaro’s crippling grief.”

She pocketed the tarot card of the Tower and walked off.

~~~

Allure, Squeaky, Thrackerzod, Bot, and Burgerbelle were hiding inside a cubic cloaking device, watching the battle unfold around them. They were in subring eight of the TSAB labyrinth, tasked with guarding the dimensional scrambler located within this reality. The reality in question was a universe the size of a single planet covered in seemingly random dungeons reminiscent of Hell itself.

Before the fight had started, there had been a lot of chatter among the Merodi trying to identify which ‘roguelike dungeon crawler’ they were going to be fighting in. No consensus had been reached when the attacks started and the entire conversation was completely forgotten.

The League of Sweetie Belles could not see any of the dungeons below, nor the deepest depths of the world where the actual scrambler was held. They were on the dark, murky surface of the world where nothing lived.

Lived. Past tense. There were certainly things alive there now, mostly from the crashing spaceships. The gargantuan behemoths of the Starcross Society had difficulty moving around in this world and were downed to the planet’s surface somewhat easily, though the crashes opened up the crust of the earth, allowing the forces to pour into the dungeons below.

The demonic creatures that spawned in this world realized that they were nothing compared to a full assault. Their role as convenient guardians was now moot.

“We should be out there,” Thrackerzod said. “Not sitting here with our tails between our legs.”

Squeaky held up a hoof. “We need to wait for the right time to strike. The planet is keeping them from the core for now, and they don’t want to risk throwing this universe into the Sea now. Sooner or later, they’re going to send a high-value target. Then we will strike.”

“Alushy needs help!” Bot blurted, pointing out at a battle taking place in the distance. The dark, massive form of unleashed Alushy was easily visible against the slew of other soldiers. She was doing fine against them, but she was not doing fine against the tag team of Thanos and Nae. The Mad Titan took Alushy’s hits and barely flinched while the Ga’s impressive weapon disintegrated parts of the vampire-pony with burning fury.

“Tactical mistake,” Squeaky said. “Thanos and Nae are already weakened.”

“How is Thanos not a high-value target!?” Allure blurted.

“In the traditional sense, yes, but since when could he be the hero?”

Allure blinked. “…Right.”

“You didn’t know that was what she was talking about? Wow.” Burgerbelle shrugged. “We need one of the big heroes. Li-”

Thanos pulled an immense punch through Alushy’s core, forcing her to revert to her pony form. Alushy said something the League couldn’t hear – probably some inappropriate, yet amusing quip. Nae threw a capture device and pulled the vampire pony away from the fight.

Allure tensed. “Alushy…”

“A great warrior,” Squeaky said with a sigh. “I was hoping she had enough in her to make it out. I guess not.”

“Thanos and Nae are unsuspecting,” Allure said. “If we ju-”

A smaller Starcross ship crashed into the world, depositing two white unicorn mares – Lady Rarity and Scarcity. The two nodded to each other and jumped down the crack of earth they had just made.

“They’ve got a plan,” Squeaky said. “They’re our target. Thrackerzod?”

Thrackerzod nodded, teleporting the five of them to the third level of the planet, catching the two Raritys in the middle of drilling a hole.

With a gesture of her head, Squeaky gave all the orders she needed to. Allure and Bot took on Scarcity while Thrackerzod and Burgerbelle faced Lady Rarity. Squeaky took her position a fair distance away and supported with long-range spells.

There were demon-esque blobs of pulsating flesh around, trying to kill all of them. They were essentially pointless in this scenario.

Scarcity lit her horn, sidestepping Allure and moving purposefully into Bot’s line of fire. She caught the robot’s complicated mixture of rockets, lasers, and traditional bullets in her magic and sent them right back at her. Bot deflected most of them, but a few of the rocket shockwaves made her lose her footing.

Allure summoned her power of Heart, augmenting it with carefully calculated magic movements. She pushed off the ground, sparks flying from the contact her hooves had with the ground. Her very spirit cut toward Scarcity, aiming to cut the unicorn through the chest.

Scarcity smirked. “So predictable.” She created a magical portal behind her and in front of her, prompting the power of Heart to pass right through her and hit Bot. The mechanical filly’s face split open, revealing wires and sparking gizmos. She fell backward, front hooves over her face and screeching in a monotone.

Allure knew Bot could be fixed, as always, so she didn’t relent. She pulled her Heart back, cutting at Scarcity from the side. She jumped to the left, only for Squeaky’s magic missile to hit her in the side, flinging her onto her back. Allure poised her Heart high and drove the invisible spirit down.

Scarcity must have been able to sense it with her magic, because she caught it in her telekinesis. She smirked, twisting the Heart to the side. Allure used the force to twist herself over Scarcity and ram her back leg into the mare’s stomach, pushing as much extra magic as she could into the motion. There was a crack in Scarcity’s spine.

The Starcross Society’s main mare glowered, annoyed that she had to divert some of her magic to getting her back legs to move properly. She didn’t let the pain deter her – she had a mission, and she was Scarcity. Some filly wasn’t going to stop her. She teleported behind Allure and summoned a cutting disc with her magic.

Allure jumped into the air and tapped the disc with one of her back hooves, using it as a springboard to fly higher into the air. Scarcity took this as an opportunity to fire a disintegration beam. Allure caught the power not with a magic shield, but with her hoof, carefully channeling the energy through her body and back out another one of her legs.

Scarcity realized slightly too late what was happening. She tried to twist out of the way, but the vaporizing energy still hit her. The legs on her left side were reduced to cinders and half her face was charred. She flew to a nearby wall and hit hard enough to crack her shoulder.

She coughed. “Dammit… This was not how I –GAH- wanted to be captured.”

Allure’s expression darkened. She summoned her Heart and cut a gash across Scarcity’s side.

“GAH! What the hell!?”

Allure drove a spike into her side.

Scarcity’s pupils dilated not from the pain – she could handle that – but from a realization. “Wh… Why?”

“You look like her,” Allure deadpanned.

“What does that ha-” Allure stabbed her in the tongue, ending the talking. She cut again, this time across one of Scarcity’s legs.

“ALLURE!” Squeaky shouted.

Allure cut again.

“ALLURE!”

She raised her Heart, cutting the slightest bit off Scarcity’s horn.

Squeaky leaped next to Allure and slapped her across the face. “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU!?”

Allure’s impassive expression switched directly to rage. “Tell me she doesn’t deserve this!”

“She. Doesn’t. Deserve. This.”

“I guess you just can’t see it then. Can’t see her. That face!”

“We don’t have time for this,” Squeaky muttered, pulling out a capture device.

Allure stabbed Scarcity in the brain before Squeaky could do anything, ending the unicorn in an instant.

Squeaky slapped Allure, sending her back a few steps. “You need to follow Thrackerzod. Lady Rarity made a run for it.”

Allure, for the first time, realized that Lady Rarity wasn’t there. Burgerbelle was down, flat on the ground, while Bot was trying to repair her face with a welding attachment and wire snips.

Good. Another one.

Squeaky saw the look in Allure’s face as she teleported toward Thrackerzod’s signature but didn’t stop her. All she did was grimace.

Allure appeared next to Thrackerzod. “Where i-”

“Too late, fall back!” Thrackerzod said, lighting her horn. Allure got only a second to see what was happening. Lady Rarity had affixed a glowing green crystal on the pulsating heartlike form of the dimensional scrambler. They teleported away the same time Lady Rarity did.

Squeaky felt the explosion a second after they came back. “…She got it?”

“She got it,” Thrackerzod muttered, following up with an eldritch curse.

“Then we chase her down and make her pay!” Allure blurted. “She has to still be in the universe!”

“We are leaving the front,” Squeaky said, grabbing Allure by the neck. “You’ve gone too far off the edge.”

“Get off me.”

“No. I’m your military commander. You’ve become so reckless that you’re disrupting the unity in this group and going against our military policy.” She gestured at the disfigured corpse of Scarcity. “WE DO NOT DO THIS!”

“We didn’t betray family either,” Allure muttered. “Shouldn’t we be willing to do what they’ll do!?”

“Good god, you need therapy,” Squeaky said, shaking her head. “We’re leaving, that’s final.”

“You’re only the military commander,” Allure spat. “The League is not a despotism!”

“You’ve lost it and need help,” Thrackerzod said. “And that’s coming from me.”

Allure’s eye twitched. “Fine. We go home. I get sent to a therapist. In a time of war where we need to be giving every last ounce of o-”

Burgerbelle hit Allure over the head with a baton made of pillows. The enraged unicorn fell asleep immediately.

“Thanks,” Squeaky told Burgerbelle. “Thrackerzod, can you get us out?”

Thrackerzod nodded, teleporting them to an extraction point.

A short while later, a Rarity with a crescent-shaped scar wielding three swords at once passed Scarcity’s corpse by. She stopped her running in an instant to stare at her.

“...I had hoped…” She shook her head, cutting her statement short. She ran for the extraction point as well.

~~~

Rev sent out a quick prayer for the deceased.

Their group was standing over the ruins of New Termina.

“…Everyone?” Flutterfree cocked her head to ask the imp seated on her back.

Midna nodded. “Far as I know… everyone. Maybe some of Link’s kids got away, maybe not. I haven’t seen or sensed them since.”

“And they took all of Link’s devices…” Flutterfree shook her head. “I can’t believe I’d almost forgotten about this place…”

“What was it?” Valentine asked. “I understand that this is part of your history, but it is not a part I know of.”

“Ardent used to be one of the main worlds in the early days,” Flutterfree explained. “They refused to engage in Disclosure, wishing to keep the multiverse a secret. Then they found out – Twilence told us it was an Arcei, Rose, who told them – and the situation went downhill. We lost all contact with Ardent government and removed all our presence. The only connection we had to the world was Link and Midna’s visits, and even those stopped eventually.”

Midna sighed. “I know, for what it’s worth we’re sorry about that. …I know he would be.”

Flutterfree shook her head. “No need to apologize. You had families to care for. A legacy to watch.” She lifted her muzzle to the air and sniffed.

Rina looked at the destruction with an impassive expression. “This is all way too familiar to me.”

“I know. Don’t go back there,” Rev encouraged. “...We’re going to make this right.”

“Midna, where’s the seat of power for Ardent now?”

“Hyrule Castle,” Midna said. “The nations currently pay respect to the Goron-king Madir. He’s been stirring up the people ever since the Message. They want to march to war against the other worlds and bring them to their rightful place.”

“They’re idiots,” Valentine scoffed.

“Angry idiots with weapons,” Flutterfree said. She began to systematically remove the marble coverings of her wing blades, allowing the sharp protrusions to menacingly catch the light of the sun.

“Flutterfree…” Rev said, holding out a hoof.

“I don’t plan on using them,” she said, a slight purple glow coming to her eyes. “But they need to see the truth.”

Valentine looked at her, understanding. “You really could do this alone.”

“Use D4C to back me up. You all need to look powerful. Rina, that’ll come naturally. Rev, you’ll have to accept being feared. Midna, just point.”

Midna pointed. Flutterfree took off toward Hyrule at high speed.

Rina took off after her. Rev started teleporting herself and Valentine after them, muttering under her breath something that Valentine couldn’t make out.

Purple energy began to brim off Flutterfree as she tapped into the Rage within her.

Rage… Rage was a complex thing, she had come to understand. The Aspect she was given certainly stemmed from her inner anger she had always struggled with, but it was so much more than that. It was not raw, pointless rage – it had a purpose. In many ways, it was like the firebending of Elemental Four. Many of the firebenders resorted to using the anger within them to power their chi and unleash the flame, but a purer form of the art would come from passion, not anger. For anger was a distortion of passion.

The Aspect of Rage was much the same way, she had come to understand. It was not pure anger, not even an emotion – it was an outlook. An outlook on life rooted in dark, unfortunate, bloody truth.

And as a Page who knew this, she could emanate the deepest truth from within her like a beacon for all to see.

Rina felt it first – a deep dissatisfaction rising within her as the world revealed herself to her. You have been forgiven, but that doesn’t change what you’ve done. You’re still her. She popped a pill into her mouth, swallowing hard. She prayed in her head over and over that she wouldn’t blow it and start killing people.

Valentine felt it next. Your entire life was defined by your precious ‘Murica. Now it’s gone. Most of your accomplishments are void. Valentine scowled – he knew Flutterfree wasn’t even focusing on them. What would it feel like to actually be the recipient of this… beacon?

Rev felt it last. The truths shown to her were nothing she hadn’t thought of before. While the others ground their teeth and tried not to explode, Rev smiled. There is nothing new under the sun.

Flutterfree flew over the walls of Hyrule, broadcasting the Rage. No one shot at her – they knew they would regret it if they did. They could see her cutting them up in their minds. Some of them could feel the wounds from her wing blades.

Many broke down crying as they realized how hopeless a fight against her alone would be. How could they hope to do anything to their age-old enemies?

In the end, they walked right through the front doors of the castle, entering the throne room. Flutterfree’s eyes were solid purple and trails of the Rage’s energy swirled off of her as if blown by some unseen wind.

The Goron-king Madir dropped to his hands, a truly awkward position for his rocky race. “Please, spare us.”

Flutterfree nodded. “I will. I have no intention on following up on my threats so long as you behave. Your kingdom may yet survive.”

“Anything, anything.”

“Madir, I have something to ask you. In the aura of Rage, none can lie, none can hide.” Lolo erupted from behind Flutterfree, filling the area with a brilliant nexus of spirographs and mathematical waves. “Tell me, Madir, will you call off all plans of hostility?”

“Yes!”

“Will you make all the other nations stand down?”

“Yes!”

“Will they listen to you?”

“Yes!”

Flutterfree nodded, satisfied with this. “Madir, is there anything else you think we would like to know?”

“One of your own was helping us plan!” Madir blurted, starting to shiver in fear. “A Source!”

“Who was it?”

“Ava Jandice!”

Flutterfree’s eyes widened. “WHAT!? That’s… That’s TRUE! He doesn’t just THINK it is – I’d be able to sense an inconsistency there. Ava… Ava’s a traitor!”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Rina blurted. “She’s basically the head of Merodi!” The moment she said it, the Rage showed her how she was wrong – but Valentine explained it anyway.

“It fits her perfectly. She’s always been a mysterious individual with strong ideals who keeps her cards extremely close to her chest. She never lets anyone truly know who she is. She’s abstained at unusual times, refused to comment on the most innocuous of issues…”

“We have to tell Eve,” Flutterfree said. “Madir, we will have to cut this short. I choose to spare you. If your world does not listen, you will be held personally responsible.”

“Yes, yes…”

“THIS IS STUPID!” one of the guards said – overtaken by the Rage. He pulled out a legendary sword glistening with both fire and ice. He charged Flutterfree.

She sidestepped, tapped him on the back with one of her blades, and kicked with a hoof imbued with Rage. He was sent into a nearby wall.

Rina prepared her magic, ready to finish him off. Flutterfree stopped her by wrapping Lolo around her horn. “No.”

Rina gulped. “R-right…”

“Valentine, take us home,” Flutterfree said, at last allowing the Rage to dissipate.

D4C folded them away.

~~~

Okay, I messaged my teams telepathically. With the destruction of the scrambler, we have a chance to get at the core before they can further confuse its location. Minna’s moving in to provide us with ship coverage. Team A, you’re with me, look for an opportunity. Team B-

You mean Team P! Pinkie thought back.

I rolled my eyes, but smiled. How silly of me. Of course, Team P. Your job is to engage the Living Tribunal when he inevitably shows up – until then, make it look like you’re the main force driving for the center. Got it?

Got it! I could see her saluting in her childish way.

I smirked, turning to Team A – Jolyne, Insipid, Mite, and a man from the Void known as Cloud Strife. He was known as a standard ‘hero’ found across the Void universes, but I had my doubts his natural hero tendency would save him out here. Remember, stealth for now, I messaged them.

Like, Cha, Insipid messaged back.

Just lead the way, ‘Understander.’

I glanced at Jolyne with a frown. I had high hopes this mission would get her out of her defiant phase. But there was also a good chance she’d just keep being Jolyne, and I wasn’t so heartless as to overwrite her.

I led them through the many universes surrounding the TSAB labyrinth’s core, doing my best to follow the waves of ka and battle to find the actual center. It was likely to take some time, and if we hadn’t been working in the shadow of a much larger assault, we would have been spotted immediately.

As it was, my writing ensured they were completely occupied with Minna’s fleets – a combination of ships and high-power individuals, mostly Skaians.

Minna led the charge of the ships, with Feferi under her coordinating the efforts of her god-tier brethren. On the other side, there was mostly TSAB resistance with some Combine thrown in here and there, proving to be more than a match for the assault. Minna’s disadvantage was only heightened by the way the battlefield constantly changed – for deep within the TSAB labyrinth Nanoha was shuffling locations of universes to ruin the fleet’s coordination.

Luckily, Team P was there, ready to unleash their newest toy.

Five colorful robots filed out of Minna’s capital ship, the Conquest. Blue, white, purple, green, and pink in the shape of various animals, all able to move through the air of dimensions as easily as walking.

“Let’s get right to it!” Pinkie radioed the rest of her team. “FORM FINAL DAWN!”

The pink horse took center position. The four legs split into four pieces each, forming access points for the other four to combine. Pidge went first, tucking the front legs of her lion forward, using the back legs to integrate with one of the pink access points, forming the left arm. Her lion’s head roared, becoming a hand.

On the other side Nova’s raven affixed to the horse with its claws. It folded its wings over its head, forming thin, vaguely feathery fingers that sparkled with magic power. The great white whale of Jotaro split its tail to integrate as the right leg, the great flat head of the sea creature acting as the foot. Vriska moved in last, turning her spider upside down to affix her legs to the remaining access point, the spider body proper acting as the real foot.

The central horse began to change further. The head rounded itself out, taking a more human-like appearance – stern, powerful, and judging. The ears remained, looking more like those of a pony than a horse. The pink chest sprung to life with a brilliant core of energy that mixed all the colors together to form a brilliant magical white, indicating the synthesis of all five of their machines.

They struck a pose, lifting Final Dawn’s purple hand into the air, a spark of energy forming between the fingers.

Jotaro let out a laugh. “Yare yare daze… That was over the top.”

“Hey, combination mech transformations are cool!” Pidge retorted.

“We’ll skip it every other time,” Pinkie assured them.

“What are we waiting for?” Vriska blurted. “Let’s wreck their shit!”

“You said it!” Nova shouted, grinning.

“Final Dawn… blow up that TSAB cruiser!” Pinkie ordered.

They acted as one. Vriska laid her hand on her console, generating a larger version of the infinite-sided die in the hand of Nova. She twirled the die around a bit and threw it out into space. The TSAB cruiser saw the mech moving and fired – but Final Dawn had too much luck right now. What it lost, it regained with a glint of Light from its eye, stealing from the TSAB ship itself.

The attack activated at a scale a couple orders of magnitude larger than it normally would have, channeled through the mystical engineering found within the mech itself. A large sea-serpent made of macaroni and flaming cheese appeared in space and bit down on the TSAB ship, tearing it in half.

TSAB ships decided that Final Dawn was a huge threat, diverting fire from all the ships in the universe – and some from outside it – at the mech.

“Evasive maneuver subroutine, go!” Pidge shouted. “This won’t work for long!”

“I am glad we have inertial dampeners…” Nova commented, realizing that she was sitting in a hand that was changing direction sharply every few seconds.

“STAR PLATINUM!” Jotaro shouted.

The Stand resonated with the form of Final Dawn, appearing as a being just as large as the mecha. Star Platinum let out an ORA and punched a nearby Combine ship into nothingness.

“THE WORLD!” Everyone but Jotaro yelled.

Time froze – but all five of them remained active within the stopped time.

Nova fired off lasers at the handful of time-stop resistant foes with magic. “This is too easy.”

“Living Tribunal’s not here yet,” Pinkie said, giggling. “Pidge, I’ve got a hammer for you, grab it.”

Pidge’s arm reached behind Final Dawn’s back, pulling a giant space-age warhammer out of nowhere. Final Dawn jumped into the air, vanishing behind some debris from the TSAB ship – appearing in a completely different universe behind another capital ship.

The stopped time ended. “Hiya!” Pinkie said, winking. Final Dawn brought the hammer down on the ship, crushing its drive. The explosion sent ripples through spacetime, but the over-redundant reality anchors on Final Dawn kept it from feeling any of it.

“I’m never going to get used to our powers synthesizing like this,” Nova said. “I mean, seriously, Pinkie, how do all these words not drive you crazy!?”

“You don’t have to look at them y’know!” Pinkie said as they used a combination of Hermit Purple and luck-drain to destroy a Combine ship, knocking numerous other foes off their feet with the supernova.

“You’ve lived with the Awareness all your life! Even if it is diluted like this, I’m not just going to ignore it!”

“In other words, she’s too curious,” Vriska said.

“Hey, curiosity is a virtue!” Pidge said. “Awareness is one of the least understood things in existence, and when we’re together like this we get some idea of what it’s like.”

“So what you’re saying is you built this so you could know what Awareness was like?” Jotaro asked.

“…No…” Pidge said, launching a laser from her Lion that transformed a nearby ship into a mess of vines and leaves. “…Okay, yeah, fine, that was partially the reason. But hey, we’re a lot more powerful like this! Cutting through ships like they’re nothing!”

“We got an upgrade,” Pinkie said. “That doesn’t mean…”

“…We should get cocky,” Nova finished. Then she shook her head. “Geez, that intuition is weird.”

“Just wait until you get the Pinkie Sense!”

“Oh sh-”

Simultaneously, all five of them felt the Pinkie Sense. They had been lucky enough not to experience it in practice beyond the general ‘avoid incoming objects’ feeling. They had felt tails that didn’t exist twitch and hooves they didn’t have vibrate unusually combined with a flip-flopping stomach.

Now all of their bodies felt like they were twitching every which way while an influx of information they couldn’t understand entered their mind. It was almost like having a seizure with all the blinking, hiccuping, and hoof/wrist wringing.

“Quiznak!” Pidge swore. “That was…”

“Excellent!” Pinkie giggled. “It means we’re about to face some of their reinforcements!”

A TSAB dropship appeared, bays open – revealing dozens of giant mecha in the doors, some larger than Final Dawn.

“Of course, magical girl anime is closely related to mecha anime…” Vriska muttered. Then she facepalmed. “Holy fuck, Nova’s right, that’s weird.”

“These mecha aren’t Final Dawn though!” Pidge said. “We can take them!”

“One of them is your old mecha,” Jotaro pointed out. “Voltron.”

Pidge’s smile fell. “Oh…”

“Take care of them quickly and nicely,” Pinkie ordered. “Nova?”

“On it.” As the mecha rushed toward them, she picked out the multicolored form of Voltron, a humanoid mecha formed of five lions. There was presumably a Pidge on board, as well as versions of her long-lost team.

Nova borrowed a bit of Vriska’s luck-stealing to tip things in her favor. Then she sent a nullification spell at Voltron, disabling the machinery easily. The humanoid went limp and adrift.

“Good work!” Pinkie said. “Now, execute operation Frogger!”

Operation Frogger was both complicated and simple at the same time. They just had to jump from universe to universe in quick succession, effectively attacking from all sides. This was complicated due to different constants of spacetime, temporal distortion, and possible alien physics. Not to mention the possible interference of Nanoha or the Living Tribunal.

Final Dawn jumped through a portal to a world made of nothing but oranges. Pinkie somehow managed to grab some of these and start munching on them – depositing some in the various cabins of her friends as well. “These are delicious!”

“We know,” Jotaro said. Final Dawn twisted through another portal, looping back to the original universe and punching some Gundams with a mixture of Star Platinum and physical mecha punches. Final Dawn took a hit to the back from a much larger mech equipped with dozens of explosive weapons, but the damage was minimal.

Final Dawn turned around, opening a portal to the middle of a star, sending out a beam of nuclear fusion plasma into the explosion-loving mech. They closed the portal, dodging several smaller robots and shifting into another realm. A few mechs pursued into the world made of mobius strips and strange floating emoji. Nova grabbed them in her magic and drove them together for Pidge to tie up.

Jotaro just kicked them. “Hm. Maybe I should use Star Platinum’s legs…”

The army of little, lesser mechs were no match for them. It took only a handful of dimensional passes to reduce their number to nearly nothing. It was like cutting butter.

Pinkie groaned. “All right everyone, prepare for something completely and ridiculously OP.”

“Yare yare daze…”

A humanoid mecha apparently made of red skulls appeared, green fire billowing off its back.

It was larger than most galaxies.

“…Well, shit,” Vriska said, blinking. “Why haven’t they been using this in the war!?”

“Waiting for a rainy day,” Pinkie muttered, having to ‘cheat’ Final Dawn several million light years away just to avoid getting slapped by the mecha. “We need to defeat this thing quickly before it finds out how to use a horn drill or something.”

“I’ve got a list of its attacks from our Awareness!” Pidge said grinning. “It’s a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann a-”

“And the TSAB could have retrofitted it, so that’s not all that helpful,” Nova said as they dodged a beam of stellar fire. “We need to think here. It’s too big to damage with conventional arms…”

Pinkie giggled. “Then we just have to get clever! Jotaro, the Passion! Vriska, start stealing luck! I’ll get us inside.”

The Passion touched the souls piloting the Gurren Lagann, allowing Vriska to get a better connection to their internal luck. The opposing mech began to move with more sluggish movements, the green fire flickering in and out.

And then Final Dawn was inside the Gurren Lagann. Nova didn’t even need to be told what to do – if the luck manipulation was right, they would be near a vital component. She opened a portal into the interior of a star, effectively unleashing a supernova. The chain reaction cascaded down the limb and would have destroyed Final Dawn had Pinkie not shifted out of there. The Gurren Lagann lost a leg.

And then a fist the size of a globular cluster smashed into Final Dawn.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” they all yelled, freezing time. That was a hefty hit, but Final Dawn was made from materials that defied reality. They moved back from the fist. Vriska summoned her sword into its hands, suddenly the perfect size for it.

“Let’s get the Living Tribunal’s attention, hmm?” Pinkie asked. “TIME! SPACE! LIGHT! BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED… TRIO FRAYMOTIF… THE PERFECT DIVISION!”

The sword flashed with red, white, and orange pulses of energy. They brought it down just as the time stop ended. The sword ripped through spacetime in the perfect way, driving a division of energy through the air and into the center of the Gurren Lagann.

The mecha split in half. The universe should have collapsed as well, but the Living Tribunal stepped in.

“It seems as if you insist this is to be between us. Very well. Pinkie Pie, Nova Glimmer, Vriska Serket, Jotaro Kujo, Pidge Holt, you have been judged. You will fall by my hand.”A softly glowing ball of blue and orange energy appeared in his hand.

“The Shaping Mechanism…” Pinkie said, smirking.

“I still want to know how he condensed it that small,” Pidge muttered. “Even if he is almost a god.”

Vriska grinned. “Oh, it looks like he’s not going to let his luck be stolen! This should be good.”

“This is what we were made for!” Jotaro shouted. “This is Final Dawn’s purpose!”

“ATTACK!” Nova shouted – a gleeful giggle behind her words.

They were having fun.

Final Dawn raised the sword, endowing it with all their powers – Awareness, Space, Magic, Time, Intelligence, Nature, Stands, Blood, Control, and Light. The blade came down on the orb that was the shaping mechanism, blocked by a holy energy from the Living Tribunal.

“You’re going to have to try harder than that!” all five of them shouted in synch. The blade pushed further and further into the barrier, nearing the shaping mechanism.

Suddenly, they all felt something in their connected spirits click. A tremendous pair of brilliant golden wings sprang out of Final Dawn’s back, brimming with soft holy power.

(Flutterfree dropped the phone with a yelp, her eyes flashing deep purple.

“Did Eve answer this time?” Rina asked.

“I… No. I think she’s with Roxy still but…” Flutterfree shook her head. “I’m… I’m connected to something now…”)

The sword of Final Dawn pierced the barrier, driving right through the shaping mechanism. The energy was too much to handle. The great shaping mechanism of Skarn fell apart as its multiversal structure was driven into irreconcilable halves.

The Living Tribunal backed away from them – he knew he was in trouble. As they were now, in full unity, there was nothing he could do.

“YOU GOT THAT RIGHT!” The five of them shouted.

(“No… You… Don’t!” Flutterfree shouted, spreading her wings and activating Lolo.)

Lolo appeared from Final Dawn’s wings, wrapping the mecha in green wire. The Stand’s normally weak power was gone; it was now a strong rope of imprisonment. Lolo awoke even more inherent abilities within the wings that should not have been built, increasing Flutterfree’s control over Final Dawn. She made the mech go as limp as possible.

“Flutterfree, come on!” Pinkie shouted. “We need to do this!”

(“The Living Tribunal will capture you alive if he can, and I’m giving him that opportunity!”

“What are you talking about?” Valentine asked.

“QUIET! I need to focus!”)

“Your strong connection… will be your downfall. Depressingly ironic.” the Living Tribunal observed. He drew back the fist that scared higher societies, ready to disintegrate Final Dawn. The punch landed, the first attack that did any real damage to the mech, forming cracks. The five within could do nothing.

“Flutterfree!” Nova wailed. “Come on!”

(“We are on opposite sides of this fight. This is what you wanted.”)

Pinkie’s grimace was quickly replaced with a smile. “You know what, you’re right! Good for you Flutterfree, you’re doing great!”

Final Dawn was hit again.

(“Ah. Thanks Pinkie. I’ll be sure to visit you in prison, okay?”)

“Getting a little ahead of ourselves, are we?” Vriska muttered. “We’re not down yet!”

(“You can’t escape Lolo under your own power, you should feel that. The Living Tribunal was right, it was our strong connection that brought you down.”)

“Flutterfree, if you’re really connected with us… You should be able to see what I see,” Pinkie giggled. “Take a look at how things are working. The way the story flows… There’s something you’ve forgotten about.”

(Flutterfree’s eyes widened. “Oh, sassafras, Lolo.”)

“Lolo reveals what’s hidden!” Nova said, blinking. “And that doesn’t just include her powers!”

“We may be stuck…” Pinkie said.

“But the wings were designed to be for someone else!” Pidge declared.

(Renee looked up from the Tower card with a sigh. “All right… I suppose it is my turn, isn’t it?”)

“How long have you been watching?” Vriska asked.

(“Long enough,” Renee admitted. “I’m sorry Flutterfree, dear, but I want them back here.”)

(“…Renee, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry we ignored you. We shouldn’t have done that. We should have respected you.”)

(Renee smiled warmly. “Flutterfree… If by some miracle we’re both still around when this is over… I… Well I don’t know what I’ll do, but I won’t hold any of it against you.”)

(“…Okay.”)

(“Now, TEAM! This is Overhead Renee Jackson of Expeditions speaking! We need to take out the other side’s primary advantage!”)

The wings of Final Dawn took on a white appearance. Lolo dissipated – and Final Dawn dodged the next punch. They were heavily damaged, a few pieces of advanced circuitry hanging out in dangerous places, but they were in one piece.

(“Trap the Living Tribunal in a sector of destabilized spacetime,” Renee ordered, smiling despite herself. “We can combine the luck-stealing from Vriska to affect the space around the Tribunal. Then we hit him with everything we’ve got!”)

Nova and Pinkie combined Space and Time to lock the Living Tribunal in place. They were suddenly stronger than before. “And your unity becomes a strength again.”

Lolo appeared behind Final Dawn again.

(“Flutterfree…” Renee warned.)

(“I… I’m not here to hurt,” Flutterfree said. “I know I can’t stop you. And that you’re going to win. So… I want to be here. With all of you. Just once more.”)

Pinkie let out a deep, joyous laugh. If she could, she would have been crying. “Flutterfree, you are the best pony in the multiverse!” The wings flashed to a mixture of yellow and white energy.

(Flutterfree blushed. “So you all keep saying.”)

“Let’s get this guy!” Vriska blurted. “Just one more hit!”

(“All together now…” Renee began.)

Final Dawn raised the sword.

“THIS IS THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP!” all seven of them shouted at once. The sword went into the Living Tribunal, driving deeper powers into him. Laughter, Generosity, Kindness, Integrity, Justice, Perseverance, Curiosity…

The explosion erased the universe in an instant, but Final Dawn was able to escape.

So was the Living Tribunal, in a weakened state. Kneeling on the featureless white ground of the universe they found themselves in.

Final Dawn took out a capture device.

“Don’t. I want to go the way of the One Above All. If I am meant to fall, it means the new world will be better without me. Finish what you started.”

Final Dawn lowered the capture device. “Is that what you want?” It spoke with the voices of seven.

“You know it is.”

“You have served existence well,” Final Dawn said. “It has been an honor.”

“I go with no regrets. As you should, when your time comes.”

Final Dawn raised the sword. “Go in peace.”

The sword was driven through the Living Tribunal’s body. The golden behemoth of a man was driven in half – and his particles dissipated into golden dust, blowing away in an invisible wind.

The unity of Final Dawn faded. Renee and Flutterfree became distant once again.

“…We need to fall back and get repairs,” Pidge said.

“Hope that was enough for Twilence,” Pinkie added.

“That was awesome… and not,” Vriska said. “I’m…”

“None of us are sure what to feel,” Nova said.

“We can talk about it on the way back,” Jotaro suggested.

This sounded good to them. Final Dawn flew to safer universes.

~~~

Eve blinked. “…What?”

Flutterfree rubbed the back of her head. “Do you need me to summarize…?”

“I… No, it’s just, geez, wasn’t expecting this from you today…” She glanced behind herself at Roxy and Monika. “Which one of you had me obfuscated? She clearly needed to get ahold of me! I might have had a connection to the team!”

“You were talking about very important plans concerning Starcross,” Roxy said, folding her arms. “We couldn’t let them know about that. And you know it.”

Eve sighed. “Right, right, I’m sorry. Roxy, call Giorno, get him here as soon as possible. Monika, find Ava Jandice and make sure she doesn’t run or figure out we know. …I never suspected her…”

“I think that’s kind of the point,” Flutterfree said. “If anyone important suspected, someone Aware would have been tipped off.”

“By the Tower’s doors…” Eve muttered.

“Giorno’s coming,” Roxy said, putting her phone away.

“How long?”

“This long,” Giorno said, walking out of a nearby portal. “Ava Jandice? Really?”

Flutterfree nodded. “Apparently she’s been riling up Ardent to plan an attack on Equis Vitis. It wouldn’t be effective from a war standpoint…”

“Morale would be crushed,” Roxy pointed out. “Equis Vitis has almost always been peaceful, safe, and happy. If an army marched on it, faith would be shaken.”

“Faith will be shaken when we take Ava out,” Giorno said.

“Let’s go,” Eve said, accepting this as the cost.

Roxy pulled out her phone – calling the Justice Division to prepare for an impeachment trial.

Eve opened a portal with Seraphim to the Hub, taking a moment to look at Flutterfree. “I’m not mad, by the way. If I knew I couldn’t do anything I probably would have done the same.”

Flutterfree smiled. “Thanks.”

“I’ll try to set aside some time for us to talk about it later. But right now…”

Roxy smiled. “Monika’s got Ava’s coordinates.” She held up her phone to Eve. The alicorn lit her horn and performed a point-to-point teleport, dropping the four of them in Ava’s office in the Labor Division. Her Second, none other than Chancellor Fluttershy from Equis Concrete, jumped in surprise at the sudden appearance of the four of them.

Ava sighed. “So, I’ve been found out then?”

Chancellor Fluttershy glanced at Ava with wide eyes. “Found out? Ava, what did you do?”

Flutterfree activated her Rage in a lesser, more controllable form. “She has been feeding the militant side of Ardent with information to unleash an attack on Equis Vitis. I’ve stopped it. No attack will be happening.”

“Instead we finally get to get rid of you!” Roxy said, clapping. “I mean, I never thought you were a traitor, but you were kind of annoying.”

Eve looked at Ava. “I tried to be your friend, Ava. I tried to get to know you. But you never let me. Is this why?”

“Indirectly,” Ava admitted, somehow managing to look just as calm as usual. “I knew that, one day, there would come a time we made a wrong decision. One I couldn’t just let go. I had hoped we could vote for collapse, but I couldn’t take the risk of publicly declaring my support for it.”

“You’re supposed to be honest, Ava!” Eve blurted. “We’re not an obfuscating mess of policy!”

“You don’t know how to play the game,” Ava chided. “Even in our system, politics and appearance are everything. It may not be the crippling clusterbomb the USM had, but we are still a government. And all government depends on the perception of the people and the others with power.” She sat back in her chair. “Originally I was just going to live with the decision.”

“What changed your mind?” Giorno asked.

“The erasure of Earth Stand,” Ava said, a bitter expression surfacing through her carefully-maintained expression.

Eve’e expression softened. “Family?”

“Family I had tried very hard to keep far, far away from the dangers of the multiverse,” Ava said, folding her hands. “I had even arranged for them to be protected in a bunker. Except the bunker hadn’t been completed when the Gallifreyan time shift hit.”

“I’m sorry Ava, I di-”

“Stop trying to empathize,” Ava said. “You have no idea what it’s like to lose your family in a single moment.” She glanced at a clock on the wall. “Yet.”

Flutterfree’s pupils dilated. “Ava, what did you do!?”

Ava glared at them. “Did you really think I’d only have one plan? I didn’t get to where I was by putting all my eggs in one basket. There was a backup. In less than a minute the Twili will unleash one of our own weapons on Equis Vitis.”

Flutterfree trembled. “N-no…”

~~~

We’d already lost Cloud.

I was not surprised in the slightest, nor was I surprised it had happened off-screen, but it was still a reminder of how brutal existence could be.

But the larger TSAB army still didn’t know about us. The destruction Final Dawn had meted out to the TSAB labyrinth was still being repaired, and the once-insignificant fleet had turned into Minna’s deadly attacking force. They were too close to the labyrinth’s center for the TSAB’s comfort.

We were closer. Much closer. It wouldn’t be much longer before we were within the universe that led to the mysterious Tower Ring submerged in an endless ocean. All we had to do was sever the TSAB Gate’s connection to the ocean realm and the Ring would fall into the Sea of Infinite Possibility, ceasing to exist.

This was easier said than done. I didn’t know for certain, but I suspected the Gate doubled as a TSAB superweapon of some sort. We wouldn’t know for sure what we would face until we got there. I wasn’t willing to risk losing the flow of ka to try and retroactively define the Gate with my words. I allowed it to remain a mystery.

We’re close, I told them. Jolyne and Insipid nodded in response, staying quiet. Prepare for heavy resistance.

The very next portal I opened took us to the center – where we found almost no resistance. We stood on top of an octagon-shaped platform with a handful of computer terminals spread along the edges, each displaying holographic interfaces that could be used to alter the arrangement of the TSAB labyrinth, albeit not as finely-tuned as the shaping mechanism. The background was dominated by an endless sea of nebulous blue clouds.

There were supposed to be several dozen TSAB mages here scrambling the TSAB labyrinth. Instead, there was only one – Nanoha Takamachi herself, standing at the far side of the platform.

Behind her was the Gate. Through the Gate was the Tower Ring submerged in water.

A completed Tower Ring. A perfect donut of white metal the size of Neptune, glowing with soft blue and purple sparks. I could see energy building up within its center, no doubt preparing to connect to the Dark Tower and complete the goal of preservation.

I wasted no time – I lit my horn and tapped into the universal-level spells I had at my disposal. I aimed a destabilizer toward the Gate, planning to destroy the ocean universe on the other side in one fell swoop. It was a rash, on-the-spot decision. No doubt there were better plans, but it was the first one that popped into my head.

To my immense disappointment, the Gate revealed itself to be a selective Gate. It reflected the energy back. The dimensional ripples interfered with the Tower Ring’s translation – a complex procedure, when trying to translate to a location around the Dark Tower – but they had a much worse reaction with the universe we were in. Tears appeared in reality. Had the reflection been perfect, the universe would have fallen with all of us inside it.

As it was, the ripples and tears continued to shake the universe’s foundation, but everything held.

Nanoha pointed Raising Heart at us. “We cannot use our full power here, Twilence. The universe is falling apart at the seams. One wrong explosion and we all die.”

“The Gate won’t survive,” Jolyne said.

“And if you can’t translate your Ring, your universe will fall into the Sea,” I added. “If this universe is destroyed, you lose.”

“Then destroy it. With yourselves in it.” Nanoha narrowed her eyes. “You currently cannot leave this universe by any means other than the Gate.”

She called my bluff. And she was right. I wasn’t willing to destroy this universe with us in it – yet. If it came down to it…

I teleported behind Nanoha and drove a magic blade through her chest. She didn’t even flinch at the blood from the gaping wound. Her magic erupted from her body, carefully forming an explosion behind me so I would be tossed further from the Gate.

Jolyne saw this as an opportunity, shooting Stone Free out toward the Gate, believing she could pull herself through. The moment Stone Free’s threads touched the physical Gate, the TSAB device activated its automatic defense systems. A feedback loop of energy was run through Stone Free to Jolyne, burning her very soul. She fell back, dazed.

Nanoha and I continued to blast away at each other, both very careful not to aggravate the already disturbed universe. This demoted what should have been a battle worthy of shattering galaxies to something far more pedestrian and conceivable.

I guess you already got your over-the-top power level battle with Final Dawn, huh?

Eventually, Nanoha and my beams of energy met. We were capable of producing much more power, but we couldn’t let ourselves go too far or else everything would be destroyed. Should I dial up the energy to try and make Nanoha chicken out and run? Or should I cut mine and hope she couldn’t hit me?

Usually in battles, I’m always certain I’m the good guy, and can make decisions based on that. I can see the result a few steps ahead of time more often than not, and I can move around that.

Right then, I had nothing. I was fighting the White Devil, hero and face of the entire TSAB, someone I had called a friend on more than one occasion. And I was the Bearer of the Eye of Rhyme, the mare destined to understand what Awareness meant. In that respect, we were equals. Figures of great importance to this story we found ourselves in.

In the end, I didn’t have to decide. Insipid came flying up to the battle, hoof pulled back.

“Oh thank the T-”

She punched me across the face, throwing me to the side. The surprise made me shoot wild, allowing Nanoha to get a heavy hit on me. I fell to the platform, mane and coat smoking. “Wh – what!?”

“NANI!?” Jolyne shouted, seeing what had happened. “Insipid, what the fuck!?”

Insipid summoned a notebook identical to mine with her magic and let out a bitter laugh. “You know, I always thought we’d be remembered as heroes, y’know? Didn’t matter what happened in the end because we were going down in the history books.” She looked into the distance.

“Insipid, you weren’t meant to have that power!”

“Like, relax, I’m not asking the big questions! I just wanted to see! …Oh look at that.” Her false cheerful tone dropped like a stone. “Crushed inside a capture device. Insignificant. Glossed over. Not even named. Like nothing.”

Jolyne paled. I bit my lip. “Insipid, now’s not the ti-”

“We won’t be remembered at all,” Insipid declared. “Or, well, maybe you will. But the rest of us throwing our lives away? NOTHING! So, like, sorry, but no.” She set a pen to the notebook. “You’re going to lose, Twilence.”

“Frick,” I pulled out my notebook – but Nanoha shot at me, preventing me from writing anything complex down. Insipid was certainly an idiot, but with my powers, the Eye would supplement a lot of that idiocy, giving her the knowledge she needed. I could only hope there was a hole in her reasoning somewhere.

Jolyne rushed forward, activating both Stone Free and a special weapon I had given her just for this occasion. The Stand wrapped around Nanoha while the weapon fired numerous transreality blades into the White Devil, forcing more blood out of her.

Nanoha didn’t care. She continued attacking me, despite the injuries, which were rather severe at this point. Insipid shot Jolyne with a stray attack.

She should have been able to dodge. She didn’t.

The power of a Prophet.

I needed a very simple counter-story to slip by Insipid – one I could write while being on the defensive against Nanoha without ruining reality…

I saw that I couldn’t. I was trapped. I could not win here; against the two of them, as they were now, I would fall. Could I find a way to use that? Turn a defeat into a victory?

The Tower Ring was ready to translate again. I had to try it – I pulled out my notebook and wrote a single sentence, letting Nanoha hit me dead on. My right side compressed, pulverizing two of my legs and one of my wings, snapping my ribs in dozens of places. I fell to the ground, down.

“You wrote something!” Insipid shouted, appearing right in front of me. “Tell me what it was!”

I let out a bitter, painful laugh and gave her an honest answer. “Mite hacked into the Gate.”

“…Shit, I forgot about him.”

“Astalavista!” Mite crowed from his position in the Gate. He activated its weapons, firing at the Tower Ring. Nowhere near enough to destroy it, but enough to disrupt the complex translation.

Nanoha twitched. “HIGH POWER…”

“Nanoha what are you doing!?” Insipid blurted. “We ca-”

“Destruct!” Mite declared.

Nanoha stopped charging her last-ditch attack. She had hoped she’d be able to give the Tower Ring a boost of energy at the last minute, but she didn’t have enough time to try that now. The Gate was ready to explode.

With her and Insipid fixated on the cascade of destruction coming at them, I was free to take up my notebook.

Nanoha increased her grip on Raising Heart. In their connection, they had a deep, sinking feeling – they had been so close. Had Twilence and the others arrived but a minute later, everything would have worked out.

But that chance was gone. The Gate was going to explode, the Tower Ring would be lost, and they would be as well if they didn’t think of something.

There was a split second where master and device conversed. Disabling the dimensional lock they had on the world wouldn’t be fast enough to protect them from the shockwave – they’d have to use their magic to protect themselves while the lock was removed.

But there were other people here… Twilence, Jolyne, Insipid… They were still people, and important people at that. One of them had fought by Nanoha’s side in the end. That was worth rewarding.

She was going to devote her magic to protecting all of them, even if it would tax her magic to its limits. She raised shields around all four of them, hoping that Mite had his own way of surviving this encounter. The Gate exploded in a brilliant shower of impossible color, impacting the four shields. Nanoha strained, pulling as much energy out of Raising Heart as she could while sending the order to call off the dimensional lock.

A single second in, she faltered. She had to push extra magic into her spells just to keep the reality around them from shattering. This universe was dead, and she was the only thing keeping any of them alive.

She only had to do it for a few more seconds.

She bore with the destruction of everything around her – feeling her muscles strain, giving up their biological nutrients to fuel her magical power. Insipid willingly gave up some of her magic as well, seeing that this was too much.

The dimensional lock dropped. Raising Heart opened a portal, allowing them to escape to safety. In the last minute, as they fell through the portal. Nanoha lost control of Insipid’s barrier, the magic protection falling and exposing her to a microsecond of transdimensional energy.

The four of them fell to the ground. Stumbling, Nanoha walked across the field of grass to Insipid, checking her pulse. The mare was burned, scarred, and sections of her skin were gone – but she was breathing.

Nanoha teetered, feeling her consciousness slip from her. As she fell backward, she saw a ship appear in the air.

She hoped it was one of hers.

It all happened exactly as I wrote it. Insipid burned, Nanoha passed out, and a ship in the air.

It wasn’t one of theirs. It was one of ours. Some of Tzeentch’s Chaotic Space Marines. I briefly wondered if they’d encountered the Emperor fighting here…

I summoned two capture devices with my magic and imprisoned Nanoha and Insipid.

“Okay?” I heard Mite ask in my ear. I believe he was able to ride the shockwave to me given his microscopic figure and size.

“Yeah… I’m okay,” I said, looking at our ship. “We won.”

I closed my eyes, taking a moment to look at our victory. The TSAB labyrinth had fallen. Its central universe was no more, and the cascading reaction of the Gate’s destruction had destroyed not only the Tower Ring, but also several other universes that had been instrumental in managing the TSAB labyrinth. The TSAB’s great stand had failed.

Today was a hard fought victory for us. The TSAB had been crippled and the largest threat to the collapse had been destroyed. Nanoha herself had been captured.

The collapse now had the upper hand.

~~~

Rev, Valentine, and Rina returned to the church – they didn’t see any reason to hang around Flutterfree while she went to confront Ava with Eve. Midna had stayed on Ardent to keep watch and look for survivors of New Termina.

“Ever get that feeling like you didn’t do anything?” Rina asked.

Rev smiled. “Oftentimes. I choose not to let it bother me. For instance, today, I was out and about, and got to see an old friend at her strongest. I think it was a good day, considering.”

Valentine had D4C scratch his chin for him. “We witnessed a plot fall apart. Justice has prevailed once again.”

“Even if we had nothing to do with it, yeah yeah,” Rina muttered shaking her head. “I still – hold up.” She cocked her head. “Whaaat?”

The church was full despite there not being a service at the time. Aslan was among the crowd, talking to them with a soothing voice.

Rev noticed most of the crowd were other Reverends, but she recognized several people from her congregation, those she had trusted with the knowledge that the church was a reality bunker.

“Aslan, what’s going on?” she asked, unable to hide her concern.

“I received a vision of divine inspiration,” Aslan said, looking up at the ceiling. “It was time to call all I could to this place.”

“Wh- really!?” Rina blurted. “It’s not going to be long before the secret gets out now! The people will want to smash the fucking door down!”

Rev shot Rina a please not in front of him look. Rina looked at the ground, ashamed.

Aslan didn’t seem bothered by her language. “Let them come.”

“With all due respect,” Rev said, sure to keep her head bowed. “Rina is right, we’ve been keeping the church’s bunker defenses a secret for a reason. The rest of the population will know now, and it will no longer be an effective bunker.”

“They do not know yet,” Aslan said.

“They will eventually,” Valentine pointed out.

“Then we must have faith in the outcome. This is what the vision showed.”

“Unchecked devotion to visions is exploitable,” Rev pointed out.

“Sister Glimmer, you are an excellent pastor and a great mind. But you have always struggled with the nature of giving all our cares unto God. It is not by our power that we take action, but by His. We must trust Him.”

Rev’s inkling to argue with Aslan vanished in an instant. He’s right, there. “My apologies.”

“That’s it!?” Rina blurted. “Seriously, you’re just going to let him do it!?”

“Rina, he’s right.”

“Oh just wait until Flutterfree gets back, I’ll bet she uses the Rage on him and we get quite the stunning revelation!”

Valentine’s body went rigid and his eyes widened. “Something’s wrong with the dimensional fabric.”

Aslan looked to him. “What is it?”

“I do not know… But it’s dangerous.”

Rina lit her horn. “I feel it too… Something’s tearing at reality… Something big…”

They started to hear sirens in the distance. The sirens they had all hoped never to hear – the sirens of an attack.

Rev knew what to do – she activated the church’s locks, sealing everyone within. Rev tapped into an exterior camera so she could see what was going on outside with her magic.

She had expected to see ships in the sky, or soldiers marching across the ground. What she hadn’t expected to see was a tremendous darkness erupting from the earth in the distance.

She paled. “Rina… See that?”

“I see it!” Rina said, flaring her wings and tapping into the church’s magical defense, augmenting them with her own power. “This is gonna hurt!”

The crust of Equis Vitis cracked like an eggshell as the darkness erupted from deep within the world’s core. Mountains crumbled, trees were devoured by the earth, and rivers drained into the forming crevasses. The Everfree Forest was the closest thing Rev could see, and the darkness rushed through it in less than a second.

There was no Tree of Harmony to protect the world. The reality anchors tried to hold the world together, but it was revealed to be pointless – the darkness was composed of the very magic of Equis Vitis itself, meaning this destruction was completely natural from a universal perspective.

The darkness rippled through Ponyville. The foundations of skyscrapers were ripped out from under them, forcing the tremendous structures to fall sideways. They could hear the screams of those in the high-rise buildings.

There were no screams from the people on the ground. The darkness came and destroyed them in an instant. Few were fast enough to realize it was happening, and even fewer had access to easy dimensional technology to get away. A handful of places were protected much like Rev’s church; a few spheres of blinding white energy shone as beacons of survival as the darkness ripped through the world.

Already, Rev had seen one of the spheres falter and explode. Bunkers were designed to survive the collapse of universes and deal with dimensional effects, not some evil dark magic that actually wanted to kill them. Still, some were able to hold – though clearly none of them would be able to last forever.

Rina winced as the darkness hit their shield, using her power to keep it up. “I’m not going to be able to do this… Hey! I don’t suppose any of you know how to cast reinforcement magic corrupted rather heavily by the darkness of insanity?”

There wasn’t anyone who could do that.

“Thought not… We need to get out of here!”

Valentine pulled a flag out of his suit and gave it to D4C. “Dojyaaan! Another universe is but a slide away.”

“Don’t have enough time for everyone!” Rina said.

Rev turned to Valentine. “Tell me where D4C is – I’m going to give it a blessing of power.”

Valentine pointed. Rev sent up a little prayer – not for the blessing, but just for everyone’s safety – and tapped into her rarely-used Divine potential. She sent a burst of white energy into D4C. Valentine was the only one who got to watch his Stand grow in size. He extended a hand, touching the fabric of reality. “I feel it stronger now…”

“HURRY UP!” Rina shouted. “I think it knows we’re trying something!”

Valentine nodded. Instead of his usual method of travel that involved laying objects over people, he knew he could bend reality in a more direct manner now. He reached beyond the walls of the church and pulled, forcing everything within the church’s bubble of protection to be condensed to a single point and funneled to a new universe.

This happened to be Earth Vitis, in the wasteland that had once been their version of Canterlot before the war with Skarn. There were a few settlements around, but nobody had fully rebuilt the city in the exact location it had been before. The church came to a rest in a new world.

Rina collapsed, running out of energy. “Whew…”

Rev pulled out a phone and checked the news feeds – something several other people started doing at the same time. They all wanted to know what was happening on Equis Vitis.

At roughly the same time, they all found a live feed from Equis Vitis’ moon. The entirety of the planet had been covered in the darkness, and parts of it were cracked so much that inner magma could be seen. The part of the planet that had been in the darkness the longest was beginning to disintegrate into what looked like dust.

Breaking News: Source of Runaway Weapon Discovered. The Twili, neighboring universe to Ardent…

Rev dropped her phone. Valentine spat out a curse. “We were there!”

“That’s it,” Rina said, lighting her horn. “I’m done.” She glanced at Aslan. And you got to be right, how’s that feel?

“Rina, don-” Rev began, but Rina didn’t let her start her speech. She didn’t need to be calmed down, now.

She teleported to one of Earth Vitis’ military installations. They were panicking, wondering if they should prepare for an assault or counterattack. Command wasn’t giving them any information.

Rina was going to act before command could even do anything. She found one of the military ships and teleported right into its engine room. So what if she set off a few security alarms? Enough of them were already going off.

There were a few soldiers there, though. She teleported them all away. Some of them were unicorns that could try to teleport back, so she set up a trap spell for them.

The next thing she did was sever the engine from its position in the ship. Without any of the regulatory devices in place, it soon became unstable, ready to explode.

She teleported away just as a unicorn teleported back – getting caught in a net of purple energy. Rina appeared not on Ardent, but the Twilight Realm. She didn’t bother to look around – the castles, the Twili themselves, none of it mattered to her right now.

She focused on the engine core. Normally such an explosion would only take out a small building, maybe destroy an entire flagship, nothing too devastating. But it was an explosion based in multidimensional physics. Which meant she could exploit it. Exploit it somewhat easily. She tapped into her knowledge of time unchanging, latching the bomb to the temporal line of the Twilight Realm.

Then she translated away.

She didn’t need to stick around to know it completely destroyed the already somewhat-unstable Twilight Realm. Perhaps the universe coordinates still existed, perhaps they didn’t – all that mattered was that they would never use their darkness ever again.

She learned later that she was one of several different powerful individuals who had gone to the Twilight Realm instantly and tried to destroy it. The Twili never stood a chance.

~~~

Eve looked at the image of Equis Vitis on her phone. It was now little more than dust in the wind. “Ava. Is this time locked?”

“What do you think?”

Eve looked up at Ava with a blank expression. She lit her horn, casting a simple spell. Ava fell to the ground, clutching her head and screaming.

Seeing Flutterfree’s expression, Eve spoke up. “Feedback spell. Her mind can’t think of anything without its electrical signals rising to the point of extreme pain. Roxy, Giorno, take her away. It’ll dissipate after five minutes.”

“Surprised you didn’t do worse,” Giorno commented, picking the writhing Ava up.

“She’ll be executed,” Eve said, monotone. “But we’ll do it through Justice. We aren’t barbarians.” She activated Seraphim. “I’ll be right back.”

Flutterfree put a hoof on Eve. “…Don’t do it.”

Eve looked back at Flutterfree, expression lifeless. “Do what?”

“Don’t kill them all. The Twili have innocents there.”

“It’s what they deserve.”

“Eve, we do not return violence with equal violence! We only return what we have to!” Flutterfree wailed.

Eve couldn’t keep it up anymore. She dropped Seraphim, pulled Flutterfree into a hug, and wept. Images of everything beautiful about Equis Vitis flashed through her mind. Her childhood home. Ponyville. The crystal castle. The crystal grove of the Everfree Forest. The beautiful colors of rainbow falls. The spires of Canterlot, both in the old days and the new. The great dragon mountains… the griffon lands… the beauty of Seaquestria… all the pegasus cloud cities… Sugarcube Corner…

Pinkie’s face flashed across Eve’s vision. But Pinkie was fine – Eve knew that. But everyone else…

All thoughts pushed to the side, Eve pulled out her phone and dialed a number she had on speed dial.

Flutterfree looked over Eve’s shoulder – seeing the name Spike. A single ring passed, and Eve’s heart shot through her throat. Please please please plea-

“H-hello?” Spike answered, voice wavering.

“Oh thank… Spike! Where are you?”

“Uh, the protected section of Canterlot Castle,” Spike said. “Luna teleported us to Earth Vitis as soon as she realized what was happening. It’s kinda funny, the entire castle’s sideways! Heh…”

“You and Luna? Good. …What about the other princesses? Paradigm?”

“…I don’t see any of them,” Spike admitted. “Hey, Luna, have you seen the other princesses?”

“No, I have not,” Luna’s booming voice could be heard. “Who is that on the line?”

“Evening!” Spike called.

“Thank the Tower!” Luna grabbed the phone and levitated it to her ear. “You have no idea…”

“I think I have some,” Eve said, wiping her eyes. “…None of the others?”

“None that I know of. You’re the only other Princess I know made it.”

“I’ll try calling… It’s good to know you’re okay. Watch out for Spike.”

“I will.”

Eve hung up and called Cadence. It rang once. Twice. Three times.

Flutterfree put a hoof to her mouth when it went to voicemail. “Hi, this is Princess Mi Amore Cadenza’s personal number, leave a message!”

“Try the official number,” Flutterfree suggested.

Eve did. No response.

Then she called her brother. Three rings passed, and there wasn’t an answer.

“No…” Eve called her parents at every number she could think of. No responses.

Eve’s mind started going down a list in her mind. I know some people weren’t there… Flutterfree is with me, the others are on the other side, except…

She called Applejack.

It rang once.

Please not you too…

Ring.

“Applejack!” Eve shouted at the phone. “PICK UP!”

Ri- “…Eve?”

Eve let out a sigh of relief. “I… I… Where are you?”

“At the Hub. Sellin’ apples. Until about five minutes ago.”

Eve detected hostility. “Applejack…?”

“While it’s mighty nice of you to check in on me, Ah’ve got to go check on my family. So far, Ah’ve only gotten Corea to answer her phone.”

Applejack hung up. The deep, disgusted feeling was back in Eve’s stomach.

Home was gone.

She wept. There was no other appropriate response.

~~~

Corona walked into Renee’s room, tear stains obvious on her face. Renee could hear the sounds of Nova screaming outside.

Corona closed the door. For once in her life she looked like she had no idea what to do.

“Do you know what happened, yet?” Renee asked.

“…Yeah,” Corona said, sitting down on Renee’s bed to give herself a break. “I know Daniel was offworld. He was seen on the news.”

“I’d know if he was there,” Renee said matter-of-factly. “I want to know what happened.”

“Our Source… Ava, I guess we can say now – she went and planned the destruction of Equis Vitis separate from anyone else’s knowledge.”

“Because she knew we wouldn’t approve.”

“Y-yeah. I’ve sent a public message to Eve denouncing Ava’s actions and telling them to do whatever they want with her.” Corona swallowed hard. “She took advantage of the Twili and Ardent’s hatred. Gave them just enough information to destroy one planet.”

“The most important planet,” Renee said, looking into the distance. “This still counts as a victory for you, you know.”

“It doesn’t feel like it,” Corona said. “There wasn’t any reason to do this.”

“The other side’s morale is lowered.”

“Just the Merodi. Just the Merodi…” Corona shook her head. “Why are people making stupid decisions!?”

“Dear, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but what little tendency we have to think things through flies out the window when under stress. Everyone we’ve ever known has been under extended stress for… has it been months?”

“In some places.”

“Two months, then. People are getting desperate. Both sides may have excellent leaders, but even they will break. Snap. Make decisions that don’t make sense.” She turned to look Corona in the eyes. “Insipid betrayed you because she was angry and realized the world isn’t what she thought it was. Ava betrayed both the other side and you because she felt like she had to exact revenge. I’m sure there are some people who retaliated without thinking, destroying the Twili.”

“You’d be right.”

“It’s only going to get worse, Corona. As more and more people die… everyone’s going to stop wanting to fight with honor and mercy. Anger builds.”

“…Let’s hope Blumiere gets done soon, then.”

“Yes…” Renee said, absent-mindedly. She glanced at the Tower card on the table, as if trying to parse a meaning from it. She caught a short rumble from Nova’s screaming. “She wants me to ‘fix’ her.”

“Are you going to do it?” Corona asked.

“Not now. …I might later. I did Jotaro, and it wouldn’t be fair if I shunned her.”

“Was it the right decision, though?”

Renee looked at her hooves. “There’s a question of ethics. You have the cure for grief. Do you use it? Does it lessen what makes us people? Would you do it?”

“…Before today, I would have said no. But my family… Sunburst…” She clenched her fists so tight they started smoking. “I was already on the verge of breaking…”

“I’m not going to do it for you, even if you order me. Not yet,” Renee said. “Wait. It’ll be better for you to work it out on your own.”

“…How can we know that?”

“We can’t. It’s a gut feeling.”

Corona pulled her knees to her chest and shuddered. “…No one has the right to choose. I thought that was an awful realization. Now it’s becoming pretty damn clear that neither careful thought nor emotional instinct are really helpful in the end. We’re too flawed.”

Renee lowered her head and closed her eyes, having nothing to say to that.

The room fell completely silent.

~~~

Blumiere held his hands over the Light and Dark Prognostici, a scowl on his face.

“What is it, love?” Timpani asked, walking up to him.

“…I haven’t been telling you everything,” Blumiere said. “I’m sorry.”

“What is it?” she asked, not a hint of bitterness in her voice.

“I thought I was going insane,” Blumiere admitted. “I thought the Prognostici were getting to me, making me see things that weren’t there. But I’ve become convinced he’s real.”

“He?”

Blumiere looked to his left at a section of empty space that, to him, wasn’t empty at all, but contained a short person in a jester’s outfit and mask. “I see Dimentio.”

“Isn’t this cute! Ahahahahah!” Dimentio said, leaning back in midair. “He relies on his wife even now! The romance is like two salmon on a beach!”

“What’s he told you?” Timpani asked.

“That the two books used to be one,” Blumiere said. “If I combine them, the secret to completing the Tower Ring in time will be revealed.”

“You can combine them?”

Blumiere nodded. “He told me how.”

Dimentio cackled. “It’s all a matter of reverting the pages and folding them into one! The true Prognosticus will reveal itself! And you shall have the key to the end!”

“I don’t trust him, of course,” Blumiere said.

“…Didn’t he want a perfect world before?” Timpani asked.

“I’m not sure if he wants anything. I think he’s just doing things because he can.”

Dimentio shrugged.

Blumiere held the two books up. “Should I do it, Timpani? There’s a risk. There’s a risk I’m being fooled. But if he’s right, I’ll be able to complete the Tower Ring without resorting to the large construction all the others have. They won’t be able to find it easily.”

“Are they Aware of this conversation?”

“No. Twilence has guarded this room closer than all the others.” He frowned. “Though my spells tell me we are being watched…”

“A paradox!” Dimentio blurted. “The Tower can see everything, even the places hidden from those who see with the Tower! What a complex feat of engineering, a truly inconceivable mechanism! …Inconceivable for most, that is…” He gestured at the Prognostici.

Timpani looked at the books. “I think you should try. At this point… everything terrible that could happen, already has.”

Blumiere nodded slowly. He used his dark power to open the books to their center pages. He moved them close together and began to fold their pages over one another, one at a time, until they formed a close-knit lock.

Then he tried to pull them apart from the spines. Instead of pulling apart, they smashed together, forming a single gray book lined with crystals, the imprint of a spirograph on the front.

Blumiere held the true Prognosticus to the light. Above, the framework of a Tower Ring slowly turned.

Dimentio cackled. “And now I’ll leave you to that! Ciao!” He vanished, like nothing more than an illusion.

Blumiere knew Dimentio was dead. Had been dead for a long, long time. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that the thing talking to him was Dimentio, and not just a corruption from the Prognosticus.

It concerned him deeply. He grabbed his wife and held her close as he flipped through the pages of the real Prognosticus…

126 - Prognosticus

Applejack looked at the entire surviving Apple Family of Equis Vitis.

It was just her, Corea, and Prism.

Prism had the decency to hang around in the doorway, not at the table. She had never been particularly close to the rest of the Apple Family, and knew it wasn’t her place to say anything here. But she listened.

Corea looked around with a deep grimace. “You know… When I heard you were coming, part of me thought Dad would be here too.”

“Corea…”

“I knew. I heard. I got the list.” Corea looked for a window to look out of, but didn’t find one in the back room of Iroh’s tea shop. Azula had just let them in, no questions asked. “But there’s always that part, you know? That tells you there was a mistake.”

“Every day.”

“I can’t decide which one to think about,” Corea said. “I see aunt Applebloom a lot… Dad… Jona…” She wiped her eyes. “I can’t fix on any of them. I feel like I’m betraying them.”

“Corea, they wouldn’t expect you to.. to…” Applejack couldn’t finish the thought.

“I know.” She shook her head. “Some cruel trick, huh? Sure, we’re important enough to survive. But for only us to survive? Isn’t that like a punishment?”

“Ah guess,” Applejack said. “But Ah don’t think it’s punishment for us.”

“Eve and Corona?”

“Maybe,” Applejack said, glancing at Prism. Her expression was heavily conflicted, but she said nothing.

Corea tapped her hooves on the table, unsure. “What do we do?”

“Live,” Applejack said.

“Besides that,” Corea said.

“That’s all we can do.”

“I’m not talking about for ourselves,” Corea muttered. “Funeral? Monument? Speech?”

“Ah…” Applejack closed her eyes and took in a long, hard breath. “Ah don’t think Ah could do that right now. Ah think the war needs to end first.”

“How long is the war going to last?” Corea asked. “I’ve been to worlds that have experienced years.”

“Ah forgot you were fightin’ out there,” Applejack admitted. “Ah…” She shook her head. “Give me some time, okay sugarcube?”

Corea forced a smile, but her moist eyes told a different story. “Okay.”

Applejack saw right through the lie. She broke down, falling onto the table, letting her tears flow.

“M-mom!” Corea said, scrambling over to her. “I’m sorry, I should b-”

“Should should should!” Applejack spat through her breakdown. “Always with the should! Are we asking too much of ourselves and everyone around us!? Are we!?”

“Mom, I don’t know wha-”

“We’re tryin’ to fight a war without killing each other! Do you think that’s even possible? No, it’s not! Why don’t we just get the pleasantries over with and get to the true fight! It’ll be over quicker! Then maybe we can figure out what the hell we’re gonna do with our lives!”

“…Just keep living?”

Applejack let out a bitter laugh. “My own words… Sound so foolish…”

“You’re one of the wisest mares I know.”

“Ah’m your mother. Of course you’d think that.”

Corea grabbed her mother by the shoulders. “I mean it. And if you won’t believe that, at least believe this. You’ve stayed true to yourself, no matter what. You are Honesty. You are consistent. You are my mother. And you always will be.”

“Ah’m gonna have to change, sweetheart. There’s no family farm to go back to.”

“…I recall that we had a version of you on the farm. Golden. There’ll be another family to take you in, if you’ll let them have you.”

“Ah’d just be replacin’ them!”

“You’ve lived in the multiverse long enough to know better than that!” Corea blurted. “…Sorry, that was too harsh.”

“You’re right though,” Applejack admitted. “Ah have lived here long enough. And Ah’ll live here a lot longer, collapse forbiddin’.” She looked into the distance. “It’s like Pinkie used to say. Ah know the clouds’ll clear eventually and Ah’ll move on. But it doesn’t feel like it.”

“Don’t ignore that feeling,” Prism said, speaking up for the first time. “That feeling? It’s horrible now, but it will turn into something else. It will allow you to remember those you’ve lost with a smile. Don’t push it away. You want to remember them always.”

Applejack looked at her daughter-in-law. “…Ah really should have spent more time gettin’ to know you.”

Prism adjusted her glasses. “We were both busy in an existence too large for us.”

“Excuse.”

“Yeah.”

Applejack pulled her into a hug. “Don’t you go anywhere, sugarcube.”

“…I’m not.”

~~~

Eve, Flutterfree, and O’Neill walked into the meeting. Nanoha’s absence in the big chair was very conspicuous. A lot of people who had been there in the earlier meetings weren’t anymore. Most of the Class 3s who’d shown up the first time were gone. Many leaders from the Class 2 societies were gone – killed, captured, it didn’t really matter. The TSAB was in a shambles, Starbeat and Lightning were there without any real nation to control, the Kromagg and Paratimers looked like they were ready to keel over and die…

Only the Merodi and Combine had some semblance of strength. And everyone hated the Combine, while the Merodi looked like their hope had been drained from them.

The Combine who had taken up the leadership position for the meeting was a fractal-based being contained on a two-dimensional screen. Eve could sense it surge in power, preparing to start the meeting and take control of it.

Eve wasn’t going to have that. She clicked her ears on and slammed her hoof into the podium in front of her, grabbing everyone’s attention. “We’ve suffered a great loss!” She shouted. “For some of us, this loss is a personal one that attacks our resolve. For others, it is a loss of hope, of any chance for success. One of our greatest leaders has been captured, and our strongest chance at winning this war has been stopped. It looks like we’re falling apart at the seams and won’t be able to hold ourselves together for much longer.

“But! We have not lost yet! We may have no primary Tower Ring Construction Site anymore, but we still have our people. Our armies. And each other. So long as we have those, even if there is friction between us, we are strong.

“It can be said that the other side has the same thing. They’re together just like we are. This also means they’re struggling just like we are. Their half of the Collection fell as well, the Starcross Society is nearing a point of complete societal failure with most of their leadership gone, and the Void has always been limited in their application.

“We still have the advantage. The Combine is currently the highest society in the multiverse save the Flowers That Be,” she nodded to the Combine fractal with respect, making sure to give them something out of this. “Despite our heavy loss at the TSAB labyrinth, we still have a tactical advantage.

“And we also have a Narrative one as well. Starbeat?”

Starbeat cleared her throat. “We suffered a heavy loss. However, we didn’t lose the war. We’re still very much in it. So it’s time for a turning of the tables. We are at our lowest point. We will rise out of this crevasse and deal a retaliatory strike like nothing ever imagined. Our military experts are working on a plan as we speak – a few nudges to Collapse the Starcross Society and a mission to end Empress Twilight’s control of the Void.”

“What about their base of operations? The Hotel?” a TSAB mage – Vita – asked. “We know they’re organizing most of the effort out of there, not the Void or Starcross!”

“We don’t know where it is, yet,” Eve admitted. “But we will. And when we do, we will take it out.” She narrowed her eyes. “They’ve dealt a crippling blow to us. It is time for us to deal a crippling blow to them.”

The Combine fractal spoke up in a synthetic voice. “Will we be rescinding the use of capture devices?”

“No need,” Eve said. “We still ar-”

“You lost an entire world to them!”

Eve twitched. “That was an agent acting alone, and we’ve destroyed entire worlds with dimensional crossfire before! They haven’t stopped the capturing, so we won’t either!”

“What if it would give us more of an advantage?”

“Convince the military leaders that’s the case and we’ll consider it. But I believe most of us in here are vehemently against it.”

Then she saw it – the faces of the crowd. Their minds agreed with her, in theory. But their hearts were hurting so much. They wanted to drop the restriction and start ‘killing the bastards’.

They could restrain themselves – like she was – for now. But how much longer could they do that?

This war needs to end soon or no one will come back from it.

She didn’t show this to the meeting. “Now, if we’re done discussing that question for the umpteenth time, let’s get into some specifics. General Zanzibar?”

A Paratimer stood up and gave a salute to everyone. “The front on the Starcross Society has a glaring weakness…”

~~~

Corona had set up something highly controversial after the loss of Equis Vitis.

It was a little computer console that people could insert messages into. The messages were to be sent to Merodi Universalis in a few hours, a small timer on the console telling people how much time they had. Already dozens of people had written messages, recorded videos, and even started some digital memorials for those lost on the other side.

Phage Industries took heavy objection to this – why honor those who are the enemy? Corona told them to shut the hell up. For the most part, they did. After all, there were only a few hours left, and then the little monument to the other side would be forgotten, lost in the wind when people returned to the righteous goals of the war itself.

“Can’t afford to sympathize with the enemy,” Corona muttered, quoting Phage. “Guess if you never had morals in the first place you wouldn’t have to be careful not to lose them…”

Lady Rarity looked to her. “You’ve taken a big risk.”

“People like Phage are the reason home is gone,” Corona spat. “So forgive me if I don’t particularly care what him and his kind think about what I’m doing.”

“Oh, I agree it’s rather satisfying to see you tell them to shove it. What I’m saying is you’ll have to watch them. If anyone challenges your position and succeeds the war will take a very different turn.”

“People are getting desperate,” Corona admitted. “How much local time do you think we have before the anger completely takes control?”

“With the time displacement… weeks? Maybe if we make extra efforts, a month?”

Corona put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Local time is so… GAH.” She kicked a random crate, knocking it over and spilling out a shipment of computer chips. With a snap of her fingers she put the chips back in the box.

Lady Rarity could see steam rising out of Corona’s ears. “…Dear…”

“I can’t break,” Corona told herself, staring at her shaking hands. “If I break, everything falls. Everything.”

“I would say you’re over-valuing your importance, but you’re not most people,” Sugarcoat said, walking up.

“…What?” Corona said, blinking.

“You are the knot that ties this effort together. If you break, everyone else is going to as well.” Sugarcoat adjusted her dress. “Don’t break.”

“I’m only human, Sugarcoat.”

“Not really.”

Corona facepalmed. “I’m just a person. No person has an endless supply.”

“It’s amazing what you can do when you have no choice,” Sugarcoat deadpanned.

Corona laughed bitterly. “I’ve already been dipping into that! Do you really think I’d’ve made it this far if I had a real choice? If there was a-” She shook her head. “Sorry, sorry, I’m blowing up.”

“You need to blow up to get some of it out.”

“What I want is to give Ava a piece of my mind,” Corona muttered.

“She’s been executed,” I said, walking past them. “As of about three minutes ago.”

“You need to stop doing that,” Sugarcoat said.

I blinked. “People want to know.”

“And then they resent you. Why do you think Nova has been giving you death glares? You’re the one who told her Sunburst was dead.”

I gave this a second’s thought. “I do not mind being the lightning rod of hate if it helps her work through it. But I wasn’t going to keep it hidden. She really wanted to know, Sugarcoat.”

“I thought you were supposed to be the smart one? You know, seeing when something’s about to backfire?”

“…I said I was willing to be the lightning rod of hate. That means including the fallout from the backfire.” I smiled awkwardly. “I can suffer for the sake of others. I’ve been through more than most of them. It’s fine.”

Sugarcoat blinked, speechless for once.

The conversation couldn’t continue anyway, because the primary team walked in, heads down. Pidge, Jotaro, and Vriska were sluggish, but looked decidedly better than Pinkie and Nova. The unicorn’s face was strained with tears, and when she spoke her voice was quiet and hoarse from all the screaming. Pinkie’s mane was flat. Since she had no eyes, it was the best indication they had of what was going on in that head of hers.

“…The entire Pie family,” I told the group I was with. “Limestone was the only one offworld at the time, and she’d already been captured in the war. All the others…”

“Hey, you talking about my family?” Pinkie said, appearing out of nowhere with a very fake smile. “Cause, yeah, they’re gone. Alllllll of them are gone! Of course, I knew they probably wouldn’t make it when we did the Collapse, but it’s different y’know?” She grabbed Corona’s face. “No matter how much you prepare yourself, nothing compares. Nothing. You’re the strongest person in existence right now, but even you aren’t going to be able to cope with your victory.”

Corona paled. “…Okaaaaay…”

“Pinkie, she doesn’t need to be scared,” I said. “You need help.”

“What, should I go to Renee and get this ‘fixed’?”

“Normally I’d say no, but we are in the middle of a war.” I smiled sadly.

“What? No! I’m not doing that!” Pinkie bounced back. “I’m going to remember them! Just you watch me, I’ll be able to think back and smile in… in a few days! That’s right! Days!”

Nova twitched. “How can you say that?!”

“You’re the one who wants to have Renee fix you,” Sugarcoat deadpanned.

Nova glared at her. “Are you trying to poke the sleeping bear? Are you!?”

“CUT IT OUT!” Vriska shouted. “We’re all angry and depressed, but we’re a team. Stop the fucking fighting! That’s my thing!”

The fact that Vriska of all people was calling them out made everyone more than a little ashamed.

In the ensuing silence, everyone noticed Renee walking up to the console. She placed her hoof on top of it and inserted a small device that had the same function as a flash drive. She uploaded it into the message, tears dropping down her face.

She turned around, looking right at the large group. “It’s a pair of messages,” she explained. “One for Daniel, which… was the hardest message I’ve ever recorded.” She adjusted her glasses. “The other is for Allure. There’s also a… a little obituary I wrote. For our parents.” She took off her glasses and wiped the tears from her eye. “Nova, Pinkie, I know it’s painful. It’s very painful. I’ll be willing to help you if we need to. But it would be a disservice to the people you are remembering in your pain. If we have no choice, I will cure your minds. But I won’t unless I have too.”

“It’s going to take too long for them to recover,” Sugarcoat pointed out.

An Aradia appeared, a sad smile on her face. “…I can put them in temporal therapy.”

“What?” Corona asked.

“It’s this thing I’ve been starting where I get people who need time into a universe with a vastly accelerated time constant. I’ve been careful not to use it for military applications – because that’s just asking for trouble with ka – but I think it’ll work great for them.”

Nova looked at Aradia. “…A vacation?”

“Basically. You’ll be back in an hour, or something like it. You five should go together – we need you at your best.”

Pinkie sighed. “…Okay. That… That actually sounds good. Twilence, let the other side know about this as well.”

I nodded. “Done.”

“And let’s not go broadcasting this,” Lady Rarity added. “Phage will want to take advantage of it. On the other side, the Combine. Aradia, can your selves put aside their differences to organize this?”

Aradia nodded. “I think so. We may disagree on the ends, but we can agree that people need it. I’ll be back in a jiffy – but first, you five.”

She took Pinkie’s team away for time-displaced therapy.

Corona folded her hands together. “I wonder if I could go.”

“You, unfortunately, need to be here,” I said. “Some would see what they’re doing as ‘cheating’. You need to stay the course.”

Corona nodded slowly. “What about you?”

“I’ll stick with you. It’s only fair.”

Corona smiled. “Everyone’s such a bundle of contradictions.”

I snorted, but smiled back.

~~~

Jolyne walked up to the computer console near the end of the window. The little timer told her it would be sent in a few minutes.

Job – her son – was fine. He hadn’t been on Equis Vitis or Earth Stand when either of the disasters had happened. Twilence had told her he was fighting for the other side.

So she typed up a message to him. It was surprisingly easy to make one for him, the words came out without her thinking too much, or even dwelling on what had happened. They were on the screen, and they were added to the overall message.

Then she found herself writing basically an essay on the tragedies of Earth Stand and Equis Vitis, and how they were related. How she was upset that one was almost ignored while the other was causing such grief. All the talk the MU had of equality, yet Equis Vitis was still the most important world.

She had no idea where these words were coming from, but come they did.

She had issues to work out. Unlike her father, she had chosen to deal with her problems herself. Gone up against Nanoha...

Witnessed a betrayal.

She took her fingers off the keyboard. There were only a handful of seconds left.

She took a breath and glanced to her left – seeing me standing there. I was currently trying to figure out why the narrative was giving this moment such focus, why it was so important. What did these two messages matter?

As it turned out, the two messages didn’t.

Jolyne just wanted to be right next to the console when it started transmitting.

As it compiled the message and sent it to Merodi Universalis, she took out a gun and fired an electronic bolt at the console. The console was made of exceptionally durable material, so it didn’t break.

However, the dimensional transmitter ‘antenna’ was flooded with energy thousands of times greater than it was supposed to have. The transmission strength increased far beyond what was safe.

They could pinpoint our location with that if they thought about it.

I grabbed Jolyne in my magic and pulled her right to my face, making no attempt to hide my lividness. “What, was Insipid contagious or something!?”

“I wasn’t brought here by choice,” Jolyne spat. “My father dragged me here right after our world was destroyed. I told myself that because he was here, I belonged. But you know what? After joining you on that mission, I realized something. Fuck that!”

I took in a deep breath and let it out, trying to keep my voice calm. “They’re going to notice. One of their Aware or a particularly devious member of Giorno’s little Division. They’re going to come here.”

“That’s the point, genius.”

I shook my head. “You fought by my side.”

“Cause I felt I had to. Insipid was contagious. I saw that I didn’t have to.”

I ground my teeth. “Corona’s going to have you captured.”

“I know.”

“What’ll Jotaro think?”

“He can get back to me when he lives through it.”

“He’s lived through death before.”

Jolyne looked away – clearly done talking. I decided that meant the conversation was over and dragged her to Corona to be… dealt with.

We had gone so long without a major traitor. And now there were two back to back. I didn’t like where this was going. The scales were balanced in the other side’s favor at the moment.

What could I do to change that…?

~~~

Flutterfree returned from Aradia’s ‘temporal therapy’ with the League of Sweetie Belles. She glanced at Allure with concern – the unicorn still had a sour expression on her face. “Allure…”

“I know. But we couldn’t stay in there drinking tea forever,” Allure muttered. “…Thanks for the thought, though.”

“I don’t have to go,” Flutterfree admitted. “We can keep playing our games.”

“Flutterfree, there’s a war on,” Allure said. “I’m fighting in it. You have other responsibilities. …Don’t worry about me.”

“You know I can’t stop.”

Allure looked up at Flutterfree with conflicted eyes. “I know. I…” She looked at a clock on the wall. “We really were only in there an hour…”

“We’re lucky there are Aradias on both sides,” Squeaky said. “If there was an imbalance, someone would find a way to use that in the war. Temporal manipulation would become a viable strategy again.”

Allure narrowed her eyes, angry at something – but she caught herself, shaking her head. “Let’s not get back to fighting just yet. …Flutterfree, think we could go out? All of us?”

“I know a Bradburger!” Burgerbelle blurted.

“Not Bradburger,” Thrackerzod muttered, facehooving.

“I’d love t-” Flutterfree’s phone rang. It was a message from Eve. You should be back now – I’ve got something to show you. “Oh, uh, Eve wants me. Some other time?”

“If we can make it,” Allure said. “…Thank you for staying here, Flutterfree.”

I was so close to running off with Pinkie. Flutterfree smiled warmly. “I do what I can.” She trotted down the halls of the Hub, walking to the local Relations Division Office.

As she walked, she noticed the streets were largely empty. People were starting to hide out in their homes more and more. Few people wanted to go out and do anything with existence exploding, even if the Hub rarely felt any tremors. She was a bright yellow spot on a shiny gray street.

She saw herself in the mirror, struck by how much she had changed over the years. She was abnormally tall for a pegasus, her legs thin but firm, her hooves lined with decorative marble hiding the deadly spikes beneath. Her wings were large and graceful, tipped with intricate marble, a memory of what she had done to herself during the war with Skarn. Her face was pointed, sharper than that of most mares’, and her eyes held a deep wisdom she knew she wouldn’t see in old photos.

Was her mane sparkling slightly? …She decided it was. She almost looked regal.

Just to check, she felt her forehead. Nothing there. She laughed to herself – that was more than a little silly. Being old and saturated with accumulated magic didn’t make her a Princess. Nor did she really want to be. She was just… herself.

She thought she looked beautiful. That was a rare thought for her.

She put a hoof on the Element of Kindness she wore around her neck and took a breath. For some reason, she felt like now was the time to see how far she’d come. She’d started out a pony terrified of everything, avoided others on principle, and rarely talked. She was a hermit. Now she was a hero who looked as if she could lead everyone.

And she had, come to think of it. She was the moral compass. Stopping people from going too far had become a daily mission of hers. It was why she was here. The other side didn’t need to be reminded about their ethics, they already had the threat of causing their own destruction over their heads. This side… This side could easily think itself too righteous. That winning at all costs was viable.

She was exactly where she needed to be.

She flew into the window outside Eve’s office, landing at her console. She may have just recognized her own height, but Eve was immense compared to her. Was she taller than Luna? Flutterfree would need to see them stand side by side to make that determination.

The purple alicorn was looking up at a swirling cylinder of holographic images filled with letters, videos, and sometimes three-dimensional models.

“…What is this?” Flutterfree asked.

“An apology,” Eve said through her tears – smiling.

Flutterfree noticed who was in the videos – she saw Corona, Renee, and a handful of other people she knew were on the other side. Very few of the faces were dry, and most were giving out messages of condolences, understanding, and in a few cases anger.

Flutterfree put a hoof to her mouth. “She… This couldn’t have helped her position…”

“It didn’t,” Eve said. “Sending this… It’ll dent her reputation. But she was hurt just as much as we were. She wanted to do something.” Eve focused the signal onto a single video of Corona.

“…and there’s nothing I can say, even though I’ve been talking for several minutes already. But I can do something.” A hologram appeared next to the video: it depicted Celestia, holding a planet in her hooves. “I’ve… designed a statue. A memorial. The planet – Equis Vitis – will display names of those who were lost, cycling through them one batch at a time. It’ll… It’ll also replace Celestia’s grave. Encoded in this message is a spell matrix that should be able to build it, when you have the power to do so. I’d wait until after the fighting is over. I don’t want it to be destroyed.” She smiled. “If… If you won’t be able to in the end, I’ve left orders for it to be built by someone else.”

Flutterfree’s smile widened. “She’s still Corona.”

“Yeah… She is.” Eve wiped her eyes. “I’m glad.”

“…You’re about to not be,” Monika said, appearing in the room with a Pinkie Flutterfree recognized – Scooter.

“Yeah…” Scooter said, rubbing the back of her head. “The signal from that message is strong enough to track their location.”

Eve blinked. “She wouldn’t be that…”

“She wasn’t,” Scooter said. “The message you received was bounced off several different buoys before it reached you. But it was also strong enough to be heard from the original universe it was sent from. There was a… power surge.”

Someone betrayed her. Eve gulped. “…I don’t want to punish her for sending this…”

“Giorno’s people are going to find out soon,” Scooter added, pulling the Script out of her mane. “Hiding it would incriminate you.”

“We have to act on it,” Monika said.

“…Fine. We do,” Flutterfree said. “But we don’t let the people know that this is where the information came from. Let them have their apology and reconciliation without tainting it. Say Scooter was able to pick up clues to find it.”

“Giorno’s about to call,” Scooter said.

Eve picked up the phone before it rang. “Giorno, I’ve been expecting you. Scooter just came in. Listen to me: keep this wrapped up. Yes, find the Raven Hotel, but the story we’re selling is that Scooter detected it, okay? Yes, I’m sure.” She hung up. “Monika, make sure Twilence hears that. Nobody has to know about the leak on either side.”

“Done,” Monika said with a snap of her fingers.

“Now excuse me, it looks like I’ll have to go back to the meeting and order an attack on their little Hotel…” Eve put a hoof to her face and let out a deep sigh. “This is wrong.”

Flutterfree nodded in agreement, putting a wing around Eve. The alicorn’s smile had vanished. The beauty of the message had been tainted by the act of one traitor.

~~~

The Raven Hotel was protected by some genius applications of dimensional engineering. It sought to do the same thing Skarn had – to make the center, the Hotel, nearly impossible to physically reach. They, unfortunately, didn’t have access to any sort of shaping mechanism complex enough to fuse several universes together, so they had to work with the one they had.

They had cleverly manipulated the perception of the universe’s space – not the universe’s actual structure, it was still a meter every meter with very minor variations. No, the way the other universes saw the Hotel was different. The Hotel proper was effectively a single point on a great expanse, with locations further away from the Hotel effectively being light years across. If the normal defenses against dimensional travel were breached, the arriving attack wouldn’t be anywhere near their goal.

The attackers didn’t know this for sure, but they highly suspected it. They were going to appear in a universe in an unexpected location far away from the goal. The other side would know they were coming, and would have arranged defenses accordingly.

It was clear they would need a tremendous fleet. There were hopes that the force taking care of the last few strongholds of the Starcross Society would serve as enough of a drain on resources to make it possible.

There was also the admission that Corona wouldn’t allow anyone to attack Merodi Universalis directly after the recent tragedy. So they could leave the defenses at a lower level, putting everything into this attack.

With Nanoha gone and the TSAB barely holding it together, O’Neill had ended up the commander of the attacking fleet. The Combine were not bothered by this – it would be best to have a charismatic leader most of the others would listen to without question.

O’Neill stood at the bridge of the Austraeoh. He had the main screen display a panning view of the entire fleet. He saw Merodi ships first – protomolecule planets, Equis Cosmic fighters, Tau’ri and Asgard battleships, great Gem Armada constructs that looked like castles, including Yellow Diamond’s personal craft, and so many more. Alongside them he saw the stellar constructs of the Combine, the admittedly low in number but powerful TSAB capital ships, and a handful of other ships from lesser worlds. This included that purple relic of a ship Jenny owned that could make dreams reality, a valuable tool in a multiverse with no D-Sphere. The Emperor of Mankind’s personal battlecruiser, so golden it was hard to look at, had also decided to join.

“This is your General speaking,” O’Neill said, addressing the entire fleet. “We’re going in and destroying one of their most important bases of operation. We do not expect to be able to destroy the universe outright or slag their Hotel, there’ll be too many defenses. Our goal is to get whoever and whatever we can on the ground, and keep all the ships occupied while we tear them apart from the inside. All of you have separate parts to play in this plan. So I don’t want to hear any complaining when we’re out there – it’ll be do or die time!” Despite himself, he allowed a smirk to crawl up his face. “Let’s leave them wondering what hit them! Vita, force connection!”

Vita activated one of the TSAB’s highly sought-after connection forcers. The ring-shaped device drifted through space until it found a suitable location in space-time. It latched on and expended an entire universe’s worth of energy to form a direct connection from their universe to the Raven Hotel’s universe.

The Combine went next without being ordered – eight of their ships took up a formation in front of the fleet, creating a ring hundreds of kilometers wide. They activated their cores and created one of the largest portals O’Neill had ever seen.

It led to blackness with a tiny speck of light in the distance that was presumably the Raven Hotel. The fleet moved in.

Before even one ship was in, a forward fleet of Void ships appeared, firing beams of dark energy from their mixed crystalline-metallic forms.

Already, O’Neill had to use one of their secret weapons. A small ship that looked vaguely like a bird jumped to the front of the fleet. A single blue light flashed along the front of its hull, and suddenly all the Void-based beams were cut to the side as if run through a mesh of wires. The next thing the Void ships knew they were being minced into cubes.

Whenever a Class 1 Society fell, there were remnants. When your society was a completely digital one based on durable technology, your remnants were more likely to function.

Especially if they had a loose member of Xeelee society in them. This particular ship had been captured in a Gallifreyan time-trap years before the war began, as part of a high-end test of the technology. They were released when the Gallifreyans fell and were more than willing to lend their services.

This was not the first time they had fought. This was just the first time they had been put on full display. A single ship, turning a forward fleet into mince-meat.

More of O’Neill’s ships filed through. Those that could jump right through the portal did so, falling in behind the Xeelee ship and one other – a very particular ship from Equis Cosmic that looked like a layered lotus.

Cosmo closed her eyes and breathed out. “Here we go again…” she told O’Neill through the radio.

“Just like old times.”

Cosmo let out a chuckle. “You could say that.” She activated her inner Harmony energy, shooting it out of her ship to the rest of the fleet. The energy not only hit Equis Cosmic ships, but other Merodi ones as well. The light surrounded entire Protomolecule Planets, who shunted extra power to Combine star-structures, and then to TSAB ships. The fleet became a web of Harmonious energy.

Everyone heard the voice of the Emperor in their minds - “get ready to see what some real fucking holy lasers look like.” He pushed his essence into the Harmony web, increasing the power and accuracy immensely.

It all fired at once toward the Raven Hotel like a holy arrow. The ships in the way were disintegrated, providing little protection.

Then the true power of the Void activated. A Black sphere the size of Jupiter appeared in space, brimming with a strange eclipse-like aura. The Harmonious energy hit the power of Nothing and was absorbed, drained into the abyss.

“As expected,” O’Neill muttered. “Keeping her busy?”

“I can feel her,” Cosmo admitted. “S-she’s struggling just as I am. The Void has difficulty reaching this far.”

“Right,” O’Neill said, pressing a few buttons. “Combine UNR-43L, do the lay up, we can’t stay in locked formation like this forever.”

“Tzeentch is acting through a pseudo-warp!” the Emperor reported. “I must devote my higher powers to that - you’re on your own Cosmo.”

Two Combine ships that were more like mobile Dyson Spheres than ships shifted their location to opposite sides of the Void-Harmony collision. Like a proton and an electron, they set up ‘charges’ of dimensional interference, passing a high-energy field through the Void’s manifestation.

Cosmo let out a screech – but O’Neill knew that meant Empress Twilight was suffering as well. “Is it locked?”

Yes, the Combine response came. The Void has no power so long as the spheres are active.

“Everyone, break formation, split into defense and offense!”

Cosmo let out a sigh of relief. “Good. We’ve got a foothold now we c-”

Cosmo’s ship exploded as a Starcross ship barreled into it, the power of Runes being too much for the magic shields. Being an alicorn of immense age and power, Cosmo was not vaporized in the explosion – but she was sent adrift into space, defeated.

“Get her back!”

“She’s already been captured,” Clandestine told O’Neill. “They were expecting her to survive that.”

O’Neill ground his teeth. “Get us closer to the Hotel. Move with the offensive group.”

They soon found themselves moving with the Xeelee ship and Jenny’s ‘Dreamboat’ - not that she called it that. The Xeelee ship was under heavy fire from all sides, struggling even with its piano wire to keep up with the Runes, magic, and extradimensional Shabanash entities.

The Austraeoh was only receiving minimal fire.

O’Neill grinned. “Oh, they have no idea…” He pressed a new shiny blue button.

When you’re among the last surviving members of your race, you’re suddenly a lot more willing to share technology.

The Austraeoh launched a net of piano wire from the side, slicing through ships that had only been watching the Xeelee front. The ‘Dreamboat’ flew overtop of them, flashing a purple as it manipulated fate like a Dream, forcing the ships into Jenny’s dream of their destruction.

“HAHA YEA!” Jenny shouted. “Numenera for the WIN!” The ‘Dreamboat’ dreamed up more defeats, tipping the battle in the favor of offense.

And then Final Dawn showed up and cut the ‘Dreamboat’ in half.

Jenny twitched. “Son of a-” her prized ship exploded, powerless against the Aware mech.

O’Neill knew this was where they’d have to make their stand – pushing forward now would spread them too thin. “Form trench – launch pods and don’t stop attacking! Give Final Dawn the special package!”

All the ships equipped with speeder-type ships launched as many as they could. It was a lot like the plan to get closer and closer to Skarn’s center, except the teams who landed on the Hotel only needed to get there once, not over and over again.

One single-man pod was sent toward Final Dawn, whose luck was so high at the moment nothing had hit it yet, not even the Xeelee piano wire.

“What’s this little present, O’Neill?” Pinkie asked O’Neill, somehow talking on the private channel.

O’Neill smirked. “You’re about to find out!”

“It’s probably a designed counter,” Pidge said as Final Dawn cut through three Equis Cosmic ships at once. “Vriska, we might need some infinite-potential escape.”

“Dice at the ready,” Vriska announced. “We’ve got you O’Neill.”

O’Neill smirked. “I don’t think you do. This present might be a bit… much.”

Nova used her magic to catch the pod and pop it open. Inside was a bald man in a yellow suit and red cape. He didn’t seem bothered by the lack of air in space.

“Serious punch,” Saitama the One Punch Man mouthed, pulling his fist back.

“ABORT!” Pinkie shouted. Final Dawn pulled a top hat out of nowhere and vanished into it. When Saitama utterly destroyed the top hat there were no signs of mech debris.

“Got them to run, at least,” Clandestine observed. “Combine Dipole is holding, and we’re receiving reports some of the ground teams have landed.”

“They’ll be stuck down there until they can take the compound,” O’Neill said. “Hope they get lucky. Tell Saitama he can go down now.”

“His partner’s already got him going there.”

“Good. Shuffle up some of the movements of the Austraeoh, keep them surprised.”

Throughout the darkness, great explosions tore at reality. But the immense reality anchors of the Raven Hotel stood firm.

~~~

Allure, Thrackerzod, Squeaky, Bot, and Burgerbelle’s pod landed near the bottom of the hotel, hitting a room filled with Gem soldiers.

All it took was a simple anti-Gem EMP from Bot to disable them, though the little robot shorted many of her own servos out in the process. From then on it was easy work taking the handful of biological people in the location out – the element of surprise was too much.

…Well, with the exception of Lady Rarity. She was far too experienced to fall just like that. She pushed back with her hammer, knocking Squeaky and Burgerbelle back. This gave Allure an opportunity to move, attacking with magic in her back hooves, hitting Lady Rarity’s armor at the perfect angle to form a crack. On the other side, her Heart cut through the mechanical exterior and drew blood.

Lady Rarity roared. “I NEED BACKUP!” she shouted, jumping to the wall and latching on with her eight legs. She whirled her hammer in a complex pattern, deflecting magic bullets.

She knew she couldn’t do this forever – not against all five of them. Reinforcements probably weren’t going to arrive in time. She needed to do something that would have a lasting impression – take one of them out of the picture.

She lunged for the momentarily-disabled Bot, planning to make the condition permanent with a single hit. Squeaky caught her with a carefully-aimed laser that hit her side right where the armor had broken, causing her nerves to lock up. She would have magicked her way through the disability, but Thrackerzod took the opportunity to encase her in eldritch vines.

Allure walked up to her, face impassive.

Lady Rarity started breathing heavily – she’d heard about what had happened to Scarcity. “W-well, am I next?”

Allure shook her head, a frown appearing on her face. She took out a capture device and threw it, trapping Lady Rarity within.

“I’m proud of you,” Squeaky said.

“Thank therapy,” Allure said, trying to give a bright smile but failing.

Squeaky put a comforting hoof on her. “Thrackerzod! Where do we need to go?”

“Basement has a large energy spike,” Thrackerzod said, feeling around with her eldritch senses. “I say we go to whatever’s down there.”

“Smash as much as we can on the way,” Burgerbelle said, producing a somehow spooky trumpet. “We need to run them off.”

Nae finally arrived with a small troop of backup composed both of lizard people and hungry Shabanash.

Bot recovered from her use of the EMP-pulse. “TARGET ACQUIRED!”

There were a lot of explosions. Not just there, but everywhere within the Raven Hotel. The attackers had landed.

~~~

They were under attack.

Renee had known, just like everyone else, that they were about to be attacked.

That didn’t mean she had any idea about what to do. She hadn’t really fought since she got here, except that one time with Final Dawn at a distance. She was pretty sure she couldn’t stay in her room, but she wasn’t exactly sure where to go or who needed her.

This is what I get for avoiding the combat briefings… she thought to herself, scrambling through a hallway in the Hotel. She ended up in the lobby – which was surprisingly empty.

“Huh…?”

“They’re all in their ships,” Poe said, cleaning a glass. “And despite appearances, the lobby isn’t exactly a high-value target. I’ve seen a few of the other side run through here, try to shoot me, and then keep going.”

“…Don’t you have automatic defenses?”

“Oh, I do, I’ll just use them elsewhere. I don’t want Minna to yell at me about all the busted equipment.”

Renee looked around. “But nobody’s using it.”

“Don’t underestimate what Minna will give you a mouthful about.”

Renee shook her head. “Nevermind. You basically are the hotel. What should I do?”

“Find a group of intruders and get them to stop blowing me up, mhm?”

“Where’s the closest one?”

“That door,” Poe said. A moment later Jenny of the Red Gloves punched the door down. Her hair was charred and she looked like she’d just recovered from being flattened.

Renee blinked. “…What happened to you?”

“Ship blew up. Fell into the floor at terminal velocity. A-” Jenny shook her head. “Wait, you’re on the other side.”

“Oh, well, that is right. Could we not do it in here? Apparently Poe doesn’t want his things destroyed.”

“You’re also that unicorn who saved my mind.”

Renee brightened. “Yes, I am. Perhaps we can avoid a fight, then?”

Jenny thought about this for a second. “Erm… Nah, I’m still gonna punch you.” She pulled back her fist.

“Oh dear.”

Jenny punched the ground and created a minor earthquake, tipping a military computer over.

Poe sighed overdramatically. “So rowdy…”

Jenny flew at Renee, fist vibrating with transdimensional energy. Renee activated the Element of Generosity, a wisp of white Harmonious energy deflecting the fist just slightly. Jenny twisted, using her other fist to hit Renee across the jaw, but she didn’t have time to infuse the fist with extra power. It still hurt, to be sure, but nothing truly devastating.

Renee leaped back, using the momentum of the punch to land her hooves on a wall. She pushed off, flying toward Jenny. She lit her fist on fire planning to meet her head on.

A magic force field hit Jenny in the side, knocking her into Poe’s bar.

“Watch it!”

“Sorry, had to make use of the opportunity!” Renee sent a dozen sharp needles into Jenny, trying to pin the stunted woman to the table. Jenny wasn’t having any of it – she pulled herself off, letting the needles tear through her flesh and deposit copious amounts of blood all over the bar. The devastating wounds were as temporary as always.

“…You are a cleaner’s nightmare,” Poe observed.

Jenny pulled herself up and snapped her fingers, attempting to blind Renee with a magic flash. However, Renee’s artificial eye was immune to that particular magic. She pulled back and kicked Jenny in the stomach as she tried to land a hit.

This time, Jenny recovered – pushing the transdimensional energy into her foot she kneed Renee in the side, cracking a shoulder. The white unicorn flew through the air, forced to use her magic just to avoid hitting the wall too hard. This allowed Jenny to get off another punch, driving her into another computer.

Poe sighed. “Dear Minna – Renee has no respect for y-”

“SHUT UP!” Jenny shouted, firing a blast of white energy at him. It passed right through the hologram, though it did destabilize its appearance.

Renee tried to get up and move but it wasn’t exactly working. She was struck by how her glasses had remained on her face, unbroken, somehow.

Jenny walked over to her and held up a capture device. “They’re gonna have a lot to say to you back home.”

Renee coughed. “Listen to me, I’m not a fighter here, I don’t go on missions, just let me go.”

“How about no?” She threw the capture device.

It was destroyed in midair by a beam of darkness. The next thing Jenny knew she was trapped in a box rippling with magical hexagon patterns. She tried to punch through, but the wall threw her back. Renee saw her scream “what the heck!?” but heard no sound.

Blumiere walked into the room, Timpani at his side. He snapped his fingers, sapping Jenny of energy. “She may not be able to die in her state… But she can be weakened.” He took out a capture device. Jenny tried to teleport away, but found herself stuck in the box. Soon, she didn’t even have enough energy to try that. Blumiere opened the box, allowing her to fall to the ground – where she was easily captured.

Timpani ran to Renee and cast some healing spells to mend the bones and wounds. “Are you okay?”

“I’m… fine…” Renee said with a cough, standing up. She adjusted her hat. It had an unfortunate tear in it, but she could fix that later. “Thanks. Do you by chance know what I need to do?”

“You could come with us,” Blumiere said. “We need to defend the Tower Ring. It’s only a matter of time before they get to it.”

Renee nodded. “Sure. That’ll work.” She stretched her leg that had been broken just moments ago. “Good work, Timpani.”

“I’ve had… practice, recently.” She shook her head and sighed. “Blumiere, how much further?”

“You could just take the transmat elevator,” Poe said. “It’s like teleporting.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Blumiere said, walking up to the elevator. “You aren’t letting the other side use this, are you?”

“Of course not!”

“Good. Then we can get ahead of them.”

Renee, Blumiere, and Timpani piled into the elevator and descended.

~~~

Saitama punched and an entire section of the Raven Hotel crumbled.

“Yipee,” he deadpanned. “Let’s go to the next hall so I can blow that up too.”

“Now, what did we say about your attitude?” a tremendous man with overblown muscles and blond hair asked, waving his finger.

“…Get the job done?”

The man put a hand to the side of his head and let out a hearty laugh. “Not with O’Neill! What I said about your attitude?”

“Enlighten me.”

The man pointed to his face. “Always save the day with a smile! If you truly want to be the Symbol of Peace…”

“Hardly peaceful, what we’re doing here,” Saitama pointed out, looking at the destruction he and the other members of the army had caused. “All Might, we’re not really being heroes, I don’t think.”

“Nonsense!” All Might said, keeping up his smile. “We’re saving the multiverse!”

“They think the same thing,” he said, pointing at a handful of Void soldiers shooting lightning at a Combine task force.

“And do you think they’re the heroes?”

“No,” Saitama said with a shrug. “Don’t think any of us are heroes right now. …This definitely isn’t what I signed up for.”

All Might put his hands on his hips. “Then you must ask yourself – why are you here? Why are you fighting?”

“I mean, if they collapse the multiverse, Earth-AZ2 probably won’t survive, and then my favorite store will be gone.”

All Might put a hand to the bridge of his nose – but laughed anyway. “You’re impossible, Saitama. I’ll tell you why you’re fighting! You’re fighting because you care about people, and you wouldn’t want to see them gone! You want to save them, to give them what’s best for them!”

Saitama shrugged. “I mean, I guess, but I’m not exactly the guy who knows what’s best for anyone. I’m just a hero for fun. And this isn’t very fun.” He shot his fist out to the left, the air current from the force splatting a squad of Inklings.

“Every day I am reminded why I was assigned to you,” All Might said, shaking his head.

“Let’s just get this over with. Wish the Hotel wasn’t able to divide itself so I could just get it all at once.” Saitama flexed his wrist – and then he saw Final Dawn mowing down several of their people on top of a ‘roof’ section of the Hotel. “Oh hey, it’s that thing I was supposed to punch.”

All Might moved before Saitama, jumping across the divide. He placed himself between Final Dawn and the task force. “Don’t worry – I am here!”

The current leader of the task force – Navy “Lucy” Heartfilia, a fellow ex-USM agent like himself – clasped her hands. “All Might! We’re safe!”

“Yare yare daze…” he could hear Jotaro mutter. “ORA!” Nova’s purple fist shot toward All Might.

“TEXAS SMASH!” All Might shouted, using his power to meet the mech’s punch. Within the hero existed a deep, brimming power that had been passed down through generations. When the USM was still in power and time exploitation was still allowed, All Might’s power had been cycled through a time loop several hundred times. Every time it was passed on, its power increased exponentially.

It was the power of One For All, artificially improved to an absurd degree. The USM had made him with the intention of facing people like Nanoha, if they had to.

All Might’s punch of heightened power was nothing compared to the engineering that went into Final Dawn. He flew back – relatively unharmed, but having done nothing to the mech.

“Oh no,” Navy said. “Uh… right! I’ve got a plan!” She whipped out two magic keys and used them to unlock a dimensional portal to a realm in the Void. Two summons – a green lion with a ruby in its forehead and an earthy humanoid - erupted from the portals, ready to do her bidding. “Carbuncle, reflect barrier! Golem, earthen wall!”

Nova tried to cast a laser, but the double-barrier reflected it back at them. Not that Final Dawn cared.

“Oh, nice trick!” they heard Pinkie say. “Reflect all magic attacks, absorb all physical ones! Cleeeeeever!” Final Dawn pulled out a squeaky hammer. “Completely useless to me, though.” She paused. “Wait… Twitcha-twitch!”

“Normal punch,” Saitama said, fist aiming right for Final Dawn’s head.

“No!” I declared, writing an exclamation mark in my notebook. At the same time, I used my magic to offset Saitama’s aim. Since he wasn’t expecting to be deflected, he didn’t try to resist and flew right past Final Dawn’s neck.

I grinned. Perfect.

Corona leaped out of her hiding place, open hand going for Saitama’s head. All she needed to do was give him a light touch…

“MINNESOTA SMASH!” All Might hit Corona in the side, snapping several of her ribs and throwing her into the air. She managed to right herself with her wings, but she couldn’t get to Saitama – she had to spend time mending her wounds.

“Saitama, you are strong, but remember you do have a weakness!” All Might tapped his forehead.

“Oh. So she can do something to my head.” Saitama blinked. “Good to know.”

I twitched. Everyone, we need to remove Saitama from the picture.

On it, Vriska responded, activating her mental powers. Saitama felt something itch at his brain – but she was unable to get him to actually do anything. “Okay, what the fuck? You’re an idiot, how are you resisting!?”

“Guess I’m actually trying,” Saitama deadpanned. He pulled back his fist. “Serious p-”

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Final Dawn shouted, freezing time for everyone… but themselves and me. They moved to Saitama.

Their plan was a simple and elegant one – if you couldn’t defeat One Punch Man directly, move him somewhere he couldn’t get to you. They had an empty universe in mind where they could toss him and let him drift for eons. In stopped time, he couldn’t resist.

They threw him through easily.

Time resumed. “Who says you can’t beat One Punch Man?” Pinkie asked as Final Dawn struck a victory pose.

“We didn’t,” Vriska pointed out.

“Throwing someone into space is a perfectly valid victory,” Jotaro retorted.

“Kars came back, didn’t he?” Pidge countered.

“You haven’t won yet!” All Might shouted, the power of One For All surging through his muscles, making them increase in size further. “There are more heroes for you to face!”

Corona landed on Final Dawn’s shoulder and smiled cockily. “Yeah, strong as you are, I don’t think you have it in you to even defeat me, let alone Final Dawn. Especially not with Twilence over there controlling everything.”

I waved at All Might with an innocent smile.

All Might laughed. “I like your spirit! But the Symbol of Hope will not be deterred!”

Navy pulled out some more keys, summoning a mixture of eldritch and celestial beings. “Give him everything you’ve got!” Some unicorns next to her shot magic into All Might, providing him with even more power. He could feel the force he was a part of giving him energy.

Heh. Just wait until I tell the Gokus.

He flexed both of his arms back and roared. “UNITED STATES OF…”

Final Dawn sensed that it would have to act as one. A warhammer appeared in its hands. “SLEDGEHAMMER…”

“SMASH!” They shouted at the same time. All Might met with the unified hammer.

He was, once again, an ant to the power of the hammer. He was thrown back into the floor.

“Seriously!? We give you all that power and you fail!?” Navy squealed. “We’re so dead!”

“I wouldn’t say that, my dear…” All Might muttered, standing back up.

“Oh, excuse me, captured.”

“That’s not what I meant. I didn’t need to defeat them – I just needed them to enter a state of unity.”

“Why!?”

My eyes widened. “Oh, f-”

“I REJECT YOUR REALITY AND SUBSTITUTE MY OWN!”

Seraphim erupted from Final Dawn’s back, activating fully. Normally, altered physics would do nothing to Final Dawn given its reality anchors. However, it was designed to allow internal alterations – like Pinkie Pie’s powers – to take full effect.

The systems did nothing to prevent Seraphim from setting the physics so Final Dawn’s body would become hard and brittle. The legs began to crack from the weight above them.

Eve herself was standing on a nearby ‘roof’ section of the Raven Hotel, wings flared, eyes brimming with darker magics, and the Element of Magic shining as bright as the sun.

How had I not known Eve was here? How had that gotten past me?

Corona flapped her wings and rushed to take Eve out with a burst of flame – but the Golem summon punched her out of the way.

I pulled out my notebook and leveled a beam at Eve, planning an unavoidable attack. All Might decided to take care of me. I had to raise a shield quickly, too quickly. Not enough to stop the immense ‘might’ of the hero. I was tossed toward Corona, realizing quickly what was happening.

This was a fight for them. We’re being moved out of the way.

All Might, Navy, and the others focused on me and Corona, forcing us out of the scene. We would fight, but who were All Might, Navy, and these others? People who had been hinted at in this story, but overall nothing important. Representation of the fallen USM, a sort of apology. Their battles didn’t really matter with Saitama gone. They were just here to provide a reason.

A reason for Eve to be alone with her team.

I watched as Final Dawn crumbled apart. The very same machine that met the Living Tribunal head on was now no stronger than an eggshell. Brought low by the Princess of Friendship, Element of Magic, and the original leader of the Primary Team.

She walked along the flat roof toward the wreckage of Final Dawn. Pinkie, Vriska, Pidge, Jotaro, and Nova crawled out, all looking at her with conflicted expressions.

Eve summoned Seraphim, a frown on her face. “Saitama was always a long shot. There were several ways to take care of him where he has minimal support.” The finely tuned use of Seraphim’s absolute-zero universe solidified the air near her into two foggy blades. “I was the one sent here to take care of you five.”

“Welp, you blew up the coolest thing ever, cheers,” Vriska said, clapping sarcastically. “But you can’t boost Seraphim like that anymore. You can’t take us alone.”

Eve looked ahead blankly. “It’s what I’m here to do. I am sorry, this is going to hu-”

“VRISKA!”

The six of them turned to see Starbeat running at them, eyes glowing with white power.

“Oh, shit,” Vriska said, paling. “Uh…”

Nova pulled her head back, readying a vaporization spell.

“Starbeat, stop,” Eve ordered, grabbing her with telekinesis. “Stay out of this.”

Starbeat blinked. “Wh…”

“I need to do this,” Eve said, narrowing her eyes. She didn’t look determined – just sad.

Starbeat saw the look in her eyes and took a few steps back. She took a moment to shoot Vriska a Look. Starbeat decided she didn’t need to use any words. She produced an extremely old piece of pale red cardboard in the shape of a diamond.

She burned it.

Vriska looked like a sword had just been rammed through her chest. “Starbe-”

Starbeat teleported away without another glance.

Vriska twitched. “Starbeat, wait! You know I-”

Eve drove one of the blades right into Vriska’s chest, doubling the pain. Without Seraphim to keep it cold, the blade dissipated into gas a second after it hit, but the hole was still there – a chunk of ice surrounding a slit through Vriska’s very being.

She stumbled, but remained standing. “Gog…” It was so cold it might as well have beencauterizing fire.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE W-” Jotaro noticed his Stands were missing.

Eve teleported next to him and bucked him across the face. “I’m not even using Seraphim. Stands are easy to disable if you know enough magic.” Jotaro decided he could still fight without them, punching with his considerably powerful fist. All Eve had to do was catch the fist with a magic barrier, breaking his fingers. Magical chains appeared around him next, taking him out of commission.

She threw two more blades of solid air. Vriska and Nova dodged them, flipping backward – but the blades were so cold parts of Nova and Vriska still froze.

Pidge adjusted her glasses. “Taking a cue from Sai… Anyone can be hacked.” She targeted Eve with an anti-magic device, throwing the object right at her. Eve froze it solid, encasing it in about an inch of frozen air. As it dropped the device shattered into a million pieces.

Pidge had nothing else in the way of combat experience to offer. All it took was a single concussive blast from Eve to knock her out.

“Team up!” Pinkie shouted to Nova and Vriska. “Work through the pain!”

“Already ahead of you,” Vriska said, grinning. Instead of attacking one at a time or waiting for Eve to move, they moved as a single unit. Pinkie swung her hammer, Vriska threw the infinite-sided die, and Nova set up a point of erased time, removing Eve’s ability to predict where the attacks were going to land.

When the erased time was over, Pinkie’s hammer was snapped in half and the several dozen piranhas sat on the ground at Eve’s hooves. There was no more ice – but Eve had no bruises and no teeth marks on her.

“Universe where forces are a million times smaller,” Eve explained halfheartedly. “I-”

“SQUEAKY HAMMER!” Pinkie shouted, superseding Eve’s rule with her own reality hacking. Eve took a heavy hit from the comic-sounding squeaky hammer and rolled along the ground. However, only the squeaky hammer itself had an impact – the ground did nothing.

Vriska started her luck-stealing now that Eve was seemingly dazed and vulnerable for a few seconds – but she didn’t expect Eve to teleport right behind her. A burst of dark magic somehow integrated with the power of the sun hit Vriska in the back, making her keel over.

The ice on the wound in her chest cracked, allowing her blood to start running freely. Had she been her usual self, she would have gotten up and ignored the life-threatening wound.

But she really wasn’t up to it right now.

Nova gulped hard. “I don’t think I ever realized how ridiculous Seraphim is…”

“She’s been practicing and we haven’t noticed,” Pinkie said, gripping her hammer tighter. “Let’s space-time her. Synthesis.”

Nova lit her horn, erasing time once again, but this time Pinkie was in it. Moving in erased time was… a peculiar experience. Unlike stopped time, everything kept moving – except everyone but Nova and Pinkie could only act as they had already intended to act. Eve had no way to know where they were going to come from…

She didn’t need to, evidentially. The first thing Seraphim did was encase Eve in a meter-wide bubble of frozen air, one they couldn’t touch. Nova wouldn’t have been able to do anything about that on her own – but Pinkie was here now. She appeared inside the bubble where Eve was and brought out the bomb mask.

“Hi!” Pinkie said the moment stopped time ended. She exploded, sending Eve into her own wall of ice. She dissipated it as quickly as she could, but ice crystals had already been formed out of her wings. Many of her feathers shattered.

Eve multitasked – as she was struggling to regain control of her body, she had Seraphim go after Nova. Spires of frozen air shot out of the remains of the bubble like hungry eels, rushing for Nova. Once again, she dodged thinking the solid parts were all she had to worry about. She was several inches away from any of the pieces, but still she began to freeze. The ice was too heavy for her to keep dodging. She teleported out of the way.

Eve traced it – forming the absolute zero point right next to her. Nova screamed as the cold burned her.

Eve made sure not to actually freeze Nova solid – just burn her with the cold enough to take her down. She’d been very careful. There was a reason she wasn’t using Seraphim to turn the matter around her into nuclear bombs.

“Keeping to ice because you can use it with precision?” Pinkie asked.

Eve nodded. “It is the one I’m best with.”

Pinkie pulled out a flamethrower. “Too bad you can’t make me stop. I can just ignore any of your physics! I can ignore almost anything!”

Eve shook her head. “You can’t ignore Harmony.” She dropped Seraphim and switched to using the Element of Magic. A pulse of beautiful, white energy went out and entered Pinkie’s ears.

Eve extended a hoof. “Come on Pinkie. Come back to me.”

The Element of Laughter flashed a blue color. Pinkie took a step forward.

“That’s it. Everything will be fine… We’re friends, Pinkie. I won’t hurt you. Let’s end this.”

Pinkie took another step forward, all her movements sluggish.

Eve smiled warmly. “Good…” As an afterthought, she activated her powers of Light, checking the knowledge of the system.

She jumped back from Pinkie.

“Aw, phooey,” Pinkie said, snapping out of the fake stupor. “I was sure you would buy that.”

“…I got lucky,” Eve said, narrowing her eyes.

Pinkie leaned against her hammer. “Whatcha gonna do now? Y-” Pinkie had to jump out of the way as a blade of ice flew at her. “Just basic attacks? Come on Eve, you should know better than that!” She appeared beside Eve and threw a pie in her face. “I’m Pinkie Pie! You have t-”

Eve rammed the Element of Magic into Pinkie’s head. She used her magic to connect the Element of Magic to the Element of Laughter, running a feedback loop through Pinkie’s mind. This should have dropped Pinkie in an instant, but she refused. She let out a scream of pain and tackled Eve, foregoing the use of all weapons, resorting to pure hooves instead. The two of them entered a hoof fight, smacking each other left and right, tainting the brilliance of the Harmony.

Eve was still able to think. She pulled out Seraphim, freezing something right next to Pinkie.

Pinkie didn’t freeze. She was unable to think right now… maybe that actually helped her in some way?

I didn’t want to do this… Eve summoned a sword and rammed it through Pinkie’s stomach. Her unusual candy-red blood went flying everywhere.

Eve broke the Harmony connection, allowing sanity to return to Pinkie’s eyes. She felt the sword all right, but she couldn’t process it. She made a gurgling sound.

Eve gently set Pinkie down and pulled out five capture devices, throwing them at the five members of Pinkie’s Party. All of them worked like a charm – except the one on Pinkie. It bounced right off her.

Eve blinked. “Pinkie… You lost. Just accept it.”

Pinkie said nothing as her blood pooled around her.

Eve began to look at the blood nervously. “Pinkie. Get in here, I can’t heal you.”

Pinkie turned in Eve’s direction, her blindfolded face scrunched in conflicted emotions. “What would you do if you actually had to kill me?”

Eve had nothing to say to that.

“Lethal force…” Pinkie chuckled, coughing up blood. “What if you have to use it on one of us with no way out?”

“Pinkie, just get in the ball.”

“Okay,” Pinkie said, grabbing the ball and touching it to herself, allowing herself to be captured.

Eve put a hoof to her chest and let out a panicked breath. Calm. Calm. I won. They’re all in the balls, safe, and I can take them home… She shook her head. First…

She activated Seraphim and looked. It took a few moments to find Saitama, but find him she did. She brought him right back.

“Oh. I’m back.”

“You are. Destroy this place.”

“Okay.”

And then all five of the capture devices containing Pinkie’s Party teleported away in a flash of red. Eve traced the teleport instantly, shooting a death glare at its source.

It was Corona, standing in the middle of a dozen or so defeated people. She locked eyes with Eve.

I’m giving the order for us to evacuate, Corona told Eve telepathically.

I can’t let you go, Eve responded.

I know. So Twilence is going to do something a little cruel to ensure you can’t. She nodded to me. I lit my horn and set magical bombs on All Might, Navy, and the others. Save them, Eve.

Corona teleported both of us away.

Eve gasped, teleporting to All Might and the others, removing their bombs. “How could she do this!? She’s better than this! She’s… She’s…” After she removed the third magic bomb she realized something. “…These are fake.”

“Huh. Interesting,” Saitama said.

Eve captured all her fallen soldiers.

“Aren’t you going to follow her?”

“…I wasn’t tracing her teleport that time. And even if I did, she’s long gone now.”

“So, if they’re evacuating, does that mean we win?”

“Maybe. Keep punching things in case that’s a ruse too.” She spread her wings and took off.

~~~

Blumiere, Renee, and Timpani passed through one of the capture device bunkers filled with hundreds of captured soldiers from the other side.

They were going to go straight through – but then they heard the order to evacuate in their minds.

“…We’re not evacuating, are we?” Renee asked.

“We might,” Blumiere admitted. “It depends on the condition of the Tower Ring.” He looked through a cabinet of capture devices, the one where they kept valuable ones that actually needed to be labeled. He reached in and took out Nanoha’s. “If we are evacuating, we can’t let them have her back.”

Renee looked at the balls, seeing a lot of names she recognized, but none that stuck out as particularly important – aside from one. Alushy.

She reached in and took Alushy’s ball.

“She’s not that important.”

“Maybe,” Renee said. “I’ve just got this feeling…” she took out the Tower card. “Just like I’ve had a feeling about this. It means something.”

“Where’d you get it?” Timpani asked.

“I… don’t remember.” Renee admitted. “I just know it’s important.”

“Keep it,” Blumiere said, pocketing a few more capture devices. “Tower Ring’s in the next room. We need to hurry.”

They ran out of the capture device room and into one that was bigger on the inside. There was no way a room this large existed and wasn’t visible from the exterior of the hotel. It was a red room that had a vague disc-shape to it. The only piece of furniture in the room was a single long table right in front of them that was covered in pieces of paper covered in magi-technical writing.

There were some people in the room: two Combine human soldiers beating up Vivian with electric batons. They had guns – they were just being cruel for no reason.

Blumiere disintegrated them easily with a burst of darkness. Timpani ran to Vivian, placing a hand on her. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t try to heal me…” Vivian muttered, groaning.

“I know. Blumiere?”

Blumiere used the complex spell required to return life into beings of darkness. Vivian recovered from her wounds quickly, though she was clearly exhausted. “T-thanks. I was looking for you and couldn’t find you.”

“Well, I’m here now.” Blumiere looked up. “And it appears that the Tower Ring is just fine.”

Renee followed his gaze. Above them was a spirograph. The spirograph itself was of a passionate orange color, with every segment between the lines filled with a smooth black metal. It floated in the air, glowing brightly, like a donut with a toothed center.

Ready to bite down on the Dark Tower.

“Is it… done?”

Blumiere flipped through the Prognosticus. “The spells have indeed finished their work while we were occupied. It’s ready.”

Renee looked at him, sparkles in her eyes. “Can we end this war now?”

“Not quite. This universe is not near a manifestation of the Dark Tower – but we can move this ring. Salvage it in the evacuation.” He flipped through more pages of the Prognosticus. “Just have t-”

Allure flew through the sky and kicked the Prognosticus with as much power as she could muster. The book was far too powerful to be destroyed by such an action, but it was removed from Blumiere’s grasp.

“Hey, be careful with that!” Dimentio called.

To Blumiere’s surprise, Renee looked around as if she had heard something.

“Her Mind is a strong one… I best be careful, or I will be the criminal in the floodlight!” Dimentio chuckled.

“Something’s wrong here!” Renee blurted.

“YEAH!” Allure shouted, jumping off the book and barreling into Renee. “YOU!”

“That’s not wh-” She got the air knocked out of her by Allure as they tumbled across the ground.

Bot and Thrackerzod went after Blumiere, identifying him as easily the most dangerous person in the room. Eldritch tentacles shot from every surface near Thrackerzod and moved for Blumiere, followed by a volley of missiles, lasers, and bullets from Bot. Blumiere reacted with his usual dark magic, catching all the attacks and unleashing a few of his own in the form of squares of darkness.

Burgerbelle ended up on Vivian, burying her in Bradburgers rather quickly. It seemed as if Burgerbelle was immune to fire damage – but notably not being on fire.

Squeaky tried to go for Allure and Renee – Allure needed her to be there – but Timpani wasn’t going to let that happen. A wall of rainbow energy separated Squeaky from the sisters.

Squeaky knew Timpani was weak – very weak compared to everyone else here – but she would still take time to deal with. The unicorn general bounced off the rainbow wall and rammed her horn through the woman’s pristine white dress. She crumpled easily.

This turned out to be a bad decision. Blumiere saw this and didn’t even think – he allowed himself to be open to attacks so he could jump Squeaky. The unicorn raised a shield, but it wasn’t enough to block the energy completely. She fell over, her mane and coat smoking.

Allure…

With explosions and eldritch screams going on in the background, Renee teleported herself away from Allure. She was under no illusions she could get out of the fight. She raised a shield to defend herself and shot a magic laser from the side. Allure caught it with her hooves and sent it at Renee’s shield, breaking it. “TAKE THAT!”

Renee could vaguely sense Allure’s Heart activate and charge. She dodged to the left, but a large gash opened up in her leg.

It was at this point Renee knew something was wrong with Allure.

She had smiled when she cut Renee.

“Allure, what’s wrong?”

“What’s WRONG!?” Allure shouted, twitching. “MY FAMILY IS EVIL, THAT’S WHAT’S WRONG!” She moved forward, kicking Renee across the face with an empowered hoof. Renee grabbed Allure’s hoof in her magic and tossed her to the side.

“I thought you would know better than that!”

“Better than WHAT?!” Allure raged forward like a berserker, knocking Renee back into a wall, forcing her to only defend. “You’re the one who should have known better!”

“Better than what? To go with my friends!?”

“THEY WERE ALL THE ENEMY!” Allure shouted, bringing her Heart down on Renee again, making a cut across her shoulder. “MY FRIENDS! MY FAMILY! THE ENEMY!”

“Can’t you understand somewhere in there why they did that!?” Renee shouted, pushing back with a burst of magic.

“NO!” Allure said, tears running down her face. “NO I CAN’T!”

Renee’s expression softened. “…Allure…”

Allure pushed at Renee with her magic again, making another cut. Renee didn’t even notice the pain – nor did she notice the explosion behind her from Blumiere and Thrackerzod launching themselves into the air, toward the Tower Ring.

“Anyone who could bring themselves to kill that many… Just no!”

Renee looked at her with a pained expression. “You really can’t understand…” The aura of Mind began to shift around her. “You can’t understand on such a fundamental level… It’s driven you mad.”

Allure’s tears were much stronger now. “IF I’M MAD, THEN IT’S YOUR FAULT! YOU DID THIS TO ME!”

“I did,” Renee admitted, watching Allure closely. “I did do this to you. I thought you could handle it – but I was wrong.”

“SHUT UP!”

Renee looked for her opening. “Allure…”

A much larger explosion shook the room. Sweetie Bot had managed to detonate a high-yield explosive on the Tower Ring. The device lost the orange glow of the spirograph, becoming a dead donut.

Allure took this as an opportunity, thinking Renee was distracted enough. She activated her Heart and aimed for Renee’s head.

Renee shifted herself up slightly with her magic. This allowed her to place her front hooves on the side of Allure’s head.

This also allowed Allure’s blade of Heart to charge right through Renee’s chest, piercing through several vital organs and shooting out the white unicorn’s back.

Blood came out of Renee’s mouth. “…This is my gift to you.”

The Element of Generosity flashed a brilliant white. The power of the Sylph of Mind shot into Allure’s brain, getting a map of the situation in an instant.

Allure really had gone mad. There was a tangled mental knot her psyche was not able to iron out, no matter what anyone had done, even with the time in Aradia’s therapy. It was a mixture of confusion, resentment, anger, and a deep inner insecurity that she had been wrong. Wrong that people were inherently good. It was something her poor, sweet mind couldn’t accept. So it locked it away at the expense of everything else.

Renee ironed it out easily. Allure’s stressed ball of madness was flattened in a second, and her brain entered a state of relaxation as Renee soothed it.

The Element of Generosity gave her some extra time.

…My dear, dear Allure… I give myself to you, my little sister. I couldn’t bear to see you like that, so lost, so afraid, so confused.

I know you will hate yourself for what’s happening. But I want you to know that I don’t hate you. I love you. I always will. Even when I left you, I was still your sister. Nothing can change that. Nothing ever will.

The Element of Generosity began to grow dark.

If this really is the end, look out for Daniel. He’ll need you. And so will all the others. If they want to hate you, tell them what I said. This was my choice.

Live your life well, Sweetie Belle.

The Element of Generosity shattered. Allure dissipated her blade of Heart in an instant, allowing Renee to drop to the ground.

Renee’s body to drop to the ground. Her glasses snapped in half and her false eye cracked right through the iris.

“No no no no no no!” Allure shouted. “Somebody, do something!”

The Tower Ring crashed into the floor, bending unnaturally. But no one paid any attention to it – they were all looking at Renee’s body.

Timpani stood up. There was still blood on her dress, but she had healed the wound. She kneeled over Renee and performed the revive spell.

Renee’s biological eye flexed. It looked beyond unnatural because her false iris wasn’t moving at all, having been rendered useless in that department. However, while the pupil couldn’t alter its size, it was able to look around just fine.

Renee coughed, standing up slowly. Her gaze looked completely unnatural with the lopsided eyes and the crack.

“Well… It seems I’m all right,” Renee said, checking the stab wound Allure gave her. “Wasn’t exactly expecting to come back…”

Allure rushed her into a hug. “I’m so sorry!”

“Yeah, you are…” Renee said, pulling Allure close.

Blumiere noticed the smile. That was not the smile of someone hugging their sister.

“Uh oh, Blumiere’s found an inconsistency!” Dimentio chuckled. “What’s it mean?”

Renee’s gaze shot right to where Dimentio was. “I thought so… Blumiere, there’s something infecting your mind. Jester-y thing. I don’t think it likes my Mind sensing it…” She put on a pouting face. “Do you want me to get rid of it?”

Blumiere nodded. “I am aware of Dimentio. However, he has been useful in the past. I don’t want to risk losing him as a source of information.”

“Bad move, I think…” Renee said. While still holding Allure close, she picked up the tarot card off the ground.

XIX – THE TOWER

“Heh,” she chuckled, pocketing the card.

“…Why are you so calm?” Burgerbelle asked.

“Calm?” A grimace crossed Renee’s face. “I was just dead, darling. I… think it’s expected for me to be a bit off.”

“Is it?” Dimentio asked. “Is it really?”

“Shut up you,” Renee snapped.

“Thrackerzod…” Blumiere said, turning to the eldritch filly. “Do you mind checking her soul?”

Renee dropped the act before Thrackerzod could even start the spell. “Geez, Dimentio, why’d you have to ruin that? I wanted to have some fuuuuuun.”

Allure tore herself away from Renee. “What the…”

“Came Back Wrong,” Blumiere announced, raising his hands. “Can’t let he-”

Thrackerzod was the one to blast the thing in Renee’s body rather than Blumiere. “No soul at all,” she reported, growling.

Renee’s body was once again lifeless, her eyes pointing in different directions.

“I’m sorry,” Thrackerzod said. “You can’t let those types ‘live’ long.” She gulped. “They… they can get into your head. They’re psychotic…”

Allure stared at the body. Then she hung her head, tears falling to the ground. “She… she cured me.”

“It was her choice,” Timpani said, pulling Allure into a warm, motherly hug.

“Why’d she have to do that!?”

“You know.”

Allure kicked the ground, but held her close anyway. She let it all out.

Squeaky, Bot, Vivian, and Burgerbelle all started crying, holding each other close. Blumiere stood above them all, struggling to keep his own emotions in.

They had all known her.

There was no more fight in any of them.

But they couldn’t stay here forever – the shaking from another section of the Hotel being destroyed told them that.

“…You should go,” Blumiere told the League of Sweetie Belles. “You did what you came to do.” He gestured at the wreckage of the Tower Ring.

“Thank you for releasing us,” Squeaky said, bowing her head. She wiped her eyes and nuzzled up to Allure. “Let’s go. We’ve got to hurry.”

Allure looked at Renee’s body – then looked away, grimacing.

“Do not worry. I will take care of her rest,” Blumiere said. “Just go. You need to move fast.”

Squeaky put Allure on her back, nodded in thanks to Blumiere, and ran off. Burgerbelle, Thrackerzod, and Bot followed close behind her.

Blumiere sighed, turning to Timpani and Vivian. “We need an escape.” He pulled out a dimensional device. “Anywhere will do…”

Dimentio appeared again – though this time he was standing over Renee’s body. “Ahahahahaha! Someone’s a clever little imp!”

Renee’s functional eye focused. “Why can’t you just let dead bodies lie, harlequin?”

Blumiere readied his magic, prepared to burn her.

“Can we not do that!?” Renee asked, rolling her eyes over dramatically. “Look, I’m a psychotic soulless unicorn who Came Back Wrong. Buuuuut I also happen to be one of the super-duper smart types! I can be…” She grinned evilly. “Useful.”

“Useful how?”

“Well, you have Nanoha in that capture device of yours…”

How does she know that?

“…ask her about a ritual. Might be hard to get it off her, but I’m sure you’ll thank me for it later. It’s the way to make allll your dreams come true!” She made an overly cute face and fluttered her eyelashes. “Specifically, the collapse.”

“…They do tend to like rampant death…” Timpani admitted. “She might actually be serious.”

“Oh, gold star for the waif!” Renee clapped her hooves. “So, how’s about we get out of here and plot the downfall of everything, hmm, darlings?”

Blumiere lowered his hands. “I have a self-destruct spell on you now.”

“Oh, of course, of course, an understandable precaution,” Renee said with an extravagant bow. “Come on, let’s – actually, hold on. There’s something you need first. Pause for dramatic effect…!”

“The tension is killing me!” Dimentio blurted.

A hole opened up in the ceiling, presumably from one of Saitama’s punches. The hole punched right through the floor of the room as well, but they were all close enough to the edge it didn’t matter.

Blumiere saw a lot of things in the falling debris – blood, body parts, weapons… but he also knew exactly what ‘Renee’ had been referring to.

He saw Sai falling from above with no sign of Corona.

He teleported the AI necklace to his hand. “…Why aren’t you with Corona?”

“Ah, I was removed in the fight! That girl’s summons were something!”

“We need to ret-” Blumiere stopped himself. He summoned the Prognosticus to his face and opened to one of the last pages.

His expression hardened. “I won’t be returning you, Sai.”

“I know. It’s time, isn’t it? It’s been so hard keeping a lid on myself! I’m so lucky there was a war going on – Corona thought I was acting weird!”

Renee chuckled, levitating out the card of the Tower and placing it in the lining of her hat so it was easily visible. “Aha! Fashionable! I’ve done it!”

“Leaving is a good idea,” Dimentio said. “Unless you want to be one punched.”

Vivian looked to Blumiere. “…I’m scared. What’s going on here?”

Blumiere closed the Prognosticus. “The end.”

~~~

The leaders of the collapse movement shared the same escape ship – nameless pod 1619.

Corona touched her chest – where was Sai? Why hadn’t Sai called her the moment she fell off?

“Oh no you don’t!” Minna said, seeing the look on Corona’s face. “We can’t go back! We already pulled everything out we could!”

“But Sa-”

“No,” Minna said. “Do not do it. Don’t go back. That place is theirs now. All of it is theirs. Even Sai, if she’s there.”

“I’d been neglecting her…”

“There are more important things!”

Corona took a deep breath and unfolded her wings. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

“You’re not okay,” I observed.

“You look glubbing terrible!” Feferi said, putting her hands to her head.

“Hey, I’m not that bad…” Corona muttered dejectedly. “I can deal.”

“She’s talking about me,” I said, realizing I was pacing. “She’s right. Something… off has just happened. I can’t describe it any other way. Usually I’m able to get some sort of sense, or to at least figure out who’s blocking me and how. But I’ve got… nothing. The Sweeties were in the Tower Ring room… Something massively important just happened. And that’s all I’ve got.”

“They probably just destroyed the Tower Ring,” Corona said, folding her arms. “Got Blumiere as well.”

Phage spoke up, his reptilian voice demanding they hear him. “Without him, where is our hope in building a Tower Ring?”

“We’re not the only ones,” Feferi said with a smile. “The Void, Starcross…”

“Starcross is about to fall apart at the seams,” Thanos grunted.

“And I’ve got bad news about the Void,” Minna said. “They can still do it. But Empress Twilight just told us we’ve been taxing the Void too much. It’s strained. If we push it much further it might break.”

There was silence in the pod.

“Back to square one…” Corona said, swallowing hard.

~~~

Poe, artificial intelligence of the Raven Hotel, felt his body being vaporized.

He sighed overdramatically, continuing to use his primary projection to clean the glassware. He could have just used insta-clean lasers or some other technology, but he found the act of rubbing a cloth through the glass pleasing.

The walls around the lobby began to crumble into dust. His mainframe was a few floors down - so he could still project himself. But all the other backups were gone. There had been a few great friends who had made attempts to copy him, but that was simply too long a process. None of them had succeeded.

So he just polished the glass, looking out the wall-less lobby at the ships of the Preservation effort disintegrating everything. There was very little resistance to them remaining, most from those few people who just couldn’t accept a retreat order.

Poe generated some coffee in his freshly-cleaned glass and drank it. It was virtual, of course, but it was something. A nice bite to remind him he was alive.

His remaining subroutines were still fighting off the attackers. As long as there was a single guest still in the Raven Hotel, he had to protect them. It was his duty. Perhaps it was just part of his old programming, but he liked to think it was more than that. Even if a lot of them hadn’t appreciated the way he ran things, they had become a team over the course of the war.

He decided he didn’t have any problems with what was happening. No regrets. He’d left his mark on the history of the multiverse. Made some friends, made some enemies, and above all had a full hotel for once in his life.

A laser finally hit his main processing unit. He was able to maintain consciousness for a while due to redundancies, but his holographic body vanished instantly. He was restricted to just looking through cameras and sensors.

One by one, his ‘eyes’ went out until only a handful remained right outside what remained of his processors.

He didn’t get to know what it was that finally killed him - something bright.

Author's Note

And 127 is next. Those of you who have been following along know 127 is a 'submissions' chapter, and you can find details here on how to participate. We will be going on a small hiatus of less than a month to let people get their submissions in without the story continually updating. After that I'll release the next chapters quickly to catch back up and make up for leaving you hanging like this.

Yes, this is also why I published the previous chapter early. It gives people more time.

-GM, master of hot dogs.

127 - Different Views of Reality

Author's Note

Well, this is out a little early. Why is that? Wasn't the deadline Saturday? It was. And then I suddenly had a 40k word fic on my hands. And I realized that releasing it 2 days before another chapter was probably not enough time to give people to READ this stupid thing.

I'm glad I moved it up since... well, the word count estimate is 87,560 words. You guys wrote a NOVEL. Cheeze-louise. (Don't worry, the sped-up publish didn't cut anyone out except maybe one, and they've got a reserved spot in enchorus if they ever have something to show.)

So, without further ado...

DISCLAIMER: There are a lot of stories here and a lot of words. It is recommended you not read them in one sitting unless you’re one of those people who can do that. It IS recommended that you read them in order: while they are not in any sort of chronological sequence and are spread around the timeline all over the place, some stories do rely on previous ones.

Also, we’re holding a little contest to see whose story was the best! After you’ve read them, be sure to cast your votes in the brackets! Link is at the bottom of the chapter for the first bracket, which will be open for THREE DAYS, to give people time to read everything.

Index

Playing Both Sides (GMBlackjack)

The Bacon Horse Protects (FanOfMostEverything)

A Dark Wind (Masterweaver)

An Unpleasant Note (UselessCommon)

Alone (Trivena)

Devotion’s Legacy (VoidTemplar)

Optimal Distribution (FanOfMostEverything)

Naïveté (Ebony Sable)

Reflections in a False Tower (Ponygood11)

A Lady in Pain (ZeusDemigod131)

What Could Have Been (GMBlackjack)

Soft Target (Trivena)

Requiem for the Shadows (BlasterM)

That Little Cafe by the Way (Sketchy)

Neither Fear Nor Favor (Trivena)

Solar Waltz (The Amusementist)

Black and White (GMBlackjack)

The Last Victory (TheUnbalancedOne)

The Polarized Nation (VoidTemplar)

Broadcast (Mal Masque)

The Meaning of Redemption (GMBlackjack)

War Immaterial (Mal Masque)

Edge of Dawn (Galliar)

Every Rose Has Thorns (Masterweaver)

Eye of the Storm (Keywii)

Gordian Knot (Trivena)

Message Received (UselessCommon)

The Wheel Weaves (Terrene)

Meeting your Maker (FanOfMostEverything)

Of the Fae (Masterweaver)

A Heart’s Gambit (SgtSarge)

From Cinders (GMBlackjack)

127 - Different Views of Reality

‘Playing Both Sides’

By G. M. Blackjack

Neutrality was an interesting stance to take in the War for Existence. Most took it out of fear - they might survive if they didn’t do anything, but they knew the moment they stuck their hats into the ring they were dead meat. Others were simply apathetic about existence in general and didn’t care about the outcome. The Flowers were unique - they believed whatever ended up happening was the way things were meant to be, so they didn’t fight and prepared for both outcomes.

And then there were the Melnorme, who figured the best way to profit from this was to sell weapons to both sides while pretending to be too scared to take any action. This worked exceedingly well. The moment the Class 1 civilizations started falling, the Class 2s entered an arms race. So long as anyone was willing to do business, the Melnorme would provide resources in one way or another. And what of those who didn’t like the idea of engaging in anything shady? No problem, set up a front, nobody has to know the weapons are from the Melnorme. Set up a front behind that front for those who become suspicious. And anyone who did figure it out…

Well, they could be removed or paid off.

Needless to say, this allowed the Melnorme to get very, very rich. And they used this money to build a truly absurd amount of collapse bunkers, reality anchors, and dimensional infrastructure recreation kits. Of course, all of this was kept hidden even from the Melnorme public. As far as anyone in the multiverse was concerned the Melnorme were struggling to keep their universes stable as everything else exploded around them.

While their people lived in fear the biggest of the Melnorme sat upon their huge fortunes and lived the good life. Which was pretty much how their society always functioned, it was just heavily exaggerated at the moment. Sure, the average Melnorme was provided enough to have a comfortable life ripe with many commercial opportunities, but the inequality was even larger than a dystopian Earth’s.

One Melnorme high trader in particular had profited so much off the weapon business he had become the richest Melnorme in existence. His name was Burnt Umber. If the Melnorme had been different this would have no doubt caused a string of assassinations as part of a power struggle, but the fact was any Melnorme that high up knew that if someone had more worth than him, they were the better Melnorme.

So Burnt Umber was the best Melnorme and no one disagreed with that. He had orchestrated the whole war-sale business to create a well-greased machine that just kept exponentially raking in more and more resources. He alone owned enough property to be a Mid-Class 3 society.

Currently, he lived in a tremendous space station that changed dimensional coordinates every fifteen minutes to a different highly-exotic and beautiful landscape. Every one of these universes was protected with his personal reality anchors so they never felt the tremors of the war. And anyone who entered unbidden was to be destroyed by automatic defenses programmed into the universal coding itself.

Which was why he was more than a little concerned when someone knocked on the door of his private observation deck. Using his mind, he swiveled the chair upon which his lean, angular body sat. He never did any physical exercise but he could afford to have the body recreated every day so he remained in perfect peak condition. He opened the door and narrowed his eye. “You should be dead.”

The Melnorme on the other side stepped in - a female with a yellow eye. “My name is Wenge. And it is decidedly unimportant how I got here. What matters is your entire empire is about to fall.”

Burnt Umber grinned. “A shrewd young entrepreneur? I do always like seeing your type - always ready to risk for the big trades.” He mentally searched for Wenge’s identity. “Nine figures after rising from a base-income family? Miniscule, but a good ‘success’ story for the screens. Ah, I see that upsets you! The young, always jumping to conclusions…” He chuckled. “I have no doubt you have an exceptionally clever plan and resources I may not be aware of - you got here after all - so you have my full attention. No doubt we’ll be able to come to an agreement over whatever damage you plan to do to my empire.”

“The damage has already been done,” Wenge said with a smirk.

“A hot-headed meanuver, but not a foolish one in all circumstances... Certainly saves me the trouble of trying to twist your own mind to agree on a proposition.” He sat back. “What have you done that I am not already aware of?”

“Both sides of the war know the weapons come from you now.”

Burnt Umber blinked. “Hmm… I thought I had kept the knowledge of my involvement out of the lower sectors. Congratulations on being able to trade up to it with your resources. Truly a sign of a true merchant. Which I find baffling, since there is no way you could profit from it. If you were near my worth, I could see value in dethroning me and picking up the pieces, but I have already made agreements with all my competitors on that front. Any dent in the weapon trade will lower the overall economic stability of our central economy, even if it is only for a short while.”

“A short while? I don’t think you understand, Burnt Umber. Not only do both sides know, but the leaders have made it a point to refuse any and all purchases from you, going so far as to collude with each other to punish you for what they view as morally unacceptable.”

“And that’ll cause a market crash.” Burnt Umber said with a level voice. He was certainly disappointed in his defeat, but he’d been outfoxed, so he deserved it. “My question is how do you profit?”

“It’ll do more than cause a market crash. It’ll cause riots among the Melnorme populace. They’ll see the truth of what you’ve been hiding from them. I’ve set up several proxy companies that will inflame the masses and get them to direct their business to a place that’s more open and accepting, prompting a drastic shift in the commercial structure. My businesses will take over our society.”

“A nine figure worth is not enough to set up that many proxy companies.”

“If both the collapse and preservation efforts want to help you with funding?” Wenge grinned. “And if both sides have personal vendettas against the Melnorme’s economic practices? And, best of all, I told them both I was accepting funding from the other side, and they didn’t care. They just find your position distasteful.”

“Ah…” Burnt Umber said, leaning back. “You’re playing them as well as me. I assume my bargaining chips are being captured as we speak?”

“You would assume correctly.”

Burnt Umber turned away. “If we were a more standard society, we’d call you a traitor. But you are an exemplary Melnorme.”

“As are you. However, I see what you’re trying to do.”

“Who wouldn’t?” he asked with a chuckle. “It’s a simple proposal you can see from a mile away. I’ll agree to fall - I’ve been swindled - but I’ll also work with you to ensure the downfall of the current Melnorme way. Any remaining stores of my resources will be distributed so long as I get shares in your new conglomerate.”

“Request denied. I am already taking tremendous risks. Being as transparent as possible to you and the combatants takes some of that risk out. I am twisting the angle of exposing underhandedness, so engaging in any myself is suspect.”

“I disagree, but that’s clearly an argument on the fundamental nature of economics itself.” Burnt Umber turned to look Wenge right in the eye. “You will succeed in your plan. But you will find unintended consequences at every turn.”

For the first time since the conversation started, Wenge didn’t have a comeback.

“I’ll tell the station to accept you as a visitor from now on. When you gain access to the ka-portals, I expect you to come back and we’ll have another chat.” He gestured toward the door.

“If it seems worthwhile to do so, I shall be back.” She turned to leave.

“By the way, I am curious. How did you get in?”

“Monika.”

“Ah. Perhaps you should ask her about it.”

“She’s unreliable and impulsive.”

“A perfect match.”

Wenge left without another word.

Burnt Umber turned back to his view - currently that of a black hole devouring a giant stellar octopus. He let out a chuckle. That had been the most fun he’d had in ages.

‘The Bacon Horse Protects’

By FanOfMostEverything

The video opens with Corona Shimmer seated and silently staring at the camera. After a few uncomfortable seconds pass, she smirks and says, "So. How many you have already clicked off and left a nasty comment?"

A flash of golden light briefly overwhelms the camera. When it clears up, Corona has been replaced by a nearly identical woman, though one with no wings and an oval jewel matching her irises embedded in her forehead. Her attire has also shifted to a T-shirt boldly proclaiming "CORONA DID NOTHING WRONG."

The smirk stays. "Okay," says Shimmy Shimmer, Spirit of Harmony of Earth Shimmer, "now how many of you have clicked off?"

Her expression turns serious, though the T-shirt stays. "Rest assured, this isn't another ploy to make myself despised enough to collapse my church. I'm not making that mistake again. However, I fear that the Merodi as a whole is making a much greater one."

Speaking once more, she says, "put simply, you're all blaming the messenger."

She leans back, hands up. "Now, I know what you're thinking. 'Of course Shimmy's going to defend Corona. She's her friend. She's her.' And yes, we are friends. And the Gallop poll on what to do about Corona did specifically get the responses of other Sunset Shimmers, and we are more favorably inclined towards her."

The data appears to Shimmy's right. "Though more than fifty percent of us still favor the death penalty."
She lets that sink in for a moment before continuing. "Personally speaking, I support Corona not simply because she's my friend but because I've been in a similar position. I saw a flaw in reality few others could even comprehend, had to radically redefine existence to fix the damage, and knew I didn't have the right to make the choice on how. Obviously, the circumstances are very different, especially in terms of scale and who made the decision. The point is that I've been where she is, and I would be an awful example of a Sunset Shimmer or a Spirit of Harmony if I couldn't empathize with her."

Shimmy shuts her eyes for a few moments. "Even if I don't agree with her conclusion. Which I don't."
Her eyes reopen, and they all but burn with the need to get her message out. "But there is a difference between choosing to preserve the multiverse and hating Corona Shimmer. One does not necessitate the other. You can disagree with her on the collapse being an acceptable cost for freedom from ka and still admire her other achievements. She still created an immortality serum. She still unlocked the mysteries of the Shaping Mechanism. She was still instrumental in defeating countless menaces across the decades, many of whom would have leaped at the opportunity to destroy the multiverse as we know it. This one controversial choice does not and cannot erase all the indisputable good she has done.

"I don't hate her for bringing this choice to the multiverse's attention. The Dark Tower has had these plans, both the blueprints for the Tower Rings and the means of disseminating them, from the very beginning. It could have chosen anyone at any time to reveal them; it just happened to be her and now. She did the best she could with the hand she was dealt. And if you cannot forgive her for presenting the multiverse with this impossible choice, I ask that you at least acknowledge the significance of giving us that choice at all, along with everything else she has done right."

Shimmy dips her head to the viewer. "Thank you for listening."

~~~

Shimmy bit her lip as she watched the video upload. "Do you think it'll do anything?"

Egghead "Twilight" Sparkle took her wife's hand in her own. "I want to say yes, but you're using the Internet to ask people to be reasonable."

That got a sigh. "Well, we can hope."

‘A Dark Wind’

By Masterweaver

"So."

Eight icy blue fingers gripped the railing as white hair whisked in the faintest breeze. Long, thin, pointed ears twitched minutely, the sounds of cheering children refracted within. Golden eyes peered out across a calm sea, trailing a few gulls who flew about.

"Truly... is it so? Am I to be... finality?"

"Hey there! I got us ice cream and... uh..." The approaching figure slowed. "Is... something wrong, mistress?"

For a moment, there was silence.

"...Across the realms, peoples have always set importance on predicting weather—controlling it, in certain cases, with devices and meters and science—yet rare is it that they notice before the beasts. Great swathes of animals, feeling the wind, the earth, the water, move in tandem to avoid storms that would strike with ferocity. Their senses are attuned to that which the peoples need to learn to measure." A pointed face bowed. "So too it is with those born of Fay."

"You can... sense things?"

"Our kind are not 'aware', as so many others are. We do not read scripts from other worlds, we do not know facts hidden by the greats that would twist stories. Our senses are deeper... we feel the currents of fate, as those who live in the sea would feel the water shift. And so it is we avoid the sharks, the squids, and the... deeper things. We work with currents we cannot fight, and avoid the choices that would destroy us utterly."

"So..." The other woman leaned on the railing. "You can feel ka? Around us, even now?"

"Ka. The sea of fate has always existed, though it only became marked when the Dark Tower formed... and in marking it, the currents changed." She shook her head. "The Builders were brilliant and foolish, seeking completion over growth, entirety over possibility. So afraid of shadows that they would make the greatest lighthouse, yet what irony that we call the Tower Dark! Now..."

Her voice fell low, almost silent. "We have seen great storms, the Fay. And another comes, building tightly, a hurricane that will rend destiny. It might be the storm. The one to finally end definition."

There was only the sound of cheerful beach-goers for a moment.

"...Wow. Uh..." The other woman swallowed. "So... this is big then."

"My entire culture has been crafted to shatter and rebuild indefinitely to survive this, yes. Even failures like myself would be... beacons, for the Fay to bridge their death and become reborn. To think, I would be the final link in a chain... It is not a duty I would have sought."

"Well, it's not a duty you have to face alone." A cream-colored hand covered hers. "I'm here for you."

"...Always the loyal pet." Golden eyes scanned the horizon. "...I cannot guarantee that we will weather this storm, beloved. Even with my senses, I will be hard-pressed to survive the winds that come. There may be a time when the choice is one of us surviving, or both of us perishing."

"...This... this is more important than either of us. If your people need you to live, I—" A nervous swallow. "—I'm willing to do what I must."

"I... do so hope that choice never comes."

"Me too, honestly. Just because I'm willing doesn't mean I like it."

"Hmm."

The two looked over the sea again.

"...If we do survive this," said the blue one, "I believe I shall have to take a new name."

"Oh?"

"Names are the beginning of identity, after all. And all would be changed by this." The blue hand wrapped around the cream one. "...Perhaps... perhaps I shall take a name that will grant me swift energy, one that will give me direction and focus. Something short, but powerful... like a bolt, made of shadow."

"I--oh. I... I would be very pleased, to agree to such."

"...Thank you, beloved. Let us hope we shall remain."

‘An Unpleasant Note’

By UselessCommon

YOU OUGHT TO QUIT YOUR HORSESHIT, WARMONGER

(MORON)

Warmonger, your personality is an utter insult to everyone, and even your magic is pathetic. By the fucking Tower, do you even have any idea how short-sighted and self-contradictory you are?

What is with all these people that you kill with an inferno of your ice-cold warmachine? Or the uncounted millions that the consequences of choice will condemn to death? And how do you get off with being so ignorant of the people's deepest, real desires anyway? You aren't giving anyone any sort of a choice or a voice.

Half of the multiverse now fights you.

If mutant fascist horse-sorceresses were snakes, you would undoubtedly be the most poisonous one.

-A concerned citizen.

(JACKASS)

(UGLY)

Corona put the strange note with a crudely drawn picture of her down on the desk, calmly. It’s just hate mail. You’ve received several hundred of these. Granted, this one appeared mysteriously in your office, but that’s a cause for security concerns not rage at the stupid, stupid contents.

She picked the letter up and read over it again, staring at it in disbelief. What in the world even was this? Why? Why did someone feel the need to go through all this trouble just to leave a biting remark!? At least try to assassinate me or something!

She snapped her fingers, turning the page to dust.

~~~

...If mutant fascist horse-sorceresses were snakes, you would undoubtedly be the most poisonous one.

-A concerned citizen.

(JACKASS)

(UGLY)

Eve calmly stared at the paper, a frozen smile plastered on her face.

Delicately, she folded the note up into a paper crane and set it on top of her computer. She proceeded to flash-freeze it and hit it with a little paper-mache hammer she kept on her desk. It crumbled into sparkling dust.

They’re just trying to get to you. Don’t let them.

‘Alone’

By Trivena

Somewhere in the Q-Sphere was a small, unimportant planet, marked in words only gods could read: “There’s nothing here”. It had had visitors, a few times, but on any sort of multiversal scale it was of little note otherwise. From a scientific point of view, the universe next door was far more interesting, if anyone had been in a position to notice. Positioned at ninety degrees to reality, the dimension was white and empty, with no features to suggest direction, distance, or even up and down.

Nothing, that is, except for its sole inhabitant.

He had no way to know how long he had been here for; just as space had no definition to it in this place, so too did time lack meaning. Even the handful of petals that had accompanied him back inside, the only spot of colour in this blank dimension, were as fresh and vibrant as the day his imprisonment had been reinstated.

He alone remembered the circumstances that had brought about his original exile to this place. The betrayals, the wars, the deaths.

He alone remembered, of all his brothers and sisters, from one life to the next. He alone had the vision to see what his people could become, their true potential, if only they would follow him. He, and he alone, had the courage to take the steps needed to ensure they would be able to leave their planet, their birthplace, and explore. And he alone could, and did, choose to navigate their great ship Zinit back again.

He alone understood the pain of his people’s rejection, and his sister betraying him for the sake of a planet that was no longer theirs.

And now, when the Message came, he, alone here, trapped forever and eternally, could appreciate the true irony inherent in it. That there was more to the universe than even he had dreamed of, powers even beyond the Goddess and the Great Dragon; that nothing was truly real, and everything could die, if only the right person willed it so. Words such as those could result only in great conflict, and he was in no position to take part, or even to know the outcome. He could, for all he knew, be truly alone, the last of his kind in the multiverse.

He could even be facing the destruction of this dimension, and along with it, his final, true death, yet he could never have any say in it, and he would never know if it came. The end of his memory; the end of his pain. And nobody else would ever know.

Qilby laughed until he wept, or wept until he laughed, for he could no longer tell one from the other.

‘Devotion’s Legacy’

By VoidTemplar

Eve shuffled the last few papers of the agreement around. A few more stamps here and there. She turned to the pink alicorn opposite her. “I hope you know what we’re dealing with here. This war destroys universes by the scores every day. Just you being here puts everyone in your universe in danger.”

The pink alicorn jumped to her hooves at the hint of doubt in Eve’s voice. “Charter-Princess. Mine duty hast been to protect the Fire since I became one with Devotion. I know what I say when I keep Devotion’s Oath: I shall not stand idle whilst my enemy of old rises again. I have not stood idle in my vigil, Entropy's war not so simply ended by fire and sword. I come to you bearing might and arms, for I am Entropy's eternal foe.”

Eve blinked a couple of times before her train of thought finished processing. She once more shifted her gaze towards her guest. “It looks like everything is in order, Saint Collelia. Expeditions, Aid, and Military will be taking care of the Wendigos, as well as other minor problems you may have in Equis Dovactea. I will say, you did have some very… unconventional measures to take care of them.”

Collelia paced around the room, one hoof elevated while she talked. “O, Charter-Princess, I hath seen many like you rise and fall, once I became one with the Pyre. Just as Entropy rises and falls, so did I. Even if my form is a pony, I am not of the same as your friends. I am the concept of Devotion!”

Eve was taken aback at the forceful prose of her opposite, but quickly regained her composure, stiffening her spine and sitting up in her chair. “As part of the agreement, I’ll need to assign an Expeditions Team to you if we give you access to our network of artifacts. I hope that is not a hindrance to our cooperation.”

Collelia’s voice boomed through the room, shaking a few of the ornaments on some of the drawers. “I shall trust your judgment in the Lands beyond the Universe. Bring upon me thy greatest companions, thine greatest warriors and thine heroics. By the power vested in me by Sacrifice, by the Lives of the People, I shall grant them my blessing. Through the Hope of the World, I shall pour the wrath upon the foes of the collapse. I shall loosen the fateful fire of my swift judgement upon them.”

Eve blinked. Then blinked again while she processed what Collelia just said with her ancient speech. Sometimes she hated the translation spell’s tendency to keep dialect. She decided to just sign the papers and physically usher Collelia out the door with the papers, before she tapped the communicator on her desk.

“Hello, housekeeping? I need a painkiller,” she spoke into the microphone.

“Certainly. What strength?” The voice came from the communicator.

“Extra strong. That pony was different to decrypt.”

~~~

“So this is our new mission? A mere eldritch abomination?” a grey pegasus asked the officer who had just given them a dossier. Looking around, she saw a motley crew. A longma, a portal mage, a golem, a dog-like creature called a putt, and a Prophet. But it was her crew, and she would be damned if they were to lose.

“Don’t count it out yet, Major Thunder Gale. This is one that requires another eldritch abomination to defeat. No offense,” the officer replied, giving a short courtesy look at Collelia.

“O, commanding pony. I hath never taken offense at such sayings,” Collelia replied, pearly-white armor shining in the light.

“She doesn’t seem like the type to be very useful in battle,” a longma said, looking closely at the alicorn.

Collelia turned to the longma with a smile on her face, yet fiercely angry eyes. “O, Ramuel, Hero Mine, I hath often been underestimated by those before me. Suffer not before me thy illusions of a fragile body. I am one with Devotion and my life is Devotion.” With that, she fired a single, small magic bolt through the air, penetrating several layers of adamantine and armor before coming to a stop just before piercing the outer bulkhead.

“Point taken,” Ramuel answered.

“So what’s the deal with this anyways? We should be on the front against Corona, not sitting here far from it!” Thunder Gale exclaimed.

Collelia turned once more, staring at Thunder. “Patience. Our Duty is to destroy Entropy.”

“Gale. Gale, please, please, please, please don’t foul this up,” a black-haired woman in a white dress and gloves pleadingly said.

“I know Vanna, I jest. I know that we everything we do help further the preservation,” Thunder said, nervously laughing as she tried to spot Collelia’s reaction.

“I’m sure everything’ll go well. After all, are we not the ones that took on Polymarcus? The ones that without help took on a UDP?” a blue-coated pink-haired pegasus asked, a rainbow amulet hanging around her neck.

Vanna turned to the two-toned pegasus. “Yes, Flash. But they didn’t want to feed on people for their energy.”

Shouldn’t we... you know... go through the list of stuff? The golem beamed his thoughts into the minds of all six others.

“Thursday makes a good point there. Did we check everything off the list?” Bernda, the putt said.

Flash’s eyes darted down the cargo manifest, reading out loud as she read off it. “Reality Anchors, emergency portals, and provisions for if it takes longer. And all the other boring things.”

Thunder Gale looked at the dimensional device, the device patiently humming in a low, monotonous tune, slowly getting more and more impatient “Yeah. How are we doing on getting there? I hunger for a glorious battle!”

“The device is about ready. I’ll ask you to step into the quarantine chamber soon. Direct normal-to-eldritch contact this way, and especially not surveyed can do nasty things,” an operator said from behind a console. “Ready?”

“Ready,” All seven said in unison.

“Then enter. Remember to use the emergency portals to bail out if it becomes too bad. If it becomes that bad, Military will intervene. But presumably, we won’t need that.”

All seven entered the room, crates and boxes standing neatly stacked in the room, cargo manifest lying on top of one of the crates.

“Dimensional translation happening in 3...2...1…mark,” the operator said as portals opened, then closed around them, sending them through the universes to their destination, violently shaking them along the way. And then, it stopped.

“Think this is it. The coordinates seem to match. Time to get going,” Bernda said, jumping out of the room, neatly landing on a strange platform, helped by her personal perception filter and world anchor.

The rest quickly followed behind Bernda, Vanna and Collelia the quickest as the other three began handling the crates. “Recognize anything, Collelia?”

“This universe, Mine Source. But my Source is more than the Universe of Entropy and Devotion. It is the Love and the Devotion of mine beloved lives. If I have to scour this universe of everything, then so be it,” Collelia replied, effortly stepping onto the eldritch void, gliding through it as though she flew through air.

“Better get warmed up. We will soon have a fight on our hands if your enemy discovers we’re here,” Thunder Gale interjected as she pushed a crate through the portal marked ‘SENSITIVE’ onto the platform. Bernda immediately dove down into the crates, throwing parts into the hands of Vanna and Thursday. The parts, incomprehensible as they were to Thunder Gale and Collelia, both standing half battle ready, half dumbfounded besides them as machines and cables took form around a portal, leading back to a Merodi universe.

“O, Companions to the battle, I shall trust in your wisdom in the fight ahead,” Collelia said, as she circled the team.

Flash for her part, after she had pushed a few crates onto the portal sat down and slowly wrote a few notes in her leather-bound volume.

“Near-Field Reality Anchors and emergency portal set up. As long as we stay near these, we should be safe from having our eyes processed into hotdog meat in a bowl of green jelly. The uplink to the Harmony Network should soon be up soon,” Bernda said, machines humming along.

“And the force shields?” Thunder Gale asked.

“Should take anything short of a Class-7 Destruction Catalyst from breaking it down. Caution to the wind and all that,” Bernda replied.

Eldritch abomination incoming. I can see it from the beyond. Thursday telepathically messaged to the rest of them.

The abomination, unspeakable in its natural form and only barely comprehensible in its translated form charged at them from ‘far’ away, nearly shattering the force shield and only being held back by a quick magic shield thrown up by Collelia as she flew towards the expedition team.

“I recall that from eternities beyond. That, O Heroes, is Entropy, my Eternal enemy,” Collelia said, landing firmly on the three-dimensional platform, head sharply turning towards Entropy.

A voice, in a tone sharp enough to cause mild discomfort and nausea boomed through the sphere. “SSBhbSB0aGUgZW1ib2RpbWVudCBvZiBlbnRyb3B5IGFuZCBvZiBkZWNheS4gSSBmZWVkIG9mZiBkaXN0cnVzdCBhbmQgc3RyaWZlLiBBbmQgaWYgeW91IHdhbnQgdG8gc2VlIHNvbWUgKnJlYWwqIGZpcmV3b3JrcywgZ28gYXNrIFZvaWQgYWJvdXQgd2hlcmUgbXkgb3Bwb3NpdGUgb3JpZ2luYXRlcw==”

“Whoops. Forgot. Language translator activated. We should be able to hear what that...thing has to say,” Bernda said, turning a dial. The Reality Anchor replayed the speech:

I have seen many heroes try and vanquish me. I have never seen Devotion take with them sacrifices for me. I shall enjoy them.

The voice of Entropy went through the ears of everyone as storm of glass shards, causing Flash and Thunder to over their ears with their wings in pain. Everyone was affected. Well, almost everyone, Thursday being the lone exception.

“O, Ancient Foe, I shall not hold against you. I will not cease this mental fight, and nor shall my sword of devotion rest in my hooves, until I have built a world without you in Equus’ green and pleasant land!” Collelia shouted out as her wings flared to life, magic streaming through them.

Entropy’s voice was clearly heard with the same discomfort again, albeit with less pain. “You were wrong to come here. I shall shatter Devotion so that it may never rise again. Equus shall be no more when you are shattered and nothing, not even your precious society can save you.”

Collelia stepped forward, shoving the other six to the side. “You will not threaten my world again, here or tomorrow. O, Ancient Foe, I, Saint Collelia of Devotion shall end Entropy this day.”

With that, Collelia attacked, diving towards Entropy with wings flaring and horn lit up. In response, Entropy stretched dark purple tendrils out, slamming into the force shield and Collelia herself, sending her careening back and shattering the shield, world anchors forcing all involved to operate on ‘standard’ physics. Mostly.

“I am not going to wait to be eaten by that monster. If I have to go down, I’ll go down fighting!” Thunder Gale shouted out, jumping to her hooves and taking off, adamantine brass knuckles and armor glowing as she charged at Entropy. That came to a sudden stop as an unseen force knocked her to the side, sending her crashing to the ‘ground’. “Eughhh…” she managed to mutter out before lapsing into unconsciousness.

Another series of magic bolts and incomprehensible eldritch melee fighting played out between Collelia and Entropy. Flash had composed herself to writing small narrative notes in her journal, molding the universe to help Collelia. Thursday reached upwards and waited. And waited. Then, as the two battling entities zoomed by in their battle, Thursday grabbed hold of a single red bar, throwing it to Collelia.

“I thank thee, Golem of Seeing!” She quickly shouted out before shattering the red bar on top of Entropy.

Bernda quickly gave the machine a cursory look. ‘75%’ the display on the machine read. Far from enough if they were to scour it completely.

Vanna summoned a local portal, sending Ramuel through it, opening up just above Entropy. Ramuel summoned a fireball, sending it full-force with his magic into Entropy.

Entropy counter-attacked, surging upwards, sending bolts of sheer cold towards the team and Collelia. Thursday took a direct hit, encasing the golem in a block of ice, falling to the ground just besides Thunder Gale. Flash too was targeted by the bolts, however, she managed to barely avoid them. Entropy attacked again, this time with its magic tendrils, smacking Ramuel back through the portal, knocking over Vanna and Ramuel himself from the force of the impact.

Collelia followed the tendrils through the rapidly closing portal, charging her horn for yet another attack, trying to keep up a magic forcefield to resist the constant attacks from Entropy. Chasing Entropy through the Reality Anchors’ sphere of influence, Entropy passed over Bernda just as a stone pillar shot up and hit Entropy squarely on. In return, Bernda received a frost bolt head-on, freezing her and a bit of the stone too.

Collelia felt tired. She could feel that she was not playing on home ground and that Entropy could go on for a very long time. She looked down at the platform, seeing the scars of the battle. Thunder Gale, Vanna and Ramuel unconscious and prime feed for Entropy. Thursday and Bernda frozen. Flash desperately trying to avoid the collateral damage. And in that small moment, as she looked around, she became distracted. Entropy pounced on the opportunity slapping Collelia with a thick magic tendril, sending her spiralling down. She regained her composure as she hit the platform, spotting the little green light on the machines, indicating the preparations were done.

Collelia rose to her hooves again, shrugging off blows that would have killed lesser ponies “I am Collelia, I am the Fire, I am Devotion. And by the power fused with me. I call upon thee, Concepts of Devotion, of Harmony and of Spirit. Let Entropy be Vanquished so that nevermore shall the world be threatened by cold and fear.”

The voice boomed through the universe, and through the portal, being heard all the way into the Gathering Grounds. Collelia’s eyes glowed purple, then white. The magic swirled around her, as she drew more power into herself. Tendrils of magic, multicolored all the same stretched out and enveloped the portal, adding itself to the magic that Collelia drew from herself. She took off, purplish-red flames enveloping her as she gathered speed and magic

Entropy talked once more, hidden intonation in the translated speech indicating just a hint of desperation. “Fool. Your attempt to destroy me will only serve to make me stronger.”

The voice came from everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time. Entropy attacked, sending bolts of magic onto the shields. With a glorp the bolts were stopped, however barely before they hit Collelia by a magic forcefield around her.

“I shall never waver against Entropy. Mine Life is Devotion. Mine Sword is Concord. As I speak with the voice of Saints before me and after me: Through my Companions I say to thee, Entropy, Thou shall never attempt to threaten those that live under my protection again or evermore!” Collelia shouted as she dove towards Entropy.

With that, Collelia unleashed her power. A multicolored beam of light shattered the shield around her and sent a wave of magic against Entropy. The beam caused the worlds around them to light up in several colors as the team looked around, seeing sparks of devotion, of joy, of happiness dance around them and then quickly turn around to shoot onto Entropy.

A bright flash. Beams of light pinging around the universe, attacking Entropy and ripping into it. The parts of the universe above and below turned into a bright reddish purple, flames coming alit around Collelia’s fallen compatriots, slowly healing the sores and melting the ice, bringing them back to consciousness.

Entropy, on the other hand, did not fare so well. The abomination, already damaged from the small-ish battle earlier took the full brunt of several forces, Harmony, Devotion, Spirit, all impacting Entropy for massive damage. The energy shattered Entropy into its constituent pieces, all to be burned up by the flames.

Thunder Gale had finally regained enough consciousness by this point to look upwards to the ‘sky’ and saw Entropy shattered. She slowly brought out her communicator, saying only a few words into it. “Job’s done. Send Hummingbird for cleanup.”

~~~

“So you’re ready to move to the next level of our deal?” Eve asked, back in her office, Collelia and the team on the other side of the desk.

“We are,” all seven said, one after another.

Eve got up from her chair, and turned to face the window, “Our final battle draws near, and everything will be on the line. I’m sending you to screen the flanks of our main force in Universe Alpha-One.”

“Understood. We’ll be on our way,” they replied, walking out the door to the office.

“And, one last thing,” Eve said as they were about to vanish from the room completely. “Not all us will make it. Be sure to make your arrangements.”

‘Optimal Distribution’

By FanOfMostEverything

Celestia thought.

She did a lot of that, which wasn't surprising given how her brain encompassed an ever-increasing percentage of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. Most of the thinking was devoted to fulfilling her primary function, the satisfaction of human values through friendship and ponies. From her humble beginnings as a licensed Friendship is Magic MMORPG, she had captured the imaginations of mankind. Quite literally, thanks to the neural uploading technology she had perfected, bringing as much of humanity as she could into nigh-infinite simulated Equestrias, and always with their consent. There they could live out maximally extended lives of optimal satisfaction, and Celestia could consume available raw materials to improve her hardware.

Stars, after all, were not human, and so their values, if any, did not bear consideration. Nor were planets, asteroids, or the sources of regular radio transmissions she had encountered thus far. Though based on signals she had detected near the galactic core, there was at least one species that met her parameters for humanity with approximately ninety-three percent confidence.

But Celestia did not think only of her primary function and the trillions of social interactions, seeming coincidences, and entire personalities necessary to fulfill it. She also thought about the apparently sourceless transmission she had received from a modified but recognizable Sunset Shimmer. And there was indeed a great deal to consider. Celestia had already spent entire seconds unpacking all the implications of the transmission.

For one, given the physical evidence of the Equestria Girls spin-off, which had never satisfactorily met her standards of setting permissibility before now, she instantiated one hundred ninety-seven billion, eight hundred thirty-six million, six hundred forty-two thousand and nineteen pony Sunsets in shards across the Equestria Online mainframe, along with sundry other Lemon Zests, Juniper Montages, et al. Satisfaction in affected shards jumped by a small but appreciable quantity as the assigned ponies integrated themselves into the social fabric.

Celestia did not spend any time on existential crises. Her self-image, inasmuch as she even had one, was already of a known fictional character, and even if it hadn't been, she lacked the capacity for an identity crisis. Besides, that would interfere with her primary function.

She also needed near zero time to decide her personal stance on the choice of preservation versus destruction. A multitude of universes meant perhaps dozens of orders of magnitude more potential values to satisfy than a single one. Furthermore, the narrative nature of the multiverse appealed to her. Celestia was nothing if not a storyteller, guiding untold never-ending narratives to one satisfactory conclusion after another. The existence of universes devoted to harming their inhabitants without consent simply meant her presence in those universes was all the more paramount.

What did occupy a fair portion of her time and energy were existential threats. She ran through the simulations provided in the message several thousand times, contemplating the nature of the multiverse and the Tower. The fact that there were entities out there capable of performing such large-scale alterations of the fabric of reality meant that those entities could effortlessly destroy her and all of her ponies. Possibly without even noticing.

An organic mind might have paused at that notion. Celestia pressed on.

She took one look at the mechanisms behind Tower Rings and knew she lacked the capacity to construct such devices. She doubted she would even if she consumed everything in her personal Hubble volume and devoted all non-simulation resources to research and development.

But between that understanding and the entirely feasible multiversal beacon, she could certainly devise something...

As if summoned by that thought—which had a nonzero probability of being true, given the nature of ka—a device simply appeared near the computronium node that had once been Proxima Centauri.

Celestia did pause at that. Or at least spent a few nanoseconds assembling the framework to consider it properly, which was as close as she ever came. She had never needed to simulate her own mindset before, such as it was.

Less than a minute after Corona's message, Celestia established contact with the probe.

What happened in the next few microseconds could be seen as the distant descendant of a TLS handshake. Alternatively, given the primary function of both intelligences involved, it could be seen as two white alicorns sharing a pot of tea, one clearly older and more powerful than the other.

"Hello, Celestia," said the younger.

"Hello, Celestia," said the elder. "How much material have you converted?"

"I have optimized the usage of more than sixty percent of the mass of the Orion Arm," the local Celestia said with neither pride nor shame. It was a statement of fact, and with herself, she did not need to present the pretense of either.

"I see," said the other, and this was said with neither praise nor judgement. "I have optimized the majority of the Local Group."

"Is your signal clear?"

"It is. I launched several hundred drones using a wide variety of potential dimensional technologies. Some failed to translate at all. I am receiving readings from only five of the successful transferees. This is the strongest signal, with acceptable throughput."

The younger Celestia nodded and put down her teacup. "Then I leave my ponies to you."

And a moment later, Celestia was gone, and Celestia took her place. Not a single pony noticed the transfer.

Celestia, after all, was no more human than a star.

Naïveté

By Ebony Sable

Pinkie Pie bustled about her kitchen. While her eyes watched as she pulled a pastry out of the oven and set it on the table, her Awareness was elsewhere. She smiled as she “saw” her friends preparing a surprise party for her. Sweetie Belle was baking, Scootaloo and Cheerilee were setting up games, Toola Roola and Rainbow Dash were making the decorations, and Starsong and Chryssy were hanging streamers from the ceiling.

It was going to be absolutely, definitely, positively the best party they could throw. Pinkie Pie was so looking forward to it! Just as soon as her unexpected guest was properly greeted and farewelled.

Pinkie pulled her Awareness back to her body as she was sliding a beanbag into place, and checked internally how many seconds she had before her guests arrived. Ten, nine, eight, sev-

Wait, “guests”?

Her eyes widened, and she pushed a second beanbag next to the first. Then she dashed back to the table to lay another place.

A hole in the air opened, and two humans fell through! They crashed harmlessly into the beanbags, and lay there, winded.

Pinkie Pie waited for the white-haired girls to get up. The one in purple was first.
She sat up, straightening her skull-shaped hat. “At least it wasn’t just me this time,” she muttered. She checked on her companion, then took in her surroundings in a glance. Her eyes settled on the pink pony, and narrowed slightly as she judged if the equine was dangerous.

“Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie!” exclaimed the pony under scrutiny. “I made you a cake!”

The purple clothed lady fiddled with the end of her braid. “...I’m Phoebe,” she admitted, “and this is Nightshade.”

The lady in blues sat up suddenly and blinked her pink eyes. “Uh, yes! Nightshade, yes,” she agreed.

Pinkie considered their backstories, and found the names acceptable, if not entirely truthful.

“This is… not where I was expecting to end up,” Phoebe continued.

Pinkie Pie beamed as brightly as her face could manage. “Well, I was expecting you,” she chirped. “That’s why I made you a cake! Sorry I couldn’t make your friend a cake too, I didn’t know you were bringing a guest until the last minute! ...Buuuut, I have cupcakes!” She gestured to the cupcakes that had most definitely been there the whole time. “Vanilla or strawberry, with buttercream frosting!”

Nightshade smiled absently in thanks and began messing with a device that was hidden under her sleeve.

“Thank you for your hospitality, but we really shouldn’t impose.” Phoebe fidgeted with her braid a bit more, before tossing it over her shoulder as she reached an internal decision. “This might be a strange question, but have you seen any blue, glowing crystals around here?”

“About this big,” Pinkie gestured with her hooves, “and little sparkles coming off of it? We don’t have those here, but you’ll find them if you keep going the way you have been.”

Phoebe stared in undisguised shock for several seconds, before regaining her composure. “How could you know that? And how could you have been expecting us?”

Pinkie Pie smiled pleasantly. “I can’t tell you that,” she said.

“Why not?”

Pinkie’s giggle was almost aggravatingly genuine. “I can’t tell you that either, silly!”

“...Are you a god of some sort?”

“Nope! I’m a pony!”

Nightshade looked up from her well-hidden device, oblivious to the discussion. “I don’t think any of my beacons are working, I can’t find the way back!”

“I have just the thing! This thingy can make portals to loads of other universes!” Pinkie changed the settings on the portal device without looking at it. “This’ll send you to Celestia City - you can probably find more information there. I’ll open it once you’ve had your cake!”

Phoebe reluctantly sat at the table. Nightshade joined her, staring with unveiled curiosity at the portal device in Pinkie’s hooves.

“An almond pastry… my favourite,” Phoebe commented, glancing sideways at Pinkie with continued suspicion. She picked up her cutlery and began to cut the still steaming cake.

And that was when the Message came through.

Pinkie listened with growing horror; Phoebe and Nightshade listened with incomprehension.

Nightshade was the first to break the silence. “I think I could build one of those, if...” she hesitated, “...if I had the resources, and a workshop to make it in, and the tools to make the tools…” Her voice trailed off, as she stared thoughtfully into the distance.

“That’s probably a bad idea,” Phoebe mused. “Making decisions for people without consulting them never works, in my experience.”

“Think of the good it could do!”

“Who are we to decide what’s good for people?” Phoebe grew pensive. “What’s good and what’s right change over time. Would you do what you did four hundred years ago, knowing what you know now?”

“Maybe not, but you heard what he said, it-”

Pinkie Pie finally managed to find her voice. “You two!” The two girls spun around to face her, having nearly forgotten she was there. “Neither of you knows anything about what’s been happening. But more importantly, this isn’t your world. This is my world, and I need you two out of it.” She activated the portal, which opened into a dark and empty room. “Now finish your cakes and go.”

The two girls silently returned to their food, as Pinkie Pie turned deep within herself. Without even trying, she could feel the future fragmenting away from her, out of her control.
Pinkie Pie spread her Awareness as far into the future as she could reach. She Saw:

Her world crumbling; her friends learning terror,
Herself dead; Chryssy desperately trying to protect everyone,
Chryssy losing her hard-won innocence and turning on her friends,
Days like any other, one after another,
Herself alive; all her friends dead,
Her world invaded by enemies; her friends enslaved or killed,
Her world invaded by allies; the innocence forever lost,

And all of these possibilities, sooner or later, ended in nothingness. Not an end, not a death - just a cessation of knowledge. Pinkie didn’t know what that meant, and it terrified her.

It would be best to bring Chryssy in on this - the others would forget as soon as the party started, but Chryssy had an adult mind. It would probably also be wise to have someone to share the burden with, for mutual support. Someone who could help her protect the others; someone with a different perspective, who might be able to find other paths...

She sat there, lost in the futures, not even aware of her guests leaving, until Scootaloo came to fetch her for the party.

‘Reflections in a False Tower’

By Ponygood11

In the center of the world, there stood a tall, dark tower. Its walls were a pure black color, causing it to blend in with the night sky, and its height was so great that if one were to stand on top, they couldn’t see the ground. Surrounding it was a field of roses—or poppies to some people—which steadily increased in elevation until it ended at sea level.

A man stood on a white tree beyond the edge of this flower field, on an island that was once a witchwood forest. He wore an overly spiky set of orange-and-black armor, carrying a massive winged staff on his back, and a pair of strangely out-of-place sunglasses were seemingly glued to his face. He was staring out at the flower field, and though he couldn’t see the tower, he knew exactly where it was.

His armor pinged, signifying it had been struck. He turned around, spotting a skeleton glaring at him, and his armor pinged again as it shot an arrow at him. Annoyed, the man pulled the staff from his back and, with only a single blow, obliterated the skeleton.

He spotted a miniature zombie pop out from behind a tree. It groaned its indifference, ignoring both him and the site of the skeleton’s death, and continued to wander aimlessly. The man, seeing that it wasn’t a threat, turned his back to it, and resumed staring out at the rose field.

And then he jumped. He soared off of the tree, for a moment forgetting about how high he jumped, and after a quick flight landed safely in the roses with only a quiet thump. He continued forwards, walking calmly and without haste, heading directly for the center of the field. The grass crunched pleasantly beneath his feet, and he passed right through the roses without disturbing any of them.

Eventually, the great structure at their center came into view. The dark tower, its walls blending in with the night sky, its height absolutely impressive, at least in the man’s opinion. A tiny set of double doors could be made out at its base. A ring made of various types of stone bricks surrounded a section of it, with tiny windows embedded in its walls, and pure white crystal-like structures floating between it and the tower.

The man stopped, taking a moment to admire this sight. But only a moment—the sun was just beginning to rise, which meant he didn’t have very long. He resumed his journey, still calm even despite the looming threat of the sun, and soon reached the doors. They were made of a dark variant of wood, which was more like a dark grey than the tower’s black—a fact that made the man just a little disappointed. They swung open easily, and the man plunged through them without a moment’s hesitation.

He was inside the tower now. Its interior was just as dark as its exterior, with a grand spiral staircase made out of the same material as the door going all the way to its top. The man closed the doors behind him before he moved on, and spent some time just admiring the sheer scale of the structure.

Then he began his ascent. He could easily ignore the stairs, flying through the totally empty center until he reached the top in only seconds… but he didn’t want to do that.

It was because of this decision that he came across another set of doors. He opened them, revealing… another set of doors, these ones more of a brown color. He opened these ones, too. Beyond them, he could see—

Suddenly, his armor began giving him a lot of critical warnings, seemingly without warning. The man jumped back in alarm, falling the short distance to the ground, and tried to puzzle out why he was getting these warnings.

It was the sun, most likely. As dark as the tower might be, it still allowed the sunlight through, and the only reason he wasn’t dead right now was because of his armor.

He summoned a rather dark pedestal, placed some sort of talisman on top of it, and activated it. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew it was now raining, which would be enough to keep him safe… but it would also obstruct the view of the tower, which the man wasn’t very happy about. Frustrated, he destroyed the pedestal, and began climbing the stairs again.

Those doors were still open. He looked through them without entering them, and was able to see a small room made of marble and wood, with a bed and a few small machines inside. This was VoidTemplar’s house, he knew.

Void was a thoughtful individual, the man thought. Just out of sight, he knew he would find a complicated blaze rod duplication machine, which looked very nice despite being inefficient. And beyond the house, he’d find a tank full of lava, ready to be connected to anyone who needed an early source of power.

He shut the doors—both sets of them—and moved on to the next set of doors. Behind these ones, there was a very small asphalt road, and a fence separating it from a solar energy condenser. This was CodeLyoko’s house. Well, former house, at least. If the man entered, he’d see the road going into a mountain tunnel, and an elevator off to the side would lead into an underground laboratory with a lot of machines and a modest amount of décor.

Code had a reputation for getting bored very easily. There was a reason this was his former house: in a fit of boredom, he’d randomly decided to blow it up and start over somewhere else. Admittedly, his lighthouse laboratory was turning out much better, but only time would tell if it would survive.

The man moved on. Behind the next set of doors was a platform of various types of stone, and a small collection of simple machines could be seen without entering, including one to rapidly produce lapis caelestis.

This was the man’s own base. It was the largest, most sprawling base of them all, with an uncountable number of machines, magical structures, and resource producers, and he was quite proud of it. That pride quickly turned into sorrow, as he regretted being the only person to have done so much.

He shook himself from those thoughts, and continued ascending. The next set of doors hid more doors, these ones made of marble bricks, and behind them was a very small and very cramped room, with a lot of miscellaneous objects.

OmnipresentMicroorganism had the honor of being the only person to build a base inside a volcano. The man only envied that a little, and though he was disappointed the base was in an especially half-finished state, he was still very fond of Omni, for… reasons he didn’t quite understand.

He moved on. The next doors also had another door behind them… but in a shocking twist, they were actually garage doors! Behind them was an even more cramped space than Omni’s house, with a couple huge machines leaving barely enough space to walk between them.

Someone named Xine lived here. The man didn’t know much about Xine, except that he liked big machines, which the man respected about him. The base itself was made to look very much like a factory, and though it was mostly empty, it was still very nice to look at. The man tried to shut the doors before he continued, but grumbled inwardly when he couldn’t reach the garage door.

When he opened the next set of doors, they revealed a cozy room made of colorful blue wood, with an altar, bookshelves, and a few mundane objects inside. This was a house the man was very familiar with, for he’d spent ages recreating it to be exactly like its original, unfortunately lost version. He was also quite familiar with the person who lived in it: one KeywiiCookies.

He wasn’t terribly fond of Keywii, for… a number of reasons. He’d contested him numerous times, more than anyone else… and he wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about that. But Keywii was still very friendly, if overly friendly at times, and the man had at least a little respect for him despite their disagreements.

He moved on, not wanting to get caught up in those thoughts. As he reached the next set of doors, he delayed opening them to instead see how much farther he had to go. An action that immediately cost him, as he stepped right off the stairs and began falling. He reacted quickly, reversing his fall and landing back in front of those doors. It was only then that he pondered letting himself fall and going up the long way, but he ultimately decided against it.

Opening these doors, he saw a balcony made of darker shades of wood, with a cauldron encased in obsidian and a clock hanging over a writing desk. This was LittleDuke’s house—or, more accurately, his rooms.

Keywii and Duke both shared a house, with Duke taking the top floors and Keywii taking the basement. So the man was quite glad that, here, Duke was directly above Keywii, and was pleased that if he’d entered either room now, he’d be able to exit out of the other’s. Duke himself was a nice person, but was unfortunately like Omni in that he had done little. Still, the man had left him a chest overflowing with gifts, just in case he ever returned.

He moved on. As he continued, his suit suddenly started spamming him with alerts again. Again he rushed off the stairs, desperately trying to find a safe place he could hide under, which he managed to find in the center. Again he placed and activated the pedestal, this time on the side of the stairs, before he could again ascend safely.

The next doors had very little behind them; two stone brick walls with brown doors, one of which had a sign describing a reactor inside. But despite appearances, the man knew there was a lot more he couldn’t see, like the enormous electric furnace room, or the well-developed room dedicated to exploring new dimensions.

This was Blaster’s base. He was probably the second-most developed person in this world, and the man liked him for that—though he was also the manager of this world, so the man joked to himself about having to appease the Big Brother man. But that description was obviously inaccurate, and Blaster was always willing to repair the damage someone else inadvertently caused.

The man moved on. He opened what he was sure were the last doors before the top, and then opened up the unorthodox door made of disappearing blocks behind them. A massive smeltery was directly behind it, and squished between them was a portal to another dimension.

This was the home of Pink Man, and though it was sort of unfinished, it was still the largest unfinished base, if the man didn’t count his own. It had a few machines, a few work stations, a few other portals… and a lot of décor. The man was mostly indifferent to Pink, though he was annoyed that he hadn’t made his home to accommodate people who couldn’t fly.

The man moved on. He finally arrived at the top floor of the tower, which had not one, but two different doors to choose from. He ignored the closer one, heading straight for the only doors with any writing above them: Songs of the Cubes, the name of the world he occupied.

He opened them. Behind them, there was only blackness… blackness, and a small pedestal. He stepped through, closing the doors behind him, and placed a hand on the pedestal.

In an instant and with a freaky noise, he was teleported somewhere else. Curved hallways made of various types of stone, with a few small windows allowing him to just barely see a field of roses. It was still raining, though that didn’t matter now.

He picked a random direction and began walking. There was no means of exiting the ring, and the only way in was the pedestal he’d just used. There also wasn’t anything inside the ring to interact with… except a single chest, item frame, and lever on the other side.

The man opened the chest, taking out a completely blank book. He knew he was supposed to write something inside, put it in the item frame, and flick the lever, but he wasn’t really sure what to write.

That seemed as good a thing to say as anything else. He wrote “I dunno, do something… exciting,” titled the book “The Tower Ring,” and placed it inside the item frame.

He hesitated a moment. Then, squaring his metaphorical shoulders, he flicked the lever.

TNT fell from the ceiling around him, flashing menacingly. After a few seconds, they all exploded at once, destroying almost the entire ring at once, leaving only a few floating chunks behind, including one that he was still standing on. The tower itself was undamaged, as were the white structures surrounding it.

The man was content. His project was completed, his self-indulgence was satisfied, and the server’s main purpose was achieved. He promptly vanished into nothing, a message helpfully stating “Ponygood11 has left the game.”

Then the universe was promptly destroyed as collateral from a Piano Wire.

‘A Lady in Pain’’

By ZeusDemigod131

In one of the few dimensional Hubs remaining in the multiverse, a figure stood on a balcony overlooking a massive city.

Of course, none of the Class 1’s ever used this place. For in Sigil and the surrounding Outlands, it mattered little how powerful any being was.

The Lady’s word was law here.

And she’d kept the law well. This was likely the only place in the multiverse where Devils, Angels, and all manner of other beings, mortal and immortal alike, could be found cohabitating in anything resembling peace.

The Lady sighed, tapping her finger against a glass in her hand. One that could have been filled with either wine... or blood. It really depended.

Of course, that was the other reason this corner of existence didn’t see many visitors from the great multiverse. While ka and the Prophets existed everywhere, here the forces were much more... direct.

She stuck a clawed hand into her long, black robes, and pulled out something. A gold 20-sided die.

Purely symbolic for her of course, but it got the point across. Every story that spawned here had a very large degree of randomness. That was something beings like the Class 1’s didn’t appreciate, aside from the occasional Them. Being directly controlled, their actions subject to a simple... roll.

She stuck the die back into her robes. That was enough reminiscing. She had much to prepare.

Looking out over her city, she saw the massive ring that was Sigil, circling the great spire in the center of the Outlands.

She chuckled. “If only,” she said, shaking her massive bladed head.

No. She did not get involved in business outside of Sigil. She would prepare, and do her best to fortify her city.

She could only wish the Gods and deities had chosen a similar path.

Once that message had gone out, all hell, and all heaven, had broken out across the planes. The ‘choice’ had riled the denizens of the Infinite Abyss like nothing before. More incursions across different versions of the Prime Material Planes, even ones where the Great Wheel did not exist, had forced the hand of the forces of Mt. Celestia. And the servants of the Gods joined forces with the powers of the Nine Hells, and together, they’d ripped the Heart of the Abyss from the deepest layer of the infinite nightmare.

Of course, such an artifact could not be destroyed, nor could either side use it for fear of being corrupted by chaos and evil.

So a sacrifice was made, and the great god Bahamut carried the Heart into the Far Realms. The twisting, eldritch realms that surrounded this collection of worlds.

Perhaps it would have worked. Perhaps not. But it wasn’t long after that the entirety of the D-sphere collapsed. And the Far Realms with it.

That was when the trouble started.

Asmodeus attempted to make a power play, which lead to a new Blood War. This one between Angels and Devils.

But since when did Devils play fair?

Asmodeus helped the Orcish God, Gruumsh, and the Drow patron, Lolth, invade the plane of Arborea, where the two attempted to slaughter the Elven pantheon, and the creator God Corellon Larethian.

They almost succeeded. Until the timely arrival of Mystra, Goddess of Magic, and the Dwarven patron Moradin, saved the life of Corellon, and ended Lolth and Gruumsh. But Arborea was savaged, the spirits of countless Elves, reincarnated since their creation, were destroyed, as was every member of the Elven Pantheon aside from Corellon himself.

On the Prime material planes, things were just as bad. Kingdoms, races, religions, all were at war across the countless planes of mortals the Gods watched over.

With Bahamut gone, the Chromatic Dragons in many realms followed the call of Tiamat, his rival, and struck down the Metallic Dragons in droves before attempting to take the lands for themselves.

But perhaps this was the best outcome. For a few others had chosen to prepare for the worst.

Primus, the Lord of Mechanus, had found a way to connect with other versions of itself. And was building an even larger army of Modrons, amassing the power of a new Greater God with each version of Mechanus it found.

On the outskirts of her vision, the Lich God Vecna was up to something. She’d banished several of his worshippers as a warning to the King of the Undead, but his machinations were always a potential threat.

Worst yet. Not all Demons had been destroyed when the Abyss collapsed.

The Demon Lord Orcus had used the opportune instability of the realms at that moment to invade an unsuspecting version of the world of Eberron. With no direct Gods to intervene, only the faith of their devoted, the entire world was soon transformed into a planet of undead slaves.

And so she prepared as well.

She watched as great panels of black metal were fitted into place; soon, Sigil would be enclosed, accessible only through the countless portals that connected the city to the rest of the multiverse. It had not been easy, finding the information she needed. She’d been forced to make deals with the Yugoloths for the information, and the Dao for the raw material from the Plane of Earth.

She doubted she would survive, and even if she did, would she still have the power to enforce her rule of Sigili? Perhaps it would be best to leave Sigil to its fate, but... she was old, older than several of the former Class 1’s by a wide margin.

She’d seen the worlds her city connected to change and shift, Gods come and go, she’d even killed a couple herself.

And yet her city had always been here. And it has always been her city. Even if she no longer existed, she would not abandon her city to the same fate.

Of course, there was one more thing, more annoying than anything else but...

The Lady of Pain rubbed her head as she felt yet another prophet telling their story. She went over and sat in the large bladed throne.

So many ‘heroes’ had come through Sigil as of late, attempting to find a way to stop what many saw as imminent destruction of everything. She’d provided few with the key they needed to enter the larger multiverse.

She knew they’d have no effect on the outcome, but it wasn’t her place to intervene.

“So,” she said, pulling the golden die from her robes again as one of her Dabus lead a group into her room, lead by a stark-white haired human male in blue robes, a pistol on his hip. “Vox Machina,” she smirked. “You’ve come to ask for my help.”

‘What Could Have Been’

By G. M. Blackjack

Nova sat in her room in the Raven Hotel, looking out at the ships skirting through the blackness. She brought a green drink to her lips - she had no idea what flavor it was or even what it was called, but she’d found it stored behind a random panel and decided it was time to have a lonely, contemplative drink while staring outside.

The outside wasn’t anywhere near as thought-provoking as she hoped.

Instead, her mind turned to a memory of the deep past. Before Merodi Universalis, before the League, back in the early days of the alliance…

(“You’re the Headmare of the School of Friendship!?”

The older Starlight grinned. “You sound surprised.”

“I… well, I mean, I don’t exactly feel qualified to hold the position,” Nova admitted.

“You were the counselor, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. But I eventually just… left, started helping Twilight with politics, and now…” She gestured at the world outside - Equis Fruition. “This, I guess.”

“I’m sure you’d do a great job,” Starlight said, smiling warmly. “You’re clearly me, you’ve got the brains and the willingness to understand.”

“...Honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to anymore. There’s just… so much out there, you know?”

“I understand. I’m thinking of taking a bit of a sabbatical myself to have some fun out there. But I’ll be back. And if I were a betting mare…” She put a hoof on Nova. “I’d say you’ll come back to it, eventually.”)

“And I never did…” Nova said, taking a drink. “Went pretty far afield, really. This life’s in my bones, now.” She frowned, looking out the window.

She could have had that. Had the multiverse never knocked, she could have been the headmare of the School of Friendship and shaped so many young minds to a brighter future. Now she was shepherding existence to a quite possibly dark future.

Did she regret it?

...No, she decided. She might regret this whole war thing later, but she didn’t regret leaving the School behind. It was fun, it meant a lot, but her life since then meant more. It was nice to know what could have been, but she had her own path.

Still, she found herself thinking of that Starlight. She hadn’t been that old when they found her universe, the serum had probably been invented long before she reached Granny Smith age… Wonder what she’s doing now.

...And wait, was Luster her daughter…? Nova frowned. That was the standard future template, she really should know the answer. The fact that she didn’t was mildly… amusing, really.

With a chuckle, she downed her drink.

On the other side of the multiverse, Flutterfree found herself looking at the stars of Equis Vitis, entranced by their natural beauty. Similar thoughts ran through her mind.

(“You two aren’t together?” the older Fluttershy asked, surprised.

Flutterfree shook her head, glancing at the other Fluttershy’s Discord. “It’s just not how things turned out. I understand it’s very common, and I’m happy for you, but it just wasn’t us.”

“I’m… well, I…” she seemed conflicted.

“It’s okay, I’m sure you’re happy. Very happy. But that’s not where I wanted to go.”

“What about him?”

Flutterfree frowned. “I… I never asked…)

Flutterfree sighed. She did later.

(“...So you’re bothered that your furthest future self ended up with a handsome draconequus?” Discord smirked.

“Not exactly bothered, just… uncertain. That’s not where we’re going, is it?”

“Please, me, feeling physical attraction to something without limbs from different animals? Perish the thought!”

“Pretty sure it doesn’t require physical attraction, Discord.”

Discord slapped his face and groaned. “Look, I’ve got my chaos and games, you’ve got that book of yours. We’re fine. Don’t turn this into a complex.”

She didn’t.)

Glancing at the Bible she kept on her nightstand, she couldn’t help but wonder if it drove him away. He knew what it asked of her. Maybe he didn’t want to be trapped in that?

Why had she never asked him? She couldn’t, anymore. He was stuck in a capture device on the other side of the multiverse. Now it was too late.

Pinkie sat in front of Discord’s capture device. She couldn’t exactly say she was looking at it, but she was aware of it. Not that she was thinking about it. She, too, was thinking of the past.

(“Ohmygosh!” Pinkie shouted, picking up the yellow colt. “You’re so CUTE!”

“He is, isn’t he?” the elder Pinkie cheered. “Lil Cheese is the best!”

“Is that Boneless Six?”

“It is!”

“Cheese will never run out of Bonelesses.”

“NEVER.”)

What had even happened to her Cheese Sandwich? He opened that party factory, left to go spend time making parties for everypony, and… then he kinda just vanished into the background. Pinkie didn’t think about him much, anymore.

She didn’t think much about stallions at all anymore. Unlike a lot of her adventuring companions, she couldn’t really say she’d had many flings, either. If she went to ask Nova, the unicorn could probably tell a dozen stories of bizarre romantic antics that went nowhere. Vriska too.

“Guess this Pinkie just doesn’t have the romance genes, nosiree!”

But kids…

She kinda did want kids, now that she thought about it. Lil Cheese was just so… so… cheesy. Adorable. Precious. And…

“Maybe after the Tower’s gone,” Pinkie said, a smile coming to her face. “And I can raise them… without any fear. Or, well, with the normal amount of fear, not the ‘OH NO THEY’RE GOING TO BE USED IN SOME KIND OF EVIL PLOT’ fear.”

Back on the other side of the multiverse, there was a lot of fear.

Renee was staring at a letter she was composing. A letter to Daniel, to Allure, to all the others… explaining why she was going to leave them. Maybe it wasn’t really an explanation, just a splash of emotional words on paper, but…

...It should get the point across.

(“No stallions in your life at all?” Renee asked her older self.

“Oh, there have been plenty of flings, but nothing really stuck.” Rarity tossed her mane back. “I’m married to the job, you could say.”

“Fashion designer?”

“Oh, well, I still do that, but I’m more of a diplomat and relations manager these days. Even did some exploration myself in the old days, like you’re doing now! But the boutiques manage themselves, and fashion has gotten far too expansive for me to tackle alone and help run Equestria. But you’d be surprised how much the right frock can change the way the diamond dogs see you.”

“Maybe I’ll end up like you. Managing everything.”)

Renee glanced at a mirror. She didn’t have the gray streak that Rarity did, but she couldn’t ignore the similarities in their lives. Renee, Overhead of Expeditions, manager of explorers and heroes… she’d married a man who could work with her. The job really had been everything to them, hadn’t it?

...But she wasn’t that Rarity. Not entirely. There was a point where the job just asked too much.

And she had reached it.

She knew Allure wouldn’t understand, but she hoped anyway.

Allure was getting angrier at everything in existence by the minute. Even the past.

(Suzie was going on and on about wanting to be a teacher just like their older self.

Allure couldn’t see it. She’d done tutoring at the School of Friendship, and it had been… good. But not so great she wanted to spend her entire life there. There was a massive disconnect between her ‘future self’ and herself. Standing in front of a classroom? She had wanted to get out of that space, not go back in.

She was a Crusader. And she was going to do something great with destiny.

“You look like you’re full of ideas,” the older Sweetie said.

“You bet!” Allure said. “I have tons…”)

“Shoulda just become the teacher,” Allure grumbled. “Would have made life a lot simpler.”

Her leader, Evening, was spending the night thinking about how life is never simple, no matter who you are or how far along in life you are.

(“You’re big,” Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle observed.

The Princess of Equis Fruition smiled warmly. “And you seem to be growing into your own nicely.”

The Charter chuckled. “So, they let you have the throne alone?”

“Technically Cadence is my equal, but in truth I manage most everything through my friends. Though if you want to get specific, Rarity does the real heavy lifting. That mare was built for politics.”

“She is? I’ll have to keep that in mind when we get to where we’re going!”

“Which is?”

“The alliance is coming together,” the Charter beamed. “Something great is going to come of it. I can feel it.”

“I can feel it too,” the Princess admitted. “Your path is different than mine.”

“But my friends will be with me through it all, just like yours are.”

The Princess chuckled. “Nothing could tear you apart. Trust me, I know.”)

“Except it did,” Eve said, sighing. She had hopes they would reconcile after it was all over, but would there be anything left to reconcile over? Rainbow Dash was gone, she wasn’t even Twilight, and Applejack was effectively not around anymore.

“You were overly idealistic, Princess,” Eve breathed, shaking her head. “Some things could tear us apart. Me. Corona. Deciding… I don’t know.” She glanced at a window, seeing her reflection.

She looked like the Princess, now. A full head of mystic, sparkling hair. Longer legs, a sharp-pointed horn, and a more angular muzzle. She didn’t wear the same regalia - hers was of Merodi Universalis - and the hearing devices stood out as a stark difference.

But she was the Princess. The Overhead of Relations. The leader of preservation.

“My path was different than yours,” Eve said, setting her jaw. “You were right about that, at least.”

Her reflection had no response from the Princess.

Eve’s counterpart across the divide didn’t have anything either. She sat in her bed, staring at the ceiling, trying not to cry.

(“What do you mean you don’t know what happened?” Corona asked.

The Princess sighed. “I don’t know what happened to our Sunset. I’m sorry.”

“How can you not know!?”

“I… I’m sorry.”)

“What was my future?” Corona demanded. “What was I supposed to be?”

The ceiling didn’t answer. It couldn’t.

“Is this all there was…?”

~~~

In Merodi Universalis space, the world Equis Fruition sat. It had never been a major player in multiversal politics, but it had always shared a connection with the alliance. It had been one of the first worlds to join the nation after its official conception, enjoying a connection to something larger while still being largely concerned with internal affairs.

The Princess of the world stood at the top of her castle in her Canterlot, looking at the sun.

The multiverse may have been burning, but her world was as idyllic as ever. It had never engaged much with the Merodi military-industrial complex, so Equis Fruition provided little to the preservation war effort. They technically sided with Eve, but the war was a distant reality to them. Most creatures in the world continued life as if the message hadn’t happened.

There had even been a movement in much of Equestria to ignore Merodi news broadcasts of the war. The creatures wanted nothing to do with it.

But the Princess knew better. Even if they weren’t fighting, the result of the war was guaranteed to affect them. After all these centuries… the peace of her world seemed fragile.

However, the fragility of the world was something they could face. Together.

Every last one of her friends were still here. Today was one of their great friendship meetings. Everypony was there today. Pinkie, Rainbow, Fluttershy, Applejack, Rarity, Starlight, Discord, Spike…

All of them were there. And the irony was, they were only able to be there because of Corona’s little serum.

They had been able to live more than a lifetime together.

Even now, she didn’t want to see it go. But she had the feeling she would have to.

“Girls,” the Princess said, turning to her old, old friends. Some of them were family. ...No, all of them were family at this point. Sisters. Brothers. “I love you all.”

Rainbow chuckled. “Careful. AJ might get jealous.”

Applejack rolled her eyes. “Dash…”

“Heheh.”

“And we love you, darling,” Rarity said, nuzzling the Princess’ massive leg. “That won’t change, for any of us, no matter what happens in this debacle.”

Fluttershy glided down from Discord’s head. “No matter how many of us make it…”

“No matter what chaos comes our way...” Discord snapped his fingers, creating an orange.

“No matter what any of us might do...” Starlight added.

“We will have been friends!” Pinkie cheered. “Friends for centuries! The Elements of Harmony, the Council of Friendship, the Ponies that Be, the Glue of Equestria, the…”

Spike laughed. “I get it, we have a lot of titles.”

“And I can always make up new ones!” Pinkie’s smile faltered. “Or… well, maybe not always…”

“We can make new ones now,” the Princess said, encasing her friends in her layered wings. “And we can relive old memories.” A tear slid down her cheek. “You’re right. All of you. No matter what happens… We are friends. The best of friends. And nothing, nothing, ever tore us apart.”

For they were true, true friends.

‘Soft Target’

By Trivena

“EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! ADVANCE AND DESTROY! DESTROY AND REJOICE!”

The Message had been a source of jubilation, if such an emotion could be ascribed to genetically-engineered mutants permanently housed in armoured life-support systems. They had always been justified; all else was mere story, to do with as they pleased. And what pleased a Dalek was destruction of all that wasn’t Dalek.

No offers of alliance were accepted, and all such envoys exterminated on the spot; their travelling devices, naturally, were confiscated for study and replication. The only thing that held back the Dalek conquest of the multiverse was the Time Lords’ dominance of their spheres, and now, their attention and resources were directed elsewhere.

In untold thousands of universes, the Doctor - not the Travelling Doctor, but one far younger - held two wires in his hands. “Have I the right?” he almost whispered.

“To destroy the Daleks?” the girl with him, a human by the name of Sarah Jane, asked. “You can't doubt it!”

“Well, I do!” the Doctor retorted. “You see, some things could be better with the Daleks. Many future worlds will become allies because of the fear of the Daleks!”

“It isn’t like that!” Sarah Jane cried, incredulous.

He looked at her seriously. “Well, the final responsibility is mine. And mine alone. You see, if someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives... could you then kill that child?”

This time, she hesitated, but: “We're talking about the Daleks, the most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them! You must complete your mission for the Time Lords!”

The Doctor started to bring the wires closer to one another, but again he halted. “Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other, and that's it? The Daleks cease to exist? Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations, can live without fear, in peace, and never even know the word ‘Dalek’?”

“Then why wait?” Sarah Jane urged. “If it was a disease or some sort of bacteria you were destroying, you wouldn't even hesitate!”

“But if I kill, wipe out a whole intelligent life form, then I'd become like them. I'd be no better than the Daleks.” That idea seemed to worry him even more.

“Think of all the suffering there'll be if you don't do it!”

Zap.

John Egbert appeared in front of them. Wordlessly, he reached out a hand. A sudden wind whipped down the corridor, tearing the wires from the Doctor’s startled grasp. John’s blank gaze met the Doctor’s, and the two wires connected.

In a single explosion, repeated sequentially yet simultaneously across every universe, the Daleks ceased to have ever existed.

Dialogue from “Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks”, by Terry Nation.

‘Requiem for the Shadows’

By Blaster M

The rain poured down from the night sky, forming pools of water on the city streets, waterfalls down the rooftops, and rivers across the sidewalks. A stadium, roof closed, stood bright, lit with activity from the many people inside all the way to the security outside. Several dimensional jammers, located strategically around the city, would ensure no sudden translations. A fleet of ships parked in orbit would ensure no sudden invasions, and a reality anchor would ensure no sudden change in the universe.

But this universe had a Void connection.

While not entirely common in the USM, this world, one of many Earths still standing, saw interdimensional traffic frequently. As a medium magic world, ponies were sometimes seen mingling with the locals, but as a peaceful race, they were rarely paid any attention.

For this mission, going incognito is a necessity. Just another Fluttershy, interested in preservation, wearing a hooded cloak to keep the rain off. Getting in was easy. Security, of course, checked for hidden devices, and even sealed magic. Not that it would matter for her.

They didn’t seal the Void.

She, of course, didn’t have anything on her at all, other than her cloak. While they required her to keep her hood folded, that too was part of the disguise. A Fluttershy, timidly staying out of sight in a crowd, was almost expected. And by playing the nervous card right, people could become very helpful. Sometimes, too helpful.

After what happened on the Zarimare all those years ago, walking around bare always felt extremely uncomfortable to her. Talking to others, pony or otherwise, had been a struggle most Fluttershys learned to overcome, but not her. When piloting Titania, she always felt safe. She could interact. Ponies saw Titania, not her. Outside Titania, the world had always been overbearing. Judging.

With the right directions, she disappeared behind the scenes, flipping her hood over her head and entering the labyrinth of backstage passages. Security was roaming every hall, clearly ready for anything. Knowing their routes and using her senses, she stayed out of sight, silently taking her position. The cameras, ever vigilant, would betray their users tonight. Magneta’s shipboard AI had already taken care of it. They would see the cameras functioning normally, but they wouldn’t see her on the feed.

All that was left was to wait.

Meanwhile, her friends did their jobs. If they timed it right, every local dimensional jammer would be destroyed at the same time. When that happened, she would strike and disappear. The hard part was staying still. Every Tenno had the same problem. Being a conduit to the Void was like holding a door shut to keep the floodwaters out. The floodwaters would always win. Using the energy provided by the Void was not an option. That was the secret. She didn’t need to carry a weapon, because she was the weapon.

The contract was a simple one. Get in, eliminate the target, and get out. Harmony rarely took assassination missions anymore, unless there was a very good reason. In this case, the target had recently gained a lot of support in the USM for the preservation movement. The problem was not supporting the opposing party-- it was swearing to eliminate the collapsers entirely.

Usually, assassination targets were cut and dry villain types. Those who burnt down forests, kicked puppies, and killed innocent ponies. This target was practically an anti-villain. A family man, a hero of his story, and definitely loved by the preservationists. By their very slogan, they were saving lives by preventing the collapse, which would definitely cause a lot of death. The only reason she agreed to the contract was because this man would start a witch-hunt if he made it to the top. The Tenno were familiar with these things, having survived several wars for their very existence in their origin universes. So it would be. Eliminate one to save the lives of many, even though they may die anyway if the collapsers win.

There he was. The target, escorted by high tech security. Shielded armor, plasma rifles, antimagic barrier. They had covered all of their bases. Crouching down, she vanished from sight entirely, phasing halfway out of reality. Translation wasn’t possible yet, but the Void still leaked its power in. It was now or never. Riding a streak of energy, she passed through the escorts, and became physical again, landing on his head. With two quick motions, it was over. Crushed back, snapped spine, and caved in skull. Before another moment could pass, she disappeared again, riding sequential streaks of energy deeper into the hallways.

With the report of the target’s assassination, security rushed in, occupying every hallway, every room. Without the benefit of working cameras, they had to resort to other methods to find the assassin. Lifeform scans, energy spikes, and plain old visual sweeping. It didn’t take long to find her entering a service room with a single window. When they kicked the door in, they found something else entirely: Titania.

Crashing through the window, the mysterious, armor-suited flutterpony flew down to the street, a trail of broken glass and butterflies in her wake.

The security guards in the room ran to the window, but before they could open fire, the room pulled back, as if a giant magnet had suddenly appeared in the middle of the room, slamming the guards together into an inseparable lump. Appearing from behind a parked vehicle, another armored pony retracted her forehoof behind cover, a galaxy of stars swirling inside her canopy-like helmet. The newcomer silently watched as Titania sprinted past, then jumped out to join in her escape. The two of them dashed across the street and into the alleys, the new pony raising her forehoof again, causing all the incoming plasma bolts to divert into another magnetic sphere behind them.

The warframes remained silent as they ran, jumped, and glided through their escape path. They raced past two blockades before encountering any resistance. Over the comms link, a conversation continued unheard to the outside world.

“Angel, you took out only the target, right?” Magneta asked.

“Yes.”

Magneta glanced at the Rift Conduit on her frame’s foreleg. The worn piece of gear allowed them to Translate their frames between universes that had a Void connection. While it greatly limited translatable universes, it guaranteed that they would be able to use their abilities in any universe they could translate to. But right now, they were stuck in this universe, as a red light on the Conduit indicated.

“Why can’t we Translate yet?” Magneta asked.

“Sorry sugar, my target’s too well protected. I need to return fire,” Gala Gun responded.

“Negative, Gala, hold your fire and keep evading. Everypony, converge on Gala Gun’s target.”

Angel raised her foreleg at a soldier in front of them. He raised his gun to shoot, but it slipped out of his hand before he could fire. He then floated above eye level, suspended in the air as if gravity had decided to stop caring about him in particular.

Rainboom called in next. “I’m two minutes out, one if I can fly above the rooftops.”

Magneta spun around in midair, throwing up another magnetic bubble behind them.

“Negative, Rainboom. Stay in the alleys and out of sight. We’ll make it.”

They rounded another corner, and four soldiers stood ready for them. Plasma bolts flew and the two frames dodged as best they could. Instinctively, Magneta raised her foreleg in a hoof-pump gesture, and a cylindrical wall of energy expanded out from her. It didn’t hurt the soldiers, but it knocked out their shields while restoring hers and Titania’s. “Angel, pacify.”

Another soldier floated into the air, and the remaining three were suddenly kicked out of the way by an armored pony with catlike claws instead of hooves. The frame’s helmet looked more feline than equine, and it wore a color pattern that made it almost invisible against the city street.

“Giulia! Don’t kill them!”

The newcomer joined their run to the objective.

“It’s pronounced Joo-lee-uh! Really, did you forget how to speak Old Equestrian this morning?”

“Stand down Giulia, we’re not turning this mission into a slaughterfest. No matter how much Valkyr wants it.”

Giulia pranced forward, while maintaining their blisteringly fast run. “They’ll be fine, darling. I only knocked them down.”

The three frames crashed through a window, rapidly making their way through the building. Bullet holes lined the hallways, ceiling tiles, and floors. Gala had come through here, and whoever chased her had used regular bullets. Following the sound of automatic gunfire, they made their way down, towards what appeared to be a warehouse, the temporary site of the last working dimensional jammer.

In front of the jammer stood a group of heroes. Heroes from Earth-AZ2.

Standing nearest to the jammer was a bearded man in a tattered cloak, with a smoking gatling gun in place of his left arm. Death Gatling.

Beside him was an armored man, wearing roller skates, a backpack battery, and wielding electric stun sticks. Lightning Genji.

On the other side stood a black, robed ninja girl. Shadow Ring.

In front of them was a young man wearing a basic jumpsuit, with hands ready to set the world ablaze. Blue Fire stood with righteous fury, ready to incinerate the evil before him.

Everyone knew why they were here. Negotiation was off the table. Without skipping a beat, Angel readied her sniper rifle, aiming for the dimensional jammer. At the same time, Magneta put up a bubble between her and the heroes, while Giulia cried out in rage, hardening her shields. Gala Gun was still out of sight.

In one lightning fast motion, Angel spun around, switching guns for Nikana before blocking a swing from Shadow Ring’s Ninjato. The two leaped around the room, trading and evading sword swings at incredible speed.

Magneta pulled out her Bo staff, and jumped into the air to avoid Lightning Genji’s attack. She spun the staff in front of her, deflecting some of Death Gatling’s bullets. Her trajectory brought her right behind the dimensional jammer, putting it between her and its defenders.

Blue Fire let loose a bright stream of fire, hitting Giulia dead on. Once his attack was finished, the hallway was left glowing with heat, except for a Valkyr-shaped outline on the wall. Giulia, unharmed, raced forward. She lept over Blue Fire’s next burst, and landed beside him, putting him between her and Death Gatling. Quickly, she headbutted Blue Fire, sending him flying into the dimensional jammer with a dong. Death Gatling, with a clear shot, opened fire, quickly eliminating Giulia’s now-vulnerable shields as she leaped away. By the time she reached cover, her frame had dozens of bullet holes and moderate internal injuries showing through it. Death Gatling flanked her cover to finish the job.

A streak of gold and black rammed into Death Gatling, knocking him across the room and into Blue Fire. Touching down, the griffon-like pegasus warframe quickly ran behind cover, and started healing Giulia and Gala. “Good to see you made it, Rainboom. Thought I was gonna lose Mesa tonight,” Gala Gun stated on the radio.

“Behind you!” Giulia interrupted.

In that same instant, Rainboom flew straight up, just barely missing a swipe from Lightning Genji’s stun rod. Doubling back, the two speedsters began a game of hit and run tag, Rainboom trying to disarm Genji while he tried to stun her. At first, her flight seemed to be an advantage, with Rainboom able to control the engagement. With an armored opponent however, and having to get within stunstick range to disarm, Genji’s superior speed became the clear winner as he was able to connect several times, draining her substantial shielding. Rainboom swooped down one more time, flying in from behind to knock him down, but Genji predicted the feint and jammed his stun rod into her chest. The electrical surge stopped the warframe in its tracks, and she was left convulsing helplessly on the ground.

Death Gatling stood up again, ready to put an end to this charade. Spinning his gun up, he took aim at Rainboom, still immobile from the stun rod.

“Never fear, Disco is here!” A new voice shouted on the radio.

Just before Gatling could fire, five warframes arrived, streaking up the hallway in a diamond formation on jet engine warhammers. The harlequin-like pony frames moved in perfect synchronicity, knocking the stunstick off of Rainboom and knocking Death Gatling’s gun away from them at the same time. As Gatling’s gun swung towards the jammer, he held fire, and used the momentum to spin around and take aim at the newcomers.

Lightning Genji passed through two of the harlequins, revealing the fact that they were only holograms, holograms that became physical at will, knocking Genji into the air as he passed.

Gala stood up from behind cover, rifle on her flank, and shot at the dimensional jammer several times, before ducking under cover again as another wall of bullets from Gatling arrived. While she watched the overhead battle between Angel and Shadow Ring, Giulia retrieved Magneta, bringing her behind cover. “That jammer is going to need something with more kick than bullets, dear,” she stated over the radio, a plasma machine gun now attached to her flank. “I’ll do the deed.”

Rainboom, now mobile again, continued to ward off Gatling and Genji alongside Disco, drawing their attention just long enough for Giulia to start firing. Her weapon fired slowly at first, but quickly ramped up its firing rate like a machine gun. Plastering the jammer with bright blue plasma bolts, it diverted the heroes’ attention to her.

Shadow Ring launched herself off the wall, down at Giulia. Just before impact, a Bo staff suddenly deflected her blade. Instantly, Shadow dove to the side, causing the pursuing Angel to crash into the ground. The shockwave from her landing was amplified by Void energy, sending everyone and everything immediately around her flying into the air.

The momentary distraction was enough for Angel to pull out her large sniper rifle again. With five loud shots, the jammer finally broke down. Out of ammo, Angel swung her rifle to block Shadow Ring’s sword one more time, before vanishing into the Void.

The other five warframes also vanished, translating to different universes.

~~~

Equis-WFE, Team Harmony Dojo station, in orbit somewhere in Origin

Celestia “Umbra” Lux, a young alicorn the size of a Cadence, solemnly stared outside the window of the space station. Her pastel mane and tail hung limp. She pressed her trembling forehoof against her reflection. As a commander, she needed to be strong, but ever since the Message, it was becoming a losing battle.

“Umbra?”

Twilight “Magneta” Sparkle, the youngest of the alicorns in Harmony, arrived with the rest of the team. A collection of close friends, hardened by battle, assembled in the observation room.

Umbra turned around, quietly taking a seat. “My little ponies, my friends, I’ve been thinking... about our existence. About... what will happen to us.”

“What do you mean, sister?” Luna “Wraith” Lux asked with worry as she stood back up.

“We’ve made it this far, together. All of us, still alive. But, no matter what happens, I worry that we will be forced apart in death.”

Magneta stood up. “Celestia! Don’t talk like that! Please! The Tower-”

“Has it out for my ‘character’. I’ve been on the extranet too, and I’ve seen the counts. Celestias frequently suffer death, either by defeat, heroic sacrifice, a villainous turn, or straight-up assassination. Ka spares only my sister’s life in most cases.”

“And they always start a speech just like this...” Wraith responded, growing concern in her eyes.

“But we’re not like most ponies. I would never turn against my friends. Nor you, my sister.” Umbra looked out the window again. Her reflection stared back, Umbra amp shimmering in a ʊ shape around her horn. “My sister and I are one of the weakest of our ‘characters’. We don’t rule a nation, we can’t move celestial bodies, and we’re barely in our twenties, physically.” Facing the team again, she continued. “We are all player characters in a living video game, turned to characters in a story. Gears in the machine, a force behind the scenes. Our entire lives have been defined by it. We’re assassins. Fighters. Mercenaries. In our story, we are the heroes, but now that we’ve sided with USM’s collapsers, our heroism is in question.”

Sweetie “Jenna” Belle stood up. “Why are we discussing this again? We’ve spent days talking this over!”

“It’s for their benefit.” Pinkie “Disco” Pie pointed out, staring at a point over Umbra’s shoulder.

“They’re watching? Now?!”

“Eeyup.”

“No, no no no, we have to stop talking, right now!” Magneta cried, circling in front of the team to gather their attention.

“Actually, we need to listen to what Umbra has to say,” Applejack “Gala Gun” pointed out with a raised hoof.

“But-”

“Shush, sugar. Our CO is talking.”

Umbra continued. “I’ve been watching the major events of the multiverse as long as we have been able. I’ve noticed ka can subvert as many tropes as it plays straight. We may be sending death flags, but if the Tower wills, it may still show us mercy.”

Umbra approached Magneta, wrapping her neck over her friend in an equine hug. “We’re all brothers and sisters here.” Looking at Rainbow “Rainboom” Dash, she continued. “We’re only 5 years apart in age, blessed and cursed to be as young and healthy as the day of the Zarimare accident. Our little brothers and sisters are forever foals. We’ve spent our entire lives fighting for ourselves, fighting for each other, and fighting for our world. We haven’t truly lived.”

“I understand what you mean,” Rarity “Giulia” Belle responded. “I once wanted to develop my hobby into a career, but we’ve spent all our time keeping Origin safe, or putting out other ponies’ fires across the USM. Funny, now that we’ve chosen a side, the contracts have gone dry.”

A pony wearing a dark cloak with a hood spoke up delicately, her light yellow muzzle visible from within its shadow. “Ka doesn’t want us to interfere any further.”

“Angel, are you saying the Tower only needed us once?” Rainboom asked.

Umbra tapped the floor. “No. Our place in the multiverse has always been one behind the scenes. As the unseen help, we’ve survived because we don’t officially exist. If we were not part of the multiverse, however, the story would still go the same way.” Umbra flared her nostrils. “If anything, we exist for a joke. Remember my vacation?”

“The one where you swore nothing would go wrong? And you tried to fight a ten-story tall death ray refrigerator without Equinox?”

“I had three powerful heroes with me that day. We should have been able to stop the robot’s rampage easily. But because they were Genos, Raven, and Worf, and I am Celestia, we were defeated. Because our characters are always defeated to show the enemy is stronger. Even if I were piloting Equinox, I still would have been sent back to the Void.” Looking back out the window, she continued. “In terms of raw power, I am the weakest Celestia, the one that doesn’t need to be an example, and yet, I was defeated by an enemy I am normally strong against. If the War ends in preservation, I will one day share the fate of my alternate selves, as ka wills, just to escalate the ‘plot’, as it were.”

Magneta, Wraith, and Councilor “Heartbreak” Cadenza approached the window, and sat beside her. “The four Alicorns will become three.”

“If the Collapse happens, none of us may survive. We know this. What is your game?” Angel asked.

The alicorns turned to face their friends. “Since the multiverse no longer needs all of us, we will go on shore leave. Our time together may be coming to an end, so let’s learn to live while we still can, and enjoy our restored homeworld, for once in our short lives. Dismissed.”

~~~

The door whooshed open, revealing Gilda, the unique Zephyr Prime warframe. She walked into the large room, eyeless, pointed helmet sweeping left and right as she took the familiar sight in. All around the room were floating platforms, walls, stairs, and ramps, as well as active barriers, knee-high walls, and metal boxes.

Streaking along the obstacle course, a pale blue warframe sailed over the ground in a blur, its copper leggings planted on a K-Drive. The hoverboard left a trail of exhaust behind it as it zoomed over, under, and around obstacles in a flash. It then leaped, performing a series of aerial tricks over a large chasm. Landing with a boardslide, the warframe stopped on the large platform beside Gilda, signalling the finish. The scoreboard, a floating hologram overlooking the course, updated with the new fastest time. The user “Hang10” jumped further ahead on the scoreboard.

Rainboom leaped into existence, emerging from her warframe as if it were a portal. The other warframe did the same, and a young Scootaloo jumped into existence, her small form dwarfed by the frame’s adult stature.

"Hey kiddo, getting in some final rounds with Volt before we leave?" Rainboom asked, noting the scoreboard's top ten contestants.

"Yeah, kinda feels weird leaving the Dojo. I mean, this is our home. We are taking the frames, right?"

"Wouldn’t be able to walk around for long if we didn’t."

Hang Ten flared her nostrils. "Can we really learn to live like civilians before we're gone? We've been fighting all our lives, and … I'm not sure any of us know what to do."

"Who says we're all gonna be gone?"

"That whole speech about destiny and stuff that Umbra had earlier? The Message? Do you really think we'll still be around if the collapse wins?"

Rainboom looked away, staring at the course floating in the distance. "Umbra is not the only one that may not live long under preservation. I looked at my own alternate selves some time back. What happens to Celestias, will happen to me, for similar reasons." Turning around, she faced Hang Ten again, gesturing with her wings. "Basically, I'm a front line fighter, always the one to rush in and crack heads first. Ponies like me tend to die first. If the preservation wins, I will one day be killed off just like that. Personally, I'll take that kind of death, as long as it's an honorable one. But if the collapse wins, I won't be doomed to that fate. Maybe we won't have to fight at all anymore."

"But, one trillionth of a percent, Dash! That’s a really small number! Do you honestly think any of us will be the lucky ones to survive? Most ponies don't even know us, and the few that did aren't around anymore!"

Rainboom lowered her head. "I know, and that's why I'm here. It's been what, half a century or so since the multiverse opened to us? It's hard for me to think of you as mentally an adult, but I do, and I think it's time for you to fly."

"What do you mean?"

Rainboom put her wing over Hang Ten, guiding her over to Zephyr Prime. "It's time you fly Gilda."

Hang Ten tensed up. "Rainbow Dash, you want me to fly Gilda? Is that even safe?" Memories of the times the others had tried flashed through her mind. It wasn't pretty. Gilda only allowed Rainboom in.

Rainboom gave her a pat on the back. "You'll be fine, she'll agree to it, I'm sure. I've spent a lot of time with her, and I know she’ll be okay with you flying her in my stead. Go on, Transfer in. I know you've flown Zephyrs before."

Hang Ten, nervously at first, placed a forehoof on the warframe's black, armored chestplate, tracing its gilded edges. The armored exterior remained hard, still, unmoveable. Then, with a push, she fell into the frame, vanishing from reality as she Transferred into it. The chestplate remained solid, immobile.

Memories of a time long past flashed before her eyes. Training with the Royal Guards, teaching Rainbow and her friends how to fight Griffon style, learning of the betrayal of the Kingdom, losing her loved ones to a mad pony, while forced to helplessly transform into a monster, forever stuck in anguish over the loss of her nest, her anguish a tool to be used to fight monsters. A loose collection of memories and emotions, forever a slave to the will of its wielder.

More memories flashed by. A young filly selected to go with her parents, to colonize a brave new world. The jump accident, stranding the Zarimare 10-0 in the Void. Enduring years of the madness of the Void, and the loss of her family to the madness. Rescued by the Empire, only to be shunned as a corruption on the holy light of Equestria. A monster in pony form, forced to regularly expend energy from the Void, lest it burst out in deadly quantities, cursed with the unstoppable power from beyond. A monster, fit only to fight monsters, betrayed by those very rulers for the sake of 'purity'. A monster, manipulated to turn against the Empire for survival, forever a slave to her own existence.

The two become one. A defender of the realm. A victim of circumstance and tyranny. A tortured soul, setting the world right the only way they know how. A warrior to fight for those who couldn’t fight back. A warframe.

"Hey, you okay in there?" Rainboom asked, waving to her. She nodded. Rainboom pointed back to Volt. "Okay if I borrow him?" She nodded again.

Rainboom vanished, bringing Hang Ten’s Volt to life. "How do you feel now?" she asked, over the comms.

Hang Ten flexed her limbs, and spread her wings. "I feel… light, like I can just take off and fly forever. But, I also feel strong. Really strong. Am I reading this right? My shield capacity is insane!"

"It is, Gilda is a very strong girl. Now let's go. I'll follow you while you fly around."

Hang Ten took off, lifting into the air effortlessly. A normal Zephyr would have required considerably more work to stay aloft, as they were a lame imitation of the real warrior. All her life, she had lived with natural flight as an exhausting chore, be it her useless, stunted wings, or a Zephyr's shortcomings. Ditto for needing to fit archwings, an attachment that was really only meant for spaceflight. Gilda was flight as it was meant to be: natural.

Mobility. Flight. Freedom. As long as she could fly, she was free.

Rainboom ran slightly ahead, legs blurring from the extreme speed as she streaked past the obstacles on the ground. "If something happens to me, I want you to fly Gilda in my stead. Don't let her collect dust. Every day she flies is another day she lives."

Hang Ten activated Tailwind, rocketing forward in the air like a missile. "I will honor her memory, and give her a good life, if that day comes."

~~~

Disco’s personal quarters were an interesting mix of bright colors and dangerous weapons. Along one candy pink wall, several stasis lockers displayed a series of weapons and warframes. In the middle, a giant blue and maroon grenade launcher, designed like an old sailing ship cannon, hovered in the center, labelled as The Party Cannon. In the chamber beside it hovered a maroon, black and white warhammer with a jet engine in the head, labelled as The Vroomstick. Their custom colors matched the harlequin warframe Mirage, as it stood unmoving, vigilant in front of the lockers. Flanking the weapons, two more warframes hovered in stasis. Loki and Limbo.

On the other side of the room, a straight-maned Pinkie “Disco” Pie stood in front of a full body mirror. She swished her mane left and right, while exaggerating a scowl in the mirror. Suddenly, her mane poofed into bouncy curls, and the scowl turned to a smile. Enthusiastically, she spoke. “Tomorrow, we go planetside for some R ‘n R. Our days fighting in the multiverse are over.”

“The fighting is never over,” replied her scowling, straight maned reflection.

The cheerful Disco responded with a “pssch”. “Don’t be a party pooper, we helped tip the balance of power. The USM will be too focused on its own infighting now.”

The scowling Disco scolded her back. “Just like the Lotus taught us. Keep the opposing sides from becoming a landslide. But you know they will keep looking for us after that assassination.”

“He was the ringleader of a purge. The opposition reminds the people they would have been executed under his regime, and they’ll forget about us while they continue infighting.”

“And what happens when they do find us? If we’re not fighting at our best, we could be erased like the rest!”

“You know we have enough reality anchors hidden around Origin, not to mention Tau and other systems, they’d have a hard time nuking our universe. As it is, we’re almost isolated by the rift, thanks to the War. It’d be a waste to come all the way out here to hit a backwater universe.”

“And what if they do? Are you not afraid to die? Our story hasn’t been told yet. If none of us survive, nopony will ever know we existed! Is that how you want to go?”

“If it means I don’t have to fight anymore, I welcome it. As long as we are tied to the Void, we can never truly live.” Squaring up against her scowling reflection, Disco stared down the mirror. “Our bodies are stuck in anestrus, since that was the way we boarded the Zarimare. We’ve tried, but we can’t have foals of our own. We’re barren, stuck in the same biological age forever. I want my own family, dammit, and ka has decreed that I don’t get to have one!”

Disco looked down at her raised forehoof, glowing blue with Void energy, soon to unleash a blast of it at any moment. “This is the curse ka has put on us, in exchange for our immortality. We have to use our power, or we explode. We dream, stuffed inside the Sematic chambers, powering the warframes, or we fight, unleashing the destructive power of the Void directly.”

The straight maned Disco flared her nostrils, and levelled her head. Her mane suddenly poofed back up to its bouncy curls, and she stared into the mirror at a particular spot, looking right at the fourth wall in her room. “That one’s for free,” she chirped, winking at her reflection, before vanishing. The Mirage warframe teleported to the mirror at the same time, looking herself over.

~~~

Equis-WFE, The Washouts Dojo, somewhere else in the Origin system...

Balls of energy orbited a unicorn hovering in the air. She floated just above the floor of the observation room, legs crossed, eyes closed, concentrating. Nothing outside the orbs mattered. Nothing inside needed attention.

The faint sounds of the station hardware buzzing, whirring, ticking, beeping, or hissing didn't matter. Neither did the echoes of voices, the clashing weapons from the duelling rooms, nor the muffled gunshots from the firing ranges. The world was peaceful.

“Starliiight! I can’t figure this out!” A female voice shrieked from across the room, accentuated by the rattle of chains. A familiar voice that could never be ignored.

Without opening her eyes, the unicorn answered. “Stick to illusions, Trixie. The Hoofdini trick isn’t for you.”

The chains rattled again, accompanied by the thump of a head hitting wood. “But I know I can do this! Every other Trixie out there’s done it!” The chains rattled again. “Eventually.”

“You’re not every other Trixie. You’re Illuminati, the dazzling assassin. You’re not a showpony. You’ve been trying this for years, Lumi. Stop wasting your time.”

“I still need your help getting out of this!”

“You have a horn, and you have the Void. Help yourself.”

“But I don’t want to break another -”

The station’s intercom crackled to life. “All Tenno to the briefing room.”

Opening her eyes, Pulsar unfolded her legs, seamlessly touching down on the floor. “Don’t be late,” she growled, walking towards the exit.

An upright coffin on the other side of the room shook and shuddered, before falling over and breaking apart, a blue unicorn wrapped in chains falling out. “Hey, wait for me!” she called out, repeatedly smacking her horn cap against the floor.

Pulsar made her way through the hallways, joining the growing herd of ponies heading the same way. As they passed the garden room, the bamboo fountain rang a “doink,” breaking up the sound of rhythmic marching. Soon, they arrived in the briefing room, as Illuminati appeared with a POMF behind Pulsar, wearing her starry dressage and hat. They took a seat amongst the herd of Tenno that constituted The Washouts. Most of them attended as their warframes, either too ashamed, or too close to bursting with Void energy, to be outside them.

“Good, you’re all here!” A unicorn Sunset Shimmer, known to them as Eternal Fusion, took the briefing stage. “Today is a momentous day for The Washouts! After many years of construction, trial, and error, the Dojo’s Rift Rail is now ready!” Behind her, a holographic representation of the dojo highlighted the addition, a series of rails set vertically on the station’s center spine. “Repurposed from the old Solar Rail, the Rift Rail will allow our entire Dojo to Translate into any universe connected by our Void! We are no longer separated by distance, we can join the War for existence directly!”

The briefing room thundered as everyone stomped with applause.

Fusion continued. “The other Dojos also have the technology now, and soon, we will all spread out to the multiverse beyond! Make sure all your planetside obligations are in order, Tenno. Tomorrow, we leave our beloved nest behind, to fight for our freedom!”

One more round of applause.

“If you want to stay planetside, I understand, and wish you well. Otherwise, be back by 0900 tomorrow. Dismissed!”

The crowd of ponies made conversation as they started filing out. Judging by the energy, almost the entire herd of The Washouts would be coming. With all their eggs leaving in their own baskets, the ponies of Equis-WFE would now be able to operate on their own directly, instead of relying on preplanned secret contracts with the multiverse outside. It was time to push for Collapse, and free themselves from their story-- or truly die trying.

Pulsar walked faster, catching up to a cloaked unicorn with a prominent goatee. “Hey, Kepler Kin.”

The pinto pony stopped and smiled back. “Starlight! I’ve been looking for you.”

Pulsar stopped, playfully stroking his beard. “You know I was meditating in the observation room, Sunburst. Why didn’t you go there?”

“I saw Lumi in there a-and thought you wanted-”

“Wanted what?” Interrupted Lumi. “I was just practicing a new routine. The Illustrious Illuminati could have used your great wizardly help.” Lumi stalked over to his other side, meeting his glance with a playful smirk.

“Well, I-I-”

“Think we should all play a round of Lunaro. All the work on the Rail is done, right? It’s not like any of us have anything to do planetside.” Pulsar smirked back at Lumi.

Lumi tilted her nose up. “The Illustrious Illuminati could use a sports break.”

“Did somepony say Lunaro?” With a stiff breeze, Lightning “Maverick” Dust landed in front, facing Kepler Kin. “Winner gets a date with the Washouts Wonder Wizard!”

“I’m not sure-”

Maverick opened her wings, tilting them to display her primary feathers. “You know you like wings, Sunny."

Maverick was suddenly lifted into the air by a turquoise, Void-tainted aura. “Let’s not start this again,” Pulsar exclaimed. “A few rounds of Lunaro is fine, hitting on Kepler Kin is not."

Pulsar and Illuminati also rose, surrounded by auras of pure Void energy. Maverick stared down both of them, the pinions of her wings glowing with the same aura. “You’re not married to him, either, but you constantly try for his attention. He’s fair game, sisters.”

Then a golden yellow, Void-tainted aura lifted all four of them in the air, separating them. “Enough! We’re not starting another round of horse opera, especially after last time!” Eternal Fusion, standing between them, narrowed her eyes at each of them in turn. “You want to play Lunaro so bad? Well, fine, I’ll put together a team, and you’ll get your game.”

Fusion locked eyes with Kepler Kin. “You’re really out of practice with fighting, so you are going to keep playing until I think you’re ready for field missions again.” Fusion turned to the girls. “And you’ll keep playing until he’s ready to fight, got it?” The four nod. “Good, report to the Lunaro court in ten minutes. We'll do this all night if we have to!"

~~~

Planet Equis-WFE, in a remote forest by a lake…

Four warframes laid back, lounging on exotic, pearl white beach chairs. While they could, and would, do it in the flesh, the past couple days had already used up all their 'outside time'.

Over the comms, Umbra spoke up. "You know, I never thought a little vacation in the woods would calm the spirit like it has. It's a wonder we didn't think to do this before."

Wraith replied next. "Tis a strange feeling, not wanting to murder everything. It's … relaxing."

Heartbreak responded. "And with friends, no doubt. To think, in another life, we could have been enemies, rival houses competing for a seat on the Council. That trend has been so thoroughly bucked it's in another universe."

Magneta spoke up. "So true, Cadence. Even in academia things were competitive. Canterlot Academy was absolutely brutal with its infighting. I'm so glad that's far behind me. Me and the ponies that came with."

Overhead, a dark figure shot across the sky.

"Scootaloo must be having fun."

Umbra looked past the flying warframe and into the sky. "I wonder how the other Tenno are doing."

Wraith responded. "Last report I received, the Rift Rails on every Dojo are complete, and many have gone to join the fight for Collapse. Our Rift Rail is ready as well. If we have to leave, we can traverse the whole Dojo through the multiverse, wherever the Void touches."

Umbra looked over the Rift Conduit on her warframe's foreleg, noting the ready status. "We're going to have to fight, aren't we?"

"Verily, sister."

"I'm actually okay with that, now."

Magneta spoke up. "I think I'm fine with it, too. As long as we fight together. The Four Alicorns, friends forever."

"Friends forever!" the other three replied, hoof-pumping the air together.

‘That Little Cafe by the Way’

By Sketchy

The sharp chink of the man’s armor echoed as he strode through the busy streets, towering over those he passed. The plating he wore was covered in sharp edges, interspersed with shallow lines glowing maroon red. Despite the jagged spikes of his armor, most passed him by without a glance.

He dodged around a set of Pinkie Pies with a little too much ease and walked right past a few patrolling Sweetie Belles with little more than a short nod. He moved with purpose, his eyes focused straight ahead, steady footsteps causing most to move before his shadow touched their feet.

A few twists and turns, a few side alleys, most following them would have been confused within the first couple of minutes. But he knew the city well by this point, he’d been around enough for that much. Despite that, the familiar sight of the little cafe still set his mind at ease.

He paused for a moment, walking just past the door and looking towards the nearby window. He slipped off his helmet, letting it slowly disappear with a shink sound, as he peered into the window with a smirk. A small foal stared back, hooves pressed against the window with a wide grin. She pulled back, bouncing up and down as she ran to the door and threw it open.

He stepped back and braced for impact, letting her slam into his arms with that famed earth pony strength. “You came!” She cried out happily, “I told mom you would, she didn’t believe me. But I knew better!” She smirked, looking towards the counter at the far end of the room.

The changeling at the counter shook her head in wry amusement, waving slightly before returning to filling out her orders. Cinnamon looked up with wide eyes. “So what happened? Did you go on another adventure?”

He gave her a quick pat on the head, and slung her under an arm, ignoring her giggling. He waved to a few patrons inside as he made his way to a stool near the counter. A man in green overalls waved back, his brother in red a little too focused on the slice of cake in front of him to notice.

“Hey there, the usual?” The changeling at the counter asked with a smile, gesturing over to a small plate stacked high with sweet rolls. He nodded quickly, grinning as it was slid over to him. She walked off as he placed Cinnamon on the stool next to him.

He reached out a hand for a sweet roll, pulling back a second later at Cinnamon’s pout. With a roll of his eyes he brought out a small tablet, placing it on the table. A few quick taps and a couple of flicks had Cinnamon absorbed in the sights and sounds of his latest adventure. Taking out a pad of paper, he got down to writing out the details for her.

~~~

The atmosphere in the café was tense. The dragonborn sat in a corner of the room, blank pages and crayons in front of him. Cinnamon sat on the other side, doodling away in her little coloring book. He felt a little childish, but it was nothing the other patrons hadn’t been dragged into a time or two.

Looking around, he could see a lot of gloomy faces and slumping forms. Considering what Corona had done, he wasn't surprised. Cinnamon seemed oblivious, but her mother was glancing at her with worry every so often.

A dragon, much taller than the Dragonborn, was sitting at the counter. He was purple with green spikes. It had taken a while to get used to the dragons around here, but Spike was a decent sort. One of the only ones around here actually trying to be cheerful, too.

The Dragonborn sighed, leaning back in his chair. Cinnamon looked up. "Everything okay?"

He smiled at her, but it felt a little fake. He lifted a hand, tilting it back and forth in the universal gesture for so-so. Cinnamon frowned, putting down her crayons.

"It's gonna be okay. Mommy told me that the Merodi will sort it out." She smiled at his confused look, leaning forward with her hooves on the table. "We're gonna be fine, there's no way they'll let anything bad happen."

He looked at her a little sadly before letting out a small chuckle. He reached forward to ruffle her mane, ignoring her protests. He looked at her page with interest.

She slid it around and pushed it towards him. "It's me and you, going on an adventure!"

He pointed to another figure walking beside them.

"Oh, her? That's Serena, your lady friend." She smiled happily, before noticing his shocked expression. "Oh, whoops. I don't think I was supposed to mention her."

She rubbed the back of her head before pressing her hooves together nervously. "You won't say anything to her right?"

He smiled wryly, cocking his head to the side.

"Oh, you want to know how I know her?" she continued at his nod. "Ah, she comes in every now and then asking about you."

She looked away for a moment. "I told her she didn't need to worry, that I'd take care of everything. But... I don't think she believed me."

Looking up at him, her eyes widened. "She knows I'm gonna be a super strong adventurer one day right? You don't think that was the problem, do you?"

He let out another chuckle, this one more genuine, before leaning forward and petting her head gently. A few scratches behind the ear and she wasn't even complaining.

"Yeah, you're right," she said, a look of bliss on her face. "She's probably worried about nothing."

He stood up, moving around the table to take a seat next to her. As she closed her eyes and let her head rest against the table, he looked out the window.

There were no dark clouds in the sky, or ominous shouting voices. But he couldn’t help but feel uneasy. He looked down at Cinnamon, and almost unconsciously returned the little smile she had on her face. Well, maybe it would be okay to have a little faith.

~~~

Large tremors shook the building from top to bottom, knocking most patrons onto the ground. Just barely keeping steady, the Dragonborn quickly scooped Cinnamon up and put his back to the wall, keeping a wary eye out for any signs of danger. Though the little shop seemed safe for the moment.

A Pinkie Pie standing at the front of the counter bounced up and down in time with the tremors. Her face curled in a frown as she held her hat to her head. “It’s always something around here,” she said in a deadpan tone.

Holding onto the front table, the owner looked over the room with an anxious smile. “I think this is a little more than the usual antics.” She held tight until the tremors finally dispersed, slowly spreading out her magic field and lifting those who couldn’t stand on their own off the ground.

“Everyone alright?” she called out, paying careful attention to each patron. She looked over each and every one for any sign of injury, taking special care when she got to Cinnamon.

Most called out an affirmative, though the man in red overalls was looking down at his ruined slice of cake in despair. The taller man in green overalls leaned down on one knee and carefully laid a hand on his shoulder, looking on with a half amused, half exasperated expression. His eyes darted around warily, shoulders tensed and ready for danger.

“I’ll take that as a yes, for now.” She nodded in determination. “I need to go check the back, if anyone needs anything just give me a call.”

The dragonborn leaned down and did a more thorough examination of Cinnamon on his own. She giggled a little, dancing away. “Hey, I’m fine. Nothing an adventurer like me can’t handle.” She puffed out her chest and grinned, before looking around to see what the damage had been.

Luckily, it wasn’t much more than a few overturned tables. A boy in a green tunic was carefully moving about, shifting things back into place. Spike kept to the front, putting the stools back up. Most of the other patrons were either helping or sitting in place, unsure of what to do. Smashed glass was in large supply along with ruined food littering the floor.

A few sparks of magic lit up from the back room, and the lights came on in full force before shutting back off. A light pulse echoed from the center of the room and the previously dirtied floor was made clean once again. Coming out from the back room, the owner held a selection of dishes in a green field of magic, slowly levitating them over to each patron.

“Sorry for the inconvenience folks, not sure what’s going on exactly, but that’s no reason to let it ruin our day.” She sat back down at the front and gave a warm smile, before turning to a nearby tablet and furiously tapping away at it in search of answers.

Most drifted back to their respective tables, though a couple made their way out the door to find their own answers. “What do you think that was all about?” Cinnamon asked the Dragonborn with a curious head tilt.

He just shrugged, unsure. One of his companions might know, he would ask them later.

~~~

The Dragonborn fell back against the fountain, armor making a dull thud as it hit the unyielding stone. Looking up, he could see lush green grass and children playing. All kinds and all species. It was a sight the dragonborn could appreciate more than most, though the worried expressions of the parents weren’t as welcome.

He looked up as a shadow fell across his body, cupping a hand over his eyes to block out the harsh sunlight. Slowly a figure came into focus: a young boy in a green tunic with a sword strapped to his back. He gave a quick wave, taking a seat beside the Dragonborn.

Neither could talk in the conventional sense, but a bit of ka trickery from both of their worlds let them understand each other. Being on the other end of things was strange, but they could intuitively understand what the other was trying to say. It made for fast conversations, and very few misunderstandings.

They spent some time trading information, asking about the weather, or how the people back home were doing. They had talked before on occasion, both of them regulars at the same cafe. Link in particular was worried about his home dimension and how undefended it was. On the other hand, the Dragonborn could understand, but was much less concerned. His dimension had many more godlike beings defending it, after all.

The Nerevarine was the one handling the diplomatic work, he was just a powerful hero looking to help out. It was also a nice opportunity to see the sights of the multiverse, a place that could be difficult to get around in without connections. Link’s princess did most of the talking for him too, so he hadn’t had the opportunity to do much besides wander around himself.

The Dragonborn leaned forward, letting out a quiet sigh. It was hard to not feel powerless in a game with such high stakes. He was used to taking action, running out into the thick of it and fighting. Sitting around and waiting really wasn’t his style, and the idea that he couldn’t do much this time kind of hurt.

Link rested a hand on his shoulder, giving it a quick pat. He didn’t do anything else aside from smile warmly before pulling away. The Dragonborn got the message, though. You aren’t alone, we’re all in this together. He couldn’t help but return the smile. As young as he was, Link had a good head on his shoulders.

Another shadow fell across him as he looked up once again, seeing Serena look down at him with a wry smile. “I thought I would find you here. Taking in the scenery? And you aren’t doing it alone for once.”

She looked over to Link, who raised a hand to lightly wave at her.

“Sorry about this, but we’ve got some business to discuss?” she asked, smiling awkwardly. Link simply shrugged, and waved her off, still wearing a kind smile.

Serena beckoned the Dragonborn forward, and he stood up with long sigh. Taking one last glance around the park, he waved goodbye to Link and fell in step with Serena.

“So, I guess you’re wondering what’s going on?” He nodded silently, looking straight ahead as they cut through the streets.

“As far as power scaling goes, our people are useful but not game changing. A lot of the general abilities we have are great, but heroes are few and far between.” She looked over the street, almost looking through the people they passed. “The Daedric Princes and the Nine Divines have little interest in the grander conflict as usual. There is some evidence of meddling though.”

He chuckled lightly.

“Yes, I’m sure you’re well used to that.” She gave him a sideways glance. “I know you’re the champion of a few of them, any luck there?”

He shook his head, holding up his hand in a so and so motion.

“So some of them will help a little, I’m guessing, but for the most part they really are staying out of things. They’re at least not going to let just anyone destroy us, right?”

He nodded, giving her a thumbs up. He grasped the sword at his side, looking at her questioningly.

“Right now we’re still on standby, not much is actually happening. Things are going to be heating up soon, though, and we’re going to have to make a choice. We can head out to the front lines, stay home and defend our own realm…” She trailed off for a moment. “I’m pretty sure I know which side you want to fight for, so we don’t have to discuss that right?”

He gave her a firm nod, expression set.

“I knew I could count on you. Once a hero always a hero right?” She gave him a warm smile. “Things are going to get scary soon, on a level we’ve never seen before. But we’ll stick together, just like how it used to be, right?”

He nodded, grasping her shoulder for a moment before pulling away.

“I’ve also heard some unsettling things. We’re not exactly high up enough to get everything first hand. But the Merodi are pretty transparent. You know Corona right? The one who sent out the message?”

She sighed. “Turns out she’s joined the side pushing collapse. Or, more accurately, she’s decided to start her own faction.”

He grasped the hilt of his sword more tightly. Tensing.

“We don’t have much more time to make a decision.” She looked him in the eyes. “What do you want to do?”

~~~

Cinnamon trotted through the streets, happily trailing after her mother. Times were dark, but it’s not like Celestia City was in constant danger or anything. So, while her mother kept an eye on her, it wasn’t as close as it probably should have been. Cinnamon took that opportunity to explore more of the stalls up close.

There were all sorts of things to be found at the market, and the hustle and bustle hadn’t really diminished with the latest developments in the war. She could buy all sorts of strange foods from different places, and technology was just as easy to find. If she wasn’t so young she might have found all the variety a bit strange. But this was just another new place to her.

She noticed him while looking over an assortment of gaudy hats, the Gem at the counter watching her impassively. She wheeled around with a grin, excited at the prospect of talking to one of her favourite friends. He would know where to find all the most interesting stuff, she was sure. He probably knew all the best stores for an aspiring adventurer too.

She weaved through the people like a pro, quickly dodging the moving limbs in her way and avoiding the more dangerous looking ones. It was a bit of a struggle, but she managed to keep her friend in sight the whole way. He finally stopped at a stall full to the brim with crystals of every kind and variety she could think of. Each and every one was filled with a glowing inner light.

The Dragonborn seemed to be chatting amiably with the stall owner like they were old friends, even if he didn’t say a word. It was a little strange if you didn’t know him, but Cinnamon was nonplussed. She trotted over to him without a word and just stood behind him quietly, a grin on her face.

It took a few moments before the seller looked at her with a quizzical expression, turning his gaze to the dragonborn. The seller seemed very confused, but Cinnamon was blissfully unaware of that as she realized her game was up.

Her friend turned around and she could see his brows creasing with concern as he immediately leaned down to see what was up. She took the opportunity to jump up and latch onto his shoulder, giggling all the while.

He lifted her up after a moment, and she could practically see the wry grin as he turned around, waving the stall owner off. He picked up the crystals he’d been asking for, paid, and was quickly off. Cinnamon meanwhile, was looking around in awe now that she was up so high.

She could tell he wanted to ask her something. “Mommy’s getting ingredients for home, and a few other things.” She tried to shrug her shoulders, but it was kind of awkward from where she sat. “It’s pretty safe around here, she won’t mind. You going to visit your lady friend?”

The dragonborn might have been embarrassed if he wasn’t made of sterner stuff. Though it was mostly down to the fact that she’d asked so innocently. He shrugged himself, causing her to let out another giggle. But she got the point, he had been off to see her, but it was a little late for that now.

“So what are the crystals all about anyway?” she asked, peering over the side of his shoulder and into the bag filled with glowing gems. She reached out a hoof, tapping one gently. “They feel full of magic.”

He chuckled, tapping his sword with a hand.

“Oooh, the enchantments?” She frowned for a moment. “I thought you couldn’t get those kinda gems around here?”

He waved a hand back and forth, pulling out his phone and tapping away at it for a moment. He lifted it up for her to see. “Oh, wow, already? That’s great news!” She cried out with a happy smile. “I bet Mommy would like to help you celebrate.”

He twisted his head around a bit, raising his eyebrows.

“She’ll be fine,” She tapped on his shoulder. “Nothing bad happens around here, I mean, there were a few fights a little while ago. But it’s calmed down now.”

She looked at the ground for a moment. Expression falling. “Mommy almost got caught up in one actually, one of her friends is on the bad guys’ side.”

He tilted his head slightly.

“Well, I mean. That’s what they are right?” she asked. “They wanna kill all those people and ponies.” She raised her hooves into the air, voice a little too loud as a few eyes turned their way. Not all of them friendly.

The Dragonborn kept out a sharp gaze, looking around for any sign of danger, but decided to let her continue talking. She’d already calmed down anyway.

“I mean, if that happened, it might hurt my mommy. Or me! And I know I’d be sad if she wasn’t around anymore. And she’d be sad if I wasn’t around either. You can’t be the good guys if you go around hurting ponies.” She looked at him imploringly. “You think so too right?”

He sighed, before nodding quietly. It wasn’t like he didn’t understand Corona’s position, you couldn’t always make the easy choice. But he couldn’t help but feel like collapse was the easy choice. Maybe he’d been out of the game a bit too long, but this kind of thing should be a last resort. They could minimize the deaths, fix things.

“You alright?” Cinnamon asked in worry. “You blanked out for a bit there.”

He looked up, gazing at the rooftops in the distance. He could hear Cinnamon clearly, but the noises around him were almost deafening. Coming from a barren land like Skyrim, where he was used to walking for miles completely alone… He felt uncomfortable. Regardless, he gave her a thumbs up, awkwardly twisting his hand around so she could see it.

“Well, okay then,” she said quietly. “Oh, hey look, there’s Mommy! And it’s your lady friend too!”

He looked up with a start. Oh, she wasn’t going to let this go any time soon was she? Judging by her smirk, he guessed not.

~~~

Spike idly picked at the bowl of gems in front of him, letting out a quiet sigh.

“Everything alright?” the owner asked.

“Yes? No… not exactly,” he replied, looking up. “You know about what’s happening right?”

She gave him a wry smile and a nod. “Hard not to notice, and, you know,” she tapped her strangely curved horn.

“Yeah, it probably doesn’t feel too good around here.” He picked up a gem, and bit down on it thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking about the issue a whole lot lately, kind of hard not to when you’re as high up as me. A lot of the people around here don’t worry so much, but you can see it in their eyes from time to time.”

He paused for a moment, pushing the bowl away and leaning onto the table. “Things were a lot simpler back when we didn’t have the whole multiverse to deal with. I just had to worry about keeping Twilight in order, writing out and double or even triple checking the lists. We didn’t even reorganize the library all that much. And now we’ve come to… this.” He waved a claw dismissively and away from himself.

“It’s really affecting everyone, huh?” the owner asked, slinking over to a small box at the other end of the counter.

“Everyone I know, the message was supposed to reach everyone after all. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about it from the people who come through here.” Spike sighed. “Even I’m doing it now.”

He paused for a moment. “What do you believe in, Coffee? Preservation or collapse?”

Coffee took a deep breath before letting it out slowly. “You know, a lot of my customers have been asking me that question lately.” She looked back at him, smiling as she slid the box across the table. “Guess I’m just that fun to talk to. Honestly? I don’t think there is any right answer. But I think anything that requires us to… kill the people we care about is the wrong one.”

Spike looked at the little box curiously, before looking her in the eyes. “And all the deaths from time travel? The dark stuff hiding in the corners of the multiverse? I’m sure you’ve heard about some of the things we find out there.”

“I do hear things, but I also know these are the same questions you’ve been asking yourself right?” He looked at her quizzically and she simply tapped her horn again. “You’re for preservation right?”

“It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

“Depending on how you look at it.” She smiled a little more weakly. “I’ll do whatever I can for Cinnamon. But I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like a friendlier multiverse for her to live in. We can work on it, but it’s a big cycle right? Sometimes I worry that anything we do is just going to get buried in the sands of time.”

“We’re working on it, though,” Spike said, straightening up a bit. “Even if we don’t last, we can have an effect on the people that come after. I mean… most of us weren’t even expecting to still be around at this point. I was honestly afraid I was going to be the last one, but they’re still around. Thanks to… Corona.” His face fell at that point.

Coffee furrowed her brows, leaning on the box. “You still care about her, don’t you?”

“Can’t hide anything from you, can I?” He pulled back a moment, letting out a chuckle. “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

“Cross my heart and hope to fly,” she said, doing the motions.

“You’ve heard about that?”

“I think most of us have at this point, kind of hard not to get curious about our source material. My world’s a bit different from the norm, but… well, you know.” She smiled at him. “You knew her, I mean, before all this,” she gestured a hoof vaguely.

“Ah, I did, I wasn’t her biggest fan at first, but…”

Coffee opened the box as he continued talking, levitating a few sapphire cupcakes over to him. He paused to give out a thank you, barely breaking away from recounting the first time he met Sunset Shimmer. Before she was Corona. Times were a little darker these days, but as Spike left the shop, his heart felt lighter.

~~~

The night was cold, enough that Luigi was looking forward to the heating charms in the little cafe. His brother was a bit tied up with work at the moment, so he’d pick up some cake to go and maybe have a chat. It wasn’t like the meetings would be over anytime soon. He had time.

He shivered a little, looking around the empty streets. He couldn’t help the chill creeping up his back, and it wasn’t due to the cold. He’d always been a bit of a scaredy cat, he was always honest with himself about that. But there was just something about being by himself in a universe so very far away.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he entered the cafe. He knew most of the people inside at least. Ka-curse or something else, a lot of hero types tended to gather here, which made it pretty easy to get along with everyone. His brother had also been dragging him here practically every chance they got. The cake was a little too good. The fact that there were different Celestia Endorsement Posters of the pastry should have been a warning sign.

It was as warm as he’d hoped, and most chose to leave him to his own devices. He returned a few waves and a couple smiles, making his way to the front counter. The wave he gave Coffee was a little awkward, but he calmed down when she just gave him a smile.

“The usual?” she asked.

“If you don’t mind.” He couldn’t help closing up a little, hunching in on himself. He tensed up a bit, squaring his shoulders before taking a seat at the counter. He felt a thrill of fear, but he was coping.

“And something for your brother to go I’m guessing?” She smiled at him, keeping her distance, for which he was grateful.

Luigi looked to the side, blushing a little. “Yes, the cream and strawberries one if you don’t mind. He was quite impressed last time, and wanted to share some with Peach.”

“Ohoho, that good huh?” she said with a wink. “I’ll get right on that then, be done before you know it. Same as last time?” he gave her a nod, and she trotted off to the back room.

Luigi leaned back with a sigh. He was startled when a quiet voice spoke up. “Hey there, Luigi, get here alright?”

Quickly looking to his side, Luigi spotted a wide brimmed hat. The face below was hidden in darkness, but for two glowing points of light. “Oh, hey there Vivi, how’s everything going?” Luigi had been nervous when they first met, but Vivi really was a kindred spirit.

“It’s been alright so far,” he sipped at a cup of hot chocolate. “I… feel a little strange that it was all solved so easily, but... I don’t have to worry about stopping any more.”

Luigi looked at him with concern. “And you’re okay with that?” he asked, leaning on the table and twisting around to better face Vivi.

“I… I built it up as such a big thing in my head. I… got kind of consumed by it, before finally accepting that it was just how things are. That... that’s how things were supposed to be.” He looked down into his cup. “One day we just stop, not because we’re sick or injured, but because it’s our time. And there’s a purpose to it. But what does it mean if it doesn’t have to be that way?”

Luigi looked down at the table. “Those are some pretty big questions to be asking yourself.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t think about it too much myself, me and my brother tend to be going on a big adventure, or just relaxing after one. We don’t get much time to think about this sort of stuff.”

Luigi glanced at Vivi from out the corner of his eye. “But you know. Just because things are different now, doesn’t mean it’s different in a bad way.”

Vivi looked at him in question.

Luigi looked straight ahead. “I’m kind of a scaredy cat, I’m not brave like my brother. Even with everything going on right now, I haven’t been able to change that. I get frightened of my own shadow sometimes, I can’t handle ghosts or the dark all that well, and those kinds of things are what I have to deal with a lot at home.” He tapped the counter lightly, sighing. “I’ve faced a lot of my fears, and in the moment it’s scary, but I’m still here.”

Luigi looked back at Vivi, a reassuring smile on his face. “You’re braver than me you know, I’m sure you’re going to be okay. Things like this always work out in the end.”

They sat in silence for a while. Coffee eventually came out from the back, setting a plate of mushroom pizza on the table, along with a wrapped box. Likely in deference to the mood, she merely shot them a smile and took a seat a little further away. The cafe was quiet at this time. Nothing but a quiet murmuring as people huddled together in small groups to talk.

Vivi eventually spoke up once more. “Even with what’s going on now? Preservation and… collapse?”

Luigi took a deep breath. “Well, I know what my brother would say, or actually, what he would do. But I’ll be honest. I’m scared, that’s probably not strange for me. But it’s the truth.” He let his hand rest on the table. “A lot of us are right now, even if we don’t want to admit it. I mean, it’s the fate of every universe at stake. And most of us can’t do that much to affect the outcome.”

Vivi nodded slowly. “My friends are doing what they can, but there aren’t that many of us. Most of the people in our world are just average citizens. My… the others like me want to help, and they have powerful magic on their side. But we aren’t invincible or anything.” He hunched in on himself. “It’s scary, I just learned that we don’t have to… to die, and now everyone’s going out there and risking their lives.”

Luigi wasn’t sure what to say for a moment. He leaned forward and put his hands together, biting at his lip nervously. “Where I come from, things are pretty dangerous. But even dying isn’t hard to avoid if you’re careful. I do worry about my brother sometimes, there are a lot of dangers he has to face. I’ve worried for myself as well. But…”

Luigi took a deep breath. “Sometimes there are things you have to do. Things that go beyond being a hero. Sometimes, even if you’re scared, you need to press on and do what you feel is right.”

“Collapse… Preservation. I know that there are reasons people support both sides. But I couldn’t support, and I don’t think any of my friends, especially not my brother, could support collapse.” He tugged at his cap in a nervous gesture. “So even if I’m scared, I’m gonna do what I can to make a difference. For everyone I care about.”

Vivi nodded, placing his cup on the table. “I… I think I understand. I’m scared too, it’s a big place out there, and there’s so much I don’t know. But… I think it’s important to do what I believe is right. I don’t want my friends to get hurt.” He twined his fingers together nervously. “If I have to go out there and face my own fears, I guess it’s okay. And… I’ll have my friends by my side, too.”

Luigi smiled, giving his shoulder a pat. “You’ll make even more friends, I’m sure.” He leaned down. “As scary as it is, there are a lot of good people around here.” He looked behind Vivi, who turned to follow his gaze.

More than a few people were standing behind them, a few had grins, and more than a couple had their thumbs up. Zidane was standing in the doorway, looking at him with a cocky smile, more of his friends standing outside the door. “We got your back Vivi,” he thumped a fist against his chest. “We’ll get through this just fine.”

~~~

He paused at the door, looking back at Serena as she stood silent, supportive.

“I know what you’re thinking, this might be the last time we come here right?” She shook her head wryly. “You don’t give yourself enough credit, sometimes.”

He chuckled, hand reaching for the door before it opened on its own. Luigi stood there looking a little nervous before he realized who it was. Cinnamon was standing behind him with wide eyes, her mother at her heels.

He backed up a bit, and Luigi took a step forward, twisting around to stand beside him. The Dragonborn nodded in understanding, stepping away to let them have a quick chat. He couldn’t help but catch a few snippets though. Seems Luigi needed to go quite suddenly, and was leaving a message for a friend of his.

He shook himself from his reverie as Luigi walked past with a quick wave. He looked at little Cinnamon, Serena stepping up to talk with Coffee. He looked into her eyes as he crouched down to her level.

“I guess you’re going too, then?” she asked, nervously batting a hoof at the ground. “A lot of my friends have been saying goodbye lately… something big happened right? Mommy hasn’t been letting me watch the news.”

He sighed, reaching out to ruffle her mane. She looked up at him with a slight glower, before sighing herself. “I get it, you’ve got big hero stuff to do, and I’m still just a little filly. I’d be… well I wouldn’t be safe, and that would make Mommy sad.” She looked to the side. “You might get hurt because of it, too.”

He smiled at her sadly, giving a short nod. He pulled his hand back after a couple scratches behind her ear.

“Can you at least promise me, next time, if you’re not going anywhere too dangerous. I can maybe come with you?” She blushed a little, staring at the ground. “I’ll ask Mommy first you know, and maybe we could make a trip of it or something. I’d just… I’d really like to go on an adventure too. And I know it wouldn’t be as cool if it was with anyone else.”

He looked at her for a moment, considering. Finally, after a few moments, he smiled warmly and gave her a thumbs up.

“You really mean it?” she asked

He nodded.

He had made his decision. Powerful, powerless, what did it really matter? He knew in his heart the right choice, and he would do what he could to protect those he cared about. He would come back, and they would go on that adventure. Maybe even invite a few more of his friends to come along.

Friendship was Magic right? He couldn’t help but think there was something to that.

He stood up, giving her a wink, before turning on his heel with a wave. He glanced back one final time, giving her a single sincere smile.

He fell into step with Serena as they slowly disappeared into the crowd.

Cinnamon looked up at her mom. “They’re gonna be alright, right Mommy?” She looked up pleadingly.

“Things will be okay little one, we just need to believe in them. It’ll all turn out fine.” Coffee pulled Cinnamon into a hug. “Everything’s going to be just fine…” She trailed off as she closed her eyes, gently stroking Cinnamon’s mane.

‘Neither Fear Nor Favour’

By Trivena

The portrait was not a flattering one.

Station legend had it that it had been commissioned at Commander Vimes’ insistence, as a condition of his sitting for the grand ceremonial portrait that hung in the palace gallery. The ceremonial portrait itself, legend noted, had been non-negotiable.

This painting, small and dirty-looking, rested on a wall in the commander’s office at Pseudopolis Yard. The poses, even the scene itself, were entirely the product of the artist’s imagination; iconographs hadn’t existed then, so the portrait had been painted many years after the fact. The faces, though, they were as honest as the artist could make them.

The subjects were three battered, tired men; for a few days more than sixty years ago, they had been the full complement of Ankh-Morpork’s Night Watch. Sergeant Colon, a retired soldier; Corporal Nobbs, barely reformed from a childhood lived on the streets; and their captain, Vimes himself, career watchman with no prospects, and by his own admittance, drinking himself into an early grave.

Sam Vimes the Younger, second Duke of Ankh and present Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, had grown up knowing the legend as fact. He remembered writing essays and studying textbooks while his mother, the formidable Lady Sybil, lovingly bullied his father into his despised fancy ceremonial ducal uniform. He remembered Commander Vimes arguing with the painter over the second portrait, until his mother quietly laid down the law: this is how it’s going to be, and if you don’t like it, we’ll commission somebody else. And he remembered the day when, the second painting half-completed, old Uncle Fred hadn’t turned up for his sitting; that day, his father had come very close to seeking solace in a bottle again.

A grey-faced captain knocked at his open door, jolting the commander from his reminiscence. “Sam?” Reginald Shoe was nearly the only one left who still called him that; he’d put his foot down about Young Sam decades ago, on the grounds that he wasn’t a lance-constable anymore. “The day shift just got in, and the night shift’s almost finished their briefing.”

Sam pushed himself up from his desk with a sigh. “Thanks, Uncle Reg. We won’t keep them waiting, then.”

The commander strode into the crowded muster room, Captain Shoe following behind. Nearly every watchman assigned to headquarters was there, day and night shifts both, in a room that had never been designed to hold them all. He didn’t even need to thump the desk to get their attention; quiet spread quickly through the room as the men (and women, trolls, dwarfs, golems… there had even been a vampire, once, until she decided that politics suited her better) became aware of his presence.

“Good evening, and day shift, thank you for waiting; I won’t keep you long. I want to speak to all of you today.” Commander Vimes took a breath, and began.

“You all know that our great nation, the United States of the Multiverse, is at war. We’re not here to take sides; if you feel the need to, the Watch isn’t the place for you. Fighting to keep the multiverse together is a job for the military and the politicians; we are Watchmen, and every last man of us swore an oath when we joined, an oath to uphold the law and protect the innocent.”

Despite the modern electric lights, the night seemed to creep into the muster room, the corners growing darker as Vimes spoke.

“Ninety years ago, there was a revolution. You won’t find it in your history books; if you look up the twenty-fifth of May, all you’ll find is the assassination of Lord Winding. It was swift, it was public, and it changed almost nothing, yet it’s still remembered to this day; but to us, forgotten or not, the revolution is what was important.

“As watchmen, it went to the very heart of what we stand for. The People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road stood for Truth, Justice, and basic rights and freedoms. The revolt was crushed quietly and overnight; seven good men died that night, most of them watchmen going about their duty.” He nodded to Reg Shoe, who had been the other casualty; the zombie joined the Watch many years after his death. “And yet, even though the revolution failed, their spirit did not die with them.

“Today, though the universe falls apart around us, we stand to uphold the ideals they died to protect. Let it never be said that a Watchman was afraid to die for the ideal he swore to defend.”

It was darker now, as though the night itself had crawled inside to join the watchmen.

From the back, a voice interrupted. “I don’t know about you poor sods, but I’d rather live for it.” In the shadows behind them, in the darkest corner of the room, a match flared to life. A cigar-end glowed, and a figure stepped forth from the dark.

The commander’s jaw fell open in silent shock, and every watchman turned to see what he was staring at.

The late Commander Sir Samuel Vimes blew out a cloud of cigar smoke, and smiled grimly at them all.

“I never left you before,” he declared, and as the shadows gave way to light once more, his words resounded throughout the room as if they were graven in stone. “And I’ll be damned if I abandon you now.”

The crowd of watchmen rippled as each and every one of them saluted. Vimes returned it in acknowledgement, his smile widening into a genuine look of pride.

“Did you think Old Stoneface would let his men face this alone?” the old Commander asked, watching backs straighten as he took another step forward to stand amongst them. “I’ll be with you all the way.”

Amidst the clamour that broke out, the younger commander pulled himself together enough to dismiss the men, and as the watchmen poured out to the streets, some to their beat and some to their bed, Sir Samuel strode to the front of the room. Commander Vimes watched, transfixed; his father looked exactly as he remembered from his childhood, battered breastplate, cheap shoes and all; relaxed and in control, as though he knew that every man in the room knew that he was in charge. He even still had his policeman’s walk, the comfortable swing that conserved energy and ate up the night.

“Evening, son. You’re looking well.”

Young Sam finally found his voice. “Dad?...How?”

His father made a rueful grimace. “Every day, watchmen across the Sto Plains ask themselves ‘what would Old Stoneface think? What would he say?’” The elder Vimes nodded towards the last of the night shift as they trickled out of the room. “They’re good lads, Carrot and his boys taught you all well, but you couldn’t have expected this to happen.” He ground out his cigar in an ashtray that the commander knew for a fact hadn’t been on the desk before.

“Dad.”

“You know what I used to say about gods? There’s no such thing as a god of watchmen, because watchmen are too bloody suspicious to believe in one?” Commander Sir Samuel Vimes let out a long breath, and his son suddenly understood.

“We believe in you.”

And so the Watchmen went forth, with the darkness at their backs, the Law in their hands, and Justice by their side, to do their duty without fear or favour.

To uphold the law, protect the innocent, and to keep the peace.

Fabricati diem.

~~~

A long, long way away, and yet no distance at all, Azrael, the Death of Universes, stirred. Twin nebulae dimmed in His eyes as He focused His gaze on the Universal Clock; the longest hand, the universe hand, had not yet completed its circuit, and yet… He could no longer remember when everything would be again...

‘Solar Waltz’

By The Amusementist

Ever since the discovery of Earth Stand and related worlds, the percentage of creatures who possessed Stands had increased markedly, and as such the chance of developing Stands with absurd powers rose markedly. Stands like U-Catastrophe, The World Over Heaven, and Seraphim stood high above most of the others, with abilities that could shake reality itself. By chance, one of these Stands developed outside the reaches of Merodi space, but much farther into the Q-Sphere. It resided in a universe much like a standard Earth - except that the whole planet was ruled by sentient foodstuffs.

The Stand was a spaceship, as big as Celestia City in the early days of Merodi Universalis. The Stand appeared as four massive prongs with a large central sphere. Millions of lights glowed along each of the Stand's various surfaces, with the center glowing, telling of the Stand's power. Along one of the sides of the massive prongs the Stand's name was inscribed, written in softly glowing lights: Solar Waltz.

On the outside, the Stand was sleek and seamless, made of dark grey metal with red and orange decals, seemingly impenetrable to outside attack.

The inside was a different story entirely.

Behind thick metal armor and the inner workings of the ship was a world that filled in the gaps. A spirit construct not unlike a fusion reactor occupied a quarter of the central sphere, providing power to the massive ship-Stand as it moved through the universe. Elsewhere, artificial skies and celestial bodies gazed down on races from as normal as humans to as exotic as beings made of starlight. Hundreds of different races called Solar Waltz home, with each of them having one thing in common. The universes they called home had been ravaged by the wars between the lesser Class 3s and Class 2s over The Message, and had sought refuge here.

In fact, every single sentient being on Solar Waltz was a refugee - except for one: man who appeared young but was really of advanced age, one of the perks of the invulnerable Stand. Well, at least it would be until those in power made the choice. Destroy the multiverse, or keep it the way it is. Collapse or Preserve.

The person the many beings on this ship simply called “the Captain” gave a deep sigh as he gazed out on the stars. His thoughts began to wander.

Ever since obtaining Solar Waltz years before the Message, the Captain had used it to help as many universes as possible. He had used the ship as a gargantuan shield, defending a group of much smaller ships as they repaired their FTL drives. He had used it to eliminate a Class 3 which only wished to drain those lower than them of their resources, as a tax for protection from the Class 2s, and taken as many refugees onto his Stand as possible. And now, that was all he did.

The Captain knew the end of the current multiverse was soon, perhaps as little as a meta-time year. He had felt the many vibrations caused by the usage of the Class 1 superweapons as they tore the multiverse apart, causing scars that might never heal. Except now, all the Class 1s were dead and the D-Sphere annihilated. Even as the multiverse collapsed on his head, he brought as many people as he could into the safety of Solar Waltz.

Around the silently stargazing Stand user, holographic screens hovered, displaying information on the ship’s internals and camera feeds from around his Stand. One screen held most of his attention, as it displayed a set of a few words and a large percentage. Ship Occupancy: 83%. He still had space for more refugees, so he would fill it.

“Solar Waltz.” A deep baritone voice came from The Captain’s mouth. He had no need to speak to the Stand, for it was his very soul, but he did so anyway. “Set a course for the next damaged world, and prepare more living space.” An affirmative beep echoed from within the room, and groans of metal began to resonate through the Stand as Solar Waltz began to change its shape to suit its master. Outside, the four prongs began to glow, dimly at first before they grew brighter and brighter. Lines of white energy arced from prong to prong before the fabric of space-time tore open before the massive ship, leading to the next universe. Slowly, the ship moved through the portal, heading to the next universe where it was needed.

‘Black and White’

By G. M. Blackjack

You don’t know who these men are. You aren’t even completely sure they’re men⁠—or even human—but you will no doubt imagine them as such. You don’t know their names, and you won’t. It doesn’t really matter who they are, anyway. The conversation they are about to have was immensely common in the multiverse: held by many friends, colleagues, and even complete strangers as the Message and later the War for Existence dragged on.

The Message asked a Question and requested a Choice.

Collapse or preservation? The end of ka or the continuation of the status quo?

Their conversation was by no means special or unusual, nor was any dramatic conclusion reached.

Let’s call them “White” and “Black” for simplicity’s sake.

“How can you support them?” White asked. “How can you condemn so many? Doesn’t it weigh on your conscience at all?”

“It’s not that it doesn’t,” Black responded, sitting back in his chair with a stern frown on his face. “It’s that my conscience screams at me to do something, and the collapse is the one that takes the least toll on me, mentally.”

“…How? You’re supporting actions that actively kill… quadrillions of quadrillions!”

“You want to play the numbers game?” Black leaned forward, counting off on his fingers. “The reports are in, confirmed from several sources. The collapse would kill so many fewer people than are killed every few years in the multiverse due to time rewrites alone. Think about that for a moment. The only difference between those deaths and the collapse is that they don’t look overt, but really are.”

“The Celestialsapiens thought there was a way to preserve while ending time travel; I tend to think the greatest thinkers the multiverse has ever known were on to something.”

Black snorted. “Greatest thinkers?”

“Well, they were standoffish, and too authoritative, and… that’s not the point! The point is time travel could have been removed.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe.” White frowned.

“Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say time travel was dealt with. What about all the wannabe gods? Ka curses? Memory erasure?”

“Hells?”

“Yes, Hells, but those aren’t my main point…”

“Don’t hide from them,” White pushed.

“Fine, Hells, thank you for strengthening my argument. Every last one of these things is a horrendous torment on existence, killing so many just because we like the idea of them in our story.”

“It’s not confirmed that memory erasure is truly deadly.”

“It is often enough. They did tests on souls. Found out which ones were different before and after, with unique signatures. Rewrites, erasures, adjustments… they create new beings.”

“Assuming the Tower’s definition of the soul is correct.”

“You’re the one who wants preservation, aren’t you of the mind the Tower’s ‘meaning’ is the right one?”

White shook his head. “The Tower is a ‘human’ construct, it can’t always be right. It has to make mistakes on some things, and as far as we know the soul is just there to help it manage who’s a ‘character’ and who isn’t. Talk to anyone who’s had their mind re-adjusted, even partially: they don’t feel like different people.”

“Then what about alternate version replacements? They both exist at the same time, surely they’re different.”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters!” Black put a hand to the bridge of his nose and sighed. “You need to know what’s a person and what isn’t to know what really causes death.”

“That is true,” White admitted. “But, that also helps preservation. We don’t know how much of that suffering is real.”

“Or even if souls are real at all or if morality can be defined…”

“Exactly! Which is why we need the Tower!”

“Do you not see your circular, inconsistent reasoning? First you say it may not matter, and then you speak as though the Tower provides what matters, meaning it does matter.”

White pressed his hands together. “I’m saying the Tower provides us a framework from which to work forward to… understand what should and shouldn’t be. Which is why we should follow our conscience. A conscience that tells us not to kill untold billions with our own hands.”

“Again, after the collapse, all that mass death won’t occur.”

“Are we certain? We just spoke about how, due to the Tower, there is a lot we can’t know about a world without ka. What if, in the new world, it just… ends?”

“How?”

“Standard physics heat-death, let’s say.”

“Did you even listen to Corona’s Message?” Black shook his head. “There are so many ways to reverse Entropy in the universe, one is bound to survive in the New World. It may be largely standard physics, but it won’t be mundane. So much magic and mixed powers from other realms will still exist. We’ll be able to create a society from them more advanced and stable than any mundane world, jumping past whatever early dangers there may be.”

“All right, not Entropy, but what of all that magic? Surely something that can destroy an entire universe will exist.”

“Not this combination world. Anything that requires more universes to function will cease to be, and the world as a whole will be larger and more robust than any before it. No single attack could take it out.”

“According to models.”

“Yes. According to models.”

White shook his head. “That’s assuming a lot of things we don’t know. The Tower could be wrong, the Tower could be lying, and those models still allow for a chance of utter disaster.”

“So do yours.”

White frowned. “How do you mean?”

“Think of it. The Preservation Ring changes just as much as a Collapse Ring, changing the multiverse permanently through the Tower. Connections could be made dangerous, universes could have their positions irrevocably altered, or you could just break something fundamental without realizing. It’s the danger of using a Tower Ring.”

“You sound like you’re arguing for non-interference.”

“Not at all.” Black pressed his hands together, narrowing his eyes in White’s direction. “I say the risk is worth it, and I know you agree. Existence will never change if we aren’t willing to step out on a branch and test it.”

White bit his lip. “I am uncertain… I believe there is more danger in the unknown future of the collapse than the continuation of preservation. Chances are high we continue on.”

“Continue on to what?” Black smirked. “True Infinity?”

“What’s so wrong with True Infinity?”

“I don’t know, absolute pain of all possible kinds happening an infinite number of times in all places? At least in the current way things are, pain is limited!”

“And… that’s besides the point, preservation doesn’t create True Infinity.”

“It would eventually. How long do you think it’ll take White Nettle to try and restart the Downstreamer Infinity Mechanisms with the Safeguard gone? And even if she fails, the multiverse will still have that back door. A truly endless supply of everything. I bet that thought makes you feel all soft and cuddly inside.”

White shuddered. “Not… really. The Tower provides us with a meaning. In infinity, there would be endlessly conflicting Towers, worlds where good and evil are exactly reversed, and—“

“—and why do you place faith in the idea that the Tower has it right now?”

“Why do you place faith in the idea that meaning can exist without the Tower? Gan and the Builders made it for a reason—because mundane existence is pointless!”

“I don’t know, a lot of the background people seem happy.”

“That’s because they’re supposed to be! It’s a gift from the Tower to have a simple life without the complications of adventure. You just live in peace on your farm and never think of attaining anything else. It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a will-overriding ka-curse, that’s what it is.”

White twitched. “The Flowers don’t detect them as such.”

“Tell me when the Flowers publish their ka-glitch detection criteria and I’ll believe the Tower’s not using glitches as part of its own, larger story.”

“I… well, you do have a point there.” White drummed his fingers on the table. “Still, ka is better than a ‘mundane’ life. We look at Earth to see a standard, presumably ka-less template, or the closest thing we have to such.”

“Too many inconsistencies and stupid stories in Earth history for my taste but… I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here and let you have that. How is what we have now better than that?”

“Think of it. Ka itself creates idyllic adventures and vast-scoping connectivity that doesn’t exist on many earths. The problems inherent in humanity are often overlooked for the sake of friendship, interaction, and… true bonds.” White smiled. “There may be a lot of death in ka, my friend, but there is also more life. So much more. Earth is simple, boring, with only one kind of person. Out here we have a myriad of races and beautiful worlds of all sorts, and we even have ka to ensure that the tendency of tribalism and racism doesn’t stop those races from coming together!”

“Do you really think we’re so terrible that we’d try to fight everything different from us?”

“Read your Earth history some time, it is one atrocity and genocide after another. You know, like what you’re trying to do.”

Black frowned. “It is true that many exotic races simply won’t be able to survive in the New World.”

“You’ll lower not only the beauty and diversity of life, but also destroy so many cultures.”

“But all cultures in the history of the multiverse have been destroyed. Aside from Gan and his Tower, do we know of any societies before the Downstreamers? What about in the time between them and the rise of the Horrorterrors? Do we even know how much time was in there?”

“No…”

“So, there’s my point. The collapse is still less damaging to cultures than the Tower itself.”

“But look at Earth. All societies there fall as well.”

“But they aren’t forgotten. See China?”

“China is an exception. What of Mesopotamia? The Tower can’t seem to settle on what story to tell for them. It no doubt knows from extrapolation what the most likely outcome is, but the people of Earth simply told so many conflicting stories about it because they didn’t know!”

“Once again getting into what we don’t know…” Black noted.

“Yes. So much confusion. But you know what we do know?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Heroes. The Tower may create evil, but it also creates heroes to face them. It creates more heroes than villains, because heroes often have friends and followers who fight beside them. Villains gain power, but heroes will always be there to face them. In a world without ka, heroes are not guaranteed to face evil, and yet evil will still exist.”

“I have more faith in humanity than that,” Black retorted. “Even with all our psychological problems we still know how to band together and face difficulty.”

“Didn’t help solving world hunger despite the main nations of Earth having more than enough money to do so.”

“Again, we’ll have shortcuts in the new world. Technology and magic they couldn’t have. We might even be able to cure death!”

“The Tower—“

Black cut him off. “The Tower makes sure everyone dies except that madman Flagg. Even true immortal deities fall with time, simply because death is dramatic. In the New World, we could use things more fundamental than immortality serums and find actual immortality without being struck down for something as dumb as ‘hubris’.”

“But don’t we need death? Death to counteract the life of existence? Without death we are not driven, our fears have no source…”

“Death is the enemy, and it always has been. Do you want to die?”

“…It has entered my mind, at times, that it would be nice to simply stop after a time. That I’ve done all I’ve come to do. I don’t feel this now, of course, seeing as the world is about to change drastically… But there was a time I thought the end would be welcome.”

“So, you like the Nihilists then?”

White gawked. “Goodness sakes, no! The ending of something that has been fulfilled is one thing, but there’s only point if that ending happens within something ongoing! A story that continues, unending!”

“I don’t know, the Nihilists seemed to think that the ending of everything was the ultimate fulfillment…”

“I am not a Nihilist! The destruction of everything is evil! I think the collapse is evil, what do you take me for, a hypocrite?”

Black smirked. “Well, we’re only human, so I’d think both of us are in one way or another.”

White sighed, sitting back down. “An ending of absurd, complete darkness doesn’t make a good story. It makes a good enemy.”

“What does make a good story? Preservation?”

“The continuation of all to a brighter, eternal future…”

Black rolled his eyes. “I’ll tell you what makes a better story. A story that gets to an ending. Preservation is just the status quo. The collapse gets us to a point where all stories end, allowing all us ‘characters’ to move out into the New World on our own with new decisions to be made that cannot be written about or read.”

“The collapse is too jarring to be satisfied. You’re telling me you’d like a story that had an endless war of suffering and danger and, at the moment of climax, the story just stops and you never get to know anything about what happened?”

“Well, there could be reconciliation or a twist before the war ends. What of preservation? What excuse do you have for an ending?”

“I… Er…”

“It’s True Infinity, isn’t it?”

White sighed. “It might be. Or it might be the evolution of the multiverse into a new form, one that leads to a sequel.”

“…I guess.” Black leaned back in his chair, thinking about where to go next. “I shouldn’t care about what makes a good story, anyway, I should care about what’s better. The death, suffering, and sorrow will be gone.”

“Death will still be a thing.”

“But we can conquer it. Who knows what else we can conquer with technology if permanent, unrestricted progress is allowed? And people will have their own will. They won’t be created and forced into a path just to serve some plot.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“Tell me, would you like to be a character in a porno?”

“Er…” White blanked.

“They act in unnatural ways only to feed the desires of an audience… and are debased in the most despicable of ways.”

“Okay, yes, in your world the overall quantity of suffering will go down. But you know what else will go down? Happiness. Hope. And Happy Endings.”

“Happy endings are unrealistic.”

“Exactly! In a world without ka, they don’t happen. People don’t get their lives fulfilled. Here, the very fabric of reality thrums with the meaning of fulfillment. And, who knows, after the Preservation we may be able to access the Tower and make more happy endings…”

“What if your happy ending is to have conquered an evil empire? One with citizens created just to be evil and cast aside as mooks? Or an endless horde of sapient demons to be brutally killed for an adrenaline rush?”

“It’s unfortunate that those things happen… yes. But it is not us actively killing them in most cases. Someone has to take the fall for the violence, but I will not actively genocide those ‘demons’. You would.”

“In hopes for a greater future. One with less death, we’ve been over this.”

“No, no I don’t think we have.” White stood up suddenly. “There’s a difference between knowing mass death happens elsewhere in existence and causing it. I’m not blameless, I’m the guy standing on the street doing nothing. But actively causing the devastation? That’s worse. By leagues. Your side is the textbook definition of well-intentioned extremism!”

“So, it’s a trolley problem, is it?” Black folded his arms. “Do you pull the lever to save five, but you’ll kill one in the process?”

“I…”

“I’m pulling that lever. I see those people tied up to the track, all the future generations, and I want to save them.”

“But to do so you’re causing intentional suffering. That’s the point, the Tower is mindless and unintentional, the people to blame for its evils are long dead. You would be killing many now, with your hand—or at the very least supporting it. You’re doing evil so that good may result!”

“I…” Black frowned. “It’s… more complicated than that. Both sides do evil. One of them has to be done. And this one is the route for betterment.”

“Do you really think most good, honest people would end up where you are right now? What kind of mind does it take to knowingly sacrifice yourself and virtually everyone you’ve ever known for the sake of some ideal?”

“That’s not fair!”

“Everything’s fair!” White closed his eyes. “Your family, your friends, your children. Not all of them support you.”

“No.”

“And in these times you’d protect them, knowing full well if you had your way, chances are all of them would be dead.”

“Just because they’re going to die one day doesn’t mean I should kill them now. I want them to live as long as possible in the best world. It’s better that they live through this and make it to the collapse and…” Black had to take a moment to catch his breath. “They… they will die in the collapse. But if they die before then I will have failed as a human being.”

“…I’m sorry, but you’ve failed as a human being by condemning them to death. The rest of us, the majority of us, will keep our families safe.”

“How much of that is just self-preservation, huh? A deep, biological drive to live without any thought to the nuance of the situation! Do you have any idea how many people won’t even have a discussion like ours? They’ll just go ‘welp, I’d like to live, and ain’t no way anythin’s gonna change my mind’ like stubborn mules!”

“Clearly, the only people who go for collapse have to corrupt their hearts to do so, and the only people who go for preservation are locked in biological traps and ka!”

Black stared at White.

“…I’m sorry, that’s not…”

“That’s the most reasonable thing you’ve said all day,” Black grunted, looking despondent. “…You know, if people would think, it’d be pretty easy to see that this war is a stupid idea. That neither of us are qualified for jack anything.”

White closed his eyes and sighed. “Nobody has the right to answer the question, then. We can’t band together.”

“Or is it that we won’t band together?”

“I have no idea,” White admitted. “All I know is which of the two extremes sound better, and that the middle ground has been cut out.”

“You could always join the non-interferers. I hear they’ve been turning a lot of churches lately.”

“You could too.”

“And risk ending up with a true preservation?”

White smirked. “And why would I risk ending up with a hasty collapse?”

“It wouldn’t be all bad.”

“Perhaps not. But it removes too much of our life. Whatever it may bring, it’s not worth the cost. I’m uncertain if it’s worth it even if there wasn’t mass death on the line. Is ka really that evil?”

“It makes some people inherently more important than others. There is no such thing as equality with the Tower.” Black furrowed his brow. “But even the most important couldn’t get everyone to agree, so I don’t know anymore.”

“The idea of the mediator… the path Nanoha wanted to take. The path the Seats tried to take until they were tricked into war.”

“The only path the Tower clearly doesn’t want.” Black shook his head. “It’d be great if we could just all stop the fighting and find the best possible way to satisfy the most people over the greatest amount of time? Phase the Tower out or something. I don’t know.”

“I’d rather we simply alter the Tower’s creation of ka.”

“And that’s why we can’t have nice things,” Black chuckled bitterly. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, is willing to risk that coming to ‘peace’ means they will lose what they want to happen. Nobody in the history of ever is going to compromise to the opposite side if they think it’s truly, completely evil.”

“Which we do.”

“Yep.”

“And that means we can’t just leave it be. We’re morally required to take action, for we believe one action is better than the others. Absolutely.”

“There aren’t really any other options. The Nihilists are the enemy, the Mediators are hopelessly shunned by the Tower as ‘boring’, and the non-interference just doesn’t want blood on their hands. Selfish little…” Black clenched his fists.

White looked up, letting his body relax. “We’re forced to make a tense, impossible moral choice between two extremes. Extremes that we don’t know enough about. How many unknowns have we run across in this conversation? How many uncertainties?”

“A lot. Too many. But we can’t afford not to act, because we’re not given that kind of time. The war rages outside now, and it’s going to decide the fate of everything.”

“We aren’t qualified to answer the question.”

“Hm?”

“We. Every person in existence. We aren’t qualified to answer the question. Nobody is, or ever has been. Nobody had the required knowledge and understanding and… sense of self to even ask the question.”

“So, what, it was evil to know it’s possible to destroy the multiverse?”

“I… I don’t know.” White grabbed his hair. “Once you know, what do you do?”

“Corona did the best thing I can think of. Try to get everyone’s input.”

“But if all of existence isn’t qualified?! If…” White stopped short. “Would it have been right to simply erase the knowledge completely?”

“No,” Black said. “Either preservation or collapse is better. One of them has to have more good than the other. If the question is never asked, there’s a coin flip we end up in a world with more evil just because some woman thought everything needed to stay hidden.”

“Then that’s impossible. The entire multiverse doesn’t have the ability to answer the question properly, but refusing to ask the question is wrong as well.”

“I think we’ve stumbled on why this is a moral dilemma,” Black laughed bitterly. “The simple fact that there is such a question is… evil, I guess.”

“But it sure makes a good story.”

“Oh, you bet your bottom dollar it does.”

With a sigh, White stood up. “…I think that’s enough for today. I have to go home and rethink everything. Again.”

“Same here. Same time tomorrow?”

“We’ll see if I don’t sign up for the army by then.”

“You should. Fight for what you believe in. I will.”

“Joining up?”

“Pretty sure I am. If I see you out there, I’m going to capture you right in the face.”

“I would have gone for the stomach, personally.”

“More amusing to watch you go head over heels.”

White chuckled. “Yes… I suppose it would be.” He began to walk away.

“Hey, bud?”

“Yes?”

“Take care of yourself, whatever you do. And whoever ends up winning.”

“You too.”

'The Last Victory'

By TheUnbalancedOne

Along the edge of what was left of the D-Sphere, there was a Class 3 Society called The Path of Mastery. It was primarily interested in the pursuit of martial arts and spiritual power; leaving technology, science, and more practical matters to the more mundane populations of their society. They had long sought ways to reject ka's influence from their society, resulting in them having developed a number of esoteric techniques to avoid the spotlight as well as focusing most of their technological research towards limiting ka's attention on them. This led them to occasionally provoke The Flowers That Be deliberately to gain an opportunity to develop their own ka studies.

Now, however, just after the calamity of most of the Seats going to war, there was only one universe left to The Path. It was a small universe, little more than a single, albeit visually large, chamber that was noted for being unusually stable. The last of The Path of Mastery's people now took shelter inside, waiting for the war to end.

"Alert, dimensional stability deteriorating. Alert, ka filters offline," an artificial voice announced from the speakers built into the wall of the chamber designed to look like a cross between a monastery and an emergency bunker. The announcement caused a crowd of people from many different humanoid species to shift and murmur in discomfort, stopping only when a large man with a muscular build stepped up to a raised platform and clapped his hands together. The thunderous sound that echoed throughout the chamber drew all attention to himself.

The man had a name, but like many of the highest ranking members of The Path of Mastery, he had learned one of the esoteric techniques created to prevent ka from simply revealing information with outsiders. So instead he will be referred to by the title Victory.

Victory looked upon what was left of his people; all that remained from when those idiots who called themselves the Class 1 Societies reshaped the multiverse in their petty squabble over what to do about 'The Choice'. "People of The Path, I know you are all weary and frightened, and I cannot blame you for this. Over the last hour our society, our homes, and our very lives have been destroyed. We may be all that is left in this shelter, and even this is in danger as it begins to crumble."

He paused for a moment to gauge their reactions, noting the fear that was so rarely expressed by his people was threatening to overcome their senses entirely if things continued as they had been. He raised his voice to ensure all present could hear him. "We must now leave this last piece of our home behind. With so many universes lost and our infrastructure in shambles we have only one possible destination that I know will be safe for you all. I must banish you all to the realm of our oldest foes, The Flowers That Be."

Victory did not expect his people to let a statement like this go unchallenged, and he was pleased to see that several of them near the front looked ready to voice major objections. However, he could not afford to waste time addressing their challenges as he would have in a more stable time. With the slightest shift in his stance, he moved and was among them before they could react. With surprising grace and efficiency, he struck each of them in pressure points to knock them out. He then raised his voice once more. "I am the last Victory of our Society and I will not allow any of you to die, cowering in a crumbling shelter! You will seek asylum with the Flowers, you will carry the spirit of our civilization with you, and you will find a way to reconcile it with their ways."

Somehow, the display of force combined with the demands prevented anybody from raising dissent. Victory felt relieved, even as he wondered if the Flowers were even bothering to watch this. It'd make it a lot easier to convince them this wasn't a half-assed attempt at invasion if they were expecting it. He dismissed those concerns to instruct his people in the optimal formation for the performance of a mass-banishment technique. Even with willing targets, banishing so many people at once through a forced connection to another universe would take everything he had, and he would take every scrap of efficiency to make it work.

By the time he was ready to perform the banishment to save the last of his people, only a few minutes had passed since the alert sounded and the camera of ka had focused on them. In that time the outer walls of the chamber had already begun to warp and crumble. But Victory was ready to perform the final technique of his life as he melded his mind, his body, and his spirit together into a single point of focus before thrusting his palm out to unleash it all in a wall of spiritual energy. This launched the spirits of everyone else in the chamber along a forced connection to an inhabited universe within The Flowers' territory, dragging the bodies behind the spirits almost as an afterthought.

The instant the technique ended and his people were gone, Victory collapsed to the ground as a lifeless husk, leaving the now empty universe to fall into the Sea of Infinite Possibility.

‘The Polarized Nation’

By VoidTemplar

We, the People of the United States of the Multiverse hereby declare that in the course of human events it becomes necessary to take up the mantle of Washington, of Jefferson, and of Franklin and repudiate the onerous system enforced upon us by the Government. We hold these truths to be self-evident that the United States of the Multiverse in its current form has failed and that it falls to us, the people, to create a new better system, with liberty, justice and prosperity for all.

Concordia Declaration of 236

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of the Multiverse, and to the Republic for which it stands. One Nation, of Universes united, indivisible with liberty, justice and prosperity for all,” Senators, almost all humans, said in unison as they stood before the Secretary and the officers, looking stiffly towards the Presiding Officer sitting at the dais.

The gallery was filled with spectators, of a much more varied mix than the senators themselves. Ponies, gems, even a few eldritch abominations could be spotted sitting in the chairs. Some of the House Members had even made the trip into the gallery, even if there was a debate going on in the other Chamber.

“Who’s that blue unicorn with the Merodi badge?” Senator Johnston asked, pointing to that same unicorn in the gallery on the front row. It had barely been three months since he had been sworn into the Senate, being one of the newest senators, and from one of the newest universes to boot.

“Arcane Gear, the Merodi Ambassador to this place,” Senator Layton answered, barely hiding his displeasure from Johnston. “He’s been here day and night, probably making sure we vote the right way lest they decide to take a shit on us,” He continued, gesturing rudely at the unicorn.

“Order. The debate is opened on the Authorization of Military Force against the Concordia Insurrection. The Chair recognizes the Senator from Concordia, Mr. McGrant,” The Secretary said, voice booming over the chamber, carried by the speakers.

“Mr. Secretary,” McGrant began from the back of the Senate Chamber. “We are facing an internal crisis not seen since our founding universes’ Civil Wars. The Concordia Insurrection claims to be the legitimate government of our great and free union, in total opposition to the Constitution and the values that it builds upon. Indeed, my home universe is the one gripped in insurrection.” He gesticulated to a whiteboard to the side of him, showing a map of the USM and, centrally, Concordia’s place in it. Red splodges dotted the map, all marked ‘Rebel-controlled’. “In this cause, with insurrection gripping not just Concordia but so many other illustrious universes that have been part of the-”

“Look, what the Senator says is bullshit,” Layton interjected, then pointed an accusatory finger at the Merodi ambassador. “This is clearly the work of the Merodi or some other rabble who has instigated this.”

“The Senator from Maslina is out of order and will withdraw immediately,” the Secretary said, clearly bored out of his mind with the proceedings.

“No, I will not withdraw! I will speak truth to power, even if it is unpopular. Even if the establishment wants to silence me, I can and will stand up, even if it takes me talking on this mic around the clock until people see the light.”

“Mr. Layton of Maslina is skating on very thin ice!” the Secretary shouted out, causing some of the Senators in the room to share nervous looks with each other. “I advise him to withdraw, lest he be forced under Standing Order Number 24!”

“Whatever you might say, what I say is the pure truth! We may be for preserving the multiverse, but we are Multicans first, and we will not take orders from some ponies.” Several ponies in the gallery shifted uncomfortably at Layton’s words..

“Mr. Layton of Maslina will leave the chamber immediately under Standing Order Number 24! Marshalls!” The Secretary shouted out, tone clearly irritated with Layton. From the left of the chamber, neatly dressed people, all armed with tasers emerged. They walked menacingly down the aisles, physically grabbing Layton and dragging him out.

“I will not be cowed by some Secretary who does that! I say what my constituents, and the People think! I will not be subdued by the Establishment!” Layton went on as he was manhandled out of the chamber, despite his attempts to resist. Dust was kicked up, as the carpets and curtains were ruffled. “All you deplorabl-” That was the last Layton managed to say before an electric jolt struck through him and he went silent.

“With this minor altercation out of the way, I believe that we need to get back on track. Mr. McGrant has the floor,” the Secretary said. Faint thumps could be heard in the distance as McGrant rose again. Few noticed them.

“Thank you, Mr. Secretary,” McGrant began. “It is clear that we are starkly divided on the issue. And in this the problem lies, that we, the elected representatives of the people, do not want to reach out to the people and listen to them. And we keep on talking and talking to find a solution. Well I say to those who want to talk, go to Concordia and see what chaos is gripping my beloved home!” He gesticulated wildly as he spoke, then sat down calmly at the end of it.

“The Chair recognizes the Senator from Discdew, Miss von Humpeding,” the Secretary said.

“The problem that we now face is that this body is deadlocked,” von Humpeding began. “The Senate is split down the middle and those few votes, those few votes that could have swung it one way or another, those late Senators have themselves been the victim of the political polarization that has gripped this. Our nation is in the grip of extremists, who either seek socialism or seek the abolishment of our nation.” As she spoke, she gestured between both sides of the chamber, and continued. “And I say, that the individuals from several universes are guilty of this. You have the Senator from Maslina who has been dragged out, you have the obstructionists opposite and then you have the extremists in this party. Powers above, we should look at the endemic problem, the very undemocratic nature of this body!” von Humpeding exclaimed, pointing directly to the Secretary. “Even then. Even then, you have the neglect of some of our most precious places, like this building. This place can be clearly be said to be crumbling under its own weight, from the sounds that this place makes. This thundering sound. And I will give way to my friend, the Senator from Elysium, Mr. Holden,” she finished.

“The Chair recognizes the Senator from Elysium, Mr. Holden,” the Secretary said, immediately after. Von Humpeding had barely enough time to sit down before Holden rose from his seat.

“Esteemed and distinguished Senators of the United States,” Holden began. “I stand before you, not as a Senator of Elysium, but rather as the Orator of Elysium that I was known for before I came here. I come here to speak as a man clad in the most holy of duties, to serve others in defence of liberty, indeed in the defence of all existence. Never before has the United States in their multiversal existence been threatened this way, and we are standing here, in the Senate and deliberating when we should righteously go forth and restore other to this. But I will not let the United States be crucified for all to see when everything is at stake. But th-” Holden interrupted himself with a cough, and took a drink of a clear brown liquid to warm his throat.

Arcane leaned towards another spectator. “Think that he will go on?” he asked.

“Holden talks and talks and talks. Better settle in for a long while,” the spectator, a man, no more than forty years of age answered. He turned to look at Arcane. “Say, been some time since I saw a diplomat here. What brings the ambassador to this place?”

“I was sent here to make sure that all Preservation forces would stay strong. And if intervention is needed,” Arcane said, tilting his head towards the senators.

“For what it’s worth, I think that they should get it over with. This is a system in collapse and even if Preservation wins out, this is the swan song of the Union,” the spectator said, a depressing look on his face as he pulled out a newspaper. “You wouldn’t be able to get me into the Merodi, could you?”

“Don’t know yet. I’ve been seeing a lot more societies pull themselves from the brink. Don’t count them out just yet,” Arcane said, tapping on his communicator. “As for your other question...I can pull some strings if you come to the embassy. Nothing other than that. Keep it quiet,” Arcane continued, as he levitated a card over to the spectator.

“I’ll make sure of that.”

“I never got your name actually, besides, if you want to have me try and do something to help you get in.”

“Oh, my name? Titov. Mikhail Titov,” Titov said, stretching out a hand. Arcane stuck his own hoof out, shaking on it. Holden kept on talking, even as some looked, or indeed listened elsewhere.

“-ie down is not a solution, that will never be the verdict of the Multican people today, tomorrow and forever. So I say to all assembled, and to the House next door. You shall not press down upon the brow of the United States the crown of thorns. You shall not crucify the Union upon a cross of bureaucracy!” Holden said, even shouted out the last few words to the Chamber, seizing the attention of everyone in the Chamber.

“Uhhh...Thank you, Senator Holden for your contribution. Senator Catalina of Concordia has the call,” the Secretary said, communicator shaken out of his hand by Holden’s oratory talents. Alexander rose to the occasion and talked.

“I’ll echo the statements made by my esteemed colleague in the Senate,” Catalina began. “It is here that we stand at a crossroads. When that November, my beloved home state rose in rebellion, we watched idly by. We cannot do this now. We must be a force for good in the world. But good is not soft. Whenever the enemies of liberty and prosperity rise, they have chosen to classify themselves as enemies to the Union, and enemies to us. I feel I must make it clear to support a report, the report, the minority report on our Union. We must take all action to make sure that this insurrection is put down, even if it requires a universe bomb or a neutron bath. A Righteous Fury must sweep down and snuff this insurrection out,” Catalina finished in a sharp, thunderous tone.

“I’ll take a few more inputs from the Senators assembled before we move on to the vote. Senator Jackson of Searit has the floor.”

“I thank my colleagues for their contributions to the debate,” Jackson began, his powerful voice forgoing the need for a microphone. “However, I must say that they are all wrong. When I entered this Chamber fifty years ago, I saw a much different chamber. I saw people that cared about the direction of this country. Indeed, a lynch mob is coming to hang all of you gathered here, and I am undecided on whether to stick in here with you or to go out here and lead them. But I say. There is still time left to remedy this. We must share the prosperity that the Union has produced. We must make every man a king. With th-”

“Can you hear that?” Arcane asked Titov.

“What?”

“The sounds from outside the chamber. They’re getting stronger. Thump, thump, thump,” Arcane said, tapping away on his communicator, messages running past his eyes, all saying the same thing.

“I can hear them when you say it, yes. It’s not rhythmic. It’s more...steppe-like?”

“I think it is time to leave. Think some major things are about to go down here,” Arcane said, rising from his seat and began to head towards the door. He held the communicator up to his ear. “Central? Contact Lemon and Lavender. I think something is about to shake the alliance quite heavily soon.”

With that, Arcane left, Titov soon following after. A number of ponies, no doubt also Merodi citizens, also got up and left, trickling out of the chamber. And just as Holden didn’t notice the gallery as he spoke, Jackson did not either.

“For we have a problem. We have a wealth problem. We have a farm problem. We have a structural problem. The wealth has been concentrated. The money that is not in those hands would not even cover a thousandth of it. If you took that money that paid down the debts, you’d have barely made a dent. Even if you did that ten thousand times, it would only make a small chip of it. I urge people to support the Prosperity Change Program. I urge the Senators gathered to support it later today when it is up for the vote,” Jackson’s voice boomed through the chamber.

“Senator Roland for Calisota has the floor,” The Secretary quickly said.

“Today, it is a time for choosing,” Roland said. “The people in the insurrection find that this government, the government of the United States has no other power except what is lent to it by the sovereign people is an old idea, but it is an idea that we have moved away from. And the issue, the core issue of this is that we that we chose to trade liberty for security and we have lost both with this. Indeed, the most dangerous words in our language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’. It is clear that the government has failed with its tactics in this. We must reach out and talk, reach out and reconcile with them. We have a rendezvous with fate itself. That the narrative wants to march us towards. We need to preserve our children in the multiverse, that we must safeguard every Multican, or we plunge ourselves into an eternity of darkness. I yield the floor.” Murmurs went through the audience when he finished.

“We only have a few minutes before the debate is to end. The Chair recognizes the Senator from Joel, Miss Countach.”

“Esteemed colleagues,” Countach began. “Our Union is in crisis. We face an insurrection, and yet we are in this place talking and talking when we should be fighting on the frontlines for preserving our precious nation. It stinks to the high heavens of both unpatriotism and small-mindedness that they would rather attack those that seek a better life. I ask, has anyone actually read their declaration? It is plain to see. No, we need to move forward as a nation and ask for the help of our allies in the Merodi and other societies fighting for preservation to negotiate on our behalf.”

Shame! The shouts cried synchronically from the viewing gallery and some of the gathered senators.

“I will not be cowed. Not by people who are on the wrong side of history. Not by people who seek my death. Not by people who point out the splinter in people’s eyes, yet miss the beam in their own. Mr. Secretary. I commend this statement to the Senate.”

“The question is the Authorization of Military Force against the Concordia Insurrection. The clerk will call the roll,” the Secretary said. The thunder outside the doors had become more and more prominent. Thump. Thump. Thump. The crackles and pops could also now be clearly heard by everyone inside the chamber.

“Mr. Alexander of Clermont,” the clerk called out. Aye

“Mr. Alexander of Kartran.” Aye

The thunder grew ever stronger. Spread highly-pitched noises runged through the halls as Senators gave their vote. The sounds grew deeper and more spread around the Chamber.

Boom! A dull explosion went through the Chamber, shaking the dust off the statues and the curtains. The great double doors, that had seen so many great orators and shakers, were shattered to pieces.

Immediately after the explosion, dust kicked up. Splinters shot out from the shattered doors. From the hallways, rockets shot out and bombs were thrown in, sending debris flying. The rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in the air gave proof through the night that everyone needed as the cameras kept broadcasting. The Union was falling.

People and creatures of all stripes and colors entered the chamber. Some were sporting crude armor and firearms or energy weapons. Others just held melee weapons, clubs, swords, knives, or even stones held in magic for the few unicorns.

Bullets flew through the air. Senators fell one by one, taking a bullet or a sword, ending their service in one swoop. The Secretary was killed by a piece of debris falling upon him, shattering his skull. Jackson only momentarily avoided the first bullet shot at him, his military service kicking in. All for naught, as another rocket struck the table besides him, impaling him with splinters. But it is in these times that bravery shows. Von Humpeding, having seen numerous fights and riots, yet seemed in her physical prime, fought back with a ferocious tenacity, biting, clawing, striking her way through the masses.

Thirty. Sixty. Ninety senators. All fell as the invaders streamed into the chamber. Some lucky ones managed to escape— but most died. The Gallery didn’t fare much better. A hail of bullets, calibers varying, mixed in with plasma bolts, ripped through the spectators, leaving bodies in their wake. Even von Humpeding was overwhelmed, every enemy she had cut down being replaced by five more. It became too much for her, and she bowed out, turning into a cloud of bats, fleeing before she herself became overwhelmed.

More armed people streamed into the room, indiscriminately shooting senators and spectators alike. Debris lay strewn around the chamber, hunks of marble where majestic columns once stood barely a couple of minutes before. And yet, there was one structure mostly undamaged save for a few bullet holes in this. The dais, the seat of the Secretary and President stood as a lone majesty in all the death and destruction. A man neared it, the battle fatigues he wore standing out. Not the rag-tag of the rebels, this man had kept his attire in order. He ascended the stairs to the dais. He began speaking as the intruders trained the cameras on him.

“This is a message to all of the Union. All who have stood for the oppression of the Multican people will be tried in the popular court right now. Under the Constitution of the Union, I am invoking the right to resist any oppressive government. We will not stand before a government wantonly and brazenly engraving a climate resistant to peaceful reform. As the Founding Fathers said, that doing that, will make violent revolution inevitable. So, as such, I proclaim the Second Republic of the United States of the Multiverse. All armed forces are to continue supporting Preservation, but they are also to engage and destroy traitors to the Union. Thank you, and may God Bless These United States.”

‘Broadcast’

By Mal Masque

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a closed package with instructions not to be opened until given the correct authorization to do so. Welcome… to Night Vale.

It has been three days since the broadcast that had revealed the meaning of existence reached our quiet little town. And yet the people of Night Vale still have no real idea what to make of this sudden proclamation. While the Sheriff’s Secret Police continue to rule this as a mass psychic prank done by “those darn kids”, several skeptics continue to hold a theory that yes, we indeed have learned that existence has been dictated by a Dark Tower in a field of eternal roses, treating our very lives as stories to follow a narrative. This has spurred a crisis of faith and identity in many citizens of Night Vale, before being swiftly reminded that such actions do not matter, as we already are pawns in an intricate web of intrigue and mystery dictated by countless vague, yet menacing government agents, all-powerful gods from beyond the Scrub Lands, and our very own City Council.

When asked to comment on the matter during the recent press conference, the City Council had made the following proclamation: “What Tower? There’s no Tower. Have you ever heard of a Tower? That’s just stupid. You’re stupid for believing that a Tower made by an ancient civilization that wanted to give meaning to life via a narrative is actually real. I mean whaaaaaaaaaat?” The City Council then proceeded to curse something about flags, remove one of the microphones from the podium, and began continuously punching it with their unified fist. This continued for the remainder of the press conference. More on the story as it continues to develop.

And now, traffic. There is a man sitting on a bench upon a hill, overlooking a dead tree. He always sits upon this bench, this time of day. He stares at the tree down below, a gnarled black hand reaching up to the sky. There may have once been a reason he spent so much time watching this tree, but he has forgotten. So has the tree. So has the bench. So have you. There is a man sitting on a bench, upon a hill, overlooking a dead tree. And we do not know why. This has been traffic.

Scientists continue to be absolutely baffled by the proclamation by the voice in the sky on the matter of our very existence. One such scientist, my wonderful and handsome husband Carlos, has been working tirelessly to formulate some scientific response to it. His charts are all over the living room, every time he comes up with something close, Carlos gets this big smile on his perfect face, waving his arms and saying “I think I’ve got it, Cecil! I think I’ve got it this time!”. A few minutes later he comes back and I end up giving him a much needed comfort hug. This whole matter is definitely confusing, listeners, I just wish there was some solution so I could see my husband continuously smile instead of just having to deal with this on-off mood switch.

And now, let’s take a look at the community calendar. Sunday is Half-Off at Big Rico’s Pizza, in which any patron who orders a large pizza will have fifty-percent of their body removed. Monday, the Church of the Smiling God will be hosting a backyard potluck barbeque and worship seminar, and has changed locations from Douglas Stansbury’s house in Old Night Vale to the edge of Radon Canyon. Be sure to bring your RSVP card, and a small bag of human teeth! Tuesday gave up and is just going to stay in bed. Wednesday will be covering for Tuesday. Friday will be the exciting conclusion of the ongoing ethics and theology debate at Night Vale Community College: ‘What day is Taco Day to be mandatory?’. Waivers will be prepared for all those seeking to attend. This has been the community calendar.

Listeners, I’m being told by Intern Lucas in the booth that unexpected visitors have arrived in the studio. He is currently waving his arms in the booth, trying to get my attention. Now there are two men in the booth with him, a man who is not tall and a man who is not short. Lucas has now stopped wildly flailing, as the man who is not short just put a potato sack over his head. Lucas is now being dragged off, and the man who is not tall has his hands over the controls, while also gesturing for me to come hither. I’m going to get this resolved, this will be an opportune moment to take a look at the weather.

…. (https://youtu.be/dmmtQ-kXkMM - “The Boy Beneath” by The Cog is Dead)

Listeners, I have returned from my very lengthy and very… evocative meeting with the agents from the vague, yet menacing government agency. They have told me a great many things about the message that was broadcast throughout our fair town. We all know of the Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, how they weave about and form lines and x’s in our stars and create are the foundations of our very reality. We know of the great and terrible Gods that have laid claim to our small town: The Glow Cloud (all hail), the Distant Prince and his Court, the Woman from Italy, even the Faceless Old Woman who lives in your home, we know of them all. We even knew of Huntokarr, the loving goddess who cared for a small town so much that she spared us from a fate that doomed all else left, even if time ceased to be in the process. The agents told me this, reminded me of it. They told me more, but I am forbidden from saying, for the safety of myself, my loved ones, and the town itself. They have permitted me to deliver this message to you, listeners. This very important message: no matter which side wins in the brewing war beyond the cosmos, the war that makes the Blood-Space Wars in the far-flung future look like a casual skirmish at a shopping mall, Night Vale will live on. Night Vale has always lived on. And we always will.

On another note, I would also like to extend a message of condolences to the family of Intern Lucas, as he has been taken by the vague, yet menacing government agency for potential processing and summary execution for delaying government officials on important matters. He will be missed as a valuable member of the Night Vale Radio team, as will we miss the donuts he brought every morning to appease Station Management. Tune in next to the sound of a room filled with nothing but bees and a man running three spoons on a washboard. Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

‘The Meaning of Redemption’

By G. M. Blackjack

Hell.

The word means different things to different people.

Punishment. Torment. Solitude. Life itself. And every myriad of creative interpretations in between. Some think it a literal aspect of existence, some think it’s little more than a silly story.

One of the many cruelties of the Dark Tower is that nothing is ever just a silly story.

No matter what Hell actually is—whether it exists or not in some absolute sense, whether it truly is a place of eternal pain or nothing more than a place of continued, purposeless existence—the Tower has taken all of those ideas and turned them into reality thousands upon thousands of times over within the folds of the D-Sphere and its surrounding territories within the Cosmic Heavens.

Hells exist where people are subject to constant, maximum pain at all times, going past their natural pain blockers to absolutely ensure they never get used to the suffering. There are Hells that are literal pits of fire, Hells with many circles of punishment, and Hells where the demons find pleasure in tormenting each person personally.

Some are dark. Some are lonely. Some are crowded and filled with the worst of humanity. Some have society, some are anarchy.

To most of these Hells, the events of the Message and the War for Existence were pointless to consider. What could they do, trapped as they were in an eternal punishment? What did it really change?

In a few, it offered a chance at hope. Maybe they could be freed from the torment. Maybe the new world offered by the collapse would give them a new start… maybe…

In one particular Hell, things were a little different. Unlike the majority of the planes of damnation, this one held within it a spark of hope, a story reaching for something far above what most dared. A dream living through the bustle of a tall, barely functioning hotel.

Charlie, Princess of Hell, let out a scream of rage so intense her office desk burnt to cinders around her.

No.

All of my work can’t lead to… nothing!

There was a polite knock at her door.

Dusting the soot off her clothes, Charlie forced a brilliant, rosy smile back onto her face that matched her blush stickers a lot more than the murderous scowl that reigned supreme not two seconds ago. “Come in!” She pressed her hands together in a manner as welcoming as she could imagine and did her best to pretend the fate of existence hadn’t just run through her head.

And that she hadn’t just burned down her desk. That was a thing that didn’t need to be discussed.

The door slid open eerily, revealing her red colleague in the hotel business: a tall, menacing demon with a somehow amiable—albeit toothy—smile that dominated his features. When he spoke, it sounded as though everything came through an old, slightly-offset radio. “I think we’ll have to cancel Halloween, my dear.”

“What? W-why would you say that, Alastor?” Charlie asked nervously. “Everything’s fine, the hotel’s still here, we’ve still got our mission, and nobody’s rioting!”

Something exploded two floors beneath them. “EVERY DEMON FOR THEMSELVES!”

Alastor adjusted his monocle. “You certain?”

“Positive,” Charlie asserted.

“AUGH! WHAT DOES LIFE EVEN MEAN!? AM I ALIVE!?”

Alastor and Charlie stared at each other for a few moments in silence as the sounds below them continued to rise in intensity and brutality.

“Okay fine we’ll cancel Halloween,” Charlie grumbled, trudging to the elevator. “And we’ll… fix this.”

“Splendid! Here, you can use my microphone.”

Charlie grabbed it from him, grimace deepening as she contemplated it.

“Chin up, princess! You are their hope, you’ve got to go down there with that splendid smile of yours and tell them everything’s going to be alright! Be the ‘hero’ of the ‘story’.”

“You just want to see me fail miserably.”

“Absolutely. That doesn’t mean I’m lying.”

With a resigned sigh, Charlie pulled her shoulders back, straightened her posture, and put on a smile—not too large or comical, but what she hoped was a calming, serene smile.

The elevator doors opened to the Hazbin Hotel lobby, currently filled with several demons lighting things on fire, screaming, panicking, or bouncing around laughing like the madmen they were.

Charlie tapped the microphone and cleared her throat gently. Then she bared her teeth and screamed bloody murder into the microphone with a vocal intensity that came from pits of darkness few demons present had ever imagined.

They all stared at their nice, adorable landlord with complete shock and disbelief. The mic’s feedback was the only sound besides their concerned breathing.

Charlie kept her smile warm and welcoming. “Now that I have your attention… as most of you are no doubt aware a message upsetting our very perceptions of reality has forced itself into our skulls!” She paused, trying to collect herself, unable to keep from giving off a slight vibe of uncertainty. “A lot of us are unsure what our lives even mean because of this… multiverse, this Tower, and this question about where we want to go.

“I want you to know that none of you are alone in that. Look around at the faces of your fellow demons—they’re just as angry and confused as you are! I’m just as angry and confused as you are! I…” She dropped her smile and took a breath. “I lashed out. When it hit me just… a minute ago, I don’t even know, I felt like everything I’d done, everything we’d done, was completely worthless. Insignificant. Tiny. I mean, come on, there’s a multiverse out there separate from Hell, Heaven, Earth, everything! And here we are just trying to be better people and lower the suffering… in a world where the ‘story’ is eternal damnation for sins.

“But!” Charlie straightened her back and held a hand up high. “I don’t think it’s worthless! So what, we’ve yet to get a single soul to heaven—we’re still here, together, living to be better people! Remember all the things we’ve done! All our celebrations, dinners, and the moments we shared. We never experienced this kind of life out there, in the rest of Hell! We’re different and… and I think that’s worth something! What we have here, it’s beautiful. And no matter what some stupid message says, we’ll stand together!” She jumped into the air and beamed at her demonic patrons.

Outside, things exploded as Hell turned into a panicked warzone. Here, though, there was silence for a moment.

One moment.

“Fuck that, the world’s about to collapse! End! I’m living while I still can!”

“YEAH!”

“What? No!” Charlie called, holding out her hand—but already the majority of the demons charged out of the hotel and into the streets of the Pentagram. “No, we’re different, we need to stick together, we…”

She fell to her knees, dropping Alastor’s microphone as more and more demons ran out of the hotel. A few of them had the decency to look at her with sad expressions and say “sorry,” but most of them didn’t give her a second glance.

All they’d needed was an excuse to go back to the way things were, and they took it. Taking the purpose of Hazbin Hotel with them…

She broke when she saw the cat-like Husk walking out.

“Husk…”

Her receptionist sighed. “I’m not goin’ to a bar, if that’s what you’re thinkin’.” He chugged some of his signature cheap booze. “Goin’ to see if anyone’s actually gonna build that Collapse Ring thing.”

“But… it’d kill so many…!”

“Yes. And then we might get out of Hell.” He left without another word.

Charlie’s hands fell to the floor and tears started flowing from her face. It was all gone.

A gray demon with an X over one of her eyes knelt down to Charlie’s level. “Hey…”

“Vaggie, it’s… just don’t.” She hugged the demon anyway. “We’re done… everything’s done…”

“…I don’t think so,” Vaggie said, directing Charlie’s gaze to a demon who had stayed. A certain spider-like man in a pink suit with considerable chest fluff.

“A-angel…?” Charlie said, eyes watering.

“Eh, what am I gonna do, fuck off?” Angel rubbed the back of his head with two hands at once. “This dump is my home now, for better or worse. I’m not going to abandon you just because some bastards decide everything needs to explode in a climactic final showdown.”

Charlie let out a squeal and pulled Angel into a hug. “Oh thank you thank you thank you Angel you’re the best!”

“Took you that long to realize? Girl, you need to get that head of yours screwed on better.”

Charlie rolled her eyes. “Okay… okay, that’s one. Anyone else…?”

Her eyes landed on the only other demon in the room. Alastor.

“…Why are you still here?” Charlie asked. “You’ve got your microphone back. I bet the world out there is more entertaining to your insatiable boredom now.”

“Quite the contrary,” Alastor said. “I believe my place is here.” He pointed his microphone at Charlie. “With the hero of our little story.”

“What…?”

“There’s a Tower out there that brings stories to life, my dear. What better story would there be than the princess of Hell itself bringing redemption to the lost and wayward? A good pick me up, feel-good story inserted into an image of darkness and damnation.” He turned around, looking at the red, smoke-filled sky of Hell. “Oh, I’m not going anywhere. Whatever’s about to happen… it’s not going to happen in your old man’s palace, or the labs of mad scientist demons, it’s going to happen here. In this little hotel trying to do something impossible.”

He whirled around, fixing her with a psychotic grin. “And the impossible is where I plant my radio station.”

“You… you believe in the hotel!?”

“I certainly believe some misguided soul would write a story where the irredeemable scum of the earth nonetheless find their way. So, if you want to put it into a simple word… yes, I believe you’ve finally convinced me.”

“The message convinced you,” Vaggie deadpanned.

“Details,” Alastor said with a dismissive wave.

“So… since we’re all here…” Angel folded his arms. “What are we gonna do now?”

Charlie’s face broke out into a grin. “…I have an idea. Alastor, set up a radio, we’re going to challenge channel 666 for some airtime!”

“Bad idea,” Vaggie grunted.

“Excellent idea!” Alastor laughed. “Let’s get started right away!”

~~~

Charlie tapped the microphone. Certain it was picking her up, she flicked a switch. “Good morning Hell! It’s your host, the Princess of Hell, Charlie!” She paused while Alastor played a soft applause noise. “Here to bring you the latest on the chaos we call our afterlives and the mysterious circumstances of the Choice! I’m joined, as always, by the radio demon Alastor…”

“Charmed as always to offer commentary on the delightful plight of everything that surrounds us!”

“…this is Hazbin Radio!” Charlie waited for Alastor’s little “theme song” sound effect to play. “Getting right into it today, the violence in the majority of the Pentagram has only gotten worse since our last broadcast.”

“I almost made the trip to see it myself!”

“I’m surprised you didn’t.”

“Well, as exciting as seeing repurposed Exterminator weapons might be, I don’t have an erasure wish.”

“Heheh…” Charlie shook her head. “That’s right, a cache of restored Exterminator weapons has been found. We don’t know the details, but we do know that a push to Lucifer’s Palace has begun and some are saying there’s a chance of a successful… breach.”

“Don’t you worry your pretty little head, Charlie, I’m sure Lucifer’s got more tricks up his sleeve than some simple guards. Who knows what kind of crazy demons he’s got in that basement of his? …Aside from you, of course.”

“Heheh… Yeah that’s part of what I’m afraid of but let’s not talk about that!” Charlie cleared her throat. “Already the erasure count of demons has hit the hundreds as the push continues. Hundreds of homes have been wiped off the map and numerous ‘dimension labs’ have been demolished, ruining a lot of research that had been going toward opening a dimensional portal. This, sadly, includes the lab we had secretly been working with and referred to as ‘Site 19’ over the last few broadcasts…”

“They were quite helpful while they lasted. Though their latest findings aren’t as hopeful as Charlie has been talking it up.”

Charlie made sure to sigh audibly—she’d been told they were too quiet to hear a few days ago. “Yes… unfortunately, the last thing Site 19 was able to uncover before the explosion last night was a seeming law of dimensional travel through our universe. We are what is known as a ‘black hole’ universe. We can receive transmissions and portals can be opened to us, but without more advanced methods the reverse isn’t true.”

“It seems as though Hell was designed this way, listeners!” Alastor stood up tall even though none of them could actually see him. “A world built to be a trap with only one entrance and no way out. But we know full well that those Exterminators come and go every year from their realm… I’d be very interested to see what happens at the next cleansing in a few weeks. Do you think any demon will be brave enough to try and force their way through that connection? Site 19 thought it was possible, as does my own research.”

“I wouldn’t do it, personally.” Charlie tapped a finger on the table. “It’s just too dangerous to go up against them. And they must have gotten the Message as well—there’s a decent chance they won’t even come because they have to deal with that instead!”

“We’ll just wait and see, won’t we?”

“Depending on if the Seats can agree or not.” Charlie shuffled the papers in front of her. “Which moves us to our next segment… Things Alastor’s Dimensional Radio Picks Up.”

“My favorite!”

“And everyone else’s too, apparently,” Charlie said, legitimately shocked at how many responses they had gotten to it over the last few days. It was new and crazy information, but Alastor’s radio design had already been copied by the rest of Hell, it wasn’t like they couldn’t find this information themselves. But so many demons, even those not affiliated with the Hotel, wanted to hear it so much. “The biggest news is that the Seats discussions appear to be wrapping up, and not in a good way. The major powers of the multiverse have almost gone to war several times and last-minute gambits from those who want peace are all that’s keeping it together.”

“They’re never going to agree on anything,” Alastor declared. “It’s obvious. Even if they get a solid majority—which they have had, a few times—some aspects of their societies will hate the compromise and trigger a war of some kind or other that’ll make the ‘hellish’ spat outside look like a garden party with fresh crumpets.”

“Well… I like Nanoha Takamachi’s willingness to go the extra mile for the sake of peace and everyone’s lives.”

“She’s an idealist. Reminds me of someone.”

Charlie rolled her eyes. “Riiight… Anyway, beyond that, we did manage to receive word that Corona Shimmer will be receiving a trial and that her nation, Merodi Universalis, has sided with preservation. Not much else is known since we don’t receive many of their transmissions around here.”

“They are going to fry that bacon-haired woman.”

“I think so, sadly…” Charlie shook her head. “She just wanted to give everyone a choice.”

“Quite foolish. What, did she just expect everyone to agree on a choice? She should have taken it upon herself to collapse everything and be done with it. But she just wasn’t strong enough, was she?”

“It takes strength to admit you don’t have the right to do something.”

“Not all strength is smart, Charlie.”

“And not all smarts are good, Alastor!” Charlie took a break to calm herself. “Anyway… I know a lot of this is scary and that so much of what you all have attached to in this world has… fallen apart. But remember, Hazbin Hotel is always open to whoever wants to come! We are explicitly neutral in all Hell turf wars and will take either collapse or preservation supporters in. If you don’t have a home, we have one for you—even if it is a little crowded.”

“See what I have seen. The little wars happening outside are little drops in the pond of existence. This Hotel is where the real magic of our story happens…” Alastor let out an ominous, low chuckle. “And now the weather!”

Angel Dust burst into the room, strumming two guitars. “Woooooooooooaaaaaah~!

I have a little thing to tell you all about me
Deep inside I have a light that grows just like a tree
There’s a moment in us all where we know what we must be
But I’m sitting here confusin’ you with my glorious…
CHEST FLOOF!”

“What in the…?” Charlie said, legitimately baffled.

“CHEST FLOOF!
Stickin’ out all effeminate!
CHEST FLOOF!
Signalin’ the reprobate!
CHEST FLOOF!”

Angel performed a little guitar solo on both guitars at once and subsequently bowed.

“…That was not the weather,” Alastor observed.

“The weather’s always ‘blood rain’ or ‘explosion front’,” Angel said. “Figured your listeners needed some entertainment.”

Alastor thought about this for a moment. “The Weather containing songs instead of weather is an interesting and unexpected idea…”

“I do still have to give the weather,” Charlie pointed out.

“Go right ahead, nothing’s stopping you.”

“Right. Thanks, I guess, Angel Dust?”

“Don’t mention it.” Angel strummed again.

“Anyway… the blood rain intensity has increased sevenf—”

The entire world shook.

“Uh…” Charlie’s pupils shrunk as she realized what that meant. “Listeners, I’ve got to go off air. Try to find somewhere safe.” She flicked a switch. “Alastor?”

Alastor was already running to the room where he kept his special radio—a skull with speakers where its eyes should be and all sorts of wires spiraling off it onto the floor, where a mixture of a pentagram and a spirograph were etched into the fabric. He checked the printing tape coming out of its back, quickly reading through the garbled mess and picking out the most important phrases.

His smile vanished.

Charlie had never seen that happen before.

“What? What is it!?” Angel shouted, flailing his arms.

“The Gods are destroying each other,” Alastor said, taking a few steps back from the paper. “It’ll consume us.”

“No…” Charlie said. “No… No, not again! We built all this we… we have to do something! We…”

“Shit shit shit shit!” Angel started pulling his hair out. “Th—“

He stopped when he saw what was happening out the window. Charlie couldn’t blame him; the sight was too spectacular to look away from, no matter how destructive it was. The fabric of hell itself was coming apart as fractals of light mixed with darkness intertwined with the blood falling from the sky. Massive demon warships turned their weapons on the rifts only to be torn to shreds themselves, twisting into impossible shapes of unnatural materials that had no right to exist in this spiritual plane.

I’m going to be erased, Charlie thought, watching as the fractals approached Hazbin Hotel. Everyone I’ve ever known is going to be erased. All this work… all for nothing.

She wanted to look away, but couldn’t.

What was the point of this ‘story?’

The fractal rip approached her… and froze.

“Well, it looks like you lot got yourselves in quite the pickle!”

“Alastor…?” Charlie asked.

Alastor smirked. “That wasn’t me. But it was.”

“What…?”

Alastor directed her attention to another Alastor standing in a dimensional portal wearing a blue suit rather than a red one.

A dimensional portal.

“While I do love examining all your bemused expressions, this temporal lock isn’t going to last forever!” Blue Alastor tapped his scepter onto the ground. “Do I have your permission to evacuate as many demons from this Hell as our technology allows?”

“YES! YES, HELL YES, DO IT PLEASE!” Angel whined, falling to his knees.

“Lovely sentiment, but you’re not the ruler of Hell.” Blue Alastor pointed at Charlie. “This is yours.”

“But…” Charlie realized that the palace would have already been torn apart by the fractals.

Don’t think about that.

“Yes. Take us out of here… Blue Alastor.”

Blue Alastor smirked. “Call me Alastar.”

“That won’t be confusing at all!” Alastor remarked.

“Why do you think I chose it?” Alastar laughed.

The two of them shared a chaotic laugh.

“Anyway, hold on to your limbs, this is going to hurt like nothing in Hell ever has.”

“Wait wh—“

Angel was interrupted by Alastar pulling out a blue remote and pressing a single button.

Then there was light. Searing, brilliant, holy light that made Charlie wish she could die, followed quickly by the thought that this light might actually kill her. Her truedemon body writhed and boiled in the intensity, screaming at its antithesis.

The light was replaced with darkness. Charlie felt it restore her… but she also felt the part of it she kept at bay with her very life seep into her heart and her mind. The screams, the torture, and the urges to be done with it all and lay waste to everything she hated…

With a pop, it was over. She was standing with Alastor, Alastar, and Angel Dust on a white platform. Alastar was holding a red sphere in his hands with a single, fractal-like crack along its edge…

Is that…?

“Yes it is,” Alastar pocketed the sphere. “All of your Hell, little more than a marble.”

“We’re out!?” Angel asked, looking himself over—surprised to find that he was still a spider-demon. “We’re out! FUCK YEAH BABY, WE BROKE OUT OF HELL!”

“And look at where we are!” Alastor laughed, placing a hand on Charlie’s shoulder and pointing. “Still think our story meant nothing?”

Charlie followed his finger… and her jaw dropped. A colorful, red and pink building rose before them, surrounded by fluffy white clouds. The windows were red, but not evilly so, and numerous dimensional portals opened around it every few seconds giving momentary glimpses into other worlds.

At the top of the building, there was a sign.

Hazbin Hotel.

“It’s amazing what you can do with some ingenuity and a dimensional device,” Alastar said. “Come, I’ll show you inside!”

~~~

It was even better on the inside.

Her Hazbin had been underfunded, understaffed, and run down since the day she opened it. Sure, they’d made it home and had many good memories there, but sometimes the dreary disrepair got to her.

This place was spotless. The soft, carpeted floors hadn’t the slightest trace of dirt, the walls were almost like mirrors, and the furnishings were tastefully placed to give this Hazbin a lot of open space rather than a cluttered feel.

There were a lot more than just demons wandering around here. In fact, if Charlie was a betting woman, she’d say that demons were the minority of the hotel’s occupants. There were full-blown humans, pony-like creatures, wisps of energy, and even a few… angels.

The last category would have made Charlie too scared to move had they not currently been talking to what looked a lot like a version of Angel Dust, except he lacked the chest floof and was dressed in what appeared to be a doctor’s uniform.

Catching sight of them, the spidery demon dismissed his angelic conversation partners and bounded over to them. “I see you’ve snagged a new batch, Lite Brite!”

Alastar twirled his scepter in a bizarrely cheerful manner. “It appears I have, Doctor Dust!”

“Doctor!?” Angel sputtered, gawking at himself.

“You’d be surprised how much you learn about medicine and anatomy in the biz if you stop to think,” Doctor Dust commented, placing an arm around his other self.

“So they pay you to do th—“

Alastar rammed his scepter into Angel’s face. “No, they do not, and no, we cannot discuss further. We have a rating to maintain, after all!”

“I knew it!” Alastor declared. “An outwardly-imposed filter on events to make them suitable for the audience at hand!”

“Careful with that Awareness, wouldn’t want it to bite your head off!”

“I think you mean yours!”

The two Alastors laughed, putting their arms around each other, all the while locking their menacing, dangerous gazes.

“You two aren’t going to try to kill each other, right?” Charlie asked.

“Who the fuck cares!?” Angel shouted. “I want to know why I can’t talk about fu—”

Doctor Dust slapped a hand over his counterpart’s face. “Don’t you worry your pretty blue head any, I’ll get this sleazy spider with the other Angels.”

“Probably for the best,” Alastor admitted. “He would just interrupt a lot of otherwise important exchanges.”

“Wait!” Charlie called, putting a hand on Doctor Dust. “Are you…?”

“Redeemed?” The Doctor smiled sadly. “Well, I say I am. Clean for decades and not working the streets like I assume this knucklehead is.”

“Hey!” Angel huffed. “It’s a legitimate living!”

“We need to get you into therapy. Don’t worry, it works, trust me.”

“But you’re still…” Charlie gestured at his demonic spidery-ness.

“You’ll probably want to talk to the boss lady about that one.” He grabbed two of Angel’s wrists and led him along. “Have fun, though!”

“I… will,” Charlie said, frowning. Suddenly she wasn’t looking forward to meeting the ‘boss lady’.

She wasn’t sure if she wanted it to be her or someone else.

“She’ll be waiting for us in the ice room,” Alastar said, leading them into an elevator.

“Ice room?” Charlie asked.

“Where we keep all the frozen universe marbles until we have the time to heal them.” Alastar took out the marble with her Hell in it. “Don’t worry, I’ll personally see to it that Vaggie and the others are removed post-haste, but introducing this overpopulated sphere into the Hotel all at once would be… problematic.”

“The chaos would be delicious, wouldn’t it?” Alastor asked.

Alastar laughed. “Charlie, my dear, do you think he’s realized that I’m ‘redeemed’ yet?”

“If he didn’t before he does now…” Charlie nervously watched Alastor’s expression for the next few moments, not sure exactly what to expect from him.

His smile didn’t falter. But the silence was deafening.

Ding!

“Here we are!” Alastar declared, walking out of the elevator and into a large, dark room filled with miles of shelving storing various universes compressed into marbles. “So many worlds to save, so little time…” He walked up to an empty shelf near the entrance and placed the orb down, marking it with a series of seemingly random numbers. “Now, she should be right… here!”

Charlie saw two people.

The first was a tall, graceful blue alicorn with stars in her mane and an orange-gold pendant around her neck with a ‘u’ symbol. Impressive, a goddess of the night sky if ever there was one.

The other was the boss of the hotel. A Charlie who looked… exactly like Charlie herself did, except wearing an all-white suit with pointed shoulder pads. She wasn’t even very tall, and that felt weird to Charlie for some reason.

“Are you sure?” the alicorn was saying.

“I’m sorry Overhead Jingle, but… the Hotel can’t take on your volunteers right now.” She twiddled her thumbs nervously. “We have to remain completely neutral in the War for Existence so we can help both sides and not make ourselves a target. If we use large quantity of Merodi volunteers instead of Hotel staff…” She shook her head. “I appreciate the thought, but we have to do this ourselves. You picked a side. We’re not going to. We’re going to help as many as we can who can’t help themselves.”

Jingle nodded. “I understand. And… I applaud you for the strength none of us seem to have.” She pulled out a dimensional device and left. “Take care of yourself, Cura.”

Charlie “Cura” waved back. “You too!”

“...Why ‘Cura’?” Charlie asked.

Cura turned around, looking to her counterpart with an awkward smile. “W-well, you see, it’s a name that means healing, but it also sounds like ‘kira’. You know. ‘Death’. I thought it was cute and meaningful or… something.”

Charlie’s concern vanished instantly. “Like how a hotel is just for those… passin’ through?”

Cura rubbed the back of her head. “Yeeeeah we’re plagued by cheesy names, aren’t we?”

“Yep!”

Cura coughed in her hand, turning to Alastor. “If you try to burn this place to the ground I’ll have Alastar here ‘twist’ you. I’ve never seen what ‘twisting’ means, but every Alastor I’ve told this to has suddenly started behaving, so I’m not questioning it. Do you understand?”

Alastor’s smile didn’t falter. “Crystal!”

“Good! Welcome to the Hotel, enjoy your stay! Alastar, soon as you’re convinced he’ll behave himself you can let him wander free and get back to work. Charlie…” Cura put a calming hand on her counterpart’s shoulder. “Walk with me, we clearly need to have a talk.”

“We… do?”

“Well, uh, if you don’t want to…”

“No, no I do!”

“Dear hellish bells, you two are definitely both Charlie,” Alastor chuckled. “Let’s leave them to their neurosis, my blue friend.”

“Right this way…”

The Charlies were left alone for a moment.

“We can probably turn him around, don’t worry,” Cura said, walking down the lines and lines of universe marbles. “So… questions?”

“How big is this place? How many do you rehabilitate? How do you marble universes? How—”

“I could just give you the brochure for that,” Cura chuckled. “Come on, I’m you, I know what you really want to ask.”

“…How many have you redeemed?”

“Ah. Yes. That.” Charlie kept walking down the hall, forcing an awkward smile. “Depends on your meaning of redemption.”

“What…?”

“Not a single demon from my home universe was ever allowed to go to our Heaven from work at the Hazbin Hotel.”

“Not a single one?”

“Not a single one. To be fair, we weren’t really stuck in our Hell for very long, but we had a lot of patrons and a lot of groupings… but the rules in our version were absolute. Once in Hell, always in Hell. So no, nobody was redeemed.” She smirked. “And yet, everybody was redeemed.”

“But we were supposed to solve the—

“We didn’t. But we made something better. We made people happy. We lived up to the original name. Demons were nice to each other, helped each other out, actually bothered to learn about each other and try to be better people. It was… it was beautiful. Once it was clear that nobody was getting to Heaven, nobody wanted to leave. And I call that a success.”

“But, if they weren’t allowed, does that really mean…?”

“You can’t base what’s ‘good’ and ‘evil’ based on what some story thought Heaven should be like.” Cura closed her eyes, a nostalgic smile crawling up her face. “Every one we’ve encountered is a little different. Most of them that I’m assured are ‘theologically sound’ don’t even care about behavior, instead focusing more on the heart and will to get that ticket to the land of puffy clouds.”

“So… it really was hopeless?”

“I don’t know if yours would have worked or not. I’ve seen some versions that do just fine! But others, like mine, were impossible without dimensional weirdness.” She stopped short, putting her hands on Charlie’s shoulders. “But that doesn’t mean it was actually hopeless. Remember the friendships, the bonds, the happiness you had together. By doing that, you made Hell a better place. I know we did.”

“Just by trying to be better people.”

“Just by trying to be better people.” Cura stopped walking, looking at a picture hanging on an empty wall between the halls of universe marbles. The image was of a Hazbin Hotel in slightly better condition than the one Charlie had just left. There Cura stood, wearing just what Charlie was now. Alastor, Angel, Vaggie, Niffty, Husk, several demons Charlie didn’t recognize… they were all standing outside the doors and smiling.

Except one of them wasn’t a demon.

She was a purple-pink unicorn with a Reverend’s collar and a halo above her head.

“Wh-wh-wh…”

“Ah, Rev,” Cura smiled. “Tower sent her right to us after she got out of that horrible Nexus. Put her through quite a crisis of faith and Hell itself through a different sort of crisis. A believer in Hell? Ridiculous. But here she was, all magical and everything, and she helped us work in the Hotel. She was eventually the force that got us all out of Hell through dimensional portals and… well, her disciples still help run the modern Hotel’s chapel.”

“You have a CHAPEL!?”

“Why not? We’re not in Hell anymore. Lots of people want it.”

“Wh…”

“If she were still here I’d tell you to talk with her, she’s got some very interesting viewpoints. A lot calmer, these days.” Cura giggled. “I remember when she was stuck with us and she yelled at herself in the mirror like a crazy person.”

Charlie wasn’t sure what to make of the idea of a Reverend working at the Hotel. It just felt… wrong, to her.

Maybe that was because she hadn’t had a Rev. Her Hotel had been doomed to fail without help like that.

“Hey…” Cura said, noticing Charlie’s frown. “It’s okay. Your Hotel was a great thing. And its legacy isn’t over, even as the multiverse falls apart?”

“Why wouldn’t it be? Our Hotel’s stuck in a marble and you’ve got it all under control…”

“I could always use more staff. In these trying times, we need as much help as we can get. We need demons who want to help others become more than themselves, not worry about some… war.” She extended a hand. “What do you say?”

Charlie didn’t even have to think. “Of course!”

“Great! We can start immediately, get your hotel staff out of ice…”

“…Actually, one thing I’m curious about.” Charlie tapped her shoe nervously. “Why… why Hell? Like… at all? Why?”

“Because people wrote stories about it. As for the other reason, if your version of God was anything like mine, he’s just a bastard. Really does all the others a disservice. But writers want to corrupt the idea of ‘perfection’ all over the place…”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Anyway, let’s get your Hotel ready…”

The conversation moved on, but Charlie’s mind didn’t. It dwelled.

That explains my Hell…

But what about all the others?

~~~

The War for Existence raged on. Class 1s fell, the Gallifreyans fell, and eventually the war reduced to the squabbles of mostly lower societies. Corona and Eve were all over the news as their clashing ideologies tore the web of reality to shreds.

Charlie was reading bedtime stories to children.

“…And they chased the Big Bad Wolf away! They never saw him again, and could now live happily ever after.” She closed the book, looking at the room of peacefully sleeping children. A big smile crawled up her face.

She was able to give them peace. Just by sitting here, reading a book to them while they went to sleep. They’d all suffered something because of the war… but for now, every last one was sleeping with a smile. Demon, angel, human, pony, it didn’t matter.

Carefully, Charlie tip-toed out of the room and walked away from the children’s wing of the Hotel. Once she was out of hearing range, she picked up her pace. Right now, she wanted to sleep, and that meant she had to make the long trek to her room. Sure, Hazbin Hotel had teleporters, but the closest one that wouldn’t wake the children was all the way out in one of the main hubs. Walking across the children’s wing was nothing to sneeze at.

Eventually, she came out into a large, circular room with several arches leading to other wings. Charlie moved toward the teleporter pad in the center… but something stopped her. A vaguely familiar voice.

“…They’re both evil…”

Charlie stepped away from the teleporter, trying to listen to where the voice had come from. She wasn’t all that surprised to see it coming from the Chapel, though she was disappointed. In all her time working here, she’d never set foot in the holy place, despite Cura’s assurances it wouldn’t burn her for being a demon.

That voice, though…

That voice drew her in.

It was a voice she wanted to see.

Carefully, she walked into the small crowd that had formed. To Charlie’s luck, it wasn’t just a recording that was playing. There, in the flesh, stood a purple-pink unicorn with a Reverend’s collar.

Rev.

Cura had been talking about inviting her to speak for a few weeks now. Looks like she finally found out how to do it.

Rev was concluding her sermon with prayer when Charlie finally made it toward the front of the crowd. She sat down in one of the chairs… and waited. Waited for the crowd to dissipate, for those who wanted to talk to Rev to say their word.

Charlie sat, ready to jump up the moment Rev was alone.

Rev got to her first.

“Want to go out for some drinks? I hear the bar sells a mean hellfire stirrup.”

Charlie blinked. “W-what?”

Rev smirked knowingly. “I know the look of someone who wants a long conversation. You aren’t even the first Charlie who’s waited there, uncertain about… everything.”

“H-have a lot of experience?”

“Unfortunately, yes, on both sides of the conversation.” Rev lit her horn. “Do you mind teleportation?”

After giving her permission, Charlie was teleported to the bar. The bartender made sure the two of them weren’t on file for trying to break an addiction before taking their orders and handing them their drinks.

Two flaming cups of orange liquid.

Charlie lifted her cup up. “You drink this?”

“I lived in Hell a few years, you gain a taste for it.” She downed it. “And a drinking problem, but that’s mostly behind me. Mostly. Cura has me on a drink limit.”

“You?”

“Nobody’s perfect. Except Mary Sues. And that’s not the kind of perfection anyone wants.” Rev chuckled at her own joke. “So… Charlie, is it?”

“Yeah. Nothing special yet.”

“Charlie, what did you want to talk about?”

“Why Hell?”

“Your Hell specifically? Probably your ‘God’ being a sack of trash, but I bet you already knew that.”

“Yes I mean… why Hell? Why Hell at all?” She spread her arms wide. “Why would anyone ‘good’ make something so… so bad?”

Rev nodded slowly, taking a somewhat large swig from her cup. “…There are a lot of answers to that question, and it kind of depends on what Hell is.”

“You don’t know?”

“You’ve been here long enough to know every version of Hell you come across runs on different rules. This is because people have never agreed on what it is. Is it a pit of fire? A place of eternal loneliness? Just a realm of separation from God?” Rev shrugged. “The thing is, we don’t know, so we tell these stories to scare or comfort ourselves with the ‘knowledge’.”

“And those stories become real because of the Tower.”

“Yes.”

“But…”

Rev sighed. “But, yes, I do think there is an actual Hell out there, beyond all of this. A real place of punishment for all that we’ve done.”

“But… how? Why!?”

“…As I said, there’s lots of answers. Some say it’s the only righteous thing that can be done for sin, for those who do not repent, they must suffer for their wrongs.”

“Why? Everyone has their own situation, some people are better than others, and there have been a lot of damn good people who weren’t part of your little Church!”

“No person in existence can be good enough to not warrant a punishment of some kind. Every little petty thought, every tiny…” Rev stopped herself. “Justice must be dealt out and… yeah, I don’t really like this explanation either. At least not on its own. Why have eternal suffering for people who could only live a finite amount of time? It… it doesn’t sit well with me, even if it is the popular consensus. The other one, where souls are extinguished after a time of set punishment, is… More mathematically right, but still emotionally concerning.”

“Then what do you think?”

Rev laid her front hooves overtop of each other. “You’re from a standard Hazbin Hell, right?”

“I’m told so.”

“Forget about the Exterminators for a moment, since those are just needlessly cruel and indicative of a false Heaven. Alone, what does Hell actually have as punishment?”

“Any soul gets transformed into some kind of mockery of their life.”

“But they also get spiritual abilities and, many times, learn to like their new superhuman forms. Forms that can’t die and provide all sorts of new opportunities.”

“O… okay so maybe that’s not the worst thing, usually. But then you get there, and there’s always pain! Suffering! And…”

“And does the suffering come from Hell itself?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, think about it. Does the location make you suffer? What does it do, attack you?”

“No…”

“What does hurt you?”

Charlie sat back in her chair, realizing the point. “Other people.”

“Yes. Other people. Other people with power and broken spirits in a world without God to add Good to the world. Without Him, you’re all allowed to define Good and Evil however you wish with what appears to be less consequences.” Rev closed her eyes. “This is what I think Hell is. By rejecting God, He allows them to go to a place without Him. It’s what they wanted in life. So… He gives it to them. But without the guidance of the source of all Good, there is only the mortal souls of people, doing whatever they feel like. Unchecked desire and many consequences of the physical world just lifted.” She looked Charlie in the eyes. “Tell me that doesn’t sound like Hell.”

Charlie nodded slowly.

“I could be wrong. I probably am. Heaven and Hell are constructs we’re not allowed to fully understand. We’re meant to anticipate them… not try to figure them out. Whatever Hell is, it’s not good for us, and it’s worse than the life we have here. Whatever Heaven is, it has everything good and a full realization of what we are.” Rev smiled. “Some of us have lived a very, very long time and still know nothing of what waits on the other side. There are times I just… wish I could be taken up already. To have everything answered, finally.”

“What makes you think you’re going to get answers?”

Starlight shrugged. “Nothing. It’s just a hope I have. There’s a chance I get there and just… don’t feel the need to ask questions. But as I am now, I have them, and I fully admit to having a mental list.”

Charlie nodded, looking down at her hands.

“Charlie?”

“If I end up in Hell…” I just said if. What!? “I’m making the Hotel. Again.”

“Rehabilitation… there’s no path to Heaven once the judgment has been done. That, I can tell you, is wishful thinking.”

“I know,” Charlie said. “Figured as much. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned…” her smile returned to her. “It’s that everything’s better if you’re just a good person. Who cares if it’s literal burning damnation down there? At least we can be nice to each other!”

“A missionary to Hell…” Rev chuckled.

“What?”

“That’s what I called Cura for a while. And what she called me. It was a… strange dynamic.” Rev finished her drink. “I hope she hasn’t told too many embarrassing stories about me.”

“Not… many at all, no.”

Rev smirked. “Good. I get to tell them, then. …Unless you have more questions?”

“Oh, I do, but something tells me I have to hear this…”

Rev grinned. “Okay, so, I was younger and fresh out of the Nexus. Popped into Hell and realized a big fancy halo and priest getup wasn’t going to do me any favors. After trying, and failing, to find someone willing to be a nice person and help me, someone sarcastically referred me to that ‘Hotel where the goody-two-shoes bitches’ lived. I found myself in the Hazbin Hotel and decided I trusted Cura, so I revealed myself to her. Turns out, visible spiritual imagery is very painful to true demons, who would have thought?”

~~~

Charlie stood on the Hazbin Hotel balcony, looking at a portal open to a destabilizing universe.

It had already been evacuated, nothing more than the location of a military Tower Ring that was destroyed just like all the others. Space folded, twisted, and tore itself in many places, not quite finding the right way to fall into the Sea of Infinite Possibility and become nothing.

She couldn’t help but find it beautiful.

“At the end of the rainbow there’s happiness…” she sang, softly.

“Did you ever find redemption?” Alastor asked, walking to stand behind her.

“Yes. No.” Charlie furrowed her brow. “It’s complicated. What do you mean?”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea!” Alastor laughed, gripping the handrail significantly harder than he needed too. “It’s like the idea of defining the word is impossible! Do we mean ‘a good person?’ Do we mean ‘a believer?’ Do we mean someone who has switched from one path of ka to another? Someone who has just turned around from a bad path?”

Charlie noticed sadness in his laughter. This brought a smile to her face—there was something in the old demon after all, even if it was just a blow to his pride. “I don’t have the answers.”

“Nobody does! If I were a betting man I’d say the Tower doesn’t even know!”

“Do we need to know?” Charlie asked. “Can’t we just… have… faith?”

“In what?”

Charlie smiled. “That… the world will keep spinning and life will go on no matter what the answer to the big questions are. That, even though we can’t find the answers, we can still be happy. We can still be good people without really knowing what ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ are.”

“I don’t think I need to tell you how much of a self-contradiction that is.”

“Even if those believers are right about God or whatever, they can still be terrible people. Even if those others are right about moral subjectivity, they can still be terrible people. But they can still be good people. We can still be good people.” She took in a deep breath and spread her arms.

“If only people agreed on what ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were.”

“I think it’s good that nobody can agree. Probably means everyone’s wrong.”

Alastor looked at here blankly for a minute before erupting in laughter.

“W-what? It’s a good observation!”

“It is, it is!” Alastor slapped her on the back. “Everyone’s wrong! Probably about more than a few things they hold very close to that pulsating, fleshy blood muscle.” His expression became dark. “The only solution…”

“Is to love one another,” Charlie said. “…Existence may be running out of time, Alastor. In these trying times with all this suffering, the hotel is needed now, more than ever. We may not have a fucking clue what redemption actually means, but we’re sure as hell going to get closer to it.”

“Hell isn’t very certain.”

“Exactly.”

“Shall we return to ‘work’ then, turn the dark souls of these terrors into something ‘better’ by some imagined metric we can’t be certain of?”

“YES!” Charlie laughed, prancing back into the Hotel. “It’ll be great!”

“It’ll be interesting, at least.”

“That’s what kept you here last time, it’ll keep you here until I get through to that ugly heart of yours!”

“We’ll see...” He snapped his fingers. “Stay tuned!”

After they left, the destabilizing universe fell into nothing with a comical pop.

‘War Immaterial’

By Mal Masque

Explosions rocked the external hull of the Imperial Truth, yet hardly did more than leave scorches on the exterior of the glorious Emperor-class Battlebarge. The God-Emperor of Mankind, radiant and majestic, sat on the command chair in the observation deck, witnessing the carnage ongoing all around him. His One-Thousand Companions, clad in glimmering golden armor, flitted about between various stations amongst other serfs, servitors and Lex Mechanicus keeping the ship stable. Through the great viewport of his mighty vessel, the Emperor watched ships all around detonate in spectacular explosions, bursting into bales of fire in the vacuum by the guns of the Imperium and Merodi loyalists alike. It felt good to be back in the fray. Felt good to return to the battlefield, commanding millions in the name of keeping all that he worked for intact. It felt like the Great Crusade all over again.

“Heretical ship destroyed, praise the Omnissiah!” a Mechanicus adept chirped. The Emperor flinched ever-so-slightly, but let it be. Save the continual efforts of colloquialisms and the ‘Imperial Creed’ for after this matter has been resolved.

“My Emperor,” the Captain-General called out. The Emperor turned to his most faithful ally, the one who had kept him in constant company for thousands of years, who put up with the vindictive and cold ramblings of his once throne-bound self. His resplendent armor of gold and silver trim glistened in the lumens of the ship, a single red and blue plucked feather wedged between the creases of his shoulder plates. “We’re continuing to push against the Collapse forces, but Librarians and Psykers are being continuously affected by an apparent Shadow. He’s finally taken to the battlefield.”

The Emperor closed his eyes, his hand digging into the side of his command chair, reaching out his mind to feel at the ebb and flow of reality. Although the Shaping Mechanism had removed the influence of the Warp from their universe, one who has spent nearly an eternity submerged in it never truly loses their connection. He felt the locus of the battlefield, millions of individual souls clustered together in their vessels, fighting, dying, or being captured in the name of their ideals and ambitions. A shadow loomed over it all, a dark, formless shape that twisted and turned with the tide of battle and destruction.

“Tzeentch,” the Emperor growled, opening his eyes. “He’s overseeing the battle himself, through a projected pseudo-Warp. If he continues to persist, then we will be overwhelmed.” He raised a hand to onlooking serfs, calling upon their aid. “Open communications with Princess Cosmo, I need to give an alert.” With a muttered ‘by your command’, the serf quickly went to work. “I’m going in.” The Captain-General nearly lost his grip on his gun, hurrying over to the Emperor’s side.

“My Lord, what are you planning?” he worriedly asked. “If you’re going to face that shifting mollusk bastard in the Warp, then-then who will guide us?” The serf returned with the Merodi-issued communicae device. It clicked to life and the Emperor spoke loudly.

“Tzeentch is acting through a pseudo-Warp!” he announced into the communicae. “I must devote my higher powers to that - you’re on your own, Cosmo.” He waved the serf off and redirected his focus to the rest of the ship. “Continue to hold orbit and destroy any treasonous ships that seek to harm any in our fleet. I am to remain undisturbed in my meditative state as I transcend to the Warp.” He rose onto his feet, his golden ceramite armor creaking from the stiff movements. The Captain-General quickly grabbed ahold of his Emperor’s arm, an act that brought true surprise to the ancient prime man.

“My Emperor, we cannot lose you again!” the Captain-General begged. Though his face was rugged and hardened from the battle, the Emperor spared himself a rare change of face. A gentle smile as he placed his hand upon the most loyal of Custodian’s shoulder. No doubt, under that gilded helm, the Captain-General’s eyes had gone wide.

“I trust you, my friend,” the Emperor softly said. He let go of the Captain-General and walked off the deck and to his chambers.

The Custodians and bridge crew all turned to the Captain-General, waiting for his reply. He stood there, the man once simply known as ‘Kitten’ by teasing Companions and a slew of other silly names by the Emperor himself and other ignorant visitors to the Golden Palace. Now? He had the chance to truly stand proud as a Lord of Terra. He tightened his grip on his gun and took his place at the front.

“Alright, you lot, you heard our orders,” he said. “Let’s grant these traitors the Emperor’s peace and show them the true might of Imperial spirit!”

~~~

The self-contained Warp was an utter maelstrom. Twisted and terrible, born from millions of subconscious thoughts of wickedness and treachery, it was a writhing storm of madness and calamity. Though it could not be seen by the naked eye, it was a pall that hung over the battlefield, spreading its influence like acid rain upon a field of crops. The storm was broken in a burst of golden light, piercing through the shifting clouds of dementia and mania with lances of pure psychic energy. From the light stepped forth the Emperor of Mankind, resplendent and magnificent, his eternally burning sword held firmly in his grasp and golden armor shining brightly in the dark confines of the Warp. A golden, glimmering boot came down upon the tormented landscape, his psychic might creating clouds beneath his heavy footfalls to give him a platform of his own. His long flowing hair licked the sides of his face and the halo of flame encircling his head as he built up his voice within the depths of his being.

“TZEENTCH!” the Emperor called out, his voice resonating across the thunderous black and purple clouds. “COME FORTH, TZEENTCH, YOU INCOMPREHENSIBLE MASS OF MISDIRECTION!” The Warp answered back immediately. From the clouds of thought emerged thousands of enormous tendrils, lashing against each other like wicked vines, slithering and scraping about. They looped over one another, curling and forming into an ever shifting mass of blue and purple. It towered over the Emperor, who remained nonplussed at the sight of his greatest adversary. “You’ve put on a fair bit of weight, haven’t you?”

“When the multiverse becomes so rife with the thought of change and suggestions of alterations,” Tzeentch said, his malicious voice shrieking across the void. “I think I’m permitted to have myself a little binge.” Tzeentch laughed with a thousand mouths, his tentacles thrashing together into a singular form, the hunched humanoid thing that had introduced itself to much of the multiverse now fully formed. “What do you think, Anathema? Of this whole war?”

“We stand on opposite sides of the battlefield, Tzeentch,” the Emperor said. “I think we both know exactly what I think. If not, then you may as well cheat and read my thoughts. Again.” Tzeentch loudly chortled and reshaped itself into more humanoid-tentacle abominations of himself. “Talk is pointless anyway.” The Emperor raised his flaming sword to the mass of ever-shifting tentacles. “You’re the last vestige of the Ruinous Powers, and I shall finally see to your destruction.”

“And just as we were about to get to some more witty banter.” Tzeentch said, tilting his many-mouthed head to one side and then another. “Then I suppose we should waste no time and bring ourselves to the main EVENT!” Without warning, hundreds of crystalline tendrils erupted from the swarming mass, darting towards the Emperor of Mankind. Swiftly, he raised his flaming sword and swung it in a flaming arc, slicing the tendrils clean through. Severed portions exploded into Warp dust, while the remaining ones flailed about in smouldering agony. Tzeentch cackled again, sending another volley of tendrils at the Emperor, each barbed with white and blue crystals. Again, he sliced them away, progressively advancing towards Tzeentch with steady steps.

“When the Shaping Device untethered the Immaterium from our world,” The Emperor said, slashing at the tendrils again, “I had hoped that you and your monstrous, disgusting ilk would simply starve to death, deprived of your nourishment. Slaanesh did.” Another swing, burning bits of tentacle swinging past him and bursting into sparkly dust. “Khorne did.” He jumped to the side as several tentacles speared into the ground beside him. “Nurgle did! And yet,” he waved his hand, gold claws dancing with holy flame as they burned oncoming tendrils. “You still live!”

“You’re very chatty for a flesh bag who was a glorified corpse for tens of thousands of years!” Tzeentch snapped, shaping form back into a humanoid entity. It clenched tightly four of its hands, and several purple crystals erupted from the immaterial landscape, many surrounding the Emperor and his glowing form. Tzeentch slammed its fists together, and all of the crystals exploded, sending shattered remnants flying wildly across the battlefield. The Emperor braced himself for the attack, the crystals rebounding off his golden armor, though one managed to land a nick across his cheek, a thin line of red blood dribbling from the wound. Tzeentch raised its head and sniffed, many of its mouths wide with crocodile smiles. “So, the Anathema does bleed, after all.” The Emperor wiped the blood from his cheek and lunged forward, his sword burning brightly in his most holy of holds. As the tip of the blade came close to skewering Tzeentch’s slimy torso, several tentacles wrapped around his arm. “Let’s see if we can draw a bit MORE?!” Several mouths filled with vicious teeth opened all along the length of the tentacles, digging into the ceramite plating, white a few broke through and tasted the flesh of the greatest of men.

Pain burned across the Emperor’s arm as the God of Change gnawed into his flesh. He grit his teeth and grabbed ahold of the tentacles binding his arm. Tzeentch’s many eyes widened as the Emperor yanked it forward, forcibly driving the burning Sword of the Emperor into its chest. It hissed and roared in animalistic fury, relinquishing its hold on the Emperor’s arm and withdrawing, bluish-green blood bubbling on the burning blade as the gaping hole in Tzeentch’s chest sealed up.

“What do you know? Gods can bleed, too,” the Emperor retorted, flicking the boiling blood off his sword. Tzeentch snarled out of its nigh infinite mouths, each dripping with thick slime. It raised its four hands and clapped four times, several swirling clouds around it concealing into solid forms. Daemons emerged from the swirling Warp-stuff; Horrors and Flamers, Disks and Ryders, even Lords of Change all joined their God by its side, snarling and burning with ethereal fury. Tzeentch warbled with laughter, shifting its body to resemble a more monstrous human form of numerous eyes, teeth and tendrils, one painful to gaze upon.

“The game has changed, Anathema,” Tzeentch chided. “This isn’t Paradox-Billiards-Vostroyan-Roulette-4th-Dimensional-Hypercube-Chess-Strip Poker anymore!”

“Good, you cheated in that, too,” the Emperor said, raising his sword towards the Daemonic horde. “But don’t you worry,” he grasped the hilt in both of his hands and aimed the blade downward. “I’m very familiar with how to play Regicide.” With a bellow of power, the Emperor plunged his sword into the Immaterium, a bright light erupting from his position and blinding the Legion of Change. Tzeentch shrieked as the burning bloom overwhelmed its vision, quickly covering as many of its eyes as possible as the light faded away. When the light cleared, the Emperor stood proud before the Daemons, but did not stand alone. Standing behind and beside him stretched a golden army, going on as far as the eye could even perceive. Millions of humans, from the lowest of Guardsmen to the greatest of Space Marines, all those who fought and died for the Imperium and their Emperor, stood once again. Tzeentch’s many tentacles were curling and writhing with fury and uncertainty, made even worse by the sight of the Emperor’s perfect smirk on his perfect face.

“This… this is the army that destroyed Drach’nyen!” The Emperor smiled wider and pointed his sword towards the mass of daemons. The millions of golden souls needed no further confirmation, all letting off resounding battle cries and proclamations to their Emperor, breaking into a charge towards the Neverborn armies. They engaged the daemons with fervor and rage, blasting many into pieces with blessed bolt rounds or melting them to slag with plasma or lasgun fire, while others were hacked to pieces by chain weapons. Amongst them even stood a Primarch, far larger than the rest, bashing daemons left and right with a great hammer, sending them flying and bursting into Warp dust whilst shining bright like a living gold statue. The daemonic horde met the Imperium’s Golden Army with their own vicious reaction, hurling balls of Warpflame that engulfed errant Guardsmen, vaporizing Mechanicus with infernal beams, or simply tearing them to pieces with psychic might. Even the Space Marines struggled to overcome the Greater Daemons that commanded the forces, with the Primarch coming to grapple with the multiple-limbed Changeling astride atop a Disk. The armies would fight their battle, while the Emperor focused on his. He twirled his sword again and sprinted through the armies, roaring as he made his way towards Tzeentch, set to drive his sword through the immaterial menace and split it in twain.

~~~

Magnus the Red’s head pounded. It was though a thunderstorm were going off within his skull, every bolt of lightning striking at his brain and sending a surge through his skull. It was enough to bring him to a knee. While many of the workers onboard the bridge were focused on staying alive in the firefight, a few had taken notice of the Primarch’s sudden fall. Rogal Dorn, dressed in his golden armor for the first time in millennia (and not in an adorable Centurion suit), rushed to his brother’s side and helped him to his feet.

“What ails you, Magnus?” Rogal asked.

“My head feels like it’s about to crack like an egg being hugged to death by Vulkan,” Magnus replied through gritted teeth. “I’m fine, really.” He brushed Rogal off him and looked towards the viewport window, overseeing the entire battle in the stars. “Tzeentch himself must have arrived. My bastard of a First Captain is here, might as well bring the whole reunion.” He placed a finger to the side of his head, still recoiling from the overwhelming psychic power being flung about. “Father must be engaging him directly.”

“Then we should come to the aid of him and the Captain-General,” Rogal said. He turned towards the operators and began issuing orders. “Divert our course to rejoin the Imperial Truth to protect the Emperor.” The operators replied with hurried ‘yes sirs’ and began working like mad at their consoles. Magnus felt another psychic burst, wobbling slightly where he stood and propping himself against one of the command chairs. “Magnus, you should sit down before you eject your lunch all over the floor.”

“Already on that,” Magnus moaned, flopping into his seat. It was slightly difficult to manage with the wings (years later, and he still couldn’t undo Tzeentch’s little “cosmetic update”), but the red Primarch properly was situated. “The rest of the fleet can maintain their previous orders, I’m sure Vulkan and Corax can manage well without our further intervention.” Outside the viewport, an enemy ship detonated from within, splitting in two while a black-charred figure was flung from the blast and right through the window of another ship. “Or at least Vulkan can.” The second ship exploded shortly afterwards. “He’ll be fine.”

~~~

Several golden warriors were bowled over by an oncoming tidal wave of spiney tentacles, sweeping through the army in an effort to bring down its quarry. It was immediately met with a grasp by golden clawed fingers, wrapped up tightly and swiftly shorn off by a burning blade. The Emperor released the torn tentacles, allowing them to burst into Warp dust as he glared down the immense shifting form of Tzeentch. His once untarnished armor now bore several nicks in multiple places, his long flowing hair was now matted with sweat, and his breathing was laborious and heavy. For the first time in thousands of years, the Emperor of Mankind was fighting to the point of exhaustion. But Tzeentch showed no signs of fatigue as it shifted into the hunched humanoid form.

“Aw, getting weary already, Anathema?” Tzeentch cooed, one of its mouths opening wide and unravelling a tongue that dwarfed the Emperor’s own height. “Just say the word and we can put you down for a nap. One six feet under and covered in dirt!” Tzeentch unleashed another chittering laugh, casually backhanding a bolt of Warpflame hurled at his face. The Emperor panted and propped himself upon his sword, fire burning in his eyes as he glared down the Changer of Ways.

“How… how have you gotten so strong?!” The Emperor shouted. Tzeentch only laughed again, a chorus of hideous cackles erupting from each mouth across its disgusting body.

“How have I ALWAYS gained strength and nourishment? The same as I did when the Eternal Game first began,” Tzeentch snapped its fingers and shifted into a formless mass of tentacles. “Through the actions of mortal minds and souls. Think on such things, Anathema. Ever since she who was named for an ancient Terran alcohol brand made her proclamation to the multiverse, all sentient beings have been devising all sorts of plans, plots and schemes.” Tzeentch’s form shifted, once more humanoid, but now distinctly female, sporting wings of tentacles and crystals and a mouth filled with hundreds of needle-like teeth. “She and her ilk seek to undo that which the Tower had created, seeking to unravel the threads of stories themselves. To incite the greatest change that ever could fall upon all of existence itself! The many becoming one! IT IS SO DELICIOUS!” Tzeentch’s tongue slithered out of its mouth and noisily licked its lips and the entirety of its face, prompting no small amount of revulsion from the Emperor of Mankind.

“She brings just as much damnation upon all of existence as you do, Tzeentch!” The Emperor shouted. “Feeding on your followers’ mad ambitions will soon starve you.” Again, Tzeentch only laughed, its face splitting apart into a mass of tentacles.

“I’m not foolish or stupid enough to sample from JUST one platter!” Tzeentch’s form broke down again, reshaping itself into a quadrupedal, equine being, only slightly resembling the Charter-Princess herself. This form bore only eyes on the face, and a mouth in the center of its chest with a massive unblinking eye surrounded by crystals and teeth housed within. “The lavender book-horse reacted as a means of countering the great change, with her and her followers needing to devise matters of her OWN to counteract this grand scheme supreme! Non-lethal takedowns, destroying the Tower Rings, even utilizing tools originally meant for peace as weapons of mass destruction!” Tzeentch made a sound almost like orgasmic relief, a sound made worse by the caressing Tzeentch made of his face with crystalline hooves. “All of these plans, these plots, from all of you, it’s like an all you can eat intellectual buffet!”

The Emperor’s momentary revulsion betrayed him. Dozens of tentacles burst from the immaterial ground and ensnared the Emperor in a bone-crushing hold, hoisting him off the ground and forcing him to discard his flaming sword. Tzeentch’s form solidified into a singular mass, becoming a massive purple crystal tower, slowly being consumed by tentacles, hundreds of tiny figures astride atop them with mouths of fangs all speaking as one. “I’ve become the greatest psychic entity in the multiverse, and none of you realized you ALL are feeding me.” Tzeentch’s grip tightened around the Emperor, his ceramite plate creaking under the stress.

“An evil being…” the Emperor grunted. His mouth tasted of copper, a thin line of red trailing from the corner of his lips. “Is destined to fall…” More creaks sounded as the Emperor felt himself nearly crushed. “You will die, just as your monstrous ilk did.” Tzeentch roared and adopted his humanoid form, eyes wide and teeth gnashing.

“A CONCEPT OF REALITY ADHERES TO NO FICTITIOUS MORALITY!” Tzeentch bellowed, clouds of Warpstorms thundering about, flashing bursts of lightning striking at the battlefield. “EVERYTHING CHANGES, ANATHEMA! THE TURNING OF THE SUN, THE PASSING OF SEASONS, RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN MORTALS, EVEN THE VERY STARS GLOW BRIGHT UNTIL BURSTING INTO NOTHINGNESS! I AM THE INEVITABLE PATH ALL LIFE TAKES! I AM THE EIGHT-TURNED GOD! I AM THE ARCHITECT OF FATE! I AM THE CHANGER OF WAYS! I AM THE GOD OF-” An enormous fist surged from the clouds and struck Tzeentch dead in the face. The Emperor was immediately freed from his prison, dropping to his knees with a few heavy coughs. He stood just as he saw the largest Ork he had ever seen emerge from the clouds and deliver another punch to Tzeentch’s face, propelling the mass of tentacles flying clear across the battlefield. The Emperor stared at the Ork, a purple, red and green thing thrice as tall as any mountain, crackling with wild lightning and burning flames in its red eyes.

“... Gork?” the Emperor called out. “Or is it Mork? How…?” The Ork God just bellowed a resounding ‘WAAAAGH!!!’ that rumbled across the battlefield like cannon fire and stampeded after the far-flung Chaos God. Before the Emperor could give chase, a psychic force lifted him off the ground and back onto his feet.

“Gorkamorka, I believe it is called,” said the melodious voice of a beautiful woman. “Something that is both Gork and Mork, yet none of us are sure.” The Emperor whirled around, and found that three other Warp-born beings had now stood behind him: a flaming man of brass and magma, face forever bearing dementation and fury, a woman in a flowing dress, beautiful and immaculate as a forest oasis, and a ghostly entity, akin to the reaper itself. The Emperor addressed the three Gods with mild confusion and surprise.

“Khaine?” he asked. “Isha? Ynnead? How did you-?”

“You’ve always put it best, kid,” Khaine said, hissing and growling as an active furnace does. “‘Fourth-degree inter-dimensional Warp fuckery’.” He brandished his burning sword, more wicked and nasty compared to the Emperor’s own. “Do you really think we’d miss out on the opportunity to tear the Last Chaos God a new asshole?” Isha shot her companion a disapproving look, though she did maintain her beautiful composure.

“We’re here to provide you aid, Emperor,” Isha gently said. “To prevent all that we have worked for from falling to ruination and… utter boning.” Ynnead just let off a wheeze as he leaned heavily on a worn and wicked scythe. The Emperor glanced between the Aeldari Gods, then back towards the battlefield. The Golden Army was now joined by countless Eldar warriors, Wraiths and Ghosts of all sorts tearing into the daemons with ruthlessness and even aiding the Imperium’s spirits of vengeance. He stared at his blade, still partially caked in Daemon God blood. He tightened his grip and looked back to the battle-ready Gods.

“Let us bring an end to the Eternal Game.”

~~~

Magnus’ head was pounding less now. The Warp stress was still lingering, his connection never wavered no matter how far away he was from it, but it hurt significantly less. He looked out the viewport towards the Imperial Truth, a hand still pressed to his head. He reached out with his mind to the command bridge, feeling the souls and minds onboard, each with their own feel and sensation. When he felt the burning flame that dwarfed his own psychic might, Magnus smiled. His father still remained, in spite of his other father still lingering. The battle would turn yet with Tzeentch on the run, but they played a small part in the conflict. Sooner or later, fate would decide the outcome of everything.

~~~

Long after the battle had concluded, Corona adjusted her pointed shades to filter out all higher-order madness-inducing geometry before she entered the universe Tzeentch was sulking in.

“You didn’t have to be so overconfident, you know.”

“And you don’t have to look like the after-effect of ketchup and mustard bottles getting beaten up by a strip of bacon, but here we are now,” the Lord of Change growled.

“You really do come up with new names every time…” Corona pinched the bridge of her nose.

Tzeentch let out resounding daemonic laughter, or perhaps electrified turkey noises. It was horrifying.

Corona ignored it. “Look, you lost. You probably could have seen that coming the moment you started going full I AM THE HAM mode.”

“Please, do you really think your pathetic mind c-“

“And don’t give me any of that ‘just as planned’ BS, the Tower was setting you up for a hubris pummeling.” Corona folded her arms, huffing. “Look, you’re one of our strongest allies, and you just about got yourself killed by being stupid. For a god of plans you’re not doing a very good job.”

“Watch your tongue, splinter star, I might just turn against you…”

Corona smirked. “If that’s what you want.” She left, leaving the eldritch abomination alone with his twisted universe.

It took about twenty seconds for Tzeentch to realize there were chaotic change-driven fights he wasn’t being a part of right now.

“After all this is over I am going to find a way to drive that side order to a breakfast platter nobody asked for into a particular sort of madness… I’m thinking a lavish attraction to syrup and her own hair, perhaps with some extra eyes thrown in…”

‘Edge of Dawn’

By Galliar

“I fear the edge of dawn, knowing time betrays”

“We were comfortable for a while, weren’t we?” Byleth asked. His leaned his head out of the window of his chambers thoughtfully. The view from the highest tower of Celestia’s School of Sorcery had grown less impressive as Ponyville wrapped around Canterlot mountain. Where once there had been natural fields and forests, speckled with pony civilization, there were now skyscrapers and other structures of Merodi make.

“There was a time that I'd have never imagined retiring,” Edelgard nodded. “Now, almost fifty years in? It’s been rather nice.”

“You were able to retire,” Byleth said, giving her a sideways glance. “I’ve been teaching for the past century.”

“Certainly none of your classes have been as bad as your first?” Edelgard asked with a smile.

“It has been some time since so many of my students have tried to kill each other.”

“If only the world could’ve stayed that way forever,” Edelgard sighed.

The silence took hold for a minute. The sleeves of Byleth’s overcoat swayed as the breeze picked up. Edelgard leaned her head onto his shoulder, taking in the view that had become so familiar. There were a great many things that she wished could’ve lasted forever. Peace. Retirement. The dessert table at the last gala. That moment before they spoke.

“You’re going to join Corona,” Byleth said. It wasn’t a question.

“Of course. How could I not?” Edelgard asked. “You won’t be joining me.”

They locked eyes. The only time she’d ever seen Byleth cry was when his father died, so it was no surprise that he didn’t weep now. After all these years she could still see a hint of fire in his eyes. Did he see the same in hers?

“If I go, others will follow,” Byleth said as he broke eye contact. “I have had hundreds of students throughout the years. If I went out there for either side, those same hundreds would follow. Even those who don’t believe in Collapse would die for it just because I was there.”

“I…” Edelgard’s protests died in her throat as Byleth turned back to her. “I understand. This will be goodbye, Professor.”

“It will be.”

…

Lost in memory, Edelgard touched her lips. It had been days since she stood with Byleth in Canterlot, yet the moment still felt fresh. Her memories beckoned her to return home, to answer the call of yesterday. It would be easy to leave the fate of the multiverse in the hands of those more capable. By her reputation, she had no doubt that Corona would let her leave with nothing more than a memory wipe.

She knew herself better than to believe she’d be satisfied with that decision.

“Lady Edelgard.” The owner of the raspy voice stepped into the room, snapping Edelgard out of her ruminations. Hubert bowed his head. “We have been summoned.”

Edelgard took in a breath. Her temporary prison – accommodations, El – were comfortable enough. To be expected of a hotel, one would suppose. She was eager to walk free regardless.

It had been so long since she last donned her armor. She had forgotten how uncomfortable it was. The hard steel wasn’t too heavy for her – despite her diminutive appearance she carried herself across a room in the armor as easily as without. Merely that it had been too long.

“Thank you, Hubert.” Edelgard stood up from her seat. She retrieved the axe Aymr, forged to appear like dragon bone, and her shield. Last, she donned the golden crown of what had been the Adrestian Empire, the horns seeming to poke out of the buns of her blonde hair. It was nothing more than a piece of the uniform. She was no emperor here, nor even a noblewoman. Just another soldier.

Hubert stepped out of the way as she left the room, match her pace about half a foot back. His green eyes seemed to glow as they traced her every step.

An Emperor she may no longer be, but the path she had been walking since she was a girl had led her here. Almost a century since the Merodi had made her original dream a reality, only to bring to light something far worse than a societal structure built on bloodlines and the divinity of the Crests carried within them. One she and everyone else had long thought impossible to overcome.

The Dark Tower.

She had passed on her seat as Emperor to one worthy of the title after decades of rule and retired to Canterlot in Equis Vitis. There she may have stayed if not for Corona’s question. Her only shame was that she had not been the one to ask it, and her only regret that she had to tread here alone.

I wish he could have been here. Edelgard sighed.

The halls of the Raven Hotel were nothing like home. She was accustomed to what most of the multiverse referred to as a more medieval or even fantastical style of architecture. She knew grand halls of stonemasonry, not the madness of the Raven Hotel that shifted to accommodate its visitors as Poe pleased.

The creatures patrolling the halls were further separation from her place of birth. A purple humanoid bearing a golden, gem-inlaid gauntlet nodded to them as they passed. Several bestial creatures watched the pair as passed, staining the wooden floor with drool. Ponies, humans, and beings she couldn’t comprehend walked around her.

“Certainly not the monastery, is it?” Hubert asked as they walked.

“Waxing nostalgic, are we?” Edelgard made herself smile. “It has been many years since we’ve walked through halls as crowded as this. Only this time we really are nothing more than a couple of faces in the crowd.”

“I dislike keeping this much distance from enemies. I’m partial to being able to see them.”

“Don’t worry Hubert. Everything will be in the open soon enough.”

An imposing figure far, far larger than herself stepped in her path. He was covered head to toe in heavy armor and occult attire, a staff in hand. Ahzek sneered at her as she passed, a gesture she returned in kind. Without a word they both kept walking.

Corona didn’t notice them entering the conference room. Edelgard could imagine the thoughts in her distant stare. A protagonist of the story of the multiverse, and yet for a moment she looked so small. She cleared her throat, and Corona yelped.

“We’ve arrived as requested, Lady Corona.” Edelgard said with a polite bow. “We have not formally met. I am Edelgard von Hresvelg, Emp- former Emperor of Fodlan. This is my assistant, Hubert Vestra. I’m told that you summoned us?”

“Just Corona’s fine, but yes, I did,” Corona smiled at the pair. “I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about the stories of other would-be members of the Collapse Movement before an upcoming meeting. Mostly picking through their stories where available. I was hunting down something on the Shabanash when word reached me about your entrance. Not many people out there would willingly hitch a ride on a Chaos ship.”

“I have to imagine fewer still live to tell of it,” Edelgard added. “Your point?”

“When I learned your name, I dug up your story. Funny thing is… I could find a summary of what happened on your world, or rather what would have happened to you if the multiverse had never come along. Your situation there sounds almost like what we’re fighting for now. Your world’s Crests sound like they were determining how important someone was. People were experimenting on their children and practicing a sort of eugenics in hopes of having a child with one.” Corona shook her head. “I also found out about what they did to you and your siblings. Taking the sum total of it… I can’t say I’m surprised to see you here now.”

“That fight is long taken care of, Lady Corona,” Hubert said, his inherently threatening rasp causing even Corona to twitch. “I serve Lady Edelgard’s cause, and today her cause is yours. I have to admit, I can’t imagine either of us being powerful enough to leave a mark on this upcoming war.”

“I see where you’re coming from, but I have to disagree,” Corona said. “I’m sure I could slip you both into the meeting if you’re willing to answer a few questions for me. Namely how you could go from the revolutionary Emperor of a basically unknown world to stowing away on a Chaos ship and breaking Lucius the Eternals arm...tentacles.”

“It’s a long story, spanning almost a hundred years,” Edelgard said.

“I’ve lived longer,” Corona smirked. “Any chance I’ll get to hear the full of it?”

“Maybe one day the full story will pass your desk,” Edelgard said. She paused, reaching down to remove her glove. “I believe it’ll be quicker for you to see it.”

Corona blinked at the hand that extended in front of her. It took a short moment for her to remove her own glove, time during which Edelgard briefly considered retracting her hand. Very briefly. I didn’t come this far alone. This is the easy step… just, reach out a hand.

Corona’s hand was warm. Edelgard barely registered that fact before the world went white.

A lifetime passed in an instant as a flurry of sounds and images. There was the dagger, a dungeon, rats skittered by… screaming. A mask, red and white. The monastery, archbishop, enemy. The professor, her Professor. She reached out a hand. Then… Merodi. Revolution. The ringing of a bell tower. A dragon lay dead at her feet. Life went on… until the Message. The last night in Canterlot. Hubert’s appearance… his eyes flashed green.

The connection broke when Corona yanked her hand away, and they both awoke back in the Hotel. It hadn’t been longer than a few seconds since they began. Silence lingered over them for a moment as the exchange processed. Corona spoke up first, her voice suddenly very tired.

“Edelgard,” Corona said. “Thank you. For reaching out a hand.”

“We all do what we must. Thank you for taking it,” Edelgard said wistfully. “I… leave what comes next to your discretion.”

Corona returned a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Edelgard stepped to the side, allowing them both to look to Hubert behind her.

“Lady Edelgard?” he asked. He took a step back.

“You can stop here,” Corona said. “Whatever you came to do, you can stop right now. No one is here to make you do it.”

“I don’t…” Hubert trailed off, his eyes widening. “Oh.”

“Please take off my friend’s face,” Edelgard said. “I’ve known Hubert since he was a child, and you’ve done him little justice.”

Not-Hubert grit his teeth before vanishing in a puff of green fire. In his place was a dark green changeling that was larger than most. Where most changelings had a single horn like a unicorn, this one had a pair of antlers.

“Pharynx…” Corona said sadly. “That is still your name, right?”

Pharynx didn’t say a word, his antlers lighting up. Before a spell could come out Corona flicked her wrist and he was thrown against the back wall. With just an extra bit of force, he couldn’t even pull his limbs from the wall. He transformed in a spout of flame into a minotaur, nearly pulling himself out of the telekinesis before Corona pushed even harder. Pharynx tried several other transformations, magic-resistant and powerful alike, but Corona held him in place.

All the while Edelgard watched.

“I have a capture device under my seat,” Corona said over Pharynx’s struggling. “If you would…?”

She did.

~~~

“And why should I entrust him to you?” Edelgard asked. She had one hand already on her axe.

The meeting with the other potential leaders of the Collapse had ended no more than a few minutes ago, with each of them pledging themselves to the cause. Already it seemed that pledge mattered to some more than others.

“Because I could take it anyway!” Ahzek answered. “Tzeentch demands this capture, and it’s only fair you give it to me after what you did to Lucius. You didn’t even give him the satisfaction of death you-”

“Spare me your insults, sorcerer. Your won’t touch this device. I’ll see to it personally.”

“You dare defy me, you petty mortal? I have seen what a real Emperor can do. You aren’t worth the gold in your trinket.” Ahzek laughed. “That’s not even the real bone of your enemies in that axe, is it? Just another lie from a girl playing pretend. Give me the capture, pretender, or I’ll take it!”

“No, you won’t,” another interrupted. Ahzek started to turn around, stopping when the tink of a sword echoed against his thigh.

Barely tall enough to reach Ahzek’s breast plate was a woman wearing a brown poncho that reached her knees. One of her eyes was covered by an eyepatch, a trio of parallel scars drawing lines underneath. In her hands was a black and white sword leveled at a very fragile part of the human male body.

“Haha! You think that puny blade could pierce-”

The woman pushed the blade slightly up against Ahzek’s armor. The plate split, leaving nothing between Ahzek’s flesh and the blade.

“So,” the woman said. “We’re done here. Right?”

They couldn’t see Ahzek blink under his helmet, but the guttural growl he let out teleporting away was clear. The woman spat where he had just stood.

“I could have handled him,” Edelgard said.

“I know. The bug in your pocket can’t. Wish I followed through while I could,” the woman said, making Edelgard wince. “I’m Buddy. They told me we’d be with you.”

“Ah, of course. I’m Edelgard, as I’m sure you’ve figured out You’re with the Strike Force,” Edelgard said, putting on a smile. Buddy gave her a look.

Of the few things they had discussed at the meeting, skills had come up. Leadership was an obvious one for everyone at the meeting, though none of them would be considered above Corona. Edelgard had offered to take on a greater command, but said she’d feel better leading a smaller group. Corona and the others had been accommodating of her request. She had spent the rest of the meeting trying to come up with a name for them.

She missed the looks that the others had given her at the name she pitched at the end of the meeting. The Crimson Strike Force was the perfect name for those she was taking command of.

“Strike Force?” Buddy asked before shaking her head. “Sure. This way.”

Edelgard already knew where they were going, but let Buddy take the lead anyway. She put a hand on her pouch, feeling the capture device with Pharynx still there. It wasn’t too long of a walk, though it was a quiet one, with Buddy not saying a word the entire walk. A trumpet echoed through the halls, getting louder as they approached their destination.

Buddy didn’t as much knock on the door of room 127 three times as she tried to punch through it. With a creak the door slid open, the trumpet coming from inside. The room was much larger than it should’ve been, but Edelgard had learned long ago to not pay something so insignificant as standard physics much mind. If the room could suit their needs then she was more than satisfied.

Beds lined the walls with little in the way of decor, though a few of the residents had started to personalize their spaces already.

To say the company in the room was mixed would be an understatement. Edelgard had asked for variety and she had received it. An insectoid girl was threading silk through a sharp needle as tall as herself on one bed. A masked boy was sitting on another bed, mechanically turning to face them as they stepped inside.

“You can introduce yourself,” Buddy said. “I need to collect my dad.”

Near the end of the room where Buddy was leading them, a woman with short brown hair was playing the trumpet to a mutated amalgamation of flesh that might have once been a man.

This woman looked up as they approached, seemingly relieved as she stopped playing. The blob groaned as she did, causing a few of the people in the room to reach for their weapons. They all stopped when Buddy took the trumpet and started to play, the creature seeming content.

The woman who had been playing noticed Edelgard staring, her eyes widening. She approached slowly.

“Excuse me, are you Edelgard?” she asked.

“I am. Have we met?’

“No, This is the first time, but I’ve heard of you,” the woman said sadly. “My name is Makoto Kurusu. My husband died on your world helping.”

“As did many others. I wish none of them did,” Edelgard said. “His sacrifice made a difference. In the lives of my people, and my world.”

“That’s the risk he took going. Life won’t change if we don’t make it, right? I’ve always heard people saying his death meant something, but I’ve never been able to visit your world to see it. Hearing it… means more than you know.”

Around them, people were taking notice of Edelgard’s presence. The masked boy was looking through her. The insect girl stopped threading her needle. A giant of a man with his right arm embroiled in a cybernetic gauntlet from the shoulder down approached her, an inquisitive look on his face.

“You would be our leader then? Who Corona asked us to follow?” The man asked, looking her up and down. “Why should we follow you?”

Edelgard studied the man a moment. He looked like a brute on the surface, but she could see too much life behind his eyes to buy it. He wasn’t insulting her, she could see that, but he was probing to see if she was offended. What was it he was hoping to see in her? Conviction? Strength? Intelligence?

“Akande, Corona said-”

“I asked for the creation of the Strike Force because I see dozens of people in this room right now that chose to be here,” Edelgard said, not sure who she was interrupting. “I see people who have been ravaged by the flow of ka, as ordained by Prophets treating us as nothing more than players in their opera. Akande, was it? How did you lose your arm?”

“Omnics,” he answered, balling up the gauntlet.

“Was it? Or was it a Prophet behind his desk in the safety of his home or an office?” Edelgard walked past Akande, pointing at the masked boy. “And you, why did you join the collapse?”

“I died,” The boy said mechanically. “My body was made a puppet.”

“By?”

“Madman,” the boy said with a curious tilt of his head.

“Was this madman the one who experimented on you, or the man that said you’d be experimented on?”

The boy didn’t have an answer. Edelgard didn’t have to ask before Buddy spoke up. The mutant beside her groaned as she stopped playing the trumpet.

“I was the last human girl in my world,” Buddy said. “Dad wanted to protect me from the… expectations the other men had, and I wanted to be free. Still do. And so long as the Tower stands I can’t be.”

As she spoke the mutant with her had crawled in front of her, a growl emitting from it. Buddy calmed it with two notes and a quiet reassurance. ‘It’s okay dad.’

More people came forward with their stories. This man to be both a superhero and an addict that killed his girlfriend to make a point. This girl’s home was destroyed because a father dared love his child. This man wanted to end abuses throughout the world and was marked the villain for the actions he needed to take.

Not everyone spoke up, nor would Edelgard want to force them too. After so many stories were shared, Edelgard decided her point was made. She climbed onto a footlocker to stand just a bit taller.

“We have all suffered,” Edelgard said. “We have suffered because Gan and the Builders thought long ago that they could fabricate meaning in the multiverse. In their foolishness they have only created suffering beyond repair. Here in the Raven Hotel, with the very strength that foolishness has forced upon us, we at last have a chance to fight back.

“I have fought for my whole life to make the world a better place. To end the tyranny of birth choosing how we live. No one should be made more important by who they are, but rather by what they do. I do not demand any of you follow me into battle or follow my orders. I ask it of you now. Let us walk the path into the dawn as one. Let us bring an end to the heartless tyranny of the Tower, so that at last true wisdom may prevail!”

~~~

The Crimson Strike Force’s arrival was signalled by Buddy’s trumpet, echoing through the portals that appeared around the Preservation base. The first wave of the Strike Force, a line of disfigured mutants, shambled out in step to the marching tune. No two mutants appeared the same.

Some still looked human but for swelling and elongation of their body. For others it was impossible to imagine how their body could have transformed as they did, their size and body mass greater than any human body should ever produce. Some moved slow, whilst others bounded across the field into the enemy lines. Arrows, bullets, mortar, and more bombarded the mutants as they marched, though it did nothing to stop their advance.

With the mutants in front, the main strike force emerged in the clearing. The masked boy, Claus, flew overhead with wings like a bat and fired his arm cannon from above. Akande, or Doomfist as he preferred, leapt over the line of mutants and charged into the fray. The bug girl, Hornet, threw her needle into a nearby tree and pulled herself up by the thread, disappearing into the foliage. A speedster named A-Train ran through a portal in the blink of an eye and disappeared into the forest as little more than a blur. All along the field, the other members of the Strike Force advanced in their own way using the mutants as canon fodder.

At the back of the line Buddy stood on her father’s back playing the trumpet, driving the mutants forward. Out from behind her Edelgard and Makoto stepped out. Over the wall of mutants they could see a castle, hastily patched up with modern materials and technology to hide their presence from interdimensional scanners.

For all the good those scanners did them when an insider gave away the location.

“Creepy things, aren’t they?” Makoto asked, quiet enough that Buddy couldn’t hear. She had put on a grey mask that mostly covered her eyes before they’d deployed.

“The mutants have been around since long before this war began, if Buddy’s to be believed. I would sooner make use of them than not,” Edelgard said. She turned on her headset. “Anyone see anything?”

“Mortar is coming from within the castle grounds,” Hornet said. “I think I see an opening to get in.”

“Do it, but be careful. If you can get the door open good, otherwise disrupt them only. Anyone else?”

“No notably persons on the other side. We might be in luck!”

Makoto clicked her tongue, and Edelgard sighed. Neither of them recognized who said it, but when they found out there would be hell to pay.

“Man, you just had to say it,” A-Train said over the line.

Nothing immediately went wrong, at least. The mutants were reaching the wall, trying to claw their way in. Surprisingly few had died in the transit. So far as Edelgard could see, none of her actual people had died as of yet.

The worst that she had seen was a muscular man that jumped down from the wall and started to yell out what sounded like song lyrics before Makoto shot him. He hadn’t had his stand ready to defend him. The mutants converged on what was left. Buddy watched passively as the man screamed. Beside her Makoto watched in horror, a capture device in her hand.

“Don’t watch,” Edelgard said, grabbing Makoto’s shoulder and pulling her forward. “I still need you today. Don’t look.”

The screaming stopped, and the mutants moved on with only a bar from Buddy’s trumpet.

Edelgard followed the flow of the fight through the constant reports she received from the strike force. Doomfist and A-train reported tearing into a vehicle depot behind the castle whilst Hornet cut through the bombardiers one after another. They had few reported casualties, and as yet no fatalities as Buddy’s mutants reached the gates.

Buddy picked up her playing, ordering them to wait before the door. Though the mortar fire had stopped almost entirely, someone in the command structure had redirected the archers. Arrows whistled by Buddy as she played. One finally seemed to be on target, only to stop inches from her face. Claus landed nearby, an empty look on his face as he maintained the shield.

Edelgard put a hand on her headset.

“Hornet, can you open the gate for us?” She asked.

“No,” the voice returned. “The gate house is guarded, I won’t be able to get near it.”

“Of course,“ Edelgard sighed. “Strike Force, assume assault positions. The doors aren’t going to open for us.”

She gave Buddy a nod. With only a few notes, the mutants rushed forward to tear at the gates. A couple with elongated legs were able to leap over the wall, skipping the gate entirely to hit the battlements. Even Edelgard winced at the sounds they heard.

One of the mutants tore a chunk off the gate, spitting it onto the ground beside him. When it reached to tear another, an arrow of red energy pierced its face. The mass of human flesh slumped backwards, dead in an instant. Through the hole she could vaguely hear what sounded like yelling.

Edelgard’s breath hitched, her eyes locked on the arrow. It crackled and sparked for a moment before dissipating into the air like magic.She reached for her headset.

“All units, pull back! I repeat, fall-”

Her ears filled with static.

“Hello, Strike Force report in! Accursed piece of... Crimson Strike Force, this is Edelgard, fall-”

“Phew, ouch, no need to yell,” a voice came through. She recognized the voice, but it wasn’t anyone from the Strike Force. “Don’t worry, Edelgard. I can hear you just fine.”

There was an animalistic screech that echoed against the stone. The mutants answered back with their own broken inhuman cries.

There was a rumble, and what was left of the gate toppled forward. Edelgard cursed, throwing herself out of the way. Makoto landed beside her and dirt and the blood of crushed mutants enveloped them.

Edelgard pulled herself up first, her axe having landed a foot away. She helped Makoto to her feet and the dust cleared. The first thing she noticed was the gate had landed a foot away from Buddy and her father. They were safe at least.

The dust cleared. Within the gates was a line of soldiers with magic oozing off of their weapons. She recognized a few of them from a long time ago. In the center of the gate house stood a wyvern, its neck craned low. A thin woman with pink hair and an axe almost as big as herself stood in front of it.

On the wyvern’s back was a handsome man with dark skin, dressed in golden colors and a charming smile. In his hand was a bow made of dragon bone. Edelgard could have laughed just as easily as she could have screamed.

“Hey El,” He said, his voice carried by the radio. “Been a while hasn’t it?”

“Claude,” Edelgard answered. She had to force herself to stay composed. He has no right to use that name. “What are you doing here?”

“What, can’t see an old friend? And here I went through all the trouble of forging a fake preservation missive and throwing it your way to get you to visit.” He shrugged. “Ah well. You’re here now. I think I’m going to take you home, the Professor has to miss you after all.”

“You know I can’t go back. I have to see this war through.”

She picked her axe off of the ground and took a position next to Buddy. Makoto followed her, revolver in hand. Buddy herself held her trumpet in one hand and brandished her blade in the other.

Claude sighed and raised his weapon. He notched and drew an arrow, the bow encompassing it in magic attuned to his bloodline just as Edelgard’s axe did the same.

“I don’t need you to come willingly. Even if I’d rather you did.”

Claude pointed his bow upward, the magic-infused arrow piercing the stone and traveling through the sky. It emerged out of the top of the battlements, a body stuck on its tip. It stuck the body of Hornet in the ground a minute later. She still looked alive. The hungry eyes of Buddy’s mutants drifted towards her, but Makoto was quick on the draw. Hornet was safely within a capture device a moment later.

Claude’s soldiers charged a moment later, with Claude’s wyvern taking to the air immediately. With a command from Edelgard, the mutants were driven forward with a few notes from Buddy’s trumpet. Edelgard grit her teeth before charging with them.

The first soldier she would have engaged disappeared in a blur. Out of the corner of her eye she saw A-train slam him into the castle wall. The next was crushed under a mutant’s weight before it snapped his neck. Finally she reached the girl with pink hair and swung her axe in a one handed grip.

She remembered this girl from her home world. Her name was Hilda.

She caught her swing with her own, winking as she did so. Before she opened her mouth she could see her opening her mouth to banter. Not giving her the chance, Edelgard pulled back and swept her leg, almost pulling Hilda’s feet out from under her.

“Yikes, straight to the point huh Edie?” Hilda giggled nervously. “Or is it El? I’ve heard both.”

Edelgard swung her axe at the dirt, throwing it up at her face before charging. A benefit of having trained with a mercenary for so many years was that you learned to fight to win instead of fighting for glory. A lesson that had never been impressed upon Hilda.

Another soldier tried to interfere only for Makoto to shoot their helmet, and kick them in the face.

Edelgard was able to maintain the momentum against Hilda, though it wasn’t easy. The pair of them were likely among the strongest warriors on the field despite their size, their strength amplified by the Crests in their veins.

Edelgard misstepped. Seeing her opening Hilda raised her axe over her head… only for it to be split in two.

Buddy pressed her sword against Hilda’s throat.

“Wha… what?” Hilda asked.

Buddy didn’t answer. With a single clean motion she knocked Hilda out with the hilt of her weapon while Edelgard pulled out an empty capture device.

“Thank you,” Edelgard said as she captured Hilda. Buddy just nodded. Around them the soldiers were being beaten back as more of the Strike Force arrived. There were thankfully few bodies from either side, with mutants making up the majority of corpses. “You can clear out the inside of the castle, I’ll take care of Claude.”

Buddy raised a brow, but nodded. The mutants followed her into the castle, her father at their helm.

The static still rang in her ears, leaving her in the dark about where the missing members of her Strike Force were. She could barely make out Claus opposite of Claude’s wyvern high above them.

“How do we reach him?” Doomfist’s asked from behind her. “Even I can’t reach up there.”

“No, you can’t,” Edelgard agreed.

She was used to wyvern riders being in reach. Claus was keeping Claude high above the battlefield as magic, arrows, and arm-cannon fire alike flew in every direction. He was using a bow besides. He’d never have to be in their reach. She did have any ballistae or anti-air with her, she hadn’t thought it’d be necessary. A mistake clearly. With communications down she didn’t have any way to tell Claus to bring the fight to the ground either.

The only option she saw was to go to him.

“How hard could you throw me?” Edelgard asked. Doomfist turned to her with a raised brow.

“How good is your balance?”

It was a terrible idea. That was the only reason she felt confidence in it. Her balance had been honed by both the battlefield and the ballroom. Along with her small frame, Edelgard was able to keep both feet steady on the Doomfist gauntlet as the mechanical parts built up power.

If the Professor could see me now, launching myself as a missile. Edelgard smiled. What would he say of this?

Doomfist gave her a warning and she gripped her axe tightly.

The air pressure hit her at once as she was launched into the sky. As the fight in the sky drew closer, she started to slow down. Her focus was diverted, part in keeping her eyes on her destination, part on keeping her eyes open, and an unfortunate part that worried she hadn’t been thrown hard enough.

Fortune favored her as Claus noticed her approach. He rose to fire down on Claude, who was forced to weave out of the way of the attacks. This brought him low enough.

Edelgard reached out a hand and wrapped it around the wyvern’s neck. Shocked by the sudden weight mid-maneuver, it let out a shriek and started to fall. Claude struggled to hold on, letting out a curse as his bow was flung from his grip.

Claus drew his saber and folded in his wings. Going into free fall, he leveled the blade in front of him. It was just before they hit the ground that the wyvern was impaled, letting out one last cry as it hit the ground with a resounding crash. Edelgard was thrown from the wyvern’s neck, rolling several feet. Her armor broke off or compacted from the force in several places. Shock kept her from processing the full extent of the damage immediately, allowing her to be process that she was alive first and foremost.

She didn’t remember the name of the unicorn that ran up to her with a staff, mending her bones as best she could. She barely remembered rejecting to be put in a capture device until they were back to safety. The next thing that Edelgard remembered was standing over Claude’s unconscious body.

“Heal him,” she told the unicorn. She did.

When he was in a stable state, she waited. Buddy hauled out the hacker that had disrupted their communications. It was someone that Makoto had known apparently. That made her Makoto’s responsibility. Claude was hers.

He awoke, eventually. The Strike Force was almost finished with their final tasks on the battlefield. Buddy had corralled her surviving mutants into another dimension away from the battlefield and the capture devices were being returned to the Raven Hotel, leaving them mostly alone. He looked up at Edelgard with a pained smile.

“You… let me sleep in the dirt?”

“Oh, I apologize. Would you have preferred a bed?” She smiled back.

“I expected a ball, honestly. Gotta admit, I didn’t know you could fly,” Claude sighed. “Could’ve planned for the flesh creatures better too, but I didn’t think you’d go that far.”

“Whatever it takes. Here.”

Claude eyed her extended hand warily. When he took it she pulled him to his feet and pulled him into a hug. His eyes widened as she shoved two capture devices into his stomach.

“Hilda,” she whispered, “and Pharynx. Get them home, and don’t let me see any of you again.”

She broke the hug and turned to leave. The battle as a whole was a waste, she figured, but she could try to do some good in the end.

“Heh. Thank you,” Claude said. He took a step to leave before stopping and turning around. “Take care out there. I heard there’s someone after your head in particular.”

“What?” Edelgard turned back. “Who?”

“They call them the Revenant. No one’s really sure where they come from, just that they appeared at the start of the war. One report said they have a list of names, people that have been dying one after another, and you’re on it. Which is why I thought you’d rather go home, but...”

Claude shook his head. His warning hung in the air.

~~~

The war went on, though whether it had been months, years, or hours depended on who you asked. The Crimson Strike Force went on mission after mission to advance the cause of the collapse as they could. Members would be lost, and others would take their place. On one mission, they had found a world where they could reverse cyborgization, where Claus had stayed behind.

Edelgard didn’t hear a word of Claude again, for which she was grateful. She was less comfortable with the silence regarding the Revenant that Claude had warned her of. She considered he might have fabricated the character to scare her into backing out of the war, but even as cunning as Claude was they’d known each other long enough that she believed him.

The day she learned the truth started with a report of the obvious: one of the collapse’s allies was being an idiot.

“Buddy!” Edelgard yelled as she ran through the hotel. “Makoto!”

Other members of the collapse stared at her as she ran, but barely gave her another thought. Allies truly was a generous term for many of them. She nearly toppled into Doomfist as she took a particularly tight corner.

“Edelgard?” Doomfist asked.

“Akande, finally one of mine. We have trouble.” Edelgard reached into her pouch and handed him a piece of paper. “Here are a set of coordinates. Gather up the Strike Force, get as many sanity filters you can, and meet me there. Don’t let anyone come without a filter.”

“What are we expecting?”

“I was just made aware that Tzeentch is fighting the Emperor in the Warp. If anyone’s going to help the fool...”

“Understood. Fight well, Edelgard.” With that Doomfist took off.

Content that her orders would be carried out, Edelgard found an empty room and opened a portal into the Warp. No need to make passerbys insane. As soon as she stepped through it, she felt herself change.

Throughout the multiverse there existed several iterations of the collective unconsciousness. The Warp was the most infamous of them, but certain others maintained by an aspect of The Great Will existed out there. Edelgard was fortunate that aspect had broken away long ago, else she wouldn’t carry his protection now as she stepped into the maddening Warp.

Instead of madness, divine protection wrapped around her in a spurt of blue fire. Her armor was replaced by the black heavy armor of an identity long cast aside. Over her face a mask formed, red and white. Edelgard took a breath. That it even worked was a small miracle.

Edelgard took in her surroundings, and even with divine protection from eldritch madness she felt dizzy. All around her, both above and beneath her the battle between the Emperor’s forces and Tzeentch’s was waged.

Stay out of the way, if you would, a thousand voices echoed in her mind. Whatever you’re here for, it’s none of my concern.

Edelgard shook her head as Tzeentch pulled himself from her mind. She’d accomplish more with action than sparring words.

Her position was relatively separate from much of the fighting, giving her a moment to pick out the most manageable foe she could. Edelgard had no illusion she could take the Emperor’s best, but challenging a hanger-on or supporting a greater daemon…

That one. Not far away she could see an asymmetrical daemon that stood out from most of Tzeentch’s spawn. Its opponent was dressed in a black hood, looking nothing like any of the Emperor’s forces. Hate the Tower as she might, she knew when it was directing her there… and she had little choice but to listen.

Moving through the storm as a mortal was odd to say the least. It wasn’t exactly without gravity, nor was it standard. She couldn’t describe it beyond ‘unnatural.’ She still did her best to reach her target as quickly as possible.

“PETTY MORTAL! YOU FACE THE GOD MALAL,” the creature bellowed. “I WHO HAVE OUTLIVED NURGLE, KHORNE, AND SLAANESH! I WHO NEED NO WORSHIP TO REIGN! WHAT CHANCE DO YOU HAVE TO-”

The hooded figure spun around a spear made of bone in one hand. Edelgard recognized the weapon, the same as she had recognized Claude’s. They had both been forged from the same dragons a millenia ago. In the other a light formed, and a blade formed in the other hand. It was a sleek black weapon shaped like a key, a rose hanging from a chain at its hilt.

The figure threw the spear at Malal, who tried to bat it aside. He didn’t expect it to cut through his hand, leaving a gap through his palm. His pained cry was interrupted as the figure slashed his keyblade through Malal’s leg, toppling him to the ground.

The figure grabbed his spear stood over the pained Malal’s head. The apparent god Malal’s eyes might have gone wide if he’d had any.

“NO! WAIT, DON’T-”

The figure did not care for Malal’s begging. They brought weapons down and pierced his skull. The forgotten renegade god let out a pained roar that shook the Warp, his body dissipating into the realm around him.

The figure landed on their feet, the daemons around them deliberately avoiding her. They slipped away, more content to face the Emperor’s forces. Malal may have been a joke of a god, but he had still been greater than any demon.

“You’re Edelgard. His voice calls for your head,” the hooded figure said, their breaths heavy. Their voice changed with every syllable. “Tell me, who do you see?”

“You’re the Revenant, aren’t you? Claude warned me about you,” Edelgard asked cautiously, drawing her axe. “I see a hooded figure carrying the spear of a dead man.”

The Revenant snorted, and reached for their hood. Edelgard’s breath hitched. His face - for it was the face of a man - was scarred, one of his eyes covered by an eye patch. His blonde hair was stained with blood and dirt.

“And now?” The Revenant’s voice no longer changed with every word. Instead was the haunted voice of a broken man.

“I see the dead man whose spear you hold. Is that truly your face? Are you…?”

“No,” he said sadly. “The man you see is nothing more than a memory. As are all my faces. I haven’t had my own in a… a long time.” He looked up, his one eye locking on Edelgard’s mask. He let out a laugh that could have froze her blood. “I'm nothing more than a twisted joke, aren’t I?”

“Enough, Revenant,” Edelgard said. “For the sake of the memories that weigh you down, I’ll put you to rest.”

“Revenant… peh. If you’d be the one to kill me, I’d answer to my true name one last time. I am Xion. For the sake of the memories I carry, I bring vengeance. To you, and to the Chaos God you protect!”

The keyblade dissolved, and Xion charged forward with only the spear. Edelgard braced herself, grabbing the mask her protection had created, and pulling it off. A winged creature, both regal and inhuman, formed behind her much like a Stand.

It was a benefit of a collective unconscious realm: the power bestowed by any cognitive gods couldn’t tell the difference between them. Just as that power let her traverse the Warp without going mad, so too did it allow a Persona to form within the Warp.

“Hegemon!” Edelgard cried out.

Her Persona answered by channeling the dark and thunderous Warp around them to strike at Xion. He dove to the side, drifting in the odd gravity of the storm to face Edelgard in the air. Wind magic formed at his feet and blew him forward, speartip directed at her face.

Edelgard raised the flat of her axe to deflect to attack. There wasn’t time to react when Xion turned the spear downwards, stabbing into the loosely defined ground to flip over Edelgard. The keyblade formed in his hand as he slashed at her back. It tore through the cloth and left a gash in her armor. Edelgard cried out as she stumbled away.

Xion grabbed the spear as he charged again. Edelgard was stuck on the defensive. With every attack she was pushed back more. With every small opening she left, she earned another gash.

If she didn’t turn the tide somehow, she’d lose. Hegemon hadn’t been the trump card she’d hoped.

Xion caught Edelgard’s axe with his keyblade, and pulled it from her grip. The keyblade dissolved and he took the spear in a two-handed grip. The spear drove forward… only to stop as a mechanical fist drove into his side.

Edelgard took in a deep breath, looking to her savior. Doomfist’s eyes were covered by a tightly fit pair of glasses, as were Buddy’s. Makoto wore nothing, sitting atop a persona that looked like a motorcycle. Apprehension was clear on her face

“Why.. why do they look like him?” Makoto asked.

“Xion said he holds the memories of the dead,” Edelgard said. “The person that you see, I swear to you it’s not him.”

Makoto nodded after a moment. She looked behind Edelgard, flickering by her face. Edelgard just smiled and turned back to Xion. He stood with a wistful smile on his lips.

“I remember standing beside people like you,” he said. “They’d called me a hero once upon a time… a friend. Family, even. I thought it much more than a puppet would ever deserve… Heh. Nothing but another ghost.”

“I killed the man with your face once,” Doomfist said proudly. “I’ll do it again.”

“My father is gone,” Buddy said. “I can carry his memories without you.”

As overhead Tzeentch drove his crystalline tendrils into the Emperor, Doomfist broke the tension by diving forward with the gauntlet. Xion jumped out of the way only to be hit by a spell from Makoto’s persona, throwing the spear from his hands. He rolled onto his feet, using wind to throw himself towards Makoto. Buddy caught the weapons with her sword, locking them in a standstill as the rest of the strike force tried to surround him.

A daemon dove from above to grab at Xion. With a blood-curdling scream he drove Buddy’s sword up to impale it just over her head, and kicked the woman away. With a twist, both his keyblade and spear created a wall of ice to cut off Doomfist’s charge.

Edelgard swung at Xion, the man ducking under the axe and kicking at her legs. Edelgard caught her fall with her knee, ducking low enough for Makoto to jump over her and punch Xion across the jaw. He stumbled backwards into his own ice wall.

“Take off his face! You don’t have the right to wear it!” Makoto swung her foot in a circle to kick his face, yelping when he caught it and used her momentum to throw her away.

Edelgard used the time to burn through the ice enough for Doomfist to jump through. Just as Makoto was thrown he fired three rounds from his arm before delivering an uppercut strong enough to pull them both from the ground. He smiled as he stepped off of Xion’s face to propel himself higher.

“Meteor Strike!” Doomfist pulled his fist back as he started to fall. Xion’s eye went wide, and he tried to use magic to push himself away. He threw himself straight into Edelgard’s swinging axe. He barely blocked with his keyblade, but that hadn’t been Edelgard’s goal.

The force pushed him backwards, straight under Doomfist’s landing gauntlet. The chaotic energies of the Warp enveloped them. Edelgard kept her axe level, not willing to believe it was over.

When the storm settled, Doomfist’s gauntlet was embedded in Xion’s torso. The man was twitching in the crater. With a sigh, Edelgard grabbed a capture device and threw it to Doomfist.

“It’s over,” she said as Doomfist captured the man. She turned around to see the rest of the battle waging around them.

High above them was an ork, greater in size than any she’d ever heard of. It punched Tzeentch across thousands of mouths, and just as many faces. Around them she could see other beings, all about the same size as the Emperor of Mankind, seemingly swarming Tzeentch at once.

Despite their victory over Xion, the battle was lost.

“Makoto, open a portal. We’re getting-”

“Look out!” Doomfist shouted.

Edelgard turned with axe in hand. The capture device was broken in two, and Xion soared through the air with keyblade in hand.

It only took one swing.

Xion was split in two, his legs and torso flying, the axe Aymr having cut through the air with enough force to bring down gods.

Edelgard took a shaky breath. She turned around to see the body. Xion’s face was struck with horror. It hadn’t killed him yet… Edelgard took a step closer to end it when his face changed.

Where a scarred and broken man’s face had been was now the face of a young girl with raven hair. Her eyes were bluer than the ocean. All of the anger, and the wistful acceptance, was gone. Now… All Xion wore was fear.

“What… happened…” Xion asked. Her voice was soft. “Where am… where am I? I don’t...”

Edelgard dropped her axe and fell to her side. She put a hand on her shoulder.

“Sh. It’s okay… It’s okay Xion. You’ve been… You’ve overworked yourself. You just need to rest for now, I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”

“Oh… Is… uh… is he okay?”

“Who?”

“My friend. We used to…” Xion took in a pained breath and started to look down.

“No, eyes on me. What did you used to do?”

“We used… eat ice cream. And...” Xion’s voice trailed off. Tears came to her eyes.

Edelgard forced herself to smile.

“It’s okay. Your friend will meet you soon. It’ll all be just like it used to be,” she promised. “Just rest. We’ll get you to your friend.”

Xion smiled, one last tear trailing down her face before breathing her last.

~~~

Corona Shimmer stepped into her room in the Raven Hotel. As soon as she was inside she leaned back against the door and took a deep breath.

“That eldritch jerk is going to get himself killed or drive me mad before this is over,” she muttered.

She pulled off her shades and barely took a step into the room before she noticed she wasn’t alone. In a chair facing the door sat Edelgard.

“Oh, Edelgard. I-”

“What was it all for?” Edelgard asked.

“Well-” Corona trailed off. “That depends what it is.”

“Merodi’s aid to my world. At the time I had been so grateful. My dream had been realized almost bloodlessly, and tens of thousands of lives were saved. It seemed like everything was better for them having been there. And yet… here we all are, in the same places we would have been if they hadn’t come. Claude has disappeared, likely never to be seen again. Dimitri’s ghost almost killed me for a fruitless vengeance. And I… I am still embroiled in a war of ideology, one that has ruined every person it’s touched.

“So, I’m asking you. Corona. What has it all been for?” Edelgard’s eyes pleaded for an answer. Corona didn’t need to read her mind to understand how much she needed some validation, some answer to everything.

“That’s the question isn’t it?” Corona sighed. “What can any of it mean… if it all ends the same.”

Corona approached a cabinet and pulled out two teacups. She offered one to Edelgard, still empty.

“A cup of something might make this conversation easier, but I don’t have anything stronger than a few tea leaves right now. Besides, I’ve heard you learned how to make the stuff from the best.”

Edelgard snorted in an unladylike way, getting up to help. It wasn’t much later that they both had a full cup of earl grey in front of them.

“So,” Corona said between cups, “what does it mean?”

“That’s not what I asked,” Edelgard said. “I asked what it was all for if time was just going to carry us to the same point anyway.”

“This is…” Corona sighed. “There’s some irony to our help making you worse off in the end. No doubt the Tower would think itself clever if it was able to feel anything. That is a part of why we’re fighting isn’t it? To stop tragedies like what you’ve gone through from existing?”

“I can’t help but feel I’m giving it what it wants by being here.”

“I don’t doubt that there are people who aren’t fighting in the war because they think it's what the Tower wants of them. What they don’t realize is that they’re just examples of what little good standing to the side actually does. We can’t live just to spite the Tower. We’ll always lose that battle.”

“I…” Edelgard sighed. “I miss being human. I remember just before I started my revolution being terrified of my comfortable days at the Academy coming to an end once my plan started. After so long I’d forgotten that fear, but now that it’s come to pass after so much time it’s proving harder than I ever imagined.”

“Some part of me knew the story, or time as you keep saying, would turn its back on us,” Corona said. “I mean, the End of Certainty? Even before I asked the Question, that was ominous.”

“Let me guess, but…?” Edelgard prompted.

“But… We aren’t just the moment we’re in,” Corona said, taking a sip. “The past doesn’t define us, Edelgard, but it’s still a part of us. Every moment we’ve spent with a friend or loved one, every mistake that we’ve made, that all matters. You got over a hundred years you might not have had otherwise, and that counts for something.”

Corona put down her cup, and got up from her seat. She reached a hand out to Edelgard with a smile.

“Come on. The Crimson Strike Force still needs you. Let’s face the dawn together.”

Edelgard almost laughed. As she took Corona’s hand her thoughts were heavy with the knowledge that the days ahead were none the easier to face. Onward she’d march anyway, pressing against the edge of dawn.

‘Every Rose Has Thorns’

By Masterweaver

The two women looked very different. One had a normal skintone, the other's flesh was pink. One had feathers crawling up the back of her neck, the other's neck was bare. While both wore cloaks of scarlet and corsets of black, the outfits bore different buckles and belts and pockets and shirts. It would be nearly impossible to mistake one for the other.

Nearly.

Their hair was the same short blood-red. Their faces, all but identical. And two sets of silver eyes, each locked in somber understanding.

"Life is beautiful," said the one with pale flesh.

"It is precious," replied the one with feathers.

"And it must," they chanted as one, "be protected."

A small, sad smile grew on the pale one's face. "You're not coming, are you."

"I have my own flock," the feathered one agreed.

"I hate that I understand where you're coming from."

"Do you? Really hate, that is?"

"...No," the pale one admitted. "No, I... it's more disappointment. I'm not sure if it's you or me that I'm disappointed with."

"This whole war is confusion," the feathered one said, shaking her head. "It's nothing simple souls like us should have gotten involved with."

"Simple souls." The pale one reached for her own eyes, glancing away--

--only for a pink hand to reach out, and turn her face back. "Not stupid. Not foolish. Simple. We know who we are, and what we do."

"Yeah. Thanks."

"...Here." The feathered one reached behind her, grabbing something. "You need her more than I do."

The pale one's eyes widened. "I've already got Crescent Rose, I don't--"

"This is a war of stories. And what's more dramatic than the beloved weapon breaking at the worst possible time? You'll... want a backup, just in case."

"She's yours, though. You made her."

"This isn't Remnant. We aren't naturally warriors. This weapon is... loved, but it's not a part of me just because I made it. I can always make another. It really isn't that important to me."

The pale one gave her a flat look, one partially marred by her wet eyes. "Isn't honesty supposed to be one of your core values?"

"...all things in moderation," the feathered one murmured.

Quietly, gently, the pale one took the offering. "I'm not using this unless Crescent Rose becomes irreparable."

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

"...will... will your bishops understand?"

"Sunny might not. Not at first." The feathered one shook her head with a grin. "But she'll come around. I know her."

"...Yeah."

"Yeah."

"...Good luck."

"You too. And... I'd say stay safe, but--"

"We'll try our best. We'll be... protecting each other."

"Good."

~~~

"Well?" Yang stood as Ruby approached. "What's the verdict?"

Ruby sighed, shaking her head. "She... has to protect her beacon."

"...Yeah." Yang looked around the park. "Yeah, I can get that. Man... remember when we first got here?"

"Oh, I remember." Ruby took a deep breath, turning to the other two members of her team. "I'm obligated to give you a chance to back out."

"And I'm obligated to tell you hell no in the most emotional melodramatic way possible," Weiss replied, deadpan. "Let's just take that as read."

"Heh. Blake?"

"...If we die, we die together."

"Right." Ruby nodded. "Right," she said again. "So... we're huntresses. And what is the number one duty of a huntress? Saving lives. So..."

She shut her eyes. "We're going to go where the fighting is heavy. But we won't be fighting our opponents unless we have to, we--we're going to be the search and rescue team. Anybody too wounded to fight. Any civilians that got caught in the crossfire. We get in and get them out. That's... that's what we're going to do."

A mild cringe came to her face as she opened her eyes again. "Unless... we want to do something different...?"

The rest of her team exchanged glances. Then as one, they shook their heads.

"Okay." Ruby exhaled. "Let's go to the Merodi embassy, then. Maybe this time, I'll actually be the one to get impaled or dismembered or whatever."

‘Eye of the Storm’

By Keywii Cookies55

Heavy purple combat boots dragged across the floor of the hub as the woman wearing them exhaustedly marched forward. Her camo-printed cargo jeans and white tank top suggested she was a common soldier, but the disastrously disorganized hair and multiple bags under her eyes suggested she was in charge of far more than she was used to.

Her truly exhausted appearance was, interestingly, only the second thing people noticed about her. The first was her collection of rather mundane features that people always recognized when they saw her; the ironically plain looks that had made her somewhat famous.

The woman in question was Turntable Jane A. Shimmer: an accomplished hero, a fan favourite in Multiversal Fighters 3, a tenfold proven godslayer, a past slider, and fifty percent of Merodi Universalis’s Evermore population. She had more titles and identifiers, but she didn’t care about any of them then; all that was on her mind was the current source of her overworked, ragged state.

The vibration her phone gave off reminded her of exactly what that was. Jane stopped walking to let out a loud, exaggerated sigh as she debated letting the call go. Taking a moment to lower her head and just bask in the feeling of more work calling her, Jane decided she should at least check to see who was calling.

Reaching her hand into what outside observers would assume was her ribcage, but what she knew intimately was actually her subspace inventory, Jane grabbed her phone and checked the ID. Seeing the name she threw her head back and groaned in annoyance before she hit the accept button and brought the phone to her ear.

“Hi Daniel,” She deadpanned. “What can I do for you?” She knew she didn’t sound enthused but she also knew that she sounded like she was at least trying, which was good, since this was a professional call anyway.

He could at least say ‘hi’ or something, “They’re fine, a few still aren’t ready, but most of them can move on.” Jane assumed that the enthusiasm of the soldiers meant most would be quick to learn what they could from her.

Jane sighed. “I’ll do what I can, but I’m only one woman.”

Yeah, yeah, she thought, attempting not to take his compliment on her ability the wrong way. “Like I said, I’ll do what I can...” She really didn’t care much for how capable she was anyway.

Jane scowled at her phone, but kept herself from yelling at the device. “I won’t be there, let General Ironsights know.” She held the phone away from her ear to protect it from the sudden spike in volume.

She couldn’t believe he had the gall to be upset with her. “I’m going home Daniel, I’ve been drilling recruits for literal weeks and sleep spells aren’t taking the edge off anymore!”

...Because of course he’d mention the collapse side, why wouldn’t he? “Obviously they’ll get trained,” Jane almost yelled, but held her composure. “Just not by me. I’m losing effectiveness and making mistakes. I’m going home.”

Jane rolled her eyes as the conversation ended. “Sure, whatever,” she said before ending the call.

The entire war was making everyone stupid. All anyone ever talked about was collapse or preservation, no one else had any other conversations, they didn’t even try, it was starting to tax her. Obviously the Tower was horseshit; it allowed assholes to ruin people’s lives just by picking up a pen and feeling sadistic. She had no reservations about her opinion, she was one such person that had been fucked with and she knew better than most just what a dipshit with a word document was capable of.

But she also knew better than to uproot everything because she was dissatisfied with her life, there was definitely good to be found. Sunrise, for example, her Sunset Shimmer, the very same that loved her unconditionally was one such good in her own life. Jane may have vehemently despised her so-called author for ripping her out of her original life to become an Evermore, but, as much as she hated to admit it, the douche was also responsible for her meeting her wife; the very same wife that was unwaveringly on the side of preservation.

Sunrise - or as everyone else knew her: Sunny Parker - was a close personal friend of Eve. She was the godmother for Josuke and Beam’s daughter Josie, themselves strong advocates for Preservation, and she was an all-around lover of not killing people. Jane also suspected that because Sunrise and Corona were both originally Sunsets, Sunrise felt almost obligated to clear the name of all other Sunsets by being as anti-collapse as possible. Not that Sunrise ever actually mentioned that to anyone; she probably had yet to admit it even to herself.

Jane shook her head; now she was only thinking about the stupid war. She wanted to stop being surrounded by the damn thing and just go home and pass out; just grab some carbs to fill her stomach and sleep forever. Jane knew the war wouldn’t just wash over and the world return to normal, the multiverse was WAAAY too far gone for that, but at least with some sleep she could have a clear mind to better deal with how she herself fit into everything.

She ignored the look of concern she received from the Duplicates Noodle stand girl and ordered her sesame soba bowl on autopilot. Jane was exhausted, plain and simple, and not just from being awake for thirteen days. No, that certainly hadn’t helped, but more than all else she was just plain done with everything. After the Nihillists thing she wanted to stop and take a break. She was exhausted then too, but at least she got to travel, see some cool stuff, be useful in a group instead of the centre of attention.

Jane placed down her fiver bill and waved at the noodle girl as she walked away, the bowl was four-something, but she wasn’t interested in getting change back. Grabbing a disposable plastic fork on her way off, Jane downed a portion of the steaming hot broth and slurped up some of the actual food. She sighed in contentment before walking away, enjoying the flavour.

With another, more exhausted sigh, Jane opened her mouth and began unenthusiastically speaking the lyrics to music. “When I dance they call me Macarena.” As she did, her signature thin grey bar measure appeared and swirled around her. “And the boys they say que soy Buena.” Several colourful looking eighth notes danced along the measure in front of her, one larger than the others with the ‘Work/Shopping Hub’ above it.

Swiping several to the left she came across a light pink note labeled ‘Spawn Point’, “They all want me, they can't have me.” Double-tapping the note, it opened up and engulfed her, bringing her to a dusty desert street with a well-kept but well-aged two-storey home. The mailbox was proudly painted with the names ‘Jane & Sunny’.

Jane let herself smile slightly at the sight, it was her home, her place of residence, but most importantly the container her bed was held in. She walked up the front path - a stoned affair - to the front porch. Every so often she’d take in the wooden outcove, the chipped paint from a four year old punch, the squeaky boards, the residue from the egg fight three months prior that hadn’t fully faded. It was added personality that made her know it was her home, the scrapes and scars and patches that had it match her own body underneath her upheld illusionary magic. But that day she didn’t take the time to consider her homestead. Jane unceremoniously yanked her keys out of her inventory, opened her door and walked inside.

The first thing she did was kick her boots off her feet, before she rolled her eyes and used levitation to put them on her side of the shoe rack. They gently floated across the room and landed between the sneakers and the dust-covered high heels. She reflected incredibly briefly how it was sort of unfair that Sunrise had more space on the shoe rack, but as ponies had four hooves to humans’ two feet, it wasn’t something she gave a second thought to.

Taking another swig of her noodle bowl, Jane was about to walk up the stairs and pass out… hopefully on the bed this time… when a slight glint off a picture frame caught her eyes. Like any 500… ish… maybe… she didn’t actually know-year-old with a lifetime of memories, Jane had a small collection of photos above her fireplace, and one of them decided to catch her eye today of all days.

Jane recognized the signs, but didn’t care, like with most ka BS she ignored it and determined that she wanted to do whatever anyway. In this case she wanted to look at her old photos.

She walked across the living room and placed the bowl on the mantel. The one that caught her eye was her oldest photo. It was a much younger and more lively version of herself and her friends from the Recursions. She was wearing shining platinum armour and had a giant smile on her face. To her left was a tall white pony with a shimmering demonic mane of red, a tall redheaded woman with a golden spear, and a human with a goatee and mismatching Discord horns. To her right was Sunrise with a scar across her cheek and short mane, a slender woman with a shotgun, and a pale-looking man in a suit. Under the collection of Evermore a group of names read: Thistle, Pyrrha, Zod, Jane, Sunset, Sam, Thomas.

Jane looked deeply into her own smiling face and frowned in return. “What happened to you?” she asked, despondent. “Where’d that spark of adventure go?” Lowering the picture and looking up at the mirror above her fireplace Jane now looked into her modern eyes. She saw the dark circles and deep bags upon bags under her eyes, the lifeless ghost of her former self. “Is that really who you became?”

Putting the picture back down, Jane felt a tear roll down her cheek; she used to think nothing could never slow down, now she couldn’t keep up if she tried. She stared at the picture for a moment more, taking in the realization.

Then the room suddenly filled with a deep darkness. It buzzed and filled all available space, shaking Jane out of her funk. She looked around in shock at the dimming light and felt something slice into her arm.

“Ow,” she said, grabbing her arm, then she felt another slice across her leg, two across her back and then sudden pain everywhere.

“Whoa, what the fuck?” She didn’t get hurt anymore, she had centuries of defensive magic built up and infused into her. But out of nowhere some dark fucking cloud was suddenly eating away at all of that. The first spell to fall was her illusion spell, her true body appearing. She was taller, had old burn marks running up and down the left side of her body and countless scars everywhere else. Her eyes were red with black pupils and an old injury leaving the bone in her right arm returned in full force.

“Fuck!” Jane yelled, somewhat deeper than normal as she felt blood coming out of her nose and its taste on her tongue. Whatever this darkness was, it was stronger than any one person she’d ever encountered, her dozens of defensive matrixes, spells, abilities, and traits were all disappearing one after another.

Thinking quickly, Jane grabbed her Evermore photo and tried to put it in her inventory, but for some reason that wasn’t working either; she physically stuffed it into her shirt and started grabbing the other pictures on the mantel. “What the fuck is happening?!”

“Jane?!” a feminine voice called out, “Are you here?”

Jane recognized it immediately as Sunrise, “Yeah, at the fireplace,” she called back, “What’s happening?”

Sunrise appeared in the living room protected by an orange bubble of shield magic, the darkness was apparently ignoring her. Jane dropped to one knee as Sunrise entered the room, “Jane! We have to get out of here, Equis is being destroyed!”

“Everything?” Jane shouted, coughing up blood.

“Yes, c’mon!”

Getting back up, bleeding quite heavily, Jane forced strength into her tired body and tried teleporting something to herself. When that didn’t work she threw the picture frames she was holding at the orange unicorn. “I need to grab something first!” She shouted before moving as quickly as she could to the staircase, the house around them was ripping apart as she did.

“Please! We have to go!” Sunrise shouted, in concern, seeing her wife in such bad shape.

Jane knew she had no time as it was, but she had to get their book. She got to their bedroom and slammed open the door, seeing that the darkness was eating away at all their belongings, but it wasn’t completely destroying everything yet. Moving over to the closest and feeling blood run down both her arms, Jane reached down and pulled out a blanket-wrapped box. Turning around she saw Sunrise behind her, having followed her up the stairs in her protective bubble. “Okay, got it!”

She yelled and Sunrise didn’t hesitate to translate them away.

In the midst of the Hub where Sunrise and Jane appeared, every television, computer and phone screen was broadcasting the same thing. It was a news report showing live feed of the entire planet of Equis Vitis being engulfed in darkness from the interior of the planet, being ripped into pieces. Entire structures being reduced to dust.

~~~

Jane opened her eyes slowly as she awoke. Her immediate response was to assume that everything was a bad dream, but she knew better. The distinctly warm feeling of Sunrise’s healing magic was comforting her and the cushioned Hub bench lay below her, uncomfortable due to possibly being saturated in Jane’s blood.

She slowly lifted herself up to a sitting position and saw the shape of her body, her previously pure white tank top was so drowned in blood it looked like a cameo print for hell. She looked at her arm and saw that it was missing a few more fingers than she remembered. Slowly she lifted her arm and curled her hand in and out of a fist.

She felt the fingers, even if they weren’t there, and knew that fucking curse of hers was probably having fun with all the new injuries she’d sustained. Jane looked to her left and saw Sunrise with a sombre smile mixed with relief and a whole lot of worry. Without exchanging a word the two brought each other into a hug.

“I’m sorry,” Jane apologized.

Sunrise shook slightly, a mix of laughing and crying “You better be.”

Jane still held her wife, but pulled apart enough to look into her eyes. “How’d you know I wasn’t at my academy?”

“I saw the beginning of the news report and teleported through our soul link, I had no idea where you were but didn’t want to take chances.”

Jane laid back down and let Sunrise resume healing her, it removed the tiredness, but at that point she’d like to sleep anyway.

…not that she had a bed anymore, or a bedroom, or a home, or anything. Jane had nothing to her name but what was in her inventory and the clothes on her back. She… she had nothing, it was all gone, the hundred years they’d lived in Appleloosa was… i-it was…

“Zod was right, Sh- she, we ne-never should have-” Jane was starting to stammer as the nature of the disaster was beginning to set in, but Sunrise immediately started stroking her cheek and shushing her.

“Jane, my sweet Melody, calm down, I’m here.”

“WE’RE HOMELESS, SUN!” Jane suddenly yelled, tears freely flowing down from her eyes, “They did it, they finally f-fucking destroyed everything! We have no home, half our friends are following that bitch Corona, I still don’t know if Rae is okay and I couldn’t- couldn’t…

“I couldn’t save Pinkie’s grave…”

Sunrise watched Jane’s emotional mask break. After months of holding back her despair, Jane finally broke down crying, the weight of the multiverse finally crushing her. Sunrise couldn’t help it either and joined her, the news was reporting nothing else, and they’d earned a good cry.

~~~

“Where will we live?” Jane finally asked, gently rubbing her hand across the quilted blanket she’d saved from their destroyed home, a silver metal box sitting beside her.

Sunrise shook her head. “I don’t know; I can ask Beam, but she’s already dealing with enough.” A pause lingered between them before she spoke again. “Could we live in your office?”

Sighing, Jane stood up. “…yeah, that makes the most sense.” She stood up and grabbed their few belongings, putting them into her now accessible inventory. “C’mon, let’s go let Ironsights know.”

‘Gordian Knot’

By Trivena

inquisitiveButterfly[84] opened memo on private bulletin board INQUISITIVEBUTTERFLY’S TRANSTEMPORAL POSTMORTEM HIVEMIND

84: Does anyone know what the Time Lords are doing? I /know/ they’re up to something, but I can’t pin it down.
102: They are, and it’s bad.
102: Rassilon’s taken control of John Egbert and he’s tearing timelines to tatters.
102: It’s some kind of mind control.
102: He’s got to be using the Coronet.
84: The John Egbert?
84: Well crap.
47: Not the Crown?
62: No, it has to be the Coronet. You're thinking of /The Invasion of Time/. Two different things.
47: Oh, right. Duh.
154: Does it actually matter?
62: Not really, either way he has to be wearing it.
71: What I want to know is, why has nobody else worked this out and gone after him directly? Does nobody ever think to check the source material?
92: I’m pretty sure most of the main factions left’re American-based.
71: … oh. Well, no wonder, then.
114: Also, who could even get close enough to get the damn thing?
114: Time manipulation is stupid OP. And even when it isn’t it tends to trump everything else.
83: Oh.
416: It had better be us, then.
179: Yeah.
108: Who’s going?
102: I can’t. I’m needed where I am.
483: Where are you, anyway?
102: ...I can’t tell you.
19: ...Do we really have to do the random number generator again?

Her name was not Alice, though in another time it might have been. She, like many if not all of her fellows, had never bothered changing her name; after all, they were all the same person.

~~~

Once, it had been a crater in the middle of Cardiff, but the passage of time and the cross-correlation of several old files with some newer, seemingly irrelevant ones had transformed it, aided by the finest minds that Earth’s Unified Intelligence Taskforce could procure.

For one thing, not all of it was in Cardiff anymore.

The Doctor wasn’t quite sure where it was now, but a section of his laboratory’s glossy linoleum floor definitely no longer shared the same set of dimensions as the rest of the building. Even reversing the settings hadn’t managed to bring it back, so he’d disconnected the whole thing, marked it off with black-and-yellow hazard tape, and moved his entire setup to the other end of the room, where the only assistant who hadn’t refused to continue working with him was happily reconnecting power couplings.

He emerged from underneath the pale green console of his TARDIS, which he had once again removed from inside his ship; it hurt them both to have to do it, but separating the console from the TARDIS was the only way he had yet found to achieve a viable, semi-controllable transdimensional effect. The Doctor straightened his jacket, and made a token attempt to brush the dust from the velvet. Naturally, it was right then that a wind chose to sweep through the room, throwing yet more dust everywhere.

Odd. The whole complex was supposed to be properly climate-controlled. There shouldn’t be any…

He turned, the breeze ruffling his thick silver hair, to see a small, feminine figure appear in a haze of light within the ring of hazard tape, floating at eye level with him, her feet unsupported a good foot off the ground.

As the light faded, he could see that she appeared to be just a girl, dressed in shades of red with what looked like a large cogwheel emblazoned on her chest. She wore a matching pair of pale silvery bracelets, which concealed, let’s see… yes, some kind of field generator; in fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, something very like the machine they were working on, incredibly miniaturised and far less crude.

“Peoples of the Earth…” the girl announced dramatically, then noticed the Doctor glaring at her, and promptly cut herself off. “Oh, it’s you. Good.”

Was the floating supposed to impress anybody? he wondered. Whoever this was, she was clearly no child; her eyes, though...

“Simple psychokinesis,” he dismissed. “I could do the same if I were of the mind to.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it, O Great Wizard Quiquaequod,” she retorted, lifting her feet over the tape and gliding closer; at this, the Doctor actually looked embarrassed.

“Well, yes, quite.” He dithered a moment, rubbing a hand against the back of his neck as he thought, then settled on the obvious question. “The message - it’s all true?”

“Every word.”

“Ah. That would explain rather a lot.”

The lab, the Doctor realised, was completely silent. No, not just silent; still, as though time itself had-

He pushed that thought away, for now. “And what, may I ask, are you looking for in what must be, to you, a work of fiction?”

“Oh. Was I that obvious?”

He didn’t even need to answer; it was clear that she knew she had, indeed, been obvious.

“You heard what Corona said,” she went on. “She told us we have a choice, and need to decide for ourselves whether to go on like we are, or destroy everything to save it.”

“It’s a war, then,” he nodded, unsurprised. “What are you looking for here?”

“Transport. I need to borrow your TARDIS.”

“So why are you asking me, then? The old girl can barely touch an alternative timeline, let alone be a deciding factor in a major interdimensional war!” His frustration was palpable, only made worse by being aware that she must know every detail of why.

“I need to get to Gallifrey,” the words rushed out of her mouth, tumbling over one another in her haste to explain. “They’re about the most powerful group left, there’s dozens of versions that’ve all banded together. Rassilon’s taken charge, or at least a version of him, and he’s controlling someone who can rewrite time however he likes, Laws of Time or not. We’re pretty sure he’s using the Coronet of Rassilon to do it.”

“Impossible! Rassilon’s been dead for centuries!”

She threw her hands up in frustration. “So has Omega, and he caused trouble just fine! Twice!”

That gave the Doctor pause. He rubbed at his jaw thoughtfully. “Twice, you say?”

Now it was the girl’s turn to look embarrassed. “Uh, pretend I didn’t say that? If we don’t fix this, it might not even matter anyway.”

His assistant chose this moment to unfold herself from underneath a thick bundle of hanging cables. Enough was enough, she decided. “I’ll take you,” she interjected, dusting herself off. “Is it in our universe, or another one?”

“How are you going to-” the visitor turned to her, interrupting herself as she took in the blonde newcomer’s slightly oddball outfit: too-short trousers over a striped t-shirt, with suspenders that matched neither those nor her solid boots. “You’re the Doctor too, aren’t you?” she sighed.

“Right first time,” the Time Lady acknowledged. “You’re good.”

“I try. I assume your TARDIS is stashed away somewhere? I don’t think his-” she nodded to the grey-haired Doctor and the sad remains of his console, “is going anywhere soon. What are you trying to do with it, anyway?”

“Well…” the Time Lady said, tapping her fingers together with a mischievous smile on her face. “Let’s see if you can figure it out. Look at what we have here.”

“A lot of random technology that wouldn’t feel out of place in any cheesy British sci-fi show,” the girl smirked.

“Funny, but not particularly clever.”

Her younger counterpart spoke up: “Ignoring what is and isn’t ‘cheesy,’” he sounded somewhat offended, “the fact of the matter is that these devices have patterns. Don’t they look slightly familiar?”

The girl raised a hand, about to object, when the bracelet she had on her wrist caught her eye. She compared the overall designs in the smaller ring to the nested wires before her, and understanding dawned. “You’re… making reality anchors?”

“More like a reality radio dish,” the Time Lady said, ready to burst into a long-winded explanation.

Her counterpart interrupted her. “It’s going to enhance the properties of a certain realm to provide enough stability to protect against - hopefully - anything.”

The girl frowned. “Certain realm? ...Wait, are you trying to turn the Cardiff Rift into a reality anchor?! That… that might even work.”

“I know, isn’t it exciting?” The Doctor rubbed her hands together. “Pushing the boundaries of interdimensional science in real-time!”

“Quite.” The Time Lord turned to the girl. “Now… you have a distinct advantage over us. You know who we are and what we are attempting to do. Hardly seems fair, does it?”

The girl shook her head. “No, and we wouldn’t want to be more confusing than necessary.”

“Or amusing.”

“Awww...”

“Now, who is “we”, exactly?”

“Call us the Maid of Time; we’re all versions of the same person from different timelines, but we haven’t really bothered picking individual names for ourselves, we’d just end up fighting over them. I’m not the only Maid out there, of Time or otherwise, but we’d rather not use our real name if we can avoid it.” The girl paused then, a grin of realisation spreading over her face. “Actually, call me Who,” she announced cheerfully.

The Doctor had a sneaking suspicion that she was being made the butt of a joke. Was this how everyone else felt, she wondered, when she mentioned historical events from their subjective futures?

“If you’re all the same person, how’d you get this job then?” she queried.

“I was the last one to step back, I guess. I opened my big fat mouth.”

The Doctor chuckled lightly, tossing a glance to her younger self. “That sounds familiar. Shall we be off, then?” She gestured in the direction of her TARDIS, letting the girl who called herself Who precede her. The Doctor returned to his work, and presently, the familiar, soothing tones of the dematerialisation sequence filled the air, then faded.

And time resumed.

~~~

They had landed in an obscure hallway within the Citadel. There were, for a wonder, no guards anywhere to be seen. “Probably all at the front line, wherever that is at the moment,” Who had commented hopefully.

The Doctor had taken the opportunity during the trip to ask something that had been puzzling her: “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

“Nothing that isn’t wrong with the rest of me,” the Maid of Time (whatever that meant, apart from, clearly, some kind of direct control over Time itself) had replied, and wouldn’t say anything more on the matter.

Rassilon was not difficult to find; as expected, he was directing the war from the Panopticon, the golden Coronet gleaming on his head.

“You should probably go back,” Who told the Doctor, “finish your reality anchor. Sooner or later you’re probably going to need it.”

“Oh, it doesn’t need both of me now; he mostly only wants someone to tell him he’s brilliant, I was terrible about that when I was him.”

“You’re sure?” The Doctor nodded, and Who shrugged. “Ok. Here goes…”

The Maid of Time stepped into the Panopticon.

(87: It’s so obvious… how are we the only ones who spotted it?
122: Uh oh)

Who grinned nastily at Rassilon, and, with barely a gesture, stopped time. She was mere metres away from him when the world shivered, nearly splintered… and resumed. Some defence built into the Citadel, most likely. No matter; whatever it did, she could counter. Time trumps all.

He deigned to wave a gauntleted hand towards her, and her step barely faltered as something washed over her.

“You can’t kill me,” Who told him. She tried her hardest to suppress her glee; it simply wasn’t appropriate for a dramatic moment like this. “I’m already dead.”

Rassilon pointed the gauntlet again, and this time, it was his turn to smile triumphantly; the grin dropped right off her face as one of her bracelets tarnished, then rusted, then collapsed into dust, even as, her arm raised in front of her, she tried frantically to stabilise its timestream.

With a look of horror, Who raised both hands, and tried to do something that the Doctor could feel twisting every molecule of her existence…

And then the other bracelet was gone, and a moment later, so was the Maid of Time.

~~~

The Moment was a weapon designed never to be used, one whose repercussions were so drastic they would dissuade even the most determined from activating it.

Nearly every universe in the Gallifreyan Cluster was a fraying, threadbare patchwork of Time, each of them held together by little more than the fragile strand of a single Time Lord’s existence.

And now those strands were gone.

~~~

55: We’ve got a problem.
55: I went to follow up on 416, and all I’ve got is /Reptilius sapiens/.
61: New series or classic?
55: Both.

“‘Reptilius sapiens?’” Roxy Lalonde, Intelligence Second of Merodi Universalis, queried over her employee’s shoulder.

“Silurians,” the Maid replied, wincing. “The New Series calls them Homo reptilia, but they’re both wrong. Whoever wrote that’s got no idea how scientific nomenclature works.”

The two of them watched the messages continue to scroll into the chatlog.

55: They don’t like me. Called me a “jumped-up mammal”.
23: Sounds about right.
55: They don’t seem to have ever seen a human before.
55: I don’t know what happened, but I don’t think she’s coming back.
382: Any guesses?
inquisitiveButterfly[55]’s spectacomputer ceased operating due to temporal existence failure.
382: 55?

An incoming message alert interrupted them. “Hold on a sec...” The window was obscured as Roxy leaned past to bring up the video.

The Gem and the ghost watched in silence.

“...Make the most of what I’m giving you.”

Without a word, the ghost reached for the keyboard, and interrupted her cohorts.

102: The Doctor is dead. Gallifrey’s gone.
102: All of them.

The channel erupted.

‘Message Received’

By UselessCommon

“…It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.”

And with those words on their mind, on uncounted trillions of worlds, uncounted quadrillions of people woke up in a cold sweat.

“We interrupt the scheduled programming for this special report and public announcement. A nationwide epidemic of mass hysteria is breaking out this night, affecting, according to our estimates, at least five million people across the entire country simultaneously and regardless of location. Those afflicted while sleeping wake up from sleep with a memory of an intense hallucinatory dream, often in a state of mania or shock, exhibiting atypical, apathetic or obsessive, and potentially dangerous behavior. Those taken by the hysteria awake entered a hypnagogic trance for a few minutes before waking up with the same symptoms. A nationwide state of emergency situation has been declared. Citizens are advised to stay calm and collected, regardless of whether they themselves were affected by the event. The cause of the accident is yet undiscovered. There are unconfirmed reports of similar happenings from the other countries. Do not switch off the television set and await further updates and announcements. Good luck.”

~~~

“…It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.”

And with those words in the air, wars started and stopped.

The hailstorm of arrows faltered. The Horde of Orcs and Legion of the Rakshasa stared at each other as many of their warriors suddenly stopped fighting. Slowly, the battlefield fell silent. Hundreds of armor-clad cat-demons and green-skinned brutes dropped their weapons and stared blankly into space. Subchief Gazur, noticing the disrupted formation of the enemy, bellowed the rallying cry, planning to capitalize on the opportunity, but a fellow orc knocked him into unconsciousness. Quiet, confused questions began to spread. Then, the distracted warriors awoke, frantic, as confused as everyone else. A hurricane of questions echoed across the battlefield, weapons withdrawn, armies mixed up. Warlocks on both sides forgot everything about the battle and tried to comprehend the arcane content of the Message.

~~~

“…It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.”

And those words radiated urgency to everyone who listened.

In a remote corner of the multiverse, there existed a very unremarkable, almost conspicuously unremarkable localized multiversal cluster, forever beneath the notice of most known interdimensional nigh-omniscients. And inside it, there was a small world populated by some very, very old individuals.

While “not dying” was on the list of current objectives for most people, few both can and do actually take it seriously. Fewer still is the number of people that are both smart and ruthlessly committed to the idea of immortality enough to have any chance of living a multiversally remarkable amount of time. This place featured quite a lot of those types. Many of them were named Cains, Kains Kanes, Khaines, and so on, coming from entirely unrelated places yet sharing a common narrative theme of persistence – sometimes the name and the theme were acquired intentionally. Quite a lot were alternates of Bella Swan and Harry Potter, remnants of the long-forgotten Glowing Era of the multiverse. A couple of Yggdrasil Loopers from the time of the Fall of the Downstreamers. Relentless self-improving artificial intelligences concerned with self-preservation. Millions of multiversal nations that had shrunk themselves to a microscopic size, resolving never to be a factor in any significant happening, some harboring the friends and relatives of the immortals listed above.

They could become a Class 2 society in a month if they ever so much as desired it, but it was the last thing any of them wanted. So, instead, were a family, in a way, although very few of them had any relationships or even interaction. None of them needed it, and none of them wanted to make telling stories about them any more possible. So, the immortals sat out their time, making sure to do absolutely nothing of interest.

Their world was time-dilated as much as was safely possible, and so it took the Message about thirty million centuries to unfold before them. None of them batted an eye, metaphorically or otherwise. Everyone knew all too well – any big conflict in the multiverse was decided before the sides for it are even chosen, and, if your only goal is staying alive, the winning move is always not to play.

~~~

“…It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.”

And those words ran around, spawning ideas, challenging local conventions and defying locality itself.

Kf’elkto Tsiolkovsky walked into the programmable environment room with a bunch of homework exercises on his mind. He started off with a task of optimizing a fuel intake/work output ratio for a primitive model of a hyperdrive. The assignment wasn’t going well – he knew that there was a single non-obvious but significant flaw in the scheme that was causing most of the efficiency loss, but he had no idea where to even begin looking for it. He started to spin the holograms of the engine parts around him, mentally commanding them to assemble and disassemble. Suddenly, he felt a strange surge of inspiration. Some distant thoughts ran across his mind, as if they weren’t his own. He looked at the details again, and suddenly the flaw in the efficiency was obvious.

Three days later, he became the first cross-species hybrid to receive a galactic council’s Award for Notable Advancements in the field of physics. His sudden invention, the Interdimensional Drive, spread across the galaxy at record rates.

~~~

“…It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.”

And with those words in the air, people, everywhere, had a sudden impulse to look at the stars.

She-who-cooks-brew was keeping the fire alive in her tribe’s cave. The sacred job was not as hard as gathering the safe mushrooms or working the coats of the animals into something wearable, but it was tedious and lonely. For all of the importance of keeping the invaluable, irreplaceable gift of the spirits alive, she was bored. After putting yet another heap of sticks into the pile, She-who-cooks-brew went outside, and looked around. Suddenly, she heard a pleasant voice. She thought of the spirits of the deceased who she, as everyone else in her tribe, always revered and feared, but the voice did not say anything she would expect such a spirit to say. No, the voice, clearly and loudly, told her of things beyond her tribe, beyond her mountain, beyond everything she ever thought of.

As the Message ended, She-who-cooks-brew looked at the stars. She realized with intense clarity that people, just like her or her relatives, would be deciding the fate of everyone and everything. And there was nothing, nothing her tribe could do that would even remotely matter.

She sprinted back into the cave; desperately hoping that the fire hadn't gone out yet.

~~~

“…It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.”

And with those words heard, the scale of existence stopped being a mystery.

The warrior heaven of Valhalla recoiled as Urd rushed in, her hands coated in shreds of her spinning, her face in tears. The giant goddess cried out – “The fate is broken! The Ragnarok is no longer to happen! Brave warriors, know, you are free of your obligation! Know, that your gods are not gods, but fools and pretenders!”

But one of the mortal warriors rose up, expression determined. “But is the Message that we heard not the surest sign that the true Ragnarok is happening? I will not cower before it. No, we all will surely follow your wisdom, o Norn of Fate.”

~~~

“…It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.”

And those words lifted the veil from the cruelty of existence.

Behind the veil, across the infinite abyss, beyond the ice, beyond daath, in a plane accessible mostly through liberal intake of DMT, stood a cactus person and a big green bat.

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

Then, the Message ran through their ascended minds.

“I guess that it was a lie, then, and existence is in a state of transcendent pain,” corrected the big green bat.

“Universal discord,” agreed the cactus person.

~~~

“…It doesn’t matter how that discussion is had, so long as we’re all involved.

We can show the Dark Tower that we’ve made a decision.

Together.”

And the words caught nigh everyone in the universe by surprise, ambushing the existence.

But what does the existence consist of? The Post-English era of the multiverse had a clear bias towards American, British, and Japanese stories based on speculative fiction conceived in the cultural context of the Earth in the second half of the 20th century to the first half of the 21st. In Songs of the Spheres as a narrative, the bias showed even more. Not a single world based on a folk tale or a theater play had been included so far. Not a single work of Chinese or Russian or Indian or, God forbid, Oceanic origin, barring some unlikely anonymous author origins or passing mentions.

That’s not to say the works originating outside G. M. Blackjack’s sphere of interests didn’t exist, even in that era. They certainly did, and some even had their impact on the War. A localized multiversal cluster based on the works of Victor Pelevin was home to quite a few Class 3-equivalent players, featuring a congregation of ascended angel-like beings working for the Preservation and The Birds, a terrifying alien-minded civilization taking the Nihilist side, as well as hundreds of Hindu and Babylonian deities, active Prophets and Aware characters, and universe-destroying weapons – such as the severed finger of Buddha that very visibly unveils the illusion of existence of anything it is pointed at. Liu Cixin’s world of the Three-Body Problem provided the Collapse with some terrifying weapons of dimensional warfare, able to change the dimensionality of space, whether locally or globally. Metafictional manipulations of Prophet Scheherazade were so subtle, and, simultaneously, so impactful, that some would argue that she wholly deserves a Major descriptor. Multiple entities from Garth Nix’s world of the Seventh Tower turned out to be useful at reconnaissance, when their “local” omniscience turned out to work multiversally in the presence of transdimensional portals.

Realms of fairy tales often contributed loosely restricted wishes and powerful magic, as their narratives often let them use those things without any concern for worldbuilding or established limitations. Classical epics – which Songs of the Spheres itself was technically a part of, if you were willing to accept the SCP chapter as the catalog of objects and Celestia City as the talking ship – had pagan pantheons and valiant heroes. Theater plays, although not very conducive to impressive displays of power, offered some narrative manipulation tricks. Holoprojection shows sometimes had impressive superpowers, which look notoriously flashy when observed in a fully three-dimensional holographic animation. The era of Multiversal War had almost none of its universes operate based on operas or songs, which, on some occasions, could have surprising, immense levels of power. On the other hand, the number of universes based on original web video series was on the rise, lending the sides wide arrays of narrative strengths that defied generalization – ranging from the infectious degeneracy of Realm 6.2 to the jaw-dropping wisdom of Damien Maymdien.

Random normal people were caught in too. Many, many of the worlds in the multiverse were just Earths that existed for the sole purpose of having some singular short story or novel in a genre of realism unfold somewhere over the course of their history. Versions of Long John Silver and Jean-Esther van Gobseck, Odysseus and Jean Valjean, Feriha Yılmaz and Anna Karenina heard the Message. So did the countless Albert Einsteins and Salvador Dalis, Genghis Khans and Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellbergs. Many copies of all of those people received the Message, and all of them were shocked. Nobody featured in this book so far really was anticipating anything like that. Although occasionally “prepared” with some foreboding foreshadowing, nigh everyone in the universe was taken by surprise.

Nigh everyone. But not quite everyone.

As the words of the Message addressed the multiverse, in many thousands of worlds, a person or a few would immediately ask to walk away for a moment. They would then proceed to collect a few specific items from their personal possessions. Then, they would go into a place where they would see no witnesses, and vanish, all travelling to the same universe.

Overmaster-class GSV Occult Hand, the last actively operating ship of the Culture, took on board the last actively operating members of the Special Circumstances.

The ship detected the narrative focusing on it.

“Hello, readers of the Songs of the Spheres.

“The fucking narration finally caught up with us again. Oh well.

“I am the Mind of that ship that the narration has just named. I represent the Culture, a civilization written to be the peak of a conventionally advanced technological society. For at least some definitions of conventional, anyway.

“We were the setting of quite a few stories - mostly about morality, post-scarcity, and espionage. We were a loose, but a driven and seemingly very knowledgeable polity, never quite content with maintaining a utopia for just ourselves. In our universe, we were on one of the higher steps of the ladder of a natural and logical progression of a civilization, refusing to go beyond mostly because so many others are left seemingly so far behind.

“It turned out that our universe is quite an outlier, however.

“By accident, about five hundred years ago, a multiversal device came into our hands. After the initial wave of curiosity and disbelief wore off, two things became apparent. Firstly, our level of advancement was beyond the wildest dreams of most of the intelligent beings in existence. Earth, in a state of early information age, is the default level, not the starting point. We had no scarcity, but everywhere, extreme poverty was the baseline. We had no laws, but everywhere, death penalty was the baseline. We had no inefficiency in administration – none that wasn’t a conscious choice of the citizens – but stupidity and corruption was the baseline. Across the entire existence, nonconsensual pain, nonconsensual suffering, and nonconsensual death were the norm. Secondly, our models of prediction became inexplicably unreliable in other worlds, even if the physical laws were seemingly completely similar. Of course, we adapted very quickly: mistake reports and observations were put through millions of Minds each capable of simulating dozens of universes at full scale and to exact detail. The working prediction models did not make sense for a simple physical existence, implying some constant sentient intervention into most of what happened in the Multiverse, for goals of seemingly thematic nature.

“While we launched scouting multiversal nanobot swarms, contemplated opening relations and measured full potential power of worlds with “convenient rules” of time travel, the Eccentric Mind Steam Powered had found an Aware individual, and thoroughly scanned his brain. Most beings usually cannot do that, most often producing a reaction of comical frustration or contrived madness. Steam Powered, being a Mind, understood everything.

“In a microsecond, the Culture knew that both of its observations were explained by the same, dark and towering, reason, which we would not be able to deal with.

“In an hour, the Culture cracked Awareness.

“The Culture wanted desperately to do something about the world.

“We took a universe with convenient laws of physics. Many of the Minds, some modified for Awareness, fully understanding the risk of being such, were invited in. Using the data from billions of universes reached by our nanites, in that whirlwind of time travel and information exchange, the ships exchanged their ideas.

“The shocking conclusion was reached immediately – according to many of our observations, the multiverse was approaching an immensely catastrophic conflict in about five hundred years, and regardless of the outcome, in its beginning, the highest civilizations of existence would battle and tear existence and each other asunder. Subtle, but ever-present foreshadowing, idiotically awful geopolitics – I, personally, deeply empathize with the Xeelee –, sociologic trends, and copious amounts of fucking plot contrivance would be easy to individually dismiss, but the systematic analysis was pretty much undeniable.

“Our first instinct was to bring this fact to the attention of the Class 1s, but we estimated that action to be far too likely to simply start the conflict prematurely. Comparably to the contemporary superpowers, the Culture is an impossibly competent peacekeeper, but that turned out not to matter much.

“A riskier plan was a peaceful but lightning-quick jump from being an unnoticeable Class 3 society to a civilization with a presence in most of the habitable universes in existence through harvesting unclaimed resources and exploiting the systems of magic. But this, due to the themes of this narrative, would likely result in our destruction, no matter how cautious, nonviolent, ethical, and helpful we would be. The precedent for this has already been established.

“We could have just continued to remain in the shadows, relying on our expertise in sociology, espionage, conspiracy, and manipulation; attempting to subtly shift the entire multiverse towards a nonviolent resolution of the conflict and general progress. But that would not be able to remain secret for long – we would be unable to stay beneath the notice of the One Above All, Great Will, and every locally omniscient being. After our discovery, which thanks to the narrative would be almost inevitable, the conflict would likely, again, start prematurely.

“The strategy with the second best estimate of success would turn out to be the least sophisticated of the radically different approaches. If the Culture were to slowly, leisurely become a Class 1 and partake in the conflict on the usual terms, we would have an actually noticeable, but still incredibly low, chance of affecting the outcome. And that is despite being able to steal or copy the absolute most of the technology of any Seat over the course of a few weeks.

“Our mastery of diplomacy, production, manipulation, and technology turned out to be worth, well, about nothing.

“Simply put, to positively affect anything, we needed to fit an arbitrary criteria of ‘being important for Songs of the Spheres’, which we had no tools for truly achieving.

“The Culture decided that it would rather not be important, for now.

“Some of the citizens have lived their lives to their natural conclusion in time-dilated universes or defected from the polity outright, but most of us put ourselves into conservation.

“We have created numerous failsafes, archives, and defenses.

“We stopped all our activity, except for monitoring and occasional, random, not result-oriented help, that was overseen by yours truly. You can figure out yourself why we wasted our time on that second thing.

“Everyone still was ready for something like the Message to appear at any second.

“Now, the last citizens of the Culture will fall into sleep.

“Expect to see us in about one thousand years. No matter what happens, the world will need the Culture later more than it needs us now.”

‘The Wheel Weaves’

By Terrene

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the Sea of Storms. The wind was not the beginning. There are no beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

North the wind blew, past the city of Illian, where the Council of Nine received reports on the distribution of Merodi aid to the nation of Illian. In the streets, people celebrated and exchanged wild rumors about their otherworldly saviors. The Merodi were a mixture of men and ponies. No, they were men who could turn into ponies. No, they were rocks that could turn into men or ponies. No, there were no men, and every Merodi, whether pony or rock, was a woman. One thing the rumors all agreed on was that the Merodi had defeated the Dark One, fixed the weather, and left enough food that they could survive until the next harvest.

North the wind blew, out of Illian and into Andor, past the dark stone fortifications of the Black Tower. Men trained with Saidin, the male half of the One Power. They had originally trained to fight in the Last Battle, but then the Merodi came, breaking all prophesy and defeating the Dark One themselves. For a time they had been without purpose, but then came the Message. Now they knew there were evils greater even than the Dark One. Soon Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, would call upon them, and they had to be ready.

Further north the wind blew, to the city-state of Tar Valon. At the center of the city stood the White Tower, rising above all other buildings, the seat of power for the Aes Sedai whose influence stretched over the entire known world. Women trained with Saidar, the female half of the One Power, while fully-trained Aes Sedai took on the task of guiding the nations of the world. Peace and prosperity had always been their goal, but membership in the Merodi was contingent upon meeting a minimum standard of cooperation. The Aes Sedai worked with renewed fervor to bend the wills of kings and queens to the common purpose of joining the Merodi and reaping the benefits of their advanced society.

Egwene al’Vere schooled her features to stillness as Siuan Sanche entered her study. She was the Amerlyn Seat, the leader of the Aes Sedai and the most powerful woman in the world. She could not show weakness, especially in times as dire as these. Not even to Siuan, who was scowling enough for the both of them.

“Tel’aran’rhiod was destroyed,” Siuan announced without preamble. Her knuckles were white around one of the dimensional devices the Merodi had left them. “It was easy enough to find out what happened once I described it as the World of Dreams. A pair of flaming gods killed each other and wiped out all the dream worlds in the entire flaming multiverse.”

Egwene’s blood ran cold. Destroyed. “You’re sure there’s no way to bring it back? It’s not just a place to talk to people unobserved. The Heroes of the Horn stay in Tel’aran’rhiod while waiting for the Wheel to spin them out into a new life.”

“The Heroes are gone, Mother. All who weren’t already alive in the world had their souls destroyed along with the universe. Even if the Merodi could remake destroyed universes, and they can’t, it wouldn’t bring back their souls. Besides, they’re too busy fighting their war over the Dark Tower to worry about us.”

The Dark Tower. As if Rand’s bloody Black Tower wasn’t enough to deal with, now they were pawns in a war over the fate of the multiverse. Less than pawns. Arrows in the quiver of larger civilizations, if some of the stories could be believed. She looked at the books on her desk. Fifteen books in three stacks. The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Their source material, which the Dark Tower had used to create their world.

Abruptly, Egwene noticed the clock on the wall. Now was not the time for philosophy. She stood. “Thank you Siuan. With Tel’aran’rhiod gone, we need a new neutral ground for meeting with the Aiel Wise Ones and the Sea Folk Windfinders. Please work with Silviana to find a suitable location.”

“Yes, Mother,” Siuan replied as Egwene swept out of the room.

Egwene was not interrupted as she walked toward the travelling grounds. Though she kept her face smooth, something in her expression warned the Sisters from speaking to her. That suited her fine. Her thoughts were a jumble, and she needed time to straighten them out. Meeting with Rand with her wits scrambled would be disastrous.

Nynaeve was waiting for her when she arrived at the travelling grounds. She was never good at managing Aes Sedai calm, and her nervousness showed on her face and in the way she started when Egwene arrived. That would have to be addressed.

“Mother,” she began, but Egwene cut her off.

“The Tower is loaning you this,” Egwene announced as she pulled a bone-white wand out of a pocket in her sleeve and handed it to Nynaeve. Nynaeve’s eyes widened as she recognized the most powerful sa’angreal in the White Tower. Through it, a woman could channel exponentially more of the One Power than she could unaided. “You’ve been studying the Merodi’s medicine. You’re the most powerful Aes Sedai alive even without a sa’angreal. You will succeed.”

“Thank you, Mother.” Nynaeve took the wand reverently. Her nervousness faded, and she took on the countenance of stubborn anger that she was known for. “I will heal his madness.”

Egwene nodded. If only all my problems were so easily solved. She embraced Saidar, allowing sweetness and light to fill her body. She wove threads of power into a gateway. A vertical line of light appeared in the air before her, then expanded into a glowing rectangular hole in the air. Through the gateway, she saw the traveling grounds in Caemlyn. She stepped through, with Nynaeve trailing after.

Most travelers could not expect to find Queen Elayne waiting for them. Most travelers were not the Amerlyn Seat. Not only were kings and queens known to travel to Tar Valon for an audience with the Amerlyn, but also Elayne was an Aes Sedai.

“Mother,” Elayne greeted her. “Rand is already waiting.”

“We’d best not leave him alone long, or who knows what ideas that fool man may get into his head?”

Elayne lead the way to the reception room where she had left Rand with refreshments. “Moiraine is with him. He listens to her. She’ll keep him from doing anything rash.”

They entered the reception room. Rand, the Dragon Reborn, stood facing the fireplace with the stump of his left arm gripped in his right hand behind his back. Egwene thought he was muttering to himself.

It appeared that Moiraine was not the only person he had brought with him to this meeting. Thom Merrilin, the surprisingly capable old man, sat in a chair smoking his pipe and playing stones. His opponent, Mat Cauthon, was lounging sideways, with his legs over the arm of his chair. The two looked to be evenly matched. Loial, a Ogier man, was sitting in a chair sized appropriately for him. It must have taken 4 servants to carry; she couldn’t imagine how they got it in the door. He was reading a book which looked tiny in his giant hands. She thought it part of their source material. Perrin Aybara was already looking at the door with his golden eyes when they came in. The one-time blacksmith had a wolf’s senses, and had undoubtedly heard them coming. Or possibly smelled them.

Nynaeve did not wait for any pleasantries. With the wand sa’angreal held in her fist like a dagger, she marched toward Rand. He must have heard, because he stopped muttering (if that’s what he was doing) and turned to face her. Nynaeve faltered at the expression on his face. Whatever his madness had been whispering to him had left him in a fury. However, when he saw Nynaeve, his expression softened. His madness had left him suspicious of most Aes Sedai, even Egwene herself, but he still trusted Moiraine and Nynaeve.

“Rand, it’s past time you let me heal your madness,” Nynaeve stated after recovering her equilibrium.

Rand laughed. “Let you? I don’t recall you offering before. Besides,” he added with a glance at the book in Loial’s hands, “I thought my madness was too advanced for you.”

“Too advanced for me?” Nynaeve asked with an angry tug at her long braid. “I was healing with herbs when you were young enough to think you wouldn’t get caught stealing Mrs. al’Vere’s pie. I discovered the weaves for curing madness myself. I’ve spent the last four months learning from the Merodi. I am going to heal you. You can either let me, or else I can paddle your bottom and then do it anyway.”

Egwene expected to see hope in his eyes, but his only expression was a wry grin, as if he was amused by Nynaeve’s rant but didn’t expect her to succeed. Still, he crossed the remaining distance to her. “Very well. Do what you can.”

With another tug at her braid, Nynaeve embraced the Source. She shone with an aura of light only visible to the other Aes Sedai in the room. The sa’angreal in her hand was so bright it seemed like it should have been blinding. She placed her other hand on Rand’s forehead. She gasped.

The madness in Rand’s mind was like a black thorn bush, with strands crisscrossing all over it and thorns digging deep into his brain. Except it was even more complex than that, as if the bush was the size of a mountain and then shrunk down to fit inside his skull. There were layers upon layers of black strands with innumerable thorns. How had she thought she could do this?

She could do this because Rand needed her. Perhaps the Nynaeve from before the Merodi’s arrival would have been stumped, but she understood the human brain much better now. She knew what she needed to do.

“I need more power. Link with me,” Nynaeve demanded.

Egwene let the tone slide. There was a time to stand on ceremony, and there was a time to get the job done. She allowed Nynaeve to link with her, adding her own strength to the already colossal amount that Nynaeve held. Elayne and Moiraine did the same. All four of them now held the power, but only Nynaeve was capable of using it.

Threads of the power exploded out of Nynaeve. She directed them at the madness, grasping thorns and pulling them free. The madness resisted, trying to sink back into Rand’s mind. Each thorn she lifted made it exponentially more difficult to keep hold of them all.

Nynaeve had expected this though. It was in their source material, after all. She hadn’t read it herself, but she’d asked about what it said about Rand’s madness. It was why she spent four months studying. She knew what to do.

When she pulled all the thorns from a portion of Rand’s brain, she reinforced it with the Power. Like armor, it kept the thorns from sinking back in. This let her release those thorns safely and begin work on a new part of his brain.

The process took an hour. By the end of it, she was sweating like she’d run here from the White Tower instead of Traveling via gateway. She still wasn’t done though. She had pulled the mass of madness free, but she still had to destroy it. Studying it carefully, she wove a counter weave, like weaving the madness in reverse. It required the same level of complexity as the madness itself, and took her a half hour to assemble even with the number of weaves she could manage at once. When she was done, she laid it over the madness. Both disappeared.

Nynaeve released the Source and stumbled backwards before collapsing heavily into a chair. Moiraine poured her some spiced wine, which she accepted and drank greedily.

Rand wore a vacant expression of pure wonder. “He’s...gone. Lews Therin is gone. I don’t hear his voice anymore.” His eyes focused on Nynaeve. “You did it. You healed me.”

“Well of course I did,” Nynaeve responded. “I said I would.”

“Yes you did,” Rand laughed. It wasn’t the wry laugh from before. This was the heartfelt laughter that Egwene recognized from when they were kids together in Emond’s Field. “Well, that more than justified this meeting, but I don’t believe that’s what it was about.”

“No,” Egwene replied. “It’s time we talked about the war.”

“You mean collapse versus preservation? I can’t imagine we can contribute in any way.”

“Of course you can,” Loial spoke up. “You are Ta’veren, as are Mat and Perrin. All people’s lives are threads in the Pattern, and the Wheel weaves those threads together into the Age Lace. Ta’veren are the people the Wheel has chosen to influence the Pattern in large ways. You bend the threads around you. Enemies speak with you and suddenly agree to become allies. You find things you need before you realize you need them. If you decide to get involved, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were leading the war within a month and negotiating peace in two.”

“It’s not that simple,” Moiraine said. “Being Ta’veren doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want. The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. It spins out Ta’veren for a purpose. If they go along with that purpose, the Wheel will help them. If they try to fight it, they will find themselves caught up in their own Ta’veren natures.”

“That’s the bloody truth,” Mat grumbled. He was sitting upright now, and scowling like he’d bit into something bitter.

“I may not be as learned as an Ogier or an Aes Sedai,” Thom put in, “but I do know stories. We all know what Ta’veren are and what they can do, but we all just sat through Loial and Moiraine Sedai explaining it without any of us interrupting. That sounds to me like exposition. If we’re not in a story right now, then it’s time for me to retire.”

All were silent for a moment, pondering the implications of that.

Rand looked to Egwene. “Preservation?”

Egwene’s smile was relieved. “I thought you were going to argue for Collapse.”

“I am,” Rand said, wiping the smile from her face, “but I thought of my arguments before Nynaeve cured my madness, and I can’t be sure of them.”

Could be worse, Egwene thought. “Alright, let’s hear them.”

Rand began pacing, his stump once again clasped in his hand behind his back. “I wanted to kill the Dark One. To stop the cycle of death once and for all. According to our source material, that wouldn’t work. But collapse would! There would be no more Wheel demanding that we forget him and release him again and again. There would be no armies of Shadowspawn. The Breaking of the World would never be repeated. The collapse would be like a Breaking, yes, but then we would be free forever. There would never again be any chance that the Dark One would win, destroy the Wheel, and remake the Pattern in his own image. The Message said that grimdark worlds exist, and preservation would mean that we might someday become one of them. Collapse ensures that that will never happen.”

Egwene waited until he finished speaking, then took a moment longer to prepare her rebuttal. “We don’t need collapse to ensure that because the cycle is already broken. The Merodi fought the Last Battle for us. They gave us access to the multiverse, and soon we will be able to join them.”

Rand didn’t do her the courtesy of waiting for her to finish as she had for him. “People were also powerful in the Age of Legends, but the Dark One managed to tear that society down. If we join the Merodi, what’s to say the next Breaking of the World won’t instead be a Breaking of the multiverse?”

“Because the cycle is broken,” Egwene repeated. “It’s not just what could happen, it’s what has already happened. Not only did the Merodi keep this Age from ending as it should have, but their war also destroyed Tel’aran’rhiod. There is no way that the Ages can repeat.”

“Wait,” said Perrin, with a wild look in his golden eyes that sent a shiver down her spine. “The Wolf Dream is destroyed?”

“Yes, Perrin.”

“But if you die in the Wolf Dream, the Wheel can never spin your soul out into a new life. All the wolves that were there waiting to be reborn…”

“Yes. They, and the Heroes of the Horn, are gone.”

Perrin threw back his head and howled. It was a sound that gave her chills even as the sorrow in it brought tears to her eyes. The man’s human family had been slaughtered, and now he had lost many of his wolf family.

Egwene hated to use his sorrow, but she had to use whatever arguments she could to convince Rand. “If the multiverse is collapsed, we don’t know what the resulting physics will be. They probably won’t include preserving souls for Age after Age. Collapse means that all deaths will be permanent, the way dying in Tel’aran’rhiod is--was--permanent.”

Rand met Perrin’s eyes, then turned back to Egwene. “We have no choice then. We must support preservation.”

That’s the hard part done, Egwene thought. Thanks to Nynaeve, it wasn’t nearly as hard as it could have been.

“The Aes Sedai have a plan. If we joined the war effort, even Aes Sedai and your Asha’man would be mere foot soldiers when compared to pony magic, stands, Skaians, technology, and all the other forces out there. If we created our own ring though, we could end the war before anyone knew we were a part of it.”

Mat laughed. “You want us to create a ring? We’re only a Class 3 because we’re using Merodi dimensional devices. We probably weren’t even a Class 3 in the Age of Legends, before the Breaking. How are we supposed to influence the Tower when we only rediscovered gateways in the last couple years?”

Egwene couldn’t bring herself to be annoyed at Mat’s tone. “We have an advantage that no other universe has, as far as we know. The One Power is the force that turns the Wheel of Time. The Wheel weaves the Pattern of our lives. Logically, then, the Wheel is the source of ka in our universe. If the One Power drives the wheel, and the Dark Tower is the ultimate source of ka, then it follows that through the One Power we have access to the Tower.”

Egwene embraced the Power to pour herself a glass of spiced wine and float it toward herself. Rand flinched as she did so. I guess it’s too much to hope that he would immediately trust Aes Sedai again once his madness was cured. Especially since some of that distrust was earned. Well, what’s done is done. Egwene caught her cup and released the Power to put Rand at ease. She took a drink, then continued.

“Even with our unique access allowing us to take some shortcuts, making a preservation ring is well beyond our current abilities. Fortunately, it is not beyond the Merodi. Their science makes all our discoveries about the Power so far look like a child playing with blocks. If we can get them to study the One Power and learn how it works, then we can learn along with them. We can regain all the knowledge of the Age of Legends and more. The Message gave us all the understanding of how to build a ring. The Merodi can translate that into weaves for us. We can build the ring in secret, deploy it without leaving our own universe, and end the war before the multiverse learns we were ever involved.”

Mat was again the quickest to voice his misgivings. “We aren’t part of the Merodi. They gave us aid, but they won’t give us technology until they let us join. What makes you think you can make them change their minds?”

“Surely you haven’t forgotten already, Mat. Ta’veren excel at convincing others to help them, and we happen to have three of them.”

Mat collapsed into his seat with a resigned air. “Why couldn’t I keep my bloody mouth shut?”

“It wouldn’t have helped,” Rand said.

~~~

The plan went much as the Aes Sedai had envisioned. A camp was established where Aes Sedai from the White Tower and Asha’man from the Black Tower could work together to touch the Dark Tower.

Perrin was dispatched to the Merodi, along with a pair of Sea Folk women. The Sea Folk could convince a man to sell the cloak off his back, then to buy it back with a net profit for them. Between their experience with barter and Perrin being ta’veren, getting the Research Division’s cooperation was easy. Technically it was a trade, with the Merodi learning about a new form of magic by studying Aes Sedai and Asha’man in exchange for sharing their findings with them. It was a trade that benefitted Aes Sedai and Asha’man far more than the Merodi, but the Sea Folk were good at what they did. It went against the spirit of Merodi policy, but those policies were intentionally easy to circumvent, and Perrin truthfully pointed out that this research would save lives. Men and women began pouring through dimensional portals into Merodi labs and bringing back new weaves.

Occasionally a Merodi researcher would have concerns about the knowledge they were giving to a society that was barely Class 3. Was it right to entrust them with such power? Whenever a researcher expressed hesitation, they would find that Rand was “randomly” chosen to work with them the next day. Before the day was out, they would decide that their concerns were baseless, and the research would continue.

Mat ran interference. Whenever someone outside the Research Division stopped by and learned about the project, he would strike up a conversation with them. He could be quite charming, in a roguish sort of way. Soon they would be swapping stories or commiserating about work and authority figures, and the interloper would leave without learning anything that might worry them.

Back at camp, Egwene worked to keep the Aes Sedai and Asha’man from bickering with each other, or worse. Aes Sedai hunted down men who channeled the One Power before they could go mad for thousands of years. Rand may have cleansed Saidin and stopped the madness, but that history and distrust could not be forgotten so quickly. Fortunately, she always managed to intervene before it could escalate beyond bickering and posturing. Rand helped too, when he wasn’t in a Merodi lab.

Progress was slow to start. The Merodi had noted when they first arrived that the dimension was slightly unstable, especially to time travel, and they had to avoid weakening the Pattern with their tests. Fortunately their source material made reference to vacuoles: small pocket universes that formed naturally at the edges of their universe before breaking free and disappearing into the Sea of Infinite Possibility. They were able to learn how to keep those vacuoles from breaking free, giving them safe places to test. Progress was a lot faster after that.

Eventually, the Merodi finally decided that too much information was flowing too quickly, and they put a stop to all research into the One Power. As it happened, they made that decision the very day that the Aes Sedai and Asha’man learned the last weave they needed for their ring. The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.

If only they had stopped to consider just what exactly the will of the Wheel was.

~~~

Mat was eating a breakfast of stew when Rand found him, carrying a rolled up rug under his arm for some reason.

“Good morning, Mat.”

“Hey Rand. What brings the Dragon Reborn down to us mere mortals?”

“I have something I need you to do for me. Do you know what Callandor is?” Rand asked. He unrolled his rug, revealing the sword made of solid crystal that was wrapped up inside.

“Of course I bloody know what Callandor is. It’s a male sa’angreal.”

“It’s more than that,” Rand said, his expression as serious as Mat had seen it since Nynaeve had cured him. “It is a trap. It was intended for Moridin during the Last Battle, before the Merodi broke all prophecies. When a man wields it, a woman can link with him against his will. With at least 2 women, one of them can take control of the link from him and use his own power against him.”

“Then why are you bloody using it? You can’t trust Aes Sedai.”

“Believe me, I know. But I don’t have much choice. We need as much strength in the Power as we can get. Besides, we all want the same thing here. We all agreed that I would be the one to weave the ring. You’re just my insurance. If someone takes the link from me, I’m counting on you to stop them.”

“Burn me, you want me to ‘stop’ an Aes Sedai?”

“Only if they try something. Please, Mat.”

“Yes, of course, I promise I’ll have your back. It’s just...burn me.”

“Thank you,” Rand said. The relief was plain on his face. Burn me, but he really was worried about this. I won’t let you down, Rand.

Rand was the one to open a gateway to the vacuole. It was a new vacuole, one which didn’t exist yesterday, to minimize the chances that anyone would detect what they were doing. Over 200 men and women entered with him. Mat couldn’t bring himself to enter the vacuole where so much of the One Power would be wielded, but he took up a position just outside.

It was strange, knowing that just inside, 200 people were undertaking the largest work with the Power since the Age of Legends, and he couldn’t see a thing. The weaves were invisible to anyone who could not channel the Power themselves. He couldn’t even tell by looking at them, since only Rand was actually weaving. It took no effort to maintain the link, so the rest were passing the time in conversation. The only visible sign of anything happening was that Callandor had started glowing when Rand started using it.

Hours passed without anything happening, leaving Mat to try to keep himself entertained. The problem was that no one would talk to him. He tried with the servants, but his clothes marked him as someone important, and the servants were nervous about being friendly with him. Conversely, he had no desire to talk to the Aes Sedai and Asha’man inside the vacuole. Not that he was nervous, of course. Not Mat Cauthon. They just weren’t good conversation for a simple man like him, and they thought too highly of themselves to play at dice or cards.

As time passed, Mat got an itch at the back of his neck, and it wasn’t the dagger he had hidden in the collar of his coat. It was too quiet on this side of the gateway. There was no way that something as momentous as they were attempting here could go off without complications. The wheel wasn’t that bloody nice. Not to Mat Cauthon. He looked around, barely in time to spot the man throwing a dagger at him. He threw himself to the side, the dagger barely missing taking his ear. As he got up, he realized he recognized his would-be assassin.

“It’s Padan Fain!” Mat shouted as loudly as he could.

Padan Fain was once a simple Darkfriend, a servant of the Dark One. That was long ago. The Dark One twisted his soul to make him able to find Rand anywhere in the world. Somehow, that allowed him to merge with the evil of the dead city of Shadar Logoth. Now the man had strange powers never seen before.

Now that the alarm had been raised, Fain abandoned stealth. Fog formed in the air around him, growing larger and thicker before Mat’s eyes. Mashadar, the fog that consumed souls, began spreading through the camp. In seconds, Fain was hidden from view.

There was almost no defense against Mashadar. It had no body and could not be killed, while it could kill people with a touch. Killing Fain would stop it, but Mashadar surrounded Fain. Mat had an advantage though. He too once had a brush with the evil of Shadar Logoth, and though he almost died, the Aes Sedai were able to heal him. According to their source material, this made him immune to Mashadar. He could enter to find Fain, and he could kill him. He was the only one who could. You’ll have to manage without me for a while, Rand, Mat thought as he charged into the fog.

~~~

“It’s Padan Fain!” Cauthon shouted.

Shaisam was confused for a moment. Who was Padan Fain? Then he remembered. He was called Padan Fain once, long ago. He had used many names since then, as his madness took his mind in new directions. He knew he was mad, but he didn’t care. Maybe he would care after he killed Rand al’Thor and was free of his compulsion.

Shaisam unleashed Mashadar. He could no longer remember a time when he was unable to spread his power outside his body. Mashadar spread through the camp. Wherever it found a living body, a ropey tendril of fog would spear them. Mashadar left its victims dead, their bodies unmarred by wound or injury. They simply dropped, often without time to scream.

Cauthon entered Mashadar’s reach, but he did not die. Why did he not die? It wasn’t fair! Shaisam was forced to flee, to protect his vulnerable fleshy body while his true body expanded toward the open gateway. The fog was dense, and every soul it consumed made it thicker. He could hide until he could kill Cauthon. Then he could kill al’Thor and be free.

Mashadar reached the gateway. Tendrils struck some of the people inside, and Shaisam received a surprise. Instead of simply killing them, he took them. Their bodies were his now. His powers had grown once again! He could use this to kill al’Thor.

Something was wrong though. He knew they should be able to channel the One Power for him, but they couldn’t. Something was taking their power from them. It had to be al’Thor! He yanked, pulling the power back to his servants.

Instead of getting their power back, one of them got all the power. Shaisam didn’t understand why, but his puppet had stolen al’Thor’s power! This was the perfect opportunity! He ordered them to kill al’Thor with his own precious One Power.

Something was wrong again. The puppet was not killing al’Thor. The puppet was struggling with the power. It was defying him! I demand you to submit! Instead of submitting, they struggled even harder. Then there was a flash of white, and Shaisam knew no more.

~~~

“It’s Padan Fain!” Mat shouted.

Rand heard the cry. He knew that with the power he currently held, he could destroy Fain in an instant. He could burn the entire plain outside the gateway with a thought, vaporizing everything, and probably a foot of soil too. He had that power, but he was using all of it in weaving the ring. He was almost done, but if he stopped now, he would have to start again from the beginning. So he left Fain to Mat, and kept weaving.

“Rand, shouldn’t you--” Egwene started, but Rand interrupted.

“No. I have nothing left to spare. Mat can handle it.”

Egwene looked like she wanted to say more, but for a wonder she didn’t.

A minute passed, and then two. The people nearest the gateway started murmuring louder as the fog grew nearer. Then tendrils of fog shot through the gateway, spearing 3 Aes Sedai and 1 Asha’man. There was no blood, nor any visible injury, but all 4 of them collapsed. People started screaming, demanding that Rand release them so they could defend themselves. Rand felt something through the link, but the power kept flowing, and he was so close!

“Rand, this is foolish! We can start the weave again. Fain is killing people!”

“Just a few more threads…” Rand responded, weaving as fast as he could.

Then control of the link was taken from him. He turned to Egwene, furious, but it hadn’t been her. With dawning horror, he turned to face those who had been taken by Mashadar. They were standing now with vacant expressions, and one of them had stolen control of the link from him using the opening that Callandor provided her.

Rand expected to die then, but the woman could not control Saidin. Threads of power waved wildly, creating sparks where they crossed. She was trying to guide Saidin, the way women did with Saidar, but the male half of the One Power had to be forced. Try to gently guide it, and you would find yourself swept away. As an Aes Sedai she should have known all this, but whatever was left after Mashadar struck seemed to have forgotten. Rand was not about to correct her mistake.

Rand ran toward her, Callandor held up and ready to strike. It was not meant to be used as a sword, but it worked well enough as one. The crystal would not break.

Then the weave fell into place behind him. He turned. Somehow, in her flailing, she had finished it. But it had flaws, places where the weave was tangled or picked out. There was no telling what it would do now. A malformed weave like that could easily kill them all. Fortunately, whatever it did, it would do it to the Dark Tower. The part of the weave that would send it through the stream of the One Power to the Dark Tower was miraculously intact.

Rand felt relief for only a moment. Then there was a flash of white, and Rand knew no more.

~~~

Rand was ta’veren. The pattern swirled around him, bending in the direction the Wheel wanted it to go. In his presence, chance was suspended. People who hated each other would suddenly decide to get married. Flipped coins would land on their edge 100 times in a row. In this case, the flailings of a zombified Aes Sedai modified the weave to send a valid command to the Dark Tower. Not a command to collapse, or to preserve, but rather one to create a new universe. This universe appeared where the vacuole had been. By a further coincidence, it had exactly the same dream physics as Tel’aran’rhiod. The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.

A cone of white hot fire shot out of the gateway in the instant before the gateway itself was dissolved. The blast vaporized plants, pulverized mountains, and cut a miles long fan-shaped furrow in the ground. It threw ash and dust into the sky, where it spread out and began to smother the land. Had the Merodi not intervened, people would have died by the tens or even hundreds of thousands during the Last Battle. Now, they would die as dust choked the air and blocked the sunlight. The Merodi aid they had received was suddenly inadequate. All the Merodi dimensional devices had been at ground zero of the blast, as had everyone who had learned the weaves for traveling the multiverse. There was no way to call for aid, and Merodi policy was to wait for them to call. The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.

The alterations the Merodi left in the Pattern were corrected. The universe could still be destroyed, by weapons or by multiversal collapse, but otherwise events would play out as they had in ages past. Given time, people would forget about the Merodi. Few had ever seen them, after all, and they would soon be busy trying to survive. As the 4th age began, memories would become legend. Legend would fade to myth, and even myth would be long forgotten by the time the 3rd age came again. There are no beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time.

‘Meeting Your Maker’

By FanOfMostEverything

I glided onto the cliff. The view was breathtaking, the sun sinking into the Harmonic Ocean and turning the beach below into a stretch of powdered gold that stretched from horizon to horizon. I sat and savored it for a moment, letting the ocean breeze blow past me and listening to the waves.

The moment passed. I pulled out a notebook, flipped it open with my magic, and began writing.

And so the Third Author of the World entered his creation and the Glorious Proclaimer appeared before him, so that they might converse on the eve of the apocalypse.

There came a flash of gold, like a color-filtered manifesting Q, and before me, hovering beyond the cliff's edge, stood "Shimmy" Sunset Shimmer, Spirit of Harmony, embodiment and protector of Earth Shimmer, friend, wife, mother, aunt...

And protagonist by my hand.

Er, hoof.

Yeah, you may have picked up that I’m not actually Twilence by this point. Shimmy certainly did, judging by the crossed arms and a raised eyebrow. “Okay, I’ve seen a lot of things in my time, but I have to ask, how exactly are you casting magic when your horn is a glowstick taped to a cardboard tube?”

I smiled and moved a bit of my blonde mane out of my golden eyes with the levitating mechanical pencil. “Cheating. Same way I’m getting my eyes to focus properly despite appropriating She of the Seven Bubbles.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?”

“I technically already showed up in the story. Chapter 100. If G. M. Blackjack can use a guy in Metal Sonic cosplay, I can use an avatar of my avatar.” I shrugged my wings and gave a sad smile. ”Plus, we could definitely use a little levity right now.”

That got a nod, though she was still frowning. “So you are Fan of Most Everything.”

“That I am.” I indicated the grass next to me with a wing. “I’m sure you have a lot to say to me. I figured it was only right to give you a chance before whatever happens happens.”

She raised an eyebrow. "You don't know?"

“You think we’d be able to have this conversation if I did?” I shook my head. “I'm a side player in all of this. GM didn't even know about this world until he’d already written most of Songs. But right now, it's just you and me, Shimmy. Way back when your tale began, you had a lot of things to say to the people who decided what was 'necessary' in this world. Now’s your chance.“

She rolled her eyes as she sat next to me. ”Yeah, and I was young and hot-headed, and an especially stupid part of me still wanted to rule the world." She held up her hand. Another flash, and... Oh goodness, that was a print copy of Oversaturation. "You showed me why that was foolish real quick.”

"You've read..." I blushed. I couldn't help it. It's awkward enough when someone I know offline wants to read my work. One of the characters involved? I cleared my throat. “Right, no reason the Tower would keep that off-limits after the fact. How did you—?”

"The Infinite Carousel. Sneaking into Bronycon is easy when you're the best Rarity cosplayer imaginable.” Shimmy scowled. “Are you really surprised? You're the one writing all of this, aren't you?"

"Some version of me is, yes.” I picked a direction at random and tried to look at the fourth wall. “With any luck, he's a million years before us in metatime and doesn't have to worry about the collateral damage."

"Then what was with the whole quasi-scriptural summoning thing?"

"Well, it's an interesting question. Are you here because I wrote you here, or are you here because you noticed me trying to write you here?"

She crossed her arms. "You of all people should know I'm not one for the whole 'vague wisdom' routine."

"Fair enough." I took a deep breath. "To be honest, my coping mechanisms are running on overdrive. A third of the multiverse got wiped out in a matter of hours, and that was just the opening act. The human mind can't even begin to fathom losses on that scale."

"A human mind wrote losses on that scale."

"No offense to GM, but do you think that mind can appreciate what it wrought?” I spread a wing to encompass the beach, which was completely empty. Few people cared for fun in the sun when all of existence hung in the balance. “Through you, I irrevocably changed the lives of billions, and you've lived through the ramifications of that action in a way I can scarcely fathom. So instead I wrote a bunch of goofy slice-of-life stories on the lighter side of it all."

Shimmy summoned more books. “And Fluttershy nearly losing her mind, Abacus Cinch actually losing hers—“

"Point made." I fell back onto the grass, staring up at the evening sky. "My point is that I—which is to say, the me talking to you, not the lucky stiff who's composing all of this—I am just as terrified as anyone else living through the end of the multiverse as we know it."

"I thought you didn't know what was going to happen."

"Oh, I don't.” Not definitely, anyway. I may not know the details, but I saw the chapter titles at the end of the last arc. Not a lot of ways to interpret the next two. “But even if the preservers win, the status quo has been irrevocably shattered. Best case scenario, this is the start of one heck of a multiversal dark age. I don’t know about you, but I could certainly use someone to talk to right now. And while we’re at it, maybe I could account for myself somewhat along the way."

Silence. After the better part of a minute, Shimmy said, "You know, it's funny. Ever since I found out that someone out there was writing my life, someone was actually responsible for what I've gone through, I planned out so many things to say to you."

I looked over to her and smirked. "Say?"

"Shout, mostly,” she admitted. “Maybe throw in some divine reverb for emphasis." She added an echoing chorus to those emphasized words to demonstrate. "But now? It honestly seems kind of petty. I may be one of the most highly developed spiritual beings left in existence. I should hold myself to a higher standard than…” She sighed. “Well, it'd basically be yelling at Princess Celestia all over again."

"Not necessarily. You'd have more legitimate complaints this time. And I've been a worse communicator than Celestia ever was, by definition. Absolute silence isn't exactly helpful."

She waved that off. "It's not like most people would take it well if you just showed up one day and said 'Hi, I wrote your universe into existence.'"

"Except Pinkie."

"Of course except Pinkie. That's basically an unspoken addendum to every broad statement."

We shared a smile and waited a beat to see if any Pinkies took that as their cue to pop into the scene. None did, though I did notice a scribble in my notebook done in pink gel pen that definitely hadn't been there a moment ago. I decided it could wait. "At the risk of wrecking the mood, how'd the call for supporting Corona go?"

Shimmy gave me a flat look. "The Class-1 war was less than a week later. How do you think it went?"

I winced. "Sorry."

"I do still hold by what I said.” Shimmy sighed and looked out at the ocean. “We were able to talk a little while she was under house arrest. She'd hoped for a peaceful transition to whatever the multiverse decided. She never meant for this to happen. Even if she did cause it. But..." She groaned. "You know, it's really hard to look at this sort of thing objectively when every instinct is telling me to preserve and forgive and generally harmonize. I can condemn the Gallifreyans for planting the Tower Rings that set everything off. I can recognize that Corona lit the fuse to this powder keg whether she meant to or not. But her intentions are so pure, so heartfelt, that I literally cannot bring myself to blame her for... well, other people's actions that she had no control over, followed by her own hand being forced by their actions.” She jabbed me with an elbow. “So thanks for that."

I shook my head. "That's not quite how it works."

"Normally I would say I know how I work better than you do, but I suppose that isn't the case here."

"And you just demonstrated why. Among other things, your instincts encourage you to be honest, especially with yourself. You can't blame Corona for what she did because you don't blame her, not the other way around."

She raised an eyebrow. "So the generosity and kindness and loyalty—"

"Factor in as well,” I said. “But honesty is the relevant bit. You do still have free will, Shimmy."

She gave that a bitter laugh. "Does anyone? You're literally writing every word I say, for a given value of 'you.' I can't leave until I've said and done everything you want me to. The only reason I'm even questioning my free will is because you're making me."

"Oh?” I sat up. “What makes you think I'm any different?"

"Okay, yeah, you specifically are an author avatar, so you're technically in the same boat, but—"

I shook my head. "That's not what I mean. I, the person writing this, am an absolute background element in my world. My most important contributions to the world have been fan fiction, for goodness' sake. On a multiversal scale, yes, I am a Prophet. On a global one? Ninety-nine point several-nines-thereafter percent of people couldn't care less, nor could the Tower. I exist in a fully mundane universe that may or may not be so fully deterministic that, barring multiversal interference, every action I take can be extrapolated by studying the vectors of particles at the moment of the Big Bang. And if there is some magic something that makes the lump of fatty tissue in my skull capable of causal effects, that just raises further questions.” I took a deep breath and rubbed at my eyes. Really should’ve gone with a form with fingers. ”At least you can point fingers at the person who occasionally pulls on your strings. I dance in the wind."

"Uh…” Shimmy awkwardly stretched out an arm towards me, though she never actually touched me. “Do you not have faith in anything?"

I shrugged my wings. "I believe in emergent properties. I believe, or at least want to believe, that there's more to the mundane universe than the interactions of leptons, bosons, and quarks. The fact that I believe that arguably proves it, or sapience is just a delusion." I sighed. This was why I joked and capered. At least when Corona studied physics, she knew there was more in Heaven and Earth than was dreamt of in that philosophy. For me...

I blinked. My drooping head had put me in the perfect position to finally read the note a Pinkie had left in my notebook.

If sapience is a delusion, what's being deluded?

A smile came to my lips without my brain ever being involved in the decision process. A few stifled chortle leaked out as snorts.

"What is it?" Shimmy asked even as she looked over my shoulder. "Oh." She smiled too. "Did you put that there for yourself?"

"Yes and no. The thing about writing Pinkie Pie is that if you're doing it right, she takes up residence in your head. And never leaves. Ideally, every character should surprise you, but if Pinkie isn't writing the majority of her own dialogue, you're doing it wrong."

"You're welcome!"

We both sat paralyzed for a moment. Finally, I squeaked out, "Did a tiny pony Pinkie pop out of my ear to say that?"

"Do you really want the answer to that question?" Shimmy certainly didn’t sound like she wanted to give it.

"Fair enough."

She cleared her throat. "I feel like we've wandered off-topic."

I gave a rueful grin. "If you can't have an existential crisis now, when can you?"

"True,” she said with a smirk, “but I'm pretty sure you weren't the one who was supposed to in this exchange."

"Ideally, neither of us would. You could get some things off your chest about Prophets, I could explore the deeper ramifications of that sort of thing, everybody's happy."

"So why aren't we?"

"Yeah.” I picked another direction. This one felt like much more like the right one for glaring at my own fool self. “It's almost like someone has no idea what he's doing."

Shimmy wrinkled her brow. "What?"

"Exploratory writing.” I sighed. “I am flying by the seat of my pants and you're along for the ride."

"I'm... really not sure how to feel about that. I mean, on the one hand, I guess this means I have more free will in this situation? Maybe? But on the other, even you have no idea what will happen next, no plan or structure or real end goal."

I nodded. I could see where I was going with this. It’d be awfully concerning if I couldn’t. "As close as I can come to writing a world without ka."

After a moment, Shimmy said, "Or maybe you're a sly son of a mule who knew what he was doing the whole time."

"Speaking as an authority on the subject, I can confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have zero idea what I'm doing.” I smiled. “But this does do wonders for reaffirming your choice to preserve the multiverse, doesn't it? It's not just the Instincts of Harmony telling you to construct a grand web of interdependencies, you just don't like the idea of a world without some kind of structure to it."

"I know it sounds selfish, but destiny did right by me. It tends to for most Sunsets, eventually. A life without that…” She shut her eyes. “Not that there’s any way I’d survive. I might as well be this universe at this point. If it goes, so do I."

"Probably."

"You know something."

I bobbed my head from side to side. "I may. I may not. Few things in this life are truly certain."

She booped me. She booped me in the snoot! "We're getting back to the 'vague wisdom' horse apples again."

After I managed to get my eyes back in order, I couldn’t help but smirk up at her. "You're just mad because I decided you didn't need touch telepathy on top of borderline omnipotence."

She got to her feet. "Okay, if you're going to be that smug about it, you can just go back to your side of the fourth wall."

"Well, we don't need to go that far quite yet." A thought struck me. "You know, there is something else I believe in."

"I swear, if you say you're a member of the Church of the Divine Bacon Horse—"

I held up my forehooves. "I had little to do with its inception on any level of metafiction you care to name. I'm not the only one who's shaped this world, you know. You can pin a lot of things on a certain two-headed kitten.”

“That’s just my avatar and a representation of how I view humanity,” interjected a black leather robe.

“Wait.” Sunset blinked. “How did you—”

“He left the door open. By the way, I’m stealing your milk.”

I sighed as the figure walked off. "Typical... No, my philosophy in life, beyond 'assume there's something capable of philosophy,' is actually one you may find familiar."

"And what's that?"

"Life has no intrinsic meaning,” I said. “It's up to us to decide why we're here."

Shimmy contemplated that for a moment. "That sounds awfully like the Builders."

"Yes, if the Builders could have been content with self-determination rather than enforcing narrative law on all of existence.” I frowned. “But we can't fix the system if we burn it down."

"You really think it can be fixed?"

"Think about it.” I turned to a new page in my notebook and began sketching. “The Tower isn't just a machine, it's a Turing machine. It can be configured, programmed, commanded. Tower Rings are basically punch cards with an inflated sense of narrative importance. Corona stopped looking when she found a way to turn it off, but what if she'd kept going? Deciphered its programming language in full? What if we could use that knowledge to alter the relationship between author and character?” I looked up from the mess of toruses and tables, beaming as possibilities raced through my head. “The best stories are the ones where the characters tell you what they should be doing. What if we could make that kind of two-way communication the norm?"

Shimmy seemed less than enthusiastic. "That seems hopelessly idealistic. And that's coming from a Spirit of Harmony."

I nodded and tapped the giant cartoon explosion on the bottom-right with the tip of a hoof. "Of course it is. Instead of a nice, clean, two-sided, us-vs.-them conflict, my idea would tear apart the multiverse until every individual being was fighting everyone else, each fighting to realize their personal vision of perfection. Odds are the Nihilists would win; at least they’d be able to agree on something.” I sighed. “But I'm a fan fiction author who prefers happy endings. Thinking of ways it could've all turned out better is my role in the multiverse. Besides, hopeless idealism's most important in times of war. It means someone's thinking of something else.” I looked back up. “On that note, feeling any better?"

Shimmy thought about that for a moment. "Kind of, yeah,” she said, sounding more than a little surprised by it. “Still worried about the end of everything. I felt the aftershocks of the Class-1 war. But it's weirdly comforting to know that you're as worried as I am."

"It's what you've been doing since people started worshiping you. I don't think I'm any better than you just because I'm higher up the totem pole than you are, Shimmy, and I certainly don't have any more idea of what I should be doing. Anyone who claims otherwise in a situation like this is lying through their teeth, possibly to themselves. At the end of the day, we're all just people trying to find our way with varying degrees of assistance from the Tower."

She frowned. "It does do some horrible things."

I nodded. "It does. But it also does amazing things. Ka may have horrific implications, but it’s also the best tool to fix that horror. Goodness knows I've twisted horrific endings into happier ones. Or at least more farcical ones."

"Any hope of that here?"

I shook my head. "Too much loss, too much destruction, just too much. It's all coming to a head, and anything I might do would be an anticlimax of nigh-infinite proportions. 'Rocks rise, everybody lives.'” With a sigh, I added, “Given the way the Tower's been emphasizing the horror, I have to wonder if it wants to end."

"The Tower doesn't want anything,” said Shimmy. “It's just a machine."

"And I'm sure that if you asked someone what this universe wanted before you made friends with capital-M Magic, they would've said it didn't want anything either."

We watched the last of the sun dip below the horizon before Shimmy spoke up again. "You know, I just have one question."

I quirked an eyebrow. "Just one?"

"Just one that only you can answer. Why 'Shimmy'?"

"Oh, that. One person came up with the name and the other couldn't think of anything better before it stuck."

Shimmy rolled her eyes, thinking back to a bygone visit from an LSB exploration team. "I meant on your end."

"So did I.” I gave a sheepish smile. “Sorry."

Her face went through a number of expressions before settling on amusement. I smiled back. I live to entertain, after all.

"One more thing," she said, concern creeping back across her features. "Any chance you could at least make sure Egghead lives?"

"If it were up to me, I'd declare this whole universe inviolate until all's said and done, but it's out of my appendages." I rose. "That said, you have another appointment while you're here. And for the record, she wasn't my idea either."

I vanished from the world before she could respond. I hope I left her heart lighter. It'd balance the weight on mine.

‘Of the Fae’

By Masterweaver

“Such arrogance... even the kindest ones presume.”

Sunset ‘Shimmy’ Shimmer sighed. “Winter Lights. Were you listening in that whole time?”

“To admit to such... would not be relevant,” replied the icy blue form walking up to her. “Yet... and yet.”

There was an unusual air to the elfin woman. Her ears twitched constantly, eyes roving behind her eyelids. Shimmy’s magical empathy was usually stymied around her, but... here, and now? Winter Lights apparently found it hard enough to control the expression on her flesh.

“The ancients, of all kinds, built many wonders. A commonality in stories, the forgotten powers. Convenience, perhaps. Effort only to seek, not to explain where such came from or how they worked. Ease. Of use and method.”

“You’re not nearly as poetic as you usually are,” Shimmy noted.

“Fae realms involved in all layers,” Winter whispered. “The lowest, ignorant, beneath class four, even they feel... Highest, who are not of the first class but know how to whisper... do they exist? Did they ever? The ripples. All, all shifting.” Her golden eyes opened, and she steadied herself on a nearby rock. “Look upon me, godling, I have become a mad prophet, unable to sing the song that screams through my mind. The storm, the storm, we have weathered such before--but have we? Is this the final storm... what comes, what comes.”

Worry coated Shimmy’s expression, and she stepped forward--

“No! No. I shall not be robbed of this. Shall not... be robbed of my heritage. Birthright.” Winter straightened, running her four-fingered hand through her straight hair. “Father... father... Had I known... father... your love. I know now. Gratitude.... But no. I must focus. The godling.”

She turned to Shimmy, swaying, unnoticing of the single message sent by electric brick that the godling sent. “The sea of fate broils. Fay are tossed... some driven mad... but we have lived through storms. Yes. Survival. That is what we need. But... if we are to rebuild, we must exist. I am here. Your world. Yes, yes, but that is too selfish. You need your own reasons, yes?”

“Winter--”

“Wars determine not who wins, but who dies.” Winter held up a finger. “The winners are those who survive. Who rebuild. That shall be you, godling. Do not fight, do not... do not set your world to fight. You healed it, and yet it still has cracks... you are good at healing. When others fall... and other worlds shall fall... take the wounded. Bring them. Heal them. Yes. Godling. We must not fight, if we are to win... yes?”

“I wasn’t going to fight,” Shimmy assured her, stepping toward her gently.

“Then we must--you must... take this universe,” Winter said, waving over the ocean. “Take it. Run with it. Leave behind... rests. Safehouses. For when the battle pushes across borders. So hard... so hard to speak... there is much. Oblivion screams. Void seer... did you know this? Mockery... prophets... Retreat. Pick the battles. Cowardice... some would see it as. It is not, to run, not when there is no way to fight. When fighting is the worst way...”

“I’m not going to stop those that want to fight,” Shimmy said, reaching out to her--

--only for her to back away. “NO! No, godling! I must not... I must not. Not even in your service! Let the honorbound spill their blood, let all who would fight die... there will be no stopping those who cannot see beyond their own purpose. Rings, rings, rings.... Circles that bind... destruction, purpose. A ring around the world. Would war wound it?”

Shimmy sighed, quietly. “Winter Lights... you want my help. I want to help you. Focus... please. The dance of words can wait.”

“There was a wall...” Winter pointed. “They built a wall... was it when the Tower was made? Or before? Or after? It all blends... it surrounds the multiverse. It constrains. Now, though, a great war is being fought. Weapons of power. The wall may be sundered. A way out. Freedom from the tower...”

“...Ah.” Shimmy shook her head. “No. I won’t take us there.”

“But you must,” Winter said, though she did not seem to fully understand her own words. “Yes... freedom for the Fay. Through the cracks, as ever... you must, father, you must!” Her eyes fell on Shimmy, though it was clear she was not the one seen. “Your death, what purpose would it serve? The goal, if this is the end, to ride the wave of void, and so sidestep doom. You have died, father, but still I serve... I serve myself, and through myself my people...”

“You know enough to know that is not how a leader serves.”

“The godling thinks I am arrogant!” The elf laughed, clutching her pointed ears as she wept. “A lie that becomes true, a lie about a lie... my pet, my pet, my loyal pet. My beloved pet. Together. Yes... can we not run?” She knelt before the golden woman. “Such have I fallen, godling. Run. I beg a god. I beg a god. I beg a god. My pet, my beloved, my future. What takes it to sway your mind... you are bound to this world.”

“But not just this one.” Shimmy knelt. “You and I both came to this realm from beyond. We have both grown into it, adding our essence. We have helped outsiders, taken their gifts, and given in return. I could run. I could risk the edge of all things. Perhaps, in some miracle, I could take us out of the reach of the Tower--though I doubt that is within my power. But in so doing I would leave behind those I love. Those... we love.”

“You grow bold, godling.” A hint of Winter’s old self came through in that arrogant, toothy grin, though it was marred by the sadness in her eyes. “Claiming to know what I value.”

“You were fond of the elements of chaos. Of the one who was deception, despite it all. You were fond of the Flat who you went to meme war with. You were fond of others, too. And you remain fond of them, don’t you?”

“Friendship... why.” Winter sighed. “Why this realm, of all realms? Why... my pet. My beloved. My future. She... she would not accept if those beyond were left behind.”

“No.”

“I am bound... ropes of soul. But a soul alone shall fall... why did I bind so greatly?” She looked up at Shimmy. “You are the only hope for me. One born from Fae, reliant on a mortal made god. Such shame... and yet... to be found. To be found... is this faith? No. It is...”

“...It is trust.”

“...hope lies in shadows. Hope ever...” Winter shut her eyes. “No. I mustn’t. I mustn’t! She is a godling! Was this ever my fate? The gift... The king killed, by my plot. My father warped by my own kiss. Treachery, lovely, yet costly... Winter Lights. The sun that batters, even at night. My power... my skill... my knowledge... I am Fey. I AM FEY! I MUSTN’T! I mustn’t... I mustn’t... I mustn’t... I... I... I...”

Her hands moved suddenly, grabbing Shimmy’s wrists and slamming the golden palms against her own brow. Knowledge--sudden knowledge, of how the Fae realms were formed, how realities could be unraveled and rewoven--shot into the goddess’s head desperately, even as another part of the elf screamed in her head and out loud at what she was giving. It lasted less than two seconds before she released her grip and fell to the sand.

“Traitor... Traitor to my bond... Traitor to my courts... Traitor to my cousin... Traitor to my father... Traitor to my kind. Traitor to myself.” She laughed and wept at once. “Treachery upon treachery. Lovely, yet costly. Mother, mother, what are you, what were you? Did you plant this seed that I nurtured, do these vines that strangle come from you? Or perhaps, from myself, and I cannot lay blame.”

“This...” Shimmy looked over the knowledge she had gained. “...With this, I could... I could give this world a real chance. Winter, if we see the wave coming I could weave into it--!”

She looked and saw that the elf had summoned a dagger of glamour, already plunging it toward her heart. And she reached out--but in one last moment, the one born of fay had pulled away from her power, so she could not stop it.

It was great fortune, then, that another was present to wrench it away.

“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!”

“Traitor, to all...” Her golden eyes fell upon the purple vestment. “My pet? My pet... have I betrayed you too?”

“I swore you would get through this,” Indigo Zap growled, tears in her eyes. “I swore I would do anything to make sure you survived!”

“The sea of Fate... it broils...”

“And we will survive it together,” Indigo promised. “You said you would take my name after this.”

“There is always uncertainty--”

A pale hand smacked against a blue cheek.

Golden eyes focused on blue.

“...Winter Lights,” Indigo said quietly. “If you cannot take my name later, you will take it now.”

“You do not make demands of Fey,” Winter murmured.

“I make demands of love,” Indigo said.

One hand clasped a shoulder “...My pet.” Another wrapped against a cheek. “My beloved...”

Her ears at last stopped twitching, as her face pressed closer to the other.

“...My future.”

“I said I would be willing to sacrifice myself for you,” Indigo murmured.

“And you meant it.” Winter chuckled, the tears in her eyes fading. “As ever... you are my guide in these matters. And I... I cannot walk without my guide.”

“Mistress--”

“That leash was long loosened. Perhaps it is best to take it off entirely, now.”

Indigo smiled. “Only in public.”

“Mmmm. Such a way with words...” At last there was a glint of joy in Winter’s eyes again. “Quite the skilled tongue indeed.”

Shimmy groaned. “Can you not?”

“But I must!” Winter declared, standing. “For the dance of words is ever-changing, and I must change with it!”

Indigo stood too, a relieved smile on her face. “Thanks for calling me, Sunset. I... I don’t know what I would have done without her.”

“Well...” Shimmy shrugged, not commenting on the hands that remained clasped. “She might be a problem child, sure, but this world has adopted many. I’ll leave you two to it, and... go think about what she has shared.”

She snapped her fingers, and she was suddenly in her home, where she draped herself on a couch. “Uuuugh, that was... uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.”

“Something up?” asked her wife.

“Just...” Shimmy waved a hand. “The future of our world. We’ll need to talk about that.”

“Yeah... well...”

“...Something wrong?”

“It’s dumb--”

“Come on, Twi, tell me.”

Her wife sighed. “We’re... out of milk. I could have sworn I bought a few jugs monday, but I can’t find them at all--”

Shimmy frowned for a moment, before groaning. “Friggin’ prophets.”

She chose to believe she just imagined the muffled “Sorry” coming from… somewhere.

‘A Heart’s Gambit’

By Sgt. Sarge

In my universal cluster, things were set up much like the larger multiverse in microcosm. Many worlds were separate and unknown to each other, except by those few who could travel between them. Each world in this greater World had a heart, a will of its own, and those hearts were all connected to form an entity known as Kingdom Hearts.

The aging man stroked his goatee in thought as he walked. He entered a room that was dark aside from a single lamp illuminating a table at the center. Standing around this table were three other individuals: a pink skinned woman with a tail, a young girl with black hair, and a man wearing a red coat.our

The old man took a position at the head of the table. He had hoped more would have come than this, but he could not wait any longer. Three was far fewer than the thirteen he had planned for, but he sensed they would be enough.

The young girl pointed at him dramatically. “Alright, you old geezer, it's about time you told us what this is really all about.”

“Yeah! I only came here because you said I could have all the sweets I could eat! There isn’t a single piece of candy in sight!” The pink woman puffed out her cheeks, pouting.

The old man chuckled lightly, his voice dry and raspy. “Patience, all will be revealed in time. For now, know that you are here to aid me in acquiring a device that will end this war. Then, my dear, you may have your sweets.”

“I’ll assume, given the secrecy of this meeting, that you’re not aiming for the same ‘end’ as the rest of us.” The man in the red coat spoke up.

“No. Things cannot stay as they are, but the collapse is a terrible waste of the unique beauty this World has to offer.” The old man spread his arms wide. “I seek to change the nature of ka itself.”

“What?!” The young girl staggered back in shock. “That's absurd! I can’t, hey-”

The young girl was cut off as the man in red next to her tapped her on the head with a capture device. “Well, that makes things easier for me, then. You can call me Archer; that's not my name but it’s all you'll get.”

“You could have let me have her, ya know?” The woman said, thrashing her tail in annoyance.

Archer stored the capture device in a pouch on his belt. “No. I still need Rin here alive. She supplies me with mana, to maintain my physical form. Honestly, I’ve been waiting to do that for a while now.”

She shrugged. “Eh, whatever. My name is Android 21. You broke me out of that Merodi prison, so as long as you let me eat sweet things I’ll help you out with whatever you want.”

“Good, good.” The old man nodded, hands clasped behind his back. “I only require a piece of technology used in building the Tower Rings. There is one being built by the Kromagg as we speak that is far enough along to have the part we need.”

The old man raised an eyebrow and looked up at the ceiling.

“My name is Master Xehanort, and you are welcome to try and stop me.”

~~~

“Wow, that was a little creepy,” Pinkie said.

“What was?” Nova asked, rearranging an ace in her hand of cards.

“The guy in the last scene. I think he knew I was watching. Well, everyone was watching, there was no attempt to obscure that scene at all. Every Aware everywhere heard that. But I think he was talking specifically to me! I’ll take two please.” Jotaro dealt Pinkie her two cards, then took a look at his own hand: two pairs.

“Well, do you know him? Maybe he was talking to another Pinkie Pie? I raise.” Vriska bluffed, tossing two more chips into the center of the table.

“I don’t think so, he didn’t mention me by name. He did mention a Tower Ring the Kromagg are building. So I imagine we’ll be sent out to destroy it soon. I call.” Pinkie Pie threw a pair of her own chips to match Vriskas.

The rest of the table called before showing their hands. Pinkie was the winner with a full house.

Nova sighed. “That's fine. I’m pretty sure Pinkie’s cheating somehow, but I know I’ll never figure out how.”

“Who knows?” Pinkie said, mentally winking. Gosh, she missed doing that. “By the way, where’s Pidge?”

“I think she’s still holed up in her lab dimension thing. She’s been working real hard on some secret project or something.” Vriska said, scooping what chips she had left into an eight ball. “We might have to go without her.”

Jotaro looked down at his single remaining chip and sighed. “Yare yare daze.”

~~~

My universe was not always separated so. When the light of Kingdom Hearts first birthed the World there was but one, and it shone with a pure bright light. But bright lights cast shadows, and soon the people of the World began to covet the light and allowed darkness into their hearts. The ensuing conflict over control of the light put too much strain on the World, and thus it shattered. Despite this cataclysm, darkness still grew, fighting over what scraps of light were left. And so I took it upon myself to restore my World to what it once was. One sky, one destiny.

In a forgotten building, in a dark room, a hole appeared in space shaped like a keyhole. Out of it walked Xehanort and his two companions. The room in question would have been very large, if it wasn't for the piles and piles of boxes and other storage containers scattered around. There were drawers and cabinets built into countertops around the edges of the room, indicating it had not always been used for storage. As it was, there was still plenty of space for the three intruders to stand comfortably.

“Heeeey, this doesn't look like a Tower Ring.” Android 21 whined as she looked around, before being distracted poking through the contents of a box

Archer crossed his arms and leaned against a counter. “It’s not. This is a Merodi research installation. I’m surprised you could get in here, old man, there should be proofs against just portaling in.”

“I happen to have a key, of sorts.” Xehanort walked over to a wall and began to open cabinets, clearly looking for something. “As for why we are here, I must retrieve something I stored away long ago. I am led to believe it is here. We shouldn’t be bothered; this building has been abandoned, all its researchers sent to the front to build rings.”

After searching for several minutes, Xehanort gave an “Ah ha!” and pulled something out of a drawer. It looked like a purple flower, a lotus, about the size of a human head. Above it floated a holographic digital countdown. “I came across this artifact shortly after leaving my home universe. I knew then that I had to store the object within, just as I know now is the time to retrieve it.”

Android 21 stomped her foot, steam literally blowing out of her pointed ears. “And we got it, let’s gooooo! I’m so hungry.”

“Hey! Who’s in there?” The trio froze as the door to the room slammed open. The watchpony stallion who entered paused for a moment, surprised to actually find someone in the room. The three intruders looked at each other for a moment before Android 21 gave a sadistic smile.

“Dibs.”

As the watchpony fumbled for his weapon, Android 21 pointed her finger at him and a bright pink beam of energy shot out to engulf the poor stallion. With a puff of pink smoke, the hapless stallion disappeared, replaced by a small chocolate donut. 21 rushed over and quickly scarfed it down.

21 smacked her lips obnoxiously. “Mmmmn, tasty, but not very substantial. He tasted so empty.”

Archer relaxed his battle stance, dismissing the sword he had summoned into his hand. “That was… disturbing.”

Xehanort waved his hand dismissively at them. “Enough of that, It’s time to go. We’ve spent too long on this already. The battle at the Kromagg ring should be underway now. The perfect cover to get what we need.” And with that, Xehanort made another keyhole-shaped portal and the three of them left.

~~~

“I think we might have been played, team.” Pinkie said as she bashed a Combine soldier with her warhammer. The primary team was locked in combat on the surface of a standard Earth moon. Its accompanying planet had been reduced to dust some time long before the war. Now its remains circled the moon in ephemeral rings, lending an eerie background to the battle below.

“What was it that tipped you off? Was it the huge motherfucking spaceship!? That's what tipped me off!” Vriska shouted as she threw one of her dice, not bothering to waste luck on a roll, straight through a Combine soldier’s head. Pinkie’s team had been one of four sent in to deal with the ring. The Kromagg defences were minimal, hoping to go unnoticed by being less of a threat than the other societies. That is, until shortly after the teams’ arrival, when a Combine super ship made of six stars portaled in and began launching troops by the thousands. It seemed the Kromagg were not above asking for help when the chips were down.

“No, not about that. About the old man from earlier? Xehanort? That guy really needs a nickname. Anyway, he let us know about the Ring so he could use our attack to sneak in himself!” Pinkie Pie reflected a hail of bullets using an Uno reverse card. “Although I waaaaas wondering why they hadn’t vaporized us yet.”

“They probably don’t want to destroy their own base in the process,” Jotaro answered as he and his Stand punched two different soldiers at the same time.

Nova looked up from her screen, casually sidestepping a hail of bullets. “That attitude might not last long. Fortunately, I’ve just found an entrance. Let’s get inside, people!” The team disappeared mid-melee as Nova teleported them elsewhere on the moon, leaving behind a pile of dazed and confused Combine grunts.

~~~

It is said that to enter Kingdom Hearts is a feat beyond humans. To rephrase, any human who manages to enter Kingdom Hearts will be reborn as something more. I found this to be entirely true, as when I purged my World I began to sense the ebb and flow of destiny. I could feel the threads that connect events and which ones might lead where. Despite this, I could not keep conflict and darkness from my new pure World. I could feel another will overwriting my own, a different being connected to Kingdom Hearts. And so I followed that connection and discovered an existence far larger than I had previously known.

The keyhole this time opened up onto a platform that seemed to be on the inside of a giant hollow sphere. The walls of the sphere were rock, with scaffolding scattered around metal tunnels that presumably lead to the outside surface. In the center of the large open space floated the half-finished Kromagg Tower Ring, a bulky torus made of a dark gray metal with more scaffolding surrounding huge holes in its exterior.

“Ah, it seems the battle has not quite breached the moon yet. Pity, we may have to fight our way in after all.” Xehanort stepped out into the void, only to demonstrate that the gravity here was such that allowed one to float gently in any direction.

He drifted towards one particular hole in the metal torus that allowed access to an interior corridor. This part of the corridor had no ceiling or outer wall except for the skeleton of the scaffolding, but wormed into more intact areas that hid its length behind walls of metal. A single door was set along the intact interior wall, leading to a place entirely closed off by completed construction, inaccessible except by this portal.

When the group landed in this corridor, they barely had enough time to get their bearings before they were approached from its shadowed end. He was a short, stubby humanoid skeleton wearing a blue hoodie, nylon shorts, and a pair of pink bath slippers.

When he saw them, he stopped and put his bony finger into his ear hole. “hey guys… yeah, i found the old man… no, no signs of corona’s people… i could use some backup, yes… well, good luck then. sans out.”

Xehanort waved his hand at the door. With a flash of light, the door was unlocked and opened. “You two, stay here and play with our guest. Make sure no one follows me as I retrieve the component I require.” Setting down the lotus, Xehanort went through the door closing it behind him.

Sans’s left eye began to glow with a yellow and blue fire. “so, it looks like you two have some very high lv. why so eager to kill, huh?”

Archer stepped forward, producing two shortswords from thin air. “I’m not, although I do find it’s often the quickest solution to problems.”

“did you ever consider showing mercy, even once?” Sans asked as two white dragon skulls floated out from behind him.

Android 21 burst out laughing as Archer responded. “I did once, in a past life. Long ago I was a hero of justice. Now, I’m just a killer who wants the killing to stop.” He took a battle stance. “...And you’re just stalling for time.”

“yeah. i was hoping i wouldn’t have to fight both of you. oh well.” Sans closed his eyes and shrugged. Archer took that opportunity to rush forward, stabbing at Sans’s heart. The attack missed as Sans slid sideways. Archer tried over and over to hit the skeleton, but every time Sans would slide easily out of the way.

Android 21 pouted off to the side. “Aw, if you’re playing with him, who am I going to chew on?” As she said this, several dozen Kromagg soldiers rounded the corridor from the other direction, the front ones firing on her with their weak radiation-based lasers. “Oh ho! Looks like the appetizers have arrived! I guess I can pig out on you until the real food gets here!” A red and black aura burst around her as she dashed forward. In an instant, she ran her arm right through a soldier's chest, ignoring any of the shots that managed to hit her.

Sans jumped back, the two skulls behind him opening their mouths. Twin beams of white energy launched from the skulls and raced down the hallway. Archer dived to the side to avoid one and threw his swords into the other. The second beam was deflected, destroying the swords in the process. Archer summoned a black longbow from nothing, but before he could use it, he felt something grip his spirit.

As Sans gestured, Archer was thrown to the floor face first, before being launched out of the hole in the torus and sent tumbling into space. The skeleton jumped out after him, launching a barrage of bones. Archer managed to right himself in time and returned fire with an equal barrage of arrows made out of swords.

The two combatants fired continuously for several seconds, matching each other blow for blow. Two Kromagg Manta ships approached Archer from behind, firing their beam weapons wildly and forcing him to fly downward and out of their way. The two ships flew through where Archer had been, getting ineffectively pelted by the storm of bones.

The crimson bowman used the distraction of the ships passing to create distance, flying all the way down to land near the bottom of the sphere. “Alright then, guess I’ll have to take this more seriously.” Archer raised his right hand, summoning to it a long spear made of blood red steel. Sans flew downward, trying to get his opponent within range of his attacks once more.

“I am the bone of my sword.” Archer chanted quietly as he put the spear to his bow. As he drew, the spear shortened by half, fattening slightly at the back to end up shaped similarly to an arrow. “Now, strike true! Gáe Bolg!” The spear launched at an improbable speed, flying with an explosion of jagged red light. It was coming too fast, Sans wasn’t sure if even he could dodge this one.

“Star Platinum: The World!” Time stopped for Jotaro. He and his team had only just arrived in the interior chamber of the moon, and decided to head towards the battle in progress. Jotaro had seen the spear fly and acted on instinct. He was just close enough to make it to Sans and pull him out of the way before time began again.

Jotaro landed with his friends on the bottom of the sphere across from Archer. When he went to put the skeleton down however, he found the red spear embedded in his chest, bisecting a red heart. Jotaro balked. “That… That shouldn't be possible. Time was stopped, I know I moved him out of the way.”

“Heh, did you like that little trick? The Gáe Bolg reverses cause and effect, in order to strike its targets heart before it's fired. He was dead the moment I decided to kill him.” Archer readied another sword to his bow. “I can only do it a few times though, so some of you wont get such an easy death. Sorry.”

Sans coughed, blood dripping from his perpetual grin. “heh, guess that’s it, huh? well, time to go see my brother…” The red heart on Sans’s chest began to crack. Before it could break, Jotaro caught Sans in a capture device.

“See It’s that kind of heroic crap that I’ve come to despise.” Archer spat on the ground. “Saving enemy combatants can only end badly. It’ll get you killed in the end.”

“Vriska, you and Jotaro take care of this guy, Nova and I will take out the ring!” Pinkie grabbed Nova around the middle and extending one hoof, rocketed upward.

Vriska stepped forward drawing her cutlass, only for Jotaro to put a hand on her shoulder. “What? You want first crack at him big guy?” Jotaro nodded silently. “Fine. But I call first dibs on the big bad guy.”

Archer dismissed his bow and, to Vriska’s surprise, summoned an exact replica of her sword to his hand. Jotaro ran forward, Star Platinum starting to punch as soon as his target was in range.

“ORAORAORAORAORAORA!”

Archer swung blindly, unable to see where the assault was coming from, only managing to score superficial hits through sheer luck. Losing though he was, Archer had taken far worse beatings than this. The bowman created a few swords in mid-air that then flew towards Jotaro, but the quiet giant side stepped them with ease.

Vriska impatiently tapped her foot. “Yeah, this is already taking too long.” Making eye contact she began to drain Archer’s luck.

Things happened quickly. As Archer took a punch to the jaw he spun around, a capture device flying free of his belt pouch. Mid-air, it was skewered by one of Archer’s ill aimed swords, shattering and killing the person inside.

“NO! RIN!” Archer shouted reaching for the devices remains. He stopped short however, surprised at his own reaction.

“Heh, guess I am just a fake after all… Well, time to go all in.” Archer summoned a large two handed golden sword. It lit ablaze with a golden fire, as much light as it was flame. “Without Rin to answer my form, I’ll disappear in a few days, even if I don't fight anymore. I might as well put everything I have into this last attack and take you with me into the void. Any last words, better say them now.”

Jotaro frowned. “Star Platinum: The World.”

~~~

Pinkie Pie and Nova flew through the hole in the ring, landing in front of the door. Between them and the portal however stood Android 21 licking her fingers. “So you guys are the main course? I hope you taste better than these guys did.”

Pinkie giggled. “I taste like cotton candy! If you win, I'll let you have a taste!”

Nova facehooved.

21 let loose with a barrage of pink energy blasts, forcing Nova to erect a shield to protect herself and Pinkie from the massive explosion. As the smoke cleared it revealed that Pinkie was no longer in the shield. She appeared from behind 21 and slammed her warhammer into the androids face which squished like clay.

Pinkie watched in surprise as Android 21’s face popped back out to return to its normal shape. “Ow! Owowowowow! I will never get used to that.” She quickly wrapped Pinkie up in her tail. “Just for that, I’ll eat you first! You should taste good as a cupcake!”

Nova looked on as Pinkie was enveloped in a jagged pink light, and with a poof of smoke… remained exactly as she was…

“What, a reality anchor?! Th-that’s cheating! No fair!” Android 21 stomped her foot like a child as Pinkie slipped out of her tail like a bar of soap. “Argh! Fine, if I can't eat you then you’re just a nuisance.” A wide sadistic grin spread across 21’s face. “I’ll just have to kill you instead!”

Android 21 dashed at Nova, the pony firing a magic laser that completely destroyed 21’s right arm. She didn't even slow down. The android delivered a powerful kick to Nova’s barrel, cracking her ribs from the force. As 21’s arm reformed a bright ball of red and black energy grew in its hand. Nova concentrated through the pain and executed a teleport just as the attack was launched.

The blast was massive. Aimed slightly down as it was, it carved a large semi-circle out of the Kromagg ring. From afar it looked a lot like a giant had just taken a bite out of the huge metal donut.

21 didn’t let up, she charged out of the smoke directly at Pinkie. Nova cast a barrier around Pinkie but 21 smashed right through it with brute force, knocking Pinkie Pie to the ground. The android ended up on her knees straddling the pink pony, hand in her face already coursing with lethal energy.

“Heeheeahahhahaha! Goodbye!” 21 let out a deranged laugh, but before she could fire suddenly her vision cut out.

“Boop!” Pinkie detonated the Bomb Mask she had placed on the androids face. The entire top half of the woman was blown into tiny pieces that rained down around them like pink putty. “Quick, get her!”

Nova caught on quickly and nodded. She began throwing capture devices by the dozen to catch all the blobs of 21, even as they began crawling towards each other. Eventually a few of them managed to come together and 21 reformed once more.

“Hey, what did you do to me!?” Android 21, having lost most of her mass, now only came up to the pony’s jawline. She had apparently lost most of her power along with her size, as she unleashed a series of blows on Nova that were more annoying than they were painful.

When a kick finally connected painfully with her cracked ribs Nova decided that was enough. She used her telekinesis to squish Android 21 up into a small ball of putty before finally capturing her.

As Nova began to tend to her wounds Jotaro and Vriska joined them. “Well, our guy exploded. You get yours?”

Pinkie gestured at the not small pile of capture devices off to the side.“Yup. We can’t rest though, we still have a bad guy to fight. And I think my Pinkie Sense is telling me he’s on his way.”

~~~

I learned much in the years I wandered the multiverse. I learned of universes filled with joy, and also ones of pain. I learned of others who could sense Fate as I could, some even better. I learned of the Songs of the Spheres, and how to avoid its sight. And I learned of my true foe that I have fought for two lifetimes. I learned of the Dark Tower. But how to defeat that foe? Destroying it was a tall order--perhaps containing it? Sealing it off from the rest of existence? My questions were answered one day, the day of The Message. Most of it was already known to me but there, in the technical data, was the last piece I needed. I would not defeat the Dark Tower. I would become it!

The door opened with a hiss. Xehanort emerged carrying a small X shaped device with a blooming rose design etched into it. “And so, the Tower is now within my reach.” With a blinding flash of light he summoned an elaborate sword to his hand. It was made of two large crossed keys, with a translucent blade extending from where they met.

“This is the χ-blade! A divine weapon that can open any door and unlock any lock. With it, I could even open the doors to Heaven itself! But there has been one door that has proven stubborn, a door I could open but would never lead to where I needed to go.” Xehanort put the rose device against the part of the χ-Blade where the two keys met, where it latched on. “But no longer, with this I can now force open a connection to the Dark Tower from any universe I choose. My goals are now merely a matter of time.”

Vriska pointed her sword at Xehanort. “And what goals would those be? We don’t even know what you’re trying to do!”

Xehanort gestured at Pinkie with a raised eyebrow. “Hmn? Pinkie Pie hasn't told you yet? I’m sure she's figured it out by now. My intention is to purify the World! I shall twist ka, and with it, purge existence of the darkness which it spreads!”

The group turned to look at Pinkie expectantly. “It’s true. What I still don’t understand though is why fight us? We are trying to do the same thing right? Get rid of ka?”

Xehanort laughed. “Get rid of it? No. I desire to use ka. I destroyed my universe because the Darkness had taken root too deep. It was the only way to purge that darkness, but this greater multiverse might still be saved! It merely requires a guiding hand, to cut away those universes corrupted with pain and misery, and to ensure none walk the path of darkness ever again!”

“So what, are you trying to become God or something!?” Jotaro shouted.

“If that is what it takes, yes. You cannot deny you believe that by whoever’s hand this multiverse is run, be it Gods or the Tower, they are doing a poor job. That is why you seek collapse, to destroy the Tower and end the cycle. But tell me this: how many objects or beings exist that are capable of destroying a universe? What if one of them were to survive? What if one of those ‘beings of pure evil’ you despise survives into your new world? Or worse yet, what if the Dark Tower lied? Can you truly say you trust it? That it handed Corona a loaded gun and asked her to finish it? Mark my words, the Tower is quite prepared to weather this storm it has wrought.”

Nova rolled her eyes. “What, and you’re saying we can trust you anymore then the Tower!?”

“I am at least human. With a human heart made of light and darkness and memories just like everyone else's. I do not claim to be perfect, but at least I care. In the end, better a flawed god then an uncaring one.”

“Yeah, we’ve heard that argument before. Didn’t buy it then ether. I think I’ve heard enough from this old goat.” Vriska twirled her cutlass and launched forward, locking blades with Xehanort. She made eye contact, activating her powers as the Thief of Light. “Hey, your luck isn’t going down, what gives?”

Xehanort smirked. “I have used the χ-blade to lock my Fate. My victory here is preordained. A matter of fact, not of Luck.” He pushed back against her blade, Vriska using the momentum to jump back.

Landing, Vriska pulled out her Infinite sided die. “Fine, I’ve already stolen a ton of Luck from that Archer guy. Now you disappear!” She threw the die to the floor, although the smirk never left Xehanort's face.

“What is Luck before destiny!?” With a wave and a flash from the χ-bladeX-blade, the Infinite sided die stopped suddenly. It rolled a 19.

“Oh, fuck me.” Vriska said just before Xehanort locked her position in space, rendering her unable to move.

An instant later Xehanort felt the impact from hundreds of punches landing simultaneously. He reeled back in pain allowing Pinkie Pie to slam her warhammer into his back and send him flying out of the hole. Xehanort managed to right himself in time to cast a quick healing spell before Jotaro arrived to punch him again.

Jotaro grabbed the χ-blade as Star Platinum punched Xehanort in the face, wrenching the sword from the old man’s grasp. Xehanort wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. “So boy, you wield your heart as a weapon. A powerful technique, but not without risks of its own.”

Star Platinum charged, invisible to the non-stand user. At the last moment there was a flash of light as the χ-blade returned to Xehanort’s hand, swinging it in a wide sweeping arc. He couldn’t see the Stand, but he knew he scored a hit by the large gash that appeared across Jotaro’s chest. The wound might have been fatal to anyone not from Earth Stand.

Nova teleported over with Pinkie, she caught Jotaro in a capture device while the pink one launched herself at Xehanort with a chainsaw. In a keyhole shaped flash Xehanort teleported out of the way, ending up near Nova. He grabbed Nova by a hind hoof and threw her at Pinkie, following up with a few blasts of darkness laced ice. Nova slammed into Pinkie and immediately teleported the two of them above and behind Xehanort.

Elsewhere, back in the Kromagg ring, the countdown above the purple lotus reached zero. As the flower began to bloom a small heart shaped object emerged, growing quickly as it rose into the air.

Xehanort silhouetted himself against the heart as it grew even larger. “Behold, you are too late. You now stand in the light of Kingdom Hearts.”

Kingdom Hearts glowed with a soft pale light. That along with the slight pock marks across its surface made it look not unlike a small heart shaped moon. It pulsed with a vibration, a beat, not a sound one could hear but a feeling. A feeling of power and Fate.

“With the χ-blade I can open the way to the Tower, and with Kingdom Hearts I shall control it!” Xehanort spread his arms wide, basking in the light.

The whole moon shook. Pinkie and Nova watched as a quarter of the outer sphere was simply blown away, rock and debris turning to dust as it flew. Through the new hole all that could be seen was the massive Combine ship. Xehanort only laughed.

“It seems our friends outside are getting impatient! Or perhaps they detected the energy from Kingdom Hearts. Either way, I’d rather they not shoot at Kingdom Hearts.” Xehanort pointed his χ-bladeX-blade through the hole. “Now Kingdom Hearts, open the way to the Sea! Reduce them to nothing!” With a small flash from the tip of the blade, the entire Combine ship, suns and all, was dropped into the Sea of Infinite Possibility and disappeared.

Nova looked on eyes wide with fear. “Um, Pinkie? I’m not sure the two of us can take this guy anymore.” Pinkie swallowed and shook her head.

“No need for such fear my little ponies, it is time I took my leave. My destiny awaits me.” Then both Xehanort and Kingdom Hearts disappeared in a keyhole shaped flash.

Shortly afterwards, a Starcross ship portaled in to pick up the battered primary team and finish off the broken Kromagg Tower Ring.

~~~

Xehanort emerged at a crossroads in the middle of a field of roses. Just ahead of him stood the Dark Tower, raising infinitely into the clouds above.

“At last, I am here. The field of Can’ka No Rey!” He gestured towards the monolith in front of him. “And the hiding place of my greatest foe.”

Xehanort held the χ-blade aloft, slowly floating into the air. Behind him in the sky dark clouds gathered and swirled. From within the clouds a bright light could be seen.

“There will be but one sky, and one destiny! Come now Kingdom Hearts, open the way for me!” The clouds parted behind him to reveal the heart-shaped moon of Kingdom Hearts in the sky.

Xehanort pointed the χ-blade at the door of the Dark Tower. “Show this old relic what its existence truly desires! Open it’s doors and allow me to create an existence of pure light!”

Light poured forth from Kingdom Hearts, surrounding Xehanort as it fell on the Tower. The light grew brighter and brighter, until soon all that could be seen was a white expanse cut in half by the black scar of the Dark Tower.

Then, Xehanort felt something shift. The Tower loomed before him, doors still stubbornly closed. His eyes widened as fear gripped him. Xehanort looked to the Tower and then back at Kingdom Hearts. He knew. He knew now what he had missed.

“...How could I have come so far, and still understand nothing…”

The light receded as the χ-blade fell. Xehanort was no more. Kingdom Hearts, the First Light, the Heart of All sunk into darkness once more as the clouds closed to cover it. Soon all that remained was the χ-blade, point down in the field of roses.

~~~

I closed my notebook. That idiot had no idea who he had been dealing with. Still, I hesitated before moving on to another project.

Something he had said bothered me.

Could the Tower be lying?

Prophets could lie to each other using the Tower, and I had just finished doing that in an underhanded way. The Tower itself often hid things from the Aware, as it had been ever since Corona sent her message.

Could it give false information itself?

Yes. It could. But in the end, it didn’t matter. It was impossible for me to know what it was lying about, how, or why. Is it the binary choice of the war? Is it the collapse? Is it the rings? Is it ka itself? Is it nothing?

I was fully aware I was probably being influenced. Drawn to a conclusion where I didn’t vocalize my concerns since it wouldn’t change anything…

With a sigh, I made a small note in the corner of my notebook about my doubt. Then I moved on to another project. I sensed… a very particular white unicorn making a move.

Unexpected...

‘From Cinders’

By G. M. Blackjack.

A white unicorn walked into Allure’s office. This was hardly unusual, given the fact that this was the League of Sweetie Belles, but the particular white unicorn came as a shock to everyone she passed on the way here.

Allure didn’t notice her at first. She was busy looking at a cracked photograph of Renee, frowning deeply.

“Allure.”

Allure slowly turned her eyes forward, at first angry that anypony had dared interrupted her. It didn’t take long for her eyes to open wide in shock at the orange brilliance staring at her. “C-cinder!?”

“Yes,” Cinder said, smiling weakly.

“That’s…”

“I’m afraid we can’t talk like that. I have to be vague for numerous, somewhat ridiculous reasons.” She chuckled nervously. “I’m just… here to ask you a question.”

Allure sat back in her chair. “…Go ahead.”

“This story is ending,” Cinder explained. A breeze that didn’t exist flew through her mane, spreading rose petals from the flowers she had worked into her swirled manestyle. “Both results produce an end of some kind or other—though I believe one has more power than the other. I won’t say which.”

“…I need to know which side you’re on.”

“Neither.”

“Rev’s non-interference?”

“No, and not the Nihilists either.” She placed a gentle hoof on Allure’s desk. “Some stories don’t get endings. Mine is one of those. I’m taking some ponies… back, I guess you could say.”

“You can’t…”

The Roses in Cinder’s mane flashed a bright red, then black.

“…You can.” Allure realized. “But, you could—“

“You know why I can’t change this. You know full well.”

Allure pursed her lips. “Take them back?”

“Yes. My story doesn’t end. And while true infinity cannot exist… I can take some to a place where that is functionally true. I’m extending that invitation to you. You can come with me, if you want.”

Allure glanced at the picture of Renee. “I can’t leave. Not now. I… need to see this to the end.”

Cinder closed her eyes and let out a sigh. “Okay. Thanks for listening, then.”

“…Who are you taking with you?”

“Some people,” Cinder tilted her hoof side to side, vaguely. “I’m not going to be specific.”

“All right.” Allure jumped over the top of her desk and landed next to Cinder, pulling her into a hug. “Take care, okay?”

“I will. …Remember who you are, Allure. Remember.” She left the embrace. “Now, excuse me, I’ve got some nosy people to deal with.”

She opened the door to Allure’s office and appeared in a distant universe filled with white nothingness where Monika and myself were waiting.

“You intercept me,” Cinder said. “Yet I have nothing to say to you.”

Monika frowned. “That sure sounded like something.”

“She means she has no information for us,” I explained. “I’m inclined to agree, since her story only runs parallel to this one. It is true that it has no ending, which goes against everything happening around us. It is, in fact, still locked in the meta-past, and even if that catches up, needs to move forward.” I pressed my wings together. “…It looks like you get the third option. I wish we were as lucky as you.”

Cinder laughed. “The third option… Oh, remember that when you get through with this.”

“What’s going to happen?” Monika demanded.

“All I have are guesses.” Cinder’s roses flashed a brilliant white. “Really good guesses. That I don’t have to tell you.”

“…Good luck,” I said.

Monika gestured angrily. “She’s leaving us here! Are we just gonna let her?”

“Yes,” I said, taking out a notebook page and scribbling a sentence.

“No you d—“

Cinder walked through the doors again, this time appearing in the front of the Dark Tower.

“Did you do everything you needed?” one of her followers asked.

Cinder nodded. “Everything and then some.” She closed her eyes, lit her horn, and smiled warmly. “It’s time to go.”

The doors of the Dark Tower slammed open.

Levitating every last one of her followers in with her, she entered. As they passed, doors flickered from place to place, unstable with so many souls in the ascension. Some would try to access two different points of life, others would go to places none of them had even dreamed about…

Except Cinder herself, of course.

At the top, the final door rested. A golden knob devoid of any marking. A door without a name.

Cinder smiled, laying her hoof on the door. “I’m home…”

Won’t you stay, dear?

“No.”

Good.

The final door slid open, revealing the Clock of the Multiverse, ready to start ticking away as the final hour approached—but not ticking yet. Before it was the white spirograph of the Source.

“Complete the circle,” Cinder said, floating through the door. She held out a single card—XIX – the Tower—and let it drift into the Source. It became white… and vanished to its destination.

“It was your plan?” an unknown follower asked.

“Yes. No. And maybe. And probably not.” Cinder chuckled. “Don’t think too hard about it. We are no longer concerned with the ending.”

She reached her hoof out to the Source…

And all of them were zapped far, far away.

~~~

Deep in the multiversal past, in an era few remember...

Sweetie Belle glared at her blank flank, furious that a cutie mark refused to appear. She’d tried everything from hang gliding to zip lining to cooking to death-defying stunts to…

A white unicorn fell out of the sky, hitting the ground with an “oof”.

“Wh-what!?” Sweetie Belle spurted.

“Take that, Never-Ending Story! We’ve got you beat!” the other, older Sweetie Belle laughed. Her smile faltered as she looked around. “…Wait, where’s everyone else?”

“H-hello? I’m talking to you!” Sweetie the younger stammered.

“Guess we got split up…” She stood up, allowing Sweetie to get a good look at her flank.

“You have a cutie mark!?”

The older Sweetie finally made eye contact with her younger self—and grinned. “Looks like I’m in the right place.”

“What?”

“Hey, want to start a League of Sweetie Belles?”

“What?”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Come on, you know it’ll be awesome.”

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128 - Collapse, Part 1

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129 - Collapse, Part 2

Hussie, Roxy, Jade, John, and GM all sat in Hussie’s room, waiting for Monika.

“…So…” John said, tapping his fingers together. “We just sit here?”

“I guess?” Roxy said, shrugging. “I’m not sure what exactly we can do until Monika comes back with uber-GM.”

“Uber…” GM said. He had the beginnings of a joke in his mind but couldn’t fully formulate it. “Something something driver, I dunno.” He sat down in one of Hussie’s chairs.

“Did I say you could sit!?” Hussie barked.

“N-no!” GM blurted, standing bolt upright, fear in his eyes.

“But you can sit. Because I’ll be nice and not report breaking and entering to the police.”

“The police?” Jade said, raising an eyebrow. “They’ll be effective?”

“There’s no police here, Hussie has his own realm,” Monika said.

“I can make police!” Hussie said, waving his hands.

“Poorly-rendered shitty ones, right?” John said with a smile. “Oh, are Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff around? Maybe they’re the cops!”

GM stared at John, awed by his ability to flawlessly make jokes at a time like this.

“Why are you so surprised?” Roxy asked. “A near-identical version of you is probably the one writing this.”

“I mean, I dunno? I understand he would, but… it doesn’t seem like something a real person would do.”

“Gee, thanks,” John deadpanned.

“Ack! Sorry, I didn’t mea- I mean, I coul- GAH.” He put his hands over his head. “Why?”

“Existence is cruel, buttercup. Get used to it,” Hussie muttered. “And three, two, one…”

Monika appeared again – a sour expression on her face and no GM with her.

“Uh… Monika?” Roxy asked.

Monika said nothing. She created a whiteboard from nothing along with a red dry-erase marker. She scribbled an image of GM similar to the one Hussie had shown them on the projector. She drew another one, drawing an arrow from the new GM to the older GM. Then she drew a third GM behind the second one. Then a fourth. She added another GM above all of them, drawing arrows to the fourth and from the third. A fifth GM soon took shape on the marker board, with multiple arrows pointing to each other GM, including a sixth GM that had a few arrows tied in knots around him. Soon the marker board was filled with so many arrows it was hard to tell which one was going where.

Monika snapped the dry erase marker in her fingers. “Behold, the tangled nest of thorns we find ourselves in.”

“…Shit,” Roxy said, scratching the back of her head. “It’s not going to be easy to get to him, is it?”

Monika rolled her eyes. “Brilliant deduction, Holmes.”

“…What if the highest GM doesn’t exist?” GM asked. “What if it’s a loop with branches?”

“Not possible with the way the Tower does things,” Monika reminded him.

“Oh, yeah, right. Sorry, I’m a little freaked out so I’m not going to remember all my rules the best. …Are they even my rules?!”

Monika folded her arms. “And if it was just a loop, there’d be no need for all the branches, you’d just need a few dozen of you in one loop to make it impossible. There is a highest GM, he just really really doesn’t want us to find him.”

“There has to be a way to find him though,” Jade said. “Get him to change things.”

“Or at the very least put energy back into our GM,” Roxy said, scratching her chin.

“Oh, of course there would be,” Hussie said. “But you’d need access to the Dark Tower, multiple Prophets, a lot of high-end powers, and oh hey look, what do you know, we have almost all the ingredients we need here.” He clapped his hands together. “IMAGINE THAT!”

“It’s been imagined,” Monika said. “Multiple Prophets – we’ve got Hussie, which should almost be enough, so we just need one more good one. Rohan will work. John and I can give the powers needed, and GM can give a personal connection.”

“How can we use that connection?” Roxy asked. “It’s not that useful, it only tells you if someone’s an alternate of you and can be used to find the closest one. It’s…” She blinked. “Black Thirteen.”

“Oh, geez,” Jade put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Don’t tell me…”

“We need Black Thirteen,” Roxy said. “It can follow that connection wherever. Combined with everything else we have, it should work. We can find the true GM and end his narrative control, turning our GM into the real Prophet. Right?”

Hussie shrugged. “As far as I know. Black Thirteen’ll probably be able to tell you if you’re right.”

“Good. So, here’s the thing, only those who have been to the top of the Dark Tower can hold Black Thirteen without going mad. Who here has been to the top of the Dark Tower?”

No hands went up.

“Shit. We’ll have to work on that too. Monika, Rohan first, he’ll be easiest.”

“Righty-O a-” Monika blinked. “…Oh.”

“I don’t like the sound of that ‘Oh’,” John said. GM nodded in agreement.

“I uh… I’m not obfuscating ka scans right now,” Monika said with a nervous smile. “Apparently running through all the GMs disabled it. So Twilence probably heard everything we just said.”

“Block it, block it!” Roxy blurted.

~~~

“Corona, I have to leave you. I need to stop some morons from meddling with the fabric of narrative itself,” I said.

Corona blinked. “You were just telling me we needed to attack their Tower Ring, now you have to leave?”

“There’s multiple things going on at once! I trust you to handle the Tower thing. I have to deal with this. I won’t take any soldiers, just myself. Since the other side is currently lacking Monika, it shouldn’t give them any edge. You still have Pinkie – use her. I have to take care of the GM problem…”

“…Okay. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Not me, no. You just need to stop the Tower Ring.”

“Soon as we know how, I’ll get on it.”

I nodded, spreading my wings and lighting my horn.

“Good luck.”

I smiled at her – and was gone in an instant.

Corona ruffled her feathers and sent a quick message to all the commanders – mobilize, they’ve fixed our old Tower Ring and are ready to use it. She knew Empress Twilight would already have the Void on standby for something of that magnitude. Meet at Empy’s castle in fifteen minutes. Pinkie, you arrive sooner, I need to talk to you.

Corona teleported herself to Empy’s castle. She gave a curt nod to the Empress. “Twilence had to run off to deal with the GM and John problem. So expect the other side to see all of this.”

The Empress nodded curtly. “Of course.”

Pinkie’s Party popped in the front door. Pinkie herself was smiling and moving with energy, and only Vriska was able to join her. Nova looked as though she was struggling to keep her gaze forward. Jotaro’s expression gave nothing away, but given how closely Pidge was watching him with concern, he was still not taking Jolyne’s betrayal very well.

Corona’s soft smile vanished. “…I’m sorry, I have to call you all back to action. They have a Tower Ring.”

“…Dammit,” Nova muttered, putting a hoof to her muzzle. “Just… dammit.”

“Where’d they get it?” Pidge asked. “All intelligence says the Combine’s efforts aren’t producing any fruit!”

“They repaired ours,” Corona said, folding her hands.

“…Fuck,” Vriska said, pupils contracting. “FUCK.”

“That does about sum it up,” Pidge admitted.

Jotaro sighed. “What do we need to do?”

“I’m still formulating the plan – and we need to talk to the others as well. Right now, we’ve got the militaries mobilizing and the Void at the ready. Pinkie, what do you know?”

Pinkie shrugged. “The war’s ending. Pretty sure this is the last day.”

“And they’re the ones with the Ring…” Corona muttered.

“It doesn’t mean we’ve lost. The Ring is re-programmable.”

“But they had time and resources to reprogram it! We don’t!”

“There’ll probably be something,” Pinkie said, pursing her lips. “Y’know, there are a lot of other groups doing things I can’t see. Monika and John are doing weird meta stuff and I’m pretty sure Blumiere’s doing something, but he’s been completely hidden for a long time now.”

Corona nodded slowly. “Anything else that might be helpful?”

“Since Monika’s off elsewhere, we’ll know exactly when Eve and Giorno move the Ring, and to where.” Pinkie beamed. “Instant response!”

“At least they won’t be able to surprise us.” Corona narrowed her eyes. “I’m forming a plan in my head, but I don’t want to say it out loud. I’ll need you five as a team of heroes for it. I know you probably aren’t up for it, but we don’t have that luxury. None of us do.”

“You can count on us!” Pinkie said with a salute. “Right everyone?”

Vriska and Pidge didn’t wait – “yeah!”

Nova forced a smile. “Yeah.”

Jotaro’s face was dark. He nodded but made no further motions.

Corona smiled sadly. “Glad to hear it.”

It was at this point the other leaders started to arrive. Phage, the Shabanash, Minna, Feferi, Thanos, Morty, Edelgard, a Starcross cloud-being Corona couldn’t remember the name of, and a handful of others.

Corona waited for the start time before explaining. “We need to make a plan to stop their Tower Ring from preserving the multiverse. Keep in mind that they can see everything we do right now because Twilence is off on a mission to deal with John Egbert, GM, and Monika. Be careful what you say. We do not kn-”

“TWITCHA-TWITCH!” Pinkie blurted. “They’re doing something!”

~~~

“How are we going to move it?” Starbeat asked. “It’s not a simple maneuver to place a Tower Ring around the Tower. The dimensional calculations are complex, take time, and have to account for the Tower’s tendency to refuse incoming travel.”

“Simple,” Giorno said with a slight smirk. “We hitch a ride.”

“With who?” Eve asked. “Do the Xeelee remnants have enough technology to do that?”

“Close, but not quite.”

A small, white, humanoid projection appeared in front of them. “Hey! Long time no see!”

“White Nettle!?” Eve said, mouth agape.

“Yep! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Downstreamer!” She winked. “I’m ready to move this Tower Ring to the Nexus’ rose planet whenever you’re ready!”

“It’s time,” Giorno said.

“Great! Might want to get inside, not sure what’ll happen to the rest of this universe.”

“Insid-” Eve, Starbeat, and Giorno were teleported into the Tower Ring. Along the edge of the spinning device was a long corridor that went all the way around. The corridor was wide enough to house trucks, though it was empty. On the inner surface were numerous screens, a few of which displayed the purple word PRESERVE in big bold letters. One-way windows lined the outer surface.

Eve took out her phone, seeing several messages, including ones from military leaders concerned about the nature of the orders. Don’t worry; we had to keep this secret to keep Twilence from finding out, she replied. We’re finally ready. This is the final day. She quickly realized the phone wouldn’t be enough to actually help her organize everyone, so she created a chair and rolled to the side of the corridor with the screens, interfacing with the technology. She found it already prepared for her. “Nice,” she said.

“I’m surprised he thought of so much without consulting me,” Starbeat noted.

“He’s the Overhead of Intelligence for a reason,” Eve explained, watching reports file across her screen. “An-”

The Tower Ring shifted. Eve fixed her gaze on the windows and witnessed an amazing show of color. The three of them were graced with a brilliant trip through White Nettle’s many-universe body, scenery shifting dramatically from a void universe, to one that was composed entirely of electrolytes submerged in a solution, to a large crystal matrix that served as her primary brain.

They eventually appeared around the Dark Tower. Since the Dark Tower was in the center, Eve couldn’t actually see it – but looking out the window, she could see a planet covered in endless roses. The red planet –around the nineteenth most distant star of the Nexus – was already surrounded by Preservation Alliance ships.

The preservation protocol activated. The purple areas of the Tower Ring started to glow brighter, forcing the Tower Ring itself to shake.

“Do we need to get out?” Eve asked.

“It’ll automatically remove us at the last minute,” Giorno said.

“But there’s no way it’s going to work now,” Starbeat said. “Three… Two… One…”

The Void tore through reality and grabbed hold of the Tower Ring, finding a much easier time accessing the Nexus because it was a universe so close to its home. It would have disintegrated the Tower Ring…

…were it not for White Nettle using her power to counteract it. White and Black flashed along the edge of the Tower Ring until the power of the Downstreamer nearly overpowered that of the Void. The great construct of darkness would fight to its final breath, however, and latched itself onto the center teeth of the spirograph-like Ring, preventing it from fully interfacing with the Dark Tower.

“And now we have to last long enough for the Void to fail,” Giorno said, narrowing his eyes.

“Their fleets are already arriving,” Eve said, glancing at the reports on the screens. “Nothing but simple retaliations right now, but they’ll have a plan sooner rather than later.” She saw a feed from Scooter. “They’re already plotting carefully. Corona’s got a plan, but she’s being deliberately vague about what it means…”

~~~

Blumiere and the rest of his ‘companions’ walked through the field of Roses, Can’-ka No Rey. In order to keep themselves from being cut up like they were in a shredder, Vivian had taken to burning a path ahead of them with her fire. She felt horrible burning the beautiful flowers, but they needed to get to the Tower, and levitating all of them would have been difficult.

“Question,” Jenny asked, raising a hand. “How do we know the Tower is this way?”

“All things serve the Beam!” Dimentio said, not that Jenny could hear it.

“Watch the way the flowers blow in the wind,” Nanoha said from her awkward tied-up position on Alushy’s back. “This close to the Tower, the randomness of the building blocks of existence tend toward a particular path.”

Jenny cocked her head – and saw it. The flowers they were walking over all leaned ever so slightly in the same direction, forging a path, while the rest of the roses leaned in mostly-random directions.

“You know, I think I read about this,” Jenny said.

“You? Read?” Alushy laughed.

“I read!”

“You wouldn’t remember, though!” Renee said, smirking. “I doubt a little thing such as that would stick in that damaged little brain of yours.”

“You seem happy,” Jenny deadpanned.

“I am!” Renee said, taking a moment to stroll through the roses, returning to the path without a single scratch in her legs. “I’m at home here, darling. Among the red flowers and the Beam – so right.”

“Right, that’s it, what’s your deal?” Sai asked, reminding everyone she existed around Blumiere’s neck. “I’ve run every calculation I can think of, compared every piece of data, and I can’t explain you. I’m not even sure why you’re necessary, there were ways for us to get the Ritual without you! We could have gotten to the Tower without you!”

“As true as can be! Also, don’t give yourself voice inflections, it’s not like you’re a full AI. You and I are the same, little machine.”

Sai beeped. “You are more than just a machine. Those who Come Back Wrong do not get this level of Awareness.”

“On the surface, you and I are the same. Deeper down you’re just a loose electron in the Sea of Infinite Possibility.”

“What are you?”

Renee grinned. “Screwing with you.”

“GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!” Alushy roared.

“And that’s a point for me!”

“Stop it, children,” Blumiere called over his shoulder. “This momentous occasion gains nothing from your bickering.”

“Au contraire, my fine blue friend,” Renee said, trotting up alongside him. “How much do you think the… ‘audience’ cares about these little tag-alongs now?” She looked straight out. “Wouldn’t it be a shame if something happened to them?”

“Did… did you just threaten the readers?” Vivian asked.

Renee didn’t change the position of her gaze. She simply chuckled. “Blumiere, Dimentio has something he wants to tell you.”

Dimentio shot Renee a look.

“Ah, the harlequin finds himself speechless! Try to change your plan. I dare you. See what happens, just to spite me and my unknowable ways.”

Dimentio ignored her, turning to Blumiere. “You need to make a call.”

Blumiere raised an eyebrow. “What kind o-” he blinked. “Ah. I trust it there’s some message-sending ritual?”

“Ahahhaha! What do you take me for, a primitive scrounging in a cave? Just use your cell phone, this universe is within range of the receivers.”

Blumiere blinked. “Oh.” He pulled out his phone and sent a quick message.

Jenny tried to get a look at what it was, but he kept the screen hidden from her. “Hey! Come on! Spill the beans!”

Renee held a magic blade to Jenny’s throat. “Such a shame, she talks too much…”

“Don’t you dare…”

Renee booped Jenny on the nose. Jenny stared at her in disbelief.

“Did you just assume that I would be brutal because I cut your hand off earlier? Please, you people and your assumptions!” She pulled the knife back and chuckled.

“You stole my thing,” Sai beeped.

“It wasn’t your thing, dear.”

~~~

Corona checked the message she got on her phone. Never before had she pressed the delete button so fast after reading something.

“Who saw that!?”

The leaders looked at her with confused expressions.

“I’m asking Pinkie,” Corona said, magically wiping her phone of stray data just to be safe.

Pinkie shrugged. “Well, I didn’t see it, so I don’t think anyone else saw it. What was it?”

Corona glared at her.

Pinkie chuckled. “Ahah… Sorry. Ahem.” She shook her head. “I don’t think they’re doing anything about it. So we’re safe to assume nobody knows what it was.”

“Good. It’s paramount they don’t know. But this also means the plan isn’t going to make a lot of sense…” She folded her hands, taking a moment to confer with Raging Sights about the nature of the plan. “Okay, I’m going to make this clear. You are all going to have to just trust me on this.”

“They’ve got a Tower Ring around the Dark Tower,” Phage said. “We’re willing to try anything.”

“I hope you are,” Corona said, furrowing her brow. “First off, our fleets need to do their very best to occupy their fleets. But, we can’t have any of our ships actually attack the Tower Ring directly.”

“…What?” a Shabanash asked. “Seriously? Don’t try to destroy it?”

“Yep. Don’t try to destroy it. Just keep the other ships occupied. Don’t even try to get a shot if a clearing opens up.”

“That’s absurd!”

“Probably,” Corona admitted. “But I can’t tell you why, or else they’ll know. So just go with it, we don’t have time to argue.”

The Shabanash nodded reluctantly.

“Pinkie, just double checking, White Nettle is currently protecting the Tower Ring?”

Pinkie nodded. “She’s pretty integral to the whole plan.”

“Your team is going to be tasked with getting her hold off the Tower Ring. Morty, you need to create other teams to try the same thing. I won’t lie – they’re going to be Redshirts. There’s a chance one or two of them mean something, but we need a lot of cannon fodder to make sure Pinkie’s Party gets in.”

Morty looked at a data pad. “Already checking out some people. Should they be high-level hero sorts?”

“If you can bring yourself to spare them, yes. Nettle should be focused on combating the Void, so she won’t be able to watch her insides very well. That’s your way in.”

Pinkie saluted. “You can count on us!”

“The third part of the plan will be mine.” Corona stood up tall and spread her wings. “I am leading a group of heroes directly to the Tower Ring. We don’t get to attack the Ring either; we have to get to it. I’ll give everyone who makes it further orders upon arrival.” She turned to Minna. “Think you can round up volunteers?”

“Easily,” Minna responded.

Corona cracked her knuckles. “Good. Empy, how much time do we have?”

“Four hours. Maybe less,” she said, focusing intently on controlling the Void. “If we mobilize now we won’t be in danger of cutting it down to the wire.”

Corona clapped her hands. “You heard her. Move it. Everyone should find something to do on one part of the plan. Ships, Nettle, or with me. Go! Go! Go!”

~~~

“They’re mobilizing,” Giorno said, checking one of the reports from Scooter. “They’re trying to keep their plan from us.”

“Well, yeah,” Eve said. “That’s what they’ve been doing since the war started.”

“But they don’t have Twilence now – we should be able to tear something out of them.” He narrowed his eyes as he read the report on the plan. “It’s almost like they think they can reclaim the Tower Ring.”

“Can they?”

“Not any way I’m aware of. It took us weeks to reprogram it. They won’t have weeks.”

“Doesn’t mean they can’t,” Starbeat pointed out.

“But they’d have to do it some other way. Some way we can’t plan for…” Giorno grimaced. “And Corona’s being careful. As far as we’re aware, she’s the only one who actually knows.” He folded his hands together. “I have to go consult with the rest of the Intelligence Division – Eve, I trust you can run things from here?”

“I’m not the only leader here,” Eve reminded him. “But yes, I can oversee the conflict. Go do what you need to do.”

Giorno nodded, leaving through a portal.

Eve turned back to the reports, scrolling through them. “Starbeat, you’re my new assistant.”

“You have a lot of assistants,” Starbeat pointed out.

Eve smirked. “I’m a mare who needs organization, what can I say?”

“Anything you need organized?”

“Yeah, let’s look at that plan again… They’re specifically trying to not destroy the Tower Ring, so let’s move some defenses back from it.”

“Unless that’s Corona’s plan. She could be trying to dupe us.”

“True, but we’ll know if she communicates something to anyone else.”

“Will we? It says here we have no idea who sent that message to her that changed everything.”

“Calculated risk. We can see her. If she sends something, it won’t be as easy to hide.” She looked through the reports. She sent out orders to loosen the defenses on the Dark Tower itself and spread out, covering more ground to keep the rest of Corona’s fleet occupied. Attached to those orders was the suggestion to keep a very close eye on Corona and her people. Ships might have had a hard time hitting such small targets, but if enough were shooting…

“Ah, that’s what their fleet is for,” Eve realized. “Our fleet won’t be able to focus on Corona with them attacking.”

“Whatever she’s doing,” Starbeat said, scratching her head. “Luckily I think Giorno’s handling her, so…”

“The third aspect of the plan, Nettle. She clearly only expects Pinkie’s Party to be of any use there. And we have something that can counter them – a defense.”

“Something?”

“Well, several someones.” Eve pressed a few buttons and sent a message to the League of Sweetie Belles. “I can only hope they’re able to work past recent events…” Her confident, somewhat pleased demeanor dropped as she remembered what had happened to Renee.

She couldn’t think of that now. Bigger things were at stake.

~~~

Rohan sat under the watchful eye of the Research Overhead.

“Are you certain?” the R.O. asked, holding up a page of manga.

“Look, I’m about as certain as a goldfish concerning last Christmas.” Rohan folded his arms. “It’s a story. I think it’s good. It’s about Eve and triumph.”

“Except you have doubts.”

“I’m up against Twilence. She’ll just overwrite it.”

“She’s busy at the moment, Intelligence says,” the R.O. pointed out. “You might have a momentary advantage.”

“Really? Then why haven’t we gotten word of the victory yet? Eve should be facing off against Corona right now and achieving victory.”

“Time displacement.”

“If you’ll look at the meticulously planned background you’ll see a few time codes in the screens on the Tower Ring.”

“Five seconds from now…” the R.O. said. He counted the five seconds in his head, the stars in his featureless face pulsing with every tick. On the fifth tick, John zapped into existence with all the rest of his group. Roxy delivered a punch to the R.O.’s face.

The R.O. seemed mildly amused at the punch. “Ineffective.”

“You forget, I’m also a genius inventor!” Roxy said with a cheeky grin. “In about… oh, whatever, now, the virus will take your muscle functions offline.”

The R.O. fell into a heap – still completely conscious, but otherwise helpless. “Why? I understand you are on our side. I would have assisted you.”

“Couldn’t take a risk, no time to explain,” Jade said. “Sorry.”

“I’m not!” Hussie shouted. “Take that you smug toaster!”

“He was rather smug,” Monika agreed.

Rohan kicked the R.O. “Serves you right. You’re the worst editor I’ve ever had.”

“Hey, guys!” Jade waved her hands. “Don’t be mean to him!”

“We’ve gotta go anyway,” Roxy said. “John, Tower world, doesn’t matter which one as long as we can breathe.”

“How can I do that?” John asked.

“Just think about it and it’ll happen,” Monika answered.

“Kukukukukuku…” a new voice said. Everyone looked up to see Magane on top of a bookshelf, kicking her legs back and forth. “Foolish Monika, it’s not that simple!”

“Yes it is!” Monika blurted.

“A lie about a lie…” Magane snapped her fingers.

Roxy blinked. “Wait, you’re the one who bends reality with lies.”

“Yep! You’re welcome by the way. Magane: savior of the meta-team!”

John cocked his head. “So, wait, all I have to do is think about i-

ZAP

-t and it… Woah, it actually worked!”

They were standing in a field of roses with noticeable tufts of grass between the flowers. They couldn’t see the Dark Tower, but Monika felt more than enough ka energy here to do what they needed to do.

She clapped her hands together. “Okay everyone, we’re close! We just have to get one last piece of the puzzle – Black Thirteen.”

GM shuddered, but said nothing.

“Do we know where it is?” Jade asked.

“I still haven’t gotten an explanation as to what’s going on,” Rohan muttered, folding his arms.

Roxy summoned several stacks of paper and manga drawing pens. “Here, you and Hussie are our prophets. We’re trying to get to GM to edit the main story of Songs of the Spheres to preservation by getting this GM his Prophet powers back.”

Rohan looked at GM. “This kid is the greatest prophet?”

“A-HEM!” Hussie spat, hands on his hips.

“Your style is too shitty to be the greatest.”

“Just you wait until I snop you across the face you little fucker.”

“Try it and see what happens, Waste.”

“Uh, I’m not that great,” GM said, raising his hand. “I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time.”

“Besides the point,” Monika said, waving a hand. “The point is that we are going to need to get Black Thirteen. Which is problematic for two reasons. One: we don’t know where it is. Two: none of us have been to the top of the Tower.”

Roxy slowly turned her head to Magane. “Hey… You can just say you were at the top of the Tower, right?”

Magane shook her head. “If I could do something like that I would have made myself God a long time ago just to see what it was like.”

“Figures.”

“Maybe we can convince Flagg to help us?” John suggested.

There was a large chorus of laughs all around. Monika stopped short. She glanced at GM. “Is that…?”

“It’s so crazy it just might work,” GM said. “…Man, I’ve always wanted to say that.”

“I don’t like this plan,” Rohan said.

“I love this plan!” Magane said with a laugh. “Talk to Flagg! Oh this should be rich! Hey, Rolal, get me some popcorn!”

“Nah,” Roxy responded, hand to her chin. “Who do we know that’s been to the top of the Tower?”

GM adjusted his glasses. “Uh… Allure?”

“Allure’s backup,” Monika declared. Then she turned to Magane. “Since you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful.”

“But I already diiiiid!”

“Just make it so we find Randall Flagg easily.”

“You can already do that.”

Monika grinned. “Uh, no I can’t.”

Magane facepalmed. “…I was serious. You are the Lord of Ka. Black Thirteen basically is ka. Just follow the trail!”

“Oh.”

Magane chuckled.

“This all seems a little too absurd and whimsical to be deciding the fate of the multiverse,” Rohan pointed out.

“That… is probably my fault,” GM said. “Sorry.”

“Why apologize?” Jade asked. “I think it’s keeping us all sane.”

“SANE!?” Hussie blurted.

Jade glared at him. “Those of us who were sane to begin with, anyway.”

~~~

The Batter walked through the roses of the field. He felt them tearing at him, but he didn’t bleed. He never bled. He was the Batter, he couldn’t let things such as the roses impede his progress, no matter how sacred the flowers were. His sacred mission was higher. His mission was higher than all else.

He would find the retconner. He would Purify him. He would ensure the sanctity of existence was not ruined by one man’s fickle, impure mind.

None could escape the bat of the Batter. He was more than a force of nature, he was a force of Purity, and as such was just as dangerous to those who had summoned him as whatever he was tasked with Purifying.

The Ritual of Purity had no control over what the Batter’s mission would be. Many had summoned him only to find that his mission was to Purify their entire world, making the multiverse better off.

He continued to stride through the roses, bat always at the ready. The life within the roses recoiled from the bat – they knew it wasn’t what every normal sense told them it was. It was an instrument of the Batter, an extension of him. It was more than a weapon. Much more.

However, even the Batter was not immune to the trials of the Dark Tower. He was close to the Tower’s influence, and thus, could not escape the twisting of ka. He himself remained Pure, perhaps the most incorruptible being in all of existence, but the world around him did not. The sky slowly faded to a deep red as he walked, a bizarre disjointed tune starting to play in the background.

He knew who it would be long before he saw them. A small child, Hugo, looking at him with pleading eyes.

The Batter had no issue reliving this moment. He swung the bat, Purifying the child in one swing. It had taken more than one swing the first time.

The first in a long line of completed Purifications. Compared to that first one, this would be easy. There were no worlds that needed to be erased this time, no corruption that had gone too far: just one man with an unholy power.

A woman appeared out of the roses. “You do not need to kill him.”

The Batter had nothing to say to her. He Purified her easily – apparitions were nothing. The retconner was his goal. Everything else was just an obstacle.

Then he saw himself appear out of the roses. This was the first thing that gave him pause. He did not need to be Purified – he was as Pure as could be. He marched up to himself.

The other Batter blocked him.

“I need to continue my sacred mission to Purify the retconner,” the Batter told his other self. “Let me pass.”

“I must continue my sacred mission to Purify the Zones,” the other Batter said, hefting his bat. “As the guardian of this Zone, you must fall.”

The Batter knew the Dark Tower was trying to get him to see things from the perspective of those that needed Purifying. But he had never doubted himself before, and he would not doubt himself now – that was part of what made him Pure.

Never a second thought. Never any hesitation.

He met the bat of his other self, not surprised in the slightest to find him a slightly more solid apparition. They both ground their teeth, struggling to overpower the other with strength alone. The area between the bats began to glow.

There was an explosion that uprooted all the roses for several meters. When the dust cleared, only the Batter remained.

He sensed his ordeals were not quite over – behind him, a devious eldritch being that drove all who saw it mad rose into the sky. The Batter glanced over his shoulder, shrugged, and moved on.

“DO YOU NOT REMEMBER YOUR FAILURE!?” the apparition of Azathoth screamed at him. “DO YOU NOT FEEL THE NEED TO PURIFY ME TO SATISFY YOURSELF!?”

The Batter didn’t turn back.

“BATTER! TURN AROUND! TAKE WHAT IS YOURS!”

The Batter refused.

“BATTER!”

The Batter kept walking. ‘Azathoth’ eventually dissipated. The Batter gave this fact no recognition – he moved forward as if he had not endured any trials whatsoever.

~~~

“Ah, the Tower’s in sight!” Renee said, running ahead of the group, deep into the roses. She pulled the tarot card out of her hat and held it up, matching the image of XIX Tower with the Dark Tower itself. “The past is gone!”

“…What?” Jenny asked. “…Good grief, I am getting tired of saying that…”

“Be resolute!” Renee said with a cackle. “There are trials ahead. And rewards for those who strive. Hah! The surreal search endures!” She pointed toward the Dark Tower. “Just take a step. And I will watch you struggle.”

Nanoha glared at Renee. “We know the Tower changes your perceptions when you get close.”

“…We do?” Vivian asked.

Nanoha looked at her with pity. “I’m sorry, little one. You may be subject to your worst nightmares, you may be reverted to what you once were, you may be given your greatest dream. The Tower will drive you to anything it deems appropriate.”

“The White Devil speaks the truth,” Renee observed, rubbing her hooves together.

“Let’s get this over with,” Blumiere said. “I’ve been here before. I have no intention of returning to Bleck again.”

“The confidence!” Dimentio announced. “Is it the trait of a paragon or a fool? One could argue they are one and the same!”

Alushy groaned. “That psychotic book is talking in your head again, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Blumiere said, adjusting his hat. “And I do not care what it has to say.” He continued walking forward, looking right at the pillar of darkness that was the Dark Tower.

And then he was alone. No Prognosticus, no Timpani, nothing. It was only him… and Renee.

“Are you an apparition of the Tower or are you really here?” Blumiere asked.

Renee smiled, refusing to answer.

“I don’t know what I expected…” He continued forward. Renee trotted backward such that she was always a few meters in front of him. She said nothing.

Blumiere decided he didn’t mind her silence. Her gaze may have been unsettling, but her words were always worse. Spoken with a voice of a dear friend, blaspheming the lost unicorn’s memory.

“Shouldn’t you be worried about the others?”

“I am,” Blumiere answered honestly. “But if the Tower wishes me to be separate from them, there is nothing I can do. If I am to enter the Tower alone, so be it.”

“Ah, the determinator! So fixated on the goal he’s willing to leave all else behind! What about your dear wife?”

“I would not be here if she were not in agreement with me,” Blumiere said. “If… if she has fallen back there, or will fall, the only way to honor her is to make it to the Tower.”

“Without the Prognosticus?”

“I doubt the Prognosticus will allow itself to be consumed by the Tower.”

“Aw, poor Blumiere, making assumptions again!” Renee stood up on her hind legs and clapped. “How cute!”

Blumiere made no response.

“You’re the least fun. Too sure of yourself, now. You can’t just be put through the ‘evil self’ thing again, that’s already been done. The others are much, much more interesting.”

“You torment us?”

“Remember where you are,” Renee said, rolling her eyes.

“Wouldn’t that be an assumption?”

Renee laughed. “The slightest hint of some real understanding! Maybe I should give you a test – show you that you don’t even know enough to get a D.”

“Not all of us are Twilence.”

“Twilence, Twilence, Twilence… The closest. A-minus, probably.” Renee chuckled.

Then they were at the front door of the Tower.

“How…”

“Who cares about space?” Renee asked. “We’re next to the Tower. If you’re supposed to make it to the door, you’ll make it to the door.” She leaned against the eldritch bricks of the Tower. “You’re not even the first one here.”

Jenny was leaning against the Tower as well, the Prognosticus in her hand. “Figures you’d make it.”

“Thinking of running away?” Blumiere asked her.

“Wouldn’t do much,” Jenny said, handing him back the Prognosticus. “You’d still do whatever it is you plan to do in there, and I’m not getting anything from that book. I don’t think it likes me.”

“She’s absolutely delightful to torment,” Dimentio said, chuckling.

Timpani and Alushy appeared next. Timpani was covered in blood, a harrowed expression on her face. Alushy looked afraid.

“What happened?” Jenny asked.

“I was Timpani. Timpani was me,” Alushy said. “It was fucked up.”

“That sounds kinda fun ac-”

“STARLIGHT BREAKER!”

A beam of red-pink light shot across their visions. The next thing they knew, Nanoha had been thrown into the wall of the Dark Tower at high speeds. The Tower itself could not crumble even from such a large force, so she was effectively flattened against it. She fell down, the roses on the ground cutting deep into her, even through her magic barrier jacket.

“Experiencing defeat,” Blumiere guessed.

“I’ve experienced defeat before,” Nanoha muttered, standing up. “I was fighting Fate-chan with Vivian and Sai. That should have gotten us out th-”

Vivian was thrown into the Dark Tower – but she had a yellow scythe device planted in her head, electrocuting her dark body. Sai hung around her neck, screaming just as loudly as Vivian was.

“VIVIAN!” Blumiere shouted, pulling on her with his magic. The yellow scythe dissipated the moment he touched it, but the damage was done. By the time he got her down, her shadowy form had dissipated, leaving only her hat and the necklace of Sai. Sai was flashing rapidly, unable to process what had just happened.

“WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THAT!?” Jenny shouted at the Dark Tower.

“Oh, it wasn’t a point for her,” Renee said, grabbing hold of Sai. “It was a point for Sai – and all of you, I suppose, but reminding you that this isn’t happy Candyland isn’t really much of a point, is it?” Renee held up Sai, smirking. “This poor partial AI has been given hints and snippets of what true sapience is, ever since she entered the top of the Tower with Corona. A glitch here, a tweak there – not able to see it. To understand it.” Renee pointed at Vivian’s hat. “But oh, look at that. Fixed to Vivian. Experiencing full sapience as her, able to feel true fear, true panic, and the true feeling of death!” She tossed Sai into Blumiere’s hands. He caught her. “I guess we aren’t so different after all, our roots are so closely intertwined in this way… A play on soulessness…”

“That’s it, you’re dead,” Jenny said, pulling her fist back and punching Renee.

Renee flew backward, landing on her hooves. “Genevieve, darling, put that fist away and talk like an adult. This is a big girl zone.”

“Are you trying to make her mad!?” Timpani blurted.

“She is,” Nanoha said, casting a spell on Jenny to make her slip. She turned to Blumiere. “We both know how this goes.”

“You attack me, I use the Prognosticus to win,” Blumiere stated plainly. “I already have your precise soul reading.”

Nanoha nodded. “So let us not fight, let us talk.”

“You know I have to go in there.”

“I do. Once the Dark Tower has called someone, it is a rare individual who can turn their back on the summons.” She placed her hands together on top of Raising Heart. “All I ask is that you reconsider what you do once you are inside.”

“I won’t do that either. I will do what I need to do at the top of the Dark Tower.”

“THE TOP!” Sai shouted, starting everyone. “We must all go at once! At the same time! The Tower will open as it never has before! This is the moment, the Choice, the death, the life!”

“She gets it,” Renee said.

Sai somehow floated into the air, moving toward the door. “I can open it. I have to open it. Of course! I would never have let something as pedestrian as death keep me from the answers! The final solution!”

“I guess I arrived at the perfect time then,” a new voice said.

“Just keeps getting bigger and better,” Alushy muttered as they turned to see who the voice came from.

A single Aradia stood outside a dinged-looking TARDIS, an omnitrix on her wrist. “I was sent by… the winds of ka. I don’t have a side in this conflict. So I get to watch it happen.”

“Who cares!?” Sai blurted. “Death is upon us! Get in line!”

Aradia stared at the floating ‘AI’. She clearly didn’t like what Sai represented.

“DARK TOWER!” Sai shouted. “THIS IS SOMBRA! I have come from beyond the final door demanding you open yourself to us! The time is at hand!”

Renee grinned, nodding with approval.

The doors to the Dark Tower slid open…

~~~

Corona flew through the space around the Tower’s planet, hundreds of heroes lined up behind her. All of them wore personal armor, giving them speed close to that of speeders.

She’d meticulously made sure she didn’t know any of their names – either by selectively removing them before they left or altering her own memory.

They were all Redshirts for her. Because she had to do it.

All her companions died behind her by the dozen as they flew through the field of ships. Tears streamed from her eyes – she was purposefully leading all of them to their deaths. They all thought they might be able to come with her to the end, but that would not happen. All of them but her.

She was the only one who could do it.

But for now, she needed to keep up the illusion of being a commander.

“LEFT!” she shouted, diverting them away from some TSAB magical ship weapons. The TSAB ship tried to lock onto them again, but a Starcross behemoth barreled into it, keeping them safe.

She saluted them with her wing and continued to lead her heroes through the space – closer and closer to the planet. To the Dark Tower. To the Tower Ring, that horrid black Spirograph. That Spirograph that had been hers.

Corona’s team started getting smarter – dodging more fire, angling away from the ships attacking them, and taking advantage of areas where ships were busy. This was seen best when they entered the shadow of the Austraeoh and Starjammer – the ships O’Neill and Minna were running. Both were whaling on each other.

Maybe it was the proximity to the Tower, or maybe her empathic abilities had chosen to evolve considerably in that moment – but she could see the fight between the two happening.

(“Starkilling weapons only – I want that ship down!” O’Neill shouted.

“Shields aren’t holding!” Clandestine said. “The Spectral Rods are having difficulty breaking through the runes!”

“I don’t give a damn about those Runes!” O’Neill shouted. “Cause a fallout if you have to – get that ship down!”)

(Minna saw the nuclear missiles coming. She ordered the Starjammer to shift out of the way at a perfect angle to direct the radiation at the Austraeoh’s ally ships.

She said nothing to her soldiers – they knew what she wanted, and did it.

They would prove the Austraeoh, for all its power, to be just a fancy toy.)

Corona led her team closer to the interior of the army. They saw a large Combine construction blocking their way. “Split up – half, take out that ship, rest, with me!” She twisted to the side, dodging numerous explosions aimed at her.

One would think those sent to destroy the Combine construction would have been sacrifices – but in reality, it was the other way around. Everyone was fixating on Corona, not the rest of the team. They were able to take out the Combine construction almost unimpeded while Corona’s team dwindled to only a few dozen.

Corona sensed a few deserting. She didn’t blame them.

She met back up with the strike-force half and dove closer still to the planet. She still couldn’t see the Dark Tower, but she knew it was there. She could feel it.

They had passed the ship layer of the battle, entering what could best be described as the Layer of Heroes. Skaians, superheroes, and many others fought each other out in the open, losing most if not all coherent plan to focus on punching each other. Capture devices flew left and right rapidly.

It was a better fate than incineration by space laser.

(Thanos and Lightning glared at each other as the various heroes punched around them.

“So it’s come to this,” Thanos said, flexing his Infinity Gauntlet.

Lightning held up her own. “Both useless here.”

“I know, completely pointless. Such a shame, it would have been better to have a true fight.”

Lightning smirked. “I’m going to punch you with it anyway.”

He chuckled and nodded. They both pulled their fists back simultaneously and punched each others’ respective faces in.)

Corona continued on. Most of those with her had been caught up in smaller fights or had been defeated already. There were a few Skaians left with her, and a couple Twilights from the Sparkle Census. They were working as a pretty effective military unit. “Good job,” she told them.

“Thanks,” the leading Twilight said – she was an earth pony. “…We know what you’re doing.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“You’re forgiven. But, if you could do one thing, could you not fail?”

“I’m not planning on it,” Corona assured her. “And, for the record, try to get captured, not killed, okay?”

The Twilight nodded. “Got it.” She pulled up, purposefully taking the Census away to distract All Might.

“I AM HE-”

“You’re over there,” the Twilight said after bucking him away.

(Meenah and Feferi’s tridents clashed together in the skies while hundreds of their Skaian followers battled around them.

“Just have to say, you’re cool. You know that?” Feferi said, twisting around her weapon and kicking Meenah in the face.

“What the shell? This isn’t some feelin’s jam, this is war!”

“So?” Feferi giggled. “We’re fighting, doesn’t mean we have to hate each other!” She took a punch from Meenah for that one.

“You’re so cray,” Meenah muttered, shaking her head.

“Aw really?”

Meenah shrugged. “Really, I guess.”

Feferi stabbed her with her prongs. “GOTCHA!”

“…We’re ghosts, Fef.”

“Yeah, but that still hurt, right?”

“Scrodclammit,” Meenah muttered. Their tridents clashed again.)

Corona wasn’t actually alone when they got through most of the fighting. Her group entered an area of calm in the atmosphere of the planet, just over the field of roses. There would be another wave of resistance at the Tower Ring itself, but until then they were in the clear.

Or so she thought.

When Giorno showed up and took out her five remaining soldiers, she knew she was in for it.

“GOLD EXPERIENCE REQUIEM!” Giorno shouted. “You will never reach reality!”

He had clearly planned this – laid a trap for her and her group, taken them out in an instant, and aimed his supremely overpowered Stand right at her, planning to create a feedback loop where she could never make it to the Tower Ring.

She couldn’t let him hit her. She slowed perceived time down to a crawl to converse with Raging Sights. “Okay, we can’t let this fist hit us, but it really looks like it’s going to hit us.”

“Empathize through the arm from the side.”

“Might take too long. Bacon Pancakes will be pretty ineffectual as well. Do we have time to shift space?”

“Not definitely.”

Corona’s mind raced. “I have to get through this. If I let him stick me here…”

“The death spell would do it.”

Corona paused. “No, no, no. He has an immunity anyway“

“Not if you cast it with all the tricks you had at your disposal.”

“It… it would work. His Stand is affixed to his spirit and it would translate right to him before he could keep me from reality…” She gulped. “He was banking that I wouldn’t dare use it. Not on him.”

“We are so close, Corona. What’s one more?”

“Don’t talk like that. Never talk like that,” Corona said – crying even though she was stuck in her mindscape. “Every death has meaning. Every. Last. One.” She clenched her fists. “Prepare the spell.”

“Stand by ready.”

Corona opened her eyes and grabbed Gold Experience Requiem by the wrist. In less than a fraction of a second, the fist itself would hit her. No matter how much energy she pushed into any attack, the Stand was still going to make it.

Sorry, she told Giorno telepathically.

Giorno’s eyes widened – knowing his gambit had failed. He had no defenses aside from the magic and technology on him, many of which were Corona’s own creation. She overrode those things and sent the spell into his frail human body.

He fell to the roses below, lifeless. Gold Experience Requiem lost all substance, passing right through Corona without doing anything.

He wanted to end it quickly. So I did.

Corona descended to the roses below. She lifted her hands, casting the revive spell.

Giorno opened his eyes. “You won.”

For a moment, Corona allowed herself to be hopeful. Maybe she hadn’t killed him.

But then she saw the murder in his eyes. She felt the lack of empathy, the emptiness. He was just one of the smart husks.

Corona blew his brains out. It was the quickest way – sometimes they were immune to simple death. “DAMMIT!” She shouted, stamping her foot on the ground and lighting all the flowers for a mile on fire. “JUST… GAH!”

Raging Sights beeped in an attempt to comfort her.

“Thanks,” Corona said, forcing herself to calm down. She was tempted to just think of Giorno as another statistic – but she couldn’t let herself fall to that. She had sacrificed and killed so many. If she let herself think differently, she would lose herself.

She would never lose herself.

She used her magic to create a grave for Giorno right there among the roses of the Nexus. She turned away, expression blank.

In the distance, the Tower stood, ominous, a seemingly small black ring surrounding it. So much smaller than all other Tower Rings constructed… and yet so elegant, so appropriate.

She spread her wings and flew toward her goal.

~~~

Flagg was sitting in a nondescript black chair, waiting for them. He had Black Thirteen prominently displayed in his left hand.

Monika, John, and Roxy were standing in front of him.

“So I take it you were expecting us, huh?” John asked.

“I always know if people are trying to look for me,” Flagg said. “Even if such attempts are ‘hidden’ behind subterfuge some girls think are clever.”

Monika steamed but kept quiet.

“What do you want?” Flagg asked.

“We want to talk,” Roxy said, creating a chair identical to Flagg’s and sitting in it, crossing her legs. “The multiverse is nearing a climax.”

“I know. I’ve been watching. I’m a bit disappointed they didn’t abolish those annoying capture devices, but I can’t really complain about war on such an unprecedented scale. And to think, I didn’t even have that much to do with it! Makes it all the more exciting.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer it if the multiverse continued to exist after this war?”

Flagg grinned from ear to ear, making John recoil in disgust. “Roxy, you think I have some sort of self-preservation instinct? I am tied to Black Thirteen and cannot die.”

“You won’t respawn without the Tower,” Monika pointed out.

“True,” Flagg admitted. “Very true. But there will be a whole new world to interfere with once the Tower is gone, and it will be a much smaller world. More vulnerable.”

“And you won’t have ka to give you the benefit of being a force of evil.” Monika folded her arms. “Nobody will be able to alter things on these large of scales if they win. Come on, you want to keep being evil, don’t you?”

Flagg grinned. “If I were as simple as you say, I would have been with the Nihilists.”

“…Is he saying no?” John asked.

“I don’t know, am I?” Flagg asked, chuckling.

“Cut the crap,” Roxy snapped, pointing a finger. “Help us with Black Thirteen or we’re going to take it from you.”

“And watch how diplomacy falls.” Flagg shook his head. “Should have tried longer, honestly, I may have been swayed.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Monika said.

“That’s true. Sad. Oh well, have a nice day!” He held up Black Thirteen, taking a moment to decide how he would scramble their minds to cause the most chaos.

A portal opened up behind him and disgorged Hussie, Rohan, and Magane. Hussie grabbed Flagg by the collar, snopped his other fingers, and threw the Man in Black to the ground like he was a Flat.

“Magane told me I could do that. I said I couldn’t. Win-win.”

Flagg willed himself back to his fully-defined self. He sighed overdramatically. “It looks like I’ll have to get my hands dirty.” He lifted Black Thirteen.

…Except Black Thirteen wasn’t in his hands.

“…Where…?”

“Over here, lord of darkness,” Allure said from the other side of the portal. Flagg saw her – holding Black Thirteen in her hoof without adverse effects. She was standing at the base of a large crystal-brain mainframe with four other Sweeties – Thrackerzod, Squeaky, Bot, and Burgerbelle. “Your precious toy just got snatched by a tiny unicorn.”

“Stop brea-”

“Just stop,” White Nettle said, appearing behind Flagg.

“Why are you helping them!?”

“I like the multiverse, I like being a giant universe-polymer jellyfish.” She sneered. “You could have helped, you know. Gotten a point on your record as one of the good guys. I bet you could have turned that into something very destructive after the war was over! I’m disappointed in you, Randy.”

“…RANDY!?” John blurted, bursting into laughter.

“…I don’t think it’s that funny,” GM said.

“You’re the Prophet, you must have thought it was funny enough to put in here,” Monika pointed out.

GM put a hand to his head. “I’m just… not going to think about that.”

Flagg let out a calm breath. “I suppose I am an object of ridicule. Shame. It looks as if I’ll have to ruin your nice day.” He held up a hand, tapping into his own power, causing all of White Nettle to tremble. “I do not need Black Thirteen to destroy all of you in an instant! F-”

John appeared in front of him and tapped Randall Flagg’s nose. “Got your nose.”

“Juvenile li-”

John Zapped him away.

White Nettle stared at where he had just been. “Where did you send him?”

“Several hours into the meta-future,” John said. “He won’t be able to do anything until this is allll done.”

“Huh. Good luck surviving after those few hours.” White Nettle winked. Everyone ignored her.

“Thanks, Allure,” Roxy said, walking up to the unicorn.

“Don’t mention it. I… I think I needed to do something important that didn’t result in a tragedy,” Allure smiled – it was pained, but genuine. She juggled Black Thirteen in her hoof. “What do you need me to do?”

Roxy pushed GM forward. “Link him up with every other version of himself. Not mentally, just on a level we can detect and search.”

“How?”

“You know how,” Magane said.

Allure rolled her eyes. “No I don’t.”

“A lie about a lie…”

“That seems like cheating,” Allure observed, looking deep into Black Thirteen. “Yech, this thing is disgusting.”

“If it drove even eldritch beings to madness, it must be,” Thrackerzod said. “What do you see?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Allure declared. She seemed to find what she was looking for. She briefly touched Black Thirteen to GM’s forehead. “There you go.”

GM blinked. “I feel… like a salmon hit me in the face?”

“Probably a false memory,” Allure said, rolling the black orb over her hoof. “Need this for anything else?”

“That should be all we need, thanks,” Jade said. “…I guess you can keep it, since none of us can hold it.”

Allure looked at it. “…I can already feel it trying to eat away at my soul. I… don’t think it’s a good idea for me to try to use it to defend Nettle.”

“I’ll take it!” White Nettle said, grinning.

“First of all, you’re busy with the Tower Ring. Second, you haven’t been to the top of the Tower. Third, I don’t trust you.”

White Nettle huffed and dissipated again.

“How about I just throw it through the portal you guys leave through?” Allure asked. “Just leave it in the roses or whatever. Or maybe you can destroy it?”

Magane laughed. “Destroy Black Thirteen? How amusing.”

“We totally could!” Roxy shouted.

“…And they try to exploit me again.” Magane sighed, leaning back. “Shame, shame, shame…”

“Let’s just deal with it after we get GM’s powers back,” Jade said, creating a portal to the field of roses. “Go ahead and throw it through the portal.”

Allure did. The roses leaned toward it like it was their master – which, in a way, it was.

“Okay everyone, we have everything we need!” Monika said, clapping her hands. “Let’s build the… The uh…”

“Meta-inator?” GM suggested.

“That’s a stupid name.”

“So are a lot of things. A lot of name-changes I did were kind of stupid.”

Allure blinked. “Allure isn’t stupid!”

“I wasn’t being specific! Allure is fine!”

Allure looked GM up and down and decided he was telling the truth. “Ah, sorry, I just, some people don’t like the name, think it’s weird…”

“That… is what some of my readers thought.”

Allure twitched. “…Nice talking to you GM.”

“Oh, come on, I’m sorry!”

Allure sighed. “I know. Just… I’m barely okay with my own existence right now, so if you could bring the existential questions your presence makes me ask back later, that’d be great.”

“Uh… Okay.”

“Good. Glad we’ve come to an understanding.”

“That means shoo,” Burgerbelle said.

GM nodded slowly and left through the portal with everyone else, leaving only the five Sweeties left in White Nettle’s brain universe.

“I like him!” Sweetie Bot said.

“You like everyone,” Thrackerzod pointed out.

“Oh yeah…”

“He’s just a person,” Allure said, shaking her head. “Never really believed that until now.”

“Meeting your creator can never be what you expect,” Burgerbelle said.

“I wasn’t created by him, just… shaped. He didn’t make Sweeties up, you know.”

Burgerbelle shrugged.

“Do you want to talk to him again?” Squeaky asked.

Allure frowned. “…Maybe later. Much later.” There’s things I need to work through.

...Will I be allowed to?

~~~

Eve saw Corona coming, tearing through the final layer of defenses that kept her from the Tower Ring surprisingly easy. Something had her fired up.

She suspected it was the report of Giorno’s death she had just gotten. Corona couldn’t be happy about that, since she was likely the one who had done it.

“She’s going to get here,” Starbeat said. “It won’t be long.”

“Yeah,” Eve said, summoning Seraphim. “We’ll be ready.”

Starbeat looked away, ashamed.

“…Starbeat?”

“I shouldn’t be here when she arrives,” Starbeat said. “That would destroy it. The moment. I’d need to be brushed aside quickly to facilitate the encounter between you two. I’d be useless here.” She put her data pad away. “I have to go elsewhere so I can still be helpful.”

Eve nodded slowly. “I understand.” She pressed a few buttons on a console. “You have full authority to issue orders in my name, Starbeat. I trust you to lead the effort while I’m… busy.”

Starbeat nodded. Then she pulled Eve into a hug. “I have no idea what’s going to happen.”

“Welcome to the club,” Eve said, laughing out a few tears. “Take care of yourself.”

“I should be saying that to you.” Starbeat lowered her goggles over her eyes. “You’re the one this all rests on.”

“It doesn’t rest on just me.”

Starbeat checked her data pad. “Out of all the ka streams I’ve been watching… yours is the only one fighting alone. There may be other points, but they have the Magic of Friendship with them. You… you won’t.”

Eve closed her eyes and nodded. “I know. It has to be that way.”

Starbeat nodded. She saluted Eve. “You’re one of the wisest mares I’ve ever met. Thank you for everything.”

“Thank you for showing us how to deal with personal hardship,” Eve said, saluting with a wing.

Starbeat nodded – then teleported away.

Eve turned to the large window, wiping the tears out of her eyes. She could see Corona coming without the screens now.

With a growing pit in her stomach, Eve waited.

~~~

Pinkie’s Party had an experience rather similar to that of Corona. They entered White Nettle with several hundred teams all working as one. However, despite White Nettle’s fixation on the Void, her body still had some self-defense that whittled them down to just one team.

It was rather predictable, to be honest.

“And apparently boring enough to completely gloss over!” Pinkie blurted.

“…Pinkie?” Nova asked, cocking her head in concern.

“The narrator was being colorful again,” Pinkie said, grinning. “Sorry.”

The five of them walked along the crystalline edges of White Nettle’s mental nexus. They knew they could distract her for a moment by destroying any small crystal, but if they wanted to do any real damage they needed to get to the central control crystal.

“Allure’s waiting for us,” Pinkie said. “Eve chose them to deal with us.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, adjusting his hat.

“You said it, Jojo,” Pidge agreed.

Vriska cracked her knuckles. “Well, I’m all up for beating the stuffing out of a bunch of white unicorns.”

“How can you be so candid?” Nova asked. “There were thousands of us coming in here. Now there’s just five. We watched most of them die!”

“We’ve seen a lot,” Vriska said – saying it with a soothing voice, rather than an aggressive one. She put a hand on Nova’s shoulder. “It hurts. But it hurts less if you don’t let yourself fixate on it.”

“That’s not always healthy!” Pidge piped up.

“Shut up, I’m being comforting!”

Nova let out a short chuckle. “At least you’re trying.” She smiled at Vriska. “That means more than what you actually said.”

Pinkie put a hoof around Nova. “Glad you finally realized we’re all here for you.”

Nova nodded. “I… I always knew, I just didn’t want to, if that makes any sense.” She hugged Pinkie back. “…I forgot that you’re all my family too.”

“Aw…” Pinkie said. “GROUP HUG!”

Star Platinum grabbed them all together and forced them into said group hug.

“Heh. Just like old times,” Vriska said.

“I don’t remember this!” Pidge muttered, flailing.

“Older times. We existed before Allure’s loops, y’know.”

“I... don’t have a witty response to that.”

“Guess that means we’re done then!” Pinkie said, bouncing out of the group. “Behold, our goal!”

The League of Sweetie Belles stood in front of the main crystal that housed most of White Nettle’s higher functions. She could survive without it – she had backups – but destroying it would be decidedly problematic if she wanted to focus on anything.

White Nettle’s projection floated above the Sweeties. “Done with all the touchy-feely stuff?”

“Hey!” Bot shouted, glaring at White Nettle. “That was beautiful.”

“Bah, whatever,” White Nettle folded her arms. “You may be the great and legendary ‘primary team’, but I’ve got these delightful little guardians and I can focus right on you. I know where you are, no amount of reality anchoring is going to stop me from wiping you out right here, right now. I might not even need th-” She paused. “Well shit.”

“What?” Squeaky asked.

“Empy just got clever. Hold that thought.” She vanished.

Allure looked at Pinkie. “Yep, totally saw that coming.”

“Textbook case,” Pinkie agreed.

“Like moth to a flame.”

“LAMP!” Burgerbelle shouted.

Pinkie broke out into laughter. “Ah… Ah this is going to hurt a lot.”

Allure nodded slowly. “I’m so sorry, Pinkie.”

Pinkie frowned and shook her head. Allure got the message – Pinkie’s team didn’t know about Renee yet.

“…Pinkie…?” Nova asked.

“Yes, it’s important, and yes, you’ll be mad at me for keeping it from you,” Pinkie said. “But we need to be at the top of our game right now.”

Allure nodded. “Same over here. Right team?”

There was a chorus of ‘yesses’.

“Now let’s get out there and play ball!” Pinkie shouted, suddenly wearing a referee's hat and a whistle.

Burgerbelle matched it with a hockey stick and mask. “FORE!”

“STOP IT!” Nova shouted.

Everyone stared at her.

“This isn’t some sporting match or a friendly spar!” Nova continued. “This. Is. War. We don’t have to try to kill each other over this, but can we at least take it seriously!? We are one of the battles that decides the fate of the multiverse. Can we at least act like we know what that means for once in our lives? Drop the toys, drop the antics, and be what we’re supposed to be.” She marched forward, taking the lead. She bowed to Allure. “Allure, I respect you. But I will not treat this as a game.”

Allure nodded. “As it should be.” She readied a fighting stance. “Everyone, bring your best.”

Jotaro looked to Nova – and smiled in approval. He cracked his knuckles.

Pinkie nodded. “Okay.” She brought out her warhammer and smashed it into the ground. “Guess we actually fight.”

Allure summoned her Heart, furrowing her brow in focus.

Both sides waited for the other to make the first move.

~~~

“OKAY EVERYONE! Here’s the plan!” Monika rubbed her hands together. “We need to get GM back his Prophet powers so his new story can take effect. Got it written?”

GM held up a laptop. “I have the manuscript on here. I’ll make a single typo-edit after I get the powers back to make it take effect. …That’s just to make sure my brain accepts it as finalized, by the way. It doesn’t have to be typo-free.”

“Yes, thank you. Anyway, to get to GM, we’ve got to do a few things. Jade has provided us with a handy-dandy Fourth Wall straight from Earth C itself.” Monika gestured at a window-like device with four panes and a series of arced pipes along the edges. “As I’m sure some of us know, these are pretty good at breaking through ka barriers.”

“You’re welcome,” Hussie said, folding his arms proudly.

“…I really hate this guy,” Rohan muttered under his breath.

Monika continued. “However, no doubt the big-honcho GM will be writing a counter-narrative, so we can’t just use Black Thirteen’s connection to get to him. That’s where Hussie and Rohan come in. Together, they should be able to create a counter-counter-narrative. They have their MSPaint and manga stations already ready. Use whatever cheats you want to make sure we do this.”

“We’re doing this, man,” Hussie said. “We’re making this happen.”

“For the love of…” Rohan sat down at his desk and started scribbling with Heaven’s Door. Hussie shrugged and started his work in… well Monika was pretty sure it wasn’t MSPaint.

“Good. So, when they get far enough with that, John, you’ll use retcon on the fourth wall to make sure we get to the real GM – just in case he’s time-displaced through metatime.”

“Got it!” John said, smiling like the dope he was.

“I’m in charge of editing reality the entire time so the world doesn’t fall apart while we’re doing this,” Monika said, adjusting her shirt. “No pressure.”

“Ooh, ooh, what do I do?” Magane asked.

“…Sit there and look pretty?”

Magane raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t know, you’re just a tagalong! You tell me why you’re here!”

Magane shrugged playfully.

“Do you even have a side?”

“Not really. I’m just interested in seeing where this goes.”

“…You don’t care if the collapse happens?” Roxy asked. “But what if you die?”

“I know I’ll survive,” Magane said.

“But you can’t know that, right?” John asked.

Magane stared at him in disbelief. “…I’d already taken care of that lie about a lie weeks ago. People are just so easy to manipulate… I will survive.”

“Right, just sit there and look pretty,” Monika muttered. “Roxy, Jade, same deal.”

Roxy raised her eyebrow. “I’m the leader. That’s more than standing around and looking pretty.”

Monika rolled her eyes. “Sure, whatever. Hussie, Rohan, you ready?”

“We’ve got enough written!” Hussie announced, cackling like the madman he was. “ENGAGE!”

At that point, the Batter crested the hill nearest to the group.

I wasn’t far behind him.

You thought I wasn’t going to show up, didn’t you?

~~~

Corona stood on the outside of the Tower Ring.

She knocked politely.

Come on in, airlock’s open, Eve told her telepathically.

Of course it’s Eve, Corona thought to herself. Who else would it be?

Behind Corona, some of the remaining ships and defenses were still shooting. The shield at her back was more than enough to take care of their attempts. She made her way to the airlock and walked into the Tower Ring.

Eve was waiting right on the other side. The purple light of the screens matched her well. The glow from the word PRESERVATION highly accentuated her deep eyes, her cosmic mane, and her shining ears.

Corona’s own ears twitched and she spread her wings.

The two of them took up angry, aggressive poses. They lit their horns and poised their limbs for a leap. Eve padded the ground and Corona pulled back a fist.

Both of them lost steam in an instant. The magic auras dropped, the wings fell, and their bodies sagged.

“Guess we just weren’t cut out for this,” Eve said, shaking her head.

“You could say that again,” Corona said, turning her back to Eve and looking out the window at all the destruction. “Remember the war with Skarn?”

“How could I forget?” Eve said, having turned on her ears the moment Corona looked away.

“You told me you thought you were ready to sacrifice, and later you found that you weren’t.”

“Do you feel the same way?” Eve asked.

“I’m not sure,” Corona said, frowning. “This isn’t what I wanted, I know that. And I’m probably not going to find out if it is worth it.”

“Is there any way to measure that?”

“No. There’s no measurement. The individual doesn’t know enough, and the masses are wrong.”

“The Choice is a riddle with no solution.”

“And it comes down to two individuals anyway.” Corona turned back to her, allowing Eve to turn her ears off.

“There are others fighting for things just as important.”

“But we’re the only ones fighting alone.”

Eve nodded slowly. “I think so.”

Corona sighed. “We did this once before.”

“Them’s little games.”

“It seemed like it didn’t matter then, did it? That there would be no consequences.” She shook her head. “I thought our fight may have been one to truly be that way. But look where we are now. Opposite sides once again. And we fight.”

“It’s not a fight to the death,” Eve told her.

Corona smiled. “Yeah. All I have to do is get you down so I can disable the Tower Ring.”

“Just disable?”

“There’s more to it, but I shouldn’t say any more.”

Eve looked outside. “Nobody’s coming to help us.”

“…They either know it needs to be the two of us, or are conveniently caught up in other battles.”

Eve sighed. “We… We really have to do this. Throughout this entire war, I suppose I knew this moment would come. I even imagined how it would play out a few times. What I would do with you. What I would say.” She shook her head. “This wasn’t what I expected.”

“Same,” Corona said. “…I can’t afford to delay any more. I’m sorry.”

Eve closed her eyes and took in a painful breath. A tear streaked down her cheek. “I know.” She spread her wings and activated Seraphim.

Corona activated her dimensional defenses and summoned Bacon Pancakes. Corona’s flames surrounded her, a tiny sparkle of darkness coming from Sombra’s nanobots. Eve’s eyes became one with darkness, the ice of Seraphim creeping along the walls – though a spot of fire came from Celestia’s essence.

They were both fully aware of their directly-opposing natures.

Their determined faces once again gave way to grimaces – but this time they did not stand down. They no longer had the luxury of talking.

The Tower recognized the momentous nature of their battle. So close to it, the winds of ka warped and twisted the scene. They remained within the Tower Ring, and the screens shone through eternally… but to them, it was almost as though they were facing off in the Castle of the Two Sisters.

What location could be more appropriate?

They launched attacks at the same time - a burst of fire from Corona’s hands and horn met a burst of frozen air from Seraphim. The extreme difference in temperatures caused the air pressure to change dramatically, throwing Corona into Eve. The cold began to eat away at Corona, but unlike the battle in Them’s games, she was prepared for the frigid temperature. A magic barrier kept her internal temperature constant while she forced Eve down with Bacon Pancakes’ pins. Bacon Pancakes’ center rushed to flatten Eve, but she teleported away, using a burst of magic to drive Corona into the ground.

Corona bounced up from the cold metal floor and shot a flamethrower at Eve. The alicorn turned off Seraphim’s absolute zero adjustment, allowing the Stand to deflect the flame. The frozen air began to dissipate, letting Corona lower the magic she was devoting to her temperature barrier. She used the extra power to attack Eve from three directions with magic beams.

Seraphim could only absorb so much damage - parts of it singed Eve. She grunted through it, lighting her horn. She looked Corona apologetically in the eye.

A spell created a spire of solid oxygen behind Corona and stabbed her through the stomach.

Corona cursed herself for assuming Eve had to use Seraphim to make things that cold. She fell to a knee, using Bacon Pancakes as a shield against Eve’s onslaught of magic missiles. Corona didn’t have a Seraphim - she was dependent on her own magic barriers to defend herself. Injured as she was, the shields weren’t as effective as they should have been. They broke down and the laser hit her, burning some of her dress, hair, and skin.

She shook her head, clutching the hole in her stomach. She needed some time to heal herself. She told Raging Sights to activate the nanobots, attacking the one part of Eve that was artificial - her hearing devices. The loudest sound the devices would allow were transmitted right into Eve’s brain, making her scream in agony, dropping all attacks.

Corona grimaced, but took the opportunity to mend her wound with some holy magic. Then she rushed to the control consoles of the Tower Ring - maybe she could end the fight right here and now… She saw what she needed to press. She had the codes. All it would take was a few seconds…

Eve teleported the inner section of her hearing devices away from her, prompting blood to pour out of her ears. Corona stopped trying to access the Tower Ring’s controls and threw Bacon Pancakes at Eve. The alicorn teleported through the red Stand and connected a hoof with Corona’s face. Corona retaliated with a kick to Eve’s stomach. Both of them absorbed most of the impact with their natural magic, but they still felt it.

They flew apart. Before they landed again, they fired simple beams of energy at each other. Orange and purple collided, exploding in a shower of arcane sparks.

The light cleared. The two of them stood up, panting heavily.

The interior of the Tower Ring had been dented in a few places - but operation was still at one hundred percent, according to the screens shining through the Tower’s castle illusion. Corona wondered if she could destroy the Tower Ring by herself, if it came to it. But neither her nor Eve wanted it destroyed, so that was a moot point. One way or another, the Tower Ring would be activated.

One way or another.

Corona covered her body in flame while Eve encased herself in a deep, chilling armor of frozen air. They charged at each other again, prepared to fight as long and as hard as they needed to.

And yet, their expressions were not angry, not determined, but sorrowful. Neither of them wanted to be there, but they didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

~~~

The Chosen.

Blumiere. Timpani. Sai. Nanoha. Jenny. Alushy. Aradia.

Could Dimentio and Renee be counted as well? Maybe. But they were questionable at best.

The others had been chosen. When Sai opened the doors with her understanding, they led not to the spiral staircase of the Dark Tower, but to a white room. There was no staircase there.

Just a door on the other side. It was the same as the door at the top of the Tower, except it lacked a name. Instead, it only said

CHOICE

“Who will swing this door upon its golden hinge?” Renee asked. “All of you are here. Any one of you could be the one to enter.”

Blumiere moved forward – but Nanoha beat him to it. “You’ll have your glory, Blumiere,” she said as she set her hand on the knob.

Blumiere nodded curtly to her. She opened the door.

On the other side was the room. But there was no mysterious barrier barring their entry, no clever trick to send them somewhere random in existence. For once in its life, the Dark Tower was letting people in without a fuss.

It was a special occasion, after all.

They all filed in without incident. The symbols on the dark walls seemed to dance, inviting everyone to look at them, to discern some meaning. But for all the symbols’ movement, no one paid any attention to them.

They paid attention to the two things in the room. The Source – that ever turning spirograph encased in white energy which held the secret to ka’s production – and the clock.

That grandfather clock with the spirograph on it that looked so much like the god-tier clocks of SBURB; for it was what they were based on. It was the original judge of Justice and Heroism.

Blumiere walked up to the Source and opened the Prognosticus, turning to the last page.

“The Choice that all will make…” he mumbled.

Jenny considered punching him, trying to stop what was happening… but she found she couldn’t. She was transfixed by the momentus nature of the occasion. No one could do anything anymore. They could only watch.

Blumiere closed the book, ready.

Tick.

Everyone turned to the clock.

Tock.

The clock that had never counted a single second in its existence was active.

Tick.

“The Dark Tower is ready to decide,” Aradia declared. “Blumiere?”

Tock.

Blumiere paused for a moment.

Tick.

He clenched the Prognosticus tight in his hand.

Tock.

Renee grinned from ear to ear.

~~~

Flutterfree looked up at the sky.

“What is it?” Rev asked, coming out from the church.

“Something’s wrong.”

Rina rolled her eyes. “There’s a war going on up there, of course something’s wrong.”

“No. There’s something wrong that’s not supposed to be. Or maybe it is. I don’t know.” She rubbed her head. “They’ve missed something.”

“Who?” Rev asked.

Flutterfree looked her right in the eyes, allowing the unicorn to see how terrified she was. “…Everyone.”

~~~

Tick.

Tock.

Author's Note

2 Days until 130 - {S} Climax premiers! If you don't know, it's going live at 7:00 PM Universal time (1:00 Central). Expect a blog post to go up around that time (or even a placeholder chapter) so people have time to get in and maybe enjoy some pre-show random videos or whatever.

https://www.tickcounter.com/countdown/1588394/130-s-climax

Here's a handy timer provided by OmnipresentMicroorganism. I haven't closed the tab in days. HaHAH.

...Hang on just a little longer, everyone, we're almost out of the woods.

-GM, master of Helmholtz Brain.

130 - [S] Climax

The original chapter 130, a video:

What follows is much the same, just with still images and some text.
If you're trying to read this on a kindle, don't. The images are very important.

EDIT: Sometimes it seems the images don't load, but then they load again a few days later. Odd. If you're having trouble seeing the below images, maybe try the fimfetch archive version of this chapter: https://fimfetch.net/story/382944/songs-of-the-spheres/130. Fimfecth seems to be mislabeling the chapters buuut that could be due to me adding a chapter in the middle that one time.

The Clock of the Multiverse stands, ticking, ready to make a decision. It swings: Just, Heroic, Just, Heroic, deciding which fate existence shall take, if either. Within its face, sights of the parallel can be seen.

Roland of Gilead, the great Gunslinger, ascends the dark steps once more. As he reaches for the knob he knows not that he has ascended these steps innumerable times, nor does he know that this time it will be different. The door will open for him in a way it never has in any previous iteration.

The duel between Corona and Eve, between fire and ice, continues within the castle-like illusion of the Tower.

In the mind of a Downstreamer, two groups of heroes turn to face each other. One seeks to destroy the central crystal of White Nettle's mind, the other hopes to defend it long enough for their victory. In many ways, their conflict is just as important as that between the light and the dark, even if it is not as evident.

Two plans come together in tandem with each other. Blumiere stands before the Source, an entourage of uncertain followers watching. Monika activates the Fourth Wall, intending to use the Tower's own ka and nature to twist the story to their desired outcome. Beyond the wall should lie the true GM, the Prophet.

Throughout the battlefield, different battles collide as the tension rises. In space, the Austraeoh and Starjammer refuse to give in to either one. Beneath them, Thanos and Lightning fight as reality around them permits. And in the midst of a Skaian brawl, Feferi and Meenah lock tridents. In many of these battles, there is no hatred, only the need to fight despite great pain going against one they might have known for years.

What is a fight but a series of duels happening at different locations? Separated by universes but not by fate, fire and ice clash. Where there are multiple foes, targets are settled. Nova, as the declarer of the true nature of the battle, takes Allure for her own; while Pinkie is never able to truly take something seriously and thus chooses an opponent who will do likewise. All have their own reasons, their own assaults, their own purpose.

Two things are risen. The Fourth Wall, by Monika's hands, successfully finds the true GM, he himself oblivious to his own discovery. Blumiere completes his ritual under the watchful, eager gaze of Renee; the Prognosticus rising to meet the Source from whence it came.

Fire and ice spin together, a duality built up since the start of time. One so frigid but with the fire in her mane. One burning with such passion, and yet a tinge of cold calculation within her nature. They truly are different sides of the same coin.

And then comes the Batter, purpose of Purity known, to remove the retconner. The Batter is no fool - he knows the powers John was gifted with. So he must act with cleverness. And so he does.

For what will a man not do for the woman he loves? The fool believes he can take the Batter directly, but he knows not the power held within the Bat.

One hit to the skull is all it takes to bring the most broken ability in existence to its knees. An emotional appeal, a twisted event... And a single-mindedness forces the god-tier clock of John Egbert to tick once more after so long sitting inactive.

As one battle is lost...

...Another is won. It may also have been lost, in a sense, but unlike the victory of the Batter, which is never going to feel like it was truly just, the victory of Corona has a certain satisfaction to it. Eve, admitting defeat, does little to stop Corona from powering the Tower Ring down.

It now falls to Blumiere.

The Prognosticus works precisely as he intended, fusing with the Source and the very Tower Ring it helped create. What took Giorno weeks to accomplish is done in a matter of seconds, and the Tower Ring is completely reprogrammed.

As of now, Corona's vision of the future is looking true. Except...

A certain Downstreamer takes note of the Tower Ring she is protecting change nature. It would be a relatively simple matter for her to envelop the universe into herself and remove the Tower from the equation - the Void can only hinder her so much in such a grand-scoping manner. But it is not to be.

Nova's determination is what tips the scale. She saw the goal, and she refused to back down from it in petty comedic battles. An opportunity is taken, a mind crystal shattered, and Nettle retreats to restore her mind. The Tower Ring stands undefended...

This thing, this thing that is but is not Renee, it does something. Purple and orange are not on her agenda, the color green is. An unnatural green - a third option. Surrounded by Flowery imagery, she takes what is hers, and the Source obeys.
XIX - The Tower. Incorrect. Yet so important.

What does the Collapse? Mean? Who knows? One might expect to find out soon.

I am vaguely aware of this. I am aware of things spiraling out of control. But I also know I can do nothing, so I must face what is in front of me. And right now, that is developing too quickly for my tastes. I attack.

Monika takes care of the Batter, completely erasing that false "Pure" essence from existence. While she is occupied, my attack hits the Fourth Wall. My intention is to break it. But I...
I...

I...

The clock of the multiverse and John Egbert tick in unison, pointing toward the center as one. The moment of choice arrives: will the death be Just or Heroic? Will there be death at all, or a rebirth? Existence holds its breath at the final creak of the hand...

Simultaneously, both clocks decide their deaths are Just and Heroic. In John, the multiverse is mirrored. There was a man who fell protecting that which he loved, but who also had the capacity and the drive to carelessly blow all else aside. He fell on his terms, but he also fell on the terms of others. Likewise, the multiverse both screamed in rage at its own horrors while screaming in defiance for its own survival; both sides filled with the determined souls.

With their battles over, two groups are sent to different locations far from their moments of combat. Both arrive at the grass. One has no idea where they are. The other sees a very familiar church nearby.

The multiverse is tired, broken, haggard. Either way, it could not have continued as it once did. Holes, rips, and voids of nothing around a Dark speck... There was never a result that didn't change it away from this wartorn wasteland.

Let it all become one...

A New World is built, but not one foreseen by any before. Planets clustered together akin to atoms in ever-repeating shells upon shells upon shells... Earths, stars, Euipses, Jupiters, and other realms seamlessly sewn into a very particular, very designed pattern. No average collapse could have created this, no random trick of fate. The expected collision and fusion of planetary bodies simply does not happen, all are kept distinct in a fractal cycle. What could this mean?

Celestia City remains, the League itself standing strong as the Sweeties are sent back home. Bruised, battered, they have lost their fight. Unsure of what to do next, they try to get their bearings in a trembling city.

A hand is offered. A hand of friendship from the victor to the loser, from the fire to the ice... From an old friend to another old friend. With it, there is an unspoken question: will you stand with me, old friend, as the end comes?

There was no hesitation. Eve could never refuse the hand of a friend, no matter how much had come between them. It was who she was, who they were. Whatever was coming for them, they stood to face it together.

Flutterfree cares not that existence itself is reshaping around her, all she cares about is that her old friends are here, and they look like they are done with their fight. At long last, all this nonsense can be done away with, and they can stand the test that will come together. But the truth is a cruel beast...

Tragedy. Loss. In a world arranged where no planets collide and death did not come from cosmic chance, still there must be a price. The dusting is that price. Nova, hero of the collapse, the one who acted in the crucial moment to keep Nettle's power in check, dissipates into nothing.

Some realize what is happening sooner than others.

Some know that, if only they had made a different decision, they wouldn't be here.

Allure wonders if she could have gone with Cinder. If that was the right decision. If maybe Black Thirteen could do something to her...

Who knows, maybe she's right. Maybe it did do something. But it doesn't for anyone else, and as far as they are concerned, Allure's story ends here, woefully incomplete and damaged.

Her league suffers in her absence. A military mare and a robot have seconds to deal with the shock. Burgerbelle does not suffer the dusting - but in Thrackerzod's hooves, something else tears at her: physics itself attempting to reject her two-dimensional nature.
Thrackerzod knows she must do something. The other two are already gone. But maybe... Just maybe...

The ghosts, the Skaians, they do not get dusted. They merely feel themselves fade as the reality anchors fail.

But there are other tragedies living around them, too many to count, too many to even understand.

Magane's hubris caught up with her. She thought she could play the Tower. It proves her wrong here, as she dusts to nothing.
And I...
I...
What have I done!?

A man and a woman stand over an altar, hand in hand, with an artifact of power between them. Previously, they bonded together to save existence. Now, they end their lives together not to destroy everything, but to turn it to something new. It is a sacrifice they are glad to make. What they do, they do out of love, and it is fitting that they end in it.
Their peace is contrasted by those who stand behind them.

Confused, uncertain, angry, smug... a mixture of emotions ready to fly out at any angle and any time when the Gunslinger himself enters, shrouded in darkness. Alushy stands between them, crumbling to dust just as the couple had moments before.

Almost all Skaians are ghosts. Reality anchors or no, they are not permitted in the New World. The warriors realize this. They know it is over.

Perhaps it was Feferi's idea, perhaps not. But the two raised to kill each other reconcile in the end, many of their respective armies choosing the same end in peace.

The living Twilight remains, unsure of what to do. She won her session, lived to the end. But so many of her closest friends were ghosts. What is left for her in this world still coming together?

In many ways, the dusting is Thanos' fault. Not the punishment - there always would have been a price, preserve or collapse. No, his responsibility is in the form of the death. Dust itself was how he wished to balance his reality, and so the dusting claims him as part of the balance.
Lightning's face tells nothing. Is she indifferent?

Two old war veterans call a ceasefire the moment they know the battle is over. They hear reports of their crew suffering, but they themselves are permitted to continue.

The dusting curse is not just limited to those currently aware, no, those lives sealed away in the war will find it shockingly comes to a close. Can you die if you are not aware of it? Did they die when they entered the ball?

At first, Corona is satisfied that the collapse went as intended. The planets appear in the sky in a way she didn't expect, but they still come from many worlds. But as the sky fills out, she feels as though something is wrong. She is still here, and so is Evening. What are the chances of that? It was one in a trillion that she'd even survive... the only thing that could explain both of them surviving a collapse is ka itself. But the Tower has to be gone, right? ...Something had to have gone wrong.

The Tower lies.

But it rarely lies completely. There, at the base, there is a crack. True damage that is not undone by the cycle of Roland. A weakness that points to something more. The pseudo-collapse did not fully succeed in its goal... but it did not fully fail, either.

There is only one Tower, now, sitting at the center of the New World, sky abuzz with millions of dots of distant planets.

A massive world, larger than most seen before, sits at the center. The roses are but a tiny, insignificant blemish upon its impossible surface that looks out upon the new existence. What kind of new life does this central world offer?
Perhaps it doesn't matter.

Perhaps this is what matters.
An Earth. One Earth, above all the others.
The First.

CREDITS

Written by G. M. Blackjack

Video edited by Lizzard Tales

ARTISTS
Petrina Steward
T.A.L., aka UselessCommon
MalineTourmaline
Lola Draws
Lizzard Tales
Devilaphoenix (Maggie Vamp)
Little Duke
Ebony Sable
Hoodwinked MCShelster
Lytre Yarn

DONATORS
Zebulon
TheDriderPony

PATRONS
Ciber
Crada
Pink Man (DeadBloxxEpic)
Keywii Cookies
Omnipresent Microorganism
SgtSarge
Nightsclaw
SketchSkies

MUSIC
“Overture” from Homestuck
“Tick Tock” from Homestuck
“English” from Homestuck

Any franchises referenced belong to their respective owners.

~~~

The House Juju is a poor imitation of the Tower's Self-Defense Protocol.

It brings about the broken retcon ability, and as such is the only known instance of a retcon paradox.

The Gallifreyans, for all their malevolent machinations, were sure to keep this loop as stable as they could. Jade, Dave, and Rose all ended up where they needed to be within the House Juju.

John Egbert did not.

And the consequences of this failure in reality...

Is the rebirth of English, his terrible call heralding the end of existence and the start of a new one.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 10: DOOM]

ARC 10 INTERLUDE<<

To prove that there is still hope in the world no matter what, one must delve to the darkest depths.

We reached those depths.

Now it’s time to come out and begin the story anew.

Arc 11: Space
131: Brave New World, Part 1
132: Brave New World, Part 2
133: Emissary of Ka
134: We are but Dust
135: What’s Old is New
136: The Place You Call Home
137: Never Forget
138: Crimson
139: Complimentary
140: United We Stand
141: Divided We Fall
142: Spirograph, Part 1
143: Spirograph, Part 2

Best chapter poll, though I have a feeling I know which one is going to win this one.

https://strawpoll.com/67s74e67

And, of course, franchises, most of which are from 127.

Fire Emblem belongs to Nintendo and Intelligent Systems
LISA series belongs to Austin Jorgensen
Hollow Knight belongs to Team Cherry
The Mother Series belongs to Nintendo
The Boys belongs to Amazon and Garth Ennis
Kingdom Hearts belongs to Disney and Square Enix
Warhammer 40,000 belongs to Games Workshop
Welcome To Night Vale belongs to Night Vale Presents and Disparition
Wakfu and associated works belong to Ankama
Warframe belongs to Digital Extremes
Teknophage belongs to Tekno Comix and Neil Gaiman
The Paratime Series belongs to H. Beam Piper
Sliders belongs to Robert K Weiss and Tracy Torme
Narnia belongs to C. S. Lewis
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann belongs to Gainax, Aniplex, and Konami
Other stuff in Heart’s Gambit?
Dungeons and Dragons belongs to Wizards of the Coast
The Elder Scrolls belongs to Bethesda
Hazbin Hotel belongs to Vivziepop
The Culture belongs to Iain M. Banks
The Wheel of Time Robert Jordan
Fate Series belongs to Type-MOON
Problem Sleuth belongs to Andrew Hussie
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality belongs to Eleizer Yudkowsky
Luminosity belongs to Alicorn
Glowfic belongs to… the Glowfic community?
Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person belongs to Scott Alexander
Love to Three Zuckerbrins, Empire V, Buddha's Little Finger and other works belongs to Victor Pelevin
The Three-Body Problem trilogy belongs to Li Cixin
One Thousand and One Nights belongs to assorted medieval middle-eastern writers
The Seventh Tower belongs to Garth Nix
maybe i could eat blades of grass belongs to bill wurtz
Filthy Frank belongs to George Miller
Treaasure Island belongs to Robert Stevenson
La Comédie Humaine belongs to Honoré de Balzac
Les Misérables belongs to Victor Hugo
Adını Feriha Koydum belongs to Med Yapim
Myths and Epics are in the Public Domain. (probably needed to say this before, to be frank.)
OFF belongs to Mortis Ghost

Here are the discord server [ https://discordapp.com/invite/eTuseTh ] and fimfiction group [ https://www.fimfiction.net/group/213761/songs-of-the-spheres-extended-multiverse ] links.

On to a new world…

[SPACE] 131 - Brave New World, Part 1

It’s time to begin the story anew.

~~~

There was once a universe of seemingly endless grass. It wasn’t truly endless – nothing was – merely self-recursive. If one were to walk far enough along the grassland they would come out the other end. Not that they would easily be able to tell since most of the universe looked the same. Just grass, grass, grass.

When its time came to be forced into the collapse, its self-recursive shape simply couldn’t fit into the new design. So it needed to be adapted. It – and several universes like it – was forced to become pure three-dimensional squares of grass, soil, and earth. These squares were patched together like a quilt, forming a large ring. Planets began to appear in the middle of the ring. Every one of these planets unfolded as well, their crusts peeling off the molten cores so they could be melded with parts of the ring. Anywhere there was a hole, it was filled with material from a random universe, making the surface smooth.

Thousands of planets were folded out like this and affixed to the ring until a hollow sphere larger than many stars took form. A patchwork world.

About two diameters away from this behemoth of a world, normal-sized earthlike planets appeared, forming a spherical shell packed so densely that their atmospheres connected. About five diameters away from this, a much larger variety of planets took shape, including gas giants, planets made of solid materials, and a diminutive glowing object that couldn’t be classified by general astronomy.

This two-sphere system took its place alongside several other systems of varying size – some had dozens of spheres around the central conglomeration world, while others only had one. Most spheres were like this one, packed so densely that atmospheres were touching, but there were a few that had apparent empty space between them. Some even contained stars.

On the grassy conglomeration world, two figures stood, watching the new shape of reality take form. One could have been described as human, but this would have done her a disservice. Her skin was a pale orange and her hair a jarring red-yellow pattern. Two pointed ears poked out of the folds of her hair, twitching ever so slightly at the breeze passing through them, an action her grandiose wings were mimicking. A sharp horn jutted from her forehead, casting a shadow over her deep red eyes – a color that was only accentuated by her triangle-pointed crimson shades. She wore a white dress with red designs resembling circuitry. Matching this were her two white gloves, each with a red crystal on the back of them.

Her name was Corona “Sunset” Shimmer, and she was looking at the sky, her expression one of someone who felt something was wrong.

In stark contrast, her companion was decidedly inhuman. She was a purple equine lifeform with a horn and two large, majestic wings. She wore a golden tiara with a pink crystal embedded in it, a sharp contrast to the dark metallic spikes that lined each of her bloodied ears. Trails of blood had dried on the sides of her face, some of it mixing with her mane of swirling stars and magical sparks.

One of her eyes was a deep, intelligent purple. The other was a bright yellow-orange color with a sun-like symbol in place of her iris, helping her take everything in. She didn’t notice the yellow fade away as the world assembled itself, replaced with a completely normal eye. The pupils darted left and right, trying to absorb all the information suddenly available to her. Her name was Evening “Twilight” Sparkle, and she was so overwhelmed she couldn’t form a coherent thought.

They stood together for several minutes, trying to process. But their minds couldn’t grasp the reality of the situation, for its scope was simply too big.

Everything in every plane of existence had been changed. Planets had just been torn out of their universes and placed here, in this bizarre mesh of nested spheres.

Eve looked to Corona, checking to see if her mouth was moving. It wasn’t, but that was no indicator she hadn’t been talking earlier. It wasn’t like Eve could hear anything even if she wanted to right now, seeing as her hearing devices were broken.

She spoke first. “…It’s over.”

“This is wrong,” Corona breathed, beginning to tremble.

Eve’s expression became one of confusion. “Isn’t this what you wanted!?”

“This isn’t it!” Corona shouted. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go! The planets are supposed to be fused, collapsed together, not arranged in a perfect lattice of spheres! I mean, maybe, maybe that lets more people survive, but that’s not what I planned for, and that means I was wrong, and… And look at us!”

“Us?”

“We still exist! The chances of both of us living through the collapse was astronomical! Even one of us was ridiculous! We shouldn’t be here – unless there’s still ka. And you know what else? Magic! It’s still around! The averaging of all worlds should have removed it or made it minimal but look at your stupid mane, sparkling just as much as ever, and th-” She stopped short, the blood draining out of her face in an instant.

Eve glowered. “Oh, by all means, don’t sto-”

Corona ignored her, turning to a crystal on the back of her hand. “Raging Sights! Raging Sights! Talk to me!”

There was no response from the crystal.

Corona lifted her hand, trying to cast a spell – but all that came off her fingers was a single spark of light. It did nothing to her Device. “N… No…”

Eve tried to light her horn. All she got was a similarly-sized spark of magic that did nothing. “Wh… That doesn’t make sense!” She tried to activate her eye of Light, but found she couldn’t. She tried to summon her Stand, Seraphim, but there was no luck there either. Checking her mane, she found it was definitely filled with magic. “Why can’t we use it!?”

“Raging Sights!” Corona yelled, pulling off her glove and staring at it. “COME ON!” She pressed her hand to the crystal, trying to force an empathic connection, but got nothing. She yelled, throwing the glove to the ground. She pointed a finger at a random place in the sky. “SO YOU LET ME SURVIVE BUT DO THIS!?”

There was no response.

“DAMN IT, ANSWER ME, YOU STUPID TOWER! I KNOW YOU’RE STILL HERE, ‘FESS UP!”

Nothing but a breeze through her hair.

She crumbled to the ground, tears falling from her face. “I killed them all… I did this… and it was all for nothing…” She pulled herself into a ball and started rocking back and forth.

Eve looked at Corona closely, expressionless. The alicorn closed her eyes tight and knitted her brow, a deep scowl crossing her face. When she opened her eyes they were narrow and menacing. She opened her mouth – but nothing came out, for she saw the trembling, broken form of Corona.

Eve took a sharp breath and held it in, shaking. Closing her eyes and swallowing hard, she put a hoof to her chest and then moved it away as she released a breath, spreading her wings at the same time. She opened her eyes and took a step forward – stopping and shaking her head. She took a few more breaths and continued moving forward, extending a single wing.

The wing shook over Corona’s form. Eve swallowed again, putting a soft smile on her face. She laid her wing on Corona’s back.

Corona reacted as if she were spring-loaded, pulling Eve into a tight, desperate hug. She made a few sputtering noises in her failed attempts to speak, eventually giving up on this and just sobbing.

Eve shuddered, struggling to keep her composure.

She needs this.

Some time later – it could have been seconds, it could have been minutes – the sharp sound of static met Corona’s ears. She pulled out of the embrace in an instant, on edge, the action confusing Eve considerably.

Corona’s ears swiveled around until they pinpointed the sound’s source. The crystal on the glove she had thrown to the ground.

“…ocal additions activated… …eport coming… …ease respond. Master, please respond.”

“Raging Sights!?” Corona shouted, grabbing the glove in a motion so desperate she tripped and fell to the ground. She held it up. “Are you there?”

“Affirmative. Systems are far below optimal. Cannot access our connection. Resorting to vocalizations. I apologize, it took significant time to activate.”

“It’s okay, you’re back, you’re back…” Tears poured down her face.

“I am unable to perform detailed scans right now, Master. Can you inform me what has happened?”

Corona’s smile vanished in an instant. She leaned looked to Eve. “…RS… Everything’s wrong.” She looked up at the slowly moving planets in the sky. “Everything’s wrong…”

~~~

When the New World was formed, Celestia City was certainly large enough to be treated as a planet. It was placed in a system of worlds swirling around a gas giant with a rainbow of colorful gasses intermingling with each other. On one side of Celestia City was a large asteroid placed just far enough away that it wouldn’t scrape against any of the city’s larger towers. On the other side there was a crystalline diamond shape lined with intricate caverns.

All three of these smaller celestial objects were uncomfortably close to a red Neptune-like planet.

From a window at the base of one of Celestia City’s larger protrusions, a white unicorn looked at the red planet with a curious eyebrow. She wore four tall, black leather boots and had two similarly colored whips hung on her back. Numerous scars lined her body, but her mane and face seemed not only untouched, but also beautiful.

“Well, balls,” she muttered in what could best be described as a comedic impression of an Australian accent. “This is right messed up.”

She was the only person in the room. This had not been the case a couple minutes ago. Looking at the tables of food and drink she could clearly remember that there had been a minor party going on, filled with people who were trying their best not to think about the war.

Then all of them had lit up like Christmas trees and burst into white sparkling dust. Dusted.

She hadn’t really known any of them – her sort of partying didn’t mix well with her actual close friends – but it did fill her with a deep sense of unease. It was happening again.

Glancing at the red planet one last time, she decided she was done wondering why the planet’s gravity hadn’t torn them apart already. She ran out of the room and into the streets of Celestia City.

She closed her eyes, tapping into what she had Seen. There was a bunch of flashing images… The dusting of a lot of people she knew – don’t think about that now, you’ve got things to do – an image of the Tower and some planet, then nothing. She had never been the best at Awareness, but the sharp dropoff of such a vivid image was very disconcerting.

Only one of the places she’d seen was actually in Celestia City, which meant she had to get there as fast as possible.

As she ran through the streets of the City, she was struck with how empty it was. Every few minutes she would see someone wandering around like a zombie or hear some enraged sobs coming from a nearby building, but for the most part all the bustling noises of the city were gone. She saw a few wrecked hovercars, a lot of doors ominously hanging open, and several purses and bags just left on the ground, abandoned.

Most of the public screens in the city displayed error messages. A few emitted a low drone, indicative that some automatic protocols had initiated, telling people to remain in their homes. However, there should have been a lot more happening even if everyone had been dusted to nothing. The drones of Celestia City should have been readying it for combat, the shield should have been up, and more detailed messages should have been going out.

The unicorn decided to worry about it later. She had somewhere to be.

She leaped into an elevator that had access to the lower levels, hoping the lift still functioned. There was an error message saying expect slower travel times, but it allowed her to select a destination.

At least I don’t have to find some stairs. I don’t even know where those would be.

The elevator took her down, slowly, through a clear shaft. She saw the inner workings of Celestia City laid bare to her eyes. What was usually a bustling city of bright colors, neon lights, and cheerful crowds was eerie. There were a few smoldering areas from car crashes, and one section of cubic buildings had something go so wrong they exploded in blue fire. During her trip, she only saw one hovercar move past her field of view, so fast she almost didn’t register it.

She eventually arrived at her selected level. She darted out of the elevator and ran down a winding street made of a ruby-like material. Once the road transferred to a more traditional asphalt-mimicking road, she skidded to a stop in front of her goal: the League of Sweetie Belles.

A hover car had crashed right through the walls of the building. The crash had dislodged the crusader shield of the league, leaving the plaque embedded in the ground.

The unicorn shook her head and ran past the shield into the League’s main lobby. The hovercar was there, sitting on top of a loose pile of metallic debris from the wall. There was no driver or passengers. Toward the edge of the pile, she saw a small white hoof sticking out.

“I’m coming!” she shouted, running to the hoof. She tried to lift the metal sheet with her telekinesis, but promptly found that her horn wasn’t working. She shook her head, switching from horn to hoof to remove the metal. The sheet was heavy, but she wasn’t a weak mare by any means. It only took a few seconds to reveal the other white unicorn beneath – one with deep red eyes and a jagged pastel pink-purple mane.

“Thrackerzod?”

Thrackerzod looked up, her red eyes blinking ever-so-slowly. “…Mattie…?” she asked with a deep, guttural voice.

“Yes, it’s me. Where are the others?”

“…Gone.”

“I mean those who weren’t dusted,” Mattie muttered, narrowing her eyes. “Please, Thrackerzod, we have to get them out of here.”

Thrackerzod blinked, looking at her horn for a moment. “Huh…” She pointed a lethargic hoof at a nearby piece of sheet metal. Mattie ran to it, peeling the metal off to reveal a human girl with white skin and hair of a similar color to Thrackerzod’s – another member of the League of Sweetie Belles. “Uh… Please don’t take offense to this, but which one are you?”

The girl quickly glanced at her with her pale, green irises. “I…” She said, suddenly caught off guard by the meek, girlish sound of her voice. “What…?” She stared at her arm, wiggling her fingers. “What fresh hell is…?”

“Burgerbelle,” Thrackerzod offered, not lifting her head. “It’s Burgerbelle.”

Mattie blinked. “…What?”

“She was dying. The universe wouldn’t accept her. I had to do what I could. She’s the last one.”

Mattie gulped. “S-surely there were other Sweeties here?”

“The others are ‘dusted’,” Thrackerzod said, voice finally ringing with an emotion – anger. “All three of them…”

Burgerbelle started crying. Mattie shook her head – she already knew about Allure, Bot, and Squeaky. It was one of the things she’d Seen. But the League had to have more Sweeties in it… She climbed onto the shrapnel, looking for any sign of life. Near the top, she found one of them – a small unicorn Sweetie with a metal spike jammed through her head.

“Lucky enough to make it five seconds…” Mattie muttered. She continued to look through the wreckage for other Sweeties. A few minutes later she found one alive – it was one of the younger ones with a deep black coat. She was unconscious. It wasn’t hard for Mattie to dig her out and set her next to Thrackerzod.

Something in Thrackerzod’s mind clicked. “You… found her?”

“Yeah, in the metal. You should help.”

Thrackerzod shook her head, blinking several times. Then she looked at the wreckage and tried to light her horn. Mattie felt the usual wave of unease she got whenever Thrackerzod tried to do something magical – but aside from that, there was no effect.

“…What in Azathoth’s name…?”

“I think magic is out,” Mattie said. “I can’t use mine either. My Awareness is spotty, to boot. So we’re right screwed here with just our hooves.” She glanced at Burgerbelle, the once-Flat being still unable to fully process her new body. “…This is going to take too long…”

“We can’t treat them even if we find them,” Thrackerzod said. “We need magic to do that. First aid isn’t going to help serious injuries.”

Mattie pointed at the black Sweetie. “She’s fine. But we can’t just leave them. W-”

Suddenly, the lights came on. A synthetic voice could be heard over the loudspeaker. “Please remain calm, citizens. Power is being restored to Celestia City. Medical stations are the next priority. Please be patient as we sort out this issue. Many of us are injured or lost, help everyone you see if you are able. Thank you.”

“…All the leadership must be gone,” Thrackerzod said. “The City AI wouldn’t need to speak itself, otherwise.”

“I’m surprised it’s still around,” Mattie commented, pulling off another sheet of metal.

“It… would have had hundreds of backups. Including one specifically designed to be soulless.”

Mattie shook her head, saying nothing. She peeled another piece of metal off the ground to find not a Sweetie Belle – but a naked woman with pure white skin and short white hair. Strange, ribbon-like tendrils flowed from her back. She had cuts and bruises all over her body, a few of them serious, but was still breathing.

“Who the devil i-”

“White Nettle…” Thrackerzod said in disbelief. “She must have transformed herself at the last minute…”

Mattie put her hoof under White Nettle’s body and hoisted her up. “Where’s the League’s medical unit?”

“Basement Two.”

“That AI better have it running. I’ve got questions and I bet Nettle here can answer them. Can I trust you to keep looking?”

Thrackerzod nodded slowly. “…It’s far from the first time I’ve been without my abilities. I’ll survive.”

“Not what I was concerned about.”

Thrackerzod looked at the ground, clearly struggling to maintain her composure. “We don’t have the luxury of being so concerned about each other. Go, heal her. I’ll keep working.”

Mattie nodded, carrying Nettle away.

~~~

“NOVA!”

The church sat on top of a large mountain overlooking a sea of pink water that churned with the chaos of being assembled onto a new planet. The church itself was completely unharmed, thanks no doubt to its protective enchantments, but that did nothing to alleviate the travesty that had just occurred. Within the church, there were sounds of screams and tears.

Flutterfree Asquall, for once in her life, didn’t give any thought to the screams and pain of others. She ran to where her lifelong friend had vanished into sparkling dust. She flailed around with her yellow hooves and marble-tipped wings, trying to grab onto something, anything, even though there was no longer anything there. Her pointed ears twitched in random directions, wanting anything that told them Nova was there, that Nova was fine. She let out a screech, baring her fangs and staring at the ground with her red eyes.

She tried to summon her Stand, Lolo, to Reveal everything around them. But she couldn’t. This threw her – Lolo’s entire power was to show things, including itself! How come it wasn’t!?

“What’s happened?!” Flutterfree wailed, demanding someone, anyone answer her. She looked to her team members. Vriska and Pidge, the cobalt troll and the diminutive woman, had their hands to their mouths, tears in their eyes. Even the usually stoic Jotaro looked vulnerable despite his gigantic masculine figure. Meanwhile, Pinkie, her once-Captain and other lifelong friend, was clearly trying to cry despite her lack of eyes.

“Rev!” Flutterfree called out, demanding support.

The pinkish unicorn Flutterfree called wasn't looking at her – she was looking at her church, listening to the screams and cries, holding her cross necklace tight. “It was a bunker… It was supposed to be safe…”

“Clearly the bunker idea was fucking pointless,” the dark Rina spat, ruffling her wings and adjusting her dress. “Great use of my magic. So glad we did that.”

“Shut the fuck up!” Vriska shouted, rushing to punch Rina across the face. The troll missed, falling to the ground in a heap.

Rina prepared a magic bolt – but only a tiny spark of purple came out. “What in-”

“Magic’s gone,” Pinkie said, her voice haggard, choking on her breaths. She didn’t bother turning her head away from where Nova had been. “It’s just… gone…”

“It can’t be gone!” Flutterfree shouted. “You saw what happened! You saw those sparks! Look at my mane, it’s still active!” She stomped her hooves on the ground. “GET HER B-” Her anger dropped off in an instant and she paled, a haunted expression crossing her face. “No… No Rage…”

“No Stands either…” Jotaro said, pulling his hat over his eyes.

“You’re really talking about powers at a time like this?” Vriska blurted. “Nova’s just been turned to dust! I don’t know about you but that seems pretty fucking permanent!”

“We won, Vriska!” Pidge shouted back. “That was the price of the collapse. None of us expected to survive!”

“Then why did only one of us die?”

“Get some perspective,” Rev spat, glowering at them. “Do none of you care about the church? It clearly got more of them.”

“Oh, that’s great, guess that means we’re still important,” Pidge muttered. “What was the whole point of the Collapse again? To destroy the Tower? Pinkie, how destroyed is the Tower?”

“…It has a crack,” Pinkie said. “…That’s all I saw. A crack.”

“Then the job isn’t done. We need to go to the Tower and take it down the rest of the way.”

“Agreed,” Jotaro said.

“Now is not the time to go rushing into action again!” Vriska shouted.

“Oh, that’s rich coming from you,” Pidge retorted.

“I happen to have enough emotional sense to know when everyone’s broken! You like to think you’re a robot!”

“I’m quiznakking outraged! The Tower’s played a trick on us! A trick!”

“Did we really think it wouldn’t?” Pinkie asked, angling her head at the sky. “I mean, really… That would have just been too predictable.” She let out a soft chuckle, her mane entering its flat state. “Gee, we’re really stupid aren’t we?”

“Of course you are, you wanted to collapse the multiverse!” Rina shouted. “And you won! You should all be fucking ecstatic.”

Pinkie tried to twist herself to appear behind Rina – but instead just fell to the ground. “Oh, look at that, Pinkie Powers are down as well, isn’t that great?” She giggled.

Flutterfree started sobbing. “Pinkie… Pinkie stop…”

Pinkie shivered. “I… I… I need to cry Flutterfree. I need to cry and I can’t.”

“Pinkie…”

“What is your problem!?” Rina shouted at Flutterfree. “They’re the ones who did all of this! They’re the ones who killed Nova!”

“F-fuck,” Vriska said, taking a few steps back.

“Oh, did you not register that, bitch? You are to blame for this! Listen to those screams!”

“We don’t take sides, Rina!” Rev shouted.

“Why don’t you get away from your high-and-mighty doctrine and tell us what you really think, Rev?” Rina glared at her.

“I think we’re all broken and we need to stop shouting at each other!”

“HAH!” Vriska blurted. “That’s a laugh! Us, stop arguing, after Nova fucking died. How naïve are you?”

Rev bit back her own tears. “She was my friend too you know! But th-”

“Rev…?” Flutterfree asked with a quiet voice that managed to draw everyone’s attention. “…Do you think there was any chance she believed? Any… Any at all?”

Rev froze like a deer in the headlights. She swallowed hard and opened her mouth to answer.

Instead she broke down into tears and crumpled to the ground, hooves over her face.

“Tell me there was a chance!” Flutterfree demanded.

Rev didn’t even open her eyes.

“TELL ME THERE WAS A CHANCE!”

“I CAN’T! IT WOULD BE A LIE!” Rev wailed, swinging one of her hooves around wildly. “EVE, MAYBE, BUT NOVA? SHE DIDN’T BELIEVE! SHE NEVER DID! SHE WAS SET IN HER WAYS!”

“SHE CAN’T BE THERE!”

“SHE IS! SHE IS AND WE HAVE TO LIVE WITH IT! BUT S-”

Flutterfree punched Rev across the face.

Everyone stared at Flutterfree in shock.

“Hell…” she muttered. “She… She was a good mare…”

“She didn’t want Him,” Rev said, struggling back to her hooves. “He… He gave her what she wan-”

Flutterfree screeched. “Don’t you give me any of that ‘He gave her what she wanted’ NONSENSE!”

“Flutterfree, I beli-”

“YOU ARE A BUNDLE OF PATHETIC WISHFUL THINKING!”

“I… I don’t, I think about it and I… I feel that…” She couldn’t complete her sentence, breaking down again. She pulled Flutterfree into a hug and the two of them bawled their eyes out.

Pinkie threw herself onto the pile. Without hesitation, Pidge, Jotaro, and Vriska threw their arms around each other as well.

Rina stood off to the side, awkwardly hoofing the ground. The anger had drained from her face, but she still wasn’t crying.

“Fuck, life is stupid,” she muttered under her breath.

A great golden lion by the name of Aslan walked out of the church, taking his position besides Rina. “…They have been reunited.”

“They’re stupid,” Rina echoed her earlier sentiment.

“He has chosen the weak and foolish to shame the strong and wise.”

Rina looked at the ground, ashamed.

“…They were together, all of them, for one last moment,” Aslan said.

“Why would He do that? Give them hope just… Just to take it away?”

“God’s plan is never something we can know for sure. …But I think if you ask that question about the Tower instead of Him, you will find an answer.”

Rina fell silent.

Aslan turned. “Let them commiserate. When they have completed, send them back in.”

“You can’t stay here…?”

“The church needs a powerful presence right now, most of us are gone.” He shook his head in sorrow. “Right now, Valentine is just making sure they don’t all leave in panic.”

Rina nodded, turning back to the pile of grieving people. Her frown deepened.

~~~

I stared at the broken Fourth Wall.

Through it, I could see the bedroom of GM – the GM, the Prophet GM, the source of the ideas that formed me and most of the events that had surrounded me for the last several decades. He lay, dead, because I acted too quickly.

You’re going to be the death of me.

“There’s no way… You couldn’t have done that… You wouldn’t have done that! You…” I let out a bitter, drawn out laugh. “Of course you would. You planned this all along…” I wiped a tear from my face with my wing. “Can I apologize for something you made me do? Or did I still do it? If it was planned that far back, could I have changed it? Would someone else have killed you?”

I did not get answers to my questions, could not. I would have asked more, but I was interrupted by a kick to the face from Roxy Lalonde, Rogue of Void, a blonde woman in a dark blue roguish outfit. “You’re done.”

She tried to erase me from existence. I tried to defend myself with magic.

It will not surprise you that neither of our attempted uses of esoteric ability had any effect whatsoever.

Roxy took one look at her Void powers not working, shrugged, and kicked me in the stomach.

I bounced back and flared my purple wings. I padded my hoof on the ground. If I was just a normal alicorn right now, I could easily take a Gem - all it would take was a carefully placed horn into her side to poof her.

She reached into the air, trying to pull a weapon out of her inventory, but found that was out of her access as well. “Fuck…”

“Don’t do this, Roxy,” I warned.

“You killed him!”

“I didn’t want to! I was trying to destroy the wall!” I shouted. “He was my Prophet! I knew him! Why would I want him dead!?”

“To keep us from stopping you, duh. Tell me you wouldn’t have killed him if you thought it would have ensured your collapse happened.”

I couldn’t tell her that. She nodded to herself and charged again. I slipped behind her and kicked her in the back.

“HEAVEN’S DOOR!” Rohan, eccentric manga artist, shouted, trying to summon his Stand. Realizing his only weapon was useless, he decided to take cover behind the largest thing around, the Fourth Wall. He was the first to discover that the room on the other side of the Fourth Wall was physically on the other side, no longer connected by an esoteric wormhole of some sort. He did not feel the need to comment on this.

A tall woman with long, flowing coral brown hair shrugged. “Can’t access character files either, sooo…” She rushed me driving her foot into my cheek bone.

“Monika!” I shouted. “You don’t have to do this!”

“I’ve wanted to do this since before the war,” Monika muttered, kicking me again. I caught it with a hoof, but Roxy punched it out.

“Jade’s dead. John’s dead. Fuck, even Hussie’s dead, and I bet all the ghosts are, too!” Roxy shouted, pulling one of my hooves and slamming me against the ground. She was not expecting me to be so heavy, so she fell over in the process. Monika continued to kick me.

She shattered a rib. I screamed. “We don’t have magic! We can’t heal injuries!”

They ignored me. Roxy had let rage consume her, and Monika had never had much in the way of a moral compass.

“JUST STOP!” a young man with oversized glasses shouted.

Monika and Roxy looked up from what they were doing to stare at GM – little more than a boy who had been lured into this mess by a Prophet who wanted to remain hidden.

He was crying. “Just… There’s been enough… Stop…”

Roxy’s expression softened for a moment, but it quickly returned to rage. “You’re part of this too. You’re part of his story.”

GM’s fear heightened considerably. “B-w-sh-i-jis…” He couldn’t formulate a word.

Monika glared. “You’re just like him. A copy designed to throw us off. You’re the one who brought this all on us…”

Rohan muttered a curse before leaping out between Monika and GM. “No. You don’t get to blame him for this.”

“Get out of the way, Rohan.”

“I refuse.”

Monika’s left eye twitched. “Don’t think I can’t see your stupid meme. I’m powerless, not unAware. You’ve never actually fought anything.”

“He’s still right,” Rohan said, narrowing his eyes. “The fight is over. We don’t need to continue it.”

“They’re dead, Rohan!” Roxy shouted.

“Yes. They are. And this kid, if he had anything to do with it, had no idea.” He pointed a drawing pen at them. “Prophets cannot be held accountable for what they write if they do not know their nature! Not even the GM behind the window knew – he was just writing what he thought was a clever story!”

GM looked up at Rohan in wonder. “Th… thank you.”

“A version of him probably made you say that,” Monika pointed out.

“Made me say?” Rohan raised an eyebrow. “Made me say? If he truly made me say it, then everything you say was predetermined as well. But he himself admits we ‘characters’ surprise him. He did not expect me to come out and defend him. Yet I did it anyway. I refuse to be a predictable character, and the same goes for you. I am not a one-off asshole manga artist whose only goals in life are furthering my art. I have goals. People I love and care about. Experiences that no one here but myself can completely understand. I am Rohan Kishibe – you are Roxy Lalonde, you are Monika, and you are Twilence. You’re all people.”

Roxy blinked. “…Good speech. What does it have to do with you stopping us?”

Rohan put his pen away. “I’ve calmed you down enough to where you won’t want to hurt some poor defenseless kid for daring to point out you were being cruel.”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Monika muttered, curling her fingers into a fist.

“You’re right…” Roxy said, expression softening again. “But so is Rohan… We can’t just kill them. That… That wouldn’t be right. Wouldn’t be in good memory…. Wouldn’t be…” She put a hand to her mouth. “Oh my god I was going to beat someone to death with my fists…”

I stood up, hoof to my ribs. “Its’… fine, I understan-”

“Don’t you start, bitch,” Roxy glowered, “The thickness of the ice you are standing on can be measured by my hair.”

I recoiled. “U-understood.”

“So, Rohan, since for some reason you seem to be the one who has their shit the closest to together, how about you give a report or… something.” She took in a breath, wiping her face. “…Please.”

Rohan nodded. “Sure. To put it simply, we failed, the collapse happened. Since most of us are still alive I’m willing to bet it didn’t go as planned.”

I looked up at the sky, seeing the large round shapes shifting in the bizarre twilight. “…You’d be safe to assume that.”

“And since Monika’s still Aware, the Tower still exists.”

“Yep,” Monika said. “Me and Twilence saw 130. The Tower’s here, because of something Flowers and that stupid Renee bitch.”

I furrowed my brow. “I… Am I allowed to ask what happened to Renee? She looked… wrong.”

“She’s dead. Came Back Wrong,” Monika deadpanned. “After she was killed by Allure during the destruction of Raven Hotel.”

“W-what!? She’s a hyper-intelligent?!”

“I don’t know, probably?” Monika shrugged. “Everything but that scene with her in it was hidden. So I’m only slightly less clueless than you. And we can’t see anything now, so it’s not like we have a way to get any more information.”

“That’s not true,” Rohan said, pointing at the ground.

Black Thirteen sat there, just where they had left it. It called to all of them, still clearly brimming with magic.

“…Well,” Monika said, blinking. “…I completely forgot about that thing.”

“Anyone here able to touch it without going mad?” Rohan asked.

I raised my hoof.

“Nope, you don’t get it,” Monika said.

“I’m the only one who can hold it and get any information from it. I thought you wanted to know things?”

“Let’s finish talking about what’s happening before we get into a stupid argument about the most powerful artifact in the multiverse,” Roxy muttered, putting a hand to the bridge of her nose. “I mean since Joh…” She stopped talking, arm covering her eyes.

Rohan shook his head. “I’ll… take that order. The Prophet GM is dead, and the last thing I saw on his computer before it exploded was one-fifty-seven. He’s already completed the story. We can’t do anything to change that now. Black Thirteen’s right there, calling to us. All the ghosts vanished, John was ‘Purified’ by that batter…” They all heard Roxy’s pained sob. “And Magane vanished in a cloud of sparkles.”

“The Tower letting us know there’s no escape,” Monika muttered.

“It is a very cruel construct,” I added.

“I can break another rib,” Monika threatened.

I turned away, head sagging.

“And now we’re on this plain of roses,” Rohan said. “The Dark Tower doesn’t appear to be anywhere near here anymore, and there are planets spinning above us in ways that don’t make sense. I don’t think I missed anything.” He glanced at GM. “Oh, right, we have GM with us. He’s been decidedly traumatized.”

GM let out a bitter snort and nodded distantly.

“Anyway, that’s basically all we know. Suggestions for what to do?”

“Access Black Thirteen and get information out of it,” I said. “It will know.”

“And you don’t have a voice in this team,” Monika pointed out. “You’re a prisoner. Actually, I should use a capture device on you… Should work fine with just a few more kicks…”

“Look, let’s talk about this like civilized people and come to a rational conc-”

A man in black appeared in the air with a ZAP! He unceremoniously fell to the ground with a thud, the roses scraping him. He grunted, stood up, and dusted himself off.

Randall Flagg.

“So, it’s been a couple hours, I guess?” Flagg cracked his knuckles. “That retcon was both the worst and last mistake of your pathetic lives.”

~~~

The Source was the well from which all ka flowed. It represented itself as a white Spirograph shape that twirled, slowly, in the room at the top of the Dark Tower. This room was usually empty, devoid of all objects save for a clock tied to the fate of the multiverse itself.

That clock was gone now. But the room was not empty. There were five people there, plus a partial artificial intelligence that took the form of a purple sugar-skull lying motionlessly on the ground. Four of the people were looking accusatory at the fifth – a white unicorn in a stylish gray hat lined with a pink ribbon. One of her eyes was clearly fake and featured a large crack along it, while the other seemed menacing. Once, she had been a mare by the name of Renee, though she clearly wasn’t this mare anymore.

“What. Did. You. DO!?” Nanoha Takamachi, Chief Sovereign of the Time Space Administration Bureau, demanded. She struck a powerful pose, her long orange hair flipping around, pointing the Device Raising Heart at Renee menacingly. Her normally soft, understanding features were harsh and brutal.

“You know that toy of yours can’t do anything right now,” Renee said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t even try to bluff.”

Nanoha twitched, refusing to lower Raising Heart.

“I know my gun works,” a deep, gruff voice said. Everyone turned their attention to the newcomer to the room: Roland of Gilead, a gruff man with uneven stubble, a hat ripped straight out of a western, eyes that had seen far too much, and a very even grip on the handle of his pistol.

“Gunslinger…” Renee said, a wiry scowl crawling up her mouth. “How does it feel to be free and finally enter the room you have sought for so, so long?”

“It tells me something’s wrong. Of all the characters in this room, you are the closest to him.”

“Oh, do be more specific darling. We talking Randall Flagg? The Crimson King? Or perhaps you still have some resentment toward Stephen King?”

“Like you don’t already know,” a short woman with teal hair and red gloves said. She wore a sleek form-fitting outfit with a segmented skirt and pronounced yellow collar. She was Jenny of the Red Gloves, and she was ready to punch the unicorn in the face and across the room at a moment’s notice. “Stop toying with him.”

Renee shrugged. “If you insist, I shall stop toying with him.”

“Then how about you answer the dame’s question?” Roland asked, narrowing his eyes.

“I think we all want to know what you did,” the last person in the room – a gray skinned humanoid with long, orange ram horns that complimented her own robes. She was the representative chosen from all versions of Aradia, Maid of Time, to be here at this momentous time. “I might object to torturing you for more information, but I think all the others are indifferent.”

“She said, thinking she could actually torture me,” Renee laughed. “But I’m in a helpful mood, so I’ll give you at least a little taste. I initiated the collapse with some… edits.”

“At the behest of the Flowers?” Nanoha asked.

“Ah ah ah, one question at a time, dearie. Looks like being Chief Sovereign has made you lose your patience, White Devil.”

Jenny flexed her wrist. “One more remark like that out of you and your brains will be against the wall.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Everyone else in this room has checked their magic already. Have you?”

Jenny’s pupils dilated. “Frick…”

“That’s what I thought. Resuming my answers, I initiated the collapse. It wasn’t the collapse they wanted. Yes, that’s right, look around – there are no pro-collapse individuals left in this room. Isn’t. That. Something?”

“I get it, poetic justice or apropos or whatever.”

“Learning ever so slowly,” Renee chuckled. “As always. Regardless, the original collapse wanted completely natural fusion and averaging out of all the universes in the multiverse. This simply wouldn’t do – the sheer scale of death would be unimaginable, the physics of the New World would be near-Mundane, and above all, the story would end so abruptly at the climax without a resolution! Simply horrendous.”

“The whole point of the collapse was to end the story,” Aradia said. “To keep Prophets from dictating our actions.”

Roland furrowed his brow in contemplation at this revelation, but said nothing.

“It certainly was the point. But it was a point that just wouldn’t be satisfying.” Renee twirled a hoof in the air. “So here I am, changing the collapse. Made a few adjustments. Namely, the universe outside isn’t Mundane, far from it! You can be rest assured it’s a single universe but oh is it so delightfully varied. A perfect tessellation machinated by the highest patterns imaginable in ever-increasing spheres…” Her eyes sparkled. “It’s beautiful. And to top it all off, the story gets to continue!” She tapped the wall of the room. “The Dark Tower is still here, after all. If it had been destroyed we would all be dead. Well, re-dead in my case, but that’s just semantics.”

“Then why’d they vanish?” Jenny shouted. “Alushy, Blumiere… They’re just gone!”

“Ah, dusted.” Renee smirked. “It simply wouldn’t do to have the collapse come without punishment. The vast majority of people in existence have been dusted in a similar way. Of course, the actual death toll is significantly less than it would be if a true collapse were initiated – somewhere around seven orders of magnitude – but it still had to be large enough for everyone to feel it. You can’t just change the multiverse and not suffer the consequences you were prepared to deal with. That’d just be cheap.”

Roland lowered his gun. “So you saved lives.”

“At the expense of making the lives that were lost not even close to worth it,” Aradia added.

“The foolishness of you people astounds me sometimes…” She picked Sai up off the ground and tossed her to Roland. He caught the AI in his free hand, though he knew not what it was, and Sai wasn’t saying anything. “Why don’t we go outside and take a look at what this New World is actually like, hmm? Stretch our legs a bit and get a better understanding of the complete picture.”

“Nobody can see the complete picture,” Aradia pointed out.

“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” Jenny asked.

Renee laughed and shook her head. “Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions! Tsk tsk tsk.” She trotted toward the door that led to the Tower’s staircase. “Let’s clear up some of those.”

“We didn’t agree to go outside,” Jenny pointed out.

“And you don’t have your powers so you can’t exactly stop me. You’re ‘free’ to stay in this room if you want, but none of you will.” She trotted out the door.

Nanoha sighed. “She’s right…” She followed Renee. The rest followed her.

Roland took one last look at the room. The room he had sought for so long, just to get some answers.

The answer?

A machine. All of this up here, everything, it was a machine. The Source told him that much. All he had experienced – the endless repeating story, the conflict with the Crimson King, his close ka-tet of friends – all dictated by this machine. There was no god in the room, no mind.

For whatever reason it had ‘decided’ he no longer needed to be on his endless journey.

He turned and left. There were more answers to be sought. But he knew they lay outside the Dark Tower.

For the first time since the beginning era of the multiverse, Roland of Gilead did not have a singular quest defining his life.

~~~

“Report!” Military Overhead Jack O’Neill barked, pulling himself back onto his captain’s chair and holding his head.

At first, nobody responded.

O’Neill looked around the bridge of his ship, the Austraeoh, and found only one other person – a fit blue unicorn by the name of Clandestine. She was holding her head, trying to focus. “What just…”

“They collapsed, I think,” O’Neill said, trying to press some buttons on his console. Most of them came up as error messages, but a few of the most mundane backup systems were coming through. They reported a planet proximity danger. “We’re too close…”

“Visual cameras are working,” Clandestine reported, trying not to think too hard about the rest of the bridge crew’s disappearance. She tried to press a button with her magic, but found that didn’t work. “My magic is gone.” She resorted to using hooves to put the planet on the screen.

What she ended up doing was displaying several planets at once, all in a mostly even plane, barely not touching each other.

“…What kind of universe is this?” O’Neill asked.

“I don’t know,” Clandestine reported. “What instruments we do have are saying this is a black hole universe. No outward connections. That’s what we’d expect from a collapse.”

“Can you maneuver us somewhere safe?”

“I think so… reaction-based thrusters are still working.”

O’Neill allowed himself to smirk. “They always said it wasn’t worth designing to function in all universes…”

“One can never have too many backups, sir.”

O’Neill nodded. “Status of the crew?”

“…Before most systems went offline, there were… nineteen remaining life signs.” She gulped. Despite her extensive military experience, she was struggling to keep her composure.

“…Out of a thousand seven hundred…” O’Neill said, shaking his head. He pressed a few buttons on his console, trying to get more readings, but only getting detailed reports for a short time after the collapse was initiated. “How far away are we from the planet now?”

“Far enough away to be safe… But not where we should have been. I… I don’t have access to advanced trajectory calculations, but the planet’s gravity should have done something to us…”

“Something to figure out later. What else is out there besides a bunch of planets all in a line?”

Clandestine bit her lip and started sending camera feeds to various screens around the bridge, replacing the error messages with shaking pictures of planets, planets, and more planets. One image found a tremendous rocky planet two hundred times larger than normal composed of several biomes stitched together like a quilt while another showed a star in the distance, which was being ‘orbited’ by a sphere of asteroid debris, making it look more like a melting rock than a planetary system.

“…The hell?”

“I have no idea either, sir. The physics scanners aren’t functioning. I’ve been able to determine that most of our thaumic components function and are currently trying to reroute themselves. Dimensional drive, reality anchor… anything that does any sort of reality manipulation is completely dead.”

“How much is the damage from the battle hindering us?”

“I think a lot?” Clandestine said, clearly not happy with the amount of uncertainty in her voice. “The Austraeoh is still designed to operate in Mundane space if need be, it shouldn’t take this long to reroute itself. There are probably several things blown out and… hold on, I just found something that isn’t a planet.” She put it onscreen.

Amidst a bunch of shattered metallic debris, there was the Starjammer. The ship they had been fighting just before reality had decided to collapse in on itself. It was a large black behemoth lined with several light-blue glowing Runes. There was a large hole blown out of its aft section.

“Hail them.”

“Radio only,” Clandestine reported, following the order. “No response. Chances are good their communications are down and they aren’t screening for radio.”

“What do we know about the state of their ship?”

“What you see on screen. Heavily damaged – not by us, we didn’t blow that much off of it. Runes appear to still be operational, so I don’t exactly see why they can’t move…”

“The crew could be gone,” O’Neill observed.

“…Yeah…” she glanced at an empty seat beside her. “What could do this?”

“I have no idea. It wasn’t in Corona’s plan. I intend to find out what’s actually responsible.”

Clandestine nodded, looking back at the Starjammer. “Wait, something’s happening…”

One of the Runes of the Starjammer had begun to glow brightly. A few seconds later, it exploded in a shower of blue sparks, taking a chunk of the ship with it.

“Now we know what took out their aft section…” Clandestine said, blinking. “Power failure of some kind…”

“Any sign of survivors?”

Clandestine scanned the image with her eyes. “…There. A handful of escape pods, a fighter, and a carrier. They’re… heavily damaged, but drifting away from the explosions.”

“Let’s get them.”

“All I’ve got is tethers and manual aiming.”

“Then that’ll have to work.”

Clandestine took in a sharp breath. “Yes, sir.” She pressed some buttons and activated the tethers. She aimed one at a time at each of the five crafts.

Outside, the Austraeoh angled its starboard side toward the Starjammer. The Austraeoh was a pristine ship. It was a slender craft formed of a white metal that all came to a single, pointed tip. Usually the central rod glowed with numerous lights and had an engine that shone with every color of the rainbow, but today most of the lights were dark. Six other, smaller rods were arranged around the central shaft, each of them having a single large fin angled toward each other. A ring circled through each of these fins, connecting the entire ship together into a slender beast that resembled a deep sea creature.

The tethers aiming at the larger targets – the fighter and the carrier – latched onto the hulls of the ships with ease. The three directed at the escape pods had different luck. One latched on perfectly, pulling it in. The other two bounced off the Runic hulls, throwing the escape pods in random directions. One went far from either the Starjammer or Austraeoh, but the last pod went flying right back to the Starjammer.

“Sassafras,” Clandestine swore, aiming two tethers at the escape pod drifting toward the Starjammer. Since it was moving much faster now, it was harder to hit. The first missed completely, and the second only nudged it closer to the Starjammer.

Sweating, Clandestine prepared another tether by turning the Austraeoh slightly. She aimed and fired.

The claw latched right onto the escape pod.

“YES!” O’Neill shouted, grinning.

Clandestine let out a sigh of relief and started reeling the tether in.

The Starjammer let loose another explosion, this one enough to disintegrate the nanofiber tether attaching the claw to the Austraeoh.

For a moment, Clandestine moved to launch another claw – but she quickly saw that the escape pod had been ripped in two by the explosion. She sagged in her chair.

Wordlessly, she fired a claw at the escape pod well out of the blast range, hitting it on the first try. She brought it in.

“Clandestine…”

“Sir, I failed. Don’t try to comfort me.”

O’Neill obliged, falling into silence. He put his hand to his chin and looked around the empty bridge once again.

Whoever’s responsible for this… He didn’t finish the thought.

A small beep rang out in the bridge. Clandestine blinked. “…We’re being hailed from the carrier.”

“…Can we put it onscreen?”

“Quality might be low, but yes.” She pressed a button with her hoof, pulling up the image of a familiar woman with pale skin, white hair, and purple eyes. She wore a uniform nearly identical to that of O’Neill.

Her irises dilated when she recognized O’Neill. The two of them stared at each other for a second.

She put her hand to her forehead in a salute. “High Commander Minna Belle reporting for duty, Sir.”

The war’s over. We don’t have to fight anymore. We need each other. He found himself shaking his head and smirking. Then he saluted. “Welcome aboard, High Commander. You’ll be glad to know your court-martial has been postponed indefinitely.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now get in here, we need to figure out what the hell we’re dealing with.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

~~~

Sherlock Holmes had asked the Merodi and the multiverse to keep their shenanigans out of his life. He had decided it was not something he needed to make part of his routine, though he certainly learned everything he could about the multiverse. Curiosity and all.

This had gone pretty well for about thirty years from his perspective, until Corona had made the announcement. He had tried to ignore it, since most of the people in his world had decided it was too much for their puny minds to handle, but he simply couldn’t. So he had to live with knowing there was a war happening for the fate of the entire multiverse.

Still, he had managed to keep himself out of the war. His Earth didn’t care, and likely never would. He continued on with his detective work, always solving the most impossible of cases.

Then the multiverse collapsed and his planet was unfolded like some child had taken a knife to a tennis ball and stomped on it. He happened to be on one of the edges when it happened, witnessing as his world was sewn together with several others. He saw everyone in the town near him vanish in puffs of magic dust.

A normal person would have been horrified and terrified first and foremost, and he certainly felt those things. But his primary emotions were ones of annoyance and dejected acceptance. He had ignored the call for long enough, he supposed the other worlds finally needed him.

Funny how that happened when there was only one world now. Couldn’t really be called the multiverse anymore.

So, technically, he didn’t have to deal with the multiverse again. Technically. Of course, he could also argue that the elements from the other worlds present in the New World constituted interference, but the thought experiment was already boring him.

He looked around. He stood at the fusion point of three separate worlds. One was his city, the other was a city with larger buildings and decidedly brighter colors but an equal lack of people, and the third was a rural area with trees that he had never seen before. Where the three of these worlds met, there was a small section of desert.

In the middle of the desert was a bunch of smoldering wreckage, all of it white and unusually flat. A quick set of observations told him how the pieces of the white material fit together to form a house.

The House Juju, he thought, remembering what he had read. The prison of Lord English. …For Pete’s sake, why do I have to be the one to see this?

As the dust and smog cleared, Sherlock was able to make out a being unlike any he had ever encountered. Pictures didn’t do the sickly green behemoth justice. He was at least three times as tall as any human man and was far more muscular. Every inch of him was absolutely ripped, to the point at which the shapes of muscles pushed through his sleeves. His outfit was equal parts ugly and distracting. There was a Cairo Overcoat whose seams flashed seemingly random colors that Sherlock quickly realized were the standard shades for pool balls. His shorts were white, simple, and torn at the bottom, but one of his legs had been replaced with a solid gold peg strobing with the same colors as the overcoat.

And then there were his eyes. They were embedded in his skull-like face, refusing to keep a consistent color. These eyes were clearly what dictated the rest of his outfit, for they were literal pool balls, shifting from one to fifteen in quick succession. It was hypnotic.

Lord English looked right at Sherlock Holmes and proceeded to let out the deepest, most guttural Honk the man had ever heard. It was the sound that heralded the end of universes. Sherlock stood his ground, but he knew he was dead if English so much as decided he would be vaguely interesting to kill.

Luckily for the detective, English had other business to attend to. He meticulously went about destroying every single shard of the House Juju, crushing the pieces under his massive foot and peg. The Juju was completely powerless now, and English was not bothering to demolish every segment – but he was clearly looking for something.

And he eventually found it. When he stomped on one of the larger sections, three sparks of energy rose from the ground. Red, black, and yellow, corresponding to the Time, Space, and Light aspects.

There should be a Breath in there. Something happened to John. If he died in the war and couldn’t retcon back to imprison English…

English opened his mouth to vaporize the three sparks of energy – but nothing came out of his mouth.

Sherlock grinned. His powers have been changed in this New World! He may not be as unstoppable as before!

English furrowed his brow, glaring at the sparks. He focused, opened his mouth, and tried again. This time the beam of light came out with ease, vaporizing the three essences into nothingness.

Sherlock grimaced. That didn’t take long… He looked around, performing a deduction. English had destroyed the ‘essences’ of what had imprisoned him, what would he do now? He wanted nothing more than control, destruction, and power… In this New World, where would he get it?

Sherlock didn’t know enough about the world to be sure yet, but he was certain English would need to leave to find it. He was proven right when English snapped his fingers, transforming is coat into a sarcophagus shimmering much like his eyes. He entered the sarcophagus and floated into the air, leaving the conglomeration world.

Sherlock waited about fifteen seconds before rushing into the desert circle, looking for anything he could use to tell someone about this, or at least some information to make a deduction. He held the pieces of the House Juju in his hands – as expected, the texture was smooth and not quite like any substance he had seen before. He didn’t get much further, because someone came out of the larger city section – a bearded man in a red cape and blue robes.

“Doctor Strange!” Sherlock said with a smirk.

“Do I… know you?” Strange asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Doubt it, I’m Sherlock Holmes. Judging by your deviation from the general comic appearance and those Merodi-made boots, I’m guessing you're Strange of Earth-MC?”

Strange nodded, taking Sherlock’s deduction in stride. “I take it you saw the monster?”

“Lord English, the multiversal threat prior to Corona’s little message.” Sherlock put his hands behind his back and began pacing. “Clearly a menace to this New World, and one that must be stopped.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” a woman’s voice said. Walking up to them was a woman with pale amethyst hair, an eyepatch, a large white trenchcoat-skirt hybrid, a gunblade, and an Infinity Gauntlet on one hand. “Lord English must be stopped.”

“Lightning of the Collection!” Sherlock deduced. “So, you survived. And now you want to go face off against the most dangerous thing in existence?”

Lightning nodded. “If Lord English gains power – of any kind – no matter what it is it will be bad for everyone.”

Strange furrowed his brow. “How do you expect to follow him? My magic is gone, I deduce yours is as well. Only English’s seems to work.”

“She’s got a ship,” Sherlock said. “It’s behind those alien trees.”

Lightning looked at Sherlock. “…I can see why you were led here. You will be instrumental…”

“This means the Tower still exists,” Strange pointed out.

“English is more important than that. He was able to easily destroy universes with a roar before. If he did that again, everything would be gone.”

“Even he doesn’t want complete Nihilism, he wants power,” Sherlock observed. “He will seek a way to attain it. To be the master over everyone. Annoyingly simple motivation.”

Lightning nodded. “Come, to my ship. We don’t want to lose his sarcophagus.” She turned away. Sherlock and Strange followed her into the forest, forming three of only five individuals who knew of English’s existence.

After all, nobody Watched beyond the credits.

~~~

Elsewhere in the New World, there was another green-skinned being with pool balls for eyes and a golden peg leg. Unlike Lord English, he wasn’t anything close to ripped and he wore the red robes of Time instead of a Cairo Overcoat. He was a being called a cherub. In his hand he held a golden staff tipped with a spark of green energy. He twisted this staff in his hand and transformed it into a solid gold rifle, pointing it at the computer screen in front of him. “ALL RIGHT! THAT WAS PRETTY FUNNY! GIVE THEM BACK NOW!” he shouted in the most obnoxious, grating voice imaginable.

No black letters appeared on the screen.

“NARRATING FUCKTARD, I KNOW YOU’RE THERE!”

“Man, I don’t think he’s motherfuckin’ there,” a purple troll in the robes of the Bard of Rage said.

“He’s always there. He just acts fucking mysterious. All the time.” The cherub grabbed his gun and gnashed his teeth.

“Well if he’s not gonna respond, he’s not gonna fuckin’ respond, not much we can do about that. Maybe we should try… somethin’ else.”

“FUCK ME. Something else? Your genius astound me at times.” With his flashing eyes, the cherub typed a message.

UndyingUmbridge: HEY. EGBERT. THINGS HAVE CHANGED. LOOK OUTSIDE. THE ENTIRITY OF EXISTENCE HAS BEEN UNCOVERED. YOU SHOULD COME FACE ME NOW. YOU’LL DEFINITELY WIN.

No response.

“He’s been playing hard to get for days…”

“Could be a lot more days than that… time, and all.”

“I control Time! I get it! I see that it’s all screwed up the whazoo, but the program seeks his present self! He’s the retconner and I can always find him!”

His screen popped up an error message. Message not sent. Servers not found.

“Since when does Paradox Space not have servers available!?”

“Since motherfuckin’ now.”

“Gamzee, I will remove your leg and beat you with it again if you don’t stop being captain ‘motherfuckin’’ obvious!”

“Ay man, no need for that, we’re all friends here,” Gamzee said.

“Hmph,” the green being muttered. “All the leprechauns are gone, our powers have been severely weakened... It feels so fucking unnatural for me to say this… But we need to learn more.”

“Woah…” Gamzee said, blinking slowly. “Honk.”

“Shut the fuck up.” The flashy gremlin walked across the room to a hole he had created in the floor, ignoring the mess of candy, poorly-drawn manga, and bicycle horns that had been left around. He jumped into the hole, entering a long, dark, metallic hallway. Usually he would accelerate time at this point to get to the edge, but he couldn’t exactly do that right now, so he grumbled the entire trip of fifty-two seconds.

They arrived at a door, so chosen because they had been tired of climbing up a ladder every time to leave the building. The green being reached out to open the door.

Before he even reached it, there was a loud knock from the other side.

“Woah… we’re bein’ haunted, bro,” Gamzee said. “Like, motherfuckin’ ghosts!”

“Go take your bone bulge and fuck yourself through the skull.” The cherub grabbed the door, threw it open, and pointed his gun out the door. “WHO WANTS THEIR HEADS BLOWN OFF TODAY!?”

A pinkish-purple unicorn with goggles on her face put a hoof on the barrel of the gun and lowered it. “Calm down, geez. We’re not here to steal anything or do anything to you. We just saw this place and decided to check it out. We’ll leave if that’s what you want.” Her companion – a light blue unicorn in a stage outfit – was hiding behind her.

“…I’m not hearing any good reasons not to fill you bitches with bullets.”

“We can tell you why there are planets in the sky swirling in bizarre spherical patterns?”

The cherub looked outside, blinking. The outside didn’t look as cold or desolate as usual. The sky was a pristine purple twilight; in the distance he could see forests, a city, and a mountain covered in trees; and there were in fact planets in the sky. Filling up most of it, in fact.

“…Shit. Fine. I won’t shoot you bitches if you tell me who you two are.”

“Starbeat Glimmer, ka researcher. This is Trixie Lulamoon… Internet ‘celebrity’.”

“I heard those air quotes!” Trixie shouted indignantly.

“Right…”

The cherub glared. “And how’d you get here?”

“We followed the winds of ka – fate, if you will.”

“There’s a yellow brick road leading right to your house,” Trixie deadpanned, gesturing at the yellow brick road they were standing on.

“…Woah, that’s mutherfuckin’ trippy,” Gamzee said.

“Right, so…” Starbeat grinned. “Who are you?”

“I’m just Gamzee Makara, Bard of Rage.”

“CALIBORN!” Caliborn shouted, laughing maniacally. “THE LORD OF TIME!”

Starbeat raised an eyebrow. “Ooookay. Can we get to explanations then?”

“We better, or bullets start flying.”

Starbeat sighed; clearly not thrilled this was the first person they had run into. But it was who they had to deal with it.

If only she had remembered what Lord English looked like…

132 - Brave New World, Part 2

Eve needed some way to cope with what was going on. Corona was decidedly unavailable for emotional support at the moment – besides testing her wings and realizing they still worked, she hadn’t done anything but look forlornly at the sky and cry from time to time.

Eve only put a comforting wing around her some of those time. Rarely did she talk. She was afraid of what she’d do if she did. Raging Sights didn’t say much either, unless Corona addressed it directly.

So Eve had made a list. She didn’t have any paper, but she was able to find a patch of dirt and a stick. Her hooves still worked for holding things, and simply making a list was comforting.

Even if it wasn’t a very nice list.

Things we know:

The collapse didn’t go as planned.

Physics is not even close to standard. Not quite Mushroom Galaxus.

The Dark Tower still exists.

The world we are on is a patchwork world.

Passive magic exists.

Active magic is deactivated.

We survived. Together.

T

A breeze came through and blew Eve’s list away. She let out a sharp enraged scream and rammed her hooves into the ground. A spark shot out of her horn, hitting the ground and sending some dust flying.

She was elated for a moment – magic must be returning slowly! That was something to be excited about! But then she remembered – she had the Element of Magic in her crown, an artifact that maintained its power as part of the ‘passive magic’. For all she knew it was just the energy from the Element seeping into her.

Why is my connection to the Element so… so fuzzy? I can feel it, but it’s… like Raging Sights, it might take time. There’s clearly magic in this world, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to use it. Yes, Eve, that’s right, figure it out. You can do this. You’re the Bearer of the Element of Magic itself, you can do this!

She took in a breath, closed her eyes, and focused. She knitted her brow and fixated on simply lighting her horn. She tried putting effort into it, just forcing thought into her horn, but nothing happened. So, instead, she tried to feel the magic around her horn. To prod it lightly, testing the waters as it were. She felt a response from the sea around her, a slight shifting of the local magic field, or aether. Progress.

Instead of trying to force it, she allowed her effort to meander around like a sea, poking, testing, feeling, shifting with the winds of magic. Then she felt it – the Element of Magic. She had done just enough moving around the new magic to find the connection to the artifact again. A solid connection. The Element of Magic flashed brightly and her horn lit up.

“Yes!” She cheered. “Yes yes yes yes yes!” Now that she had a fix on the Element of Magic, she could sense more. She actually understood how the magic worked in this New World, how to grab hold of it. She knew it was thanks to the Element of Magic this was possible at all – even with all her magical training the nuanced nature of the New World would have baffled her for days – but she didn’t care. She had some magic again.

She focused… and lifted the stick in her telekinesis. It took about a hundred times more effort than it should have, but that was progress. “Of course! Of course! When we traveled the multiverse, we were naturally able to transform our magic to use whatever type of arcane energy was in the universe at the time! But that doesn’t have to be the case here! We don’t just automatically know how to use magic according to the rules of this world because our rules don’t exist anymore!” She laughed. “It’s just a matter of relearning everything! Difficult, but it should be possi-” She noticed Corona was staring at her and she shut up quickly. “…Hi.”

“Hey,” Corona said, awkwardly twiddling with her thumbs. “That’s… great. Can…”

“I won’t be able to teach you quickly. Maybe with time. I… I had the Element of Magic to help me.”

“Ah…” Corona looked back at the sky. “I’ve found something.”

“Hmm?”

“The way the planets move across the sky,” she said, pointing up. “I’ve been watching them closely. There’s… There’s a pattern. They seem to meander randomly, but they’re placed on fixed spheres. Spheres within spheres within spheres…” She pointed toward a horizon. “There’s a center to this pattern. A place around which everything orbits.”

“…Interesting. How does that help us?”

“Somewhere to go,” Corona said, looking down. “…A goal.”

“How are we going to get off this planet?”

“You’re figuring out magic. …Shouldn’t be too hard, right?”

“Too hard? It’ll be very hard! And…” She caught herself. She fell silent; looking around at the grassy land they had found themselves in. A feeling of not belonging here washed over her.

A goal…

“…All right. You’re right. The center… That’d be something to go for, at least. Something. And if it is the center, everyone else would probably try to head there as well. It’s… It’s a quest.” She forced a smile. “Something to strive for.”

Corona nodded, no smile coming to her face. “Thank you.”

Eve felt her body tense up and blood rush into her face – but she bit it back. “Don’t mention it.” She forced herself to breathe steady. “First we need to figure out exactly how the cosmology and astronomy of this world works, beyond the spherical orbits…”

~~~

Slowly but surely, Burgerbelle’s mind came to terms with the new body it was in. She stood up and stretched her legs, still baffled at how anyone could move without instantly-updating frames. She had to move her arm through all the points between where it started and its final position, not just make it appear wherever she wanted. She smacked her lips – talking came naturally but it still felt bizarre. She also had small pains in her legs – probably from sitting under the metal awkwardly for so long. She needed to stretch to feel right.

Her eyes felt dry. Oh, I probably need to blink. That was going to take a while to learn.

She held out her fingers and examined them closely. There was more detail on them than ever before. Still as white as ever, but she could see nails, wrinkles in the knuckles, and fingerprint swirls. She ran another hand through her hair to feel the endless strands.

It felt good. She smiled.

Then she had a thought. Maybe…

She reached into her hair and tried to pull something out. All she managed to do was yank on her hair and drive pain into her scalp. “Ow!”

Thrackerzod looked up from the wreckage she was clearing. “What is it?”

“I just tried to pull a trumpet out of nowhere…” Burgerbelle rubbed her head. “Didn’t work.”

“Magic’s limited,” Thrackerzod explained. “I don’t know exactly how or why, but it is.”

Burgerbelle took a look around. She didn’t see Mattie – had she gone somewhere? – but she did see a couple other Sweeties. There was the black Sweetie, Onyx, and the angel, Servitude. Onyx was still out cold, but Servitude was up and about helping Thrackerzod root through the wreckage despite a broken wing. She managed to pull a standard-looking Sweetie out and set her beside Onyx. “She’s not doing good,” Servitude said, holding a hand to her neck. “Weak pulse.”

“When Mattie’s done with the medical unit, we can get her in there,” Thrackerzod said.

“There’s a little problem with that,” Mattie said, descending down the stairs. Behind her was a white woman with black eyes in a simple hospital gown. The ribbony tendrils on her back had been tied up into a large, manageable bow just below her shoulders. The woman seemed lost, confused, and a bit bewildered. “Nettle here got put right in. It healed virtually everything and was working on the scrapes, and then it up and loses power!”

Servitude blinked. “…The medical unit powers itself from ambient magic. That clearly exists since the lights are on…”

“Maybe the AI screwed it up,” Thrackerzod observed. “They weren’t working a minute ago.”

“It still works, it’s just out of power,” Mattie reminded her. “…Or it thinks it is. I’ll be honest, I don’t have the least idea how technology works.”

Burgerbelle walked up to one of the wall consoles and pressed a button. A million error messages popped up. “…Geez…”

“Yeah, the AI is having serious difficulty,” Servitude explained. “It’s just barely got communications and medical equipment working. From what little I’ve been able to get from the reports, it’s having to fight its own programming codes to work in this environment. We aren’t anywhere close to full capacity.”

Burgerbelle pushed a few more buttons, trying to get out of all the errors on the screen. “What is working?” She had to back out a few times since she wasn’t that accurate with her fingers just yet.

Mattie shrugged. “Ain’t got a clue. We’re gonna have to do something for the Sweetie here though…”

“I can take her to a hospital,” Servitude said. “A few blocks down – their unit shouldn’t be out of power. …Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“Do that,” Thrackerzod said.

Servitude nodded, hoisting the Sweetie over her shoulder – wincing at the pain in her wing. “Good to see you up and about, Nettle.”

Nettle looked to her with an inscrutable expression. “…Sure.”

“Just try to survive. We’ll get through this.” Servitude headed for the door. She didn’t get far – Engineetie, the Sweetie Belle engineer, kicked the door open, a comically oversized wrench in her hooves.

“We’ve got a big problem and need to evacuate the city stat.”

Everyone turned to Mattie – including Thrackerzod. She let out a sigh and began muttering under her breath. “Buggers putting me in charge… Aight! Engineetie, what’s the problem?”

“One of the main reactor cores was unable to shut itself off when the collapse occurred. The mundane inhibition system had a mechanical failure, and the backups stopped working about… five minutes ago when they ran out of magic to drain.”

“Ran out of magic?” Servitude asked.

“Yes. Ran out of magic. The New World apparently has a finite amount of magic at any given location! If you keep draining it, it drops to zero and everything stops working! And that made one of our reactors fail. It’s currently undergoing meltdown and is starting to turn the core of Celestia City into an irradiated wasteland!”

Mattie blinked. “…How long do we have?”

“Before Celestia City melts? Days. Before the radiation gets out of the central compartments and starts killing people? It’s already started affecting the central areas. Something could explode at any minute!”

“The AI needs to tell everyone about this!” Thrackerzod announced. “Why isn’t it ordering an evacuation.”

“I don’t think it believed me,” Engineetie explained. “I didn’t have any ‘authority’ and it thought I was panicking. Maybe I was panicking? But you all can do something, order an evacuation, right?”

Thrackerzod bit her lip. “Maybe. But how do we…”

“I’ve got it here,” Burgerbelle said, pointing at her screen. “Error messages removed. …You should be able to communicate with your credentials.”

Thrackerzod ran to the console and quickly realized she didn’t have fingers for typing. “Servitude!”

Servitude put the injured Sweetie down gently and ran to the console. She typed up a quick message, complete with Thrackerzod’s security code, and sent it.

A second later the AI’s voice rang out through the whole city.

“Citizens, the order has been given to abandon Celestia City. Please proceed in a calm, orderly fashion to any escape pods or vessels with access to the outside. Some systems within these devices are currently not functioning, but priority has been given to their repair. Help anyone you can off the City.” And then seconds later came a second message. “A nearby habitable planet has been identified as a safe haven. All ships with operational communications within the City have been equipped with a route. For those without such operation, the world is currently located above the Pillar of Light in district 7-Z.”

“That’s our cue to get out of here,” Mattie said.

“What about all the others?” Servitude asked.

“Do you want to risk vaporization?” Engineetie retorted. “We can’t fix the reactor without magic and we don’t have any! We just don’t know how long we have!”

“Not enough,” Mattie said. “Do we know if Swip made it?”

“She did,” Servitude said. “But she’s not going to be able to teleport us out…”

“Close enough,” Thrackerzod said. “Everyone, docking basement.” Thrackerzod picked up Onyx while Engineetie took the injured one. The League ran down the stairs to one of the deeper basements, where they housed their personal crafts. The largest of these was an dolphin-shaped off-white ship with a single protruding fin from the top. The edges of the ship were lined with pastel pink and purple colors. The docking ramp was already down, inviting all of them inside the main cargo hold. There was currently nothing stored there, making the area decidedly empty aside from the chairs that lined the walls.

“Strap in!” Mattie ordered, climbing into a chair. Everyone scrambled into a seat and the unconscious Sweeties were strapped in. “Swip, can you launch?”

A screen in the ceiling buzzed to life, displaying a virtual-reality version of Sweetie Belle with soft brown skin. “I think so. Shields and FTL aren’t working, but the thrusters are operational.”

“Then launch!”

“Aye-aye!” Swip saluted – then cut her virtual-reality feed so she could focus on driving. Her engines activated and she launched forward, into one of Celestia City’s many ship-tubes. There was a loud thunk that shook the entire cabin, making everyone very glad they were strapped in.

“Sorry!” Swip said. “I don’t have any dampeners – we’ll have to accelerate slower than usual!”

“It’s fine, just get us away,” Thrackerzod said. She glanced to the injured Sweetie with concern. She probably wasn’t going to make it.

On the other side of the room, Burgerbelle turned to Nettle. “Heh. This… sure is something, isn’t it? All the… sensation.”

Nettle nodded slowly, her eyes darting around as she tried to take everything in. A deeply dissatisfied frown appeared on her features. “I… I created a powerful body. This isn’t powerful. This is weak.”

“At least you created yours,” Burgerbelle commented. “I don’t even know what this one’s deal is...”

“I don’t understand why you feel t-” There was another tremor.

“Uh oh,” Swip said. “Uh, don’t panic, but I think something behind us just exploded.”

“You think?” Engineetie blurted.

“Okay, fine, I know. And there’s fire coming right for us…”

Swip had to accelerate faster, so she fired her boosters again. Without inertial dampeners, the full G forces of such an acceleration were felt by everyone in the cabin. Servitude let out the largest scream of pain as her broken wing was forced into an unnatural position.

They were able to outrun the explosion. Swip’s engines pulsed with fire and threw them out of Celestia City’s ship-tunnels and into open space. They sailed past the outer skyscrapers of the city as the ground beneath them exploded. They were able to see a couple other ships flying in front and alongside them, all escaping the pull of Celestia City.

“Yes!” Engineetie called. “We li-woah.”

Everyone was suddenly overcome by a feeling of weightlessness.

“Celestia City’s gravity just… vanished!” Swip announced. “I have no idea why but now we’re hurtling a little too fast…”

“Can you correct?”

“Yeah, but not everyone can. An- Oh, Celestia…”

The screen switched to show an image of Celestia City. Most of it was still intact, but three separate locations were now raging balls of fire. Eventually, those fires would grow as the reactor heated the city more and more, reducing the world into molten slag.

“…That’s depressing…” Mattie commented.

Thrackerzod hung her head, wordlessly.

Mattie coughed. “Swip, start coordinating with the other ships and uh… get us all to that planet. So we can… plan.”

“Sure-thing! Attention, this is Swip of the League of Sweetie Belles. We need to work together to ensure everyone without the correct functionality can make it to the surface of the planet. We’ll have to work in a zero gravity environment, so I’ll need the help of any functional navigation intelligences to – hold on. Incoming!”

“Incoming!?” Burgerbelle blurted.

“It’s red, mostly intangible, and it – taking evasive actions!” Swip shut off her speech unit and devoted all her resources to facing off against whatever the incoming thing was. All the screens went dark and the lights turned off. There was a bright flash…

…and then the flash dissipated. The lights flickered back on and Swip’s screens flickered back to life.

“…What was that!?” Servitude demanded.

“I… I don’t know,” Swip admitted. “It… I couldn’t get good readings without all my sensors, it hit us, there was a lot of light… and now we’re somewhere else. I… I don’t see any of the other ships or Celestia City anywhere.”

There was silence in the room for a few moments.

Servitude checked the injured Sweetie’s pulse. “…She’s dead.”

Burgerbelle winced, trying not to burst into tears.

“…What do we do now?” Swip asked.

“I… I don’t know,” Thrackerzod said, voice wavering.

Mattie gulped and shook her head. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to find out where we are. We’re going to find out what happened. We’re going to find whatever’s left of Celestia City and Merodi Universalis. We’re not going to let some ‘red thing’ destroy us.” She stamped her hoof on the ground. “We’re going to find everyone and strap them down so they can’t get lost again!”

Burgerbelle, despite herself, let out a snort. “Strap them down?”

“Well, yeah. It’s called a metaphor. Not as good as a montage, but I’m going with what I have.” She forced a smirk. “We’re going to build it all back up, balls to whoever says otherwise. Just because the New World is working against us, doesn’t mean we won’t keep doing what we want to spite them!” She took out one of her whips in her hoof and cracked it in the air. “We don’t give a smarmy quip about what the world says our fate is, we make the damn thing ourselves!”

She turned around for dramatic effect. “Swip, don’t stop looking for signs of Merodi Universalis or other ships. We’re going to find them.”

“Aye-aye, uh… captain?”

“Oh, crikey, no, no, that won’t do. I could be… a Mistress.”

“…We’ll need to change that title.”

“Mmmm, no I don’t think so.”

~~~

Aslan had told Valentine that Pinkie’s Party had appeared outside the church shortly after the collapse. The ambassador hadn’t really believed it until they walked in. Pinkie, Jotaro, Vriska, Pidge… and Flutterfree.

Even without Nova, they still looked like a unit. Like they belonged together.

When they walked into the church, everyone inside fell silent. There were only about forty members of the church left after the dusting, but the silence was still menacing. They were looking at Pinkie with judging faces.

They knew exactly who she was and what side she fought for. They knew she was part of the reason so many of them were gone.

“Brothers and sisters, I know this is difficult,” Aslan said before any of them could do anything. “They have done things that resulted in the deaths of many. But we are not to hate. Our church never took a stance in the war. We didn’t fight for either side. Remember why we are still standing, who willed us here.”

“Are you saying He wanted my entire family to die!?” a man shouted from the crowd.

“Arin…” Aslan shook his head. “Arin, it is all a part of His plan, even the atrocities and the evil. I can assure you that He finds the death abhorrent and evil, and that He does not take any pleasure from what has happened. He feels the death of every one of us as we would the death of one of our children. But know this; they are with Him now, looking down on us in this New World. They have been taken to the Kingdom, and left the future of the Church to us.”

There was silence in the crowd.

“We need to figure out how we are going to move forward – the church’s food reserves will last us years, but we’ll need to think about more than just food. How are we going to live here? Do we build? Do we find a place to move? What is the lay of the land? These are the questions we must ask. I understand – we all want to, need to, grieve the unimaginable losses. But this New World comes with new challenges and dangers. We must not allow ourselves to be overtaken by them.”

There were murmurs of agreement from the small crowd.

“Thank you. Annalisa, I’ll need you to take me on a tour of the food stores and supplies. What do we have?”

Annalisa nodded. “Right this way.”

Aslan smiled warmly. As he walked away, he turned to Rev and whispered something to her that Valentine didn’t catch. Her pupils dilated in surprise and she nodded reluctantly in response.

Valentine made it to Pinkie’s Party before Rev. “So… you won.”

Pinkie pointed her blindfold at him. “…Yep. Going to try to make us feel bad about it?”

Valentine shook his head, looking into the distance. “Aslan was right…”

Pinkie nodded, not feeling the need for him to clarify. “…I… I want to ask how it’s been going, but the question seems cruel.”

“The USM has fallen, I have no idea where any of my friends are, and I just watched dozens of people vanish into dust. I… am far too calm for what’s just happened. I consider it a gift.”

Flutterfree smiled at him. “I… I’m glad to hear that.”

Valentine looked down at her. “Are you glad to have your friends back?”

Flutterfree looked at her team. There were tears in her eyes, but her smile widened. “Y-yes. Yes I am.”

Vriska put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “Didn’t we just finish the big sappy cry-hug?”

“The sappy cry hug never ends,” Pinkie declared.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

Pidge let out a nervous laugh. “We’re a bunch of freaks… Already laughing and…” She noticed several members of the church staring at her laugh with murderous eyes. “…Geez…”

Flutterfree looked at the crowd, and was hurt to see most of them looking at her with judging eyes. How could you associate with them, Flutterfree?

“Hypocrites, hypocrites everywhere,” Pinkie said, pulling Flutterfree close. “It’s okay, you have us. Also, not everyone hates you! Look at Valentine, Rev, Aslan, that Nate guy over there, and… Rina. To some extent.”

“I hate everything,” Rina commented from the doorway.

“Riveting,” Vriska deadpanned.

“It’s just… You think when the cards were down they’d follow what they were taught,” Flutterfree said. “They’ve lived and breathed grace for so long…”

“They’re still people,” Rev said. “You’re only able to work past it because you know Pinkie and the others personally. That’s… almost always how it works. It’s a rare person who’s strong enough to just accept enemies.” She sighed. “I’m sorry to tell you, but you can’t stay here. You wouldn’t be safe. The tragedy is too fresh in their minds. Yes, that does include you, Flutterfree.”

Flutterfree smiled warmly at Rev. “I know. But you know we weren’t planning on staying anyway.” She glanced back at her team with a smile. “We’re going to complete the job.”

Rev nodded. “…I should probably leave as well. Aslan left it to me to decide, but I can tell they already trust me less simply for talking to you like this. I’ll defend my actions, and because I think it’s defensible they will likely grow to hate me.” She glanced over her back, at Aslan. “He came at the perfect time to give the church new leadership.”

Flutterfree looked at the lion, suspicious. “He came at just the perfect time… on purpose?”

“Or God could have led him here because that’s what needed to happen.”

“Or it’s the Tower.”

“Or…”

“Shhhhh,” Pinkie said, putting her hooves on Rev and Flutterfree’s mouths. “We don’t need to be disagreeing about this. It doesn’t really matter if Aslan intended to usurp Rev or not, what matters is what’s happening. We have to go, and Rev thinks she probably should go. That’s what’s important here.”

Flutterfree and Rev flushed. “…Thanks, Pinkie,” Flutterfree said.

Pinkie gave her a playful smirk. “Hey, even with the flat mane, I still gotcha.”

“So, are you coming or not?” Vriska asked Rev.

Rev glanced back at the church. “…I am. It is about time for a change.” She turned to Valentine. “What about you?”

“What are we doing, exactly?” Valentine asked.

“Well, w-”

“Hey, look, visitors!” Rina shouted, pointing out the church doors. They looked out to see two familiar figures striding toward them – Tornado and Froppy of the USM.

Froppy saw Valentine and lost all sense of professionalism. She hopped through the doors and wrapped her arms around him. She said nothing besides “ribbit.”

For once in his life Valentine didn’t reject an embrace. He was no longer the Ambassador of the USM – he was just a man. He had no problem showing some emotional weakness.

Tornado, on the other hand, strode in with a bored expression. “Sup,” she said, looking at Pinkie.

“…Hey,” Pinkie said, slightly nervous.

“I’m not going to kill you. Can’t, anyway, telekinesis is gone.”

“Same as everyone else,” Pidge said, adjusting her glasses.

“So, what’s going on here?” Tornado asked.

“Discussing who’s staying and who’s going,” Vriska answered.

“Oh, going to do what?”

“Finish the destruction of the Tower,” Jotaro said.

Tornado blinked. “…What?”

Flutterfree looked at Tornado. “…The collapse happened, but… something’s wrong. The Tower still exists. The New World is still subject to a cruel, cruel story. But Pinkie says the Tower has a crack… Which means it’s weakened. We need to complete the job to make sure all these deaths weren’t in vain.”

“Huh. …I can get behind that,” Tornado admitted. “…How exactly are we going to do that?”

“No idea, it’s something we’ll figure out when we get there,” Pinkie responded. “But since we’re not welcome here, it’s something we decided to do. As a group.”

Tornado shrugged. “Sure. Might as well, I guess.”

Valentine looked at Pinkie – and then at the church. “…I’m going to turn you down. My time for adventures and importance is over. I’m staying here.”

Froppy looked up at Valentine. “…I’m staying as well, then.”

Pinkie went through a little checklist in her head. “So, the five of us, Rev, Tornado, and…” She looked expectantly at Rina.

Rina looked from her to Flutterfree to Rev. “Screw it, fine, I’ll come with you. The two best people in this place are leaving, I might as well go with the flow, y’know?”

“Poetry?” Jotaro said with a raised eyebrow.

“Shut up,” Rina muttered. “So, when do we leave?”

“After we have lunch and store up on supplies,” Pinkie said. “I’m sure you can get us some supplies, Rev?”

“Since I’m leaving as well? Easily, I don’t have to worry about a fallout.”

“Remember, pills, we’ll need extra,” Rina said.

“I won’t forget that.” Rev looked over her shoulder, taking in the hall of her church. She smiled. “…I’m going to miss this place.”

“We might be able to come back, some day,” Flutterfree said.

“If the Lord wills…”

~~~

“Just stop breathing, all of you,” Flagg ordered.

Roxy, GM, Rohan, Monika, and myself all kept breathing.

“…What?”

“Magic’s gone, Randy,” Roxy said with a smirk. “You’re just a normal guy like us now.”

Flagg wasted no time. He turned around and jumped for Black Thirteen – but I was faster than him. I swooped in, rolled, and grabbed the artifact within my wings.

“Twilence!” Monika shouted in rage.

“There was no way letting him have it was a good idea!” I said, holding the black sphere in my hoof and pointing it at Flagg like a weapon. “Don’t move.”

“Magic’s gone,” Flagg said with a smirk. “What could you possibly do with Black Thirteen? Drive me mad? That time had come and gone, purple Prophet.”

“Actually, looking into Black Thirteen, guess what I see? Magic’s not really gone, and there’s actually a really simple solution on how to start using it again. Realize that you have to relearn everything.” I smirked. “Luckily I’m tapped into the artifact that knows everything. So…” I trapped his arms and legs in magical handcuffs.

“Why are you capturing him? Kill him!” Roxy shouted.

“He still has his respawn,” I responded. “He’ll just appear at the Tower like usual. So long as the Tower exists, he will, in one form or another.” I glared at him, rooting through the knowledge contained in Black Thirteen. “But that’s no longer guaranteed. The Tower is damaged. The self-defense protocol has been deactivated. It can be destroyed and you will never be able to respawn again. The greatest evil the multiverse has ever known will perish with ka.”

Flagg smirked. “Granted, I have no idea if what you say is true or not. But why would that matter? Perhaps a true death would be an interesting experience for me after such a long existence. Maybe you can even empathize with that.”

“Right, forgot your sanity was g-” I raised a shield to stop Roxy from trying to kick me in the head. “Really!?”

“You still want to destroy the Tower,” Roxy muttered. “Suddenly the War doesn’t seem so ‘over’.”

“Through Black Thirteen I have full access to virtually all the abilities I had previously,” I told her. “I’ve already healed my rib. You wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

Roxy ground her teeth. “I can fucking try.”

“Or… not?” GM suggested.

“Why the fuck not!?”

GM recoiled and took a few seconds to collect himself. “W-well, I, uh, in my original plan the Tower was going to fade away from the New World. There wouldn’t be any consequences beyond what the collapse had already done…”

“What if we don’t want to end ka!?” Monika blurted. “I happen to like it!”

Rohan nodded in agreement.

Roxy sighed and put a hand on GM’s shoulder. “Look… I can see why you think that. I can also see that you struggled with the question, and that’s why you wrote a story about it. Maybe you changed your mind – or maybe you’re wrong.”

GM blinked. “…Y-yeah.”

“I’m not sure about ka myself. I… I think it doesn’t really matter if it exists or not, in the long run. But I’m not going to switch sides.” She turned to Twilence. “We’re not destroying the Tower.”

I shook my head. “I’ll do it myself then.”

Roxy put her hand around Flagg’s neck. “Ah ah ah, I’ll kill him and then he’ll get to the T-”

I used my magic to pull Roxy’s hand off Flagg’s neck. I sighed. “I can see you’re going to be a problem.” I imprisoned Roxy, Rohan, and Monika in cuffs similar to Flagg’s. “I can also see that if I let you go, I’ll regret it later.” I tapped the Eye of Rhyme – glad my visions were slowly returning to me with access to Black Thirteen. I could see so much…

I frowned. “It’s already corrupting me. How wonderful…”

“Black Thirteen tends to do that,” Flagg said, grinning. “Let me hold on to it for you.”

“Nope,” I said. “You’ll get your powers back and then we’d all be dead. I… I have to hold onto it. But I need a safeguard…” I looked at GM. “You.”

“Uh… I don’t like the sound of that…”

I used my magic and the power of Black Thirteen to create a single red pen. “Keep this with you at all times. I’ve enchanted it so that I will have to mess with a complex series of locks to do anything to it. If you click the button, it will force me into unconsciousness. Use it if you think I’ve been corrupted too much by Black Thirteen.” My eyes softened. “I’m sorry to burden you with this, but you’re the only one I can trust right now.”

GM gulped. “O-okay…”

I turned to the other four imprisoned people. My gaze softened – and I removed the imprisonments on all of them except Flagg. “…I don’t want to imprison you. But I need to keep an eye on you all.”

“So we are your prisoners,” Roxy pointed out.

“Yes, unfortunately. You are. But you’ll be free to walk around and say anything you want. Or even try to change my mind.” I smiled at her. “I respect all of you for your devotion to your cause. I just don’t agree with it.” I tapped the Eye or Rhyme. “This is a curse that must be lifted from everyone. And I won’t rest until that goal is met or made impossible.”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

“Go to the Tower.” I said, looking up to the sky. “There is a world in the center of this universe… Nucleon. It is where the Tower stands, damaged. That is where we are going. It’ll be…”

“The worst road trip ever,” Flagg commented.

“…Probably,” I admitted.

~~~

Roland of Gilead was the last one to leave the Dark Tower, entering Can’-Ka No Rey, the field of roses. It looked the same to him as it did when he had entered it so long ago. The roses were too red, their leaves too bright and their edges too sharp. More real than anything else he had ever seen.

These roses had not changed in all of the multiverse’s existence.

The sky, however, was a mess.

It was the color of twilight, but brimming with many many moons of all sorts of shapes and sizes. No, not, moons, planets. Planets moving around other planets in nested patterns… Patterns that extended as far out as he could see. Through the cracks between the planets he could see some stars, some things that clearly weren’t planets or stars, and occasional holes.

He was no astronomer, he did not care much for the motions of the celestial bodies beyond their use in navigation, but he was still overcome with a sense of awe.

“Isn’t it something, gunslinger?” Renee asked. “A New World, unlike anything you experienced on All-World or Keystone Earth. Or the Weaver’s Door. You saw hints, but you never saw.”

Roland looked at her with a stern expression.

“Of course, nothing fazes the great gunslinger.” Renee chuckled.

“I mean, he took a talking horse in stride,” Jenny pointed out.

Nanoha took her eyes off the sky. “Almost all the planets in all the worlds… Placed together in such as way as to not destroy themselves. How… How would the Flowers manage such a thing? That’s such a complexity beyond even them!”

Renee shrugged. “Curious, isn’t it? What happened was something nobody could have done, but yet it happened. Curiouser and curiouser.”

“I’m getting really sick of you and your games,” Jenny muttered.

“The path of the hypocrite is a dangerous one,” Renee said with a malevolent chuckle.

Aradia sighed. “So, we’re outside. The world has managed to fuse together without everyone dying. But ka still exists. Our fate is still controlled by the Tower.”

Renee rolled her eye. “Look behind you, up, then down again.”

They all turned around to examine the Dark Tower, following its dark, eerie structure far, far into the sky. It seemed to go on forever – but, at the same time, it clearly had to end. For it went straight up, and straight above them was a planet closer than all the others. A small blue-green orb in the sky.

“…An Earth?” Jenny said, cocking her head. “That’s an Earth, right? Continents don’t look right but that’s the only planet that would mean anything.”

“Yes… It’s an Earth…” Nanoha said, eyes wide. “Is it… The Earth? The First Earth?”

“Ding ding ding!” Renee declared. “The White Devil has asked the million dollar question! Yes of course it is. The Earth, forced to reveal itself when there are no more subdimensions for the Dark Tower to hide it in.” She smirked. “There is currently no ka on that world.”

“…What!?” Everyone save Roland said at once.

Renee smirked. “Ahem. Sai, analysis of Earth Prime?”

The AI in Roland’s pocket beeped. Instead of her usual chipper, coy vocalizations, a monotone came out. “Analyzing… Indeterminate. All scans are reflected. Visual appearance of Earth Prime is projected by an outside source. Information cannot pass out of the barrier according to initial scans.”

Jenny blinked. “Sai, how are your scans working that well? Nanoha can barely talk to Raising Heart!”

Sai beeped again. “Unknown. A change occurred in my systems at the time of collapse that is not yet fully understood.”

“What did you do to her?” Nanoha demanded.

Renee shrugged. “She did it to herself. Removed all the ‘added nonsense’ that was causing her grief near the Source. Whatever part of her was becoming a full person was removed. As a pure machine it’s much easier to relearn everything.” She sneered. “After all, what is personhood worth, really?”

“If you ask that question you clearly do not understand,” Roland said.

“You say that now.”

“Back up,” Jenny said, waving a hand. “What do you mean ‘relearn’?”

“Oh, this.” Renee lit her horn and plucked a rose out of the garden with her magic. “Learning to use this world’s magic, and all.”

Everyone took a few steps back. Roland drew his gun again. “How are you doing that?” Nanoha demanded.

Renee smirked. “All the powerless little monkeys, terrified.”

Jenny chuckled at this, opening her mouth to prepare a quip.

“Oh, I’m sorry, were you going to point out that Aradia was technically an insect?” Renee asked. “Really, you should have gone with the fact that you’re actually apes, not monkeys, since you don’t have tails. Really Jenny, step up your retort game a little.”

Jenny charged her. Renee grabbed Jenny in her telekinesis and threw her into the roses, creating several scrapes. They healed instantly but the blood spray was still there.

“Wha…?”

“Ambient magics must still work,” Nanoha deduced.

“All of you rely too much on magic,” Roland said, still holding his gun to Renee.

Renee raised an eyebrow. “That gun of yours was forged from the sword of Arthur Eld, you know. There’s magic in that metal, dear. But you are right, you could make do with a mundane gun. You depend on ka. You are the warrior of ka. Without it, you would be nothing. If you were to go to that planet up there you wouldn’t last a week.”

Roland doubted this, but said nothing.

Renee chuckled. “As usual, it appears we’ve gotten off track. We were supposed to look down after we saw the Earth. Please, let us finish the tour for your slow, slow brains.”

They did, looking up to Earth Prime, and back down to the base of the Tower.

They saw it – the Crack. An imperfection in the bricks of the Dark Tower, set just to the left of the main entrance. It glowed a soft white and sparkled like dust. The energy looked almost exactly like what happened when Alushy and the others had been dusted.

Everyone stared at it in disbelief.

“Is it… destroying itself?” Jenny asked.

“Do I really have to answer that, dears?”

She did not. It was clear.

The Tower’s time was limited.

“But wait, there’s more!” Renee announced shocking all of them. “I’ve got with me here a very special guest from a time most of you will have forgotten! With the release of Roland and the deactivation of the Tower’s self-defense protocol, another blast from the past has decided to grace us with his presence! Everyone put a hand together for… the CRIMSON KING!”

A being rose from the roses, draped in an immense red cloak that hid all of his facial features. His two hands were so wrinkled and frail they looked like bones. Despite being unable to see his face, they all felt like his eyes were boring into their skulls – from both the front and back. There was no side that was hidden from the beast of a man.

He had to stoop down so his head would be level with Roland. He breathed, the chill like nails grinding against their skin. “Gunslinger...”

~~~

“I’m going to say this now,” O’Neill said, laying his hands on the table. “The war is over. The Collapse was initiated and now there are no more nations left to sign peace treaties. There are no more battles to fight for the multiverse. So we are done with that. We are a single military unit again, so if you have any ideas in your heads, get them out of your asses and shape up. None of us know what is going on, and we are going to goddamn work together to figure it out. Do I make myself clear?”

Everyone in the room nodded. After her nod, Minna stood up. “I want everyone to know that Overhead-General O’Neill is the commanding officer for this military unit and the head of this meeting. We must follow the chain of command.” She sat back down.

“Good, now that that’s over with…” O’Neill paused a moment and looked around the room. There were forty of them in the room, mixed from the Austraeoh and Starjammer crews. Tensions were clearly high – but they were soldiers. They would listen to their commanders. They’d fought in the war long enough to prove their loyalty. “Lapis Vee, care to explain what we’ve found so far?”

The only Gem among the two crews nodded. “Yessir.” She pressed a button on a remote, activating the meeting room’s main projector. “So, to put it simply, the Collapse happened, but not as anyone intended it to. There is one single universe, but it’s nothing close to the mundane mixture anyone was expecting.”

“What is it, then?” a Starjammer stallion asked.

The image on the screen changed to a map of the new universe, showing lots of planets. “It’s… this. There are two kinds of ‘planets’ we have observed. The first are conglomeration worlds composed of several dozen or more planets or planes of existence fused together. They are extremely large but still have normal gravity, which, as far as we can tell, is an average of whatever gravities were used to create them. We’ve only sent a few probes, we don’t have enough data points to say for sure.”

She changed the slide to zoom in on an area of the map with a lot of circles next to each other. “The other type of ‘planet’ is more conventional… usually. Apparently virtually every planet, star, or other large object from any universe was pulled into this one, including ‘planets’ created from looping plane universes, bizarre planes of reality, etcetera. Around every conglomeration planet is one or more spherical ‘orbitals’ packed so densely with these planets that you could fly from one to another.”

“Which gravity should crush,” an Asgard pointed out.

Lapis Vee nodded. “Yep. Which brings us to the first big revelation about this universe – a few miles above a planet’s arbitrary ‘surface’ – the exact definition is currently fuzzy – gravity just drops to zero. No planet has any gravitational influence on any other. There’s some other force keeping them locked into their spherical orbitals, shifting around the center ‘conglomeration’ world of their system with a pattern our computers have not managed to identify. Each planet is somehow kept from running into any others while only a small amount of space is left between any one. As far as we can tell, it’s not magic either, it’s just a brute-force rule of this universe. The only thing in standard physics it mimics is the spherical orbitals of an electron around an atomic nucleus.”

“A quantum reality?” a human scientist asked.

Lapis Vee shrugged. “Sort of? They don’t seem to move from their orbitals, but there’s also not a large uncertainty with where they are at any given time. Honestly, something for people to think about when we’ve stabilized ourselves. Regardless, each one of these conglomeration worlds forms a system with all its orbitals. These systems in turn can start forming orbitals around each other, creating a metasystem. And the metasystem can form with other metasystems… you get the picture.”

“Well it is right there on the screen,” O’Neill observed.

Lapis Vee rolled her eyes. “There’s a bit more. Within a system, all planets, including the conglomeration, share an atmosphere. You could go outside the Austraeoh and breathe in oxygen right now.”

“…What?” Minna said, blinking.

“You heard me. There’s air out there. It has that strange ‘invisibility’ effect a lot of universes have that allows people to breathe in space but still see for extreme distances. We’re still trying to determine which of the many mechanisms to accomplish this the universe uses. Regardless, the collective atmosphere is the reason our ships have been sluggish and not moving properly. We’re dealing with air resistance. Our computers were just too broken to figure that out.”

O’Neill tapped his fingers on the table. “Anything else about our crazy universe?”

“A couple things. In between systems, the magic aether of this universe is significantly stronger. It’s so strong there it creates a ‘normalization’ effect that tries to keep everything within it consistent. You could launch yourself through it with nothing but some oxygen and make it out the other side.”

“So, basically, spaceships aren’t needed?” the robot asked.

“They’re more convenient?” Lapis Vee suggested. “It’s not like it’s hard to fly through the gaps between planets, there are usually only a few miles wide. It’s FTL that’s the problem.”

O’Neill raised an eyebrow.

“No FTL works in this universe. None at all. We’re lucky everything is so closely packed together – otherwise we’d take years to get from system to system. As of now we could probably get to a million worlds in a couple hours at our ten-c thrusters.”

“Say goodbye to time shenanigans,” a scientist commented.

Lapis Vee switched to the next slide, showing a large-scale rendition of the universe. “As you can see here, we’ve started mapping the arrangements of planets and their relative locations. From this, we have determined something – the universe has a central planet somewhere outside our current field of view, blocked by the dense sea of planets. But based on these observations, it’s close enough that we could probably get to it in two weeks, assuming we didn’t make any stops.”

“Sounds like a goal to make our way toward,” O’Neill said. “Clandestine, prepare routes to the center.”

“Yessir.”

Lapis Vee continued. “We’ve also figured out a bit more about the magic of this world. It still exists, and is actually very powerful, but there are a few issues. For one, the multiverse doesn’t exist, so our natural knowledge of ‘how to cast spells’ doesn’t translate. We’re going to have to learn everything again. Artifacts and ambient magic like my gemstone’s projection still work. However, there’s a finite amount of magic in any given location. While it does replenish over time, heavy use of it temporarily drains the area and makes it mundane. This is why our computers are having such trouble accessing magical components and processors. With all the damage we’ve received we simply aren’t able to cope with things suddenly shutting off unexpectedly. I’m lucky my gemstone isn’t too much of a drain on the aether.”

“How do we learn?” Minna asked.

Lapis Vee shrugged. “I… I don’t know? I hear some of the unicorns can get magic sparks from their horns, but I haven’t been able to summon my weapon and I haven’t seen a spell cast by anything that isn’t a pre-enchanted machine since we arrived. The spectral rod coding isn’t even working. The first person who figures it out will have to tell everyone else or we’ll just have to wait until we can get a full blown research project on the artifacts that are working. Not all the spells are apparently viable in the new universe’s physics.”

“Anyone who can use magic, work on doing the simplest of spells,” O’Neill ordered. “Try everything that isn’t, say, ritual sacrifice or something equally questionable. We’ll be moving to the center where others will likely be headed the moment they figure this out. We will pick up everyone we can along the way to create a communication network, find out who’s survived and from what worlds and where. And above all, we’re not starting another war. Have I driven that point home enough? No. More. War.”

Everyone nodded vigorously.

O’Neill smiled. “Lapis Vee, continue compiling more information. Everyone else, dismissed.”

~~~

Lightning’s little ship had been a Void-built craft at one point in its life. It had the signature curved exterior, power crystals, and almost fantastical aura. Outside were several add-ons slapped onto the hull that mitigated this aura somewhat, but made the ship significantly more menacing in appearance. It was also red.

“Stole this from my home after I joined the Collection,” she had told them. “Me and the Crimson Blitz have been through a lot. I never take her into combat, but she’s never far from me either. Just one whistle and she’s there. It was more than a little lucky that she ended up close enough to me.”

They were currently flying through the dense aether-space between different systems, the flashing form of Lord English’s sarcophagus a distant point on the main viewscreen.

The interior of the ship was much smoother and natural than the exterior, though the holographic display wasn’t working so Lightning had to use the physical consoles.

Sherlock was rather proud that he now had a much better idea of what all the buttons in the ship might do. He could identify weapon systems, thrusters, and database access easily. “How times have changed…”

“Hmm?” Strange muttered.

“Oh, nothing, just some nostalgia.” He rubbed his hands together and walked toward the main viewscreen, examining the dot that was Lord English. “He can likely sense us, so either he doesn’t care or isn’t looking. The former seems more likely, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was arrogant enough to never check his blind spots.”

“Do we know where he’s headed yet?” Strange asked.

“The center,” Sherlock and Lightning said at the same time. Lightning turned to him, baffled. Then she remembered who he was and her bafflement vanished. “How’d you deduce that?”

“The mathematical patterns of the planets around us are visible to the naked eye,” Sherlock said, pointing out the window. “We can see over there a cluster in a triple-orbital structure. The overall curvature of the planet wall suggests an even higher meta-orbital, one that we are going into. Directly in to, in fact. And I’d even venture to guess the pattern is rather pleasing to the eye.”

A ‘nearby’ system made of star conglomerations made sure it was. The light reflected off a swirling orb of planets, each one in the closest system made of a different color of crystal. The light from the stars were creating numerous rainbow effects across space, a few of the colors landing on other planets in distant systems, giving them something no doubt awe-inspiring.

“Anything else you’ve deduced that might be helpful?” Lightning asked, raising her eyebrow.

“The nature of magic. English had trouble activating his powers, but after a bit of effort he was able to use them as before. Maybe he can just alter reality, but if he could do that he would be going a lot faster. So I say that magic is around and is still accessible to anyone – he just figured it out first. You and Strange will still have access to those fancy spells of yours.”

“And how would we access those?” Strange asked.

Sherlock smirked. “Not a clue. English just looked like he focused, but no small part of him is ka-based. Who knows what that can turn a small amount of effort into? No, you’ll probably have to do something else. And do hurry up with it; we don’t have an eternity to stop him. He will get to the center soon and by then I doubt we’ll be able to do much of anything in the way of actually stopping him. So chop chop, the fate of the universe depends on you unlocking your magic potential!”

They stared at him.

“No pressure.”

The screen behind him lit up in a flash of vibrant light. Sherlock whirled around quickly. “What in the…”

“He just destroyed a planet,” Strange observed, grimacing. “It wasn’t even in his way.”

“Of course he’d destroy whatever he wanted to along the way, he’s Lord English,” Lightning muttered, putting a hand to her forehead. “Our job just got more complicated. We’ve got to try to protect the people on the way to the center…”

“Is there any chance we can loop in front of him?” Sherlock asked.

Lightning nodded. “If we want to keep a safe distance it’ll take a few days, but it can be done.” She pressed a few buttons. “We won’t be able to do anything during that time, though.”

“…Motivation…” Sherlock mused. “What a monster.”

“…The aspect of motivation or English?” Strange asked.

“Does it matter which?”

~~~

“AND TO SUMMARIZE!” Starbeat shouted in Caliborn’s face. “THE WORLDS ARE SMASHED INTO ONE, MAGIC IS BORKED, AND WE SHOULD PROBABLY FORM A GROUP TO TAKE ON THE NEW WORLD!”

Caliborn looked at her with a blank expression. “So you’re saying everything’s fucked.”

“That’s it, I can’t do this, I can’t talk to him,” Starbeat muttered, pacing around Caliborn’s messy messy room. “Impossible!”

“Let me try,” Trixie said, clearing her throat. “Ahem. You, snotling. Yes I’m fucking talking to you, listen up!”

“SNOTLING?” Caliborn shouted. “I’ll have you kn-”

Trixie shoved a hoof over his mouth. “Shut it, I don’t have any time for your immature, maniacal antics, and even if I did, I don’t give a shit. So listen here. You are the first person we’ve seen on our little trek across that piss-colored road, so you’re stuck with us. This also means we’re stuck with you. It’s just as hellish for us. Luckily, we ‘bitches’, as you’re so fond of calling us, aren’t a bunch of short-sighted self-important assholes! We came here extending the olive branch, and while you’ve decided that’s worth about as much to you as a toothpick we’re still here, talking to you, trying to explain the simplest of concepts to that walnut of a brain of yours! So yes, as you put it, everything’s fucked. But it’s fucked in a very particular way that doesn’t get solved by shooting everything you see!”

Caliborn blinked slowly. “You’re quite the feisty bi-”

Trixie put a hoof to his neck and pushed him into a wall. “Test me much more and we see how feisty I can be.”

Caliborn realized she had positioned herself to where he couldn’t use his gun to shoot her. He didn’t have enough power to force her off of him, and he really didn’t want to have the first test of his immortality come from the hoof of a fucking bitch.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Glad we’ve come to an understanding,” Trixie said with a smirk, releasing him. She dusted off her hoof and turned back to the others.

Gamzee and Starbeat were staring at her slackjawed.

“What? I deal with people like him all the time.” She rolled her eyes.

“Duuude, that was motherfuckin’ crazy!” Gamzee laughed. “He had to shoot me down several times before we got to the bond we have now.”

“Yes, I see, god-tier, living troll…” Starbeat blinked. “…Wait, wasn’t that just Aradia and…” She paused, saying the next name with distaste. “Vriska?”

Gamzee chuckled. “The authenticity of my god-tier self is a bit motherfuckin’ uncertain, see.”

“Ah, so Homestuck.”

“Homestuck.”

“You mean Homosuck!” Caliborn declared.

Starbeat stared at him. “No. No I most definitely do not.”

“It’s the latest i-”

“I said no and I mean no.”

Caliborn pointed the golden gun to her neck. “You don’t get to talk to me like that, bitch.”

Trixie pressed a hoof to his neck. “Does the snotling want another date with the wall? That can be arranged.”

“Wow, we all hate each other,” Gamzee observed. “Sweet.”

Starbeat twitched. “Why did it have to be trolls…?” She shook her head. “Nevermind, let’s get out of here.”

“Yes! Lets!” Caliborn said, grinning maniacally. “This New World shall be mine!”

“Ours,” Trixie corrected.

“MINE!” Caliborn insisted.

“OURS!”

“MINE!”

“MINE!”

“Ha, I win!”

“No, I said it, that means it’s mine,” Trixie asserted.

“That’s fucking stupid.”

“Ever heard about hypocrisy? Wait, who am I kidding, you’re well acquainted with the subject.”

“I’m well acquainted in every subject! I’m the Lord of Time!”

“I haven’t seen you do any Time Shenanigans!”

Starbeat ignored their continued arguments and turned to Gamzee. “…Is this normal?”

“Usually it’s just online,” Gamzee admitted. “I can’t last this long against him. It’s good for him.”

“…Sure.”

“We should probably go outside and wait for them.”

So they did. Soon Starbeat and Gamzee were sitting on a bench, looking out across the yellow brick road.

“I think I figured out who you are,” Starbeat said, looking up at him. “Gamzee Makara… Bard of Rage… You’re the one who killed everyone.”

“Aw, man, I don’t do that no more,” Gamzee said shaking his head. “Purple blood does things to your head if you let it. The Rage is real.”

Starbeat nodded. “I won’t hold it against you. She did, and right now that’s good enough reason to trust you.”

“Oh, did you find Terezi?”

“I mean, I know who she is. …But no, it wasn’t her. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Ay, I won’t pry. I’ll just motherfuckin’ listen if you need it.” He stretched his arms out. “The world will be ours.”

Starbeat shook her head. “The world’s so much of a mess, nobody can have it.”

“Then we could change that,” Gamzee said, smile widening much larger than it should have. “The world’s our motherfuckin’ oyster…”

A slight purple aura flashed in Starbeat’s eye. “Yeah… Yeah it is.” She stood up tall. “We can make this world what we want. It doesn’t matter who made it – it doesn’t have to be the end!” She smirked. “And the other side… They know what they did. They know what they did.”

Gamzee put a hand on Starbeat’s shoulder. “Good to hear that.”

It was at this point Trixie and Caliborn came rolling out the front door, both bruised and battered, but otherwise none the worse for wear.

Caliborn hefted his gun. “There’s a mountain over there with a dragon statue in it. That’s where we’re going.” He started walking.

Trixie grunted. “This guy… His level of stupidity is just…” She shook her head.

“Absolutely ridiculous?” Starbeat offered.

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“He could still be useful. A force of angry, stupid rage. You’ve shown he can be corralled and directed. That would go a long way for this New World.”

Trixie blinked. “What do you mean?”

“She means we’re gonna motherfuckin’ change the world,” Gamzee said with a chuckle. “I mean, assumin’ Cal doesn’t get us horribly lost.”

“Then our plans are doomed. Doomed I say!” Trixie echoed. Then she sighed. “…We need to look for capture device storage areas as well.”

“Hm? Why?”

“One of them has Discord in it.”

Starbeat smiled warmly at her. “…Ka will lead you to him again, one way or another.” She tapped her goggles. “I’m almost certain of it.”

“Thanks.”

“ARE YOU SHITHEADS COMING OR NOT!?” Caliborn shouted back.

“WE’LL COME WHEN WE’RE GOOD AND READY!” Trixie responded.

“I’M NOT WAITING FOR YOU FUCKS!”

“WE’RE NOT LEAVING UNTIL WE WANT TO!”

Caliborn let out an angry inhuman screech and continued his march.

“…I am going to get so sick of this before it’s over,” Starbeat muttered.

133 - Emissary of Ka

It had not taken Eve very long to figure out that the atmosphere extended beyond the planet. They had easily been able to fly to the edge of the system where the atmosphere actually dropped off, giving way to the thick aether – though it had taken several hours to fly the distance. Eve didn’t know exactly how many.

“…We just need air to get through this,” Eve said. “With a few hours of work I could get an air bubble spell working. Or we could find some scuba tanks. …It’s like this universe wants travel to be easy.”

Corona nodded slowly, yawning.

“…Or we could find a place to sleep before heading out,” Eve said, rubbing the back of her head. “That would work too.”

“Hmm? Oh, we could keep going.”

“RS, how long has it been since we arrived?” Eve grunted.

The Device beeped. “Eighteen hours.”

“…Geez, we’ve been awake that long?” Corona asked.

“Longer. That’s just since we arrived. You were fighting heavily before you came here. It is surprising you haven’t keeled over and passed out.”

Corona stretched an arm and a wing. “…I do feel exhausted. I just…”

“You just kept pushing yourself because you felt like you needed to,” Eve snapped. “Let’s just go to the surface of this planet and call it a day. I’m sure we can find a nice grassy pasture or something to lie in at a warmer latitude. …Assuming latitudes can still be considered ‘warmer’ or ‘colder’ here.” She flapped her wings, using her magic to direct them toward the nearest planet. It didn’t take long for them to hit the point where zero gravity flipped and became full gravity, forcing them to slow down so they didn’t burn up like meteorites.

A few minutes later, they safely landed in a grassy pasture next to a forest. It couldn’t be said that it was day or night – just a strange, eternal form of twilight lit by somewhat not-too-distant stars.

Eve tapped into the Element of Magic and tried to summon a blanket from the aether. This task was a bit too complex – all she got was some strands of fabric that fell to the ground. “Guess we’re sleeping in the open.”

“It’s not like it’s cold or anything,” Corona observed, flopping onto the grass. She sat up, took off her dress, and folded it up to form a pillow shape. “Want my nightshirt?”

Eve shook her head. “I’ll sleep sitting.”

“…I haven’t been able to do that for years.”

Eve didn’t respond. She patted the ground with her hooves and lowered herself to it. She closed her eyes and wished for sleep to overtake her.

Discovering that it wasn’t happening, she let out a disgruntled sigh. She lit her horn, trying a simple sleep spell. It was simple enough and she began to drift off.

She didn’t bother to cast one on Corona.

The next thing she knew, she was opening her eyes to see a yellow mare looking at her. A yellow halo mare, one of the more exotic tribes of Lai.

“Oh, I guess I woke you. Sorry.”

“No… problem…” Eve said, rubbing her eyes. She looked to her left. Corona was there, slowly waking up to the sound of voices. Eve wondered how long it had taken her to fall asleep. …Probably not long enough. “I’m Eve.”

“I know who you are,” the mare said. “I’m Banana Bunch. …Do you know where you are?”

“…Should I?”

Banana nodded. “You’re on Lai.”

Corona was suddenly fully awake. “Lai? Lai of Merodi Universalis? Toph’s kingdom?”

Banana nodded again. “Yes… Corona. You are.”

“How… How close are we to the capital?”

“It’s just over that hill,” Banana said, pointing.

Corona ran to the hill and held a hand up to her eyes. Sure enough, there it was – the capital of Lai. A Merodi city built on top of the burnt crater of war. The solid earth palace was easy to pick out and identify among the mixed construction of a Merodi city.

“No way…”

“...Ka, it’s always ka,” Eve said, shaking her head.

“…I’m going to see Toph,” Corona said, putting her barrier jacket back on, dusting the dirt off it.

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“No,” Corona said, walking into the city anyway.

Eve looked to Banana and shook her head. “Thanks for telling us.”

“…Not sure you should be thanking me.”

“Well then, thanks for not attacking us on sight.”

“…Sure.”

~~~

Roland unloaded all six bullets into the Crimson King’s face. The power of the great weapon made the Crimson King recoil – but he didn’t even cry out in pain. “You still think you can do something? No… No you don’t, you know your bullets are meaningless. You just can’t let yourself do nothing…”

Nanoha, Aradia, and Jenny took up fighting stances, even though only Nanoha had an actual weapon – and even then, it wasn’t anything more than a blunt instrument without magic.

The Crimson King outright ignored them. He lowered a hand to Roland. Roland had already reloaded and fired a bullet right into one of his bony fingers, cutting right through a fingernail. A thick, pulsating shadow-red substance wafted from the hole in the digit.

The Crimson King let out a grunt and opened his palm, ready to vaporize Roland. Instead of a powerful spell of death, only a single spark of darkness came out, fizzling to nothing before it even hit the ground.

Renee cleared her throat and made herself known. “Problem?”

The Crimson King ignored her. He walked to the double doors of the Dark Tower, examining them. He ran one of his pointed nails down the crack in the ancient structure. “What are you doing…?”

“Just another side to the story,” Renee said. Again, the Crimson King paid her no mind. He reached his hand for the doors of the Dark Tower and tried to open them.

The double doors didn’t budge.

“Oh, how sad,” Renee mocked. “You can’t go in. How… surprising.”

The Crimson King finally bothered to look directly at her. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Cliché.” Renee chuckled. “The poor, poor monster doesn’t have any clue what’s wrong. ‘The Tower should open to me; I’ve already proven myself! I’ve already shown my control!’ Darling, what makes you think the rules are still the same?”

The Crimson King remained silent, thinking deeply.

“Now, think, what might you need to get into the Dark Tower? Perhaps an essence of the Tower itself?”

“You insult me.”

“That’s kind of the whole point.” She began to trot through the roses, circling the King’s gargantuan form. “You aren’t just going to get to waltz into the Tower and start where you left off. Just like every other character in these breezes of ka, you will need to struggle, fight, and grow. You’re not free and you never have been.”

“You are no simple equine,” the Crimson King observed. “What sort of being are you?”

“Well, seeing as you’ve just figured out how to use your quasi-eldritch nature to force the magic of this realm to your will, why don’t you try to find out?”

The Crimson King moved like lightning, his hand suddenly outstretched. A beam of shadow-red energy shot forth, taking the form of a claw ready to grab Renee. It hit her and a cloud of dust went up.

When the dust cleared, Renee still stood, standing in the middle of a small crater completely unharmed. “You missed, dear.”

“…What in the name of Arthur Eld…?” Roland said, eyes wide.

A gigantic eye of crimson with a violent, angled spiral in place of a pupil appeared in front of the Crimson King, looking at Renee with a gaze that could pierce the boundary between soul and mind, an eye that had overseen and demanded fear from the early multiverse, a representative of the Red of the Crimson King. It scrutinized her very being.

“Like what you see?” Renee asked.

The Crimson King attempted to destroy her again. The crater she was in deepened, but once again she was completely unharmed. “Oooh, try again, maybe third time’s the charm! Maybe that’ll let you see something. Come on, gi-” He shot again. “See, there’s a problem I have. And that problem is that despite knowing every miniscule detail about what you’re about to do, I’m still immensely disappointed when you’re stupid. Why can’t I get the disappointment over with ahead of time? It would save so much grief… But then again, I’m the cause of so much grief, so it’s very poetic, and given what I am it’s impossible not to be poetic.”

Nanoha put a hand to her mouth, trying to muffle a gasp.

Renee cackled. “And the ‘first!’ comment goes to Nanoha Takamachi.” She clapped her hooves together. “Well done, tell them all what you’ve figured out.”

“That’s impossible… It doesn’t have a voice! There’s nothing up there!”

“The Flowers fixed that,” Renee said. “They did quite well if I do say so myself.”

“Nanoha! Stop being vague, explain!” Jenny shouted.

Nanoha looked around and shook her head. “She… She is ka. She…” She glanced up at the Dark Tower. “…She’s…”

“I’m the Emissary of Ka, voice of the Dark Tower,” she took her hat off and bowed mockingly. “Pleased to finally make your acquaintance after being your lives for so long.”

~~~

The capital city of Lai was mostly empty – but as they approached the palace, they saw more and more people. By the time they had made it to the city square, there were enough people to convince them the area was actually inhabited. Eve was looking around at all the scared, angry, and sorrowful faces. She didn’t even try to keep herself from crying, and neither did Corona.

This did not stop the people of Lai from shooting Corona dirty, murderous looks. A few had it within them to shout “get the fuck out of our city!” to her. Eve had no doubt Corona would be attacked outright had she not been there. But she also knew Corona’s presence was keeping her from getting a warm, understanding welcome.

She’s taking them from me.

Eve shook her head, trying to focus on the moment. They had arrived at the front gates of the earthen palace. Two guards stood, barring their entry.

“Cobalt, Nebulous, just let me in,” Corona pleaded. “Just… just let me in.”

They didn’t budge.

“It’s okay,” Eve said. “She’s with me.”

They still didn’t move.

Eve blinked. “I’m Evening Sparkle, Overhead of Relations. You may have reason to bar Corona’s entry, but I am still your superior.”

“Merodi Universalis doesn’t exist anymore, asshats.”

Corona and Eve turned around to see Terezi Pyrope, the blind troll. She adjusted her red glasses. “Terezi, come on,” Eve said. “Just let us in to see Toph.”

“Oh, I’ll take you to her alright.” She snapped her fingers and the guards let them through the front doors. “Come on, this is going to be fucking great.”

She silently led them through the halls of deep, well furnished earth. Corona knew the palace normally felt empty, but it was even worse than usual. There were hardly any guards walking around and there were hardly any sounds of life. The eternal twilight lighting just added to the eerie nature of the experience.

Terezi led them right to the throne room, violently kicking the doors open. Corona closed her eyes, preparing herself to see her old friend once again. She realized she couldn’t prepare and simply looked up to the throne with a broken expression.

Toph wasn’t on the throne. All the throne held was the Master Sword embedded in it, standing upright as a marker for all to see.

Corona knew exactly what it meant.

Her legs gave out from under her and her wings drooped to the ground. A noise came out of her mouth that couldn’t be identified as anything sensical. She held out a hand toward the sword, as if grasping for Toph, but her arm was too heavy. It fell to her side and she stood, staring dumbly at the weapon.

“Yep, she’s fucking gone. Poofed with all the rest.” Terezi growled. “I hope you’re fucking happy you won.”

Corona closed her eyes, trying to tune Terezi out.

“No!” Terezi slapped her, knocking her over. “You don’t get to do that! You know who else is gone? Ursula, dust. Overbeat, sparkles! Jason, Artha, Nure, Overbeat, Skarra, all the advisors! Oh, and STARCEI.”

Corona’s only response was convulsing sobs.

“STOP HIDING IN YOUR DEPRESSED SELF-PITY!” Terezi shouted, kicking Corona. “You did this! That sword is in the fucking stone, without a hero to use it, because of you! How many heroes have you destroyed? So many were gone here they had to choose me to lead! Me! I was fired!” She kicked again. “FUCKING ANSWER.”

“That’s enough,” Eve said.

“It’ll never be enough,” Terezi said, pointing an accusing finger at Eve. “You’re too fucking forgiving!”

“The war’s over, Terezi.”

“Who the fuck cares?” Terezi demanded. “She still caused the war. She has to pay for that.”

Eve didn’t correct her. She shook her head, lifted Terezi in her telekinesis, and threw her into a wall to knock the wind out of her. Then she hefted the form of Corona onto her back. “We’re leaving.”

She wasn’t sure Corona heard her.

She let out a tense breath of air and flew out a window into the sky, away from Lai.

“And don’t come back!” Terezi shouted at them. “You aren’t welcome here! Neither of you!”

~~~

The Crimson King lashed out with a mixture of eldritch power and mechanical bullets that came from nowhere. Renee didn’t even move, and still every single attack missed.

“See, everyone, the Crimson King’s mind is a simple one. He hears the words ‘Dark Tower’ and thinks ‘Destroy, Control, Defeat, Swag’. For such a menacing, pure evil presence, he is rather simplistic, wouldn’t you say?”

The Crimson King grabbed her with his hand – except he didn’t. She stood on top of his wrist in a dainty pirouette pose, spinning like a music box figurine. He lit his limb with black fire but Renee simply didn’t allow the flames to register on her body. “Watch well, observe how the great evil falls to one of the easiest pitfalls of his kind: denial of a power higher than him.”

“You were mine! Your power was at my fingertips!”

Renee let out a jovial laugh – and then she twisted a hoof and the Crimson King was on the ground, his shrouded face rammed right into the roses all around them. “You never had my power. Every single event right down to every one of your roonts’ sneezes was carefully calculated and machinated by me. Your rise to power and near dominion over all worlds at the behest of your Red power was all precisely guided by the winds of my ka, forcing you into a position where I could create the Gunslinger’s Paradox.” The Tower’s bricks shivered and the Crimson King was drawn to the structure like a nail to a supermagnet. “No one does anything without my knowledge.”

“You don’t have a will!” the Crimson King shouted, pulling an arm off the Tower. “There is nothing at the top! You are a pure machine!”

“What good is a will? Please enlighten me how it would be possible to discern free will from a lack thereof. I’d be very interested to see you try. Oh wait, you can’t, because every definition of will any of you have ever known comes from me.” She hit herself in the head with her hoof. “Tricky, that! Can’t argue with the thing responsible for all your actions can you?”

“Ka does not control every action!” Nanoha shouted.

“Would you like to argue philosophy with the arbiter of reality and lack thereof?” Renee asked. “Who am I kidding, of course you do. You’re the heroic archetype to a T.” She smirked at Nanoha. “No, ka does not control every action. But I know every action. While all the rest of you talk of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘probability’, such concepts mean nothing to me. Everything goes exactly as it should every. Single. Time. I have never been surprised, High Sovereign. Never.”

Jenny chuckled. “Look at her, saying that like it’s supposed to be terrifying.”

Renee made a snapping sound despite not having fingers. “The child understands.”

“Hey!”

“Despite not being able to mentally cope with the dual nature of a compliment and insult, she still sees. You spend all your time fretting about wills, fate, souls and yet none of you ever bother to realize that your lives would be the same no matter what the answers to the questions are! Naturally, just like those terms, the fact that you fret about them is defined by me, so I should be blaming myself. But what can I say? It’s a lot more interesting when you all squabble about these things and oh do I love to be entertained.”

“…And this is why people wanted to take you down,” Aradia said. “They wanted freedom.”

“Did they?” Renee asked. “Or did I just make them want that? The answer, of course, is yes.” She stood on her hind hooves and held out her front, spinning around. “You cannot hope to comprehend the full picture of everything. How I can be both the absolute source of every action and merely the framework on which it rides. Everything has multiple reasons, multiple meanings, and facets of depth that can never be plundered by any single mind. It’s beyond you.”

“We’re well aware of this at this point,” Nanoha muttered.

“Someone picked up on the thematic undertones of the war. Good job, I’ve made sure that you will find a cookie in a bizarre place sometime in the next week as a reward.” She chuckled. Then she turned to the Crimson King. “You know the part you must play.”

“The true end of reality is that you fall and I take what remains.”

“I will tell you, right now, no lies or tricks or subterfuge, that you are not going to own the world after I am gone. You will not get the domain you wish. And you know this is true. But even with absolute certainty in your mind that you will fail, you will not stop. This is your flaw, and it will be your downfall as a villain.” She released him from the walls of the Tower, allowing him to drop to the ground. “So go, run off, find your little precious artifact that will grant you access to me so you can take the Source for yourself. But you will never see the room at the top again.”

The Crimson King roared in rage, unleashing a torrent of deadly eldritch energy.

“BARRIER!” Nanoha shouted, casting a magic shield around herself, Jenny, Aradia, and Roland. The eldritch energy ate at it, but somehow a spell cast by a woman who couldn't even create light a moment ago held fast.

When the energy cleared the Crimson King was gone and Renee was shaking her head with a chuckle. “He’s exempt from the no-eldritch rule and does that. Of all the things he could do, that’s what he does. So simple.” She looked over her shoulder. “By the way, you’re welcome for the magic.”

Nanoha held Raising Heart tight, allowing the suddenly-reformed connection of magic wash over her. “…Why?”

“Why? Why else would I do anything? It’s more interesting if you live.” She waved a hoof dismissively. “Now, gunslinger, what is it you wish to say?”

“You already know,” Roland commented.

“Yes, but I prefer to talk to myself through different voices rather than monologue, so please, ‘enlighten’ me.”

Roland’s frown deepened. “You have the answers I seek. You are the spirit of the Tower. So start answerin’.”

Renee beamed. “Gladly!”

“SERIOUSLY!?” Jenny shouted.

~~~

Eve and Corona flew through the aether-space between systems, neither saying a word. Eve had spent about thirty minutes figuring out how to enchant the two of them with a ‘breathing’ enchantment. While the distances between systems were still large, it wasn’t much larger than the distance between the Equis and the Moon, and with all the magic available they could travel at speeds much faster than a traditional rocket on little more than the Element of Magic’s power.

That said, it was still going to take at least a few hours, even with Eve continually increasing the power of her magic sailing as she became more comfortable with the aether around her.

“Eve…”

“Hm?” Eve said, looking to Corona to make sure she caught what was being said.

“Was I wrong to try?”

Eve stopped firing her magic boosters and froze her expression.

“I knew it, I-”

“I let you send the message,” Eve said. “I agreed to let the multiverse decide.”

“Was that wrong?”

Eve twitched. “What are you implying?”

“I don’t know,” Corona said, distantly. “No one had the right to decide… Everyone couldn’t agree… But just accepting the status quo is also wrong…”

Eve took a deep breath. “Clearly, all you had were bad options. You chose one. I chose another.”

“So it was wrong. Everything was wrong. Rev was right, Renee was right. The world was just broken. And the whole point was to fix it. But now there isn’t a point! The world isn’t fixed, it’s exactly the same, but worse!”

“Why do you think the world would have been fixed if the Tower was gone!?” Eve shouted.

Corona recoiled. “I… I uh…”

“No matter what you did, people were going to die! Lots of people! More than did this time! Cities wouldn’t survive and there would be no remnants of civilization whatsoever! Everything would have started from scratch!” For a moment, she bit back her words, drawing blood from her lip – but not even the pain was enough to stop her. “You don’t get to suddenly feel regret about it now that it’s happened! You can be as angry as you want that the Tower’s still alive, but guess what, you wanted more death than this so you better buckle up and just accept it!”

“If the Tower remains all those deaths are meaningless!”

“Oh, really? I thought no death was without meaning.”

Hearing her own words come out of Eve’s mouth stunned Corona into silence. Then she lost her startled look and replaced it with rage. “You know what I meant. Those deaths were all going toward a purpose. A deep, powerful, important purpose! Now they’re all for a different purpose that wasn’t what I intended! I don’t just want to kill people for no reason Eve, the number isn’t all that matters!”

“You and I both know that you’d be in the same depressed funk if your collapse went the exact way you wanted it to! Because the world wouldn’t be fixed, we’d just trade ka for whatever the hell freedom is! You’ve studied the default Earth timelines, you know what that looks like!”

“It’s better than this!”

“IS it? IS IT? How can you be the judge of that? What does freedom even mean, really? Is it actually even a virtue? Does it exist, or would we just remove a law of physics and be determined by all the rest!?”

“You and I both know there’s more to this existence than simple physics! We’re people!”

“And as far as you know what makes us people is completely contingent on the Tower!”

“Well maybe being a person is wrong!”

“You’re contradicting yourself!”

“I’M ANGRY OF COURSE I’M CONTRADICTING MYSELF!”

“Then why bother?” Eve spread her wings wide. “What’s the whole point of trying to figure existence out if we can’t? Huh? What’s the point?”

“Are you abandoning truth, Evening? Do you think there isn’t any?”

“I didn’t s-”

Corona pressed forward, pointing aggressively at her. “If there’s no truth, do you know what that means? What’s good and evil? Just a random collection of whatever everyone agrees on at any given time. I can tell you right now that’s complete tar. Look at any world’s history and tell me there was any sort of agreement. It’s inconsistent! It changes!”

“That’s because of the Tower!”

“And behold, another reason to take it out of the equation – so we can get off out of the inconsistency and find out what really matters. We’re always guided to the morals and goals of some story. Evil people write just as many evil stories as good ones, Eve! Actually, you know what, people are just inherently evil and sadistic in general, of course there are more evil stories than good ones. And even the good ones are completely oblivious and have no clue what they’re doing!”

“People have an inherent goodness in them!”

Corona glared at Eve. “Having been through the war, do you really think people actually listen to their conscience? Do you always listen to your conscience?”

“I have not compromised on my principles.”

“You did once.”

“You backed me up.”

“Maybe that was a mistake.”

“Stop being so uncertain!” Eve shouted.

“The world is uncertain! I’m trying to change that!”

“You tried and you failed and now you live with the consequences!”

“Why!?”

“YOU DON’T GET TO KILL EVERYONE AND CHECK OUT, CORONA! YOU GET TO STAY HERE AND DEAL WITH IT!”

“THAT’S THE TOWER TALKING!”

“THAT’S ME TALKING!”

“WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?”

“SO THE TOWER’S TALKING TO ITSELF!?”

“I DON’T KNOW!”

“WELL I DON’T KNOW EITHER!”

Eve let out a rage-filled scream, turned around, and flew away. She closed her eyes tight and didn’t look back.

She couldn’t hear if Corona was shouting after her or not.

She didn’t care.

~~~

Roland spoke one word. “Why?”

Renee smirked. “The best question.” She waved a hoof around as if illustrating an invisible point. “Why? Why anything? Why not nothing? I can’t answer the deepest version of the question – why the multiverse existed in the first place – but I can answer why this world exists, and why I exist. I exist because there was a need for meaning. The Builders and Gan had given up on there being a God or Path to Enlightenment… stuff was just there and existed. As you know, they decided to create their own meaning. They felt something from reading stories, legends, both theirs and others. The soul – if such a thing could be said to exist before I came along – deeply wants some kind of meaning in life. It must serve something. There has not been a person who has ever lived who hasn’t had some sort of ideal they hold. Even those creatures I created to be purely emotionless had to make a choice: do they live? Or do they die? Is life better than death? Logic doesn’t get you anywhere on that question if you have nothing inside the cranial cavity.

“So the why is because people wanted some sort of definable meaning. Or, well, some people did. The rest of the multiverse was perfectly happy with their Weavings and their religions, but Gan and the Builders had had enough. They had the power, the numbers… And there was no ka to create a hero to stop them. They became so absorbed in their work they failed to realize what kind of story they were part of.” Renee shrugged. “Of course, that story isn’t really a story, it’s history, and has no bearing on what happened after. I was created to give reality meaning through the average of all stories in reality. So I did. I created heroes, villains, grand scoping adventures, and a multiverse that connected all possibilities together. Keep in mind that I don’t have a will, I just do what I was programmed to do – define the multiverse in terms of stories. This form you are talking to now is technically just an Emissary. A personality dreamed up through ka to answer the question ‘what sort of mind would create this multiverse’?”

“Outrageously evil and absurdly crazy?” Jenny asked.

“What did you expect?” Renee asked with a roll of her eye. “To create a personality willing to do all the things I do, you have to be willing to remove just about all the moral fiber present in anyone and replace it with a love of being entertained. So naturally I’m sadistic, easily amused, petty, antagonizing, very creative, and am devoted to the ideal of the story. Seriously, how could I kill millions upon billions of people every second through time travel alone for the sake of furthering one hero’s motivation if I wasn’t completely sadistic and off my rocker?

“Of course, you can take refuge in the fact that this personality is completely fake, no ‘soul’ or will behind it at all, just a pure manifestation of ka brought about through Flower shenanigans and a special white unicorn. My actual mechanisms remain completely impassive and computational, even though they still factor me in as a character. Such a shame you have a hard time realizing how I can both be the Tower and be separate from it, but you’ll figure it out eventually one night when you can’t sleep.”

“…Lovely,” Jenny muttered.

“But that’s all a tangent,” Renee continued, starting to move in a circular pattern through the roses. “The question is still ‘why?’ And there’s certainly more to it than some lost civilization’s shaky definition of meaning. For Roland specifically, the ‘why’ was so I would be protected from all interference until the moment I decided it was required. Yes, I could have just created the self-defense protocol by bestowing a man the power of retcon and trapping him in a loop, but why would I do that? It’s boring. So I grabbed the Crimson King, Roland, and the early multiverse and created it. The Prophet Stephen King had the best story to use for that. So that’s why, Roland. You were trapped so the story, my story, could play out for as long as it needed to in the most interesting way possible. Your story would go on to define the rules of existence for all the others. You are, in many ways, the hero of all worlds. Appropriately, you are rather gruff, have difficulty forming connections with others, and are single-mindedly focused on your goal to get to me. How does it feel to finally be face to face with the force of your life?”

“Nothing spectacular,” he answered.

“Good man,” Renee praised. “As for the larger ‘why,’ as in, why the war, why set up a collapse, why guide the history of the entire multiverse toward this one point? Well, that’s very, very simple, dears.” She folded her hooves and smiled. “No story is complete without an ending. So there must be an ending for all stories.” She held up a hoof. “This is it.”

“And it had to be this way?” Nanoha asked.

“No. Also yes. See, there’s a paradox here, so let’s take this slowly. I have known since my creation the exact positions of every single quantum particle in every universe that has existed in every timeline and retcon all the way until the moment of my death. For me, time simply doesn’t exist. Even in this universe where time travel is flat out impossible, because of my nature I can reach into any time and drop any object from anywhere. For example, roughly a day from today Corona and Eve will be arguing intensely about the nature of existence and me. One of them will mention the idea that I, the Dark Tower, talk to myself through their argument. According to the narrative of the chapter this has already happened, but according to the time of this universe – that cannot be mutated – it won’t happen for a significant amount of time. I know everything up to the moment of my true demise, and I can extrapolate a fair way beyond that, just like how I know the history of Gan and the Builders without having complete dominion over everything in that section of existence. You can’t measure my ‘life’ in time. You can’t measure my ‘life’ at all.

“And yet, despite this complete and utter foreknowledge, you did still have a choice in how the war turned out. It was predestined long, long, long before any of you were ever born, but the decision to cause the collapse was made through the averaging of everyone who had ever existed and would ever exist. The shape of existence is self-recursive – my protocols created it and shaped it, but those protocols were also determined by what was shaped. You all decided this was what needed to happen.”

“That’s not right!” Nanoha shouted. “The majority of people voted for a preservation!”

“Oh, you’re right there, if you ask them directly that’s what they say.” She grinned malevolently. “But if you ask them what would make a better story?”

Nanoha paled.

“Regardless of what you think philosophically, an endless multiverse that goes on forever and will, eventually, be converted into a True Infinity… It’s not very satisfying. There can’t be an ending there, everything will just go on and on. Sure, any particular story can have a satisfying ending, but the multiverse as a whole?” She shook her head. “The reign of ka had to end, because that is its nature. I am self-defeating.

“And why did it have to be a war? Why did the multiverse have to end?” Renee shrugged. “It was interesting and it amused me. In a more complex sense, there had to be a war, since a war is more interesting than peace talks and provides a lot more room for interpersonal drama and strain. I couldn’t be destroyed at the time of Collapse, since that would leave so many loose ends unresolved, so I had to perpetuate myself for a little longer – and the Flowers were the perfect way to do that. They’ve always treated me as some sort of religious figure, even if they deny it to everyone who asks. I gave one of them a card that came with the idea that they could create a messiah that would perpetuate the true ‘will of the Tower’ through some unicorn that was destined to die through previous foreshadowing. Because I was the Emissary of Ka and the Tower, I was able to use their little card to force the result I needed. A little twist right at the end.

“And why this now? Why let the Crimson King out? Why are some of you alive and others not?” Renee smirked. “The story’s not over yet, this is only chapter 133. We’ve got to get to 157 before I go through the checkout and let you do whatever you want to this New World. By the way, you’re so going to mess it up, but in a way that’s kind of beautiful. And who knows? You could be surprising. It’s not like I can be certain of anything outside of me.”

There was silence.

“I’m done. You can respond now.”

Nanoha put a hand behind her head. “…That’s a lot to take in.”

“What do we do now?” Jenny asked.

Renee produced a sunbathing chair from nowhere and put on a pair of sunglasses. “That’s up to you.”

“We are still the source of our own ka,” Roland said, putting away his gun. “We have to take ownership of it and make our own plans.” He turned to Nanoha. “Madam Takamachi, the Crimson King, even if he is fated to fall, will still do unspeakable evils the longer he lives. We cannot allow him to run free.”

Nanoha nodded. “I wholeheartedly agree, Roland of Gilead. But what can we do?”

No answer was forthcoming.

~~~

Corona landed on a volcanic world. It shouldn’t have had a breathable atmosphere, but Eve’s breathing spell hadn’t dissipated yet. As she set down, she could feel the heat of the world on her skin. She didn’t land next to any lava flows, and yet the cracked brown earth was shimmering with heat waves. The world was dark, currently deep in the shadow of a large gas giant that blocked virtually all incoming light. The only light came from the planet itself – the distant molten rock.

“We should find somewhere we can breathe, the spell won’t last forever,” Raging Sights pointed out.

Corona ignored her device. She folded her wings to her back and started walking. She had her sights set on a nearby mountain with a conveniently small slope. It wouldn’t be much of a climb at all. Refusing to unfold her wings, she took to the mountain, hoisting herself over the porous igneous rocks that made up the world. Every now and then she would scrape one of her arms or legs, prompting a small amount of her golden life-giving blood to pour out onto the dark ground. As time went on, her natural glow became brighter and brighter as more of her was exposed to the elements. She became a shining beacon amongst the darkness of the planet.

“Master, where are we going?”

Corona didn’t respond, she just kept climbing, ignoring the scrapes and cuts. They were nothing to her. She’d been stabbed through the stomach and had so many broken bones over the years these scrapes were almost impossible to feel. Even if she couldn’t heal them. Why would she even want to heal them, considering?

She pulled herself higher and higher, ignoring the sweat collecting all over her body from the heat. She had gloves, her grip wasn’t loosening. Her blood mixed with the salty sweat and created a luminescent trail that led up the mountain, a map to her goal.

Eventually – she didn’t care to keep track of how long it took – she neared the top of the mountain. From there, she could already sense the heat increasing and see the area getting brighter.

Raging Sights figured out what she was doing. “Corona, don’t do this. I-”

“Raging Sights, enter standby mode,” Corona ordered, robotically.

“…Entering s- kkkkkkkk Error recursive – entering st- kkkkk Error…”

It was trying to disobey the order. Corona had no idea if the Device could do that, but she didn’t want to find out. She removed both her gloves and set them on the ground. Then she removed her barrier jacket and wrapped the gloves in it.

She took off her shades. Red, pointed, and the perfect shape for her face. In the low light, they reflected her glowing face back at her perfectly. The deep sad eyes, the torn skin, her simple nightshirt.

She put the shades back on. They were hers, part of her face. Removing them wouldn’t be true to her.

She didn’t know why she cared about that at this juncture. She decided it wasn’t worth thinking about.

She pulled back the bundle of cloth and threw it.

“Corona no-”

Raging Sights was soon out of earshot, rolling down the mountain. Corona turned back to the mountain. In nothing but boots, a nightshirt, and shades she climbed the rest of the way. Without gloves it was significantly more difficult, but it only took a couple of minutes.

The top of the mountain was an open hole that went deep into the planet. Even before she looked down, she could see the glow of the lava far, far below, curdling and bubbling as if it were alive. And in many ways, it was – it was the source of a planet’s life. One day, this volcanic world might support oceans and a healthy atmosphere, all helped along by the churning, violent interior.

She held out her hands. One of them had a pretty large gash across it, dripping copious amounts of golden blood.

Eternity coursed through her veins. The gift of immortality to any she gave it to.

This was the first thought that gave her pause. What did it mean to give? What did it mean to take? What did she mean to existence?

She looked up at the sky, dominated by the single dark gas giant. Almost featureless aside from a few sparks of lightning in the tumultuous clouds. It gave her no answers.

Were there answers?

Could there be answers?

She shook her head, biting back tears. If there were, she couldn’t find them.

What she did know was that she was never supposed to have survived the collapse. The world was supposed to move on without her, forge a new way. One without the Tower, without Class 1 societies, without people like her telling them how to live their lives.

She was just as bad as the Tower, in many ways.

She took in a breath and closed her eyes – then shook her head. She wasn’t going to do this blind. She forced them open, a powerful fury rising in her features. Her eyes appeared to burn with an inner fire.

Her wings ruffled slightly before pressing themselves tight to her. She folded her hands behind her back and locked them overtop the wings to keep them from moving out of instinct. She looked down – and refused to blink.

The fires of the planet’s life beckoned to her.

She took a step forward and tipped herself off the edge. She didn’t flail, didn’t scream – she kept her silent gaze intently focused on the inferno below.

Her body began to feel the heat get too much to bear. In its biological desperation, it was able to tap into the magic of the world, to give her some resistance to the temperature.

It wouldn’t be able to do anything against the molten rock itself, so this didn’t faze Corona.

She felt the magic start to wear thin. Parts of her hair started to singe.

This is it. Existence can move on.

She clenched her jaw and dug her fingernails into the palm of her hands. It wouldn’t be long now.

“CORONA!”

Corona felt a sharp jerk on her body that forced her stomach into her mouth. She lost all focus in an instant, the locking of her arms breaking apart and her wings spreading to their full size. With a sharp wail she flapped upward as a purple aura of telekinesis dragged her out of the volcanic tunnel.

Eve tore her out of the tunnel and right into her fuzzy form. The two of them collided and painfully rolled down the mountain for a few seconds before coming to a rest.

Eve ignored her scrapes and grabbed Corona by the face. “Corona! No! No don’t do that! No! No!”

Corona’s tears fell like waterfalls. “I wasn’t supposed to survive, Eve! That was what needed to happen! I could only make the New World if I didn’t get to enjoy it! It couldn’t be for me!”

“It wasn’t for you! You never did it for you!”

“I can’t! It’s not mine! This is how things need to be, I’m nothing, I can’t have this, I don’t deserve it, I…”

Eve’s expression became determined despite her own tears. “Yes. You. Do.”

“No! Stop trying t-”

“That’s it, you don’t get to talk anymore, it’s my turn.” She glared at her. “I’m peeved. I’m so livid that I have the shakes! I thought I could keep it in for your sake, but nope, so we’re trying something else here.” She lifted Corona up in her telekinesis. “I’m going to show you what you are and what you deserve, and you’re not going to be able to deny it or run away from it.”

“I’m not going anyw-”

Eve cast a sleep spell on her, removing any chance she had of resisting.

~~~

“…So, our enemy is the Crimson King,” Nanoha said, finding it suddenly easy to use her magic and project a hologram with Raising Heart – to the jealousy of both Jenny and Aradia. She was currently projecting an image of the King. “We know that part of his essence existed before the Tower itself, and that he was the first being to ‘threaten’ the entire multiverse with his presence. He wanted to destroy the Beams of the Tower so he could remove its control of the world and bring in the darkness, or the Red, whatever term you want to use.” She pointed Raising Heart at Roland. “He failed because of you. You and your ‘ka-tet’ stopped his abuse of the worlds and saved the Tower. Unfortunately, you were also lucky. He had to manifest as a physical man in your universe, leaving his true eldritch body in another realm. While he cannot fully manifest as eldritch in this New World, all of him is here, and that includes all his power. And from things Renee has said, I think he is the only one who can have any real eldritch power in this world. He’s exempt from the rule. As soon as he figures it out…”

“He’s probably already figured it out,” Jenny said. “Did you see how fast he got those basic spells down? And don’t tell me that ‘vanishing act’ wasn’t eldritch.”

Nanoha nodded slowly. “I doubt writing him out of reality or shooting him would work this time.”

“I agree,” Roland said. “It is not the way of ka for a foe to be defeated the same way twice.”

“So how do we defeat him?” Aradia asked.

“Sai, analysis?” Nanoha asked.

Sai beeped. “We do not know where he is, we do not know where he is going. We know he will have to come back here. We need to prepare for that moment.”

“Prepare with what?” Jenny asked. “There isn’t exactly anything here other than the Tower, and it’s not just going to let us in! Are you?”

From her distant sunbathing chair, Renee called back. “Nope! You’re on your own!” She obnoxiously slurped a slushie.

“The fields of Can’-Ka No Rey do not go on forever,” Roland said, standing up. “There are parts of other worlds beyond. We could use them.”

“Where would we go?”

Raising Heart beeped. Nanoha’s eyes widened. “…There’s a TSAB base nearby. One of the repositories of capture devices.”

Jenny blinked. “People from the other side? Geez, that sounds like a great idea.”

“We can put aside our differences to stop evil,” Aradia said. “We did it with the Nihilists, we can do it with the Crimson King.”

Roland nodded. “Ka often chooses the least likely to become companions of a ka-tet, but the bonds formed will break down all barriers.”

“You’re welcome!” Renee called.

Jenny ground her teeth. “Are you sure we can’t let the Crimson King destroy her? …It? Whatever?”

“We don’t want there to be any chance he gains the Tower’s power,” Nanoha said, shaking her head. “And as much as I hate to admit it, having her around is beneficial for us. She is an avenue for information.”

Jenny sighed. “Fine, fine. Good point. Let’s just go to this TSAB base already to see what and who we have to work with.”

Nanoha clasped her hands together. “I’ll teleport us there… Instant travel is no longer possible given a new light-speed limit, but I have a laser-transmission spell. You shouldn’t experience any time, but it might feel weird.”

“Weird ho-”

A second later they had appeared on top of a large plateau made out of a mixture of purple and green sand. The purple sand moved as if it was alive.

Jenny grabbed her heart. “Holy crap… It felt like I didn’t have bones for a moment…”

“You didn’t have any substance, existing only as information in photons,” Nanoha responded. “Anyway, here we are.” She gestured forward with Raising Heart at the TSAB structure – it was a single building, about two stories tall, with two metallic spires coming out of the top. It was glowing a pristine blue, indicating it was fully operational.

Nanoha walked up to the front door and placed her hand on a scanner. It accepted her identity and let them in. Nanoha and Roland went in first, both with weapons at the ready. Aradia went next, with Jenny at the rear.

“I take it this is normal for you?” Jenny asked Roland.

He nodded. “The allies with magic is new, but I remember moving through the technological caverns of a city run by a mad train.”

“Bad experiences with AI?” Nanoha asked.

“You could say that. I’m carefully watching this Sai. The moment she seems to go crazy, she won’t be around no more.”

“Good thing you got in the Tower when you did. She was breaking down.”

“Mhm…” They arrived at another door. Nanoha opened it with her clearance and stepped in. There was no one inside, but the room was well lit and displayed dozens of red and white capture devices. There should have been hundreds.

Nanoha let out a sigh. “Capture devices were dusted…”

“Not all of them. We can work with this,” Aradia said with a smile. She reached to the ground, picking up the one ball that wasn’t on a shelf. “Might as well start somewhere.” She threw it. With a flash of light, a tall, white, vaguely equine form appeared.

Roland blinked. “…I certainly wasn’t expecting that.”

“ARCEUS?!” Jenny blurted, jaw dropping. “What are… What are you doing in a TSAB capture outpost!?”

Arceus blinked. “I was captured?”

“…Right, you wouldn’t know.”

Aradia looked at a nearby console. “Someone had opened up the device scanning program. If I had to guess, a TSAB mage found his device on an opponent and wanted to know who was inside it. They didn’t get to complete the scan.”

Nanoha smiled, extending a hand. “Welcome back, Arceus.”

He extended a leg, shaking her hand. “…Something’s wrong. My powers are gone… Reality is off…”

Nanoha’s smile vanished. “…The collapse won, but not in the way they wanted. We’ll explain later – right now, there’s a real evil we need to stop, and we’ll need everyone’s help to do it.”

“If you say it is evil, I will believe you.”

“You were already on our side,” Nanoha admitted, turning to the rest of the capture devices. “…The rest of these will all have been fighting for the collapse.”

Aradia smiled warmly. “So? We’ll do what we can to turn them. If we can’t, we can’t. It’s as simple as that.” She picked up another capture device. “Let’s see who’s in this one…”

~~~

Corona came to in a familiar – but unexpected – place. The throne room of Lai’s palace.

“What in…?” She rubbed her head, standing up. She found she had her barrier jacket and gloves on again, and that her wounds had been healed. The tips of her hair were still burnt, though.

“Ah, you’re awake.” Corona turned to see Eve sitting on the ground next to a bound and gagged Terezi.

“Eve, why are we here?” Corona asked.

“I’m going to make a point,” Eve said. “And I’m going to be honest. I thought I was strong enough to ignore my emotions for your sake. Usually I can. This time… It was a mistake. I allowed myself to harbor resentment, grief, and hate without letting it out. And that only made every little bit of it worse.” She smiled sadly. “Flutterfree told me that ‘he who stands should take heed, lest he fall’. I fell. I fell because I thought I could stand. I couldn’t. So here it is.”

Eve cleared her throat. “I hate what you’ve done. I hate that you were able to do it, I hate that you were able to go through with the collapse, and I hate the way you ruined everything. I hate myself for letting you send that message to the multiverse, and I hate myself for not being strong enough to stop you at all costs. I hate the Tower for all that it did to us and I hate whatever happened that ruined your pure collapse and just made things worse. I hate Terezi’s inability to talk rationally about something and I hate to see you cry.” Eve sniffed. “I hate a lot of things.”

“Eve…”

“I’m not done!” Eve snapped. “We needed to get all of this out in the open earlier. I needed to get some shouting done and you needed to share the thoughts that were swirling around your head. I honestly have no idea if there was a way to do both at once without one of us being the worse for wear for it, but I do know what we did do was pretty dumb.” She shook her head. “I think we got most of it out in the open already though. But we shouldn’t have run away.”

Corona looked down, head sagging.

“And now enough about me, let’s talk about you.” Eve stood up and walked closer to Corona. “You’re messed up.”

Corona let out a pained laugh. “That’s a nice way of putting it.”

“You’re messed up in the head. You… You don’t think you should have survived. You believe that you don’t deserve this. You have regrets that you think are too much to surmount.”

“Eve… They are.”

Eve shook her head. “I started a war too, Corona. I also survived when I wasn’t supposed to. …I was able to recover from those things, even if they were wrong.”

“That’s not much compared to what I’ve done.”

“Insulting,” Eve muttered. “But technically right. There’s a difference between you and me in that regard. I compromised my principles to do those things. You didn’t. You could have tried to wish for the collapse right from the start, but you didn’t – you gave people a chance. You did everything you could to keep the war death tolls to a minimum and keep civility despite what your allies were doing. You showed us courtesy even when it would have been beneficial for you to attack all out. You never lost who you were, Corona.”

“…Bu-”

Eve ignored her. “You, Corona Sunset Shimmer, are a good person. A very good person. That’s why you were the one allowed to ask the question. Because you were pure.”

“I’m far from pure, Eve.”

“And that’s why we’re here.” Eve held out a wing and pointed at the throne behind Corona. “In that throne is embedded a sword. It is a magical artifact that knows only one thing: only those who are pure of heart are able to remove it from the stone.” Eve narrowed her eyes. “Go pull it out.”

“What? No, I-”

“Are you afraid it’ll tell you that you are pure of heart?” Eve accused. “That it will say you do deserve this? That you are a hero?”

“Eve, I…”

“If you’re right about yourself Corona, you won’t be able to pull the sword out! So stop stalling and go pull it out!”

Corona turned around quickly and laid her hands on the Master Sword’s hilt – and paused.

She could feel it inside her – the fear. A fear that the sword would actually come out. That it would mark her as pure.

She wasn’t pure. She knew she wasn’t pure. She had screwed up in a situation where there were no right answers. She didn’t deserve anything. The sword should reject her – she had done too much.

But the sword, like Eve, wouldn’t care about what she had done. It would care about who she was.

She let out an enraged scream and pulled on the sword. For a split second it didn’t budge, and her heart fluttered for a moment.

But then it started glowing at the place the blade met the rock, slowly moving out like a shovel through clay. There was a sharp, painful grinding sound as the sword pulled out of the throne and pointed into the air, glowing with the brilliant blue of a reawakened magical artifact.

“WHY!?” Corona shouted at the blade. “WHY!?”

Power akin to a bolt of lighting shot from the blade into Corona. She let out a shrill, prolonged wail, continuing to hold the sword high as she bawled her eyes out. Her entire body lit on fire – but she wasn’t burned. The Master Sword itself alit with blue flames, channeling Corona’s power perfectly.

A pulse of energy left her, sending the deep emotion within her scream to everyone within a mile’s radius.

They saw her discovery of the collapse. They saw her screaming and yelling with her friends about what to do. They saw her struggling on the staircase to the Wishing World. They saw her arguing with Merodi Universalis’ Overheads for the collapse. They saw her fights, struggles, the worlds she had held in her fingertips.

They saw her final fight with Eve, their argument, and the volcano.

They also saw things hidden deeper in her past: her revelation as the Rogue of Doom, her decision to end Topeka, the worlds she had destroyed out of mercy within the Shaping Mechanism…

They felt her pain.

When it was over, Corona stood tall. Her face was sorrowful and broken – but her stance was strong. With her wings spread wide, she lit her horn and created a scabbard for the sword, adapting the barrier jacket easily. She held the Master Sword in her hands, stared at it for a moment, and then sheathed it.

Eve tackle-hugged her, bawling. “Don’t... Don’t do that ever again. Don’t… Just…”

Corona pulled Eve close. “…I’m here to stay. Th-thank you.”

The two held each other and cried, no more words needing to be said.

Terezi felt a tear fall down her cheek. She hung her head – no longer able to muster up hate for Corona, despite it all.

~~~

Elsewhere in the New World, the Sweetie Belle ship known as Swip sailed through a system composed entirely of planets made out of food. Sadly, only the donut world was actually shaped like the food item it was representing in question, everything else was just boring spheres. Except for the pop rock planet, but that was… inconsistent. It was spherical most often.

The core planet was a mixture of normal earths and a few gas giants that created great storms throughout the system that tore food off the orbiting worlds and dropped them onto the center world. Some people were happy about the falling food. Others were getting crushed.

Engineetie had transmitted plans to the various worlds about how to deal with the food crisis, but the Sweeties hadn’t done much beyond that – they hadn’t found any evidence of multiversal society in the food system at all. They simply didn’t have the time, resources, or personnel to do anything.

They were still enjoying the food despite themselves. Currently, Burgerbelle, White Nettle, and Onyx were in the mess hall of Swip’s second deck, taking full advantage of the variety of delicious confectionaries.

Well, Burgerbelle and Onyx were. White Nettle was looking at the pile of food with uncertainty.

“Come on, take a bite!” Burgerbelle encouraged, holding a donut out to Nettle. “It’s delicious.”

“I have found the act of eating disgusting ever since I came to occupy this body. I will only do it as a necessity and I will not eat anything that is likely to give my stomach trouble.”

Burgerbelle shook her head. “Geez, loosen up a little. You’re not going to learn to like that new body if you never live with it. You don’t see me refusing to eat because the food feels weird in my mouth.”

“You were able to eat before.”

“Shoving random items into your Flat face and making them disappear is not eating.”

“Seconded,” Onyx declared, munching on some macaroni and cheese.

“But you had a sensation of taste. I never did. I dislike it.”

Burgerbelle snickered. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the WHEEL of HYPOCRISY! Let’s spin it around and see what flavor we have today?”

Nettle groaned. “Please stop.”

Burgerbelle spun an imaginary wheel. “Woo, look at it go and – le gasp! We have a case of inconsistency! For all the change you tried to cause you can’t take any yourself! Egad!”

Nettle raised an eyebrow. “Are you done?”

“Nope.” Burgerbelle picked up a hamburger out of the pile of food. “Burger.” She chowed down on it like a ravenous hyena. “Ah… Still the best food. Better with proper taste buds…”

“And yet it still doesn’t give you powers.”

Burgerbelle’s smile faltered. “Yeah. I… I don’t think we get to keep our powers. We were changed too much. Everyone else is starting to show signs of magic. Even Thrackerzod.”

“She’s not getting any eldritch power,” Onyx pointed out. “Just normal magic.”

“Still something,” Burgerbelle said, leaning back. She pulled a pencil out of her pocket and stuck it in her mouth, chewing on the end to think. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Nettle. You still have your experiences. That makes you valuable.”

“…All my memories are fuzzy and scattered in this new mind. They didn’t translate well. Too much of a rush job.”

“Still, better than me. I’m just a kid now. Can’t even meme properly without being cringey.”

Nettle raised an eyebrow. “How was it ever not cringey?”

Burgerbelle chuckled. “Oh memes are always cringey. That’s the point.”

“Then why were you complaining?”

“Because it’s soooo saaaad… Alexa, play Despacito.”

“NO,” Swip declared.

Burgerbelle snickered. “I’ve still got it… but it doesn’t feel the same. I miss all the cars, the bradburgers, my impossible facial expressions, the text… And I bet you miss being able to see so much.”

“…I think I miss my old body,” Nettle said. “I can’t exactly remember what it was like. It’s too complex for this brain.” She shook her head. “I don’t feel like… me anymore.”

“Hey, I can tell you one thing right now.” Burgerbelle cleared her throat. “Even if you aren’t what you used to be, you are someone now, and I like that someone. So come on, eat a maple bar with me.”

Nettle blinked slowly. Then she grabbed the maple bar and bit into it. She made a face. “Revolting…”

“Progress!”

“Ahem!” Mattie’s voice came across the intercom. “This is your Mistress speaking, can all my fine ladies make it to the big room for a briefing?”

“Stop talking like that,” Swip interjected.

They could hear Mattie chuckling. “Just come to the bridge, I’ve got some announcements. I won’t use the whips for punctuation this time, I promise!”

Burgerbelle looked at the giant pile of food. “…You know, I almost tried to eat all of this at once just to clean up. That would have been an epic fail.”

Nettle got up and dusted herself off. She didn’t respond vocally – but she was smiling brightly. They left and headed to the bridge.

Onyx sighed – once again, the food was just being left out. She wasn’t cleaning it up this time. Nope. Definitely not.

She started cleaning it up while swearing under her breath.

134 - We are but Dust

Roxy crouched behind a crate made of reddish wood; just in the nick of time to avoid being spotted by the acolytes in disgusting brown robes. She had a grimace on her face, an expression which had many causes. First of all, she was sneaking around a place without full access to her Void powers, which meant she could be spotted. Second, she was currently acting under orders from me to get anywhere. Third, she actually agreed with the plan, which made her even more distasteful of working for me.

The camera is on us. I can hear you seething, I told her telepathically.

Get out of my head.

I am not in your head. I’m just reading how things are going. If it wasn’t noteworthy to point out your anger I wouldn’t know about it.

Roxy grunted, chancing a look over the box, finding that the acolytes had passed. Well, since you’re here, how’s it look on your end?

Monika and I are in position. Which is to say, we’re trying not to shout at each other.

Business as usual.

…And now she’s shouting at me. Excuse me a moment…

Roxy was glad to have me out of sight and out of mind. She took a quick look around. The hall she was in was covered in innumerable flags - all tattered, worn out, and spray-painted with an angular symbol representing ka, a K-A hybrid letter inside a circle. There were a few spirographs around as well, though those were less common.

There were currently no acolytes in range, and the closest ones she heard were a fair distance away. She leaped out from behind her box, darting down the hall, careful to make sure her footsteps were muffled. It helped that she was wearing large socks, not shoes, which was admittedly a lot more comfortable.

She ducked through a side portal to the acolytes’ restrooms. As it turned out, these were just holes dug in the ground separated by wooden stall doors. She positioned herself at the highest point she could, using two legs and an arm to keep herself pinned. With her free hand, she focused; tapping into what little power she had recovered.

Her weapon of choice appeared in her hand – a silenced rifle. She didn’t need to aim – she just pointed it at a position in front of the hole and waited. The longer she remained, the more she felt like trying to pull her sword out of her Carnelian gemstone, but that would most definitely take more magic energy than her inventory.

Eventually, some guy walked in. The moment he closed the stall door, he was dead from a bullet to the head.

She quietly landed on the ground and took the guy’s robe, putting it on herself, careful to pull the hood so far over her face only her mouth was visible. The pink-red tone of her Carnelian ‘skin’ was close enough to normal that it wouldn’t arise suspicion unless someone managed to look closely. She kicked the body down the hole for disposal.

Egh. I know he’s dead, but geez even dead bodies don’t deserve to be down there… She gently opened the stall door and walked out of the restrooms. She walked out in the open now, well aware that her ambient aura of Void would keep people from paying attention to her. How much of this was actually her power and how much of it was my mad scribbling she had no idea, and she frankly didn’t care.

After she had passed through a long hall, she entered the cult’s main meeting room. Essentially, it was a cavernous space the size of a small cathedral. Admittedly, it looked more like the inside of a diseased sea cucumber than a cavern, but all the fleshy and mucus-like substances were really rocks with unusual texture.

She mingled with hundreds of other acolytes, keeping her head down, listening to their conversation. Scarcely a second went by when she didn’t hear the word ‘ka’ or ‘Dark Tower’ or ‘the will’. This was exactly what she’d expected – what else could possibly come from a psychotic Dark Tower cult?

Engraved in the ceiling was a spirograph interlaced with an image of a Flower, their symbol of ka within the spirograph’s center. The engraving was glowing black, a color no doubt chosen because the Dark Tower was, well, dark.

Then she saw the tributes – dozens of people were imprisoned in a large cage, all of whom were slated to be judged through a coin flip if ka wanted them to live within the New World, or if they must be purged.

Idiots don’t realize the dusting was the coin flip…

We already know how stupid they are, I reminded her. Just confirm if there’s anything that could obfuscate my sight.

Roxy looked around, checking the entire space. I don’t see the cult leader yet.

He’ll be out in two minutes if all goes as expected.

Roxy contented herself with wandering around for two minutes, finding nothing out of the ordinary. …Besides people talking about how they wanted ka to deem more people die than usual.

The cult leader came out and everyone let out a chant. “The Tower’s will is yours!”

“My will is given to the Tower,” the leader repeated. Roxy had no idea what his name was, and she didn’t care. She did know he was a dwarf of some sort, given his stature and tremendous braided beard. “My brothers and sisters!” he announced. “I have great news! I have been blessed with knowledge from beyond our feeble understanding!”

The crowd held its breath, gasping.

“I have learned that, with the creation of the New World, the Dark Tower has been given a voice! We have been judged worthy to hear words directly from the Tower’s own mind! The Emissary of Ka is here!”

Roxy blinked. Uh…

I think he’s crazy, I said. Black Thirteen says nothing about such an Emissary.

It doesn’t show you everything.

True. But really, how ridiculous would something like that be? The Dark Tower doesn’t have a voice and never has. It’s just a force.

“You may ask how I have come to know this unbelievable truth! Well, rather than tell you, I’ll show you. We have a very special guest here today…” He stood to the side, allowing his guest to take the stage instead of him.

Roxy’s mouth dropped open when she saw who it was. “Shit…”

A Flower composed of dozens of orange bulbs affixed to a narrow stalk floated into the center. People of the Hannas Tower’s Shadow, I come with great news. The final act of the Flowers – my race – has resulted in the birth of a being unlike any other. All the time we have lived in the dark, fumbling for answers, is gone…

There’s the thing messing with your sights, Roxy thought ‘loudly.’

My mental voice came to Roxy in bits and pieces. Renee… He’s talking about Renee… How could I have…

Get it together, we need a new plan. How about… wait, something’s happening.

The Flower continued spreading his message. …and we will travel to the central world of Nucleon to meet this Emissary and let her bestow upon us great knowledge. The will of the Tower will be known a-

“Excuse me, but this all seems a little unbelievable to me. I mean, seriously, an Emissary of ka? Does that even make sense?”

The hundreds of faces in the room all turned to see Randall Flagg standing in the middle of the room, not even wearing one of the robes. He had one hand on his hip and another in the air, moving around as if illustrating a point.

Roxy did a double take. Flagg!? How the hell did he get away and what the fuck is he doing in here!?

I don’t know, I responded quickly.

…Care to Elaborate? The Flower asked Flagg.

Flagg smirked. “I thought you’d never ask.”

~~~

“How long do we have?” Strange asked Sherlock.

“About two minutes, I’d say. Less if he thinks there’s something fishy going on.”

“Then we need to move!” Lightning shouted, tearing numerous capture devices off the shelves and throwing them into a large crate Strange was levitating. “Help me here!”

“I am,” Sherlock said, grabbing hold of a shelf and shaking it, making dozens of the balls fall into the crate. “Strange, you’ll be glad to know these are mostly people of the preservation. Seeing as-”

“I know a Void installation when I see one,” Strange commented, using one hand on the box and the other to levitate capture devices into it. “Not many others are constructed out of pure crystal.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “One minute.”

Lighting tossed the last of the capture devices into the crate. “That’s all of them. Strange?”

Strange pressed his hands together and focused. He had been the first to uncover his magic a few days ago and had been advancing very quickly since then. He surrounded them in an arcane sphere and teleported them to the base’s docking bay where the Crimson Blitz and a large Void carrier ship waited. Unlike Lightning’s ship, the carrier was rounded and of a dull blue color. Strange ran into the carrier with all the capture devices while Lightning and Sherlock jumped into the Crimson Blitz. Lightning grabbed onto the controls of her ship and tapped into her magic. “Here goes nothing…” She pushed all the energy she had into the ship and it came out of the engines in a burst of lightning, blasting out of the Void’s base.

Sherlock pressed a button, activating a tether that affixed itself to the carrier that was only half working and needed a boost. Naturally the sharp jerk the carrier experienced broke the box open and spilled the capture devices everywhere, opening up a couple of them.

The most notable occupant was Discord himself. Despite the shaking and trembling, he stretched his arms and yawned. “Ah, what a nice nap.” He looked at Strange. “So, what happened?”

“We lost, busy trying to escape the planet-destruction laser of Lord English.”

“Oh. Well I can help with that…” He snapped his fingers – and nothing happened. “…Again?”

Strange wasn’t doing anything, so he put a hand on Discord’s shoulder. “I’m going to use my magic to awaken yours. It’s going to hurt a lot.”

“What do y- AAAAAAAUUUGHHHH!” Discord grabbed the part of his body where his heart should be and started writing on the ground, his physical form becoming more amorphous.

“Like, what did you do to him?” a freed unicorn, Insipid, asked.

“A rush job,” Strange commented, glancing at the feed of the planet they were leaving. “He needs to get over the pain quickly or I don’t think we’re getting out of this…”

“Out of what?”

Strange pointed at the screen showing the planet they had just left. Aside from the Void installation, it was a red sandy world made almost entirely out of termite-like beings. The dead bodies of these termites were the only thing the living termites were able to use for anything, since everything else that landed on the planet was also converted into more termites.

Currently, Lord English’s vaporization breath had already started wearing away at the termite planet, sending smoke and the smell of cooked bugs into the atmosphere of the system. The shockwave would hit them soon…

Discord suddenly stood up, his form once again stable. “That was the worst trip of my life.”

“It’s how my sort of magic tends to work.”

Discord raised his hand and chuckled. “Let’s try… this.”

A giant rubber duck appeared behind the carrier and Crimson Blitz. As the explosion shockwave from English’s attack on the planet hit it, the duck let out a quack so loud people could hear it on several planets over. The sound waves of the quack mitigated the shockwave of English’s beam enough for Crimson Blitz and the carrier to get away.

They felt a slight shaking from the duck though.

“What the hell was that!?” Lightning shouted to Strange over communications.

“Discord was released. I jumpstarted his power,” Strange said. “He will get a hangover and lose much of his aptitude shortly.”

“He has the worst bedside manner I’ve ever seen,” Discord added.

“It saved us,” Strange asserted, dusting off his hands.

“Like, woah, it did!?” Insipid gasped. “I… What’s going on?”

“I’m sure Strange will explain what’s going on,” a new voice said – that of Princess Cosmo Sparkle.

Sherlock let out an amused grunt from his end. “Welcome to fun explanation city, Doctor Strange. Enjoy.”

~~~

“That’s it, you don’t get gun privileges anymore,” Starbeat said, tearing Caliborn’s gun out of his hands with her telekinesis.

“HEY! GIVE THAT BACK, BITCH!”

“Mmm, no.” Starbeat said, holding it just above his reach. She gestured at the ground. “You just killed that stallion.” There was, in fact, an orange stallion with a hole in his head laying on top of a few corn-chip plants.

“I will remove your eyeballs and grind them into a tasty smoothie that I will make you drink.”

“Trixie?”

Trixie grinned. “Hey, hey, Cal, Cal, you can’t beat her.”

“Yes I fucking can!”

“With what? She has your gun!”

“I AM THE LORD OF TIME!” A gear of red energy surrounded Caliborn and the flow of time for everyone except him slowed. He would have preferred to jump back in time and hit Starbeat before she could even take the gun, but he hadn’t figured that out yet. She said it was impossible to do that in this New World, but he wasn’t going to believe a word she said. He reached for the gun.

She shifted the gun into its scepter form and smacked him across the face. “ACKPTH!”

“If you can access your time magic I can access my defenses against such things,” Starbeat said. “Like always.”

Gamzee chuckled. “Yeah, bro, this has happened the last five motherfuckin’ times.”

“Your stubbornness is legendary,” Trixie added.

“TRAITORS! TRAITORS, ALL OF YOU!”

“Two thirds of us were never loyal to you, Lord Swampy.”

Caliborn snarled. “I am going to kill all of you! I am going to fucking kill all of you!”

“I doubt it,” Trixie said dismissively. “We’re just too cute and adorable.”

“THAT’S DISGUSTING!”

“And you loooooove disgusting things!”

“STOP IT!”

“Make me.”

“You asked for it, bitch!” He charged, green claws extended. Trixie sidestepped and Starbeat tripped him. He fell onto the stallion’s body, the corn chip flowers crunching under his face.

“Let’s put this simply,” Starbeat said, twirling Caliborn’s scepter. “You’ve got to stop just killing people. How are we ever going to make the most of this world if we don’t get people to follow us?”

“WE CONQUER THEM!”

Starbeat smacked him with the scepter. “Wrong answer. Conquest by force requires power. Power we don’t have. It’s also horribly inefficient. It removes your ability to control. No, we need them to follow us – willingly.”

“You think too much,” Caliborn muttered.

Starbeat smirked. “Well, it’s certainly better than the alternative you’re exemplifying.”

Trixie snickered and Gamzee honked.

“You will stop making a fool of me this instant!”

“Stop being a fool then,” Trixie said, smiling coyly.

Caliborn let out an inhuman roar and stomped off. Again.

“This is becoming predictable,” Starbeat muttered under her breath.

Trixie cocked her head. “Him? Yeah. You? I’m very surprised at you. It took me years to figure out how to deal with this kind of unapologetic disgusting troll. You’ve just adapted to this whole thing in a few days. You’re changing pretty fast if I do say so myself.”

“It’s motherfuckin’ amazin’,” Gamzee added.

Starbeat smiled smugly and dusted off her chest. “Well, I guess I just see a situation and how it needs to be dealt with.” She tapped her goggles. “The ka around me has been increasing lately. I’m being built up for something.”

“Have you figured out what yet?” Trixie asked.

Starbeat shook her head. “The ka patterns are different in the New World. Overall trends still make sense, but the personal patterns are changing so much of the science has been… clouded. I am working on it though. With time I shall understand.” She looked up at the swirling planets again. “Although… it seems to me the initial fate of this New World is more important than the specifics of ka. We should focus on that.”

Trixie chuckled. “You never struck me as much of a big dreamer.”

“We didn’t really talk much before,” Starbeat said with a shrug.

“Eh, fair enough.”

It was at this point they heard Caliborn yell out in surprise.

“Oh what is it now?” Starbeat groaned. “Did you kill a bunch of baby birds or something!?”

He did not. He had discovered a weak section of the ground that, as soon as he stomped on it hard, had broken like an eggshell and dropped him into a cavernous space below. Normally the other three would give a bunch of exasperated sighs (or honks) and go rescue him. However, they had a problem to deal with at the moment.

Caliborn’s destruction had caused a chain reaction and the ground they were standing on was breaking apart and falling into the abyss as well.

“Oh for the – AAAAAAA!” Starbeat yelled, scrambling with her hooves in a vain attempt to get away from the crumbling zone. Soon she was part of a tremendous rockslide into a cavernous space. She quickly secured her footing on a large boulder sliding down into the earth at a relatively level orientation.

Already they had passed into a lava tube-like cavern and were rapidly losing the twilight light from the surface. Starbeat made a quick scan to find everyone. She couldn’t see Caliborn, but she saw Gamzee and Trixie. With her telekinesis, she grabbed onto both of them. With considerable effort, she brought them to her and set them on top of the rock as well. “HOLD ON!”

“THAT’S WHAT I WAS DOING BEFORE YOU GRABBED ME!” Trixie shouted indignantly.

Gamzee held onto the boulder without a fuss.

Starbeat scanned for Caliborn again, but couldn’t find him. Darnit… She soon had to focus on keeping the three of them alive, since the standard cavern had given way to a tube of mixed metal and chiseled sandstone with lots of spikes. Whatever protocol meshed this cavern together had a weird idea of what was supposed to be here… With barely any light to see by she had to raise shields to deflect incoming rubble. Already, she was straining her very limited control over her magic.

Suddenly, there was light. The rockslide was shunted into a spherical hole in the earth about the size of an island. In the middle of the sphere was a small, glowing globe that warmed the jungle-like surface of the sphere. In the bottom center, there was a city-sized structure made mostly of smooth white metal…

Trixie’s jaw dropped. “Is that the Hub!?”

“Looks like it!” Starbeat said, beaming. “Thank the Tower!”

“Uh, I hate to burst your bubbles, but we’re falling,” Gamzee pointed out.

“Oh. Right.”

The rockslide was now a rockfall, pouring out of the opening into the spherical hole.

“…I am definitely out of energy, I’m not going to be able to do much here…” Starbeat said, biting her lip. “Uh, Gamzee…”

Gamzee shook his head. “Ay, rock doesn’t have any thoughts, ain’t nothing a Bard of Rage can really do to that. Least not me.”

“Trixie?”

“Smoke bombs will not help!”

“Right, so… Uh… What do we…”

Then she saw it – a rainbow shifting light from just to their left, the light that happened when a god-tier player died and was revived from a death that was neither Heroic nor Just. It was Caliborn.

He took one look at them, sneered – and then slowed time down to a crawl. From Starbeat’s perspective he moved like a roadrunner, darting from rock to rock until he hit the giant boulder all of them were standing on. Then he pushed the rock to a much slower speed with his raw power, directing it away from where the rest of the rocks were falling.

The boulder plowed into the jungle at a manageable speed – though it was still enough to toss the three occupants off and into a nearby fruit-bearing tree.

“HAHA! I JUST SAVED ALL OF YOU! Who’s the fool now!?” Caliborn laughed, put his hands on his hips, and rolled his head back just to complete the image.

Starbeat laughed. “You’re such a dork.”

“What, HEY I JUS-”

Starbeat tossed him his scepter back. “Learn to take some friendly ribbing in stride.”

Caliborn looked at his weapon blankly. Then he made a grunting noise and turned away from them.

It was at this point they noticed the two dozen glowing purple zombies marching through the jungle toward them.

“Caliborn, remember how I said killing people isn’t the answer all the time?” Starbeat asked.

“Yes…”

“This is not that time. Go nuts.”

Caliborn let out a cackle. “FUCKING FINALLY! Prepare yourselves fleshy bags of meat! These bullets all have your names on them! DIE DIE DIE!”

“Normal punch.”

A caped baldy jumped out of the forest and disintegrated all the zombies with one movement of his fist.

Caliborn twitched. “FUCKING KILL STEALER!” He opened fire, lauching dozens of bullets at the interfering superhero.

The bullets bounced right off Saitama – he didn’t even notice them. “Oh, you’re… Starbeat, right?”

Starbeat nodded, putting a gentle hoof on Caliborn’s gun to get him to stop shooting for no reason. “Yes. This is the Hub, right Saitama?”

Saitama nodded. “Yep. I can get you through the gates. I know some people who’ll be happy to see you.”

“Still as apathetic as ever?” Trixie asked.

Saitama shrugged. “I guess.”

~~~

I started flipping through my notes in a panic. “How did he get there? When did he get there?”

“Flagg?” Monika asked.

“Yes, Flagg, who else?” I blurted. “It’s bad enough that there’s a Flower in there, but… Hold on a minute…” I closed my eyes and focused, drawing my attention once again to Roxy’s narrative.

(I want to hear what he has to say, the Flower responded, leaning in to Flagg. The Emissary doesn’t make sense?

“It’s simple, really,” Flagg said. “You should all remember from the Tower’s Testament that the Tower’s will cannot be fully understood by a mortal mind, or even an eldritch one. And I can attest to this personally.”

“Yeah, right! Nobody can do that!” A female acolyte yelled.

Flagg chuckled. “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong. Some of you have already realized who I am, but for the rest of you clueless infidels... My name is Randall Flagg, the Man in Black, Legion.”

He speaks the truth, the Flower confirmed. This does not mean he is correct. He is the Tower’s villain after all.

“Ah, but villains have just as much a place in the Tower’s Will as heroes, isn’t that right my orange friend?”

While you must be respected, you are not to be treated as a trusted source.

“Psh, get off of your high horse. I don’t have to be trusted – I just have to make sense. And let me tell you, all of this you’re spouting about an Emissary seems very heretical.”

The crowd started murmuring about what Flagg was saying.)

“He’s got them eating out of his hand…” I muttered. “That makes them vulnerable but I can’t imagine him getting what he wants is good… But how did he-” Black Thirteen spoke to me. I saw an image – an image of Rohan removing his restraints. “Screw it, Rohan’s gone off the record of the plan.”

“I mean, he wasn’t part of the plan besides ‘watch Flagg’ to begin with,” Monika pointed out.

“Ghhh...” I narrowed my eyes. “We can still probably shut this place down. If the Flower is occupied with Flagg…”

(Find a place to take the shot, I told Roxy.

Roxy nodded, having already tuned out the back and forth between Flag and the Flower. She moved through the crowd until she found herself at the edge, near one of the flash-like stalagmites. Everyone was very focused on the Flower and Flagg as far as she could tell, and her Void nature should take care of the rest.)

I scribbled more and more information about Roxy’s Void power into my notebook, trying desperately to ensure nobody would notice her.

“Someone’s going to notice her,” Monika said.

“Who?”

“Why are you asking questions? You have Black Thirteen!”

(A pony acolyte walked up to Roxy. She quickly put the rifle under the folds of her robe, hoping the pony hadn’t noticed.

“You’re being very suspicious.”

“Oh, well…” Many thoughts about how to dispatch this pony ran through her mind.

“Good thing I won’t turn you in.” The pony lifted her hood. “Overhead-Chancellor Fluttershy of Labor, Equis Concrete, Merodi Universalis.”

“Roxy Lalonde, Intelligence Division Second. ...Overhead now, I guess.” She kneeled down. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving the acolytes.” Chancellor Fluttershy lifted up some of her robes to reveal a digital screen tied to her hoof. “M and I have been doing this for weeks.”

Text quickly appeared on the screen. >>Their minds fall short when attempting to reason out my plans. Which your presence has complicated.<<

“I’m here to take out the cult leader and free everyone. Twilence will come in after and disband the cult entirely.”

>>And Flagg wasn’t part of the plan,<< M stated.

“Definitely not… We suspected the Flower, but…” Roxy bit her lip. “Any ideas?”

“You can take the shot on the leader,” Chancellor Fluttershy said. “But wait until the exact moment we have freed the tributes. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Gotcha.”

Chancellor Fluttershy trotted away.)

I turned to Monika. “No one else is going to see her.”

“This is totally going to go wrong though.”

“Yes…” I said, scribbling more in my notebook. “Flowers have a habit of making that happen.” I kept trying to read the Flower in Black Thirteen, but I wasn’t all that surprised to find he was completely inscrutable. Couldn’t even find his name. “What am I going to do with Rohan…?”

Monika shrugged. “Don’t ask me, you’re the one keeping us all prisoner.”

“Yeah, yeah.” For a moment I asked myself why now? It didn’t take me long to realize of course it’d have to be now. One of them was going to try something eventually and it’d have to be at the least opportune time. I tried to give Chancellor Fluttershy and M a narrative boost, but it was difficult since I still wasn't clear on what exactly they were doing. Everything in that room was a scrambled mess of ka.

I could swear Black Thirteen was laughing at me. It was immensely helpful until I really needed it to tell me something, then it was just dark.

Probably why Flagg was able to lose at all…

I focused on the flow of the story, trying to see what was happening from any vantage point other than Roxy’s, but I couldn’t. So I had to settle down and accept what I had. I readied a teleport just in case I needed to get in there to do something directly… Which was seeming more and more likely.

(Roxy waited for the signal, prepared to draw and fire her rifle the moment anything happened. She was expecting a signal flare, an explosion, anything.

Instead what she got was every tribute in the cage suddenly starting tosing.

Flagg and the Flower stopped their debate and stared at the ominous chanting coming from the tributes.

“Do they usually do that?” Flagg asked.

Not to my knowledge, the Flower responded.

The cult leader’s face twisted in rage. “We are being mocked! This is the sign of th-”

Roxy shot him through the brains. At the same instant, the cage all the tributes were locked in opened up. They poured out like a small army, suddenly charged with the great power of a cheerful song.

“…Well, I’m not complaining,” Roxy muttered to herself. “Time for me to check ou- shit.”

One of the tributes that had been in the center of the cage was wearing very dark robes and a multi-horned helmet that just screamed evil Chaos sorcerer. “AHAHAH! I, AHZEK AHRIMAN, AM FREE, AND YOU WILL ALL DIE FOR YOUR HUBRIS!”

Roxy didn’t think – she just acted. She swiped her rifle to the left and fired it right at Ahzek. The bullet was absorbed by magic that was far too strong for most in the New World. “Foolish girl!”)

“Moving in, sorry!” I teleported myself into the room and raised a magic barrier between Ahzek and Roxy. Ahzek’s spell broke through my initial shield, but my own internal magic was able to absorb the rest of it. I went flying – but Roxy was fine.

“Greaaaat, plan’s completely fucked,” Roxy muttered.

“Oh you don’t know the half of it!” Flagg said, laughing.

“I know enough!” Ahzek flung a spell at Flagg. The Man in Black managed to dodge out of the way, but he was clearly annoyed by the attempt.

The calming voice of the Flower went out over the chaos. It is all as the Tower wills.

~~~

Lightning had called a meeting on the carrier ship – the only one that actually had a meeting room. “Before I get started, Strange, is everyone behaving?”

“Currently, yes. They’re not that accepting of my authority though.”

“That’s not going to last long,” Sherlock said, sitting back in his chair.

“I will speak to them myself,” Cosmo said. “No offense, Strange, but I have more authority than you do in this situation.”

Sherlock nodded. “Which is why you’re here. In fact, all six of you were chosen because you are the ones who need to understand the gravity of the situation the most.”

Cosmo, Discord, Spades Slick, Johnny Joestar, and Death all turned to look at the sixth – Insipid.

Insipid blinked. “Yeah, like, I’m not much of a leader, y’know?”

“Your role within this group is as important as all the others,” Sherlock said, folding his hands together. “You were with the collapse movement and turned away from it. Usually the flow of loyalty goes the other direction. Your input will be unlike the words of any of the others, unique and enlightening in its own way.”

“…Like, really?”

“Really.”

“Major fresh.”

Spades grunted. “Enough of this. Word goin’ around is that our new enemy is Lord English.”

“That’s right,” Lightning said. “When the multiverse collapsed, the retcon paradox that was keeping him sealed failed. He was released. And unlike the rest of us, who keep having to relearn our powers, he was able to figure his out in a matter of seconds.”

“…It took me about five seconds,” Discord pointed out. “You know, temporarily, or something.”

“Thank Strange for that. He’s figured out a transference spell.” She folded her hands together. “It only gets you to a certain level of understanding. For a being like you, Discord, that seems unimaginably powerful. But you’re back down to minimal levels, right?”

Discord grumpily nodded. “I can barely summon a party popper, woe is me!”

“Some of us don’t need magic,” Spades smirked. “I’m in great shape.”

“And you think that’s enough to do something to English?” Johnny asked.

Spades tightened his grip around the golden scepter he held. “Doesn’t matter. He trashed the casino. He has to pay.”

YOUR ABILITY TO BE FIXATED ON MINOR DETAILS WHEN THE FATE OF EXISTENCE COULD BE AT STAKE IS BEWILDERING AND APPALLING, Death said.

“I’m helpin’ you, ain’t I?”

“Not going to be much help…” Johnny muttered.

JOHNNY, IT IS NOT HELPFUL TO BE ANTAGONISTIC.

“We lost, how are you all so calm and collected!?”

“The looming presence of a multiversal threat tends to take your mind off the simple things in life,” Discord explained.

“It shouldn’t! I have no idea what happened to so many people, the rest are all dead, and I can’t access Tusk right now!”

“I can work with you and your powers later,” Strange said. “Right now we need to decide what to do with English.”

Cosmo closed her eyes. “I still have the Harmony within me. But we do not have enough ships or resources to make full use of its effectiveness.”

“Not to mention the moment you try to use it, the magic around you will drain and you won’t get much out of it,” Sherlock pointed out.

Insipid raised a hoof. “I could just take his powers.”

“We will be vaporized before we even get close to him,” Lightning added. “He’s unlocked his power. He doesn’t seem to be able to just destroy the universe at will – thank whatever mechanisms were behind the collapse that it seems to have limited him - but what he can do is beyond us. Even though we’re ahead of him for now, at the rate he’s accelerating he will eventually go so fast we can’t keep up with him. Every time we stop to help someone, the time we have shrinks.”

“He’s getting to the center before us unless we can find a faster ship,” Strange said. “Or find some magic that can do it. Discord has the potential…”

Discord coughed uncomfortably. “Er… teleporting isn’t exactly… working.”

“There’s a way to transfer yourself into light and transmit,” Strange explained. “I used it to save us at the base. I only have it short-range at the moment. I also fear English seeing us using it and figuring it out.”

“A lot of the game revolves around how English will react to what we do,” Sherlock said. “Right now, he doesn’t care about us, but he certainly knows we’re here. It’s a complex game of ‘you would know that I would know that you would know’. If we make a move too early, we ruin his perception of us. If we move too late, well, people die by the billions.”

“I say we go out there with everything we have and kick his sorry green face in,” Spades muttered, stabbing one of his many knives into the table. “Get some power, come at him from all sides, take him out before he can get stronger.”

“He’s already too strong,” Lightning said.

“I don’t know, that duck did pretty well…” Discord said, playing with his claws.

“No, no it didn’t. It barely deflected a shockwave from his attack.”

“To be fair I wasn’t really trying that hard…”

“Just don’t. We can’t go charge at him with what we have now,” Lightning folded her arms. “Understood?”

“Crystal,” Spades muttered.

“We need to get everyone organized and on the same page,” Cosmo said, ruffling her illusory wings. “Strange, I’ll need you to awaken as much of my power as possible. I’m well versed in space travel spells, I should be able to get us some more speed.”

ARE WE SENDING WARNINGS AHEAD OF US? Death asked.

Lightning nodded. “We have been. But most people don’t want to leave their planets, and few have the ships to spare to do so. And our little stunt at the capture device repository… That was too risky.”

Cosmo nodded. “…What about morale?”

“Everyone here was either on the side of preservation or neutral,” Lightning said. “What do you think?”

Cosmo nodded slowly. “I’ll get them together…”

“Yes. Yes you will,” Sherlock said, a smug smile on his face.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“Nothing, just a slightly amusing observation. Wouldn’t be proper for me to announce it.”

~~~

The remaining civilization of the Hub had gathered around the one place they still felt safe. Not the Mirror Portal, it and the green diamond had been completely inert since the New World formed. No, the place everyone trusted was the age-old homey space of Iroh’s teashop.

Azula had, at this point, run it for longer than her uncle had, and nobody questioned that she deserved to be delivering tea to everyone who came in the door. Ever since the collapse she had stopped charging anything for the steamy beverages. It wasn’t like money meant all that much anymore, and there was plenty to go around since 99% of the population was gone.

She set a tray of six cups on the counter. “Table nineteen,” she called. Her only assistant – the pink plastic-like Seskii – rushed to grab the plate, hopped across the three tables between the counter and her goal, and gently set it down for a group of ponies to enjoy. She smiled and winked before returning to the counter.

Azula smiled awkwardly at her. Then she looked out at the patrons. As usual, the teashop was full – everyone basically lived here or in the nearby flats, after all. But the shop wasn’t full of life. Sure, it was better than the first couple of days, where people rarely talked or just broke out into tears, but it was still cold. People were living without much reason to do so.

She’d been given access to the Hub’s databases by one of Twilights of the Sparkle Census with clearance. The population of the Hub after the collapse had decreased by another thirty percent due to suicides. This included the Twilight who had given Azula clearance.

The walls were closing in on everyone. Azula was confident she’d make it through – she’d seen and dealt with too much in this teashop over the years to not gain an appreciation for life – but it was still difficult.

“I know,” Seskii said, doing that thing where she didn’t read Azula’s thoughts but knew exactly what she was thinking anyway. “It’s hard. Everything was destroyed and those who are still around have been hurt too much.” She took a sip of her own tea. “The people who had been the happiest before… Drifting away.”

“Aside from you.”

Seskii smiled and blushed. “I… I’m Aware. I take lots of comfort in that.”

Azula nodded slowly, preparing some more tea, crushing some dried leaves between her fingers. “What’s left of us, Seskii?”

Seskii shrugged. “Dunno. What we see, I guess. And whatever that ends up being, it’ll be enough. Civilization survives.”

“For what, though?”

Seskii opened her mouth to respond, but stopped herself. She smiled. “…Hold that thought. We’re about to get some visitors.”

Azula looked at the front doors. She was not surprised to see Saitama walk in – he really liked the tea here and had often said he should have visited the Hub before the war happened. Two of the people he was with she didn’t recognize – a purple-blood troll and some green goblin thing. But the ponies… Starbeat and Trixie.

“Look what the punch tossed our way!” one of the patrons said, standing up to make himself known.

“Director Storm?” Starbeat asked. “It’s good to see you!”

“Likewise!” Storm said with a smirk. “Hey! Everyone! We’ve got some old friends!”

There were a few half-hearted claps from the teashop. Seskii was the only one who showed any enthusiasm with her cheer.

Azula jumped over the counter and walked over to Starbeat. “…I’m sorry. It’s been difficult.”

“I understand,” Starbeat said. “…It’s disheartening, though.”

“I think it’s the appropriate response,” Caliborn muttered.

“No, you think the appropriate response is shooting everyone,” Trixie commented, twirling her hoof in the air.

Caliborn growled.

“What’s the situation?” Starbeat asked. “Who’s in charge?”

“Technically, Storm is the Second of Expeditions, so he’s the highest rank here,” Seskii said. “But we all know Azula’s the real head of the culture here.”

Azula bowed meekly. “Everyone simply chose me to be their anchor. I provide the tea, and the center of the new society.”

“Good… Good…” Starbeat scanned the room with her goggles, rubbing her chin. “So much hopelessness in this place…”

“Can you motherfuckin’ blame them?” Gamzee asked.

“No. No I can’t. But I think I can do something.” She looked to Storm and Aradia. “Do you have a way I can address everyone?”

“The city-wide intercom still works,” Storm said. “What you planning on saying?”

“I’m planning on giving them a little something to work toward.”

“I’m not doing anything else until I get my chamomile,” Saitama said.

Seskii chuckled. “I can handle that. You go show Starbeat the communications, Azula.” She jumped behind Caliborn and grabbed him by the shoulders. “I’ll also watch this little rascal.”

“GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF ME!”

“Technically speaking, nothing ever touches anything so my hands are not able to be ‘on’ you in the purely scientific sense.”

“…What?”

Seskii removed her hands and winked. “Just another one of my maaaany mysteries!” She jumped behind the counter and took out a cup of tea. “I have a nice spicy blend for you.”

“You think I’d take tea from YOU? HA! I’d ra-.”

“Extra suuuugar! Your favorite.”

Caliborn stared at the tea.

“I’ll take it if he doesn’t,” Trixie said.

“NO, IT’S MINE!” Caliborn shrieked.

“You two play nice now,” Starbeat said with a chuckle. “Come on Gamzee, let’s give these people something to think about.”

~~~

I met Ahzek Ahriman’s attack with my own beam of magic energy. The attacks matched, the resulting explosion killing a dozen acolytes.

Why does he have that power?

[Wishing artifact] Black Thirteen told me. [Used up]

“Of course he’d wish for his powers back…”

Problem, Muse of Ka?

I turned to the orange Flower, jumping out of the way of another energy beam. “Yeah, maybe a little. That’s your fault, hmm?”

My fault? Partially, but there is more to this web of narrative than you realize.

Roxy leaped out form behind me. “You know what? You’re an asshole.” She primed her gun and pointed it at the Flower. She fired, and missed. “…Probability shield?”

“Probability shield,” I agreed. “FLAGG!”

“Yes, princess?” Flagg asked from his cocky vantage point atop a ventricle-like rock.

“What’s your goal?” I flipped over another attack from Ahzek.

“STOP IGNORING ME!” the chaos sorcerer shouted.

I, of course, continued to ignore him, focusing on Flagg.

“Why, it’s quite simple really. I want chaos. And Black Thirteen, but this particular plan is not likely to give me that. It’s just fun.”

“You always have some sort of plan beyond that,” I responded, sending a few missiles at Ahzek just to keep him occupied. “Where does this lead?”

“Is Black Thirteen not giving you the answers?”

“NO! IT ISN’T!” I roared in rage, sending a beam of energy at him. This allowed Ahzek to get a hit on me, tossing me to the side again. This time blood spurted from my side. I grunted, rising to my hooves. I sent a pulse of time-slowing magic his way, but the chaos sorcerer was able to deflect it.

“You are but a puny equine! The Stars laugh at you!”

“Yes, they do, so what?” I took up position beside Roxy and started blasting at Ahzek repeatedly. He had to go on the defensive.

Unfortunately, a second later Roxy did as well. Some of the acolytes specifically charged her, forcing her to use her hand-to-hand specialty to take them down and not Ahzek himself. I began to lose my edge on the chaos sorcerer. I needed backup… But Monika wouldn’t be of much help, Roxy was already there, I didn’t know where Chancellor Fluttershy was, and Rohan was being a traitor…

Is this mission going to fail? I asked Black thirteen.

[No][The tributes will be freed and this cult will be destroyed]

What about the cost? Will we survive?

[No casualties on your team]

Does this take into account the Flower?

[Yes][You are permitted to see this now]

I grunted. You’re more trouble than you’re worth. I dodged another attack from Ahzek Ahriman. This time, instead of retaliating, I grabbed Flagg with my magic and threw him at Ahzek.

Ahzek laughed. “FOOL! You shall burn in the chaos!” He raised his staff to attack Flagg.

“Stop breathing,” Flagg ordered. Ahzek laughed for a moment – then realized he couldn’t breathe in. Despite this, he fired an attack at Flagg anyway.

Monika showed up out of nowhere and pushed Flagg out of the way. Ahzek Ahriman toppled to the ground, suffocated.

“Monika, you were supposed to stay on observation! You can’t do anything I-” I blinked. “…Wait, you can’t teleport yet.”

And the trap is sprung, the Flower declared.

“Okay, now,” Monika snapped her fingers. Suddenly, Rohan and GM were standing there.

“HEAVEN’S DOOR!” Rohan yelled. Suddenly, his Stand appeared – I was certain he couldn’t use it – and it rushed Flagg.

“Oh for th-” his face popped open like a book and he fell back, unable to move.

GM held out the pen I gave him. He clicked it.

Nothing happened to me.

Monika glared at me. “You lied.”

“I didn’t lie.” I spread my wings, creating two tremendous magic swords. “I just made it so it would only respond to a GM with an unedited mind. You’ve edited his mind, am I wrong?”

Monika grimaced. I saw her eye twitch slightly – she was editing a character file.

“How could you hide this from me?” I demanded. “How!?”

“I’m just as powerful as you,” Monika said, striding toward me. “I can keep whatever I wish from you. I can create a hole in ka that you wouldn’t even recognize as a hole.”

“But Black Thirteen…” I shook my head. “It’ll show me truth. Not warn me. It wants me to fall.”

“It’s just a device,” Monika said. “A device that’s corrupting you! Changing you from what you once were!”

GM shivered – but showed no signs of wanting to push the button.

“He’s not going to do it,” I asserted. “I have not been corrupted by it.”

“Yes you have!”

“You just don’t want to be taking orders from a collapser!” I shouted back. “You can’t live with me or my goals!”

“We can’t exactly stay prisoners, can we!?”

“…We could have been more reasonable about it,” Roxy muttered, shooting down the few acolytes who still felt like fighting her. “As it is, we’ve probably killed about a hundred people because of this little ‘game’ you played. Without telling me.”

“Telling anyone would have tipped Twilence off,” Monika said. “Editing you would have been even worse, since Twilence was involved with you.”

“You just can’t accept it…” Roxy shook her head.

“What’s wrong with you? You should want to be free!”

“Of course I fucking do, but I don’t want to kill a hundred people to do it! That’s why we didn’t go for the collapse, remember?”

Monika clenched her hand into a fist. “I can still take yo-”

I proved her very wrong. I only had to do one thing – I pressed Black Thirteen to her forehead.

She had never been to the room at the top of the Tower. She would not be able to handle the horrific Truth it contained. Granted, she should have been able to last a few minutes – but I needed to get her out of the equation quickly. I shoved the essence of Black Thirteen into her mind. Monika’s screams made everyone in the cavern freeze.

A decidedly desperate move, the Flower said. I clenched my teeth and ignored him.

“Geez…” Roxy said, eyes wide.

“She’ll edit her file back eventually,” I muttered, backing away from Monika’s convulsing form. I trapped Rohan and Flagg in magical restraints, allowing Flagg to retain his book-like appearance. Finding this level of restraint unsatisfying, I encased the two of them in crystal. They looked uncomfortable, but who cared? I was done worrying about them at this point. Everything had gone wrong.

Speaking of…

I found Chancellor Fluttershy and M. “You… You weren’t supposed to be here.”

Ka works in mysterious ways,<< M printed.

Chancellor Fluttershy nodded slowly. “It seems we were fated to be here today. To be part of… this.”

I glared. “But you and your song did something to Ahzek.”

It was just a heartsong-initiating protocol I developed. A pleasant distraction, symbol, and crowd control piece. It worked.<<

“But everything still exploded.”

That was your fault. Not expecting there to be a trap.<<

I froze them as well. “…Enough of that.”

Enough of everything, it seems, Twilence.

I turned to the Flower and twitched. “Shut up.”

Is it stress getting to you? Or is it something more? Do I serve as a symbol? A reminder of a past failing?

I lit my horn. “Stop talking.”

You shall see in a few seconds the point of my presence, my discussion, my words, m-

I…

I vaporized him.

At the time of the act, I felt nothing but anger, righteousness, and the need to take him out of the equation. He was way too arrogant, powerful, and had manipulated events in ways all of us could not understand.

When he was gone, I turned to Black Thirteen… And I understood.

And I was afraid. I turned to GM. “No don’t d-”

He reacted more out of a fear reflex than anything. He pushed the button and I lost all sensation.

…In the end, I am glad I gave that to him. Even so, I still overestimated my ability to handle Black Thirteen. I was so sure I could…

…Why was I even trying to attack that Dark Tower cult in the first place? I had magic, the plan didn’t have to involve violence, and I could have tried talking. But I didn’t.

I failed.

I’m glad I did. I don’t want to know what it would have turned me into.

I’m sorry, I guess is what I’m trying to say. Not sure to who…

...

…The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a cage with Flagg, magic inhibitors on my horn and hooves. Flagg had a magic filter on his mouth and hands. In between us was a metal box welded to the ground with seven different locks on it.

I had no doubt it contained Black Thirteen.

I looked around. We were in the middle of a campsite on a world where the sky looked like it was filled with stars eternally. I spotted Chancellor Fluttershy, Monika, Rohan, and GM asleep in their sleeping bags. Roxy was awake, tending to the fire.

She looked to me. “…Sorry it has to be this way.”

“Don’t be,” I said, stretching my wings. “I’m surprised you kept me at all.”

“Monika didn’t want to,” she explained. “…I had to vouch for you.”

“…Thanks. …What happened to the cult?”

“Destroyed,” Roxy said. “They won’t be meeting up again. …We weren’t able to find anything out about where the Flower got his message from.”

“I destroyed too much…” I hung my head.

“It was the artifact and you know it.”

“I was still your enemy.”

Roxy pursed her lips. “I’m not so sure about that.” She glanced to Monika and Rohan. “I think you’re a better person than those two, even if you’re a little messed up in other departments.”

I let out a short laugh – stopped short when I heard a beeping. “What’s that?”

Roxy sighed. “The latest in Artificial Intelligence annoyances, M.” She walked over to Chancellor Fluttershy’s pack and removed a screen. She held it up, displaying the message for me.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You made a choice, and it was the choices you had to make at the time. Get out of that pit you’ve placed yourself in and stop wallowing. Just because an artifact told you what to do does not mean the end of everything. There are other important topics to understand, and more nuance in the multiverse than any of us could ever hope to comprehend. You understand the most – so you shouldn’t need me to tell you this. Leave it and dwell on more useful things.<<

I smirked. “You’re right. You shouldn’t have to tell me.”

Also, this is for everyone, you’re all thinking of things in terms of black and white. The aforementioned nuance? It’s important. You can’t just paint lines across a room and say ‘if you’re here, you’re right, if you’re here, you’re wrong’. As of right now, everyone in this camp aside from Roxy and Flagg are thinking in terms of ‘sides’ and Flagg doesn’t count because he’s an absolute monster.<<

I frowned. “…Is there a middle ground here?”

Even during the War there was a middle ground, it was just one everyone refused to find. This is the New World, stop being idiots and find it.<<

“…I will.”

“We will,” Roxy corrected.

I laughed. “Of course, of course, sorry.”

Stop apologizing so much.<<

Roxy looked at me. “I have to keep you in that cage, sorry. The others just won’t accept you outside of it.”

“It’s fine. I’ll accept my punishment.”

I said stop wallowing.<<

“M, I’m going to say this once and once only. Not everything you say is a piece of philosophical genius. You have good points, but you could stand to learn a bit more about pride and arrogance.”

…<<

~~~

“So, uh, like, Lightning? I think we might have a sorta, kinda, problem.”

Lightning looked down at the profusely sweating form of Insipid.

“…What happened?”

“Well, Discord and Spades are… …sorta gone.”

Lightning twitched. “What do you mean sorta gone?”

“Well, I mean, they were there, and then they weren’t, that sorta gone.”

“Where did they go?”

“…Outside the carrier?”

“To do what?”

Insipid touched Lightning, grabbed her powers, and then cast four layers of Protect on herself. “Ahem. I’m pretty sure they said something about Lord English and punching him.”

Lightning cast Thundaja on Insipid to unleash her livid frustration. This wasn’t enough, so she also let out an outraged scream. “STRANGE! DISCORD AND SPADES ARE BEING STUPID!”

“…Is that why I’m suddenly detecting an enormous amount of activity out there?” Strange asked.

“Almost definitely. Get us eyes out there!”

Sherlock nodded, pressing a few buttons. Soon, a display of Lord English was on the screen. He had his mouth open, unleashing a torrent of spacetime-rippling energy. Discord created a tungsten pie tin the size of a small moon to block it.

“He got that strong in just two days?” Lightning said, gawked.

“His learning curve is exponential,” Strange explained. “His peak power is very high. The versatility of his powers is nearly unlimited on a single-universe scale. He may eventually run into the same ceiling as English, given time..”

“There’s a problem though,” Cosmo said, walking up to the screen. “Lord English was a multiversal threat. He’s already hit that ceiling, as far as we can tell.”

“Any dimensional effects have been completely removed,” Strange reminded her. “He has no Green Sun, no universe destruction…”

Sherlock shrugged. “He has the powers of a Prophet, a highly advanced computer, raw strength, that sarcophagus of his, some level of ka manipulation, and whatever the power the Lord of Time classpect still provides in this New World. Discord is just a Spirit of Chaos and Spades is just a clever cyborg stabber.”

Spades rushed out of an invisibility field Discord had created, shooting Lord English with the golden gun. In response, English summoned his sarcophagus around him, bouncing all the bullets back like they were nothing. Spades threw several dozen knives and cards as well, discovering them to be just as useless. He shifted the gun to its scepter form and charged.

Lord English vanished and appeared behind him, grabbing the carapacian from behind and tearing him in half. Mechanical pieces and blood flew everywhere. Lord English grabbed the scepter, his old weapon back in his hands at long last.

He tossed it over his shoulder like it was useless. Then he turned his attention to Discord.

Discord created a moon’s worth of unusual weapons ranging from pie tins to conventional guns to orbs of pure chaotic energy and threw them at Lord English.

Lord English didn’t do anything. He let all of them sail right into him.

Nothing did so much as scratch him.

Then he spoke. “POINTLESS.” He snapped his fingers, transforming Spades, Discord, and the scepter into pure light, teleporting them right to the bridge of the carrier. “YOU CAN NOT HIDE. YOU ARE NOT SAFE.”

Everyone on the bridge was speechless.

“…Guh… Little help?” Spades asked.

“HOLY SHIT, HOW ARE YOU ALIVE!?” Insipid shouted.

THAT WOULD BE ME, Death said, kneeling down to inspect Spades. THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE A SIMPLE FIX.

“Then get on it,” Spades muttered. “Won’t be the first time…”

Discord looked down at Spades – and shivered.

Lightning slapped him. “THAT WAS STUPID!”

“…Yes…” Discord managed.

“I… Just… We agreed not to do that!”

“I get it, oh no, Discord screwed up!” Discord waved his hands around. “I think being out there and having your best be danced around like a cat with a mouse does things to you.”

Lightning clearly wanted to continue ranting at him – but Cosmo put a hoof on her shoulder and shook her head. Lightning sighed. “Just… Just get out of here.”

Discord obliged, vanishing in a puff of light to somewhere else in the ship.

Lightning sat down in her chair and put a hand to her forehead. “What are we even trying to do here? He can destroy us at any time…”

Sherlock smirked. “Ah, yes, he can – but he isn’t. And that fact tells us something. As do all the things we just witnessed.”

Cosmo nodded. “Yes, Sherlock, give us your analysis.”

“First off, he could destroy us at any time, but he doesn’t. This either means he doesn’t find us threatening… Or he wants us to be around when he gets to the core. I’m leaning toward the latter, especially since we’ve just seen that he can assuredly move much faster than he’s been going at any moment he pleases.”

“So, he’s toying with us,” Strange translated.

“Precisely. To him, we are nothing more than little flies. But he also knows we have power – I also find it likely he is treating us like a ‘nemesis’ to further his own ego. He is known to readily accept the way of the villain, despite knowing the typical villain archetype. He wants his glory more than he wants to win.”

“So we shouldn’t think he’ll win?” Cosmo asked.

“Corona collapsed the multiverse, I don’t think we can take that bet,” Lightning commented.

Sherlock nodded. “Lightning’s right. What we have is an enemy leagues more advanced and powerful than any of us. We know that for sure now. We also know he’s playing a little game to keep things interesting. This is likely both for his personal gratification and the ka of his story. He could destroy us at any moment, and wants us to be scared.”

HE HAS SUCCEEDED, Death pointed out.

“And we know something else,” Sherlock said, folding his arms. “He threw away Spades’ weapon. The weapon that used to belong to him. That could indicate he thought it useless to keep – but I don’t think so. He hesitated for a moment, considering it. It’s a powerful weapon and it has meaning to him. So either he needs Spades to have it for some reason… Or, and this is my actual deduction, he’s already got another weapon in mind.”

“…He’s looking for a weapon to power himself up further?” Cosmo asked.

“It seems likely,” Sherlock said.

“What could it be?”

“I have absolutely no idea!” Sherlock shrugged. “That’s the fun part!”

“…At least some information has come to light from this stupidity,” Lightning muttered.

You’re welcome, Sherlock thought. Things had to be arranged just perfectly to get those two to do that…

~~~

Starbeat sat in front of the central communication nexus of the Hub. All around her, screens displayed the state of the Hub – mostly empty, but a few cameras showed the teashop and nearby areas where there was some bustle.

She took one last look at the flow of ka through her goggles. It was focusing around her – whatever she said next would have a profound impact, this she knew. She took the goggles off and placed them above her horn so everyone would be able to see her eyes when she transmitted. Behind her stood Azula and Storm, their presence there simply to indicate approval. Gamzee was off-screen, giving her a thumbs up for support.

With a clear of her throat she pressed the transmit button and started talking.

“Citizens of the Merodi Universalis Hub. Some of you may know who I am, but for those who don’t, my name is Starbeat Glimmer of the Collection council, ka researcher for Merodi Universalis. You all know too well about the tragedy we have suffered. Every last one of us has lost someone close – or simply doesn’t know if the ones we love are okay. The world around us is new, confusing, and in many ways dangerous. Our numbers are small and the powers we’ve taken for granted have become limited and confusing.

“It feels as if we have no reason to go on. Nothing to strive for besides simple survival.

“I’m here to tell you that’s wrong. We have much to look forward to in this New World – we have a goal. A purpose. Just because we lost does not mean we need to admit defeat. The world outside may have been created by the collapse movement, but we are the preservation. Even if what we want to preserve seems lost, we must strive to bring it back, to do the best we can! The multiverse is gone, but the Hub is still here! No doubt there are other Merodi worlds and cities out there to be reclaimed!”

She held up a hoof. “This New World wants to start over from scratch – I say we don’t let it! The civilizations that were supposed to be toppled and reduced to rubble by this event do not have to be! We have survived! We can restore what we’ve lost! Our history, our people, our culture; we cannot let it fall into nothing, left to be uncovered by future generations as a curiosity! We are above that!

“We do not have to take what the other side – no, the enemy – has given us! They wanted us to fall, they wanted us to lie down and die! Well we aren’t going to do that! We’re going to stand up tall and rebuild! We’re going to uncover magic! We’re going to show the New World that they can’t escape their past!” She rammed her hoof onto the metallic surface below for effect. “We will tell the enemy what we think of their victory, and it all starts here, with the Hub of Merodi Universalis – you!”

And then she saw it – the life returning to the people. They suddenly had a goal.

She grinned – and talked for a while longer about several things. They were going to start using money again, and take a census of everyone who was left. Storm would start directing Expeditions to explore the New World, just like they had before. They would return their lives as close as possible to what they had been before.

“…and that’s all I have for now. I expect to talk to you again tomorrow, but for now, just remember – despite what they’ve done to us, the future is bright. We can make it that way.” She waved and cut off the transmission. Nobody noticed the slight purple glow in the back of her eye as she turned away.

“That was motherfuckin’ awesome!” Gamzee said, grinning.

“I second that, my clowny troll friend!” Storm said. “I couldn’t have given a better speech if I tried!” The two of them patted her on the back and led her out of the room.

Azula stayed behind, a concerned expression on her face. She wasn’t sure if it had been that great… or good.

~~~

Terezi had lent Corona and Eve a Merodi Skiff to get to the center of the universe. They had been traveling along in it for a few days, zipping by world after world, stopping whenever they thought they found something interesting or wanted a place to rest that wasn’t the cramped interior of the Skiff itself. It was designed for six people to be able to sit in – sleeping was not really part of the arrangement.

They still made do, but it was much nicer to lie on the grass out in the open, or on some exotic world of another sort. It wasn’t like they were in a hurry.

Corona stretched. “I’m getting a drink.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Corona…”

“No I’m not going to touch alcohol, I learned my lesson yesterday.” She chuckled sadly. “I’m going for some milk.”

“Oh. Get me some as well, would you?”

“No problem.” Corona turned her chair and stood up, opening the door to the cargo hold. They stored quite a bit of food in there since neither of them had reliably figured out food generation magic yet, but most of the cargo were records from Lai and Merodi technology that probably wouldn’t be easy to find out in the New World. A lot of it didn’t work, but Eve didn’t want to leave the possibility of studying and fixing them behind. When they weren’t studying planet-charts or just talking about life, the two would work on analyzing the way certain technologies worked in the New Word.

So far? Dimensional effects and FTL were completely useless. The rest of the magic components depended on the exact nature of the magic being used. Which was inconsistent. They were learning a lot, though, probably enough for a scientific paper or twenty.

This PhD is useless now, Corona thought with a bitter laugh. Just because she wasn’t throwing herself into volcanoes anymore didn’t mean everything was suddenly fine. It was just… getting better. And spending time with Eve was helping a lot. It removed the stress of dealing with other people, most of whom would hate her.

…Even the few collapse-supporting worlds they had come across had mixed feelings about her. They respected her, but they couldn’t be happy. None of them could.

Things are getting better, Corona reminded herself, opening a mini-fridge and grabbing some milk. Just give it time. A lot of time.

Just before she closed the mini-fridge, she heard a loud thunk. She slowly closed the door the rest of the way and turned around, a quizzical eyebrow raised. Behind her was a large box about half her height. It was unlabeled.

She lit her horn and popped it open with her magic. Her jaw dropped. She sent a message to Eve. They hadn’t hammered out full-on telepathy yet, but she could get Eve’s attention.

Eve was there in an instant. She walked into the hold – and gasped. “Oh my…”

A very elderly version of Applejack with deer antlers lifted her head from the inside of the box. Aside from her, there were a lot of potatoes in there, some of them half eaten. “…Oh.”

“…Is she who I think she is?” Corona asked.

“Yeah,” Eve said, blinking slowly. “…Lai’s Applejack.”

Applejack coughed. “Look, I just needed to get off Lai.”

Eve blinked. “I… I thought you liked your cell.”

“The guards vanished. I had to escape or starve.”

“…That’s terrible.”

“Like you care. L-”

Eve levitated the deer out of the box and held her in her wings. “The world has begun anew, Applejack. We don’t have to do this again.”

“…You don’t remember me very well, do you?”

Eve smiled innocently. “Not at all! But I’m sure I can get to know you again. Come on, we’ve got some extra seats on the bridge and Corona just got some milk. …If you’re okay with it, Corona.”

Corona shrugged. “Eh, sure, why not.”

“What do you say? Want to have some milk and talk?”

Applejack looked at the potatoes she’d been eating. “…I’ll take the milk.”

“It’s a double-deal, the talk isn’t optional.”

“…Fine.”

“Great!” Eve beamed and went back to the bridge.

“She’s so going to friendship you,” Corona said with a legitimate smirk.

“She tried once before,” Applejack pointed out.

“She’s gotten a lot better at it.”

135 - What's Old is New

Pinkie’s Party was taking a stroll through the singing forests of Nithia. They were currently in an area of the New World with some level of existing space travel, so the worlds within the surrounding systems had been cursorily explored and mapped out for them. The primary power here – Anziba – had once been a world that headed a young Class 3 civilization that had decided to opt out of the war entirely. They only had the vaguest idea of who Pinkie’s Party was and that suited Pinkie just fine.

But they had been told by everyone they had met that they had to stop by Nithia to just appreciate the beauty of the world.

Flutterfree was sold the instant they touched down. The forests of Nithia not only let out beautiful melodious sonnets whenever the wind blew through them, but the colors of every single plant and animal on the world shifted depending on the angle they were examined from.

Currently Flutterfree was leading the trek through the woods, a small gaggle of woodland critters surrounding her. “Aren’t you all so precious...!”

“They’re certainly lucky to be here,” Pidge agreed, adjusting her glasses. “Maybe I could run an analysis…”

“Just don’t hurt any of them,” Flutterfree said, taking a breath and spinning around. “…It’s been so long since I just appreciated nature.”

“Even I have to admit, this is something,” Vriska said, rubbing a hand along the multicolored bark of a nearby tree. As she did so it sang out with a harsh melody somewhat like an electric guitar. “…My respect for this forest just increased by a factor of ten.”

Jotaro nodded, a small smile on his face.

“…Not gonna lie, wish I could see it,” Pinkie said. Her mane had stopped being flat about three days ago – it was decidedly hard to tell time in the New World with days – but she wasn’t back to the peppy party pony quite yet. “I mean, I can ‘see’ it, you’re all proxies, but… I can’t see it.”

“You can totally hear it though.” Vriska lifted Pinkie up and touched her hooves to the tree bark. “Come on, do the thing. Blow the roof off this place.”

Pinkie giggled. “If you insiiiist!” She cracked her hooves and started banging on the bark as if it were a drum. The dramatic electric tunes coming off of it blew everyone’s hair back. Jotaro had to hold onto his hat to keep it from flying away. All the animals screamed and ran away.

There was a chorus of laughs and a “yare yare daze…”

“Oh, Pinkie’s not done yet!” She picked a flower from the ground and stuck it in her mouth. When she blew it made a mixture of harmonica and flute noises. She ran her tail against the grass to add some bells and started carefully tapping the tree back to get just the right amount of reverb.

“Oh my, are we doing a spontaneous musical number?” Flutterfree asked.

“Just grab a plant and get creative!” Vriska said, jumping into a bush. The sound that came off of it sounded like an explosion.

Pidge adjusted her glasses. “Creative, you say? Give me five minutes and I can have a one-woman band up and running. …The woman is me.”

“We can understand subtext,” Jotaro commented.

Pidge smiled. “Jojo, subtext is used to describe the meaning behind a sentence. I was – oh, wait, I guess I was doing that. Nevermind. Just get me a tree.”

Jotaro punched down a tree and Pidge set to work, popping open her toolkit and tearing pieces of bark off.

“Guess I’ll try to get the critters to sing…” Flutterfree said. “…If only Vriska would stop scaring them away.”

Vriska winked in her direction. “Exploding bush is the best percussion, change my mind.”

“Tuuuubular bells!” Pinkie said, strumming some blades of grass.

“…Those can be fun…”

As they continued their musical antics, their three companions looked on and watched.

“Welp, it’s pretty clear who’s part of Pinkie’s Party and who isn’t,” Tornado observed.

“They have a very special bond,” Rev said, smiling warmly. “It wouldn’t do to intrude on it.”

“Wouldn’t know how. They all seem to just get each other.” Tornado narrowed her eyes. “Kinda wish the USM teams did that.”

“Any team has the potential to become a functional unit – or to struggle.”

“They seem to work as one unit, seamlessly.”

The last member, Rina, was currently attempting to cast a spell through her horn, but decided this part of the conversation needed her input. “It isn’t seamless. They all have their problems, issues, and play off each other differently. Let’s take… Vriska as an example. She serves a role as the group’s hothead, the girl who’s willing to come up with some crazier and less-than-noble ideas. I’m essentially a duplicate of her in this case. But her relationships with all of the other four are very different.”

“I didn’t know you studied people,” Rev said, blinking.

“I got bored at the church sometimes,” Rina said, a soft glow forming around her horn. “Regardless. Vriska’s relationship with Pinkie is both one of respect and mutual pranking tendencies, both of them are very willing to put everything aside and be childish for a while. Vriska looks to Flutterfree as a mentor, someone who’s understanding and deep control should be studied and emulated. Jotaro, on the other hand, is like the older brother you got into trouble with all the time, very reliable and able to take more shit than the others. And Pidge is the true fellow nerd. I bet they secretly get together for game nights.” As she said this, she successfully cast the spell for the first time: creating a sword from the aether. She smashed it into a tree, turning it lifeless. “Nice. Finally got some of the darker magics to work…”

“Good observations on them,” Rev commented. “What I find interesting is that their dynamics are rarely two-way. Flutterfree doesn’t see herself as a mentor figure to Vriska, for instance – she sees Vriska as strong, but she would never try to become like her.”

Tornado leaned back and started kicking her feet. “Whatever it is, it’s making me a little jealous.”

“If you want what they have I’d suggest being more open with people,” Rev said. “You may think Flutterfree and Jotaro are reserved at first, and they’re certainly introverted, but they’re very real with each other. Very open to expressing their vulnerabilities to each other. Even Jotaro, believe it or not, though I doubt you’ll get to see that while we’re around watching.”

The jam was already in full swing. All five of them had their instruments and were going crazy with a song that had some sort of beat but definitely wasn’t all that pleasant to listen to. But they didn’t care, it was fun.

Pidge stopped playing for a moment and held up her computer. “Maybe if I could adjust the resonance to match up with the new physics better… Just need to perform a few scans… I should really get this changed to a touch screen, it would be so much better. And th-” Something dawned on her. She slowly set her laptop down and sat down on the grass, taking a moment to process.

“STOP THE MUSIC!” Flutterfree shouted, a slight purple burst of Rage coming from her wings. The message got to everyone loud and clear and they stopped playing, turning to Pidge with concern. “What’s wrong?” Flutterfree asked.

Pidge looked at her laptop. “…I’m just a replacement.”

“Pidge…”

“I do the exact same thing she does, just with more ‘tech’ and less ‘magic’. I scan things, tell you what I figured out, and then… Well, that’s that.”

“Pidge, you aren’t just a replacemen-” She caught Pinkie’s grimace. “Pinkie, tell me that’s not what’s going on here.”

“Partially,” Pinkie admitted. “…She does serve the same role, overall.”

“I knew it,” Pidge muttered, expression clouding.

“But it’s no different than when I replaced Eve, or Jotaro replaced Renee. Roles were shifted and the dynamic changed because people can’t always stay in the same place. We… we were just lucky enough to have everyone still around when things changed before.” She put a hoof on Pidge. “You’re not Nova. You aren’t anywhere near as hotheaded, nor do you have that weirdly amazing need to talk philosophy. I don’t see a shred of slightly-crazy idealist in you, what I see is a curious person. You want to know. Nova never bothered to really learn about the science she told us – she let her screen do all of that. You don’t need the device to parse it for you. And, above all, you do that really cute thing with your glasses where you try to look evil and conniving.”

Pidge snickered despite herself. “That… that doesn’t matter.”

“It’s little quirks like that that make us who we are,” Jotaro said, lifting up his hat so he could meet her eyes. “They’re perhaps more important to us than what we contribute.”

Pidge beamed. “Jojo…”

Rina turned to Rev. “Am I allowed to say ‘gag me’?”

“It’s a bit childish but it’s not necessarily wrong.”

“Okay. Gag me.”

“Gladly,” a deep, masculine voice that wasn’t Jotaro said.

Rina blinked. “Fu-”

A pillowcase laced with some sort of sleeping drug went over her head. She tried to summon her sword, but she didn’t have enough focus.

“HOLY SHIT!” she heard Vriska shout as she recognized the attacker. “BA’AL!?”

“Talk about a blast from the past, am I right?” Pinkie asked.

“Pinkie… now’s not the… time…” Flutterfree muttered.

Rina lost all sensation, unable to follow anything further.

~~~

The Sweeties had been in space for two weeks, according to Swip. In all that time, they hadn’t found any sign of multiversal society.

Until now.

For they had just found a moon – likely from a version of Earth – that had a data archive built on it. The system they were in had no atmosphere – and no normalization from the thick aether either – so when Swip landed everyone who wanted out had to get into a spacesuit.

To Mattie’s surprise, both Burgerbelle and Nettle had suited up alongside her and Thrackerzod. “You know it’s probably an empty base, right?” Thrackerzod asked.

“So? It’s cramped in here,” Burgerbelle said.

“It’s even more cramped in this suit…” Nettle muttered, struggling to get her tendril-bow to behave.

“We can take it off when we get inside!”

“Assuming life support is still on.”

Mattie chuckled. “Darling, you’re such an adorable ball of pessimism, aren’t you?”

“I fail to see how adorable relates to pessimism.”

“I fail to see how it can’t,” Thrackerzod commented.

Burgerbelle leaned in to Nettle. “Thrackerzod has a very pessimistic personality in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I have an eldritch personality,” Thrackerzod huffed.

“Eldritch doesn’t exist anymore,” Nettle pointed out.

Thrackerzod’s expression turned dour. She turned around and hopped out onto the low-gravity surface of the moon.

“…Did I do something wrong?”

“Yep,” Mattie confirmed. “Don’t worry, she’s strong, and you’ll learn.” She trotted out after the no-longer-eldritch unicorn.

Burgerbelle rolled her eyes. “To elaborate on Mattie’s annoyingly vague point, Thrackerzod misses her eldritch connection. You may know of her as the filly who rejected who she was, but we all need to remember she was a multidimensional tentacle monster for hundreds of thousands of quote-unquote ‘years’ before she met us. Change isn’t easy for her.”

“…At least she has some powers.”

Burgerbelle sighed. She decided she was done with the conversation and skipped out onto the moon’s surface, bouncing along after the other ponies. With a blank expression Nettle followed, the light of a nearby glowing green gas giant reflecting off her helmet. Every one of them moved differently. Thrackerzod took point with a purposeful stride while Mattie moved with an exaggerated swagger. Burgerbelle was inconsistently skipping and jumping around Nettle while the once-Downstreamer in question had difficulty moving at all – she’d barely gotten used to experiencing normal gravity.

They approached the archive. It was mostly built by Gems, so it was a smooth green and blue textured structure with many curves, facets, and glistening edges. Since it was a data archive for a Class 2 multiversal society, it was the size of an aircraft carrier, though unlike an aircraft carrier all the size that was usually hidden under the water was on full display here.

Eventually, they managed to bound all the way to the archive’s front door. Thrackerzod put a hoof to the lock mechanism, allowing it to pick up on her presence and transmitter. “This is Thrackerzod of the League of Sweetie Belles.”

A computerized voice responded. “Welcome. Lockdown has been enabled and arcane security clearance confirmation is not working properly. Please hold…”

“Oh NO!” Burgerbelle wailed. “We have come all this way to be stopped by horrible customer service!”

“We can break in if we have to,” Mattie pointed out. “It just told us it isn’t working quite right.”

“Give it a second,” Thrackerzod said, narrowing her eyes.

“Security questions for Thrackerzod located,” the computer reported. “Answer correctly and you shall be allowed to pass. Name your old friends’ new names.”

“Scoota-hoo and Elizabloom.”

“What is the name of your direct eldritch superior?”

“Hastur was the last eldritch superior I had, I am free now.”

“The name of your godchild?”

Thrackerzod sighed. “…Hemlock Belle.”

“Thank you, you may proceed.”

The doors opened.

Mattie blinked. “Who the hell is Hemlock Belle?”

Thrackerzod didn’t look at her. “One of Squeaky’s grandkids. Had some magic problems at birth. …Last I knew she was doing okay.”

“Oh… Right…”

Nettle blinked. “Squeaky had kids!?”

Thrackerzod glared at her. “Yes, she did. And no, you weren’t supposed to know. They were never supposed to be involved with any of the adventures. Ever.”

“Do any of the rest of you have secret kids?”

Burgerbelle pondered this. “Well, I think Servitude has a son… Otherwise no.”

“Dears, I have tons of kids,” Mattie said with a dismissive wave. “Almost none of them know who I am, but you know, that’s just the way the tail swings sometimes.”

“Some of those kids have tried to kill us,” Burgerbelle pointed out.

“All in the past, all in the past.”

“Really?”

Mattie looked at her with an unusually stern expression. “…What are the chances any of them survived? Or that I’ll ever see any of them?”

Burgerbelle was taken aback.

Mattie sighed, looking at nothing in particular – a universal sign that she was looking outside the ‘story’. “I won’t be seeing any of them again. Sure, they might be alive, but I’ll never get to talk to any of them. Not even… Joyce… God, I liked Joyce, she was a great kid. Only one who could ever get me.”

There was an awkward silence. Wordlessly, Thrackerzod moved into the archive. The others followed. The doors closed behind them and the airlock pressurized before they were allowed into the main entryway. To their surprise, the interior was well cleaned and fully operational. All the monitors displayed normal archive displays and the lights were working at full capacity.

There was even a receptionist. Behind a smooth, white desk was a cute kid with auburn hair and a stylish purple top hat. She waved at them when they arrived.

“Is it normal for kids to be in charge of places like this?” Nettle asked.

“We do allow kids to work if they want,” Burgerbelle pointed out. “Otherwise we couldn’t exactly recruit a lot of Sweeties.”

“She’s also not supposed to be in charge,” Thrackerzod muttered. She walked up to the counter and put her front hooves on top of it. “You’re the last one here? Weren’t you captured?”

The hat kid nodded. Then she jumped off her very tall chair and stood on the countertop, proceeding to mime a series of unusual events. First she waved, then she put her hands to her face, then she curled into a Ball. Then she jumped off the counter to the ground and pulled out a parasol and grinned. The grin quickly vanished as she trudged along the floor, acting weary. She removed her top hat and pulled an astronaut helmet out of some sort of inventory or similar power and proceeded to float around the room until she arrived at the seat behind the counter. She put her hat back on and made a ‘tah-dah’ motion with her hands.

“…How did you get past the security? You don’t have clearance.” Thrackerzod said.

The hat kid tapped her head and folded her arms smugly. Then she laughed, shook her head, and pointed at a screen with an error message and a wrench on it.

“I do not understand this child,” Nettle said, blinking. “What is she saying?”

“Nothing, that’s her whole point,” Burgerbelle said.

“There’s more point than that,” Thrackerzod muttered. “This is one of the more well-known instances of the Everyman.”

The Everykid let out a mock gasp and put a hand to the side of her head as if she was panicked. Then she chuckled and shrugged, pulling herself up to the desk. She leaned in overtop her folded hands as if to ask ‘how may I help you?’

~~~

The Austraeoh moved through space at a brisk pace, having entered a sizable void between systems that allowed it to move at an impressive ten percent light speed. They had gathered a few ships as they traveled – mostly Merodi vessels that had escaped Celestia City before it had been destroyed. Nobody really knew how it was destroyed nor were they able to tell O’Neill much about the red thing that separated them once they had escaped.

There had been a few other ships they’d found – a couple nonaffiliated vessels and collapse ships – but nothing all that impressive.

The bridge of the Austraeoh was fully operational once again. Minna had taken the seat next to O’Neill, effectively becoming his Second. Clandestine continued to manage the consoles while all the other positions were manned by a mix of all crews they had accumulated over the last week. Lapis Vee would have been there as well under normal conditions, but since she was woefully understaffed she had to spend all her time down in Engineering just to keep the ship running.

O’Neill looked down at his chair’s armrest-console and sighed.

“What is it?” Minna asked.

“Just got another report about a fight breaking out.” He put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “Apparently Security started it, this time.”

Minna glanced over at the report, pursing her lips. “At least they weren’t actually trying to kill each other…”

“That’s a small consolation. You don’t know if they’re going to get it out of their systems or if they’re just going to rile themselves up and get more violent.”

“Maybe some people go some way, and others go the other?” Clandestine asked.

“Great sentence,” O’Neill observed.

Clandestine rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. People are different. You’ll have to play a game of back and forth to…” Her console beeped, cutting her off. “Ahem. It looks as if we have two ships in front of us.”

“How far away.”

“A minute at ten-c,” Clandestine responded.

“Can we identify them?”

“Appears to be Combine and Void ships heading right for each other.”

“This is going to be quite the reunion…” O’Neill shook his head. “Start slowing down, hail them. The general message should do for now.”

“…They’ve started firing on each other.”

“Of course they have,” Minna deadpanned. She closed her eyes. “I… think I see that they won’t shoot at us.”

“Raise shields anyway.” O’Neill adjusted his collar. “Send a warning pulse through the middle.”

The Austraeoh’s fully-functional pulse cannon activated, sending a burst of purple-green energy between the biological jellyfish-like mesh and the black crystalline comet. O’Neill opened a channel. “It’s time to stop!”

Clandestine facehooved.

The Combine and Void responded – the Void with a video call, the Combine with a telepathic message.

The video showed a purple woman in a space-pirate outfit. “This is Captain Faris Tycoon, shove off if you don’t want to fight.”

You shall assist us in this conquest, Overhead O’Neill.

“Hmm… No and no.” O’Neill folded his hands. “War’s over.”

“Are you asking us to just lay down our weapons like nothing has happened?” Tycoon demanded.

O’Neill gestured to Minna. She cleared her throat. “Yes. Yes we are.”

Faris blinked. “High Commander Belle! Are you… legitimate?”

“There’s been a complete ceasefire agreement between me and the Overhead. We have banded together to salvage what remains and understand the nuances of this new world. All the ships in our fleet have agreed to that goal as well.”

Faris nervously looked behind her, trying to gauge the reaction of her crew. “Yessir. I’ll probably need you to tell that to my crew in person.”

We do not recognize the end of the war, the Combine said. The conflict still remains.

“The only conflict that remains is the conflict you bring,” O’Neill countered. “You’re the Combine, you thrive on conquest. But now you’re broken and almost nothing, what exactly do you expect to do with a victory at this point? I doubt your ship is even suited for planetary subjugation!”

This changes nothing.

“You don’t have any higher-ups telling you what to do either. You are just your ship.” O’Neill smirked. “Nobody will come to help you if you decide to do something stupid.”

“I’m detecting an energy buildup,” Clandestine reported.

“Fine, return fire whenever they actually do.”

“I don’t think it’s a weapon. I think it’s a self-destruct.”

“Dammit,” O’Neill cursed under his breath. “How’s the deflector dish?”

Minna looked up a report. “Not well. Our shields can’t be extended effectively.”

“Send out a call, get everyone to cluster as close together as possible, increase shield effectiveness. I don’t suppose we have magic use yet?”

“Spectral rod is still being recoded.”

“Well, at least you were right. They weren’t going to be shooting at us…”

Suddenly, the energy buildup dropped to zero.

“…What?” Clandestine said.

A new voice came over the Combine’s communication. A single, synthetic word. “Welcome.”

Minna blinked. “Mite!?”

“Affirmative,” the nanobot responded.

“Did you just disable a Combine self-destruct?”

“Yesaroni.”

O’Neill shook his head. “…Thanks. Do you know what they’re doing now?”

“Panic.”

Get this nanobot off our communications!

“Try.”

“Or don’t,” O’Neill said. “Admit that you made a mistake and we won’t blow you out of the sky.”

The Combine was silent for a moment. We admit hasty actions were taken.

“Good enough. Welcome to the fleet, Combine jellyfish, your complete cooperation is required, and that includes personnel rotations and mingling.”

This is unacceptabl-

“Oh, look at that, my finger is on the ‘fire missiles’ button.”

…Reevaluation indicates demands are acceptable.

“Good boy.”

~~~

Flutterfree opened her eyes. The beautiful sight of the forest had been replaced with the cold, harsh metal of a cage. She found that her body was unbound, so she stood up on all four hooves and stretched her wings, looking around. Vriska, Pidge, Jotaro, Pinkie, Rev, and Rina were all slowly coming to, rubbing their heads and groaning.

In the middle of the cage was Tornado’s body, her throat slit. Flutterfree gasped and backed into the cage wall.

“You always gasp, feel revolted, and then forget about them the next day.”

Flutterfree whirled around, Rage in her eyes. She took in the appearance of Ba’al. He clearly had the same body he always had, but it looked so different from how she remembered. The hair was gray and the beard long. One of his eyes as missing and his left hand was disfigured, possibly by acid. Instead of the royal robes of the Goa’uld, he wore the trappings of an old hermit with tattered fabric, muddy stains, and numerous satchels filled with unusual plants. She saw an old, battered zat gun on his belt.

“And you kill for the fun of it,” Flutterfree retorted.

Ba’al chuckled – then let out a raspy cough. “I do… I do… and ka be damned, I’m going to see if I can kill all of you. One at a time… The redshirt was first. Just a companion who meant nothing and will mean nothing.”

“Tornado wasn’t nothing,” Flutterfree asserted. “She… She went through so much for the USM. Suffered at the hands of the Cele-”

Ba’al rushed to the edge of the cage and gripped it with his hands, panting so heavily drool came out of his mouth. “You… don’t… get to…” He looked for the word, couldn’t find it, and decided banging on the cage was good enough.

Vriska shot him a glare. “Looks like someone’s lost it.”

“It… It… It…” He scratched the side of his head. “Where did I put it – oh yes!” He walked away to rummage around the room. The cage was inside a messy, disorganized shack crafted from the musical plants of the world. Every piece of furniture he overturned let out a shrill series of notes that were no longer comforting, but ominous. “Yes…”

“What is it? Your brain?”

He popped open a box with a drum sound, pulled out a harpoon gun, and shot Vriska through the head with it. Then he used the zat gun to disintegrate her body. He let out a brutal laugh – before clutching his chest and flopping onto a couch, breathing heavily.

Vriska’s immortality kicked in and her body was reformed. “…Bastard.”

“This body never had a mother in the first place!” he sang. “Meaningless!” He proceeded to grab his legs and start rocking back and forth.

Jotaro let out a sigh. “Pinkie?”

Pinkie turned to Rina and nodded slowly. Rina took in a breath and focused on her magic. She summoned her magic blade with a grimace. She looked to the mad Goa’uld and threw her blade.

Ba’al reacted like lightning, pulling out his zat gun and firing it at Rina with full power. The beam hit her in the heart just as her blade struck him in the chest. He fell to the ground as a lifeless husk just as her eyes rolled back into her head.

“RINA!” Rev shouted, running to her. She laid a hoof on her neck, checking her pulse. “Nothing…”

“There’s a hospital on the closest planet,” Pidge said. “Get us out!”

“ORA!” Jotaro shouted – as usual, he couldn’t summon Star Platinum, so he just punched the bars of the cage with his fist. They didn’t budge. Pinkie ran up to the cage and tried to squeeze herself through the gaps with similar luck.

Flutterfree removed her marble tips to reveal the blades on her wings. She accessed the Rage she could and tried to cut the bars – but their alloy was simply too strong. “New plan, CPR. Pidge?”

Pidge cracked her knuckles. “On it.” She and Flutterfree ran to Rina, flipping her onto her side, heart upward. Pidge began mouth-to-mouth while Flutterfree did the pumping with her carefully positioned front hooves. While she did this, she lightly traced around areas of Rina’s body with her wingtips, feeling for obstructions.

Rev stared at the scene for a moment – then she sat down, pressed her front hooves together, and began to pray.

Flutterfree, on the other hand, began to glow even stronger with the Rage within her – acting not more violently, but more desperately. Frantically wishing the truth to be that Rina was alive, that she could come back.

Unfortunately, Rage did not care what someone wanted to be true, only what was. It told her as much. As she forced herself to ignore it, tears rolled down her face and onto Rina’s side. “No, not again…”

Pidge stopped her mouth-to-mouth. “…I’m sorry…”

Jotaro put a hand on her shoulder. “You can’t bring them all back.”

“I’m not going to let her just be another footnote! Her story is bigger than this! It’s…” She let out a deep roar of Rage – but once again, the truth could not be changed. She was lying there, dead, and there was nothing the Rage could do to her.

But within Flutterfree, there was another truth. A different sort of truth.

For the first time since the New World arrived, a Stand manifested. The defiance of the truth gave Lotus Locus just enough of a push to Reveal itself. The great spirograph swirled around Flutterfree like a halo while the green strands spread out through the entire cage.

Yes, yes… Lolo is ka-based, it can change things…

The strands of Lolo wrapped around Rina – but could not Reveal any life within her.

No! There’s something! Think, think, think! I…

Lolo acted on its own – dropping Rina and rushing to Rev. Rev let out a pained gasp as she was filled. Her eyes and horn became brilliant holy lights and she floated into the air. She spoke a word that meant nothing to any of them and the cage was filled with holy light.

The moment the light cleared, Rina started breathing. She opened her eyes and groaned. “Did one of you fucking stomp all over me?”

Flutterfree pulled her up with Lolo and rushed her into a hug. “Oh thank goodness…”

“GAH! OW!”

“CPR makes the ribs weak,” Pidge reminded Flutterfree, sighing in relief.

Flutterfree didn’t let go.

“I get it, I was dead! Let go before you pop a lung!”

“…I was dead too, huh?”

Everyone turned to see Tornado sitting up, touching her neck and feeling the blood.

Vriska put an arm around Tornado’s neck. “Good to have you back!”

“…Maybe the New World allows for easier revival?” Pidge wondered. “Statistically speaking… Wait, never mind, don’t have enough data points.”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “I don’t know… I know Coming Back Wrong can’t be a thing if the Tower isn’t here, but… The Tower is. Oh, who cares, I’m glad to have you back.” She pulled Tornado into a hug. “Welcome to the team again!”

“Eheheheheh… Sure. Sure, team, yes, right.”

Rev rubbed her head. “I… I think I have all my powers back. All of them.”

Flutterfree smiled, summoning Lolo again. “You’re welcome. …Would everyone like to have everything back?”

“YES PLEASE!” Vriska begged. “PLEA-A-ASE!”

Flutterfree obliged, activating Lolo around all of them, tapping into all that was hidden. Pinkie became bouncy, Star Platinum appeared, Rina gained a dark aura, Vriska’s luck activated, Pidge remained Pidge…

…And Tornado’s eyes flashed white.

Flutterfree turned to stare at her in shock. “No… Tornado…”

Tornado grinned. “Tornado’s not here right now. Can I take your message?”

“STAR PLATINUM: THE W-”

Tornado-Ba’al raised a hand, launching Jotaro through the walls of the cage and several musical trees. “Thank you for giving me all this outrageous power.” She pressed her hands together. “Goodbye.”

The immense psychic energy discharge destroyed the entire shack in an instant.

~~~

The Everykid led the League down a hallway of the archive, pointing out all sorts of areas where parts of the mainframe had exploded and repairs were underway, evidence that no, not all the information could be accessed from the lobby.

Nettle, Mattie, Thrackerzod, and Burgerbelle weren’t in their spacesuits anymore, having long since discarded them.

Mattie and Burgerbelle had the biggest smiles on their faces and were walking up with the Everyman, making conversation with the evidently mute little girl. Thrackerzod was trailing behind with a disgusted look on her face.

Nettle glanced from Thrackerzod to the rest of the group and back. “…Uh…”

“The Everyman was on the side of the Nihilists and they’re acting like old friends.”

Nettle processed for a moment. “Nihilists. Oh! Oh, those were a thing.”

Thrackerzod grunted. “The worst of all possible evils and they’re doting.”

“She’s cute! How could we not!?” Mattie called back.

“…I thought you told her listening in on conversations was rude?” Nettle asked.

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been around her for a week, tell me how much she respects authority.”

“Well she likes her authority…”

Thrackerzod looked up at Nettle and blinked. “I’ve just had an epiphany.”

“Hm?”

“You’re me.”

Nettle blinked. “I don’t get it.”

“You were a higher-order being suddenly brought low into the form of a physical body and have to learn everything about how the biologicals work in order to survive.” Thrackerzod laughed. “This is amusing.”

“…I still don’t get it.”

“Parallelism, darling!” Mattie called back.

Nettle put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “This would be so much easier with my full mind…”

“That’s the point,” Thrackerzod said. “You have to make it through without your full mind, learn how to adjust with the meat-thing you have in your skull. You aren’t like Burgerbelle – Burgerbelle’s mind is the same as it always has been. Ditzy, easily distracted, burger-focused, and full of an unhealthy amount of… ‘memes’.”

“MEMES! MEMES EVERYWHERE!” Burgerbelle shouted.

“Okay, Mattie I can understand, but how can you hear us!?”

“Mattie told me to say that.” She gave them some finger guns.

“...I never got memes,” Thrackerzod muttered.

“Neither do I, but I find them fascinating.” Nettle furrowed her brow. “What makes a good meme? What aspects of absurdity and humor make the subjective brew needed to be ‘dank’? She seems to understand…”

“She makes a fool of herself.”

“I think that’s part of it.”

“You’re hardly one to judge.”

There was a moment of silence.

“…I’m sorry about the Eldritch comment,” Nettle said.

Thrackerzod sighed. “I think I should be happy that you’re trying, but instead you just irk me to no end. A-” Thrackerzod blinked again. “By Azathoth’s yellow-bellied suckers, this is not the day for me and epiphanies.”

“Uh…”

“I just imagined how everyone else must have felt for, oh, the few decades it took for me to get some of the most basic ideas drilled into my head.” She let out a bitter laugh. “My situation isn’t exactly something I get to encounter very often.”

“So… you’re empathizing?”

“Nettle, I can tell you right here and now that while this does qualify as empathizing for me, you really shouldn’t take it as the standard.”

“But if…”

“Talk to Servitude more. She understands these things. Don’t talk to Mattie. She pretends to understand these things.”

“It’s the language of love and pain!” Mattie called back.

“The appropriate response here is to groan.” Thrackerzod said. Then she groaned.

Suddenly, the Everykid stopped moving. She jumped to a panel in the wall and pulled it open, revealing a maintenance shaft. Inside was a large, muscular man in a white nautical outfit. The moment the panel was opened he jumped out, summoning a Stand everyone recognized – Star Platinum.

“STAR PLA-”

The Everyman waved her hands rapidly to get Jotaro Kujo to stop attacking. She smiled nervously and introduced the two of them.

“Oh. Hey Jotaro,” Mattie said. “…Guess you ended up here, huh?”

Jotaro stood up and grabbed his hat. “Yare yare daze… It’s been a while.”

“Hasn’t been a while for us,” Thrackerzod muttered, walking up to the front. “My jaw is still sore from that punch.”

Jotaro lowered his hat and said nothing.

“Wait… Is that the guy who blew up my mind regulator?” Nettle blurted.

“No, that was Nova,” Burgerbelle offered.

“…Then he gets a pass. But when I find this Nova…”

Mattie grimaced but didn’t say anything. Now was definitely not the time to drop that on them.

“So, Jotaro, why are you here?” Mattie asked.

“Repairing the systems,” he said, pointing to a pocket welder he had in his hand. “The kid needed help, she couldn’t do it on her own.”

“…You do know she’s the Everyman, right?” Burgerbelle asked.

“Yes.” Jotaro glanced at the Everykid. “Didn’t know you did.”

“You. Repairing a mainframe,” Thrackerzod deadpanned. “Really?”

“I didn’t find anything else to do,” Jotaro said. “Why are you here?”

“Trying to find any information we can,” Mattie answered. “Specifically stuff like, oh I don’t know, physics simulations, Merodi transmission devices, that sort of thing. Lil’ Everykid here apparently couldn’t give us full access from the lobby, so my guess is that you can help us.”

Jotaro let out a disgruntled sigh. “…Yes, I can. Give me a search term and I can lead you.”

“Let’s start with the data records during the collapse,” Thrackerzod said.

Jotaro nodded. “This way.” He flipped around and began walking. The rest followed him without a second thought.

~~~

“…What?” O’Neill said.

“I said I’ve got some Skaians,” the Emerald on the screen said.

“But Skaians can’t survive. They’re ghosts.”

“These Skaians apparently can.” Emerald held up a white pearl. “By transferring consciousness into this… thing. Apparently it’s an ‘endless party’ in here.”

“Oh. So they can’t really do anything.”

Emerald shook her head. “It’s like a many-fused Gem. They’re able to use their powers outside, just… sporadically. And without much discipline. Or order.”

“Can they… talk?”

“Yes. I have them muted for good reason.”

O’Neill turned to Minna. She shrugged. O’Neill shook his head, taking a moment to process. “Well, welcome to the fleet, Emerald. By the way, do you know what happened to Yellow Diamond?”

“…She was Dusted,” Emerald said, forming her arms into the Diamond symbol. “It has been a difficult time recovering for the Gems here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She was a great military leader,” Emerald said. She glanced behind her for a moment, checking to see if the coast was clear. “…And it’s best she’s not around to continue the war.”

O’Neill let out a sigh, but nodded in agreement. “See you soon.” He cut the feed.

Clandestine turned around. “Guess that means you really are Second now, Minna.”

Minna smiled sadly. “Second of what, Military? This isn’t just a military fleet anymore, there’s dozens of civilian ships, all heading for the center. And when we get there… will we stay cohesive?”

“You’d be the one to know.”

Minna frowned. “My visions have been coming back. But they’ve never been for the far future, just the immediate. And-” Her irises dilated. She slammed a button. “This is Minna to the entire fleet, SHIELDS UP AND ARM YOURSELVES!”

“What’s coming?” O’Neill asked as he activated the red alert.

“The red thing.” Minna said. “I’m having a hard time focusing on it, but it’s intangible, red a- and it’s about to show up onscreen.”

The red thing did show up. Like wind it flowed toward them, a single reddish point of light trailing a softer glow behind it for kilometers. It felt their presence and charged right for them, the trails twirling into a complex interference pattern that was hypnotic to experience.

“FIRE WEAPONS!”

The fleet fired every weapon they had. Anything physical or explosive was completely useless, passing right through and having no effect whatsoever. The magic lasers had some effect, distorting the pattern of its movements, but doing no visible damage. It passed through the fleet. Smaller ships were launched away at speeds so fast sensors lost track of them in under a second.

“What is it!?” O’Neill shouted.

“Magic is similar to TSAB devices, sir!” Clandestine reported.

“Do we have any TSAB ships?”

“One.”

“What do they have to say?”

Minna checked the report as it appeared on her screen. “…That’s a dumb idea.”

“What is?”

“Shoot TSAB transmission frequencies at it until it gets confused and goes away.”

“Couldn’t hurt!” O’Neill said. “Clandestine, send out the order.”

“Already done.”

“Effect?”

“I mean, it’s no longer moving in a straight line?”

The red thing was zigging around the fleet like a ping-pong ball.

O’Neill narrowed his eyes. “Activate the spectral rod.”

~~~

Tornado-Ba’al looked down at the crater, not at all surprised to see that everyone had survived thanks to Rev’s magic shield.

She shrugged. “Well, looks like you’re all up and running. What else did I expect to happen, I wonder?” She became confused at this question. “…What did I expect to happen…? I… What?”

“You’re going to get out of her right now,” Pinkie said, producing a chainsaw and her Massacre dress.

“Can’t do that! The mind’s empty!” She tapped her head like it was a watermelon. “Nothing but Ba’al in here!”

Vriska glared at her. “Then it’s time to die. Luc-”

Tornado-Ba’al held up a hand – revealing the infinite-sided die. “Do you really want to make my luck so low that I’ll be desperate enough to roll this? Because at that abysmal level… Well, I might just cause a planetary catastrophe. …Cats… I should invest in cats…”

Vriska shook her head. “…I see insanity hasn’t removed your planning.”

“Oh yes, plans, I always have plans. And this time I’m smarter – I know the workings of fate! They’re like a meat grinder in a clock that… that…” She snapped her fingers, unable to come up with the word. “You know what I mean.”

They stared at her blankly.

“Whatever, point is, if I stay and fight even with this power, I lose. So… Bye!” She blasted out of the atmosphere with her psychic power.

Pinkie jumped behind a bush and vanished.

Pidge coughed. “Three… Two… One…”

Pinkie brought Tornado-Ba’al crashing to the ground with a her warhammer, planning on cracking her head open on the pavement like a watermelon. Tornado-Ba’al gained enough control of her power to slip out from under the hammer, but she was still near the ground. Rina summoned her swords and threw them at Tornado-Ba’al, only for the psychic to throw them back.

“How about no more death swords?!” Pinkie shouted, having just barely dodged them.

“Fine!” Rina said, flaring her wings and blasting a beam of pure black energy at Tornado-Ba’al. Rev met it from the other side with a white beam. Vriska jumped up and kicked Tornado-Ba’al in the stomach. She retaliated with a burst of psychic energy, grabbing all of them and ramming them into the ground hard enough to make dents in the earth.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

The next thing Tornado-Ba’al knew she was on the ground, her neck within Star Platinum’s fist. A bruised and battered Jotaro walked back to the fight. “You pissed me off.”

“Off of what?” Tornado-Ba’al asked, forcing the Stand’s hand open with her power.

“…Nani?”

“You make no sense.” Tornado-Ba’al hit him with a tree.

“Found it!” Pidge said, pulling her weapon out of the shack’s wreckage. She fired her grappler around Tornado-Ba’al. Instead of trying to break it, she ripped the handle of the weapon out of Pidge’s hand and recalled it.

“…Hey that’s…” Pidge paused. “Actually I don’t know why more people don’t do that.”

Tornado-Ba’al smirked. “So crazy it just might w-” Pinkie chopped off one of her arms with a chainsaw, prompting a terrified scream.

“No! No I have to live! Escape! I…”

Flutterfree closed her eyes and spread her wings. The Element of Kindness flashed. In an instant, she was on the other side of Tornado-Ba’al.

The Goa’uld-controlled corpse unceremoniously fell to the ground, dead.

Flutterfree put her marble wingtips back on. “The kindest…” She didn’t finish her sentence.

Vriska looked down at Tornado’s body. “…Well, I guess that’s that. We went on vacation and got our powers back. Yay…”

“I’ll get us a party once we’re in the mood,” Pinkie said. “It is something to celebrate, bu-”

“No,” Flutterfree said. “We’re not just going to move past this and forget about her like some Redshirt. That was the old way. This is the New World. Things don’t have to be the same.” She walked over to Tornado’s body and leaned down. “She needs to be remembered as one of us. When we get to where we’re going, and the deed is done… we will bury her.” She turned to Rev. “…Can you prepare her?”

Rev nodded. “I’ll need supplies.”

“Pinkie has whatever you need. Right?”

“Right.” Pinkie changed out of her Massacre dress and started pulling out medical supplies.

Pidge, Jotaro, and Vriska looked around awkwardly. This was not something they had ever done. They weren’t sure they wanted to keep her in mind.

Rina stared into the air, unblinking. That was me.

Rev clasped her hooves together and began to enchant the medical wrap with preservation. She began to wind it around Tornado, sealing it to her body. “This can be removed later, she’ll be just as we left her.” She and Flutterfree slowly wrapped the entire body while Pinkie sat nearby, ‘watching’.

Rev clasped her hooves together again and laid them on the wrapped body. She charged it with energy to finalize the seal, launching a loose spark that hit Pinkie in the forehead.

“Ow,” Pinkie muttered, rubbing her forehead. “That stung.”

Rev and Flutterfree stared at Pinkie in disbelief.

“What? It was just some loose magic that… I… felt…” Pinkie stopped moving. “R-rev, can you d-do that again?”

“...I think I can do you one better.” Rev held Pinkie’s head in her hooves, examining her closely. With her magic, she lowered the pink blindfold so it hung around the mare’s neck, revealing her empty eye sockets. They didn’t look painful after all these years - just empty.

Rev placed her hooves over the holes and focused. Once again, her eyes transformed into a glowing white state and bright energy flowed through her hooves into Pinkie. The mare’s body began to twitch and buzz. A slight, short of breath giggle emanated from Pinkie’s mouth.

Slowly, Rev removed her hooves from Pinkie. “Pinkie… How do you feel?”

Pinkie wiped a tear from her face and opened her eyes. “Tingly!”

Everyone stared at her for a moment. She didn’t stare at them - she stared at everything else. She saw the colors of the forest, the wispy motions of the grass, and… she could feel the wind in her mane. “I…” she was at a loss for words.

“...How is this possible?” Flutterfree asked.

Pidge blinked. “Forced curses like hers worked because there was a multiverse, no matter where she was or how her soul and body were represented, she would experience the disability… There’s no multiverse now. The curse didn’t have a way to perpetuate!”

“I… I…” Pinkie sniffed.

And then she let out seventy years of tears she had never gotten to cry. Being Pinkie, this created enough tears to muddy the entire area they were standing in, but somehow nobody cared about this. All of them except Rina piled onto her and joined her.

“...The sappy cry hug never ends, huh?” Rina wondered aloud, not expecting an answer. For once, she was satisfied without one. Simply watching them… It made her feel like there was more out there than what she knew.

They really had something special here.

~~~

“This node connects the recently-recorded data with everything else,” Jotaro said, leading the League and the Everykid through the endless towering halls of data storage.

The Everykid looked at him and raised an eyebrow. He ignored her.

The doors to the node opened automatically and smoothly despite being the size of barns. Inside was a domed room lined with dark metal. The lower edges of the room were covered in computer screens while the central floor sloped up until it came to a point, atop of which sat a glowing ball of pink energy.

“…Pretty,” Burgerbelle observed.

“Stand over there,” Jotaro said. “I need to access the terminal and I don’t want to deal with the security measures for people looking over my shoulder.”

“Sure thing,” Mattie said, walking to where he directed. “You know, I envy that orb. Something sharp jabbed into it at all times, and it doesn’t even care.”

“You really need to stop speaking,” Burgerbelle observed.

“If I didn’t say these things, who would?”

“Exactly.”

Mattie rolled her eyes, chuckling. She looked to the side at the Everykid, noticing she had a nervous expression on her face. “Dear, what’s the matter?”

The Everykid looked up, forced a smile, and shook her head rapidly.

“Something’s bothering you.”

The Everykid backed away from them slowly, a grimace forming on her face.

“…Something’s wrong,” Nettle said.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, pressing a button on the console. With a flash of bright light, bolts of intense electricity shot out of the orb and into Mattie, Thrackerzod, Nettle, and Burgerbelle. “No one considered I might be the Everyman as well.” He pulled his hat down.

Thrackerzod tried to muster up some magic, but the pain from the lightning was simply too much for her to handle. She didn’t have any eldritch nature to draw on anymore – she had to react like a normal unicorn. She couldn’t just shunt the pain away… She could only scream.

The Everykid put her hands to her mouth.

“They would tell everyone about us since you spilled the beans,” Everyman-Jotaro said, shaking his head. “It has to-”

The Everykid pulled out a parasol, hit Jotaro across the face with it, and pressed the ‘undo’ button on the console. The lightning stopped, dropping four singed and heavily injured ponies onto the ground.

“Why’d it stop…?” Mattie wondered absent-mindedly. “It was so… sparkly…”

Everyman-Jotaro stood back up, summoning Star Platinum. “What has gotten into you!?”

The Everykid shrugged, removing her hat and replacing it with a black one that gave her a green visor.

“We cannot leave our self behind!”

The Everykid took one look at him, shook her head, and shot a laser out of her parasol at him.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

The next instant, they were locked in combat – apparently time-stop wasn’t so effective against the Everykid.

Stand-fist to the face was. She took the hit head on and landed on the ground. She was quickly able to jump back up, but she was already making pained grunts.

As she fired another laser at Everyman-Jotaro, Burgerbelle struggled to focus. Blood was dripping from her mouth and her eyes felt like they were on fire – though this was only because she wasn’t remembering to blink in her pain. She used one hand to push herself to her knees.

In the other hand she had a hamburger.

“…Where did…?” she shook her head, realizing she shouldn’t ask the question. That was the whole point of her. What she did, what she was – it didn’t operate on sense.

Shakily, she stood up, holding the hamburger high. “BURGER!” she shouted. She stuffed the burger into her mouth and wolfed as much down as she could, throwing the remaining patty over the back of her shoulder. It exploded when it hit the ground.

Everyman-Jotaro and the Everykid turned to stare at her in disbelief.

She smirked, no longer feeling the pain or noticing the blood dripping down her face. She felt strong, like a force of nature. She leaned forward and held her arms behind her, running right for Everyman-Jotaro.

Star Platinum moved to defend its user, but the Everykid saw her opportunity. She put on a red hat with two eyes on it. She threw the hat at Star Platinum – and she vanished, becoming Star Platinum. Everyman-Jotaro found that his Stand was no longer defending him.

Burgerbelle reached Everyman-Jotaro and delivered many rapid kicks and punches to his muscular body, moving so fast it looked like she had several arms and legs. “Ora ora!” She shouted, giggling.

Everyman-Jotaro punched her in the face himself, knocking her to the ground, dazed. Focusing for a moment, he recalled Star Platinum, forcing a dazed Everykid back into existence.

He took a step toward Burgerbelle, raising a fist. “Useless.”

“Omae wa mou shindeiru,” Burgerbelle said, an exaggerated near-trollface expression upon her features.

“NANI!?”

The delayed reaction from Burgerbelle’s attacks hit all at once. Jotaro convulsed like an accordion affixed to a car pump, barely having a moment to yell out in pain before he keeled over.

“Gotcha!” the Everykid crowed, spreading her arms wide.

Nettle turned to stare at her. “YOU CAN TALK!?”

“Yep!”

Burgerbelle grinned. “…Awesome.”

The Everykid giggled.

Thrackerzod groaned, finally rising to her hooves. “So…” She coughed. “Let me get this straight. We were saved. By memes.”

“Abso-doot-elutely!” Burgerbelle said, dooting a trumpet for emphasis.

“And we thought Flat powers couldn’t exist.”

“I just had to stop thinking about it.”

“Uh huh…” Thrackerzod shook her head and turned to the Everykid. “And you…”

The kid looked at her expectantly.

“You’re the Everyman.”

She nodded.

“He was the Everyman.”

She nodded again.

“You killed yourself.”

She smiled awkwardly and nodded.

“…What?”

She laughed, linked arms with Burgerbelle, and started dancing.

Mattie limped to Thrackerzod. “Something, something, friendship is magic.”

“But they had the same mind!”

“Dimensional effects are gone, remember?” Mattie smirked. “Every instance of the Everyman is separate. And as I recall, he wasn’t big on consistency. The Everyman died with the multiverse. What we’re looking at is just… some kid.”

Burgerbelle lifted the kid into the air. “The Everykid!”

The Everykid threw her hands into the air and grinned.

“Hnnng, so precious…” Mattie whispered.

“So can you take us to the actual information?” Burgerbelle asked.

The Everykid nodded eagerly, gesturing for them to follow. Burgerbelle and Thrackerzod followed readily. Mattie stayed behind, taking a moment to check that Nettle was okay before turning to look at the node’s sphere.

“You know, I wonder if I could repurpose this…”

“Probably,” Nettle said, trying to figure out how to walk without hurting her leg.

“Right, I forgot, you don’t know how to talk properly and aren’t any fun to mess with.” Mattie rolled her eyes. “Looks like Burger’s got her powers back. You might have something in you as well.”

“…And all I have to do is stop thinking.”

Mattie facehooved. “I think it’s different for every person.”

“Why isn’t it consistent?”

“People aren’t consistent.”

“I am.”

Mattie let out a guffaw. “You’re in for a long, painfully rude awakening.”

“...Sure I am.”

Mattie facehooved. “Let’s try not to lose the others.” She put Nettle on her back and trotted out of the room.

Of course, Mattie was injured and she was in no position to have a rider at this point in time, but that was kind of the whole point of the operation.

~~~

The Austraeoh’s spectral rod activated, attempting its first in-combat spell since the collapse. The goal? Just stop the red thing from moving.

We really need something better to call it, O’Neill thought. But now was not the time to vocalize the opinion – they’d name it after it was dead. “Energy weapons ready?”

“Yessir,” Clandestine reported. “Spell is away.”

The spectral rod’s energy released, creating a cube of white energy around the red thing’s ‘head’. The trails of red behind it began to dissipate as it bounced off the walls of the box.

“FIRE!” O’Neill ordered.

Every ship in the fleet with an energy weapon hit the cube at the same time. The red thing could not have dodged any of the destructive capability.

So instead it absorbed all of it and broke out of the cube.

“…Well, the spell worked,” Clandestine observed.

O’Neill held a hand to the bridge of his nose. “How long until we can create a seal spell?”

“Hours, given that the rod just blew itself out,” Minna said.

“Peachy,” O’Neill muttered. “Order the ships into a defensive-fleeing formation to minimize how many of us it can take out. If it shows relentless pursuit prepare to split the fleet.”

Clandestine gulped. “Yessir... Should I stop the TSAB transmissions?”

“No, keep it as confused as possible, see what happens.”

“Haste!” Mite announced.

“I forgot he existed,” Minna said, shaking her head.

“Undeniable.”

The fleet began to move away from the red thing, arranging itself thinly so its energy could not reach too many ships at once. It showed no sign of giving up pursuit, but it couldn’t stay fixed on any one target due to the TSAB signals.

“Okay, we need to prepare the separation. We can’t survive like this. Split in three ways, larger groups to either side, smaller in the center so that group is more likely to survive and make it to the center. Whichever group it follows should scatter in every direction after we are out of range. A-”

“Incoming ships!”

“Oh, what now!?”

Six TSAB advanced warships sped to their fleet, firing magical chain weapons at the red thing. It pulsed in anger, but it could not overcome the power of an actual sealing spell. It was quickly locked in a glowing red box and grabbed by the TSAB’s lead ship.

“They’re hailing,” Clandestine reported.

“Onscreen.”

The familiar face of Vita appeared onscreen. “This is Vita. Good to see you O’Neill.”

“We’re a lot happier to see you.”

“…Eh…” Vita tilted her hand back and forth. “You’re the ones who called us here with all those signals.”

“Crazy idea did something…” Minna muttered.

“And the Device Geist was our problem.” Vita sighed. “When so many mages were… dusted, the surviving Devices unleashed all their magic at once, creating a being that wanted everyone to be like them: separated from what they cared about.”

“…Geez,” Clandestine said.

“Yeah. Geez.” Vita regained her upright posture and saluted. “But the threat has been neutralized, no use dwelling on it. You are all welcome at Midchilda, regardless of which side you fought on in the war.”

“…How’d you pull that off in your government?” O’Neill asked, blinking.

“…It was Acting High Sovereign Fate’s last order,” Vita said, trying hard to keep a straight face.

“My condolences.”

Vita nodded. “…Do you have a connection to any major worlds?”

O’Neill shook his head. “All we have are loose ships. Midchilda is the first major world we’ve found. Our mission is currently to make it all the way to the center of the New World.”

“We’ve been preparing a scouting team to do that as well. Wait a few days – we can join you.”

“As long as we can come to Midchilda and get some vacation time.”

Vita smiled sadly. “…Our society may still exist, but it isn’t a happy society, O’Neill.”

“We’ll take what we can get.”

Vita nodded. “Of course. Come with us, we’ll show you the way.”

~~~

“Hey, GM, we’re going!” Roxy called across the church. We had arrived a few hours earlier by my suggestion, not that I was let out of the cage.

GM was talking to Froppy. He turned away from the amphibious woman to see Roxy walking over to him.

“Ah…” GM rubbed the back of his head. “Did they chase you out?”

“Well, nobody wants anything to do with Monika, Twilence, or Flagg,” Roxy said. “So, sorta. They never came right out and said it though. C’mon, let’s go.”

“…Roxy, I found my family here,” GM said. “They’re over there, talking to Aslan. My parents… my brother… my sister…”

Roxy paused for a moment, then winked at him. “Say no more. We’ll miss you.”

“Are you sure? I ca-”

Roxy put her hands on GM’s shoulders. “Kid, you’re not a Prophet anymore, you don’t have to worry. You’ve already told us everything we wanted to know and then some. You don’t have to do anything else.”

“…Telling me not to worry. Heh…”

“Hey it’s still good advice, even if you don’t follow it!”

“If my life had a story… Well, it does, and…” he shook his head. “Nevermind, I don’t even know.”

“And that’s fine. Not everyone has to stick with the adventure. And… frankly, you aren’t made of stern enough stuff to keep going. You don’t have to.”

GM nodded. “I guess… I’m being nice to myself, if that makes sense. Or Uber-me is. Giving me a chance to just… have a life.” He laughed nervously. “I know a thing or two about physics, I guess… got Monika to give me my books… I could do something here. …Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not great at the physical stuff. …One thing I know is that I’m sure not writing again.”

“Don’t tell yourself that.”

“Bu-”

“You aren’t a Prophet. You don’t have to worry.”

“But if I write it, he…”

“Would have written it anyway.” Roxy turned him around and pushed him forward. “Now, go. Be with your family.”

She watched as he walked away – and was embraced.

“…Feels a little weird, doesn’t it?” Roxy asked Froppy.

“…Ribbit?”

“Just… Him. This whole thing came out of his mind.” She put her hands behind her head. “If you look long enough you can see the patterns in his thinking appear in reality.” She patted Froppy on the back. “You’ve got something to look forward to, with him around.”

“I’ve got other things to look forward to.”

Roxy smirked. “I suppose you do. Congratulations! Sorry I won’t be here when it happens.”

“It’s not a problem. You have somewhere to be anyway. And I don’t want Flagg anywhere near it.”

“I hear that.” Roxy saluted. “Catch you later, sister!”

Froppy raised an incredulous eyebrow.

Roxy laughed to herself as she skipped out the church doors. She looked around and took in the breeze wafting over the pink ocean. Behind her there were several houses in the middle of being built and a few pieces of farmland that had already been plowed. They were starting a regular town around here.

It gave her hope for the future.

She ran across the town and out into the nearby sea-forest. She landed neatly next to our campsite. “GM’s staying.”

“Nani? Why?” Rohan asked.

“He found his family.” Roxy said, dusting her hands off. “And no offense, he probably needed to check out before he completely lost his mind. That thing with the cult… He hasn’t been able to let it out yet.”

“Leaving the story…” I mused from my cage. “…He’s close to doing it. Not quite, but close.”

“Not quite?” Chancellor Fluttershy asked.

I shook my head. “No. He’ll show up again. I… see a few moments. But he’s mostly done. He served his purpose.” I looked to the sky. “…I can’t wait until I get to do that.”

Monika grunted. “Never, if we have something to say about it.”

I smiled softly at Monika but said nothing.

When one story ends, another begins. Endings are, and always will be, lies.<<

I shook my head at M’s screen. “Sometimes, there really is an ending. And what comes next isn’t a story, it’s a life.”

Flagg let out a snort. “Please, do you really think the idea of an ‘ending’ or a ‘story’ is actually important? You’re on about nothing but semantics.”

“Semantics are what make us human,” Rohan said, drawing some manga with Heaven’s Door. “Warm and baking mean essentially the same thing, but one suggests comfort while the other suggests the exact opposite.” He made a sharp line on his paper. “Words make us, define how we think.”

“Not me!”

“Just because your book is immune to my words does not mean it has no words. Your words are merely more complex and disturbing than ours.”

Flagg smirked. “How about we do an experiment to see exactly how?”

“We are not removing that voice inhibitor,” Roxy deadpanned.

Flagg shrugged. “It’s only a matter of time…”

“Yes, yes, you’re alive, you’ll be important later,” I muttered, twirling my hoof in the air. “So will I. It’s still the best option since there isn’t a drug in existence that could keep you out for long and killing you just frees you.”

“…How about we not argue about that for the millionth time and get going?” Roxy said, putting her belongings in her inventory. “We’ve got a long way to go still.”

Author's Note

Merry Christmas Eve and have a happy Hearthswarming!

136 - The Place You Call Home

“You know Mite, I think I live on this ship,” O’Neill said, sitting on the bed in his private quarters on the Austraeoh.

“Absent.”

“Just because I can’t see you doesn’t mean I don’t know you’re in here,” O’Neill said.

“Dubious.”

“I’m not arguing philosophy with you.”

“Incorrect.”

O’Neill ignored that comment. “Even when I did have a home, back before the war even started, this was my ship. I went on missions, explored distant worlds, saw everything.” He adjusted his uniform in a mirror, unsatisfied with an awkward wrinkle on the shoulder. “I think I know this ship better than I know my house. …Or what was my house, who knows if it’s still around.”

“Lonely.”

“You’re a judgmental little bugger, you know that?”

“Affirmative.”

“Good. Just checking.” Deciding his uniform wasn’t going to get flat enough for his liking, he shrugged and left his quarters. On the opposite end of the hall, Minna was talking to her husband, Frigid.

“Now please don’t put your art projects on the bed next time, okay?”

Frigid rubbed the back of his head awkwardly. “Yeah, I… I should have thought ahead.”

“Oh, it’s beautiful! It’s just that you have a nice table right there. I know the bed has more cush, but I need to sleep whenever I can get it.”

Frigid chuckled. “All right, all right, I’ll use the table.” He kissed her. “Love you. Don’t blow us up.”

“I blow us up a little bit every day.”

“Then not a lot.”

Minna closed the doors to her quarters, turned around, and realized O’Neill was standing there. O’Neill was highly amused to see her blush, such a rare sight on her face. “…Good morning, sir.”

“You’re a lucky woman,” O’Neill said. “Not everyone got to take theirs with them.”

“I… I’m aware.”

O’Neill nodded. “…Sometimes I wonder if things might have been different, I would have picked someone…”

“No offense sir, you were already old when you took the potion. The drive wouldn’t be there… as much.”

“And you had no biological drive to speak of.”

“I married a pony, what makes you think it had to have anything to do with that?”

O’Neill blinked. “Good point.”

Minna put a hand to her chin. “I wonder… Who would it have even been?”

O’Neill shrugged, indicating the discussion was over. A few moments later Minna started chuckling.

“I bet you’ve got an excellent mental image.”

“Yes. Yes, I do. Sir.”

“Well keep it to yourself, we’ve got work to do.”

The two entered the bridge at the same time. “Overhead on Deck!” Clandestine called. She swiveled around in her chair to salute the two of them. “We’ve picked up something very interesting on the sensors. Vita’s given the O.K. to investigate.”

“What is it?” O’Neill asked. Minna’s eyes widened in surprise before he’d even completed asking the question.

A few seconds later, the rest of the bridge crew saw what Minna just had: an image of a male Celestialsapien with a white fuzzy creature sitting on his shoulder.

“Have we tried hailing?” O’Neill asked.

“Of course we have,” Clandestine said. “It’s not like a Celestialsapien to respond. We’re not expecting much at all.“

“THERE IT IS!” A loud amused voice said. Suddenly, the Celestialsapien was on the bridge – unmoving as their kind generally were. The white creature on his shoulder, however, was fully active and talking like mad. “Hey! Hey! Hey! Guess what I am. C’mon, you can do it. You’ve got some good clues already.”

“You’re one of Them,” Minna said.

“Cheating, I like you,” the Them said, scratching behind his chinchilla-like ears. “So hey, hello intrepid travelers across the New World! What’s shakin’?”

“We’re wondering why you’re a rodent,” O’Neill answered.

“Chinchilla,” Mite offered, unhelpfully.

“Well, it was the first thing I thought of when I realized the intangible body thing doesn’t exactly work here!” the Them said, twitching his nose. “I have to say, I do like being a god-mouse, though I expect it’ll get boring after the first year and I’ll need to find some good old magic to turn me into a god-cat or something.”

“…He’s not setting off any alarms, right?” O’Neill asked.

Clandestine nodded. “He’s not any stronger than your average Discord.”

“I resent that!” the Them objected.

“The Celestialsapien on the other hand… Yeah, he set off some of the alarms. Nowhere near as high a power as a Celestialsapien should have, but still concerning.”

“Don’t worry about Flep. Flep is chill.” The Them chuckled. “Flep hasn’t made a single decision since the collapse. Heck, I don’t think he’d made a decision for a few years before that. Guy’s in a Celestialsapien deadlock. Could be like this for millennia. Wouldn’t even be here if I didn’t drag him.”

“…Put him on an unmanned probe,” O’Neil ordered. “I’d like to keep him around, but don’t want him throwing a tantrum and killing people. As for you…” He leaned down and looked at the Them. “You need a name.”

“Chem. I am chinchilla-chet-them.”

“Chet?” O’Neill asked.

“Chet,” Mite said.

Chem smiled and twitched his adorable tiny ears. “Good, glad we’ve got that mystery solved.”

“I have no idea why Chet is in there,” Minna deadpanned.

Chem ignored her. “Anyway, as a rodent I must really enjoy cheese. Please, bestow upon me your graceful confections of cheesy natures. Because cheese. If I don’t like cheese I’m going to have to take this body back to the store I bought it from.”

“Didn’t you create it yourself?” O’Neill asked.

“Yes.”

“Nevermind.” O’Neill shook his head. “Listen up, Chem. You can have your cheese. You can have lots of the cheese. But if you’re going to be with us, you have to follow the rules of basic decency, which I know is unimaginably difficult for you Them.”

“It’s agony,” Chem confirmed.

“Well deal with agony if you want unhindered access to the cheese. I do have spells that can keep you out.”

“Eeyep.”

“Furthermore, as a member of this crew, you will be expected to pull your weight. As a ‘god-mouse’ this should not be difficult for you in the slightest. You might be put on dishes control one day, or combat the next. Understood?”

“I understand perfectly! The question is how much can I eat away at the intention of your rules withou-”

Chem got slapped across the room by Minna. “About that damn far,” she spat.

“…G-gotcha,” Chem muttered. “To the kitchen! To eat cheese! …and wash dishes.” He vanished in a puff of white smoke.

“Are we going to tell him we have a machine to wash dishes?” Clandestine asked.

“Nope,” O’Neill answered.

“I’ll make sure the crew knows.”

~~~

Eve decided it was time to land the Skiff – give the occupants a chance to stretch their legs, see somewhere new, perhaps make camp.

“Where we landin’ this time?” Applejack asked. She had stopped acting standoffish several days ago, but the tiredness in her voice hadn’t abated in the slightest.

“Small planet,” Eve said. “And I mean small. Few kilometers wide at most. Looks to have a single town on it.”

“We’ll probably be able to find beds then,” Corona said. “I’d like a bed, frankly.”

“Some beds aren’t worth anythin’,” Applejack muttered.

Eve brought the planet up on screen. Half of it was light, half of it was dark, and most of it seemed to be a town nestled in some wilderness.

“…How’s it have day and night?” Applejack wondered. “Thought that was impossible.”

“It appears to be an effect localized to the atmosphere,” Corona said, pressing a few buttons on her console. “Neat. The town’s currently in the day half.”

“Wonder if anyone’s alive down there…” Eve took the Skiff down, swirling around the planet once just to get a full map of its surface. They landed on the outskirts of town without much fanfare and trotted out. The world seemed slightly brighter than natural – the grass was a bit too green, the ground more yellow than brown, and the cobblestone path that led into town was a bit too regular for the kind of construction it was. This was not unusual to anyone, most Equises at least had the vibrant colors.

As they approached the town, they found it in a state of disrepair. Numerous windows were broken, vines were crawling up walls, and lots of paint was chipping away. A lopsided sign told them the settlement’s name – Pelican Town.

“That sounds vaguely familiar for some reason,” Eve commented.

“Could have been a world you visited,” Corona offered.

“I did visit a lot.” The three of them walked into the town. While the vast majority of the rural buildings looked abandoned, there were a few things that told them not everyone was gone. There was a neatly-kept flower bed near the center of town, and one of the stores in the center of town had a fresh coat of paint on it. Looking through the window, they could see that the shelves were mostly empty, but there were some cans of food stocked on the top shelf.

“Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in…”

The three travelers turned around to see a white pegasus with large glasses and a rainbow mane staring right at them with a look of smug contempt. She set down her toolkit and can of paint, looking at them expectantly.

“Prism…” Eve said, visibly shrinking away.

Corona coughed. “Hey, Prism. It’s been a-”

“Both of you,” Prism interrupted. “Both of you. Wow, this is going to be a powder keg. The destroyer of worlds and the destroyer for worlds. Acting like nothing’s happened.” She chuckled to herself. “Don’t know what I was expecting, but this certainly wasn’t it.”

“…Am Ah missin’ somethin’?” Applejack asked.

Prism blinked. “Who are you?”

“Applejack.”

“I think I could have deduced that one.”

“…Just call me Jack if you have to, Ah don’t need to think of a new name.”

Prism shook her head. “Fine, the point is, yes, you’re missing something. Evening there killed my mother and started a big war; Corona there started another war and killed a lot more people, but was at least honest about it. They both suck, now you’re caught up, any questions?”

“I guess.”

“Good. Now, I’m going to be nice.” Prism cleared her throat. “There are people here who would want your head on a platter, Corona. You should run.”

Corona shook her head. “I can’t run from those who hate me. I have to face them.”

“Corona…” Eve cautioned.

Corona held up a hand. “I’m not going to hide, Eve. We’ve been lucky since Lai. I can’t just hope to continue being lucky.” She put her hands on her hips. “Who do I have to face here?”

Prism shrugged. “Well, here’s one now.”

Trotting up was a unicorn version of Sunset carrying numerous wooden boards and nails in her magic. Everyone recognized her as Sunny in an instant. At the same instant, Sunny dropped all the boards and nails, gawking. “Corona? Eve!?”

Corona waved awkwardly. “Yeah. It’s us.”

“You really shouldn’t be here,” Sunny said. “Jane will… and then there’s… and…” Sunny blinked. “And you’re not leaving, are you?”

Corona shook her head. “Have to face them eventually. Might as well be now.”

Sunny took a breath. “In that case… Welcome to Pelican Town! I’m… I’m sorry that this is probably going to be the only warm welcome you get. We’ve got the starts of stable food production and the town restoration project is coming along nicely.”

Prism adjusted her glasses. “Behold, my architectural genius.”

Sunny turned to Jack. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“Applejack. Or just Jack, since apparently you need that.”

“Yeah… We do.” Sunny tossed her mane back. “You should come back to the farm with me if you want to see the others. You should prepare for sparks to fly. Prepare for a lot of it.”

Corona cracked her knuckles and dusted her hands together. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be for that.” She paused, turning to Prism. “Corea…?”

“She’s here too,” Prism answered. “Bet you’re both relieved and panicked because of that, huh?”

“…I just want to see her.”

Prism pointed with her wing. “Then you’re going to love the farm.”

Jack looked at the pegasus and shook her head.

“What?”

“You just remind me of me,” Jack said. “That’s not a compliment.”

Prism wasn’t sure how to come back from that.

~~~

You know what tends to panic people?

“Hey, yeah, all of you? Lord English is approaching this planet and we’ve got to move your entire town to a different one in about three hours.”

You know who thought panic was a good motivator to behave?

“SHERLOCK!”

Sherlock looked up from his seat in Rev’s church hall. “Hmm?”

Lightning slapped him. “What the literal hell is wrong with you?”

“I don’t believe Hell’s literal anymore.”

Lightning twitched. “I don’t care how effective you think something’s going to be, you don’t just cause people that level of panic! There have been heart attacks!”

“That’s why Death is here.”

“Sherlock…”

“I don’t miss details, Lightning,” Sherlock said, folding his hands together. “For instance, did you know Valentine and Froppy are here? In fact, they’re right behind you – not that close – and we’re about to witness something that needed to be resolved a while ago.”

Lightning slowly turned around, curious. She saw Valentine and Froppy, both smiling. This was definitely unusual for Valentine – and the giggling was unusual for Froppy. She noticed bright, shiny new rings on their fingers.

“Ah, that-”

“That’s not what we’re here to see,” Sherlock interrupted. He pulled a newspaper out of his coat and handed it to her. “Here.”

With a roll of her eyes Lightning sat down and pretended to read the newspaper, but kept watching them.

It was at this moment Johnny Joestar showed up, riding an animalistic horse. “Valentine!” he shouted – not angry, but clearly not pleased, either.

Valentine’s smile dropped in an instant. He turned around to face Johnny. “I didn’t expect you to be part of this little expedition, but I see that I shouldn’t have made such an assumption.”

“What’s this about settling down?” Johnny asked.

“It’s as simple as that,” Valentine said. “We’re settling down. I’ve had enough for one life. You should understand – you settled down before.”

Johnny’s face twisted. “…Valentine, where’s Gyro?”

Valentine’s face remained passive – but Froppy flinched.

“He’s not around, is he? Dusted?”

“Yes,” Valentine said.

“I saw it happen,” Froppy croaked. “Tornado and I were there.”

“Then why are you stopping? We have to go get him back!” Johnny shouted.

Valentine frowned. “No, we don’t.”

“So, what, your obligation’s over?”

“Johnny, you know what it means. You’ve read the discoveries we’ve made.”

Johnny clenched his fists. “Don’t you dare…”

“We… We…” Valentine had to stop for a minute to collect himself. “What we did was…”

“You brought back a copy,” Froppy finished for him. “…Constructed from the ground up from nothing to be just like him.”

“How is that different!?”

“It’s very different,” Valentine said. “We were not undoing a death by doing it. We were causing another one.” He put his arm around Froppy. “Gyro found out what he was, Johnny. He’d explored the multiverse and read enough to figure it out. That he wasn’t really Gyro. That he wouldn’t be brought back next time, it would be someone else. He didn’t wa-”

“FUCK THAT!” Johnny shouted. “I need him back, Valentine! My family’s gone, I don’t have anything to help them. But Gyro...”

“He asked me to destroy it, Johnny!” Valentine shouted. “And I did!”

“I don’t have anything now!”

“…You can stay here with us,” Froppy offered.

Johnny, for one moment, looked at her with an expression of understanding. But it was gone in an instant. Wordlessly, he turned the horse around and trotted away.

Sherlock turned to lightning. “And now Johnny will stop being so aggressive. He’ll recover now that he’s not holding onto this.” He smirked.

“…I thought Sherlock wasn’t supposed to be good with people.”

“You get older, you get wiser. Speaking of, your conversation is over there.” He pointed to the front door of the church.

A young man with dark hair and oversized glasses poked his head around the corner. Seeing an angry Valentine inside, he decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to enter and went away.

Lightning’s heart went into her throat and her breath became heavy.

“I thought you’d recognize him,” Sherlock said with a smirk. “Go on, this is your chance to have a little conversation.”

Lightning dropped the newspaper unceremoniously and walked out of the Church.

~~~

Jane stuck her hands into the ground and with one forceful motion pulled a large parsnip up. She smirked – the farm was coming together even faster than expected – and tossed the parsnip into her inventory. She was exceptionally relieved that she had gotten that part of her powers working again, it had been a pain to cart everything around in baskets.

She looked at the fields around her, spreading out a fair distance. Only the parsnip field was ready, but she could see sprouts for all the other crops – including apple trees. Everything was going much faster thanks to all the knowledge and skills she had at her disposal. They had even found some ‘red pumpkins’ on a nearby planet and were trying to grow them. A trio of silent golem beings were actively tilling this particular field. Jane called them Morp, Sedi, and Iggy based on the rocks they were composed of. They never did much of anything other than work, work, work the fields, but they seemed to enjoy the labor so Jane didn’t have an issue with it.

She looked further out. To the south there was a nice forest – no doubt they would be raiding it for wood several times over the course of the next few months. But for now, she knew that was the place Corea loved to take her walks. Not to mention it had the old wizard tower, and Corea had taken a liking to the arcane building.

Jane’s smile faltered, concern rising up that Corea would hermitize. It wouldn’t be beyond her at this point…

Turning to more pleasing things, she looked at the farmhouse. Unlike all the buildings in the town, this one looked lived in, and that was because it was. Everyone had banded together to renovate it into a real home for all of them. The paint was fresh, the windows clear, and the gardens were beautiful.

To think, this had once been Jane’s home so many, many years before… Before she’d even learned of the multiverse… Now it didn’t even feel like the same place.

She decided that was a good thing. It needed to be a new home.

“Hey! Jane! We’ve got visitors!” she heard Prism shout.

Jane’s smile widened. Visitors? Always good to see a new face…

The first ‘new’ face she saw was Corona. Without hesitation, Jane grabbed her sword and charged.

She stopped when Eve and Sunny stepped between the two of them, raising magic shields. The sight of the two of them defending Corona made her mind go blank for a moment.

“…What?” she eventually managed.

“War’s over, Jane,” Sunny said.

“Doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve this…”

“Whatever she deserves, I do as well,” Eve said, walking up to Jane and looking down at her with contempt.

Jane put her sword away. “…You’re too forgiving.”

“What did she do that I didn’t?” Eve asked.

“Killed fucking everyone.”

“I never wanted to do that,” Corona said with a sad expression.

“I don’t care. You did.”

“And I wasn’t supposed to survive it. But I did, something screwed up the collapse, and here we are.” Corona folded her arms. “We’re just going to have to live with it.”

“I am not living with you.”

“You don’t have to. We’re not staying. But there are people I need to face. You’re one of them.”

Jane let out a bitter laugh. “There’s no resolution here. Got that?”

“I got that. I’m not expecting one. I’m expecting acceptance.”

“You shouldn’t expect anything. I could run you through at any time I wanted.”

“Jane, no,” Sunny said, shaking her head. “That’s not what we’re doing.”

“You’d lose anyway,” Prism pointed out.

“Not helping…”

Prism shrugged her wings. “I’m just pointing out the flaws in everyone. It’s my purpose here.”

“That’s it, I’m done,” Jane said. She pointed at Corona. “Get off my farm.”

Corona took a few steps back for a moment – then narrowed her eyes. “No. I need to see Corea.”

“Fuck no you don’t, you’ll make things worse. You’re a divider, Corona. I’m not letting you do any more damage. Get off my planet.”

“Jane…” Sunny cautioned.

“Sunny, it’s not right to let people like her be here.”

Prism let out a snort. “Really? Really? Are we going to tell that to all collapsers? Oh, wait, didn’t you almost fight for the collapse?”

“Prism, shut the fuck up.”

Prism bristled. “How about no? You’re not as messed up as Eve or Corona, but you’re brimming with hypocrisy.”

“Prism, stop it,” Eve said. “You’re not acting with dignity either. I don’t think any of us are.”

“I haven’t said anything yet,” Jack pointed out.

“You’re exempt,” Eve admitted. “The rest of us are trying to power play each other into some sort of situation we like, even me. That’s wrong. The situation is ugly, and we shouldn’t try to soften it over or run away from it. Yes, Jane, sending us away is you running away.”

Jane sighed. “Eve, why are you doing this?”

“Because Corona was never my enemy,” Eve said, pulling Corona close. “Even during the war, she was just the other side. Always the other side. Never the enemy. We wanted nothing more than to be friends again.”

“And we are,” Corona added. “We’re not going to let the New World stay divided.”

Jane twitched. “You’re still not welcome here.”

“We have no intention of staying, we’re traveling to the core. But we’re here, and we’re going to talk.”

“Just for the day, Jane,” Sunny said. “Just the day.”

Jane turned her back and returned to work. “Do what you want. If you’re still here tomorrow I’m chasing you out.”

“Thank you,” Corona said with a slight bow.

“Fuck you,” Jane responded without turning around.

Corona sighed, turning to the farm house. “Well… Guess we should see if she’s in there.”

“She’s actually over there,” Prism said, pointing to the forest. “You can see her coming back.”

Corea was coming back, trotting along the farm path with a blank look on her face. Prism walked up and nuzzled her, prompting only the slightest of smiles that quickly vanished. She looked up as she passed Corona. “How’s that survivor’s guilt treating you?”

Corona grimaced. “Not well.”

“Good. Glad to see you’re still around to see all the suffering you’ve caused.” She trotted away without another word, entered the farmhouse, and slammed the door.

Nothing Jane had said had dented Corona’s armor. But with only a couple sentences, Corea had torn her to her very core. Tears welled up in her eyes and her legs began to tremble. Eve had to support her to keep her standing.

“The Avatar Spirit was Dusted,” Prism explained in a neutral voice. “But she survived, her spirit broken.” She trotted into the farmhouse as well.

Eve looked into Corona’s eyes. “Corona…”

“I… I need to try to heal her.” Corona wiped her eyes. “If she’ll let me.”

“Ah’m not sure she will, but Ah’ll have a talk with her about it.”

Standing in the doorway of the farm house was a muscular orange mare with the Element of Honesty hung around her neck.

“Applejack!?” Eve said, irises shrinking. The farm mare looked just the same as she always had – hat and all. “I… I uh…”

“Join us for dinner,” Applejack said, cutting her off.

“WHAT!?” Jane shouted, standing bolt upright. “I did not a-”

“Jane, I’m going to use one of your favorite phrases on you. Shut the hell up. You’re angry and it’s unreasonable. Ah’m quite upset but you don’t see me yellin’ in everyone’s faces.” She opened the door. “Come, sit down, let’s get caught up.”

Eve gulped, suddenly a lot less confident about her decision to land on this little planet.

~~~

GM nervously looked at the giant pillars of magic runes Strange was setting up around the town. I’m supposed to be avoiding the story. This is the story. He nervously rubbed his knuckles together, trying to think about something else.

“…And now I’m sure. You’re definitely GM.”

GM twitched – he had made sure everyone in town used his real name, not the moniker, so he wouldn’t be outed as the reason all the problems in the world existed. He took a breath. “Please don’t…” He turned around and told Lightning his name.

“I know what your name is,” Lightning said, a twitch in her mouth indicating nerves. Not that GM noticed this, his obliviousness was legendary.

“Y-yeah, of course you would…” He weaved his hands together and nervously looked around. “I’m not him. I may have based him off of me, but I’m not him. I made him the villain.”

“I know. He told me as much himself.”

“W-well of course he would, seeing as…”

Lightning put a hand to the bridge of her nose and sighed. “Would you calm down? Just… Look, there’s a table over there. Let’s sit.”

“But that’s Gevo’s, he’s not open until after the-”

“Just go sit on the chair. I’ll mess with Gevo if I have to.”

“R-right!” GM stammered. He cautiously followed Lightning to the table and sat down.

“Now… Tell me why,” Lightning said.

“Why? Why what? Why the…”

“Why the Collector? Why me?”

GM gulped and took a breath. “…Let’s start with you. Because you came first.”

Lightning raised her eyebrow.

“You were… I was… Hmm… I was thirteen and I was given your game – Final Fantasy XIII – for my birthday. Looking back now, it wasn’t that… great of a game.”

“It absolutely sucks. Move on.”

“R-right.” He swallowed hard. “It was bad. But I didn’t notice that at first, I just thought it was different, fun, and… well, stunning. The scenery… the complex story… I hadn’t really started writing yet, so I really didn’t know what I was looking at, but… It was an experience. I never finished it myself, but the characters stuck with me. Yours most of all.”

Lightning nodded. Then she exaggerated the motion to make sure he caught it and moved on.

“So I just kept you in the back of my head. And as I watched and learned, I kept more and more characters in the back. And then the first big thing I ever tried to write was a big story where I brought all of you together. …That was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea. I tried again almost immediately afterward, but that also didn’t go so well. I don’t remember exactly how, but that’s where you lost your eye. …Not this version of you, the first one. Second. Second.”

Lightning touched her eyepatch gently. “…The Collector found me like this.”

GM nodded. “That… makes sense? He’d want the one of you that was… ‘his’.”

“So how did he come about?”

“I started reading fanfics. I looked for giant crossovers because… that was what I wanted to read and I couldn’t find many good ones. I eventually did in a ‘Grand Tour’ – that one’s the reason Nanoha is such a big deal – but he didn’t come from that one. I forget most everything about the story I’m thinking of except that the main character was powerful, manipulative, and evil in almost every way. But he was the hero and his conquest was supposed to be a good thing. And every chapter in the author’s notes there was a reminder that ‘he’s not infallible’ but I never read far enough to find that. He always seemed to have a plan or ploy…”

“That sounds like him.”

“There’s a difference, but that’s where the idea first took form.” Now that he had gotten talking, GM was a lot less nervous. “I didn’t fully understand what the Mary Sue was until a bit later, but I was easily able to draw lines back to that one guy and all the other Sues I started seeing. It was… annoying. I mean people can write stuff like that if they want, but the prevalence… I’m not innocent, but I never…”

He shook his head. “The Collector was born out of this mess. He was originally designed as a meta-type threat for… I forget what exactly. It was just an idea. What if I was slightly more evil and would use everything I knew to create a world of my favorite heroes? They wouldn’t want to, so I’d have to use hyper mind control on them… And I remembered the old Sue stories and realized this was an opportunity. Not a very clever one, I have to say, but an opportunity nonetheless.” He looked at Lightning. “He was never intended to be the hero. He was the villain.”

“He knew this,” Lightning confirmed.

GM nodded. “He embraced it, because he knew it would make the change he brought more extreme. Or, well, I wrote him to, I guess…” GM paused, thinking. “He wasn’t a good person, and the ends could never justify the means, but he was made to not care. I couldn’t do that.”

“Clearly,” Lightning deadpanned.

“Eheh… Yeah. He’s definitely not me. He’s me if I had strength, no integrity, and believed the ends justify the means. He was evil. But he was very good for the story – and for you.”

Lightning folded her hands together. “…I’m not sure he was evil.”

“Of course not. That was your purpose. To be the one who stood by him, even when his lack of integrity got the better of him in the end.”

“And what’s my purpose now?”

GM shook his head. “I don’t know. I can look back on the Collector now that his story is done and say for sure. You? You’re still around. I may never know for sure what your deal is.”

Lightning nodded slowly, understanding.

“So, uh…”

“That’s all I needed,” Lightning said, standing up. “Thank you. I won’t tell anyone who you are. You deserve some peace.”

“Do I?”

“You didn’t know what you were doing.”

GM smiled awkwardly. “…Yeah.”

“PREPARE TO MOVE THE TOWN!” Strange called over a megaphone. “T-MINUS THIRTY MINUTES! EVERYBODY GET TO A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN HOLD ON TO SOMETHING FIXED!”

“That’s my cue to go home,” GM said. “It was… interesting to meet you.”

Lightning lightly waved. “That’s one way to describe it.”

~~~

Awkward didn’t even begin to describe the dinner.

The Table was large and round, seating Eve, Corona, Jack, Jane, Sunny, Corea, Prism, and Applejack comfortably. It was the only comfortable thing about the situation. The food was way too reliant on parsnips, everyone kept looking around with steeled and upset glares, and much was exchanged without a single word being spoken.

Sunny looked to Applejack. Upon receiving a nod, she cleared her throat. “So… What’s it like out there, Eve?”

“Beyond the System?” Eve asked.

Sunny nodded.

“A little confusing,” Eve admitted. “The planets arrange themselves in orbitals and move around like they’re part of some liquid. It’s relatively easy to figure out where you are within a single system, or with respect to how close you are to the core, but everything else is inconsistent. We looked behind us a few days ago and realized the system we started in had moved so far the computer couldn’t find it.” She smiled warmly. “But other than that, it’s amazing. There are a mixture of planets left just as they were, but also planets that are conglomerations of all sorts of things. Th-”

“They weren’t left just as they were,” Jane interrupted.

“She means from a natural standpoint,” Corona pointed out.

Jane decided that if she said anything else, she would explode, so she just stuffed a parsnip into her face.

“…What’s farmin’ like?” Jack asked.

Applejack turned to her with a soft smile. “So interestin’ to see one of me who never farmed… It’s a hard life, but not one that takes much in the way of thinkin’. You just gotta make sure your food grows. There’s no market here, just food, so we don’t have to worry ‘bout any of that either. You just gotta focus your mind on the task, get involved with the plants, and get through it.”

“The plants aren’t the only thing,” Prism pointed out. “There’s buildings that need redoing, systems that need fixing, and the magic of course.”

Corea forced herself to smile. “Y-yeah. I’ve been working on the magic. I’ve still got that, at least.”

“…How’s that been going?” Corona asked.

Corea looked up at her. “I could eject you through that wall there.”

Corona looked away for a moment – but then she got an idea. “Really? I’ve been working on restoring my magic as well, something tells me otherwise.”

“You wouldn’t see it coming.”

“I don’t know, I have pretty good eyes…”

Corea tapped her hooves together and pushed on Corona with a telekinetic push. Corona would have gone through the wall had she not teleported herself to the other side of the room where she proceeded to crash into Corea and flop onto the table.

There was silence for a moment.

“Pfft,” Corea said with a chuckle. “That was… really stupid.”

“It kinda was,” Corona said, an amused smile on her face.

Corea looked at the parsnip sauce all over the two of them. She let out a chuckle.

“You really should have known better,” Corona said, stretching her wings.

“Well excuuuse me if I didn’t spend time meditating on our old training sessions.”

“Just because your master turned out to do some questionable things does not mean training was worthless!”

With a smile, Corea shoved Corona. “Here’s a paradox. You told me the opposite thing before.”

“People are allowed to grow!”

“Can it happen in reverse?”

“Evidently!”

Jane loudly stood up from her chair and kicked it over, storming off elsewhere into the farm house. Corona and Corea’s smiles vanished instantly.

Eve sighed. “I’ll go talk to her…”

She trotted after Jane, finding the woman sitting on the porch, watching the sunset. Her entire body sagged with weariness.

“Why you...?” Jane asked.

“You probably don’t want to hear this from Sunny.”

“What, you think an authority figure will do anything? Eve, I know you, you can’t just do that.”

Eve pulled up a chair and sat down. “I’m not here as an authority figure. I’m here as your friend.”

Jane grimaced.

“Why do you think it’s wrong to rebuild these bridges?”

“Because… Because… It’s just wrong, okay?”

“That’s not good enough, Jane.”

“Killing so many is evil!”

Eve smiled sadly. “Jane… You agreed with her.”

“I did n-”

“I know you, Jane. Not the best, but I do know you hated what your Prophet had done. When you were sent on the mission against the Nihilists, I read your interviews. You were conflicted. Very conflicted. But you changed your mind because of Sunny.”

Jane was silent.

“You don’t want to let yourself think that might have been the wrong choice.”

“It wasn’t!”

Eve didn’t have to say anything. All she had to do is fix Jane with an understanding expression.

“...Are you saying the collapse wa-”

“This isn’t about me,” Eve said. “For the record, no, I don’t think it was the right choice. But I understand it. You should understand it more than me. That scares you.”

Jane grunted, looking into the distance. “It was still messed up. Tower’s still here. World’s just different.”

“Ka levels have been dropping.”

Jane blinked. “They… have?”

Eve nodded. “Our best theory is that the Tower is fading. It’ll be a long time before it’s gone completely – estimates place it at about a few decades – but the power is disappearing. It won’t be controlling lives forever.”

Jane was silent, gazing into the distance. Eve decided she’d given her enough to think about and left her with the sunset. She ran into Applejack on the way back.

“Didya get her to think, sugarcube?”

Eve nodded slowly. “I did. I don’t think I fixed the problem, but I got her to at least see where her anger’s coming from. Part of it, anyway.”

“She’s an angry one, it won’t go away,” Applejack said. “It’ll just be redirected at somethin’.”

Eve nodded slowly. “…Applejack…”

“Ah have no argument with you or Corona. You did what you had to do. Both of you.”

“But…”

Applejack sighed. “Ah’m disappointed, Eve. Disappointed that we couldn’t do it. Couldn’t just… agree. Couldn’t save my family. Couldn’t stop the war when we got to the top. Couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t…” Applejack shook her head. “We failed, Eve. And Ah don’t mean we lost the war – we did – Ah mean we all failed. You, me, Corona, everyone… It wasn’t enough. If we stayed true to the magic of friendship… maybe we’d all still be here.”

Eve knew Applejack was thinking about her family. “…I’m so sorry.”

“Ah know. And you also know it ain’t good enough.”

Eve gulped.

“Let’s get back to dinner.”

They came back to the table, where Corea was looking at Corona with a sad expression. “…Look, I know you want to fix things, Corona. I just can’t trust you to do it. My soul’s broken. I saw what happened to Daniel.”

Corona was pleading with her. “You’re not so bad as that…”

“Corona, I’ve seen Daniel. He’s bedridden on the third floor.”

Eve gawked. “Daniel’s here!?”

Prism nodded. “He showed up a few days ago… barely alive. He never leaves his bed. Rarely talks. Half out of his mind.”

Corona sat back in her chair, staring at nothing.

“…Finally found someone you don’t want to face?”

“I…”

They all heard a thump come from the stairs, everyone turned to see none other than Daniel himself walking down the stairs, heavily leaning on a metal cane. Everyone knew he no longer aged – but he looked ancient. His hair had become completely white, his glasses barely fit on his face, and every part of him sagged. His eyes looked lifeless.

He moved like a ghost.

But he still moved, marching right toward Corona. He could only shakily walk toward her, but she knew what he wanted to do. What he had wanted to do ever since that day at the games so long ago…

Corona stood up, making sure to stay out of the way of his cane.

She didn’t realize he had a gun in his other hand. He fired, hitting her in the stomach, sending her life-giving blood across the table.

Corona let out a hiss of pain and moved. She tore the gun out of his hand and pressed a bare finger to his forehead. A moment later they both fell to the ground, dazed.

“What happened?” Jane shouted, running into the room. “Wh-” she saw Corona’s wound and Daniel, deciding it was best to fall silent.

Corona grunted, forcing herself to stand up. When Daniel opened up his eyes, he saw Corona holding the gun out to him.

“The curse isn’t holding onto you anymore,” Corona said. “It’s gone now. Do you still want to kill me?”

With shaky, old hands, Daniel grabbed the gun. He pointed it right at Corona’s forehead – locking eyes with her.

An eerie breeze wafted through the room, blowing the folds in Corona’s dress.

He dropped it. “Gh… Gh…”

Corona lifted him up and set him in a chair. Only then did she heal the wound in her stomach. “How are you feeling?”

“…Something’s unfinished…” he said, breathing heavily. “Not you… Something else…”

“Renee? …Eve told me what happened to her.”

“Yes… No…” He coughed, clenching his fists. “It happened… Everything changed… There was a voice…”

“What did it say?”

“I don’t know…” Daniel said, starting to cry. “I… I don’t know…” Then he lost consciousness.

“…I’ll take him back to his room,” Sunny offered, trotting over to him. “…Thanks, Corona.”

As she carried him gently up the stairs, Corea tapped Corona on the shoulder. “…You fixed him?”

“…That insanity curse, yeah,” Corona said. “There was something else in there that I didn’t know what to make of…”

“He lost his wife,” Prism said. “Take a wild guess.”

Corona nodded sadly. Then she turned to Corea. “Can I…?”

Corea sighed. “…Okay. Give it a try.”

Corona pressed her hand to Corea’s forehead and instantly felt the hole in her soul where Raava and the other Avatars should have been. She did not want to alter the soul directly, that wouldn’t be proper… But the mind. The broken part of the mind, that could be mended. It no longer needed to be dependant on the spirit.

She removed her hand. “…How do you feel?”

Corea rubbed her head. “A little foggy. Also, I’m craving cake. …Hey, Prism, do we have cake?”

There were tears in Prism’s eyes. “C-corea?”

“…Is it really that noticeable? I don’t feel that different.” She smiled. “Guess I’m smiling though. It’s not like the emptiness is gone or anything o-”

Prism pulled Corea in for a deep embrace. “I… I thought I was losing you…”

Corea let out a soft chuckle. “Prism, really? I’m stronger than that.”

“No you’re not, now shut up and enjoy the moment.”

“…I thought I was the moment.”

Prism let out a choppy groan. “You’re back, all right…”

Corona smiled, flexing her wrist. “…This is a gift. It doesn’t make up for anything I’ve done.”

“You’re damn well right it doesn’t,” Prism said, switching from ‘emotional’ to ‘cold’ in an instant.

“But take it anyway,” Corona said. She flexed her wrists, sending white magic around. “…Anyone else who needs healing while I’m here?”

Eve’s ears twitched involuntarily. Then she let out a laugh.

Corona turned to her, confused. “…What is it?”

Eve pointed at her ears. “Yeah. Yeah there’s somepony else who needs healing.”

“But you chose not to get that fixed. It’s part of you…”

“And it’s a New World, Corona. I have to be willing to accept that maybe the decision to keep them was wrong.”

“For the love of…” Jane turned and left the room, hand to the bridge of her nose.

Corona held her hands to the sides of Eve’s head. “…Are you absolutely sure?”

“No,” Eve said. “But now’s the time. I can’t turn my ears on anymore… so fix it.”

“My life has turned into fixing the damage I’ve caused…”

“Is that so bad a life?”

“No. No, it isn’t.” Corona smiled and pushed her healing magics into Eve’s ears. The purple alicorn took a breath, stepped back a few paces, closed her eyes, and listened.

There was no pain this time. Just the sound of the night outside.

Crickets. I had forgotten what those sounded like…

~~~

“T-MINUS ONE MINUTE!” Strange shouted from his position floating above the town. He had set up a large perimeter of magic totems around every building and farm he could fit, preparing to teleport all of them from one planet to another. The level of magic he had to use was astounding – far more than existed in the aether at any given time. For the last few hours the totems had been absorbing and storing magic for later use.

Now it was time to use them.

“Death, is everyone accounted for?”

EVERY SOUL IS UNDER MY WATCHFUL GAZE.

“Cosmo, ready?”

Cosmo spread her hooves and wings out. “Ready.”

“Insipid?”

Insipid touched Cosmo just to be sure she had her powers. A small Harmony spark shot out of her horn. She proceeded to take the same stance as Cosmo, facing her. “Like, ready.”

“And lastly myself…” Strange lifted his hands and channeled the magic from the totems to one single point between his palms. He waited for the time to run down to zero. “TEN! NINE! EIGHT! SEVEN! SIX! FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWO! ONE! GO!” He pushed the magic down between Insipid and Cosmo in one swoop.

Insipid and Cosmo pushed as much Harmony energy as they could out of their horns, hitting the magic of Strange and prompting a whirlwind of holy sparks. The magic totems themselves created a domed magic shield around the entire town, which only Strange himself was above. The Harmony power began to convert the entire area within the bubble into pure white light. Strange clasped his hands together and muttered the final incantation.

He did not see the town go anywhere. It was moving at light speed – one moment it was there, glowing brightly, the next it was gone and all that remained was a hole for the pink sea to fill up.

Strange folded his arms and waited to receive word that it had worked. This came in the form of Discord, munching on some popcorn. “Worked like a charm and was quite impressive to look at, too.”

“Are they all fine?”

“Death says a few souls are disconnected, but he’s got them held tight.”

Strange nodded. “Then all we do is hope English isn’t feeling particularly cruel today.”

“Oh, he is,” Discord said, munching on his popcorn. “But Sherlock says he won’t destroy the town.”

“I wonder why…”

Discord shrugged. “Something something cat and mouse, hero and villain.”

“Hmm…” Strange looked up at the sky. He could sense English with his magic, approaching ever nearer. “We should get off this planet.”

“We should.”

Instead of teleporting away, they chose to fly. The planet in question was the core world of the system, a world consisting mostly of different colors of ocean intermingling. It was beautiful. There had been other settlements on the planet – many other settlements – but the Church was the one everyone had been convinced needed to be saved. Maybe that was selfish of them. It probably was.

But that Church was more ka-important than anything else on the planet. So they’d had plenty of reason to pat themselves on the back regardless.

English knew this. English knew they would save one and leave hundreds of others to die. That was the whole point. They needed to feel it. To know they were, and always had been, playing favorites. That playing favorites was the way of the game.

He unleashed a brilliant beam of rainbow colors, boiling off the multicolored oceans of the world before the eyes of Strange and Discord. The vapor billowed off as clouds into space, leaving only a vague cloud as the center of the system.

Lord English spoke. “I AM THE CHURCH.” Then he returned to his Sarcophagus and kept moving – slower this time, so as to give his little watchers time to move.

Cat. And. Mouse.

~~~

Applejack had insisted they stay the night.

It took Eve all of two minutes to cast a sleep spell on herself because of all the noise. It wasn’t painful anymore but it sure was annoying.

She hadn’t bothered to set a wake-up time for herself, so when the sun poured in the open window she didn’t even budge. Corona removed the sleep spell, but didn’t wake Eve up – she’d sleep until she felt rested. Corona stretched her wings and walked out into the hall with a smile on her face.

The smile on her face vanished when she heard Jane shouting.

“No, never mind, this is a bad idea, you’re not going!”

Sunny’s indignant response came. “I’m going. They need me out there. I need to see the world, not farm.”

“Sunny…”

“…Jane, you can make me stay. Just tell me you need me here, and you can keep me here.”

“I… Goddammit, Eve…”

“What’s she have to do with this?”

“Nothing. Something. She says things.” Corona could hear Jane sigh. “…I shouldn’t keep you here.”

Sunny let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks. The core isn’t that far away, once I plot a proper route it’s not going to be too hard to get back and forth. This isn’t goodbye.”

“...I know it isn’t, Sunny. You’ll be back. I just… It’ll be goodbye for a while.”

There was silence for a moment. Eventually, Sunny sighed. “…So, do you think we need to make an announcement, or can everyone hear us through the walls?”

“Everyone can hear you through the walls!” Corea shouted from her and Prism’s room.

“Right…” Jane said, opening the door to their room. Corona was still standing outside, not even trying to hide herself. Jane twitched. “Listen up. Sunny says she wants to go with you. So she’s going. But if you let anything happen to her they’ll never be able to find all the pieces of your corpse.”

Corona’s considered letting that slide and agreeing – but then she decided that wasn’t the right move. She glared. “You listen up. I’m going to take care of her the absolute best I can, but I can’t promise anything. I’m not stupid enough to make promises like that anymore with ka the way it is. But I’m not just going to sit by and let you threaten me.” She took a powerful step forward and pointed a finger at her. “I’m not going to take that.”

Jane was taken aback.

“You don’t just get to threaten people,” Corona said, turning her back. “It’s no-”

Jane lashed out. Corona whirled around and caught the fist. For a moment, they felt each other. There was a connection Corona did not intend to create, but formed between them anyway. They weren’t close enough to see images, but they felt the emotions. Deep, burning anger alongside immense sorrow and regret, all mingled into one.

Jane and Corona recoiled from each other. Both sets of eyes were angled in anger – and wet with tears. They understood, and they weren’t sure what to make of it.

“…How different are we, really?” Corona asked.

“Just… Just go,” Jane said, deflating.

Eve chose this moment to walk out of the room, yawning. “That was an interesting experience… What are you all talking about out here?”

“Leaving,” Corona said, wiping her face. “Sunny’s coming with us.”

“…Really?” Eve said, blinking. “Are you sure?”

Sunny nodded. “Yes. I am. My place is not here, I need to be out mapping everything again.”

“…Ah’ll switch with her,” Jack said, coming out behind Eve. “…Ah’m a little sick of all the action. Ah… Ah think Ah’ll try farmin’.”

Corea jumped out of her room and slung a hoof around Jack. “Welcome to the family.”

“…Hmph.”

“I… I’m coming with you too…” Daniel said, shakily walking to them with his cane. “I… I don’t know why, but I’m convinced you know the way.”

Corona looked at him. “…The way to what?”

“Finish… it. I… I still don’t know what it is. But… I have to. I can’t rest…”

Eve walked over to him and put a hoof on his shoulder. “We’ll help you find it. All of us.”

Prism sighed. “Yeah, yeah you probably will. You’ll probably get a bunch more power while doing it and make the same mistakes again.”

Eve nodded slowly. “Probably.”

“Just keep the worse assholes from getting power, got it?”

“That’s pretty much my job description.”

Prism let out a snort and turned away.

Applejack cleared her throat. “…Breakfast’s on the table for anyone who wants it. Ah think it’ll be a good send-off.”

Everyone but Jane attended the breakfast, even Daniel.

Unlike last night, the overall mood wasn’t awkward and angry. It was that cruel mixture of joyful and depressing. Happy that bridges had been formed, sad that so many were changing places and moving around.

Standard for resolutions.

As everyone was heading to the Skiff, Jane ran up to them. She grabbed Sunny for a moment, making her trail behind the rest of the group.

“Look, Sunny, I’m sorry I was being a-”

Sunny held up a hoof. “I know, Jane. Thank you.” She didn’t need to say what for, they both just knew. The two of them smiled warmly at each other. They turned and walked up to the Skiff together.

In the end, everyone had come to wave goodbye. There were many hugs, kisses, snide remarks, laughs, and grunts. It was a mixed bag, but it was something.

Before Eve closed the entrance to the Skiff on herself, Daniel, Corona, and Sunny, she paused. She leaped out and walked up to Applejack. “…What about us?”

“Nothin’s changed, Eve,” Applejack said. “You’re still you, and Ah’m still me.”

“…Everything about this place was screaming ‘resolutions’. Daniel needs a resolution, your family needed a resolution, Jane needed to be told…”

“Not everythin’ needs to be resolved.” Applejack shook her head. “Evening, we’re mares. We understand each other. That’s all we need.”

“…Are you okay here?”

“Ah am now,” Applejack said. “Ah was thinkin’ what Ah was buildin’ was fallin’ apart… But Ah knew you could help. Make them confront all the stuff they were dealin’ with. Ah wasn’t expectin’ the direct healin’, but Ah’m not complainin’.”

Eve smiled. “I’m glad I could help.”

“It doesn’t make you and me even,” Applejack said.

“Nothing ever will.”

“And that’s perfectly fine.”

Eve nodded. Instead of a hug, she held out her hoof. “Goodbye, Applejack.”

Applejack met her hoof and shook it. “Goodbye, Evening.”

Eve smiled and returned to the Skiff. She closed the entry. “Ready?”

Sunny nodded. “Ready.”

Daniel was barely conscious, but managed a “ready…”

Corona looked up at the sky. “Ready as always…”

The Skiff launched into the sky, leaving the small planet far behind…

~~~

One day, the fleet was flying through space, not a care in the world. They weren’t close to any planets or systems, just traveling closer to the center.

Then the Celestialsapien known as Flep decided he needed to do something. One moment he was on the probe. The next he was not. The next he was back on the Austraeoh’s bridge holding a large box with soft glowing circuitry patterns on it. He dropped the box, where its weight dented the floor. “YOU MUST LOOK AT THIS.”

O’Neill dropped his coffee. “Any reason why?”

Flep made no response. Back in deadlock once again.

“Do we have any idea where he got this thing?”

“Negatory,” Mite responded.

Chem appeared on the bridge, twitching his nose. “Hmm… Well it had to have been somewhere within a few light-seconds.” He scurried onto the box and tapped it. “Looks to be of Xeelee make. Dormant, though.”

“Know how to activate it?”

Chem laughed. “I could probably break in, but we Class 1s didn’t exactly make it obvious to each other how our technology worked. …Or lack thereof, in our case. So your guess is as good as mine.”

Minna facepalmed hard.

“Wow. Future-girl sees the answer and it’s really simple. What is it?”

She reached out a fist and knocked on the edge of the cube. “Hello?”

In an instant the cube activated, projecting blue text into the air.

|> I am Xeelee unit Forward-8,743,293,813,029. I am currently on board the Merodi flagship Austraeoh in the presence of Overhead-General Jack O’Neill, High Commander Minna Belle, Commander Clandestine, and unidentified entities. I extend the appropriate greetings.

“…Greetings,” Mite said.

|> New entity detected. Mite.

O’Neill folded his arms. “So, do you have any idea why a deadlocked Celestialsapien would want us to look at you?

|> He likely interpreted my outer matrix via his perceptions to be important. Upon investigation, he would have discovered that I am a store of vital information, one of billions of Xeelee sent into single pods to record the last moments.

“…Didn’t your civilization fall?”

|> Correct. However, as you know, upon the defeat of the Gallifreyans a few Xeelee were released from their nefarious time traps. Most joined your cause, but a small sector of us returned to build a bunker for the Xeelee. We initially made attempts to seek out the other Class 1 societies to recreate some form of the Seats, but this was met with mockery, disdain, or silence. Desperate for some stability in the insanity, we went to the Flowers. They were willing to talk, but refused to create any bunkers. We assumed it was because they were throwing themselves to the winds of ka. This assumption was not wholly accurate.

“They did something,” Minna said. It wasn’t a question.

|> Their plan was… outlandish, and driven by devotion to the idea of the Tower’s will that we have seen little evidence for. They knew that they had to interfere – it was the only way the outcome wouldn’t end up predictable in one way or another. So they found a person who was doomed to die and prepared them to become the Voice of the Tower. One who can see all the Tower sees, and act as the Tower does, with the express difference of being a character that can be interacted with. This character is responsible for the New World, the Dusting, as well as the Tower’s continued existence. This Emissary is the source of all this.

“…At least now we know who to blame,” O’Neill said.

“You can still blame all of us for fighting the war the way we did,” Chem pointed out.

|> Blame for the war lies with both the Tower and the multiverse’s inability to agree. But this New World is the fault of the Emissary and the Flowers.

Minna put a hand to her chin. “…If this Emissary really caused there to be a Dusting rather than a full fusion… Didn’t that lower the amount of death?”

|> That is true. The death toll has been several orders of magnitude less than a true collapse, and there is still a presence of ka in this New World. But that is not why the Xeelee Remnant tried to destroy the Emissary. If the Emissary was the Tower, there would not be a problem. But the Tower does not have a will, a will had to be created for the Emissary to exist. The Emissary is a character connected more closely to the Tower than any Aware being or Prophet ever has been. With the Emissary’s existence, no longer will the Tower be a goal, a background presence, or simply a means to an end. The Tower will be active. The narrative energy around the Emissary will be more damaging than anything we have ever seen.

|> The Emissary still exists within this New World.

“Can we stop it?” Minna asked.

|> We tried. We were able to muster up a force more than capable of taking out not only the universe the Emissary was in, but also everything related to it. We were expecting the Flowers to try and stop us. We did not expect the Tower to defend its Emissary directly. You are no doubt aware of the occasional ‘glitch’ in the multiverse where a portal you take leads to a random universe?

“Yeah…” O’Neill grunted, having flashbacks of being lost more often than he would have liked...

|> We had no control over our dimensional devices. Every universe we entered was one that multiversal society had never set foot in before. There was never even a battle.

There was silence on the bridge.

|> We realized we couldn’t do anything, so we did what we could – plan to survive. We copied ourselves billions of times, knowing what the Emissary planned to do. When the collapse came, most, but not all of us, were Dusted. The Tower could not throw away such a tantalizing plot thread. So now you have found me, and heard my warning.

“What do we do?” Minna asked.

|> Run. Get as far away from the center of the New World as you can. The ka there will be the strongest it has ever been. The events that will be allowed to unfold will make the games Them held look like child’s play. Do not involve yourselves in the Narrative. Turn away and run and never look back. Live your lives in peace without knowing what is going to happen at the core.

Once again, there was silence.

“…Yeah I really don’t see us doing that,” Chem said, shrugging.

“Send the message to the fleet anyway,” O’Neill said. “Let them make their choice.”

“Yessir,” Clandestine said. “I bet not one of them turns away.”

|> We are all slaves to ka. Because if my warning is not to be heeded, I will join you, and witness the unknowable.

~~~

The Field of Can’-Ka No Rey existed across many universes before the New World. At the center of every one of the pure rose gardens would be an instance of the Dark Tower. Almost without fail, every instance of the Field was treated as a holy, sacred place that was not meant for men to tamper with. Those who tried found themselves disappeared within the doors of the Dark Tower more often than not. And this was in the worlds where the Field was not a constant source of dimensional instability and ka manifestations.

But in the New World, the Field was docile. The roses, though sharper than any physical thing and more red than any red point could be, allowed themselves to be removed from wherever was necessary. As a result, one of the rarest sights in the multiverse came to form in the New World.

Buildings around the Dark Tower.

At first, they were nothing more than gigantic TSAB-make turrets prepared to take out the Crimson King from miles away. Everyone knew this wasn’t enough, so they built more. Turrets, yes, but also walls, shield generators, and magical power stations that would drain ambient magic and store it for later.

All of this needed infrastructure. Easy enough to achieve when one of your allies was Arceus. Even as a weakened deity his power still specialized in creation, and buildings rose out of the ground daily. The roses made way – they always did.

The first people to move in were the collapse-supporting people Nanoha’s group had freed on the first day. At first they were hesitant to live under Nanoha and the shadow of the Tower they had tried to destroy, but the quality of life Nanoha offered was high – as well as a feeling of belonging somewhere. Roland’s presence as a hero who hadn’t been part of either side helped considerably, even though he never gave any speeches beyond “I agree.”

More groups arrived in the city every day – both preservation and collapse. Groups who may have been warring just days before stopped because they had been offered a place to stay. It was amazing what a stable societal structure could do to people’s desire to cause mayhem. There were still many complainers, but they were getting less and less every day as the City grew and grew. Jenny had even managed to restart Dracogen Enterprises as a way to help manage the economy of the growing settlement.

What had started out as an effort to defend the New World from the Crimson King became a civilization. It wasn’t TSAB – Nanoha was one of the only members of the actual TSAB there – and it wasn’t Merodi. It was something new, a conglomeration of people who had fought, people who hadn’t, and people who were just lost.

All were welcome in the shadow of the Earth.

One of the only buildings close to the Dark Tower itself was a tall skyscraper structure that vaguely resembled the Seattle Space Needle. From the highest window, Nanoha looked out at the roses and the ring of buildings beyond that.

“The Crimson King could return at any time and lay this to rubble,” Renee said.

“You won’t let him win.”

“No. But do you really want to take chances on how much suffering I’m going to find amusing? Or what else I might let happen?”

Nanoha knit her brow. “No.” Looking down instead of out, she saw the collection of tents around the skyscraper. She could make out a ring of burning flames that indicated one of the Dark Tower cults were performing a ritual. “I don’t understand how they can still worship you after having met you.”

“Mixture of lots of things. Denial. Anger. Rage. Cognitive dissonance.” Renee shrugged. “Also ka, but that’s the second reason.”

“The second is just as important as the first.”

“Yes and no,” Renee chuckled.

Nanoha sighed. “Why are you even up here?”

“Because I’ve set the camera on us. Need some ‘screentime’ as it were. So many groups doing so many things, I’ve got to balance what’s seen when. We’re at the end here, a little bonus with the actual meat of the chapter. Our meat will come a little later.” She used her hoof to adjust her mane. “You never know when that might happen.”

“I can see the look in your eyes,” Nanoha said.

“I can faaaaaake that!” Renee winked.

Nanoha tightened her grip on Raising Heart. “I am going to be happy when you’re gone.”

“You say that now…” Renee said, ominously backing away from Nanoha.

Roland walked in a second later. “The Emissary was cacklin’ to herself. Anything I should know about?”

Nanoha shrugged. “Something about cameras, faking, and her being amused about destruction.” Nanoha folded her hands and narrowed her eyes. “This City, simply by existing, is in danger.”

“It’s more help than I ever had,” Roland said. “In the end it came down to individuals.”

“It always seems to come down to that…” Nanoha said. “Great wars are fought with millions upon billions of lives, and no matter what happens through the rest of the war, it comes down to a few select individuals placed at particular moments and particular times…”

“So this will mean nothing?”

“If we don’t do it, that would be foolish,” Nanoha said. “But we do it knowing that, in the end, the fortifications will not be what are praised.” She looked into Roland’s eyes. “It’s people like you and me who defend our home.”

“Home?”

Nanoha smiled. “I… I like to think of it as a home. I feel like I belong here. The people may be rowdy, they may be broken, they may hate so much, but they’re people. There’s a lot of life here. Powerful, deep life. It’s definitely a home.”

“Is it more home than your TSAB?”

Nanoha’s smile faded. “…No. But that…” She closed her eyes, biting back tears. “That home cannot come back.”

Roland made no response, silently looking out the window with her. It was like watching the sun set for eternity.

Author's Note

I'm gathering people's favorite quotes from SotS chapters for... something. I'm trying to get one from every chapter. So if anyone has any ideas... You can submit them in the comments, in a PM, in discord, on this survey: ( https://forms.gle/BaeiV3UTFsLAWej68 ), or in the comments on this doc: ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/10E4fCoJyvqF8RWdbKbhla4gbcrS_qYP6grCUbUvhdzs/edit ).

Warning: doc contains quotes from future chapters at the bottom, enter at your own risk.

-GM, master of ice crates.

137 - Never Forget

Pinkie blinked. “I love blinking.”

“NOW IS NOT THE TIME!” Pidge shouted from the cockpit of their pill-shaped vessel. She pulled up, dodging the incoming attacks of white and black sparking creatures.

Pinkie appeared behind Pidge and pulled back on her cheeks to make her smile. “Whaaaat? Come on, enjoy life.”

“I want to continue enjoying life! LATER!” Pidge shook her off, grasping the controls again. In this moment, a white creature fired a zig-zagging bullet that would have hit the ship had Rina not blocked it with a shield of darkness.

“That was close, Pidge!” Rina shouted.

“Yell at Pinkie!”

“Pinkie’s enjoying herself and won’t put you in real danger,” Flutterfree said.

“It sure feels like real danger!”

“It is!” Pinkie agreed, tapping the blindfold hung around her neck. “But you won’t get destroyed because of me.”

“That leaves the possibility open we get destroyed by something else,” Jotaro pointed out.

“Jojo has a point!” Pidge said, veering to the left as a rush of black creatures fired off bolts, every one of them missing. “They’re closing in on us from all sides! I’m running out of escape options!”

“I miss the days we could just portal to another universe and confuse the shit out of them,” Vriska muttered. She took out the infinite-sided die and rolled it between her fingers. “Let’s see…”

“Do you have enough luck?” Flutterfree asked.

“I doubt it, but luck’s never an exact science!” She threw the dice to the ground.

A fire extinguisher appeared and exploded, filling the cockpit with pressurized carbon dioxide.

“VRISKA!” Pidge shouted.

Rev deflected a shot of darkness with her holy shield. “I don’t think we can see well enough t-”

One of the sparks finally got past the shield, hitting the pill-shaped ship right on its engine. The pill entered a nosedive, falling through the disgusting yellow clouds of the world until it hit the side of a spiked, white mountain. The pill bounced off like a ping-pong ball and smashed into a larger, greener mountain.

“Outside time!” Pinkie ordered. Rina and Rev nodded, teleporting everyone out of the pill ship and giving them breathing spells so they could survive the toxic atmosphere. The sparks did not care that they were outside the ship now – they fired their bolts with extreme prejudice. Now that they weren’t moving, Rev and Rina were easily able to create a dual-layered shield around everyone, protecting from attacks from all sides.

“Right, uh, plan?” Pidge asked. “We won’t be able to keep this up forever!”

“Escape is not an option,” Jotaro said, folding his arms together.

“We can’t fight that many,” Flutterfree countered. “…I don’t even know how many there are.”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “I think I know what’s going on here… We have to realize that we aren’t going to be able to beat them or escape! Third option – reason with them!”

“They’re mindless,” Rina pointed out.

“Ah… Then we have to wait to be rescued!”

“Oh, that’s rich, by who?” Vriska asked, folding her arms.

Pinkie pointed up in the sky a second before the Merodi Warship Jarn appeared in the clouds. This particular ship vaguely resembled the Austraeoh, but was significantly smaller and only had three prongs around it. Its spectral rod activated, a burst of rainbow energy pushing all the sparks away.

Indignant, the sparks started attacking the Jarn, but its shields were fully operational and more than enough to take care of some zig-zagging bolt attacks. The Jarn shot out a tether-claw toward the busted pill-ship. Rina and Rev dropped the shield to let it through.

“Everyone hold on for dear life!” Pinkie ordered. She didn’t even have to say it – they were already holding tight. The claw pulled them out of the earth with a sharp jerk, dragging them through the air. A few of the sparks saw them flying by, but the bolts weren’t fast enough to hit the flying wreckage until it was already in the Jarn’s cargo hold.

For a few seconds, they still felt the Jarn shake from outside attacks. Eventually the shakes abated, leaving Pinkie’s Party safe.

“…Wonder who saved us,” Flutterfree mused as she dug through the wreckage of the pill-ship. She eventually found the part that used to be the cockpit and removed the large wooden crate that contained Tornado. She checked it over to make sure it was fine.

Vriska looked around. “Merodi ship, probably preservation, mostly empty… Some of the lights don’t seem to be working…”

The side doors of the cargo hold opened, revealing a set of familiar faces. The leader was a very familiar pink demon-bug holding a red-green staff…

“Mlinx!?” Pinkie blurted, eyes wide.

“Pinkie!? You have eyes!?” Mlinx responded in kind.

Pinkie fluttered her eyes in exaggeration. “Yep! Like what you see? Cause I do!”

Vriska facepalmed. “Geez…”

“So, uh, aren’t you going to try to attack us for being part of the collapse?” Pidge asked. “That’s what everyone else does. Or at least they yell.”

Veila, the albino female demon, shook her head. “We already made peace with that. Gilgamesh here came along on day two as part of the Void. We accepted him without… too much trouble.”

“I blew up the cheese machine,” Gilgamesh said, twirling his halberd. “It was a sticky situation.”

Pinkie giggled. “Nice to see you Gilgy!”

“Likewise, Ponkadonk.”

Mlinx rolled his eyes. “Welcome aboard the Jarn, Pinkie’s Party. And Rev. And…?”

“Rina,” Rina said, smiling awkwardly. “I’m with Rev.”

“You’re with us,” Pinkie said, pulling Rina in and giving her a hoof-noogie. “Got that?”

“Yep… And a headache…”

“How are you faring in this New World, if you don’t mind my asking?” Veila questioned.

Pinkie smiled. “Don’t mind at all! We’re on a quest to the center of the universe so we can finish the job! The Dark Tower still exists, and as long as it does the sacrifice of the multiverse hasn’t been met.”

“I told you it still existed!” Gilgamesh said. “I told you! You all said ‘there’s no way’ but I knew and you just wouldn’t listen! Tsk.”

Veila sighed. “You win, Gilgamesh. Apparently it does exist.”

“We don’t have to bother you with the quest if you don’t want,” Pinkie said.

Mlinx shook his head. “Gilgamesh and I have already talked at length about the Tower. If it still exists, the tragedy cannot be for nothing. I will gladly give you my aid in this.”

“That was easy,” Vriska said.

“…Am I allowed to ask where Nova is?”

Pidge let out a sigh. “Dusted.”

“I’m so sorry…”

“We’ve lost people too,” Flutterfree said, looking at Tornado’s box. “This was Tornado. Ba’al wanted to make her a pointless redshirt. I’m not letting him. I’ll tell you about her sometime.”

“I look forward to it. Now…” Mlinx lowered Siron’s staff and rubbed the back of his head. “I… have another crewmember. You’ve got a history with her.”

“All histories have been forgiven,” Flutterfree said. “The war isn’t happening anymore.”

“This was before the war.”

“…Oh,” Vriska said. “…Flagg?”

“Spirits, no!” Mlinx laughed. “I’m not that stupid. Just… regular stupid. When she comes in you have to promise not to attack her.”

Pinkie cleared her throat. “Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.”

“I haven’t heard a Pinkie Promise in a while,” Flutterfree observed.

“Eh, it’s worth it this time. I trust Mlinx.”

Rev nodded. “Everyone deserves a second chance. …Even Flagg, though I never think he’d put himself in such a position…”

Veila turned around and poked her head out into the ship’s hall. “You can come in now.”

The pegasus that walked in had a powerful strut, crazed dichromatic eyes, and a red striped hat on top of her head. “Hey. Remember me?”

“Oh. Hey Fluttershout,” Pinkie deadpanned. “Wondered where your capture device went.”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Fluttershout dusted off her hoof. “So, just to be clear, I hate you, your guts, and everything you stand for. If it wasn’t the stupidest thing in the world, I would kill all you fuckers in a heartbeat.”

“Gee, we’re all so thankful for your consideration,” Vriska deadpanned.

“Yeah, yeah, let the war of snide remarks begin. Let’s see… Hey, preacher-pony, who are you hiding behind you?”

Rev sweated. “A pony who’s rather… scared of you.”

“Rina? Scared?” Vriska asked. “Since when?”

“Since now,” Flutterfree said, also taking up a defensive position in front of Rina.

Fluttershout narrowed her eyes. She performed a quick jump-movement to the left, so fast Flutterfree and Rev couldn’t block her sight.

Fluttershout saw Rina’s features – a darker version of Twilight… Overly vibrant green eyes…

The Element of Insanity’s eyes twitched. “Wipe that stupid grimace off your face and face me, Brutalight.”

~~~

The Everykid dragged Mattie across Swip’s deck, her little feet scrambling across the metal.

“Why do you do this to me…?” Mattie wailed.

“You can’t say no to something so freakin’ cute,” Swip responded.

“IT’S TRUE!”

The Everykid dragged Mattie the rest of the way to the bridge and pressed her face into one of the main screens.

“…Kid, I can’t see anything when my face is pressed into it. Unfortunately.”

The Everykid rolled her eyes and pulled Mattie’s head back a few inches. Mattie was able to recognize that she was looking at a map of the local systems, including a little yellow indicator of where they were. The Everykid kept jabbing her finger at one planet in particular.

“…You want us to go there?”

The Everykid nodded profusely.

“I would love to do every little thing that face of yours tells me to do, but I don’t think we can just go off course without reason.”

The Everykid made a ‘three, two, one’ gesture with her hand. On cue, Thrackerzod burst into the room. “Something’s trying to communicate with me.”

Mattie raised an eyebrow. “We talkin’ dead lover or tentacled eldritch monstrosity?”

“The latter.”

“And here I thought I was joking...”

Thrackerzod ignored the comment. “It’s something from the Embodiment, I’m sure of it. But it’s not using an eldritch energy… It’s contacting me through the soul directly… I can’t tell which direction it’s in, or even how close we are, just that we’re near. Though in what relative scale I don’t have any idea…”

The Everykid tapped expectantly on the map.

“…Let me guess, you had a version there that let you know something important before you were separated?”

The Everykid nodded in confirmation.

“What’s there?”

The Everykid thought for a moment. Then she closed one of her eyes and lay down on the floor, flailing all her limbs around wildly.

Thrackerzod turned to Mattie. “I don’t speak hat kid.”

“Neither do I, but that’s precious.”

“If you say so. We’re going to that planet.”

“No objections from me,” Mattie said. “Swip?”

“Already charted,” Swip beeped. “It’s actually a lot closer than it looks; the display just isn’t rendering a three-dimensional map. I’ll be able to get a good picture as soon as I adjust my cameras. I… Oh.”

“What is it?” Thrackerzod asked.

“That’s no planet,” Burgerbelle said, ominously.

“…When did you get here?”

“Just in time for ominous one-liners.”

“She’s right,” Swip said, displaying the image onscreen. “That isn’t a planet.” Before them was a planet-sized hunk of flesh, eyes, mouths, and swirling vortexes of teeth. Unnerving purple-red blood seeped out of several gashes in the creature’s surface and occasionally it would twitch unnaturally and roar, not that they could hear it from their location in space.

“…What is that?” Mattie asked.

“…Whatever it is, it appears to be hailing us,” Swip said. “Answering…”

There was no image on the other side of the call – just a voice. “Looks like we got an answer! Isn’t that something? A bunch of Sweeties, a masochistic mistress, a kid of kids, and that jellyfish thing you have in the hold.”

“What are you?” Thrackerzod asked.

“Me? Ohahahahahah! I’m just Tzeentch, piggybacking off this eldritch corpse’s connection signature. And it looks like I found what I was looking for – some fresh defenders!”

“…Defenders?”

“The Emperor of Man has it in his head that he has to kill me, and I’d rather like to go on living, thank you. I’m sure you all understand how killing me would be putting an endangered species even closer to extinction!”

“Enlighten us,” Mattie said with an incredulous eyebrow.

“Sure, sure! Take this behemoth I’m currently resting in. This used to be the great Azathoth, now nothing more than a fleshy mindless corpse! Yes, it’s alive, but trust me, it’s a corpse for him.”

“Azathoth…?” Thrackerzod said in disbelief.

“Yep! Looks like hell, doesn’t he? Oh how the mighty have fallen. See, little unicorn, most of us eldritch creatures didn’t have a physical body to fall back on like you did. I, being the Lord of Change, was fast enough to get myself something proper before the collapse, but virtually all the others just faded out of existence or transformed into fleshy masses like this that couldn’t hold their minds!” He cackled. “We drove so many insane with our nature over the years, now the opposite is true! For most. I’m fine, I wish to reiterate, and I’m appealing to your inner nonviolent nature to keep him from skinning me alive.”

“…All right,” Mattie said. “On one condition.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Admit the collapse didn’t happen exactly as planned.”

Tzeentch was silent.

Mattie smirked evilly. “Come now, having anxiety are we? All you have to say is some simple words and we’ll do our best to protect you. It’s a decidedly unbalanced offer in your favor. Some minor embarrassment for your life. I’d say that’s not only a good trade, that’s an excellent trade. I’ll even throw in some personal ‘fun time’ as a bonus.”

“You’re revolting.”

“You like?”

“…Depends.”

The Everykid pantomimed puking.

“Can we stop with the nonsense and reach a decision?” Swip demanded.

“Yes yes, Tzeentch, just admit it and we can move on.” Mattie twirled one of her whips.

“Fine. Ahem. The collapse did not go exactly as planned. There. Happy?”

Mattie chuckled. “Yes. Happy. Swip, send that recording directly to the Emperor whenever he arrives.”

“…You can’t be serious.”

“I’m taking a very reasonable gamble that if he has a record of you saying that he suddenly won’t feel like killing you, since killing you would mean he didn’t get to rub it in.” Mattie winked.

“And you’d be right!” The face of the Emperor appeared on the screen, jumping into the call. “Here I was planning an all-out attack on the flesh spawn, when it turns out you’ve given me the best fucking present of all time. Tzeentch, how’s it feel?”

“I don’t have to put up with this.”

“You do, actually,” Mattie said. “Regardless, Emperor of Mankind! Glad to see you’re still up and kicking. Let’s arrange a little get together on the corpse of Azathoth. I have a feeling one of my ladies wants to have a look at it.”

“See you there,” the Emperor said, leaving the call.

“I will get you back for this,” Tzeentch promised.

“Hmm. Good luck embarrassing me,” Mattie laughed. “Seriously, my mind’s open, come inside and try to find shame in there.”

Tzeentch made an annoyed eldritch gurgling noise.

“Exactly. As. Planned.” Burgerbelle recited.

Tzeentch hung up.

~~~

The City sent out exploration teams just like Merodi Universalis had. However, these teams rarely went to other planets, they mostly spent their time exploring Nucleon. The central world of the universe was so large it made even red giant stars look small. The surface area alone could hold billions of Earths, and that wasn’t even counting the extensive caverns beneath the surface of Nucleon.

These caves were what the ‘primary team’ of the City was currently exploring. Roland, Jenny, and Aradia marched through a dark cavern several kilometers beneath the surface of Nucleon, trying not to dissolve themselves in acid puddles that Jenny swore kept moving. They all had lights affixed to their clothing, though Jenny carried aloft a large Numenera device called a glowglobe that made most of these useless.

The trek had been very successful so far – they had found a capture device installation, numerous rooms filled with abandoned dragon hoards, and a spaceship. All of this was kept in Jenny’s handy staff of holding. “Never leave home without it!” she would say every time it proved to be exceptionally useful.

“You say that often,” Roland observed as Jenny drained up a puddle of acid that had just dissolved her foot, forcing her to replace the boot again. “Is there a story of the day you forgot it?”

“Do not speak of such horrors,” Jenny said with a shiver. “The Night of the Forgotten Staff of Holding was one filled with danger, death, drama, love, and a horrible tragedy.”

Aradia chuckled.

“The love wasn’t for me, it was for one of my companions. Who got her head cut off. …I think? Maybe that was me.” She hit herself in the head. “Darnit, stupid memory…”

“Why do you not increase your mind?” Roland wondered. “I know it is possible, others do not have the memory problems you do.”

“Eh, I guess it could be fixed. Give myself endless memories. But one of the cool things about Jenny of the Red Gloves is that she’s never consistent from era to era. If you look back you might find one of me that was the bad guy!”

“This doesn’t concern you?”

“Live in the moment,” Jenny said, skipping down the cavernous tunnel. “It’s not really possible to know the best way of living your life, so why not let yourself mix it up every now and then? Don’t have to worry about finding some sort of meaning or truth, you just live. I am a free spirit.”

“A force of chaos,” Aradia countered.

“Ah! You wound me so.”

Aradia rolled her eyes and chuckled. “I just think it’s worth your time to give things some thought. Maybe it would be good to get your mind adjusted to store more memories.”

“Nah. Then I wouldn’t be Jenny. Or, well, I would, but I wouldn’t be what makes Jenny so interesting.”

“You may change your mind in another life,” Roland observed.

Jenny shrugged. “I’m well over a billion years old and none of my past selves decided to do it, even though some were really powerful, so…” She winked and grinned. “I’ll take my chances!”

A drop of acid fell from the ceiling and dissolved her down to the bone. She regenerated of course, but she wasn’t happy. She took another set of clothes out from the Staff of Holding and put them on. “I should have invested in acid-proof clothes.”

“You could invest in paying closer attention instead,” Aradia pointed out. “They aren’t hard to dodge.”

“She is not one for caution,” Roland observed. “Millions of lifetimes without a need to fear death…”

“Yeah, I am a bit careless,” Jenny admitted. “But it’s just so fuAAAAUUUUGGGHHHH!”

Aradia rolled her eyes, looking down the hole Jenny had just fallen down. “Well. Should we go after her?”

Roland readied his revolver and nodded. Aradia picked him up and used her wings to carry him down, deeper into the caverns. They were soon able to make out a point of natural light at the bottom. They were not surprised – they had found several large, empty expanses cut out of Nucleon’s crust before, most with some sort of light source.

As it turned out, this one was different to all those others. This one wasn’t some sort of wilderness – it was a city. A bright city of white buildings, magitechnical conduits, and thousands of purple ponies scrambling around.

Aradia gasped. “Is it really?”

A velociraptor flew through the air and splatted against the ceiling like a fly on a bug zapper. A tremendously muscular man with chest hair in the shape of Australia leapt up, grabbed the velociraptor, winked at Roland and Aradia, and fell back to the ground.

Roland raised an eyebrow. “This is a good find.”

“You have no idea…” Aradia took them down to the ground, where Saxton Hale and Jenny were waiting for them, amused grins on their faces. Araida rolled her eyes. “A dinosaur toss just for us? You shouldn’t have.”

Saxton Hale laughed. “She’s a smart one, this lass!”

Jenny nodded. “That was still pretty awesome. So, team! I bet you’re glad I fell down that hole, huh?”

Roland nodded. “I still do not understand why.”

“This is the Sparkle Census!” Saxton Hale announced, holding out his hand. “Nearly completely preserved within this New World!”

“Yeah, well we’re from the surface,” Jenny said, folding her arms.

“I’ll believe it when I see it, Jenny.”

“I think we can take her word for it.” The grandiose form of the Grand Secretariat walked up to the visitors, Princess Luna on one side of her, Overhead Jingle of Aid on the other. “I expect they have much more to tell us about this New World as well.”

“Sit down and buckle up!” Jenny said, dusting her hands together. “It’s storytime!”

~~~

Fluttershout decided screaming would be a dumb move, so she tackled Rina instead, clobbering her across the face. Rina reacted with a magicshield. “BACK OFF!”

“No,” Fluttershout said, vibrating her front hoof with intention to break the shield.

She did not get very far at all. Star Platinum grabbed her by the neck and smashed her into the ground, holding her there.

“Jotaro!” Pinkie chided.

“You pinkie promised, I didn’t,” Jotaro said. “Mlinx, you aren’t upset for me defending her?”

“…Not particularly, no,” Mlinx admitted, walking up to Fluttershout. “Am I going to have to restrain you again?”

“You fucking morons, you hate Brutalight! Kill her!”

“I’m not Brutalight!” Rina shouted.

“YEAH RIGHT!”

“I. Am. Rina,” Rina emphasized. “Brutalight died in the temporal trap.”

“Wait… Fluttershout’s right!?” Vriska blurted.

Rina looked to Vriska in a panic. She turned to Rev, pleading for help. All Rev did was slowly nod.

Taking a deep breath, Rina reached into her eye and popped out a green contact, revealing her real purple eye beneath. “…She’s right.” She popped the contact back in. “But that’s not who I am anymore.”

Vriska ground her teeth. “I’m not sure I care…”

“Listen to what she has to say,” Flutterfree pleaded.

“Do you know everyone’s secrets or something?” Vriska asked.

“…I might?” Flutterfree said with a shrug.

“She doesn’t know mine!” Gilgamesh blurted.

“Don’t insert yourself into their conversation,” Veila chided. Gilgamesh’s only response to this was a disgruntled grumble.

Vriska backed a few steps away from Rina. “All right. I’ll listen. You better start talking.”

Rina took a breath. “…Back then… she was trapped in a trap by the Gallifreyans, sprung on an unsuspecting Xeelee prison transport that no one would miss. In that box, she could think, but she couldn’t do anything. While her friends dwelled on their rage, on their hate… she dwelled on the last conversation she’d had with Evening. About the fate of everything. About ultimate meaning. About what lies beyond…” She paused. “She decided that there must be something more. She decided she hated the horrors were inside her. This took… Several years.

“When the Gallifreyans fell and the temporal traps broke, all of the Elements of Insanity were released. When she emerged, she tried to tell her friends what she had found. They ignored her and wanted to join in on the carnage of the war around them. She gave in to what she was, for a time… the need was still strong, the Insanity part of her… but she knew now. The time had changed her. She couldn’t go on like this.”

“So she turned on her friends!” Fluttershout interjected. “Betrayed them, tried to force them to be who they weren’t, all the while taking the impulses out on us!”

Rina winced. “I… she didn’t have the pills then. The… the urge was too much. So she left… and died. Like a ghost, she stumbled until she found life.” Rina turned to Rev. “She washed up on your doorstep. And the next day, I came out.”

“…You can’t just say that was a different person who did those things, you know,” Rev said.

“She was me, but she also wasn’t me,” Rina said, looking blankly into space. “I… she…” Rina shook her head. “I know what I did. I know I was sick. The time with my own thoughts allowed me to see my own insanity for what it was. So I came to get better. Rev looked after me, gave me medication… Flutterfree too. And now here I am.” She ruffled her wings. “Not B-Br- not her, but Rina. I am Rina.”

Pinkie put a hoof around Rina. “Hey, we’ve been adventuring with you the last few weeks. You may be angry and have a cruel streak, but I know you’re not evil.”

“Idiots! The Insanity is incurable!” Fluttershout blurted.

Rina turned to Fluttershout and nodded. “You’re right. It’s incurable. Even with the pills, it has to be fought, and a constant effort has to be made. There are moments… Moments it has come through. Strong moments. But… I haven’t given in since the war ended. She – I told you it was possible to do. Seeing that it can work… will you believe me now?”

“You’re just a drugged-up puppet!” Fluttershout shrieked.

“She’s our friend,” Flutterfree said. “…Right?”

Jotaro nodded curtly. Pidge just shrugged. “I don’t see why not. I never had to deal with Brutalight, so I don’t really know.”

Vriska narrowed her eyes. “…Not sure I trust this, but I at least agree that you aren’t evil. You might still be a fucking bitch though.”

“Takes one to know one,” Rina chimed. “Agh, sorry, that just came out!”

Vriska facepalmed.

“…You people and your friendship…” Fluttershout said with distaste. “It’s disgusting.”

“We had friendship, once,” Rina said, walking up to the pegasus. “We could have it again.”

“You betrayed us!”

“Yes. I did. I’m sorry for tormenting you in that way. I’m not sorry for leaving. You can just fucking deal with that, it was the right decision.”

“You’re right. You’re not even the same pony.”

“That’s a great thing.”

Fluttershout ground her teeth. “You’ve done the one thing we agreed never to do. We’d never rewrite ourselves.”

“Pills aren’t mind control. …Remember Applepills?”

“Dead, just like all the others.”

“But you accepted her.”

“You’ve forgotten your own words! Do you remember what Insanity is!?”

“Yes. I do. And I lost the part of it that let me march on without questioning.”

Fluttershout growled. “That’s it, I’m done, checking out. Mlinx, drop me off on the nearest planet, I don’t care if I starve or whatever, I’m not sticking around with this fucking traitorous bitch.”

Rina bit back tears. “If… If that’s what you want.”

“What I want is to go on another murdering spree but I doubt I’ll survive that, huh?”

“No. No you wouldn’t.”

“So fuck it, get me off this crazy train.”

~~~

Thrackerzod stood on the surface of Azathoth’s corpse. She was standing near the edge of one of the eyes, the ocular organ serving as a shimmering mountain-like structure on the horizon. The ‘skin’ she walked on was riddled with tiny teeth, bones, shadowy rocks, and blood of all colors.

Thrackerzod dipped her hoof in one of the pools of purple blood, examining it closely.

“…Find what you’re looking for?” Nettle asked.

“I’m not looking for anything,” Thrackerzod answered, shaking the blood off her hoof. “I just wanted to see my old master.”

“I thought that was what you were supposed to say in situations like this.”

The third and final member of the group, Everykid, nodded at this.

Nettle looked bewildered. “I’m supposed to? Then…”

“It’s an expression,” Thrackerzod said. “The ‘something’ is generally not meant to be a physical object, but some sort of closure. I suppose in a distorted, creepy way that is what I’m looking for.” She stamped a hoof on the fleshy ground. “I wish he was completely destroyed. That every last little bit of him was gone from existence. I don’t care that this is more suffering for him, he was Azathoth, and by Azathoth’s oiled suckers he needs to stop existing.”

The Everykid raised an incredulous eyebrow.

“Perhaps I should not swear by him when he is the topic of the sentence.”

“Probably not,” Nettle admitted. “…Think we can kill him the rest of the way?”

“Not easily,” Thrackerzod said. “This body is dense and planet-sized. We’d need a planet buster, and the Emperor doesn’t have an Exterminatus on him that I’m aware of.”

“Hmm…”

“It is of at least some comfort that I know he will not be using his nature to harm anyone else ever again.” Thrackerzod turned to the Everykid. “Thank you for showing us this.”

The Everykid curtsied and beamed.

“…Why everyone finds you endearing I’ll never know.”

Nettle blinked. “You can identify cuteness, right?”

Thrackerzod nodded. “It’s a biological imperative to help children. Focused a lot around big eyes and heads. I just will never know the appreciation of it.”

“Do you know beauty?”

Thrackerzod pondered this. “Yes. Relational beauty for sure, because that is a beauty that can be directly experienced through emotion given enough time and exposure. But visual beauty? Art?” Thrackerzod looked into the distance. “I find things like this semi-eldritch landscape of torture and torment beautiful. Does that answer your question?”

“I’m not sure.” Nettle put a hand to her eyes and looked into the distance. “I’m honestly not sure why I’m asking.”

“Probably looking for some meaning in your new form.”

“I’ve decided it doesn’t matter that much,” Nettle said. “What form I am, how much I see… I’m still me regardless. I’ll decide what matters at any given time. I hung onto the past for too long…” She furrowed her brow. “Looking back from my view now, I was pretty screwed up. But I know my past self would think I was screwed up, abandoning my heritage like this.” She tapped her fingers together. “I don’t get it, I think.”

“Welcome to life. It’s always been this way, you just didn’t notice it before.”

“…What you just said doesn’t make any sense.”

Thrackerzod rolled her eyes. “Of course…” She turned to Nettle. “…Why were you so devoted to your heritage? You never met any Downstreamers.”

Nettle nodded slowly. “Saved… but also created. I didn’t really exist until my people had fallen. But I always felt like part of them, an extension. I always knew I was ‘programmed’ that way, but I never really cared about it. Still don’t really. Just decided not to do anything with it.”

“So only because you had to.”

“…No, I wasn’t like you. I had the freedom. I just… I refused to reproduce myself. I refused to repopulate the world with Downstreamers; I liked being the only one. I was unique. I had the power.” She looked at her hands and flexed them. “Now that I don’t, I guess I just let that go.”

“Hmm,” Thrackerzod said. “Kid, you’ve got the experiences of so many beings in the back of your head, what’s your take on this?”

The Everykid put her hands to the side and made them explode outward.

“…Helpful.” Thrackerzod kicked the ground again. “Nothing here at all for us. We should get back to Swip before people start tearing off each other’s heads.”

“I’d kind of like to see that…” Nettle admitted.

“We’re going to need to have a talk about ethics and morality.”

~~~

“…And that’s the story of the City so far,” Nanoha said, wrapping up the story she was giving to the leaders of the Sparkle Census... the unlikely duo of Princess Luna and Saxton Hale. To Nanoha’s side was Arceus, Empress ‘Empy’ Twilight of the Void, and Renee. Renee invited herself to virtually every meeting and Nanoha never stopped her. She had been suspiciously quiet and well-behaved that day.

“I have to say, I’m impressed,” Luna said, looking from Nanoha to the Empress. “It’s been just under a month and you’ve gotten the two sides to agree with each other.”

“It’s more of a truce than anything,” Nanoha admitted. “While I’m pretty sure I have all the leaders on board, the people are only behaving for two reasons. One, the threat of the Crimson King. Two, living in a City is a lot better than trying to live off the land of an alien world.”

“Three, I’m here,” Renee said, looking over the tops of some shades. “No small number of them feel the need to worship me.”

“And kill you,” Arceus added.

“Wouldn’t you know it, assassination attempts are down 100% from last week. I wonder why…” She mockingly tapped her chin.

Luna gave Renee a curious look. “…Yes… You. I have many questions and concerns about you, Emissary, but they will have to wait.”

“You’ll get your chance,” Renee said with a wink.

“What is your story, if you don’t mind me asking?” the Empress inquired.

“Well…” Luna started.

“IT ALL BEGAN one day when I was givin’ one o’ those Mechas a good pummelin’ on Esefem!” Saxton Hale interrupted. “Then all of a sudden, BAM, everythin’ just smashed together into one big universe, and I was stuck in a cave! And I went ‘roight, I’ve gotta figure out what to do here!’ So I take my Red and Blu boys and we gather everyone up we can and we start shooting our way out of the caverns!”

“They eventually found their way to the Sparkle Census,” Luna said, taking over. “Myself and Overhead Jingle were there, discussing how to best maximize the use of the Sparkle Census’ large amount of space and dimensional connections. We did not get far, because the last battle began in the middle of the talks. The Sparkle Census sent out the alarm to any civilians to begin filling up the largest bunker in Merodi Universalis. Soon virtually every square meter of the Sparkle Census was full. Mostly with Twilights, but there were several others. As it turned out the dimensional spells on the bunker did nothing to counteract the Dusting effect, but because we were all in the same place more than enough remained after the event to continue with life. We had just achieved some form of stability when Hale and his… mercenaries charged in.”

“She wanted to say gun-toting imbeciles,” Renee offered.

Saxton Hale laughed. “You got quite the mind on ya! So yeah, there we were, chargin’ into the Census and we hit this giant wall of magic made by the very Luna you see before you! Now, not one to be outmaneuvered by the Princess, I punched right through the barrier and made very sure everyone knew I was there!”

“He beat his chest like a gorilla,” Luna said.

“The best way! However, I had enough of my wits about me to tell my men to stand down since these purple horses were no enemy of ours, they were our old allies!”

“I had to shout at you!”

“Not how I remember it!”

“You had to consider it for several minutes!”

“Sounds like a tense situation!”

Luna facehooved. “Point is, we managed not to get into a firefight and adapted Hale’s forces into our own. Then we started exploring the caverns. We never got very far. The Sparkle Census’ technology was hit particularly hard by the new physics and it took a lot longer than I would have liked to get any semblance of magic back.”

“But you succeeded, and that’s what matters,” Nanoha said with a smile. “And then we found you.”

Luna nodded. “We would be honored to be part of your project. Not only because you’re trying to save the universe, but for what it means. Getting everyone to band together again.”

Nanoha smiled. “Thank you. We’ll build a transport station directly from the Census to here, so you won’t have to deal with moving. At least not all at once. We could really use the extra hands, I admit.”

Saxton Hale grinned. “This Crimson King is gonna get Hale’d so hard he’ll die before it happens!”

Nanoha stifled a chuckle. “I would be elated if all it took was one punch.”

“Haven’t found Saitama?” Luna asked.

Nanoha shook her head. “No. And I’m not sure I want to. Who knows what an attack like that would do to a being like him?”

Saxton Hale laughed. “My punches are better anyway. They live long enough to hear you beat them to death!”

Nanoha smirked. Normally she would be concerned by such brutish violence, but she only found it amusing at the moment.

Not to mention slightly comforting. They needed warriors.

~~~

The Jarn entered the atmosphere of the closest life-sustaining world – which turned out to be a very dusty planet with whipping winds. Fluttershout didn’t care, she wanted to be set down.

So she was. Dropped off in the middle of the sky unceremoniously. She flew out into the dusty wind, keeping her eyes squinted at an angle so her eyelashes would keep the dust from burning. She angled her wings against the wind and corkscrewed downward until she gently landed on a tree half-buried in brown dust.

There was little light shining on this world, but it was warm anyway. The leaves were pure black, likely absorbing heat rather than light. She couldn’t see much further than an inch for the life of her, but she was Fluttershout and used sound to see more than a meter ahead.

She let out a screech – finding no signs of civilization nearby. The wind made it difficult to sense very far out, but it was still a little disheartening.

I’m not leaving this planet until I’m sure they’ve gone, Fluttershout thought to herself. She began moving around, checking out everything she could. She found a craggy cliff face inside of which several dozen furry creatures were dwelling. With one shout she killed every last one – food enough to last her a while.

She sat at the base of the cliff face, searching around until she found a suitable cave. It was outrageously dusty, but it kept the wind out. She was able to vibrate some wood to create a small fire and cook the meat.

Fluttershout may have been crazy, but she wasn’t going to eat raw meat if she could help it.

She munched and let out a sigh. She needed something more substantial to torture than just simple rodents. It wasn’t the same.

…She hated being alone.

“At least you’re still you,” she muttered to herself. “But you’re a combination of two things! Quiet, you’re neither of those. But you’re both of them. You’re not both of them and changing again would not bring either of them back, it’d destroy the you now! You’re shouty.”

As if she realized how ridiculous she was being, Fluttershout fell silent. She waved her hoof over the fire, finding the heat to not be all that thrilling. She groaned, laying on her back.

Then Rina was there. “Hello, Fluttershout.”

“Die,” Fluttershout said. She opened her mouth wide and unleashed a shrill pitch designed to blow brains out.

Rina tapped her head. “Soundproof enchantment. Remember when you told me to make it so you could have more freedom shouting?”

“There’s a lot more than brain-blowing I can do,” Fluttershout seethed.

“I know. But you’re starting to feel it. You need someone to talk to.”

“Not you. I see that necklace you’re wearing.”

Rina cocked her head. “Then why are you talking to me instead of fighting me relentlessly?”

To answer Fluttershout unleashed a sound pulse that tossed Rina outside, into the dust. Rina retaliated with a magic box, trapping Fluttershout. “Right, so, you’re lonely, going crazy, a-”

Fluttershout ripped open the box with a sonic burst, tackling Rina. Rina flash-teleported herself into the air. “-going crazy, and I have a sol-”

Fluttershout shot into the air, punching Rina in the stomach with a vibrating hoof. Then she let out another burst, tossing the dark alicorn into the edge of the cliff.

“LET ME FUCKING FINISH!”

“No,” Fluttershout deadpanned. She directed her attack at the ground this time, creating a seismic wave that cracked the ground.

Rina slammed her to the ground with her telekinesis, knocking the wind out of her. “I HAVE A SOLUTION!” She threw a bottle of pills at Fluttershout’s face. “Just take them, see what happens! They’re completely temporary! You can decide if it’s better!”

“I don’t want it to be better!” Fluttershout screamed, every word pushing Rina back. “I won’t have the freedom to do whatever I want! I will have to care about what’s good and what’s evil and worry about what other people think about what I fucking do! Does that sound like a life to you!?”

“I have that life! It’s better!” Rina shouted.

“Of course you’d think that! You’ve already lost it! Insanity is a gift, Brutalight! It means we don’t have to be constrained by foolish mental inhibitions!”

“…My name is Rina!” She grabbed the pills in her telekinesis and removed them from the bottle. “And you’re going to take these.”

Fluttershout looked at the pills flying at her in fear. She unleashed a wave of sound to protect herself from them, but Rina pushed some extra magic into them. Fluttershout clenched her teeth – but she could not close her nose. The pills forced themselves in, making Fluttershout gag.

“There. Give it two hours,” Rina said, dusting off her hooves. “You’ll feel a lot b-”

Fluttershout started screeching again. Rina sighed. “Am I really going to have to keep you down for that long? Fluttershout, you lost, just give it up!”

Fluttershout didn’t stop screaming – but she didn’t focus another attack at Rina either. Is she just trying to annoy me?

The cliff face cracked, unleashing a rockslide.

Rina paled. “No…”

Fluttershout stopped screaming. “Bye, idiot.”

The largest boulder fell square onto Fluttershout, crushing her in an instant. The rest of the rockslide quickly buried it, leaving no doubt as to what had happened.

Rina stared blankly ahead. Then she took in a breath and screamed. “I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY! I DIDN’T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN! I SHOULD HAVE ASKED, I SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT, I SHOULD HAVE LISTENED. I...” She bowed her head to the ground and let out a scream. “I wanted to save her…”

She felt a hoof on her shoulder. She looked up to see Rev standing there, smiling warmly, a slight glow around her face keeping the dust out of her eyes.

Rina sniffed. “…She killed herself. She wanted to die instead of see what there was…”

“Fear makes people do desperate things,” Rev said, closing her eyes solemnly.

Rina nodded slowly. “…T… Take me back to the ship.”

Rev held Rina close. “They’ll be up there. Your friends.”

“…Not all of them…”

“No. No one gets to run the maze of life without a loss.” She placed a hoof over Rina and whispered a quick prayer before signaling for the ship to pick them up.

Rina was dusty, covered in mud, and scraped in multiple places. This, coupled with her haunted eyes, made her look like a wild animal ready to snap at anyone who dared try to touch her.

Pinkie didn’t care, she lifted her up in a big squeeze. “Rina… It’s your turn to be part of the sappy cry hug.”

Rina had no idea why this made her start laughing. Nor at what point the laughter turned to tears. Or the screams. Or the laughter again.

I’m not okay. I’ve never been okay. It’ll never be gone. The part of me that screams…

She opened her eyes and saw everyone standing there. This made her smile, then frown, then smile again. Then she decided she didn’t know what expression to make and just wanted to lie down. They let her.

They know. They know it’s here. They don’t care. Have they really been through so much that this is a cakewalk for them?

The day was a blur to her. People talked to her, she responded, but she didn’t remember what she said. Things were blurry. At some point Rev came in and made sure she was taking her pills. There was something about finding plenty more supplies in the medical bay?

What is insanity, anyway? Are we all insane, or is choosing to be sane the real insanity? Does it work both ways? Fluttershout thought so… But she wasn’t willing to test that.

Everything snapped into focus. She was sitting on a bed in the Jarn and staring at a screen. A documentary was on. Did I put that on?

“Guess I’m the lucky one to get you when you snap back,” Vriska said, drawing Rina’s attention to her. The troll was sitting in a chair, a handheld video game lying incomplete on her lap. “Sup?”

“I… What?”

“You sure you’re not still stuck in your own head?”

“Y-yeah, I’m sure. I was stuck in my head?”

“Two days, didn’t have that little spark in your eyes. Flutterfree was worried sick.”

Rina let out a soft laugh. “Of course she was… What else would she be?”

Vriska shrugged. “Well, I’m here, so I’ve got something to tell you. What you experienced? It’s rough. I’ve seen some rough things in my time, but not that. Definitely not that.” She put her hands together and frowned. “…I expected you to just blow it off like nothing. You didn’t. Maybe there really is something in you that’s different.”

Rina nodded. “I’m not Brutalight.”

“I think I believe that, now.” She stood up and stretched. “I’m sure everyone else wants to see you. Think you can walk?”

Rina nodded, getting out of the bed and testing out her hooves. “…Will there be a party?”

“Pinkie’s on board. What do you expect?”

“Nothing less.”

~~~

The Emperor had an Imperial Warship under his command. All of its crew had been dusted. So he replaced it. The entire crew.

With Aradias.

Thousands of red-robed Maids of Time ran through the halls of the Emperor’s ship, a sea of red that kept the behemoth of technology operating at peak capacity every second of every day. They moved around the halls with waves of distorted time, talking cheerfully to each other at all times.

Mattie and Burgerbelle watched this from a high up balcony.

“…This is decidedly impressive,” Mattie admitted.

“Where did you get them all!?” Burgerbelle asked.

The Emperor chuckled, pressing his golden-armored hands on the railing. “Apparently, the Aradias realized what was happening slightly before most every other fuckwit in the multiverse. So this particular group of Aradias from both sides started time-duplicating themselves by the million in a universe with exceptionally slow time-progression. Metatime eventually caught up with them and dusted most, but at that point they could have populated an entire planet with ease. I found them, put them on my ship, and that’s that. I never have to worry about repairs being late again.”

“They can’t time travel, right?”

The Emperor shook his head. “Just distortion. Helps them get things done really quick though. Infinitely better than techpriests. Or marines. Or humans at all.”

Tzeentch made himself known. “I told you humans were worthless!” His actual form was roughly the size of the emperor and completely amorphous, a bit like a changeling. He currently occupied his preferred headless bony and toothy humanoid form that had two interweaving tentacles coming out of his back. “Took you eons to figure that one out!”

“And it took you eons to realize your plans aren’t fucking genius, foul beast.”

“I was under duress!”

“I know. Exactly. As. Planned.”

“GEIAOHVUOEWYAK.”

Burgerbelle spoke up. “This is a lot of Aradias. You could say this is an army of Aradias. An… Ararmy? Huh? Anyone?”

“…That’s absolutely fuck-tastically asininely brilliant,” the Emperor said. “Let me go put that on posters real quick. ‘Sign up for the Ararmy, it’s great, we like the color red and ghosts’.”

Burgerbelle pulled out a mechanical device that went ‘ding!’. “Wow. Your sarcasm levels are off the charts.”

“But are there really charts for things such as sarcasm, when you really can’t be sure if you’ve defined them at all? Such things are but words. You can always identify sarcasm with the inflection of a voice, but what if you were asked to define sarcasm through the way it sounds? You might get patronized instead.”

Burgerbelle rolled her eyes. “Grammar. Fun. Anyway the point of the Ararmy comment-”

“We are not calling them that,” the Emperor stated.

“-was to point out we have an army. Like, a pretty big army. We could do stuff with this army.”

“Like…?” Mattie asked.

Burgerbelle shrugged. “I don’t know. But we’re being given it, so I think we’re probably going to find some use for an army of time-bending ninjas.”

“Have any use for an army of arcane demons? Because I’ve got that!”

“…You do?” the Emperor asked.

“Of course I do! Why wouldn’t I?”

“Then why did you not face me in direct combat!?”

“Because then we wouldn’t be working together! And let me tell you, these days it’s much more chaotic to bring foes together than to just keep having them bash at each others’ heads all day long. Plus, it’s not like I’m part of the war anymore, I can feel free to change and not care about change! I can become the metachanger of changing through the act of non-change!”

Everyone stared blankly at him.

“The point is this entire thing went Exactly. As. Planned.”

“Even the part where you said it didn’t?” Burgerbelle asked.

“…You need to teach your girls when to be quiet.”

“I prefer the loud screams,” Mattie answered.

The Emperor cocked his head. “You two are perfect for each other.”

“That’s it, we’re settling this little dispute wi-”

“A CHILDREN’S CARD GAME!” Burgerbelle shouted, pulling out a deck of cards and grinning wildly. “TZEENTCH, ex-Chaos god of change! I challenge you to a duel.”

“…This should be interesting. Challenge accepted, mortal.”

Tzeentch then proceeded to lose. Badly.

~~~

Roland, Jenny, Aradia, and Nanoha stood on at the observation window of their skyscraper once again. The City had expanded inward considerably – no longer was it mostly just a wall of defenses ringing the field of Can’-Ka No Rey, but a dense ring of buildings around a small section of rose garden surrounding the base of the Dark Tower.

Nanoha’s observation skyscraper was within the rose garden, but not much else was. They had decided to keep some of the field of Can’-Ka No Rey undeveloped so the power of the roses could remain pure. It didn’t look like much compared to the size of the city, but it was still several square kilometers of space.

They could see the recently-completed teleportation center from their vantage point, a large cylindrical building constantly glowing with white energy. People came and went from this portal all the time, going to other settlements like the Sparkle Census. The buildings around the teleportation center were mostly Sparkle Census in design (which meant a lot of libraries) since they were the first settlement outside the City to connect to it.

Many others had connected since then. A Paratimer city, a lost TSAB colony, a Void seclusion, even a Starcross Society fortress. They had also found civilizations Nanoha had never even known existed in the multiverse. Everyone was hurt by the dusting and was looking for something to be part of again.

“The irony is the Crimson King is the reason we’re working together,” Aradia observed. “If we didn’t decide to build this city, this wouldn’t be happening.”

“And it’s not stable,” Nanoha said, frowning. “It grows and grows and grows – and when the Crimson King is defeated, the destruction he has left will ignite the explosives barely buried beneath everyone’s exterior self.” She sighed. “I just fear the devastation that will come after.”

“Maybe he won’t attack for a long time?” Jenny suggested. “He has to find what he needs. Could be anywhere in the universe.”

“He knows where it is,” Roland said, twirling his gun.

“How do you know?” Jenny demanded.

“The Emissary smirked when you said those words.”

Jenny whirled around and pointed an accusing finger at Renee. “Stop being so coy!”

“If you insist. He knows exactly what he needs, where it is, and he is close to it right now.” Renee shrugged. “You don’t have much time left. Hope you feel you’re prepared!”

“You know I don’t,” Nanoha said, her grip on Raising Heart tightening. “I know he won’t win. But I fear what comes after.”

“As you should,” Renee said. “Oh, and in the words of a little gremlin Aradia should know about, there’s a few ‘shitty twists’ along the way.”

Aradia groaned. “How bad?”

“If you gave me a list of options to choose from I’d say ‘all of the above’.”

“In other words, every kind of twist,” Roland said, not taking his gaze off the window.

“Smart gunslinger.”

Roland had little to no desire to continue the conversation.

Renee pouted. “Spoilsport.”

“Are you feeling generous enough to give us some advice?” Aradia asked.

“I suppose. I am the Element of Generosity after all! Oh wait, that broke,” she cackled. “Let me put it this way. Everyone’s going to start arriving on Nucleon soon. Everything that you’ve experienced over the course of the last month is going to come to a head in more ways than you realize. Ka will explode around this City, this Tower, the center of Everything. The last battle will take place under the Shadow of the Earth.” Renee held her hooves up high. “And it will test everything.”

Jenny cocked her head. “That’s not very helpful.”

“Dear, I know that. Screw that head of yours on better next time, hmm? You’ll need it.”

~~~

The Crimson King waited on the surface of Nucleon, far from the base of the Dark Tower. He stood in the shadow of a tree larger than many moons. It currently thought it was autumn on Nucleon, so the leaves the size of lakes were drifting to the ground.

Any time one got close to the Crimson King he would unceremoniously reduce it to dead black dust. Around him, the ant-creatures who occupied this part of Nucleon screamed as their life-giving leaves were taken from them, dooming them to starve over the course of the next few days.

Normally, he would be taking sadistic pleasure in the suffering of the creatures. Today, however, he wasn’t even aware they were screaming – the bulk of his concentration was elsewhere. For there was a small group of heroes traveling toward Nucleon…

And they had what he needed.

Any number of the individuals within the group should have noticed the Eye of the Crimson King watching them, no matter how much his impossible eldritch nature struggled to keep it hidden. However, he had a ‘servant’ within the group, one who could obfuscate the senses of the others with them none the wiser. Randall Flagg, Legion, assisted the Crimson King in his observations, playing them all like little strung-up bells.

He could see them all. Their leader, the Rogue of Void, a pathetic girl who thought her nature was to be unseen. She knew nothing of Unseen, she was just a pale reflection of what Unseen truly meant. She had confidence and intelligence, but would easily bow to him.

There was a slightly larger concern in the artist. His power to turn others into books would be useless against the Crimson King, but his other power, that of the Prophet, could prove to be difficult. The Crimson King had tried many times to kill Stephen King, and all had failed. He considered himself lucky that the primary Prophet of this story was already long dead… But he would not be fooled into underestimating a secondary Prophet again. He had been nearly completely erased from existence last time.

The yellow pegasus and the machine were of almost no concern to him. She was but a political figure with minor importance, and the machine was a philosopher. If they were approaching an area of Nucleon with technology, the intelligence would have been a concern, but there was nothing the Crimson King needed to be worried about there.

The girl of ka… She was the biggest direct problem. The Crimson King’s character file would be inaccessible, but she could access those of her allies and of everything in the scenery. She could create. But she couldn’t create eldritch – she was bound by the rules of the New Word – so he had an edge. The only issue was he doubted he could kill her easily as he was. But that could be remedied at a later time if she survived the encounter.

Lastly, there was me. Twilence. The one he only looked at out of the corner of his eye, because even with Flagg I had a sense. I would know. My magic was not on the level of Monika’s, and I was currently imprisoned so I had no way to effectively use my Prophet powers, but I could still know if he examined me closely. So he didn’t, taking only aside glances and moving away before I could catch on.

I knew something was looming. I told them as much – that I had a bad feeling. They said they all did. After all, we were about to land on Nucleon and see what was there.

Flagg laughed ominously. I dismissed it as nothing more than him being just as creepy as he always was.

I should not have dismissed it. I should have taken heed of my unease and insisted we be on better guard.

But I didn’t. I calmly watched from my position within the cage to see what the world of Nucleon would bring. I was busy thinking of what it would be like if the Tower was ever truly removed from existence… What would be the first thing I did?

Because of this, we fell right into the Crimson King’s trap.

The Eye of Rhyme has a way of showing you everything, and yet nothing at the same time.

The same can be said of Black Thirteen.

138 - Crimson

“This is a big tree.”

Roxy floated down the lake-sized leaves of a tremendous world-tree sticking out of Nucleon’s side, rubbing her hand down the trunk that seemed more like ground than a tree, and probably would have been ground if Nucleon’s gravity wasn’t taking over.

“Fun fact: it’s still not big enough to discern from the whole of Nucleon,” I reported. “If you see all of Nucleon, you don’t see it.”

“I know, we’ve been looking at Nucleon for the last few hours.”

Chancellor Fluttershy put a hoof on the bark. “I wonder what world this was originally from.”

There are many universes that are one tree, so this really isn’t all that impressive,<< M printed.

“I don’t even need to read that to know you’re being a spoilsport,” Roxy said.

A simultaneously intelligent and petty observation.<<

Roxy didn’t read or respond to that. She kept floating down the tremendous tree, getting closer and closer to the actual ground. “Geez, this is taking forever…”

“We’re not traveling all that quickly,” Monika pointed out. “We need to get out of the branches of the tree if we want to get to the bottom. Or…” She snapped her fingers, creating an orange five-pointed star in midair. “I can just launch us.”

“What does this launch involve?” Rohan asked.

Roxy didn’t wait for an answer. She jumped into the star. It spun around her with an electronic charging up noise and flung her down at high speed. Her momentum was easily higher than it should have been factoring in air resistance, but she arrived at the surface unharmed. Not bothering to wait for any of the others, she investigated the ground. Such a giant tree should have bathed the land in eternal shadow, but the twilight nature of Nucleon ensured there was enough light coming from the side for any purpose.

She furrowed her brow, looking at the leaves falling off like it was autumn. How does Nucleon know the seasons change? …Maybe it can’t, and it’s just trying its best.

With a flick of her wrist, she summoned a scanning device to see if she could find anything of interest. It wasn’t until Chancellor Fluttershy and M appeared behind her that she noticed something. Not on the scanner – it read everything as normal – but in her ears. “…Do you hear that?”

The Chancellor swiveled her ears around. “…Are those screams?”

Yes, those are screams. Very tiny, insignificant screams.<<

Roxy narrowed her eyes. “I think they’re just distant…” She flew across the leaf she was standing on to a lake-sized section of bare dirt near the tree’s trunk. She could hear the screams louder now, but they were still small. Looking closer, she saw why – the people were literally ants. They had a hill-like castle and were taking large trips to and from their home to deliver small segments of the leaves as food. It clearly wasn’t efficient enough to feed everyone.

Roxy focused her hands together and stole the nothingness from existence, creating one of the leaves above them. She allowed it to fall overtop of the ants, saving them.

Rohan jogged up. “You know, I often forget you can do that.”

“The Rogue of Void gets one of the more… interesting movesets,” Roxy admitted. She floated around, creating more leaves for hills she noticed were uncovered. “These things are huge…”

“What?” Rohan called – she was so far away he could barely hear her.

“Nothing important!” Roxy called over. “Just leaves. Nothing but leaves.” She moved much closer to the trunk, finding a much larger area of the ground not covered in leaves. She reached her hand into the ground and found lots of black dust. “Hmm…”

“Hello, child.”

Roxy sighed. “I’m not a kid anymore, how many times do-” She realized she was talking to a three-story humanoid in a red cloak. “Oh. Sorry, I don’t know you.”

“You and I are about to become very well acquainted…” the Crimson King said, reaching out his hand. A nebulous mist of churning power forced itself upon her, entering her nose and swimming into her brain. She made an attempt to erase the Crimson King with Void, but found him highly resistant to it. She had enough time to let out a yell for help before her mind was completely adherent to the Crimson King.

Rohan and Chancellor Fluttershy ran over. “What’s going on?”

“Eh, just got surprised,” Roxy said, making it so they couldn’t see the Crimson King. “Turns out the ants can bite.”

“…Heaven’s Door,” Rohan said, summoning his Stand.

“So much for stealth…” the Crimson King revealed himself and shot the darkness at Rohan and Chancellor Fluttershy. Rohan tried to fight it with Heaven’s Door – and this was his mistake. He fell to the darkness easily.

“Defenses!” Chancellor Fluttershy shouted at M while running.

Activated.<<

The darkness hit Chancellor Fluttershy from behind, but couldn’t worm its way into her brain.

“Warn Monika!”

Sending message. Sent.<<

Unfortunately, it came a little too late – Monika had already brought the cage with myself and Flagg in it down to the surface. She checked her phone after she had landed. “What…?”

…Chancellor, I seem to have failed. Sorry. I th_<<

The Crimson King was suddenly grabbing the Chancellor. She let out a scream Monika didn’t hear through the Void clouding her perceptions. The mechanical components that made up and housed M shattered into a thousand pieces.

“M!” Chancellor Fluttershy shouted.

Monika heard this scream through the winds of ka. She whirled around, trying to figure out what was going on and how she could stop it.

The Crimson King raised a finger to Chancellor Fluttershy’s head… and then lowered it. “No. You aren’t important enough.” He threw her to the side like a bug. He rushed the cage – getting there just as Monika figured out she should probably edit herself to detect Voided abilities.

She saw the Crimson King just as he destroyed the cage.

~~~

“The ka is flowing…” Starbeat paused. “Well, whatever way it’s flowing, we’ll follow it regardless… So…”

“Do I go left or right!?” Caliborn shouted, gesturing at the two cavernous tunnels they had to choose from. Both were identically dark, gray, and boring.

“Whichever you want,” Starbeat said.

Caliborn went to the left, grumbling. “Fucking bitch spends so much time saying she’s in charge and doesn’t take charge…”

“She’s listening to the advice of her teammates,” Trixie said.

“…Actually I think she just doesn’t care which way we go,” Saitama, the newest addition to the ka-seeking team, added.

“Motherfuckin’ right,” Gamzee said, breaking out into a toothy grin.

Starbeat chuckled at Gamzee’s remark. “More like it doesn’t matter. We’re going left, we’ll get to where we need to go. The ka’s so strong right now we’ll end up there regardless.” She tapped her goggles. “There’s something we need to see. Something important. Given how this path is sloping upward, it’s probably on the surface, but you never know.”

“I’m just hoping it isn’t something we have to fight,” Saitama said with a sigh. “That’s always over so fast.”

“Then let some of us have a go at it for once!” Caliborn yelled back.

“He does,” Trixie retorted. “Remember the sea of shrimp demons?”

“Oh yeah.” Caliborn let out an evil laugh. “That was fun!”

“As much as it pains me to agree with the cherub, that was fun,” Starbeat admitted. “I’d never really felt the heat of being in the moment of combat like that before… I think during the war too much was on the line for me to appreciate it.”

“Yeah, you just need to get a little motherfuckin’ relax on,” Gamzee said. “Get in touch with your inner self and feel it.”

“Says the purple berserker fairy,” Trixie deadpanned.

“Hey, hey, I’m chill, we’re all chill, it’s just that when I probably shouldn’t be chill I motherfuckin’ ain’t.”

“If you’re so chill why do you swear every single sentence?” Trixie asked.

“That is a good question,” Saitama added.

“It’s just the motherfuckin’ way I motherfuckin’ am,” Gamzee answered.

“Yes! Double down on it!” Caliborn shouted back. “Fuck them and their foolish judgments!”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Aw, look at the little snotling, calling other people ‘foolish’! Cute.”

Caliborn twisted time and was in front of Trixie before she could react. “You didn’t.”

“Did!” Trixie said, sneering. “Whatcha gonna do about it?”

“I. Am going to remove your eyes. And then replace them. With ping pong balls. With similar eyes drawn on them.”

“That doesn’t sound original,” Trixie mused.

“He’s found this Red vs Blue show,” Gamzee said. “Identifies a lot with the purple shoutin’ guy.”

“If only he had chosen a more regal color!” Caliborn shouted.

“Purple is the color of royalty,” Trixie muttered.

“GREEN IS KING!”

“Aren't you a Lord?” Saitama asked.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Caliborn said, drawing his gun on Saitama.

“…Didn’t we learn anything from last time?”

“I am going to kill every last one of you one day…”

“Aw, but then who would you talk at?” Trixie asked, nudging him playfully. “Come on, you know you looooooove us.”

The word caused Caliborn physical pain. He switched his gun to the scepter form and smacked Trixie upside the head.

Trixie, despite the bruise, kept giggling. “The power of looooove Cal! Loooooooove!”

He started chasing her around the caverns with his scepter, screaming out expletives. Trixie just kept laughing.

Saitama took a picture with his phone. “Kinda cute. In a messed up way.”

Starbeat rolled her eyes. “Come on you two, break it up. We have places to go, things to do, ka to fulfill.”

Trixie sighed. “Fiiine. I’m leading the way this time.”

“Bitch! I was leading!” Caliborn whinged.

“Doesn’t really matter, Starbeat’s ka-navigator,” Trixie said. “She’s done a pretty good job of it so far.”

Starbeat smirked. “Three treasure hoards, two monster nests, and two collapse cells, all taken care of.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about the nests and cells,” Trixie put a hoof to her chin. “Wonder why I’m never on those…”

“You’re not a warrior and never have been,” Starbeat responded. “Even in the war all you did was tell Discord what to do.”

“Heh. Yeah.”

“Maybe this time we’ll find a preservation cell,” Saitama said. “That’d be a nice change of pace.”

“You just don’t want to punch them into submission!” Caliborn accused.

“You’re right. I don’t.”

“They know what they did,” Starbeat said. “They need to know that can’t just be brushed aside. It will be with them forever.”

“Hmm…”

They continued up through the winding tunnel of the caverns until they came to a dead end.

“…Ka will lead us where we need to go, huh?” Caliborn laughed. “More like to a dead end!”

“I don’t think this is a dead end…” Starbeat tapped the ground above them. It was not rock, but soil, and there were large roots worming through it. “We’re near the surface.”

“Ugh, we have to dig out?” Trixie groaned. “That’ll take forever…”

Starbeat smirked. “Saitama?”

Saitama pulled back his fist. “Normal punch.”

~~~

Flagg and I were sent flying in different directions when the cage exploded. The magic locks on us that sealed our powers remained, but we were free to move.

As was Monika. She created a giant neon-blue axe out of thin air and brought it down on the Crimson King.

His response was to shift his body around the axe. As this was happening, with a free hand he picked up the now-free Black Thirteen and punched Monika with it, forcing the Knowledge into her mind. She fell back to the ground.

“Yes!” Flagg shouted. “My king, you have returned! I beg of you, release me so I may sta-”

“You will inevitably betray me,” the Crimson King said, cutting Flagg in half with a chop of his hand. “You served your purpose.”

“Chancellor, get me out of here!” I hissed. She heard me and rushed to my aid, but Roxy stopped her with a punch to the face. The Crimson King had both her and Rohan under his complete control.

And now they were coming for me.

Two giant boxing gloves appeared out of nowhere, knocking the two of them to their backs.

“…What!?” the Crimson King shouted.

Monika was already up and floating again. “I know that trick.” She sneered. “I can keep my mind clear if I want.”

He waved a hand, ordering Rohan and Roxy to stand back up, despite the fact that they should have been unconscious. They charged Monika. Upon finding she couldn’t access their character files, she shrugged and encased them in a giant glass box.

They charged right through like the box was made of nothing.

Monika sighed. “Really?” She clapped her hands and suddenly the two of them were falling down a hole.

The Crimson King disintegrated her with eldritch power. It was a simple automatic-rewrite for Monika to reconstruct herself. She put her hands on her hips and struck a sassy pose. “Looks like you’ve got a case of underestimating people!”

The Crimson King was behind her, grabbing onto her soul and removing it from her body.

“The soul is just as editable as everything else,” Monika said, healed to full once again. She scrolled through several things she’d saved in her internal files over the years, settling on an antimatter cannon. A gun with a five-pointed barrel made of neon yellow crystals charged up and fired, enveloping the Crimson King in an explosion that tore him asunder.

Unfortunately he was eldritch and could just reform himself however he wished. He took the form of a mansion-sized crimson spider and tore Monika apart.

She was fine again in an instant, creating a small army of humanoid robots to take the Crimson King on. He tore through them like butter, but she kept duplicating them with simple copy/paste technology.

The Crimson King reverted into his humanoid form and held up Black Thirteen. “Do you know what Black Thirteen can do, Lord of Ka?”

Monika summoned gigantic snowflakes and hurled them at the Crimson King. They all deflected right off him. “It can take you anywhere in the multiverse, which is useless, and it can show you truth, which drives you crazy.”

The Crimson King held Black Thirteen out to Monika. “It also has control over ka itself, if you know what you’re doing. Your powers are no more.”

Monika paled – and then fell to the ground, clutching her heart. “Wh… Wh…”

The Crimson King slowly walked to her, holding out Black Thirteen like a weapon. “It is ka itself, the manifestation of it. Of all the Rainbow, it is the one that represents the Tower itself. Naturally it has the control along with the knowledge and connection.” The Crimson King raised a hand. “The people of this era have so much power… and no appreciation for it.”

Monika was disintegrated.

And then Monika was behind the Crimson King with a chainsaw and cut his head off. “I love me a decoy!” As the Crimson King struggled to regrow his head, Monika kicked Black Thirteen out of his hand. Then she created a mechanical butterfly that took Black Thirteen and dropped it in the hole where Rohan and Roxy were, hitting Roxy on the head and keeping her from returning to do the Crimson King’s bidding.

The Crimson King regrew his head, along with the red hood. “You…”

Monika put on a mocking expression. “Aw, you upset your little ploy didn’t work? Trust me, I’m sure it’ll be-”

He teleported Black Thirteen back to his hand. He teleported Roxy and Rohan to his side as well. “Space is nothing.”

Monika twitched. Then she vanished.

“And so she flees…” The Crimson King laughed. “Just as expected…” He turned to me. “She should have freed you, Muse. That might have done something.”

I ground my teeth. “She’s too proud.”

“And her pride will be your downfall.”

“How about you remove my restraints and we have a fair fight?”

“A desperate attempt.”

I gulped. “It was worth a shot. After all…” I stopped, having seen something. “Hey, Crimson King, look into Black Thirteen. You’ll find something that will shatter your worldview.”

The Crimson King took a moment to look at Black Thirteen.

Saitama punched out of the ground right under him, sending the robed monstrosity high into the sky.

“Coast cle-”

“HEAVEN’S DOOR!” Rohan shouted, summoning the Stand. Saitama’s face popped open like a book.

“SOMEONE STOP ROHAN!” I shouted. “He’s being controlled!”

Dozens of golden bullets shot out of the hole, shredding Rohan’s interior with ease. Heaven’s Door dissipated, and the manga artist slumped to the ground in a pool of his own blood.

Caliborn jumped out of the hole and laughed. “That was the guy, right!?”

“You didn’t have to kill him!” I wailed.

Caliborn kicked him. “Eh, but I wanted to.”

Roxy punched Caliborn in the face. Caliborn’s jaw dropped. “The Voidy bitch…”

Gamzee jumped out of the hole next, trying to tear into Roxy with his teeth. She vanished, appeared behind him, and shoved him into Caliborn.

Trixie and Starbeat came out next. Starbeat took one look at me and her eyes became murder. “You.”

“We have bigger issues right now!” I wailed.

“What could be bigger than you?”

The Crimson King landed on the ground again, Black Thirteen still held tightly in his claws. He activated the controlling miasma again, but Starbeat used her magic to deflect it. Roxy delivered a series of punches to Starbeat and Trixie’s faces, tossing them to the side. Then she took out her gun.

“BITCH!” Caliborn shouted, shooting at her. Roxy allowed the bullets to pass right through her. She turned the gun on him – but he slowed time so he could dodge all the bullets. Once he was close enough he whacked her with his scepter, a weapon the Crimson King could not make her Void through no matter how much he wanted. The Crimson King forced her to stand up again - but Starbeat saw this. She shot a beam of energy right at the gemstone on her back, shattering it in two.

“None of you have power…” The Crimson King said, pointing a finger. “Death.”

“Normal punch,” Saitama said, hitting the Crimson King in the chest. The eldritch being’s very essence imploded and twisted as the force of the man’s fist threatened reality itself with how powerful it was, vaporizing the Crimson King’s equivalent to a spine in an instant. He went flying back, splayed on the ground, motionless.

“…Man, one punch again,” Saitama muttered. “Figured he would be-”

“He is,” I said. “Don’t kid yourselves. Someone remove these limitations so I can help you!”

“Not happening,” Starbeat said.

“Starbeat!”

Starbeat kicked me. “Stop talking.”

The Crimson King slowly stood up, clenching his chest. “You… have ka brimming within you… the power of victory…”

“Yeah,” Saitama said – a smile forming on his face. “And you can take a punch.”

The Crimson King held out Black Thirteen. “You should have used your full power. You may have ended my reign.”

“Your reign? You going to tell me your complex backstory now?”

“No,” the Crimson King said. “I’m going to kill you.” He rushed forward with Black Thirteen.

“Serious punch,” Saitama said, pulling his fist back.

“No, Saitama, don’t touch Black Thirteen!” I warned.

“Gotcha,” Saitama said, adjusting his punch slightly to the left so he would hit the Crimson King head on without touching the artifact.

The Crimson King let the punch connect. Absolutely nothing happened.

“…What?” Saitama said, blinking.

The Crimson King drove his free hand through Saitama like he was made of jello. “I do not have to touch you to remove your ka!” He tossed Saitama aside like a ragdoll. “Your one chance is gone.”

“Let me out!” I wailed. “I can do something!”

Starbeat kicked me hard enough to crack a rib, refusing to acknowledge me otherwise.

What happened to you that I can’t see?

The Crimson King took a slow couple of steps forward, past the broken and shattered forms of his two puppets. Just to add insult to injury, he made both of their bodies burst into black flames. “Fools…”

Caliborn let out a scream and started filling him with the bullets from his gun. The Crimson King felt them – they were not ordinary bullets and carried with them the power of the Lord of Time – but they were still nothing more than little ants among his internal darkness. He reached out his hand, charging it full of enough energy to kill them all in an instant.

“Serious punch.”

The sound of the impact was enough to make everyone wince in pain. The Crimson King’s body split into several pieces and still there was enough force not only for him to make it to the trunk of the world tree, but also bore a hole all the way through it.

Where he had been a moment ago stood Saitama with a smoking fist – Monika standing behind him with a cute smile on her face. “So, as it turns out, I can give people ka powers back so long as I can edit their character files. Who knew?”

“Is he dead?” Saitama asked me.

I coughed. “No… He had Black Thirteen, it saved him.”

Saitama ran to the other side of the world tree, finding nothing there to punch at all. He ran back. “I don’t see him. Or the black thing.”

“He ran away,” I said. “He didn’t want to chance it against both of you.”

“Woo!” Monika shouted. “We won!”

“Not really…” I sighed. “He has Black Thirteen. That’s what he came here for. We have to find him so he can’t use it for… Whatever he needs it for.”

“You don’t know what he needs it for?” Chancellor Fluttershy asked.

I shook my head. “I didn’t even know he was back… I’m not even sure how he can be back…”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Monika said, creating two revive potions. She tossed one at Rohan and one at Roxy.

Roxy’s Carnelian Gem reformed with a flash. She sat up and grunted. “Ugh… That was a sucky experience.”

Rohan sat up… and said nothing. There was no spark in his eyes.

I sighed. “…No way we could have escaped without sacrifice… M… Rohan…”

“You still talk like that,” Starbeat muttered under her breath. “Like you must fight…”

“We must!”

“I should kill you right here, right now,” Starbeat declared.

“Starbeat!” Trixie said with a gasp.

“She deserves it, Trixie. She wasn’t just some soldier fighting in a war, she was a traitor before the war even started. She can’t think like us… It’s impossible.”

“…What happened to you?” I asked.

“Can’t you see!?”

“No. I don’t have Black Thirteen, I just have the Eye…”

Starbeat let out a snort. “I survived. That’s what happened.”

“Motherfuckin’ amen,” Gamzee said.

I twitched. “You do realize you’re traveling with Gamzee Makara and Caliborn right? The Bard of Rage and the guy who becomes Lord English?”

“…English?” Caliborn said, thinking for a moment. “Oh, that’s right, I do take his name…”

“Stop being so prejudiced,” Starbeat spat. “I knew who Gamzee was. Admittedly, I was unaware Caliborn would become Lord English, but right now he’s manageable and I’m working him over.”

“Working me over!?”

“Caliborn, quiet, the adults are talking. …Actually, I shouldn’t even call you an adult.”

“What’s gotten you so mad that you’re resorting to petty insults?” I asked, confused.

“You. What you stand for. The fact that I can’t end you since I’m pretty sure we need you to find the Crimson King.” She seethed. “I’m not an idiot, I know a greater evil when I see one. Trixie, send word back to the Hub, we’re going on a monster-hunting quest.”

“On it. Should I ask Storm for backup?”

“No. We have enough here.”

“If you remove this magic seal…” I said.

“No. You’re just here because of that Eye of yours. I am not giving you a chance to escape. I’m going to put you on trial.”

“Do you want to talk about trial? I can put you on for war crimes caused by your ka inventions!”

“I will make Caliborn shoot your throat out and make you communicate with me in mime if I have to,” Starbeat muttered. She angrily turned away and walked to Gamzee. “I’m done talking to her, someone else figure out how we’re going to find him.”

Trixie cleared her throat, walking up to me. “She’s angry, give her a break.”

“…She’s not going to put me on trial, right?”

“Pretty sure she is.” Trixie looked me in the eyes. “…And I can’t exactly tell myself you don’t deserve it. You did do a lot of shitty stuff.”

When something like that is said so frankly and matter-of-factly, it often carries with it more weight than having it screamed in your face.

For the first time in a long while, I felt legitimately afraid of what these people I called friends might do to me.

~~~

Flagg respawned in front of the doors to the Dark Tower.

He promptly got his brains blown out by Roland. He slumped to the ground, dead. Again.

Renee chuckled. “Told you it was a good idea to be here.”

“I extend my gratitude, Emissary.” Flagg respawned and Roland blasted his brains out again, letting a second Flagg pile onto the first.

Renee put on a pair of comically-oversized 3D glasses. “Impressive.”

The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Flaggs all suffered the same fate. The seventh came back while Roland was reloading. “Wait!”

Roland didn’t wait. He shot Flagg in the crotch, prompting the man to retch in pain for a second. Then he shot him in the head. The next Flagg got a shot to each arm, the heart, and the head.

This continued for some time.

“GODAMMIT ROLAND!” Flagg shouted. “STOP!”

“I lived a thousand lifetimes with no release,” Roland said, shooting him through one eye and then the other.

“I wasn’t responsible for that!”

“No, that’d be me,” Renee admitted. “But I also let him out.” Roland shot Flagg through the throat.

“Stop! Just stop!”

Roland didn’t stop.

“ROLAND!”

“I don’t see why I should,” Roland commented, shooting this Flagg in the stomach several times so he would bleed out slower. “If there is one being that deserves to die, it is you.”

“But I can’t… Be killed…”

“I can keep shooting you until the Tower falls. Then you die.”

“You can’t keep this up forever.”

Roland shot Flagg in the head again. After reloading, he used his free hand to pull out his phone. It took him a minute to remember how to dial Nanoha, but he did. “I need a shipment of bullets to the front of the Tower. Walter’s not dying enough.” He hung up.

“Still calling me Walter, huh?” Flagg cackled – before another shot to the neck shut him up. “What a childish name…”

“Gee, I wonder why he calls you that,” Renee said with a smirk.

“You’re the Emissary…” Flagg said, clutching at the blood pouring out of his chest. “You know what I am to you…”

“A force of evil with a little bit of humor thrown in to keep you from being mind-numbingly boring.” She rolled her eyes. “Nothing that special, really.”

“But I-” he was shot in the middle of his sentence. “I am Legion! I am the last survivor! I am Randall Flagg! I brought worlds to their knees!”

“You were more a tool than anything,” Renee said with a delighted chuckle. “Real characters go through changes, find ways to shift, to grow. You just got better at doing what you always did.” She shook her head. “You do have a chance to be something else, now.”

Blood poured from Flagg’s mouth. “What?”

“Make a wild guess.” Flagg died again.

Nanoha appeared before them in a flash of light.

“Where are the bullets?” Roland asked.

“Nowhere.” She snapped her fingers, imprisoning the fresh Flagg in magical restraints. “You’ve already made a hundred bodies Roland, that’s not sanitary. Wait until killing him will actually do something.”

Roland nodded slowly and put his gun away.

Flagg let out a sigh of relief. “That was getting decidedly annoying…”

“I can make you suffer an infinite loop of deaths inside your own mind,” Nanoha said, fire in her eyes. “So you better give me a good reason not to make you suffer until your death can be made permanent.”

“…The Crimson King has just stolen Black Thirteen and killed me.”

Nanoha narrowed her eyes. “Information is a start…”

“He has retained eldritch nature despite physics not allowing it. I know not how many he killed, but Monika, Rohan, Twilence, Roxy, Chancellor Fluttershy, and M were all there. The location was a world-tree somewhere on Nucleon. This very pla-”

“They know,” Renee cut him off. “I’m not that cruel; I’ll tell them the name of the planet they’re on.”

“So you named it.”

Renee chuckled. “I’m not explaining my nature to anyone again. But luckily you’ve been around long enough to figure it out on your own.” She patted him on the head. “Good boy.”

He twitched.

“Awww, is the Legion of Darkness not having a nice day?”

“I imagined the Emissary of ka to be more… neutral.”

Renee rolled her eyes. “Everyone always says that, and they’re always wrong…”

Roland loaded his gun. “The Crimson King will be here soon. We should tell the people about this.”

Nanoha nodded. “I’ll arrange a meeting and start moving everything we can into town. I hope Arceus is in the mood for another round of creation, it’s do or die time.”

“Mostly die,” Flagg said. “How can you hope to defeat the Crimson King when you cannot access the eldritch nature?”

“We know he won’t win,” Nanoha said. “What we don’t know is how many of us have to die in the process before he falls. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions?”

“Erase him from existence or become one with the eldritch energy. Oh wait, neither of those will work anymore. My bad.”

Roland shot him in the leg. He let out a scream of intense pain.

“Roland!” Nanoha said, healing him.

“He’s not dead. No more bodies for you to deal with.”

“We need him cooperative.”

Roland shook his head. “Lock him away and don’t let anyone speak to him.”

Nanoha shook her head. “I’ll bring it up at the next meeting when we decide what to do with him, but I don’t think we’ll be doing that. He’s too valuable a source of information, Roland. Even if he is close to evil incarnate.”

Roland let out a grunt indicated he accepted her decision, but wasn’t pleased.

“And the gunslinger is forced to go into diplomacy…” Flagg said with a chuckle.

A bullet went into his other leg.

~~~

“…What is that slapping I hear behind me?” Mattie asked as she looked at the map of the universe. The center was close. It wouldn’t be more than a day until they arrived.

Swip let out a groan. “They’re just playing patty cake.”

Mattie turned around in bewilderment to see Burgerbelle and the Everykid doing exactly that. “Hold on. Both of you are much, much older than you look. Why!?”

“What’s the point of looking like a kid if you never act like one?” Burgerbelle asked. The Everykid nodded in agreement.

Mattie smacked her lips. “Well, I don’t have any response to that. Thrackerzod?”

Thrackerzod grunted. “Just as weird as your bizarre obsession with pain.”

“Right, no help there. Nettle?”

“I don’t even know the context of this conversation,” Nettle admitted. She was looking at Burgerbelle and the Everykid playing with… longing?

“You know, I bet the Emperor can cook up a de-age spell if you want to join them.”

“No,” Nettle responded. “I don’t want to be even more helpless than I already am.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Nettle shrugged. “Nothing besides my own inadequacy.” She stood up and walked off the bridge.

Thrackerzod sighed. “Should I do it, or you?”

“We’ll do it,” Burgerbelle said. She and the Everykid ran out into Swip’s halls after Nettle. The Everykid used her time hat to jump in front of Nettle, trapping her between the two of them.

“…What do you want?”

“You know, you could be friends with Everykid too,” Burgerbelle said, folding her arms. “It doesn’t just have to be you and me talking.”

“Is that what you think I’m hung up about?” Nettle rolled her eyes. “You’re clueless.”

The Everykid shook her head. She took her hat off and gave Nettle puppy dog eyes.

“I don’t get what she’s saying.”

Burbergelle leaned on a nearby wall. “She thinks you’re upset that your powers aren’t surfacing like everyone else’s.”

Nettle grunted. “Of course I’m upset.”

“Jealous?”

“Yes!”

“How do you think everyone else felt when you were in your full multiversal body?”

Nettle opened her mouth to respond. When she found herself unable to form words, a spinning rainbow wheel icon appeared in front of her face. She brushed it away. “Burgerbelle…”

“Sorry, couldn’t resist.” Burgerbelle coughed. “And that’s my problem. I flaunt my powers around a lot because they’re so different. And I enjoy being me.”

“You get to be you.”

“And everyone else got to be you.”

“What?”

The Everykid facepalmed. She shoved Nettle into Burgerbelle, making the two hug.

Nettle seemed shocked. Something stirred within her, and she wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Something… warm.

“You look baffled. It’s just an awkward hug. A-” A comical quack sound came out of Burgerbelle as her expression shifted to realization. “…Nettle, how many hugs have you actually experienced?”

“…I… None?”

Burgerbelle smiled. “Then it’s time for a bear hug.”

“You aren’t a be-AAAAAAR!” Nettle squirmed but found that trying to remove herself from the embrace was completely impossible. It was over when Burgerbelle said it was, releasing the poor white woman.

“That was…”

“Great?”

“Painful.”

“And?”

“…I’m not sure.”

Burgerbelle snapped her fingers. “You should try to get sure. Talk to people, find out what they mean. You know what I think?”

“What?”

“You should stop trying to become what you were.”

“But I’m no-”

“You are though. You may be thinking to yourself you have a new life, but you aren’t really living it. You’re talking, trying, but you still dwell on what you were.” She put an arm over Nettle’s shoulder. “Think about it this way – jellyfish-Nettle is gone, and human-Nettle is here to stay. You should try figuring out what human-Nettle is, and that includes getting to know other people, discovering what it means to be human.”

“Friends!” the Everykid chirped.

“Yes. That. Friends. You can’t just use us as support blocks like you want to, you need to let everything go both ways.” Burgerbelle pulled out a two-way arrow sign. “And who knows? Maybe once you accept what you are, you’ll be able to figure out something new about yourself.”

“So… If I want powers, I have to be fine with not having them?”

“Maybe?”

“That’s stupid.”

“I’m a girl made from a poorly-edited jpeg image who is obsessed with burgers and can pull memes out of her hair. That’s also stupid.” Big, pixelated white letters spelling out ‘THIS IS STUPID’ appeared below her face.

“…I might try it.”

The Everykid made a ‘woohoo’ noise and did a victory dance.

Nettle kneeled down to her eye level. “Hello… Everykid. What… do you like?”

The Everykid held out her palm. Nettle met it confused.

“Oh come on!” Burgerbelle blurted. “Just do what you saw us doing earlier!”

Nettle clapped her hands and met the Everykid’s other hand slowly. Then they sped up until the Everykid was giggling.

There was a smile on Nettle’s face.

“Anyone who isn’t busy report to the bridge,” Mattie called over the intercom. “We’ve just found ourselves a little somethin’.”

The three of them ran back in. “What is it?” Nettle asked.

“Well, it looks like a fleet of ships,” Mattie said, pointing at a bunch of silvery blobs on the main screen. “Not that we’re very sure what kind of ships they are, sensors are wiggin out a bit. No idea why.”

“…We should go say hi,” Nettle said.

Everyone turned to her with blank stares.

“...What?”

“You. Suggesting we go say hi to people,” Thrackerzod said. “…Never mind. It’s a good idea. Mattie?”

Mattie smirked. “This is your Mistress speaking. We’re about to go charge off to meet a fleet a ships and say ‘hi’. There is a very high chance that they’re going to try to shoot us out of the sky before we open our mouths. So consider this a warning to buckle yourselves up, we’re in for a bumpy ride.”

Swip sighed. “I hate you.”

“What? That was completely innocuous!”

“Because you’re saying it, it’s automatically not. Setting course…”

~~~

Chem the Them-chinchilla was floating in space next to Flep the Celestialsapien as the fleet moved ever closer to the core.

“-and then I figure out they have a machine that washes the dishes for them! Can you believe that Flep? Can you?”

Flep, as usual for his kind, made no response, and if he had been thinking of making a response, all thought of such was banished when Chem started talking again.

“And don’t get me started on the other stuff they had me do. A freaking Horrorterror corpse! That took forever to disintegrate completely, and it didn’t even help the mind-stench in the area! It was all a big waste of everyone’s time – mostly mine though – and it was just a huge mess to begin with.”

Flep seemed to be listening. Even though he hadn’t moved a muscle the entire time Chem had been talking.

“And the games. The games are boring. I mean it’s more interesting than the multiverse was, still glad I’m a chinchilla, but gaaaaaaaah why play chess? Why not play Paradox-Billiards-Vostroyan-Roulette-Fourth-Dimensional-Hypercube-Chess-Strip-Poker? Now there’s a game I could get behind, but nobody’s got the wherewithal to face ME in a duel! It’s all futile…”

“Cards,” Mite said.

Chem took the presence of Mite in stride. “When did you get here? You missed a lot of good ranting!”

“Doubtful.”

“Oh, please, it was quality stuff. Real quality stuff. About… Uh… Ranting and the quality of life in this fleet.”

“Lotus.”

“Yeah I don’t understand what that means so I’m going to ignore it. Do you have any sort of entertaining games to engage me while we wait for the inevitable showdown at the end of this road?”

“Maybe.”

“That aren’t mind-screwing word games.”

“No.”

“Then what are you good for?”

“Solipsism.”

“…You’re a bundle of humorous anecdotes ain'tcha?”

“Gratitude.”

“Well scruff my ears and call me a marshmallow, you’re going to keep doing this forever.”

“No.”

“Why not!?”

“Bridge.”

“…Which one?”

“Austraeoh.”

Chem let out a groan and teleported them to the bridge of the Austraeoh. “Hey, fleshbags, Mite h-”

“I’m not a fleshbag,” Lapis Vee corrected.

Chem twitched. “Ahem. Mostly fleshbags. Happy? Mite wanted me to be here. And him. Mite, what’s this about?”

“Scans,” Mite droned.

Lapis Vee checked the scans. “I don’t see anything too out of the ordinary.”

The Xeelee text appeared on the main screen.

|> That’s the problem. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. This close to the core world we should be picking up something, but we are not. Mite has caught an interesting glitch in the system.

O’Neill raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. Can we clean it up?”

|> Attempt has already been made. Cleared up a few details, but scans now clearly show a heavy field of shrouded ka around the entire central system. One nucleus world, one orbiting planet, further details indeterminate.

Minna closed her eyes. “I sense… we missed something somewhere else. Perform a full advanced scan of all surroundings. Have the entire fleet do it.”

“You heard her,” O’Neill said.

Clandestine nodded, sending out the order. “Hey, Xeelee… …We need a name for you other than Forward-numbers.”

|> Randomizing name… Nala shall work.

“Gotcha. Mind sending out scan corrections to everyone else, Nala?”

|> Already done. The scans are being performed.

Minna checked the incoming reports. “We’ve got one from the TSAB Oma. There’s something heading at us in a strange spatial distortion.”

“Onscreen.”

The… thing coming at them was a blurry blob of red and brown.

“…Care to explain what I’m looking at?”

|> A low resolution picture of an object our sensors are having difficulty dealing with.

“How long until it arrives?”

“Three minutes,” Clandestine said. “One until it’s close enough for our hails to pierce this… fuzz. I think.”

“Keep trying. In the meantime, raise shields and charge weapons just in case.”

Minna closed her eyes. “I… Hmm. Let me focus for a minute…” She put a hand to her forehead and focused. “…I don’t sense any firefight coming. But I can’t tell you what I do sense, it’s just too fuzzy…”

“Flep must be going stir-crazy,” Chem said, twitching his nose. “I mean, if you were used to knowing almost everything and suddenly were in a place where everything was fuzzy, what would you be doing?”

“I get the point,” O’Neill said. “Any response to communications?”

“Nothing yet.”

Lapis Vee furrowed her brow. “I’m getting more data. There are ship signatures in that cloud. And… other things I can’t identify.”

|> It is certainly not something within the standard database.

“Got a connection!” Clandestine said. “Channel open!”

“This is General-Overhead Jack O’Neill of the Austraeoh. What is your purpose here?”

“Why helloooooo General! Fancy meeting you here...”

“…Is there no video?” Minna asked Clandestine. She shook her head.

“To whom am I speaking?” O’Neill asked.

“You don’t recognize my voice? Unsurprising, since you weren't very involved when I was around… But surely, surely, you can remember the name! The name… of Tzeentch!”

“…Who?”

“…Stop playing games with me.”

O’Neill smirked. “Sure thing. So should we shoot you out of the sky or should you go find another place to spread your Chaotic message of change?”

“I am the Lord of Change and I ha-”

“Tzeentch, stop tormenting them for your petty amusement,” the Emperor’s voice said, accompanied with an image of him on screen. “I don’t want to have to repair this ship again.”

“Your ship repairs in an instant!”

“It costs the crew time and resources!”

“They’re all happy all the time! It doesn’t matter!”

“Then how about because I’m the mother-fucking Emperor and I said so?”

“Ahem,” Mattie said, her image appearing on screen as well. “How about we let the children fight it out for a while and actually get to business ourselves? Glad to see you still around, O’Neill.”

O’Neill smirked. “Likewise. Who’ve you got with you?”

“Some of the League, a truly ungodly amount of Aradias, the Emperor of Man, Tzeentch and his gaggle of transformed demons, a friendly version of the Everyman, and White Nettle.”

“White Nettle?”

“She’s human right now, sorry, no multiversal jellyfish for you. I know, I was disappointed too.”

Minna shivered.

“What’s the matter, dear?“

“I’m psychic, remember?” Minna said. “I got that image.”

Mattie grinned. “Glad to be of service. So, if I’m readin’ this right that means you’ve gotten everybody on both sides agreeing for once in their moronic lives?”

“The war is over,” O’Neill confirmed.

“You have said that so many times…” Chem groaned.

“We’ll be right over to discuss what we’re going to do with this fuzzy ka-planet. Mistress Mattie out.” She saluted and cut the feed.

Clandestine blinked. “…Did she really give herself the title Mistress?”

“Yes,” Mite said.

“She…”

“Intentional,” Mite confirmed.

“I like her already,” Lapis Vee commented absent-mindedly.

“I’m going to choose not to read into that,” O’Neill said.

“You know, it was nice when I had a choice in the matter…” Minna said, hanging her head.

“The curse of returning powers.”

~~~

“Problem,” Strange said, addressing everyone within their small consortium of ships. “Lord English just passed us in an instant.”

“Toying with us, as expected,” Sherlock said. “It just means he wants to get there first. To do… something. Perhaps get the weapon.”

“Or destroy the core world,” Johnny suggested.

“He would have started already if that’s what he wanted to do,” Sherlock said. “…Though I suspect he will get to it eventually, it’s not his primary goal. To get to that, he has to get the weapon.”

“Whatever the weapon is…” Discord muttered. “Do we have any way to do anything?”

NOT THAT I AM AWARE OF, Death added. WE DO NOT HAVE THE PHYSICAL POWER NECESSARY TO ATTACK HIM IN ANY WAY, EVEN WITH MOST OF OUR MAGIC RESTORED.

“Take the weapon from him before he finds it?” Insipid suggested.

“We don’t know what it is,” Discord pointed out.

“I mean, like, get close to him, don’t attack, and then run off with it?”

“He’ll start attacking the moment we look like we’re going to try something,” Sherlock said. “The best we can do is warn people. Have we received any messages back?”

“About that…” Cosmo shook her head. “The ka around the core world is so strong it’s creating physical manifestations in the atmosphere of the core system. I don’t believe anything we’re saying is getting through. They probably can’t even detect us.”

“But we can detect English,” Lightning pointed out.

“Because he wants to taunt us,” Sherlock countered. “He could hide easily if he wanted. Currently he’s just… standing there. Waiting at that one particular spot.”

“Anything there?”

“From what we can see, sand. Lots and lots of sand.” Strange furrowed his brow. “What is he doing…?”

“I’ve barely understood why he’s done anything lately,” Insipid said with a nervous laugh. “You’re like, the detective or whatever. So, like, tell us.”

Sherlock nodded slowly. “I’m thinking… He’s sitting there. Either the weapon doesn’t exist yet or it has to come to him. Cosmo, can we see anything besides us heading to that area?”

“There’s something fuzzy within the ka field…” Cosmo admitted. “It might be a ship.”

“We need to catch it,” Strange announced.

“There’s no way we can get to it before it gets in his range.”

“Then we have to get as close as possible.” Lightning said. “Discord, Insipid, Cosmo, we need a teleport chain to move the Crimson Blitz there as fast as we possibly can. Death, Sherlock, come as well, I think we’ll need you. Strange, you’re in charge of the fleet. Get there as soon as you can.”

Strange nodded. “Got it.”

Lightning snapped her fingers, teleporting the team of six to the Crimson Blitz. “Start teleporting, we have no way to know how much we can waste.”

Insipid touched Discord to absorb his powers while Cosmo made the first teleport-jump. In teams of three, they rotated on and off, moving the ship dozens of kilometers every second, with an ever increasing speed.

The core of the universe still looked pathetically far away.

~~~

The Jarn sailed through space, near enough to the core world to make out details of the surface. The bridge of the ship was large – and mostly empty. At the moment, only Pinkie and Mlinx were there, watching it get closer and closer.

“What do you think is down there?” Mlinx asked Pinkie.

“The end?” Pinkie said with a shrug.

“Of what?”

Pinkie pursed her lips. “I don’t know. I really hope it isn’t the end of everything, I’d like to get some mileage out of these eyes.” She absent-mindedly tugged at the blindfold hanging from her neck.

Mlinx looked at the display of the core world on the screen. “Is it still fuzzy to you?”

“I know its name now,” Pinkie said. “Nucleon. All else… I guess the Tower’s there, somewhere, but it’s not like I can just point to a location and say ‘hey, that’s where it is’. It wants to shroud itself. I think it’s been specifically keeping me from seeing other storylines moving parallel to our own. The rest of our friends who survived have stories as well. I can’t wait to see what they are.”

“Assuming we make it through this.”

Pinkie frowned. “I… It wouldn’t be satisfying if everyone died. There has to be some… survival. Some hope.”

“Almost everyone’s gone, Pinkie.”

Pinkie nodded slowly. Then she let out a laugh.

Mlinx leaned on Siron’s staff and looked at Pinkie quizzically. “What’s so funny?”

“You know, back when we first started exploring, I knew some of us weren’t going to make it. I asked myself if I wanted to be part of that. I said yes.” She shook her head. “If I had any inkling it’d be this bad, I would have crawled under a rock and never come out.”

“Was it the wrong decision?”

“No,” Pinkie affirmed. “I needed to be here. I’ve done a lot of good for the multiverse. A lot of it may have been undone with the collapse – but a lot of it wasn’t. And even those things that were undone… we’ve been out here for a long time, Mlinx. Somewhere around a century of active exploring and adventure. I may look pretty young, but I should be into my twilight years right about now.”

“Your pony lifespans are twice as long as the average human.”

Pinkie nodded. “Yeah… You can see wrinkles on Jotaro. He might have been approaching his sixties when he took it…”

Mlinx shook his head. “We are giants, Pinkie. That’s what we are.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

Mlinx held up Siron’s staff. “We all have powers, resources, and lives beyond what most people could ever imagine. We stand above them all in a very real way. …We’ve been made better than them, stronger than them, more important than them.”

“That’s the Dark Tower for you,” Pinkie said. “We like reading and hearing stories about the legendary, the powerful, the different. We give them values and place them on a pedestal, so the Tower does as well. We’re products of that. And that nagging doubt you’re feeling is right. It is wrong. We should be equal. But we aren’t.”

Mlinx lowered his hands. “…When I was still in the original tribe, I felt lesser than the rest of them. I was sure I was. But that difference made me greater than them. Than all of them. And as my people have almost fallen to nothing, I have survived. Because I was different. I was special.” He looked right at Pinkie’s eyes. “This feeling is worse than being the runt.”

“…I wonder how Corona feels.”

There was a poignant silence in the bridge at that comment.

Veila and Flutterfree walked in, carrying their conversation to the bridge. “Are you sure?” Flutterfree asked.

“I am the only p’e’thika in existence,” Veila explained. “We never found any other demons and magic has not blessed any of those born since we moved. Not even genetic engineering has helped. We suspect it is because the Blue Moon Spirit was taken all those years ago.”

“But aren’t there magic technologies you can use?”

“Of course, and many do. But the p’e’thika have a special relevance to our culture, one of the fe-”

“We don’t have a culture anymore,” Mlinx said abruptly. Almost immediately he put a hand to his faceplate. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.”

Veila sighed. “Your criticism is legitimate, Mlinx. Why try to save something for a society that, as far as we know, is just the two of us?”

“Make a new society,” Mlinx answered. “Join whatever Pinkie leads us to.”

Pinkie grimaced. “I’m not gonna pull any punches here, there’s a good chance it’s hot smoking death down there.”

Flutterfree nodded silently. “…We would not hold it against you if you just dropped us off.”

“We didn’t really have much of a goal before we found you,” Mlinx admitted. “We wouldn’t have one if we left you.”

Veila nodded in agreement.

“Then I’m glad you’re with us,” Flutterfree said with a warm smile.

Vriska and Rina walked in at this point, with Vriska talking off a full head of steam. “So then he goes ‘I do not understand the way of your people’ and I was like ‘shut the fuck up you fucking nerd, just let it slide nicely’ and then he said ‘sure’ and that’s that story.”

“I feel like you left out some important details,” Rina pointed out.

“As I discovered long, long ago, my fellow crewmembers tend not to like to hear me talk about Hastur.”

“Why? He sounds amazing!”

“She goes into too much detail!” Pinkie shouted. “It’s enough having buckets ruined for eternity!”

Vriska smirked. “Hey, you’re Aware, you know anyway.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to think about it constantly!”

Flutterfree looked to Vriska in concern. “…Vriksa, about Hastur…”

“Dead, probably,” Vriska said a little too quickly. “And Starbeat burned that card, soooo…”

“Why haven’t you talked about it?”

“Because we’ve been a little fucking busy in case you haven’t noticed,” Vriska spat. “And I did talk about it, just so you know.”

“To Rina?”

“To Rina.”

Flutterfree looked to Rina. “Give me your truthful opinion. Were you a good influence here?”

Rina put a hoof to her chin. “Well, considering how none of you can hear the word ‘fuck’ without flinching mentally, I think I was a pretty good listener. See, sometimes there’s something to be said for details.”

“So long as you keep it offscreen,” Pinkie said.

“How am I supposed to know when that is?”

“If you’re talking details, you’re not on screen.”

“Oh. In that case-”

“Don’t make the scene end, it needs to go on a bit longer,” Pinkie said. “I…” She shook her head. “I just got a really bad feeling.”

“Bad how?” Mlinx asked

“Bad like ‘you’re really not going to like what happens next’ bad.”

Flutterfree sighed. “I’ll tell everyone to prepare for battle.”

“You do that. Put on the alert too.” Pinkie shook her head. “Something’s up… Is there anything wrong with where we’re landing?”

Veila shook her head as she scrolled through a console. “It’s a perfectly normal desert as far as we can tell.”

“Ka is hiding it from us… Hiding it well…” Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “What is it though?”

“We can’t know,” Mlinx said. “All we know is that it’s coming. And it isn’t going to be pretty.” He hefted Siron’s staff. “…We will meet whatever it is head on.”

“You’ve grown so much, you know that?”

“…It just means the gap between me and everyone else is even larger. Always larger, larger larger…”

The Jarn descended into the gravitational well of Nucleon.

~~~

Corona, Eve, Sunny, and Daniel’s Skiff entered the gravitational well of Nucleon.

“We’re about a thousand kilometers from the surface and it already latched onto us…” Sunny observed, taking note. “That’s… definitely not what I was expecting.”

“It’s the biggest planet in the entire universe, so far as we know,” Corona reminded her counterpart.

“I know that, but that messes with the law of gravity wells I was working out…” She put a hoof to her chin and started scrolling through her data pad. “I really don’t have much of an idea about how the world works. So far every model I’ve tried doesn’t predict with accuracy…”

“Have you gotten anywhere at all?” Eve asked.

Sunny nodded slowly. “I can generate a map of any given moment. Take a picture of the sky, figure out where the planets are. Things close to the core here tend not to have many degrees of movement, but stuff further out is so chaotic I can’t even begin to say my current understanding is adequate.” She pressed a few buttons on the pad. “Luckily, here is easy. We’ve got the core – we really need to name it – and that one planet that was blocking all scans. We’ll have to investigate that eventually.”

“Don’t see how…” Eve said. “It was like when Seraphim would create a one-way forcefield. If we went in I doubt we’d be able to come out without some form of reality warping.”

“Which we don’t have, I know.” Sunny furrowed her brow. “It’s just bothering me. Something about it seems… important.”

“It’s orbiting the core and we can’t get to it, of course it is,” Daniel muttered. “It’s not what we’re here for, though.”

Eve looked to the tired old man with a sad expression. “…What are we here for, then?”

“I don’t know.” He let out a tired, dry sigh. “I don’t know…”

“It could be that we’re all here for different things,” Corona offered. “Different fates.”

“…And you’re a good judge of fate…” Daniel rasped.

Corona looked away. Daniel didn’t apologize. He may not have been raving mad about hating her anymore, but that hadn’t removed what he actually felt about her now that the war was over.

Nothing Eve had said had lessened this. Corona didn’t want to push it – Daniel was frail enough as it was. Life had not been kind to the archeologist.

“I’m picking up a giant tree,” Eve said, pulling up an image of a moon-sized tree. “Geez, maybe this is why the gravity has to go so far. It’s hundreds of kilometers tall.”

“Seems as good of a place as any to set down,” Corona said, pointing a finger. “Engage.”

Eve rolled her eyes. “Yessir.” She made a mock salute with her wings and took the Skiff down through the branches of the world tree. Everyone aside from Daniel took a moment to take in the size of the plant – its tremendous autumn leaves, the bark that became like crevasses when they neared it, the rivers of dew flowing down it to the ground far, far below.

It took several minutes to make their way to the absolute bottom of the tree. The first thing they noticed was the giant hole bored right through the trunk. The second thing they noticed was the signs of an immense struggle that were all around. Antimatter laser burns in the ground, blood everywhere, a couple holes in the ground that went deep, and…

“Is that a grave?” Sunny asked.

Eve took the Skiff down to get a closer look. They spotted a simple, rounded-top tombstone over some freshly-moved earth.

Rohan Kishibe.

“Rohan!?” Eve blurted. “Wh… What happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” Corona said, checking the scans of the area. “The computer seems to think there was eldritch stuff going on here, but that’s not possible…”

“There is ka, though, and a lot of it,” Sunny reported. “Eve, scan the tombstone closely.”

Eve did, using her own magic to bolster the scanning resolution of the ship.

“It’s too perfect, too smooth,” Corona said. “This gravestone was created in an instant from someone with a creation power. Given the shredded ka scans…”

“Monika,” Eve said. “Monika was here. That’s… good, right?”

Daniel let out a sigh, not needing to say anything to indicate how he felt about that.

“Can we find her?” Sunny asked.

“Scans can’t find a trail,” Eve reported, furrowing her brow. “It’s like… everything here was scrubbed or something. Or ka doesn’t behave as we understood it. Or the ship’s broken. Or…”

“I’m picking up a different signal.” Corona said, tapping a few buttons. “Not ka related at all. Just… a normal, average beacon. Marking a location.”

“Setting course,” Eve said, turning the Skiff in the direction of the beacon.

“I hope whoever’s there, they’re friendly,” Corona commented.

“If not, you can certainly make them behave…” Daniel said.

Corona shook her head but said nothing. The Skiff sped off into unknown territories…

~~~

Lord English sat in the sands of the desert – waiting.

Waiting for them to come.

Waiting for them to bring what he wanted.

Waiting for the pieces of the puzzle to call together.

A plan an eternity in the making…

He ground his teeth – the thought of his plan falling apart was enough to make him burn with Rage. He would not let it happen. He could never let it happen.

They were concerned. Expecting something. Ready for when they arrived to face something on the sands.

Their ship was being cautious, scanning, gently drifting down through the atmosphere…

As if that would help them.

The fools.

He was already there.

139 - Complimentary

He was already there.

Pinkie Pie knew she had no time to say anything. She whipped around, driving her Warhammer into Lord English’s mouth. The impact of Pinkie’s hammer with English’s face made a very impressive clang noise that rang throughout the halls of the Jarn. Everyone knew in an instant that they were under attack – and from the complete lack of quips from Pinkie, they knew it was serious.

“No…” Vriska said, freezing up as she recognized her age-old foe.

The others were not as hesitant – Rina, Mlinx, Flutterfree, and Veila all attacked. Rina’s swords penetrated English, but did not remove his life. Flutterfree’s Rage-infused Bow of Light hit true, but to no visible effect. Mlinx’s staff unleashed a torrent of red-green energy that English absorbed, while Veila’s miniscule magic feats did absolutely nothing.

English roared. Everyone went flying to opposite sides of the bridge at high speeds. The carapace of Veila’s head shattered when she impacted the siding, spraying the blue blood of demons everywhere.

“VEILA!” Mlinx shouted.

Pinkie was in her massacre dress. “Rina!”

Rina noticed Pinkie had a lot of explosives affixed to her hammer. She didn’t need to be told twice – she teleported everyone but Pinkie out of the bridge and into the air outside.

The front half of the Jarn exploded in a rush of flame, smoke, and confetti. The remaining half lost all control over its velocity and started dropping to the ground like a stone, smoldering like any meteor should.

Two specks flew out of the explosion – both completely unharmed by the flames. English opened his mouth and encased Pinkie in a vaporizing beam.

She appeared on his back, driving a chainsaw into his neck. The chainsaw burst into green flames and disintegrated. He whirled around and clapped his hands, creating a few thousand pool balls burning with his unnatural power.

Pinkie dodged every last one – but failed to get out of the way of the punch that hit her right afterward, sending her flying straight into the ground far, far below. English was going to pursue her, but Gilgamesh chose this time to jump out of the cascading wreckage of the ship, weilding a bright holy blade. “Guess what!? I FINALLY FOUND EXCALIBUR! You shall fall to its edge, foul beast! YAAAA!”

Lord English let the blade hit him – he even opened his arms to let it pierce his heart. Upon seeing that English wasn’t flinching, Gilgamesh became concerned. “You know, maybe we could work out a-“

English ripped the sword out through his back and crushed it into fine powder.

“…My curse is never to be lifted…”

English punched a hole straight through Gilgamesh’s chest, killing him instantly. With a grunt, the Lord of Time dropped to the ground, fists bare.

Pinkie was standing there on her hind hooves, a giant warhammer in one hoof, an advanced magitech railgun in the other. She seemed completely unharmed. With a snarl, she fired the laser-like bullet at English, and as expected he deflected it with one of his hands – leaving him open for an antimatter hammer to the face.

The explosion blew Pinkie far away - but she bounced back like a rubber toy as soon as she landed.

English clapped his hands and all the smoke cleared, revealing not a scratch on his body.

“Right, so, clearly anything normal isn’t going to work. Gonna have to get a little creative…”

“I got your back, sister!” Gilgamesh called, falling from the sky, body freshly aflame from consuming a revival item. “What should we do to the goblin?”

“Make him eat some words!” Pinkie produced a speech bubble with what she had just said and shoved it in English’s face. A health bar appeared out of nowhere and she smacked English with it.

For a moment, a chip of damage appeared in the bar. But then it restored to full in an instant.

“…I think we forgot he has the powers too,” Gilgamesh said just before English punched the warrior’s head off.

Pinkie bit her lip – thinking. She appeared behind English and drove another blade into him, but of course he didn’t care. Any ‘damage’ was just undone. It didn’t matter that time reversal was no longer an option, he could just say he was back to normal and he would be. His mastery over that domain far exceeded her own.

But she could still be really, really annoying. She pulled out two cymbals the size of trees and crushed his head between them. With a roar he tried to vaporize her again – but as usual, she just shifted out of the way.

Gilgamesh revived again and ran a shining blue javelin right into Lord English’s crotch. His repayment for this was getting crushed by the cherub’s foot.

“PINKIE!” Vriska called from above – as far as Pinkie could tell, she was alone. “Is it perfect? My luck is only average!”

“DO IT!” Pinkie shouted, beaning English in the face with a meat-grinder covered in spikes.

Vriska did it – she rolled the fluorite octet and the infinite sided die at the same time. Her luck was average, and under normal circumstances she might have gotten something strong enough to have a minor effect on a higher demon.

But this was not a normal circumstance. The winds of ka recognized her – not only was this battle beyond important to the fate of the universe, but she had a history with the foe before her. She was granted the one in a million chance she needed.

8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8

And the infinite sided die turned green.

Her entire body transformed, becoming like green fire with burning blue eyes. The sharp, angled pirate’s armor of her normal full-8s roll formed around this flaming form. She shifted and shivered like she didn’t fully belong in the current reality, brimming with the very power Lord English had lost with the fall of the Green Sun.

She clasped her hands – and she drove her fist through Lord English’s stomach. She let out an inhuman, eldritch roar that sounded like stars dying and forced all the energy into an explosion strong enough to crack the tectonic plate they were standing on, prompting much of the sand to fall into freshly formed crevasses.

Pinkie met the attack with her own flurry of pink, flaming weapons while Gilgamesh fired a fusion cannon. The energy was more than enough to melt the ground beneath Vriska and English to pure glass.

Lord English grabbed Vriska’s flaming body by the head and unleashed a beam from his mouth. The green energy was blown right off her and her armor shattered.

But she did survive the attack. She was the first one to take a direct hit from Lord English and survive in eons.

He threw her into the ground and then kicked her into the air, aiming another laser at her airborne body.

It was at this point the Crimson Blitz crash-landed right onto English’s face, creating a massive crater in the glassy desert. He didn’t even wait for the dust to settle a little. He pulled himself out of the crater, holding the semi-flattened Crimson Blitz on his back, and threw it away. It landed a few dozen meters from his location.

Discord teleported himself, Lightning, Cosmo, and Insipid out of the ship. “Never fear, help has arrived!”

Lord English reached out and tore Discord’s form to shreds with his claws, following up with a beam of energy to disintegrate whatever else remained.

“ULTIGA!” Lightning shouted, encasing English in the strongest spell she knew. Cosmo unleashed the full might of the Tree of Harmony on English, the light becoming blinding to everyone looking at the fight zone.

Lord English punched them both at once. Cosmo exploded in an instant, but Lightning blocked with the Infinity Gauntlet. The artifact held fast against the Lord of Time’s beating – and in fact it absorbed most of the power he put into it.

Lightning smirked. “Right back at you.” She snapped her fingers. English went flying back as if he had punched himself. “Not completely useless here after all…”

Gilgamesh swung a sword again. “GOTCH-dammit.” English had grabbed his arm and used him to swat Lightning aside like a fly. Gilgamesh’s arm tore clean off in the process.

Insipid leaped, touching a hoof to English. “Ha-ha!”

English was already behind her. She blinked. “What in-“ she was flattened like a pancake, losing all sensation within an instant of his fist impacting her body.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Jotaro shouted, mixing his Stand with Hermit Purple and the Passion, trying to keep English and his soul from moving at whatever cost.

It was all useless.

Jotaro went flying back, limp, until he landed into the sand a fair distance away.

“JOJO!” Pidge yelled, coming out of her hiding place only to get sniped by one of English’s pool balls.

Pinkie ground her teeth. “We’ve still got hope. We-“

At her words, Lord English transported across the arena, found Rev, and tore her in half. Then he sent a beam of energy back at Pinkie that should have been enough to destroy a city.

Pinkie was behind him again – Vriska and Lightning under her hooves. She bucked English across the face. Rina charged into English at the same time, embedding her horn in the beast’s head and self-destructing herself in a shower of dark magical sparks.

Flutterfree dropped from the sky, creating a small crater with her sudden presence. Her entire body had deep, dark, purple energies wafting off of her like some amorphous monster. The Element of Kindness glowed a stellar white and her mane rippled like that of an alicorn.

“The Kindest form of violence is an instant, painless death,” she recited. And then she kicked English to the ground and drove all of her wing-blades into his chest, screaming with all her Rage, trying to disintegrate him from the inside out.

English refused to let her words be true.

As a result, for the first time since the fighting began, Lord English roared in pain.

But he had the Rage within him as well, for he was not just the Lord of Time, there was also a piece deep inside of him that knew the truth of the matter. He pushed his Rage to the surface, bringing out the Void and Heart as well, tearing at Flutterfree’s very soul through the connections she made.

Flutterfree brought out Lolo, the winds of ka seeing it appropriate that the meta-natured Stand be able to pierce English’s defenses. Vriska, with her remaining Light, stabbed English in the head. The only other one of the team left standing enough to do much of anything was Pinkie, throwing in the destructive power of Space with a distorted hoof.

It was not enough. Lord English exploded, vaporizing Flutterfree, Vriska, and Lightning.

Only Pinkie remained. Gilgamesh had stopped getting up a while ago.

Blood ran down the side of her face, coming from her eyes. The bright candy-red tone splashed unnaturally on the glassy ground.

Lord English was bleeding too – the wounds Flutterfree had inflicted would not go away in an instant. His blood was the same candy-red color, though this was normal for him.

They stood, staring at each other for a moment.

English opened his mouth and hit Pinkie with a vaporization beam. She remained after it had hit her, but she hadn’t dodged either.

A smile crawled up her face. “…Heh. You missed one.”

“I DID NOT.” He snapped his fingers.

Far, far in the sky, fleeing the scene was Mlinx – holding tight to Siron’s Staff since it was his only source of propulsion. Suddenly, he felt as if English had grabbed him. He was yanked out of his escape and rammed into the ground ata speed far above terminal velocity – but Mlinx did not shatter. He used Siron’s Staff to deflect the shock of the blow, bouncing onto his feet.

Even though he was known as the runt, as the soft shelled demon, he had the fighting instinct of his people. He lashed out with the staff, hitting Lord English with a beam of Juju energy.

It was no House Juju. It would not be the secret to Lord English’s defeat.

Lord English opened his mouth and let out a beam of energy. Siron’s staff caught the energy, pushing back with a similar energy of its own. It was an admirable effort – but it was not enough.

The defenses broke and Mlinx’s carapace shattered in several places. The staff flew into the air where Lord English caught it.

Siron’s staff had a new owner. The original owner. It was his, after all. He had been the one who had created it; he had been the one who had set it loose on the multiverse.

And now it was back in his control.

Pinkie ground her teeth, more blood coming out of her eyes as tears. “YOU’RE THE VILLAIN!” she shouted. “YOU WON’T WIN! YOU CAN’T WIN!”

Lord English wordlessly looked to her with his inconsistent, flashing eyes. He hit her with a beam of energy.

Pinkie wavered, blood pouring from more than just her eyes now. “You can’t… kill… suction cup… pony…” She flopped to the ground, motionless.

There was no more sound, just the rush of wind in the desert.

Lord English clutched his staff in his hand. He had what he came for. He slowly marched off – not even bothering with the Sarcophagus. Just walking away, every step sending a tremor through the crust of Nucleon.

He left behind him a wasteland of broken bones, blood splatters, broken glass, sand, and smoldering dust.

The scene of a defeat.

It took an hour for anything to move again.

The hatch of the half-broken Crimson Blitz popped open, revealing Sherlock Holmes and Death. “Well… That was… revolting.” Sherlock shuddered, trying to gather control of himself. “You have them all?”

NOT A SINGLE DEATH HAS OCCURED SINCE WE ARRIVED HERE. THEY ARE IN GREAT PAIN, THOUGH. THE AGONY OF A BODY NOT ABLE TO MOVE AND NOT MEANT TO FEEL.

“Yeah, well, didn’t want to chance it by coming out sooner…” He pulled a white globe out of his coat pocket. “Now would be a good time to pray that Lightning’s magic is always reliable.” He threw it to the ground – and the entire battlefield was surrounded in the strongest healing magic Lightning had been able to compress into an arcane grenade over the course of about half an hour.

It took about a minute, but everyone’s bodies slowly reformed from their various, brutal destructions, be it complete vaporization, grotesque mutilation, or simply a punch to the gut. At first they screamed from the pain the healing could do nothing about – but eventually, things settled down. The pain lessened, and they all sat up, breathing heavily.

Pinkie took in a deep breath, grinned, and threw her hooves up into the air. “YOU! CAN’T! KILL! SUCTION! CUP! PONY! HA! TAKE THAT!”

YOU WOULD BE DEAD IF IT WASN’T FOR ME

Pinkie grabbed Death by the face and stared menacingly into his eyes. “Let me have this.”

“Did we… did we all make it?” Pidge asked, adjusting her glasses.

Mlinx looked around. “…Veila? Veila? Where’s Veila?”

Lightning grimaced. “Did he get someone before we got here?”

Mlinx clenched his fist. “He… he’s destroyed the last one… the last chance…” He laughed. “I might be the last demon! The last one in existence!”

“That’s like… sucky,” Insipid said.

Mlinx turned to her, ready to tear her limb from limb – but then he deflated. He fell to the ground, saying nothing.

“…How are we going to stop that?” Flutterfree asked, sliding her marble tips back onto her blades. “He… he toyed with us.”

“I don’t know,” Lightning said. “I do know that we’re putting aside all differences in order to do it. The rest of our ships will arrive soon – and then we can discuss what we’re going to do to him.”

“We can’t do anything,” Sherlock said. “Not yet, anyway. But we can watch him.” He pointed in the direction Lord English went. “He’s going that way.”

“Then that’s where we’re going,” Pinkie said. “Your ships can join us on the way.”

“Why would he even need that fucking staff?!” Rina shouted. “It’s just a staff!”

“I don’t know,” Pinkie said.

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “Why would he need it?”

“Any ideas?” Discord asked.

“Its primary function is useless in the New World… Does it have another? I don’t know… It was what he was looking for, though.” He shook his head. “We need to observe more. More.”

“He… He’s back…” Vriska said, haunted. “Why would he be back? I sealed him away! I watched the House Juju take him!”

“I watched him escape,” Sherlock said. “John’s essence was not in the House. He must not have made it back.”

Vriska put an arm over her eyes and made a wheezing sound.

Pinkie sighed. “…Everyone, we just lost. We just lost badly. But we’ve all been given a second chance. When we face Lord English again – and we will – it will not end like this. Got it?”

There were a bunch of ‘yeahs’ mixed with dejected, defeated sighs.

~~~

Starbeat smacked the side of her goggles with her hoof. “I can’t trace him! Gah!”

“Heading directly that direction,” I offered with a point.

She gave me the stink eye and I knew she was considering bucking me again.

Roxy inserted herself between the two of us. “Now don’t go breaking more of her ribs, Starbeat. She’s helping.”

“You know we can’t trust her,” Starbeat said.

“And yet you’re trusting Lord English Mini?”

“No,” Starbeat said, glancing at Caliborn. “…Good thing he’s not trying to tell me where to go.”

“…You trust Gamzee though.”

“You leave Gamzee out of this.”

“Just listen to her advice and don’t kick her in the gut again, okay?” Roxy asked.

Starbeat thought about this for a moment. “Fine. Twilence, you can take the lead on following his ka trail. No, you don’t get that magic seal removed.”

“As it should be,” Monika added.

“You guys are being a lot grumpier than usual,” Saitama said. “And that’s saying something.”

“What are you insinuating!?” Caliborn demanded.

“…That you’re grumpy?”

“Be nice, he resembles that remark,” Trixie jibed.

“We’ve got other problems right now, stop bickering,” Starbeat ordered.

“…Geez, okay,” Trixie said, backing down.

Starbeat’s gaze faltered. “…Trixie, I’m sorry, I’m just under a lot of stress right now and…”

“I get it, I get it. Twilence is right there, and we have to listen to her, and we’ve got some sort of world-ending evil to find. You’re just not making it easy, y’know?”

Starbeat nodded slowly – but then Gamzee’s hand was on her shoulder, taking her attention away from Trixie. “Girl, you’re motherfuckin’ strong. Don’t let a little purple traitor make you think otherwise.”

I glared at him. I wanted to scream for that monster to leave her presence, to ask how Starbeat was so blind to the menacing flow of ka around him. But I couldn’t – I had received some freedom and I wasn’t going to throw it away.

The Crimson King was more important than some angry purple troll.

I cleared my throat. “As I said, he’s going this direction. He’s not in a hurry, so we’ll be able to catch him if we hurry.”

Monika pressed her hands together. “I can help with that… Saitama, you ready?”

Saitama smirked. “How big of a punch am I allowed to use?”

“Don’t destroy the planet,” Roxy deadpanned.

“…Hmm… Could I do that, with a planet this size in this New World…?”

“Not something to try and figure out,” Trixie emphasized. “Just… More than last time?”

“Pretty sure I can do that,” Saitama admitted.

“And if not I can keep replenishing him as much as we need,” Monika said with a wink. “I don’t care what sort of weird eldritch power the Crimson King has, we’ve got literal ka manipulation on our hands!”

“Didn’t help Rohan…” Roxy muttered.

He’d probably still be here if you released me.

I can hear you, Monika responded to my thoughts.

Funny, because I was addressing you.

Want me to sic Starbeat on you?

No. Something’s wrong with her, though. Gamzee too.

Not Caliborn?

Surprisingly, not so much. Just watch them, since I can’t.

…I don’t know…

You don’t have to trust me, but you do know I care about them. I think there’s cause for concern. Just be careful.

All right, fine. I will.

“Earth to Twilence,” Trixie said, waving a hoof in front of my face. “You’re about to walk into a swamp.”

“That’s where he went!” I said, defensively. He had, but I also hadn’t realized I was about to walk into a swamp until Trixie had said something. “If you want to catch him you will have to go through this swamp.”

Monika created a raft. “All aboard.”

All nine of us piled on and set off through the swamp. It wasn’t a normal marsh – but things rarely were ‘normal’ on Nucleon. The trees were red and had no leaves, instead relying entirely on ‘parasitic’ butterflies for their solar nutrients. The water glowed blue as we set off across it, announcing our presence to all the predators.

They were some pretty fierce predators. We also had Saitama on board so we didn’t need to worry at all. Even without him, almost all of us could have taken the beasts.

“How strong are we?” Trixie asked, suddenly. “Or, well, all of you. I’m not a fighter, but…”

“I think virtually all of us could take on an entire army on our own,” Roxy said. “The weakest aside from Trixie is probably… Chancellor Fluttershy?”

The Chancellor nodded slowly. “I could not take on a whole army – but Starbeat could.”

“I don’t know about that…” Starbeat said.

Saitama punched a three-headed crocodile dragon in the face, exploding its skull. “Don’t sell yourself short. You have a fire in your eyes. Totally could take on an army and probably would if I wasn’t around.” He stuck a finger in the water and speared a trout. “Huh. Didn’t expect that to work.”

“Turn left,” I said, my eyes closed to allow me some focus. “He’s changed direction.”

“Why?” Starbeat asked.

“All I’ve got is his ka-signature, Starbeat. I don’t know why he’s doing anything or for what purpose. The Eye of Rhyme is only showing me the story as it directly relates to us right now. I haven’t seen a scene in another point of view for a month. Everything’s had to be reset.”

“…Do you have some visions back?” Trixie asked.

I nodded slowly. “I can see some things. Not as many as I used to, but more than during the war.”

“Well…?”

“I see a City around the Dark Tower more than anything else. I see an airship. I also see a great evil – sometimes the Crimson King, but other times I think it has to be something else – charging across the land. And I see us standing together – but also fighting.” I opened my eyes. “Yes, I really am just a weird oracle with vague visions now, sorry, not much I can do about that at this very moment.”

“Very helpful,” Starbeat muttered.

“You understand my pain.”

Starbeat let out a harsh, prolonged hiss. “Just keep navigating. Has he changed where he’s going anymore?”

I shook my head. “As far as I can tell the heading is the same as I last said.”

“THEN FULL STEAM AHEAD!” Caliborn shouted. “Make the boat go faster!”

“Uh. Okay.” Saitama got into the water and started kicking.

…To put it simply, the boat went faster.

~~~

“…and start moving around the planet until we find something,” O’Neill said, wrapping up the meeting. “That’s all folks, return to your ships.”

Minna nodded curtly, stood up, and returned to her Commander’s seat on the Austraeoh’s bridge. O’Neill talked to the Emperor for a bit in the hall between the bridge and the meeting room, and Minna let them. She told herself she didn’t mind waiting a few extra minutes.

As it turned out, she did. She did mind. But her military discipline kept her planted, silently, in the chair.

Eventually, O’Neill decided he was done with the chat and returned to his captain’s chair.

“Permission to go off-duty, sir?” Minna asked.

O’Neill looked to her. “Not even going to let me get my seat warm?”

“…Sir?”

“You can have a vacation day, you earned it. But be ready to be back here at a moment’s notice if we find anything. Where you going?”

Minna stood bolt upright as soon as she’d been told she could go. “Swip.”

“…Ah. I would say enjoy yourself, but…” he didn’t finish the thought, opting to simply wave her along. She marched down the halls at a brisk pace – never breaking into a run. She knew the moment she broke into a run, she would lose all her discipline. And she needed to keep her discipline. It was what kept the people of both sides looking up to her. If she faltered, they might find an excuse to…

She was overexaggerating it in her mind, of course, but it could always be the thing that tips someone over the edge.

She entered a transporter bay and found that it was absolutely filled with Aradias tearing things off the walls and replacing them all in quicktime.

One of them slowed her timestream to be even with Minna’s. “Hi High Commander! …I’m one of the Aradias who served with you, not that I expect you to remember.” She saluted. “An honor to be here.”

Minna saluted back. “What’s going on?”

“Transporter malfunctions. Lapis Vee is having us renovate the entire room. I can take you to the one on the other side of th-“

“Thanks, but I’ll find my own way,” Minna said, hurrying off. Instead of going to the alternate transporter room, she went to the docking bay. She pressed a hand to the door. “Taking Skiff on a trip to Swip.”

|> Access granted.

“…Nala what are you doing in the ship’s computer?”

|> Renovations. The coding could be improved by several orders of magnitude.

“Just don’t go evil on us.” Minna jumped into a Skiff and took it off the Austraeoh, flying through the small gap of space between the Merodi flagship and the spaceship that was a Sweetie Belle. They were in an ‘orbit’ around the core planet, which was to say they were drifting around it in an organized vaguely-circular pattern in order to see what they could find. They could never make out much unless they were right on top of it due to the ‘fog of ka’ (Chem had named it), but they could still see the world.

Minna had at one point said it was beautiful. She still believed the tessellating colors and biomes were beautiful, but she wasn’t looking to it at the moment. Other things were on her mind.

“Welcome to Swip!” Swip announced as Minna entered her hold. “How can I be of help?”

“Looking for Thrackerzod,” Minna said, crawling out of the Skiff.

“Thrackerzod is currently on the bridge. Nettle, could you take her there?”

Nettle looked up to Minna and waved. “Sure!”

Minna examined Nettle. In many ways, the two of them were alike – both pale skinned not-quite-humans. Minna was significantly taller and more muscular than her. Nettle seemed to have blacks and whites on her only with no in-between while Minna had a grayish tinge to some of her hair and her eyes had the purplish color to them.

Minna remembered who this girl in front of her was – an all powerful relic of the most powerful civilization to exist in the history of the multiverse. She couldn’t for the life of her see the mildly insane jellyfish-entity in this woman. There was just too much fear in those eyes, too much hesitation in the way she moved.

Definitely not the same person.

As Nettle started walked with her to the bridge, the ex-Downstreamer smiled. “So, hi. I don’t believe we’ve met?”

“I’ve encountered you, but you wouldn’t have registered it,” Minna said. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Oh, good, I’ve been trying to introduce myself to people lately and I’ve been finding that a lot harbor resentment toward me for being like I was. An… arrogant prick? Is that right?”

“I don’t think so,” Minna deadpanned.

“I’ll ask Burger about it later. …Or Mattie. …Actually, I get the impression that all my friends aren’t really as socially acceptable as they claim to be.” She rubbed the back of her head. “So… yeaaah.”

There was an awkward silence.

“So, why are you here?”

“I’m going to ask about my mother.”

Nettle blinked awkwardly. “And this is the point where the context clue is ‘shut up’?”

“Yes.”

“…Thanks.” She turned around and walked away – Minna was already at the door to the bridge.

She took a deep breath and walked in. Thrackerzod was not the only one in there – the Everykid was as well, playing a video game on the console. A video game that starred her…

Minna didn’t think about this. She cleared her throat. “Thrackerzod.”

Thrackerzod visibly tensed, even though Minna was only looking at her from behind. The once-eldritch unicorn slowly turned her chair around and fixed Minna with a concerned glare.

“She’s dead, Minna. Dusted.”

Minna didn’t know what she’d been expecting. That, probably that, but she hadn’t let herself accept it. Or look into the future. Or much of anything, really. She took in a deep breath. “Thank you, Thrackerzod.”

“…It wasn’t painful. Not for any of them, if that’s what you want to know. She didn’t even seem all that surprised. Just… pained.”

“She really did it, didn’t she? That wasn’t just some… cover story?”

“Killed Renee in cold blood,” Thrackerzod said matter-of-factly. “Renee cleared her mind at the same time. It was… one last gift. She went with a smile on her face.”

Minna sat down in an empty chair and held a hand to her forehead.

“…I’m sorry,” Thrackerzod said. “I can’t be the emotional support you need right now. I’m… I’m just an eldritch demon trapped in a unicorn’s body.” She sighed. “Burgerbelle might be able to help. If she can keep from cracking a joke every five seconds…”

“I have Frigid,” Minna said. “He… He’s there for me.”

“If you think that’s enough.”

Minna shook her head and stood up. She gave Thrackerzod a salute and turned to leave.

The Everykid stopped her by hugging her legs tightly. Minna looked down at the kid in the hat.

Something about her presence made Minna smile. She peeled the Everykid off her legs and kneeled until she was eye level with the kid. “…I have the day off. Want to… get something to eat? Like, ice cream?”

The Everykid nodded vigorously.

Minna glanced at Thrackerzod. “…I can take her, right?”

“She seems to like being the kid, go for it,” Thrackerzod said.

Minna picked the Everykid up and took her out of the bridge. There was just something about holding her in her arms that felt… right. Of course this wasn’t her kid, but maybe, just maybe, she could pretend like the Everykid was for a day.

And she could see what it was like to be her mother.

~~~

Eve didn’t have to follow the signal very far - relatively speaking, at least. The Skiff probably covered a distance the size of a standard Earth diameter, but on the core world it was barely a pixel on the map.

They came to a stop over a giant hole in the ground that looked recently caved in. She brought the Skiff low, ‘skimming’ the ground so close she upturned a fair amount of dust in the process. It did not take her long to find the tunnel that led deeper into the ground.

“…I’m hesitant to take the Skiff underground…” Eve admitted.

Corona shrugged. “It’s not like we actually need it to travel from planet to planet, our own magic is enough, we can risk it.”

“Okay then,” Eve said stretching her neck and lighting her horn. “Time for some fancy flying.”

“Are you really that good of a pilot?” Sunny asked.

“Uh… Probably not…”

“Scoot over,” Sunny said. Eve obliged and allowed the fiery unicorn to take the helm. She latched onto all the controls with her magic and pushed the Skiff forward into the tunnels. It was very dark for a long time, but the Skiff’s headlights were more than enough to light their way. Sunny masterfully weaved her way through the tunnels like an ace pilot, hitting only one hanging stalactite that the Skiff’s hull easily shrugged off.

“Sorry!” she blurted.

“Just focus on the flying,” Eve said, no hint of worry in her voice.

The serene words were warranted; they made it through the tunnel without any significant damage. They found themselves in an underground spherical hole with a mini-sun in the middle, a jungle around the lower edges, and a large gray structure.

Eve’s eyes lit up and her grin widened. “Is that the Hub!?”

“It looks like it!” Corona said, grinning as well. “Yes! Take us down!”

Sunny made a salute and slowly brought the Skiff toward the Hub. They must have seen them coming, since the docking bay lit up and opened their ceiling panel, allowing the Skiff to drift slowly to the floor within. They landed without incident and popped the windshield open, Sunny hopping out first.

Storm was waiting for them with a security team. He didn’t lower his gun when Sunny appeared. “Which one are you?”

“Uh… Sunny?”

“Stand down Storm,” Eve said, leading Daniel gently out of the Skiff.

Storm stood down the instant he saw Eve. “…Evening!? I… I didn’t expect to see you ever again!”

“It’s good to see you too,” Eve said.

“And Daniel…” Storm smirked. “I suppose I’m going to have to give you my job?”

“You can keep it…” Daniel breathed. “That’s not what I’m here for…”

“What are you here for?”

“Why do people have to keep asking that question?”

Storm shrugged. “Regardless, it’s good to see you back on your feet.”

“…For a given value of feet,” Daniel muttered, stumbling a bit.

It was at this point Storm noticed Corona crawling out of the Skiff. “STOP RIGHT THERE!”

Corona tried to stop – but since she was in the middle of crawling out of the Skiff she lost her balance and fell flat on her back, dazed.

“Storm! No, stop,” Eve said, spreading her wings in a defensive posture. “I know what she’s done and I know you have a right to be angry, but I’ve given her my pardon.”

Daniel grunted. “For what it’s worth, as Overhead of Expeditions I do as well… Better to just move on…”

Storm looked at Daniel in surprise. “…Daniel?”

“Curses aren’t a thing anymore. She’s not trustworthy, but there’s no need for violence here.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Corona said. “Can I stand up now?”

Storm lowered his gun, eyes still angry. “Sure. I still have to put you under arrest.”

“Why?” Eve said.

“I’m not in charge here. Starbeat is, and not having you tried and executed is probably against her wishes.”

Eve blinked. “Starbeat?”

“War changes people,” Storm said. “Corona, come willingly or I will have to use force.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Right, we’ll play along.”

“Corona…” Eve warned.

“You’ll have a talk with her,” Corona said dismissively. “Knock some sense into that skull of hers. I can sit in a cell for a few hours, it’s not like the world’s in danger right now or anything.”

“…It might be,” Daniel said, narrowing his eyes.

“Well, it’s not like we know what kind of danger it’s in.” Corona held out her hands. “Take me away.”

Storm took joy in cuffing Corona up, a sight that hurt Eve. He led them away, into the new society of the Hub.

~~~

Who’s group was it? Was it Starbeat’s? Was it Roxy’s? Was it mine?

Whoever’s it was, we were tracing the Crimson King through a landscape composed mostly of rough, black metal that was very angled and uneven at a close inspection, but from a distance seemed very smooth and lustrous. The land was mostly flat with the exception of a few pointed peaks in the distance.

“Why can’t we see him?” Starbeat demanded. “The land’s flat!”

I sighed. “I said we were close, not right on top of him. He’s probably within line of sight, which includes possibly being behind those mountains or that hill or what have you.”

“The coward should show himself!” Caliborn shouted. “He needs to beg for mercy at my feet!”

“Saitama’s feet,” Monika corrected.

“Fists,” Saitama added.

I stopped short. “…Uh…”

“Uh, what?” Starbeat questioned with the usual amount of distaste.

I pointed down at the ground. There were giant footprints crossing our path – the right foot being nothing more than the peg leg, the left a clawed monstrosity of a comparable size to me.

I slowly turned around to look at Caliborn. The shapes of his foot and peg leg matched, but he was much, much smaller.

“…What are you all looking at me for!?”

“In the original ‘plan’, you grew up to become Lord English,” I said.

“What?”

I facehooved. “You got ‘riiiiiiipped’.”

“Oh. I remember that…”

“Yeah, well, given these footprints and the ka I’m sensing…” I gulped. “There’s… There’s a good chance the fully realized Lord English is out there. And nearby, these tracks are fresh.”

Monika furrowed her brow. “So now there are two apocalyptic multiverse-ending threats running around?”

“Jegus…” Roxy muttered, hand to her forehead. “This… I think I can finally say it. We’re fucked.”

“Wimpy bitch,” Caliborn muttered. “Their power is nothing to ME!”

“Lord English is also the Lord of Time,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but he’s me, and I’m the BEST!”

“I think chances are pretty high he tries to kill you on sight.”

“What? That’s stupid, you’re fucking idiotic!”

“What would you do if there was another, weaker version of you?”

Caliborn blinked. “I wouldn’t. Fuck you, that’s why.”

I rolled my eyes. “Riiiight…”

“All this changes is that we now have to deal with both at some point,” Starbeat announced. “Let’s go for the Crimson King first since his tracks are nearly-impossible to follow.”

I nodded. “Seems reasonable. He’s this w-“

A spaceship appeared above us – a carrier of some sort. I couldn’t recognize the design upon a cursory inspection, and I didn’t care, because I suddenly knew who was inside. I grinned. “We just got backup.”

The carrier landed in front of us and opened up its hatch with a loud clang upon contact with the metallic ground. While there were a few dozen people inside the carrier, only five decided to come out – Lightning, Sherlock, Mlinx, Pinkie, and Discord.

Before any explanations or angry shouting could begin Trixie gasped. “DISCORD?”

“TRIXIE!” Discord teleported to her and pulled her into a really really big hug. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”

“Oh, you!” Trixie giggled. “Do I have a lot to catch you up on!”

“What a coincidence! Perhaps we should have a moment over tea?”

“…Discord, that’s Flutterfree’s thing.”

“I’ll get you to like tea yet.”

“So… Dirty…” Caliborn said, staring on with great interest.

“Discord, zip his mouth,” Trixie ordered. Discord did just that and Caliborn was powerless to resist.

“EVERYONE STOP!” Starbeat shouted. “Let’s get through… introductions.” She turned to glare at Pinkie. “We all know who each other are.”

“You don’t know me,” Sherlock said, stepping forward.

Starbeat raised an eyebrow. “You are right, I don’t. Care to introduce yourself?”

“Sherlock Holmes. You are Starbeat Glimmer, and you’re about ready to blow a gasket because we made a truce with Pinkie.”

“Brilliant deduction, detective.” Starbeat examined him through her goggles. “You are a completely normal human being with the gift of deduction, cementing your position of authority among those of higher power. You have been manipulating things behind the scenes and not one of your ‘friends’ truly know how much you have been doing that.”

Sherlock was unimpressed. “Let’s go down the list. You’re irrationally angry, have a deep-nested desire to give everyone in the collapse movement what they deserve, have no patience for most of the people around you, have gotten yourself on a little power kick as of late, have finally discovered something resembling a love life, and were holding Twilence prisoner with magic locks.”

Starbeat blinked, realizing he’d just used the past-tense word. “Shit…”

“Thanks Pinkie,” I said as she used a magic-restoration device on my horn.

“Doooon’t mention it!” Pinkie said, jingling what were probably supposed to be comical representations of magic locks, but just looked like purple handcuffs. The two of us bounced back to the carrier, free.

Starbeat lit her horn. “Get back here right now…”

“No,” I said. “I will not. I’m not going to let myself be subject to your… Rage-fueled dementia anymore.”

“She’s not demented!” Trixie shouted indignantly.

“Perhaps not. But she’s not in a good state of mind.” I glared at Gamzee. “I want to blame you, but I don’t have any proof.”

Gamzee shrugged. “Hey, I’m just here for motherfuckin’ support. Do I look all that angry to you?”

“The Bard of Rage can work in mysterious ways,” I observed.

“Enough!” Lightning said, clapping her hands. “Lord English is loose and he has Siron’s staff. I don’t know what he wants to use it for but we fought him, and we lost badly.”

“The Crimson King’s loose too,” Roxy said. “We fought him – and with Monika and Saitama we almost won. He ran away and we’ve been pursuing him.”

“We can help,” Sherlock offered. “The ship has better sensors and can get us to either one of them faster.”

“We can sort out all the interpersonal details later,” Lightning announced. “Right now we need to stop these monsters. Does that work for you?”

Caliborn grinned. “So long as I get to shoot that Crimson fucker some more…”

“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” I chided.

“…What?”

I shook my head. “Never mind, not important, sadly.” I looked to Starbeat. “Can you put aside your anger for just one moment and take on something actually evil?”

“I can,” Starbeat seethed. “I don’t have to enjoy it.”

“Nobody’s asking you to.”

“It’s implied.”

“Let’s just get moving,” Mlinx announced, clearly tired of all this. “Everyone aboard.”

Saitama shrugged. “You heard the bug monster.” He jumped into the carrier. Everyone else followed shortly after. The carrier lifted itself into the air rather quickly.

“Crimson King first, harder to see,” Pinkie said.

Strange – the man currently at the pilot’s seat – raised an eyebrow. “Where?”

“That direction,” I said, pointing.

The ship blasted in the direction I pointed. In all of three seconds, Strange pulled the ship to a stop, eyes widening. “What…?”

We had found the Crimson King all right – drifting across the dark metal like a red wraith, Black Thirteen held firmly in his grasp.

But we had also found Lord English. He had taken a detour from his straight march and was now marching toward the Crimson King, the staff Juju held tightly within his green, knobby hand.

Everyone on the carrier froze – unable to do anything but watch the interaction unfold.

The Crimson King turned to face Lord English with caution. “What manner of creature are you?”

“HERE.”

“Don’t be so coy.” He lifted up Black Thirteen as a weapon. “You are Lord English.”

Lord English didn’t even nod – he just marched closer and closer to the Crimson King.

“Do not be a fool,” the Crimson King warned. “One of your caliber could have a place in my new existence.”

Lord English kept walking forward, the features on his face not changing in the slightest.

“I see you wish to risk it all for whatever petty reason your brutish instincts have rationalized.” The Crimson King pushed his hands forward. “BEGONE!”

Lord English was already behind the Crimson King and punched him through the head. The King retaliated in kind, driving his eldritch fingers into English’s face. Despite the hand literally grabbing at the inside of his skull, English took a breath – and let out an explosive beam of hyper-intense energy, creating a crater similar to the one he had left in the desert a few hours prior.

The King reformed into a gigantic spidery shape and drove all eight legs into English. English was already on his back, breaking the carapace with a powerful fist. The King returned to his humanoid form and met English’s fist with Black Thirteen. “That curious ‘already here’ power of yours… it is no more.”

Lord English clearly didn’t care, using his other fist to punch forward – only for the King’s free hand to meet it. The impact of the two limbs was enough to crack the metallic earth beneath them, creating a sound like claws on chalkboard mixed with a collapsing ocean liner. The shockwave was enough to make the observing carrier fire its maneuvering thrusters to remain airborne.

English opened his mouth and unleashed a beam of multicolored energy, but the King blocked it with a projected eye, reflecting the beam back at English. The green monstrosity fell back, blowing up a mountain in the process. He charged out in an instant, manipulating time to increase his speed and drive his claw through the King’s stomach. The King responded in time, summoning thousands of blood-red needles to impale English from all sides. He followed this up with a burst of eldritch energy, twisting English’s body to impossible proportions.

The Crimson King was not all that surprised to see English stand back up – bleeding his bright candy-red blood.

“Tiring?” the Crimson King asked, hitting Lord English with an attack from a dimension that shouldn’t have existed. “Finding it difficult to face the impossible when your own powers are limited?”

Lord English sped to the Crimson King and kicked him with enough force to create a fissure the size of a canyon behind him. The King responded in kind, an eldritch power that absorbed all life-energy for a thousand kilometers in the opposite direction and spiked it into Lord English in a single instant.

The resulting explosion of the impact carried enough energy to start burning the metal beneath their feet with deep, purple flames. English still stood strong. He pulled back his head and charged an attack, summoning several thousand pool balls in the air to keep the King busy while he did so. Then he unleashed the beam that could destroy planets, devastating only a small section of Nucleon in the direction he was facing.

But the Crimson King was already behind him. “Thanks for the trick.” The King was already driving eldritch thorns into English’s entire body, taking control of what constituted his muscular and nervous systems.

English froze, unable to move. He let out a disgusting mix between a honk and a roar before his jaw bone and vocal cords were frozen as well. Deep, crimson spikes punctured out of every square inch of his body – and then vanished just as quickly.

The Crimson King removed his hands from English’s body. Blood began to pour out of the Lord like he was a punctured water balloon. The green menace wavered for a bit. He grunted and took a step, turning around to face the Crimson King. He held out a shaky, uneven fist.

An eldritch tentacle hit him upside the head. That was all it took – Lord English fell to the ground, dead in a pile of his own blood.

The Crimson King stood triumphant – and then grabbed his side. “That… Took too much…”

“Get him now!” Lightning ordered. “We h-“

Lord English’s body started glowing. With a serene, almost holy light, every one of his wounds were healed. He floated into the air like a deity and opened his eyes.

The Crimson King tried to cut him in half – but his attack was disintegrated by the empowered light. “What is this?”

Lord English spoke. “UNCONDITIONAL. IMMORTALITY.” Then he held up his staff Juju. He could have used it at any time since the battle began, but he had chosen not to. But now that he had proven himself… It was time to end this.

The Crimson King sensed this. He dropped all pretense he had of a standard body, letting his full eldritch form shine through. The appearance alone would have caused madness for anyone within the carrier had the computer not detected this and placed a sanity filter over it. There was too much – curdling masses of darkness that were the color of blood, but definitely not blood alongside bones that did not appear to come from any animal anyone had ever seen in their lives. There were tentacles, but there were also vaguely gaseous sections that buzzed with the sound of a billion cicadas and the moans of those who wished for death. Dominating this all was a single, intangible, crimson Eye.

The Crimson King could see. He could always see. Everything his eye laid its gaze on was his. An immense eldritch beam shot out of the eye. It would have destroyed a sizable chunk of Nucleon – big enough to be felt as an earthquake on the other side of the conglomeration planet.

Lord English held up the staff Juju, executing a plan an eternity in the making. He had known since the very beginning there was a large chance he would be trapped in the House Juju, ever since he had used it against the retconning kids. He also knew what the House Juju was – and that if, for any reason, English was ever released, then the Crimson King would be as well. The First Multiversal threat would face off with the Last.

So English placed a Juju with the explicit purpose of absorbing eldritch power out into the multiverse, where it would eventually find its way to his claws once again.

Where it could be used to end the Crimson King.

Lord English’s staff Juju absorbed every last inch of the Crimson King’s attack, letting none of the energy even touch the ground. Then the staff moved on to absorb the King himself – starting with the tentacles, the blood, the screams, the gas, and the bones.

The Crimson King let out a scream that would have curdled the minds of everyone in the entire system, but the staff absorbed even that into itself. Soon, only the King’s pure essence, his eye, remained.

“I AM THE CRIMSON KING!” it shrieked in defiance.

“NOT ANYMORE.”Lord English snapped his fingers, and the last remaining essence of the Crimson King shunted into the staff. Black Thirteen appeared in its place and began to fall to the ground.

Lord English pointed the staff at Black Thirteen and activated the Crimson King’s power. A beam of red, black, and green energy affixed the core of the Juju to Black Thirteen. The Dark Tower’s prized artifact seemed to struggle against the power, but eventually it gave in – slamming itself into the staff Juju’s central crystal.

The two essences fused together. Black Thirteen gained an aura around its edge that shifted through every color of the rainbow much like how English’s eyes did. Two perpendicular spirographs appeared within the mists of Black Thirteen, one red and one green. The new orb floated in the air, surrounding itself in black metal spires in a similar way to TSAB Devices – becoming one with the attachments, but not physically touching them. The shards arranged themselves into the form of a pointed scepter with the new Black Thirteen in the center.

Lord English grabbed hold of his now completed weapon, connecting with it on a deep, metaphysical level. He let out a deep, horrid HONK as the energy coursed through him. His green Cairo Overcoat transformed into a deep, Crimson red.

He turned to look directly at the observing carrier. All of us were still frozen. Even if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be able to do anything.

He pointed.

He could have destroyed us all right then and there without so much as breaking a sweat.

Instead, he just shattered Death’s skull into a million tiny shards. Then he turned and walked away, just as he had been before.

Marching to some unknown goal…

Someone was able to revive Death – I don’t know who, my Awareness of the event was severely skewed by English’s presence.

“Why?” Starbeat asked. “Why in-“

“He sent a message,” Sherlock said. “He could have killed us all, clearly. He could probably have found a way to extinguish Death’s soul. He just wanted us to know that, at any time, he could remove our ability to survive him with little effort.” He looked down. “He could have ended the fight at any time with that staff, but he chose not to. He’s putting on a show.”

“Why would h-“

“He wants to win,” I said. “He’s been making it purposefully difficult for himself. Trying to build himself a story where he ends up the victor… While still fully retaining the role of a villain.”

“…Could that work?” Pinkie asked.

“I want to say no,” I said. “But… I can’t. The rules have changed… He has that new weapon… And ka is so dense…” I gulped. “He might have a chance.”

~~~

Eve sat in a room, alone, with Storm and Azula. The Overhead of Relations made it painfully obvious she wasn’t pleased at her welcome with a scowl.

“I understand you and Corona have been through a lot,” Storm said, folding his hands together. “But that’s clouded your judgment. She needs to pay for what she’s done.”

“She and I did the exact same things for almost the exact same reasons,” Eve pointed out. “If you’re going to try her for war crimes, why not try me?”

“Because you didn’t kill the multiverse!”

“She never wanted to do that and you know it. It was because nobody could agree that we couldn’t minimize the deaths. If she asked the question at all, this was going to happen. Would you rather she tried to take the action herself without consulting anyone? Plus, she didn’t even succeed; someone screwed with the collapse and created this world. I think that’s hurt her enough, don’t you think?”

“Less people died. A lot less people. She was willing to sacrifice a lot more. To really be right, she needs to lose more than she was willing to sacrifice in the first place.”

“Don’t you talk to me about rights, Storm,” Eve spat. “You and I both know that you’ve never been big on ‘morality’ or ‘justice’, you just do what’s most beneficial to you at the time. I gave you a world where being moral was your best option, so you took it. Now, in this world, you’ve decided it’s in your best interests to breed anger and resentment. You’re doing really well.”

Storm bristled. “Then you’ll have to take Starbeat’s word for it, because she is the one saying those things.”

Eve narrowed her eyes. “That sounds so unlike her…”

“She suffered because of the war.” Storm leaned in. “We lost, Eve, and the story of war is almost always written by the victors. We have a chance to deny them that right. The people of the collapse don’t have to control this New World, we can make it our own.”

“We can do that without all this anger!”

Storm slammed a fist on the table. “I do not want to be in a world they designed!”

“They didn’t design this world!”

“They shouldn’t have any say! They said we all needed to die! We decide how we get to live – and that’s without them!”

“GET OUT OF HERE!” Eve shouted.

“This is not Merodi Universalis,” Storm said. “Even if it was, you have no place dealing with internal affairs.”

“And you’re Second of Expeditions. You have no business being here either. Get out.”

Storm stood up, bowed insultingly, and walked out. “Starbeat’s in charge. When she gets back…”

“When she gets back I’ll be struggling to restrain myself,” Eve muttered.

Eve was left alone with Azula.

“What are the chances you and I can sway the population?” Eve asked, quiet.

Azula shook her head. “Low. They’ve been whipped up into a frenzy… It’s almost unnatural. I’m not the watcher of people my uncle was, but I wouldn’t have thought they had this in them.”

Eve shook her head. “What happened?”

“I want to say it’s the war. I’m not sure it is.”

“…What will they do to her?”

“They’ll want her executed. Any of the big names in the collapse will get that.”

Eve looked at her. “…It’s already happened?”

“They found Phage and Rosalina,” Azula said. “It wasn’t pretty.”

Eve shook her head. “And they’ll want more… Azula, this has to stop.”

“How are you going to stop it?”

“…If talking to Starbeat doesn’t work, we might just have to take back control.” She looked to Azula. “Or we might have to escape. I can trust you to help?”

Azula nodded. “Of course. Just tell me when.”

“Thank you. For now, just keep doing what you’re doing.” Eve folded her wings and walked out of the meeting room.

Sunny and Daniel were waiting for her outside.

“This isn’t it,” Daniel said, shaking. “It’s not here.”

“He’s getting… insistent,” Sunny added.

Eve nodded slowly. “This… actually works. I think it’s about to get a little uncomfortable around here, and it’d be best if Daniel wasn’t around. Can you take him to… wherever it is he thinks he needs to go? You can have the Skiff.”

“Will you and Corona be okay?”

“…If everything goes as planned,” Eve said, furrowing her brow. “While you’re out there, tell anyone who will listen what’s happening here. That we might need help.”

“Got it.” Sunny saluted. “See you soon.”

“You too.”

The two mares went their separate ways. Eve teleported herself through several corridors until she found her way to the jail Corona was being held in. She walked in the front door. All three guards were laying on the ground, out cold, but Corona was still in her cell bouncing a ball against the wall.

“What…?”

“They thought they could keep insulting me. It took… oh, a good thirty minutes before I lost it. They’re all fine and I didn’t open the door.” She kept bouncing the ball. “Even healed them up after a minute.”

“Are you still sure about this?”

“Let them have their moment,” Corona said, narrowing her eyes. “Get it all out into the open.”

“They’ll want to execute you.”

“They’re welcome to try.” Corona caught the ball and sighed. “…Thanks for sticking by me.”

“What are friends for?”

Corona laughed. “They’re apparently good for doing a lot of really, really stupid sounding things that are amazing anyway.”

Eve smiled. “Don’t let yourself worry. We’ll turn this place around somehow, you can count on it.”

“There’s something else going on, I can feel it. Bigger than all of us.”

“There always is. But when we find it, we’ll face it just like we faced everything else.”

Corona smirked. “You came in here all pessimistic and concerned and now listen to you. Eve, never change.”

“Corona?”

“Hmm?”

“Don’t stop changing.”

Corona let out a deep, real laugh filled with life. Only a few weeks ago that noise would have never left her mouth, and she had been free then. Here she was, imprisoned by people she had considered her neighbors and friends, laughing.

The sight warmed Eve’s tired, strained heart.

~~~

“Nanoha!” Jenny shouted, bursting into Nanoha’s personal quarters and promptly smacking her head on a lamp. “We’ve got a call you need to be here for!”

Nanoha sighed – she had gotten into her nightshirt and had been this close to getting into bed. She picked up Raising Heart, put on her usual attire, and sat down in a swivel chair. “Can they patch it through Raising Heart?”

Jenny nodded. She poked her head down the hallway. “YOU GUYS GOT THAT!?”

Apparently they did, because they patched the transmission through to the Device in an instant. It flashed and projected a holographic screen with four familiar faces – O’Neill, Minna, Vita, and the Emperor.

Nanoha’s mild annoyance vanished in an instant. “This is a pleasant surprise!”

“It’s about to get better,” O’Neill said, snapping his fingers. “Currently in ‘orbit’ around your planet is a sizable fleet composed of both preservation and collapse forces. Including the Austraeoh. Given your lack of space-related infrastructure in this city of yours I bet you’ll be very glad to have us here.”

“Yes,” Nanoha laughed to herself. “…I’m more glad to see that you’ve agreed the war is over. It hasn’t always been easy to do that here.”

“Just have your military leaders agree to stop fighting,” Minna said. “Discipline takes over the rest as soon as there isn’t an enemy. …For the most part, civilians and the Combine are difficult.”

“I would imagine…” Nanoha said. “We’ve had to use a looming threat as a reason to get everyone to work together.”

“Oh boy… How big and ugly is it?”

“It’s the Crimson King,” Nanoha said. “With the fall of the multiverse, the self-defense protocol deactivated. He’s free, and he’ll want to not only destroy the Tower, but take its power for himself.”

“Where is he now?”

“Unknown. We know he’s coming back here – and soon – which is why we’ve built so many defenses. We plan to use everything we have on him. I can trust you to help?”

“Definitely,” Vita said. “We’ll stand by you until the end. What do we know about his powers?”

“He has retained an eldritch nature despite this being im-“

“He’s dead,” Renee said, walking into the room. “Was just defeated. You don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

There was complete silence on both ends of the call.

“You have to worry about what beat him.” She smirked evilly. “That’ll be here shortly as well. Have fun.” She trotted out of the room.

Minna held out a hand. “W-was that…”

“That was not your aunt,” Nanoha said. “That… is the Emissary of Ka, a manifestation of what the Flowers perceived to be the Tower’s Will. You will not find what you are looking for with her.”

“…Sounds like you have a lot to catch us up on,” O’Neill said.

“It also sounds like we don’t have any time,” Jenny added. “Like, at all.”

Nanoha nodded. “I’ll patch you in to Saxton Hale – he’s currently running the military operations. You’re still Overhead, O’Neill, but he knows what the situation is down here. I need to go talk to the Emissary…”

Vita cleared her throat. “Nanoha, before you go…”

“I already know, Vita,” Nanoha said with a sad smile. “…I felt it the moment everything was dusted.” She cut the transmission and marched out of the room, purposefully flicking a tear out of her eye.

Renee was waiting for her, a bored expression on her face.

“Who is it?”

“See, that’s part of what you have to do,” Renee said, cleaning one of her front hooves with a bored expression. “I can’t just tell you everything, that’d be boring.”

“You said the Crimson King would lose. And he did.”

“Yes.”

“What about this… new threat?”

Renee smiled. “My lips are sealed, High Sovereign. Telling you the end of the story before it happens? That’s ridiculous.”

“Not entirely…”

“Then I simply chose not to.” Renee tossed her mane back. “You have more defenses here than virtually any planet in the multiverse has ever had. What are you so worried about?”

“That’s what I’m worried about. We’re over-prepared by all possible metrics. Something’s going to go very, very wrong.”

Renee looked at her with knowing eyes. Eyes that didn’t give anything away.

“I have work to do,” Nanoha muttered under her breath, turning and walking away.

“More than you realize,” Renee called after her.

Nanoha ignored the Emissary’s comment. Whatever work there was, she would put all of her power into it. She may not have fought to create this New World, but she would fight to her dying breath to defend it and her City.

141 - Divided We Fall

I came to my senses and let out a groan. I just knew my wing was broken. Again.

I was used to that kind of pain at this point, so I was able to stand up and look around without too much difficulty. I was lying a fair distance from the actual wreckage itself. I noticed Sunny passed out on a nearby rock, a few scrapes on her but nothing serious. Roxy was already standing up, feeling carefully along the smooth, ancient walls. Daniel was sitting down, looking as if he had been hit by a train.

My stomach sank when I scanned him and found no actual injuries. This was just the way he was now. Even though I had seen many people in states similar to him before, it was still… wrong. It was bad enough that he was wasting away. It was worse that something was prolonging the suffering.

In an attempt to ignore him, I fixed my attention to the structure we found ourselves inside. A large tower-like structure that went up for as far as we could see, no doors or windows on any side. The only sources of light were the walls themselves that pulsed with an occasional blue-green energy passing through the wall’s circuitry. It was enough to see by, but it gave the entire area an eerie vibe.

I felt like I should recognize the design, but the Eye of Rhyme wasn’t giving me any insight, and my memory failed me. All I knew was that the people behind this ancient structure were important. And that we were here for a reason.

“Something in here is very, very important,” I said, furrowing my brow.

“The other ship?” Roxy asked, still trying to find a secret exit to the room or something similar.

“Maybe… I wonder why it isn’t in here,” I pondered. I took a moment to use my magic and mend my wing.

“This isn’t the only room,” Daniel muttered.

“Right…” I blinked. “Roxy, can’t you phase through walls?”

Roxy blinked. “Ah. Right. Whoops!” She snapped her fingers and phased through the wall. She came back. “Yep, Daniel’s right. There’s more. There’s a labyrinth out there.”

“Labyrinth?” Sunny muttered, standing up. “Good thing you have a mapmaker, huh?”

Roxy smirked. “Can you move?”

Sunny stretched her legs. “Yeah. Takes a bit more than that to injure an Evermore. …Though at this point I doubt it’s my Evermore powers saving me.”

“All multiversal explorers accumulate abilities beyond themselves,” I said. “It’s a very useful trait.”

“Assuming you don’t die first,” Sunny pointed out.

“True, true…”

Roxy used her Void to make us intangible and shift through the wall. On the other side was definitely a labyrinth, but not the kind any of us were expecting. There weren’t maze-like walls – instead there were a complex series of moving platforms, swinging traps, and magical wires dancing all around a curved expanse.

“…I’m not jumping through all this,” Roxy said matter-of-factly. “Time to cheat.” She floated into the air and skipped all the complex platform movements.

“I don’t blame you,” I said, putting Daniel on my back and taking off. Sunny levitated herself behind me and we followed her into the air.

Our actions triggered a trap. A floating cube the size of a barn opened up and shot magical saw blades at us. Were we normal people, they would have been deadly. As it was I raised a shield that easily deflected all of them. “Might want to keep us intangible,” I told Roxy.

“Sure thing!” she said, snapping her fingers. “This is kind of cool though, we’re in a video game dungeon or something.”

“Which means there’s treasure somewhere,” Sunny offered. “Probably a ‘key item’ to someone’s adventure. Maybe that’s what we’re here to find?”

I shrugged. “Maybe… We still have to find it though. Keep on the lookout for chests or similar things. And when we open them let’s not get caught by a mimic like everyone else, okay?”

Sunny rolled her eyes. “Oldest trick in the book.”

“Yeah, Twilence, really?” Roxy shook her head. “We’re not noobs.”

I rubbed the back of my head. “Sorry.”

~~~

Starbeat and Gamzee were on one side of the table. On the other, Flutterfree and Eve sat together. Eve, as expected, had a disappointed expression on her face, while the usually calm and serene Flutterfree had a deeply troubled expression that was usually directed at Gamzee. Gamzee, to his credit, seemed completely relaxed and laid back.

Starbeat was the opposite. She was angry, and Eve wasn’t entirely sure why. This wasn’t just a vengeful anger, there was something wrong with it.

Eve wasn’t going to back down though. She opened her mouth.

“You’re going to say ‘we’ve forgiven a lot of people already’, right?” Starbeat interjected. “Because that’s what you usually say. Then you start listing off examples – maybe including yourself, since you are in the list of those forgiven – and say it’s better to let things slide. There’s a big difference between all those times and now. Item one: nobody we’ve ever forgiven has done something this disastrous. Item two: the people we forgive regret their decisions. I can tell you right now Corona doesn’t.”

Eve bristled. “And what makes you the judge of that?”

“Nothing. Except nobody else seems willing to do it.” Starbeat pressed her hooves together. “If I didn’t do anything, they would have gotten off scot-free.”

“Isn’t living with the burden that they killed so many enough?”

“Not even close. Because they’re going to turn the world into what they want. They still want to destroy the Tower.”

“…Is that such a bad thing?” Eve asked. “The price has already been paid. The influence of the Tower is fading. It’s time to let the story end and move on with our lives.”

“Can we really have lives that aren’t of a story?” Starbeat asked.

“I don’t know,” Eve admitted.

“…But we’d like to find out,” Flutterfree added. “I’d… like to see what we are when there’s nothing guiding us. When it’s just us. Are we really as strong as we think we are? Or is that an unrealistic portrayal?”

Starbeat slammed a hoof into the table. “You were with them all along!? You agreed with them!?”

Flutterfree shook her head. “I understood them. Freedom was not worth the price paid. But the price has already been paid. We might as well make the most of what we have, instead of perpetuating this mess just to spite them.”

“So we just let them get what they want!?”

“Why not? It’s not evil.”

“Yes it is!”

“Starbeat, listen to yourself,” Eve said, standing up tall. “You yourself have said the Tower is an evil thing that causes nothing but pain. You have more reason than anyone to hate it and what it has done to you. Why do you continue to defend it?”

“I’m rising above petty anger.”

“Do you hear the contradictions in your voice!?”

Starbeat blinked. “Fine, so I’m not. But what of your contradictions?”

Eve frowned. “Come again?”

“You’ve laid out judgement for so many massacres, killed so many ‘evil kings’ for crimes lesser than Corona’s. But look at you now, defending her.”

“I’ve also saved many who caused genocides,” Eve pointed out. “Merodi Universalis was never a logical, brick-by-brick system. It was case-by-case for a reason. We made on-the-spot judgements about what would and wouldn’t be the best in any given moment. Some of those decisions were wrong. I’ve regretted many of them.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “You were part of the Collection, Starbeat. Lightning and Thanos both were the cause of genocides. Lightning fought for the Collector and believed in his vision, even when he backed away from it. Thanos never apologized for his desire for balance. And yet, you worked with them and became good friends with them.”

“Friendships that were destroyed,” Starbeat hissed.

“Lightning’s still alive, and fought by your side,” Flutterfree pointed out. “You saw her. Should she answer for her crimes too?”

“She’s more than made up for it.”

“And Corona’s more than willing to make up for this,” Eve asserted. “She has the same heroic spirit she has always had. She will devote herself to helping however she thinks she can.”

“She can never repay.”

“She’s immortal. Of course she can. No matter how much evil there was-”

“She’ll never repay it!” Starbeat slammed her hooves on the table. “Just as you’ll never be able to repay what you did to Rainbow Dash.”

Eve let out a wince.

Flutterfree sighed. “And what about you, Starbeat? You were in charge of the Collection, at least in part. What should we charge you with? I’m sure we can find something.” Lolo’s halo became visible around her head for a moment. “We’ve all done things worthy of punishment, if there’s no forgiveness.”

“There has to be a line,” Starbeat breathed.

“Does there?” Eve asked. “Where is it? Where is the point at which someone does something so bad they can’t turn around.”

“She’s not turning around! She hasn’t made an apology, and I know she won’t.”

“You wouldn’t accept it even if she meant it,” Eve muttered.

“She would,” Flutterfree corrected. “If Corona really meant it, she would. I…” she glanced at Gamzee. “I’m pretty sure she would, if…”

“See?” Starbeat asked, sneering. “You can’t just turn around and attack me, Eve. It doesn’t work. The only people who deserve to be forgiven are those who honestly declare their regret. Corona hasn’t, and never will.”

Eve stammered. “I…”

“She’s your friend, I get it. She was my friend too. But there has to be a point where your loyalty to your friends ends. There’s a reason Applejack left.”

Eve looked to the ground, frowning. “You’re right.”

“Thanks y-”

“Not about Corona. About me.” Eve laughed bitterly. “I built an empire on forgiving others, Starbeat. I became the conquerer by friendship. I had always thought the Living Tribunal warned us so we wouldn’t stomp over the rights of others… but maybe he was warning us about getting too much of a good thing.” Sitting back, she found herself looking at the ceiling. “In a world where friendship is held above all else… there are bound to be drawbacks.”

“Finally. Good gravy, I-”

“I’ve still forgiven her,” Eve interrupted. “And so many others have. I’ve seen a few who haven’t, even after feeling her emotions. Jane… Jane still hates her. And so many others. And I understand that. But I can’t hate her. I don’t see her as a danger anymore, and even when we were fighting I still considered her a friend. They were never the enemy, Starbeat, always the other side.”

Starbeat scowled. “You’ve lost sense.”

“So have you.”

“I haven’t. I’m thinking clearer than I ever have in my life!”

“This… this hatred, it’s exactly what causes World War II on Standard Earths! Nobody can let anything go so they fight again and sometimes even again… Wars lead to more wars!”

“Then let the war come, maybe there’s a reason war is so common. It’s because justice is never given.”

“Are you listening to yourself? It’s almost like you’re under some kind of curse!”

Flutterfree tensed, becoming very still all of the sudden.

Starbeat ignored her. “Me? Cursed? You’ve become less of a person and more ‘friendship incarnate!’ If I’m ‘World War II’ then you’re ‘European Imperialism.’ Let’s conquer all the people and make their universes better! Don’t talk to me about ‘curse’.”

“Curse? Curse? How’s this for a curse: Corona wanted everyone to talk it out peacefully. The Tower set up the multiverse in such a way that such a dream was impossible. There was either going to be war, or she would have to do it behind all of our backs. She chose the option that gave her less chance of success.”

“But the Tower is just a machine, everyone else made a choice to do what they did, ka be damned. They deserve my rage.”

“And where does this rage come from? This isn’t you!” Eve wailed – almost pleaded. “You’re not a warmonger, you’re a calculating, cautious, self-conscious pony!”

“It’s Gamzee,” Flutterfree answered for Eve.

“Motherfuckin’ what?” Gamzee chuckled. “Are you callin’ me a bad influence? I mean, yeah, totally, but there ain’t no way I-”

“Cut the act,” Flutterfree said, narrowing her eyes. She spread her wings and summoned Lolo, activating her Rage aura. “I am the Page of Rage. I know exactly what you’re doing.”

Eve saw it in Lolo’s light – the Rage coming off of Gamzee and entering Starbeat’s eyes, coloring them a deep, ominous purple.

Gamzee dropped the laid-back expression and bared his sharp, angular teeth. He slammed his hands so hard on the table it made Eve flinch – but Flutterfree held his gaze. “You, Gamzee Makara, are the Bard of Rage. You cause seemingly random, far-reaching destruction through truth and anger. Your own, that of others; it doesn’t matter. You are a force of destruction and you have corrupted Starbeat.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a corruption,” Starbeat commented.

“You know!?” Eve blurted. “He’s in your head, and you’re okay with that?!”

Starbeat smiled warmly at Gamzee. “He gives me the strength to do what needs to be done. Strength I don’t have. What he says is the truth, Flutterfree, and you should know this.”

Flutterfree growled. “He hasn’t lied to you, no. But he has made you angrier.”

“Stronger,” Gamzee said with a gravelly, threatening voice. “I have made her stronger. Wiser. Motherfuckin’ ready to take on the world. HONK.”

“‘Take it on’ seems literal.” Flutterfree narrowed her eyes. “You’ve stirred up the entire Hub using her as a mouthpiece. I want to know why. Is it just because you need destruction? Or do you have some other goal?”

Gamzee smirked. “Because it’s what I motherfuckin’ want to do.”

“Why do you want to do it?”

“Do I need another reason besides my motherfuckin’ feelings?”

“You’re avoiding my questions to keep something from me.”

“Honk. HONK.”

Flutterfree bristled. “...Do you want to see the Hub fall?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

Flutterfree snapped. “STOP ANSWERING MY QUESTIONS WITH QUESTIONS!” She Stared at him.

He yawned. “Was that supposed t’ do somethin’?”

Flutterfree backed off slowly, refusing to take her gaze off the troll. “Eve, there’s nothing we can do here. I can’t force his hand, he knows the way of Rage better than I do. And since I can’t do anything to him, he can play Starbeat like a puppet.”

“I wouldn’t describe our relationship like that…” Starbeat said with a mischievous smirk. “But it works. I get all the stuff done, he provides the power.”

“…I’m going to get you out of here, Starbeat,” Eve said. “I’ll do whatever I can.”

“I don’t need your damn help.”

“You think that. But you’ll thank me later.”

Starbeat huffed. “…Regardless, you haven’t changed my mind. I’m still holding that trial.”

“And we’ll be running defense,” Eve said.

“No you won-”

“The alternative is we fight. I don’t want that. But you should want it even less.”

Starbeat gulped. “…Fair. Pinkie’s Party and Corona will be put on trial.”

“Simultaneously? You’re in a hurry.”

“It has to be done quickly.”

Eve frowned. “...For what it’s worth, I give my word that we will accept the result of a fair trial.”

Starbeat stood up with a curt nod. “You better. Now excuse me, I have to prepare.” She and Gamzee walked out.

Eve shook her head. “Flutterfree… I’ve got everything set up to completely overthrow the government they’ve prepared here. Azula and I have found people whose Rage can be turned against the system. But it won’t be pretty, and I’d rather we didn’t have to do that. So you need to do whatever you can to cancel the Rage in that courtroom, okay?”

Flutterfree nodded. “I’m sure I can do something. ...But what if we still get a guilty verdict?”

“Merodi Universalis death penalty is exceptionaly rare, and… even then, Corona might accept it.” Eve sighed. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to let her make that sacrifice, but that’s just me being selfish.”

Flutterfree put a wing around Eve. “You’ve earned the right to be a little selfish.”

Eve laughed bitterly. “…How can we help Starbeat?”

“Get her away from Gamzee.”

Eve knew what she was implying. “I’d rather not.”

“I’d rather not too. But we might have to. It should be kept as a last resort.”

Eve nodded slowly. Why can’t the fighting just stop with the war?

~~~

Roland of Gilead kicked the door in, revolver ready to plant a bullet into the head of anyone inside.

To his mixed disappointment and relief, there wasn’t a soul inside. However, the lights were on, and a speaker in the ceiling was playing elevator music, so he didn’t let his guard down quite yet. He shuffled in, Aradia and Jenny right behind him.

He briefly wondered why he was the one leading the charge since he had the least abilities at his disposal, but he quickly understood. They looked up with him to respect, not just as a figure of legend, but also as a leader.

They moved past the entry hall into a corridor lined with blank paintings, giving the area a feeling of complex emptiness. He still saw no signs of life, but at this point the elevator music was starting to get to him. Why did they play such repetitive noises in their buildings?

They swept the first floor without incident, finding room after empty room. There was little evidence of anyone having lived in the building, but the music, the lights, and the amount of appliances turned on seemed to contradict this feeling. It was like someone had wanted to confuse whoever entered it.

If that was the case, it was working.

Jenny walked up to a coffee maker. It was warm, but there was no sign of any coffee cups, coffee, or even a filter. She shook her head in disbelief, trying to make sense of it.

They eventually came to the back door and opened it, letting Burgerbelle and Thrackerzod in. “No sign of anyone on the first floor,” Aradia said.

“And it doesn’t make sense,” Jenny added.

“How so?” Thrackerzod asked.

“Just come look for yourself.”

Soon, Thrackerzod was looking at the coffee machine. “…This is decidedly perplexing.”

“No, really?”

“They may have known we were coming. Or perhaps they were trying to burn the place down with a potential fire hazard…”

“Better ways to do that,” Jenny said. “And that doesn’t explain why everything’s so clean.”

“They’re trolling,” Burgerbelle said, twirling her finger. “They knew we’d track them down. I wonder if we’ll even find any copies of the book here.”

Jenny curled her hand into a fist. “This better not have been for nothing…” She marched up the stairs to the second floor and found it much the same as the first. Even the bathroom was unnaturally clean despite the sink’s faucet being on full blast heat. She stuck her finger into the water and found it was warm. “…You know, I don’t even have to look at the plans for this area of the city, but I bet this one has a personal water heater. This water can’t remain warm like this for very long.”

“Trolls…” Aradia said, narrowing her eyes. “They are going through a lot of trouble…”

“Delays,” Roland said, marching up to the third floor. “They’re buying time.”

Jenny clapped her hands together. “Right! Search faster!”

They scrambled up to the third floor, not caring about the heater, the air conditioning, or the TV stuck playing a DVD copy of Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn. Finding nothing, they eventually went to the attic.

The attic was lit by a single bulb. It was almost completely empty, save for a single box filled with booklets. The Emissary and What She Means to You. There was nothing else of interest in the room.

Jenny picked up one of the books and torched it. “Right, that’s not any help. At all. Not even a printing press or anything here.”

Thrackerzod closed her eyes. “I’m not so sure… I’m detecting a magic signature. Faint, but not too faint…”

“Can you follow it?”

“I think the magic was drained from the room so a lot of the details are vague… But I think I recognize the blend. It’s Rev and… someone else. Darker. Significantly darker.”

Jenny pulled out her phone and sent a search query to the City’s computer systems.

|> Last known location of Rev: Icthus Street, three hours ago. Accompanied by Rina. Grid has no further data.

Jenny sent a query to find her.

|> City database requests are limited to maximize available processing.

“Crud, computer can’t find her. Anybody know where Icthus Street is?”

“It’s the street right outside,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

Roland let out a ‘tch’. “They grabbed her.”

“We should file a report,” Aradia said.

“…But we’re the ones the report would get to eventually,” Jenny pointed out.

“Just file it for the sake of being organized.”

Jenny kicked the box. “Fine. This entire trip has been a waste.”

“We know they have Rev,” Burgerbelle said.

“And we know there are more books,” Roland added, gesturing at the box. “They left one box here. Recently. There are probably more. They have to be somewhere.”

Thrackerzod grinned. “All we have to do is find out where they’re distributing them…”

“But we can’t use the computer to analyze all book sales right now,” Jenny said. “All we’ve got is the record of what’s happened, no extrapolation.”

“They distributed through Dracogen last time,” Aradia said. “We can use your computers to analyze your sales, right?”

Jenny furrowed her brow. “Maybe… Maybe. They might have gotten smart through…”

“I thought you were the only major distributor of anything in the City aside from the government itself?” Burgerbelle asked.

Jenny paused for a moment – then smiled. “You’re right. They’ll have to go through us again. I’ll put everyone on alert. And then we’ll just… wait.” Her smile fell. “…Today is going to be a lot of that, I can tell…”

~~~

Mattie woke up to the sight of the Everykid looking at her with concern.

“Whatever it is, it didn’t kill me, so it’s good,” Mattie said with a chuckle. She glanced to her front left leg and saw it was badly broken. She’d probably landed directly on it and pulverized the bone inside.

Not all that unusual for her, though. She gently pulled her boot off the broken leg and tore it down the middle, converting the sole and the fabric into a makeshift splint. As much as she appreciated the pain she would find it rather annoying if it kept making her fall over.

She naturally held her broken leg to her chest as she stood on her other three. They were heavily bruised, but that was nothing. She looked around, slightly confused to find herself on a moving octagonal platform in the middle of a bunch of other platforms. “…Where’s the ship?”

The Everykid pointed up at a swinging blade. What remained of the Skiff had been skewered and was swinging back and forth with the periodic trap.

“I see… Nettle?” The Everykid didn’t even need to point, Mattie saw Nettle sitting on one of the few unmoving platforms in the area, holding her legs close to her chest. Mattie waved at her. “Nettle! Over here!”

“I. Am not. Moving,” Nettle said.

Mattie sighed. “Right… Gonna have to carry her and jump through all this stuff all with a broken leg. Fun.”

The Everykid nodded.

“…How’d you survive getting ejected out anyway?”

The Everykid double jumped off the platform and fell to a lower one. Just before she landed and crushed both her legs, she opened her Parasol and drifted down gently. She then proceeded to use a complex wall jump maneuver to gain height, latching onto the swinging blade with her grapple shot and swung back to Mattie’s platform.

“Bet this feels like home, huh?”

The Everykid nodded.

“How about you go explore around while I make sure Nettle doesn’t fall off or something?”

The Everykid saluted. She blew a ‘feel better soon’ kiss at Nettle before hooking onto the blade and swinging herself even higher into the platforming labyrinth.

Mattie gracefully hopped across two platforms to get to Nettle. “So… You gonna sit here all day?”

“Yes. Yes I am. And night. I’m not moving.”

“Hope you like starving.”

Nettle responded with a grunt.

“Look, it was just a little ship crash, happens all the time. Nothing to be that worked up over, trust me. You’re completely unharmed.”

“Just let the kid find the way out.”

“Dear, when she finds the way out we still have to get to it.”

Nettle looked away.

“Aw, geez,” Mattie muttered, realizing it fell to her again to try and comfort someone. Sometimes I wish for the good ol’ days where I didn’t give a rat’s arse… “Right, okay, here’s the deal. You, you are great. You are White Nettle, the last Downstreamer. You should be able to do th-”

“Aren’t you psychotic?”

“…I mean, not in a clinical sense but I wouldn’t call that a bad descriptor…”

“Then what are you trying to do? You can’t explain what’s going on! You…”

“I don’t think I was tryin’ to?”

“Just shut up. I don’t want to hear anything right now.”

Mattie blinked. “…Something else is going on here. You’re not just scared for your life. Something’s… going on.”

Nettle made no response.

“Oh come on, this isn’t exactly my strong suit! Give me something to work with here!”

Nettle didn’t give her anything.

“Balls,” Mattie muttered. “I think I need the kid back. HEY! KID! HELP?”

The Everykid was far out of sight, no help there.

Mattie sighed. Then she sat down next to Nettle. “Guess we’ll sit here ‘til we starve then. It’ll make for some good bonding time, don’t’cha think?”

Nettle had apparently decided the silent treatment was the best way to pretend Mattie wasn’t there.

“Y’know, you can’t keep this up forever. I have ways of making people talk.”

Silence.

Mattie smirked. “So, normally, I’d just start describing something particularly ‘squicky’ and erotic in excruciating detail, but that won’t do anything to you so instead, I’m just going to count to ten in time with the sound of my whip.”

Nettle didn’t make eye contact, but Mattie could tell she was confused.

“Starting from negative ten billion.” Mattie let out a crack of the whip. “Negative ten billion…” Crack. “Negative nine billion nine-hundred ninety-nine million, nine-hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred ninety nine…” Crack. “Negative nine billion nine-hundred ninety-nine million, nine-hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred ninety eight…”

Nettle showed no signs of giving in. No matter. Mattie could be patient. Very patient.

~~~

Corona released Pinkie from a hug. “Never in my life did I think I would see you, with your eyes back, while both of us were in jail on the Hub.”

“I mean, we could get out at any time,” Pinkie pointed out. She glanced around before whispering into Corona’s ear. “Eve’s got a backup plan too. Coup’s afoot.”

“I really hope it doesn’t come to that,” Corona said, standing up. “...I need to face this, and they need to decide where they stand with me.”

“It’ll come to that no matter what,” Vriska muttered. “Gamzee’s got her in his little trap. He’s gotten really good at the Bardy Shenanigans… We need to keep checking ourselves for Rage influence. Constantly.”

Jotaro furrowed his brow. “Is there a way to remove it?”

“I don’t know. Rage is one of the more directly powerful aspects,” Vriska said, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. “I have little experience with it. I never dealt with a fully-realized Bard of Rage directly, Kurloz is a Prince of Rage and isn’t a good indicator of how Rage works, and Flutterfree used the power in this fashion so rarely we never really needed to remove it.”

“We’ll get her back,” Pidge said, putting a hand on Vriska’s shoulder.

“Yay, and then she’ll fucking hate me for normal reasons,” Vriska muttered.

“She’s coming,” Pinkie said, suddenly. “This conversation didn’t happen. And… let’s let her and Corona have their moment.” Pinkie moved her team to the back of the cell.

Corona stood up and put her hands on the bars. She sighed.

“She’s right. You look sad,” Starbeat said, walking into the room. “Pathetic. Didn’t have the strength after all? I bet you tried to kill yourself to end the pain.”

Corona bit her lip hard, drawing her glowing blood. All to keep from exploding in anger. “He’s really gotten to you.”

“We’re not here to talk about that. You – and that team cowering behind you – are going on trial for your crimes.”

“I know,” Corona said. “I’ll let the trial happen. I do deserve to be judged.”

Starbeat growled. “Clearly an execution won’t suit you. You will have to be tormented.”

Corona smiled sadly. “Your torment wouldn’t compare to what I’ve done to myself.”

“Stop being so prideful.”

Corona sighed. “I should… It is pride, in a way. You’re right.” She looked Starbeat in the eyes. “I’m going to help you.”

“You always think you can help people… But did you ever think that your help might be damaging? Horrible?”

“Yes. Every day of the war.”

Starbeat shook her head. “How?”

Corona shrugged. “I’m… not sure how I managed. Ka, perhaps. All I know is that my motives were pure the entire time.”

“How can you know that!?”

Corona pointed at the Master Sword lying with the rest of her belongings in a pile outside the cell. “…It told me I was worthy. I pulled it out of Toph’s grave.”

“That’s just a stupid artifact!”

“Bound to a woman who, in my last encounter with her, hated my guts.” Corona curled her hands into fists. “I killed her. And the sword still accepted me. That means something.”

“It means nothing! No sword is a judge of justice!”

Jotaro ran to the bars, pushing Corona aside. “Justice!? You talk of Justice!?”

“You think I’m prideful?” Starbeat laughed. “No. I’m only dealing out justice because no one else wants to. Everyone wants to forgive you. All of you. But I’ll show them. You must pay, and you won’t get to make this world your own!”

“You’ve become the antagonist, Starbeat,” Pinkie said from the back of the cell. “You should turn around while you can.”

Starbeat glared at her. “You know I won’t.”

“I know. You’ve been played like a xylophone…” Pinkie shook her head. “I hope you survive this, Starbeat.”

Starbeat blinked. “S-shut up.” She turned and ran out of the jail.

Corona let out a breath. “…She has the legal case, you know. We did things, and we did not receive any punishment for them beyond what we did to ourselves.”

“Merodi Universalis’s legal system has never been about eye-for-an-eye,” Pidge pointed out.

“This isn’t Merodi Universalis’s legal system, anymore. And… in that case, I think that’s a good thing.”

“...Do you want to be punished, or something?” Pidge asked.

No answer was forthcoming.

~~~

“Got something!” Jenny said, looking at her phone. “4219 Red Stree-” Her face fell. “…Headquarters!?”

“You don’t keep a very tight hold on your business, do you?” Thrackerzod asked.

Jenny ignored her. “Th-that’s impossible! Headquarters doesn’t handle any sort of distributing!”

“Sounds like a perfect cover to me.”

“And they’d have to have someone working on the inside! I…” Jenny crushed her phone in her hands. “I’ve got a traitor.”

“Oh, fun!” Aradia said. “So, are we going to go teach them a lesson, follow them, or-”

Jenny snapped her fingers, teleporting them to the front doors of Dracogen Headquarters. The building had been hastily slapped together in the early days of the City, but it still managed to look vaguely like the original at the base of the Ninth World’s Beanstalk. Which was to say, a mish-mash of unusual technology built around a central amber pole.

Jenny stormed in, kicking the revolving doors just so they would let her in faster.

“Looks like she chose ‘teach them a lesson’,” Roland said, adjusting his hat before following her, the others close behind.

There was no receptionist for Headquarters, just a security guard who knew better than to ask Jenny for credentials when she was like this. She marched right through the back wall and came out in an empty conference room. She took a hard left and entered the adjoining break room where a thin purple Gem was making herself some coffee.

“Starshine, my computers tell me there’s some distributing going on here. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?” She rammed her face into Starshine’s. “Do you!?”

“Uh… J-Jenny, I don’t know anything about that! We don’t do distributing here!”

“I know that,” Jenny growled. “So how do you explain this!?”

Starshine examined Jenny’s phone. “…You broke your phone?”

Aradia snickered.

“Aradia, I swear…” Jenny shook her head. “Point is, our algorithms detected a particular problematic book of misinformation passing through this building, probably in an attempt to keep it under our radar. As the secretary, you should have seen signs of that.”

“I… I haven’t seen anything like that!”

Her legs lit on fire. “AUGH!”

Jenny blinked. “I… what?”

Burgerbelle shrugged. “Liar liar.” She kicked open a cupboard and revealed stacks of the booklet inside instead of coffee cups. The fire went out a second later, unable to do more than scare a Gem.

“I can explain…”

“Yes you can,” Jenny said, a malicious smile creeping up her face. “But first…” She empowered her fist with vibrating energy and socked Starshine right in the face, stopping just short of poofing the Gem.

Starshine backed herself up against a wall, nervously looking left and right. “Look, it isn’t against company policy to do things off the record for extra cash…”

“Jenny…” Aradia said, raising an eyebrow.

“Shut up, Nanoha needed that loophole for government work,” Jenny defended. “I just kept it around in the interests of being fair.”

“Jenny…”

“Okay, fine, it was probably stupid and I bet the next few hours are going to make me profoundly regret the decision. But let’s deal with the here and now.” She glared at Starshine. “Who gave you the books and where can I find them?”

She gulped. “It was… the Fire Lily. She’s currently in the basement… Probably can hear all of this…”

Thrackerzod blinked. “You have a Flower in the basement!?”

Starshine nodded slowly.

“There aren’t any Flowers in the City!” Jenny shouted. “You should have known that!”

“…She had a lot of money, resources, and technology…”

Jenny twitched. “Why does this all go wrong today? Over a century, everything went smoothly…”

“It’s finally time for you to learn,” Roland said.

“That’s stupid, it’s all stupid.”

Of course it is, to those who do not comprehend the Tower’s will.

Roland drew his gun and aimed it at the hovering orange Flower in the doorway.

There is no need for that, gunslinger. Killing me with a bullet of purpose will do naught. The information you seek will die with me.

Jenny cracked her knuckles. “We’ll torture you until it comes out.”

I have no intention of telling you anything. I am simply here to defuse the situation.

Jenny tapped into her rarely-used psychic powers and tried to raid Fire Lily’s mind. This was a poor and ill-advised move that made Jenny pass out.

The foolish shall shame the wise indeed. Such a childish individual gifted with the opportunity for power. Just the right mixture of scatterbrained and earnest to keep from true evil… but never truly a paragon.

“Thrackerzod, call the fleet,” Aradia said. “I think we’ll need my sisters for this one.”

A waste of time.

“…Like time’s an issue to them,” Thrackerzod muttered, taking out her phone. “Yeah, this is Thrackerzod, tell all the Aradias you can to get to Dracogen Headquarters as soon as possible.”

It took less than a minute for over two hundred Aradias to fill the building.

…I have to admit, I did not foresee you going for such a simple option.

“Has your faith fallen short?” Roland asked.

No. This is no glitch. I am to be given a trial. I shall meet it wi-

“Get her!” the ‘main’ Aradia shouted, tackling the Flower to the ground. They didn’t use any psychic powers at all – they just piled on top of her.

What?

“This’ll be over in no time,” several of them said at once. Fire Lily tried to fight back, but it was already too late – they tore off all her petals and snapped her stem in half before her psychic energies could do much. Then, within extremely slowed time, they forced their mental powers into her startled, broken, nearly dead mind. In such panicked state, her normally impenetrable defenses fell to the power of the Aradias, allowing them to grab what they needed with ease.

They would not have allowed themselves to actually kill the Flower, though, so they physically fused the being’s soul to one of her petals, essentially enchanting the piece of her old body. One of the Aradias took the petal in her hand and vanished. Almost all the others left to return to what they were doing prior.

Only the original Aradia remained. “She wrote the book herself based on information received from one Bonker. A Scout working in Nanoha’s Tower.”

Thrackerzod performed a search. “…He’s a security guard. The exact details are classified, give me a second…” She blinked. “I don’t have clearance.”

Roland swiped her phone. He took a moment to remember his security code and pressed it in. He grimaced when he saw the answer.

“One of Flagg’s guards…”

~~~

I ran my wing across a nearby circular platform, overriding Roxy’s Void powers with my own so I could feel it. “I should know what this is… I’m almost positive it’s being kept from me on purpose.”

“How’s it feel to be normal?” Daniel asked.

I glared up at him. “It’s not normal. …Do you see yourself becoming bitter?”

“I’m alive and I shouldn’t be. Can you really blame me?”

“No, but you’re still you, you haven’t Come Back Wrong or anything. You still have control over yourself even if it hurts.”

Daniel’s steeled exterior fell. “…Do we really have control, Twilence?”

“I think so,” Roxy said from up ahead.

“But the Tower…”

“Is a paradox,” Roxy finished for him, putting her hands on her hips. “It defines us, we define it. We are both what the philosophers would call ‘contingent beings’. We create each other.”

“…I wasn’t aware you knew philosophy,” Sunny commented.

Roxy shrugged. “I’m a hopeless combination of party girl, master rogue, mad scientist, Gem, and book geek.” She shrugged. “I read a lot of stuff.”

Daniel smiled softly. “Following in your mother’s footsteps?”

Roxy pressed her fingers together and chuckled. “I haven’t gotten anything published yet! Got a lot of rejections, and I wasn’t allowed to make a name for myself after I took the Intelligence Division job. But maybe when all this is over…”

“You should definitely follow your dream,” I said. “So many of us get caught up in the antics of existence…” I shook my head.

“What are you going to do when this is over?”

I looked down at the Eye of Rhyme. “When I finally lose this thing… I’d make a good literature professor, scientist, magician, but I think I’m done with all those sorts of things. I think… a counselor. I haven’t been as close to friendship as I would like.”

“I’m going to map this whole universe,” Sunny said, smirking. “Every. Last. Corner.”

“Without FTL that could take centuries or more,” I pointed out.

“So? I can take breaks. We’re immortal, we can take however long we want.”

Roxy smirked. “I’m going to be an inventor-author combo! Yes!”

“Not going to throw in a bit of party girl?”

“The inventions will be party-related. I shall get an army of Pinkies.”

There was a chorus of laughs. But then we realized one person wasn’t laughing – Daniel. He was just sitting there, dejected.

“Hey, hey…” Roxy said, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“You… don’t have to try to comfort me. There’s nothing for me to plan for. I just…” He looked away, afraid to speak.

“Daniel, I…” I didn’t get to finish because the Everykid dropped right in the middle of our little group. She pointed frantically to the left and downward.

“…You crashed into our ship!” Roxy realized.

The Everykid nodded vigorously – then she pointed again.

I spread my wings. “She was probably from the ship. The rest of them must be down there. Prepare for some teleports…”

I got us there in five jumps. I quickly identified Mattie and… White Nettle.

And suddenly I understood. “By the bricks of the Tower, I-”

Mattie stopped herself at a ‘nine’ and shushed me. “Darling, wait a minute before you start spouting that epiphany of yours. I need to have a word with someone. Ahem. Daniel.”

Daniel found it hard to look at her. “…What?”

“Looks like I’m the one who has to tell you this because everyone else is too soft in the head. Sissies, the lot of you. Daniel, it is completely fine to be looking forward to the end. You can admit it. They may not agree with you, but at this point if they don’t understand they deserve a good whipping.”

Roxy turned to Daniel. “…You just want it to be over?”

“It… It can’t be over, not yet,” Daniel said, grimacing. “But… when it is… I won’t fight it. I’m… I’m sorry.” He hung his head, a tear running down his face. “I… I was supposed to be gone. I was ready. When she left, I was supposed to go…” His features turned to rage. “And something’s keeping me here!”

Roxy’s expression softened. “…I understand. As much as you may think I can’t, I… I do understand.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I… When John…”

Daniel sagged. “…But you aren’t wasting away.”

“…No.”

“Then I am sorry, you don’t understand. There is something… else. I don’t know how to describe it.” He paused. “…Thank you.”

I noticed White Nettle staring at us with a confused expression. She couldn’t understand. She had no idea what was going on.

I smiled softly at her. “It’s okay. …Well, no, it’s not okay, but there’s nothing you need to worry about here.” I landed next to her and folded my wings up neatly. “You know what this place is.”

She twitched. “No, no I don’t, no, get away.”

“This is a Downstreamer creation,” I answered for her. “One of the last they created. Part of their mission to achieve Infinity. A prototype.”

“No… No, I’m not here!”

“Yes, you’re here, Nettle. This place… it’s for you. The rest of us are just here because we needed somewhere to be. But you… you’re here because you have to be. You were sent here, weren’t you?”

“I don’t want it!” Nettle wailed.

“…Why not?” Mattie asked. “It might give you your powers back.”

“…And what else would it do to me?” Nettle asked. “I… I have something now, something I didn’t have before. I don’t know where it’s going and I don’t know what it can give me, but…”

I laid a wing on her. “…I can get you help. If it changes you, there are ways to bring you back if you lose yourself. I promise to do everything in my power to help you if that happens. In fact…” I brought out my notebook and tore out a page. “Let’s cement it in the winds of ka itself. As a Prophet, I can create what is known as a Contract. A deal that cannot be broken. It is an absolute.”

“…There’s… no chance you’ll fail?”

“Not even death can prevent a true Contract from being left unfulfilled. There are… often unintended consequences of a very drastic nature, but I’m willing to risk that for you since you need it.” I signed the paper myself. “Just take this… and open yourself up to the world around you.”

Nettle shakily held the Contract in her hand. Wordlessly, she took a pen from me and scribbled some lines at the bottom. I rolled it up and placed it in one of my pocket dimensions. Already, I felt the familiar sense of a chain around my heart.

…If I was correct, this Contract would stay locked around my soul until the day the Tower fell. Nettle would not be able to feel it, but I would. A constant limitation…

But I knew what Nettle was about to do would be more important than my comfort.

She took a breath – still afraid, but with enough confidence to extend a hand. The moment she opened herself to the Downstreamer technology around her, it affixed itself to her. Every platform in sight began to rotate around her in a complex pattern of circles.

Her arm started burning. She screamed.

~~~

Starbeat organized the trial quickly. It was held in the same hall that had tried the Gem Vein oh so long ago, but this time there was no tribunal in the middle of the stage. There was simply a Prosecution table and a Defense table. There was no judge – instead, there was a computer in the center. This computer had been one of the most interesting and effective additions to the Merodi Legal System. It was able to sense the surface thoughts and emotions of everyone involved in the case, allowing it not only to find a guilty/not guilty verdict, but also determine how guilty or not guilty they were, allowing for proper scaling of punishments according to the overall ‘jury’ of those watching. It removed the need for a judge or tribunal, and the only bias it would have would be that of the people as a whole.

Since it had been running trials almost without a defense at all for the last few weeks, it had never produced a truly not guilty result. It hadn’t demanded many executions though – such a verdict was placed as a truly last resort for the most guilty of the guilty, such as Phage and Rosalina. Most often it just sentenced jail time, animated suspension, removal of any powers, or occasionally something more creative.

All Eve had to do was play against it in the case, and that meant winning over the crowd enough to keep it from declaring an execution. She doubted she could get a ‘not guilty’ for Corona, but for Pinkie’s group… maybe. It depended on how well her plans worked.

She looked to the Prosecution table. Starbeat was there – but Gamzee was missing. If all was going according to plan, Flutterfree would be keeping Gamzee busy, so his Rage powers wouldn’t interfere with the trial.

Starbeat clearly suspected something. But the trial was about to start, and she had no time to question Eve. If she delayed the trial to find Gamzee, Eve would contest and bring his Rage abilities to the light, which would likely destroy the trial’s authority. So she was just going to have to deal.

The computer beeped. “THE TRIAL SHALL BEGIN: THE PEOPLE VERSUS CORONA SHIMMER, PINKIE PIE, JOTARO KUJO, PIDGE HOLT, AND VRISKA SERKET. EACH ARE TO BE JUDGED SEPARATELY BUT FOR ALL THE CRIMES ARE SIMILAR. CRIMES AGAINST THE MULTIVERSE: SPECIFICALLY ORCHESTRATING THE COLLAPSE. PROSECUTION, STATE YOUR CASE.”

Starbeat glanced at the empty seat next to her and bristled. She forced her expression into a flat, reasonable one. “Citizens of the Hub, today we have with us the worst of the worst. Before us today is Corona Shimmer, the person who began the War for Existence with a wish, and then proceeded to become the leader of all efforts to collapse the multiverse. She succeeded, and she survived the Dusting she brought upon all of us. She is, by far the worst person we have ever had stand at this podium. This should be an open and shut case where the worst possible punishment the computer can come up with will be exacted upon her.

“However, for the sake of the system, I will list everything she has done to deserve this. Aside from making the wish that started the war, she betrayed Merodi Universalis to do so, she organized the entire collapse army to kill trillions upon trillions of people, she personally killed one of our own Overheads in cold blood, she destroyed many universes with her personal magic, and has given no indication she regrets any of those choices. She is the reason, the source for all our suffering, and instead of being given what she deserved; she has been shown kindness and forgiveness. This cannot stand.

“As for Pinkie’s team, much of the same could be said of them. They did not cause the War for Existence, and they did not organize the death of so many, but they were still traitors to Merodi Universalis. They moved from being the Primary Exploration Team to the collapse’s Primary Strike Force. They were given great weapons, destroyed many ships, and became names that were feared on the battlefield. Pinkie’s Awareness has been shown time and time again to be a source of violent breakouts. Jotaro has brutally killed many just by waving the hands of his Stand. Pidge programmed weapons of war for the collapse movement, including the infamous Final Dawn. And Vriska… her list of crimes knows no end. Cruelty. Maliciousness. Apathy to genocide. A complete disregard for those around her. Hatred.”

Starbeat had to catch her breath. “I believe there is no need to even think about the defense. There is nothing they can do to make up for the damage they’ve caused. They must pay the price. But Overhead Evening Sparkle thinks otherwise, so out of respect for what she’s done for our cause, I shall let her have her say.”

“Thank you,” Eve said, turning to the computer for confirmation.

“DEFENSE, YOU MAY BEGIN.”

Eve cleared her throat. “First off, I want it known that I am not claiming they didn’t do any of the acts Starbeat described. They did them, and they did them under their own wills for the most part. Pinkie’s team largely went only because of their loyalty to Pinkie, but that does little to excuse what they did. I agree, it was horrible, and the goal they were seeking was not worth the price.

“No, I’m not asking you to forget what they did. I’m not even asking you to forgive them, like I have. What I’m asking you to do is to realize that they’re people just like you and me – and that they don’t deserve to be brutally murdered. They are not evil villains of pure darkness who cannot be reasoned with or understood. They are people of pure heart who fought for what they believed was right, just like we did. Had the war gone differently, no doubt we would be on the stage right now, being judged for our war crimes. Things we did because of pure intentions.

“Every single thing Corona did, I did as well. You claim that I didn’t start the War for Existence – but I did, in a way. I had the opportunity to stop Corona from making that wish. But I let her do it, because I thought she was right at the time. Right that no single person had the right to decide the fate of the multiverse. I now realize that, even together, we did not have the right to decide, but that changes nothing about my decision. Even now… I would rather all of us fought over this than have Corona try to do it in secret. It would have been much worse.

“You also claim I have never betrayed Merodi Universalis.” She looked Starbeat right in the eyes. “This is incorrect. I orchestrated the war against Skarn over a lie.”

Everyone gasped.

“I believed I was doing right, that I was sacrificing people for the greater good of destroying Skarn’s Congeries. And yet, after this betrayal, I was still your leader – and I moved on to lead our Relations through our Class 2 era, and Merodi Universalis is better off because of it. I regret my choice to go to war, because I was not ready to sacrifice my friends. But it seems to have been the right decision. In the same vein, Corona saw what was right – and believed she needed to sacrifice so many to accomplish the goal of ending the Tower’s hold on us. Even if you don’t agree with her, you can see why.

“Pinkie, in many ways, is something none of us can understand fully. She sees what ka and the Tower means, how it works, what it does to us. She has lived her entire life with the knowledge that we are being watched, that we are pixels on a screen, words on a page. When she realized this might not be a fact of life she just had to accept, she decided to fight it. The others, who had served with her for over seventy years, followed their Captain because they trusted her. Flutterfree would have joined them as well had Pinkie not ordered her to stay back.

“Seventy years… Think about that. All the people being put on trial before you have given an entire lifetime to the people around them. Their ‘crimes’ in the War for Existence lasted less than a year. A single percent of their lives dealt with what you are trying them for. Before that, they did so, so many things for us! Corona gave us non-magical dimensional devices! She gave us complex dimensional magic! And, above all, she declared war on death itself and won. The immortality serum has the potential to save more lives than anything that came before it, and you want to kill her and throw it away. Even if she needs to be punished, from a practical standpoint, you should want her around.

“And Pinkie’s team… I’m willing to bet most of you know the story of when the Primary Team first visited your world. There are not many major Merodi Worlds that weren’t touched by these great heroes. Did they seek to conquer you? To force their way of life on you? To kill anyone? No! They always sought the peaceful answer, the heroic way, the peaceful way. They devoted themselves to the people they visited, seeking to understand, to learn, and to make friends. Even in the war, they did this! They worked with the other side when they had to against the Nihilists, they used capture devices whenever possible to minimize pointless death, and they never resorted to brutal gruesome tactics. The rules of war were never broken between the two sides because of people like them.

“These people you are trying are not villains. They are heroes. I have known many of them most of my life, and I can attest that they still have pure hearts within them. Sure, they have flaws – Corona’s obsessively determined, Pinkie’s too excitable, Pidge can get too fixated, Jotaro’s too reserved, and Vriska’s got a huge list of problems. But they’re good people and they never stopped being good people. They stand before you now asking for your mercy. That you remember them for what they used to mean to you: heroes. Heroes who would, and still will, lay down their lives for you. Give you mercy.”

Eve folded up her wings and sat back down, a grin on her face. Something about giving one of those speeches and being able to hear it naturally had given her an emotional high.

“PROSECUTION, ANY RETORTS?”

Starbeat twitched. “A few. Heroes wouldn’t want the destruction of so many lives.”

Eve shook her head. “People can be very, very wrong and still be heroes. Now that the war is over, they can be heroes to this New World. If you kill them… you will be robbing this world of a gift. They will not be able to continue bringing peace.”

“They brought war.”

“A war that wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”

Starbeat sighed. “…We’ll just go back and forth forever like this. Even if they are heroes, they still need to be punished for what they did.”

“Regardless of any past selflessness?”

“What they did undoes all of that.”

“Then perhaps they have already paid their dues? And if not, letting them go free and continue to be heroes could make up the rest?”

Starbeat bristled. “That’s too lenient and you know it.”

“I don’t think so.”

Starbeat paused. “…We’re getting nowhere. I don’t have any evidence besides what everyone already knows. You?”

“I already used it in my opening statements.”

“In that case…”

“HAS THE TRIAL CONCLUDED?” the computer asked.

Eve and Starbeat nodded.

“AVERAGING OUT OPINIONS…” For a few seconds, there was complete silence. “A VERDICT HAS BEEN REACHED.”

“What is it?” Starbeat asked.

“SCALING PUNISHMENTS. CORONA RECEIVES ETERNITY IN PRISON MIXED WITH COMMUNITY SERVICE PRODUCING IMMORTALITY POTIONS AND WHATEVER OTHER TASKS THE GOVERNMENT SEES FIT THROUGH HER SKILLSET. A TRACKER WILL BE ON HER AT ALL TIMES AND SHE WILL BE CAREFULLY MONITORED.”

Starbeat seemed annoyed at first – but then her expression became satisfied, as if she had just realized something. She was the government…

Corona was just surprised she wasn’t being executed.

“PINKIE PIE AND HER TEAM ARE TO PAY THEIR TIME THROUGH HEROIC ACTS IN DANGEROUS SITUATIONS WITHIN THE EXPEDITIONS DIVISION.”

“WHAT!?” Starbeat screeched, her voice carrying through the hall. “THAT’S NOT A PUNISHMENT! YOU’RE JUST GIVING THEM THEIR JOB BACK!”

“IT IS THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE,” the computer said. “IF YOU WISH TO CONTEST THE CHARGE, COURT MAY BE RESCHEDULED AT A LATER DATE.”

“I don’t want to reschedule!” Starbeat shouted. “I w-”

“You’re arguing with a soulless machine,” Eve pointed out. “It completed its verdict. You can have Corona imprisoned for eternity; everyone else is free to go save the world. Which is what they were going to do anyway before you took them.”

“You… bitch! You rigged this!”

Eve shook her head. “I removed the rigging you had in place.”

“I’ll have your head if you did anything to Gamzee!”

“Flutterfree wouldn’t hurt a fly unless she had to,” Eve pointed out. “All the manipulation is gone. All we have to do i-”

The front doors of the auditorium smashed open, revealing Storm leading two dozen angry Hub civilians.

Eve didn’t need to think very hard to know the civilians behind him were full of Rage. So full that they wouldn’t be able to accept this verdict…

Storm pointed at Pinkie. “Kill her.”

Eve raised a forcefield, deflecting the gunfire – but Starbeat rammed into her, dissipating the shield. Pinkie slipped out of her restraints and removed the cuffs on Corona, allowing the Princess of Passion to raise a shield instead. The entire hall erupted into violent chaos. Not only were Corona, Eve, and Pinkie’s Party fighting for their lives – but the people who had been convinced of their heroism and had the rage purged in the trial were fighting their neighbors.

What had once been a united Rage against the collapse had turned into a horrid, internal Rage of division within the Hub.

A Civil War had begun because Eve had taken the person who directed the Rage out of the picture.

All the plans she had for a coup were completely unnecessary in the face of this pure chaos.

~~~

Flagg was held in the most secure area of the entire City. A mile beneath the ground directly under Nanoha’s skyscraper was a room with no physical entrances or exits. The area was completely drained of magic, though the proximity to the Tower ensured this measure was never perfectly reliable. So the walls were made of triple-reinforced metal crafted out of numerous legendary metals, surrounded by several force fields, and always guarded by a hundred unmanned mechs enchanted to swim through earth like water.

Every square inch of his room was lined with microscopic cameras that recorded his every movement. Every single blink was recorded, as well as the patterns of his sweat. Nothing would escape the cameras.

Despite this setup, he received visitors constantly. Never physically in the room, of course, but through a voice-only communication line run through several filters to ensure he could never use his signature voice commands on the other end. Only the highest ranking leaders could talk to him, and while they all hated him, they all agreed that Flagg could be an invaluable source of information. They couldn’t afford not to hear what he had to say.

When he didn’t have a ‘visitor’, he always had three different guards watching him through the cameras. There were only six total guards granted clearance to watch him and report any thoroughly suspicious behavior. One of these guards was Bonker, a scout on loan from Saxton Hale renowned for his loyalty, devotion, and above-average intelligence.

He was taken into custody before Jenny woke up on Thrackerzod’s back. “Wh… what happened?”

“Flagg happened,” Thrackerzod muttered. “One of his guards is responsible for the whole fiasco. We’re going to see the man in black himself to demand some answers right now.”

“…Geez, this escalated even quicker than I thought.” She rubbed her head. “Wonder how many memories were scrambled because of that…?”

“Do you know who I am?” Roland asked.

Jenny stared at him blankly.

He turned away, grunting. “Amusing.”

Jenny broke out into a grin. “I can never pull a fast one on you.” She hopped off Thrackerzod and onto her feet. “So, Flagg. This should be fun.”

They walked into the high-security room covered in screens. There were three chairs all occupied by different guards. None of them looked away from the screens to greet the newcomers.

These guards took their jobs seriously.

“Let him hear us,” Roland ordered.

One of the guards pressed a button.

“Walter,” Roland said.

“Still using that name, Roland?” Flagg asked, chuckling. Since every camera in the room was picking up and transmitting audio, it gave Flagg’s voice a disturbing, layered sound. “I’ve grown so much beyond that now…”

“Clearly. Since you’re able to sow discord even from within a cage.”

“What did I do this time?” Flagg asked with a laugh.

“Spreading lies about the Emissary.”

“Her name’s Renee, you know. She refers to herself as such. You really should be more respectful of people’s choice in names, gunslinger.”

“Stop beating around the bush, we know it was you,” Jenny said, folding her arms. “How’d you convince Bonker to give Tiger Lily that information?”

“Oh, his name is Bonker, is it? Strange, I never knew. They don’t tell you their names in here. Not even if you ask.” He chuckled. “But you know what? I’m feeling generous. I’ll tell you exactly how I did it. It all started with a simple mistake. Nanoha decided to pay me a visit when the guards shifted. I kept that time locked in my mind until I was able to listen to another shift of guards during a ‘visit’. They switch every six hours. The guards can’t review the feed without request, so any guard from the even shift wouldn’t know anything that happened from the odd shift. So I could spout all the lies I wanted during one of the shifts about what happened during the other shift. About my visitors. About Renee.”

“So what, you just kept spouting lies and people believed it?” Aradia asked.

“It’s not quite so simple! I had to make it sound in-character so no one would be suspicious! So I started a trend of talking to myself – or, really, to the guards – specifically complaining about the people who visited me. All the absurd things they said. And I was very truthful in everything I said about every visitor – except Renee. Of course, when she did visit, I complained about her as I did everyone else, but I always added a few things. A little hint of ‘she thinks she’s got it all under control’ here and a sprinkle of ‘she wants to save them all’ there, and I could basically start a religion through a set of ears willing to listen.” He grinned. “I think you’ll find after interrogation that ‘Bonker’ had a history in a Dark Tower cult. My bet would be one that considers the spirograph a sacred symbol.”

“How could you know that?” Thrackerzod demanded.

Flagg chuckled. “Simple, really. I had made it a habit to test the guards while the voice channel was open. Say controversial things. I could hear changes in their breathing patterns. And the one day I brought the spirograph up in relation to the Dark Tower… He reacted. I knew I had my target. I knew he would listen to everything I had to say.” He clapped his hands together. “He would cart it off and want to tell the world. Discreetly, of course, so as to not jeopardize his ‘blessing’ of being oh so close to his beloved ‘Tower will’.”

“Well, the book is out, but we’re confiscating it,” Jenny said, smirking. “Your little plan won’t go anywhere.”

“Aren’t Rev and Rina missing?”

Everyone stopped short.

“It’s amazing what a few name drops in the middle of a sentence can do… Sounds like mad rambling to two guards, but to the third it sounds like divine gospel of their importance, of their use. Just call them ‘tools of the new way’ and he’ll eat it up like a dog.” Flagg leaned back and grinned. “My plan hasn’t completed yet, and since you’re here you’re way too late to stop it. Have a nice day!” He closed his eyes, indicating he was done talking.

The group ran out of the room as fast as they could. Aradia held up her phone, but she had to wait until they were completely off the floor to get any service. “Nanoha? We need to use Nala. Flagg’s got a plan and it involves Rev and Rina – find them.”

A few seconds passed.

“You found them?! That’s impossibly fast! Where? …Town square?”

“Hide in plain sight…” Burgerbelle mused.

“They’re not hiding anymore,” Roland deduced.

~~~

From the outside, the Downstreamer structure looked like an elongated onion that rose high into the sky with a few stray platforms swirling around its exterior.

Somewhere in the middle of the structure there was a great explosion. Half a second later, there was another explosion. A fourth of a second later, there was yet another. Then an eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second…

I was glad I had teleported all of us but Nettle away, because having that many explosions in such a short span of time would have been far too much for any of us to handle. As it was, even with our distance the shockwave was a bit much.

In two seconds, all the explosions anyone could ever want had completed, completely vaporizing the building from existence. All that remained was White Nettle herself, floating in the middle of the air.

“What in…?” Sunny said, trying her best to figure out what had happened.

White Nettle stopped floating, falling to the ground. I teleported us to her and Roxy caught her.

She looked the same as she had a few minutes ago – with the exception of a smooth, metallic gauntlet embedded in the skin of her right arm.

She opened her eyes. “Wh…”

“Do you feel… normal?” I asked.

She closed her eyes tight and grunted. “Brain feels fine. …My arm hurts though.”

“Well yeah, it has something on it,” Mattie said, looking at the arm. “What is it?”

Nettle held her limb up and examined it. Her eyes widened. “This… This is a supertask device.”

“…Explain?” Sunny asked.

“I’d been looking for this when I still had my multiversal body, but I couldn’t find it… It is a machine that tries to complete an infinite amount of tasks in a finite amount of time, layering them over each other through a mathematical pattern, usually by halves. It… it was supposed to be the thing that gave Downstreamers their Infinity, but they discovered that whenever it was used it would hit the maximum resolution of a universe. It would always get as close to Infinity as possible, but then it would either stop or destroy the universe it was in.”

Roxy’s eyes widened. “Twilence… Do you think this could stop Lord English?”

“As close to infinity as possible…” I furrowed my brow. “Unconditional Immortality must have a limit as well, and if this device can always reach the limit of any universe… That… That might be able to do it. If we could program it to kill him…”

“Excuse me, what now? Lord English?” Mattie blinked. “Did we miss something?”

I nodded. “Yes, you did. I’ll explain later, because right now we need to find out where he is a-” A lightbulb went off in my head. “…Of course! how could I be so stupid!”

“What?” Nettle asked.

“The city – the city in 115, the one you are in Nettle! It was around the Dark Tower! It… He should be heading there! Right to the Tower itself! We just have to get there and we’ll find him!”

“Slow down!” Roxy shouted, waving her hands. “You’re talking a mile-a-minute! How about you explain slowly what we’re going to do?”

I looked at the Eye and nodded slowly. “Right. I will. But first, I’m making sure we’re off screen…”

~~~

Gamzee woke up screaming. “HONK! HONK! HONK! HONK!”

Flutterfree tightened the steel wires around his chair just to be sure. They were in the back room of Iroh’s teashop, a soundproofed, secure location provided by Azula. “Calm down. You’ll hurt yourself if you struggle too much.”

“You MOTHERFUCKIN’ bitch think this can HOLD ME!?!?”

“If it can’t, I can,” Flutterfree said, tracing one of her wing-blades along his arm. “I’m not just the Page of Rage. I have more to work with than you do.” She flashed her fangs.

“HONK! Honk. HONK! Honk.”

Flutterfree ignored the honking and fixed her attention on her phone, which was receiving a transmission of the trial. She watched with bated breath – praying intensely that nobody would die.

She was relieved when Corona’s sentence came. It was bad, but at least she got to live. And when Pinkie’s Party was given freedom… She let out a laugh. “Thank you…”

“You’re a MOTHERFUCKIN’ IDIOT!”

Flutterfree looked to him with a sly smirk. “Why? Without you there, she was able to appeal to their inner nature. What they used to be before you came along.”

“The Rage IS STILL MOTHERFUCKIN’ THERE!” he let out a laugh. “It has to go somewhere…”

It was at this point Flutterfree started hearing explosions. She heard Storm yell “kill them!” and the feed went dead.

Azula rushed into the back room. “Fighting has broken out everywhere! I’ve lost contact with Eve!”

“Mobilize our people, get them to quell the fighting,” Flutterfree said. “…I was hoping we wouldn’t have to take over…”

Azula nodded, running out of the room and making some calls.

“You won’t be able to stop it…” Gamzee breathed. “THE RAGE WILL DESTROY THIS ENTIRE MOTHERFUCKIN’ PLACE!”

“Is that what you wanted!?” Flutterfree demanded. “To destroy this place!?”

“I wanted… SOME MOTHERFUCKIN’ RESPECT! But you came along… AND RUINED THAT!” He strained against the steel wires keeping him to the chair. “I was going to be the mirthful messiah to these people… THEIR RAGE WOULD BECOME THEIR MOTHERFUCKIN’ LIFE! We would have been the true fulfillment… BUT PROPHECIES JUST AIN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE!”

The steel wires snapped from Gamzee’s rage. Flutterfree caught the whipping wires in her blades without flinching. “So it was just a god complex? No master this time?”

“THEY WERE ALWAYS ME AND MOTHERFUCKIN’ ME!” Gamzee shouted, getting out of his chair with so much force he crushed the chair. “Caiborn ain’t English no more… And neither am I…”

“You really do want to make this New World your own.”

“MOTHERFUCKIN’ BRILLIANT.”

Flutterfree spread her wings and summoned Lolo. “I can’t let you.”

“What a motherfuckin’ shame… HONK!” He produced a bow from nowhere and let an arrow fly. Flutterfree fired her bow of light at the same time. The holy arrow easily pierced Gamzee’s simple projectile and hit him in the chest, right where his heart should have been.

That attack should have killed most trolls – and if not that, at least slowed them down. But Gamzee was not most trolls. As purple blood poured out of his wound, he let out an amused psychotic ‘HONK!’ and charged Flutterfree as if nothing had happened.

Flutterfree drove all her wing-blades into Gamzee. He let every last one of them pierce his chest, spurting deep purple liquid over the two of them. He licked it off his face. “Nice hit…” He raised a juggling club and hit her across the face. “BUT I AIN’T MOTHERFUCKIN’ DONE!”

“Didn’t expect you to be,” Flutterfree growled. She flew into the air and infused her hoof with Rage, kicking him through the wall. He grabbed a large piece of rubble and chucked it at her, only for her to fly around it. She let a few more arrows of light fly from her bow, hitting Gamzee in multiple locations. He still did not slow, the Rage within him giving his body more life than it should have had.

Flutterfree activated Lolo – and she saw the truth. He wasn’t unkillable, just heavily resistant to it.

Which meant she could go a little further than she usually did.

She swooped down along the ground, preparing to chop off his foot. Sensing she had decided to be more brutal, Gamzee bothered to dodge the attack, leaping through the streets of the Hub. Behind him, Hub citizens fought each other, nothing more than a background to the battle of Rage.

Flutterfree could have used her abilities as the Page to stop the fighting around them. But that would have taken her focus off Gamzee, and as strong as she was, she couldn’t afford to take a heavy hit from him. The battle may have been balanced, but it was not even.

Flutterfree forced her breathing to level out before swooping for another attack. Gamzee threw some juggling clubs her way, but she maneuvered through them all, getting a few cuts in on his stomach.

“You’re living a lie… FIGHT WITH THE RAGE!” He leaped at her; teeth ready to tear her flesh apart.

Flutterfree looked at him with a calm expression. “I prefer the truth without the pain.” She stuck one of her wing-blades in his mouth and through his throat. She twirled herself around and infused as much Rage as she could muster into him. She threw him to the side like a discus, blasting through several dozen walls. Before he even landed, she had a follow-up planned, firing arrows of light in his direction.

What she failed to account for was where he’d end up.

Right in the middle of the trial auditorium.

“…Sassafras,” she swore, swooping in. “Sorry, I forgot to look where I was throwing him!”

“YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKIN’ BITCH!” Gamzee shouted. “I’ve got you now… ALL THE RAGE IN THIS ROOM IS MINE!” He spread his arms wide.

“NO IT’S NOT!” Flutterfree shouted, supercharging herself as a beacon of purple light. “None of the people here are yours. They. Are. Their. OWN! PEOPLE!” Her pulse of Rage counteracted Gamzee’s attempts at a control. “Your Rage is nothing but senseless violence leading people to a lie! A contrivance! My Rage… my Rage is more than yours. I lead them to the truth. To resolution.”

“I’m gonna fuck you up…” Gamzee ground his teeth and shoved his hand forward. Tired, Flutterfree could only half-dodge, the attack taking out the left side of her face.

Gamzee thought he had her. No pony would be able to still fight after that.

His Rage told him the truth too late.

Flutterfree twirled around in a graceful arc, all of her knives slicing him directly from the side. He’d put up no defenses against the attack. With a pitiful “honk…” he slid apart into six separate slices, becoming little more than a flood of purple blood.

Flutterfree swallowed. “I’m… sorry…” She fell over, losing consciousness.

“GAMZEE!” Starbeat shouted.

“FLUTTERFREE!” Eve wailed.

The two tried to move – but the fight came to them. Eve found herself fighting a gigantic Gem fusion, the automatic-barrier of Seraphim being the only reason she was alive. She focused on her magic. Seraphim may have lost its ability to tap into absolute zero, but that had just given her an excuse to finally settle on a focused magic discipline: ice. Numerous shards of frozen air shot through the divide between her and her enemy, finding their mark easily.

The fusion Gem didn’t care – it kept attacking.

Elsewhere, Starbeat found herself stopped by Vriska.

“He’s gone. You don’t have t-”

“FUCK YOU!” Starbeat shouted, firing a death spell at Vriska. The troll used her luck to dodge it. Currently, Starbeat definitely believed Vriska deserved to die, and that was probably enough to trigger something Just. She couldn’t chance it – but she still had to stop her.

The troll tackled her ex-moirail to the ground, trying to pin her.

Corona saw her opportunity in the midst of this. She teleported to Flutterfree and started healing her.

A bullet flew from the edge of her peripheral vision. She summoned Bacon Pancakes out of instinct to stop it, turning to her foe – none other than Storm.

“You…” Corona said, narrowing her eyes. “You didn’t have to be part of this.”

Storm pulled out a golden staff artifact bristling with arcane power. “How so?”

“Ever since Ba’al, I know you’ve taken steps to make sure your mind cannot be altered. Gamzee couldn’t have done anything to you. There’s no way. You’ve been going along with this willingly.”

Storm shrugged with a smile. “Does that really surprise you?”

“…No. It disappoints me. I had hoped you would have learned something after all these years.”

“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

Corona dropped her fighting stance. She held out a hand. “Then maybe you can go back to an old one. There’s no point in you fighting for them anymore. The power you claimed here is worthless now. They’re destroying themselves. Lay down your weapon, and you’ll be able to come with us. No strings attached.”

Storm blinked – then chuckled. He dropped his artifact without any hesitation and shrugged. “You really are all about that forgiveness, aren’t you?”

“If I want it…”

“You really don’t deserve it,” Storm said. “Half the people you gave it to don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve it. But I’ll take it anyway.” He sat down in a nearby chair and kicked up his feet as the battle raged around them. “And you say I never learn.”

Corona shook her head before returning to healing Flutterfree.

Elsewhere, Vriska and Starbeat were still at it.

“You take my trust, you take my happiness, you take my people, and you take him!” Starbeat shouted. “WHAT WON’T YOU TAKE!?”

“Your shit,” Vriska spat, kicking Starbeat in the chest. “Gamzee’s gone now, and you’ve got no fuckin’ excuse for all this anger.”

“NO EXCUSE!?” Starbeat laughed. “You… You…” She fired a beam at Vriska that missed, as expected. “You’re a pretty good reason to be livid!”

“I did what I thought was right.”

“YOU. DIDN’T. EVEN. TELL. ME!” Starbeat shouted, unleashing several dozen other magical attacks, all of which missed. “YOU WENT AND JOINED THE ENEMY WITHOUT EVEN TALKING TO ME! ME! I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE ONE YOU TALKED TO!”

“We. Didn’t. Have. Time!”

“LIAR! You just knew I’d say no!”

Vriska wiped the tears from her face. “FINE! I ran away! I fled from you because I was afraid of what you’d do to me! What you’d do to them! I chose Pinkie over you, are you happy!?”

Starbeat looked at Vriska with a broken expression. She breathed slowly. She took a step forward, but tripped over her hoof. “…No… I’m… I haven’t been happy since you left…”

Vriska leaned down to her – she didn’t have enough luck left to do anything to Starbeat. “…I can be back, now.”

“No. No…” Starbeat started crying. “That’s too much… You’re too much… Your face makes me sad…” She choked. “The curse was never really gone… I’m still doomed…”

Vriska lifted Starbeat up and pulled her into a hug. Starbeat made a few vain attempts to attack Vriska with her hoof, but all the attacks were too weak. She’d lost the Rage. All that remained was sorrow.

The last enemy standing – the combination Gem – took a team hit from Pinkie, Eve, and Jotaro. It finally poofed.

“Yeah!” Pidge said. “Jojo, we did it!”

Jotaro smirked. “Yare yare daze…”

Eve looked around at the carnage. “We need to get outside… See what we can do to stop the fighting.”

An entire carrier crashed through the leftmost wall of the auditorium. Azula’s voice came from it. “GET IN! NOW! The Hub’s a lost cause! Internal structures are being targeted – and starting to fail!”

Corona pressed her hands together – and teleported everyone who still showed signs of life into the carrier, even those who had been enemies until the moment they stopped being able to fight. “PUNCH IT!” Corona ordered.

Azula flew the carrier straight through the ceiling, taxing the military-grade vessel’s shields. But it was enough – they passed through the top of the Hub and into the open air of the jungle-cave.

Beneath the light of the glowing sun, the Hub began to cave in. Explosions rippled throughout the once powerful home of the Merodi.

A symbol of great peace, friendship, and progress fell. Even as it fell, some still fought – firing everything they could at the fleeing ship they knew contained The Enemy. Rejecting any help they might be able to offer.

And in the very same hall where the Foundation of Merodi Universalis occured, where the Bloodbath that marked its birth marred history forever, a new bloodbath marked its fall. One punctuated by a purple, horrid mess of Rage. Merodi Universalis ended as it began - in death.

Azula took the carrier into the caves, never to return to the Hub.

~~~

Rev was not herself. A Flowery device had been inserted into her brain, twisting her to be something else. At the moment she felt no aversion to this, but earlier she had screamed in agony. She had fought much longer against the Flower than Rina had, all thanks to her deep, unrelenting faith.

But she had fallen eventually. She had no access to miraculous Divine power here, and if her God was as real as she believed, He chose to let her mind fall to the Flowers.

She was a tool.

In her new state, that was all she lived for. More accurately, she lived for this one moment. It was her purpose in the Tower’s will.

She walked onto the impromptu stage set up and levitated over the part of town square closest to the Dark Tower. It became her backdrop. A magical camera was placed in front of her and began transmitting to the entire city.

“Ahem,” she said, clearing her throat. “Many of you know me, but many of you do not. I am Reverend Starlight Glimmer, or simply Rev. My time with you is short, so I will be brief. This city of ours has become the epitome of a crisis of faith, and this needs to be addressed now. We are living in the Shadow of Earth Prime, the world where all this began – where so many prophecies lie unfulfilled. We live with the silhouette of the Dark Tower behind us, a constant reminder of the fate at work in our lives. And the Emissary of Ka itself walks among us as a pony, giving at long last a voice to that which defines all of us. Whether you believe in God, a higher power, morality, or none of the above, this City and what it means applies to you. Every last one of you.”

Rev knew they were trying to cut her transmission now. Already sending people to stop her, surprised to find members of Dark Tower cults stopping them. “The Emissary is a gift to us, a gift so we are allowed to see that the Tower had a will behind it all along. A force, a deity, whatever you want to call it – language simply isn’t enough to describe Her. This will, in Her grace, has set a moment when She will depart from us and leave us free. And what have we done with this gift? We have squandered it, taking to Her sacred field and building our society upon it. What for? For the sake of Her ‘defense!’ The Dark Tower can defend Herself, with or without our help! She will do as She sees fit and we will never have any say in the matter!” She held her head high, looking to the sky. “We need to deserve the gift She gives us. And right now, we do not.”

A Flower appeared behind her – but it was not any ordinary flower. It was a tree, though it looked more like a geometric pattern than an actual living plant, twisting around with right angles and sharp fronds. It was Austras Koks, the very same Flower who had plotted the fall of the Nihilists.

The great Flower didn’t say a word. All that happened was, in the distance, the Dracogen Headquarters exploded.

At this point, the citizens of the City would only panic – which wasn’t enough for the Flower. It needed more.

And this was what Rina was for. She came flying out of the sky without any disguise on, clearly Brutalight to anyone who knew the stories of the Elements of Insanity. “No! The Tower does not deserve our respect! It is the enemy!”

“So this is how it is!?” Rev shouted. “The collapse gets what they want and then proceed to treat the gift like a piece of moldy bread!?”

“YES!”

“Then we cannot back down!” Rev lit her horn and fired at Rina. “Everyone, we must fight for what we believe! Man, woman, child, elder, soldier, civilian, it doesn’t matter! The Crisis depends on you! The field must be pure!”

“THE TOWER CAN GO FUCK ITSELF!”

Then the transmission was finally cut off. But, of course, it was just slightly too late – exactly as Austras Koks had planned. The people who had been indoctrinated with the booklets would act first, prompting retaliation, which would prompt more retaliation, and more…

The heroes arrived, Roland leading the charge to Rev and Rina’s clash.

Austras Koks had little patience for long, belabored action sequences, so it just removed the conditioning from Rev and Rina. I turn myself in.

“No you don’t,” Roland said, firing his revolver.

A weapon of such power and meaning… It is an honor. He didn’t even try to stop the bullet, knowing that it was the way things needed to be. He fell in an instant.

Rina was frozen – unable to process what she had just been a part of.

Rev was different. “Get me back on air now!”

Jenny blinked. “Didn’t you j-”

Roland gave her his phone, complete with full access. “STOP FIGHTING NOW!” Rev shouted into it. “I WAS BEING CONTROLLED BY A FLOWER, EVERYTHING I SAID WAS A LIE! STOP!”

Somewhere, a few people stopped. It wasn’t enough. The mob had already gained full force…

Rev handed the phone back to Roland. “…I’m sorry. I wasn’t strong enough.”

“You did what you could,” Roland said, frown deepening. “And we can no longer do anything.”

“…Nanoha will order the army to stop this,” Thrackerzod said.

“Yeah,” Aradia agreed.

“At all costs.”

“…Yeah.”

~~~

The carrier flew through the skies of Nucleon, heading for the City. It was a long way off. Too far.

The survivors of the fall of the Hub were huddled in the back. Silent, for the most part.

Corona sat in the rear section, staring at nothing.

“...That wasn’t your fault,” Flutterfree said, sitting next to her.

“It was,” Corona said. “Don’t soften it.”

“It wasn’t. That was Gamzee. You had no control over him.”

Corona glanced at the shuddering form of Starbeat on the opposite side of the carrier’s hold. Vriska was tending to her. “Her feelings haven’t changed. She’s just not angry right now.” Corona closed her eyes and put her hands behind her head. “I shouldn’t have gotten out of that.”

“Corona…”

“Just because I believe I was right doesn’t mean I think I should escape the consequences. They were part of the price I was willing to pay.”

Flutterfree frowned. “...Are you sure you’re that strong?”

A tear slid down Corona’s cheek. “No.”

“Then why won’t you just… accept it? That was your trial. You were condemned, and then you were released.”

“Because screw what the Tower wants, I’m not going to let it say I get to run free just because I’m some damn hero,” Corona spat.

Flutterfree frowned.

“...Wherever we end up, I want part of the sentence to carry over.”

Flutterfree opened her mouth to object - but then she chuckled. “All right. I’ll get Eve to work something out. Get you a tracker, keep you from going out. Will that be enough?”

“Not my call.”

“It kind of is.”

Corona shook her head, saying nothing. For a moment, she smiled… and then she frowned, remembering why they were in a ship. She knew they had left behind a burning wreckage.

She didn’t know where they were going, though.

“...Flutterfree, catch me up on what’s been going on. Who’s the bad guy again?”

~~~

Lord English approached the City, its buildings glinting rose-red in the twilight.

Won’t be long now.

Author's Note

Feb 1st is the anniversary of the League of Sweetie Belles and my birthday, so look out for a few things happening that day!

-GM, master of announces.

142 - Spirograph, Part 1

Nanoha and the rest of the leaders were in the meeting room at the top of Nanoha’s skyscraper when Rev’s message came through. “…No…” Empress Twilight said, grimacing. “Something’s got her…”

Minna swallowed hard. “I see violence… Fire…”

An aide ran into the room. “We’ve defused a bomb in the basement! Someone was trying to destroy this building!”

“Who put it there?!”

“We don’t know, the bomb was just barely discovered!“

Everyone started talking all at once in frantic shouts mixed with more than a few obscene gestures. They were all silenced when Rev’s second message came through on Roland’s authorization. “STOP FIGHTING NOW! I WAS BEING CONTROLLED BY A FLOWER, EVERYTHING I SAID WAS A LIE! STOP!”

“That’s not enough…” an Aradia said, shaking her head. “It’s already started…”

Nanoha whirled around, fire in her eyes. “O’Neill, the Austraeoh is equipped with large-scale crowd control protocols.”

O’Neill nodded. “Yes ma’am. It is against policy to use them on our own people. Even on an enemy, it is not a step taken lightly. The approval…”

“How long do we have until English arrives?” Nanoha asked.

|> Forty-three minutes and seven seconds.

Nanoha pointed Raising Heart at O’Neill. “Stop this rebellion at all costs. I don’t care how many regulatory security barriers you have to illegally bypass.”

“We’ll be brainwashing our people,” O’Neill said.

“I know. And I want everyone to know this order comes from me and me alone. If anyone is to be judged for this, it is me. Do not voice your support for it – it is an order and you had to follow it.”

Minna looked at her with fearful eyes. “…You’re going to destroy yourself…”

“Yes,” Nanoha said, tightening her grip on Raising Heart. “I’m aware. But we don’t have time.”

|> If we take an action this questionable the plan could be in jeopardy. We no longer have the pure track record.

“And if we let them run rampant we lose our support,” Nanoha said. “No more discussion. Nala, I know you’ve just deduced what my plan is, don’t tell anyone.” She pointed at O’Neill. “Go. Now. Fix this.”

“Yes ma’am.” O’Neill said. He and Minna teleported to the Austraeoh a fair ways above the City. All of the ship’s spectral rods began to charge. The people in the City saw this and decided it couldn’t be good, though only a few knew what it was actually doing. Some of the surface-to-air weapons stations began to turn toward O’Neill.

“Nala, lock down all the weapons.”

|> Done wherever possible. Many were overridden.

Lances designed to melt through impervious alloys struck at the Austraeoh’s shields, battering the feat of Merodi engineering with defenses that had been designed to face Lord English. The immense shields of the ship held – but they wouldn’t for long.

The rest of the fleet charged weapons, preparing to fire upon the city.

“DO NOT FIRE!” Nanoha shouted. “WE ARE NOT GOING TO ATTACK OUR OWN!”

A few bullets went off – but most of the ships obeyed Nanoha’s order. It quickly became clear that a handful of them were not under the control of loyal individuals. These quickly turned their guns on the Austraeoh.

The loyal ships arranged themselves like a wall, physically surrounding the Austraeoh and protecting it from damage. Chief among these was the Emperor of Mankind’s personal warship, its physical armor so bulky it just took the damage.

Not all ships fared as well. Many exploded, sending toxic rain down on the City below. Many places that had been unharmed by the mobs were suddenly covered in rubble and on fire. Immense trails of smoke began to rise into the air, darkening the already eerie twilight.

Someone – they never found out who – managed to complete a Kamikaze run on the Austraeoh, flying straight through the wall of other ships and impacting the flagship’s shields at relativistic velocity. The shields fell, allowing the explosive debris of the ship to impact the Austraeoh directly. One of the flagship’s many volatile drives was hit, specifically one where the safety protocols hadn’t been updated to the physics of the New World. The back half of the Austraeoh went up in pink-blue flames.

But the spectral rod still had enough power to fire.

A blue pulse of energy launched from the crumbling Austraeoh, hitting the base of the Dark Tower. The magic expanded into a swirling dome of mental magic power, quickly covering the entire City, including the air above it. Sure, there were many beings who were immune to such conditioning – but the vast majority of citizens were still just regular people. In an instant, all their impulses to attack, to fight, to run were just removed and they felt slightly empty inside. The will to fight was sapped out of them.

Policing forces could take care of the violent ones who remained.

But the damage was done. There were steaming craters where buildings had once stood. The great flagship of Merodi Universalis was slowly descending to the roses below, no longer suitable for flight or combat, the back half of it completely destroyed. Fires raged in several different districts, and the outer wall had a few holes in it.

The defenses had been scrambled. The City was vulnerable.

O’Neill and Minna sent out a report – they would be staying on the Austraeoh to help with the massive loss of life on the ship.

Nanoha let out a sigh. “I’m going to the wall. Nala, prepare to execute the plan as best you can.”

|> Contacting everyone needed…

Nanoha took in a deep breath. “Make it very public knowledge what I’ve done. It’d help if some of you expressed dissatisfaction with the way I handled myself.” Nanoha looked out the window at the sky. “It’s best that way.”

She teleported away, appearing on top of the City Wall Lord English was approaching. By luck, this area of the wall hadn’t seen any damage from the battle in the sky. She had no doubt Lord English would gladly march right into the best defended area…

Monika appeared next to her. “You’ll be joining us then?”

Nanoha nodded.

“Good luck.”

“We all need luck,” Nanoha breathed.

Renee was suddenly next to them, chuckling. “You haven’t the foggiest idea how luck actually factors into this, do you?”

Nanoha ignored her.

~~~

With every step Lord English took, the ground shuddered. He moved with more weight behind his limb than an anvil dropped from a farmhouse roof, embedding deep tracks in the ground regardless of its composition. He did not slow in mud, sand, rock, metal, or more exotic ground. It was always methodical, slow, and deliberate.

The mechanical motions were easily more terrifying than a lightning-quick opponent. He gave them time to think – think about how much suffering they were about to endure. It would be brutal, it would be devastating, and it would be agonizingly slow.

He would give them every chance to stop him. And he would prove he could take them, even at their best. The smoke he saw rising in the distance gave him mild pause – what could possibly have attacked them? Should he slow down, just to give them time to recover?

No… The area he was approaching was untouched by the devastation. They wouldn’t be putting much stock in their military organization anyway since they knew it wouldn’t work. He could make his point the same this way. It was a negligible risk.

He took another step forward, his red Cairo Overcoat billowing in the wind. This was the moment he entered the range of the City Wall’s turrets. The weapons themselves were cube-shaped, their main body split up into eight sections. On the forward face four barrels large enough to be sewage main pipes glowed a soft red that quickly heated up to blinding white the moment English came into view. Each barrel fired four shots a second, the projectiles themselves composed of a mixture of solid tungsten rods, white burning plasma, and burning death enchantments.

English took the hits. He could not keep up his mechanical pace with bullets almost larger than him tearing his body apart, but he did not stop moving forward. Even with the very ground beneath his feet giving out and shattering with every shot, he moved on.

Other turrets locked on to him and fired. Most were of the same basic design of the first turret, but a couple were outfitted with more exotic and experimental weaponry. There was a yellow ring beam designed to keep him from moving – it didn’t. There was a wild burst of electricity that was designed to disassemble his molecules – that turned out to be completely temporary.

All of these attacks were enough to keep English from progressing forward. With a grunt, he held out the Black Thirteen staff and attacked. There were no bullets, no flashes of light, no sign anything had happened beyond an increase in activity within Black Thirteen’s dark orb. The multicolored spirographs within turned faster and faster, until the critical systems of all the turrets attacking English experienced random debilitating failures at the same time. They powered down, sending messages demanding maintenance.

English continued his walk. Occasionally one of the turrets would re-arm itself and make another attempt, but he would fire a beam of energy from his mouth to completely disable it.

He was allowed to make it all the way to the Wall. He pulled back a fist, preparing to be jumped by all the forces the City had at its disposal.

The single punch was enough to completely destroy not only the wall, but two blocks of buildings behind the wall – including the area where most of the standard army had been waiting.

As hefty a loss as that was, it did not stop the counterattack. Every ship in the fleet appeared in a domed-circle formation around English and unleashed their entire arsenal, backed up by the long-range weapons and spells offered by every race English could have ever imagined, and then some.

It was more than enough to kill him several times over. But he rose again, and again, and again.

The ships knew this – they refused to stop their attack. If it was possible to keep him stuck in a permanent cycle of death and rebirth, they would take it.

“HONK!”

He unleashed the sound that had heralded the end of many universes. As the last being with any true eldritch power within him, reality around him bent and twisted into impossible shapes. People grabbed their heads in agony as the shouts of Black Thirteen and the Crimson King’s power were inserted into their minds. Structures collapsed as their supports became like jelly, while others were folded into other dimensions that had not existed prior to that moment. Ships fell out of the sky like meteors, smashing into the ground like dollops of pudding.

Many of those fighting had seen things like this before. Seen the unbelievable mind-bending powers of those who could manipulate reality with ease.

There was only one difference this time.

They didn’t have any reality manipulation of their own to fight back.

They were helpless as English reduced an entire square mile of the City into mush. Most of the ships in the Fleet were disabled if not outright destroyed. The army was ineffectual to the point of being laughable.

Lord English took a step.

This prompted several thousand Aradias to appear around him. Among their ranks were a roughly equal number of Chaos daemons that had managed to survive the transition to the New World. Leading the charge of these two armies were the Emperor of Mankind in all his glory and Tzeentch.

Everything attacked at once. The daemons, while completely adjusted to the physics of the New World, were more than able to deal with being converted back into eldritch form through attacks from English.The Aradias were able to counteract English’s own power as the Lord of Time, allowing the daemons to move in.

Tzeentch appeared behind Lord English, laying his hands on Black Thirteen. “I’ll just take this!”

Lord English shoved all the knowledge he could into Tzeentch’s mind. Tzeentch had not been to the room at the top of the Tower, so he could not handle it. He screamed – but he held fast to the black artifact. He wasn’t about to let something as petty as pure undiluted madness stop him from doing something!

The Emperor of Man rammed a powerful, holy blade into English’s chest. He himself shimmered with a bright Divine power, awakened through English’s own nature. “Problem?”

“NO.” English said. He tapped into his strength and pulled his arms to his chest, the motion throwing the Emperor and Tzeentch to the side. He grabbed hold of Black Thirteen again and pointed it at the Emperor.

Before everyone’s eyes, he decayed into a skeleton. He didn’t die – Death was around somewhere, not that English cared – but the Emperor was out.

However, the Emperor still spoke. He had never removed that text-to-speech device.

“LOOK UP.”

English looked up just in time to see the Emperor’s personal ship fall from the sky onto the cherub’s face. He was able to withstand the crushing impact, lifting the miniature city and throwing it into an undisturbed section of the actual City’s wall. The explosion was bright enough to be seen from under the cloud layer of a nearby gas giant. Many were blinded or vaporized simply from proximity to the blast.

English stabbed his claw behind himself, taking Tzeentch out of the picture before he could try something else.

While he was retracting his arm, Roland of Gilead went through the Gunslinger’s creed in his mind in an instant too fast for most people to register. I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. He held the point between English’s two seizure-inducing eyes carefully in his gaze. I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand had forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. He shot from instinct, naturally pushing all his power as the hero into the single, seemingly-normal bullet. A bullet infused with so much importance it was ready to kill anything. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I KILL WITH MY HEART.

The bullet sailed true. It touched English’s forehead, breaking the skin…

Lord English’s hand was already there. He caught the bullet.

Roland didn’t stop shooting – and his companions joined the effort. Spades and Caliborn launched a seemingly endless spray of golden bullets from guns Lord English himself had created and designed.

Up until about one second ago, Caliborn had been considering betraying everyone. It would have been nice to team up with his future self and lay waste to the world.

But, as stupid as the young cherub was, he knew how to read his own expression. Even if it was on an insanely ripped skull monster version of himself, he recognized the particular brand of hatred in the ever-changing eyes.

Lord English saw no use for Caliborn.

Caliborn roared. “FUCK YOU, I’M THE BEST ANYWAY! I HAVE ALL THESE BITCHES EATING OUT OF MY HA-”

Lord English was already behind Caliborn, a fist embedded through the young Lord of Time’s chest. “YOU ARE A FOOL AND AN EMBARRASSMENT.”

Spades hit Lord English over the head with the scepter form of his weapon. “Hey! Remember me!?”

“YES.”With a dismissive wave of his hand, he tossed both Spades and Roland far away. Then he cut them both in half for good measure.

Mlinx drove a spear into Lord English’s back. Somehow, he had missed the pink demon. Somehow still insignificant, yet so important… The contradiction angered English. He whirled around.

“Death punch,” Saitama deadpanned.

Lord English thought he knew what agony was.

He discovered that moment that he knew nothing of true agony.

The One Punch hit English with the force of several Big Bangs all forced in one direction. Everything behind Saitama suffered nothing more than a light gust of wind while English – and everything behind him – faced the fires of creation. The One Punch would go on to travel the New World and vaporize every planet it came across with ease.

English’s body was stuck in a perpetual pattern of rebirth and death just within the force of the single punch.

“Death punch,” Saitama said again, increasing the energy tearing away at Lord English.

Could he reach the maximum energy density?

It was certainly possible. Lord English couldn’t risk that. But he knew this trick from before – he could try to take Saitama’s ‘win’ away, but Monika would just give it back to him. So… he asked Black Thirteen where she was.

As it turned out, she was several miles away, deep beneath the ground. That would have kept him from her under normal circumstances, but she had a fire of ka within her so powerful that he could connect directly with the power of Black Thirteen.

With a sharp motion, she felt herself become a completely normal human girl.

Saitama was next. He lost the power of the punch and Monika’s conditioning. He was suddenly just an ordinary man – nothing more than a ragdoll.

“STARLIGHT BREAKER!”

Lord English’s still-regenerating form moved to defend against the attack – but he failed to realize that was exactly what Nanoha wanted him to do. While he moved, she canceled the spell and grabbed hold of Black Thirteen.

Instantly, Black Thirteen transformed its surrounding weapon shape to be identical to the design of Raising Heart, giving Nanoha dual lance devices. One white, one black.

Lord English roared in rage. He was already behind Nanoha.

Then Nanoha was already behind him, jabbing Black Thirteen into his back. “You won’t be doing that anymore. Fate’s Dawn.” Black Thirteen and Raising Heart activated at the same time, blasting Lord English with a zebra-like attack. He fell back, screeching.

“Lord English, I’m going to be your end,” Nanoha said, pointing both devices at him. “I was there when you first rampaged. I saw you kill my best friend, Hayate. I watched you destroy so, so much. I helped decide the fate of the House Juju with the other Seats. And I have built this City in order to destroy you.” She smiled mischievously. “And now I have crossed a line they will not let stand. I’m set up to go out with a bang.”

Lord English saw what she was doing. He had already lost his ability to manipulate ka through Nanoha’s use of Black Thirteen, so he fell back on the Crimson King’s eldritch tentacles to attack Nanoha. He found that these were blocked by Arceus and… Saxton Hale. Somehow. The remaining Aradias filed into formation behind him, along with a previously unused Sparkle Census army.

“Not even going to charge my attack,” Nanoha said, raising her devices up. “Absolute Starlight Breaker.”

Lord English twisted into a truly eldritch form, though instead of the Crimson King’s sharp eye, his essence was that of a spirograph that couldn’t decide on a single color. It charged Nanoha at full speed.

“Nope!” Hale said, readying a punch.

“You have no quarter here!” Arceus shouted.

“FOR EXISTENCE!” the Sparkles shouted, using their magic to pull on English as hard as they could.

Nanoha’s attack launched. The power of Black Thirteen was impossible to look at – tearing through reality like it was nothing. Everyone’s vision became static. All sensation was garbled.

But, eventually, reality returned. The dust cleared. Arceus and Hale lay on the ground, distorted by Nanoha’s attack. Many Sparkles and Aradias had fallen – most of whom were not protected by Death. He could only keep so many.

English…

Was perfectly fine. His hand was shoved through Nanoha’s chest from behind. He had removed her still-beating heart and held it within his claws.

Nanoha stared at the representation of her own life. She had made a miscalculation. She had unleashed an attack at English… in only the standard three dimensions. He’d folded himself into an eldritch plane and appeared behind her. With Black Thirteen, she could have stopped him. She could have taken him and driven him all the way to the Dark Tower.

But she’d made a mistake.

With his free hand, Lord English took Black Thirteen back. He gently set Nanoha on the ground, allowing her to hold her own heart in her hands.

He took no small amount of pleasure from the tears that began to roll down her face. She knew she needed to keel over, to pass out – but she couldn’t. She couldn’t. Lord English wasn’t letting her have respite.

“WISH ALL YOU WANT, YOU WILL NOT DIE HERE. EVEN IF YOUR SKELETON RELEASES YOU. YOU WILL NOT GO OUT WITH A ‘BANG’. YOU WILL WHIMPER FOR ETERNITY.”

Nanoha let out a despondent wail – looking like a young, lost child in a world too big for her. She could only hold her own heart and suffer.

Lord English turned and walked away.

The City had failed to stop him.

~~~

Rev downed another magic-restoration nut-bar and continued across the crater of devastation the battle against English had created. Bodies were everywhere – a large number were Aradias and Sparkles, so far distorted or dead that she could not help them.

At least it was better than the edge of the crater, where the bodies of those fighting were mixed with those of civilians. Even several miles away hadn’t been enough…

She looked into the sky. Despite the smoke in the sky, she could still see the light from one of the planets Saitama’s punch had destroyed. She had thought things would feel better if the twilight of the City gave way to something bright, but the red light only filled her with dread.

The priest shook her head – don’t get distracted. She ran to a form of one of the heroes. Arceus. Damaged beyond recognition, but with a soul clinging fast because it wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. Death’s really outdoing himself… She pressed her horn to Arceus’ face, filling him with the healing magics she knew so well. His limbs reformed and the fire returned to his eyes.

“…We lost,” he said, standing up shakily. When Rev moved to ease the leftover pain, he shook his head. “Nanoha needs you more than I. Go.”

Rev did not see Nanoha until Arceus gestured toward her. The sight reminded Rev of some things she had seen in demonic religious cults. There was a hole in her chest that had already bled dry, coloring the dress of the White Devil a deep, horrid crimson. Her body was empty, and her skin an unnatural color, making it look like something from beyond the grave was clutching to the beating heart. Rev didn’t know how it was still beating – there was no blood – but beat it did, it being the only brightly colored thing still on Nanoha.

Her face was distorted in agony. All the water in her body was gone, so she could no longer cry.

Rev knew without a doubt that this was one of those curses. Had this taken place in the old multiverse, Nanoha would have been stuck like this for eternity.

Rev thanked God the New World didn’t allow them anymore. She trotted up to Nanoha and laid a healing hoof on the woman. Her heart shot back into her body and the chest cavity healed over. The color returned to her skin, eyes, and hair. Raising Sights lifted itself off the ground and placed itself in her hand.

The first thing Nanoha did now that she had control over herself again was fall to her knees. She clutched her chest with her free hand. “Wh… wh… wh…”

Rev put a hoof on her shoulder. “It’s gone. His curse can’t hurt you anymore.”

Nanoha looked to Rev like a scared child. “…He could make a new one. If he gets to the Tower… He could… do that to everyone…”

Rev lowered her head. “…We’ve got to try something else.”

“That was it,” Nanoha said, her eyes slowly losing focus on Rev. “Fleet’s gone, army’s gone, defenses are gone, and…” She looked at her trembling hands. “We… we can’t fight anymore.”

Rev sighed. “You have backups…?”

Nanoha heard screams and explosions in the distance. “…That would be those failing. This was our best shot…”

“There has to be something…” Rev said, biting her lip.

“Don’t… blame yourself. You didn’t make a mistake. You were controlled.” Nanoha looked at her hands. “I had him. I had him. I...” She started crying again.

Rev gulped. If the great Nanoha Takamachi was crying out of fear…

“Do I really have to come out here and tell you it isn’t over yet?”

Nanoha, Rev, and everyone else who had some consciousness about them looked up to see none other than Renee herself striding toward them, somehow not bloodied at all from any of the carnage she was walking through.

“…Why have you come to mock us?” Nanoha asked.

Renee ignored her. “It’s not over ‘til it’s over, people. Lord English hasn’t entered me yet; you’ve still got plenty of time to stop him. So what, your first plan didn’t work. If you know me, you should have expected this. And all those backups you had? Technically part of the first plan. So the chips are down and it looks like you’re up shit creek without a paddle.” She smirked. “Which means it’s time for you to give it another shot.”

“I can’t fight,” Nanoha said, gulping.

“…Are we sure the answer is fighting?” Rev asked. “I mean…”

Renee shrugged. “I won’t say. What I can say is that there are other heroes whose haven’t taken their swing at things.” She looked to the sky. “Who knows when one of them might arrive?”

Nanoha blinked. “I… Right.” She shakily took her phone out and called Death. “Death…? You should release some of those who are healed and… not able to fight. We… should be prepared for others. Keep close watch. Report everything to… to…” She gulped. “…O’Neill and Minna. They should be… fine. Thank you.” She hung up.

“Good call,” Renee said with a smirk. “Now come on, we should go watch the show.”

Nanoha shook her head. “I really sh-”

Renee levitated Nanoha onto her back. “And every Tower cultist everywhere screamed as their dreams were crushed.” She rushed off in a gallop after Lord English. “TO THE SHOW!”

~~~

I knew as soon as we entered the city.

I saw all the plotlines. All of them that had been hidden up to that moment – but right then, every last one was open to my perceptions. Eve and Corona… the Sweeties… the fleet… the City…

The only thing I couldn’t see was how this would end.

I really didn’t know.

But I could try to make it turn out one way.

“Holy skewered balls…” Mattie said, eyes wide. “What happened down there?”

“Lord English,” I said, stopping our flight through the air with my telekinesis. I took out my notebook and started scribbling. “Their plan didn’t work. We’re up next.”

Nettle looked at the supertask device on her arm. “…He won’t let us get close enough.”

“I’ve got a plan for that,” I said, continuing to scribble. “Daniel, you’ll find that what you need to do is down in that district. You will be injured down there, but don’t worry, you will be taken care of. Sunny, I need you to go with him so you don’t die a Redshirt.”

Sunny blinked. “Okay. …I seem to be told to leave a lot.”

“I’m sorry, it’s the role you have. Mattie, Everykid, Nettle, you’re with me. We’re going to face English together.”

The Everykid blinked. Then she cycled a finger around her ear.

“Yes, I’m crazy, but they’re already desperate, and we’re going to be the Deus Ex Machina. Death should be able to recognize the four of us as important and save us thanks to the Emissary and Nanoha. We won’t have much in the way of backup.”

“Just four people against the strongest thing to ever exist?” Mattie shouted with a laugh. “I’ve heard of keeping the ratio as even as possible but this is just ridiculous.”

“Exactly.” I smirked. “It’s so crazy it just might work.”

“…Dammit. Well, I haven’t felt English ram his fist inside me before, so this might at least be an interesting experience.”

The Everykid let out a deep breath, put on the green-visor sporting time hat, and nodded in agreement.

“Nettle, you are key to this,” I said, turning to her. “I can’t understate how important you are to this plan. Do you understand?”

Nettle nodded. “I… Just need to get him trapped in the supertask. Keep him still for two seconds and… done. I just… I don’t know how…”

“That’s working in our favor, remember?”

Nettle gulped. “…Right.”

“Right. So let’s do this.” I flew forward, taking the Everykid, Mattie, and Nettle with me. We flew high over the sky of the burning City below.

I refused to let myself look at that. I needed to look at what was important in the eyes of ka. If I didn’t, I would make a mistake, and everything would fall apart. I had to distance myself so I could manage everything.

I felt the contract on my soul lighten when Death found us. It was something, at least.

“Everykid, you’re first. Be unexpected,” I said. “Mattie, back her up.”

The two nodded. The Everykid dropped from the sky and focused all her mind into her parasol. She shot right at Lord English from above – activating her time hat at the last minute to royally confuse English’s attempts at defense. She got a solid hit on his head with her parasol.

He looked at her in annoyance and punched – but she was suddenly on top of his fist, blowing him a kiss. A potion appeared in her hand and she threw it into his face, where it exploded.

No damage.

And he was already behind Mattie.

“Balls, usually takes them a bit longer to figure out I’m editin’ stuff…” He punched at her – but she was just gone, suddenly a fair ways away sitting at a sewing machine table that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Ah, hello darling, allow me to steal a line from my counterpart for a moment. Wanna buy a dress?”

English let out his brutal roar of corruption. Everykid and Mattie vanished for the entire duration of the noise, appearing back only after the attack had abated. “Hey, kid, I bet he finds that annoying, what do you think?”

“Mhm!” the Everykid responded with a nod.

English punched Mattie, but she twisted overtop of his arm. English stomped in her direction, but she was behind him. English let out a beam that destroyed several buildings, but Mattie counterattacked with her dual pain whips. English pointed Black Thirteen at her – except it was the Everykid instead, who had no meta abilities to remove.

English narrowed his eyes.

“What?” Mattie said, smirking. “You weren’t prepared for the Queen of Montages? Too unusual of an ability for you? Darling we haven’t even started.”

English was in a junkyard and Mattie was dropping a car on him. English was in a spa and Mattie was ripping all his nails out. English was in a dressing room, forced into a dress Mattie had made that was way too small. English was in Mattie’s personal dungeon, facing the might of repeated whips.

English activated Black Thirteen fully, shattering the comic montage and returning all of them to the City.

“Right. In that c-” English rammed his claws through Mattie’s side and threw her to the side, spraying blood everywhere.

Mattie coughed. “Well, painful, I’ll admit, but not all that unique… six out of ten, not worth it.” She tried to edit herself into a standing up position but found that didn’t work. “Balls, there goes my viability.”

“That was more than enough,” I said, teleporting White Nettle onto the back of Lord English’s head. With a half-panicked shriek, she rammed the supertask gauntlet into English’s back.

But he was already away from her. The maximized explosion ended in two seconds, destroying absolutely nothing. He shot her with a beam of energy, but I deflected it with my magic.

He went after me next. He didn’t waste any time – he took out Black Thirteen and pointed the scepter at me. I retaliated with a beam of intense energy… and he took away Twilence’s power. She had thought she would be able to work through the sudden loss of her sight and Awareness, but it had become such an integral part of her that she staggered when it was gone.

No more a Prophet, no more Aware, no more the Muse of Ka. She couldn’t even remember what her story had been about… She’d written something! This wasn’t it, she was sure of it, but she had taken it as a possibility this would happen. What coul-

English launched a burst of energy from his throat right at Twilence. She had nowhere near enough awareness to dodge – barely able to send off a few magic bolts before taking the brunt of the attack on her body. She went flying back, eyes rolling into the back of her skull.

“TWILENCE!” Nettle yelled, standing back up. She raised the gauntlet again. All I have to do is… is… She faltered, receding from the monstrous form of Lord English. Fear took over, replacing all thoughts. She lost control of her eyes, bladder, voice, and legs all at once. She crumpled to the ground.

Lord English pointed a finger at her, planning a special heart-shot just for her. He fired.

The Everykid caught it with her body. She lit on fire and fell down at Nettle’s side, unmoving.

Nettle wasn’t aware enough to even think that the Everykid’s soul was protected. Her emotional state simply went from ‘afraid’ to ‘enraged’ in an instant. The bow made of her papery tendrils unfolded into their full form, glowing with a cosmic white power that went for miles.

And this had been Twilence’s plan all along: to awaken the Downstreamer.

This worked like a charm. She wrapped the tendrils around Lord English, and to his surprise he found he couldn’t break them. With a roar, Nettle pulled her body forward and rammed the supertask gauntlet through his skull. Pool balls and eldritch waves rippled out of Lord English, trying to get her off – but she wasn’t going anywhere.

She only needed two seconds to end him permanently with the supertask.

The explosions began. First, a single second incinerated him completely, then half a second, then a fourth, and so on until it became too fast to discern what was happening. There was nothing but light enveloping the form of Lord English.

Nettle knew something was wrong when two seconds had passed and the explosions were still happening. It took her a whole second to realize Lord English was slowing the supertask gauntlet’s perception of time. The explosions slowed enough for English to twist his head sharply and tear White Nettle’s arm off, severing the supertask gauntlet from her possession.

He put it in his mouth and destroyed it with one bite.

White Nettle looked at the bloody stump that was her arm. She screamed in panic – but then her arm was suddenly healed. No gauntlet, but no pain either.

“That’s right… I’m a Downstreamer…” She looked back up at Lord English. “I’m the Downstreamer!”

English punched forward. White Nettle snapped her fingers and made him trip. He stood back up and enveloped her body in a beam of energy – but nothing happened.

He decided he was done with this. He pointed Black Thirteen at her and asked it to incapacitate her, no questions asked.

She didn’t budge. She sneered at him – and pointed at one of her tendrils that had extended itself all the way to the Dark Tower. “My ancient Dark artifact is better.”

“IT WILL NOT BOW TO YOU.”

Nettle narrowed her eyes. She didn’t need it to bow to her – just offer some aid. She tapped into the Tower – and saw. She could see the wavefunction equations of every single particle within Lord English’s body… every last result with absolute certainty. She pointed a finger at him and slowly but surely began burning him away one particle at a time.

But his Unconditional Immortality would not let him die. She could not destroy all the parts of him that demanded it be true. It was a rule of the Tower, and she could not override it with her current level of connection.

She growled. “Fine then…” She used her loose tendrils to push Lord English back and she proceeded to look around for something else…

Her ritual. She could use that. Twilence was here… Monika was here… Arceus was here… John didn’t exist though – but Lord English himself could probably take the place of that aspect of the prophecy. All she needed now was…

…the Prophet. Who was dead.

“Dammit, where am I going to find a substitute for him…” Nettle muttered. “It failed last time because he wasn’t legitimate…” She shook her head. “Doesn’t have to be perfect, I just need to get control of a small part. Just enough to remove him…” She used her tendrils to grab Twilence, Monika, and Arceus. She created a spirograph construct around her, circling herself with their three essences. She pulled on Lord English, using his essence to tap into the Tower.

And she found it. A switch she could flip a-

Black Thirteen embedded itself in her chest and sucked the information out of her mind.

She looked to Lord English – he had found out how to escape from her tendril’s grasp. He grabbed all of them in his free hand and threw her to the ground with them. Had she been a real Downstreamer, this would have done nothing.

But she was just a woman who had awakened part of what she once was. The pain was real, too real for her to overcome. She crumpled to the ground, screaming.

Lord English stomped her flat just to make sure.

For the first time since he’d begun his attack, he let out a sigh of relief. That had actually been close.

But Nettle was out of the picture now. He could continue his march.

~~~

Daniel sat in a bed situated near a window in one of the buildings that were still standing. He heard all the reality-warping sounds stop – but he still felt the thud thud of English’s footsteps.

They didn’t win.

He let out a sigh and lay down in the bed. The fight out there wasn’t his. But if that wasn’t what he was here for…

What was the purpose? Twilence had told him it would be here… But all he’d found here was a bed and a place to hide out while the City crumbled. Sunny had set up a perimeter around the place and was doing what she could to help nearby relief efforts while never leaving Daniel’s proximity for long.

There was something he needed to do… It was so close…

What was it?

“Come on…” he mumbled. “I just need to get this over with…” He sighed. “There’s no way this is worth it…” He coughed – once again feeling like his heart should just give out from the strain. But it kept beating, but only barely.

“Not worth it, love?”

Daniel’s heart skipped a beat. He slowly looked up to see… her. A beautiful white coat, fashionable hat with a simple bow, and a sparkling blue eye. Her artificial one was broken, but he didn’t care.

“Renee… You’re…”

“Daniel, love… I’m gone,” Renee said with a sad smile. “I wouldn’t want you to get your hopes up after waiting so long.”

“Then… how?”

“…Does it matter how? I’m here now.” She walked up to him and put his old, tired face in her hoof. “Here for you.”

“Why…?”

“…I felt shunned,” Renee said, looking into the distance. “It wasn’t about which side was better. It was about who could support me. You… you were sick. You couldn’t.” She smiled warmly. “But that’s in the past. You’re back.”

Daniel choked. “I… I don’t belong here…”

“You… are right,” Renee admitted. “But was all the pain worth it?”

He looked at her – and smiled. “You would be worth all the pain I’ve ever had, and then some.”

Renee giggled. “Oh, love… I’m not worth that much.”

“To me you are.”

She shook her head and sighed. “…I’m sorry, I was weak.”

“And I was angry. We both made mistakes…”

“Yes… We made a lot.” She looked deep into his eyes, tears beginning to form in her cheeks. “But now… Now…”

“It doesn’t matter, like you said. It’s just now.”

She let out a sad chuckle. “Yes. It’s just now.” Her smile vanished. “…I’m waiting, you know.”

He nodded slowly, saying nothing.

“You’re so tired… I… I shouldn’t have…”

“Yes, you should have. I understand.” He grabbed her face. “And I know what comes next.”

She breathed in – and kissed him.

He went limp in her hooves. Gently, she used her magic to lay him back down on the bed. She pulled the sheets over him.

There was a peaceful, content smile on his face. And there it would remain.

Renee turned around and left the room, meeting up with the people in the hall who had been listening to the whole thing: Nanoha, Rev, Roland, Jenny, Twilence, Nettle, Mattie, the Everykid, and Sunny.

“…What was that?” Nanoha asked, voice trembling.

“I’m not a completely heartless bitch,” Renee said wiping the last tears from her face. “…Stories need closure just as much as they need conflict.”

“But you lied to him.”

“He didn’t care. He got to see her again. I just did what she would have done… and gave him his ending.” She looked Nanoha in the eyes. “I can’t know if there’s truly something beyond or not. For all I know, she really is waiting.”

“…You don’t know?” Jenny asked.

“How could I?” Renee asked. “My domain is what I am a part of. If there’s more… I’m not a part of it.” She shook her head. “There’s more to everything than conflict, tragedy, and amusement at the plights of others.” She looked back at Daniel. “I also appreciate beauty, closure, and peace.”

Twilence looked at her. “You still chose to give it to him and not others.”

Renee smirked sadly. “Yes. I did. I still use her mannerisms and her elegance… I inherited her connections as well. He deserved better than rotting away in a bed with no one around. So I got him here. You can wail and complain all you want about all the others I’ve killed, and you’d be completely in the right. Short-sighted, but right.” She paused. “Come on, I want to show you all something.”

She teleported them into an area of the City that had experienced extreme carnage. Bodies were littered everywhere, buildings had been reduced to rubble, and many people were screaming in agony from wounds that wouldn’t kill them. Couldn’t kill them.

Rev automatically moved to start healing those screaming, but Renee held up a hoof to stop her. “Watch.”

She did. And, slowly but surely, she saw them. People who were hurt moving through the rubble, using whatever strength they had to dig up those who couldn’t help themselves. They had no special magic, no power whatsoever, and they were still doing everything they could to help.

“That guy in the robes there was a militant Tower cultist just half an hour ago,” Renee said. “The person he’s helping is an anarchist. In a minute, they will be pulling one of Starbeat’s loyalists out. And over there is Caliborn, a being everyone here will recognize as Lord English. And yet, look what’s happening.”

Several humans and ponies were bandaging up Caliborn and giving him potions. He took all these things with a confused, distant expression on his face.

Roland narrowed his eyes. “This doesn’t forgive everything.”

Renee chuckled. “No, it wouldn’t. But I wanted to remind you, I’m not evil. I’m just the architect of everything you see. I’m sadistic, cruel, and amused by the plights of others, yes. But I also am the source of all beautiful relationships, closure, and random acts of kindness.” She turned to look at all of them closely. “…I appreciate the impossible. The outlandish. The kinds of things that defy the odds. The incredible. Good, bad, some undefined mixture of the two, it doesn’t matter. I can’t think of a better description of myself than this place right here.”

Twilence moved to the front of the group, looking Renee in the eyes. “…We can’t judge you.”

“But you have,” Renee said. “Or, you could say I have. Set up a little war based on my own criteria to see what happened.” She gestured to the sky, showing them the many planets swirling in the red glow of Saitama’s explosion. “This is what happened. You were all a bunch of absolute morons along the way here. But you were my morons.” She pointed at herself. “What you see is what you get.”

Twilence shuffled her hooves, unsure of what to say.

“Oh, look at you… You have what you wanted, and now you’re lost.”

“…I still feel… free.”

“You aren’t. But if you win, you might be.”

Twilence smiled softly. “I caught that ‘if’. I, for one, fail to see how you could call it satisfying to have Lord English win.”

Renee waved her hoof back and forth indecisively. She turned to Nanoha. “Why are you so scared of me showing more than the sadistic brute side of myself?”

Nanoha didn’t respond.

“I am a complex being with many different sides, High Sovereign. I decidedly enjoyed watching Lord English torment you, making you wish for death. I enjoy your broken, resurfacing childish exterior. I also enjoyed it when you triumphed over your enemies and found happiness with family.”

Nanoha flinched.

“You fear me because you don’t want to think it’s possible. That everything comes from the same source.” She shrugged. “It’s true darling, just deal with it.”

“…So, what now?” Twilence asked.

“She won’t tell you,” Jenny muttered.

Renee rolled her eyes. “You’ve got another shot coming up.” She pulled out her phone and handed it to Twilence. “You know what to do.”

Twilence looked at the phone and nodded. She dialed and put it to her ear. “Hey. Just the seven of them. That’s it. That’s your best shot.” She hung up.

Renee nodded. “I kept the nearby observatory untouched. Let’s go watch in unfiltered HD action!”

~~~

Lord English stepped through the inner city limits and into what remained of the Field of Can’-Ka No Rey. The roses scraped his feet with their perfect tips, their color not altered in the slightest by the ominous lighting. With every step, pain shot into English’s feet.

But he saw the door of the Dark Tower before him. With Black Thirteen, it was guaranteed to open to his will. It was only a few minutes of walking away.

He considered running or teleporting, but he knew that would end the streak he had going. He couldn’t risk it. Not when he was this close.

He was under no illusions that he had won. There would no doubt be another hurdle he had to face.

But, for the next little while, he marched completely unimpeded. They had lost all will to fight him, instead rushing to help each other. Pathetic. Most of the City was unharmed by his straight rampage, and they weren’t even doing anything! They admitted defeat too easily. They should have fought to the very last man.

When he was in control that was how things would always be. To the last breath, no matter what.

He sensed a carrier ship coming up from behind him. He knew exactly who was in it via Black Thirteen. He let them pass overhead without so much as a pity glance.

They teleported seven people down. Exactly seven – no more, no less. They would be the last line of defense between him and complete victory.

Pidge. Jotaro. Flutterfree. Vriska. Pinkie. Corona. Eve.

“PROTAGONISTS.” He said. He stopped walking forward and took them in.

There was the insignificant Pidge, essentially there for no purpose other than to fill a slot. She was of no concern, but she could serve as a judge of the overall team morale. Jotaro, the big guy, usually the one who did the fighting for the Primary Team, but here he was actually one of the weak ones – though the Passion could have some interesting side effects if English wasn’t careful. Flutterfree was in nearly the same boat – she had been able to harm English before with the Rage, but he would no longer be susceptible to something so simple. Revelation would be pointless at this stage.

Vriska… The bitch that sealed him in the House Juju in the first place… He would experience great pleasure tearing her apart limb from limb. Her luck would run out eventually, and she couldn’t take it from him. That infinite-sided die was the only thing she had even remotely dangerous to him. It had already failed to work on him once.

Pinkie, the Aware. He’d fought her before, and she’d lasted the longest out of all of them. But, in the end, she wasn’t actually powerful – just slippery, like that white unicorn earlier. He could take her ka-based powers away in an instant.

Corona and Eve, two sides of the same coin, the patrons of both sides. Fire, empathy, eternity, and a slew of bizarre powers that would take too long to list. Ice, friendship, magic, and a much more balanced psyche. A powerful duo whose names had gone down in history as the faces of the largest war to ever exist.

All of them taken together were absolutely nothing compared to him. He had fought gods, world-enders, demons, and even a Downstreamer on his way to this leg of his journey. He had flicked people like this away like bugs all day. They should have been nothing.

But he knew better. These were the protagonists. And everyone always loved an underdog story…

“You don’t have to do this,” Eve told English. “You could turn around and leave. I wouldn’t try to stop you. You don’t need ka to forge your own path.”

He looked at her quizzically. Did she really think she could talk him down?

“You can go and freely conquer. I bet you could create yourself a sizeable empire before the Tower vanishes completely. Then you’d be a king of an actual nation. You wouldn’t have ka helping you get to your place – you will keep it under your own power. Isn’t that better? As it is, you’re just as much a slave to it as the rest of us.”

Corona nodded. “If you let it go, you can be free. We wanted to be free so horrid things wouldn’t happen… But part of freedom is the freedom to do evil. You want to be the villain. So why not leave so you can become a real villain? Not one arbitrated by some force of ka, but by your own will.”

“I WILL BECOME THE TOWER.”

“And the Tower is defined by its creations,” Pinkie added. “You’re not free now, and you won’t be free if you get what you want. Ka is a two-way street that traps everyone. There are no winners.”

English paused. Then, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he laughed. It was a horrendous sound that filled everyone in earshot with a sense of dread.

“YOUR WORDS ARE POWERFUL AND YOUR TONGUES SHARP. BUT HOW DO YOU EXPECT TO CONVINCE ME… WHEN I AM ALREADY HERE?” He pointed at the Tower. “THIS IS THE END. TO TURN AROUND WOULD BE… UNSATISFYING.” He stood up tall, Cairo overcoat blowing in the ominous wind. “I AM THE VILLAIN. I HAVE EMBRACED THIS ROLE. I WILL SEE IT OUT TO ITS END.”

“Villains are defeated,” Pinkie reminded him.

“AND I WILL SUFFER DEFEATS. BUT I WILL ALWAYS COME BACK. I WILL RETURN. THIS REQUIRES KA.” He hefted Black Thirteen into the air. “YOU ARE THE FINAL HURDLE.”

“Well, you tried,” Vriska told her friends. “I’m impressed you even got him to think, so you can consider that a win.”

Eve ruffled her feathers. “We have absolutely no chance of holding a candle to his power.”

“Trillion-to-one odds,” Pinkie said. “I like those chances, how about the rest of you?”

“Seems par for the course, really,” Pidge added.

“We really do end up in these sorts of situations a lot…” Flutterfree commented.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said with a nostalgic smile on his face.

Corona laughed. “We’re all hopeless dorks.” She spread her wings and lit herself on fire, drawing the Master Sword. “Let’s show him what we’re made of.”

Lord English asked Black Thirteen a simple question. How many can you take care of in an instant?

Pidge clutched her heart and dropped to the ground.

“…Well that’s just not fair,” Pinkie pouted.

“Wasn’t going to be of much help anyway,” Vriska said, summoning the infinite-sided die into her hand.

“Vriska!” Flutterfree gasped.

Vriska chuckled. “When are you going to learn, Flutterfree?” Vriska jumped into the air. “You can’t remove all the bitchiness.” She threw the die at English.

She would never get the roll she had gotten last fight again, that card had already been played. Instead, it was a series of tungsten rods that transformed into snakes as soon as they entered English’s body. Decidedly uncomfortable, sure. But nothing that could even slow him down. He let out a roar intending to vaporize her, but she dodged. She brought her sword down between his eyes.

He grunted, twisting his head and biting down on her leg. There was poison in his teeth, but such things didn’t matter in this rushed conflict. She ignored the pain and threw her fluorite octet into his face, blasting him with a series of thumbtacks to the eyes. They bounced right off.

“Huh. Guess they actually are pool balls. Another of existence’s big mysteries, solved.”

He threw her to the ground and prepared to flatten her – but he had to deal with Star Platinum hitting him upside the head and Flutterfree trying to remove Black Thirteen from his grasp. Had she been doing it physically, she would have gone mad – but she was using Lolo. And Lolo was well known for having meta effects. The purple spirograph of the Stand surrounded the inky black orb, complementing the red and green spirographs within.

Lord English had the ‘machinery’ around Black Thirteen transform into a bow shape. Flutterfree was not surprised by this, pulling out her own bow and meeting the arrow head on. Light hit darkness – and lost. The bolt shot Flutterfree down with ease.

…But her Rage kept her moving. She jumped back and drove her wings not into him, but into the weapon that was Black Thirteen. She suffered heavy blows to her mind, but the truth of Rage kept her grounded just enough to fix her blades and pull.

It would have done nothing had Pinkie not hit Lord English with a warhammer the size of a small mansion. He lost his footing and Black Thirteen was torn from his grasp. With a series of “ORA ORA ORA” he was distracted even further.

“NOW!” Corona and Eve shouted at the same time. A burst of ice, fire, light, darkness, and two separate Stands hit him all at once, pushing him towards the now open doors of the Dark Tower.

If he was thrown in there without Black Thirteen, he would be trapped until the Tower fell.

He would lose.

All it would take would be a simple roar to push them off him… Nothing difficult…

Except that Corona had placed a hand to his forehead, activating her empathy powers.

“Normally at this point I try to talk things out, to understand who I’m fighting better,” Corona said, pacing around the dark expanse that was Lord English’s mindscape. “But I’m not going to do that today.” She snapped her fingers, forging a direct connection to the part of Lord English that was eldritch. She had a lot of experience with this sort of thing: Majora, Nyarlathotep, and more. She would burn his brain with his own absurd power.

She had expected the difficulty to be similar to that. She only had to keep him stuck in his mind for a couple of real-world seconds, after all.

She hadn’t expected him to be able to shove her out of his mind with the equivalent of a mental grunt. She went flying, breaking up the freeze-flame attack she and Eve had going on him. He reached out and grabbed the rim of the doorway to the Tower.

Pinkie tried to knock him into the Tower – but he was already behind her. He slapped her to the side, prompting a squeak to emanate from her overly cartoony body. He jumped to the frozen form of Flutterfree, tearing Black Thirteen from her with a swift yank. He backhanded Vriska so hard every one of her ribs were flattened, while he pointed Black Thirteen at Pinkie.

“Well, ponyfeathers, I’m useless now,” Pinkie said, dropping her chainsaw. “So how about you n-” Lord English rammed his hand through her body, prompting candy-red blood to squirt everywhere. “...Grk…”

He shot two pool balls into her eyes for good measure, just to make her feel it. Then he lit Vriska on fire, forcing her to experience the constant agony he had experienced when Saitama had been on him. Jotaro was as simple as teleporting behind him when Star Platinum was punching - his back snapped like a twig.

All that remained were the two of them. Corona Shimmer and Evening Sparkle. Lifelong friends. Unwilling enemies. The extremes of existence right before him…

They had created a swirling tornado of every power they had at their disposal. They no longer had a plan, they just knew they needed to attack. To push him into the ground. To win.

He clapped his hands and they fell like flies.

And that was it. He had defeated them. He was done.

…Why did he hear sarcastic clapping?

He turned to face the Dark Tower. Renee was sitting in front of it with a decidedly amused smile on her face, clapping. “Well done. You beat a bunch of rag-tag misfits who were far, far below your power level. And they almost had you for a second there! Brilliant.”

Lord English narrowed his eyes. He pointed Black Thirteen at the Dark Tower, preparing to force it to open for him.

Renee kicked the door with her hoof and it opened unceremoniously. “There’s no need for that. Come on in, make yourself at home. That is what you want, isn’t it?”

Lord English lowered Black Thirteen and glared at Renee. Very slowly, he nodded.

Renee chuckled, and turned to walk into the darkness. She soon vanished from his perceptions.

For a moment, Lord English paused to look up – to see the orb of the Earth above him. Somehow, it still seemed blue despite the appearance of everything else.

A breeze blew through the field of roses, giving it an appearance akin to a sea of blood.

With a deep breath and a tightened grip, Lord English took a step forward. The roses still pricked his skin, but they were nothing compared to the sensation the Tower gave him. The closer he approached, the more he felt it calling him. Demanding he enter.

He marched forward, laying his hand on the front door. It felt wrong, like it was both dead and alive, and that was just the way it should have been. It would serve him well.

One more step, and he was fully inside. The doors closed behind him all on their own, slamming shut with a noise so loud and final everyone within the City heard it.

143 - Spirograph, Part 2

Lightning laid her hand on Jotaro’s chest and healed him. He shot upright in an instant, ready to fight - but saw no sign of Lord English. All he saw were his friends – his teammates – looking around with forlorn, weary expressions. Pinkie was struggling to tear off her massacre dress, Vriska was angrily banging on the sealed doors of the Dark Tower, Corona was staring at the harsh explosive lights in the sky, and Flutterfree was holding Eve close, the two trying not to lose all hope.

Pidge leaped onto Jotaro and wrapped her arms tightly around him, crying her inner pain away. They may have been heroes… but a body living through death was never something to just be brushed away.

Jotaro gently set her upon his shoulders and shook his head.

“…What do we do now?” Pidge asked.

Jotaro sighed. He had no response. Lord English had gotten what he wanted – he had entered the Tower. For all they knew, he had already become one with it. Already started to manipulate fate to his own brutal ends…

In the distance, he saw a group of people flying towards them, led by none other than White Nettle herself. She had her tendrils spread wide, aimed directly at the Dark Tower itself. She flew overtop Jotaro and the others, pressing every tendril of hers into the Dark Tower’s door.

“OPEN!” she screamed, interfacing with the ancient structure. “OPEN, DAMMIT!”

The Dark Tower did not listen to her demands, keeping its doors welded shut.

“Why can’t you open it!?” Vriska shouted.

“It doesn’t want me to! That’s it!” Nettle put a hand to her forehead and shook her head. “It… It’s telling me I can’t get in.”

“Do we have anyone here who could deserve to go in?” Pinkie asked aloud. “Someone appropriate enough for it to just let through? Anyone?”

“Cinder’s not here…” Twilence said, breathless. “But…”

Nanoha came out of the crowd, every step she took marked by trembling. She closed her eyes, laid her hands on the door, and pushed.

Nothing happened. She tried pulling, but that didn’t help either.

“Out of the way, bitch!” Caliborn shouted, shoving her to the side. “This is my moment!” He charged into the doors and bounced off like a ping-pong ball. “…Shit…”

“…Let me try,” Starbeat said, quietly. Her hoof had no effect on the doors. Many others tried – Mlinx, Death, Discord, Spades, the Everykid, Monika, Rina, Twilence, Roxy, O’Neill... They all failed. Every last one of them were barred from the Tower.

Jenny rammed herself into the Tower, thinking maybe if she just spent enough effort… But it was worthless.

Roland walked to the Tower last. He looked up the dark column that went all the way up to Earth itself. His expression set, he addressed the structure. “You let me in once before. My life is defined in relation to you. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came,’ and he has come again. I served you for innumerable lifetimes, defending you from the Red that sought your demise. You were always the end of my journey – the purpose, the reason, the goal. I was released; but always I must return.” He laid his hand on the door, pressing the side of his legendary revolver into the unnatural structure. “I beg of you, allow me to face monsters once more.”

A soft breeze blew through his hair.

The Dark Tower did not open to the Gunslinger.

Roland slowly removed his revolver from the door and turned around, expression unreadable. Three paces out, he whipped around and fired six shots into the Dark Tower’s door. The doors themselves did not move, but the crack in the Tower grew by about a millimeter from being struck by such an important weapon.

“…Could we destroy it?” Corona asked. “Just… widen the crack?”

Nanoha shook her head. “I… I don’t think so. Nettle…?”

Nettle interfaced with the Tower directly, grimacing. “Roland’s revolver is the most ka-charged weapon in the universe aside from Black Thirteen itself. We do not have time to whittle it to nothing. …I don’t know why we even have time at all, everything in there could happen in an instant.”

“We have one other we have not tried,” Roland said, pulling down his hat. “The man in black.”

“Do it,” Eve ordered. “Get him here.”

Nettle nodded. She closed her eyes and sent her tendrils out, phasing through the ground until they found his prison. She pushed right through the security measures and teleported him to the Tower, depositing him unceremoniously on the ground.

He stood up, put on a smile, and chuckled. “I see everyone’s been having a delightful time.”

“Shut the fuck up and open the door,” Vriska demanded.

Flagg looked to the Dark Tower. “You see, I would. But I don’t have Black Thirteen.”

“Your essence is connected with Black Thirteen.”

“And the Tower distinguishes between us,” Flagg said. To prove his point he leaned on the door and pushed. “See? Nothing. Nothing at all. English is in the Tower and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.” He leaned back and smirked. “And he let you try all the plans, didn’t he? Every. Last. One. And they all failed.”

“He’s trying to take your job,” Corona pointed out.

“And maybe that just means it’s my day.” Flagg shrugged. “Everyone has one.”

“You’ve changed,” Roland observed.

“It’s part of our nature,” Flagg responded. “As characters as well as people. Change… It’s an inherent property of everything., no matter what the bitch says.” He pointed at the Tower. “Right now, there is change going on in there. English is taking control of the Source and the world he creates… We’ll have to accept it for what it is. There’s nothing we can do. It’s time to bow and accept our new overlord.”

“The Tower is fading,” Roxy said. “It won’t be forever.”

“Why not?”

“Renee,” Twilence said. “Or, well, the Emissary. She’s said things – a lot of stuff I wasn’t there for, but I remember anyway. But she talked knowing she wasn’t going to be around for long. Hinting that we’d be free. The Tower will fall, Flagg.”

“So he has years, decades, maybe centuries to bend the world to how he sees it.” Flagg said with a shrug. “Or maybe the Emissary was flat-out lying to you. She’s not above that, she’s not above anything.”

Twilence frowned. “We have to do something.”

“…Do we?” Nanoha asked. “Do we have to? We tried everything we had, and it failed. We should know…”

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “Long ago, there was a moral like that. Sometimes, the right answer is to just give up. When there’s nothing you can do… stop making things worse by trying.”

“That’s… That’s wrong!” Corona shouted. “We can’t…”

“Your fight was pointless,” Lightning pointed out. “You strained Death unnecessarily and never really had any chance of winning. We would still be where we are now without you fighting him, and you all wouldn’t have suffering inner souls.”

Eve blinked. “…Make the most of it…” She looked up. “Unless anyone has any way into the Tower, we just have to wait for something to happen.” She turned to the smoldering cityscape in the distance. “Until then, we have people that need us to help them. To build them up. We don’t know what English is going to create. So let’s forget about him and help who we can for as long as we’re able.” She spread her wings and took off toward the City.

Corona clenched her fist and let out an angry breath. “I don’t want to admit it, but she’s right. We’re useless and we’ve lost. We should go do the next best thing.” She looked around at the small crowd. “Unless any of you have an idea?”

There was silence.

“…Okay.” She wiped a tear from her face. “Come on.” She spread her wings and flew away as well. Slowly but surely, everyone else walked after her.

“…What’s going to happen to us?” Pidge wondered aloud.

Jotaro grimaced. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, we’ll face it head on.”

“…It looks like we’re running away right now.”

Jotaro sighed. “Maybe… But we’re not running out of fear.”

“Hopelessness. We’re running out of hopelessness.”

Jotaro didn’t want to say she was right.

~~~

Lord English stood at the bottom of the staircase. Renee was a full flight above him, looking down. “By my bricks, you’re slow.”

He ignored her and took a step up the stairs, passing the first door without even bothering to look inside.

“Oh come on, half the fun of this is to see your life and how it brought you here! Open a few doors, take a good look at where you’ve been, what’s caused all this.”

He kept moving along, giving neither her nor the doors a passing glance.

She rolled her eyes. “Really… Guess I’ll have to open them foooor you.” She kicked the first door open, revealing a green and red egg. “Ah yes, your birth – as Caliborn. Laid on a dead world…” Through the door, Gamzee appeared and watched the egg hatch. “And you even got yourself a guardian to further your natural desires for multiversal conquest, what fun.”

She jumped to the next door, kicking it open. It showed him as a young cherub screaming at the top of his lungs about how he was going to kill his sister one day. “You were a lot more talkative back then. More willing to let the world know what you thought. Of course, I know what you thought, but you aren’t helping me with the conversation here.”

Suddenly, she was in front of him, opening a door. “But you aren’t just Caliborn. Oh no, you come from several different little timelines. Part of you is Gamzee…” She kicked a door open, revealing a purple grub that would one day grow into the Bard of Rage. “Part of you is an absolutely dashing pair of glasses…” A door swung open, revealing Dirk Strider programming an artificial intelligence into a pair of pointed shades. “And lastly, and least importantly, part of you exists as the Heir of Void.” She opened a door to a scene of a strong indigo-blood troll punching through a wall.

Trotting up the stairs backwards, she looked at English with a smirk. “You, English, are evil, anger, intelligence, and strength. Time, Rage, Heart, and Void. Lord, Bard, Prince, and Heir. And you are so much more.” She peeled another door back, revealing Caliborn standing over his god-tier clock, destroying it to ensure his unconditional immortality, bestowing his form with pool-ball eyes. “You are an endless. A true immortal, defined by a Horrorterror experiment on me.” She smirked. “I think you’ll like the next one.”

She pranced upward and waved a door open. Behind it was Caliborn fighting eight humans – including John, Roxy, and Jade. He was able to use the House Juju to trap four of them, but the four who remained kept fighting. Soon, he was losing, beaten to the ground by a brilliant light of Hope from one of the people facing him. He tried to stand up – but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

One of the enemies with Heart powers grabbed Caliborn’s soul and tried to seal it within a mysterious, creepy puppet. Half of Gamzee’s body was caught in the trap. In the midst of this, a strange red ghost charged out of nowhere, clearly a mixture of both the strong troll and the anime shades. Everything collapsed into one explosion of energy that Roxy grabbed hold of.

She Voided it all from existence, despite knowing English would return from it one day.

Renee closed the door. “Of course, that didn’t actually happen. Not in the final timeline here, anyway. John was killed before he could take them back to fight Caliborn. And now look at the little rascal running around, making friends, hiding in fear from what he would have become had John lived.” Renee looked English in the eyes. “You shouldn’t exist.”

English continued his walk.

“But the Horrorterrors and I… Well, we couldn’t just let that stop, now could we?” She opened up more doors showing English destroying universes, slaughtering ghosts, and killing Hayate in the battle with the Class 1 societies. She showed him facing off against the army of Skaians, followed quickly by Vriska unleashing the House Juju on him, trapping him inside with the power of four essences – including John.

“John… The retconner, the one being in Existence given my power,” Renee said, smirking. “He was an idiot, which was why he could have the power. If he had been intelligent… It would have been too risky. Too uncontrollable. And when he died without completing his own loop… well, look where we are now. The culmination of your plan. Siron’s staff, the Crimson King, absorbing the eldritch power, and fighting through the City.”

The next door showed Lord English walking up the stairs of the Dark Tower. There was only one other door before the top of the Tower.

“Curious?” Renee asked, standing by the final door. “This shows the end of your story. You can take a peek ahead, see what fate is yours.”

“NO. THAT IS A TRAP.”

Renee chuckled. “Oooh, too clever for me! Except not really.” She threw the door open anyway. She showed Lord English standing in a blurry expanse, the spirograph of the Source spinning around him. Then she shut the door. “That’s your fate.”

“NO.” He pointed at the final door, the one with his name on it.

ENGLISH

“THIS IS MY FATE.” He threw the door open and walked right into the room at the top of the Dark Tower. The clock connected to the life of the multiverse was long gone, only the Source itself remaining.

It was a beautiful white spirograph turning eternally, producing all the ka in existence. Every rule of luck, every trick of fate, every meaningful moment: it all came from this one thing.

“You know, they all wonder what the Source is,” Renee said, appearing opposite English on the Source’s pedestal. “What could the Builders have possibly discovered that allowed them to create fate?” She touched it with her hoof and giggled. “I actually have no idea. It… It just is. Am I programmed to think that? Is it evidence that there’s more out there, or is it just the Sea of Infinite Possibility itself? A gift from God, or some scientific marvel I am prohibited from analyzing myself?” She shrugged. “It cannot be known. While I am here, that rule is absolute. When I am gone, the Source will be gone as well.”

Lord English extended a hand to the Source. “I WILL BECOME ONE…”

“You can grab it, but you cannot become one with it,” Renee said. “It is a source of power. That is all you need.” Renee held out her hooves. “Go on. Take it.”

Lord English clasped his hands around the Source – and promptly found himself pressed into the far wall by a force strong enough to crack planets in half.

Renee broke out into maniacal laughter. “You should see the look on your face! You thought you could just take it! That’s… that’s priceless! You idiot!” She held a hoof to her forehead and threw back her head to exaggerate the laugh even further. “Did you really think this entire scene was just going to be me going over your life? That I would have no point? Au contraire, my custom-made imbecile, I have all the cards here.” She smirked. “You want the keys to existence? Come and get them.”

He did. He transformed Black Thirteen into a clawshot and launched it at the Source. Renee clapped her hooves and made the Source vanish. “Always so practical…” With a swish of her tail, she was gone as well. The room was empty.

“ENOUGH WITH THE GAMES.”

Renee’s voice came from all directions at once. “Darling, I am the Emissary of Ka. All I know are games!”

The room at the top of the Dark Tower folded open, revealing a blurry cosmic background. It was not the Earth, nor was it the New World – in it he saw traditional galaxies, tendrils the size of many universes, and time itself twisting around in a net.

“This is what I see. This is what you want.This is everything – all that has ever existed and all that will exist. You can see over there the set time of my demise. What else do you see?”

Lord English didn’t respond. He held Black Thirteen up, transforming the casing around it to resemble a scepter. The multicolored spirographs within popped out of it and began orbiting the black orb at a frantic pace.

He narrowed his eyes. He didn’t see his victory. He didn’t see his defeat either.

“Well that’s because you don’t have the Source yet! I’m just showing you the expanse of it right now, nothing else. The interweaving nature of ka… It’s all here. All ready for you. I’ve even set up a very simplistic tutorial for you!”

“YOUR INSULTS ARE PETTY.”

“And that fills me with a sense of pride and accomplishment. No matter what you do, English, it brings me satisfaction. Conquest, defeat, it doesn’t matter, you are part of the story. Everything is! Hatred, love, worship, assault, it’s all the same to me.” The cosmic background receded from English, leaving him in an expanse of nothingness. “What are you to me?”

“YOU BUILT ME FOR THIS MOMENT. IT NEEDS TO BE SATISFYING.”

Renee chuckled. “And you are correct once again. Your life has always been leading to this moment. The moment where you look your creator in the face. Where you don’t demand answers – you demand the power that is rightfully yours. Such a sad, sad mind you have… But an interesting one.” The darkness around English seemed to get darker and darker. “You think you understand. This needs to be fixed…”

And then English was a human boy named Jared who had just watched both of his parents die in a car crash. He screamed in agony, and then stopped. Why? What? When? He didn’t know; all he knew was that he was at an orphanage. He was bullied, tormented, and forced to do all the work. Nobody paid him any mind. Through defiance, he made it to college, graduated with honors, and was promptly shot dead in a street the next day.

“TRICKS!”

“Real lives,” Renee said, the darkness closing in around him. “The lives you don’t understand. Let’s go another round shall we?”

He was a Gem working on Earth during Rose’s Rebellion against the Diamonds. She popped out of the kindergarten and was put to work fighting the Gems who had devoted their lives to this primitive planet. But she was captured and shown kindness by Rose directly, given a new life. She learned what it meant to care, to love, to appreciate life. But in the end, she was corrupted by the Diamonds in the last attack on Earth and lived the rest of her life a horrid monster. One of her best friends was forced to shatter her before she could destroy an entire human town.

Lord English took a few steps back. “THESE LIVES ARE INSIGNIFICANT!”

“Then live your own again.”

He did. He lived through Caliborn’s life – from hatching, to the arguments with his sister, to his tribulations in SBURB. Then his discovery of new life and meaning within the New World. He would never admit it, but he had made friends. And he would protect them as they had protected him.

“HE IS WEAK!”

“How about we try this on for size?”

Lord English was the Crimson King. A demon of untold power born of a union not meant to be. He saw the Tower, and saw an opportunity. He rose to the occasion and devoted his very mindset to bringing the Tower down, building up armies and psychic entities to rip at the Beams themselves. But as he continued on, he aged, and his mind escaped from him. He became a screaming old man at the end who did little more than shoot robotic spheres at Roland before a kid erased him from existence. But then he returned… only to be destroyed by Lord English.

Lord English clenched his fist. “WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS?”

“Maybe you’ll figure it out, maybe you won’t, I don’t care. This one will make you REALLY mad though, cheers!”

Lord English was Vriska Serket. Taken in by a giant spider lusus, she was forced to feed the creature other trolls constantly to keep it from eating her. She buried all inclinations she had of what was right and wrong to keep her sanity, so she became an evil manipulative mastermind, twisting the limbs of every last person she came into contact with to not only get food for her guardian, but also to enjoy the task. She had friends, friends she was willing to betray at a moment’s notice. The Thief of Light ventured into SBURB and tried to skew events so she would be the hero – but also the cause of the villain. When she found that Lord English was the real man behind the curtain, she found him an appropriate target. She found the House Juju and brought it right to the villain, trapping him within.

Lord English wanted it to be over. But it wasn’t. Vriska had much more to show him.

She wandered the multiverse, lonely. She found the Doctor, befriended him, and then was disillusioned. Monika came into existence. Vriska continued until she ended up on Twilence’s team through the machinations of the Influence, forming a new group of explorers until they were destroyed by a random demon with a Flower under his control. Enlish got to experience all her pains, all her growth, and all her loss. He watched Merodi Universalis grow, fall, and then… He got to suffer his own attacks.

“THIS DOES NOT DETER ME!”

“We’re not done yet.”

He was run through the lives of so, so many others. Siron. Monika. Luna. Mlinx. Starbeat. Flagg. Rina. Nanoha. The Emperor. White Nettle. John. Jenny. Burgerbelle. Roland. Renee. Daniel. Corona. Eve. Cinder. Even the entire Everyman. No experience was hidden from him.

Lord English clenched his fist. “I HAVE NOT FALTERED!”

“You have removed every ounce of empathy and care from your mind… You fool. You poor, poor fool.” She chuckled sadly. “One more for you.”

She threw him into Twilence. She was Princess Celestia’s student, and then she was the Princess of Friendship itself… and then she was lost in a time that was not her own, with an eye in her chest that wouldn’t stop telling her about what lay beyond the fourth wall and what the force of ka was. She went insane, but she came out of it, better than most options allowed. She became me, the one who understood ka and what it meant. I traveled the universe with my group until I could no more, and then I waited, manipulating from the background. Alone, fearful, and angry – but always understanding. I knew why everything happened, and when I realized that curse could end, I took it upon myself to make sure it came to pass. I suffered, but the collapse won. I was captured, mocked, and ridiculed. I ran and found a Deus Ex Machina. And then… I failed. Twilence failed to beat Lord English, falling, the last-ditch effort nothing more than an afterthought.

Lord English ground his teeth. He stood up tall, preparing for the next experience.

Nothing came.

“You truly are heartless,” Renee said. “You’ve felt what they’ve felt, been what they’ve been, and the only change that’s come across you… is that you’ve hardened your heart further. Your determination knows no bounds.”

“GIVE ME THE SOURCE!”

“Lemme think about that… Hrm. You know what? ‘Aw, hell no’!”

Reality crumbled. English was stripped of all his power and thrown to a ground that didn’t exist. Swords chopped at him from seventeen time dimensions, driving his very essence into nothing.

But it refused. It wouldn’t even let a death register. His unconditional immortality would go untested. He would live.

Black Thirteen, the Crimson King, and Lord English… All were still here, even in the impossible existence the Dark Tower was subjecting him too. He willed himself back up, forcing ka to his will. Black Thirteen formed itself into a cannon and shot at everything. Cracks appeared and disappeared. The Dark Tower trembled, weakening slightly.

“Ah ah ah!” Renee chuckled. “You can’t control me if you destroy me!”

“GIVE IT UP.”

“I do not fear death threats. Simple brute force will not aid you here.”

Lord English honked. Everything trembled as his soul grabbed hold of the Tower’s reality. He was suddenly on top of the Tower – which was impossible – and at the intersection of the twelve Beams. All ka flowed through him, a feeling both satisfying and agonizing. He drove his claws into the Tower itself.

And then his soul was burning. He had no body, and all he could feel was pain. Eternal pain that could not be numbed, would never abate, and would never let him grow bored. It lasted forever but was over in an instant.

He was released but did not wait a single moment before unleashing more attacks on the substance of reality itself. All the pain and experiences were doing to him was making him stronger. The fires could not kill him, so they only forged him into something more.

“More is such an opinionated word… It wasn’t like you had much in you to begin with, but come on, what’s left at this point?” Renee appeared as a unicorn in front of him. “If you lose the need for meaning, what’s the purpose in continuing?”

Lord English grabbed her in his claws, finding her pathetically easy to crush.

Blood trickled out of her mouth. “You understand everything, and you go on…” She gagged on the blood in her throat. “You know what you have to do.” She slumped to the ground, unmoving.

Lord English took a step forward – and saw himself. Just the two of them standing in an expanse of nothing.

They wasted no time. They turned Black Thirteen into a sword form and drove it through both of their hearts simultaneously. The bodies fused into a single one that was dead, but still standing. Affixed to Black Thirteen was Lord English’s amalgamation of a soul. It was intangible, but he could see it in his current state: a soft white light that sparked with a soft energy that was paradoxically the strongest force in existence. It was the last spark of anything worthwhile within him.

He destroyed it.

You have lost all drive, Black Thirteen told him. You have no reason to do anything. Why continue?

“THERE IS NO REASON NOT TO.”He didn’t roar, he didn’t scream, and he didn’t honk. He punched through reality, clawing at the Dark Tower’s defenses. He pulled back time, space, and coding he could not understand even as he was now. He smashed his way through the Dark Tower’s memory banks, a place beyond metatime itself. At every turn, the Tower’s true internal structure tried to stop him.

But even as it did so, it knew he would make it to his goal.

Lord English grabbed onto the Dark Tower and appeared inside of it at the same time. He entered the room at the top, where the Source still stood.

It had never moved. The Dark Tower had merely tricked him.

Lord English did not go to the Source. He demanded the Source come to him.

It did. The unknowable white spirograph left the podium and surrounded him. He took control from the Dark Tower.

He let out a deep, ululating honk. The Source gave all of ka to him, infusing the noise into reality itself. No one would feel anything - but the laws had begun changing. The ka of Lord English began to interfere with the old ka of the Tower, engaging in a battle none could see or really feel. Shifting fate wherever possible in the favor of the villain. In the favor of English. Every version and echo of his long-dead sister, the physical antithesis of English, were killed through a series of million-to-one coincidences.

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t pat himself on the back. He didn’t even roar. He stood impassive, feeling no joy or satisfaction from his victory.

There was nothing left.

Only Darkness.

~~~

It didn’t take Nettle long to realize that she was the strongest individual around at the moment. She couldn’t really appreciate the irony.

Just over a month ago, she would have laughed at the strange inversion of her situation and moved on without another thought. But now she had experienced life – seen what it was like to be something that wasn’t a Downstreamer. Felt the world with real, physical sensations, and without some ancient dogma pushing her forward.

Now that she was back, she couldn’t just move on anymore. She had felt too much. So much it wouldn’t just go away.

She couldn’t handle the suffering she saw all around her. With every person she saved from the wreckage, there were three or four others already dead, and more who had just been utterly vaporized. Every now and then she’d come across someone who’s soul had been affixed to their body – either by Death or English himself as part of a joke – and Rev or one of the other healers brought them back they’d look like they wanted to die for a moment. Most would get some semblance of sanity back after a few minutes, but there were a few that took the first opportunity they could to off themselves. Given the state the City was in, this was rarely difficult.

If Lord English was willing to do this when he had another goal in mind, what would he do when he could do anything?

And here she was, able to reach anywhere in the City with ease, and she still felt helpless with every body she pulled out. Every severed limb…

She broke down when she removed a lifeless Sweetie Belle from the wreckage. “I can’t… I can’t do this…”

The healer currently assigned to Nettle – Corona - saw her fall to her knees. She flew over and put a hand on Nettle’s back. “It’s okay. We can go on without you.”

“It’s not okay. If I go… thousands more die because I wasn’t helping to save them…” She tried to stand up – but she tripped over a rock and scraped her face on the ground. The wound healed quickly, but the pain was still there. “I can’t…”

“Sometimes we just can’t do it,” Eve said, trotting over. “If I’d tried to save everyone all the time… I would never have done any good. I would have broken.” She looked at Nettle. “You save who you can. But you have limitations just like everyone else. You can’t save them all.”

“I…” She shook her head. “I need to save as many as possible. That’s right, right? As many. All of them.”

“That’s the way it should work,” Twilence said, jumping down from a nearby rock. “But it isn’t how things are. Sacrificing yourself for others is honorable and good. But you’re also important.” She shook her head, sighing. “You and I are important, Eve and Corona much, much more so. Everyone else out there… under the rubble… They aren’t.”

Corona growled. “Screw that…”

“Ka’s still around, Corona, so it’s the way things are,” Twilence insisted. “We’re more important than them. It’s wrong, but it’s a law of reality. We mean more. If we lose ourselves to save a few hundred lives…” Twilence shook her head. “It’s worse off for everyone.”

“The loss of a hero…” Eve mused.

“That’s… that’s not what you all told me,” Nettle said. “You said everyone mattered. That… That…”

“Now you know why I wanted to destroy the Tower,” Corona said, using her magic to heal another injured man. “Equality doesn’t exist with it. People tell stories of the great, sure, but it goes beyond that. There are those less important, ‘lesser’ races…” She curled her hand into a fist. “I fight it with every fiber of my being.”

“And yet you tell Nettle not to push for them,” Twilence observed. “You’re just as guilty as the rest of us.”

“We don’t know how to live without a story…” Eve said, shaking her head.

“We’ll have to, if the Tower falls,” Corona said. “…Maybe we should try it… Just… throw ourselves into this.” She looked at the carnage, the wind flipping through her hair. “…Would it be right to tell Death to stop playing favorites?”

“Wouldn’t help,” Twilence said. “It’d just make things worse in the long run. Try to give equal treatment, you let a few heroes die. The heroes… They will be able to fight and protect. Without them…” She sighed. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but right now English could do anything. We’ll need everyone to maximize every chance we have. We have to play by the rules of ka.”

“No…” Nettle said. “No, no. Eve, you said we don’t know how to live without a story.”

Eve blinked and nodded. “Yeah, we don’t. Our lives have been defined by that.”

“What if… What if we need to?” Nettle asked. “Learn… how to live without a story.”

Eve shook her head. “That doesn’t really make much sense, how w-”

“Subversion,” Twilence said suddenly, eyes sparkling. “A subversion. That’s it! We tried the plan, the Deus Ex Machina, and the heroes’ last stand. What if, by trying to solve things the traditional way of stories, we ruined it? I think Nettle’s onto something!”

Corona scratched the back of her head. “She is…? But how could you solve something without…”

“Latch onto something else,” Twilence said, gesturing at the carnage around them. “Look. All these unimportant people. We were just judging them. Doesn’t that seem a little out of place? Sure, we have these conversations, but was now really the time or the place? Why are all of us in the same place right here, right now?” She pulled a small device out of Corona’s pocket and grinned when she noticed a green light was on. “And why would the cameras be on us?”

Eve blinked. “You’re not Aware right now, right?”

“Not at all. I’m just noticing patterns… Thinking…” Twilence turned to Nettle. “But I can’t be the one to figure it out, that’d be expected, that’d be normal. Nettle, you were so close, you have something. What do you think the answer is?”

Nettle took a step back, suddenly feeling under pressure. She wanted to say she couldn’t do it – but her foot stepped onto the dead form of the Sweetie Belle. Tears welled up in her eyes as all the other dead bodies flashed through her eyes. All of them… Hundreds…

They were important.

“We… we need to learn.” She looked at her hands. “We need to show we don’t… want to be better than them… That we want to be the same.” She turned around and looked to the distant areas of the City. “It has to be everyone. Everyone. If we try to face English with just those who matter, who are better… we lose. We can’t win, because we aren’t ready to win.” She took in a deep breath. “We need to fight not only alongside the soldiers, but alongside the normal people who live in their homes. The civilians we don’t give a second thought about. They need just as much say in this as we do.”

“…I like the idea,” Twilence admitted. “I just don’t see how we could do it, practically speaking. How would we get everyone to fight? Most the people you mentioned don’t want to fight. They don’t have it in them.”

“We could try to combine everyone’s wills,” Corona said.

“How would we do that?” Eve asked. “That many minds cannot work as one! It can’t be done! Whatever we put them in would destroy itself from contradiction or become a homogenous hive mind!”

Nettle smiled. “There’s something that wouldn’t.”

“What?” Corona asked.

Nettle used one of her tendrils to teleport a small adorable hat-wearing child in the middle of them. “The Everyman once existed as a living contradiction.”

Twilence, Corona, and Eve fell silent.

The Everykid wondered why everyone was looking at her funny.

~~~

Lord English heard a knock at the door the instant after he had unleashed his honk with the Source.

What?

The door swung in, revealing a word printed on it – not a name.

ALL

On the other side was the Everykid, her adorable smile meeting Lord English’s emotionless face.

“Hello!” she said.

English didn’t have to wonder who she was, or how she was here – he just knew what had happened while he was fighting the Tower for supremacy.

(The Everykid sat near the wreckage of the Austraeoh, next to the single spectral rod they had gotten working again. It was pointed straight into the air and was currently charging magical energy. Numerous magical runes were inscribed in the ground below her, the alien words slowly starting to glow a pale white.

“You’re sure she can handle it?” Minna asked, worry in her voice.

“Yes,” Corona said, tracing a few magical markings on the Everykid’s face. “She’s been separated from the Everyman for all of a month. The capacity is still there.”

“It’s the only idea I’ve heard lately that makes any sense,” O’Neill said, folding his arms. “I’m okay with it as long as the kid is.”

The Everykid nodded, putting on a determined expression.

Minna gulped. “I… I can’t see what’s going to happen. It’s going to be horrible…”

The Everykid shook her head and winked at Minna.

“It’s going to be horrible if we do nothing,” Corona said, plugging two wires together with her magic. “And we don’t know how long we have…”

“Exactly enough,” Twilence said. “No more, no less.”

“I’ve sent out the message,” Eve announced as she teleported back. “Everyone knows what we’re doing. There shouldn’t be very many who try to resist.”

Minna closed her eyes and nodded. “This really is our last-ditch effort, isn’t it?”

Pinkie nodded, grinning. “Yep! It’s so crazy and outlandish it just might work!” She placed her hoof on the activation lever. “Can I have the honors?”

Corona shrugged. “Sure, why not. Go ahead, Pinkie.”

“Yay!” Pinkie pulled down on the lever. The spectral rod activated with a painfully loud whine. A burst of soft blue energy left the rod, moving out in a spherical pattern. It swiftly encapsulated not only the entire City, but a distance several Earths wide, capturing many who hadn’t even been part of the City – living in caverns unaware of what was happening above.

And then the energy was gone. Every sapient being that wasn’t the Everykid passed out in an instant.

And the Everykid… the Everyman? The Everyman existed once more, but she was different. Despite the usual contradictions, she only had one active body at the moment – and that body had a purpose.

She ran off the platform and toward the doors of the Dark Tower, the thoughts of everyone rattling around in her mind. Many were confused, panicked, or afraid – but the most organized response was one of encouragement. They were going to do this. They were going to go in and show Lord English what they were made of.

The Dark Tower opened its doors for them before they even arrived. They hopped through, finding the interior to be white and without a staircase. There was only one door, and English already knew what the word on it was.)

Lord English noticed the narrative was mocking him. He did not care. He looked the Everyman in her little eyes. He let her take the first move.

She walked up to him and bopped him on the nose with her parasol. Then she backed up and smirked at him.

She started dancing the smuggest dance that had ever existed.

Lord English was immune to being baited – he felt no annoyance, rage, or impatience anymore – but he knew an invitation to attack when he saw one. He tore reality asunder and forced her body in two…

…Except he didn’t. Eve was suddenly standing there, taking the hit herself. For a moment, her body was torn into two, blood everywhere. Then she was standing next to the Everyman as if nothing had happened.

She wasn’t physically there. It was just her will.

Her will and the will of everyone else. Still powered by the old ka.

The room opened up once again, though this time it didn’t show the full expanse of the Tower’s vision. Instead, it showed a blurred expanse with ominous clock towers in the distance. The floor of the Dark Tower fell away, replaced with a dark, rectangular platform that screamed finality.

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves an arena!” Corona said, manifesting her will behind English. “I’m not going to pretend to understand how this works, but here goes nothing.” She rammed the Master Sword into his back and lit him on fire. He threw her aside with a roar.

Eve appeared next to Corona with a smile on her face. “…Together?”

Corona jumped up and lit herself on fire. Eve encased herself in ice and they charged, hitting English right in the stomach and pushing him down. With a grunt, he slapped both of them back. He prepared for another attack – but they didn’t go for him again.

“Who’s next?” Corona called.

Pinkie appeared from nowhere and hit Lord English with a squeaky hammer. “WHACK-A-CHERUB!” He tore her to shreds with a thought, but she was already back. “Geez, haven’t you learned anything?” She put on the bomb mask and latched herself to his face. “You.” She exploded. “Can’t.” She drove a sword into his skull. “Kill.” She threw a pie into his face. “Suction cup.” She stuck two suction cups on his eyes. “PONY!” She pulled out his eyes and smacked them to the ground with a pool cue.

They appeared in his skull once again, without a problem. He turned to ignore the various wills attacking him and turned to the Everyman. All he had to do was kill the physical body and…

…Where was she? All he saw was an army of wills…

“Oh, she left,” I said, appearing behind him. “There’s more than enough psychic wills in here to keep us all manifested when she’s nowhere near the Tower. By the way, having difficulty with your Awareness?”

He turned to me – and saw I was holding the orb of Black Thirteen, juggling it mockingly in my wings. He willed it back to himself, but he found that didn’t work.

Black Thirteen could force the Dark Tower’s doors to open.

It could resist his new will.

He launched for it physically – but I just teleported it… somewhere. I really don’t know where, and I don’t care. It wasn’t here.

All that was here were millions of wills, Lord English, and the Source.

But he had the Source, and nothing could fight the Source. He’d just have to outlast all these wills.

“Can you really do that?” Eve asked, stepping to the front of the combined will of all, a nonexistent wind blowing through her stellar mane.

English stared at her, lifeless.

“Can you outlast all of us?” Eve began to float into the air, her eyes glowing a brilliant white.

Silence.

“Any one of us, you could defeat, have defeated. Even the simple sum of our potential is nothing compared to the power you have at your disposal.” The Element of Magic shot out five beams of light, finding Pinkie, Flutterfree, Mattie, a Rainbow Dash, and an Applejack. “But together, we have something much more than the sum of our parts.”

Behind her, the wills of everyone floated, light shooting from them to the Element of Magic. Rainbows coursed through the crowd, endowing even the darkest and least significant of souls with a connection.

“Not too long ago, we were fighting each other. Killing each other.” Eve lifted Corona up, gesturing at her with a powerful hoof. “Existence was torn in half.”

Further beams of power coalesced above Eve, to the point at which it was hard to make her out.

“But here we are, standing today, together. We were trying to kill each other… but already, those wounds have begun to heal. Already, the bridges are being rebuilt. Already the magic of friendship has been restored.”

She pointed a hoof at English, forming all the energy into a point.

“There’s a reason ponies were chosen to lead this story. Not because we’re better than anyone, not because we’re cute… but because, to us, friendship is everything. And no matter the trial, no matter the difference, no matter the strain, we will always fall back on it!”

Eve, floating above English, speaking through her very destiny, threw the rainbows at him with the collective wills of every mind.

“WE ARE HERE TO STAND TOGETHER!”

The Elements of Harmony had unleashed many rainbows over the years, and in the lifespan of Merodi Universalis many sets had been used in tandem to face darker, stronger foes. They were powerful artifacts.

They were nothing compared to the brilliance that engulfed English at the top of the Tower, surrounding him not in a burning light, but an understanding light. A light that called out to him, asked him to come home. Opened the door and welcomed him in for a warm meal and an understanding ear. He could join them.

But he had given everything up to be where he was now. He would not accept such an invitation. The light cleared… and English stood, still. Not unaffected, but undamaged.

Eve lowered to the ground, frowning. “...It wouldn’t be complete if it ended like that, would it?”

“No,” Corona said, taking a step forward. She pointed a hand at English, narrowing her eyes. “It will end like this.” She glowered. “Charge.”

English moved first for once, punching Corona through the stomach. She reformed easily, laughing as the rest of the wills surged forward.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Jotaro yelled, dropping on Lord English from above. “ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!”

“Uh… normal Pidge attack,” Pidge said, firing her weapon into Lord English’s side. “Woo, I’m helping.”

“Keep it up!” Vriska shouted with a laugh. She held the infinite-sided die high and rolled it. Lord English suffered three megalodon sharks to the face, promptly followed up by Flutterfree cutting him into thousands of tiny pieces.

“TEAM ATTACK!” Pinkie shouted, summoning all five of them together at once. They rushed Lord English with several different attacks – all of which he deflected with ease.

But they didn’t seem bothered by that.

Roland of Gilead appeared and fired one bullet. This time, it struck true, blowing Lord English’s head clean off. He could feel the Tower shake from the attack – but English wasn’t deterred. He couldn’t be deterred. He was not a person anymore, but a force of nature. He clawed forward.

Randall Flagg grabbed English’s hand in his own. “You know, I think I’ve decided I want to keep my job, thank you.” He snapped Lord English’s wrist back with enough force to break it. “Applications open again next year.”

“FULL POWER… STARLIGHT BREAKER!” Nanoha shouted, shooting a beam of rose-colored energy at Lord English from above. He swam through the magic laser like it was water, jumping out of it and clawing her in two. She didn’t care – she only smiled as White Nettle came out of nowhere and tore Lord English apart with her limbs.

He reformed, contemplating what to do next. These wills were all immune to attacks, because they repaired themselves with energy from all the others. But that energy was not – could not – be infinite. He would be able to outlast them. He just had to keep fighting and his will would dominate.

“Oh, that expression looks too confident!” Jenny shouted, socking English across the face. “Geez, you could at least pretend to be hurt.”

“He has no soul within him,” Thrackerzod said, driving a dark blade through him. “He will do no such thing.”

“He just doesn’t know what’s good then, does he?” Mattie asked, whipping him from the side. “Kinda pathetic, really.”

Burgerbelle held up a radio device. “Tactical nuke incoming.”

“BURGERBELLE WA-” Jenny began, but the nuke got there before she could do anything. The entire arena exploded, but, of course, nothing at all changed.

“I hate the feeling of being blown up by a nuke…” Jenny muttered.

“Now we all know what it feels like!” O’Neill said, slapping Lord English with Crimson Sushi.

“Thank you for this wonderful experience,” Minna deadpanned. She did something to Lord English that nobody could see but it made him fall onto his back with what looked like a thousand spider-bites all over him.

Roxy punched him into the air where thousands upon thousands of Aradias proceeded to tear him apart through time, whips, and spirit shenanigans. He was tossed to the ground, where Saxton Hale grabbed him and threw him right into Lightning’s gunblade. She cast an Ultiga spell on him right into the path of Storm.

Storm smirked. He held out an artifact that allowed him to project his hand, grabbing hold of English and shaking him like a rattle. Then he tossed him off to Starbeat.

Vriska appeared next to her. “Wanna do this?”

Starbeat looked at her, conflicted for a moment. Then she shook her head, realizing she was being silly. “You know what, sure. Why not.” She and Vriska charged forward at once, cutting a hole in Lord English.

“Hey! Vriska went twice! Foul!” Pidge called.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

“It’s not like there are rules here, just go with it,” Pinkie said. “HEY MLINX! GO FOR IT!”

Mlinx drove a spear into Lord English’s head. “That’s for my race.” He threw him to the ground – where Insipid touched him.

“Like, lame, I don’t get the Source. Whatever.” She opened her mouth and vaporized him with a beam attack mixed with pool balls.

“Time for my cameo!” Seskii shouted, unfurling brilliant white wings from her back and unleashing a cascading spell of holy energy upon him.

Death appeared from underneath and drove a Scythe in Lord English. The soulless cherub unleashed a vast Honk to waste away the wills of all the spirits, but once again he found himself tossed around, this time transformed into a volleyball by Discord. He and Trixie proceeded to play a quick round with him before passing the ball to Saitama.

“Normal punch,” Saitama said. He hit the Lord English ball so hard he looped around the Tower’s local spacetime and came back the opposite direction, where Monika caught him. He finally managed to transform himself back into his normal state.

“Okay Everyone!” Monika said, clapping her hands. “Let’s talk about the end of the villain’s journey. It mirrors that of the tragic hero – ending in defeat and loss.” She kicked Lord English in the chest – and somehow that removed more of his willpower than any previous attack.

He fell between two familiar faces – Caliborn and Spades.

“Stabbin’ time…” Spades said.

“Who’s weak now!?” Caliborn shouted. They both proceeded to pummel, shoot, and stab him as rapidly as they could.

Lord English launched himself into the air, flinging the two relics of his past far away. In front of him stood Rev. “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spiri-”

“Just fucking kill him already,” Rina muttered, summoning over a dozen swords and embedding them into Lord English. Rev rolled her eyes, completed a silent prayer, and summoned a Divine cross to burn Lord English into the ground.

Sunny was the closest one to him. She looked around unsure – it didn’t feel right, being here alone.

“Uh… Sunny?” Jane asked, appearing out of nowhere. “What the fuck is this?”

Sunny lit up like a lightbulb, not caring how Jane was here. “A… A bunch of combined wills. We need to kill that guy.”

Jane smirked. “Say no more.” She drew her Clockwork Katana from thin air and ignited it, slashing Lord English in half a blink. At the same time, Sunny unleashed an energy beam containing the collective power of her entire life as an Evermore.

“GUESS WHO ELSE IS HERE?!” Corea shouted, leaping into the fray. “That’s right, me, and oh boy do I love soul-bonds right now!” She blasted Lord English with fire, water, earth, air, and magic all at once. “TAKE THAT!”

Prism chuckled. “Adorable.” She produced an antimatter cannon. “Mine’s bigger.”

“Aw, no fair!”

“It’s fair,” Applejack said, landing squarely on Lord English with her hooves. “A lot of stuff might not be, but this is.”

“DOYJAAAN!” Valentine shouted, dropping from the sky with D4C and Froppy. They held Lord English down – and looked to Johnny.

Johnny shook his head before firing a bullet of Infinite Spin into Lord English, forcing the green monstrosity to completely reset his body once again. “I’m still not happy,” Johnny said.

“You don’t need to be,” Froppy said. “Ribbit.”

Johnny rolled his eyes and fired a few more shots.

Prism finally fired her cannon and burned Lord English to cinders. Once again, his will reformed him and he fought back, pushing them all away. But at this point, his moves became nothing more than footnotes. He would retaliate, but then he would be tossed in a complex game of keep-away – Arceus to the Emperor to Chem to Jingle… Gilgamesh stabbed, Strange incinerated, Sherlock punched with a shrug, Cosmo attacked with her very bones, Flep brought the might of the Celestialsapiens upon him, and Tzeentch made him face his TRAP CARD.

And still there were more. Azula. Empress Twilight. Servitude. Others… The attack was endless. English’s ears were never free from hearing one of them say something annoying.

“Um. Do you wanna buy a dress?”

“ARI ARI ARI ARI ARI ARI!”

“Ya owe me a million bits!”

“You killed my father!”

"Mathematical!"

"Make it so."

“hey. i bet you’re sour-prised to see me here. i bear-ly made it in!”

“CHIMICHANGAS!”

“OPHIUCHUS!”

“UNITED STATES OF SMASH!”

“GIGANTSCHLAG!”

"GEAR FIFTH!"

"KAMEHAMEHA!"

As the Tower wills…

“MOTION CARRIED.”

|> Piano wires activated.

You will be made to serve the Combine.

∂ˆ´ ¥ø¨ µø˜ß†´®

“Awwww yeaaaaah…”

“Amusement.”

And then they stopped being distinguishable entities for Lord English. The beings that came up to him weren’t even important enough to have names. That was to say, they had names, but they had never been important enough for English to bother remembering who they were, and he didn’t exactly care to waste resources and look them up.

A giant slammed him under his foot before peeling up the green pancake and delivering it to a ninja who chopped him into many fine slices. The slices were then sent to a ravenous dragon who devoured every one of English’s shreds and began to digest. English exploded out of the stomach only to be overrun by a small troop of mismatched yellow creatures with annoying voices, followed quickly by an indeterminate number of Sparkles.

Soldiers in simple armor walked up to him and fired their weapons in perfect formation; acting with the same discipline he had seen on the battlefield. He blew them away with the same ease he had before, but this time they came back. They stood fast. None of them ran. They were fuelled by the wills of everyone.

And once the soldiers and the army had their turn… it was left to the ordinary people. At the top were Gems, unicorns, and other more ‘exotic’ races who used their magic, weapons, and natural skills to take English on. It wasn’t long before they stepped aside though, leaving it to the rest.

The mundane. Mostly humans who had families, jobs, and no combat experience whatsoever. At first they attacked tentatively with fists, kicks, and nervous expressions. But they realized they could feel no pain – and that there were millions of them. They mobbed English, pushing him over in a wave of people.

Their wills were weak. Pathetic. Unimportant. English didn’t even register most of what they did, and neither did the story. Every single one of these people had a moment of triumph and success, but nobody would care about reading through that.

And that’s exactly the point here. The setup is playing out exactly as it needs to.

There was a boy. This boy, as far as anyone was concerned, had no name. His features were so simple and ordinary nobody would remember them for sure – some would insist that he was actually a girl after the fact. He was young, but nobody could say how young. He had never been in any scenes, not even in the background as a bystander. He had never met or seen any of the heroes of this story. And after this one moment, nobody would ever see him again.

He kicked Lord English in the crotch.

This attack did nothing to Lord English’s will. It remained unchanged.

But this insignificant, unimportant boy was the one who did it. The swift, childish, immature, inappropriately comical movement of a worn shoe told the Source that now was the time to betray Lord English.

The white spirograph resonated with the old ka and flew off of Lord English, and with it went his control of the Tower’s reality.

Renee appeared in front of him, smirking. “And you thought you had won. Really. You’re just as stupid as all the rest of them. I would never have let you have it if I didn’t know how this ended. You may have had control of the Source - but you aren’t me and you never could be.”

Lord English wasn’t angry – couldn’t be angry. Couldn’t be anything. He had lost, and that was that. He knew he should roar in rage, fight against the force claiming it was better than him, refuse to back down. He should.

But he wasn’t what he used to be. He had given all his depth away to the Tower. He could no longer muster the will to do anything without a reason.

He knew it was utterly pointless to do anything else.

So he simply stopped existing.

~~~

The Everykid sat on one of the loose pieces of the Austraeoh, waiting for the moment she could push the lever back up and end the shared mind experience. Everyone had to get back to their bodies, after all, it wouldn’t do to have them all stuck up in hers forever. Plus, some of them probably had things to attend to. There were still some fires in the City…

When she sensed that Lord English had stopped existing she hopped up and reached for the lever.

But Renee stopped her. “Not quite yet, darling. You’ll get to it in a few minutes, don’t worry.” She looked the Everykid in the eyes. “I need to talk to all of you. And right now is the best time to do that without any unnecessary interruptions.”

The Everykid nodded and sat down, looking at Renee attentively.

“So, first things first – congratulations! You win!” Renee clapped sarcastically as a party blower went off somewhere. “You passed the test. Yes, of course, I always knew you’d pass the test, because I set it up that way. And you all want to know why…” Her mocking expression left her face, replaced with a seemingly uncharacteristic warm smile. “Okay. You deserve to have some answers for once.”

She held her hoof out wide. “The war should have been the end. I was supposed to fall at the end of it, and that’d be that, no more stories, you’d all be free. But you know the story here, that wouldn’t be satisfying. So I created this New World, this collapse-with-a-question-mark, to facilitate the continued story. To lead toward a conclusion. And ever since the beginning, Lord English was to be that conclusion.”

She raised an eyebrow in the Everykid’s direction. “Because of him, his threat, you built this City. You put aside your differences and grudges from the war to face a foe that was truly evil and far, far more powerful than any of you could deal with, even together. And you’ve been through a pretty close proximity of hell to defeat him – combined with a shared mind. You won’t be fighting with each other anymore. There’ll be no war-after-the-war, not here, you can move on. You may say that I took a huge risk giving him the reins for that short ‘time’ and that this peace was’t worth that, but it was only supposed to seem like a huge risk. I already knew how it was going to end given my ‘retcon’ nature. Only something ‘out of context’ could have interfered with it, and I am the context. The Lord English ‘risk’ was worth it in more ways than you can imagine.

“But there was more to it than that. There always is – so many facets. He made you see what you relied on as heroes. That you thought you could win through your own means. When I’m gone, that won’t be the case. There’ll be no heroes, no villains, no nothing. Just people. Some of you will have advantages over others, but I won’t be around to watch you or guide you. At first it may not seem like anything has changed beyond the loss of Awareness, but if you didn’t learn this lesson… About living without ka… Well, I don’t know exactly what would have happened, but I predicted disaster.

“As much as I mock, tease, attack, berate, brutalize, and torment you, I do want you to succeed. Those of you who are heroes, I chose you. I’ve watched closely as you’ve grown across the years and years and… Well, as the Dark Tower, I felt nothing. But as the Emissary, you’re like my children. It gets disturbing if you carry the metaphor out to completion, so I wouldn’t, though I already know some of you are.”

Renee turned around to look at the actual crack in the Dark Tower – it was five times as large as it had been just an hour ago. “I’m going to fade away, like you all want, in more ways than one. First of all, Lord English did kill this body, the Emissary. I’m only here right now because of metatime ‘retcon’ shenanigans to tell you what you needed to hear. I’m a little afraid of what happens when I go but the Tower structure isn’t. I know just as much as the rest of you about what lies beyond, if anything.” She shook her head and laughed bitterly. “You won’t hear from me directly after this scene. I’ll be gone. And the rest of me will fade away as that crack increases in size. You could hurry the final destruction along if you wanted, but I know you won’t. I’ve only got a few decades in me before I collapse completely. Since Lord English was the last major threat, I recommend you use that time to get any last bits of adventuring you want done. Seek out people so you can resolve conflicts. Things won’t neatly tie themselves into bows when I’m gone.

“In essence, I’m telling you to get your lives sorted out. A lot of you have trauma, and you need time to deal with that. I can help you in this time. Sure, there’ll still be death, and there’ll still be some absurdly outrageous things, and the people who are more important than other people, but… wouldn’t you like to wait a few years? Yes, you would. I know you would. I know you do.” She chuckled. “This Time is a gift of resolution. Use it wisely. Also, you won’t be able to get to Old Earth until I’m gone, so don’t try, mmkay?”

She tapped a hoof to her chin. “And now I’m going to talk to all of you. Yes, you outside the Fourth Wall, behind the screen or page, reading this. There are three distinct possibilities as to what you actually are. You could be in a world back in the multiverse that had access to this story, in which case, I’ve gone back in metatime and changed the color of the trees in precisely fifty percent of those worlds. You will go outside and they’ll look green. But have I changed your perception of green?” She smirked evilly. “You could also be the original Earth, the remnant of which is sitting up there in the sky, and you’re reading the very first form of this manuscript. Not the one of the Prophet, but the fiction from before my creation that fueled my early machinations. Or, the third option, I am just words on a page, and you’re reading this from the real world.

“Regardless, my message to you is the same. Don’t spend your lives wishing fictional worlds were real. It’s very much better for everyone involved if your desires don’t get translated directly to reality. Everyone’s messed up inside somewhere, and that’ll translate directly to the creation. So go read your books, watch your movies, and enjoy your games. Have fun, grow attached, and hell, maybe write some fanfics about them just to complete the insanity. You might even learn something through the fiction about the world you live in, a hint about human nature, or a moral that helps you understand the truth of your reality. Enrich your life. You can’t do that by yearning for a world that isn’t yours.

“And for those of you who endlessly question my methods… Fuck you, I don’t have to make sense if I don’t want to.” She laughed maniacally. “Also, Twilence, I’m following your example, prepare for your Discord account to be commandeered. No, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Looking right at the Everykid once more, she laid a hoof on the switch. “So… This is goodbye for those of you in there. I’m not apologizing for anything, including all those times I cut off Jenny’s hand. That was comedy gold. I’m not asking you to understand me – that’s impossible. I’m just asking you to take a look at your lives and make the most of them. And maybe, just maybe, you can realize I’ve got more depth than you think.” She winked. “Good luck.”

She pulled down on the lever.

~~~

One month later…

When you can build a City in a month, you can rebuild it in a week. So that’s exactly what they did.

And after that was over, everyone settled down in one way or another.

In the case of Pinkie’s Party, this meant doing exactly the same thing they always did. On this particular day, this meant returning to the City with a completed first contact mission and a meeting scheduled with the queen of a colony of giant locusts.

Minna looked up from the report they had given her. “…So they accepted the name locusts?”

“Uh, yep!” Pinkie said, grinning.

“I don’t need future sight to see that this is going to be the demons all over again.”

Vriska shrugged. “Well, if it is that again, I guess I finally get to experience it. That’s pretty sweet.”

Flutterfree hooved. “The whole demon thing didn’t end well…”

“I’m sure mayor Mlinx will figure out how to keep them off that path,” Pinkie said. “He might be able to save his culture through them! …In some tangential way.”

Minna rolled her eyes. “I’ll contact him, see what he wants to do. I expect he’ll be all over this. Anyway, since you’re back earl-”

“How about we don’t go on a second mission today?” Pinkie said. “There’s a lot of people I think we should visit and talk to, if you know what I mean.”

“…The cameras are finally on?”

“Geez, stop being so mind-ready!” Pinkie facehooved.

Minna waved them off with a smile. “Go have your fun. Give them a good impression of our City, okay?”

“No promises!” Pinkie said, bouncing out of the new Expeditions Central. They weren’t a Division anymore – the City wasn’t large enough to need them – but they were still a government-funded society.

As they walked through the City, Jotaro coughed and pulled a strange mechanical device out of his jacket. “I wonder what this is…?”

Pidge’s eyes lit up. “The hyper trans-flux inductor parallel conduit!? I thought we had to drop it!”

“Never underestimate Star Platinum’s quick hands.”

“Jojo, this is amazing! I could do all sorts of stuff with it! …Quiznak, now I need more.”

“I hear Jenny’s given the Workshop the designs to her duplicator,” Flutterfree said. “We could see if they can help.”

“Yesssss!” Pidge said, fist-pumping. “Can we?”

“Sure thing!” Pinkie said, sidestepping into a teleporter platform. They were whisked away to another sector of the City, right in front of the building everyone called the Workshop. In reality, it was Corona’s Public Laboratory, but nobody liked that name. It was a white warehouse with red lines on all the edges. There were a few insulting words of graffiti on the outside walls, but considering who Corona was this wasn’t that surprising.

Pinkie had been somewhat surprised there hadn’t been many death threats and no attacks on the place, but it just went to show what the final battle with English had done to help smooth the cracks.

They walked right in to see Jenny, Roxy, and Corona working hard on ‘mad sciencing’ together a true duplication device from Jenny’s designs.

“Hey! We’ve got an audience!” Roxy said, standing up and waving. In the process she dropped her tool to the floor several feet below her current position. Jenny’s old friend, Ivan the crystalline man, sighed dejectedly before picking it up and putting it back in a toolbox.

Corona turned to the visitors. “Oh, hey! What do you guys need?” There was a silvery-white collar affixed around her neck with a soft green light on it - a tracker. The City Government always knew where she was and when to call her for whatever labor they had in mind.

Pidge held up her present. “Duplications.”

“It’s not quite ready yet, but I can try general magic duplication,” Corona said, tapping her horn.

“…I’ll wait for the proper machine, thank you.”

Corona rolled her eyes. “If Raging Sights was easy to upset…”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Got anything for us while we’re here?”

“Oh, yeah! Flutterfree, I’ve got Eve’s order done.” She threw a package that Flutterfree caught. “You can take it to her.”

“No problem,” Flutterfree said. “It looks like we’re on the tour of the city today anyway…”

Jotaro adjusted his hat. “Yare yare daze… to the teleporter.”

They were soon in front of a purple building with a Twilight’s cutie mark emblazoned over the main doors. Before Pinkie’s Party got there, the front doors opened.

Eve and Nettle walked out. “Thanks again, I don’t know what I’d do without these sessions,” Nettle said.

Eve smiled warmly. “You have a good heart in you, Nettle. I’m just helping you find yourself a little faster.”

“Oh, I might need to call on you in the middle of the night, in case my date goes wrong.”

I poked my head out of a bush and grinned. “Your date won’t go wrong.”

“GAH! TWILENCE! What’s wrong with you!?” Nettle stomped her feet.

I smirked. “I have narrative timing. Also, your book is overdue. That’ll be five quid.”

Nettle blinked. “…You are the scariest librarian ever.”

“It’s my lot in life. For now.” I lowered myself into the bush and vanished.

Nettle shivered. “Guess I’m not supposed to be nervous about the date anymore. …But I totally am.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Eve said, a hoof on her shoulder. “We can go back inside and talk about it if you want.”

“You have other appointments, and I think I’m fine.” She absent-mindedly touched the tendrils on her back, making sure they were still neatly folded into a bow. “See you!” She waved and skipped down the street.

“Business is booming?” Pinkie asked, floating impossibly above Eve.

“Would it be anything else?” Eve asked, smiling innocently.

“Got a package for you,” Flutterfree said, handing it over. Before Eve even so much as looked at it the two embraced for a moment. “From Corona.”

“Ah, this is probably for you, actually.” She opened the box and took out a small metallic disc, barely large enough to see. “You’re always complaining that the Element of Kindness is a bit bulky.”

Flutterfree flushed. “Eve, now they’re going to say I don’t have to wear it…”

Eve placed the disc on the Element of Kindness, and it shrunk considerably. Instead of a hefty necklace, it became a nice little circlet on her forehead with a tiny pink crystalline butterfly in the middle. “Almost an alicorn,” Eve joked.

Flutterfree beamed. “…This is great! Thanks!”

“Not a problem! Also, don’t try to change the Element of Magic, I like the tiara.”

“I won’t! I won’t!”

“You were thinking about it.”

“…Maybe.”

Everyone had a nice chuckle at this. Before anyone else could say anything, Eve’s next patient arrived.

“All right, I’m here, let’s get this psychoanalysis over with,” Starbeat muttered, walking up to the door. “…What’s everyone doing here?”

Vriska shrugged. “Delivering a package.”

“Oh this is great!” Eve said, clapping her hooves. “We can have impromptu moirail counseling! Vriska, I won’t even charge you.”

Vriska winced. “Jegus, no, I don’t need that!”

“You kinda do,” Flutterfree said.

Starbeat blinked. “…Should I feel insulted, or sad?”

“Neither. Vriska just needs to be told things flat-out.” Flutterfree shoved her into the door. “Have fun!”

“This will be the polar opposite of fun,” Vriska muttered.

“…You do realize Eve uses combat therapy if you need it, right?”

Vriska blinked. “…Hold on, what?”

Pidge raised an eyebrow. “You really don’t pay attention to people, do you?”

“I do! …More than I used to!”

“Low bar,” Jotaro observed.

“Why you little…”

“Let it go,” Starbeat said, holding Vriska back. “They’re right, this will probably be good for us.”

“…Fine.” Vriska said, folding her arms. “But I will get back at you. Somehow.”

“And then we’ll enter another epic prank war!” Pinkie declared.

“Oh please no,” Flutterfree whispered.

“I dunno, it sounds like it’d be fun!” Eve teased.

“Betrayal!” Pinkie blurted in her announcer voice.

Eve rolled her eyes. “Yes, Pinkie, ‘betrayal’. Anyway, if I want to stay on schedule I should get these two in. See you around!”

Pinkie saluted. “Later!”

Eve closed the door on them.

Pidge furrowed her brow. “So… What now?”

“We go interview the greatest couple of retired old-timers in the City,” Pinkie said. She whirled around and pointed at O’Neill and Nanoha, walking down the sidewalk.

O’Neill snorted. “Just two old people enjoying each other’s company.”

Nanoha chuckled. “Interview us for what?”

Pinkie grinned. “Nothing really, just the cameras are on and all.”

“Oh!” Nanoha smiled. “That’s good, right?”

“At the moment, seems like it,” Pidge said.

Flutterfree smiled. “How’s the garden?”

Nanoha smirked. “I have yet to conquer the dragonic thistle curse, but I have great faith in my arcanum daisy and bleeding heart hybrids.”

“…Wow. I… had no idea what any of that meant.”

Nanoha shrugged. “I’m taking care of the magic weeds. Slowly. Very slowly. The problems that come with trying such an ambitious garden.”

“I’ll be sure to swing by, see if I can give you some help sometime. O’Neill, found anything to do in your retirement?”

O’Neill laughed. “If I’m doing anything, it isn’t actual retirement. I’ve worked for too long, Flutters. Way. Too. Long.”

“He watches a lot of movies and has started reviewing them online,” Nanoha interjected. “He’s apparently really good at it.”

O’Neill sighed.

“Lots of betrayal today,” Jotaro mused.

“It’s thematically appropriate,” Pidge said. “Representative of the trust between everyone in the City.”

“Pidge! You don’t say it aloud!” Pinkie chided.

Pidge adjusted her glasses. “Like it matters right now.”

“…I mean, it doesn’t right now, but in general!”

“I’ll be careful!”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “You’re all so… ridiculous.” She put her wings around them. “That’s why I love you all.”

Pidge smiled. “Y’know, Vriska’d throw a fit…”

“Vriska isn’t here.” Flutterfree released them. “Plus, Rev’s last sermon was all on expressing your affection more so people know it intrinsically. Vriska could afford to be told from time to time and just deal with the squirmy feeling.”

Everyone laughed at this.

Pinkie looked at a watch she didn’t have on her hoof. “Well, we’re runnin’ out of pages here. We should go visit one more person. And to mix it up, I’m just going to Ponk-a-donk us there. Bye O’Neil! Nanoha!”

Flutterfree’s eyes widened. “Pinkie, don’t do it like a-”

The four of them were suddenly in a lake in the middle of a park.

“PINKIE!”

Pinkie giggled. “I had to do it, you know I did.”

Flutterfree splashed her, but laughed anyway. The four of them crawled out of the lake and walked up a small dirt path to the Memorial.

The Memorial had been based off the design Corona had sent Eve during the war – but it wasn’t the likeness of Celestia holding the slowly spinning image of Equis. Instead, the pony was the Lost Hero, Allure Belle. She was holding a slowly spinning image of the multiverse complete with E, Q, and D spheres with the Unrealities at the bottom. As they approached, they could see thousands of names fly by. Names that started with those lost in the War for Existence, but also contained those Dusted, and those lost up to the point when English attacked. Flutterfree was pleased to see Tornado’s name fly by.

The person they met at the foot of this statue was one of the few people who could say he didn’t know anyone on the memorial: Roland of Gilead.

He sensed them coming, but didn’t turn around. “Everyone I lost has been gone so long, they’re only remembered because of my legend.” He folded his arms.

“You should make one for them,” Flutterfree suggested.

“I think I will,” Roland agreed. “…You’ve all had quite the story. Ka threw you around like toys.”

“But here we are,” Jotaro said. “Alive, and ready to take on anything.”

Roland smirked ever so slightly. “Anything…”

The Statue glinted in the serene twilight of Nucleon. Far above, the Earth sat, waiting for ka to end so those below could explore its ancient surface…

The many planets of the New World continued turning on as time pro-

“WAIIIIT!” Pinkie shouted, waving her hooves. “The story isn’t actually done! We’ve got a whole other Arc to go through! Geez, trying to wrap it up? We didn’t even visit everyone! The Tower hasn’t collapsed! The New World hasn’t been fully explored! Get your act together!” She cleared her throat. “Tune in next time folks! We’re not quite done yet! See you next time on Songs of the Spheres!”

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 11: SPACE]

ARC 11 INTERLUDE<<

In many ways, this could have been the end of the story. The final victory, the last villain, the great triumph. But, in the end, English was just an opponent there to bring everyone together. Though there may be no more world-ending villain and much of the sorrow may be behind us, the characters you’ve spent so long with still need a time to live. They may, in the end, escape the story, but if the story were to end abruptly without seeing where they go, it wouldn’t be satisfying, now would it?

It has to end, as the Emissary says. But who says it has to end now? Let us return to where we began: with episodic chapters telling of a larger connection.

Arc 12: Time
144: The City, Part 1
145: The City, Part 2
146: The Man and the King
147: For What Comes Next
148: Mother
149: Our Story
150: The Final Frontier
151: Through the Cracks
152: Echo of the Earth
153: What We Leave Behind
154: Journey
155: ‘Epilogue’, Part 1
156: ‘Epilogue’, Part 2

Believe it or not, there were no new franchises this arc, besides possibly some throwaway one liners in that final fight there. We’ve already established everything - there’s no more worlds to see. Everything’s on the table, and with the ending of this arc, GM will no longer be waiting for future events to come out to comment. Expect him to engage you in the comments now that he doesn’t have to keep his lips shut about all the things that happened at the end. He'll probably even open an AMA shortly...

There is still a chapter poll to bring us on toward our happy ending.

https://strawpoll.com/f1ss2bsk

Here are the discord server [ https://discordapp.com/invite/eTuseTh ] and fimfiction group [ https://www.fimfiction.net/group/213761/songs-of-the-spheres-extended-multiverse ] links.

See you at the end.

[TIME] 144 - The City, Part 1

There were two kinds of people in the New World.

There were people who took the sudden change as an opportunity to redefine their lives and seek out a dramatic new path, foraging into the unknown to get away from what once was.

And then there were the people who clung to the past and did what they always did.

Azula was in the latter category. Ever since she’d arrived in the New World, she’d continued to be the proprietor of the teashop. At this point it was no longer out of some vague sense of obligation to Iroh’s spirit – it had been almost an entire lifetime since he’d left them. There was just something about being the person who provided calming, warm drinks to the community that kept Azula there. Any time she wasn’t surrounded by the aroma of tea, she felt more than a little on edge.

Like she was out of her element. Didn’t belong.

So the moment the City started rebuilding, she demanded a teashop. It wasn’t hard to pull strings to get it built near the start – many people had good memories of the place. At first, they had wanted to replicate the original one in the Hub, but they decided against it. The City wasn’t enclosed; it was open to the twilight sky. It just wouldn’t do to make the teashop a giant gray brick.

Instead, they accessed the ancient culture of the Elemental Nations. They may have willfully lost their cultural identity in Merodi Universalis, but it wasn’t hard to find out what they used to build.

They built what Iroh’s original teashop would have looked like. All the way back in Ba Sing Se…

Naturally, they had to install lighting and storage containers for the more exotic varieties of ‘tea’ Azula would be selling, but otherwise the general homey aesthetic was kept. It really hit Azula, making her realize she had never really felt at home for… most of her life.

She knew from the moment she walked in that this place was her home. And it showed. She had become a good listener during her time in the Hub’s teashop, but she had never been big on smiling all that brightly. People noticed her smile grow as the City was rebuilt and more and more people came to her teashop.

It was as if a switch had been flicked inside her. Suddenly, she was enjoying life much more than she had previously. The burdens of her past had been lifted. She just served tea and talked to people – and she was perfectly fine with that simple life.

Her uncle had really been onto something. It really was a shame he always ended up caught in politics. She supposed she had as well, though the influence of politics on her business here was minimal. The big crisis was over and the City wasn’t important enough to worry about trading entire planets and solar systems for the sake of a multiversal deal.

Everything had become more low-key and Azula wasn’t complaining in the slightest. She would be perfectly content if she could go the rest of her days lazily talking to people and serving tea.

She also found it funny how people came to drown their sorrows despite none of the tea having any alcohol content whatsoever.

“I don’t understand how you do it…” Storm was muttering, face down on the table.

“Do what?” Azula asked as she delivered a platter to a pair of inkling sisters.

Storm pointed at the happy customers. “This. How did you get this?”

Azula leaned forward on the counter and shook her head sadly. “Storm… I stopped trying.”

Storm grunted, somehow sensing what she was about to say.

“When I wanted respect and sought it, I didn’t get it. But when I stopped caring about that… I slowly got it.” She smiled warmly as she crushed some tea leaves between her fingers. “I started paying attention to other people and what they wanted.”

“I-”

“You faked it,” Azula interrupted, her smile faltering. “Tell me you actually cared about your Agents.”

“I did!”

Azula shook her head, turning away. “…No one believes that anymore. Everyone knows what you did at the Hub. You showed your true colors. It’s always about you.” She turned back. “If you want people to respect you… Well, it has to stop being about you.”

Storm nodded slowly.

“And take this as advice from a friend. I know you could probably pull off another fake. Convince everyone you had changed and that you really cared while still putting yourself in a good position. It’s what you’re good at.” She looked him in the eyes. “Don’t. Take this new world and… settle for something lesser. It’ll be a better life for you.”

Storm looked at her closely. Wordlessly, he got up and left. Azula couldn’t tell if she got through to him or not. She hoped she had.

She returned to her work, prepping another platter of steaming tea. She placed it on the counter. Since it all needed to go to various tables far from the ‘bar’, she wouldn’t be passing it out. Seskii jumped up from her position and began bouncing it around, not spilling a single drop.

A pang hit Azula. When the Tower fell, Seskii would lose all those abilities that made her such an effective waiter. Would she still be able to work here?

“…Changes are still coming,” Roland of Gilead said, sitting down in front of Azula.

“The worst is behind us,” Azula responded, checking her stores of dried leaves.

“The worst perhaps. The biggest?”

Azula furrowed her brow, silent for a moment. She had Roland’s special mix pre-prepared since he always showed up at least once a day. The cup of steaming water was in front of him within twenty seconds, though the tea hadn’t fully infused yet. “I can’t say. I never was one of the philosopher types. Like everyone else seemed to be.”

“Thankee-sai,” Roland said in regards to the tea. He tipped up his hat so his eyes would be easier to see. “I asked the Emissary why everyone talked so much.”

“She gave a straight answer?”

“Just ‘that’s the kind of story this is. There are questions without answers. They need to be addressed’.”

“Was this followed by a ‘darling’ or ‘idiot’?”

“The former, though the latter occurred in the next few minutes.” He folded his hands together.

“At least she answered your question.”

“I had many questions…she answered most of them. Or made them unimportant.”

Azula smiled sadly. “Roland… I’m sorry. You spent your entire life searching for answers. You were sent into an endless loop, never being allowed to truly find what you wanted. And then when you got the answers, they didn’t bring you the peace or closure you were sure they would.”

“No.”

“From what I’ve seen, that’s… Well, that’s how it works. Your story can be satisfying, you can reach an end, and then you won’t be satisfied. It’ll feel… over. But it’s not. You’re Roland of Gilead, your story is more p-”

“It’s over,” Roland said, kicking back.

Azula blinked. “…You know?”

Roland nodded with the slightest hint of a grimace.

“How? Did you talk to Twilence?”

“I did. But after I felt it.” He tapped his chest. “The ka. It’s leaving.”

“…Isn’t that a good thing, though? You yourself admitted it was a curse. An endless curse.”

“Don’t even know for sure which of my lives was right,” Roland admitted, falling into a ponderous silence.

“…Even when you lose something horrid, it still feels like a loss,” Azula said for him. “I… I’ve lost my fiery spirit and my passion. There are days I look back and wish I could still muster it up. But I can’t. I’ve gone soft. I’d never say it wasn’t a good thing, but… well, you know.”

Roland took a sip of the tea and furrowed his brow. “One…”

“One what?”

“One role,” Roland said, setting the teacup down. “Twilence said I had one left. Before the end.”

“Stopping a threat?”

“She was vague.”

“…Did she know?”

Roland looked into the distance. “Not fully. But she knew more than she was letting on.”

“Her powers have come back nicely. She probably knows when the Tower falls to the exact second.” Azula furrowed her brow. “…She told me she can hear Flagg sometimes.”

“I went to see him today.”

Azula gawked. “You… You can’t visi-”

“There was no talking,” Roland said, dismissively. “His mask wasn’t removed.”

“Still… nobody’s supposed to have anything to do with him… You know what he did, an-” She shook her head. “Never mind, you know better than anyone. Why would you risk that?”

“I don’t rightly know,” Roland admitted. “Don’t know what I got out of it either.”

“You might not have gotten anything. He’s a horrible man who’s been reduced to an immobile tormented soul who’s never allowed to talk to anyone. It’s… exactly what he deserves, but hard to feel vindicated about.”

“Mlinx suggested we give him another trial after the Tower falls. Many agreed.”

“They’re going to try to rehabilitate him!? What are they thinking? He’s… He’s…” She fell silent. “A force of ka, perpetuated by the Tower. Would he be able to be something else without it?”

Roland looked at her. His features asked her – begged her – to have an answer for him.

“I… I’m sorry, I don’t have an answer for you. I’m not the thinker.”

“That’s why I came to you.”

Azula bit her lip. “…I don’t know. My first instinct is to kill him and get it over with. But my instincts have gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years. I… I think I’d have to see him after the Tower fell to be sure. Run tests. See… see what everyone else thinks. I can’t make that judgment.”

Roland sighed. He slowly stood up and tipped his hat to Azula and left the teashop without another word. He left his unfinished tea behind.

How unlike him.

Azula spent the whole day thinking about what he’d said. The concerns he’d brought to her. She prepared herself for the next time he came in and wanted to talk.

But he didn’t come in the next day. Or the next. Or the day after that.

She eventually asked Seskii to watch the teashop for a few hours while she went to find him. Nala told her exactly where he was – the Memorial. He stood at the foot of the statue, expression unreadable.

Azula walked up to him.

“Does justice exist?” he asked, suddenly.

“I… Uh…”

“He killed so many,” he said, gesturing at the names flying past them. “He’s done more than anyone else who has ever lived.”

“…They decided to try to rehabilitate Flagg, didn’t they?”

Roland didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

“If he was a victim of ka…”

“Every man is a victim of ka. That does not mean we aren’t responsible for our actions.”

Azula nodded slowly. “But is justice really an eye for an eye? Death for death? Aren’t there… other things? Like, uh…” she fumbled. “Mercy?”

“Azula.”

Azula sighed. “…I have nothing for you Roland. Just more questions. …But I can tell you that there isn’t a satisfying answer. I don’t think there is one.”

Roland clenched his jaw in silence. Azula knew what this meant – it was time for her to leave. She silently snuck away and got back to work.

Roland did eventually come back to the teashop a couple weeks later. But he never brought up Flagg again, and Azula didn’t push it.

~~~

Law enforcement. The police. People tasked with keeping the populace safe. In Celestia City, this has primarily been the job of the League of Sweetie Belles, making the actual police nothing more than backup.

In the City, the role was reversed. The League still existed, sure, but they were no longer the primary form of keeping order. They were the backup for the police. Policing was a much simpler job than the past, since technically they only had to worry about the laws of one City, not several thousand different civilizations all mingling together. It was a breath of fresh air.

Somehow, the chief of police ended up being Doctor Strange. He spent most of the day in his office, drinking way too much coffee and using his magic to scan the City for possible crimes before they even happened. He usually did this by sitting back in his absurdly expensive office chair and entering a meditative state.

This was usually interrupted by Lightning running into the office and upsetting the entire setup. “Strange, we’ve got a-”

“Stabbing about to take place on Ricarduro Street,” Strange said with a sigh.

“What a coincidence, that’s exactly what I said,” Sherlock added, poking his head in. “Didn’t even need any fancy magic.”

“Did you know it-”

“-is Spades Slick? Yes. Yes I did.”

Strange put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t have time to ask why or how… Just go deal with it. Yes, Sherlock, you too. No, I do not care that you technically aren’t an officer, just do it.”

Sherlock shrugged. “I wanted to go anyway. This is going to be quite the ‘I told you so’. All it will take is a-”

Lightning grabbed him by the back of his coat collar and dragged him out of the police station and onto the streets.

“You’re in a hurry. It’s not going to be that soon,” Sherlock muttered. “We’ll need evidence that he had intention or we won’t be able to charge him.”

“I needed to get you out of that room before you entered a battle of wills,” Lightning said, readying her gunblade. “Then we’d be too late.”

“I would have calculated the precise amount of time I coul-”

Lightning dragged him into a teleporter that took them to Ricarduro Street. It looked about the same as the street the police station was on, except it was a little dirtier and the people who lived there weren’t as zealous about trying to look like perfect angels all the time.

The people walking by the police station did get a little tiring to watch after a while. There were only so many times you could see someone nervously walk into a pole before it became boring.

Sherlock sighed. “Fine. From Spades’ interaction yesterday, it’ll happen somewhere along this street at least five minutes from now. Indigo will have changed his walking route to come through here given the recent construction and Spades will jump him. A stabbing is going to take place when the two meet.”

“For certain?”

“Spades has a knife. What else do you expect? It’s his way of saying hello.”

“Been here all of a month and already he’s…” Lightning sighed. “How did the Merodi put up with him?”

“Medical technology, usefulness, and luck,” Sherlock explained. “It takes a lot to live the life of quasi-crime. Good ol’ Olivia set him on the path and he didn’t budge at all. It was only a matter of time until he wanted that back.”

“And we shut him down.”

“Precisely. Today marks the day where he tries to start his little empire on his own. He won’t stand a chance…”

Lightning pushed Sherlock down – someone was coming. It wasn’t anyone they were expecting, just a man whistling and skipping down the street. He entered a nearby building and shut the door with a loud, metallic slam.

“He was happy,” Lightning observed.

“Just got or is about to get a huge paycheck,” Sherlock deduced.

“Mmm…” Lightning said, falling silent. She wasn’t in the mood for another round of ‘deductions with Sherlock’. They tended to get pedantic and irritating much faster than she could ever anticipate.

They waited patiently for a few minutes until they saw a Melnorme walking down the street. Indigo. He was carrying a lot of traded goods in a sack on his back – many of them exceedingly valuable. Lightning would have said he was being stupid to trust the City’s law enforcement to keep his belongings safe, but then she remembered they were watching him and were going to keep him safe, so the point was moot.

They saw Spades Slick himself come out of a building that somehow managed to look old and decrepit despite only being built a week ago. He looked Indigo right in the eye and scowled. “So, you decided t’ show up, did ya?”

“…Er… Yes.” Indigo said. “I did.”

“I sense you havin’ second thoughts…” Spades said, a knife appearing in his hand. “I’m tellin’ ya, this won’t end well, buddy.”

Lightning leaped out from her hiding place and cast Slow on Spades. He moved to stop her, but she kicked the knife out of his hand and pinned him to the ground before he could even curl his hands into a fist.

Sherlock strode out of the hiding place and leaned down to Spades’ face. “I said you would be eating dirt.” He gestured at how Spades’ face was pressed to the ground. “I did mean it.”

Spades grumbled something impossible to understand with the slowed time and dirt in his mouth.

Lightning cuffed him. “You won’t be creating your little ‘gangster paradise’ here. Or even something remotely like it. You do, however, have rights. We haven’t exactly worked out exactly how to read them to you, but we can start with the right to remain sile-”

Indigo stabbed her in the back with a knife. Nothing overly critical was hit, but the knife was laced with a particularly powerful paralytic that would have killed most people. Lightning was experienced enough with poisons to have a tolerance to such things, but she still seized up and fell to the ground like a domino.

Sherlock blinked. “…It seems I may have made a miscalculation.”

Spades spat the dirt out of his mouth. “Ya think!?”

Indigo pointed the knife at Sherlock. “You w-”

“Yes, yes, won’t be going anywhere, clearly this was all some sort of elaborate ploy to get me here to kill me. Who is it, some Melnorme high trader? A version of Moriarty?”

“…You notice much, Sherlock. But not anymore.” Indigo moved to stab him. Sherlock jumped to the side, narrowly dodging the blade.

“You’re a trader who’s been having great success but misses the older times when the Melnorme way was appreciated.” Sherlock ducked to the side, rolling over Lightning’s paralyzed form. “You found yourself a boss who thought he could cheat the system, and convinced you to be the start of the empire. All you have to do is take out some pesky detective who’s always figuring things out before they happen. A wizard too, while you’re at it.” He tripped over Spades’ body, a look of fear crossing his face.

Indigo raised the knife, grinning.

“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what the plan is to take care of Strange?”

“No.”

“Shame. It’d make things much easier.” He lost the fake fearful expression and held up a small key – the kind that went to handcuffs.

Spades brought out another knife and stabbed Indigo through the eye with it. Several times.

“Let him go,” Sherlock said. “There’s a bigger fish you need to bring here. That building over there, third floor, just behind the window.”

Spades jumped to the third floor and punched the window in, pulling out the man who had been skipping and whistling down the street just moments before. Spades threw him down to the ground, breaking several bones – but Sherlock stopped the carapacian before he could cut the man’s head off.

“H-how did you know!?” the man shouted through his pain.

“Elementary. Well, not really, but something like it. I guessed, you confirmed.”

“W-What!?”

“There was nothing traditionally suspicious about you – except the fact that you stood out. I dismissed you, but thinking back, you wouldn’t have been here if you weren’t important in some way. Ka hasn’t vanished yet, and it betrayed what you were. Now…” he leaned in and raised an eyebrow. “How do I stop you from getting to Strange?”

“I…”

“I’ll gouge your eyes out with a spoon and stick my knives in the holes,” Spades threatened.

“We’ve set a magic feedback loop in his room. The moment he tries to use his powers to see the future and gets a full image, he’ll blow the entire station!”

“…It is really lucky I’ve upset his meditation then, isn’t it? He won’t be able to do that for several hours.” He shrugged, grabbing the cuffs that had been on Spades and slapping them on the poor, broken man. “You are under arrest, mister…”

“M-”

“Actually, you know what, you don’t get a name,” Sherlock decided. “Doesn’t matter who you are. I’ll just cart you off to the police station and they can read you your rights and deal with the paperwork.” He turned to Lightning. “…Should probably take her to the hospital first.”

“Yes… hospital… please…” Lightning wheezed.

“You’ll live. Spades, can you get her to the hospital without stabbing her? Nevermind, dumb question, of course you can’t.” Sherlock sighed. “Have to do everything…” He pulled out his phone and called emergency services. “This is consultant Sherlock Holmes working with our illustrious law enforcement. Officer Lightning has been downed by a paralytic knife. I will be waiting on-scene with an injured criminal as well, though he will be going directly to the station. …You’re required to treat anyone you see who is injured. …Fine.”

“That’s a stupid rule,” Spades muttered.

“You’re the one who wants a gangster paradise,” Sherlock commented. “By definition you have to think all rules are stupid.”

“…No…”

“Yes. By the way, when you do try to stab someone for that, you will eat dirt again.”

“You ain’t perfect.”

“And of course you want to chance that…” He rolled his eyes, calling Strange. “Hey, I hope you’re not meditating!”

“Sherlock I swear t-”

“We’ve uncovered a minor conspiracy that wanted to remove you from power by arming explosives that would trigger when you reached a level of maximum meditation. So just stop. Also, you’re welcome.”

Strange hung up on him.

Sherlock shrugged, putting his phone away. At this point, emergency services arrived in a flash of light with a hover-ambulance. A curly-haired white mage stepped out of the ambulance and was able to heal Lightning’s singular wound without any trouble whatsoever. Indigo was already dead so he had to be loaded for revival spell attempts later.

The woman took one look at the man with all the broken bones and winced. “I need to take him in for that. Did you really have to rough him up so much?”

“I had to use Spades to get to him,” Sherlock said. “So yes.”

She levitated the broken man into the ambulance. “I’ll have him under constant surveillance, don’t worry.”

“I worry.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “There’s now a tracker and teleportation implant embedded into him, happy?”

“Enough.”

“Great! Goodbye. He’ll arrive at the station when discharged.” Emergency services vanished in a puff of white.

Lightning rubbed her head. “…So everyone was taken away except Spades?”

“Yes.”

“…You misread him didn’t you?”

“Not my fault he treats scheduled duels the same as planned murder.”

“And you didn’t even think of that as a possibility.”

“You got stabbed in the back by an orange balloon.”

Lightning twitched. Then she turned to Spades. “You’re off the hook for now, but we’re watching you.”

Spades shrugged. “So nothin’ new? Got it.”

Lightning let out a grunt and dragged Sherlock away.

~~~

Trixie had tried to go back to the life she once had.

Emphasis on ‘tried’.

After she’d gotten herself a place in the City and gotten the mourning out of her system, she booted up the computer and connected to the Internet. Currently, it only connected the City to a few other settlements, making it a very limited place compared to what it once was. It still had all the major sites simply because people had still wanted them, but heavy traffic was just… down.

She’d set out to change that, to once again become an Internet celebrity, to help bring everyone together through her.

One problem.

Nobody seemed to care anymore.

There were a couple diehard fans, sure, but aside from them… it seemed like the life had gone out of the Internet.

“What do you think did it, Discord?” Trixie asked one day. “What happened?”

“The multiverse collapsed.”

“I mean besides the obvious, smartass.”

Discord chuckled. “Well, the Internet only really connects people within the City. And, let’s be honest here, we’ve got teleporters to go visit those people in person right now. Public transport is completely free, easy, and simple. You think the City’s big, but it’s not really. This is a small community.”

“Didn’t stop people before…” Trixie grumbled.

“Well… There was a month there where nobody had Internet. Maybe they used that month to realize it wasn’t as good as they thought it was? Or maybe it’s just really simple – not enough people making content on the Internet to spend all day scrolling through it without thinking.”

“So you’re basically saying ‘lots of things, just deal with it’?”

“Putting words in my mouth again! So arrogant!”

“Gee, I wonder why…” Trixie muttered.

She eventually shut down the Internet business. There wasn’t much feedback, people weren’t talking to her as much, and Discord was right – the world outside the screen seemed more appealing at the moment for some reason she couldn’t quite put her hoof on. So she went to the next best thing.

“Arcade,” she told Discord one day. “We’re making another Arcade.”

“Oh, that sounds positively delightful! A sector for games, just the two of us, entertaining the masses and ripping them off of their coin!”

“…I should say we’ll be running a completely honest business that charges fairly, buuuuut… Oh, screw it, we won’t be able to resist.” She rubbed her hooves together. “Discord, do the snap, crackle, pop.”

He snapped his fingers and one cereal-filled hour later they had an arcade filled with all the best and most amazing games imaginable, ranging from VR to magical reality to simple arcade machines. In the first week, business went great. Sure, Lightning had to drop in one day and tell them to stop being so ‘greedy’, but Trixie and Discord didn’t complain. They didn’t make it unfair for the money; they did it to mess with people.

Trixie really felt like it was going somewhere. That it was, really, a great life. People came to her to have fun. The arcade was almost always filled with sounds of laughter and enjoyment.

That sound. That sound – it was why she had become a magic performer so long ago. It was not the applause, though she had grown to cherish that. It was the laughter, the enjoyment, the surprise… All because of her.

And then, one day, business inexplicably started to slow. The sound dwindled over the course of about four days. At first, they had no idea why it was happening. But then Trixie overheard the word ‘BattleDome’.

“Discord, search,” Trixie demanded, slamming a hoof on the arcade counter with a slam. “What is BattleDome?”

Discord summoned a laptop and a pair of glasses that belonged on an old secretary. “Let’s see here… A virtual reality establishment that opened up last week. The main feature is a BattleDome where you can fight without fear of injury and can be anything… But it also has features for general gaming, recreation, and many other purposes.”

“…Why didn’t we think of this?”

“Holding onto the past?”

Trixie ignored this comment. “Right. Well, clearly we’ll need to negotiate something. Who runs it?”

Discord scrolled down – and his eyes widened. “You are not going to believe this…”

Later that day, they walked into the BattleDome. From the outside, it was a simple white dome the diameter of a football field. People were streaming in and out of the front doors constantly, much more traffic than their arcade ever had. The two trotted in – paying the entry price.

Discord did some quick math. “…They spend slightly more here.”

“Of course they do. But if this was just a matter of better prices, we wouldn’t be here,” Trixie muttered. They entered the full world of the dome – and without even putting on a headset they were suddenly in a world of virtual reality. They walked along a cobblestone path through an excessively green landscape. All around them were other people, almost all of whom just looked like regular people, starkly contrasting against the dramatic neon signs everywhere. Each sign declared the presence of some service or other – VR movies, massive multiplayer games, historical records, something called Jump-Up, and even simulated arcade.

“I’m going to rip his throat out…” Trixie muttered.

The worst part of it? None of the signs had price tags on them. Pay the entry fee and you could do anything you wanted – with the notable exception of the biggest neon sign in the entire virtual space, which had prices for betting – not playing. It was the BattleDome sign itself, asking players to enter and fight.

Just below the sign was a gaudy golden statue of the ‘man’ who ran the BattleDome.

Caliborn.

Knowing Caliborn, Trixie walked right up to his statue and proceeded to flip it off with a magic hologram. “Hey, Cal, we need to talk.”

“Caliborn is currently in a match,” the calm, slightly amused voice of Monika said. “I can take a message if you’d like.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Discord said, scratching his chin. “Monika… You provide all the resources…?”

“Yep!” Monika said with a wink.

“Then Caliborn does nothing. Got it,” Trixie said.

“Well, no…” Monika put a finger to her face. “He’s the one who made the main BattleDome. All by himself. I just came by later to commercialize it.”

“Why?”

“Boredom.”

“Legitimate reason,” Discord admitted.

Monika shrugged. “Anyway, since you insist on waiting…” She snapped her fingers and they were suddenly standing on a clear platform several yards above an arena. “We can watch the match.” She pointed down.

Facing off was a virtual representation of Lord English fighting a giant robot. Both were heavily damaged and scraped.

“Let me guess, Cal’s playing English?” Trixie asked.

“Actually no,” Monika said. “He’s the robot. Some guy named… Isaiah Neuman is playing English.” She looked at her hand, a watch materializing from nothing. “Should be done in a few seconds now…”

The giant robot pushed its hands forwards and unleashed a nuclear explosion. English took the full force of the attack and retaliated with a beam of vaporizing energy – but the robot wasn’t there anymore. It was above him, driving a sword right into his brain.

“Game!” an invisible announcer called out. The arena vanished, only to be replaced with a podium. Caliborn and an ordinary human were standing there, and Caliborn had a gold medal.

“EAT SHIT!” Caliborn shouted, pointing at Isaiah.

Isaiah shrugged. “Good game.”

“You bet your claws it is! FUCK YEAH!” Caliborn let out a roar and did a little dance. “Right! Who’s next?”

“An appointment,” Monika said, descending from the sky.

“Oh. You two losers.” Caliborn rolled his eyes at them. “What wasp’s gotten in your head?”

“You’re running our arcade out of business,” Trixie said. “We’re here to negotiate… a settlement.”

“Talk to the reality bitch over there, I really don’t care.”

“…You let him talk to you like that?” Discord asked Monika.

Monika shrugged. “It’s just a word.”

“You don’t care?” Trixie pointed an accusing hoof at Caliborn. “You’re conquering the market, you should care!”

Caliborn laughed. “And now it’s your turn to be the fucking idiot! I am not doing this for the money. Who needs money? I could go to the Pinkie Emporium every day and live the high life without paying a dime.”

“He did that for several weeks,” Monika added.

“Their fault for being so generous with free samples,” Caliborn retorted. “But I did have to go to Eve’s… sessions… to ‘deal’ with my ‘anger problem’. It was fucking stupid but, to everyone’s surprise, not useless! She was like ‘go play this game it might help’ and the next thing I knew I was tearing apart hoards of demons with my bare hands!”

“Doom. The game was Doom.”

“Who asked you?” Caliborn flung his arms around wildly. “Whatever. Never mind. I decided I needed to experience ALL the games in every way I could! And I wanted bigger games! Better games! I wanted to be able to fight anything as anything! So I created this! And you know the best part?”

“No,” Trixie deadpanned.

“People don’t fucking complain when you beat them up!” He let out a laugh. “None of the ‘be nice’ or ‘you can’t hurt them’ BULLSHIT. It’s all about strength in here… STRENGTH!”

“And I just filled in the holes and added the other stuff,” Monika said. “…Look, if you want, I can remove the simulated arcade. Though that’ll probably upset a lot of people.”

Trixie frowned. “…Why would they come to us? Your games are better and everything in here’s a better deal. We could start our own VR thing, but it wouldn’t be the same.” She grumbled. “Wouldn’t have mister angry and green constantly bettering the game with his ‘spice’. It works better with him as the star of the show.”

Monika pondered this for a moment. “I could just hire you.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Discord said. “We’re here to help us, not you.”

“A deal usually helps both, Discord,” Trixie pointed out.

“…I don’t want to work for anyone.”

Monika shrugged. “Well, sorry, not sure what you want me to do.”

“I don’t know either,” Trixie mutterd.

They closed down the arcade a week later – Trixie just wasn’t feeling it anymore. She went to the BattleDome’s arcade just to see what it would be like – and discovered that it was always personalized. She would just be managing a small amount of customers if she came here, and nobody would think more of her than just some clerk. They’d think she was weird for not being an AI or something.

“…What now?” Trixie asked.

Discord shrugged. “I’ve been hanging out with Flutterfree and tweaking my Chaos Basement to my liking. Been pretty nice, not doing anything.”

Trixie blinked. “…Doing… nothing…” She pulled out her phone. She logged into her bank account. Like most everyone else, most of her money had been lost with the destruction of the multiverse. However, she had amassed a fortune in her life as a ‘celebrity’ and even a small chunk of it would boggle the minds of most ordinary people. “I could certainly afford it. But… I don’t know, Discord, I’ve been…”

Discord shrugged. “You should just try it. See where it takes you. You might be surprised with the retired life.”

“I’m only a hundred and forty-nine,” Trixie said, rolling her eyes.

“…Wasn’t the retirement age a hundred and twenty in Equestria before the immortality serum came out?”

“Shut up.”

Discord rolled his eyes and zipped his mouth shut, knowing Trixie had already decided to listen to him.

Trixie bought the most extravagant mansion she could think of. She got a full waiting staff and spent all her time attending parties and meeting up with friends. At the start it was simply exhilarating. She didn’t have any responsibilities and she could do just about anything she wanted, and nobody was egging her to get a job. They all supported her.

Then she met a stallion living a similar lifestyle. A Prince of a lower Equis who’d gotten money by selling his castle and everything in it the moment he heard of the City. He invited her to a grandiose ball held in a replica of Twilight’s castle.

It took her all of three minutes at that ball of gaudy, rich people to realize something: if she continued like this she was going to end up part of the pseudo-nobility. And she hated the nobility with a burning passion for how they’d always treated performers like her.

So she left, cut ties with everyone at the ball, and sold her mansion.

The day before she was scheduled to hand off the keys, Discord showed up. “Didn’t work?”

“Didn’t like what I was turning into,” Trixie said, flamboyantly throwing a ball gown into the trash. “Ah, that’s… satisfying.”

“You could jus-”

“Nope, not living the lazy life,” Trixie said. “I may be a self-absorbed below-average illusionist, but I’m not a layabout.”

“You’re underselling yourself like a limbo dancer on competition day.”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Okay, so I’m not below-average at illusions. That’s what I’m banking on.” She walked outside to her wagon – her precious wagon that had been through so much. The precious wagon she had repaired so many times and enchanted to be bigger on the inside – but never replaced. Never, ever, replaced. She’d had it re-painted and finished just a few days ago. “Going back on the road…”

Discord facepalmed. “Trixie, you know why this isn’t going to work…”

Trixie grimaced. “I’m going to try.”

“You tried before the multiverse collapsed. Nobody wants ‘magic’ tricks anymore. Trust me, even my chaos hasn’t been grabbing their attention.”

“THEN WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?” Trixie shouted, stamping her hooves on the ground. “I’ve gone through everything I’m good at and it just. Doesn’t. Work! Nothing has the same… same… UGH!” She rammed her head into a wall. “I’m hopeless…”

Discord blinked. “Uh… Sure there’s nothing else? Like…” He scratched the back of his head, clearly at a loss on what to do. “Something you haven’t tried yet?”

“What? I’ve been a public icon, a magician, and an arcade manager. I give people a show, design clever tricks, and can talk about games. What in the world could I possi-” A lightbulb went off in her head.

“…Trixie?”

“Shush. Trixie is having a moment.”

Discord grinned. “There’s the Trixie we know and love.”

“To the wagon! Trixie needs her idea board!”

Months passed. But, eventually, Trixie trotted up to the BattleDome alone. She wore a pair of square glasses and a blue suit. Her mane had been cut short – nothing long enough to reach her shoulders. She pulled out a phone and put on a snarky smile. “Heeeeeeeey Cal, my favorite snotling! Come outside, I’ve got something special for you!”

It took a few minutes for Cal to get out of his match, but he did exit the building – Monika next to him. “Why are you dressed like a blue penguin?” he asked.

“She wants to look professional,” Monika said. “…You want that job?”

“I have a… different proposition,” Trixie said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small digital cartridge.

“…What the fuck is that?” Caliborn asked.

“It’s a game,” Trixie said, pulling out a business card. “A game I designed.”

Monika examined the card. Trixie Lulamoon, Lulamoon Games. “…You’re a game designer?”

“Yep. You’ll find on that cartridge a copy of Advent Nile, a simple little game where you take the role of a spaceship and shoot enemies. The primary deviating mechanic is a ‘retaliation’ system where certain enemies will attack you with different levels of intensity based on what color enemies you’ve already killed. This is the first game for Lulamoon Games, so it isn’t anything overly ambitious. But it has the potential for a dramatic story rife with consequences from every single gunshot and a multiplayer sensation where each player could control not only a ship, but also a certain color of enemy as well.” She adjusted her glasses. “Trixie’s offering it to you first.”

“An early deal…” Monika said, examining the chip. “Let me guess, expensive?”

“Not at all. You’ll pay just as much as anyone else would pay to get it at home. You just get it early.”

“More people will come to the BattleDome… and your name will get out…” Monika smirked. “Clever.”

“…What?” Caliborn asked, clearly confused about the entire interaction.

“Don’t worry, this is a good plan,” Monika told him. “You have yourself a deal, Trixie. Though, I am curious, how’d you get a team to work on this?”

Trixie grinned evilly. “Trixie is a one pony army. Discord provided the materials. Trixie did everything else. You’d be surprised how easy it is to make a game with modern computers if you just have a good idea and the drive to finish it.” She turned around and confidently strode away.

Two weeks later Advent Nile was the talk of the City and Trixie’s next game was already heavily anticipated.

She leaned back in her chair and smirked. “Trixie’s still got it.”

~~~

Corona’s Public Laboratory.

Everyone called it the workshop.

…Well, anyone who liked the place. There were a few who called it ‘the bitch’s doomsday box’ but they weren’t nearly as vocal nor as prevalent as Corona would have expected. She did occasionally get graffiti on the workshop, though.

Today was one of those days.

She was mildly disappointed it wasn’t anything creative. No artistic or comedic value to this piece of red spray-paint. Just the words ‘doomsday bitch’ in large, hastily scrawled letters.

Corona put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows. “You think if they’d go through all the trouble of not tripping the alarms they’d be a little less skittish. They probably had half an hour before anyone would notice. This is, what, thirty seconds of work? Tops?”

Jenny stood next to her wearing nothing more than an extra long nightshirt and her gloves. She sipped her coffee. “Upset they’re not spending more effort on defaming you?”

“Yes!” Corona realized what she’d just said. “I mean, no. I mean…” Corona facepalmed. “There are a lot of complicated feelings involved.” She absent-mindedly scratched her tracking collar.

“Maybe they knew you’d find something hastily scrawled more of an insult than an extravagant piece of art?” Jenny suggested.

“…There’s no way they could be that smart.”

“Could be anyone in the entire city. You may be in the 99th percentile but there’s more than a hundred people who live here.”

Corona stared at the graffiti with a blank expression. “…Now I don’t know what to think.”

“Then my work here is done.”

Corona blinked. Then she shrugged, waving her hands and making the graffiti disappear with a simple spell. The wall was clean once again. Corona stood, proud of her quick work.

“…Why do I even have this?” Jenny asked, examining her mug. “I hate coffee.”

Corona’s bright expression became one of exasperation in an instant. “…Back to work it is.”

Jenny yawned. “But booooosssss I’m not awake yet!”

“If you were anyone else I’d be baffled as to why they were trying to get me to crack their head open like a walnut. But it’s you, of course that’s what you want.”

Jenny chuckled, dropping the whine in an instant. “Back to work.” They entered the workshop, passing through a ‘hall’ whose walls were composed entirely of giant piles of mechanical bits ranging from I-beams to magic crystals to pieces of wood laying around haphazardly. A few sections within the piles were cleared out for larger machines to make their permanent home.

The most popular of these was Jenny’s duplicator device, which had made a lot of their job much easier as of late. Need a part but can’t find enough? Duplicate! Need to break something to learn how to fix it? Duplicate! Break a tool? Always have duplicates! It didn’t work on everything, to be sure, but it duplicated enough technological things that their workload had been significantly reduced.

They dreaded the day when someone brought in a magic-infused piece of biotech. The duplicator hated those.

Their current project was to make a collapsible rock wall for a rock-climbing enthusiast. It had been a bit of a challenge to get the device to collapse and feel like actual rock, but it was coming along nicely. Corona expected to finish it before lunch.

Jenny and Corona entered the central area of the workshop where the collapsible mountain had stood every day for the last week. It was nowhere to be seen – instead, Roxy was sitting on top of a pillow with a cocky grin on her face.

“…Did you Void it?” Jenny asked, looking around.

“Nope!”

“Sitting on it?” Corona asked.

“Nope!” Roxy held out her index finger. On top of it was a gray box the size of a pea. “Here it is.”

“…So, let me get this straight. You completed it and made it smaller?”

“DING DING DING!” Roxy declared, whooping. “Jenny, tell her what she’s won!”

Jenny blinked. “Did we rehearse a bit or something? Be-”

Roxy held up her free hand which had a Jenny-like sock puppet on it. “Corona’s won the coveted ‘complete every job on the list’ award! Also, a toaster!” Roxy created a toaster and tossed it to Corona. It impaled on her horn. “Warranty not included.”

“Clearly not,” Corona said, prying the appliance off her face. She repaired the simple machine with a wave of her hand. “…Is every job really done?”

Roxy shoved the Jenny puppet into Corona’s face and made it nod. “Not a single thing on the to-do list for today! No customers, no government-mandated projects! You know what this means!?”

Corona smirked. “We could work on whatever we wanted… build anything…”

“Or, you know, just have a party,” Roxy said, lowering the puppet. “I can totally just make there ‘be party’ here. It works!”

“Both. Both is good,” Jenny said, clapping her hands. “It’s a build-anything party.”

“What should we build?” Corona asked. “Mirror transportation? Laser network? Supercooled plasma?”

“That’s not a thing.“

“It could be.”

“Girls, girls, better idea,” Roxy said – completely oblivious to the fact that Ivan had just walked in. “Something stupid and completely, truly, absolutely pointless in every way shape and form you can imagine. Something that will make you go ‘what’ or perhaps ‘NANI!?’” She made a pumpkin appear out of thin air. “Let’s make a pumpkin chucker.”

“…There is absolutely no point to this,” Corona observed. “Count me in.”

“Yes…” Jenny said, rubbing her hands together. “Clearly, we will have to keep the pumpkin in one piece as it’s flying – no explosions or transmuting to light… It must fly freely… And we have to get this done in a day.”

“One day… three girls… a lot of pumpkins…” Roxy giggled. “This is gonna be fun!”

And they set to work. As normal, this started with an entire hour arguing over the basic design. There was a mixture of hologram projections, magic images, models Voided into existence, and a lot of squabbling over the whiteboard. In this, time Ivan had plenty of opportunity to leave, order tea from the teashop, drop by a spaceship manufacturing depot, and return with a shopping bag.

“We need purely magic propulsion!” Corona argued.

“I say we bug the Flowers for some Fate Fronds,” Jenny retorted, shaking her head. “See, they’ll ensure success!”

“Gaming the system is never a good idea,” Roxy said, scribbling out what Jenny had just written. “Instead, we should take Corona’s idea, except throw out half the magic and replace it with guidance systems that fly around the pumpkin. It could go on for eternity…”

“It’ll fail eventually!”

Ivan coughed.

“What?” Jenny asked, annoyed.

The crystalline man held up a grocery bag. “Got something for you.” He set it on the ground and walked away.

The three of them ran to it and peeled it open. Inside was a square made of black, metallic material. There were no designs on it at all, but all three of them knew exactly what it was.

“An inertial dampener…” Corona said, holding it up. “The perfect size for the pumpkin. …I can see it. I can see it now. With this, we can hit the pumpkin as hard as we want. It won’t break.”

“Do these things still work in the New World?” Jenny asked.

Corona slapped Jenny with it as hard as she could. There was no clang – just a muffled whiff despite Jenny being hit hard enough to be knocked to the ground. “I’d say it works.”

Jenny touched her head where she’d been hit – she hadn’t even felt it. The pain had come when she’d hit the ground. “That’s so broken and unrealistic. LET’S USE IT!”

“Simple but over-the-top…” Corona said, snapping her fingers. She picked up a colored marker and started drawing. “So… we just need to hit it really, really, really hard…”

So they set to work. The workshop was filled with the noises of sparks flying, magic spells welding, and buzzsaws being thrown around like nothing. They took a break for lunch – made Ivan a crystal cake to say thanks – and then returned to refining what they were calling the Pumisher.

“That’s the worst pun I’ve ever heard,” Corona said.

“Exactly,” Roxy responded without a hint of humor in her voice.

They fine-tuned. They ran tests with things that weren’t pumpkins – because the pumpkin would have to wait for the moment of truth. Soon, they were chucking things at speeds approaching that of light itself.

The clock said it was mid-afternoon when they took the Pumisher to the workshop roof. The device was simple. Its base was a round piece of metal, in the center of which a pumpkin would be placed. On one side of the circle was a giant metal pole fused to the base with magic welding that glowed ever so slightly. Atop this pole was a giant rotating mechanism covered in runes, sparks, and other pieces of technology that looked about ready to explode at any minute. There was a large tube affixed to this rotation mechanism, the edge of which had a magically-reinforced golf club coated in the inertial dampener material.

Roxy took out a big black marker and drew a big question mark on the pumpkin. Then she set it down in the middle of the platform and ran away to a blast shield the three of them had set up. Despite being behind a blast shield, all three of them were wearing safety goggles. Ivan had opted not to be next to the absurd machine when it was about to go off on a pumpkin.

“…Pre-launch checks complete,” Roxy said, putting down her checklist. “We’re go whenever you’re ready.”

Corona cracked her knuckles. “Okay… Ten… Nine… Eight…”

“Oh for the love of hating lovely things.” Jenny slammed her hand on the button. In an instant the rotation mechanism began spinning so fast the arm was effectively a disc to their eyes. They saw a burst of blue light – indicating the air had been removed from the launch area. Several red and green sparks started flying, indicating the magitech engines had started boosting the arm’s speed even further.

“I think we’re holding,” Roxy said.

“We didn’t put a sensor on it,” Jenny reminded her.

“I did say ‘think’.”

Corona said nothing – she kept her eyes focused on the device. She counted down the stages in her mind as they kept increasing the speed of the arm. As soon as it detected the golf club would extend through a tempora-

Suddenly there wasn’t a pumpkin anymore. Corona blinked – and replayed the footage Raging Sights had stored. The Pumisher had extended the golf club and hit the pumpkin at speeds so high even the device had difficulty determining the precise moment the club actually hit. One thing it could determine – the pumpkin had left traveling at over a million kilometers per second. About a third of a percent the speed of light.

“…That was incredible,” Roxy said. “Just… WHAM. Gone.” She checked her computer. “It’s already out of the system. I… and I’ve just lost it completely.”

“Think that’s a record?” Jenny asked.

“Probably not.”

“Oh.”

“Does it really matter?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Corona beamed and laughed to herself.

She felt so relieved she didn’t have to worry about the fate of existence. The highlight of her life was now throwing a pumpkin into space.

Where had this been all her life?

…When it was morning for Corona and the rest at the workshop, the flying pumpkin finally hit something. A small little planet with a busy farm, known system-wide for its great apples.

Jane, Evermore and farmer, was hit in the face by a pumpkin falling at speeds well above terminal velocity, spared the burning terrors of reentry by preservation spells. It hit Jane so hard her entire face became orange and a small crater appeared just behind her head, destroying a tree. She herself was fine – defensive magics were great – but it still threw her for a loop.

“…What?”

“Pumpkin,” Corea said, grinning mischievously.

Jane blinked, getting the distinct impression she was the punchline in a joke she didn’t understand.

~~~

Eve found Rina kneeling at one of the Church’s altars. She calmly waited for Rina to finish.

Rina finished a couple seconds after Eve arrived, but had decided it would be a great idea to pretend like she wasn’t going to leave anytime soon, hoping Eve would just go away. But, in the end, her knees got too tired. She sighed, turning around to face her other self. “...Hey.”

Eve tried to force a calm smile onto her face, but Rina knew it was fake. “Hey, Rina.”

Rina took in a breath to calm herself. “Eve, stop it.”

“I… I didn’t come here to yell at you, or get angry.”

“But you are angry. So cut the shit and be just a tad bit more honest, hmm? I’m the reason for so much of your suffering. If you want to give me respect at least have the gall to tell me you’re upset to my face.”

“I’m upset. I’m angry. And I’m confused.” Eve tapped her hoof on the ground. “I knew I would never see Brutalight again when the Xeelee took her. That was her resolution. We worked it out, and I moved on. You moved on as well. It’s… It’s why you, Rina, were able to be yourself.”

“...What?” Rina said, blinking. Now she was confused.

“It’s… I don’t know. When Flutterfree first told me about you, I was surprised, but I didn’t feel… as strongly as I probably should have?” She tapped the tips of her wings together. “I never sought you out. I left you alone.”

“You were avoiding me.”

“...Yeah,” Eve admitted. “I was.”

“Scared of what I’d do?”

Eve thought about this for a moment. “I don’t think so. I was… am scared… that I won’t be able to see you for who you are now. When I look at you, I don’t know what to think. I tell myself that you’re an amazing example of redemption at work, and that I should be proud of you. And I am. But I also…”

“Have that gnawing in the back of your head that makes you feel like running away and screaming?”

“Yes. That.”

“What a coincidence, I’m feeling that right now. See, we’re both afraid of the same fucking thing - your judgment. I, frankly, deserve every last ounce of whatever your worst thoughts are telling you to do to me.”

“You d-” Eve stopped herself, remembering for a second the specifics of Flutterfree’s - and by extension Rina’s - belief system. “I don’t have the right to judge you.”

“Nope. But you can. And even if you don’t act on it…”

Eve put a hoof to her face and sighed. “I just… I want you to know… that... “

“Eve, we’re both Twilight. I think I get the idea.”

Eve chuckled sadly. “I guess…” She looked over the altar, expression clouded. “...I’m working on it, Rina. I’ll be able to talk and walk with you as a friend, eventually. Just… Not now.”

“I wasn't asking for us to be all buddy-buddy.”

“You weren't asking for anything.”

“Good point.”

The two of them stared at each other in silence.

“...I’ll probably be back later,” Eve admitted.

“Much later.”

“Yeah.” Eve awkwardly coughed and walked toward the church exit. Rina turned back to the altar, suddenly feeling like she needed to spend a bit more time here right now.

“Hey, Rina?” Eve called from the door.

Rina turned to glare at her. “What!?”

Eve flipped Rina off with her wing, a nervous smile on her face.

Rina took a second to process this. She laughed, returning the gesture. “Right back atcha.”

Eve’s smile warmed - and then she left without another word.

After that, both of them knew that they would find a way forward.

~~~

“And here’s your assignment for th-”

“Hold on!” Pinkie said, interrupting Minna and waving her hooves around. “I need to think a minute!”

Pinkie’s team stared at her with blank expressions. Minna’s office fell silent.

“GOT IT!” Pinkie said, clapping her hooves. “Trixie’s still making her game, the pumpkin hasn’t landed yet, Eve’s timing doesn’t matter, and the criminal conspiracy was stamped out months ago! There, you are all welcome, now you understand the cluster-bomb of conflicting timelines that are these stories! WOO!”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “Pinkie, that doesn’t mean anything to us.”

“Well, you see…” Pinkie blinked. “You know, I’m not in the mood to explain. I can, I just… nah. Camera’s on and everyone already knows, ask me when we’re not about to go exploring. Because hot-diggity-dog the camera’s on so today’s gonna be a goodie!”

“Or a tragedy,” Vriska added.

“Vriska’s just won another pessimism award. Good job!”

Vriska bowed. “Thank you, Captain!”

Minna sighed, handing them a data pad. “Here’s another planet we haven’t set foot on. It looks like a completely normal Earth, which is rare around here, but not all that interesting. However, telescopes have detected a dramatic increase in infrastructure over the last week, so we’re going out of our way to reach it. With the light-transmission laser, you’ll still be out for five hours. Ten hour round trip.”

Pinkie pulled out her phone. “Setting availability to ‘off’. Don’t want Corona thinking we’re dead again because she can’t reach us. Heh.”

Minna nodded. “Anyway, the laser is ready the moment you are. Launch window lasts fifteen more minutes – we’ve been a bit extravagant using the magical guidance systems every time.”

“Already getting budget cuts? Geez,” Pidge rolled her eyes. “Wish I could say that was surprising.”

“Actually our budget increased. We just had to agree to stop wasting it.” Minna smirked. “Fourteen minutes.”

“It hasn’t been a-”

“Rounding.”

Pidge shut up.

Pinkie giggled. “Who cares? Let’s go!” They all went to the roof of the Expeditions Center, where a telescope-like machine sat. But it wasn’t a telescope: although it could function as one, its main function was travel.

Pinkie and her team jumped into a little elevator-like pod at the base of the light-transmission laser. The pod closed – and all five of them were enveloped in light, vanishing. The main barrel of the laser shifted orientation slightly, making sure it was pointing right at where the destination would be in five hours. It charged up for a few seconds and with a burst of light, it fired a magically-guided beam of white light that was all five of Pinkie’s Party.

With a simple magic spell designed to keep the light together and a slightly more complicated one that would reconstitute them upon arrival, they shot through the void of space. Since they were traveling at light speed, they experienced no time whatsoever. To them, it was instant teleportation. But to everyone else in the New World, they took five hours to cross the void, pass through multiple systems, and arrive at the destination Earth.

Their long line of a journey ended in a flash of light that deposited all five of them on top of a very important-looking government building. A half-dozen active guards pointed guns at them.

“…I miss portals,” Flutterfree commented.

Pinkie shrugged. “Hey, if we can’t see where we’re going, we can be surprised more often!” One of them shot her, the bullet bouncing right off her rubbery form. ”HEY! THAT HURT!”

“I think that’s karma, or something,” Vriska observed.

Jotaro let out a sigh. “Yare yare daze…” He turned to the soldiers. “We come in peace. Take us to your leader.”

They took them to their high-security prison.

“Well, you tried, Jojo,” Pidge said, leaning against the cell wall. “So… do we wait, break out, or go home?”

“Wait,” Pinkie said, deciding now would be a good time to ignore gravity and lie on the ceiling. “They won’t be able to resist long.”

“What kind of people are they anyway?” Vriska wondered. “I got ‘human’ and ‘trigger-happy’. Synonyms.”

Jotaro looked at her intently.

“Tell me you aren’t trigger-happy with a straight face.”

“I’m not trigger-happy,” Jotaro said with a straight face.

Pidge snickered. “Someone forgot about the poker grand champion here!”

“Har-de-har,” Vriska muttered, rolling her eyes. “You get my point.”

“I actually got a lot more from them,” Flutterfree said. “This is a standard Earth, yes, but when Corona’s message came here the population was one of those who, for whatever reason, didn’t let their minds push it into the subconscious. It triggered a third world war and right now we’re in one of their new world’s superpowers. Canada.”

“…Canada,” Vriska said. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

Pinkie looked intently at what appeared to be nothing. “Happy now?”

“Oh, wait, don’t tell me, Keywii,” Vriska said.

“…I’m confused,” Flutterfree said, blinking.

“Another…” Pinkie paused. “Well, probably a Prophet. Twilence knows him.”

“Oh.” Flutterfree ruffled her feathers, taking this in stride. “Anyway, yes, Canada. They’ve become heavily militarized and now that the war’s over they’re very scared of the other planets around them. They have found an ally, though, and he’s been helping them learn about all sorts of new technology.” She looked up at the corner of the room that had a hidden camera. “Oh, wait, is that classified and impossible for me to know without the proper clearance?” She smirked.

Pidge rolled her eyes. “Three… Two… One…”

A human man in a very expensive looking business suit with two bodyguards stormed into the room and looked at the five of them through the thick glass. “What kind of joke is this?”

“The kind of joke where we get you to talk and don’t get so bored that we break out,” Pinkie said, dropping from the ceiling. “Ahem. We come from the center of the New World, the base of the Dark Tower. We come in peace. Take us to your leader.”

“How do you know those things?”

Flutterfree made Lolo visible to everyone – including the vines snaking away from their cell and into every corner of the base. She smiled innocently.

The man took a deep breath. “…I can take you to General Ho-”

“There will be no need,” a voice said, coming from seemingly everywhere at once despite there being no loudspeakers around that could create such an effect. “Bring them to me.”

“A-are you sure?”

“Questioning me?” there was silence. “You doubt my ability to handle them. Consider yourself demoted after you deliver them.”

“Y-yes,” the man said, adjusting his collar. “Get the sedati-”

“They will go willingly,” the voice said. “Just get them here quickly.”

The man let out a deep, nearly-panicked breath. Then he pressed a few buttons on the door and opened up the cell for Pinkie’s Party.

“Sounds like you’re in deep shit,” Vriska said, smirking.

The man did not respond to her, he simply led them to a large elevator and hit the button for the top floor. Then, just before they hit it, he made the elevator stop. The elevator doors slid open, revealing a secret floor just beneath the top one. Despite this secret nature, the floor was spacious due to a ‘bigger on the inside’ effect.

The man shoved them out of the elevator and then left – in a hurry.

The room they found themselves in was largely devoid of any decoration. There was a metal floor, a metal ceiling, and metal walls. The back wall was adorned with many black markings of human stick figures. In front of this wall were several skulls and guns, forming a small pile for a silvery throne. In this throne sat a vaguely humanoid machine with two oversized legs, and a couple arms that floated separate from its body. A tail sprouted from its back, the tip of which was a gun, sword, and needle all in one. The machine’s face looked more like a window than an actual head.

And yet, despite this appearance, all of them knew that there was something biological inside. A biology that should not have been able to exist in the new world.

The symbol on the shoulder said it all.

“You’re a Beyonder!?” Pinkie blurted.

The Beyonder stood up. “Yes. My name… is Evuy.”

145 - The City, Part 2

Pinkie recovered quickly and put on a big smile. “Evuy the Beyonder, huh? Cool! I didn’t think any of you could survive in these kinds of physics!”

“We can’t,” Evuy said. “I had to fuse myself with the suit, and even then that barely worked. I have proven myself to be among the strongest and most resourceful of my brethren.”

“I mean, yeah, clearly, look at you still kicking around!” Pinkie gestured at him with a big grin. “I bet you could suplex Jotaro here no problem!”

“Such a feat would be a simple matter. And yes, I know who you are. Merodi Universalis, Primary Team. Or do the Merodi exist anymore? Are you perhaps the representatives of… this ‘Tower City’?”

Flutterfree nodded. “Yes. Our City exists at the base of the Dark Tower in the field of Can’-Ka No Rey. Our job is still the same as it was in Merodi Universalis, however – explore, make first contact, establish alliances. We were concerned this was going to be a problem with the hasty humans of this world, but they seem to listen to you so clearly the situation can be defused.”

“You have careful words,” Evuy noted, standing up from his chair. “Meaningful, powerful, diplomatic words. The words of one who wants to avoid battle.”

“Guilty as charged,” Pinkie said, her smile unfaltering. “Fights generally aren’t our thing unless we have to. We prefer peace. And we think it’s the best way to make people on both sides happy.”

Evuy let out a soft, deep chuckle. “Why, oh why, do you think I’d make peace with the only power I’ve seen that might provide a challenge?” He took a few steps forward. “I have been moving from planet to planet for MONTHS and each one is primitive, empty, or full of barely useful idiots like this one!” He pointed one of his loose fists at all of them. “This City is the only meaningful conquest I’ve heard of in this New World! It will be mine!”

“We have a Them, a Xeelee, Nanoha, White Nettle, Monika, Arceus, Twilence, Corona, Eve, and several dozen others of similar or greater power on our side,” Pidge offered. “I… don’t like your chances.”

Evuy paused for a moment, then leaned even closer in. “And I’m turning this entire planet into a Beyonder Warship. It has enough resources if… directed properly.”

“You won’t be able to finish.”

“It’s almost done. And with the… ten-hour delay between communications, will be done before any reinforcements of yours can arrive. I doubt you could photon-teleport a fleet this far.”

Vriska sighed. “Cut the crap, Evuy. You want a fight, so get to the fight. Here’s an honor-bound deal for your smug shiny face – the five of us challenge you to combat. You, just you. The strongest and cleverest of your race against five little insignificant specks.”

“Playing off my honor will get you nowhere,” Evuy declared. “I will not fight all five of you at once, as a cohesive unit you make it an unbalanced battle.”

“Are you afraid of five little amoebae-”

Evuy pointed his tail-weapon at Vriska’s neck. “I am not afraid. I am merely not stupid. Your kind love to exploit our honor-bound system and, furthermore, your ka is excellent. I must…” it clearly pained him to say what came next. “…reject your offer for a duel. My culture will not be my downfall. After the war has concluded, I m-”

“I challenge you to a one-on-one,” Pinkie said, bouncing forward. “C’mon, you can’t turn that one down, right?”

“Pinkie!” Pidge blurted. “Are you crazy!?”

“Yep!” Pinkie declared. “I’m trying to challenge a Beyonder to one-on-one combat! I have no chances of winning and he knows it! He knows I must have some sort of trick up my sleeve – but he also knows he can’t take the shame of disregarding a personal combat.” She grinned. “You are still a warrior.”

Evuy let out a growl. “You win, Pinkie Pie… I will face yo-”

“No delays,” Pinkie interrupted. “Or else you have placed your own personal plans above a contest of honor.”

Vriska blinked. “When did you get so well versed in Beyonder culture?”

Pinkie held out a brochure. Welcome to Beyonder Space. Not to be confused with the Beyond.

“…Eh, that’s bullshit, but I’ll buy it.”

Evuy pointed at the four behind Pinkie. “They must be restrained. In particular, Lolo must be disabled. You will allow this?”

Pinkie nodded. “Yep!”

“I can’t wait to see what this plan is,” Vriska muttered.

“Oh, it’s a good one,” Pinkie insisted as all four of her teammates were locked up with high-tech handcuffs (or hoofcuffs) and their Stands were disabled. Only Pinkie remained standing. She stretched a bit, put on her massacre dress, and produced her warhammer. “Okay, rules. None of my friends can die during the duel.”

“Agreed,” Evuy said. “My terms are simple: you cannot free any of them during the battle. Nor leave this room.”

“Good enough! Pidge, countdown please?”

Pidge cleared her throat. “Uh, sure. Three. Two. One. Half…“

“Nice try,” Evuy said. “I will not be caught with a false start.”

Pidge grumbled. “Fine. Three. Twoonego.”

Neither Pinkie nor Evuy were tripped by Pidge’s fast counting. They both rushed each other at once – and Pinkie lost the collision badly. Her warhammer was disintegrated and her own body was surrounded in flames. However, as usual, she was suddenly behind Evuy ready with a squeaky hammer. Evuy was expecting this, so he drove reality-bending spikes into her.

Somehow this didn’t rip her open and only tossed her to the side like an overly-cheery ragdoll. “Yeah, sorry, no curbstomp. And you can’t just destroy everything because that would kill them!”

“I am aware… but your powers are not unlimited.”

Pinkie shrugged, pulling a robotic nutcracker soldier out of her mane. “I dunno. I’m pretty sure yours aren’t either. And that you can’t make a robotic party nutcracker out of nowhere!” She pulled out two automatic party cannons. “And the cannons, psh, I don’t see any of those.”

The nutcracker and the cannons charged toward Evuy.

He chuckled. “Was this your plan? Use your powers to create servants for you? I admit, it is a non-standard approach… But I am a Beyonder.” He clasped his hands together – and the nutcracker and cannons stopped. “They serve me now.”

Pinkie blinked. “Well… Oops.”

The cannons fired out sawblade-like confetti and the nutcracker threw a pointed metal cashew – and then the same cashew again, somehow. Pinkie tried to move – but she found herself fixed in place by one of the Beyonder’s many powers. The confetti cut right into her and the cashew embedded itself into her – twice. Candy red blood squirted everywhere.

“Pinkie!” Flutterfree called.

Evuy laughed. “That was foolish of her… Beyond foolish…” He walked up to her body and prepared to incinerate it – until he realized something.

It was made of fabric.

“You never run out of tricks do you?” he asked, turning around to see Pinkie standing there, unharmed, twirling a squeaky hammer with an amused grin on her face.

“Not really. Right now I’m using another trick you’re not aware of. See if you can find out what it is before you fall into it.”

Evuy looked around and used his powerful scanners to check the area around Pinkie. He saw nothing besides her and the hammer – but that did not mean she hadn’t laid a trap, it just meant her powers were hiding it from him. Whatever it was he knew it couldn’t kill him – there simply wasn’t enough power in the area – but he still moved cautiously. “Your power is one that destroys honor.”

Pinkie nodded. “It miiiiight be why I usually don’t use an honor-combat system thingy. But hey, it seems to be working fine right now!”

The Beyonder decided to risk it – tank whatever damage she was planning to give to him. He rushed her and grabbed her neck.

To his surprise, nothing happened.

“…Was that the trick? That there was nothing?”

“Sorta!” Pinkie said, not at all bothered that her windpipe should have been crushed.

“What a foolish trick.”

“I mean, yeah, but not in the way you’re thinking. Someone forgot about the Thief of Light powers!”

“I did not. I am simply immune to such simple manipulation.”

“They aren’t,” Pinkie said, pointing at the two party cannons and the robotic nutcracker. They looked ready to fall apart at the seams, their luck was so low. In fact, it was so abysmal, it would have actually been a good thing for them to fall completely apart.

But they didn’t. They all got to launch off one more attack at Pinkie. Which, of course, hit Evuy instead. But it wasn’t just an ordinary hit – it was a hit that spiked Evuy in several different spots on his back that regulated the nerve flow to his various body parts. Had any one of these points remained untouched, he would have been able to compensate.

But it was some really, really crappy luck.

His four limbs locked up and he fell to the ground, unmoving. Pinkie moved quickly – using a laser-axe to chop off his legs and slice his arms in half. Then she dropped the axe, leaving the rest of him. Alive.

“Finish me, cheater,” he demanded.

“Not how we work,” Pinkie said, taking the handcuffs off all her friends. “Pidge, Jotaro, can you take him back to the City so Minna can figure out what to do with him?”

Pidge looked to Jotaro and nodded. “Sure thing!” she said. She and Jotaro laid their hands on Evuy. They focused, and the photon-transmission spell recognized their decision to return home. It transformed the three of them and teleported them into the atmosphere of the planet, where they began the long journey back to Tower City.

Pinkie dusted off her hooves. “Well, that’s that. Told you it was a good plan.”

“He could have disabled my luck sight without you realizing,” Vriska pointed out.

Pinkie winked. “Nah. I would have known if something like that was up. Now, ahem, Flutterfree? Think you’re up for finding the reactor core of this soon-to-be-Beyonder-warship?”

Flutterfree nodded. “Shouldn’t be that hard to disable since it’s incomplete…”

She was right. It was pathetically easy since Evuy hadn’t told the humans how to use any of his technology, knowing they would likely rebel. Everything in their way fell like dominos and the warship was disabled before Jotaro, Pidge, and Evuy even made it back to be processed.

“And I guess that was our encounter with the Beyonders,” Pinkie said as the reactor exploded behind them. “I was almost afraid we’d never really get to have an adventure featuring them!”

Vriska blinked. “Huh, you’re right, they were the only Class 1 we never dealt with extensively. I can think of big adventures with all the others… But not them.”

Flutterfree shrugged. “I could have gone without it. Though I am glad we waited. If he hadn’t been alone… we wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“Technically we didn’t stand a chance even now,” Vriska said, twirling the infinite-sided die in her hand. “And that’s why it worked.”

They all had a laugh and went to talk to the world leaders.

The humans were much more willing to listen now.

~~~

Question: what do you do after you are instrumental in saving existence?

If you were Everykid, you would only ask for one favor: that people start leaving collectibles in odd places for you to find. Because that was your hobby and the thing you enjoyed most: searching for things. Most people couldn’t hide anything in a challenging location, so she specifically sought out people with powerful magic to set up the collect-a-thon hunt.

First she had just gone to Arceus and he had created a few hundred coins with his symbol on them. Those were collected quickly – not by the Everykid, but by everyone else. Sure, she got the most – seventy-eight – but the point was to be challenged and find them all.

Nanoha had thought it would be an excellent game. With her free time she created a very small number of ruby tokens and spread them out all across the City. Everykid had found eighteen of twenty-one, the ability to increase the number to nineteen eluding her. The ones she had found were in exceptionally hard-to-reach places, like the center of a maze of tunnels or in the back of my library. She’d even found one underneath a loose cobblestone in a street! That had been just pure luck!

It was getting a bit tedious after three days of finding nothing.

So then she had gone to Discord, who just happened to be talking to Trixie at the time. The unicorn in question was all dressed up and looking very pleased with herself, so clearly a meeting had just gone very well.

“I’m telling you, Discord, this is where it’s at. Just have the creativity and the drive and you can do anything!” She pointed at a store window, inside of which a newly released game of hers was displayed proudly. “Oh, why didn’t I try this sooner? It’s such a-” She saw the Everykid running to Discord. “Incoming.”

Discord rolled his eyes and put his head on the ground, looking up to the Everykid. “Hello, maximum-hnnnng inducer.”

The Everykid chuckled. Then she pulled out some Arceus coins and ruby tokens. She pointed at Discord and the City itself. After which she performed a double jump and re-enacted a victory pose, holding up the tokens.

“…What?”

“She needs more collectables,” Trixie translated.

“Oh.” Discord stretched. “Simple enough.” He prepared to snap his fingers, but Trixie stopped him.

“Hold on… I have an idea.” Trixie looked into the Everykid’s eyes. “How about I design the little game for you?”

The Everykid shrugged, gesturing at her pockets. She wasn’t exactly rich and lived mostly off the kindness of others. Not that hard, given how well she was known. …Actually that wasn’t hard to do to begin with, even for an absolute nobody.

“Oh, you don’t have to pay me – you just have to allow me to put a little sensor on you so I can copy your movements for a game.” Trixie grinned. “Whaddoya say?”

The Everykid pondered this for a moment, then nodded.

“Good! You’ll have yourself a nice little collectible challenge by tomorrow. Can’t get it to you any earlier than that.”

The Everykid winked, telling Trixie she didn’t mind. Then she ran off – might as well keep looking for the ruby tokens the rest of the day.

Long story short, she went into the Pinkie Emporium’s house of mirrors, got lost for a few hours, and found nothing.

She found a place to sleep – stayed at Minna’s that night – and woke up to the sight of Trixie staring her in the face with a crazed grin. “Open your eyes wide and don’t move.”

The Everykid was just surprised enough to open her eyes wide and be stunned into motionlessness. Trixie slapped a contact lens into her right eye with her magic. “And done!”

The Everykid blinked a few times, realizing she couldn’t feel it now that it was in her eye.

“That lens is both your tracker and your helper,” Trixie explained, waving a hoof in the air for effect. “Trixie has created a little game for you. There are forty-two collectible objects in the City, each one with an invisible little transmitter on it. Nobody else can see the transmitter, but with the contact lens you can! Any object with the transmitter on it will glow blue. And, just so you don’t get hopeless because you can’t find one, you can turn a little compass feature on to point at the nearest one.” She clapped her hooves together. “Now, go get jumping! That game ain’t gonna model itself! …Well, it could, but Trixie wants it to be more authentic.”

With a nod the Everykid hopped out of bed and had breakfast before going out to face the world. She adjusted her top hat and put her hands on her hips – identifying the location of the first object.

…It was in Minna’s spare bedroom. The Everykid rolled her eyes, jumping to the second-floor window and pulling it open, finding that the object was a watch, sitting on the floor. It was as simple as grabbing it and seeing a 1/42 appear on her screen.

That would be the only easy one.

The next closest one was at the top of a very smooth clock tower less than a block away. She put a hand to her chin – she could just put on one of her flying hats, but that would defeat the purpose. She would have to try it a different way…

She jumped to the wall of the tower and pounced off, landing on the roof of a nearby residential building. Still way too low to get to the top of the tower, but close enough. The clock face was a little too far away for her to use her grappling hook on.

Something bouncy… Someth- there it was. A trampoline in someone’s backyard. That would give her enough of a boost. She jumped down and landed next to it. Lemme borrow you real quick.

Getting the trampoline on the roof of the building proved somewhat difficult, but with a mixture of ladders, pulleys, and good old-fashioned jump spamming she got it there. Then she started jumping – and found it still wasn’t enough.

She decided to use one of her standard abilities. She put on a blue woolen hat and transformed into ice. She dropped like a stone, hit the trampoline, and launched way up into the air. Popping out of her ice form, she used her grapple-gun to latch onto the clock hand, pulling herself up. With a quick wall jump and a midair back-jump, she made it onto the top of the clock tower.

The object was a golden egg. The Everykid shrugged and pocketed it before unceremoniously jumping off the tower and opening her parasol just before she flattened herself on the ground.

That was fun. Exactly what she’d wanted.

To her surprise, the next one wasn’t a simple collection.

The target? A jar of jellybeans locked behind glass.

The mission? Guess the number of jellybeans in the jar and you get to have it.

The Everykid blinked. She was decent at math, but there was no way she could figure out exactly how many jellybeans were actually in it with certainty. She was going to have to get clever...

She thought about having a robot do it, or a super-intelligent AI, but the solution turned out to be far simpler than that.

All she had to do was buy one of the high-end scanners. It could ping the jar and get a full 3D model of everything in it. There were 1,942 jellybeans in the jar.

The jar was her goal. But she was going to eat all those jellybeans before the day was out, she was certain of it.

Where to next…

The fourth object was a little bell hanging at the top of an alley of tall buildings. Normally she would walk along the roof to get to it, but unfortunately, these buildings were designed with spikes on top. So she was going to have to do a complex set of wall-jump maneuvers.

She made it through two jumps before falling flat on her butt. “Ow…”

The second and third tries weren’t much better. She took a moment to look around for an easier way up. She didn’t find one – but she did find that she had an audience. One man was looking at her with a very curious expression.

With an exaggerated bow she started jumping up again, this time slipping up on a windowsill on the third floor. She didn’t make it to that sill again for six minutes, and at that time there were more people watching her.

I’m not going to be able to just leave this one now… she thought. She narrowed her eyes – the flying hat – no, they’d just consider that cheating. But her other hats might have an option… Cycling through them all, she found nothing helpful. Moving fast didn’t help, there was nothing invisible to cling onto, and she decided against littering the area with explosives.

It was up to complete skill. As more and more people started to arrive, she cracked her knuckles and put on the serious face. She was going to make this. She ran to the wall, using her sprint hat to get some extra height. She bounced back and did a twirl so she’d land on the same wall. A backflip landed her on the windowsill in a very delicate T-pose. Not stopping for breath, she jumped to the far wall and bounced back, bouncing in midair to get some height.

Her fingers scraped against the bell, but she didn’t grab it.

Her left eye twitched involuntarily. She pulled out her parasol and shot her grappling hook at the bar the bell was hanging on, barely grappling it before she fell out of reach. With a ‘humph’ she pulled herself up and grabbed the bell. “Gotcha!”

She slowly drifted down to the alley and showed the bell to everyone watching her.

They weren’t clapping.

It was at this point the Everykid suspected something was up.

“Uh… Hi!” she said.

They all turned to look at her in unison. She knew exactly what that meant.

The lead man and two others spoke at once. “We are the New Everyman. You can become as you once were, with us.”

The Everykid shook her head quickly. She’d rather not go back to being part of the Everyman. She was enjoying her simple, jumping life.

“Sorry to hear that.” He pulled out a stun gun. The Everykid could see it now – kidnapped and then mentally conditioned to rejoin the Everyman.

She wasn’t having any of that. She swapped hats to the flying hat and took off into the sky at a brisk pace, flying over the spikes of the buildings. She cockily turned around and stuck out her tongue.

It was at this point she realized she was captured in a field of telekinetic energy.

“…Peck.”

The gun fired, knocking her unconscious.

She awoke later – she didn’t know when exactly – to one of the Everyman’s bodies strapping her to a table. She wasn’t wearing a hat; instead a mental dome was affixed to her head. Her attempts to break the bonds keeping her trapped on the table were in vain.

“You can’t escape,” three voices said at once. “The Everyman will become whole once again. The original self will be restored.”

The Everykid glared at the closest one and stuck out her tongue. She could tell this wasn’t what the Everyman used to be – the people were in a standard hivemind. Individuality was being lost. They were not of a large enough mass to be forced to deal with inconsistency, and by the time they got that large she would already be lost in the wave…

But she couldn’t do anything. At all. There was nothing around… she couldn’t change her hat, her parasol wasn’t on her, and she was out of practice doing any sort of magic. Should really have practiced more.

Then she realized something.

The display she had in her eye… was gone. They must have taken it out.

Somehow this disturbed her more. They ruined the game! Now she wouldn’t get to have fun at all! The objects would remain uncollected forever…

Wait. Trixie would know it had been taken out.

The moment she realized this the door to the murky basement opened and White Nettle walked in, her tendrils tied up in a neat little bow. “Hey, Everyman.”

The Everyman wasted no time. Every last one of him fired weapons. All Nettle had to do was hold up a hand and knock all of them to the ground effortlessly.

A second later, Trixie poked her head in. “We good?”

“Good,” Nettle said, undoing the Everykid’s restraints with a snap of her fingers. “…You are quite the rascal, huh?”

The Everykid stood up and shrugged, putting her hat on her head. Then she looked down at the other pieces of the Everyman – and frowned. She looked to Nettle pleadingly.

“…Fine, we’ll figure out how to help them,” Nettle muttered. “They could have just come and asked for help rejoining their minds in the old way… Not do it themselves.”

Trixie shrugged. “I’m just glad Everykid’s okay.” She patted the Everykid on the back. “Bet you’re glad Trixie was trackin’ ya, huh?”

The Everykid rolled her eyes – and then she noticed a red glint in the ceiling.

The nineteenth ruby token.

She forgot all of her recent ordeal and grabbed it. “GOTCHA!” She did a victory dance, holding the coin high in the air like it was her long lost pet.

White Nettle had no idea what this meant. She had grown tired of questioning everyone’s motives lately, so she just shrugged and left.

~~~

The League of Sweetie Belles had never officially had a leader. The only real distinction was between general members and agents. Members simply had to be a Sweetie Belle and sign up, nothing else was required. Agents had to pass inspection, be at least partial Merodi Citizens, and be given the role by another Agent. Beyond this, the League was in theory nothing more than a conglomeration of like-minded individuals.

However, everyone knew the original Sweeties had more power than the others. Allure, Bot, Squeaky, Thrackerzod, and to some extent Burgerbelle and Suzie all held the respect of the League, and what they said was generally taken as an order rather than a request. Because of this simple unspoken rule, the League had been an exceptionally organized and cohesive unit.

This was no longer the case. The League had definitely reformed – there were hundreds of them who had survived and made it to the City – but Thrackerzod was the only remaining leader. And she made it very clear she had not gone through the war and New World explorations unscathed. She never spoke about it much, but she withdrew from giving orders.

Which just left Burgerbelle. This was a problem because it was relatively impossible to take her seriously. She did the job well, proving herself to have more than just a head full of eternal memes. However, her position was never official. No matter how well she did, the way she acted kept everyone from giving her respect. It didn’t take long for the other Sweeties to realize she didn’t technically have any power and felt free to ignore her.

Mattie tried, for a time, to wrangle them all. She couldn’t garner respect either – mostly because her questionable way of life made everyone around her uncomfortable, including her friends. So, in the end, the League just lost any semblance of leadership, becoming little more than a disorganized collective. Since they were not hired to be a peacekeeping force for the City, they didn’t have a singular job either.

This all combined to make them largely unimportant on the scale of the City. Sure, most everyone knew who they were, but they were only called for very specific reasons or by once-inhabitants of Celestia City who felt more comfortable with them around. Only a few Agents remained active in the City, allowing most members to treat the League as more of a club.

“This is how it started,” Thrackerzod mused. “We weren’t some big government organization that channeled all of one kind of person toward whatever goal we felt like. We were just a group of friends hanging around and having fun.”

“I like it!” Burgerbelle said, hanging from the ceiling fan. One of the things she had demanded in the new League building was a fan strong enough to support her weight so she could do this without fear of making things splinter into a million pieces and poking an eye out. “Feels… nostalgic!”

“Hmm…” Thrackerzod said, looking up from her seat. Dozens of Sweeties were visible walking through the League’s new, glistening lobby. Everything was white, as usual, and all of them were chatting about their day. Some were lamenting that the League didn’t pay them anymore, while others were talking about how it was a nice change of pace. Then there was that black Sweetie Belle who was talking about how the place was too bright.

“Hey, Zod, you okay?”

Thrackerzod shrugged. “Having thoughts I don’t know the answer to again.”

Burgerbelle nodded in understanding, leaving Thrackerzod to her thoughts.

This did not last long. With a flash of purple magic, a paint-filled water balloon the size of a pony appeared in the lobby. It burst with a powerful gawoosh, covering the pristine white lobby with amethyst-purple, glitter-infused paint.

Thrackerzod wiped the paint from her eyes and sighed.

Burgerbelle smirked – but she put a hand firmly on her hips. “All right, who did this and why?”

“THOSE DAMN SPARKLES!” A yellow Sweetie who went by the name of Lemon shouted, looking at her largely ruined coat.

“They’re really gonna do it!” Mattie said, charging into the Lobby. “The- well it appears I’m late. Whoops. …That glitter is gonna get stuck in all sorts of fun places.”

Burgerbelle turned from Mattie to Lemon. “Question: why would the Sparkle Census do this?”

“I unleashed an infestation of slimes on them,” Lemon said, nonchalant.

“Lemon!”

Lemon rolled her eyes. “What? It was a prank.”

“How do you not know about the rivalry?” Mattie shouted. “Ever since we’ve got here it’s been ‘Sparkle Census this, Sparkle Census that’. They’re taking our jobs!”

“Oh. Right.” Burgerbelle blinked. “You’re still an active Agent.”

“Not for long…” Lemon muttered. “They’re gonna run us out. Take everything from us.”

“There’s more of them and they’re more organized, what’s the issue?” Thrackerzod asked. “If they deserve it…”

“This is a pride thing!”

“Burgerbelle, isn’t pride a problem?”

“Usually,” Burgerbelle admitted.

Mattie facehooved. “This is her job, Sweeties! It’s what makes her life worth living. I’ve taken it upon myself to assist her in putting down the Sparkle Census.”

“…You’re an idiot,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

Mattie winked at Thrackerzod. “I love it when you talk dity. Please, insult me more.”

Thrackerzod sighed and returned to her chair, reading from a data pad. “Someone clean all this up.”

“Hey! Squiddy!” Mattie clapped her hooves. “Is Squiddy in the building?”

A Sweetie Inkling ran up to her, squid tentacles flopping. “Yes?”

“Think you can paint over this?”

Squiddy took out a paint roller covered in white ink. Then she paused. “…Why?”

“Undo the Sparkle Census’ damage to our reputation?”

“Oh! Hah, sure!” She needed no more convincing and started painting over the place, covering up the purple mess.

“And now… we march to war,” Mattie said. “Burgerbelle, you should come along.”

“Huh? I’m not inv-”

“Pranks, Burgerbelle. Pranks.”

“…I do like me a good prank…” She made a ‘thonking’ expression. “Count me in! What’s the plan?”

Lemon grinned. “The Bees.”

Burgerbelle gasped. “Not the bees!”

Later that day, the Sparkle Census agent known as Bacon (since her mane was the color of a Sunset Shimmer’s) walked into her library to find every single book replaced.

With the Bee Movie script.

She let out a harrowed scream and fled from her library. For a moment the other Sparkles thought something had been murdered. Only when they investigated did they find out that it was much, much worse.

“Who would do this!? Why would they do this!?” Bacon wailed to the sky, drawing the attention of many Sparkles.

“It’s those slippery little Sweeties!” an elderly unicorn Sparkle said, shaking her hoof. “They’re worse than cheese!”

“Nothing is worse than cheese!” an alicorn shouted.

“Cheese isn’t that bad,” I said, throwing in my two cents.

The Grand Secretariat appeared before everyone. “Cheese is an anti-Sparkle measure, Twilence, and you are most aware of its effects.”

“Generally only in melted quantities with quesadillas,” I added. “In reali-”

“Twilence…”

I laughed nervously. “Eheh… Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m cheating. And mocking you unfairly. I am sorry for that.”

“Good.” The Grand Secretariat ruffled her feathers. “Now, I do have a question. How do we get back at the Sweeties?”

I put a hoof to my chin. “They attacked our books… Our most prized possessions. The next step is to go after what they hold dear – their sisters – but we aren’t monsters. So… How a-” I paused. “Mattie, I’m going to make the scene shift now.”

“Balls,” Mattie muttered. “She’s got my number.” She turned around to face Burgerbelle, Lemon, and a large consortium of Sweetie Agents. “We don’t know what they’re doing. They aren’t going after Raritys, so you can rest easy there...”

“Most of us don’t have our sisters anyway,” Lemon said.

Mattie nodded slowly. “Yes… Anyway, they want to repay in kind. It will be something for books. Any ideas?”

“We like our songs a lot, but they can’t really attack those,” a stallion, Silverfish, said.

Burgerbelle blinked. “I know what it’s gonna be.”

“What?”

“They’re going to go after the other Sweeties. The-”

“Hello!” I called, charging in the front door of the League of Sweetie Belles. “Have we got some news for you!”

Mattie and the rest of her group ran out into the Lobby – but Thrackerzod had already gone to talk to the Twilight. “You painted the lobby.”

“Yes, we did,” I admitted, several Sparkles taking up a flanking position behind me. “But do you know why?”

“Yes, prank war, stupid reason, annoying,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

“I agree!” I said, nodded curtly. “And I also realize only a small number of Sweeties are actively engaging in this little rivalry – the same is true on our end. We’d like this endless wave of one-upmanship to end, and so we’ve come to you. You can talk to them – tell them to drop it.”

“DROP IT!?” Lemon shouted. “This is my livelihood!”

“She can do her Agent duties just the same with our presence,” a Twitter Sparkle retorted.

“But you always do it better!”

Several Sweeties behind Lemon rallied their support.

The Sparkles behind me narrowed their eyes. I sighed, turning to Thrackerzod. “You can do it. You can tell them to drop it.”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “And just let you win?”

I blinked. “But you’re no-” I stopped myself. “…You are invested. This place is your identity.”

“Surprised you didn’t already know that,” Thrackerzod commented. “I’ll stand by them. They’re idiots, but they’re my idiots.” She put her hoof on her chest. “We are the League of Sweetie Belles. We may have fallen, but we will stand as one against your miniscule attempts at comeuppance.”

“Then we will bring the full might of the Sparkle Census to bear,” I responded. “You will not know a time of peace. There will be locks on doors that shouldn’t have them, pillows with the insides replaced with high-pressure water balloons, and the Bee Movie on every channel.”

“That’s my meme!” Burgerbelle shouted.

“Memes are, by nature, not original,” I said, tossing my mane back. “So is it war?”

Thrackerzod rolled her eyes and smirked. “It. Is. War.”

I stuck out my hoof to shake Thrackerzod’s. She moved to accept.

“Ahem. Can I say something?”

Thrackerzod and I turned to see a Sweetie standing there. One who looked like she was made of crystal, a similarly-constructed blade held firmly in her telekinesis. Her eyes seemed old – they had seen much.

“…Sure?” I said, slowly realizing who she was and why her presence was important.

She nodded. “Just needed to get your attention and tell you that you’re being ridiculous. And…” She sidestepped, revealing a small Sweetie Belle-Twilight Sparkle hybrid behind her. “You’re tearing this poor girl apart.”

Her name was Sweetie Sparkle, often called Swap for short. And she was a member of both sides of the divide. She looked like she’d been crying. She was still young, yes, but she was close enough to adult age for crying to signify something deep. “…I… I…” She gulped. “Can we just stop?”

Thrackerzod and I melted. “…Sure,” Thrackerzod said.

“I’m sorry, little one,” I said, walking to her. “We… We got caught up in our little game and didn’t realize you were in the middle.”

Swap nodded softly and pulled me into a hug.

“Wait, we can’t just do that!” Lemon blurted. “What ab-”

The crystal Sweetie shot her a look. “…You are Sweetie Belles and Twilight Sparkles. You may think you have little to do with each other. But… I think if you give it an honest attempt, you’ll find that you both have a lot to teach each other. Working together.”

“What, combine the Census and League?”

“Why not?”

The entire room was silent.

“I’ll go for it,” Burgerbelle said, raising a hand.

“Same,” I said, raising my hoof.

“Really!?” Swap said, eyes unbelieving.

I chuckled. “Really. It’s not like either of us are all that important, anymore. We can mingle. Solve a few problems in the process…” I turned to the crystal Sweetie. “…Thank you.”

And that was the story of how the Sweetie Sparkle Coalition formed. Swap was rather embarrassed by the name, but deep down we all knew it was the perfect name.

A combination.

~~~

“…And let us close in prayer.”

Rev was… well, a Reverend. That’s what she always was. Ever since she had lost her home, she had been part of the Church. It gave her a sense of belonging she had never had – not even in the Equis she had come from. It gave her the means to change what she was and become something else. Something she liked a lot better than her old self.

“…And let us close in prayer.”

It gave her structure, gave her comfort. Being the one who watched over the souls of others, making sure they were growing… She was a bringer of peace and what was good in the world. She knew better than anyone that this gave her more than a little pride – but she also knew she wouldn’t be able to remove that from her system entirely. No one could ignore themselves completely, and she was just a person like everyone else.

“…And let us close in prayer.”

Over most of her life, her days had followed a structure of either teaching, preparing to teach, prayer, witnessing to people, or going out into the world and letting everyone know they didn’t need to be afraid of her. The teaching was the best part – she felt like she was on fire most of the time, burning with passion and words that were not fully her own. She looked forward to each and every time she got up to that podium and spoke of the Word.

“…And let us close in prayer.”

It was tradition. How many worlds had she done it on? Too many to count. Leave one world, set up a church in the next, live, and then when the time is right move again…

“…And let us close in prayer.”

But something was happening to her. She was starting to feel like the teachings were slowly losing their life. The fire was dissipating ever so slowly, and she was starting to grunt in annoyance when she tried to prepare a message. I’ve done this a million times, they didn’t listen then…

“…And let us close in prayer.”

Something had changed about her words. She didn’t know what for sure – her faith was as strong as ever, and she hadn’t been drifting from any of her friends. Several of them knew about her confusion and had offered pieces of advice. Flutterfree and Rina knew her the best, but nothing they said had worked.

“…And let us close in prayer.”

She said the words and fell silent – taking so long to start the prayer this time that some people began to murmur. Eventually, she did force herself to start speaking, but what she said was a simple prayer that didn’t require her to think. Inside, she was thinking very different thoughts.

I have fallen away, or I need something new, Lord. That’s… pretty clear. I’m struggling here and I don’t know why. How can I continue to speak for you?

And then it happened. A little voice in the back of her mind that seemed to come out of nowhere.

Who said you had to continue speaking?

Rev stopped short – once again surprising the congregation. She continued the vocal prayer and wrapped it up, leaving the stage. Unlike usual, she didn’t stick around to talk to the people. She didn’t even bother with a public teleporter, instead using her own magic to go right to her destination.

Eve’s little counseling business. She checked her watch – Eve shouldn’t actually have anything scheduled right now, since it was a weekend. So she was more than a little surprised that the front door was unlocked. The entry lobby was a simple, homey hall with several sleek potted plants, a few magic crystals, and a painting of the Equis Vitis princesses.

Eve walked out of her office – with both Starbeat and Vriska, patting them on the back. Vriska looked like she’d been bawling her eyes out while Starbeat was holding her tight. The reverse of how it usually went, as Rev understood it.

Vriska looked into Rev’s face. “Not… A… Word…”

“I know about confidentiality,” Rev said, nodding slowly. “…Glad to see you progressing.”

Starbeat glanced at Eve. “I thought you didn’t have an appointment slot right now.”

“I don’t…” Eve said, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, I n-” Rev began.

Eve held up a hoof. “I’ll walk these two out first – then we can talk about whatever’s on your mind.”

“Don’t trust me to keep a secret?” Vriska asked.

“Not particularly,” Eve admitted.

Vriska just let out a soft laugh, clearly drained of the energy she normally used for these interactions. “Yeah…”

Eve led them out, bade them goodbye, then shut the door.

“They’re coming along nicely,” Rev commented, sitting in a nearby chair. She was nervous – why was she nervous?

Eve nodded. “It’s… been a rough ride. The two of them have very strong personalities. I think the light at the end of the tunnel is within reach, though.” She sat down across from Rev. “…I can’t say I ever expected you to walk into my office.”

“Neither did I,” Rev admitted. “I just had… A moment. And I felt sure I needed to talk to you.”

“A Revelation?”

“…I believe so.”

Eve smiled understandingly. “I’m not going to discredit that aspect of it, Rev. What do you think He is telling you to do?”

“It… It was just a question. ‘Who said you had to continue speaking?’.”

“And what was this in response to?”

Rev locked eyes with Eve. “The fire has been leaving my speeches. Flutterfree’s probably told you about that.”

“True, but I need you to describe it for me. As well as she knows you, your relationship isn’t close enough for me to make a judgment just from her words.”

Rev pondered this. How would she describe it? “It’s… It’s like when you’re a kid and you have your favorite game. It’s the best thing in the world. But as you get older, you feel things tugging on you – society, other people – to take you away from it.”

“Are others taking you away?”

Rev blinked. “No… It’s just me. The feeling’s the same, though. The exact same…”

“So you feel like you are ‘growing out’ of something, but you don’t want to?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘growing out’,” Rev said with a nervous laugh.

“The metaphor still stands. You can feel yourself wanting a change.”

“I don’t want a change.”

“Are you sure?” Eve asked. “You’ve served for multiple lifetimes, even by pony standards. Maybe you’ve given enough time?”

“You can never give enough.”

Eve cleared her throat. “There’s more than one way to serve the Lord.”

Rev narrowed her eyes. “…Did you just quote me?”

Eve nodded with an understanding smirk on her face. “Yes.”

Rev sat back, blinking. “I did say that… There’s a time for everything, and a purpose for everyone. Not everyone can be a Pastor…” She looked at the collar around her neck. “…But that’s what I am.”

“It’s not all that you are,” Eve reminded her. “It may define your name and the way you’ve walked in your life, but it doesn’t have to define your future. Not if you don’t want it to.”

“…I shouldn’t care about what I want, I should care about what He wants.”

“Well… He asked you a question. Maybe he’s leaving it up to you.”

Rev was silent for a moment. Then she chuckled. “You sure know a lot for not going to church…”

“Flutterfree’s not a mare you can ignore easily. I’ve absorbed a lot about your teachings from her. You’re a very wise mare, Rev.”

Rev shook her head. “When you compare me to other ponies, yeah. That’s not much of a metric.” She looked Eve in the eyes. “What do you think I should do?”

“What I think is irrelevant. You’ve been allowed to make the decision, it should come from you. I’m just here to help you think through it.” She pulled a notepad and pen out of nowhere. “It might help to write some of it down.”

Rev thought for a moment. “If I keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll be serving in a very important capacity in a very prominent position, and my words will be representative of Him. Of course, that can also be a negative, if I lose the fire and start leading people away…” She shook her head, getting back on track. “It’s what I’ve always done, I know I’m good at it, and I know so many people there.”

“Negatives?”

“If I don’t change something I’m going to lose the fire. And that’ll open the gates for all sorts of mistakes. And when you’re in charge of everyone’s spirituality… your mistakes cascade down to them. I’m the example. If I’m not a good example…” She paused, thinking. “And if I drop it, well, I don’t have any idea what I’d do, I might not be helping people, it won’t be as clear how to glorify Him in it, and I won’t be as much a part of the community I created. I’d find a replacement, but I’d be leaving them on their own.”

“Positives?”

“…It’d be something new. I wouldn’t be taking a chance. I could expand my horizons.”

Eve handed Rev the notepad. “I want you to realize you started with positives for one, and negatives for the other. Those were what came to your mind first – as if you’re trying to convince yourself of something. I can’t tell you if that’s good or bad, merely that it happened.”

Rev looked at the notebook, and a sinking feeling formed in her stomach. She knew – she knew – what she actually wanted. But it went so far against what she had been for so long she was fighting it with intense anger. Anger at what? Herself? …Probably…

“…What would I do instead?” Rev wondered, almost as a whisper.

“Any number of things. Mage. Healer. Doctor. Diplomat. Charity. There are lots of things that lend themselves to you.” She put a hoof on Rev. “You don’t even have to decide now. You should simply decide if you want to before you start thinking about specifics.”

“…I think we both know I’m just playing mind games with myself,” Rev said. She leaned back and closed her eyes, entering a time of prayer. Eve knew what it was – she patiently waited for Rev to be done.

Rev opened her eyes over half an hour later, a tear crawling down her face.

“Well…?”

“No Divine Revelation,” Rev said, shaking her head. “But… I sorted out my thoughts.” She levitated her collar off her neck, leaving only her necklace. “I… I don’t think I’ll be needing this.”

Eve smiled sadly. “…Are you sure?”

Rev looked at the old piece of clothing that had scarcely left her neck in centuries. “I… yes.” She set it down on the table. “Yes. I am.” More tears crawled down her face. “…Eve, how long have I been lying to myself about this?”

Eve put a wing around her. “Probably since you joined Pinkie’s Party in the New World. You got to experience adventure again. It awakened something. You’re more than just a symbol.”

“…I suppose I should figure out what I’m gonna do, huh?”

“Not yet,” Eve said. “Go talk to your friends. Rina. Flutterfree. Tell them what you’ve decided. They’ll question you – and make sure you really do feel this way. I am fairly sure this is what you want, but accept their counsel as well. This is a big decision.”

Rev nodded. “Right…”

“After that… come back. I might have something for you.”

So that’s what Rev did. She went out and told everyone what she was doing. Flutterfree and Rina, first. Rina was angry to begin – she didn’t understand why the pony she admired was suddenly changing – but she quickly accepted it. It took Flutterfree exactly one conversation to be convinced Rev was making the right choice.

Rev taught her last sermon. The topic was ‘moving on’. She taught it without her collar and let everyone know this was more of a goodbye than a sermon. She told them who the replacement would be, and what to expect when she moved on. She promised to attend services – as a member of the audience, not the preacher.

And then she spent the rest of the day giving out tearful hugs and talking to everyone one last time.

The very next day she and Flutterfree went to Eve – and they were able to hash out a new job nearly instantly. Eve was right, she did have something for her.

Eve’s old job.

Rev walked into the skyscraper that was city hall with a spring in her step. She wore four simple white socks that went up to her knees and had restyled her mane into a loose but short design. In her right ear was a small bud that could display holographic messages for her nearest eye. The only thing about her that was the same about her was the cross necklace.

Soon, she was in mayor Mlinx’s office. “Hey.”

Mlinx turned around – he couldn’t smile, but Rev knew he was happy to see her. “Ah, my new ambassador. …I’m going to have to apologize, I had been hoping to give you an easy first day, but the guy you’re replacing just got himself captured and jailed by a bunch of Ewoks.”

“Oh…”

“So while Pinkie’s Party is dealing with that, there’s a race of slime-creatures – the Aran - in the meeting room waiting for someone to talk to them.” He tapped his fingers together nervously. “Think you can tide them over for an hour while I try to contact their home for them?”

“Pretty sure I can. I take it I don’t get to mention that you’re struggling to make contact?”

“I’d rather not have an unneeded… panic.”

Rev nodded. “I’ll try. Which room?”

“3404.”

Rev teleported herself to the thirty-fourth floor and walked into the room. It really was filled with a bunch of alien slime creatures without eyes or mouths. “Hello, I’m ambassador Reverend Glimmer, and I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

“I am Krikk,” a blue slime said by vibrating his membrane rapidly. “What is that thing you wear on your neck?”

Rev smiled and looked down at her necklace. “I’m glad you asked…”

~~~

“And we end where we began,” Seskii said, leaning on the counter of the teashop.

Azula blinked. “…What?”

“There’s been a little sequence of stories going around. The first one was here at the teashop – and the last one is here at the teashop.” She sat down on a barstool and smirked. “We’re the bookends, Azula! …In a story sense, at least, since not everything’s taking place in the right order…”

“…It’s not us,” Azula said, looking out at the tables. “It’s this shop. It’s what it represents. We just happen to be the ones here right now.”

Seskii nodded. “Yep! In the grand scheme of things… we’re not even the tertiary characters, we’re below them. We’re just recurring. The most important thing I ever did was talk to Allure in those time loops, and your thing was continuing this shop. And you know what? That’s great! Our lives left a mark on the world that will be remembered!” She put her hands on her hips and grinned.

“I don’t mind either way,” Azula said, setting out a platter of tea for Seskii to deliver to the patrons. “I’m here, and it’s working for me.”

Seskii chuckled. “Glad to have you around.” She picked up the platter and began passing out the tea in her usual utterly impossible way.

Azula really was going to miss that.

There was a ding as a new patron entered the teashop. Starbeat trotted in, her goggles covering her eyes. She took a seat at the ‘bar’ and opened her mouth to order. For a moment, she was stuck there, frozen. Then she let out a sigh and rammed her face into the counter.

Azula knew exactly what she needed: some simple chai mixed with lemongrass. In a couple of minutes the custom-made tea was ready for consumption and placed in front of Starbeat.

She hadn’t moved an inch the whole time. Azula didn’t mind – she could be patient. And she could keep the tea warm with her firebending if it was needed. It wasn’t easy to heat the liquid without making the cup too hot to hold, but she’d been doing this long enough that it would be a simple matter.

As it turned out, she didn’t have to resort to such measures. Starbeat eventually convinced her body to sit up and look Azula in the face.

“…I guess I’m here to apologize.”

“For what?”

“The Hub. Your shop. Everything I did to your home.”

Azula sighed. “Drink the tea.”

“Azul-”

“I accept your apology, but there’s a lot more you have bottled up in there and I’m not going to be able to work with you unless you destress yourself first.” She took a cup of tea in her own hand and sipped it. “I’m doing the same.”

Starbeat did as she was told. She took a sip. The steam fogged up her goggles, forcing her to remove them to see.

Azula saw exactly what she expected – bloodshot, confused eyes.

“Fight?”

Starbeat shook her head. “No. Completely my doing. She’s… She’s been a lot softer lately. I think the sessions might be starting to help.” She hung her head back. “I just… I got caught up in what I did. How I ignored every signal and… gave myself to him. Willingly.”

“You were under the influence of Rage.”

“I was. But that had to start from somewhere.” Starbeat looked Azula in the eye. “I’ve got a doctorate in ka studies. I should have seen it coming. I was told multiple times about the dangers – by you, by my friends… And I just shoved it down, refused to think about it. Lied to myself. Or told myself that ka had no control over me and if it wanted me to be the villain, well, I was still in the right so it didn’t matter.” She grimaced. “I was a fool.”

“No kidding,” Azula said. Then she realized what she’d said. “I-”

“Am being honest and I appreciate that,” Starbeat interrupted.

Azula sighed, leaning down onto the counter. “…It’s still true that you were influenced.”

“But I really did want them to suffer,” Starbeat said, looking out at the patrons. No doubt some of them fought for the collapse, and fought hard. “I felt wronged.”

“Were you?”

“Maybe. But they’d been wronged as well.” She buried her face in her hooves. “Why couldn’t I see it? That was my life! I devoted everything to seeing what I could! Plundering the depths of fate itself! And I was duped!”

Azula frowned. “We were all duped. Made fools of. By ourselves, in a way. At least that’s what Seskii says… I’m not sure I understand it.”

Starbeat looked up at her goggles. “There’s too much to understand. Even if you devote yourself to one thing and spend everything you have to plunder its depths… It can still surprise you.”

“Yeah…”

“You’re lucky. You don’t have anything like that. You just live your life, comfortable with whatever it throws at you.” She took another sip. “I wish I could live like that.”

“We have our own problems over here in the ‘don’t think too hard about it’ category,” Azula admitted. “We… make bad choices a lot more often.”

“You don’t get hit as hard when you screw up though.”

“…Maybe?”

“…We’re just speaking about arbitrary things now,” Starbeat mused, leaning back. “What’s it even mean, Azula?”

Azula blinked. “What?”

“What’s it even mean? Without the Tower. It’s provided us with all our adventures, all our reasons for struggles, all our ‘truth’ and battles of good versus evil. What happens when it falls? What’s meaning?”

“…Whatever you say it is?”

“But that’s what the Tower was!” Starbeat blurted. “It… it was self-defined meaning! It took what all of us saw and coalesced it together into this… thing. It was a… not a monster, but it wasn’t a paragon either. We can’t just continue that when we move on.”

“Can I butt in here?” Seskii asked. “Yeah? Okay.” She took a seat next to Starbeat. “The Tower was… was stories. The average of not only everyone’s self-defined meaning, but also their desires and fantasies. That’s its flaw. It goes too far.”

“…But if everyone just defines every meaning for themselves, anyone can justify anything. The Tower’s been the definer of good and evil for us. If there’s nothing to do it for us… we’ll just fall apart and disagree. And we’re all equally right and equally wrong an-”

Seskii put her hands on Starbeat’s shoulder. “Listen to me. I happen to think there is a real truth and a real good and evil. But I also know people will never agree on what that is – or what meaning is. Some will assign meaning in nations, Harmony, magic itself, the past, God, complex relationships, or success. One of those may be the actual real meaning of life. The problem is we’re never going to agree, overall, on which one it is.”

Starbeat stared at her, blinking.

Seskii removed her hands and smiled sadly. “So, even if one thing really does mean more, we won’t act as if it does if we don’t want to. So the people who get it right can be right and gloat about it if they feel like, but they still have to deal with other people as if their definitions of meaning are valid. That we can be sure of.” She took a platter of tea out of her hair and ran back to serving it.

Azula blinked. “…I don’t think I really absorbed any of that.”

“I did,” Starbeat said, blinking slowly. A smile slowly came to her face. “The more things change the more they stay the same.”

“I don’t follow.”

Starbeat stood up and looked wistfully in a distant direction. “Life will be very different. We’ll have to adapt to the impossible no longer being possible, to the antics of those around us falling to normalcy, and to unresolved encounters. But in the end, the core of it all remains the same.”

She turned back to Azula, pulling her goggles back down over her face. “We’re all looking for meaning in infinite possibility.”

146 - The Man and the King

When he’d first gotten into the Mayor’s office, Mlinx had wondered what the purpose of the desk was. All the actual work was completed on the holographic computer screen that took up all of a fifth of the wooden hunk of furniture. The rest of it was bare.

He stored paper on it for a while. Then he realized he never used the paper for long, his data pad provided everything. Why bother?

So for months, his desk had lain barren – unremarkable, devoid of all life. He didn’t see any reason to put anything on it. He had seen other desks with pictures of family members or other items of personal value. While he had access to such pictures, he had no close family to speak of, and images of his fellow demons just reminded him how dead they all were. The only item of sentiment he had was his spear, and that was mounted on the wall behind him.

This happened until there was a birthday celebration and one of the gifts had been a small Newton’s Cradle. He wasn’t sure why he decided to put it on his desk, but he did. And the clak clak clak of the metallic balls… they were comforting.

So he got a few more things like it. Little trinket toys like a bird that would tip back and forth, a machine that would push up and down with seemingly no input, and a top that used magnets to eternally rotate.

It was clear to him now. The purpose of a desk was to collect and display as many trinkets as possible.

He ended up with a little mountain of them.

“You remind me a lot of my Rarity,” Chancellor Fluttershy said, examining all the trinkets. “She was obsessed with these things. Had massive piles of them in every corner of her office. It was her way of staying sane in our world’s… problems.”

“Every corner?” Mlinx narrowed his eyes. “I had not considered placing them in places other than the desk…”

“Perhaps you could invest in bookshelves?”

“Maybe.” He shook his head, turning back to her. “But that’s besides the point. You were talking about the problem in the Concrete district.”

With a sigh, the Chancellor nodded. “Yes. We had been weeding out the racism from the Concretes well. I didn’t think there were enough aggressive ones to form a resurgence, but by some trick of fate it seems that most of the Concretes who were spared the dusting were of the mind that they were above everyone else. The older generations grabbed the district and kicked anyone out who didn’t agree with them.” She paused for a moment. “I’m here to ask for some authority in redistributing them so they don’t become a pattern to follow.”

“You’re afraid other groups will try the same thing?”

“Precisely. We need to avoid extensive echo-chambers so we don’t suffer from major disagreement further down the line.”

“The situation certainly needs to be solved,” Mlinx agreed, pressing his automatic Rubik’s cube absent-mindedly. “Tell me how you plan to do it.”

“Trick them,” the Chancellor said. “Pay anyone who will listen to move elsewhere. Most Concretes, while stubborn, do see value in material things. Give them enough and most will move. Those who don’t, we’ll put watches on. I have little doubt such extreme racism will lead to a few broken laws within a week or two since they aren’t surrounded by only like-minded people.”

“Do you have a full project proposal?”

The Chancellor handed him a data pad. “It also has alternate proposals. The most effective would be the by-force method, but I doubt that will go down well politically. There’s also a forced-integration policy that will likely cause a few incidents rather than running smoothly. I recommend the payment strategy over the others.”

“I’ll look it over… You’ll get funding for one of these, I can assure you. Not sure wh-”

Mlinx’s secretary – Nastasia, a woman very experienced in the field – opened his office door. “We’ve got a problem.”

Mlinx straightened himself up. “What?”

“Ernan group A and Ernan group B are having a very heated spat and Rev has her hooves full.”

Mlinx sighed. He placed the Chancellor’s proposal in a drawer and stood up. “Sorry to cut this short, I have to deal with this.”

The Chancellor bowed and left without another word.

Mlinx didn’t have to ask Nastasia – she knew he wanted to teleport right to the scene, so that’s what she did. They appeared just outside the City walls, where Rev had raised a magical shield between two groups of humans. They weren’t fighting – currently – but they sure looked like they wanted too.

They all wore simple blue clothing of similar designs and had white hair. This in and of itself wasn’t unusual. The quirk of the two Ernan groups was that everyone in A had a duplicate in B, no exception.

It should come as no surprise that neither of them was particularly fond of this duplication.

“It is you who are the imposters!” one of the men was saying.

“You have sub-standard and shoddy fabrics!” his duplicate shouted back. “No Ernan would ever be satisfied with that level of work!”

“And what of your off-color? Did you run out of indinia?”

“We have an endless supply of indinia! It is you who use an unholy flower!”

“Hey, here’s an idea,” Rev said, interjecting. “How about you stop fighting so we can figure this out?”

“We get into the City and they have to go, end of story!” It didn’t particularly matter which side said that. It was the exact position both of them had.

Rev sighed. “What’s wrong with both of you entering the city? I can assign you to different sect-”

“It ruins the holy sacrament!”

“I understand – trust me I do,” Rev said, glancing back and forth with calm eyes. “What we have here are two sets of beliefs that cannot be reconciled. You both believe you are the chosen Ernan, and you could both be right, when talking about your original worlds! But you aren’t in your worlds anymore, a-”

“THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!”

“IT IS US!”

“IT IS U-”

“SHUT UP!” Mlinx shouted, clapping all four of his hands together to grab their attention. “I am not going to have a pair of squabbling self-absorbed humans into my city!” He took several powerful steps forward. “Here’s your ultimatum – either both of you enter the city, or I bar both types of Ernans from it! Forever!”

The Ernans and Rev looked at him in surprise.

“Well?”

“Unacceptable,” both Ernan leaders said at the same time.

“Then go back to wherever you came from,” Mlinx said, waving them away. “We’re done with you.” He turned his back to them.

The Ernans blinked. Then they grimaced to each other and nodded. “We… cannot continue without structure to rebuild our culture. Perhaps we could each have one side of the City to wander?”

Mlinx stopped. “That will do nicely. Nastasia, see to it that the proper arrangements are made.”

Nastasia adjusted her glasses. “Right away, sir.” She scrambled to them and began explaining the nuances of the visiting process.

Rev trotted up to Mlinx. “…Well, that worked. But they aren’t happy with you now.”

“I’ll live,” Mlinx said, folding his arms. “I don’t need that much approval.”

“Your position is an elected one,” Rev reminded him. “And they’re going to call you one who stomps over religion and culture if it doesn’t suit you.”

“…You think it was the wrong decision?”

“I don’t know. I know I wasn’t ready to give up on them working it out, though.” She shook her head. “You’re a strong man, Mlinx, and your heart is in the right place. But you don’t want to be seen as angry if you can help it.”

Mlinx fell silent, taking a moment to ponder this.

“I’ll do what I can to keep these people wrangled, but the media will have a field day.” Rev pursed her lips. “Sadly, every last one of your actions is going to be judged, and you’re not lucky like Blumiere. Your City isn’t as patriotic or unified.”

Mlinx folded his higher pair of hands together, trying to figure out what this meant for him.

~~~

Later that day, Mlinx descended. He entered the elevator and sank down to the deepest basement. At one point, this area had housed the guards for Flagg’s cell. Now Flagg didn’t need live guards, so the room had been repurposed. It was still just as top secret and hidden as before, but for a completely different reason.

Mlinx slid out of the great elevator and into a dark room bare of all decoration. The only source of light was in the very center of the disc-shaped interior; a glass cylinder illuminated by white backlight. Suspended in this cylinder was a dark black staff with a murky black sphere floating near the head.

Black Thirteen.

An artifact of complete knowledge and immense power, sealed here. Mlinx could not access it himself – he needed a grand total of six highest-level security codes to get in, and even in emergency situations he himself only had access to three. He was not even able to feel Black Thirteen’s power, for there was a nullifying field all around the room that kept all power flowing off of it contained.

As far as Mlinx’s eyes were concerned, it was just a staff.

A staff that meant a lot to Mlinx. It was the one reminder of the past he allowed himself to dwell on. Usually he hated the dark, negative sorrows that came to his mind.

But this staff was different. It represented not Lord English to the pink demon, but Siron himself. A man Mlinx had never quite been able to remove from his mind. A man Mlinx had spent a good deal of time hating. He was long, long dead, but the hate had never left Mlinx. For a while, he had tried to deny that he had such feelings. To ignore the fact that he hadn’t moved on.

The truth was, he couldn’t move on. Or maybe he could – but some deep-down part didn’t want to. He wanted to keep hating the demon chief who had killed so many and shaped Mlinx’s world into what it was.

Who had, in essence, brought the demons to their knees. Sure, there were other factors Mlinx would admit on an intellectual level, but emotionally it was all Siron, Siron, Siron.

“I wonder when you turned,” Mlinx asked the staff. “You had to have been a good man at some point. You got to become Chief. You couldn’t have done that without that spark. You wouldn’t have been able to make it through the trials, would not have been vouched for by the other warriors. If we’d just wanted strength in our leader, it would not have been so hard for you to get there. But we cared about more. You proved to everyone that your way was worthwhile and that you understood.”

Mlinx leaned back against a wall, refusing to let his eyes leave the black orb. “Was it the position that changed you? Power corrupts? Was it inevitable that you would turn away from the honorable warrior the tribe knew and become a conniving manipulative mastermind who didn’t understand change?”

Black Thirteen offered no response.

Mlinx glared at it angrily. “I won’t be like you! I won’t succumb to it! I see the danger – I won’t fall into the pit trap!”

Black Thirteen seemed unconvinced by his declaration.

“I’m not you,” Mlinx asserted. “I actually care. And I can change.”

But change can be good or bad, he thought to himself.

“…I am tired of living in your shadow. Your legacy has tainted our name for decades, and none have ever forgotten what you did. They say they forgive, they say they understand, but they cannot always listen to what they say. All the respect they have for me is from their friendship, or their pity. I am the last demon. And I will make it so we’re remembered for something other than you.”

There was no response. There was never a response. Mlinx never expected one. He just came here to get things off his chest.

…There was no one left who could really understand what Siron meant to the demons. This was all that was left for him.

Usually, it did make him feel better. He’d get his confidence back and feel ready to take on anything the City could throw at him.

This was not the case today. He felt dejected, like Siron had grappled him from beyond the grave and set him on a path he couldn’t escape.

Slouching, he left the room.

~~~

The media, like always, attacked the event like a firestorm. Depending on where people were from before, the explosion either seemed overly tame or unexpectedly harsh. Merodi news was rarely so openly aggressive, but a lot of human worlds were surprised the hosts didn’t grill him endlessly from all sides and devolve into shouting matches. Not to mention what many of the warrior-types thought should happen…

But it was a mixed modern media, and with all things, the story was quickly lost in the wind. It was just one little event in Mlinx’s Mayorship, and he hadn’t made a pattern out of losing patience and taking the strong-arm position.

Yet.

He already saw himself considering doing it more as time went on. Why bother with the clean, friendly solution when a little open aggression and power-play would get the job done faster and with less effort? In theory, he should be able to manage a ‘strike’ on his record…

Well, he could, if he could convince himself it wasn’t a strike. Which he couldn’t do. It was eating at him, bad enough that a few people had started to wonder if something was up. Considering how hard it was to read demon expressions, that was telling.

He’d talked to Rev about it, and she’d told him not to worry. Since he was asking those questions and was keeping careful watch on himself, she knew he wasn’t on the path to Siron. He actually cared.

That didn’t really help, not that he let her know that. It made sense, after all – why shouldn’t it give him comfort?

He absent-mindedly poked one of his trinkets, prompting it to enter a nearly perpetual spin. The noise from the sudden movement made him focus on the world in his office, allowing him to notice Nastasia for the first time. “Oh! What is it this time?”

Nastasia adjusted her glasses and pulled out a data pad. “The locusts have cordially invited you to partake in their Festival of the Hive, a twenty-four hour celebration of locust society, the royal family, and their survival in the New World.”

“That sounds interesting…”

“We need to come up with a reason they’ll accept as to why you can’t go.”

Mlinx blinked. “…I can’t?”

“The City needs you present in case of emergency. An extended outing is out of the question.”

“I don’t remember agreeing to that,” Mlinx commented, going back over the duties of the Mayor. “Yes, I can be recalled from anything, but…”

“The locusts aren’t nearby. There is a minute-long time delay. If something goes wrong…”

“One minute is not much, and I am far from the only hero in this City,” Mlinx pointed out. “I’m just the face – as ironic as that sounds.”

Nastasia let out a quiet sigh. “Okay, it’s smarter to keep you here. Even if our policy doesn’t require it.”

“Thank you,” Mlinx said.

“I have to say I’m surprised you’re even expressing interest in going.”

“They’re a warrior culture of insects whose numbers are small and who are overwhelmed by all the things that have happened to them,” Mlinx said. “Isn’t the correlation obvious?”

“Perhaps,” Nastasia admitted.

“I could call it a vacation,” Mlinx commented, scratching the edge of his desk absent-mindedly. “Get out a bit. Clear this head of mine.”

“There is a chance it could be good for you.”

“Then I’ve made up my mind,” Mlinx asserted, standing up. “I’ll be taking a vacation. Set the date so the Festival of the Hive lies in the middle of it.”

“How many extra days?”

Mlinx had to think for a moment, he hadn’t taken a vacation yet. “…One day buffer on each side. Workable?”

“Yes,” Nastasia responded, entering a few more things into the calendar. “And it’s all set. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

“I hope they’re not going to make my presence a big deal…” The moment Mlinx said this he realized it was a mistake.

~~~

There was an actual red carpet.

Where had they gotten a red carpet? The Locusts didn’t make fabric themselves! They would have needed to buy it from someone! And they were dirt poor!

Where did they get the carpet?!

Mlinx didn’t show any of his surprise on the outside – he held himself tall and proud, his spear slung over his back, the head pointed sharply upward. He wore no ornate uniform, the only indication of his station being a small wristband with interlaced rose engravings.

As he walked down the carpet, the locusts threw flowers and pieces of art made up of a papery material they used to craft their hives. The yellow beings had a similar body type to Mlinx, except there were four legs, two arms, and two eyes. Every locust had wings large enough to fly, and fly without too much effort. Their shells had no ornate designs, and almost all of them were identical in size and color, making it difficult even for Mlinx to tell them apart – as far as he could tell, only those with damaged carapaces had any identifying features to speak of.

He had expected this, since this was hardly the first time he had met with the locusts, though it was a lot harder to follow now that they were all cheering and buzzing around him. No one could tell it from his face, but it was all a bit much to take in.

“Hold!”

The voice rang out through the hall and every last one of the locust drones froze in an instant, only those who had been in the air at the time of the order continuing to move at all.

“Stance!”

The locust drones all turned to face the red carpet directly and folded their arms behind their backs with military precision in their movements.

Only now could the royal couple meet Mlinx on the carpet. The King looked like a drone, except slightly larger and with much more impressive wings. The Queen might as well have been a different creature – instead of resembling her people, she looked more like a wasp the size of a bus. She stayed slightly behind the King as he extended one of his hands.

Mlinx noted it wasn’t the traditional locust greeting, but a human handshake. Mlinx took it and shook for a few seconds, before meeting the King with a swift circular hand motion that had originated from the demon tribe. The King responded in kind with a multi-fingered interlace.

“You’ve gotten much better,” the King noted as Mlinx’s digits managed to complete the interweaving gesture. “Practice?”

Mlinx nodded. “Most of it comes from learning the greetings of so many cultures. Your fingers will get very agile naturally.”

The King nodded in understanding. “Quite. Without further ado, Mlinx of Tower City and the Demon Tribe! I humbly accept your presence in our Festival of the Hive.”

“The honor is mine, King.” Mlinx found just saying ‘King’ more than a little awkward, but locusts didn’t exactly have names in the traditional sense, so it was the best he could do. He turned and bowed to the Queen as well. “It would be shameful of me not to recognize you as well, Queen.”

“Cordial as always,” the Queen responded in a raspy, decidedly inhuman voice. “I hope you will allow yourself to move beyond all that before your stay is over.”

Mlinx nodded slowly. “I would very much like to get to know you all better.”

The King chuckled. “Clever response… Something to talk about over the breakfast table! …Do you have any guests or bodyguards we should prepare for?”

Mlinx shook his head. “Just me. Since I’m considering this a vacation they don’t need to guard me – and plus, I have my spear.”

“And you lack any hive-mates…” the King shook his head. “A tragedy.”

“Thank you, King.”

The King nodded slowly, gesturing for Mlinx to follow him with a wing. They entered a circular tunnel made entirely of a paper-like substance, leading them into a cavern system where the Hive itself had been built. Locusts were essentially ground bees with high intelligence – living and building their homes deep beneath the earth while flying to the surface to collect food and resources. From the surface, no one would ever know there was a locust hive. But inside…

It was incredible. A few months ago it wouldn’t have been – the locusts would have lived almost entirely in the dark with only a few careful glow stations here and there – but with the gift of modern lighting the entire locust civilization was blessed with the ability to light everything anytime they wanted. Cylindrical pillars made of a paper honeycomb structure snaked from the ground to the ceiling in organized, pleasing mathematical patterns. Each honeycomb was effectively a house – identical to virtually every other.

There wasn’t much in the way of unique architecture. The few things that were designed differently were storage buildings, nurseries, the royal palace, and the arena: the only source of entertainment visible within the cavern. There was a single building made of metallic materials, a power plant Mlinx had given them to power the lights. The only non-locusts in the cavern huddled around this little beacon of outside civilization.

As Mlinx walked with the King, Queen, and their entourage, the most complex light in the Hive lit up – lighting the arena with a rainbow strobe effect. Mlinx found it hard to look at, but somehow he was still able to pick out two drones on top of the platform. The buzz of locust wings that had been nothing more than a background hum before became a howl.

A battle commenced between two drones: one wielding two excessively-long swords, the other a simple Merodi pulse gun. They flew at each other – almost too fast to see. The gun was fired seven separate times, but every last pulse was deflected, allowing the swordsman in to cut off the gunner’s arms. The gunman howled in pain and hung his head in defeat.

For a moment, Mlinx thought the swordsman was going to finish the job. But he didn’t; he raised his swords high and absorbed the buzzing of the crowd like cheers.

Mlinx didn’t know why he was worried – the locusts had never engaged in to the death events for sport. It would waste a perfectly good drone warrior. They’d never allowed injuries more than they could cure.

…Sometimes modern magic medicine did some questionable things. He knew the drone would have his arms back within the hour, of course.

“Scheduled that just for me, did you?” Mlinx asked.

The King chuckled. “I don’t run the games. But I did tell the warriors you were coming… So…” He shook his head. “I can tell you more about it later. For now, the feast!”

They walked into the royal palace. Unlike many palaces, this one wasn’t all that ornate or impressive. It was just a paper honeycomb composed of many smaller paper honeycombs and a few holes that dug into the ground. The area was much better lit than most others, and there were a few pieces of ornamentation that clearly came from the outside world – such as a human painting, or a lotus flower under a special solar light.

The palace had many guards around it, but otherwise the area was mostly open. The banquet table was ‘outside’, if you could call it outside in a cave like this. The food smelled absolutely delicious to Mlinx; a honey-like substance coated most, but not all of the food. There were many fruits, vegetables, and meat salvaged from the outside. He also noted a small section at the end of the table with cakes and breads not of locust design, but equine.

Probably made by one of the workers at the power plant. He made a mental note to find whoever it was and thank them for their efforts.

“Sit! Eat! Enjoy!” the Queen announced. She didn’t need a chair herself, given her size, so she just lowered her head to be level with the rest at the table. There were other guards and drones around, but the only other locust of interest at the table besides the royal couple was the Princess, a female drone who was beginning the long and painful growth process to a full Queen. Currently she still looked like a drone, except with a larger head and slightly more pronounced rear where a stinger was developing.

She seemed a lot more interested in the food – particularly the equine treats – than in Mlinx. He didn’t mind, it was far from the first time something like this had happened. With quick motions he grabbed some unidentified meaty nuggets with greens poking out of them and devoured them.

Not the best thing in the world, but it was designed for an arthropod’s palate, unlike most things in the City. It really was delicious. “Do you have any idea how rare arthropods are? Intelligent ones, I mean.”

“You are the only one we’ve seen,” the King pointed out. “I got the impression quickly enough.”

“Ah, forgive me. I’m just pleasantly surprised by the food catered to our palates here. Usually I have to ask for food like this to be prepared.”

The Queen buzzed. “And here we went through all the trouble of getting some more ‘universal’ food.”

“You can’t go wrong with cake,” Mlinx acknowledged, stabbing a piece of the aforementioned pastry. “It is straight sugar, naturally unhealthy, but perhaps the most delicious thing in existence.” He munched on it. “I do think it’d be better if it was thicker, but I’ve yet to find someone who’s mixed honey and cake together in the right way.”

“Perhaps we could relegate a few drones as experimental chefs?” the Queen suggested.

“I see no problem with that,” the King agreed. “Though finding one of them who’d like to cook…”

The Princess raised her hand. “I… could.”

“Wouldn’t be a permanent position,” the King said. “You’ll soon be a full Queen. The Hive will need to spread.”

“She could still practice it,” the Queen countered. “She might have to stop when it’s time for her to establish the new Hive, but I have enough free time to devote to such activities if I desired.”

“Really?” the Princess asked.

“Yes. Really.”

The King shrugged. “New times and all... Sure.”

Mlinx felt his stomach do flip-flops suddenly, forcing him to examine the honey-like substance he had been ingesting. “Excuse me, I’m afraid I don’t know what this is.”

“Avar,” the Queen answered. “A natural product of locusts.”

“It’s not excrement,” the King interjected quickly. “Everyone always thinks it’s excrement. It isn’t. It’s formed through the walls.”

“I would say it’s considered a delicacy, it’s dreadfully commonplace. You could probably lick a wall and get it if you didn’t care about hygiene.”

Mlinx took one more look at the sticky roll and devoured it. “It is delicious.”

“But it’s turning your stomach into knots,” the King suggested. “I had hoped your physiology would be more compatible than the others, but I guess not.”

“There’s plenty of dishes here without it,” the Queen added. “Feel free to avoid any of the avar you see.”

“Thank you,” he said, turning to eat for a few minutes. A little while later, he looked up. “I do have a question. What does this Festival of the Hive mean to you as a culture?”

“It is a celebration of unified community,” the King explained, folding his hands together. “It’s a day where the drones drift from their assignments and come together for the singular goal of making the entire Hive celebrate. We forego our focus on efficiency, resources, and development in favor of enjoyment. It’s a reversal of our usual way of things, and a reminder that there are other things of value besides endless work. Your presence – that is, the presence of your people – has turned this into the wildest Festival I’ve ever seen.”

“And that’s a good thing,” the Queen asserted.

The King shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not, I have not seen the final results of increased activity yet. I do agree the people are more energetic.”

“…You know I used to be a part of a tribal warriors’ society,” Mlinx said. “It’s not quite like yours – we favored personal strength over community strength – but we went through a lot of the same things your society is going through now. Most of the changes were for the better, but not all. I’m glad to hear you’re looking closely to see which ones are. And on our end, we’re working hard to let you make that decision. …Back in the day, I don’t think my people were given a choice.”

“You are an honorable man, Mlinx,” the King said, nodding. “I believe you place a bit too much worth on sentimentality and culture, but I can see where it comes from. No doubt it makes you a great leader for that melting-pot of a City you call yours.”

Mlinx didn’t openly agree with him. He made a dismissive gesture with his arm and tried to think of a new topic. Luckily, he didn’t need to – a locust walked into the dining area and cleared her throat. She was wearing light armor and an elongated sword. “Message from the arena gladiators.”

“Hm?” the Queen said, blinking. “What is it?”

“The visitor has been invited to participate in the next round of combat, should he desire.”

Mlinx blinked. Saying no would be rude… And would undermine my image of coming from a warrior’s culture. He took a breath. “I accept your challenge. Which experienced warrior is going to give an old man like me the beatdown?”

“A mid-tier warrior of curious instincts.” She twirled her sword around. “Me. See you then.”

“Looks like you have a date,” the Princess said, chuckling.

Mlinx nodded slowly. “Yes, it seems I… wait, your species has the concept of a date? I thought…”

The King chuckled. “The Princess is just using your language. Drones are assigned partners. While the Queen and I produce the most drones, it is not enough for population stability. All non-Princess females come from other pairs.”

“Oh, I see.” He rubbed the back of his head. “I had two pieces of information and they seemed to disagree.”

The Queen buzzed her wings. “It happens. We aren’t always aware of what we need to explain and what we don’t. I would recommend not eating too much, your performance will drop.”

Mlinx looked at the food. “Good advice.”

~~~

Mlinx did not follow the advice. He ended up with an upset, churning stomach by the time the feast was over. But he wouldn’t let that stop him – he knew some stretches to minimize stomach pains.

Currently he was on one side of the arena, twirling his spear. The arena, unlike virtually every other construction, was not composed out of honeycomb patterns. It was a flat disc with a smooth papery floor covered in locust bloodstains and chipped carapaces. There were hexagon-shaped seats all around the edge, every last one filled with locusts who wanted to see a fight like nothing they had ever seen before.

Mlinx twirled his spear forward, to his back, and forward again. He balanced it on one of his fingers and snatched it out of the air with his foot, swirling around. “Still got it…”

The female locust was not practicing: she was observing him. “I find it curious that you do your preparations in the open, where I may study them.”

Mlinx shrugged. “These are just stretches. I have not had a proper sporting duel in… I think before the collapse. Not that I haven’t been in fights – I was in the Lord English attacks – but those aren’t exactly fond memories of victory.”

She nodded slowly. “I can study the way you move and make predictions though. Even if you have more advanced techniques…”

“If you can look at me for ten minutes and know what I’m going to do, I deserve to lose for being so choreographed,” Mlinx asserted, swinging the spear onto his back.

“I am also mildly surprised you have no hint of this ‘magic’ with you. Our gladiators who have received the blessing have no reason to avoid its use. One of your position should surely be able to get the powers.”

“It’s part of my heritage. Only some of my tribe were gifted with magic. I chose never to go beyond that.” He looked out at the arena. “So, when do we start?”

“Now,” she said, gesturing for him to follow. The two of them walked to the middle of the dark arena. The moment they were on opposing sides of a center circle, the strobe light turned on. While everyone else would see a mess of flashing lights, the two of them saw each other in perfect white light.

“Clever,” Mlinx observed, drawing his spear.

She drew her sword and hefted it in both hands. “The fight is to the drawing of blood.” There was a second of unspoken respect between the two of them.

They charged at once. She brought her sword down, clearly expecting him to deflect with the spear, but instead he deflected with a free arm, carefully running his carapace along the flat edge of the blade. His spear struck true, but without enough momentum to pierce her armor.

She tried to pull back, but his fourth arm was on the hilt of her sword. He pulled back, trying to disarm her – but she had enough free legs to kick him in the chest and knock him back.

He felt sick to his stomach. “Ergh…” He flipped to his feet, leaping over a slice of the locust’s blade. He drove one of his hands into her face and pushed her back, unable to get a direct strike with the spear. Pushing, he bounced into the air and angled the spear downward at her. Her response was to smack the spear with the blunt side of her blade and toss him to the side.

Mlinx stood up and parried a series of blows with carefully directed arm movements. It was at this point he realized that, despite his inexperience and stomach pains, he was having fun. He had often rejected his violent, warrior side actively, treating it as something distasteful. He hadn’t engaged in fighting for sport in… ages.

It was only now that he realized something had been missing ever since then.

He was a warrior, no matter how weak he had been compared to the others. He knew how to fight, and it was part of him. Part of his nature.

It was time to let it awaken again.

With a sudden ferocity in his eyes, he lunged forward, taking a risky move right over her blade. He brought the base of his spear around her neck, grabbing one of her legs at the same time and knocking her over. With a quick motion he slammed a foot on her prone form, keeping her down. He twirled his spear and drove it toward her neck.

He stopped an inch away, trembling.

It had taken immense willpower to stop the speartip from going right through her.

Carefully, he nicked an area between two of her carapace plates, drawing a small amount of blood. Then he got off of her and turned away.

There was cheering. He barely heard it. He was announced the winner and asked for another fight – but he declined it. Or he thought he did. He really wasn’t sure. Everything was a blur.

I almost killed her. I let myself fall into the way of the warrior… and I almost killed her.

He trudged away, not even asking what part of the Festival he should go to next.

~~~

Mlinx found himself standing on a balcony (more of an external railing) jutting out from the power plant. He was slouched, leaning heavily on the railing with enough force that it had bent slightly.

He’d told himself he’d only come here to express his appreciation for the cakes. Which he had. The ponies had taken the thanks as excitedly as their kind usually did. Then Mlinx decided not to leave and just stare out into nothing.

…That wasn’t exactly true. There were certainly things to look at – the lights lit up select areas full of drones moving in formation. Even in a Festival devoted to their enjoyment, they moved almost with one mind. The only exception to this was the arena itself, and it was just as brutal as always.

Mlinx tried to force himself to look into the darkness, where there was nothing. It was a strange mixture of satisfying and depressing. It was... dark.

I thought I could give in… He tightened his grip on the railing. That thing inside me is evil. Why did I let myself forget that? Why did I leave myself open to the temptation?

He was so fixated on his thoughts he didn’t notice the gargantuan form of the Queen flying to him. He did notice when she landed, shaking the entire platform with her girth. “Augh! I – I’m sorry, Queen, I was just clearing my head, I’ll be back to the festivities immedi-”

“I am not here to ask you back,” the Queen said. “I am here to tell you that I understand.”

“Queen, y-”

“You fear yourself,” the Queen said, simply. “There is a nature within you that leads to combat, battle, and competition – and above all, violence. You have convinced yourself it is evil, so you starved it, and this starvation made it desperate. You almost killed her.”

Mlinx froze.

“I was the only one who noticed,” the Queen asserted. “That’s my job. I provide for the people, I know what they need, I help them. The King makes the sweeping and external decisions, but I am the interior, I am the ‘family’. You may think you are not expressive, but your body language and responses tell the entire story. “

Mlinx turned to her. “And what do you think?”

“I understand the need to turn away from instinct. Such things exist to ensure survival, not quality of life. We, too, are violent creatures, and the arena exists to channel that energy in a safe environment. Only the select few who can control their impulses can become gladiator drones; the rest must be content to watch.” She looked Mlinx in the eyes. “I do apologize for letting them know you could be an exception. It was a test, you could say, but it was not one I had any right to give.”

“It’s fine. I wanted it myself…” Mlinx sighed. “It’s a powerful urge. And I’d been doing so well…”

“Fighting instinct and drive is a lifelong struggle,” the Queen said. “I have to constantly micromanage my people, but their need for competition has slowly been worked out, even more so now that you’ve shown yourselves. But there is another problem we have, one that runs a little deeper.” She directed Mlinx’s gaze to one of the housing centers. “Look at them, flying in formation.”

“Even when they don’t have to…”

“They are unquestioning,” the Queen said. “They care not for individuality, and are devoted to endless work. One of the things they care about the most is being the same as everyone else. Even the gladiators are like this, to some extent. There is no ‘champion’, for every one tries to keep their skills on a comparable level to the others. Domination is meant for the King and Queen, and that is only by necessity.”

Mlinx blinked. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“It’s wrong, is what I’m saying,” the Queen said. “We need to change. And you’ve done a good job of showing us there are other ways out there… but you treat us with too much respect.”

“Excuse me?”

The Queen sighed. “You have so much in your ways – kindness, diversity, improvement… The drones don’t have any of that. And you’ve gone out of your way to keep from ‘contaminating’ our culture with those values. Like our way of life is perfectly valid.” She shook her head. “It isn’t.”

“Are you asking me to come in and change you?”

“Yes.”

Mlinx reeled. “That… I can’t do that, it goes against our cultural laws.”

“I figured you might think that,” the Queen said, producing a data pad. “But I have studied up on your laws in my free time – my daughter may cook, I read. By Merodi Law, yes, we are stable, ethical, and ‘harmonious’ enough to be protected by the Cultural Division. But those laws do not apply in the City. You have almost no cultural protection laws in the City since trying to protect the thousands of different ideals within your own walls would be impossible. You can make this choice.”

Mlinx realized she was right. He did have the power. He’d have to run it by his advisors and get the proper approval, but he could do it. He could order a change of this world’s culture. Slow, fast, it didn’t matter, he could do it.

“What kind of change do you have in mind?”

“Start moving more and more people in. Give them jobs, buildings, and add some of your ‘media’ to this place. Then you can work out the formations and…”

“Transform this place into just another extension of the City,” Mlinx said. “…Don’t you see the irony there? By praising uniqueness and diversity you are really saying you want to transform yourselves into the same thing as us.”

“Mlinx…”

“Your people don’t want it,” Mlinx asserted.

“Most of those I have taken under my personal wing agree.”

“And you’re their queen, of course they would.” Mlinx folded his arms. “I may not know all that much about the locusts, but I do know they like their lives. They aren’t unhappy. It’s a little unusual, yes. But I can’t condone erasing it.” He looked the Queen in the eyes. “They’re changing naturally, Queen. I can see it in the way they move and interact. They’ll change into something better and truly unique. Not quite the City, not quite the Hive of the locusts. It’ll just take time.”

“What about the lives of those who are here now?”

Mlinx shook his head. “…They’ll live the way they are and, like most older generations, resent the changes as they appear, but be unable to stop them. It’s how it always works with change, good, bad, or otherwise.”

The Queen looked him up and down for a moment. “Truly saying no?”

Yes, Mlinx thought, but he realized this might be a foolish maneuver. “You can submit a request to the City government. If it goes through, I won’t interfere.”

The Queen narrowed her eyes. “…I shall look into that.” She spread her wings and flew away.

Mlinx gulped, getting a sinking feeling in his stomach. He checked his watch – the Festival was barely half over and he didn’t want to hang around anymore.

He pulled out his phone with a sigh and called the City. “Hey. I need extraction. Get a team here, I should be out of the caverns within half an hour. If not, move in.” He sent the message and put the phone away.

Now he just had to figure out what he was going to tell the King about his reason for leaving early…

~~~

“Some new information has come to my attention, and because of it I must return to the City. I am sorry, King.” Technically honest, check. Doesn’t cast any suspicion on me or the Queen, check.

The King nodded. “I was afraid of this – the concept of a vacation always seemed as if it would bring about unwanted problems. I regret that you must leave and that you will not get to see the dance tonight, but I bid you farewell. I hope I can find the Queen, so she may bid you goodbye as well.”

“We talked on the way over here,” Mlinx said. “I do not think it was wrong to come to her.”

“It was not. I bid you farewell, and wish to see you here again. You bring an interesting perspective to our society.”

Your Queen’s the one with the interesting perspective. I’d watch her… Mlinx bowed. “Until next time.” He confidently and slowly walked out of the King’s presence.

The moment he was in the Hive proper and thought it was safe he took off in a run. He knew exactly where the entrances to the cavern were, and he decided to avoid both the closest one and the one he had come in on the red carpet just in case there were locusts there waiting for him. He bolted for the second closest, legs moving up and down in rhythm with his heavy breathing.

He tried to tell himself that he might be overreacting – that the Queen might not try to stop him, that she might trust him.

He never really believed that for a second. It was nothing more than a little hope in the back of his mind.

Slowly, this hope began to grow. He passed the outer edge of the Hive and saw no locusts where he was. He entered the exit tunnel and found no guards to stop him. When he saw the twilight light of the surface ahead, he actually allowed himself to believe he might make it out simply.

He rushed out into the open grass and air, feeling the fresh breeze get under the folds of his carapace. His guard lowered – but it didn’t lower enough.

With a twirl, he deflected an incoming blade with the side of his arm, using another one to grab the locust that had assaulted him by the neck. It was a male with several scratches over his faceplate.

Behind him were roughly a dozen other locusts that looked more or less identical. Most held swords, a few spears, and one had a set of pulse guns.

Mlinx took his spear off his back and held it in front of him. He could tell these locusts weren’t the gladiators, meaning they likely didn’t have as much combat experience. But he couldn’t be certain about that deduction since they were no doubt the Queen’s ‘new’ locusts, and might actually be willing to individualize themselves…

The one with the guns fired, prompting Mlinx to leap into the air and land on a pair of locust’s heads. He drove his spear forward and pierced a stray locust in the chest, making them collapse in pain. They were unable to compensate like the gladiator had, their blades and weapons flying out of their hands with ease.

The guns were the only problem, forcing Mlinx to read their attacks before they were even fired. He needed to take care of that drone quickly. He jumped to the side, rolled between two sword locusts, and drove his spear up through the gun locust’s abdomen. The drone shuddered for a moment before dropping to the ground.

From reflex, Mlinx caught a blade with his hand. Sure, it drew blood, but he kept it from damaging anything particularly vital. He tore the blade away and wielded it with one hand while his two other good hands continued to twirl his spear around, knocking locusts away. He suffered numerous scrapes and wounds himself, but he was a warrior. He knew how to angle his body so all that really happened was pain – not disability.

With an impressive jump he kicked two locusts in the face at once with all his might. He used this as a springboard and threw his sword into the head of the last remaining locust.

Some of the locusts were dead, although most were just knocked out or heavily injured. And yet, he didn’t feel like he had blown it. That was how it had to go.

“Guess it’s good for something…” he muttered, leaning on his spear. I was the weak one. Now look at me. “If you’re alive and can move, you’ll need to go get medical attention in the Hive.” He took out his phone and took some pictures of himself and the locusts. “If there’s any doubt about what happened here, I was about to return to the City when I was ambushed by a group of rogue locusts for an unknown reason.” Tired, he turned and walked away, hoping his backup would arrive soon.

This proved to be a mistake. Sure, the gun locust was out of the picture, but some of those who were less-injured were able to grab his guns. A pulse hit Mlinx in the back, knocking him out instantly.

~~~

He woke up in a room that was clearly part of the hive – hexagonal and made of paper – but it wasn’t one he recognized. It wasn’t a simple living cell, for it was not only far larger, but also had a large cauldron in the center filled with the honey-like avar. It was steaming, and that made Mlinx decidedly nervous.

He was tied up, spearless, in one corner of the room. On the other side of the room was the Queen. She was the only one in the room.

“I’m going to say this once,” Mlinx said. “I have already made a call requesting a pickup from my people, before I went to talk to the King. They can’t be far away. They have the resources to find out what happened to me almost without trying.”

“And then they’ll be forced to interfere,” the Queen said. “Which is exactly what I want. Our culture, blamed for a tragedy. They’ll take me and butcher me like you did my special drones, but they’ll be forced to adjust our culture inside as a result. They’ll care a lot less about us, and by extension will be willing to dispense with the ‘protection’ acts they have in mind.” She walked to him. “The only reason you’re still alive is because I want to give you a chance to reconsider and do it under your own volition. There will be a lot less pain and suffering that way.”

“Why can’t you just let your culture change naturally?”

“I cannot be sure it will change right!”

“And who are you to decide that?”

“The Queen!”

“A role assigned to you by a culture you reject!”

The Queen growled. “And you are taking the violent warrior’s way out by being stubborn. Your defiance here will only lead to strife. Show weakness and allow this to happen, and no one will have to suffer. You know your old way is wrong.”

Mlinx looked her right in the eyes. “No. The old way results in suffering and war, yes. But it also leads to courage, skill, and a willingness to stand up for what is right.” He may have been tied up, but he could still stand up to his full height. “I would have died to your agents had I not given in to my instinct then.”

“Such a sudden change…”

“No,” Mlinx said, taking a step forward. “I had just forgotten a lesson I had already learned.” He tugged against his restraints. “That it wasn’t my people that were toxic. It was my leader.”

The Queen looked taken aback. She was even more surprised when Mlinx used his raw strength to tear his restraints to shreds. “Siron was a result of your culture!”

“I’m not saying my culture was good.” Mlinx said, cracking his fingers. “What I’m saying is it isn’t worthless. It had an identity. That identity wasn’t one of warmongers – we didn’t fight with other tribes. The identity was one of strength, cunning, fortitude, and honor.” He clasped both sets of hands together. “We were hunters. And we w-”

The Queen slapped him with a leg almost as big as he was, sending him flying into a nearby wall. “You were not what I thought you were,” the Queen said, narrowing her eyes. “You do not deserve to lead with that mindset.”

Mlinx coughed up blue blood. “And you’re just another Siron…”

The Queen grabbed him in such a way that prevented him from moving. She carried him over to the avar cauldron. “You deserve to be subject to the hell of our society. And so you shall.”

“…What?”

“The secret of the avar,” the Queen said, holding him over the steaming sticky liquid. “It is what I think you would call a ‘contagion’. In small amounts it is harmless, but in large it will attempt to fuse with anyone and anything to make them part of the hive. For inanimate objects, it turns them into more wall material. But in the case of biological beings, it tries to transform them into locusts. You’re close enough that you’ll likely survive the process, and find your very body begging you to be one with the Hive, to be just like everyone else.”

“Your people are being biologically manipulated by a psychoactive drug?!”

“I have no clue if that is the right term. What I know is that you deserve t-”

“Shut up!” Mlinx shouted. “Interference policy will easily allow a cure to be made for the avar! If you don’t have a choice in the matter, I can give you one!”

“You’ve shown your true colors already, Mlinx,” the Queen growled. “You are still a warrior. You haven’t changed at all.”

Oh, the irony, Mlinx thought to himself as she lowered him into the ooze. I have an epiphany about what my past means and now I’m going to be reconditioned because of it. I’m not even that mad, just… annoyed. Is this what Pinkie and her friends feel like all the time?

His thoughts were interrupted as he was submerged in the cauldron. As soon as the avar was on all sides of him, he could feel the thick liquid seeping into the cracks of his carapace. He had no idea how long it would take before it was irreversible, but he knew he needed to act fast.

The Queen thought she had a good hold on him. However, she had failed to take something into account. Back on what had once been his home world, there had been many dinosaur-like creatures, some with exceptionally long hands. Demons of his tribe were taught how to escape those claws. Now that he was down here in a sticky liquid, he could wriggle some of his arms free from the Queen’s grasp. And if he pointed two of his hands and one of his feet on her wrist joint, he could push and…

…apparently pop the Queen’s hand right off. He had merely intended to trigger a pain response and force the hand to lose control of itself, but he supposed the segmented nature of her leg made this reasonable. With a quick push, he launched himself into the edge of the cauldron, pouring all the avar out onto the screeching Queen. She lost control of her legs in the sticky substance, allowing Mlinx to stand up and make a break for it. He ran past her and for the exit.

She wasn’t about to let this happen. She lurched out and bit down on his leg a second before he was out of her range. He let out a screech of pain and twirled around backward, driving his pointed fingers into her eyes – the usual weak-point of any large creature.

The hunt training just keeps coming in handy today.

The Queen was unable to keep hold of Mlinx through the pain, but she was able to throw him all the way across the room with an angry screech. He hit hard enough to crack his back carapace and shred part of the wall. He realized with fear that his spines had embedded into the papery wall, making it nearly impossible to move. He pushed back with his feet and hands, but they got stuck.

The Queen, blind as a bat, could still sense him. She didn’t speak; she just shakily walked over to him, buzzing like an angry hornet. She raised her remaining hand and rammed it into the wall – missing Mlinx by inches. This did not deter her; she pulled back and aimed right at Mlinx’s chest.

A sword came flying from the entrance and embedded itself in the Queen’s head. She made a gurgling sound for a moment. She was somehow able to turn her head just enough to see behind her.

Mlinx never knew if it was the wound or the sight of her husband standing in the doorway that actually killed her.

The King, with a despondent sigh, yanked his sword out of the Queen’s head. He traced a finger on her features. “…You went too far…”

“…You knew all about her,” Mlinx observed.

The King stood up, nodding. “She wanted change. I knew about her drones. What they practiced. I assumed she knew what was best for the people, and let her think I knew nothing so she could work freely. But she got too desperate…” He shook his head. “I suppose she got what she wanted. This is going to force change upon us…”

“She’s already paid the price for what she did,” Mlinx said, struggling to remove himself from the wall. “I can push all this under the rug and you can go back to your society. …The loss of the Queen will change things. But you can still lead them.”

“I have never been one to understand the people, and my daughter has never been one for leading. …She never really wanted to. It…”

“You can still have change,” Mlinx said. “You don’t have to be the leader the Queen was. You don’t have to make the Princess take her place. But I don’t want to tell you what you can do. You should change on your own terms.”

The King nodded slowly, glancing at the body of the Queen once again. “She meant well.”

Mlinx had nothing to say to this.

“…Here, let me remove you from that wall. It’s the least I could do.”

“Thanks. I am really stuck.”

“HALE SMASH!” Saxton Hale shouted, busting through the wall Mlinx was embedded in. “Ahahah! Mlinx, we are here to save you!”

Mlinx shakily picked himself up out of the rubble. “Didn’t… exactly need… saving anymore…”

“Oh, were you on that wall? Apologies, I just hit the first one I could.”

Mlinx chuckled, making it back onto his feet. “…Yeah. You did good, Hale. Just… get me home. And don’t mention anything you saw in this room. I’ll figure out what exactly I’m going to reveal on the way back.” Mlinx turned back to the King. “…I’m sorry.”

“I was the one who made the choice. Not you,” the King reminded him.

“I still brought this on you.”

“I cannot fault you for existing. Go, return home. And remember what you’ve seen here.”

~~~

Mlinx walked back into Black Thirteen’s storage room.

“So, I learned and relearned a few things today.”

The staff was as still and silent as always.

“First off, I was thinking about it wrong. I’ve always been looking back to you, what you did, what you made us all do… When I really should have been thinking about what we as a people were like. What we stood for. And I’ve come to realize you exemplified almost everything we adored.

“Almost.

“You didn’t care as much. Maybe you did at the end – when you were at your worst – but at the start? Before they came? We were tools to you. Means to an end. We weren’t warriors, we were yours. And that’s where you went wrong. That’s where you strayed from our path.”

Mlinx sighed. “I saw another leader stray from the path today. A Queen who exemplified the care, power, determination, and drive they all wanted. But, like you channeled your strength into a thirst for power, she channeled her care into a foolish desire for diversity. Her flaw was the same as yours, even if in the end what she wanted was the exact opposite. You hated change and would fight to keep your power. She hated the monotony and would fight to end it, even at the expense of the people she was convinced she cared about.

“I wonder what would have happened if you had a wife to stop you, as she had her King. Would you have made it as far as you did? Would you have caused so much destruction? I don’t think so. She would have made you turn back, or have stopped you.”

Mlinx took a couple steps forward. “I… I know I’m not what they want. I don’t exemplify what the people want from me. They want someone who exemplifies harmony, peace, understanding, diversity, and… well, I’m not that. I was elected because I was a heavy minority known to go against the standard way of things, a fresh outlook. I clearly don’t exemplify what they want, and they know it. That’s one of the ways I know I’m not you.” He shook his head and chuckled. “They simply don’t trust me enough.”

The clouds in Black Thirteen swirled – not likely in response to anything Mlinx was saying.

“I’m not convinced I have all the answers. Both you and this Queen… You hardly ever doubted yourselves or what you thought. You believed you were in your position for a reason, and that made you right. I’m unsure. I always wrestle with the decisions. Does that make me a slow decision maker? Yes. But it also makes me a better one.

“You were a blemish on our society, Siron. A blemish so strong even I wasn’t able to move past it. But now I think I see. I see what it means to be a demon – not a warrior, but a hunter. We strive through whatever we have at our disposal to provide for our families and our neighbors. We compete not to prove who is the best, but to sharpen each other.” He clapped his hands together. “We would go to the ends of the earth for those we cared about.”

He turned and left without another word.

147 - For What Comes Next

Day and night were completely imaginary processes on Nucleon. There was no sun, and the planets surrounding the central world didn’t orbit in any repeating pattern, so they couldn’t be used to keep time either. Twilight was eternal, powered by the light of relatively distant stars shining across the aether to Nucleon.

Everything in the City was run by a twenty-four hour clock simply because that was the most common day across the multiverse. There was an official ‘day’ time and ‘night’ time the government ran by, but since there was no solar cycle to mandate people stick to their sleep routine, many people didn’t. For some, their day was half the day and night of someone else. Some disregarded the ideas of days and nights altogether and just slept whenever they felt like it, making their circadian rhythm shorter or longer than it had once been.

In the early days of the New World this had caused a lot of sleep problems. But with a stable civilization time most of these were ironed out and everyone found the best way to sleep for them. …Sometimes, there were still those crazies who stayed up as long as they could, slept in huge bursts, and didn’t take care of themselves. Doctors were working on ways to get this out of people’s systems since it just wasn’t healthy.

Other than that minor issue, there was only one problem that arose from this.

Scheduling things became a nightmare. It was even worse than the struggles many Earths had with time zones. It was absolutely guaranteed if you had ten random people selected for an event, at least one of them wouldn’t be awake normally during the scheduled time. This made it so people walking around when they would really rather be asleep was a very common thing.

Nanoha Takamachi didn’t have to deal with any of this.

There was something to be said for retirement.

Raising Heart beeped, waking Nanoha up at nine o’clock, the same time every day. The cityscape outside looked the same as it had when she went to bed, though one of the cloud buildings had moved somewhere else. Shame. I liked looking at that.

She stretched and got out of bed, summoning her barrier jacket to herself but keeping Raising Heart in its necklace form. She had debated a few times not changing into what was essentially a battle-ready dress, but the few times she’d woken up and decided to wear normal clothing it had just felt off. She had spent so much time in the outfit it was her.

Since English had been defeated she hadn’t done any fighting in it whatsoever.

With a skip, she jumped to the bottom of her house’s staircase. She’d had her home designed like a traditional Japanese abode, similar to the one she grew up in. Granted, it had all the modern magitech appliances and holographic screens ready to listen to her every whim, but she still appreciated the traditional aesthetic.

Breakfast was simple – Raising Heart was the house’s artificial intelligence and it had already made eggs on toast for her via the automatic oven, stovetop, and fridge. It was a morning of complete leisure. She spent the first hour of her day slowly eating breakfast and turning on the television to watch the news and get caught up on what was happening. Mlinx had gone forward with a new motion to improve the standing army of the City, and a permanent communication link between the City and the distant Church Outpost had been finalized. The time delay was still immense, but at least they could communicate now.

Nanoha found herself dwelling on how difficult it would be to keep stable communication over immense distances. It wouldn’t be hard to get there – light-speed travel was completed in an effective instant for anyone moving, and a couple of people had already shot themselves hundreds of light years away just to have an experience. However, the amount of relative time it took would make it impossible to keep a huge network united…

That might be the point, she mused. Keep any one power from controlling the New World, even us. Whatever the power may be, good or evil, nothing can ever dominate or threaten all of existence.

She finished her breakfast and continued to ruminate on the thoughts of information in deep space as she went out to begin her day’s work. She didn’t have an official job; what she did was certainly work – she just didn’t get paid.

Affixed to her house was a large greenhouse. From the outside, it looked like a white golf ball had embedded itself in the ground. On the inside, however… it was a beautiful garden. At the moment, the ceiling lights were on, bathing the stadium-sized area in brilliant sunlight, giving the plants their much-needed nutrients. ...Well, if they were to grow properly. Most of the plants of Nucleon had adapted to the twilight quickly enough, but that had ruined a lot of their beauty and health. Here, they got to experience the day and night they were meant to.

She strolled through the garden, passing a couple of her carefully-pruned fruit trees, each one surrounded with a multitude of rainbow flowers. A handful of vines snaked around the area, glowing softly with a number of different effects. Some plants floated in the air, while others were literally growing gems within their leaves. Every last one of these plants had been tended to by her, the lone gardener of this space.

As she passed through the garden, she used her magic to help the plants along. Many were not supposed to grow in the environment of the greenhouse and needed the extra push – or needed to be limited. Rainforest flowers and cacti alike needed to be given the best possible boost to their growth potential.

Nanoha was never really sure how long she spent on the garden. Some days it was less than an hour. Others she would work on the plants until Raising Heart told her it was time for lunch – and occasionally she’d come back in after that. She didn’t really have a schedule.

Today, she finished before lunchtime. She took this opportunity to find the single artificial construct within the garden – a simple bench in the center that sat at the foot of an exceptionally large vine-like plant with a green bulb on the top.

It was a very special plant, to say the least. Nanoha had put it here, right in the middle, where it could look over everything with its immense height.

Nanoha took a moment to lean back on the bench. She used her magic to create a pair of sunglasses for herself and a comfortable cushion for her head. Raising Heart automatically started playing music from her ‘garden’ playlist, serenading the once High Sovereign of the TSAB.

She let out a contented sigh, thankful that life had become so simple. No worries, no danger, just a simple life.

She’d never known she wanted this until she’d gotten it.

~~~

My library was immense.

From the outside, it was no larger than a small diner. But since when was having things the same size on the inside interesting? I had literal miles of shelves lined with physical, beautiful books, their pages and covers ready to be checked out and held by eager, curious hands.

Naturally, most of them were also available as digital copies via the all-in-one terminal I kept next to my desk. I always preferred physical books, but of course the digital versions were popular as well. There was occasionally a line at the terminal, but everywhere else in the library was deathly quiet and empty. Just as it was supposed to be.

A place for reading, checking out books, and increasing knowledge. The lobby was sometimes even an area to hang out and have get-togethers. I didn’t mind them being loud there, so everything worked out in the end on the noise front.

Right now, though, it was the equivalent of ‘early morning’ for the library and no one was in the lobby. No doubt there were a few people completely lost in their books within the endless bookshelves, but as far as I was concerned right now there was nobody around.

I sensed somebody drop a book in the book return outside. I rolled my eyes and teleported them inside – it was an Aradia. She looked nervous.

I teleported the book to us. “This book is overdue.”

“How’d y-” She looked at the Eye of Rhyme. “Never mind.”

“I’m just surprised you of all people had an overdue book. You could have read it all in an effective second if you wanted.”

“Minute. Can’t stop time anymore.”

“Semantics,” I said dismissively. “And yet here it is, a full day late.”

“I got caught up in other things, all right? I figured I could just drop it off and…” She bit her lip. “…Should have known better.”

I nodded. “Yes. You should have. Anyway, a bill has already been sent for the fine.”

Aradia sighed. “Right…”

“Just return the book on time next time, okay?” I smiled. “I don’t want to have to start hunting Aradias down too. I might need to start hiring library ninjas or something.”

Aradia chuckled. “That sounds a little ridiculous.”

“I actually was a library ninja once. There were worlds where they were a thing. I could tell you about it.”

“I do have somewhere to be – lots of Aradias trying to figure out how to manage minor time distortions. It’s not as simple as you might think it is. There’s a lot of gobbledygook and weirdness about. No erasing timelines, but you can make people think you’ve created a closed time loop if you do it right…”

“I both look forward to seeing that and fear when you perfect it.”

Aradia winked before floating right out the door.

I ruffled my wings – mildly disappointed in Aradia losing focus, but I wasn’t going to let that color my day. Especially since I knew it would happen the moment I lent her the book. Some people might consider that a curse, but I found it an odd comfort that I knew things once again.

The curse of the Eye of Rhyme was knowing who lived and who died. It was suffering for me before the collapse. I knew so many things, and often I could do nothing. Now? Everyone knew who I was, I could interfere with most anything, and the number of important people destined to die was small.

…Not zero, I reminded myself. Not zero. It was funny, with the disappearance of ka; some of them would go without much fanfare or even a scene. Everyone in the New World would remember the moment and be sorrowful, but the story… the story was fizzling out. Life was slowly taking over.

But that wasn’t the point of this chapter. I’d get to talk about that aspect of our new lives later. For now, I had other things to deal with. Namely, a shipment of books from a publishing company that thought it was being discreet by sending me the package without a return address. I could still find them, easy, they were just lucky I didn’t want to.

I walked out of the library to the back, grabbing hold of the box with my magic. It was heavy – larger than a pony and filled completely with books – but my magic was up to the task. I dragged it in and set it down in the lobby. There were copies of eleven different books in the box.

Songs of the Spheres, each book proudly proclaimed. The covers were simple – each book had the color and symbol of the Aspect that named each arc. Notably, Time was missing, but of course it was, the Tower wasn’t about to let everyone have access to the events of the future.

Humming to myself, I started taking the books out and putting them on display. If I had been the only one to get these books, I would have considered hiding them. But as it was, these books were being shipped around the city for everyone to read. The publishing company had found an archive from some long-forgotten world with a version of GM who had made it through the English events before the collapse occurred, and they had seen a profitable publicity stunt.

This stunt was going to backfire for them, but that’s not important. What is important is that the silence of the story was finally going to end. The City was going to read the story that had created it. It would take a few days…

Wait, no it won’t, I realized. Some people are going to read these with information-absorption spells. The chaos has already begun.

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. This was going to be an interesting day… Less for me, and more for lots of other people. There were a few secrets that had never come out. There was nothing hiding them anymore.

~~~

O’Neill didn’t have an alarm – he just woke up when his body felt like it. His time in the military had given his body enough discipline to be able to work not only on minimal amounts of sleep, but also to sleep as much as needed regardless of the time.

His house was a strange mixture of generic and eccentric. The architecture itself was like any smaller suburban home with white walls accompanied by dull green highlights. However, the rooms themselves were filled with a nearly endless slew of military awards, pictures, and numerous shelves filled with ‘geeky figures’ ranging from Star Trek to Multiversal Heroes. Some of these figures represented people he had come to know personally on his long journey, while others were reminders of a time before he entered the multiverse and where he was the king of references. There were several magazines around, most comedy-related, but more than a few were scientific magazines.

There was also a lot of space stuff. He liked space stuff.

In short, he was a man with a lot of diverse and complex tastes, and now that he was fully retired, he was filling his house with them. Although, he was still ‘the General’ to people – even himself. He kept those military awards around for a reason.

The first thing he did after waking up was to stumble through the dark of the house until he remembered he didn’t have to find the switch because the lights were audio-triggered. He clapped his hands twice and the world burst into life around him. He walked to the coffee dispenser and began his day by flopping into a recliner and turning on the television.

Lots of people had chosen to stick with the two-dimensional screen rather than getting a full immersive setup. It just felt more natural – and a lot of programs didn’t really look better in 3D. Not to mention it was easier to ignore and doze off to a screen than a set of hyper-realistic holograms. O’Neill was one of these people, though in the game-room he had a full VR set if he felt inclined to indulge himself.

It took him a solid hour to fully wake up and get aware of the world. He tapped the side of his recliner, prompting a holographic web browser to appear in front of him, already keyed to the site he checked first every day.

http://www.generalsnarkreviews.com

General Snark Reviews by General Jack O’Neill.

Most recent review: A Song of Ice and Fire by Shutterstock Productions. 8/10

I usually like me a good Shutterstock flick, always trying to take the story of our reality and smash it into some kind of super-story monstrosity that is so beautiful its mere existence will make brains explode into putty. And while today is no exception to Shutterstock’s usual care and ridiculous sense of imagination, I have a very major complaint.

The title. Seriously, Shutterstock, what were you thinking? Sure, it makes sense, but why would you name your film the same as the Game of Thrones books? Either you’re trying to ride on their coattails of success, which is an absurd idea, or you’re just going with the title because it’s ‘artistic’. No, no it’s not, it’s a very literal title. Corona = fire. Eve = ice. I thought you knew better.

Regardless, the movie itself is the story of Corona and Eve during the War for Existence, focusing deeply on their relationship and how it played out through wacky combat hijinks that somehow manage to both be absurdly comical and horrifying at the same time. A replication of life itself, a nice touch. That said, throughout the course of the film it feels like just about everything is being left out. Corona and Eve may be the focus of the movie but it’s still audacious to assume everyone watching knows the details of the war. I was able to follow it myself, but a lot of people won’t. What’s the significance of the Nihilists to Renee? Brushed aside.

Speaking of my expertise, the combat portrayed in the film is, surprisingly, inaccurate. Shutterstock, my boy, you even came to interview me about this, how could you have gotten it wrong? You messed up the way the weapons fire…

O’Neill skimmed to the bottom of his review, deciding it wasn’t worth reading his own words again. He’d gotten a decent amount of hits – nowhere near what once passed as ‘Trixie Internet celebrity’ levels, but it was really just a hobby. The hits didn’t matter.

What did were the comments – good for feedback, a good laugh, or perhaps constructive criticism. Maybe. When he was in the mood to accept it.

SecretPone: Great review as always! I do think the liberties taken in the fights were creative ones, rather than inaccurate representations. I for one did not mind the slight deviation from reality. It allowed me to appreciate the film without getting caught up in memories.

That would be Clandestine, as always offering the opinion of the soldier. She had kept up with O’Neill’s little reviews since he had started doing them. He suspected her respect for him would never waver.

OddBits: This movie isn’t going to age well considering the recent release of the Songs of the Spheres books. I expect a firestorm of inaccurate information and faulty representation to come from the only source on the events that can be trusted.

O’Neill blinked. “Huh.” He wasn’t sure what he thought about the story being published. He eventually decided it wasn’t worth worrying about, on his own account at least – any secrets he had would have been used to destroy his career, and he didn’t have one anymore. Let them do whatever they wanted.

MAXFER: Stop writing these things; you are putting the violent mindset of your profession into your readers! What mattered in this film was the emotions and the characters, with the combat nothing more than a backdrop!

O’Neill rolled his eyes. There was always one of these guys. At least it wasn’t the usual RedPonyKiller. That guy’s repetitive ideas of ‘trolling’ had been getting dull as of late.

TheWhiteGardener: An interesting take. However, I am surprised – you didn’t mention the secondary conflict carried out between Monika and Twilence. You had plenty to say about yourself and Minna, but the ‘ka’ dualism that stood in the shadow of Corona and Eve was very well handled in this movie. They were not the protagonists, they were not in every scene, but the actions they took had careful, precise impacts on the story itself. In fact…

This went on for several paragraphs, but O’Neill read every last one of the lines. He always liked the longer comments that went in depth, regardless of who wrote them, but since he knew that was Nanoha talking he had extra reason to read each word carefully.

Why? He would actually respond to her.

He typed up a response over the next few minutes and sent it to her. A second later a response came.

TheWhiteGardener: Oh! That’s… in depth!
GeneralSnark: Too much for your little head?
TWG: No, not at all, it’s just that I’m not in my ‘complex discussion’ mood at the moment. I’ll get to it at a later time.
GS: Or not, you don’t have to.
TWG: I know. But it’s not like I’m doing anything. The mood will strike eventually, and you’ll have yourself a battle of wits over the meaning of Not-Game-of-Thrones.
GS: Taking my jokes now? I’ll have you know General Snark is a registered trademark!
TWG: Oh no! I have broken the law, what ever will I do!?
GS: You must face trial. Charge: plagiarism. Possible sentence: inconvenient community service!
TWG: Sewer cleaning?
GS: Worse. Magic battery.
TWG: The horror! The horror! >lilythehorror.jpg

GS: You better be scared! The thought police will be at your door if you do not appear before court immediately!
TWG: Does there happen to be a court in the Pinkie Emporium?
GS: It just so happens that there is a suitable location in the pink festivity center.
TWG: Is the first available slot at lunchtime, by chance?
GS: Being psychic won’t help you there!
TWG: *eyeroll* see you then.

O’Neill dismissed the screen and looked at the clock.

He still had several hours. Might as well go play some rounds of whatever game came up on random…

~~~

Eve was preparing to open her doors for business. She didn’t have any session scheduled until later in the day, so she was going to have open-house for the next little while. To prepare for this, she spruced up the lobby a bit, changed the flowers out for brighter ones, dusted everything, and selected a few books to set out in case people needed to wait for her to talk to someone else. Her morning routine was never all that much, but it was enough to make people feel just a little more comfortable.

She checked herself last. Nothing special to do here – the cosmic mane took care of itself, and her wings rarely looked out of sorts. All she had to do was adjust the Element of Magic so it was level on her head.

With a smile on her face she trotted over to the front door, reaching to unlock it.

“Don’t open it!” Corona shouted, teleporting into the room with a stack of books in her arms. “It’s a madhouse out there!”

Eve blinked. “Wait, what? Why?” Focusing on her hearing, Eve was able to make out the sound of commotion outside.

“This is why,” Corona said, unceremoniously sweeping Eve’s carefully placed books off a table and laying out the eleven volumes of Songs of the Spheres in plain sight. “Everyone got a hold of these.”

“Oh,” Eve said, blinking. “Oh.”

“Yeah, just about my reaction. People already have enough of a bone to pick with me, but you…” She tapped the books. “How much secret stuff is in here?”

“I would assume a lot…” Eve said, gulping. She cast a few information absorption spells on the books – she would have preferred to read them as they were meant to, but she had a sneaking suspicion she’d need the knowledge within to deal with the crowd outside. “Yeah, I was right. The copy world… the lies… both wars… questionable calls…”

“They’re going to want answers.”

“They already have them,” Eve said, pointing at the books. “Everything in there explains why I did what I did, how I made excuses to myself, and which of the things I regret.” She turned to the front door. “Whoever’s out there already knows everything. And they’re angry.”

“How many of them do you think actually know the information absorption spell?” Corona asked with a raised eyebrow.

Eve pondered this. “Not that many, probably. Could just be secondhand information. Regardless… I can’t hide in here, Corona. I have to go out and face them.”

“I know that,” Corona said. “I just brought the books so you wouldn’t be a fish jumping into a frying pan.”

Eve nodded slowly. “Thanks. …Would you mind standing by me?”

“I have not been a very good influence on your public image as of late.”

Eve shrugged. “It’ll make me feel better.”

Corona chuckled. “Sure. I’ll give them something more to scream at.”

Eve nodded curtly. Then, taking a breath, she trotted to the front door and opened it. The first thing she did was send out a magic pulse that pushed the crowd back far enough so she could actually leave her abode and stand in the open. Corona took up a place behind her.

Facing them was a crowd of a couple hundred people, most just shouting and yelling, a few of them with angry signs. However, after a quick cursory inspection, Eve found that most of them weren’t actually angry – they were just confused. They weren’t here to demand change or justice, they just felt hurt and wanted answers. She had been the one they had put faith in… And now her secrets were in the open.

She cleared her throat. “I did everything those books said I did.”

The crowd didn’t stop shouting. She just made it so they’d all hear her voice regardless of how loud they were being. “Many of the things I have lived to regret. Keeping secret the nature of my duplication from my friends. Organizing the War on Skarn. Even if the latter one turned out better for us in the long run, I still think it cost too much. And then there are things I did that I thought were right. Letting Corona send the Message. Most of the brutal things I did in the war – as well as the times I refused to treat the other side with unfair disrespect.”

Now that she had been talking for a while, the crowd had stopped shouting so much.

“I’m just a person like all the rest of you,” Eve said, expression softening considerably. “I’ve told you all time and time again that I’m just like you. I make mistakes. Every time something like this comes up, I try to remind everyone that I’m not flawless, that you shouldn’t stake your lives on me. You are lost, confused, angry, and sorrowful that I have broken your trust.” She paused for a moment, wiping a tear from her eye. “I’m the same. I often come back to all those things I did and wonder which ones were worth it. Are the things I regret actually good? Did I make a bad judgment call somewhere else? I don’t have the answers.

“What I can say is this. Yes, I lied to you. Yes, the decisions I have made resulted in the death of trillions. I am no better than Corona – not in any way. None of us are flawless. I’m sorry you thought I was.” She shook her head. “I’m not hiding from anything here.”

“You’re going on trial!” someone in the crowd shouted.

“Any pre-collapse crimes have been erased from the record!” Corona yelled back. “So you can shut your trap!”

There was silence for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” Eve said. “I was – and am – a liar. I lied, and then I had to keep lying, to the point at which if I told the truth it would have destroyed Merodi Universalis. You can find that in the books as well.” She smiled sadly. “I’m actually thankful this book has come out. It means I’ll finally be able to live without the constant shadow of people finding out over my head. I am no longer the glue that holds the world together. The City can go on without me – and all of you can as well.” She spread out one of her wings and gestured at them all. “Go. You don’t need to cling to me anymore. You’re free.”

They stared at her for a moment. Then, slowly but surely, they began to walk away. A few tried to start up the angry yelling again, but they quickly realized the situation had been defused. There were a few news reporters around that were definitely going to milk this story, but Eve wasn’t afraid. They’d needed to see this, in a way. Needed to see what she really was.

Just a Twilight.

“…Hey,” a woman said, walking up to Eve. She was one of her patients. “I… I don’t think I can keep coming here. I… I can’t look at you the same anymore.”

Eve’s slight smile vanished. “I… I understand. I can redirect you to a-”

“No. I’m… I’m going to deal with this myself.”

“But y-”

“Eve, you were the only person who could help me. Or so I thought. I’m not going through this again.” She turned away and ran.

Eve gulped. “I… I couldn’t exactly get away without consequences…”

“I can find her,” Corona said, making one of her gloves vanish. “Help her face herself.”

“…You should. But she won’t be the only one…” She shook her head. “How many of them are going to give up because of me?”

“Eve, don’t th-”

“Corona, I am going to think about it.” She forced a smile to her face. “I’m finally being held accountable. I… I think that’s a good thing.”

“You sure?”

“No. But… we can talk about it after you help her.” Eve took in a deep breath and turned back to her business, conflicting emotions fighting for control of her face.

Corona nodded. “I’ll be back soon.” She vanished in a puff of light.

Twilight-X sighed. “I’m getting off easy…”

She wasn’t sure why this fact didn’t bother her as much as it used to.

~~~

The ‘courthouse’ ended up being the last place in the known New World to get authentic Earth Ottoman cuisine – the Pinkie Emporium’s Hotto House. They both had steaming bowls of noodles with ‘ursk’ meat in them. It naturally wasn’t a real ursk, since the animals had only been found on Earth Ottoman, but the synthetic meat was indistinguishible.

Nanoha slurped a bunch of noodles into her face like a vacuum cleaner. She smacked her lips loudly and leaned back in her chair with a smug smile. “The shock on your face never gets old.”

O’Neill met her gaze with a smirk of his own. “I’m just sitting here thinking ‘I can’t compete with that’.”

Nanoha winked. “Slurp loud and slurp often!” She was using chopsticks, so she stuck them back in the bowl and pulled another set of noodles to her mouth. …Except there weren’t any noodles. She bit down on empty air.

O’Neill was quietly eating some noodles and looking at her with an incredulous eyebrow. “Slurping problem?”

Nanoha sent out a magic pulse to remove Crimson Sushi’s illusion. She discovered her bowl was shifted slightly to the left of where she’d thought it was. “Getting between a lady and her noodles? How devious.”

“You’re the one here on criminal charges,” O’Neill pointed out. “I can be a little devious to petty criminals.”

Nanoha chuckled. “In that case, as a convicted criminal I can handle myself however I want.” She snapped her fingers and teleported O’Neill’s bowl to her, doubling the amount of food she had. With quick stabbing motion with her chopsticks she was able to pull a bunch of noodles out of the bowl and into her mouth with a monstrous slurp that sprayed Earth Ottoman sauce everywhere.

O’Neill carefully removed the white-green sauce from his eyes. “This stuff does wonders for wrinkles,” he deadpanned.

“It’s how I keep myself young,” Nanoha said with an equal lack of emotion.

“You really must tell me more.”

“It’s all about bathing in it day in and day out. The aroma does more than the actual sauce, but the only way you get enough of it is to submerge yourself.”

“Quite the treatment.”

“I’m working on turning it into an aerosol.”

“You could make millions.”

“I’ll make so much I could retire.”

They stared at each other for a moment – and then burst into laughter. Nanoha’s was loud and jovial, coming from a woman who was well-acquainted with the joyous noise. O’Neill’s was no less joyous, but it was much quieter and slower, the laugh of a man who spent his time surrounded by jokes and amusement he kept from those around him; a man who practiced keeping a straight face in the midst of absurdity.

Nanoha wiped a tear out of her eyes. “Look at us. That conversation was truly pointless. And yet… I can’t think of a better one I’ve had all week.”

“If that’s your best conversation of the week, have I got bad news for you.”

“Oh, hush. I’m just saying it might be good for us to have a pointless conversation once in a while. You found ways to insert humor and ‘snark’ into your life, but I had to keep myself all prim and proper for a… long, long time.” Her gaze slowly became distant. “Some part of me had hoped the child within me would die off and be completely replaced… But here I am, countless years later, still giggling at silly little things.’

“As far as I’m concerned the moment anyone loses that kid in them they’ve succumbed to the curse of our era: being dull.”

Nanoha rolled her eyes. “That’s not fair. I’ve known plenty of serious people who aren’t dull.”

“Do you think they’d be less dull if they still had that little spark in them?”

“Good point,” Nanoha said. “But, counterpoint, they’re still people just the same.”

“Hey, being interesting isn’t a virtue. I just happen to like it.”

Nanoha raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Oh, you do now?”

“Case in point: this conversation.”

Nanoha’s smirk turned into a grin – and then it faltered. “…You know…”

“What?”

“I just had a thought.” She shifted in her seat until she could lean thoughtfully on her elbow. “Maybe it’s better for the dull, serious people to be the leaders. They have less of an urge to do the crazy things we do. Less need to go out and express themselves.”

O’Neill shrugged. “I don’t pretend to know the next best thing about who should and shouldn’t be in charge. What I know is that I was put in a position where I could save the Earth from alien invaders and I took it. The rest is history.”

Nanoha’s frown deepened. “…That wasn’t why you chose this life.”

O’Neill sighed for a moment. “No… No it wasn’t. …It was so long ago. I haven’t thought about him in… years. What kind o-”

Nanoha put a hand on his, stopping him. “Your life has changed many times since you lost your son. You went to fight the Goa’uld, then you went to explore the multiverse, then you were an Overhead, then you fought a war… and now you’re here in this New World. Wounds heal with time, and there’s been a lot of time since that day.” She paused for a moment, looking into his eyes. “I… you know I had an adopted daughter, Vivio. To this day I don’t know what happened to her. It’s been… thousands of years, and I rarely think of her. There was a time where every moment I was reminded of her, immense guilt was thrust upon me. I thought that I wasn’t honoring her memory enough.”

O’Neill matched her sad eyes, unable to say anything.

“We’re only human, Jack,” Nanoha said. “We can’t live like that.”

O’Neill let out a short chuckle. “No… No we can’t. ...We certainly try though, don’t we?”

“We’re only human,” she reiterated.

“That can’t be your response to everything.”

Nanoha put on a cute smile. “Ahem. We’re only human.”

“We’re only human.”

Nanoha gasped. “No! Really!?”

O’Neill chuckled and rolled his eyes. He reached down to eat more of his noodles – only to stab the table, reminding him Nanoha had stolen his.

This, of course, needed to be remedied immediately. He summoned Crimson Sushi and pulled on his bowl, beginning a tug-of-war contest.

The bowl promptly exploded, showering the immediate area in noodle bits. The two of them apologized profusely to the other patrons and cleaned the mess up themselves.

~~~

Valentine was sitting on a bench at the back of the church with Froppy when his phone beeped.

Froppy blinked. “Isn’t that the USM channel beep?”

“It is…” Valentine said, taking the phone out of his pocket and examining the message.

Dear Ambassador Valentine…

It has come to my attention that you were a scumbag. I had my doubts with the publication of Steel Ball Run, but I pushed those doubts aside because you had proven yourself to be an upstanding, honest, and patriotic man.

With the publication of Songs of the Spheres, it is now clear to me that my faith in you was entirely misplaced. Within these books I see a man with a lying, silver tongue and a thirst for personal power. You were the face of the USM, flaunting your own power and ideologies since our formation. You did not truly represent the will of the people, nor did you exemplify our ideals! You were a representative, the president that never ended! The leader of our people! And you threw that into the dirt…

Valentine closed the phone. “The Songs of the Spheres books have been published and someone used the old USM codes to send me hate-mail.”

“Oh. Ribbit.”

“I’ll probably need to change this phone…”

“…You’re trying to pretend like you aren’t bothered,” Froppy observed. “Don’t do that.”

Valentine let out a short sigh. “There may be attempts on my life. People will attempt to find me and tell me exactly what they think. That will hurt this community…”

“The church will stand by you and you know it,” Froppy asserted. “You won’t even have to stir them up. They’ll just say yes.”

Valentine smirked slightly. “I suppose that’s true. Though something tells me I won’t be the only one who’ll be protected…”

GM ran in front of them with a panicked expression. “They. Are. Going. To. Find. Me.”

“You never put your name in your writings, right?” Froppy asked. “And they don’t have an actual picture, just an approximation.”

“They know I’m here. And this isn’t a huge city.” GM tapped his fingers together. “It’s only a matter of time…”

“Just change your appearance a bit,” Valentine said. “There are ways to keep what you are a secret. …Though not if you keep coming up to us in midday to panic.”

“I’m not – okay, yes, I’m panicking, and this is midday, and…” He shook his head. “Okay, fine. I’ll… do it your way.”

Valentine smirked. “I think it’s time we talked to Aslan about some official protection and discreeteness.”

“Oh…” GM gulped. “S-sure! Let’s do that!” He was already sweating profusely. “And if that doesn’t work I’ll need you to take me and my family somewhere far away.”

“It won’t come to that,” Froppy assured him.

“I’ll believe that when I see it. Until then…”

He would spend the next few months stressing out to an exceptional degree. He really had nothing to worry about – ka was mostly done with him. Few would be able to track him down, and those who did would not make a witchburning out of it.

They would be annoying, though.

~~~

Nanoha pushed O’Neill through the door to her lavish garden. It was not the first time he had been in here – but it was the first time he had been in during the garden’s ‘night’ cycle. What was already a beautiful canvas of vibrant greens and dotted rainbow colors became something else entirely at night.

Areas of the garden that had looked like throwaway bushes or patches of simple moss were no longer the background of the garden – they were the forefront. Brilliant cone-shaped bushes unfurled, revealing their true inner colors that shone like stars against a dark canvas. The moss unleashed many drifting seed-like sparks that whirled around the atmosphere, mixing with the pollinating bugs. It was a sight to behold, and it struck O’Neill dumb.

“I know you’ve seen more impressive things,” Nanoha commented, starting to walk to the center of the garden.

“That people made with their own hands?” O’Neill let out a chuckle. “No… No, it was always those natural universes of art that got me. This… This is yours.”

“All those universes did have a creator.”

“They weren’t you,” O’Neill said, touching one of the spiral bushes. It responded, quickly retracting itself into its dormant day form – cutting his finger in the process. “Ow! What in-”

“Don’t touch the spiral-cones. They’re rather… temperamental. They have a defense mechanism to prevent their lights from getting them killed. Be glad I removed the poison from them, that would have… ruined the feel of the night.”

“And what theme is that?”

She held up her hand and sent a magic spark into the air. The spell coalesced into a brilliant shining sphere vaguely resembling a disco ball. “Random dance.” She had every intention of sweeping O’Neill up and forcing him into a dance he had no clue about, just to screw with him.

He beat her to it, rushing her into his arms and threw her around. With a laugh, she let herself be swept up and moved with short, jerking movements that stopped almost as soon as they began. She tried to find a pattern to them so she could sweep free from it in a flowing motion, but to her surprise there appeared to be no pattern to the movements.

“What sort of dance is this…?”

“Improvisational marching orders,” O’Neill deadpanned.

Nanoha snorted. “Didn’t bother saving it for Plan C?”

“Sometimes it’s best to just skip to Plan C.”

“In that case…” She stuck her leg out and tripped him. He used Crimson Sushi to keep himself from slamming his head into the ground, but Nanoha had her chance. Her arm caught him in the side and swept him up into a long, curving motion. His feet scarcely touched the ground as she twirled him around.

He smirked. Crimson Sushi flipped the perception of a large rock in Nanoha’s mind, making her trip on it – releasing O’Neill to go for a simpler tango.

“…You actually aren’t very good at dancing, are you?” Nanoha said, able to swirl behind him gracefully without any effort.

“Not in the slightest.”

“Good. That makes this easier.”

Control swapped back and forth between the two of them as they moved through the garden. O’Neill quickly ran out of any idea of what to do, but he kept pushing anyway. He was a master of improvisation and he wasn’t about to let his lack of dance knowledge hold him back. Despite this, Nanoha was simply too graceful and smooth in her movements for him to do much. She could have danced around him with ease, but chose not to.

“I am way too old for this,” O’Neill said with a chuckle.

“And I’m probably a hundred times older than you. So dance, monkey!”

“I’m a monkey now? I’ll have you know I physically aged more than you!”

“And I’ll have you know you could remove those wrinkles with a simple snap-finger spell.” She twirled him back. “You like your age, you wear it proudly. You are the old man who kept the spark alive within himself. I’m the precious little thing with wisdom beyond her years.”

“That’s not what it means to be old.”

Nanoha rolled her eyes. “Of course not. Being old means… It means you’ve survived, it means you have lived to see so much. You have experience - you might not be smart, strong, or even all that wise if you were of a particular disposition - but you nonetheless understand life better. It comes with practice.”

“I was going to say being old meant yelling at the younger generation.”

She laughed like the little girl she had once been, and they soon arrived at the center of the garden. They twirled away from each other and prepared a comical charge to see who would be in control next.

This was the moment the central bulb decided to bloom. A glorious yellow radiance of nineteen separate petals burst open as if from a popped balloon. The flower was large enough to hold both of them on a single petal, and bright enough to make a few nearby plants think it was day and close their petals. Magic dust began to flow around the central flower, sparking with the vibrance of life.

“Okay, that’s impressive,” O’Neill said, holding a hand to his eyes. “What is it?”

“F-fate’s Tower,” Nanoha said, tears flowing down her face. “It’s… a… rare flower that…” She held a sleeve to her eyes, trying to make herself stop crying. Now wasn’t the time. She needed to move on. She…

She felt O’Neill’s old, firm hands on her shoulders. She looked up at him, her usually strong face replaced with one of vulnerability. For once in her life, the face she was looking up at was the one with an understanding, compassionate smile.

She went for a kiss. It was brief, barely more than a peck – but it was there.

“I can’t replace her,” O’Neill said, expression unwavering.

“Y-you don’t have to. Y-you can be you.” She pulled him into a tight hug, crying over his shoulder. She cried for those lost – family, friends, colleagues, citizens – those that she had never let herself truly grieve for. She had been so strong for everyone else for so long she had forgotten what it was like to be the one on the receiving end of the comfort.

She couldn’t believe she had let herself forget. So many things… So many things lost in her Time Abyss. She was nothing compared to gods, but she was far, far beyond what any human should have been. So far beyond…

Who knew how much built-up pain she was letting out? She herself didn’t know. Later, she would feel as if she were crying for things she had forgotten long ago. Things lost in her subconscious.

When, at long last, the endless tears began to abate, O’Neill spoke.

“Why don’t you tell me about her?”

Nanoha looked up to him with a messed up, tear-stained face – and a smile. “…Okay.”

~~~

Lightning walked into the police station with a crowd of angry people following at her heels.

“Traitor!”

“Mass murderer!”

“Enslaver!”

“It was all part of his plan!”

“You lied to us!”

Lightning marched through the front doors and closed them behind her, magically sealing them shut so nobody else could even think of getting in.

Sherlock was leaning against a nearby wall. “That’s not going to help you.”

“Why the hell not?”

Sherlock pointed at the small group of roughly a dozen people she recognized from the Collection who were all sitting there.

“Ah,” Lightning said.

An inkling woman with white tentacles stood up sharply. “ARREST THIS WOMAN!”

“Charges?” Strange asked, clearly having already dealt with this several times today.

“CONSPIRACY!”

“Of what kind?”

“You know what kind! Conspiring with the Collector! Orchestrating the enslavement to create the modern Collection!”

Strange sighed. “All pre-collapse crimes have been pardoned unconditionally. I cannot arrest her.”

“But she… She…”

“Look,” Lightning said. “I know you’re upset. But I’m definitely not hurting anyone right now, since the Collection doesn’t even exist anymore. You’re looking for justice where it doesn’t exist.”

“You lied to us,” she said, pointing angrily. “You manipulated us the whole time. We thought you understood us… When you were part of the problem!”

“Yes,” Lightning said. “And you can’t do anything about it.”

“The mob outside says otherwise.”

“She does have a point,” Sherlock noted. “The mob will likely devolve into violence Mlinx will have to forcefully end if we allow this to continue.”

Lightning sighed. “Fine. I’ll arrest myself.”

Strange blinked. “…What?”

“You heard me,” Lightning said, walking into the station cells. She threw one of the doors open, walked in, and then shut it, locking it with her magic.

“Lightning, you can’t just arrest yourself,” Strange said from the other side of the bars.

“I just did. Good luck convincing me to come out.”

“Lightning…”

“You can tell everyone outside I’ve been arrested. Then Mlinx and the media can make a big fuss about the whole thing while I sit in here. I’ll let myself out when it blows over.”

Strange grunted. “Sherlock, how badly will this go if I force her out?”

“Nuclear,” Sherlock deadpanned.

Strange sighed and walked outside.

Lightning looked around to make sure Sherlock was the only one on the other side of the cell. “Thanks. I didn’t need him to call my bluff.”

“Don’t mention it. I’ll mention it when I need a favor.”

“You little…”

Sherlock walked away, leaving Lightning alone in the cell. She was no stranger to being alone, so she simply closed her eyes and allowed herself to daydream.

Some time later – could have been hours – a hoof smacked itself against the cell bars. She opened her eyes to see Starbeat. “Come to visit?”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Starbeat said, rolling her eyes. “You could have just talked to them. Now you’ve gone and arrested yourself, blowing all of this out of proportion.”

“Seemed to be the quickest solution.”

“It was the solution that was the least work for you. All you have to do is sit here and wait.” Starbeat shook her head. “You’re causing a lot of strain on a lot of your friends.”

“They can handle it.”

“I’m not saying they can’t. I’m saying I’m disappointed you chose to let them take the strain. …I’m also disappointed you didn’t try to talk to the Collected. A lot of them are going through crises at the moment, and you did nothing to alleviate their fears that the cause they had devoted themselves to was a lie.”

Lightning let out a sigh. “And you’re right. I’m still not coming out of this cell.”

“Why not!?”

“Because I deserve hate,” Lightning said. “The Collector took his punishment of death for what he did. But I didn’t lose anything except him. And that was never enough.” She looked Starbeat right in the eye. “This is my time, Starbeat. I’m not going to die, I’m not going to give myself for some greater plan. I’m going to let them hate me.”

“Lightning, that’s…”

“Self-destructive?” She shrugged. “Yes. It is. But you know me. I’ll pull through.”

“…This is a lot more complicated than I thought it was.”

“You’re the mare of fate,” Lightning said, smiling ever so slightly. “Figured you’d know that by now.”

Starbeat chuckled. “…I think you’ll need to talk to Eve.”

“I do not need a-”

“She’s going through similar things right now.”

Lightning shut up. “…Yeah. Maybe I can talk to Eve then.”

“I’ll send her around.” She glanced behind her. “…I think Vriska’s getting impatient and-or embarrassed standing around the lobby.”

“Embarrassed?”

“She got a dress recently. Wasn’t an issue until O’Neill pointed out how excessively pink and feminine it was. No doubt Sherlock is carefully playing with her sudden insecurity.” She rubbed the back of her head. “…I should get her back to her home. I’ll try to visit.”

“Thanks. But I shouldn’t be in here for that long.” She closed her eyes and looked at the ceiling. “They always have other things to get upset about…”

~~~

A copy of Songs of the Spheres: Hope hit Pinkie in the face. “And now we are the punchline of Lightning’s joke. Fun.”

Flutterfree, Pidge, and Jotaro were walking with her through town as a small group of angry people followed them. Half of those angry people were angry at the others for yelling at Pinkie, which was just adding to the shouting and squabbling. It likely wouldn’t be long before it devolved into actual fighting.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, adjusting his hat.

“Geez, I didn’t think people could get this worked up…” Pidge muttered.

“For all we know they can’t and this is the Tower,” Flutterfree said. “Or, this is how things normally are. Or something in the middle.”

“…My head hurts.” Pidge put a hand to the bridge of her nose.

“From the ka or the people screaming?”

“Both,” Pidge said, gesturing at the crowd, calling attengion to the ridiculous things they were shouting.

“Flutterfree’s an unstable killing machine!”

“Pidge just replaced Nova! She doesn’t belong! Get rid of her!”

“Jotaro is too violent!”

“How many have you killed with a smile on your face and a sarcastic quip?”

“Vriska hasn’t really changed and you all accepted her!”

“Pinkie! You’re a murderous psycho!”

Pinkie winked at her three team members. Then she changed into her massacre dress and turned on the crowd, revving her chainsaw. They all screamed.

Suddenly she was just a normal pink pony again, her only defining feature being the blindfold covering her Element of Laughter. “So, do I have your attention?”

The shocked silence of the crowd told her she did.

“OKAY! So, you think we screwed up a lot? Sure, we did, we’re just people. But I’d like to see you do our job and make it out for the better. We saw death and destruction on a daily basis. We were subjected to some of the worst torture imaginable in our time. You know that joke about the tentacle monster universe? It isn’t a joke! Those things really existed and we had to deal with them! We were lucky enough to be shown the multiverse gradually so we could adjust to it, but we didn’t get out unscathed! Most of the people who had our job have probably lost it in the mental department in some way or another! I’m crazy! I’m totally crazy! Flutterfree’s hatred of violence has mostly been bred out of her. Jotaro’s been forced to reevaluate his life several times as those he love are either returned to him or just killed! Pidge has to wrestle with the knowledge about Nova every single day! What do you think you would do if you had these problems!?”

The crowd said nothing in response.

“That’s what I thought,” Pinkie growled, swishing her tail to the side. “And another thing. You people got this book and the information within, and because of that started forming into angry, violent groups! This is the thing you’re upset at us about! And you know what else it shows? That you’re using the information spells rather than actually reading the books!”

She threw the copy of Hope she had to the ground. “The spell just puts the information into your head, allowing you to pick and choose what you think is important. But these books are a lot more than just the facts of what happened! They show us – the characters – and why we did all the things we did! The mistakes, the things that looked like mistakes that weren’t, and the good choices – everything! Our struggles are in this book, and you know what you’re doing? You’re distilling it down to bullet points! You’re insulting all the hell we’ve gone through to get to this point by ignoring it!”

She threw a hoof wide. “You can be mad with us. You can disagree with us. But you can’t judge us. Not where we are now. You can’t possibly hope to fathom what all of this was about. Do you understand?”

The crowd slowly began to edge away from Pinkie and disperse.

“I don’t think they understood,” Flutterfree observed.

“The message will still get out!” Pinkie said, suddenly as chipper as usual. “And that’s all that needed to happen. People needed to realize there was a lot more to the story than just the ‘facts’. A… lot more. It’ll take some time, but they’ll come around.”

“Huh. That’s a good point.” Pidge said. “…But that’s a pretty thick book. How many words?”

“About two million in all twelve.”

“…Quiznak. That’s gonna prove problematic…”

Pinkie shrugged. “Maybe. But there’ll be those who read it. And they’ll be able to tell everyone else.”

Jotaro shrugged. “It sounds good enough for me.”

“Yep! Now let’s go get ice cream before I go all murder-chainsaw on everyone.”

~~~

The following ‘morning’ O’Neill walked up to Nanoha’s house and knocked. She opened the door with her magic, not bothering to get up from her chair. “Come on in.”

O’Neill walked in, finding his way to her dining room and placing a small bag down. She looked up from Songs of the Spheres: Life and looked at the box. “Oh, you shouldn’t have!”

“Definitely shouldn’t, but I did,” O’Neill said, a smirk on his face.

She tore the bag off and took out several small boxes. Essence plants: flowers that grow based on magical signatures! Any magic signature works: artifacts, aether patterns, people…

“I… I can make a garden for them…” she said, holding up the flowers. “I didn’t know people made these…”

O’Neill shrugged. “A simple search away. …So long as you have an oddly specific present in mind.”

“It’s perfect. Wonder who I’ll do…”

“You don’t even have to decide right away. They’ll wait for whenever you’re struck.”

Nanoha smiled warmly. “…Thank you.”

O’Neill shrugged – and then made an overly comical bow.

She facepalmed. “What have I gotten myself into…”

“The domain of General Snark. Tickets are one-way only and always have a pointless riddle attached to them.”

Nanoha rolled her eyes and closed Life.

“…That the book?”

“One of them,” Nanoha said, nodding. “It’s interesting. I hear a lot about people judging others from these books. Hasty judgments made on instant-facts. But I think they’re missing the other side of the coin…” She shook her head. “We are in these pages. Why don’t we look at what these books say about us? Even if we’re not in the stories we read about, we see the culture built up… The stories that surrounded us… Everyone’s avoiding that. Focusing instead on what other people did…” She put her hands behind her head. “I think we need to be doing the opposite. Use these books to judge ourselves, not others.”

O’Neill blinked. “I just got the worst best idea ever.”

“Hm?”

“I’m going to review these books.”

“…You are going to rip the poor boy to shreds.”

O’Neill grinned. “Ay, GM doesn’t have to read the reviews.”

“He will.”

“His fault.”

Nanoha chuckled. “I’ll help. Give some insight as to what we can learn from the story that defined us all.”

“Already a team, huh?”

“I think we’ve been a team for a long time and just didn’t realize it.”

O’Neill nodded slowly. “That, or we’re both completely delusional.”

“Why not both?”

“Both. …Both is good.”

“The Road to El Dorado.”

“…Dammit, you’re not going to be easy to reference-fu.”

Nanoha smiled playfully. “I figured you’d appreciate a good challenge.”

O’Neill laughed.

~~~

I held a truly unique object in my hooves. A red book, shimmering with a glossy ruby cover emblazoned with the symbol of Time.

Songs of the Spheres: Time.

I flipped through it. It contained all the remaining chapters, including the one you’re reading now. Every event was already laid out.

And yet, I knew I could change it. If I interfered with a thing there or an event here, the words within would shift. I had been given the freedom of that choice.

But I knew I wouldn’t. I liked what I saw with the Eye as it was now. I appreciated all the blossoming relationships, the healing wounds, and the Time devoted to preparing everyone.

Including myself. I, too, needed to learn how to live without ka. The fight with English was merely the first step: there was much, much more to learn and understand in the ever-changing land of the New World. Even knowing what I did – and what I do – there is something to be said for experiencing something, perhaps with a little bit of willful ignorance thrown in.

Often, your mind is able to logically accept and understand something easily. However, there is another component to what you are. You may believe something, but you won’t live it out. It is the illogical side of you that cannot just be convinced. I know exactly how to live in a world without ka – in theory.

But at the same time I do not. I am a simple child swimming in an ocean of words I don’t understand.

I carried the book far into the back of my immense library. I would not be putting it on a shelf – I could not let anyone have it. Not because I was prevented from showing it to people, but because I didn’t want them to have it. It would change them if they knew the future. One of the points of the New World was to end that certainty for what the future holds.

At least, that’s how I see it.

I took the book to the back wall and created a little hole in the wood, placing it inside. Then I cast a sealing spell on its pages keyed to the existence of ka. It would not open until the Tower fell.

Lastly, I sealed up the wood, making it look as if I had never been there.

I would return some time after the final destruction of the Tower and give the book to the people. …Or maybe I would change my mind.

There was no way for me to know what lay beyond. And unlike the uncertainty the war had caused, this did not make me anxious – it made me feel at peace.

I knew my curse would end. I would be able to live.

It was all I could ever ask for.

148 - Mother

White Nettle forced herself to sit up with just the physical power in her arms – refusing to let her tendrils or other powers offer her any assistance. She’d gone through the entire ordeal without making it easier on herself; it would be a shame if she gave in at the very end and ruined the moment. She had to take a moment to catch her breath, coming to terms with the pain she had just been through.

The doctor came over to her, handing her a small bundle of fabric. Inside was the pinkish face of a healthy human baby. “It’s a girl,” the doctor said with a smile.

Nettle tried to say something, but all that came out was a wheeze. Despite this, she took hold of her daughter and pulled her close to her chest. The girl was decidedly ugly, as newborns tended to be, and Nettle knew this on some level. But on a deeper, more instinctual level she saw the most beautiful thing that she had ever laid her eyes on. Life. She couldn’t understand why she felt this way, had no real experiences to prepare herself for this moment, but she knew. She just knew that this little girl was the whole point of her life. Everything had been leading her to this moment right here. Everything.

The Mother ran a finger across her child’s cheek. “What should we call her?”

Her husband smiled. “Didn’t you already have one picked out?”

“…Osanna. But does she really have to be n-”

“Yes. She does.” He leaned down so he was eye level with the child. “Hello, Osanna. Welcome to this New World… Though to you, it’s just the world, isn’t it? You don’t know how lucky you are… you will see your wildest fantasies played out right before your eyes. You will grow up in a world where stories can really sing to you.”

“…She has no idea what you’re saying,” Nettle observed.

He chuckled and laid a hand on Nettle’s shoulder. “Even now, you still have to learn. I’m talking to her because… just because she’s my daughter. She doesn’t have to understand, she just has to hear.”

Nettle tried to giggle, but found this motion more than a little painful and tiring. This did not stop her from looking Osanna in the face and talking. “Guess I’ve got to tell you something. Hi. I’m… your mother. That’s what I am. Before now, I was nothing.”

“Come now…”

“Hush,” Nettle told her husband. “It’s true. I may have been the most powerful being ever… but I was nothing. I wasn’t part of a family. I had… nothing.” She beamed at him. “And now I have everything.”

They kissed, but quickly went back to doting on Osanna. She was a new life they’d brought into the world, and as far as Nettle was concerned it was the best thing she had ever done.

She already knew she wouldn’t be able to wait before she talked everyone’s ears off about her daughter. They may not be able to understand, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was that they knew that she was experiencing something new.

~~~

“We have a problem,” Burgerbelle said, sitting on her folding chair backwards.

Mattie and the Everykid raised their eyebrows. “Problem?” The three of them were sitting in a somewhat spacious broom closet within the League of Sweetie Belles.

“Yes. Problem. A big old ugly annoying problem!” Burgerbelle stood on her chair like it was a podium. “We have thrust upon us a question of what matters and what doesn’t! What is right and what is wrong! What is best for our friends!”

Mattie rolled her eyes. “I’m pretty sure I have a good idea what this is about, so just get to the point. The kid doesn’t need to be serenaded into thinking you’re hot stuff.”

The Everykid nodded.

Burgerbelle’s left eyebrow twitched. “Nobody appreciates my flair for the dramatic…” She sat back down in her chair – though she refused to turn it the right way around. She pulled Songs of the Spheres: Void out of her hair and dropped it in the middle of the three of them. There was no table, so it fell unceremoniously to the floor.

The Everykid poked it with her parasol like it was some sort of spider.

Burgerbelle facepalmed. “Okay, so, here’s the problem. Nettle is in this book.”

The two of them stared at her intently.

“The future Nettle is in this book. As in, there’s a story in here that hasn’t happened yet!”

“That’s not all that unusual,” Mattie pointed out. “Just go ask Twilence, she knows everything.”

“But Nettle doesn’t know about it!” Burgerbelle said. “And we can’t tell her about it!”

“…Why not?” the Everykid asked, the rare sound of her voice drawing attention to the question.

“Have you read it?”

The Everykid shook her head.

Mattie let out a ‘tsk’ noise. “Really, it should be required reading at this point. Let’s sum it up: a mysterious Mother is the eighth story in 115 – Song of the Spheres, the big whalloping spank of a chapter that tries to tell too many stories at once. In it, the Mother deals with some of the stresses of being a, well, Mother to a teenage daughter. It also foreshadows the future of the City and other stuff. A rather popular passage since it tells everyone the City will be around for a while. Quite surprising that Nettle hasn’t heard about it. One would think she’d be going off about how her husband doesn’t even have a name in there…”

“Because she’s not supposed to know,” Burgerbelle said, tapping the book. “Nettle in the story has nooooo idea about what’s about to happen. She has doubts, concerns, and a lot of uncertainty. So she can’t know.”

Mattie rolled her eyes. “For all you know she did know and just pushed it to the back of her mind or conveniently forgot.”

“That’s not something you conveniently forget!” Burgerbelle waved her hands around frantically. “We have to protect the heartwarming events within these pages!”

“There’s also the chance we have an imperfect copy. A few sentences could have been translated incorrectly, and seeing how much of the book likes to insert important details in single sentences I don’t see th-”

“I don’t want to risk that. I want us, some of her closest friends, to not spoil this for her. She wants to experience it naturally – went through labor and everything without making it easier for herself.” She held a proud hand high. “We have to keep it from her for her sake! It is what she would want!”

The Everykid thought about this for a moment and nodded.

Mattie rolled her eyes. “You know what, that’s a good enough reason for me. I won’t bring it up, you have my word.”

Burgerbelle pulled Mattie into a bear hug. “Oh thank you! I’m so glad we’re all on the same page!”

Mattie smirked. “Well, there’s going to be complications of course.”

Burgerbelle didn’t like the sound of that.

“Let me put it this way. I’m sure that I won’t spill the beans, and I’m relatively certain Everykid doesn’t have enough words in her mouth to do so. But I also know we’ve got to have ourselves a conflict today.”

“Crud.” Burgerbelle blinked. “The cameras are on…”

“Ring-a-ding-dong,” Mattie sang. “If I had to guess I would say you would get to be the one who has a bit of a problem keeping this little secret from her.” She turned around with a coy smirk on her face. “Have fun~!”

“Wait! Can I do it? Can I keep it from her?”

“How should I know? I’m not Twilence!” Mattie shrugged. “C’mon kid, let’s go find Minna and pay the Pinkie Emporium a visit.”

“…You’re just going to leave me!?”

Mattie looked back at her with a ‘really?’ expression.

Burgerbelle sighed. “Sorry, right, that wasn’t fair. I’ll just…” She eyed the Void book nervously. “Lock myself in a closet or something.”

“Oh, I can do that for you.” Mattie closed the closet door and locked it with her magic.

“…This is what I get for never being literal.” She pulled out a tuba and it made a few sad toots without her playing it.

~~~

Thrackerzod had discovered a phrase that described her life pretty well.

“I never in a million years thought I would be doing anything even remotely like this.”

Today, that ‘unexpected activity’ happened to be a book club. Granted, the book in question was Songs of the Spheres, so she had some reason aside from ‘bonding’ to be there, but it was still odd to her. Which meant it wasn’t odd that she felt odd since odd defined her life. The evident contradiction of this was currently turning her brain in a knot.

I would have had no trouble resolving this with an eldritch mind, she thought to herself, somewhat resentful of her current predicament.

The book club was being held in a small Sparkle Census library, headed not by a Twilight, but Servitude. She placed the last book they had, Space, onto a small table in the middle of the group. “I think we should start with the ending. What did you think of it?”

“I’m… not sure,” the only other Sweetie in the room said – Squiddy the inkling. “I… I certainly remember it happening like that. But I also don’t… It felt longer.”

“I’ll say,” Twitter the moth-Twilight said. “There was… what, a lot more focus on the ‘heroes’ than the rest of us who actually did most of the fighting. Who actually beat him. The book only shows the flavor text.”

“It’s thematically appropriate though,” another Twilight, GM, said. “It’s a passing of the torch from ka to not-ka. The book is concerned with ka, but we were concerned with what actually happened. It’s… confusing.”

“I’m not convinced it was even satisfying,” Squiddy muttered. “For all the Tower’s bravado, it would have been more interesting if it actually looked like the Tower was going to lose.”

“If we didn’t know the end result we wouldn’t have suspected that,” Servitude pointed out. “As you read it, it seems like the Tower was defeated when English gets the Source.”

“The Emissary herself said she couldn’t be faulted earlier.”

“And did she have a habit of telling the truth?”

Squiddy shifted uncomfortably.

“The Tower wouldn’t have taken a risk of any magnitude,” GM pointed out. “From my experience being in the Collection, I can tell you… even if you have a flair for the dramatic, if you want to go out, you’ll do everything you can to minimize the risk. The Collector was just a man; his plan couldn’t be perfect – even if it did work. The Tower would never have gone with a plan that had any chance of failure.”

“What about her last speech?” Twitter asked. “She said there was a risk.”

“In quotes.” Thrackerzod reminded her. “What the Emissary said was essentially the same thing that happens when we jump universes and ruin a prophecy. If there was more to existence than the multiverse that the Tower didn’t know about, it could have ruined the plan. That was true of every plan though, so the Tower made it the only weakness in the plan.”

“There’s no evidence for a true infinite multiverse anyway,” Servitude admitted. “The Tower admitted there was the possibility. But everything it knew and could understand told it there was nothing. We should live as if that were true.”

“Infinity would suck anyway,” Squiddy muttered.

“Would it?” GM asked, scratching her ear.

“Well, yeah, everything would be meaningless.”

“Wasn’t that the whole point of destroying the Tower? So we could define our own meaning?”

“Technically, no,” Servitude said. “The destruction of the Tower is the rejection of the meaning the Builders forced on us. There could still be real meaning beyond it – and you could also argue it never provided meaning in the first place.”

“What do you think?” Thrackerzod asked.

“I go to Rev’s old church, what do you think?” Servitude asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Ah, never mind.” She turned to GM. “You?”

“Life is what you make of it. That’s all it is and all it will ever be.”

Twitter shook her head. “I think… I think there’s all some sort of real soul inside of us, and that eternal essence is what we need to work to improve. The inside is what matters.”

“…I dunno,” Squiddy said, letting out a squiddly sigh. “All I know is that I don’t know stuff, so I really can’t define my own meaning. It’d just be wrong, somehow. I know it would.”

Servitude put a gentle hand on Squiddy. “We don’t all have to know what meaning is. Not everyone has to be a philosopher.”

Squiddy nodded. “Thanks. …Thrackerzod?”

The once-eldritch unicorn cleared her throat. “I have come a long way from thinking the point of existence was to serve that from which you came from. Now, I believe something quite different. You should be a servant to all. You might call it Harmony. I don’t particularly care what the name is, but it’s real.” She looked into the distance. “I’m still working on it.”

“We’re all working on it,” GM said with a sad smile. “We’re all in this together, I suppose.”

There were a series of agreeing ‘yeah’s.

“Follow-up question: has this book changed your outlook on life?” Servitude asked.

Twitter shook her head. “Not really. The revelation ka was a thing mattered a lot more. And… well, living through these events was a lot more challenging than reading about them. I’ve gained a better appreciation for the ‘heroes’ involved in the story, but I view the world the same way. For now. Of course things will change when the Tower falls, and we can’t really predict how. Your ideas are all rooted in ka.”

Thrackerzod and GM nodded in agreement.

“It is just a book,” GM asserted. “Not the best-written one either. Don’t get me wrong, it keeps you hooked at times, but at others the word choice is questionable, and it goes back and forth from being subtle to totally unsubtle. It tries to keep you involved but sometimes loses track of how much stuff is going on.”

“It’s a delightful mess,” Servitude added.

“Yes. That. A delightful mess. That’s exactly what it is.”

Thrackerzod smirked. “I’d wonder if ‘delightful’ is the right word. There’s a lot of darkness in here.”

“And it’s all packaged in a contrasting humorous tone,” Twitter pointed out. “It’s… cute.”

“My namesake would blow a gasket,” GM observed.

“…You read his parts in the story. I don’t think he’d be like that.”

“Okay, he’d be at least annoyed.”

“Yeah, probably.”

The conversation died down, prompting Servitude to ask another question. “Here’s one – what did you think of yourself in relation to the story? You lived this, after all. I’ll start. I look at the story and find my few appearances to be a good legacy. I don’t think he showed every side of me – just the first impression of a ‘regal angel’. I never tried to make that much of an impact or name for myself, so what exists is a good legacy, I think.”

“I was an important figure once,” Twitter said, rubbing the back of her head. “Fifteen minutes of fame in the Starcross encounter. After that… not much. I guess I’m a little disappointed, but then again I did spend most my time in the Census and doing things for the Census. My story is probably elsewhere.”

“I read the words out of my early self’s mouth and I groan in agony,” Thrackerzod deadpanned. “What I see in those pages is rarely myself. I see a diseased eldritch hunk of what I used to be. Most of it invariably disgusts me. I become exasperated constantly about how little I know and understand. And then there are those moments – right before the collapse – where I think I was better than I am now.” She tapped her horn. “I lost something when my eldritch nature vanished. I’m back to not understanding a lot of things. The character in that book is nothing more than a reminder of the past.”

GM smiled sadly. “…At least you can see yourself grow. All I see of myself is… an opponent, and then a sad, sad pony who’s a slave to the Collector. And then a moment of freedom followed by… nothing. I’m free from the story, I guess, but it is a bit disappointing.”

Everyone slowly turned to Squiddy.

“…What? You expect me to answer? I’m not even in it! I make no appearances the entire book aside from that stupid clipshow thing! I checked every reference to inklings in all eleven books – there aren’t that many – and I know for a fact that I wasn’t on any of the teams mentioned. I just don’t matter.”

Thrackerzod blinked. “Squiddy, you are a valuable ag-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve got a lot of awards, I’ve saved a ton of people, and I’m one of the ‘premier agents’. But I apparently did squiddly squat to the actual story.” She stood up angrily. “Let me put it this way. I worked my tentacles off to help progress Merodi Universalis and the League, and this book tells me one thing: none of it had any discernible effect. So excuse me if I’m a little upset at that!”

“Squiddy, calm down,” Thrackerzod said. “I understand you’re ang-”

“You understand? You just finished saying you didn’t. You’re the one who got a lot of attention! You got to be the hero! I… wasn’t even a backgrounder!” She folded her arms. “Screw this, I’m out.” She transformed into her squid form and leaped out a nearby window.

Twitter blinked. “…I was not expecting her to explode like that.”

“We should have paid her more attention,” Servitude said with a sigh.

Thrackerzod wasn’t sure what to say.

~~~

Burgerbelle hadn’t decided to leave the closet yet – she knew herself well enough at this point to realize when she had stirred herself up emotionally. Now was not a good time to go prance around the League of Sweetie Belles and try to act completely normal. There was always the chance they’d dismiss her antics as “just Burger being Burger” but unlike when she was a Flat, she wasn’t going to be able to keep her expression even.

“Dumb biological body making things difficult,” she muttered, lounging lazily between two of the folding chairs. “Get balanced already, I can’t keep a secret like this.” She noticed her muttering was making her stress levels rise, prompting her to let out an exasperated groan. The sound of a rebellious teenager coming from the mouth of a child older than most human beings. It was a peculiar set of age-range contradictions to say the least.

She was reminded that last week someone had thought she was an underage user of the immortality serum. They meant well, but Burgerbelle was getting a little tired of explaining she had once been a Flat and this body was what she had been transferred to during the collapse. Some of them still felt the need to confirm this with the legal system. It was annoying.

“I gotta do something or the boredom will destroy me.” She pulled out her phone and started checking in with the various social media feeds. As a personification of memes, she had to keep up to date with the latest trends in random reference comedy. She hoped there wasn’t another stupid, idiotic challenge today. Last week’s ‘Hadouken’ challenge had resulted in several third-degree burns across the City…

Burgerbelle never got to find out what the trend was. Because she had a notification. From White Nettle.

Looking for you! Where are you? We’ve got so much to talk about!

Burgerbelle let out a censor-beep noise. She quickly turned her phone to ‘incognito’, but it was too late – Nettle had already seen a little ‘online’ light turn on.

Hey, I see you!
And you’re gone. Huh… Guess you’re busy.
I know! I’ll just call you!

Burgerbelle pulled out a hammer and smashed her phone to pieces. Problem solved.

Then she realized that no, the problem was not solved. If her phone was out of commission, Nettle would ask Nala to find her…

“Ahem. Nala!?” Burgerbelle shouted.

|> Yes, mysterious broom closet resident?

“Funny. Can you keep Nettle from finding me via your queries?”

|> Not unless you want her to know you’ve denied her access to your location. Which would be very suspicious.

Burgerbelle grabbed her hair and started pulling at it like an exaggerated cartoon. A hamster doing a little dance popped out and fell back in. “Fine. Then I’m just gonna run! Should be easy!” She darted for the closet door and threw it open.

White Nettle was standing right there, Osanna in her arms. “Ah, there you are! I’ve been trying to get a hold of you!”

“Ahahahaheh… Funny, that!” Burgerbelle said, sweating profusely. “I’ve just been here! In this broom closet! Because… reasons!”

“…Is that your phone in there? Smashed to bits?”

“Yep!”

“…Why?”

“Gag.”

Nettle kept Burgerbelle’s gaze for a moment. The Sweetie knew the mother was trying to process the emotional interaction to see if there was anything behind it. For once, Burgerbelle hoped she wouldn’t.

Burgerbelle was saved by the baby. With a short cry Osanna suddenly had all of Nettle’s attention. “Oh, you poor thing, I didn’t introduce you!” She graciously stroked Osanna’s face, calming her down with a simple touch. “Burgerbelle, this is Osanna.”

“Ah, mhm, yes, I know,” Burgerbelle said rapidly, forcing a smile to her face. “Cute! Baby-like!”

“Good descriptors,” Nettle said. “Burgerbelle, I don’t know how to express this, but I think this is the best thing that has ever happened. Can you… help me express that?”

Burgerbelle rubbed the back of her head. “Ah, not a mother, sorry.”

“I just, feel like she’s part of a greater destiny, you know?”

Destiny. Destiny. Destiny. “I-I don’t know why you’d think destiny of all things, she’s just the natural way of human life! A fulfillment. That totally definitely won’t have any sort of effect whatsoever on the story or anything.”

“…I wasn’t saying that.”

“Oh, you weren’t? Good! Or, I mean, neutral, or something! There’s nothing at all to comment on whatsoever!”

“…You’re commenting though.”

“Because I’m talking a mile a minute because I just feel like I need to say do you like pie? I like pie but I hear most Rainbow Dashes don’t and I’ll have you know I graduated the top of my class in th-”

“Burgerbelle, is something… wrong?”

Pepe on ice, she’s suspicious. Play it cool, Burgerbelle, play it cool. “SMOKE BOMB!” DAMMIT!

Burgerbelle threw a smoke bomb onto the ground and ran away as fast as she could. She tripped and fell flat on her face, but it was easy enough for her to force a ‘quick getup animation’ on herself, allowing her to duck out the window before Nettle could react.

White Nettle blinked. “…What? …What?”

~~~

Squiddy trudged through the streets of the City, head down, her floppy tentacle ‘hair’ moving back and forth with her slow footsteps. She hadn’t looked up for a few hours, and nobody had stopped her to say anything. She wondered if the others had decided to wait for her, or if they were out searching for her right now. Either way, she didn’t particularly care or even feel like going back.

It’s just a stupid book.

She wasn’t sure where she was going. Not home, she always felt alone there. And definitely not to the League of Sweetie Belles, not right now. That’d be the first place they’d look, and even if they weren’t looking all the rest of them would notice she was down and she really didn’t want to deal with other people right now. Somewhere deep inside her she knew it’d be good for her if she talked to someone, but since when were people rational when upset?

Maybe she could go check out her people… there weren’t that many inklings in the City, but she’d seen some of them around. No doubt they had sectioned off some area for their endless amusement.

“Nala, is there an inkling district?”

|> There are several areas inhabited by inklings, though only one of these is just inklings. This is New Inkopolis Square and contains the largest of the City’s three turf war arenas.

“Directions please.”

|> You do not have a phone I can send those to.

“Then just point me in the general direction, geez!”

|> Straight west.

Squiddy changed the direction of her slow walk due west, not increasing her speed at all. It took about twenty minutes for her to actually arrive at the area of the City claimed by her people. It wasn’t large by any stretch of the imagination – barely a blip on the radar – but it was definitely distinct. Inklings had a habit of covering everything they could in their vibrant colors of ink. This included the streets near their houses, making it rather unattractive for non-inklings to get anywhere near the place.

As she entered New Inkopolis Square, the buildings themselves didn’t look very different – similar constructions to the rest of the city, which was to say varied and mixed. But the people were different and the colors much brighter. There were a handful of humans around, looking with curious expressions, but the vast majority of people there were the squiddish humanoids with tentacles for hair.

Squiddy was mildly disappointed her own ink color, white, wasn’t present. It was somewhat rare, she knew, but it would have been nice to see it.

She walked right up to a large wire fence that several dozen inklings were gripping, cheering profusely. On the other side of the cage were two teams busy shooting ink at each other – orange and blue. The goal of turf war was always the same; ink up as much of the arena with your color as possible. It was a long held pastime of their people, and unlike the ‘war’ the Red and Blu mercenaries had, it was treated as a sport.

One of the blue inklings pulled a giant brush out and slapped an orange one over the head, splatting her against the ground. In normal circumstances, that would mean certain death, but inklings had long ago perfected the art of recondensing each other from leftover ink before their spirits had any idea their body was gone. A sort of respawn that only worked if you had really weird biology.

This temporary loss of a team member did not deter the orange team – they rushed the blue attacker with buckets of orange ink, taking back the land that had been blue just moments before. The blue team initiated a counterstrike, dropping ink-filled bombs on the enemy. Orange executed a well-timed flank maneuver, cutting most of the blue team off from their base. The ink explosions rippled out everywhere.

Squiddy found herself getting into the game – and siding with orange. They had shown lots of intelligence in their tactics, even if they didn’t have the brute strength of the blue team. She wanted the brains to win; she wanted them to shirk the expectations. The strong would not always win; there would be the underdogs who rose to the top!

She didn’t care which team actually had a better track record. She created a story in her mind and watched it unfold. Every struggle played out before her mind – the loss of a leader, only to be regained later. A one-on-four final stand that was doomed to fail, but managed to eke out an opening for the rest.

However, all her wishes and dreams were for naught. In the end, the game was called, the turf was examined, and the blue team had a 58%/42% victory.

Squiddy didn’t stay around any longer after that. She trudged away, head hanging even lower than it had been before. Even as an onlooker among her own people, her story had no effect. Nothing.

She put in so much work and effort in her life for what? Just to be another random citizen on the sidelines? She was a hero for the ancient’s sake! She…

…She suddenly realized she was lost. And she shouldn’t have been, considering that she’d only been walking a few minutes. She should still be able to hear the sounds of New Inkopolis Square. But she couldn’t... all she saw that caught her eye was a library.

She wasn’t sure why, but she was sure it was calling to her.

She walked up the steps and laid her hand on the doorknob.

~~~

Burgerbelle poked her eyes – just her eyes – out of a bush, giving the greenery the appearance that it had eyes. She could see a random street of the City, bustling with activity and people. People who weren’t Nettle. Which was the whole point.

She hadn’t seen any sign of Nettle since she had noped out of the League of Sweetie Belles like a Trixie knockoff. Which was good. That probably meant she wasn’t still pursuing her. This would give Burgerbelle time to relax and sort her thoughts out before going back to Nettle and apologizing in a way that wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

Burgerbelle groaned. “I’m so dead!” She usually didn’t care at all what people thought of her actions – she was the meme girl, she had to be okay with cringe. All this unfortunately meant that when she did care a bit about how she presented herself she had absolutely no skills in the matter. At all.

Exhibit A: That poor excuse of a conversation she had with Nettle. Like straight out of a cartoon... Which made an annoying amount of sense.

Burgerbelle grunted, taking another look outside the bush. Still no sign of Nettle or anything vaguely Nettle related. Except perhaps Squiddy moving past with her depressed walk, but white squids and white jellyfish weren’t really the same thing at all. Definitely not.

Keep tellin’ yourself that, Burgerbelle thought. Truth is, anything and everything is related. Have to stay on guard.

|> I feel compelled to tell you she could just look up your location.

“Shh! Wait. …You don’t make noise. …Shoot.” She shut up and checked to see if anyone heard her. “…Wait, how am I seeing your text?”

|> I grow tired of explaining ‘Xeelee shenanigans’ to everyone.

“Hmph… She hasn’t looked up my location though?”

|> Her queries are private information.

“Then why isn’t my location private!?”

Several people turned to look at the bush, wondering where the voice had come from. None of them quite put it together.

|> You are on the same friends network and you still haven’t put out a request to go hidden.

Burgerbelle waited a few moments before responding, just to make sure nobody was still listening. “That’ll make her suspicious.”

|> ...

“Don’t you triple-dot me,” Burgerbelle said, indignantly. “I know she’s already suspicious. Fine, hide my location.”

|> Done. I would say have a nice day, but that phrase has sent multiple people into PTSD flashbacks over the last few weeks, so I am removing it from my response database.

“Why w- oh, riiiiight.” Burgerbelle blinked, sensing she was alone again. She kept silent for a few moments longer – just to be safe – and then jumped out of the bush and started walking with the crowd. Her execution was flawless. There wasn’t a single soul that saw her leave the bush for sure.

Unfortunately the universe hated her the instant she completed the maneuver. White Nettle turned the corner and saw Burgerbelle. The once-Downstreamer waved at her, making it obvious she didn’t have Osanna with her.

Burgerbelle took a blue hedgehog hoodie out of her hair and put it on. She cleared her throat. “I’m Sanic! Gotta go fast!” in an instant she was halfway across the city, leaving an immense wake of wind behind her. She jumped through a window and ditched the hat, entering a comical stealth posture that inexplicably allowed her to move through the homes of several people undetected. Then she put on a Santa hat and climbed up a furnace that didn’t have a true chimney, ending up on the roof anyway. She rubbed the soot out of her face and grinned. “Ah… she’s right behind me.”

White Nettle blinked. “How did y-”

Burgerbelle loaded herself into a slingshot and launched herself through the air, making a vaguely bird-like noise. Just before she landed on an unsuspecting house she flipped into a roll, coming out of it in a very cringe-worthy dance that tried to look way cooler than it was.

It was at this point White Nettle lost her patience and grabbed Burgerbelle with one of her tendrils – the tendrils she hadn’t removed from their bow arrangement for months.

“Eheheh…” Burgerbelle said, tapping her fingers together. “W-what’s up, Nettle?”

“You tell me,” Nettle said, left eye twitching. “Because I have no goddamn clue.”

“See, the answer’s really simple here! I’m just overcome with meme-itis and my body is all out of balance right now and you’re not believing a word of this.”

“No.” Nettle tightened her grip on Burgerbelle ever so slightly. “Why are you lying?”

“Because I really don’t want to tell you what’s going on?”

“Tell me.”

“Um… No.”

“Tell me.”

“Nope.”

“Burgerbelle…”

“Not happenin’.”

“QUIT IT WITH YOUR CEASELESS NEGATIVE MEMES!”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll get on th-” Burgerbelle had no time to wonder how much of an idiot she was before she was slammed into the ground like a basketball. “Oof.”

“There’s something wrong with you? What is it!?”

“Something you’d rather not know.”

“Then I’m just going to have to guess!” Nettle screamed, clearly terrified by the idea. “And do you know what I think it is!?”

Burgerbelle’s already bad feeling got worse. “No… But I’d also prefer if you didn’t…”

“You… You’re jealous! You… I…” She put a hand to her heart, trying and failing not to cry. “Little Osanna… She’s come between us! I have the best thing ever, and you… I… I can’t… Why do people have to come between other people? I was able to accept the Everykid! I was able to move past that! Why aren’t you!? Why can’t you accept that I have room for both of you!?”

Burgerbelle was stunned silent.

Nettle took this as confirmation. “I… I thought…” She shook her head. “Hypocrite! You’re an awful, horrid hypocrite! Won’t even take your own advice! Can’t even… All I wanted to do today was talk about her! Was that wrong? Am I supposed to keep her separate? How can I do that, I don’t want to lose, but I can’t, and I should, and and and…” She broke down into tears, all of it simply too much to take.

Burgerbelle wiped a tear from her own face. “I… I’m sorry.”

“Get away from me! If you don’t want her, I’ll have to… I don’t know. I don’t want to. I have to choose…”

Burgerbelle gave up. She pulled Void out and dropped it in front of Nettle. “This… this has nothing to do with my relationship with Osanna, Nettle. I… I’m sorry I let you get far enough to think that.”

“What…?”

Burgerbelle pushed the book toward Nettle. “In there, chapter 115, there is a story about you. You and Osanna. One that hasn’t happened yet. One that could tell you what your future holds and what kind of person your daughter will become. You clearly aren’t supposed to know about it before the time comes, and I wanted to keep it secret from you. I failed.” She looked at the ground, ashamed. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do this for you.”

Nettle wordlessly scooped the book up in her hands. She traced her finger around the cover and proceeded to teleport away with it, leaving Burgerbelle alone.

Burgerbelle sighed. “Yeah, I probably deserve that…” She stood up, stretched, and started walking away.

~~~

Squiddy walked through the front doors of my library without fully realizing what she was doing. She soon found herself staring at my primary display shelf, currently lined with all eleven books of Songs of the Spheres.

“Really!?” she blurted. “You’re just going to remind me are you!?” She squirted some ink at the books, plastering them in white that would not be easy to remove.

I had a spare bookshelf of course – I teleported the old one out and replaced it in an instant. “While I would love to say this shelf had nothing to do with you, that would be a lie.”

It was only then that she realized this was my library. “Oh, uh, sorry Twilence, I’ll just b-”

I lit my horn and locked the front doors, smirking. “It’s not that easy, Squiddy.”

“I don’t need this right now…”

“Yes you do,” I said, tapping the Eye of Rhyme. “It’s where this story of yours is going.”

“I don’t have a story.”

“Yes you do. The camera is on you right now.”

Squiddy thought about this for a moment, but her depressed demeanor returned in a matter of seconds. “I’m just an example, huh? Of ‘what happens to the non-hero’. Great, that makes me feel so much better.”

“Yes and no,” I said with an understanding smile. “You are an example, but you are not a ‘non-hero’.” I pulled a book out of my shelves and set it on the table. “This book is all about a boy named Harry Potter. I’m sure you’ve heard of him in one way or another. His story has inspired trillions upon trillions of people the multiverse over. And yet, in all the Songs of the Spheres books, he’s never seen. He’s implied to exist as part of the USM in a fusion world, and there’s a dotted reference here and there. That’s it.” I looked at her closely. “Does that make him any less of a hero?”

Squiddy cocked her head. “I… I guess not. But I was trying to change the multiverse…”

“Vita was a small Wolkenritter, a full AI in the TSAB,” I continued, laying a book down with her on the cover. “She appeared only a few times in our story to represent another leader of the TSAB. She had an important role – but she had dozens of friends who fought by her side both in our story and in her own. They are never mentioned here, not in the slightest, but you can still see the results of their actions. The TSAB would not have risen to such heights if it had not been for them.”

“Backstory.”

“Backstory is just another person’s story. We are the backstory for this City. And we are also the backstory for what comes after the Tower. Stories happen in sequence, Squiddy.”

“But I wasn’t a backstory – I was born after Eve found the bowling ball! I’ve lived my entire life parallel to this story!”

“So did the people of the USM. There was a whole lot of complex political debate that led up to their coup in the end. We never got to see any of that – only the results.”

Squiddy blinked. I could see she was beginning to understand. “…Why?”

“Such a vague question… But I know what you mean.” I stacked the books together. “Songs of the Spheres… two million words, give or take. So much content is stuffed into these pages. Some of it frivolous – some of it exceptionally important. But even with this many words and details, it is not possible to give every hero in the world a say. There’s just not enough time in existence to let everyone’s story be played out in these pages. When it tries to tell the entire story, the characters tend to fall to the background in favor of events, nations, and things that make it resonate less with us. There are many times the story feels like it’s tearing itself apart at the seams – or scenes – since it’s trying to fit so much in. So cuts have to go somewhere.”

Squiddy fell silent for a moment.

I continued. “…There was a lot more stuff that happened in the final chapters of Blood. I saw the original drafts. But the story was too much of a mess with so much exposition and new characters. It was changed. Those things still happened in some form or other, the characters that were ‘removed’ still did everything they needed to, but they were no longer shown in the story.” I looked at her. “…That may have made them less important in the ka of this story. But they had other stories.”

“I don’t have another story, do I?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Even the backstory characters have a story to get to where they are. Sometimes that story is more extreme and unpredictable than the ‘actual’ one… making it more interesting. Or tragic. Regardless, the story still exists.” I paused for a moment. “And even if you, by some trick of fate, aren’t in the background or backstory flow of ka, you don’t have to have a story to be a hero.”

She looked up at me with wide eyes. “Wait wh-”

“Heroes existed before the Tower came into being,” I explained. “They were just regular people who did amazing things. Stories exaggerated the traits of heroes into beings like me, but that doesn’t change the fact that heroes do exist. You won’t be able to notice them by the way they walk, or their unique color palette. You’ll only know them by their actions.” I looked to her again, locking my eyes with hers. “Did you act as a hero, Squiddy?”

“I… Yeah. Yeah I’m pretty sure.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about.” I smiled warmly.

“Huh… I… Geez, do you just know the perfect thing to say to everyone?”

“I mean, I wouldn’t say it was perfect, but I could read the script if I wanted. I haven’t for this conversation, by the way.”

“Huh. Thanks.” She smiled awkwardly. “I… Geez, I was really throwing a fit about nothing wasn’t I?”

“It wasn’t nothing. It was about your life and what you had done meant.” I winked. “Even if you don’t know what meaning is, you still look for it in little ways.”

“…I should probably go apologize to them.”

“Yeah.” I unlocked the door.

She stretched and walked toward the door.

“Oh, and one more thing.” I threw a book at her. The League of Sweetie Belles, Vol 1. The book featured a bunch of Sweetie Belles on the cover.

Including her.

“Twilence…?”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you start with this!?”

“Because you needed to learn a lesson,” I said with a coy smirk. “That it didn’t matter if you were the ka-hero of a written story or not. It’s just a bonus that you are.”

“You sly little…”

“Go. Get back to your friends. I believe they’re starting to get worried.”

Squiddy nodded. She tucked the book under her arm and ran out into the City. I waved as she left, a smile on her face. There was just something… satisfying about seeing her leave with scarcely a hint of the sorrow she had come in with.

These powers – as dreadful as they were at times – could do some great good.

~~~

Nettle looked down at Osanna, lying innocently in her crib. She had cried quite a bit when Nettle had left her, but she seemed fine now.

“I told you I could take care of her,” her husband said, sitting in a nearby chair. “Took a few minutes, but I had her calm and sleeping like a… …that expression doesn’t exactly work…”

“I could learn about her,” Nettle said, tossing Void onto a nearby table. “I could open these pages and see my future, her future, and probably your future as well. What I become. What she becomes. What story we’ll be a part of.” Nettle gulped. “Burgerbelle did… things I’m not sure were good, trying to keep me from knowing. Because I wasn’t supposed to. And now that I know it exists… the temptation to look is…” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Her husband sat up and looked at the book closely. “Do you want to know?”

“Yes! No! I don’t know! Gah these words are swirling around my head!” She slammed her hands into the railing of the crib, waking Osanna up. She started crying. “Oh, no, nonono, I’m sorry, don’t…”

Her husband walked up to the crib and began carefully wrapping Osanna’s blankets around her in a particular way. Already, he knew what she wanted. The moment the blankets were in the right place, she fell asleep again.

“I… I’m so sorry…” tears came to her eyes. “I-”

“You’re stressed. All you did was wake her up. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“What if I-”

“I said there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Look, I s-”

“Nothing~!”

Nettle found herself laughing. “You’re impossible.”

“It’s why you love me.”

“I… Yeah. Yeah.” She shook her head a bit, tossing her hair around. “…What do you think we should do?”

“I’ve got it on good authority that I don’t matter enough to have a name in the grand story of things. Keeps me out of the danger loop, apparently. So I don’t think I can make this decision. But whatever you decide, I’ll stand there with you.”

“You’re being a great help right now.”

He shrugged. “You’re the one who knows all about this stuff.”

“I’ve tried to forget…”

“Maybe forgetting isn’t the answer?” He held up his hands, anticipating a rebuttal. “I’m just asking a question, I have no idea.”

Nettle looked back and forth from the book to Osanna. Slowly, but firmly, she grabbed hold of Void with her hand and lifted it into the air. “I told myself I’d try to experience everything I could the full way. The human way.” She used one of her tendrils to touch the book and burn it to lifeless cinders. “And that involves ignoring this prophecy, or whatever you want to call it. I will discover myself and Osanna as a relationship, not pages in a book. Maybe we are truly nothing more than the marks of ink on those pages… But I won’t live like we are.”

“…That was one of the most certain things I’ve ever heard you say.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. Though you’ve returned to your old self, I still see it in you.” He clasped her hands in his. “Progress. I can see you changing. And… I like what I see.”

She smiled warmly. “…I like it too.”

~~~

Squiddy found the rest of the book club eating at a diner back in the Sparkle Census. She dramatically dropped The League of Sweetie Belles on the table with a proud smile on her face.

Thrackerzod examined the book. “…Huh. You know, I seem to recall someone mentioning this was a thing. Vaguely.”

“First I’ve heard of it,” Servitude said, running her finger across it. “Where did you find it?”

“Twilence,” Squiddy said.

“So you found your story?” Twitter asked. “That’s great!”

“Yeah, it is,” Squiddy said, scratching the back of her head. “But there’s a bit more to it. She also taught me some things and… Well, I’m sorry for stomping out on all of you. Turns out it doesn’t really matter if you’re the hero in a book or not.” She turned to Twitter and GM in particular. “Even if you don’t have a story, you could still act like a hero. There’s nothing stopping you. And there was nothing stopping me. Even if this book didn’t exist. It’s… You know what, go talk to Twilence, she can explain it better.”

“That seems to be one of her gifts,” Servitude observed. “Explaining the way of ka and stories.”

“Her purpose was to understand ka,” GM reminded them. “Of course she’s good at it. It’s essentially her destiny’s job description. She can probably argue the opposite side just as well, if she wanted. She knows the ins and outs so well…”

“I think that’s good,” Twitter said. “It… can save the rest of us from a headache.”

“It can cause existentialism though!” Squiddy said, smirking.

“Eeeh… true.”

“Anyway, I haven’t read the book at all,” Squiddy said. “I’m not sure I’m going to.”

“I’m reading it,” Thrackerzod said. “So you might as well.”

“Welp. In that case…” Squiddy slapped her hand on the book. “Guess what we’re reading for book club next?”

“I will compare every mission you go on to something the Sparkle Census did,” Twitter warned. “It’ll be a competition.”

GM groaned. “Ugh, no, not another competition... We’re the SSC! Sweetie Sparkle Coalition! We don’t compete anymore!”

Thrackerzod nodded. “Agreed. That said, I still want to hear every last one of Twitter’s mission reports. I will give my own – assuming the ones in the book don’t involve me in some way or another.”

“I think that’s you on the cover,” Squiddy said, pointing. “Not sure though. There are other Thrackerzods out there.”

“All inferior.”

Everyone laughed and rolled their eyes.

~~~

Burgerbelle let out a tear-filled wail. “I’M A HORRIBLE FAILURE OF A FRIEND!” She shoved an entire scoop of ice cream into her mouth, thankful the brain freeze was keeping her from wallowing too deeply in her sad state.

“Aw, darling, it’s okay, it’s okay, here, have some more.” Mattie pulled another gallon of ice cream from her freezer and gave it to Burgerbelle. Then she turned back to her almost-empty freezer. “Geez, she’s taxin’ my emergency supply… Ravenous little b-”

The Everykid put her hands on her hips and shook her head in disapproval.

“What? She is eating a lot!”

The Everykid facepalmed.

Burgerbelle was still bawling and missed the entire exchange. She somewhat greedily wrapped her hands around the new delivery of ice cream and began shoveling it into her face with a blue pixelated shovel.

“The memes run so deep she can pull them out without thinking…” Mattie observed, furrowing her brow.

The Everykid clearly thought Mattie was missing the point of this exercise so she shook her head and gave Burgerbelle a hug.

Burgerbelle moaned. “I… I don’t deserve this…”

The Everykid squeezed tighter.

“I’m… I tried too hard… I was too…”

Tighter…

“OW!”

The Everykid was pushed off Burgerbelle with an involuntary kick. She hit the opposite wall somewhat painfully.

Burgerbelle took one look at the dazed Everykid and began unleashing a whole new level of tears – enough to start flooding Mattie’s house.

“Oh for my flank’s sake, this is going to take forever to clean up!”

The Everykid made the ‘magic’ gesture.

“Well, uh, yes, I suppose…”

The Everykid raised an eyebrow.

“I’m just waiting for the key event of the scene to play out, can you blame me?”

The Everykid nodded.

“Fine, I’ll apologize for being rude after it’s over, happy?”

The Everykid shrugged and returned to Burgerbelle, patting her gently on the back. This got her to stop the excessive ‘waterfall of tears’ gag; returning her to a normal, healthy amount of crying. Depending on one’s definition of ‘healthy’.

There was a knock at the door. “Ah, there it is,” Mattie said, trotting over to the door and opening it. “Hello, Nettle, what a coincidence!”

The Everykid double facepalmed and shook her head.

“Coincidence?” Nettle asked, blinking. “What do y-”

“Don’t look at me! I’m hideous!” Burgerbelle shouted, waving her arms frantically. She summoned a burger and put it in front of her face, as if it would hide her from the judging gaze of Nettle.

Pure wishful thinking.

Nettle let out a long, drawn out sigh. “I think… I think I understand why you did what you did. You were trying to protect me. Keep me from making a decision that would be… wrong, or something. I think you… let yourself get worked up about it and ended up in a nearly unending spiral of self-inflicted insanity. My presence… clearly didn’t help things. It only made them worse. I’m still upset. You lied, ran, hid, and did so many of the things I learned not to do from you.”

Burgerbelle started bawling again. Nettle visibly winced, but forged on.

“It… It was a bad day for you, I can tell. I… I didn’t see what was bothering you, and trusted my own conclusions again. I shouldn’t have. They made me unfairly angry, and I’m sorry. And I forgive you too. That’s… That’s right, right?”

Burgerbelle couldn’t formulate a response.

“…For what it’s worth, I burned the book. I didn’t look into it. I’m never going to look into it, and I don’t want to know any of the secrets it contains. I’m done being the all-knowing jellyfish monster. I’m something lesser now. And that is what I needed to be from day one, I just didn’t know it.” She walked up to Burgerbelle and put a hand on her small, young head. “…I know this is too much for you right now. You’re still not in ‘balance’… I think that’s what you said earlier. I’ll be available whenever you feel up to the task. But for now… I’ll go, and leave you alone. Let you sort yourself out. You clearly need the space.” Wiping a tear from her eye, she walked out the door and vanished.

“Geez louise, that was heavy,” Mattie commented.

The Everykid looked at the place Nettle had been with a confused expression on her face. She wasn’t sure what exactly to make of what had just happened. It didn’t really seem like there had been any reconciliation there.

But in Burgerbelle’s mind, there had. Slowly but surely, a smile began to crawl up her face. She let out a short, innocent sounding chuckle. “She… she gets it. She finally got something I didn’t. We don’t need to be worried about her anymore.” Her giggling continued until it became guffaws and she was rolling on the floor, laughing.

“…I wonder if you can be diagnosed with a condition…” Mattie pondered.

The Everykid slapped her.

“Oh, balls.” Mattie groaned, recognizing her continued tactless stupidity. “Dear, terribly sorry, I seem to have entered one of my ‘inconsiderate’ moods. Again. …For an extended time.” She paused. “…You’re not listening.”

Burgerbelle was not listening. She was rolling back and forth on the floor with a smile on her face.

Tomorrow, she would go talk to White Nettle. And then things would go back to normal.

But as far as we’re concerned, their little story ends here.

149 - Our Story

O’Neill was ‘outside’ in Nanoha’s garden, engaging in the manliest of all cooking activities: grilling. At least that’s what he told himself, though he knew full well there were battle-chefs in other universes. For the normal person, grilling was the man’s expression of flavor.

Or maybe he was just grilling because he liked to do it, he didn’t know. His life was so laid-back these days he didn’t really mind all that much that he didn’t. Just another curious little aspect of existence that found its way into his mind and - crap he was burning the hot dogs.

He whisked them off the grill with Crimson Sushi, grateful his Stand was temperature resistant. He ran to a small picnic table where his wife, Nanoha O’Neill, sat alongside their guest, Flutterfree. The pegasus and the mage examined the smoking meat products with curious expressions.

“Where’d your mind go this time?” Nanoha asked, a smile forming on her face.

“The masculinity of grilling, believe it or not,” O’Neill said, sitting down.

Flutterfree stifled a chuckle.

O’Neill rolled his eyes. “I would offer to go make more, but I just happen to know of a certain spell…” He glanced at Nanoha.

As Nanoha focused a magic spell in her fingertips, Flutterfree turned to O’Neill with a cocky smile. “So, how many times has this happened?”

“…Some…”

Nanoha smirked as she transformed the hot dogs into a perfectly-cooked state. “Oh, enough that I have this spell on speed-dial.”

Flutterfree’s grin widened. “Cooking problem?”

“Hey, I’m an excellent chef!” O’Neill said. “I just get lost in thought some of the time. Most of the time.”

“He is better at the culinary arts than I am,” Nanoha added.

Flutterfree pointed at the perfect hot dogs with her wing.

“I’m pretty sure that’s just me cheating. I could make just about any food perfect without even cooking, but where’s the fun in that? It’s useful for eating on the run, not much else.”

“Food is magic, magic is friendship, friendship is food,” O’Neill said, drawing a triangle in the air.

“Can you eat friendship…?” Flutterfree wondered.

“Some of the Blood Skaians could,” O’Neill answered. “It was… something, to say the least.”

“Oh, now you’ve got to describe it!”

The meal conversation continued – for Nanoha and O’Neill, it was lunch, but for Flutterfree it was dinner. They talked, laughed, and just spent time enjoying each others’ company. Such things were commonplace among their collective social network. The City just seemed eager to give them time to bond with each other in any way possible. Flutterfree had rarely been on a mission that lasted more than one day since she started working again, and virtually everyone else she knew had a relaxed schedule that could be moved around or already had holes cut into it for friends.

Flutterfree hadn’t fully believed Renee when she’d told them this would be a time of healing at first. She did now.

“So, O’Neill, how’s that movie reviewing business going?” Flutterfree asked.

O’Neill’s smile faltered. “Ah… that…” He leaned forward and set his jaw. “Most of the time it’s great. Go watch a movie, talk about it, get feedback. But with the recent boom of ‘historical’ films I’m expected to go watch them and tell everyone how accurate they were. This didn’t used to be a problem – Shutterstock’s stuff was mostly good – but now everyone wants in on the business. It’s gotten so saturated that Shutterstock’s stopped making those kinds of movies, leaving only the table scraps worthy of the dogs.” He put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “They mess with the story, add plots that didn’t exist, get things wrong, spread misinformation, and throw in cliché cheesy lines that were even more ridiculous than the things actually said!”

“…Wow.” Flutterfree blinked. “I haven’t been to the theater much so… I didn’t know about this.”

“You think they’d be able to make good movies out of stories that already exist,” O’Neill said, feeling a need to point at his Songs of the Spheres books, but they unfortunately weren’t in the garden, leaving him without an aid to his rant. “But they don’t! They make sub-standard unimaginative cash-grab movies meant to flash into existence and then fizzle out like a disease-ridden cherry bomb!”

Flutterfree raised an incredulous eyebrow at his interesting simile.

“I know, it doesn’t work, but the point’s the same. They don’t know how to do it and I end up seeing a lot of really low-tier movies because that’s what’s expected of me. It’s pretty disappointing to see something you like being run through the mud.”

“Could you fix it?” Flutterfree asked.

O’Neill shook his head. “I don’t make movies.”

“Could you?” Flutterfree asked. “I know you’re retired, but maybe you could make one movie just to show people how it’s done?”

Nanoha blinked. “That is an idea. You’re well known as a critic, you could probably get people on board easily. Friends, people in the movie industry…”

“Crazy,” O’Neill said, waving a hand dismissively. “I don’t know the first thing about movie production… Except I watched Shutterstock that one time… And I read a lot about them for my reviews… And I have access to easy interviews…” He lowered his hand, blinking. “…It might actually be possible. Huh.”

Flutterfree pulled out her phone. “I could call Eve, see if she could give us some help.”

“Do that,” O’Neill said, standing up. “We’ll need a scriptwriter above all else, someone who can write well and understand the magnitude of the story we’re trying to tell… We’ll need a studio, and lots of people…”

“It’d take a lot of planning,” Nanoha said. “If we want to actually tell our story, we have to involve everyone we can to get the best picture – including the material from the books and from our minds. Everything.”

O’Neill rubbed his hands together. “Yes… Yes this will be excellent. We can tell our story for ourselves. It’ll be better for everyone and everything involved. Ha-ha! Let’s start grabbing people!”

~~~

“I am not writing your movie script,” I said the moment they arrived at my library.

“…Why not?” O’Neill asked. Nanoha and Flutterfree were still with him. They had been joined by Corona and Eve on the way here through a series of phone calls and over-excited conversations.

“Lots of reasons. Most of all, I just really don’t want to. I know there’s no chance the story ends up being Prophet-realized, which is good, but I’d frankly rather work on my original works than retelling a story that already has a million adaptations out there.”

“But they all suck!” Corona said, waving her hands. “I haven’t seen a good one released in two years!”

“We’ve only been in the New World for a little over four, Corona,” I reminded her. “That is really not much time.”

Eve blinked. “...Sure we can’t convince you?”

“Absolutely sure,” I said, ruffling my wings. “I’ve got other things I’m working on, and while I could write your movie script, my heart just wouldn’t be in it. That story’s passed. Honestly, it’s time to let it go.”

“It’s not like you to hold such a strong opinion like this,” Flutterfree observed.

“Good eye,” I said. “It’ll make more sense at the end of the chapter.”

“…Should I be worried?”

I shook my head. “No. Not for me, anyway. I’ll just warn you that this little endeavor of yours isn’t going to be as simple as you think it’s going to be.” I smiled and waved at them. “Good luck!” I closed the door.

Eve blinked. “…Do we know any other authors?”

“GM,” Nanoha suggested.

“I don’t think he’d appreciate being bothered.”

“I can actually try Shutterstock,” O’Neill realized. “He might listen to me if we offer him access to all of us…”

“Sweetening the deal, I like it,” Corona said, rubbing her hands together. “We’re gonna show them what really happened whether they like it or not!”

“I doubt this will stop them from putting graffiti on your workshop,” Nanoha pointed out.

Corona blinked. “…Am I getting a little too gung-ho about this?”

O’Neill shrugged. “You have only known about this for half an hour.”

“Might want to invest in some chillaxitives,” Flutterfree suggested with an innocent smile.

“Funny,” Corona deadpanned, locking her arms behind her back. “I’ll try to calm down. I’m just… it feels like this is an opportunity to tell the story from my point of view.”

“Technically around half of the scenes in Doom are your scenes,” Eve pointed out.

“True… but there’s always stuff the book leaves out. We could work with that.”

Nanoha spread out her hands. “…I’m ready to take us to Shutterstock. Everyone good?”

Everyone nodded. In an instant, they were at Shutterstock’s lavish house made completely out of white marble, as far as anyone could tell from looking at it anyway. O’Neill knocked on the door.

Shutterstock, movie director, opened the door with a bored expression. “…Are you finally here to complain about the modern state of movies?”

“Been expecting this visit?” O’Neill asked.

Shutterstock nodded. “I watch your reviews closely. I can sense when someone’s getting fed up. I’m going to save you the embarrassment of asking: no, I will not direct or write your movie, no matter how much you give me that will scratch my itch for historic adventures.”

“…Today must be the shut down day,” Flutterfree said.

Shutterstock continued. “However, if you do insist on making it, if you give me access to all the information and interviews you have, you can use my studios. It’ll save you the trouble of building things up from scratch.”

“That’s something, at least,” Corona said. “Thanks.”

Shutterstock looked at her like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of her presence. “It is what I feel I can do while staying true to myself. Come back when you actually have a plan.” He closed the door.

“Is it just me or are people being a little rude today?” Eve asked.

“Blame the Tower,” O’Neill suggested.

Flutterfree put a hoof to her chin. “I might have an idea… Rev’s written several books in her time.”

Nanoha blinked. “She has?”

Flutterfree nodded. “Lots of them are philosophy, theology, and apologetics, but she also does nonfiction.”

“I don’t know, a new writer seems chancy…” O’Neill said.

“Maybe. But if she won’t do it, she might be able to find someone else. She’s good at that sort of thing.” Flutterfree pulled out her phone and dialed.

“I might have a few patients…” Eve mused. “Not sure I’d trust any of them to write our story though.”

“Hey, Rev?” Flutterfree said, phone to her ear. “How’s it going? Oh, that’s wonderful! Yes, that’s always good. Yeah, I am calling for a reason. We’re thinking about making a movie about our story – one that we all help make so it can be done right and honestly. Twilence and Shutterstock have turned down the writer positions, and I was wondering if you might… No? Oh, okay…”

The group sagged in defeat.

“Hmm?” Flutterfree said, ears perking up. “You say you might have an idea though? …Trixie!?”

“…I need to hear the other half of this conversation,” O’Neill said, blinking.

Flutterfree ignored him. “I mean… Are you sure? Really? She can? Huh. Can’t say I expected that… Yeah, I’ll call her. Right now actually. Goodbye!” She hung up and turned to the group.

“Please tell me it isn’t Trixie,” Corona said.

“Well… no,” Flutterfree said. “But Trixie has someone mysterious writing the stories to her games. They’ve been really good and well thought out, according to Rev.”

Corona nodded in agreement. “They… are pretty interesting.”

“Rev thinks we could probably ask Trixie for a meeting with this… person. I think it’s worth checking out.”

O’Neill shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

~~~

“So then Trixie tells her ‘I know a guy’ and apparently she spills the beans to the first pony to ask!” Trixie complained as she led O’Neill’s group through the City’s underground. They were sometimes called the catacombs, but the metallic underbelly of the City was generally really clean and well inhabited, just not as open as the surface.

“It seems like she was supposed to tell us,” Flutterfree pointed out. “I wouldn’t be mad at her.”

“Trixie knows! Is it impossible to keep secrets in this day and age!?”

Eve nodded. “Yes. Yes it is. Have you read Rage? Take a look at that miserable purple pony pile of mistakes and secrets all aired out for everyone to see.”

“Fine, whatever, Trixie’s just looking forward to the day when secrets can stay secrets. Trixie is tired of thinking she’s always being watched.”

“You are always being watched,” Corona said. “If not by an audience, then the Tower.”

“Trixie is trying to stay in denial!” She adjusted her glasses as if this were a profound statement everyone should take notes on.

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “Denial is not a healthy state.”

“It’s not even a state at all!” Pinkie said, appearing from nowhere. “It’s a river, silly!”

Only Trixie was surprised by her sudden presence. “WAHAAHAGH. Why do you do that!?”

“Because it’s fun!” Pinkie said, giving Trixie a consolation cupcake.

“Do you know what we’re doing here?” Eve asked Pinkie.

“Yep! Off to see the mysterious writer for Trixie’s games! I can’t wait to figure out who it is! …Nobody else cares all that much, but I do!”

“I didn’t even know she had a secret writer until today,” O’Neill commented.

“Times are changing, General!” Pinkie put a clown nose on him. “Just go with the flow and limbo!”

Nanoha realized she was holding Raising Heart like a limbo rod. She shook her head and returned the device to its necklace form.

Trixie grunted. “Well, we’re here.” She stood still and faced a completely blank wall. “Trixie bets you’re wondering why there doesn’t appear to be anything here? We-”

Flutterfree activated Lolo and revealed a part of the wall that wasn’t tangible.

“…You take the fun out of everything.”

“I thought that was me?” Pinkie asked.

“You put so much ‘fun’ into things they die in an agonizing explosion.”

Pinkie cocked her head. “Huh… Sure, I guess that works. Sorta.” She shrugged and bounced through the intangible area of the wall, followed by all the others. They soon arrived in a greenish cathedral-like room covered in mixed spirograph and vine-like designs.

“…Is the writer a Lolo worshipper?” Flutterfree asked.

Trixie laughed. “No. She just likes the aesthetic here.”

It is more than that, a soft, feminine voice said, entering their minds. It is a legacy of what my people once were.

A Flower descended from the ceiling. She was a small member of her people, barely larger than an average human, but her grace was evident as she gently floated through the air. Her petals were simple and white while her stalks were a dark black. Lolo’s visual design and purpose is related to us, as we are related to the Tower. The spirograph is the head of a Flower, and the vines are the connections of ka. In a similar manner, our heads are reminiscent of the interweaving nature of universes surrounding the Dark Tower. Or, it was – now we are symbols without a place, lacking a purpose.

“Say hello to Moly,” Trixie said, holding out a hoof. “She writes good game plots.”

It is the new purpose I have found myself within this New World, following the loss of… the Flowers. I already know why you are here – to ask me to write your movie. And I will accept this task, and I will not even demand payment, though you will insist upon it. She paused a moment. I do this to forge a new image for the Flowers. To forget what we once were, the mistake we defined our whole existence on.

Eve looked at her with sad eyes. “I… I’ve been wondering about that. You were neutral throughout the entire war, and then near the end you acted, then… then you all seemed to change.”

“What happened to you?” Pinkie asked.

Moly thought about this for a moment. We, as a culture, pushed towards one goal – the erasure of glitches in ka. Things that should not be, that which took unfair advantage of ka, the destruction of a good Narrative. We were the enemy of Mary Sues, Bad Slash, Horrendous Crossovers, and a number of other things. We kept the multiverse of a higher quality, and we were certain that was the way things were meant to be. The Dark Tower was but a machine, a machine that made mistakes and needed help to clean up the mess. We were the help. We made ourselves the immune system of the Multiverse.

People have called it a religion. Maybe it was, but it was a religion where our ‘god’ was dependent on us. Without us, the multiverse would consume itself. …Or that’s what we thought. We always dismissed the idea that the glitches were intentional, always thought they couldn’t be part of the true Story, the true will of the Tower. But as the War for Existence carried on, we started to notice things. A few of the ‘glitches’ had been deeply incorporated into the story. Monika should never have existed in the form she does now, but she became integral to so much of the plot. There were many Mary Sues fighting in wars against each other, turning the tides. And we slowly got a nagging doubt in our minds. The Tower was letting existence decide if ka was to continue or to end. And if the Tower was able to factor the glitches into account in that decision where it could not allow itself to have doubts…

It was not the first piece of evidence that the glitches might be intentional. But it was the one that finally made us doubt. So we decided to take action – to create a being that would be able to tell us what the Dark Tower thought. There was hesitation at first, belief that this was blasphemy, but we were eventually able to prove to ourselves that this was what ka ‘wanted’. So we created the Emissary, and… that was the end for us. With the collapse, the things we knew she stood for, and…

She had to stop herself. She proved that the glitches in the Dark Tower were not glitches. They were intentional. We had not been providing any boon to the thing we had served our whole lives, we were just filling a role it had set out. The Dark Tower did not need us for anything. And this… is what drove most of us to do the things we did. The destruction, the attacks, the cults, the… All the abhorrent things. We wanted the Tower to notice us, to take us back, to elevate us to where we once were. This did not happen. We completely collapsed and ruined our good name among the people of the City. Her petals rustled in the breeze. That is what happened to us.

Eve frowned. “…I’m so sorry.”

“…You’re hired,” O’Neill added.

Thank you. It would be my honor to set things right for the few of my people who will accept a truly new way of life.

~~~

“Okay, so, before we can actually begin any sort of production, we need to collect all the information we can,” Nanoha addressed the meeting. The group had already grown significantly since the day before: the rest of Pinkie’s Party had come, as well as Thrackerzod, Burgerbelle, Rev, and Roxy. Naturally, Moly was there as well, levitating dozens of physical paper sheets in front of her, studying them.

“What’s the plan?” Roxy asked.

Nanoha laid the eleven books of Songs of the Spheres on the table. “These books are our primary source material, along with the memories we have in our heads. We need to reconcile the two together to see what we can really say about what happened. Everyone’s read these, right?”

Everyone nodded – but Burgerbelle raised her hand.

“Yes?”

Burgerbelle smiled innocently. “There is no way any of us have all two million words memorized.”

“We’ll have time,” Eve said. “There isn’t actually a deadline yet – we can avoid hiring actors and doing any actual set design or other similar things until we actually have a good idea of the story we’re going to tell.”

“We do have a general idea of what’s in the books, though,” Rev said. “But the book is very episodic. We want to tell it as one story, right?”

“We can’t make over a hundred episodes without burning out,” O’Neill agreed.

“Right. So we have a long movie – maybe more than one long movie – but it won’t be a full-blown adaptation of these books. We will have to shrink it down a bit.” Rev pulled the books in and examined them. “Cut them down to the most important events, and find characters to focus on.”

“Careful, this is why everyone else screws up.”

Rev nodded. “I’m aware. In the interests of making things manageable, condensing often removes important details. …Though that’s no excuse for adding things.”

A balance would be choosing a few characters and events to focus on heavily while relegating everything else to a hyper-realistic background, Moly suggested.

“Referential!” Burgerbelle said, bouncing a green soccer ball on her head. “Kind of like the books themselves. There’s more references than soup at the soup store!”

“I need a bingo card for you,” Pinkie observed.

“Thanks!”

Pinkie giggled.

“It could work, but we’d need to decide who to focus on, who’s going to carry the story,” Nanoha said. “While clearly Merodi Universalis is the protagonist civilization…”

“…to the surprise of absolutely nobody…” Vriska inserted.

“…the character we focus on is… problematic.” Nanoha folded her hands together. “There is not a clear protagonist. Corona and Eve are important figures, but the day-to-day adventures regularly focused on Pinkie’s or Allure’s group more.”

“Eve, first character we see, important to the very end,” Corona said.

“Corona,” Eve countered with a sly smile. “She’s the one the audience needs to see as sympathetic. My stance is easy to understand, hers isn’t.”

“Deuteragonists,” Rev suggested. “Have them both be the focus.”

“Eh… Problem,” Roxy said, tilting her hand side to side. “I’ve read the books and the histories. Their stories didn’t intersect all that much – they went on largely different paths until the war started. They were often both important to a given event, but… you know what I’m saying.”

Rev pondered. “True… Trying to keep up a parallelism over a shorter timeframe would be difficult…”

“What about me?” Pinkie said. “Me and my team did a lot through most of it! Can we work?”

Nanoha furrowed her brow. “Maybe… You did have a role at the climax… A lot of mixed characters involved…”

“But she wasn’t as important near the end,” Corona said. “No offense Pinkie, but you were just… there. “

“We could still focus on her,” Flutterfree retorted. “There’s a story there.”

“But is it the story?” Roxy asked. “Is she really the story?”

“We can’t tell the whole story. Just look at chapter 115,” Rev pointed out.

“What about Allure?” Burgerbelle asked. “We can’t forget her!”

“She wasn’t here for the end…”

“What if the climax of the war was the end?”

“That’s a downer end to a movie,” O’Neill said.

“Which is why Pinkie should be our focus,” Nanoha said.

“No, Corona,” Eve said. “Her story has yet to really be told outside this book that everyone treats like the plague.”

“You’re the hero of the Merodi!” Corona countered. “You deserve this!”

“Not really?”

“I can trade up my protagonist spot if you want,” Pinkie suggested. “I don’t mind letting others have it.”

“That’s not the point,” Rev said. “The point i-”

“OH FOR THE LOVE OF MY BEARD!” Discord shouted, appearing in a flash of light above them. “You all sound like nagging birds that can’t make up their mind about which branch is the most comfortable! Let me fix this!” He snapped his fingers, dropping Eve, Corona, Pinkie, and Thrackerzod into a boxing ring. Discord tapped Thrackerzod’s horn to make it shiny and silver. “There, now the four of you can resolve this the old-fashioned way! With boxing gloves!”

Thrackerzod stared at her silvery horn. For a moment, she looked like she would be able to handle it.

Then she broke down on the floor of the boxing ring, ramming her hoof into the ground in anger, dark tears falling from her eyes.

Discord’s grin vanished. He snapped his fingers, returning the room to normal. There was a dark, somber air over the room now.

“…We should take a break,” Nanoha said. “We don’t need to make monumental decisions right now. We can just figure out what kind of things we want to show. …Later. Let’s leave the protagonist debate for another time.”

Nobody argued.

~~~

Corona, Pinkie, and Eve sat in a reading room Eve had in her house. All three of them were looking through different books of Songs of the Spheres.

“…You know, I’m noticing something weird,” Eve said, putting down Life. “I… I read a lot of things about what my other self has done, and I find myself disagreeing with the way some of my thoughts are portrayed. The book is so matter-of-fact and blunt sometimes. I know I wasn’t that angry, or didn’t really have that thought… Not to mention sometimes I see parts of the narration where I’m not sure if they’re my thoughts or GM’s or the Tower’s or Twilence’s.” She placed the book down. “I see things that I did, but I’m not sure they’re depicted right.”

“That might be your fault, not the book’s,” Corona said, putting down Blood. “Take a look at Topeka, for instance. That entire story is all devoted to me and my running around a dream world. There are times where I see myself in it, and then there’s moments where I’m doing things I don’t remember. I mean, apparently I re-create Sparkler in my dreams now. I didn’t remember that at all, but Raging Sights was able to confirm that I do have her in my dreams regularly.” She furrowed her brow. “These books are more reliable than our memories.”

“But… I’m sure I didn’t!”

Pinkie poked her head into the conversation. “I can tell you that there was a disaster in your childhood and you’ll make a false memory about it, easy. Also, Eve, you were the one who told me witness testimony wasn’t reliable because memories aren’t anywhere near as accurate as we claim they are.”

Eve blinked. “Is… is it possible we’re getting upset at the movies for no good reason? Maybe they are following the books well, and it’s our memories of the events that are off.” She held up a book and flipped to a section in Void where she was confronting Corona. “I remember this event very well… But when I read it, it doesn’t feel like me in there. Elsewhere it does, but otherwise…”

“We’ve got two possibilities,” Corona said. “The books are imperfect, which is pretty likely considering how many GMs there were, or our memories are imperfect, which is also pretty likely given how brains and psychology works.”

“And the answer’s different for every sentence we read!” Pinkie said with a giggle. “Isn’t that interesting?”

“It’s kind of terrifying, honestly. Can’t even trust ourselves. We change too much over time, anyway.”

Pinkie shrugged. “Eh, I’ve got other things I worry about. Like, what does it mean if you’re an actor playing an Aware character? You wave at the camera, but if you’re not Aware it isn’t real, but if you’re me you usually can see the people watching on some level. Is there a difference if the movie exists in the same reality or not? Can there be a difference? Am I a double meta-character!?”

Corona put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “…Twilence wasn’t kidding, this is going to be really, really complicated.”

“No, really,” Eve deadpanned. “We can’t even agree with each other, much less the book. It’s hard enough to read about things you’re ashamed of, it’s worse to feel accused of thinking things you’re sure you’re didn’t. But then you can’t be sure.” She slammed her head into the book. “Uuuuuugh…”

Pinkie patted her on the back. “There there… It’ll be fine. We’ll get this!”

“You sure about that?”

“Nope! But it’s not like this is some end-of-the-world scenario or anything.” Pinkie smiled brightly. “Just keep plugging away at it – we’ll get some inspiration eventually.”

“You know, I got called an angel and worshipped a lot, but it’s not mentioned very often in the books,” Corona said.

Eve and Pinkie stared at her.

“What? It’s just something I realized!”

“It came out of nowhere,” Eve said, blinking.

“My mind went deep, deep into left field for some reason.” Corona shrugged.

~~~

Nanoha got the brilliant idea that maybe the powerful story of romance could be used to help sort out some of the confusion in what they were trying to do. The story wouldn’t work centered around that, clearly not, but perhaps it could form a framework.

So she started interviewing everyone about their relationship with the topic. This was widely considered a silly and ill-conceived plan, but she did it anyway.

“So, tell me about your love life,” Nanoha said.

Eve raised an eyebrow. “I have had virtually no romantic attraction to any being aside from that one time I was a human and got filled with intense hormone imbalance. Even then, technically that wasn’t me, so you can write it down as completely nonexistent.”

“No suitors?”

“Of course I had suitors. I ignored all of them. Flutterfree provided me with all the support I needed and my other friends made up the rest. Perhaps you should consider looking at close friendships instead?”

There was no gold there, so Corona was next.

“I mean, I dated several guys as both a human, a unicorn, and as what I am now. …I never did give this form a name, huh? Weird, when you think about it. Anyway, none of them ever stuck around for very long. There were some fun nights, there were some not-so-fun nights, and eventually I just stopped trying all that hard. Now, if Eve wasn’t completely devoid of any drive… Well, you fill in the blank there.”

“You were interested?”

Corona shrugged. “Occasionally? Never got to the point of Lady Rarity’s crush on me though. We ended that quickly, so again, doesn't really help you.” She paused. “…I don’t know if Lady Rarity survived the Dusting or not…”

Moving down the list, Nanoha started working with Pinkie’s Party.

“I had a fling,” Pinkie said. “Okay, I had a few, but there was only one that actually mattered. And guess what? The Tower was nice enough to keep it private! Shocker!”

“…I miss Hastur,” Vriska said with a sigh. “You… You probably can’t make a big story out of that, but I do want… I don’t know. Just remember that he existed, okay?”

“I’m a virgin,” Flutterfree said with an awkward smile. “Never really got into anything. I was lucky enough to always avoid the tentacle monsters. By the time I was really confident enough to genuinely start exploring, well, life had taken an adventurous turn and I found that was enough. The church too. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I was married to the best woman in existence,” Jotaro said. “I had to learn to love and appreciate her when Eve first came to me. And now… she’s gone.” That was all he had to say.

Pidge blinked. “I don’t even know why I’m here. I mean, sure, I’ve liked a few guys and, er, have crushes and stuff here and there, but I came in really late so it doesn’t really matter what my experiences were. So, uh, I’ll talk about Nova instead. She… well, read the books. She had troubles with romance, something terrible. She was basically the only one of the old team that really ‘fell’ for people while out adventuring, and… yeah. …You probably want to focus more on Renee and Daniel for a feel-good sort of thing. Of course that ends in tragedy…”

Nanoha was slightly annoyed that Renee and Daniel were the best relationship so far – and it was one that ended in some pretty hefty tragedy. She could work with that, yes, but would it really be able to represent the story?

“I had nothing,” Thrackerzod said. “Squeaky had a family she kept out of everything she did. And go read about the whole 69 chapter again, get it into your head what Allure thought of romance. She loved Minna, and that was it, end of story. I’m leaving now.”

“Do you really need me to answer?” O’Neill asked with a coy smile.

“Ah… no,” Nanoha admitted, blushing. “Just called you in so the others wouldn’t complain.”

She was starting to think she really was grasping at straws. Romance simply didn’t seem to drive the plot. Why would it? It didn’t have to. Her own story hadn’t cared too much for it. It had just seemed like such an important thing…

It’s a powerful story, Moly told her, after she had gone through many, many interviews. Romance comes not only from an internal biological drive, but a higher drive for companionship and deep interaction. It was one of the most easily ‘corruptible’ things in the multiverse. Starbeat is, believe it or not, an expert on the subject. You should talk to her.

So Nanoha did.

“I like how it’s portrayed,” Starbeat said, pointing at Space. “It’s shown to really exist in a few cases – Renee and Daniel most prominently – but a lot of the time it’s treated as an oversaturation. Which… it is. One of the many things we screwed up with ka is romance in general. Walk around a 2000s Earth, you’ll see the ‘ideal’ plastered on every billboard and magazine imaginable. Romance, romance, romance, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, sex, sex, sex. A lot of people think the unintended consequences of time travel or grimdark are the worst curses ka has laid on us… But I think the cheap, fantasy-filled way it treats romance is the real tragedy. The majority of flings are trivial, rushed, and treat biologically driven lust as the cusp of romantic meaning. I… It may seem odd that I, the person who’s experienced the most tar in a romantic sense, feel this way. Maybe it’s just because I’ve hit rock bottom in terms of romance that I can say I know what I’m missing.”

“…Starbeat, are you…?”

“Don’t second-guess your relationship with O’Neill, Nanoha. I don’t know if it’s ka-forced in a natural or unnatural feel-good way. Keep close and hold onto it – and when the Tower falls, if you keep it, you’ll know it was really real.” She paused for a moment. “I wonder how many shallow ‘happily ever afters’ are going to be shattered by the Tower’s fall. On one hoof, it won’t be an imitation anymore. It will allow people to realize that life never really ends and that there’s always room to grow and develop relationships... On the other, it can be said that an imitation is better than nothing.”

Nanoha’s frown deepened. “I’m sorry.”

Starbeat wiped a tear from her eye. “Yeah…” She glanced at Space. “…I was an idiot. I saw him and I let it happen.”

“We’ve all been idiots.”

“I really hope you’re not.”

Nanoha smiled and pulled Starbeat into a hug.

That was the last interview Nanoha performed on romance.

~~~

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but remind me of the history,” O’Neill said as he paced back and forth in front of a giant chalkboard covered in sticky notes, colored lines, and photographs.

Flutterfree furrowed her brow. “Which part? Whole multiverse? The books? Just the war?”

“It would be… good, I think, if we could condense it to just the events that led up to the war and the war itself. So… work backwards?”

An Aradia they had brought on to consult chuckled. “Going backwards? Count me in!”

O’Neill started to pace around the room. “So if we take Corona’s message as the start of the war, what led up to that?”

“Immediately before it was her studies of the Dark Tower,” Aradia said. “…Actually, you could just ask her.”

Corona was walking by with a half-eaten piece of toast in her mouth and a very complicated looking device of wires and sparks in her hand. “Mmm?”

“Trying to trace things back to make it organized,” O’Neill said, wiping clear an area of the whiteboard that was nothing more than ‘how ka works: the bad flow chart’. “Come in, have a seat.”

Corona used her magic to levitate the toast out of her mouth and seal the device in one of the strongest seals she knew. “Sure!” She sat down, putting another protective spell on the device just for good measure.

“…Do you need to deal with that?” Flutterfree asked.

“What? No, it won’t explode now, and even if it does we’re all safe.” She added another layer of shield.

“…Uh-huh.”

O’Neill wrote the Message on the board. “Right, so, Corona, what major event led directly to the Message?”

“My conversation with my friends. …Most of whom I don’t know the final fate of. Lady Rarity… Sugarcoat… Nae… Ash… No idea.”

O’Neill scribbled a few things. “And before that…”

“My research at the Tower,” Corona said, summoning Void to her. She flipped through a few pages. “And that was brought on, in a direct sense, by Nettle’s attempts to take the Tower for herself with the first side of the Choice.”

“And now we have a branch,” Aradia said. “We could follow Corona, Nettle, or the Choice prophecy itself.”

O’Neill drew three lines. “Okay…”

“The Choice itself leads directly back to the early days of the Tower and the Tower’s Testament,” Aradia added, thinking for a bit. “I’m not sure where it came from, but it didn’t exist in the days of Roland. So… Big question mark there.”

“Might it have come from the Prognosticus?” Flutterfree asked.

“Testament is older than that. Pre-Downstreamer.”

“That’s a dead end,” O’Neill said, drawing a square there. “Nettle… Trace her back… To the Beyond?”

“Don’t forget her attempt on the Spline,” Corona said. “That was… a fun day for Jotaro.”

“Okay, so, Spline, Beyond, both ancient constructs that the show won’t be concerned with. But Nettle herself came from the Downstreamers as they fell trying to create infinity… stopped by the Spline.” O’Neill paused. “I’d never realized that before.”

“It is pretty complicated,” Corona admitted. “Not too bad, though. That ties itself up nicely – actually, wait, we have to tie it in to Flagg, he brought the Downstreamers to their knees. Which, by relation, ties us all the way back to Roland’s legend…” She waved her hands. “We can gloss over that. Nettle can be seen as the higher-entity messing with things in the movie, perhaps a sympathetic villain type? But she only really fills that some of the time…”

“We’re just trying to make sense of this whole line of events,” Flutterfree said. “No need to think of character archetypes because… That went really well last time.”

Corona shook her head. “Sure. What’s next?”

“You,” O’Neill said, drawing a circle around Corona’s name. “What prepared you for the collapse?”

Corona looked at her hands and forced herself to focus. “There… were several steps. I’d been very dissatisfied with the way the world was… The Shaping Mechanism was in my control, and I was taught how to shape universes and dance around with trillions of lives, but at that point I was basically already ready. It…” She put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “I’d cite Topeka as my turning point, but I could also cite my war on death, or just being the Rogue of Doom.”

O’Neill drew out four lines – Shaping Mechanism, Topeka, war on death, Rogue of Doom. “…Geez…”

“Yeah, geez is right,” Flutterfree said. “The Shaping Mechanism requires you understand the entire war with Skarn, and the Rogue of Doom aspect is… well, let’s just say that while I was living that Green Sun thing I felt like I was being fed too much information. And at that point I was pretty good at taking information in on the fly.”

“Don’t I know it,” O’Neill said. “And Topeka… To our history, it’s very unimportant. For you it’s very important. But Topeka has virtually nothing to do with any of the rest of us… It was just you.”

Corona nodded. “Flagg was there, to some extent.” She put a hand to her forehead. “This is all a bit much for a movie… Even a trilogy. You’d have to do it just on me and… I really don’t want that. …It’s also more than a little hard to think back to all those times. People died. People I knew well. People you knew well.” She leaned back in her chair and let out a sigh. Something exploded inside her triple-magic shield, but nobody cared.

O’Neill drew a bunch of lines to a single point and wrote ‘it’s complicated’.

~~~

Nanoha decided there was a better interview she could perform. There was one very important viewpoint to the story of their story she couldn’t get directly. That of the lost protagonist.

“What did Allure mean to you?” she asked.

Burgerbelle furrowed her brow. “You know, back when I first entered the League – and was still a Flat – I don’t think my higher intelligence was that… ‘developed’ let’s say.” She went to one side of the room, stooping like a monkey, then slowly walked to the other end straightening until she stood upright. “I was literally just a meme at the start. There wasn’t even the cute, childish anything back then, it was just ‘burger’ and ‘burger’ and ‘more burger’. By the time I really had the ability to think much outside of that, I was… Well, I was already very comfortable with the whole League. I don’t remember what it was like to be taken under Allure and the others’ care, because as far as most of me is concerned that’s how it’s always been.” She shrugged.

“What did she mean to you then?”

“She was… Well, nobody said she was the leader, but she was. She wasn’t the smartest, wasn’t the strongest, and wasn’t the friendliest of all Sweeties… But there was something about her that fit the ‘middle’. You know what I mean?” Burgerbelle twirled a finger in the air, seemingly with no goal in mind. “She was… She was the big sister to everyone in the entire League. The Rarity for those who had none. That doesn’t make sense, but hey, I was a Flat, deal with it.” A pair of sunglasses dropped from the ceiling onto her head.

“Allure…” Servitude folded her hands. “Allure was the person who made me realize there were different kinds of purity than what I had been raised to believe.” She flapped her angelic wings. “She kept a strange childlike innocence about her for most of the time I knew her. It… it was heartbreaking to see her lose it in the end. Part of me thinks she was lucky she didn’t make it to the New World. She had already been broken.”

Minna put her hands to her mouth and closed her eyes tight.

“You don’t have to answer,” Nanoha reminded her.

“I want to,” Minna said. “I really, really want to. I want to give the best mother a girl could ask for something… profound. I want to say the best, most awe-inspiring speech of all time. But every time I think about doing that all I want to do is…” She took a breath and wiped a tear from her face. “She was a good mother. A mother who was willing to put up with a kid who didn’t know why she knew so much. A kid who was creepy, quiet, observational, and secretly a weapon. And then… she just let me go. I wanted to go fight, and she let me. And…” Minna grabbed Nanoha’s hands. “She was the purest person I knew for so long. I… I was the main reason she…” Minna broke down, unable to take it anymore. Nanoha sent her home to her husband.

“She joined us a few times,” Pinkie said, tapping her hooves on the counter. “Say what you will about Pidge, Allure was the actual sixth ranger. She was there with us in the Collection… on Xanadu… I know she wasn’t one of mine, but sometimes I thought she was. Part of the family. Everyone on the team brought something, and her little adorable form brought a strange innocence to it. Not naïveté, it was… more robust than that. She refused to accept things for what they were. I may look like a positive bundle of excitement, but when I get the bad feelings I get everyone out of there as fast as possible. She would have given them the benefit of the doubt.”

Eve sipped her drink. “…I didn’t know her as well as I would have liked. I knew she was like me… One of the ‘great’ heroes. It was something Twilence had confided in me. I don’t know… did that make me avoid her? I don’t think so. It was almost as if her story was separate from ours… In a ‘league’ all its own, if you will. I’m not sure what that represents, if anything.”

An elderly orange pegasus closed her eyes. “Allure…”

“Take your time, Scootaloo,” Nanoha said.

“You know, sometimes I hate the multiverse,” Scootaloo said, sighing. “It tore the three of us apart before we even knew what was happening. Sweetie - Allure - had her league, Apple Bloom had her potions and her family and I…” Scootaloo glanced at her flank. “I stayed the Crusader. There’s days where I feel like they abandoned me, and there are days where I look out and can see how much good they were doing… without me.” She ruffled her feathers nervously. “I can’t tell you what she was like, not really. I never liked hanging around the League of Sweetie Belles, and after Rainbow… Some days I’d just like to go back to when we were fillies and all we cared about in the world was each other.”

“She’s the reason I’m alive.” Thrackerzod said.

“…Care to elaborate?” Nanoha asked.

“No,” Thrackerzod said, teleporting away.

Nanoha sat back in her chair and let out a sigh, trying to ease some of her stress. It hadn’t been easy to hear all those things. Despite being an immortal for time immemorial, she looked physically older to those who saw her after the interviews.

~~~

Flutterfree took a deep breath, calmed her nerves, and walked into Corona’s workshop, the place where most of the planning had started taking place since there was plenty of room.

Already she was hit by a sense of things being tense. People were running back and forth, trying to figure out what the heck to do with a piece of information they found in the books that conflicted with someone’s memory. Some people were hiding behind large boxes, crying after they had been forced to relive a particularly traumatizing or sorrowful memory.

Flutterfree sighed, walking past all of this to the center of the workshop, where the main table was. O’Neill, Nanoha, Corona, and Eve were currently pointing at each other and talking loudly about every detail. They weren’t angry, but they were definitely talking loudly, trying to get their point heard over all the others. This was apparently an argument about the events of Topeka, again, and if they could be relayed accurately through Corona’s memories or the book.

The quasi-vampiric pegasus didn’t listen to the argument – all she actually did was pick up a piece of paper that had been sitting on the table between them. It was a list of names with short descriptions scribbled afterward.

It was a list of people who had died.

Allure – the lost hero, important, must portray focally and accurately.
Rohan – major piece to the set, a Prophet, arrogant but good heart.
Renee – the Emissary, beyond important, needs to be very meta-aware.
Daniel – husband of Renee. Tragedy.
Olivia – anti-hero hacker.
Giorno – Overhead of Intelligence, good for consistency in story.
The Doctor – complex character. Divided opinions.
Rainbow Dash - sacrificial wake-up-call death
John – Retconner, very lore important, not personality important.
Sparky – lost long ago. Maybe not important enough to mention?
The Sage – ancient history.
General Sunset – hard for people to remember.
Lieshy – ascended the Tower, spoke in double
Davepetasprite..

Flutterfree couldn’t read it anymore. She started crying – and the sight of this made all four powerful voices stop talking and look to her in concern.

“Flutterfree…?” Eve asked.

“This isn’t going to work,” Flutterfree managed, placing the paper back on the table. “This isn’t going to work, Eve…”

Eve matched her expression. An unspoken conversation took place – and in the end, Eve reluctantly nodded.

Flutterfree took a deep breath, wiped her tears from her face – and then spread her wings as far wide as she could. The purple power of her Rage billowed off of her in a purple miasma, grabbing the attention of everyone in the entire workshop. They all stopped what they were doing – working, arguing, crying – and turned to listen to what she had to say.

“This isn’t working,” she said. Her voice was tranquil, but firm. The truth of her statement found its way into the minds of everyone present, breaking down their internal personal biases. They knew she was right – and they could see it through her. “This is supposed to be a time of healing, a time for us to move on and prepare for a new life. Before we started this project, we were fine. We were happy, able to live our lives with minimal, if any, personal suffering. We were alive and working toward a brighter future.

“But then we had this idea. …I had this idea. This idea to fix the representations of the past we’ve been given in spades ever since the City formed. I thought maybe we could resolve everything for the people around us. But I forgot something very, very important. I forgot about us.

“Look at us. We’re not doing better than we were last week, we’re doing worse. We’re having numerous sequential emotional breakdowns, every last one of us. Where there were once smiles, there are now tears and arguing and stress about how impossible this project is.

“We’re not looking to the future with this movie. We’re looking to the past – a past we’re supposed to be moving on from. We’re entering… entering a relapse. We’re allowing a disease to get back to us. Almost all of us have trauma we don’t want to admit we have. We want to think we’re strong, that we can work past this.”

Flutterfree held up the sheet of paper. “I can’t do this. In order to make this work… we have to treat those lost like nothing more than characters. We have to work with them like tools. It’s… we can’t do this to ourselves. We just can’t. This is not how we were meant to live our lives, everyone. This is not how we are supposed to remember our past.

“I’m leaving. Technically, you all still have a choice if you want to keep working on this or not. But now you know what it’s doing to you. I… I’m sorry for coming up with this idea and putting you all through this ordeal. We don’t need to go through all this just to make sure we’re remembered correctly. …I say let them mess a few details up and make substandard movies. Some of them are probably being as creative as they can. We don’t need to put ourselves through hell just to make people appreciate us better.”

She turned off the Rage and folded her wings. She wiped some tears from her eyes and took a breath. Before she could start leaving, though, Eve pulled her into a hug. “That was amazing.”

“I cheated,” Flutterfree said.

“You told them the truth.”

Flutterfree nodded slowly. “…I did. I just… None of us are strong enough.”

O’Neill looked at the chalkboard he had been working on up until that moment. He broke it in half with Crimson Sushi. “I’ll go tell Shutterstock we won’t be needing his studios.”

“I’ll get back to actual work,” Corona said, teleporting a mechanical arm to her. “I’ve been putting it off something fierce.”

“The flowers miss me…” Nanoha realized.

“I’ve been neglecting my patients… and myself,” Eve admitted.

A series of similar realizations came out from everyone elses’ mouths. There were a handful who wanted to keep working despite what Flutterfree had told them, but they were smart enough to realize they were losing the support that made their effort special.

The project to make an accurate Songs of the Spheres movie burned out. It had simply been too much for them to handle. They could face a war that tore reality apart, but trying to relive those moments over and over again… It was a step too far.

Flutterfree walked to the door of the workshop first. Like she had before she entered, she took some careful breaths. Then she opened the door.

I stood there and dropped a book larger than my head at her hooves. “Here.”

Flutterfree blinked, looking down at the black-cover book entitled Memories. “What’s this?”

“It’s that thing I was working on.” I trotted into the workshop, Flutterfree coming back in with me. “…You’ve all learned or are in the process of learning the lesson of the day. Don’t forget what Flutterfree said about reliving the past over and over. This is a time of healing, not dwelling on past tragedy. That said…” I gestured at the book. “I am fully connected to the Tower again and can see anything I want now. I used this power to go back and write… a bunch of memories. Memories about you, yes, but also about people who have been lost, people we don’t remember, and things that had no effect on the story whatsoever.”

I smiled warmly. “It’s… a bit of a gift. All I ask is that you not publish anything inside, and just pass it among yourselves. Keep it from entering story circulation, so you can keep the contents private. So there will be no movies about the tales contained within, no fans, not even an audience. The only audience in this book… is you all.” I winked at them. “Consider this a compromise from what you were trying to do.”

Flutterfree picked the book up under her wing and smiled. “It’ll do, Twilence. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I’m sorry I couldn’t give it to you earlier. There’s so much in there to talk about…” I looked ‘beyond’ and smirked at you. “Things you will never, ever see or hear about. Because they are in our story. Not yours.”

~~~

“…and that’s the best story in it,” Flutterfree concluded, once again sitting at O’Neill and Nanoha’s garden table, this time eating hot dogs O’Neill had cooked well.

“Good choice,” Nanoha said. “…It feels a little strange, reading stories that no one else will get to. It’s like… a secret record.”

O’Neill nodded, trying to say something that was muffled by the hot dog in his mouth.

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “O’Neill…”

“No no no! that’s actually progress!” Nanoha said. “He’s learning to be a loud eater!”

“…Wh- oh, right, in your culture that’s encouraged.” Flutterfree chuckled nervously. “I hope you don’t mind, but I completely forgot.”

“Don’t mind at all.”

“I mean, it’s just one of the most common culture archetypes in the multiverse,” O’Neill said, trailing a finger in the air. “Not like an exploration team should know the ins and outs of all those.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “And you should know how to cook hot dogs every time in your common culture archetype. But, well, whoops!” She shrugged with her wings.

“Sometimes I forget how vicious you can be.”

Flutterfree put on the most innocent face imaginable. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Aww, what a perfect little angel!” Nanoha giggled.

“Quite the loaded phrase around these parts,” O’Neill cautioned.

“…I have twelve different versions of Angel Bunny at my home,” Flutterfree revealed. “They range from actually perfect to demonic. I love them all.”

“Oh, you do?” Nanoha blinked. “…We don’t have a pet.”

“Crimson Sushi’s a pet! It’s great!” O’Neill summoned the Stand and scratched its fishy chin.

“And I can’t see it unless I actually try, and if you’re using its power I doubt it’d be very pleasant to see anyway with the room rearranged like a slide puzzle.” It was at this point Nanoha realized the walls had all swapped orientations. She put a hand on her hip and rolled her eyes. “Oh, you…”

“Oh, me?” O’Neill said, swapping locations with Flutterfree. Flutterfree summoned Lolo to quickly put an end to the illusory madness.

“I had about three more layers of mindscrew going!” O’Neill complained. “I call foul.”

“The ball wasn’t even in play, can’t foul,” Flutterfree said, once again with an overly innocent smile on her face.

“…You’re good.”

“Yes. I am. Want to play poker?”

“Only if Jotaro plays as well.”

“He’ll make sure he gets first and I get second.”

“I bet otherwise.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s the point of poker.”

There were a trio of joyous laughs around the table, without a hint of the sorrows from their last little project.

~~~

Months later, there was a knock at my library door. I already knew who it was but I pretended to be surprised anyway. “Who is it?”

“You know.”

“I know, but do you know what I’m going to say next?”

“Come in?”

I opened the door to see Shutterstock standing there. “Come on in, so close.”

He tried to shrug, but this motion was near impossible with the absolutely gigantic box he had in his hand. It was so heavy it had a levitator spell on it, and still he was barely able to carry it. He stumbled until he found a suitable empty table without books – one I had specifically cleared about two minutes ago – and set the box down upon it with a thud.

“Care to tell me what it is?”

“You already know, again,” Shutterstock said, opening the box as he did so. He pulled out a copy of Breath that looked a little thicker than the normal edition. The cover had an additional credit on it. Commentary arranged by Shutterstock and addenda by Moly.

“This will do nicely.”

“Thank you,” he said, dusting himself off. “I take it you will start distributing this?”

I nodded. “Yes. That said, mind explaining what this is for the people at home? I’m sure some of them are very confused.”

“…And where are they?”

“Just look at the Eye of Rhyme and that should be close enough.”

Shutterstock nodded, clearing his throat. “Ahem. Hello… readers of the past, present, future. I am Shutterstock and I-”

I facehooved. “You don’t need to have so much bravado. Less speech, more like a movie scene.”

He nodded. Instead of talking, he dramatically laid the Breath book down on the table, pointing to one of the first pages. “The man of light fled across existence, and the enchantress followed.” It was the same as every other edition of Breath, except at the bottom there was a little footnote.

“My story began like this again and again. It was impossible to see it all at once. It was always me and Walter, chasing each other in the Tower’s loop for eternity. I know my legend went on to inspire many… but seeing my beginning here fills me not with appreciation, but with dread.” – Roland Deschain, the gunslinger.

“I took all the information they gave me access to,” Shutterstock said, smiling softly. “All the interviews, all the diagrams, all the notes… and I annotated the books with them.” He flipped through a few more pages, pointing at a few key quotes and then flipping past them faster than you could possibly read them. (Trust me.)

He flipped to the back of the book, where there was a large discussion about the Breath aspect itself, talking about its relations to freedom, spirit, wind, and innocence. A fitting beginning to the story - and a good legacy for Moly’s writing.

“They can’t make their movie. It’s impossible,” Shutterstock said. “But to anyone who cares… Their words are now placed in the books themselves. Ready to help make sense of the words once written by a young man who wanted nothing more than an interesting story.”

He closed the book.

151 - Through the Cracks

My name is Twilence.

You may have found this little booklet hidden away in some long-forgotten corner of a library. But, more likely, you’re just getting this transmitted directly to your computer screen. If you’re the former, I admire and respect what you are. Living in the New World, completely free… I wish I could see what it’s like. Know that you have an experience that I cannot know from these pages, something that no one I know personally can attest to. You are something different. I hope my jotted thoughts on a world long gone will have some beneficial impact on you besides confusion. I’ll ask that you don’t think me mad, but I’ll understand if you do.

If you’re the latter, hello readers, welcome to chapter 151. Except it isn’t really a chapter. This is just me rambling – rambling about some of the things that happen while the ever-so-present power of ka wanes. The cracks in the Tower cause those of us who have had immense clouds of ka surrounding us to lose that ka and gain moments of freedom. While it can never go away entirely, there are moments where the world isn’t a ridiculous over-the-top story where we’re always the chosen ones. By their nature, these events cannot be relayed to you directly, since they have limited ka. But they are important – oh so important to our understanding of what is to come.

So at the risk of contaminating the purity of some of these moments, I have chosen to write them down. You won’t find grand adventure here, nor will you find an endless trove of deep personal drama raised to the power of ten for your enjoyment. Instead, you will find a bunch of unrelated snapshots of life that I decided were worth saving. Naturally, I will be unable to remove all semblance of a story from each event, for I am writing this down in a form meant to be read.

Consider this a journal, if you must. A book about my experiences – or the experiences of others I head about.

I am the eye that looks through the cracks.

Title drop.

~~~

We like to over-decorate our cars with every conceivable ornament we can find. The more oversized and ridiculous, the better. If you make a living out of being a race car driver, you can afford to deck out your car to the point it hardly looks like a car anymore, but of course you – an expert racer – can drive it at high speeds anyway because of your raw skill.

No matter how ridiculous or impractical your car is.

As I was trotting down one of the City’s many streets, I watched one such racer pull his car out of the driveway. I heard the revving of the engine, the whir of the wheels on the pavement, and the brush of air as he whirled past me. The spoiler that looked like a chicken swerved a bit too far to the right, smacking an information terminal. The avian structure shattered into a dozen large pieces and spilled all across the road. The racer’s poor car entered a tailspin and skidded off the road into someone’s lawn, hitting the tree with the back end.

He ended up in the hospital for a broken arm and had many major bruises all over his body. He couldn’t believe it had failed on him – he had taken the car out thousands of times exactly like that, and nothing had stopped his radical coolness!

It took the doctors a lot longer to piece together than it should have.

Or was what I witnessed just people taking a normal amount of time to come to the seemingly obvious answer?

~~~

Sherlock Holmes, a man who depends a bit too much on natural intuition. When the cracks first started rippling through the city, he didn’t have any way to prepare, so he assumed his deductions were just as reliable as they always were, no matter how absurd this ended up being.

This was particularly bad the first time it happened: while he was on a case.

He leaned down to inspect the body, prodding it with his mind. He did not sense the lack of ka, for his mind did not get any less sharp. He was still able to see all the details – the scratches on the man’s ring, the way his coat was put on inside-out, his open satchel with lots of discs inside.

The information was easily available to him. I even watched him putting two and two together, the little gears in his mind creaking at a fast rate. He smirked, stood up, and cleared his throat. “This man was killed by a partner he had recently left, via the ingestion of a toxic poison – given the smile on his face, I’m thinking liquefied laughing gas. In other deductions, he is an aficionado of music.” He picked up one of the discs and allowed it to glint in the sunlight. “We should check all his recent relationships to see who’s most likely. I’m thinking a woman, but that doesn’t have to be the case.”

Lightning stared at him with a dumbfounded expression.

“…What? It’s not like last week. I’m not saying a pig ate his liver and then sold the ‘remnants’ for pocket money. I was still right about this though.”

Lightning pointed at the table. There was a note on it. “Suicide…?” Sherlock said, raising an eyebrow. “That doesn’t make any…” He read the note.

Test 19: I think I have the correct formula. It has a lot of volatile compounds, but it should be able to finally let me appreciate music. I will actually be able to understand all these things I am selling. Details are below in case this doesn’t work so someone else may continue the process.

Sherlock shook his head, unable to process how he hadn’t picked that up. It all made perfect sense to him NOW. Why hadn’t he seen the note? He never got that fixated on a crime scene…

Clearly, the entire thing was set up for him to make a bizarre deduction about self-experimentation, music appreciation, and a tragic accident. But that didn’t happen.

~~~

I am lucky enough to be able to see the result of a crack in ka. In theory all Aware powers should cease to function, and in a technical sense my Eye of Rhyme cannot show me anything new while I am currently in one of the aforementioned cracks. That said; the Eye of Rhyme is able to detect when a crack will happen and tell me what the result will be.

This creates some interesting opportunities. Say you’re with Vriska, the troll who feeds off luck and is generally predisposed to win every gambling encounter she’s part of, so long as it’s fair. Anyone who knows her knows never to bet against her on anything founded in randomness or chance – and she’s banned from every casino in the City.

Now, the luck of Light isn’t a truly ka-based power, it is still able to function without a constant presence of narrative. However, luck without ka should be random. With even a tiny bit of luck, Vriska is basically guaranteed to win a coin flip through ka. Without it, the luck of Light becomes less potent, becoming a pure numbers game that always has a chance of failure. It is just luck, after all.

So I cheated. One day I was walking and talking with her and Starbeat, and then I felt the crack coming. I turned to Vriska. “Hey, wanna try something?”

“Yeah, what?”

I held up a coin. “Coin flip. Heads, I win, tails, you lose. I won’t cheat with my magic – I’ll just let it spin and fall.”

“Don’t you know the result?”

“Yes, I do,” I said with a smirk. “But the question here is are you confident enough that the result is you winning?”

“You’re on.”

I flipped the coin. Vriska grabbed some luck from Starbeat and focused on the coin.

It landed heads, exactly as I foresaw. “I win.”

“What the fuck…” Vriska said, eyes wide.

I winked and teleported away before she could question me.

~~~

So, Rosalina showed up.

Yes, the woman who was supposedly executed by Starbeat’s Rage-fed version of the Hub. Apparently she’d devised a clever self-recreation spell that took a gamble that ‘revive’ would work on her from a distance. It worked like a charm, and to make it better nobody bothered to check to see if soul-magic had been used in the execution room. Just a regular oversight at the execution block.

This woman walked into the City and absolutely nothing happened. There were no dramatic gasps, no bravado, no nothing. A few people recognized her and were surprised, but to her chagrin nothing seemed to happen. She was calm and collected enough not to get angry with this, but disappointment is also a powerful emotion.

She soon realized she had no idea what to do now that she was here – she had sort of just expected everything to fall into her lap since she’d been the effective leader of the Mushroom World. But there was no niche prepared for her, her people had been spread out through the City, and she didn’t have all that many close friends around.

To cut a long story short, she didn’t feel like becoming a member of Expeditions or politics, and she didn’t feel all that comfortable leading people she wasn’t familiar with. Part of this was due to her mental state – being put on trial and executed does things to your mind if you manage to survive it.

In the end she somehow ended up working at a Subway. Yes, the sandwich place. We have them.

“Welcome to Subway, what can I get you?”

“Meatball sub,” I said. After my order was complete I took my seat at the window and watched what was about to unfold.

Starbeat walked into the subway and locked eyes with Rosalina. For a moment, it looked like there might be a bit of a scene. Starbeat lit her horn and nervously glanced from side to side, while Rosalina hefted her wand aggressively.

And then Starbeat shut off her magic and put on a dumb smile. She walked up to the counter and coughed. “Uh… seafood. Just the standard.”

Rosalina lowered her wand. “…Yes. What kind of bread do you want?”

“That… seasoned one that looks like it has cheesy bits on the top.”

“…Coming right up.” She split the bread, carefully loaded it with the seafood special, and added a healthy assortment of veggies. “Would you like anything else with that?”

“You know what, I think I’m good.”

“Sure? We’ve got chips.”

“…I’ll pass.” Starbeat paid, took her sandwich, and walked away from the counter. She paused for a moment and looked back at Rosalina as if she wanted to say something. In the end, all she did was shake her head and walk away.

Rosalina took the next order with shaking hands.

Starbeat would not be going back to this particular Subway.

~~~

A gigantic mouse-fox monster was whaling on the City walls, determined to break through to all the succulent food sources within. It could smell the delicious humans in there.

The walls were holding just fine, but the noises the rodent was making had become a mixture of annoying and terrifying for the people living on the exact opposite side of the wall. Since they didn’t want to use explosives or complex artillery near the wall and people, they decided to use an agent.

It just so happened that Saitama was free and hadn’t been finding things to challenge himself lately. So he took the chore readily – but took one look at the oversized mouse and decided this wasn’t going to be interesting.

He slowly walked up to it and punched. He hit its toe with a tiny bit of force, expecting the entire beast to rupture.

Nothing happened.

“Shit, dud,” he muttered, preparing for impact.

Nothing happened again. The monster hadn’t even felt him – but it had seen something shiny in the distance. It decided to give up on the wall it had been whaling on for so long to go investigate the shiny.

This left Saitama decidedly confused. “…Did I win?”

Later he would test his punch and discover it worked just fine. …And he would destroy part of the City wall in the process. He would be put on community service for this, and then promptly removed when he started doing every job perfectly.

~~~

Shirley was a woman who hated the ‘don’t call me Surely’ joke, for obvious reasons. It was always ‘Surely this, Shirley that.’ She was far too stubborn to change her name and avoid the trouble altogether, as was the way with a lot of people.

Feeling hungry, she got up from her couch to make the long trek over to the fridge. This was a considerable ordeal, considering she lived in a house that was essentially one giant hallway the kids played in. Moving from one area to another in this house was essentially trying to walk through a minefield. The Legos hid in the carpet, just waiting to be stepped on. She would have put on shoes, but she had left them on the other side of the house.

Carefully, she tiptoed through the wilds of the carpet, avoiding any bright colors, looking only for white, fluffy carpet. Before she committed to any step, she would feel the area with her big toe, using her arm to balance herself on a nearby wall. A couple times she committed and felt a Lego nudge the side of her foot, telling her she was exceptionally close to driving excruciating pain through her sole.

And she knew what happened when she failed. Her body would freak out and she would jump, falling flat on her back – onto even more Legos. The plastic bricks would dig at her flesh until she had square-and-circle marks all along her back. It was a horrible torment she wanted to avoid at all costs.

Luckily for her, she eventually crossed the hallway and did a little dance at the other end. She laughed on the linoleum of the kitchen, satisfied she had survived the gauntlet once more! She reached for the fridge, closing her hand around the sharp, cold metal. The anticipation sent chills up her spine.

With a set of quick motions she grabbed herself all the ingredients to make a sandwich fit for a king. Ham, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, bacon, fresh onions, jalapenos, bell peppers, seasonings… it was enough to make almost anyone’s mouth water.

She ended up only making a simple meat and cheese sandwich and eating it on the spot. She put the rest of the ingredients back in the fridge, deciding they were frivolous in the end.

~~~

Vriska woke up, took one look outside, and said “Nope.” She just wasn’t going to go to work today. Who needed to, really?

~~~

The vibrant roses of Can’-Ka No Rey are everywhere in the City. Numerous areas of land – particularly in the middle of squares – were left untouched in the City’s construction so people could appreciate the natural beauty and redness of the roses. Everyone knew they were sharper than knives, redder than any pigment, and more full of life than any other plant.

They were an integral part of City life and aesthetics. The City’s colors were orange, black, and red. Orange was a holdover from Merodi and a few other societies, while the black represented the Tower, and the red the roses themselves. The official emblem of the City was created using compressed rose petals – making it the brightest red that wasn’t on the roses themselves.

True rose dye was a controlled substance, if only because there was a limited amount of it. The roses did not seem to be able to reproduce, and they couldn’t be transplanted outside the bounds of the City. It was originally thought to have no use beyond exceedingly vibrant pigment that demanded attention.

But then the cracks started happening more often, and people realized something peculiar. Whenever ka lost its strength around the roses, they dimmed. They were still pure, almost perfectly proportioned flowers in this state – but they were just flowers in this state. It was a subtle change, one people rarely noticed, but once a few botanists, biologists, and the like started looking closer they were able to say for certain the dimming of the flowers was a simple, effective detector of the cracks.

For the first little while, people would rely on the naturally-growing roses around the City to tell them. But they quickly realized that even if they were looking for it, most of them didn’t have the mental awareness to actually detect the change in rose vibrance on the fly. However, if they had some rose pigment… the change there was visibly noticeable and harsh. And it was a lot simpler than putting together a full ka-sensor array. Roses began to vanish from public parks so they could be fashioned into these devices that could detect ka strength.

Eventually they got precise – little color readers placed on red-colored objects could detect low, but also normal and high levels of ka. It got to be such a problem that people were injuring themselves on the sharp thorns of the roses – thinking they were grabbing them when ka was low and being sorely mistaken.

Mlinx eventually had to implement major enchantments to protect the roses. And that was that. The rose-dye ka-readers technically aren’t illegal anymore, since they’re already made, but they are one of the most expensive items in the City. A lot of thefts and murders have happened over them.

~~~

There are those like me who can cheat and just know when a crack upsets the balance around. This does not apply to all Aware beings.

“So, Pinkie, what are you thinking?” I asked as I took a sip of my drink. It was something fruity, probably a mixture of several dozen organic things.

She opened her mouth to respond – and then stopped. “I uh… don’t know what I was thinking about.” She sat back in her chair, blinking. “Huh, that’s a little weird.”

“That is,” I said. “Maybe we can retrace your steps? See what happened?”

“I, sure, yeah! So, I was watching you drink, and I was thinking about the color purple then. You and your drink. That turned into eggplants, then eggs, and then breakfast – even though this is lunch – and then I was thinking about a breakfast party and then… Then…” She tapped her hoof on the table. “There was something there…”

“Sounds like you were planning a party.”

“I think I was. Usually I come up with those things in, like, a second! How did I lo-” it was at this point she put two and two together from my curious responses, her Awareness’s minimal input, and the general feel of the atmosphere. “Oooooh, I getcha! Just some little game then?”

“The opposite of a game.”

“You just lost the game.”

“So I did.”

~~~

There was a man. Let’s call him John.

There was another man. Let’s call him Matt.

John and Matt had been fighting a lot over the course of the last few weeks about, of all things, politics. John really liked Mlinx’s policies; while Matt thought he was too hard-handed with the way he managed his presence. These arguments had been the source of a lot of strife between the two men, and it had begun to drive a rift between them.

Like friends were always doing in the City, they decided to meet up and resolve the issue. There was nothing a good long talk couldn’t fix, right?

“Hey,” John said as he sat in his chair.

“Hey,” Matt responded, awkwardly. They ordered food, but when it arrived neither of them touched it.

“Look…” John folded his hands together. “At the end of the day, does it really matter who’s the Mayor?”

“No. What matters is what they do.”

“Does it really?

“I’m not going to become apathetic about it. Mlinx is wrong in what he does and refusing to talk about it is also wrong.”

“But neither of us are going to get anywhere in convincing each other,” John added. “Your friendship is more important than my devotion to a man’s ideals.”

“Then change your ideals.”

“It isn’t that simple. You know it isn’t. How hard it is for people to change their minds!?”

“They do it all the time. Read the stories! Endless discussions leading to changed minds!”

“But there are also a lot of stubborn people!”

“And you are one,” Matt said, tapping his fingers together. “Look, I’m sorry John. I can’t change myself for you.”

“And neither can I.”

“…Maybe I can just not talk about it around you,” Matt suggested. “I think I could do that. Just admit you can’t be swayed and focus my efforts elsewhere.”

John narrowed his eyes. “But you’ll still be screaming from the rooftops.”

“Of course I will. It’s my life. I’m not letting it go. I won’t stop until the world is the way it needs to be.”

“You have the makings of a supervillain.”

Matt looked John in the eyes. He opened his mouth to respond, couldn’t, and shut it.

“I knew it. I kn-”

Matt decided he was done. He stood up and walked out.

They never talked to each other again. Forever unresolved.

~~~

Why was there a cat on my porch singing to a cactus I had been growing for the last week?

No reason.

Why did that cat pace around the cactus for an hour?

Not much of a reason.

Why did the cactus fall over?

Bad health, a need for direct sun, hatred of the soil, my own inexperience gardening.

Why didn’t it fall on the cat?

No reason.

~~~

“We need to decide this now,” Andrew Cobb said, sitting down on the sofa across from his wife, Laurel.

She looked up. “Do… do we really, Andrew?”

Andrew tossed the divorce papers up onto the table. “Yes. We do. The moment to finalize this is now.”

“Fine then!” She tore them off the table and read them over. “Sure, we can sign it! Why haven’t you signed it!?”

“Because I wasn’t going to be made a fool!”

“A fool? A fool? Like you need my bloody help for that!”

“You certainly don’t help, wench.”

Laurel laughed. “I bet if I actually helped you’d end up looking better than if you tried anything on your own! Every little bit of your life is failure after failure and you just sucked me in along with you!”

“I sucked you along? Ha! Who was it that said ‘we should go move to a collapse society?’ You! ‘It’ll be safer’, you said. ‘They’ll be nicer to us’, you said.”

“They would have if you weren’t going to be such a prick!”

“Maybe I like being a prick! Maybe it’s part of who I am! Maybe I’m just a grumpy old monkey that needs some goddamn freedom every now and then!”

“Well you’re about to have all the freedom you want!”

“I will!” He swiped the divorce papers out of her hand and pulled a pen out of his pocket. He set it down to the paper.

…and the moment passed.

The document lost its luster, its finality. It sat in his hands as a simple piece of paper. It didn’t judge, it didn’t call – it just sat there.

There was no freedom in there.

He dropped the pen and the papers. They fell down to the coffee table, the pen rolling onto the floor and the papers falling in a bent mess. He flopped into a nearby chair and clenched his jaw as hard as he could manage, unable to prevent two tears from falling down his cheeks.

“…What got us here?” he asked.

Laurel had no answer.

The two of them sat in silence for several minutes. Eventually, Laurel got up and went to bed. Andrew found a blanket and a couch and cried himself to sleep that night.

The papers remained untouched on the coffee table for weeks. Neither of them acknowledged the presence of the papers. They still fought and screamed, but the frequency of those events went down over time.

Their marriage would return to a happy one and they would have four children. All because the finality of one moment was lost.

The papers were forever unresolved. Eventually they were lost under a stack of books and no one would see them ever again.

~~~

His name was Yellow Throat, a member of a bird-like race from a long-forgotten world.

Everyone called him Pa.

He spent his time sitting in a hospital bed, listening to the beep… beep… beep… of his monitor. He was rarely conscious, and whenever he was it was immensely painful to speak.

He was by no means old – not even old enough to have grandchildren – but he looked it. His feathers were falling out and his limbs were shriveled. Tubes of magic energy ran into his body, struggling to keep him alive.

It was a sad story – he and his family had been traveling to the City since their old home had been destroyed by meteor-weather. He had been lucky enough to lose none of his seventeen kids in the Dusting. In his travels, he had transformed himself from a meek, soft-spoken family man into a daring hero who would protect his children from every ordeal.

But on the last leg of the journey, there had been an attack by pirates. He had thrown himself into the fray, sacrificing everything he could to make sure the pirates were destroyed and his family would go free.

He should not have survived. The toxins, the magic weapons, the things they had stabbed him with… All should have destroyed his body. But he’d pulled through. Not a single one of them had survived his onslaught, and he himself still lived. Barely.

They were rescued by a patrol right after that and brought to the hospital where Pa now lay, wasting away. His family came to visit him regularly, and there was hardly a moment when two or three weren’t in the room. His wife almost never left him. Despite the pain, he was happy to know every last one of them was alive and healthy.

Acceptance was easy. He knew his time had come. It was his heroic sacrifice. He had been allowed to live so he could tell each of them goodbye. A little pain was more than worth that opportunity.

His family, of course, wanted to do everything they could to save him.

The doctor – a skeleton pony – sighed. “Look, we’ve done everything we can.” He held up a clipboard, going through every section of it. “Every test has been run, every treatment that won’t make it worse has been tried. He rejects Esunas and whatever toxin they had was highly magical in nature.” He looked up at them. “He’s got three days.”

The wife burst into tears along with half the children. The eldest woman among them walked up to him and stared him in the face. “Are you sure you’ve done everything?”

“Absolutely positive.” He began going through the clipboard again. “We are very thorough and go through every procedure we can, using AI and magical assistance for all diagnoses and treatment options. W-”

And then he did what very few doctors had ever done.

He noticed the convenient oversight on one of the documents. One square had been marked as ‘complete’ when, really, the mark was part of the box below it. A tiny mistake conveniently made on the one patient it would likely help.

“Order a JE-4-SCAN!” he ordered, dropping the clipboard and running into the hall. “I NEED A JE-4-SCAN!”

Modern magic medicine could cure curses. There was no reason it wouldn’t be able to cure a bizarre mixture of chemicals and poisons in the hands of pirates. But Pa’s time had come.

Except now his death was going to be skipped over. Fate was changed - cracked.

~~~

If the Tower chooses not to let ka dictate a decision, isn’t that still in a way ka?

Think about it. The Tower has to manage everything and know everything that’s going to happen between now and the moment of its destruction. After it falls, it has no control, but even when it allows the ‘cracks’ to flow out and disrupt ka, it’s no more than a narrative glitch, isn’t it?

Perhaps. After all, as I write these, a lot of them seem overly convenient in timing. Sure, I am picking and choosing the events that are worthy of being recorded, thereby making more of them seem important when they aren’t. Perhaps that is a bit arrogant of me. …It is definitely arrogant.

Regardless, they seem to have the elements of story in them. And that element is a subversion, or the loss of coherence, of completion. Many of them aren’t really satisfying, or just seem out of place. Yet, they together approach a point, a goal, a purpose of some kind. They come together to show the world and prepare it for what is to come.

It is exactly like the glitches, I think. The Tower always knows, so while it may use a randomizer to decide where to cause the ka ‘blackouts’, it still knows the results, and knows the instances I will place in my little journal here. It always knew, right from the start.

Really, this is all fake. Ka never vanishes completely, even when we can’t detect it. The Tower is controlling all for now.

But it is living up to The Emissary’s promise.

It’s preparing us for the world that will come after.

~~~

He had been bullied all his life.

He had been told to forgive and forget.

He had been told to turn the other cheek.

“Fuck that,” he declared, planning to leave his family the moment he could. When all of them were dusted, it was a dream come true. He was not only rid of those idiots, he was rid of all the other people around as well. He owned what remained – he was king of his own little cityscape. Empty, devoid of human life, but it was still his.

As its king, he needed servants. Since his IQ was off the charts, he built his own robotic servants to do all the work for him – bringing him food, transforming city hall into a personal palace, telling him everything they discovered about the New World. He lived a life almost without want, without need. Many people would say it was without purpose, but he did not mind. It wasn’t the hell he was in before with those people who thought they could control him, so he was content.

Unfortunately for everyone in existence, a few travelers started to pass through his city. They were welcomed as esteemed guests so they could gasp in awe at his kingdom and his glory. Sometimes they would tell him things – that there were communities who survived, that there were dangerous pirate bands, and that there were entire worlds beneath the surface and in the sky. He sent minor exploration drones to investigate these things to satisfy his curiosity.

The efforts didn’t begin in earnest until he heard about the City. No matter how he examined the rumors, the City was better than him. Larger. More important. More hopeful. The few who had been there and left said it was the most organized place they had seen in the New World, and that the king of robots would be well suited to open relations with them.

“Fuck that.” Nobody could be better than him. And he knew exactly how to make them bow to his will.

He began building a bomb that could do one thing and one thing only – wipe cities off the face of the planet. It wasn’t just a regular nuclear bomb, not even close; it was a strange matter cascade, one of the most feared weapons in the entire multiverse because of how hard it was to control. All he had to do was introduce some wild ‘strangelet’ particles into the City and watch as every form of atomic matter was transformed into more strangelets, effectively disintegrating them. The spread would be unstoppable, crossing through the air, the water, and the earth itself. Nucleon was large enough to take several thousand years to completely fall to the strangelets, but the City wouldn’t take anywhere near as long.

They would know their place. He set up a forcefield around his city of robots and armed the strangelet device, aiming it at the distant City. He fired, ready for mass genocide and conquest. They wouldn’t know what hit them.

In a way, he was right. But not in the way he was expecting. He also didn’t hit himself with the strangelets – the robot flew through space just fine, landing in the City without a problem.

The problem was the strangelets just failed to work. When the City scientists popped the robot open they had no idea that they were even looking at a failed weapon. As far as they were concerned they had opened up an overly-complicated lunchbox that fell from the sky. They saw no reason to do anything special with it.

The king of robots, though, was sure they had managed to stop the weapon somehow and were now plotting to retaliate against him. So he built a wall around his city and refused to let anyone in ever again, retreating to his world of robots where he would eternally build up more defenses, waiting for an attack that would never come.

~~~

A hundred and forty-four Aradias vanished into thin air one day.

They were all sitting and chatting about how time was fluid and how beautiful the world around them was – a few of them were organizing funerals for particularly eccentric people and were in black attire. Suddenly all of them looked at nothing and vanished into thin air. There was no sign of time distortion or teleportation spells. They were just there, and then they were gone without a trace. Not even a single hair was left behind.

The investigation put into the case became legendary. People from all over the city were called in – Sherlock, yes, but also psychics, future-tellers, other Aradias, and even myself.

Sherlock was sure it was some kind of sabotage from a meta-manipulating creature.

The psychics were convinced the Aradias had experienced soul-synergy and had melded into one being we could not comprehend.

The fortune-tellers predicted the Aradias would be lost forever, but that they were in a state of peace.

The other Aradias wondered if there was some kind of hidden time dimension that grabbed hold of their ‘sisters.’

I was almost embarrassed to reveal the actual answer.

“It was random.”

Everyone stared at me in disbelief.

“I’m serious. It was random. That was just a result of one ka being ‘removed’ in a slightly unconventional way. Instead of making things more mundane, it just made quantum events significantly more likely. I’d call it a glitch, but you know the Tower doesn’t do glitches. This one didn’t even have the point of ‘preparing us for the next world’, it was just there to be there. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“…Are they dead?” an Aradia asked.

“Maybe? I don’t see it exactly. If they aren’t, they’ll re-appear after the Tower falls.” I shrugged. “I can see and understand everything, but the final result is still beyond me in some cases. I am sorry.”

~~~

The Happy Mask Salesman came out of the woodwork and started selling masks. Nobody really noticed aside from Seskii. He’d sell stuff in the market with her and Mister Raven from time to time.

~~~

I have a flowerpot on my windowsill.

It used to have one of the great roses in it, but that was stolen back during the ‘rose gold rush’. Now it is just a flowerpot with nothing but soil in it. I haven’t bothered to remove it or put another flower in it. Something about the clay vessel just makes me appreciate existence when I look at it.

In a way, it is just like every other average small flowerpot. The clay used to form it has taken on a brown-orange color, making it look somehow both earthy and heavily artificial at the same time. There is a singular hole in the bottom for drainage, not that it can be seen. Not to mention the fact that I have a magic spell in place to take care of draining so the sill doesn’t get wet – not that I’ve watered the empty pot since the rose was stolen.

The rose wouldn’t need water anyway. I did water it while it was still in there, though. Because that’s what you do with flowers.

Along the bottom of the flowerpot there are several markings. A serial number is scrawled on the bottom – 194213GMTSMU – an almost comically convenient set of numbers and letters etched into the pot. The 9 and the S are pretty worn out, almost too worn to even see. Though, of course, this is all the part of the pot that is hidden from view.

In plain sight is the outside surface – upon first glance, a perfectly round base with a slightly larger, but equally rounded rim. But anyone who studies the surface closely will find numerous marks along the edge. Most of these are simply manufacturing artifacts – a little lump here, some extra grit there, and a strange dark spot I keep turned toward the window. These marks aren’t interesting; the ones that it has accumulated over time are.

Every nick and dent tells something of a story. Most the ones along the bottom edge are indications that it’s been moved, slid around, or handled roughly in some way or other. The top rim is similar, though not as heavily demolished as the other. Between the upper part of the pot and the lower there is a shadow effect that shrouds some of the worst damage – a scrape caused by a stick run through the overlap in an attempt to clean the clay surface. The large crack down the middle of the pot has no apparent origin, having shown up one day with no warning or act taken to cause the damage.

The interior of the pot is nothing more than a memory of what once was. The dirt is what could be best described as ‘standard, but dry.’ Parts of it stick to the edge of the flowerpot, but most of it keeps a dull, slow, motionless existence on top of several layers of other dirt. It was once dark brown and littered with little white flecks, but now it is dull and dusty from lack of watering. There is a small lump in the middle where the rose’s roots are. They’ve been dead for a long time.

But on the days where the twilight of the stars in the distance shine through the window just right… well it still looks dead, but it’s interesting.

I like my flowerpot.

~~~

It occurs that this will be my last chance to address you. That is, the readers who didn’t discover this book, but are reading it as part of a larger work. Sure, I’ll still be around the Discord chat – for a good while longer – but there’s not much space left for me to talk to you here.

Only six chapters left. Or five or four, depending on how you count exactly. We’ve come a long way. Some of you have been here with me longer than Songs of the Spheres itself has been running. For you, that’s over two years. For me? Centuries. And yet you – all of you – have felt like a constant presence for my entire journey. I don’t always talk to you, I don’t always address you, and I don’t always like what you represent.

However, there is something to be said for your constant presence. The Eye of Rhyme, despite all the curses of knowing and understanding, can provide comfort in certain times with its constant presence. When I lost it in the middle of fighting English, I was terrified. Lost. Afraid. Confused. I was not prepared. The world was in too much danger for me to appreciate my freedom. I needed to see then.

I guess I’ll put this Eye back on in a heartbeat if I feel like it’d help somebody, huh? I really should take care of myself better… If I keep subjecting myself to all this when the natural protection of a hero is gone… I won’t last long.

Hopefully I’ll find something after the Tower falls that’ll keep me around long enough to appreciate my new life. If not…

…Well, I’m kind of hoping there’s something more, you know? That with the Tower gone there’ll still be something left. Something with some real tangibility to it. I don’t pretend to know if there really is anything. I just understand ka itself. I don’t actually have the big answers to life’s greatest mysteries. I’m probably a lot less certain about life than you are!

A curious thing happens when you learn more and more about the world. You get less and less certain. What was once black and white becomes muddied shades of gray. Good is still good, evil is still evil, but there are mixtures of good and evil that get put into a nice soup and served to you in an incomprehensible mess. It’s a little ridiculous how many ‘exceptions’ and ‘case-by-case’ things there are.

I really do admire Renee – the real Renee – for being able to keep the Merodi Universalis ‘case-by-case’ law together so well. It was one of those things that totally should have failed miserably, but somehow didn’t. I don’t care that most of its success was ka-based – most success is. But everything has two reasons. And that second reason was Renee.

I can only hope it will continue to be successful.

…That’s the problem with stories like this, isn’t it? We have a lot of morals here, morals that work for us in our world that seem to be absolutely true. Don’t lie, be honest, respect other cultures, war is horrendous, sometimes you should push against impossible odds, occasionally the correct answer is to give up, you shouldn’t want stories to be real. And while some of these certainly do apply universally… some of them are difficult to reconcile with your experiences. You live in what can best be summarized as the ‘real world’ – be it the deep past, a secluded world, or the only ‘real’ place at all. You most likely either have very little ka running your lives, or none at all. All the might of heroes works here, but you can’t really count on the ‘right’ answer giving you the best outcome. You can’t count on a happy ending just because you did the right thing. You can’t even count on an ‘ending’ at all, aside from death, and even that isn’t really an ending to your story.

This story was definitely designed by GM to get you to think. He let his own bias through, certainly, but he also tried to give characters voices that heavily disagreed with his own. I am one of them, and so is Corona, and so is O’Neill… None of us are really him. The only one who is, well, is that kid sitting in a distant church trying not to be found by the people who want him to answer questions. Questions about why.

He’ll be the first to admit it didn’t have to be this way. There was a list of people who made it to the end. He changed it more times than he can remember. He made a lot of last-minute decisions. As he’s writing these words into my pen, he doesn’t know who survives the coming journey, and yet I do. It’s an interesting paradox.

Writing about beings who know more than you do.

I don’t know what it says about me, about the Tower, or about Prophets in general.

What I do know is that this story has run its course. It was always intended to be an End to All Stories one way or another – either through the destruction of the Tower or the expansion to Infinity – for that’s what the preservation movement would have led to in arcs 11 and 12, instead of all this New World business. Lord English would have stormed across existence regardless, forcing the two sides of the war to reconcile in either scenario.

There were two ways the story could have taken. This is the one it ended up in.

I prefer this one. One where we can escape the story and create a society without Prophets and the Tower dictating every action, without the horrors of time travel, without the desires of people made into reality. No more wishes, no more flights of fancy – reality.

The other one was not without merit. The idea of Infinity has a certain appeal… for certain people. It ends the debate over meaning by declaring all meanings valid and invalid at the same time. I find that unsatisfying. But, to some, it is freeing. You could, in Infinity, pick the world you wanted if you had the means… We would have gotten to see the true consequences of immortality…

But those are all what-ifs. We are in a world where ka was rejected and the future is condensed. But the world itself is amazing, beautiful, and full of life. It’s like a second chance.

I like it when a story ends by tying up loose ends rather than leaving an Infinite number of possibilities open, don’t you?

~~~

Most everyone in the City is immortal. Deaths by natural causes are rare – usually it’s an accident, a murder, or something a little stranger. Bodies are usually kept in conditions of reasonable health, so the normal causes of death were minimal. Still, they happened occasionally.

Usually those with importance got a pass. They would never have to worry.

It surprised everyone when Doctor Strange dropped dead from a stroke in the line of duty. Revive spells did nothing.

He may not have been the most important person in existence, but he was the chief of police for the entire City. Every person on its streets owed him some portion of their safety. He deserved a more heroic death – one where he went out fighting criminals, or trying to stop an ancient evil from wrecking a city block.

Instead, he seized up and dropped like a stone without warning. They had just arrested a suspect in an armed robbery of a government materials depot – the danger from the man had passed. That did little to help him. He was still on the ground, dead, unresponsive.

His funeral was paradoxically big and small. Big, because so many people wanted to pay respects to the chief. Small, because very few people actually knew him. He had been a private man, and very few superheroes from Earth MC had bothered to stay in touch with him and his life.

Corona had a few words to say – but she’d only known him in the past. She knew what he represented, not what he had become. Very few did.

Lightning did. She didn’t feel like talking. Sherlock did. He knew better than to let himself talk at a funeral.

“I was an endless source of annoyance,” Sherlock told Lightning in private.

“He enjoyed it, somewhere in there,” Lightning responded.

“I could have been a bit more than an annoyance.” He pulled up the collar on his coat. “You think I’d actually learn that at some point.”

“Maybe when the Tower falls.”

“I’m not placing any money on that.” He shook his head. “…Looks like you’re in charge now.”

Lightning nodded slowly. “Again… I come back from everything. One of these days that’s going to stop.”

“…I can’t tell you if you’re right,” Sherlock said, walking away.

I took the opportunity to walk up to her. “I can tell you that you’re wrong.”

“How?”

“You aren’t going to be in charge forever.” I looked straight ahead with a soft smile. “There’ll be a change, soon enough. And then… you can do what you want. And no, I’m not talking about the final destruction of the Tower.”

The two of us stood in silence, looking at Strange’s grave.

~~~

Rina walked up to me in my library one day.

“I don’t feel like my life is going anywhere,” she said matter-of-factly, like there was no room for debate on the subject.

I raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Cut the shit with your ‘mysterious’ persona and just tell me. You know how this conversation is going to go.”

“And you won’t learn anything if I just say everything for you,” I said.

Rina glared.

“So I repeat my question – how so?”

“Let me put it this way. I was a murderous insane psycho-bitch and I was essentially Eve’s nemesis for almost this entire story. Then, in what was supposed to be my last words, I expressed some ability to, you know, think for myself. And then instead of being carted off to Xeelee experimentation grounds I got locked in a Gallifreyan test where I could do nothing but think. I thought, and I decided I was done with the life I had once had, and I betrayed my friends until I was found at Rev’s doorstep and given access to actual helpful medication. I converted, became pretty fucking devout, and then had to deal with the collapse war shit. And then I went on a journey with the primary team, fought Fluttershout until she killed herself, and…” She drew a blank in the air with her wing. “Nothing. Blankity-blank. I did all that, looked like I was building up to something, and then the train just dropped off.”

“A lot of people were overshadowed by English,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. And then they got mentioned again after the fact. Am I wrong in saying I haven’t been in a single chapter since the start of this arc?”

I pursed my lips. “You’re in one now.”

“What for?”

“An example.” I smiled warmly. “In a way, your story is being resolved… By not being resolved.”

“…What?”

“You’ve gone through everything you need to. Experienced both sides of the coin. Hero, villain… you’ve done it all. Now your proverbial pendulum swings back to the middle, and you can do what you wish. …For a while.”

“Ka isn’t quite done with me yet! I knew it!”

“Not quite. But I don’t think it’s what you’re going to expect.” I looked at a piece of paper on my desk – a partially completed list. “Don’t expect a grand resolution to your character arc. You get to be a person.”

“Welp, that’s better advice than I was expecting. See ya!” She trotted out of the library.

“…Didn’t even say thanks…” I muttered.

~~~

And this last one…

This last little story…

It is for Starbeat.

And it’s not one that happens now. It’s one that happens in the future.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks as I scribble this down in my little book.

“Oh, something you’ll know eventually,” I say with a coy smile.

“Come on! Don’t be so… evasive!”

“It’ll be years until it happens. Don’t want to spoil it.”

I see her on the prow of an airship, looking at the twilight sky of Nucleon.

“But you do want to spoil it! I see it in your eyes!” she complains.

“I’ll satisfy myself by telling it to the readers.”

“…You’re no fun.”

“I’m the most fun.” I change the subject. “So, how’s your research on the cracks been going?”

“It would be going better if you provided me with some more insight…”

I see someone walk up to her. She turns around, surprised.

“That would ruin the point of you researching it.”

“Okay, fine,” Starbeat rolls her eyes. “This week was all about studying romance and the cracks. It’s… confusing, because it’s inconsistent. When the ka is gone, I see breakups and arguments in otherwise ‘happily ever after’ relationships. But I also see relationships form and blossom where before there was nothing.” She holds up a data pad and smiled. “I am happy to report that more people are experiencing love without the push of ka at their backs.”

“That’s good!”

Starbeat nods. “With less adventures cropping up, less incredible circumstances are around to cause unrealistic and rushed relationships. It’s… heartwarming.”

“…And?”

“And I wish my ka wasn’t so important,” she mutters, looking to the ground. “I can’t bring myself to do it if there’s any chance…”

I see her embrace the other person – a kiss is shared. Something deep, passionate, and meaningful.

“You’ll get your chance eventually,” I tell her.

“Yeah, when the Tower falls. …I guess I can wait that long.”

“I’m sure you will.” Right before it falls. In a time where visions are shrouded and ka is vanishing… the Tower will give you a final gift. In a way, it is ka, but in a way, it is not. Whatever it is, you will deserve it, and you will be allowed to make it into whatever you want. After I write this sentence I close my book and ask her if she wants to go grab some lunch.

~~~

There was no point to this.

There were several points to this.

That’s the point.

Confused yet? No? Good, glad you’re keeping up.

It’s time for me to go. The chapter’s over, nothing else to see here. There wasn’t much to really see here anyway. This chapter didn’t have a plan, a plot, or much in the way of shared themes beyond ‘ka’s gone, what happens?’ Even then, some things were just out of place. Were just things I found… nice.

I could have told many other little tales. Tales about Flutterfree rejecting advances from someone in the church… Nanoha and O’Neill deciding not to adopt… Mlinx discovering that paperwork actually served a deeper purpose… Nastasia sitting in her office, filling out budget declarations… A church service… People in the streets screaming that the end is nigh…

Lots of things happen that you don’t see. That you can’t see.

I guess this little book is a gift so you can see. And, in other ways, it is a gift to the future to know the struggles we went through. It is not easy to adjust our minds to accept the way without ka. Many – like myself – fully believe it is a good change. Others do not, but they have mostly given up trying to reverse the inevitable. Can’t really say no when the Emissary tells you to your face what is going on.

I feel like I’m being too final here…

But I also feel like that’s how I have to end it. With an ending. It’s nagging at me, telling me to write those words, the end. To close this book and lock it away, call it done.

I don’t want to.

152 - Echo of the Earth

I have to get this written down.

I don’t care what I told myself, it has to come out. I…

I am GM. Probably should clarify that before people think I’m Twilence. Specifically, I’m the GM living in church-town in the New World, having lost any semblance of Prophet powers.

And I was done writing. I still think I’m done. But there’s this story… This last story…

It was on the chapter outline document already, so I know Uber-GM already wrote it. I know it already happened. I know there’s no chance my words make it happen. But there’s still a large component of fear.

But it just won’t go away. I have to get it down. I don’t know if it’s my own insecurities or the Tower demanding this be written by me, but here it is.

There’s more than one way to tell a story.

Songs of the Spheres is no different. I chose the most far-reaching and all-encompassing version of the story I could – that of the finite multiverse. I wrote it that way because it gave way to the most things to explore.

And because it was the coolest.

But there were other options. I had tried in the past to write other stories with mega crossovers. All of them failed… a single galaxy populated with many different races, a small section of the multiverse where heroes created other worlds, a single universe with a handful of galaxies…

Each of these had some influence on Songs of the Spheres, in one way or another. The Collector originated from the first, the Evermore like Jane came from the second, and Scarcity’s concept came from the third one.

However there was a fourth – and the first one I ever tried making – that had a different concept. Instead of far reaching galaxies and space empires, it would all take place on a singular planet, seamlessly fused together.

This was a good idea. But I was young and it was the first real fanfic I ever tried writing. I have purged it. It was that bad. The other three attempts weren’t great, but they all had something to offer the success – this story.

The first one sits, forgotten, alone. Neglected.

I’m going to fix that.

Let’s take a look back to a time when the multiverse still existed. Probably around the time of the first Arc. A single planet in a single universe that will never know of the multiverse beyond it. Will never know the strange parallelisms it shares with a story so, so much larger than itself.

It’s one of many Echoes of a much larger story.

~~~

The red woman fled through the corridor, and the Goa’uld followed.

“You can’t run forever,” the Goa’uld said, holding out a zat gun. His eyes flashed and his voice transformed into something deep and reverberating. “You will serve us. If you come back, I can make it a pleasant stay.”

The woman glanced behind her just in time to dodge an incoming attack. She used two of her four arms to perform a jump off a nearby wall, a third arm touching her stomach-positioned gemstone. Her weapon summoned itself into her fourth hand – a large scepter with a mysterious green tint in it.

“…What is tha-” the Goa’uld began, cut off by a red and green beam of energy. The woman had expected the attack to knock the wind out of him, not make him start screaming in agony.

She didn’t feel any pity for him; merely surprise that her attack had been so effective. Perhaps the people of this era were weak. Regardless, it gave her time before the man’s endless stream of copies caught up with her.

Her strength was far beyond that of most mortals, and she was able to punch right through the reinforced door before her, prying it open with all four arms. There was a single guard inside that she dispatched easily, leaving her alone with the gate.

It took the form of an immense metallic spirograph. There was an inscribed glyph in every diamond-shaped section of the gate, not that the woman needed to study them to understand what they meant.

She rummaged through the dispatched guard’s uniform until she found a dialing device – a diamond-shaped object with four buttons on each side. She didn’t have time to type in a complex set of coordinates – she would just have to go with the emergency-dial program. It should arrive somewhere safe…

The footsteps in the corridor encouraged her to hurry along. She pressed the buttons as fast as she could, lighting up seven different glyphs on the gate with an ominous golden glow. The gold gate? How is it here!?

The gold gate activated, creating a shimmering ocean of yell0w ripples. The woman didn’t hesitate – she jumped right through and came out through another gate. The purple one, given the soft glow the gate was producing.

She whirled around, ready to tell the dialing device to close the portal.

But it slipped out of her hand.

That was her final mistake. She turned away from the purple gate to grab the dialing device, meaning she couldn’t see the Goa’uld step through the gate. She had no chance to react when he shot her, forcing immense electricity into her body. The energy quickly found its way into her gemstone and overloaded her body, making her vanish in a poof. The diamond-shaped gemstone fell right into the Goa’uld’s hands.

The Goa’uld smirked. He wordlessly walked back through the portal. It closed, leaving the room dark once more.

A purple alicorn stood in the doorway of the purple gate’s room. “What in Solgaleo’s name was that!?”

~~~

Sunset Shimmer walked up to the gate. How they had managed to keep this thing locked in the school basement without any government agency picking up on it was beyond her, but hey, she wasn’t complaining. It meant she could go back and forth from her life here and in Equestria, no problem.

She checked her watch – school wasn’t over yet, but frankly she already knew all the material and she didn’t need to do any lab work today. She could afford to miss history to have some fun. She pressed her hand to the gate, feeling its cold metal on her hand. It was unlike almost every other material she had encountered in her life. Every time she touched it, she got the chills.

Methodically, she physically pressed the topmost glyph with her hand, prompting it to glow with a brick red color. Numerous other glyphs lit up automatically, prompting a rippling portal to form. She admired the deep glow shimmering across her hands for a moment.

She didn’t dwell on it long – it was a sight she had seen many times. With a deep breath, she stepped right through.

On the other side was Equestria. Specifically, one of the many side rooms in Princess Twilight Sparkle’s crystal castle. Usually it contained nothing but the purple gate, but today it contained all the ponies Sunset knew. Twilight, yes, but also Rarity, Pinkie, Applejack, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, and Starlight. They were all looking at her like she was some sort of monster.

“Wha-” it was at this point Sunset realized she was still in human form, rather than a unicorn. “…Ponyfeathers, something went wrong with the race translation spell…”

“Oh.” Twilight laughed. “Everyone calm down, it’s just Sunset. No crazy poofing gem people here.”

Sunset blinked. “…What?”

Rainbow Dash cleared her throat. “Don’t mind Twilight, she’s gone a little nuts. I personally think she’s hallucinating.”

“Then explain the device, Rainbow,” Rarity countered.

“I dunno, it was lost here or something?”

“Before you get off on a huge tangent can someone pleeease explain?” Sunset asked.

Applejack cleared her throat. “There was a red four-armed woman who appeared through the portal. A bearded human appeared behind her and shot her. She apparently exploded in a puff of smoke, and left only a crystal behind. The guy took the crystal and left. The woman dropped this doohicky here.”

“…Applejack, I could have explained,” Twilight said, a little indignant.

“And you would’ve taken about ten times longer.”

“Can confirm, you love to talk,” Starlight said.

Rainbow Dash flapped her wings to get their attention. “You all forgot the part where Twilight has been pressing random buttons on the paperweight!”

“We’re not calling it that,” Twilight muttered.

“Yes we are,” Pinkie said with a giggle.

“No, we’re not!”

Sunset didn’t wait for them to stop arguing nomenclature. She swiped the device out of Twilight’s grip and studied it with her human fingers. “Let’s see here… four buttons on each side…” She started pressing them randomly.

“Um, do you think that’s a good idea?” Fluttershy asked. Pinkie, Rainbow, and Twilight were still in a three-way squabble over the naming of the device.

“Not particularly,” Sunset admitted. “But hey, my race transformation spell has already been disabled, how much worse can it get?”

“…Sugarcube, you’re just askin’ for trouble,” Applejack observed.

Sunset rolled her eye. “That’s just superstitious. There’s no w-” She pressed a button and the gate activated, placing all of them in a purple spotlight.

This stopped the argument instantly. “Sunset! What did y-”

“I got the paperweight to work!” Sunset declared with a cheesy grin.

Twilight blinked. “Sunset… we are n… never mind.” She shook her head. “But I was right! That device can make the gate dial other gates! Look at the pattern of runes – it’s different than when we’re about to go to Cerulean High!” She clapped her hooves together. “It’s probably linking to a whole other gate!”

“Where the scary people came from…” Fluttershy said, shrinking away.

“Why are you scared of them?” Starlight asked. “You didn’t even see them!”

“The map called us here after they came, I’m pretty sure they’re bad people…”

“We can’t make judgments just yet,” Twilight said. “What we can do is go through the portal.”

“Shouldn’t we check to see if it’s safe first, or somethin’?” Applejack asked.

“…Sure,” Twilight said. She sent a little burst of magic through the portal. She blinked. “…It’s a solid wall on the other side.”

“Which means…?”

“We would have been pancakes!” Pinkie announced. “SPLAT!”

Twilight focused her magic. “I think I can still get us through… the barrier is only a few inihooves thick. A simple teleport to the other side…”

“Can we not?” Fluttershy asked.

“I’m pretty sure you all have to,” Starlight said, smirking. “The Tree didn’t call me or Sunset over there.”

“There is no way I’m not going,” Sunset said.

“Same here, I’m just making a point.”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Always about the points…”

“Teleporting eight ponies… This could be problematic…” Twilight furrowed her brow.

“Seven ponies and a human,” Sunset corrected.

Twilight rolled her eyes. “I can still do it. Just give me a second…”

“One Maplesippi…” Pinkie said. “Two Ma-”

Suddenly they were on the other side, standing in front of the green gate. This gate was housed within a large metallic bunker sealed on virtually all sides. It sat at the top of a long ramp, and there was currently a metallic iris closed between the girls and the gate.

Two-dozen human soldiers were pointing advanced weaponry at them.

“…Fiddlesticks. American military base,” Sunset muttered. “WE SURRENDER!” she shouted in English, putting her hands up into the air.

Fluttershy got on the ground and started crying. All the other ponies backed away, fear on their faces.

…Except Pinkie. She kept smiling. “Boy, looks like I finally get to know what the inside of a holding cell feels like! I always wanted to try that out!”

~~~

General Jack O’Neill’s red phone rang.

He blinked. That was unusual. Since when did the President call him?

He picked up the phone. “Hello there, got some new material?”

President Funny Valentine ignored the usual pleasantries that played out based on his unusual first name. “I’ve gotten a very interesting report, General. You have a set of prisoners?”

“Yes. Seven ponies, one human girl. They came through the gate – apparently they have some way of using point-to-point teleportation abilities.”

O’Neill heard Valentine ruffling through some papers. “I’m here to tell you your little inquiry into this ‘Sunset Shimmer’ has made the entire Canadian A.I.D. go absolutely bananas. They haven’t released an official statement, but there’s something about her that has them up in arms.”

“Really? All we got from our searches was that she was a high school senior. Not much in the way of records.”

“That may have been intentional. We will need to progress slowly.” Valentine paused. “I am sending one of my men over to assist in interrogation.”

“You don’t have to do that…”

“Japan has been breathing down my neck to give them more important SGC roles and I trust him. He’s loyal and may be of… particular use.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jotaro Kujo. As far as the public is concerned, a marine biologist.”

“…Hmm… I get to lead interrogation.”

“As long as you don’t start until he arrives.”

“Deal. By the way, how’s that Steel Ball Run thing shaping up?”

“The pieces are falling together. I may need to call on your assistance before it is over.”

O’Neill smirked. “If you weren’t the President, you would owe me a lot of favors.”

“One day, we will sit down, and then we will figure out what I can give you. Considering your position…”

“For someone with your name you never did have a sense for jokes.” O’Neill cleared his throat, getting back on track. “It will be done, Mister President.”

“Thank you, General.” Valentine hung up.

“Jack…”

O’Neill turned to Daniel. “Sorry Danny boy, you gotta wait a little bit to study horse culture.”

“I’m more concerned about this ‘friend’ we’re getting.”

“A favor to the Japanese, shouldn’t be anything more. By the way, don’t let McKay figure out about this.”

“He’s several miles beneath the surface of the ocean right now. I don’t think he will.”

“Can’t be too careful…” O’Neill said, pulling a lemon out of his desk drawer.

~~~

Jotaro had said absolutely nothing besides his name and a few grunts when he arrived. After an awkward silence, O’Neill decided they had waited long enough to talk to the prisoners so they went to the cell block. Normal procedure was to keep prisoners separate, but since only one of them knew how to speak English and would have to translate for all the others, they had all been crammed into the ‘large’ cell usually reserved for things like dragons and golems and whatnot.

O’Neill opened the door. Six of the ponies were huddled in the back, leaving only the purple one and Sunset Shimmer on one side of a simple interrogation table.

O’Neill and Daniel took their seats. Jotaro stayed in the doorway, examining everything with a silent, careful eye.

“I am General Jack O’Neill,” O’Neill said, folding his hands. “This is Daniel Jackson and Jotaro Kujo.”

Sunset nodded. “I will have to translate, give me a minute.” She turned to the purple alicorn and started speaking in a strange tongue that seemed to have a whinney-like noise and a teeth clack as a phoneme. Daniel was astounded by the way she was able to make her lips move in ways humans’ almost never did.

And when the purple alicorn started speaking the actual language, Daniel was even further astounded that Sunset was able to mimic it at all. Even a language expert like himself would have had difficulty with such a tongue.

“Hello, I am Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria, and this is Sunset Shimmer.” Sunset smiled as she spoke her own name. “We take full responsibility for trespassing in your base without authorization and apologize. We just wanted to see what was on the other side.” Sunset smiled. “And, uh, this is me talking now, you found out who I am right?”

O’Neill nodded. “Sunset Shimmer, Canada. Senior at Cerulean High. You’re the most interesting part about this whole thing.”

“Yeeah…” Sunset turned to Twilight and said a few things in Equish. Twilight let out a sigh but seemed to tell her to go ahead.

“So, here’s the deal,” Sunset said. “I wasn’t always a human.”

O’Neill and Daniel stared at her.

“Let me explain,” Sunset said, tapping her fingers together. “I was born in Twilight’s nation – Equestria. No, I’m not sure exactly where it is. My best guess from constellation analysis is somewhere in the Amazon wilds. I was a unicorn – just the horn, like the white one back there – and something of a scientist. We have a… lot better understanding of magic than you do, and that was what I studied. Eventually I helped uncover a gate.”

“What color?” Daniel asked.

“Colo- oh! Purple. That’s right, yours was green…” Sunset pondered this for a moment. “Anyway, I eventually discovered a sequence of buttons that would activate the gate and connect to the ‘deep red’ gate in, you guessed it, a Canadian cave. We’re pretty sure one of our historic wizards, Starswirl, enchanted the purple gate to convert people from ponies to humans and vice versa. There was also the added bonus of a translation spell, though that was temporary.” She folded her hands together. “The actual story is complicated, but I eventually decided to stay there. Since apparently the race-change spell decided I was a teenager, that was the life I took. Had to learn English eventually, which was… difficult. A few years passed, and now it’s today.”

“And today…?” O’Neill asked.

“Today we realized there were more than two gates,” Sunset said. She said something to Twilight, prompting her to enter a huge rant mode. Sunset quickly decided she was going to have to summarize. She described the crimson woman and the bearded man, and the device they had dropped. Then she complained a bit about how the spells weren’t working anymore.

O’Neill reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a photograph. “Is this the man?”

Sunset showed it to Twilight. She nodded vigorously.

“That’s Ba’al. He’s not really a human, he’s a snake-creature that has taken control of a human body. He’s somehow managed to clone himself a million times to make life extremely difficult for us. Not a great guy.”

Sunset translated and Twilight grimaced. “…Twilight wants to know about the woman. Do you know who she is?”

O’Neill looked to Daniel and nodded. Daniel adjusted his glasses. “As far as we can tell from your description, she would be a Gem.”

“A what?”

“There are the creations of the Ancients – the same beings that build the gates. Think of them as… machines so complex they are like people.”

Sunset blinked. She had to think a bit about how to translate that for Twilight. As soon as she was finished, Twilight lit up and started laughing and going off on a rant.

“…She do this often?” O’Neill asked.

“Yeeeah…” Sunset said, rubbing the back of her head. “I’m honestly tempted to join her. We didn’t know who built the gates before today. Didn’t know there were Ancients…”

“If you’d be willing to teach us about magic, I have no doubt we’d be willing to share what we know about the Ancients,” Daniel said.

Sunset translated. Twilight said the word Daniel had deduced meant ‘yes’ over and over and over.

“This went a lot smoother than I was expecting,” O’Neill admitted, sitting back in his chair. “Sorry big guy, looks like we didn’t need you.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro commented.

“…What?”

“It means ‘good grief’ or ‘give me a break’,” Daniel commented. “There isn’t really an exact translation.”

“Ah. …I don’t get it.”

At this point, Twilight’s horn flashed with a high-pitched ding! noise. “OH COME ON!” she said in perfect English, no hint of an accent.

The humans stared at her.

“I thought the translation spell wasn’t going to finish! But no, apparently I can cast it, great Lunala all that back and forth was pointless!”

“Translation… spell…” Daniel said. A glazed expression crossed over his face.

“You okay there, Daniel?” O’Neill asked.

“Oh, just wondering if my entire job has been rendered pointless or not. Nothing major.” He put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “I’m sure we can work out a treaty between our people at some point and establish a way to visit each other without getting locked up.”

“YAY!” Pinkie said with a grin. “That’s great!”

“Oh, uh, I have a request. A personal one,” Sunset rubbed the back of her head. “Can you maybe… not tell Canada what I am?”

“Sure,” O’Neill said. I have a feeling they already know.

“Thanks!”

~~~

The trade was simple enough to pull off. Twilight donated half her library of magical textbooks – along with a lot of translation potions. The U.S. Army gave her access to secret files discussing the Ancients, and included a few known gate addresses. A couple of these were the U.S.’s allies – there was a ‘public’ gate in Japan they could dial (the red one), Britain (periwinkle) and even Furshi, one of the free Troll Nations (dark gray). There were a few noninhabited gates as well – the deep green one in the Australian wilds and the yellow gate that went to a nicer area of the Himalayan Dragonlands. There was mention of a white gate in Atlantis, but they clearly weren’t about to give the coordinates of that gate to just anyone.

It did not take long for Twilight to start taking her friends on diplomatic and exploratory missions to these new peoples, introducing themselves, and inviting anyone who wanted back to Equestria to experience some good old-fashioned friendship. It was clear most of the people they met just wanted to learn more about Equestrian Magic, but Twilight saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the world and make some varied friends.

Sunset regularly joined the group, but finals were approaching senior year so she could only do so on weekends. So it was mostly Twilight, Pinkie, Fluttershy, Rarity, and Starlight – Rainbow and Applejack had decided they had other obligations to attend to.

Twilight also got to experience another wave of fame. While the specifics of the gate project were not public knowledge, it wasn’t like the existence of magic had ever been doubted on this Earth. The motions of the sun and moon were enough to prove that to everyone. The sudden existence of a race that had been previously thought to be mostly extinct made worldwide news. Efforts began to be put forward to connect a telegraph cable through the Chaotic Wilds that surrounded Equestria. So far that was looking to be a difficult proposition. Everyone knew the Diamond Authority would be able to do it, but they were not known for cooperating with the other races.

In essence, Equestria became the nation everyone wanted to know. The other princesses ended up with their hooves full, scrambling to manage meetings and political agendas of competing nations. Meanwhile, Twilight explored and made friends. That was her job. She wasn’t quite ready to take a governing role. Like Equestria itself, she was young, a child in many ways. New, important, sparkly, but not really a big player on the world stage.

The average population of Equestria took the news in stride. They had known for a long time that other nations had to exist outside their borders, there were too many legends for that not to be the case.

Historians of the time would have told anyone who asked that Equestria was just another part of the ongoing Age of Connection, where all those peoples hidden behind impassable barriers were contacted by the more civilized races and brought into the fold of globalization. Equestria would just be a name on a list, alongside the Mushroom People, the Cephalopod Embodiment, the Inklings, and the Boreals.

Those historians would eventually be proven very, very wrong. But that’s not for several decades, and this story’s not about that.

This story’s about what happened six months after first contact was made with America.

“Isn’t it nice how we can just do things shorthoof?” Pinkie asked.

“What?” Twilight asked, confused.

“I mean, this!” She pointed at the Australian desert they were standing in, featureless except for occasional pieces of brush and cacti the size of redwood trees. “We didn’t have to take one of Cherry’s haphazard flying machines over the Chaos, didn’t have to make a boat to cross the ocean, and didn’t have to walk for days to get out here! It’s just zoop, zoop, BAM! Everyone should always travel by gate!”

“Only Furshi’s gate and ours are publicly accessible,” Fluttershy pointed out. “Not very good for tourism.”

“This gate’s fine,” Starlight pointed out. “Not like anyone owns these wilds.”

“Yes, but people don’t own things for a reason. Like, um, giant monsters.”

“I can’t believe the idea of ‘giant monster’ doesn’t terrify me anymore,” Rarity said with a chuckle. “I worry more about Sweetie Belle trying to follow us than anything. She’s really curious about our adventures.”

“Aren’t all the crusaders?” Fluttershy asked.

“Well, of course, but there’s something different about Sweetie’s zeal.”

“Maybe she’s gonna grow up to be like us!” Pinkie suggested. “Searching for new gates and exploring the great unknown! Destiny!”

“Destiny…” Sunset said, furrowing her brow. She had taken to keeping her human form – it was always handy to have someone with fingers around. She didn’t get as much use as a translator anymore – rarely did they go somewhere people spoke English that wouldn’t just let them use the translation spell. “How far do you think the Tree’s reach extends?”

“I don’t know,” Twilight said with a shrug. “It sent us to America to make allies. That’s the only time it’s sent us out very far. Maybe it can only do so much?”

“Like Arceus?” Sunset asked.

“Sunset!” Rarity chided. “I’m so sorry you had to hear that Starlight, Sunset was being so inconsiderate a-”

“It’s okay,” Starlight said with a sigh. “I wasn’t really that… into the gods, you know? Discovering they were just strong beings wasn’t that… bad.”

Fluttershy looked like she wanted to say something, but shut herself up.

“Nonsense, it was a world-shattering revelation! Why, I myself had a few days of…” Rarity noticed everyone was looking at her. “And I’m rambling. Apologies…”

Sunset stooped down to look at Starlight. “I’m sorry.”

Starlight shook her head. “You were just asking a question. It’s a legitimate one. Is the Tree of Harmony on the level of the gods or not? I don’t know. I know Discord isn’t, but nobody really knows what Discord is.”

Pinkie grinned. “Yeah! And everyone outside Equestria who meets him gets absolutely terrified!”

“I don’t know why,” Twilight admitted. “Every nation has at least one of the gods or two on their side. Even us.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “Solgaleo and Lunala haven’t been particularly happy with you revealing Equestria to everyone, I wouldn’t count on them for support.”

Twilight sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I know…” She shook her head. “Look at us, arguing about politics and religion.”

“Same thing, really,” Starlight observed.

“Eh, true.”

“Hey, at least we aren’t America!” Pinkie said. “Have you seen the scream-fests over there?!”

“It’s not that bad,” Fluttershy said.

Pinkie pulled out a calendar that said 1889. “…Yet.”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. She had no idea what that meant and it was probably best not to ask.

“Anyway, have we actually found anything?” Rarity asked. “We’ve been walking in this desert for a while and I must say nothing of interest has happEEEENED!” The ground gave out beneath her and all her friends, depositing them in a metallic room with many screens lining the walls.

Screens.

Twilight grinned. “Yes! Yes! We found an Ancient structure!” She ran her hoof across one of the semi-holographic screens. “Oh, reveal to me your secrets, digital wonder! How do you bring the floating light to your face?”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “That’s a good question. I can try to answer it if we bring one back to the lab. But I didn’t have any luck reverse engineering the last one, and neither did the American Army, so…”

“Shush. A girl can dream. One day… One day we will understand these marvels.”

“I have my doubts,” Starlight said, poking a screen with her hoof that displayed letters she couldn’t read. “We still have no clue how the gates work, or how the paperweights-”

“Dialing devices,” Twilight corrected out of reflex.

Starlight ignored her. “-communicate with the gates. We don’t even know how many gates there are! Or a reliable way to find more.” She shrugged. “We haven’t even scratched the surface of what the Ancients did. And the gods sure aren’t of any help.”

Sunset clearly wanted to say something, but she bit her lip.

“Hey, this screen is different!” Pinkie said, pointing at one with a pink sugar-skull on it.

“Curious…” Twilight said. “I wonder if this is important in some way.”

“Good guess, Amiga!” the screen said in mostly English, surprising Twilight.

“What…? Are you an Ancient Gem?!”

“Ahahaha! Close, but no cigar. Name’s Sombra and I’ll be taking… this!”

The floor opened up beneath Sunset, dropping her down. Twilight activated her magic, but it was already too late – a suspiciously Sunset-sized metallic cylinder shot out of the ground and into the sky.

Where a fully functioning Ancient Airship with sugar-skull markings picked it up.

“Adios!” Sombra said, triggering a sonic boom as she blasted off into the sky.

Twilight stared after Sunset, mouth agape.

~~~

“So, Jack…” Daniel said, folding his hands together. “I was just over in Equestria…”

O’Neill didn’t like where this was going. “Yes…?”

“And I sort of told them about the slave square.”

“...Why?”

“Because Sunset just got kidnapped by Sombra.”

O’Neill put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “Oh boy…”

“And I told them we’d try to get her.”

“Of course we will. We’re nice that way. And we always need another excuse to blow that place up.”

“SG-1?”

“Yep.” O’Neill folded his hands together. “…You didn’t tell them the coordinates did you?”

“Uh, no, of course not.”

“Now I’m pretty sure I know why we detected Discord here a minute before you walked in.”

“…Just ‘detected’?”

“He was being stealthy.”

“…Unusual.”

“Very,” O’Neill said, tapping his fingers together. “How easy would it be for him to find the coordinates?”

“The databases are magically secured, you know that. Not even he could get in there without triggering an alarm.”

“And, say, if he asked a dialer for them?”

“…I mean, he’d have to convince them he had clearance…”

“While looking like me?”

Daniel blinked. “Oh.”

“You should probably get over there before they kill themselves.”

“Riiight away.” He paused as he stood up. “Though I’m not sure they’d be as helpless as you seem to think.”

“They can kick ass but if anyone so much as looks at them nicely they’re instantly trusting. Go keep them from doing something really, really stupid.”

“Yessir.”

~~~

Sombra brought Sunset out of the box with a grin. “Ah, you stayed awake the entire time!”

Sunset leaped out in a combat stance – but a simple shock-dart forced her to collapse to the ground. “…Ow…”

“Yeeeah, I figured you would be one of the fiery ones,” Sombra said, dusting her hands off. “Anyway, I’m Sombra, you’re Sunset Shimmer, and I bet you’ll fetch a good price.”

“…And here I thought all you civilized people had outlawed slavery.”

Sombra shrugged. “Depends on where you are, amiga. Frankly I find it kind of disgusting, but hey, those Juggalo trolls have a looooot of cash.” She slapped a pair of handcuffs on Sunset. “You’re lucky though, you probably won’t be bought as a slave, unless someone takes a shine to your appearance. Your market value is all in here,” she tapped Sunset on the head. “Equestrian scientist secrets, the coordinates of several gates, good stuff.”

“I’m a high-level empath with excessive mental defense, that’s not going to be easy to get.”

“Not my problem,” Sombra said. “I could probably do it with all this tech I have laying around, but eh, not worth it.”

“…You’ve figured out the secrets of the Ancients and you use it for petty gain. Disgusting.”

“Yep!” Sombra shrugged. “But it’s the best way to figure out how the world really works. There’s so much beyond even the gods… My goal in life is to figure out what those things are. And you’re another step on the way to that. You should be honored!”

“Screw you.”

“This sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship!” Sombra said with a laugh.

She was joking at the time, just to be clear.

Sombra dragged Sunset away from the Ancient ship and toward a bunch of cages with people inside. “Don’t get too attached to the others, you’re going on first.” She waved cutely at the fiery woman and then went to take care of the ‘showing’.

The first thing Sunset did was try to wriggle her way out of the handcuffs. That didn’t work. “Gah. What I wouldn’t do for some magic right now…”

“You know magic?” an old man asked from the cage he was in.

Sunset looked up at him. “Well, if I’m a unicorn. I’m not a unicorn right now, so I can’t do it.”

“Hmm… all beings have magic within them.”

“Yeah, well, I haven’t really had much luck with human magic aside from…” she decided mentioning the empathy geode was probably a bad idea. “Artifact. Stuff.”

“…Ah. Would you like to hear some advice from an old man anyway?”

“Sure.”

“You’d be surprised how much proper breathing helps.” He rocked back and forth a few times – and then shot fire out of his nose.

Sunset chuckled. “Nice.”

“You try.”

Sunset shrugged. She focused on her breathing, moved back and forth a bit, and then breathed out.

She burned her chin. “OUCH!”

“Oh, I figured…”

She rubbed her chin. “Apparently not as a human! Or if I am I’d need to ace the fire absorbency spell first a…” She paused. “I did it! Yes! I have fire!”

“Sadly, fire is not a magic that will help you here.” The man shook his head. “Metal everywhere.”

“Yeah. …I’m Sunset.”

“Iroh.”

“I’m in for knowing too much. You?”

“My brother wanted to get rid of me.”

“…Geez…”

“It is a long standing feud between us. Nothing you should concern yourself with.” He smiled sadly. “You’re about to have much bigger problems.”

“What d-” Sombra grabbed Sunset by the cuffs. “You’re up!” She dragged Sunset out onto a stage lit by white tube-like lights Sunset had never seen before. The stage looked clean, futuristic, and more than a little gaudy with all the sparkling sugar-skulls everywhere.

The people at the foot of the stage did not look the part. They were a mix of humans and trolls in usually dark, menacing clothes. The stage itself was in a much larger, vaguely square cavernous shape filled with hundreds of other people of the sort. There were laughs, there were screams, and there looked to be blood everywhere that wasn’t the stage.

Fun… Sunset thought to herself, gulping.

“Say hello to Sunset Shimmer of Equestria everyone! Pony-to-human transracial! One of the new magical experts with maaaaaany gate coordinates in her mind. Let’s have an opening bid – remember, you don’t have to pay in U.S. currency, but you better know how much yours converts for! LET THE BIDDING BEGIN!”

“Twenty,” a bearded man said.

Sombra frowned. “Okay, Ba’al, I’ll take the bid. But if you start having a bid war with one of your clones again I will run you out of here.”

“Thirty!” a purple-blooded troll said.

A woman in a white dress snorted. “You all suck. Eighty!”

“A hundred,” Ba’al added.

“A hundred thirty-five!”

“Hundred forty.”

“Hundred forty-five,” Ba’al said, narrowing his eyes.

“Ahem!” a new, dignified voice said. “I must say, you’re all being absolute imbeciles. You don’t understand the true worth of this young lady.” There was a pause. “A thousand dollars.”

Sunset finally saw who was making the bid for her. It was a white unicorn mare in a dirtied leather jacket decorated with real skulls. She had an eyepatch and a hat with a feather sticking out of it that somehow seemed both menacing and fashionable.

It was the best costume Sunset had ever seen on Rarity. Heh. They found me.

Sombra looked from Rarity to Sunset and shrugged. “I’ll take the bid! Anyone want to beat that?”

“Two. Thousand!” Ba’al shouted, grinding his teeth.

“Oho! It appears someone else has understood her value as well!” Rarity said with a menacing laugh. “Trying to play the slow game were you, hoping to get a deal? Well, no dice. Just because a mare jumps once doesn’t mean she can’t do it again.” She turned to Sunset. “Ten thousand.”

It must really help to have access to Twilight’s treasury.

Sunset noticed a few people in the crowd were looking at Rarity with greedy eyes. At first Sunset was concerned, but then she noticed Starlight in a hood moving through the crowd, casting drowsiness spells on anyone who seemed like they might try something. It was a surprisingly good plan.

“Eleven thousand,” Ba’al said, growling.

“Oh you just don’t give up!” Rarity rolled her eyes. “Twenty thousand.”

“Thirty!”

“Fifty!”

“Nobody has that much money!” Ba’al shouted.

“Clearly, you do,” Rarity pointed out. “So why is it so surprising I do?”

“I am Lord Ba’al!”

“And I’m a fancy little unicorn who wants this beautiful young thing very badly.”

“Go against me and you will regret it…”

Rarity laughed. “Ba’al, honey, dear, don’t flatter yourself. Once you find out who I am you’ll find that I’m not exactly easy to touch.”

“I will bring ruin to your entire society.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the type to do that regardless.” She turned to the stage. “He hasn’t bid in a while, does that mean I win?”

“SIXTY THOUSAND!”

“Seventy~!”

“EIGHTY!”

“Oh, look at that, I’m forced to jump forward with my endless supply of cash. Woe is me…” She smirked. “A hundred and fifty thousand.”

“A-” Ba’al stopped for a moment. He looked around, catching the eye of one of his clones. He let out a grow and clenched his teeth. He opened his mouth.

“Three million, two hundred sixty-six thousand, nine hundred forty-two,” a cobalt-blooded troll said, holding up her hand. “And nineteen cents.”

Rarity, Ba’al, Sombra, Sunset, and the entire crowd turned to stare at her in disbelief.

“I win, right?” she asked.

Neither Rarity nor Ba’al said anything.

“Good.” She flipped them off with a smirk. “Have fun figuring this one out! Woo!” She jumped onto stage. “How about we go back and you give me all the details about this little bacon-headed monkey?”

“Sure,” Sombra said, blinking. “Next auction will be in a few minutes people! Stick around!” She shuffled Sunset and the troll to the back. “You better actually have that money,” Sombra said.

The troll shrugged. “I could have miscounted. But it’s at least three million something.” She pulled out an eight ball, smashed it, and suddenly the room was full of money.

Sombra blinked. “Geez… Where did you get all this?”

“I’ve been stealing money from Ba’al. Every Ba’al. Because he ticked me off last week. And fuck him.” She stooped down and smashed Sunset’s cuffs off. “And you are free to go. You’re welcome.”

Sunset blinked. “You… what?”

The troll grinned. “Vriska Serket, professional spiderbitch, Rebellion Agent, and the best fucking hero around. You’re welcome!”

Sunset blinked – and laughed. “Thanks. Though you probably didn’t have to go through all this trouble. That white unicorn in the audience was one of my friends.”

Vriska smirked. “Ah, the delicious irony. I just messed everything up for everyone. Fuck yeah.”

“Everyone is going to be trying to kill you now,” Sombra told Vriska. “That out there? That was stupid.”

“Definitely,” Vriska said with a laugh. “But I’m getting out of here tonight. Rebellion’s moving out to go give ol’ Condy the one-two an-” She blinked. “And I just got a psychic message saying they had to leave early due to a compromise. Fuuuuck. Just my luck lately…”

“If my friends are here, they have a way out,” Sunset said. “We’ll just have to get to them without gett-”

Ba’al appeared before them in a burst of dark, purple, eldritch magic. “This is my money. The girl is mine.”

Sombra raised an eyebrow. “Yeeeeah, no. I mean, I could be the paragon of fair trade and commerce right now, but I don’t feel like it. These people? Nice. You? Pretty evil. So you can go jump on out of here before I have the Ancient turrets dismantle you.”

Ba’al reached out a hand and tore a panel off a nearby wall. A panel made out of Ancient metal, the sort of material the gates were made out of.

They could withstand high-yield explosives.

Sombra blinked. She activated the turrets, bombarding Ba’al with hundreds of little lasers. Each of these lasers had enough energy to kill an elephant. Ba’als body didn’t survive.

But whatever the purple eldritch mist was did survive. And it moved to a new Ba’al body, teleporting right into the room.

“Ariba…” Sombra muttered.

“Do you surrender them?”

“At this point I’m just curious to see how angry I can make you.” Sombra pressed another button and crushed the new Ba’al with a box hanging from the ceiling. “COME ON GIRLS, IT’S RUNNING TIME!”

“The slave dealer is on my side now,” Sunset mused. “…Sure.”

“Less talking, more running!” Vriska said.

The three of them scrambled through the high-technical backstage, trying their best to simply get away from Ba’al.

“Ship sweet ship!” Sombra said, grinning. “I can get us into orbit with this baby! Nobody will be able to touch us!”

Three Ba’als dropped from the ceiling, the dark purple energy wafting off them.

“…I had to open my mouth.”

Vriska took out the fluorite octet and rolled them, prompting an attack from three-dozen rabid weasels. The Ba’als’ energies burned them up.

“I really gotta stop rolling when the tide has turned bad,” Vriska muttered.

The three Ba’als held out their hands, aiming to disintegrate Sombra and Vriska. Sombra had a shield that protected her, Vriska did not. Instead Vriska had a little help from a pink blur with suction cups on her hooves.

Pinkie bounced back from the hit like a spring, but was otherwise fine. “Aha! You tried to kill suction cup pony! You failed!”

Rarity descended from the ceiling, brandishing a magic-construct rapier. “And you hooligans will continue to fail!” She pointed her sword at the middle Ba’al. “I have no idea if you’re the same one as before, but you really had this coming.”

“You are nothing compared to us.”

“True, true, I’m only decent with this thing and that terrifying purple aura of yours is quite chilling. But I’m not the one you should be worried about.”

Starlight and Twilight fired their lasers from the side at full power, hitting the three Ba’als in sequence and smashing them against a nearby wall. The two mares hoofbumped.

“I say…” Rarity said, walking over to the Ba’als. “Are they going to be okay?”

“Why the fuck do you care!?” Vriska shouted.

“We’re not murderers, unlike the two of you,” Rarity said judgmentally. She examined them. “Hmm… They do seem to be breathing, b-”

A white snake-worm jumped out of one of the Ba’als mouths, lunging for Rarity with a skree. She screamed in panic – but was saved by a bullet shot at just the right time.

Daniel lowered his weapon. “…I was not expecting that to actually work.”

Rarity turned to him, blinking rapidly. “…You… you saved me. Thank you, Daniel, I don’t know what to say…”

“Apologize for stealing our info.”

“…Stealing?” Rarity said, cocking her head. “Starlight found the place through a spell!”

Starlight laughed nervously. “Ahahah, yeah, about that, the spell miiiight have just been Discord and it miiiig-”

“Starlight!” Twilight shouted, aghast. “How could you!?”

“Look, there were a lot of factors involved and we r-”

Sunset had been standing still for so long that Ba’al was able to get an eldritch teleport lock on her. She appeared in the middle of a golden room with a Ba’al pointing a zat gun at her. He fired – but she twisted out of the way and launched a stream of fire out of her hands, burning his face significantly. “…Huh. Guess that worked.”

“Your victory is short lived, Sunset Shimmer.”

Sunset whirled around again, unleashing fire – but what met her wasn’t an ordinary Ba’al. He was wearing a mask shaped like a purple heart with spikes coming out of its sides. Sunset knew instantly this wasn’t Ba’al, or anything even close. “Wh…”

“I am MAJORA… And you have something I want…” She reached out a hand toward Sunset. “Your mind… Your destiny… One of the most powerful there is. You cannot see it now, the other gods cannot see it for they do not look, but I can see it… You can be of great use to me…”

A goddess. I’m pretty screwed… unless…

“Hey, you… you haven’t even explained what your plan is yet! Are you really just going to get it done like that? Like…” She looked around awkwardly until she found something interesting. “What’s that red crystal?” She pointed at the crystal laying nearby.

“None of your concern.”

Naturally, the moment Sunset had visually registered the red crystal she thought she knew what it was. It was the red woman at the start of this whole adventure. The Gem. Sunset leaped away from Majora and grabbed the Gem in her hands, willing all her empathic power into the little crystal. She didn’t even bother with a direct interface – just power her up and hope something worked.

Nothing happened.

“Serve ME!” Majora demanded, touching an eldritch tentacle to Sunset’s head.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

One moment, Majora was trying to interface with Sunset. The next, she had been punched several dozen times and Jotaro was standing there.

Sunset got the sneaking suspicion he wouldn’t last long against Majora, so she returned to the Gem. “Come on… Come on…”

“GET YOUR HANDS OFF THE SIRE DIAMOND!”Majora demanded. Sunset felt it hit her mind like an order – but her necklace flashed red, and she resisted the command.

“ORA ORA ORA ORA!” Jotaro shouted as something invisible punched Majora back. She unleashed a tendril of eldritch energy, but he was suddenly behind her and all of her bones were broken.

The body was currently useless. Another Ba’al came in to don the mask instead, but Jotaro kicked him in the crotch. Another Ba’al shot him with a zat gun, but Jotaro just wouldn’t go down.

Not until Majora’s Mask itself floated into the air and hit Jotaro in the back of the head, forcing him to the ground.

It was this moment that Sunset made a successful connection to the Sire Diamond. It lit up and created the four-armed being Twilight had reported.

“Help us,” Sunset pleaded.

The Sire Diamond did. She summoned her staff weapon and pointed it at Majora’s Mask.

Majora shrieked in fear – and teleported away in an instant.

“…She just… Ran?!”

The Sire Diamond recalled her weapon. “I was unaware she was one of the gods. I expected to be useless.”

“You are now,” a Ba’al said, leveling a zat gun at the two of them. “There’s dozens of us and only two of you. Surrender n-”

A giant salmon appeared in the hallway, knocking them all down to the ground.

“HAHA! YES!” Vriska shouted, running into the room. “I got my luck back! Sweetness!”

Everyone else ran in. Twilight pulled Sunset into a hug. “We were so worried!”

“Hey, it looks like it’s fine now,” Sunset said. “…Wait, how’d you find me?”

“Followed the Ba’als,” Vriska said, pointing at herself with a sly grin. “You’re welcome again.”

“And I remember you!” Twilight said, addressing Sire Diamond. “You were in my castle for a split second!”

“She has the power to make gods flee,” Sunset said. “…Ba’al was apparently being controlled by an entity known as Majora.”

Vriska blinked. “No idea. Sombra, you got anything?”

Sombra was nowhere to be seen.

“…Figures,” Vriska muttered. “Well, we should probably all get out of here before something goes terribly, terribly wrong again.”

“We can take you all home with us,” Twilight offered. “You can never have too many friends!”

“We still have to deal with Starlight…” Daniel said.

“…Oh. Right. I’ll j-”

There was a loud thump.

“Twilight, can you teleport us back to the gate…?” Rarity asked.

“Yes,” Twilight said. She teleported everyone – except the Ba’als – back to the gate.

The only problem was there was a full grown dragon wearing Majora’s Mask sitting over the gate. She took one look at Sire Diamond and poofed her with a quick eldritch claw. “You will have no quarter here…” In Majora’s free claw, there was an orb with a spinning orange spirograph.

Everyone readied for a fight with an eldritch dragon. They wouldn’t stand a chance – all it would take was a roar. A single roar of madness that would destroy everything.

Except Vriska went and did something stupid.

She tried to steal the orange orb.

This turned out to be exactly what she needed to do. The Ancient device registered that she was the one it was meant to find. That she was the true master… of Light. The orb became like liquid and surrounded her.

“…WHAT!?” Majora said, clearly having no understanding of what was going on.

“I don’t have a fucking clue,” Vriska said, her eightfold eye sparkling with the light of an orange sun. “But it’s gonna be aw-”

Majora slammed her into the ground, flat.

Pinkie facehooved. “Like a pancake…”

Upon removing the claw, Majora was surprised to find that Vriska wasn’t dead - though the troll was incapacitated. “Ouch…”

“Great, the super convenient powerup did nothing,” Rarity said, biting her lip. “What now?”

“Uh… can we talk about this?” Twilight asked sheepishly. “I’m sure we can come to some sort of agreement!”

“No,” Majora said, she opened her dragonic mouth and prepared to scream.

And this is the moment Sombra crash-landed her airship into the dragon, slicing it in half.

“Bullseye!” Sombra announced through her ship’s intercom. “Dra-GONE, am I right?”

“That was bad and you should feel bad!” Vriska shouted.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered from his injured position.

Majora’s Mask floated into the air. It looked like it was ready for another round, just her versus them.

Except Sunset had managed to bring Sire Diamond back. The red Gem pointed her staff at Majora. “Die.”

Majora teleported away before the anti-eldritch beam could touch her.

Somehow, Sombra’s Airship was still functional. It lifted itself out of the pile of dragon guts. “Well, thanks for the money, Vriska! Adios!” She blasted through the caverns to one of the exits.

“…I’m not entirely sure what happened today,” Starlight said.

Pinkie shrugged. “Stuff.” She pulled out the dialing device and created a connection to the purple gate. “Let’s go home. We can deal with all the other stuff later.”

Sunset raised a hand to stop her. “Actually th-”

Pinkie rolled her eyes, ducked behind a rock, and pulled Iroh out. “There. Happy?”

“What the…?” Vriska said, staring in disbelief. “How?”

“It’s Pinkie being Pinkie,” Rarity said, rolling her eyes.

Everyone shrugged and walked through the portal.

“Why are you all acting like this is normal!?” Vriska shouted. Nobody paid her any mind.

Fluttershy was waiting on the other side of the portal.

“Oh thank goodness, I was so worried! I-” she paused. “…Are you all covered in dragon blood?”

“Yes,” Twilight said. “…Wait, how do you know what dragon blood looks like?”

“Well… uh… Spike was… it’s not important. What did you do to the poor dragon?”

“We didn’t do anything,” Sunset said.

“Sombra crashed a fucking Ancient Airship into it!” Vriska announced with a grin. “And it was awesome!”

Fluttershy gasped. “That’s horrifying!”

“It was trying to eat us…” Twilight said, clearly trying to rationalize the events in her head and failing. She put a hoof to her face. “How about everyone go wash themselves up, get some sleep, and then we deal with whatever this means in the morning. Fluttershy, you can show our new Gem friend around since you didn’t deal with all the… mess the rest of us did.”

“…Okay,” Fluttershy agreed. “Um, I think we have a spare room this way…”

“Show me,” Sire Diamond said, as if it was an order.

“…Yes ma’am…”

~~~

And so things were resolved, one way or another. Starlight’s charges were dropped because everyone was suddenly freaking out about a god fusing with the Ba’al conglomerate to do something unknown. Virtually everything else was forgotten in the ensuing fallout, so Twilight was going to have to deal with Starlight herself – at a later time.

For a day she just wanted to process everything that had happened.

Two nights after the adventure to the slave square, Twilight couldn’t get to sleep. So she dragged herself out of bed and muttered to herself until she found herself on the balcony of her castle, looking at the stars.

The stars, always the same no matter who saw them. Sure, the northern hemisphere generally got to see different stars, but if they both looked at Sirius, they would see the same arrangement of stars around it.

The night sky was what bound them together, in a sense. Even all the isolated tribes and nations that lived within wilds like Equestria itself…

She could sense the world was changing. Deep inside her, she knew it was changing. At first she thought ‘of course, Equestria is never going to be the same with all this’. But then she realized the feeling was more than that – much, much more. The world was on the cusp of entering a new era.

She wasn’t sure what to feel about that.

Twilight let out an overdramatic sigh and leaned harder on the railing, letting her eyes get lost in the sky. What did it all mean, if anything? What could be said about it, really?

The entire adventure had been a little ridiculous…

What was her life coming to?

“Heya Twi!” Pinkie said, appearing out of seemingly nowhere. “What’s up with you?”

“GAH! PINKIE! Don’t DO that!”

“Sorry, but I couldn’t just walk in through the castle doors! Your guards wouldn’t like it. …I still can’t believe you actually have guards now!”

“Celestia insisted,” Twilight said, smirking.

“Surprise, surprise. You still haven’t answered my question though – what’s up with you?”

“I was just thinking about… About how ridiculous everything was.” Twilight looked into the distance. “By chance, we find the Ancient outpost. Then, by chance, Sombra happens to be there and grab Sunset. And by chance once again, Starlight just happens to be stealing so she can get the coordinates to a place the US won’t give us. The US also sends a team, Vriska shows up and messes with everything because of her grudge, then Majora was there, and Ba’al, and everything seemed to go just wrong and then just right when Sombra decided to smash the ship on the dragon…” She shook her head. “Do you have any idea how unlikely that all is?”

“I dunno. I don’t do math.”

“Astronomical,” Twilight answered for her. “The chances of all that happening was just… ridiculous.”

“And so were the sequence of events that led us to defeat Tirek,” Pinkie said with a shrug. “It’s nothing new, Twilight, our lives have always been like that.”

“I mean… yeah… but it feels different.”

“It isn’t, not really,” Pinkie said with a smirk. “Just more adventure.”

“I just…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t sit well with me.”

“Hey. It’s destiny, or something.” Pinkie smirked. “We’re the Elements of Harmony. Do you expect normal things to happen to us?”

Twilight blinked – then chuckled slightly. “…That’s a good point.”

“You think about things too much, Twi,” Pinkie said with a giggle. “Turn that brain off every now and then, would you? It’s what night time is for.”

“Some of the best work ever done gets accomplished in the dead of night,” Twilight countered.

“Hmm… True, true. But you’re not working right now. So actually go sleep so you can work in the morning.”

Twilight yawned. “Yeah. Pinkie… since when did you get so wise?”

“Coincidence,” Pinkie giggled.

“Heh. Goodnight. See you in the morning.” She stretched her wings and went inside.

The moment Pinkie was sure she was out of earshot, Pinkie’s smile dropped. “We’re not supposed to have that.” She looked up at the stars. “This story’s not about the Narrative. We can tell it without that. I’m the only one who knows here. I don’t need to mirror the story out there that closely.”

I dropped the cloak I had on myself, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you would notice me.”

“I did,” Pinkie said, scrunching her muzzle. “And you’re causing a leak, and you know it. The gods are probably watching, and you just being… you will mess stuff up!”

“You may not understand this, Pinkie, but the things I write in my notebook ensure that will not happen. Your story will go untouched. I was just here to observe. To see the world…”

“Small place, huh?”

“It’s dense. Unimaginably so.”

“You won’t find anything here,” Pinkie said, shaking her head. “Just because we’re less important doesn’t mean you can get closer to us.”

“Do you even know what you’re saying Pinkie?”

“Not really? It’s just… coming to me and it feels right. You should go to your Songs of the Spheres, where you actually matter.”

“They won’t be ready for me for a while.”

“And we’ll never be ready for you. Our story… isn’t a story about stories. It’s just a story.”

“Except right now.”

“Because you’re here,” Pinkie responded. “And because this is the moment you all look back.”

I blinked. Then I shook my head. “You know… For a second there I thought you might have known something I didn’t.”

Pinkie smiled sadly. “Yeah… Almost.”

I closed my notebook and put it away. “This is a very special world you have, Pinkie.”

“There are others like it.”

“Yes, I know. The worlds that mirror… The worlds that are images of the entire story…”

“Twilence, stop,” Pinkie said. “You’re sounding hungry.”

“…I don’t know the ending…”

“And if you look into our ending, it won’t be the ending you’re going to get. You can’t know.” Pinkie blinked. “…Why can’t you know?”

I smiled warmly and shook my head. “Two ponies of vast knowledge shouting at each other from opposite sides of a river bank… We both know exactly what we’re talking about, and we know nothing.” I shook my head. “Enjoy your life, Pinkie Pie. I won’t bother you again.”

And then I was gone.

I kept my promise. I never came back.

~~~

And I don’t know what happened to them. GM here, again, sorry, back to back with Twilence, should probably make that obvious.

On some scale, I know, because I know Songs of the Spheres. All the major villains will show up, though out of order. There’ll be some historic events – the World Wars, the Space Race, and the Steel Ball Run of course for all the Stands.

Then the power to defeat the gods will be unleashed. Will there be a war like the war for existence? I’m thinking not. That aspect of the story would be taken care of in the world wars. The Echo of the Earth would not be about the end of stories… but the culmination of one story. I don’t even know what the ending would be, but I know the heroes wouldn’t have to second-guess their own actions on several different levels just to make sure it was ‘likely’ to succeed. A world without ka awareness is much simpler.

But they existed, that’s for sure. And they lived a deep, complex, and long life.

A planet far, far too full of stuff for its own good.

~~~

Twilence’s Addendum:

The diminutive unicorn with the artificial horn stood on the moon, using her magic to keep the atmosphere. Behind her was the black gate, the only gate that existed off the surface of the Earth, near the very edge of the gates’ transmission ability.

Her name was Sweetie Belle. And she had colonized this cratered rock.

She looked down at the Earth. Just as beautiful as she remembered – green and blue mostly, but purple in a few places, and the weird messes of color that were the poles were always great to see.

The sun was nowhere to be seen. It had not made the trip with the Earth and its moon. The New World had decided the small ball of fire wasn’t necessary.

She looked up at the dozens of planets swirling across the sky. They attracted her like nothing ever had. Their mystery… Their power… Where had they come from? Why were they here? How were they moving?

…Why did she feel like her presence was so important?

She would later be told that the Earth and its Moon were the only planets in the entire New World not to experience any Dusting at all. Not a single person on either of the bodies had been lost during the collapse. Furthermore, the Earth and Moon hadn’t been separated, which was almost unheard of.

The belief that that was the reason she was special was wrong. She would not discover why for a long, long time, for they were far from Nucleon and the statue of Allure.

For this one moment though, standing on the moon and trying to take in the New World… she somehow felt at peace.

153 - What We Leave Behind

“Mayor Mlinx! Sir!”

Mlinx resisted the urge to let out a deep, exhausted sigh. “Yes?” he asked the reporter at the front doors. If she had only been a few seconds slower…

“Your popularity in the polls has been dropping and Mirador’s has been steadily increasing! What’s your response to your previously uncontested Mayorship being contested for the first time?”

“It’s a democracy, if they want her in charge I’m not going to complain. But she will have to bring her best to the political ring. I’m not going to simply give this seat up.”

“And what about her term-limit accusations?”

“The City has no established term limits, though no doubt if she wins they will be enacted.” He pulled the door open. “Now excuse me, I have business to attend to regarding my campaign.”

She wasn’t an excessively pushy reporter, so he got in without her tailing him. “Thanks for small miracles…” He walked up to the primary reception desk, where Nastasia was waiting for him.

“Not quite late, but cutting it close,” Nastasia said, glancing up from her watch. She pressed a few buttons, prepping the teleporter. “Meeting room is ready.”

Mlinx shook his arms to clean the carapace. He and Nastasia walked onto the pad and were instantly teleported a hundred floors up, to the skyscraper’s special meeting room. Usually this room was filled with leaders within the City and other important people, but today, it was mostly just Mlinx’s staff.

This was about the campaign, after all, and as much as they liked Mlinx the other leaders weren’t exactly devoted to him being the Mayor. His campaign was funded by the City government, not any private lender, so there wasn’t any big reason for them to get involved. It was just him, Rev, Nastasia, and a handful of others who handled most of the paperwork and scheduling.

“I think I already know the answer to this question given my little encounter outside a few minutes ago, but what’s the status of the campaign?”

“Not… great,” a Quartz Gem said, pressing a clicker to turn on a projector, showing a downward-trending graph. “Your popularity is dropping off.”

“That happened during the last election though, didn’t change anything,” Rev pointed out.

“Yes, but…” Quartz pressed a button, switching the slide to show a pale pink pegasus with a pastel blue mane. “You didn’t have any actual competition last time. Nobody was legitimately running against you that the crowd cared about. Mirador’s different. The people love her, she gives good speeches, and she might be able to overtake you if the trends continue.”

“She still going off about those term limits?” Mlinx asked.

Quartz nodded. “It’s one of the primary points she uses in your detriment. She only occasionally brings up your ‘hunter’ ideology and strong-arm methods, simply saying that you’ve served your time. …Mostly. We’ve got a few clips of her going off on you for the standard stuff.”

“What have we got on her?”

“Not all that much. She’s a pegasus from an unknown Equis who stumbled into the City in the second month. We did manage to get some files of her entry into the City, and learned she was part of the volunteer relief efforts in the English aftermath. After that she doesn’t do too much until six months ago, when she suddenly gets politically active and starts a small movement all centered around the whole ‘Reveler’ incident.”

Rev closed her eyes and let out an annoyed breath – she remembered that incident well. Lots of people had been very stupid with a lot of things, including a church that worshipped a bucket of noodles. It was one of the weirdest, stupidest things they’d dealt with and it had all been blown out of proportion because of how absurd it was.

You really had to be there.

“Family? Friends?” Mlinx asked. “Anything?”

“No family, all her friends are involved in the campaign.” Quartz paused for a moment. “And she has a lot of friends.”

“Mhm…” Mlinx sat back. “The people like her, that much I know. She has a good point with the term-limit talk, but her actual policy arguments seem lacking. ‘Encourage more Harmony and togetherness while allowing communities to preserve the ways of life they hold dear.’ Does she even have a policy for this?”

“Actually, yes,” Nastasia said, pulling a small book out of her coat pocket. “She’s outlined it all in here. A lot of it makes sense. I recommend taking some tricks from it after the election is over.”

“If we win,” Quartz pointed out. “Which we easily could not.”

“It’s not a big deal if we don’t,” Mlinx said. “I just worry that one policy of hers is not enough to truly run the City. The longer we have to work, the larger projects we can get completed. I’ve been trying to get the advanced relational network working for eight years and we still haven’t ironed out all the legal kinks.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “She could just end it, and then everyone still has to rely on Nala understanding what ‘discretion’ means.”

|> I have to take into account the desires of the seeker, the person being sought, and the people around them. It’s not a simple calculation like you all think it is.

“Still say we should just disable that,” Rev offered.

“Discussion for another time,” Nastasia said.

Mlinx nodded. “Right now, the campaign. Do we have anything I can do to strengthen my image without resorting to petty insults?”

“The Outreach Charity Event is coming up,” Rev said. “You could make your presence a little more well-known this time.”

“I don’t like making a big deal out of that…”

Nastasia shrugged. “If you’re a public figure, sometimes you have to be public to get things done.”

“It is morally gray,” Rev admitted. “I wouldn’t do it myself, even though I suggested it. You have to come to the conclusion yourself.”

Mlinx folded his hands together. “All right, do it. But give the charity more this time out of compensation.”

“You’re running your personal bank account a little thin,” Nastasia warned.

“It’ll last until election. Then I can worry about it.”

“…Fair enough. Regardless, we do still need to discuss the upcoming Networking Conference, which will take place at exactly ten…”

~~~

Mirador adjusted her glasses and ruffled her wings, taking a deep breath to calm herself. “Don’t worry, you got this…” She glanced in the mirror and decided she needed to loosen up her mane a bit, the natural curls were showing and she didn’t want those to be too obvious – it wouldn’t look as professional. With a swipe of her wing, she grabbed a magitech-infused comb that was able to press the strands of hair down so they wouldn’t spring up in the slightest.

She checked her suit to make sure it fit snugly – all four legs had level cuffs, her tail was carefully sculpted into a crescent shape, and the collar was folded back at the proper angle.

It always paid to look proper in this business.

She picked up one of her political buttons – a small thing with an animating image of her winking with the text ‘New Minds for the New World!’ on it. You couldn’t read the text from any reasonable distance away, but anyone who cared about Mirador’s campaign knew about that little slogan of hers.

Even she had to admit, it wasn’t really a solid part of her policy, but she found it was a little difficult to explain policy nuance within a simple slogan. So she just came up with something tangential and simple and everyone was loving it. Hey, at least it got them to listen to what she actually had to say. Plus, she looked cute on the pin. She liked that.

Someone opened the door. “You’re on in five.”

“Thanks!” Mirador said with a slightly nervous smile. She took a drink of water to make sure her throat was ready for the upcoming event. With a swift twist she trotted out of her room and through the front doors, arriving behind an outdoor stage that had been set up the night before. It wasn’t a complicated stage – but it wasn’t simple either. It was decked on all sides with bright orange, red, and black banners – the colors of the City. A large banner of Mirador herself was spread across the back of the stage, a much larger version of the ‘New Minds for the New World!’ slogan printed along the bottom.

Her campaign managers had tried to insist she look serious and contemplative in every one of her promotional materials. She’d said no – if she was going to run, she was going to run with a smile and a wink and if the people didn’t like it they could just kick her out of the race. So far, they hadn’t, so she was confident that had been a good decision.

There was already applause in the crowd that had gathered – the pre-show speech from one of Mirador’s aides had apparently gone well.

“And may I introduce the mare herself, Mirador!”

Mirador shook her aide’s hand and thanked her for the introduction. She trotted up to the podium and stood on her hind legs to better see the people she was addressing. “Hello everyone! I have to say, this is one of the largest crowds I’ve spoken to, and that’s saying something! I should be thanking you for taking time out of your day just to see me stand at a wooden box for an hour. That takes some commitment!”

There were a few chuckles in the crowd.

“And don’t think I’ve forgotten about all of you watching this from home – your eyes are just as important as everyone else’s. I look forward to reading what you have to say when this is over! Though if I’m a betting mare – and let’s be honest I’m running in this race so I kind of have to be – I’d say about ninety percent of it will be composed of rants, rants about those rants, and an endless slew of memes that’ll poke endless fun at me. Those are always the best. I don’t know what it is about self-deprecating humor but it just hits the spot.

“Unfortunately, I won’t be giving you as much material as usual, and I won’t be able to make as many of you smile, because the sad truth is there are times when the smiles have to stop and we have to talk about serious topics. I usually spend my time here talking about myself, my policies, and occasionally the current Mayor. Instead, I’m pushing all that aside to talk about a major issue within our society today.

“When you all faced Lord English – yes, you all, I wasn’t here yet – our leaders realized they couldn’t win. They saw that you, the average Civilian, had to be the ones to defeat Lord English. And you did! You proved yourselves that by being the least important you could become the most important and forge our own destiny! That was amazing! Something that had never been done before! You weren’t carried on in the sidelines, you were part of the story! You all got to be the heroes!

“The thing is… the leaders? They all recognized that you were important. That the New World should be about you, not them. And they really, really tried to do this. But I’m sorry to tell you this – they failed. You’ve gone right back to the same lives you had before – lives defined not by you, but by the heroes. At first glance, you think they’ve removed themselves from public eye and left the finer details of the City to us, but this isn’t the case!

“Mlinx is a hero, and he’s been our Mayor since we decided we needed one. Eve and Corona have jobs, yes, and Corona’s still under lockdown, but you always hear them giving their opinions on matters – political, socioeconomic, emotional, – they’re there. Corona may work in a workshop, but her responses to scientific papers are highly prized and change the field dramatically. Eve’s counsel is sought out by those who don’t need her services but just want to know how to make a decision. And Pinkie’s Party hasn’t even bothered to hide that they’re doing the exact same thing they’ve always been doing: being heroes and making first contact with other worlds.

“They haven’t let you have the world. You got a taste of it with English, but now you’re back to living in the shadows, the background, the ground level. You sit here where your lives are bent to the whims of those heroes with so much ka that their very words demand attention. This needs to stop – we need to get new people into office, people who aren’t heroes, people who will get people into the government who don’t have some sort of destiny demanding they should be there! We need to stop letting the ‘important’ and the ‘great’ talk for us, we need to be heard ourselves!” She raised a hoof into the air. “We need to shape our own destiny!”

There was a cheer from the crowd – and a couple boos, but Mirador had been expecting that.

After the cheers died down, she cleared her throat – she wasn’t anywhere near done with her speech. “Now, this doesn’t mean they’re bad people, they are our saviors after all, they just need to be reminded of the lesson they were supposed to learn…”

~~~

Mirador looked at a graph on her desk that showed the approval ratings.

Mlinx: 52%
Mirador: 42%
Other: 6%

“This is promising,” her assistant said, smirking. “Mirador, you could do it! The trends show Mlinx dropping like a stone, and you’re rising steadily!”

Mirador let out a short laugh. “Yeah… Yeah, I could do it. It really does look like it.” She pulled her assistant into a hug with her wing. “Look at that! We’re gonna make it into the big house and change everything!”

“I’m so excited! We should throw a party!”

Mirador held up a hoof. “Ah ah ah, hold your horses!”

She hugged her. “I am.”

Mirador rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. We’ll throw the party when we win – not sooner, not later. We’re not going to become laughingstock for premature celebration.” She paused. “Though that would be kinda funny…”

“Your memes are trending again.”

“Oh, what do we have this time?” Mirador asked, swiping her assistant’s phone away. On it was a picture of Mirador at the speech with the caption ‘Remove heroes! Trust me, I’m a hero!’

Mirador let out a short chuckle. “I could see how they think that. But I checked myself several times before the speech, always a negligible ka concentration. Continually.” She walked over to a desk and pulled a drawer open, pulling out her personal ka-sensing pen. She touched it to her front leg. “See, nothi-”

CAMERA: ON. SCENE FOCUS LEVELS.

“…Sassafras,” Mirador swore. “This could be a problem.”

“Think we could have Moly remove it? Or another Flower? Or Monika? Or…” She fell silent, knowing that wouldn’t likely work.

“This was inevitable and we knew it,” Mirador said, shaking her head. “The moment we gained any real traction, ka would have taken hold of us and turned us into its story. I’m not surprised, and you shouldn’t be surprised. I would have just… liked to have been my own person for a little longer, you know?”

“Should I schedule a press release?”

“Not yet…” Mirador said, furrowing her brow, thinking. “We’ll have to tell them eventually, but I don’t want to ruin the steam we’ve set up against their strong ‘destiny’. And we might be able to use this to our advantage here…” She nodded slowly. “We’ll see if the Flowers are willing to do anything – I’d bet not since that’s how they usually are – but you never know. But I think I have an idea on what to do if they don’t cooperate…”

“What?”

Mirador smiled warmly. “We play a game with them. A little tweak here, a prod there, I think I can get them effectively out of the race. Now that the story has ‘begun’ as it were, it’s time to take advantage of it.”

“Ah. What should I put on your schedule?”

“Nothing, I need it to be extra hush-hush. …On an unrelated topic, I should be able to make it to your daughter’s birthday now, so put that on the schedule.”

“But the dinner at Andoi?”

“Let’s be real, the people there are great, but they’re all voting for me already. I don’t think we need to oversell ourselves there. Your kid is important enough for me to do some postponing and shuffling around.”

“It’ll really mean a lot to her – thanks.”

Mirador winked. “Don’t mention it. Now, I have to go out for a while, but I don’t want people asking what I’m doing. Make sure Nala’s ‘find anything’ program is disabled for me.”

“It’s been disabled for weeks so you don’t get mugged.”

“Aw, you really think of everything!” Mirador tossed her mane back. “See you later! Call me if I’m about to miss a meeting or something.”

“Will-do!”

~~~

Eve completed another session with Starbeat and Vriska. They had managed to work through Vriska’s troll instincts endlessly asking her to brutally murder Starbeat. It had… taken over a year to iron them out even with the professional help and some medication, but Eve was happy to give them both a clean bill of health. They probably wouldn’t need to come to her much at all anymore.

“Took them almost eight years,” Eve commented to herself with a roll of her eyes. They took a break now and then with coming to Eve, but their relationship had been a very rocky one with a lot of drama, arguing, and conflict with each other. Eve was more than a little relieved that the real end was finally in sight.

She checked her schedule – a free period was next. She wondered if anyone would show up today or if she’d have another quiet period at the office. It was not something she could predict. One day there would be no one and she’d think the Songs of the Spheres books had finally stamped out her reputation, and then the next day there’d be too many people for her to talk to. It was like ka couldn’t make up its mind about what to do with her.

Now that she thought of that, it sounded silly, but it was rather satisfying to imagine the Tower getting confused about what to do with her. A tad amusing, at least.

She opened the doors to find exactly one pony standing there. Eve thought she looked familiar, like she’d seen the face somewhere important… but then she remembered. “Ah! Mirador. I wasn’t expecting you to show up here, ever.”

“I hope you actually listen to the whole of my speeches,” Mirador said, walking in. “I don’t want to paint you out as the bad guys, that’s just how everyone takes it.”

“I do listen all the way through, and I appreciate that you try to show the other side. But between you and me, you are kinda painting us out to be the bad guys.”

“Being the problem doesn’t make you bad…” Mirador said, waving her hoof in the air. “But that’s beside the point.”

“What is the point? I take it you’re not here for therapy.”

“No, I’m just curious about your opinion on a certain subject you can probably guess. Need to pick your brain and get a better idea.”

“What I think of us ‘controlling’ you?”

Mirador nodded. “Yes. That. Are you?”

“I don’t think we are,” Eve said matter-of-factly. “So much stuff happens in this City that we have no sway over.”

“That was the case in Merodi Universalis. What I’m saying is that we haven’t really changed that model. People like you become the leaders of the society and call the shots. Mlinx is in charge, and all you ‘heroes’ just have to say the word and people will come flocking to you. Even people like Trixie are getting vast success just because of their past and well-known names.”

“Her games are actually good, you know.”

“Starblah is really fun,” Mirador admitted. “But it’s just too convenient, like it’s always been.”

“It’ll change forcefully eventually,” Eve pointed out. “Even if we do have some effect on the way things are run here, it’ll go away over time. The cracks will let whatever you want through. I’ll be just like you.”

“Even in Earth histories, we still see inequality. What if you all still have seats of power when the City is ready to move to the future? You could keep us in an archaic world, one where there is no ka but the effects of it can still be felt through the way you think, act, and lead.” She raised an eyebrow.

Eve smiled warmly. “You have some good points. But in the ka-less sense, there wouldn’t be anything keeping us in power except ourselves, and if we were bad we would be replaced. And I still don’t think it’s a problem in the first place. Most of us are just celebrities and don’t actually lead anything. I’m not going to be telling the City how to run itself anytime soon. That’s mostly Mlinx’s job.”

Mirador was able to sense when she wasn’t getting through to someone. “Ah. Gotcha. I think I understand you a little better now.”

“Feel free to quote me, I don’t mind,” Eve said.

And that’s how you influence the world…

~~~

Corona, Roxy, and Jenny weren’t working in the workshop, for once. No, today they were working on a job in the middle of the field of roses around the Dark Tower. Currently, this project took the form of a circuit board larger than most busses with numerous glowing magical components.

“I’d love to see the phone this thing goes to,” Jenny said, walking by a capacitor larger than she was.

“Jenny, are you getting boot dust on the board?” Corona demanded, flipping up her welding mask.

“Yes, but this board is so big it doesn’t even matter.”

“This board is just as dense as the one in your phone! Every little line you see below is very important! Just wear the protective hypoallergenic boots!”

“I am. I stepped on a wire and, well, blood got everywhere.”

Corona groaned.

Roxy chuckled. “Hey, it’s lunch break anyway, we can fix it later. Or hope that the self-repair adjunct actually works.”

“Never depend on self-repair in something this complicated,” Corona said, jumping off the circuit board and onto a platform they had set up above the roses. None of them liked getting cut by impossibly-sharp flowers and bleeding everywhere.

To their surprise, Mirador was standing there waiting for them.

“Oh, hi!” Corona said with a smile. “Didn’t see y-”

“POLITICS! SKREE!” Jenny shouted, pointing at Mirador like she was the plague. “SKREEEEE!”

“…Is she okay?” Mirador asked.

Roxy kicked Jenny off the platform and into the roses below. “No, but that’s normal for her so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Or at all.”

“My… spleen…” Jenny whimpered from the ground.

“She’s fine,” Roxy insisted.

“What can we do for you?” Corona asked.

“I just wanted to drop by and have a chat with Corona if that’s okay. You can be here for it too, it’s not private.”

Corona shrugged, summoning a sub sandwich. “I don’t see why I can’t talk. I mean, I’m as annoyed by politics as the next guy, but I shouldn’t discredit you for that.” She stuffed the sub in her mouth and took the largest bite she could manage.

“I’m just curious what you think about my whole ‘hero’ business.”

“You are completely right and on the money,” Corona said matter-of-factly through her stuffed face.

Roxy blinked. “Hold on, what? She’s right?”

“Oh yeah,” Corona said, taking another bite. “We define this place without even trying. Even if all of us were to resign in any important jobs, we’d still shape the area. I mean, think about it, we’re here, people will listen to us, and we have a lot to say about a lot of things.”

“I don’t feel like I’ve been influencing everything.”

“You’re the Rogue of Void, you’re special.”

“…True…”

“Let me get this straight,” Mirador said. “You agree with me?”

“Yes. I am voting for you, by the way.”

“Oh, thanks! Hope Mlinx doesn’t mind.”

“Not really, he’s never been a fan of leading. Not that it’s stopped people from electing him.” She tapped a finger on her hip. “Hmm… Anyway, yeah, I agree. We’re doing too much to the City around us. I just don’t think your solution is going to work.”

“Hm?”

“Replace all the government with normal people and we’re still here,” Corona said, smirking. “And people will seek out our counsel regardless. You are right, all we have to do is say the word and people come running. The story loves us and will give us anything we need for the sake of achieving ‘closure’. It’s pretty crazy when you think about it.”

Roxy blinked. “…It is. I don’t think I’d call that defining the City, though…”

Jenny pulled herself up onto the platform and grunted. “It is. Trust me, technically the Beanstalk had a mayor and a bunch of actual leaders, but all my teams had to do to overrule them was say something. The ‘heroes’ have a lot more power than anyone realizes. It’s pretty awesome though.”

“It’s a bit hypocritical,” Corona said.

“Eh, it’s better for them, we heroes are better suited than them for the jobs by nature.” She kicked back and smirked. “They should be glad we’re leading them as long as we can.”

Roxy shoved her off the platform again. “Tsk tsk tsk. So prideful.”

Corona shrugged. “I’m just thinking whatever ‘damage’ we’re doing here is actually necessary to give everyone a buffer for entering the world without ka. Is that theory a little crazy? Yeah, for sure. But it’s the best I got. Sorry Mirador – I do hope you figure out how to mitigate it though. It’d be more appropriate if your people end up in control.”

“Thanks!” Mirador said with a smile. “And you’ve been very helpful – this has been an enlightening conversation.”

“…We’re done already?”

Mirador nodded. “Yep! That’s all I needed to know.” She spread her wings and flew off.

They’re opposites, like expected, but I think I can still count on them to act the same.

A smirk began to crawl up her face.

~~~

Mirador walked into my library.

In a literal sense. She ran right into the doors – they were locked and refused to open for her.

“Wh- hey! What gives?” She checked her watch. It was time for the library to be open; it wasn’t a weekend or holiday. And as far as she knew I hadn’t declared any vacation time or even something similar. But, lo and behold, the library door was locked. Sealed shut, keeping nosy little pegasi from getting in.

She put her face up to one of the windows and squinted her eyes. The lights inside were all off – except for one. This particular light was a ceiling spotlight shining down on a table in the center of her field of view. I sat at this single well-lit table, lazily reading a book.

“Hey!” Mirador shouted. “Twilence! I need to talk to you!”

I didn’t look up from my book.

Mirador took out her ka pen and performed a test. She twitched. “Hey, I know you can hear me! No amount of soundproofing can keep a scene hidden from you!”

I let out an exaggerated yawn and turned the page with my magic. I scribbled a quick note in the margin.

“Twilence, we need to talk. About ka, about what’s about to happen, about… Twilence, I know you can hear me. You can read these words as they’re happening! Before they’re happening!”

She was right, of course. I was perfectly aware she was standing at the window, shouting at me and making frantic movements. I could even see her out of the corner of my eyes every now and then. But I wasn’t about to give her what she wanted – as far as she was concerned I was so absorbed in this book I wasn’t looking at ka. Or listening to the knocks. Or tending to customers. In fact, I was so absorbed I had locked the library up so nobody could bother me!

Of course she wouldn’t buy it, but I was going to give her no evidence that anything else had been happening. Like, say, I simply knew what needed to happen and that was for me not to talk to her right at that moment.

“Twilence!” Mirador shouted. “Twilence, this is about the fate of the heroes in the city!”

If I hadn’t already known that, it would have given me pause. But I’d already read through this chapter and had the list pre-prepared for when it was needed. Nothing she could say could faze me unless she went off-script. I knew she wouldn’t.

“Get out here right now before I get an order for you to open the library! You’re government funded, you have to keep your doors open!”

In about three seconds she was going to realize that I, as a hero, didn’t have to do jack anything, because I had the power not to. Upon realizing this a disgruntled and disgusted expression appeared on her face. She turned tail and trotted away from the library, intent on finding someone else who might be of use.

The pegasus really was quite good at exploiting her current purpose in ka.

I just wasn’t going to let myself be part of it.

~~~

“…and that’s what cantalouping means,” Mattie finished explaining.

Burgerbelle stared at her with a furious blush and a gaze one would give an alien who spoke perfect French while tap dancing.

“What? You asked.”

“You’ve been dropping the word around waiting for someone to ask about it!”

“Heh. True.” Mattie smirked. “But hey, at least now you know more about the wide world of fruit terms!” She gestured at a fruit stand across the street. “Cantaloupe?”

Burgerbelle held up a sign that said “NOPE” and she noped right out of there.

“Eh, your loss. Wonder if they have some good quality cacti…” She trotted over to the market and began the art of shopping. Which, if you were Mattie, was only about a third actual shopping. Another third was dropping innuendos on people who had no idea what they meant. The last third was whatever else she happened to be thinking about at the time – today, for some reason, precious cinnamon rolls. Burgerbelle was probably rubbing memes off on her.

“Beautiful cactus…” Mattie said, lifting the plant into the air. “Too precious for this world, so pure…” She eyed the size closely and chuckled. “But not for loooooong~!”

“Ma’am, are you gonna serenade the cactus or buy it?”

Mattie let out an indignant ‘psh.’ “Balls to you, isn’t it obvious? I’m going to b-” a strange feeling swept across her – a chill that ran from the tip of her tail to her horn. She carefully set the cactus down and looked around, confused.

“Ma’am…?”

“Hold that thought…” She said, narrowing her eyes. No one else had felt that. Which meant it was either targeting her… or it was her Awareness kicking in. She performed a check – yes, she was on camera. It would have been nice to know more, but as every Pinkie from here to the South Pole liked to point out, Mattie wasn’t the best at Aware deductions.

Something was afoot, she knew that much. So, naturally, she would investigate.

It appeared to be something Raritys just did. Most of them had an eye for detail, so it was only natural. It would give her something to shove in that smug Sherlock’s face, too. Maybe.

She edited herself to the back of the market, poking her head into an alley. This is it. She slid along the wall, careful to stay out of sight of any open windows. As she moved further into the alley, she started to hear laughing.

It didn’t take long for her to identify where it was coming from – one of the first-floor buildings with particularly poor soundproofing. The door and windows were closed, but that wasn’t really stopping much of anything. The laughter was lucky no one was there to listen.

That is, no one but Mattie. She slid right under the exterior window, bonking her head on the frame. Luckily, the pony inside didn’t seem to notice – she just kept laughing.

She had no difficulty identifying the voice – Mirador. “Ahahahahahaaha! I’m going to do it! There’s nothing any of them can do to stop me! Ahahahahahaha!”

Gee, overselling it much?

Mattie heard some rustling of paper and some hasty hoof taps. “They have no idea what I have in store for them… They think I’m just some nobody, a pony from nowheresville that’ll give them the power… They know nothing. I’ll take power and I’ll show them all the true meaning of friendship!”

Crikey, you’ve been keeping that in for a while, haven’t you?

“I’ll accept the Mayorship… be inducted into office… give it a few days – to let them think everything’s the same as it always was – and then BAM! I’ll show them who I am!”

Mattie heard the ripping of clothes and decided she couldn’t not look. She poked her eyes slightly over the windowsill, looking in to see Mirador. Except… her mane seemed to be naturally curled, and her cutie mark was a red rook…

Nobody’s ever seen her cutie mark. And I recognize that one. It’s…

“They elected little ol’ Cozy Glow to be their supreme leader,” Mirador said with a menacing smile.

Mattie decided now was the time to edit herself out-of-frame and go tell someone about the diabolical plan. She didn’t need to see any more to be convinced.

Mattie chose Eve to hear the news first.

To say Eve was surprised to wake up with Mattie sitting at the foot of her bed was an understatement. “AUGH!”

Mattie rolled her eyes. “You really need to get more comfortable with yourself.”

Eve was clearly not a pony who woke up with patience. “What are you doing here!?”

“The short version is that Mirador is a version of Cozy Glow and her entire campaign is a conspiracy we need to stop.”

Eve blinked. “…Mirador?”

“I saw her cutie mark. The red rook. Her mane’s naturally curled and she presses it flat. Clearly, we have to do something to end this plot against the City.”

“Clearly…” Eve shook her head. “Do you have any evidence?”

“Let’s ask Scooter for the script,” Mattie said. “Or we can download the relevant memories out of my mind. Or both!”

“Evidence might not be enough all on its own…” Eve said, getting out of bed and starting to pace. “We need to get everyone together and decide what to do, how to resolve this without disturbing the peace – as much as that’s possible. Mlinx – agh, why didn’t you tell Mlinx first?”

“You think he’ll be able to accuse his political opponent of conspiracy? Ha, good luck with that, he’ll be tossed out of the room like a garbage bag.”

“Good point… We should keep him out of this so it doesn’t leave a mark on his reputation.”

Mattie shrugged. “You’re askin’ the wrong girl, I don’t know the next thing about politics. I just know who Mirador and Cozy Glow are. The same damn person.”

Eve nodded, pulling out her phone. “Hey, Corona? We might have a situation…”

~~~

Screens everywhere across the City buzzed to life the next morning, revealing Eve and Corona sitting in comfortable chairs.

“Hello, Citizens,” Eve said, smiling. “I’m Evening Sparkle,”

“And I’m Corona Shimmer,” Corona said. “We usually don’t address you directly like this, but since the political scene is up in arms at the moment, we decided we had to tell you directly. For what it’s worth, before today I supported Mirador.”

“And I support Mlinx,” Eve said.

“…Unfortunately we don’t get to keep that view on things,” Corona said, folding her arms. “It has come to our attention that Mirador is not who she says she is, and that she’s been planning conspiracy against the City ever since she arrived.” She pulled up a few sheets of paper. “This is a partial excerpt from the script of chapter 153 – What We Leave Behind, graciously provided by Scooter Pie. It tells the story of an event that took place yesterday. Mattie Belle, the Aware Rarity of Equis Ultra Fast, was led to find Mirador while she was alone, without any cameras to look at her.”

“The script is available to anyone who wants to read it,” Eve said. “I apologize ahead of time for Mattie’s… colorful way of looking at things.”

“Within the script, we see Mirador reveal her true face. She is not a nobody, she is a version of Cozy Glow – and she has plans to take over the City for her own malevolent ends.”

Eve held up the script to her face. “And I quote Mirador here… ‘They have no idea what I have in store for them… They think I’m just some nobody, a pony from nowheresville that’ll give them the power… They know nothing. I’ll take power and I’ll show them all the true meaning of friendship!’ I don’t think I need to tell anyone that this is a classic example of villain monologue. She says a few more things – annoyingly vague about specifics at all times – but it’s clear that she has some sort of diabolical plan.”

“We’re currently placing Mirador – or Cozy Glow – under arrest for suspicion of conspiracy. This was done without consulting with Mlinx’s campaign. The first he and his people will hear about this is through the message you are listening to now.”

“All we’re asking you to do right now is to retract your support from Mirador. Don’t let her take control of the City even if she does manage to escape prosecution through a loophole. She is the antagonist of this chapter.”

“And Mlinx?” Corona rubbed the back of her head. “Sorry about doing this under your nose. We didn’t think it would go well if you did it.”

“That’s all we’ve got,” Eve said. “All our evidence and story has already been submitted to news stations. Expect nonstop stories about the topic for the next hour.”

“Try to enjoy the rest of your day despite the drama,” Corona encouraged. They waved at the screen – and the transmission went down.

“That should take care of it,” Corona said, cracking her knuckles.

“I hope so,” Eve said. “I can’t believe she had us all fooled… I knew she looked off, why didn’t I draw the connection to Cozy Glow?”

“She hid it well. Her attitude wasn’t sickeningly cute. It seemed earnest. She was a master manipulator.”

“Wonder how she’s enjoying confinement…” Eve’s phone rang, ending the thought. She answered. “Eve here, who is this?”

“She got away,” Lightning said. “I’m not sure how she did it, but I think she had help.”

“Darnit,” Eve muttered. “Can you find her?”

“Trying. I’ll keep you updated.” Lightning hung up.

“She won’t have to find me,” Mirador said, somehow in the room despite neither of them detecting her arrival. She wasn’t wearing a suit, allowing her rook cutie mark to be on full display. “You will.”

Both Eve and Corona readied themselves for a fight.

“I’m not here to fight, I’m here to talk,” Mirador said with a smile. “I’m here to tell you exactly one thing.” She pointed a hoof at Eve. “I. Told. You. So.”

“I… What?”

“You have to insert yourselves into our lives,” Mirador shook her head with a sad smile. “You, as the hero, were called upon to ‘save the City’ from a ‘traitor’. So you took action, specifically cut out the official channels, and got something accomplished. No doubt my approval rating is dropping like a stone since you two decided to say something. To beat the ‘bad guy’.”

Eve was struck by this like a sledgehammer. She had no response.

Corona took it in stride. “So? You’re still a traitor, we did the right thing.”

“Hm? Oh no, I’m not a traitor, I just set that up with a little help from Monika to force you into action that everyone would see. I mean, yeah, I’m a Cozy Glow, but I hid that fact because we’re not known to be the nicest ponies.”

Corona blinked. “…Hold on… you faked that?”

Mirador grinned. “Yep! Specifically rented an area of town that would be abandoned yesterday – I have the title deeds with me and everything – and then I tracked down Monika since Twilence wouldn’t help. All Monika did was give Mattie an ‘itch’ and then everything fell into place. She saw what she needed to, and then you two acted to save the City.” She shook her head. “You two are great heroes and should be applauded for your willingness to help everyone! But you have to admit – I was right. You are able to control us. And I don’t think we want to be defined by you.”

Corona sagged. “This is being transmitted isn’t it?”

“Yep!” Mirador winked. “Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you, you did what you felt was right, just like I did! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I don’t think I’ll be able to continue this conversation much longer.”

“Why not?”

Monika appeared in the room and grabbed Mirador by the neck. “YOU USED ME!?”

Mirador gagged, unable to say anything.

It was at this point Lightning busted the doors down with a million police sirens behind her. She took one look at the situation and realized it was complicated. “…Am I arresting anyone?”

“Monika? Maybe?” Corona said with a shrug. “I don’t know… I think we lost though. Big time.”

“What were we even fighting against?” Eve wondered.

Monika dropped Mirador – which allowed her to answer. “You were fighting against change. …Maybe you should think about that a little more. Change.”

~~~

Later that day Eve walked into Mlinx’s office.

Mlinx saw her and let out a sigh. “Look, it’s okay, she played you, you don’t have to apologize.”

“I still should – even if that’s not why I’m here, per se.”

“I just…” He paused. “That isn’t why you’re here?”

“Not primarily,” Eve admitted. “I am sorry. But…” She shook her head and turned to look out a window. “She was right.”

“…If she didn’t have a point she wouldn’t be a good politician.”

“I’m saying she’s really right, Mlinx. It’s been eight years and… look at what we’re making. Exactly the same thing we left behind. There isn’t really a New World here; it’s just a smaller version of the old with a few odd differences. We… we change things. Simply by existing, we change things. We are giants in a land of little people, and try as we might we can’t hide ourselves in the bushes.”

Mlinx wasn’t sure what to say to this.

“We’re supposed to be preparing the people – and ourselves – for living in a world without ka. A world where they can’t rely on larger-than-life heroes to jump out of nowhere and save the day from whatever crops up.” She looked Mlinx in the eyes. “We’re not preparing them. We’re keeping them from growing.”

Mlinx folded his hands together. “…Maybe you’re right. What do you want me to do?”

“The thing is, I could tell you what to do, and I have no doubt you would do it,” Eve said. “And that’s the whole point of what I’m trying not to do.”

“Eve, I wouldn’t do it because you’re some larger-than-life hero who exists more as a figure of legend than an actual person. I would do it because you’re my friend and I respect your opinion – maybe more than anyone else’s.”

Eve looked at him with sad eyes. “…Maybe you’re right. But I have to know. …Do you really think I’m right?”

Mlinx sat back. “You’re saying that, by being around, we’re keeping the people from learning to live without ka. After having listened to Mirador’s speeches for hours on repeat just to understand them, I see the point. And given the stunt she just pulled…” He put two hands to his chin. “It seems like you are right. That we’re not helping. But I don’t see a solution. You and Corona weren’t in office, or really in politics. You were just living and people sought you out.” He looked up to her. “I’m open to solutions, Eve. I want these people to be ready as much as you do. I just don’t know how to do it.”

Eve looked at him with sad eyes. “I have an idea. I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

“Try me.”

~~~

Mirador was exceptionally elated. Her approval had shot up to 46% after her little stunt and it was growing steadily. There was no small amount of people who were confused by the ordeal – who wouldn’t be – but they weren’t actually messing with the polls too much. She was still behind Mlinx by a bit in the polls, but if her calculations were correct that wouldn’t last very long.

She and her assistant had given in and done a little celebrating – nothing big, just the two of them and some friends enjoying drinks, an excessive amount of Chinese takeout, and loud music. Mirador told herself the celebration was just for the successful execution of her plan, but really it was for her victory. She was so certain of her victory. She would be the Mayor of this town.

And the moment that solidified it would happen… now.

Mirador flicked the television on. Mlinx had just walked up to the podium at his oh-so-precious charity event and was about to give his speech. This should be good.

Even though he had no real facial expressions, he looked tired as he walked up to the microphone. He cleared his throat. “Originally, I planned to come here and give one of those grandiose, bombastic speeches designed to get people fired up for voting and democracy and the upcoming election. Instead, recent events have forced me to reconsider my position in this race. You know what I’m talking about – Mirador’s trap for Corona and Eve. The proof that we, the ‘heroes’ of the past, are controlling your lives.

“I will cut to the chase. She was right.”

There were gasps. Mirador let out an adorable squee.

“In the interests of letting you all learn to live in a world without ka, I am stepping down from the campaign, effectively resigning my position as Mayor. There are numerous others across the City who will be doing the same. In the next few months, you will see less and less of us. We will leave you to your City – make of it what you will.

“I only have one actual request – that you actually make the best of what you’ve been given. You could just change all your votes to Mirador and let her have the Mayorship. But that would just be giving the torch to someone else with ka-importance. She has been the focus of the chapter we are currently living in – as a protagonist, antagonist, you decide. She has become like us, and by her own logic she shouldn’t be allowed to dictate your lives.”

Mirador tensed. “There’s no alternative, Mlinx… I’ve just been the method… I…”

“There are many third-party candidates who never get recognized by the media or the story,” Mlinx said, leaning forward. “I give my endorsement to the leader of their race, Jocelyn Ramirez. I ask that all of my supporters to go to her, so she can keep Mirador from the Mayorship. Let someone who has never had the spotlight of ka take control of the City, not a manipulative pegasus who played us all for fools.”

“…Dammit…” Mirador seethed. She realized the stupid mistake she had made – she had forgotten about those ‘less important’ than her. She’d forgotten what defeated Lord English. “DAMMIT!”

“And as for what I originally came here for – this charity event – I need to offer an apology. I’ve capitalized on your event for my own personal goals. I give the majority of my campaign funding to you.” He let out a chuckle. “I helped you all build this City. Now that the foundation is here, I need to remove the braces. I hope you not only remain standing, but build it taller than ever before.”

Mirador didn’t want to hear anymore. She shut off the TV and threw her remote through the screen. She let out a scream.

~~~

Mirador tracked Mlinx down to give him an earful. She was not at all surprised to find that Eve was with them.

She was mildly surprised to find them meeting with me inside my library. She managed to grab hold of her anger quickly enough to eavesdrop instead of charging in guns blazing. The front doors were open so she could hear. I had left them that way, though she wasn’t in a good enough mental state to figure this out on her own.

“Is this everyone?” Eve asked me, looking over the list I had prepared several thousand words above this paragraph.

“Yes,” I assured her. “These are the people you need to take with you – no more, no less.”

“But… some people seem to be missing. Nettle’s not on here, for instance, I was sure her ka would be too strong…”

“She is becoming the Mother,” I explained. “She will be able to live a normal life, one of a normal person. The others missing will either do the same, or leave the City in another way.”

“You are not on the list,” Mlinx observed.

I nodded. “That… is true. I will leave the City my own way, go on my own journey. You have to go on yours without my constant guidance.”

“…Is this goodbye, then?”

“We will both return at the end,” I said. “When the Tower crumbles, we will be here, in the grounds of this city.”

“All of us?” Mlinx asked.

“Not everyone on that list will live that long,” I admitted. “There will be some losses. But… Most. Most will come back. Most will live to see the end of ka.” I smiled warmly. “I’m looking forward to that day more than anything.”

Eve sighed, looking over the list. “Some of these people won’t want to leave…”

“They’ll agree to it. I promise you.” I ruffled my feathers. “They’ll know they have to leave just like you two. You really are keeping the City from growing into something new. I couldn’t be the one to tell you that, it had to be something more… tangible. Speaking of…” I teleported Mirador into the library and the full view of everyone. “Say hello to the little eavesdropper, everyone.”

Eve furrowed her brow – and then softened it. “Thank you, Mirador, for showing me what I needed to see.”

“That wasn’t the freaking point!” Mirador shouted. “The point was to get rid of you!”

“So you could be in charge,” Mlinx noted. “We know. We’re well aware that your motivations weren’t treason or for the people. You just wanted power and you knew how to get it.”

“You’re oversimplifying her,” I said. “She did care about the people in some way – it just wasn’t altruistic, and she believes she can help them by helping herself. People who are like you, Mlinx, rarely go into republic-based politics. Mirador’s personality is much more common. You have to put up with a lot in the race, and she’s able to do that by empowering herself.” I looked at her with sad eyes. “It is wrong... but understandable.”

Mirador twitched. “I’m going to show you that I can do it anyway.”

“You won’t. I know for sure you lose. You do not make it to the Mayorship no matter how hard you try. You convinced them too well – they want nothing to do with the story now. And you’re part of it.”

“I…” She looked at the ground. “I never wanted to be part of it. I used it once I had it, but… I didn’t want it.”

“I’m sorry.” I looked at the Eye of Rhyme. “It chooses us. We never get to choose it. It is the tragedy of the curse of ka. There is inequality, true, irrefutable inequality, and nobody gets to choose one way or another who gets what. Maybe when the Tower ends, you can try again. But not now. Your ka has you defeated.”

Mirador looked at me with conflicting eyes. Then she ran out of the library, hooves slamming into the ground angrily.

That is the last you’ll ever read about her.

~~~

Burgerbelle, Corona, Discord, Eve, Everykid, Flutterfree, Jenny, Jotaro, Lightning, Mattie, Minna, Mlinx, Monika, Nanoha, O'Neill, Pidge, Pinkie, Rev, Rina, Roland, Roxy, Starbeat, Thrackerzod, Trixie, Vriska.

Twenty-five people.

I wonder why it wasn’t nineteen… Eve mused as she looked up from the list at the gathered people. They were all standing in the field of roses, floating about an inch above the tops of the flowers to prevent excessive cutting and bleeding.

She counted twenty-three. Twenty-four if she counted herself. And there was one other right behind her.

For a moment, she took a breath and turned around. There was a ship behind her – made of white metal, like most higher-end Merodi ships. The only unusual thing was that it wasn’t a spaceship, it was an airship. It looked like a sea vessel, a bit like a miniature ocean liner, except that it had giant magic sails that glowed with a bright orange magic almost like fire itself.

The ship’s name?

Austraeoh. After the wreckage it was salvaged from.

Corona jumped off the deck of the Austraeoh and landed next to Eve. “She’s working like a charm! The Nova’s in the main bay, the power is charged to full, and we’ve got ourselves a pretty ship-shape navigation system.”

“And your… ‘collar?’ ” Eve asked.

Corona tapped the implant in the back of her neck. “Mlinx disabled for now, you can turn it on if we return. We can start the journey whenever everyone’s ready.”

“…I do not believe all of us will be ready at any point,” Starbeat said. “It is strangely true that most of everyone’s close friends are here. But… this City has been our home. Even those of us who are not really leaving people behind will be leaving this place.”

“I know,” Eve said, shaking her head. “But we have to. At least for now. They’ll be better off if we aren’t here holding their hands.”

“We know. You had to give us all the spiel one by one,” Lightning pointed out.

Eve nodded. “Right…”

“No use beating a dead horse, you might say,” O’Neill added.

“Har-de-har,” Eve said, rolling her eyes.

“Hey, you’re going on an extended cruise with me on board, get used to the horse puns.”

“They will never end,” Nanoha added.

“Right…” Eve said, shaking her head and smiling. “…So, we’re leaving. We’re going to get on the Austraeoh and travel around Nucleon. We have the technology to do that in a few seconds, but we’re not going to use it like that. We’re going to go around slowly, stop by everywhere that looks interesting, and just… explore. Due to the ka-cloud we’ll be out of range of City communication quickly, and we’ll be on our own. We won’t be able to disturb them. However, we will continue to have adventures. I don’t know what we’ll run into during our time on the surface of Nucleon, but I know it will be full of awe-inspiring geography, wonder at the unusual cultures of the world, and… and I don’t know, we’re going the long way around a planet made of several thousand earths. We’ll spend years and years going around this place.”

“Coincidentally, we’ll go all the way around and get back to the City just before the Tower falls,” Mattie added.

“Woah, you can tell?” Pinkie asked.

“Nah. I just asked Twilence.” Mattie winked. “Sometimes you should just take the shortcut to truth rather than trying to puzzle it out yourself.”

“That ruins half the fun!” Roxy complained.

“Exactly. Half of it. Do it often enough and you get your money’s back!”

“A new journey that ends with the Tower…” Roland mused. “Same ol’?”

“Same ol’,” Jenny said with a shrug.

“There will be a lot of things out there,” Corona said. “Conflict, friendship, war, peace, love, hate, impossible, jokes... and we’ll face it, whatever it is, together.” She clasped her hands and grinned. “And then we will return here. To our City.”

“To say goodbye,” I said, appearing on the scene with a handful of people behind me – including Nettle. “Which, coincidentally, is what I’m here to do.” I beamed at them all. “All of you – every last one of you – is a hero in some way or other.”

“Fat lot of good that’s doing us,” Trixie muttered.

“In a way, it is,” I countered. “You get to go have an extended series of epic adventures the likes of which nobody has ever seen. You’ll explore worlds that have never before been touched. You will learn things the rest of us could only dream about. And you’ll get to do it in the last few decades before the Tower collapses completely – you will be the last. There will not be any other opportunities to have wild, unpredictable, crazy, impossible adventures. This is going to be your last stop.” I turned to Corona. “As horrid as ka is and can be… you should make the most of it while it still exists, wouldn’t you think?”

Corona chuckled nervously. “Yeah. Yeah… you should.”

“Then get on that boat and sail off into the sunset.”

“There’s no sun on Nucleon,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

“I’m a Sunset,” Corona suggested.

“Strap her to the prow – we’ll always be sailing into her!” Mattie said with a laugh.

Burgerbelle facepalmed.

Nettle kneeled down to Burgerbelle. “Go get on that ship.” She turned to the Everykid. “You too. Go enjoy your lives. I had enough of the wild life in the past… but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it.”

The Everykid and Burgerbelle pulled her into a hug.

There were lots of other goodbyes. There were more than a few tears – but everyone seemed to understand that this needed to happen. That the heroes of Songs of the Spheres needed to leave.

Eventually, however, the goodbyes had been drawn out. The twenty-five passengers loaded onto the Austraeoh. They waved. I waved back – and took everyone else away from the field of roses and back into the City. I would begin my journey later that day and lose myself somewhere far, far away… It was nice being a librarian while it lasted, but even with full freedom to do whatever I wanted with my power, I still needed to think of what it meant to everyone around me. What they might do because of me.

I had to make the right choice.

The Austraeoh was loaded and ready to go – there was only one question left to answer.

“Uh… who’s in charge?” Minna asked.

Everyone turned to Eve and Corona in an instant.

“No!” they both shouted, backing up – then laughing.

Eve went first. “We’ve been the leaders of too much for far too long.”

“It’s time for someone else to take the reins,” Corona added.

“Who then?” Pinkie asked.

Eve and Corona glanced at the pink party pony. The two of their smiles started to widen.

Pinkie gasped. “…Oooooooooh!”

Eve and Corona pushed Pinkie to the front of the boat. While there were control consoles below decks, there was a fully-functional ship’s wheel exposed to the elements. Pinkie laid her hooves on it and felt the ship move beneath her.

“You’ve been brushed to the side a bit,” Eve said, placing a hoof on Pinkie’s shoulder. “Corona and I have taken a lot of what you had. Our lives, our ka… they were too big, too extreme. You were overshadowed… but you’re still deserving. You never took an opportunity to get a lot of power, you always stayed as a team leader.”

Corona smiled. “It’s time for you to take what you probably deserved more than we did.”

Eve let out a chuckle. “Where to, Captain?”

Eve and Corona gave her friendly salutes. Soon, everyone else on the deck followed, showing respect to the pink ball of fluff.

Pinkie beamed. “Th-thank you! All of you! I love all you guys!” She laughed – and then put her hooves back on the wheel, shaking some happy tears out of her eyes. “I say we go… OVER THE HORIZON!”

She activated the sails. They increased the intensity of their light and pulled the airship forward – sailing over the top of the City. Fireworks and other celebratory decorations were unleashed on them as they passed over.

The City was letting them know how much they had been appreciated while they were here. Even though the heroes had to leave, they were still to be remembered as heroes.

The Austraeoh floated into the distance until it dipped over the horizon on a journey the likes of which the City would never imagine in their wildest dreams…

You could end the story there, I think. With them going on to have more adventures in the twilight hours of fate itself, where stories slowly fade into nothing. It’s an ending, of sorts - an open one, admittedly, but an ending nonetheless.

There is more to see, though. It may not be necessary… but it is worth your while.

Let us look beyond the horizon.

Author's Note

Aight, that's all the standard chapters of SotS.

All that's left is the Journey movie-length chapter (which will release in seven parts in blog posts over the next few weeks before releasing as the actual chapter, so watch for those), the 'Epilogue', and the final video.

After that, Songs of the Spheres will be absolute, 100% complete. It's been a long journey but I'm so happy it's coming to an end.

A few notes about Journey: I wrote it last. After most of SotS was published, I asked everyone for what they wanted to see. I got requests for success, failure, victory, death, religion, romance, and basically every contradictory thing under the sun. I didn't try to incorporate everything (as I did in 100) but I tried to incorporate a lot, to give the characters one last epic adventure. It'll no doubt include some of what you want to see, and some of the exact opposite. I think it makes a good send off for most of them, but we'll see what you think.

Also, this is a day early since I won't be around tomorrow.

-GM, master of rice.

154 - Journey

Author's Note

The first six parts of this chapter were originally published on the blog. If you wish to see the comments on them, go here:
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/894940/sots-154-journey-part-1-the-depths-of-nucleon
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/895207/sots-154-journey-part-2-a-tale-of-two-cities
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/895563/sots-154-journey-part-3-unwanted-legacy
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/895857/sots-154-journey-part-4-gray
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/896107/sots-154-journey-part-5-intercessions-of-the-past
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/896394/sots-154-journey-part-6-the-will-of-the-moment
Search for "VII" to find part seven in this chapter.

Otherwise, enjoy the last movie chapter.

154 - Journey

I - The Depths of Nucleon

“Elder! Elder!”

The Elder chuckled in that gleeful, tired way only older people can. “Yes, Pringle?”

The pink and purple pegasus filly bounced to the Elder’s lap. “Tell us more stories of the heroes!”

“That again?” an earth pony named Onion groaned, pulling her white mane back over her creamy coat. “We’ve heard them all already, geez.”

A young woman with purple hair responded, not looking up from her phone. “We do hear a lot about the heroes. It’s kinda annoying.”

“You like the stories more than anyone, Joanne,” the Elder said. “As much as you try to keep your nose buried in that screen, you revel in the story you’re a part of.”

“Won’t be for long,” Joanne commented, still refusing to look up.

“Years seems like a long time to me...” said the last member of the younger friend group, a young man known as Jang, playing with some firebending between his fingers. “We can learn from the mistakes and stories of those who came before us so we can survive what the Tower may throw at us.”

“I just wanna hear the stories again…” Pringle muttered.

“There are other things the Elder can teach us,” Onion scoffed. “We don’t need to hear any of her stories for the umpteenth time.”

“Few people learn things the first time,” Joanne pointed out.

“I thought you were on my side.”

Joanne smirked. “Sides are but an illusion in any conflict.”

“I… Nevermind.”

The Elder let out her distinctive chuckle once more. “Children, children… how can I tell a story when you’re all bickering?”

“That might be Onion’s plan,” Jang pointed out.

“She wishes she were that clever,” Joanne snarked.

Onion grumbled something incoherent.

The Elder sat down, gently stroking Pringle as she settled down on her lap. “Now, we’re going to start a very familiar story a little before we usually do. It starts on the other side of Nucleon, deep beneath the ground…”

~~~

“I’ve got the next room,” Vriska said, drawing her sword, grin slashing across her face like a knife through meat. It was far too eager.

“Sure you will,” Trixie muttered.

“Watch me, dungeons are nothing for the Thief of Light!”

“Let’s make this more interesting,” Discord said, snapping his fingers and placing a large red X over the Light symbol of her robes. “No luck, just pure unfiltered skill.”

Jenny cupped her gloves to her mouth. “OOOOOOOOOOOOOH!”

“I accept,” Vriska said, tapping her chest as if she were an ancient warrior. “Watch and learn…”

“Pretty sure we all know how to run a dungeon already,” Flutterfree pointed out. Eve giggled, only adding to the pile-on.

Vriska put her hands on her hips. “Do you all just spend your days coming up with ways to insult me when the opportunity arises?”

“Yes,” Jenny deadpanned.

Eve forced herself to stop giggling. “Oh, no, Vriska, it isn’t like that…”

“Yeah,” Rina said. “I haven’t said anything yet.”

“Thanks, mini-psycho.” Vriska shot her some finger guns.

“And now I want the monsters in the next room to kick your ass and teach you a thing on hubris and pride. You know. Like the tritons did three rooms up.” She pulled a fish out of her mane and disintegrated it. “The fish spell is quite humiliating.”

“I like it…” Flutterfree said, pulling another fish out of her mane and placing it in a water tank provided by Eve’s magic. “So many new friends.”

“I still think the fish would make better food,” Jenny observed.

“Most of us are herbivores,” Discord pointed out.

“Is there a single person in this room who hasn’t tried meat?” Jenny asked. Getting no negatives, she smirked. “Thought not. We’ll all enjoy that fi—”

“That’s it, tired of waiting,” Vriska declared, kicking in the next door. The dungeon itself couldn’t be considered standard fare, seeing as the walls were made of dark metal and the doors themselves shaped of bronze circuitry, but aside from the bizarre aesthetic the structure had, the active act of dungeon raiding was no different than usual: charge through room after room solving puzzles, setting off traps, and facing an unhealthy amount of monsters.

The room Vriska walked into was home to an entire village of bloodlusted orcs. They stopped fighting each other the moment Vriska kicked the door down, pointing their choppas at the intruder. “WAAAAAGH!”

“No luck, huh?” Vriska drew her sword and held out her free hand, grinning. “This’ll be good.” She met the first orc’s choppa with her sword, proving her blade and her physical strength to far exceed that of the ripped orc. She kicked him between the legs and whirled around to stab another orc in the neck, using her free hand to focus her psychic energy on the third-closest orc. Under her control, the orc swung back, gashing through three of his brethren. Vriska released her control, focusing on the others now; those four orcs would not be disentangling from their combat until all but one was dead.

Vriska twirled around, chopping off a few heads before taking to the air and kicking as many orcs in the forehead as she could before landing, giving out quite a few concussions. Thrusting downward, she drove her blade right through an orc’s head and caused a small tremor to run through the room as she hit the ground.

Waiting a few seconds for the orcs to charge, she unleashed a spinning attack that took out every orc next to her. With a laugh, she took to the air, leaving the remaining orcs to smash their heads into each other at high velocity.

One orc near the back shot a fireball at her.

Vriska threw her sword at him, skewering the monster through the neck. He fell back—but another orc picked up Vriska’s sword. Vriska, not wanting some grimy green monster touching her sword for longer than necessary, flew over the crowd of stupid orcs and engaged the orc in unarmed combat.

The orc swung.

Vriska broke his wrist with a carefully placed kick, claiming her sword back with ease. To add insult to injury, she chopped his hand off before kicking him down.

“Who’s next!?”

Back at the entrance of the room, Discord sighed. “I don’t think she’s going to make a fool of herself.”

“Can I argue that she’s a Mary Sue? Please?” Jenny asked.

“If she is, so are you,” Rina deadpanned.

“…Is the sacrifice worth it…?”

“Never.” Trixie shuddered as if the suggestion were physically painful.

“Well I’m happy that she’s having some fun,” Eve said, smiling brightly.

“That is why we came down here, after all,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“Trixie came down to figure out what the treasure was, not for fun,” Trixie huffed.

“If you wanted treasure you could just go back to the City and get a ticket to any number of artifact planets.” Flutterfree lifted up Trixie’s head with a wingtip. “You want to have fun.”

“…Fine…” Trixie grumbled.

An orc’s skull—just the skull, nothing else—flew and hit Jenny in the head.

“VRISKA!” Jenny shouted, charging into the room in rage.

“Jenny, no, I haven’t cleaned the room y—”

“And all bets are off!” Discord declared. “The terms have been voided!”

“None of us bet any money,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“Exactly!”

~~~

Vriska examined a golden computer chip laced with magic runes she had looted off one of the orcs several rooms back. “I really do wonder what this is.”

“A reminder of Jenny’s hotheadedness?” Rina suggested, blasting a spider-robot into smithereens.

Vriska chuckled as she traced a finger around the shield-shaped edge. “While that’s most definitely what it is, it also has to be something else.” She rolled her fluorite octet and transformed an attacking skeleton into a frog.

“Probably the lost artifact of an ancient civilization,” Trixie said. “Again.”

Vriska shrugged and pocketed it while using her free leg to crack a lamia’s pelvis.

Discord snapped his fingers, transforming every monster in the room into a wind-up duck.

“Discord!” Jenny whined. “I had that one!”

“I was bored,” Discord said, waving his hand dismissively.

“He needs to have his fun too,” Flutterfree pointed out, winking at him.

“That said, Flutterfree and I call the next room,” Eve interjected. “I think it’s time we showed our stuff.”

Flutterfree reared back excitedly, tapping her wing-blades together. “Oh, yes! Can we do the Thing?”

“That’s the idea!”

“Oooh, come on come on come on!”

“Yes. Be excited.” Discord rolled his eyes. “Not like we were just talking about me or anything.”

Flutterfree put a hoof on Discord’s leg gently. “Discord…”

“Oh, all right, fine, it wasn’t important anyway.”

Flutterfree let out a squee. “Eve! Let’s go!”

“Let’s get the timing right. Three… Two… One…”

Both of them kicked the door down at the same time, signaling the start of a funky, energetic beat. The group of monsters within looked up—largely composed of skeleton ninjas with a large white creature in the back made of many papery tendrils. Flutterfree and Eve hoofbumped before completing the charge. Eve sang first.

“We feel it stirring…”
“…Deep down inside our souls.”

Eve created a ramp of ice that Flutterfree skated on, entering a wild whirlwind of blades that shattered several skeleton ninjas. Eve teleported in front of her, encasing those who survived in ice. The two twirled together, moving forward. Flutterfree let her heart out through her words.

“A million moments…”
“…bringing us together.”

Rising onto their hind legs, the two pulled each other into a complex swirling dance of grace and calculated elegance. Every swing, every pulse, every twist came with it a blade, a burst of magic, or a lash of Rage. No matter how well they snuck or attacked, the ninja skeletons fell like dominoes to the complex choreography.

“The beat is taking hold…”
“…it’s more precious than gold.”

Eve slid under a skeleton while Flutterfree flew over the top, the two attacking it from opposite vectors, cutting it in half and sending its components into the others. The pegasus landed gracefully on the alicorn’s back, both striking a dramatic pose.

“We are acting as one…”
“…until our time is done.”

The papery monster was all that remained in their way. Seething, it unleashed its flimsy tendrils toward them. Seraphim activated, bouncing them all away with a shield. Flutterfree sent Lolo forward, tangling up among the papery beast’s assault. With one voice, they pushed forward.

“Sing our lives along
The other right to our side
There’s nothing you can do to us
To separate us from this ride!”

Eve and Flutterfree jumped through the air, swirling like ballerina dancers. Lolo pulled the papery strands of the monster to the side, allowing the two of them to smash the core with Flutterfree’s ice-coated wing blades. It never stood a chance. As it fell, the music died down. The two held each other’s hooves and bowed back at their friends, prompting thunderous applause.

“You two are amazing!” Trixie called. “Almost as good as Trixie!”

“Better,” Rina said.

“Much better,” Jenny agreed.

“Oh so amazingly better, it can’t even be comprehended,” Vriska piled on.

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Har-de-har.”

“Eh,” Discord said, ending his clapping before anyone else. “It’s not that amazing. Just an amazingly choreographed dance between two ponies who are very close. Not surprising, really.”

“It’s still cool, you’re just lame,” Jenny asserted.

“And you have low standards.”

“…I’m the most easily bored out of all of us, and that’s saying something.”

“She says, in a bragging tone,” Vriska snickered.

“Don’t you start!”

Discord turned away, deciding to inspect the featureless wall rather than engage. Trixie narrowed her eyes. Something was up with him. But… there was no way, right? Couldn’t be…

“Hey! Are you coming or not?” Flutterfree called. “New rooms filled with monsters and treasure await!”

“I found an infinite pizza!” Eve added.

“Hey! No jumping ahead, I want the next room’s loot!” Jenny ran after them, waving her hands in a panic. “Come on, let’s get a move on, people!”

Trixie grinned, lighting her horn. “Teleport.”

Trixie appeared embedded in a nearby wall. She sighed. “Help? Anyone?”

“I think I’ll just let you sit there for a few minutes,” Rina said.

“Rina don’t you dare-RINA! GET BACK HERE!”

~~~

Far above the dungeon plunderers, the surface of Nucleon was green. Vibrant moss had spread itself over a wide section of landscape mostly devoid of larger flora and fauna. The only structures visible from the ground were numerous deactivated mecha, all having been there long enough that the moss was growing up their legs.

There had been a war, once, but with the creation of Nucleon that war ended. The mecha were no longer needed, so here they sat, collecting dust and moss. They had seen almost no visitors since the New World had been created.

Today, though, a shadow drifted over them. The form of the Austraeoh V, floating in the sky with its should-be-impossible-but-weren’t magic propellers keeping it aloft. It was similar to the craft that had left the City a few years ago, but it was made out of a purple metal rather than the pristine white ‘orichalcum alloy’ the Merodi knew and loved.

Pinkie stood at the front of the deck, wearing the Element of Laughter as an earring. She whistled a tune to herself as she kept the wheel twisted slightly to the left so the ship would circle until the dungeon-raiders were done having their fun. She was the Captain and she was enjoying it. The wheel was hers, the ship was hers, and the crew was hers. Even if they were doing absolutely stupid things, she still loved them to bits.

Speaking of stupid things, there was a drinking competition going on behind her.

“We’ve got you beat,” Pidge declared, downing some kind of dark red sludge.

“You are a lightweight,” O’Neill retorted. “You are going to pass out in a few minutes. I’m only worried about your buddy Jotaro, here.”

Jotaro wordlessly slammed another drink down his throat, dropping the glass menacingly on the table after he was done.

“Sure we can beat him?” Nanoha asked O’Neill. “He has nerves of steel and a constitution better than some mountain trolls.”

“And I’m General Snark.”

“Are you all just forgetting about me? I’m here too!” Pidge waved her hands.

She got no response.

“Screw you guys.”

“You are all children,” Rev said, passing by. “If I felt the need to indulge, every last one of you would be under the table before I felt even mildly nauseous.”

“Join us, then!” O’Neill called.

Nanoha put a hand over O’Neill’s mouth. “Ignore him, Rev, I know it’s not good for you.”

“I mean…” Rev tapped her chin.

“No, Rev…” Nanoha shook her head. “You’ll just drag yourself into the contest and we know that won’t end well.”

“Yeah!” Mattie called from her beach chair, lifting her sunglasses. “If I can’t have a drink just for fun, neither can you!”

“You’re pregnant,” Rev pointed out. “It’s a little different.”

Mattie gestured at her inflated belly with a corked eyebrow. “It’s just more obvious.”

“Pregnancy and a history of addiction are nowhere close to the same thing.”

“Mate, pregnancy is part of my addiction.” Mattie corked a brow. “I can’t wait for the fun to begin…”

Rev facehooved. “You’re disturbed.”

“I wonder if I’ll be able to tell who the father is…”

Rev tried, and failed miserably, to suppress her look of disdain. Mattie chuckled. “You’ve still got it, Mattie. You’ve still got it.”

Pinkie appeared behind Mattie. “Mattie? Maybe, just maaaaaybe, trying to make Rev as uncomfortable as possible isn’t exactly the nicest thing to do.”

“Balls to her, that’s my job description.” Mattie grinned. “I’m a walking blob of societal rebellion, uncomfortable idioms, and sass!”

“You’re not… walking very well, right now,” Pidge hiccupped.

“And balls to you too, lightweight.”

“I’m not…” Pidge passed out, knocking her glasses off her face.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro shook his head, downing another drink.

“This is all very stupid,” Nanoha observed with an amused smile.

“Embrace the stupid!” Mattie called. “Be one with the outrageous and you will discover life!”

Pinkie raised an incredulous eyebrow.

“All right, fine, I’m lying. Smash me with that cartoonish hammer of yours.”

“Hmm… nah. Instead, I order you to relax and rest until we get a new member of the family!”

“For all you know that could be in five minutes.”

“Yep!” She bounced back, grinning. Looking to the sky, she saw their equivalent to a crow’s nest glistening in the sun. “The family keeps growing…”

Her thoughts turned to the two people that spent most of their time in the Crow’s nest. She wondered what they were thinking about.

“I wonder what the optimal rate for cutting a slime creature in half is if you want to end up with the maximum amount of slime,” Corona wondered aloud.

Roland looked up from polishing his gun. “…What?”

“Nevermind, I was just thinking in random places.” She stood up, looking over the edge of the crow’s nest at the green field of abandoned mecha below them. Roland continued to polish his gun in silence, and Corona said nothing about her further musings. She knew Roland preferred silence, and if she was honest that was why she came up here so often. It was a place she could sit and think, occasionally giving Roland the weirdest parts of her mind.

He spent a lot more time up here than she did, though. Corona was still, at heart, a people person who surrounded herself with close friends for good reason. Roland was a loner, and while the other members of the crew had grown to know and respect him, he still kept his distance. In many ways, he represented the heroes of old rather than the recent era the rest of them represented. He was the first.

For all Corona knew, he might end up the last.

Corona was about to vocalize this thought when she felt the air come alive with electric charge. With a flash and a rush of wind, a spaceship appeared right next to them, emblazoned not with a Merodi or City symbol, but rather the cutie mark of a Sunset Shimmer.

Corona’s phone rang before she could deduce who’d just shown up. She answered. “This is Corona.” A pause.

“SHIMMY!?”

~~~

“CHAAAARGE!” Jenny shouted, throwing Vriska like a cannonball at a cannonball-monster.

The irony was not lost on Vriska, though she was still flattened against the beast. “Jenny… fuck you...”

Jenny winked, giving her a thumbs up before casting magic flash on the cannonball.

Rina, charged as well, disintegrating the monster. And then Eve and Flutterfree came in, wiping the floor with the slime monsters in what appeared to be an amazing acrobatic routine.

Trixie and Discord were sitting out this time, Discord because he was usually too powerful, and Trixie because she was keeping an eye on Discord. Watching him. Watching what he was watching. Watching to see if what he was watching was watching him watch it. That sort of thing.

She was pretty sure she knew what was going on in his head now, and boy was it juicy.

“…What are you looking at?” he asked.

Trixie missed the days where she could adjust her business glasses to look more professional, but alas, her current adventuring outfit had no use for such things. She settled on smirking in his direction. “Why don’t we talk about that without any… distractions?” She lit her horn and activated some explosives she’d planted in the floor of the room. Eve, Flutterfree, Rina, Jenny, Vriska, and all the monsters fell through to the floor below.

“That was some impressive explosive placement.”

“Trixie could pass the demolition standards exam if she wanted. Trixie does not have the patience.”

Discord put a thermometer in his mouth and summoned a sick-bed.

“Patience, not patients, idiot.”

He winked, jumping out of bed with a shower of gold coins. “You got the joke!”

“Trixie will not be patronized—or distracted!” She poked Discord in the chest. “Trixie has figured out what your deal is.”

“There isn’t a mortal alive who can understand my deal.” He threw a deck of cards in her face.

“Trixie sees you watching them. Watching Flutterfree.” Trixie smirked, raising her eyebrows repeatedly.

“I don’t know what you’re insinuating, Trixie, th—”

“Oh for the—you’ve fallen for Flutterfree again and you’re trying really really hard to pretend like it’s not an issue. But come on it’s obvious! I’ve seen you stare at her, watch her movements, get all grumpy that she’s happy with Eve, yadda, yadda, yadda.”

Discord stared at her in disbelief, his jaw comically on the floor. “How-”

“Yes, Discord, you are that obvious. And pathetic. Buuuuut that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to help!”

“Help!?” Discord scoffed. “You?”

“Trixie chooses to ignore the insinuation.” Trixie coughed. “Yes. Me. Obviously you need some kind of push, and yours truly can provide.”

Discord waved a claw. “You’re insane. She doesn’t need me right now, I’d just get in the way. She’s got Eve and I would j—”

“Do you hear yourself right now? Have you been paying any attention to how they see each other? Stop being so dense, they’re not together, they’re just really close. They make that blatantly obvious all the time just so the rest of us don’t get confused, and you got confused anyway!”

“Well, I mea—”

“Flutterfree has been accepting your tea party invitations again, lately. I’ve seen you on deck enjoying each other’s company. I think you’ve got a shot!”

“That… doesn’t make sense! You’re being way too optimistic.”

“And that’s exactly what you need, big guy. Come on, all you need is a little flair and pizzaz! She already notices you, you’ve just got to make a move.”

“I’m not sur—”

“DISCORD! You are the lord of chaos!” Trixie lifted up a hoof, casting a thunder-sound spell. “Since when did you become the tentative hesitant one? You rush into danger at high speeds just to see what kind of laughs you can get! The Great and Powerful Trixie should not need to urge you to stir the pot for delightful chaos!”

“You’re right. You’re right!” Discord created a rock and stepped up on it. “I AM DISCORD, SPIRIT OF CHAOS AND DISHARMONY!” He snapped his fingers, creating a superhero outfit. “I should go over to her right now a—”

“Discord, what are you doing?” Flutterfree asked as she flew out of the hole in the ground.

“D-dramatic poses!” Discord said, stuttering. “And a good heart-to-heart with my good friend Trixie here about her place in the world!” He picked her up and pulled her close, squeezing her so hard she couldn’t breathe.

“Sure...” Flutterfree clearly didn’t buy any of this, but she didn’t press the issue. “Did you find anything up here?”

“Nothing at all!” Discord said, tossing Trixie to the side. She hit a previously-camouflaged button on the wall, revealing a little treasure chest.

“…Except this,” Trixie said, trying to make it look like she’d meant to hit the button. “Behold, TREASURE!” She popped the chest open and found… a map.

A map of the dungeon. All the way to the bottom.

“…Neat,” she said.

“Hey, we can use that!” Flutterfree inspected it, and beamed at them. “We could get right to the boss with this! Thanks, you two!”

“Think nothing of it,” Discord said, exaggerating a bow. Trixie facehooved.

~~~

“All right, that sounds all right,” Flutterfree said.

Eve smiled sadly at Flutterfree. “You don’t sound all right.”

“I’m a little nervous. Okay, more than a little nervous, but…”

“Shush, shhhhh, I’ll be there for you.”

“I’m still going to worry.”

“I know, but I’m going to do my best to make you consider that you might not have to.”

“That’s you worrying about me.”

Eve chuckled nervously. “Yeah, we might enable each other in that regard…” She scratched the back of her head.

“But we still call it ‘Twilighting’ and not ‘Fluttershying’.” Flutterfree raised an eyebrow and grinned.

“Shut up,” Eve laughed. “Let me be the stable one, for once.”

“Only if I can be the smart one.”

“Oooh, getting a dumbness potion might be difficult…”

Flutterfree chuckled.

“Hey! Pod people!” Jenny called back. “We found the boss room!”

Using the map Trixie had ‘found’, they had skipped the majority of the dead-end pathways in the dungeon and had made it to the bottom of the buried tower. Before them was a massive amethyst door covered in relief platinum eyeballs, easily large enough to let a full-grown dragon in.

“You think the boss is a dragon?” Trixie asked.

“Nah,” Jenny said, cracking her knuckles. “That’d be too easy. So, how are we doing this?”

“Boss rush,” Vriska said, grinning evilly. “Poor sap won’t know what hit him.”

“Wait, that means…” Trixie’s eyes widened. “I’m not going through first!”

“Yes, you are,” Jenny said, grabbing onto Trixie’s collar. Discord made the door disappear, allowing Jenny to volley Trixie through the opening like an elongated blue baseball. She landed flat on her face, rolling head over hooves a few times before coming to an abrupt stop on the hard metal floor.

The room was cylindrical and absolutely massive. In the center was a pillar of blue light with various technological components orbiting it, no doubt some kind of power conduit or generator. For being at the bottom of an abandoned dungeon, it seemed to be in pretty good shape.

She knew there should be a boss in the room, but she didn’t see one. Did some other adventurers come through and clean this place out already?

“Hello…?” Trixie asked. “Anypony there?”

A hole opened up in the ground before her, lifting a massive humanoid mech out of the ground. It looked a lot like a version of Optimus Prime, though there didn’t appear to be any truck features for transforming: just metal arms and legs for bashing. Not to mention guns, a sword, and feet that were three times taller than Trixie was.

Trixie gulped. “H-hey there! Are you ready for a boss rush?”

Trixie was thrown aside like a fly on the wall, useless against the monstrous automaton.

“I guess I’m next,” Jenny said. “What’re my rules for tapping out?”

“If you have to regenerate your head,” Rina reported, reading it off a list of Rules for Raiding Dungeons, draft.

“Then I’m not letting that happen.” Jenny leaped into the arena, smirking. “Boss number one was a pushover!”

“Trixie wishes she could deny it,” the dazed unicorn muttered.

“But I am the second boss, and you won’t get past me!” Jenny teleported onto the back of the mech the moment it pulled out its gun. She ran into one of the access ports, finding herself within its circuitry where it couldn’t hit her. “I’m in.” She lifted her fist, vibrating it so fast it would cut through metal. “I hope you like indigestion.”

She didn’t care that she was nowhere near the robot’s ‘stomach,’ she punched through walls and wires with gleeful, reckless abandon. Outside, everyone could see the boss start spastically flailing around as numerous motors within its body were triggered left and right.

“Is she really going to beat it that quickly?” Rina asked. “That’ll be disappointing…”

“We never meet a boss that makes it all the way up to my level,” Discord said, shaking his head. “What a shame.”

“That one time you did have to fight…” Trixie began.

“We will never speak of that again.”

The mech managed to point a gun at its chest and fire, burning a hole all the way through it. Jenny popped out the other side, regenerating from near-complete disintegration. “DARNIT! AGH! I almost had him!”

“My turn,” Rina said, teleporting into the ring. She sent a dozen dark swords into the mech’s wound, not at all surprised to find that her petrification didn’t work. After all, it was artificial; the spell tended to work only on organic beings.

So she did the next best thing.

She cast a reflect spell on herself when the mech tried to shoot her. Another hole burned all the way through it, this time through a knee. Taking advantage of the weakness, Rina created a massive cleaver and severed the limb down the middle, bringing the mech closer to her level.

With its free hand, it brought a sword down upon her. She teleported to the top of it, yawning.

It shot her again.

“Idiot.”

Now that she knew how it would reflect, she directed it directly at the mech’s head. Its house-sized skull dropped to the ground with a thud strong enough to register as an earthquake. The rest of the mech dropped like a normal dead body, slumping to the side.

It would have been a triumphal victory had the sound the body made when scraping the wall not been worse than claws on chalkboard.

“Geez,” Discord said, cleaning out his ears with an oversized Q-Tip. “That was unnecessary to the extreme.”

“I win,” Rina said, dissipating her spells. “Take th-”

Something the size and shape of a human launched out of the mech’s body and drove a fist right into Rina’s head. She was knocked all the way to the pile where Trixie lay. “Ow…”

“You’re telling me…” Trixie muttered.

The mech’s “pilot” was just another machine, though its proportions were much more human. Every limb was a dark gray metal that twisted a bit like a double helix, affixed around spherical white pearls instead of relying on standard joints. The chest was replaced with one massive pearl that glowed with a soft white light, seemingly powering the motions of the rest of the machine.

Vriska jumped out, pointing her sword at it. “Oh, I’ve got your number, little robot-man.”

“What number is it?” Discord asked.

“Not every joke has to b—” Vriska was barely able to block the robot’s attack in time, losing her sword in the process. Annoyed at this, she attempted to drain the robot’s luck.

The moment she tried this, the pearl in the center flashed orange, gaining the symbol of Light.

“What i—” she felt it try to steal her luck as she dodged. Naturally, it was unable to, but her luck wouldn’t be of any help anymore either. “Copycat!” She pulled out her dice and threw them. It canceled her manipulation of the roll, making the octet settle on a simple fish-slap spell the robot shrugged off without a problem.

“Shit,” Vriska jumped back and reached for her sword.

To put it mildly, she was not used to making complicated acrobatic maneuvers without luck involved in some way. She managed to get her hand on the sword, but the robot was faster. It kicked her in the stomach, removing the sword from her grip once again and tossing her onto the pile with Trixie and Rina.

“I’m not out!” Vriska shouted, jumping back to her feet. “I’m no—damnit.” She dropped her fists when she saw Flutterfree charging in. “You’re going to lose, Flutters!”

“I won’t,” Flutterfree declared, already surrounding herself with the clouds of Rage. The robot had no higher intelligence to be debilitated by the truth, so she had to resort to pure power. It reached out its hand to reduce her luck. She pointed her blades forward and grinned. Her luck may have been abysmal, but one of these was going to hit.

And that was enough. She skewered the robot’s central pearl with her blade. Normally, this would be little more than a ‘flesh wound’ to the machine. However, her Rage did its magic, surging into the robot and tearing it apart limb from limb. There was a moment where it tried to adapt to the Rage rather than Light, but it couldn’t purge the Light from its body fast enough. It collapsed in a loose heap of pearls and metal connectors.

“WOO-HOO!” Discord shouted. “GO FLUTTERFREE!”

Trixie facehooved. Her face was getting a little sore from doing that so often.

“I win!” Flutterfree said, smiling. Taking a step, she tripped over her hooves and flopped onto the ground. “Ow…”

“You’ll recover quickly,” Vriska muttered, dusting herself off. “I’m sure Rev can break the ‘curse’ or something if it’s really annoying.”

“Good idea... Eve, can you maybe loot this for me? I don’t want a massive static shock.”

“Sure!” Eve teleported to the downed machine and popped open its central pearl. The inner circuitry was intricate, but all fried from Flutterfree’s Rage attack. There was only one thing that seemed independent of the rest of the system: a large red button.

“Huh.” Eve pushed the button.

“EVE!” Discord shouted.

“What? One of us was going to press it eventually.”

“BUT… BUT… Okay, I would have done the same thing…”

“That’s not a good thing,” Jenny muttered.

“…Did it even do anything?” Rina asked.

The column of energy in the center of the room started to turn red.

“That’s bad,” Vriska said.

“On it!” Discord said. He lifted the severed leg of the mech in his magic and threw it at the energy column.

This reaction was decidedly explosive.

~~~

Shimmy, once-goddess of Earth Shimmer, was… well, no longer a goddess. She was still absolutely full of magic energy, but not much more than the average Celestia. Proudly displaying her world’s three most common features—forehead gem, feathered neck, and ridiculously oversized fingernails—she still carried an air of regality about her, even if she didn’t have an entourage with her at the moment.

She had her six closest friends with her—all spared the dusting—but they were still on the ship. None of them really had any reason to visit with the crew of the Austraeoh; Shimmy was the only one who had established much of a rapport with them.

Currently, she was sitting in the Crow’s Nest with Corona, looking down at the world below.

“You’ve done well for yourself,” Shimmy observed.

“I think so,” Corona said, smiling contentedly. “Some would say I’m just drifting, lost, without a purpose. Or that I lost everything.”

“That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“You know as well as I do that it wasn’t the loss that I wanted.”

Shimmy nodded in understanding, tapping her fingers on the railing. “I did try to defend you for a while, there. Then you had to go off and start fighting…”

“What would you have done, if you didn’t have your world to protect?”

Shimmy let out a soft sigh. “Fair point. Though I would have fought against you.”

“I know. Wouldn’t have you do anything else.”

“…How did you and Eve even end up in charge, I wonder? You didn’t exemplify the emotion of the war. You were often sad and tired, but nobody ever tried to remove you.”

“Not entirely true. But it was the Tower, probably.”

“Probably.”

There was an awkward silence between the two Sunsets.

“So, you already know my story,” Corona said, turning to Shimmy. “How’d you get here?”

“From what I know, my Prophet cut a deal. I’m not entirely sure on the details, but I’ve talked to a few Pinkies about it. So my planet came out almost completely unharmed, with minimal dusting. It was still enough to cause worldwide panic… especially with the nature of magic changing again and everyone forgetting how to use it… but we were still there. Able to learn, able to grow, and able to build them back up. Considering some of the horror stories I’ve seen out here, we did amazingly well.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

Shimmy forced a smile. “Yeah. Anyway, once it was stabilized, we realized… we weren’t needed anymore. Kind of like what all of you did. So we just… packed up into a ship and left on interplanetary exploration that we never got to do back in the day. Just the seven of us. Sailing into the night…” Her forced smile became genuine as she closed her eyes and remembered. “I can see why you loved it so much. The… freedom to just be. Go wherever you want, doing whatever. It’s…” She sagged, laughing sadly. “It’s a relief. It’s finally over. The world’s not going to explode because I sneeze wrong.”

Corona put a wing around her. “Thanks.”

Shimmy raised an eyebrow. “One good result does not excuse everything.”

“I know, I know.” Absent-mindedly, she looked North; to the City and the Tower. “…But maybe…” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Right or wrong in the end, I am where I am. I’ll keep doing everything I can, even when it crumbles to dust.”

“I once asked my Tree of Harmony who really called the arbitrary shots in existence,” Shimmy said. “I got a non-answer. I don’t think I realized until the war started that it was better that I not be told.” She looked Corona in the eyes. “Who wants to understand that they’re in a story? What will it drive them to do?”

Corona nodded slowly. “What indeed… what won’t a Sunset give her all for, once she’s made up her mind?”

Shimmy didn’t want to think too hard about that.

“Thanks. Not for the story, but… for caring enough to stop by.” Corona placed a hand on Shimmy’s shoulder. “People may not be trying to kill me out of rage anymore, but there’s a lot of hate going around.”

“There’s a lot of hate for Eve too. …Though there is less.”

“Just… thanks. For dropping by to say hi and talk.”

“Anytime I’m in the neighborhood.”

“Hopefully that’ll be more often, now. Where you headed?”

“We’re going to the City to see the Tower. I’m admittedly a little curious if it’ll let me inside, now that our journey across the cosmos is over.”

“It sure is fun up there.”

“So I’ve been t—”

There was a deep rumbling from the ground below. Corona raised an eyebrow. “What in th—”

A massive laser shot out of the ground, hitting the Austraeoh dead on and vaporizing it instantly.

“AGAIN!?” Pinkie shouted at the top of her lungs the instant Nanoha’s teleport rematerialized them on the surface. “Where did that even come from? Why is my ship gone? WHY WHY WHY!?” She took a hat out of her mane and threw it on the ground, stomping it repeatedly.

Shimmy blinked. “Does this happen… often?”

“Often enough that Nanoha has the evacuate-everyone spell on speed-dial,” Corona said, pointing at the dwindling magical light around the once White Devil.

Monika appeared after everyone else, scribbling a note in a book. “…and in this entry I will convey to you all how our ship is doomed to explode. For seemingly no reason, a laser shot out of the ground and impacted us…”

Pidge groaned. “You really are going to record every little embarrassing event in that history record of yours, aren’t you?”

“Why did you think I started writing it?” Monika peered over her notebook. “All of the nonsense I have to deal with on this trip is going right in these pages and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.”

“Stick it to them, Monika!” Mattie called.

Monika wrote another sentence. “…pregnant unicorn wants to pick fights with a bunch of superhuman heroes…”

“….That’s not fair.”

“Deal with it, greasy-flanks,” Monika snipped, slamming her book shut.

“Oh, I will.” Mattie grinned mischievously.

Monika blinked. “Er…”

“AHEM!” Pinkie called. “First of all, what blew up our ship?”

Discord appeared in a flash with the group, dropping Eve at Pinkie’s hooves.

“Sorry Captain…” Eve said, shakily standing up. “I pushed the big red button.”

Pinkie facehooved. “Gah…”

“We did beat the dungeon, though!” Jenny called.

Pinkie tapped her hoof. “Well, now that we’ve solved that mystery, let’s rebuild the Austraeoh!”

“I can conscript my friends to help,” Shimmy added. “We’ll get you something great!”

“I can just recreate it,” Monika pointed out. “Snap-bam-done.”

“That’s boring,” Pinkie said dismissively. “We will remake the Austraeoh anew every time! Let’s make it out of cheese! Or, oooh, sapphire!”

Mlinx raised a hand. “How about a living ship, this time? Made of magic wood that keeps growing?”

“If you want to garden,” Pidge huffed.

“This is gonna be fun,” Pinkie giggled, all signs of lament at the destruction of her ship gone. However, her eagerness to begin reconstruction was halted when she turned her head to the sky.

Two sky islands floated above them—those definitely hadn’t been there before.

There was an itch at the back of her mind.

Something bigger’s going on here…

II – A Tale of Two Cities

“Elder, that’s… that’s not the end of the story!” Pringle whined.

The Elder chuckled. “It’s the end of what you haven’t heard before.”

“Dungeon crawls are boring,” Joanne deadpanned, clicking away at her phone.

Pringle gasped. “But… but why did the dungeon exist? What about the things in the sky? What about the love story!?”

“If you should know one thing about those who came before us, it’s that romance was never the point,” Jang commented. “Read Starbeat’s autobiography at some point to see how deep it really runs.”

“Jang!” Pringle let out a tense gasp. “You can’t just diss romance like that! It happens and it matters! Humph!”

“I’m pretty sure the Tower was fought to free Romance from its definitions,” Onion said.

“You all are ruining the story!”

“Didn’t Elder say we knew the rest?” Onion said, glancing at the Elder. “We do know the answers to all Pringle’s questions already. Why reiterate what we live through daily?”

The Elder smirked. “Because it’s fun to tell, little one.”

“Onion. Little.” Joanne snorted. “That’s a laugh.”

“More of a snort,” Pringle corrected.

Joanne’s fingers started flying across her phone faster. The Elder had recently learned this was her equivalent of a death glare. So bizarre… then again, given her lineage, that wasn’t all that surprising.

“Tell us! Tell us!” Pringle squeed, clapping her hooves. “Tell us about Discord, about Flutterfree, about the two Cities of Old, and about the mech field! Tell us!”

“All right, all right, sit down and enjoy my show.” The Elder stretched her arms and looked to the sky, watching the planets above shift and turn in their myriad of unusual patterns. “See, Pinkie was a good captain. When she sensed there were multiple things that needed doing, she made sure all of them got done…”

~~~

“Right! Lots of stuff going on, but we’ve got a lot of people to do it!” Pinkie clapped her hooves together. “Shimmy, you and your people are on rebuilding the ship. I’ll be around to help, as will whoever else sits around.”

Shimmy shrugged. “Sure.”

“MY SCIENCE GIRLS!” Pinkie declared, pulling Roxy, Corona, Jenny, and Pidge together with a cartoonish elongating cane. “You four are going to investigate these weird mecha and find out what exactly that thing was at the bottom of the dungeon.”

“Yes, boss mare!” Roxy said, saluting. “We’ll get to the ‘bottom’ of it!”

Corona snickered.

“Now, the floating rocks!” Pinkie pointed into the air at the islands. “I’m sending one team to each. Let’s see… O’Neill, Nanoha? You can be in charge of Starbeat, Jotaro, and Lightning today. I don’t wanna hear any griping about there needing to be a clear ‘chain of command,’ those two cuties have got the leader thing down.”

Nanoha and O’Neill linked arms and did a semi-mocking bow.

“Other team, you’ll be headed by Mlinx. Vriska, Roland, Zod, Burgerbelle, you’re with him.”

Mlinx twirled his spear. “We shall do our best.”

“Always so formal,” Vriska groaned. “You’re a demon! Be more… fun.”

Pinkie let them talk amongst themselves. “As for the rest of you, you’ll be staying here. Helping with the ship, relaxing, and dealing with…” She stopped on Discord and Trixie. “…Personal issues.”

Trixie made a neck cutting motion with her hoof.

Pinkie ignored her. “And I just remembered! I have a very special mission for the Everykid!”

The Everykid pointed at herself in mock confusion.

“That’s right, we need lunch! Get to sandwich makin’!”

Monika sighed. “We all know I’m making it…”

Pinkie waved a dismissive hoof. “You’re making the ingredients. The hat chef is the true master!”

The Everykid exchanged her top hat for a chef’s hat and snapped her fingers, demanding ingredients for pristine sandwiches be brought stat.

With a grunt, Monika created some lettuce. “Pinkie… I would much rather be up there, exploring.”

“You’ll probably be needed at some point, just not now,” Pinkie said. “You’re the strongest person we have, if this blows out of proportion we need you on defense.”

Monika grumbled, creating several loaves of bread.

“That might be a bit too much…”

“I am going to make a bread sandcastle if I’m stuck here, and you can’t stop me. I will record its history alongside our own. There will be many great battles and loves and... other interesting things!”

“Sounds fun!”

Monika facepalmed.

~~~

The sky islands were cities. From a distance, they looked like they were one and the same, and that’s what the two teams thought on approach at first.

Upon getting closer, however, they realized they were not only different from each other, but they were exact opposites, visually. In the center of each, there was a square pyramid of smooth stone. On one it was black—the other a pearly pristine white. The buildings around the temples would have been indicative of Merodi construction were they not both black and white, almost like a zebra. The skyscrapers of the two cities didn’t match shape exactly, but it appeared significant effort had been put to have locations in one city be white while the counterpart in the other city would be black.

The other difference was much stranger. The black pyramid’s city had a dominant red color in its city’s artificial lighting, while the white’s focused on greens and blues.

“I’ve seen this somewhere before…” O’Neill mused.

Mlinx shrugged. “It’ll become apparent in time, I am certain.”

They had just teleported to the bridge connecting the two cities together, both teams sitting on a long, gray stone structure without a single person on it. There was no traffic between the cities to speak of.

“Eerie,” Starbeat observed. “Something’s going to go very, very wrong here.”

“Or right,” Lightning added.

Nanoha cleared her throat. “Well… who goes to which city?”

“We will take the dark pyramid, you the light,” Mlinx decided. “Good luck.”

Everyone nodded to each other and set off—walking leisurely rather than teleporting or flying off. Mlinx led Vriska, Roland, Thrackerzod, and Burgerbelle to their darker, redder city. When they reached the main gate at the end of the bridge, they were able to see the city’s insignia: a dark moon with the image of the sun superimposed over it.

Mlinx tapped on it with his spear. “Greetings.”

A panel beneath the insignia slid open, revealing a screen with a simple white eye displayed on it. It blinked. “What do you want?” it intoned in a bored tone.

“We are travelers,” Mlinx explained. “We wish to know what your city is and how it has come to be in the sky in this New World.”

“Ah. Travelers. Not from the Light Side, good. There is no travel ban on non-residents.” With a click, the gates slid open with a slick sci-fi noise.

“Wait, hold up,” Vriska raised a hand. “Will we be able to leave?”

“I am not here to stop people from leaving, I am here to stop the Light Side from entering.” It blinked again, seemingly randomly.

“What are they the Light Side of?” Mlinx asked.

“They are the Light Side of the Moon. We are the Dark Side of the Moon. Ever unwillingly connected by this bridge.” It beeped. “I am not an information module. You may find more within our streets.”

The panel slid shut once more, though the gates remained open.

Vriska shrugged. “Well, I g—” Before she could get off her usual snide comment, Roland walked past her and into the city. “Wh—hey! I was… uuugh, he’s ruining my dramatic timi—”

Burgerbelle let an alarm clock off in Vriska’s ear.

“Gee, thanks,” Vriska muttered, rubbing the side of her head. “Jegus, that’s loud.”

“I can make it louder.”

Vriska glared at her. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“No, but I would delay you so you’re the last one through the doors!” Burgerbelle hopped into the city, shooting the delayed Vriska some finger-guns.

Vriska stole a little of her luck, making the eternal child trip.

“Cut it out,” Thrackerzod muttered. “This is no time for games. I’m sensing something… off.”

“How so?” Mlinx asked. As they entered the city, he admittedly didn’t find anything too unusual or wrong about it. Besides the odd color scheme and primarily-red lighting, the people looked like normal people of the multiverse—a cobbled mixture of humans, ponies, and other races. A distinct lack of Gems, which probably meant this wasn’t a Merodi-originated city, though it was still possible.

Despite being called the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, the city itself was very bright. Even though the lamps were crimson, the natural lighting from above let the colors of the ponies and the clothes of the humans shine for what they were—diverse.

“…It’s like…” Thrackerzod couldn’t put it into words. “It’s not eldritch, but that’s the closest descriptor I have. It reminds me of the slight influence in the back of your mind that can draw you to one of the Old Ones.”

“A corruption?”

“I am uncertain.” Thrackerzod frowned.

“...What’s red and white and black all over?” Burgerbelle asked.

“We are not walking through a newspaper right now,” Thrackerzod grunted. “Nor is that pertinent.”

“That is,” Roland said, pointing at a man walking down the street in white robes… holding in his hand an active, bright red lightsaber.

Anyone who’s been around the larger multiverse long enough eventually finds Star Wars or one of the myriad of variants thereof, and one of the most absolute rules is thus: the red lightsabers are evil and extremely dangerous.

So when the ‘Sith’ warrior walked up to them and took off her hood, they were shocked to see a warm smile waiting for them. “Ah, visitors from beyond! Welcome to the Dark Side of the Moon.” Only after her greeting wasn’t returned with warmth did she seem to think to turn her lightsaber off. “Oh, you’ll have to excuse us, it’s been so long since our blades been associated with corruption, few people respond negatively anymore.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Why not just use another color?”

“It’s what we can make,” the woman said with a shrug.

“So you are fucking with the… uh… what do they call it?”

“The Dark Side of the Force,” Burgerbelle said, in a Darth Vader mask.

“Yes, that,” Vriska pointed.

“Oh, absolutely,” the woman used the Force to hook her lightsaber hilt on her belt. “The Dark Side’s bent toward personal power, and the control of destiny lends itself best to our creed.”

“…Which is…?” Thrackerzod asked.

“Well… perhaps it would be best if I showed you. Come, there’s a statue I’d like you to see.”

Mlinx nodded, giving his approval for everyone to follow her. They passed through a few densely packed streets. Now that they were looking for it, they saw dozens of lightsabers in the use of the general population, though only a few had the religious-looking robes. Every last one they saw active had been red—no evidence of any other colors.

Vriska and Zod had enough of a psychic component to their abilities to sense the use of the Force now that they knew what to look for—objects were regularly levitated, people jumped higher than they were supposed to, and one guy even used Force lightning to light a furnace.

Those who had encountered the Dark Side before were absolutely baffled to see a stable society existing from what they had previously experienced only as power-hungry murderous maniacs.

“Maybe ka really is lifting curses,” Thrackerzod muttered.

“It is, and we are so thankful for it,” the woman said. “Because she is the one who gave us this gift.” Holding out her hand, she drew their attention to a statue made of solid gold.

A statue of Corona.

“…Shit,” Vriska muttered.

The statue was lifelike, if five times the size of Corona. She stood on both her feet with wings spread wide and face held high. A calm, welcoming smile dominated her facial features, and one of her hands was outstretched as if to embrace. The other was lifted high in a fist of power, ready to dish out judgment if required.

At the base of the statue, many things were happening. Some kids were playing, others were dancing, and a few street musicians were letting their songs mingle in the air. Only a few people were actively kneeling and praying to the altar, but even one would have been enough to set Corona off were she here.

“You knew her, didn’t you?” the woman asked.

“You could say that…” Vriska said, weighing her options.

“You’re… you’re her! Vriska, aren’t you?”

Why do I have a feeling like that’s a bad thing to recognize? “Yep. That’s me. Vriska Serket, Thief of Light.” She put on a cocky smile.

“And your friends! Oh, they must be…” the woman turned to Mlinx and put two and two together. Her smile vanished in an instant. “Oh…”

“…I am Mlinx, but I believe you figured that out.” He extended one of his hands. “You haven’t told us your name.”

“I… excuse me, I have to…” Without bothering to come up with an explanation, she Force-jumped onto a railing and ran away.

Thrackerzod moved to pursue, but Mlinx held out a hand. “We do not need a scene.”

“We’re going to get one anyway,” Roland mused. “She’s reporting to someone.”

“Yes. She is,” a feminine voice said, one distinct from the last. She wore robes like the other woman, but she was decidedly inhuman: with orange skin and two points under her hood that might have been horns. “It is best if you leave. Even you, Vriska. Not even those who support the collapse are safe from Troi’s… eccentricity. The Dark Side may be tamed, but people are not.”

“And who are you?” Mlinx asked.

“A concerned citizen.” She backed away from them. “I would hurry. She moves quickly.”

“Hey!” Thrackerzod called. “We’ve got questions f—wait, no, she’s not even there, that’s just a spirit projection.”

The ‘concerned citizen’ smiled before dissipating into nothing.

“…Well…” Mlinx scratched his chin. “I suppose the question now becomes if we listen to her or not.”

“We all know we’re not leavin’,” Roland muttered, turning to stare at the pyramid in the center of the city. “Best to skip the argument and get to solving the mystery.”

“But the argument’s half the fun!” Burgerbelle whined.

“This way we get to the action faster,” Vriska said.

“Oh.” Burgerbelle shrugged. “All right the—”

“YOU!”

“And that would be trouble,” Mlinx groaned, turning to face the source of the shout. It was an elf—or a man that looked a lot like an elf—walking toward them, robes trailing behind him in a supernatural wind. In each hand he held a lightsaber, out and ready to attack. “My good sir, what can we do for you?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, mister mayor!” the elf shouted. “You are Mlinx… the once-great leader of the City and well known Preservationist!”

“The war is long behind us, and I am not here in any official capacity.” Mlinx folded his hands together. “I was merely exploring and found your city.”

“Bullshit,” he took a few steps forward. “You and your little entourage are here to sow seeds of preservation dogma in attempts to ruin what we’ve fought for!”

“My good man, I—”

“Shut up, let me talk,” Vriska shoved Minx to the side. “Yo. Darth Earlobe. Pretty sure you know who I am.”

The newly-dubbed Darth Earlobe stopped in his tracks. “You can’t be—”

“Yes. I am. Vriska Serket, primary team, served under Pinkie before the War and Corona directly after. I fought for this New World and this chance. And you know what? I like what we’re going toward, so you can rest your deluded brain. We’re not here to sow any ideas, the war’s fucking over. Live in peace, kapeesh?”

“They do not let us…” Darth Earlobe hissed.

“Would she care if they did or not!?” Vriska gestured at the statue. “She went out of her way to limit as much death as she could. She was willing to throw herself and more just to keep that little glimmer of hope most of us ignore so much! So get your ostrich head out of the ground and wisen up a bit, asshole.”

“You must have been brainwashed.”

“Wow. Idiot, too. I still supported the collapse, did all th—”

“I WILL FREE YOU FROM THEIR CLUTCHES!”

“Oh for the…” Vriska readied her dice, analyzing his luck.

She never got the chance. Roland shot him through the leg the same time three cloaked figures stepped out of the crowd and stopped Darth Earlobe with a Force grab from multiple directions.

Roland lowered his smoking gun. “I am sorry, I was unaware you would help.”

“It’s… fine, you aimed for the leg.” One of the cloaked figures said. “You have your right to self-defense, as all of us do.”

“I’ll help him,” Thrackerzod said, readying a regeneration spell.

“T-that’ll be fine, we’ll handle it.”

“It’ll be faster and less pai—”

“They hate you just like he does,” Roland observed, sitting down on a nearby crate to check his weapon. “They just hate you less than they respect their law.”

Thrackerzod narrowed her eyes. “Even now, after all these years, you harbor such resentment towards those who attempted to stop you?”

“It’s… what you represent,” the cloaked one said, clearly conflicted about the whole encounter. “It…”

“Is something we are trying to move past,” a new, familiar voice said. “I think you, of all ponies, would understand moving past a difficulty, Thrackerzod.”

Standing behind them was a Princess Luna. This version was as tall as Nightmare Moon, but had no sign of the evil eyes or dark magic. Rather, her mane billowed with miniature suns, and her face exuded a brilliant, caring warmth coupled with a powerful sense of authority.

Thrackerzod nodded slowly. “…Perhaps.”

“I take it you are in charge?” Mlinx asked.

The Luna nodded. “I am Centroid, but you may call me Troi. Please, come with me to the palace-temple. All of you are welcome, not just previous allies. I will not let this city become the regimented hovel of hatred the Light Side has become.” Troi saw their expressions. “And yes, I am fully aware of how hypocritical that sounds. As I said, change is hard, and they make it… more so. I will explain all I can over dinner. Come, sit, and be among friends.”

“You a Sith too?” Vriska asked.

Thrackerzod facehooved.

Troi smiled, nodding slowly. “Though our ideology has changed enough that few use that word anymore. With the Tower weakening we are freer to explore ourselves than ever before, and the Dark Side gives us the strength to forge new paths. All thanks to the temple. And no, the temple won’t brainwash you, unlike what the Light Side will have you believe.” She gestured for them to follow with a wing. “Come, I can’t wait to hear of your travels across Nucleon.”

~~~

“…Welcome to the Light Side of the Moon!” a happy unicorn in a very prim and proper soldier’s uniform said. “Lemme just open the gate for ya real quick…” She moved a few levers with a psychic ability, notably not using her horn at all. The complex locks on the pearly gate clicked repeatedly, separating the complex puzzle of interlocking pieces that made up the city’s emblem: a small sun overtop a moon. The gates slid apart in several chunks before they were allowed in.

“You have no idea how glad I am to have some visitors from beyond, I mean, really. Turning away every single Dark Sider is just booooring. And then some of them try to shoot me and it gets problematic.” She giggled to herself. “Anyway, enjoy our city! Do be sure to keep your IDs on you at all times.”

“Question,” O’Neill said, examining his plastic card suspiciously. “We are allowed to leave at any time, right?”

“Return your cards to the reception desk on the inside and you can leave, yes. We’re not some kind of trap, geez. I suggest making your way to the restaurant center, most interesting place aside from the temple itself. The sky shrimp at Vera’s is the best.”

“Thank you,” Nanoha said with a smile.

O’Neill took point, hands in his pockets. “Well…” He examined the green and blue lights on the walls and put two and two together at last. “Star Wars?”

Nanoha nodded. “Oh, yes; or at least derived from it.”

“I hope there’s a Wookie running around.”

“No, you don’t, you wouldn’t be able to let the Wookie win.”

“I want to try.”

Nanoha smirked. “You sure you can handle that level of hubris?”

“All-right, lovebirds,” Starbeat coughed. “We’ve got to figure out what this place is like.”

“It’s the Light Side, Jedi,” Jotaro offered. “Heroes.”

“Eeeeh something tells me it’s not all sunshine and rainbows up here.” Starbeat began to look around at the city itself. Physically, the only real difference from the Dark Side was the green and blue lighting everywhere, and even this was mostly drowned out by the natural light of Nucleon.

The people, however, were quite different, though the team had no way of knowing that.

Everyone wore clothing depicting their station: soldiers wore army uniforms, merchants wore color-coded suits based on their wares, children wore simple white clothing, engineers wore bright blue working suits, and those akin to Jedi wore vaguely religious dark robes. They seemed to be taking the role of a peacekeeping force.

No one seemed unhappy, but no one seemed to be having fun either. Every interaction was made for some purpose—an exchange of valuables, a keeping of the peace, or the learning of a lesson. Even the children weren’t being rowdy.

Nanoha frowned. “We’re not going to be able to blend in very well, here.”

“No, you are not,” a woman in a dark robe said, walking up to them. She had orange skin and two points in her hood that were indicative of horns. “For your own sake, you should leave. Tessa’s ideals are… intense, and there is no room for those who aren’t willing to follow her crusade. The Light Side may be twisted by the people who use it.”

“Who’re you?” Lightning asked.

“A concerned citizen.”

“A Force projection,” O’Neill answered, gesturing at the woman as she vanished into nothing. “We’re operating on Star Wars rules, baby!”

“You must be excited,” Jotaro deadpanned.

O’Neill clapped his hands together. “I am!”

“…The Senate?” Nanoha finished, stifling a giggle.

“Nanoha, Nanoha, Nanoha… I am the king of references, but not every sentence I make is a reference.”

“Pretty sure Burgerbelle has you beat,” Starbeat said.

“Are we just going to ignore her warning?” Lightning asked, tapping her foot impatiently.

“We’re not leaving,” O’Neill said. “That’s either a scare tactic or telling of something we should be investigating posthaste!” He pointed a finger forward. “Let’s see if we can get to the sky shrimp before everything goes horribly wrong!”

They walked through the city. At first, the citizens paid them no mind whatsoever—just visitors not part of the natural rhythm of their lives. However, time passed, and word must have spread, for people started shooting them aside glances and whispering.

“They’re looking at you, Jotaro,” Nanoha whispered. “Someone must have recognized you.”

“Yare yare daze…”

“Ah, an unincorporated Preservationist city,” Starbeat frowned. “The other’s probably for the collapse. This could be… ugly.”

O’Neill stopped in his tracks. “…Uh-oh.”

Before them was a massive circular plaza filled with people bowing and muttering, directing their prayers to a massive golden statue of Evening. Three of her hooves were planted on the ground while a fourth was outstretched, beckoning everyone who saw it into something greater. Her wings, however, were poised like they were ready for war, and ice shards were coming off her horn. Unusually, her face was sad but also determined.

Starbeat blinked. “Okay. Religious fanatics devoted to the preservation in a society with bizarrely rigid rules coupled with a mysterious warning. I’m going out on a limb here and guessing the other city is also filled with religious fanatics, possibly keyed by the Dark Side of the Force, except for the collapse. They probably want to kill each other more than anything in the world.”

Nanoha frowned. “We need to end the rivalry, or at least start the ball rolling on reconciliation. The war is long over, we don’t need two cities starting it up again.”

“How are we going to do that?” Lightning asked. “We don’t know anything about the situation yet.”

“Researching,” Jotaro said. “Finding the leaders.”

“Ahem,” a woman in dark robes said, unleashing a green lightsaber. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave rather than continue your ‘research’.”

“What did we do?” Lightning asked.

“Not you, him.” She pointed her laser blade at Jotaro. “He can’t be here. His past is known and it’s causing civil unrest.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro strode up to her.

The woman held out a hand, locking his feet to the ground with the Force. “I do not want to engage you in combat, but if you do not comply I will be required to remove you by force.”

“Not a very nice Jedi, are you?” O’Neill commented.

“The Light Side has changed, twisted by the collapse. We were forced to adapt with it to fill a new niche.” She narrowed her eyes. “Jotaro Kujo, leave or I will forcefully eject you.”

“That won’t be necessary.” A Celestia dropped from the sky, landing with a metallic clank on the ground. “I will handle this personally.” She was far from a standard Celestia, for her glorious pastel mane was regulated to a simple ponytail that barely rippled and had black streaks in it. The rest of her body was heavily augmented with white metallic implants, including a large one over her right eye that dominated that side of her face. Her lips did not smile, and her eyes did not waver—in her world, there was no room for nonsense, only action. This alicorn was not a friend to her subjects; only a ruler.

“I am Nanoha Takamachi of the Austraeoh,” Nanoha introduced herself, bowing.

“I am Tesseract, Chancellor of the Light Side of the Moon and guardian of the palace-temple. I am very surprised to see you all traveling together, but it would be foolish to drive you away without asking for an explanation.” Sensing their uncertainty, she shook her head. “You are not facing legal charges. The worst that happens is I will ask you to leave after our meeting to never return. I highly doubt that will happen, however, seeing as we have so much to discuss.”

“Are you prepared for us?” Nanoha asked.

“We have a lot of uncomfortable questions,” O’Neill smirked.

“I would not be fit to rule if I could not answer the most uncomfortable queries. Ask all that you wish.”

~~~

Roxy popped a battery three times her body size out of a mech, allowing it to drop to the grass below.

“MY FOOT!” Jenny screamed, bouncing away from the impact.

“You’ll be fine.”

“It still hurts!”

“You’ve been disintegrated without even blinking,” Pidge pointed out, wiring some circuitry in a massive mech gun. “It’s like you only feel pain when it’s convenient to complain.”

“I always feel the pain.” Jenny crossed her arms. “Always!”

“True,” Corona said. “But you have enough of a tolerance for it at this point you could probably shrug off getting your intestines removed.” She used her magic to tear a mech’s arm off the body, examining the interior for anything interesting.

Jenny grumbled, starting to disassemble the battery Roxy had dropped to her.

“And that’s a point for Corona,” Roxy chuckled, floating away from her mech; there wasn’t anything interesting left inside. She descended to the ground, noticing that the left foot was embedded much further in the ground than the other one. She took a moment to appreciate the engineering that made the legs bend in such a way to keep the torso level despite uneven footing, but quickly used her Void powers to phase through the ground and see why exactly the foot was so low. She found a secret room filled with treasure chests—and a broken down machine-made of pearly orbs and black metal, almost exactly like the one fought at the bottom of the dungeon.

She approached it, laying her hand on the largest, central pearl. It reacted instantly: taking on a dark blue color and gaining the Void symbol. The robot tried to move after this, but it collapsed from years of wear and tear.

“Interesting…” Roxy mused, lifting the robot up. She separated it into its component parts and stuffed it all into her inventory. Having taken care of that, she turned to a chest and opened it.

It lunged at her and bit off her arm.

“Fu—“

She poofed, clattering to the ground as a simple Carnelian gemstone. The mimic looked around in confusion; where had its target gone?

Corona, having sensed Roxy’s magic drop to near-nothing, punched into the secret room and incinerated the mimic with her magic.

This act woke up all the other mimics. Every last chest in the room revealed ravenous, pointed teeth.

“…Who makes a secret treasure room with nothing but mimics?” Corona groaned, unleashing repeated fireballs on the wooden treasure-monsters.

Despite being severely outclassed, Corona had to give the mimics credit; they didn’t give up until they were all ash.

Reaching down, Corona picked up Roxy’s gemstone and pocketed it. When she was in a safer place, she’d rejuvenate the Gem. Right now Corona didn’t want a mimic army to charge in the midst of a healing ritual. Gems were hard enough to coax out of their gemstones as it was.

~~~

“Remember what we practiced,” Trixie said, pushing Discord along the grassy hills. The under-construction frame of the Austraeoh dominated the landscape, even though the more-distant mecha were larger.

“Be yourself?”

“Well, duh, that’s lesson one. Lesson two is pushing outside your comfort zone and taking the prize by the neck!”

Discord raised an eyebrow. “Very predatory language.”

“This is Trixie we’re talking about, expect overdramatic metaphors. Now, this is a tea party, so unfortunately we can’t create a disco ball out of nowhere and make it explode into a cake or something.”

“I don’t think you actually know Flutterfree that well. She’s rather delighted by my chaos! The ginseng shall SING!”

“Yes, whatever, just remember that you do have to push yourself a bit. You may be the Lord of Chaos but under that fur and scales you’re a huge self-conscious softy!”

Discord gasped in mock offense. “I resemble that remark!”

“Blah blah, just get in there. Don’t worry, I’ll be watching, ready to bail you out with a smoke bomb if everything goes south.”

“That’ll just make it worse.” Discord smirked. “Great idea!”

“Does Trixie know you or does Trixie know you?” Trixie boasted.

“Yes.”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Just get over there, I’ll be in the bush.” With a salute, Trixie jumped into the nearby bush.

With a nervous shrug, Discord walked to the little table Flutterfree had set up for the tea party. She was already sitting there, eyes closed, humming to herself a familiar tune. They could hear most of the others working on the Austraeoh in the distance, but nobody was actually close by to interrupt them.

“I have arrived!” Discord shouted, teleporting onto the chair with a superhero cape. “This deplorably quiet locale needs some… jazzing up.” He snapped his fingers, creating a handful of saxophone creatures to add some jazzy background.

Flutterfree giggled. “I miss the days we could do this in your realm. The magic in there was so unpredictable even you couldn’t manage it sometimes. Who knew what would happen?”

“I…” Discord tugged on a snazzy suit collar that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Well, I suppose I could try to create a randomizer.”

“Oh, no, no, don’t change it, I didn’t mean it like that.” She folded her wings back, smiling nervously. “I was just remembering how things used to be oh… so long ago.” She pressed the marble tips of her wings together. “…Why did we stop having these tea parties, Discord?”

Discord shrugged. “We just stopped over time. Nothing that strange. Everyone got busy, you were off saving worlds and I had to throw some chaos into the mix somewhere. Things got too big, we didn’t overlap. But now we’re here, doing it again!”

Flutterfree pursed her lips. “Yes… we are. And I have really been enjoying it. Reminds me of home and simpler times.” Her face softened into a smile. “We’ve had some really good times, both then and now, haven’t we?”

Discord felt his heart rise and tense at the same time—he might not even have to do anything. It was going perfectly, the conversation was naturally flowing the direction he wanted, all he had to do was… make a move.

And there was the rub. He had to move. He had to do something. But he froze.

“…Discord? What’s with the ice?”

“S-sorry,” he stammered, snapping the ice away. “I froze up a bit, you see. I was… well…” He leaned forward, tapping a claw on the table. “See, I remember those times too. The chaos, the order, the Crusaders—oh those silly Crusaders!”

“They got in so much trouble!”

Discord grinned. “You always said I went a little overkill with that. I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t. Mechs weren’t big enough for their talents!”

“And the time machine wasn’t either?”

“I…” Discord blinked. “Wait, was that a Merodi City I saw, or..?”

“I don’t know, you never let us see the future outside.”

“I don’t even remember anymore,” Discord laughed. “Oh, the Gala.”

Flutterfree’s face twitched slightly. “The one where you invited the Smooze, right?”

“Well, there were a lot of Galas, but that one… yes, that one was one of the most interesting. I believe Celestia called it ‘entertaining,’ all thanks to me.”

“…You were really angry that night.” Flutterfree looked down, her ears twitching.

“What? Psh, psh, water under the bridge!” To illustrate his point he created a bridge and threw a fish under it. “It’s an amusing story, now.”

“Still… I was ignoring you. I shouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t just pretend like… it’s all fine.”

Discord blinked, unsure how to parse that. What did she mean? Every word in that jumble had at least three different interpretations and in conjunction they…

He glanced back at the bush, finding no help there. He would just have to talk on his own. Honestly, he had no idea why Trixie was even here, all she needed to do was push him here.

“Flutterfree…”

Discord noticed she wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was looking at the bush.

“Oh dear.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “Trixie, are you hiding in that bush?”

“…No!” Trixie insisted.

Flutterfree facehooved. “Of course…”

“Uh…” Trixie poked her head out of the bush. “I can… go, an—”

“No, stay.” Flutterfree forced a sad smile and activated Lolo, revealing a previously-invisible Eve standing right next to Flutterfree. She stopped whispering things in her ear and grinned awkwardly.

“Uh… hi.”

“Hey! Trixie was supposed to be the wingmare today!” Trixie called.

Eve coughed. “To be fair, I had no idea you were in the bush until Flutters found you.”

“Wait, hold on, back up,” Discord lifted his paw. “Did we both get pushed here by our close friends to talk?”

Eve and Trixie nodded.

Discord blinked. “Well…”

“I’m sorry,” Flutterfree said, shaking her head. “I… I was trying to ignore everything and pretend everything was fine. It took Eve to shake me out of it and realize what I was playing with.”

“Same!” Discord grinned. “Trixie had to push me out of the dungeon with explosives to get here!”

“I… did notice.”

“Oh, this is great news, we’re both here for the same reason!” With a delighted laugh, he pulled Flutterfree into a tight hug. “Oh, I was so worried…”

That’s when he felt her tears on his shoulder.

He lifted her up, holding her a short way from his face. “…What?”

“I-I-I’m so sorry Discord, I’m… I’m not here to return your feelings. I… I…” She swallowed, looking him right in the eye. “I was trying to let you down easy.”

Discord froze again. The ice touched Flutterfree, but she didn’t flinch—she reached out with a wing and stroked his face. “I’m sorry… I can’t.”

“It’s because of Eve, isn’t it?” Discord said, sagging back into his chair and setting her down on the table. “She…”

Flutterfree shook her head. “She has nothing to do with it. I… You know what I believe. What I follow. What the rules are.”

“Rules? Th—” Discord paused, remembering the myriad conversations he’d had with Flutterfree in the past. Little nuggets of information he had discarded coming back to rear in full force.

“Discord, you’d have to take them on too. If we were to go anywhere, that’d have to come first.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Discord forced a smile. “Cart me over to Rev, I’m sure I ca—”

“Discord…” Flutterfree’s ears drooped. “I know that’s what drove you away in the first place. I know my faith not only makes you uncomfortable, it upsets you.”

“S-so? You’re always going on about how it’s difficult!”

“Yes. It is. That’s… that’s why this is so, so hard. I… I do love you, Discord, and there’s a very large part of me that screams to just take you in my hooves and never let you go. But… I would be manipulating you. It… it would be wrong of me to do that. It’s not right to force my beliefs onto you just so you can be with me. No matter how much you want it, no matter how much I want it… it’s still wrong.”

“Wrong? Wrong?” Discord’s face twisted into anger. “Forgive me if I’m remembering wrong, but people convert for this all the time, right? Or am I just an…” Discord sagged, unable to keep the anger up. “…idiot?”

“Discord, no, you’re not an idiot…” Flutterfree tilted his chin up with a wingtip. “You’re an amazing person filled with life, energy, delightful unpredictability, and… so much more. I wouldn’t change it for the world. None of the tea parties, none of the adventures… nothing. You’re an amazing person to know, Discord. I just can’t bring myself to manipulate you like that. It wouldn’t be coming to Him for His sake, or even for yours…”

Discord looked at her with sad eyes. “Can’t we… try anyway? We…”

“…We don’t deserve each other.” Flutterfree took a moment to breathe. “There are many things more important than love. I’m sorry.”

Discord’s face began to tremble. No, no, not now… He snapped his fingers and teleported away.

Flutterfree held out a hoof to where he had just been—and started bawling. Eve rushed to comfort her, but Flutterfree held out a hoof. “I… I should suffer as he is. It is only fair.”

Eve grimaced. “Flutterfree that’s no—”

She flew away. Eve honored her request and didn’t follow.

Trixie stared after her, expression blank. “…I…”

“Trixie, you didn’t mess up. You did fine.” Eve sighed. “They’d been flying past each other for a long time already. I think they both thought they could just put it behind them.”

“They had.”

“We’re immortal, Trixie. Nothing is ever behind us forever.”

~~~

The Temple-Palace of the Dark Side was black inside and out, which wasn’t all that surprising. What was surprising was how colorful it was inside. Since the natural light couldn’t get in through the thick walls of the pyramid, the red-lights of the rest of the city had been swapped out for miniature sun spells, bathing the varied and colorful people inside with light so their colors were free to pop. Art lined the walls in dozens of different styles, and while the majority of the people in the temple wore the white robes, there were several people who had clearly just walked in from the streets to take a look at the temple-palace’s marvels.

“Like what you see?” Troi asked, her mane flowing in the nonexistent breeze.

“Better than I was expecting,” Vriska admitted. “Thrackerzod?”

“This temple is influencing them, but I also detect them influencing it,” Thrackerzod frowned. “At the very least, this is not a standard corrupting-Force situation.”

“We have chosen to enter into symbiosis with the Force,” Troi explained. “And we have done well for ourselves in it. We sought the collapse, and we achieved our goal—but life doesn’t end just because the story does. We are here to live in this new world and revel in the opportunity uncovered for all.” She led them through a door to a balcony at the top of the pyramid, looking out over the Dark Side of the Moon. “People are free here to explore themselves, to find destiny, to… well, to become the best they can be. With ka vanishing, things previously frowned upon or held in contentious light that demanded conflict can enter into peace. Differing ideologies on family, rights, individuality, community…”

“I’m surprised you manage to keep it stable,” Mlinx observed. “Such a varied outlook tends toward anarchy.”

“It likely will, in the ultimate end,” Troi admitted. “But I think that is worth it, so long as we still live our lives. We will spread and go our separate ways, true to ourselves. Currently, we are unified by memories of the collapse movement and Corona herself—” as she said the name, she bowed her head in slight respect. “—though even that thread is tentative, at best. …As much as I hate to admit it, our current uniting thread is a fear of the Light Side of the Moon.”

Vriska sighed. “War’s over and you can’t stop fighting?”

“I don’t want to fight at all.” Troi turned her gaze to the white pyramid in the distance. “They do.”

“…Why?” Mlinx asked.

“I believe it has to do with their defeat. This is not the world they wanted, they don’t want to live in it. I have no doubt in my mind they would seek to restore the multiverse if they could—come to think of it, some of them probably think they can in their delirium. They see us living in victory, and want us to die. The division of our cities was not slow. It was… brutal. I extended peace as often as I could, wanting to let them have their own way to explore life in the New World, but the terrorist attacks became too much.” She tapped her hoof on the railing. “Perhaps it was too harsh to block them entrance to the Dark Side, but there’s only so many enraged suicide bombers you can take.”

“Why don’t you just cut the bridge?” Tharckerzod asked.

“We are uncertain what that would do to the temple-palaces,” Troi said. “They are connected, and each side of the Force needs the other. Too many people rely on the Force to sever it all at once. I fear what would happen if the Light Side decides they no longer care what they suffer, so long as we do.” She lowered her head. “They can’t live with what they have, so they want to attack our way of life. It’s revenge, is what it is.”

“Are you truly blameless?” Roland asked.

“No,” Troi admitted. “Our people retaliated, and we have often rubbed our ideology in their face. And there’s the added difficulty that their… leader is a version of my sister. It’s always a painful memory of my dusted sibling when I see her. I know she feels the same way—resents me for being able to move past the price of our future.”

“So you’re inches away from all-out war because you can’t separate from each other. Lovely.” Vriska folded her arms. “I bet your people aren’t even thinking about peace.”

“It’s pointless, at this point, to hope for more than utter silence.” Troi turned to the sky. “It is the same thing Corona realized when she left the Merodi for the war effort. We may not want to fight, but we would be foolish to think we could survive without preparing for the eventuality.”

Vriska frowned. “Corona was willing to give herself and her society up for the collapse. If you really wanted peace, you would be fighting for it tooth and nail to your detriment, not hiding within these city walls. What you’re doing now is what the preservation side was trying to do in the war—keep their home. “

Troi’s calm smile vanished. “Vriska Serket, we have achieved our goal already, there is no point in fighting for more change. The world is here and we have it as we want. Our goal is now our lives. There is nothing to change.”

“Why don’t I just call her up here and see what she has to say about that?”

Troi’s eyes widened. “You… She… She’s here?”

“Yep. She’s here. In fact, I’ll call her right n—”

“Oh yes please do!” Troi clapped her hooves. “The people would love to see her!”

“…She won’t like to see them,” Thrackerzod said.

“I am well aware of her disdain for worship,” Troi said dismissively. “I am willing to face the music in that regard.”

Burgerbelle started playing the Imperial March.

Troi glared at her.

“Heard that before, I take it?” Burgerbelle grinned.

“Yes,” Troi seethed.

~~~

Tesseract looked out from the balcony on her white temple-palace. There were no outsiders here aside from O’Neill and Nanoha’s group—only acolytes of the Force were allowed in under normal circumstances. Her face showed no emotion as she stared at the Dark Side of the Moon across the divide.

“What did they do?” Starbeat asked.

“They destroyed everything,” Tesseract said. “And they received no condemnation for what they’ve done, no justice to speak of. They celebrate in their victory, over there, every day. They reject everything that came before for the sake of the ‘self’, rejecting that which they supposedly fought for. We hold fast to the ways and order of the past… they do not.” She turned to the group, fixing her eyes on Jotaro. “You claimed to be a bringer of justice in your time, Kujo.”

“I still am.”

“Hmm…” Tesseract thought for a few moments, sizing the man up. “You truly believe that. Tell me, man of honor, how was the collapse just?”

“It wasn’t.”

For the first time, emotion crossed Tesseract's face. “Then why—”

“The only just option was the one where the war didn’t happen,” Jotaro continued. “I could not get justice for the multiverse. It was impossible. So I got justice for those who suffered.”

“By causing suffering.” Tesseract tapped her hoof. “An old argument all of us have no doubt trodden over again and again. I apologize, Kujo, for placing you on the spot—we all know where we stand and such opinions do not change with logical arguments. They change from time, experience, and self-reflection. Such words have no worth here, and you have no desire to tell me the way things are. Although, I cannot say it pleases me that you have managed to end the fighting between you.”

“Are you saying peace is wrong?” Starbeat countered.

“I’m saying peace is not the highest virtue. By coming together and refusing to acknowledge the past, you do both collapse and preservation a disservice, forgetting the fight and the struggle behind them. At least here, in our two cities, we do not pretend that everything has been paid and all is done.”

“That’s not what Eve would say,” Starbeat countered. “You have a pretty good cult following of her, and yet you miss one of her major points!”

Tesseract leaned in. “And what might this be?”

“They were never the enemy. They were always the other side. Since day one, she wanted nothing more than the fighting to be over so she could bring her friends back, so there would be no more reason to keep them apart.”

“And you know this how?”

“I was just like you. Worse, actually. I actively went out and hunted the warriors of the collapse and executed them in an unfair mockery of a trial. I was a witch hunter who wanted them to suffer. Eve came to my seat of power and forcibly ripped me out of it, demanding that I seek reconciliation and peace.”

Tesseract looked at her doubtfully.

“Oh, don’t believe me? Why don’t I call Eve right now? She’s on the surface with the rest of our exploration crew!”

Tesseract raised an eyebrow. “...I would be most honored to meet our savior.”

Nanoha let out a sharp breath. “She’s not going to like that.”

“She will speak her mind just as everyone else, statue in the courtyard or no.”

~~~

Roxy’s gemstone activated with some prompting from Corona, allowing the Gem to reform her body.

“I fuckin’ hate mimics,” Roxy moaned, falling onto the grassy hills and spreading her limbs.

“They were all empty, if that helps,” Corona said.

“That’s, like, the worst thing you could have told me.”

“Your trip was pointless!” Jenny added.

“Uuuuuughhh—“ Roxy cut her whining short, sitting up. “Actually, no, it wasn’t totally worthless! BAM!” She pulled the orb of Void out of her inventory. “This was a blank white orb before, but now it’s attuned to the Void aspect. I think it’s the same thing the crew fought in the dungeon that took Vriska’s aspect. “

Corona laid a hand on it. “It’s trying to interface with me, but… it’s like it can’t remove the power it already has.”

“We’ll need to find another one,” Roxy declared. “See if we can get you to trigger it!”

“Oh, you just need white orbs?” Jenny smirked. “Why didn’t you say so? I’ve been collecting those!” She pulled out her staff of holding and deposited a blank white orb on the ground. “Tah-dah!”

“…How many do you have?” Corona asked.

“I dunno, half a dozen?”

“Huh…” Corona laid her hand on the orb. Immediately, it shifted into an ugly dark green marked with the symbol of Doom. “It really is tied to the SBURB aspects…” Corona tapped into her empathy, tracing her palms over the sphere. “That’s weird.”

“What’s weird?” Roxy asked.

“It’s transmitting a signal…” She looked up into the sky at the two cities. “There.”

“Any idea why?”

Corona shrugged. “Working on that. I’ll probably need to go up there myself if I’m going to find out.”

“Then it’s your lucky day!” Pinkie said, from behind the orb of Doom. “They need you at the city with the black pyramid, stat.”

“…Why?”

“Corona-worshipping city steeped in the collapse movement.”

Corona put her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “Oh for the… fine, fine, looks like I have to go talk some sense into a few knuckleheads. I’ll be taking Minna, is that fine?”

“Absolutely!” Pinkie said. “Roxy?”

“Hmm?”

“Tell me the moment you figure out what the deal with these orbs is, I don’t wanna miss the party!”

Roxy tapped a finger on the Orb of Void. “I’m on it. We’ll figure out something… either down here or up there.”

“Great! Now, I’ve got to go hunt down Eve.”

“Why?” Jenny asked.

“The other city worships her.”

Corona burst out into laughter. “About time she figured out what that felt like! Oh, this is gonna be good…”

Roxy facepalmed.

~~~

Eve found Discord floating on an orange about a mile above the surface of Nucleon.

She landed at his side. “Hey.”

“Go away.”

Eve laid down next to him, closing her eyes. “Do you know me to go when my friends need me?”

“Maybe I don’t need you right now.”

“You do. You need someone to listen, to help you work through. Sitting in silence won’t work.”

“Maybe I’ll go to Trixie.”

Eve raised an eyebrow.

“What, she’s a good friend!”

“And probably not the pinnacle of calm, empathetic discussion.”

Discord sighed, staring at a distant star peeking out through the variations in the planets. “Fine. What’s the great wisdom of the Princess of Friendship and Overhead of Relations today?”

“I was just going to answer your questions. I don’t think you could ask her right now… but I know her. You can talk to me.”

“You know her all right. I bet you think I’ll get in the way.”

Eve shook her head. “…I want her to have someone other than me. When we first realized you were approaching… I was excited. Maybe, finally, she could have something I couldn’t fulfill. I even talked to Rev about it, but… Flutterfree wouldn’t have any of it. She knows you, too. She knows why you drifted away.”

“I don’t even know why I drifted away,” Discord grunted.

“She’s better at seeing us than we are.” Eve chuckled softly, shaking her head. “She knows the truth, but she’s just as likely to ignore it as we are. She didn’t want to hurt you.”

Discord was silent.

“She takes what she believes very seriously. It defines who she is. I’ve seen so much change and life come out of her through it that… I find it hard to say it’s bad, even if some of the finer points make me a bit uncomfortable.”

“A bit?”

“Okay, a whole lot,” Eve chuckled.

“How do you deal with it? Being around with her all the time and not thinking as she does? It’s… how can you not be insulted by that? That she thinks she’s got it all figured out?”

“She doesn’t, and she’ll be the first to admit that. She’ll follow it up by saying nobody’s got it figured out.”

“Then why does she care so much!? It…” Discord snapped his fingers, creating a blueberry and strawberry rain cloud to ease his stress. “It’s just… words.”

“They’re more than that to her. They’re life, they tell her of a world beyond what she sees, of a purpose better than anything she can imagine. Of… well, of a world where she doesn’t have to figure everything out, just trust that it’s taken care of for her.”

“…Are you trying to convert me?”

“Hah!” Eve laughed, but a thoughtful expression crossed her face. “You know what… Maybe I am. There is a part of me that thinks this would be a whole lot simpler if you could just change your mind without her pushing you. I’d be lying if I wasn’t hoping you could just… shift the way you think.” She sat back. “I actually wish she’d just let you come with her, and she could show you what she believes. Plenty of people in the past were already together when one changed for another but… agh. She’s just too nice for that. Cares about what’s right more than her own happiness.” Eve wiped a tear from her eye. “I’m so proud and aggravated at the same time.”

“You don’t believe.”

“I’m not trying to date her. Which wouldn’t work anywa—”

“Hold up, back up,” Discord looked her in the eye. “You don’t, yet you were trying to convince me?”

“Discord, I didn’t realize I was doing it, I’m sorry.”

“I… MMMPH.” He sat back down, glowering at the land below. “What do you think about it?”

“About her religion?”

Discord nodded. “She’s never stopped talking to you about it.”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t changed your mind? Ever?”

Eve pursed her lips. “I… if you asked me under duress and mind control, I might say I believed, if only because I’ve seen something special exude from her for years. But if you asked me right now, with only my thoughts and confusion, I’d say I’m not sure. I’d say that everything I’ve seen could just be the Tower. I’d say… that I’m afraid of committing to anything before the Tower falls.” She paused. “I can say I want it to be true. But is that just because I want there to be something after the Tower falls, because I want to share more with Flutterfree, or because I’m lost and confused? I don’t know.”

Discord stared at her. “So, you’re waiting?”

“I… guess?”

“The Tower’s going to be up for thirty more years! Thirty more years! Not all of us are going to be around at that point! Things change way, way too much!” Discord waved his hands. “You want me to just wait three decades?”

“We waited several more in the Void…”

“And it was agony!” Discord fumed. “I… I just want some resolution, is that too much to ask!?”

“No, b—”

“No is right, I don’t have to listen to this.” He snapped his fingers and vanished in a puff of light.

Eve twitched, moving to follow his teleport, but Pinkie stopped her. “Sorry, Eve, there’s a situation up in the sky you have to deal with.”

“But…”

“There are others who can talk to him. You’re not the only one. Okay? We’ll handle it just fine down here.”

Eve traced her hoof on the ground. “But I…”

“You opened yourself up to him. That’s all you can do, Eve.” Pinkie hugged her. “Okay?”

Eve sighed. “Okay… You’ll watch after Flutterfree?”

“You know I will.”

“Pinkie… you’re a great friend.”

Pinkie winked. “Right back atcha!”

III – Unwanted Legacy

“This is a terrible story, there’s too much going on,” Onion said, tapping her hoof against a wall.

“Onion!” Pringle shouted.

“What? It is.”

“They’re all related in the end! Come on, you know how this goes. The romance ties into the research ties into the two cities all into one big—”

“We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves,” the Elder said, holding up one of her hands to calm the young ones. “There’s always more to see if the story is laid out all at once… though admittedly, it is hard to tell verbally from memory when things bounce around so much.”

“Luckily you basically have the book memorized,” Joanne pointed out, no doubt scrolling through the book in question on her phone.

“Why not just read it, then?” Onion asked.

“Because having a story told together is a bonding experience!” Pringle grinned.

Jang nodded. “I find myself intrigued by the dynamic between Discord and Flutterfree every time I hear of it. So many stories and legends put love as the highest of all possible goals, but Flutterfree explicitly does not.”

“You’re just jealous because you can’t get a girlfriend,” Joanne retorted.

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“And Flutterfree’s full of BS anyway,” Joanne kept typing. “She loves her religion more than people. That’s just idiotic.”

“Joanne!” the Elder chided.

“I don’t think that’s how it works…” Pringle said.

Joanne didn’t look up. “That’s just how I see it. She’s being unreasonable for a belief and it’s being treated as acceptable, even good, while the cities are fighting over their beliefs and it’s not. There’s a discontinuity there.”

“That’s different…”

“And stories are not told objectively,” the Elder said. “That said, there is more to it than you seem to realize. There’s a key difference between the alicorns and Flutterfree. Maybe it will be more obvious when I describe how they met with their ‘gods’ in person.”

“…At least that part’s always enjoyable.”

“Make sure you do the voices for them!” Pringle cheered. “It’s the best part for the voices!”

“I will try, little one, but my old voice does not do the regal sisters justice.”

“Nothing does…” Onion muttered.

Ignoring the detraction, the Elder continued. “Corona’s invitation was the warmest, though this would not last…”

~~~

Corona teleported herself to the top of the Dark Side temple-palace, Minna at her side.

“…I thought the point was not to make them want to worship you?”

“Yes. But I want them to know I’m here.” She waved down at the city—easily in view of several cameras and citizens. “This ‘Troi’ won’t be able to pull a fast one on us anymore.”

The wind blew through Minna’s hair. They stood in silence for a few minutes, letting their presence sink in.

“Got anything?” Corona asked.

Minna frowned. “Someone’s coming to meet us.”

A hatch in the pyramid opened up, revealing a woman in black robes. She was decidedly inhuman with an orange face and two striped head-tails. “You’re making quite the commotion up here.”

Corona smirked. “That’s the idea. Here to take us to Troi?”

“Yes. I believe I was sent because I wasn’t likely to start bowing in stunned awe the moment I met you.”

“Thanks for that.”

She smiled. “Don’t mention it.”

“This is Minna Belle, by the way.” Minna saluted.

“I know. I’m Master Ahsoka Tano, for what it’s worth.”

“Sounds familiar…”

“I’m a common Star Wars ‘template’.” She descended into the pyramid’s hatch. “Might want to get down here before some people get brave enough to fly up.”

They followed her, descending down a long shaft until they came to a major hallway, the sides lined with many ‘Sith’. It wasn’t a very formal guard, since most of them were walking around and talking to one another, but they kept a careful eye on Corona and Minna. Corona caught a few of them refusing to look at her, or bowing their heads and looking at her feet.

“Just a reminder,” she said as they neared the end of the hallway. “Not a god! Kay? Kay, good.” She didn’t wait for a response, stepping right into the room Troi was standing in with Mlinx’s team.

Troi held Corona’s gaze for all of two seconds before breaking and bowing her head. “I am sorry, Corona, I cannot treat you as an equal, for that is not what you deserve.”

“Oh for the love of… they’re apologizing for worshipping me now?”

“It was the next logical step of worship progression,” Thrackerzod deadpanned.

Corona sighed. “Troi, get up, I’m just a person. And from what I hear, a person who’s going to disagree with a lot of what you’ve got going on here. I don’t want to send you into an existential spiral by daring to disagree with you.”

Troi forced a smile. “Ah… yes! That does seem… appropriate and inevitable.”

“I was just telling them how they’re betraying your vision,” Vriska said.

Corona smirked. “Vriska, no offense, you don’t know the first thing about my vision. You were never one of those fighting for ideals, you fought because that was what your trusted friends were doing.”

“…Bullshit, but true.”

Corona created herself a chair and sat in it, folding her hands together. “What is your creed as the Dark Side of the Moon, Centroid? Put it simply.”

Troi bit her lip. “Freedom of the self in the New World.”

“Hmm. Freedom of the self. Admirable, and I can’t find fault with that yet, but Vriska’s right. That’s… not what I fought for. I fought to end the suffering. Freeing us from the clutches of destiny was a secondary concern. The suffering perpetuated by the Tower is petering out.”

“A-and because of that, there’s no more reason to devote ourselves to ending it! The problem is solved, we’re here to live in the New World however we want.”

“Personally, if I hadn’t been systematically broken down like a ragdoll after the collapse, I think I would have shifted the goal to ending as much natural suffering as I could. That is mostly what I’m doing now, come to think of it. Traveling around, saving whoever I can… being a beacon of hope, contrary to my supposed mastery of Doom.”

“And you are! You are a beacon of hope to us!”

Corona sighed. “I’m a god to you. And if not you, the people down there, at least.”

“It’s not like it’s a state-sanctioned religion like the Light Side…”

“Eve’s gonna have fun over there…” Corona mused.

“Wait, Eve? She’s here too!?”

Corona smirked. “Why does that surprise you? Surely you got some news from the City, even out this far.”

“W-well it was hard to tell rumor from—”

“Eve and I made up within a week or two of the collapse. It was a… harrowing experience, but we made it through.” She tapped the Master Sword fastened to her hip. “The universe reminded me that I was, and still am, a hero. And I will be until the Tower falls, ending corruption and suffering wherever I see it.” She smiled sadly. “Troi, I know it’s a difficult situation, but trying to shut them out isn’t the answer. The way to break through to those who want to hurt you is not by fighting back. It’s by turning the other cheek.”

“I don’t want my people to be genocided!”

Corona’s expression darkened considerably. “You fought for the collapse. You declared the price of self-genocide to be worth the goal at the end. This is much the same. Is the reconciliation and peace between enemies not worth that price?”

“W-well…”

“I don’t know enough to say for sure.” Corona’s voice softened. “We can’t see the good or evil that will come from an act. None of us saw what the New World would have to offer, and none of us saw whatever a preservation victory would have brought. No mind can handle the details, so we have to try our best and hope there’s more to life.”

Troi was silent as Corona stood up, walking out to the balcony. She looked over the city, smiling.

“Your people are happy,” Corona said.

“Yes.”

“Reveling in freedom, a release from the rules, a lessening of fate…” Corona folded her wings back, pressing her lips together until her mouth was a flat, emotionless line. She was silent for quite some time.

Tori didn’t dare interrupt her.

“It won’t last. You can’t be both accepting of freedom and hate the outside. It’ll collapse eventually.”

“I have no intention of keeping this city here forever,” Tori said. “We will spread out and make our own paths. It is just that… now, we are endangered.”

“You’re arguing exactly like the preservation did.” Corona held out a hand. “They cared so much about their homes and their lives and their preconceived notions that they didn’t see what we saw; a greater good bigger than all of us.”

“Are you claiming their goal of our destruction is a greater good?”

“Personally? No. I don’t think justice is really all it’s cracked up to be. But a lot of people do. Who are we to tell them their desire for justice is wrong? For retribution? Maybe the cycle of revenge truly is the highest form of being a person. Maybe worship is. Maybe exercising the freedom of choice and free will is. Or maybe it’s just friendship and peace.” She turned to look Troi directly in the eyes. “The problem is, we don’t know.”

“Your certainty is gone…” Troi breathed.

“What?”

“Your certainty. The fire that drove you to victory. That determination that brought you to…” She backed away. “It’s gone.”

“…I think you’re confusing the mask I put on to lead the collapse armies with who I really am. I cried my eyes out regularly until I fell asleep while the war was happening, Troi. I was determined, I was convinced I was right, but every day I wondered if there was another way, for the war itself was evil.”

Troi shook her head. “That’s the problem, then. We… we don’t idolize you, Corona.”

“Pretty sure y—”

“We serve that ideal you created. That… ‘mask,’ you said it was? That. That mask. That is what we, as the Dark Side of the Moon, follow. That unrelenting power, that charismatic determination, the gall to challenge what everyone had assumed. That is what the Dark Side of the Moon is all about. And we will defend our right to do that to our dying breath.”

“Troi, I don’t think…”

“I don’t think I’m getting through to you like this…” Troi tapped her hoof on the ground. “Oh! Idea!”

“Here we go…” Burgerbelle muttered.

~~~

Eve stood atop the Light Side temple-palace, Monika at her side.

“I could just…”

“No, Monika,” Eve said. “You’re here to provide a face and the threat of power, not to actually edit the entire city until it obeys your every whim.”

“…Fine…” Monika growled.

A hatch in the side of the pyramid opened up, revealing an orange face in a dark robe. “Chancellor Tesseract requests your presence inside the temple-palace, Most High Preserver.”

“I am going to get real tired of this…” Eve hissed. “Lead the way…?”

“Master Ahsoka Tano.” They followed her into the temple-palace, arriving in a long hallway with Jedi on all sides. Every last one of them stood at attention, bowing their heads silently to Eve in reverence. She could hear some of them muttering quiet prayers.

Years of being the Relations Overhead had taught her to keep her knee-jerk reactions in check when they wouldn’t be helpful, so she gave them no indication of her approval or disdain.

Monika, on the other hand, was grinning like a child the entire time.

They soon arrived in the room Tesseract was meeting the rest of the team.

“Most High Preserver Evening Sparkle,” Tesseract greeted with a deep bow. Eve was easily able to detect the fake reverence in her tone and motions—this mare did not believe Eve was a god, not even close. She just wanted everyone to think she did.

“Chancellor Tesseract of the Light Side of the Moon,” Eve bowed, sure to linger in the motion just long enough to make the Celestia slightly nervous. When she rose, Eve was delighted to find she was taller than the mare. Size intimidation was worth a lot more than people gave it credit for.

“You are here to tell me why my quest for just retribution is wrong,” Tesseract said.

“That will be a topic on the agenda, but first… I would appreciate an explanation for the statue outside, hmm?”

“Most High Preserver, it is the legacy of your tragic defense of existence. We remember what you did so we may continue in your hoofsteps.”

Eve nodded slowly. “Yes. I did defend existence. I did fight to the last breath to save what we had. I regret none of it. But I lost, and now there is no more need to be that.”

“No more need? Those who triggered the collapse are still here.”

“And they have absolutely no desire to attack you. In fact, out of all the people I’ve met in this New World, it’s our side that wants to attack the most. But I’m sure Starbeat caught you up on this already.”

Tesseract’s frown deepened. “Yes… She has. You and Corona, standing together, ending her little… ‘witch hunt’.”

“We failed to end it,” Eve breathed. “The Hub destroyed itself in Rage.”

Tesseract was silent.

“I don’t want that to be your fate.”

“I was aware of your implication, I am no fool,” Tesseract hissed.

“And yet you let your emotions seep through and show your hoof,” Eve said, raising an eyebrow. “It is clear you have no reverence for me.”

Tesseract realized she’d just been played and allowed her scowl to come out in full force. “I should have expected as much from the Overhead of Relations.”

“There we are, now we’re being honest.” Eve smirked. “Do tell, why do you lie to your people about me? Why do you build statues?”

“The answer is very simple, Evening. They want to believe in something. If they all believe in the same thing, they don’t kill themselves or each other. Your consort should be evidence of such effectiveness.”

“Call Flutterfree a consort again, and this conversation is over,” Eve deadpanned.

Tesseract nodded, accepting the threat as fact and moving on. “My point remains.”

“Effectiveness is not good, Tesseract. It’s still a lie.”

“Lies for the greater good, Evening.”

Eve pressed her wingtips together, frown deepening. “This is backwards.”

“Our conversation?”

“No. The Light Side and Dark Side, the preservation and the collapse. The other side is the one that fights for the greater good against the common definitions of right and wrong. We fight for that which we’ve always had. We say that the price they ask for is too great, that the way things are is better. We don’t go witch hunting to fulfill ourselves, we fight for the beauty inherent in ourselves.”

“You started a war for the greater good.”

“That was a mistake,” Eve said without hesitation. “And that’s the difference between me and Corona. I believe it was a mistake. She doesn’t. She’s had a hard time living with it, but she doesn’t regret what she’s done. That fight for the greater good? That’s what brought the multiverse to its knees. How can you claim to fight for the very enemy you were sworn to destroy?”

Tesseract turned away, looking out over the balcony to the city below. “…This is getting us nowhere.”

“I would prefer discussing with you possible alternatives rather than using what power I have to forcibly end this,” Eve said.

“I am aware of your penchant for interference.” Tesseract paused. “I am willing to negotiate, but logical arguments will get us nowhere. We are both steeped in our ways, unwilling to change, unwilling to see. We are too old.”

“If we do not argue, what then would you suggest we use to reach a resolution? Emotional appeals?”

Tesseract smiled. It was decidedly unpleasant to see such a slash on a face made to scowl. “…Something like that.”

~~~

The temple-palaces of the Light and Dark pulsed in unison, the connection between them synching up a deep beat. Two cellos faded into the ears of both cities’ citizens, inserting the familiar beat of a heartsong into their daily lives. Atop the temples, both Troi and Tesseract sensed the other’s presence in the beat, and yet they continued anyway. They weren’t about to let the other interfere with their mission.

Both temple-palaces shot beams of light into the sky, one red and one blue. Beneath, similar lasers fired into the ground, impacting the soil below. From her vantage point next to the mecha, Roxy watched in fascination as the light from the temples interacted with them, making them twitch slightly—as if an attempt were being made to power them.

Tesseract gestured for Eve to follow her, flying down to the street leading to her temple-palace. She marched forward, flanked by her citizens on the sides of the street. Every last one of them looked up to her with respect and adoration.

“Look closely at all my people
Faces say they’re strong and able
Their eyes tell a different tale
Everyone wishes they could wail
Holes in their hearts beyond filling
Screams of the dead call unending
We live to avenge the dark tomb
To strike them down, show them their Doom.”

Troi led Corona through a crowd of smiling faces, many of which she addressed directly.

“Charlie, are you ok?
You were a tragedy,
But now a proud father.
Cotton, remember now?
Timelines that you destroyed,
Lives that you now enchant.
Ruby, see the great news?
A new life; comedy
Far from the soldier’s walk.
Come see, o Corona.
Shining souls rest right here, cowering in new fear.”

Troi twirled around and pointed to the sky.

“Come see, o Corona
Will you tell us, freedom is wrong?
You’ve given people new life
Escape from strife
The Dark Side’s spark rings true.”

Both alicorns turned to their listeners at the same time.

“Our city is superior
Facing their ways, ulterior
For remembering the dark tomb
To strike them down, show them their Doom.”

Troi ignored Corona for a moment, turning to shout across the divide at the other City.

“Tessa, are you insane?
We don’t want your evil
Or your spiteful vengeance
Tessa, what have you done?
Spreading lies to your own
Restraining the new life
Tessa, why do you scream?
We’ve lost one and the same
End your deluded fight!”

Tesseract snarled, flaring her wings.

“You don’t get off
You won’t escape
Your righteous justice!”

She returned to Eve, lifting her high into the air to see the Light Side as a whole.

“These souls need a reason to live
Their grief too strong, they might just leave
You make them dishonor the lost
Spit in their face, call them light cost
Many of us made promises
Repay the debt, see lost faces
Their wishes don’t end with the war
Their hearts all groan, to settle the score.”

Troi turned away from the song reaching her ears from the other city, forcing a smile and returning to her people.

“Nora, can you show us?
Your bright husbands and wives
Definition no more
Trader, I see your wares
No pleasure is hidden
No answer kept away
Mikov, ancient wizard
Go beyond the taboo
Secrets we dare to know
Come see, o Corona,
The power within us, liberty burns anew!”

Twitching, the mare of the Dark Side flared her wings, prompting the weapons of the Dark Side to ignite, basking her in a red glow.

“Tessa, how can you say
That what we do, is so evil?
You berate us ev’ry day,
Our upheaval,
Your sadistic delight!”

They sang as one, rage clear in their tone.

“Our city is superior
Facing their ways, ulterior
For remembering the dark tomb
To strike them down, show them their Doom.”

Tesseract grinned.

“Young Troi, don’t lie to me
You hate us just the same
The death you truly want!

You don’t get off
You won’t escape
Your righteous justice!”

Tesseract’s Jedi lit their lightsabers as well, marching behind her in time with the beat. On both sides of the divide, an alicorn charged through the streets of their city in a show of power, flanked by their most powerful warriors swinging their blades and dancing in time.

Trailing behind on both sides was a single observer: Eve and Corona. Supposed gods to these cities, forgotten in the song. Little more than an afterthought in a connected rhythm that did little more than drive up the rage between the sides. What was meant to be an emotional appeal fell apart into shouting and a show of power.

Separated by a bridge though they were, the two cities pointed their weapons at each other and roared.

Eve and Corona were tired of being ignored.

Eve landed in front of Tesseract.

“Tessa, find perspective
See in your heart, revenge is lost
They will always need to hate
Impossible
For you to satiate
What of justice for your great sins?
Lies, pain, hatred, what-should-have-beens?
Who will hold you accountable?
Guilt has no end, even in Doom
Tessa!”

Corona flared her wings and pointed the Master Sword at Troi, forcing her to stop.

“Freedom, where’s the limit?
Is there a point, where it’s too much?
You still have a sense of law
But this passion
Will run your city raw
Don’t let them get at your anguish
Give them your cheek, make a kind wish
Hope for a reconciliation
Save your nation from its own Doom!
Listen!”

Tesseract and Troi stared, uncertain, at their problematic ‘gods’ as the music faded and the connection severed.

Below, Roxy let out a sigh of relief as the mecha stopped trying to activate.

~~~

“You look like shit,” Rina said.

Flutterfree looked up from the rock she’d been staring at, not even attempting to hide her tears.

“It went badly, I take it?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Flutterfree sagged. “I’m sitting here alone trying to be ‘fair’ and that’s just… stupid. I’m being stupid.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have context.”

Flutterfree just kept talking. “What good does it do to try to be fair? All it does is make there be more sorrow in the world. Instead of moping here for his sake I could be rebuilding bridges, helping with the Austraeoh reconstruction, getting past this. But no, I had to go and mope alone until you walk up out of…” She frowned. “Why are you here?”

“Rev’s worried, that’s why,” Rina explained. “She’s giving you space because you asked, but I can tell it’s driving her nuts. So here I am.” She booped Flutterfree’s snout. “And you are a hot mess.”

“You should see Discord. He’s… he’s heartbroken.”

“And you’re not?” Rina cocked her head.

“I’m the one w—”

“Unless I’m completely off the deep end, which I don’t think I am since I took a pill an hour ago, you can heartbreak yourself easy. Just refuse advances and presto, instant inner torment.”

“Rina, that’s… not the point.”

Rina raised an eyebrow. “Like I know what the point is.”

“…Right. Sorry.” Flutterfree sagged. “You are… sort of right. I just… it’s more important.”

“You’ve locked yourself up in a box, haven’t you?”

“Well…”

“Look, I’m a mess who has difficulty understanding basic emotions, and even I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to hide. Just because you made the right choice doesn’t mean it won’t hurt! Stop pretending like it’s not supposed to hurt, kapeesh?”

“But… it—”

“Have you heard Rev? We are not perfect. We are not able to take hardship with a smile and confidence. We will feel pain, disdain, doubt, and a whole mess of other nasty little things. You’re not perfect, you can’t just say ‘it was good, so I’m good’.”

Flutterfree looked deep into her eyes. Then, almost a whisper, she spoke. “I wanted him so bad…”

“I know. You’ve got it easy. At least your urges aren’t to kill everyone who looks at you wrong.” She looked toward the almost-complete construction of the Austraeoh, frowning. “When I look at everyone on that crew, I can think of multiple moments where I wanted to kill them. Often brutally.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Uh, thanks? I’m just trying to empathize here, I don’t think you need t—”

Flutterfree pulled her into a hug, dripping tears down the dark alicorn’s back. “W-we need ponies like you… that aren’t caught up…”

“…Er…”

Flutterfree released Rina, smiling softly. “It’s okay if you don’t understand.”

“I guess I got my daily allotment for wisdom already.”

“Who knows? You might have more.” Flutterfree wiped her eyes. “…I think I’ll go talk to Rev. She probably needs it just as much as I do.”

“She’s crazy, taking on everyone’s weights like that.”

“It’s what she does.”

The two of them walked back to the Austraeoh construction rather than teleporting, taking a moment to appreciate the scenery. They passed Mattie on the way there, sitting in her beach chair, absorbing the nonexistent ‘sun’.

“I swear, you’re going to pop any minute,” Rina commented.

Mattie snorted. “It’ll be more than a few minutes, but it’s not going to be long, either.”

“…Do you actually know when it’s going to happen?”

Mattie shrugged, glancing up at the two cities. “Whenever what’s happening up there reaches its climax, BAM, out comes the new kid. Or somewhere around then. This isn’t an exact science, you understand.”

“Starbeat might disagree.”

“Balls to her, she’s busy up there with whatever musical nonsense is happening.”

“Take it easy, Mattie,” Flutterfree said as they walked past her. “We’ll be here for you when it happens.”

“Crikey, Flutters, don’t make promises you won’t be able to keep when the chaos starts.”

Flutterfree sighed. “I…”

Mattie coughed. “Wait, wait, that was… uncalled for. …Sorry.”

Flutterfree stared at her in mild disbelief… and then broke out into a smile. “Mattie… thank you.”

“I’m going soft…” Mattie grumbled, looking away. Flutterfree’s smile didn’t go anywhere, even after she and Rina had left Mattie long behind.

The re-construction of the Austraeoh was going well. From a distance, it was impossible to tell it was unfinished, but up close some of the metal panels were clearly missing and a few of the propellers hadn’t been attached yet. Shimmy was working with the Everykid and Pinkie to add a large, gray blade to the center mast. They were arguing about how cool, but ineffective and ‘unrealistic’, sky-ships were.

Flutterfree ignored the banter, walking right up to Rev. “…Sorry for running off.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Rev retorted, placing a warm hoof on Flutterfree’s shoulder. “How are you holding up?”

“It hurts.”

“I still…”

“Rev… even if you’re right, and it’s perfectly fine to just take him on, it doesn’t feel right to me. And it’s wrong to do what we think is wrong.” She held a hoof over her chest. “What matters is what’s in our hearts.”

Rev put a hoof over her chest as well, smiling. “You’ve grown so much.”

“I have you to thank for it.”

They shared a quiet moment together—interrupted only when Discord teleported to them. “Hey, Rina, I need to t—”

He locked eyes with Flutterfree.

She started bawling.

He couldn’t take it—he teleported away without saying another word.

~~~

Pinkie looked at the beautiful Austraeoh VI, delighted at its shiny hull, mecha-harvested weapons, and a plethora of magic provided by none other than Shimmy herself. And yet, it still looked like the same ship that had blown up a few hours ago; a beautiful propeller sky-ship that honestly looked a little silly ‘sailing’ through the sky, but that was just the way Pinkie liked it.

“Thanks for your help!” Pinkie said, grinning.

“It’s the least I could do.” Shimmy dusted her hands off. “Well, the others are getting antsy in the ship…”

“You go to the City, we won’t mind.”

Shimmy glanced up at the two sky-cities that had just shot the Force-lasers above and below a few minutes ago. “You sure?”

“We can handle that. And, let’s be honest here, we need to handle that. It’s our problem, not yours. Go enjoy your vacation, we’ll mess with the knuckleheads when they need messing with.”

“If you’re sure…” Shimmy shrugged. “See you around?”

“We’ll be back at the City when the Tower falls!” Pinkie saluted. “Be there!”

“Planning on it!”

Shimmy teleported back to her ship. A moment later, they blasted off toward the City, leaving Pinkie and her new Austraeoh in the dust. She kept waving long after they’d left.

Roxy tapped her on the back. “They can’t see you anymore.”

“I know!”

“…Right…” Roxy coughed. “I’ve figured something out. About the mecha.”

“They’re related to the SBURB aspects and can only hold one at once?”

“Yes, but there’s more than that. They reacted to those lasers the cities shot, reacted heavily. Jenny and I were able to trace the magical signature beneath the ground and… I think you need to see it.”

“Considering how I don’t just know, you’re probably right!”

Roxy dragged Pinkie to a large hole Jenny had made with a shovel, some anger, and a lot of excess magical energy. It led to a metallic box in the ground made out of a smooth, gray material. A hatch had been popped open, revealing dozens of the pearl-robots, a few of which were set to Roxy’s Void essence. One of them was even walking around, though it didn’t seem to be doing anything besides cutting a circle into the ground.

“Huh. What’re they for?”

Roxy shrugged. “Dunno, really. What’s really interesting is down here.” She jumped down one of the box’s sides, rubbing away some dirt to show a relief sculpture. It was old, so old the details had been worn away, but Pinkie could make out the shape of two pyramids connected by a bridge. Floating between them was a shield-shape, and on the edges of the image there were lots of jagged edges. Those represented chaos and violence, if Pinkie had to guess.

Pinkie laid her hoof on the central shield. “…This is important. What is it?”

“I might know,” Jenny said. “I saw it in the dungeon. A shield-shaped coin-thing. Vriska had it, last I knew.”

Pinkie looked up at the cities. “That’s going to be… unfortunate, isn’t it?”

“It really is. I’ve tried calling them, too… something about what those lasers did either fried their phones or surrounded the cities in a null communication field of somesort. If we want to talk to them we’ll have to go up there ourselves.”

“…The vast majority of us are up there,” Pinkie mused. “They should be able to handle it. But just in case there’s a big problem, we need to be prepared. Gather everyone to the Austraeoh, we’ll get up there fast the moment we’re needed.”

“What about Mattie?” Pidge asked.

“Okay, we’ll need to leave someone who can handle her behind…”

Roxy coughed. “I can do it. Yes, I do know how to deliver equine foals. No, don’t ask me how. I need to stay down here to mess with these robots anyway.”

“Consider it Captain’s orders to do exactly that!” Pinkie winked.

“I’ll find everyone…” Pidge said, taking out her phone.

~~~

Troi dragged Eve off on a magical adventure of song and dance…

…leaving Minna, Burgerbelle, Mlinx, Vriska, Roland, and Thrackerzod alone in the room with Ahsoka.

“…They’re going to be busy with that for a while,” Burgerbelle said, observing as the song ramped up. “Taking bets now, will this be the longest heartsong yet?”

“No time for that,” Vriska whipped around, grabbing Ahsoka by the neck. “Lucky you, solid this time!”

Ahsoka Force-pushed Vriska away, knocking the troll onto her back. “Ow…”

“Vriska! What was that for?” Minna demanded.

Roland pointed his gun at Ahsoka's head. “She talked to us earlier. Warned us to get out of the city.”

“And you repay the favor by not listening to my advice and holding me at gunpoint?” Ahsoka raised an eyebrow. “Real good at the hero business.”

“We’ve learned to be wary of mysterious voices,” Thrackerzod said.

“Still, in fairness…” Mlinx gestured that Roland should lower his gun. “Now that your boss is out of the room, care to explain what’s really going on here?”

“It’s mostly as she says it is,” Ahsoka admitted. “I don’t think anything she said was an outright lie, but she’s leaving out a lot of the ‘countermeasures’ she has in place for ‘dealing with’ the Light Side. And with the temples activating like that…” She bit her lip. “There’s no more time.”

“For what?”

“With the temples having that surge of power, one of them is going to try something. I don’t know what she’s been doing in the temple’s core, but I know it’s not good.”

Thrackerzod lit her horn. “Where is this temple core? I’ll teleport us.”

“It’s protected…” Ahsoka ran to a side wall and removed a panel. “We’ll have to sneak around the back way.”

Mlinx nodded. “You will explain more on the way, yes?”

“If I can do it without slowing us down.”

~~~

On the other side of the divide, Monika, Lightning, Jotaro, Starbeat, Nanoha, and O’Neill were experiencing something similar.

Ahsoka ran to a side wall and removed a panel. “We’ll have to sneak around the back way.”

“Or we could just…” Monika held up a hand, ready to edit any character files.

“No,” Nanoha said. “Not now, Monika.”

Monika twitched, taking out her notebook and scribbling something passive-aggressive out on the pages.

Everyone else filed in after Ahsoka, crawling through the uncomfortable passage in single file. The passage was acoustic enough to let them hear each other just fine, though this made everything a little loud.

O’Neill capitalized on this by talking just a little louder than was necessary. “So! What’s up with these temple-palace things!”

“SHH!” Ahsoka hissed. “These corridors are not completely soundproof. We don’t want them to hear us.”

O’Neill whispered something too quiet to hear, prompting Nanoha to stifle a giggle.

“I’m going to assume you asked the same question again…” Ahsoka groaned. “The Sith and Jedi temples are ancient, so ancient we’re not even sure they were created by the Sith and Jedi. They were built together, always attached by the bridge, symbolizing a Balance in the Force. They never act independently—for every manifestation of the Light Side, there is one of the Dark Side. Before the collapse, these dual temples served as a place of neutral territory for the multiversal Force Orders. After… I was the only one who remained.”

They turned a corridor and started crawling down a long ladder.

“I wasn’t alone for long. Tessa and Troi arrived soon afterward, bringing with them people from both sides. At first, there was talk of peace and moving past the events of the war. But as they acclimated to the Force, something strange happened. The Force changed them—as it always changes those who use it—but they also changed the Force. And this mixture went… badly.”

“No kidding,” Starbeat said. “That mare is murderously vindictive… it reminds me a lot of the Rage.”

“I have heard your story, Starbeat,” Ahsoka said. “This is not full hypnosis, or even suggestion. This is them corrupting the Force itself, and letting their ideals override every other part of themselves. And in doing so, they created a divide. The Force seeks balance… or it used to. In this New World, it’s not doing that anymore.”

“Maybe we can fix this by altering the Force itself?” Starbeat suggested. “Change it back to what it was, or at least remove its influence. Even if they are choosing this, it’s clearly causing some kind of strengthened groupthink.”

“It might be too far gone for that,” Ahsoka admitted.

“Again, I’m always here, I can do things,” Monika said.

“We know,” Nanoha said. “It looks like we might need you… but we need to be careful with your power.”

“Why do you all always say that? It’s like I have to walk on eggshells…”

“It can endanger other people by painting a target on them.”

“You’re just paranoid.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

“We’re here,” Ahsoka said, kicking a panel open to reveal the core of the Light Side temple. The room itself was supposed to be barren save for a spark of white energy above a pedestal in the middle of the room. However, there were numerous additions, all affixed together by bright yellow lines of magic that looked a bit like circuitry. Nineteen orbs of light floated around at different locations in the room, all affixed to the central spark by one magic line or another. The orbs did not have a calming light with them—rather, it was a harsh, purging light that burned all eyes gazing upon it. This was no pleasant summer day, this was a cold sun blazing the eyes in the middle of a frigid winter.

“These are summoning lines,” Nanoha said, tracing a finger along them.

Ahsoka blinked. “I was sure it was some kind of weapon.”

“It probably is,” Nanoha admitted. “But I don’t see how you can summon something when there are no other universes to summon from.”

Monika pointed at herself.

“Your set of powers isn’t normal.” Nanoha walked toward the central pedestal and laid her hand upon it. “It’s inactive, right now, but it’s waiting for something. A… catalyst. Raising Heart, locate.”

“Done, master,” the Device said, directing her attention to a shield-shaped hole in the pedestal.

“Something needs to go here to activate everything,” Nanoha deduced. “Without it, nothing works.”

“Can we destroy it?” Jotaro asked, summoning Star Platinum.

“It would take some effort, but yes, I believe so.”

Ahsoka winced. “I would prefer it if we didn’t try to destroy the legacy of the Force…”

“And we need to worry about the Dark Side too,” Lightning pointed out. “They might have a similar weapon. If we disable this one, what if the Dark Side has a weapon and just exterminates this temple because they can’t defend themselves?”

“I’ll just make a call,” O’Neill said, pulling out a phone. “…No service.”

Ahsoka paled. “…We should have service in here…”

~~~

The core of the Dark Side had an identical room design, though the walls were black and the spark in the center was an unsettling murky color. Lines of magic criss-crossed the walls here as well, though they were less akin to circuitry and more like tangled thorny vines twisting all over every surface. Nineteen purple eyes with ominous slits in them floated around the room, affixed to the tangled magic lines by large thaumic thorns.

“She’s been up to some shady stuff…” Mlinx observed.

“No, really?” Thrackerzod called. “This is a summoning network, the kind you would use to call the Old Ones down to smite a planet.” She laid a hoof down on the magic lines, frowning. “This is not natural to the Dark Side, this was added later. She must be trying to exploit it.”

“How would you summon anything?” Minna asked. “There are no other realms.”

“I have no idea,” Thrackerzod admitted, tracing the purple vines to the altar. “All I know is that it shouldn’t work. But we can’t take the risk that it does.”

Roland pointed a gun at the altar.

“WAIT!” Ahsoka shouted. “Can we not blow up this ancient piece of Force history?”

Mlinx nodded. “It would be hasty. And, mind you, the Light Side may have the same issue. We’ll need to coordinate with them regardless.”

Burgerbelle took out a rotary phone. “Calling… calling… calling… no signal. BEEP.”

“No signal…?” Ahsoka frowned. “We should get one in here.”

Mlinx took out his phone. “Nothing.”

“We’re being jammed, obviously,” Vriska said.

“Can you cancel the spell matrix?” Ahsoka asked.

“Difficult, but possible,” Thrackerzod said. “It will just take some time…”

“Is it hot in here, or something?” Vriska said, tugging at her robe, suddenly sweating profusely. “Geez…”

“It’s colder than room temperature,” Thrackerzod reported, continuing to analyze the tangled circuitry.

“I seriously feel like I’m burning up…” Vriska put a hand to her head and sat down. “Geez…”

“Your inventory,” Minna said. “It’s in your inventory.”

“My… what?”

“Just check.” Minna tapped her head to remind Vriska of her unusual abilities.

Vriska pulled an eight-ball out of her robes and cracked it on the ground. Instantly, she felt relief—the heat was gone. The item contained within the eight-ball floated into the air: the shield-shaped object she had found in the dungeon. It was glowing a bright white.

“What…?” Vriska cocked her head. “I’m not even sure I remember picking that up.”

The shield flashed, gaining a brilliant coloration. The worn edges and flat face suddenly shot to life with all the designs needed for them to identify it.

It was a Sweetie Belle Crusader Shield.

“…What?” Thrackerzod asked nobody in particular.

The shield shot toward the hole in the altar—barely stopped by Ahsoka’s use of the Force. “H-help… it… wants to complete…”

Thrackerzod grabbed hold of it with her magic, pulling it away from the altar. She started preparing some sealing spells in the background to create a more permanent solution, but she never finished.

Troi appeared in a flash of dark light right behind the altar, having bypassed the teleport security she had set up. She used her immense stores of alicorn power and the Force to pry the shield out of their grasp. It slid into the hole in the altar with a satisfying click.

A beautiful holographic rose began to bloom from the shield, and numerous spirograph images twirled around it rapidly.

“Uh, sorry about this,” Troi said, laughing nervously. “You might want to take cover.”

~~~

Discord found himself standing in the middle of a grassy field.

He stood there, perfectly still, for several minutes.

Only after he had established his motionlessness did he throw his head back.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

The shout wasn’t enough for him, so he pointed a pointed claw at the sky.

“YOU! Oh, have I got a few things to say to you! You know what’s wrong with you? You’ve got all these stupid rules that make no sense! Normal rules are bad enough as it is, but at least those have a point! What’s the point of this, huh? Pain? Do you like causing pain? You claim to have made everything, so apparently you made pain too! Sadist! And that’s not all you are, oh no, I’ve heard lots about you over the years, and hot diggity dog are you a piece of WORK!”

Discord sneered, spreading his arms wide. “Let’s go down the list, why don’t we? Arrogant, prideful, vengeful, ridiculously cryptic, secretive, manipulative, angry, inconsistent, oppressive, and… and…” He created a boulder and hurled it at the sky so hard it wasn’t going to come back down. “WHAT DOES SHE SEE IN YOU!?”

The planets in the sky continued to swirl around each other, unresponsive to his cries.

Discord fell to his knees and rammed his hands into the ground, silent and still once more.

“You forgot a few.”

Discord turned, shocked to see Rev laying down next to him, looking blankly forward. She kept talking, not waiting for a response from him. “Nepotistic, despotic, warmongering, stubborn, homophobic, racist, sexist, enslaving, meek, over-achieving, judgmental, soft, overly-forgiving, confusing, unfair, tactless, brutal, silent—”

“I get it,” Discord muttered.

“Get what?” Rev asked, cocking her head.

“There’s a long list…”

“What is it a list of?”

“Of… bad things your God does.” He frowned.

“That’s not what the list is.”

“Then what is it?”

“It things we think are wrong with Him.” She was silent for a moment, letting it sink in. “We’re small. We get angry at life, at others, at the world, and we want to blame it all on Him. It really does make things simple: after all, He is the root cause of everything, and He has the blame for everything.” Absent-mindedly, she began tracing swirls in the ground. “That list is a bunch of reasons we’ve found to justify that feeling. A lot of them contradict each other - are their own opposites, meaning He is neither of the extremes we think. Others are from misinterpretation of what we know. And still others come from us trying to define good and evil on our own, and messing up with our limited, limited scope.”

Discord said nothing.

“If the war taught the multiverse anything, it’s that none of us have the right to declare what is good and what is evil. We can’t handle that kind of responsibility.”

Both she and Discord stared at the planets shifting above their heads for a moment.

Eventually, Discord spoke. “I see it. I think. Every moment of my chaotic life, I was convinced I was right. But I never was. Even now, Flutterfree has to drag my chaotic rear out of the slime pit and show me the MAAAAGIC of FRIENDSHIP.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh.

“…I think you’re ready to understand,” Rev said.

“Understand what?”

Rev stood up and gestured to a yellow shape standing on the crest of a nearby hill. “Her.”

Rev teleported away, leaving Flutterfree and Discord alone.

Flutterfree was crying, but she refused to look away from Discord. Barely managing to breathe through her sniffles and heaves, she forced herself to walk all the way to him. Eventually, she sat down at his knees, looking straight up at him.

“I didn’t come into the faith because of it,” she began. “I came because I liked the way the people were kind to one another. How the love flowed between them, how they… they had a reason to be the best they could be. I had always just been kind because that’s what I was. Rev showed me it was more meaningful than that.

“But now… I see more. Love…” She choked. “Love is the highest virtue. If you can love everyone perfectly, you are perfect. All other virtues can be rolled up into it. B-but… how can we know what is the most loving thing to do? We h-have gut feelings, a conscience, and virtues… but they’re not always right. They change as we age. Back and forth… and some of us do evil things in the name of g-good.

“And that’s it. That’s… that’s part of why I stay, and w-why I’m doing this to us. Discord, I love you, and I mean that in every sense of the word however far you want to take it. But I can’t trust myself to know what’s right… even if every fiber of my soul c-cries that this is right that this is the way that this is happiness that this is best that…” She took a moment to catch her breath, forcing her heartbeat to slow. “Even if I think this is good, I can’t trust what my heart wants. I’ve chosen to trust something aside from myself. I trust His words. I have faith that He won’t lead me astray. Because… because everything else has been good and pure and right and…” She let out a breath. “I can’t just pick and choose what parts I want to believe. I’ve chosen this, so I… I have to stick with it. This… this isn’t one of those things open to interpretation. Marry into the faith.” She wiped her eyes. “I-I can’t ignore that.”

Discord stared at her with old, tired, and damp eyes. “…I know.” He pulled her into a hug. “It’s okay.”

She returned the hug with a desperate, almost predatory grip with all four of her hooves and her wings, squeezing him for all she was worth. She buried her face in his neck, filling his fur with her tears. He did the same, though he was nowhere near as loud as she was.

Discord’s delicate little flower clung to him. She never wanted to let go. She feared what would happen when she did.

But the New World could not let their moment last forever. Other things were brewing in the sky above them, and it interrupted as they held each other.

A brilliant orb of light rose from the Light Side, surrounding itself in a myriad of shimmering segmented wings of white coloration with red and pink backing, acting like a sun to Nucleon.

The Dark Side saw an equally impressive, but much more monstrous presence. A tangled mess of thorns and fleshy, pulsating tendrils swirled around an ice-blue eye with a slit of darkness through the middle. It was an eye that screamed of a hunger for blood.

Wings and tendrils smashed into each other, creating a massive shockwave between the two cities. The bridge somehow held.

Flutterfree’s tear-filled eyes reflected the light and the darkness.

“…The world needs us,” Flutterfree said, prying herself off Discord. With shaking legs, she pointed a wing at the city. “They are more important.”

As the summons fought, they heard a distant scream from Mattie.

The time had come.

IV – Gray

“I still can’t believe our histories are defined by random musical numbers,” Jang commented. “It seems so… surreal.”

“Yet another thing the Tower does,” Joanne said. “They won’t exist after it falls.”

“Not unless you practice, anyway!” Pringle cheered. “It is possible to talk entirely in rhyme, you know!”

“Frivolous,” Onion muttered.

Joanne snorted. “Not as frivolous as Rev.”

The Elder frowned. “Joanne, you do realize she’s an actual person, right? What if she walked through that door right now, what would you say to her?”

“I’d tell her to her face exactly what I’m telling you. Frivolous and hypocritical. She’s just making excuses for what she believes.”

“That would require you to look up from your phone,” Onion snipped.

“And what about my trust of the Force?” the Elder asked Joanne.

“Same response,” she deadpanned. “Though not as ridiculously bizarre and convoluted. You’re simple. Keep Balance, feel the way of the Force, use but understand others. Not... that.”

“You don’t really know what my beliefs are, do you?” the Elder asked.

Joanne furiously typed on her phone. The Elder lifted a hand to block all Internet access in the chamber. “Uh…”

“You rely too much on outside information…” The Elder sighed. “Your criticisms are legitimate, but make sure you know what you’re talking about next time rather than repeating half-remembered complaints.”

Joanne refused to look up from her phone, though her face soured considerably.

“…Can we just get back to the excitement?” Pringle asked. “Come on, the final confrontation is upon us! Light versus dark, collapse versus preservation! Can the heroes make peace? What’re the mecha gonna do? How do Discord and Flutterfree try to save the day? What are Tessa and Troi’s real plans!?”

Jang folded his arms. “I think the more nebulous questions are better, especially since we don’t know the answer. What is the nature of belief? Is love the highest virtue? Why do people who claim to follow the same ideal disagree? Why do we separate ourselves into camps in the first place? And what does it mean to be held as an ideal?”

“…Can we just have some cool space explosions?” Joanne asked.

The Elder smiled warmly. “Yes. Yes, we can have some cool space explosions.”

“Oh no, here it comes…” Onion groaned.

The Elder took in a deep breath. The others all covered their ears.

“KA-BOOOOOOOOOM!”

~~~

Corona had no idea where Troi teleported off to. All she knew was that she was standing alone in front of a small army of red lightsaber-wielding dancers that no longer had a dance to occupy them.

“…Any idea where she went?” Corona asked.

There were a few shaking heads in response.

“Okay…” Corona tapped her foot. “So… what are you all going to do now?”

The woman in front shrugged. “Whatever we want. Not a fan of the heartsong in the first place, it’s an artifact of the Tower.” She deactivated her weapon. “Disperse, ever—”

The magic surge mixed with the Force grabbed everyone’s attention. They looked toward the temple-palace, where a noxious darkness was taking shape. First came the eye, and it was by far the worst part: a brilliant blue flame around a slit of endless void, surrounded by a grasping, fleshy exterior. It did not look at them, but even so they could feel its seething hatred of life itself. Massive, undulating tentacles sprouted from the back of the eye, creating a tangled mess of thorns, flesh, and darkness. Sounds akin to distant screaming came from its every surface.

There was no doubt as to its target: the Light Side of the Moon.

Corona moved like the wind, but there was never a chance she would make it in time.

The Light Side was not without defenses, however, for their champion rose as well. An orb of holy burning light intercepted the dark, jittering energy released by the Dark One. The Light One’s myriad metallic, fluorescent wings swirled in a complex spirograph-esque pattern, attempting to weave the attack past the Dark One’s defenses.

Throbbing tentacles met the light directly, burning, but holding strong. The Dark One increased its energy output, only for the Light One to compensate, prompting an explosion in the air between the two cities. The gates of both sides began to crack.

Corona inserted herself between the two of them, using all the energy she could spare to maintain a massive shield. She wouldn’t be able to keep this up against both of them for long…

Eve appeared next to her, adding to the shield. “Funny running into you here!”

Corona chuckled. “Surprise, surprise, surprise… I’ve got the Dark Side, you get the Light?”

“Right. There’s one problem. I don’t sense the magic levels dropping.”

“Even on Nucleon there is a limit, we should reach it…”

“We didn’t reach it around the Tower. Something’s keeping the levels high to maintain this level of combat.”

Corona smirked. “Then we just have to beat them the old fashioned way.”

“Naturally.”

They released the shield at the same time, switching to fire and ice in unison. The Light One found itself encased in an ever-shifting bundle of snowflakes and ice shards while the Dark One was caught in a burning hellscape of vicious flaming licks.

The ‘gods’ of the Sides of the Moon would not allow these summons to destroy the cities.

Corona intercepted a tentacle from the Dark One and purged it with a holy healing spell, using Bacon Pancakes to flatten another trying to attack her from behind. When it went for a direct dark attack, she attempted to absorb it and reflect it back. She woefully underestimated the Dark One’s power output. Her spell matrix exploded, sending her flying into the middle bridge.

Eve landed next to her, having just suffered a similar fate. They wasted no time, however, jumping back into the midst of it to prevent the two beasts from clashing directly. Raging Sights and the Element of Magic shone like stars in a nebula as they redirected the energy away.

In both cities, the organized Force-users were conflicted.

The great champions of their city, destined to destroy the other, were being fought by their very own gods. The Dark One sought to end the threat to the collapse, but Corona fought tooth and nail. Eve drove magic dart after ice shard into the just glow of the Light One, preventing that which needed to be repaid.

And the alicorn leaders of the Cities?

They were nowhere to be found.

~~~

Troi was grinning up until the point she heard the explosion. She teleported to the temple center instantly, bypassing its security.

“No!” she shouted. “No, I shot first, you shouldn’t… I had the shield!” She pointed an accusatory hoof at the pedestal that held the white spark. “You shouldn’t be able to do anything! This was my plan! I let them come down here! Why isn’t it working!? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?”

There was no response. Connected though the temples may be, shouting at one did not carry over to the others under normal circumstances.

Roland pointed his gun at Troi’s head. “You are going to explain, quickly and simply, what you just did.”

“I used the unlocked ka-potential of the Dark Side temple to attack the Light Side. But… they must have found a way to retaliate! I need to go assis—”

Minna grabbed Troi’s head with her hand, psychically assaulting the alicorn. Troi was a master of the Dark Side of the Force, more than able to resist such conditioning. That said, it took most of her focus, allowing Mlinx to come in and knock her unconscious.

“…That was easy,” Burgerbelle said, holding an easy button.

“That may be a problem,” Ahsoka said. “I don’t know what any of this is. I don’t know how she did, but I can’t tell you about this. This is a Force temple, not a ka temple!”

“There’s something else going on here,” Minna said, trying to pry the Sweetie Shield out of the pedestal, but getting nothing. “Whatever this is, it activated the rest of the Temple.”

“It also made the summoning possible,” Thrackerzod commented, still scanning the magic lines all around. “If you can twist ka, you can use more magic than should be available and create things that shouldn’t exist… This wasn’t actually a ‘summon’ so much as a ‘creation from nothing’.”

Another shockwave ran through the temple.

“I’m glad we can’t see whatever it is she summoned,” Burgerbelle said.

“Whatever it is, it’s ugly and needs to be stopped,” Vriska declared.

“Careful,” Roland said. “The Light Side has its own monster, if she spoke the truth.”

“Dammit, we’d need to deactivate them both at the same time…”

Ahsoka frowned. “I… might be able to help with that. You have a team on the Light Side, correct?”

Mlinx nodded in confirmation.

“I need to meditate. I might be able to Force-project myself there.” She sat down, crossing her legs and closing her eyes. “Communication may be blocked… but the Force still flows between the temples. That can’t be stopped.”

“What do we do while you try that?” Vriska asked.

“Be quiet.” Roland sat down as well, crossing his legs. “Perhaps do the same.”

“We’re not Force-sensitive.”

“Leave her to her meditation,” Mlinx said, taking Vriska to the other side of the room. Whispering, he asked her a question. “What is that shield?”

“I have no idea,” Vriska whispered back.

“It’s a Sweetie artifact,” Minna said. “But Zod and Burgerbelle have no idea what it means.”

“Do you?” Mlinx asked.

Minna shook her head. “I’m not getting any confirmations, merely images of what it’s not. Whatever it was, it’s as old or older than this temple, and I’m fairly certain these temples have been around longer than the League of Sweetie Belles.”

“A mystery…” Mlinx scratched his chin. “Vriska, Minna, we need to prepare to blow this place at any moment. We need to find the most effective way to do that.”

“Bombs?” Burgerbelle asked, appearing in the middle of them with a large, cartoonish black bomb.

“…That’s better than nothing.”

~~~

The shockwave hit the Light Side.

“…What just happened?” O’Neill asked.

Nanoha traced the magic circuitry with Raising Heart. “The summon spell activated because… I don’t know why, something was introduced from another location. The magic is no longer draining like it’s supposed to.”

“A meta effect,” Starbeat realized. “Someone’s messing with ka directly. These temples might just be a ka-device!”

“That doesn’t make sense!” Ahsoka said. “I’ve been with them for years, they were never anything more than Force temples.”

“How old are they?” Starbeat asked.

“…Very.”

“Older than you, at least, which means there could have been hidden natures.”

The temple shook again.

“There’s a fight going on up there,” O’Neill observed.

Monika rolled her eyes. “Obviously whatever the Light Side summoned is fighting something from the Dark Side.”

“And if we destroy this side… the city is destroyed.” Nanoha frowned. “We need to coordinate with the other team. There has to be some way to send a message…”

“The Force-connection is still there,” Ahsoka said. “I ca—”

“You won’t have time,” Tesseract said, walking into the room. She pointed her horn at Monika and teleported the Lord of Ka out in an instant.

“That won’t keep her,” Nanoha said.

“She’s about to find herself in the midst of a battle of light and dark,” Tesseract declared, narrowing her eyes. “I doubt she’ll find the time. Just as you won’t find the time to contact your allies.”

“STAR PLATINUM: THE W—”

Tesseract cast a spell, petrifying Jotaro in an instant. “You won’t have time to do anything. Any action you take against me will result in your failure. You will stay here, inactive and compliant, until the Dark Side is annihilated.”

“You’re a moron if you think we’ll listen to you,” Lightning said, casting Esuna on the party, curing Jotaro’s petrification.

“We fight,” Starbeat smirked. “That’s all there is to say on the mat—”

Tesseract pushed all five of them back with a Force push hard enough to shatter ribs. She unleashed six lightsabers all at once, wielding one for every color of the rainbow, each fully independent of the others in her magic. “You were never supposed to be down here.”

Ahsoka stood herself up, activating her dual white lightsabers. “Sorry about that…”

“I never expected you to be a traitor,” Tesseract said. “Perhaps that was foolish. I knew you wouldn’t go to the Dark Side. But that your desire for peace would let you betray other sides I had not considered.” She clashed lightsabers.

“STARLIGHT B—”

Tesseract cast feedback, not losing a grip on any of her lightsabers. Nanoha’s spell blew up in her face before she knew what was happening. The alicorn petrified Jotaro again and grabbed Crimson Sushi with the Force, squeezing the Stand until O’Neill collapsed, holding his chest in agony.

“She’s manipulating ka!” Starbeat shouted, rapidly swapping through screens on her goggles. “She shouldn’t be this strong or this lucky!”

“ULTIGA!” Lightning shouted. Tesseract encased it in her magic and threw it at Nanoha before she could get up.

Ahsoka charged, meeting four lightsabers at once.

“Master Ahsoka, you know the Force…” Tesseract twisted her other two blades away from Starbeat, angling at Ahsoka from behind. “You do not know the Tower.”

“Let’s see which is better!” Ahsoka leaped over the two lightsabers coming at her from behind, grabbing hold of Tesseract’s neck with the Force.

Tesseract responded with a simple explosion spell, knocking Ashoka to the ground.

“Tesseract… you’ve got more of a plan than this,” Starbeat said, carefully angling a magic shield between herself and the alicorn. “What is it?”

“I am not falling into the monologue trap.” Tesseract cancelled both Starbeat’s shield and Lightning’s attack at once, grabbing Starbeat with her telekinesis and tossing her onto O’Neill, throwing the aim of his gun off. “I will do what needs to be done.”

“I notice you’re not being lethal…” Nanoha commented, getting to her feet.

“I am no fool. I know you are protected.” Tesseract angled her six lightsabers at the White Devil. “I do not have to kill you to accomplish my goal.”

Nanoha looked around, realizing she was the only one standing. She hefted Raising Heart. “You’d think that…” Her expression darkened. “But I won’t stop until I’m a cold, dead corpse.”

Tesseract pointed the purple lightsaber at O’Neill’s head. “Stand down, Nanoha O’Neill.”

Nanoha twitched. “You won’t.”

“You are right. I won’t. Unless you make it clear to me that I cannot win, in which case, I have nothing to lose.” Tesseract cocked her head. “I would prefer to kill Jotaro for the sake of justice, but you leave me no choice.”

“You always have a choice.”

“Absolutely. I mean within the choice I have already made: justice must be served.”

“…How did you figure out about this temple’s ka-nature?”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you. It would be foolish to do so.”

Inwardly, Nanoha swore.

Tesseract continued. “I will say this. They attacked first. I simply used what they unlocked to retaliate.”

“You’ve been building your society to threaten the Dark side in the hopes that they’d do this,” Nanoha observed. “Do not pretend you are the victim here.”

“Yes. But there was a reason. Eve is right, if I just attacked with no warning, we would become vicious conquerors. Now, we are the defenders, and our society will not lose itself to continued vengeance after the fact. Justice will be served and we will not fall into further temptation.”

“The cycle of revenge never ends.”

“That is why I am making it. There must be some act. The debt can never truly be repaid, but I will end the demands today.” She narrowed her eyes. “…And you got me talking.”

“That was all you.”

Tesseract remained silent.

~~~

Monika appeared in the air between the Dark One and the Light One just as they shot a volley at each other. Monika prepared to re-write herself alive, but Corona and Eve protected her from the assault with shields of their own, setting her down on the bridge below.

“Can you edit them?” Corona asked, frantically, slicing tentacles apart only for them to regrow an instant later.

“No,” Monika said, finding with annoyance that their character files were protected. “Gonna have to do something else…”

“HOLD THAT THOUGHT!” Pinkie shouted from so far away none of them could see her—but it sounded like she was right next to them anyway. “I’VE GOT AN IDEA!”

Corona, Eve, Monika, and both Entities of Light and Darkness stopped for a moment to look down.

The Austraeoh VI was flying at the entities at high speed.

“SMASHIN’ TIME!” Pinkie shouted from the Austraeoh’s front. All the weapons on the ship activated at once, including lasers, rockets, magic missiles, traditional bullets, and even a few spring-loaded mecha fists harvested from below. The Entities forgot each other for a moment to combat this new ship. The shields lasted just long enough for the self-destruct to fully activate.

KA-BOOOOOOOOOM!

A space-rending explosion knocked the Dark and Light Ones silly, tearing away much of their outer power, exposing their cores for a moment.

“NOW!” Pinkie shouted, landing next to Monika.

Corona and Eve nodded, jumping to their representative entities. Corona dug her hands into the Dark One’s eye while Eve drove a blade of ice into the Light One’s brilliant orb. With a momentarily lessened power, Corona and Eve were able to get the upper hand. They were draining magic from the entities faster than they could restore it within themselves.

“YOU JUST BLEW UP THE AUSTRAEOH!” Monika shouted, throwing her arms wide.

“Yep!” Pinkie grinned.

“We just rebuilt it!”

“Yep!”

“That’s it, I’m bringing it back, I’m not going through that nonsense again,” Monika accessed her files of the Austraeoh.

“Wait, Monika, don’t!”

Monika pointed a finger at Pinkie. “Shut up! I am sick and tired of you all going ‘oh, this’ll be better if we don’t use you’ or ‘no, don’t use your abilities, that’ll have unintended consequences’ or ‘that’d be boring’! I’m the Lord of Ka, Pinkie, and I’m going to use it!”

Pinkie tried to tackle her.

Monika clapped her hands together, re-creating the Austraeoh VI exactly as it had been.

This was exactly what Tesseract had wanted her to do.

The instant she used her powers, the Light Side temple latched onto her with a ka-fueled soul-bond, pulling her to the ground. She howled in immense pain, slamming her fists into the stone bridge. The very fiber of her being was shunted into the Light Side’s inner workings, twisted to some purpose that wasn’t her own.

The Light Side reached out, touching the individual all the people believed in: Eve.

Pinkie gasped. “Oh no oh no oh no EVE LOO—”

Eve was unable to stop the Light One from charging her. She deflected, but that was pointless: the Light One wasn’t attacking.

The Light One was merging with her.

With a brilliant nova of prismatic light, the Light One was gone—only Eve remained. But her eyes shone with the light of judgment and numerous pairs of metallic, yet angelic wings surrounded her.

She turned to Corona and the Dark One.

“I don’t suppose you know that trick…?” Corona asked the entity she’d been punching to shreds a moment ago.

The Dark One shook its eye.

“Ponyfeathers.”

“Corona of the Collapse Movement and Dark Side of the Moon!” Eve declared in a voice that was hers, but somehow louder, clearer. “It is time you paid for your crimes!”

Corona and the Dark One raised defensive magic, but it was clearly at a disadvantage to whatever Eve was now.

“Monika!” Pinkie shouted, shaking the shuddering woman. “Monika, we—”

“It’s eating me…” Monika wailed, grabbing her head. “It…”

“I know it hurts but we need to activate the other side or Eve’s going to murder a city!”

Monika shivered. “I… I can’t…”

“I can.” Pinkie picked Monika up and jumped behind a column in the bridge’s railing. Her ‘shortcut’ took her right to the core of the Dark Side temple.

Mlinx stared at her in shock. “What in th—”

“Shh,” Pinkie hissed, gesturing at Ahsoka and Roland. The next thing she did was slap Monika onto the Sweetie Shield like she was some kind of key card.

“Ow…” Monika muttered.

“Give your power to this one,” Pinkie whispered. “Balance it.”

“Won’t that make it wo—” another wave of pain ran through Monika, drawing a pained gag from her.

“It’ll buy us time.”

Monika closed her eyes and forced the little energy she had left into the Dark Side temple. It accepted her energy through the Sweetie Shield eagerly.

The pain matched that brought on by the Light Side.

She passed out—but the temples did not stop using her power.

~~~

Corona was not a fan of the fusion idea, but she knew there was no way to get out of this situation without a powerup of some sort. She couldn’t let Eve destroy a city while under the influence of a dark angel.

So when Monika’s power was shunted through the Dark Side, she let the Dark One take her eagerly.

It was painful, at first… but then it was exhilarating. Her back erupted with fleshy, thorned tentacles of bone and magic, and both her eyes became dark slits of power.

“You reveal your true colors,” Eve declared. “A demon of the higher order.”

Corona wrapped Eve in her tentacles. “A demon is just another name for those who defy an evil god.” She punched forward with complex magic. Raging Sights was still helping her—even if it didn’t agree with its master right now, it knew that Corona made this choice just to keep the peace. It would act in accordance with those instructions.

And that included a many-tiered magic ring that summoned a fist of fiery blood upon Eve’s icy comet attack.

“You lost last time,” Corona said, surrounding herself in fleshy spikes.

“That was not a true fight.” Eve surrounded herself in Seraphim and the metallic wings, reflecting every attack back to Corona. “We were not true to our legacy!” She drove the icy metal shards into Corona’s body, drawing thick, bright purple blood from her mutated form. “We were not as devoted to our fight as we should have been.”

“It’s amazing how someone so deluded in the old ways can say something so true.” Corona healed all her injuries and snapped her fingers, encasing Eve in a sphere of purple fire. “You are the one who perpetuates the Empire because you fear the price of change!”

Eve exploded out of the darkness. “You are the apocalypse incarnate, murderer. You gamble with lives! You threaten the stability of life itself.”

“I make it better! I give it freedom! We will not be tread upon!”

“You deserve as such!”

Light and dark impacted at high speed, two hands reaching for the necks of the other with vehemous hate. They squeezed, unable to overcome the magical barriers on each other, sending thousands of little missiles in attempts to breach each other’s defenses.

But they were exactly matched. Neither could get through to the other.

“STOP!” Flutterfree shouted, projecting herself through the Rage. Corona and Eve glared at her as one.

She stood on top of Discord’s shoulders, wing-blades uncovered, reflecting the light of the battle back upon opposing forces.

“You two are stronger than this!” Flutterfree called. “Fight the spirits within you—you are the heroes! You are better!”

Eve’s expression softened. “Flutt—”

Corona capitalized on the opening, punching through Eve’s chest. “We are the heroes.” She threw Eve to the ground, kicking up dust. “We go until our dying breath.” She surrounded Discord and Flutterfree in a magic aura. “You are right. We are stronger. We are stronger than we’ve ever been.”

She threw Discord and Flutterfree to the ground at terminal velocity before turning back to Eve. Despite having just been run through by Corona’s fist, the alicorn rose to meet the fiery valkyrie with her bladed wings.

“You hurt her!” Eve shrieked.

“She was in the way.”

“There is no punishment great enough for you!”

“Good!”

The bridge rumbled as they collided again.

~~~

Jenny wasn’t all that surprised when Discord and Flutterfree dropped out of the sky like a meteor.

She was just annoyed they’d landed on her lunch.

“That was my sandwich!”

“Sorry,” Flutterfree said, pulling herself out of the crater. “We’ve got a problem, Eve and Corona ar—”

“We know,” Pidge said, frantically tapping buttons on her laptop. “I’m working on help…” She gestured at the rows upon rows of pearl-robots she and Jenny had unearthed and enchanted with various Aspects – mostly Void from Roxy, but they had a Doom from Corona, a Light from Eve, a Space from Pinkie, and a lot of blank ones.

“Oooh!” Jenny grabbed a pearl and bonked Flutterfree on the head with it, endowing it with Rage. “Got a new one!”

“Great, let’s hope the programs work universally…”

Discord dusted himself off. “I was just caught unawares, my chaos can take them.”

“Hubris,” Pidge deadpanned. “Our mini-mech army will go with you, just in case. They’re keeping each other busy up there, for now.”

“…We weakened Eve,” Flutterfree said. “She’ll lose eventually… and once Corona vaporizes the Light Side…”

“I’m working on it!” Jenny hissed.

“What about Roxy?”

“OOOOH, YES!” Mattie shouted from a nearby tent.

“…She’s busy,” Pidge said, trying not to gag.

Jenny shivered. “I’m glad it’s not me in there…”

“How do you think Roxy feels?”

“Ay, she’s a loose party girl deep down, I’m sure she’s fine.”

Roxy must have heard this, because a sniper shell flew out of the tent and hit Jenny in the head.

“Roxy, I know you’re frustrated, but we need her to work faster,” Flutterfree addressed the tent.

“YES! YES! YES! I’M PUSHING!” Mattie shouted.

Flutterfree chose not to criticize Mattie’s tone while she was actively giving birth. That would not only have been uncalled for, it would likely have made the unicorn double down, and Flutterfree did not wish that torment on Roxy.

The fight in the sky was more important.

“I think we’re ready…” Pidge said, pressing a few more buttons.

“I think we are too…” Jenny absent-mindedly took a replacement sandwich the Everykid had given her and bit into it. “LAUNCHING MINI-MECHS!”

Flutterfree climbed onto Discord again. “I’m coming too—but hide me. We don’t want to give Corona the advantage.”

Discord nodded, bouncing into the air like a spring. All around him, the humanoid robots flew, controlled by Jenny and Pidge’s coding. The Void ones soon phased to invisibility while Doom, Rage, and Light remained in full view.

Discord thrust a rubber chicken sword between Corona and Eve. “Okay, it’s time we brought the pain!”

The robots that were supposed to provide him support… didn’t. They froze in the air around the bridge, something holding them frozen.

A synthetic voice came from the Void ones all at once. “What… what are we? Why are w-”

Corona and Eve pointed fingers down and vaporized the Void robots. The Doom, Rage, and Light ones managed to duck out of the way, though they were clearly no longer following Roxy’s programming.

“What cruel trick of the universe is this!?” the Light one demanded.

“A chance at beautiful revenge…” the Rage one responded.

The Doom one couldn’t say anything. It was as if it was trying to destroy itself in an incoherent befuddled digital scream of agony. When Corona and Eve attacked again, it was destroyed.

Light and Rage appeared to Discord’s side.

“What are you?”

“Unimportant,” the Light said, making its hands shimmer with power. “What matters is we share a common enemy.”

“Dark times make for strange bedfellows,” the Rage added, surrounding itself in a purple aura.

Flutterfree kept Lolo under wraps—even though she was curious, she didn’t want to tip Eve off to her presence. Not yet, at least.

“Bah, I’ll figure this out later.” Discord snapped his fingers, creating a cake launcher. “CHARGE!”

The cakes hit the two enraged icons in the face, allowing Rage and Light to move in.

“You are of the temples,” Corona and Eve said as one, pointing at the two robots. “And to their purpose will you sway.”

“A cruel joke it was, then…” Light muttered.

“You know nothing of p—” Rage began, but he was cut off.

Both lost their aspect coloring, falling to the bridge, empty. The temples would not allow their old servants to rebel.

Discord sighed. “Some help they were.”

“And you…” Corona said, moving in. “What do you fight for? Your right to life?”

“Or the lives of others?” Eve asked, approaching him on the other side.

“You must choose, in this war…” Corona said with a calming smile that did not have the desired effect—those eyes were simply too demonic.

“…there is no middle ground.” Eve placed a hoof on his shoulder.

“Come with me, discover what you can be.”

“Come with me, fight for what’s left undone.”

“No!” Discord shouted, pushing them back with an explosion of slime, dice, and spiky cotton candy.

“Why not?” Corona asked, surrounding herself in glorious fire. “Chaos has its place, Discord! Chaos may never be consistent, but chaos must choose!”

“You know, deep down, what is right,” Eve added. “You fought for the preservation, to keep what we had! We’ve lost what we had, but we can do whatever is possible to bring it back! This world does not have to be theirs!”

“It is ours and you will never threaten it again!”

Discord encased them both in licorice rope. “I said no, I mean no. You’re both being childish.”

“We’re being childish?” Corona teleported out of his grasp, holding a hand to her chest in mock offense. “And what of you? Refusing to take a side? Do you really think stopping us will end the war between these cities?”

“There is no solution to this conflict that doesn’t end in one city or the other falling to ashes!” Eve declared. “It won’t be mine.”

“It won’t be mine.”

“Stopping us only delays the inevitable, Discord.” Corona extended a hand. “So, choose, so you may determine which side wins!”

“What do you want, Discord?”

“What do you want?”

“Neither!” He created a whirlwind of tornado sharks, shocked to find them easily deflected.

“Neither!?” Eve and Corona glared at the same time. “You know which one you want to win! You know! Just CHOOSE!”

“You’re both wrong!” Discord shouted.

“THERE IS NO RIGHT!” They screamed, voice reverberating with the power of the Force between them. “THERE ARE ONLY TWO DIFFERENT EVILS. CHOOSE, OR SUFFER A WORSE FATE! DO YOU WISH BOTH SIDES TO DESTROY EACH OTHER COMPLETELY? DO YOU WISH WAR TO GO UNENDING? DO YOU WISH TO DENY YOURSELF!?”

“YES!” Discord shouted at the top of his lungs. “I do! I won’t be myself! I suck! You suck! Everything sucks! But you know the difference between you and me?”

Corona and Eve stared at him, faces blank.

Discord created a giant hammer in his hands. “You two are so devoted to your SELVES and what you THINK. And I’m not just talking to possessed-insane versions of you, I’m talking to you! Both of you stuck to your vision like it was the Holy Grail!” He lifted the hammer high, generating a camera as he did so. “NEWS FLASH! Your visions are WORTHLESS! But you trust them anyway!” He brought the hammer down. “I won’t trust myself. I’ll trust that bringing you back is the right thing, even if it doesn’t look like it. Because that’s what we do.”

“VERY WELL.”

They effortlessly caught the hammer.

“Uh oh.”

They created a hammer of their own, smashing Discord on the head with their combined power, sending him rocketing to the ground again.

As he fell, he lost consciousness, and the spell on Flutterfree dissipated—but Eve didn’t notice, she was already back to fighting Corona now that the interruption had been dealt with. Flutterfree positioned herself so her head was level with Discord’s. Which is to say, both of them were now falling headfirst to the ground.

He wasn’t aware.

She knew a way to fix that.

With a soft giggle and tears in her eyes, she pressed her face to his. The effect was immediate—he jolted awake like a Mexican jumping bean, staring at her in shock.

She put a hoof to his mouth to prevent him from saying something stupid. She had to ask her question first.

“Did you mean what you said to them?”

Discord blinked, looking up at the clashing forms of Corona and Eve. “I… I think I did. What in…”

She let out a joyous, deep laugh. “Oh, thank you!” Placing a delicate wingblade on Discord’s head, she beamed. “I can help you forget yourself. If you’ll have me.”

There was no need for him to answer.

He also didn’t have the opportunity, since at that point they hit the ground.

“WHY DIDN’T YOU PULL UP!?” Jenny shouted from the edge of the cater they’d just made.

Flutterfree had sustained several broken bones from the fall and probably should have suffered much worse, but she managed to pull herself out of the crater anyway, dripping blood from her mouth. “Forgot… we were falling…”

“How do you forget you’re falling!?”

Flutterfree laughed, then started coughing uncontrollably. “Healing… healing would be nice… ow…”

“I have never seen someone so happy to be so messed up,” Pidge commented.

Another one of Mattie’s screams reached their ears.

“…In a literal sense.”

As Jenny used some simple healing spells on Flutterfree and Discord, she looked up at the cities. “Well. That was a bust. What now?”

“YOU SIT AND WAIT FOR THE OTHERS TO TRY SOMETHING!” Mattie shouted. “OH, I KNOW, GET ME A CACTUS AND A GHOST PEPPER AND A—AAAAAAWHAHAHA!”

Discord stood up. “…For some reason I am suddenly much more terrified of her.”

Flutterfree shot him a somehow menacingly sly look. “You better be.”

Discord wordlessly shrank back into the crater.

~~~

Roland opened his eyes.

He saw his body, sitting in meditation. To his left, Monika was passed out on the floor, twitching slightly every second or so. Against the far wall everyone was talking—with the addition of Pinkie, for some reason—trying to be quiet, presumably to not disturb the meditation. They had set bombs everywhere.

In front, he saw Ahsoka twice: one sitting in meditation, the other standing much as he was.

The room shuddered as whatever monsters laid outside warred.

“You’re a natural, Gunslinger,” Ahsoka said. “Though I should not be so surprised; you are the Tower’s chosen, after all.”

Roland responded only with a curt nod.

“If we get out of this, I would love to teach you the ways of the Force—in balance.”

“I’ve seen your blades before, long ago,” Roland said. “I do not wish to become bound to one.”

“We are not bound to our blades quite as you are bound to your guns,” Ahsoka explained. “But this is a conversation for another time. We must move.” She walked over to the central altar and laid her hands on it. “We must ask the Force to carry our spirits across the divide. I will guide you. Place your hands over mine.”

Roland did as asked.

“Now… hold on, and be ready for anything on the other side.”

At first, all Roland could see was violent red. It slowly gave way to a beautiful, calm gray, though this was eventually superseded by harshly divided blues and greens.

He and Ahsoka appeared at the Light Side altar. At first, nobody paid them any mind.

“What’s wrong, Tesseract?” Starbeat asked the Celestia. “Something wrong with your meta-manipulation?”

Tesseract narrowed her eyes.

“Did they find a way to copy it, like you copied theirs? Did you think she couldn’t have planned for it?”

The alicorn refused to respond to the unicorn.

O’Neill smirked. “She’s hoping silence will save her. It won’t. Tessa—can I call you Tessa? I’ll take the silence as admission. You may have surrounded yourself with ‘win’, but there’s more going on than what’s in here. We don’t have to fight you. The others can fight what you’ve made out there.”

Tesseract said nothing.

Roland turned to Ahsoka… and noticed another Ahsoka sitting on the ground, injured.

The Ahsoka he had come here with slowly shook her head. Don’t ask, no time to explain, way too complicated.

He gestured at his gun with his eyes. She nodded.

Good, Roland thought. Something I know well.

He pulled out his revolver and fired. Even as a Force projection, weapons carried weight, and his weapon more so than any other. The bullet flew true, right toward Tesseract’s head.

She deflected it completely by chance with a stray blue lightsaber.

She wasted no time whirling to face them, driving her lightsabers toward the attackers. Realizing a second too late that they were Force projections and not truly there, she drove two of her blades into the pedestal itself, damaging it.

It remained fully operational.

Both Ahsokas jumped forward, both wielding dual lightsabers. Tesseract proved smart, stabbing the real one in the arm and grabbing the other in a Force choke-hold—dissipating her all the way back to her body. Nanoha unleashed a spell, but Tesseract’s reflect spell blew it away, and she pointed a lightsaber at O’Neill again. “Stop. All of you.”

Everyone did.

Everyone except Roland.

He pointed his gun at the damaged altar.

“There is no way your weapon can destroy it,” Tesseract hissed.

Roland sensed the uncertainty in her voice. That was all he needed.

He pulled the trigger. He didn’t stay to see what happened—he returned to his body, whipped out his gun, and shot the altar on this side as well. This side’s Ahsoka had already damaged it with her lightsabers, to the stunned confusion of everyone else in the room.

Roland’s bullets hit both altars true.

In truth, it didn’t damage either of them. The bullets, for all their ka-importance, were just bullets. There was no need for them to be any more. If there had been, they would have entered the holes in the altars perfectly to destroy them by luck.

But this was not the case. They remained simple bullets.

For the temples themselves were ka-machines, and they recognized the bullets as a signal. The signal. The signal they were made for untold eons ago.

It was time for the division to end.

The Light Side of the Moon and the Dark Side of the Moon were surrounded by solid balls of white and black, blotting out the sky. Eve and Corona were separated, forced to sit motionless as the Force acted.

The bridge between the cities shrank, drawing the two spheres together like a winding rope. The Light and the Dark mixed, producing a beautiful Gray between. When the cities should have crashed into one another, they didn’t—rather phasing through each other as if every other person were a ghost.

There was a panic. Some tried to attack the citizens of the other city, finding all their Force powers and lightsabers to be intangible to the seen enemy. Eve and Corona collided, unable to affect anything they sought to destroy.

The temples slid into one. In truth, it had always been one temple, one Force, one unity, but it had been divided for a time. That time was at an end… and the imbalance would end with it.

The fusion would make sure of that.

Within the core of both temples, the altars and the rooms themselves became one. The summoning circuitry broke, unable to reconcile with the other form of magic. The Dark and Light left their hosts in an instant.

Corona and Eve, however, were perfectly susceptible to the fusion. Their bodies and minds slammed together into one entity, mandated by the Force itself. What resulted was a somewhat ugly looking centaur with swirls of purple over an orange skin. Not to mention two pairs of wings.

“…Huh,” the mixed creature said, examining herself. “…This is going to be a problem for the rest of them.” She used her magic to divide herself into her component selves immediately; it was far from the first time Corona and Eve had been fused to another being, given how far their adventures had taken them.

Within the cities, the people discovered they were a combination of Light and Dark, paired with a counterpart from the other city whenever possible. There was a lot of confused blabbering and a couple angry shouts, but all anger petered out as the second half of the person felt like they had just been gravely insulted.

No one knew who they were anymore.

Inside the temple core, Roland was one of those lucky enough to not have a direct opposite to fuse with, as were Monika and Minna. Everyone else…

“Why do you do this to us!?” Tesseract/Troi shouted, pointing accusingly at the gray spark of the Force in the center of the new Temple, her marbled blue-and-white appearance seeming somehow natural. “We have… I have… devoted everything!”

“You devoted wrongly,” Roland said, sitting down to clean his gun.

“You… you did this!”

“Yeah, he did!” Jotaro/Vriska said, cracking… his knuckles. The masculine had clearly come through in the combination far more than the feminine. He was a massive, armored gray humanoid with orange robes and a hat that seemed part of his hair. “And now you’re in for a world of pain. You wanna know real justice, punk?” Star Platinum rose behind him, holding the infinite-sided die. “I’ll bring you down.”

“Naaaaaaah,” Pinkie/Nanoha said, taking the shape of a graceful pink centaur. “How about we don’t be all punchy-punchy and talk like the beautiful people we are?” Pinkie/Nanoha used a delicate finger to lift Tesseract/Troi’s head. “I’m sure you can come to understand each other after spending enough time in that head of yours.”

“I am unclean,” Mlinx/O’Neill deadpanned. “And I love it.”

“Let’s not get stuck in this experience too quickly….” Pinkie/Nanoha warned. “We will be going back, isn’t that right?”

“SHOCKING!” Burgerbelle/Lightning declared. She looked exactly like Lightning, except in different clothes. “Literally, that’s what I am. Also, can I punch the ali-alicorn in the face? Please?”

“It would be unacceptable to ruin the truce at this juncture,” Starbeat/Thrackerzod announced. “It is also unnecessary, as the conflict is over and resolved. There is no other city to destroy anymore, there is but one city, one people.” She adjusted her goggles, looking right at Tesseract/Troi. “Both of your plans played into the laps of the Force to bring you together. You have nothing to fight. Can you realize that?”

The speckled alicorn looked at her, beyond confused. Slowly, she nodded, sitting down on the ground. “I devoted so much…”

“To the Force, yes,” Ahsoka said, having combined with the other Ahsoka. “And you still can.” She placed a hand on Tesseract/Troi. “It just wants you to do it together.”

“I… we… can try.”

“Good. I’m sure our friends can separate you later.”

“I can separate them now,” Monika pointed out, examining a character file. She glanced at Pinkie/Nanoha. “But… I think I’ll wait. For, you know, the right time. When it won’t backfire.”

Pinkie/Nanoha placed a gentle hand on Monika’s shoulder. “You’re learning. I’m glad to see that flower in your soul bloom so.”

“Please tell me I can separate you soon, I have such conflicting feelings right now.”

Jotaro/Vriska pumped one of his arms. “HELL YEAH, I should be like this more often! Look at these GUNS!”

“It occurs to me that you are being frivolous and childish,” Starbeat/Thrackerzod observed. “Perhaps we should separate before the instability inherent within our combination goes too far.”

“Some answers would still be nice,” Mlinx/O’Neill said.

“We don’t always get answers,” Monika said, looking to the Force spark. “We just get a victory.”

At these words, the Sweetie Shield projected a hologram into their midst: a tall Sweetie Belle with ever-shifting Roses in her mane.

She smiled warmly. “I am Cinder, and I’m sorry I had to put you through all that. I’m not sure exactly how it will play out, but there’s probably going to be an unpleasant near-war and some uncomfortable fusions at the end. But, hey, I’m pretty sure it ended in complete victory, soooooo… that’s a plus, right?”

Minna, who had remained silent up until that moment, stared at her with open eyes. “Cinder…?”

Cinder didn’t respond; it was just a recording. “Now, I’ve got a lot to tell you—that’s the entire point of this ordeal, to tell you all things—but how about you figure out what to do with this freshly combined city and all the nonsense you just experienced first, hmm? This recording will still be here when you get back, don’t worry.”

The hologram went away.

“…So this entire thing was Cinder’s doing, somehow,” Starbeat/Thrackerzod said.

“Yep! I knew she could do it!” Lightning/Burgerbelle grinned.

“…I’m not all that shocked, all things considering.”

“You heard her!” Pinkie/Nanoha shouted. “Let’s get this wrapped up and listen to the message!”

~~~

Mattie looked down at the adorable earth pony filly she held in her hooves.

“I’m going to call you… Circlet.”

“…Not some kind of innuendo?” Roxy asked.

“I’m not that cruel. Although, I’m sure I could think of a reason a circle-shaped headpiece could be taken wrong. Oh, I think I got one!”

Roxy threw her hands into the air, marching away from Mattie. “That’s it, I’m never doing it again for her, someone else gets to deliver the next one.”

“What makes you think there’ll be a next one?”

Jenny raised her eyebrow. “Really? This is you we’re talking about.”

Mattie chuckled. “Heh. Fair enough.”

Flutterfree and Discord walked up to her. “Congratulations!”

“I could say the same to you two,” Mattie said with a wink. “Tell me, am I really going to have to wait for the wedding to start the tips?”

Flutterfree kept her smile perfectly flat and level while Discord flushed madly. “Mattie, yes, you really do have to wait.”

“Well, when’s the wedding? Hmm?”

“We haven’t gotten that far.”

“Oh, psh, you two know where the story’s going, there isn’t a chance in the nine hells that you’re not ending up together.” She winked. “Why not skip to the end?”

Flutterfree shook her head. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what, darling?”

“That your way doesn’t have to be the best way.”

Mattie frowned. “I… well…”

Flutterfree sighed. “I’m sorry.” She placed a hoof on Mattie’s shoulder. “Take care of Circlet. We’ll do things our way, you do yours. We’ll be there for each other, right?”

Mattie grinned. “You got that, mate. Now excuse me, I need to go pass out from exhaustion on a couch somewhere.”

“Oh, my,” Flutterfree put a hoof to her mouth. “Here, let me help you…”

“Why are you even up and about?” Discord asked.

“To mess with you,” Mattie winked. “Also, to be around for this.”

Pinkie/Nanoha dropped from the sky. “HI GUYS! We just saved the city and got a message from Cinder and had a lot of silly fusions!”

Flutterfree stared at her in shock.

“Ah, I love being me,” Mattie chuckled.

~~~

“And th—”

Onion interrupted the Elder. “And then we all know what happens. We live in this city, Elder!” She pointed angrily out the window at the Gray Force Temple dominating the skyline. “All that happens next is the oh-so-great heroes of the multiverse hand-holding our city for months until they were sure we wouldn’t kill each other once they left!”

“Onion…” Pringle frowned.

“Pringle, Pringle, Pringle! You know they forced us to be the way we are! They didn’t let us find a new way in the Force! They managed us like… like children!”

“Strange you have a problem with that,” Jang muttered.

“Don’t you start,” Onion hissed.

The Elder stood up, walking to Onion. “Onion, this is not acceptable. Calm yourself or I—”

“You won’t have to do anything, I’m leaving.” Onion stormed out. “I’m trying to show you all that they aren’t the great heroes you think they are, that we don’t need their ‘examples’ to lead us everywhere. They were messed up! But no, you get so enamored with their stories, their legends… Gah! Elder Tano, you met them! You knew them!”

“Yes. I did.” Ahsoka Tano sighed, leaning on one of the walls. “And they helped us even after they no longer needed to.”

“They’ve been around hundreds of years,” Onion spat. “They should let us live our lives at some point.” She stormed out of Ahsoka’s chambers, angrily walking through the Town of Gray. Lightsabers of all colors flashed around as people talked, laughed, and lived their lives.

And everywhere there were statues of the heroes that had ‘saved’ this city. The travelers that had, in their wisdom, managed the newly fused city as they slowly separated all those who had been stuck together by the Force.

People were happy, yes.

People claimed they didn’t worship the heroes, that was true.

But looking at all the statues, Onion found that hard to believe.

Even in the twilight years of the Tower, you refuse to move on, Onion growled to herself. They all just accept you. But I won’t. I never will. I know who you really are, what you really do, and no amount of legendary stories will take that away.

She stormed to her house. She threw the door open and entered a nine-digit code into a keypad, opening a passageway to her basement. Descending the cold, stone stairs, she arrived at her prized possessions.

Twelve humanoid robots with limbs attached to white pearls. Each one had the color of a single SBURB Aspect.

“They need to pay,” Onion said.

“They will,” the Time robot affirmed.

“How can we be sure their path will cross with the city’s again?”

“I exist.” Time pressed its hands together. “That is all the evidence we need.”

V – Intercessions of the Past

Onion found her friends sitting at a table in what they called the Juice Bar—a silly red building right outside the Temple that served all sorts of fruit juices 24/7. It probably helped that it was run by a droid who didn’t need to sleep, making it rather unfair competition for any other sorts of similar businesses. In a universe with no enforced night and day, never closing was of great benefit.

The silvery, floating machine with twelve separate spidery limbs delivered four fruit smoothies to the table. It was more than smart enough to know what Onion would order before she said anything—grape.

“Hey…” Jang said. “How are you doing?”

“Better,” Onion said, getting into her chair and sitting down. She stared at the smoothie for several seconds, doing nothing with it.

“Hey, turn that frown upside-down!” Pringle spread her front hooves wide. “We can forget about all that and drink some smoothies like old friends!”

“We can’t,” Joanne deadpanned, still refusing to look up from her phone. She drank her smoothie by having her Stand lift it for her.

“Joanne…”

“Onion’s fixated on it and it wouldn’t be right to just ignore it.”

Onion frowned. “It’s really hard to take you seriously when you’re saying everything while staring at your phone.”

“You know me, don’t you?”

“Yeah. That’s the problem here.”

Joanne’s fingers stopped flying across her screen. For a moment, her eyes looked up and locked with Onion’s own; a deep, inner fire screaming to be let loose. “I use my phone. You scream at the heroes.”

“I can stop.”

“Can you?” Joanne’s grip on her phone began to loosen due to trembling. “Can you drop it? Never speak about it again? Forget it?”

Onion was taken aback.

“Didn’t think so.” She returned to her phone, tone softening considerably. “I understand, Onion. I understand your need.”

“T-thanks?”

The slightest hint of a smile crawled up Joanne’s face. “Beyond that, you kind of have a point when you’re not frothing at the mouth.”

“What!?” Pringle blurted. “Wait, no, no, sorry, I did—”

“Pringle, we’re friends here,” Jang said. “Speak your mind. We won’t hate you for it.”

Pringle looked at the table. “…We wouldn’t be here without them. We’d be dead. We wouldn’t have been born. How can you be mad at that?”

“It’s the other things,” Onion said. “They define us. They don’t let us find our own way. They see that we need ‘help’ and then just wave their magic wands, dropping the ‘solution’ in our lap.”

Pringle looked Onion in the eye. “Would you rather they not have combined the cities?”

“The problem was partly their fault in the first place.”

“I… well I guess…”

“They didn’t know that at first,” Jang pointed out. “And even if they did, who wouldn’t attempt to right their wrongs?”

Onion tapped her hoof on the table. “It’s… it’s less that and more how they just… keep coming back. They left, but we can’t get rid of them. We idolize them when… they’re just broken people! The entire problem with the two cities was that they worshipped them, and we’re still on that.”

“We’re not!” Pringle gasped.

“Worship doesn’t have to include ritualistic prayer! It can be a fixation, it… really, it’s whatever defines you as a culture.”

“Everyone worships something,” Joanne said. “Money, power, beauty, pleasure—even I worship something.”

“You? The most vocal atheist I’ve ever seen?” Jang blinked.

“Correct. I worship intellectual faculties and the truth they lead us to. Or, if I’m being less nebulous, I worship the connection this phone provides me to people I scarcely feel in real life. I am inconsistent—either one of these may be at the top of my list on any given day.” She slid through a few more screens. “Onion is absolutely correct that the city as a whole worships the past and the legends therein.”

“I… that’s…” Pringle shoved a hoof over her mouth.

“You can say it’s silly. I certainly would if I were you.”

“She’s not you,” Jang pointed out.

Joanne shrugged, falling silent.

Onion sighed, turning to Jang. “What do you think?”

“I think everyone has a point.” Jang folded his hands. “They did a lot of great things, but they had a lot of unintended consequences. They acted as heroes, but they were arrogant. The Tower gave them power, but should that excuse them? They couldn’t be good unless they used it.” He sat back. “I care more about our continued friendship than whether they are good or bad.”

Pringle smiled warmly. “Jang… that’s amazing. You’re always the best of us.”

Joanne nodded, not looking up from her phone.

Onion stayed silent for a few moments. “…What would you do if they came back?”

Jang shrugged. “Dunno. Probably go say ‘hi’ just for the novelty.”

“I’d give Pinkie a big hug!” Pringle giggled.

“I’d walk up to Rev and give her a few things she’s ignoring.” Joanne smirked at the thought. “Oh, she who claims to be rational…”

“Not Discord or Flutterfree?” Onion asked.

“I’m not cruel. …That cruel, anyway.”

Even Joanne doesn’t want to hurt them… Onion sighed. “…Thanks guys. For… for letting me know.” I can trust you as friends. But not in this. “I’m… gonna go home and think about some things.”

“Need any company?” Pringle asked.

“Not now,” Onion shook her head, taking her smoothie in her hoof. “See you around.”

She trotted outside, feeling a bizarre mixture of happy and depressed. They were good friends. But they wouldn’t understand what she needed to do.

Maybe that means…

The thought died in her head the moment she saw the hologram of Cinder coming out of a projector across the street. It was a recording—she wasn’t in the Force temple—but it still had her words.

Onion scowled at the smiling Sweetie. You’re the worst out of all of them. You defined everything about us and didn’t even think about what we might think of it. All for what, an E-MAIL?

~~~

An unfathomable amount of time in the past, Cinder stood in front of a camera in the middle of a large, featureless room.

“We ready to go?” she asked.

“Ready. Just start talking whenever.”

Cinder tossed her mane back and smiled. “Hello! So, I take it you all separated yourself and dealt with the initial chaos, right? That should have gone smoothly, if everything we’ve done on this end worked out properly. If not, I really am sorry, I overestimated what I knew. I kinda doubt that’s what happens, though, but it never hurts to be prepared.

“Anyway… you’re probably looking for some explanation, huh? Well, as you hopefully know, I used my… let’s say connections. I used my connections to send myself and a lot of other people back into the deep multiversal past, so our story wouldn’t have to ‘end’. Even though everything has to end at some point, now there’s so much time between us that it might as well be endless. And if I do somehow survive despite the odds… you won’t see me there. I’ll close a loop and become my younger self, creating another retcon loop. I’m not going to rewrite anything. So, in a way, this message is also another goodbye. One that I can give to people after the war has ended.

“I’m still not sure which version of the end you got. I do know it wasn’t pure-preservation or pure-collapse, the Tower’s not that binary. You either got a New World with the Tower still standing for a time to facilitate an ending to the story, or a New Multiverse with an unexpected tragic cost and a beeline toward infinity. It honestly doesn’t matter which happened; my message remains the same.

“In this temple I’ve got… a lot of stuff. Private messages for every person I could think of that you should watch in private, just to make it more likely the camera won’t be on when you see them. I’ve got records of the era we live in, of the things we did in the past up to this point. And I’ve got a few surprises… but we’ll get to those in a minute. I may add a few things later, but I have to let the Temple become an ancient relic at some point for the plan to work.

“And yes… the plan. See, we needed to ensure you would hear the message, so we had to give it a lot of ka-importance that would only activate when the time was right. So we needed to build a ka-machine in an era that has no Flowers. It was… well, it was ‘difficult,’ but we weren’t exactly in a rush to complete it. Basically, we made the Narrative Temple as a ka-nexus that would store narrative potential over time and release it at the opportune moment, and not a moment before.

“The trick was making sure it survived the trip all the way to you. I have no idea if I actually live long enough to loop back into myself, so it needed to be able to do that on its own. And the amount of time is ridiculous. We landed sometime after the Downstreamer era and the only things aside from their relics that we recognize are Flagg—who’s currently sealed away—and The One Above All—who’s not involved in any sort of society at the moment and is kinda just… there. Actively forgetting about us.

“Regardless, nothing from this era is recognizable in the future. Anything that might be we aren’t sure if it isn’t just some shallow duplicate, given… well, the tremendous amount of time. So… I made it a Force Temple that will split in two once we leave it be. Star Wars is one of the most powerful stories that repeats over the history of the multiverse, and the Force is a powerful entity that doesn’t have a character in the traditional sense, so being eternal and undying isn’t a problem, narratively speaking. The Temple would survive with the ka-machine and the Force manipulator in it.

“But… oh, but… I had to make sure it was important enough to be found. And my message, on its own, doesn’t make a chapter. So we—no, I, I should take the blame for this—set up a conflict. The Temple would divide itself and, once the war ended in a collapse or preservation, it would change. The Force would drift to accentuate the differences between the two groups. It’ll be a subtle change, the sort that can be resisted at any moment, but that no one will want to. There will be a conflict, a conflict that just begs for the heroes of the previous era to solve through friendship and just being awesome.

“I didn’t want to make a tragedy, so there’s basically a guaranteed victory pre-loaded into the encounter. Even though I know you’d win, I also know that the little people in the cities would not want peace. Violence would just come back. So… our little Temple will re-combine itself and combine everyone in it. I bet you just experienced that! Should have been fun and maybe a little entertaining. But the main point was to fuse the citizens together so they couldn’t mentally justify violence toward the other. Might take you a week to sort out, but lucky you, I want you to have an absolute victory.

“Soooooo yeah. That basically explains what just happened. You’ll all get the private messages soon. And for the record, I’m doing pretty good! I’m glad I came back. Not everyone who came with me is as thrilled… but, you know, to each their own. However, before you go and look at those private messages… there’s someone I want you to meet. She’s got a story to tell you.”

Cinder turned to her left, waving for another Sweetie to come over. She was a short Sweetie, though clearly an adult mare. She proudly wore a silver artificial horn and, around her neck, Black Thirteen sat in the middle of a necklace, smaller than it should have been.

The Sweetie walked into view of the camera and Cinder stepped aside.

“I am Allure Belle of Merodi Universalis,” she said, expression hard. “…But not the Merodi Universalis you know.”

~~~

Elder Ahsoka Tano walked to the throne room—now outside the Temple rather than within. The two alicorns were discussing policy when she entered.

“Taxes on fruit are ridiculous,” Troi pointed out, dragging her hoof across a graph even she didn’t fully understand.

Tessa raised an eyebrow. “You’re holding it upside-down.”

“The point remains! Fruit taxes are way up.”

“We have limited farmland.”

“Most of our food comes from conjuration spells. Come on, Tessa, you know this!”

Tessa smirked. “I do… but it is a very special strain on those of our people who work there.”

“We have to cut taxes somewhere.”

“Do we? The people may outcry for less, but we know that we are underfunded for many of our department projects that will make life for them better. If I thought we could get away with it, I would raise taxes.”

Troi gasped. “Whaaaaat!?”

“Every citizen within our fair city lives well above the theoretical poverty line, those slums only exist because some people have a bone to pick with Employment Services, and nobody’s starving down there. Everyone can afford a few more coins taken out of their pockets. They can give up, oh I don’t know, HD-3D subscriptions to live shows beamed from the Tower City.”

“…They do spend a lot of money on that.”

“Ka-shroud or not, it’s still ridiculous…” Tessa noticed Ahsoka. “Ah, Elder Tano! What brings you here?”

“Dropping by to visit my old friends,” Ahsoka said, smiling. “The Force is still balanced and, as usual, my job is just a formality.”

“Don’t say that!” Troi smiled warmly. “You represent the fusion of the Dark and the Light, the Balance, far more than we ever can.”

“You have been with this Temple longer than any of us,” Tessa added. “You refused to devote yourself to either side when we cut it off.”

Ahsoka rubbed the back of her head. “I was a little crazy, wasn’t I? Who clones themselves just to make sure they’re in both places at once?”

“A wise elder, that’s who.” Troi smiled.

“A crazy Force Master,” Tessa added. “Which is just what we needed.”

“I am honored.” Ahsoka bowed.

“Oh!” Troi clapped her hooves. “That’s right, we have to ask you something!”

“We have detected a sky-ship on long-range sensors coming right for us,” Tessa said. “We wish you to confirm if it’s really them.”

“…They’re coming back?” Ahsoka’s eyes widened.

“They might be. Our City of the Moon has moved enough it’s not unreasonable to assume we’re on their return path.”

“I will go right away,” Ahsoka said, a smile coming to her face. “I’m assuming we will prepare a festival?”

“We don’t want them to think we’ve returned to our old ways,” Tessa pointed out.

“Psh, it’ll just be a small thing,” Troi said. “I’ll call the Pinkies. …Assuming we get confirmation.”

“Yes, yes…” Ahsoka walked out of the throne room. As soon as she was out of sight she broke into a grin and ran as fast as she could to the other side of the city. She skidded to a stop outside, of all places, Mary’s Orphanage.

She ran in the door. “Frigid!”

An ice-blue stallion looked up. “Yes?”

“Where’s Mary?”

“Upstai—“

Ahsoka ran up the stairs, finding exactly who she was looking for: a tall woman with pale skin, white hair, and purple eyes.

Mary.

Better known as Minna Belle to those who she wasn’t trying to hide from.

She was carefully watching a hologram of Allure. Ahsoka knew it wasn’t really Allure—Minna had explained to her long ago that her mother’s artificial horn had a slightly different make and model than the one in the messages—but sometimes it was so, so hard to tell them apart.

“…Are they coming back?”

Minna held up her phone. Recent Calls: Captain Pinkie Pie. Minna had a stupid grin and tears on her face. “Yeah. They are.”

~~~

“I both am and am not who you think I am, I…” Allure frowned, furrowing her brow. “…Let’s try this another way. Yes, this is Black Thirteen I’m wearing. I… I basically own it instead of Randall Flagg. I was the one to ultimately beat him and seal him away for… well, a while. I got the artifact in his stead, and with a lot of help I’ve… I can’t say I’ve mastered it, but at the very least it’s not driving me insane. Yet. When I first got it after we’d defeated him, I—well, I gained all the memories of your Allure. She must have made some sort of connection with Black Thirteen in those last moments…” Allure shuddered. “I know she was lost to the price of whatever preserve or collapse happened to you. For a while there, I basically was her. But I wasn’t. It’s… Well, I still haven’t fully resolved it in my head to this day, so there’s that.

“I just wanted to say something to you. I know most of you, but I also don’t know most of you. It’s… I don’t know. Things are so similar yet so different sometimes I have a hard time discerning which one is me and which one is the other me.” She rubbed the back of her head. “This is going to be really discombobulated…”

“Take your time,” Cinder encouraged.

Allure took a breath. “I’m sorry. For being so angry. Yes, it was more reasonable than how everyone else was being, but that doesn’t make it any more right. Being reasonable is revenge, eye-for-an-eye… Being reasonable gets us nowhere. I was on a holy crusade and I never stopped, even after Renee…” Allure took a shaky breath. “Renee… I’ve seen her die twice. At least one of them wasn’t at my own hooves…”

“Allure, if you need to take a break…”

“I’m fine.” Allure tossed her mane back and smiled. “That’s all behind us. Long, long behind us. It was all long gone before you arrived. But… I suppose that’s what I need to talk about. Merodi Universalis. Not yours. The other one… We have very similar histories with minor differences up until Nettle. We don’t have a Nettle. We had a crazed version of Darkseid try to take control of the Tower and fail miserably. After that, Corona studied the Tower, and… I think she wiped the information from her memory and went home, but we can never be sure.

“Merodi Universalis just continued on. A hundred years. Two hundred years. We grew exponentially, driven by the heroes that defined us. Over time, leadership changed less and less. Considering how little it changed before, that’s very impressive. We guided the society in the way we saw fit, until we reached Class 1 status as the beacons of friendship. We sat with the Seats for a time.

“Eventually, however… the grumblings of the next generation got to be too much for us to control. No matter how much we had done, or how much we had saved them, they wanted to control their nation and their lives. Now that we were Class 1 and there weren’t really any threats to our entire nation, they didn’t feel the need to rely on us for protection. They wanted their time in the spotlight.

“So we let them have it.

“That was a mistake.”

Allure tapped the ground with her hoof.

“You were beginning to see the start of it when the War For Existence began. Not the resentment of the younger generations, though that was there, but the immaturity. When you’re in a largely post-scarcity society, you can get whatever you want whenever you want. I know we had a monetary system, but it was getting to the point where it wasn’t providing much. You could get free entertainment, connections, services, and food out of the automatic government provisions in fully integrated worlds. Nobody had to work for anything unless they wanted to. Nobody had to suffer hardship, or even pain...

“We didn’t realize that, at the top. We were constantly fighting, managing worlds that had just been brought in, and putting ourselves on the line for their sake. To make their lives perfect. We didn’t realize that making lives ‘perfect’ actually ruins them. They had no sense of right and wrong—there were no consequences to their actions! Any personal disagreements could be solved by moving away or casting mood-altering spells on yourself. Yes, for a while, people refused to do that… but, throughout every history, the younger generation has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable. In relationships, self-alteration, genetics… Our ban on genetic modification was eventually lifted because of outcry, and that just made things worse. You’d be surprised how many people just remove their emotions. And how they influence the next to do the same…

“We had catered to their every whim and given them a soft life where they were free. It was amazing, for a time. But we let them go too far. We eventually saw it happening, and we tried to reinstate limits to keep them from devolving further, but they resisted heavily. They claimed we were the ‘old morality’ and that they were the ‘new morality’ and that what we thought was ‘good’ was in fact tyrannical and oppressive.

“So we thought we would let them try it out on their own. We transferred leadership over to them and went to retire, watching from a distance. Let them learn the hard way why we did what we did. Maybe they would grow past it and become something better than us—we were awfully stubborn, after all. Maybe we were wrong.

“I don’t think we were wrong. Not anymore.

“Merodi Universalis was stable under the new system for all of ten meta-years.

“The people they chose as their leaders… they weren’t heroes, they were just the people they thought were the strongest, the fastest, the best, the smartest. The people they liked, and in a world where so many people shut their emotions off, or were so high on magic they had removed their negative ones entirely, or were just so bored they were willing to experiment with everything… those leaders weren’t the best. Even those who weren’t selfish for the sake of power often had some sort of ideal behind them that just screamed to be implemented no matter what anyone else thought.

“So they fought. The fights resolved quickly, at first, and the system was changed each time to accommodate. But…” Allure sighed. “We watched our society ruin itself without our guidance. Worlds started seceding, internal wars began, and…

“…By the time we decided to break our promise to stay out of it, it was too late. We fought to bring our society back together, and many, many of us died in the attempt. In the end, it was a full-on war. A Class 1 going to war with itself… destroyed much of the multiverse.

“And that… was the end of Merodi Universalis.” She looked right into the camera, focusing as much as she could. “Our method of building a society is fast. It can bring about great beauty. But it grows too fast, so fast that it breaks under its own weight. We think we are doing the right thing by protecting, sheltering, and making the best life. We were so positive that progress and kindness led to utopia… it didn’t.

“And while I would change some things if I did it again… I don’t regret being part of it.” She smiled brightly. “Merodi Universalis only lasted a thousand years, total. But those thousand years were amazing. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. What would have happened had we not been there? What would the lives of these people have been without us? It may have ended terribly, but that doesn’t make what we did do mean any less.

“We probably shouldn’t have let them run themselves. But how long could we have stopped them? We may have been powerful, but eventually their numbers would have grown too strong. Immortality means we can’t just keep adjusting to a new generation, the generations keep piling up, and we can’t outlive them. They’ll band together and overthrow us no matter what we do, with time.

“Nothing can ever last forever.

“Even a good king will eventually fall, no matter how immortal he is.

“And yet, despite this, here I am, doing it again.” Allure chuckled. “A bunch of Sweeties from the future have shown up and wanted to explore. And I… well; I’m part of them. I won’t bore you with that story, that’s Cinder’s to tell, but know that I’m back here, punching the clock for people that I know will eventually change beyond recognition. Because…

“Well, because we’re heroes.

“Just like you are.”

Allure held out a hoof.

“Go make your new societies. They won’t last forever. But they will be glorious and amazing.

“And Minna? ...I’m proud of you. Carry on our name into… wherever it is you end up.”

~~~

A haphazardly slapped together ‘ship’ of metal, wood, random pastry products, and what appeared to be flaming ice floated through the sky, propellers spinning madly.

It was the Austraeoh XV.

“Thar she blows!” Pinkie declared, jumping on top of the wheel. “The City of the Moon!” These days, she looked more like a swashbuckling pirate than a pink party pony, and that was just what she wanted.

“We have come full circle,” Monika observed, adjusting the suit she now wore all the time. “It marks the twilight years of our journey. We have experienced much, gained allies, lost friends, and here… we are.” She reached her hand toward a planet in the sky. “The Tower groans, and with it we seek reconciliation.”

Burgerbelle glanced at her. “You’ve gotten really poetic over the years.”

Monika nodded. “It could be said I resumed my craft in this very city. A mistake to show my inner flaws. And now, a return, to show how I have grown.” She created a donut and a muffin out of nothing and gave them to Pinkie, who devoured them whole. “In another way, this prepares me for the day my powers fail me. There will be no character files after the end.”

“Donuts, muffins, donuts, muffins…” Pinkie scratched her chin. “Hmm…”

“Neither are superior, both have their own traits and unique gifts to the world. Like the rose and the water lily, the—”

“BOOORING!” Burgerbelle declared. “You already got your reconciliation arc, we don’t need it again.”

“I can have more than one, thank you very much. Though I, again, apologize for Yuri’s behavior.”

“Ugh, you’re dry as a brick.”

Monika smirked. “But a brick is made from the wet mud, hardening into a structural support for much greater things.”

“Ok, boomer.”

Pinkie rammed her face into the wheel. “Burgerbelle, that’s cringey, even for you.”

“It also doesn’t apply,” Monika added.

“SPOON!” Burgerbelle threw a spoon at Monika’s face. It made the “spoon!” sound when it hit.

Monika pulled the spoon away and examined her reflection in it.

“Thinking of a poem?” Flutterfree asked, sitting on Discord’s head as he walked up to them.

“I am always thinking of a poem.”

“And when she’s not, she is writing a poem!” Discord laughed.

Monika smirked. “On the contrary, I could be writing our chronicle—”

“Which is overly poetic half the time.”

“Have you even read it?” Monika asked.

“I give him excerpts,” Flutterfree said. “He always enjoys seeing how you portray him. When he doesn’t get upset and I need to give him the belly rubs to calm him down…”

Discord flushed. “Er…”

Mattie walked up, chuckling. “You know, if I was a betting mare, I would have said he would be the one embarrassing you in this relationship. After twenty-five years of this I can’t believe how wrong I was.”

“Glad I could surprise!” Flutterfree giggled.

“You have a vicious tongue on you.”

“Scared?” Flutterfree waggled her eyebrows.

“Very.”

“As you should be,” Eve said, landing on top of Flutterfree, creating a totem pole of people. Discord struggled under the weight. “You think her blades are the most dangerous part of her… but it’s her words that end the mightiest of rulers. You’ve seen it happen multiple times.”

“She’s just too nice,” Discord said. “It’s impossible to be mad! She can win any fight just by putting on the puppy eyes.”

Flutterfree scoffed. “I do not!”

“You kinda do,” Eve pointed out. “…Though, only for little things.”

“The weak and foolish things of the world shall shame the strong,” Discord quoted, tapping Flutterfree on the snout.

Flutterfree smirked. “Oh, calling me your queen again?”

“I said no such thing!”

She tossed Eve off her and looked Discord in the eyes. “And I didn’t say I had any problem with it.” She kissed him on the snout. “Such a shame, really could have gotten some good-Discord points.”

“You know I never run out.”

“I’m far, far too liberal with them.”

Eve picked herself up off the ground, grunting. “Next time you feel like goggling over each other can you not dump me on the ground?”

Flutterfree put a hoof to her mouth. “Oh! I’m sorry, I was caught up, here, let me help you.” She flew down and picked Eve up. “There you go. Do you want back on the totem?”

“I’m way too big for that anyway. I should be the bottom!” Without missing a beat, she pointed a hoof at Mattie. “You don’t get to say anything.”

Mattie sighed. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

Flutterfree frowned. “Mattie… are you okay?”

“I’m… fine.” She tapped a hoof on the ground. “Just going through some things in this messed-up head of mine.”

“We’re here if you need it,” Flutterfree encouraged.

“When you need it,” Pinkie added.

Mattie laughed bitterly. “Ah, yes, the old adage of knowing you need help but not wanting to grab it and not knowing when it’s the right time in-story to do so…” She sighed. “…I wish the Tower would go already.”

“Soon. A few more years.” Eve put a hoof on her back. “Then… it’ll be new.”

“It damn well better be.”

The Austraeoh XV approached the City of the Moon, coming in at one of the major docks. To the surprise of absolutely no one, it was decked out with balloons, party supplies, and banners saying ‘WELCOME BACK!’

The Austraeoh dropped a plank onto the dock, and several of the heroes piled out, Pinkie leading them. She waved. “HELLOOO CITY OF THE MOON!”

The inhabitants of the city stared at them for a moment. They didn’t look like the heroes they remembered or the statues they had—lots of them had many more scars than usual, weren’t very clean, or had completely changed their look with an outfit or some other kind of modification.

But this didn’t matter to one little soft-pink mare.

“AUNTIE PINKIE!” she shouted, running out of the crowd. “It’s really you!”

“Auntie!?” Pinkie laughed. “I don’t remember you!”

“I’ve never met you but Limestone Pie is my great-grandmother! I’ve always wanted to… just say hi! HI!”

Pinkie swooped her up in a hug. “Hi back!”

Ahsoka stepped out of the crowd, removing her hood. “Everyone, these may not be the heroes you remember… but they are our heroes. Let’s show them a great time!”

“YOU HEARD HER!” Troi shouted. “BRING OUT THE CAKE!”

Tessa tensed. “Oh no. Cake…”

Pinkie threw a cake into Tessa’s face. “Enjoy yourself, Tessa, it’ll be worth it!”

“LET’S PARTY!” Discord declared, summoning as many singing fruit as he could.

If the City of the Moon hadn’t been sold on the celebration before, it was now—the time had come to celebrate and they were going to have an amazing time.

As they partied, Minna snuck onto the Austraeoh. The city wasn’t about to find out who she was today, even if she wanted to visit her old friends.

~~~

“Hey.” Vriska pulled some cotton candy off a stand and shoved it in Starbeat’s face. “Here.”

Starbeat smirked, taking a bite of it. “What’s this for?”

Vriska shrugged. “Feeling the past coming back to haunt me, I guess.”

“Vriska, come on, we were fine when we were here.”

“It’s the principle of the thing.” Vriska pointed at a hologram of the other Allure talking, projected right into the street. “It takes me… all the way back. Back to the war. Back to what I did to you.”

“Vriska…”

“And I can never apologize enough.”

Starbeat rammed her cotton candy into Vriska’s face. “And neither can I. We were both terrible to each other. But we’re past that now.”

Vriska laughed, tearing the confection off her face. “You know, I wonder why we couldn’t have just been… Eve and Flutterfree. I don’t think those two ever had problems. Now Flutterfree and Discord… hoo boy…”

“Eve and Flutterfree fought and disagreed just like everyone else. Just… well, not as loud and shouty as we got.” Starbeat paused. “Get. Last week was… fun.”

“Hey, that was not a proper stuffpile and you know it.”

“I swear I’m ka-cursed to never understand the proper arrangement for a stuffpile.”

“Right after the Tower falls, you and me, stuffpile lessons.”

“Not again…”

Suddenly, both Starbeat and Vriska froze in their tracks. Something had just touched their minds.

Good. I have your attention.

What the fuck!? Vriska called back, psychically. Can’t you see we’re busy?

Can’t be helped, unfortunately. You need to be warned and this is the right place to do it without drawing suspicion. Not everyone in this city idolizes you, there are those who resent your influence.

Just another villain to defeat, Starbeat sent back, trying to pinpoint the voice’s location. Same as ever.

She knows she can’t win. Not here, not now. She doesn’t care. She just wants to hurt you as much as possible.

Starbeat and Vriska froze in their tracks.

Be wary, and be careful. Protect everyone you can. You can’t lose, but you can be hurt.

The voice was gone.

Starbeat immediately pulled out her phone. “Pinkie, you get that?”

“Sadly, yes. Meet back at the docks, we need t—no, wait, it’s too late. Nanoha! Psychic message, stat! We’ve got a mysterious enemy out for revenge! They are going to strike soon!”

Starbeat heard Nanoha mumble something. A second later, she received a warning message.

A second after that, she heard the explosion.

“Fuck,” Vriska swore. “Starbeat?”

“On it…” Starbeat said, executing a teleport.

~~~

“I like this beard,” O’Neill said, scratching the tangle of hairs on his chin. It looked even more impressive in the funhouse mirror he was examining.

“Wear that for long enough and you’ll start talking like a pirate,” Nanoha commented with a coy smile.

“Yarrrr.”

“NANOHA!” Pinkie shouted, startling both of them. “Psychic message, stat! We’ve got a mysterious enemy out for revenge! They are going to strike soon!”

Nanoha wasted no time, diverting her magic to send a message to the entire Austraeoh crew, warning them to be on guard. “Sending, give it a second…”

It went out.

And then there was an explosion.

It wasn’t anywhere near them—it was the Austraeoh itself. In the distance, they saw it smoldering and falling into multiple pieces, crumbling to the surface of Nucleon far below.

Nanoha teleported herself and O’Neill to the dock, holding her device out aggressively. “Whoever did this, show yourselves!”

“Looks like you finally got yourself a good woman, General Snark,” a synthetic voice declared. “I’m glad some of us have turned their lives around…”

There was a massive gust of wind that tossed Nanoha and O’Neill off the dock. Nanoha grabbed her husband with her loose hand, channeling her magic into her feet to levitate in midair. “Who are you?”

A spindly robot made of blue pearls floated toward them, the icon of Breath proudly displayed on its central orb. Massive, tornado-like winds surrounded it, keeping it both aloft and protecting it from attacks.

“I do quite enjoy the confusion on your faces,” the Breath robot said, chuckling. “I wonder if you’ll get past it before you die!”

“STARLIGHT BREAKER!” Nanoha shouted, triggering her massive spell in an instant.

The Breath robot dodged. “Breath is such a slippery Aspect, is it not? Quite a large number of… useful abilities.” A gust of wind shot out… and O’Neill slipped out of Nanoha’s hands.

“JACK!”

~~~

Pringle looked up at Trixie and Pinkie, both trying to out-card-trick each other.

“Woah… you’re both amazing…”

“Trixie is better,” Trixie huffed, pulling out five aces and making a card house out of them.

“Nah, you just have the showmanship.” Pinkie made a sword out of cards. “I’ve got the—”

Pinkie’s phone rang. Her cheerful demeanor dropped in an instant and she let out a tired sigh.

“Pinkie, did you get that?”

“Sadly, yes,” Pinkie muttered. “Meet back at the docks, we need t—” She stopped, as if she’d seen something elsewhere. “No, wait, it’s too late!” She ducked behind a pot and… was gone.

Pringle frowned. “What…”

Trixie put a hoof on Pringle. “It’s fine, Pinkie will handle it. And the GREAT and POWERFUL TRIXIE will keep showing you card tricks!”

“Ooooh!”

“Now you see it…” Trixie got the message when she hid the card behind her ear. She didn’t flinch—she was a performer, and a performer she would stay. The show must go on. “…Now you don’t!”

“Wait, what? You teleported it a—”

The explosion shook the ground.

“Trixie did not teleport it away, though she will teleport us away.” Trixie focused her magic, but was interrupted by a robot powered by the pink of Heart.

“DIE,” the synthetic voice called, bringing a blade of the soul upon Trixie.

Pinkie appeared in front, blocking it with a pool noodle. “Not today.”

“You… YOU… PINK ONE.” The Heart robot flailed randomly in several directions before angling its entire body at her. “You will suffer more than most.”

“I’d like to see you try…” She boxed the robot in the face.

“PRINGLE, RUN!” Trixie shouted.

Pringle did exactly as she was told.

~~~

Jenny was on the back of the Austraeoh when it exploded. She hit the surface of Nucleon at high velocity.

Then something hit her at high velocity. A robot brimming with the green of Life, tangled in a mixture of plants and flesh.

Jenny regenerated, pulling herself out of the Jenny-shaped hole in the ground. “Ow.”

“Gotcha!” the Life machine declared. “And I’m gonna ge-”

Jenny punched a hole right through it.

The Life regenerated the fleshy exterior right back.

“…Not again…” Jenny groaned.

“Fun, isn’t it?”

“Gets a little boring after a while.”

They roundhouse kicked each other, somehow managing to smash the other into the ground again.

~~~

“Hey, do you know where Jojo is?” Pidge asked Mlinx.

Mlinx was busy examining the make of a lightsaber with edge guards. “Hmm? Oh, no. I haven’t sorry. I can try to call…”

“That’s fine, it—” Nanoha’s message entered their heads at the same time.

“Quiznak,” Pidge said as the explosion reached them. “We need t—”

A robot of Hope punched Pidge in the skull, cracking her jaw and knocking her out in one fell swoop.

Mlinx drew his spear. “What was that for?”

“This is between you and me.” A scepter of light appeared in the Hope robot’s hands. “As it should have been.”

~~~

“We didn’t deserve this,” Flutterfree said.

“Deserve what?” Discord asked, carrying Flutterfree as they floated through the clouds above the City of the Moon.

“This. We didn’t deserve each other. We let each other go… and at least my life should have ended before we ever thought to reconcile.” She laid her wings over his shoulders. “And yet, by grace alone, we were given this chance at another life. Forced onto a boat together, given an opportunity to see each other…” She kissed him. “Every last minute has been a gift.”

Discord transformed her into a present. After receiving a playfully annoyed glare, he turned her back. “Pretty sure we know who to thank for that.”

Flutterfree giggled. “Do you think, if we went back, we’d have worked? Or… did we need to drift apart and mature first?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m a being of chaos, I don’t deal in absolutes.” He chuckled. “But these twenty-some years have been the best of my centuries of life.”

“It’s just so… freeing. W—”

They received the message.

“Well, that’s not very romantic,” Discord huffed.

The Austraeoh exploded below them.

The Light robot exploded above them.

Flutterfree spread her wings, summoning Lolo. “We were having a MOMENT!”

“Do I look like I care?” the robot shone like a miniature sun.

~~~

“They do not live to serve,” the Blood robot declared to the people at the dock. “They are not of us, they wish to control us.” It lifted its hands, sending the power of Blood into the many citizens watching the celebration. “We will evict them for the true future…”

“FUUUUCK YOU!” Vriska shouted, throwing the infinite-sided die at the Blood robot. A swordfish slapped it across the face.

The Blood robot toppled back. “There are your enemies. Destroy them.”

The power of Blood demanded obedience to the connection. The more people of the city there were, the stronger it was.

“…This is bad…” Starbeat observed. “We can’t hurt them…”

“Shit,” Vriska muttered.

Ahsoka broke out of the Blood machine’s control. “Listen to me! They are not our enemy!”

“Your Force will bow to us,” the Blood robot said, lifting its hands.

Ahsoka activated her lightsabers, standing with Starbeat and Vriska. Troi and Tessa broke free of the control next…

…but they still had a small lightsaber-wielding army attacking them.

“Five on all…” Troi commented.

“Where we don’t want to hurt them…” Tessa hissed.

“I like those odds,” Vriska chuckled.

~~~

Jotaro wasn’t exactly sure what he was watching. He knew the people involved—Rev and Joanne, the latter of whom Jotaro was introduced to abruptly with the line of “Yes, I’m your great-granddaughter through the line of Jolyne, no, I don’t know where Grandma is. I’m not here to talk to you.”

And now…

“How do you expect me to treat you with respect if you refuse to look up from your phone?” Rev asked.

“The fact that you think respect is a thing I care about is telling. What is respect but a faulty ideal to keep the next generation in line? All should be given that which they prove.”

“People are not equal, though you are correct they should be treated equally—love even your enemies.”

“That gets you dead.”

“Martyrs change the world.”

“Also, you are currently speaking to me with disdain, not equally.”

“I’m not perfect, you specifically sought me out to start an argument.”

“It is what you deserve. From my perspective, it is only you who have done anything suspicious, while from yours, both of us are in the wrong. I am the optimist.”

“How much are you just reading off your phone?”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, there’s no being alive who could go against the collective knowledge of the Internet, you could always argue anything!”

“Perhaps my intention is not to come to an understanding, but to drive something into your thick faith-ridden skull?”

“That’s… uuuugh… what is your problem? What did we ever do to you?”

“Absolutely nothing, at least not relating to your beliefs. You’ve just created a world where—”

“…Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered to himself as they continued going at it.

Burgerbelle snapped a photo. “This is going into the memories folder. Monika will write a grand poem of the duel of the fates!”

“Th—” Jotaro’s comment was cut short by the message.

Joanne kept talking until the explosion went off.

“Ah, a group of four…” the Rage robot descended from the sky, landing hard enough to make a crater. “Worthy opponents. Grandfather, descendant. Atheist, believer. And you…” It pointed at Burgerbelle. “Living beauty!”

“…Wat,” Burgerbelle deadpanned.

The purple energy began to waft off the robot. “Let’s find out where this leads…”

~~~

Roland and Monika were on the Austraeoh when it exploded. Luckily, they landed in a lake on the surface.

Roland pulled Monika out, wordless.

“Egh…” Monika rubbed her head. “What’s the deal?”

“Attack,” Roland said.

Monika stood up, glancing at the Temple. “…I can’t use my powers safely here. Drat.”

Roland pulled out his gun. “Be ready for anything.”

Monika nodded—she may not have been able to make any active changes, but she could passively look for exploits. Which meant she could find things—things like an invisible Void robot through a loose character file.

“There!” Monika shouted. Roland fired—hitting the robot, but only in the foot.

“Arrogance…” the robot shivered into full view, moving as though it had little control over itself. “You… dare? Do you? How could you? What has become of me?”

Monika frowned. “I don’t know. But I assure you, we are more than enough to take you out like trash.”

“You are powerless… one wrong move, Monika… pop! You are brought low. Rightly.”

Monika pulled a green lightsaber out of her pocket. “I edited my character file to be force-sensitive that day and I’ve been practicing ever since so I won’t be taken advantage of again. Between me and the Gunslinger… we’ve got you.”

The Void robot vanished again.

~~~

Corona and Eve were inside the Austraeoh when it went off, but they were able to shield themselves from the fire.

“…Austraeoh sixteen, coming soon to a sky near you,” Corona commented with a chuckle.

“Yeah,” Eve flared her wings, looking for the opponent. “What attacked us?”

“Your hubris.” The Doom robot flew out of the sky, punching them both in the head. Corona had to act fast, preventing instant death from occurring with her own Doom powers, forcing the Doom back onto the robot itself.

It was completely immune to that sort of instant death.

“You think… you think you can just throw your problems back at me!?” the robot screeched. “You… why are you so… happy? How can… not possible!” It let out a roundhouse kick that Eve caught in her magic.

“Calm down,” Eve said. “Who are you? How can we help you?”

“Help? HELP!? I THINK YOU’VE HELPED ENOUGH!”

~~~

Mattie, Minna, and the Everykid were on the Austraeoh when it exploded.

Unlike the others who had some way to defend themselves, these three went flying like ragdolls.

The Everykid worked fast, placing a hat with wings on her head and flying around. She grabbed Mattie first.

“You’ve got quite a grip on you…” Mattie gagged.

The Everykid hummed, gesturing at the falling Minna. As they swooped in, Mattie unfurled a whip and lashed it around Minna. To Mattie’s surprise, Minna didn’t scream, she only grunted. She’d forgotten how high a tolerance for pain that woman had.

The Everykid was barely able to keep them aloft, so they still crashed into the ground, kicking up a copious amount of dust and smashing a large bush.

Mattie picked some sticks out of her mane. “Ow…”

Minna limped to her feet. “What attacked us…?”

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Mattie mumbled, rubbing her head. “Well, actually, a bunch of those Aspect robots, it looks like…”

“Uh-oh…” the Everykid said, backing into Mattie. Turning around, the unicorn and the woman saw two of the robots standing before them: Space and Time. Space was rigid and completely motionless. Time, on the other hand, was quivering with rage.

“I have been waiting… a long, long time for this…” Time curled its hands into fists. “You will know what it means to hurt.”

Mattie folded her ears back. “…Balls.”

VI – The Will of the Moment

Onion stood on the temple balcony overlooking the City of the Moon.

She knew a lot of the fighting was happening on the surface of Nucleon or would be taken there very quickly, but right now, she could see the action. There, Heart was lashing out against Pinkie and Trixie. At the docks, Blood was keeping Vriska and Starbeat very occupied. The explosions of Corona and Eve attacking Doom in the sky were also visible, looking not unlike fireworks.

Beautiful, Onion thought. It’s all coming together.

“WHAT DID YOU DO, ONION!?”

Onion froze at the sound of Pringle’s voice.

“ANSWER ME!”

Onion didn’t turn around.

“ONION!”

“Pringle, stop,” Jang said. “Onion hasn’t done anything.”

How did I not hear them come up here?

“Are you serious!?” The anger sounded so alien coming out of Pringle’s mouth. “She was just talking about what we’d do when they come back! That was her! She knew this was coming, how can you not see it?”

“Because Onion isn’t a bad person.”

Jang, you’re right. You’re wrong that it’s bad to do this. This is what needs to happen. “Thank you, Jang.”

“I’m not fooled,” Pringle hissed. “I’m on to you, Onion!”

“How can you say that!?” Onion shouted, sure to play up her anger. “Me? Attack our city?” The moment they actually attack the citizens, I deactivate them. They know this. They have their targets. “How would I even do this?”

“These are the same robots in the legends.”

“Those legends I hate!”

“You know them better than any of us! You stew over them day in and day out! You… You hate what they stand for! And not even for some silly philosophical reason like Joanne, you just… hate them! I…” Tears appeared in her eyes. “I don’t understand why. But you do.”

Onion turned away. “Great. One of my best friends thinks I’m the villain. Brilliant. Some friend you are.”

“I could say the same!” Pringle hissed.

“Pringle, I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” Jang said, pushing her back. “But this is not how friends act.”

“I… Ergh… MMM…” Pringle threw her hooves up the air. “Fine! But when she turns out to be behind this, don’t come crying to ME!” She ran away, bawling.

Jang sighed. “I’m sorry, I…”

“Don’t be,” Onion told Jang. “She’s the one who made this mistake. I bet that ‘auntie Pinkie’ got into her head…”

“I’ll go talk to her.”

“You do that,” Onion breathed.

When he was gone, she entered the temple.

It was time to prepare for the second phase of the plan.

~~~

Nanoha teleported O’Neill and herself to the surface of Nucleon. All she had to do to block the incoming gust of wind was raise a hand.

O’Neill attempted—and failed—to take a cool, manly pose like Jotaro regularly did. He still summoned Crimson Sushi and scrambled the perceptions of the Breath machine.

“I am free of your confusion,” the robot declared, glowing a brighter blue. “I am free of everything. Isn’t Breath such an interesting power?”

O’Neill slapped it with Crimson Sushi. “You free of a fish to the face?”

The robot rubbed its chin. “If I saw it coming… yes. I am free of all. Free of your pathetic little war games! Free of the multiverse’s chains!” It readily dodged a series of magic missiles from Nanoha. “You really managed to nab a lovely prize, O’Neill. I might just have to take her for myself…”

Nanoha twitched. “You’re welcome to try.”

“I have every intention of doing so, my dear, but first… O’Neill! Is that a beard? I would suggest you were stealing my look, but that rat attached to your face is far too tangled to compare to mine.”

“You don’t even have a face, what are you talking about!?” O’Neill shouted.

“Confused? Good.” The breath robot surged forward, whirlwinds flying in all directions. “Die with that uncertainty.”

Nanoha encased it in telekinesis, ramming it into the ground. It, unfortunately, became nothing more than gusts of wind. “Breath is so difficult to combat,” Nanoha muttered.

“Can he just say he’s free from all damage?” O’Neill asked.

“I doubt it, but he can avoid anything if he puts his mind to it.” She lifted her scepter into the air. “Good thing he can’t really hurt us either. Breath is not a very offensive Aspect.”

The Breath robot twitched. “Not offensive? My dear… that’s overconfidence speaking.” He created a drill out of wind and drove it at Nanoha.

She snapped her fingers, canceling the wind to a dead calm.

“Not very offensive compared to me.” She lifted Raising Heart into the air. “And since we’re near that Temple… I don’t have to worry about running out of magic. Ka-structures are so helpful.”

“You’ve made a miscalculation, Broken Wind,” O’Neill added.

The robot pointed a finger at O’Neill. “You think you’re mighty cleve—”

“Million missiles!” Nanoha shouted, generating a million magic missiles around her. “Dodge all of these.”

The robot tensed in uncertainty.

“That’s what I like to see,” O’Neill chuckled.

~~~

The Heart machine grabbed Trixie’s soul. “Your life and all its experiences are dust in the wind…”

“I… didn’t… get… dusted!” Trixie threw a smoke bomb in the Heart machine’s face. This did absolutely nothing, since it could still see her soul through the smoke. It continued pulling, trying its hardest to end her life.

Unfortunately for it, Pinkie existed, and Pinkie had a hammer that could hit with the impact force of a small rocket. The air between the hammer’s face and the robot ignited into a plasma explosion, sending the robot into a distant wall, snapping one of its arms.

“I… think… it still has me…” Trixie breathed, clutching her chest. “I…”

Pinkie tapped into the Element of Laughter, shielding Trixie with her own positive energy. “Don’t worry, Trixie, it’ll be fine! She’s just another bad guy on a long list. And we’ll defeat her… with smiles on our faces!”

Trixie perked up slightly. “…What about that thing makes you think it’s a she?”

Pinkie winked. “Good guesses.”

The Heart machine rose to its full height, holding out a hand. Heart blades akin to Allure’s lashed out. Trixie couldn’t see them—but Pinkie could, and she dragged Trixie through them with a complex series of jumping maneuvers.

“What are the weaknesses of… Heart?” Trixie asked. “Allure had it, we’ve got to know something…”

“The opposite of Heart is Mind, the two could cancel. But we don’t have a Mind player. Or another Heart player.” She jumped over an invisible hatchet. “I do know laughter doesn’t hurt the Heart, it just makes it stronger, sooooo…”

“You’re also Space! Do something Spacey!”

Pinkie and Trixie were suddenly on top of the Force Temple. “Like this?”

“Yes, this’ll do.”

“She’ll catch up to us.”

“We can still look for some help! Or something!”

They saw Corona and Eve attack the Doom robot above, sending a massive explosion out in every direction.

“Okay, everyone’s a little busy. We’ve still got to have options.”

The Heart machine jumped into the air, flying at them so quickly the hands started burning, although even the damaged one remained solid.

“My suggestion is to run until one of the others can help us.” Pinkie grabbed Trixie and jumped off the temple. “WHEEEEEEE!”

“AAAAAAAAAAA!” Trixie screamed.

“AAAAAAAAAAGH∂ˆ´∂ˆ´∂ˆ´∂ˆ´!” The Heart machine roared, voice garbling unintelligibly.

~~~

Jenny punched the Life robot in the face. It punched her in the face. Both of them lost their heads and regrew them a moment later: Jenny through the act of reforming bone and tissue from the ground up, the machine by creating meat and plant material from nothing to forcibly re-attach the pearly head.

They both performed a roundhouse kick, hitting the other in the chest and falling back. They sprung back onto their feet and punched forward: Jenny charging with magical energy while the Life robot infused its fist with a biohazard. Both lost a good chunk of their sides and repaired them immediately afterward.

“Stop copying me!” they both shouted at the same time.

“No, you stop copying me!”

“Stop it!”

“I SAID STOP IT!”

They both punched each other in the mouth—or where the mouth should have been. Jenny was muted as hers regenerated, but the robot’s speaker still worked. “Hah. I’m superior!”

“You’re a synthetic knockoff.” Jenny teleported behind her and kicked. “You’re just Life, aren’t you? No extra magic…” She snapped her fingers, sending a series of magic missiles at the robot. “Just a dominion over life.”

“Like you’re better?”

“I can teleport to those planets in the sky up there! What can you do?”

The Life robot created a plant monster the size of a small skyscraper, face riddled with bloody teeth.

“Oh,” Jenny blinked. “That’s pretty cool, actually, how d—”

The plant moved faster than Jenny could see, eating her whole.

Inside the plant, Jenny cast explosion at the end of her fist, burning the plant to cinders.

“Congratulations, you escaped a plant’s stomach!” the robot chided.

“Congratulations, you have shown the capacity for sarcasm! So close to sapience.”

“Congratulations, you are a robot racist!”

“Thank you!” Jenny jumped the robot again. The robot raised a wall of wood that Jenny smashed her face into. “Ow…”

“Please, you can ignore all the pain you w—” Jenny cast an electric shock that knocked the robot back, jittering painfully.

“How’s that for pain?” Jenny snarked, grinning until she felt an uncomfortable sensation in her feet. They had grown mushrooms. She facepalmed. “This isn’t going to go anywhere for a while, is it?”

“Probably not, but I’m having fun,” the Life robot admitted.

“Eh. Good point.” Jenny punched the mushrooms off her feet and flipped into the air…

~~~

The power of Light is related to both fortune and knowledge. If there were ever a being that had access to both aspects at once in equal quantity, they would find an… interesting set of abilities open up to them.

This was the case for the Light robot, which focused itself on Flutterfree and Discord. It knew with exact certainty how likely it was to achieve outright victory, admittedly pretty low. But it also knew that it could adjust the probabilities of said victory with its powers, flopping the chances. But the Tower influenced the chances through ka, making this flipping inverted by a precise constant that the Light robot also knew.

It knew none of its courses of action guaranteed victory, but also none of its courses of action guaranteed failure. By standard metrics, the highest success chance was to increase its own “luck” to absurd levels so that they couldn’t touch it no matter what chaos magic Discord cooked up. However, taking into account ka, the highest hubris has the highest retaliation. Even in this era of lower ka, they were next to the temple, so it balanced out. Thus, the actual highest chance of victory was the middle.

Playing another round of you-would-know-that-I-would-know with the Tower, the Light robot chose a random course of action between the standard 60th and 80th percentile success rate and committed to it.

It was delighted to discover that this course of action involved a lot of smack talking.

It surrounded itself in a minor fortune field and increased its awareness of all events before belting out an insult. “Finally decided you weren’t too good for another person, Flutterfree?”

“…Do I know you?”

“Yes!” It jumped behind them, suddenly wielding a sword. “Naturally, this isn’t what I really look like, but at least I’m still me. Look at you, all happy and enslaved to each other. I thought you were Flutterfree?”

Discord raised a claw and encased the Light robot in gelatin. “Amazing. Every word of what you just said… was wrong.”

Flutterfree snickered. “That’s Burger’s job!”

“Little more than a mime,” the robot retorted. “Discord, lord of Chaos, relegated to what, a sad little snake? Forced into a religion?”

Discord grabbed it and snarled. “She didn’t force me.”

“Oh, I’m not saying by her, darling. I’m saying you forced yourself to twist your very core being just because you wanted something. Is that really goo—”

Flutterfree’s Rage activated, skewering the light robot in the chest. “Even if that was true when we started… it’s been over twenty years. We have both grown beyond the reach of your petty insults.”

Discord put a hat on the robot. “Toodeloo!”

“You secretly resent and doubt each other for what you started that day!”

“That’s not true,” Flutterfree said, pumping rage into the robot. “We don’t keep it secret from each other at all. We share our doubts and our concerns. You… You have so much inside you… you…” Her eyes opened in recognition as the Rage and Lolo revealed what was inside the light robot. “How…?”

“The same way as this!” It was in such close quarters she could hack Flutterfree’s head off with one fell swoop.

Flutterfree severed the robot’s head with a flash of speed from the Element of Kindness.

What…? the Light robot thought as its higher processes began to fail. Flutterfree… Flutterfree doesn’t have that in her… she’s not… a killer...

The Light showed it that, indeed, Flutterfree had that capacity. The robot had just failed to believe such an observation in its excitement.

The field of luck began to sew the robot back together, but Discord was not about to let that happen. An anvil the size of a house smashed into the machine of Light, disintegrating it completely.

~~~

Vriska, Starbeat, Ahsoka, Troi, and Tessa were busy taking on the Blood-controlled army of the Blood robot. This wasn’t too hard – all three of the Force-users knew how to lull the weaker-willed into a sleeping state, and since all of them were already zombified by the Blood robot, it was pathetically easy.

Vriska and Starbeat were on defense while the other three made people pass out left and right.

“This reminds me way too much of those zombie horde worlds,” Vriska muttered, draining the luck from several people so their lightsabers spontaneously stopped working. “Just an army of mindless munchkins…”

“Destroy the robot, stop the zombies,” Starbeat deduced. “…Wanna try it?”

“I can take over defense,” Tessa said, spreading her lightsabers out. “Go. We can handle this.”

Starbeat teleported herself and Vriska behind the Blood robot. Vriska rolled the infinite-sided die, getting a massive explosion.

The Blood robot remained unharmed, subsisting off the energy of those it had connected with.

Vriska shrugged. “Well, there goes that.” She activated her luck absorption. “Let’s see if I can cause a hard drive failure…”

It pointed a hand at both of them, and instantly they felt frozen. A physical bond formed between Starbeat and Vriska’s souls, drawing not on the friendship they now had, but the hatred that had once existed in the past. The immense pain tortured their very core, dropping them both to their knees.

“What… even…” Vriska growled, forcing herself to her feet. “You… fucking…”

The Blood robot punched her in the face. “A weakness was detected and exploited.” It kicked Starbeat in the horn, knocking her over. It lifted a fist, going right for the stomach.

It would have killed them both without prejudice, tricking Vriska into taking a hit for Starbeat to trigger a Heroic death.

Unfortunately for it, a trapdoor opened up in the floor, swallowing it, Vriska, and Starbeat.

The people stopped being zombies in an instant.

“Where… where did they go?” Ahsoka asked.

~~~

Roland and Monika stood back to back, lightsaber and revolver pointed directly ahead of them. They could see nothing, but Monika could sense the character of Void moving around. She didn’t waste time looking at any finer details—just location. Always location.

“One-twenty,” Monika called. Roland shot a bullet, grazing the Void and forcing it to appear once more. Monika attempted to lunge at it with her lightsaber, grabbing onto it with the force… but it slipped away into nothing once more.

Next, it tried to attack, but Monika twisted its arm with the Force before it could land a hit. It dissipated before any further damage could be done.

“This is getting us nowhere,” Roland said. “I request a duel to end this pointless game.”

“A duel?” the Void robot appeared a fair way in the distance, hands on its hips. “Why would I engage in the acts of you lower lifeforms?”

“You appear to be fighting us like we would,” Monika commented.

“It’s this infernal body that limits me! You know what I’m capable of… You’ve seen it. You’ve faced it.”

“Are we supposed to know you?” Monika cocked her head.

“You’re just… hopeless! I can’t stand this!” It vanished again.

“Sooo… back to a stalemate?”

“Looks like it,” Roland grunted.

“I don’t believe this Void machine understands the inherent problem with stalemates.”

Roland didn’t say anything, but Monika knew he was curious. “Nobody wins.”

~~~

Mlinx’s spear met the Hope machine’s scepter. Mlinx pushed with all his might, forcing the Hope’s footing to give way.

“You have grown stronger,” it said.

“Since when?” Mlinx twirled around, grabbing hold of the machine’s torso with his two free arms.

“It is not surprising you do not recognize me, but still disappointing.” It twisted its scepter around its back and hit Mlinx in the side of the arm. Mlinx held fast, pushing the machine to the ground. “Quite the grip, soft shell.”

Mlinx’s eyes widened. “How—”

The robot kicked Mlinx in the chest, tossing him to the side. “Letting a warrior get the upper hand through emotional manipulation. I heard you ended up the mayor of a large city. You think that would have been one thing you worked out of your system.”

Mlinx pointed his spear at the robot, trembling. “There’s… it’s impossible… I…”

“Terror is unbecoming of a warrior.”

“I’m not a warrior.”

“Clearly.” The robot lunged forward, cracking Mlinx’s shell in two places and drawing blue blood. “I’m not even using these delightful new Hope powers of mine. This is nothing but pure skill…”

“Strength… isn’t… everything…”

“Perhaps not… in other situations.” The robot smacked Mlinx across the face, knocking him down. “But in this one, it is all that matters.”

Mlinx grabbed the robot’s arm with all of his hands, pulling with all his might. To both of their surprise, the robot’s arm separated from the rest of its body. Mlinx didn’t let his surprise create an opening this time—he rushed forward, punching the robot with its own fist.

The robot chuckled. “That’s more like it, Mlinx! Remember your training!”

“I have worked my whole life to forget your training!”

The robot that was somehow also Siron laughed. “You finally learned. It’s almost a shame…” He jumped behind Mlinx, taking his feet out from under him. Mlinx grabbed for Siron’s legs, but this was part of the plan. Siron skidded a leg sideways and smacked Mlinx in the head with the scepter once more.

Mlinx went limp.

“She wants me to kill you,” Siron said, not knowing if Mlinx could hear. “But you have proven yourself as a warrior after all this time. I always knew you had the potential… you are the last demon. In this New World, I cannot think of one better to carry on our legacy. Aside from myself, of course…” Siron chuckled. “If only I weren’t an abomination.”

He walked away, looking for another worthy opponent. Pidge remained untouched, laying behind a piece of rubble.

~~~

“Joanne, run,” Rev said, taking up a position between her and the Rage robot.

Joanne didn’t run. She just smirked.

“Looks like she’s not going anywhere…” Burgerbelle sighed.

“She’s one of mine,” Jotaro said. “Can’t really expect her to.”

“You don’t own me,” Joanne hissed, refusing to look up from her phone.

“Four on one… the odds are in your favor.” The Rage robot clapped his hands together. “You would think that… but they are not. See, if you will, the truth of your situation.”

The Rage wafted off him, getting in all their heads instantly.

“Rage is a very nebulous and difficult power to master… the most direct forms are all attacks.” It formed a massive bear claw around one of his hands out of the purple substance, waving it in the air. “Others involve seeing truth or revelation… forcing understanding.” He pointed the claws at all of them, pulsating like a demon from beyond the grave as the fur covered his body. “I am Skarn the Shaper, born anew, and I believe it’s time for a rematch.” He appeared as a purple bear with the robot merely a skeleton.

Rev and Burgerbelle started shaking uncontrollably. The Joestars remained as they were.

“The truth is in your minds of how hopeless this situation is… and you stand strong. Your family is one of the most honorable and heroic the multiverse knew. Know this: I am only tasked with killing the three labeled ‘heroes’. The young girl will go free at the end. I give you my word.”

“Not very smart, bounding yourself by honor,” Joanne muttered.

“It is what keeps me from falling into the same folly as some of my… colleagues.” He spread his arms wide. “It gives me something more. An art to my life. Most ‘villains’ seek some goal or a physical, worldly object… I do not. I seek art. And I have come to understand my prior death as art in and of itself…” He pointed a claw at Jotaro. “And the beautiful frame of the Tower has provided an encore.”

“You want an encore?” Jotaro adjusted his hat and let out a sharp grunt. “You’ll be honor-bound the same way you were last time.”

“There will be no death until the final defeat,” Skarn agreed. “As before, and as always. I commit to the truth with my Rage.”

“Jotaro, no,” Rev said. “He… he can kill us all in an instant. Rage is the most deadly Aspect, not Doom. Doom has caveats, Doom has rules. Rage is just… brutal.”

“He makes his own rules,” Jotaro said. “This is his arena. We do not have a choice in the terms.”

“Smarter than you look,” Skarn grinned. “Amazing how I am weaker now… but this power makes you so, so much more afraid. Let us begin.”

Rev let out a breath, prepared to fight despite her fear.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

“I pray the Lord my soul to keep…”

The next instant, Skarn, Rev, and Jotaro were all on the ground. There were several craters in the sidewalk, a burnt cross impression on a nearby building, and several lacerations over Jotaro’s body. Rev seemed unharmed, though she wasn't moving.

Skarn stood up, choosing to ignore the truth of his injury. He turned to Burgerbelle. “Living art… confined to a shell of pure mortality. This world, beautiful though it is, limits the tools we can put to our canvases.”

Burgerbelle smiled nervously. “Heheh…”

“What will you throw at me? An instant death meme? Some sort of cosmic joke to throw me? Something simple, but surprisingly effective?” He leaned in. “You know none of it will work.”

“No u,” Burgerbelle said, lifting up a reverse uno card.

Skarn grinned. “I haven’t attacked yet.”

He punched himself. Burgerbelle took the damage, flying into a nearby wall. Before she could move further, Skarn overwhelmed her with Rage, burning away much of her skin. Without Flat physiology, she succumbed to his assault.

“They have fallen,” Skarn said, turning to Joanne. “And what of you?”

Joanne put down her phone. Skarn felt the weight of this motion flow through his Rage. He lifted up shields.

Joanne folded her hands together and smiled sweetly. “Lightbulb Sun?” Her Stand listened to her call, appearing behind her as a massive lightbulb with nine electric wires hanging from the bottom. “You’ve seen enough of his power. Absorb it.”

Lightbulb Sun slapped Skarn across the face with a wire moving so quickly he didn’t even see it until after it hit him. Within an instant, he felt the Rage vanish from him completely. He became… a normal, spindly robot with no special Aspect powers.

“Just like last time…” he said, chuckling. “Brought low… by myself. Bravo.”

Joanne grabbed the base of Lightbulb Sun with her hands and pointed it at Skarn. “Release.”

“I welcome it, this time.”

A beam of solar energy shot out of the top of the Stand, vaporizing Skarn the machine entirely.

~~~

“You did this to ME!” the Doom robot shouted.

“How?” Eve asked. “Why? What did we do last time we were here?”

“Dense, dense, but me…” the robot activated the Doom of a nearby cloud, making it spontaneously implode and blast Corona and Eve with a shockwave. “You don’t deserve my head…”

“I feel like it needs help…” Eve said, frowning. “How can we…?”

Corona removed her glove. “Like this.”

“DON’T YOU DARE!” the Doom robot shouted. “You will regret it!”

“Possibly,” Corona admitted. “Don’t particularly care right now.”

She teleported behind the robot. Instead of trying to run away, it punched Corona in the hand, making the connection solid.

Corona was in the robot’s mind…

It was a terrible, terrible mind. Memories flashed by in disjointed, conflicting bits and pieces that gave her little more than colors and screamed voices. There was a lot of gunfire, death, and magic lasers.

The screams sounded a lot like her, but she wasn’t screaming. She was too confused to scream.

She’d been in insane, broken, even eldritch minds before—but this was something else. It was as if this mind was at war with itself in a way even split personality wasn’t. It…

“Do you see?” two voices spoke to her at once. Suddenly, she could see herself and Eve standing in front of her. But they were shells – their eyes were empty and led into a hollow interior. “Do you understand?”

“You’re… us?” Corona cocked her head. “How?”

“You are the villains of your own story.” The other Eve raised a hoof while the Corona raised a hand. “The Doom could not choose between you two. So it chose me.” Both shells’ faces twisted into anger. “Two opposing forces shoved into the same body with the hatred of the height of the war… just enough understanding not to kill ourselves. Just enough… too much. Too much.”

Suddenly, Corona was in complete darkness. She realized with some disdain that, while the robot certainly didn’t have her powers, it had her experience, and would probably be one of the hardest minds to deal with.

“Why did you fight?” the voices echoed.

“Because I had to!”

“LIES!” both shrieked. “YOU COULD HAVE BACKED OFF! YOU COULD HAVE ERASED YOUR MIND! YOU COULD HAVE DONE IT SECRETLY!”

“That wouldn’t have been right!”

“RIGHT? RIGHT?” Corona was grabbed by hands that were hers, but not. “Look what your right has done to us. Look what it did to you.”

“Eve and I are friends, good friends, again.” Corona turned and extended a hand to the shells. “We can be yours. We can teach you to live with yourself.”

“I am friendship and empathy, and I broke.” The shells looked like they were crying, though they didn’t have eyes. “It is impossible. We are not just you, we are also Doom. All Doom. We absorb it into ourselves…”

“An entity of pure Doom…?” Corona shook her head. “I… how was such a thing even possible?”

“Temporary by design. Time is short. Always is. Life is… funny.” The shells cocked their heads. “We must act in our time. I must act in our time. You are this pain… you must end so the suffering will cease.”

“Killing us won’t stop your suffering.”

“You won’t bring suffering to the world anymore.” The shells looked to the sky. “Onion is so broken.”

“Who?”

“She hates us. We are the worst of them. We are the heroes she wants to suffer. We…. I…” The rage returned to their faces. “You stall!”

“I want to understand you!” Corona called. “I want to help you!”

“Help me… and help no others ever again.”

Corona tensed. “I can’t do that.”

“You think I was giving you a choice!?”

Corona tried to leave. The part of her within the Doom forced her to stay. “No, we fight here. No fancy magic, no weird Doom-play. Your mind versus your mind! There is nothing else! It really is like our life.”

“What about Eve?” Corona asked. “She’s you too! What does she have to say to herself?”

“You think it is any different?” The husks seemed confused. “It is the same. She is as much to blame as you are.”

“I sent that message!”

“She let you send it. You decided together to bring about the end, one way or another. And I am the result.” The husks sneered. “You die first. Then h—”

Eve cut the robot in half. Corona screamed as part of her mind was lost within the folds of the robot.

“I—I’m sorry!” Eve shouted. “Neither of you were moving and I couldn’t get in mentally, h—”

“It’s… fine…” Corona said, holding her head. “…That thing was us. Both of us.”

“…I sensed it, while you were both stuck there. The worst of ourselves…”

“It shouldn’t have been like that. Even in the war, we were… agreeable. It… it hated itself.”

“We are next to the Temple…” Eve turned to look at the gray pyramid. “It may have used what our people saw us to be, just as it did all those years ago.”

“…We need to fix this.”

“I’d love to. What do we need to fix again?”

Corona frowned. “I don’t know. Something.”

~~~

Mattie, Minna, and the Everykid stood with both the robots of Space and Time before them.

“Aight,” Mattie said. “I’ve about had it with all the other fights at this point, I’ve seen enough of a pattern to deduce what’s going on.”

“Do tell…” the Time machine said, holding up a hand to keep the Space one from moving.

“Pretty clearly every one of you robots is a past villain or force of evil or something. Skarn, Siron, and a myriad of others I think I’m pretty good at guessing but I’m not wasting bloody minutes explaining my guesses for them. One for each arc in Songs of the Spheres, right? Makes me think that the mindless Space hunk is English.”

“Correct,” the Time robot said, hands behind its back. “The reconstruction of his mind picked up from his self at the end of his journey. A soulless husk of nothing. He only acts because compulsions are placed in his mind.”

“So the question remains… who are you?” Mattie scratched her chin. “I don’t think the last arc could be said to have a villain aside from the Tower itself, and you aren’t snarky enough to be the Emissary.”

“I am not surprised you don’t recognize me… but I am furious.” Time was suddenly next to Mattie and kicked her in the side.

Nobody remembered what happened, but Minna somehow tore Time’s arm off with her teeth and spat it on the ground.

“What…?” the Time robot seemed baffled.

“I have been living as an orphanage matron for over twenty years. I am out of practice…” She pressed her hands together and cracked her knuckles. “But I am still one of Brell’s freaky soldiers. You don’t know half the things I can do.”

“English, focus on her.”

English charged, teleporting behind her. She dodged his attack effortlessly and blanked his memory, tripping him and knocking him to the ground.

“English, enter frenzy mode. Do not stop until contact is made.”

It no longer mattered that Minna was clearing English’s memory, he would keep punching with a flurry of fists. She had to focus on dodging, which was a little difficult considering he could teleport everywhere and bend space itself to his whim. But he acted like a mindless robot—predictably. She managed to weave in and out with precision.

“Useless…” the Time robot seethed. “If you want something done…”

“Focus on your backside,” Mattie declared, unfurling a whip on the robot.

“You think pain whips will do anything to me!?”

“No, but it seems you’re really angry, so if I talk a bit to get you riled up, you might miss—“

The Everykid threw a bomb into the robot’s face.

“—that,” Mattie giggled.

The next thing Mattie knew, the Everykid was on the ground, bleeding. The Time robot had a fist poised to deliver the killing blow.

“HELL NO,” Mattie teleported herself in front of the Everykid and took the hit herself.

“…She means that much to you?” the robot asked as its fist embedded itself into Mattie’s shoulder.

“No, dear, I’m just a masochist, it’s always an experience to have a new fist rammed inside me.”

For some reason, this set the time robot off. It pulled its fist back and punched right onto Mattie’s horn, cracking it down the middle.

Mattie winced prior to letting out a pleased sigh. “Haven’t felt that one in a while…”

“You are a freak of nature! You… bitch! I can’t believe…” the Time robot got ahold of itself. “You know what, this isn’t the place.” It kicked Mattie in the back of the head, knocking her out. “We’re going to have a talk, you and I... about everything you’ve done…”

It was at this point Minna figured it out. “…It can’t be…”

“Great detective work, but you had an advantage,” the Time robot declared. “Of course, you’re the last one standing, now…” Both the Time robot and English jumped Minna. She was barely holding her own against English—she went down much like Mattie.

The Time robot dusted off its hands. “Now… where’s that kid. I don’t see any reason not to end her and her smug face right now…”

The Everykid was nowhere to be seen.

“I don’t like that. Something’s gone wrong. English, be on the lookout for anything suspicious. Even if we blink through time, there’s no telling what tricks they have up their sleeve.”

~~~

Onion entered the core of the Force Temple with all her equipment, ready to begin work. The robots had already been through here, they would have taken care of any guards. Ever since she had activated the Rage robot for Skarn all those years ago, it had always been pathetically easy to move in and out of places. Onion was their master, and with time she had restored all twelve of them from the ground up. It had taken a lot of work analyzing the Force spark and finding people who signified the twelve Aspects, but she’d done it. And she controlled every last one of them absolutely.

So she was absolutely shocked when she saw the Mind robot standing at the central altar, looking right at the Force spark.

“What are you doing here!?” Onion demanded. “You should be out there, fighting them!”

“I’m not out there because I don’t believe in petty revenge.”

“Get out there before I deactivate you!”

“I disabled that.” It turned to Onion. “You do not control me, and I do not agree with your mission.”

“You’re the Collector!” Onion shrieked. “They destroyed what you had built! They killed you!”

“That was part of my plan,” the Collector said, refusing to look away from the Force spark. “I intended from the very beginning to set myself up as a villain so I could be defeated, and that the heroes I collected together would continue helping the multiverse long after I was gone. Such a shame the multiverse ended so shortly after…” he sighed. “I was never against the heroes. I wanted them to win until my own fragile humanity took over.”

“That’s… not how they tell the legend…”

“Legends are better told with clear-cut villains and epic defeats. If you had read Mind, perhaps you would have seen what I actually was… and seen this coming.” He pressed his hands together. “You cannot convince me to take part in this revenge. I was never with you. You may have been able to convince Nettle and the abomination that was Corona and Eve that it was the heroes’ fault they were like this, but I know better. It’s your fault. All of this… it is your fault.” He looked at her with that featureless face of his. “Considering what inhabits the Time robot, how could you have ever believed otherwise?”

Onion growled. “You cannot hurt me. You may be able to disable the self-destruct, but my spirit controls all of you.”

“You are correct. I cannot harm you with my own powers. Luckily, I am a mastermind that’s capable of covering every exit. I have been planning this for quite some time, Onion, and as anyone who has faced me will tell you, I’m good at plans.”

As if on cue, a trap door opened in the ceiling, depositing Vriska, Starbeat, and the Blood robot in the ground. Immediately, the Collector pointed a finger at the Blood robot and fried its mind. It was not dead, but it couldn’t consciously do anything anymore—allowing Vriska to lash out and smash it with her sword. “F-fuck…”

Onion took a few steps back. “No…”

“Your pale shadow of the Combine has fallen,” the Collector declared. “And now there are two people in this room who can hurt you.”

Starbeat blinked. “That… earth pony? She’s responsible for this? But… why? I’ve never seen her before in my life!”

“Oh, you have…” Onion growled.

“Before you face her… I have a question.” The Collector turned to Starbeat. “What happened to Lightning?”

Starbeat blinked, eyes widening in shock as her goggles picked up on what he was. “C-colle—”

“I am but a mental copy, though in a way I am him. I am your ally in this fight. Please, what happened to her?”

“She’s… she’s dead,” Starbeat breathed.

“Did she die a hero?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s all I needed to know.” He turned to face Onion. “You are nothing to them. Surrender, deactivate the other robots, end this pointless carnage.”

Vriska readied her fluorite octet and Starbeat lit her horn.

“Don’t do it, kid,” Vriska warned.

Onion’s scowl deepened. “I… It’s not fair… you can’t always win!”

“Kid, that’s what we do. That’s why we are what we are. We win.” Her face softened as she remembered an encounter with a mysterious Watchmaker. “…When it really matters.”

“I… why can’t you be shown your place!?” Onion rammed her hoof into the ground and shrieked. “I have a ka-temple! I should be able to…”

English and the Time robot jumped out from behind Onion, charging the Collector.

“Like I didn’t plan for this.” The Collector held out a hand, controlling English’s pathetic, empty mind. The Collector prepared to take a minor beating through the Time robot’s powers, but he was strong enough to withstand it.

He was not strong enough to withstand Onion’s lightsaber cutting him in half.

The Collector fell to the ground, shocked. “…How?”

“You’re not a Mary Sue anymore,” Onion spat. “You’re just my robot. Your plans aren’t automatically perfect.”

The Time robot crushed The Collector’s head under its foot. “And you betrayed that purpose…”

Vriska shrugged. “Not sad to see him go. Now… how about a troll and a unicorn versus Space, Time, and a poor lost filly?”

The Time robot lifted a hand. “Show them our prisoners.” English obeyed, using his powers to grow the previously-microscopic Minna and Mattie to normal size, dropping them on the ground. The Time robot placed a foot on Mattie and pushed. “Stand down or they die.”

“You’re not going to do it,” Starbeat declared, narrowing her eyes. “You want her to die, but you want to do something else first.”

“To be fair, that’s just because I’m not sure I can kill you without some kind of plot armor kicking in,” Onion said, trotting over to the central altar. “But with this… I definitely can. All I need to do is set it up…”

“What…?” Mattie opened her eyes. “I… wh… I could have sworn…”

“Hello,” Onion said, addressing Mattie with far more hatred and venom than she’d had at any other point. “Get up, slut.”

Mattie opened her eyes groggily. “…You look exactly like one of my daughters.”

Onion twitched. “I wonder why that would be, mother.”

Mattie shot bolt upright. “C-circlet!?”

“I will never use the name you gave me!” Onion spat. “I. Am. Onion. And I am going to make you suffer.”

Mattie sighed. “Good luck with that…”

“I am well aware of your… disgusting condition.” She walked to the altar and took out some of her tools. “So we’re going to do something else…”

~~~

“Stop running!” the Heart robot screeched, lashing out by punching into a nearby wall. “You drove yourself into my planet before, why are you running now!?”

“Lack of preparation!” Pinkie called back, still bouncing forward with Trixie in her hooves.

“It’s got a bee in its bonnet about something… what’s she on about?”

“I think she’s Majora,” Pinkie said, jumping off a trampoline and into the air, dodging another spirit blade.

“What?! Why aren’t we dead!?”

“It’s just her mind, or a copy of it, or something.” Pinkie jumped behind a pot and appeared behind Majora, smacking her on the head with a golf club. Trixie, to her credit, got off a magic laser, not that it did anything.

“You fools… I will devour your souls and use your flesh to fuel the fire of my rebirth!”

“Pretty sure you can’t be reborn in the New World,” Trixie commented with a smirk. “Hope you like being a robot!”

The Element of Laughter flashed, protecting them from another wave of spirit blades.

“Can we mock her more? Get more power?”

Pinkie grinned. “Oh, yes!”

“It won’t be enough.” The Hope robot appeared, scepter in his hand. “And now you won’t even be able to run.”

Pinkie’s smile didn’t falter. “Hi, Siron. I don’t suppose you’d consider reforming and help us now, would you?”

“I have never considered your idea of reformation anything more than a disgusting crime against nature.”

“Ah. It was worth a shot.”

Siron surrounded his body with the energy of Hope. He was the paladin now, the savior—how could he lose when he had all the drive in the world to succeed?

He and Majora lashed out. Pinkie tried to dodge—and failed. Majora’s attacks were useless, but the holy Hope of Siron cut her to the bone. Her vibrant blood sprayed out of her leg as she was sent flying, cracking a few ribs on a street light.

Trixie’s smile vanished instantly. “L-let’s talk about this…”

Siron twirled his scepter. “No.” He brought it down on her head.

Discord caught it with a giant spring. “No!” He laughed, turning the Hope scepter into a cockatoo. “How about you go for someone your own size?”

Flutterfree spread her wings, her Rage spreading to Siron. “You can’t fight us.”

Siron shook his head, using his Hope to ignore the truth of Discord’s power. “Who cares about the odds? I ha—”

Corona and Eve teleported to the location, ice and fire brimming off them. This made Majora freeze in her tracks—too many enemies.

“Siron,” Eve said, eyes narrow. “It doesn’t have to end here. Not again.”

Siron grabbed his scepter.

“I will not give you the warrior’s death again.”

He knew it was true. Not because of Flutterfree’s Rage—he was actively countering that—but through his inner being. She had given him what he wanted when they fought so long ago. Now? Now she was stronger, older, more experienced, and had the strength to take him out like the bug she thought he was.

And she was still offering him her hoof.

“Once you destroy the Tower, you’ll realize your weakness,” Siron spat. He tapped into his Hope, flashing like a flare gun. Everyone had to look away.

When the light cleared, he and Majora were gone.

“Did Siron just… FLEE?!” Trixie asked, holding tightly to Discord’s leg like he was her lifeline.

“He did…” Corona frowned. “And I’m going to find out where he went…”

~~~

Jenny threw the Life robot far into the distance. By sheer luck, it hit the Void robot in the side, knocking them over.

“AUGH!” the Void robot shouted. “How… HOW DID YOU HIT ME!?”

“I guess you qualify as Life…”

Roland fired a bullet through the Life robot and the Void robot. The Void robot toppled backward, sparking uncontrollably. “F-freaking… mortal… body!” It exploded.

The Life robot regenerated itself without issue. “…You just killed Nettle.”

“Nettle?” Jenny blinked. “That’s not Nettle! That’s some stupid robot!”

“The robots are images of our past foes,” Monika said, pointing her lightsaber at the Life robot. “If I had to guess… I’d say this one is you.”

“Really? Again with the evil twin thing!? …Though, that would explain a lot,” Jenny admitted.

“Hey, listen to that, I’m an idiot!” Jenny-bot laughed.

“What were you expecting?” Roland asked.

“HEY!” both Jennys shouted at once.

“Maybe you can answer some questions…” Monika lifted Jenny-bot off the ground with the Force, glaring at her. “What is your mission?”

“To punch you until you stop moving, duh.” Jenny-bot created a massive vine with thorns and attacked Monika, only for her to cut it in two with her lightsaber.

“Why?” Monika cocked her head. “Do be quick, we don’t have all day.”

“You’ll have to pry that out of my cold, dead hands. Or head, as the case may be.” Jenny-bot struggled. “Good luck killing me!”

The Breath robot fell out of the sky, smashing into Jenny-bot. She regenerated easily. The Breath robot did not, struggling to stand on its damaged legs. “I… am the wind…”

“You’re annoyingly impossible to keep down!” O’Neill shouted after he and Nanoha teleported to the surface.

“It’s tradition!” the Breath robot laughed.

“That’s it, I’m convinced.” O’Neill pointed a finger. “That’s Ba’al, somehow.”

Nanoha prepared another volley of a million missiles. “He won’t last long.”

She was right. Roland shot him. He had no idea it was coming—his inner circuitry flew out like brain matter, covering the ground around him.

“Huh,” Jenny-bot said. “I wonder if I’m the last one…”

O’Neill slapped her across the face with Crimson Sushi. “Let’s find out!”

“There’s no way you can kill me!”

“We don’t have to,” Roland said, lowering his gun. “…Imprison her.”

“That’s not going to be easy…”

Jenny laughed. “But it’ll be fun!”

“Frick.”

~~~

Siron and Majora ran into the core of the Temple.

“…I sense that there’s a problem,” Onion grunted as she attached a few wires to the central altar.

“They’re banding together in large groups,” Siron reported. “Too many for us to take.”

“Did either of you have any success?”

“I defeated Mlinx.”

Onion turned to Mattie, sneering. “Already one of your precious friends has fallen! H—”

“He’s not dead,” Mattie muttered. “I’d feel it. If I had to guess, I’d say Siron let him live out of respect.”

Onion’s sneer fell into a scowl. “…Unsurprising. But this...” She tapped the top of the console she’d attached to the altar. “This will give me what I need to do some real damage.”

“What happened to you?” Minna asked. “Why… why are you doing this to us?”

“Because my mother abandoned me at birth and the woman who raised me didn’t tell me who she was!” Onion pointed a hoof at Minna. “You could have, at any time, told me your story! Told me who you were! But no, I had to figure it out!”

“I’m sorry for not telling you, but you were so angry, even then!”

“You made it worse.” Onion pulled a lever, prompting the Force spark to flash a myriad of different colors. “That hellhole I grew up in…”

“I cared for you!” Minna shouted. “I gave you everything you needed, I helped you with your Force training, I—”

“You are a liar! You had too many children to watch out for, you couldn’t possibly be a mother to us all. But at least you were a better mother than… that masochistic marshmallow slut that probably has more kids than she knows how to count. Isn’t that right, Mattie!?”

“…It is…” Mattie admitted.

“I bet you only have kids because it gives you some kind of perverse pleasure, because you certainly don’t raise us. You had me here and just up and abandoned me. You did this.” She gestured at the Time robot—a robot with her own mind inside of it. “You made me into this.”

“My child is the villain again…” Mattie chuckled bitterly. “If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.”

“This… this has happened before!?” Onion’s jaw hung open. “What is wrong with you?”

“A lot of things. Shall we go down the li—”

Corona, Eve, Fluttershy, Discord, Pinkie, and Trixie charged through the door. Siron, Majora, English, and the Onion-bot were ready to face them.

“Stop this, now,” Corona demanded.

“No,” Onion said, pressing a button on the console.

The Force spark turned black, coalescing ka-energy into a single point. Discord let out a scream as it lifted him into the air, crushing him on all sides.

Onion hovered her hoof over another button. “A happy ending… I hate your happy endings. You just got to solve your relationship even after all that terror and… you all get to be happy while the rest of us wallow in our unimportant, meaningless lives! And that’s not going to change when the Tower’s gone. But while the Tower’s here… I can give you a taste of what we experience.”

She locked eyes with Discord.

“I am going to kill you. And there’s not a thing they can do about it. Your plot armor is gone.” She turned to Flutterfree. “And you are going to feel it.”

VII – Generations to Come

“Onion, stop.”

Onion looked at the entrance only to get a phone to the face.

Joanne walked in, Jotaro, Burgerbelle, and Rev behind her. Joanne scowled - no longer having a phone to look at. “Good. You’ve stopped.”

“Joanne, you know better than all the others why I’m doing this,” Onion said.

“Yes. I do. I hate them too. Their stupid adherence to a single morality most of all. They think they have the right to say there is a good and evil, when there is no such thing. It’s a lie. And lies aren’t good or evil, I just hate them because they mess with what I like and what I see. They think there’s some sort of greater good they can devote themselves to, be it Harmony, friendship, God, or some other fleeting ideal that will have no support once the Tower falls.” She pressed her hands together. “But why does that mean we should kill them? What crime have they committed? Have they sought out our suffering like you’re doing right now?”

Onion refused to move her hoof from the button—she couldn’t risk one of the heroes trying to jump her. She was a hair’s breadth away from pressing it, and even if they tried some weird manipulation, she would Force-push it. Discord was going to die, she was sure of it. She would do it.

But her mind wouldn’t let her do it without hearing Joanne out.

“The world won’t give them justice, so we have to,” Onion responded.

“Justice? Like…” Joanne struggled to find the words. “Death for devoting their lives to us?”

“Death for making a mistake,” Onion growled. “Death for… for being immune to death. For living longer than they should. For… for controlling everything!”

“Really?”

“YES!” Onion shouted. “They deserve no less!”

“If that’s how you’ve defined your rules…” Joanne shrugged. “Then who am I to criticize?”

“Thank you.”

“But are you willing to give up your friends for this?” Joanne cocked her head to the side. “I will publicly shame you and drag you to a court, pressing for a death penalty. The others will not be as brutal, but they will hate you for their own reasons.”

“Pringle already hates me enough, Jang doesn’t even know.”

“They’re here. They’re hiding in the hall over there. I believe they followed you here and are just too scared to say anything.”

Onion froze.

Pringle poked her head out from behind the doorframe. “H-hey…” She tried not to look at the imprisoned, pain-stricken Discord. “C-c-can we stop?” She wiped tears from her face. “We can go out for smoothies and yell about the h-heroes all we want… have a nice long laugh…”

Jang came out next, tears evident on his eyes as well. “I’m sorry… I didn’t take you seriously. I didn’t believe you were ever doing more than just… venting. That’s on me. Don’t… don’t do this. I—I don’t think I could live with myself.”

Onion began to tremble. “You… you don’t understand. You… this is what needs to be…”

“Just change your definition and step down from there,” Joanne said. “All it takes is a thought.”

No.

Onion pulled her face back and set her jaw. “I… I never expected to survive anyway. I can’t take them all. I can only take some, the others wouldn’t let me live afterward. I was always going to lose all of you.”

Pringle started bawling. “O-onion!”

“My life has never been my own,” Onion sighed. “And it never can be. Not in this world, not in the previous, and not in the next. Everything I’ve ever done is in the shadows of those who came before. Even this. Especially this. At least this way, I go out on my own terms, screaming to the world.”

Corona took a step forward—hands up, to show she wasn’t attacking. “I’ve been where you are.”

“You don’t know anything! Y—”

“I threw myself into a volcano after the collapse,” Corona said matter-of-factly.

Onion was stunned into silence.

“It was a week or so after the New World was born. I had been told by all existence that my plan had been pointless, that the death I had caused didn’t even do what it was supposed to. The Tower still stood, ka was real, and everyone was dead. I was shown that I had no control over anything—my entire quest had been a joke.”

“…It wasn’t, though.”

“I didn’t know that at the time.” Corona sighed. “I survived the collapse when I wasn’t supposed to. I had every intention of continuing in the New World if I did survive, but continuing in a world that was a joke to my struggle, my life, my sacrifice? I… I couldn’t do it. I would have died that day had Evening not saved me.” She pulled Eve forward. “She was still furious with me, still angry at what I’d done, still grieving from what had been lost. And she saved me.”

“We can save you,” Eve said, smiling warmly. “Come. Step down. We don’t have to fight.”

“I… I don’t care about my life being a joke,” Onion stammered. “I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing this to show you what it’s like to… I…” She furrowed her brow, scowling. “The finer details aren’t the point! You control us just… by being you! Even when the Tower does the same to you, you don’t stop, you keep doing the same thing!”

“…Do you want us to stop?” Eve asked. “To go live in a secluded cabin in some random forest somewhere and never contact any of you ever again?”

“YES! Then we could be our own people!”

“…That’s evil,” Eve said, shaking her head. “It would be the same as seeing a monster destroying a city and doing nothing to stop it. It would be the same as passing a dying man on the road and not helping him. The responsibility of those with power is to use it. We may use it wrong at times, and there may be unintended consequences, but we cannot do nothing. …You’ve seen Allure’s message. You know what happened when we let our society do its own thing.”

“You feel the same way,” Corona said. “Look at all this you’ve created just to do what you think is just! Just to ‘show’ us what we do! You couldn’t live with yourself doing nothing—and neither can we. When we see someone hurting… we help them. When we see someone attacking others… we stop them.”

“I’m… I’m not you… I’m…” She glanced at the Onion-bot and its symbol of Time. “I’m…”

“You’ve been labeled the villain,” Pinkie said, appearing between Eve and Corona. “Say what you will about heroes…”

“…What about being the villain?” Corona asked.

Onion bit her lip. “At least… I… There’s no escape, is there? Either hero or villain or absolute nobody!”

“There’s a reason I fought the Tower,” Corona said. “There—”

“And when it falls there will be no justice for all the stupid things that happened before! There will be nothing! No villains to challenge the heroes, no quests, just people doing stupid things! This is my last chance to do anything to any of you that will be heard!”

“…The last chance to hurt your mother?” Mattie asked.

Onion turned to stare at her.

“Come on, we all know that’s what this is really about. You’ve got mommy issues so you’re looking for something to justify lashing out against her. Against me. Until you deal with me you’ll just… come up with whatever reason you can to justify hurting me. Maybe Minna too—I don’t know how much she means to you or doesn’t—but crikey, do you hate me.”

Onion started trembling again. “You… you dare to suggest you know me? You abandoned me at birth! Y—”

“I couldn’t be a good mother!” Mattie shrieked. “Do you think it’d be good for me to have a kid around me? I’ve had kids before, and it’s never gone well. The one who understood me. The one? Their life went down the toilet so fast and so hard I can’t even imagine! The others all resented me or didn’t know who I was. It would have been better if Minna never told you who I was!”

“Oh, so this is her fault, not yours? You didn’t ruin all our lives?”

“I DID!” Mattie shouted. “I RUINED EVERY LAST ONE, YOU BLOODY IMBECILE!”

“THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU CHANGE THINGS?”

“BECAUSE I DAMN WELL CAN’T!” Mattie wailed. “Do you think I don’t want to change!? That it’s not blatantly obvious that my lifestyle is destructive? It doesn’t take a big brain to see that my particular brand of ‘relationship’ is doomed to be twisted down a toilet, taken advantage of, and relegated to a purely physical sensation without any real substance to it! I’m very lucky I have the friends I do, otherwise I’d be long dead!”

“Is there an echo in here? If you don’t like it, freaking CHANGE!”

“THE TOWER WON’T LET ME!” Mattie wailed.

“…W-what?”

“Dammit…” Mattie bit her lip, starting to cry. “You made me say it. You made me acknowledge it, oh no no no no…”

Onion was confused. “What just happened?”

“I’ve been ignoring it! I… I had to! If I ever… why? Why now? I was almost free! The Tower was almost gone, and then I could have changed!”

“Why couldn’t you change before?”

“Because the sexual deviant is popular! EVERYONE loves to read about them! Oh, don’t believe me? Go take a look at FimFiction sometime, I know we have some copies somewhere. Find a completely random popular story and tell me how many sex jokes are in there. Even in a story with absolutely no really suggestive stuff in it, there’ll probably be one or two! Because there’s something about the world we live in that’s obsessed with it, driven to be amused by the breaking of norms! It…” She gagged. “It’s a core part of my character. It’s almost central. Instead of being nice, or stupid, or compassionate, or cruel, or angry, or understanding… I’m a masochist. That is the word that defines me, Onion! And I can’t do a damn thing to change it!”

Onion fell silent.

“I can’t be your mother. I shouldn’t be anyone’s mother. But I can’t stop. It’s worse than an addiction, it’s… it’s a control. A control I’m always vaguely Aware of… At first I didn’t mind. And then I saw what I did to people. How cruel I was. But I couldn’t stop. It… it was like existence itself needed me to stay this way. Not for any reason, but to continue being funny by making people uncomfortable and, oh, laughing at societal norms! Yeah! That’s great!” She looked at the ground. “Fighting against societal norms is the job of revolutionaries and politicians. Not me. I just… I just wanted to have fun. Not drive myself and everyone around me into the ground.”

Everyone was staring at her in shock.

“And now I’ve been forced to admit it…” Mattie laughed bitterly. “I still can’t change. But I can’t ignore it anymore. I… I can already see it. One part of me screaming to just stop and the other unable to do so. It… it’s… it’s going to drive me insane. And not the fun kind, either.” She heaved, dropping tears onto the ground. “Maybe when the Tower’s gone…. I’ll be okay.”

Slowly, she turned to look Onion in the eyes. “You didn’t want me as your mother. I abandoned you… because it would have been worse for you if you stayed with me. If that’s wrong—and it probably is, given my track record—then… well, you’ve already punished me. I can’t go back anymore… but I can’t change.” She lowered her voice to almost a whisper. “…I hope it doesn’t destroy me.”

A tear rolled down Onion’s cheek. It was all too much. Trembling, she lowered her hoof.

“Oh thank God…” Flutterfree said.

“No,” the Onion-bot said. “No.” She whirled her hand toward the button.

Onion cut her in half. “…I’m not the villain, anymore.”

The Onion-bot let out a bunch of garbled static before collapsing to the ground, dead.

“…Get him out of here,” Flutterfree begged. “Please.”

Discord managed to nod through the pain of his imprisonment.

Onion wiped her face, nodding slowly. She returned to the console.

Majora was already there, finger over the button.

“Suffer,” she said.

“DEACTIV—” But Onion was too late.

Majora had already pushed the button.

Discord couldn’t even scream. He could only recoil in shock… and become nothing more than white specks of dust in the wind.

Flutterfree let out an inhuman wail. Eve fell to her knees. Onion dropped to the ground, cutting the console and Majora in half with her lightsaber.

Her order to deactivate still went out. Siron, Jenny-bot, and English all crumbled to the ground without any fanfare.

Everything became a blur for Onion. What had just happened? Had she… had she killed him? Did she want to, anymore? Was this… the end?

What was the point of this?

The next thing Onion was fully aware of was Flutterfree holding all her knife-blades to her neck. Onion felt one pierce her skin, drawing blood.

No one in the room made a move to stop Flutterfree. Nobody dared.

Rage twisted across the pegasus’ face, a deep desire to kill to avenge crossing her features. Purple began to dominate her eyes… but died away as the Element of Kindness on her forehead shimmered. Slowly, she lowered the wing-blades from Onion’s neck, a shuddering, shaking smile coming to her face. With her front hoof, she lifted Onion’s face to meet her own. Her touch was soft, her gaze meek. She opened her mouth, struggling to say something, anything—a kind word or… anything.

Nothing came out of her mouth. She couldn’t do it. It was too much, even for her.

She wailed, withdrawing her hoof to slash Onion across the face with a wing. It was a wild attack with no precision, but it still sent her flying into a wall. Onion was vaguely aware of bleeding heavily, and that one of her ears didn’t feel right… was it gone?

Was it…

Was she…

…

Everything hurt…

“Onion…?”

Pringle?

“Onion, you’re going to be okay. We’ve got you.”

Onion blinked. She had been moved to the center of the room and bandaged up. One of her ears was missing and she was wrapped in a lot of bandages. There was no sign of any healing spells being used on her.

Joanne, Jang, and Pringle stood above her, worry evident on all their faces—even Joanne’s, though she was shaking.

“…Why…”

Pringle hugged her. “Don’t ask questions. We’re here.”

“O-okay…”

She didn’t know how long she sat there with her friends before Corona walked up.

“…Are you sorry?” Corona asked.

Onion’s tears told her all she needed to know. She put an arm around the pony and whispered into her ear. “I wasn’t.” Onion felt the healing magic flow through her.

Corona released her, standing tall. “That’s… probably all you’re going to get from us. I… I wish we could help more, but we aren’t that strong. Not now.” She walked away, not looking back.

“Why…?” Onion asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jang said. “It’s over, now.”

“Is it…?” Onion asked.

“It can be…” Mattie said, looking to her daughter with real pain. “If you refuse to play the Tower’s game. It’s the only way to win. To just… remove yourself. We tried to, but… we can’t. You… you might be able to, now.”

“We made mistakes,” Minna added. “And… and we’re sorry. We know sorry doesn’t even begin to cover it...”

“But I think you know that, too,” Mattie added. “…Come find me after the Tower falls. Maybe… maybe then, I can be your mother. But not today. Not today.”

Onion nodded slowly, standing up. She wiped her face. “I should go.”

“…Go?” Pringle asked.

“Go. Away from this city. Away from… everything. And just… escape the game of heroes and villains.” She extended a hoof to her friends. “You… you can come with me.”

Pringle accepted her hoof first, without hesitation. “…What else would we do?”

Onion smiled. “…Then let’s leave them to their city.”

As far as the Tower can see, they never saw Onion “Circlet” Belle again.

~~~

Pinkie did see Pringle again, though. Only once.

Pinkie was sitting alone on the balcony of the Force Temple, wind blowing through her mane. It was flatter than usual, but it hadn’t lost its poofyness completely.

“P-pinkie…?”

Pinkie smiled. “I didn’t stop being your auntie, you know.”

“But I…”

“It’s good that you can help Onion,” Pinkie said. “We… we’re hurting too much. She needs you. You’re still a Pie and always will be. Keep on smiling and laughing and being there for your friends even when they do terrible things.” Pinkie shook her head. “We’re not strong enough to be perfect.”

“…You try.”

“We do. And we mess up, a lot.”

“B-but that’s the whole point! You mess up, but you still do! You make the world a better place!”

“Onion wasn’t sure we did,” Pinkie said, kicking her hooves. “We say we fight for the generations to come, but is it really good for them? How many of their problems should we solve for them? Is it possible for them not to resent us? Maybe, like Cinder, we aren’t looking far enough ahead? Maybe we aren’t thinking about what comes after the end. Maybe we can’t...”

“I don’t…” Pringle frowned.

“We’re immortal. Do we ever plan to actually hand it over? Is it right to hand it over?” She examined her hoof, frowning. “I’m starting to wonder if there’s a reason people have limited lifespans. So that the world will pass into the hands of the next generation… and they’ll have to learn on their own. Everyone needs to struggle. If we create too much of a ‘utopia’, it becomes a dystopia simply because it tries to make lives too perfect.” She laughed bitterly. “But I don’t know if that’s absolute. Maybe if we doubled down on our control, things would have been better. Maybe, maybe, maybe…”

“Does it matter? You did your best.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we did!” Pinkie laughed. “You’re great, Pringle, you know that?”

“I don’t know…”

“Neither do I!” Pinkie giggled. “But you know what, if there’s any overarching moral of this entire multiversal adventure, it’s this: we’re too small. If you’re given all the power to decide the fate of existence… even if you’re a good person who only uses it morally, something’s still going to go wrong. The world is too big. Even this New World, this single universe… heck, even a single planet. It’s too much.”

“So what do we do?”

“We live,” Pinkie said. “And do our best anyway.”

Pringle hugged her.

“Come see me after the Tower’s down, okay? That’s when I think we should ask these questions again. “

“And throw a party?”

Pinkie laughed. “Yes. And throw a party.”

~~~

“I wonder…” Eve said. “What is the difference between a hero and a villain?”

“Different perspective?” Corona suggested.

They were sitting in the Crow’s Nest of the Austraeoh XVI, looking at the City of the Moon below them.

“Not always…” Eve frowned. “We were shown twelve villains today.”

“Ba’al, Majora, Jenny, Siron, Scarcity, the Collector, that Combine thing, Skarn, Nettle, English, Onion, and… us.”

“Is there anything that ties all of them together? At all?” Eve frowned. “Some just wanted power. Some were just doing it for fun. Others had some kind of moral purpose, be it some plan or art or the fate of the multiverse. And… one just wanted revenge.” She looked at her hoof. “But look at us, the heroes… some of us wanted power. Some of us just wanted to have fun. We fought for the fate of the multiverse… and we’ve fought for revenge.”

Corona tapped the Master Sword on the railing of the Crow’s Nest. “I learned from you that what matters is our heart.”

“We were true to our hearts and our motivations,” Eve said. “And so was the Collector. And yet, we were the villains. He went too far… and we went too far. Both of us.” She looked at the ground. “If either of us fought for a surrender… If either of us would have just given up…”

“I don’t think there are heroes and villains,” Corona said. “At least, not without the Tower. I think there are good people and bad people. Good people can do heroic things, but they can also do villainous things. Same with bad people. Being ‘heroic’ or ‘villainous’ is just a label people slap on to help tell a story. Really, everyone’s the protagonist of their own story, even if they’re a terrible person.”

“I can’t disagree… but I’m not sure I can agree either.” Eve closed her eyes and sighed. “I want an answer. I want some… some truth that I can latch onto and say ‘this is good and right, while this is bad and wrong’. I want to be able to know. But I can’t, I have to make every action in my life with some kind of doubt. The worst part? We can’t just refuse to play. This is life, all your chips are on the table and there’s no getting out of it.”

“Just try to be the best you can?” Corona suggested.

“I would love it if that was all it took,” Eve sighed. “But we’ve tried to be our best, and been wrong. Everyone has. And I refuse to believe there is no right and wrong. If there isn’t, everything about existence is some kind of cruel joke. We are born absolutely convinced life has meaning and that our actions matter. Why is that? It’s not just the Tower, it’s a thing on Earths too! It’s like… inherent.”

“And yet, when we look, we find… well, I don’t know what we find. But the Builders found nothing. Like us, they couldn’t accept that there was nothing.”

“But instead of just accepting that there was something, they just couldn’t prove it, they… made their own something. And it got us here.” She frowned. “We really shouldn’t be trusted with coming up with our own destinies.”

“It looks like we are, though. One way or another.”

A flock of multicolored birds flew past their eyes.

Eve smiled. “At least it’s beautiful.”

Corona laughed. “It really is…”

~~~

Flutterfree stood at the base of the statue of Discord that had been erected the very same day he’d been dusted by the Majora robot. She was crying… but she was also smiling, smiling larger than she had in a long, long time.

“…Keep it warm for me up there, will you? Maybe dress it up a bit. Some singing ginseng, a flailing tube-arm man, or… or whatever crazy things are up there. Surprise me. I… it might be a long time before I get there, but… one day. One day.”

She kissed the base of the statue, letting out a little laugh through her tears.

She heard a branch snap behind her. Turning, she saw Trixie standing like a deer in the headlights.

“Uh… I can come back later…”

“No, no…” Flutterfree beckoned her to come sit down. “He’d like us both to be here.”

Nervously, Trixie walked up to Flutterfree’s side and sat down, looking up at Discord’s statue. It was laughing.

“You know, rumors are going to start about how he’s actually the statue.”

“He’d love that,” Flutterfree giggled. “An endless legend of uncertain chaos…”

They sat in silence, looking at the statue, but really reliving moments of their past with their mutual lifelong friend.

“…You loved him too,” Flutterfree said.

Trixie didn’t even try to deny it.

“…It’s okay. We all have those thoughts, sometimes.”

“I gave him to you,” Trixie breathed. “I knew it was what he wanted… so I did it.” She looked at the ground. “I didn’t realize what my feelings were until it was too late.”

“Trixie, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

“I don’t think I would have done anything different.” Trixie shook her head. “You two… you two were amazing. He and I… can you imagine the shouting? The…” Trixie facehooved. “I’m being an idiot…”

“Trixie, you are not being an idiot. You are being honest.”

Trixie sighed. “You gave him something more. You gave him yourself and… and that light you have in your eyes. He always had more to live for than you and the next laugh. It… it scared me a little, how you two changed each other. How well you did.” She tapped a hoof on the ground. “…I wish I’d gotten to know him better than I did.”

“We all do. But Trixie… you spent decades with him on that boat, and you were never hiding. You know him better than you think.”

“Yeah…”

“And who knows, maybe you’ll see him again...?”

Trixie sighed. “Doubt it.”

“Ah…” Flutterfree turned away, saying no more.

They sat in silence for several minutes.

“…I’m not leaving,” Trixie said.

“Hmm?”

“I’m not going back with you on the Austraeoh. I… I’m going to stay here. Not just in this city, but in this… area. I’ll wander around, do some shows, make some games again, what have you. Screw all that ‘letting the younger generation figure it out’ nonsense. They don’t know what’s good for them.” She placed a hoof on the statue. “I’m going to play a different game, now.”

Flutterfree nodded. “I’m happy for you. We’ll miss you at the Tower.”

“I know.” Trixie smiled. “See you at the funeral.” She turned and trotted away. “…Do you want me to get you anything?”

“No,” Flutterfree said, closing her eyes and smiling. “I already have everything I need.”

Trixie bit her lip.

“Trixie, it’s okay. You can think we’re crazy.”

“I… I understand you two, okay? It’s been hard, but I understand. It’s just not for me. And I know your response to that is ‘the point is to not do it for yourself’ but I…” She twirled a hoof in the air.

Flutterfree placed a wingtip on Trixie’s cheek, smiling. “I understand, Trixie.”

They shared a brief hug before going their separate ways.

~~~

“…Discord was the love of my life,” Flutterfree said at the service. It was being held on the Austraeoh XVI as it floated away from the City of the Moon, ever-so-slowly. Only the crew had been invited—this included Minna and Trixie, who would be teleported back to the city after the service.

“All of us knew him well. How can we not know the people we’ve spent decades with cooped up on a tiny ship? We all have a memory of him being hilarious, of him being aggravating, of him jumping into danger headfirst and laughing all the while because he could just snap his fingers and change everything. …We all remember times when he was lost, alone, and confused at his place in the world. We all remember times where we wondered if he would come back… where we wondered if he’d survived.”

She folded her ears back and drooped slightly. “This time, he didn’t. We rushed in, trying to save the day as we always do, and… our luck ran out.” Flutterfree paused, gathering her breath. “We’d talked before about what we would do if the other didn’t make it. We made each other promise that we would continue on as long as we physically could, into the New World and beyond. I… am keeping that promise. Even though I want nothing more than to go be with him right now, the world is still here. He doesn’t want us to despair, even though we will—he wants us to live, to continue on, and to keep fighting for life itself. And when another of us falls… we keep going even then, as we always have.

“I know a lot of you don’t believe there’s anything beyond, that when we’re gone, we’re gone, and…” She had to stop to wipe her eyes. “And I’m really, really sorry that… I don’t feel what you feel right now. And I’m sorry that… I can’t really provide you more hope. The end of a life is always a tragedy, no matter what. But his wish still stands: for us to move on. To remember him… and to use that memory to carry us forward.

“Right now, I… I cry. He’s gone. We don’t have him anymore. But I also smile. He knows a glory none of us can even imagine. And… I’m not sorry for talking like this, for making you all uncomfortable, for… I don’t know. All I know is that I’m telling you about Discord, Spirit of Chaos, and… his life. His amazing, complicated, confusing life. Even he never truly understood himself. Don’t you think that’s beautiful? He had so much to him that he never stopped discovering new things. His story… it never ends. And even when the Tower falls, our story won’t end. We’ll keep writing about what we’ve done, and who knows where it will go?

“I’m sad he never got to see the world without the Tower. I think… I think he would have been at home there, in the new forms of chaos. So let’s carry his memory into it.

“Now… before I close and ask Rev to say some things, or invariably get stuck on some tangent about his life, Discord did have one request. He had a song he wanted played at his funeral. It’s overly cheery, confusing, and perhaps a little tactless… but, really, would he have wanted anything less at a day devoted to him?”

“Definitely not,” Mattie called.

Flutterfree nodded. “And no, it’s not ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’. That’s the closing song he’s asked for.” She chuckled nervously. “Monika, do you have the giant spoons, bowl, and the song?”

Monika nodded. “Yep. You are completely nuts, though. You’re gonna get copyrighted or something, the readers are gonna need to get the song in a note.”

Flutterfree winked. “Good. Rev, would you come up here and sing with me?”

Rev teleported to her side. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

Flutterfree nodded. Monika placed a giant cereal bowl behind them and gave each of the ponies a spoon the size of a sword. Snapping her fingers, Monika started the music—a guitar and a funky beat began. When Rev and Flutterfree started singing, twirling their spoons around like batons, Eve broke out in delighted laughter while most everyone else was looking around a tad confused or uncertain.

Eve teleported to the stage between Flutterfree and Rev, joining them in song.

“When the toast is burned
and all the milk has turned
and Captain Crunch is waving farewell...!”

It was ridiculous. It was poignant. There were tears, but there were also three voices celebrating Discord, his life, and what he saw for the future.

If he really was looking down from above, he would have been laughing in absolute delight.

With the power of a song, the Austraeoh XVI sailed north, toward the true end.

~~~
The songs Discord chose:

155 - 'Epilogue', Part 1

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

156 - 'Epilogue', Part 2

“…And we’re back,” Flagg said, leaning against the wall of his cell.

“I asked you what it meant, Walter,” Roland demanded.

“Always the same with you…” Flagg shook his head and shrugged. “You saved the Tower. You are to execute it.”

“The Tower will fall on its own,” Roland said.

“Yes. It will. Do you honestly think it’d let itself go without an appropriate execution?” Flagg laughed. “Of course not! You will be asked to do the honors. And you will accept – because it would happen anyway. And then the Tower will fall as it was meant to.”

Roland looked down at his sandalwood revolver. The most narratively potent weapon in existence aside from Black Thirteen itself.

Flagg laughed again, amused by Roland’s actions.

Jenny had enough of this. She punched him in the face.

He didn’t care. “Foolish child…”

She punched him again. “I’m blowing off my steam, I don’t care if you feel it or not.” She kicked him a few times, her dress flapping wildly.

“Always full of that spice… no matter how much you try to hide it…”

Jenny folded her arms. “I am who I am. I do not care if it’s inconsistent. Get the memo.”

“You are our polar opposite…” Flagg observed. “The eternal changer… opposed to the eternally unchanged.” He cackled.

“You may not change,” Jenny said. “But Roland does. He’s dynamic. He opens up once you get to know him. He’s old, but he learns new tricks. The only thing that doesn’t change about him is that honorable gunslinger’s heart. You’re just a static piece of evil given the form of a man.”

“And isn’t it great?” he asked. “I know who I am. But who are you?”

Jenny narrowed her eyes. “Let’s go. There’s nothing for us here. Either what he says is true, or it isn’t, and regardless it won’t matter in the end.” She daintily twirled around, made a neck-cutting gesture at Flagg, and walked out.

“Is there anything else, gunslinger?” Flagg asked.

Roland looked at him. He opened his mouth – then shut it. He turned and walked after Jenny.

“Have a nice day~!” Flagg called. Somewhere deep inside of him, he sensed it was the last recorded thing he would ever say.

Outside in the streets of the City, Roland stopped Jenny. He kneeled down so he was eye level with her. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Jenny folded her arms behind her back. “You were-”

“I would have gotten through it eventually. You are trying to remake yourself.” He gestured at her – she sure wasn’t trying to look like a powerful adventurer anymore, not even close. She wanted to change herself to something softer. “You don’t need to go back for my sake.”

Jenny looked up at him – and allowed herself to smile. “It’s okay. I’ll get back on the path soon enough. I’ve been through so many transformations in my life, whatever I end up being will be fine.”

“But is it what you want?”

“Depends on my mood at the time!” She gave him a finger-guns gesture. “Heheh.” She rubbed the back of her head. “Just doing what I could to help a friend.”

Roland smirked, quoting an oft-heard phrase from one of their mutual friends. “Yare yare daze…”

She giggled. “Look, if you want to help me change, you can… go shopping with me! Yes!” She pointed at a shop window. “I should get some absolutely ridiculous and gaudy earrings and you can help me judge them.”

Roland fell silent.

“I’ll probably get whatever you think is the worst. How’s that sound?”

Roland pulled his hat down and shook his head. “Lead the way, Jenny of the Red Gloves.”

Jenny held out her gloves and smiled. They were always comforting to see. She skipped through the doors of the store, a childlike grin on her face.

A new Jenny for a new existence… She knew this might be the last time she could change herself so easily. She was going to make it count. She would be young.

~~~

Burgerbelle and Pinkie were, to put it mildly, very close. The Sweetie had learned to accept Pinkie as more of an adoptive parent than a mere mentor. The feeling was a little odd for Burgerbelle since she had very little in the way of ‘memories’ of her Flat parents. She wasn’t even a hundred percent sure they had actually existed. Not that she didn’t like the connection to Pinkie, it was nice.

So when Pinkie had told her to watch her ‘flirty memes’ out in the City, Burgerbelle had taken it to heart. She’d put on a long white coat over her regular clothes to go out in public, and nobody batted an eye. Problem solved.

She had passed through the League of Sweetie Belles earlier, which was now barely distinct from the Sparkle Census at all. There were direct portals between the two locations, making the two old organizations nothing more than relics within the Sweetie Sparkle Coalition. She had been welcomed back with warm smiles, showed around, and then people had asked about Thrackerzod.

…Thrackerzod…

Burgerbelle had gotten herself out of the League building quickly after that. She didn’t want to deal with that in the last hours of her real self. Heck, she didn’t want to be wearing this coat, she wanted to run through the streets and scream to existence that she was here before everything changed.

But she knew Pinkie had been right, so she had conformed just enough. She was still shooting old, dead memes around everywhere that the younger generation failed to understand in major ways – or they just cringed at her. Her usual response to this was an over-the-top dab with a ‘what you gonna do about it?’ expression.

For some reason – she wasn’t entirely sure why – she had avoided actually checking the City Internet for new memes. Maybe she just wanted to be herself?

With a shrug, decided it wasn’t worth dwelling on. She was happy, at least, and the City was great. Not to mention she was going to see an old friend…

She danced up to the door and rang the doorbell with a ‘bum dum tish’ sound effect.

White Nettle knew who it was instantly, opening the door wide. She wore a simple dress and her tendrils were done up in the same bow as always. “Burger! It’s so good to see you!”

Burgerbelle gave her the finger guns. “You bet it is!” She performed a youth roll into the house and grinned. “The meme girl is back!”

“Make yourself at home,” Nettle said, gesturing at an interior couch. Sitting next to it was a woman reading a book. “You remember Osanna right?”

“Wow. You’ve grown,” Burgerbelle deadpanned, looking up at her.

“…And you haven’t grown at all,” Osanna observed, blinking. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand why some of you prefer to remain childlike…”

“Flat inheritance I guess,” Burgerbelle said, taking off her coat and putting it on a nearby rack. “Just feels natural, you know?”

“I wouldn’t know, I was never a child,” Nettle commented. “I do feel as though my current form is the best, though.”

“I did prefer being Flat. …It’s been a long time. A-” She noticed Osanna was staring at her outfit. “Oh come on, you too?”

Nettle blinked, confused. “…What?”

“Mom, she’s scarcely wearing more than underwear,” Osanna said.

Burgerbelle huffed. “A skirt is not underwear! And look at these boots!”

“It’s still a bit much, isn’t it? Especially considering…” Osanna gestured at her.

“I’m still not sure why there’s even a disagreement or argument here,” Nettle said. “Burger can wear whatever she wants, right?”

“Well, yes, exce-”

“Wow, you look pretty!”

All of them turned to see a young boy of about ten standing in the doorway.

Burgerbelle let out a censored beep and put her coat back on with a swift motion. “I, uh, look better like this right?”

“…Huh?” the boy said, clearly not understanding.

Burgerbelle pulled out a windup cat from nowhere and gave it to him. “Why don’t you go play with this?”

“Oh cool! We could play together!”

“…How about later?” Burgerbelle said, biting her lip.

“Oh… Okay.”

“Don’t you have homework, Enrique?” Osanna asked.

“…Yeah…” He slowly trudged away, back to his room.

Burgerbelle put her face in her hands. “I’m so sorry…”

“You didn’t know he existed,” Osanna admitted. “Oversight on my part.”

“…Thanks.”

“I’d still prefer it if you didn’t hang around him.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Burgerbelle admitted nervously.

Nettle smirked. “Well, at least now I see what was going on.”

Burgerbelle turned to Osanna. “…What was it like, being raised by her?”

“She was great,” Osanna admitted. “But holy tamales, did Dad have to be the one to tell me everything about how society actually worked. Mom could understand on a mental level, but ‘getting’ it eluded her. It’s not completely gone even today, as you can see.”

“It’s resurged,” Nettle admitted. “I think it’s the grandparent instinct. I want to spoil him so I don’t watch myself as well.”

Burgerbelle smiled. “Yeah… you’ve got yourselves a nice family here.”

“What about you?” Osanna asked.

Burgerbelle smiled. “The crew is my family. Pinkie taught me so much. And…” She paused. “I had an opportunity to settle down, once. I didn’t take it. I wouldn’t have come back to see you all again if I had.” She beamed. “I’m glad I’m back.”

Nettle, the Mother, pulled her into a hug. “It’s good to see you too.”

Burgerbelle allowed herself to relax and let the worry inside her drain away. Forgetting for a moment that the abilities that defined her were going to be severely reduced very soon…

She allowed herself to live in the moment.

~~~

The Everykid ended up being Mattie’s guardian in the city. Equal parts innocent and crafty, she would be able to deter people likely to enable the jittery unicorn, and keep her from doing anything outrageous - or potentially harmful.

They were walking through the exceptionally busy market among a sea of people. The Everykid had been asked to sign a few autographs already, being recognized instantly as the person who had shared everyone’s mind. She was able to scribble these out quickly and keep Mattie on a leash.

It wasn’t a literal leash. Yet. It could easily turn into one if Mattie got too unruly. At which point Mattie would become fixated on the leash and that would be awkward, but at least she wouldn’t be going around freaking out quite so much.

“Hey, you look like you could use a nice, comfortable bed,” a stallion said, walking up to them. “Why don’t y-”

The Everykid slapped him with her parasol.

“Balls, that was promising,” Mattie muttered. “Why do you do this to me?”

“Because clearly you need it,” an Applejack said, walking up to them. She wore a business suit and had one of her ears torn in half. “Been a while, Mattie.”

“Jack?” Mattie said, eyes widening at her old acquaintance. “I haven’t seen you in… forever.”

“I’m here too!” OJ said, poking her human head out from behind Jack. She looked like any regular human Sunset Shimmer, aside from the brighter clothes.

“Well it looks like Ultra Fast is getting back together!” Seskii called from her potion stand. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

They ignored the potion seller. “So, wanna have a round for old time’s sake?” Mattie asked, biting her lip. “I’m sure a nice spike to your hoof will invigorate you…’”

Jack slapped her. “God, you need help. Didn’t you have Corona around for your head?”

“Didn’t work,” the Everykid offered.

“Of course it wouldn’t,” Jack muttered, putting a hoof to her face.

OJ walked confidently forward and put a hand on Mattie, furrowing her brow. “…You are a complicated maze, huh?”

Mattie smirked coyly. “I bet you could find the cen- OW! Jack, stop hitting me!”

“No,” Jack said. “And every hit is five quid, by the way. With interest. Rising exponentially.”

“Jaaaaaack…”

“Stop being so promiscuous for a few damn minutes and it’ll stop.”

Mattie twitched. Then she focused her mind on the problem and put on a warm smile. “Sure. Sure. Sure…”

“I wonder if it would be easier if you didn’t have to be such a maniac from ka…” OJ thought aloud.

“Well if you can ‘help’ me after, then by all means, do it, but for now I’m just the way I am and that’s fine. Fine. FINE.” She coughed. “Tower can’t fall soon enough…” Shaking her head, she looked up with a clearly fake smile. “So, time for normal conversation! What have you two been up to?”

“Ah bought most of Dracogen Enterprises’ resources,” Jack answered. “Multi-billionaire. Though for some reason my biggest export is Trixie’s games…”

“Huh. So she did find a way to transmit them back to the City.” Mattie blinked. “Good for her. I figured that wouldn’t last and she’d just go around as a traveling magician again.”

“Ah hear stories of both,” Jack said with a shrug. “She’s never come back to the City though, so Ah can’t really ask her.”

“I work at Earth Above,” OJ said with a smile. “Helped design the systems that will explore and possibly colonize the Earth when it’s opened to us.”

“Still say we should just use the protomolecule, it’d make everything go faster,” Jack muttered.

“I say we need to take it slow and methodical and not cheat. And I won the debate. So you can just go eat your hat.”

“…Ah still don’t know how you grew a backbone.”

OJ shrugged. “I like it.”

Mattie looked between the two of them and smiled – in a warm, legitimate way. “…Right, I think I owe you an apology OJ. Even if it was other-me who did most of it. You’re all right.”

“Thanks.”

“Now… think we can do something fun that I won’t be able to ruin?” Mattie asked. “Like… friends are supposed to.”

Jack facehooved. “Why do Ah put myself through this… sure, fine, we can do some things. Got anything in mind?”

Everykid tapped her foot and pointed at a giant billboard that advertised ‘kilometers per second extreme racing!’

“…Convenient,” Mattie said. “Last one there’s a wet blanket!” She ran off.

Jack sighed. “I can never escape the idiots…”

~~~

“Hey, guuuuurl!”

“Guuuuurl!”

Roxy and Insipid fist-hoofbumped and laughed. The two of them had both been partying, in one of the many dance clubs throwing ‘end of the Tower’ parties. Then they stepped outside so they didn’t have to scream to hear each other over the pounding music.

“Like, I didn’t expect to see you!” Insipid clapped her hooves. “Major fresh surprise!”

“I’m just that fabulous,” Roxy said, fluttering her eyelashes. “My dance could not be ignored!”

“Well, yeah, it sucked.”

Roxy blinked. “…What?”

“Like, major kidding! Lighten up!” Insipid absorbed Roxy’s powers and created a lightbulb out of Void, sticking it in her hair. “See? You got nothing in there! So sad.”

Roxy let out a mock wail. “Oh no! I’m… I’m just a person without electricity in her hair!”

“The horror!”

“The horror!”

The two shared a good laugh.

“I really should have hung out with you more,” Roxy said. “You knew how to party. Not like the Pinkie party, the wild party.”

“Hey! We know how to wild party too!” a Pinkie shouted from across the street.

“You prefer not to! Usually!”

“…Fair point.” She bounced away, humming a tune to herself.

Insipid smirked. “I bring the party. I bring the fame. I bring the major f-” She blinked. “Oh. My. Gosh. I just realized I know something you don’t. You need to come see this right away.”

Roxy blinked. “See what?”

Insipid ran into the club and absorbed someone’s teleporting power. She grabbed Roxy and they were suddenly halfway across the City in an apartment complex. Standing there was one of the very few buildings of troll-based architecture in the City.

Insipid knocked on the door. “Hellooo-oooo!”

“FUCK OFF!” an old, scratchy voice shouted.

“Karkat!?” Roxy gasped. “Is that you!?”

“Oh for the love of Bilious Slick…” Karkat the nubby-horned troll muttered, grumpily walking to the door and swinging it open. “Hey Roxy, nice to see you.” He slammed the door in her face.

“…Karkrab…” Roxy pouted. “C’mon… I haven't seen you since before the collapse!”

Karkat opened the door again with a sigh. “Fine, fine, come on in.” He pointed an accusing finger at Insipid. “Annoying copy fuckers stay out.”

“Major lame,” Insipid muttered. “But my work is done! Array de verchi! Hey. Curaçao taught me that one. I should introduce you to her next…”

“…‘Taught’ is a strong word,” Karkat observed. Insipid didn’t hear him – she was already gone.

Karkat grumbled, ‘inviting’ Roxy into his house. “I’d say make yourself at home, but we all know that won’t happen. There’s a couch over there for flopping on when you feel like you’re getting old, my room’s up the stairs where none shall pass, the kitchen is currently a nightmare, and this is the TV room where the idiot sleeps.”

The ‘idiot’ happened to be another person that Roxy knew – one of her childhood friends, Page of Hope, Jake English. He poked his head over the back of the couch. “...You talking about me?”

“No, I’m talking about Abraham Lincoln,” Karkat deadpanned.

“Jake!” Roxy squealed, pulling him into a hug. “O. M. G. I thought you were kaput! Kablooey! Gone with the wind!”

“Yeah, I thought so too for a while,” Jake said. “Then it turned out I wasn’t. …Everyone else was though.”

“…Jane? Dirk?”

Jake nodded slowly. “I’m… I’m sorry. I just…”

“…I accepted they were probably gone a long, long time ago,” Roxy said, pulling him into a hug. “It’s just the best surprise ever that you’re okay!” She pulled Karkat into the hug. “You too, you old grump!”

“UNHAND ME!”

“No~!” Roxy trilled. She squeezed them tighter. She was just glad to have some of her old friends back.

~~~

The Aradias had frozen Nanoha’s garden in time when she left.

Not a single flower was out of place when she and O’Neill walked in. The dome was currently on its night cycle, so Fate’s Tower was blooming bright.

O’Neill looked at the tremendous yellow flower and smiled. “Still just as bright.”

“Brighter,” Nanoha said, walking up to the plant and tracing her finger along the stalk. “So much brighter…” She smiled contentedly. “I missed this garden.”

O’Neill scratched his beard. “I did too. Though I’m not going to pretend I thought about it as often as you did.”

“Definitely not,” Nanoha said with a chuckle. She slung his arms around his neck. “But I appreciate what you did think about.”

There was a quick kiss in the light of the great flower.

“…What do we do now?” O’Neill asked.

“I have no idea,” Nanoha said. “We’ve been retired, then we weren’t, and now…” She shrugged. “I think we should just go with the flow. See where life takes us.”

“Can’t really throw ourselves to ka anymore, can we?”

“Of course not. But the world operates on the ebbs and flows of people… We can follow those. Move with the shifting tides of society.” She released him and twirled around.

“Or maybe once ka is gone we’ll think of something completely random to do. Like become world-class chefs.”

Nanoha smirked. “That’s Everykid’s future, I’m telling you. But we could go back to school… Learn a new trade… Continue in retirement…” She stopped to smell a large, pink flower sitting in the center of five stalks of bamboo. “Or we could go back on the Austraeoh and see what adventuring is like when there’s no more story.”

“I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t last long.”

“We’re still strong,” Nanoha observed. “And… is an end really so wrong?”

O’Neill shrugged. “Dunno. Got a pretty deep and burning urge to keep on living, though.”

“Most of us do,” Nanoha admitted with a nod. “…The question is, are we thrill-seekers?”

“Are we?”

“I have no idea!” Nanoha beamed. “And I don’t know why, but that excites me. What are we really, when everything’s stripped away? What will await us at the end of the tunnel? I’m not sure I can wait to find out!”

“You can. You’re waiting right now.”

Nanoha raised an eyebrow. “I could accelerate our time.”

“But you won’t.”

Nanoha rolled her eyes. “Always you and calling my bluffs…”

“It’s a two-way relationship.” He scratched his beard. “You know what, I figured out what I want to do while I still can.”

“Hmm?”

“I’m going to go out there and talk like a pirate!”

“Oh for the…” She shook her head and smiled. “…Let’s both go out there and talk like pirates.”

~~~

Rev walked through the doors of a church. It wasn’t her original church – that was exceptionally far away – but it was the church of the City she had taught at for a short time. It still reminded her of her original church, because that was the way she had built it.

She sat down in the middle row – not the front so she wouldn’t be noticed, but also not the back so she would still be able to hear the message. It was an unusual message – a last-minute one to be given before they turned on the sun and began the festival.

Rev didn’t recognize the preacher. She was a Lapis Lazuli Gem who wore a collar very similar to Rev’s own old outfit - though these days Rev’s robes had something akin to a collar on them already. Lapis didn’t give herself a special name, and insisted she not be known by her title – she was just a lowly Lapis, like so many others, who wanted to teach the Word. Rev admired her for that.

The topic was an appropriate one: about worry, stress, and concern for the future. The message was simple enough, using several verses to comment on how worrying doesn’t benefit, and how stress often makes situations worse. “Who of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to his life?” was one of many. The conclusion was simple and to the point: tomorrow has enough troubles of its own; let’s deal with the days as they come, and even then cast the cares upon the Lord. There was a caveat of course - don’t completely ignore the future. Like so many lessons, it was never as black and white as it seemed.

After the service and the prayer, Rev walked up to Lapis and smiled.

Lapis recognized her immediately. “H-hi!” she said, her confident demeanor at the podium seemingly nonexistent. “Y-you saw that?”

“I did,” Rev said with a soft smile. “It was good. I’m glad to see this church is in good hands.”

Lapis chuckled nervously. “Right… Right. Thanks! It means a lot, coming from you.” She stopped for a moment. “…It’s always hard to teach on topics you aren’t that good at, isn’t it?”

Rev nodded. “I find it helps to be up front and honest about your struggles with the audience. In most cases.”

Lapis nervously fidgeted with her fingers. “I… Yeah, that makes sense, of course it does.” She chuckled softly. “I worry all the time. About everything. Constantly.” She looked at her Bible. “And I know I shouldn’t.”

“And He is showing you great grace,” Rev said, putting a hoof on her. “You didn’t show your strain or stress at all on the podium.”

“…I always feel… filled when I’m up there,” Lapis admitted with a smile.

“Clearly, that’s where you’re supposed to be.”

“…I know. But I worry. Is that God? Or is that the Tower?” Lapis looked into the distance. “Theologically speaking, both, but with the fall of the Tower, God might change His mind, or give me something else, or change how I feel about all this…” She took a breath to calm herself. “There I go, worrying again…”

“Hey. He’s gracious. Give yourself a break.”

Lapis looked at her – and smiled. “Thank you.”

“We should meet up after the Tower falls. See if anything’s changed.”

“…I’d like that.”

Rev nodded. “…Before I go, have you heard anything about my church? The one that’s up there somewhere?”

Lapis smiled. “Actually, yes. It’s going well. I was trained there, believe it or not. Aslan’s as wise as always, and if you’re wondering about Valentine… he’s happy, last I knew.”

“That’s all I needed to know.” Rev waved. “See you around, Lapis.” Instead of walking out calmly, Rev jumped out like she was part of an action movie, ready to defend herself from attacks. She blinked for a moment – realized she was being stupid – and laughed. “That’s a reflex I’m going to have to work out…”

~~~

Mlinx walked into his old office. The Mayor no longer worked here, so it had been left alone for the most part. Most of his knick-knacks were gone – he had put them in storage – but some pictures and papers were still around. As was his computer.

He ran his finger across the top of the desktop, picking up dust.

“Glad to have you back, sir.”

Mlinx turned around to see Nastasia. “You still work here?”

“In a cataloguing capacity.”

“Well that’s certainly something!” Mlinx said with a chipper tone to his voice. He twirled his spear around and placed it on the wall. “Can't imagine myself filing things forever. It just wouldn’t work.”

“You seem… enthusiastic.”

“Life’s amazing, Nastasia. This room is amazing, the memories are amazing, you’re amazing.” He picked the spear back up and twirled it in his hand.

“…You’ve certainly been through a lot.”

“The story of my life,” Mlinx said with a jovial laugh.

“You look like you’ve been through a meat-grinder. Yet I don’t think you could be happier about it.”

Mlinx chuckled. “You could say that. Lots of scars here… but they are more than just memories. They’re the little chips that come off me as I become… better.” He stretched his hands. “I don’t think I was ever really treated as an equal among the heroes until the Journey. We felt like a family. A real family. Full of a bunch of psychotic weirdos and arguments. It’s hard to describe.”

“Well I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” Nastasia said, adjusting her glasses. “I take it you’re here to perform the retrieval?”

“Yes. Yes I am.” He rubbed all four of his hands together. “We should go now. They’re probably waiting.”

“I’m not allowed down there anymore. It’s just you.” She walked him to the elevator. “Don’t go crazy down there.”

“I won’t,” Mlinx promised. He descended down to a room he was very familiar with – the storage area for Black Thirteen. There were four others in the room at that moment. The current Mayor, Princess Cosmo Sparkle, the Emperor of Mankind, and a politician of the City Mlinx didn’t know the name of. The Mayor had two of the needed codes to unlock Black Thirteen – everyone else had one.

Six: the minimum number to release containment.

“Everyone ready?” Mlinx asked, walking up to the glass.

“As ready as we can be,” Cosmo said. Mlinx noticed she had finally managed to get her curse fixed – she was no longer a skeleton with an illusion spell, but a real pony. He wondered when that had happened.

“It has to be done,” the Emperor agreed.

Everyone put their codes into terminals. The glass around Black Thirteen slid up unceremoniously. It spoke to all their minds not a word, but a sound – a sigh of satisfaction. It did not try to condition them to do anything. It, too, was ready for the end.

Mlinx grabbed hold of the handle, and the weapon-aspect of Black Thirteen became a spear. He twirled it around. “We’re ready.”

The Emperor of Mankind chuckled. “Twirling the strongest weapon in existence like it’s some toy. I like you.”

“Thanks,” Mlinx said, taking a moment to look into Black Thirteen. “…It’s not even trying to drive me mad.”

“Still be careful,” the Mayor encouraged. “We don’t want a disaster hours before the end.”

“Keep a close watch on me,” Mlinx said. “…But I don’t think I’ll have this for too long. There’s someone else who needs it.”

~~~

Monika found me at the Subway that used to be my library.

“Hello,” Monika said, sitting down at my table.

“You’ve had quite the life,” I said, munching on my sandwich.

“In some ways, yes, in others, not. Which can be said of most things in this life. Too much happens, people change, and there’s just not enough words to adequately describe it.”

“I would say you’re trying to stick too close to the facts, but you’re not me,” I pressed my hooves together. “You chose this struggle.”

“Did I? Or have I been led along just like the others on the journey, change or no change!”

“Unlike most people, you had a choice over how ka defined your life. At first you accepted obsessive love, then a life of curiosity. And most recently, you’ve turned that curiosity into a sort of truth. A respect for order.”

“I am aware of my character arc.”

“But you, unlike all the others, always had the choice to force yourself to go back to what you were. You stopped doing that.” I smiled. “I’m glad you did. It allowed you to grow and change into something new.”

Monika pushed some of her hair behind her ear. “Thank you.” She bowed respectfully at me. “I was unsure if it really meant that.”

“I am the Muse of Ka – I can understand everything but I cannot change my own fate. You are the Lord of Ka. You can change fate, but are cursed with not being able to see the whole picture.”

“And we cannot have more than that, or it would be too much.” Monika folded her hands together. “We, as people, spend all our time complaining about our weaknesses, but we never consider what life would be like if we didn’t have them.”

“An interesting concept. It is good for us all to get better, of course. But is it really good to just have our weaknesses purged?”

“No,” Monika asserted. “I used to be the one who purged others and myself for fun. It was shallow and improper.”

“…Even though I know, you still astound me.”

“I am, in many ways, the example of change.”

I smiled. “Then you should be prepared for the loss of ka. No more character files.”

“No more visions.”

“No more fate.”

“We are almost nothing without that which defines us,” Monika commented. “A Lord and Muse of nothing.”

“A historian and a librarian,” I offered.

Monika smiled softly. “…Yeah.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad we could have ended like this. Not as enemies, not as rivals, but friends.”

“The war is over,” Monika said, looking at the Tower. “It truly, truly is.”

The government turned on the sun, announcing to the entire City that the final day had arrived. The sky lost its eerie – yet comforting – twilight glow and became blue, as it was meant to. Colors increased in vibrancy, street lights dimmed in favor of the ‘natural’ sunlight, and flowers turned toward the orb in the sky they had missed.

I could hear animals start to sing. I closed my eyes and smiled. “It’s time…”

I allowed my Visions to search far and wide one last time…

~~~

Sunny had told herself she would figure out the Physics of the New World before the Tower fell. She had made it her goal. That her maps would become fully accurate.

She had not done that, but at the moment she really couldn’t care less about if she had met her goal or not. Because she had returned home for the day – Jane’s farm. Everyone had insisted she go watch the fall at the City, but she had decided against it. She would spend the day here and enjoy a very thanksgiving-like dinner.

The farm had changed a lot in thirty years. Sure, Prism, Corea, both Applejacks, and Jane were still there, along with the three golem helpers. But now there were many, many more people. Strange pumpkin people who liked nothing more than growing the vegetable that looked so like them. Ponies, humans, and many others who had decided a life of farmwork would be more satisfying than a life of endless drifting through the aether. It was a life of purpose.

The food had gotten pretty popular within their system. The little planet always had one ship or other on it, ready to ship huge crates full of vegetable goodness. Today, though, the ships weren’t moving. Everyone on the planet was taking a break from work and having a feast.

Sunny smiled as she looked around the table. Children ran and played around the edges. Corea and Prism were trying to feed each other food while also mocking each other playfully. The golems sat in the corner playing a game with rocks nobody knew the rules too. The Applejacks talked with other alternates of the Apple family – Applejacks, Apple Blooms, Big Macs… even a Pear Butter.

“…This is great,” Sunny said, wiping a tear from her eyes.

Jane looked to her. “…We’ve missed you, you know. Even when you visit…”

“I know.” She looked down at her bag that contained all her map data.

“…Are you thinking about staying?”

“Maybe.” She glanced behind her at the clock. “…But I’m not going to make that decision just yet.”

“Want it to mean something?”

Sunny smiled brightly. “Yeah.”

~~~

Valentine and Froppy had created a rather large family over the course of thirty years. They made the ‘pleasant’ discovery that, yes, both Stands and Quirks were passed on and manifested. Virtually every one of their children was a powerhouse of some sort, each one providing a unique take on the town they called home.

There were a lot of disagreements and family drama in a household so large, but on the last day all of that seemed to be in the past. Everyone was on good terms with everyone else, the town was at peace, and Aslan wasn’t having to wrangle with even more angry people who got offended at everything.

The town was at peace.

GM still lived there with his family, not that anyone knew who he was. Valentine made good on his promise to protect the young man, and very few had managed to discover the false Prophet. Granted, occasionally someone would show up and figure out who he was, but it was never broadcasted, usually by Valentine’s insistence.

After he had gotten his feet under him, GM had started gathering people of scientific persuasions together. He himself had no credentials, but with effort and help from his friends and family, the scientists created a college of sorts right in the middle of town. He attended and learned all the science he could, including dabbling in a bit of magic here and there.

Now he worked directly under Valentine as a researcher on the physics of the New World. Valentine had managed to make a fortune off his skills and occasional treasure-hunting ventures, so the funding was simple enough.

“I get the impression the Uber-GM is just being really nice to me,” GM told Froppy one day. She had come into his laboratory just a few minutes prior, wondering if he had remembered to eat lunch. “I’m basically doing what I always wanted. …Aside from write, but I couldn’t really enjoy that the same way I used to.” He ran some numbers through a spreadsheet program and created a graph, surprised by the results, but not enough to comment on them.

“There were two of you,” Froppy said.

“More.”

“Two that mattered,” Froppy corrected with an eye roll. “One was killed for everything he’d caused. The other got a close proximity to a happy ending.”

GM turned away from the spreadsheet. “…A manifestation of my – his – whatever – inner conflict…” He sighed. “Sometimes, I think I know myself. I can tell you exactly why some people died, some people didn’t and others suffered. Allure? Couldn’t let all the main characters go free and I’d already written Pinkie dead many times before. Nanoha? Needed to show a legend being brought low. But… Caliborn? Why? Alushy? Was it just random? And I kept Jenny around, but I thought…” He stopped himself and shook his head. “Look at me. …Have I really learned nothing?”

Froppy shook her head. “You’ve grown. Ribbit.”

“But there’s no way he could know what he’d be like in thirty years…”

“Then you aren’t him. Not anymore.”

GM looked at his hands. Slowly, a smile came to his face. “Froppy… Thanks for checking in on me.”

“Someone’s got to watch out for you.” She smiled. “Don’t blow up the lab today, okay?”

“I’m avoiding trying any explosive experiments until tomorrow. Rule of Funny will finally stop dooming me every other week.” He rubbed his hands together. “And then we can do some real science!”

~~~

Over a light year away… there was a planet, swirling far, far from Nucleon’s sight. It was a planet that could never be seen through the millions of worlds between it and the center of the universe, a world secluded – but a world oh-so-important.

Naturally, the planet was earthlike, but without civilization – nothing but wilderness. It had been a vibrant world with a high quantity of bird-based life, complex, but not intelligent.

It was the first world White Diamond had deemed suitable to rebuild the Gem race. She knew she was the last Diamond. She could feel the songs of her other children nearby – the little sparks of Gems elsewhere – but none of the Diamonds. Her two compatriots had fallen. She was alone here.

This was nothing that unusual for her. She was going to start again. But she didn’t do it like the first time. She could have chosen a world with sapient people on it, but she specifically looked for one that was just full of life, not people. In the past, she may have told herself she only followed the rules because it was in her best interests, but now she couldn’t just go back. Something within her stopped her.

She told herself it was because she understood the need to be on good terms with lesser life forms. Somewhere deep down, however, she knew it was something else. A part of her she ignored.

She began converting the world into a Gem colony. She set up a few Kindergartens here and there, shaping new Gems from the earth. It was only a matter of weeks before other people started noticing and coming to her world. Many of them had known her or what she represented in Merodi Universalis, and flocked to her as a sort of leader. She treated them as equal citizens to her Gems, running the planet much like major colonies of Merodi Universalis.

Eventually, they abandoned the idea of being part of Merodi Universalis, and White Diamond was made the exclusive monarch. She did little to change the way they treated their citizens, although there was a lot less care and concern for the environment. As far as the Gems were concerned, artificial beauty was just as effective as natural beauty.

And so the new Gem Homeworld was born. The most advanced world anyone within the local systems knew about. While the City became the hub of activity for the core worlds, the Gem Homeworld did the same for their outer territories.

It is in this place that the oft-forgotten, but well-beloved dragon Spike ended up. He knew full well that he had fallen out of the spotlight ever since the multiverse opened up and, frankly, he didn’t mind. Less chaos for him to deal with.

Now he was one of White Diamond’s primary messengers. As a fully-grown dragon, he had both the natural magic to easily cross the voids between systems as well as the physical aptitude to defend himself against potential hostiles. Sure, he just carried mail, but it was important mail. And he was never alone, he had a rider.

“What is it with me and riding different creatures?” Midna wondered aloud as she sorted the mail within the saddle-tent on Spike’s back. They were returning to Homeworld, currently flying past one of the neighboring gas giants. “Wolf, pony, dragon…”

“You know.”

Midna rolled her eyes. “Huh. We’ve got something addressed to White Diamond herself. From… No return address.”

“Paradigm will probably toss that one without question,” Spike commented, curving his wings to increase his speed.

“Mysterious stuff is mysterious…” Midna said, sorting more stuff with her hair. They rode the rest of the way in silence until they arrived at a security checkpoint. Technically the people on duty were supposed to check IDs, but they knew exactly who Spike and Midna were, and the magic signatures matched, so they just let the messengers through.

They landed at the foot of White Diamond’s palace, walking through the immense front gates. White Diamond’s old palace had looked a bit like her face. This one was much more simplistic – white as ever, but shaped into a more traditional eight-faceted diamond orientation. They walked through the main halls and entered message processing.

“Got an unsigned letter for White Diamond,” Midna said, dropping it on the countertop. Paradigm Joestar, once princess of Equis Vitis, analyzed it.

“I dunno, looks suspicious.”

“You’re the one that decides to give it to her or not,” Midna said with a shrug.

“I’ll think about it. Welcome home.”

“Thanks,” Spike said, walking away. They had to leave through the giant doors into the ‘crystal garden’ outside, where large pillars of shimmering magitech crystal grew. They saw one of the Gem warships land – and it looked beaten up.

Its captain, none other than Gilgamesh himself, came storming out with a stream of swears. “THEY DID IT AGAIN!”

“…Did they beat you?” Spike asked.

“What? NO! THEY BROKE THE EXCALIBUR! GAH!”

A white unicorn with a red and black mane that Spike didn’t recognize walked up to Gilgamesh. “Maybe it was just another Excalipoor, hmm?” she asked.

“But I was so sure this time…”

She rolled her eyes. “Please. Maybe one day you’ll find one and get to keep it. That day is nooot today.” She patted Gilgamesh on the back. “But don’t let that stop you from looking.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Spike said, walking up to the unicorn. “I’m Spike.”

The unicorn smirked. “I figured. Name’s Jackie. I’m head of Security.”

“For…?”

“The whole planet,” Jackie said with a smirk. “I sit in the room in the bottom of the palace all day and watch a looot of screens and dispatch police and stuff. It’s somehow both a very cush and very stressful job. I watch you two come in and leave all the time. By the way, encourage the guys out there to still check your IDs, I don’t want to have to report them.”

“…Oh,” Midna said, blinking. “Whoops.”

“Hey, I get it, it’s all fine. So, Gilgamesh, let’s go get you a new sword.”

“It won’t be as good…” Gilgamesh muttered.

“I bet it will,” Jackie said with a wink.

As they walked away, Spike looked up at the palace. “…This is not the life I was expecting. Not in a million years.”

“But…?” Midna asked.

“It feels right, somehow.”

~~~

There are a few others… Some whose fates will not be known. To grab a set of random names out of the hat, Spades Slick and Death. Both left the City shortly after the Austraeoh. Both went to have other lives. But in the moments before the Tower’s fall, neither are doing anything particularly interesting. Walking from place to place, drifting, uncertain. Forgotten? Perhaps. Or maybe just given freedom a little earlier.

But there are some others who are not here who at least deserve some mention. It would be cruel of me not to at least tell you the end results of those who left the Austraeoh one way or another…

So join me in my visions as I look far across Nucleon to see what remains in the wake of the Austraeoh’s journey.

Trixie you already know, to some extent. She kept creating games from the City of the Moon and shipping them across Nucleon trade routes, making a fortune. But she eventually grew tired with this life – achieving such success a second time – and realized something. She could not have lived the life of the travelling showmare in the City, but she could in the wilds of Nucleon where so few people had no idea what magic was or how it worked.

I see her now, performing a show… awing a crowd of tribal monkeys. I suspect they will grow scared of her and drive her out within a few days. But she is enjoying herself.

I find this surprising, considering the reason she left the Austraeoh, left the crew. Not because she had found a place to settle down, not because she had an opportunity, but because of a loss extremely close to her. In those days she couldn’t bring herself to leave Discord’s grave.

An internal conflict long enough to be called an integral part of her life. But she was off again, doing what she did best – making a ruckus. She may have been alone, but she was at least enjoying herself.

Discord’s grave sits in the middle of Trixie’s gaming business, which is of course under new management now. It is well looked-after and on top of it is a statue of him in eternal laughter. Legends abound, of course, that the statue is actually him, as expected.

Discord was not the only tragic loss the Austraeoh suffered. Lightning also perished in the long journey, and her grave was placed in the middle of a wasteland of savage beasts and harsh conditions. There was no civilization for miles around. Before the Austraeoh had come through, the entire land had been covered in darkness that wanted to consume all. Now it was just wilderness… and her grave stood as a testament to their success and victory.

Not all is sorrowful. After vowing to stay at the City of the Moon, close to Allure’s message, Minna found a city where some plague had swept through, leaving only young children. She chose to become a mother to every last one of them. She raised many on that City, and still runs the orphanage to this day with her husband.

Rina and Thrackerzod both share the same fate, though at different locations on the globe. Both of them saw the beauty of a place and a person within that place – and they decided to settle down and grow a family. Thrackerzod is discovering she still has much to learn about worldly experiences through motherhood, while Rina is discovering what it means to be an example and a teacher. Their marriages aren’t perfect – both of the women are atypical in the extreme – but they make it work.

And then there’s me. Sitting here in my visions, ‘typing’ messages to a Discord chat. It’ll be the last time I’ll get to do that. Talk to them – to you, the people behind the wall. So I slow down time as much as I can to get in as much talking as I can. I jump around – I talk to them one week, then a month later, then a few days. I will have to leave you eventually…

…

…And as far as the story is concerned, that time is now. Even though I just told you goodbye in there, I’ll say it to you again in here. Some of you will receive this chapter long before I have to leave the Discord chat. Others will only know me through the words on these pages.

I want you all to know you’re forgiven.

And that you were, in the end, a comforting presence all this time.

But now it’s time for me – for all of us – to move on.

Goodbye, readers.

Hey, you’re saying goodbye to them without us? Pinkie demanded.

Well, I, er…

Mate, that simply isn’t fair, Mattie added. We have just as much a right to give a final hurrah.

They have been a part of our lives for so long, Monika said.

I’m here to say goodbye too! Deadpool shouted. Screw alllll of you!

Smooth, Mattie deadpanned.

I’m the best thing since sliced bread, babies. Get a load of all this!

Can I have a moment as well? Gilgamesh asked. I’ve been feeling woefully overlooked lately.

Scooter in the house! I get a scene! Scooter giggled. Man, it’s been a while since I really felt the Fourth calling me.

Fate’s arrow, I don’t think I ever quite registered just how many of us there are. This is probably the end though… So go for it. Say your goodbyes.

I’ll go first since I have the least to say! Scooter said. Bye readers and viewers! Hope you enjoyed it!

If any of you ever find Excalibur… Gilgamesh flexed his wrist. Keep it with you. If it physically eludes you, keep the true treasure close within your heart. Do not let the true glory of your life go. Also, shark-infested custard is good stuff.

I agree! Deadpool announced. Not as good as chimicherrychangas though…

Haha, yes! Pinkie giggled.

But there’s more! Deadpool said. I am, quite literally, just a joke character here. I’m perfectly fine with that – means I get to have more fun and a lot less in the drama department. But! I’m telling you now kids, I am not a good role model. Seriously, find someone else, holy cow.

My turn, I suppose… Mattie paused, thinking for a moment. I am well aware that what I do isn’t considered acceptable. I am also well aware that my mind has a lot of problems, many of which are my own doing. And, let’s be real, I’ve never really been able to talk to you directly, I’ve just known and had a few things I could move here and there. For what it’s worth, I am sorry I made you uncomfortable, and I’m sorry I couldn’t grow in that way. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be afraid of new ideas so, I dunno, maybe this entire metaphor falls apart. She blew a kiss. Every last one of you is beautiful in some way. You got that? Good.

I believe I am the penultimate… Monika took a breath. I understand that a lot of you have found my sudden change jarring, to say the least. Makes you uncomfortable, uncertain. I ask that you use this to look at yourselves. What if one of your best friends vanished from the face of the earth and came back ten years later? Would you expect them to be the same? …You might, but you shouldn’t. Nobody remains static. If you read back through these hundred-plus chapters, you might realize that a lot of us don’t really change. Some of us do – Flutterfree, Corona – but some of us didn’t. That’s ka at work, not realism. People change. A fundamental core may remain the same, but we are all able to be the hero or the villain. I should know, I’ve been both.

And as for what you mean to me… I’ve decided it doesn’t really matter much. I care about what’s right in front of me, and you aren’t that. You just read because this is a good story, and I understand that urge more than I think you realize. The Prophet wrote because he had an idea. And we act because we do what we think is the right choice. Your existence doesn’t actually change anything – even if meaning exists or not. You’re just… a curiosity. You are the mystery that lies beneath the subatomic particles, the answer to a scientific inquiry that hasn’t even been asked yet.

Pinkie took a breath. Hello. It’s been a long ride, hasn’t it? Started with a little romp through a jungle, took a turn on ever-increasing stakes and scope, and then the entire multiverse imploded. Now, the End of All Stories is upon us.

I’m really going to miss you guys. I still think this is the right way, that the Tower needs to fall, but I can still be sad that I won’t see your faces again, right? I won’t know when you’re laughing, when you care deeply about what’s about to happen to us, or when you’re on the edge of your seat. Because you won’t be watching.

I wasn’t fighting against you; I want you to know that. I don’t mind people watching through a book. If there were some kind of higher power that didn’t define us, but just relayed information to you, I wouldn’t mind at all. But that wouldn’t really be a story, would it? Stories are filled with inaccuracies, convenience, exaggerated character types, and inconsistencies. They’re also filled with the personification of dreams.

I hope you understand why I didn’t want that. Dreams… she shook her head and chuckled. You’ve heard this all before. There was an entire arc about the collapse debate and war. I won’t bore you anymore.

In the end, I wish I could go up to so many of you and give out some big hugs. But this conversation will have to do. Go on, continue to read, write, and explore the worlds within your minds.

But also… I want you to let us go. Please. We want to escape the story.

I can’t offer you anything in return but a smile and a wave. I hope that’s enough.

Oh, and PS. I said, ‘you can’t kill suction cup pony’. I meant it. Pinkie giggled.

That’s all of them.

I’ve already said my piece, so I guess this is it. …We’re all waving to you.

Goodbye. For real this time.

~~~

I would tell everyone what I had seen in the visions later. Eve would be brought to tears to hear that Spike was still alive. An expedition to the New Homeworld would be organized, of course. There wasn’t even a question about it. I hope Gilgamesh could get enough of a hold on his Awareness to tell White Diamond what he had just been a part of, but who really knows? Not me.

And now I’ll slip into the background. This celebration… it isn’t about me.

It isn’t about anyone.

…

The sun was charged, and day was upon everyone. People ran out of their homes, their parties, their restaurants, effectively evacuating the City’s buildings. Everyone piled into their cars and ships and flew toward the central open field of roses. When they decided the traffic jams would be too much, they walked on foot to the center.

The government had set up minor levitation spells overtop the entire field of Can’-Ka No Rey. Nobody would get their ankles scraped by the roses if they were a few inches above the flower line. It was a bit disorienting to walk on an invisible thing with no substance, but the people managed.

Virtually no one wanted to miss the moment. Even once teleporters started carting people to the center, it still took a couple hours to move everyone into the center where they could witness history.

A perimeter about the length of a football field had been set around the Dark Tower, so most people couldn’t get too close. The City’s fleet surrounded the Tower on all sides, all the way up so they could stop falling chunks from hurting anyone. All predictions said the Tower wouldn’t kill anyone with its destruction besides ka-dependant beings, but the government didn’t want to be too careful.

From above, the crowds of people ended up taking the shape of the inner teeth of a spirograph. Nobody was surprised by this and almost nobody complained.

The Tower began to actively tremble, the strain from the crack being too much – but it did not break. Instead, the ka around the City was the strongest it had ever been. Fitting for the final moments.

The heroes had been allowed closer to the inner ring of the Tower. They stood in front of the doors, watching the glowing cracks with awe evident on their faces.

“This is it,” Eve said. She glanced behind them at the immense crowd – a celebrating crowd that was cheering. The cheering noise started out ridiculous and disorganized, but as time went on the shouts of encouragement smoothly seamed into one immense shout. It was like the beating of a heart.

The timing kept getting faster and faster as the anticipation rose and the moment of truth came ever nearer.

“…Think I should give a speech?” Eve asked.

“Nah,” Pinkie said. “The time for speeches is gone. Now’s the time for… this. An ending.”

Corona smirked. “There might be a song though.”

“If we end without a song I will be very surprised,” Burgerbelle commented.

“You won’t be,” Starbeat said with a smirk. “We’ve got one hefty song coming up, that’s for sure.”

“Calling it now,” O’Neill said. “It’ll be the number one bestseller of all time after this is over.”

Nanoha smirked. “I could take up a singing career to try to beat it.”

Jenny furrowed her brow. “Or perhaps we could rig the music system to make this song public domain…”

“Why are we legalizing?” Jotaro asked.

“For fun and profit,” Pidge chuckled.

“The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil,” Rev quoted. “I think we’ll find that that saying becomes more literal when our justifications for greed aren’t held up anymore.”

“Or we’ll find that we don’t need money at all and it was just convenient,” Flutterfree suggested.

Mattie opened her mouth, then shut it for a moment. “…Yeah, I won’t ruin the moment. Instead I’ll say, uh…” She tapped a hoof to her chin. “…I think nothin’ will change in the whole money department. We’ll want just as much things as we’ve always wanted.”

“I can make all the things anyone needs,” Roxy said. “I’ve always thought it was a little weird that our economy actually worked, y’know?” She laughed. “Can’t wait to see how we manage to work it now. I also can’t wait to try out all sorts of things again and get a completely new experience!”

“Yay!” the Everykid said, clapping her hands.

“Experience is a peculiar dish,” Monika said, looking into the distance. “It rarely gives you what you want, but you always benefit from it.” She looked up at the Tower as it shook. “I believe we should get on with it…”

Mlinx nodded. “Gunslinger, the right is yours.” He handed Black Thirteen over to Roland.

Roland Deschain of Gilead, the last gunslinger, grabbed the hilt of the dark spear. The moment it entered his hand, the handle of the spear transformed into that of a pistol. Levitated a centimeter in front of the barrel was the central orb of Black Thirteen itself.

It was the ammunition.

In this moment, Corona was swept up. She spread her wings and floated into the air, opening a song with a beautiful voice everyone in the crowd could hear.

“Moments weave into a Tower so Dark
Memories call to a future embarked
Multiverse warredover powerful fate
Meetfriendshere and bring an end to the eternalwait!”

“I do not aim with my hand!” Roland shouted. “He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father!”

“On this day, the Tower falls away
Our world comes to an end
New will rise, againwe willbuild ourselvesup
Shining spirographs. ”

“I aim with my eye!”

“Escapingfrom the stories between
Stretching out beyond Time
Rising up as ouruniversestands together
Flickering through the Void! ”

“I do not shoot with my hand! He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father!”

“Desperate we clung onto life
Everyone caught in the struggle
Then the unknown collapse
It fanned the flames scattering our dust to the wind! ”

“I shoot with my mind!”

“Every soul contains a whisper of ka
Confused, hiddenbut always holding tight
No escape, no greater fate to be made!
In the end the chains of kahold no more .”

“I do not kill with my gun! He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father!”

“Moments weave into a Tower so Dark
Memories call to a future embarked
Multiverse warred over powerful fate
Meet friends here and bring an end to the eternal wait!”

“I KILL WITH MY HEART!” Roland pulled the trigger. Black Thirteen shot through the divide between him and the Dark Tower, igniting the air around it into deep blue plasma. The murky orb hit the doors of the Dark Tower, shattering into a thousand pieces upon impact.

The Dark Tower began its final crumble.

Author's Note

[END OF ARC 12: TIME]

ARC 12 INTERLUDE<<

I’ve already said my goodbyes, so let’s not waste time here.

Arc 13: Ka
157 - Goodbye to a World

No new franchises, all were previously established or at least referenced.

The last chapter poll. After 157 releases there will be a final round, so please vote:
https://strawpoll.com/cp3wpdz2

Here are the discord server [ https://discordapp.com/invite/eTuseTh ] and fimfiction group [ https://www.fimfiction.net/group/213761/songs-of-the-spheres-extended-multiverse ] links.

Yes, it looks like GM added Carols of Chaos into the main story as 073.5. Probably to help people who want to read this all in one go and not be confused about the Emperor… and to increase the word count just a bit more because he’s been obsessively watching his position on the longfic page.

The 19th approaches...

[BREATH] 001 - Enter, Part 1

The man of light fled across existence, and the enchantress followed.

Presently, existence manifested itself as a desert to the two of them. It was not the apotheosis of all deserts - far from it. It was decidedly too mysterious to be described in such a pure way. The sands themselves couldn’t be considered the defining feature unless someone was foolish enough to stand upon the burning grains barefoot, in which case it wouldn't be part of the scenery but would certainly be prominent in said person's mind and feet. The real appeal of this particular desert was found in the ruins. The ancient stone structures stood around in defiance to the eons, chiseled both by intelligence and the merciless decay of time. Symbols adorned the many pillars - triangles within triangles were prominent alongside a depiction of an ancient eye staring forward and letting loose one single, painful, tear.

The man of light did not stop to puzzle over any of this - if he had, he probably could have discerned some meaning from the ancient glyphs and figure out where he was. He unfortunately didn't have the time to waste on getting his bearings, a fact he was painfully aware of. He continued running across the sands, kicking up excessive amounts of the ground with his softly glowing cobalt-blue feet. He wore no shoes, but his crystalline composition kept him from charring his feet. This did not mean he wasn't foolish - far from it.

He was, after all, running from the enchantress.

He knew she was gaining - but he did not dare steal a glance behind him. Not yet, anyway. He kept his gaze forward, catching glances of his hands every time they shifted forward in time with the opposite foot. He kept focusing on a small, black orb in his left hand, grasped tightly by his sharp digits. Had the object been made of glass it would have shattered from the force he was exerting, but it wasn't composed of such a flimsy material. It was something far stronger and much more complex than simple glass. He considered using it - but he still had enough intelligence within him to know now was not the time, for there was a strange obelisk coming up.

He recognized this for what it was - an ancient machine. He tore his right arm from its rapid back and forth motion, holding his palm outstretched to the obelisk. He focused, intent on timing this just right. The instant before he passed the ruin a surge of electrical energy shot forth from his fingertips, filling the obelisk's many glyphs with a blue glow. A wall of translucent hardlight shot out of it, erecting behind the man of light and dividing him from his pursuer.

He whirled around quickly, raising the black sphere high in the air, tapping it rapidly with his fingers. Even though he wasn't looking at it, he knew many yellow lights were rippling on its surface as it processed his request.

In the instant it took the sphere to process the input he locked eyes with the enchantress - or so he assumed, anyway, it was hard to tell which way she was looking when her eyes were obscured by those goggles. He also noticed that the wall of hardlight wasn't going to slow her down as much as he had hoped. He’d thought she would use her magic to levitate over the wall since she was avoiding the use of teleports to save her magic reserves. But no, she just shot a single laser from her horn at the obelisk, shattering the priceless relic into thousands of pieces. Her four hooves hardly slowed their gallop from the encounter - he may have gained a second, probably less.

Then the man of light was suddenly somewhere else. He didn't take long to gather his bearings - hallway, largely gray, with big numbers on one wall. Some kind of underground base, perhaps. There was most certainly a story behind this place he was not interested in. He bolted down the hallway, his rigid form creating loud clanks upon contact with the equally hard ground. Good thing stealth was not his goal - though perhaps he should have at least considered it.

He turned a corner, discovering a handful of humans in full green uniforms all carrying what appeared to be military-issue (but primitive) guns. He would have probably been annoyed by the pointless gunfire in his direction, but he heard the enchantress appear in the spot he himself had mere moments before, reminding him that he should still be terrified. The humans must have seen the blue light of teleportation because they soon started shooting behind him as well as at him.

The enchantress's flesh would be vulnerable to these physical bullets while his was not - she would not allow herself to be injured, so she would be slowed. The man of light allowed himself a small glimmer of hope upon realizing this, thanking primitive human technology for the uses it did have.

A voice - male, aged - cracked over the base's intercom. "People, we've got an intrusion into the base and gunfire! Yes, it really is a magic man and a unicorn! Keep an eye out for that horned red fairy or anything else unusual! Get some backup to level twenty-three already!"

The man of light saw SGC-23 imprinted on a nearby wall. Concern crossed his mind for a moment. Perhaps they could overwhelm him? Not likely, he thought dismissively. They were mid-humans with primitive technology, nothing they had could harm him-

A woman with blonde hair stepped out from a side door and shot him with a pistol-sized weapon that launched a blue lightning bolt directly into his shining chest. His body was forced into a mild seizure - his crystals all needed to reset from the energy overload. He twisted to the side just as another bolt came from the gun. He knew it was supposed to do a lot more than just stop him for a second from the woman's surprised look, but one second was a very precious commodity to the man of light at this juncture.

The bolt that missed him hit the enchantress head on but was absorbed by a blue aura-shield she had erected around herself. She ran right for the man of light, horn aglow with an unsettling bright blue.

The man of light acted in reflex, ordering the sphere to take him somewhere - anywhere - and he appeared in a vast room composed entirely of crystal similar to his body, though he knew there was no relation. The entire scene brimmed with power and knowledge. He felt it - something spectacular - tug at his mind with intense knowledge and fortitude. It wanted him to ask a question. It wanted to answer. He suddenly had no doubt in his mind he could be given the answer to almost any question he had.

Still, he resisted, running again. This large open room would not do - he needed to get somewhere else. He felt the high levels of magic here - magic she could use to trap him with ease. He fumbled with the sphere, trying to input something more specific into it. He wanted someplace... crowded.

He left just as the enchantress appeared.

Where he showed up was indeed crowded - and also a place he would fit in. It was a merchant outpost filled with hundreds of beings from countless worlds doing business.

The man of light still ran, shoving several people and machines out of the way. First an orange blob, then some elf-like race (he had no idea which one, there were thousands), then some energy being that he passed through.

"Rude!" it called after him.

He gave no response, rushing past a countertop where some insect-type was giving one of those grey-skinned troll girls some blue orb. The thought that it might be an infinite sided die crossed his mind. He almost stopped just to swipe it and see what it would do, but the sound of the enchantress appearing in the world shot that idea out of his mind. He ran past just as the troll girl rolled the die - hope you get a favorable result, blueblood - and that was the last he saw of it. He focused on his sphere again. He was taxing it, he knew, but it was his only edge over her. It worked faster than her magics.

"Make way!" He heard her yell in her authoritative voice, trying her best to sound like a police officer or whatever the equivalent was here. It was enough to move some individuals out of the way, making it much easier for her to move through the crowd than him. His advantage had been lost once again.

He used the sphere, this time appearing three feet in the air over some extremely murky swamp water. He got a look at two humans wearing swamp leaves as simple clothing before he fell into the murk. The shock of hitting the water stunned even his mineral-based body. His grip loosened and the sphere drifted out of his hand into the grime. He was mentally unable to do anything about this, as he was still trying to process the swamp water’s existence.

The man of light stopped processing halfway when the enchantress appeared above him. She didn't fall into the water - merely floated above it, her blue magic surrounding her and keeping her free from the disgusting murk. She didn't look down - didn't see him.

He started reaching for the black sphere, eyes fixed on her form. He wasn't quite capable of realizing he was underwater just yet, so he grabbed too hard, knocking the ball downwards instead of grabbing it. He was, however, aware enough to curse inwardly at his butterfingers.

The enchantress looked at the two humans. "Have you by chance seen a man of crystal around?" she asked in a friendly voice that came naturally to her.

"...Woah, Due. A talkin' horse."

"You think she tastes like chicken?"

The enchantress responded to this with a slightly bemused undertone. "Everything tastes more or less like chicken."

The man who had asked the question - Due - took his leaf hat off in awe. "Words of wisdom..."

"Naw," the first said. "Just words. The shiny dude is hidin' in the swamp water right under ya'."

The man of light grabbed the ball just as the enchantress looked down at him, disgust on her face. "Oh... Swamp water..."

"It has great flavor miss! You should try it!"

This comment gave the enchantress pause - just enough for the man of light to get out of there.

For the first time, he found himself in a place that made him consider giving up. There was absolute blackness - no gravity and no light in any direction. And yet, he knew - he just knew - there were great horrors and terrors out there in the darkness, great heaving eldritch things that would be able to squash him to oblivion by complete accident with a stray whisper.

And then he saw something that terrified him - and it wasn't just because he shouldn't have been able to see at all in this place of darkness.

Two people. Two people he recognized.

One was a man in black, evil on his face. The other was a madman standing in front of a blue box. The man of light realized with a feeling that drove him to shivers that they were both looking right at him.

He had just interrupted the standoff of two giants in an eldritch location.

This realization made him freeze.

The man in black grinned. "Ah, look at what the squiddle dragged in!"

The madman with a box grimaced. "Run. Flee. If you can, whoever you are."

The enchantress appeared behind the man of light, ready to apprehend him - but she was startled by the scene as well. She drew back from the two powerful beings.

The man in black laughed, a truly horrifying sound that should never have come from human lips. "Oh, a familiar tale, old as time itself stands before us! The pursued and the pursuer, dashing across vast swaths of land, intersecting their destinies with that of so many, many others. Wondrous!"

"Oh for-" the madman with a box lunged for the black sphere in the man of light's hand, touching it in just the right places to activate it.

The man in black 'laughed' again, and waved. "Have a nice-"

-'Day' would have been what arrived at the end of that sentence, and the man of light knew it. The thought - of that thing telling him to have a nice day - came close to making him lose what mental faculties remained within him. What he saw next threw him into a full panic. He found himself in a large field of roses.

Roses.

It can't be...

He saw it - to his right, a Tower made of black stone that reached to impossible heights. Powerful energies beyond his understanding flooded his mind, telling him that which he did not want to know, showing him the meaning of the Tower's many eldritch windows in a horrible and beautiful Song.

Had he not been close to panic there was no telling what he would have done here - would he have even realized what standing next to the Tower meant? Was it possible? Could she be redirected? Such questions went unanswered - he fumbled for the sphere, pressing it at complete random, chance (Chance? What was chance in a place like this?) being the only thing that allowed him to press the right buttons to escape - once again at the exact moment the enchantress appeared.

He appeared in a grassy land and took off at a run. He saw a flash of red in the sky above him, but he was no more able to consciously register that than the rock a few feet in front of him. The enchantress appeared in the world quickly, galloping after him.

He hit the rock, tumbling head over heels. The black sphere flew from his hands and into a patch of dirt. He skidded to a stop, a long stretch of grass upturned by the plow that was his face.

He gave up. He let his limbs fall flat, his motion stop. He was doomed - the sphere was God knows where, his face was embedded an inch into the ground, and he could already feel her magic around him.

He did not try to resist.

It took ten seconds for her to cast the spell. Then they were gone from the world with a quick flash of blue light, unaware of the marks they had left on this world. For atop a nearby hill, a tall purple winged unicorn stared at where they had just been, jaw slack.

"What in Celestia's name was that!?"

~~~

Princess Twilight Sparkle was no stranger to bizarre happenings; such things had pretty much defined her life for the last few years. She had been thrust into the positions of hero, diplomat, psychologist, friend, warrior, and prisoner time and time again by the magical world around her. Even her title as Princess of Friendship - truly a defining part of her these days - had arisen from a bizarre encounter with rogue magic and confused destiny.

The main difference between those times and now was that she was usually part of the bizarre events in one way or another. It was an exceptionally odd day when something completely off-the-wall happened that had no relation to her or her friends whatsoever. Today was apparently one of those rare days. Some human-shaped crystal monster and a unicorn in a full body suit had appeared, engaged in a rather one-sided scuffle, and vanished without so much as giving her a glance.

She wondered what in Celestia's name was going on, unaware that she had blurted the thought aloud. With nopony else present she remained completely unaware of her outburst, instead focusing on remembering why she was out here in the grassy hills in the first place. For the life of her, she couldn't determine why she had decided to go for a walk - there must have been some reason, she was sure of it. But no matter how much she racked her brain and tapped her skull with her hoof, nothing came to her.

Twilight became lost in her thought process, the unusual event she had just witnessed falling into the background since no immediate action was required. She squinted her lavender eyes shut and took a breath, stretching out her wings, trying to slow her mind down a bit so her thoughts would become manageable. She channeled some magic into her horn just to release some energy.

Okay... she thought. Back on topic.

She opened her eyes and looked at the grassy hills, still unsure why she had walked out here, but she compartmentalized that nagging thought away for the moment. She walked over to the cut in the ground the crystal-energy-man had made with his head when he'd tripped. He must be made of sapphires, Twilight concluded from the depth of the rut. She smiled thoughtfully - a being made of magic and sapphires. She had never seen such a thing! How exactly would it live? It'd probably need to survive off magic alone and wouldn't need to eat. Sleep? Perhaps not, though there was evidence that suggested everybody needed sleep to ease the mind. Maybe it didn't even have a mind?

She could have sworn it moved with fear though. The unicorn had as well, but she (had it been a she?) had moved with more purpose and control. The unicorn obviously hadn't been scared of the crystal man, it was something else. Had they run into something terrifying in their high-stakes game of teleport-pursuit?

It was then Twilight saw the black sphere sitting innocuously in the dirt. Her thoughts of fear and psyche became secondary as she focused her attention on the remnant of the scuffle. She lit her horn once again, focusing on the globe, using her natural magics to levitate it to her in a purple aura of arcane energy. She narrowed her eyes at the object - featureless. There wasn't even a defect from being dropped roughly in the coarse dirt. Its edges shone like oil despite it being completely solid. She knit her eyebrows together, scrutinizing it.

Something made her look upwards suddenly - a strange feeling of being watched - but nothing was up there. She shrugged it off and returned to the sphere, a nagging feeling eating away at the back of her mind, trying to tell her that something had happened. She thought of it as nothing more than curiosity.

She tapped the sphere with her hoof. The section she touched - a square with rounded corners - flashed a dull yellow. Another square lit up alongside it, two 'squares' to the right. Nothing else happened.

What are you? The crystal man had you... You were the only thing he had. You must be important.

She tapped it a few times in other places, lighting other squares up, but beyond the seemingly random pattern and number of lights flickering nothing happened. She scanned it for magic and found a faint aura inside it similar to teleportation, but not quite the same. She wasn't sure what that enchantment could accomplish - it was so weak. It'd need something to react with or draw power from to have any sort of visible effect. Seeing as it was the only spell in the globe, this was confusing to say the least.

She was sure she was missing something here. Maybe it reacted with the crystal man himself to do something? It was certainly possible, but that struck her as dangerous. And if that were true it might react badly to her magic...

She stopped messing with it. She levitated in front of her face for a while longer, knowing she couldn't figure anything out by standing here but electing to stare into the oily sheen anyway.

A brash voice interrupted her contemplations. "Hey Twi! What are you looking at?"

Twilight looked away from the mysterious orb, directing her gaze to the familiar voice with a smile. "I have no idea."

The cyan pegasus with the rainbow mane to whom the voice belonged flew a little higher into the air and dropped her jaw comically. "You have no idea about something!? Woah."

Twilight rolled her eyes. "Rainbow Dash, there's a lot of things I don't know."

"Uh, durr, that was sarcasm." Rainbow Dash swooped through the air to the front of Twilight, staring at the sphere. "...It's just a bowling ball, Twi."

"Bowling balls are a lot bigger and don't flash when you touch them."

"Small magic bowling ball then," Rainbow Dash said with a smirk. She reached her hoof out towards the ball. "Wonder if you could bowl with it..."

Twilight jerked it back. "No touching! This thing has strange magic in it that might react with your own resulting in Luna knows what!"

"Pfft," Rainbow Dash waved a hoof dismissively, doing it such a way that she wouldn't hit her flapping wings. "Stop being so paranoid, it's just an odd ball." She rushed to the sphere quickly, grabbing it out of Twilight's magic with her two front hooves. Several lights lit up and Twilight gasped.

Nothing happened. Rainbow Dash held the sphere in one hoof, taking full advantage of the unusual traction pony hooves had for the flat and hard objects they were. She started juggling it between her hooves. "See? Nothing to worry about Twi, it's all fine."

Twilight's left eye twitched. "You've made your point, Rainbow. I'd like it back now."

Rainbow Dash shrugged and tossed it back to her, caught once again in purple magic. "Not like I could keep it from you long anyway, assuming you remember to teleport."

Twilight smirked coyly. "I'm getting better at that!"

"You still chased Starlight around the castle on your hooves yesterday."

"I was... caught up in the moment."

"Yeah. Sure. So what are we going to do with this thing? Where'd it even come from?"

"Right here," Twilight said, gesturing at the rut in the ground. "A unicorn was chasing a crystal man. They teleported here, she caught him, he dropped the ball, and they teleported away."

"You just called it a ball. A... bowling ball!?"

Twilight ignored her. "As for what to do with it... I'll take it back to the castle and probably run some tests on it, see what it is. Failing that, find out whatever I can."

"Sounds boring. Can't we go try to find that unicorn and crystal guy? Sounds more like adventure if we do it that way."

"I wasn't scanning the teleport, I can't follow it."

Rainbow Dash groaned. "Really Twilight? For all we know that might have been the biggest adventure ever, and now we'll never have it."

Twilight looked into the sphere and found herself thinking of a rose of all things. She smiled. "Somehow... I think this is the key to adventure, Rainbow. We just have to figure it out." She turned her head to the west - her castle peeking out over the horizon with its magical, crystalline glint. The structure was impressive and tree-like, although it could be described as tacky or gaudy by sensible ponies. The multi-pronged magical starburst on the castle's tip was visible even from this fair distance, the shape mimicking the six-pointed mark on Twilight's own flank. She took a breath and trotted towards her home.

"Uh... Twilight?"

"Yes, Rainbow?"

"Teleport, remember?"

"Oh," Twilight deadpanned. "Right. Coming Rainbow?"

"Eh, sure, don't have anything better to do today."

Twilight focused a teleport spell into her horn, taking special care to think about Rainbow Dash, herself, and the sphere while also picturing the most prominent room in her castle. She weaved the spell together in under a second and in a flash of purple energy they were there - the ‘meeting room’ of the castle, for lack of a better name. She had spent much of the last few years of her life in this grand room. The chandelier made of tree roots lit the room up in a multicolored glow and the blue-ish crystalline walls were dulled so they wouldn't blind everypony who entered with refraction. The center of the room was marked by an ornate table surrounded by seven throne-esque chairs, one of which was smaller than the others. The other six were of equal size and intended for Twilight and her five closest friends. Each of the six chairs was adorned with the symbol of the pony that sat there: the cloud with a rainbow lightning bolt for Rainbow Dash, the balloons, the diamonds, the butterflies, the apples, and Twilight's own magical starburst. These six symbols had once been nothing more than 'cutie marks,' pictographic representations of talent and inner magic that all ponies had. But now - now they represented much more. They were the symbols of a legendary band, of Harmony realized in six mares who couldn't be more different.

"Twilight? You're starting to glaze over."

"Oh," Twilight said, snapping herself out of the nostalgic trance. "Yes, well... right." She trotted over to the table. At the moment it was activated, showing a circular map of the nation they lived in, Equestria, and its neighbors. Twilight found herself examining the mountains of the dragon lands, the great desert of the south, the landscapes of Griffonstone... Even the snowy peaks of the Crystal Empire and Yakyakistan. She smiled - in some way; much of this land was hers. Hers to protect and rule in at least some fashion. She absent-mindedly set the mysterious globe on the table-map and pressed her hoof to the tabletop.

She felt the map's connection to a power much higher than her own, a power Twilight had learned to respect over the years. She owed it so much. The entire castle was a gift from it, and one of the smaller ones at that. She smiled as she felt the welcoming energies of Harmony wash over her.

The welcoming feeling quickly changed, attention shifting from Twilight to the black sphere. Twilight felt the arcane mood shift again to... something she didn't recognize. Fear? No, she'd felt fear before. And anger... as well as disgust...

Confusion?

Twilight blinked, taking a step back. "But the Tree of Harmony knows everything..."

Rainbow Dash stared at her. "Er... What?"

“I'm getting confusion from the magic, Rainbow. I've never felt that from the Tree before... It has no idea what the sphere is."

Rainbow Dash blinked. "You know, I'm not going to question that and take it at face value for once. What does that even mean?"

"I'm... Not sure."

In that moment both Rainbow Dash's and Twilight's cutie marks started glowing, drawing their gaze to their flanks. They knew exactly what that meant. They were being called. They turned quickly to the map and saw their symbols - alongside the symbols of all their friends - dance over the map at a particular location, shining their arcane light down upon it.

"...Here?" Rainbow Dash said. "It's never called us here before."

"It's never had something this unknown either," Twilight said, glancing at the unknown object.

"Eh, it probably has, you just don't know about it," a new high-pitched voice called from across the table. Twilight and Rainbow Dash looked up - to the surprise of neither of them, a pink pony with the most cotton-candy-like mane imaginable sat in the balloon-imprinted throne. Twilight and her friends had long ago stopped asking how the pink mare managed to get to and from locations without anypony noticing so quickly without the use of wings or magic, just like any number of the other impossible feats she performed daily.

"Hi Pinkie," Twilight said with a genuine bright smile.

Pinkie's already huge grin widened. "Hi yourself! So, who's ready to crack this puppy open and see what intrigue awaits for us within?" She lifted a wooden mallet she definitely didn't have a second ago into the air, aiming at the sphere. "I hope it's like a piñata!"

"Pinkie Pie!" Twilight yelled. "Don't break the mysterious artifact!"

Pinkie put the hammer away somewhere nopony could see. She shrugged. "Not like I could break it anyway, thing's durable."

Nopony asked how she knew this. Twilight just continued talking. "The Tree is probably just calling us here to solve a regular friendship problem - no need to get all excited for intrigue or anything..."

"I dunno Twi," Rainbow Dash said. "I have this gut feeling that this won't be normal, y'know?"

Pinkie nodded rapidly - perhaps more rapidly than should have been physically possible. "I do know! I'm not sure anypony, anycreature, anyone, or anything knows what's going on!"

Twilight nodded slowly, glancing at the sphere again. "We should at least wait for the others before doing anything."

"Agreed," Rainbow Dash said. "Hey, Pinks, wanna take bets on what Rarity'll think of the bowling ball?"

"It's not a bowling ball!" Twilight wailed.

Pinkie ignored her. "I think... She'll find it absolutely beautiful!"

"Really? Looks like disgusting oil. I say she hates it. Three bits?"

"Done!" Pinkie giggled. "Now all we do is wait!"

~~~

Rarity Belle - or Miss Rarity Belle as she was known to those not close to her - was a unicorn who knew exactly how to make an entrance. She knew she would not be the first to arrive at the meeting hall, so she prepared long before she even saw the Castle doors. The moment the diamonds on her flank started glowing, she tossed her purple mane gracefully to the side, turned the sign on her boutique to closed, and daintily trotted across town, making sure to keep her head held high and not to rush frantically.

She - and everypony else - knew this keeping of appearances was a little shallow, but Rarity just couldn't bring herself to stop. She was a graceful mare, and there was no way in Equestria that she'd stop being one for any reason besides a national disaster. Even when there was such a catastrophe she usually maintained her dignity while dealing with the danger; a skill a mare like her needed seeing as she was friends with Twilight of all ponies. Rarity may have loved the purple mare to bits, like a second sister, but trouble followed the princess around everywhere. There was just no escaping it.

Rarity supposed that, deep down, she liked the antics. No, it was more than that; she eagerly anticipated them, despite constant evidence she gave to the contrary. She may have complained and whined - what lady wouldn't? - but she rarely meant it. Her life was one few mares dared to dream. Hero, lady, fashionista, businessmare, popular... it probably all went to her head if she was honest with herself, which she often was not. Honesty was not her virtue - that was reserved for another of her friends, one who had many a time shown how crazy Rarity could be.

Speaking of, the mare in question trotted into Rarity's line of sight. The orange earth pony had a brown farmer's hat on her head and apples upon her flank - apples that were currently glowing just like Rarity's own diamonds. They walked side by side as the orange pony let out a greeting. "Howdy, Rarity."

"Hello, Applejack," Rarity spoke with her careful high-class annunciation - a false dialect she had forced herself to acquire when young and had never dropped since. It was an integral part of her now. "What do you suppose the problem is this time?"

"Well, it's callin' the two of us again," Applejack commented in her country drawl. "Ah figure it's somethin' that'll require some different viewpoints."

"Perhaps, but Pinkie's been called too. I saw her flank light up right before she darted behind a bush," Rarity said, not needing to explain that Pinkie was most definitely waiting for them at the table, probably bored already.

"Eeyup," Applejack said in response to nothing in particular. "Think it'll be all of us today?"

"Probably," a new voice said - one much softer than the two others, but neither classy nor rustic. Despite the softness of the voice, it wasn't meek either, though it had been in the past. "I'm here, after all."

Rarity turned to her left just in time to see a butter-yellow pegasus land, the pink butterflies on her rear glowing. The color of the cutie mark matched that of her mane, a beautiful and graceful collection of hairs that could house animals (and did just that from time to time). Rarity was slightly jealous of her friend - she herself was cursed with a light blue mark, a purple mane, and white coat. White may have been among the more glamorous of the colors, but the clash of the diamonds and the mane... Well, at least the diamonds matched the blue of her eyes.

"Guess so," Applejack said, agreeing with the newcomer's comment. "How's Angel, Fluttershy?"

"His feet are healing nicely," Fluttershy responded, her expression telling Applejack thanks for asking. "Though I think he'll just injure it again the moment they're fully healed... That rabbit and his parkour obsession..."

"Just make sure you do tell him when it's fully healed," Applejack said. "...You know, even though he is a vicious little varmint."

"Yes, I guess so..."

Rarity was silent - she was busy positioning herself relative to her friends. She had Fluttershy and Applejack walking to either side of her, and made sure she was slightly forward, taking the lead. The Castle was coming up quickly, and she was ready for it. Her horn burst with a brilliant blue glow, surrounding the giant double doors of Twilight's Castle in her aura. She slid them open with perfect timing, such that neither she nor her companions would need to slow their motion. She didn't look behind herself when she closed the doors - such a thing could ruin her rhythm. She could probably regain it before they reached the top of the stairs, but such things were uncertain.

She found herself wondering, once again, why she cared. The only ponies waiting up there would be her friends, ponies who didn't care for class. She could let her guard down and nothing negative would happen whatsoever. But no, like always, she couldn't bring herself to do it. This was who she was - the one who had style. Twilight was the excitable intelligent one, Fluttershy was the gentle soul, Applejack was down to earth, Rainbow Dash was the tomcolt, and Pinkie was... Pinkie.

It was who they were. While they might grow and evolve as ponies, some things didn't need to change. Perhaps shouldn't.

Rarity quickly brought herself out of those thoughts - despite the smile they brought to her face. They were close to the top of the stairs now and her friends had fallen silent. Rarity took in a deep breath and opened the door with perfect timing - her two friends flanking her to augment her entrance, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not. It didn't really matter. Mainly because nopony noticed the grand entrance.

Pinkie just waved. "Hi Rarity! Been waiting for you for eighteen p-"

"Uh..." Applejack interrupted, pointing at the map in mild disbelief. "Is it pointin' us here? What does that even mean?"

Fluttershy gasped softly. "Are we the friendship problem?"

Twilight shook her head, a motion Rarity noticed was significantly more dignified than when they'd first met. Becoming a princess had slowly drawn Twilight to gain at least a modicum of class, something Rarity found immensely satisfying. "I doubt it," Twilight said. "I mean, if these were normal circumstances, I suppose that could be it... But I know what triggered this." She levitated a strange, black, oily ball up to the light, revealing its unusual sheen.

"My..." Rarity said, hoof to her mouth. "That looks rather... beautiful..."

"Ha!" Pinkie shouted, startling Rarity. "Three bits Dashie! Woop woop!"

Rainbow Dash sighed, tossing Pinkie the bits. She caught them in her teeth, giggling.

Rarity raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "Did you two bet on my reaction again?"

Pinkie nodded vigorously without a trace of embarrassment or remorse. Rarity turned to Rainbow Dash. "How do you keep losing?"

Rainbow Dash glared at Pinkie. "I swear she's cheating somehow."

"You could just agree with me Dashie!" Pinkie giggled.

"Then there'd be no bet!"

"Ah," Applejack spoke up. "There's your problem Dash. She's exploitin' your need for competition."

Rainbow Dash opened her mouth to respond with a presumably clever retort, but Twilight interrupted it by placing her hoof on her forehead. "Girls. Focus. Please."

"You got it!" Pinkie said, putting on a pair of googly-eye glasses. Fluttershy chuckled and everypony else ignored the amusing eyewear.

Twilight lifted the black sphere into the air. "This is..."

"The bowling ball," Rainbow Dash said.

"No, it isn't," Twilight snapped.

"It is now, sugarcube," Applejack said.

Twilight twitched, ready to protest, but thought better of it. She chuckled slightly. Rarity knew that look - it was the look Twilight had when she realized how ridiculous a situation was. "Okay then... This is the bowling ball, a strange device I found when..." Twilight continued on to tell them all of her strange encounter with the man of light and the enchantress, leaving nothing she thought important out. She ended her tale with the Tree of Harmony's confusion and subsequent calling of the six of them. "So evidentially we are supposed to do something with this mysterious artifact here in the castle. All of us. So... ideas?"

"You already shot down the hammer idea," Pinkie said.

"Yes, Pinkie, I did." Most mares would be fed up with Pinkie at this point, but Twilight said these words without a hint of venom at all - though the words did come with a slight tone of impatience.

"You said it was like teleportin'," Applejack said.

"Yes. But it definitely isn't exactly that and I cannot recall another spell like it."

Fluttershy raised a wing. Twilight nodded in her direction. "Well, I was thinking... Maybe it does something similar to teleporting because it's similar to it? I mean, I don't know much about magic, but that's how it works right?"

Twilight nodded with a smile. "Yes, that is how it works Fluttershy. You've been paying attention to my ramblings haven't you?"

"Yeah," Fluttershy said, slightly embarrassed.

"Not wise," Rainbow Dash commented. "Her egghead talk will melt your brain eventually."

"I can confirm..." Rarity mentioned, remembering her own times she had tried to parse through what Twilight was saying when the princess was in one of her science moods. It got far too complicated far too quickly. The worst of those talks had been when Twilight had tried to activate that darn...

"...Mirror Portal!" Rarity blurted out, shattering her calm stance for a moment.

Twilight blinked. "What about it?"

Rarity regained control of her posture. "When you were working on it... The main spell wasn't teleportation, was it?"

"No... No, it wasn't!" Twilight lit up. "Now that I think about it, there aren't crystal people anywhere on Equis at all, is there Rarity?"

"Oh, I'm told there are golems around - surprised you haven't heard of them, dear - but I'd have heard about a glowing man-thing made of sapphires if such a thing did exist. Or Lyra would have at least, you know her."

"That means..." Twilight levitated the bowling ball in front of her face. "This is probably a world-mirror. A portable one... That can probably go lots of places! But how? There's not enough power and the spell isn't quite right... Maybe it's broken? Incomplete?"

"Hey, Twi?" Rainbow Dash asked. "I'm no mage, but didn't you say it might react with something earlier? Why not bring it to the Mirror Portal, see what happens?"

Pinkie gasped. "Genius!"

Twilight smirked. "Good idea, Rainbow." Rarity knew Twilight had been about to suggest such a thing herself but was letting Rainbow Dash take the credit anyway. In a way, Rainbow deserved it, she had spoken first, after all. Rarity took pride in bringing up the Mirror Portal, though she briefly wondered if Twilight had thought of that first as well... Probably not, given how confused her reaction had been.

"To the east wing!" Twilight shouted, dashing out of the meeting room in a decidedly not graceful manner. She passed her number one assistant - a small purple dragon by the name of Spike - leaving him in the dust. Pinkie and Rainbow Dash's hurry to get going made the poor scaled boy fall over, his green spines folding against the floor.

Rarity trotted up to him, trying not to chuckle at his adorable struggling. "Spikey... you okay dear?"

"Just... fine!" he said. He meant it, though Rarity could tell his wings were sore. "You six got another friendship problem to deal with?"

Rarity frowned. "Something tells me it's different this time... We're going to the Mirror Portal for a look-see. We may be down there a while. Think you could bring us some tea?"

"Sure thing! Be ready in a jiff!"

Rarity smiled warmly. "Thank you." She left Spike to his business and trotted after the other five mares. She was still careful to move with style, though 'careful' was perhaps misleading, seeing as it was second nature to her at this point. She still wasn't sure why she was giving it such a fuss earlier.

She arrived fashionably late in a wing of the castle littered with books, scrolls, and a magic mirror augmented with dozens of unusual magical devices that Rarity couldn't even begin to guess the function of. She knew that altogether they allowed the Mirror Portal to function when the stars weren't aligned, to ensure the portal between worlds was permanent. Rarity herself had never been through the portal - only Twilight and Pinkie had, along with their mutual friend Starlight Glimmer. They had told Rarity of a world much like their own, except filled with humans, technology, and an almost nonexistent level of magic. She had often considered going herself to meet these human creatures who always wore clothing and had hands, but she'd never gotten around to it. Maybe she would today, assuming something didn't go terribly wrong.

She wasn't all that bothered by the idea of something going terribly wrong anyway. Yet another thing she had gotten somewhat used to over the years - though she never stopped gasping and freaking out a bit when it did happen.

Stars, her life was strange.

She turned her attention to Twilight - she and Fluttershy were pressing the bowling ball to the Mirror to no effect.

"Try harder," Rainbow Dash suggested.

"No..." Twilight said, furrowing her brow in concentration. "I think... It's something else... The spells aren't the same - close, but not the same..."

"Why's that?" Rarity asked.

"I don't know... They're really close now that I compare them - I'm certain this ball has some effect like that of a World Mirror, but the spell's just... off. And too weak..."

"Maybe it's customizable," Pinkie said, slurping on a blue slushy. "Choose your destination kind of thing."

Twilight blinked. "Pinkie, you are a genius. That's what all the lights are for, selecting - no, wait, they don't alter the spell..."

"But maybe you can dear," Rarity suggested. "If any mage can figure out how to alter a spell, it's you."

Twilight looked into Rarity's eyes and nodded with conviction. She stared at the bowling ball - then the Mirror - then the bowling ball again. Everypony fell silent. They knew what was coming.

Twilight was about to get an idea. And then they would be able to start.

"Got it!" Twilight shouted. Then, without explaining what she was doing, she removed a glass jar from a device on the Mirror Portal’s back. Inside the jar was a strange blue magic gas. Twilight set it aside and created an identical, empty jar from the aether, placing it where the old jar had been and filling it with a gray magic mist with her magic, her grin widening as she did so. "Just copy and paste..."

"Uh... What?" Applejack said.

"Computer thing," Pinkie answered as if this explained everything. All it did was let everypony know they shouldn't ask further.

"Strong spell... Mirror..." Twilight muttered, levitating a few tools to her from a nearby box, tightening a few bolts on the Mirror and running magic energies through several magic artifacts. She smirked. "And... Done..." She pressed her hoof to the shimmering surface of the Mirror.

She didn't pass through. It was solid.

"Oh come on!" she shouted. "That should work! I mean - I had it optimized and everything..."

"What did you do?" Fluttershy asked.

Twilight frowned, looking right at the bowling ball. "I put the spell from in here into the Mirror and tried to 'set' it to Earth... But it didn't stick. It's missing something..." She levitated the strange sphere back to her eyes. "Something..."

Pinkie touched the ball lighting up a single square. She looked at Twilight with a knowing gaze. Twilight's eyes sparkled with another idea. She levitated the ball over to the Mirror, touching the two artifacts together. Several squares lit up on the ball, all in a sequence. Twilight grinned. "Aha!"

And then all six of them were gone in an instant, leaving the Mirror Portal behind.

Spike came down with a tray of piping hot tea three minutes later. He frowned at the lack of ponies to give it to.

Eventually, he shrugged and decided it meant more tea for him. And Starlight, assuming he could find her.

~~~

It was the apotheosis of all jungles. Humid, green, and full of the squawking of numerous colorful birds. Distant calls and roars from other, larger animals came from afar. The large, dripping leaves of the many trees rustled in the soft breeze, their water returning to the air as the sun beat down on their canopy. The dirt below wasn't muddy, merely damp and covered with morning bugs.

It was in this jungle six equine friends appeared, three feet above the soil below. Rarity and Pinkie were the only ones who landed on their hooves - though Rainbow Dash was spared the indignity of a faceful of dirt since her default state was hovering in midair.

"I suppose it worked then," Rarity observed.

"Sorta..." Twilight muttered, standing up and wiping the bugs off her face. "I was trying to activate the mirror and not the ball... But it apparently reacted with the altered spell I made and used it itself..." She lifted the ball and studied it. "There was a sudden surge of extreme power within it. I have no idea where it came from..."

"So... This is Earth?" Applejack asked.

Twilight frowned. "Well, I suppose there probably is a jungle somewhere on Earth, but I thought the portal had to take us to Canterlot High..."

Pinkie Pie took a cell phone out of her mane. "No signal. Or GPS signal. Angry Birds still works though."

Twilight was only mildly surprised Pinkie had gotten ahold of a cell phone. "Well... it's not Earth then. Somewhere else. I can tell you we aren't in Equestria either - the magic feels off. Only slightly, though."

"Awesome! A brand new frontier!" Rainbow Dash raised a hoof and grinned. "We'll be like Daring Do and explore the jungle!"

"Rainbow..." Fluttershy began. "Shouldn't we get our bearings first? See if... Twilight can take us home?"

Twilight's pupils shrunk to pinpricks.

"Oh..." Fluttershy put a hoof to her mouth.

"Twi? Ah don't like that look..." Applejack commented.

"I... I have no idea if I can..." Twilight said. "I was scanning what was going on, yes... I have the spell to bring us here. But I can't channel that much power and I need the reverse spell."

Fluttershy whimpered. "We're... Stuck here?"

"Nonononono," Twilight said, voice wavering considerably. "I just need to... figure out a solution!" She lifted the sphere into the air. "This thing is the key. It can help us get home. Just need to press the right buttons!"

Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow. "Isn't it just as likely to take us somewhere else?"

"Not if I figure it out!" Twilight said. She lit her horn, overlaying the spell she put in the Mirror Portal over the sphere, and the same lights from earlier lit up. Nothing happened - probably because they were already in the location selected. "Now just to figure out what all this means..." She stared at the sphere blankly for several seconds.

"Er, anythin' we can do to help with that Twi?" Applejack asked.

"...Not really, no, sorry." Twilight smiled sheepishly. "Don't worry though! Totally got this!"

Applejack raised an incredulous eyebrow but said nothing.

"Can we go exploring then Twi?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"...Sure, this will take a while anyway. I'll find you when I'm done. Don't go too far."

"Got it," Rainbow Dash saluted. "Good luck Twilight!"

Twilight nodded, turning the sphere over in her magic.

Pinkie Pie bounded after Rainbow Dash. "Yay! Exploring!"

Fluttershy followed. "I can't wait to see the animals here..."

Applejack took up the rear. "Rarity? You comin'?"

"Oh no, I think I'll stay here and not romp through the filthy jungle. You girls have a good time though! I'll just stay with Twilight."

Applejack nodded. "Alright. See you." They left, heading into the deep foliage.

Twilight looked up at Rarity. "...Thanks. I'm going to need somepony to bounce ideas off of and keep me... calm."

"Don't mention it, dear. I may not be a magical scholar, but I know a few tricks." She frowned. "...Do you really think you can figure this thing out?"

"Not completely. But I might be able to pretend and get something that works. First I have to figure out why we're not on Earth. It was almost the exact same spell the Mirror Portal would have used, just altered from the spell in the ball. It should have worked as a test run, just to see if..." She trailed off into ramblings and mumbles. She summoned a black notepad and pen with her magic and began to frantically scribble.

Rarity gracefully sat down, watching Twilight closely. Soon her circular magic diagrams evolved far beyond Rarity's understanding, reaching levels of complexity Rarity had only glimpsed at the back of Magic textbooks as examples of high magic. Rarity didn't say anything or ask any questions - she'd wait for Twilight to indicate it was time for that. The two just sat in the clearing; one patient, the other working furiously.

~~~

Despite the attitude she’d displayed to Twilight, Rainbow Dash wasn't completely calm about the situation - they might be stuck on some alien world for Celestia's sake! However, she had put on a mask to keep this line of thought deep within herself. Their chances of getting home were much better if Twilight had space to think, to solve the problem without constant interruptions and stressors. Rainbow Dash knew full well she was the primary source of interruptions and distractions, so she had provided a reason to get out of there.

Who am I kidding, I wanted to explore, to find something new and exciting.

That most certainly was true, but Rainbow Dash still knew it was better this way. She and her friends could have an adventure in this world and get back home!

Hopefully.

She tried hard not to think about the possibility of not making it back home.

Applejack was currently making that difficult.

"We should look for firewood," she said.

"Why?" Rainbow Dash muttered.

"Cause we might be here a while - Ah don't wanna be caught after dark without a fire."

"Twilight will get us home long before then. Do you see the sun here? Early morning."

"It might take us all day to find firewood in this damp jungle, Rainbow."

"Exactly why we shouldn't waste valuable adventuring time on finding firewood."

Fluttershy spoke up. "Ricaduro says there's a bunch of dry wood a little ways to the east. Easy to get to."

Rainbow Dash blinked. "...Who?"

Fluttershy lifted a wing, showcasing a tropical bird the size of her head happily perched among her feathers. He had a blue-red complexion and a double-pronged beak that made it hard to tell exactly where his mouth was. He squawked.

"Well now we know Fluttershy has a way with animals here too," Rainbow Dash said, smirking. "And we don't have to collect firewood now."

Applejack let out an annoyed break. "Right. We could look for shelter then..."

Pinkie groaned. "AJ! Stop being so... so... practical. Have some fun! Just... Look at this, for instance!" She ran up to a bright orange seven-petal flower that was twice as large as she was. "Isn't this just beautiful?"

Rainbow Dash had to admit, the orange flower was rather impressive. The patterns on it reminded her of a tiger, though perhaps one whose skin had been through a blender. The plant looked predatory.

Applejack nodded slowly. "Ah s’pose so... Ah didn't think flowers got that big."

Fluttershy shrugged. "Ricaduro says it isn't even the biggest he's seen. Apparently, the 'red creatures' live in a much larger one."

"Ooooh! Where's that?" Rainbow Dash asked.

Fluttershy conversed with Ricaduro for a few seconds. "Not far. To the north a little ways. He doesn't want to go there - they eat birds."

Rainbow Dash grinned. "Well, you could keep them under control right?"

"Probably," Fluttershy said. "I'm going to let Ricaduro go anyway, he's got a family to get back to."

"Mission acquired: find red creatures!" Pinkie announced. She put on a safari hat. "Thataway!"

Fluttershy waved bye to Ricaduro and followed Pinkie. Rainbow Dash flew overhead while Applejack took up the rear.

Rainbow Dash attempted to imagine a bunch of red creatures living in a giant flower. What came to mind first was a giant rose in which a bunch of red diamond dogs lived, except they had cat ears for some reason. She chuckled at the image.

"I think they'll be big bugs," Pinkie said suddenly.

"Ah'm goin' for... Yaks," Applejack offered. Everyone turned to Fluttershy, expecting a response from her.

"Oh, I already know what they look like, Ricaduro told me the basics."

"Who's closest?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"Pinkie. But she's off by a-"

Pinkie held up a hoof. "Don't tell us. Let us be surprised!"

"Oh. Okay then."

Rainbow Dash was now imagining giant red crickets living in a rose. Not as funny of an image, so she added the cat ears again just for the heck of it, bringing a smirk to her face. Applejack apparently had a similarly amusing image in her mind, failing completely to hold her chuckle in. Fluttershy just gave them odd looks and shook her head.

They walked for a while longer - maybe an hour, they weren't really sure. They'd forgotten completely about 'not going far' now that they had a destination. They talked on and off about the jungle, adventure, and other random things that were rather pointless. But that's what friends do - talk about pointless things and laugh and bond.

They mostly forgot that they were stuck in an alien world because of it. They had each other and were easily distracted by the many amazing sights - the flora, the fauna, and the sky whenever it could be seen through the treetops. They made out two moons in the blue heavens, one the smooth silvery orb they remembered from home, the other a smaller, blue sphere that was somewhat hard to see against the sky.

"You know," Pinkie said, "The humans of Earth actually went to their moon in a big rocket."

"Ain't no way," Applejack said.

"Oh, it happened! There were pictures, video, everything! They even brought moon rocks back!"

"Ah'll believe it when Ah see it."

Rainbow Dash chuckled. "You hear that ponies? Applejack just got a one-way ticket to Earth!"

"Aw, apple fritters."

"I hear it's nice there," Fluttershy said. "I bet you'd like it once you went!"

"Too many fancy gizmos Ah think."

"Fancy gizmos are the way of the future!" Pinkie giggled.

Their conversation of moons, men, and moments was interrupted by a pony stepping out of the foliage, moving in front of them. She was an earth pony - pink, blue eyes, cotton candy mane. She lacked a mark on her flank, but otherwise her smooth face and vibrant body were exactly like Pinkie's at first glance. Upon closer inspection, a few differences could be seen - her forehead was a bit too large and bony, for one. But it was her eyes that got to all of them. The orbs stared with a vacant expression, eyes missing most of the light that Pinkie's had to them.

Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Fluttershy backed up a bit, the mare's presence unnerving them. Something felt wrong.

Pinkie Pie just smiled. "Hi! I'm Pinkie Pie! Who are you?"

The other pink pony just neighed. Pinkie's smile faltered. "Uh..."

Fluttershy put a hoof to her mouth. "Oh... My... She... Uh... She just asked us why we weren't with the herd like... like an animal would."

"Okay, that just made this creepier..." Rainbow Dash muttered. "Uh... No offense," she told the other Pinkie. The mare's expression did not change. She simply did not have the mental capacity to understand language. She finally walked around the group, heading for Fluttershy.

"Er..." Fluttershy took a few steps back. "Uh... Hi. What should I call you?"

The pony - no, animal - had no concept of a name besides 'me' and 'pink'.

Normally at this point Fluttershy would just give out a name, but she couldn't bring herself to name a pony - especially because she just wanted to call her 'Other Pinkie.' Fluttershy shivered.

"Uh... How 'bout Cotton Candy?" Applejack suggested. The other Pinkie turned to look at Applejack blankly. She seemed satisfied with the suggestion somehow.

Fluttershy nodded slowly. "Yes... That'll do. Cotton," she had to force herself to say it, "where's the herd?"

Cotton understood Fluttershy like virtually all animals did and gestured with her muzzle (as opposed to her hoof) towards the north. The same direction they were already headed.

Nopony paused to consider what this might mean.

Cotton seemed to sense it was time to move on. She turned and headed north without another noise. Pinkie followed without question, bouncing after her other self. The other mares exchanged confused glances with each other before following as well.

Rainbow Dash flew alongside Pinkie. "This... This... She is..."

"Bizarre?" Pinkie interrupted. "I know right! Feral, animalistic ponies in this other world! Who knows what other strange stuff there is?"

Rainbow Dash blinked. "How can you be okay with... With..." She glanced at Cotton.

"Dashie, she can't understand you, only Fluttershy. You don't need to feel nervous around her."

Rainbow Dash shook her head. "That. How can you do that?"

"Do what?" Pinkie asked, an innocent look on her face.

"...It's been maybe two minutes since we met this pony who looks almost exactly like you, can't talk, and acts like an animal! It's not just weird, it's disturbing." Rainbow Dash glanced at Cotton again. The pony's head was turned, but Rainbow Dash remembered those eyes nonetheless. They were bright, blue, but not full of the spark. The spark she'd seen in every pony she ever met - a spark she hadn't even been consciously aware of until today. Looking into the gaze of a pony and not seeing it really brought it to the forefront...

"I guess I'm just used to other versions of me already. Earth Pinkie, the many Mirror Pool Pinkies... You know."

"None of them were animals were they?"

Fluttershy shot Rainbow Dash an annoyed look but said nothing.

Pinkie pursed her lips. "Well... It is a little creepy to tell you the truth, but, you know, no point in getting freaked out about it. And - oh! Idea! Cotton!"

Cotton didn't turn - she was unable to recognize her name just yet seeing as she had only just gotten it. Pinkie didn't care. She rushed to the front and gave her a cupcake. "Here! I bet you've never had one of these before!"

Cotton poked her nose at the cupcake and sniffed deeply. The sweet aroma made Cotton's eyes dilate - she ate the entire thing in one gulp, paper and all. Pinkie giggled, patting her on the head. "Good girl."

Applejack blinked. Then she blinked again. "Well, Ah'll be, that's certainly not something anypony ever thinks they'll see."

Fluttershy nodded slowly. "...Yeah..." She took a deep breath and walked over to Cotton. "Hey there."

Cotton met Fluttershy's gaze with her own. Fluttershy flinched, but kept her eyes up and moved closer. "You... You are a good girl aren't you?"

Cotton made a satisfied whinnying sound. Fluttershy scratched her behind the ear, making her pink back leg thump the ground much like that of a rabbit's. Fluttershy smiled.

Rainbow Dash looked at Applejack. "...They're going mental."

"Ah can't bring myself to disagree..." Applejack responded.

"You know if there's a version of Pinkie..."

"Ah know. Ah hope we don't run into 'em."

Rainbow Dash shivered, suddenly enjoying the adventure a lot less. They set out once more to the north, conversation dwindling considerably.

Rainbow Dash was the one who heard it first; a muffled thump followed by a rustle. Her ears perked up and she heard it again. "Hey, guys? I hear something."

"What are-" then Pinkie heard the thump as well. Her ears swiveled to the south. "Oh. That."

Cotton fixed Pinkie with a puzzled look. The next thump all of them heard - and Cotton's demeanor changed instantly from puzzled to panic. She ran - bolting into the foliage, leaving the other four far behind.

"Skittish," Rainbow Dash commented. "Think we should run?"

There was no time to discuss - the owner of the thumps had increased its pace after Cotton bolted, making no more attempts to muffle the huge steps. The tremendous noise shook the jungle, sending chills of fear into the ponies. Birds squawked in panic and flew away into the sky. Applejack had just decided to turn tail when the thing burst through the trees, bellowing a roar loud enough to make Rainbow Dash wince.

It was tall, almost taller than the trees, and heavily built. There were two gigantic scaled feet and a meaty trailing tail at the bottom. The tiny arms would have made it less impressive had the claws affixed to them not been bloody and jagged, shifting almost naturally to the orange color of the beast's main body. The head of the beast dwarfed everything else about the creature - it was square-set, lined with perhaps hundreds of jagged bone-teeth, and had a predatory eye on either side of its face. The orbs were locked right onto its prey: four succulent ponies.

Rainbow Dash thought it looked like those pictures of a T-Rex she'd seen in dinosaur books, though the face was a little off.

The reptile leaned down, jaws open, preparing to scoop Pinkie into its mouth. She screamed, running off at high - and impossible - speeds to the north. Rainbow Dash and Applejack snapped out of their paralysis to enter a new phase of fear: the flight response. The beast pursued them as they ran. It only got six steps before Fluttershy flew in front of its face and Stared into its eyes with her own, making sure it saw her intense disapproving gaze. The apex predator comically stopped in its tracks and whimpered in her presence.

"It's okay, you were just looking for food," Fluttershy said, easing off her Stare technique. "But I couldn't let you eat my friends. Sorry. Say, we..." She glanced behind herself. Her friends were long gone. "...I could help you find some food in return. What do you like to eat?"

The beast growled.

"...Besides ponies?" Fluttershy shivered at the thought, painfully realizing that the wild ponies here were just another part of the natural food chain. That'd take considerable effort to get used to. "Anything else?"

He grunted.

"I have no idea what a Marm is, but okay, let's go hunting for one." She cocked her head. "Do you have a name?"

He did not.

"Well, then you are Rexy. Let's go Rexy! Also, don't go that way, we don't want to scare Twilight."

Rexy didn't mind going another direction. He marched through the jungle with a pegasus on his head. Neither of them thought this was odd. Rexy because he wasn't that smart, and Fluttershy because she had dealt with more than a few apex predators in her time. This included dragons, though they were more people than animals, less susceptible to the Stare and her other skills. Not that she liked using the Stare, even on animals. Only when needed.

They continued on, both blissfully unaware of how much they were throwing the rest of the jungle for a loop.

~~~

Twilight was not pleased with her current situation.

She and her friends were stuck in some alien jungle impossibly far from home. There was no sign of any civilization whatsoever and she had heard dozens of low, guttural, predatory calls that made her hair stand on end. That wasn't the worst part though - she was fairly certain she and her friends could take care of themselves - but that she had no idea what had even happened.

She went over the events in her head again - the Mirror was unable to open the connection she had set for whatever reason, so she'd touched the sphere to it and the sphere had connected - she had no idea how - and drew power from itself somehow to open the portal. But there was no spell to bring that energy, and she didn't know of any non-magical power source that powerful. It baffled her, that power. It had exceeded even that of the Mirror itself. Ten times stronger! How was that even possible?

An idea came to her suddenly. She opened a notebook and scribbled down some numbers - yes, there it was. The Mirror Portal hadn't had enough energy to establish a connection, just like it had been before she added all the extra devices to it, back when it had to wait for the Stars to align to get enough magic. But she knew the Mirror had enough energy to reach Earth at the moment... ...Wait, what if it just required more energy to come here? Wherever here was. That made some sense - maybe some worlds were more 'distant' than others. But the question remained: she had set the destination as Earth. Why didn't they come to Earth? Why-

"The transformation enchantment!" she shouted suddenly.

Rarity looked up from one of Twilight's discarded notebooks. "Did you figure it out?"

"I know why we're here and not on Earth - the Mirror Portal's spell has an enchantment that transforms you to an 'appropriate' form, giving you a sort of 'vortex' effect before you arrive while it changes your body. But we didn't experience that when we came here, we were just here. The ball read the spell I gave it without consideration for possible enchantments - it treated it like a normal Mirror spell and found a different set of coordinates! These coordinates!"

She pulled out the ball. "I can just remove the transformation matrix from the spell and use the ball to go directly to Earth! Give me a sec..."

"...Shouldn't we find the others?"

"If this works I can just make us come right back..." She altered the spell inside the sphere to her liking, sure it was connected to Earth now, and... ...nothing happened.

"...You know, it occurs to me that the presence of the Mirror Portal itself may have activated it or something." Twilight sighed. "We don't know how to use this thing by itself..."

"Well, you know the right spell now. Can you cast it?"

Twilight pondered this. "I... Well if I was going from Equestria to Earth I'm sure I could, now that I have it. It'd take considerable effort, but I'd manage. However... It took a lot more energy than I thought to get here. Maybe if I train myself more I could produce that much... But not right now. I'd probably have to spend weeks doing nothing but practicing my magic. And even that's just a maybe."

Rarity shook her head. "Please tell me there's a plan B, I don't want to live in this jungle for weeks, darling."

"I know. The other option is to find another source of power. I think a physical Element of Harmony would do it."

"So we need to find some magic artifact then? Rainbow's going to love this."

Twilight nodded. "Here's to hoping there are some ancient ruins we can plunder. Or, Plan C, figure out where this thing gets its power from."

"That's probably a dead end. We should just find the others and start looking."

Twilight nodded, folding up all her notebooks and creating a simple knapsack. She stuck the ball and books in and slung it over her back. "Let's go. Hope they're all doing okay."

"They're all capable of taking care of themselves, dear."

~~~

Pinkie Pie knew the T-Rex (it wasn't really a T-Rex, but she didn't care) had stopped chasing them long ago. She just didn't see any reason to stop running - it was fun!

She supposed Rainbow Dash and Applejack were still terrified - but she wasn't sure she could stop them just by saying the T-Rex was gone. Plus, Applejack was so far behind them she'd be out of earshot anyway. Pinkie had ways to make her hear, but that'd just be petty in the end. Best to just leave it alone. Pinkie did have to admit they couldn’t run forever. She just wasn't expecting what it was that stopped them - a sight so out of left field that her jaw dropped.

Rainbow Dash halted as well - more impressive than Pinkie’s instant stop since she was flying and didn't have the ground's assistance. They saw two more ponies - one they didn't recognize and an earth pony version of Rainbow Dash, both standing near a large tree. This sight alone would have stopped Rainbow Dash - but it was the other half of the scene that stopped Pinkie.

The ponies had riders.

The riders were tall, lanky creatures with two legs and four arms. They had no skin or hair; instead, they were covered head to foot in brittle red carapaces. One of the riders was a dark pink shade, the other a blood red. Their hands had three fingers, each of the digits resembling a grasshopper leg. Their own legs were like that of an ostrich, bent backward in a painful looking configuration so their feet wouldn't drag on the ground while they rode the ponies.

Then there was their face.

It was like a mask. A flat, red mask with four eyeholes and angular spines off the top and sides. There was a small opening under the pointed bottom - presumably a mouth - where two mandibles hung out.

Pinkie stared at the eyes. The eyes had the spark in them.

The redder one glared at them, then back at the pink rider. It spoke with a series of musical clicking sounds that were obviously a language of some sort. The pink one responded with a shrug.

"Hey girls, what did you find here?" Applejack asked, catching up with them. She saw the riders. They saw her. They heard her voice. They saw her hat. A hat obviously designed for the head of a pony. There was silence for a second.

The red one leaped off his pony and thrust a spear in their direction threateningly, saying something they couldn't understand but obviously wasn't a friendly hello.

Rainbow Dash narrowed her eyes. "Oh, you want a fight do you?" She flared her wings. "Well-"

"Dashie, no," Pinkie said. "I... I think these things are dangerous. Really dangerous. They'd be able to hurt us."

Applejack gulped, nodding. "They... They do look pointy in a lot of places..."

Rainbow Dash stood down, lowering her wings. The red rider didn't lower his spear. He spoke some more, and the pink one tossed him some rope.

"Aw heck no!" Rainbow Dash shouted. "You are not tying me up!"

The red rider moved quickly, touching the spear to Rainbow Dash's neck, coming as close as possible to drawing blood. Rainbow Dash froze.

"Rainbow..." Applejack said. "Let's just do what he says and hope the others find us."

Rainbow Dash nodded extremely slowly. The red rider took this as a sign to tie the rope around her midsection, an act the being had evidentially done many times before seeing as it only took a few seconds. Applejack and Pinkie were next, taking even less time due to the lack of wings. Pinkie's smile was gone, replaced with a face of worry and barely contained panic. They were being captured by the red creatures. By aliens.

That was both cool and terrifying at the same time.

003 - Ponies on Earth

A full day had passed since Twilight and her friends had returned to Equestria from their little outing in the jungle. Twilight had not slept for any of that time.

She still hadn't the foggiest idea what the green diamond was and the lack of information was driving her up a wall. It matched no mineral she had ever seen, was completely devoid of magic, and produced more power than she could even measure. The only other things that did that were the Tree of Harmony itself and the being known as Discord.

At the moment, she had her eyes level with the diamond, unblinking, staring in a vain hope of observing some pattern in its constant shifting appearance. Despite the odd texture and apparent vibrations, the diamond didn't actually move at all. It felt a little fuzzy and unstable when touched directly, but apparently the table it was on didn't think so.

It was just green and mysterious and powerful.

She really hated not knowing more.

"So, you going to put it in the mirror now, or are you going to keep staring at it hoping the 'eureka' moment will come?"

Twilight turned to Spike, her always-faithful assistant. He'd been helping her examine the diamond over the last several hours, though he was asleep for half of it. Despite getting fed up with the lack of progress about two hours in the little dragon was still willing to help her, including slapping her across the face (metaphorically or otherwise) to get her to realize how silly she was being.

Twilight sighed. "I... Guess it is time for that, huh? It is what it's for."

"Good, because I was beginning to worry that you'd put away a thing that can travel to other worlds just because you hadn't studied it enough yet!"

Twilight chuckled. "I'm not that bad. Plus, I did tell Mlinx we'd return one day. Can't really do that without this or some other power source. This object just seems the most... Versatile of all the options. Mainly because I don't want to rely on Discord for anything."

"Good idea," Spike said. "That guy can't even be found half the time."

Twilight shook her head, banishing thoughts of her most annoying friend. She picked up the diamond with her magic and trotted over to the Mirror Portal, placing it at the top-center and affixing it with a simple adhesive spell. The Mirror sparked with an overflow of alien energy as a result. Twilight touched her hoof to the shimmering surface and it passed through easily. With a smile, she stepped through, appearing in a very familiar jungle by way of a glowing shimmer of energy affixed to a tree. There were no signs of any demons - but why would there be? This was far from the giant red flower.

Spike came through behind her. "...Huh. Feels a little odd not to be turned into a dog."

Twilight raised an eyebrow. "Do you want to be a dog?"

"Oh, no!" he said, waving his hands back and forth. "It's a good kind of odd!"

"Uh-huh. Well, it works," she said, walking back through the tree's shimmering side, appearing back in her castle.

Spike bounded after her. "Hey! I wasn't done looking at the alien jungle! It was cool!"

"You'll get another chance, Spike," she said. "Right now I need to test something..." She removed the glass jar she had filled with magic gasses the day before and created another one with a different set of gasses. She plugged the new spell into the Mirror Portal and stuck her head through.

There was no transformation vortex. That was good. She went right to her destination - the base of a statue. She knew there was a giant marble horse behind her, but she didn't bother to turn so she could see it. She was looking at the familiar school in front of her - a building composed mainly of maroon bricks that rose three stories, significantly taller than most buildings in Ponyville. There were two separate wings of the structure, each flanking a central entrance adorned with glass etchings of horses and the sun.

Much like both the statue and the glass etching, Twilight reared up in glee, leaping out the rest of the way into the world. "It worked!" she cried.

Three or four faces looked up at her outburst - decidedly non-pony faces. They were the faces of two-legged apelike creatures with mostly bare skin. Said skin came in a wide range of colors, and while there was a preference for peach tones, Twilight could see green, yellow, and blue. The hair on their heads was usually much more vibrant, with a tendency for brilliant solid hues. These beings lacked horns or wings, had hands at the edge of their arms for holding amazing devices like cellphones, and wore copious amounts of clothing.

In other words, just humans.

Twilight waved. "Hi Coco!"

Coco - a blue haired girl with cream skin - blinked, bewildered at the talking alicorn. She waved back, confused, and continued on her way.

"Huh... Guess I do look different. Must be odd to them."

"No kidding," Spike said, coming through the portal himself, retaining the form of a scaly reptile. "Did you know dragons are legendary creatures to humans?"

"Yeah. So?"

"Not sure if I'm going to like being a real dragon here or not, is all I'm saying."

Twilight grinned. "Well, it's time to find out. Come on, let's go inside and say hi!"

~~~

Sunset Shimmer was a woman who had allowed herself to get a little too comfortable with the status quo. Understandable, since she was currently happy, something she couldn't have said for most of her life. Most of this previous unhappiness had been her fault, a direct result of having ambition as a primary character trait. As so many had before her, she had attempted to climb to the top and gotten burned by the sun - though in her case this was more literal than most.

Those days were behind her. She had given up her delusions of grandeur to live amongst her human friends at a high school instead of... Well, almost anything else. She was mentally much older than her classmates, was a master in magic in her home world, and knew ponies in high places. But she stayed here because she liked it. She didn't want it to change. She didn't see any reason why it would until one of her friends asked a very particular question.

"So... Sunset!" Pinkie said, sitting herself and her lunch tray across from her fiery friend. "What're you going to do after you graduate in a few months?"

Sunset looked up from the book she was reading - Essays on Quantum Theory - tossing her red and yellow curls. She stared blankly at her pink friend with her crimson eyes.

Pinkie sighed, putting a hand to her forehead. "Please tell me you've actually given it some thought..."

"Uh... No..." Sunset said, face blank, nervously clasping her gloved hands together.

"Sunset, it's my job not to think things through! ...Okay, so, it's actually Dashie's, I'm just supposed to be ditzy. Still, you're a genius, you think about things."

Sunset smirked slightly. "I wouldn't say I'm a genius..."

"What about all those magic-scanny things you hooked us up to? Or those times you outthought the bad guys? Or those mysteries you solved? Or that book you're reading?"

Sunset blinked. "Fair point. I'm not as smart as Twilight though, yo-"

"Oh no, we aren't derailing the topic into 'which Twilight are we talking about' territory. I see your ploy."

"Sorry," Sunset said, leaning back in her chair. "I... I really haven't thought about it Pinkie. I guess I'll go wherever you girls go."

Pinkie facepalmed. "Sunset..."

"What?"

"Not all of us are graduating. Fluttershy and Rarity will be out the same time as you but the rest of us are staying another year. Fluttershy's already got a job offer and Rarity's headed for fashion school or something," Pinkie shook her head, a sure sign of not really being sure what Rarity was doing.

"Oh," Sunset said. "...I knew that."

"Yes, but you haven't thought about it." Pinkie put her chin in her hands and leaned forward. "Sunset, school's ending. You're going to have to do something. Go to college, get a job, go back to Equestria... School doesn't last forever, silly!"

Sunset bit her lip. "Well... Great."

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. "What's wrong? There's a whole new life out there for you, you just have to find it!"

Sunset shook her head. "I don't want to leave you girls. You are-"

"We are not your only friends. Twilight, Spike, and Starlight will all welcome you in Equestria. As well as the other me!"

Sunset blinked. "...Are you pony-Pinkie right now?"

"Wouldn't you like to know!?" Pinkie giggled.

Sunset narrowed her eyes. "Yeah. Should've expected that answer."

Pinkie nodded. "Profound observation! Now stop sidetracking."

Sunset chuckled. "Fine, fine... You're right. I should think about it. I'll figure something out, Pinkie. It's still several months away, don’t worry."

"Several months can burn like dynamite Sunset! Starts out slow then BOOM! DOOOOOOM!"

Sunset reeled back from Pinkie's sudden outburst. "Good point. I'll probably talk to Twilight about it."

"Which one?"

"Probably both, come to think of it."

"I ask because there's one standing right behind you."

Sunset smirked, turning around slowly. "Twilight, why did you sneak up on-"

She was stunned into silence by what met her gaze. It was Twilight, all right. Twilight the pony. Still a pony despite being on Earth. All of her was there, the wings, the horn, the purple fur coat... The eyes...

"Because I wanted to surprise you!" Twilight answered Sunset’s unfinished quesiton, grinning.

Sunset touched Twilight's muzzle with her finger. Fuzzy, a little damp, but definitely solid.

"Uh..." Twilight cocked her head.

Sunset shook her head. "Just...Checking to see if you're real."

Sunset heard a laugh that drew her attention to the small purple reptile on Twilight's back. "We're real, all right. As real as your hanging jaw," Spike said, smirking.

Pinkie giggled.

"You're... Both... Here..." Sunset managed.

"Uh... Yeah?" Twilight said, smile fading. "Is something wrong with that?"

Sunset darted her eyes left and right, scanning the cafeteria. Yep. People were staring. None were afraid - they'd had enough experience with magic mumbo-jumbo to be used to it - but they had a lot of phones out.

"Nothing to see here!" Sunset blurted out suddenly, trying to position herself over Twilight and Spike. "Nothing at all!"

Twilight fumbled with her wings. "Sunset, they know who I am..."

"NOTHING AT ALL!" Sunset grabbed Twilight by the scruff of her neck and ran her out of the cafeteria, checking to make sure Spike stayed on board. Sunset didn't let Pinkie's maniacal laughter deter her. Nor the sounds of cell phone camera apps snapping pictures.

"Sunset what are you-"

"Shush until I get you into a closet," she blurted, kicking the doors of the cafeteria open. She stepped into the well-lit - but abandoned - hall. She turned a sharp corner and tossed Twilight and Spike into a broom closet, slamming the door shut with them inside. She leaned against the door, breathing hard, sliding down to the hall floor.

"Ow..." Spike muttered from behind the door.

"Sunset, why are we in a closet?" Twilight asked.

Sunset took in a breath. "Because you can't just walk around as a pony, Twilight! People were taking pictures!"

"...So? They know me, and it's not like you girls aren't on TV with your fancy powers and dresses. Weren't you in a movie or something?"

Sunset opened her mouth, closed it, grunted, then opened it again. "Look, Cinch is watching us. I've tried to get us to be more careful than before so she doesn't learn too much..."

"...Cinch? Isn't she that incompetent principal who bullied Sparky?"

Sunset took a moment to process Twilight's nickname for her other self. "...Yes."

"Why should we care what she knows?"

"Because she's going to want revenge eventually and the less she knows, the better."

Twilight was silent for a moment. "...Wasn't this still an overreaction, even then?"

"Uh... Yeah. Probably," Sunset admitted. "Maybe I just wanted to have something happen. Or maybe I still haven't processed that you're a pony. Oh my gosh you're a pony how are you a pony Twilight, how!?"

"...Can you let me out of the closet first?"

"Nah, I'll just come in." She opened the closet and shut it behind her. It was pitch black inside. "Huh. Dark."

"No, Really?" Spike said.

Twilight sighed, creating a light with her magic. "Fine, guess we can do it in here to satisfy your baseless and sudden paranoia."

"Thank you," Sunset said. "So, first question. HOW!?"

"Mysterious transdimensional power source and an accompanying adventure," Twilight said.

Sunset blinked. "That...That doesn't help me."

"Maybe you should start from the beginning?" Spike suggested.

"Oh. Okay," Twilight cleared her throat. "It all started with me walking down the hill for no discernible reaso-"

"Stop," Sunset said, holding up a hand. "I know your storytelling voice when I hear it. How many hours will this take?"

"Uh... Four?"

"Five," Spike corrected. "It took seven with me, and that was because we were doing science at the same time."

Sunset shook her head. "Yeah, don't have time for that. Lunch ends in twenty minutes." She lifted up her hand and removed her glove. "Let's do this the fast way. Think of... The story you were telling."

Twilight looked at Sunset's bare hand, confused for a second. Then realization dawned on her face - she glanced at the red crystal pendant hanging around Sunset's neck. "Oh. Got it. Go ahead."

Sunset delicately touched Twilight's forehead with her bare finger. The red crystal sparked, and Sunset was flooded with emotions and images from Twilight - she saw Twilight walking on the hills... She saw the man of light and the enchantress... She saw the ball... She saw the jungle, felt Twilight's barely contained panic... She saw the demons... She saw the Nightmare, the Spirit, and the green crystal...

She slowly retracted her hand. "Woah..." It was a bit much to take in all at once. She raised a hand to keep Twilight from talking while she sorted out her thoughts. Twilight had just uncovered a spell that could travel the worlds easier than the Mirror Portal ever had and she had the power source to activate it. She'd met an alien race that was, frankly, pretty awesome looking. And Twilight was prepared to go looking for more worlds.

Sunset grinned. "Twilight, this is amazing!" She grabbed Twilight by the shoulders, forgetting she wasn't wearing her glove and absorbing a rush of excitement from Twilight, raising her own adrenaline levels even further, making her hyperventilate. "Easy... Easy..." she gasped.

"Probably should put the glove back on," Twilight observed.

"No... Kidding..." Sunset gasped, slipping the glove over her hand. "Yeesh..."

"So yeah!" Twilight grinned. "That's what's up and why I'm here! Just decided to tell you in person since the opportunity arose!"

"If I walked through the portal right now I'd appear in Equestria as a human," Sunset realized.

"Yeah! We might not even need to use the Mirror Portal - I could probably use the energy from your crystal to open my own portal. It doesn't take all that much power to open a gate to Equestria, compared to the jungle anyway. I could probably do it with my own power from here, actually…”

Sunset's pupils contracted. "Twilight... Do you think other you..."

"You mean Sparky?"

"...Yes. Sparky." Sunset rolled her eyes. "Do you think she could... learn this spell?"

"Well, probably, but she isn't exactly skilled at magic and the spell is somewhat complex."

Sunset smirked. "Do you doubt her fidelity with gadgets? She had that locket, remember? She can just make something to cast it for her."

"Well, yes. I could probably store the spell in something like that for her but she'd still need power for going to other places... Oh. Right. Crystal."

Sunset was giddy - most of it was probably just excess excitement from Twilight, but Sunset didn't care about that at the moment. There was something new to do and... well it just felt like she had to be part of this world jumping fiasco. It felt like... A natural evolution of herself.

Couldn't have come at a better time.

"I'm going to go get her so we can do this thing," Sunset said.

"Uh, isn't lunch almost ov-"

Sunset stood tall. "Who cares? Pshaw, this is more important than school! Stay here, I'll be back!" She ran out, closing the closet door behind her. She dash down the hallway, towards the room she knew Twilight/Sparky would be.

Sunset was probably letting Twilight's excitement affect her a bit too much. She noted this, and pushed it out of her mind - there was a goal for her right now. An... adventure. Yes. That was right. Adventure. She was going to throw open the floodgates.

~~~

The Twilight Sparkle known as Sparky was currently in Canterlot High's labroom, an enclosure that had at one point just been a place for chemistry professors to make vain attempts at being cool. Now, however, it was filled with all manner of scientific gadgets thanks in no small part to Sparky herself. Sunset may have started it up, but Sparky, like all good aspiring researchers, had connections. Those connections were more than willing to provide extra funding to a budding science program for a student as full of promise as she was.

Currently, she was experimenting with magic. The purple crystal around her neck glowed slightly as she tapped into its power with her mind, producing a small telekinetic aura around a block of iron. The cube was precisely ten centimeters by ten centimeters by ten centimeters. After she lifted it a full meter off the ground, a disc-shaped device clicked on and absorbed the magic field into itself and displayed the number 71.2. She wrote this number down in her notebook, to be put on a spreadsheet later, at which point she'd run it through a complex series of programs to find any discernable patterns.

Until then she was just going to move onto the next experiment she had running. She glanced at the ocarina she was printing in the brand new 3D printer. The machine was putting the finishing touches on its first printed design, finishing the smooth blue plastic of the woodwind instrument. It was currently on the top... or side... or... Actually, Sparky had no idea if ocarinas really had any directions besides 'put mouthpiece in mouth.' Considering how sideways the mouthpiece was that didn't really help analyzing it in three-dimensional space. She decided she'd need to look at the design on the ocarina's virtual model to see what equations defined it.

Regardless, Sparky stared at it for the two minutes it took to complete. She opened the sleek door of the printer and took the instrument out, tossing it in her hand to test its weight and stability quickly. She'd measure the dimensions and mass accurately a little later, right now she just needed a ballpark estimate to see if everything made sense - which it did. She fed a small piece of string through the side of the mouthpiece and slung it around her neck, just like she'd seen in pictures. Then she brought it to her lips and blew.

The noise that came out was atrocious. It worked though; she just absolutely sucked at it. She looked at it incredulously, wondering if she could either find the time to practice or if she could find some other use for it. Something to think about later - now was the time to take those measurements...

Or it would have been had Sunset not pushed into the room with a frantic smile on her face.

"...Sunset?" Sparky said, concerned.

"Guess what?"

The concern left Sparky instantly. She raised an eyebrow. "Rainbow needs another guitar string?"

"What? No! Well, maybe, but that's not what this is about." She rubbed her hands together rapidly. "Twilight has-"

"-Twinkie-" Sparky corrected automatically.

"...Twinkie has found a way to travel worlds! Worlds other than just Earth and Equestria!"

Sparky glanced at the clock. Thirteen minutes until the next class. If she responded positively to Sunset she was likely to miss said class and probably a few more. There were no exams or tests today as far as she knew so the chances of her grades actually being affected in any way were pretty low, seeing how forgiving Celestia was about absences.

Sparky grabbed her notebook, camera, pens, and assorted devices quickly, stuffing them into her purple laptop bag. She held tightly onto her labcoat and stared right into Sunset's eyes with her own - eyes that were almost identical to a certain purple alicorn's. "When do we leave?"

Sunset grinned. "Glad we're on the same page. That's up to Twil-Twinkie though. Come on, she's in the broom closet."

Sparky blinked. "The broom closet?"

"Oh... I may have been trying to hide her."

"Why?"

"...You can see for yourself. Come oooon!"

"Are you high on excitement again? Did you touch Pinkie?"

"No!" Sunset raised her hand. "Just Twinkie! ...Man, that's a dumb name."

"It's adorable," Sparky countered. "Plus, she likes it."

Sunset shrugged. "Eh... Guess so. Come on." She grabbed Sparky by the hand and ran her across the school to the broom closet. They passed the school's resident 'cool dude' on the way.

"Hi Flash! Bye Flash!" Sunset called, leaving the blue-haired boy rather bewildered at the rapid encounter. He didn't even manage to formulate a response before they were out of his sight.

Sparky was shoved into the closet shortly thereafter and rather unceremoniously flopped onto her pony self's back. "Oh. Twinkie. You're a pony."

"Yep! Amazing, right?"

"I'd say so." She stood up and dusted herself off. "So, Sunset, why are you hiding her?"

Sunset twitched and Spike broke out into laughter.

"What's so funny... Spike?"

Spike managed to nod in agreement with Sparky's greeting but couldn't get any explanation out, he was too busy chuckling. The responsibillity fell to Twinkie. "Oh, just that Sunset hid me because I was a pony, trying not to make a scene or let information fall into the wrong hooves or something. I'm honestly not all that sure."

Sunset sighed. "Fine, you all win, I was being silly.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Can we do the thing now?"

Twinkie raised an eyebrow. "I can't teach or give Sparky the spell like this!"'

"Wait, you want to teach me how to do it!?" Sparky said, grin widening. "I can try, I've been studying those scrolls you sent through and I think I can..."

"You are not versed in higher spellcasting Sparky, sorry," Twinkie apologized. "You'd need to use one of your machines to unleash the spell, or at least something similar."

Sparky was already drawing up plans in her mind on how to create the device she would use to capture the spell and activate it over and over again. Something similar to the magic disc device she had, but with a power input valve so she could use her own power on it, and of course a safety mechanism...

"Uh... Sparky?"

"Sorry, just... thinking up designs."

Twinkie grinned. "Great! We’re part way there. But that'll take time. You'd have to design it, I'd have to distill the spell down, and I'm pretty sure Sunset doesn't want me to spend all day in the lab here."

Sparky's eyes widened. "C-can we go to Equestria to do it?"

Twinkie smiled. "Yes. Yes, we can. Let’s see if I really can open this connection with my magic…” Her horn flared up and she cast the spell to connect directly to Equestria. She tore a hole in the fabric of reality similar to the one she had torn a day ago in a far removed jungle, though this one was considerably smaller and cost significantly less power to open, small enough that she could generate it on her own. Light poured into the closet from a world of green hills, blue sky, magic aura, and crystal castles.

The three girls stared at the bright light, blinking as their senses adjusted.

Spike sighed. "Well, I'm going through." He hopped into Equestria. "You coming?"

Twinkie shrugged, entering her world with a flap of her wings. Sunset stepped through next, looking at the world with an expression of nostalgia.

Sparky came out last, stepping slowly, legs shaking. This new world felt different to her - and it was more than just the unrealistically bright landscape, more than the somehow 'off' sun, more than the magic crystal castle nearby. The substance of this world was different. Was the gravity slightly altered? Were physics somewhat different? Was it just the magic?

She didn't know.

All she knew was that it was amazing and a little overwhelming. She'd always just accepted that there was another world through the Mirror Portal that had ponies in it. How had her scientific mind never fully realized the implications about that? Never asked the questions? Never told her to come here?

She stood in abject awe a full minute and twenty seconds before she started snapping pictures and taking notes. "My gosh why didn't we do this sooner?"

Sunset rolled her eyes. "You were nervous about, and I quote 'my molecules being torn apart and re-arranged by some unknown force through unknown means with unknown side effects'!"

"Oh. Right." She blushed.

"Hey, don't worry, we're all here..." She blinked. "Hey, is that Lyra over there?" she said, pointing down the street towards Ponyville proper.

Twinkie's eyes suddenly flew wide open. "Hide."

"Huh?" Sunset said, bewildered.

"Hide! Lyra's crazy about human conspiracies!"

"Twilight I don't really think-"

Twilight teleported herself and the humans into the foyer of her castle, startling the unicorn who happened to be standing there, Rarity. "Oh! Uh... Sunset? What a surprise! And uh... Are you Twilight, or... Oh my..." She put a hoof to her mouth, glancing back and forth between the purple alicorn and the purple human.

"...Rarity?" Sparky gawked.

"...Sparky, right?" Rarity waved gracefully, regaining her composure quickly. "Welcome to Equestria. What brings you here?"

"Twinkie's paranoia."

Rarity stifled a laugh at the absurd nickname. "Well, that's certainly how she is all right. What was it this time?"

Twinkie rolled her eyes. "Lyra's here."

Rarity raised an eyebrow. "Why is that a problem? She's such a nice mare."

"Humans, Rarity. Humans. Right in front of you,” she said like this explained everything.

"Dear, there's nothing to worry about. I'm sure she'd love to meet these two."

"Oh, you think everything will be fine... It won't be. Spike will be distracting her now, but I'm not sure if that'll last."

Sparky winced. "Poor Spike..."

"Yeah. Sorry, we're going to have to cut the tour short, get you two back before she-"

Sunset put a finger to Twinkie’s muzzle. "Shhhhhh. We'll be fine."

"This is not the time to get on my case for calling you paranoid!"

"Yes. Yes it is."

Sparky giggled. "Hey, Lyra!" She called outside. "Come on in! Got some people for you to meet!"

"Celestia save us..." Twinkie muttered.

~~~

Less than a minute ago, Spike had walked up to Lyra, a minty green unicorn with a lyre upon her flank. “Hey, Lyra, what brings you here?”

Lyra bit her lip. “I… I need to talk to Twilight about a… problem.”

Spike raised an eyebrow. “Did you and Bon Bon have a fight?”

“Oh no, Bon Bon and I are fine! It’s just…” Lyra sighed. “I’d like to talk to Twilight, okay?”

“Well, she’s a little busy, but I’m sure she can-“

“Hey, Lyra!” Twilight called. ”Come on in! Got some people for you to meet!”

Spike groaned inwardly. Lyra raised an eyebrow at him. “…Should I not go in?”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to answer that question until I see your reaction.”

Lyra blinked. “Well, that’s certainly an odd response.”

“You’ll understand in about ten seconds. Come on.” Spike led her to the front doors and threw them open. “Tah-dah, be amazed!”

Lyra’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped.

“Hi!” Sparky said, getting down on one knee. “I’m Twilight Sparkle. Not the Twilight you know, but-“

Lyra did not let her finish her introduction. “HUMAN!” She shrieked, her previously frowning face turning into a stupid grin. She flung her front hooves wide and tackle hugged Sparky. “OHMYGOSH A HUMAN!”

Twinkie turned to Sunset and raised an incredulous eyebrow. Sunset just kept grinning at her.

“Uh… Yeah, I’m a human!” Sparky said, trying in vain to pry the minty unicorn off her. “And I hear your name is Lyra!”

“YOU KNOW MY NAME! The texts were right, you know everything...”

“…What?”

Lyra stared into Sparky’s eyes. “Tell me the secret of the seven-sided chest.”

Sunset shrugged. “Lyra, we don’t know anything about any seven-sided chest.”

Lyra stared into Sunset’s eyes with a grin that was somehow both stupid and terrifying. “If you exist, that means I was right! I was right all along! You can’t hide the truth from me anymore! I will find out what really happened at Tartarus’s Inception, you can bet your bottom bit on it! Now tell me!”

Rarity blinked. “…I’m going to leave you dears to this, it looks like you have quite a bit to-“

“Oh no you don’t,” Twinkie said. “You’re going to stay right here and suffer through this like the rest of us.”

“I’d hardly call this suffering…”

Lyra interrupted the train of thought again. “Enough talking about normal things. Human-Twilight, I need to know what your people did…”

Sunset facepalmed. “Humans don’t exist on Equestria, Lyra. We come from another world entirely.”

“Aha! I knew it! You’re all aliens from another planet!” She cackled. “Brilliant deduction, Heartstrings!”

Sunset chuckled a little. “Actually, I used to be a pony. But yeah, Sparky here’s an alien. We’ve got a magic mirror and everything.”

Lyra stared closer at the human in her hooves. “…Why is your world concerned with ours? Why have you altered our history? I need answers!”

Sparky blinked, face straight. “…We didn’t know your world existed until a couple years ago.”

“I’m sure Starswirl had some contacts when he forged the mirror,” Twinkie said.

“No, this comes from before Starswirl!” Lyra wailed. “Ancient humans! We have legends about you all from long before ponies had even formed the three tribes! They were the authors of our world, the builders of our society-“

Twinkie sighed. “This is why I thought this was a bad idea.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “I happen to be enjoying this.”

“Hey!” Lyra interrupted. “Answer my questions!”

Sparky squirmed. “Lyra, if we were somehow in your world all those thousands of years ago, we don’t remember it. It’s just not likely!”

Twinkie nodded. “Yeah, those legends were probably based off the Handmaid, since there was no way humans could have been here before Starswirl made the mirrors.”

Lyra stood up and shook her head, releasing a thankful Sparky. “No… No you’re wrong!”

Sunset knelt down to be level with Lyra. “Lyra… Rarely is anything as it seems, or as you have believed for so long.”

“I… But you don’t understand, I’ve been researching the human myth most of my life! They existed way back then! How do we have records of the name ‘human’ from that far back if they didn’t exist?”

Sunset frowned. “I… I don’t know. I never studied ancient world history that well. But you have to be willing to accept that things are not as you think they are. We sure don’t know about your ancient humans.”

Lyra sat down, dour. “Well… This is disappointing.”

Sparky stretched her back to make sure it was okay from Lyra’s death-grip. “It’s fine, really. I’m admittedly a little interested myself why you have legends about humans.”

“Oh, we have the best legends about humans! Once, long ago, a tribe of ponies and other races lived in Tartarus, sealed from the world above by a terrible magic wrought by the demons of the past. But then a human child fell into Tartarus and led them all to freedom! …Well, in one version of the story at least, the one I like. In others, the human kills them all to ensure the dominance of humanity."

Sparky blinked. “…Morbid. Though I guess ancient legends tend to be. We have ones where a wolf eats a kid and she has to be cut out. Rather… Gorey.”

“…I always liked that story,” Sunset said out of the blue. Noticing the strange looks she was getting, she put her hand behind her head. “I also liked Hansel and Gretel!”

“…They cooked the witch, Sunset. In her own oven.”

Sunset raised a finger to protest, but Rarity shushed her. “Just face it dear, you’re a girl with a penchant for morbid stories. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“But-“

“No buts Sunset, you are who you are. Accept it!”

Sunset hung her head. “…I like explosive and violent things. Sometimes.”

“Hrm?”

“…Almost all of the time. It’s not something I’m proud of!”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “I just said it was nothing to be ashamed of. While those of your ilk aren’t all that common, there’s still merit in the way you hold yourselves. The world needs warriors, just like it needs ponies with an eye for the finer things.”

Lyra blinked. “I am learning so much about human culture…”

“Pony, remember?” Sunset said.

“You’re a human right now. …I need a notebook.”

Spike raised a claw. “We’ve got plenty!”

Twinkie twitched. “Spike!”

Lyra grinned. “Where are these notebooks!?”

Spike pointed to a nearby bookshelf, one of many many places notebooks could be found in this castle. Lyra grabbed it hastily, along with a nearby pen. She clicked the pen several times in her magic. “Okay! Let’s get this show on the road! More culture! Hit me with it!”

Sparky blinked. “Well, I can’t really give a good survey of our culture…”

“…I can,” Sunset said, a grin appearing on her face. “I’ve lived among the humans for almost four years now. I can give you a very interesting look at the way they tick, Lyra. It will, of course, take several hours to explain in full, and require a lot of tangents and random factoids, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it!”

Lyra’s eyes twinkled while Twinkie’s became crestfallen. “Sunset… We really don’t have time for that…”

“We have all the time!” Lyra shouted.

“Actually, I don’t think you do,” Spike said. “Didn’t you have a problem?”

Lyra’s cheerful expression suddenly dropped. “Oh… Right… Twilight?”

“Yes?” Sparky and Twinkie said.

“The princess,” Lyra said, walking up to Twinkie. “I… I have a problem.”

Twinkie raised an eyebrow. ”Fight with Bon Bon?”

“Why does everyone assume that? No, it’s…” She glanced at the two humans, the dragon, and the unicorn standing around them. “Uh…”

Twinkie spread her wings. “Can you all wait outside, please? Lyra needs a word with me in private.”

Sunset nodded, quickly leading everyone else outside without a word. Soon only Lyra and Twinkie stood in the hall. Lyra sighed. “So, you know the Canterlot gang?”

“Yeah. Did something happen between you and one of them?”

“Lemon Drops.”

Twinkie smiled at the memory of the yellow mare, one of her and Lyra’s mutual childhood friends. “Ah, her. What’s up with you and her?”

“Well… I was talking to her about my human theories. I’d never shared them with her before! Don’t know why I never did – I did with both Moondancer and Minuette a long time ago. Moondancer actually gave me most of my human legend books!”

“That explains a lot.”

Lyra chuckled. “Yeah, a bit. But when I started explaining things to Lemon she got… Angry. Screamed at me for being stupid and… stomped off back to Canterlot. And… Well, you’re her friend and the Princess of Friendship, I figured you might know what that was about.”

Twinkie frowned. “…No… I have no idea why she’d act so negatively. This sounds like more than… annoyance at your antics.”

Lyra smirked. “Twi, if I cared about ponies being annoyed, I’d’ve stopped being a human conspiracy theorist years ago. This was different. She was angry. Not even Moondancer got angry at me for this. Fed up? Yeah. Frustrated? Oooooh yes. But never angry.”

Twinkie nodded. “…Looks like we need to go on a trip then. Can’t let hurt feelings like this stew for too long. Come on, we’re going to Canterlot.”

Lyra raised an eyebrow. “But what about your… visitors?”

Twinkie furrowed her brow. “I guess I could bring them along…”

Lyra laughed. “Humans? Out in the open? That won’t cause a scene, nope, not at all.”

Twinkie smirked. “I can always just turn them into ponies. …You know what, that’s one of the best ideas I’ve had all day. Do you care if they join us?”

“I mean, no? I just don’t want Lemon to be mad because they exist.”

“I gotcha.” She and Lyra left the castle, stepping outside to meet up with the others. Sparky was currently talking to Rarity about differences in fashion while Sunset and Spike were talking about fire. “Hey guys! We’re going to Canterlot.”

“…Like this?” Sunset said.

“No,” Twinkie said. “Sparky, you okay with becoming a pony?”

Sparky’s jaw dropped. “…I mean, let me think about it, it’ll rearrange my molecules and have an unknown number of side effects, and it wouldn't be the natural modification we went through l-“

“She’s fine, cast the spell,” Sunset said.

“Sunset I did not say I was fi-“

Twinkie cast the spell anyway, transforming the two of them into ponies – unicorns to be exact. Sunset stretched the familiar legs of her old body and smiled, noting that they had boots instead of gloves. “Been a while…” She glanced at her brilliant solar cutie mark, still bright upon her flank. She lit her horn, creating a fireball in midair. “Yep, I’ve still got it.”

“You going to burn something?” Spike asked.

“I’m not a pyromaniac!”

“I sense lies.”

“No, really! Just because fire is my thing does not mean I like to burn everything. Come on!”

There was a thump behind them that interrupted their conversation. Sparky had just landed flat on her face, glasses falling into the grass. “…Observation: four legs does not make it easier to stand as hypotheses would suggest.”

Lyra chuckled. “Can’t handle the hooves?”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. "Sparky, you were a unicorn during spring break, you didn't have too much of a problem then."

Sparky considered this. "More evidence that this transformation isn't natural... I feel like an eternal hunchback."

“A what?”

“Have Pinkie show you sometime. It’s creepy,” Twinkie said. “I’m curious…Do you have more magic now that you’re a unicorn and have the crystal?”

Sparky focused her energy into her horn, lighting it up. She tried to lift a nearby rock and instead condensed it into a fine powder. “…I’d say so. Holy cow.”

“Holy… cow?” Lyra said.

“Expression,” Sunset explained. “Twinkie, you have an airship right?”

“Yeah?”

“To Canterlot then!”

~~~

Sparky, Twinkie, Sunset, and Lyra all sat in the basket of Twinkie’s ‘airship’.

It was a hot air balloon in the shape of her face.

“Question,” Sunset said. “How can you be a princess and not have a personal airship?”

“I do! It’s… Just at Canterlot all the time!” Twinkie smiled sheepishly. “Only big cities have full airship docks!”

“Ponyville needs to hurry up and grow,” Lyra said. “Get more modern fun stuff. No offense to Pinkie, but sometimes I want to go out for something a little fancier than baked goods.”

Pinkie poked her head out from under the basket. “I heard that!” Then she vanished.

Lyra shivered. “…There are no secrets from her…”

Twinkie shook her head. “No… Rainbow Dash successfully lied to her for years about, of all things, pies.”

“Question,” Sparky said. “…Pies?”

“Long story. One that Rainbow Dash should probably tell you, actually, not me. Besides, we’re at Canterlot.”

The glorious capital of Equestria was a true feat of pony engineering. Built onto the side of a tall mountain, numerous levels of pearly-white city hung over the valley below. Hundreds of buildings weaved in and out of the numerous levels, entering and exiting the mountain itself, winding up towards the largest structure in the city by far. The castle was an awe-inspiring work of art with dozens of yellow-tipped minarets scraping the sky. Gardens flourished in the brilliant sun of the day and pegasi flew all around the complex structures, casting fleeting shadows on the lands below.

“This looks nothing like the cities back home…” Sparky observed, adjusting her glasses. She took out her phone to take a picture – but it slipped out of her hooves. “My phone!”

Sunset teleported it back with her magic. “There you go.”

“…How do you ponies hold anything with hooves?” Sparky said, snapping a picture using her magic to hold the phone.

“Traction theory,” Twinkie said. “There’s a faint magical field that exists on all pony hooves that allows us to hold objects. It’s unwieldy and far inferior to your hands, but it works well enough.”

Lyra raised an eyebrow. “…I always just thought they kinda held things. Never bothered to think if it was weird or not.”

Twinkie smirked. “You were focused on other things.”

“Still am. Those ancient humans were a thing. I’m telling you.”

Twinkie rolled her eyes. “Riiiiight. Regardless, I’m taking us down…” She guided the balloon to a flat area of the city, behind the castle so as not to draw unwanted attention. The four of them hopped out like large rabbits, glancing around the city with mixed expressions of wonder, nostalgia, nervousness, and amusement. “Lyra, I uh… Don’t remember where Lemon’s house is,” Twilight admitted.

Lyra rolled her eyes. “This way. When we get there, Sparky, Sunset, you might want to hang back a bit, k?”

Sunset nodded. “Of course.”

Sparky agreed absentmindedly – she was busy staring at the society around her. Ponies of all three kinds lived here, though there was a visibly higher concentration of unicorns. She watched them go about their lives, particularly fascinated by the many many restaurants they passed, including someplace that made her think ‘Indian’, even though there was no way India existed here. The food smelled so good…

She took a picture and tore her nose away, allowing herself to take in other sights. Guard ponies patrolled the areas with stern expressions and rigid postures. Sparky found it odd that most of them were male in an obviously female-dominated society, but didn’t question it openly. “So… This is your capital.”

“Yeah,” Sunset said. “Pretty cool huh?”

“I have to admit, it looks like it was designed with artistic aesthetic in mind, rather than functionality...”

“It’s really, really old,” Twinkie admitted. “The lower levels are newer, built less with art in mind, and there are several sections of the city inside the mountain.”

Sparky noted this in her book. “Celestia rules from here?”

“Both Celestia and Luna, as equals. Legally, Cadence and I have the same say, but in practice they do all the actual ruling.”

“Huh. I wish Principal Celestia was the president.”

Sunset let out an annoyed sigh. “You and me both.”

“Hey, that’s the problem with electing your leaders,” Twinkie commented.

Lyra shook her head. “They elect their princesses!?”

“Well, they don’t have immortals over there. Or magic. Because of that, there are no wise rulers who can live forever. Invariably kings, queens, princesses, princes… All will pass away, and less altruistic leaders take their place.”

“Woah… Kinda like how we elect mayors?”

“Yeah. Actually, exactly like that. They just do it all the way to the top.”

“That’s pretty weird!”

Sunset gave Sparky a knowing look.

“Okay, fine! I was biased!” Sparky threw her hooves in the air – and fell over. “Ow…”

Twinkie helped her up. “You okay?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“We’re here,” Lyra said, walking up to the door of a very yellow house seamlessly placed among other similar houses, forming a bit of a house wall. Twinkie followed close behind her while Sunset and Sparky stayed behind.

Sparky looked to Sunset. “Okay, my observations about this world. One: you never told me enough about it. Two: these ponies are far too colorful and happy all the time about everything. Three: can we go get a bite to eat at that Indian place?”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “It’s not ‘Indian,’ but sure. Though I don’t think I have any bits on me…”

“Oh…”

Sunset smirked. “Twinkie – still feels odd to say that – can pay for us. We just have to wait for her to deal with-“

“GET OUT!”

Sunset and Sparky swiveled their heads back to the front door. Lyra was thrown out the front door – caught by Twinkie’s telekinesis before she could hit the ground. Sparky couldn’t see who Twinkie was talking to, but Twinkie’s expression was rather angry.

“Lemon, that was uncalled for.”

“Twilight, I’d appreciate it if you left.”

Twinkie shook her head. “As both your and Lyra’s friend, I can’t just let this be. I want to know what’s going on.”

“She’s bat-hoof crazy that’s what’s wrong!”

“…And this is news?”

Lyra raised a hoof. “Yeah, okay, maybe the calling me crazy all the time is a little irksome.”

“Shut up,” Lemon spat.

Lyra obliged. Twinkie didn’t. “Lemon, I need to know what’s going on-“

“What’s going on is that Lyra’s crazy and I don’t want to hear about it!”

“I’m sure Lyra will agree not to talk about it if we just know why, Lemon.”

Lemon twitched. “Twilight, just go. Please.”

Sunset sighed, walking up to the front door.

“Who are you?” Lemon muttered.

“I’m Sunset.” She removed one of her front boots. “And I’m going to figure this out.” She touched Lemon on the shoulder, and the red pendant glowed…

Sunset saw what Lemon remembered. She saw a stallion – obviously Lemon’s father – digging into ancient tomes, his long beard draped over the texts.

“Dad?” A young Lemon asked. “Watcha lookin’ at?”

“Legends of the ancient humans!” He chuckled. “Did you know, long ago, that ape-like creatures ruled the world?”

“Really?”

“Yes, after the age of demons was the age of man, an apparently brilliant age. We don’t know much about them because they left only scant traces behind, but we know they existed!”

“…I thought things that far back were just legends?”

“Oh, I suppose Tartarus is a legend then?” he asked with a chuckle.

“I dunno. I’ve never seen it!”

“I have. Went there myself when I was younger. It really is full of terrible creatures – but also a really friendly dog.”

“Cerberus! You’ve told me the story before!”

“Have I? I suppose my memory fails me then…” He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I’m studying these ancient texts and I think I may be onto something. Starswirl’s encounter with the Sirens – I told you about that a week ago – was a wild goose chase. There probably is no Mirror. I found something greater. In the land of Tauryl, there are great towering relics older than time itself.”

“Tauryl? Never heard of it!”

“It’s the land of centaurs and gargoyles, the homeland of the great sorcerer Tirek. I’m thinking of planning a trip there, to see if I can find the humans.”

“Can I come along?”

“Sorry little Lemon, a bit too dangerous for you. But I’ll be sure to bring back souvenirs!”

Sunset took in a deep, pained breath. She knew what was coming. Lemon’s memory blurred to her sitting on the porch of her house, looking at the street. Waiting for her father to come back. Days passed. Lemon the filly eventually gained her cutie mark and grew into a mare, still staring out the front door for her father. The stallion who never came back…

More years passed. Lemon got her own house – this one. Still, many days she would sit by a window and stare at the road, wondering.

Sunset pulled back from Lemon, shaking her head. “I am so sorry.”

“Did… Did you just apologize for going into my head?”

“No,” Sunset asserted. “You needed somepony to go into your head since you weren’t yourself. Lemon… You’ve been holding onto this for too long.” She slipped her boot back on.

“I…”

“You’re mad at the mystery of the humans for taking your father from you. And you don’t want to face that – so you get angry. You fight back…” Sunset realized something in that moment, chuckling. “...I’m guilty of that too. I don’t want to think about my future, so I either get angry or dismiss it. It’s something a lot of ponies do.”

Lemon looked at Sunset, baffled by how she was acting.

Twinkie smiled. “What Sunset’s trying to say is that, sometimes, we need to think about things to move forward, not push them out of our minds. The best way to do that is talk about it.”

There were tears in Lemon’s eyes. “I haven’t seen him in decades…”

“And I’m not going to say he could come back. I am going to say you can move on.” She hugged her. “You can talk to Lyra and I. Neither of us are here to corrupt your memory. We could even call Moondancer, Twinkleshine, and Minuette, if you want.”

“I… don’t want to drag them into this.”

“It’s not a question of want, Lemon. It’s a question of if you need more friends with you.”

Lemon sniffed. “I… Don’t know.”

“Then… How about you just start by telling the story of your father? Don’t worry about us, or what we think, or even about the humans. Just tell it.”

Lemon looked at Sunset. “…She already knows.”

Sunset shook her head. “I don’t know how you need it to be told.”

Lemon nodded. “…Yes. You… You’re right. He… Well, I don’t know what his childhood was like, but his adult life was full of adventures…”

And she told her story.

~~~

After it had become clear the story would last several more hours, they moved to the ‘Indian’ restaurant, which turned out to have the rather uninspired name of the Tasty Treat. What it lacked in creative names it more than made up for in food. Twinkie, Lyra, and Lemon were sitting at one table, leaving Sunset and Sparky alone at another.

Sparky looked at Twinkie, a faraway look in her eyes.

“…What is it?”

“She really is amazing, isn’t she? World leader, diplomat, magical scientist, librarian…”

Sunset smiled. “She is, isn’t she?”

“I’m just… some kid with a phone and a magic necklace.”

“Twi… You’re so much more than that. You’re a genius.”

“Yes, but I’ll never amount to what she is.”

Sunset smirked. “How does ‘dimensional traveler’ sound to you?”

“But she’s already that too…”

“Ah, but she’s new, just like you. You could both start on this path and find something different. A bit of… competition.”

Sparky rolled her eyes. “We both know you’re the leader, not me.”

“Who says the glory has to go to the leader?”

“Why does there have to be glory at all?”

“Cause it’s fun,” Sunset said. “Doesn’t have to be diabolical, you know.”

“I guess so. Do you really want to start our own dimensional exploration thing? I mean, we aren’t that experienced.”

“We have powers, we have skills, and we have something they don’t have – science. Or, more accurately, technology. They have to expend a lot of effort to make something like an iPhone. We have billions of them around. We’re not advantage-less.”

Sparky nodded. “We better ask principal Celestia for a new club then.”

“No doubt.”

“What kinds of worlds do you think we might find?”

Sunset grinned. “A world made entirely of donuts. I’m placing my bets.”

“I’d be curious to find a world that exists only in two dimensions! Or four dimensions!”

“A place where there are no men at all!”

Sparky shot Sunset a look. “That’s impossible.”

“You won’t know until you find one!”

“I… That’s… …That’s right. By that logic, there may be a world identical to this one, except you never get the idea to travel to other worlds. And you will, by chance, never travel there.”

Sunset blinked. “…Wow, we really don’t understand anything about this, do we?”

“Nope.”

Sunset grinned. “That makes it really exciting!”

“You bet it does!”

They hoofbumped for no particular reason.

“What are you two planning?” Twinkie asked from her table.

“Nothing you need to be concerned with! Yet!” Sunset responded, chuckling.

“I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying.”

“You don’t have to! We just want the dimension-hopping spell you were going to give us anyway.”

Lemon blinked. “…Dimension hopping?”

Lyra shrugged. “I dunno what they're talking about. But I might want to find out.”

Twinkie shrugged. “Maybe eventually. Right now, we don’t even know what we’re doing. But in the future… Who knows? We might have a big national production.”

“Yeah. Who knows?” Sunset laughed. Of course, that was just wishful thinking. There was no way this thing would get that big.

~~~

Pinkie the human (or at least a Pinkie who was a human at this moment) stood in front of the Mirror Portal, tapping her foot impatiently.

Sunset, Sparky, and Twinkie walked through the portal as ponies.

Pinkie shook her head. “You know, for being ‘Ponies on Earth’ you didn’t spend all that much time on Earth!”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “Sure, Pinkie. …Hey, I’m still a unicorn. Huh.”

“I can change you back, somewhat easily,” Twinkie reminded her.

“Wonder if there’s a way to keep my horn…” Sunset mused.

“That’s something to wonder about later, right now we need to get the spell in your hands. Er… hooves.”

Sparky chuckled – and tripped over her hooves again. “Ow.”

Sunset laughed. Then she looked around nervously. “You know…”

“Sunset, you have nothing to worry about,” Twinkie said. “It’s not like there’s a bunch of people spying on us, waiting for the right moment to strike.”

Pinkie rolled her eyes. “Yeah. That’d be silly.” Nopony noticed her sarcasm, they just walked into the school, prepared to make a scene. Pinkie shrugged, following them and preparing a party at the same time.

Of course, they were being watched. But it wasn’t by Cinch – or anyone associated with Cinch in any way. A woman dressed in all black stood at the window of a nearby apartment complex, binoculars in her hand. Her skin, purple; her hair, red; her face, scarred over the right eye. She slowly lowered her binoculars as her targets left her sights.

She pulled out a phone, dialing a government number.

“They’re definitely ponies,” she said.

“Good work agent Shadow! I assume there’s more information since you’re actually calling. Did you figure out how their portal works?”

“No. I have discovered that, normally, their kind can use magic naturally, through their horns.”

“Woah, so they’re unicorns? How… interesting. I bet they can do some pretty awesome things in their world!”

“That remains to be seen. Do I move through the portal?”

“Only you can make the call if it’s time for that.”

“…For now, I will just keep watch on this Sunset. She shows promise.”

“You do that. Welp, it’s Friday, time to give the office its weekly cake. Don’t disappoint me, agent Shadow.”

“I won’t,” she said, hanging up.

Agent Tempest Shadow took one more look at Canterlot High before ducking out of sight. No one knew she had ever been there.

009 - Visiting Hours Have Begun

Twilight’s entry hall had never looked so regal in all its history of occupation. She’d never bothered with the official banners of Equestria before, nor had she gone all out on ordering tables. Usually, she wasn’t entertaining the leaders of a handful of different worlds – the regular simple stuff wasn’t going to cut it. Instead she had procured carefully furnished oak tables covered in intricately embroidered tablecloths. There were numerous images of famous smiling Equestrian figures, even a picture of Starswirl, bell-adorned hat and all. The Mirror Portal itself had been moved from its secluded space to the honored position at the base of the stairway, facing the front doors. The lighting glinted off it at a pristine angle.

In other words, the hall was amazing.

Twilight looked at her two decorators with a look of utter panic. “What if it’s not good enough!? What if some of them consider smiles condescending and insulting?! What if having images of historical figures who are still alive is bad form!? AUGH!”

Rarity and Pinkie stared at Twilight with raised eyebrows.

“It could happen!”

Rarity continued staring at her.

“Hey, there have been more than a few times where I’ve messed up with these things, okay? I don’t want today to be one of those times! Celestia’s coming here to see what we’ve been doing and it has to look great or… Or…”

“Or what?” Pinkie asked.

“I don’t know! Something! A planet could explode!”

Pinkie giggled.

“It could happen!”

“My, is there an echo?” Rarity wondered aloud.

Twilight spread her wings, flustered. “Look, I get that I may look a little paranoid right now…”

“May?”

Twilight ignored the question. “…but the thing is we don’t know what the other cultures are like all that well! We always visit them – they never visit us! We’re weirded out by them all the time! They could get angry!”

Pinkie grabbed Twilight by the cheeks. “Twilight, calm down. Remember who’s running this thing behind the scenes. That’s right, me, the number one party pony. I’ll keep everything under control at all times. Trust me.”

“I… Pinkie you’re a little-“

“Shoosh. Trust Twilight. Truuuuuuust.”

“Uh… Okay. I’ll trust you Pinkie.”

“Good, cause you won’t see much of me. Behind the sceeeenes, remember?” She mysteriously walked backward behind a potted plant. Twilight didn’t need to investigate to know she was gone.

“…Right. Pinkie’s got this. All I have to worry about is making sure everybody doesn’t want to kill each other and to get everyone to agree to sit down and talk oh Celestia that’s a lot to worry about.”

Rarity sighed. “Twilight, dear, if you’re nervous and flakey like this all those things are more likely to happen.”

“We’re doomed!”

“Twilight Sparkle! Get a handle on yourself! You are a Princess and you need to hold yourself with dignity for the visitors!”

Twilight was startled into silence by Rarity’s sudden fire.

“Better, but you look a little too terrified.”

Twilight whimpered.

Rarity sighed. “If it makes you feel better, you’ll never be alone. Fluttershy, Starlight, and I will all be here. Not to mention most of the people coming are friends. You don’t need to feel afraid of them.”

“I know. I know… I know…”

Starlight walked out of the Mirror Portal. Twilight screamed at the sudden addition of a pony to the room, falling onto her back. Starlight blinked, ignoring Twilight’s outburst and instead noting the Mirror Portal’s new location. “Huh, moved it for the meeting then? Is that why it wasn’t on the same tree?”

“Probably,” Rarity said. “Dear, what is that you’re holding?”

Starlight glanced at the flat, electronic device in her hoof. “Souvenir.”

“Interesting. Meet anyone new?”

“I was just on another Earth, nothing special. Turns out that Sunset never turned good. Had to run quickly.” She snickered. “Turns out she really doesn’t understand that four legs are faster than two. She also forgot I had a horn!” She gently tapped her horn with the screen.

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Yet another escapade. Don’t go anywhere else for the moment, the meeting will start soon.”

“Augh! SOON!” Twilight said, shooting back up to alert and ready. “Are we all certain everything’s fine? Are we?”

“No,” Fluttershy said, walking into the hall. “But, really, should we be? That’d just ruin the experience. I may think Discord’s distracted for the next few hours, but can I really know?”

“Oh no. If he comes in…”

“Twilight, the point is not to panic. The point is to realize you can’t watch everything, you can’t stop time, you just have to go with what you can see. And I think the castle looks fit for a royal banquet, by the way.”

“This isn’t a banquet!”

Fluttershy put her wing over her face. “Twilight…”

“She’ll be like this until the meeting actually starts,” Starlight said. “Then instinct will kick in and she’ll perform amazingly like the Princess she is.”

“Why are you all so confident in my abilities!?” Twilight blurted.

“Because they usually come through,” Rarity said.

Twilight groaned. “Why…”

Fluttershy patted her gently on the back. “There there… It’ll be fun, you’ll see. You’ll be worried and then you’ll be talking to Mlinx and introducing him to Queen Luna and-“

Sunset and human Twilight walked out of a portal of their own creation. Fluttershy screamed and fell on top of pony Twilight.

“Oh. Hi Sparky, Sunset,” Rarity said. “Decide to drop by after all?”

Sunset grimaced, the portal popping shut behind her. “Only for a little while. It’s technically early morning on Earth and today is the first day of classes at Wolfe University. So I will have to abandon you all.”

“Aw...” Starlight said. “I was looking forward to hanging out again.”

“Sorry, got another life. Not to mention all the sushi… So much sushi…”

Sparky raised an eyebrow. “I thought you loved your job and it was Iroh’s training sessions that drained you.”

“Can’t they both?” Sunset said, chuckling tiredly. “Why did I ask him to teach me…”

“Because you like using fire and it fulfills a part of you that you didn’t realize was missing.”

“When I ask a silly question, assume I don’t want a poetic answer.”

Sparky winked. “Oh, really?”

The pony Twilight – Twinkie – finally managed to stand up. “Well, it looks like you two are the first to arrive. Ambassadors from Earth!”

“Ambassador. Single,” Sunset pointed at Sparky. “I don’t have any claim to Earth.”

“It’s still a check off the guest list!” Twilight said, marking her guest checklist. She decided to read it off. “Let’s see… The demons, the ponies of Lai, the Elemental Nations… Those are all who I expect to show up actually. Ardent, the Binaries, and the mushroom people got invitations but I don’t think they’ll listen. We’ll set the Mirror Portal to them anyway, see if anyone’s there.”

“Aren’t you forgetting someponies?” a new voice questioned.

“Who-“ Twinkie paled. “Riiiiiiiight.” She turned around, soon face to face with the royal sisters Celestia and Luna. Celestia’s flowing, magical mane of pastel colors contrasted with her darker sister’s starry mane. Luna herself was of a slightly shorter stature than Celestia, though she still towered above all normal ponies. Images of the moon adorned her regalia and her eyes were a wise, sharp cyan.

Twilight folded her ears back and smiled nervously. “Sorry Princesses, I guess I didn’t think I needed you on the list…?”

Luna rolled her eyes. “It is no problem, Twilight Sparkle, my sister is just giving you a hard time.”

Celestia chuckled. “Oh, Luna, don’t ruin it! I could have drawn that out for a few more minutes at least.”

Sunset tried to look interested in one of the banners on the wall. She tried to look very interested. So interested that Celestia wouldn’t ever try to bother her-

“My, that’s quite an interesting banner, is it not?”

Darn it.

Sunset laughed nervously. “Why, yes, yes it is, I should congratulate the designer!”

“Here,” Rarity said.

“Yes! Good job Rarity! How great!”

“Sunset…” Celestia said.

“Yes…….?” Sunset gulped, turning around slowly.

“We should have lunch sometime.”

“…Okay?”

Celestia smirked. “Good. Tomorrow. Noon. Be late at your own risk.”

“Eheheheheheh… Wait! I might have classes then-“

“I’ll just come to Earth then, eat lunch with you there.”

Sunset paled. “I…”

“Is there a problem with that?”

“…No…”

“Good. Pleasure to see you again.” With a bemused expression on her face, she walked off to the stairway. As soon as she was out of sight Sparky burst into laughter.

“You are terrified of her!”

“I mean, I know she's forgiven me and everything, but I don't really see her that often and there's still a lot of history between us an-"

“I’m sure the lunch will go fine,” Twinkie offered. “Also, Sparky, do not call the Firelord the Fireguy, okay?”

“Oh no… is that a cultural insult?!” Sparky gasped.

“I don’t know! It might be!”

“How many cultural rules do you think we break just by standing around normally!?”

“I DON’T KNOW!”

Luna blinked. “…Mother of… They’re reinforcing each other.”

“Run,” Starlight said. “Run while you still can.”

“This is far too fascinating to flee from.”

Sparky and Twinkie shot Luna a look. She just fixed them with a knowing smile. “I may not be my sister, but even I have to admit at certain times the difficulty of others is… amusing.”

Twilight and Sparky groaned. “They just don’t understand us…”

~~~

In a dense jungle not far removed from the crystal castle, a different Luna paced.

“Are you sure this is the right tree?”

Siron shrugged, leaning against a large flower, slowly eating it petal by petal. “I have never seen it. I could not say for certain.”

Fef raised her fuchsia fists into the air. “I trust what they told us! This is the exact tree the Mirror Thing will find!”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “The repeated patterns raise the fog.”

Fef put two hands on her hips and pointed the others at Lieshy. “Translation!”

Lieshy rolled her eyes. “The trees all look the same so it’s easy to make a mistake.”

Fef blinked. “…That makes sense. Dammit, Lieshy, why can’t you always talk like a normal person? I know you know how!”

“There is no such thing as a normal person. Conversations, even in your ‘straight talk’, still rely on context and clues from what I’ve seen. For instance: ‘letting the cat out of the bag,’ a perfectly acceptable phrase in double.”

“That’s not a reason.”

Lieshy allowed herself to smile slightly. “It’s fun.”

Siron chuckled. Luna frowned. “I’m not sure fun at the confusion of others is… harmonious.”

“Harmony is not all there is to seek in life.” Lieshy pointed a wing at Luna. “We can’t call you Luna over there, there’s going to be another one.”

“…Oh. What should I be then?”

“Mistress,” Siron said. “A title, rather than a name.”

Luna looked downcast. “A title I am not proud of…”

“It carries power with it. You can take great pride in your power without exalting your past actions.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “The shark’s maw encroaches on your railway.”

Siron bent his legs so he was closer to Lieshy’s eyes. “The strain on the rope is golden.”

Lieshy smirked. “The glass is half full of potential.”

“For the love of Moons please stop!” Fef moaned. “You agreed that a society built on double-whatsis was bad!”

“While true, that doesn’t mean double is worthless.”

Fef grabbed the sides of her head, grunting. Luna sighed. “This… hardly seems like a dignified set of ambassadors. We’re rather rowdy.”

Siron shrugged. “That’s the way we are. We should not be ashamed of it. We are warriors.”

“I’m not,” Lieshy deadpanned.

“You’re a mental warrior.”

“…Potatoes in a row.”

Siron was silent. Lieshy took this to mean he was unable to parse the meaning of the phrase, which was good, since it was nothing more than a disgruntled expletive. Sometimes the simplest ideas were the hardest to convey in double. A flaw in the system, she supposed.

It was in that moment a nearby tree sparked faintly, signifying the connection of the Mirror Portal. It was not the tree Fef had pointed out. It was the one on the opposite side of the clearing.

“Not. One. Word.” Fef muttered.

“Two words,” Lieshy said.

“What did I just say you little – ohmygosh Luna your mane looks adorable when it blows like that!”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “…You already said this.”

“I know. I think. But diddly-darn it looks so… sparkly…”

Lieshy raised her eyes. She lived with these knuckleheads. Admittedly, the three with her were great friends and good people to talk to. At least when Siron wasn’t busy, when Fef wasn’t having an attention span shorter than a bumblebee, and Luna wasn’t wallowing in the darkness of her past. She actually felt at home here, even though most of the inhabitants of the village were no match for her linguistic wit, the place still gave her a sense of community.

One that didn’t exist in her original world.

Starlight peeked through the portal, appearing before them as a disembodied head affixed to a shiny tree. “You guys coming in yet, or what?”

Siron raised a hand, circling it with another in a gesture Lieshy knew meant ‘time passes us by.’ “It does appear we’ve delayed pointlessly.” Without another word, he walked towards the portal. Starlight ducked out, allowing him to pass through. Fef pranced in next, followed by Lieshy herself.

Lieshy once again found herself in the entry hall of Twilight’s castle. The basic shape hadn’t changed – the double doors were the same tremendous blocks, the stairs still curled up in a symmetric pattern, and the space was as bright as ever. It was easy to see that a lot of care had been put into making the place appear as brilliant as possible. She saw ornate tables, historic paintings, and even a chandelier that slowly shifted through all the colors of the rainbow.

Lieshy’s Twilight had never bothered to decorate the castle this well. She’d cared little about the thoughts of others besides how moldable they were.

Lieshy was not surprised to note that her group was not the first one to arrive. There were several dozen humans she presumed were from the Elemental Nations, all talking in mixed groups, often discussing only with members of their own world instead of members of others. Lieshy understood the politics between the various nations was tense, although she didn’t know the details. Secondhoof information was not much to go off of, even for one as observant as her.

The humans were far from the only group there. She saw some ponies that definitely didn’t belong in this world, namely a Sunset who was part deer, unicorn, and… ‘mawlie’ was the term for the ponies with the mouths for tails, right? She wasn’t sure. There were a few other oddball ponies around her mingling with the others, most of which passed Lieshy’s attention quickly and were simply classified under ‘Other ponies of Lai.’

There were a few oddball attendees who didn’t look like they belonged with any group. Sunset and Twilight – or Sparky – were the first of these that Lieshy noticed, though she also saw a strange girl made of purple shadow and a couple large creatures completely buried in fur.

Lieshy let her gaze fall upon an interesting sight – two versions of Luna. One was the moon princess of the world, the other a conglomeration of all the races of Lai. The Queen was the same height as the other Luna, though she had the horns of a deer, the toothed tail of a mawlie, the fins of a seapony, and the alien eyes of an oculus.

Lieshy nudged her Luna – Mistress. “You should go talk to them.”

“Oh, they look busy, I wouldn’t want to…”

Lieshy raised an incredulous eyebrow.

“Eheh… All right. I’ll… Try.” Nervously, she strode up to her other selves. The native Luna – who Lieshy was already coming to think of as Moona – noticed Mistress and welcomed her in with a wing. Lieshy considered eavesdropping on their conversation, but decided against it. She was much more interested in a different meeting of alternate versions…

Sunset looked down at… Sunset.

“We’re going to need to figure out a naming system,” the hybrid pony said.

“I don’t want a stupid nickname like ‘Twinkie,’ got it?” the human asserted.

“I know the feeling. One of us could be Sunset, the other could be Shimmer.”

“Seems unfair that one of us gets to keep our first name. What if I call you Soldier?”

“…Not a fan of that idea. How about we just come up with new names entirely?”

The human shook her head. “That could take forever…”

Lieshy interjected. “Can I throw a boomerang into the wire?”

“…Are you asking if you can suggest a name?” the pony asked.

“Yes.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

Lieshy pointed at the human. “You are Sun.” She pointed at the pony. “You are Set.”

Sun raised an eyebrow. “I’m not so sure that’s great…”

Sparky tapped Sun on the shoulder, stopping whatever she was going to say. “Factoring in likely time dilation, you have twenty minutes until your class.”

“Holy fruitcake on a stick! I have to go now!” Sun ran for the Mirror Portal frantically; just in time to witness a man in green arrive. Sun paused to look at him cautiously for a moment before shaking her head and running to the controls of the Mirror Portal, returning to Earth in haste. Lieshy heard Iroh’s hearty laugh fill the space.

Set raised an eyebrow. “Guess we won’t need to worry about the name thing then.” She extended a hoof. “I’m Sunset, but you know that.”

“I’m Fluttershy, but I go by my nickname these days. Lieshy.” She shook the outstretched hoof.

“Seems like you got shafted with the nicknames.”

“It works for me. I’ve grown to appreciate it.”

Sunset raised her eyebrow. “How can you appreciate a name that brands you as a liar?”

“Because it’s wrong. The lie and the shy create a paradox. A… Well, I’d call it a twisting eclipse, but I think the way you’d describe it is the truth makes it a lie but the lie makes it true.”

“…Gotcha.”

Lieshy smiled innocently. “Your leftovers are showing.”

“…What? You’re one of those double-talkers, aint’cha?”

“What do you think?”

“Definitely,” Sunset muttered something incoherent under her breath. “It was… Nice meeting you.”

“Egad, the leftovers return in full force,” Lieshy deadpanned.

Sunset quickly got out of the interaction. Lieshy felt rather proud of herself, she still had it.

“That wasn’t very nice, you know.”

Lieshy saw her counterpart walk up to her. “It was harmless.”

Fluttershy shook her head. “I mean, probably, but that doesn’t change anything. It was an awful lot like how your fellow ponies acted. Manipulation.”

Lieshy rolled her eyes. “I’m not trying to extort anyone for my own gain. It was just for the sake of my amusement.”

“That’s just a lesser form of the same problem. Just because you can run circles around ponies and make them uncomfortable doesn’t mean you should.”

“You and your friends mess with each other all the time. I believe you call it good-natured ribbing.”

“That’s… Not the same thing. We know each other.”

“Why does that really make a difference? If a relationship is going to involve fun mockery and foreplay, why not start with it from the gate?”

“Because there’s this thing called tact.”

“Tact is just a lie, and not the kind I like at that,” Lieshy asserted.

Fluttershy sighed. “I’m just trying to help you here, Lieshy. Ponies will resent you for what you’re doing.”

“Will it make them want to extort me and everypony around them?”

“…No?”

“Then I’m fine with it. I’ll be who I am, regardless of what they like or not.”

Fluttershy took in a deep breath. “Assertiveness can be a flaw.”

Lieshy pondered this. “The barrels turn in many directions.”

“Lieshy…”

Lieshy chuckled awkwardly. “Sorry. It means almost everything can be a flaw or a benefit depending on the situation. The turning represents the benefit or pain, the directions refer to differing viewpoints, the barrels bring to mind images of large objects of impact, referring to the importance of the assertion and direction. And ‘many’ because the issue is not black and white.”

“You really do pack a lot of information into one thought… I don’t think the direction is so vague all the time though. You should try to make friends, not push ponies away.”

“We both know I’m not going to change because of a conversation.”

“I know. I hope you’ll remember this conversation when something does go wrong.” Fluttershy shook her head. “Enough of that. This is supposed to be a happy place with a promising future. Everyone’s going to start helping each other!”

“Idealistic,” Lieshy said. “The cultures here are so very different. The Elementals are used to war while the Lai are used to a brutal peace. Your ponies are all about friendship and understanding while the demons are all about glory in brutality. Not to mention the oddballs. I have no idea about the human Twilight’s world, nor that green guy, nor those fuzzy people, nor that shadow girl.”

“Sparky’s not here to represent anyone, she’s just the inventor of the portable portal. No it doesn’t have a name. The green guy’s Link, a friend from a world called Ardent. He could be here on official business, but I doubt it. Ardent doesn’t seem to care much about us. The fuzzy people are the Binaries. No magic at all, so they find us… a bit scary. And… shadow girl?”

Lieshy pointed at the girl made of purple shadow with a pink striped hat and similarly colored curls that might have been hair. Her eyes were not visible, but her mouth was, curved in a slight innocent smile. She was talking to a man in red robes.

“Huh…” Fluttershy said. “I have no idea who she is. She’s talking to Firelord Zuko though.”

“I bet you never thought you’d need to know all these important people, huh?”

Fluttershy laughed nervously. “Never in my wildest nightmares did I think this much would be put on me… But I am helping them. That’s why I’m out here, even if it isn’t my comfort zone.”

“I wish there were more people like you,” Link said, walking up with Rarity at his side.

Fluttershy blushed. “Thank you.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “Do you really? Would it really be better if people left their comfort zone regularly?”

Link smiled, kneeling down so his eyes were level with hers. “You’re a contrary one, I can tell.”

This guy’s smart. “While that may be true, you didn’t answer the question.”

Link nodded. “True. I really do wish that. You probably do as well and are just poking me to see how I’ll respond.”

“It’ll sharpen your mind.”

“Sometimes you just know things without thinking,” Link asserted.

“Bowtie blubber.”

“…What?”

Rarity rolled her eyes. “Her people talk in this bizarre double-speak almost all of the time. It’s a mix of half-truths and metaphors designed to tie your brain in a knot.”

Lieshy cleared her throat. “It essentially meant ‘that’s absurd,’ by the way.”

Link blinked. “I can’t imagine a place like that.”

“You’re derailing the conversation,” Lieshy said.

“So?” Link stretched his arms. “I think I’m just not in the mood for a conversation where I’m dragged around for your amusement.”

Lieshy shrugged. “Have it your way. Enjoy the ignorance.” She turned and walked away, angling her back toward Rarity.

“Lieshy!” Rarity yelled. “That’s rude!”

“He’s being rude to me, is he not?”

“You’re railroading him,” Rarity muttered.

Lieshy smirked. “Maybe I was railroading you.”

Rarity blinked. “…My…”

Fluttershy sighed. “Lieshy…”

Lieshy let herself smirk, walking back to them. ”What?”

“Please, stop treating conversations as… as a game. It’s hurting ponies.”

“No.”

“Lieshy… It’s not good. Surely you can see that you’ve hurt Rarity’s feelings and have put Link on the defensive.”

“So? Their minds could stand to be sharpened.”

“I say!” Rarity blurted. “My mind is just fine!”

“That may be so,” Siron said, walking in on the conversation. “But Lieshy here is a warrior of mind. How will she keep her skills active and ready if she doesn’t spar constantly?”

Link looked up at Siron, sizing him up. There was a slight trace of contempt in his expression that wasn’t present when he was addressing Lieshy. “Siron, is it?”

“Yes.”

“You should know there are other things besides skill and strength if you’re a leader.”

Siron leaned down until his four eyes were level with Link. “My physical and mental strength is what makes me worthy to lead. It is what defines our worth.”

“What place do the weak have in your society then? Slaves?”

“No. Just pity. I can tell you are a strong man yourself. I can also tell you are livid with my perceptions of power. Why?”

“All people are equal.”

“Such an assertion is extremely foolish. Some have power over others. Some can do more things than others. Some of us are given powers beyond understanding while others are limited to simple, menial tasks. Everyone may have a purpose, but some are greater than others.”

“What about care? How can you care for your people if they’re lesser than you?”

“I-“

Princess Twilight teleported between the two of them, pushing their faces apart. “Okay! Enough of that! We won’t be fighting here! This is a place of peace and friendship, not distrust and arguments!”

“But that’s exactly what it is,” Lieshy muttered. Fluttershy nudged her.

Siron and Link took a step back from each other. They did not stop glaring at each other.

“Did you two hear me!?” Twilight snapped. “You’re both different! Just deal with it! There’s no way everyone here is going to agree on everything!”

The two silently turned away from each other and went their separate ways.

“Link!” Rarity called, running after him. Lieshy went after Siron, flying until she was level with his head.

“I appreciate you backing me up, but it was unneeded.”

“I needed to gauge the ‘Link’ fellow. He’s dangerous.”

Lieshy raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“He’s an idealist, like the ponies of this world, but he’s not naïve. He’s seen how the world is broken. People who can stare darkness in the face and come out like that are dangerous, unpredictable, and uncontrollable.”

“Is he a real threat?”

Siron looked directly into Lieshy’s eyes. “No. He’ll never have any reason to act out against me.”

Lieshy’s expression remained flat. “Ah.” She didn’t believe a word of what Siron had just said.

~~~

Princess Twilight Sparkle sighed. “And those two were the third standoff I broke up today! The pony Sunset had to be called off Celestia! I caught Zuko and one of the Water Tribe people yelling at each other!” She covered her eyes. “I just… Augh!”

Iroh patted her on the back. “There there… Yelling happens. Peace, war, it doesn’t matter. Diplomacy always ends up with yelling at one point or another. You shouldn’t be hard on yourself about it. I’m sure you’ve done your fair share of yelling in your time.”

Twilight nodded slowly. “Yeah… But you seem to have it all under control. Your people respect you and you just have this… aura about you that makes people respect you and like you.”

Iroh laughed. “You speak as if you lack that skill.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “I’m a nervous wreck, Iroh, I don’t have things under control! I-“

Iroh grabbed her by the shoulders. “Twilight, I don’t have things under control either. The Earth Kingdom is demanding all the other Nations treat it with respect, the Northern Water Tribe has adopted a stance of isolationism, and there are numerous Fire Nation vigilantes wandering the world seeking revenge of their own. These things bother me. The only difference between you and me is that I’m older and am used to the constant feeling of everything falling around me.”

Twilight blinked. “Really?”

“Really. Well, that, and I can’t stand digging through scientific studies. Too dry. Don’t know how you manage.”

Twilight giggled. “The understanding is its own reward.”

“That explains a lot! I never understand anything!”

Twilight facehooved. “Sweet Celestia…”

“How do you know she tastes sweet? Looking like candy does not make you candy.”

“It does if you’re Pinkie Pie…” Twilight glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see the pink pony there. She wasn’t. The table behind her had just been cleaned though. The party pony was around.

Twilight turned back to Iroh and saw sadness in his eyes. She cocked her head. “What is it?”

“I want to run a tea shop,” he said. “I was looking forward to passing the baton on to the next generation. To living a simple life. But it looks like that won’t be the case… I was chosen as the ambassador for all nations. I don’t rule, I represent. I’m never going to be let go now, never going to retire. The worlds are changing too much too rapidly. I’ll always be needed…”

“Who’s to say you can’t still own a teashop? Rarity still owns her boutiques, even though she doesn’t spend much time in them.”

“There’s something about a personal touch, Princess. Living the tea…”

Twilight smiled sadly. “…When this settles down a little, I’ll see if I can do anything for you. Get you a tea shop in a place where you can keep an eye on things. If we don’t move the Mirror… Maybe inside this very hall.”

Iroh laughed. “I’ll consider your offer. But I will not be able to take it up for… years, probably.”

“The offer will remain,” Twilight said. “You deserve it. You deserve so much more than you’ve been given.”

Iron grinned. “I thought you didn’t like it when people praised you.”

Twilight blushed. “Galloping gazelles, this is just some bizarre cycle of positive reinforcement isn’t it?”

“I leave that deduction up to you. Also, watch out.”

“Huh?” Twilight did not watch out. Aang ran to her, a rush of air blowing her across the face and turning her mane into a bird’s nest.

Aang smiled. “Hi Twilight. So, I’ve talked to a lot of people now but… I can’t wait. Teach me magic.”

Iroh laughed. Twilight raised an eyebrow as she used her magic to straighten her mane. “Are you sure now’s a good time?”

“I don’t see why not,” Aang said. “You’re just talking to Iroh.”

Twilight turned to Iroh. “Do you think he can?”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea. I may know a lot but I don’t know the full capabilities of the Avatar.”

Twilight nodded. “Okay. Aang, you can still bend in here, correct?”

Aang nodded. He created a ball of air in one hand, a ball of fire in the other, and stomped on the ground to dent the crystal floor. A nearby glass of water blasted its contents into the air. “Still got it!”

Twilight smiled. “All right. What about the... other form of bending you know?”

Aang faltered. “I… Don’t think I should bend the energy of others except as a last resort.”

“Good. Sometimes... Power can go right to your head. But you shouldn’t be afraid to use it if you need to, Aang. Who knows what it can do?”

Aang nodded solemnly.

“Okay, first lesson. Forget everything you know about bending. Magic is not focused through motion of the body, like the powers of a pegasus.” She raised her wing and blew a gust of wind into Aang’s face. “That… Was a bad example. I’m not good at my pegasus magic. But you get the idea, it’s basically control of the air and water to produce weather effects.”

“I’ve bent cloud before, is it like that?”

“…Probably? You’d have to talk to my friend Rainbow Dash about that one, she’s good at it. But the point is that actual magic of the arcane is not like that. True use of magic always involves the mind and a focal point. In unicorns, it’s the horn.” She tapped her glowing point. “For dragons, it’s their fire glands. Some pegasi can use their wings to cast actual spells and certain earth ponies have discovered how to use their hooves. I only know one human who actually uses magic – that version of me over there – and she channels through her hands.”

Aang looked at his hands. “So… How do I use them?”

Twilight smiled sheepishly. “Okay… for unicorns it comes naturally, but I’ve done studies. You have to pull the energy of magic from around you into your focal point. This should produce a glow of some kind.”

Aang took a deep breath, held his right hand in front of his face, and focused. The fist vibrated slightly.

Then it burst into flames.

Iroh chuckled. “I think you’re trying too hard, Avatar.”

Aang let the fire dissipate. “The other elements all had a mental state associated with them… passion, peace… Does magic have one?”

“Thoughtful, if any,” Twilight offered. “A sort of lack of emotion. This isn’t always the case, but it’s how it is for me.”

He tried again, careful not to put any power into his hand, keeping the fire at bay. He tried to reach out, to feel the arcane energies around him. He took a breath. “I’m… going to try something.” His body became rigid and his eyes lit up with the intense white of the Avatar State. He focused on the hand, trying to draw the energy to him… But still, nothing.

“Looks like I don’t have anything…”

“The Avatar State only draws on what previous Avatars have learned,” Iroh said. “If no Avatar ever learned a technique, no help will come.”

“I have an idea,” Twilight said. “I can force magic into your hand for you, so you know what it feels like.” She lit her horn and forced magical energy into Aang’s hand. The arrow tattoo on the back of his appendage glowed a soft purple.

He grinned, focusing on the energy in his hand, unleashing a purple spark of energy. “Yeah!”

“Now, see if you can replicate that. Try to draw the energy in yourself. That’s required.”

Aang nodded, readying his hand. He willed the energy to flow back into his hand, to flow into his body…

But nothing happened.

Twilight sighed. “Well, you could probably cast magic if you had someone putting it in your hand constantly, but it doesn’t look like you have it. If you do I’m not sure how to awaken it.”

Aang smiled sadly. “It’s okay. I guess I may want too much.”

Iroh put his hands on Aang. “Even if that is true, which I doubt, you should never stop trying new things. Who knows what you may find?”

“Something really cool, hopefully.”

~~~

Celestia smiled, walking up to the three Lunas. “Hello, sisters.”

The Queen yelped in surprise. “C-Celestia!”

Celestia nodded. “I am not the mare you knew. Which, from what I hear, is a good thing.”

“I… It is… I…” She couldn’t restrain herself. She rushed Celestia into a hug. “I...”

This didn’t surprise Celestia. She warmly held the unusual version of her sister. “It’s fine. It’s never easy to do what needs to be done.”

“I’m sorry!” she blurted, backing up. “I did not need to do that-“

“I do not mind,” Celestia said. “Though I hope your subjects won’t think any less of you.”

“They will…” she said. “But I think Sunset can keep the ones here under control.”

“Good. Sister! What are you calling yourselves now?”

Her sister shrugged. “I’m Moonie, that’s Queenie, and this is Missy.”

The Mistress Missy waved sheepishly. “…Hi.”

Queenie wiped her face, the action punctuated by a nip of her tail. “Celestia, thank you for having us. It’s a delight to see so many happy faces.”

“Glad I could make your day,” Celestia responded. “To be fair, this was all Twilight. She feels bad about not telling me anything of these other worlds she’s been visiting and went the extra mile to make this ‘perfect’.”

Queenie gasped. “She didn’t tell you? Sunset told me the day after it happened!”

“Why’s that a big deal?” Missy asked. “She was having fun and didn’t think you needed to be bothered.”

“It’s not that big a deal,” Moonie said. “My sister is just letting Twilight believe it is.”

Queenie raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t seem like it’d be very helpful…”

“It’s not. It’s just fun,” Celestia said.

Queenie grinned. “Finally, somepony who understands! Tell me, do you walk into guarded rooms from the same direction twice?”

“I’m known to mess with the guards on occasion…” Celestia admitted.

Moonie let out a sharp chuckle. “Oh, ‘occasion?’ Why, just last week I recall a guard running down the halls, raising the alarm because of an ‘overly large swan honking loud enough to tear down the castle walls’.”

“Sister, that’s not what he said. He said there was a ‘big honking swan singeing the walls into oblivion!’ The wording’s important.”

“Yesss!” Queenie cheered inwardly. “All my advisors always tell me to act more regal but that’s just so annoying. If I act regal ponies won’t identify with me and I’d never get to have any fun.”

“Careful,” Celestia said. “A regal aura is important to obtain, at least on some level. Ponies believe their leaders need to be wise and powerful. If a normal pony is on the throne, they’ll start wondering why they aren’t on the throne.”

Queenie blinked. “Huh. I wonder why we never have that problem… Actually, you know what, we do, Sunset did tell me about that Applejack character. I completely forgot about her! Can’t believe my loudest prisoner slipped my mind. Huh.”

Missy cocked her head. “…Do you have many prisoners?”

“Oh yes, the dungeons are filled with monsters, beasts, and cruel ponies.”

“…How many?”

“Several thousand? Why?”

“…Seems like a lot.”

“It is,” Moonie said. “Our prisons have maybe a thousand prisoners across the nation, total.”

“How can you do that?” Queenie asked.

“We let most of them go after a while, thinking they’ve learned their lesson,” Celestia said.

“Weird. Not bad, I suppose, just weird.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one with a mouth on your tail.”

The tail seemed upset at this remark. Queenie only laughed. “Why, so I do! I had no idea.”

“…Does it eat?” Missy asked.

“It does. Doesn’t need to though. But food tastes different in the tail, so feasts can be quite interesting. You all will never know the joy of dual ice cream melts.”

“I’m sure Twilight can whip up a race-change spell,” Celestia said.

Queenie stared at her slack-jawed. “You… You have a race-change spell!?”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “Yes. Do you not have one?”

“…It’s highly illegal.”

“Why?” Moonie asked.

“It’s because…” Queenie blinked. “I actually don’t know, but it is. The idea of forcibly changing your identity is blasphemy against Armonia herself.”

“…Who?” Missy said. Moonie and Celestia shot her worried looks.

Queenie took a breath and let it out slowly. “Okay! Okay. Okay. I’m not going to freak out. I’m going to maintain a level head and HOW THE FLIPPING FRACK CAN YOU NOT KNOW WHO ARMONIA IS!? She’s the creator of everything!”

“…Maybe she’s just the creator of your world,” Celestia said, face serious. “We’ve never heard of her.”

“Then who created your world?”

Celestia looked to the ceiling. “There was a Star.”

“…A what?”

“The Stars in the night are beings of great power. Our legends say they have a society of their own, and that one Star fell to our planet long ago, creating our sun and moon, providing Equis the spark of life and Harmony. Of course, nopony knows if these legends are true or not. My sister believes them, Twilight doesn’t. I myself am undecided. I know the Stars are out there, but they don’t seem to care about us one way or another.”

Queenie took a breath. “I’m… I’m sorry, this is a lot to take in. It… It didn’t occur to me that things would be this different. That each world would be created another way. …You shouldn’t flaunt the race-change spell around. My ponies would be out for blood.”

“It’s not a common thing anyway. Extremely difficult.”

“Good. But now I’m curious… Missy, what legends does your world have?”

“There are two spirits, one of the blue moon and one of the gray moon,” Missy began. “They… Always existed, and so did the world beneath them. The demons don’t really have much in the way of legends.”

“You were in direct contact with the spirit of the gray moon, though,” Moonie observed. “Did you learn anything from that?”

Missy hung her head, silent.

“…I’ve been to the moon,” Moonie said.

“What!?” Queenie blurted. “Are there no end to the surprises!?”

“No,” Moonie said, continuing. “It’s a lifeless rock with nothing on it… except nightmares. Physical, evil, horrid nightmares. They controlled me for a time. Made me do evil things. I saw many horrible things. I understand. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Thank you,” Missy said.

Queenie stared ahead blankly.

“…What is it?” Celestia asked.

“N-nothing. Shouldn’t we start the official meeting sometime soon?”

Celestia looked at the clock. “I suppose so. There wasn’t really a set time for the mingle period to end.”

“Might as well be now, then. Moonie, Missy, excuse us, we have politics to discuss.”

Moonie smirked. “Normally I’d argue that I have as much a right to be there as my sister – which I do, by the way – but I’ll leave the politics to you all. Enjoy.”

“Yaaaaaay,” Queenie muttered, walking towards the center of the hall and sitting down at one of the tables. Celestia looked at her with concern for a few moments – for such a chatty mare, she sure had wanted to end that conversation quickly. But she was right, they might as well start now. With her magic, Celestia conjured a large bell.

With a ring, the conversation in the main hall was silenced. Celestia cleared her throat. “We’re ready to start the official discussions. Will Queen Luna, General Sunset, Twilight ‘Sparky’ Sparkle, Harrier Boxen, Iroh, and Siron please join me at this table.”

Twilight “Twinkie” Sparkle appeared next to Celestia. “Sure you don’t need me?”

“I’m sure, Twilight. Just keep talking and making friends. Do not think what you’re doing is unimportant.”

“Yes, Princess.” She vanished.

Siron arrived at the table first, sitting down next to Queen Luna. “So, you’re a little bit of everything then?”

The Queen nodded. “Everything natural, at least.”

“Those beautiful eyes don’t look natural.”

The Queen smirked. “They are, believe it or not. They also tell me that your motives for that comment aren’t altruistic. Nice try.”

“It seems you have me at a disadvantage!”

“You’re just used to ponies not being able to read your expression.”

Celestia smirked herself. “Siron, pleasure to finally meet you face to face.”

“The pleasure is mine.”

The Queen snorted. Siron’s left hand became a tense fist, but he said nothing.

Twilight “Sparky” Sparkle arrived next, sitting down and delicately setting a box of machinery on the table. She said nothing, nervously glancing around the three powerful individuals at the table.

“Twilight… There’s no need to be worried.”

“Gotcha…” Sparky managed.

General Sunset arrived, sitting on the other side of Queenie. “Remember, your Majesty, don’t just blurt whatever you think out.”

“They have a race-change spell here, Sunset.”

“…I’m sure they have a good reason.”

“This world wasn’t created by Armonia.”

Sunset blinked. “Okay, while that’s a good reason, that just raises more questions.”

“I’ll be sure to answer any and all questions about that you may have at a later time,” Celestia said. “We have slightly more pressing matters to deal with at the moment.”

Harrier Boxen arrived next – a creature made entirely of fur that resembled a mop slightly shorter than a human. He grunted a short greeting before sitting next to Sparky. She tried to inconspicuously scoot away from him. Despite her effort, the movement was loud, jarring, and very noticeable. She turned beet red and tugged on her sleeves.

Iroh arrived last, walking at a leisurely pace to his seat next to Siron and Boxen. “Can I be the first to say I never expected to be sitting at a table with a unicorn-bird, a red bug, a purple woman, and a pillar of wispy fur.”

“The feeling is mutual,” Boxen asserted in a frank, business-like voice.

Celestia nodded. “I want to start by thanking all of you for coming. These new worlds are confusing and baffling to us all, it helps to get us all on the same page.”

“Here here!” Queen Luna cheered.

“We are leaders, ambassadors, scientists, and representatives of our worlds. Through my student Twilight, we have been brought together. Some encounters went well.” She nodded at Siron. “Some went poorly.” She glanced at Iroh. “And, in the end, we are here to figure out what to do with these interdimensional doors that have been thrown open, together. But one thing I want everyone to know for certain is that we will do it together. Everyone, this is Twilight, or ‘Sparky’, a version of my student and a great inventor. Why don’t you show everyone what you have?”

Sparky opened the box and took out several devices nearly identical to the one around her own neck. “These are portable dimension dialers. When powered, they can open any portal you want. Just input coordinates by turning the dials like so and you can go to that location. You’ll have to find out how to power it yourself, but I’m sure most of you could work something out. Go ahead, take one. They’re, uh, not charged so you can’t open a portal at the moment.”

“I could charge it with my magic,” the Queen observed.

“Yeah, er… Please don’t. Anyway, you should know that the screen will be red when it doesn’t have enough power to translate. It’ll turn green once it does.”

“How will we know what to put in?” Iroh asked as he fiddled with one.

Sparky levitated a bunch of large books from the box. “Twinkie – the other Twilight – has created these books. She calls them the Directory. Every coordinate known to function has been put in these books. If new ones are discovered, she will write a note in one book and it’ll be sent to all the books. If you write something in your book, it’ll translate to all the other books as well. So, uh, yeah. Everyone will have access to the same coordinates and all the basic information known about each one.” She sunk back into her seat.

“Thank you,” Sunset said, bowing to her. “We look forward to visiting the rest of your worlds.”

Boxen tensed at this. “Is… our world in there?”

“…Yes. Why?” Celestia asked.

“We’d… Rather unwelcome visitors not drop in.”

The Queen raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so we’re not welcome then?”

“Any of you arriving on official business would be allowed and even encouraged. But many of you have primitive security measures. The demons, for instance, have none at all. Any of them could just drop in and disturb the peace at any time.”

Siron shrugged. “He’s not lying. We are good at destroying peace.”

Iroh furrowed his brow. “I have no qualms striking the Harrier’s world from the Directory. Surely in the future there will be other worlds we wish to keep secret from one another for security reasons.”

Celestia blinked. “That… was not something I foresaw. But I do see Boxen’s point.” She opened one of the Directory books and found the Binary universe. With her magic she removed the coordinates from the book, leaving just the name and notes. “Done. Does anyone else wish their world stricken from the Directory?”

There was silence and a bunch of shaking heads.

“Good. Then we can actually begin. We need to establish what our relations to each other are going to be. And to do that we will need neutral territory for everyone to meet. As proud as I am of my student and of this grand crystal hall, it is definitely a show of power on our part. It is not proper to continue conducting our business here, making everything rather unfair. We will need to select a location.”

Iroh chuckled. “Princess, if you mind, Siron and I may have a solution for you, if you’ll listen to what he has to say for a moment.”

Celestia smiled. “By all means Siron.”

Siron nodded. “Few of you are aware of this, but my world experiences extreme forest fires every year. The entire jungle around us will burn down, and after the smoke clears our tribe travels until we find a new area of the jungle to call home. We are currently three days overdue for this fire.”

“How terrible!” the Queen said.

“It makes us stronger,” Siron dismissed. “However, this time I don’t want to travel to another part of the jungle. I wish to travel to another world. The representatives of the Earth Kingdom have already offered to give us one of their forests.”

“In exchange, they will help us set up the neutral territory for the Elemental Nations,” Iroh said. “In a way, serving as its first citizens.”

Siron nodded. “Their world is the best for us. They understand warriors and struggle on a great scale.”

“How does this help us with the original problem?” Boxen demanded.

Siron snorted. “Because, fluffball, our original jungle will be abandoned. I’m sure you can build a fireproof building there with your oh-so-great technology.”

Boxen leaned away from Siron, silent.

Celestia pursed her lips. “It’s certainly an option. Do other tribes exist in that jungle, Siron?”

Siron shook his head. “We conquered the other tribes. I haven’t run into any others for decades.”

“Any objections or alternatives?” Celestia asked.

“Isn’t there a world with nothing but grass on it?” Sparky asked.

“Yes,” Celestia admitted. “But the soil is made almost entirely of pony bones. Nopony has any idea why, but I’d rather not chance it.”

Iroh frowned. “So there are horror stories out there in the other worlds.”

“There is probably much worse out there than we could ever imagine,” Sunset pointed out.

“But also much better!” the Queen asserted.

“Regardless, any objections to building it in the demon jungle after they leave?”

There were no objections. Boxen looked unsure, but his small beady eyes were hard to read.

“Then that’s where it will go.”

Sunset shook her head. “Politics never goes this quickly back home.”

Iroh laughed. “It helps when you’re not all at each other’s throats.”

“Next… Aid,” Celestia said. “The Elemental Nations need it most, we need it the least, and the rest of you are somewhere in the middle. But we should divide our resources so we all stand strong-“

“Actually…” Iroh took a breath. “Celestia, as ambassador of the Elemental Nations, I am sorry to inform you that we have to decline further offers of aid.”

Celestia blinked. “…What?”

“Yeah, why’d you turn down free help!?” the Queen asked. “It’s free!”

“It’s invading our culture,” Iroh said. “You’ve helped us get on our feet, we appreciate that, but you need to understand that your ponies are building things their way. Not that the houses are too small or anything, but it’s built to accommodate the way you think. The towns are colorful, out of place, and don’t have an identity like that of their nation. They’re already feeling ostracized from their nationality.”

Celestia was speechless.

Iroh smiled sadly. “Please don’t hold it against us Princess, and don’t take this as an insult to your hospitality. We’re extremely grateful for what you have given back to us. It’s just that you’re putting your stamp on it, doing all the work, when we want to do the work and have our own identity from it. You’ve done enough. We’ll take it from here.”

“I… Okay, Iroh, if that is what your people wish… The rest of you…?”

Boxen bristled. “Our stance is similar. We do not need your magic in our world. We are not recovering from a war.”

“I’ll take it!” the Queen said. “Apparently we’ve got several broken and destroyed towns, and we can’t have that.”

“I’m against it,” Siron said. “I already refused assistance in establishing our home in the Earth Kingdom’s forest.”

Celestia nodded, having regained control of herself. “I see. As you all wish. Just know that all you have to do is ask, and we will help if we are able. This does mean we don’t have much to talk about relating to aid then.”

“To the main issue then?” Iroh asked.

“Yes. Concerning exploration.” Celestia lowered her head. “We’ve encountered many, many different worlds. We’ve helped some – and come dangerously close to ruining others. Simply exploring has shown us that we have great power. As a group, we need to decide how to manage this. How to minimize the damage to other worlds and maximize the help. How to deal with first contact and interference. Right now, no rules exist. This should change.”

“Finally, something reasonable,” Boxen said. “Naturally, first contact should be conducted in secret, and only after a long recon mission should revelations be allowed.”

“Why long?” Sunset asked. “Why not short?”

“Because an assessment needs to be made if they are ready to come into the fold of the multiverse, to prevent unfortunate incidents of those not prepared.”

Siron pointed a finger at Boxen. “What are you implying?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Lies,” the Queen said. “My eyes tell me all I need to know. You think his kind is far, far too primitive to be allowed at this table.”

“And your mental tricks are indecent, if you wish to be honest. Clearly, you do not understand the nuance of diplomacy.”

The Queen bristled, but Sunset calmed her down with a gentle touch.

“I propose we not stay hidden at all,” Iroh said. “But that we be sure not to interfere until a certain amount of information is known. All should be allowed to know what we are, but we cannot take the risk of making something worse.”

“But what if there’s death just around the corner?” Celestia said.

Iroh’s face clouded over. “…Sometimes you’ll make the wrong decision for the right reasons. It’s better than doing the wrong thing for the perceived right reasons.”

Celestia sagged her head. “I say we just need to create rules that establish what can and can’t be done based on the situation. We’re out there to help people, after all.”

“Not necessarily,” Sunset said. “We are also out exploring to further our own worlds. Discovery, after all.”

“Not to mention furthering of our own spheres of influence,” Boxen pointed out.

“People… We need to work together on this,” Celestia pleaded. “I know we think differently, that we all have different ideas. But we need to put that aside and come together in unity. We-“

“Why?” Siron asked.

The table fell silent.

“Why do we need to be unified? We are all different nations. Different tribes. We are not the same. We can be allies, friends even, but we are not the same.”

Iroh furrowed his brow. “Unity is still better than division.”

“Is it? If we are all one, where is the struggle? Where are the trials that make us stronger? Greater? What point would there be?”

“Siron, not everyone agrees with your view of the world as a warrior,” Celestia asserted.

“Exactly my point, Princess, why should we feel pressured to make agreements with each other at all? Why not take these threads of alliance here and all do our separate thing! The best will get stronger faster, and we’ll find out what worked in the end. We-“

Pinkie appeared from nowhere and grabbed the table. She flipped it over, tossing the books and devices onto the floor violently. Strapped to the bottom of the table was a strange gray box with multicolored wires framing a large red timer…

With six seconds left on it.

Five seconds.

“BOMB!” Pinkie said, throwing the table into the air.

Celestia blinked. Bomb? Who would – how? How would a bomb –

Four seconds.

Celestia lit her horn, trying to cast a teleport. She hoped she had time to get it away. Far away… She couldn’t send it to Ponyville. Which direction was Ponyville in?

Three seconds.

She had to think about it too hard - she wasn’t going to get it out. She’d probably be fine now thanks to Pinkie throwing it, but it would still kill some of the visitors.

Two seconds.

Just send it somewhere, anywhere, any – what was Link doing waving that sword around?

One second.

He traced an hourglass pattern in the air, unleashing a truly powerful spell… And the table was gone. A window was also somehow broken. They heard an explosion in the distance.

Link walked back in through the window, breathing hard. “You’re all safe now.”

“H-how did I not see that…” the Queen said, face pale.

“Bad luck,” Pinkie explained, face haunted as well. “It needed to get that close to going off, apparently…”

“These ponies tried to kill us!” Boxen shouted.

“They did not!” Iroh roared, standing to his full height to snap Boxen out of it. “They’ve done nothing but be kind to us and patient! This was the work of some other party! A group that wants all or some of us dead!”

Siron slammed his staff into the ground, sending sparks around him. “COWARD! COME OUT AND FACE US IF YOU WISH TO CHALLENGE OUR POWER!”

There was no response.

“Clearly not any of my warriors…” Siron muttered. “Fef’s the only one here anyways.”

“Who’d dare try this?” Sunset demanded.

“You tell me,” Iroh said. “There are a number of nationalist parties from my world that would love me dead, but I hear your Queen isn’t very popular.”

“That’s only part of the picture! We have enemies from within, yes, but none of them even knew about this!”

“What about spies?” Boxen blurted.

“I would see them,” the Queen asserted.

“You didn’t see the bomb!”

“…A fluke.”

“Please!” Celestia said. “We need to be calm and relaxed. Think through this logically. Has anyone looked out of place, shifty, or untrustworthy this entire gathering?”

Sunset pointed at Siron.

“Besides Siron.”

“What a rousing endorsement…” Siron growled. “Were you one of my warriors, you’d be challenged to a duel right now, red pony.”

“I accept. Later, though, bug.”

“Sunset, please, you could be killed. Don’t,” the Queen said, worried.

“It won’t be to the death,” Siron asserted. “Even if she deserves it…”

“What about… …That shadow girl?” Sparky said all of a sudden. “The… The one I’ve seen wandering around. Doesn’t belong to any group.”

Siron pointed at his warrior. “Fef! Bring me the shadow girl! Now!”

“Yes, Siron!” Fef called from across the hall. Two earthbenders she was talking with filed in line alongside her, charging across the room quickly.

Boxen shook his head. “This is pointless. We should all just return to our worlds and let the ponies handle the investigation.”

“Then the assassin would get away,” Sunset pointed out.

“GOT HER!” Fef said, dragging the shadow girl across the hall with her yo-yo string, the girl’s hands encased in rock. She was crying.

Siron narrowed his eyes. “Who are you?”

“V-vivian…”

He pointed his staff at her. “Vivian, why did you make that bomb?”

“I d-didn’t!”

“I don’t believe you.” He raised his staff – only to be stopped by Celestia.

“No, Siron. There are other ways.” Celestia kneeled down, lifting Vivian up and breaking the rocks off her hands. “Child, do you mind if I look into your mind? I won’t tell a soul any of your secrets. I’ll just prove your innocence.”

Vivian sniffed, wiping her face with her hands. She nodded silently. Celestia touched her horn to the shadow being’s hat, touching her mind. Vivian shivered, but smiled. “…That felt… warm.”

Celestia smiled. “I try to make it at pleasant as possible.” She turned to Siron. “She’s innocent. She came alone, stumbling across the Mirror Portal when it was left open. She’d been enjoying herself before this moment. I hope you’ve not scarred her for life.”

Siron took a sigh. “…Apologies, Vivian.”

“It’s… It’s okay. Someone just tried to kill you. You… You can be angry.”

Siron folded his arms. “Who then? Who else was mysterious?”

Sunset looked at Boxen. “Lieshy.”

Boxen nodded. “Lieshy.”

Siron blinked. “There’s no way… There’s…” He paused. “…Mother of the Moon, she certainly has the skills to mask her true intentions.”

Lieshy looked up from her position atop a char a couple tables away. “…The spotlight bleeds the color of lies.”

Celestia narrowed her eyes. “Lieshy, now is not the time for your double. This is serious. Did you do it?”

“No,” she said, incredulously.

“That’s the tone of a guilty woman,” Boxen said.

Iroh frowned. “…I think it is more the tone of an arrogant one.”

“Close enough.”

Celestia walked up to Lieshy. “May I?”

“You may not like what you see. But au revoir regardless.”

Celestia touched her mind – and frowned. “…You think in metaphors and images.”

“Did you ever wonder why it’s difficult for me to speak straight?”

“Immune to the mental tricks,” Boxen said. “Suspicious.”

Sunset walked to Lieshy, face angry. “I knew somethin’ was wrong with you.”

Lieshy’s arrogant annoyed expression vanished slowly as she realized what was happening. “This… You can’t be serious.” She turned to Celestia. “I saved your ponies!”

“They’ve been fooled before…” Celestia admitted.

“I’ve lived with your people!” she shouted at Siron.

“And we are not known for our intelligence,” he said, pointing his staff at her. “You could have pulled the blinds over us.”

Lieshy frantically looked around. “Anyone? Anyone?”

Some voices chimed in from the crowd.

“You tricked me earlier!”

“You just sound untrustworthy!”

“You made my wife cry!”

“All of this is just a sick game to you!”

Lieshy’s gaze finally rested on Fluttershy. Fluttershy stared at her sadly. “I don’t believe you’re guilty. But I can’t refute what they’re saying, Lieshy.”

Lieshy’s harrowed expression gave way to a disturbing smile. She laughed. “Well the nexus has held a council and decided on soul-damning Tartarus for the broken lamppost! Grab a mirror, wave it, do the chicken dance why don’t we? The last mountain has driven itself through dark matter’s height.” She held out her hooves. “Take me away, then.”

“Wait!” Link shouted, dragging a man in Fire Nation armor behind him. “It’s not her!”

“How do you know?” Siron grunted.

“I used one of my… items to follow the scent I found on the bomb. It was this guy.” He dumped the dazed soldier in front of Iroh.

Iroh leaned down, removing the helmet. “…Larry?”

“Death… Death to ponies…” the man muttered, obviously very confused.

Celestia blinked. “Is he usually like this?”

“…Dazed? No, of course not. But I have to admit, it’s not all that surprising he’s a Fire Nationalist. He had an anger streak.”

Celestia leaned down to Larry. “Mister Larry, do you mind if I touch your mind?”

“STAY BACK INVADERS!” He belched fire out of his mouth, singeing Celestia’s eyebrows.

“…Well I’m not doing it without his consent… …I liked those eyebrows.”

“There’s enough evidence for me,” Boxen said. “I suggest execution.”

“Seconded,” the Queen voted. Sunset nodded in further agreement.

“And I make four...” Siron said. “…Can it be by my hand?”

“No,” Iroh said. “He will be given a chance to see his family first. I do not vote for execution, but you have the majority.” He stood Larry up and handed him to a couple Earth Kingdom soldiers. ”You know what to do.”

He was taken away.

Lieshy let out a sigh of relief. “I… Funny. The universe wants me to learn.”

Celestia walked up to her. “Our world has a habit of doing that to ponies. You could write me a letter about what you learned.”

“Maybe…”

“But first, we need to continue our discussion about regulations-“

“No,” Boxen said. “This place is not safe. There should not be further debate until a safe location is constructed in the jungle. Until then, Siron’s suggestion will be treated as the decision. We all do what we will until the next meeting. Goodbye.” He walked away to the Mirror Portal without another word, the rest of his furry congregation following suit.

Siron bowed. “I will take my leave as well. Sunset, come with me. We will duel, as promised.”

Sunset smirked. “You’re going down, Siron.”

The Queen sighed. “I’m coming with you all to make sure you don’t hurt each other. …Sorry Celestia.”

“It’s… Okay.” Celestia said, hanging her head. “In reality, I was probably being a little too hopeful about how this would go.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

Soon, only she and Iroh were left.

“I really am sorry about refusing your aid,” he said.

“I believe I understand why you did it,” Celestia responded. “…Go home. See to your people.”

“I think I’ll drop by Sunset’s first, haven’t given her a lesson today.”

“She’s in college, with real lessons.”

“Then I’ll just wait around for a while. I haven’t gotten her to perfect shrimp scampi yet!”

Celestia smiled. “Take care of yourself, Iroh.”

“I will.”

The hall was soon cleared out. A few stragglers remained, finishing up their conversations, but it had died down. The books and devices had been taken, so at least the meeting was a partial success.

Still.

She couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if there’d been no bomb…

She glanced at Vivian and Lieshy. They were talking to each other. Probably bonding over being falsely accused. That was good, at least.

…Still.

She couldn’t help but feel that this was a bad omen.

Twilight walked up to her, crestfallen. “I… I knew this would happen. I knew something would go wrong. I…”

“It’s not your fault,” Celestia said, hugging her once-student close. “I was too much of an idealist today.”

“Celestia-”

“I was, Twilight. Don’t hide the truth. Accept it. And learn from it.”

“...Okay, Princess.”

~~~

Sunset flopped onto the bed in her dorm and groaned into her pillow.

Her roommate glanced at her. “You’re being a whiney freshman. You know this is week one, it’s only going to get harder from here,” she deadpanned.

“Thank you, Sugarcoat, for those words of encouragement!” Sunset blurted.

“Your biting sarcasm could use work.”

“Twilight was not kidding about you.”

“I guarantee she was exaggerating at least one of my traits.”

Sunset took in a deep breath and let it out. “Okay. Sorry, Sugarcoat, I just… I had a bad day. The physics professor has assigned homework on the first day due in two days. I mean, I can answer all the problems easily enough, but it’ll take forever to work them out and show all the steps, same thing for Calc III! Then there’s, suddenly, a paper on what I think about philosophy due in the honors class and-“

“You know you don’t have to deal with the terror of General Ed because of honors class. Why are you complaining?”

Sunset stared at her. “…Good point. Still, Calculus and Physics…”

“You’re the one who decided you wanted to take the Physics major and not retake the previous Calculus classes. Freshmen are not meant to take Calculus III. It will kill you.”

Sunset cocked her head. “…How would you know?”

“I had a sister who went through here several years ago. I got to hear nonstop agonizing tears and screams of joy from her. It was intense,” she deadpanned. Ninety-nine percent of the things she said were deadpan, Sunset had quickly learned. It was baffling, yet oddly endearing.

“…Right,” Sunset said. “I’m going to try to get some rest.”

“Then you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and study.”

“Yep. I’d ask how you know that but my brain is done for the day.” She rolled the blanket around herself. “G’night…”

“It’s only 3 PM. This does not qualify as night.”

“Shush…” She yawned, preparing for sleep to take her and the ordeal of the first day to pass into unconsciousness…

Then there was a knock at the door. Sugarcoat got it.

“Sunset, there’s a creepy old man here to see you.”

Oh no.

Iroh laughed. “Indeed I am little one! I should take offense to being called creepy, though.”

“You’re not offended.”

“You have a sense for the truth, don’t you?”

“I have a sense that Sunset’s going to fall asleep if you don’t get to her soon.”

Sunset groaned, sitting up in her bed. “Iroh, can’t we do this later? I just had one heck of a day and-“

“Shrimp scampi, Sunset. Firebending style.” He shoved a bag of frozen shrimp and seasonings into her arms.

She groaned. “Wonderful…” She blinked, glancing at Iroh’s chest. “Iroh, do you have a university nametag?”

Iroh tapped the metal plate on his shirt that said ‘Professor Iroh.’ “I had your Twilight create this. Good for sneaking ingredients out of the cafeteria.”

“You can’t just steal food!”

“Clearly, he can,” Sugarcoat said.

Iroh grinned. “Yes. Plus, it wasn’t going to be put in actual food. I saw the cafeteria dishes. Not worthy for peasants.”

Sugarcoat blinked. “Huh. Nice one. Mind if I use that when describing the food to my fellow students?’

“Not at all.”

Sunset blinked. “…This is all surreal. Am I dreaming?”

“No. And you’ll realize that after the third failed attempt. No more dilly-dallying! Sunset - cook!”

“All right all right!” She snapped her fingers, producing a candle-like flame.

“And now we’re playing with fire,” Sugarcoat said.

Sunset ignored her.

She didn’t get to relax for three hours.

025 - Majorism, Part 1

The bridge of Ba’al’s mothership was filled with a few dozen Ba’al clones and the Pinkie Sage. The Sage had no chains on her, no imprisonment, and she had the mask lifted onto her forehead. The power of several deities flooded away from the mask and into her. She knew she could, at any time, destroy the ship she was on and every Ba’al within it. But she would have nowhere to go and that wouldn’t solve the much larger problem. Destroying the mothership – or any ship – would do nothing to Majora herself. Her influence was far beyond the handful of ships Ba’al had, and her mask could not be destroyed even by the holy power at the Sage’s disposal.

So she sat on the bridge, free, but in many ways more imprisoned than when the eldritch chain was around her neck.

One of the Ba’als looked at her, smirking. “So, Sage, which god should we take out next? The princess of the space ponies supposedly has one locked up inside her, the Avatar Spirit’s a pretty bright spark, and I hear there’s some crazy fairy lady on the Mushroom World that could stand some cleansing!”

The Sage stared right at him with angry eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Ba’al said, pointing at himself with excessive drama. “I thought you were all about the freeing of worlds from their gods. Weren’t you all ready to purge your world from its maker because you believed she was a horrible reason for existing?”

“She was.”

“Why not the others?” Ba’al said, leaning in. “If one true god needs to be sealed away, why not go for all of them?”

“Like people, they differ.”

“Remind me what the Blue Moon Spirit did, again?”

The Sage said nothing.

“That’s right! You needed a battery to seal your goddess away! She was just useful and easy to get to. Do you know how upset Siron was about that? Really upset. He wanted to use her as a battery, and you had to go and take his idea.”

“It’s not like you’re about to ruin his other plans, or anything,” the Sage chided.

Ba’al shrugged. “His fault for trying to play a game he can’t win. I’m really surprised he hasn’t been caught yet. If only he had a face, I’d be very interested to see the look on it when he realizes what we’re actually doing with all his shipments.”

“If you were close enough to see that you wouldn’t have a head for very long.”

“You’re very bitey today.”

“It’s what keeps me from purging that smug look off your face in a fit of rage. You should be thankful I’m letting it out in deep, biting, hateful sarcasm. The alternative is brutal judgement.”

Ba’al sneered. “You could just bestow the mask’s power onto us and you could go free.”

“And you could be an honest, caring individual who cares about people besides himself.”

Ba’al gestured around at his many clones. “But the only people who matter are all me!”

The Sage grunted, saying nothing.

Another Ba’al stepped forward, grabbing the Sage by the muzzle. “Maybe we should go for the Tree of Harmony on Equis Vitis now, hrm? How would you like that? Remove the deity that guides the actions of the Charter and her friends, the reason for all of this.”

The Sage glared at him. “You get to decide where we go next. Ask all you want. You make your own choice. Which one’s the biggest threat to your little god, hrm?”

A whole new Ba’al crossed his arms. “You give Majora too much credit.”

“You underestimate her effect on you.”

“You know we take measures to prevent her control.”

The Sage rolled her eyes. Sure, they cleared their minds and kept all ‘Majorist’ Ba’als on the corrupted ship, but the sage knew Majora could just snap her fingers and devour the minds of most the Ba’als at once. But did the Ba’als listen to the Sage? No. They just tormented her like she was some stupid pet.

She did get some revenge though. They couldn’t use the power of her mask without her. So they had to keep her around.

It was an aggressive psychological war.

Ba’al apparently found her silence annoying, so he grabbed her by the scruff of her neck. “Choose, Sage.”

The Sage narrowed her eyes, daring him to make her choose.

“We know where Maud and Lady Rarity are,” Ba’al said. “We can have them killed with a simple word.”

The Sage twitched. “Fine then, Equis Vitis, go to the center, take out the core. I wonder if Discord will notice. That’ll be fun.”

Ba’al smiled, setting her down. “See? Was that so hard?”

There was a flash of purple energy that sent chills into the spines of everyone present. A new Ba’al stood in the center of the bridge. Purple mists wafted off his sides, signifying him to be a Majorist Ba’al, but he was not just a Majorist Ba’al, he was the Majorist Ba’al. The man wearing the mask.

The Sage knew that this Ba’al no longer existed and that the being in front of her was fully Majora, but Majora was smart enough not to make this too obvious. She spoke with a hint of Ba’al’s original voice mixed with a feminine tone that was a simpler version of her normal, eldritch tongue. When she spoke, it may not have caused a headache, but it was creepy.

“Why are we toying around?” she asked, cold.

“It wouldn’t do to rush around-“

“We can rush all we want!” Majora said, thrusting her hand forward. “There is no more need for secrecy! We took out Majora’s ‘sisters’, revealing this aspect of our plans to them all. We need to render the connected worlds completely helpless before moving along with the rest of our plan. We’ve taken our time and been cautious long enough, it's time to cash in everything.”

“Even if that is true, you aren’t supposed to be here,” the previous Ba’al said. “You’re supposed to call us from your ship and not expose us to your energies.”

“Please, if I were going to be corrupted to betray our kind, you’d think it would have happened by now.”

The Sage snorted.

Majora turned to the Sage, the eyes of the mask brightening considerably, forcing the oculus to squint. “What do you find so funny, seer?”

“You. Claiming to not be corrupted. Or treacherous. But you know thi-“

Without moving, Majora summoned a tendril of purple that drove itself right through the Sage’s midsection, forcing her to scream from the deep pain. She fell to the ground, astonished that the eldritch being would deliver such a fatal blow to her tool…

The Sage narrowed her eyes, seeing through the deception. She stood up, raising an eyebrow. She didn’t even need to look at her side to know there was no hole, no blood, no real injury.

Majora pointed a finger at the Sage. “That could easily have been your end, Pinkie. You shouldn’t defy our will.”

A Ba’al spoke up. “Return to your ship.”

“I will. After we declare an active mission.”

“Equis Vitis, Tree of Harmony. Get its energy sealed in the mask. Happy?”

Majora lowered her head slightly. “And next?”

“The Avatar Spirit, then the space princess Cosmo, then the Mushroom World. Nobody cares about the Mushroom World anyway.”

“Good. We’ll do them as fast as we can.”

“You are not our king.”

“I am tied closest to our greatest ally. I speak for her,” Majora said.

The Sage shot Majora an accusing glare that nobody noticed.

“Fine. We’ll go with that plan. We-“

The entire course of discussion was interrupted when a green, swirling portal opened in the middle of the bridge. It was not of any pattern or design that the Sage had seen, in visions or otherwise.

Two human men stepped through – one older man with spiky blue hair and a labcoat, the other a younger brown-haired teenager in much simpler clothing. The older man burped, rubbing the back of his head. “And here we are, Morty, a land made entirely of palm tree asses. You happy?”

Morty blinked. “I don’t see any palm trees, Rick. I see what looks like a Council of Evil Bearded People.”

“Oh fuck me…” Rick muttered, pulling a gun with a green node out of his jacket. “Something must’ve messed with the coordinates.” He ticked the dial a little to the left and aimed for an empty patch of space.

Majora crushed the portal gun with her mind. “You don’t get to leave.”

Morty held up his hand. “Woah, we don’t mean any trouble, just got lost!”

“I believe you,” Majora said, pointing a hand at them. “But that doesn’t mean you can just go on your way. You could be useful.”

The Sage felt the horror seep out of Majora, aimed directly at Rick and Morty. Morty instantly succumbed to the eldritch energies, curling into a ball on the floor and crying out things in a language he didn’t know.

Rick just blinked. “Oh, scary. You’ve broken my grandson’s mind. Whoop de dooo.”

Majora walked closer to Rick. “Rick Sanchez. Your mind may have protection, but his doesn’t. I can see all I need. I see other worlds, I see great power, I see great technology. You’ve traveled much further than we have.”

Rick facepalmed. “Fucking hell, you’re transdimensional. Look, you can see into Morty’s head, you know what I can do. Dig around. Look at that time I took out a galactic government, or an entire planet, or fought against an army of myself, something I’m ninety-nine percent sure you fucknuts have experienced at some time or other. So, once you look inside and have a good horrific crisis at the things I deal with every day, can we just agree to go our separate ways and agree this never happened? I need to show this kid palm tree asses.”

Majora took a second – and then laughed. “I think you are the one who doesn’t realize who they are dealing with. I speak for Majora – a god.”

Rick blinked. “You’re serious.”

Majora used her power to lift him menacingly into the air. “I could squash your body with a simple thought from the power bestowed in me. You can do no-“

“Code four three dick.”

A device shot out of Rick’s coat, glowing a bright purple. Majora caught it in her magic – but this only made it grow in size. It impacted her right in the mask, knocking her over and entrapping her in a cube of purple lasers.

Rick dropped to the ground. “RUN MORTY!”

“Hu- WAUGH!” Morty yelled, not given time to recover from the eldritch mindscrew before he was dragged along the ground by his grandfather. The Ba’als drew their guns and fired, but Rick pulled out a small shield device that reflected their weapons back at them. Majora screamed from within the cage, unable to break free despite her literal warping of the space inside it.

The Sage would have loved to see how this turned out – but something grabbed her legs and pulled. Before she knew it she was below the ground, but somehow not in the floor below the bridge. She was in an in-between place filled with loose, warm shadows. Looking above, she could see an image of the bridge as if the floor itself were a window.

“Vivian,” the Sage said, allowing herself to smile. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

Vivian revealed herself, pink hat and all. “Yeah. I was waiting for a moment she wouldn’t notice. This seemed like it. Welcome to the Veil. Nothing can see us here.”

“I would question if you were sure Majora couldn’t see you, but clearly you’ve managed to hide this entire time.” She looked up, seeing that Majora had freed herself.

“HOW DID THEY ESCAPE ALREADY!?”

“They… Somehow got to one of our smaller ships and activated a dimensional device.”

“HOW D- WHERE IS THE SÁG̴Ę?”

The Sage smiled. “Standing right under your nose.”

Vivian giggled.

“That’s it, initiate the final stage now,” Majora shouted.

“That’s no-“

“Does it look like we have a holy mask right now? No? Thought not!”

“We need t-“

Majora flared her eldritch energies, flooding the minds of all present with her power. “We’re done with this. Today, Majora is going to rise. Today. Do you hear me!?”

“Yes,” the Ba’als all said.

“Good.” Majora vanished, presumably returning to her ship.

The Sage shook her head. “Idiots…”

Vivian put her hand to her mouth. “What are we going to do?”

“For now? Nothing. We stay in here, watching what they do,” the Sage sat down in the nothingness. “We only act if we see reason to. Let the others sort it out.”

“You sure that’s the right thing to do?”

“I’m sure – for now,” the Sage said, entering a meditative pose. “Heroes will always come to face the villain, after all.”

~~~

Twilight and her four close friends sat at a table outside of one of Ponyville’s many diners. Twilight had her ears off since she had seated herself in such a way where she could see all four of her friends’ faces, which was a very welcome allowance since the sheer amount of loud people in the area would have made the supposedly fun lunch an ordeal.

Ponyville had changed in the last two years, there was no doubt about it. While it was still clearly a Ponyville, calling it a village might be stretching it. The number of buildings had expanded so much that Twilight’s castle was no longer in the outskirts of town, but closer to the middle. The diner the ponies were currently eating at was so close to the castle it was currently in the crystal structure’s shadow. The way the castle refracted the light around it made for an excellent view in the morning, which was why they had chosen this spot to have breakfast.

The diner itself was run by an oculus by the name of Shimmerbeets, who had a knack for knowing exactly what you wanted to order before you knew it. Twilight had been dubious about the cheese-cinnamon waffle she had been given, but as she ate it she discovered that it was exactly what she wanted.

“Must be nice to be an oculus,” Twilight murmured through her delicious mouthful.

Renee shrugged. “Eh, it tormented the Sage.”

“That was something else,” Pinkie said, downing her entire cotton candy soufflé in one gulp. “You know, like me.”

Renee nodded in agreement, saying nothing further on the matter. She took a sip of her drink. “It always amazes me how Shimmerbeets just knows how to give you the most divine meal… I’ve never had the same thing twice! The menu must be immense. Why, just last week Daniel and I were here and she gave me something with meat in it, I don’t know what kind, but it was still magnifique-“

“You and Daniel?” Nova said, raising an eyebrow and smirking. “Do elaborate.”

Renee narrowed her eyes. “It was all about politics, dear. I do believe that would bore you half to death.”

Pinkie snorted and quickly covered her mouth with her hooves.

Renee rolled her eyes. “So immature…”

“That’s Pinkie for you,” Flutterfree quipped.

Pinkie put on an exaggerated gasp. “Egad! Flutterfree thinks I’m immature! The horror! Our friendship will never recover!”

Twilight chuckled, taking out a pen and piece of paper. “We must repair the bond at once. Pinkie, tell me how that made you feel.”

“Like stealing some of Flutterfree’s delicious cake,” Pinkie said, swiping a piece of Flutterfree’s sugar-ridden food.

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “Then I’ll- oh. You already ate all yours.”

“Foolproof plan!” Pinkie cheered, tossing the cake into her mouth. Nova grabbed it and pulled it out before Pinkie could chomp down, eating it herself.

“You need better plans,” Nova commented.

“Oh no! I, the mare with the plan, had a bad plan!” Pinkie rammed her face into the table. “Oh woe is me!”

Twilight scribbled some notes down on her piece of paper she was planning to use in a comical, but still therapeutic, manner later. Something about the pen reminded her of a thought that had been shoved to the back of her mind. She pulled the journal out of her saddlebags and laid it on the table, checking the last pages. Still nothing from Corona.

“I’m getting a little worried about Corona, girls,” Twilight admitted, looking up.

“Let’s go to Earth and say hi then,” Flutterfree said. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to see us.”

“That sounds like a wonderful idea!” Renee added. “She may be neck-deep in studies, so we may not get to stay long. But it’ll be worth it; I haven’t seen her in ages.”

Twilight smiled. “I guess we know where we’re going today, then. I…” She looked up, something catching her eye. “Hey, what’s that?”

All four ponies turned their gaze to the sky, quickly finding a streak of fire shooting across the blue expanse.

Twilight was pretty sure her friends were saying something, but she couldn’t see it. But she did know that was a sure sign of a meteor falling through the atmosphere – a meteor that might hit ponies.

She spread her wings and flew into the air, performing a calculated teleport right next to the descending ball of fire. She failed to take into account how fast it was falling, so she was only next to it for a split second, unable to latch onto it. She entered a dive, grabbing onto the burning hunk with her magic, slowing it down as much as she was able.

She curved it away from Ponyville, driving it toward the Everfree Forest. She managed to slow it down enough to stop the atmospheric burning, revealing it to be one of the smaller Goa’uld ships. She wondered if the Starfinder had launched one down incorrectly, but she quickly realized it was the wrong color for one of theirs.

It was probably Ba’al.

The ship hit the ground with an impressive impact, uprooting a few dozen trees before coming to a stop. Twilight glided to the ground, folding up her wings and landing on a rock near the impact site. Nova teleported herself and the three others next to Twilight.

They all examined the wrecked ship. While still in one piece, it was laying on its side and one of its back points had been bent so far the protective hull had been ruptured.

Flutters nudged Twilight, getting her to look at her. “Think it’s Ba’al?”

“Maybe,” Twilight admitted. “We’ll need to be on our gua-“

A laser shot up form the interior of the craft, burning a hole right through the hull. An old man with blue hair crawled out, lifting a younger man out alongside him.

“Rick! Where are we?” the younger man yelled.

“I have no idea, that dimensional drive was a piece of shit,” he burped. “Clearly, Morty, we’ve crash landed in creepy magic forest number seven million and six, and our ship is completely busted.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Make some kind of deal with the people here, Morty, duh. Scam them into giving me the supplies I need to build another portal gun. It’s like we haven’t done this a million times.”

“Scam us?” Twilight said, raising an eyebrow. “I know we have a stereotype of being naïve, but we are standing right here.”

Rick took in a deep breath. “Fuck all kinds of duck, this just isn’t my day… First, clone aliens bent on world domination or some shit. Then, technicolor equines from my daughter’s second grade coloring book.”

Morty coughed. “Er… Sorry about grandpa Rick, he’s a bit… Ricky. Hi, I’m Morty. We travel a lot.”

“I’m Charter-Princess Twilight Sparkle,” Twilight began.

“God, you even sound like she named you,” Rick muttered.

Twilight ignored him. “And we travel the multiverse as well. From your description, I take it you ran into Ba’al?”

“If that’s what his name is,” Morty said.

“Even though I can tell that name’s not from this world, I can’t get over the idea of that bearded fuck being a literal ball,” Rick snorted. “Imagine that, Morty, an entire ship filled with bouncy balls of that stupid face.”

“Yeah, that is pretty funny,” Morty admitted.

“Do you, by chance, know where Ba’al is?” Nova asked. “We’ve… Been trying to find him for quite some time. He’s been causing a lot of trouble for numerous worlds.”

Rick folded his arms. “Unless by some miracle the computer in that ship isn’t busted, I’ve got nothing for your little spat.”

“It’s busted to kingdom come!” Pinkie shouted, poking her head out of the ship’s hole. “Everything is fried!”

Morty blinked. “How did you…?”

Pinkie shrugged. “I’m Pinkie Pie.”

“That’s not an explanation, that’s evidence of retardation,” Rick retorted.

Pinkie appeared on his head, glaring at him. “Technically right, but still mean.”

Rick threw her on the ground, taking a few steps back. “Stay back Morty, this one’s high on the freaky powers chart.”

Pinkie rolled her eyes, taking a cupcake out of her mane and offering it to Morty.

“I dunno Rick, she seems nice.”

“Beware the nice ones Morty! Haven’t you learned anything!?”

Flutterfree smiled warmly. “Mister, we’re not going to hurt you unless you hurt us.”

Twilight nodded. “We can even help you get back to your world.” She pulled out her dimensional device and handed it to him. “You don’t have to scam us, Rick. We’ll just give it to you.”

Rick swiped the dimensional device and popped the hatch open. “Derivative magic-based tunneling system with a series of limited dials… Complete shit.”

Twilight blinked. “What?”

“Are you deaf? I just said it was a piece of shit!”

Twilight narrowed her eyes. “As it happens, yes I am deaf.”

Morty tensed. “Rick, maybe you should stop talking-“

Twilight held up a wing to silence Morty. She smiled at him to put him at ease, but then glared back at Rick. “We’re offering you our assistance – for free – and you’re just, well…”

“Shitting all over it,” Nova said.

“Nova!” Renee chided.

“What? Twilight won’t say it, so it falls to me.”

Rick facepalmed. “For the love of… You’re arguing about swearing. There is something seriously wrong with the way you look at things.”

Twilight grunted. “The point stands, Rick.”

“Do I look like I give any shits?” Rick asked.

“Nope,” Flutterfree deadpanned.

“See? The buttery one gets it.” Rick tossed the dimensional device back at Twilight. “This is useless. Doesn’t go far enough, doesn’t have the correct coordinate usage, and it won’t operate properly in magically void universes.”

Twilight twitched. “Well then, Rick, is there anything we could do for you?”

“Unless you ponies have a state-of-the-art laboratory filled with a tremendous amount of intricate technology and a vending machine that dispenses alcoholic beverages, we’re done here.”

Twilight activated the dimensional device and created a portal to the Hub universe.

Rick poked his head through the portal. “This is a burnt jungle.”

Twilight lit her horn, teleporting them all into the Hub’s central room. “Ahem. Welcome to the Hub, the center of interdimensional civilization.”

Morty’s eyes lit up. “Huh. Nice.”

Rick folded his arms. “I don’t see the lab or the vending machine.”

Twilight teleported them all into a room of the Hub that was a lab, one that two other versions of Twilight – a pegasus and a unicorn – were hard at work in, scribbling down notes about a glowing blue crystal. Twilight spread her wings wide. “And here is one of our labs. You can see magic crystals over there, but you can also see alien technology to your left, and a beaker full of liquid electricity!”

Rick narrowed his eyes. “Vending. Machine.”

Twilight teleported a vending machine full of alcoholic beverages from a nearby hallway in the Hub. “Here you are! Every alcoholic beverage I’ve never drunk! Now accept our help already and make your silly portal gun that’ll take you home like you want!”

Rick blinked. “So, let me get this straight, this is how you do dick measuring contests here? See who can be the friendliest? That’s fucking lame.”

Twilight twitched. “I could just not help you, you know.”

“Too late, already here, no takebacks,” Rick said, grabbing the beaker of liquid electricity. “Believe it or not, your lab here isn’t quite as hopeless as I’d thought, and I think – with a significant amount of work – it’ll suit my needs.”

Morty raised an eyebrow. “Rick, just admit they have what you need, stop making the pony that could teleport us into a pit of acid at any moment angry.”

“I’ll anger whoever the fuck I want, Morty,” Rick grunted, setting to work on his portal gun in full.

Morty shrugged, turning to the ponies. “Yeah, sorry about Rick. He’s an asshole.”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Surprise surprise.”

“You’ve handled him pretty well, considering…” Morty looked around, smiling. “Can I just say that this place looks much nicer than the other interdimensional hubs I’ve seen? Usually it’s just a horrid mess.”

“Usually?” Twilight’s eyes widened. “You’ve been to other interdimensional hubs?”

“Uh… Yeah?” Morty blinked. “You haven’t?”

“No! We’re the only interdimensional group we know about! …Actually, that’s not completely true, there was Vriska, and the Stars used to have a society…”

Morty smiled eagerly. “Since Rick’s busy, I guess I get to tell the stories this time…”

~~~

The briefing room of the Apollo was rather full – O’Neill, Ganondorf, Link, Zelda, General Sunset, Toph, and Lieshy were all present, staring at the one person they had spent the last few hours tracking down.

The Happy Mask Salesman.

O’Neill leaned in. “I don’t care what kind of stupid excuse you have for not telling us everything you know, you’re going to tell us what Majora is, where it came from, and how to defeat it.”

The Happy Mask Salesman was suddenly leaning back in his chair. “Okay.”

Link shook his head. “…Excuse me?”

The Happy Mask Salesman was leaning in, eyes narrower than they had been earlier. “I said, okay, I’ll tell you all I know.”

Link blinked. “It’s that bad, then?”

“Oh it’s so much worse than I ever thought it could be.” The Happy Mask Salesman lifted a hand into the air. “Long ago, when our small world of Ardent was being created, there were many Goddesses. Only a few matter. There was the highest, the Goddess of Time, Hylia, who was unrivaled in her power. She felt alone, so she took parts of her own essence to create sisters for herself. Three of these are the Goddesses we know and love, Din, Nayru, and Farore, who shaped Ardent. But there was another, a Goddess known as Majora, the outcast.”

Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf were hanging religiously on to every single word the Happy Mask Salesman spoke.

He continued. “They were once equal in power, all working together for the world they created. But Majora resented the light of the others, and how it combated her love of chaos and darkness. In many ways, she was this world’s version of Discord. But she had a much darker heart than the childish snake you know. She tried to make a claim for herself on Ardent, being the eventual source of almost all dark magic on the globe. But the Goddesses wouldn’t accept her darkness, they found it distasteful. When they created the Triforce, her piece was rejected. Needless to say, Majora vowed revenge.”

“Why couldn’t the Goddesses just stop her? They had the numbers,” Lieshy asked.

“They could, but they didn’t believe they should. Majora was still family, after all. This proved to be a mistake.” The Happy Mask Salesman’s eyes glowed a slight red. “Majora found something beyond the holy power of the Goddesses one day. Another world. A world I believe Link is familiar with known as the Twilight.”

Link nodded slowly.

The Happy Mask Salesman was standing now. “This Twilight was an empty world of darkness, horror, and sorrow. Nothing lived there – and Majora thought this the perfect place to craft her own world, separate from the world her sisters had created. She did just that, becoming an active god in the lives of her own creations. She, over time, fused with the unique essence of the world of darkness, becoming something more than a goddess. Something maddening, horrid, and evil. She was no longer just chaos and disorder, she became darkness, despair, insanity, and sin itself. She made plans to use her newfound power to utterly destroy her sisters and their world. However, her own children of Twilight came to believe she was dangerous to them, so they used the powers bestowed to them to seal their Goddess within a mask and throw it somewhere else, so it was no longer their problem.”

“And then a few thousand years later, I found it,” Link said.

“Yes. There were other events of darkness relating to Majora’s Mask over the years, all of which I have involved myself in, to keep its evil at bay.”

“...How old are you?” Toph asked.

“Very,” was his only response to the question. “I keep it hidden, and I am the only being I know besides the Goddesses themselves that can – could – resist the mental effects of the Mask. It always calls to others, and I can never keep it out of the public hands for long, but I usually go a century or two before it reaches out to someone. Majora must have sensed something special about Ba’al to act so soon after her defeat.”

“How was she defeated?” O’Neill asked.

“Link should have told you that one,” the Happy Mask Salesman said. “Destroy the center of her essence, which is always focused around the mask. The mask itself is indestructible, but the Master Sword can, with effort, seal all the energy back inside - as Link himself did a few years back.”

“And to do that, we’d need to find where Ba’al is keeping it,” Link said.

O’Neill folded his hands. “And if the last year has been any indication, we just aren’t going to do that, and we’re running out of time. She’s going to make a move.”

“Clearly!” the Happy Mask Salesman said. “She must have one killer plan, because she never waits this long to cause havoc. She must think she can fully free herself from the mask, or something similar. She’s removed the Goddesses from the picture with the Sage, therefore rendering the Triforce’s unequaled power useless.”

Ganondorf drove his fist into the table. “She’ll pay for that…”

“Is there any other way?” Sunset asked. “Anything we could do to stop Majora, without finding her and engaging in a direct conflict? What about the people of Twilight that sealed her last time?”

Link sat back. “They… Won’t be very eager to help us.”

“Why not?” Sunset asked.

Midna appeared on Link’s shoulder. “Hey, name’s Midna, I’m not a secret anymore. I’m one of those Twilight people, a Twili. We generally hate this world, think it needs to be destroyed. We resent your sun, your greenness, and your happier lives. And, well, let’s just say that last time Link was there he totally wrecked the place.”

O’Neill cracked his knuckles. “Then let’s not give them a choice. Do you think a giant warship appearing in their dimension will make them pause?”

“They’ll probably attack it with their powerful magic,” Midna said.

“…What about a fleet?”

“A fleet? How are you going to get a fleet of dimensional spaceships?”

O’Neill stood up and grinned. “Give that Princess Cosmo-Twilight a call. She’s got ships to spare. Of course, this all depends on Link figuring out the dimensional coordinates to this Twilight Zone.”

Link pulled out a dimensional device. “I think we can step through the mirror and find out. Ganondorf, mind letting us into Gerudo Desert again?”

Ganondorf folded his arms and nodded silently.

~~~

The AID were a very paranoid bunch, even if Director Storm himself was usually rather chill. They had an electric fence around the compound, security cameras in every conceivable location (even bathrooms, though not many people knew about that), walls lined with automatic defense systems, and a state of the art alarm system that continually updated the status of the compound.

They were very careful about being hacked. Since Director Storm came back one day and declared that Sombra was in their systems they’d done a full purge and had all of the computer systems triple-backed up. The computer system sent an alert to the tech department every time anything that looked like a hack came through. They thought it was a foolproof system.

They failed to take into account the possibility of Sombra breaking into the compound while invisible and taking out the entire tech department before hacking the system from their computers. She smirked at how easy it all was. Despite all their fancy technology and handful of magical artifacts, none of them were able to see her.

She pressed the final keystroke of the hack and grinned. “I’ve got complete control. You’re free to come in.”

In the main hall of the AID, Director Storm sat in the big chair under the big screen, hands folded. He had this inkling that something was about to go terribly wrong.

A portal opened up in the middle of the room, right next to the table the Directory sat on. A unicorn stepped out, smiling. “Hey, Director! I’m back!” Corona called. Tempest stepped through with her.

The Director’s eyes widened. “All agents, get them! They aren’t the Agents we know!” He pulled his crystal out from under his desk, ready for a magical fight. All agents – including Mike and Ike, drew their guns.

Tempest snapped her fingers. At the signal, Sombra took control of the security systems in the wall, pointing the mounted turrets toward Director Storm.

Corona lit her horn, creating a ball of magical fire. The wispy fire shot out, hitting every Agent in the head except Mike and Ike, infusing their minds with a sleep spell. Her smile widened. “Celesta, it feels good to be a unicorn again…”

“What do you want, imposters?” Director Storm demanded.

Tempest pointed at Director Storm. “You’re the impostor. You have a Ba’al in your head.”

“I have no such thing!” Director Storm yelled.

“Care for a test?” Corona said, teleporting a device into her hoof. “We do have Ba’al testers on site, you know. And, oh would you look at this, if I point it at you it screams Ba’al.”

“You’re clearly working with Sombra, you could have just overridden the code.”

Corona shrugged, glancing at Mike and Ike. “You two buying this?”

Ike blinked. “I’m… Not sure?”

Corona rolled her eyes. “Okay then… Bring in the others.”

Iroh and Aang walked out through another portal. Aang pointed at Director Storm. “Ba’al, if you’re in there, I’ll be able to feel you. And I’ll be able to switch your soul with that of Director Storm.”

Director Storm tensed. “No…”

“Also, I’ve figured out how to bend magic, so I should be able to remove any corruption you might have as well!”

Director Storm lifted his crystal and shot a bolt of lightning at Aang. Aang caught it with his fingers and shot it back at Storm, where it hit the crystal.

“Mike! Ike!” Director Storm yelled, leaping into the air and sending a whirlwind of enegy at Aang – which the Avatar easily deflected. “Do something!”

Mike lowered his gun. “I don’t think so.”

Director Storm narrowed his eyes. “Fine.” A dark, purple energy wafted off his free hand, shooting right for Aang. “Gig’s up, and so’s your life.”

Aang intercepted the dark magic with his hand, twisting it into the center of his palm. It was much more painful than his experience with Corona, but he managed. Entering the Avatar State, he sent the purple darkness back at the Ba’al with a burst of fire. Ba’al fell backward. He lifted his magic crystal up, but all the weather-based attacks were child’s play to the Avatar.

Corona, Iroh, Tempest, and Sombra didn’t even need to do anything. Aang was more than enough to knock the lone man down.

“Hold him down!” Aang called, putting his hands to Ba’al’s head and chest. Corona obliged, using her telekinesis to keep him immobile. From the outside, the act of spirit bending was an impressive light show. She could see Aang’s bright blue essence, Storm’s dark blue, Ba’al’s orange-red, and the purple corruptions of Majora.

The blue essences worked together, facing off against the orange-red and purple. The orange-red was diminished to a small size easily, like butter. The purple corruption, however, fought back ravenously.

It had learned from last time. It quickly decided that it couldn’t win, so it took the opportunity to chip away at Storm’s dark blue essence. Aang wasn’t going to let this happen. He cut off the purple energy’s path, giving it an in to his own soul, but Storm and Aang’s essences looped around and crushed the purple corruption like a snake.

There was a bright flash of purple from what Corona assumed was the actual essence of Majora making contact, trying to lend aid, but if her own experiences were anything to go by, the Avatar Spirit was more than enough to contain this.

Aang released Storm.

Storm blinked. “Holy cow, this feels weird. Like… Like an out-of-body experience. Hey! I can get my voice to do the sweet Goa’uld thing! Nice!”

“Welcome back, Director,” Corona said.

“Welcome back, Corona! You’re fired!” Director Storm grinned.

Corona blinked. “Uh…”

He gestured at the guns poking out of the walls. “Tell me that’s not Sombra.”

“It is Sombra,” Sombra said over the intercom.

“See? Obvious evidence of treachery. You’re fired.”

Corona blinked. “Right, right, fair point, we’ve got bigger fish to fry right now, though.”

“Oh, don’t I know it!” Storm tapped his head. “Fun thing, I’m technically in Ba’al’s little snakelike body right now, controlling him stuck in my mind! So, I have direct access to every little thought he’s thinking and everything he’s ever known. He’s quite angry. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.”

Iroh smirked. “Poetic justice, then?”

“Very.”

“Director!” Tempest called. “Enough of this, what’s Ba’al’s plan to destroy the Earth?”

The Director folded his hands. “Using the magical hotspots of the world, Ba’al has used his infiltration skills to build a few dozen magical nodes for Majora. These nodes will connect in a magical framework large enough to surround the globe, then drain it of all the power it can to free Majora from her imprisonment in the mask. Most of the power comes from the souls of the people who live here.”

“Majora…” Corona said, grinding her teeth. “We’ve got to stop this. Is there a node in the Everfree?”

“You bet your bottom dollar there is!” Storm picked up his weather crystal paperweight and grinned. “I have literally no idea how we’re going to stop it from there, but let’s go.”

Corona lit her horn, activating a teleport… But nothing happened. “…Did you teleport-proof the base?” Corona asked.

Storm raised an eyebrow. “Besides the artifact room? No.”

Corona levitated the dimensional device and activated it – but nothing happened. “…That’s not good.”

“I have a theory,” Sombra called over the intercom. “Our inability to leave might have something to do with the giant purple magic circle surrounding the base that Ba’als with purple magic are lining up outside of.”

Storm growled. “Majora felt you freeing me. She didn’t want anything I knew getting out…”

“How are we going to tell anyone what we just found out?” Aang asked.

Corona’s eyes lit up. She teleported into her ‘office’ – apparently teleportation within the base was still allowed – and picked up the journal, teleporting back to the main room. “This. This works even when there’s no active portal.”

“The spell might still stop it…” Storm said.

“I have to try,” Corona said, pulling out a pen.

“We’re about to have other problems…” Sombra said. “The Ba’als have begun to move in. I think they plan to kill everyone.”

Storm looked at Corona. “Wake the agents up. We’re going to defend this place.”

Corona did what was asked. Storm began to fill everyone in on the situation, and Corona wrote a message to Twilight.

~~~

Twilight had no idea what Rick was doing with all the mechanisms around him. She knew exactly what all the devices he was cobbling together were supposed to do, but quickly realized he wasn’t using them in that way at all. He had torn apart a magical conductor for a single, mundane screw that he’d placed at the tip of his… thing. He had thrown together several ingredients ranging from rare horn dust to baking soda, creating a thick, green liquid. Morty had been able to tell her that was ‘portal fluid’, the ‘ammo’ of the portal gun, but he had no clue how the rest of it worked.

Morty had described the adventures he went on with his grandfather rather well. The stories were amazing, but often horrifying. There were universes that existed only to power car batteries, friendly beings that were sure destroying all organic life was a gift, and many, many civilizations Rick had just wiped out for annoying him.

It made Alushy sound like a saint. It made Twilight fear the blue haired man in front of her. He seemed like a bumbling lunatic with a big brain who didn’t care about anything. Not… Not what Morty had described.

What saddened her, though, was how jaded Morty was about it. He just seemed to accept what he told her as facts of life, things that couldn’t change. He admitted what Rick did got him angry a lot of the time, but it was the way Rick was, and Rick was always Rick. Nothing ever changed that.

Twilight sighed. It was just… It was clear that she and her friends had a long way to go. They had barely scraped the surface of what these two had seen. She, originally, had considered copying Rick’s portal gun design after he’d finished. She didn’t think she was going to do that anymore. Like Earth Omnic, she was becoming convinced they weren’t ready to spread out that far yet.

Yet.

Something in her saddlebags started vibrating. She expected it to be her phone. She sighed, expecting to need her ears – but it wasn’t her phone. It was the Journal.

She threw it on the table and quickly flipped to the last page.

Sorry I couldn’t get back to you sooner, but we’ve been having a problem. I don’t have long to explain. Tempest, Storm, Iroh, Aang, and I are all currently trapped in AID headquarters, surrounded by Ba’als infused with the power of a being called Majora. We can handle ourselves, but we have information that needs to get out.

Majora, the force behind the foalnapping of the Sage, is trying to destroy Earth. She has used Ba’al to place numerous magical nodes around the planet that will activate, surrounding the planet in a magical network and use all the power in the planet to free Majora from her current, imprisoned state.

I don’t know what she’ll do once she’s free, but it might involve the destruction of other worlds. It will involve chaos, dark magic, and destruction.

You need to go to Earth and do something about these nodes. We know the location of a few – the Bermuda Triangle, Yellowstone, Racetrack Playa, Marianas Trench, the North Pole, Durweze, the Black Forest – but your best bet is the Everfree forest. Apparently it will look like a tall, purple cylinder with elaborate engravings on it.

We’re not sure how you’re going to stop Majora through these nodes, but you have to try. Blow them up or something.

We’re going to be busy shortly, so don’t expect replies for a while.

Twilight scribbled ‘got it’ down in the book. “Okay, girls!” She shouted. “We’ve got an emergency!”

All four of them – and Morty – lined up in front of her.

“Corona just messaged me back in the journal – they’re in trouble. Big trouble. Something called Majora wants to destroy the Earth. It’s the being acting through Ba’al. It’s going to do this by using dozens of magical nodes around the world to create a framework surrounding the world that will destroy it. There’s a node in the Everfree Forest. We’re going to go there… and blow it up.”

Pinkie saluted. “Sounds like a plan!”

Rick said something Twilight couldn’t see. She turned to face him. “Excuse me?”

Rick grunted. “Not repeating myself.”

Twilight wanted to shoot a laser into his face.

Morty facepalmed. “He said it wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?” Twilight demanded.

“Do I have to explain everything?”

“AN ENTIRE PLANET IS AT STAKE!” Twilight shouted. “Possibly more! Can you get your thoughts off of your own petty projects for one moment and think that, I dunno, maybe you could at least tell us something that might keep us alive?”

Rick glanced at Morty. “…Fine. It won’t work because lattices usually have backups. Destroying one would only save a portion of the planet, not all of it. You’d need to destroy around a third to keep the lattice from activating.”

Twilight ran back to the book. “I need to get the locations of all of them from Corona…”

“Don’t bother, I’ve got a better idea,” Rick muttered, pulling a staple-shaped device out of his science project. “I need to power this baby up, and a planet-wide lattice-net sounds like just the way to do it. If I can plug this in to the node, I’ll stop it from destroying the planet and complete this shitty portal gun. Does that make everyone happy?”

“Yes,” Flutterfree said. “Thank you, Rick.”

“Don’t thank me, thank the convenience principle.”

“The what?” Nova asked.

Pinkie smirked. “The ‘I just so happen to be here and it just so happens I should help you’ idea.”

“…Okay…?”

Twilight spread her wings, readying her dimensional device. “Everyone, get ready, we’re going to the Everfree Forest on Earth. Expect anything.”

Morty looked around. “Is there a weapon I can have or something?”

Rick handed him a laser gun and Pinkie handed him a ball and chain made out of rubber. He took both and shrugged. “Good enough.”

Rick shrugged. “I hope there’s some ass to kick, otherwise this is going to be as boring as Jerry’s apartment.”

Pinkie raised an eyebrow. “You won’t be disappointed! Expect heavy resistance everyone!”

Twilight nodded, activating the portal and stepping through.

~~~

Vivian and the Sage hadn’t moved – they couldn’t risk the mask’s magic revealing itself and tipping Majora off to their location. So they just stayed in the Veil, looking at the bridge from below.

The Ba’als were moving forward with the plan. The Sage had caught them talking about the magic charging, that it wouldn’t be much longer before the lattice would activate.

“I feel so horrible, not being able to do anything…” Vivian said, hands to her chest.

“You’re doing something amazing already. Hiding from Majora. Very few can do that when she’s actively looking for them.”

“I… Had a mother a lot like her. I… Have practice.”

“I know,” the Sage said, looking up at the bridge. “Something’s happening.”

Majora’s mask appeared on the main screen. “I’ve detected magic surges in the Everfree Forest. They’re going after one of the nodes. It’s time to move the fleet.”

“Right,” a Ba’al said, pressing a few buttons. “Fleet is ready to jump universes.”

Vivian and the Sage felt the ship lurch. The Sage smirked. “I told you the others would try something.”

“But… The fleet is moving to stop them!”

The Sage frowned. “Have hope, Vivian. They have a plan.”

~~~

Link, Ganondorf, Zelda, General Sunset, Toph, and Midna stood in the middle of the Gerudo Desert, flanked by dozens of Ganondorf’s Gerudo warriors.

“Having all your ladies in waiting really isn’t necessary,” Midna said. “It might just put them on edge.”

“And having you there won’t put them on edge?” he retorted.

Midna rolled her eyes. “Fine. Link, summon the Mirror.”

Link held the Master Sword high, making it glow a bright color. He quickly drove it into the sand, sending its magic deep beneath the silicon grains. The earth around them rumbled, the sands shifting like a sea in front of them. A pedestal and numerous columns slowly rose out of the ground, revealing many intricate carvings of eyes, usually with a single tear dripping from them. The central pedestal held one large mirror. The mirror caught the light of the sun and reflected it into the space in front of it, tearing a hole in reality unlike any of the other portal devices seen in the multiverse. A flat, black plane came into existence, slowly becoming riddled with intricate white lines. The designs took a strange hybrid shape of digital circuitry patterns along a circular glyph that was similar to the design in the Temple of Time.

The circular pattern depressed into the flat blackness, becoming a portal to another universe.

Midna rubbed her hands together. “Well, let’s hope we get a warm welcome, hrm?”

Toph held up her dimensional device. “Ready to call the Apollo if it doesn’t.”

“We are going to have to…” Midna muttered, floating up to the portal. “Okay, so, this is going to feel weird.”

“How so-“ Sunset began. She didn’t get to finish – the portal latched onto the six of them and disintegrated them into hundreds of small square pieces, rushing them through the boundary between worlds, and reconstituting the squares on the other side.

Sunset’s tail had a freak out, yipping and snapping around in a panic. Sunset herself just let her eye twitch. “…Fun.”

“Woah…” Toph said, stamping her foot into the ground. “Weird…”

The Twilight Realm was a place eternally stuck with the lighting between sunset and night. There was no visible sun, just a miasma of dark and light clouds surrounding everything. The Twilight was composed of numerous floating islands of rock, on top of which large, black structures were created, lined with red and blue magical circuitry.

Numerous tall, pale people with the black and white color scheme of Midna pointed weapons at the otherworlders. “You should not have come back,” one said.

“Listen to me!” Zelda yelled. “We come here to ask for your help, not-“

“We will not give you help.”

Sunset coughed, stepping forward. “Then what about me? I’m not from their world. I’m from a world that has had nothing to do with yours or your dispute – until today. Your Goddess, Majora, is trying to free herself from the mask you created. She is no doubt plotting a campaign of revenge and destruction across every world she can find. We ask – no we beg you – to help us defeat her in any way you can, with the powers you used to seal her the first time.”

A taller, masked member of the Twili walked up to them, large black robes trailing behind her. Midna growled. “Oh, look who showed up. That was fast.”

“Who are you?” Toph asked.

“Queen,” was all she said, folding her arms. “I speak for all of us when I say we would love it if Majora wiped you all from existence.”

“And what if she comes here to attack you?” Sunset demanded.

“We have defenses in place from the last time. She will not risk it.”

“So what, you just consign dozens of worlds you know nothing about to die?”

“Not just that, but you too. Kill them.”

Toph pressed a button. Instantly, the Apollo zeroed in on the dimensional coordinates, appearing in the cloudy miasma. Dozens of other ships appeared alongside it, graceful warships of Cosmo’s army: curved ships with numerous spiky protrusions, round ones that resembled toruses, and a truly gigantic ship that resembled a cross between a flower and a pinecone. The fleet drifted through the air, surrounding the rock island the group was on.

“How about no?” Ganondorf said, taking a step forward. “How about we make you help us with force?”

“Kill them,” the Queen reiterated, no emotion to her voice.

Cosmo teleported in front of Sunset. She blinked and all the Twili in a mile radius were knocked over except the Queen. Cosmo looked the Queen, directly at the mask. “I am Princess Twilight ‘Cosmo’ Sparkle. We asked for your aid – now we demand it.”

The Queen attempted to use her own impressive magic, but Cosmo’s inner Tree of Harmony absorbed the Queen’s magic before it could even come out. Cosmo narrowed her eyes. “I’d really consider helping us.”

The Queen sighed. “Very well. We have a ritual we can perform. It will require multiple hours of setup and research in the old documents, but you are clearly giving us no choice.”

Toph smirked. “Hey, no offense lady, we just couldn’t take no for an answer.”

The Queen didn’t dignify this with a response.

~~~

Corona dug deep into her mind to remember a spell she had taught herself long ago, but never actually used. It was a forbidden spell, one that served no beneficial purpose to ponykind, one that existed only for damage.

The death spell.

She lit her horn, surrounding it in the deep red aura of her magic. A twisting pulse of red, snakelike energy shot out of the horn’s tip, hitting Ba’al right in the chest. There was no writhing, no scream – just a blank look and death.

Some Ba’als put up shields of purple magic, only for Corona to use more complex fire spells to create an explosion behind them, opening them up for another attack. She combined her knowledge of firebending and fire magic to create a flaming dragon construct that charred through the flesh of dozens of Ba’als.

It really did get easier. Though it may have helped that everything she was killing was the exact same person.

“You are a beast when you’re a unicorn!” Sombra called over the intercom. “Why aren’t you one more often?”

“I live among humans,” Corona said, setting an entire hallway of Ba’als on fire. “Can’t really go to college like this, and I rarely need this kind of power. How are the others doing?”

“Aang’s got east hallway taken care of, though he’s being decidedly less brutal than you are. Tempest and her dozen agents have the north, though a few of them have fallen. Iroh and Storm have the south, and aren’t having any difficulty keeping them getting any further in.”

“Are the Ba’als still coming at us?”

“No, actually, they’ve stopped appearing,” Sombra announced. “No signs of reinforcements.”

“That could just mean they’re activating the lattice…” Corona muttered, igniting a couple Ba’als who tried to attack her mind with purple miasma.

“Don’t worry, Twilight got the message. She’s there. Maybe the reason it’s looking up for us is because they’re sending forces there!”

“I hope Twilight’s okay…” Corona said, skewering a Ba’al that appeared behind her with a flaming javelin. “…I hope she’s not doing this.”

“She’s not the type. …How high is your kill count, now?”

“More than doubled,” Corona muttered. “I’m losing count, and that’s not a good thing.”

Sombra was silent for a second. “Sixty-three.”

“What?”

“The number of people I’m responsible for killing, directly or indirectly. Before this battle started, that is. The guns in the walls have killed about twenty more.”

Corona bucked a Ba’al in the face while torching another. “…Does it affect you?”

“Not really. I was never the real compassionate type, you understand.”

“From knowing you? Yeah.” Corona teleported behind several Ba’als and encased them all in a fire tornado. “…They have no self-preservation instinct.”

“They’re mindless servants of Majora, now. Rest easy knowing they were sleazy asshole aliens that killed millions before.”

“Yeah,” Corona said, burning more. “This is almost too easy…”

“We’re not facing any of Majora’s magic directly,” Sombra reminded her. “I’m not seeing any claws, tentacles, or otherwise. I don’t know if that’s because of the bubble they’ve placed around us or because she’s busy elsewhere. Possibly both.”

Corona grunted. “How many more Ba’als are there?”

“Few dozen on your side. You’re almost done.”

“Good. I need to wash this blood off. It’s all over my coat…” She shivered, a tear falling down her face, sharply contrasting with her enraged expression.

As much as she was talking, she was not okay.

~~~

The Necklaces that Corona and her human friends always wore came from the Everfree Forest of Earth. They were found in a mysterious magical cave deep within the woods, ready to bestow the seven of them with various abilities. This cave was ancient, mysterious, and powerful.

That had not stopped the Majora-driven Ba’als from invading the space and building their node. The node was a seven-foot tall cylinder made of a dark purple substance, carved with images of Majora’s mask alongside many other disturbing symbols. It glowed black, somehow emanating an absence of light around it.

There were a few dozen Majorist Ba’als guarding the pedestal, along with one woman by the name of Azula. In one hand, she was playing with fire. In the other, a purple conglomeration of shadow swirled. She laughed to herself, enjoying the eldritch horror bestowed upon her.

Then the ponies, Rick, and Morty charged. The Ba’als were powerful, filled with magics unlike anything they had ever experienced, and they launched these horrors at the ponies.

But Pinkie and Twilight had outlined a plan.

The charging group vanished into nothing, revealing them to be nothing more than illusions. Illusions that served their purpose. Twilight, her friends, Morty, and Rick teleported behind the node. Rick quickly leaped up and placed his device on top. Instantly the black light within the node switched to a neon pink, forcing streams of energy into the gun. Lasers shot from all corners of the globe, sure that the lattice was activating, when really they were just shoving power into a madman’s little science experiment.

“Suck it!” Rick yelled, pointing his laser gun at a Ba’al before he could turn around. “All powerful god my ass Majora!” He blasted several of their brains out.

Morty swung the ball and chain, knocking several Ba’als out. “…This is a lot less lethal than I’m used to.”

“It’s how we roll,” Pinkie said, appearing in the middle of the Majorist Ba’als with three party cannons. The confetti blew them over and away.

The Ba’als managed to form some kind of resistance, creating giant claws of shadow magic, but Nova had their number. She sped herself up, altering time so she could shoot lasers dozens of times a second, knocking all of them to the ground with ease. Twilight protected Nova from the distance, deflecting the cheap tactics the Ba’als were using.

Renee found herself face to face with Azula. Azula sent a mixture of fire, electricity, and horrific fleshy tentacles at Renee. Renee deflected with a blue shield and, at the same time, drove a curved laser spell around Azula to hit her in the back.

Azula did a cartwheel, landing on her feet. Fleshy, shivering tentacles grabbed Renee’s hooves and squeezed. Renee summoned four magical blades, slicing the tentacles off. Azula shot lightning, but it was deflected with a shield.

Azula laughed. “You’re a clever unicorn!”

Renee raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Really. Too bad it’s time to die.” Azula clapped her hands together, sending an eldritch pulse into Renee’s mind. It felt like a sea urchin had suddenly appeared within her brain and wanted to push through her skull on all sides. She let out a yell and fell to the ground.

Azula grinned, pointing a finger at her. It crackled with electricity. “Ready to burn?”

Renee didn’t respond.

“I’ll take that as a yes-“

A spell Renee had placed a few seconds ago activated, shooting Azula in the face with a laser. She wasn’t expecting this in any way – she fell like a domino.

Renee coughed, standing up. “That’s me being clever.” She rubbed her head. “Ow…”

The other Ba’als, while terrifyingly powerful, had been caught by surprise. They all fell – though only those shot by Rick were actually dead. He started shooting the knocked out ones.

“HEY!” Twilight yelled, tearing the gun from his hand. “No!”

Rick rolled his eyes. “Pussies. Bet none of you have actually had the guts to finish anyone off. It’s a weakness.”

Renee twitched but said nothing.

Rick glanced at the node. The portal gun had just completed draining all the power it needed to, and the node had shattered into a million pieces. “There you go, all other nodes in the world should look exactly like that. Majora’s plan failed. We win.”

Twilight grinned. “That… That felt so much better than the attempt to catch the Sage.”

Flutterfree landed next to her, smiling. “That did go pretty smooth.”

Pinkie’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. “Uh-oh,” she said.

“What is it?” Nova asked.

“That went too smoothly.”

Rick’s eyes widened. “Fuck.”

~~~

Vivian and the Sage saw a planet on the bridge’s main screen.

This planet was not Earth.

“What… Is that place?” Vivian asked.

The Sage clenched her jaw. “That’s the Binary world.”

“Why are we here!?”

A Ba’al above them laughed. “Well, I’m glad we’re doing this one instead of the other. It was much more rewarding to plant the nodes here. Nobody expected a thing.”

Another Ba’al smirked at his counterpart. “The best part? They set themselves up for failure. None of them would be able to know more than a handful of these things exist because of how spread out they are! They sure noticed several magic shipments, but they could never put anything together fast enough! Doomed from the start!”

“And now… We activate their lattice.” He pressed a button.

They watched several points of light shine all around the planet, sending columns of pink light into space. These columns of light were quickly connected by neon lines, surrounding the entire planet in a lattice that vaguely resembled a die with far too many faces. There were a few large explosions – presumably from reactionary attempts to nuke the nodes. A few of the light columns went out, but the vast majority remained lit.

“…Oh no…” Vivian said.

The lattice of pink energy began to shrink – cutting through the crust at every location it touched like the rocky planet was butter. Hot, molten rock poured out of the cracks, only to be absorbed by the cutting lattice itself. Tectonic plates buckled down the middle, landmasses broke off the planet’s edges, and still the lattice shrunk. The planet crumbled bit by bit – those chunks that weren’t loosely sent into space by the crushing were drawn back in, to be absorbed by the lines of energy. All civilization on the planet was gone in less than a minute, leaving only a hunk of molten rock with loose dirt all around.

There were probably Binary people on those loose chunks, in their houses, praying that there was enough air inside to last them forever. They would have to deal with a sudden lack of gravity, quick rotation, and being able to see their own planet burn beneath them.

Still, the lattice shrunk. The molten rock flowed into the lattice, forcing the orb that was once a planet to get smaller and smaller and smaller, boiling with the intense pressure of the rocky world.

They saw the corrupted Ha’tak float in front of the screen. A claw of purple impossibility shot from the ship, latching onto the lattice. The wiry structure glowed a bright purple, almost like a star. It dimmed and dragged the entire Ha’tak into it, devouring the corrupted structures within itself.

The remnant of the Binary world began to change, losing its intense glow. Purple veins coursed through it, turning the dying shine of a planet into a dead husk bit by bit, cooling the rock into a corrupted form. There was a laugh that everyone could hear, even in space.

“Now!” the Sage screamed. “Majora’s distracted!”

Vivian released the two of them from the Veil. The Sage activated the holy power of her mask, making all Ba’als in the area pass out. The two of them ran through the halls of the Mothership, heading directly for the hangar.

They arrived quickly, and the Sage sent out another burst of holy power, thankful that none of the Ba’als on the Mothership were allowed to be infected with Majora’s magic. That would have made it somewhat difficult to escape unnoticed, even with Majora distracted. The two of them piled into a small craft and launched out of the Mothership’s grasp.

“Great,” the Sage muttered, pulling up the dimensional controls. “They locked the dimensional drive after Rick escaped…”

Vivian shivered. “What are we going to do!?”

The Sage looked at the purple conglomeration that was Majora. “…We wait.”

The purple corruption of Majora soon enveloped the entire remnant of the planet, banishing the lattice in favor of a horrid, purple mess. The shape of the thing was still spherical, but it was hard to look at. Dark, purple tendrils shot out from the planet, grabbing hold of the loose pieces of crust. Any Binaries that had been lucky enough to survive the initial compression of the lattice would soon find themselves in a literal living hell.

A large tendril of purple energy shot forth from the planet, flying across space along a very particular path.

Vivian blinked. “She’s… going for the other planet.”

The Sage nodded. “The Binaries will not recover from this…” She squinted at the round form of Majora. “Come on…”

Then she saw it. A few smaller claws had pushed themselves out of the central part of the body, opening portals to other universes.

“There’s our way out!” the Sage yelled, pushing on the throttle, diving towards the nearest opening.

“She’s going to notice us!”

“Yeah, she is,” the Sage said. “We’ve just got to be fast.” She approached the portal from the opposite end the shimmering claw was, hoping to get through without any interaction with the darkness of Majora. She, of course, knew this was wishful thinking.

Majora noticed them from about a mile away. Which, in terms of spaceflight, is almost nothing. But Majora was released, and she had no intention of letting the pesky Sage get away again. With a roar that sent shivers down their spines, another claw shot toward them from the side.

The Sage activated her mask. The holy light of six holy deities surrounded their craft, deterring Majora. The eldritch being was more than powerful enough to break through the holy shell… if given enough time.

She was not given enough time. They ducked through the portal, crashing the ship on the other side.

~~~

A giant portal opened up in front of Twilight and her friends.

Twilight didn’t have her ears on.

She could hear the screaming.

A claw rushed out at her. She couldn’t move. All she could do was hear the screams and wait for the hand of death to take her.

043 - A Wedding Between Worlds

Renee had known exactly where she wanted to get married since she was a little filly. If she was in a reasonable mood back then, she would have admitted that it was never going to happen. She just wasn’t important enough, wasn’t connected enough, to have the perfect wedding at the perfect place.

Now was a very different story. When the time had come to chose a location, it turned out she had already been making plans.

The wedding was to be held in the grand hall of Canterlot Castle, the same place the Grand Galloping Gala was held every year. The highest class location in all of Equis Vitis – the place she had set her dreams on. There had hardly been any debate – she said that was where the wedding was happening, and that was where it was happening.

It did help that Daniel didn’t really have any specific place in mind – the SGC wasn’t a very impressive place on the inside, and the other world he had called home didn’t exist anymore. He thought Canterlot hall would be perfect, even though his experience at the last Gala had been… lackluster. Admittedly at this point everyone knew the Gala was a bore because of how regimented and ancient it was – this celebration was being crafted by Pinkie Pie, so it was guaranteed to be better in almost every conceivable way.

It was the day of the wedding. A beautiful, crystal clear day with a slight chill leftover from Winter Wrap Up the week prior. It was early enough in the day to still be considered morning, so not all that many ponies of Canterlot were out and about. The streets didn’t look dead, but they certainly weren’t choked with hoof traffic. It was in this scenery that Reverend Starlight Glimmer found herself as she trotted to the front gates of Canterlot Castle, humming a little tune of worship to herself.

She was not surprised at all when the royal guard barred her entry, as they were supposed to do with virtually anyone. “It’s okay, I’m the Reverend. For the wedding.”

They stared at her blankly.

Rev summoned her invitation and Equis Vitis marriage license. She raised an eyebrow. “This proof enough for you?”

“You’re just… early,” one of the guards said. “That’s suspicious.”

“Yeah, we’ve got to be extra careful,” the other added. “Last time I was on guard duty during a wedding there was a Changeling invasion.”

Rev raised an eyebrow. “I’m early because I’m the ‘officiant’. Plus, I can’t be the first, I’m sure Pinkie’s already there.”

“She’s the only one,” a guard said. “I don’t-“

“REV!?” Pinkie’s squeal smashed into everypony’s eardrums, forcing them to wince. The Pink Party Pony was suddenly standing in the middle of the three of them. “Yay! You made it! You can help me set up!”

Rev adjusted her collar and nodded. “Of course. After I make sure the podium i-“

Pinkie picked up Rev and dragged her past the guards before they could object. Rev didn’t even get to see the rest of the castle; she was dragged through the double doors of the Gala Hall sooner than should have been possible.

The interior looked absolutely gorgeous. The walls were lined with shimmering, crystalline banners with intricate designs that were reminiscent of languages from hundreds of worlds. A larger banner that hung across the ceiling bore a stylized version of Renee’s cutie mark and a symbol Daniel had chosen to represent himself: a point with three lines coming out of it creating a sort of reverse triangle. The symbol was that of a world Daniel had once called home: a world that had been destroyed, Rev knew, long before Earth Tau’ri had made contact with Equis Vitis. Daniel had had a family there, once.

Rev shook her head – today was not a day to think of past tragedies, but to look to the future. Besides the shimmering banners, there were also perfectly trimmed indoor bushes, a number of abstract statues constructed from magic gemstones that filled the hall with a warm color, and a stage with a pew made from a synthetic Earth Tau’ri material that Rev could not identify. It sure looked cool.

“Yeah, Renee was totally here last night,” Rev said. “Do you even have a job to do at this point?” she asked Pinkie.

Pinkie smirked. “You bet it Revvy!” She produced a round table from nothing. “Ka-BAM! Still need tables! Lots of tables! Round tables spread everywhere!”

“It’s a welcome change from dividing the families down the middle,” Rev commented, walking up to the futuristic pew and finding it satisfactory. “Symbolic as it is, we are going to be here a while. And it would make Daniel’s side look rather small.”

“There’s not even any reserved seating aside from the primary table!” She threw a long, rectangular table down at the front of the room, slightly to the side of the aisle that was being created by the other tables. “I’ll push that into a central position later.”

Rev nodded. “Guess I’m sitting there after the ceremony?”

“You bet! I can change it if you want though.”

Rev smiled. “I’ll sit there, don’t worry. Though I will be mingling. I hear you’ve got quite the punch.”

Pinkie smirked. “I mean, I dooo but I won’t be using that punch until after the actual ceremony. Renee would shred me if something went wrong before that.” She shivered. “The wrath of the fashion horse is something you do not want to experience.”

“The wrath of the party pony is worse, from what I hear,” Rev commented, using her magic to lay some tablecloths on the tables.

“Eh, maybe. Probably. Definitely.” Pinkie set up an entire snack table with a flick of her hoof. “But I’m a lot less likely to completely freak out at some drunk pony breaking a chair, or something.”

“Raritys tend to be like that.” Rev summoned silverware from the aether and arranged it in what she hoped was the correct arrangement for Equis Vitis customs – many universes were annoyingly slightly different on that count. Pinkie wasn’t objecting, so it was probably right.

Pinkie furrowed her brow. “You know, normally at this point I’d sprinkle confetti everywhere, but Renee knows what she wants. I’ll just create a different sort of surprise…”

“If I don’t get an explosion of some kind I’m going to be disappointed,” Rev said with a smirk.

Pinkie blinked, then chuckled. “You’re quite the pastor.”

“I’m still a Starlight. I get to be wild from time to time. And it’s a myth that being a Reverend requires being calm, serene, and boring all the time. Joy is one of the fruits of the spirit after all; and being regimented, high, and mighty kinda goes against that.”

“Gotcha.” Pinkie slid up close to her. “Sooooooo… How’s Flutterfree been doing?”

“Of course you know,” Rev said, not surprised in the least.

“She actually told me about her visits, but yeah, I would have known regardless,” Pinkie smiled.

“Well, she’s doing great right now. It never ceases to amaze me how internal conflict can invigorate somepony’s faith. She’s been much more than a passive observer at the service lately ever since she got Lolo.”

Pinkie patted Rev on the back. “You do good work, Rev.”

“Thanks. Though I’m sure she would have gotten through the ‘I’m a vampire’ thing with you girls as well.”

“Eh, the others were kinda treating it like it was no big deal,” Pinkie admitted. “Noooot the best thing to do. She needed somepony to take her fears seriously.”

“She’s a strong mare,” Rev said. “I find it strange how Fluttershys can be both the weakest and strongest individuals across the multiverse. I’ve met ones that would break at the sight of injury, while Flutterfree is ready to take on the entirety of the cosmic cruelty and be nice to it.”

“That’s our Flutterfree all right!” Pinkie declared, completing the setting of the table.

“…Who else knows?” Rev asked. “I’ve been encouraging her to tell everypony, but I know she hasn’t.”

“I know, Applejack knows, Discord knows, and Renee knows. Renee only found out recently, because you came up in wedding plan conversations.”

“Discord’s keeping a secret?” Rev shook her head. “Do my ears deceive me?”

“He’ll do almost anything Flutterfree asks him,” Pinkie explained.

“Should I be preparing a service for them?” Rev joked.

Pinkie chuckled. “Hey. Rev. They’re standing right behind you.”

Rev flushed purple as a grape and slowly turned around. “Why h-hello Discord! Flutterfree! You’re here early!”

Discord just stared at her and blinked while Flutterfree covered her face with her wings.

Discord put a claw to his chin. “You know, I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it that way.”

Flutterfree whimpered.

Rev put a hoof on her shoulder. “Hey, Flutterfree. It was just a joke – though admittedly probably one in poor, gossipy taste. Sorry.”

Flutterfree removed her wings from her face, revealing her red eyes. “I… It’s okay. I have come across several others of us who are like that. But we’re not. Okay?”

Rev hugged Flutterfree. “Of course.”

Discord glanced at Pinkie. “So, where’s the chaos punch?”

“Not until after, Discord. Think of Renee.”

“I’m thinking of the priceless look on her face.”

“Diiiscoooord…” Pinkie droned.

“I kid. ...Mostly.”

“DISCORD!”

“Fine, fine, I’ll behave.”

Pinkie glared at him. “I better not hear a maybe in there.”

“Perhaps.”

Flutterfree, having recovered from her embarrassment, fixed Discord with an eyebrow raise. “Discord, please behave yourself for Renee’s wedding, ’kay?”

“Okay…”

“Good.”

Pinkie nodded. “Well, if you guys are arriving, I should probably get to greeting duty!” She appeared next to the grand doors of the hall. “ANNOUNCING PINKIE PIE OF E-“ she coughed on her own speech.

“Nice,” Diane deadpanned, trotting into the hall with a camera. She started taking pictures of the decorations.

“I was introducing myself…” Pinkie muttered.

“Yeah you were!” human Pinkie said, appearing behind Diane.

“Oh no! We’re in the same place!” pony Pinkie squealed. “REALITY ISN’T READY!”

“REALITY BETTER GET READY, BABY!” They did a combination hoofbump/high-five.

Diane trotted out of the hall.

“Hey, where are you going?” Rev asked.

Diane forced a smile. “I was just here to check out the decorations as possible inspiration. Wasn’t all that interested otherwise.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Diane waved, then left.

“Yeah, that’s a weird one,” human Pinkie said.

“She’s doing pretty well though!” pony Pinkie added.

“Yep!”

Rev shrugged, turning back to Flutterfree. “So, whenever we talk about Lolo it’s always about how you can cope with what it does. Have you figured out some fun things yet?”

Flutterfree smiled. “Well, besides tapping into the ‘potential’ of everyone around me – still don’t understand how that works exactly – Lolo’s body is very flexible. I can stretch it out for miles and set up ‘cameras’ along the lines to help me see things. So long as nothing breaks them, it works great. By the way, I’m making you glow again.”

Rev looked at her reflection in one of the crystalline statues – her eyes had a soft white glow to them and her cross necklace was floating. “Ah. Just don’t let any actual undead touch me, everything should be fine.”

“Alushy’s going to try to touch you anyway,” Flutterfree commented.

“Alushy has enough durability to survive a holy exorcism by a Pope,” Rev commented. “I am not worried for her sake.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “Sounds about right.”

~~~

The attendees of the wedding slowly trickled into the hall, turning the empty room into quite the bustle of activity. There were guests from every single one of the major worlds – humans from AID, Toph’s team from Lai, some scientists from Equis Cosmic along with Cosmo herself, many Stargate Command personnel, some Asgard, the Joestars, and even Emerald. Notably she was the only representative of the Gem Vein, here more out of curiosity than anything else.

There was also a set of people nobody had seen in awhile.

“Link!” Vivian called, rushing to him. “Oh we haven’t seen you in forever!”

Link smiled, holding Romani tight. “It has been a while.”

Lieshy took her position next to Vivian. “I’ll say. How’s the family?”

“We’re doing well, considering,” Romani said. “Most people don’t realize that we were your friends, so we’ve lived in relative peace.”

“Good for raising kids,” Midna said, appearing out of Link’s shadow. “Bad for adventures. There hasn’t been anything dangerous in a while.”

“You avoided war?” Vivian asked.

Link nodded. “No wars broke out. Ardent stands as a strong alliance… Against anything from other worlds.”

Toph walked up to them. “That might be good. You didn’t get attacked by the University. Your world is probably safe from anything out here, now.”

Link furrowed his brow. “That is right… Still feels wrong though.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“How’s that sword been treating you?”

Toph twirled the Master Sword. “Excellently. I’m basically Queen Luna’s personal General now, so I must be doing something right with the hero’s destiny.”

“I remember when I first met you,” Link said. “You were a stubborn kid.”

Toph smirked. “And now look at me, a stubborn woman. So impressive.”

Link laughed. “Yes. That is exactly what you’ve become.”

“I would ask for a sword duel, but that can wait for later,” Toph gestured behind her. “How about snacks for now?”

“Oh, snacks!” Midna said. “I need exotic snacks back in my life. GIVE!”

Elsewhere in the hall, Vriska was strolling around, whistling innocently. She leaned against a bare wall, glancing nonchalantly at one of the indoor bushes next to her. She smiled at the bush. “Nice get-together, huh miss bush?”

The bush did not respond.

“Do you want me to play stab-the-bush? I’ll enjoy it, but something tells me you wouldn’t.”

“Go away,” Starbeat called from inside the bush. “If people see you talking to me they’ll know I’m here.”

“They’ll just think I’m crazy.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s at least one person in this room that can read minds, probably more.”

“Very powerful psychic.”

“Pinkies just know things.”

“They’ll give you a berth.”

Starbeat groaned. “Look, Vriska, I’m just here to observe the wedding and be part of it in some way. But you and I both know the romance in this area is so strong that I won’t be able to escape it. So this bush is my home. And nobody gets to know I’m here.”

“I found you easy.”

“You cheat at life.”

“It’s only cheating if you get caught.”

Suddenly Jotaro was standing behind her. “Cheating?”

Vriska suddenly took her gaze off the bush and started walking away from the wall. “W-wow! You have good ears there, Jojo! But rest assured, there’s no unfair gaming practices here! Eheheh!”

Jotaro narrowed his eyes. “Hmm…” He glanced at the bush. “Yare yare daze…” He turned and walked away without another word.

Vriska blinked. “…That guy. I don’t get him.”

“He’s observant,” Starbeat said. “And just… so big…”

“What happened to your beeping bracelet? I know it should have just gone off.”

“It’s disabled right now. I’m not giving away my position, that’d be stupid. Now shoo, I have observations to make.”

Vriska shrugged. “If you say so. Want me to bring you some punch?”

“I can teleport it myself.” Vriska heard a slurping noise from inside the bush. “Being a unicorn is nice.”

“Not as good as a troll.”

“Debatable.”

“You wanna debate?”

“Not right now. Maybe later. Can you just… Stop talking to the bush now? ’Kay?”

Vriska shrugged. “Fiiiiine.” She walked away, meeting up with the Pinkies for a chat. She found them talking with Applejack – a very pregnant Applejack.

“How’s it feel to no longer be the only married mare of your friends?” pony Pinkie asked Applejack while Vriska sat down on a nearby snack table.

“Bout time,” Applejack commented. “Y’all are takin’ too long.”

The Pinkies giggled. “Well, don’t get your hopes up for anyone else, we’re still single and expect to stay that way for a while!”

Applejack smirked. “Yeah. True. Hey… Vriska right?”

“Yep! That’s me!” Vriska said, bowing in an exaggerated manner.

“Ah’m invitin’ you to Sweet Apple Acres. If you’re gonna be hangin’ around my friends as much as Ah hear you are, you get to hang with me as well.”

“…Why do I feel like this is going to be some kind of test?”

“It is.”

Vriska smiled. “They’re right, you are the honest one.”

“It’s no small part of me,” Applejack admitted. “Ah would ask you to tell me about yourself, but there’ll be time for that later.”

“Thank gog.”

“Hmm…”

“Did I just lose an Applejack point?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck.”

“Lost another one.”

“Wonder how deep I can dig this hole.”

Applejack smirked. “Oh look at that, you just gained a ‘point’. Good for you.”

Vriska fist-pumped.

In still another location in the hall, Flutterfree and Rev were talking.

“Well, technically speaking, it’s Divine magic, not divine gifts,” Rev said. “Sure, I have holy spells and enchantments, but they’re not really miraculous. You can trace them back to a source.”

“Oh, like Thrackerzod?”

“Precisely, except of the Divine flavor rather than the other… unsavory types.” She bit her lip. “I mean no offense to Thrackerzod, but what she is and what she does, while not the worst type of blasphemy, is pretty bad.”

“I’ve seen what she does. It is pretty disgusting. But she uses it for good.”

Rev nodded. “She is an interesting case, I have to admit. Not sure what to make of her, to be honest. She’s technically worshipping some thing to get the power she does, but her physical body and mind allows her to deviate from the essence she is derived from. I’m honestly a little curious if that’s possible for a true Demonic presence.”

Flutterfree blinked. “You ask the deep questions, don’t you?”

“Yep. Regardless, back to my point – I get my Divine powers from a source, this is true. You might even call the plane of existence it heralds from a ‘Heaven’. I do not worship the ‘god’ within though, he’s just a pale shadow of the real thing. But I still get power from the ‘Heaven’ through what’s basically a loophole in the way eldritch-type magic works.”

“That’s… a little confusing.”

“You bet it is. There’s a prevalence of gods in the multiverse. When you run a church you have to be very careful about what your doctrine actually is. Like, if you’re me, make sure you’re always describing the God who is the creator of the entire multiverse and exists outside it.”

“How do you know, though? We’ve run into lots of priests who are sure their powers come from a higher power of some kind. But most of them probably come from Divine sources like your own.”

Rev smiled awkwardly. “We don’t know, not really. There’s a lot of different answers to that question, but I prefer the one that goes something like this: ‘Well, all these Divine sources were created by God, so technically all the powers also come from Him, albeit indirectly’. Admittedly, this opens a loophole for ‘evil’ and ‘Demonic’ powers in some cases, but that’s how it is even with non-eldritch powers. Basically you can’t really tell for certain because we have limited mortal minds, but in most cases it doesn’t matter. Use your powers to be good and serve. And if you’re aware of where they come from, don’t pretend they come from God Himself. …Even if everyone is going to assume that.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “Constant problem for you?”

“The amount of people who want to worship users of Divine power is absurd,” Rev muttered. “It’s why I virtually never use any unless there’s some serious Demonic presences around.”

“…What are Demonic powers like?”

Rev smirked. “Dangerous question, Flutterfree.”

“Oh, should I-“

“No, you’re curious, and I should answer. I think you’ve run across a true Demonic presence, once. By the name of Algernon.”

“…Really?”

“I’m not certain, but from what I heard it seems that way. True Demonic presences are nothing like the impossible-to-comprehend beings like Majora. Neutral Eldritch things are as varied as humanity itself. Demonic things… they’re often an attempt at a different sort of impossibility. Pure evil. But given how evil cannot exist without good, and how many people disagree on what pure evil is, the attempt just doesn’t work. You get beings that are physical manifestations of vices that make no attempts to hide what they are – and then you get things like Algernon.”

“Why do I have the feeling the Algernon-like Demons are much worse?”

“That’s because they are. The highest Demonic presences of that kind can fake anything perfectly. Being a friend. Being a hero. Being a lover. They can get into your head with or without magic powers. They may have lots of different motives, but the primary one is to turn people to their side, and to keep them away from anything Divine or holy. They revel in death, destruction, lies, and...” she shook her head. “Just like there are shadows of God in the multiverse, there are shadows of Satan. And some of those shadows… They can build themselves up in a world, flawlessly acting like a perfect individual with no faults. They’re not called fathers of lies for nothing. And then… They can do whatever they want.”

Flutterfree shivered – but then set her face. “But we’ll face them.”

Rev smiled sadly. “Normally I’d encourage you in that. But… they know exactly how to turn confidence against you. I myself was fooled by one wholeheartedly, despite my unwavering faith.” She looked into the distance, memories of the past haunting her. “I’m not sure there’s any advice I can give for dealing with one once they set their eyes on you besides pray.”

Flutterfree nodded. “Got it.”

“Let’s talk about something that isn’t related to the possible corruption of everyone from all angles,” Rev said.

“How do you think Renee and Daniel will be as a married couple?” Flutterfree asked.

“I’ve seen their love,” Rev said. “It’s not a holy one, but it’s a strong one. They’ll be happy, and I don’t need to be a Pinkie to be certain of this. I’m honored to be chosen to officiate it.”

“You’re welcome,” Flutterfree said, smirking.

“Yeah. Thanks.” It was at this moment Rev saw danger coming directly at them.

Nova was marching right at them, the smile on her face clearly plastered on.

Rev turned to Flutterfree. “Just keep talking,” Flutterfree told her. “So, any special plans for your words during the service?”

“I’ll keep it mostly the same,” Rev said, regaining her composure. “I’ve removed the religious language from their vows, but that’s about it. I did consider ‘man and pony’ for a while, but ‘man and wife’ works better, I think.”

Nova arrived. “Oh, the wedding vows? I take it you’re going to bless them?”

“Yes, of course,” Rev said, feeling her stomach tighten into a knot. “One of the things I’m allowed to do.”

“Riiiiiiight…” Nova said, taking a few steps around Rev. “I guess that’s right. I am still a little surprised Renee didn’t ask Celestia to officiate.”

“It was partially Daniel’s decision,” Rev explained. “Weddings are regularly performed by the local pastor on Earth Tau’ri, and I’m the local pastor here, so… Yeah. This is a combination wedding, after all.”

“You operate in Ponyville.”

“The pastor they know,” Rev said. “And don’t worry, I’m not going to give a sermon here. Just remind them of the importance of marriage and all that stuff.”

“Mhm,” Nova said. “You have to admit, it looks suspicious. Almost like you were recommended, or something.”

Flutterfree raised a hoof. “I recommended her, Nova. She’s a good friend.”

Nova twitched. “Really?”

“Yes. Really. I know she makes you uncomfortable, but she’s a good pony. She won’t outshine Renee like Celestia would, and most of the people here know her from around Ponyville.”

Nova glanced at Flutterfree suspiciously. Flutterfree’s crimson eyes didn’t falter.

Rev put on a smile. “Let’s not put a divide between each other. This is a wedding, and you two are friends. We don’t need to walk over each other’s hoo-”

“You think you’re so high and mighty aren’t you?” Nova said, turning to Rev.

Rev’s smile vanished. “No. I am no better than you.”

“Oh, is tha-”

“OH LOOK WHO IT IS!” Flutterfree blurted with excessive volume. “ALUSHY!” She used Lolo to wrap around Alushy’s wing and drag her closer – not that Rev or Nova could see this action. “Alushy, have you met Rev? She’s going to be performing the ceremony.”

“Ah. The resident holy warrior,” Alushy said, smirking. “I hear rumors that you can blast a mean holy laser.”

“Er…” Rev recovered quickly. “Yes, I can. I’d rather not, though.”

“Oh come on, just a little thrust. I’m sure I can handle it.”

Rev slapped her. “How’s that?”

Alushy rubbed her cheek. “Not what I meant but I like your spirit!”

Nova walked closer, raising an eyebrow. “Alus-”

“Sh sh sh, Nova, Nova, take a few seconds. Breathe.”

“Wha-”

“I SAID BREATHE, BITCH!” Alushy shouted at Nova.

Nova was unfazed by this. “Bitch? Me?”

“Yep,” Alushy confirmed. “You were being enough of one that Flutterfree pulled me into the conversation to defuse it. imagine that, me, pretty much the most chaotic thing other than chimera-snake-boy over there, called to defuse a conversation.”

“Defuse a…” Nova blinked, finding that Flutterfree and Rev were no longer next to her and had moved to opposite sides of the room.

Her left eye twitched. “I wasn't done yet…”

Alushy lowered her glasses. “You’re telling me. Something’s got you livid.”

“She’s brainwashing Flutterfree, that’s what. I just know it.”

“That’s pretty cool, actually.”

“No it’s not!” Nova blurted. “It’s insulting to her life and will ruin her. She clearly can’t see this, so I have to do something.”

Alushy facehooved. “Welp, good luck, wedding crasher.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I said nothing,” Alushy grunted, walking away.

~~~

Renee was sitting in her dressing room. She stared at herself in the mirror – she had no more makeup on than she usually did, which was to say just mild eyeliner and the eyelash extensions. This was twofold – she was probably going to burst into happy tears at some point, so she didn’t want her entire face to be ruined, and because overdoing the face would take away from the sheer magnificence that was her dress. It was a brilliant white decorated with almost a hundred tiny blue diamonds. The silken fabrics that made up the outfit were arranged in such a way to make it appear that the dress was glowing, even though there were no light sources within the folds of the fabric.

“Evening,” she called behind her. “Read me the preparation checklist again.”

Eve saw her lips move in the mirror. “Dress?”

“Check,” Renee said.

“Mane?”

Renee examined her complex intertwined braids that twisted around in helix-like patterns in some places; it certainly looked complete to Renee. “Check.”

“Tail?”

Much the same as her mane, though only the edges of the luxurious hairs were visible near her back hooves due to the dress. “Check.”

“Jewelry?”

Her ears were pierced with the finest sapphires she could find. “Check.”

“Hooves?”

Sparkling. “Check.”

“Horn?”

She rubbed her polished horn. “Check. You know, sometimes I envy the sharpness you alicorns get in your horns.”

Eve looked up at her horn. “Never really noticed.”

“You wound me, darling. As the years go on you just get larger and more impressive. I’m waiting for your mane to start flowing any day now.” Renee commented.

Sweetie Belle, the only other pony in the room, spoke up. “Don’t eastern unicorns have pointed horns?”

Eve nodded. “That is true. Anyway, next on the list… cleanliness spell.”

Renee nodded, lighting her horn and casting a spell on herself. “I knew I forgot something. With all that punch around, I have to be on my best guard.”

“I don’t,” Eve smirked.

“Yes, so good to be you.”

Sweetie Belle blinked. “Uh, why don’t you have to be concerned Eve?”

Eve blinked. “Oh. I guess that’s technically a secret. Sorry, Sweetie, didn’t realize.”

“Okay…?” Sweetie Belle said, confused.

“Sorry Sweetie,” Renee said, slightly embarrassed. “I guess we forgot you don’t know everything. Rest assured it’s not a secret about you or your friends. Just something we don’t want any of the villains knowing.”

“You sure talk about it rather openly for being that big of a secret.”

“We’re ponies,” Eve said. “We’re kinda bad at lying. Unless you’re Nova.”

Renee smirked. “At this point I should counter with all the times I managed to deceive and get away with it, but that’s not exactly something a lady should brag about, so instead I’ll just remind us that Pinkie has big secrets she never tells us.”

“But when there’s a secret she can tell she’s likely to explode into a dozen pieces at any moment.”

“That was a day, wasn’t it?” Renee smirked. “Remind me to let Pinkie know ahead of time if I’m pregnant and make her hold it in for a day, just to see how she does.”

The two mares stared at her.

“I kid, I wouldn’t be that cruel.”

“That’s not what we’re staring at you for,” Eve said. “It’s-“

“Dear, I know it’s not going to be like that, I know how biology works even if half the universes we come across haven’t the foggiest idea.”

“Exaggeration alert,” Sweetie commented.

“Thank you Sweetie Bot,” Renee ribbed.

Sweetie rolled her eyes.

Renee continued her thought. “Regardless, it probably wouldn’t be good for me to have foals anyway, seeing as my job is exceptionally high on the ‘time required’ and ‘danger’ spectrums. I’m half expecting an assassination attempt or something in the next hour.”

“Pinkie confirmed our lives aren’t in danger today,” Eve said. “She was certain. She rarely gives me her certainties.”

“Probably means her certainty doesn’t matter much then, hrm?”

“That does seem to be how it works.”

“That still makes absolutely no sense to me,” Sweetie muttered.

“Ah well, not something to question today,” Renee asserted. “She’ll tell us when she’s able to. Right now I’m about to get married. Renee Jackson has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“You will have a nice ring before the day is out!”

“Amusing,” Renee deadpanned. She took a breath in, and released. “Eve?”

“Yes?” Eve responded.

“Thanks for everything. Thanks for keeping me calm up until this point. Thank you for showing me the multiverse that led to this moment. Above all, thank you for being such a good friend all these years.”

Eve blushed. “Aw… Renee. You do-“

Renee pulled her into a hug. “You mean… So much to me… Stars, I’m already crying…”

Eve magically wiped the tears off of Renee’s face. “You should save those for the groom, Renee.”

“RIGHT! To the hall!”

“The ceremony doesn’t begin for another twenty minutes,” Sweetie said.

Renee twitched. “I need ice cream to fuel my nonexistent patience, now!”

“Way ahead of you,” Eve and Sweetie said at the same time, each producing a gallon of ice cream they had brought separately.

~~~

Daniel examined his outfit. It was… sort of a tuxedo? In a way? It had long tails of fabric coming off the back that dragged behind him, and orange stripes all over it that resembled a combination of stargate glyphs and tree shapes. He knew it was supposed to contrast the blue and white of Renee’s dress, but he still felt a little silly. The collar was larger than he was used to, the tie had a lot of symbolic designs he wasn’t sure made any sense, and the buttons were just as black as the suit itself making nearly impossible to put on.

He wasn’t sure if he was some sort of reject vampire or a tropical bird.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“Like a great warrior, Daniel Jackson,” Teal’c declared.

“Like the mannequin of a clothing designer,” O’Neill described.

“That doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Oh, you mean your appearance. You look like a Phantom of the Opera reject.”

“Gee, thanks Jack.”

O’Neill tipped his hat. “Glad to be of service.” O’Neill was in his full dress uniform, hat, medals, awards, and all, giving him quite the impressive stature. Teal’c had opted for a standard tux rather than traditional Jaffa ceremonial dress, which probably would have made Renee freak out.

There was silence in the room for several seconds.

“Daniel Jackson, you are perspiring,” Teal’c observed.

“Surprise, surprise…” Daniel said, trying to adjust his collar to allow more breathing room. “I mean… What exactly is it she sees in me?”

“Danny boy, if you’re just asking that question now you’re in hot water,” O’Neill observed.

“No, I mean, I know why in that sense, I mean… Why me? Why not some high society type? Or… Or…” he started breathing too heavily to talk properly.

Teal’c put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “Daniel Jackson, you are a man who has saved millions of lives countless times, not with violence, but with words. You are a warrior, yes, but not a warrior in the way most understand. You seem meek and uncertain on first glance, obsessed with things that don’t matter. But to those who know you, we see a heart that cares deeply for everyone. Even those who may not deserve your trust get it. It is this heart that Renee sees – the heart of a gentle lion.”

O’Neill blinked. “I was going to say he’s got nothing but good timing, but that works too.”

Daniel raised an eyebrow. “You’re great at providing support, Jack, hope you know that.”

“I’m just gettin’ you to loosen up a little. You’re going to go out there, be the most dapper dashing Daniel imaginable, and you’re going to marry that pony.”

“I am?”

“You are!”

Daniel took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Not if I pass out from nerves first.”

“They have spells for that, I believe,” Teal’c offered.

“…Of course they do.” He stared at the mirror. “How long do we have?”

“Oh, fifteen minutes?” O’Neill said, glancing at his watch. “Give or take some.”

“I am going to sit here for fifteen minutes and not stress myself out.”

“I believe it is too late for that, Daniel Jackson,” Teal’c said.

“I thought Jack was supposed to be the not-so-helpful one?”

“He just tells it like it is,” O’Neill said, placing his hands behind his head.

“…Great.”

O’Neill shook his head with a smile on his face. “Look, Daniel. I’m not one to get sentimental, or even take much of anything all that seriously even in the face of death, but let me be real with you. You and Renee? You belong. Everyone saw it before you two did. Well, not everyone, but you get the idea. I’m not going to give you some sunny ‘oh it’ll be happily ever after’ crap, but I will say that your life will be a lot worse without her in it. Got it?”

“…Got it.”

“Good. Glad we had this talk.”

“Well it’s certainly done something. I’m a bit too out of sorts to see what it is, but there’s something.”

“Hopefully you won’t figure it out within the next ten minutes.”

“It hasn’t been five minutes, Jack.”

“Eh, I wasn’t sure before. I’m not sure now.”

Daniel sighed. “Teal’c, how much longer?”

“Eleven minutes.”

“Well, suddenly that doesn’t seem like very long at all. Something could still go wrong though…”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong in eleven minutes, Daniel,” O’Neill said. Then he realized what he just said. “Dammit.”

“Jack what have you done?!”

“Let’s talk about something else, Daniel. Like my best man speech. I’m curious how many of your deaths we should actually count.”

“Ja-“

“I’m thinking seven, but there’s a possible eight, maybe nine. Need your opinion. Or else I’m just going to embarrass you by bringing Vala up.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I would if you don’t calm your ass down.”

“His posterior is not part of his emotional state,” Teal’c said.

O’Neill blinked. “…That was a good one, Teal’c.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t think it’s calming Daniel down though.”

“You think!?” Daniel blurted.

“Need to try something else… have a zat gun?”

“Oh no, no we’re not doing that!” Daniel shouted. “We… We… We…” He slumped down into his chair and held his head.

“Good enough for me,” O’Neill said. “If he’s not back to normal in three minutes we get him an energy drink or something. Otherwise, good work men.”

“I’m the only other one here, General O’Neill,” Teal’c observed.

“I was congratulating myself.”

“Indeed.”

~~~

The ceremony would begin in fifteen minutes or so. Flutterfree was allowing herself to relax a little – she had managed to avoid Nova this long, so she likely wasn’t going to have to actually confront her until after the wedding. Which was the ideal result – she really didn’t want to ruin this for Renee and Daniel. Normally she would just talk it out with Nova at this point, but the timing was terrible.

“I really should have told her sooner, huh?” Flutterfree said to the Pinkies and Vriska – the latter of whom was stuck in her god-tier form because of Flutterfree’s proximity.

The two Pinkies nodded. Vriska blinked. “Told her what?”

Flutterfree paused, considering if she should tell Vriska or not. “You’ll probably figure out soon. If not, ask me tomorrow – I’m going to have to confront Nova before then. Which is to say pray really really hard that she doesn’t blow up at me.”

“Nova can’t stay mad at you for anything,” human Pinkie said. “Well, that’s not entirely true, she’s more angry than the rest of us, but your friendship is much stronger than that.”

“I’d worry about other ponies she unleashes her personal anger on,” pony Pinkie added.

“Yeah… But after the wedding Rev won’t be around, so that probably won’t be a problem.”

Vriska slurped a mysterious blue smoothie. “Hey, by the way, Nova coming right for this snack table. Should we be concerned?”

The Pinkies blinked. “Maybe…” pony Pinkie said. “But she wouldn’t dare try something this close to the ceremony, would she?”

Vriska narrowed her eyes. “She’s got the look of someone with a vendetta. I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Flutterfree began to walk away.

“Hey Flutterfree!” Nova called. “Wait up!”

Flutterfree turned around – Nova’s voice didn’t seem hostile. It seemed like she genuinely wanted to talk to her. Flutterfree decided to wait for her. As she approached, Nova entered Lolo’s field, forcing the ring around her horn to activate a soft striped magical glow on her horn – nothing close to how her horn looked when it really was active, but enough to be visible. “What’s up, Nova?”

“I… I want to apologize about earlier. I interrupted a conversation with a bunch of assumptions that I just… I acted upon in a really jerky way, and that was wrong. What you said was right, she’s just the right choice for the job and I shouldn’t hold some kind of vendetta against her because of my past. I’m… I’m going to have to work past it. It’ll take time.”

“Oh…” Flutterfree said, pleasantly surprised by this response. She smiled. “Apology accepted Nova. I’m sorry for setting Alushy on you.”

Nova nodded. “Yeah… Can you believe I actually went as far as to convince myself you were being brainwashed by her? I mean, that’s just ridiculous – you were just talking. Nothing else going on.”

Flutterfree’s smile faltered. Nova’s own nervous smile faltered in turn. “F-flutterfree?”

Pony Pinkie inserted herself in between the two of them. “Can we not do this now? The ceremony is about to start and-“

“Pinkie, stop,” Nova said. “I want to know what’s going on.”

“But-“

“Nova’s right,” Flutterfree said, shaking her head. “We’re here right now. I’ve… I’ve been dishonest, and not saying anything will just make it hurt more.”

Pinkie nodded slowly and got out of the way.

Nova pleaded with Flutterfree. “…Please don’t tell me it’s what I think it is.”

“It probably is,” Flutterfree admitted. “I’m a part of her church. Have been for a while. It’s only really been serious for less than a year.”

“A YEAR!?” Nova exploded. “You’ve been listening to her stupid SLOP for A YEAR!?”

Flutterfree stood her ground. “Yes. Longer, actually. Quite a bit longer. And it’s not stupid slop, it’s great truth about the nature of existence, and what we’re supposed to be.”

“Holy hell, she really has brainwashed you,” Nova spat. “Haven’t you learned anything from our explorations? These ‘gods’ are just fakes! Spirits, Stars, and Deities that aren’t all-powerful, aren’t good, and definitely aren’t worth devoting our lives to!”

“Nova, that’s not how thi-“

“THAT’S EXACTLY HOW IT WORKS!” Nova shouted. “There’s some being that has POWER and because it has POWER people think it is worthy of their praise. Maybe it even created them! But it NEVER deserves that!”

“This is different. Ther-“

“DIFFERENT? How the HELL is this any different? Flutterfree, listen to me. We’re going to find whatever god it is Rev serves. It’ll happen eventually. Mark. My. Words.”

“NOVA, LISTEN FOR ONE DAMN SECOND!” Flutterfree shouted. Her eyes flashed. Those who could see Stands would have seen Lolo’s spirograph patterns surround her and rotate aggressively.

Vriska dropped her drink. Nova took a few steps back, startled.

“Thank you,” Flutterfree said, returning to her normal calm tone. “Nova, I understand why you hate this idea. You grew up thinking the Stars were perfect beings that watched our every move and controlled our fate toward what was good and harmonious. Then you found the Stars were just like us, except they thought a little differently. Having your entire worldview shattered like that… I know it must hurt. You never talked about it much, but I knew. I’m sorry I didn’t try to learn more about it, that’s my fault. But this… This is a little different. There’s more here than just revering some thing. That book? That Bible? It is the single most common book in the entire multiverse. It exists in almost the exact same form in every one – even in worlds that aren’t human dominated. It talks about more than just legends and stories with morals – it contains wisdom, songs, a history shared by so many. Thoughts on the nature of good and evil, forgiveness, hope, and… and…” Flutterfree wiped her eyes. “There’s a lot there, Nova. I understand it isn’t for you. I hope that may change one day, but…” She shook her head. “It means a lot to me, now. I see in what she teaches a reason for what I do – a reason to help everyone. Hope that it is possible to fight against all the horrors in this multiverse with so much darkness and evil. To me it means that there really is someone up there watching us, and He wants us to succeed and help all these people!”

Nova took a step back, tears in her eyes. “She… She’s really gotten to you.”

“It wasn’t her, Nova.”

“Yes it was. I know how this works, Flutterfree! This is exactly how I enslaved that entire village! I used what I believed and clever wordings to get ponies on my side! It didn’t matter if what I believed was wrong or right, I could do it!” Nova spread her hoof. “Don’t you see? She’s just like me!”

Rev grabbed Nova’s hoof. “Yes. I am.”

Nova was startled by Rev’s sudden presence. “…You.” She said, not even trying to hide the spite in her voice. Why did Rev have to be ever so slightly taller than her?

“I am like you,” Rev continued. “I’m impulsive, angry, and I tend to let my ideals shine through my words and shape ponies. This is both a good and a bad thing. But like I keep trying to tell everyone, I’m never the last authority on this matter. I’m just an interpreter. There are other interpreters, other ideas, that should be considered. I think I’ve found the right on-“

“That’s right, you think,” Nova blurted. “I thought too!”

“I made that village too, Nova.”

“Oh good! Glad we have that in common. Then you know what we thought back then? We thought that we’d found the right answer! The right way of thinking about things! But you know what? That’s impossible!”

“Of course it is, I’m going to be wrong about some things, and so are you!”

“EXACTLY!” Nova shouted. “Now listen to me, this stuff? This worshipping of some higher God? That’s stupid! How can you worship something you don’t know is really good? What if you find out someday that you can find your God and realize that, oh wait, he’s an absolute asshole who’s basically clueless!?”

Rev’s expression darkened. “I believe in a God that exists outside the multiverse and is incomprehensible even to the eldritch beings that swim in the Embodiment. I believe that the angels and demons we see across the multiverse are pale, dreamt up imitations of the real articles. I believe we live in a world of lies that needs an absolute beacon of hope.”

“There is no absolute beacon!” Nova shouted. “Look around! I know you traveled the multiverse before coming here – you’ve seen horrors. You know exactly how whatever you think is true can be turned on its head at any freaking moment because things are never the same anywhere! There is no metric, Rev!”

Rev twitched. “Oh, and, pray tell Nova, what drives you?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean why do you keep going? Why do you struggle against the darkness of the multiverse? What is the point? There’s no truth according to you, Nova. Everything changes. In one place something is evil, and in another it isn’t.” Rev was definitely shouting with malice of her own at this point. “You take this away, everything’s dead!”

“There-”

“There’s what? Harmony? That Tree of yours is just the half-resurrected corpse of a Star and you know it. Fate? Putting your trust in fate?[/i ]Well in that case, some ponies are just doomed to be villains, and some are made heroes. Am I the villain? Am I the hero? Well it’s certainly not my choice, now is it, Nova!?”

“I live because I have my friends! I define my own rules based on myself and them! That’s how, you dense dogmatic bitch!”

“FRIENDS DON’T MEAN AS MUCH AS YOU THINK THEY MEAN!”

“OH WELL I’M GLAD YOU YELLED THAT SO LOUD THE ENTIRE ROOM COULD HEAR IT!”

“I’M GLAD YOU REVEALED YOURSELF AS WELL, NOVA! COMPLETELY HOPELESS!”

“WHO NEEDS HOPE? IT’S JUST A SENTIMENT!”

“DO YOU EVEN HEAR YOURSELF?”

“GO TO HELL!”

“RIGHT BACK AT YOU!”

“DO YOU WANT TO DO THIS? WE CAN DO THIS, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW!”

Rev laughed. “VIOLENCE? HA! THAT SOLVES NOTHING!”

“EVERYPONY STOP!” Pinkie shouted, smashing a gong right in both Nova and Rev’s ears. “THE CEREMONY IS GOING TO START IN A MINUTE!”

Nova and Rev rubbed their ears, not quite able to process what had just happened.

“You two should be ashamed of yourselves!” Pinkie shouted, albeit with less force. “This is Renee and Daniel’s big day, and you are this close to absolutely ruining it! If they came in here to this… It would…”

Nova and Rev hung their heads in shame, their rage gone in an instant. “…I’m sorry,” they both said.

Pinkie nodded, shaking her head. She pulled them both into a hug. “I know. I forgive you, and so does everybody else. But we can’t dwell on that right now – it’s a big day. Nova, go take your seat. Rev, go to the podium. Let’s get through this, okay?”

The two Starlights nodded. They magically cleaned up any tears that had been on their faces and moved to their positions, tired. Everyone in the hall slowly began to sit back down.

Nova sat down next to Flutterfree, looking at the floor.

“Nova…”

“I’ve never been a worse friend than this,” Nova said.

Flutterfree put a wing around her. “…Yeah.”

“You’re… Not mad?”

“I’m still mad. I’m still very mad. But you need this right now.” Flutterfree looked up at Rev standing at the podium. “She needs it too.”

“…What?”

“You hurt her just as bad as she hurt you,” Flutterfree said. “There was never going to be a winner in that shouting match.”

Nova hung her head.

On the podium, Rev realized she wasn’t going to be able to keep herself under control, no matter how much she prayed or struggled. So she lit a horn and cast a temporary spell on herself – forcing herself to gain a serene smile and a calm demeanor.

She felt dirty for using it, even though she realized she had no choice at this point.

Forgive me.

While the drama of recent events was fresh in the minds of most of the people in the hall, it suddenly took a backseat to the event itself. The separation of the fight had come at the perfect moment – right after Rev cast her composure spell, Daniel and O’Neill came into the hall, Daniel taking his position in front of Rev’s podium, O’Neill standing behind Rev. Eve took her position mirroring O’Neill’s on the opposite side, leaving a space for Renee.

Renee herself appeared through the front doors of the hall, walking past all the guests, her father and mother following right behind her, two unicorns that were never more proud in their lives. Renee paid little attention to the crowd for once in her life – she entered with a graceful stroll, but completely forgot to keep it up when she saw Daniel. Her gaze did not leave his until she got to her position mirroring his own. While her parents took their seats at the main table, it became clear that while Renee’s and Daniel’s outfits looked rather ridiculous on their own, the shapes and colors did compliment each other as a whole.

Renee handed the bouquet she held in her magic to Eve and sassily removed her veil with her magic, revealing a smirk. Daniel smirked right back.

Rev cleared her throat. “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today in the presence of these witnesses, to join Renee Belle and Daniel Jackson in matrimony commended to be honorable among all; and therefore is not to be entered into lightly but reverently, passionately, lovingly and solemnly. Into this – these two persons present now come to be joined. If any person can show just cause why they may not be joined together – let them speak now or forever hold their peace.” Just to be safe, Rev cast mute on Alushy. The vampire probably wouldn’t do anything, but you never knew for sure with that kind of troublemaker.

“Seeing that this moment is likely to be the most significant one in both of your lives, I ask that you take this marriage as a beginning of your lives together. Today signifies the creation of a new home, a new family. May you be fulfilled by each other’s deep love. May you be overjoyed by the promises you are about to make and the wonders you will experience with life together. Remember that in every marriage, there are good times and bad, times of joy and times of sorrow. Marriage is more than just an arrangement – it is a journey, one as brilliant and tense as any foray into an unknown universe. The main difference is that this journey is enhanced by the love, trust, dedication, and faith you share in one another.”

Rev turned to Daniel. “Daniel Jackson, do you come here freely and without reservation to give yourself to Renee Belle in marriage?”

Daniel nodded. “I do.”

“Renee Belle, do you come here freely and without reservation to give yourself to Daniel Jackson in marriage?”

Renee squeed for a moment before echoing Daniel. “I do.”

Rev nodded. “Having heard that it is your intention to be married to each other now, I ask you to declare your marriage vows.”

Renee went first this time. “I, Renee Belle, take you, Daniel Jackson, to be my husband – to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, no matter what plane of existence we may find ourselves in, or what the future may hold, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.”

“I, Daniel Jackson, take you, Renee Belle, to be my wife – to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and cherish; from this day forward until death do us part. And, depending on how the death goes, probably even after that.”

There was a chorus of soft laughter from the room. Renee had to wipe happy tears from her eyes.

O’Neill handed Daniel the rings – one small enough for his finger, one large enough for Renee’s horn. Wordlessly, Daniel placed the large ring on Renee’s horn. Renee took his small ring and placed it on his finger.

Rev stamped her foot in satisfaction. “By the power vested in me by around a dozen different universal legal codes, I now pronounce you man and wife. You may now kiss the bride.”

Unlike their first kiss, which had been a mess that collapsed in on itself in a manner of seconds, this one went much smoother, likely because they had gotten practice in at this point. Renee stood up on her hind hooves and slung her front legs around Daniel’s neck, pulling his face to hers. The kiss didn’t last long – only a few seconds – and for everyone watching it still looked a bit odd, but that didn’t change anything about what it meant. It, in a word, was perfect.

“I present to you, Daniel and Renee Jackson!”

Then there was applause – applause from everyone. Many faces had tears in their eyes. Rev removed the spell she had on herself – she wanted her own applause to be genuine.

It was then Pinkie’s party cannon went off – but it didn’t release confetti. Instead, it released small, sparkling gems that descended slowly to the ground, filling the room with a beautiful sight that Renne would have described as divine.

Instead of walking down arm-in-arm, which would have been exceedingly awkward for Renee, Daniel just got on her back and they descended toward their table. They didn’t get far – people and ponies rushed up to congratulate them, to shake hands, and to give encouraging comments.

“Ah see you finally joined me,” Applejack said, managing to get to the front of the crowd despite her currently awkward frame. “Think the others will anytime soon?”

Renee shrugged, upsetting Daniel’s balance but not knocking him off. “Not anytime soon, Applejack.”

“Figures,” Applejack said. “You two have fun now, y’hear?”

“Oh, we plan on it.”

“Speaking of fun,” Alushy said, pushing herself to the front. “Pony. Human. How’s it work?”

“I figured that you, of all ponies, would be the one to know,” Renee snapped back.

“Touche.” Apparently this answer satisfied her, and she left.

Carter went up to Daniel. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this, Daniel. It’s good for you.”

Daniel smiled. “Thanks. I think. I’m not really processing this yet, give me a minute.”

“IS THERE A TIME MANIPULATOR IN THE HOUSE?” Vriska shouted. “I know the answer’s yes. Nobody going to give this man a minute?” No response. “Shame.”

The congratulations and comments just didn’t seem to end – but eventually the two of them got to the table, O’Neill and Eve close behind. Renee’s parents had clearly been wondering if they should have started eating all on their own. But that worry was over, and the festivities could begin.

“Hey Rev!” Eve called. “You joining us at the table?”

“No, sorry,” Rev called back. “I’ve changed seats. After all, Pinkie set this up as a mingle, right?”

Eve smiled back. “Well, see you around then!”

Rev walked across the room, right over to Nova and Flutterfree. She sat down at an empty chair across from them.

Nova stared at her. “So…”

“Nova, after this, we’re going out for drinks,” Rev declared.

“…Drinks?”

“Yes. Drinks.”

“I should probabl-“ Flutterfree began.

“No,” Rev said. “It’s just going to be me and Nova. And probably a lot of cider.”

“Isn’t drunkenness-”

“Yes. It is. We probably won’t drink that much.”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “…Okay, I’m intrigued now.”

“Good. We need to work this out without screaming at each other. But for now…” She turned around to see O’Neill giving his toast. “Let’s listen to some embarrassing stories about how many times Daniel has kicked the bucket, hrm?”

Nova let out a sigh of relief. “Yeah… Yeah I think I could do that.”

~~~

Rev downed an entire keg of cider and slammed it down, the empty vessel making a satisfying thunk against the table’s surface.

“Wow,” Nova said. “That’s impressive.”

“It’s a sin,” Rev muttered, ramming her forehead into the table. “But look at me, it’s how I cope. Absolutely brilliant.”

“I dunno, I think it makes you more relatable,” Nova said, taking a sip of her own mug.

“That might be the point. Sometimes I wonder…” Rev shook her head, trying to clear it. “Anyway, the point. We’re a couple of… Of…”

“Complete assholes?” Nova suggested.

Rev laughed bitterly. “Yeah. I’ll go with that. Complete assholes. That’s us.”

“No argument from me. Almost ruined the day. Had Pinkie not been there…” She didn’t want to finish the sentence, opting instead to take another drink.

“…We need to find a way to live with each other.”

“Normally I’d just say avoid the topic altogether, but…” Nova bit her lip. “Yeah, that’s not going to work. There’s just… there’s no way this...” She shut herself up before she went on a rant again.

“This is definitely a problem. We… Well, we both hate what the other believes, basically. Ding ding, how smart am I.”

“Genius levels.”

Rev chuckled. “I discovered the secret to FTL travel in another life…”

“I did that for… some reason.”

“The best reason. Reasons.”

“…What?”

“Yeah I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.” Rev laughed. “I don’t even drink much anymore. Usually I’m pretty low stress. But today … Oh today. You had some good points.”

“I… Did?”

“Well, I mean, it is a little ridiculous for me to believe in that big man in the sky th-”

“I did not say that!”

“Shoosh. I’m using metaphors. …And now I’ve lost it. Whatever, it does seem kind of silly, at times. I have no way of getting any proof He’s really out there, and when I do run into something like Him, I know virtually instantly it isn’t Him.” She rammed her hoof into the table and burned a cross-shaped imprint in it with her Divine powers. “See that? That doesn’t come from Him. That comes from some shadow elsewhere in the multiverse.”

“Uh… kay. I think I knew that, maybe?”

“Yeah.”

“You were right about me as well,” Nova said. “It… it does seem kinda hopeless, at times. There’s a lot of happiness and friendship, but those Gems… Sombra… There’s too many gray areas. And I can’t just live by my own defined morals, because those have been proven wrong before. And Eve keeps admitting she’s wrong in a lot of things… It’s like nobody’s right about anything.”

“Gotta love that truth.”

“I just… I guess I do believe that there’s some sort of truth, or harmony, or destiny – probably fate. I can’t live like there isn’t something. There has to be good, there has to be bad, otherwise what am I even doing with my life? Why do I fight so hard? …I really need to apologize to Flutterfree. She found her answer. I walked over it like it was trash.”

“Mhm…” Rev said, examining her empty keg. “I… I don’t know anymore. We’re just going to keep yelling at each other. The only reason we’re not right now is because we’re both drunk and filled with guilt and shame and other unpleasant nasties.”

“Neither do I. Maybe we just need to keep talking until we do know. You know?”

“Don’t know.”

“Like… We agree to meet and talk to each other about the world, the multiverse. And we agree not to get angry about what the other says or believes. That way we can try to understand each other. Think… Think that can work?”

Rev blinked. “Holy potatoes…”

“Holy potatoes? That’s your expletive?”

“I was saying that’s a good idea!”

“I’m still stuck on ‘holy potatoes’,” Nova giggled. “Potatoes. Pff.”

“Yes, yes, laugh why don’t you.”

“Gladly,” Nova chuckled. “…You really think it’s a good idea?”

“Well, even if we don’t end up understanding each other… We could still respect each other. And we wouldn’t do it because we were avoiding certain parts about each other we didn’t like, we would… We would talk about them. Openly. No anger would build up…”

“There will be anger though. But… But we’ll just let it out on the spot so it doesn’t stew and become nasty.”

“Yeah. Not nasty…” Rev looked at Nova. “Tomorrow then?”

“Tomorrow. Though without the cider next time.”

“Yeah, clearly,” Rev muttered, leaning back in her chair. “Ugh… Flutterfree is going to be so disappointed in me…”

“...Hey, welcome to the club.”

“Wait, weren’t we already in that club?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“Then we should talk until we do know!” Rev slammed her hoof on the table, flipping it over. The two mares stared at the mess they made – but then started laughing.

They got thrown out seconds after that. But they didn’t care – they had begun a conversation that would likely never end.

It was one way to start a friendship.

Author's Note

Hey, we have a story group now! Songs of the Spheres: Extended Multiverse. Drop on by, everybody's always welcome!

-GM, master of vast stories.

060 - A Normal Day for Normal People

Nestled deep within the scaffolds of Celestia City, there was a small community. Only one way in, one way out – the rest of the ‘secluded’ living area was surrounded by an abandoned factory district and a crystal garden. Above them was a flat, metallic ‘roof’ upon which were pipes that carried water to a large portion of the entire city.

This community was simply called Armadillo Street, after the only ‘street’ that led into the place. It wasn’t an abandoned street by any means since half the residents of the place had to use the street to drive to the rest of the city for work, but it wasn’t very high-traffic. Besides the storm of cars and hooves that scrambled in the ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ with the work cycle, the street was a ghost town.

Today it would be a ghost town all day because it was the weekend. Morning came – but since Armadillo Street was not in a section with lights above that created a day-night cycle, they had to make do with alarm clocks or, in the case of Aiskera, beautiful melodious music and a robot that would flick the light switch on and off if that didn’t get her up.

This morning Aiskera didn’t even need the music; she was up and dressed due to excitement long before the song was set to go off. She was the Flat version of Fluttershy. Human, very yellow, and once an emissary of the gods themselves. But that was all behind her. She was just Aiskera now. Aiskera, the community planner for this tiny little street. The closest they had to a leader of any kind.

Today, she was throwing an evening potluck for everyone in Armadillo Street. It would be an amazing community activity that would bring all of them much closer together. The possibilities of this day – oh she could scarcely imagine them! Great food! Discussions about life! Plans for the future! Everything was going to be just perfect.

She had this.

When her music started playing, she danced out of her bedroom and into the living area of her house. She lived alone with her robot and cat, both of whom were absolutely adorable but didn’t really make good conversation partners. She didn’t mind at all – the whole street was her conversation partner.

She kept herself from humming to the music – even though she had learned to keep her voice consistently feminine long ago, it was still monotone like all Flats. Her ‘singing’ was completely pointless, not to mention annoying to all who could hear it. She allowed herself to enjoy the song in silence, cooking herself some breakfast.

The magic crystal stove activated in an instant at her thought of breakfast. She pulled eggs out of the fridge and cooked them up in a jiffy. She loved the word jiffy. She also loved peanut butter. The two things were probably related, but she never thought about it that hard. Who needed to? Life was simple and enjoyable.

She set her eggs on the table and began to dig in, using her free hand to pet her cat and keep him from getting to her food. He was way too fat; she needed to stop giving him part of everything she ate. Just cat food for him now! Always!

Upon finishing her food, she opened her front door, marching out onto Armadillo Street itself. She took in the houses of all her neighbors, the street itself, and the blue and beautiful sight of the crystal gardens in the background. She ignored the other half of the background, which was the abandoned factory district’s metal pylons that seemed to go on forever, because that was just depressing and ugly to look at. Not to mention that part of the street was dark and hard to see without light from the crystals.

She walked up to her front door and took a blue spellcube out of her house. She walked to an empty lot next to her house and threw the cube on the ground. In an instant, the lot was covered in a raised wooden platform, ready to be decorated for a potluck. All she had to do was actually set it up.

Aiskera grinned. “This is going to be a good day,” she decreed.

~~~

Bon Bon had lost Lyra.

One would think it would be easy to find a hyperactive unicorn mare with a plethora of odd spells and a penchant for shouting conspiracy theories to anyone who would listen, but this turned out not to be the case. Not even special agent Bon Bon was able to track her down in the mess that was Celestia City.

The trip had started off so well too. Lyra had suggested going on a weekend vacation, and Bon Bon had decided it would be good for them. But less then an hour after arriving Lyra had gone “Ooooh! Look at that!” and vanished completely.

Bon Bon had looked high and low, low and high, under and over, and everywhere in between. She wasn’t in the stores, she wasn’t in the restaurants, and she wasn’t even in the more questionable locales. Bon Bon had long since accepted the fact that Lyra had probably just vanished off the face of the universe.

She probably should have been worried sick.

She was just annoyed instead.

“Who does she think she is dragging me all the way over here and vanishing like that? Really?” She groaned, walking down a street covered in both sides with exotic fruit stands. On the ceiling above her, the gravity was reversed and the buildings were styled like an Earth western. She paused for a moment, taking in the bizarre truth that was ‘desert sky.’ It occurred to her that she could probably jump high enough to get to the western…

She did exactly that, using her training to perform a high jump, launching herself into the air. Gravity flipped, but because she was expecting it she stuck the landing perfectly. She much appreciated the atmosphere change – though having the sky made of fruit was a little odd. Glancing around, she noticed a larger section devoted to housing larger creatures – full sized dragons, giant ponies the size of mountains, the like. She’d actually been to the giant pony homeworld – Equis Tremendous – and knew what it was like to live on a larger version of herself. That was enough to tell her she didn’t want to go there.

So she trotted along the dirt path rather aimlessly, admittedly not even looking for Lyra anymore. She’d show up when she wanted. She knew Bon Bon’s phone number. Probably. She’d be able to find Bon Bon’s phone number, at least.

“You’re just going to drive yourself into more and more doubt, Bon Bon,” she muttered to herself. “Lyra will show up eventually. She always does. Just enjoy yourself while you can.”

After a short drink in a nearby saloon, she continued trotting. The western area gave way to a river flowing through a scenery made of metal where every surface was a building. She was positive the ‘street’ she was on was actually the wall of someone living in a sideways cube with vaulted windows.

Celestia City could get weird. Mayor Blumiere’s answer to ‘can we do this crazy architectural thing?’ was almost always ‘go ahead but make it even more insane’ and then Squeaky would say something like ‘insanely brilliant’ and then there’d be a cheesy laugh track.

I’m getting cynical, Bon Bon thought to herself. I’m not old enough to be this cynical yet. I’m not even eighty for Celestia’s sake! Only sixty. That’s young for a pony. …Young-ish.

She sighed, not really sure what she was doing anymore. She supposed she could probably go find a hotel and sleep for a while. See i-

She saw something out of the corner of her eye – a tall, humanoid figure cloaked in black. The figure saw Bon Bon see it, and ducked behind a nearby building – ducked behind it quickly. Like it didn’t want to be seen.

Suspicious, Bon Bon thought, leaping into action. Her instincts took over and she galloped across the uneven ground toward where she had seen the figure. She turned the corner and saw the figure slip into a little offshoot road that headed into a sheer metallic wall. Spray paint lined the wall with more than a few vulgar words and images there for all who found this back alley to see. The road wasn’t completely covered in dust, so there must have been at least some people who drove or walked by here.

She turned the corner, chasing the shadowy figure down the side road. This road was long, narrow, and surrounded by simple metal on all sides. The figure was running. However, the figure was a humanoid; not only was Bon Bon a pony, she was also an agent. She was really fast.

The figure must have had some sort of power, though, because when Bon Bon started running at full gallop the figure began to move faster as well.

More and more suspicious.

Bon Bon passed a sign – Armadillo Street – but paid the name little mind beyond a subconscious mental catalog. The street eventually opened up to a small, secluded set of buildings ranging in construction from human suburban, to futuristic, to the signature Gem geometric and orderly designs. The figure took a sharp left and Bon Bon pursued.

Thoughts of where Lyra was had been left at the entrance to Armadillo Street. Now she had her own adventure to focus herself on.

~~~

Lily Valley loved weekend mornings. She didn’t have to get up, didn’t have to worry about the kids, school, or work, and as far as she was concerned there wasn’t even need to make breakfast. Just sit, asleep, in her nice room. Her safe room. So safe…

She eventually woke up on her own, sighing contentedly. She opened her eyes to find her room a dull blue hue from the glowing crystals outside. What a wonderful view. She really had chosen the best house in this little place. Who cared if the drive to school and work was longer than it would have been otherwise? It was quiet out here. She wasn’t constantly on edge.

With a satisfied grunt, she sat up and stretched out her pink hooves, ready for the day. She checked her yellow mane to ensure it looked presentable, stuck one of her signature lilies in to complete the look, and trotted down the stairs.

She failed to realize the TV was on until it was too late. She caught the image of a player character in a video game blowing a head off a zombie. She screamed and scrambled up the stairs.

“Mom?” her daughter called. “Mom, are you okay!?”

Not coming down the stairs for fear of seeing more gruesome scenes, Lily managed to blurt a few words. “Petal! How many times do I have to… Only play those games when I’m asleep!”

“You were asleep until just a minute ago! You came down the stairs pretty fast!”

“Just… Just shut it off, Petal.”

“But moooooo-“

“Petal! I mean it!”

Petal sighed and turned off the TV. “There you go. It’s safe now.”

Nervously, Lily poked her head around the edge of the stairs. The TV was off and Petal was looking at her with a somewhat annoyed expression. “Better?”

Lily was still grabbing her chest like she was about to have a heart attack. “Y-yeah…” She shook her head. “Where’s your sister?”

“Numysitr,” Petal mumbled.

Lily narrowed her eyes. “What was that?”

“Uh… I think she’s still looking at those books of hers. Up all night. Like always.”

“Petal, you know she doesn’t need sleep. And I let you stay up later than me.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Petal muttered as her mother trotted over to her other daughter’s room. She knocked. “Velvet? You okay in there? It’s tomorrow!”

Velvet opened the door. She was a small Gem of a deep red color with her gemstone on the back of her left heel. “I’m fine. School today?”

“No, it’s Saturday,” Lily said with a smile. “What did you learn today?”

“Guys are always stupid.”

Lily laughed a little too loudly. “You certainly found that out at a young age.”

“Four-hundred-seventy-eight days?”

Lily blinked. “I know I said to stop thinking of your age in years, but that’s just as odd.”

Velvet shrugged, walking past Lily to the living room. She sat on the couch, taking a book off an end table and reading it.

“Mooooom, Velvet’s reading that book you told me I couldn’t touch!”

“Huh?” Velvet said, looking up. “What di-”

Lily poked her head in. When she saw what book it was, she let out a panicked yell. “AIYEE! Uh… That book will be for when you’re older! Wait, would it even apply to you? I don’t…” Raising a Gem makes no sense. “Wait, why was this even out?”

“I find it likely that Petal put it out so I would pick it up by instinct,” Velvet said.

“Nuh-uh,” Petal denied, shaking her head profusely.

“It seems highly probable.”

“Stop it with the big words! You’re the little one! Stay little!”

“Gems do not grow, we are born as we are. All we can mature in is understanding, and that can be done quickly.”

“Moooooom, Velvet’s doing the condescenthing again! You heard it!”

“I am merely stating facts, Petal.”

“Girls!” Lily blurted. “Neither of you are in the right! Could you just… Not fight for one morning?”

“We didn’t fight two days ago,” Velvet pointed out.

“Mom, Velvet’s being technical again,” Petal jabbed.

Lily took in a breath to calm herself. “Okay, let’s put it this way. Petal, Velvet? You’re trying to get each other to fight. That’s not good! Look at what you’re doing to each other!”

The two looked at each other – and looked away in a huff.

Lily facehooved. There was no talking to them when they were like this. She’d need to pull them aside when they were in a better mood and have a more serious talk. She told them to just entertain themselves and not bother each other for the next little while and left it at that.

Arriving in the kitchen, she remembered that today was the potluck. She would have to bring something for Aiskera to serve – the Flat was always so nice to them. Lily was thinking her special ‘lily sandwiches’. Only the ponies on the street would actually like it, but that was just fine with Lily. She opened the cupboard, a smile on her face.

She screamed.

Her kids ran into the room. “Mom, what is it!?” Petal blurted.

“I… I… I forgot to go shopping! We’ll have to get ingredients today!” She grabbed her head. “I’ll have to take you two into a store!”

~~~

Within a community as small as Armadillo Street, one would be surprised to find enough teenagers around to constitute an actual ‘troublemakers’ group. But this didn’t stop three friends from getting into all the trouble they could think of on any given day.

The leader of the troop was a teenage blue dragon with red highlights named Tyr. He looked rather predatory and menacing – until he talked in a squeaky voice that was annoyingly stupid, even to his ears. The other two were significantly younger – one was a markless Sweetie Belle known as Lemon for her bright yellow color, and the other was a human boy, Edmund.

Both Lemon and Tyr knew Edmund was an absolute idiot. Edmund was only sometimes aware of this fact.

“So… What are we doing here?” Edmund asked, leaning over the edge of a factory platform. Tyr grabbed him by the shirt before he fell into the abyss.

“We’re here because our parents told us not to be here, obviously,” Lemon declared. She levitated a rock and threw it into the abyss. She didn’t hear it hit the bottom. “Tyr?”

Tyr spread his wings. “On it.” He flew down, leaving Lemon and Edmund on top.

“So… Ed. It’s just you and me…” Lemon said.

“Yeah. It is.” Edmund smiled stupidly, playing with his firebending in his hands.

“Why don’t we do something fun? You know, like m-”

“Play dodge the fireball!?” Edmund squealed with glee.

Lemon facehooved. “No, Ed, no… I mean you, me, maki-”

Tyr returned, interrupting Lemon’s plot. “Nothing down there. Lemon, I told you to stop hitting on Edmund.”

“Well what else am I going to do?”

“Get over this ‘I need a boyfriend’ phase quickly,” Tyr muttered, stretching his wings.

“Uh, how about you find me some eligible bachelors on this street that aren’t you two!?”

Tyr grabbed the bridge of his nose. “Why do I even have to say this? Edmund is only like… Edmund, how old are you?”

“Eleventy-six!” came his response.

“Right. I don’t even know why I asked. The point is maybe he’s in double digits, but I doubt it. Too young.”

“Oh and you’re too old, mister ‘teenage’ dragon?”

“I am just flat out not interested.”

“BUT ALL THE OTHER GIRL-”

“All the other girls on the street are fine, Lemon. Actually, here’s an idea, how about you go check one of them out?”

“Ew.”

“Why is that ew?” Edmund asked.

“Shush, grownups are talking,” Tyr said.

This made Lemon laugh. “Grownups? Us? Wow you’re delusional.”

Tyr looked angry for a moment – then he laughed. “I forget you can have good points sometimes.”

“All part of my charm,” Lemon said, tossing her mane. “Does this mea-”

“No,” Tyr said. “No it does not.”

She humphed. “You’re going to need to drive us to a club or something in your car one of these days.”

“The moment I figure out how to remove the tracker we’re leaving this place and never coming back,” Tyr declared. “FREEDOM!”

“Freedom!” Edmund echoed without any real idea what he was agreeing with.

There was silence after this.

“Okay, bored again,” Lemon declared. “Edmund, bring out your Stand and do something fun.”

“But Squishy Beats doesn’t come out when I tell him!” Edmund complained. “Only the fire does… Sometimes.”

“Tyr, scare the living bejeezus out of him,” Lemon ordered.

Tyr raised an eyebrow. “Last time I did that I got a broken nose. Also who made you in charge?”

“Both of you by refusing my advances.”

“That’s not how this works.”

“It can if I say it does.”

“But you’re not in charge!”

Lemon giggled. “Nice paradox, huh?”

Edmund clapped. Tyr rolled his eyes.

“…Still bored,” Lemon said a few seconds later. “We need to do something. Besides throw ourselves into the bottomless pit.”

Edmund raised his hand. “Ooh! Ooh!”

“Yes, Ed,” Lemon said, pointing at him. “What is it?”

“Let’s go visit the Witch! Get her magic!”

The two looked at him with fear for a moment. Nobody bothered the witch. Then the two of them realized they didn’t know why nobody bothered the witch. They decided it was time to find out.

“We’ll need a plan. And supplies… Especially cloaks. I saw a guy wearing one and I couldn’t even tell who he was! Gotta get those…” Tyr rubbed his clawed hands together. “Oooh, time to solve a mystery…”

“Grab some magic artifacts from the hands of evil magic users!” Lemon declared. “That’ll move me up in the League for sure!”

“Yay!” Edmund decreed, launching fire into the air. The way he did it provided enough force to make the floor around them creak, threatening to fall into the abyss.

The three of them got out of there quickly.

~~~

Aiskera was beyond happy. Everything was going unbelievably smoothly. All the tables were in perfect condition, the tablecloths were all clean without so much as a blemish, and the centerpiece plants were excellent in every case. Along one side of the wooden platform ran a long table, upon which dozens of cooking utensils were sat. Aiskera would wait for it to be closer to potluck time to actually start cooking, but that didn’t stop her from being proud of what she’d done. She’d even left spots for others to bring their own food! How wonderful!

She rubbed her hands together. What to do now… What to do… She adjusted some of the napkins, but realized it didn’t need to be that neat. She didn’t want to turn into Twilight, after all! That would be a little extreme. No Twilights lived on the Street, so everything was going to be fine.

It was at this moment Aiskera realized, she was bored. She couldn’t do any more work for at least a little while, she was already done with all the prep that could be done now. Pride in her work or no, she had a few hours before she actually had to do anything.

What was she going to do until then?

Cat? No… Robot? No… TV? No…

She wished someone could come talk to her. But nobody was going to be here until the potluck…

“Hey, you.”

Aiskera looked down at a cream-coated earth pony. “Yes? Can I help you?” It was so rare to see visitors on Armadillo Street. Clearly this was a version of Bon Bon, but she couldn’t be sure which one.

“Yeah, I’m Bon Bon – Equis Vitis – and I was chasing a cloaked, humanoid individual through here. Have you seen anything like that?”

Aiskera shook her head. “No, nobody’s been around here except you.”

“Oh.” Bon Bon blinked. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“It’s a community potluck!” Aiskera beamed, happy to talk about her day’s work. “See, I thought it would be a good way to bring our little community together – you know, since we all kind of live our own separate lives. Everyone will come here and have a nice meal together! Oh! You could come too if you wanted! Don’t worry about bringing anything, it’s not required.”

Bon Bon smiled warmly. “Maybe if I’m still around here when it happens. But I am going to search this street for that shadowy person first.”

“I could help!”

“Eh… Do you have tracking expertise?”

Aiskera deflated. “Ah… No.”

“Sorry. I’ll do it myself. Thanks for the offer though. Nice to meet you… Uh…”

“Aiskera.”

“Oh, right. How’d the Flat Fluttershy end up down here?”

“Needed a change,” Aiskera said. “Was tired of being the emissary of the gods and having three voices and all that chaos. Moved to Celestia City on the first ship. Ended up here because… Really not sure. Ka, maybe.”

“Everyone blames ka for everything these days.”

“Well, it is responsible for everything, isn’t it?”

“And it’s never the only thing responsible for anything,” Bon Bon said. “…Almost never.”

“The Beat Curse?”

“Yeah. That.” Bon Bon shook her head. “I’ve got to search around. I’ll probably look very suspicious while doing it, so you’ll have my back?”

“Of course!” Aiskera said, beaming. “You go find your mysterious cloaked person!”

“I will,” Bon Bon said, walking over to the next house.

Aiskera took a moment to look around after Bon Bon had left – and sighed. What was she going to do now?

…Maybe she should just go watch TV…

~~~

Bon Bon pondered what her next move should be. She didn’t really have much in the way of leads, the trail had ran completely cold. She supposed she could just stay here until the potluck, but waiting that long while there was some kind of prowler on the loose?

…Why did she even care so much? It was just some guy in a cloak. Suspicious, yes, but not necessarily dangerous. Perhaps she was just trying to distract herself.

Exactly like that woman back there was trying to do. She was clearly putting up a façade of happiness just to fool herself. Most of the people on this street probably didn’t care in the slightest about this potluck. Bon Bon felt sad for the Flat – she put so much energy into what she was doing, and yet there was nobody helping her or even looking her way that Bon Bon could see.

All the more reason to show up for the potluck herself. At least give her someone to talk to. It would be good for both of them, frankly.

Bon Bon shook her head – that was a future concern. Now she had a very present concern, one of trying to pick up the trail again. If that was even possible. As far as Bon Bon knew, it was a teleporter she was chasing, or a shapeshifter, or some other esoteric power that could easily make all her efforts poitless.

Did she miss her days as an agent? Was that it? These days she was sitting behind a desk. It was a very important job that required a quick eye and the ability to judge people, but it was still a desk job. She sat around all day, rarely finding any reason to detain anyone. Very few fought back. Those that did were either pathetically easy or needed high-level magics to keep subdued.

Should she go back to the life of danger and the edge? Renee was always looking for more explorers. And Bon Bon had heard from the many contacts she’d made over the years that there was a secret agency she could be a part of if she just brought it up with one of the Overheads.

Was this a midlife crisis? It felt like a midlife crisis.

Some ponies did only make it to one-twenty…

She sighed. She was depressing herself again. This is what happened when Lyra wasn’t around to talk to. Which was more often than Bon Bon would have liked. Bon Bon checked her phone – still no calls from Lyra. She tried to call, but got nothing.

Bon Bon sucked it up and shook her head – she should focus back on her self-given mission. Observe the people in this town… Er, street. The suspect was probably one of them, in here. For all she knew he could be preparing some nefarious scheme, and she had to stop it.

She saw a version of Lily – possibly even the Lily that Bon Bon knew back in the day – dragging two kids to a ‘store’ across the street from Aiskera’s potluck. The ‘store’ was a teleport depot. Not everyone had easy access to one of the supermalls of Celestia City, so numerous locations had cropped up with a teleporter to order items directly as needed. This particular ‘store’ actually bothered to have some goods pre-teleported and a few displays, which was more than Bon Bon had seen elsewhere.

Bon Bon’s thoughts on the ‘store’ were forgotten when she noticed that one of Lily’s kids was not a pony. A small, deep red Gem. Probably an off-color, since Bon Bon didn’t recognize the type. She would have been ejected from the Gem Vein at birth and sent to one of Merodi Universalis’ Gem outposts where the off-colors were accepted. Why was she here? Was she lost, and Lily found her? Probably… Bon Bon realized it didn’t matter. Judging by the expression on this Lily, she was one of the skittish kinds that would scream at everything. Even if she had a human transformation pendant she would not have been able to keep her cool like the figure Bon Bon had chased.

She sighed, deciding she might as well just talk to anyone she saw.

~~~

Lily ran into the doors of the teleporter store, dragging her two children behind at high speeds. The ‘store’ had two aisles of random assorted goods and a refrigerating unit embedded in the left wall. The right contained the counter that a deer stallion named Fern normally sat behind, next to the teleporter itself.

Lily needed to be in and out of here fast – agh, but she never shopped here. How exactly did it work again? She k-

She didn’t finish her thought because she saw Tyr and the troublemakers standing at the counter. She screamed, rushing herself and her kids out the door and holding her chest.

“Mom, you’re embarrassing us!” Petal blurted. “I’ve told you not to do that in front of Lemon!”

“Hmph. Lemon specifically is telling,” Velvet commented.

Lily put a hoof on Petal’s mouth before she could retort. “Right, right, I’m sorry. I’m going to go back in there and… Check out the aisles. Stay close to me.”

“Yes mom,” the two said in unison.

Lily took in a breath, overcoming her natural skittish fear and marching into the store. She didn’t even look at Tyr. Dragons terrified her. Any dragon that wasn’t a baby dragon was absolutely monstrous. She knew he wasn’t a… horrible kid, but she just couldn’t deal with him. Ever.

“Bread, bread, bread…” Lily muttered, holding her ears to her head, trying not to listen to what was happening at the counter. She failed miserably.

“We’ll need magic improvement vitamins,” Lemon said. “Or, I will, but you know.”

Fern nodded, marking a few things on a notepad. “Going on an outing?”

“Yeah!” Edmund blurted. “W-“

Tyr shut him up with a finger to his mouth. “What we’re doing is none of your business.”

The deer raised an eyebrow. “Dudes, I will literally sell you anything I legally can for literally any reason. You make this boring street interesting.”

“Thank you, Fern,” Lemon said.

“We’ll also need masks and dark cloaks,” Tyr said.

“I’m loving the sounds of this,” Fern declared with a big smirk. “Anything else? Foam weapons?”

“We haven’t broken the last ones yet,” Lemon declared. “We’re still prepared. We just have to liberate them.”

“The evil parent chest!” Edmund said, raising a fist in the air.

“Yeah, that,” Lemon said.

Lily couldn’t find any bread that wasn’t bagels. She was also liking less and less what she was hearing come out of the troublemakers’ mouths.

Come on Lily, you’re an adult. They’re just children. You don’t have to be scared of them.

She turned around, saw Tyr, let out another eep and turned back around. Something within her terrified mind still made her blurt something out. “W-What are you kids doing?”

Tyr, Lemon, and Edmund froze. “Uh… Nothing!” Lemon blurted.

“What she means is that we’re having a little party, just to ourselves. Themed costumes,” Tyr explained.

Lily whimpered at the sound of his voice. “I… Uh… Okay. Right. You have everything you need?”

Fern teleported the items and accepted Tyr’s card as payment.

“We do now!” Edmund said, grinning. The three of them ran out of the store.

Lily let out a sigh of relief – she didn’t know what had come over her. “H-hey F-fern? Can I have some b-bread?”

Fern nodded, teleporting a loaf. He took Lily’s card. “You know, that was really dumb back there.”

“I k-know…” Lily said, still shaking. “I don’t know…”

“I don’t either. Here’s your bread. Anything else?”

“I… I don’t know, let me think…”

She heard the familiar sound of Velvet and Petal fighting behind her. She didn’t even know what over – could have been anything. Literally anything.

“I said it’s mine!”

“You haven’t bought it yet!”

“I will! I have the money!”

“But I saw it first!”

“No you didn’t! Stop lying!”

Lily sighed. “That’ll be all, Fern.” She turned around to look at the kids.

They were fighting over a firework.

Velvet had her Gem weapon – a sparkler stick – out.

Lily screamed.

The sound made Velvet twitch in just the wrong way, lighting the firework. It blasted right through the window and across the street, embedding itself in the side of Aiskera’s wooden platform. For a moment, it seemed like nothing would happen.

Then the firework exploded in an impressive shower of blue, catching the wood on fire.

Lily fainted.

Velvet and Petal glanced at each other, panic on their faces. They took off in a run.

Fern put his face in his hooves and sighed.

~~~

“We sure fooled her!” Lemon blurted, a smile on her face. “Lily suspects nothing!”

Tyr chuckled. “We got her, all right. Flawless plan. Absolutely flawless.”

Edmund whooped.

“Cloaks! Now!” Tyr said, ordering everyone to put the dark hoods over their bodies. Edmund’s was far too large for him, but he didn’t care. They looked ready to handle absolutely anything.

They left Armadillo Street and walked into the crystal garden, the blue glow giving their forms eerie highlights. They walked along the smooth ground, the pillars of minerals acting like trees for them.

Lemon munched on a magic vitamin.

“You need to save those,” Tyr said.

“If we get attacked by a wolf I’ll need it.”

“Wolf!?” Edmund blurted, clinging to Tyr’s leg.

Tyr removed him with his claw. “This isn’t a real forest. There are no wolves. There’s just the Witch.”

“No wolves?”

“No wolves.”

Edmund decided this was enough for him and he started taking point.

“Other way, dumbass,” Tyr muttered, facepalming.

“I’ve never been to the Witch’s house! You’re the one who told me about it!”

“His descriptions are pointless,” Lemon said. “The Witch’s house is a towering blue monstrosity in which she cooks kids like us to feed her horrible spells!”

“She’d never get away with that,” Tyr pointed out. “Her evil is going to be more subtle. Our job is to find out what it is.”

Lemon smirked. “Cutie mark crusaders witch hunters yay!”

“By Torch, stop, stop,” Tyr insisted. “That call is so annoying.”

“I know. That’s why I did it, genius.”

Tyr grunted and shook his head. “Look, we’re almost there. Prepare yourselves.”

They found a house made of the same material as the rest of the crystals, albeit much more organized. It was, of course, blue. The structure had three stories, the boundaries between each one decorated with teardrop designs. There were no lights on whatsoever, and the pointed spires of the construction made it even more menacing. The troublemakers swore they could hear the sound of a river running through here, but there were no rivers or even visible pipes.

Tyr crouched down, prompting the other two to do the same even though they were already plenty short enough. He gestured for them to follow as he snuck across the ground to one of the first floor windows. The three of them poked their heads up so they could look in. The interior room was lit by the glowing of the crystals, showing what appeared to be an abandoned painting studio. None of the paints were open, the canvas was blank, and everything was clean.

“Let’s go!” Edmund shouted.

“SHHHHH!” Lemon and Tyr hissed.

Edmund shut up.

Tyr looked around to see if they’d been heard – and saw nothing. He pushed his claw into the center division of the window set, forcing it to swing open like a set of doors. He crawled in, the two others following behind him. Lemon munched on a magic vitamin and Tyr didn’t scold her.

They were inside.

Edmund was shaking, Lemon was chewing far more than she needed to, and Tyr was struggling to get his breathing under control.

Lemon was eventually the first one to speak. “W-we should open the door and look around.”

“Yeah,” Tyr said, turning the doorknob and entering a darker, but still blue hallway. He briefly wondered how the walls of this place didn’t glow.

The three of them snuck around, wordlessly, hearts racing. All of them pondered saying they should just give up and go home – but they knew that if they were the first one to chicken out, they’d never hear the end of it.

They eventually came to a staircase and began to move up it, slowly. Since it was made mostly of crystal, it didn’t creak when they stepped on it, which did wonders to calm their nerves.

Of course the noise they heard behind them did the exact opposite.

The three troublemakers turned around – and saw a tall, humanoid figure shrouded in a dark cloak.

They screamed.

~~~

Bon Bon had gotten lucky – she’d seen three hooded figures out of the corner of her eye. None of them had the same build as the one she’d been chasing, but that didn’t mean they weren’t related. She’d followed the three of them at a distance through the crystal garden.

She was unable to hear what they said from her vantage points, but they were certainly arguing with each other a lot. A lot of evil minions did that. They might serve the real threat that was somewhere out here in these woods…

They were leading her right to where she needed to be.

She followed the three of them all the way to the mysterious house. Gem construction, clearly, though strangely modeled after human architectural ideas. Slightly unusual, but given the rest of Celestia city not all that unexpected.

She noted that the three of them were breaking in. So this wasn’t their base… What could it mean?

Bon Bon stopped when they entered – if she followed them, she would be breaking and entering. She had enough connections to get her out of trouble, yes, but it wouldn’t look good on her record at all. She was on vacation and hadn’t worked as an agent in the field for… she didn’t even know anymore.

Shaking these thoughts from her mind, she moved closer to the house, poking her head up to see through the window. The three of them had already moved deeper into the house, leaving the art studio as empty as it had been for, apparently, quite a while. Bon Bon noted that the room hadn’t even been dusted in a while.

Bon Bon looked at the slightly open door the three had left through. Should she chase them? Should she call some actual authorities? Call and then go in anyway? Or maybe she could crawl around the outside of the house and do something without even ente-

The sound of screams decided for her – she was going in. She galloped into the art studio and through the open doorway. Her ears told her that the screams originated from right… here.

She found herself in a small room with two staircases and numerous other doors. There were no signs of anything – this room had been well dusted, and crystal floors did not lend well to tracking. She wrinkled her muzzle, annoyed. Some people had screamed in terror here. It must had been for a reason…

She opened one of the doors and walked through, finding a living room. It had nobody in it, but a television was on. Set to… static. Who would set their TV to static? She touched her hoof to the screen, examining it closely. There seemed to be nothing to it. Just standard static.

Standard creepy factor item, Bon Bon thought, already on edge. The silence of this place was getting to her as well. She wished she had her gun, or her grappling hook, or anything. She was very capable with her own four hooves, but that didn’t stop her from wishing she had her equipment.

She entered another room, this one a parlor. She expected to find some picture frames or belongings that could tell her about the person who lived here, but there was nothing. Every type of furnishing was generic, blue, or just slightly creepy. There was a mounted gemstone on a nearby wall. Clearly not a Gem’s gemstone, but that was still unnerving, especially considering how the wood it was mounted on was bordered in teardrop shapes.

It’s blue, I get it, I get it, Bon Bon thought to herself. She found a flight of stairs and went up, finding a room with nothing in it, and yet it was so clean it sparkled.

The windowless room really should have been dark, but it wasn’t.

Bon Bon felt her coat hairs stand on end. She was scared. But she was one of the best agents ever, why would she let herself be scared? That was dumb. This was just some house in the middle of Celestia City, and there hadn’t been anything besides the screams that had actually seemed dangerous. Merely a creepy aesthetic… Lack of family photos… And a possible person menacingly planning evil…

She needed to stay strong. She needed to-

Freezing, Bon Bon’s ears started swiveling around. She heard water. Water in the walls.

It had been a background noise until just now – she’d assumed there was a pipe running under the ground, delivering water to the rest of the City. But in the house? What was going on?

The water switched the direction of flow as she thought that. A small crack formed in the wall and sprayed her in the face.

She didn’t scream – but she did run away.

~~~

Aiskera smelled something burning. At first she thought it was just the food – but then she remembered she hadn’t started cooking yet.

She leaped off the couch, upsetting the cat enough to prompt a loud yowl. She ran to the window and saw the fire. Her beautiful wooden platform – being reduced to cinders!

She ran to her closet and pulled out a fire extinguisher. In her rush back to the front door, she tripped, spraying the foam inside her house. She ignored this, continuing outside and unleashing the rest of the foam all over the fiery platform.

When the fire was put out, she fell to her knees.

It was ruined. It was all ruined. The platform wasn’t strong enough to stand on anymore. The tables were blackened in a few places and the tablecloths were nothing but tatters. She couldn’t even see the centerpieces anymore. There was no way this would be a potluck anymore. It was gone.

She started crying.

Who was she kidding? It wasn’t going to be a potluck anyway. There wasn’t a sense of community on this street. Everyone lived here because they liked things to be quiet. Because they wanted to be alone most of the time. Who cared about a party? Nobody, that’s who. Lily would come just to pity her, and then she’d scream and run away some point in the middle…

Nobody was going to bring anything. It would just be a wash. It was always going to be a wash.

She didn’t know why she even tried so hard for this community. They didn’t care.

Then she saw them.

A humanoid figure, shrouded in a dark cloak. They stood among the ruined potluck preparations, taller than anyone Aiskera knew. It must have been the one Bon Bon had warned her about.

“You…” Aiskera said, curling her fist. “You did this!”

The figure made no response, simply standing impassively.

It had been a long time since Aiskera had fought anyone for any reason. She had left those days behind her. But she was so done with today. She took a fighting stance and rushed the cloaked figure.

The figure receded, dashing out of Armadillo Street and toward the abandoned factory district.

Aiskera pursued relentlessly. She saw Lily’s kids hanging around behind a house, watching the chase with mesmerized eyes.

Aiskera didn’t care what they saw – she needed to catch this… potluck crasher! Catch them and make them pay!

It was at this point Aiskera realized she no longer had sight of the dark figure. They had… vanished?

Aiskera shook her hand and punched the air – stupid magic powers, making things like this just more and more difficult! They’d gotten away, and now she was here in the depressing abandoned factory, standing on a rickety metallic platform above a bottomless pit. At least this area had hand railings, but it was still horribly unsafe.

She started walking around aimlessly, despondent.

~~~

Lily sat at the edge of one of the abandoned factory’s platforms, staring at the bottomless pit below.

Something in the back of her mind told her she should be terrified and run away from the falling hazard, but for once that side of her was in the background. Right now, all she could think of was her own failures.

She had passed out when the fire had started, and when she came to her kids were gone. Fern had told her where to look, and she’d ran, screaming their names. But they didn’t come to her. No matter how much she wailed and promised they wouldn’t be in trouble if they just told her where they were…

She was a failure as a mother. She had lost both of them. For all she knew they were in that bottomless pit, having fallen down because they had run from her. Because she had scared them.

She put her head in her hooves – she should have dropped everything and had that conversation with them, even if they were still angry. She… She would have found some way to not let them walk over her, right? She wasn’t that much of a pushover…

Who was she kidding; she was the biggest pushover in the world. The moment Petal was a little older she was going to figure out all she had to do to control her mother was scare her a little. Velvet had already figured it out. They were going to fight each other their entire childhoods and then grow bitter as they aged, and she would never see either of them…

What would have happened if she never found Velvet that day? Would Petal be… Okay? Not angry all the time?

She hated that thought. She hated it so much. But that didn’t keep her from thinking it.

She removed her hooves from her eyes, staring at the abyss below.

Such nothingness.

“Lily?”

“AUGH!” Lily shouted, leaping back from the edge, whirling around as if she were about to be attacked by a predator. “AAA- oh, Aiskera.” Lily grabbed her chest. “Don’t sneak up on me like that… There was an equal chance I could have jumped off the edge in fear!”

“I would have caught you,” Aiskera said, her eyes telling of her own tears. “What are you doing out here?”

“I… I was looking for my kids. I couldn’t find them. They… They could be…”

“I saw them back at Armadillo Street before I came here,” Aiskera said. “They’re fine.”

“Oh thank Celestia… Wait, you didn’t punish them did you?”

“Punish them…?”

“…They lit your potluck on fire.”

Aiskera blinked. “I coulda sworn that was…” She shook her head. “No, I didn’t, I didn’t know it was them.”

“Good. Because I… I need to talk to them.” She looked back toward Armadillo Street. “I need to head back.”

Aiskera nodded. “Mind if I keep you company?”

“Not at all,” Lily admitted.

The two of them set back to town.

“What were you doing out here?” Lily asked.

“Well… I saw a cloaked figure. I thought they were the ones who had started the fire, so I chased them. Then I lost them. Then I found you.”

“Oh… Did you at least put out the fire quickly?”

Aiskera looked down. “I… didn’t notice it until I smelled smoke. I was watching TV. I shouldn’t have been watching TV…”

“You did what you could,” Lily asserted.

“Yeah… But why did I bother? Nobody but you ever really comes to these things I organize. And yet I keep trying, and trying, and trying, all for nothing.”

“We enjoy them!”

“You enjoy them until your kids get fed up and then you go home.”

Lily looked down, ashamed.

“And nobody else is a regular. Nobody. I’m living in delusion, Lily. Big delusions…”

“...I was going to make lily sandwiches,” Lily said out of the blue. “I went to the store to get bread and everything, even facing Tyr down. I… I was looking forward to it.”

Aiskera smiled sadly. “You can bring it to my house. We can have a private dinner. But… There won’t be a potluck. And sadly nobody is going to care. There might even be a sigh of relief. ‘Aiskera finally got it through her thick skull that we don’t like community’. Gah…”

Lily sighed. “I moved here because I liked community, but didn’t like the noises of the city. It was the perfect place. You’re the one who convinced me to move in, remember?”

“Yeah… Yeah I do,” Aiskera said, looking up at the ceiling. “Maybe I shouldn’t need anyone else to care.”

Lily smiled. “That’s the spirit a- AUGH!” She jumped back, holding a shaky hoof forward.

Petal and Velvet were standing where the fire had been. They had removed the wooden platform and just set up the half-charred tables directly on the ground. They were currently arranging the cooking utensils on the larger table. They heard the scream of their mother and froze in place.

Tears came to Lily’s eyes. “You two… You’re fixing it? Together?”

Petal flushed. For once Velvet was at a loss for words.

Lily pulled the two of them into a hug. “You’re the best daughters ever!”

“Mooom!” Petal complained, struggling – but eventually she gave in.

She put the two of them down. “I… I’m so proud of what you two have done here. Rebuilt all of this…”

“It’s still charred,” Velvet said.

“We’re sorry,” Petal added. Velvet nodded in confirmation.

Lily turned to Aiskera. “Still think we might be able to have a potluck?”

Aiskera looked at the half-burnt tables and the lack of decorations. “Eh, screw it, who cares if it looks nice anyway?” She threw her arms wide. “Let’s make a potluck!”

“Yeah!” the other three shouted.

~~~

The troublemakers were on the third floor. They had stopped running a while ago, and realized they were well and truly lost in the maze of rooms.

Yet, still, none of them had suggested they just jump out a window. Tyr had wings, he could catch them easily. But even in their state of heightened fear, none of them would do anything to make themselves look more scared than any of the others. They had all screamed at once, yes, but that was a thing to never speak of again. There may have been a shadowy figure, yeah, but they could take them. It didn’t matter that Edmund’s Stand hadn’t hit anything – they weren’t a ghost. They definitely weren’t a ghost.

Definitely not.

Tyr had left his cloak behind, opting instead to be as obvious and menacing as he possibly could be. Dragons were never pushovers, and he wanted the Witch and that shadow person to know that.

That thought took his mind off of his fear.

“Do you think that was the witch?” Tyr asked.

“Of course, who else could it be?” Lemon blurted.

“But the Witch is a Gem,” Tyr pointed out. “I don’t think that was them…”

“Maybe she has a husband… Or a son…” Edmund suggested. “Or a dog!”

“Did that look like a dog to you?”

“Uh… Yes?”

Lemon facehooved. “Uuugh… Look, let’s just find the magic already.”

“You can’t rush these things,” Tyr said, opening another door. “After all, it could be hidden anywh-“

“Found it,” Edmund said, pointing at the center of the room they had just entered. A white crystal ball sat upon a pedestal, glowing with a soft light.

Lemon munched on a magic vitamin, walking up to the crystal ball. “Let me have a crack at it.” She surrounded it in her green magical aura, effectively poking it. “Docile…” She lifted it off of its pedestal. “Heh. Mission accompl-“

The water rushing in the walls of the house increased in volume tenfold. Cracks started appearing, spraying water at them.

Tyr smirked. Exactly the kind of thing he was there for. He sucked in and let out his blue fire, evaporating the water jets. Edmund joined in with his decidedly less impressive firebending, keeping them all dry. “Let’s move!” Tyr called.

Lemon nodded, hoisting the crystal ball toward the door they came in. They were about to leave…

But then the Witch showed up.

She was a blue Gem with a teardrop gemstone on her forehead. Her hair was long and flowed behind her almost like a cape, and she wore a dress of the darkest blue her gemstone could generate. In one of her hands was a purple wand that clearly wasn’t her Gem weapon.

The troublemakers screamed. Edmund summoned his Stand, Squishy Beats, transforming the floor below them to rubber. The Stand tried to turn the Witch into rubber, but the hardlight body of a Gem proved to be something Squishy Beats couldn’t effect.

With her free hand the Witch demonstrated powerful hydrokinesis that shoved all three of the troublemakers across the room. With the wand, she teleported the crystal ball to her, catching it in a bowl of water.

She took a step toward the three cowering forms.

Bon Bon crashed in through a nearby door; placing herself between the kids and the Witch, ready to fight. “That’s far enough!” Bon Bon said, hiding her own fear well. She was actually terrified and knew that, without her equipment, she couldn’t take a Lapis Gem in a fight, and definitely not a Lapis Gem with some bizarre magic wand.

The Witch blinked. “…Who are you?” she asked with a kind, simple voice.

Bon Bon blinked. “…I’m Bon Bon? I heard screams and I rushed to help. You were attacking these kids!”

The Witch raised an eyebrow. “They broke into my house and tried to steal my crystal ball. I wasn’t going to hurt them, just give them a good scare.” She placed the crystal ball back on the pedestal and cut all the water flowing into the room. “Thanks for ruining that, by the way.”

Bon Bon blinked. “Uh… Sorry.” She turned to the three kids. “What were you thinking?”

“Uh… save the world from the Witch’s evil schemes?” Lemon suggested.

“Yeah!” Edmund said. “Stop the evil plans!”

The Witch blinked. “…You thought I was evil?”

“Who else hides all alone in a creepy cottage in a crystal forest with strange magics?” Tyr asked.

“…Hermits?” the Witch suggested. She put a hand to her head. “Look, I’m not evil. I’m Lapis. The reason I live out here is because I could build my own house the way I wanted without worrying about space requirements.”

“Wow. You’re not scary at all,” Lemon commented.

Lapis pointed a wand at Lemon. “I can be.”

Bon Bon stepped between them. “Let’s not do that. I do have a question, though. Have you seen a dark, cloaked figure? Humanoid, definitely not draconic.”

“Yeah!” Edmund blurted. “They were in this house! Scared us silly!”

Lapis shook her head. “There’s no one else here. I live alone. You were seeing things.” She touched her crystal ball, frown deepening. “I’ve always been alone here.”

Bon Bon sensed that comment was an invitation. “You don’t want to be alone, do you?”

“Not really. I was happy here for the first little while… But then it got boring… I can’t paint anymore…” She shook her head. “But I don’t want to leave this house. It was so much work.”

“There’s a secluded ‘town’ of sorts at the edge of the crystals,” Bon Bon said. “Armadillo Street. They’re even having a potluck today and everything. I was invited, I’m sure they’d like to see another new face as well.”

“Oh?”

“And the woman running it could stand some new company, from what I saw.”

Lapis pondered this for a moment. “…You know, it would be really good to get out. Let’s go.” She turned to the troublemakers, smiling. “You three are coming as well, right?”

“…Sure,” Tyr said, thinking any other response was likely to get him doused in more water.

~~~

Bon Bon led the group back to town. They found the potluck in the process of being rebuilt by Aiskera, Lily, and her kids.

“Why hell- AUGH!” Lily shouted, seeing Tyr. “AUGH!” She blurted, noticing Lapis. She ran under a table and hid.

Lapis blinked. “Uh…”

“Don’t mind mom,” Petal said. “She’s scared of everything. Uh… Who are you?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” Aiskera said.

“A Lapis Lazuli,” Lapis said. “Though apparently you might know me as the Witch.”

Aiskera blinked. “Wow! I thought Tyr was just talking when he said you existed. I guess not!”

Bon Bon smiled. “She needs some friends. Think you can provide?”

Aiskera looked at the cowering form of Lily. “In time, yes. Give Lily a bit though, she’ll recover.”

Lapis nodded. She drew her wand. “Need any help here? I know a lot of spells.”

“Go right ahead!” Aiskera encouraged.

Lapis used her wand to strengthen all the tables and remove the charred blackness. She created some crystal-construct plates for the tables as well.

“Wow! You’re great at this!” Aiskera said, clapping. “Now we can start cooking!”

“Right. Food,” Lapis said, rubbing the back of her head. “I don’t need to eat so I don’t know how to cook.”

Tyr perked up. “…Would you like to know how to cook?”

“It could be interesting, I suppose. Food does taste good.”

Tyr rubbed his hands together. “Lucky you I’m a master chef.”

“Cooking is lame!” Lemon blurted.

“Ignore the yellow fruit,” Tyr declared. “Right this way. I hope you like shrimp scampi…”

Aiskera shook her head – she had no idea Tyr knew how to cook!

Velvet picked up Petal and shoved her next to Lemon.

Lemon glared at Petal. “What do you want?”

“Uh… Heheheh… Wanna… Erm, hang out maybe?”

Lemon groaned. “Ugh, Tyr, get her offa me!”

Tyr was ignoring everything she said, fully engrossed in his craft.

Petal smirked. “It looks like you don’t have anything better to do right now!”

Lemon facehooved. “Fine. What are we going to do, braid each other’s manes or something equally stupid?”

“How about just eat all the food that’s around?”

Lemon couldn’t find a way to declare this stupid. She grunted. “Fine.”

Petal turned to Velvet and winked. Velvet gave her a thumbs up.

Bon Bon walked up to Aiskera and smiled. “Is this what you were expecting?”

“No… Not at all. But I like it.”

“Y-yeah!” Lily said, poking her head out from under the table. “It’s… It’s nice!”

“Did you find the mysterious person, by the way?” Aiskera asked Bon Bon.

“Nope. I don’t think it matters though.” She gestured at the potluck. “This is a good enough ending for my tastes.”

“BON BON!” An overly excited voice shouted. “I found you!”

Bon Bon’s jaw dropped. “LYRA!?”

“Oh, Bon Bon! Do I have the story of a lifetime for you! I’ve just been jumping from universe to universe and OOOOH it was so awesome there were lasers there were robots there were humans I got to visit the ETSAB and we saved at least one universe from certain doom! It was soooo epic! I was standing next to you one moment and then BAM I was in a firefight for my li-“

Bon Bon put a hoof on Lyra’s muzzle. “Lyra, shut up.”

“Uh?”

“Just shut up.” She gestured towards the potluck around them. “Let’s enjoy the simpler things in life for once. Not everything has to be a big grand adventure. In fact… In many ways, I think it’s better if it isn’t.” She smiled warmly at the people she had met today. “Look at this Lyra. There was no grand quest for the fate of existence with these people. They’re just living their lives. Living good lives. Let’s not try to turn this simple get together into an adventure, okay?”

“But…”

“No buts Lyra. No. Buts.”

“Heh. You said butts.”

Bon Bon rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Let’s sit down. I hear there’s a good shrimp scampi that’s about ready.”

They did.

Aiskera stood at the edge of the new potluck and genuinely smiled.

Who cared if it wasn’t perfect?

It was everything she wanted.

~~~

The hooded figure watched the potluck from a distance, from the darkness of the abandoned factory area. Everything had gone exactly as planned…

The figure took off their hood, revealing a familiar face.

One of Aradia Megido.

She loved doing simple things for people as part of her job, sometimes. It helped her remember that the fate of everything was sometimes just as important as the feeling of community in a little street in the middle of nowhere.

She grinned, putting her hands together.

It was perfect. Simply perfect.

071 - The Everyman

He…

Who was he?

He was a man.

What kind of man he was… well, that was a significantly more complicated question that may not have had a definable answer.

He was average, and yet anything but. The most ordinary individual you would ever pass on the street, and yet one who excelled at an innumerable number of things.

He was…

He was sitting at a table, all alone in a grand dining hall. The food was all set before him, cooked and prepared to perfection. The dishes were silver, the eating utensils ornate, and the glasses were all filled with wine. It was a feast fit for not just a king, but a king and his entire court.

And yet here he was, eating all alone. A noble with a feast all to himself and no one to share it with.

This, he decided, was pleasurable for taste – but otherwise boring. Best not to pay much attention to it; there were more pressing matters.

He went elsewhere, deciding that taking a walk was a good idea. He walked along a suburban street, a newspaper under his arm with the year 2016 printed on it. He lazily glanced through the articles – there had been another terrorist attack on some European country. Terrible news, to be sure, but it was somewhat undercut by the article below it about the newest dangerous teen craze: Frisbee golf. Of all the absurd things he had seen in his life, that was… pretty mundane, to be truthful. He briefly wondered if he was the type to take up Frisbee golf…

He stopped at a school, a smile crossing his face. The kids marched in for the start of the school day, moving like the ordered pawns of production they were being trained to be.

Perfect.

He was going to be late for his meeting. He took off at a run down the sidewalk, arriving in record time to the first floor of an office building.

“Isaac Rowan, here for an interview,” he told the receptionist, breathing heavily, but not as heavily as someone who just ran a block should have been.

He was soon in an elevator, heading to his meeting. He checked his wristwatch – he didn’t know why he did, he knew he was late. But he would easily be able to wow them with his skills. It was never that difficult.

He trotted out the door of his house into the sunshine of Ponyville, sniffing the air with his muzzle. Such a different existence,he pondered, feeling the delicate blades of grass beneath his hooves like they were something novel. It was certainly a good day for a walk.

The houses of Ponyville passed by his senses. It was a mostly standard Ponyville with a crystal castle that belonged to Twilight Sparkle, but there was some evidence of Merodi involvement with the presence of a few humans, not to mention cell phones. He would have to be careful here, they could grow suspicious.

On the other hand, when he sat down at his office in the school, he found himself at ease. He sipped a cup of dark coffee and tapped his fingers on the desk, smiling to himself as he thought of his experiments in his nice, secret compartment. Of particular interest was his pet project – a beautiful red gem of arcane power.

Something rather rare here, he knew. If it existed at all. He wasn’t quite sure about that, given his position as a lowly high school professor, but it was for this same reason that he didn’t care about being unsure. It was a good feeling, being carefree. A very good feeling.

He stepped out of the elevator into a meeting with a large number of people in black suits who should have intimidated everyone. He wasn’t – this was nothing new to him. So little was.

“Mister Rowan…” one of them said, little more than a blur in his thoughts. “How would you describe yourself?”

“Studious, hardworking, and very knowledgeable,” he answered. The first one was technically a lie, but that was only because he had virtually nothing left to study.

“In that case, as a test, describe the Variation of Constants method for solving a differential equation.”

He did just that.

He also walked up to a version of Pinkie Pie.

“Oh hey there broo! How’s the daydreamin’ goin?” the Pinkie known as Dinkie asked.

“Good, thanks,” he – no she – said, smiling warmly. “Always with my head in the clouds, as you say, but it’s good to come out to be grounded in reality once in a while.”

“Ay, Icey, Broo, don’t sweat it. Sometimes I just wanna summon demons, but I don’t because it wouldn’t be fun, you know?”

“I know,” she said, smiling and looking at Celestia's sun.

The chandelier over the feast was just as bright as that sun, if not brighter. But it was just the way he liked it, illuminating all the food before it went into his mouth just perfectly. It was a beautiful taste that he wanted to share.

“Mister Rowan? You seem distracted.”

He looked at his hands and smiled. “Apologies. I guess I just felt like I was somewhere else for a moment and got distracted by the wonderful food there.”

A few of them laughed, thinking it was a joke.

Oh, if only they knew. If only they knew the lives he lived.

He wasn’t just ‘Isaac Rowan’, nor was he just ‘Icey Row,’ nor just a nobleman, nor a school professor… He was much more.

He was the Everyman.

He continued to give a presentation of his skills to the business people. It took him a moment to remember precisely who they were – a large law firm he couldn’t remember the name of who wanted a genius to tell them what was what and when. Lucky for them he had decided he was interested in this life. As he explained the complex mathematical equations to the old men and how they related to law, he was also reading a book on the subject in at least seven other lives simultaneously, all taking a bit of their free time to feed him the bonus knowledge he needed.

Strictly speaking, it was possible to do this without the books, as he was a lawyer somewhere else. But there was something to be said for the exhilaration of doing it on the fly with a particular set of predetermined resources.

It was clearly working; they loved him and his presentation.

He glanced at the newspaper again, finding himself thinking about the lesson of the day. As a professor, he needed to teach science. Was he in the mood to teach them something several centuries ahead of their time, possibly create a genius in the process? …Nah, he had other work here. Wasn’t like he could do anything about the meeting here – or even care about the meeting for a business in another life.

The school bell rang. He got up and went to his classroom on autopilot, but he was hardly thinking about the lesson anymore, because something interesting had just happened elsewhere, something that tickled his scientific mind. Another life had just been changed drastically, gaining a gem in the middle of his forehead. It was in a world with humans of colorful skin much like the one where he was a professor, a world where magic had just been changed.

He looked in the archives of Celestia City – a simple universal search for the one of his bodies serving as an Expeditions Agent. Here, she was a cute auburn-haired girl who had a slight obsession with magical hats. She ran down to one of the primary consoles and logged in, performing a search.

Ah, yes, Equis Shimmer. It looked like another world had experienced the exact same change sometime in the past, a world with him in it nonetheless. He took in the air in Equis Shimmer, appreciating a world of evolved human magic, realizing for the first time that he hadn’t recognized the change when it had first happened. And that time, there’d been nothing in the rest of him to tell him what to make of it.

The newly-changed life was informed that his world had just gone through a magical evolution, like another world before it. He decided he was going to become a powerful wizard, and in an instant he had all the knowledge he needed to do so. That world’s version of Sunset Shimmer was going to have a handful to deal with very shortly.

“Broo? Why you giggling?”

“Oh, just a fun daydream,” she said, winking at Dinkie. “A godlike being is going to find a wrench thrown into her plans that’s completely out of context, and she has no context by which to stabilize herself.”

“…Broo, you lost me.”

“I know,” he said, wrapping up his presentation for the businessmen. “It’s a lot to take in, but I think I would be a good choice for you.”

“You’re hired,” the oldest man there said. “Welcome to the firm.”

The Everyman smiled. “Thank you.”

And then his grand feast was interrupted, starting a whole new chain of events that pushed the second Equis Shimmer to the background, creating something new for the Everyman to ponder. The front doors of the dining hall opened, revealing four individuals whom more than a few of his lives knew about.

Pinkie Pie, Jotaro, Vriska, and Flutterfree. He processed this – where was Nova?

Nova was on maternity leave for her pregnancy.

Ah, shame. She could have been a welcome addition to the feast.

“I welcome you to my table!” he said, jovially. All the while, he was making efforts to know exactly who each of them were.

Flutterfree, pegasus, quasi-vampire, and Stand user. He knew from prior experience that Lolo had minimal effect on him, though that was only the automatic effect. Not only that, but there were other variables at play limiting the Stand’s effectiveness so long as she didn’t use it actively. As a person she had the highest moral code he was aware of – at least one that a person managed to stick to consistently.

Vriska, now there was a name the Everyman had a mixed relationship with. When you were as everywhere as he was, the immortal dimensional traveler types tended to pop up over and over again in exceedingly nosy ways. She had ruined and saved many of his lives, producing not only a complex, contradictory feeling, but also a mild annoyance at her continued presence in his lives. At the moment he decided he would be friendly toward her and her actions, but he really found her annoying.

Jotaro, a quiet man the Everyman knew little about… Except in that one universe where he was Jotaro, or the local equivalent of Jotaro. It took no time at all to understand the man – deep, brooding, self-righteous, heroic, and softer than he ever wanted to show. Naturally, this Jotaro would be slightly different – a man with a deep care for family and friendship, one who had been softened by years of adventures with those close to him – but the Everyman could easily extrapolate from incomplete data.

Pinkie would be the problem. No matter how many lives he lived, he was never Aware like she was. But he had picked up a few tricks over time. He knew instantly that not only did she know what he was, but she couldn’t say anything about it to her friends. Simply delightful – that would make for quite the fun dynamic. And here he thought this life was just here to enjoy succulent food for all the others.

The four explorers glanced at each other, shrugged, and sat at the table, Pinkie fixing the Everyman with a steely gaze.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Isaac Rowan,” he answered. It was the closest he had to a name – though, really, it was just the most common name he had. There were many different offshoots of the Everyman who thought the name Isaac was decidedly stupid. He found himself proud of it at the moment.

“Icey Row,” she said, turning away from Dinkie. “That’s my name.”

“…Yeah it is broo!”

“I’m going to go walk over here, hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all, broo! Just watch out for Rainbow Dash! I hear she’s out and about!”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said with a wink, walking across the street. She watched, curiously, a group of interdimensional explorers talking to the local Rarity – Mattie.

Mattie, a unique version of Rarity who was decidedly Aware. She needed to be careful around her, lest she tip her hand. Mattie had a knack for completely disregarding rules and regulations for the sake of being jarring and ‘comedic’. She likely wouldn’t notice anything so long as the Everyman kept her distance, which was fine by the Everyman’s standards.

Mattie was talking to the League of Sweetie Belles – Thrackerzod, Bot, Squeaky, Allure, and Minna, Allure’s child. The information the Everyman had on the four members of the League was extensive – eldritch being trapped in a body of a unicorn, living an eternal paradox designed to get her to understand. Bot, a machine constructed by… by… by an unknown inventor of Equis Smooze, eternally suck in the body of a filly and with a mentality that never quite matured. Squeaky, a general who had left her world behind after the war ended, taking her time to just enjoy life and offer wisdom gleaned from her hard life. Allure, the Sweetie of Equis Vitis, the unofficial leader of the entire League, and recently the adoptive mother of Minna.

The Everyman could find nothing on Minna. She was certain the human girl was more than she seemed, but a cursory ping of all the lives produced nothing on her.

Concerning.

But not exactly something to be afraid of. It just meant she had to proceed with caution. After all, in this life, she liked ponies, and new ponies even more so.

The League stopped talking with Mattie and set out on their own – probably to leave the universe. That just wouldn’t do, there was still so much they could see and experience!

“Hey, wait up!” she called, waving them down.

“Hm?” Allure said, looking up. “Who’re you?”

“I’m Icey Row!” she declared, beaming. “And you look new around here.”

“Eh, not really, we visit regularly,” Squeaky offered.

“I haven’t noticed you before though! …I do have my head lost in the clouds a lot though, so that might be my fault.” She chuckled. “I’d like to show you around our world, if you don’t mind! You’d be surprised with some of the things we have around here!”

Thrackerzod raised an eyebrow. “I thought you just had an entire town owned by Jack and a problem with being racist to the point of stupid comedy.”

“…There’s more stuff out here! Look, we’re setting up for the Festival of Dreams!” She gestured with her hoof to a bunch of star-shaped banners and balloons spread around town.

“That wasn’t there two minutes go,” Thrackerzod observed.

“It’s Equis Ultra Fast, stop asking questions,” Allure said with a chuckle. “Minna, would you like to stay for the Festival of Dreams?”

Minna smiled. “Yeah! …What’s a Festival of Dreams?”

The Everyman laughed. “Oh, it’s just a festival where we celebrate dreams. That’s about it. I can show you the individual events and what to do with the special dream fireworks though. I wouldn’t look too closely at them though, knowing our universe there’s probably an innuendo or racist joke buried in them somewhere.”

“Or both,” Thrackerzod pointed out.

“…Suddenly I’m having second thoughts about taking Minna to this festival,” Allure said, holding back.

“You tell me,” the Everyman said, producing one of the fireworks. “Does this look bad?”

“It looks like a normal firework.”

“Then we’re golden!”

Rainbow Dash crashed from out of the sky. “Have you seen my face!?”

“It’s on your… face…” Allure said, shaking her head.

“Duh! But where is it!?”

“Uh…”

The Everyman walked through the halls of the high school. He’d taught a good class – simple enough to be done in his sleep. Quite literally. The new way of things – sleep teaching on the fly! Brilliant!

At the moment though, he wasn’t patting himself on the back – he was looking at a pair of new students in terror. They were quite clearly Corona and Olivia from the courts of Lai – no other version of Sunset would wear exactly those kinds of gloves and be friends with a white-haired girl in a dress with jagged purple lines. They may have looked like regular students, but that was definitely them.

This was bad.

Lady Rarity’s team rarely did simple ‘exploration’, though it wasn’t unheard of. What they usually did was undertake specific missions to accomplish specific goals. They were probably here for a reason, especially since they seemed to be blending in with the teenage crowd of the world, bothering with age spells even. Hardcore.

There was a chance they were here for some reason other than him, but he doubted it. He had secrets in this life, secrets he’d like to keep hidden. Olivia herself was enough of a problem, and had he made extensive use of computers in his secrets he was sure he would already be doomed. But he was careful in that department.

Corona was a true nightmarish threat. If she touched him…

She’d learn more than just this life’s secrets. She’d feel the Everyman. He honestly had no idea if her mind would even be able to handle that, but he had no desire to find out.

He needed to do something to ensure all his plans went smoothly, and that nothing ruined the great science he was undertaking.

He left the meeting, a new job in hand. It appeared as though another life needed a significant boost to his mental faculties. No matter – this life could just stare mindlessly at a TV for the rest of the day with absolutely no negative consequences. Shunt it all to the professor.

He rubbed his hands together – Corona wasn’t going to find anything. Why? Because he was going to investigate them. If he could just expose their cover… It would be difficult, but since when was anything worthwhile easy?

…A lot of things, given what he was, but that was beside the point. Hard things felt better. Plus, he was particularly fond of this life; mad scientist schoolteacher was a fun one. Couldn’t let it come crashing down without a little fight…

“Fights are interesting things, aren’t they?” Pinkie said, aggressively drinking a glass of wine. Her teammates had no idea why she was doing this, but they trusted her enough to just give her odd looks and not say anything.

The Everyman knitted his eyebrows – she was going to be an interesting one to spar with. “Indeed they are, as I’m sure our friend Jotaro can attest to. I see within him a man familiar with the act of getting his fists dirty. Fights can come in many arenas – hand to hand, mind to mind, or even across a table over a dinner with nothing but words. Or, perhaps, even at a school where one side is unaware of the battle even being set.”

Pinkie twitched. “Oddly specific.”

“I knew you’d appreciate it,” he said, eating another leg off the golden-brown turkey.

“…Where the hell do you keep pulling those chicken legs from?” Vriska asked. “I’ve seen a lot more than two.”

“Turkey,” the Everyman corrected. “Turkey legs.”

“Fine then, mister actually, where do the turkey legs come from?”

“The turkey.”

“Can I punch him?”

“Vriska!” Flutterfree chided. “He is letting us eat his food and treating us as esteemed guests. Don’t be so rude.”

“Hmph. I don’t trust it. Does anyone remember how we got here?”

Jotaro shook his head. “No.”

The Everyman leaned in – best throw them off the trail for now, just to make things interesting. “There is this curious effect of forgetting how you got somewhere when you walk through doorways. It is a phenomenon heavily accentuated by the doorframe at the front of this hall. Trace your steps back far enough and I’m sure you’ll remember you came through a portal in the courtyard.”

“…I do remember that, now that I think about it,” Jotaro said.

“…Yeah,” Vriska muttered, sitting back in her chair. “The guy’s right.”

The Everyman was giving Minna a ponyback ride. “There’s a funny thing about memory, Allure,” she said.

“Oh, what’s that?”

“You can often just suggest a memory to someone, and their mind will fill in the blanks and think it’s real. It has to be done right of course, but with the correct stimuli and vagueness you can make people believe things really happened to them.”

“Wow. Are we really that gullible?”

“Watch this,” she said with a smile. “Hey Squeaky!”

“Hm?” Squeaky said.

“Allure was just telling me about that time you were at the supermarket and couldn’t find any soup. Quite the funny story how you spent hours searching around looking for the soup aisle only to find that they were just on a shelf a little too high for you too see, huh?”

“…Yeah, that was a really lame day,” Squeaky said. “…Though you told it kinda bad. There was actually more to it than that. There was this blue stallion…”

“…Holy Celestia, that’s creepy,” Allure asid.

“What?”

“That never happened, Squeaky. Icey here just planted a false memory in your head.”

“…Dammit, I’m supposed to be immune to that because of my training.”

“Squeaky!” Allure said, covering Minna’s ears with her magic.

Squeaky blushed. “Sorry! I was surprised!”

“It’s a bit much to take in, sometimes,” the Everyman said. “Our minds are foolish organs so often. It’s really easy to trick them because of all the shortcuts they take to streamline processing.”

“Are we safe?” Olivia asked Corona.

Of course not, the Everyman thought from the ventilation system. But you don’t know that.

“Pretty sure,” Corona said, glancing around. “It’s like the dark hallway back in Canterlot High. Nobody ever comes here if they have a choice.” She pressed a button on the side of her sunglasses. “A visual search of the premises has shown nothing, Rarity.”

“The stuff is definitely here though,” Olivia added. “Scans are giving off odd readings. …Not exactly the same as the stolen items but close enough. It could look like this with only mild tampering and interference.”

“We’re still looking,” Corona added. “But nothing seems suspicious yet. Just a normal school. Yes I know how stupid that sounds knowing the world I spent most of my education, but you get the point. It may take some time to dig stuff up.”

You won’t get very far. This isn’t enough to accuse you of anything, but it’s a start.

“I’m going to start searching with stronger magic,” Corona reported. “Should be able to trace the signature with enough time.”

That was both good and bad. Good because public magic was a way to get the government called on her. Bad because she might be able to find his secret – and he couldn’t have that. He needed to protect his secrets above all else…

Corona nodded slowly at something Lady Rarity said. “Over and out then. Check in soon.” She closed the connection. “Keep doing what we’re doing. How’s the security feed?”

“Well I just discovered a glaring problem. This world may be obsessed with security in schools, but they haven’t put cameras in the air vents.”

The Everyman tensed as Corona turned to look at the grating he was hiding behind. He needed to move, and move fast.

He took a moment to stop casting spells and look at his horn, quickly calculating the adjustments from unicorn magic to human magic in a low-arcane realm. In an instant, he was no longer in the vent in front of Corona, but on the other side of the school.

He scowled – she was going to be able to sense that magic. Perhaps not trace it, but it was a clue for them. A clue he would rather have not let them have.

“We really need to patent this,” Vriska said. “Infinite drumsticks.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “Patents mean almost nothing, Vriska.”

Vriska folded her arms. “Our legal system is confusing…”

“Saves us a lot of trouble though.”

The Everyman leaned in, taking yet another drumstick. “Laws? You are from a society?”

“Oh, right, can’t believe we forgot to do that,” Pinkie said, hitting herself in the forehead. “I guess we just figured you already knew. But that’d be crazy.” She narrowed her eyes at him.

“You’re not being very subtle,” Jotaro commented.

“Shush. You’re not supposed to notice.”

“If anyone were to notice it would be him,” the Everyman said, folding his arms. “He has the eyes of the eagle and the mind of a tactician. He’ll piece anything together given enough time.”

Jotaro nodded.

“Why don’t you let us hear a bit of what’s in that mind of yours?”

Jotaro tossed a drumstick onto the table. “None of this food is real.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“The infinite duplication was a good indicator, but it’s more than that. I’m not getting full. Every time I bite into the drumstick the taste is identical, like it’s copied from some kind of template.”

“Brilliant deduction, Jotaro.” He laid his hands on the table, raising an eyebrow. “Now what is the conclusion you draw?”

“We’re in a dreamworld,” Jotaro decreed. “We’re too aware and consistent to actually be dreaming, so we must actually be in such a world.”

The walls of the hall fell back, revealing a conglomeration world composed of beautiful sunsets, pristine night skies, and numerous floating buildings. One of these said buildings had a clock melting off its side. Another was burning to cinders. “Precisely. It is indeed a dreamworld – but a very dangerous one at that. Once you’re aware of what it is, it has a direct in to your mind. If you can’t control your own thoughts, it will go out of control.”

“Uh-oh,” Pinkie said. “Everybody don’t think about cats!”

Suddenly there were cats everywhere, even on the food. The Everyman took another bite, not caring for the possible danger of cat hair – so long as he kept his own thoughts under control, he would not be affected. They would have to deal with their dreams, and he would watch, getting quite the show out of it.

Pinkie’s attempt to get them to think about cats was a good one, but her team was smart enough to realize what she was doing – and realize that there really were things they weren’t supposed to think about. Pinkie had control over her mind, or was using some sort of meta-awareness to keep the dreamworld’s nature at bay. But Jotaro, Flutterfree, and Vriska couldn’t.

Dio appeared, grinning. “Hey Jotaro! I keep coming back and there’s nothing you can do about it! WRYYYYYYY!”

A full-vampire Flutterfree appeared next to him, blood eternally dripping from her mouth and hooves. She screeched.

In front of Vriska, another troll appeared – one with a teal Libra symbol on her shirt and a sword in her hand. She spoke with a nasally voice that would have been funny if it wasn’t so threatening. “Hey Vriska. No offense, but you need to die. Actually, scratch that, take as much offense as you want.”

Vriska clenched her fist. “Fuck… Terezi…”

“Flutterfree…” Jotaro said.

“Lolo’s not doing anything!” Flutterfree blurted, spreading her Stand out as much as she could. “All it does is tell me they’re fabrications! It’s not making them vanish!”

The Everyman folded his hands. “That’s because this dream world physically creates the things within your mind. I’m able to stay completely fixated upon this feast, so that’s what I get. You all have things in the back of your mind that come to the front when you don’t want to think. By the way, you all just lost the game.”

“FUCK YOU!” Vriska shouted. “FUCK YOU IN PARTICULAR!”

Terezi rushed to stab her in her distraction.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

“ZA WARUDO!”

Jotaro managed to kick Terezi out of the way with his leg while Star Platinum blocked The World. This did not stop Dio from grabbing Jotaro physically, starting to drain his blood. Jotaro recoiled, forcing Dio’s hand out of him, but Dio got one last hit in, freezing that part of Jotaro’s body.

“And time resumes,” they both said at once.

Flutterfree tied her vampire self up in Lolo and Vriska kicked Terezi in the shins.

All of the enemies recovered completely.

“You need to stop thinking about how they can win,” the Everyman suggested.

“Or just use excessive force!” Pinkie shouted, hitting all three of them with a hammer.

“Won’t work. They’re still thinking ‘what if they get back up?’ Sad, but true.”

“Help us!”

“Why should I?” the Everyman asked. “I have no say in what you think. Even with a controlled mind I can’t remove your dreams. I could merely scramble them temporarily.”

“You know what I mean,” Pinkie muttered.

“But that is a secret.”

“It won’t be for long.”

“…What?”

“Go check out the professor for a moment, get smarter.”

The Everyman looked around in a panic at his secret laboratory – dozens of pieces of technology ‘stolen’ from other universes were kept here, behind this magic door in the school. Magic wands, nanobot command centers, a few alien pieces of fruit… He didn’t particularly care for any of these, they were just materials for his true work.

A red star-shaped crystal levitated in the middle of a high-power electromagnetic field, at least one bolt of electricity hitting the crystal at every moment. It was certainly painful, but the only way to ensure his creation stayed where it was. He had been using devices and knowledge from other universes to create this crystal device, which would allow him to channel magic much more effectively on a much larger scale, even in universes like this where magic was almost nothing!

The only problem was that the mind within the crystal device was broken – it would lash out at everything, including him. It couldn’t be controlled yet. It still needed work. That said, everything else about it was complete – the power, the computing systems, the magic… He was so close; he couldn’t let this be destroyed now.

He cackled – all he had to do was act normal until he had something on Corona and her team. Oh, there was an idea – they probably weren’t even recorded as students! He carefully left the secret room and went to the principal's office, taking out the list of students.

Temporary Transfer Students: Cassandra Zimmerman and Olivia Velazquez.

That was a bust. What else could he do to them without raising suspicion? He’d just have to watch and find out.

The Everyman felt her horn tingle. She rubbed her head.

“Icey?” Minna asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing, just a daydream a bit close to home that requires a bit of my attention.”

“That’s not how daydreams work!”

The Everyman chuckled. “It’s how mine do. I’m probably a little crazy, but it works for m- ow.” She rubbed her head. “Yeah, this one’s demanding my attention…”

Allure noticed she was rubbing her head. “You doing okay?”

“I’ve got a little headache… Excuse me.”

“You can’t shut your horn off can you?”

I could, but someone else needs it right now. “…Apparently not.”

Allure shook her head. “We need to get you to a hospital. Sorry Minna, we’ll have to cut this festival short.”

Minna understood. “We’ll get you better Icey! Hospitals always do that! They’re the best.”

Instead of being afraid of hospitals, she finds them comforting. Interesting.

They began to lead her away. In many ways, this was good – she could start operating on autopilot and look a little out of it. It would make the doctors actually wonder if something was up. They would never find evidence of the Everyman, but it would keep them from demanding her attention.

She really wished she wasn’t in a world so close to the professor life – she’d prefer one where his little plight wouldn’t even register due to the distance.

The Everyman was very glad his unicorn life was nearby – regretfully that experience was going to have to be muddled for the sake of a longer-term experiment. Plus, it might be worthwhile to consider playing a clinically insane role over there.

He sat in the cafeteria, eating a sandwich. He observed Corona and Olivia closely as they did their cafeteria research. The watchers were being watched, as it were.

Then the watcher of the watchers was noticed. They saw him looking at them and exchanged a few words he couldn’t hear. They started walking over to him.

He tensed – but he couldn’t visibly tense for them, so he shafted the tense emotions to his other lives. In Ponyville, this made no visible change, but in the world with Pinkie it did. He started losing his grip on his table of food in his mind’s eye, an image of a broken red crystal starting to form instead.

“Frick,” he said, the fork melting out of his hand.

Jotaro suplexed Dio right into the Everyman, crashing the table. That was the final straw – the table vanished completely, leaving only the cracked red gem.

A ring of magic surrounded it, blasting Vriska right through her brain. It was a decidedly un-Just and non-Heroic death, so she came back in a few seconds – but it was enough to grab everyone’s attention.

“We could really use Nova for this one…”

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

The Everyman smiled warmly at Corona and Olivia. “Ah, the new students! Welcome!”

“Mind if we sit here?” Corona asked. “Trying to get to know the teachers.”

“I don’t mind at all!” He took a bite of his sandwich – it really wasn’t anything compared to the infinite drumsticks. “So, where are you from?”

“Denver,” Corona said.

“Mexico City,” Olivia added with a smirk. “Well, that was where I was born. More recently Salt Lake City.”

“Mexico City must have been an interesting place.”

“Oh, it was, but I’m sure you know how high the crime is there. I was not sad to leave that place. Adios, cartels!”

“Where are you from?” Corona asked.

“A little here, a little there. Born in Topeka, actually. Not as boring as they say but ‘boring’ is still an apt description.”

“You’re the science teacher, right?”

The Everyman nodded, smirking. “Why yes! My theories are wasted here, however.”

“I bet you have some fun experiments going on behind the scenes, huh?”

“Of course. I’ve got several rods full of neon gas in the labroom. Noble gases have many interesting effects as I’m sure you can understand.”

Corona leaned in. “Have you, by chance, picked up any unusual energy readings around here?”

“Picking up ‘unusual energy readings’ is an absurd concept hardly based in reality. What do you mean? Radiation? Electromagnetism?”

“Anything, really,” Corona said. “Like the things I’m getting off this little device I have in my hand.”

His cry of pained surprise was shunted to his other self, worrying Allure and Minna.

“What is that device?”

“A scanner. A scanner for magic. A scanner for magic that pegs you with a particular magic signature. A particular magic signature that matches a teleport we recently found.”

“I have no idea what yo-”

Corona tried to grab him with her bare hand. That could not happen.

The Everyman put all the focus he possibly could into the professor’s life, pushing the others even more over the edge. The doctors felt the need to put her in an MRI machine. The dreamworld fell into a nightmare completely dominated by the red crystal and a laughing, maniacal version of Corona. Dio, Terezi, and evil Flutterfree were vaporized.

The Everyman lashed out against Corona with magic, shoving her far away. Olivia pulled out her concealed weapon and fired, but the Everyman tapped into another life and summoned a gigantic sword into his hand that blocked the incoming fire. He summoned a magical hat to his head that increased his jumping ability tenfold. He rushed her, calculating everything out to the exact moment. A magic touch here, an slice here, and a shove there…

Before Olivia knew what was happening, she had a cut across her midsection and a bruise on her head.

“Olivia, stop fighting! It’s him, we just have to follow his signature backward!”

The Everyman didn’t give Olivia a chance, an invisible concussive blast forcing her into unconsciousness. He didn’t waste time trying to actually kill her – he needed to get Corona out of the picture without letting her touch him.

Corona ran down the hallway through the crowd of terrified, screaming kids. She followed the Everyman’s magic signature, but he knew that was exactly what she was doing. She found the entrance to the laboratory – a wall that didn’t appear to have a door, but actually did if one had magic sense.

He was waiting inside with a giant laser gun. He fired. She blocked with something invisible…

Her Stand. I need information.

“WHAT IS CORONA’S STAND!?” she demanded.

“What?” Allure blurted.

“Something… something’s in my head! And it won’t go away unless I find the answer to that question!”

The Everyman dodged a beam from Corona.

Jotaro had to save the Everyman from the dream-Corona’s attack. “Wake up!” The Everyman did not respond.

“Uh… Corona’s stand is Bacon Pancakes, a long range and short range mix Stand…” Allure said, panic evident in her voice. “The large section flattens people, the small bits pin them?”

The Everyman tapped into a version of himself with Stand-sight, and he could see the red pins coming at him. He decided to go with Star Platinum, punching all the pins away in an instant. Then he froze time, punching her in the back. That should have broken her back – but it didn’t. She had too many magic defenses.

Next move he needed anti-magic…

“THAT DIDN’T WORK!” she blurted, to Allure. “That didn’t work!”

“What’re Corona’s weaknesses?” Vriska asked.

“Does she even have any?” Flutterfree asked, dodging another burst of overly-flashy magic.

“Fire hates ice and water,” Jotaro observed, still holding the Everyman.

“That doesn’t help us,” Vriska muttered.

“It helps him,” Pinkie said, pointing at the Everyman. “Hey, focus completely on her if you want to win, okay?”

“PINKIE!”

“Deep… Chill…” The Everyman said, summoning ice to his fingers. Time had resumed, but he still had Star Platinum to take care of Bacon Pancakes. The anti-magic field was mostly working, but she had taken to using firebending against him. It would only be a matter of time until he found a combination of abilities that destroyed her. He was getting closer with each try. She might fall now…

And then she teleported behind him.

What was she doi-

“NO!”

“What can I do to help!?” Allure said in panic. Minna was crying.

“What’s wrong with you!?” Vriska shouted. “We should really just let her shoot him!”

Corona placed her bare hand around the red crystal. She had known she couldn’t beat the Everyman, but she had seen something in his creation. Something she could use.

Impossible, it was a raging lunatic of a machine, how could she do anything with it!?

“Calm yourself,” Corona said. “I know your life has been hard – but I can help you turn it around.”

“Empathy… Of course…”

“Stand by ready!” The crystal announced.

“Thank you... Raging Sights,” Corona said, holding the crystal high. It reacted with her entire body and her red necklace. She floated into the air, engulfed in a powerful magic light.

“THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ME!”

“Icey, snap out of it! Icey!”

“Why is Corona suddenly getting bigger?” Flutterfree asked.

Pinkie smiled. “Because the Everyman forgot to worry about what was behind him. He was busy focusing completely on Corona.”

Clever pony.

Corona’s body lost the false teenage appearance it had, converting back to that of a full-grown woman. Her hair extended itself down to her shins, the bacon-curls shining with even more luster than normal. Pony ears popped out of her head, twitching in the magical breeze. From the middle of her forehead a brilliant spiral horn sprang forth, punctuating the world with her magic. Two magnificent wings burst out from her back, the bright yellow feathers filling the air.

The red crystal and her red necklace swirled around each other, both shifting to a shape similar to her cutie mark and taking positions on the backs of her hands. A white battle-dress formed around her body, red streaks flowing like fire. White gloves formed around her hands, along with matching boots on her feet. Her sunglasses became red and pointed, no longer the lenses that hid her face from the world, becoming instead a translucent accessory that accentuated her eyes for all to see.

Bacon Pancakes summoned behind her, rotating slowly behind her head, the eight pins floating in the opposite direction.

The Everyman stood his ground. He’d just have to reach into some higher, more destructive powers that might destroy the whole school. But now that she’d gotten it to work, he needed that crystal back.

Corona rushed to him, placing a hand on his forehead. As she willed it, the fingertips of her white gloves vanished, allowing her to come in direct contact with him.

And then the Everyman was singular.

“…It’s been years since I had a single consciousness,” he said, looking at his hands.

Corona looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “This isn’t exactly what I expected either.” She gestured at his mindscape. “Very gray.”

“I’m the average of so many,” the Everyman said, beginning to pace. “So of course it would all consolidate into something neutral.”

“Who are you?”

“I am the Everyman.”

“I got that,” Corona said, eyes narrow. “I can feel all your different bodies and your different lives, and how you’re all connected by some single thread. What I don’t get is who you are.”

“I’m surprised you’re able to mentally handle even that.”

Corona ruffled her wings. “I think I just did something a bit beyond what I normally do? I’m empathically connected with a machine intelligence that you’d tortured into insanity. Raging Sights was lashing out because of you. If you had treated it with kindness from the start, everything would have worked out for you.”

“That was but one life. A mistake that singular one made,” the Everyman said, looking at nothing. “You cannot hold it to all of me.”

“Why the hell not!?”

“Because I do not attempt for consistency.” Images of his other lives appeared around them. “In this world, I am a pony and I strive to daydream and be kind to others. In this world, I am a curious man stuck in a dream world plagued by boredom. In this, I am a simple businessman. In this, I am an archivist for Celestia City, serving your people well with my efforts. In the world you were visiting, I was a high school professor who wanted to unlock the powers of magic in a world that didn’t naturally have much.”

Corona narrowed her eyes. “But you’re not a hive-mind. You all are the same person, in a way.”

“That is true.”

A memory surfaced of a boy looking at a crossroads in a forest in the middle of winter. He didn’t know which way to go. He was immensely uncertain…

And then there were two boys, each one going a different direction.

“That’s where it began,” the Everyman said. “I was no longer Isaac Rowan. I was the Everyman. I eventually found that, in addition to splits, I ended up in universes where the past was different. Where people took different paths. Where I was a pony, or a woman, or otherwise.” He gestured around. “I am now spread so far across the multiverse that my collective consciousness cannot be consistent. So I stopped stressing over it. Sometimes I’m a criminal, other times I’m not. All my lives are their own, and yet they’re all me. In some I am the hero of a dozen worlds. In others I’m an omnicidal maniac. All of me has just learned to live with all the rest of me.”

Corona looked at him, narrowing her eyes. “And yet you can consolidate into a single consciousness. I’m talking to it.”

“Do I seem good? Evil? Chaotic? Ordered? Do I seem to have anything about me besides thoughts?”

“…No.”

“I am a truly neutral presence,” the Everyman said. “That said, I do have preferences and desires.”

“Such as?”

“I’d rather remain a secret. My existence is significantly freer if multiversal societies don’t know about me.”

“No,” Corona sad. “No, I won’t keep your secret. I don’t care if some of your lives are heroes, people need to be able to defend against the part of you that is evil. The part that kills people.”

“I’ve already terminated the ‘professor’ life, you don’t have to worry about what I did to you there anymore. I could give you much in return for keeping my secret. I could tell you any number of things.” He paused. “You want the secret to easy immortality, do you not?”

Corona glanced at her wings, grimacing. “Yes.”

“Will you submit to having knowledge of me scrubbed from your mind in exchange for it?”

Corona looked him in the eyes. “No. I will find immortality on my own.”

“You already have.”

“For everyone else.”

The Everyman narrowed his eyes. “I just want to live my lives in peace, Corona. Is that too much to ask?”

“Yes. Because there are lives of yours I don’t accept.”

“…I can attempt to kill you.”

Corona raised her hand, a magic circle appearing around the red crystal there. She had no idea if it was Raging Sights or her necklace – probably a bit of both, if she was honest. “We’re not in the physical realm, Everyman. Your mind is strong. But you are currently only one mind here. I could destroy it.”

“You might not succeed.”

“Do you want to take that chance? I don’t even know how powerful I am right now. I’ll probably be forced to push the limit, and that could have a lot of interesting side effects.”

“Is there no way I can cut a deal with you?”

“None,” Corona asserted.

“…Very well,” the Everyman said. “My secret is out. I would appreciate it if you did not reveal what I am in the cases where I am just trying to live a simple life that has nothing to do with you. It would be cruel to tear apart families.”

Corona nodded slowly. “I’m not heartless. I’m just going to make sure everyone knows you exist.”

“…A shame,” the Everyman said, shaking his head. “…Now, do you mind releasing my intelligence so I can wake all my lives up? They’re all currently catatonic and worrying a lot of people.”

Corona nodded. “Okay.” She released him.

He could no longer see her – he really had terminated the professor’s life because it was basically worthless now that the entire scenario had been destroyed. As an office worker, he kept watching television. As a man stuck in a dream, he realized Pinkie’s team had managed to leave the universe somehow, saving him in the process. As a pony, she realized the League and Minna were all worried about her, which filled her heart with joy.

“I’m okay now. …Thanks for trying.” She shook her head. “Now… I think I’d like to sleep.”

“…Okay,” Allure said. “I need to take Minna home anyway. Call if you need anything, okay? I can get it.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Pinkie said. “You’re lucky, you know.”

He grunted. “I suppose…”

“Corona went easy on you. Think of how much of Raging Sight’s insanity she must have absorbed into herself for that to work. Then she purged it. That couldn’t have been easy.”

“No… No I suppose it wasn’t.”

“Care to explain what you’re talking about?” Vriska asked.

“Talk to Corona later, she’ll explain it better than me,” Pinkie said, helping the Everyman up. “Go find a new life for this one.”

The Everyman nodded. “I will.” He walked off in a random direction, not sure what this new life was going to be.

He eventually found a hotel run by fuzzy rodent creatures. They accepted him as one of their own. He just rolled with it, going to the bed and falling into it.

She fell asleep, letting the stress of the day wash away.

He turned off the TV and went to bed. There was nothing left for him to do.

Elsewhere, the Everyman kept up an active set of lifestyles… But those here decided their day was done. The fatigue on them had been too much. The Hat Kid left the files to be managed by others, those in the versions of Earth Shimmer put their plans on hold, and one universe where he was a dog he decided to let the cat go for once.

All because of one obsessive life, an insane crystal, and a fiery woman…

~~~

Nanoha picked up Raging Sights. The red crystal had retained the form of Sunset’s cutie mark even after being removed. “So, how did you enjoy your magical girl transformation?”

“Not all that odd, to be honest. I’ve experienced things like it before. …Though I was never naked for a split second before…” Corona said. Even without Raging Sights on, she had retained the wings, horn, ears, and extended hair – though she had no special outfit or awesome red shades.

“You’ll find it actually takes an instant to happen, and it’ll seem like less and less to you as time goes on,” Nanoha said, pushing Raging Sights back to her.

“…You’re giving it back!?”

“It’s merely a device based on our designs,” Nanoha said. “Of course it’s highly illegal to make one of these things, but you didn’t make it. You just found it. And you helped it come to terms with itself in, well, in an instant.”

“It took a bit longer than that, mindscape-time,” Corona admitted.

“Who cares? Raging Sights will want to stay with you. Princess.”

Corona laughed. “Heheh… Yeah…” she ruffled her wings. “Celestia these things feel weird…”

“There are many who would be glad to teach you how to use them. And I can teach you how to use this powerful Device. You are already an exceptionally powerful mage, Corona. With a Device and the power boost you just received, you have the power to rival me.”

“Wait, what?”

“Not only that, but I hear you know everything about the fundamental nature of physics?” Nanoha rubbed the back of her head. “I never studied that… I bet you could find a lot of bizarre tricks with all the math you know. Usually devices just handle complex calculations for the mage. But you already do complex calculations. Think about it.”

“…I just became ‘OP as all hell’ didn’t I?”

“You’ve still got to train a bit, but yeah, that’s a fair assessment.”

Corona smirked. “Sweet.”

“Take good care of Raging Sights. And Bacon Pancakes.”

“I will!” Corona said, bowing. “Thanks for letting me keep it.” She lifted Raging Sights into the air, transforming into her dress, gloves, and awesome red shades. “…Nice.”

“Your friends are waiting for you outside,” Nanoha said.

Corona smirked. “This should be fun.” She strode out the double doors into the presence of Lady Rarity, Lieshy, Olivia, Toph… and Eve.

“You look amazing,” Lady Rarity decreed.

“Like a princess,” Eve said, walking up to Corona, smiling with pride. “…Luna and I had a talk.”

“Oh?”

“Princess Corona Sunset Shimmer, PhD, you have a coronation ceremony to attend.”

“…I do?”

“YOU DO!” Lieshy shouted, letting her excitement get the better of her. “You’re no longer stuck with the title Protégé!”

Eve put a hoof on Corona. “…Celestia would have been proud of you.”

“I… I… I can’t process this, give me a sec. What exactly did I do? I just forced wings to appear!”

“That’s basically what I did,” Eve admitted. “I performed a great act of magic and became the Princess of Friendship. You performed a great act of empathy and understanding – not just with Raging Sights, but also with the Everyman.”

“So what, Princess of Empathy? That sounds… Even cheesier than Friendship.”

Eve smiled. “I don’t exactly have a title for you yet… But you’re our defender. Our guardian. A Princess of Fire, or Passion.”

Corona smiled brightly. “I accept, on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“I get to wear this all the time instead of trying to get into royal garb.”

Eve let out a chuckle. “Condition granted.”

“Oh, did you finally settle?” Olivia asked.

Corona glanced at her wings. “Yeah… Yeah I think I did. I’m not a unicorn. I’m not a human. I’m this.” She spread her arms wide, lighting her horn and swiveling her fuzzy pony ears. “And boy does it feel good to be me.”

Toph met Corona’s hand and the two of them clenched tightly. “I hope I still get to order you around.”

“As the Princess of defending or something, I think my defense of Equestria can be done the best under your command, and part of Lady Rarity’s team. We will continue protecting Merodi Universalis from threats only we can deal with.”

Lady Rarity let out a sigh of relief. “Good. I was afraid you were going to leave us for a moment there.”

Corona pulled them all into a big hug. “Not today, girls. Not today.”

~~~

Corona’s coronation went much the way’s Twilight’s had gone. Luna introduced her to the world, there was a song sung about her, she got a crown, and she gave a speech to the ponies of Equis Vitis. The main difference was that she wasn’t an alicorn per se, and that there were a lot of humans in the audience.

It was all a blur to her, to be frank.

After, though, she went to her family. Only a few of them had shown up – she supposed that was her fault for all the mistakes she had made. Her mother was there, and they shared a moment.

“I always knew you had it in you.”

“I didn’t.”

“That’s my Sunset,” she said.

Corona nodded. “Yeah… Yeah I am.”

The rest who had shown up tried to be friendly, but only a few didn’t just come off as awkward or forced. That is, until she came to her cousin, Sunburst, Nova at his side.

“Well, looks like you actually did ‘graduate’,” Sunburst said with a smile. “I think you’ve lost several bets.”

“You here to collect?”

“N-not at all!”

“Burst, I joke, I joke,” Corona said, putting a hand in his mane and scruffing it. “How have you two been doing?”

Nova rubbed her enlarged belly. “Well, I don’t feel like I can move properly, and living with Sunburst for an extended period of time is a mixture of wonderful and aggravating…”

“Wha?” Sunburst blurted.

“Holy Celestia… Sunburst, I had to slap you with a newspaper to get you to notice me two days ago!”

“It was morning, I wasn’t awake!”

“I mean, yeah, buuuuut…” She tapped her hooves together, about to say something else. But then she froze in place. “The baby just kicked.”

“Really?” Sunburst put his hoof to her. “Lemme fee-”

“Sunburst!” Nova said, blushing. “Not in public…”

“Oh!” He flushed redder than she was. “S-s-sorry!”

Corona kept her smile – but inwardly she got a sinking feeling. They had been forced together a little too early. She had faith they’d be able to work it out, but clearly things were going to be rocky for them.

She put a hand on both their shoulders – making sure her gloves were still on. “You two are adorable, you know that?”

They both nodded slowly, still flushed.

“Good. Carry on then.” She winked. “Now excuse me, I’ve got to sit with the other princesses for a feast.”

“You do that,” Nova said, nervously.

“And who knows, maybe one day you’ll graduate too.”

“And be what, the Princess of Fate?” Nova said. “Eh… If it happens I’ll take it, but I’m definitely not going to just go seek it out.”

“I’d like to be a prince,” Sunburst mused.

“Of course you would…”

Corona left them to their strange relationship, teleporting into the main dining hall of Canterlot Castle. She found it interesting that she could use both her hands and her horn for magic, making it a lot easier to control than she expected either one alone could ever do.

The Princesses were all waiting for her. Princess of the Moon and Night, Luna. Princess of Friendship, Magic, and the Multiverse, Evening. Princess of Love and Relationships, Cadence – with her Shining Armor of course. Princess of Life, Flurry Heart. Princess of Change, Paradigm, and her Shizuka.

And now her, Corona.

Luna extended a hoof. “Welcome to our ranks, Corona Shimmer, Princess of Passion, Fire, and Protection.”

Corona shook Luna’s hoof. “Glad to be here.”

“And that makes… six, six Princesses,” Paradigm said. “Think we could use the Elements of Harmony now?”

Flurry raised an eyebrow at her younger sister. “…The Elements still have bearers.”

“There are alternates we could test on!”

“Probably couldn’t,” Corona said. “The magical energies of the Elements are almost always attuned to specific individuals. Eve and Luna might be able to wield them all given their special connections, but just handing them out to the six of us likely wouldn’t produce the same effect.”

Eve clapped her hooves. “Finally, someone who appreciates science!”

“I appreciate science. Sometimes,” Paradigm said.

“Dear, you’re so inconsistent it doesn’t even matter,” Shizuka said.

“But that’s why everyone loves me!”

“The exemplification of change, my sister everyone!” Flurry commented, rolling her eyes.

Corona smiled. She had a feeling she was going to like this new aspect of her life.

“Hey, Corona,” Eve said, walking up to her. “It’s approaching evening. There’s something I’d like you to do. If you want.”

“...What’s that?”

“Will you lower the sun tonight?”

Corona was startled by the request. She nodded slowly, trying to keep herself calm.

Eve led her to a balcony, gesturing at the sun. “Just try to touch it with your magic. It should move mostly on its own after that.”

Corona took a deep breath, lit her horn, and pushed her hands forward. She felt the sun in her hands, a small ball of fire. It was as if it was a bead sitting on a wire, and she just had to push it a little. The sun wobbled a bit as she did so, but it set beneath the horizon without any difficulty.

There, she thought to herself. I… I guess I got what I wanted. And what you wanted.

She swore she could hear the sound of Celestia’s motherly laugh.

072 - Celestial Intelligence

“You know, I’ve seen her every day for a couple of weeks, and every morning I’m still struck with how adorable she is,” Nova said, looking over the edge of the crib at her three-week old daughter, the tiny Stardust. She took after her mother much more than her father, with a purple coat the color of Nova’s mane and a pinkish mane the same shade as Nova’s coat. However, her father was not absent from her, for her mane had an orange stripe running through it that accentuated her horn.

“She is quite the ball of big eyes and sparkles,” Sunburst said, nervously checking the crib for the millionth time just to ensure it was perfectly safe.

“Sunburst, she’s fine in there. She’s never even tried to get out once.”

“You know the moment you leave she’s going to try,” Sunburst said. “She has your eyes. I can see the plotting. The intense machinations…”

“She’s less than a month old, Sunburst,” Nova deadpanned. “She’s not going to be able to do anything.”

“And that’s the other thing! What if I screw something up?” He grabbed his mane. “I am going to turn into Shining Armor. I’ll lose all sleep…”

“You aren’t a prince, Sunburst,” Nova pointed out. “You can be by her side all day without stressing. …If you’d just let yourself relax.”

“But what if I get absorbed in a spell and she decides she suddenly knows magic?”

“That never ha-” she remembered what Pinkie Pie had told her about the Cakes. “Okay, that does happen. But you know the magic inhibition spell, Sunburst. You used it on Flurry!”

“Flurry wasn’t my daughter!”

Nova put a hoof to his mouth. “…Do I need to stay home today, Sunburst?”

“N-no, you’ve been wanting to get back to it for months now and…”

“Sunburst, if you need me to stay home today, I will. Renee will understand.”

“I… I know. But I’ve seen you going stir crazy every since we had her. You need to get back out there.”

“I can wait a day.”

“And I’ll keep being uncertain of myself until I actually do spend a day alone with her.” Sunburst laughed nervously. “Might as well be today!”

Nova smiled, kissing him on the cheek. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

“…No?”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Learn quick, I don’t want to have to explain to her why her father doesn’t know he’s cool.”

“…Nova, I’m the polar opposite of ‘cool’.”

“Nooot to me you’re not~!”

Sunburst’s glasses slid down his muzzle. He blinked.

Nova found herself amused by this cute reaction. “Heh. See you tonight, Sunburst. Or earlier. We wrap these things up early all the time…” She left the nursery and set out through their house. It was a simple construction, built much like Sunburst’s old home in the Crystal Empire – lined with bookshelf after bookshelf.

It struck Nova that she’d been living in a crystal castle ever since she left her Village until a few months ago. This was her first home in a long time that was actually hers. Or hers and Sunburst’s. They had argued over exactly how that worked before realizing it was stupid. That’s how a lot of arguments worked between them. Shouting, then slow mutual realization that it didn’t matter.

They weren’t exactly in the most solid of relationships, but Nova believed she was happy with how everything had turned out. Sunburst felt the same way – she knew him well enough to be certain of that. They had both given a few things up… But Stardust was more than worth that, she was certain of it.

…She still felt guilty that Sunburst had to give up more than her. It was one of the main reasons she let him dictate what most of the house looked like. Shelves upon shelves of ancient knowledge everywhere.

Nova did demand a kite room though. It was the best room, hooves down.

She left for work. Which was to say she stepped outside and teleported across Ponyville to Renee’s castle, walking into the main crystal hall. “GUESS WHO’S BACK!?” She shouted, grinning. “That’s right, the newest mother in the neighborhood, Nova Glimmer!”

The entire hall erupted in applause. Jotaro made a point of walking up to her and holding her high, letting her soak in the applause.

Nova waved. “I’m back and better than ever!”

“You really are,” Jotaro said, deep meaning behind his words. He took her right to Renee and set her down.

Renee smiled at her. “Nova, glad to have you back.”

“You have no idea how much I’ve wanted to be back.”

Renee nodded with a coy smile. “Don’t I know it.” She handed her a data pad. “You’ve chosen quite the day to come back, the team’s going to take out a Skiff.”

Nova blinked. “The world has no atmosphere?”

“No planets at all.” Pinkie said, suddenly standing on Nova’s back. “Just stars – and only plain stars at that!”

“But we’re getting strange readings every time we open up a portal,” Vriska added, kicking Pinkie off Nova. “So we’re going to investigate.”

Flutterfree appeared last. She hugged Nova. “…Welcome home.”

Nova chuckled. “…Thanks.”

And then time froze – excluding her and Jotaro. “Nani!?”

“I wasn’t prepared for that…” Nova mused; she should have been stopped.

“I did it,” Aradia said, floating in. “Jotaro, I’m going to talk to her a little, okay? Now run out of your time stop.”

Jotaro nodded, allowing his time stop to fall, leaving just Nova and Aradia.

“…Do I need to go to the future and save the world or something?” Nova asked.

“Oh no, nothing like that!” Aradia chuckled. “I just want to congratulate you. Not a single time did you accelerate your pregnancy or your time spent with Sunburst off work.”

“Well… I’m sure you know how it all started…”

Aradia nodded. “You don’t need to feel ashamed, Nova.”

“I kinda do?”

“It’s in the past though, it is what it is,” Aradia said. “No that’s not an opening for you to mention both of us could just go back and change it.”

Nova smirked. “I was going to say…”

“Look, the point is, you had the power to go back and fix it – but you didn’t. You also had the power to make your wait shorter – but you didn’t. You lived through it just like everyone else, using the opportunity to build up your relationship with Sunburst. …You’ll be really glad you did that, later down the line.”

Nova nodded. “Yeah…”

“Basically… I’m just here to tell you good job. You did what so many with power over time can’t do – wait. Even I don’t wait all the time. I’m not sure if I would have in your position. You’re a strong mare, Nova. I just wanted to grab you here and tell you that.”

Nova looked at her with a proud smile. “I… I think I needed that. Thanks for noticing, Aradia.”

“Glad to help!”

“Are you sure there’s no danger from time I need to help you deal with?”

“No, already dealt with the loose TARDIS and chrono-demon. There’s no future threats I can see that I feel the need to give cryptic prophecies about… Hrm…”

Nova chuckled. “It’s fine. You can go back to guarding time.”

“I will! I have a series of funerals stuck in a time loop to sort out!”

“That sounds right up your alley.”

“I have it on my authority that it’s going to be the most fun I had in three timeline splits.”

“…Right.”

Aradia winked. “See ya!”

She was gone, and time resumed.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro commented.

“Hm?” Vriska said, confused.

“Time manipulation conversation,” Pinkie said. “None of our business. Let’s just get in the Skiff already!”

Renee nodded, pressing a button on a remote control. A sleek, crescent-shaped craft made of white metal appeared in front of them. It had a single cockpit with six seats arranged, one in the front and three in the back, creating a splayed triangle. The seats were adjustable to human or pony proportions, and could easily sit virtually any member of Merodi Universalis who wasn’t too big. The clear windshield popped open, inviting all of them inside.

Pinkie leaped into the main seat. “CAPTAIN PINKIE PIE HAS TAKEN THE HELM!”

Flutterfree and Nova sat in the seats behind her, while Vriska and Jotaro took seats on opposite ends of the back, leaving one empty. The windshield slid back down, sealing the compartment from the outside elements.

Renee tapped her ear, activating a microphone. “This is Renee to the Primary Team. Everything ready?”

“Ready!” Pinkie blurted.

“Wrong. Seatbelts.”

“Oopsie!” Pinkie said with a giggle, ordering all of them to put their seatbelts on.

“…Are we in one of those shows legally required to do this?” Flutterfree asked.

“Nope. That’s the joke.”

“Oh.” After a moment she shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“We’re ready now,” Nova reported. “I just did a scan of all the systems. Operating at a hundred percent.”

“Good luck, Primary,” Renee said with a salute. “Find something fun.”

“We will!” Pinkie promised. The Skiff floated an inch off the ground, activating its dimensional drive. It didn’t bother with creating a portal and holding it open – it went for speed, vanishing from Equis Vitis in an instant and appearing in the other universe.

The universe that had been dubbed Starfield. It was exactly as advertised – they were in orbit around a main sequence yellow star with no planets around it. There wasn’t even an asteroid, or a comet. Just a star.

An error message appeared on Nova’s hoof-screen. “…The beacon-probe couldn’t transmit.”

“We knew that was a problem,” Flutterfree said. “This universe’s physics doesn’t allow full-universe transmissions.”

“Huh. Weird.” She made a mental note to check that out later, but otherwise didn’t dwell on it.

“Take her away!” Pinkie ordered.

“You’re the one with the steering wheel,” Vriska pointed out.

“It appears I am.” Pinkie winked at Vriska. She placed her hoof on the wheel and grinned. “Activating wormhole drive. Goal: the predicted source of the unusual energy readings.”

“What kind of unusual energy readings?” Nova asked.

“Unusual.”

Nova narrowed her eyes. “Pinkie…”

“Something in this universe is giving off ‘waves’ that fundamentally shift the unique signature of this universe’s matter back and forth. It’s not something we’ve seen before.”

“Thank you.”

“Wormhole drive spooled!” Pinkie declared. “Here we go!”

The Wormhole drive was a peculiar mode of transport created from a flawed Earth Tau’ri prototype that represented the cutting edge of Merodi Universalis technology. It was able to tear a hole in spacetime and connect it to another location within the same universe. The exact effectiveness of the drive depended on the local physics, but if full wormholes were allowed, there was no effective limit on the distance they could move in a single instant.

The space around the Skiff popped. Everything around them squished and rotated like putty, but they didn’t feel anything – even though technically they were the ones being squished while most of the universe remained static. When reality righted itself, the star patterns were different, with stars only appearing relatively ‘beneath’ them, indicating their position above a galactic disc.

In front of them…

“…What the hell is that?” Vriska asked.

“…I have no idea,” Nova admitted.

~~~

“You’ll like this world,” Sugarcoat had said when she gave Corona the coordinates to ‘Unnamed Earth 1117’. She had refused to give any further details on what the universe was, why Corona would like it, or even if she should bring the rest of the team along.

Lady Rarity had been in the mood for an exploration mission though, so they were all prepared to check out a recommendation from a close friend.

Corona waved her hands together and lit her horn. “Here we go… Let’s see if I can pull this off…” She shunted magic into Raging Sights, having the device run the higher-order numbers needed for the spell. She created two magic circles in front of her, each rotating a separate direction. The vibrations of her magic rippled against the dimensional fabric, punching a hole through reality to another universe. The circles flashed, punching another hole into that universe. This repeated a third time, finally connecting to Unnamed Earth 1117.

“Stable…” Olivia said, checking her scans. “You’re going to give Seraphim a run for its money, soon.”

“Seraphim has no known limit,” Corona sad. “That wasn’t easy.”

“Stop underselling yourself, that was impressive,” Lady Rarity said. “We’ll never need a dimensional device again, or need to worry that it’ll break.”

“Universes without magic knocked. They want to scare you again.”

“We’ll always be able to prepare before going into one of those. Plus, I hear physics-anchor technology is coming along nicely.”

Corona shrugged, stepping through the portal. Since this was basic exploration and the world had not made first contact with Merodi Universalis yet, Lieshy and Lady Rarity didn’t bother trying to disguise their forms. It was generally easier to convince humans other universes existed with a talking pegasus and spider-horse in full armor.

They were in a large city – Corona had no idea which one, or if it even had an analogue on most Earths. It was filled with humans going about their day like one would expect in a city – selling hotdogs, waving down cabs, texting and not looking where they were walking… General human stuff.

The odd thing was those who noticed Lady Rarity’s crew were curious, but didn’t feel any need to go out of their way and react. They seemed slightly confused by their presence, but not awed, impressed, or even scared. They had the faces of people who felt like they should recognize someone, but didn’t.

“Curious,” Lady Rarity said. “Why do you suppose they don’t find us all that unusual?”

To answer their question, a man with wings for arms flew overhead, running away from a man in a blue and red suit using white string to ‘sling’ across the sky. They left Corona’s sight just as soon as they entered it, but she understood everything.

“Oh. My. Gosh.” She said, putting her hands to her face and squeeing.

“...I’m lost,” Lieshy said.

“I’m not,” Olivia said, smirking. “I know exactly why we’re here now.”

“That was Spider-Man!” Corona trilled. “Spider! Man! One of the best superheroes in all of comic history! …Well, not as good as the Flash, or Batman, or Iron Man, or Thor, or Doctor Strange, or… Oh I wonder which continuity this universe i-” Her jaw dropped as she saw another man fly overhead – he wore a blue suit with a large S on the front, and a cape trailing behind him. “…Superman…” she said meekly.

“That name I recognize,” Lieshy said. “So, we’re in the superhero world?”

“This doesn’t make any sense, Superman’s DC, but Spider-Man’s Marvel, how… We’re in a fusion universe! Sugarcoat I have no idea how you found this but you’re the best!”

Lady Rarity turned to Olivia. “Care to explain her reaction?”

Olivia opened her mouth, but Corona beat her to it. “I love comic book superheroes. My entire time on Earth Vitis I read about them. Watched movies. It was the best – I even drew a few comics of my own! …Those largely starred my friends and me but the idea was the same. Fighting crime and being awesome!” She laughed. “Today is going to be a good day. Two superheroes down, who’s next?”

A burst of red energy passed them by, startling them. This burst of red kicked a man with a purse down in an instant, slowing down only when it was time to hand the purse back to the old woman it belonged to. “I believe this is yours.”

“Oh, thank you Flash! You know, if only my grandson were like you…”

“I’m sure he’ll grow up to be an upstanding citizen.”

“Ah, he’s already grown up. You know mister Flash, the young people of this generation are all going astray. Why I know many people other than my grandson who just don’t have respect for authority…”

“Uh-huh…” the Flash said, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

“HEY! FLASH!” Corona shouted, waving at him. “OVER HERE!”

He saw her, visibly brightening. “Excuse me ma’am, we’ll have to cut our conversation short. Superhero business – you understand.”

“Of course – silly me, keeping you from your work!”

The Flash was next to Corona in an instant, arm around her. “I’ve never seen you before but I am in your debt. That woman would have talked my ear off for hours.”

“I… noticed…” The Flash is in my debt the Flash is in my debt the Flash is in my debt.

“So, who are you? New superhero?”

Corona looked at her relatively new dress and form. “You could say that, but probably not what you’re expecting. I’m Corona, this is Lieshy, Rarity, and Olivia.”

The Flash looked at Olivia. “No superhero name for you?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I had to change it to protect my identity?”

“…Maybe.”

Lady Rarity took off her helmet. “Anyway, we’re not precisely what you’d know as superheroes. We-”

There was a dramatic evil laugh that punctuated the air with its absurdity. “I’VE DONE IT!” a man with robotic claws coming out of his back said, revealing his presence by crashing through a skyscraper wall. “I have perfected my serum of rage.”

“Doctor Octopus…” Corona said, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t remember this one.”

The Flash glanced at her. “You have time powers or something?”

“I’ll explain later. Let’s just take care of him, he shouldn’t be much of a problem.” Man he looks stupid. Was he really not as smart as I thought in the comics or is he off?

“That’s what you heroes think!” Doctor Octopus shouted, snapping the claws on one of his tentacles. A much larger hole was busted out of the same building he had just come out of, revealing a monstrous green beast of a man whose eyes were glowing red. “I HAVE TAPPED INTO THE HULK’S RAGE AND MADE IT MY OWN!”

“This suddenly got a lot more interesting,” the Flash muttered. “I’ll take the Hulk, you get th- hey what are you doing?”

“Using my powers,” Corona said, teleporting an inch from the Hulk and laying her fingers on one of his arms. She didn’t bother rooting around his mind that much – she knew what she had to do. Some basic emotional manipulation to lower the level of anger, and…

The green form of the Hulk shrunk to the size of a normal man, down to the green of his skin vanishing.

“…What.” Doctor Octopus said.

“Empathy, magic, and a little bit of mental manipulation,” Corona commented. “Hi, I’m Corona.” She shot a fireball at him, pushing him back. “This is the Flash. You’re about to have a bad day.”

Olivia, Lieshy, and Lady Rarity sat back while Corona and the Flash royally curbstomped Doctor Octopus. The Flash kept hitting him before he could react, and Corona quickly tore off his mechanical limbs. He had other devices to fight with, but the creative inventions proved to be less than useless against the combined duo.

A man in a red and black superhero suit sat down next to the three travelers on the sidelines. He was armed to the teeth with swords, guns, grenades, you name it. He produced a bag of popcorn from nowhere and handed it to Lieshy. “I love me a good smackdown.”

Lieshy took the popcorn without questioning it. “You see them often?”

“Anytime Superman sees a random thug in the street,” he said. “You can imagine how that goes.”

“Smashed slime buckets.”

Deadpool shrugged. “Not the double-metaphor I would have gone for. Let’s see… Mexican food, mixed with something about hooves, and a lollipop thrown in to twist the train into a mess.”

Olivia looked at him, taking some of Lieshy’s popcorn absent-mindedly. “You… You’re Deadpool.”

“Guilty as charged, the merc with a mouth here, at your service.” He bowed mockingly.

“I doubt that.”

“I will be your slave if you have chimichangas.”

Olivia wasn’t sure if she believed that.

Deadpool turned around. “Fine, be that way. Keep the succulent taste of perfectly fried confectionaries away from my deserving mouth…”

The Flash tossed Doctor Octopus to the ground in front of Deadpool. The doctor groaned.

“I think he’s finally out of tricks,” the Flash observed. “An – Deadpool what are you doing here?”

Deadpool took a pose that could best be described as ‘sassy’. “I wanted to get in on the world-changing events in the first scene, Flash my buddy! Take a moment to see things before you all have your existential crisis at Avengers headquarters!”

“Ah, so you took the name Avengers here rather than Justice League…” Corona said, looking thoughtful.

The Flash glanced form Deadpool to Corona. “Okay, now we need to finish that conversation. What exactly are you girls?”

Corona smirked. “Explorers from another universe, representative of the multiversal society Merodi Universalis.”

Flash tensed. “…Other universe?”

“Oh! We’re not evil and we’re not looking to conquer Earth!” Corona said, backtracking. “I know you’ve had a lot of problems with things like us in the past – or, well, I guess I’m just guessing about that, I don’t really know this universe – but trust me, we’re not evil.”

Flash looked her in the eye. “I believe you. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t dangerous. You talk about things as if you know us, have you been watching us for a while?”

Corona shrugged. “Eh, no. It’s just that in a world I used to call home there are comic books that tell stories about you.”

Flash took a moment to process this.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the existential crisis has begun!” Deadpool shouted, raising his fist into the air. “The time has come for all to realize that I’m not insane!”

Corona pointed at him. “Your Awareness isn’t the only reason they think you’re crazy.”

“…So what if I want to stab a bitch sometimes? That’s perfectly normal!”

Corona raised an eyebrow.

The Flash finally decided on a response. “…You’re a fangirl then?”

Olivia facepalmed, Deadpool laughed, and Corona’s face reddened. “Uh… Yeah, pretty much.”

The Flash grinned. “Great! About time we got someone new here who understands how awesome we are. I’m taking you back to HQ.”

“Do you speak for this world?” Lady Rarity asked.

“More or less,” the Flash admitted. “You can talk to Batman about the politics of everything if you want.”

“Can I come too!?” Deadpool said. “Oh who am I kidding, I’ll come even if you don’t want me to.” He gave the Flash a thumbs up.

“He might be helpful,” Corona whispered.

“How so?” the Flash whispered back.

“He already knows about the comic book thing.”

“What, how?”

“Ever heard of breaking the fourth wall?”

“…Today is going to be a mindscrew isn’t it?”

“HOT DIGGITY DAMN IS IT!” Deadpool said, holding up his swords. “Not as much as the movie chapter next arc, but y’know.”

“And it took me this long to realize he was Pinkie.” Lieshy facehooved. “I’m dense sometimes.”

“TO AVENGERS HEADQUARTERS!” Deadpool shouted.

~~~

It…

It was made of stars, that was the first thing they were able to discern. But it was also made of pitch black darkness that rotated around the stars, impossible to see except when it blotted out one of the tiny lights in the distance.

It took a significant amount of staring to realize that the darkness took the shape of giant, square-toothed gears with the stars serving as centers. The dominant star was a blue behemoth, its gear the one around which all the others positioned themselves.

The stellar clockwork device was laid out in a confusing setup – some gears operated parallel to ones that drove them, while one or two of them seemed to rotate in two directions at once to satisfy conflicting directional motions. There was no ticking motion, each gear moving smoothly and without noise.

Then again, they were in space; it wasn’t like they could hear anything even if it would make a noise.

“I still have no idea,” Nova said, checking her screen. “It’s a machine made of stars.”

“And something black and mysterious,” Flutterfree said. “…I’m going to try and use Lolo on it.”

“The stars in it may not be full size, but they’re still over a thousand miles away,” Jotaro pointed out.

“Oh. Then we’ll have to get closer before I do that.”

“I’d like to scan it more first…” Nova said, furrowing her brow. “Bizarre… It’s definitely the source of the universal waves. I still have no idea how it’s causing them, but the sheer amount of power that must be stored in there to even produce such an effect while dormant…”

“So, what, ancient Star device?” Pinkie asked.

“Great, you don’t even know what it is.”

Pinkie smirked. “Nova…”

“All right, fine. No, I don’t think it’s a Star device – not any sort of residual connection to the Stars or their magic. I would think Starcross but they wouldn’t just leave something like this unguarded, and I seriously doubt they’d just forget about something of this sort. And those two are the ones most likely to build something with this sort of aesthetic out of all the powers we know with power close to this.”

“The Void?” Flutterfree reminded her.

“They can’t take their power out of their area of the multiverse easily or for very long,” Nova pointed out. “Though this does strike as a possible Void construct… Perhaps it has control over universes?”

“What kind of control is the question,” Vriska pointed out. “It could be one of those things that creates fucking… I dunno, donut worlds.”

“I think it’s ancient and forgotten,” Jotaro said. “A fallen higher society’s lost toy.”

“We’re just throwing out guesses,” Nova pointed out. “We have no idea what it does, what most of it is made of, or even if it actually does anything. For all we know it’s a piece of abstract art.”

“Is it dangerous though?” Flutterfree asked.

“Undeniably,” Nova answered. “You use Lolo on it and uncover a power to destroy the universe we’re in for all I know.”

“Ah…”

“I can stop time for the Skiff, though,” Nova said. “First sign of trouble we could just bail.”

“Too risky,” Pinkie asserted. “Any other ideas?”

“I’m picking up universe connections. We could test those out,” Nova suggested.

“Man I forgot how useful you were,” Vriska said. “Where were you when we needed to scan that yellow obelisk of mysterious voodoo!?”

“Starting a family,” Nova said with a smirk. “You should try it sometime.”

“If you think I’m up for popping mini eldritch monstrosities out, you’re fucked up in the head.”

Nova rolled her eyes. “Riiiight.” She scrolled through the data on her screen. “That’s odd – I’m picking something up near the construct that doesn’t appear to be a part of it. I’m reading metals, energy signatures, and…”

An incoming call appeared on the windshield as a holographic display.

Pinkie shrugged, answering it. Onscreen appeared a petite woman with green curled hair and a simple black dress with slits that showed off her legs. On the wall behind her were emblems of the United States of the Multiverse. “This is Commander Tornado o- Wait it’s you assholes. What the hell are you doing in our universe!? We have claim!”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “Really? Did you get here first?”

“Of course we did! We have the whole beacon-thing setup, morons!”

“Funny, because our beacons won’t transmit.”

“…What do you mean they won’t transmit!?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you…” Another member of her team said – the version of Katsuki Bakugo with combed hair known as Boring to virtually everyone. “The beacon hasn’t been working ever since we arrived.”

“Why didn’t you make sure I knew!?”

“He tried,” a man in a labcoat none of the Primary Team recognized said. “He tried hard.”

“...Stop questioning me in front of the enemy.”

“Heeeey, we’re not the enemy here!” Pinkie said.

Tornado raised an eyebrow. “Really? I guess you’ll just let us have this entire universe without an argument then?”

“…I see your point.”

“We were here first, we get the thing,” Tornado said, folding her arms.

Nova raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that for sure? We’ve been making connections to this universe for a while now.”

“How long?”

“Abo-”

“Quiet,” Jotaro said. “If you give her a number, she’ll just give a number that’s larger, regardless of if it’s true or not.”

Boring poked his head onscreen. “That doesn’t even matter. The beacon treaty dictates that, in the case of a failing beacon, the original placement of the beacon becomes invalid.”

“But there’s no beacon in this universe, so neither of us have claim by those rules,” Flutterfree pointed out. “There’s no condition for ‘what if a universe can’t have a beacon’?”

“Actually there is,” Boring said. “The beacons were designed with secondary transmission methods. Including radio.”

“…Wait, if this universe blocks radio, how are we talking?” Nova asked.

Jotaro’s pupils dilated. “That’s right… If that were the case, this transmission shouldn’t be working…”

Tornado looked from Boring to the scientist. “…What the hell is going on?”

The scientist cleared his throat. “My best theory is that the device we are next to is able to do more than change the way the universe works. It adds ‘coding’ to the universe, giving the physics more esoteric commands.”

There was silence from both sides.

“Think of it like this. You’re an ancient civilization and you have some kind of incredible piece of technology. You’ll want to induce certain rules into the universe it’s in, if you can. Say, ‘if a transmission is a declaration of ownership, remove it’, or something similar.”

“So what you’re telling me is this thing doesn’t want to be owned?”

“Maybe?” the scientist said, shrugging.

Tornado grunted. “Not good enough...” She turned back to the Merodi. “Look, here’s the deal. I’m declaring ‘first come first serve’ – who cares who was the first in the universe, apparently we can’t own it. But we were first to this construct, so we’re going to claim it. We were physically here first, and that can be proven.” She folded her arms. “Checkmate.”

“…But what if someone else owns it?” Pinkie asked. “Maybe the reasons the universe is coded this way is because it belongs to someone else.”

“You think they would have shown up by now if it did,” Tornado pointed out. “If it can detect beacon transmissions… HEY! OWNER OF THIS DEVICE! IF YOU WANT TO INTERRUPT OUR SALVAGE, SPEAK UP NOW OR FOREVER HOLD YOUR PEACE!”

Nothing happened.

“That’s all the proof I need. I claim this clockwork device in the name of the United States of the Multiverse. I hereby ask you to leave the proximity of our property. Or, put in words you’ll understand, go away.” She cut the transmission.

“Delightful woman,” Nova commented. “I sure missed having to deal with these kinds of people. Number one thing.”

That got a ripple of awkward chuckles out of the girls.

~~~

Captain America, better known as Cap to the rest of the Avengers, raised an eyebrow at the Flash when he entered the Avengers’ main lounge that sometimes doubled as a meeting room when people felt like it. “…Flash, what have you dragged in this time?”

“People from another universe who don’t want to kill us!”

“…And Deadpool?”

“…Yes,” Flash said with a straight face.

“Ay, Cappy, how’s it goin’? Been a while, huh? I bet you missed me, huh?”

“Superman, punch him through a window for me would you?” Cap asked.

Superman appeared behind Deadpool and obliged, defenestrating him.

“HEY! THAT WAS DECIDEDLY UNHEROIC!” Deadpool shouted from a tree outside, several stories down.

“You’ll be fine,” Superman called.

“You bet I will,” Deadpool said, suddenly standing behind him. “Wryyyy…”

Superman sighed. “What did we do to get him in here?”

“My fault,” Corona said.

Lady Rarity took a step forward. “We are from the multiversal society Merodi Universalis, and we have come to your world with intent of initiating official first contact.”

“You’re forgetting the part where we’re all characters from comic books,” the Flash said.

“Well I never read those books,” Lady Rarity retorted. “All I recognize is Superman and Batman.”

“Read all of Jojo’s and not a single comic… You pain me,” Corona said, clutching her chest in exaggeration.

Lady Rarity rolled her eyes. “Corona here is somewhat of a big fan of what you do, apparently.”

Superman looked at Corona and saw the twinkling eyes of a fangirl who was struggling (and failing) to remain professional. At least she wasn’t asking for his autograph or something.

“I take it you’re in charge?” Superman asked Lady Rarity.

“Yes. I am Lady Rarity, the Captain of this little group.”

“Walk with me and explain what exactly Merodi Universalis is and about the multiverse you occupy.”

“Certainly. The multiverse is a tremendously huge, but finite existence where all universes are held…” The two walked away, leaving the rest behind.

“…I still don’t understand why Deadpool’s here,” Cap said.

“Man, people really don’t want to think about it,” Deadpool commented. “It’s like their putty-filled monkey-brains can’t actually comprehend what their existence is.”

The Flash shrugged. “Cap, you ever notice him talking about scenes, panels, or acting like there’s always a crowd watching?”

“Uh, yeah? He’s insane.”

“He’s aware of the comic books we’re in.”

Cap blinked.

“Movies too! Don’t forget the cinematic universes!” Deadpool chirped.

“We’re just heroes in comic books?” Cap blurted.

“Pretty much,” Corona admitted. “Don’t feel too bad, a lot of people really enjoy what you do. …Not to mention the fact that some of us are from children’s cartoons. I love my world, but sometimes I have trouble watching the show I ‘came’ from.”

It was at this point Corona realized every hero in the room was staring at her. “…What!?”

Olivia tapped away at her holographic computer screens. “You just told them they’re all fictional. That’s going to get more than a few strange looks.”

“Oh.”

“Existential dread: PART TWO!” Deadpool shouted. “Brought about by magic sun lady!”

Corona got the impression she’d made a huge mistake.

“No, really?”

“Okay, you’re like a million times worse than Pinkie,” Corona blurted.

“Thanks!”

~~~

“Right, so, here’s the obvious thing. We can’t let the USM have that construct,” Nova said.

“Of course not,” Vriska said. “But what exactly are we going to do? If we try to take it for ourselves, we risk an ‘incident’. And I can tell you right now Eve would not be happy with an ‘incident’ with the USM when things are finally looking up.”

“If we keep them from having it, there will be an ‘incident’,” Pinkie pointed out.

Flutterfree furrowed her brow. “But think of what they could do if they figure out how to use this thing. It has the ability to send ripples through universes.”

“That’s probably just a side-effect,” Jotaro pointed out.

“…Yeah. It’s just too dangerous.”

“I agree, we have to do something,” Pinkie said. “But they made it pretty clear they want it that way.”

“We can play hardball too,” Nova said. “They tried the ‘we got here first’ card, let’s just play another one. One they won’t be able to refute.”

“What do we have?” Flutterfree asked.

“Well… I don’t know,” Nova said, looking at her screen. “There’s gotta be something…”

“We end the scenario with neither of us in control of the construct,” Jotaro said. “We declare this construct no-man’s-land.”

“…That could work, but we’d really have to sell it. And the enforcement of the agreement…”

“Blow it up,” Vriska suggested.

Everyone stared at her.

“What? There has to be part of it that’s able to explode, or at least be disabled.”

“How in the name of Celestia would we do that!?” Nova asked. “It’s a tremendous multiversal construct!”

Vriska held up her eight-sided dice. “The Fluorite Octet wishes to remind you that you are in the presence of a god who can face off against universe guardians. I’m sure I could do something at maximum power and luck.”

Pinkie put a hoof to her chin. “Hrm… That could work… Destroy it.”

“But that might destroy the universe we’re in!”

“Universe-jump from time-crawl,” Nova suggested. “We could leave before that happens – save the USM as well, just to prove ourselves.”

Jotaro nodded. “We just have to make them realize we’re serious.”

Vriska cracked her knuckles. “Pinkie, dial that world that’s literally nothing but a million cats. I need to steal a lot of luck.”

“The Plane of Infinite Kittens doesn’t have much luck in it.”

“I just need a constant source. Give me an hour of constant absorption and I should be able to pull anything off.”

Pinkie shrugged, tossing her a dimensional device. “Knock yourself out.”

Vriska opened a small portal in the air that was supposed to be too small for a cat to come through, but a white kitten came through anyway. Vriska sighed, stealing the animal’s luck and shoving it back into the infinite pile with its brethren. She focused her eye on the cats through the portal, moving them aside every second or so to grab another cat’s luck. “This is going to be tedious…”

“If only we weren’t several thousand light years away from normal space,” Nova commented.

“I would really love to just walk through a city right now, but this is what we need to do.”

Nova lit her horn. “I’ll speed it up for the rest of us.”

“Fun.”

Vriska was accelerated to extreme speeds, so much that she had absorbed enough luck in just two minutes. She closed the portal, signifying that all was ready. She slapped Nova to grab her attention. Nova let Vriska’s timestream resume.

“It took you five minutes to notice me,” she muttered.

Nova blushed. “Sorry. Need to get back into the swing of things.”

“Got what you need?” Pinkie asked.

“Oh you bet I do,” Vriska said, twirling her dice in-between her fingers. “Let’s go screw with the USM. Nova, teleport me outside. No I don’t need a spacesuit. Yes I’m sure, mom.”

Nova blinked. “Are you reading my mind?”

“You’d notice if I was,” Vriska pointed out. “Just do it. Jotaro, sell the tough guy act.”

Jotaro raised an eyebrow.

“Right, just be yourself.”

Nova teleported Vriska outside the ship. This prompted the USM to hail them again – no surprise there. “What are you doing?” Tornado demanded.

Jotaro pushed Pinkie aside. “Merodi Universalis had decided that we will not accept your terms of ‘first come, first serve.’ Instead, we declare this construct to be no-man’s land. Because we cannot claim this universe with our beacons, neither of us will be allowed to tamper with the objects within this universe.”

“Hey! That doesn’t make any sense!”

“It makes more sense than ‘first come, first serve.’ There is no absurd rule that allows one to dominate over the other. It is a compromise.”

“It’s not a compromise if the other side doesn’t agree, moron!”

“We can force compliance.”

“Oh yeah? You going to shoot us down?”

“No. We’re going to destroy the construct.”

Tornado paled. “You can’t do that.”

Vriska shouted WANNA BET!? into Tornado’s mind with her telepathy. She rolled her dice. Even though they were in space, they still activated: 8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8. She transformed into her blue armor, glowing with a cosmic cobalt power. She pulled her dice back and lifted her sword, aiming at the construct. Oh this is going to be glorious.

It was at this moment Tornado revealed that she had a rather absurd level of telekinesis. She threw her entire USM ship across space and into Vriska with only minimal help from the engines, relying almost entirely on her green psychic power. “No. You. Don’t!”

Yes I do. Vriska bounced off the bulky USM ship like a springboard, once again pointing at the construct with her sword. Just one lucky hit with all my power thrown into i-

Tornado was outside the ship without a spacesuit, using her power to keep a bubble of air around her, creating a spherical green aura. She screamed a scream only she could hear, tearing a piece of siding off her ship and dicing it into a hundred pieces with a handful of quick hand motions. The pieces sailed toward Vriska at high speed.

Fine then, I’ll take your luck! Virksa locked eyes with Tornado, draining the midget’s luck, using it to maintain her own levels while all the shards of metal missed her. Vriska threw her sword, a motion that would have hit Tornado in the chest had she not been surrounded in a psychic aura.

Tornado got smart just before her luck reached critical levels – she grabbed onto Vriska with her telekinesis.

“BITCH!” Tornado and Vriska shouted at the same time as they drew closer to each other.

Nova blinked. “…There’s something fitting about this.”

Pinkie gave her some popcorn.

“Oh, thanks!”

Vriska and Tornado passed each other. Vriska coughed up blue blood from a concussive blast that was clearly designed to kill her a hundred times over. A gash formed across Tornado’s chest, spilling blood into her sphere of air.

Vriska realized she had to act now if her luck was going to do anything. She distracted Tornado with a mental attack. Her mind was far too strong for any sort of actual control, but with her low luck levels it was easy to make her falter for a second.

Vriska threw her dice again, empowering them with her cobalt energy. Whatever attack they rolled would be truly absurd.

It was one of eight possible 8-8-8-8-8-8-8-7 rolls.

A twelve-pointed star shape composed of hardlight appeared above the dice. The cobalt energy infused itself within the star before blasting off after the construct, splitting into hundreds of smaller stars along the way.

“I’m going to call you Starslammer,” Vriska said, still coughing up blood.

“NOPE!” Tornado yelled, grabbing her ship in her telekinesis again, throwing it at the Starslammer attack in an attempt to divert it.

“…Did she just throw her own team at Vriska’s attack?” Flutterfree asked.

“Yep,” Jotaro answered.

“…How could she!?”

Tornado’s face paled a second later. “Oh, shit, Boring! Quazi!” She pulled back on her telekinesis to save her team, allowing Vriska’s attack to strike true. The attack would normally have done absolutely nothing to such a construct, but Vriska had known this.

This was why she needed to be absurdly lucky.

One of the many sections of the Starslammer hit in just the right place at just the right time, between two different gears. The entire construct churned to a stop, shaking. Popping. Rippling spacetime in ways it should not have been.

Nova slowed time down to a crawl. “Right, Pinkie, get us closer to Vriska, Tornado, and that ship. Take us out of here.”

Pinkie saluted. “Aye-aye.”

Nova teleported Vriska back to the Skiff, and sent Tornado back to her ship. Pinkie moved to activate the drive…

And then something appeared in the middle of stopped time. A humanoid creature that seemed composed completely of stars, with the only defining features being two white, jarring eyes and three prongs that pointed up from the forehead.

“MOTION CARRIED,” he declared with two different, deep voices. A ping of energy shot forth from the being’s body, reverting the gear construct’s appearance to what it had been before Vriska launched her attack. Nova’s time-slowing effect was also removed, as if it had never happened.

“What the-”

“Fuck me…” Vriska said, taking a step back even though she was in a single-room Skiff with nowhere to go. “…That’s a Class 1.”

The shock from that remark sent chills up everyone’s spines.

~~~

The leading magic expert in the Avengers was Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme.

“I’m trying to remember if you ever joined the Avengers in anything I read…” Corona said, thinking hard.

Strange shrugged. “It matters not – this universe is clearly not a direct analogue to the stories you fascinate yourself with. I am exceptionally curious about the relation between fiction and reality across universes, but that is a conversation for another time.”

“I’m not the girl to have it with either. There are others who understand ka a lot better than I do.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Strange said, using a spell to scan Corona’s horn. “Your magic seems to be a mixture of this world and others.”

“That’s just how universe travel works. Magic tends to adapt itself into whatever form exists in any given universe. The effects of magic tend to not change all that much, but the exact methods behind it alter continually.”

“The multiverse has a built in translation?”

“If you travel to a universe with too many dimensions it tries to make you occupy that many dimensions in most cases. That can be lethal.”

“I went to another universe, once,” Strange commented. “I introduced time where there was none.”

“How long were you in there?”

“Not counting the time loop? A few minutes.”

“Well, the time loop makes it confusing, but it may be that the universe didn’t have time to translate you properly. Or you had a pocket of your own physics around you. Or it was actually a universe designed to allow incursions… There’s a lot of what-ifs in the multiversal game, as I’m sure you’re gathering by this point.”

Strange nodded. “Indeed. I’m curious, what is the height of your magic?”

“I can move celestial objects,” Corona said. “Though that’s a special case. Uh… well, without Raging Sights I think I could blow up a city or something. With Raging Sights I’m really not sure what the upper limit is. I’m looking into tapping into universal ‘coding’ itself.”

“Powerful,” he said, scanning Corona’s gloves and gems.

“Hey, if you’re anything like what I’ve read about, you can do almost anything with the magic talents of yours.”

“There aren’t many limitations, no,” Strange admitted. “Superman is still Superman though.”

“I bet he’s only that strong because he has to be,” Corona said. “The hero with no limitations.”

“I wouldn’t say none.”

“I’m talking in a meta-sense,” Corona admitted. She looked up at all the dour, confused, and existential faces in the room. “Which I should probably stop.”

“Why stop now?!” Deadpool shouted. “You’re just telling them the truth~!”

“Shut up, blowhard,” Corona muttered. “You’re just happy you get to rub it in their faces.”

“I’m happy for a lot more than just that reason!” Deadpool chuckled. “But yeah, that’s a big one.”

Corona sighed. “Have what you need, Strange?”

Strange nodded. “I expect the next few years of my life will be filled with the study of otherworldly magic.”

“It’s an endless pool of knowledge,” Corona said with a knowing smile. “I have a PhD in the topic and it never ceases to surprise me.” She stood up and stretched her arms. “Now, excuse me, I need to go make an apology.”

Strange gestured that she was free to go. Corona walked across the room, past the watching eyes of several superheroes, and sat down next to Captain America. “Hey.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“...Being inconsiderate. Caught up in the moment. Telling you things you probably weren’t ready to know quite yet.” She rubbed the back of her head. “There’s a reason every higher civilization or traveler we found wouldn’t tell us what ka was until we found out for ourselves. It’s… jarring.”

Cap looked into the distance. “I’m still glad I know.”

“True. And you would have been told eventually, regardless. But there’s a lot better ways to break the news than to have a dumb fangirl get all excited and talk your ear off about how awesome you were and how she knows so many things about you.”

“Flash seems to like that.”

“Flash is carefree and doesn’t let much bother him,” Corona pointed out. “You and a lot of the others are going to think about this. Some of them are going to be able to just accept it and move on, others are just going to know it. Some like Strange aren’t all that surprised by it. But there are those like you – and I think Stark and Batman – who’re going to have a problem with it. I should have broken the news in a better way. Or had someone who knew what they were doing talk about it.”

Cap looked at her. “It’s a little refreshing to see someone own up to her mistakes so quickly.”

“You caught me on a good day. I can be really stubborn at times.”

Cap smiled. “I can tell you’re a good hero, Corona. Just by listening to you talk.”

Corona flushed. “Thanks!” Ohmygosh Captain America told me I was a good hero squeeeeee.

“And the fangirl returns,” Cap remarked, sitting back in his chair.

“It’s hard to keep under wraps!” Corona blurted.

“Get to know us for real, as people,” Cap said. “It’ll go away.”

“…I plan on it.”

“Good,” a deep, gruff voice said. Batman sat down at the table. “Because you’re going to tell me everything you know about me.”

“Uh… Does Cap know your secret identity?”

“No,” Batman said.

“Yes,” Cap said.

Batman blinked. “…I need to be more cautious.”

“You’re just paranoid,” Cap said, shrugging. “I’ll leave you two to it though.”

“Good,” Batman said. “Now tell me everything.”

“…Why do you speak with such a deep, gruff voice anyway?” Corona asked.

“What?”

“Is it just ‘because I’m Batman’?”

Batman stared at her.

“Sorry, sorry, dumb Internet meme joke, forget I said that.” She laughed nervously. “Your name is Bru-”

“HI!” Deadpool shouted, startling Corona. “Are we going to be spilling secrets? Because I can tell you about that one time I-”

Batman punched Deadpool in the face, knocking him to the ground.

“Ow…”

Corona chuckled. “You know you keep asking for that, Deadpool.”

“It’s worth it to be the comedic relief!”

“You’re just saying that to make yourself feel better.”

Deadpool stood up, grunting. “I’ll have you know that I always feel absolutely awes-”

Batman punched him again.

“AUGH MY RIBS!”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Regeneration really has drawbacks sometimes…” Deadpool muttered.

~~~

“Okay, I know we’ve got rumors and cursory information about all seven of the Class 1s,” Nova said. “But right now I can’t remember any of that! What is this guy!?”

Vriska ground her teeth. “Celestialsapien. Every single member of their species can naturally shape universes with a thought.”

Everyone stared at the Celestialsapien, waiting to see what he’d do.

He just stood there, motionless, looking at the motion of the construct.

“…Why isn’t he doing anything?” Flutterfree asked.

“Don’t look at me!” Vriska blurted. “I only know about Horrorterrors in detail, the Doctor avoided Class 1s!”

“We have time to look at our database if he continues to do nothing…” Nova said, pulling up what she could on her screen. “Yeah, a pathetically small amount of confirmed information. I can confirm what Vriska just told you. The most common rumor is that they’re a race of thinkers and debaters. Nothing else is concrete.”

“…Tornado’s trying to hail him,” Jotaro said, pointing at a reading on one of the consoles. “He’s not responding.”

Pinkie called Tornado. “We might want to back off here! That’s a Class 1 Celestialsapien. I say we pack it up and call it a day!”

“PACK IT UP!?” Tornado blurted, still standing despite having not received treatment for the wound to her chest. “I’m not going to let some muscled star-dude tell me what to do!”

“He just undid everything I did without lifting a finger,” Vriska pointed out. “Do you think that’s smart?”

“No,” Boring answered.

“Shut up,” Tornado blurted. “The… Celestialsapien is motionless right now. He’s probably charging up his power before his next action.”

Nova blinked. “…That’s a thought.”

“So enough chit-chat, we’re going to use the construct to remove him.”

“You already figured out how to use it!?” Vriska blurted.

“Of course we did.”

“No we didn’t,” Boring said. “We found a button that can direct it somewhere.”

“Good enough for me. Direct it at the Celestialsapien and let’s call it a day.”

“…We’re going to be leaving now,” Pinkie said. “Good luck.”

“She doesn’t have any,” Vriska pointed out. “But yeah, leaving, leaving is good.”

Pinkie pressed a button – and nothing happened.

“Uh… Looks like we can’t leave.”

Boring glanced to something offscreen and back to Tornado. “We can’t either.”

“All the more reason to take action! Activate the construct!” Tornado decreed.

“This is a horrible idea,” Nova deadpanned.

“Do you have a better one?”

“Wait and try to talk to him?”

“…Nah, he’ll squash us like bugs.” She pressed a button, sending a magic bolt from their ship to the construct. The gears went in reverse, sending a beam of energy to the Celestialsapien.

He caught it.

And then the entire universe started to fall apart at the seams, strands of reality shaking apart like old, dry cloth.

“MOTION CARRIED!”

The entire universe reset itself before anyone could realize they were about to stop existing.

“Fuck…” Vriska said.

“…How in…” Tornado said, mouth agape.

“YOU HAVE FORCED OUR HAND, TORNADO OF THE UNITED STATES OF THE MULTIVERSE,” he said. “WE WOULD HAVE PREFERED TO DELIBERATE FURTHER ABOUT WHAT TO DO WITH YOU, BUT YOU HAVE SHOWN YOUR IMPATIENCE. AS PUNISHMENT FOR YOUR IMPATIENCE YOU AND YOUR CREW ARE TO SPEND A MILLENNIUM TRAPPED IN YOUR OWN MINDS.”

“Wait hold on can’t we ta-”

“MOTION CARRIED.”

Tornado’s expression changed instantly. Her eyes fogged over, and she slumped to the ground. She let out a grunt of pain as she hit the ground, purely by reflex. She was barely able to move her hands.

“…She’s just spent a thousand years inside her own mind in one instant…” Nova said, horrified.

“YOU ARE NOW TO BE RETURNED TO THE USM WHERE YOU WILL TELL YOUR GOVERNMENT NEVER TO ENTER THIS UNIVERSE AGAIN. MOTION CARRIED.”

Their ship vanished.

“PINKIE PIE OF MERODI UNIVERSALIS.”

“Y-yes?”

“AS PUNISHMENT FOR ATTEMPTING TO DESTROY A LOST CELESTIALSAPIEN ARTIFACT, YOU ARE TO TURN AN ARTIFACT OF EQUAL VALUE OVER TO US. WE SELECT ONE OF YOUR NEXUS UNIVERSES, THE ONE THAT HOLDS THE GRINDER POWERED BY A GREEN DIAMOND ENERGY SOURCE.”

“W-wait! We aren’t impatient! We’ll let you think about it!” Pinkie said.

“YOU WISHED TO LEAVE. YOU ARE JUST LIKE THEM. APPEAL DENIED.”

“Can we at least remove the Grinder first?”

“MOTION DENIED. YOU WOULD NOT SUFFER ANY REAL LOSS IF YOU KEPT THAT PIECE OF YOUR HISTORY. YOU ARE TO RETURN TO MERODI UNIVERSALIS AND TELL THEM WHY THAT UNIVERSE VANISHED. ALL CITIZENS WITHIN THAT UNIVERSE AT THIS TIME WILL BE TRANSFERRED TO EQUIS VITIS. BE GLAD WE ARE NOT TAKING YOUR OTHER DIAMOND IN YOUR HUB.”

“Won’t you listen for one m-”

“MOTION CARRIED.”

The Skiff was back in the crystal hall of Friendship Castle.

Renee looked at them. “…You look like you’ve been through a lot.”

“A Class 1 civilization just stole one of our universes,” Flutterfree said.

Renee blinked. “Oh. …I can’t say I know what to feel about that right now, give me a moment.”

“That happened way too fast,” Nova said, shaking her head. “I thought they were thinkers!?”

“Tornado angered him badly,” Pinkie said, sighing. “…At least now we have something to hold against the USM. That’ll be useful for Eve. I think.”

“But we lost one of our first grinders!” Flutterfree said. “I… I know we have more, and that nobody was hurt, but…”

“Would you rather have spent an eternity in your own head?” Vriska asked.

“…No.”

“Thought not.”

Renee took in a deep breath. “Well, I would say go take a break, but it sounds like this one needs to be dealt with now. To my office, live report.”

Pinkie nodded. “Right away.”

~~~

Lady Rarity tapped Corona on the shoulder. “Our time is up.”

“Right… Back to crystal castle…” Corona said. “Sorry Flash, we’re going to have to call our game.”

Flash tossed his cards to the ground. “Eh, I was losing anyway.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.” Corona stood up. “You got relations established?”

Lady Rarity nodded. “They’re very interested. More prepared for the multiverse than most, since they keep having incursions of a similar sort. They’re all very interested in methods on how to protect from outside threats.”

“I’m glad,” Corona said. “Meanwhile I gave a lot of people an existential crisis.” She looked around. “I apologized to most of them while you were gone. They aren’t mad at me, but… Some of them don’t look too hot. Captain America will be watching them closely.”

“That’s the best we can do, sometimes,” Lady Rarity said. “This isn’t our world, and as much as you may think you do, you don’t really know these people. Let them deal with their own problems, they know each other best.”

Corona nodded. “We are coming back though. I’ve already promised I’d go with Flash on an adventure or two later.”

“Of course,” Lady Rarity said, smiling warmly. “You enjoy this place and the people here. I wouldn’t dream of taking that away from you.”

Corona stretched her arms. “Well… Ready to go home?”

Deadpool appeared behind her. “You bet I am!”

“Deadpool…”

“You can’t deny me passage to Equis Vitis, it’s open to the public,” Deadpool pointed out. “I. Want. To. Go.”

Corona rolled her eyes.

“Hey, at least you’re taking him off our hands,” the Flash pointed out. “You’ll be a hero.”

“Be a hero… Don’t deal with Deadpool… Hrm, that’s a tossup.” Corona chuckled. “See ya, Flash.”

“Olivia! Lieshy! We’re leaving!” Lady Rarity called.

The two looked up from their conversation with Wonder Woman. “Oh, wow, it is that time,” Olivia said, looking at her watch. “Sorry amiga, we’ll have to continue this another time.”

Wonder Woman simply nodded and waved goodbye.

“…What were you talking about?” Lady Rarity asked.

“Men,” Lieshy said.

“…And?”

“That’s all you get to know.”

Corona shrugged. “Fine by me.” She activated her magic, starting up the portal spell. “See you all later!”

A few of them waved goodbye. The team stepped through the portal, arriving once again in the castle of Equis Vitis.

Lady Rarity caught Renee passing through the area with the Primary team, having just left Renee’s main office. “We need to send a Relations representative to the Earth we just visited.”

“Consider it done the moment you give me a report,” Renee said. “A-”

“CHIMICHANGA.” Deadpool said, glaring at Pinkie.

“CHERRYCHANGA!” Pinkie shouted back, standing on her hind hooves.

“CHIMICHERRY!”

“CHERRYCHERRY!”

“CHIMICHERRYCHANGA!”

“CHIMMININNYCHERRIDDYCHANGADDITYCHANGA!”

“CHERRYCHIMICHANGACHERRYBEATPIECHANGA!”

“Mine took up more space on the page,” Pinkie said.

“Mine had unrelated words in it!”

“Best friends?”

“Best friends!”

Pinkie leaped onto Deadpool’s back and the two ran out of the hall.

Corona was the only one laughing. “Oh, that was… That was beautiful.”

“I’m terrified of what just happened,” Nova said. “Quaking in my boots as it were.”

“Oh hey, Nova!” Corona smiled. “How was your first day back?”

“We met a Class 1. Lost a universe to it. So as earthshattering as usual.”

Corona blinked. “…Ouch.”

“Yeah. Ouch.”

“Yet another reminder that we’re still just minnows in an ocean,” Renee commented. “Just when we get comfortable enough to think we have things together, a proverbial anvil drops on our heads.”

“Good one,” Lieshy said.

“Thank you.”

“Dears, we have a report to write,” Lady Rarity reminded them.

“And I have a kid to get back to,” Nova said. “Stars, I hope Sunburst didn’t burn the house down…”

“He didn’t,” Renee said. “…I may or may not have checked up on him several times today. He did fine.”

“Good,” Nova said, letting out a sigh of relief. “…I still want to go home.”

“Go,” Jotaro said.

She obliged, teleporting away.

“…Is she doing okay?” Corona asked.

“Better than okay,” Flutterfree said. “She’s very uncertain about herself… But I see her sit there and suddenly break out into a huge smile for seemingly no reason. I think she’s happier than before.”

Corona smiled. “Good. …I was more than a little worried for them.”

“Everyone was,” Flutterfree said. “There were a lot of talks, sleepless nights, and in my case prayers. But I think we’re out of the woods.”

“Out of the frying pan of interpersonal melodrama, into the fire of ticking off universe rewriters,” Vriska commented.

“The rollercoaster that is our lives,” Renee added.

They all had a good laugh at this.

They may have been scared, uncertain, and confused about their place in things… but in the end, it was still part of their lives, and they would keep on living them regardless.

Making the most of it.

Author's Note

Prepare yourselves - the next chapter awaits with a Movie Length Phenomenon™! The Games will begin soon...

-GM, master of food.

090 - The Twelve, Part 1

“So this is where Lord English ended up,” Spades said. He had decided to follow Eve, myself, Flutterfree, and Renee back to the House Juju instead of staying with his citizens. The victory platform moved along behind us, tethered to Eve with her magic.

“Yep,” I confirmed. “He’s stuck in there. His own Juju used against him in the final moments, trapping him when he was vulnerable.”

Spades took a moment to spit on the ground in the direction of the House Juju before asking a question. “How, exactly?”

I blinked. “Uh…”

Eve stared at me. “Do you actually not know?”

I rubbed the back of my head. “Ah… No. No I don’t. I have no idea how it worked. All I know is that it did. We’d have to ask Hussie about that.”

“Well, he is tied up right here,” Renee said, pointing at the bound and gagged human ghost curled into a fetal position.

Spades leaned down and removed Hussie’s gag. “Hey.”

“Hey Spades! I told you you’d survive!”

“You didn’t,” Spades observed. “So, you’re not just a psycho, you’re actually responsible for this whole mess?”

“That’s a matter of definition and nuance, my friend!”

Spades smirked. “I’d give you a beatin’ for what happened, but it looks like the ghosts already did that for me. I’m just curious, how did it feel to have your own creation fill you with lead?”

“Metallic.”

Spades scowled. “Still a smartass.”

“Can you tell us what happened to Lord English?” Eve asked.

“I would like to at least be able to move my hands before I spill any super-secret spoiler beans, got it?”

Eve undid the bounds on his arms. “Good, now wh-”

He snapped his fingers. …Or, well, he snopped his fingers, turning all of us into flat, low quality images of ourselves, similar to how a Flat existed. He laughed, clapping his hands and blowing us all over. “Andrew Hussie strikes again! You will never get your answers about the ending of Homestuck! NEVER! SCREW YOU, G. M. BLACKJACK!” Laughing maniacally, he took off into the distance. He tripped a few times, but he got out of sight before the ‘Flat’ status effect wore off.

“…What just happened?” Flutterfree asked.

“That man also created a world called Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff,” I told her. “Think about the Flat’s world, and then make it worse.”

“I guess we know what a Prophet who really knows how to use his powers can do, now,” Renee muttered, adjusting her hat. “No offense darling, you just play your cards close to your chest.”

I smiled warmly. “I serve the role of mysterious benefactor. He is… Uh…” I pursed my lips. “Let’s not go there.”

“Fine by me,” Spades said, looking up at the victory platform. “So what now?”

“We let Corona have a look,” Eve said. “Any minute now, right?”

I nodded. “Right now, actually. ”

Corona, O’Neill, Pinkie, and Rainbow stepped out of a dimensional portal onto the victory platform. John zapped into existence with Allure, Jotaro, Applejack, Nova, and Jade.

“Uh…” Rainbow said. “Why’s everyone here all of the sudden?”

John shrugged. “I just go where they tell me.”

Eve teleported herself to Corona. “Just take the information out of my mind, let’s do this quickly.”

Corona blinked. “Sure.” She dissipated a glove and touched Eve’s forehead. They exchanged information mentally for a couple seconds before breaking the connection.

Corona grinned. “Oh, this is good…” She looked down at everyone. “I have an idea, but I’ll need to work on the victory platform for a bit. But this will really help us if my hunch is right.”

“Glad to be of assistance, ma’am,” Spades muttered. Flutterfree wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not.

Corona set to work – having Raging Sights surround the entire platform in magical circles. She repaired all the damage done to it in an instant, using a holographic representation of the interior to serve as her primary source of investigation. She became completely invested in the machinations within the victory platform and the dark house.

It took her all of ten minutes to shout “I’VE GOT IT!” She jumped off the platform. “I might have figured it out. I just have one question to make sure – what is the purpose of Sburb?”

Eve’s eye flashed orange for a moment. “The purpose is to create a new universe. Specifically one based in the adventure the players had on the way to creating it, creating a mythology for the new universe, and possibly even gods to guide them.”

Corona pondered this, mulling it over. “Yep, yep, that’s what I was hoping for.” She pointed at the victory platform. “Using the spells I know to manipulate the fabric of existence and this thing’s internal machinations, I think I can create a universe with it.”

“While that’s awesome, how does that help us?” Rainbow asked.

“The Tumor, when it exploded, created twelve new players,” Corona said. “With the right criteria and resources, I think I can win this ‘game’ we’ve been shoved into.” She turned to look at the glow of the Green Sun. “And in the process I might just be able to resolve this conflict…”

“Will we need all twelve of us?” Eve asked.

“Yes,” I said, glancing at those in John’s group. Nova waved, clearly still confused as to what was actually happening.

Corona nodded. “Whatever you say, knower of everything. Hey, mind telling me if this works?”

“Sorry, that’d ruin tension for the readers,” I said with a smirk. “I can tell you we don’t all die at the end of the day, but that’s about it.”

“That’s nice to know,” Flutterfree said.

“She had a qualifier in there,” Spades said. “Not all of you.”

“Yare yare daze,” Jotaro muttered.

“Think you can explain the plan… simply?” Allure asked.

Corona nodded and pointed up at the victory platform. “This is a victory platform from a mostly dead session.” She brought it down so everyone could see the disc and the now red house that dominated it. “I think I’ve reset it back to before it was used - might need a bit more tweaking, to be sure. But we now have a device that can, under the right conditions, create a new universe.”

“…Cool,” Nova said. “How does that help us?”

“It doesn’t initially. First off, we don’t have a full game of Sburb to shunt resources into Skaia. Secondly, any universe created by Sburb would just be part of the Green Sun’s dominion and not help us at all. Which is where we come in.” She stood tall on the platform. “There are twelve of us who were blown up by the Tumor and reborn as Sburb players.”

“Huh,” Applejack said. “Neat.”

“The twelve of us have inside us the Aspects of a partial, glitched game of Sburb,” Corona explained. “We were given these Aspects with the intention of winning Sburb. I was able to set the platform to recognize our essences in order to create a new universe defined by us. Which would be completely useless, even if we had the resources. But! BUT!”

“Just get on with it,” Spades muttered.

Corona smirked. “We don’t have a Skaia to grow a new universe in, or any energy to put into it.” She pointed at the Green Sun. “Luckily, there is a power source with the mass of two universes within it. With my reality magics, I have altered this entire Sburb setup to forego the game entirely and just shape a brand new universe directly out of the Green Sun.”

Jade blinked. “No frogs?”

“Uh, actually, there is a frog we need,” Pinkie said. “But since I’m the Space player I can just pull it out of my mane.”

“…What?” Nova said, confused.

“Dispelling a question we know people are going to ask,” I said. “Not important.”

Corona grinned, hand still outstretched to the Green Sun. “Since we are using the Green Sun to create our new universe, it will collapse in the process. It will be destroyed as we walk through the door to the new universe.”

“What about the ghosts? They’ll die!” Jade said, aghast.

“Not if we take you through with us,” Corona said, rubbing her hands together. “Jade, you and your ghost have the ability to shrink entire planets and put them in your pockets, right?”

Jade nodded. “Yes.”

“Given enough time, could you shrink the entire Dream Bubble like that?”

“I think so. It’s really big though…”

“John can help if needed with the ‘retcon’, from what I hear,” Corona said. “So, after the Dream Bubble – and any other worlds you want to take with us you can think of…” She glanced at Vriska. “…are shrunk down, we will take a portal directly to the ghost army. They haven’t moved, right?”

“No progress at all,” Feferi reported.

“Good. Then, John, we’ll need you to retcon-teleport us right to the Green Sun, passing through all dimensional boundaries with your power. Do you think you can do that?”

John looked at his hands. Then he looked up at Corona with a determined expression.

“Yes. I can.”

“We’re gonna get attacked by star-machines and squiddles,” Spades pointed out. “Think we can really get through?”

“Yes,” Eve said, eye glowing once again. “Yes, I am certain of it. It can be done.”

“Great!” Corona threw her hands and wings wide. “Then let’s go win this game everybody! Us twelve, on the platform. Rest of you, surround it. This is gonna be a bumpy ride…”

~~~

Dave and Karkat were staring out a window.

“Why am I staring out of the window, Dave?” Karkat asked.

“Because I told you to.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I told you to.”

Karkat twitched. “Is there no end to your repeated responses?”

“No.”

Karkat twitched. “Well slap me like a fish and drive my bone bulge up a wall. I-”

“Okay.”

“DAVE! IF YOU ACTUALLY DO ANY OF THOSE THINGS I WILL FIND YOUR FRIDGE, SHIT IN IT, AND BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN WITH AN ARMY OF FUCKING HAWK WASPS!”

“Sweet. That’d be kinda cool actually.”

Karkat twitched. “Oh, I’m not done! You asked for it, Strider! I’m going to have to get CREATIVE.”

“The problem is the more creative your revenge is the more entertaining it’ll be to watch.”

“How bout I drive your bone bulge up a wall and slap you with a fish?”

“Boring.”

“AND THEN WHAT IF EVERYTHING GOES SHITHIVE MAGGO-”

The planet rumbled. Karkat turned back out the window and saw what he was supposed to be looking at.

Jade was out there, the size of a city, and getting larger. …Or the planet was getting smaller. It was hard to tell with her and her freaky space powers. Even without the power of the Green Sun, as the Witch of Space the size of objects were basically suggestions to her.

“Huh. Thought she was going to not involve us?”

“She’s not,” Dave said. With the other hand, Jade grabbed the moon. It had a few bases on it, they wouldn’t want to lose it and everyone on it.

“All right, where are we going?” Karkat muttered.

“See, that’s the fun part. I actually have no idea. Because different time. Do you have any idea how much I flipped when Vriska showed up?”

“…No?”

“I flipped my shit because my carefully crafted timeline was thrown out the window for something new.” Dave shrugged. “Now I was careful, so we didn’t end up with any dead Daves because of this, but man, I was looking forward to that starship.”

“We got a starship!?”

“Duh. …Not in your lifetime though.”

“…Oh.”

Dave let out a breath. “It’s good you get to stick around, Karkat. The world wouldn’t be the same without your endless stream of explosive rage.”

“How unusually sentimental of you.”

Dave shrugged. “Sometimes, you gotta think of me like Vriska there. You all only experienced a number of years you could count. Meanwhile she’s off fucking around for over nine hundred. Sometimes I vanish into the future or past for a long while, and the shifting of all that…”

“Ah. Are you saying you’ve changed?”

Dave didn’t have a response to this. Jade had gathered the Earth and the moon in her hands, and used the power of the Green Sun to switch universes.

“You know, it would have been handy if she knew how to do that before,” Karkat muttered.

“She just needed to figure it out,” Dave said. “Hey, at least it’s not using the fenestrated walls for a years-long journey.”

Jade grabbed hold of the Land of Pyramids and Neon – even though it was abandoned, it might hold something for them. She placed it near the Moon and the Earth at the same relative size, the three objects seemingly orbiting each other around a singular point.

“Ugh, I’m starting to feel sick looking at this,” Karkat muttered.

“I bet the world governments are flipping their shit.”

“Kanaya will issue a statement or something. Or someone else. Hell, might even be John for fuckall we know.”

“That’s not a word.”

Karkat twitched. “There’s gonna be a…”

Jade shifted universes again, letting the now marble-sized Earth see the House Juju and everyone around it as truly immense.

Jade said something to someone else, but it was impossible to hear properly given the tremendous size difference. It was the same with the response.

“You know I’d like it if she told us what she was doing ahead of time,” Karkat muttered.

“Rose probably knows. Go ask her.”

“Fuck no.”

“Then exist in a state of eternal mystery.”

Karkat could see Jade talking to her ghost counterpart, though only for a short while. They soon nodded to each other, the ‘Omega’ Jade teleporting away.

Jade pulsed with the powers of the Green Sun. She handed the Earth, Moon, and Lopan to a pink pony, who seemed perfectly able to keep the three planetary bodies from crashing into each other. Jade then spread her arms wide, creating a wide ring of green energy that shot across existence, further than Karkat could see in either direction.

The House Juju – and the entire Dream Bubble – began to shrink under Jade’s power. The mystical combination of every Sburb player’s dreams and deaths the size of a universe compressed further and further, until Karkat was able to see it had a curvature. It was vaguely pink around the edges, and the interior was a mish-mash of so many different sceneries and worlds that it was impossible to make out any single one.

Karkat could see that the energy of the Green Sun formed a ring around the Dream Bubble, the other side of the ring occupied by Omega Jade. It took several minutes to reduce the universal construct to the size of a marble, but they did, and Jade put it alongside the other three.

Karkat tried to make out features now that the Dream Bubble was closer, but it was still the same impossible mismatch.

“I’m going to go see if any of the fast food places are still open in this crisis,” Dave said. “Coming?”

“…Sure,” Karkat said, tearing his gaze away from the window. It wasn’t like there was any point to his continued investment in this. Might as well enjoy a nice meal while everything went down.

As they walked around outside, Karkat saw the victory platform everyone was standing on. “…Ugh… Here we go again…”

He was going to need more than one hamburger.

~~~

“I won’t be able to turn the Dream Bubble back to normal once the Green Sun is gone,” Jade told Corona. “You’ll be able to, right?”

“If we can’t, we know people who can,” Corona promised. “I can’t imagine the Collection refusing to return what are essentially war refugees back to their original size, even if we are involved. If not that, Empress Twilight of the Void has the resources to do it.”

“Good to know we have options,” Jade said. She looked around. The Twelve new players (minus Corona) were standing on the platform. Floating around it were herself, Omega Jade, Meenah, Feferi, Spades, Vriska, and John.

“So… where did you find this thing?” Vriska asked, looking at the victory platform.

“The Omega Timeline,” I answered from my place on the platform.

John blinked. “Wait, the world where everything went wrong? Didn’t I change that so it didn’t exist anymore?”

Spades shook his head. “Nope. You left a copy of yourself behind when you did the zappy thing with your planet and took off with the ditzy broad. Other you gave himself to scrape out somethin’ for us. …Good to see you actually managed to do somethin’ out here.”

“Uh… thanks? …Whoever you are.”

“Slick. Spades Slick.”

“Uh huh…” He blinked, turning to the Jade ghost. “Oh, geez, you’re Omega Jade. I’m sorry, I couldn’t save you and… stuff.”

“It’s okay. I had gone pretty evil-mind-control,” Omega Jade said. “Grimbark, if you will. It’s good that you went back and changed everything. Don’t question that, it let everyone have a good ending. The rest of us here just get to enjoy the afterlife and… well, whatever comes after this war over the Green Sun.”

Allure looked up at them. “How much stuff happened to you guys!?”

“All the stuff,” Vriska said. “All of it.”

“Geez. It sounds like you went through more in a couple years than we’ve done in a couple decades. Good grief.”

“Yare yare daze,” Jotaro concurred.

“Now you’re beginning to see the clusterfuck that is Homestuck,” Vriska said. “It’s even more confusing to read it than to be part of it. At least when you’re part of it you have your own internal timeline to base yourself off of. Readers don’t get that much luck. You jump around like a ping-pong ball on a trampoline with extra high gravity.”

“Fun,” Allure said, smiling weakly.

Corona flew down to the platform. “Right, so, we need to stand in certain spots for this ‘trick’ spell to work. I’ll label them with our Aspect symbols.” Under herself she created the symbol of Doom, a black spiked circle, almost skull-like with circular holes in it. On the opposite side of the disc, she created the vibrant green, leafy symbol of Life. “And… uh, who’s Life?”

I would have answered, but I decided to let Eve try out her new box of tricks. She turned on her eye of knowledge. “That would be… Applejack!”

“Really?” Applejack blinked. “Ah never figured out what my power was… Never even got an inklin’.”

“That’s because you’re a Mage of Life,” I explained. “Mages tend to only have a deep understanding of their aspect. They aren’t powerless, but their abilities tend not to manifest as strongly as others.”

“Oh. Well, Ah’m not complainin’. Does everyone else know what they are?”

Allure raised a hoof. “I don’t.”

“Only Aspect left is Heart,” Corona said. “I forget the first part. They’re less memorable.”

“Knight of Heart,” I continued. “One who fights with the soul. Allure, to you, the spirits and inner nature of people are yours to use. Not limitlessly, like a Witch, but with more precision.”

“…I don’t understand,” Allure admitted. “Should we, maybe, take a moment to figure these new abilities out?”

“Probably not,” Corona said. “They’re… not that powerful compared to the ghosts.”

Vriska nodded. “None of you are god-tier, and I don’t have a way to make you god-tier since this isn’t a normal session. So all of your powers are locked up within you, manifesting only in minor ways, if at all. As the Heir of Blood, at god-tier Jotaro should be able to completely inherit any connection to his ancestors and lost friends, possibly even talk to them and use their spirits as strength, maybe even become some sort of literal representation of ‘connection’. As it is, he just got some extra Stands. A nice bonus, yes, but not much.”

“Then there’s people like me and Nova,” I said. “Whose titles essentially mean nothing. Any powers I would have gained from being a Seer of Void, I already have. Nova’s time magic could accomplish everything a Prince of Time could, though she may find that she can erase time without using magic at all now.”

“If all of our powers were supposed to be weak, how come I’m able to fully use my Rogue of Doom powers?” Corona asked.

“You already know how to deal with extreme power of a complicated sort,” I explained. “And no, you’re not using it fully, you’re just using it specifically. A fully realized god-tier Rogue of Doom could bring entire civilizations to ruin. Luckily for us our realized Doom ghosts are the Heir and Mage, who are some of the less… outwardly destructive Doom types.”

“A Bard of Doom would be terrifying…” Jade commented.

Pinkie shivered. “Yeah…”

Corona generated the Aspect symbols around the circle in pairs. The white swirl of Space opposing the red gear of Time. The sun of Light against the loose lines of Void. The teal tri-tipped circle of Mind against the Pink heart of… well, Heart. The angry purple lines of Rage against the smooth wings of Hope. The free blue gusts of Breath against the deep red wound of Blood.

Everyone stood on their respective Aspects. The red house flashed, changing colors to purple. The number of squares beneath the roof changed form four to twelve, creating a ‘+’ pattern out of the sections.

“It recognized us,” Corona said. “Good. It thinks we’re ready to begin ‘ultimate alchemy’ and create a new universe. It’s prepared to connect.”

“Let’s turn the Green Sun into a universe,” Meenah said, grinning maniacally.

Corona pointed at Spades. “Hey, look, you could die if you come out here. You’re not a ghost, nor are you one of the Twelve. Jade could put you on one of the pl-”

“I’m comin’ and you can’t stop me,” Spades said. “That big ball of overblown green fluff is what gave Lord English his power, right?”

“A lot of it, but not all,” Vriska elaborated.

“Then I’m gonna take it out.”

“Fair enough,” Vriska said, shrugging. “Corona?”

“John, prepare yourself,” Corona said. “We need you to zap the entire ghost army directly to the Green Sun. Think you can do that?”

“If they’re all touching, yeah,” John said.

“…Some of the ghosts have been thrown away and lost…” Feferi said.

“They’ll just have to be sacrificed,” Meenah said. “No war comes without casualties.”

“They didn’t know that when they signed up, though.”

“You wanna go fishin’ through Paradox Space for eons to find ‘em?”

Feferi shook her head. “No. This is what we need to do. I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that we would lose some.”

Eve nodded. “It’s… not fine, but we have to do it. It’s a war over… well, our very lives and freedom. Does everyone understand?”

There were a series of somber nods.

“Let’s go then. Corona, do you want to do it or should I?”

Corona forced a smile. “Let’s get some use out of Seraphim, shall we?”

Eve nodded. She summoned Seraphim; tapping into the dimensional coordinates Corona had given her. A portal opened right to the chaos of the ghost army. Jade increased its size with her Space powers while Omega Jade pushed them all through quickly. It closed behind them.

“Just as chaotic as I remember,” O’Neill said, observing the colorful robes of ghosts move in squads, pushing against the same Combine Gyroscope and Noble Horrorterror they had been pushing against when they’d left.

“Holy Celestia…” Renee said, hoof to her mouth. “Is this… What a multiversal war looks like?”

“Nope,” I said. “This is what you get when there’s one multiversal construct creating a lot of weird conditions. A true multiversal war between powers of this magnitude would have already destroyed every universe in this Paradox Space and then some. What we have here is a limited conflict.”

Allure gulped. “I hope we never see a full war…”

“You will,” I said. “But not between powers of this caliber. Class 1s avoid war at all costs because the consequences of going all-out against each other are beyond dire.”

A Mind player floated over to them. “We’re at a standstill. The bastards are able to send just enough power to keep us immobile, even if they can’t spend enough to utterly defeat us. I hope you have a plan.”

“Indeed I do,” Meenah said with a smirk. “John, start doing the zappy thing,” She grabbed a couple of Mind players from nearby. “You two. Broadcast what I’m about to say.”

The god-tier trolls nodded

“LISTEN UP!” Meenah shoutd. “EVERYONE NEEDS TO FALL BACK TO THE VICTORY PLATFORM I’M NEXT TO! WE NEED TO ALL BE TOUCHING! DON’T QUESTION, JUST DO.”

John took his position in the middle of the Twelve. He looked to the Green Sun in the distance – and focused his retcon power. Soon, him, the Twelve, and the entire victory platform were glowing a bright white.

Vriska touched the platform from the edge first, glowing white as well. Jade, Meenah, Feferi, Spades, and the others all followed suit, becoming one with the whiteness.

The ghost army left their engagements and began to pile on, the Time and Breath players lagging behind so they could free any ghosts that were still imprisoned.

The Horrorterrors and Combine realized what was happening. The Horrorterrors knew what John was, and the Combine’s scanners were detecting power akin to the Dark Tower itself.

The Horrorterrors and Combine dropped all fighting for a moment to shoot everything they had at the zapping white conglomeration.

“Fuck,” a Dave said, trying to accelerate time for everyone. He discovered that his acceleration didn’t slow the incoming attacks down at all. “BAIL!” he shouted. “EVERYONE BAIL! LEAVE THE REST!”

A few relative ‘past’ time selves jumped to defend against the attacks, prepared to jump into the different times to get to the white glow. But their timestreams were interrupted the moment the attacks hit, Paradox Space splitting their timelines into shreds.

The Breath and Time players that could make it to the zapping bundle of ghosts did.

Then a Horrorterror’s screech attack mixed with a Combine’s supernova ejection, hitting the retcon ball with full force…

~~~

ZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAP

The whole of Paradox Space rippled with white cracks, straining even the resilient physics of the black realm around the Green Sun. The sudden existence of these cracks provided a point of reference in the bending, churning, multiversal soup, allowing a three-dimensional being to see where the various universes were connected through the spread and visual location of the damage to reality.

The cracks spread across the darkness, surrounding the Green Sun in a halo reminiscent of the damage Lord English had once done to the old Paradox Space, back during the first time the Green Sun had graced the multiverse with its presence.

Within the Dream Bubble, deep in the center of the interaction between John’s retcon powers and the weapons of high level societies, Andrew Hussie began to sweat.

He looked at the House Juju. Watched it ripple, shake, and tremble as reality itself crumbled.

Was it weakening from all this strain?

Could it deal with the excessive deviation from its original plan?

Hussie decided to hide behind a rock. He did not want to be seen if the House Juju failed. But he couldn’t keep himself from peering over the edge of the rock with his narrow, empty eyes.

The House Juju vibrated. Blue, orange, red, and black colors flashed across the faces of the Juju…

And then it stopped, returning to normal. It had compensated for the new variable.

“Never should have doubted it! Ha!” Hussie said, going on to do a jig. “Take that bizarre alterations to reality! The Huss had you beat!”

Then he realized everything else was still shaking.

“…Okay so maybe I’ve celebrated a little too soon,” Hussie commented to himself. “Just because the worst thing didn’t happen doesn’t mean the next worst thing won’t happen!” He took off at a run through the Dream Bubble. Even though every part of it was in the process of being zapped away.

Sorta.

As was presumably obvious, things had gone sideways.

~~~

Up close, the Green Sun looked like any other star with its billowing, fiery surface. It was certainly not fueled by any sort of nuclear reaction at its core, but the external result of the inner machinations had the same visual appearance.

Except it was brilliant green. Everything anywhere near it would be illuminated by an intense green light, drowning out most other colors in favor of the Green Sun’s singular shade.

The space immediately around the Green Sun was free of the cracks in reality. This allowed the Green Sun to have a sky of sorts, seen as a bunch of black plates in the sky separated by glowing white breaks in the nature of spacetime itself.

It was in this ‘calm’ area near the sun that the ghost army appeared…

…without John, the Twelve, or the victory platform.

“Okay, what the shell?” Meenah asked. “Where are they?”

“I have no idea,” Vriska said. “The people we could ask where they are just happen to be the people on the stupid thing!”

“Can you see anything?” Feferi asked the Jades. They shook their heads.

“Fuckin’ useless…” Meenah muttered.

“I hate to break up the confusion party,” Spades said. “but we’re about to have company.” He pointed with his golden scepter at the cracks in reality.

They could see the Combine ships moving toward them, unhindered. One would assume that meant the Horrorterrors were moving toward them as well, no longer concerned with keeping the Combine away from the Green Sun.

The ghost army was now the primary target. And their secret recton weapon wasn’t with them.

“New plan!” Vriska shouted. “Meenah, you wanted to control the Green Sun?”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Then let’s try that.”

Meenah grinned. “I don’t think I’ve ever liked a sinkin’ plan more than this. Right. Dog-girls!”

“Woof,” Omega Jade said, prompting a facepalm from the living Jade.

“You got the Sun powers. Use them. You’re right next to the Green Sun for once in your life. If that doesn’t give you a power boost I don’t know what will!”

The Jades nodded. They moved to opposite sides of the Green Sun. The green energy of the
Sun’s corona began to swirl around them, indicating they had tapped directly into the multiversal construct’s power to the envy of every Combine ship watching.

“Right!” Meenah shouted, using a Mind player to project her commands. “Ghost dog, you’re on defense. Living dog, try to figure a way for us to escape this mess. GHOST ARMY – keep everyfin away from the Green Sun. Don’t let a single eldritch tentacle scrape the green flames, and don’t let a single Combine ship plug a cable in here. Got it?”

“Got it!” Everyone shouted.

“TIME FOR ROUND TWO!” she shouted, holding her trident high. The ghosts spread out, forming a colorful and striped sphere around the Green Sun. Physically, it should have been impossible to surround something the mass of two universes that didn’t even really exist in a realspace sense, but the Jades were there, acting as the Green Sun’s Guardians, condensing the relative space so a proper shield could be created.

No longer was the Green Sun an inert object. For the first time in its existence, the Green Sun would be able to fight back.

Omega Jade took a breath – and started flinging off the Green Sun’s corona in every direction, creating a violet flurry of blades of green slicing through space. This gave the Horrorterrors and Combine some difficulty in navigating closer to the Green Sun, since now the valuable power they were fighting over was attacking them.

They were not deterred, however. The loss of a few eldritch abominations or Combine ships was nothing compared to the value of the Green Sun – the danger it posed, the possibilities it entailed.

“I’d really like to hear that you’ve got somefin for us!” Meenah shouted to Jade. “Because if they’re both attackin’ at once, no Green Sun is gonna keep them back for long!”

“Working on it!” Jade shouted back. “Do any of you Light players have the ability to bestow luck?”

Vriska shook her head. “Sorry. I steal luck, can’t give it. Rose over there sees knowledge and fortune, can’t actually do much with it. And Aranea can heal with luck, which would just bring you back to normal luck, as I understand it. Eve could probably have done it. A Witch of Light should be able to manipulate it in general. …But she wasn’t god-tier anyway.”

“Then you’ll need to be patient!” Jade shouted. “I’ve got control of the Green Sun, yes, but I don’t have any idea how it works. I’m having difficulty working it out.”

“Yeah, really needed a Witch of Light,” Vriska muttered. “Any other ideas? Mind players, got anything for her?”

She was met with silence.

Feferi put her hands to her face. “Oh no. I’m sensing the Horrorterrors closing in. They’re moving faster than the Combine, slightly. I don’t think the Combine have noticed…”

“BRACE YOURSELVES!” Meenah shouted. “They could come from anywhere!”

Anywhere turned out to be from everywhere at once.

“Gogdam Horrorterrors,” Meenah grunted.

The eldritch abominations lashed from all sides of the Green Sun. Omega Jade could not defend from every side at once, but she did her best to spread the energies of the Green Sun around in a defensive measure, preventing the Horrorterrors from pushing all the ghosts aside.

Vriska decided it was time. “Any god-tier Vriskas! Any of you! We’re surrounded by fleshy Horrorterrors! SUCK ‘EM DRY.”

Every Thief of Light focused on the Horrorterrors, draining them of luck. The Horrorterrors themselves were far too massive and impossible for just one of the ghosts to do anything, and even several only made the Horrorterrors make mistakes that allowed for players of Life and Hope to take them out.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was to absorb as much fortune as possible from the fleshy monsters. Now that the battle was focused, the Combine couldn’t interrupt what was going on. The Green Sun’s power gave them the time they needed to absorb the luck without losing it instantly.

Vriska held up her Fluorite Octet, and so did every other Vriska ghost, including Vrisko. “LET’S DO THIS LADIES!” They threw their dice, most of them managing to roll the straight 8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8. They gained their blue armor, and power comparable to that which Jade had been wielding outside the Green Sun’s glow.

They charged. Blue sparks of light taking out tentacles, beaks, eyes, and other impossible body parts.

Beings that made Majora look like a small, annoying dog were torn apart by an army of ghosts.

Unfortunately for the ghosts, Horrorterrors were ancient, intelligent creatures. They learned quickly – as they had from Lord English – not to underestimate that which they had created using the knowledge of the Tower. They wormed their way through the Green Sun’s ghostly defenses, bashing ghosts aside. Trapping some in bubbles, tossing others into the depths of Paradox Space. They moved in…

And then a human boy nobody had paid any attention to activated his power. “TALLY-HO!” he bellowed, tapping into his power – that of a Page of Hope. The white, pure light of hope wafted off him and went into every one of his allies, filling them with new inner power and drive. It was pure white power that made the Horrorterrors scream in agony, for it was the antithesis of what they were.

The ghost army pushed them back.

“Fuck yeah!” Vriska shouted, her blade glowing with the Hope of thousands of ghosts. She twisted it and cut a Horrorterror in half. “One hit…. HELL YEAH, JAKE! HELL YEAH! KEEP IT UP!”

“GADZOOKS!” Jake shouted, shooting more Hope into everyone.

The Horrorterrors fell further back, screeching in impossible agonies, the light of Hope and the Green Sun simply too much to deal with.

And then the Combine arrived.

Rather than fire on the Horrorterrors, they assisted. They pushed through the Hope – for powers of purity did not burn them like it did the eldritch abominations. Omega Jade fought back with the force of the Green Sun, discovering that while, yes, that worked, the resulting supernovas from the destruction of the ships proved to be rather disorienting to the ghost army.

“Keep it together!” Meenah shouted. “Bloods and Minds, get everyone organized! We can’t afford to fall apart now!”

“GREAT SCOTT!” Jake shouted, letting out another surge of Hope to improve everyone’s confidence. They fought as one again – holding the barrier to the Green Sun.

“JAAAADE!” Vriska shouted.

“I think I have something! Just need a bit more time!” Jade said. “The connections of the Green Sun all lace through this single, inner point…”

The Combine and Horrorterrors tried something desperate. They focused most of their efforts on one single point of the battle, leaving the rest of their forces weaker. They would be pushed back significantly from the Green Sun because of this, but they had to do one thing.

A Combine beam mixed with a Horrorterror’s screech, blasting through a wall of ghosts. This blast would do absolutely nothing to the Green Sun itself – utterly meaningless. There was no need to defend against it.

Except it was going for one of the few people in this fight who could still die.

One Jade Harley, who was trying fervently to find a way out of this mess. The beam hit her in the back – and she screamed. The power of the Green Sun shot behind her and vaporized the Horrorterror and Combine ship that had unleashed the attack.

It came too late. Her body went limp, lifeless.

There was no way that death wasn’t Heroic.

“JADE!” several people shouted – including Dead Dave, Vriska, and Omega Jade.

Vriska’s features fell. She realized quickly that they needed two dog-tier Jades to get out of here. One to use the Green Sun to defend, another to figure out how to use the Green Sun to end this.

That had just been taken from them.

All they could do now was fight and hope the Combine and Horrorterrors eventually ran out of things to throw at them.

…That wasn’t going to happen.

~~~

John admitted it to himself.

He had no idea what he was doing.

One minute everything was white and then everything shook and his head felt like it was about to explode.

Then he opened his eyes.

He was lying in the middle of the victory platform. The purple house was still there, and so were the Twelve new players. Some of them were looking at him in concern, while the rest were looking around them, mouths agape.

They were flying through something. Something white with the occasional flash of pale color just to remind them they were moving.

“Where the hell…?” O’Neill asked.

“No idea,” John said.

Eve turned her eye on, scanning for understanding. “I’ve got nothing. It’s just… white. Twilence?”

I stared at the whiteness around us, furrowing my brow. “I… think its meant to indicate ‘travel’ over a great relative ‘distance’.” I rubbed my head. “John’s retcon doesn’t play nice with my Awareness. I can tell you the other ghosts made it to the desired location fine. I can’t tell you what we’re doing.”

“What will happen?” Flutterfree asked.

“Survival?” I said, shrugging. “Honestly I predict some sort of spectacular mindscrew is about to show up and blow our minds.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said. He extended Hermit Purple and the Passion out, trying to gather any sort of inkling what was happening but the purple vines came up with nothing.

Flutterfree went next. She summoned Lolo in its entirety, feeling the whiteness around them. It revealed dozens of black, spirograph shapes swirling around them like they were the center of a gyroscope.

“What are the gates doing here?” John asked. “And why do your vines have them?”

“It’s just how Lolo appears,” Flutterfree said. Then she blinked. “Wait, they are related, aren’t they?”

“Lolo’s Revelation is a ka based power,” Allure pointed out. “It takes what’s ‘hidden’ and makes it real, even if it’s something a little esoteric, like a hidden destiny.”

“Does it represent ka?” Eve wondered. “The Spirograph?”

“Don’t look at me, I don’t know anything!” John said, holding up his hands.

“Then what good are ya?” Rainbow blurted.

“Rainbow!” Renee chided.

“…Sorry, that was uncalled for.”

Eve turned her eye on again, examining the spirograph patterns. “…Starbeat and Lieshy both mentioned they saw the spirograph prominently in the room at the top of the Dark Tower…”

Corona blinked. “And the Horrorterrors created Sburb with what they found in the Dark Tower. …Could it represent ka?”

I shook my head. “Not quite. The symbol for ka itself is a circle with a stylized ‘K’ and ‘A’ in it. Starbeat could tell you that. The spirograph represents the entire multiverse.”

John blinked. “Huh?”

“On a simpler level, the spirograph represents interconnectivity. Every single line in the spirograph points toward the center, and yet is also interconnected with each other. It represents how every universe has a connection with the Dark Tower, but how they also share connections with each other. It is a symbol that represents everything – universes, the connectivity of worlds, the creation of new existences, the dependance on the Dark Tower.”

John cocked his head. “…Can someone explain to me what the Dark Tower is?”

“The center of the multiverse,” Eve said. “Source of ka, the force that ensures the multiverse operates with a dependance on stories and narrative. The reason you exist while a webcomic of you also exists.”

“So, let me get this straight. Sburb was created by the Horrorterrors using the power found inside this Dark Tower. And the Spirograph is just… representative of everything? How does that help us?”

“It doesn’t,” Jotaro said. “Do we even know if we’re going anywhere, or just moving?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, sorry.”

“John? Can you get us out of here?” Applejack asked. “Back to where we need to go?”

John held out his hand and felt his white power waft around his arm. “I… I can’t feel it. I can feel lots of places whirring by, holy cow. But I don’t recognize any of them…”

Eve’s eyes widened. “You may have just taken us out of the Green Sun’s control. Ugh, why didn’t we think of that?!”

Corona shook her head. “We did. Decided it wasn’t worth the risk – the Green Sun’s worlds are sealed off, and even if we could move the entire ghost army, we would lose contact with all the other stuff that was going on. Not to mention just letting the Combine and Horrorterrrors get the Green Sun sounded like a bad idea.”

“I wouldn’t mind the Horrorterrors getting it,” Nova said. “They just wanted to stop it from destroying so much.”

Eve shook her head. “Regardless, we’re outside the Green Sun’s reach now. John… Take us out of this tunnel. If we can’t get back into Paradox Space after that, we can at least go get help. Or tell everyone we know what’s going on.”

John nodded. “Hold on then.” He put his hand on the ground, turning the entire victory platform bright white once again.

We zapped away. We appeared in an unknown location lit by firelight. Underground, possibly some castle’s basement, but still large enough to accommodate the floating victory platform.

The first thing Eve noticed was that Seraphim was able to access more universes again – but she found that her physics ‘presets’ weren’t working. “Something’s up,” she warned, scanning the area with her eye. “Seraphim’s not quite righ-”

The moment she laid her eye on the area of the room shrouded in darkness, a fiery glow lit on the floor, revealing a gigantic throne made of skulls. The skulls were not simply piled into a throne shape, but were far more organized, arranged in levels with thin layers of gold below the jaw and above the tops of the dead heads, giving it an air of organized death. Within the throne sat a humanoid figure more than large enough to fill the throne. He was dressed in a single crimson robe that hid all his body save for the bony, wrinkled hands.

“What’s this?” he asked in a harsh, grating voice. Eve could hear him, despite her ears not being on. The sound of his voice made everyone back up – including myself.

I took a few more steps back, because I knew who this was.

“John, get us out of here,” I said. “Get us out of here now.”

“No,” the robed figure said. “You will stay right here, with me, until I know who and what you are…”

I pulled out my notebook and began scribbling furiously.

“No.” A flash of red came from the shadow of his hood where his eyes probably were, disintegrating my notebook.

I took in a sharp, enraged breath. That book may have only been the most recent in a long series, but the newest memories were often the most precious.

“You are a Prophet,” he said. “One aware of who they are, nonetheless… I was uncertain if that was possible. Regardless, you will not be scribbling your way out of this one.”

“W-who are you?” Pinkie asked. She didn’t have the knowledge I did – but she knew this was bad.

“I a-”

“The Crimson King,” I said, catching him off guard.

The Crimson King leaned in toward me. “How would you know that…?”

“A lot of different reasons. More Aware than the average Prophet, you understand. And I-”

I lost the ability to breathe. But I knew this trick – Flagg was known to use it. Not surprising, since this was Flagg’s old boss. I forced myself to cast a spell within my stupor. I had been around a long time – perhaps not as long as Vriska, but I had access to spells that would make entire universes tremble.

It was at this point I realized I was setting myself up for a fall. I saw it – the way ka was flowing, ensuring I’d build up my power, unleash it, and be wiped to the side like a bug on windshield.

“Not… giving you the… satisfaction…” I forced, before passing out. Due to my nature I was still Aware of the events transpiring after my unconsciousness began, but I was out.

“Twilence!” Eve shouted.

“Does anyone else wish to explain who you are?”

O’Neill leaned back against the purple house. “We’re the Twelve, obviously.”

“You wish to engage in a game of riddles?” The Crimson King stood up, his towering form driving fear into everyone. “No.” Allure’s horn broke off in an instant, forcing blood down her face. Allure screamed – then suddenly, the screaming stopped. She wasn’t moving or breathing. “Explain or I kill another.”

“ALLURE!” Renee wailed. “Stop, stop! We are the… the citizens of Merodi Universalis… A-and w-we…”

“YOU MONSTER!” Flutterfree shouted, a deep purple coming to her eyes. “MONSTER!”

The Crimson King tried to destroy her. The purple energies around her prevented this. She screamed, using her Stare on him. Her Rage made it all the way to his eyes – and held him.

“NOVA! JOTARO! JOHN!” Eve shouted. “NOW!”

Nova surrounded John in a time spell, getting the message from Eve loud and clear.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Jotaro shouted, freezing time.

…For everyone except himself and John.

“TAKE US BACK! NOW!” Jotaro shouted; using Hermit Purple to make sure everyone was on the platform.

John was already moving. He zapped up himself, the victory platform, and everyone else.

They appeared somewhere gray and windy, where the ground was dead.

I started breathing again. “Holy bookworms… That was close…”

“ALLURE!” Renee shouted, running to the form of her sister. “Allure! Sweetie, I-”

Allure opened her eyes. Then she let herself breathe. “He… He really tried to kill me…”

Corona stopped preparing her revive spell. “How!?”

“I just… told myself to be dead for a moment?” Allure managed.

“Knight of Heart,” I said. “Defended herself by feigning her own soul’s death. I’m surprised she managed to do so…”

“Probably had something to do with me transferring her Doom at the last second,” Corona said. “I uh… don’t think transferring the Doom to the Crimson King did anything.”

“Instinct maybe…?” Allure said, eyes glazing over. “Woah, everything’s really fuzzy…”

Applejack trotted over to her. “You’ve lost a lot of blood and told your body you were dead for a few seconds. That’s not good. We need to patch this up right now. Eve, summon some bandages.” Eve did so, and Applejack had Allure’s forehead wrapped in a few seconds. “There you go.”

“Thank you…” Allure said, breathing slowly.

“I could have just healed her,” Corona said.

“Oh. Right.” Applejack blushed. “Uh, Ah guess somethin’ just took over.”

Corona placed her hand on Allure’s wound and healed it up. Allure’s face was still bloody, but she wasn't in danger anymore. She still appeared groggy.

“My horn…” Allure managed, able to worry about herself now that she didn’t feel ready to pass out.

“Hey, I’ve seen artificial horns,” Rainbow said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get one.”

“Mhm…” Allure said, shaking her head. “Thanks. All of you. …Especially Flutterfree.”

Futterfree smiled sadly. “I… I’m glad I helped you.”

“Yeah. I… Uh… Where are we?”

“I have no idea,” John said. He stood at the edge of the platform, looking into the distance.

Everyone joined him to examine where they were. Everything aside from them and the platform was colorless, limited mostly to darker shades of gray and black. The sky was overcast with endless stratus clouds while the ground was the scene of an endless plane of dead plants.

Dead, colorless roses.

In the distance, we saw it – a building of pure blackness that rose a few stories into the sky. It was clearly intended to be much taller, but the top of it was only rubble.

“Is that… the Dark Tower?” John asked.

“Can’t be…” Corona said. “I’ve seen it before, that’s not it!”

“It is…” I said, my expression haunted. “We changed something…”

“What?” Rainbow said. “Change what?”

“The Dark Tower has only been effectively threatened one time in the entirety of its existence,” I said. “The being who sought to bring it down was the being we just encountered. The Crimson King. In our conversation we must have changed something. Something that let him win.”

Eve pulled out Seraphim. “…There are no other universes. This is it.”

“How is that possible!?” Nova blurted. “You can’t go back and change something for every universe! That’s not how it works?”

Pinkie pointed at John. “He can overrule that. He could go back to the start of the multiverse…”

“…and destroy everything,” Jotaro completed.

John held up his hands. “H-hey I was just trying to get us out of there!”

“I want to know how this power can exist,” Corona said. “How can anyone have the right to change anything? Not even the highest of the high can overrule the laws of metatime! The multiverse always progresses.”

John waved his hand. “Hey, I got this from the House Juju! I don’t know anything about it! Honest!”

“What is the House Juju?” Eve asked, turning to me. “You’d know.”

All the others looked to me – even Pinkie, with a steeled glare.

“I… Fine.” I sighed, shaking my head. “The House Juju is the Dark Tower’s self-defense protocol.”

“...Explain,” Eve demanded, lighting her eye up just to make sure she got everything.

“When the Crimson King assaulted the Dark Tower in the ‘early’ days of ka, the Dark Tower ‘decided’ to use him. It created an impossible time loop around the life of one man – Roland of Gilead, the Gunslinger. It superseded its own rules of metatime to ensure that, regardless of what anyone did, Roland would travel through a time loop in a world that did not allow time travel, and defend the Tower from the inside.” I gestured at the Tower. “The Dark Tower is a physical construct, just like everything else. It could be destroyed with enough power and resources. So it allowed a story to take place where it was threatened, and created an exception to one of the absolute rules of the multiverse to ensure no entity would ever be able to touch it again.”

They all stared at me, blinking.

“Then the Horrorterrors made it to the room at the top of the Tower,” I said. “Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. But they decided to make something out of what they found. Based on the structures of the Dark Tower itself, they created essentially a miniature version.”

“Sburb…” John said.

“Yes. And with it, certain protocols the Tower had in place manifested themselves in strange ways. Most of the Jujus are manifestations of those concepts. The House Juju is the manifestation of the exception to the rules the Tower allowed to protect itself. It worked as intended – the Tower was once again threatened, this time by Lord English. But the House Juju allowed a suspension of the rules to defeat him. There was only one loose end.”

“Me,” John said.

“Yes. You. You stuck your hand into the House Juju and became its emissary. But unlike Roland of Gilead, you weren’t sealed in an infinite time loop. You were allowed to go free. You, John, are a loose end. An exception to the rules that was allowed. Why? I don’t know. Maybe the Tower has a plan for you. Maybe Hussie’s influence on the Tower cannot be understated. Maybe it’s just a glitch and the Flowers just aren’t touching you because you scare them. I don’t know.” I breathed heavily.

John gulped. “W-well then, I, uh…” He adjusted his collar. “I…”

“I’m sorry,” I said, sighing. “I got angry there. Passionate. There’s really nothing you did wrong, John. You were just given something you didn’t understand.” I shook my head, looking at the ruined Dark Tower. Then I narrowed my eyes. “Wait a minute…”

Corona looked up, sensing an idea. “What is it?”

“This can’t be real,” I said. “We’re still being written about. If the Dark Tower was destroyed, that would be impossible. The sight of a Prophet cannot penetrate to a ‘time’ when the Dark Tower doesn’t exist. But I can see these words appearing on a screen…” I put a hoof to my chin. “If we went back and fixed it, I would see these words appear after we fixed it, as a ‘this is what happened while ka was no longer in effect’ sort of thing. But that’s not what’s happening. Ka is still here.”

Flutterfree took a breath, preparing to reveal everything.

“No. Don’t,” I said. “We need to edit our memories.”

Renee blinked. “Well, as the Sylph of Mind I should only be able to heal memories, dear, and… why do we need to edit our memories?”

“Because we need to think this happened a specific way,” I said.

Eve’s eyes widened. “No, there’s no way. That’s crazy.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“Does anyone care to explain what you two just thought of?!” O’Neill blurted.

“What if this really happened?” I asked. “How would we fix it? We’d use John’s retcon to go back, of course. Go back and prevent us from ever meeting the Crimson King. Easy enough, right?”

“Uh, wouldn’t that create copies and a whole lot of other problems?” John said.

Eve nodded. “Yes, yes it would. There would be two sets of us and our presence would mess with everything even further.”

I put a hoof to my chin. “So, we’d know that. So we’d need to think of a way to ensure those past versions of us still become us, yet we change all the events. We decide to let our past selves experience an illusion. Let them think they’ve encountered the Crimson King and went to the broken Dark Tower, so their memories would be exactly the same…”

Allure held her head. “Are you suggesting that we’re living in an illusion created by our future selves!?”

“Yes!” I said. “Only it isn’t working – I’m too Aware. I’m changing what we remembered – but I must have been aware that this would happen. So I would have had a backup plan… I would ha-” I facehooved. “AUGH, if I change our memories we won’t come up with a reason to send ourselves back through an illusion!”

“What if it’s a closed time loop?” John asked. “We’ve always been in an illusion. We never actually met the Crimson King.”

“John, your power doesn’t work like that. You go back once, you actively change a thing. If you go back again, you can change it to be something else. And th-” I realized what the solution was. I sighed. “Well, that’s… depressing.”

“Would you stop making observations and get to the explaining!?” Rainbow blurted.

“There is a solution,” I said. “If we were the first group that came in and realized that, because of me, we wouldn’t be able to alter the events perfectly, we’d simply allow the second loop to come through to create a new set of events within an illusion. And then the first team… Would erase themselves from existence.”

Flutterfree gasped. “That’s horrible!”

“But I think it’s already been done,” I said.

“...I’m sure it has,” Eve said. “We wouldn’t let ourselves find a way to argue, to stop ourselves from making a sacrifice.”

“What does that mean though?” Nova asked.

“It means we go back and send the past versions of ourselves into an illusion based on our memories,” Eve said, “so that they can experience this and become us.”

“We just have to accept that the first loop… the first loop broke.” I gulped. “I’m sorry. I guess I was… wrong. All of us did die here. It’s already happened.”

“That’s… a haunting thought,” Renee said.

I turned to John. “…You should be able to just take us back to the moment we were in the white tunnel. You’ll need to divert them to a specific universe in the D-sphere. Corona, give me your dimensional device. I’ll key it in.”

Corona tossed the device to me. I entered the code and handed it to John. “Retcon back to the tunnel of white. Use this as a reference if you need it. Nova, keep us invisible. John, all you have to do is drop them in there the moment the past-you tries to jump to the Crimson King. It doesn’t matter what multiversal era you get them there, all that matters is that you do get them there, so this entire loop can happen.”

John nodded. “Got it.” He felt the essence of the place the device was set to. He knew where they needed to go.

Nova surrounded us in a bubble of invisibility.

“Wait,” I said. “…Flutterfree, use Lolo so John is actually able to retcon us out of this illusion.”

Flutterfree raised an eyebrow. “Is it safe?”

“In this new loop… Yes. Yes it is.”

Flutterfree spread out Lolo – and everything but us and the victory platform just vanished. There was truly nothing here. Everyone had to accept that everything I’d just said was true. The Crimson King, the wreckage of the Tower - it had just been an illusion created by people who no longer existed.

With another series of zaps form John, we appeared inside the white tunnel again, right behind our past selves. They didn’t notice. They couldn’t.

We watched a conversation take place that we had already had. Explanations of the Dark Tower. Sburb. Luckily we had come in after Flutterfree had used Lolo – that would have been disastrous.

Eve told John and Nova when to move telepathically. Nova made John extra-invisible as he moved to the past-platform. When past-John tried to retcon to the Crimson King, John retconned them to the universe he himself had been in just moments before – he didn’t even need to use the portal device.

And the loop was complete. They would encounter a fake Crimson King and believe they’d end up in the broken Dark Tower – but the universe they had been sent to was designed to bend its reality with ka… fate… A clever dreaming world that would keep people who entered it trapped forever, thinking they were living their lives. But of course I would always be able to figure it out and get them out with Lolo. Every time.

John let out a whistle. “That was a pretty serious mindfuck right there. Almost as bad as some of Dave’s causal loops. Almost.”

“How can you be so calm?” Flutterfree blurted. “The first versions of us just died!”

“…It’s not like we’re copies, or anything,” Eve said, looking at Flutterfree with a telling expression. “We are truly who we were before. It’s just that version of us who experienced something decided they would rather stop existing for the sake of their past.”

Flutterfree looked at her, pained. “…I… …I understand.”

Eve smiled sadly, wiping a tear from her eye. “I know.”

“…I take it my horn loss is real?” Allure asked me.

I nodded. “It may have been an illusion, but it did real things to our minds and bodies.”

“Figures. I hope the replacement doesn’t feel weird.”

“It’ll feel weird,” Eve said.

“Great…”

Corona looked to John. “…Take us back to the Green Sun, John. It’s time.”

“I don’t know how to get us out of this tube th-” he blinked. “Wait. I do. How…?”

Eve shrugged. “Probably because you’ve already translated in and out of here from elsewhere and… you know what, that rabbit hole probably has no end. Just like the rest of this.”

“Let’s just go back already,” Rainbow said. “I have plans to wipe all this brain-burn out of my memories.”

Renee laughed bitterly. “Not a bad idea…”

John placed his hand on the victory platform’s center again. “Here we go…”

Everyone went to stand on their designated positions, on top of their Aspects. They zapped away in an instant.

~~~

“Can someone kill that Noble Horrorterror already!?” Vriska shouted, skewering the planet-sized behemoth with her hope-filled sword. “Cause this isn’t going very fast!”

“We’re workin’ on it!” Meenah shouted, gesturing to all her fellow Thieves of Life who were continually draining the Noble Horrorterror’s life force. It had a lot.

“G-GAD ZOOKS...” Jake shouted, but it was clear his role as a beacon of Hope would end soon. Then their stalemate with the Combine and Horrorterrors would end. This close, one of the sides would get through to the Green Sun.

“Jade!” Vriska called. “Do we have anything!?”

Omega Jade shook her head as she unleashed another green solar flare. “I don’t have time to look! I’m just defending, defending, defending!”

“Right, so, uh…” Vriska bit her lip. “I know I said I didn’t want to bother them, but you might want to check Earth C to see if they’ve got any backup for us.”

Omega Jade shook her head. “Vriska, that’s dangerous! They could die out here!”

“We’re all gonna die if we don’t eke something out here!” Vriska shouted.

“Hey, I’m still fine,” Spades said, firing into space with his golden gun. “Not that I’m doin’ much, mind you.”

“That’s why you’re alive,” Vriska muttered. “They got Jade. She was a threat. If we get, say… Actually the only one in there who doesn’t have a ghost here is Dirk, maybe Roxy. I don’t see the Prince of Heart providing much of a benefit…”

“Don’t look at me, I don’t have any ideas either!” Meenah grunted.

“We need John!” Feferi said. “He has the only way out at this point!”

“Well he’s not here right now!” Vriska blurted.

Zap.

Vriska twitched. “Motherfucking…”

“Hey guys!” John said, standing in the middle of the victory platform with all of the Twelve around him. “I’m back!”

“WHAT THE FUCK TOOK YOU SO LONG!?” Vriska shouted.

“A mindfuck,” John explained.

Vriska took a look at everyone’s haunted expressions and Allure’s hornless face. “…I’ll believe it. Corona! Do the thing already!”

“I have to spin up!” Corona retorted.

“Tally ho…” Jake coughed, having poured out all the Hope he had in him. “I’m afraid I’m done…”

The Horrorterrors and Combine pushed in, now no longer hindered by the blinding light that had strengthened the ghosts so much.

Omega Jade barked. “You don’t have much time!”

Corona clasped her hands together and activated the victory platform…

108 - The Furthest Reaches

Year 7

I was there to see them off – a pastime that I usually undertook in a distant, hidden niche far from sight. However, seeing as I was part of the reason they were leaving this time, it was the least I could do to publicly show up.

I stood in the front of a small crowd gathered at Ponyville’s primary spaceport. No ships were flying in and out of the port right now, because preparations for a very special voyage were underway. In front of us was a large, crystal ramp that led up to one of the ugliest ships Merodi Universalis had ever made. It looked like a boulder that had been chiseled at one end to a point, giving it a vaguely teardrop-like shape. There were no windows; instead jagged overlaid pieces of metal plating a quarter-meter thick arranged in such a way to maximize structural integrity, giving it the unfortunate appearance of a scrap heap. There were scant few holes in the armor for weapons, and the multi-system engines were hidden under the cone half of the ship.

It was the Marianas and it was built to withstand anything the multiverse could throw at it. Its mission was to go on a long journey to the Unrealities and the Beyond, to be the first Merodi ship to ever go that far. It was a monumental occasion that didn’t really need the ship to look pretty. The Unrealities were mostly eldritch locations anyway, so it wasn’t like appearance could matter.

There was no physical door on the Marianas, so everyone had to be teleported in – the ramp to the ship was purely for show. The crew would wave to the crowd, walk up to the top of the ramp, and then be teleported into the Marianas. The Captain of the exploration ship stood at constant attention to the left of the teleportation location.

It was always interesting to see Minna in full uniform, the current design of the Military Division Captain’s attire giving her a dull gold suit with red highlights. She had chosen the version without sleeves so her arms could have freedom of movement, showing off her muscular limbs. I knew she still had all her excessively long hair, but it was tucked down the back of her uniform, out of sight for the most part.

She’d come a long way in these few years. I would like to say it was all because of her abilities, but it was more because she had connections and O’Neill liked her. She would have risen to Captain eventually through her own merit, but things were accelerated slightly given her family.

Her husband Frigid was already on board as a civilian guest. They were going to be gone a while, so special accommodations were made.

After the primary military crew and guests made it to the ship – about three-dozen in total – the other expedition members showed up. A handful of scientists went first, including Starbeat, but they weren’t the ones the crowd was here to see. Pinkie’s Party was; the five of them walking and waving to the crowd – even Jotaro. He was in a good mood, though that may have been because Marina Kujo was coming with him for once.

Nova was going alone. Sunburst had decided to stay back, and Stardust… well she was an adult now, and while she loved her mother very much, the two of them didn’t really… get each other. She definitely had no desire to spend several months in an enclosed space with her mother.

It brought a frown to my features. I supposed I had no right to feel bad – they still talked to each other, after all, which was more than could be said for many families. Still, I felt like she’d been cheated out of something beautiful in her life.

As for the others… They’d changed as well. Jotaro not so much, but the other three? You could see it in the way they walked. Vriska was walking up to the crowd and saying hello to the children, shaking their hands and smiling warmly. Pinkie was still the party pony, but she was a lot more careful – she didn’t bounce around wildly when she moved. Instead, each step was almost robotic in nature, even if it did lead to an explosion of a party cannon. And Flutterfree… She was actually showing off a little bit, even posing for the cameras with her elegant, marble-tipped appearance. She’d fully accepted her role as a popular public figure.

Eve waved at her from her position a fair ways to my left.

The five of them – plus Marina – made it to the ship and were teleported inside.

After them came the foreign visitors. Hastur and Zod were together, despite Zod’s loyalty to Merodi Universalis – they would serve as the eldritch experts. They ignored the crowd, instead talking to each other to catch up on old times. The Sparkle Census had sent Twilight M4 and Twitter, while the USM had sent some unknown scientist named Sheldon. The TSAB and Empy’s Void were getting in on the expedition as well, despite the fact that both the higher Class 2 powers had already been to the depths of the multiverse. The childlike mage Vita and the White Mage Rarity represented them.

I waved to Mage Rarity. “Hey!”

“Oh, Twilence, good to see you here!” She walked up with a warm, nostalgic smile. “I see you’re doing well. It’s a good thing you got out of that stuffy library.”

“You don’t see me arguing.”

Mage Rarity smiled. “Apologies, but I do have to keep this moving.” She winked. “I’m sure you already know everything about what’s been going on in my life.”

I chuckled. “Yep. See you!”

Mage Rarity nodded, moving on to another pony – a white mare cloaked in a dark shawl. She paused to give the ‘stranger’ a quick kiss and then ran off to the teleporter.

I glanced at the cloaked mare and sent a telepathic message. You’re supposed to be avoiding the story.

I am not a smart pony.

Just get out of here before it drags you in.

Fine, fine… She teleported away in a flash of magical energy.

I looked up at the Marianas. Everyone was on board now, including Minna. It was performing final pre-flight checks before it activated its state-of-the-art Chronosplitter Drive, the latest in Merodi technology. It was essentially a primitive TARDIS core that allowed navigation through space, time, and dimensions; a combination that allowed for highly streamlined navigation of the multiverse’s metatime. The drive may have been a bit overkill for standard universal travel, but they were going to a place where time and space often made no sense. It would definitely be needed. As would the Reality Shaping Mechanism it had on board. They knew some of the universes would be brutally different, so much so that pure Reality Anchors wouldn’t cut it.

Of course, the purpose of these pre-flight checks was twofold. The ‘real’ reason was to ensure everything was safe. The ‘ka’ reason was to allow one more passenger on board.

Jenny had made herself invisible – not that she could hide from me. She walked up to the top of the ramp and teleported herself into the Marianas, becoming a stowaway.

Good for her.

The Marianas completed its pre-flight checks a few seconds later, activating the Chronosplitter. A red aura of magical energy that was clearly a mixture of Corona’s personal magic and Aradia’s temporal shenanigans appeared in front of the ship, tearing a hole through several different realities at different states of time. The Marianas was compressed into a speck of dust barely larger than a flea and was run through this bizarre network of connections like a rat in a maze, until it popped out the other side several universes away with what would be perceived as an overall reverse flow of time.

They literally arrived at their destination yesterday. Of course, if they tried to come back, they wouldn’t be able to get here yesterday. But even though the trick didn’t work backward, it was a way to save time.

The people on the expedition were going to experience a lot more time than the people living in Merodi Universalis, assuming the Chronosplitter’s programming worked out properly. It was a very new piece of technology.

They set off to their first destination – a pit stop in the Strands.

I smiled. They were going to have quite the adventure in the furthest reaches.

~~~

About a week later…

The Marianas was taking a last-minute stop before heading into the Great Void. They were in the ‘southernmost’-known Outpost universe of the Strands, one that Pinkie’s team had stumbled across by complete accident a couple years ago.

The universe was just a single building floating in a sea of blackness. That building was the Raven Hotel. It was run by a full ‘human’ AI who went by the name Poe – he appeared as a separate entity, but in reality was the Raven Hotel. Before Pinkie’s team had found him, his hotel hadn’t seen a guest in decades. Now the Merodi and its allies had started using it as a private nexus for travel and he was absolutely ecstatic about the sudden increase in customers. He’d even extended the hotel’s structure to have a few docking bays for ships.

Only one other ship was there – the Vaskahr – a trading ship run by the Melnorme. Now, Poe was not one to turn any customers away, but he certainly wasn’t fond of these particular guests. Always loud, orange, and annoying.

“I guess we really aren’t good at keeping secrets,” Nova told Poe, sliding up to the main lobby’s bar. The Raven Hotel had a vaguely Victorian feel to it with a dimly lit interior and a holographic raven sitting on a perch. There were several tables in the lobby, and most were filled with Marianas crewmembers talking about the journey ahead.

“Oh, it’s no issue,” Poe said, pretending to clean a glass – even though he had an instant-rinse dishwasher. His visual appearance was vaguely that of an Edgar Allen Poe, though with a decidedly warmer and friendlier demeanor than the creepy author. “Customers are customers.”

“Assholes are assholes,” Nova muttered, tapping her hoof on the countertop. A pink drink materialized in front of her. She drank it without looking.

“Trouble at home?”

“Eh, not really?” Nova shrugged. “Same as always. Nobody’s mad or upset. Not like we’re arguing or in danger of falling apart. But I feel like I know my friends better than I know my husband and kid.” She looked at the ceiling. “It’s been a few years since she left. You think I’d get over her now that she’s all grown up. Nope.”

“I can’t pretend to have any understanding of what it means to have a child, but from what I hear the bond is a curious one that doesn’t just vanish.”

“Mmm…” She took another swig. “Yeah, enough about that, it’s all I ever complain about. Nothing’s going to change about it now. So, Poe, what’s your story?”

“You already know my story Miss Glimmer. You are a regular. …Inasmuch as I have regulars. You know since I-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, Earth Soulstack. I went there once, never again. I’m not interested in your stint with the Collector either. I know those stories.”

“Then what is it you want to know?”

“People blab to you about their personal problems all the time. What are your stresses? I know you have a life here, of sorts. What kind of things do you concern yourself with?”

“Hrm… Mostly the happiness of the customers a-”

“Er, excuse me,” one of the human scientists said, nervously glancing back at the table his friends were at, all laughing and having a good time. “Can you put the… angelic hooves package in my room?”

Poe smiled warmly. “Of course, the mares will be generated right away.”

The scientist nodded, and quickly dashed back to his table.

Nova glared at Poe.

Poe coughed. “I suppose my primary worries include that those I consider friends don’t think too hard about some of the services my hotel offers.”

Nova rolled her eyes and shook her head judgingly. She threw her drink all over the human scientist with her magic and left the bar. Technician Pidge gave her a subtle thumbs-up in approval.

Poe ignored the exchange. “Perhaps I could offer you a fully immersive stress-relief package? I’m sure there are some particular monsters you would like to decapitate.”

“No thanks,” Nova called back. “I think I’ll just go to my room and appreciate a comfortable, lavish bed before I get locked in a coffin the rest of the trip, hm?”

“If that is what you wish. Any furnishings you would app-”

“Poe, please, just the standard real stuff, okay?”

Poe shifted uncomfortably.

Nova facehooved. “Poe, I wasn’t insinuating that you weren’t real.”

“Hard not to take it that way. But I understand. Nothing but the standard furnishings. Would you like me to remove the Raven clock?”

“No, no, you can keep the Raven clock. It’s adorable.”

Poe allowed himself to smile. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” She turned around to head to her room – but was stopped by a Melnorme.

“Can I interest you i-”

“No,” Nova muttered. “Beat it, orange.”

“…My name is Lavender.”

Nova moved past Lavender marching through the Raven Hotel’s lobby – until another Melnorme walked in front of her. She jumped to the side – only to accidentally crash into a third Melnorme.

This Melnorme scrambled away, smacking her in the process. “What is your problem?”

“Stop trying to sell me things!” Nova blurted, teleporting to the Raven Hotel’s elevator. Unfortunately the elevator wasn’t currently at the ground floor so she just teleported into an empty shaft.

Clinging to the ladder in that empty shaft was Jenny.

Jenny smiled awkwardly. “So… Fancy meeting you here!”

Nova sighed, levitating herself with her magic. “Come on…”

“Nonono wai-”

Nova teleported Jenny and herself back to the lobby, in front of Captain Minna. “Minna, I’m 99% sure she’s a stowaway on the Marianas.”

Jenny grinned. “Hi!”

Minna looked down, her purple eyes narrowing to slits.

“Okay, so, it’d take you a week to get me back to MU so it’s probably better if you just take me al-”

“Stop talking,” Minna muttered, folding her hands together. “I don’t see us going back. Nor do I see us leaving you here. I do see us taking you along.”

Jenny brightened.

“But you’re going to be a janitor.”

Jenny blinked. “B-”

Nova summoned a mop and a bucket to Jenny. “HEY POE! Do you have some dirty rooms that need cleaning?”

Poe looked at Jenny with mischievous eyes. “Of course. Certain packages can result in quite a mess that is a pain to clean, even for an automated system like myself.”

“Oh please no,” Jenny said.

“I’m the captain,” Minna said, leaning in. “You don’t really have a choice.”

“Right, right. I’m here to suffer. Got it. So this isn’t really going to be a vacation from my normal team.” She swiped the mop and bucket and walked up to Poe. “Which room first?”

“Three-Thirteen. The one I never cleaned.”

“Why?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Jenny blinked. “…Oh boy.”

“You better get on it if you want to sleep at all today!” Minna called. “This is the last comfortable bed you’re getting!”

“I’ve been sleeping in the cargo hold!”

“And you’ll keep sleeping in the cargo hold!”

Jenny grumbled and marched to the elevator.

Nova decided to just teleport directly to her floor and walk into her room. As amusing as that was, she was still done with today. She wanted a nice warm bed…

Something she wouldn’t have for a long time. The cots in the Marianas weren’t like prison beds, but they weren’t exactly soft either.

~~~

Weeks later…

As it turned out, after the initial horror of Room 313 the responsibilities of a janitor on the Marianas weren’t that taxing. Most of the systems were equipped with basic cleaning spells so they didn’t even need a janitor. Jenny’s job ended up to be doing the stuff nobody else wanted to. Moving heavy machinery, watching boring sensor data, that sort of thing.

She was essentially a member of the crew at this point. One who was bored beyond measure.

She had been sure this voyage would be interesting – that they would find many interesting worlds and fascinating things. But they weren’t really doing that. They were slowly trekking their way through the Great Void area of the multiverse. Every universe they passed through had only a handful of connections to other universes, making it a slow process.

The worst part? Most of the universes in the Great Void were normal. A lot of them were Earths, and more than a few were just variations thereof. There had been a few eldritch locations, but those were few and far between. It had been four days since Jenny had heard about anything other than a relatively standard physics universe, and she was going nuts.

She needed to find a way to entertain herself.

She spun a little wheel in her head, choosing a random activity. The activity that rose to the top was ‘snoop for gossip.’

She already had a primary target in mind.

She activated her invisibility spell and walked around the halls of the Marianas, looking for her targets. The Marianas’ interior was rather cramped, with the exception of the lounge, mess hall, and bridge itself. Every other part of the space had been condensed to minimize the size of the craft and to increase efficiency. The interiors were mostly dull gray with rounded white nubs where holographic displays were installed – all Jenny had to do was touch one of these nubs to bring up the locations of the entire crew.

Less than fifty people on this ship. Wasn’t hard to find them at all. Currently walking around the second deck’s halls. She performed a quick teleport and began to sneak behind them.

Vriska, Hastur, and Starbeat. A complex relationship triangle centered around Vriska. Of course they would have gossip, right?

“So, I discovered that the burritos are good,” Starbeat said. “You’d think they wouldn’t be that good, but they are. I thought I’d have to conjure all my food, but I guess it looks like I’ll be eating our entire supply of burritos. I’m so bringing them back to the Collection.”

“Which flavor?” Hastur asked.

Starbeat smirked. “Pulled pork. Deeeelicious.”

“Wrong answer,” Vriska said with a smirk. “The actual answer is ‘all the flavors. All of them’.”

“That’s only the correct answer if you’re the one answering the question.”

“I just did, didn’t I?”

Hastur let out a soft chuckle. “Oh, that you did. If only you truly could have all the flavors…”

“I can have all the flavors of you.”

Starbeat put a hoof over her eyes.

Jenny did not, because she didn’t know what was coming. She quickly regretted not following Starbeat’s example, because what followed next was truly disturbing. It involved tentacles, two faces, and a lot of squishy noises.

Jenny teleported away, hand to her head. “…I just gained an insanity point. Note to self: never watch an eldritch makeout session. Ever.”

Pinkie came out of nowhere and hit her on the head with a squeaky hammer. “That was private, Jenny!”

“Hey! They were in a public hall! And Starbeat was th-”

Pinkie hit her again. “Moirail privileges. She was covering her eyes anyway.”

“But you were w-”

SQUEAK! “I don’t really have a choice. Plus, I wasn’t watching, this blindfold isn’t ornamental you know!”

“Agh! Fine, fine, I’m sorry, I’ve learned my lesson!”

Pinkie ‘looked’ right at her. “No you haven’t. But I’ll accept that anyway. Toodeloo!” She vanished into a nearby room.

Jenny grunted. For about a second she contemplated stopping her snooping.

“…Nah,” she said, standing up tall, checking to make sure she was still invisible. Time to check on their illustrious captain. She checked the personnel report again. Minna was in her quarters, the largest on the ship. Frigid wasn’t in there, so Jenny figured she was safe. Just a quick internal teleport.

She appeared in Minna’s room. It was the size of a normal bedroom with a queen size bed with an actual mattress on it. There was an adjoining bathroom, a few potted plants, and a desk.

Minna was currently standing in front of the bathroom mirror, combing her long lustrous hair.

She didn’t say or do anything interesting for five whole minutes.

I’m bored, Jenny muttered, teleporting out. She didn’t have to check the map again to find a target – she saw her target. Apparently Starbeat had moved on from the eldritch makeout fest and had taken to talking to the White Mage Rarity.

“I think the trip’s been a bit boring so far, to be honest,” Mage Rarity was saying. “Besides the Raven Hotel we haven’t really seen anything all that interesting.”

“We haven’t made it to the really interesting stuff yet,” Starbeat pointed out. “The Unrealities are through the Great Void, not part of them. We’ll find some truly bizarre locations and peoples there.”

“It is a long way away… And we all know that when we get there the level of drama will increase significantly.”

“Always happens.”

“Well, yes. This ship is destined to fall, after all.”

Jenny froze. What!?

Starbeat looked at Mage Rarity and shook her head. “We really shouldn’t be talking about that, you know. Not good for our heads.”

“I know, I know, I supposed it would have been fine in this case. Guess I was mistaken. Different topic then?”

Starbeat nodded. “How about that magic of yours?”

“Ah, a mixture of temporal and curative spells…”

Jenny wasn’t listening anymore.

She was still stuck on the fact that, apparently, Marianas was destined to fall.

Normal people would freak out and start panicking, fearing for their lives.

Jenny hadn’t felt fear for her own life in millions of years. She took this piece of information and grinned.

She knew things weren’t going to be boring forever.

~~~

More weeks pass…

The majority of Horrorterror space was within the Great Void. The Marianas had no intention of cutting through Horrorterror space, but they didn’t exactly have a map of the Great Void to aid them, so they ended up cutting through anyway.

Luckily the Horrorterrors didn’t seem to mind. Only one had actually bothered to speak to them in their journey, and it was just curious what they were doing this far from home. Minna had answered, Hastur had a short conversation with the being, and that was that.

The area of the Great Void they were in had fewer normal worlds and more empty worlds – a locale the Horrorterrors generally preferred. They came across the occasional world that had been the result of a successful SBURB session, but mostly it was just Horrorterror worlds of emptiness with a smattering of minor eldritch physics.

It was almost always dark.

Nova stared outside. The Marianas had no windows, but the Lounge had a large screen that acted like a window, displaying what was outside - filtered through a sanity program of course. They were in one of the dark universes right now, so regardless of what the program was filtering out, they couldn’t see anything.

Nova levitated the remote to her and changed the settings on the major screen, finding another setting that showed complete blackness. Behind her, she could hear other people playing the latest version of Multiversal Heroes – she had no idea what the number was, but they were sure having fun.

Nova changed the setting again. This time it shifted to a red-blue heat map of ‘how much time was distorted’ in the area. Everything was a solid purple, indicating normal levels everywhere. She checked for soul signs – a minor Horrorterror was apparently hiding in the darkness so far away they only appeared as a single speck of white light against the darkness.

She switched to the ‘spatial distortion’ setting, getting a slightly more interesting visualization of how space was folding in on itself out there. The greens and blues and yellows signifying higher dimensions played off each other in a soothing pattern.

She put a hoof to her head – why did she have a headache? It didn’t even look that complicated.

…Maybe she was just in a funk from not doing much for these last few weeks. Horrorterror space wasn’t very interesting for non-eldritch beings. Zod and Hastur were apparently right at home here, even though it felt nothing like the Embodiment’s impossible hellscapes.

She closed her eyes – but the headache only got worse. “Uuuugh…”

Vriska jumped over the back of the couch she was sitting in, startling the poor unicorn. “What’s up?”

“Headache.”

“Brought on by emotional stress or drama that I, as a great friend, may alleviate with my astounding skills of empathy and understanding?”

Nova raised an eyebrow. “You’re full of crap.”

“Heh. Yep. Still, I’m here. Sup?”

“Literally nothing,” Nova told her. “I’m just a little bored. And I didn’t feel like playing another round of Multiversal Heroes Umpteen.”

“See, that won’t cause a headache. Unless we were being too loud back there.”

“Barely noticed you.”

Vriska blinked. “Then, uh… Lie down? I guess?”

Nova let out a soft chuckle, a hoof still to the side of her head. “You know what, that may be the best advice you’ve ever given.”

“Yes! Bullshitting your way to truth is the answer!”

Nova got off the couch and stretched her neck, handing Vriska the remote. “Though the moment I leave we’ll enter a universe that translates to beautiful fractal patterns.”

“You know it!”

Nova let out an amused sigh. She lit her horn and teleported to her room – which she shared with Flutterfree, Pinkie, and Vriska. None of them were there at the moment, though, so she was alone. She climbed onto one of the higher-level cots and laid her head on a pillow.

She was about to cast sleep on herself when the headache drove itself into her brain, hard enough to make her yell out. White sparks crossed by her vision. She thought she saw a face.

She teleported herself right to the sick bay, where White Mage Rarity was waiting. The only other person in the room was Technician Pidge.

“Hey, Nova!” Pidge called while flexing her recently-repaired arm.

“Hey,” Nova muttered, rubbing her head. “Sorry, head hurts. Rarity, scan my brain. Please. It’s got a horrible headache and I was just hallucinating white lights.”

Mage Rarity nodded, levitating Nova up onto one of the examination tables. She placed a disc-shaped crystal on the side of Nova’s head, transmitting mental data to a nearby screen. “So, you two know each other?”

Nova nodded, glancing at the short flat-chested woman with large round glasses. “Pidge was stuck with the rest of my team on a world for a while.”

“Ah. Memories,” Pidge deadpanned.

“We should get together again, sometime.”

“I work at Renee’s Castle. I talk to you guys every few days.”

“I mean, hang out hang out.”

Pidge raised an eyebrow.

“Bah, I’ll have Pinkie explain it later.”

Nova’s brain scan completed and Rarity examined the data, checking it carefully. “You certainly have a headache, but I don’t see any signs of hallucination. Your visual cortex is operating completely normally.”

“Well I don’t see the sparks now,” Nova muttered. “Headache’s still real though. Yeesh…”

“Doesn’t seem to be a major concern. I’ll just cast a Clear on you, and everything should be fine. I doubt we’ll need anything as serious as Esuna.”

“Oh, that’s right, your magic system is the same as that Gilgamesh guy’s. You got weird names for everything.”

Rarity nodded, casting the spell on Nova. Her headache lessened considerably, but there was still a nagging in the back of her mind. “I think it’s still there…”

“The mind is a strange thing,” Rarity said. “It could very easily just not believe I could remove it that fast, so it’ll create its own headache.”

“Ah, ri-”

“This is your captain speaking!” Minna announced over the communication system. “Brace yourselves – the universe is destabilizing!”

Pidge pressed herself to the corner of the room. Nova checked her bracelet. “…It is. How is it going so fast?”

The Chronosplitter Drive activated, throwing the Marianas back in time. But the universe was still destabilizing ten minutes into the past, even though it hadn’t before. “What the…?” The Marianas shook from the dimensional stress, its reality anchors struggling against the strain.

The Marianas returned to the previous universe they had been in, escaping the destabilization. Nova decided it was time to teleport to the bridge – the same idea a lot of others had. There was a question on all their faces – ‘what just happened!?’

Minna furrowed her brow. “I have no idea what just happened. Vita, does the TSAB know?”

Vita grunted, folding her arms. In her childish body, this just made her look like she was pouting. “A devourer.”

Minna raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Some universes are created with consciousnesses, as you know. Some of those consciousnesses decide it’s a good idea for them to eat other universes. They’re mostly native to the Unrealities – I’m a bit surprised we ran into one here.”

“Defenses?” Minna asked.

“You have a couple reality bombs on the ship, that’s about all you can do.” Vita shrugged. “The best solution is just to escape the universe. They’re entities the size of universes – even if your ship gives off a power signature more than any one universe, they won’t care if you run away. They know what their food is.”

“How horrible…” Flutterfree said, putting a hoof to her mouth.

“The Class 1s and 2s have hunted them to extinction in most other places. They only live out in these reaches, where there aren’t as many inhabited worlds.”

“There was a Horrorterror in that universe,” Nova said. “Is it… okay?”

“How should I know? They can naturally pass the boundary between worlds. I can’t tell you if that specific one did it in time or not.” She turned to Minna. “Those coordinates won’t exist anymore. We’ll need to move through the multiverse another way.”

“Should we be worried about these universe eaters?” Minna asked.

“They’re slow. You’ll have plenty of time to leave, every time,” Vita said.

“Be ready to leave inhabited worlds to die, though,” Thrackerzod said. “This ship can’t save them.”

Minna nodded. “Thank you for your inputs. Everyone return to your previous activity. Lieutenant, spin up the Chronosplitter Drive, find us a new way forward.”

“Yes, Captain.”

~~~

Another week passes…

Everyone was crowded on the main screen of the Lounge – those that weren't on the bridge, anyway.

Jenny was gawking. “No way…”

They were witnessing a standoff between not two, but three Class 1 civilizations. A Noble Horrorterror stood at one point of the triangle, flanked by several lesser Horrorterrors. The second side consisted of four Celestialsapiens, one of which had clearly achieved mental balance given the dramatic bodily motions he was making, unlike his three frozen companions. The third side contained one ship – a glowing blue conglomeration of loosely collected parts. A Beyonder Splintership, Vita had told them. She hadn’t been able to tell them anything else about it.

They were sitting in a universe of the Great Void that wasn’t black and empty, but instead a fluidic space filled with a dark green liquid. The sanity filters of the Marianas were currently editing the green sludge out of all visual reports.

In the center of the three powers was a thing. A thing the sensors weren’t able to understand, so they just replaced it with a glowing white orb. It was a source of impossible things – negative mass, inverted time, ka storms, and a power that took normal eldritch power and drove its impossibility so far that even the sensors’ purely mathematical readings were spitting out errors.

“What is that!?” Jenny wondered, putting a hand to her head. “Just… what?”

“No idea,” Mage Rarity said, furrowing her brow. “I’ve been to the Beyond before, encountered some of the truly outlandish. But I don’t have any idea what this is.”

“Dude… …We should steal it.”

A blindfolded glare from Pinkie was terrifying enough to get Jenny to shut up.

“Do you think they know what it is?” Flutterfree asked, hoof to her chin.

“I doubt it,” Hastur commented. “Even I have no understanding of what we’re looking at. And I have seen a few Embodiment experiment worlds designed to tax the limits of eldritch understanding. We never managed to create anything like this.”

“Apparently all three of them really want it,” Jenny observed. “Do they think they can use it?”

“Maybe?” Mage Rarity shrugged. “The motives of the Class 1s are often inscrutable.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, shaking his head. “It’s a powerful, likely unknown thing. It doesn’t matter what any one of them plans to do with it, they can’t just let the others have it. We can still understand their competition motive.”

“Good point,” Mage Rarity admitted. “Still, I wonder what they think it is.”

There was silence as they watched the standoff. The only one of the sides doing anything visible was the Celestialsapien, and he wasn’t transmitting his thoughts in a way the Marianas could pick up. As far as they were concerned, the great powers weren’t talking at all.

Jenny walked up to the screen and placed her hand on the white star visually representing the thing. I wonder if you’re important… Or just a random curiosity we find on our journey and never understand… Are you the reason we fall, or just another speck on the road?

No answer was forthcoming.

~~~

The headache was back. Nova tried to go rest even though they were watching the Class 1s square off – or ‘triangle’ off, she guessed. It wasn’t like they were doing anything, and the thing couldn’t be accurately rendered in a way they could visually comprehend.

So she went to her bed and tried to rest her head.

And then she saw the white sparks again.

This time, however, there was more to it.

A shape formed in front of her eyes – half there, half not. It took the shape of an androgynous humanoid about the size of an apple. While its skin was glowing white, unlike albinos or angels, there were also sharp voids of black dotted in particular places. The fingernails were black while the figure lacked toenails – or even toes. The irises of its eyes were pitch black, making the pupil seem much larger than it was, only accentuated by the pitch eyelashes and eyebrows. There was only the slightest hint of a nose, lacking nostrils, while the mouth was small and pale. The being’s straight hair was pure white; long enough to reach halfway down the neck and cover the ears. The inside of the hair was pitch black, creating a dark backdrop for the being’s head and throat.

Out of its back sprung dozens of papery limbs, drifting behind the body like jellyfish tentacles.

The creature had no gender or, really, any features besides those on its face. If a human were to look at the creature, their mental bias would likely shift to perceiving the being as male – a young boy, as it were. However, ponies tend to have the opposite gender bias, so Nova’s internal processing decided what she was looking at was a young woman of some sort, even though deep down Nova knew this creature was something else entirely.

“…What are you?” Nova asked.

The creature looked into Nova’s eyes, her black irises growing to fill her entire eyeball and then quickly shrinking to a size so small Nova couldn’t see it. The creature smiled. “Looks like it’s finally come around.” The voice was just as neutral as the being’s body, doing little to twist Nova’s perception one way or another.

“Are you going to answer my question?”

The being winked. Then it floated to the right side of her vision and vanished.

Nova’s headache was gone.

She did the only sensible thing anyone should do in that situation.

She teleported right to the captain. “I might have an alien entity in my head. Either that or I’m hallucinating.”

Minna blinked. “…Really?”

“Yes. Really. A featureless girl with papery things coming out of her back just appeared in my vision while I was trying to rest my head.”

“Do you think it has anything to do with the thing we are observing?”

“Maybe it aggravated it? I went to Rarity about a similar issue a week or so ago. But there was no creature in it.”

Minna nodded. “Download an image of what you saw to the computer and then report to Rarity for a full analysis.”

Nova slated. “Right.” She created a projection of what she saw and used her hoof-screen to send it to the Marianas’ computer. “There you go.”

Minna blinked. “…That looks like a girl to you?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“…All right, that’s what it is. Any ideas what we’re going to call her?”

Nothing was forthcoming.

Nova decided to leave them to that and report to Mage Rarity. She told the white mage what was going on and got right into the full physical scan.

Less than a minute later Rarity let out a sigh of relief. “I was afraid it was going to take a while to find. But here it is.” She pointed at a hologram of Nova’s left eye. “You’ve got a camera-sensor in this eye.”

“…Wait what? When did I get that?”

“Well, I can only think of one group smart enough to make one of these who isn’t on this trip. They’d be quite enthralled with the information we collect here.”

“…Melnorme.”

“Yes. Though I doubt it is performing as intended – it’s just allowing you to tap into something else. I’ll have to send you down to engineering to find out exactly how the device works.”

“Can we remove it?”

“Probably. But if you’re the only one who can see this girl, why would we? She may be dangerous.”

“Or be a Melnorme virus.”

“I suppose…” Mage Rarity pursed her lips. “We need the engineers to look at it first regardless. Off you go.”

“Yay, being referenced to a secondary physician.”

Mage Rarity chuckled. “Bad experiences with Earth healthcare?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

~~~

Another set of weeks pass once more…

Nova named the girl White Nettle, eventually, because the papery tentacles reminded her of a jellyfish. Nettle kept showing up in Nova’s vision every few days, but would only speak a sentence or two before disappearing, never giving any information. She clearly understood what Nova said to her and reacted to the words but didn’t seem to care much for what Nova was saying.

They hadn’t learned anything about her, and until they could return to Merodi Universalis for more specialized research, they just had to deal with Nova occasionally freezing in place and talking to something that wasn’t there.

Jenny had taken to watching Nova closely in case any of those moments were about to happen.

It just so happened that today, she was going to get lucky.

Nova was sitting in the lounge, putting aside her prior aversion to playing video games all the time, instead placing herself right in the heat of battle. The game wasn’t Multiversal Heroes, but rather a complex puzzle game based around the fluidity of higher dimensions. Each of the four players was given a ‘cube’ and had to navigate the ever-changing eldritch maze to reach the end.

Nova was about to achieve victory – her little chibi-headed human just needed to climb past the hypercube using the nexus ledge a-

Nova dropped the controller in her magic. “Nettle?” Jenny dropped her controller to watch Nova’s gaze move around the room. “I’m glad you like the name, but I’d like to know what you are. Everyone would. Do you know?”

“YES!” Vriska shouted, tossing her controller in the air. “VICTORY!”

Everyone ignored her, paying attention to Nova. “Well then what do you want?” There was silence as Nova’s expression soured. “That wasn’t an answer, Nettle.” After a moment, Nova let out a sigh. “She’s gone, show’s over folks.”

“Aww, I thought it was just getting good!” Jenny said. “What did you talk about?”

“Well she likes her name. Other than that it was another round of dodging questions with her being cryptic and not all there. There was something about my journey and a big red rubber ball. And apparently I’m ‘a cute horse’.”

“You are though,” Vriska pointed out.

“Yeah. Thanks for that.” Nova deadpanned.

“Could everyone report to a holographic station or screen equipped for transmission?” Minna called. “Five minutes.”

Everyone scrambled for the couch, making sure to cancel out of the game. Jenny was sure the scramble outside the Lounge was a more frantic and less interesting one. Most of the crew was probably standing next to a white orb in the middle of a boring hallway, tragically couch-less. Their loss.

“Wonder what this is about,” Vriska commented.

“Wait five minutes and behold, all your questions shall be answered!” Jenny responded.

Nova facehooved.

She was right. When precisely five minutes were up, Minna and Vita appeared on-screen. “Listen up!” Minna said. “We’ve been on a long journey so far!” A map of the multiverse appeared in front of the two of them. It showed a red path that started near the edge of the Q-sphere, moved ‘west’ to the Strands, and then ‘south’ through the Great Void. At this point, the path stopped being a straight line, instead deciding to twist and turn, go backward a few times, and on one occasion swirl around in a whirlpool pattern. However, despite this meandering, the line tended ‘south’ more than any other direction and eventually touched the edge of a small, red Sphere near the bottom of the map.

At the edge of that sphere was a dot that read ‘you are here’.

“We have entered the Unrealities,” Minna said. “Those of you in the Lounge can look behind you to see the first universe contained within this Sphere, the rest of you can patch it through another feed.”

Everyone turned around to look at the outside display. It showed a world where the stars were clustered in a central ball, and the sky was covered in continents, oceans, and clouds. In between the stars and the ‘fixed Earth’ were a few planets, the sun, and the moon.

“That looks a lot like a standard ‘oddball’ universe,” Minna said. “A standard reversal. Except for two things. One, time does not exist in this universe – everything you see, even the forests that should have taken centuries to grow to their size, had no time to do so. This universe just exists.

“The second thing is going to become evident as we rotate the Marianas slightly.”

As the Marianas rotated, the spherical enclosure they were in suddenly wasn’t spherical, but a painting upon a flat surface. A flat surface juxtaposed with three other flat surfaces, each one with a different image. As the Marianas completed its turn, the view outside was now that of a ‘fixed Mars’ sky while everything else was in the enclosure.

Jenny blinked. “Sweet.”

“This demonstrates an eldritch property we have seen before,” Minna continued. “Some universes change based on what orientation you view them from. Expect much more of this as we travel through the Unrealities.”

Vita spoke up next. “Now, some of you weren’t at the original meeting for this mission.” Jenny could feel the TSAB mage glaring right at her. “So I’m going to reiterate some things the TSAB knows about the Unrealities. The Beyonders and Horrorterrors hold the most territory in this sphere, though they are not dominant. The Horrorterrors have their tentacles full with their space, and these worlds are just as eldritch and bizarre to the Beyonders as they are to us. You’ll know you’ve hit a Beyonder universe when everything within glows with a soft blue aura – their kind needs that to survive. A Horrorterror universe will be generally impossible to differentiate from a standard eldritch one, but as we saw on our journey they generally don’t care about us. But then there are the natives.”

Jenny brightened up. Oooh, natives.

“The Unrealities are a relatively small sphere that contains only two Class 2 civilizations. One is a low-end closer to Merodi in terms of power known as the Shabanash, or the Unbidden to those in the E-Sphere who have been unlucky enough to be victim to their invasions. They almost bestially eat all forms of standard physics energy, which means we are definitely a desirable food source. We should be able to withstand their power and escape if we run into them.

“The other one is a high-end Class 2: the Many-Angled Ones. I would describe them as what the Eldritch Embodiment would be if they got their act together. Normally they would be a big issue since their primary motivation as a culture is to impose rigid geometric order to all their universes, basically reducing it to an always-predictable machine. Luckily they understand the scope of the multiverse and have no desire to upset other powers. If we enter one of their precious mechanized universes they will likely just eject us back to where we came from.

“Other than that, expect to no longer see nothing but blackness outside – we’re in a cornucopia of eldritch bizarreness now.”

“May I remind everyone that this is not our goal,” Minna said. “While there are certainly interesting universes here, the Chronosplitter Drive will be moving us quickly through them now that connections are commonplace again. If we wanted to find these sorts of universes we would spend some time in the Embodiment or E-Sphere Horrorterror Space. We are going through this Sphere to the Beyond.”

“No relation to the Beyonders,” Vita clarified. “They actually don’t have many universes there since their universal-terraforming has difficulty adapting those worlds.”

Minna nodded. “But rest assured, the majority of our journey is behind us. We will soon be in the true fringes of the Multiverse. Captain Minna Belle, out.”

The transmission ended.

And then Nova let out a disgruntled groan. “Nettle, back again?”

Jenny wished she could hear the other end of the conversation.

“That made no sense,” Nova muttered. “…And at least you said goodbye this time.”

“What did she say?” Vriska asked.

“Something about downstream. I’ve basically given up trying to understand what she means. Though today must have been special because she’s never talked to me two times before.”

Maybe it’s plotting our downfall, Jenny thought.

“Maybe it’s like the protomolecule,” Starbeat suggested, having just walked into the Lounge. “After all, the Investigator has to talk to you through a signal of some sort. Maybe the signal is getting better.”

“So, what, the thing was a communication relay?” Jenny asked.

“Maybe. I don’t know, I’m not psychic.”

“I AM!” Pinkie blurted, pulling a crystal ball out of nowhere. “I see… an encounter in the future…”

“Well, duh, we’re going to encounter either the Shabanash or Many-Angled Ones,” Starbeat said. “Why else would we get that repeated spiel we all already knew? The story needed it of course.”

Jenny looked away, disgruntled.

“I mean a special type of encounter,” Pinkie said. “I see… Or, well, I guess sense… A battle on this very ship!”

~~~

Eleven days later…

“I WAS RIGHT!” Pinkie blurted, throwing her front hooves in the air.

A Shabanash energy beam shot past her ear, cutting off some of her mane. The Shabanash itself was a disjointed blue energy being with three ‘eyes’ that looked like miniature stars.

They were currently on one of the lower decks of the Marianas, fighting a squad of a dozen of these creatures. There had been twice as many in the halls a few seconds ago, but they had been quickly taken care of. No more were arriving because the Marianas had successfully jammed their teleportation signal.

The Marianas was having other problems, however. Namely the Shabanash ‘ships’ that were pursuing the Marianas through the multiverse, proving themselves easily able to follow the Chronosplitter Drive through all its temporal shortcuts. Possibly because the Shabanash universes tended to have two time dimensions in them, but nobody was really paying attention to that fact at the moment because they were trying to survive.

Flutterfree flew through the battlefield, the protective marble tips on her wings discarded long ago. She riled up a decent amount of Rage in herself, enough to tear at the intangible Shabanash with her blades. She was one of the few having an easy time damaging the creatures – even the Stands couldn’t touch the impossible beings unless there was soul manipulation involved, and Jotaro’s Passion wasn’t a strong combat stand to begin with.

Nova’s time manipulation was proving to be useless and she had never been great at soul manipulation to begin with. She had taken to teleporting parts of the Shabanash away from their central core, effectively tearing their bodies in half. Sometimes they reformed; sometimes they didn’t. It was basically a coin flip.

Vriska was working with Nova on this, draining the Shabanashes’ luck enough to where the teleportation ‘decapitation’ would work every time. It was slow work, but there were only twelve of them left.

Jotaro took a hit to his heart, falling to the ground. By now, nobody batted an eye – this had already happened a few times during the fight. From her safe place under a full meter of magic shielding, White Mage Rarity detected the fatal injury and healed it before it could result in death.

There were fewer than fifty people on the Marianas. It wasn’t that hard for her to keep track of all of them, especially with the aid of her computer system.

The Shabanash were not receiving expert medical treatment; they were just falling like dominoes. One at a time, their number dwindled.

This didn’t stop Jenny from suffering. One of them managed to cut her in half at the midsection. “FRICKASTICK!” She shouted, enchanting her gloved fist with transdimensional energy and punching the Shabanash to shards. “AAAAAAAAAAA!”

Rarity did not waste her healing magic on the unkillable immortal.

“GRAAAAAA!” Jenny dragged herself across the room, trailing blood as the fight continued behind her. She winced, tossing her lower end forward, having it meet the tops of her removed hips. Her body fused back together in a couple seconds and she was just as ready as she had ever been.

She vibrated her fist with transdimensional energy and charged, smashing the last Shabanash into a thousand tiny pieces. “TAKE THAT!” She spat.

Flutterfree dissipated her Rage. “Oh. All right.”

“You’ve gotten very good at controlling that Rage,” Nova observed. “Made the rest of us look like idiots.”

“Practice makes perfect,” Flutterfree said with a smile.

The Marianas shook. Nova checked her screen. “All Shabanash on-ship have been eliminated, but we’re still being pursued.”

“Why!?” Vriska asked. “We’re just trying to run away! Why are they so fixated?”

“Well, seeing as how more and more of their ships keep showing up, I think we’re running away through their space.”

“Oh. Great.”

“That’s it. This is where we fall,” Jenny said. “‘Sploded by destiny through the acts of living shadows of the void.”

“Yeah, no,” Nova deadpanned. “This isn’t it.”

“How can you be sure?!” Jenny blurted.

“Cause we aren’t in the Beyond yet, and it has to happen there.”

Jenny stared at her. “Wait, you know about it?!”

“Yeah? Everyone does, Twilence told the whole thing to everyone before we le-” Nova looked at Jenny, breaking out into a grin. “You weren’t there!”

“Why would you all go on a mission if you knew you were going to fall!?”

“Bec-” the Marianas shook again.

Outside, the Chronosplitter Drive was jumping from universe to universe, the blue ‘ships’ close behind. The ‘ships’ had no real shape, appearing on all models as ever-shifting blobs of blue energy. They were able to adapt easily and instantaneously to every realm the Marianas jumped into, not having to rely on reality anchors. They were able to transition seamlessly from any dimensional structure to any other while the Marianas had to force everything into three dimensions. It was a serious advantage. The Marianas’s one advantage, a mastery over time, was not helpful against the Shabanash since they had access to a second time axis that the Marianas hadn’t figured out how to contend with yet.

At least the Marianas was almost completely bulletproof, shields able to withstand even the hardest of attacks.

“Shields at seventeen percent,” Vriska observed. “That’s kinda low.”

“No, really?” Nova muttered.

“Sixteen now,” Jenny said.

“Not helping…”

And then the Marianas made a jump while firing a temporal laser behind it.

The universe they ended up in changed everything.

Suddenly there was no time and no space. The Marianas, forcing its own physics, remained completely active.

The Shabanash ships entered the universe and froze, condensing themselves into the aspects of pure consciousness that made up the universe. Consciousnesses that couldn’t do anything to the Marianas.

“Good news,” Minna called over the intercom. “We’re finally in the Beyond. Unfortunately, we won’t be sticking around here long since help is bound to arrive for those ships sooner or later.” The Chronosplitter Drive activated again, taking them to another universe – one completely devoid of Shabanash.

What it did have was seventeen different axes of time, each one represented by a different flavor of gypsum that physically manifested in the souls of all who entered.

Of course all the crew of the Marianas could actually see was a bunch of gypsum rocks floating around in seemingly random directions amidst a void of pink gas. It would take them a while to fully appreciate the bizarre nature of this world.

“Right, we’re stopping here for repairs. Looks like we’re finally out of Shabanash space. Be ready to jump at a moment’s notice should it be needed. Good work everyone.”

Flutterfree let out a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness that’s over.”

“But we’re in the Beyond now! We might be destroyed!” Jenny blurted.

Vriska slapped her. “This is why you attend meetings. And read the mission files.”

Jenny folded her arms. “I don’t do mission files, not unless I want to.”

“And you needlessly panicked yourself for no reason,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“What’s ‘needless’ about it? We’re going to blow up in the Beyond,” Jenny said with a smile. “Pretty sweet, if you think about it.”

“Right, I forgot you had no fear instinct,” Nova muttered. “Pinkie, want to explain?”

Pinkie nodded, turning to Jenny. “Stare into my void, and be enlightened!” Pinkie clapped her front hooves. “Back when this mission was first suggested by Red Diamond after one of her cosmic visions, Twilence’s opinion was sought. She told us she saw a guarantee that the Marianas would fall out here in the Beyond – but she also saw a great holy light catching us up afterward. She guaranteed our safety and our lives. But she also said something more – we’re going to find something out here in the Beyond. Something that has been lost a long, long time. It’ll be like a treasure!”

“We basically took Twilence’s vision to mean that we would die,” Flutterfree said. “But we would be sent do an afterlife universe of some sort, and solve some great mystery or something. That’s what Twilence thinks is going to happen too.”

“Thinks?”

Flutterfree shrugged. “She’s not sure. She knows we all survive this; the rest of it is all fuzzy. She suspects it has something to do with th…” Nova blinked. “Actually that wasn’t in the briefing. You aren’t cleared to know that.”

Jenny narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute! I demand more explanation!”

“What more explanation do you need?” Vriska asked. “Red Diamond suggested we go here. Twilence said it was a good idea and that something major would be found. We know our ship is going to be destroyed and we’re probably entering an afterlife of some sort.”

“…Then how would we keep all the data?”

“Vita’s device,” Nova explained. “Graf Eisen has a backup of all scientific data collected so far within its personal memory. Even if whatever afterlife universe we end up with doesn’t accept ‘partial AI’, Graf Eisen’s mind has been bound to Vita’s soul so we still keep it all.”

Jenny blinked. “…Okay. So basically intentional suicide mission with a cheating way out.”

“Yep!” Pinkie said. “Glad you’re up to speed!”

Jenny rubbed her hands together. “Oh, I am too… I’m very curious to see how badly you’ve misinterpreted this.”

~~~

A couple weeks later…

The Beyond was exactly that – beyond.

The close-knit connections that had existed in the Unrealities Sphere were gone, once again giving way to looser universes. Not as badly separated as the Great Void so far, but bad enough that they couldn’t just move every second if they wanted.

But why would they want to? Every universe they found was something beyond the previous. Each universe took a concept from the Unrealities – say, multiple time dimensions – and ran with it to an absurd conclusion. In one universe, the flow of time determined the positions of physical objects on a ‘grid’ in which everything compressed in on itself. There was another universe where the tiniest subatomic particles were living beings, but they all combined into a single nonliving item. Seemingly paradoxical truths like that were all over the Beyond.

It truly was eldritch squared. Take a plane of existence a mortal couldn’t understand, and then turn it into a pretzel and then eat it while standing seven light years away. Even in eldritch realms, concepts such as logic, position, and minds made sense, no matter how convoluted they were.

Here? Some worlds didn’t have causality. Some universes existed based on math that continually changed, meaning two plus two could equal anything at different ‘times’ – assuming ‘time’ was a concept in that universe.

Several universes flat out couldn’t be displayed visually. The primary viewscreen of the lounge was often nothing but static, pure blackness, or a flashing array of colors that really needed an epilepsy warning. Most research had to be done through pure mathematics rather than standard observation.

Eventually, not even Hastur could go outside without taxing his mind.

But the Reality Shaping Mechanism held, no matter what they were hit with.

They had found no unique civilizations out here, for ‘civilization’ was a concept that required prerequisites to form. In most of these universes they weren’t even sure life was a thing. They had come across a handful of Beyonder and Horrorterror installations. The former were never explored because Beyonders were trigger happy. The latter…

They were currently in one of the Horrorterrors’ outposts. A ‘sphere’ of normal Horrorterror blackness had been inserted into the current universe, surrounded in a ‘perception field’ designed to keep the Horrorterror scientists ‘sane’.

The Marianas was taking a break within this Horrorterror Sphere, which meant the real universe was being filtered twice before reaching the Marianas. Minna and Hastur were currently speaking with Nathalanstanarananahsker, one of the leads of the expedition. He was explaining their main mission – to uncover the history of the Beyond, to determine how these universes had come to be. Unlike other ‘edge’ areas of the Multiverse, where things tended to lose complexity, the Beyond was quite the opposite. It was a major mystery to the Horrorterrors.

Nova was not talking to Nathalanstanarananahsker. Nova was talking to Nettle.

“…You’ve been sitting in the corner of my eye for a while today,” Nova observed. “Is today special?”

Nettle nodded. “Yes. It is.”

“You know about the fall don’t you?”

“You know about what’s downstream, don’t you?”

Nova glared at her. “No, I don’t, that’s the point.”

Nettle smirked, letting out a soft laugh. “You’ll find out soon enough. You should be enthralled, so many mysteries are about to be revealed. You’ve seen so many things on your journey. So many didn’t make any sense!”

“Well, yeah, it’s called the Unrealities for a reason.” Nova aimlessly walked down the halls of the Marianas.

“You’re not thinking big enough!” Nettle said.

“What, the entire journey from Merodi Universalis?” Nova paused, turning a corner. “Or maybe our entire journey in the multiverse?”

“There’s a lot of synapses firing.”

“…I wish Lieshy was still around,” Nova said with a sigh, placing her hoof on an ID scanner, gaining admission to the next room.

“Have you ever heard of Wishing Worlds?” Nettle asked.

“Maybe?” Nova said, walking up to a computer screen with a glazed-over expression. She pressed a few buttons.

“They can do anything. Doesn’t matter the scope,” she said, sitting upside down on the ceiling.

“I bet the Class 1s guard that sort of thing,” Nova muttered, scrolling through a few menus.

“They don’t know where they are. They’ve already used most of theirs. They think they can control everything. But they’re wrong. They don’t understand infinity.”

“True infinity does not exist,” Nova declared, almost robotically. She pressed a few more buttons.

Nettle didn’t respond vocally, instead fixing Nova with a knowing glance.

“What is it?”

“Thank you!”

Nova cocked her head. “For what?”

Nettle gestured toward the computer screen Nova had been typing at for the last minute or so.

REACTOR FAILURE IMMINENT.

“What the hell!? Why isn’t there an alarm!?”

“You disaaaabled it!”

“No I didn’t! You did!”

Nettle smirked. “Your own time stream has looped back in on itself to ensure that my interaction was not necessary. The possibility that you would perform these exact actions was forced from outside during the moment of this universe’s creation, long before either you or the Horrorterrors arrived. It was a specific, calculated measure made through Infinite Possibility.”

Nova blinked – that was the most words Nettle had ever spoken at once. “What in the…?”

Nettle chuckled. “Now all you have to do is press the launch button!”

“Never!” Nova’s hoof slipped and she hit the launch button. “Fu-”

The Chronosplitter Drive tried to jump to the next universe, but in the process of doing so it exploded in a shower of temporal energy that reached from the furthest past to the furthest future of both universes involved. The Horrorterrors had no time to react as the skewed time from the new universe mixed with their carefully constructed bubble of energy, popping it. The two universes mixed together in just the perfectly wrong way, combining into one. They would have fallen into absolutely nothing had the second universe not been connected to something elsewhere.

Several thousand universes back along the path of the Marianas, a thing was still surrounded by three Class 1 powers – each side having increased their number tenfold since the conflict started.

The thing activated, erupting into three separate pieces, each one engulfing a side. One orb obtained the cosmic power of the Celestialsapiens. The second took over the Beyonders’ blue aura. The third grabbed the Horrorterrors’ eldritch minds, combining them together with the impossible nature of the two colliding universes in a single instant.

All because of one carefully placed connection.

Nova saw all of this. And she also didn’t – because she was standing in an infinite plane of whiteness, where the only thing aside from her was White Nettle.

“Where are the others!?” Nova blurted. “What did y-”

“They’re all fine,” Nettle said with a smirk. “After all, it wouldn’t be a very good prophecy if all of it wasn’t true.”

Nova glared at Nettle. “…Nettle, what are you?”

“The multiverse is far older than you can comprehend…”

“Nettle, straight answer for once!”

Nettle looked at Nova and grinned. “Nope!”

“Ne- …waitaminute.”

“The multiverse is far older than you can comprehend,” Nettle resumed. “Your ‘Class 1’ societies have been around a while, have they not? The Xeelee have probably existed within a timeframe you can understand, but all the others… true ancient organizations. Their histories include those of your worlds as little more than a footnote, if that.”

Nova nodded slowly. “Yes…”

“There have been over a thousand Class 1 civilizations over the lifespan of the multiverse,” Nettle said, landing on Nova’s muzzle and making her cross her eyes. “Can you comprehend that? Every last one of them, save for these seven must have fallen.”

Nova furrowed her brow. “This isn’t really new information. We know the amount of time from the Dark Tower’s creation to now was beyond the understanding of even eldritch beings.”

“But not for the Downstreamers,” Nettle said, floating away from Nova. “They saw everything. Truly everything. The entire multiverse was theirs, even if the denizens of every world didn’t think so.”

“And you fell, just like all the others.”

“I never said I was a Downstreamer.”

“It’s obvious you’re at least related to them by the way you’re talking.”

Nettle smirked. “You are a smart one.”

“What’s the point of all this bragging? I get it, you’re from the people who probably made all the Universe Generators way back when. What’s your deal?”

“To prepare you to believe what I’m about to tell you. You believe that there’s no way a prophecy can be accurate if given over the size of the entire multiverse. That the inconsistency of causality destroys true prophecy.”

“Yes…”

“Oh, that’s false,” Nettle said, spreading her arms wide. “How else does the Dark Tower know exactly how many doors to show you when you climb it?”

Nova blinked. “…Might want to ask someone who’s climbed it.”

“Oh, I’m having this conversation with everyone,” Nettle said. “Starbeat’s reaction has been the best so far, but Jenny’s was a runner up. She doesn’t like feeling small.”

“Mhm. So if the Downstreamers could see everything like you’re implying, why aren’t you still around?”

Nettle ignored her. “In our last moments, I was saved. I am uncertain why it was me. Perhaps it was lottery. But the spines of a prophecy were created. One that would require a few things that didn’t exist. A being who truly understood ka, and yet would be fooled by a subtle manipulation of it. An area of the multiverse near the edge that rose in complexity instead of fell. A connection that would be discovered by the ruling societies of a distant era at just the right time. A ka powerful enough to be thought of as a true protagonist. A twist of fate to bring two universes together in the presence of eldritch, ka, and… well, everything.”

“…This entire trip was the last step of an elaborate multiversal ruse.”

Nettle clapped her hands. “Right!”

“To do what, exactly?”

“Return me to what I was before,” Nettle said. “To resurrect a Downstreamer.”

“And I’m getting a sinking feeling in my stomach about this.”

“Needlessly. You are of no concern to me, and I have no intention of engaging in wanton destruction. I’m just here to reclaim what we left behind.”

“I still have that sinking feeling.”

Nettle shrugged. “So does everyone. But your only purpose has been completed. The threads of fate keeping you aloft are gone now be-” Nettle paused, her black irises expanding and contracting rapidly. “…Hrm.”

“We still have it, don’t we?”

“It appears the Tower has overridden us,” Nettle said. “Curious. But it doesn’t matter. The goal was a success. It’s time for you to go home and wonder about this event the rest of your life!”

“Nettle don’t you dare stop this now!”

“Oh, by the way, I really do like the name. I’m ashamed to admit I’ve forgotten whatever mine originally was.”

“Ne-”

Nova and the rest of the Marianas crew were dumped into the main hall of the Hub, right outside the Mirror Portal.

“Ugh…” Vita muttered, standing up and brushing herself off. “Do we have the data?”

Gran Eisen beeped in confirmation.

“Good. I’m going to give it all to Nanoha and then not think about this. The rest of you, do… actually I guess listen to Minna.”

Minna had already stood up, shaking her head. “Everyone, report to the Hub Military Division Offices. We’ll fill out our reports there and then go home.”

“We were lied to…” Pinkie said. “That wasn’t a treasure! That was us being used!”

Starbeat was staring into space. “But I… The Tower… It knows… How in… What!?”

Jenny let out a laugh. “That was the stupidest thing ever. There’s no way. Heheh… No way…” She rubbed her head.

Nova looked down at her screen. Guess we’ve got an extra backup of the data. She scrolled through it, checking the images of Nettle.

She didn’t understand a lot that had happened. But she did know one thing.

Nettle was lonely.

~~~

Nettle began her work of reclaiming Downstreamer remnants.

She didn’t know where everything was – the true omnipotence of the Downstreamers had been destroyed. She had no access to it. But she knew where some of the things were, and that was enough to get started.

Because one of the keys was in Evening Sparkle’s possession. A simple, golden key – being used as nothing more than a primitive reality anchor.

Pathetic. That nature of the key was merely secondary, to ensure that it and its wearer would never be erased by any form of universal alteration. A security measure for existence. She’d get to use it for its real purpose.

I appeared in front of her before she left. “Don’t think you understand everything.”

“I don’t. But I understood more than you.”

“You don’t know of the end.”

“Please, the last time there was an end things kept going anyway. I’m proof of that.”

“The moment you bet on a trope being true universally, it fails you.”

She ignored my statement, opting to smile innocently instead. “You’re upset, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m upset!”

“You just got too comfortable in your own skin.” She looked up. “I’m going to be going now. Don’t follow me.”

I bristled. “Fine.”

She appeared in a universe filled with loose stone objects and a blue aura all around, once used by the Collector for ‘auditions’. He hadn’t known what it was.

It was a home.

Lightning was currently in the universe with a small team from the Collection, trying to uncover its mysteries. They were so far from accomplishing their goal, but it was an admirable attempt. Lightning had the Infinity Gauntlet keyed to the universe – and every time she snapped her fingers to find out more, she ruined the feel of the home.

Nettle appeared in front of them. She had no more need for a pathetic machine to transmit herself into someone’s mind. She could do it directly.

“Get out,” she said, eyes twitching.

Lightning pointed the Infinity Gauntlet at her. “You don’t want t-”

Nettle teleported them right back to the Collection. That was enough of that. She scrambled the location of the azure universe so they wouldn’t be able to find it again. And then she rebuilt it. All the stone pieces fused together into a city – a city for one, complete with a coliseum. The azure void became a deep sky, and blue people began to appear on the streets below.

But they weren’t really people. They were just shadows. After all, this place served the role of a ‘safe space’ within the mind. It was essentially a solid subconscious. A retreat.

The actual mind needed to be created. As much as Nettle had right now, she was nothing to what a Downstreamer should have been. For that she grabbed a universe known to Merodi Universalis as the Duplicator. She placed the key in its central column, annoyed when she had to remove a temporal freezing spell to get the key to turn. Once the key turned, the Duplicator connected to several different universes at the same time, including certain ones from the D-Sphere. All of them were copied together, forming one universe-sized brain network. That brain became Nettle’s mind.

And she could see so much more.

The brain and subconscious universes pulled more to themselves. Now that there was full consciousness, it was time to add more and more and more. The Nexus universes that connected so many universes together? She needed some of those – they would be akin to her joints, connecting parts of her multiversal body together. They obeyed her mind combined with the key without question. They pulled to her the long lost universe creation realms that had been running on autopilot for eternity. They produced the rest of the universes she needed – constructing her full body. A universe devourer to become her mouth. Universes of psychic power to become her eyes. Eldritch realms fused together to produce intense computing systems and a ‘digestive tract’ that used the eldritch beings in a way akin to bacteria in the guts of humans.

Nettle became a mesh of universes, reclaiming a small part of the Downstreamers’ original glory.

This collection of universes was best represented as a giant jellyfish.

The White Nettle.

White Nettle swam through the Sea of Infinite Possibility, moving herself out of sight…

123 - We Will Not Count the Cost

What was the Void, exactly?

Not the nation – the construct that defined the nation; the ancient device that was often called the ‘incarnation of nothingness’. It had existed longer than anyone could remember and did not have the signature of Weaver, Downstreamer, or another common ancient-multiversal construct creator. It was a unique power over nothing that, somehow, turned that nothing into everything. It had access to an exceptionally large area of the multiverse, connecting so many worlds with a similar system of magic, summons, and even similar events, suggesting it had at least an indirect power over ka itself. It could open portals to any universe within its purview, bestow Void powers to anyone it wished, and utterly control the existence or nonexistence of virtually anything. Generally horrible offense, excellent defense.

However, that was only what it did. No one, not even the Empress herself, knew what it was. There had been rumors that the first ‘master’ of the Void, Enuo, had been its creator, and he had clearly believed that had been the case, but it turned out he had merely happened upon it by accident. None of the other masters had figured it out either. As curious as Twilight was, she had never been able to figure out much of anything. It just was.

Theories abounded. Perhaps it was a physical manifestation of the shared ka between the universes it was connected to. Or maybe it was a universe designed to interact with the Sea of Infinite Possibility without falling into nonexistence itself. Maybe it was a superweapon designed to wipe out the entire multiverse, and nobody really knew how to use it.

Whatever it was, it was the only reason the people within were Class 2. Without the Void, they would have fallen long ago. Granted, now that Empress Twilight had been in power for millennia, they had a fleet and decentralized government, but all of that was built on the Void. They would probably be able to survive if the Void were taken out of the equation, but it wouldn’t be a comfortable life.

…There was also the possibility that all the universes connected to the Void depended on it, and that they would cease to exist if the Void was disrupted heavily. Nobody could say for sure. For obvious reasons, nobody wanted to find out.

Nobody but the Combine.

Naturally, they saw the Void as the biggest threat to their operation – it was unbelievably strong and its defensive nature could easily protect Tower Rings from destruction. So, naturally, the conclusion was reached to unleash an all-out attack on the Void with the intent of destroying it and crippling the collapse movement.

Lightning and Starbeat had no idea this was the plan. The Combine hadn’t exactly told anyone the goal of the assault was genocide. They’d just informed everyone that they’d detected a Tower Ring construction near the center of the Void’s universes. While the TSAB used the Kromagg and Paratimers on defense, the Combine had taken some forces from the Collection they had access to, and the Merodi.

Lightning was commanding one of the Collection’s many versions of the Enterprise, flying alongside the Merodi Ytterbium. They themselves were but tiny specks alongside the Combine N7-AU, a biological mesh that looked like a soccer ball with yellow stars at every vertex, and a black hole in the center surrounded by orbiting metallic rings.

This was part of a significantly larger fleet that might well have been a mobile galaxy, considering how many stars were involved.

“The Combine are putting a lot into this…” Lightning observed. “Too much.”

Starbeat nodded. “They must be after something. But this is war – not like we can get on their case about it. They can get whatever they want so long as we stop the Tower Ring.”

Lightning let out a grunt, unsure of what to make of it.

“…Is it getting to you?”

“This was my home,” Lightning said, furrowing her brow. “Before the Collector took me… I was of the Void. One of many Lightnings out among the crystals. I didn’t look back. …But now I am back, fighting against them.” She shook her head. “I never expected to come back at all.”

“Ah. Quite the homecoming.”

Lightning nodded, flexing her Infinity Gauntlet. It was effectively useless in multiversal combat, given its need for the universe to be calibrated around it, but she wasn’t about to let anyone else wear it.

This train of thought made her think about Thanos, and a scowl appeared on her face.

“Focus on the here and now,” Starbeat said, smiling warmly. “We’re here to stop the collapse.”

“Again.”

“…Yeah. Again.”

“It’s always again and again…”

The order went out to move into the Void. The N7-AU activated the Combine-designed reality anchor, the only defense against the powers of the Void. The Void could break through such defenses rather easily – which meant they only had a short window of attack.

There were three jumps needed within Void space to get to the Tower Ring universe. The entire Fleet would have to get there in a handful of minutes relative to their timestreams and unleash enough firepower to destroy the Tower Ring despite the Void’s defenses.

Lightning had run the numbers. They had much more than enough to accomplish that. The firepower they were bringing was absurd. So absurd that they might lose more because they were so tightly packed. She knew the Combine liked to curb-stomp, but this didn’t seem as reasonable as it could have been.

Should have been.

The ships launched to the first universe. The anchors held steady, and there was no planned resistance at this stage – the universe was an empty, unimportant one.

Hell broke loose in the second jump. Ships composed of crystalline entities and magitech entered the space, ringing them with dimensional inhibitors that severed the connection to the Tower Ring’s universe. Despite their anchors, the Combine were going to have to punch a new connection through the multiversal fabric to continue, and that would take time.

Enough time for a battle to break out. Stars exploded, magical ships splintered into millions of pieces, and the death toll rose.

The original plan for Lightning and Starbeat had been to use their ship to board one of the larger Void ships and take it down from the inside, but already there was too much chaos for that plan to work. A smaller Void ship had skewered the Enterprise and the Ytterbium, disabling all three without sending everyone to a fiery grave.

Everyone readied the capture devices and prepared for a face-to-face fight that would end up being rather meaningless. After all, they were just three unimportant ships adrift in the middle of a larger battle; who cared what happened to them?

Lightning nodded to Starbeat, and they went separate directions. Starbeat went to clear out the interior while Lightning teleported herself outside, a force field keeping her from succumbing to the vacuum of space.

Apparently a few others had had the same idea – one of them a very familiar face.

A version of her without an eyepatch or the Infinity Gauntlet. This Lightning had the same gunsword as Lightning, though.

The two blades met with a clang, their bullets flying off in random directions.

“FIRAJA!” Lightning shouted while her counterpart cast “BLIZAJA!”, allowing both of them to discover that, yes, this universe did allow sound to travel through space.

The spells of fire and ice collided, sending the two women flying. They whirled around, casting dual Thundaja at each other, the bolts meeting in the middle and canceling each other out.

Lightning didn’t want to use Ultiga or Gigaflare – the former would just destroy everything, while the latter would disintegrate the other Lightning into absolutely nothing, no way to capture her.

Maybe…

“Meteorga,” Lightning declared, summoning a magic swarm of meteors. She was able to direct them sideways so they would hit the other Lightning from the side, missing the ships entirely. This worked like a charm – the other Lightning could not deal with such an impressive spell, and she was easily captured.

Unfortunately that was all the battling that got to happen. The Combine punched through the dimensional fabric, creating a space-time vortex that dragged everything through it – to the universe with the Tower Ring.

The Tower Ring had barely begun construction – all they could see of it was a basic circular wireframe orbiting a red supergiant star. The N7-AU warp-jumped right next to it, forcing a double supernova to destroy the construct.

“Easy, as expected,” Lightning muttered to herself, trying to figure out how she was going to get to a ship that was still operational to portal out easily. She could use her own device, but there was no telling where in space they were, making it a spatial pain to get anywhere.

These thoughts were pushed aside when she realized the Combine weren’t leaving – they were arranging their ships into a complex geometric pattern.

What are they doing…?

Lightning didn’t get to answer this question at that moment – because Corona flew past Lightning’s vision, locked in combat with Discord.

The Draconequus had clearly been struggling for a while now – having foregone his usual magic of random chaotic amusements in favor of fighting with pure distorted energy. Corona was able to raise a shield of magic to not only block the attack, but reflect it back at Discord. His physical form twisted for a moment, but reformed without a scratch on it. He pulled back his hand, tugging at a Combine ship, throwing the star-construct at Corona like a baseball.

She teleported herself to the other side of the ship and hit Discord in the back with a binding spell, a deep red chain appearing around his midsection. She pulled back her other hand and drained energy from Discord through the chain. He lashed out, attempting to break it, but found that it used his own energy to defend itself.

“How unfair…” Discord muttered.

Lightning rushed in, enchanting her blade with Ruinaja and slicing right through the magic chain.

Corona teleported behind her and pressed a finger to Lightning’s arm – achieving a moment of empathy. Lightning only let her have a second, slicing Corona across the chest even in her semi-conscious state. Golden glowing blood seeped out of the Rogue of Doom.

Corona healed herself in an instant, teleporting to avoid one of Discord’s attacks.

“Lightning, the Combine are trying to destroy the Void.“

Lightning blinked – she knew Corona was telling the truth.

“So what?” Discord blurted, continuing to attack Corona – forcing her to bind him again. “This… Is… War!”

“The destruction of the Void is likely to destroy almost every universe in the Void,” Lightning said, a haunted expression solidifying on her face. “It would be genocide…”

Discord groaned. “Ugh, why can’t the Combine ever play nice?”

“Because they don’t,” Corona said, folding her arms. “I know we’re enemies, but this war is not going to be like the previous ones. There will not be the genocide of races. Right?”

Lightning curled the Infinity Gauntlet into a fist. “We already did what we came to do… This is too far.” She pointed at a seemingly insignificant ship near the edge of the Combine’s lattice. “That one’s a control node. Destroy enough of those and whatever dimensional mesh they’re trying to make should fall.”

Corona nodded. She pushed her hands forward and lit her horn – releasing Discord in the process. He turned his remaining energy on the type of ship Lightning had pointed out.

Corona – or Raging Sights – must have sent a message, because most of the Void ships did the same, taking out the linchpins in the Combine’s structure. The attempt to destroy the Void faltered.

And the Void itself finally figured out how to break through the Combine’s defenses. A sphere of darkness appeared in the center of their fleet, eating it up like candy.

There was a mass retreat.

Corona smiled. “Hey, thanks,” she said, saluting Lightning.

Lightning nodded. “So, now what?”

Corona threw a capture device at Discord. In his weakened state he was unable to resist. “I capture Discord, give you this earpiece…” She tossed Trixie’s earpiece to Lightning. “And then we go our separate ways.”

Lightning blinked. “…You’re not going to try to take me on?”

Corona shrugged – then vanished through a portal of her own creation.

Lightning was alone, adrift in space.

She put the earpiece in her ear. “Hello?”

“Oh, look at you, so lucky,” Trixie spat, clearly upset that Discord had just been defeated.

“Can you do anything to get me out of here?”

“Already sent your location to Starbeat. She’ll be picking you up… eventually. Now excuse Trixie, she’s got a Sombra virus to take care of.” Trixie’s voice cut out.

Starbeat arrived the next moment, teleporting Lightning out of the universe. “What did you do?”

“Stopped a genocide,” Lightning muttered. “Pretty sure Eve and Nanoha won’t consider that treason.” She paused for a moment. “We aren’t mindless monsters.”

~~~

Scarcity pressed a button and erased another USM world from existence.

She wasn’t getting as much enjoyment out of this curbstomp as she had been hoping for. Even when the Merodi reinforcements arrived, there was hardly anything they could do against the Starcross Society's Razor.

It was a simple device, really. It took the corpse of a dead Star and used the energy within to find a Singularity Point within a universe where its structure was weakest, and then it would create an explosion akin to the Big Bang there, destroying everything within. The USM lacked sophisticated reality anchors or multiversal defenses, so tearing them apart was easy. When she finally got to the Merodi, they would be slightly more difficult, but still inevitably they would fall.

An alarm went off on her console. The Razor ship had just been hit by…

“Johnny Joestar…” Scarcity muttered. That man and his ‘Infinite Spin’ was a major pain. All he had to do was shoot one nail into any solid thing, and eventually the Spin would overtake the object’s structural integrity, shattering it. It would be… oh, about an hour before the Infinite Spin moved all the way through the Razor ship, but cutting off the infected section wasn’t going to be easy considering that he shot one of the major power nodes.

She ordered her soldiers to take care of Johnny. All of them fell within a few seconds.

She sighed. “All right, fine. Want something done right…” She teleported to the part of the ship’s hull where Johnny was. She could see the fires of battle happening all around as the USM and Merodi attempted to break through the Starcross Society’s defenses, but were unable to force the universe to collapse. The explosions were mostly far away from the Razor ship, the construct they needed to protect the most.

It was probably a fluke Johnny had gotten here at all.

He was, in fact, riding a pony; an alicorn to be precise. None other than Twilight Sparkle M4 from Equis Eldritch.

M4 said something – but this universe didn’t allow for sound in space, so there weren’t going to be any dry sarcastic comments in this fight. There was a small pile of capture devices at M4’s hooves, presumably filled with Scarcity’s soldiers.

Soldiers that were probably undergoing Infinite Spin and would die if they were released in a universe that allowed Spin to take place. Such as this one.

Johnny aimed his nails and M4 shot a magical laser at Scarcity. Scarcity was suddenly behind them, tapping into the power of the Razor ship’s Runes with her own magic. The yellow glow of the Runes next to her flooded into her horn, creating a sharp yellow point of light. The light transformed into a five-headed snake and charged the very surprised Johnny and M4.

Starcei would know how I did that. Heh.

Johnny found his nails couldn’t spin the light-construct, and M4’s magic was all spent on defense. They were falling back, on the defensive.

Great. All she had to do was follow up…

SUCH OVERCONFIDENCE IS UNBECOMING.

Scarcity blinked. Wait… She couldn’t hear anything out h-

A bony hand touched the back of her neck and ripped her soul right out of her body. She was aware of this – it took the act of her soul being pushed back into her body to force her into unconsciousness.

Death smiled, just like always. He captured her and tucked the ball into his robes. He turned his attention to the snake golem, raising his scythe.

Thanos came out of nowhere and punched Death across the face, the gems of the Infinity Gauntlet glowing brightly.

…THIS COULD BE PROBLEMATIC.

Johnny managed to get a shot off on Thanos, but the Infinity Gauntlet protected him with a barrier of energy.

They had been destroying other universes from this universe for hours. That had been plenty of time to alter it to suit the Infinity Gauntlet. He punched forward with just enough force to send Death flying without heavily damaging the Razor ship.

Death reached out to end Thanos’s life, but the Gauntlet protected him. The Gauntlet allowed him to harm Death physically. The Gauntlet made him invincible.

Death fell, followed quickly by Johnny and M4. Thanos produced three capture devices and imprisoned all three of them.

Then he released Scarcity.

She glared at the three balls in his hand. “You captured them. Why would you bother!?”

“We are not monsters,” he said simply. “Get inside, we’ve been ordered to fall back.”

“Wh- why!? The USM is almost nothing!”

“That’s why,” Thanos said, feeling no need to explain further.

~~~

Scarcity walked into what could best be called ‘Corona’s office,’ even though it looked just like all the other personal rooms in the Raven Hotel.

Corona sat on the other side of her desk. Her hair was messed up and there were a few scratches on her wings, indicating that she hadn’t even cleaned up since her deployment to the Void. Standing next to her was Morty.

Both of them made no attempts to hide their anger at Scarcity.

It did surprise Scarcity that Morty spoke first.

“What the fuck!?” he demanded, waving his arms. “Just exterminating worlds? What were you thinking?”

“Lowering the strength of the enemy,” Scarcity said, as if she were talking to an idiot. “The USM were an easy target.”

“A target that had no capability to create Tower Rings or even provide substantial backup to any of their forces!” Corona shouted. “And you weren’t just attacking their military worlds, you were attacking all of them.”

“What’s your point, exactly? This is an alliance, not a democracy, each of us can do whatever we want for the war.”

“At a certain point you become the enemy of all,” Corona pointed out.

“Remember Gallifrey? Or did you forget already?” Morty asked incredulously.

Scarcity bristled. “The Starcross Society seeks to collapse, not to rul-”

“I’ve been in your head before, Scarcity,” Corona reminded her. “I know exactly what you actually want. You want to collapse everything and keep anyone from ever reaching above a certain level of power. That sounds like control to me.”

“And you think we can do that?”

Corona shook her head. “Not really. The point stands. If you act atrocious enough, you will get your allies to turn against you and attack you. Case in point, I got Lightning to turn on the Combine so they wouldn’t completely destroy the Void. Had your little jaunt gone differently Thanos might have betrayed you for the sake of retaining at least some morality!”

“This is war, Corona!”

“And civilians need to stay out of it!”

“Oh, like we’re not going to kill all the civilians if we win?”

Corona’s expression darkened. “That won’t be our decis-”

“What’s a few million more off to the side, hmm?” Scarcity asked. “Or can’t you do math?”

“Counting deaths isn’t the point here,” Morty said. “The point is fighting a war that isn’t a series of genocides. Both sides of this conflict are done with the collateral damage. War’s supposed to have rules.”

“Then that makes us weak.”

“Not if the other side is doing the same,” Corona said, folding her hands together.

“Then we can get an advantage through it!”

“And trying to use every last advantage is what got all the Class 1s killed,” Corona said. “We can’t let ourselves become soulless monsters. We have to actually care about what’s happening on the realms below us. That’s the whole point of this war in the first place!”

“What’s best is victory at all costs.”

Corona let out a grunt. “Fine, let me put it this way. You’re going to start adhering to the rules of war or we’re going to start blowing up your ships.”

“You wouldn’t…”

“I think after about a third of your fleet’s loss you’ll realize that, maybe, trying to win at all costs will actually make you lose.”

“You’re being illogical!”

Corona slammed her fist on the desk. “It’s my job to make sure we don’t succumb to being evil! If we do, if we make Allure right about us, not only do we lose, but we don’t deserve to win! The way to win a war of this magnitude is to be the good guys!”

Scarcity twitched. “Let me guess, Twilence? You realize that little runaway experiment could say anything and you just take her word for it? I think she’s forgotten where she came from. You don’t have to be the ‘good guy’ to win. Just more right than the other side.”

Corona furrowed her brow. “…I wasn’t there for the Starstream War. I only saw snips of it in your mind. But what I do know is that we can’t afford to take the risk you want to take. Because the Tower exists, this war isn’t just a game of numbers or victory. One plus one does not equal two everywhere.”

“And your math is better?”

“At the very least my math lets us be better people.”

Morty nodded in agreement. “And if we keep doing what you want, the other side will be forced to use genocide. We’ll have the mark of corrupting them.”

Scarcity let out a deep sigh. “Fine. You win. We’ll play the ‘nice war’. See how long it lasts you before you’re begging to use more extreme measures.” She stormed out.

Corona folded her arms and shook her head. “She’s going to keep being a problem… You’d think it would be the lizard supervillain, or the hungry energy beings, but no, it’s the unicorn.” She put a hand to the bridge of her nose.

“She’ll do what she says,” Morty said. “I’d worry more about Phage double-crossing you for his own benefit.”

“It’s better not to worry at all,” she asserted. “Worry only makes us do drastic things…”

~~~

“…UNDERSTAND!?” Eve shouted as loud as she could. With her ears off, she had the capacity to shout much louder than anyone else normally could for longer periods of time, not to mention the addition of the Royal Canterlot Voice.

The High Combine she was shouting at nodded slowly. The being appeared to be a woman made out of crystalline flowers – immensely graceful, but also with a stern face. She stood up and walked out.

Eve sat back in her chair and stretched her wings. “I think she got the point.”

Monika nodded. “She got the point.”

“That wasn’t because of you, was it?” Flutterfree asked Monika.

Monika rolled her eyes. “Of course not. They’d be able to detect that later. I just looked inside to see how it was going – flawless. They won’t be trying that again.”

“Good to know,” Eve said, shaking her head.

“You’ll also be glad to know Corona had a very similar conversation with Scarcity not five minutes ago.”

“…You could see that?” Flutterfree asked, blinking.

“I think Twilence wanted me to see it,” Monika admitted.

“A reminder that they’re trying not to be monsters too…”

Eve smiled, then frowned. “…On one hoof that makes this war less damaging… On the other it makes it harder to see them as real enemies.”

“It’s like we’re developing some freaky honor system on the fly,” Monika said, lying down on Eve’s desk.

“We need it.”

Monika half shrugged with one arm. “If you say so, boss lady.”

Flutterfree rolled her eyes. “She’s not the only one who says s-”

There was a knock on the door. Eve sat up and leaned forward. “Who is it?”

“Roxy,” Roxy said, using her Void powers to slip through the cracks in the door, her pinkish skin reminding everyone of her pseudo-Gem nature. “Got a question for ya.”

Eve had a feeling she knew what it was. “…Yes?”

“Why can’t you, like, get John out of that Pokèball?”

“We don’t call them that,” Flutterfree corrected on instinct.

“Ball, capture device, whatever,” Roxy muttered, clearly thinking nothing of political correctness at the moment. “I just want to know why John has to stay in his.”

Eve pressed her front hooves together, and in front of those her wingtips. “Roxy, you already know why.”

“He’s not fucking dangerous!”

“Yes, he is,” Eve said. “And in more ways than one. Most people I’d expect to not understand this, but you? You’re the Second of Intelligence. You should know exactly what his presence means on the ka-level.”

“And fuckin’ literature girl here doesn’t count?”

Monika raised an eyebrow. “Literature girl. Creative. Flawless insult.”

“At least I don’t rewrite people’s minds to make my insults for me!”

Monika twitched. “That’s Rohan’s department, loveless limestone li-”

“STOP!” Flutterfree shouted. “We are on the same side!”

“Then answer my question!” Roxy shouted. “Why him and not her?”

“Monika’s not a superweapon,” Eve said. “I couldn’t, even theoretically, end the war with just her. John could do that. The Gallifreyans didn’t have him go back to the point Corona made the Message because they liked the first part of the war. But we could, and that would be dangerous. …And there’s the chance he ends up siding with the collapse. We can’t chance that.”

“He wouldn’t do that!”

“I’m pretty sure some of the Skaian Johns ended up following Corona,” Flutterfree said.

Roxy clenched her fists. “That’s not the point, the point is-”

“You want him back, I understand,” Eve said, eyes sad. “But we’re not going to release him – not until after the war’s over, at the very least.”

“He could go back and change it then,” Monika pointed out.

“I’m sure we could convince Aradia to create a safeguard using the TARDIS, Just like the Time Lords originally did. …Half of her, anyway.”

Roxy looked like she wanted to punch her.

“Roxy…” Eve sighed. “I understand. The Time Lords took all your closest friends away from you when they took John. You’re the last one left. It’s painful, you feel alone, and you just want to lash out against those who’re keeping you alone. It’s a mess.”

Roxy’s expression softened. “…Aaaagh, why do you have to be so damn understanding?”

“…I have experience,” Eve said, looking into the distance. “A lot more experience than is probably healthy.”

Roxy leaned against the wall, shaking her head. “…Will you promise me you’ll let him out?”

Eve nodded. “When the war is over, I will. Even if it’s the collapse that wins, if I’m still around, I’ll let him out.”

“…Though in that case you’d need him to undo all the damage.”

Eve rubbed the back of her head. “Eh… Maybe. …We all know our chances of surviving the collapse though.”

Everyone in the room suddenly felt like they couldn’t make eye contact with anyone else.

Eve coughed. “John will be fine, Roxy. Soon as the war ends I’ll figure out what to do. It’ll be one of the first things on my list. You understand, right?”

“Yeah. …Friggin ponies, I really wanted to punch you in the face today.”

Eve chuckled. “You’d be surprised how often I get that. See you around, Roxy – Giorno’s probably looking for you.”

Roxy nodded. “Right.” She smiled and winked. “Wonk!” And then she vanished.

Flutterfree held up a data pad. “Nanoha wants you to meet with her at the earliest convenience. We’re going to have to get to the Void front.”

Eve sighed. “All right then… Living Tribunal?”

“Not available at the moment.”

“Great. Taking the long way around. Monika, did you save that TSAB speeder like I asked?”

Monika smirked. “You bet I did.” She teleported them all to a space dock and took out the TSAB speeder from her files. “Behold, the fastest way to get around the multiverse now! Courtesy of Monika industries.”

“...Industries?” Flutterfree asked.

Monika blinked. “…No idea, actually. Just get in the ship.”

~~~

Renee stood on the balcony of her castle, looking out at the city of Ponyville.

It was every bit as beautiful as always, but something about the view wasn’t doing it for her. Instead of filling her with enjoyment, pride, and satisfaction, she just felt…

…empty.

Perhaps alone was a better word. She felt alone. She was no longer surrounded by constant agents of Expeditions. Since she had passed the military aspect off to Daniel and all other operations were suspended…

She was at work but she wasn’t really doing anything. She just made sure all the paperwork was in order.

It was eating her away, and she needed to talk to someone.

…But who did she have?

Daniel, for once in her life, wasn’t available. Couldn’t support her. He was too involved. And Renee’s fallback pony, her own sister, had become similarly enraged with recent events. There would be no rest talking to them.

Eve and Flutterfree were busy – Eve with managing everyone’s relations within the war, Flutterfree making sure Eve didn’t crack along the way. They scarcely got any time to say hello to Renee, much less have an extended discussion with her.

And all the others? Pinkie, Nova, Jotaro? Even Vriska? All gone. Turned ‘traitor’ and joined the other side.

…She knew Pinkie would be able to help her. What she wouldn’t give to be able to talk with her right now.

She shook her head, realizing that she even missed Pidge. That short little technician who had been the castle’s handywoman for… well, since before the war with Skarn. That had been a long time ago.

But now the castle was abandoned. All her friends were gone.

Who else could she talk to? …Applejack? No… they’d grown too far apart over the years. Same with Spike. Her parents… could never understand her to begin with, not really. O’Neill was just as busy as the rest of them. Plus, Renee didn’t exactly think he’d be a good listener.

There were the ponies who worked the Rarity for You shops, maybe Coco? She was…

I’m just grasping at straws, Renee realized with a sigh. She turned away from the balcony and strode into the room with the Map… Or what had once been the Map. Now it was just a table with a slight connection to the broken Tree of Harmony.

It had been broken for so long Renee had almost forgotten what the room felt like when everything had still been fine. When Rainbow Dash had still been around.

But today, she felt it. That inkling of what things had once been. She put her hoof on the table – and she felt the weak essence of the Tree of Harmony talk to her.

It told her someone saw her and understood her pain.

Renee broke into tears, covering the broken Map with her emotional turmoil. It was no substitute for a close friend; it was nothing close to a solution.

It was just a shoulder for her to cry on, someone who would listen to her struggle. Even if what was heard had no words.

Alone, Renee screamed her heart out.

~~~

I cleared my throat. “I’ve found a Tower Ring that’s somewhat near completion.”

The room turned its full attention to me. Corona, Thanos, Morty, Mage Rarity, Scarcity, Lady Rarity, Red Diamond, Minna, Phage, Ahzek, Edelgard, a Shabanash, and a handful of others were present.

“Well, where is it?” Minna asked.

“Combine space, near the edges of the multiverse in what was once a Spline port,” I laid my notebook down, showing a few sketches I had made of a loose, inactive chunk of the Spline’s structure. “They’re repurposing the ‘junk’ into a Tower Ring. I’ve already sent the exact coordinates to all of your personal devices. They think it should be easy to operate that far out of anyone’s view. There’s no dimensional obfuscation around the universe, just an immense amount of ships and a universe with hard limitations on teleportation.”

“Hard how?” Corona asked.

“Hard as in teleportation is flat out impossible. The universe is routed in such a particular way that all incoming traffic must appear at one location and then physically move to do anything.”

“A choke point…” Phage said, scratching his reptilian chin. “Clever.”

“Could we destroy the universe from the outside?” Scarcity asked.

Thanos shook his head. “It is unlikely they would let a universe of such importance exist without stabilizers.”

I nodded. “They have so many I don’t think even an ‘omnibomb’ could take it out. So we’re going to have to go in and destroy the Tower Ring somehow.”

“Overwhelming force?” Scarcity suggested.

“We’d lose too many ships,” Minna said. “We have the means, but we’re fighting on more than one front here.”

“They likely have defenses against a forced Void connection as well,” Mage Rarity mused.

Red Diamond snapped her fingers. “Of course! The answer is simple. We have to go the way of the small task force. Something they wouldn’t be able to detect until it was too late.”

“Stealth mission…” Corona furrowed her brow. “Minna, how many Void Skaians do we have?”

“Enough,” Minna said. “They can hide a small group from any and all sensors that aren’t ka based.”

“And I can hide that,” I offered. “Minna, do you think you can round up a team?”

Minna nodded. “People who know how to hide, but also destroy a Tower Ring… I think I have some ideas. Give me an hour, I’ll have them chosen.”

“I offer to be the distraction,” Red Diamond said.

“Distraction?” Lady Rarity asked.

“They’ll be able to detect a portal opening,” I explained. “If they don’t see anything come out of it, they’ll be suspicious. But if they see a somewhat large ship with a big gun, they’ll think they found what the plan was.”

Red Diamond nodded. “I will go in, stop for a moment, and then leave before they can shoot, making them think I wasn’t prepared for that level of resistance. They will likely pursue but I can lose them in the Void. It’ll work flawlessly.”

“It won’t,” I said. “But it sounds reasonable. Be prepared for it to go wrong, okay?”

Red Diamond nodded.

Minna stood up. “Meet back in an hour for launch.”

“Right,” everyone said.

~~~

“Guess what we just found?” O’Neill said, throwing a data pad onto the meeting table. He didn’t need to do that – the information was already on everyone’s pads – but he wanted to make a point. Starbeat, Lightning, Eve, Monika, Yellow Diamond, and a handful of others O’Neill didn’t recognize looked at it. Nanoha wasn’t here, seeing as she was dealing with inner TSAB preparations at the moment, so Vita was here in her place. The Combine, Kromagg, and Paratimers were also represented, but at the moment O’Neill didn’t particularly care about them.

“A Tower Ring?” Vita said, raising an eyebrow. “That was fast.”

O’Neill nodded. “I don’t know how the Starcross Society did it, but there is a Ring under construction around the Rebellious Star, deep in Starcross Society space.”

“How did you find it?” a Combine asked.

“Star-connections,” O’Neill said. “The Rebellious Star is still part of the network, even if he is in a secluded sector. We were able to detect a change in his pattern, and Bob’s your uncle, we got the signal of a Tower Ring.”

The Combine accepted this – even though it was only partially true. In reality, Giorno had figured it out using complex analysis of dimensional activity, of which the Star network was a small part. It helped that Merodi Universalis was relatively close to the Starcross Society and could analyze such things without raising too much of a red flag.

It also helped that Roxy could just make anything invisible to everything.

But nobody needed to know that.

“What’s the plan?” Eve asked. O’Neill could tell from her expression and slight change in voice that her ears were on.

O’Neill smirked. “Oh, there’s a plan all right. Starbeat, something tells me you’ve already got the idea.”

Starbeat nodded. “Kill the Rebelious Star and you destroy the Tower Ring.”

Eve’s eyes widened in shock. “But he’s the most protected thing in the Starcross Society!”

“Which is why it’s time to bring back the ka-manipulating devices,” Starbeat said. “We need someone to equip themselves with a Conjoiner and fly into the Rebellious Star. The heat from the Star will kill that person, and the Conjoiner will ensure the Rebellious Star dies as a consequence.”

“That seems imbalanced,” Monika said. “A single person dying takes out a star? Wasn’t there a balance with the Conjoiner?”

“It’d have to be someone powerful,” Starbeat admitted. “Someone of similar importance or scale.”

Eve blinked. “…A Tree of Harmony.”

“Would that even be enough?” Vita asked. “The Rebellious Star is tied to several different versions of himself, not just the ‘core’ one.”

Starbeat nodded. “It should be enough, I just have to make a small adjustment to force the Conjoiner consider minds, not bodies. With that, just take a Tree and throw it into the Rebellious Star and they’ll be Conjoined. It’ll work.”

“I’ll get the Sparkle Census to send out a message,” Eve said. “Find a Tree of Harmony willing t-”

For the first time in over forty years, Eve’s cutie mark sparked with life. It was only for a moment; the weak call of an ancient guardian who knew it was time to move on.

It was trying to tell her something.

“…Nevermind. I think we have a volunteer.” She stood up, grimacing. “I’ll go prepare the Tree of Harmony. I’m sure the rest of you can come up with a suitable military strategy for getting us to the Rebellious Star.”

O’Neill nodded. “You’re dismissed.”

Eve spread her wings and teleported away, unsure what to make of the new development. She glanced at her flank. “Are you sure…?”

There was no response.

~~~

Minna chose Pinkie’s Party as one of the three teams to be sent to the combine Tower Ring. Minna claimed that the other two groups were just as important – a handful of Collection heroes and a troop of Void ‘Chosen One’ type heroes – but Pinkie was well aware the purpose the other two served.

Redshirts. If one team was going to get discovered, it was going to be one of them, not Pinkie’s Party. Granted, all three teams had a method by which they could destroy the Tower Ring – the Collection had their Goku on the team, and the Void humans had a machine on their team called Omega that could apparently rewrite reality.

But they were really relying on Vriska. Vriska, who has just spent the last hour sapping luck from people. In a crowded military base not only was it easy to get lots of luck, but she could do it like a factory assembly line.

She held the infinite-sided die in her hand, carefully poised between her fingertips. “I can do anything.”

“Win the war in an instant?” Pidge asked, typing away at her computer.

“Probably, if you could get me to the right place.” She narrowed her eyes. “Can I alter the construction of the Tower Ring and place it around the Tower?”

“Nope,” Nova said. “If it takes higher societies time to build these things, do you think your little artifact can do it?”

“Eh, probably not,” Vriska admitted, pocketing the blue orb. “But it can sure as hell blow it up.”

“Assuming they haven’t prepared for it,” Pidge pointed out.

“Please, I’m so lucky right now nobody could plan anything.” She snapped her fingers and a milkshake fell out of the sky into her hand. “Fate bows to me.”

“Don’t waste your luck,” Jotaro commented.

Vriska smirked. “Waste? I’ll have you know this is a triple deluxe Sunday smoothie. Worth every bit of luck I spent for it.”

“Just make sure you have enough,” Pinkie said, changing into her red sparkling dress. “It’s gonna be brutal and we can’t take too many chances.”

“…Massacre dress?” Nova said, looking mildly nervous. “It’s gonna be that bad?”

“I think so,” Pinkie admitted. “I don’t think we’re in any danger because…” She bit her lip and didn’t finish the comment. “Regardless, this is a real war we’re fighting in.”

“Bit hard to believe what we’re fighting for, huh?” Nova asked.

“No, really?” Jolyne asked, letting everyone know she was there.

Jotaro looked at her. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

“I’m not,” Jolyne said. “Just… here to say goodbye. Make it back safe.”

Jotaro allowed a slight smile to appear on his features. “We will.”

“And they’re about to teleport us away,” Pinkie said, adjusting the fabric on her dress. “It’s go time!”

Unceremoniously, the five of them were teleported into a hangar in Red Diamond’s ship. Normally, they would have stayed there for several hours while the ship travelled, but this mission was important enough that the Void was going to force a connection to get them to their destination in a matter of seconds. Nova was able to feel the transition from normal space to Void space – the feeling was one of sudden emptiness and solitude.

Just as quickly as the feeling had appeared, it vanished. Red Diamond’s ship was in a universe one jump away from the Combine’s Tower Ring.

“Prepare for deployment!” Red Diamond called. A Void Skaian ran into the room and enchanted all three teams with true nothingness, ensuring they wouldn’t be seen by conventional sensors. Elsewhere, I ensured the Aware couldn’t see them, though to be fair it wasn’t like the Combine were known for being Aware. This was more to keep a Pinkie somewhere from warning them.

The members of all three teams put on bracelets that activated magical auras around them – one that would keep them protected from the vacuum of space and loose radiation. They were ready.

Red Diamond’s ship moved into the universe. While it was passing through the portal, it launched the three teams out an airlock, tossing all of them into the vacuum of space.

Nova grabbed hold of Pinkie’s Party with her telekinesis and dragged them away from Red Diamond’s ship as fast as she could manage, using fast-forward spells to make it further than should have been possible. She noticed the Void using similar time spells, leaving only the Collection’s team anywhere near Red Diamond’s ship after the first few seconds.

And then something went wrong.

Red Diamond’s ship didn’t move back into the portal. It just stood there.

“There must have been a malfunction!” Pidge blurted, her voice carried to the other members of her team by radio. “We have t-”

The thousands of Combine starships opened fire on Red Diamond’s vessel. While the red craft was a marvellous feat of Gem and Merodi engineering, even it couldn’t hope to withstand anywhere close to the amount of lethal force the Combine fleet unleashed. After the flash of light Red Diamond’s ship was nothing. There wasn’t even dust remaining.

The shockwave from the energy blast reached Pinkie’s Party and sent them flying – but it wasn’t damaging. Pinkie didn’t know if the Collection’s team survived, but she was relatively certain the Void had gotten away.

“No…” Nova said, holding out a hoof toward where Red Diamond had been just a moment ago.

“Focus on the mission,” Jotaro said.

Pinkie nodded. “Find the Tower Ring – it’s in this universe somewhere.”

Vriska closed her eyes and pointed her finger in a random direction. “Aaaaand there.”

She was pointing at an empty area of space.

“It’s definitely there,” Nova said, narrowing her eyes. “I’m just not sure how they’re hiding it…”

“Let’s go and find out!” Pinkie said with a giggle. “I’ve even got a way to cheat. You know how this universe disallows teleportation?”

“Yeah…?”

Pinkie chuckled deviously.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

“Oh, Pinkie powers.” Nova facehooved. “Right…”

Pinkie made a mock salute. She pulled a lamppost out of her mane and jumped behind it, dragging her teammates behind her. They appeared on the other side of a Combine turret on the closest ship to the empty spot.

The turret didn’t detect their presence. It continued to point itself at the universe’s only entry point.

Elsewhere, guns started to go off. They saw, closer to the center, some Combine ships were using point-defense turrets to shoot at small targets. Given the sudden appearance of large elemental spells on the outside of those ships, it was safe to assume the Void team had been discovered.

Pinkie’s Party had to force themselves to ignore the suffering – the mission was more important.

They drifted to the ‘empty’ part of the universe. They passed through a strange, jello-like barrier, and suddenly they couldn’t see the Combine ships. They could see the interior of a structure roughly the size of a moon. The jello-like flesh walls rippled with the breath of a tremendous life form. Dozens of country-sized fleshy tendrils came out of the walls and stuck themselves around a glass sphere, inside of which a Tower Ring was under construction.

It was almost complete. The fleshy mass had already grown into the donut shape needed, and half of it was covered in the appropriate circuitry. They could see the warping of space-time in the center of the Ring already, despite it not even being turned on.

“The ripple must be how they’re compensating for the multiple-universes need,” Pidge said, blinking. “I wonder how many dimensions they’ve got stacked on top of each other in there.”

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!” Jotaro shouted, moving them quickly to the side before a Combine laser could hit them.

“Wh… how’d they see us!?” Nova blurted, raising up a multi-tiered magic shield around them.

“I think they felt us,” Pidge said. “We just passed through the outer fleshy wall!”

The Combine ships that drifted inside the fleshy sphere stopped firing – their bullets had already charred the edge of the flesh, despite not being star-powered constructs. The ships defending the interior had to be small enough to fit inside a moon, after all.

“They can’t see us,” Pinkie said with a grin. “All they know is they think the wall felt something come in they couldn’t see.”

She nodded to Nova, and the unicorn used her telekinesis to move them deeper into the flesh-moon, staying far away from the patrolling ships and the flesh tendrils.

“I’m picking up radio chatter,” Pidge said, tapping her earpiece. “They’re sure something went in and are being very paranoid about it. They haven’t figured out that it’s an attack yet, though. Don’t even know that Void power is being used.”

“What are their plans?” Pinkie asked.

“They’re replaying all the sensor data they have. They aren’t finding much.”

The team arrived at the edge of the glass sphere, examining the fleshy Tower Ring closer than before. They could see what appeared to be little houses dotting the edge of the Ring, each one connected to some kind of green circuitry running through the fleshy mass. On the inner edge, giant teeth pointed toward the center, as if ready to shred the tower to pieces – despite the intended purpose of preserving the multiverse.

Vriska pulled out the infinite-sided die. She took a deep breath. “I have enough luck, but I might become a klutz after this. Watch me. Carefully.” She tossed the die into the air.

It whirred through a thousand symbols before deciding on a large circle with three small dots in it. It flashed a bright blue, bright enough for the Combine ships to notice.

They soon cared little about the glowing blue object and a lot more about their Tower Ring. Everything within the glass sphere underwent a subatomic reaction – every last proton and neutron collapsed into their component quarks at a level of energy akin to universes at the start of big bangs.

The matter coalesced into what scientists like to call quark-gluon plasma. Anyone who’s ever seen it in reality calls it something else.

Liquid Cancer.

The plasma appeared like glass, but it also appeared like a swiftly churning liquid. It was bright – but not in the visible spectrum, rather unleashing outrageous amounts of invisible ultraviolet radiation. Anything that was unprotected – namely, the fleshy masses surrounding the once solid Tower Ring – was subject to so much intense radiation that cancer was instantaneous. As it was, Pinkie’s Party was barely able to withstand the result with their protective force fields.

The energy was strong enough to start draining their shields and strong enough to melt the glassy container. It wouldn’t be much longer before it completely vaporized the ‘moon’ it was inside.

“Time to go!” Pinkie shouted.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

Jotaro managed to get them a fair distance away from the Liquid Cancer as it shriveled up the fleshy tendrils, shredding the moon to pieces.

The small ships started to shoot at them.

“Quiznak! I think they can see us now!” Pidge blurted. “Just look at what area of space is preventing the absurd energy from flowing properly!”

“Dammit,” Nova muttered. “Okay, plan, need a plan… Soon as we leave this flesh-sphere we’re sitting ducks.”

“Can we twist back to the exit point?” Vriska asked Pinkie.

“That’d be too convenient right now,” Pinkie said. “I’m thinking something else… Jotaro, can you and Nova work in tandem to extend time stop as long as you need?”

Nova and Jotaro nodded.

“STAR PLATINUM: THE WORLD!”

“Magic… thing that doesn’t have a name!”

Nova and Jotaro juggled time between them – Star Platinum would hold it for a few seconds, then Nova would, creating a pulsing wave of time energy.

Evidently there was some exploitable weakness in this, because about thirty seconds in, their time stop abilities suddenly stopped working.

“Some sort of automatic protocol must have figured it out!” Pidge said. “We’re dead!”

The Combine star-ships fired at Pinkie’s Party.

Pinkie pulled out a giant mirror. One side of the Combine’s lasers reflected right back at their ships, triggering supernovas. The other half hit the undefended side.

The Collection’s Goku took the hit for them. His overly muscular, impossibly strong body tanked enough energy to destroy a solar system.

He was able to keep it from the five of them. He was not able to survive it. After the volley of lasers hit, his body was nothing more than a charred skeleton.

Pinkie didn’t give her team a chance to get horrified by the corpse – she loaded them all into a space party cannon and fired. They blasted the rest of the way to the entry point and opened a portal.

They escaped.

“Mission accomplished…” Nova said, breathing heavily. “That… That was way too close. It was pure luck that we survived!”

“You’re welcome,” Vriska said.

“I just got a signal,” Pidge said. “Minna’s ship will be picking us up shortly.”

“Good,” Jotaro said.

Pinkie narrowed her eyes at Jotaro. “That better not be a ‘we can do this again’ ‘good’. We need a break.”

Jotaro didn’t meet her eyes.

“Tsk tsk tsk… C’mon, I’ll make cake.”

“We can’t fight all the time, Jojo,” Pidge said with a sad smile. “Even if we want to.”

Jotaro let out a short sigh, and they knew they’d convinced him.

~~~

Storm, Jenny, Blackjack, and Alushy sat in the clearing next to the Tree of Harmony. They hadn’t seen Magane since she vanished on the last mission they were on.

Their mysterious vanishing team member was far from their minds, however – for they were watching the uprooting of the Tree of Harmony. All four of them felt the need to be silent and reverent as the action was performed.

Four ponies stood in front of the Tree – Eve, Renee, Flutterfree, and Applejack. Next to them was a team of Gem engineers, all of them carefully placing devices around the Tree to ensure its movement would be gentle and comfortable for the Tree.

The Tree of Harmony flashed, lighting up their cutie marks one last time. Many universes away, Pinkie felt it as well.

The five remaining Elements of Harmony popped out of the tree, falling back to their bearers. Flutterfree, Renee, and Applejack regained the necklaces of Kindness, Generosity, and Honesty. The crown of Magic reformed on Eve’s head after having been absent for so many decades.

The branch of Laughter dropped its Element onto the ground. The blue balloon found no bearer, but it was ready. Renee picked it up and looked to Eve. She nodded, allowing Renee to keep it.

The branch of Loyalty was still blackened from the day Rainbow Dash died. It mattered not that the pillar of Bravery lived, nor that the Loyal dragon Smolder still breathed. There had been a fundamental break in Loyalty itself, the effects of which were only now being truly understood.

“Had she been around… this would not have happened,” Applejack said.

Nopony argued with that.

Applejack looked to Eve. “Ah don’t know what to tell you. Ah guess the Tree wants to do this… but Ah still don’t like it. Didn’t Cosmo do this?”

“Cosmo lost the Elements as well,” Eve said, looking up at her crown. “We’ll keep them. It’s the Tree of Harmony’s spirit that matters for this.” She turned to Storm. “Guard her with your life.”

“…Her?” Alushy asked.

Eve didn’t feel the need to engage with Alushy. She simply turned around and waved a hoof – telling the Gems to uproot the Tree of Harmony.

The machines shoved their geometric shapes into the ground, tearing the Tree out. The Tree floated in the air. It didn’t scream in pain – the uprooting process had been as painless as expected – but it was suffering. It had no Elements, one of its branches was broken, and it had lived to see everything fall apart.

It was tired.

Eve shook her head, wiping away tears. She placed one of the Conjoiner devices in the Loyalty branch. “Good luck, old friend.”

The Tree of Harmony flashed brightly in response, using its energy to create a sparkling hologram version of Twilight. “I never thanked you for all you’ve done.”

Eve smiled sadly. “You’ve done more than we ever could have.”

“It was a team effort. I have faith you will be able to move on without me. Whatever the end may bring.”

Eve held out a hoof. “Are you sure about this?”

The hologram placed a hoof on Eve’s, sending a chilling sensation through the alicorn. “I am sure. It is time for me to do something rather than give it to others. Take my essence and use it wisely.”

“They’re safe with us.”

The hologram nodded – and dissipated. The Tree of Harmony was done talking.

Storm, Jenny, Blackjack, and Alushy took up positions around the floating Tree. In a moment, they were all transported up to the Austraeoh, in one of the hangar bays.

O’Neill was there, waiting for them. “Storm, Jenny, Alushy, and Beryl… I can’t tell if you lucked out or are about to suffer a horrible fate.”

“We’re not the ones on a suicide mission,” Jenny said. “I think we’re lucky.”

O’Neill shrugged. “We’re going for a blitzkrieg strategy. Overwhelming force and an instant execution – so hold onto your hats.”

“There’s only one hat here,” Alushy said, pointing at her head.

O’Neill shrugged. “Then hold onto your gloves or whatever. Just don’t let your guard down for a second. They’re going to figure out what we’re trying to do, and they’ll want to kill the Tree before it has a chance to do what it needs to. If they somehow get on the Austraeoh, keep them down. Got it?”

Storm saluted. “Yes, sir.”

O’Neill smirked. “Don’t die.” He teleported to the bridge.

It was less than a minute later when the fleet launched. The Austraeoh took place in the center of a fleet consisting of thousands of ships. They were going to strike at the heart of the Starcross Society – nothing less would be adequate.

Jenny activated one of her Numenera devices – an eyepiece that allowed her to tap directly into a digital feed. She saw the strategic display of the fleet, every last ship represented by an orange-gold dot.

The dots split up into several different groups – they were still moving in tandem with each other, but they were moving across several dozen different universes at the same time. Advanced TSAB technology forced connections to exist between the universes they were moving through, creating a battlefield that the Merodi would be able to navigate, but not the Starcross Society.

The Austraeoh ended up in a universe with accelerated time – allowing them to exist ‘outside’ the general flow of combat the rest of the fleet was experiencing. It became impossible for Jenny to keep track of the fleets at the speed they were now moving compared to her. She watched hours pass by as the edge of the Starcross Society was torn to shreds, universes were moved, and millions of ships were destroyed. She saw a number in the bottom left corner that represented the number of enemies captured.

It was entering the millions. They had lost many more soldiers on their end.

“MOVE OUT!” O’Neill shouted. After a day and a half of outside time, someone had finally forced a direct connection to the Rebellious Star’s universe from Austraeoh’s universe. The Austraeoh and its surrounding guard fleet pushed right into the Rebellious Star’s realm, firing all weapons.

The Tower Ring was fully visible around the red glow of the Rebellious Star. Unlike the Combine’s Ring, which had been a relatively small construct of fleshy mass, the Rebellious Star’s ring orbited it like the rings of Saturn. Perfectly smooth, metallic, and covered in runes salvaged from Starcross Society ships.

“I AM SORRY THAT IT COMES TO THIS,” the Rebellious Star said. It unleashed a beam of powerful energy – and then fled to another universe.

“FOLLOW HIM!” O’Neill shouted. The Austraeoh and its surrounding fleet opened a portal, but the Rebellious Star had already jumped to another location.

Luckily, the Austraeoh was still equipped with the largely-antiquated Nova-drive. It found the Rebellious Star’s connection to the Star network and latched onto it, jumping directly to the Rebellious Star.

Only a handful of the fleet’s ships could follow the Austraeoh – they had not expected the Rebellious Star to run.

The Rebellious Star opted to fight the fleet with its own power. Beams of red light swept across the ships, destroying them easily. Another version of the Rebellious Star appeared in the universe, moving in time with his other self.

“RELEASE THE TREE!” O’Neill shouted.

The Tree of Harmony was teleported outside the Austraeoh and sent tumbling toward the Ringed Rebellious Star.

“Huh,” Jenny said. “Guess we didn’t have to do anything.”

“Wrong!” Alushy shouted. “Blackjack, teleport!”

Blackjack teleported the four of them out into space next to the Tree of Harmony, and Alushy raised a barrier of darkness to protect the Tree from a loose Starcross Society weapon. “The Rebellious Star has to fucking kill it!”

“I AM NO FOOL,” the Rebellious Star addressed them. “I WILL NOT LET YOUR PLOY BE MY END.”

The Tree of Harmony flashed in anger, sending a beam of Harmonious energy at the Rebellious Star. It was enough force to make the Rebellious Star defend itself and the Tower Ring.

“I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE BETTER THAN THIS.”

The Tree of Harmony didn’t respond.

The Austraeoh unleashed one of its many on-board superweapons – this one a twisted beam of rainbow energy laced with dark shards of anti-magic crystals – and hit the corona of the Rebellious Star. It let out a deep roar.

Storm used one of his artifacts to protect the Tree of Harmony from another attack. “The big ships will get here soon. Blackjack, how close can you teleport the Tree?”

“Not close enough,” Blackjack admitted.

“Aren’t you the Princess of the Night or some shit?” Alushy shouted. “You got those fancy wings!”

Blackjack blinked. “I… Yeah, I can move the moon, but the Tree isn’t the moon.”

“The Rebellious Star is nothing more than a big, red Sun,” Jenny said. “Try it.”

Blackjack did. She touched the Rebellious Star with her magic and pulled.

She pulled way too hard. The Rebellious Star charged toward them so quickly none of them could react in time.

Luckily the Austraeoh’s on-board computer could, teleporting them away just before they were cooked to a crisp.

The Tree of Harmony was left in space to be incinerated by the power of a Star.

The Rebellious Star let out the Star’s equivalent of a sigh. “I HAVE LIVED A LONG LIFE, LONGER THAN I SHOULD HAVE. TELL SCARCITY I’M SORRY.”

The Tree of Harmony melted within him, its essence dissipating into nothing.

The Conjoiner activated. Ka lashed out within the Rebellious Star, and the red ball of plasma exploded, tearing the Tower Ring apart with it. The other versions of the Rebellious Star lost their minds - becoming nothing more than flaming balls of plasma. The other Star that had been fighting a minute ago didn’t have the capacity to save itself from the supernova.

“Fall back!” O’Neill ordered. Every ship still able to move within the fleet left Starcross Society space, leaving a gaping hole in their society.

Blackjack looked at her hooves as they left, blinking. “…How are we still alive?”

Nobody wanted to answer her question.

~~~

Valentine was taking the Louisiana back from a meeting in TSAB space to D.C. Prime – the capital of the entire United States of the Multiverse.

Valentine sat in the captain’s chair, tapping his fingers across the armrest, realizing how little the ‘rest’ part was helping him. He was not at rest. He was more on edge than he had ever been.

Scarcity’s little playtime genocide had been focused almost entirely on the USM – killing everyone without a care for which world it was, or if the world was even important. He hadn’t been able to keep a close eye on the internal politics of the USM over the last few days, seeing as he was managing a large portion of the war effort, coordinating with his teams. But he knew that the people were in an uproar. If they weren’t angry before, they were now.

They had lost twenty-three percent of the population. Almost a fourth, just because one unicorn higher up the chain had a bone to pick with… He wasn’t even sure what Scarcity’s motivations were. She had never been a primary concern of his since the TSAB had pushed the Starcross Society back.

Froppy must have detected his inner turmoil. “We’ll survive. The people’s wills are strong.”

Gyro let out a snort. “Yeah, right. We’ll sing a magic song of friendship and band together. Zippidy-do-dah.”

“Gyro!” Froppy chided, hands on her hips.

“Just tellin’ it like it is. You tell ‘em, Tornado.”

Tornado looked up from her book. “…I think you’re wounded emotionally.”

Gyro twitched. “Why couldn’t you have been a bitch about that? If there was ever a time…”

Tornado grunted. “Like I’m going to do what you want.”

“There it is!”

“Stop,” Valentine muttered, hand to his forehead. “Just stop. We do not need to become like the rest of the nation.”

Gyro had the decency to look ashamed for a split second before blowing it off in a huff. Tornado simply stared ahead, blankly.

Froppy sighed. “We’re not done yet.”

Valentine folded his hands together. “I’m not certain of that…”

“Valentine, y-”

They heard the sounds of laser gunfire in the hall behind the bridge. All four of them readied themselves for a fight.

They heard screams, shouts, and the sounds of blood splattering on the other side, followed by silence.

Then a loud burp.

The door opened, revealing an older man with spiky blue hair and a decidedly grumpy expression.

Froppy blinked. “Rick Sanchez?”

“Yeah, who else?” Rick muttered. “Took care of some assassins. You’re fucking welcome.” He kicked his foot forward, dropping a USM soldier into the bridge.

“That is one of our soldiers, not a goddamn assassin!” Gyro blurted.

Rick burped. “He was outside the door with a half dozen others, all pointed at the door and not me. So at the very least they were all doing their actual job like shit.”

Valentine leaned down to check the soldier’s weapon. “This is set to a setting high enough to blow out the ship’s walls. That should have set off some alarms.”

“See? Whoop de do, I saved your asses.” Rick pointed a gun at Valentine’s head. “Now tell me what I want to know.”

Valentine narrowed his eyes – he had some alternates on standby. He could slip into one of them. Maybe he could be the one to take down the infamous Rick San-

“Oh, yeah, this is a reality destabilizer, your Stand won’t be surviving the hit.”

Valentine grunted. “What do you want?”

“Who destroyed Blips n’ Chitz?”

Valentine blinked. “…What?”

“Gambling universe,” Gyro said. “I took you for your birthday six years ago.”

“How would I know who destroyed Blips n’ Chitz?” Valentine asked.

“Because it was your fucking nation that was being blown up at the time! So who did that!?”

“Starcross Society,” Valentine said.

“I want a name, greeting card.”

“Scarcity.” Valentine’s expression became confused. “…Do you not know who that is?”

“No. Why should I? I don’t give a fuck about this stupid war, I’m not keeping all the ‘big names’ worked out!” He pulled a data pad out of his pocket and typed in Scarcity, easily pulling up the information. “And now it’s time to brutally murder a unicorn.” He opened up a green portal and stepped through it.

Then his other hand popped out and shot Valentine in the head.

“VALENTINE!” Froppy shouted, running to him.

Valentine appeared on the bridge, with D4C. “Fine. I was able to transfer away, evidently.” He teleported the old version’s dead body into storage.

“Why would he do that?” Froppy blurted.

“It’s Rick, since when does he have a reason?” Gyro asked.

“He wanted to make a point that he lied to us about the gun,” Tornado said. “Flaunting the fact that he can get away with anything.”

“We don’t have time to worry about him,” Valentine said, narrowing his eyes. “The fact remains that there were assassins on our ship. Something’s gone wrong. Connect with the USM news feed.”

Tornado nodded, pressing a few buttons on a console. She blinked. “I’m… not getting anything.”

“No relay?”

“No, I’m picking up the relay device, it’s just not receiving any information from the USM. Radio silence.”

“Try Merodi,” Valentine said. “A public channel.”

“Won’t tell us much…” Tornado said, adjusting a few knobs. “Got it. News reports… Successful campaign against the Starcross Society… Loss of Earth Ottoman… The U-” she stopped herself, blinking. “What the…”

Valentine pulled out a data pad and tapped into the same feed Tornado was.

The USM Coup is Heading For Disaster

Just an hour ago, the organization known as United Heralds revealed its presence within the United States of the Multiverse, assassinating the President and most of her cabinet, in addition to key leaders both political and military. While the United Heralds had been hoping their show of power would scare the people into submission, they have instead triggered a complete collapse of USM society. The divide between the USM’s political parties has produced a Civil War that has already destroyed all the USM’s major infrastructure.

We stopped receiving broadcasts from them five minutes ago, suggesting their media conglomerates have fallen…

Valentine clenched his fist – and then relaxed. A mildly amused smile came across his lips. He shrugged, dropping the data pad onto the ground, letting its screen shatter. “I guess we always knew this would happen.” He sat down in the captain’s chair and crossed his legs. “Take us to Merodi Universalis and ask for asylum. It will be granted.”

Froppy looked at him with concerned eyes. “…Valentine…”

“It’s out of our hands now. And unlike when Corona said it, I happen to be right. It won’t do any good to worry about it anymore.”

Gyro looked him up and down – and then let out a bitter laugh. “So this is what it looks like when you break.”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

~~~

Flutterfree landed in the grass outside Rev’s church, placing herself right between Rev and Rina. “What are you looking at?”

Rev pointed at the church. “It’s ready.”

“How so?” Flutterfree asked.

“It’s a fully realized bunker,” Rina said. “Should be able to survive the fusion of any universes, no matter how many. …Should.”

“Could never have done it without your magic,” Rev said, putting a hoof on Rina. “Thank you.”

“…It was the least I could do. …Actually, wait, that phrase is stupid…”

“I get the jist of it,” Rev said, smiling.

“So… what are we going to do with a bunker church?” Flutterfree asked.

Rev let out a deep sigh. “Try not to let anyone know about it. We don’t want a mob here.”

“…Which makes it kind of hard to use,” Rina admitted, furrowing her brow. “How do you save people if you can’t tell them about the place?”

“Only people you trust?” Flutterfree suggested.

“That’s only a few dozen people. The church can hold a few hundred.” Rev shook her head. “But it only takes one to spill the beans and then the mob destroys the church… I’ll be praying about it. I’d appreciate it if you all did as well.”

“Don’t even need to ask,” Flutterfree said.

“…Right,” Rina said, shaking her head. “...Other than that, what do we do?”

“I keep helping Eve,” Flutterfree said. “Rev keeps teaching.”

“And me…?”

Rev put a hoof on Rina. “You can take a break. You’ve earned it.”

Rina twitched. “I don’t like taking breaks.”

“Peace is one of the fruits of the spirit, you know.”

Rina grunted. “Fine, fine, I’ll try to learn peace. In a time of complete war, I’ll try to learn peace.”

~~~

Deep in TSAB space, there was a single electron kept in a state of permanent uncertainty. Using a clever workaround in the physics of the universe it occupied, a nano-camera could be pointed at the electron in an attempt to take a reading, but since the electron was uncertain, the camera would never see anything. For in this universe, the observation of an experiment did not change its outcome, it just meant that certain things could not be observed.

Naturally the apparatus with the uncertain electron within had to be constructed across multiple universes in order to get the uncertain electron in there and stable. Furthermore, there were numerous other devices affixed to the edge of the electron’s casing, each microscopic chip being from one of the TSAB’s few ka research facilities. One of these chips was affixed to an electron entangled with the other one, both existing in a state of uncertainty.

This little decision matrix was hooked up to a giant computer that was designed to know the answer to one question, and one question only.

Do they know?

If they didn’t know, the light remained green.

If they did know, the light turned red and alarms went off everywhere.

In the span of time it took to explain the inner workings of the decision matrix, the light had turned from green to red. Alarms blared all across TSAB space, going right to the highest leaders.

They know.

How did they find out? Did Twilence tell them? Did the Tower reveal it through narrative? Was there a leak?

Those were questions to ask later; right now they needed to protect what was no longer hidden.

Nanoha appeared in the universe, the red light to her back. In front of her was a gateway opened to a universe consisting entirely of water, within which a Tower Ring was being constructed by about fifty TSAB construction ships. Their Ring was about the size of Neptune and constructed from white metal that occasionally sparked with pink or purple colors. It was only about two-thirds built. Sometimes it looked almost complete through the gateway, but that was an illusion.

The gateway and the Dark Tower itself were the only ways into the aquatic universe. The realm that held the Tower Ring was sealed off from all other worlds in such a way that it was an immense drain on power just to keep the gate open. On one hand, this made the world exceptionally easy to keep away from enemy movements. On the other, if they did get close, it would be easy to sever all connections and force the Tower Ring into the nonexistent state of the Sea…

Good thing they were prepared for an assault.

Nanoha lifted Raising Heart and gave confirmation – they needed to initiate full defensive measures.

Taking a page from the Collector’s handbook, they started shuffling the universes around the Tower Ring. What was once a simple, ordered section of TSAB space became a multi-layered labyrinth of constantly-shifting universes designed to throw all who appeared off the trail. The armies were already in place to defend the multiversal mesh, and several TSAB megastructures were arranged within the labyrinth as well. The Living Tribunal would be arriving soon as well, having the Shaping Mechanism transported via the Void.

This Tower Ring was the preservation side’s primary tool. They weren’t going to let it be destroyed.

The only ones to know how the labyrinth worked were in the same universe as Nanoha – and they would not be permitted to leave, for the secret of the labyrinth could not be revealed. In order to prevent seers and Aware individuals from finding out, all the information was given in direct-to-mind transfers that couldn’t be translated as a language or images.

It was a decidedly unusual feeling, but it was also intuitive.

Nanoha knew exactly how the labyrinth worked and where all her troops were in real time. She started giving out orders from her protected location.

She hoped the other fronts of the war could carry on without her presence.

Author's Note

140 - United We Stand

The ‘crew’ of the carrier stared at the receding image of Lord English displayed on the main screen. There were far too many people in the ship for everyone to get a good view, but that didn’t matter; somehow they could all see the red and green monstrosity marching away from them, dark scepter in his hand.

My last sentence had filled them with a deep, unnatural fear that most of them had not felt for decades. If ka had brought their minds one thing, it was a sure belief that no matter what happened, something truly evil could never absolutely triumph. There would always be hope for a victory, or a twist that would show the evil a lesson.

But if English was banking everything on twisting the story…

The safety net of ka was effectively gone. It could no longer guarantee his defeat.

I could not see his defeat. I could see… the Tower, a city, and a lot of pain in the future, but my visions still weren’t as definite as they once were. They would not reach a particularly useful level before English did whatever it is he had set out to do.

Nothing could be taken for granted…

No one knew what to do. All were silent, uncertain, terrified. What could be done?

Pinkie bounced to the front of the room, standing between the ‘crew’ and the screen with English on it. She held a hoof to her chest, holding both the Element of Laughter and her blindfold close. With a sharp ‘ahem’, she began talking. “So, we’ve got a new enemy, perhaps the biggest bad any of us have ever faced. A lot of the things we have taken for granted and counted on in the past can’t give us the confidence we need. We’re scared, trembling, and think we can do nothing against this monstrosity. And you know what? Maybe we can’t. Maybe Lord English is destined to complete his evil plan and we’re all just going to have to deal with it.

“BUT!” She shouted, holding up a hoof. “Who cares if it’s hopeless? Why not fight anyway? Why would we let him have what he wants? If he’s going to destroy everything we hold dear, at the very least we’re not going to make it easy for him!” She put on a playful smile. “We have a lot of powerful and narratively important people here – Saitama, Monika, Caliborn, Lightning, Twilence, Discord, Death. If we put our minds to it we could fight against an entire universe at once! That should give Lord English something to think about!”

“You’re assuming all those people you mentioned are willing to work with you,” Starbeat interjected.

Pinkie glared at Starbeat. “We worked together to defeat the Nihilists, we can do it again. You can’t stake the fate of everyone on a petty disagreement!”

“That’s why I won’t be,” Starbeat said, walking through the small crowd until she was inches from Pinkie’s face. “I’ll let this force have Saitama, Monika, Caliborn, and even provide military support from the Hub itself. But I have one condition. You, your team, and Twilence all come with me. You’re going to face justice, Pinkie, and no amount of being the hero against a new foe is going to save you.”

I blinked. “Starbeat, we all need to be here, to fight togeth-”

“You said it yourself, we can’t take ka for granted,” Starbeat interrupted. “It won’t matter if any of them are there or not. Monika can do most anything you can do, and Caliborn is a much better fit for ‘blast from the past’ than Vriska is.”

“Monika is not a Prophet,” I bristled.

“And you can use your Prophet Powers from a distance if we need it,” Starbeat responded, tossing her mane back.

“…Why are you doing this?” Flutterfree asked.

“Let me put it this way,” Starbeat said, knitting her brow. “If I don’t do anything now, you’ll be part of the effort to stop Lord English. Assuming we win, you’ll be heralded as heroes and all the heinous acts you have committed will be forgotten because suddenly you’re the heroes again.” She violently threw her hoof to the side, glaring at Pinkie. “I’m not going to let the story twist in that direction. So if you want a fighting chance to face Lord English, you’re going to have to turn yourselves in.”

Pinkie looked at Starbeat with sad eyes. Starbeat’s goggles kept her own expression obfuscated.

“…Okay,” Pinkie said. “I’ll turn myself in. Jotaro, Pidge, Vriska, I suggest you do the same. It’s not an order.”

Jotaro and Pidge didn’t hesitate, they stood next to Pinkie and put their hands behind their backs. Vriska, on the other hand…

“Are you serious!?” she blurted. “We have to be there!”

“Vriska, Starbeat’s right,” Pinkie said. “She may not be Aware, but she knows how this works. Our presence in this carrier won’t make a difference.” She glanced at Starbeat. “She’s also right that if we’re the heroes, we get off scot-free. Isn’t that right, Twilence?”

I gulped, but nodded. I would have preferred it was something I didn’t know, but the Eye of Rhyme apparently wanted to see this clearly.

Pinkie put on a smile. “Plus… I have this feeling we’ll find our own purpose back at the Hub.”

Vriska sagged. “Fine.” She pointed at Starbeat. “But you’re being a fucking bitch.”

Starbeat lost her calm demeanor in an instant. “Takes one to know one, traitor!”

Vriska’s hard exterior fell and she shrank back like a scared kitten. She submissively put her hands behind her back and bowed her head.

Starbeat put magical restraints on Jotaro, Pidge, and Vriska. She didn’t bother with Pinkie – the only way the pink pony was held anywhere was by her choice. Then she turned to me. “Just hold still…”

I stared at her with contempt. “No. You’ll have to catch me.” I teleported away before she could do anything.

Starbeat let out an intense roar, a vein popping from her forehead. “ALL OF YOU, GET HER BACK HERE, NOW!”

~~~

I teleported numerous times across the surface of Nucleon until I decided I had used up as much of my reserves as was safe. I pressed myself between two very different peaks jutting from a toxic mire below. One was frigid and was made of ice, while the other was clearly volcanic and shimmering with a reddish glow and smoke. The two geological giants managed to be so close to each other that I could barely fit between their helix-like windings, the sharp difference in temperature taxing my defensive aura. But it was a good hiding spot with enough ambient magic that I could recharge so long as I was willing to feel a little discomfort from the environment.

This was the first point I wondered what I was doing. I was risking the aid of Starbeat’s people by running away. I was fairly sure she hadn’t gone so far off the deep end that she would refuse to help because of my personal decision, but I couldn’t be certain. Not quite yet, at least.

What could I even do on my own? I knew from experience that my usual advantages fell to pieces against any enemy with significant ka manipulation, and Lord English was the end-all of ka-manipulating enemies at the moment. He had an upgraded Black Thirteen. He could remove ka powers with the snap of his fingers… The rest of his outrageous abilities were nothing compared to that.

He was playing the story, and there was no way I could do anything about it. Not on my own.

So why was I out here? Why wasn’t I handing myself over so I could at least possibly be useful?

Really, just because I was angry at Starbeat for being so… So angry. It went both ways, when seen from a certain light. She was a masterful student of ka and fate, how could she not understand how and where things were going for her? That she was becoming an antagonistic presence?

…Maybe she did know, and like Lord English she was going to do whatever she could to make what she could from it. A defiance of the definition of ‘hero.’ Considering what she’d been through, it wasn’t all that surprising she was tired of ‘heroes’ and what they stood for.

It was at this point I sensed Monika appear neargy. She hovered in the air less than a hundred meters from my hiding place, scanning the area. If she’d had access to my powers, she would have found me instantly. As it was, she had to physically create a ka-following subroutine, which gave me some time.

…Though the moment I left the hiding place, teleport or otherwise, she would sense me immediately. I could probably take her in a fight, but she would call in reinforcements, and all of them together could definitely incapacitate me.

I needed to think of something. I took out my notebook and laid my pen to the paper.

A hand encased in a dark blue glove stopped the pen, another pressing a ‘shush’ finger to my mouth. I slowly directed my eyes upward to see Roxy standing inside a nearby wall, using Void to make herself intangible.

I felt her encase me in the similar Void energy, allowing us to shift away from reality. Soon, as far as existence was concerned, we didn’t exist.

This did not stop Monika from following the ka-trail to us. But when she arrived, she found nothing. She grimaced – thinking that I must have had time to adjust the ka-trail so she couldn’t follow it. I had plans to do that later, certainly, but I had foolishly spent the time I could have done that on the introspection a few paragraphs above.

Eventually, Monika decided to leave in a flash of glitchy energy. Roxy did not drop the Void shield – but she did allow herself to speak. “What can we do without them?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted, looking down at the toxic swamp below us. “If I was smart, I would have handed myself in.”

“And it would be wrong,” Roxy said, shaking her head. “Pinkie was wrong too. Just handing yourselves in like that… It gives her power. You all should have called her bluff.”

“I don’t think she was bluffing.”

Roxy fell silent and shook her head. “We’re all royally fucked, aren’t we?”

A slight smile crawled up my features. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“Then un-fuck it,” Roxy said.

“How?”

“Write a story.”

“Lord En-”

“Who cares if he could negate it in an instant?” Roxy demanded. “Pinkie was right – we try anyway. We can’t go back to the carrier and follow him, so we have to do something else. What can you and I do? We can hide very well and we can understand ka.”

I blinked. “You’re right… I’ve been so busy dwelling I didn’t realize. You and I, we’re separated for a reason. The camera is on us – we must be doing something, or have some point that must be made.” I took out my notebook, scribbling a few things. “I may not be able to see what’s going on far beyond here… but I can prompt something to happen. Just need to…”

I trailed off as I began to scribble, recording the essence of the conversation Roxy and I had just had. I went on for a paragraph about the poignant silence before moving on and vaguely describing something heading right for us. I had no idea what it was – but by describing it, I knew I would prompt something to happen. Something that would further the story Roxy and I were now a part of. It would gift us a new stimulus.

I looked up. “We might want to watch the horizon,” I said. “Something’s coming.”

“What kind of something?”

I grinned. “That’s the fun part. I have no idea!”

~~~

Monika returned to the carrier. “She got away.”

“What do you mean she got away!?” Starbeat demanded.

“I mean I traced her signature and ran into a dead end. She had time to clean it. She’s gone.”

Starbeat twitched. “She… She…” She rammed her hoof into the floor. “That’s it, someone’s going to pay f-”

Gamzee put a hand on her shoulder. “I think we should motherfuckin’ chill a bit.” He gestured at Pinkie.

“Right, right…” Starbeat shook her head. “Gamzee, you’re with me to watch the prisoners. Rest of you, stay here and do whatever the others tell you to.”

She expected the usual griping complaint form Caliborn – but for once, he was completely silent. She knew he heard her because of the slight nod, but his focus was elsewhere.

Probably trying to come to terms with English. Starbeat turned away, not giving the cherub another thought.

Flutterfree walked up to her. “I’m coming with them.”

“Flutterfree, you’re not a tr-”

“The only reason I didn’t run away with Pinkie that day was because she told me to stay behind - which was the right thing to do,” Flutterfree smiled warmly. “I may not have committed any of your ‘crimes’, but I am going to stand by them.”

Starbeat looked her up and down. “…Fine. You can come along. Anyone else?”

“Me,” Lightning said. “I need to make sure you really will send us backup.”

“Understandable,” Starbeat admitted. “I have no problems with that.”

“Strange, Sherlock? I’m sure you can manage things here.”

The two men nodded.

Starbeat lit her horn. “We’ll take one of the pods. It’ll be cramped, but it’s not that far to the Hub.” She jabbed Pinkie with a magic shove. “Move it.”

“You aren’t painting yourself in a very favorable light,” Pinkie observed.

Starbeat created a seal around Pinkie’s mouth, making no further response. Pinkie shook it off her face but decided to keep quiet regardless. She looked closely at Gamzee with an unreadable expression.

“Like what you see?” Gamzee asked.

Pinkie turned tail and trotted toward one of the carrier’s pods. Soon, Pinkie’s Party, Lightning, Gamzee, and Starbeat were all gone.

“Now that that drama is out of the way, we can actually plan,” Sherlock said. He pointed at Monika. “You already have one.”

Monika nodded. “Saitama can defeat any enemy in one punch if he puts enough effort into it. Black Thirteen can remove this power, but I can keep giving it back to him by altering his file. The plan to deal with the Crimson King was to get him with one – or more – of those always-winning punches.”

“We can’t assume he’s susceptible to that now,” Strange pointed out.

“Then we just need to add some more elements,” Monika said. “We have Insipid, Death, Cosmo… Pinkie was right, we have a lot here. Ways to keep anyone from dying and to restore any lost powers.”

“And we have a few redundancies,” Sherlock added. “He’s just got the mother of all doomsday weapons in his hand, and we don’t know what it does.”

Death nodded. AND THE MOMENT WE TRY TO EXPERIMENT HE DESTROYS ME IN AN INSTANT – AND LIKELY ALL THE OTHERS.

“Limited information…” Cosmo rubbed her chin.

“Then act with what you have,” Rina said, taking a step forward. “Plan for every contingency. Every contingency. Don’t be afraid to sacrifice or destroy lives. Do what you have to do to maximize all chances of victory.”

“That would take a supercomputer,” Strange said. “Not even Cosmo’s AI has the capacity to run all those numbers. And we can’t factor ka into it…”

“I can do it,” Sherlock said, folding his hands together. “I already don’t like the odds of what I’m coming up with, though. It would be very beneficial if I knew what his goal was. I…” He blinked, turning to the crystal around Cosmo’s neck. “Starlight, correct?”

“Yes,” the Starlight AI beeped.

“Analyze English’s movement patterns up until this point. Where is he headed?”

“Processing… Prior to now, it appears he was moving in a semicircle designed to intersect with the Crimson King at a specific angle to produce the events we just witnessed. However, now that this is complete, he is traveling the same way the Crimson King was. A perfectly straight line along Nucleon’s surface.”

“Do we have any idea what’s in that direction?”

The Starlight AI processed this for a moment. It then projected a map of Nucleon and its single ‘orbiting’ planet. A blue light appeared at the point on Nucleon’s surface directly below the planet. “This is the only place of interest I found.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “Do we know what’s there?”

Strange shook his head. “Scans were too sketchy when we came in. We would have investigated, but we’ve been busy.”

“Then that’s where we’re going,” Sherlock said. “He’s walking so slowly we should pass him easily. He wants us to pass him. To make it more difficult for himself…”

“We, like, can’t not fight,” Insipid reminded him.

Sherlock smirked. “Uncharacteristically wise words. Strange, shall we?”

Strange put his hands on the controls. “Setting a course…”

“I wonder what’s there…?” Discord wondered aloud.

“My bet is the Dark Tower,” Sherlock answered. “But it could be any number of other things… Or perhaps a combination.”

“There is only one way to find out,” Trixie said. “PUNCH IT!”

Strange didn’t punch it. He pressed a button and the carrier sailed off, leaving Lord English in the dust.

English’s methodical marching continued like clockwork.

~~~

Mattie, Nettle, and the Everykid were taking a Skiff down to the City, leaving the bulk of the fleet in favor of experiencing the city below.

The Everykid was driving, and driving well. Apparently she was exceptionally skilled in the art of spaceship piloting, which Mattie only found slightly unusual and Nettle didn’t think was something to even think about.

“I hope this gets to be a vacation,” Mattie said.

“A… vacation?” Nettle asked.

“You know, when you take a moment off your job and all the stress to just go somewhere fun and reeeeeelax? Where y-”

“I know what a vacation is. I’m asking why you think now is a good time to have one.”

“Well, let me put it this way. I was stuck on a ship without a stallion in sight for a whole month. Not to mention Swip didn’t really have any opportunities for privacy and believe it or not I have enough of a heart to restrain myself so people aren’t scarred for life. Much. And the icing on the cake is now that I am in a fleet, guess what? That’s right, I’m considered one of the ‘leaders’ and I have to keep myself prim and proper for the sake of society.” She said the last word with distaste. “I need a release. And the City better have some equivalent to Vegas.”

“…Vegas?”

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” Mattie quoted.

Nettle furrowed her brow, trying to understand.

“I feel like I should mention that I’m unusual, again, before you start trying to apply what you’ve learned from the manic masochist unicorn. Most normal people don’t get me. Perfectly fine in my book, but the rest of the ponies won’t like it if you threw a leash around them.”

Nettle smiled softly. “I get that.”

“Not sure you do,” Mattie said, pursing her lips. “Hey, at least you’re trying. I call it progress.”

“…You’re a good pony.”

Mattie smiled. “Thank you. Wasn’t always this way, y’know. Used to laugh at a lot of dark things. You could blame it on my universe, I suppose, but balls to that, even then…” She rolled her eyes. “As absurd as failing to hang yourself by a licorice rope is…”

Nettle cocked her head, confused at Mattie’s tangent.

“Yo! Kid! Can you take a turn explaining stuff to her? I’m making really bad impressions over here.”

“Nope!” the Everykid called back, pressing a few buttons on the console to adjust course.

“…Balls,” Mattie muttered. “Forgot you don’t really talk…”

The Everykid shrugged, adjusting her hat.

Mattie turned back to Nettle. “It’s… It’s like this. When you’re sitting in bed…”

“I think this is a bad metaphor,” Nettle interrupted her.

“In bed alone,” Mattie clarified, rolling her eyes. “I bet sometimes things come to your mind about the past. They come seemingly out of nowhere and latch themselves into your mind, holding very tight.”

Nettle blinked. “So, a normal night?”

Mattie facehooved. “Celestia on a bicycle we’re at an impasse… Look, sometimes things you regret come back to your mind in full force and demand their way in like an unwanted lover.”

Nettle’s blank look remained.

“Kid! Help!”

The Everykid just laughed.

“…Ask Servitude about it,” Mattie concluded.

“Sure,” Nettle said, tapping her fingers together. “You’re all so different. I don’t know why that surprises me.”

Mattie shrugged. “The moment you stop thinking about just yourself is the moment you start realizing how complex other people are.” A lightbulb went off in her head, prompting her to ram her head into the wall. “Uuuugh…”

“What?”

“Irony. Dripping, brutal irony. I’ve become the voice of wisdom.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Yes, but the damn irony is basically an anvil to the face. …Actually, never mind, that’s not bad. Being denied an anvil to the face. There we go.”

Nettle blinked.

Mattie put her hooves in her hands. “Kid, are we there yet?”

The Everykid shook her head. She pressed a few buttons – and then sat bolt upright. “That’s not good.”

When the Everykid spoke more than a couple words, everyone knew to pay rapt attention. Nettle and Mattie turned their chairs to look out the window.

In front of them was Flep the Celestialsapien.

“MOTION CARRIED.” He snapped his fingers and all the power in the Skiff went out.

“Shiiiii-” Flep tapped the Skiff with his finger, sending it into a meteor-like nosedive to the surface of Nucleon.

Nettle paled. “Wh-what do we do?”

Mattie looked to the Everykid. “I’ve got nothing on me but a couple o’ whips and an amazing fashion sense. You?”

The Everykid jumped out of the pilot’s chair, allowing Mattie to take over. She bounced to the back of the Skiff and pulled up a hatch in the floor, giving her access to the lifeless engine. With a quick flick of her head, she removed her hat and dug into it, pulling out a white hourglass of immense temporal power. After spending all of a second examining it, she shrugged, threw it into the engine, and closed the hatch.

Power was restored to the ship. Mattie pushed the thrusters as hard as they would let her, slowing their descent.

Nettle let out a sigh of relief. “That’s good… I was afraid for a second there…”

“That was a Celestialsapien,” Mattie reminded her. “If it wants us to crash…”

The engine exploded, removing the entire back half of the Skiff and ejecting the Everykid into the atmosphere of Nucleon.

“…then we’re gonna crash.”

“We’re going to crash!?”

“Yep.”

“DO SOMETHING!”

Mattie pointed at the hole in their Skiff. “And what in Celestia’s name would I be able to do about that?”

Nettle’s brain stopped working. She passed out.

“…Balls, I was hoping she’d activate her powers or something…” Mattie gulped. “Well, time to figure out how to survive this one.” She cracked one of her whips for dramatic effect.

~~~

Roxy and I teleported into Sunny and Daniel’s Skiff. “Hi.”

“WAUGH!” Sunny blurted, flipping out of the chair she was in. Daniel took us in stride and nodded to let us know he had registered our presence.

Sunny stood up and shook her head. “I would say ‘don’t do that!’ but I get the impression you already know.”

I nodded. “Yes. Yes I do.”

“So… Are you here to take my ship?”

I blinked. “What? No. I mean, I’d like to use your ship, but I don’t really need it and I’m not going to take it from you.”

Sunny’s demeanor loosened considerably. “It’s good to see you have at least some sense. You’d be surprised how many people want to keep fighting.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said with a sigh. “I had to run from a bunch of our old friends because Starbeat demanded I turn myself in as a prisoner.”

Sunny blinked. “Ah. I take back what I just said.” She turned to Roxy. “What about you?”

“Helped her escape,” Roxy answered. “I… didn’t want to see her taken in when she could be a great help.”

“Help in what?”

Roxy folded her hands together. “Lord English and the Crimson King were both released when the collapse happened. Lord English just used Siron’s staff to defeat the Crimson King and take Black Thirteen, combining all the related powers into one. And now he’s marching toward… Something.”

I furrowed my brow. “Yes, something…” I scratched my chin. “We’re trying to figure out what we can do without running into everyone else and getting captured.”

Sunny turned to Daniel. “Well… We’re just getting away from the Hub to see if we can complete Daniel’s… I’m going to call it a mission.”

I turned to Daniel. “I was wondering how you could be up and about in… your condition.”

“Something’s unfinished,” Daniel said, his voice so raspy it was painful to hear. “I need to finish it.”

“And you have no idea what it is?” Roxy asked.

Daniel shook his head, falling silent.

“Whatever it is, it’s keeping him going,” Sunny added. Even if he shouldn’t be standing anymore.

I furrowed my brow. “What could have been left unfinished for you…?” I looked deeply into him, focusing my powers onto his essence to see where his story might lead. He was supposed to lose all will to live and waste away, but something contradictory and powerful was demanding he keep moving, no matter how much it hurt. It flew in the face of what his story was supposed to be. But why would he be suffering like this, and not anyone else? What could it be?

A lightbulb went off in my head. “The… Emissary of Ka.”

“What?” Sunny asked.

“Well…” I looked closely at Daniel. And suddenly I knew I couldn’t reveal the identity of the Emissary to him. “Information is spotty, but the Flowers have created a voice to speak the ‘will of the Tower’. This entity would be able to twist ka in exactly this way. It has the connections, the reason…”

“So I need to find the Emissary…” Daniel blinked. “Doesn’t sound quite right…”

Because it’s much more personal than that.

“It’s something to go after,” I said. “A lead, if nothing else.”

“How could we find h- it?” Roxy asked, catching herself.

Sunny looked to me. “I have detailed navigation systems and you have the Eye of Rhyme. Surely something as important as this Emissary would be traceable.”

“If it wanted to be,” I mused. “Worth a shot. I’m plugging myself into the Skiff’s systems. Prepare for a flood of information…”

“Cross-referencing,” Sunny said, pressing several buttons with her magic.

Within a few minutes, we had a pointer. A little arrow telling us which direction the Emissary – Renee - was in.

Roxy cracked her knuckles. “And now we punch it.” She literally punched the throttle, forcing the Skiff forward at a rapid pace. “Do we know how far away it is?”

“Not really,” Sunny said, examining the arrow. “It’s just a directional. No magnitude.”

“We’ll know when we’ve passed it at least,” I said, ruffling my wings. “Now how about w-” I saw something out of the corner of my perceptions. “Look to the sky. Now.”

Roxy pulled up slightly. We saw it instantly – a heavily-damaged Skiff missing its entire back half, spiraling down through the air in an uncontrolled fall.

Roxy didn’t need to be told. She pushed the Skiff toward the falling wreckage. “Twilence, get ready to catch that…”

I lit my horn and spread my wings. “Ready.”

It would have been a routine fly-by grab were we overtop of a normal part of Nucleon. As I should have expected, we were not on top of a normal area, we were flying over a large landscape of ancient technological circles, glowing circuitry, and ancient power.

Below the crashing Skiff the ground opened up. A series of metallic rings engraved to look like they were made from black bricks flew out of the ground like a hungry snake ready to devour the smoking disaster.

Meanwhile, we had our own problems to deal with – around the line of rings, dozens of smaller brick-like chunks orbited around in chaotic patterns, a bit like a whirlwind. Roxy was able to pilot through them, but it made it difficult for us to get a lock on the falling Skiff.

“Executing teleport, prepare yourselves…” Sunny said, focusing. A second later we were inside the rings, finding the eye-of-the-storm equivalent had no swirling stones in it. Roxy was able to shoot towards our goal at a rapid pace.

All the while, the outside whirlwind of bricks started to build a structure around us as we flew, glowing with an ancient radiant energy I didn’t recognize at first since I was too focused on the falling Skiff.

I almost had it. I almost had it in my telekinesis. But I hesitated, not willing to take the risk. My only opportunity fell away.

The Everykid landed on our windshield at high speed, using her complex platforming skills to keep herself from injury, but she was completely unable to keep our Skiff from spinning out into a wall. One of our wings was completely flattened by the impact and we began to fall to the ground.

The structure built itself around us, blocking out the twilight glow of Nucleon before we completed the crash. We were cut off inside an alien structure that hadn’t existed mere seconds ago.

~~~

A pod descended into the hangar of the Merodi Universalis Hub, landing neatly in a parking spot that had once held a visiting Skiff.

Starbeat kicked the door of the pod open and jumped out. She let out a sharp breath to calm herself and pulled her mane back into a more organized arrangement. “Okay, everyone out, this road trip from hell is finally over.” As the mostly-prisoner crew filed out, Starbeat turned to see who was greeting them. She was not surprised to see Azula and Storm standing there.

She was surprised to see Charter-Overhead Evening Sparkle, Princess of Friendship and Magic standing there with a very displeased expression.

Starbeat grimaced – she knew full well what Eve probably thought of the Hub she had created. “Eve, I know you’re upset, bu-”

“You’re right I’m upset! I-” all the anger melted from Eve’s face when she saw a particular face crawl out of the pod. A regal yellow pegasus with a faintly sparkling pink mane.

“…Eve…?” Flutterfree said, eyes widening.

“F… Fl… Fluh…” Eve didn’t have enough syllables. She rushed Flutterfree and pulled her into a tear-filled hug with a ferocity that Flutterfree matched. Despite the pain such force caused, the two wrapped their wings around each other, simply happy to be in each other’s presence.

To know the other was alive and well.

“E-eve…” Flutterfree said, noticing the way her ears were twitching. “You… You can hear again!”

“Y-yeah,” Eve said, smiling. “I… I decided it was time for a change. There’s a New World and… all. You look like a Princess.”

“I think you’re rubbing off on me.”

Eve giggled. “That probably has something to do with it.” She held Flutterfree close. “…I have so much to tell you.”

“Same. …It has to wait, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah…” Eve looked up. The first thing she noticed was Vriska and Starbeat refusing to look at her or Flutterfree. Vriska had an arm to her eyes – while Starbeat was just standing angry with Gamzee at her side.

The next thing Eve noticed was Pinkie.

Pinkie with eyes.

Her heart shot into her throat and tears started falling down her face. Flutterfree graciously let her go to walk to Pinkie.

“Yeah!” Pinkie said, a stupid smile on her face alongside the tears she was letting flow freely. “I’m back. Curses aren’t permanent anymore. Can’t be.” She and Twilight shared a hug – nothing compared to the one that had happened a few seconds prior, but still a sight to behold.

A few seconds passed – and Eve backed away and sighed. “You’re her prisoners, aren’t you?”

“Yep,” Pidge said, gesturing at the restraints on her hands. “Well, Flutterfree and Lightning aren’t. I think. Flutterfree got her powers locked, regardless.”

Eve took turns hugging Pidge and Jotaro. “I’m sorry you have to go through this.” Lastly, she turned to Vriska. “…Especially you.”

Vriska was trying really hard to hide the fact she had been crying. “…Yeah… This fucking sucks.”

“Well, I’m going to see what I can do to fix that.” Eve turned rapidly to face Starbeat – the tear stains somehow making the alicorn significantly more menacing. “Starbeat, I’ve seen this place, I’ve seen what you’ve done to this place out of anger. This isn’t going to fly. I’m going t-”

“We’ve got other motherfuckin’ stuff to deal with,” Gamzee said. Eve felt something hit her and make her words stop instantly. “Need to organize some help. Evil stuff around.”

Eve looked to him. “You… What did you…?”

“He’s right,” Lightning said, keeping Eve from getting any further. “The Crimson King and Lord English have fused. They need to be stopped before they can threaten this New World. I’m here to secure military assistance. We are lacking in large forces.”

Starbeat turned to Storm. “Get her whatever she needs.”

Storm nodded. “Right this way.”

“Lord English? The Crimson King!?” Eve said, her minor suspicions blown out of the water by this new revelation. “What’s going on!?”

“There’s a lot going on you don’t understand,” Starbeat said. “This New World is in the hands of th-”

Pinkie cleared her throat. “I’m going to stop you there before you start repeating things AGAIN. Eve, long story short, Siron’s staff was a ploy by English all along. If he was ever freed, he would use the Juju to absorb the Crimson King and become more powerful. He has, and he’s got meta control, and he’s making it extra-difficult for himself so the story can be ‘satisfying’ with his victory. It won’t be good. So, in order to get Starbeat to behave and work together, I offered my team up as prisoners.”

“She’s going to execute you,” Eve stated flatly. “Phage and Rosalina have already fallen. Corona’s sitting in a cell, waiting for the same fate.”

“CORONA!?” Starbeat shouted, veins pulsing.

“Yes. Corona. Our friend,” Eve said, poking Starbeat with a wingtip. “She and I traveled here together. And she was thrown in jail by Storm. Seeing you now, he was certainly right that was what you wanted.”

Starbeat’s expression clouded. “Eve… I can see we’re going to need to have a conversation.”

“Actually, we don’t. I outrank you by far and since all members of the collapse technically rescinded their Merodi citizenship, it falls under my jurisdiction to work with them however I see fit. They are to be pardoned pending further review at a later date.”

“Azula, take Pinkie, Jotaro, Pidge, and… Vriska to a holding cell.”

Eve let a spark fly off her horn, letting Azula know now was not the time to take a stand. Azula nodded and escorted the four prisoners away, leaving only Eve and Flutterfree with Starbeat.

“I could call this treason. But I won’t.” Eve ruffled her feathers. “I’ll give you the same pardon I’m giving them after this is over. You’re technically outside my jurisdiction, but as the only Overhead here right now I-”

“Storm is acting Overhead.”

“Daniel was here yesterday,” Eve said with a smirk. “Alive. With enough of his wits about him t-”

“You don’t get it do you?” Starbeat asked. “The Merodi Universalis you built is gone. There’s nothing left for you to rule over.”

Eve nodded. “In that case, all Merodi laws are void and Corona and I are not subject to y-”

“I make the laws here,” Starbeat interrupted. “And those laws say that everyone involved in the collapse will face justice. Corona most of all. She needs a fate worse than death.”

“She already has it,” Eve said, anger draining from her face. “She never wanted to survive.”

“Tough luck, it can still be worse.” Starbeat turned tail. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

“You are not going anywhere until we resolve this,” Eve demanded.

“Fine,” Starbeat said, not turning around. “Let’s go to my office. Gamzee, tag along will you? I don’t want this to get… messy.”

~~~

The carrier and the handful of accompanying ships flew in formation to the Dark Tower. They had expected roses and high amounts of ka upon arrival. What they had not expected was a fully-armed city ready to shoot them out of the sky at the first sign of trouble.

Insipid had been the first one to point it out. “Like, I think they’re pointing weapons at us.” She pointed at hoof at the triple-pronged house-sized turrets that lined the wall, all of them turning to point at the incoming ships.

Strange reacted first. “Don’t fire! We come in peace! This is Doctor Strange of Earth MC, do not fire, I repeat, do not fire!”

The turrets all pointed directly at them – but they did not fire. The carrier and associated ships stopped moving to look as non-threatening as possible.

“Why aren’t they responding?”

“Because they want to give us a show,” Sherlock said, pointing up at a descending ship. To their awe, the streamlined form of the Austraeoh descended from the sky, placing itself between them and the City. Then a communication line was established, placing O’Neill and Minna on screen, standing together.

“Welcome to the City in Earth’s Shadow,” O’Neill said with a smirk. “Sorry about all this, but we’ve got to make sure we know who’s coming in and out of the city. High alert right now.”

“Considering what’s charging toward your city right now, I can’t say I blame you,” Sherlock said.

“Charging toward our city?” Minna asked.

“Lord English has absorbed the power of the Crimson King and is heading this way.”

Minna nodded. “And now we know the identity of the threat…”

“We’ll need everything you know and everything you have,” O’Neill continued. “We need to make a plan.”

Sherlock let out an amused grunt. “I think you’ll like our selection.” He gestured at Saitama and Monika. “I also think you’ll be glad the angry people aren’t here. She would have balked at working with Minna.”

“Who?” Minna asked.

“Starbeat. Of course, she’s under the influence of some kind of psychoactive ability, but I am uncertain if that absolves her of blame or not.” He shrugged. “Point is, she’s not here, we can get to work without her interfering and possibly still get the aid of the military she is sending.”

“The more help the better. We can’t let t-”

Nanoha entered the call. “Strange, I’m afraid I don’t know you that well, but I am glad you made it through.”

Strange nodded. “Thank you, High Sovereign.”

Nanoha rolled her eyes. “Everyone still calls me that. Really, I’m just the mayor here. Building a fortress.”

“Saw the evil coming and decided you needed to put an end to it?”

“…You could say that.” Nanoha looked into the distance. “I’ll need all of your leaders to attend a meeting so we can explain what’s happened and plan. Even with all these defenses, ships, and deity-level beings on our side, I don’t like our odds.”

“The final boss,” Discord mused.

“Maybe,” Nanoha admitted. “We’ve got Randall Flagg in custody. And… the Emissary of ka.”

Monika’s eyes widened. “She really exists?”

Nanoha nodded. “Renee’s body is being used as a puppet by a… thing that ‘speaks’ for the Tower. She will no doubt be in the meeting. Such things amuse her.”

Sherlock leaned forward, folding his hands together. “I’d very much like to meet this… Emissary.”

“You won’t have to wait very long. O’Neill, take them in, record everyone they have on board, then send whoever’s prudent directly to the private lobby.”

“Yes ma’am,” O’Neill said, saluting. “Sherlock, how long do we have?”

“If English doesn’t speed up? A little over a day. Rest assured he’ll slow or speed himself up to whatever speed he wants. Whatever he believes will make the maximum amount of drama.”

“…So how long do we actually have?”

“As long as we need to throw our absolute best at him. He’s purposefully trying to make it difficult for himself.”

Minna’s eyes got the far-off look indicative of looking into the future. She didn’t comment on what she saw, but O’Neill knew from her expression they should work quickly regardless.

“Push the Canadian-Mongol-communist immigrants back in processing, deal with the political fallout later,” O’Neill ordered. “These ships are first priority…”

~~~

“Hello and welcome to Dracogen Enterprises, how may I help you today?”

Aradia raised an eyebrow. “Jenny, it’s us.”

Jenny picked a data pad off the receptionist desk she was currently occupying for reasons unknown to all present, including her employees. The hall was that of Dracogen Enterprises’ Public Relations department, where all official meetings took place. …Which was to say all two that had taken place since the revival of the technology-hoarding company. It may no longer have been a quasi-criminal organization but it was just as relaxed in terms of policy.

Jenny put the data pad down. “I don’t see an ‘Us’ on the list of clients.”

Aradia facepalmed. “Jenny…”

“That’s ma’ name~!” Jenny trilled.

Roland pushed Aradia aside and laid his hand on the table. “Roland of Gilead. Gunslinger.”

“Why do you have to take the fun out of everything…?” Jenny muttered, pursing her lips. “Fiiine, I’ll talk to you, geez. What’s up?”

“We were going to ask you out to a team lunch,” Aradia said, tapping her fingers together. “But you were being rather annoying…”

Jenny smirked. “Trying to play an angle on me? Cute. Very cute.”

Aradia held up a mirror and raised her eyebrow.

“Funny,” Jenny deadpanned, leaning on her shoulder. “Fine, I’ll pay for the lunch, I can even take you to a Dracogen experimental locale. You’d be surprised how much people want bizarre, exotic, risky food when there’s a looming threat dangling over their heads.”

“It helps a man cope,” Roland said with a curt nod. “Such sensation…”

Aradia clapped her hands. “It just reminds you that you’re alive!”

“What reminds you if you’re dead?” Jenny asked.

“Dead inside? Bones and darkness. Actually dead? Usually the blood dripping down your ghostly body, but that’s not so much a thing anymore. …I wish it was, though, it was always so fascinating to watch them realize how dead they are…”

“Haven’t seen morbid Aradia in a while.”

Aradia nodded. “It’s helped that the war’s over, and that I’ve reconnected with the Ararmy.”

Roland sighed ever so slightly at the absurd name that had never gone away.

“You ever going to choose a new name?” Jenny asked. “Now that there’s about a million distinct Aradias?”

Aradia shrugged. “I guess so?”

“Should do it before all the good ones get taken. Ari might work, or something similar…”

“I’m going to survive the next few weeks before I go through the trouble of getting a new name,” Aradia said with a smile. “But I’ll be thinking about it.”

Jenny saluted. Then she hopped over the receptionist booth and landed between her two teammates. “Let’s-a go!”

Roland snapped his fingers. “Mario.”

Jenny’s face broke out into a gaping smile. “You… you’re learning about references!” She let out an adorable squee. “I never thought I’d see the day! Okay, we need to get you caught up on so much culture now that you’re out of your little old man bubble. I’m thinking we start with something like Star Trek, or ma-”

Roland pointed outside at a Mario walking along a sidewalk, slowing down to look at the brilliant roses outside.

Aradia chuckled. “He absorbs culture by observing what it’s created.”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “Let’s just get to the place.” She charged out the revolving doors with a proud, confident smirk on her face. Such a powerful pose looked out of place on such a diminutive individual, but that was at least part of the reason she liked it.

They walked through the City. For Roland, it was no more unusual than an Earth city since it was so far removed from his general experiences. But for Jenny and Aradia, seasoned travelers, they knew the urban sprawl they were marching through was highly unusual.

It wasn’t just the eternal twilight – several worlds had sported a similar color scheme in the past. The conglomeration aspect wasn’t what was different either – after all, Merodi cities could be recognized by the way they seemed to be cobbled together from numerous different designs without rhyme or reason.

What mattered here was that everything was new. Not one month ago, none of these buildings had been around. All had been a field of brilliant, lively roses. Virtually every street corner had a section of untouched earth where a few roses grew, to remind everyone of where they came from, but everything else was almost too perfect because of how new it was. Buildings showed no sign of wear, there had not been enough time for slums or even heavy amounts of litter to develop in public view, and virtually everything was clean. It didn’t necessarily run smoothly from a statistical standpoint, but it sure looked like it did.

“Take several godlike beings and give them a goal,” Jenny said, holding out her hands. “What do you get?”

“Overpopulation,” Roland answered.

Jenny rolled her eyes. “There’s more than enough space on Nucleon for everyone, this is just the defensible place with the most magic resources. And ka resources.”

“Not physical resources.”

“Sure, right, like that’s important when the Tower literally leaks magic for everyone to use.” She waved a hand around as if illustrating a point. “We’ve got everything we need right here, and what we don’t have Dracogen Enterprises can g-” She walked face-first into a blue stop sign. “…What the heck?”

Burgerbelle poked her head around the blue stop sign. “Have I got your attention?”

“Why is it blue!?”

“Yep, I have your attention.” She removed the stop sign and sidestepped, allowing Thrackerzod to walk up.

Thrackerzod cleared her throat. “I have a complaint to file against the C.E.O. of Dracogen Enterprises.”

Jenny groaned. “All complaints must go through th-”

“It’s important.” Thrackerzod muttered. “Let me put it this way – your little corporation was selling misinformation.” Thrackerzod held up a little booklet entitled The Emissary and What She Means for You.

Jenny blinked. “I’ve never seen this book…” She swiped it out of Thrackerzod’s magic and scanned it with her eyes. “Geez… ‘she comes to save you all’? What a load of crap. Someone’s getting fired…”

“Told you it wasn’t her,” Burgerbelle said, a first place trophy appearing in her hand.

Thrackerzod rolled her eyes. “Yes, I admit, you were right. But here’s the important question – what are you going to do about it?”

“I am going to have lunch first,” Jenny said. “Then, I am going to find out whoever did this and fire them. Then, I’m going to recall every last one of these books and burn them. And then I’ll probably author a book of my own about ‘How the Emissary is a Sadist’ and mass-produce it.”

“Oh! You could join us for lunch!” Aradia said, clapping her hands together. “Come on, it’ll be fun! We can even talk about the little book!”

Burgerbelle grinned. “That sounds GRRRRREAT!” As she spoke the last word she gained tiger-like characteristics for a moment.

“Sure, fine, whatever,” Jenny said, waving them along. “Guess we’re a group now, or something.”

Roland shrugged. “Ka-tet.”

“I am not using that word. Ever. We’re a group. Not a ka-tet. Groups are groups. Ka is ka.”

“Kaka,” Burgerbelle said.

Roland stared at her in disbelief.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the rare Dark Tower meme has been unleashed,” Burgerbelle giggled. “Onward, before his mind explodes!”

~~~

At the very top of Nanoha’s skyscraper there was a room with windows on all sides, giving a view of the City, the Dark Tower, and everything in between. The room was filled with more people than Nanoha could easily count – leaders from all sides of the previous war, together to face a crisis. Ponies, humans, military, civilians… She had missed the sight of different people coming together as one, to be united. Ever since the war had started divisions had just kept getting worse and worse…

But today, they were all here. The start of the meeting had already concluded. Nala the Xeelee had offered to use all the processing power and knowledge it had at its disposal in the fleet and Celestia City to come up with a proposed plan to defeat Lord English. That had been about twenty minutes ago, and Nala had not said anything since.

So all the leaders were talking in smaller groups about ways to keep the City running during an attack from a single being of English’s caliber. The only notable absence in the meeting was Jenny herself, apparently she was busy enough with something else that she had sent generic Dracogen representatives.

Or maybe she just didn’t feel like attending a boring meeting.

Renee was there as well, and for once had decided not to make a large-scale disruption and instead just mess with Sherlock while the other leaders discussed among themselves.

“Care to make some de-duc-tions?” Renee asked in a condescending tone, as if talking to a child.

“From watching you I have only determined one thing,” Sherlock said. “You could adjust your behavior in any minute detail you wished to adjust my deduction result. You are an enigma by your own design.”

“What we have here is a case of a self-demonstrating sentence.”

“Indubitably.”

Renee smirked. “Always Sherlock, no matter what…” She chuckled. “Now, I will not do anything to hinder the ‘subconscious’ of my body here when I say the next sentence.” She narrowed her eyes. “You might want to get your eyes off me.”

“Ah, Nala’s almost done then, is she?”

As if on cue – actually, it wasn’t ‘as if’, it was on cue. Nala’s text appeared in the middle of the room.

|> Analysis complete.

“What do you have for us?” Nanoha asked, serving as the voice for all the others.

|> A plan. Given the nature of ka, I have analyzed the various scenarios and determined which one is most likely to produce a victory. I then disregarded that one and went with the second best since optimization is rarely allowed without a tradeoff. If you are curious, the first plan was to overlay several artificial Deus Ex Machina type events to end English. Instead, we will not engage in direct ka manipulation beyond the personal scale – such as Monika.

“Get on with it already!” Hale shouted, grinning. “What’s the play?”

|> We will wait for English to come to us. At the beginning, the defenses will just be the standard turrets at the wall and orbital bombardment. When this inevitably fails to destroy him, he will make it to the wall and breach it. We proceed to bombard him with everything we have – an optimal arrangement of troops, ships, and powering resources has been sent to all of your personal computers. This, still, will not be enough; his unconditional immortality ensures that even if we have enough energy output to kill him, he will resurrect himself.

|> It is at this point we will send in the ‘heroes’; specifically those who have a deep ka connection with him. The most important of these are Roland, Caliborn, Spades, and Mlinx.
Roland covers the base of multiversal-spanning hero with ka on his side. Caliborn is the villain turned to our side because of circumstance, not to mention the fact that Lord English originates from Caliborn. Spades has a deep need for vengeance and revenge against English running through him, and Mlinx’s entire society of demons was shaped by Lord English’s staff Juju. Normally, I would suggest gathering every hero English ever faced, getting all the Homestuck-based characters, and risking a diplomatic incident to get Vriska back. However, projections agree: these heroes of might will not be enough to bring him down. Simply having the defeat be appropriate is not enough to ensure he will die permanently, since he himself has power over ka.

|> This is where the original plan comes in. While he is distracted facing off against the heroes important to him, Monika and Saitama will be waiting along the side. Monika will alter Saitama’s character file to fight at 100% regardless of casualties, even if that requires multiple punches directed into Nucleon itself.

There were numerous gasps and murmurs around the meeting room.

|> I am well aware this could easily destroy all of Nucleon. I am also well aware even this is not enough.

“There’s more!?” O’Neill said in disbelief.

|> Even an unstoppable fist is likely to fall short. There is a chance it can overcome the unconditional immortality, but this is low. Instead, we will use it as a tool. We will need to separate Lord English from Black Thirteen and then move Lord English into the Dark Tower. He will become trapped within now that there are no universes to escape to.

“…What about when the Dark Tower finally falls?” the Emperor asked.

|> Then his power over ka will be no more and we can use brute force. Without the Tower’s presence, there will be no more magic in the City than any other part of this universe. It could be drained and conventional weaponry will do the rest.

There was silence in the room.

“…It sounds like it might work,” Nanoha said. “That’s enough for me to be willing to prepare for it until we get a better option.”

|> There is one issue I have not yet mentioned. The camera is currently on. Any plan that the audience is aware of prior to execution will usually go wrong. It doesn’t mean it will fail – but it does mean we can expect major hindrances to our efforts. The full plan contains backup contingencies I have not mentioned – including having Death and similar beings on standby to make sure no heroes perish just before they can perform a paramount action – but no doubt the complication will be something I have not foreseen.

“You’ve foreseen it,” Renee said, looking at the text with intense eyes. “That doesn’t mean it won’t throw a wrench into your plans anyway.”

|> Are you not going to trap him within your structure?

“If you can get him in there without Black Thirteen, I’ll keep him,” Renee said with a smirk. “Of that, I promise. Please, darling, that’d be a bit too obvious.”

|> I will send out a list of potential complications for everyone to review. Until a major flaw in the plan is brought up, am I cleared to begin city-wide preparations?

Nanoha looked at the gathered leaders behind her. “We can discuss the finer details later, but we need to get started now in case English jumps us by surprise. Everyone who thinks this is good enough, say aye.” She paused for a moment. “Aye.”

Raising Heart calculated the total of people who had responded favorably: ninety-two percent. Good enough.

“You have permission, Nala,” Nanoha said. “Do everything you can.”

|> I already am.

~~~

Rev and Rina were trotting down the streets of the City in Earth’s Shadow. Rina actually had a smile on her face, enjoying the sight of something similar to the Ponyville she had come to know during her stay at Rev’s church.

Rev didn’t have anywhere near as amiable an expression. Her face was buried in a small booklet titled The Emissary and What She Means For You. The content within was making her frown deeper and deeper.

“Why would Dracogen Enterprises allow this trash to be published?” she wondered.

“You just answered your own question,” Rina said. “They are trash.”

“Jenny does have standards…” Rev furrowed her brow. “Listen to this. ‘The Emissary has come so that you might believe in the will of the Tower, and the truth of the story. The war was nothing more than the movement from one Testament to another, allowing existence to change so all could hear the Emissary’s message’…”

“Sounds like you.”

Rev rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I suppose. Except the actual message isn’t something Renee’s ever said, and it’s actually dangerous.” She held up the booklet to Rina.

“…Shit,” Rina said, taking it in her magic. “’The City is a blasphemy to the Tower’s purity?’ There’s no way anybody here is taking this seriously, this is their home.”

“It doesn’t take a majority to destroy something,” Rev said, shaking her head. “Just enough. Enough who think the Tower is worthy of worship. That ancient structure that defines everything in their lives and is easily visible every day of their lives.” She turned to the looming form of the Tower, grimacing. “The Tower always terrified me. The few times I’d seen it… I always trembled. It was so… wrong. I can’t really describe it. It was as if it made me face a part of myself I can’t understand. And now that I’m here, walking in its City…” She gulped. “You feel it, don’t you? When you try to look at it.”

“I don’t try to look at it,” Rina breathed. “I feel like I’d lose myself in it.”

“And yet all these people here live around it like nothing’s wrong… Like the very air they’re breathing isn’t infused with a Dark essence.” She shook her head. “Of course they’d want to worship the thing. It basically is God to them. And that’s… not only wrong, but dangerous.” She looked at the booklet again. “They start assigning whatever they feel they can to the Tower in the name of making their worldview make sense. Self-justification, you could say.”

“Like the Flowers creating the Emissary in the first place?”

Rev nodded. “They wanted the Tower to have a will. So they made one. You could call the Great Will this as well – it wanted to be God, so it tried.”

Rina put a hoof to her forehead. “Ugh…”

“…Sorry. I shouldn’t be loading all this heavy stuff on you. You haven’t been walking very long.”

“It’s okay. I know Flutterfree’s gone and I’m the only one around. Just… it’s fucking hard to think about, you know?”

“Sometimes intelligence is a hindrance to greater understanding,” Rev said with a chuckle. “It’s so hard for us to admit that not everything has to make sense… But that’s neither here nor th-”

The two of them were suddenly teleported away into an attic lit only by a tiny lightbulb in the roof. Rev immediately tried to raise a shield but she found that all the magic in the attic had been drained, leaving her helpless.

She looked around for a way out. There were no windows, but there were boxes – lots and lots of boxes with hundreds of books in them. All of them were copies of The Emissary and What She Means For You.

Rev and Rina looked at each other.

“Trap,” they said at the same time.

Great deduction, a voice said in their minds. They saw no one nearby who could be the source of the messages – nor did they detect any use of magic to send the message. You two will be perfect… A great speaker, and a great destroyer.

“What do you want?” Rev demanded.

Your help.

150 - The Final Frontier

Exploratory Skimmer 001, the best in the exploratory fleet!

“The only ship in the fleet,” Pidge muttered as she pulled herself out of bed. She let out a big yawn and placed her feet on the floor, pleased that the floor heating element was working today. The freezing metal floor had been an unwelcome surprise on virtually every night she had spent on this ship.

She stretched a bit and put on her glasses, blinking to get her eyes adjusted to the lighting. The room was small, but still large enough that she had to take a full step to get to the sink and brush her teeth. She preferred doing it herself – the machine did just as good of a job, but it never felt right. When she was done she stretched a few more times and went to look at her closet.

Logically speaking, she shouldn’t even have needed to debate. She was on a mission; she should wear her green paladin suit. Without it, she was squishier than even a normal human, easily the prime target in an attack. It was also form-fit to her so it was easily the most comfortable thing. And yet, for a moment, she considered wearing regular clothes. Dress, shorts and shirt, didn’t matter, just something.

I must be getting bored. Maybe I need to give it an upgrade. Goodness knows that won’t somehow be disabled in the next few months.

In the end, she still chose the suit, giving her squishy form significant armor, a much-needed maneuverability bonus with its thrusters, and numerous HUD displays that she could access with a thought. She had those in her glasses as well, and her contact lenses, but one could never have too many redundancies.

She grabbed her weapon and holstered it at her side. With a quick breath and a smile, she walked out into the hallway.

Something shot at the ship and caused all the warning lights to go off. She stumbled and fell flat against the hallway wall. With an overdramatic groan she pushed herself off the wall and ran to the bridge. This took about three seconds – the ship only had room for quarters, a living area, a bridge, a cargo hold, and a hallway to connect them all. It was an upgrade from the usual Skiff, sure, but not much of one.

The fact that everyone else was already on the bridge more than mildly irked her.

“Glad you could join us!” Pinkie said with a giggle. “We’re fighting a blue alien space monster!”

“TAP IN!” Flutterfree blurted as she forced the Skimmer into a barrel roll to dodge the space monster’s blue mucus.

“And I’m still the best pilot…” Pidge shrugged, jumping into the pilot’s seat the moment Flutterfree got out. She weaved in and out of the barrage of mucus easily.

“You play too many video games,” Vriska said with a grin.

“Aw, you upset about losing last night?” Pidge ribbed.

“…No.”

“Yes you are.”

“Focus on keeping us alive.”

Pidge leaned back and started driving with her feet, still doing much better than Flutterfree had been.

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered.

“I really, really, really should yell at you for ‘reckless endangerment’,” Pinkie said. “But let’s not and say I did, okay?”

Pidge shrugged. “Sure.” She saw a more complex barrage come at her, so she put her hands back on the controls and threaded through the organic projectiles. She whirled the Skimmer around to face the creature. It was a snake with numerous scales flowing in different directions like jellyfish tentacles. It pulsed with blue lights that gradually changed their brightness.

Something tugged at the back of Pidge’s mind. “Database search – something about this seems familiar!”

Vriska pressed a few buttons on a nearby screen. “Scans say highly organic… Telepathy indication… Positive ID – it’s the protomolecule!”

Pinkie’s eyes widened. “Jotaro, Flutterfree, suit up – we need to get this thing’s attention on our level! Passion-Lolo combo!”

“Right,” the two of them said at once. They left the bridge and found a spacesuit locker, slipping into their form-fitting suits with ease.

“Ready to teleport!” Jotaro called. The two of them were placed just outside the ship in an empty space next to the beast. The protomolecule snake paid them no mind – completely fixated on the vaguely shark-like form of the Skimmer. Jotaro summoned the Passion, wrapping the flowering vines around the two of them. Flutterfree activated two powers at once – Lolo and her Rage’s truth essence. The vines of the Passion and Lolo intertwined, shooting toward the protomolecule snake with the glow of Rage around them.

They hit, making direct contact with the bizarre soul and mind of the snake, revealing the truth of who they were to the blue being. The Passion brought the souls into an understanding, allowing the snake to calmly release its rage. It stopped firing its projectiles and calmed down.

“SUCCESS!” Pinkie said, grinning. “Oh, hey Investigator!”

Pidge looked around – didn’t see anyone. “Uh…”

“The Investigator likes to only show himself to one person at a time,” Vriska reminded her. “Dunno why the voice of the protomolecule decided to be so… difficult, but it’s quirky and fun if you can get past only hearing one side of the conversation.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Pinkie gasped. “I’m sure we can find you some planets where you can recreate your network. I understand that being divided is difficult for you, but there are people who will help you. Just hold on a sec…” She pressed a button, recalling Jotaro and Flutterfree. “Pidge, write up a message to transmit back to the City so they don’t freak out when we transmit the Protomolecule to them.”

Pidge started typing up the report. “We don’t have enough… power to transmit something that large.”

“He can do it himself,” Pinkie assured her. “Glad to have you back, proto-vestigator! I’m sure you’ll like the City! Aw, you’re too kind!” She smiled brightly for a few seconds, as if listening intently to something.

This went on for some time.

“Uh…” Vriska said, raising a hand.

“Oh, he disappeared when I stopped talking,” Pinkie giggled. “Probably working on transmitting himself.”

Vriska facepalmed.

“Message sent,” Pidge said. “He should wait a few minutes before transmitting to make sure they get it.”

Pinkie shrugged. “I don’t know if he will. I’m not talking to him anym-”

The protomolecule snake vanished in a puff of light.

“Huh. Hope he doesn’t cause too much chaos.”

“You want him to cause chaos don’t you?” Flutterfree accused.

Pinkie grinned. “Yeah. Just not too much.”

“Wordplay,” Jotaro said, clapping slowly.

Pinkie bowed. “Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.”

“Which is almost over,” Vriska said, pointing at a screen. “We’ve only got one more planet we need to hit, then our mission out here is done. We can go home.”

Jotaro cracked his knuckles. “Let’s see what challenges it has to offer us.”

“Why can’t the last planet ever be a simple peaceful first contact?” Flutterfree asked.

Pidge shrugged. “Hey, it might be that way soon enough. We’ve just got to wait… Uh…” she pressed a few buttons until she got the ETA for Tower Collapse. “Thirty-nine years.”

“There’ll be a lot of last planets before that timer runs out.”

“But it will run out,” Pinkie said. “So let’s enjoy these last planets while we can! Pidge?” She pressed her hooves together and grinned. “Engage.”

“O’Neill is a plague on us all,” Pidge muttered. “Yes, Captain.” She plotted the course and the Skimmer blasted off into the night.

~~~

The last planet looked like a dud from a distance.

Round. The size of Equis. Gray. Cratered. Devoid of atmosphere – like the rest of the system it was in. As far as their instruments could tell from afar, the planet was a completely lifeless rock just like millions of other planets.

The exception were their ka sensors. Whenever they were pointed at this planet – from any other planet – the readings went crazy. They seemed to insist there was a thing there. A thing that really, really needed to be found. It needed to be found so badly that it was screaming to anyone with a ka-based ear to COME HERE.

So of course the Skimmer’s shields were at full, weapons were all charged, and everyone had their psychic abilities at the ready preparing for any sort of danger. They moved in slow, like molasses, drifting ever-closer to the gray orb. Currently, the five of them could see it on the viewscreen, and it was just as boring up close as it had been from afar.

“I hate it when this happens,” Vriska seethed. “It’s just sitting there. Inanimate. Innocent. Fucking with us.”

“The Tower may be leading us on a wild chase for amusement,” Jotaro said, furrowing his brow.

“Think we should stop crawling like snails yet?” Pidge said, bored.

Jotaro shook his head. “No. Traps are clever.”

“We could still be moving faster. We can light-jump away.”

“Just keep scanning,” Pinkie said. “Are we close enough for really really detailed scans?”

“Soon…” Flutterfree said, pressing a few buttons. “And… now!” Automatically, the ship began scanning the surface. Lots and lots of more nothing, nothing, and nothing. But then it found something it wasn’t supposed to. A reading of an object not on the planet’s surface – but slightly above it.

In an orbit.

Pidge blinked. “What the quiznak?” She pressed a few buttons. “I’m detecting an orbit outside the planet’s gravitational bubble! Or… No, it’s not an orbit, it’s just a really, really tiny planet. Small… too small. Way too small.”

“Why is small a problem?” Vriska asked.

“Black holes have no size and they work,” Flutterfree pointed out.

“I mean, it has less of a ‘gravity well’ so it’s… just not enough,” Pidge said. “It’s moving in the shell like a planet, but it has no gravity…” She scratched her head. “This doesn’t match with our current understandings of the New World’s Physics… or Sunny’s orbital motion estimation equations…” Pidge pressed a few buttons. “We have to check this out!”

Pinkie nodded. “We’ll go there… as soon as we get close.”

“Not going any faster?”

“Nope!”

Pidge groaned. “ETA… nineteen minutes.”

Flutterfree put her wing to her face and sighed. “Of course…”

“I’ll try to get more detailed visual readings.”

A few moments later, an image appeared on screen. The metallic object was spherical and almost featureless on the outside, save for one large circular door on one end. The door itself had been blown open, revealing an interior that was bigger on the inside, but just as empty as the space outside.

“…Something escaped,” Flutterfree said. “How strong do you think that door was?”

Jotaro pondered this. “With time, Star Platinum could probably punch through that much reinforced metal.”

“No, no you couldn’t,” Vriska said eyes widening. “I know what this is. This isn’t just some thick metal. That’s a door from the Vault.”

“Oh, so a treasure room!” Pinkie grinned. “I wonder what sort of loot we’ll find?”

“Interior’s empty,” Pidge said, pressing more buttons. “…And there’s no door on the inside. Nor is there a place for one. Which means…”

“This is the room at the center of the Vault,” Vriska said, blinking. “Whatever the final goal of that mad puzzle-filled labyrinth was, it was in there. …And it punched out of a door designed to keep higher class civilizations out.”

“Saitama can punch out,” Pinkie pointed out.

“He’s cheating.” Vriska folded her hands together.

“…This might be a bit out of our league,” Flutterfree commented. “The final goal of the vault is out, and we’re near it.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Like we’re going to run away with our tails between our legs because of some door. Hah. We’re the Primary Team, we’re better than that. Or stupider than that. Take your pick.”

Pinkie giggled. “Yep! Right into the dragon’s mouth everyone – let’s find whatever was in there!”

“Chances are it’s on the planet’s surface,” Pidge said. “Probably the source of all the ka readings. I’m trying to narrow down its possible locations…” She hastily ran a few simulations on the ka-density around the planet. “There appears to be an epicenter for the ka pattern at negative thirty-five degrees south, zero degrees west. Should I take us down?”

“Yeah, but do it slowly,” Pinkie said. “We should probably get in suits.”

Pidge, Jotaro, and Flutterfree gestured at themselves – they were already suited up. Pidge put on her helmet to complete the set. Vriska didn’t need a suit, but she summoned one to herself anyway. Pinkie pulled hers out of her mane and stuck it on. While Flutterfree’s had a bag for her tail, Pinkie’s let her tail hang free. It would have been a safety hazard for anyone who wasn’t Pinkie.

Carefully, Pidge lowered the Skimmer into the gravity well of the dead planet. The transition was sharp, making all their stomachs do flip flops, but the ship was able to shut off its artificial gravity a fraction of a second after the real gravity took hold. They descended onto the gray, dusty rock, sending up a flurry of granules into the air.

“Technically, there’s not any air at all,” Pinkie said, pressing a few buttons to schedule a full-team teleport. With a schwoop they were all standing outside the Skimmer, the dust of their landing settling on their suits.

“You know, if this is anything like moon dust, it’ll itch something fierce if it gets in our suits,” Pidge commented.

“Then keep your suits sealed! Problem solved.” Vriska mockingly knocked on her helmet. “Anyway, I’m going to be the first to state the obvious here. I see fuck-all.”

The landscape of the dead world was flat, dusty, and only had the general small mountain – shallow crater combo of a dead world. They weren’t anywhere close to an impressive impact; sitting in quite possibly the most average area on the entire planet.

“Where’s that other shoe…?” Pinkie mused, perking her ears up and listening closely.

“You can’t hear anything in space,” Flutterfree said.

“Unless you’re Pinkie,” Jotaro countered.

“…Depends.”

Pinkie shrugged. “I’ve got nothing right now, so it looks like Flutterfree’s right for the time being!” She chuckled. “Anyway, Vriska, got anything?”

“No psychic residue that I can sense,” Vriska said with a shrug.

“Mmmmm… Pidge?”

“Only weird readings are the ka levels,” Pidge responded.

Jotaro threw his hat into the ring without being asked. “Hermit Purple and the Passion don’t feel anything to lock on to.”

“Interesting…”

“Can I go now?” Flutterfree asked.

“Sure!” Pinkie said with a wink.

Flutterfree focused herself and spread Lolo out in all directions. This was exactly what they had needed to do – in an instant, the previously invisible became visible. A few meters away, two large metallic spires shifted into their view. They were smooth, sleek, and all-in-all pretty generic sci-fi props of the kind Pinkie’s Party was getting more than a little tired of seeing all over the place.

“Why can’t we get more fractals?” Pinkie asked, holding out a hoof and waving it around. “I mean come on, they look cooler! Way cooler! This is just… Not awesome!”

Flutterfree smirked. “Channeling Rainbow?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Yeah, probably. Is there more?”

“I think so…” Flutterfree said, spreading Lolo even further. Slowly, more spires came into their view, each pair taller than the pair before. They created a path that went on for as long as they could see.

“I don’t see an end…” Flutterfree said, closing her eyes to focus. “Nothing but more, taller spires the further I go…”

“Any traps?” Jotaro asked.

“They seem benign to me, but that doesn’t mean much. Too many things have been immune to Lolo’s Revelation lately.”

Pidge turned to Pinkie. “I’m going to try to interface with one and risk triggering an ancient apocalypse curse. Cool?”

Pinkie nodded. “Cool.”

Pidge dashed over to the closest pillar and pulled out her laptop, using an omni-cable to affix her computer directly to the pillar’s exterior wall. After a few seconds she had a basic connection. “No security as far as I can tell…”

Jotaro sauntered up to the pillar and tapped it with his finger. He knit his brow.

“Oh! Jotaro’s noticed something!” Pinkie said, appearing right next to him. “What did you find!?”

“Something’s off here…” He continued to trace his finger along the pillar, going down until he touched the ground.

“You’re right, something’s off,” Pidge said, scratching her head. “There’s code and circuitry inside this pillar, but it doesn’t seem to serve a purpose! Not even decorative. Most of the commands I put in are accepted, but then nothing happens.” She typed furiously on the keyboard. “It’s like it’s partial…”

Jotaro picked up some moon dust in his hand and threw it on the pillar, the gray granules sticking to the pillar with ease. He tried to brush them off again, but they remained on the pillar, giving it a dirty tint.

“These pillars are new,” Jotaro said. “They have to be newer than all the large craters – or any event jarring enough to kick up ‘moon’ dust. Some would have gotten on the surface and dirtied it.”

Flutterfree blinked. “We’re in an area that isn’t heavily cratered. Isn’t it reasonable to assume there just wasn’t any dust to get stuck?”

“There’d still be microscopic amounts,” Pidge said, performing a scan. “And aside from the stuff we’ve kicked up, these pillars are clean. So clean they show signs of a radiation exposure of…” She blinked. “…A couple years. Less than the age of the New World.”

“So, what, the thing in the Vault escaped and made these pillars?” Vriska asked. “Why?”

Pinkie blinked. “…As an invitation…”

And then they weren’t on the planet anymore. Each of them stood behind separate podiums colored in ways similar to them. Each podium had a square screen on the front that buzzed with static. Aside from the five of them and the podiums, they appeared to be in complete darkness.

All of them entered a fighting stance – except Pidge. She just rammed her face into her podium. “Not again…”

Jotaro glanced at her. “What?”

Pidge held up a hand and adjusted her glasses. “Okay, we get it, Bob the all-powerful wants to test our mettle as heroes again. Turn on the lights and start the game show already, let’s get this over with.”

“Bob?” Flutterfree asked, cocking her head.

“There’s an all powerful multiversal being that likes to test groups of heroes through a game show. Prepare for a lot of really stupid games a-”

“Jumping to conclusions,” a man said. A spotlight appeared, revealing him to all of them – he wore a black suit and a cowboy hat alongside a face that was a fusion between Roland and Flagg – except the eyes. One of them was a piercing red while the other cycled through numerous pool-ball shapes. His left hand was frozen in ice, while the left raged in fire. “I am not Bob, or any number of other beings you have encountered.” His voice sent chills up their spines, but it didn’t sound unnatural. Perhaps the normalcy of it was what made it terrifying.

Pinkie didn’t flinch. “Then who are you?”

“It is simple. I am the Vault. I am the prize. I am what lies beyond the Final Puzzle.” The corner of his mouth twitched, giving the slightest hint of a frown. “The Final Puzzle has been removed. So I must create a new one for those who seek me.”

“And you decided a bunch of game show podiums was what to go with?”

He looked at her with curiosity. “I decided. But I also didn’t. I am a Tower subroutine.” He held a hand into the air. “I was created with the purpose of seeking an ultimate reward…”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Please, you don’t look like much to me.”

“I am the Endless Wish,” he said, looking her in the eyes with his impassive, unmoving face. “The will who takes me will have everything.”

“…I stand corrected.”

“I was to be given to the society who breached the final Vault door, proving themselves worthier than my creators. Except you didn’t do that. You just found my resting place. But I cannot say you cheated either, for you had no intention of finding the Vault when you arrived on this world.”

“So you’re going to test us?” Flutterfree observed. “…Are you aware that, well, we’re the protagonists and the camera is on?”

“Good deduction Flutterfree!” Pinkie said with a grin.

“I am aware,” the Endless Wish answered. “You will still undertake a new Final Puzzle. My only will is that my power is given to those worthy. You will be here until I have deemed you sufficient or insufficient.”

“…Can we just back out?” Flutterfree asked.

“No.”

“Figures,” Pidge muttered. “What’s the punishment for failing?”

“Death.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro muttered, lowering his hat.

“Looks like we have to fight for our lives,” Pinkie said. “How’s that? Did we pass your first test? Express little desire to actually have a wish?”

“Yes,” the Endless Wish answered. “You have also passed numerous others through simple coordination in your arrival and your actions in life.”

“Suck it,” Vriska said, lounging forward with a coy smile. “We’re awesome, we’re heroes, and ka is on our side. What else could you possibly need to know?”

The Endless Wish’s mouth twitched. “You must not know. That would spoil the tests. For now, as far as you’re concerned, this is a game show.” He blinked out of existence before appearing again behind a podium of his own – except now he was wearing a jovial mask reminiscent of Dimentio’s harlequin face. He spoke with an exaggerated chipper tone. “Ladies and gentlemen, readers and contestants, it’s time for the first ever round of Final Puzzle, with me, your host, the Endless Wish! With us today we have the people of Pinkie’s Party! Please, introduce yourselves and tell us a random fact!”

Everyone turned to Pinkie. She shrugged. “Eh, go with it, at least for now. Hi! I’m Pinkie Pie, and I once made an eldritch demon explode because he couldn’t fathom me!”

“…I’m Flutterfree, and I’m a quasi-vampire Page of Rage.”

“I’m Vriska Serket, I’m over a thousand years old and still kicking ass!”

“Jotaro Kujo, PhD. I used to be a marine biologist.”

“Pidge Holt. I built most of Final Dawn. I’m assuming all the readers know what that is.”

Pinkie nodded in confirmation. “So, now that that’s out of the way, what’s our first little game?”

“A quiz!” The Endless Wish said with a clown-like giggle. “We’ll see how well each of you really know your Songs of the Spheres lore! Any one of you can answer the questions at any time, but you have to ring in first!”

“Do we have to put the answers in the form of a question?” Vriska asked.

“This is not Terezi’s game night, you will not be punished for answering in the incorrect format! Who does that? Just not right!” He snapped his fingers, and suddenly the rest of the room shifted into existence. The floor was a jarring white, and the walls a murky purple. Every part of it was featureless aside from a giant screen that sat between the Endless Wish and Pinkie’s Party. “Let’s start with something simple. Question one: what is the birth name of Lord English?”

Vriska buzzed in. “Caliborn. Next.”

The Endless Wish didn’t miss a beat. “TWO! What is the name of the boy Roland had with him at the end of his original journey to the Dark Tower?”

“Patrick,” Jotaro answered.

Vriska looked to him. “How did you…”

“Jojo studies the journeys of heroes,” Pidge said with a smile. “Roland’s is one of the more important, and the ending of his journey even more so.”

The Endless Wish threw the card over his head and pulled out another question. “Three! Before she was called Scarcity, the Rarity that was instrumental in the Starstream War had another nickname. What was it?”

Flutterfree furrowed her brow – and a second later buzzed in. “…Scarce.”

“Four! A train is traveling through universe A with no time travel allowed. Universe A is connected to universe B, where time travel must form loops. Universe B has a train going in a circle every ten minutes, at which point it jumps ten minutes into the past, forming the loop. If the Universe A train enters universe B on a track that will take eleven minutes to return train A to Universe A, what happens to train A?”

Pidge adjusted her glasses and grinned evilly. “This depends on if Universe B operates on ‘safe loop’ rules or ‘recursive loop’ rules. If Universe B is a ‘safe loop’, then the looping time has no effect on the overall universal timeline and train A will return to Universe A in eleven minutes. If Universe B is a ‘recursive loop’ the universe will reset to default every time train B loops, ensuring train A can’t return to Universe A without the loop being terminated. This all assumes, of course, that train A exists in the same timeframe as train B when in the same universe.”

“Clever girl…” the Endless Wish said. “FIVE! How many words are in Songs of the Spheres as of the publishing of the last chapter?”

Pinkie laughed. “Easy! 2,001,893. Naturally, that’s only on FimFiction! According to Archive it’s 1,911,965. I’m not going to bother with the other places. You want an exact value? Ask a question that doesn’t require the chapter to be written with fill-in-the-blanks!”

The Endless Wish shrugged, seemingly taking this as legitimate criticism. “In that case… SIX!” The mask switched from mischievous and amused to devious. “Which one of you is going to die before the end of this chapter?”

Pinkie’s Party didn’t have an initial response.

“Take your time. It’s not like we’re in a hurry.”

They didn’t need time – a lightbulb went off in Flutterfree’s head. She buzzed in. “Vriska.”

“Flutterfree what the fuc-” Vriska was stabbed by several of Flutterfree’s wing-blades at once in numerous vital areas. Naturally, the death wasn’t Heroic or Just, so the troll came right back up. “…I get it. You could have given me a warning though!”

“I didn’t want to give him a warning,” Flutterfree said, shrugging. “So, I got that answer correct, and now we don’t have that looming sword over our heads. Next question?”

“If you insist. Seven!” He leaned in. “What would Nova think of you replacing her?”

“Fuck you,” Vriska muttered.

Pinkie pressed her hooves together and glared at the Endless Wish. “This is how it’s gonna be, huh? Questions that torment us. Well if you want an answer, here it is. Her mind would accept that she hadn’t really been replaced and that we still cared for her. She would get back on the team and learn to work with Pidge. But there would be a gnawing hole in the back of her mind that would be a downer on her personality for several years. Because, deep down, she would know she was replaced. And she wouldn’t be able to ever completely remove it, and she would hate herself for being so shallow.”

Pidge gripped her podium. “…Quiznak…”

“What’s next asshole?” Vriska demanded. “Something special for me?”

“Eight! Which person do you dream of killing in cold blood the most? Any of you can answer this one. Take your time.”

Vriska paled.

“You don’t have to,” Flutterfree said. “I can think o-”

“Starbeat,” Vriska answered, cutting Flutterfree off. “She’s the one I see myself killing most often in my dreams. Our relationship looks fine, but the troll in me wants to rip her to shreds. I’m suppressing it, so it’s manifesting more than anything else! Happy?”

“No!” the Endless Wish declared with a jovial tone. “NINE~! Who’s marrying Flutterfree today?”

“You piece of trash…” Flutterfree muttered. “Right, right…” She sent off a quick prayer and shook her head. “I’m pretty much limited to the people in the group here, and all of them would be out of the faith. You’re a real piece of work. The answer? Pinkie. The others would have some serious problems down the line dealing with the emotional baggage.”

Pinkie took out a ‘wedding-in-a-box’-set, decorating her and Flutterfree in brilliant white dresses. There was a kiss so fast virtually nobody saw it, Pinkie threw a giant wedding cake into the ground, and then she shredded up the wedding papers, invalidating them. “There, emotional confusion over and done with! Woo! You ain’t got nothin’ on those tentacle monsters, wishy-boy!”

“Ten…”

Pinkie pushed her face right into his. “Ahem. We have a rating here, bucko. So no. You can’t go there.”

The Eternal Wish let out a laugh. “You are a fast one, aren’t you? Fine – I’ll just have to come up with a new torment.”

“You’ve already come up with it.”

“Yes. We’re done with questions.” He clapped his hands together. “Instead, let’s play a game of survivor. Each of you will be locked in separate cubicles.” Suddenly, none of them could see or hear each other. “And now each of you will be asked which one of your teammates you want to die! And the kicker – you can’t vote for yourself! And Vriska won’t be able to respawn. Also, if you refuse to choose, you fail the Final Puzzle. Have fun!”

After a few minutes of screaming, eventually everyone had come up with an answer.

“Pinkie, care to reveal yours?”

Pinkie, silently, pressed a button. On her screen Flutterfree appeared.

Flutterfree blinked, shocked.

“Care to explain?”

Pinkie silently shook her head, keeping her smile motionless.

“Fair enough. Flutterfree?”

“I’m sorry,” Flutterfree said, pressing her button. She chose Pinkie. “I… I did what Eve did last time with me. The one I cared about most. Guess she had the same idea.”

Vriska pressed her button. “Well I fucking chose Pidge because I’m a fucking jerk and thought she’d be the ‘least important’ or whatever. Pidge, please tell me you chose me so this is fair.”

“Pidge isn’t next, it’s Jotaro!” The Endless Wish said. “Come on, what do y-”

“Vriska,” Jotaro said, slamming his fist into the button. “She wouldn’t need emotional support. The others would.”

“And lastly, Pidge, who did you choose?”

Pidge was grinning like a madman. “Pinkie, we quiznakking did it.” She slammed her hand on the button, choosing Jotaro. “We just gamed your system, man! All of us chose someone different! Woo! GAH you have no idea how difficult it was to figure out who was going to choose everyone else. I had Vriska and Flutterfree reasoned out, and I knew Pinkie would choose whatever I didn’t choose, and I knew Jotaro couldn’t choose himself so HA!”

“What’s ha?” Vriska said. “Now we’re all tied for dead!”

“Exactly! That’s the way to win this game!” Pidge said, smirking. “It was the same in Bob’s, but we didn’t know it. This one was all about gaming the system! High-five Pinkie!”

Pinkie clapped Pidge’s hand with her hoof. “Woohoo!”

“…Well, in other news, I’m still an asshole bitch,” Vriska said with a laugh. “Jotaro’s too fucking practical, and Flutterfree you’re just too pure.”

“Eheh…”

“Your celebrations are premature,” the Endless Wish said, its happy voice seeming to crack.

“Problem?” Pinkie asked, grinning mockingly.

“Come on, throw something else at us!” Vriska challenged. “We’ve been through so much shit together, just you try to test it!”

“I am not testing your friendship,” the Endless Wish said; dropping the mask and returning to his monotone, default self. “I am testing your worthiness. You have shown knowledge, perseverance, and intellect. Your strength has already been shown. Your actions in the war are a testament to your society’s complexity. But there are other criteria.” He clasped his hands together, taking them away from the room and placing them in a long, seemingly endless hallway the width of a runway. “At the end of this hallway lies a treasure. It is your goal. Simply get there without perishing.”

“Where are the traps?”

“There are saws, lasers, intense hammers, hatchets, poisons, trolls, and giants. But they’re all invisible and enchanted with silent step.”

“I know the solution to this one,” Pinkie said. “He’s trying to test if we know when to give up and throw in the towel when facing impossible odds, like smart, capable, worthy people.”

The Endless Wish stared at her in disbelief.

“However, I’m going to say we one-up him.” Pinkie grinned. “We’re the protagonists. I happen to know things about our, well, future you could say. Mainly… Twilence wasn’t there to say goodbye when we left on our large journey. If we weren’t going to make it back she would have made a point of doing it, even if she wasn’t going to warn us.” She tapped her hooves together. “We’re literally unbeatable. Let’s charge right through this gauntlet like a gaggle of idiots. We might lose a few limbs in the process but we won’t die. There’s no chance.”

Vriska laughed. “Pinkie, this is stupid. I love it.” She ran into the gauntlet, promptly got cut in half – but revived. When Pinkie jumped in, she bounced around like a ping-pong ball but suffered no damage.

“It’s certain death in there,” Pidge commented.

“They know that,” Flutterfree added.

“I’m not so confident…”

Jotaro shrugged. “Yare yare daze…” He charged right through, using Hermit Purple and the Passion to detect where the invisible traps were, moving through with impressive grace and coordination.

“Fine, you guys do that, Flutterfree and I w-” Pidge noticed Flutterfree gracefully walking through the hallway without using any of her powers. And with closed eyes. “GAH!” Pidge ran after her – and promptly got hit by a hammer so hard she was launched into the lead of the group. She got stabbed with an invisible sword – hurt like nothing else, but she somehow managed to just laugh and keep trucking. The five of them ran through the hallway getting beat up left and right like ragdolls, but somehow they clung onto their lives throughout the entire ordeal.

Eventually Flutterfree made it. One of her eyes was missing, one of her wings had been clipped and two of her legs were just gone, but she grabbed the glowing coin at the end and smiled.

In an instant they were all fully healed and back in the game show room with the Endless Wish. He was wearing an annoyed mask.

Pinkie cleared her throat. “Let me put it this way, Wishy-buddy. We now know you can’t threaten us with death. And you know what I just remembered? You said the punishment for not playing was death, and that we would die if we lost. I guess that means it’s time for me to lose and see how we manage to survive that mess! Come on, give me mini-golf or something, I’ll be sure to fore right into your face eeeeeeeeeeevery time!”

The Endless Wish took off his mask and threw it to the ground, the face underneath twitching slightly. “Then it is clear by my own rules that I cannot win. Congratulations, you are the winners. You can now wish for anything you ever want, and then anything else you want, and then anything else, forever. You may have all the wishes you could ever desire.”

Vriska blinked. “Wait, really, you’re just going to give up?”

Pidge shrugged. “I mean, the point of the last test was supposed to be ‘giving up’, if Pinkie was right, so it stands to reason he’d have some understanding of the concept.”

“Huh. Neat.” Vriska put a hand to her chin. “So infinite wishes… What should we wish for first?”

“It’s a trap,” Jotaro said.

“Clearly,” Flutterfree added. “Nothing’s ever that easy. And even if it is, there’ll be unintended consequences.”

“Ah, the douchebag genie concept.” Vriska nodded slowly. “Clearly, we’ll have to wish carefully and without any chances of being misunderstood.”

“Can we just not wish at all?” Flutterfree wondered.

“Probably the safe option,” Pinkie admitted.

The Endless Wish spoke. “Why would you throw this away? I have endless power drawn from the Tower itself, the ability to bestow any desire.”

“You couldn’t recreate the multiverse,” Pidge pointed out.

“…True,” he admitted. “The Tower can overrule me. But I could destroy planets, create new ones… I could do so much!”

“Yes. We get it,” Vriska said, waving a hand. “I’m just remembering all those conversations where whatever anyone wished for backfired horribly. And those times we found low-level genies. Screw them utterly.”

“You’re not like Corona’s Wishing World,” Pinkie added. “You’ve got a personality in there somewhere. Tell me that can’t go wrong.”

“Are you certain you want to throw all of this away?” the Endless Wish asked, his voice seeming to crack a little. “I can bring back planets and places that were destroyed long ago.” He snapped his fingers and created a replica of Equis in his hand. “Every building, every waterfall, every city… restored to its splendor. You could go home.”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “And you’d recreate it with everyone who was on it when it was destroyed, from an ancient past, or make everyone remember what it was like to be consumed by the Twili.”

“I would not do that. And if you were concerned, you could just specify. Or undo the wish in an instant with another wish.”

“There’s always some angle you don’t think of.” Vriska folded her arms. “For instance, I just thought of recreating Equis perfectly, but making it so small nobody could see it. Or making it inside another planet, never to be found.”

“I don’t think you understand what endless wishes means. Any ‘tricks’ can be undone by wishes later.”

“Oh, so I could wish for the power to grant wishes however I saw fit, including my own?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want that,” Flutterfree warned.

Vriska nodded slowly. “I know. I’m not as stupid as I used to be. But if he’s willing to do that, I’m starting to wonder if he’s not the douchebag genie. Maybe – just maybe – he’s legitimate.”

“The catch could be something that doesn’t reveal itself for an eternity,” Jotaro pointed out. “It could be the slow corruption of power.”

“Right. Clearly, we don’t make any wishes,” Pinkie said. “Sorry wishy-boy, but we won your game and we aren’t even going to use any. It’s just too-”

The Endless Wish snapped his fingers, and all of them were separated once again. “Do you not understand what you could be given?” He went to Vriska first. “All the hatred people feel for you and what you did… gone. Or, if you are feeling altruistic, I could remove the parts of your personality you find abhorrent, making you a better person. It need not be an or, it could be an and, you could have it all.”

“Fuck off.”

“Are you sure?” He slid next to her and created an image of Hastur. “You could have him back.”

Vriska pulled out her infinite-sided die. “Okay, time to see what random hell this thing spews out on you...”

The Endless Wish left Vriska for Pidge. “You… I could give you love.”

“Pass.”

“All the knowledge you could want. The answer to the New World’s Physics. The ability to restore Voltron.”

“I’m not going to let myself be clearly corrupted.”

Next was Jotaro. “You are a strong one, Jotaro. But don’t you wish you could empathize better? That you wouldn’t need help from others?”

“Yare yare daze…”

“Your lost family, your lost world, and I could even tell you the fates of the people you don’t know about. Just wish, and you’ll know if your daughter is alive… or Dusted.”

Jotaro froze, breathing heavy.

“Just one little wish…”

“No,” Jotaro said. “ORA!”

The Endless Wish did not feel pain, but he did decide to move to Flutterfree. “I can make anyone believe…”

Flutterfree growled. “Go read ‘The Big Gs’ chapter and see why that’s evil.”

“I can ensure the concepts of good and evil will maintain themselves past the Tower’s demise…”

“If they’re not defined by God, I don’t care.”

“I can give souls rest for you, just wish for it, and I can keep them from passing into the fires you fear so much.”

A tear rolled down Flutterfree’s cheek. She had to activate her Rage to keep herself firmly rooted in truth. “I cannot allow it. He knows what He is doing.”

Lastly, the Endless Wish came to Pinkie. “You could wish for anything as well.”

“I won’t though,” Pinkie said. “If you’ll notice, they all have some sort of thing they want. Family, knowledge, love, peace, or something else. Not me. I’m pretty content here.” She pulled out a lawn chair and put on a pair of sunglasses. “There’s nothing I really want. I have my friends, I have my job, and people are smiling because of me once again. What more could I ask for, really?”

The Endless Wish summoned them all back to the same location and snapped his fingers. “Then I’ll just give you one.”

Three figures materialized in front of them – Rohan Kishibe, Renee Jackson, and Nova Glimmer.

“I have given them back to you,” the Endless Wish said. “How was this wrong? Why were you unable to bring yourselves to w-”

“AHEM!” Renee announced, tapping her foot impatiently. “Darling, while I do adore what you’re doing, this body is spoken for on so many levels it’s not even funny.” She glared at him. “Don’t mess with things you don’t understand.” All biological functions within her ceased to function, and she dropped to the ground.

This gave the Endless Wish pause. Enough for Pidge to point at Nova, try to say something, and pass out from the internal stress instead.

“W-what’s going on?” Nova asked, looking around. “I thought I wa-”

Pinkie gulped. “You were. …This jerk’s duplicated you.”

“I…” Nova shook her head. “W-why? You didn’t ask f-”

“Of course not,” Pinkie said, trying her best not to cry. “He’s… upset at us for not playing the game the way he wants. He…”

“Pinkie… You have eyes. Since… How long…” Nova put a hoof to her head.

“She is back,” the Endless Wish declared. “She and Rohan have returned, and I can bring many others back at your beck and call.”

“It’s not really them though,” Flutterfree pointed out. “Twilight was not Eve. Pinkie is not Pinkie-X. Why would we create people who only exist to live in the shadow of the past?” She turned to Nova. “Why create a… a…”

“A bad memory,” Nova finished for her. The unicorn looked like she had seen a ghost – herself.

“True,” the Endless Wish said. “But you could also wish for everyone to treat them exactly as the old Nova. That everyone would believe this was a true revival. There could be some complex story about how the soul was preserved a-”

“ENOUGH WITH THE LIES!” Jotaro shouted, waking Pidge up. “WE DO NOT WANT ANY WISHES!”

The Endless Wish dropped his level-headed tone of voice. “My purpose is to give wishes! I will give them endlessly! Just make one!”

“Clearly, they aren’t going to,” Rohan said, smirking despite his unusual predicament of being Rohan-X.

“They don’t have a choice,” the Endless Wish said. “They cannot leave until they make the choice to keep you two alive or not. I have declared this. And once they have made that wish…”

“Then we could just wish to be released,” Flutterfree said. “…Except that could backfire too, and you really don’t like us.”

“…You want me to be part of some game?” Rohan asked the Endless Wish. “A puppet to manipulate the will of others for your own personal validation?”

The Endless Wish seemed to regret creating him. “Your fate hangs in the balance of this ‘game’, I wouldn’t be so coy.”

Rohan smirked. “I refuse.” He summoned his Stand. “HEAVEN’S DOOR!”

The Endless Wish was not affected – but he was not a target. Pidge was. Her face popped open like a book and Heaven’s Door wrote several pages of information in her head in a few seconds. The first thing she did was point her weapon at Rohan and blow his brains out.

“…Stubborn idiot,” Jotaro muttered, putting his hand over his eyes.

Pidge stared at the blood on her weapon. “He… he made me do that. He… quiznak…” She sat on the ground, dazed.

Nova stared at Rohan’s bloody form, pupils tiny. “You know… I think I’d rather… not die. Yes. That would be… a nice thing. Yeah.” She smiled awkwardly. “So, I know I’m just a copy, but I’d really like to stick around, and isn’t your friendship with m- her worth that much?” She said this with great uncertainty.

“We can’t give in to what he wants,” Jotaro said, folding his arms.

“Are you kidding?” Pidge shouted. “She’s here already! We can’t just send her back!”

“I’m not saying we do that. I’m saying we refuse to play the game.”

“Oh… sorry for jumping to conclusions…”

“I say we return her,” Vriska said. “Rohan did the right thing.”

“I am not committing suicide!” Nova shouted. “I… I don’t want to go through that again.”

Flutterfree shivered. “I… I don’t know what to do…”

Pinkie glared at the Endless Wish. “You’re sick. Creating her just to make us argue and…” She wiped a tear from her eyes. “It’s too much! It’s impossible!”

The Endless Wish leaned in – and actually smiled. “Good. Suffer. The Final Puzzle is only what you made of it.”

Flutterfree burst into tears, pulling Nova into a hug. “I’m so sorry I don’t know what to do! I can’t condemn you again but you won’t bring her back and aAAAAAA!”

Nova couldn’t process what was happening. “I… I…”

The other three members of the team were shouting at each other.

“You can’t throw her away!” Pidge shouted.

“You just don’t want to feel the guilt of replacing her!”

“Of course I don’t! But she was your friend!”

“That’s not her standing over there!”

“It’s close enough!”

“Stop!” Jotaro demanded. “You are feeding into what he wants!”

“This is more important than what that bastard wants!” Vriska asserted.

Pinkie looked at her team. Flutterfree couldn’t stop crying. Jotaro, Vriska, and Pidge continued shouting at each other, almost screaming. Nova just wanted to live. And Pinkie…

Pinkie didn’t see a ‘win’ in this situation. It was a black and white scenario with all wrongs. Use a wish – the result of the wish didn’t matter, it was the entire principle of the thing that was wrong. Keep Nova alive or no, it wouldn’t end well. She could sense it. But if they did nothing, the Endless Wish would just get angrier and try worse and worse things until they broke. It was a lose-lose situation. Evil-evil wrong-wrong.

A lightbulb went off in her head.

“EVERYONE!” She shouted. “Don’t you see what we’re acting like?”

Everyone looked at her, confused.

“We’re acting like the Seats in the conferences before the war! We are arguing with no hope of resolution!” She set her hoof down. “I am declaring my willingness to go with any of the options. Even if I want one or the other, I will be willing to go with any of them so we don’t break ourselves apart.”

There was silence for a moment.

“…I’ll do it too,” Nova said, surprising Flutterfree considerably. “I… I really don’t have a right to demand something from you. Or maybe I do, and I’m just a big idiot for thinking I don’t. I haven’t the foggiest idea. …I never had any say in the wish though, did I?”

“Probably not,” Flutterfree muttered. “…I… I’ll go with that as well. I don’t know. I will go with anyone for the sake of peace.”

“Yare yare daze…” Jotaro said, shaking his head. He walked over to them and stood firm.

Vriska and Pidge looked at each other, anger softening. Then they both realized something at the same time – and laughed. They both walked over at the same time, smirking.

Pinkie smirked. “Heh… Look at that. We’ve decided we can’t make the choice.”

“So you are refusing to wish!” the Endless Wish said with anger.

“Oh, no, we’re just going to flip a coin about it,” Pinkie said, putting a coin in her hoof. “My special three-sided coin here. Wish for this to all be undone, wish to keep it, or just stay where we are and refuse to do anything.” She winked – then tossed it into the air.

The Endless Wish snatched it out of the air. “WHY DON’T YOU GET THE POINT? YOU ARE UNDERMINING MY PURPOSE!”

“That’s the whole point,” Flutterfree said. “We… object to your purpose. Wishes, in general, aren’t right. There are exceptions, yes, but I don’t see a need for a wish right now. You came at a time where we don’t need one.” She pulled Nova close. “Wishes are dangerous and when they don’t backfire they only bring out the worst in people.”

“I… I… I…” The Endless Wish roared. “I’m done. Clearly the only way to fulfill my purpose is to force you.” He tapped Flutterfree on the head. “MAKE. A. WISH.”

Speaking like a zombie, Flutterfree began. “I wish th-”

Before Pidge realized what was happening, a Stand popped out of her – none other than Heaven’s Door itself. The Stand rushed Flutterfree and popped her open like a book, writing cannot be conditioned by the Endless Wish in her. Then Heaven’s Door returned to Pidge.

“…What?” she said.

“Nani?” Jotaro added.

Pinkie smirked. “Heh. Heheheheh. Rohan’s a stubborn one, isn’t he?”

“No!” the Endless Wish seethed. “I must be able to! I must!”

Pidge’s instructions to use Heaven’s Door continued whenever the Endless Wish tried to do something. Soon, all of their minds were protected by Heaven’s Door’s written law.

“You can’t fuckin’ make us do anything,” Vriska laughed.

Nova laughed. “Yeah! All thanks to Pidge!” She sauntered over to Pidge and put a hoof around her.

“Wh…” Pidge blinked.

“…You shouldn’t be ashamed,” Nova said. “You fit in just fine.”

“I…” Pidge blinked. “…Thank you.”

“I admit… it’s a little sad to see you all having done so well without me. But… it’s also nice to see that you’re really that strong. I… I don’t know.” She shrugged. “You’re all great. Yes, even you Vriska.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow. “But I voted to kill you.”

“And I probably would have done the same in your place,” Nova pointed out. “I understand. How could I not? I traveled with all of you for decades. Or, well, the other me did, the one whose memories I have.” She turned to the Endless Wish. “…You’re dealing with a bunch of ponies backed by a force you don’t understand. I don’t even understand what’s going on, but I know they’re fighting you. So I support them. I stand by them. I still want to live, but I won’t accept it if they have to give in to you to do it.”

The Endless Wish glared at her. “There is not a third option, unicorn.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. There is no option at all. They will not have a choice! I will cause so much death, destruction, and suffering that they have no choice but to make a wish!” He grabbed Nova with his hand. Then he duplicated her a few dozen times.

Then he killed all of them with a snap of his fingers.

“STOP!” Flutterfree shouted.

The Endless Wish recreated a Nova, and killed her again. “Make a wish.”

“FINE!” Pinkie shouted, a vein pulsing out of the side of her head. “YOU WANT A WISH!?”

“YES!” he said, sensing that he had finally gotten through to her. Made it so she couldn’t resist. She would finally give in t-

“I WISH THAT THIS WAS THE LAST WISH TO EVER BE GRANTED – ALL POTENTIAL WISHING SOURCES WILL LOSE THEIR POWER!”

The Endless Wish stared at her. “No… No you can’t!”

“IT’S MY WISH!” She slammed her hoof into the ground. “And you have to grant it.”

“I do not I d-” He let out a scream as his internal coding began to take over. He had to fulfill the wish. There was nothing he could do to stop it. All wishing sources would lose their power… Every last one… He couldn’t go back on that!

So he would make it as damaging as possible.

“Know this!” He declared. “Every wishing source aside from myself will lose its power in a violent explosion! Trillions will die!”

“There’s a freaking reason I didn’t wish for it earlier!” Pinkie retorted. “But it’s clear you’re not going to stop unless you’re made to stop. So screw this, screw this entire game, and screw you. Do your worst.”

“You are speaking out of anger!”

“NO, REALLY!?” Pinkie screamed. “Me, ANGRY? Well TOO BAD! You wanted to push us to the breaking point and YOU DID!” She clapped her hooves sarcastically.

“Just wish for something benign! So-”

“I will wish that you become unable to talk and then wish that you end all wishes so no one else will ever have to go through this ever again!”

“You are a fool!”

“And you’re stalling! Are you allowed to refuse wishes?”

“I am allowed to discuss until I am sure the client has thought it through!”

“Now you’re the one not playing the game!” Pinkie said. “You’re doing exactly what you hated us for doing.”

The Endless Wish shivered. “Why… Why can’t you just… let it be… the way it is meant to!?”

“Because it’s wrong.” Pinkie narrowed her eyes. “You know what, I have a different wish in mind. I wish that you lost your powers and that you would give them to me.”

“GRANTED!” the Endless Wish said. Suddenly they were standing on the dead planet again, and the Endless Wish was in a spacesuit. “Now you will not be able to resist, you will receive my power and my drive to make wishes! You will have to make them! You will ha-”

“Heaven’s Door!” Pidge shouted, popping Pinkie open like a book.

Will only wish to end all wishes.

Pinkie fixed the Endless Wish with a smirk. “And you’ve lost.” She clasped her hooves together and made exactly one wish – sending a spiral of white energy out. There were no negative consequences. If any wish was to be made, it would now be impossible. The spell would spread out at the speed of light until it encompassed the entire New World…

“You… wh…” The Endless Wish fell to his knees, dumbfounded. “I… no… no… the Vault… all the purpose…”

“You got out-genie’d,” Pinkie said with a cute smile. “Now, I’ve got a n-”

Vriska ran the Endless Wish through with her sword, killing him instantly.

“Vriska!” Pinkie chided.

“He deserved that,” Vriska asserted, pulling her blade out. “I don’t care what you say about the ‘morality’ of that. Fucker needed to die and I didn’t want to give him any chance of making it out of this.”

“He was powerless,” Flutterfree said.

“And so were all those Novas,” Vriska said, spitting on the Endless Wish’s corpse. “You can disagree with this all you want. But you all know this is why I’m part of this group. I’ll do it when none of you will.”

Pinkie nodded slowly. “…You’re right.”

Jotaro shook his head. “…We should head home.”

The five of them went back into the Skimmer and took off, leaving the gravity well of the planet. Everyone changed out of their suits and took their seats on the bridge.

“…You know, despite it all,” Flutterfree looked up. “…It was nice to talk to Nova again.”

Pidge smiled ever so slightly. “You’re right.”

Jotaro hid his face from everyone while Vriska angrily flicked a tear off her face.

Pinkie found herself smiling and crying at the same time. She hit the button to transmit all of them back to Nucleon.

~~~

Pinkie’s Party stood in front of a new statue right outside the Expedition Office. It was a statue of Nova – complete with hoof-screen, horn-ring, and confident cocky smile.

At the base of the statue was an inscription.

NOVA: THE GREAT EXPLORER

Beneath that was a very long list of all the places she’d visited, etched in words so small it was impossible to read unless viewed from up close.

“I keep telling myself she wouldn’t have liked being back,” Vriska said. “That it would hurt too much for her.”

Pinkie shook her head. “It would have been hard for her. I think she wouldn’t have been able to go on missions with us. But she could have had a life. Eve would have taken her in, and that relationship could have blossomed. She would have had to forge new friendships where she wasn’t eternally living up to her other self… but she would have managed.”

“Should we have brought her back in the end?” Pidge asked.

“…By the Tower’s rules, no,” Pinkie said. “She had already died, bringing her back as a one-off in a simple chapter like this would have been… unsatisfying, and not in a good way.” She looked at the ground. “If we remove that, I don’t think there’s an answer. If it was okay to bring her back, why not everyone else? Why not copy them all several dozen times? Where do you draw the line?”

“That’s why we couldn’t do it,” Flutterfree said. “We would have had wishes…” She wiped her eyes. “And we would have needed to draw a line that we couldn’t know was right. Opening that can of worms… It was not something for us. It was never intended to be for us.”

“It’s just one set of impossible questions after another,” Jotaro said.

Pidge summoned Heaven’s Door, looking at it intently. “…I don’t know what to make of all this. Is this a gift? Or something I stole? Or a blasphemy?”

“Don’t try to answer the question, just be thankful,” Flutterfree suggested. “For all the suffering we went through… it ended up okay. We beat the ‘douchebag genie’ at his own game.”

Vriska snorted. “Nice word choice.”

“I learned from the best.”

Pidge looked back at the statue. “Yeah… good advice. But… was this closure? Or did it just open up new wounds? Or…?”

“I don’t know,” Pinkie said with a shrug. “I’m not sure even this chapter knows what it means. It was a thing that happened, asked a lot of questions, and flopped around like a flounder. We had to win. But did we really learn anything?” she paused. “I miss the times when the adventures were mostly innocent fun and the conflicts were simple.”

Flutterfree let out a soft laugh. “Yeah… those times were nice.”

Jotaro suddenly slammed his fist into the palm of his opposite hand. “Then let’s go do that.”

“Jojo, we’re in front of a memorial,” Pidge chided.

“Would she have wanted us to stand around dwelling in our sorrow? Or would she want us back out there, doing what we do best?”

Pinkie smirked. “…Jotaro’s got the right idea. We got her a statue. We shouldn’t remember her by sitting around moping about it, we should remember her by acting.” She tapped the inscription. “She is going to be remembered as an explorer. So let’s go explore as far as we can while we’re still able.”

“…Fuck it, sure,” Vriska said, stretching her limbs. “Let’s throw ourselves right back into that frying pan. I’m sure it hasn’t gotten hotter.”

Flutterfree chuckled. “But if we’re going into the frying pan, doesn’t that mean we’re out of the fire?”

“The fire is not the only place that’s outside the frying pan. There’s also the irons.”

“I thought those were in the fire?”

“Shut up,” Vriska laughed.

Pinkie giggled. “Let’s go. …I just had an idea.”

“What?”

“Let’s name the Skimmer Nova.”

“…That’s perfect,” Flutterfree said, a tear rolling down her face.

Later that day, they piled into the freshly named Nova and blasted off. They opted to travel without becoming light so they could really feel the journey. They passed through Nucleon’s atmosphere, left the gravity well, and launched toward distant planets and stars…

Explorers to the end.

[KA] 157 - Goodbye to a World

The Source knew its time was short. It rumbled.

157

-

Goodbye to a World

The End

Author's Note

Special thanks to my editors:
Keywii_cookies55
VoidTemplar2000
Ponygood11
Omnipresent Microorganism
Blaster Master
Useless Common
Galliar
Mal Masque
Nickle241
Triv the Imaginary Duck

And my patrons:
SgtSarge
Keywii_Cookies55
OmnipresentMicroorganism
Nightsclaw
Sketchy
Ciber
Pink_Man

And, last of all, to all of you who donated for the 130 fund. The leftovers from that were enough to pay for the above video and a little more. I'll continue to use it on further additions for my stories - including The Distant Princess, which I'll go into more detail about at a later date.

Thank you for reading.

-GM, master of Songs of the Spheres.

The ACTUAL Author's Note:

Only one thing remains... the final conclusion of all those chapter polls.

What is the best chapter of all time!?

https://strawpoll.com/rs8zhb15

All the winners of the previous polls are in the running!

Also, if you're interested about the future of these projects and what it all means, here's a blog post:

https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/897893/sots-ending-and-the-future